The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolution

Drawn from a series of public lectures, this is the mind of Freeman Dyson at its most fertile. The book bubbles with creative ideas even if my instinct throughout was to treat it as yet another item of that curious genre - speculative science faction.

He writes clearly and, very unusually amongst the top level of scientists let alone applied mathematicians, his genius is capable of understanding history and society. Indeed, I suspect that he would have made a very fine historian if he had taken a very different route in life.

However, a decade and a half on from the lectures, very little of what he has predicted (all of which I have no doubt is feasible) has come to pass. He seems to have been looking in the wrong direction more than show more once. His speculations are more than a little utopian.

This is a little odd because he has a highly intelligent approach to the effect of politics on technological investment. There are some very acute observations on failures to be cost-effective. One might have expected him to have been a little more cautious on that ground alone.

While mildly stimulated, I did not get a great deal out of the book because it was simply not grounded enough in the world I think that I am living in. He was persuasive, as a Kuhn-sceptic, on one thing though - that technique and tools drive science as much as concepts and models.

His argument for scientific development as a craft process with many incremental changes and cross-fertilisations, with investment by scientists themselves in the machinery that enables discovery, is well taken. It made me rethink how thought and application exist in close dialectic.

But there is so much material here, so much inventiveness, so much intellectual creativity and so many leaps that the book leaves one wondering precisely what one has learned that is useful. That may be unfair but one wanted not more ideas but clearer thread for those already offered.

Like contemporary science fiction, speculative science faction throws so much at the reader that the tale often spins away far from the credible and the useful - and the human. That so little of the implicit prediction appears to be materially present today seems to confirm a lack of groundedness.

Oh, we poor mortals - unable to deliver what our intellectual gods demand of us! show less

I was surprised by this book. I thought it would just be all "wow, technology, cool." But it was actually about how to thoughtfully and ethically use technology to bring about social justice. Technology shouldn't just be about making new toys for the rich, but it should be about developing ways to level the playing field for everyone in the world. One thing I found that was very interesting was the accounts of how technological advances will often liberate one group of people while taking away the freedom of another group. One example given in the book was the rise of househould appliances in the early twentienth century. The servant class was done away with (in those days, middle class families might have multiple servants), but middle show more class women then lost much freedom when they had to return to household duties.

Dr. Dyson, a physicist, sees solar energy, genetic engineering, and the Internet as the tools to bring about this social revolution. I would be interested in seeing an updated version of this book because this was written over ten years ago, and a lot has changed since then. Internet access still isn't freely available everywhere, but it sure is better than it was in the late 90's. show less