Freeman Dyson's Einstein Lecture appears in the February issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time. I happen to be a frog, but many of my best friends are birds. The main theme of my talk tonight is this. Mathematics needs both birds and frogs. Mathematics is rich and beautiful because birds give it broad visions and frogs give it intricate details. Mathematics is both great art and important science, because it combines generality of concepts with depth of structures. It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper. The world of mathematics is both broad and deep, and we need birds and frogs working together to explore it.

... I came to Princeton and got to know Hermann Weyl. Weyl was a prototypical bird ... I wrote his obituary for Nature, which ended with a sketch of Weyl as a human being:

"Characteristic of Weyl was an aesthetic sense which dominated his thinking on all subjects. He once said to me, half joking, 'My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful'."

People who solve famous unsolved problems may win big prizes, but people who start new programs are the real pioneers.

After Gödel, mathematics was no longer a single structure tied together with a unique concept of truth, but an archipelago of structures with diverse sets of axioms and diverse notions of truth. Gödel showed that mathematics is inexhaustible. No matter which set of axioms is chosen as the foundation, birds can always find questions that those axioms cannot answer.

Weak chaos gives us a challenging variety of weather while protecting us from fluctuations so severe as to endanger our existence. Chaos remains mercifully weak for reasons that we do not understand.

The subject of chaos is characterized by an abundance of quantitative data, an unending supply of beautiful pictures, and a shortage of rigorous theorems. Rigorous theorems are the best way to give a subject intellectual depth and precision. Until you can prove rigorous theorems, you do not fully understand the meaning of your concepts.

The archetype of the dead city is a distillation of the agonies of hundreds of real cities that have been destroyed since cities and marauding armies were invented. Our only way of escape from the insanity of the collective unconscious is a collective consciousness of sanity, based upon hope and reason. The great task that faces our contemporary civilization is to create such a collective consciousness.

Birds and Frogs

William Nordhaus:

The economics of climate change is straightforward. People do not pay for the current and future costs of their actions.

Freeman Dyson:

As a scientist I know that all opinions, including my own, may be wrong. I state my opinions firmly because I believe they are right, but I make no claim of infallibility. I beseech you, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, to think it possible you may be mistaken. One principle that we might all accept is that the future is uncertain.

Snow-dumping in East Antarctica would be a good way to stop sea levels from rising. A permanent high-pressure anticyclone over East Antarctica keeps the air over the continent dry and the snowfall meager. To dump snow onto East Antarctica, we must move the center of the anticyclone from the center to the edge of the continent. This could be done by deploying a giant array of tethered kites or balloons so as to block the westerly flow on one side only.

Carbon-eating phytoplankton and snow-dumping are fanciful projects. Like other engineers' dreams in the past, they will probably be superseded by better ideas and newer technologies long before they are needed. They are illustrations of the general principle that antidotes to even the worst-case consequences of climate change will be available if we allow economic growth to continue. The future of technology beyond fifty years from the present is totally unpredictable.

To reach reasonable solutions of the problems, all opinions must be heard and all participants must be treated with respect.

If you would like to revisit The Question of Global Warming:

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

'The Question of Global Warming': An Exchange

Nathan Myhrvold:

Iceland is a modern technological society which retains a frontier attitude. Greenland, on the other hand, really is a frontier — in several senses of the word.

Dubner and Levitt:

This is our third and final guest post from the very polymathic Nathan Myhrvold. The first two were Icelandic travelogues; this one takes us to Greenland. It includes some of the most stunning photographs we have ever seen.

From the archive:

I was describing this to a friend over lunch in Palo Alto. As I was describing this the waiter came up behind me to take our order. I was in the middle of saying "it's very hard to enter the rectum, but once you do things move much faster", only to hear the waiter gasp. Whoops. I tried to explain saying "well, this is about" but with a horrified look he said "I do NOT want to know what this is about! Some people are just not interested in natural history, I guess.

Light Pollution Ends Abruptly -- Iceland is missing

The mother of Icelandic pop singer Bjork is 11 days into a hunger strike in protest at plans to develop part of Iceland's wilderness.

Eating Polar Bears Is Okay in Greenland

Brian Greene:

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective.

America's educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives.

In teaching students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science's underlying technical details.

(Start reading here)

Put a little science in your life

Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals.

... Unprompted sharing of information and attitudes can be seen as a forerunner of adult gossip, which ensures that members of a group can pool their knowledge and know who is or is not behaving cooperatively. The free sharing of information also creates the possibility of pedagogy — in which adults impart information by telling and showing, and children trust and use this information with confidence.

... Seemingly useless play activity is in fact a first baby step toward the creation of distinctively human social institutions.

How Are Humans Unique?

Craig Venter gave the Dimbleby Lecture on December 4.

In this lecture I will argue that the future of life depends not only in our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence.

To some this may be troubling, but part of the problem we face with scientific advancement, is the fear of the unknown - fear that often leads to rejection.

Science is a topic which can cause people to turn off their brains. I contend that science has failed to excite more people for at least two reasons: it is frequently taught poorly, often as rote memorization of complex facts and data, and it is antithetical to our visceral-driven way we live and interact with our world.

A DNA-Driven World | Craig Venter

Any Republicans who think the stem-cell breakthrough gets them off the hook are going to end up very unhappy. This issue will not go away.

First, even the scientists who achieved the latest success believe strongly that embryonic-stem-cell research should continue. No one knows for sure whether the new method of producing pluripotent cells will pan out or where the next big developments will come from. We are still many thresholds away from anything that can be of practical value to me and others. Scientifically, it makes no sense to abandon any promising avenue just because another has opened up.

Second, even if this were a true turning point in stem-cell research, people like me are not going to quickly forget those six lost years. I am 56. Last year I had a kind of brain surgery that dramatically reduces the symptoms of Parkinson's. It received government approval only five years ago. Every year that goes by, science opens new doors, and every year, as you get older and your symptoms perhaps get worse, doors get shut. Six years of delay in a field moving as fast as stem-cell research means a lot of people for whom doors may not open until it is time for them to shut.

Third, although the political dilemma that stem cells pose for politicians is real enough, the moral dilemma is not and never was. The embryos used in stem-cell research come from fertility clinics, which otherwise would discard them. This has been a powerful argument in favor of such research. Why let these embryos go to waste? But a more important point is, What about fertility clinics themselves? In vitro fertilization ("test-tube babies") involves the purposeful creation of multiple embryos, knowing and intending that most of them either will die after implantation in the womb or, if not implanted, will be discarded or frozen indefinitely. Even if all embryonic-stem-cell research stopped tomorrow, this far larger mass slaughter of embryos would continue. There is no political effort to stop it. Bush even praised in vitro fertilization in his 2001 speech about the horrors of stem-cell research. In vitro has become too popular for politicians to take on. But their failure to do so makes a mockery of their alleged agony over embryonic stem cells.

Why Science Can't Save the GOP

Why are evolutionary biologists bringing back extinct deadly viruses?

That's an interesting question. See also the audio interview, in which the author "discusses what retroviruses can teach biologists about how humans evolved, and how they may hold the key to conquering AIDS and other diseases." See also coverage in Discover, complete with electron micrographs.

I especially liked this anecdote:

Harmit Malik grew up in Bombay and studied chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology there, one of the most prestigious technical institutions in a country obsessed with producing engineers. He gave no real thought to biology, but he was wholly uninspired by his other studies. "It was fair to say I had little interest in chemical engineering, and I happened to tell that to my faculty adviser," he recalled. "He asked me what I liked. Well, I was reading Richard Dawkins at the time, his book 'The Selfish Gene'” -- which asserts that a gene will operate in its own interest even if that means destroying an organism that it inhabits or helped create. The concept fascinated Malik. “I was thinking of becoming a philosopher," he said. "I thought I would study selfishness."

Malik’s adviser had another idea. The university had just established a department of molecular biology, and Malik was dispatched to speak with its director. “This guy ended up teaching me by himself, sitting across the table. We met three times a week. I soon realized that he was testing out his course on me. I liked it and decided to apply to graduate school -- although I had less than a tenth of the required biology courses. I had very little hope." But he had excellent test scores and in 1993 was accepted at the University of Rochester, as a graduate student in the biology department. He visited his new adviser as soon as he arrived. "He looked at my schedule and said, 'I see that you are doing genetics.' I had no clue what he was talking about, but I said sure, that sounds good. I had never taken a course in the subject. He gave me the textbook and told me that the class was for undergraduates, which made me feel more comfortable." It wasn’t until the end of the conversation that Malik realized he would be teaching the class, not taking it.

Here are a few papers:

Discovery and analysis of the first endogenous lentivirus

The lentiviruses are associated with a wide range of chronic diseases in mammals. These include immunodeficiencies (such as HIV/AIDS in humans), malignancies, and lymphatic and neurological disorders in prim... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Annals of Science: Darwin’s Surprise

Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women's work as well as men's, so it's a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women - the vital "reproductive core" of a tiny population - could well have meant demographic disaster for a species already struggling to survive among monster bears, yellow-fanged hyenas, and cunning Homo sapien newcomers.

Stone Age feminism?

Frank and Ramesh's difficulties with their ant-cemetery project were due, in large part, to their difficulties in thinking about emergent objects. They were adamant that dead ants should never be taken from a cemetery because they thought the dead ants define the cemetery. How can a cemetery grow, they wondered, if the dead ants in it are continually being taken away?