In Washington D.C. today, President Bill Clinton named Freeman J. Dyson, this fall's Montgomery Fellow, one of the recipients of the Enrico Fermi Award to honor a lifetime of achievement in the field of nuclear energy.
This award comes with a $100,000 honorarium and a gold medal. It is the government's oldest science and technology award.
According to Dyson, when the award was established in 1956 it was intended to "glorify the nuclear enterprise." The irony today is "now I get the award for criticizing the nuclear enterprise," he said. For example, Dyson opposed the construction of the supercollider and was once described by a scientific colleague as being "perpendicular to the mainstream."
Dyson, who has designed a full-scale nuclear reactor, said this fact was not mentioned in the citation. "That was not an oversight," he said. "It's just that today it is not considered 'politically correct.'"
Dyson will travel to Washington, D.C. in January to accept the award. This fall, however, Dyson will be at Dartmouth where he will be making himself available to students and area residents.
Dyson, who is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University, will co-teach History 30 this term with Martin Sherwin, the director of the Dickey Center for International Understanding. The course, titled "America in the Nuclear Age," will focus on the development of nuclear weapons, the decision to use those weapons and the effect they have had on American politics, culture and society.
Sherwin and Dyson taught a similar course together in the mid-1970s when both were teaching at Princeton. But Sherwin said they have decided to do an updated version of that course for this fall.
"There is a lot more history to discuss since we last taught the course," Sherwin said. "It seems the arms race ended in a way that nobody had predicted. Perhaps one of the major questions of the course will be what the arms race had to do with the end of the Cold War."
Dyson will speak to the general public in a lecture titled "Looking Forward: Science and Science Fiction" on Tuesday, Oct. 11 at 4 p.m. in 105 Dartmouth Hall. The speech will focus on the 100th anniversary of the publication of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine," a story that is both science fiction and an indictment of the class system.
"I'm interested in looking at how much of what Wells was writing about then is still a problem. I think his concerns are still valid," said Dyson.
Unlike H.G. Wells who was trained as a biologist but gained his fame through his writing, Dyson has always managed to combine both.
"I still do hard science even while writing books about societal problems. I don't see the two as incompatible," said Dyson.
Dyson has written several books about science for non-scientists. He has written, "In all my writing, the aim is to open windows, to let the experts inside the temple of science see out, and to let the ordinary citizens outside see in."
