Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson (born December 15, 1923, Crowthorne, Berkshire, England—died February 28, 2020, near Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.) was a British-born American physicist and educator best known for his speculative work on extraterrestrial civilizations.

(Read Carl Sagan’s Britannica entry on extraterrestrial life.)

Dyson was the son of a musician and composer. As a teenager, he developed a passion for mathematics, which he pursued at Trinity College, Cambridge, but his studies were interrupted in 1943, when he began serving in the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. He received a B.A. from Cambridge in 1945 and became a research fellow of Trinity College. In 1947 he went to the United States to study physics and spent the next two years at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, where he studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer, then director. Dyson returned to England in 1949 to become a research fellow at the University of Birmingham. He was appointed a professor of physics at Cornell in 1951 and two years later at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he became professor emeritus in 2000. He became a U.S. citizen in 1957.

Britannica Quiz

Physics and Natural Law

A longtime advocate of exploration and colonization of the solar system and beyond, Dyson studied ways of searching for evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. In the 1950s he was a member of the Project Orion research team, which developed a working model of a spacecraft meant to carry humans to Mars. He wrote a number of books, including Weapons and Hope (1984), Origins of Life (1985), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Imagined Worlds (1998), and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999). Disturbing the Universe (1979) and the epistolary Maker of Patterns (2018) are autobiographies.

A fellow of the British Royal Society and a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, Dyson received the Wolf Prize in physics in 1981, the Lewis Thomas Prize, awarded to scientists for artistic achievements, in 1996, and the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 2000. In his Templeton Prize address he warned of the dangers of a “free market in human genes,” arguing that it could lead to the splitting of humanity into hereditary castes and a return to a society of masters and slaves.