Freeman Dyson’s Life of Scientific Delight

Ann Finkbeiner of Nature reviews Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (Liveright, 2018) by Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences, writing:

“Dyson notices everything. He describes Americans’ friendliness as a result of their inattention to the past, and thus of their loneliness in time. He watches astronomers react to an unexpected discovery: how they were impressed into silence and how the theorists mumbled but could say nothing coherent. He quotes and describes children, his own and other people’s: ‘the children have come out of doors in summer clothes ... [The] grass is green and the crocuses are out. The children are more brightly coloured than the crocuses.’”