Science patterns and speculations... and Freeman Dyson and Stephen Wolfram

My friend and legendary polymath Freeman Dyson passed away at 96. We had lunch planned for when he and his irrepressibly impressive wife Imme next came to their apartment in La Jolla. Alas, it’s not to be.

Freeman’s long and creative life was spent being a scientific and philosophical rascal — rewarded for impudent skills at questioning anything and everything… skills that would likely have got him strangled in any other culture. Born into this one, he rose from World War II Blitz survivor to one of the most original thinkers in mathematics, physics and space technology.

One thing you’ll not read in any of the bios spilling across media is my judgement that Freeman Dyson was the greatest theologian of the 20th Century! He and Tulane University Professor Frank Tipler had books in the 80s forecasting the likely condition and interests and survival of intelligent super-beings in the distant future. Tipler’s notions centered on a cyclical cosmology — gravity slowing the Bang expansion, then reversing it into a Big Crunch — as illustrated in Poul Anderson's famed novel Tau Zero. 

Meanwhile, Freeman pursued the logic of the Great Dissipation, assuming that the expansion goes on forever; how might intelligence continue long after galaxies, stars and even protons decay away?

Freeman “won” that rivalry when astronomers discovered universal acceleration of expansion (the fact behind “Dark Energy” speculations.) Hence my awarding him that title. 

(The title of Greatest 21st Century Theologian may be won by another friend - Roger Penrose - who has revived cyclical universe notions in new and funky ways that are totally consistent with Freeman.)

Of his many legacies, Freeman's absurdly creative and productive offspring -- first George & Esther and then four more with Imme -- count highly. One recent memory was taking him (with the Benford boys) to revisit the glider point at Torrey Pines (near UCSD) where he 60 years ago helped to invent a new kind of launcher catapult. What a guy.

Okay, that was an impulsively garrulous riff, borne out of my sitting here perplexed and grieving, but celebrating a life like no other.

== Speculations and advances ==

Speculations run rampant about the source of the coronavirus pandemic, which I went into elsewhere… and whether it might have repercussions similar to Chernobyl.  

Meanwhile folks might find interesting my stories about infectious disease, offering insights into how some become killers and others might evolve into something else. Maybe cooperative. Or even weird? "The Giving Plague" was a Hugo nominee (It's in Otherness but also available on my website.)

And "Chrysalis" Is a biology tale found in my third and best collection Insistence of Vision.

And moving on... this woman apparently has the super-power to smell early stages of Parkinson’s Disease, long before a victim shows any outward symptoms.

Researchers have created a mutant bacterial enzyme that can in only a couple of hours break down PET plastic bottles into their individual chemical composites, which could later be reused to make brand new bottles. Conventional recycled plastic that goes through a “thermomechanical” process isn’t high enough quality and is mostly used for other products such as clothing and carpets.

An interesting claim: “ "Air-gen" or air-powered generator, connects electrodes to microbe-created protein nanowires to produce electrical current generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere.” I’d like to see the energy gradients, to believe it.

Scientists describe how they assembled genomes made up of blueprints for proteins — and demonstrated that it was capable of replicating 116 kilobytes worth of its own RNA and DNA. The team plans to build an “enveloped system” that can reproduce like this last one — but also consume nutrition and dispose of waste, like a living cell.

Between the 1860s-1890s, father-and-son glassworkers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka created thousands of anatomically correct models of marine invertebrates. They're so delicate it could be mistaken as a real sea creature. Thank you David Crosby!

Scientists outlined a method to “shape intense laser light in a way that accelerates electrons to record energies in very short distances: the researchers estimate the accelerator would be 10,000 times smaller than a proposed setup recording similar energy, reducing the accelerator from nearly the length of Rhode Island to the length of a dining room table.”

Watch a violinist play while surgeons operate on her brain.

Especially interesting as an amateur beekeeper who does have problems with wax moths… Showing how beekeeping has multiple uses, an amateur beekeeper and scientist at the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria learned of the ability of the greater wax moth larvae in eating plastics after she plucked the larvae out of her beehives and tossed them in the garbage only to find them chewing holes in the bag. The one drawback is they excrete a toxic substance when fed plastic. 

==  A Theory of All ?  ==

More diversion from those exploring the smart-edge of civilization. Polymath Stephen Wolfram - inventor of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language - wrote me a note about his new venture… solving the Riddle of Everything and "cracking the code in physics." Do visit his linked site - Stephen has credibility! In addition to the web-posted missive linked below, see his "Physics project.”

While I'm a licensed, if minor league physicist, it strikes me that his approach has much in common with (1) cellular automata using simple rule sets to create complexity (and note that John Conway, inventor of the Game of life (featured in Glory Season), died of Covid, last week), plus (2) pattern-sifting... plus (3) big-data machine-learning systems... both of the latter needed in order to cull the vast population of rule-based 'universes' down to a few worth contemplating.

When we last spoke - gosh a year ago - we mulled over how different statistical regimes -- e.g. Bose-Einstein vs Fermi-Dirac -- would certainly apply to the range of rule sets. And sure enough, in this missive Stephen says "the only requirement is that it’s distinct from all other elements," suggesting that the example he gives in this web presentation uses the Fermi-Dirac approach. But of course in a "universe model" you'd have to generate both types, since fermions make up all the "matter" -- Leptons and quarks -- while bosons carry the forces of light and EM and gravity etc. It will be a combination of both rule sets, that interact, with bosons created-destroyed in a simple tabulation of energy... while fermions must keep careful track of their identity and net-sum number.

The first exampled network that SW's rule pattern "grows" will strike you as looking like a human brain. I wouldn't make anything of that. But the stringy clumping of the galactic clusters - according to recent maps -- also comes to mind.