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Rogues' Gallery
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Nothing Personal
We like Marky?
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Complete archives for People

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Dyson's adult journey began with a stint in the Royal Air Force's bomber command in World War II, a role the Gandhian pacifist took after giving serious consideration to being a conscientious objector. After two years in the service, Dyson attended Cambridge University where he completed a bachelor of arts degree in theoretical mathematics in 1945. In 1947, he made his first trip to the United States to Cornell University to serve a scientific apprenticeship at the elbows of the some of the greatest minds in physics.

Cornell in 1947 was the center of a renaissance of pure physics research, born of the ideas and concepts that had lain dormant during the war. One of the chief orchestraters of this rebirth was Dyson's graduate advisor, Hans Bethe, a future Nobel Laureate who spent the war years working on the atom bomb at Los Alamos. Bethe brought other former Los Alamos scientists to Cornell, including Richard Feynman, a young professor of physics who would help influence the course of Dyson's career.

Feynman was then working on a private version of quantum theory that would later become the standard method for making calculations in particle physics. It is a credit to Dyson's scientific acumen and personable nature that Feynman and the other physicists accepted the young graduate student as a colleague straight away. When Dyson wasn't hard at work on a physics problem Bethe had given him, he was part of a coterie of faculty and grad students ministering to Feynman. By spending a lot of time around Feynman, Dyson got the opportunity to observe the physicist "at the height of his creative powers." Dyson understood Feynman's work well enough that he was able to do something Feynman couldn't: write about the theories for a broader audience, a skill Dyson would develop into a second career.

Dyson's work at Cornell was short; his program lasted nine months. But during his studies at the Ithaca campus, he raised many philosophical questions for which his advisor had no answer. Philosophy questions in physics were the bailiwick of another one of Bethe's former Los Alamos colleagues, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was then director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Bethe spoke to Oppenheimer about Dyson, and Dyson was off to Princeton in the fall of 1948 for a year of post-graduate work at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Dyson impressed the legendary Oppenheimer enough with his work that he earned a long-term membership to the institute. Dyson also met his future wife during this time. They married, settled into Princeton, and started a family that grew to six children. By 1953, Dyson had earned an appointment as a physics professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, a position he held until his retirement in 1994.

After becoming a U.S. citizen in 1957, Dyson caught wind of a fascinating project taking shape near the sun-kissed beaches of San Diego. The Orion Project would allow Dyson to marry his boyhood fascination with Jules Verne to his desire to use his mathematical training to solve an interesting problem: Is it possible to create a propulsion system that will allow man to explore the entire solar system for a politically acceptable cost? Orion provided the most exciting and happiest times of Dyson's scientific life, mostly because he became an engineer, a being apart from a scientist. He noted the difference in "Disturbing the Universe": "There are no prima donnas in engineering. In Project Orion ... nobody was working for personal glory ... It did not matter who invented what."

Orion was born at the General Dynamics Corporation, the progeny of several former Manhattan Project scientists and Dyson, all of whom were anxious to find a more noble and peaceful use for nuclear power. Under Orion, a vehicle much larger than Apollo (perhaps as big as a city) would be propelled into space by several repeated nuclear explosions. The craft would carry a large supply of bombs and the requisite machinery for throwing them out at the right time and location.

Dyson saw so much promise in this project that he predicted to writer John McPhee that they would put men on Mars by 1965 and on Saturn by 1970. Unfortunately, Orion met the same fate as Dyson's fictional Erolunar mission: It never made it to the launch pad and was declared dead in 1965. In his own post-mortem of the project in a 1965 Science article, Dyson attributed Orion's demise in part to politics over funding and by the scientific community's disdain for engaging in anything related to engineering. But mostly, Orion was scrubbed because the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 outlawed it. Proponents of the treaty, he said at the time, didn't give Orion a chance.

Eventually, Dyson's own position on nuclear test bans would change: He grew to believe that if the U.S. were to stop nuclear weapons testing and production, it would reduce incentives for the Soviets and others to pour time and money into developing their own weapons. In the early 1960s, Dyson become a staff member of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where he took part in test ban negotiations. Later in the decade, Dyson chaired the Federation of American Scientists, an organization founded in 1945 as the Federation of Atomic Scientists by former Manhattan Project scientists, including Oppenheimer, for the purpose of addressing the dangers and implications of the nuclear age. Dyson later struck an intellectual balance between opposing views: He became a champion of anti-nuclear activists, understanding at the same time why the government military machine would dismiss the protests.

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