Freeman Dyson, Infinite in all Directions

Freeman Dyson is a brilliant, iconoclastic physicist. In 1985 he was invited to give the Gifford Lectures. According to the web site, the Gifford Lectures:

were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820–1887), a senator of the College of Justice in Scotland. The purpose of Lord Gifford's bequest to the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Aberdeen was to sponsor lectures to “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God”.

As Dyson points out:

The words "Natural Theology" have a technical meaning. According to Christian doctrine, God gave us two books in which his actions are recorded. One book is the Bible, the other is the {4}  Book of Nature. By reading the Book of Nature we can obtain knowledge of God's work, whether or not we also read the Bible. This is what Adam Gifford meant when he wrote his will. Natural Theology is the reading of God's mind as expressed in the works of Nature.

Dyson's lectures collected in a book, "Infinite In All Directions" online here, is full of stimulating ideas.

Below are a few excerpts, along with my comments:

I do not know what the word "materialism" means. Speaking as a physicist, I judge matter to be an imprecise and rather old-fashioned concept. Roughly speaking, matter is the way particles behave when a large number of them are lumped together. When we examine matter in the finest detail in the experiments of particle physics, we see it behaving as an active agent rather than as an inert substance. Its actions are in the strict sense unpredictable. It makes what appear to be arbitrary choices between alternative possibilities. Between matter as we observe it in the laboratory and mind as we observe it in our own consciousness, there seems to be only a difference in degree but not in kind. 

I've seen someone else (I think Kevin Kelley) express the idea that particles have "free will." Just as we can predict (to a certain degree) the behavior of groups of people, but cannot predict the behavior of individuals, so we can predict the behavior of groups of particles--but individuals can "decide" for themselves what to do.


He argues that the conflict between religion and science is misplaced:

Therefore, I say, speaking as a physicist, scientific materialism and religious transcendentalism are neither incompatible nor mutually exclusive. We have learned that matter is weird stuff. It is weird enough, so that it does not limit God's freedom to make it do what he pleases.

My personal brand of scientific humanism is influenced by the writings of H. G. Wells, and especially by Wells's Outline of History, a lucid account of the history of mankind, written in 1920. First, two sentences at the beginning to set the stage for his history:"Not only is Space from the point of view of life and humanity empty, but Time is empty also. Life is like a little glow, scarcely kindled yet, in these void immensities."