Freeman Dyson Q & A

October 9, 1997 


Student Question: inaudible

FD: Yeah, I always write for a particular person, she's my sister. I 
think it's a very good thing to have an individual in mind when you're 
writing and of course, she is also this my only ??? She is a lady, she's 
a bit older than I am, she's now 77. She essentially doesn't have any 
scientific background . She was a medical social worker, now she's 
retired and living in England. So, she's just an interesting reader who 
was willing to tell me which words count or where I'm being obscure and 
so on. I think that's very valuable. But I'm essentially talking to her 
while I'm writing - and I think it helps to keep the style sort of 
focused to have a particular person in mind or you start to become 
technical then you...that's just as well, she wouldn't get that so I'd 
better leave that out. So anyway, that's the answer...but I think it's 
certainly very helpful to me.

Student Question: inaudible

FD: I don't know whether it's important. All I know is I get paid for 
it. I feel lucky because every one of my books was commissioned -- so 
that I never sat down and said well I have something important to say. 
What, in fact, actually happened is somebody asks me, "We'll pay you in 
advance far in advance for certain lectures on the condition that you 
turn them into a book" or something like that. But I've always been 
writing for a particular occasion, everyone of my books, and I don't 
have the feeling that they were intended to say something important. 

Also, I don't know how far it's true that scientists were more inclined 
to write for the public - maybe in the 19th century, that may have been 
true. "The Origins of the Species" was written as a book intended for 
the public rather than for an expert. In this centtury, I think, it's 
been fairly absent. I mean at the moment, many of my friends who are 
professional scientists also write for the public - Stephen Gould, for 
example, Stephen Hawking. Or I don't know who else? You probably know 
more of them than I do. But in any case, there's quite a number I 
consider excellent books written by professional scientists for the 
public...almost every astronomer writes for the public because that's a 
subject that's easy to write about. Something the public is always more 
interested in than the??? from time to time. 

I've just been reading a marvelous book which I recommend you to read. 
It's called "Remaking...." and it's about all the things that go on 
there. It's written by a professional biologist, his name is Lee Silver, 
who was was a colleague of mine at Princeton. Here's a case in point, at 
least he doesn't have any pretensions to be a great writer. He's got 
lots of interesting stuff to write about so that's what counts. It's the 
book about the realities of genetic engineering --- human babies. I 
found it very illuminating because there a lot of these problems society 
needs to consider for the future. You think you're scared about what 
people might sometimes do -- when you find out that actually there are 
things already being done.

Student Question: inaudible

No, it's not always...and in fact, that's what this book is about. The 
fact is that it's upon us right now. That's what this book is saying. 
It's not something remote. It's something you have deal with right 
now..And certainly it's not an Orwellian or Huxley scenario, it's much 
more than a free-enterprise scenario but people will stop at nothing to 
get babies. Parents will pay big money, go to all sorts of 
inconveniences to get babies. It's a very, very basic human drive and 
it's nothing the government's necessarily involved in unless they want 
to be in. At the moment, it's pretty much laissez-faire, they can 
essentially do what they want and they keep very quiet about it. So, I 
think we do have to to worry but on the other hand, ...himself, he's 
really a believer in laissez-faire, he thinks that's the only future 
that will let people order their genes to their kids and pay the price. 

Whatever they do is either their own risk or risks to the kids. There 
obviously has to be some limit to that. That's something your generation 
will have to work out. I think it's good to start writing about it.

Student Question: inaudible

FD: It's always what comes to my mind. I never make any big plans for my 
life. It's always a matter of just grabbing the opportunities as they 
come by. What happens is scientists generally have a problem in their 
middle age, you're not as bright anymore as you used to be. The 
brilliant, especially if you are a theoretical scientist as I am, the 
really brilliant discoveries are mostly made by people under 30. You can 
still be pretty good after the age of 50, then you'd better find 
something else to do. 

Many scientists become teachers and as they grow older, spend more and 
more of their efforts on teaching, which is fine. Some spend time 
teaching until a ripe old age, others become administrators or they 
start software companies. All other careers can begin.

For me the solution was to start writing books. But I didn't actually 
make a plan to start writing books. What happened was: When I was 50-
years-old, just by chance the --- Foundation started a series of 
sciencific biographies which was. . . I don't know whose idea that was 
they thought it would be nice to publish a series of books by scientists 
and I was invited to do one so I said yes. I thought that would solve 
the problem. I found after I started this book, it was extremely 
rewarding, that was "The Birth of the Universe" ? I always liked best. 
The book I like best, the most personal, it's more appealing . So I 
enjoyed writing that one very much. 

So I started writing with that in mind. And then after that, the other 
came along. "Infinite in All Directions," you see, were lectures in 
Scotland which was more or less supposed to be about theology but in 
fact you don't have to talk about theology. If you've read the beginning 
or the end of that book, there's a little bit of window into the book 
about theology. It's really not that at all. But in any case, the first 
one of the first group of lectures was on William James, who was a 
psychologist and he was not an expert in theology at all. He was 
interested in religion. He wrote this marvelous book "The Varieties of 
Religious Experience" ??? lectures, which was describing the phenomenon 
of religion, but a psychologist looked at. It's a wonderful book, full 
of brilliant descriptions of people and kinds of religious experience 
they had. That was my model. I read William James long ago so when I was 
asked to do the lectures,...that was the motivation.

Student Question: inaudible

FD: Let me say one of them could be like a historical narrative. 
Actually what I had in mind was Dante's Inferno. That's what the shape 
of the book was - because you know, the Inferno was what World War II in 
England would be, Purgatorio was coming to America, becoming a 
scientist, getting involved with other political and ethical problems 
and then finally the final stage, the Paradiso, which was just all about 
faith, and the future, dreams of things, exploring legality and ...So 
anyway, that was the model. It's more like a poem than a history. 

But the other part of your question, it took four years to write. OF 
course, I was doing all kinds of other things, it wasn't four years of 
time. All together, perhaps one year for all the writing and it was very 
much patched together. I think that's fairly clear when you read it.

I like to tell personal stories as much as possible. It's ..which would 
make a good chapter. It wasn't written in the order which you read it. 
The beginning was the beginning but after that it's more or less patched 
together. The very last chapter, that's one about Kubrick and 2001.

Student Question: inaudible

FD: Well, that's very interesting. I never was at that place. I didn't 
know it existed in fact. When I've been to Alburquerque, it's always 
been on the way somewhere else. Well, anyway, I'm glad to hear about 
that. No, that's very interesting because it is a big Air Force base. 
So, it clearly glorifies the Air Force. Well, I'm not surprised, every 
institution likes to glorify itself to some extent. I'm actually much 
more concerned with the Smithsonian which of course went through a big 
soul-searching...just two years ago. Nine to five-- they were supposed 
to show the exhibit of Enola Gay and this gave rise to a huge fight. My 
good friend... is the director of the Smithsonian, ... as result of it. 
It still is an unsettled question: What one's to do with public 
perception? To me, it's very interesting. While this was going on, this 
fight going on about the Smithsonian, I was, in fact teaching at 
Dartmouth I took some time off from Princeton, a semester, and I taught 
a history course at Dartmouth on the nuclear age with Martin Sherman 
whom you may have heard of.

He's a young revisionist historian, has written a book called "The World 
Historian." So we taught the class together . He presented the 
revisionist view and I presented the traditional view and the students 
got both sides. It went extremely well, they wrote excellent essays. It 
was a writer's course. I was very much impressed with stuff the students 
wrote, I thought they were very forceful. 

So, my feeling is that both sides should be narrating. I think to a good 
extent, it was planned. The Smithsonian was very much slanted in a 
revisionist direction, I mean that was why the government took such 
trouble. The opposite plan from the one in Albuquerque. There should've 
been some form of compromise but that wasn't possible...with both sides 
was so strong. I hope one day it will happen.

Student Question: inaudible

FD: There is of course. It stems from... There's one book which I've 
always I read as a teenager which was a book about writing, a book 
called "The Writer's Notebook" and I have always treasured. Does anybody 
know it? C.E. Montague-- who was the editor of the Manchester Guardian 
at the time. The Manchester Guardian was the most intellectual newspaper 
in England and he was the editor and a very good writer himself.  He 
wrote a number of novels as well as beign the editor of a newspaper. He 
wrote this...of notes ...which I find delightful -- it had a lot of good 
advice. That's what influenced me. He said there are two really 
important rules about writing: Have something to say and don't say it 
twice. That kind of style said that everything had to be simple and 
clear and he could do that himself. One other thing, another rule, was 
kill your dialect. Anyway, so that's always been important for me.

But as far as models for writing, I don't know, I've got Judy Blume, who 
is considered very low-brow, I read Judy Blume to my children, they love 
it. That's an example of, I think, very good writing, of a very 
unpretentious kind. "Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing." Rudyard Kipling, 
who also I think is marvelous. There's no one influence

Student Question: inaudible

FD: I've never tried and I think it's something you probably have to 
have a lot of practice in order to do it well. I think it's too late for 
me to start now. I think it would be great to find out. If I had started 
earlier I would've probably enjoyed it a lot, but it is probably very 
difficult but since I've never tried, I can't tell you. Have you tried?

I think the people who do it well usually start it by writing for their 
own children. I don't know if you know "The Lord of the Rings." That's 
one of my favorite books. That was written by ?? for his own children 
under a pseudonym and it was published under another name. It was 
actually marvelous. It was a spoof, a spoof of a fairy story, very 
sophisticated, beautifully done for children. I love that kind of thing.

Student Question: inaudible

This came too late for my kids, and I don't know how kids reacted to 
that. I am certain ???. My boy was so lucky, he was in a kindergarten in 
San Diego when Dr. Seuss himself came to the kindergarten for a day to 
get new ideas from the kids.


Student Question: inaudible

In that case, I had to have a plan because the Ford Foundation was 
paying for it, and they asked me to give them a plan, so I gave them a 
plan that didn't much resemble what actually came out. But still it 
certainly was a help. There was a plan with these two sections and a 
rough idea of what would be in them, but it turned out that they were 
different in detail. But I think that it is a help. With the other 
books, I have done that with the assumption that you don't have to stick 
to it.

Student Question: inaudible

I don't really do any research, because the kind of writing I am doing 
is anecdotal. I have never written anyting like a textbok or anyting. 
All the research I do is mostly just checking the facts afterward 
because that's what you have to do. Checking references and finding out 
whether the names are right and so on but I don't actually sit down and 
do research before writing, generally I just start writing and then 
afterward I find out if I need a little bit more before I finish.

Student Question: inaudible

I suppose you need to have a certain skill. To my mind, science and 
writing are not all that different. I mean, in both cases what you're 
doing is just trying to use tools essentially in most cases. In science, 
my tools are mathematics mostly and in writing your tools are the words 
and the architecture of the story. In both cases, it's the skillcraft 
and in both cases you must have the skills to be able to do it and some 
people have them and others don't. 

So a lot of times you've just never acquired a skill to write. I was 
lucky; I never was taught much science in school. we did have to write a 
lot of essays so my education included a lot of writing. But we always 
had to study English as a subject so we always had to write essays about 
everything., so I was sort of trained to do that. In addition, I 
suppose, I've always had a kind of sensitivity to language. 

If you look around, I mean, Stephen Gould is a man I deeply respect and 
who writes well for the public. He writes all kinds of books. Most of 
Stephen Gould's books are just collections of rather short pieces that 
he published in Natural History magazine or something like that. They're 
books about different kinds of animals and they are just full of 
information and written in an engaging fashion. They chapters are short; 
there's not, in the way of architecture, just bringing together a lot of 
amusing facts. And he turns out these books by the one per year or so.

But on the other hand, he did do a totally different kind of a book 
which is called "Time Cycle, Time's ..." which is much more scholarly 
and I think it is the finest thing he has written. It is a very lovely 
book. It's on the history of the concept of time and full of historical 
details especially about theologians in the 16th century that nobody had 
heard of. I found it absolutely fascinating, I mean potentially this 
book's tracing the notions of time which originates in various religious 
contexts and ending up with the evolution and the discovery of 
geological time and general awareness. We are 36 million-years-old 
rather than just a few thousand. It's a very deep, I think, historical 
study which must have taken a lot of research and he clearly has a gift 
for writing, there's no doubt-- which few people have. It's very, I 
think, that's a sign of ...a skill of writing you've made these up 
somewhere...or something like that. But still it's a lot.

Student Question: inaudible

FD: I don't think you need to be a scientist at all to understand what 
little we know about...life. I mean really we know almost nothing about 
...life. They admit it's just a miracle these ... somehow find their way 
from eastern United States to Mexico and it's not the same...life to 
arrive in Mexico that started out. They stop on the way and lay eggs 
from their descendants until they finally come back again. It's 
absolutely amazing...nobody understands how they do it or anything at 
all about how this can happen. I think you're just as much able to 
describe that whether you're a scientist or not. 

One of the advantages of writing booksis that it opens doors. And as a 
result of having written that chapter, I was invited to Mexico to the 
place where the butterflies go in winter. It was absolutely beautiful, 
high up in the Mexican mountains about 11,000 feet up were these tall 
trees which were absolutely full of butterflies, just covered with 
butterflies. So we went up there, walked up to where they are and as 
they arrived at the top of where the butterflies are concentrated, the 
sun rose over a neighboring mountain and the sun hit the top of the tree 
and the butterflies started to fly. There were growing swarming of 
butterflies up there, with the sun rising. If the sun came down the 
tree, clouds of butterflies get thicker and thicker. We finally came 
down to ground level and we were drowned in butterflies. It's an awesome 
sight and I didn't have to be a scientist. I hope one day I'll describe 
it, it's much harder to describe something like that then to describe a 
single butterfly in New Jersey. It's something I've been thinking about, 
it doesn't have anything to do with science.

Student Question: inaudible

FD: Well, not if it's ... if you take Princeton professors as the model. 
I would say people who are really good at observing are three-year-old 
kids. If you really want to see nature, take your kids out for a walk. 
They see things much better than we do. Certainly, I wouldn't ask a 
professor of physics to observe anything. Of course, there are some 
people that are really good, that is, of course, Steve Gould. He is 
really a naturalist rather than a scientist. He works in a museum so his 
job is observing nature and the outdoor so there are some people who are 
very good at observing most scientists certainly are not.

FD: I am always, of course, an anarchist, I would like to abolish 
required courses. Formal education, in general, that doesn't make much 
sense. People have the terrible illusion that you have to know 
everything before you can do anything. It's just totally wrong. So, I 
would like, I shouldn't say this, this sounds a bit personal -- but I 
have a daughter who is a very successful journalist and she never went 
to journalism school. So, that's sort of my feeling about it: You learn 
by doing much more than by studying. 

David Abrahamson: Tell them also about the vision thing with Esther.

FD: This was the same daughter, I know that this is not very relevant 
but it happens to be true. We never had her eyes tested when she was a 
kid. She was always reading anyway and so it never seemed to be a 
problem. It turns out she was very short-sighted and when she was about 
10, we did have her tested, I can't remember just why. The eye doctor 
said this child is terribly short-sighted, she has to have glasses. So 
he gave her glasses and so she went outside and she said, "These trees 
have leaves on them. I never saw leaves on trees before." So, she'd been 
walking around in a blur all the time.

DA: At that point she developed a passion for observation.

FD: So have your eyes tested from time to time.

Student Question: inaudible

FD: Well, actually I have two book contracts so I have to be working on 
something, that's of course the problem. Most of the time I do this kind 
of thing, especially visiting small colleges which I tend to do more 
than places where they only have undergraduate programs and I enjoy 
generally talking with undergraduates...Apart from this kind of teaching 
on the run which I do a lot of, I am also supposed to be sitting at home 
writing books. I have a contract with Oxford University Press. This is 
the way I get the...books into writing books. 

I was invited to give a series of talks at the New York Public Library. 
which I did last February which was great fun. I mean the New York 
Public Library is a beautiful place. It's an ancient building like a 
Turkish path, the audiences are very discriminating, they have to pay 
$10 to get in so they're highly motivated . I had a very good audience 
and I taught there, all kinds of things -- but the hooker was that I was 
supposed to turn these lectures into a book which still needs to be 
done. And, of course, getting lectures and writing a book ought not be 
coupled together, it's not a good way to write a book. That's the way it 
is. 

So, I've got to write a book, it's supposed to be due, I think, next 
June or something like that. I don't know what the name will be ...I 
think it'll be called "The Family, Internet and the Genome" or something 
like that. All the...technologies which are just coming along and we 
have to deal with. So, that's why with the others, something which I 
find actually more challenging which is Cambridge University Press which 
published a book on origins on life, asked me to prepare a second 
edition and almost everything in that book is obsolete, it was written 
twelve years ago so I'll have to do a total re-write and that will take 
a lot of research because it's clearly a book about science. Origins of 
life is a subject that's fascinating to me because it's a subject in 
which everyone is equally ignorant so you can write a book which is for 
the public and also for the experts because the public knows as much as 
the expert. 

So a lot has happened in the last 12 years which I will have to learn, 
so that'll take the rest of the time, so that's why my life for the next 
two years...one thing I've never had to do is to find a publisher and 
that's very lucky.

Sandi Wisenberg and Bob Dunlock- of the Center for Writing Arts.

DA: I wonder if a question or two comes to your guys minds?

BD: One thought I had having to do with quick spark thought was that in 
some respects, evolutionary theory has become an increasingly popular 
mythology in our time. What's your sense about that? Do you think it's 
been with us for a long time as a central mythology-- I mean, less the 
scientific fact of it and more the cultural mythology...

FD: I don't know who you have in mind. There's a very interesting book 
I'm reading by Jerry Guymond -- is that what you had in mind?

BD: I did actually have the sense that you have to contend with it-- no 
matter what you're doing.

FD: Yes, I mean, I don't know quite in what sense you mean mythology, I 
mean it's a fact of life that evolution dominates almost everything we 
do, I mean the world is changing in a evolutionary fashion and somehow 
one has to deal with that so I should put in a commercial now for my son 
which if you'll excuse me, my son has just published a book called 
"Darwin Among the Machines" which just came out a few weeks ago which I 
highly recommend, I think it's a good piece of writing, I'm not 
altogether unbiased. It's about this, in fact, it's about the history of 
the concept of evolution as applied to machines and it is a very 
important metaphor for one's...I think it's something that will remain. 
I don't think this is something that will remain. I don't think this is 
something that will fade away. What do you think?

BD: Well, I really don't think mythology's just a culture but I 
appreciate your central story...Tyson's in trouble...the fact...how to 
tell the story, how to work it out.

FD: There's a difference, of course, between this country and the rest 
of the world, evolution in this country is sort of regarded as 
controversial, that doesn't happen anywhere else. That's not really the 
point you're talking about.

BD: Let's discuss...

FD: Well, it's not controversial. In some countries, it's regarded as a 
part of life. In some countries, some people argue whether its real or 
not.

DA: I'll take the last question. It's quite simple. I'm going refer to 
it as the pearl of wisdom question so you can even label it that way. 
One of the wonderful things about writing is that the more one writes, 
the more one understands about writing. There's a wonderful sort of 
circularity to it which means that when one has been a writer for a 
while, one has learned a great deal about it. 

The question is: If there's one thing that you know now about writing 
that you think would have been really wonderful to know when you began, 
I'm sure the class would just really treasure the thought. It could be 
something really banal, it could be something cosmic. What's the one 
thing you know now that you wish you knew when you began the practice, 
the craft of writing for the public?

FD: Well, something I've learned just the last few months is people like 
short books. This last book is much shorter and people like it better. 
I've had huge numbers of people who have told me, "I have enjoyed your 
book so much, I could read it on one airplane flight." So, the next 
one's going to be even shorter.


Copyright 1997 Freeman Dyson. All rights reserved.