Photography and plan to join us upstairs afterwards for the book signing and king case you are wondering where we pod cast most of these events, there are 1300 broadcasts for you to listen to, tell your grandchildren there are a lot of classics and your kids, they can get some homework done pretty quickly. I am the director of author events and i am pleased to welcome you and our guests this evening. Freeman dyson is an iconoclast, genius and one of the great minds in physics, mathematics and popular science. Everything else you need to know before he takes the stage is either in his books or in the programs in your lap. Tonight since we only have 60 minutes of Freeman Dysons time 59, it would be a waste of final nitrogen and seconds to tell you any more than to say Freeman Dyson will be interviewed by David Goldberg professor of physics at Drexel University and author of the universe in the rearview mirror. Please welcome to the library of philadelphia Freeman Dyson and David Goldberg. [applause] welcome to everyone, welcome to Freeman Dyson. I would like to begin by talking about the title of your latest book which you borrow from the soviet Rocket Scientist constant until, ski lkonstantin tsoilkov tsoilkovsky this is your book the tribute to his vision of space travel . The great thing about him is he was interested in biology more than engineering. Although he actually worked out rocket equations and understood how to do the engineering part he understood that if you really want to go into space seriously, it is much more a problem of biology and engineering. It is not just getting into space, it is what you do when you get there. On that topic, you make an interesting claim early in your book, you say the last century, the 20th century is the century of physics the century of biology. The Nineteenth Century is the century of chemistry. On that topic, from the biological perspective the make an interesting, and with regards to understanding biology, you talk about evolution and make very provocative claim the darwinian interlude has lasted 2 or 3 billion years. After a 3 billion years the darwinian interview is over. A single species, homo sapiens begins to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the Main Driving Force of change. This is a big question if you are up to it. Tell us how in your opinion human beings have changed the nature of evolution. As a side note very interested in hearing how the biologists responded here to your claim. I learned a lot recently from peter grant, biologists who worked in the galapagos islands, they spent 20 years living on one island in the galapagos and got not to know every bird there personally. To understand the inherited characteristics, particularly the beat from one generation to the next. In conclusion, which came as of big surprise to them and thus is it goes very fast he didnt stay long enough to see evolution happening. These species seem to be finches which darwin observed actually do evolve from year to year from decade to decade. Darwin started life as a it geologist, he tended to think in geological terms. Everything had to be slow. He had the notion that evolution was always millions of years but in reality that is not true. As the in a very practical way you can in fact evolve species this is Natural Selection, nothing artificial, variation of finishes from year to year essentials because these islands have a very rapid and quite abrupt fluctuations of climate one year will be wet and the next year will be dry. That makes a big difference to the birds, food is abundant or scarce. What happens is Natural Selection operates on that kind of rapid timescale so it is actually not true that cultural evolution is necessary, biological evolution both sides go fast. So sort of follow up on that. One thing that struck me, you now say it is more of a mix of the two, but darwins day is not necessarily over. Of course is not over. It is true that human domination is a fact. We are in control of the biosphere to a great extent. Is up to us not to mess it up. At the risk of drawing the my knowledge of the biological world one of the lessons we often turn, we underestimate the microscopic world scrutiny engineer individual plants, wheat engineer large animals we carve out large swaths of farmland and things like that but there is a lot going on beyond our control, beyond our everyday interpretations of the bacterial level. Do we miss basically the microscopic world because we have so clearly dominated the world on the macroscopic. I wouldnt say that. Very large amount of biology is concerned with microbes, most of what be learned about fundamental biology comes from studying microbes, viruses in particular. I think we are having at least as big an effect on the microbial as the big animals. In both cases we dont control it but we are certainly disturbing it very seriously. This brings up an important point. You are a physicist. You are a physicists among many other things. As a student, you work in contributions to Quantum Mechanics and quantum field theory in particular but i think it is fair to call you your contributions are fairly extensive. This particular book for those who havent read it yet is a collection primarily of essays and book reviews and one of the remarkable things is how much ground it covers. We discussed a little bit, biology, physics history and so on. Can you describe your process of diving into a new field, biology, ecology, evolution economics, so on. If you could describe your process, described what you learned and if it is not too much maybe your sense of how daunting it can be to go into a world where other people have generated expertise and developed expertise yourself. I would say, this normal development is getting old. Get broader and broader and shallower and shallower. Like a river of reaching the ocean. Anyhow. And of course writing books is a congenial activity for an old gentleman. It can be done on time. Of course i have had the enormous advantage of living in a community at princeton which is sort of bright young people. I had the opportunity to get to know people. That is why i find it easy to get into it in a lot of different subjects just because i get to know a lot of very exciting people and i have this wonderful situation of being a member of the club where most of the other members are 70 years younger. Of course one of the exciting things is i have known you as a thinker for number of years. I met you when i was a student at very briefly. In your book you write about some of your heroes, you write very lovingly about Richard Feynman in a chapter devoted to tree to biographies of him but you begin the chapter with a general discussion of sort of scientists, the scientist with a capital s perhaps, as personality, you put einstein and Stephen Hawking on one side one category and people like Richard Dawkins and carl sagan on the other. To me, feynman comes across as a scientific hero to you. As the side note he is one of my own as well. What draws you to him as a thinker . There are so many important physicists in the 20th century, why the reputation, enduring reputation of fineman as a physicists hero to so many Young Students even now . Came from england to this country as a graduate student at cornell. Data was already across tremendous pieces but what was even more amazing when is this young guy named fineman i had never heard of who was right there, got to know him in the first weekend immediately, couldnt have been luckier and a clown, search and listen to all kinds of famous so it was obvious, an enormous opportunity just to get to know him. And the process of understanding Quantum Mechanics. And what was quite different from everybody else. Writedown and equations and solve it. That was a normal way of doing science and with fineman who just wrote down the solution, he just wrote down the equations. And he did that by drawing pictures, it was astonishing how well this worked. Got all the right answers and nobody understood why. I made that my task. Just to understand feynman and explain him to other people is what i did. One of i thought it was interesting when i contrast that your essay on fineman to your peace on paul durac who is influential on our understanding of the unification, Quantum Mechanics generally, but the unification of Quantum Mechanics and einsteins theory of special relativity. They are too numerous to list but durac doesnt have this sort of enduring it miss those around him in the way that fineman does and his contributions are among the most important of the 20th century. Using your peace as a launching point if you could comment on why that is. The answer is very simple that feynman just enjoy it to play up to the public, he liked to fool around and that was quite opposite of durac. Durac always wrote as few words as possible and if asked a question he would usually answer yes or no and that was it. So it was quite normal that the public would respond to feynman because feynman responded to the public. That to me was quite a surprise. I knew feynman as a scientist and also as a friend but i did not think of him as a public figure in those days. What i think is wonderful is the public does have good taste. The public understood how great he is and that came as a surprise. Yesterday i wrote another book, max planck who was a contemporary of einstein and they were very Close Friends and they had the same contrast the einstein was a great physicist, Everybody Knows about him, planck was equally great as a scientist, planck was the father of Quantum Mechanics, he was an enormously powerful scientists and an admirable human being in all sorts of ways but he was like durac, he kept quiet. Everybody admirers einstein very few admire planck. The reason is exactly the same. Planck wasnt happy in front of the microphone, einstein was. To turn it around on you a little bit, you have of this lengthy career, you have written all of these books, how do you see your own role in the pantheon of scientists as personality . You never know what you will end up being famous for. The main thing is i dont take myself too seriously. I have always had a short attention span. I love to jump around from one thing to another. And angela exwife. I have been happy to have a big, family second, life second, work third. Im not a worldclass scientist. I just enjoy life. No comment on that. You are an observer of not just physics but all sciences but i am curious, as somebody a little older than i would like but certainly early enoughs in my career, opportunities to tackle new problems, and i am curious what you think are the biggest remaining problems in physics. I talked mostly to astronomers not so much to particle physicists and other kinds of physicists. The big mystery is dark matter and dark energy. Those are overwhelmingly the biggest parts of the universe and we dont understand them at all. It is amazing how little we understand, but we are observing dark matter in great detail and every year learning more about it and we will come to observe dark energy as time goes on. But still i would say those to me are the two most astounding mysteries. I wanted to one of the most interesting, i think, qualities of your work is you are very willing and very excited to take on controversial viewpoints. Is that a Fair Assessment . Oh yes. You have a chapter on Climate Change in this book. You point out that the work of science is never finished, there should never be an orthodoxy that cant be challenged. You describe proponents of Global Warming and environmentalism generally as being part of a religion. I like this quote even though i dont entirely agree with it the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. Tomorrow happens to be earth they given the we have days to celebrate theres a point taken their. Here is my question. You put the idea forward that we should be skeptical, willing to challenge science but there comes a time when further study is in a sense a rhetorical device meant to postpone action potentially in definitely. Much of the urgency from the Environmental Movement is intended to counter claims that might be funded by the Energy Industry for example. At what point should society and the Scientific Community make the equivalent of pascals wagered . That there is enough information to act . That is a question of judgment. I happened to have worked at oak ridge, that is where i learned what i know about climate. That is the National Laboratory to in those days run by weinberg. They had a group it was called i think Energy Analysis for something. Group of people who were concerned with energy on a large scale and it included experts on forests experts on vegetation, experts on soil and microbes that live in soil. It was heavily into the ecology. Also people who understood a bit about meteorology, climate, so it was balanced. I think we understood that all these things have to be taken as part of the big picture and it only makes sense to start making recommendations to the government about policy. If you look at all points of view especially ecological point of view ecology is what it is really all about. Climate to my mind is a minor issue compared with the ecology. That is the basic difference between the and the majority. Is not a question so much as a fact, question of the emphasis that i would put far more emphasis on the biological aspects and much less on fluid dynamics. If you look at the climate what is called Climate Science is actually just fluid dynamics. That is all it is. They do big computer models of the atmosphere and the ocean which are all just fluid dynamics but they dont have much else. The real world is enormously more complicated. The real world doesnt come into their models at all really. Somehow or other this fluid Dynamics Community has become dominant. It has tremendous political punch. And that is why i disagree with it. I think the emphasis is wrong. I believe ecology should come first. Thinking about how much you can trust any particular scientific model, one thing i thought was interesting is william nordhouses question of balance with the the question of Global Warming and Climate Change is based relies heavily on economic simulations. I would make the argument that there is a lot of black box computing going on the we dont really know what goes on inside the black box. Can we do this if we can understand the atmosphere moving into a century into the future can we understand Human Behavior a century into the future . Of course not. I wouldnt say that doesnt necessarily is what is really the practical question. The practical question is, do we actually know whether we are doing more harm than good when we take some action, for example to try to limit the emissions of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere . Do we understand the effects on the ecology well enough to know whether we are doing good or doing harm . That to me is the question i dont know the answer to or anybody else knows the answer either. A specific question, do you feel there are other areas where the scientific orthodoxy or any of the orthodoxy is off base . I dont think anything at this moment. Undoubtedly i would say most of the time dealing with political questions rather unscientific questions. A slightly lighter topic, i know you are not crazy, i know you are not crazy about the naming convention but one of your major and legacies intended this way in the realm of Science Fiction. And the 1960s you propose what is known unto others as the dyson sphere which i have heard you are not crazy about the naming convention but you propose it as a possible signature for supercivilizations, looking out there for intelligent life, the construction is basically a giant sphere at the earths distance from the sun around a star and increase your liveable area by quadrillions. In principle all the energy going in, we could look for infrared signature is as a way of looking for supercivilizations. I am wondering more generally, if you could comment on the interface between science and scientific proposals and Science Fiction and potentially how they are used or misused in Popular Culture . I love sciencefiction. I wrote a piece for the week magazine, books, four Science Fiction books i was recommending all of them concerned with religion in one way or another. That is what is important about Science Fiction, it is about human people it is about emotions, real problems of human life. Is not about science. It doesnt matter whether the science is right or wrong. The important thing is whether the people are well drawn and present a serious point of view. The four books i was recommending all of them were written by friends of mine. [laughter] octavia butler, the parable of the talent, two written by mary russell, the sparrow and children of god, they are all wonderful stories but people primarily concerned with religion than science and that is the truth, religion goes far deeper into history, goes far deeper into our way of thinking than science so i am an advocate of Science Fiction not because it has anything to contribute to science but because it has a lot to contribute to wisdom. Guest it goes both wise, but certainly not so it doesnt certainly might be just sort of work remarking about the story and the whole point is that if