Interview: Freeman Dyson
Theoretical Physicist and Author

Professor Dyson, you've done so many different things in your career that this may be a difficult question to answer. But how would you explain, to someone who doesn't know anything about your work, what makes it so exciting for you?

Freeman Dyson: My life's been more or less divided in two parts: I mean, the first half as a scientist, the second half as a writer. They're surprisingly similar in a way. I mean, in both cases you're just using a skill to do all kinds of interesting things. So as a scientist I used my skill in mathematics to solve puzzles in many different areas. And each time you solve a puzzle, of course it's exciting. It's hard work and you work terribly hard, groping around in the dark trying to find a way to attack a problem. I would sit at the desk and scribble. My way of thinking is just by scribbling equations on bits of paper, so I would scribble a hundred pages worth of equations. And then when the time is ripe you suddenly begin to see the pattern and you begin to see how it's going to work. And then that's of course when all the blood, sweat and tears finally pays off, and then it takes only a couple of hours then actually to figure out how to do it. And then after that it's fairly easy then to fill in all the details. So then you have a problem solved, and you go and write it up for a paper to go into a professional journal, and you begin making speeches and you suddenly become useful. You've done something that other people can make use of. So that's a great life as a scientist. It's like building a cathedral: you put in a brick here and there and gradually the cathedral grows. That's the feeling you have in science, that it's a communal enterprise. It's exciting because things do change, and they do grow, and you finally end up producing something very great and beautiful, but my contribution is quite modest. But still it's part of the big picture. So that's very satisfying.

Is there one particular problem you solved that excited you a great deal?

Freeman Dyson: They've all excited me more or less equally. But they had very unequal importance. It didn't matter to me whether they're important or not, as long as I could solve them. But it was one in particular that turned out to be important, which was sort of the nature of the way atoms behave, interacting with radiation, with light, and radio waves. So that was a physics problem which I was able to solve about two years after I came to America. So it was early in my career. So it was a great piece of luck that particular problem turned out to be important, and that's why I got ahead. I mean, I became a full professor on the basis of that. So that particular problem had been hanging around for some time, and so it was well known to be important, and I had the mathematical tools that were needed. And after that I looked at all sorts of other problems which, to me, were just as exciting, but which were only interesting to two or three people all together. That's just a matter of chance in a way.

In most careers there are moments of frustration, of failure, self doubt. Have you suffered those things?

Freeman Dyson: Oh, yes. I certainly deal with those.

I have the advantage, of course, of this short attention span, so that I didn't ever get obsessed with a problem in a sort of pathological way. I have had a number of failures. I published several papers that actually turned out to be wrong. That's very depressing, when one of your colleagues calls up and says, "Look, that's all wrong for the following reasons..." And you think, "Oh, I'm absolutely no good. I've lost it." But after a week or two you recover. That's happened to me several times. I have the good fortune not to take myself too seriously. I know what I can do, and when I make a mistake it's not a tragedy. Luckily people have short memories too.

You say you have a short attention span, but it must take patience too, to write out hundreds of equations in search of a solution. Is patience important?

Freeman Dyson: Yes, it certainly is, and what we call sitzfleisch. Sitzfleisch is a German word which means just the flesh on the bottom where you sit. That's important, to be able to sit in a chair for six hours scribbling at a stretch without being distracted. That's very important. You have to be able to lose yourself in a problem and not get impatient.

What about criticism? How have you handled criticism in your lifetime?

Freeman Dyson: Oh, I rather enjoy it.

When I started my second career, as a writer, the first book I wrote was called Disturbing the Universe, which I still consider to be the best. It's a more personal book, and it tells about my life. The very first review of that book that came out in The New York Times really tore it apart. It was written by Horace Judson, who's a good friend of mine, who is also a writer. He really tore into that book and told everybody it was no good and for the following reasons. And then that was, of course, the best thing that ever happened. There's nothing like a bad review for selling a book. So I always felt I learned more from the bad reviews than from the good ones. The same is true of criticism in general, and you learn more from your failures than from your successes. So if you have an honest critic, that's an enormous help. And of course my wife is the honest critic that I rely on. She's always telling me when I've really screwed up.

In all these things that you've done and thought about, what gives you the greatest sense of satisfaction and fulfillment?

Freeman Dyson: Now, in the second half of my life, when I'm mostly writing books, I've found that most satisfaction comes just from the response of readers. I still get wonderful letters from people who read my books. I have pen friends all over the world, and it's delightful. In spite of the computers, and the frequent statements that people no longer write letters anymore, lots of us do. So I still get these wonderful letters from people who've read and understood what I was writing about. I think that's the biggest satisfaction in a way, apart from the family. The family of course is best of all. And I've been extremely lucky there too, having six gifted children, and that's a big part of life. I enjoy their success just as much as I enjoy my own.

Your speculation about the universe has also provoked a certain amount of controversy. How do you deal with controversy?

Freeman Dyson: I enjoy controversy. Without controversy life would be very dull, and science especially. The beauty of science is that it's all mystery, so everything, everywhere you look in science, there are mysteries. I mean, it's just the opposite of what the public imagines. The public imagines scientists know everything, but actually we know almost nothing. We have a lot of speculations and we have a lot of mysteries. And if it stops being mysterious, then that will be the end of science. So we thrive on controversy. So all my speculations, in fact, are not going very much beyond what anybody else is thinking. It's maybe I'm a little bolder in putting it into print. But mostly, all of us are groping in the dark. All the really interesting questions in science, we have no idea what the answers may be. And that applies too to the applications, of course. At the moment, the greatest controversies are about applications of science, genetic engineering in particular, which is something I'm much involved with. And of course there are very hot views on both sides, and so I enjoy that. It's only by listening to the opposition that you can ever hope, in fact, to arrive at any kind of peaceful agreement.

You don't worry about friends or colleagues talking behind your back, saying, "Dyson's at it again! Can you believe what he is saying now?"

Freeman Dyson: I would be very happy if anybody says that. I like to be in the minority.

How important do you think it is to look beyond the conventional wisdom about things?

Freeman Dyson: I think it's extremely important. Not that the speculations are right, but simply to give somebody a feeling for alternatives. There are all sorts of possibilities open to us, and let's at least explore and find out what's there. It doesn't mean we have to go that way.

Are these speculations a function of the writer's imagination or of scientific thinking?

Freeman Dyson: Mostly it's the writer's imagination. When I'm writing books I'm really not dealing with science at all. I'm guided a little bit by what I know about science, but basically I'm a writer, and I'm thinking with my fingers as I write. Of course a lot of it turns out to be nonsense, but in literature you have license, you can talk nonsense. It's not held against you, as long as it's written well.

Much of what you've written deals with the future. Looking ahead, into the 21st Century, what do you see as our greatest challenge?

Freeman Dyson: You never know what the big challenges are, of course, challenges are unpredictable. So the idea that you can predict the future of course is absurd. All I can do is just think of things we already know about, and clearly genetic engineering is to me the most exciting because that offers us the chance to change so many things. I mean it's going to change -- first of all -- medicine, as applied to humans, when we know more about the way we function. There are all sorts of possibilities for curing diseases and for giving people healthier lives, which I'm sure we'll take advantage of. Then there is the question of what it means when you start to improve your babies, and give your babies talents that they otherwise wouldn't have had, but it's by inserting the genes. That's a really tough problem, whether that should be allowed, whether it will be too disruptive to be tolerated. What are to be the rules there? That's a huge challenge. What are the limits that you have to impose on parents who want to monkey around with their babies and produce babies according to their own ambitions? Are they allowed to force their own ambitions on their babies by giving them the appropriate genes? That's a problem we're going to have to face in the next 50 years. That will be one of the number one challenges.

Then there's the whole question of applying solar energy creatively to bring wealth to the poor countries, which I think is enormously promising. The poor countries of the world, by and large, are those that have the most sunlight as well as having the most poverty. Those two things could go very well together: that sunlight gives you the chance to produce wealth anywhere in the world where you have sunlight, and notably in the tropics. And while I don't see any reason why this genetic engineering shouldn't be used as a basis for all kinds of new industries -- production of food and fuel and chemicals, and all kinds of recycling of materials -- all these things could be done biologically much cheaper and with less disruption of the environment. So that's a hugely promising field. And that's of course highly unpopular in certain circles. There's very violent opposition to this kind of biotechnology. I think it will win through. One has to listen to the opposition. The opposition has good reasons for being worried about it.

As usual, when you have tremendous promise, you also have tremendous risks, and so you have to balance them. But I think without taking risks we're not going to solve the problems anyway, so you might as well accept a certain degree of risk. So that's perhaps the most important challenge for the next 50 years. But in the meantime, we may understand how brains work, so from neurology you may have a totally different set of challenges. When you find out how we think and remember, and we may have all sorts of ways of improving our mental functions, or enlarging our mental functions, that will produce huge challenges as well. What's quite clear is that the next century is going to be an exciting time for these young people who are just growing up.

What is the role of the scientist when it comes to these major life-changing breakthroughs? What are the social responsibilities of the scientist?

Freeman Dyson: We have a responsibility in two ways I would say. First of all, it's the simple fact that we know the technology. We know what's possible, and we know what isn't possible, very largely. So we can warn the public what the problems are going to be, a little bit before they arise politically. So we can provide an early warning system, which can be very helpful. The scientists certainly have a function to keep the public informed about what's going on.

The different function of scientists, which I think is equally important, is that we are a very successful international enterprise. That we are every day working together with friends and colleagues all over the world, including places which are hard to get to. We have friends and colleagues in China and in Cuba and in Mongolia, all sorts of places, all around the world. We're accustomed to working together with people. We know them as friends, and so we are actively in communication. I think that's extremely precious. We understand the scientists all over the world better than the politicians understand each other. Which frequently happens, that when a political problems arises, as it often does -- especially in questions involving war and weapons -- that the scientists are able to communicate with the people on the other side, and actually find a way, then, to making agreements. So many of our arms control treaties have actually been architected by scientists. Although in the end, of course, it's the politicians who have to decide what kind of treaties to negotiate, but very frequently these international contacts, which the scientists live with, have been enormously helpful. So that the mere fact that we know how to get along with people with different political views, I think, gives us a very important influence. So many of my friends who work in the government are actually working more or less as diplomats, rather than as scientists, because they have that particular background which politicians desperately need.

What about the fate of living creatures in the universe? Do we have a future?

Freeman Dyson: Oh, we have lots of future. Life is immensely tough. I don't see any way in which we can bring life to an end on this planet. Many people have tried to imagine that, but it's very hard to see it really happening. Life is here to stay. I think there's no question. It's only a matter of whether or not it spreads from this planet to take over the universe. That's something I would like to happen. It's exciting that we may do something to influence that.

What do you think the younger generation may live to see and experience that we in our lifetimes never will?

Freeman Dyson: I think the move of life, out from the planet into the universe, is something they very likely will see. That's also a question of genetic engineering, that we can engineer plants and animals, say, to live in Mars without having to just live in a tin can. But they could live in the Martian environment as it exists, so that you can imagine bringing life to a dead planet. That's, to me, very exciting. First of all, we have to find out if there's any indigenous life first. If there is indigenous life on Mars then I would leave it alone. But if it turns out there's nothing alive, then we might as well bring our own life. But it certainly has to be genetically engineered first. I think that's something we very likely will learn how to do in the next 50 years, to grow plants that can actually live outside -- out of doors -- in places like Mars, or the satellites of Jupiter, and various other interesting places. So that we can begin then, sort of the process of adapting life to living in all kinds of interesting places, and then evolving in its own way. Of course, once life is established, we won't any longer be in control. Life will evolve in the way it sees fit. That's something which will be very exciting to watch. That's something they might or might not actually achieve in their lifetimes.

We'd like to ask about your own early years. You grew up in England?

Freeman Dyson: Right.

Those were not the most tranquil times, in the 1930s and '40s. What was your childhood like?

Freeman Dyson: Well, we were protected from all that of course.

I had a rather idyllic childhood. Son of a schoolmaster, living in a quiet little town in the south of England where nothing much had changed for 500 years. But we saw the clouds gathering in the sky, of course. I mean, we knew Hitler was on his warpath, we knew World War II was coming along and was likely to be a bloodbath. In fact, we expected World War II to be much worse than it actually was. We had images of anthrax bombs already in those days. We all expected to die of plague, and somehow or other we survived. But it was a time when we were all very much on edge, and after -- I would say my idyllic childhood was maybe the first ten years -- and then after that when I was a teenager it got rough. Then we were faced with these terrible choices of whether or not to try to fight Hitler. We were also in the middle of an economic depression. So it wasn't an easy time.

How do you think you were affected by it?

Freeman Dyson: I think it made me grow up very fast.

I started to take on the burdens of society at a young age, and feel that whatever I did made a difference. I joined the Peace Pledge Union, which was a pacifist organization. That was our answer to Hitler. If we just get to talk to Hitler for six hours we could get him to see the error of his ways and everything would be fine. So there was a lot of that in the air. Our hero was Gandhi, of course, who had used passive resistance very affectively as a tool of liberation, and so we thought maybe that was a good idea. He was the only politician that I trusted in those days.

Ironically, he didn't trust England.

Freeman Dyson: He understood us pretty well.

Were you a good student?

Freeman Dyson: Yes. But of course it was a fortunate time to be a student, because the whole system was screwed up. By the time I got into high school and college the war had started. All the teachers were away, they were all fighting the war and so the whole system was completely in disarray. So that was a great time to get an education.

Great in what way?

Freeman Dyson: Well, we could do what we liked. We didn't have to go to class. There wasn't any paper, so therefore there weren't any exams. In England all exams had to be written. So since the country was out of paper there weren't any exams, so you could actually get ahead. So I studied all kinds of interesting stuff. I didn't have to worry about the curriculum.

Given this opportunity, what did you study? What interested you?

Freeman Dyson: I was interested in lots of things. Biology, I was interested in becoming a doctor. I thought of being a medical doctor at that time. But I found out that I had no talent for that, so I ended up as a mathematician, rather by accident.

What do you mean?

Freeman Dyson: I think it's a common situation.

I had interests which were much wider than my talents. So I would have loved to do all kinds of wonderful things, to be an explorer or to be a medical doctor. In spite of everything, the only thing I really could do was mathematics. That's the only talent I had. So I ended up doing that. It wasn't such a bad idea, because as a mathematician I could actually be useful in all sorts of directions. So I applied mathematics. First of all, I worked for the Royal Air Force as a statistician. That was my first job in the war. And then afterwards I turned to physics and I turned to astronomy. I turned to engineering. In all those fields I could apply mathematics. So I had very little formal training. I think the usual rule is it's much better to do something first and then find out how to learn it, rather than trying to learn it first.

How did you discover this talent?

Freeman Dyson: Mathematics was something I was born with. At the age of three I was doing calculations and I loved numbers. I just loved multiplying big numbers, and that's something you can't account for. My father was a musician. He was playing the piano at the age of three, and I was doing calculations.

How were you influenced by your family? What was your family like?

Freeman Dyson: Well, he was a musician and my mother was a lawyer. I enjoyed both of them but they didn't force their ideas onto me. They understood that I was different. So I had all the encouragement, but very little pressure, which I thought was very fortunate. It was just right for me. They supplied me with books, and my father read a lot of popular science, so I read all the books on his shelf and that was extremely helpful. He was interested in what I was doing, and he never tried to develop a musical talent which I didn't have.

What about your siblings?

Freeman Dyson: I have an older sister who is still going strong. In fact, she's one of my closest friends. When I write books, I write books for the general public. I usually have my sister in mind as the audience. She's a retired medical social worker, so she knows people. She doesn't know science, and she's the kind of person I like to write for.

Do you think it helped to be a younger brother and have an older sister?

Freeman Dyson: Oh, yes. She was enormously helpful to me and never resented the fact that I got all the limelight.

That's unusual, doing these calculations at the age of three. Growing up, was it difficult being different?

Freeman Dyson: No. I always lived among hooligans. I went to a Dickensian school where bigger and stronger boys were always bullying me and slapping me around, so I was always the underdog. But somehow that was part of life, and I wasn't depressed. I just learned to live with that. The only way I could beat them was I was better at math.

You beat them with numbers.

Freeman Dyson: Yes.

As a young person was there an experience or an event that inspired you? Was there some defining moment for you when you were growing up?

Freeman Dyson: Yes, I think I could say yes. It was the time when I developed a new religion. It was grotesque that that's the way it was.

When I was 14 I suddenly had a kind of conversion to a new religion, which I called Cosmic Unity, in which all human beings were the same person. It was a kind of transmigration of souls, except instead of waiting until you were dead before transmigrating, you transmigrated all the time. So we were always just the same soul flitting around from one person to another. So it gave you a scientific justification for ethics. If the person that you are hurting is just yourself, then clearly it doesn't make sense. So that was what we were going to talk to Hitler about, I guess. So anyway, I started out then as an evangelist, at the age of 14, to try to make converts to this great new religion. And I wasn't very successful. I think I made one and a half converts all together, and so it only lasted for a few months. But in a way that defined my attitude, both to human problems and to religion in a way. I thought everybody goes through such a time of life when you start to take the problems of life and death seriously. That's the way it hit me.

It may not hit many people at the age of 14! Was there a person, perhaps a teacher, or particular books that influenced or inspired you when you were young?

Freeman Dyson: There was an older boy called Brian Lloyd. I'd love to know what happened to him. He was a Welsh boy who had a wonderful gift of the gab. He talked for six hours, and that's why we chose six hours, because that was his habit, to talk for six hours. He was really good. If he had got to talk to Hitler he might even have done the job!

Where did all these ideas about religion and life and death come from?

Freeman Dyson: They're natural. I think everybody's born with it to some extent. You look for justice in the world and you don't find it. I was looking for justice really more than anything. I could see the fact that I was very privileged. I enjoyed this very sheltered childhood and never had to go hungry, whereas the rest of the world was in much worse shape than I was. I had somehow to come to grips with that. Why is the world so unfair? It's a good answer if all those other people who are suffering are really me. Then it's not so unfair.

What were you reading as a young man?

Freeman Dyson: I read a lot of science fiction. I did read -- I don't remember at what stage -- William James's The Variety of Religious Experience. That probably was later. It was an excellent book about religions. I read a book called Men of Mathematics, which was full of romantic stories about mathematicians. That gave me, certainly, some idea about doing great things in mathematics. I didn't go much for literature in those days. I think I wanted to read books more about practical and scientific questions. I read Aldous Huxley's Ends and Means, which essentially is the ethic of non-violence and non-involvement. He was a Gandhian. I think maybe I got a lot of that from Huxley.

Where did this imagination spring from, all thinking about life beyond our own planet, and the future? Where did that come from?

Freeman Dyson: I suppose a lot of it comes from Jules Verne. He was the one that I read first. I know I discovered Jules Verne at the age of eight, I remember that. I read From Earth to Moon and a Trip Around It, and Captain Nemo and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Those were great stories. I think that's maybe where it came from. But that was not unusual. Most of the kids at that time were reading stuff like that.

Back in England, when you were a kid, with all that was going on around you, did you ever think that there might not be a future?

Freeman Dyson: Oh, yes. We didn't expect to survive. That was sort of a given. This next war was -- we looked at it rather the same way we now look at World War III, I mean, you don't expect to survive World War III if it happens. That was the same feeling we had.

Yet you survived to think a great deal about the future.

Freeman Dyson: Yes. It was just amazing. The war turned out to be almost a picnic, compared to what we'd expected.

When did you first know what you wanted to do?

Freeman Dyson: I never have. I'm always waiting to find out. I've been an opportunist. I've always grabbed at opportunities as they came along.

What did your parents think about what you decided to do or not do with your life?

Freeman Dyson: They were very tolerant. I remember when I came to America. Of course that came as a bit of a shock when I told my mother I was going to stay in America. I remember her saying, "Well, I understand from a professional point of view that makes a lot of sense. But how could you stand to live among all those hypochondriacs?" And I've been wondering ever since.

Was that the nicest thing she said about America?

Freeman Dyson: Right. That was certainly the image we had of Americans. And it was pretty accurate, I would say.

Was there someone who gave you a break you needed to get ahead?

Freeman Dyson: I suppose there were lots of lucky things that happened to me. One of them was getting a Harkness Fellowship. At the time after the war, when I wanted to travel, all the young people of my generation had been unable to travel, all through the war years. So we were just dying to get out and see the rest of the world as soon as the war was over. And there happened to be this philanthropic foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, founded by Harkness. And they offered fellowships to young English people to come to America for a couple of years and essentially study and do whatever we liked. And I got one of these fellowships. That was a tremendous piece of luck. And as a result of that, I went to Cornell University, which happened to be the place which was most active in physics at that time. All the bright people from Los Alamos went to Cornell after the war. It was just a great place to be. So it sort of fell into my lap. I got this fellowship and when I arrived at Cornell, fresh from England, I found that I was rich compared with the poor Americans who had to struggle to get into graduate school. And I was being lavishly supported with this fellowship. So I've always been pampered right from the beginning.

We don't all think of winter in Ithaca as being pampered. We'll take your word for it.

Freeman Dyson: A little bit of cash helps even there.

What do you know now about achievement that you did not know when you were younger?

Freeman Dyson: I suppose that what I've learned comes from Dick Feynman, who's one of my heroes. He's the professor at Cornell whom I got to know when I first came to America, who's a great, just a great man, and many books have been written about him. He was a great character as well as being a great scientist. And he had -- he was a tremendous success. Of course he did all kinds of things very well and his gospel was, "Always say yes the first time, and say no the second time." I think that's a very good rule for life, that the first time you have an opportunity to do something crazy say yes. Try it out and see if it makes sense, and if it doesn't make sense then have the courage the next time to say no. He applied that rule all through his life, and I think I have to a great extent too. So I'm very happy to take chances, to take risks, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. At least life is interesting that way, and in the end you achieve something. But you can't tell in advance which of the chances you take are going to turn out well and which are going to turn out badly. When things do turn out badly, then cut your losses and try something else. I'm sounding like a pontificator at that point, but I think that's roughly how I would explain whatever success I've had. And it doesn't apply to everybody; people are all different. Some people find some great purpose in their lives right at the beginning and stick with it all the way the way through. That's great too. That's not the way I have been operating.

Not all smart people are successful. How do you account for the success that you've enjoyed, for your achievements?

Freeman Dyson: I think it's largely luck. And, of course, being an opportunist, being able to grab opportunities as they turn up. I think it's sort of in my favor that I have a short attention span. I can always switch from one field to another rather easily. I've never got stuck into one narrow groove. I think that's probably the main reason that when new things come up I'm always ready to jump.

You say luck. Do you believe in destiny?

Freeman Dyson: No. Not really.

Blood, sweat and tears?

Freeman Dyson: Yes, blood, sweat and tears, yes. But that's part of doing a job well no matter what you're doing. That certainly runs in the family. All my family are all hard workers.

Is there anything that you've wanted to do that you have not been able to do? That you haven't done yet?

Freeman Dyson: There are certainly many things that I tried to do, but some of them my children have done instead, which is always very satisfying.

I always wanted to go to Russia and become fluent in Russian and study. I love the language, and I wanted to go there and really work in Russia. Of course there were a lot of brilliant scientists in Russia, as well as wonderful literature and a wonderful civilization there. So I never did that, but my daughter Esther is now doing it. She's fluent in Russian and she spends a lot of her time there. She's helping the Russian entrepreneurs and getting businesses started. She has a very upbeat view of Russia. So that's something I feel she is achieving, which I didn't have time for. And I always wanted to be a medical doctor. I've got two daughters who are medical doctors. So I think that's the way I've dealt with the things I wasn't able to do in my life. Just have enough kids and they'll do it for you.

How important is it to get paid to think, as opposed to getting rewarded for making and selling things? How important is it to society?

Freeman Dyson: I think it is important for society to have people who are paid to think. Historically, that has been extremely important. There have been always patrons of science and art. In the days before we had governments taking over this role, we had dukes and princes who did it. The progress of science and art has relied to a great extent on philanthropy of one kind or another: rich people or rich organizations, rich institutions, universities in particular, being set up and paying people to think. That's why we have so many universities all over the world. It's a remarkable fact that universities never die, that almost everywhere where universities have been established they've survived in one way or another. So we still have universities in Italy which are 800 years old, and in England which are 700 years old. This seems to be something very permanent and it's a very good way of keeping a culture alive. So you have people who are paid and pampered and allowed to live in comfort and think. That's to a large extent what universities are for, besides educating the young. The two things go very well together. Of course people who are paid to think can also teach, and people who teach can also think. That's, I think, a part of life which we should certainly preserve.

But I'm not against people going out in the world and doing something useful. For most people that's a much better way of having an interesting life. Most of us are not particularly happy just doing nothing but thinking. Most of us are not gifted as teachers. So there are lots of other interesting things to do. I think we need many different kinds of professions. Fortunately the world is now offering at least as many choices as it has in the past.

You were not born in the United States, but you are an American citizen. How would you define the American Dream?

Freeman Dyson: I think to me it's a little bit of... ...it's a fraud in a way. Coming from the outside, the Americans consider themselves unique, and they're not. I mean, I think Americans have a far too high opinion of themselves in general. They think that their particular form of democracy is so wonderful. Well, many other countries are just as democratic in different ways. Many other countries have equally strong dreams. I happen to come from England, which also has a dream of its own, which is something I also can live with very well. And, of course, there are many other countries which have very strong traditions and strong personalities, like Switzerland and Holland and Finland. Every country you go to, especially the smaller countries, have very strong indigenous cultures, which I think are extremely important and worth preserving. So I'm very much against this idea of American uniqueness, America somehow should be setting a pattern for the world. I don't agree. I think America is one of many.

The beauty of America of course is that it's big and rich, and it's a hospitable country, and I'm very grateful to America because they've allowed me to function as part of the American society. The fact that I didn't get born here doesn't matter. I can still pontificate here as much as I like. So it's treated me generously. It's a rich and generous country, and that's something that I certainly treasure and I'm grateful for. But as to having a particular dream, I don't know whether that's true. I mean, this idea that going into space is something peculiar to America is totally wrong. The Russians had it first. The Russians in fact have just as strong a dream about space as we do, maybe stronger, and the Japanese also. I've spent time in Japan. They think about the future even more than the Americans do. We all can have these dreams. I think to put the word "American" to that is not really accurate at all. And this notion of the American frontier as being such a great thing is to some extent just an illusion. The other places in the world have had their frontiers too. The Russians have theirs and the Australians have theirs. It's nothing uniquely American about that, except fine literature has grown up around it.

What advice do you have for the young men and women like those who are here at the Academy this weekend?

Freeman Dyson: I'd like to listen to them first before giving them advice.

The best advice one can give is take advantage of all these great opportunities that exist. The world is open in a way it hasn't been before. They're lucky to be alive just at this point, when it's easy to travel, it's easy to make contacts all over the world. The Internet has been an enormous help, of course, to most of the young people in the world, at least those who have access to it. All these kids do have access to it. So it's a wonderful time for exploring, to get a feeling for what the world has to offer. The main thing is don't imagine that you have to have a job which will last the rest of your life. The first job you get is not going to last, very likely, so let that be just a way of exploring. If it turns out to be a failure, then that's just a part of your education. You go on to the second job, and the third job, and the fifth job maybe will be something really exciting. So that's the advice I would give. Just be flexible and don't expect to make your plan and stick to it all the way through.

Many young people are afraid of failure. What would you say to them?

Freeman Dyson: Certainly not to be afraid of failure. In fact that's one thing I like about the business world, as opposed to the academic world.

In the academic world, people punish you for being a failure, and the punishment can be very severe. In business, it's a badge of honor to have failed two or three times. It shows you have something there. You have what it takes if you've survived a couple of failures before you had a success. I like the business ethic in that way. I'm very lucky to have a daughter who's a successful businesswoman, so I have seen that.

Professor Dyson, it's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us.

Freeman Dyson: You're welcome.