Freeman Dyson, a renowned physicist and mathematician, has died at 96, his daughter Mia told Maine Public Radio.
Dyson was a British-born physics professor at Princeton. He worked on nuclear reactors, solid state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, and later was known for being a skeptic of climate change.
Dyson was known for his “Dyson tree” concept, in which he envisioned that a genetically engineered plant could survive in a comet and grow in distant colonies. Another of his ideas, the Dyson sphere theory, was featured in Star Trek. The theory proposed that a technologically advanced society could surround its native star to maximize the capture of its available energy.
Dyson agreed with the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases cause climate change, but he argued that increasing carbon in the atmosphere could have positive benefits, such as enhancing biological growth, agricultural yields, and forests.
In a 2007 interview with Salon.com, Dyson said that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all.”
Throughout his lengthy career, Dyson won numerous prizes, including the Templeton Prize for progress in religion in 2000 and the Henri Poincare Prize for contributions in mathematical physics in 2012. He earned an undergraduate degree in math from the University of Cambridge but became a tenured professor without a Ph.D.
