Freeman Dyson: Optimistic Rebel

Physicist Freeman Dyson makes a cameo appearance in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins takes him to task for accepting an award from the pro-Christian Templeton Foundation. Dawkins makes it clear that organizations like the Templeton Foundation should be named and shamed. They should not be allowed to appropriate the authority of an eminent physicist.

Now Freeman Dyson has a book out, The Scientist as Rebel, and he talks to Benny Peiser at TCSDaily.

Asked about the growing pressure on scientists to follow the “scientific consensus,” he replies:

Certainly the growing rigidity of scientific organizations is a real and serious problem. I like to remind young scientists of examples in the recent past when people without paper qualifications made great contributions.

For instance there’s the mule-driver who ended up as astronomer and second-in-command to Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory.

But don’t worry about the future, Dyson advises.

Amateurs and small companies will have a growing role in the future of science. This will compensate for the increasing bureaucratization of the big organizations. Bright young people will start their own companies and do their own science.

Then he talks about a new development in genetic science, a gene sequence called Human Accelerated Region 1.

In “the genomes of mouse, rat, chicken and chimpanzee” it is strictly preserved. But in the human genome it “appears grossly modified with eighteen mutations.” What is going on here?

And get this. He attributes the current gloom-and-doom mood to the British class system. No, not the division between the bosses and the workers. We are talking about the class war in the middle class!

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.

Yes. Margaret Thatcher, grocer’s daughter. There must be some mistake!

And the worst of it is that the British welfare state, the only child of the academic middle class, is self-destructing as we speak.

Go on. Read the whole thing!