Birds and Frogs

Book excerpt: This book is a sequel to the volume of selected papers of Dyson up to 1990 that was published by the American Mathematical Society in 1996. The present edition comprises a collection of the most interesting writings of Freeman Dyson, all personally selected by the author, from the period 1990–2014. The five sections start off with an Introduction, followed by Talks about Science, Memoirs, Politics and History, and some Technical Papers. The most noteworthy is a lecture entitled Birds and Frogs to the American Mathematical Society that describes two kinds of mathematicians with examples from real life. Other invaluable contributions include an important tribute to C. N. Yang written for his retirement banquet at Stony Brook University, as well as a historical account of the Operational Research at RAF Bomber Command in World War II provocatively titled A Failure of Intelligence. The final section carries the open-ended question of whether any conceivable experiment could detect single gravitons to provide direct evidence of the quantization of gravity — Is a Graviton Detectable? Various possible graviton-detectors are examined. This invaluable compilation contains unpublished lectures, and surveys many topics in science, mathematics, history and politics, in which Freeman Dyson has been so active and well respected around the world.