https://www.livescience.com/freeman-dyson-dead-at-96.html
For those of you who have never heard of him (How few of you there are), he was a physicist and one hell of a thinker. He had his hand in everything from astronomy to nuclear engineering to physics and climate science.
His most famous idea is the Dyson Sphere. He proposed that advanced alien civilizations, and perhaps future human civilizations, might seek to harvest close to 100% of a star's energy output by surrounding them with swarms of satellites. Swarms so thick, they blot out the sun.
https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-just-found-a-secon…
Another of his big ideas was the Orion Drive, which was to be the ultimate heavy-lift rocket. Take a firecracker and stick it under a bucket. It will send the bucket flying. Now, if you had a string of firecrackers in the bucket, each one timed to go off a second after the next, the bucket would keep on flying.
The Orion Drive would operate on the same principle, except that the bucket is a spaceship and the firecrackers are nuclear warheads.
https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/OrionProj.html
This thing could have worked. The math proved it would work, materials testing showed it could work, and prototypes powered by conventional explosives flew. It would have been a bumpy ride, but it could have gotten us to Mars at express speeds.
When I think of Freeman Dyson, I think of him as a toolmaker. I don't think he made anything, but his ideas were a font of inspiration for other authors. How often have you seen Orion Drives and Dyson Spheres in science fiction?
From figuring out how to make Lancaster bombers safer (Remove the turrets. They'll fly 50mph faster than the German fighters) to dissuading the US government from using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam to pouring water on climate change hysteria, Freeman Dyson left his mark in real life too.
Shine on you crazy diamond. You had a good run.
For those of you who have never heard of him (How few of you there are), he was a physicist and one hell of a thinker. He had his hand in everything from astronomy to nuclear engineering to physics and climate science.
His most famous idea is the Dyson Sphere. He proposed that advanced alien civilizations, and perhaps future human civilizations, might seek to harvest close to 100% of a star's energy output by surrounding them with swarms of satellites. Swarms so thick, they blot out the sun.
https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-just-found-a-secon…
Another of his big ideas was the Orion Drive, which was to be the ultimate heavy-lift rocket. Take a firecracker and stick it under a bucket. It will send the bucket flying. Now, if you had a string of firecrackers in the bucket, each one timed to go off a second after the next, the bucket would keep on flying.
The Orion Drive would operate on the same principle, except that the bucket is a spaceship and the firecrackers are nuclear warheads.
https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/OrionProj.html
This thing could have worked. The math proved it would work, materials testing showed it could work, and prototypes powered by conventional explosives flew. It would have been a bumpy ride, but it could have gotten us to Mars at express speeds.
When I think of Freeman Dyson, I think of him as a toolmaker. I don't think he made anything, but his ideas were a font of inspiration for other authors. How often have you seen Orion Drives and Dyson Spheres in science fiction?
From figuring out how to make Lancaster bombers safer (Remove the turrets. They'll fly 50mph faster than the German fighters) to dissuading the US government from using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam to pouring water on climate change hysteria, Freeman Dyson left his mark in real life too.
Shine on you crazy diamond. You had a good run.
