Dialogue & ex/CHANGE

INTERVIEW WITH FREEMAN DYSON	by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist: My first question I wanted to ask because I just read your book The Sun the Genome and the Internet so I wanted to ask what you are working on now? Are you working on a new book? Freeman Dyson: No, I am not. I am between projects, which is a good time. I am looking around for what I might do next. I have some physics calculations which I do just for fun, which are nothing important but I like to keep my hands busy with calculations. These are really little puzzles rather than serious science. HUO: And what exactly is it? FD: Well, it is a problem of - A friend of mine who is an experimenter in Princeton does experiments with, very beautiful experiments with rubidium atoms and he finds an unexpected symmetry in the structure of these atoms which nobody understands. I am trying to understand it. But it won't be anything deep. It might be quite beautiful. HUO: Could you tell me a little bit more about the background of The Sun the Genome and the Internet because one of the main issues in the book is this idea of the more tool driven scientific revolution instead of the concept revolution. You mentioned Peter Gallison, you emphasized Peter Gallison. FD: Right. I happen to know Gallison. I have a great respect for him as a historian. He presents a history of science as a history of tools which, to me, makes more sense than considering it as purely intellectual history which is more customary. And he has also been in Princeton where I got to know him. I think I already had this point of view long before that we need both concepts and tools. The tools raise the new questions which then the concepts try to answer. You need both but generally the tools come first. After you have the tools then you know what the questions are that you have to explain then you have to find the concepts to explain them. HUO: We had actually worked with Peter Gallison on projects related to the laboratory and I wanted to ask you do you think the current discussion and current use of the internet has changed laboratories? FD: It has changed things very much. Everybody uses the internet all of the time and you cant imagine living without it. It was invented mostly for scientists; the rest of the world only started later. The scientists were using it already thirty years ago and it was there little private club but now it has become much more. HUO: And when did you start to use it? FD: Rather late because I am not an experimenter. An experiment is needed more. I suppose about ten years ago. HUO: And has it changed the way you work? FD: No, but it changed the way I communicate with my family. We have a big family scattered all over many places and it draws us much close together. I think for our family it is a tremendous gift. HUO: So, more for the family? FD: Yes, for me personally. But for communication it has made a huge difference. We visited New Zealand recently and if you have to live in New Zealand, you are far more dependent on the internet than if you live here. HUO: One other question I wanted to ask is about the notion of interdisciplinarity because I am particularly interested in links between art and science and architecture and science and lots of different interdisciplinary situations and I wanted to ask you about your view on interdisciplinarity and if you see a necessity to enhance because within the university context there is a certain feel, very often, of interdisciplinarity? FD: I don't like the word. It is somehow too pompous, the word interdisciplinarity. I think it is not a good idea to organize interdisciplinary work. It should be spontaneous, interdisciplinary work. It, very often, is extremely helpful to have people from different disciplines talking together. I don't like the idea of organizing a project just in order to be interdisciplinary. I think it is better to begin with a narrow question and then find out how you can throw light on it from the outside. HUO: Could you explain to me a little bit about how, in your own practice, this has worked? FD: I am rather unusual in a way because I work in different fields. The reason is that my tools are mathematics and the only tool I have, in fact, is mathematics. And mathematics lends itself to many different applications. I do applied mathematics which means I can do physics, I do astronomy, I do a little bit of biology and engineering; they are all different field in which mathematics allows me to operate. HUO: And how is there a link, is there a link to art? FD: Yes. Certainly, to my mind, the two things are very close. Building a scientific theory is very much like building a bridge or building a building; it is a form of architecture. I think there is a very strong connection between the way science builds and the way architects build. You have to have, first of all, the materials and the tools and then somebody comes along with a scheme for putting it all together. It still needs a lot of people to do the whole… actually to build the building. The architect plays an essential role. I think it is very much like that. Certainly, in astronomy, the people I know who are astronomers, who have had the temperament of an architect in a way. HUO: And have you had dialogs with architects or with artists? FD: Not so much. I don't remember. It is certainly not a part of my life. It is more if I meet architects at a party but we don't have serious discussions. HUO: One artist who told me that he contacted you was James Lee Byars. FD: Yes. HUO: ...for the World Question Center. I wanted to ask you if you could tell me a little bit about this and what question you had of the world because he made his world question center and he called lots of different scientists and I think John Brockman had asked him to contact you for a question. FD: I am sorry to say, I don't remember. I have only a vague memory. I don't think it made much impression on me. But, no doubt, he could tell you. I probably didn't give it the attention that I should. HUO: But you asked a question? FD: No doubt that I did but I can't remember what it was. HUO: Concerning this link to art that you mentioned, concerning this building of the bridge or the building of architecture, I recently interviewed Gregory Chaitin, the mathematician, and he said that somehow there is another comparison that art and science are not so connected because he said that in the most best case or in the most amazing case, a scientist has maybe three or four big ideas and their whole life leads to these ideas and that happens during this very feverish period of maybe weeks or months or years of work. I wanted to ask you how you see this because somehow it is a very non-linear approach. FD: Yes. To me it is not like that. There are many different kinds of scientists. The way I work is more like Hayden and his position where he wrote a concerto every week or whatever it was. Not quite as frequent as that but still, he worked, more or less, steadily all through his life and he produced works as they were needed. They were written in order to be played at the court of the emperor or the prince or whoever it was and that is roughly how I work. I have never been a kind of temperamental artist with sudden bursts of creativity and then nothing for a long period of time. That is not for me. For me, it is just using my tools and trying the practice of the craft and that is, more or less, a steady occupation. But since I have taken to writing books it is not so very different. Instead of writing calculations I write books. But, again, it is not inspiration, it is just pleasant work, collecting evidence, and putting it together and writing it down. HUO: A daily practice? FD: Yes, exactly. HUO: Could you tell me about the beginnings of this daily practice, how you entered science, how did it all start? FD: I began, mostly, with mathematics and I started mathematics as a teen-ager. My first work was in purely mathematics. There I found I could actually publish papers in pure mathematics without knowing very much and it is wonderful field because you can find a problem and solve it and make a real contribution without having learned much about the rest of mathematics. I started very young and that gave me a taste for it. HUO: You mentioned in The Sun the Genome and the Internet that Gotfried Harding was very important. Was he your teacher? FD: No, he wasn't actually my teacher. I went to his lectures but the person who influenced me the most was Besicovitch who you have probably not heard of. He is Russian and we were very close friends so my style is very much Besicovitch style. He was an expert on geometry and I tend to think in the way he thought. Mickey and I would go for long walks and he also taught me Russian which I enjoyed very much. We had a rule that when we went for a walk we were not allowed to speak English. HUO: He was the same age as you? FD: No, no he was much older. HUO: So, he was a teacher? FD: Oh yes. Maybe he was a man of fifty or sixty when I was a student. HUO: One other question to continue with something in terms of The Sun the Genome and the Internet, which has also to do with your book which I read in French, when you talk about human-scale, in science, you somehow describe the genome project as including a very big set of junk DNA which is almost ninety-percent and the experiment is far too big. Could you tell me a little bit in terms of how you see the situation now in 2001 and where action would be needed on a smaller scale or is it about linking small experiments, networks of small experiments? FD: Not so much. What has been done is marvelous. It is extremely useful for science, what has been done, only I think much more could have been done with he same effort. What I wished would happen is that sequencing becomes cheap. At the moment it is ridiculously expensive. Craig Venter has helped a great deal to make it cheaper to make it cheaper. He has reduced the cost by, maybe, a factor of ten and that certainly was important. Have you talked to Bill Haseltine? HUO: No, not yet. FD: He is here. You should talk to him. He is the head of Human Genome Sciences and he also has a big company and does a great deal of sequencing. He does it in a much more sensible way. HUO: ...than the Human Genome Project? FD: Yes. He goes, straight away, for things that are scientifically important and doesn't try to sequence everything. I think he is making a very big contribution. What I would like is that we have really fast, cheap sequencing so you could do a whole genome for a few thousand dollars. Then we would really be able to explore the whole living world. That has not yet happened. Instead we have these big projects which are all right but they cost too much and they take too much time. HUO: In general, do you think it is more true that more human-scale experiments will be necessary or just in relation to the genome project? FD: That is true in general. In many fields there is no lack of small projects. One needs a balance between big and small and some projects are necessary and others are not. HUO: Do you see also a link between ecology and sustaiablilty of experiments of science? FD: No, I don't think that is connected. That is concerned, sustainability is concerned with... It is connected in the sense that if things are too expensive then they will not be continued. It is a question, sustainability. We would like to have many human genomes instead of just one and if it costs billions of dollars each time then you don't have many. HUO: So, it is also about multiple voices and not monopolies? FD: Yes. HUO: How do you see the whole funding of science because in art there has been a very strong tendency toward commodification and laboratories in terms of basic artistic research have disappeared or are about to disappear more and more for some kind of more commercial, commodified museums. I think museums are run more and more like companies. I think a similar thing happens in science as in the arts in this regard. How do you see this situation in term of independence of science and also in terms of this possibility to make not useful research which might prove, all of the sudden, to be useful? FD: Yes, I mostly talk to astronomers. Astronomy is now my main interest in science. Astronomy is completely useless and also completely free. There is absolutely no constraint on what astronomers do with the money they raise. A lot of the money does come from private sources but it does not mean that it works like a business. I have many friends that work with the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, which is privately funded and others who work with the European Southern Observatory, which is publicly funded. There is really no difference. I think it is good we have both kinds. Private money has fewer constraints. It is not subject to politics. HUO: Or bureaucracy. FD: Less bureaucracy, still some, but less. Still, the European observatories are doing extremely well also. We are very happy with the situation there. HUO: Are there any particular astronomers you're in dialog with? FD: Oh yes. We have a very strong group in Princeton. I suppose my closest friend is Paczynski who is a Polish astronomer who has settled in Princeton. He is still running a group of astronomers in Poland who observe gravitational lenses and other beautiful things. HUO: How has this come that your focus has shifted to astronomy? Do you think it is the most interesting field right now? FD: Yes, in a way. It is making discoveries, about one every week. Every week, on Tuesday, we have a meeting with astronomers for lunch. Every Tuesday you learn something new. The field moves very fast, I find that exciting. If you look at particle physics, things move very slowly and in particle physics it takes ten years to do an experiment. In astronomy it takes maybe two weeks. HUO: It is this opposite idea that everything will be known? FD: Yes. We are learning more and more mysteries. HUO: Are there any recent discoveries you are particularly fascinated by? FD: Well, the most exciting thing, just now, is gamma-ray bursts which is still very mysterious but we are learning more and more, just in the last year, how they are behaving. Mostly because of the European satellite Beppo-Sax, which first was able to locate these bursts and once you know exactly where they are then you can explore with other telescopes. HUO: And you have written all of this? FD: No, no, I haven't published anything. I just enjoy talking with people. HUO: That leads us back to this notion of interdiscipliarity because your practice is very interdisciplinary. FD: Oh yes. Certainly personally, I like to move from one field to another. HUO: Could you tell me a little bit about this because you are, on the one hand, a great physicist, you are a great engineer, on the other hand you are a great author of books, these different roles, all at the same time? FD: Not all at the same time but one after the other. I like to change from one thing to another because after you spend two years writing a book you want to do something else. HUO: So, you first started with mathematics and physics then more engineering issues and the books came later. FD: Yes, roughly when I was fifty I started writing books. HUO: What was the beginning of ...(?) was it this idea to communicate science because your books have also contributed, I mean things have changed so much in the last years actually. I also spoke with John Brockman who said that ten or twenty years ago science books were not read by many people. In big parts, books like your books have become made accessible or also made interesting science for a much broader. Was this the ideas when you started to write the books, to communicate of make bridges to...? FD: It is totally wrong to imagine this is new. When I was a child I read wonderful books by Eddington and Jeans and Whitehead. Scientists of the 1920s were writing wonderful books for the public, not to mention Darwin. There is nothing new in that so I follow this tradition. Brockman may think he invented it but... HUO: He didn't say that. He gives you a lot of credit. FD: Anyway, it is not true. I didn't invent it either. HUO: But do you think it was interrupted at a certain period, because Chaitin also mentioned a similar thing to me. He also said that there were a lot of scientists in the twenties and even in the nineteenth century who had actually these very public, accessible books but did think that there actually was a moment when it was interrupted. FD: It might be true. I don't remember. It is quite possible there was an interruption in the forties and fifties there was less. I am not sure. Certainly there has always been some good writing. HUO: How do you see, at the moment, this very public reception of superstring theory because I also interviewed Brian Greene. What is your view on superstring? FD: I think it is beautiful mathematics. We had a good discussion at one of the evening sessions. Brian Greene and I were on opposite sides in a discussion. I disagree with him, very strongly, about the purpose of doing science. He is a very strong reducionist and he thinks the whole of knowledge can be reduced to a few equations. He has this dream of understanding everything with a few equations. I have the opposite view that the more we learn the more mysterious it gets. There is no likelihood that a few equations would explain everything. The philosophy is quite different. On the other hand I think what they do is quite beautiful. I am not against string theory. I am only against the ideological view that Greene presents. But string theory, in itself, is a very beautiful piece of mathematics. It has a lot of depth and a lot of new ideas in it so perhaps it will turn out to be useful. I don't know. It is quite possible it will. HUO: I read in your book also The Sun the Genome and the Internet, you say, basically, you speak about molecular biology and astronomy as the most rapidly growing areas of science today and then you talk about the fact that new tools arise from new tools rather than new concepts and there is not actually an ...(?) situation where he was using the new tool to explore new territory without having any pre-conceived theory of what he would find there. So, in this sense, one could say that it is like a complex dynamic system where there is not a ...(?) where one discovers on the ...(?)? So it is like a journey. FD: Yes. Indeed yes. We need all kinds. I have a great respect for Greene. He is an excellent scientist, only we are just moving on different paths. HUO: One other question I wanted to ask because you close the book The Sun the Genome and the Internet with a remark on the responsibility for making the network serve the interest of social justice and human freedom. I wanted to ask if you could tell me a little bit more about this concretely, how you think, at the moment, science networks and other networks can serve social justice and human freedom and not just the economy. FD: I am thinking, especially, of my daughter who is very active in Russia. HUO: Ester Dyson? FD: Yes. She spends a lot of time in Russia. For some reason we both have this strong attraction to Russia. For some reason she spends a lot of time there and she really believes that she is doing something important for Russia in teaching Russians how to do business. She is a businesswoman essentially. The companies that she deals with are internet companies and the internet, for her, is absolutely essential. She believes it brings freedom because governments cannot control it. Almost in its nature it is anarchistic and so it has brought freedom to many places in the world where it didn’t exist. You see that also in China too. It is a tool for freedom, quite apart from science, in the organizing of economic activities. And also it is very good for small companies. It makes it easy for a small company to become established. You have immediate access to the market. You can use it for social justice. It is not always used that way. At least it is possible. HUO: How do you think, because it is the only question which I always ask in every interview, it is the only question that is current(?) which is about the unrealized project in terms of un-built roads: projects which are too big to be realized, too small to be realized, to utopic to be realized, which have not been realized yet which you could realize in the future or projects which have been forgotten and so of all of these possibilities of unrealized projects. I wondered if you could tell me about your unrealized project? FD: I don't know. The obvious example is the spaceship which I worked on and this was almost fifty years ago... worked on a nuclear spaceship in California. I wrote about that in another book. That was a spectacular project. It would have changed the whole way we work in space. We would have gone much more rapidly into space. It was a great dream and history passed it by. On the other hand it had a fatal flaw which was environmental. It was terribly bad environmentally. It would have spread radioactivity all over the landscape. It was the worst kind of nuclear project and so it never flew. I wouldn't want to revive it. At a certain time in history it might have been possible but certainly not possible today, and I certainly would never dream of reviving it. That is not quite what you have in mind. HUO: It is very interesting. Was it published? FD: Oh yes. The first book I ever wrote, which was Disturbing the Universe, has a chapter about this project. HUO: It was in a very advanced state? FD: Yes. It was before the chemical rockets had grown to dominate the field. We were in a race with von Braun. Von Braun had chemical rockets and we had nuclear rockets and von Braun won the race, which probably was just as well. HUO: My very last question is, one thing we haven't spoken about with all of your work is your major contribution to electrodynamics and quantum physics. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about discoveries of yours from the perspective of now? FD: Yes. It is now ancient history. What we did was to tidy up the mathematics. The particle physics as it existed in 1940 was, more or less, complete. We had all of the physical ideas only there were no mathematics that made it consistent. The mathematical precision was lacking. What we did in the 1940s was to get rid of all of this confusion of the mathematics and make it mathematically complete. That was the big contribution. And that has lasted and Feynman was the moving spirit and Feynman had understood how to do it. I helped in a modest way but it was mostly Feynman's ideas. HUO: You had a dialog with Feynman? FD: Oh, yes. We were very close. Fifty years later, that is the way every particle physicist works. We provided the mathematical tools which every student learns. It is built into the subject. It is like building a cathedral again. We laid the foundations and now there is a huge building. HUO: That is beautiful. It leads us back to architecture. And how do you see in quantum physics the theory of tele-transportation of somebody like Zeilinger who actually shows, through quantum physics, that with light and maybe later with molecules that tele-transportation is possible? FD: That's perfectly correct. I think what he is doing is beautiful. I don't like the word. I think the word gives a false impression. What he is doing is transferring a state of photon from one place to another. Which is probably very useful as well a being technically challenging thing to do. I think it is very fine that he does that. Probably one can do it with molecules also. The public has the notion that it implies we are going to be transferring people faster than light which is nonsense. HUO: Like Star Trek? FD: Yes. I think it gives a rather false impression but the work is perfectly sound and very good.