Birds and Frogs ─ Selected Papers, 1990-2014

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are examined, and they all fail for one reason or another.This invaluable compilation, that also contains some unpublished lectures, surveys many subjects, in science, mathematics, history and politics, in which Freeman Dyson has been active and so well respected around the world.