Freeman Dyson: The Scientist As Rebel

George Johnson reviews Freeman Dyson's latest collection of essays The Scientist As Rebel.

In June 1948, as Jack Kerouac was recovering from another of the amphetamine-fueled joy rides immortalized in “On the Road,” Freeman Dyson, a young British physicist studying at Cornell, set off on a road trip of a different kind. Bound for Albuquerque with the loquacious Richard Feynman, the Neal Cassady of physics, at the wheel, the two scientists talked nonstop about the morality of nuclear weapons and, when they had exhausted that subject, how photons dance with electrons to produce the physical world. The hills and prairies that Dyson, still new to America, was admiring from the car window, the thunderstorm that stranded him and Feynman overnight in Oklahoma — all of nature’s manifestations would be understood on a deeper level once the bugs were worked out of an unproven idea called quantum electrodynamics, or QED...

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