Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Nature Has More Imagination (#019)

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

In a ranging conversation, associate director Brian Keating interviews the preeminent scientist and thinker Freeman Dyson, discussing his career in science and letters, the role of creativity and subversiveness, the perils of prizes, and how nature always shows more imagination than we do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, two, one. Hello, and welcome to Into the Impossible, a podcast about how we imagine and how what we imagine shapes what we do. From the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. I'm Patrick Coleman, and today we're bringing you an interview between our associate director, Brian Keating, the astrophysicist and author of the recent book, Losing the Nobel Prize, with one of the preeminent scientific minds

of the 20th and 21st century, Freeman Dyson. Before we get into the interview, I do want to just let you know about a program that we have going at the Clark Center this year if you're in the San Diego area, and the program is called San Diego 2049. So this series of programs, which we're organizing with the School of Global Policy and Strategy,

will use the imagination and narrative, tools of science fiction to stimulate complex thinking about the future and the ways we can shape it through policy, technology, innovation, culture, and social change. We're going to have a series of events here on campus throughout the year, including a lecture by writer Werner Vinji on October 12th and a world-building workshop for UCSD graduate students led by Anne Pendleton Julian. And one of the exciting things about San Diego 2049 is that graduate students at UCSD can participate in the program, develop their own future scenarios, and compete at the end of the year with their projects, and along the way, earn a certificate in speculative design for policymaking.

So if you're a graduate student at UCSD or you know one, be sure to let them know. And if you're just in the area, please join us for any of the public events throughout the year. We're going to have some great writers and thinkers here in San Diego, bringing their intelligence to bear on the future of the border region and the larger world in 30 years' time. And now, without further ado, let's go to the interview with Freeman Dyson. You have such a remarkable career. You've been an inspiration for many of us younger physicists throughout the generations. You have that rare quality, which is not only do you have great longevity of your ideas and influence,

but you've had the good fortune to go through so many different generations of physicists and see so many different levels of physics throughout your career. And you've not only had great impact on my career and other people's careers, but you've influenced popular culture in a way that few physicists have. In fact, I'm going to give a quote that Oliver Sacks, the late great Oliver Sacks said of you, he said, A favorite word of Freeman's about doing science and being creative is the word subversive.

Freeman, you feel that it's rather important that not only you be you be orthodox, but you also be subversive. And you, Freeman, have done that all your life. I wonder, this is me speaking now, if you've thought about the different ingredients behind your intellectual capacity, in particular for the creativity and imagination that we so deeply are interested here in the Arthur C. Clark Center. Yeah, well, it's more true of Oliver Sachs than it is of me. He's been a lot more subversive than I have.

But, no, of course, I like to be subversive, but the most important work I did, in fact, was just the opposite. It ended up very conservative. I was hoping to upset the whole apple cart of physics, and what actually came out was that the old theories were good. So I had to accept that, that's the way nature thinks, and that's the way we have to think, too. So the actual work I was doing wasn't subversive at all, although my intentions were.

You failed at being subversive, how radical of you. That quite often happens, that you hope to create a revolution and you end up deciding, after all, that the experts were right. So for the benefit of our listeners who may not be familiar with the revolution you're talking about, Could you expound upon it briefly? Yeah, well, this was in the 1940s that we had a theory of quantum electrodynamics, which was the theory of atoms and radiation. A basic theory that was required for understanding physics, for understanding what atoms do and how they interact with light.

But the theory was mathematically a mess. It was producing stupid answers, which are obviously wrong. So everybody was thinking that, oh, we have to have something radically new, some wonderful new ideas. It turned out, my work was actually just to fix up the mathematics to get rid of a lot of the mathematical nonsense. What was left over turned out to be correct. So in the end, we rehabilitated.

the old theory rather than creating a new one. Very interesting. So one thing I'm always curious about, and I tend to ask is one of my favorite sawhorses on these podcasts, is whether or not creativity is like mathematics or even great art in that it could be, or can it be, in your opinion, can it be taught? Or is it something you can merely nurture?

And if you're not born with a certain amount of creativity, imagination, as a physicist or as an intellect, can you actually learn or teach somebody to be creative? So the answer is yes. I mean, surprisingly so. Actually, even Mozart had a teacher, namely Haydn. I mean, if you look at great musicians and great artists and great scientists, they all had mentors, at least as far as I know. and in case it's an unconscious process, of course, you don't sit down and teach how to make great music,

but you just make some music yourself, try it out. It's a mostly matter of practice, but practice guided by other people's knowledge and experience. But I always say for myself that I do both, calculating science and also writing English. And both cases, I always say it's the fingers that do the thinking, that I can't really think about a problem in the abstract, just walking in the country and thinking, that doesn't work.

I have to sit down at a desk and actually calculate something or actually write something. And as the fingers move, somehow the thoughts come. And I think that's true of many of us. And of course, it's two of musicians, particularly the fingers really are doing the thinking in the case of music. And I think science in many ways is very much the same. Absolutely. Okay.

So connecting those two digital practices of using your fingers, both mathematics and literature. literature, writing. How do you find switching between the two? Is it a natural phenomenon for you that it's relatively simple for you to switch between writing English, as you say, and writing mathematics? No, it was very much a conscious decision. I was very happy doing science when I was young, and science is really a young man's game. And then there comes the midlife crisis when you're 40 years old, and you suddenly realize you're not so smart as all these young people around you,

and you better find another line of work. So in my case, the other line of work was writing, and it turned out to be a very productive enterprise. I wrote a number of books. They sold well, and I found in many ways it opened, writing books, opened doors, it widened my circle of friends very much. So I became much more of a public figure as a writer than I was as a scientist. So I've enjoyed the second half of my life. It was a conscious decision that science is really a young man's game.

As writers can continue to write into their 90s, and they don't seem to deteriorate so much. So in my case, it certainly has worked out very well. Very good. And the next question I want to ask is the broad panorama that is characteristic of your work from spanning the very most. deepest underpinnings of the atom and the nucleus and that all ranging all the way out into the deep interstellar voids. And I wonder, you know, when you think about the distant future, you know, I've heard you speak about the four revolutions that you've witnessed in your lifetime, beginning with the space revolution and kind of the generation that we're in now with the

exploration of space. But even that started with you during that, during, and your, you experienced the early part of the space race and even living in England during the war and having to undergo some of the shelling by Hitler's forces using Werner von Braun's technology. I wonder you mentioned once that in some ways you were influenced by Arthur C. Clark, who is, of course, the namesake of this organization that we're a part of. And I wonder, has this capacity for spanning the very small to the very large, is that in any way, did that just come naturally to you, that you were able to think the small picture to the big picture?

Was that something that came easily to you? Yes. I mean, I have a short attention span. I like to jump around from one thing to another. So that's just my temperament. and so it means I don't generally think deep thoughts. I'm usually just listening to the latest gossip, and that's what I mostly do.

I mean, there really are two kinds of scientists, the deep thinkers and there are problem solvers. The deep thinkers, of course, are the most important. They're the people we really revere the most. People like Einstein and Heisenberg, and in Dirac, the people who solve big problems by

sitting down and really staying with one problem for ten years until they have it. And that's not my style. I can work very hard on a problem for a few weeks and then either I solve it or I don't. In either case, I'm

finished, so I go ahead and do something else. Which means that I don't dig so deep, but I do spread more broadly. We need both kinds, but I certainly have enormous respect both for the good problem solvers, like my teacher, Hans Bater, who was an absolute champion problem solver, but also not a deep thinker. And there are others, of course, like Ed. Witten, my colleague and friend in Princeton, who has done nothing but deep thinking all his life.

So one thing that you've been particularly in the news for in the last few years, especially so, with the discovery of a remarkable star that seemed to have a lot of unusual activity that's colloquially known as Tabby's star, this star that had activity that couldn't be explained at least initially by ordinary astrophysical phenomena. And it was conjectured there might be signals of an advanced technology or civilization that might be somehow orbiting this star. And it sort of evoked a renewed or rekindle an interest in what are known as Dyson spheres. And I wondered if you could first describe the inspiration for that.

It has been said that you accredited science fiction author, Olaf Stapleton, perhaps planting a seed that germinated the idea of the Dyson sphere. At first, I wonder if could you describe the genesis of that idea? And then if we have time, I'd like to explore the topic of other civilizations and maybe sending life from Earth out to other civilizations. But first, on Dyson spheres, was that influence in any way by the writing of Olaf? Yes, well, this is a little bit complicated because the whole notion of Dyson spheres

and misunderstanding. And so, I mean, I have to explain what I actually was trying to do and what actually happened, which was quite different. So, there was a couple of friends

of mine, Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi, who were physicists at Cornell. They had the idea of listening for alien civilizations by radio. It was a time when radio telescopes were just getting good. So they proposed to listen for alien signals in the sky by radio,

and that sounded like a very good idea. So I was quite excited about that. But I asked them the question, well, what do you do if this aliens don't want to communicate? And how do you detect non-communicating aliens? And the answer which I came to was you look for waste heat that any advanced civilization, if it has a big industry or big population, will have to get rid of a lot of waste heat. And the only way you can get rid of waste heat on the large scale

is radiating it into space. So it becomes infrared radiation. So what you should look for is infrared sources in the sky, objects in the sky which are radiating a lot of waste heat away in the form of infrared. So I suggested that and published this in

magazine science that was about 50 years ago and so waited to see what would happen. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA you can bundle your

auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. But unfortunately, I used the word biosphere to describe the habitat of these aliens you were looking for. They would be living in some kind of an environment, and this environment, this habitat would have an outside surface. and what you'd actually see was the warm outside surface of whatever the aliens had built. But I used the word biosphere, and the science fiction writers misunderstood that to mean a big round ball, which of course wasn't at all what I had in mind. And the real habitat would be much more like just a collection of orbiting objects in space,

which would have a big surface. but they would have to be disconnected objects orbiting around so that they didn't require to be physically very strong. They could just be sort of big balloons with aliens living inside. Anyhow, so the science fiction writer's got a wrong idea of that. But the right idea, the actual picture of aliens orbiting, around stars in big balloons actually does come from a science fiction writer Olaf Stapleton. And he was describing the advanced civilizations in a book called Starmaker, which is a book,

one of my favorite science fiction books. I mean, it belongs to this genre, which I call Theo-fiction. It's not really science and fiction, but it's a combination of theology. fiction, which Stapleton was particularly good at. So that picture of the galaxy with its alien civilizations absorbing the light and turning it in for infrared, that's clearly described in that book of Stapleton. So it is, in fact, where I got it from. Sticking on the topic of potential extraterrestrial intelligence and why we might not have seen the evidence for such existence of such extraterrestrial intelligence, there's the famous so-called Fermi paradox, which is if you calculate the abundance of alien civilizations, potentially, with a modicum of realism in terms of physical properties that would be needed.

or even just the probability of such civilizations arising, you come up with a probability that's greater than zero. And Fermi's famous paradox was, you know, where are they? And if there's even a slight probability given enough time, there should be some degree of probability that they would have visited and made contact or produced signals that are potentially visible to Earth civilization. So I wonder, how do you really

reconcile, in your mind, what are some of the more plausible solutions to the Fermi paradox? I don't regard that really as a paradox. I think, I mean, it's a mystery. That is not the same thing. The universe is full of mysteries. That's just one of the biggest of them, but there are all sorts of mysteries, and one of the big mysteries, of course, is the origin of life. We don't know how we originated. And we have no idea whether that was just, a colossal accident which was enormously unlikely, but it just, it happened and we have the result. Or it might be that it's quite a common occurrence and that for some reason life doesn't survive very long, that it has so many bad things can happen that life may be quite common in the

universe, but it usually goes extinct. So, I mean, there are all sorts of possible explanations. So I don't regard it as strange that we haven't discovered aliens. It's a mystery why we don't find aliens, and I'm always expecting to find them, I think, but I won't claim I can calculate the probability. There's no way you can calculate a probability. There's no way you can calculate a probability on the basis of one event. And we only know one kind of life. That's us. And so whether it's probable or improbable, we just don't know.

And the question of whether or not we should be looking for life that looks like us, we've talked about this at one time. But you know, is it, do you think it's a necessary precursor that life follow some sort of pattern that's reminiscent of the way nature? seems to work on Earth. Absolutely not. I mean, nature always has more imagination than we have. So if you want to guess what you're going to discover, it's not really a discovery.

Very good. Okay. So the next topic I wanted to talk about was potential ways to visit or send our portions of our species out into the interstellar medium within our galaxy. And you had actually a very storied history with spaceflight, including working on the so-called Orion Project. And I was wondering with the recent developments, including as we record this in March of 2018,

or only last month, Elon Musk and SpaceX send a Tesla Roadster into the solar system. with an orbit that he initially said at least would last for a billion years or so. And the question of getting even beyond our solar system using advanced propulsion systems, I wonder, first, could you describe what the Orion program was about and its current status as well? And then we could get into where you see this might be going in the future. Good. Well, of course, Yuri Milner, the Russian supporter of wild ideas, is doing very well. He has this breakthrough project which he has just established with real money. And so he's actually pushing ahead with what he calls an Alpha Centauri mission. That is an interstellar mission. And I think this is wonderful.

This is quite new. Only started a few months ago. And we have no idea really what's going to come out of it. But it obviously is the right sort of a project if you want to go ahead with ambitious new technology. What I was doing with Project Orion, that was now what, 60 years ago, it was very different.

I mean, that was, by comparison, a very modest project, to use nuclear bombs to drive a spaceship. And that was something we really knew how to do. Nuclear bombs are, in a way, very simple things. They are just big packages of energy that you can explode and you can use them for, all kinds of purposes, particularly murdering people. So we wanted to use nuclear weapons for doing something different. It wasn't murdering people. And so the project was actually started

here in San Diego with the General Atomic Company, which is still here. And so we actually had a project to build this nuclear-powered spaceship, which we called Orion. But that was not an interstellar mission, was very definitely solar system. It could reach velocities of the order of 30 kilometers per second, which is the speed the earth goes around the sun. So it's a very good speed for a solar system mission, but it's not at all good for interstellar. So Orion, from that point of view, was a rather simple and conservative project.

It would have had enormous consequences. It would have meant really cheap and massive missions inside the solar system visiting planets and satellites and comets. Which is a great shame it didn't go forward. On the other hand, the reasons for stopping it was in fact a good reason that it was extraordinarily messy. When you explode bombs all over the place, you needed a large number of bombs. for each mission, the order of 2,000 per mission. So it meant a huge amount of radioactivity being spewed around all over the place, including the planet Earth. So we calculated what we knew about the effects of radioactivity on human health. And as far as we

could tell it, or it worked out that every mission we flew, we would probably kill a roughly one person. But that was considerable uncertainty, might have been as many as 10, might possibly have been a hundred. So anyway, I thought it was quite unacceptable, and I think the public considered it unacceptable then, and even much more so now. So I would say it's a dead project for good reasons. It simply was too filthy. to be tolerated by a civilized society. So anyway, I don't regret having worked on it. It was exciting at the time, but I don't regret having killed it.

I actually testified in the Senate hearing to ratify the test ban treaty, which made Orion impossible. So I'm sort of proud of that too. Very good. We'll get back to politics a little bit later, hopefully. But, well, actually, why don't we go to that now? So you mentioned these projects, which in some sense were nucleated either by General Atomics. I've mentioned the connection to the SpaceX, which is a private company. And it seems like in many ways a lot of big projects are being undertaken, not by governments, not by entities that have vastly superior fortunes,

even though there are very many wealthy billionaires that are funding prizes like Breakthrough Listen and also Elon Musk's for-profit companies. What do you think of the new money kind of influence that's occurring in science to guide projects and directions and pursue goals of philanthropists rather than goals of nations, as things might have done,

in the early parts of your career. Yes, well, I mean, all in favor of private money. But that's not new, of course. I mean, astronomy has always been supported with private money. Galilee, right? The Keck telescopes in Hawaii, which are doing wonderful work in astronomy. These are ground-based telescopes. They were all paid for by Mr. Keck.

We have a long tradition in astronomy. of being supported with private money. And it's certainly, private money is much more pleasant to work with. You don't have to write proposals all the time, and you don't have to write progress reports every three months. It's a much more efficient use of money if you can get it privately. On the other hand, it's also true that the government is doing extremely well. people the public is not aware of how wonderfully well the government has been doing in recent years.

I mean, the Kepler mission is a great example, the mission which discovered 4,000 planets sit around other stars. That was all done with government money very efficiently. So the government actually is good at that too. We need both. One shouldn't put them down just because they happen to be governments. and what the government is not good at is taking risks. And so if you have something which is risky, then much better do it privately.

And that's why the private companies are doing so well at the moment. Because if you want to have a really much cheaper space propulsion system, especially space launch system which is really cheap, you've got to make it risky. because most of the expense of the government programs come from being so risk averse everything has to be checked over 25 times and the paperwork is horrendous

and that's the consequence of not taking risks so that's why the private companies can do much better things like space launch which they're starting to get doing now being risk averse is of course just a way of making everything expensive. So switching, I like to switch from a controversial subject like politics to a less controversial one, religion, if you don't mind. So you're known as a practicing Christian or a non-denominational Christian, I guess, specifically.

So maybe, instead of me telling you what you are, could you maybe describe the role that religion plays in your life or has traditionally? traditionally played in your life, if you don't mind. And then I have some follow-up questions on the relationship between religion and science and more interest to me, of more interest to me, the relationship of scientists to religion. I think it's actually a fascinating subject. So how do you describe your, was it from your upbringing or how was your upbringing sort of theologically speaking and then how did you evolve over time? Yeah, well, I would say, answer the second question first.

I'm a non-believing but practicing Christian, which I think is actually a very large fraction of the practicing Christians are. I mean, in my church in Princeton, which is Presbyterian, they don't care whether you believe everything. That's not really the point. It's a community. And it's the community of people who have a loyalty to the church, which is based on other things rather than belief. That it's a community. It has a very important youth component. It takes care of teenagers.

There's a lot of activities for teenagers in the church. They have wonderful music. They have several choirs, and they have, of course, the liturgy, the order of service. And above all, they have the literature. The Bible and all the Bible is still the greatest work of English literature, both historically and at the present day. And that's what the religion actually gives us, whether or not you believe in the details of whether Jesus really existed or whether he was divine or human. And I'm simply not interested in that.

I think clearly Jesus did exist and he's a wonderful source of wisdom. And so I have enormous respect for him. but I don't worship him. And I think the same is true of Jews, of course, even more, that many of my Jewish friends are practicing but not believing. That's not at all unusual, and that's probably true of Muslims too. And anyhow, I think that's a happy state of affairs. You don't have to worry about whether everything you're told is true.

And you certainly don't have to blame people who think differently from yourself. I should also mention, I mean, that I was brought up in the Church of England, which is, in England, of course, religion is sort of a question of class, that if you're upper class, your Church of England, if you're lower class, you're Presbyterian or Baptist. So it's very much of a social. social distinction. So I had a sister who became Catholic

because she couldn't stand the snobbery in the Episcopalian Church. So she became a Catholic and so when I was in England visiting my sister, I became Catholic too. I went to Mass with my sister, felt very comfortable there

and now I have a daughter who is a Presbyterian minister so I feel very comfortable with her and when I go to to hear her preach in her church and so it doesn't matter to me whether it's Catholic or Protestant or Episcopalian, whatever you want

or for that matter Jewish. I wonder, you know, many of our colleagues don't share the ecumenical thoughts that you've expressed. I always find it ironic because, you know, most universities, at least in America, we're set up first as theological seminaries, essentially. Columbia, Princeton has a very storied history with the Princeton Theological Seminary.

Our greatest universities were sort of established in this way. And now it's basically impossible to find religious studies on campus, or at least on many campuses that I'm familiar with. And I wonder if that's a product of the more secular age that we now live in. But in particular, you know, I've heard it said about the National Academy of Sciences in the United States that over 93 or so percent of scientists do not have a belief in God. Either are atheist or are agnostic with only 7 percent, that is to say, having a belief in theism as a traditional definition of the word. I bet the same is true of your fellows of the Royal Society as well, that there's a large number of non-believers and maybe even active non-believers. That is to say, not even not believing, but trying to convince others not to believe. They're sometimes described by your fellow countrymen Richard Dawkins as militant atheists.

And I wonder, what are your thoughts about that and why there is so much tension? I mean, it's almost as bad as the tension is between philosophers and physicists. It's actually much worse than that. But why do you think there is such an innate resistance to religion on the part of scientists as a general role? Yes, I think it's tremendously exaggerated by the media. I mean, Richard Dawkins, who happens to be the most notorious, with these people. He's a militant atheist.

I think he does a lot of harm. He's telling young people, you have to make a choice, either religion or science, but not both. And I think that does a lot of harm. He actually turns off a lot of young people who happen to be religious believers

thinking they can't be scientists, which is absolutely not true, of course. In the past, of course, Newton, of course, was a very pious Christian and a very serious Christian. And most of the great scientists of the past were believers until recently. The change came in the 19th century. In the case of Princeton University was a religious foundation, what happened in the 19th century was it became secularized,

And then the theological seminary was founded to take care of the religious part of Princeton University. It was really a split in the university. The theological seminary became independent and does the theology. Princeton is secular. And they live side by side. And so that's been the solution in many places. So you separate out the religious part. And the reason why that happened is, of course,

very complicated. It's certainly, it's partly just due to the American Constitution, which makes a separation between politics and religion, which is certainly good on the whole healthy. So that encouraged the universities to become secular, but of course the same thing happened in France and in other parts of the world in a similar fashion around the same time.

Indeed. So when you look around the scientific landscape, at least in my field of cosmology, there's a notion that has become almost synonymous. with the Big Bang theory, which is the epoch of what's called inflation, this early super rapid expansion of space and time that has theorized to take place in the very first few nano-nano-nano-nano seconds after the Big Bang. And I wonder your thoughts on, not on inflation,

but one of the consequences of inflation, at least as proposed by many of the theorists, including Alan Gooth and Andre Linday and other. others who first worked out the details of the inflationary theory down to the level of perturbation theory and structure formation. And that is the so-called multiverse, which seems to suggest that our universe may not be alone. So not only might there be a Fermi paradox within our galaxy or even between galaxies, but there

might be additional room and real estate for Fermi's question to be asked, which is that there might be an infinite number or functionally infinite number, 10 to the 500th universes have been suggested as not implausible according to the laws of string theory and relativistic early universe cosmology. I wonder, first of all, your thoughts on the multiverse, if you have any, and then follow-up question about the similarities between the sort of ability to, test or falsify scientific theories such as the multiverse and where they fit into sort of the orthodox conjectures of modern science. So first on the multiverse and then if we have time to talk about whether or not it is how it fits into traditional definitions of science.

Yes, well, because I'm very skeptical about theories in general. and so I mean inflation was a beautiful idea and it's not really a theory it's a sort of a model it's a mathematical

scheme which is extremely simple and there's really very little evidence from observations that it's true it's a model that's a model that's consistent

with the observations but it's probably much simpler than anything that nature would have devised. Nature has a habit of being complicated. And so when we look at things for the first time, we usually have a simple model in mind. And so we look at a star and we think it's very simple,

that just a big ball of gas, and you make models of it. The problem is that people who work with models tend to believe the models. it's almost impossible to work seriously on a problem without believing more than it's really justified. And so it tends to become then almost a religion that you have a mathematical scheme which you sort of becomes in your own mind somehow true

and then you think about it as if it were real nature but when the time finally comes and you do the observations, nature usually says it's wrong, and that's what I tend to believe much more what nature is saying than I believe what the astronomers are saying. So that's my own temperament. But the fact is that astronomy is amazingly rich. There's so many wonderful things we are observing.

within, inside the universe. That's what I'm excited about. Then there are all these other things which are beyond the universe, like what they call the multiverse, from which we have no observations, but nothing but mathematical speculation. I don't find that so interesting,

and it's almost certainly it has some elements of truth, but most unlikely that it's anything like the real truth. And so anyhow, as far as I'm concerned, I leave it alone. Other people take it much more seriously than I do. Of course, two of your countrymen had sort of a difference of opinion.

So one was Sir Arthur Eddington, who said, never believe in observation until it's been proven by a theory, which, of course, is the opposite of most ways that we think of the scientific method. and then Carl Popper also said, well, he said in contrast, that essentially the predictions of a theory which cannot be refuted by observation or tested by evidence that such theories and the models that are spawned by these theories would not qualify in his definition as counting as a scientific pursuit. It might be a fun parlor trick. It might be give employment to astrologers and other soothsayers, as Popper called them. But I wonder if this notion of falsifiability, does that hold any resonance to you, in your opinion? Oh, yes.

It is. No, I mean, I am really agree with Popper that science ought to be verifiable. But there is, of course, an amazing fact, which that somehow goes in the other direction is the fact that mathematics has been so amazingly successful in describing nature. And so there is some kind of, I would say, really a major mystery that so much, of what we've invented as mathematicians, what looked like pure mathematics. Finally, after a hundred years or so,

we find it's all there in nature. And so there is a possibility, this goes against Popper, that by pure mathematics, you can actually predict what nature is going to do. And that does, it does work. So Popper is not the whole story, and the real world is a mixture of Popper and Eddington. Of course, that's what makes it so beautiful that there are these mysteries we don't understand.

I would like to say science is really not about things we understand. Science is about things we don't understand. That's what makes it exciting. And in that sense, of course, science and religion are not so different, that both science and religion are misguess. histories, we have this amazing ability which we can't explain to find out how nature thinks. I've always liked to say, we just are monkeys who came down from the trees rather recently. And it's amazing that a monkey can write a symphony or invent street.

theory or anything else. I mean, the imagination which we have wasn't required to survive in the jungle or when we climbed, or when we were living up in the trees. Somehow this imagination is a gift from nature which we don't understand, like many other things. One more question before we turn to the final question. It's like it's the penultimate question. If you knew that there was a God, what question would you most like the answer to, if you could sort of circumvent all the scientific method and hard work? If you could just ask a question of this omniscient, omnipotent being, what would that question be? Oh, well, of course, it's a hard choice.

There's so many mysteries and I don't know which I would choose. but perhaps how did life begin, I think, would be sort of number one in my mind. He probably knows. One would hope so. Meet the job description. Okay, so I want to spend the last few minutes talking about prizes, and you know that I'm quite interested in prizes, and you've won so many of them it would take all the remaining,

all the remaining time we have just to list them, including one recent one that I do want to bring up. But in particular, what I consider to be the world's most prestigious accolade of any kind, the Nobel Prize, you once said, I think it's almost true without exception, that if you want to win a Nobel Prize, you should have a long attention span, get a hold of some deep and important problem, and stay with it for 10 years. That wasn't my style. You've talked about that.

But I guess it's clear to me. or it seems clear to me that you never really saw winning the Nobel Prize as a priority. Many people, as you know, have considered that you should have had a share of the Nobel Prize that went to the folks along with whom you created quantum electrodynamics or the theory of quantum electrodynamics. I wonder how you're losing of the Nobel Prize in my language that have any effect on you, or where do you see the role of such prizes? some say it's a curse to win a Nobel Prize. T.S. Eliot, who won the Nobel Prize for literature,

said the Nobel Prize is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after they won it. You've had such a remarkable career, even since those heady days of inventing quantum electrodynamics. So I wonder, what are your feelings on prizes such as the Nobel Prize? Well, I was recently, there's a wonderful, Joslyn Bell, Bernal, so she's called

Jocelyn Bernal now. And she's the one who discovered pulsars. That's right. Pulsing radio sources in the sky, which turn out to be rotating neutron stars. And they have an enormous importance in the dynamics of the universe and in all sorts of ways.

It was one of the biggest discoveries ever made in astronomy. And she did not get the Nobel Prize instead her supervisor Anthony Hewish got the prize and she was barely mentioned she was then a graduate student when she did the work anyway so that's sort of a famous example

of a wrong person getting the prize and she was visiting Princeton recently she's a wonderful lady she was only about 20 when she did the work and now she's in her 70s I guess but still going strong. Anyway, she was visiting Princeton. Of course, the students asked her the inevitable question,

what do you feel about not getting Nobel Prize? And she said, oh, it's wonderful, you know. It's so much nicer to have people ask you why you didn't get the Nobel Prize than to have them ask you why you did. I feel the same way. It is, anyhow. But in fact, of course, we didn't. worry about it. It really wasn't in our minds when we were doing the work. I think it's become

much more worried about these days somehow just because of the media, the media pays so much more attention to it than they used to. And I don't, in those times when I was a graduate student, I don't think it actually was talked about so much. Certainly we weren't thinking about it much. And it's certainly true. I did not. deserve it because I was mostly just cleaning up, sort of cleaning up the mathematical mess. It was all just mathematical details. What I was doing, all the ideas came from the other three. So I'm not unhappy with that at all.

Well, then you'll be distressed to know that on a new website, which is called Losing the Nobel Prize.org, you are one of the people who has suggested that should receive a Nobel Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. So I know that will not mean that much to you, but for many people,

they do see that as a wrong that should be righted and injustice that could be potentially corrected still. So I don't expect to comment on that. But one thing I would like to draw attention to is last week it was announced that you won the

Highland Prize. and so I want to read the citation, I believe I have it on my phone here. Okay, so I wanted to read it. This is from, oops, okay, the headline is, this is from the National Space Society Organization, and the headline is Freeman Dyson, famed physicist, wins the National Space Society's prestigious Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award. So the Space Society members have voted to give Freeman Dicey, in the prestigious Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award.

This award honors the work that he has done as a groundbreaking physicist and mathematician and as a major thought leader in the science and space communities over half a century. And there'll be a presentation in Los Angeles on May 24th through May 27th, and you'll be celebrated there. I wonder if you could give us a preview in any way of the remarks that you might be thinking about for your acceptance speech of this wonderful award. Yeah, well, of course, no, I have enormous respect for Heinlein. I mean, I do read quite a lot of science fiction, and Heinlein was very good as a spinner of stories.

And I think science fiction has been important, still is important, for getting kids interested in science, and for getting the public interested in supporting science. Actually, I find that the people I most enjoy reading are people like, oh, I forget the names, it doesn't matter. There are two ladies whom I know personally who write what I call, theofiction of the fiction which is more concerned with philosophy and theology rather than science. And Hindline was the old-fashioned kind who just had people strutting around in space. Anyhow, what I'm going to talk about at the ceremony is an outrageous comedy about what might happen in the future.

And that's what I think science fiction can contribute to somehow light a touch, so you don't, doesn't all have to be so serious. And so I'm promoting something called the Noah's Ark Egg, which is a vehicle for getting embryos into space very cheaply. So I think it might, in fact, have an important part of our future I mean, the important thing is not humans going into space. The important thing is life as a whole. If you want to flourish in the universe, one species won't cut it.

You have to have a million species living together. That's when nature really can take off and evolve. Evolution is not something that's done by one species. Evolution requires a whole ecology. and it's a very complicated and very powerful, creative thing. And I think the Nozark egg might be the way to do it anyhow. That's what I'll be talking about. Very good.

Well, I know that you said in the beginning that you like to get the bad news first, but now the bad news comes at the end that this interview has to come to an end, despite my desire to very much continue to pick your brain. But you'll be around San Diego. I know a lot more in the future. a scholar in residence here at the University of California, San Diego. And I appreciate your visit and congratulations on winning the Highland Award as well. Thank you, Freeman.

Thank you. This has been Into the Impossible, a podcast of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. We'd like to thank our guest, Dr. Freeman Dyson, and acknowledge our generous patrons and sponsors, including Viasat Inc., members of the founder's orbit and the James B. Axe Family Foundation. Your support is much appreciated. To find out more about the Clark Center and other exciting projects, research and programs, as well as how to support our mission, please visit imagination.ucsd.edu. Audio production is by me, Patrick Coleman, produced by Patrick Coleman

and Brian Keating. And thank you for listening. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, four, two, two. Thank you.