The great Freeman Dyson has died:
‘You could tell that the world was a beautiful place through his eyes, and somehow understanding all the formulas and the natural laws and all the mysteries he had plumbed through the study of physics, that is only grew more and more beautiful, the more he understood.’
Mia Dyson says her father still regularly went to his office at Princeton University. On Wednesday, on such a visit, she says he suffered a fall and died of his injuries Friday morning.
Damn it. I loved that old man.
Yes, even more than this guy:
But he was awesome!
From The New York Times:
Richard Feynman, a young professor at Cornell, had invented a novel method to describe the behavior of electrons and photons (and their antimatter equivalent, positrons). But two other physicists, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, had each independently devised a very different way. Each of these seemed to satisfy the requirements of both quantum mechanics and special relativity — two of nature’s acid tests. But which one was correct?
While crossing Nebraska on a Greyhound bus, Dr. Dyson was struck by an epiphany: The theories were mathematically equivalent — different ways of saying the same thing. The result was QED [Quantum Electrodynamics – M]. Feynman called it ‘the jewel of physics — our proudest possession.’
By the time Dr. Dyson published the details in 1949, a doctorate must have seemed superfluous. He was appointed professor of physics at Cornell in 1951. Teaching, he soon realized, was not for him. In 1953, he became a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he spent the rest of his career.
Dyson's equation of the Feynman and Schwinger/Tomonaga methods earned for the three, but not himself, the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Also, a cyborg Astrochicken!
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