In Memoriam: Freeman Dyson

In honor of my colleague and mentor, Freeman Dyson, I am posting here the full transcript of my interview with him for the Geek Monthly magazine on May 31 of 2007. 

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Interview with Freeman Dyson

Institute for Advanced Study

May 31, 2007

KRISTEN GHODSEE: Outside of the world of physics, one of the things you are most famous for is the creation of the Dyson Sphere.

FREEMAN DYSON: Yes.

KG: I don’t know if you have seen this but the Dyson Sphere is listed in the new Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, Brave New Words.

FD: No, I have not seen it. Oh. So that is a real fame. Good.

KG: You say that you lifted idea from [the science fiction book] The Starmaker, so I am curious how it got attributed to you. Did you further develop the idea, or write about it in a more popular place? It was Science [magazine], right?

FD: No, it is less popular. I wrote a technical article in Science. So this was in fact a serious proposal that we look in the sky for infrared sources as evidence of alien life. That was a serious proposal that was in the context that, the year before, the search for alien intelligence had become about looking for radio signals. So I said “Well fine, if they want to communicate then we can listen to radio signals. But suppose they don’t want to communicate? Can we still find them? And the answer was yes, if they are big enough, they have to radiate away their waste heat. So the way to look for them was through infrared. That was the point, I wrote this piece to stimulate the infrared astronomers to start looking. And then I mentioned the kind of thing you are looking for, which would be a habitat with a large surface area radiating infrared radiation with a star inside supplying the energy. That’s how it developed. I actually used the word “Biosphere.” And that was interpreted as being a round ball, which it did not have to be, of course.

KG: And it has become known as the “Dyson Sphere.”

FD: Yes, and that was because of Larry Niven who wrote the Ringworld, I think it was, where he picked it up. But in Stapleton [author of The Starmaker], he didn’t talk about a sphere at all. He was talking about these galaxies whose lights were dimmed by inhabited structures. I forget just how he described it, but dimming the light of a whole galaxy or something like that.

KG: In terms of recent science fiction, do you have a favorite application of the concept?

FD: The one thing I really enjoyed was the piece out of Star Trek, which one of my daughters taped and sent to me [Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 6, Episode 4, Relics, Air date: 10-12-1992]. So there you have one of these big round balls and there is a very delightful conversation about it. So that’s good fun. It’s all nonsense, but it makes for a laugh.

KG: In your book, Imagined Worlds, you were quite optimistic that in your lifetime there would be space colonization. So what happened? Why aren’t we there yet?

FD: Yes, it is an interesting question. I think the main reason was the [space] shuttle. The shuttle was a huge step backward.

KG: Why?

FD: Because it is not going anywhere. And the [space] station is even worse. It is a dead end. It really set back exploring by 40 years. So that is the primary reason, but there are lots of other reasons, too. The original momentum which led to the Apollo program where people actually got to the moon would have taken us a lot further, but it was essentially just switched off and replaced by the shuttle. Of course, there were a lot of good reasons. The Vietnam War was going on at the time so people were distracted from any kind of bigger adventures. The Vietnam War was such a disaster and so the general feeling was that we don’t trust the government to do anything, and certainly not space exploring. So the momentum was lost. I think that was the turning point. So in these forty years we could have done a lot. Whether we would actually have colonies, of course, I don’t know. But there is nothing really standing in the way except for a loss of will.

KG: And do you think that has to do with the end of the space race? The demise of the Soviet Union?

FD: Yes. It had a lot to do with that. Of course, the Soviet Union hadn’t disappeared in 1970, but the Soviet Union had clearly lost the race. And after that we were just racing ourselves, but not racing anybody else. So that took away a lot of the fun. So now we are hoping that the Chinese will fill the gap.

KG: Spark the race again?

FD: Yes, we need some competition, that is clear. There are a lot of countries that are now becoming more interested in it.

KG: So what do you think about space tourism? Of course, you know that one of the [Institute for Advanced Study] Trustees [Charles Simonyi] just returned from space and few weeks ago.

FD: Yes, in fact, my daughter was at the launch. It was exciting. The Russians are much more casual about security than we are, and visitors were allowed to clamor over the rocket, and she was near enough so she could feel the heat. She said it was just marvelous to see him go up. This is delightful. My daughter is a venture capitalist and she thinks there is actually money to be made in this business. That is why she was there. And maybe she is right, but I don’t know. It goes against all my socialist principles.

KG: Twenty-five million dollars is a lot of money [to pay to go into space].

FD: Yes, in a way, it is a horrible extravagance. On the other hand, like so many things… I was just reviewing a book about the early history of the Royal Society. It is a book called The Fellowship. It is not a great work; it is written by a journalist, not by an historian. But it is a delightful story, because there was a bunch of people in the 17th century who were sort of the Charles Simonyis of the time. There were wealthy. They were interested in science and they loved to show off. They all enjoyed all sorts of extravagances. And of course this was the great turning point when religion suddenly stopped being the dominating influence. And they had been fighting wars of religion for hundreds of years, and finally they said let’s stop that and do something different. So they turned to science as an alternative. So these people, when at the time the mass of the population were desperately poor, were squandering their money and building laboratories and big telescopes and sending expeditions all over the world and exploring and spending money regardless. And, of course, in the end it all paid off. They started this Royal Society. And there is a delightful episode. One of the great scientists of the period, William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood, who was a medical doctor, was really a first rate scientist. And it happened that he was also the private physician to Charles I, who was fighting the civil war, and so at one of the big battles of the civil war. When Charles I was busy fighting, he handed his two sons, who were then just kids, to William Harvey to take care of during the battle. And so there was William Harvey with these two kids, who were both future Kings of England. And so it happened that Charles II, who was then only twelve years old at the time, somehow got interested in science as a result of being taken care of by Harvey. It was one of these wonderfully fortuitous coincidences. So when he came back in 1660 and became King, he was just all ready then to start the Royal Society, which was a good way of reconciling the enemies. There were these scientists, half of them had been Royalists and half of them had been Puritans, and they all came together and started the Royal Society with the help of the King. So it was a happy ending. I have the feeling that this sort of extravagant space exploring by private citizens does have a future. That is what my daughter thinks anyway. But, of course, I was brought up as a socialist and the idea the extravagant wealth is evil in itself.

KG: Since you brought that up, one of the major themes that I have taken from reading all of your books is the idea that the market and competition are drivers of technology and science. But on the other hand, you have a real concern for the damage that technology and science has done to equality and social justice in the world. I think there are very few scientists in the world who reflect deeply on the problems of inequality. I am interested in this from a personal point of view, because of my work in Bulgaria, where I see the aftermath of the loss of a radically different way of imagining the world. Yes, communism failed in practice, in the Stalinist sense, but there are still a lot of people who believe in the idea that there is something better out there for the majority of people in the world than the sort of rampant, neoliberal capitalism that we have now.

FD: Yes, we see that in Germany very strongly. I don’t know whether you are familiar with Germany, because my wife is German, and we still have family there. And, course the Easterners and Westerners are still very different. She is an Easterner, and I used to visit the village where her family lived. And in those times, during the communist times, it was actually a happy place. The system worked. The Germans were very proud of it. And they said, after all, we invented communism. The Russians messed it up, but we can actually make it work. And they did in the sense. That society was a very humane society, unless you wanted to be a politician. Of course they were brutal if you got involved in any sort of political activity. But for the people in the villages it actually worked. The village was prosperous. It was growing stuff it sold to the Russians for fixed prices. It was a fixed economy and everybody had a job. Everybody had security. And the village actually had a zoo, which was their pride and joy. The school children took care of the animals. It was run by the local communist party. They actually ran it well. There was a professional veterinarian in charge. It was a great asset to the village. But of course, as soon as the reunification happened, it was destroyed. It then had to pay for itself, and there was no way you could sustain a zoo in a village like that. So that was just once of the many things that was destroyed. I don’t know what the villagers would say today, of course the village is transformed totally now. Most of the people who lived there were out of work and had to move into the cities. They have been replaced by stockbrokers and business people who have country cottages there. The village has now been gentrified. They don’t do much farming there anymore, but it is just as beautiful as it ever was. Anyhow, what is certainly true is that the people there… We had cousins in Leipzig who joined the march when they began marching against the communist government. They were trying to reform the communist government. They marched at the same time the Solidarity people were marching in Poland, it was part of the same movement for reform. But one thing they were not marching for was to be swallowed by the West. They did not have that in mind at all. What they wanted was to have a government of their own that was more responsive, and that would sort of be like Austria, an independent country. But what happened was totally opposite, and they were immediately swallowed by the West. And the all of their institutions were upset and destroyed. And there is still a lot of bitterness, of course.

KG: What do you think went wrong?

FD: I think the unification was a mistake. East Germany on its own could have done much better. My image of it was like Austria. Austria is German-speaking, but it has a separate government and it is doing very well. It does not want to be swallowed.

KG: So few scientists today seem to concern themselves with issues of social inequality, yet this seems to be a recurrent theme in many of your popular books. How did you become so interested in these issues?

FD: Well, it was growing up in England during the Churchill administration, which was of course a socialist administration. That was the irony. When Churchill took power in 1940, he actually agreed with the Labor leaders that they would divide the power. That he would run the war while they ran the country. He brought all of these Labour people into the government, all very strong socialist Labour politicians who actually ran the country while Churchill was running the war. So it was a socialist country in a very deep way. I considered myself very fortunate in that money absolutely didn’t matter. The whole time that I was a teenager and growing up, it didn’t matter whether you had any money or not. There was nothing you could buy anyhow. Everything was rationed, and all the important things were rationed or very cheap. And so essentially everyone was equal. It was a wonderful time in many respects. It was a much more egalitarian society then we have ever had since. And the question is: do you have to have a war to do that? I don’t see why. It was just sort of a happy accident, but having a war helped, of course. The fact that we were being bombed created a lot of solidarity and the feeling that we were all in it together. And anybody who was profiteering from the war was just immediately ostracized. Of course we hated the Americans, because they didn’t understand it. They thought money could buy anything. So that is the background. I grew up in that socialist society, which was in many ways very good. And then of course it gradually fell apart after the war when Churchill was kicked out and the socialists took over. It was never as socialist afterwards. It somehow didn’t work without the war to hold it together. So the five years after the war were not so happy. It gradually became less egalitarian. That’s the background, and the fact that I was involved with the bombing also became one of the central problems for me. Question of war and peace have always dominated.

KG: So then you come the United States and to Cornell. How long is that after you get out the military?

FD: That was only two years.

KG: So what did you do for those two years in between?

FD: For those two years I was in England, sort of getting back into academic life. I worked for a year in London and for a year in Cambridge trying to figure out what to do next. I wanted to go to Russia. I was all set. In fact, I had studied Russian. I was in love with the language. So I intended to go for several years at least to Russia to study and to do science, because of course the Russians were very good in science. And so that was my immediate goal, but then that became politically impossible after 1946, after the Cold War began. It became essentially impossible to go to Russia as a student. They sealed themselves off. And so I went to America instead.

KG: So you studied Russian in the military?

FD: Well before that.

KG: At Winchester.

FD: Yes. And my daughter sort of fulfilled my ambitions by studying Russian and going to Russia a lot. This venture capitalist daughter actually specializes in Eastern Europe. And she has done a lot in Russia, also during the Soviet time and she has actually put the language to good use.

KG: So then you came to Cornell, and you came to the U.S. at a time of growing anti-communism…

FD: Well, that was later. The remarkable thing was that when I came here in 1947, this was also a socialist country. It was to a remarkable extent. Anyone who wanted an education could get one more or less. The GI bill was extremely generous – free education for almost anybody. There was a lot of public housing going up. There still was in way the wartime spirit, which was not so different from England. I felt, especially at Cornell, very much at home. Cornell was a small, isolated community. In those days, nobody had cars so we all helped each other out and took care of the babies and so on. It wasn’t at all the capitalist hell that it became later. The rabid anti-communism, it is hard to remember the exact time-table, but the McCarthy period didn’t begin until around 1950, several years later.

KG: So were you here when that began?

FD: Well, I went back to England for two years. So I was in England, I remember, I was at Birmingham, and there was a communist student chaplain or something at Birmingham. He was a notorious communist who was advising the students. There was a noble, Lord Vansittart in the House of Lords who wanted to become a McCarthy in England. So he made a speech in the House of Lords against the chaplain who was preaching communism in Birmingham, saying he was corrupting the youth and should be thrown out. And then, the president of the University of Birmingham issued a public statement, which was just one sentence and it said, “The political affiliations of members of the staff are of no concern to the administration of this university.” And that was it. It was something that the president of Princeton did not do. Anyway, that was starting when I was in England, but Lord Vansittart failed.

But in this country, of course, it got very bad. I came back here, I moved here in 1953. And, of course, by that time, it was just when things were really very bad. And I remember, by that time I had three kids, so we were pretty much settled here, but I still had a suitcase packed so I could go back to England on short notice if things really got bad. The test was whether Oppenheimer would keep his job here. He was Director of the Institute, and when he lost his clearance, which was in 1954, there was some question whether he would be kicked out of the Institute [for Advanced Study]. And if he had, I would have packed the suitcase and gone home.

KG: But they kept him on.

FD: The Trustees actually made a very brave statement saying that he was a good guy and they were going to keep him on. After that, things did improve.

KG: But the egalitarianism of the post-war years was gone.

FD: Yes.

KG: In your books, write talk a lot about the role technology plays in exacerbating inequality. How so?

FD: It is also true that technology is a great liberator. But when I look at my children, in many ways they have all sort of become computer addicts. And this has sort of led to a gentrification of a society in a way. The old working class doesn’t exist anymore. Instead, you have this gentrified middle class and the very poor with a huge gap between them. That is why the Republicans do so well. There is a fairly solid majority of people who consider themselves above the gap. And that is what makes them so damn selfish. And so technology has done that. It has created this gap, but it has put it in a different place. In the old days that gap was between the top ten percent and the bottom ninety. And now it is more like sixty-forty or so That makes it harder to deal with.

KG: So now that we are one the topic of technology, let me ask you a different question. What do you think was the most important technological innovation of the last ten years.

FD: In the last ten?

KG: Well, the recent past.

FD: I think Google. It is hard to remember how we lived without Google. I actually visited Google last summer. It is a wonderful place. It is really a fantastic place, you should go there if you ever have the chance. I was very lucky because there was a group of high school kids, which my granddaughter happened to belong to, so I got to go with them. We were all invited to visit Google for a day, and the kids were absolutely overwhelmed by it. Well, I am sure that the intention was that a lot of them would end up working there. But it is a wonderful place. First of all, it is sort of like a sand box where you can just play around. And there are tennis courts and swimming pools and free food and drink for everybody. And it is all very healthy, the best kind of foods, not just junk food. Real meals that are free for everybody whether you work there are not. It is sort of a geek’s paradise.

KG: Where is this now?

FD: Mountainview. Of course the founders were both Stanford people. Larry and Serguei, the two founders, are walking around in shorts and everybody calls them by their first names. It is amazing as an institution. And I’m sure it can’t last. It is bound to become rigid and bureaucratic in time. But it is still amazingly unbureaucratic considering that it is growing extremely fast. Somehow they manage to keep it informal. Anyway, that is certainly something spectacular. And it is not just a tool, it is a new way of life. And the way they are working there is also something new.

KG: So it seems that within certain sectors of society, things are become less hierarchical at the same moment that society is becoming increasingly polarized overall.

FD: Yes. But this is changing very fast. I just listened to a talk by Bill Haseltine. He is a big capitalist. He runs an outfit called Human Genome Sciences. It is a company, which essentially exploits the genome. It does science and then sells the proceeds to pharmaceutical companies. So it is a capitalistic way of doing science. But he is a smart guy. He gave a talk about health care, and I found it quite astonishing that he was very much concerned about health care, and what one might do. He went to India. He stayed in India for six months, and he examined very carefully what the Indians are doing and he came to the conclusion that they actually are the best. If you take the money that the Indians are spending on health care, they are getting far more from it than we are. And in fact, the system is working extremely well. It is not universal, it is only about a quarter of the population that is actually getting it. It is mostly in the cities, of course. But he said that fundamentally it is a system that works. He said that he did the cost accounting as best he could by looking at the system as a whole, He said that they get something like 50 times the value that we get for a dollar. And he said that it is not just due just to lower wages. Lower wages would account for a factor of five, but not for a factor of fifty. The other factor of ten is just due to things being done right. Not wasting it all on unnecessary procedures and legal maneuvers and all that kind of stuff that we have. I found that very very very striking that something in India is actually working well. And so I have great hopes. India, of course, is still a very socialistic country in many respects. They have a lot of greedy capitalists as well, but they might manage to somehow to strike a happy medium. So I was writing a piece about what to look forward to, and I was thinking about Indian villages being gentrified in the same ways that… people not being farmers anymore, but the villages filled with stockbrokers and businesspeople…

KG: With their country cottages?

FD: Yes. And the wealth will somehow spread out into the villages because that is where the people are. Anyway, technology has its good sides as well. The general accessibility of the Internet is a huge plus.

KG: It seems to be a fairly democratic technology, at least in terms of access to information.

FD: Yes, but not everybody has it, Still, it is spreading fast.

KG: I now want to ask you about your popular books. What compelled you to start writing books for a more general audience?

FD: Well, it was this midlife crisis essentially that every theoretical scientist goes through. I mean, experimental scientists can go on forever, but theorists generally run out of steam. It used to be said that anything worth doing you have to do before you are thirty. And sometimes you might be able to extend that to fifty. But by fifty, you are pretty much out. So then the question is: what do you do then? So most of my friends become administrators, and some of them are very dedicated teachers, and they are very happy teaching. But I decided that what I really enjoy is writing, so that’s what I would do. Then the opportunity arose…every book that I have done has been sort of on commission. I never actually set out to write a book that wasn’t invited by somebody. So, in the first instance, the Sloan Foundation decided to subsidize a set of science autobiographies and so I was invited to write one. That was just a happy coincidence. It came at a time when I was looking for something. And so I did, I spent then about three years writing that [Disturbing the Universe]. And then the next one was Weapons and Hope, I forgot how that one originated. I think it was my publisher, Harper and Row. I have an editor there...who is a wonderful editor of the old style of those who actually read everything that he publishes. We just celebrated his 90th birthday. And so he is long ago retired. There aren’t anymore like him. But in those days there were still a few. So that was that, and all of the books came from some kind of stimulus of that kind. The Origins of Life was a set of lecture that I gave in Cambridge.

KG: Imagined Worlds was also lectures…

FD: In Jerusalem, yes. So that is how it went.

KG: And this one [The Scientist as Rebel] was a New York Review Collection?

FD: That one was absolutely unexpected! I had been publishing these book reviews, and then quite out of the blue, Mr. Silvers, who is the boss there, telephoned me and said, “How would you like to do a book?” So it was already written, I didn’t have to do anything [laughs].

KG: That’s nice!

FD: So that was lucky. And there is a new one that is coming out in a few months that is called A Many Colored Glass, which is published by the University of Virginia Press based on a set of lectures that I gave there. So anyway, it has been a way of life since then. I produce a book once every five years or so. I find it very satisfying.

KG: Has it compromised or changed your reputation within the field of theoretical physics?

FD: No. Of course, everybody knows that I am an old fuddy-duddy. If you are polite you say an old “fuddy-duddy;” if you are not so polite you say an “old fart” [laughs]. So you don’t expect that people will take you seriously as a scientist once you have reached a ripe old age. So that’s fine. I think the young people tolerate me very well. And I certainly enjoy sitting at lunch with them and listening to what they do.

KG: So what do you think is the most exciting thing going on in theoretical physics?

FD: Well, theoretical physics right now is a bit in the doldrums. And that is not what I do. Actually, all the theoretical physicists around here [Princeton] are string theorists. I never took the trouble to learn string theory. Basically, I think it is beautiful mathematics, but it is not my cup of tea. So I not terribly interested in it. So instead, what I mostly do is talk to astronomers and biologists. Because we have a first rate group of astronomers here. And also a first rate group of biologists who are just starting up because of the new building that is going up. And I am really very excited about astronomy and also about biology. I don’t do them myself, but astronomy, of course, is racing ahead. There are huge discoveries being made every week. So it is a wonderful time to be an astronomer. And so I am a sort of spectator there, a cheerleader. But still I have a useful function. And I am very much interested in the work that the biologists are doing. This new book is mostly about biology.

KG: What would you say then is exciting about what is going on in biology now?

FD: What’s going on here, I am not really sure that is so exciting. I can’t really judge. What they are trying to do here is to bring people into biology from physics. It is a sort of mixed gang of [“re-treads,” what they call “re-treads”], who are trained as physicists and computer scientists and are trying then to apply modern data processing to biology which is something that probably has a big future. Biology is now just swamped with data. There are enormous quantities of data coming in coming in from all sides, not just genomes, but all sorts of molecular pathways and genealogical data of one kind or another. Anyway, so what they do here, they call it “Systems biology.” They are trying to mine all this data and make something useful out of it. But I am not sure that that is so exciting…

KG: So what is exciting to you?

FD: What is exciting to me is a thing called HAR1, which was actually discovered in Santa Cruz by a fellow called Haussler, who is a friend of mine. He is also really a computer scientist doing biology. And what he discovered was this thing called HAR1, which stands for Human Accelerated Region. And this is something that I think is really very wonderful. It is a little stretch of DNA in the human genome, which he discovered just essentially by clever data mining. He was looking for certain clues. So he found this little stretch of DNA which is in fact almost totally conserved from fish… they have the genomes of zebra fish, of mice, of rats, of chickens and chimpanzees, of course. And so this stretch of DNA is totally identical all the way from zebra fish to chimpanzees, and so it evidently must be something important because it has been so jealously conserved and not allowed to vary for at least 300 million years all the way from chickens to chimpanzees. And in humans it is very very different. There are eighteen changes when you go from chimps to humans. So it has been evolving very fast. That is why they call it “accelerated region.” So this piece of DNA is doing something in humans, which it has never done before. And of course nobody has much idea what it is. But I think it is the start of a big breakthrough. I think it is the start of something big, understanding what really happened to make humans so different from chimps. There are two things that are known about this little piece of DNA, which are highly significant. First of all, it does not code for a protein, which most genes do. This codes for RNA. So it is not a conventional gene, it is a stretch of RNA that has something to do with the organizing of genes. So it is a higher-level structure of some kind. And the second thing is that we know when it operates, which is in the second trimester of pregnancy. And it operates in the cortex of the brain during the crucial period of the pregnancy when the brain is getting organized. So with luck it will tell us something important about brains. And to me, that is something really exciting.

KG: And what about in astronomy?

FD: Well, there is a corresponding thing in astronomy, which I think is called Baryon Oscillations. Anyway, the idea is that we are now actually able to see more or less all the way across the universe. These sky surveys have just revolutionized the picture of things. Ten years ago, we had only seen about one thousandth of the universe. The little piece of the universe that we had explored was about one thousandth of the volume of the whole thing. And just in the last ten years there have been sky surveys, particularly the Sloan Survey, which the people here have been very much involved with, and several other surveys, which essentially put the whole sky into digital memory. It multiplied the data by a factor of a thousand. So you have a complete record of everything in the sky, and it did not take very long. Data processing is the thing that just leapt ahead, and improved by a factor of two every fifteen months or something. The factors of two just multiply and multiply. So we now essentially have the universe on a plate. And the question is: what can you actually do with that? And the plan is to look for the universe vibrating like a drum. And there is a good chance that it can be picked out. At some point in the early universe there were sound waves spanning the whole thing from one side to the other. And they leave traces in clusters of galaxies, so that if you look at the large scale distribution of clusters of galaxies you can see it as a faint record of this periodicity so you get an accurate measure of the dynamics of the universe and not just that static situation. So that is a gleam in people’s eyes at the moment.

KG: And have they found these oscillations?

FD: Well, it looks like it. It is not yet proved, but that is the kind of things that is exciting. The power of modern data processing getting applied to the universe as a whole... And there are all sorts of other exciting things going on. Gamma ray bursts are the big mystery. They are unbelievably violent explosions, which happen all over the universe. They are probably the most distant things we can ever see. They are brighter than anything else by a big factor, and there are still about a hundred different theories about how they originated. But there the progress is very fast.

KG: So when you think back on how you got interested in science, how do you think it differed from the way that young people today get interested in science?

FD: Well, I don’t think it’s all that much different. In my case, it all comes from just being a good calculator. When I was about three years old, I fell in love with numbers. I just loved to calculate things. My mother preserved some of my first scribblings, and its all numbers. So that is how it starts. You just happen to have a talent, and you spend the rest of your life just enjoying it. To me, I have always been looking for interesting problems that mathematics can help. And I found out pretty soon that physics and astronomy are really the things where mathematics is most useful. In biology, it certainly wasn’t possible then, and it is a question of whether it is possible now… I remember as a child wanting to be a biologist because I was very much interested in all these exciting things that were going on, and there was a lot of good biology. And I read the popular science books, and especially this wonderful book [The Science of Life], which I still treasure. It is fifteen hundred pages, and it was a school prize I won in 1938.

KG: H.G. Wells?

FD: It is Wells and Wells and Huxley. Of course, [Julian] Huxley was a professional biologist. The other Wells is the son of the great man. So the three of them got together…it is a wonderful book. It is actually amazingly modern in spirit. I mean, it is all about ecology and things which are supposed to be much more recent, but actually are not. So that is the kind of thing I was reading, and they had a vision of biology as a science of the future, which I found compelling. So I wanted to be a biologist. So if you really wanted to be a biologist you have to learn how to dissect things. So I fished a crayfish out of the stream and tried to dissect it, and that was a total disaster. It became a stinking mess very fast, so I discovered that I didn’t have the right tools to be a biologist and I so resigned myself to doing mathematics.

KG: That is a wonderful story.

FD: That is more or less how it was. But I have always been interested in biology as a bystander. But what I actually do is, of course, mathematics.

KG: Which brings me back to H.G. Wells and science fiction. You talk a lot in your books about The Time Machine. What influence do you think science fiction has had on your development as a scientist, even just as inspiration, or in getting people interested in science more generally.

FD: I would say none at all as far as my professional work is concerned. But of course it has a lot to do with what I do as a writer. There is a strong influence there. But no, the sort of science I do professionally is so totally detached from anything human. I became famous just for being able to calculate how electrons behave. I mean, that is sort of a miraculous fact of nature that electrons somehow pay attention to what we calculate. So I could sit there and scribble and come out with all of these long calculations, and then somebody would do the experiment and find out that “Yes, that is exactly right.” That is exactly what the electron does. That is a miracle, of course, but that had nothing to do with science fiction. It just happened. It is an amazing thing that the laws of physics are pure mathematics, and that by understanding deep structures in mathematics you craft nature, which is the sort of thing that made people like Einstein somewhat mystical. He said that most incomprehensible thing about nature is its comprehensibility. And that is still true of course. But that again has nothing to do with science fiction. Well, The Starmaker maybe has something slightly to do with that. The Star Maker is a picture of the creator. Stapleton was actually a professional philosopher, so it is rather an academic book and the characters are not very well drawn. But the idea of book is that the Creator is enjoying himself creating mathematical models more or less and experimenting with different kinds of universes. He starts out with something that is just a little rhythmic tune, a simple piece of music, and then he goes on to more complicated things. And we are sort of at the turning point. Our universe is where it really begins to be mature. Our universe is still a failure; it has fatal flaws. And so in the end the Creator condemns us and goes on to something better. So that has some slight relevance to what is going on today in cosmology.

KG: Some people are incredible inspired by science fiction.

FD: Yes, of course. I go to science fiction conventions, and there are all these young people who like to dress up as Star Trekkies, and they have a lot of fun. They read all of the latest books, and they are having a good time. There is a science fiction museum in Seattle, I don’t know if you been there. I was there last summer and it has all the holy relics from science fiction films which go back a long way. There were expressionist silent films in the 1920s. And all the costumes of those films are preserved there.

KG: So what would be your favorite science fiction book of all time?

FD: That is an interesting question. I don’t know. There are so many good ones. Certainly the most perfect is The Time Machine. It is real work of art. I also like Sirius very much; it is another Stapleton book.

KG: It is a very sad book…

FD: Oh yes. Of course, most of the great books are. Sirius is a great story. He [Stapleton] really knew dogs well. Then, of course, there is Octavia Butler, who recently died. Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Both of those are very good. Then there is Mary Russell, and The Sparrow. It’s what I call theo-fiction rather than science fiction. It is very theological. And I think it is sort of a good genre. It really hasn’t got that much to do with science, but much more to do with religion. The Sparrow [and The Children of God] is about a planet where there are two intelligent species and one of them is cannibalistic and eats the other. So it is a sort of society with two levels, with the master and the slaves, and they are separate species. And two humans get to this planet and happen to arrive on different parts of the planet. And one of them is a Jesuit priest and he turns up with the masters. And the other is a Jewish girl who turns up with the slaves. And so they take opposite sides. The planet had actually been at peace because both sides accepted their fate and accepted the natural order of things with one side as masters and one side as slaves. And of course this Jewish girl then stirs up the slaves to revolt. And the Jesuit priest is helpless and doesn’t know whether to defend the masters or not. So in the end, it ends in a total disaster, and huge numbers of the master race are slaughtered. And of course, if you look at it today, this was written about five years ago, it is exactly like the Shi’a and Sunni, and there we are just stirring them up. I like those books very much. They are not great pieces of literature. But I met Mary Russell in London at the science fiction convention, and I liked her a lot. And she herself grew up Catholic and then converted to Judaism, so she knows both sides very well. I think it is a good form of literature, because it brings religion into contact with modernity, which is what it badly needs.

KG: So I noticed that you won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. How did that come about?

FD: Yes, well I think it was a clerical mistake and somebody mixed up the names. I was very grateful, and never really questioned why they did that, but it didn’t really make much sense. I am really not a religious person, and never have been. But anyway, I am very grateful for the cash and also for the doors that it opened. I mean, it has been an enormous help to me as a writer to have this fake reputation as a religious expert. So actually, this new book that I have finished but not yet published, the last chapter of that is called “The Varieties of Human Experience,” and it is about theo-fiction actually. I am sort of explaining how important this new kind of literature could be for the future of religion, which I think is true. That was of course Templeton’s idea -- that religion should move into the modern world. He said that we should be making spiritual discoveries in the same sort of fashion that we made scientific discoveries. That was his whole motivation, to try to bring science and religion together. Which I think doesn’t work, but what I think what does work is to bring religion and literature together, because they always have been partners. And so theo-fiction is just a modern style of literature and religion. And I think it could be important. And so in that sense I am with Templeton. That particular chapter is addressed to Templeton.

KG: And is there anything in what you’ve written that made them think of you for that prize?

FD: Yes. I know pretty much how it happened. There are few passages in Disturbing the Universe, which have a definitely religious tone. The argument from design, and the conversations that I had in the beginning about “cosmic unity.” So that was, I think, what did it.

KG: But that is such a small percentage of everything you have written.

FD: Of course, it was just a sort of a sideline or a sideline, or a footnote to a footnote. But that’s what happened. Those passages were taken out of context, and made their way to the Internet. People put those on their websites, and I became identified with those particular passages. I think that is how it happened. So the Templeton people somehow became aware of my existence, and didn’t know anything much more about me. Of course, it is not Templeton himself who chooses the prizes; he has a committee of academics. So these people on the committee… which I think it a great mistake. When it started out, the first Templeton prize went to Mother Teresa. And it should go to people like her who really do some good in the world. But instead, it has become sidetracked because he set up this committee of academics, and mixture of scientists and theologians, and they always give the prize to people like themselves. So it has become, more or less, an academic prize. Which is a shame. It has been a long time since it was given to somebody who really earned it. So the kind of people who have been getting the prize are mostly a little bit more theological than I am, but not much. So that is the story.

KG: You keep good company with Mother Teresa…

FD: I wish it had kept up that way. Of course, they did give it to one or two Muslims, and two Jews. So it tries to be ecumenical, but it doesn’t really succeed.

KG: So I have another question that is unrelated to this. I am a mother, and I know that you have many children and grandchildren, and you write at some point about ectogenesis, which I think is a great idea. [Laughter] And I am so disappointed that there haven’t been more developments in that direction. So why not? I mean artificial wombs were a big part of the feminist movement in the 1970s because they thought the only way that men and women could really be equal is to take care of this pregnancy business.

FD: Yes.

KG: So is it politics or technology that is holding this back?

FD: Oh, it is certainly technology. We are only just beginning to understand how embryos develop. And of course this whole cloning business is in fact trying to do precisely that. You do not have an artificial womb, but you have an artificial egg cell. And already there, there are huge stumbling blocks. They are only able clone… the success rate is only one percent or so. So the idea of doing that with humans, which I think would be perfectly reasonable if the success rate were ninety-five percent or something, but if it is only one percent then it is criminal to take a chance. So there I think the obstacles are certainly technical. I remember reading Brave New WorldBrave New World ought to be on the list of the best books, it is a brilliantly written book. But I am delighted to hear you talk about that. How many kids do you have?

KG: I just have one.

FD: And how old is she?

KG: Five and a half.

FD: And so now things are improving…

KG: Yes, but when I was going into labor, I remember thinking that the mechanics of this process haven’t really changed in thousands of years, when so much else about our lives have changed. I suppose if things go wrong, you are much better off these days than you were in the past, but the process itself is so primitive. Which I suppose some people may see as a good thing. But I had a difficult pregnancy and a c-section, and so I was fantasizing about the possibilities of an ectogenesis revolution.

FD: Well, it is an interesting thought. I have never given this much thought, because it obviously wasn’t in the cards for my daughters’ generation. But what amazes me is that my daughters are so prolific…

KG: You have how many grandchildren?

FD: Fifteen. But I didn’t ask for so many. And I don’t need so many, but somehow they just keep producing. And what amazes me is that they are all professional women. They all have demanding jobs, and they are all having babies. And somehow or the other it doesn’t seem to drive them crazy. I am amazed. I mean something must have happened somehow to make things more convenient than it used to be. I don’t know. I never expected this. I thought that as soon as they became professional women that babies were more or less out. Perhaps one or two.

KG: So you have six children and fifteen grandchildren.

FD: Yes, they all seem to enjoy having babies. One of them was trained as a nurse and she liked to have her babies on the living room floor. And two of them were born here in Princeton on the living room floor. It seemed to be no trouble for her. All the friends and neighbors were handing the baby around as soon as it was born. Somehow or other, things seem to have gotten easier.

KG: Certainly having the children’s center here was a huge factor in my ability to accept the fellowship here [at the Institute].

FD: You should thank Kitty Oppenheimer for that. You know the much-maligned Kitty was the one who started the childcare center. Yes, when he [Oppenheimer] came here as Director, that was the first thing she did. And it made a huge difference. And now in all the films she is portrayed as being a total drunk and a useless person.

KG: History can sometimes be very unkind. So how would you like to be remembered? You write a lot about immortality, in the both literal and figurative sense. What would you like to be your immortality?

FD: Of course, there are so many different meaning to the word. When I was writing about immortality I was just meaning the continuation of life. There was nothing about human beings particularly. And I wasn’t making any distinction about any creature or a whole society. It was just a question of whether any sort of life could ever continue forever. And that is a more or less well defined scientific question. You can argue about what life means, and I found that an interesting question. But this has nothing to do with personal immortality. Otherwise I have not written about personal immortality except when I am talking about my mother and the world’s soul. She is saying that she would just like to merge with the world’s soul when she is finished so that some of her memories and character would be preserved as part of the world’s soul. And I thought that was a nice idea. Not that I particularly believe it. And that is about as far as it goes. As far a manipulating the human species is concerned, I look to that as a coming disaster. If we find a cure for death, which is quite likely to happen… There is a fellow in Cambridge who is promoting this idea… This guy is a sort of television evangelist or something. I have never met him, but I am told that he exists in Cambridge and apparently has quite a following. That sort of thing is certainly coming, and I don’t know how we can avoid it. It will probably be easier than ectogenesis to keep people alive more or less forever. And I don’t see much good coming of that. It could be a very unpleasant situation.

KG: How so?

FD: Well, just all these aged people just lying around and not leaving any room for the young. I can just imagine if we had to share the planet with Hannibal and Oliver Cromwell and all these…

KG: But there might be some very interesting people to share the planet with…

FD: Yes, but still it would make progress very difficult.

KG: And so what about immortality in a figurative sense. Your legacies…

FD: Well, there I am quite happy with the way things are. I see myself in my children and grandchildren and of course books are sort of children as well. And there are grandbooks, which are book written by my kids. So I am quite happy with that.