Legendary physicist Freeman Dyson talks about math, nuclear rockets, and astounding things about the universe

Today, frequently writes about science and technology's relationship to ethics and social issues. Business Insider sat down with him and talked about math, war, the human brain, the education system, and the Orion Project.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. It was originally published on September 9, 2016.

Elena Holodny: Who has most inspired you in either math or science?

Freeman Dyson: Oh, definitely [Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard] Feynman. Dick Feynman ... he has now become famous, to my great joy, because when I knew him he was completely unknown. But I recognized him as being something special. He was only for a short time at Cornell when I was a student and he was a young professor. So I didn't work with him, but I just sat at his feet, literally, and listened to him talk. He was a clown, of course, and also a genius. It was a good combination.

Holodny: What does it mean to you to be a good mathematician-slash-scientist versus a great one?

Dyson: I would say it’s just like any other art — mathematics is really an art, not a science. You could say science also is an art. So I would say the difference is something you can’t really describe — you can only recognize. You hear somebody playing the violin, and it was Fritz Kreisler or it was somebody else, and you can tell the difference.

It is so in almost every art. We just don’t understand why it is that there are just a few people who are just completely off the scale and the rest of them are just mediocre. And we don’t know why. But I say it’s certainly true of mathematics.

Holodny: What are your thoughts on math as an absolute versus as a way to measure things?

Dyson: Well, both, of course, are real. That’s the beauty of it. You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too.

That’s, of course, the beautiful thing about science — that it’s all about things we don’t understand, not just the things we do understand.

And that, by some miracle, the language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That’s just an amazing piece of luck, which we don’t understand.

Holodny: It’s interesting that in some fields — for example, in economics — that math models do not perfectly reflect what’s happening in the real world in the same way that they do in physics.

Dyson: Yes, that’s another mystery. That’s, of course, the beautiful thing about science — that it’s all about things we don’t understand, not just the things we do understand.

In fact, there’s a wonderful essay that I was just reading by [German mathematician David] Hilbert. When he was quite an old man, he gave a wonderful talk in Königsberg, about in 1930, about the relation between physics and mathematics, essentially. Only what is quite amazing is that he talked also about genetics — and with an expert knowledge. I mean, I was amazed. That’s Hilbert, the very purest of mathematicians, and he understood all about the genetics of fruit flies and how you could axiomatize genetics of fruit flies and deduce the existence of a linear structure for heredity. And, of course, just 10 years before DNA was identified. But Hilbert really understood it. Because nobody was listening.

Holodny: Could you talk about your experience working on the Orion Project?

Dyson: Well, that was of course a great adventure. It was just good luck. Again, everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy. Orion was obviously crazy. So I said "yes" and had a great time.

The key to having an interesting life is to always say 'yes' to anything crazy.

The idea was to explore the universe with a spaceship driven by atomic bombs. And so the double objective was to be scooting around very fast in space, which would’ve been great, and also getting rid of the bombs, which was also great. It was the only really good way of getting rid of bombs. And, unfortunately, of course it never happened, but we really believed in it at the time.

The project started in 1958 — just at the same time as the Apollo project to go to the moon. So we were competing with Wernher von Braun. Von Braun won, of course, but he was friendly to us. [Laughs] After he had won, he was helpful to us.

But after the first two years or so, it was no longer really practical. Then it was just a theoretical program to understand what you could do. But still it was interesting. So I came back after two years and continued living here, in Princeton. The project went on for another five years, but it was no longer people really expecting to fly.

Holodny: You participated in World War II as an analyst. What was that like?

Dyson: I was lucky. I was protected. Because of [Henry] Moseley. Moseley was a British scientist. He was a very, very brilliant young man who discovered the connection between chemistry and X-rays, that you can identify chemical elements just by looking at the X-rays.

That was Moseley’s Law, which he discovered in 1913 when he was just a young kid. And he definitely would’ve had the Nobel Prize.

However, in 1914, war broke out. In England, that was a volunteer war, and all the young people volunteered, including Moseley. And he went to Gallipoli and got killed.

So that was a huge tragedy for English science. And the English government then decided before World War II that this time the scientists were going to be kept alive. It was government policy that if you were a bright, young scientist, you were not allowed to get killed [...] I thought it was terribly unfair. I was one of the beneficiaries, so I was given a safe job. Meanwhile, my friends were getting killed. So I had a very bad feeling about the whole situation.

But anyway, I was sent to the headquarters of the bomber command to work as a scientist, collecting information about the bombing of Germany. And there, it was exactly the same as it’s been in Afghanistan in the last few years. It’s amazing — it’s exactly the same mistakes are made over and over again. It’s the same situation, essentially.

There was one of the generals in Afghanistan who wrote a paper, which was leaked by somebody, describing what happened in Afghanistan — and it’s exactly what happened to us in World War II.

They had this huge system of information gathering in Afghanistan. They had satellites. They had drones flying over all the time, and people on the ground collecting information. This was all then collected and sent to some place in Virginia, where there were thousands of expert analysts looking at all this information.

So you had this whole apparatus gathering intelligence — all one way, just going from Afghanistan to Virginia. But nothing ever came back. This was all so secret. It wasn’t allowed for the information to get back to the soldiers, who might have used it.

And exactly the same thing happened to us. I was one of these analysts, sitting at the command headquarters in England. The bombing was disastrously costly, and we were losing bombers at a horrible rate — something like 40,000 young men were killed just on the bombing. And we were supposed to find out how they were being killed, in order to do something about it.

We never understood what was going on. Nothing that we ever discovered ever went back to the crews who may have done something with it. The whole thing was a disaster. I was, of course, completely aware of this. So from my point of view, that was a horrible time. And the bombing did very little to help the war. It killed a lot of people, but that was about it. [...]

It’s a horrible business, of course. I mean, the killing, what’s going on now in Syria is ... inexcusable from any point of view. They certainly don’t need to be told how war is bad. I don’t know what can be done in Syria, but, clearly, our being there is not helping.

Anyway, that’s what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

Holodny: Although we’ve been talking about war, you are generally optimistic about the future. You once said, "We just came down from the trees rather recently, and it’s astonishing how well we can do." How do you maintain that optimism?

Dyson: Well, I think we’re doing pretty well. It’s clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news. And people who rely on the media, like Mr. Trump, think that everything is a disaster. [Laughs] The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it’s mostly rubbish. It’s a point of fact that we’re doing extremely well.

The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India. ... They're the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago.

The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India — both of them doing well. It’s amazing how much progress there’s been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter — they’re half of the world’s population. They’re the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don’t see anything that's going to stop that.

People who travel in China tell me that the mood there is still very upbeat, because their media is different from our media. Chinese media emphasize how well things are going and suppress the bad news and publish the good news. Of course, we do just the opposite. [...]

For me, science is just a bunch of tools — it’s like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it’s an instrument I know how to play.

Dyson: Well, they are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it’s the same universe with two different windows. I like to use the metaphor “windows.”

The science window gives you a view of the world, and the religion window gives you a totally different view. You can’t look at both of them at the same time, but they’re both true. So that’s sort of my personal arrangement, but, of course, other people are quite different.

Holodny: The brain's another interesting thing. On the one hand, it's an organ, and that's just plain old biology. But on the other hand, the thoughts are something else.

Holodny: In your opinion, what's the biggest misconception about mathematics?

Dyson: I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn it. That seems to be a complete mistake. All the time worrying about pushing the children and getting them to be mathematically literate and all that stuff. It’s terribly hard on the kids. It’s also hard on the teachers. And I think it’s totally useless.

[The Ph.D. system] was designed for a job in academics. And it works really well if you really want to be an academic, and the system actually works quite well. So for people who have the gift and like to go spend their lives as scholars, it’s fine. But the trouble is that it’s become a kind of a meal ticket — you can’t get a job if you don’t have a Ph.D. So all sorts of people go into it who are quite unsuited to it. [...]

Anyway, so, I’m happy that I’ve raised six kids, and not one of them is a Ph.D.

Anyway, one day, the wife of Alfred Sarant woke up and she found her kids were in bed in the morning, but the husband had disappeared. In the same morning, Bruce Dayton woke up and found his kids were still there, but his wife had disappeared.

Holodny: Oh boy.

Dyson: Anyhow, it was a big deal. It was a huge search for these missing people and nobody ever found a trace of them. They just disappeared from the face of the earth.

But in order to get an education in the United States, he had to be an athlete. So he took up long-distance running, and actually he had the world record for 100 miles. He's a real long-distance runner, an amazing runner. And he also wrote this book about running. Really remarkable character. [...]

He came into our kitchen once and looked out of the window. And he immediately identified 14 species of birds — just outside our window. We only knew two of them!

The world is just — it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It’s just amazing. Why are there so many kinds of birds? And then you have to be a very special kind of person to know them. Nothing is boring if you look at it carefully.

Why it cost so much to travel by air