Freeman Dyson, a visionary and renaissance physicist, dies at 96
Source: Washington Post
Freeman Dyson, a visionary physicist and technophile who helped crack the secrets of the subatomic world, tried to build a spaceship that could carry humans across the solar system, worked to dismantle nuclear arsenals and wrote elegantly about science and human destiny, died Feb. 28 at a hospital near his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 96.
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Mr. Dyson, born in England between the world wars, spent most of his professional life as a kind of genius-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, overlapping in his early years with Albert Einstein.
In a career spent traversing fields as diverse as physics, biology, astronomy, nuclear energy, arms control, space travel and science ethics, Mr. Dyson was always obliging when a journalist called him for a grabby quote about the trajectory of humanity. His ideas were reliably unorthodox; the Pulitzer Prize-winning classical composer Paul Moravec once called him the worlds most civil heretic.
Of all his notions, his most famous was that alien civilizations, seeking to maximize their supply of energy, would build elaborate megastructures around their parent stars to capture much of the solar radiation. Astronomers periodically see something that they speculate might be one of these spheres although Mr. Dyson freely admitted he lifted the idea from science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/freeman-dyson-a-visionary-and-renaissance-physicist-dies-at-96/2020/02/28/0ba462e0-5a58-11ea-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html
exboyfil
(17,863 posts)of life outside of our biosphere. I think it has a better chance of success than looking for intentional radio signals.
We should be doing a full sky survey for our galaxy looking for these structures around other stars (we kind of already do that with our exoplanet detection methods). Also a survey looking for K-3 galactic civilizations in the 300 billion galaxies in the visible part of space.
brooklynite
(94,592 posts)...all the energy (esp. light waves) would be captured.
exboyfil
(17,863 posts)you are actually looking for the heat signature of waste heat. That and the fact that few think that an entire sphere would ever be built. Most likely it would be a swarm. As far as a galactic civilization, you would see part of a galaxy obscured in the visible wavelength along with the waste heat signature.
A very simple Welcome mat would be putting something like a large triangle in orbit around a star (perhaps several in different planes). Using Kepler techniques you would know it is artificial very quickly. This is a very low energy approach vs. blasting radio waves.
NurseJackie
(42,862 posts)Lucky Luciano
(11,257 posts)burrowowl
(17,641 posts)lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)If he gets his way, the sky will be made of metal.
FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)LunaSea
(2,894 posts)He will be greatly missed.
I was once honored to illustrate some articles by Dyson
Thought I's share one with you.
LaurenOlimina
(1,165 posts)TlalocW
(15,384 posts)Thanks to Star Trek: TNG
TlalocW
BumRushDaShow
(129,084 posts)But Scotty helped to save the day!
Takket
(21,575 posts)everyone should watch the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics". It is a great watch even if you aren't a fan!
uppityperson
(115,677 posts)hunter
(38,317 posts)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson#Career_in_the_United_States
Many of Dyson's opinions would be anathema to Democratic Underground. It seems to me his perspective was limited by his Christianity and the customary baggage of English prejudice.
Here's in interview with Dyson, and this tidbit:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/11/freeman_dyson_interview/