Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography through Letters

by Freeman Dyson

Overview

A lifetime of candid reflections from physicist Freeman Dyson, “an acute observer of personality and human foibles” (New York Times Book Review).

Written between 1940 and the late 1970s, the postwar recollections of renowned physicist Freeman Dyson have been celebrated as an historic portrait of modern science and its greatest players, including Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and Hans Bethe. Chronicling the stories of those who were engaged in solving some of the most challenging quandaries of twentieth-century physics, Dyson lends acute insight and profound observations to a life’s work spent chasing what Einstein called those “deep mysteries that Nature intends to keep for herself.” Whether reflecting on the drama of World War II, the moral dilemmas of nuclear development, the challenges of the space program, or the demands of raising six children, Dyson’s annotated letters reveal the voice of one “more creative than almost anyone else of his generation” (Kip Thorne). An illuminating work in these trying times, Maker of Patterns is an eyewitness account of the scientific discoveries that define our modern age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631495472
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/16/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Freeman Dyson is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician. The author of Disturbing the Universe, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

1 Great Minds Around the Billiard Table 1

2 War and Peace 23

3 Truth and Reconciliation 42

4 Cornell Student 56

5 Go West, Young Man 82

6 Demigods on Stilts 102

7 Nolo Contendere 124

8 Well, Doc, You're In 134

9 The Physicist in Love 151

10 Cornell Professor 171

11 Mycenean Tablets and Spin Waves 185

12 Moscow and La Jolla 204

13 The Forsaken Merman 221

14 A Spaceship and a Wedding 241

15 Homecoming 261

16 Working for Peace 274

17 Marching for Justice 289

18 Sitting in Judgment 306

19 Two Deaths and Two Departures 318

20 Adventures of a Psychiatric Nurse 343

21 Whale Worshippers and Moonchildren 360

Bibliography 385

Index 389

Editorial Reviews

"Who but Dyson formulates revolutionary physics while riding on a Greyhound bus through Iowa cornfields? In other episodes in this remarkable epistolary autobiography, readers join Dyson as he assesses with Gödel equations for a rotating version of Einstein’s universe, as he defends Feynman’s quantum theorems against Oppenheimer’s doubts, and as he explores with Bohr the prospects for a nuclear spaceship. Readers will naturally value what Dyson reveals about how he built his towering reputation as a scientist. But Dyson draws the substance of his narrative from letters he sent his parents between 1940 and 1980, letters in which he discloses quite unscientific aspects of his life—including the joys of romance, marriage, and fatherhood, as well as the trauma of divorce…. Dyson never lets readers forget that, for all of their exceptional intellectual gifts, scientists live human lives defined more by family ties and friendships than by laboratory results."

Booklist [Starred Review]

"There is much in the letters collected here to enjoy; Mr. Dyson writes wonderfully well."

Ray Monk

…I was enthralled by this collection of Freeman Dyson's letters…He knew Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and, well, just about anyone worth knowing in the scientific universe of the last six decades. But he is also no doubt today one of the world's best-known theoretical physicists precisely because, like Oppenheimer, he has always been a polymath, a literary man of science who could explain the physical world to us in plain old English…These letters will delight any reader with their often contrarian observations. Dyson is an excellent witness, an acute observer of personality and human foibles…Dyson's letters are particularly engaging when they describe the occasional flashes of illumination that lead to a scientific insight.

The New York Times Book Review - Kai Bird

03/12/2018
“I had the good fortune to live through extraordinary times with an extraordinary collection of friends,” writes Dyson (Dreams of Earth and Sky), a mathematician and physicist. In an effective dual narrative, he shares his life through letters spanning 1941 to 1978 as well as present-day reflections. Earnest and delightfully casual, the book is concerned more with the man than his science, as “family came first, friends second, and work third.” Dyson’s scientific work surfaces anecdotally, from his light bulb moment during a Greyhound bus trip on how to combine the rival radiation theories of Schwinger and Feynman to working at the General Atomic Laboratory on a bomb-propelled spaceship capable of going to Mars. The letters abound in informed references to notable figures, such as a description of J. Robert Oppenheimer spending his spare time “reading St. Thomas Aquinas in Latin and writing poetry in the style of Eliot.” Candor and closeness are built into the narrative, as his letters address immediate family members on personal topics such as two rather unconventional marriages, child-rearing, and public service during the Kennedy administration. Covering a dizzying array of events, this long volume intimately chronicles both the sweet and bitter parts of “the daily life of an ordinary scientist doing ordinary work.” (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"[The letters] cover a remarkable range of scientific interests, acquaintances, opinions and adventures… He says what you wouldn’t expect; if Dyson has a pattern, perhaps it is contrariety… The one Dysonian pattern for which the letters hold unequivocal evidence is delight. He uses the word often and invokes it even more…Maybe with some people, you don’t look for patterns. You just enjoy their multivariate company."

Ann Finkbeiner

2017-12-24
An epistolary memoir from a leading postwar physicist and mathematician, taking in the era from the 1940s to the end of the 1970s.World War II was an excellent time to get an education, writes English-born physicist Dyson (Dreams of Earth and Sky, 2015, etc.), a longtime professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton: "The famous old professors were all there, but there were hardly any students." Nonetheless, the war exerted some pull on his studies; in this collection of letters, he writes of operational research on detecting U-boats and such. Still, he heeded the advice of a senior professor who told him that "research never mixes well with learning," and he set to puzzling out his own problems in quantum electrodynamics, particle theory, and other fields. A dozen years on, he recorded, happily, that as a result of one experiment, "we now have the job of changing our theories to agree with the new information, and this is likely to lead to substantial progress." That passage is characteristic, for Dyson reveals himself to be wedded not to preconceived notions but to the primacy of proof, whether it be of that spinning particle or of the identity of a bomber on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1969. "Undoubtedly," he writes, "the radical students will be blamed for it." The author's account of events in the laboratory is punctuated by detours into popular culture (seeing, for instance, the film Treasure of the Sierra Madre on release in 1948 and finding in it "fairly obvious application to present-day international relations") and contemporary intellectual history such as the debut work of sociologist Amitai Etzioni. Advocates of science will find in Dyson an admirable model. Why go to Mars when we could irrigate the Sahara, he asks. The science of space travel may be 10 times the benefit in the end, he writes, but "the main purpose is a general enlargement of human horizons."A pleasure for science students and particularly of science humanely practiced.

Kirkus Review