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Revision as of 10:45, 24 October 2001 by Malcolm Farmer (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)English-born physiscist. He was involved in the Manhatten 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 beiong 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 prefererred 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 technolgy, science, and the future:
- Imagined Worlds
- From Eros to Gaia
- Disturbing the Universe
His daughter is the well-known Esther Dyson