Humans and Technology
Freeman Dyson in his own words

One of the 20th century’s foremost physicists died today.
by Konstantin Kakaes
Feb 28, 2020

WIKIMEDIA

Freeman Dyson died today, at age 96. He was one of the foremost physicists of his generation, and also wrote widely on the relationships between science, technology, and the world. He wrote occasionally for the New Yorker in the 1970s and 1980s, and, for many years, was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. He also wrote a handful of articles for MIT Technology Review, including a two-part series about his role in World War II.

Here are some selected quotes from his prolific writing. They are by no means representative of the entire range of his interests, but are simply glimpses into a lively, perceptive mind that the world lost today.


On the space race, from a letter to his family in England, January 1, 1958:

"I have nothing original to say about Sputniks. I feel cheerful about them. It seems to me clear that the Soviet government does not intend to throw bombs at anybody but does intend to dominate the earth by rapid scientific and industrial growth. This will in turn stimulate the Americans to undertake major projects which they would be too parsimonious to do otherwise. There is no question that colonization of the moon and planets will be one of them. I expect eventually to take a hand in this. The prospect seems to me exciting and hopeful.”

On technology and ideology, from Disturbing the Universe, the New Yorker, August 6, 1979:

“Scientists are not the only people who play with intellectual toys that suddenly explode and cause the crash of empires. Philosophers, prophets, and poets do it, too. In the long run, the technological means that scientists place in our hands may be less important than the ideological ends to which these means are harnessed. Technology is powerful, but it does not rule the world.”

On genetic engineering, from Infinite in All Directions, 1985:

“I do not think that the theoretically possible dangers of genetic engineering will turn out to be real. I think that the benefits of it will be large and important ... Instead of destroying tropical forests to make room for agriculture, we could leave the forests in place while teaching the trees to synthesize a variety of useful chemicals. Huge areas of arid land could be made fruitful either for agriculture or for biochemical industry. There are no laws of physics and chemistry which say that potatoes cannot grow on trees.”

On the spiritual value of science, from “The Scientist as Rebel,” New York Review of Books, May 25, 1995:

“Historians who believe in the transcendence of science have portrayed scientists as living in a transcendent world of the intellect, superior to the transient, corruptible, mundane realities of the social world. Any scientist who claims to follow such exalted ideals is easily held up to ridicule as a pious fraud. We all know that scientists, like television evangelists and politicians, are not immune to the corrupting influences of power and money. Much of the history of science, like the history of religion, is a history of struggles driven by power and money. And yet this is not the whole story. Genuine saints occasionally play an important role, both in religion and in science. Einstein was an important figure in the history of science, and he was a firm believer in transcendence. For Einstein, science as a way of escape from mundane reality was no pretense. For many scientists less divinely gifted than Einstein, the chief reward for being a scientist is not the power and the money but the chance of catching a glimpse of the transcendent beauty of nature.”

On nuclear energy, from Imagined Worlds, 1998:

“They wrote the rules of the game so that nuclear energy could not lose. The rules for cost-accounting were written so that the cost of nuclear electricity did not include the huge public investments that had been made to develop the technology and to manufacture the fuel. The rules for reactor safety were written so that the type of light-water reactor originally developed by the United States Navy for propelling submarines was by definition safe. The rules for environmental cleanliness were written so that the ultimate disposal of spent fuel and worn-out machinery was left out of consideration. With the rules so written, nuclear energy confirmed the beliefs of its promoters. According to these rules, nuclear energy was indeed cheap and clean and safe. The people who wrote the rules did not intend to deceive the public. They deceived themselves, and then fell into a habit of suppressing evidence that contradicted their firmly held beliefs.”

On evolution and free will, from Origins of Life, 1999:

“As the grandfather of a pair of five-year-old identical twins, I see every day the power of the genes and the limits to that power. George and Donald are physically so alike that in the bathtub I cannot tell them apart. They not only have the same genes but have shared the same environment since the day they were born. And yet, they have different brains and are different people. Life has escaped the tyranny of the genes by evolving brains with neural connections that are not genetically determined. The detailed structure of the brain is partly shaped by genes and environment and is partly random. Earlier, when the twins were two years old, I asked their older brother how he tells them apart. He said, ‘Oh, that’s easy. The one that bites is George.’ Now that they are five years old, George is the one who runs to give me a hug, and Donald is the one who keeps his distance. The randomness of the synapses in their brains is the creative principle that makes George George and Donald Donald ... George and Donald are different people because they started life with different random samples of neurological junk in their heads. The weeding out of the junk is never complete. Adult humans are only a little more rational than five-year-olds. Too much weeding destroys the soul."

Freeman Dyson's Solution to the Problem of Evil

Dyson’s principle of maximum diversity says that without hardship and suffering, life would be too dull
By John Horgan on May 8, 2018

Dyson's principle of maximum diversity decrees that "when things are dull, something turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which made life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death." Credit: Randall Hagadorn, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ US

Freeman Dyson, at the age of 94, is still disturbing the universe. He has a new book out, Maker of Patterns, a collection of annotated letters that tells his life story through the 1970s. He continues writing splendid essays for The New York Review of Books. His latest, in the May 10 issue, ends with the Dysonian sentence, “Freedom is the divine spark that causes human children to rebel against grand unified theories imposed by their parents.”

Hoping to do a Q&A with him, I sent him a dozen questions. I asked, for example, about his assertions that the environmental movement has been “hijacked by a bunch of climate fanatics” and that “paranormal phenomena are real.” (See my 2011 post on Dyson’s “bunkrapt” ideas.) He ignored all the questions except for one about the Singularity. Here is our exchange:

Horgan: You have speculated about the long-term evolution of intelligence since the 1970s. What do you think about the predictions of Ray Kurzweil and others that we are on the verge of a radical transformation of intelligence, or “Singularity”?

Dyson: The Kurzweil singularity is total nonsense. For better or for worse, human nature is a tough beast, designed to prevail over technological revolutions and natural disasters. It changed only a little in response to the agricultural and industrial revolutions, not to mention ice-ages. It is absurd to imagine it changing radically in a single century.

That’s not enough for a column, so I thought I’d dust off a profile I wrote after interviewing Dyson in 1993 at the Institute for Advanced Study. In the profile, which ended up in The End of Science, I tried to convey Dyson’s personality, and his vision of humanity’s ultimate purpose and destiny. Here is an edited version:

Freeman Dyson is a slight man, all sinew and veins, with a cutlass of a nose and deep-set, watchful eyes. His demeanor is cool, reserved--until he laughs. Then he snorts through his nose, shoulders heaving, like a 12-year-old schoolboy hearing a dirty joke. It is a subversive laugh, the laugh of a man who envisions space as a haven for “religious fanatics” and “recalcitrant teenagers,” who insists that science at its best is “a rebellion against authority.”

Dyson was once at the forefront of the search for a unified theory of physics. In the early 1950s, he contributed to the construction of the quantum theory of electromagnetism. Other physicists have told me that Dyson deserved a Nobel Prize for his work, or at least more credit. They have also suggested that disappointment, as well as a contrarian streak, nudged Dyson away from particle physics and toward pursuits unworthy of his powers.

When I mentioned this assessment to Dyson, he gave me a tight-lipped smile and responded, as he often did, with an anecdote. Lawrence Bragg, he noted, was “a sort of role model.” After Bragg became the director of the University of Cambridge's legendary Cavendish Laboratory in 1938, he steered it away from nuclear physics, on which its mighty reputation rested, and into new territory.


“Everybody thought Bragg was destroying the Cavendish by getting out of the mainstream,” Dyson said. “But of course it was a wonderful decision, because he brought in molecular biology and radio astronomy. Those are the two things which made Cambridge famous over the next 30 years or so.”

Dyson, too, has spent much of his career swerving away from the mainstream. He veered from mathematics, his focus in college, into quantum theory, and then into solid-state physics, nuclear engineering, arms control, climate studies and speculation about humanity’s destiny.

He wrote his 1979 paper “Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” in response to Steven Weinberg’s infamous remark that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” No universe with intelligence is pointless, Dyson retorted. He argued that in an open, eternally expanding universe, our descendants could resist heat death and endure virtually forever through shrewd conservation of energy.

Dyson did not think biological intelligence would soon yield to artificial intelligence. In his 1988 book Infinite in All Directions, he conjectured that genetic engineers might someday “grow” spacecraft “about as big as a chicken and about as smart,” which could flit on sunlight-powered wings through the solar system and beyond, acting as our scouts. (Dyson called them “astrochickens.”) Civilizations concerned about dwindling energy supplies could capture the radiation of stars by constructing energy-absorbing shells--sometimes called Dyson spheres--around them.

Eventually, Dyson predicted, intelligence might spread through the entire universe, transforming it into one great mind. He asked, “What will mind choose to do when it informs and controls the universe?” The question, for Dyson, has theological significance. “I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God,” he wrote. “God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be considered to be either a world-soul or a collection of world souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at the present stage in his development. We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left behind.”

Dyson insisted that “no matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness and memory.” The quest for knowledge would be--must be—“infinite in all directions.” In other words, even a God-like intelligence cannot know everything.

Dyson admitted to me that his vision of the future reflected wishful thinking. When I asked if science is infinite, he replied, “I hope so! It's the kind of world I’d like to live in.” If minds make the universe meaningful, they must have something to think about. Science must, therefore, be eternal. Contrary to what Weinberg and other physicists have suggested, there can be no “final theory” that answers all our questions.

“The only way to think about this is historical,” Dyson explained. Two thousand years ago some “very bright people” invented something that, while not science in the modern sense, was obviously its precursor. “If you go into the future, what we call science won't be the same thing anymore, but that doesn't mean there won't be interesting questions.”

Dyson hoped Godel’s incompleteness theorem might apply to physics as well as to mathematics. “Since we know the laws of physics are mathematical, and we know that mathematics is an inconsistent system, it’s sort of plausible that physics will also be inconsistent”--and therefore open-ended. “So I think these people who predict the end of physics may be right in the long run. Physics may become obsolete. But I would guess myself that physics might be considered something like Greek science: an interesting beginning but it didn't really get to the main point. So the end of physics may be the beginning of something else.”

In Infinite In All Directions Dyson addressed, obliquely, the only theological issue that really matters, the problem of evil. If we were created by a loving, all-powerful God, why is life so painful and unfair? The answer, Dyson suggested, might have something to do with “the principle of maximum diversity.” This principle, he explained, “operates at both the physical and the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which made life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth.”

When I asked Dyson about the principle of maximum diversity, he downplayed it. “I never think of this as a deep philosophical belief,” he said. “It's simply, to me, just a poetic fancy.” Perhaps Dyson was being modest, but to my mind, the principle of maximum diversity has profound implications. It suggests that, even if the cosmos was designed for us, we will never figure it out, and we will never create a blissful paradise, in which all our problems are solved. Without hardship and suffering--without “challenges,” from the war between the sexes to World War II and the Holocaust--life would be too boring. This is a chilling answer to the problem of evil, but I haven’t found a better one.

Postscript: After I emailed this column to Dyson, he replied: Dear John Horgan, Thank you for sending your summary of my more oracular statements. I find the summary accurate and thoughtful. I have nothing to add or subtract, except for one correction. The “Time Without End” paper is obsolete because it assumed a linearly expanding universe, which the cosmologists believed to be correct in 1979. We now have strong evidence that the universe is accelerating, and this makes a big difference to the future of life and intelligence. I prefer not to speculate further until the observational evidence becomes clearer. 

Yours sincerely, Freeman Dyson.


Freeman Dyson, global warming, ESP and the fun of being "bunkrapt"
By John Horgan on January 7, 2011

Should a scientist who believes in extrasensory perception—the ability to read minds, intuit the future and so on—be taken seriously? This question comes to mind when I ponder the iconoclastic physicist Freeman Dyson, whom the journalist Kenneth Brower recently profiled in The Atlantic's December issue.

"The Danger of Cosmic Genius" explores Dyson’s denial that global warming will wreak havoc on Earth unless we drastically curtail carbon emissions. Dyson questions the computer models on which these scary scenarios are based, and he suggests that the upside of global warming—including faster plant growth and longer growing seasons in certain regions—may outweigh the downside.

This article resembles Nicholas Dawidoff's 2009 profile of Dyson in The New York Times Magazine—with a crucial difference. Whereas Dawidoff teased us with the possibility that Dyson could be right about global warming, Brower declares right off the bat that Dyson is "dead wrong, wrong on the facts, wrong on the science." Brower's goal is to explain how "someone as smart as Freeman Dyson could be so dumb."

Brower has known Dyson for decades. Brower's 1978 book The Starship and the Canoe was an affectionate study of Dyson and his equally quirky son George, a kayak-designer who in the 1970s lived in a tree in the Pacific Northwest. In his Atlantic article, Brower recounts Dyson's brilliant contributions to particle physics (he helped formulate quantum electrodynamics), nuclear engineering (he designed a method of space transport based on repeated nuclear explosions) and other fields.

Brower weighs several explanations for Dyson's stance on global warming: Brower rejects one obvious possibility, that Dyson, at 87, has "gone out of his beautiful mind"; by all accounts, Dyson's intellect is still formidable (and I found it to be so three years ago when I attended a three-day conference with Dyson in Lisbon). Brower gives more weight to the notion that Dyson—one of whose books is titled The Scientist as Rebel (New York Review Books, 2006)—has always been a provocateur who loves tweaking the status quo. I emphasized this contrarian aspect of Dyson's personality in my 1993 profile of him for Scientific American, titled "Perpendicular to the Mainstream".

Brower's favorite theory is that Dyson possesses a kind of religious faith in the power of science and technology to help us overcome all problems. We can bioengineer ourselves and other species, Dyson asserts, to help us adapt to a warmer world; if Earth becomes uninhabitable, we can colonize other planets, perhaps in other solar systems. "What the secular faith of Dysonism offers is, first, a hypertrophied version of the technological fix," Brower wrote, "and, second, the fantasy that should the fix fail we have someplace else to go."

This analysis makes sense to me. Dyson's worldview seems both oddly retro, in a Jules Verne-ish or even Jetsons-esque way, and hyper-futuristic, so much so that humanity's current problems—notably global warming—fade into insignificance. His remarkable 1979 paper, "Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe," calculates how intelligent beings, perhaps in the form of clouds of charged particles, can ward off heat death—the polar opposite of global warming!—even after all the stars in the cosmos have dimmed.

Much more damaging to Dyson's credibility, however, is his belief in extrasensory perception, sometimes called "psi". Dyson disclosed this belief in his essay "One in a Million" in the March 25, 2004, New York Review of Books, which discussed a book about ESP. His family, Dyson revealed, included two "fervent believers in paranormal phenomena," a grandmother who was a "notorious and successful faith healer" and a cousin who edited the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

Dyson proposed that "paranormal phenomena are real but lie outside the limits of science." No one has produced empirical proof of psi, he conjectured, because it tends to occur under conditions of "strong emotion and stress," which are "inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures." This explanation reminds me of the physicist Richard Feynman's quip that string theorists don't make predictions; they make excuses.

Dyson even offered an explanation for what the parapsychologist Joseph Rhine called the "decline effect," which I discussed in a previous post. "In a typical card-guessing experiment," Dyson wrote, "the participants may begin the session in a high state of excitement and record a few high scores, but as the hours pass, and boredom replaces excitement, the scores decline." When I ran into Dyson three years ago in Lisbon, he cheerfully affirmed his belief in psi and reiterated his explanations for why it hasn't been empirically demonstrated.

I disagree with Dyson that global warming is no big deal—I urge doubters to read Storms of My Grandchildren (Bloomsbury, 2009) by the climatologist James Hansen—and that ESP is real. Yes, some researchers still claim to have found tentative evidence for psi, as The New York Times reported in a page-one story last week. But if ESP existed, surely someone would have provided definitive proof of it by now and claimed James Randi's $1-million prize for "anyone who can show under proper observing conditions evidence of any paranormal, supernatural or occult power or event."

Despite this lack of evidence, lots of people—including scientists—share Dyson's belief in ESP, just as many share his lack of concern about global warming. And let's not forget that many leading scientists—notably Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health—believe in a God who performs miracles, like resurrecting the dead. Eminent physicists also postulate the existence of parallel universes, higher dimensions, strings and other phenomena that I find as incredible as psi.

In his 1984 book, The Limits of Science, the biologist Peter Medawar coined the term "bunkrapt" to describe people infatuated with "bunk," meaning religious beliefs, superstitions and other claims lacking empirical evidence. "It is fun sometimes to be bunkrapt," Medawar wrote. That's a nice way of putting it. The gleeful rebel Dyson, it seems to me, embodies our bunkrapt era, when the delineation between knowledge and pseudo-knowledge is becoming increasingly blurred; genuine authorities are mistaken for hucksters and vice versa; and we all believe whatever damn thing we want to believe.

Photo of Dyson courtesy Wiki Common

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John Horgan
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com.
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Freeman Dyson, legendary theoretical physicist,  dies at 96

Andrea Stone
A great figure in 20th-century physics, Freeman J. Dyson—the theorist who unified the world of the atom and the electron, a critic of nuclear weapons tests, a designer of space civilizations, and a steadfast climate change contrarian—died on February 28, 2020, in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 96 years old.

© Photograph by William E. Sauro, The New York Times via Reuters Professor Freeman J. Dyson of ​the Institute for Advanced Stu​dy in Princeton is shown at Ja​dwyn Hall where he had an offi​ce and taught, November 15, 19​72.

At his death, Dyson still maintained an office at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he took up residence in 1953 as a professor of physics. The IAS confirmed Dyson's passing to National Geographic.

"No life is more entangled with the Institute and impossible to capture—architect of modern particle physics, free-range mathematician, advocate of space travel, astrobiology and disarmament, futurist, eternal graduate student, rebel to many preconceived ideas including his own, thoughtful essayist, all the time a wise observer of the human scene," Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of the IAS, said in a statement. "His secret was simply saying yes to everything in life, till the very end."

When Dyson began his appointment at the IAS, Albert Einstein still roamed the grounds. Though he would later be called an "heir" to his renowned colleague, Dyson never came up with a general theory of anything. Modest, shy, and self-effacing, he was always content to work with others on their ideas.

"I'm not a person for big questions," he told Quanta Magazine shortly after his 90th birthday. "I look for puzzles. I look for interesting problems that I can solve. I don't care whether they're important or not, and so I'm definitely not obsessed with solving some big mystery. That's not my style."

"He did not propose radical new ideas, but instead helped clean up the details of the theories first proposed in the quantum revolution of the 1920s," said Declan Fahy, an associate professor of communications at Dublin City University in Dublin, Ireland, who studies scientists as public intellectuals. "In the 1940s and 1950s, he and others proved experimentally that the theories were correct, and this resulted ultimately in the theory of quantum electrodynamics, which describes how atoms behave. It's hugely significant in science, but does not capture public imagination in the same way as string theory."

Dyson became famous for translating the ideas of Richard Feynman and two other physicists into more accessible mathematical calculations in a seminal 1949 paper, "The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman." But before that, he and Feynman spent four memorable days driving from upstate New York to Albuquerque that included not only deep, inspirational conversations but also taking shelter from an Oklahoma flood in a brothel.

Despite Dyson's key role in synthesizing their ideas, he was overlooked in 1965 when Feynman, Harvard physicist Julian Schwinger, and Japanese scientist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga won the Nobel Prize for their work on the physics of elementary particles.

Though he was passed over for the Nobel—his 2000 Templeton Prize cited that work as his "most useful contribution to science"—Dyson's improvement of the early understanding of how atoms behave was a major advance from earlier ideas regarding both relativity and quantum mechanics, said Virginia Trimble, a physicist at the University of California at Irvine.

"You could say that, without this understanding, you wouldn't have modern computers or telephones or digital cameras," she said.

You also wouldn’t have certain radiation therapies used for cancer to this day. In the late 1950s, building on an idea by Edward Teller, Dyson led a team that designed and patented the TRIGA (which stands for Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomic), a small, low-power nuclear reactor that is still used in research hospitals to produce medical isotopes to treat various forms of cancer.

Dyson's nuclear energy work also extended to the Air Force's secret Project Orion, which sought to build a spaceship propelled by exploding atomic bombs that would take humans to the farthest reaches of the solar system. The fantastical venture was canceled after NASA opted for more conventional rockets and the nuclear test ban treaty put an end to aboveground atomic experiments.

Dyson's interest in nuclear weapons also brought controversy. As a member during the Vietnam War of JASON, a defense industry advisory panel, he spearheaded research on the feasibility of using small, tactical nuclear weapons against the enemy. His ease in separating the technical from the moral aspects of the project made him a target of the anti-war movement.

Still, the scientist had other, less divisive ideas that became the stuff of science fiction. His hypothetical Dyson Sphere, a megastructure that would encompass a star to capture its energy, was portrayed in novels and in an episode of TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation. The hypothetical Dyson tree would grow on comets to support future space colonists.
Proud not to be a Ph.D.

Freeman John Dyson was born on December 15, 1923, in Crowthorne, England. His father was the prominent British composer Sir George Dyson, and his mother, Mildred Atkey, was a social worker. He was a math prodigy who by the age of 5 had calculated how many atoms were in the sun.

Dyson attended Winchester College, where his father was a music instructor, before working as a civilian targeting analyst for the Royal Air Force during World War II.

Not long after earning a degree in mathematics from Cambridge University in 1945, Dyson moved to the United States. He enrolled at New York's Cornell University and, despite lacking a Ph.D., was a professor there from 1951 to 1953. Although he would eventually receive some two dozen honorary degrees, Dyson never completed his doctorate. Instead, he became an outspoken opponent of the "Ph.D. system," which he called "an abomination" that discouraged many budding scientists, especially women.

After Dyson's mentor at Cornell, physicist Hans Bethe, wrote a letter to Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study, Dyson was invited to become a fellow. It was there that he wrote his epochal paper on quantum electrodynamics, which launched his career and led to a permanent place at the institute.

The versatile scientist worked on a wide range of areas in theoretical physics. While Wolfgang Pauli won the Nobel Prize for his exclusion principle stating that no two electrons in an atom can have identical quantum numbers, it was Dyson and mathematician Andrew Lenard who later proved it definitively.

Dyson wrote more than a dozen books that made complex scientific and moral concepts comprehensible to nonspecialists. Among his best-selling books are Origins of Life and Weapons and Hope, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction in 1984.

The scientist, who became a U.S. citizen in 1957, married twice and had six children. His two children with mathematician Verena Huber Dyson are technology venture capitalist Esther Dyson and science historian George Dyson. In 1958, he married Imme Jung, his wife for more than 60 years when he died. She and their daughters Dorothy, Mia, Rebecca, and Emily, as well as 16 grandchildren, also survive him.

So, too, does his controversial stance on climate change.

Dyson's criticism of climate science grew out of his own involvement with the JASON group and developed amid the nuclear winter debate with Carl Sagan and others. In his own simple climate model, Dyson underplayed the effects of greenhouse gases. Atmospheric physicists savaged his model for going against a broad consensus. That stung Dyson, who insisted that "global warming is grossly exaggerated as a problem." His skepticism continued to bring scathing criticism during his final years, as evinced in a New York Times Magazine article headlined "The Civil Heretic."

"An important theme in his popular science books was the value of the scientific contrarian," Fahy said. "At the end of his life, it was this issue that increasingly came to define him in public, rather than his vital contributions to physics."

Dan Vergano and Michael Greshko contributed to this article.

Legendary mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson has died at the age of 96

Mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson has died at the age of 96, according to a press release issued by the Institute for Advanced Study. 

yson was perhaps most famous for contributions to quantum electrodynamics, his biography on the the institute website noted. 

Dyson's contributions to both science and popular culture are many: he won the Max Planck Medal and the Templeton prize, wrote books like "The Scientist as Rebel," was an outspoken supporter of Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, and his Dyson Sphere concept even made an appearance in Star Trek. 

Legendary mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson has died at the age of 96, according to a press release issued by the Institute for Advanced Study. 

The British-born mathematician and physicist, best known for unifying the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Richard Feynman, suffered a fall on his way to his office, his daughter Mia Dyson first told the Maine Public. He passed away on Friday.

Dyson had a colorful career: He worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Airforce in World War II, before attending Cambridge University to get his undergraduate degree in mathematics. He went on to do graduate work in Cornell University, and became a professor there despite never having formally gotten a PhD.

Dyson worked on a diverse range of physics and mathematical problems: nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology (one of his ideas, the Dyson Sphere, was even featured in a "Star Trek" episode). He won the Max Planck Medal and the Templeton Prize, and wrote often-quoted books like "Disturbing the Universe" and "The Scientist as Rebel."

He also kept track of the politics that later surrounded his expertise. Notably, he was among 29 scientists who supported the Obama administration's 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. He also acted as a a military adviser regarding the use of nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War in 1967.

And in 2009, he was the subject of a lengthy profile in the New York Times Magazine after expressing his skepticism about the scientific predictions surrounding climate change. He stuck to that conviction, telling NPR in 2015 that, "I'm not saying the climate disasters aren't real, I'm merely saying we don't know how to prevent them."

Dyson is survived by his wife of 64 years and six children.

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Scientific Rebel Freeman Dyson Dies

The iconoclastic physicist rejected the idea of an endpoint to the human quest for knowledge and happiness.

By John Horgan on February 28, 2020

Credit: Getty Images

Freeman Dyson, who possessed one of the truly original minds of the modern era, has died. Dyson, 96, helped construct the standard model of particle physics, and he envisioned the Singularity decades before that term was adopted to describe the radical transformation of human intelligence. Below is a eulogy cobbled together from The End of Science and other writings. –John Horgan

Humanity, Nietzsche proclaimed, is just a steppingstone, a bridge leading to the Superman. If Nietzsche were alive today, he would surely entertain the notion that the Superman might be made not of flesh and blood but of silicon. As human science wanes, those who hope that the quest for knowledge will continue must put their faith not in Homo sapiens but in intelligent machines. Only machines can overcome our physical and cognitive weaknesses--and our indifference. 

In fact, there is an odd little sub-culture within science whose members speculate about how intelligence might evolve when or if it sheds its mortal coil. Participants are not practicing science, of course, but ironic science, or wishful thinking. They are concerned with what the world might be or should be centuries or millennia or eons hence. The literature of this field—which I call scientific theology--may nonetheless shed new light on age-old philosophical and even theological questions: What could we do if we could do anything? What is the point of life? What are the ultimate limits of knowledge? Is suffering a necessary component of existence, or can we attain eternal bliss?

Physicist Freeman Dyson was the leading practitioner of scientific theology. In his 1988 essay collection Infinite in All Directions, Dyson speculated on why there is so much violence and hardship in the world. The answer, he suggested, might have something to do with what he called "the principle of maximum diversity." This principle, he continued,

operates at both the physical and the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which made life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth.

Dyson, it seemed to me, was suggesting that we cannot solve all our problems, we cannot create heaven, we cannot find The Answer to the riddle of existence. Life is--and must be--an eternal struggle. Was I reading too much into Dyson's remarks? I hoped to find out when I interviewed him in 1993 at the Institute for Advanced Study, his home since the early 1940's.

Dyson was a slight man, all sinew and veins, with a cutlass of a nose and deep-set, watchful eyes. He resembled a gentle raptor. His demeanor was generally cool and reserved--until he laughed. Then he snorted through his nose, shoulders heaving, like a 12-year-old schoolboy hearing a dirty joke. It was a subversive laugh, the laugh of a man who envisioned space as a haven for "religious fanatics" and "recalcitrant teenagers," who insisted that science at its best is "a rebellion against authority."

I did not ask Dyson about his maximum-diversity idea right away. First I inquired about the choices that had characterized his career. Dyson had once been at the forefront of the search for a unified theory of physics. In the early 1950s, the British-born physicist strove with Richard Feynman and other titans to forge a quantum theory of electromagnetism. It has often been said that Dyson deserved a Nobel prize for his efforts--or at least more credit. In fact, some colleagues have suggested that disappointment and, perhaps, a contrarian streak, later drove Dyson toward pursuits unworthy of his powers.

When I mentioned this assessment to Dyson, he gave me a tight-lipped smile. He then responded, as he was wont to do, with an anecdote. The British physicist Lawrence Bragg, he noted, was "a sort of role model." After Bragg became the director of the University of Cambridge's legendary Cavendish Laboratory in 1938, he steered it away from nuclear physics, on which its mighty reputation rested, and into new territory.

"Everybody thought Bragg was destroying the Cavendish by getting out of the mainstream," Dyson said. "But of course it was a wonderful decision, because he brought in molecular biology and radio astronomy. Those are the two things which made Cambridge famous over the next 30 years or so."

Dyson, too, had spent his career swerving toward unknown lands. He veered from mathematics, his focus in college, to particle physics and from there to solid state physics, nuclear engineering, arms control, climate studies--and speculation about the long-term prospects of intelligence.

Dyson was provoked into taking up this final topic by physicist Steven Weinberg, who once remarked that "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." No universe with intelligence is pointless, Dyson retorted in a 1979 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics. He sought to show that in an open, eternally expanding universe, intelligence could persist forever--perhaps in the form of a cloud of charged particles--through shrewd conservation of energy. 

Dyson did not think organic intelligence would soon give way to artificial intelligence. In Infinite in All Directions, he speculated that genetic engineers might someday "grow" spacecraft "about as big as a chicken and about as smart," which could flit on sunlight-powered wings through the solar system and beyond, acting as our scouts. (Dyson called them "astrochickens.") Still more distant civilizations, perhaps concerned about dwindling energy supplies, could capture the radiation of stars by encasing them in energy-absorbing shells--now called Dyson spheres.

Eventually, Dyson predicted, intelligence might spread through the entire universe, transforming it into one great mind. But he insisted that "no matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness and memory." The quest for knowledge would be--must be--"infinite in all directions."

Dyson addressed the most important question raised by this prophecy: "What will mind choose to do when it informs and controls the universe?" The question, Dyson made clear, was theological rather than scientific:

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be considered to be either a world-soul or a collection of world souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at the present stage in his development. We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left

Ultimately, we “cannot hope to answer" the question of what this superbeing, this God, will do or think. Dyson admitted that his view of the future reflected wishful thinking. When I asked if science could keep evolving forever, he replied, "I hope so! It's the kind of world I'd like to live in." If minds make the universe meaningful, they must have something to think about, so science must be eternal.

"The only way to think about this is historical," he explained. Two thousand years ago some "very bright people" invented something that, while not science in the modern sense, was obviously its precursor. "If you go into the future, what we call science won't be the same thing anymore, but that doesn't mean there won't be interesting questions."

Like physicist Roger Penrose, Dyson hoped that Godel's theorem might apply to physics as well as mathematics. "Since we know the laws of physics are mathematical, and we know that mathematics is an inconsistent system, it's sort of plausible that physics will also be inconsistent" and therefore open-ended. "So I think these people who predict the end of physics may be right in the long run. Physics may become obsolete. But I would guess myself that physics might be considered something like Greek science: an interesting beginning but it didn't really get to the main point. So the end of physics may be the beginning of something else." 

When, finally, I asked Dyson about his maximum diversity idea, he shrugged. Oh, he didn't intend anyone to take that too seriously. He insisted that he was not really interested in "the big picture." One of his favorite quotes, he said, is "God is in the details." But given his insistence that diversity is somehow essential to existence, I asked, didn't he find it disturbing that so many scientists and others seemed compelled to reduce everything to a single insight? Didn't such efforts represent a dangerous game?

"Yes, that's true in a way," Dyson replied, with a small smile that suggested he found my interest in his little idea amusing. "I never think of this as a deep philosophical belief," he added. "It's simply, to me, just a poetic fancy." Dyson was maintaining an appropriate ironic distance between himself and his ideas, but there was something disingenuous about his attitude. After all, throughout his own eclectic career, he seemed to be striving to adhere to the principle of maximum diversity.

The 1984 book The Limits of Science by biologist Peter Medawar consisted for the most part of regurgitated Popperisms. Medawar kept insisting, for example, that "there is no limit upon the power of science to answer questions of the kind science can answer," as if this were a profound truth rather than a vacuous tautology. Medawar did offer some felicitous phrases, however. He concluded a section on "bunk"--by which he meant myths, superstitions and other beliefs lacking an empirical basis--with the remark, "It is fun sometimes to be bunkrapt."

Dyson was both brilliant and bunkrapt. He thought that global warming, on balance, might be beneficial, and he took extrasensory perception seriously. In a 2004 essay in the New York Review of Books, he proposed that "paranormal phenomena are real but lie outside the limits of science." No one has produced empirical proof of ESP, Dyson conjectured, because it tends to occur under conditions of "strong emotion and stress," which are "inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures." 

Dyson’s vision of the far future is bunkrapt, too—and also one of the most profound bits of ironic science I have encountered. The principle of maximum diversity suggests that, even if the cosmos was designed for us, we will never figure it out, and we will never create a blissful paradise in which all our problems are solved. No theory of everything, no heaven. Without hardship and suffering--without “challenges,” from the war between the sexes to World War II and the Holocaust--life would be too boring. This is a chilling answer to the problem of evil, but I haven’t found a better one.

Further Reading:

Freeman Dyson, global warming, ESP and the fun of being "bunkrapt"

What Would a Machine as Smart as God Want?

Brilliant Scientists Are Open-Minded about Paranormal Stuff, So Why Not You?

Donald Trump and the Problem of Evil

Was Psychedelic Guru Terence McKenna Goofing About 2012 Prophecy?

What Should We Do With Our Visions of Heaven and Hell?

What’s Wrong with Physics?

Can Faith and Science Coexist?

Is Science Infinite?

Is Science Hitting a Wall?, Part 1

See also my free, online book Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity & Who We Really Are.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John Horgan

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com.

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Volcanic eruption sparked a week long thunderstorm, and scientists want to know why


Maya Wei-Haas 

In December 2018, after months of sputtering, the Anak Krakatau volcano in Indonesia collapsed. Its southwestern flank slid into the sea, shoving a wall of water into the neighboring islands of Sumatra and Java. The catastrophic event and resulting tsunami killed more than 430 people and injured thousands more.

The collapse was only the start of Anak Krakatau’s fiery fit. The volcano continued to billow a gaseous plume miles into the sky, feeding a rare six-day thunderstorm that sparkled with lightning. The event offered scientists an incredibly detailed look at how some eruptions can affect local weather in remarkable ways. As described in a new study in Scientific Reports, this intense volcanic storm was supercharged by vaporized seawater that chilled to ice in the rising plume, unleashing more than 100,000 flashes of lightning.


“It blew me away how much lightning was there,” says Andrew Prata, a post-doctoral researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and lead author of the study. At its peak, the volcanic lightning storm crackled with 72 flashes a minute.

Volcanologists are starting to unravel how these flashy shows could be used to track the ever-shifting dangers of volcanic eruptions, yet the specific processes that drive the lightning are just coming into focus. Another volcano, Bogoslof in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, began a series of eruptive events in December 2016 that continued for nearly nine months, resulting in thousands of lightning strikes that scientists are also using to piece together the inner workings of volcanic storms.

The latest studies of Anak Krakatau and Bogoslof emphasize the watery mechanisms that drive the varied personalities of volcanic eruptions.

“We have to think broadly about the full range of eruption styles ... to use lightning in a meaningful way,” says Alexa Van Eaton, a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano Observatory and lead author of the study on Bogoslof in Bulletin of Volcanology.



smoke coming out of the water: Billowing clouds of vaporized water shroud Anak Krakatau at the start of the lengthy volcanic thunderstorm in December 2018.
2 SLIDES © Photograph by Antara Foto/Bisnis Indonesia/Nurul Hidayat via Reuters

Billowing clouds of vaporized water shroud Anak Krakatau at the start of the lengthy volcanic thunderstorm in December 2018.






1-4/19 SLIDES © Photograph by Randy Olson, Nat Geo Image Collection
GRASSLAND BIRDS OF THE GREAT PLAINS WADE BY THE WATER'S EDGE AS A STORM BEGINS TO TAKE SHAPE IN THE BACKGROUND.

The science behind the flash

Whether sparked by a springtime shower or an eruption of volcanic fury, all lightning requires what’s known as a charge separation, which develops as positively and negatively charged particles accumulate in different parts of a cloud. As the opposing charges build up, they generate an imbalance that nature resolves by releasing a bolt of electricity—lightning.

In an atmospheric thunderstorm, the charges form in a chaotic swirl of ice, slush, and liquid water. Collisions between these phases of water can shear electrons from the particles, leaving some positively charged and others negatively charged.

In volcanic eruptions, on the other hand, ash particles play a critical role. These tiny fragments form as the rapid expansion of gases in magma shatter the molten rock into glassy shards, which gain a charge in the process. The ashier the plume, the higher the chance these particles collide and fracture within the billowing clouds, producing even more charge that might spark lightning.

Researchers have long suspected that ice also plays an important role in driving volcanic light shows. Eruption plumes, even from volcanoes not surrounded by the ocean, are laden with water that was previously entrained in the magma. When these plumes rise high enough in the atmosphere for ice to form, the lightning rates and intensity often skyrocket, explains Stephen McNutt, an expert in volcanic lightning at the University of South Florida who was not involved in the new work.

“It’s a really intriguing grey area of how volcanic lightning comes about,” Van Eaton says.
Anak Krakatau’s icy tower

Indonesia’s Anak Krakatau first peeked its head above the ocean waves in 1929, nearly half a century after its parent volcano Krakatau blew a massive crater in the seafloor in one of the largest eruptions in recorded history. Over the decades, Anak Krakatau has continued to reach higher into the sky, but two years ago, its ascent halted when one of its sloping sides crumpled back into the sea.

Seawater flooded the system and vaporized into towering volcanic clouds that stretched as high as 11 miles, according to satellite analyses. At the lower levels, ash was likely abundant, evidenced by a hefty sprinkle of glassy shards on nearby shores. But the ash didn’t seem to reach up to the cloud tops, leaving white puffs like a run-of-the-mill thunderstorm.

Infrared data and modeling suggest that the volcanic clouds were remarkably rich with ice, containing a mass of frozen water equivalent to 600,000 Asian elephants—five times the amount of ice found in non-volcanic clouds nearby. This wasn’t the most ice-rich eruption volcanologists have seen, but the storm lasted nearly a week thanks to a steady supply of seawater. The rates of lightning were also startlingly high, with an average of 8.7 flashes each minute.

In satellite imagery of the event, puffy clouds and tropical thunderstorms faded in and out of view over the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but the storm over Anak Krakatau remained steadfastly in place—“right where the action is happening,” Prata says.

“It’s a fantastically massive thunderstorm,” says the University of Bristol’s Karen Aplin, who specializes in atmospheric electricity and was not part of the new research.
Lightning switch

Hints of ice supercharging volcanic storms date back to the mid-1960s, when daring scientists risked their lives to study the eruptions of the Surtsey volcano off the coast of Iceland, Van Eaton says. The researchers took boats perilously close to the rumbling shores of the volcanic island and flew planes through the hazardous plumes to document Surtsey’s blasts.

While much of the lightning they observed was tied to black jets of volcanic ash, the researchers spotted one period of intense electricity flashing in the sky. They suggested it could have been driven by a process similar to a meteorologic thunderstorm, which would mean it was driven by ice.

Decades of research since, however, have shown just how complex these icy processes can be in volcanic lightning. The patterns of lightning at one eruption don’t necessarily translate to another. For example, lightning only flashed for half of the explosions during the 2016 and 2017 eruption at Alaska’s Bogoslof volcano.

Later analysis revealed that only the plumes rising above the altitude where ice forms produced strong lightning. This dramatic change surprised Van Eaton, who "previously thought about the role of ice as sort of an extra boost for lightning," she says. Instead, the presence or absence of ice was like a switch at Bogoslof, clicking the tendrils of light on and off.

The pair of analyses of Bogoslof and Anak Krakatau provide a detailed peek at the complex array of factors that must unite to stir a spark. As current methods improve, researchers will likely continue to tease out more details of volcanic lightning mechanics.

Van Eaton vividly recalls videos of the death-defying work at Surtsey in the 1960s: “We’re just now circling back with more modern tools and techniques to sort of show that, yeah, they got it right.”

Hackers are sending malicious software in emails disguised as information about the coronavirus in order to gain access to people's computers
Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com

© Provided by Daily Mail Security experts have discovered cybercriminals are sending emails with a malicious strain of software disguised as information about the outbreak. The emails, discovered in Japan, claim the virus has spread like wildfire throughout the…

The coronavirus is sending the world into a panic and hackers are using it as bait to steal people's personal data.

Security experts have discovered cybercriminals are sending emails with a malicious strain of software disguised as information about the outbreak.

The emails, discovered in Japan, claim the virus has spread like wildfire throughout the country and prompt recipients to open an attachment to 'learn more'.

This attachment gives hackers access to the victim's computer, allowing them to harvest personal data and infect their computers with a virus.

The coronavirus from Wuhan is one which has never been seen before this outbreak. It has been named SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. The name stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2.

Experts say the bug, which has killed around one in 50 patients since the outbreak began in December, is a 'sister' of the SARS illness which hit China in 2002, so has been named after it.

The disease that the virus causes has been named COVID-19, which stands for coronavirus disease 2019.

And now hackers are taking advantage of people's fears.

© Provided by Daily Mail Security Experts with IBM X-Force and Kasperky uncovered the malicious emails, which they found 'are composed of different representations of the current date and the Japanese word for 'notification', in order to suggest urgency,' IBM X-Force shares in a blog post

Security Experts with IBM X-Force and Kasperky uncovered the malicious emails, which they found 'are composed of different representations of the current date and the Japanese word for 'notification', in order to suggest urgency,' IBM X-Force shares in a blog post.

The emails appear to be sent by a disability welfare service provider in Japan, which warn recipients the outbreak has spread to certain parts of the country and urges the reader to open the attach document to learn more about the outbreak.

To make the emails seem authentic, hackers have added a footer at the bottom, complete with a postal address as well as a phone and fax number.

Kaspersky analyst Anton Ivanov said: 'The coronavirus, which is currently hotly debated in the media, has been used as a bait by cybercriminals'

'So far, we've only identified ten unique files, but since this type of activity is common to popular media topics, we expect this number to increase.

© Provided by Daily Mail The emails appear to be sent by a disability welfare service provider in Japan, which warn recipients the outbreak has spread to certain parts of the country and urges the reader to open the attach document to learn more about the outbreak

© Provided by Daily Mail To make the emails seem authentic, hackers have added a footer at the bottom, complete with a postal address as well as a phone and fax number.

'As people continue to worry about their health, fake documents that are said to educate them about the coronavirus may be spreading more and more malware.'

The first human cases were publicly reported from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where approximately 11 million people live, after medics first started publicly reporting infections on December 31.

By January 8, 59 suspected cases had been reported and seven people were in critical condition. Tests were developed for the new virus and recorded cases started to surge.

The first person died that week and, by January 16, two were dead and 41 cases were confirmed. The next day, scientists predicted that 1,700 people had become infected, possibly up to 7,000.

Just a week after that, there had been more than 800 confirmed cases and those same scientists estimated that some 4,000 – possibly 9,700 – were infected in Wuhan alone. By that point, 26 people had died.

By January 27, more than 2,800 people were confirmed to have been infected, 81 had died and an estimated total number of cases ranged from 100,000 to 350,000 in Wuhan alone.

By January 29, the number of deaths had risen to 132 and cases were in excess of 6,000.

By February 5, there were more than 24,000 cases and 492 deaths.

By February 11, this had risen to more than 43,000 cases and 1,000 deaths.

A change in the way cases are confirmed on February 13 – doctors decided to start using lung scans as a formal diagnosis, as well as laboratory tests – caused a spike in the number of cases, to more than 60,000 and to 1,369 deaths.

By February 25, around 80,000 people had been infected and some 2,700 had died.

February 25 was the first day in the outbreak when fewer cases were diagnosed within China than in the rest of the world.

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS SO FAR


Someone who is infected with the coronavirus can spread it with just a simple cough or a sneeze, scientists say.

Nearly 3,000 people with the virus are now confirmed to have died and more than 83,000 have been infected. Here's what we know so far:

What is the coronavirus?

A coronavirus is a type of virus which can cause illness in animals and people. Viruses break into cells inside their host and use them to reproduce itself and disrupt the body's normal functions. Coronaviruses are named after the Latin word 'corona', which means crown, because they are encased by a spiked shell which resembles a royal crown.

The coronavirus from Wuhan is one which has never been seen before this outbreak. It has been named SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. The name stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2.

Experts say the bug, which has killed around one in 50 patients since the outbreak began in December, is a 'sister' of the SARS illness which hit China in 2002, so has been named after it.

The disease that the virus causes has been named COVID-19, which stands for coronavirus disease 2019.

Dr Helena Maier, from the Pirbright Institute, said: 'Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that infect a wide range of different species including humans, cattle, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats and wild animals.

'Until this new coronavirus was identified, there were only six different coronaviruses known to infect humans. Four of these cause a mild common cold-type illness, but since 2002 there has been the emergence of two new coronaviruses that can infect humans and result in more severe disease (Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses).

'Coronaviruses are known to be able to occasionally jump from one species to another and that is what happened in the case of SARS, MERS and the new coronavirus. The animal origin of the new coronavirus is not yet known

THE RIGHT WING SOLUTION TO EVERY PROBLEM
Trump officials discuss tax cuts, other emergency measures in hopes of tackling coronavirus fallout

WHEN IN DOUBT ABOUT WHAT TO DO CUT TAXES

New emails released from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show how much concern there was within the agency, and how much questioning and anger from the outside, regarding the credibility of its critical-to-life hurricane forecasts as a result of actions taken during Hurricane Dorian last fall.

© Tom Brenner/Bloomberg President Trump displays a hurricane path projection map while delivering updates to the press regarding Hurricane Dorian during a news conference inside the Oval Office, on Sept. 4, 2019, at the White House in Washington. (Tom Brenner/ Bloomberg)

The emails, released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request from The Washington Post and other media outlets, demonstrate the tenuous state of scientific credibility in the Trump era, even at a federal agency with decades of service — NOAA dates to 1970, while its National Weather Service has its roots in the 19th century.

et all it took was a six-day period featuring a few tweets from President Trump and a Sharpie-modified hurricane forecast map in the Oval Office followed by a politically motivated statement about the storm’s path to cause some citizens to regard the agency’s work as tainted by political interference.

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The insight that credibility can be swiftly damaged when dealing with the collision between science and politics is particularly relevant today, as agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health face the outbreak of the new coronavirus.

As was reported Thursday, government health experts have been directed to clear any public comments first through Vice President Pence’s office, which is a highly unusual directive during a disease outbreak and has raised concerns about political interference in public health communication.

In past disease outbreaks, such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and SARS, the CDC and experts from other federal science agencies dealt directly with the media.

A stormy six days

Many of the emails concern Trump’s inaccurate assertion in a tweet from Sept. 1, 2019, in which the president claimed that Alabama “will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” by the Category 5 storm. They also concern a controversial unsigned statement that a NOAA representative issued on Sept. 6. That statement criticized the National Weather Service forecast office in Birmingham for a tweet that contradicted Trump’s claims.

The statement was widely interpreted within NOAA’s National Weather Service as contradicting an accurate forecast because of political pressure from the White House and the Commerce Department. The Post has reported that the demand for NOAA to issue the statement came from White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, at the request of the president, via officials at the Commerce Department.

The new emails released Friday include messages sent from members of the public to Ken Graham, the director of the National Hurricane Center, and other officials, expressing frustration with NOAA’s Sept. 6 statement and a newfound distrust of its forecasts.

In one email to Graham, a member of the public wrote of concerns about NOAA’s forecast accuracy.

“I live on the east coast of Florida,” the person wrote. "For all of my adult life I have relied on upon the scientific honesty and ethics of NOAA in general, and the National Hurricane Center specifically, to provide accurate storm information.”

“I was heartsick and dumbstruck to see the NOAA announcement today supporting the president’s ludicrous and psychotic defense of his Alabama forecast garbage. Mr. Graham, as a fellow scientist and professional, would you kindly reassure me that the politics of a lunatic will not be affecting the science done at NOAA and the NHC?”

© Ramon Espinosa/AP Volunteers wade through a flooded road against wind and rain brought on by Hurricane Dorian to rescue families near the Causarina bridge in Freeport, Grand Bahama, Bahamas, on Sept. 3, 2019. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

Similarly, a resident of Biloxi, Miss., wrote to Graham on Sept. 7, a day after the unsigned statement was released, saying the episode threatened to “irreparably” damage the NHC’s “previously sterling, trustworthy reputation for scientific reliability, accuracy and truthful public service.”

“Please do not let Washington’s epidemic of dystopian politics contaminate your previously respected agencies,” the Biloxi resident wrote.

An email from NOAA employee Gregory Hammer, who was tracking the volume of tweets on the matter received by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said more than 600 emails had been received.

“Most are asking, in some form, ‘How can we trust NOAA?’ or stating that ‘NOAA has lost its credibility,’” Hammer wrote.

In response to the torrent of criticism, the Hurricane Center’s Graham pleaded with National Weather Service leadership in an email to help him craft an official response.

“The biggest request we are getting are emails just asking for assurance we are science based as always,” Graham wrote to Mary Erickson, the Weather Service’s deputy director. "Not looking for anything other than [to provide] assurance ‘we have not changed.’”

The emails released also reveal the sentiment within NOAA to rally around those who were sticking up for the agency’s scientific integrity. After acting chief scientist Craig McLean sent an email within the agency announcing an investigation into the Sept. 6 statement, numerous NOAA staffers wrote to thank him.

“Our integrity as a science agency is priceless, and so that unsigned press release from “NOAA” hurts all of us -- so when the next storm comes by (and it will), will we be believed?” wrote Howard Diamond, a climate science program manager at NOAA, in a message to McLean.

The new emails also reveal that Stephen Volz, NOAA’s assistant administrator for satellite and information services, wrote to his division’s public affairs team with one directive on Sept. 9: “To you both, I can imagine this past week has been hell. I can guess what sort of “guidance you hve[sic.] been getting from NOAA Comms.,” Volz said, referring to NOAA’s communications department in Washington.

“To which my only guidance, potentially contrary, is to tell the truth. I know you know what that is, and I support you in doing so.”