No.129
The Trusty Servant
undergraduate at Oxford proposed
the correct structure of the chemical
compound Diborane; and his
younger brother, the oceanographer
Michael Longuet-Higgins (39-43), who
introduced the theory of the origin
of microseisms. Dyson, Lighthill, and
the two Longuet-Higgins brothers
all went on to become Fellows of
the Royal Society, in recognition of
their achievements in their respective
fields. ‘We were all Collegemen at
the same time. To have had the four
of us all there together was quite
remarkable really when you look back
on it.’
My brief conversation with Professor
Dyson introduced me to a rare
breadth of horizon that is unusual.
To hear someone speak plainly about
his very real ambitions in the 1950s to
travel into space, and the many years
spent designing, building and testing a
spacecraft to take him there, is not an
everyday occurrence. ‘It was the most
romantic period of my life, working
on my spaceship. I was entranced
with the idea, and I was dead set on
going myself,’ he tells me. ‘I was going
to have 2,000 bombs on board to get
me up into the sky. I know it sounds a
bit crazy now, but it seemed quite real
at the time.’
all worked. I cleaned up the mess. I
didn’t need to invent anything. There
were three different versions of this
set of ideas, all pretty well understood,
but they were not at all user-friendly. I
just straightened it all out.’
At Winchester, the young Freeman
Dyson was quickly identified as
mathematically gifted. By his final
year there was no Mathmā don at
the School who was able to teach
him anything further, and so it
was arranged for Daniel Pedoe,
a professor from Southampton
University, to come in each week to
tutor him. ‘I remain very impressed
to this day by the imagination shown
by the school in arranging this for me.
Travel was not easy during the war,
so this was a significant undertaking.’
It was through these tutorials that
he first learned about the world
of professional mathematics and
he attributes to these sessions his
ultimately becoming a mathematician.
The other major influences on
his early years were three of his
contemporaries in College: James
Lighthill (36-41), the aero-acoustic
mathematician whose work paved
the way for the development of
Concorde; Christopher Longuet-
Higgins (35-41), the cognitive scientist
and theoretical chemist who as an
9
His sense of scale is remarkable,
too. He’s very comfortable talking
about the possibility that life exists
elsewhere in the universe, but
cautions us not to get over-excited.
‘There’s no point in wasting our time
trying to guess now – we’ll find out
about it one day.’ As for space travel,
the idea still clearly excites him.
‘Commercial space travel probably
will become a part of daily life… but
only in a couple of hundred years’
time. For now, unmanned missions
are proving very successful, and
we’re gaining a totally new view of
the universe all the time. So, when it
happens, it won’t be very useful. But
it will be a great adventure.’