Nancy’s Reviews > Maverick Genius: The Pioneering Odyssey of Freeman Dyson > Status Update

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.

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