Status Updates From Maverick Genius: The Pionee...

The man who once claimed to prefer the 18th century to the 20th, at least when it came to fostering ties between scientific and humanistic values .. has now lived well into the 21st century.
Nice paragraph on FD’s many and varied friends.

Holograms !!

Washington, 2011
Banquet of Arthur C. Clarke foundation.
Elon Musk (spoke ehe FD) was presented the Innovator Award. Musk was on hand because his third great venture is SpaceX, whose chief products R Falcon, a rocket designed to deliver payloads 2 Earth orbit more cheaply than NASA has ever done, and Dragon, the first private spacecraft 2 have orbited Earth and returned safely.

Chicago, 2010
F Dyson = president of the Space Studies Institute, an org. dedicated 2 the commercialization of space.

Celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 2008 visiting the Galapagos Islands.
Kazakhstan, 2009
Esther paid 3 million $ to train as a cosmonaut .. all arranged by Space Adventures, n which Esther was an investor.
Simonyi, a former Microsoft executive, was a friend of Esther’s and also chaired the board of directors at the Institute of Advanced Studies. March Simonyi got the space trip (Esther was backup).

Greenland meeting n 2007 .. prospective merging of nano- and biotechnologies … grow’g ability 2 map genomes and 2 construct deliberate genetic sequences 4 the purpose of make’g functioning single-cell factories.
When ? 3y later Craig Venter ….

Diversifiers Uncover new ideas and explore new phenomena. Dyson, who loves complexity and diversity and mystery, claims 2B a diversifier. It’s ironic (his) single greatest professional achievement, helping 2 formulate the new quantum electrodynamics, was the work of a unifier.

San Francisco a few days later, 90th birthday of Charles Townes, Nobel Prize 4 work on lasers and Templeton prize 4 religion and science.
The future of science depends on collaboration of unifiers (Newton and Einstein) and diversifiers (Fermi and Townes).
Unifiers consolidate a wealth of ideas into an elegant, universalist scientific framework. That aim, is in effect, a theory of everything.

Oct 2005 the Long Now Foundation “ a group that discusses deep history”
Esther, George and Freeman on public stage together 4 the first time.
Verena Huber-Dyson was there. She is the mother of Esther and George. Imme arranged it. Been about 50y since they saw each other.

Dyson’s eldest child, Esther Dyson, is an investor and philanthropist. She lives in Manhattan and travels the world.
George is his only son and lives in the port of Bellingham, WA. He builds kayaks and writes books on the history of science.
Freeman lived n the same Princeton house since 1956. His wife Imme runs long distances (races too) and flower gardens. They celebrated 50y in ?

Modern biologists don’t use atmospheric electricity 2 create life (Frankenstein). Instead .. they delicately restitch genes in government-funded labs.

Biotech is here .. genetically modified (GM) food. Jan. 2001 mtg of World Economic Forum
n Davis, Switzerland.

Naturalist vs. Humanist
Green over gray.
Food over carbon/Co2.

His main objection 2 the consensus scientific view, encapsulated in the reports .. on climate change is: poor data and faulty computer models.

Heretic / Prophet
These pages are interesting.

Nice section here: Dawkins classifications of belief in God, Einstein and Dyson fall where ?

Templeton Foundation .. yearly prize 4 “progress in religion” received in 2000.
Took many ppl by surprise. [Indeed i think so too !]
Presented by Prince Philip on 5.9.2000
1 million $ prize (more than Nobel awards)
Public ceremony @ National Cathedral in DC.

Dyson: I hated the College 4 perpetuating the privilege of the ruling class. .. I was not a loyal Wykemhamist. I left England and was glad 2 raise my children in America, partly 2 escape from the culture of boarding schools ..
!! He lived in Winchester. His father taught music at Winchester College.
He said after 50 years all the hate was gone and only love remained.

He (Dyson) wants 2 bring profitable industry 2 small towns, not in the form of heavy machines and energy-intensive factories, but in the form of small-scale but significant enterprises.
.. 2 level the playing field in life, 2 slow or reverse the migration from villages to over-crowded cities.

Those who think that science is ethically neutral confuse the findings of science, which are, with the activity of science, which is not.
-Jacob Bronowski

Biology: DNA /RNA
Origin of Life

Plugging away to the end ;)
I agree on “climate change”.

Hanging in there.

I was just going to skip read but the writer is very good .. so have read every word so far !
Freeman is 24y and Feynman is 30y.
June 1948. Cross country trip on Route 66 from Ithaca, NY ( Cornell) to CA.