Birds and Frogs: Selected Papers, 1990-2014

Description

This book is a sequel to the volume published by the American Mathematical Society in 1996 — Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson with Commentary — that contains a selection of Dyson's papers up to 1990. The current edition comprises a collection of the most interesting writings of Freeman Dyson from the period 1990–2014, and was personally selected by the author.The first of five sections introduces how the various items came to be written, while the second includes Talks about Science. The most substantial is a lecture to the American Mathematical Society — Birds and Frogs — describing two kinds of mathematician, with examples from real life. An important tribute to Yang Chen Ning written for his retirement banquet at Stony Brook University can be found in the third, which is then followed by a section on Politics and History, the most substantial contribution being A Failure of Intelligence, a historical account of the failure of the Operational Research at RAF Bomber Command in World War II. The last and final section carries a recent article — Is a Graviton Detectable? — discussing the question whether any conceivable experiment could detect single gravitons, to provide direct evidence of the quantization of gravity. The question is still open. Various possible graviton-detectors are examined, and they all fail for one reason or another.This invaluable compilation, that also contains some unpublished lectures, surveys many subjects, in science, mathematics, history and politics, in which Freeman Dyson has been active and so well respected around the world. CONTENTS Section 1. Introduction and Commentary 1. Introduction Section 2. Talks about Science 2.1. The Origins of Life in the Universe 1. Gravity is Cool 2. RNA and Garbage 3. Looking for Life 2.2. When We Were Kids 2.3. Birds and Frogs 1. Francis Bacon and René Descartes 2. Jokes of Nature 3. Abram Besicovich and HermannWeyl 4. Frank Yang and Yuri Manin 5. John von Neumann 6. Weak Chaos 7. String Theorists 8. Manin Again References 2.4. The Current State of Physics 1. Prophets of Doom 2. A Hopeful Future 3. The Ghost of Aristotle 4. Particle Physics 2.5. A Walk Through Johnny von Neumann’s Garden 1. Foundations of Mathematics 2. Games and Quanta 3. Bombs and Computers 4. Summing Up References 2.6. Are Brains Analog or Digital? 1. Change of Title 2. The Road Not Taken 3. Dynamic Quantum Clustering 4. The Failure of Artificial Intelligence 5. Maps and Feelings 6. The Endicott House Meeting 7. Mathematics as a Tool for Understanding Nature 8. Quantum Analog Computing References Section 3. Memoirs 3.1. Homage to George Green: How Physics Looked in the 1940s 1. Concepts and Tools 2. Classical and Quantum Green’s Functions 3. Nicholas Kemmer 4. Physics in 1948 5. Quantum Field Theory and Green’s Functions 6. The Later History 3.2. James Bradley, the Inventor of Modern Science 3.3. A Conservative Revolutionary 3.4. A Meeting with Enrico Fermi 3.5. Edward Teller, 1908–2003 References 3.6. John Archibald Wheeler Reference 3.7. Chandrasekhar’s Role in Twentieth Century Science 1. Basic Science and Derived Science 2. A Violent Universe 3. The Polarization of Light in the Daytime Sky 4. Ellipsoids and Black Holes References 3.8. Nicholas Kemmer 1. Life 2. Work References to Other Authors References Section 4. Politics and History 4.1. Science in Trouble 4.2. Progress in Religion 4.3. Tolstoy and Napoleon: Two Styles in History, Education, Science and Ethics 1. War and Peace 2. Tolstoy on Education 3. Napoleonic and Tolstoyan Science 4. War and Peace Revisited References 4.4. Of Children and Grandchildren 4.5. A Failure of Intelligence: Operational Research at RAF Bomber Command, 1943–1945 4.6. The Individual or the Group?A Question that Arises in Science, Law and Language 1. Introduction 2. The First Hit: Language 3. The Second Hit: Law 4. The Third Hit: Science 5. Conclusions References 4.7. Nukes and Genomes 1. Abolition of Nuclear Weapons 2. Why did Japan Surrender? 3. The Age ofWonder 4. Freedom of Inquiry 4.8. Noah’s Ark Eggs and Viviparous Plants Section 5. Technical Papers 5.1. The Coulomb Fluid and the Fifth Painlevé Transcendent Dedication 1. Mehta’s Identities and Coulomb Gases 2. The Coulomb Fluid 3. Painlevé and the Fluid Combined 4. Summary of Results References 5.2. The Oklo Bound on the Time Variation of the Fine-Structure Constant Revisited 1. Introduction 2. Extracting the neutron capture cross section of samarium 149 from Oklo data 3. Bounding a possible shift of the lowest resonance in the capture cross section of samarium 149 4. Translating possible resonance shifts into a bound on the variation of the fine-structure constant Acknowledgements References 5.3. The Sixth Fermat Number and Palindromic Continued Fractions Acknowledgment References 5.4. Thought-Experiments— In Honor of John Wheeler 1. Beyond the Black Hole 2. Complementarity and Decoherence 3. Two More Thought-Experiments 4. Black Holes and Quantum Causality 5. Concluding Remarks References 5.5. Opacity Bounds 1. Introduction 2. The Bound on the Rosseland Mean 3. Other Bounds References 5.6. Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Contains Strategies that Dominate any Evolutionary Opponent Methods and Results Discussion Acknowledgments References 5.7. Partitions and the Grand Canonical Ensemble 1. A Physical Model for Partitions 2. An Exercise in Experimental Mathematics References 5.8. Is a Graviton Detectable? 1. Introduction 2. The Bohr–Rosenfeld Argument 3. Can LIGO Detect a Graviton? 4. Graviton Detectors 5. Thermal Graviton Generators 6. Non-thermal Gravitons 7. Nonlinear Electrodynamics 8. Conclusions References Index