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Freeman Dyson’s Gravitational Machines

What an intriguing thing to find Freeman Dyson’s “Gravitational Machines” paper popping up on arXiv. This one is yet another example of Dyson’s prescience, for in it he examines, decades before the actual event, how gravitational waves could be produced and detected,...

On Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson's response to the perplexity of our existence was not purely scientific. A polymath by nature, he responded deeply to art and literature and often framed life's dilemmas through their lens. Always thinking of himself as a mathematician first, he unified...

Freeman Dyson: Reasons for Optimism

Centauri Dreams believes profoundly in what I might call 'realistic optimism.' While an aggressive belief in the human future can be overstated, it's important to remember that intellectual fashions come and go, leaving many a futurist trying to explain another failed...

On Retrieving Dyson

One of the pleasures of writing and editing Centauri Dreams is connecting with people I’ve been writing about. A case in point is my recent article on Freeman Dyson’s “Gravitational Machines” paper, which has only lately again come to light thanks to the indefatigable...

The Dyson Sphere Search

The Dyson sphere has become such a staple of SETI as well as science fiction that it’s hard to conceive how lightly Freeman Dyson himself took the idea. In a 2008 interview with Slate, he described the Dyson sphere as no more than ‘a little joke,’ and noted “it's...

Pondering the ‘Dyson Slingshot’

Let's start the week by talking about gravitational assists, where a spacecraft uses a massive body to gain velocity. Voyager at Jupiter is the classic example, because it so richly illustrates the ability to alter course and accelerate without propellant. Michael...

Dyson Sphere Hunt Using Kepler Data

The idea of the multiverse -- an infinite number of universes co-existing with our own -- has a philosophical and mathematical appeal, at least if you're a follower of string theory. Indeed, there are those who would argue there could be as many as 10500 universes,...

BBC Audio: Dyson and Clarke

Will life spread out from Earth to flourish in the cosmos? Freeman Dyson has always supported the idea, and with great persuasiveness. BBC Four has created an archive of interviews on its Web site, among which is a clip of Dyson discussing life's variety and the...