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Freeman Dyson
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In your opinion. Or who is your favorite. Freeman Dyson is my favorite. I think he is the best too.:!)
nicksauce said:IMO Weinberg as the greatest, and 't Hooft and Wilczek for being cool guys. I don't particularly like Freeman Dyson due to his religious views and his views on global warming.
What is wrong with his religous views and his views on Global Warming?
nicksauce said:. I also believe, based on the way I understand the current overwhelming scientific consensus,
Andre said:Science is more about standing up against consensus (if it was consensus in the first place). Also http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~bfvaughan/text/lex/defs/consensus.html .
One of the main things science teaches us is how little we really know and understand so how can science be used to discount religion?I am agnostic and I am not promoting religion.nicksauce said:Frankly, I find it odd for any physicist to be a religious and to be a Christian. I also disagree with attempts to reconcile science and religion, since I believe religion to be antithesis to science.
nicksauce said:Frankly, I find it odd for any physicist to be a religious and to be a Christian. I also disagree with attempts to reconcile science and religion, since I believe religion to be antithesis to science. I also believe, based on the way I understand the current overwhelming scientific consensus, that he is downplaying the dangers of global warming. Maybe I'm wrong. Since this is a forum to discuss physics and not religion or climate change, I won't make any further comments. That said, Freeman Dyson is obviously a great legend with respect to his particular works in physics.
Weinberg, may seem like an "*******", but I am just quite impressed that not only did he make huge contributions to theoretical high energy physics, but also to gravitation and cosmology. I also find his texts and his "The first three minutes" to be exceptional reads.
There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don't find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming -- around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)
It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system's behavior over the next five days.
Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, "Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with 'At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .'"
I haven't seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.
I wouldn't say science is more about standing up against consensus. Science is about finding the truth of empirical claims, regardless of whether the consensus agrees with the conclusions or not.Andre said:Science is more about standing up against consensus (if it was consensus in the first place). Also http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~bfvaughan/text/lex/defs/consensus.html .
By definition science doesn't deal with religion (where religion is "a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny."), due to the invocation of the supernatural. This isn't true for every single claim a religion makes, of course. For instance, the virgin birth is an empirical claim that a human female has given birth without the sperm of another human male, but when you say a supernatural "God did it," it is out of the domain of science. You can't test or predict things like that.Dadface said:One of the main things science teaches us is how little we really know and understand so how can science be used to discount religion?I am agnostic and I am not promoting religion.
Anyway,I also digress and my vote goes to Hawkins, not that I understand what he has done but because of his success as a science populariser.
kldickson said:- Appeal to Misleading Authority
- Vagueness
- and, well, rank subjectivity, in that to all factual indications it is impossible to reconcile science, which is rational, and religion, which is absurd and utterly idiotic!
SW VandeCarr said:Are you sure you can use Freeman Dyson's name (unless of course it's also your real name)? Do you have his permission? I encountered a situation on another site where a member's user name was identical to a physicist's name (he's best known to the public for his pop science). This was a poorly managed site where lurid personal attacks and profanity were rampant and the individual involved was among the worst offenders. You've referred to Dr Dyson in the third person and on this thread at least, you haven't broken any rules. However, I'm not sure it's OK to knowingly use a another real person's name if it's not also your name without that person's permission (unless, of course, you are THE Freeman Dyson since you haven't specifically really said you weren't.)
Pupil said:He would be one egotistical bastard if he were the real Freeman Dyson.
Pupil said:It's not illegal or bad to have the forum name of a real person.
You see, there is a reason those two wrote really good books. The reason people pick Hawking (please check spelling) and Penrose is related to the absurdity of the initial question. One usually is forced to assume we are talking about fundamental physicists, merely to restrict the list of possible names. In a precise, even almost technical (yet simple), sense, Hawking and Penrose have made seminal contributions to the study of space and time. Hawking from the quantum point of view, and Penrose from the Relativity point of view.maverick_starstrider said:Is there a reason people are picking Hawking and Penrose beyond their pop sci books?
Note that there is not a single week, maybe even a single day, without work published on arXiv based on Penrose's ideas. He is the grandfather of spinfoam models, and his twistor geometry has applications ranging from string theory to noncommutative geometry.Kurdt said:I adore Penrose.
maverick_starstrider said:Is there a reason people are picking Hawking and Penrose beyond their pop sci books?
How about "the emperor's new mind" ? If Penrose wrote a single "pop-science" book, considering we all know he wrote serious articles and textbooks, what is your point ?SW VandeCarr said:I wouldn't call Penrose's "The Road to Reality" a "pop-science" book.
humanino said:How about "the emperor's new mind" ? If Penrose wrote a single "pop-science" book, considering we all know he wrote serious articles and textbooks, what is your point ?
I bought it twice for myself (have it in two private libraries separated by an ocean), offered it 3 times to several friends, read it once word per word, and keep re-reading chapters fairly often. It is a jewel.SW VandeCarr said:Have you read "The Read to Reality"?
humanino said:I bought it twice for myself (have it in two private libraries separated by an ocean), offered it 3 times to several friends, read it once word per word, and keep re-reading chapters fairly often. It is a jewel.
Loren Booda said:We just missed John Archibald Wheeler!
humanino said:You see, there is a reason those two wrote really good books. The reason people pick Hawking (please check spelling) and Penrose is related to the absurdity of the initial question. One usually is forced to assume we are talking about fundamental physicists, merely to restrict the list of possible names. In a precise, even almost technical (yet simple), sense, Hawking and Penrose have made seminal contributions to the study of space and time. Hawking from the quantum point of view, and Penrose from the Relativity point of view.
Your two picks are excellent physicists for sure. Bardeen was, in a precise sense, the best physicist alive at some point : in the evaluation of the Nobel committee.
maverick_starstrider said:Uh. Hate to break this to you dude but Wheeler's dead.