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Dyson translated his mother's lesson to fit what he believed was happening between the military and anti-nuclear activists: "Wherever one looks into the world of human organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards. The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things together which nobody in his right mind would do alone."

What sets Dyson apart among an elite group of scientists is the conscience and compassion he brings to his work. One of his specialties is in the field of adaptive optics, work with mirrors that can, in theory, allow a ground-based telescope to see objects as clearly in the sky as a space-based telescope. Dyson understood the dark side to adaptive optics -- that the technology used peacefully by astronomers could be used by military to focus laser beams on satellites, aircraft and other targets. Before beginning his work on the optics, Dyson studied both the peaceful and the military applications and determined that the latter death ray scenario was more the stuff of science fiction than reality. To this day, Dyson's work is enabling astronomers to make successful observations.

Dyson is so well-known for his theories about taking Jupiter apart to build a star-bound biosphere (known throughout science fiction as a Dyson Sphere), that it's easy to overlook his physics work, which would earn him worldwide recognition -- membership in the national science academies in three countries including the United States -- and numerous scientific awards, including the 1994 Enrico Fermi Award, given by the U.S. government for excellence in physics. For his own part, Dyson takes a whimsical view of his place in science. He told Omni Magazine in 1978: "It's amusing to think that someday all my 'serious' work will probably be a footnote in a textbook, when everybody remembers what I did on the side."

One could look at Dyson's life and see it as a series of threads, each representing a project he has taken up on the side, all woven together to tell his story. The latest thread concerns Dyson's role as an author, writing about the aesthetics of science and explaining the philosophical and theoretical issues involved in scientific endeavors ranging from nuclear research and space travel to solar power and genetic engineering. In each of his books and articles, Dyson intersperses scientific explanation with meditation on humanism and how the human condition affects science, and vice versa. One of the most eloquent examples of this is in "Disturbing the Universe," where he examines the motivations behind the political actions of the chief architects of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller:

Oppenheimer was driven to build atomic bombs by fear that if he did not seize this power, Hitler would seize it first. Teller was driven to build hydrogen bombs by the fear that Stalin would use this power to rule the world. Oppenheimer, being Jewish, had good reason to fear Hitler. Teller, being Hungarian, had good reason to fear Stalin. But each of them, having achieved his technical objective, wanted more ... Each of them became convinced that he must have the political power to ensure that the direction of the enterprise he had created should not fall into hands that he considered irresponsible.

Dyson is a credible analyst because he is a man who has tasted war, having served in the British military while wrestling with his conscience over the morality of war and all that goes with it. In making his observations, he thinks with his heart and hands, qualities he values as an essential part of sound scientific inquiry. This thinking is also an essential part of art. So it is no surprise that Dyson equates scientific inquiry with craftsmanship. Perhaps this is the self-styled frog's greatest legacy: to be down in the mud, engaging in the tactility of life as a human who happens to be a scientist.
salon.com | Oct. 9, 1999

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