Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Three heresies ...

... pronounced by Freeman Dyson in his University of Michigan 2005 Winter Commencement Address.

I particularly liked this:

You students are proud possessors of the PhD, or some similar token of academic respectability. You have endured many years of poverty and hard labor. Now you are ready to go to your just rewards, to a place on the tenure track of the university, or on the board of directors of a company.
And here am I, a person who never had a PhD myself and fought all my life against the PhD system and everything it stands for. Of course I fought in vain. The grip of the PhD system on academic life is tighter today than it has ever been. But I will continue to fight against it for as long as I live. In short I am proud to be heretic.
I am not sure I quite agree about the U.S. no longer being top nation by 2070 (though I hold no brief for its remaining in that position, either). I think that America will mirror Rome and be around for a long time in much the same way that Rome was - and for much the same reason: because the roads lead here.

1 comment:

  1. I see Dyson is still "Disturbing the Universe," sommething he does so well. I've always appreciated his viewpoint, even where I disagree with them.

    Take global warming. There's one thing the general science media is apparently too stupid to understand about global warming, and pass on intelligently: global warming doesn't mean everything will turn into Miami or San Diego. What it means is what is known from both fluid dynamics and chaos theory: if you put more energy into the overall system, it becomes more turbulent, even chaotic, until it attains a new equilibrium at a higher energy level.

    So, if you put more energy into a system like the weather, you get higher-amplitude variations: you get more violent storms, more unusual weather systems, etc. I'm looking out at a white-out April blizzard outside my window right now. Super-hurricanes like Katrina are also a taste of high-amplitude change. Desertification will accelerate in places like the Sahara. And those are just a few examples.

    Of course Dyson is correct in saying that you also have to account for geology, biomass, and other elements of the overall system. I would point out, however, that the reasons mountains wear down to nothing is simply because of weather. Erosion and shaping of the landmasses by weather is one of the most powerful, if not cataclysmic, forces on the planet.

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