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Revision as of 15:26, 1 January 2002 by 213.253.39.xxx (talk) (added day of birth)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Freeman Dyson (December 15 1923 - ) English-born American physicist He was involved in the Manhattan Project during World War II; after the war, he moved to Princeton.
He worked on the Orion project, which demonstrated the possibilty of space-flight using nuclear propusion: a prototype was demonstrated using conventional explosives, but a treaty banning the use of nuclear weapoins in space caused the project to be abandoned.
In one of his papers, he made the observation that it was possible that a growing technological society would increasingly surround its native star so as to maximise the capture of available energy. The end point of this process would be the complete enclosure of the star; all wavelength from visible light downwards being intercepted and waste heat being radiated outwards as infrared radiation. Therefore, one method of searching for extraterrestrial civilisations would be to look for suspiciously large objects radiating in the infrared. Dyson actually conceived of such a structure as being a cloud of asteroid-sized habitats, though science fiction writers
have preferred a solid structure: either way, such an artifact is often referred to as a Dyson sphere.
He has published a number of collections of speculations and observations about technology, science, and the future:
- Imagined Worlds
- From Eros to Gaia
- Disturbing the Universe
His daughter is the well-known Esther Dyson.