Imagined Worlds

Imagine a world where whole epochs will pass, cultures rise and fall, between a telephone call and the reply. Think of the human race multiplying 500-million fold, or evolving new, distinct species. Consider the technology of space colonization, computer-assisted reproduction, the “Martian potato.” One hundred years after H. G. Wells visited the future in The Time Machine, Freeman Dyson marshals his uncommon gifts as a scientist and storyteller to take us once more to that ever-closer, ever-receding time to come.Since Disturbing the Universe, the book that first brought him international renown, Freeman Dyson has been helping us see ourselves and our world from a scientist’s point of view. In Imagined Worlds he brings this perspective to a speculative future to show us where science and technology, real and imagined, may be taking us. The stories he tells—about “Napoleonic” versus “Tolstoyan” styles of doing science; the coming era of radioneurology and radiotelepathy; the works of writers from Aldous Huxley to Michael Crichton to William Blake; Samuel Gompers and the American labor movement—come from science, science fiction, and history. Sharing in the joy and gloom of these sources, Dyson seeks out the lessons we must learn from all three if we are to understand our future and guide it in hopeful directions.Whether looking at the Gaia theory or the future of nuclear weapons, science fiction or the dangers of “science worship,” seagoing kayaks or the Pluto Express, Dyson is concerned with ethics, with how we might mitigate the evil consequences of technology and enhance the good. At the heart of it all is the belief once expressed by the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, that progress in science will bring enormous confusion and misery to humankind unless it is accompanied by progress in ethics.

This is an extraordinary book, written in the wisdom of old age but with the hopeful courage of a man whose commitment to science, if not necessarily to its products, has kept him young., Imagined Worlds makes illuminating criticisms of what [Dyson] calls 'ideologically driven' technologies, which, because they symbolize national pride, are obliged to succeed...Ideologically driven technologies, Dyson argues, discourage the rigorous experimentation without which no technology can properly evolve., Freeman Dyson is one of the last survivors of the heroic age of theoretical physics and contributed greatly to the standard theory of quantum electrodynamics. However...he does not suffer from tunnel vision. His imagination embraces the entire cosmos and all the possibilities of future technology...Imagined Worlds is one of those mind-stretching books that any intelligent reader can enjoy., Dyson has a startlingly profound imagination, a willingness to take ideas as far as they can possibly go...In this book he provides a fascinatingly plausible view of artificial telepathy. He has helped to design extraordinary spaceships and advised the Pentagon on wild (and no doubt occasionally woolly) weapons. Best of all, from the science-fiction writer's point of view, he admires science-fiction writers. This book is, in part, a tribute to science-fiction; it is an attempt not to predict the future, but rather, through imagination, to bring some of its potential to life., In his new volume, Imagined Worlds, Freeman Dyson, following in the tradition of two of his heroes, novelist H. G. Wells and biologist J. B. S. Haldane, gives us a cautionary vision of where science and technology are taking us in the next century...Dyson's book is a fascinating romp through possible futures.

Freeman Dyson is Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.