Tuesday, April 7, 2009

FREEMAN DYSON

It is easy to post death notices as so many people of note are passing away. Every time one turns around someone we have heard of clocks out.

There are those souls, however, who just keep on ticking. Freeman Dyson is one...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_dyson

I was aware he is still around and working, but I guess I needed to read up again on the brilliant man. One of my memories of the physicist actually getting it all wrong, as history would show, is an interview I read with him years ago that had been conducted in the 1960s. (I think it was done during production of the landmark picture 2001: A Space Odyssey.) Mr. Dyson, while talking about computer processing power, speculated that we were at the limits of miniaturization and could probably not go much smaller. This little fact or piece of trivia does not the super-scientist any less brilliant. Remember that Bill Gates, in the 1970s, was reported to have said something like "No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer."

No comments: