This article was originally published in the April 2018 Princeton Echo.
Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, has made his mark on science through work in physics, astronomy, and mathematics, that the average person can only dream of understanding, his latest book, due out April 10 from the W.W. Norton imprint Liveright, tells Dyson’s story through mundane correspondence with his family that offers a window into science history being made around him.
“Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters” consists of letters Dyson sent to his family between his departure for college at Cambridge University in 1941 and the death of his sister in 2012. The letters record his observations of a world often in political turmoil but also a time of great scientific progress — Watson and Crick determining the structure of DNA, the discovery of cosmic background radiation as solid evidence of the Big Bang theory — while also telling his life story.
“I do not have any great discovery like the double helix to describe,” Dyson writes in his preface. “The letters record the daily life of an ordinary scientist doing ordinary work. I find them interesting because I had the good fortune to live through extraordinary historical times with an extraordinary collection of friends. Letters are valuable witnesses to history because they are written without hindsight. They describe events as they appeared to the participants at the time. Later memories of the same events may be seriously distorted by hindsight. When I compare my memories with the letters, I see that I not only forget things, I also remember things that never happened.”
Dyson, 94, appears at Labyrinth Books on Wednesday, April 4, at 6 p.m.
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