The famous physicist (and arguably the most famous one to not win the Nobel prize,) Freeman Dyson, who I had the pleasure of seeing while in graduate school, has a new book titled 'The Scientist as Rebel', which I started reading recently. The book is a collection of various essays, most from The New York Review, which he has written over the last 3-4 decades.
The book had my attention right from chapter 1, which begins:
There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. ........ Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity.
Science is an alliance of free spirits in all cultures rebelling against the local tyranny that each culture imposes on its children. Insofar as I am a scientist, my vision of the universe is not reductionist or anti-reductionist. I have no use for Westernisms of any kind. I feel myself a traveler on the "Immense Journey" of the paleontologist Loren Eiseley, a journey that is far longer than the history of nations and philosophies, longer even than the history of our species.
.... over periods of 10,000 years the distinctions between Western and Eastern and African cultures lose all meaning. Over a time span of 10,000 years we are all Africans. And over a time span of 300 million years we are all amphibians, waddling uncertainly out of dried-up ponds onto the alien and hostile land. .... In the long view, not only European civilization but the human species itself is transitory.
and later on p 13:
The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science. Science in its everyday practice is much closer to art than to philosophy.
For many scientists ... the chief reward for being a scientist is not the power and the money but the chance of catching a glimpse of the transcendent beauty of nature.
....one could so easily substitute poets for scientists and the sentence would make perfect sense to most. Little wonder then that he writes later: "Science is an art form and not a philosophical method."
Other interesting articles about Dyson:
On March 22, 2000 Freeman Dyson won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion for 2000. You can read the text of Freeman Dyson's acceptance speech on May 16, in the Washington National Cathedral.
Heretical thoughts about science and society via edge.org
A-Bombs, Space Chickens and God - Conversation with Dyson (2000)
Dyson forecasts the future - (November 2006)
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