- Interview
- The same interview at TCSdaily
(Rebel with a cause: the optimistic scientist)
Dyson talks about the possibility of life that lasts forever or almost forever both from a social perspective and a cosmological perspective. He criticizes the growing rigidity of scientific institutions and the pernicious, anti-scientific concept of a "scientific consensus". He explains why he feels certain that the climate models can't be trusted.
The radical fundamentalist cult, as Klaus Rohrich called it today's Canada Free Press, is discussed in some detail.
Dyson argues that the confused atmosphere, including the ideas of doom and gloom and the feelings of lost influence in the current Western Academia, is analogous to the Post-First-World-War situation in Germany before the rise of Nazism. Fortunately and amusingly, China and India are happily taking the roles that America took in the 1930s, still believing that technology is a good thing.
Freeman Dyson also talks about optimism and recent discoveries in genetics. He explains the particular strength of doom-and-gloom ideas among British cosmologists as a result of the English class system. Margaret Thatcher came as a revenge of the commercial middle class, he adds. Analogously, gloom and doom is now used as a revenge of people at the universities against business that they dislike.
Finally, Dyson argues that some hypothetical extreme differences in religion and atheism between the U.S. and the U.K. are exaggerated by the media. Freeman Dyson says that he enjoys reading Peiser's CCNET. The Reference Frame congratulates Benny Peiser to this fact and thanks both Gentlemen for a nice interview.
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