Having penned hundreds of letters to his family over four decades,
Freeman Dyson has framed them with the reflections made by a man now in
his nineties. While maintaining that "the letters record the daily life
of an ordinary scientist doing ordinary work," Dyson nonetheless has
worked with many of the twentieth century's most renowned physicists,
mathematicians, and intellectuals, so that Maker of Patterns presents
not only his personal story but chronicles through firsthand accounts an
exciting era of twentieth-century science.
Though begun in the dark year of 1941 when Hitler's armies had already
conquered much of Europe, Dyson's letters to his parents, written at
Trinity College, Cambridge, often burst with the curiosity of a
precocious seventeen-year-old. Pursuing mathematics and physics with a
cast of legendary professors, Dyson thrived in Cambridge's intellectual
ferment, working on, for example, the theory of partitions or reading
about Kurt Gödel's hypotheses, while still finding time for billiards
and mountain climbing. After graduating and serving with the Royal Air
Force's Bomber Command operational research section, whose job it was
"to demolish German cities and kill as many German civilians as
possible," Dyson visited a war-torn Germany, hoping through his
experience to create a "tolerably peaceful world."
Juxtaposing descriptions of scientific breakthroughs with concerns for
mankind's future, Dyson's postwar letters reflect the quandaries faced
by an entire scientific generation that was dealing with the
aftereffects of nuclear detonations and concentration camp killings.
Arriving in America in 1947 to study with Cornell's Hans Bethe, Dyson
continued to send weekly missives to England that were never technical
but written with grace and candor, creating a portrait of a generation
that was eager, as Einstein once stated, to solve "deep mysteries that
Nature intend[ed] to keep for herself."
We meet, among others, scientists like Richard Feynman, who took Dyson
across country on Route 66, Robert Oppenheimer, Eugene Wigner, Niels
Bohr, James Watson, and a young Stephen Hawking; and we encounter
intellectuals and leaders, among them Reinhold Niebuhr, George Kennan,
Arthur C. Clarke, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr.
The "patterns of comparable beauty in the dance of electrons jumping
around atoms" invariably replicate themselves in this autobiography told
through letters, one that combines accounts of wanton arms development
with the not-inconsiderable demands of raising six children. As we once
again attempt to guide society toward a more hopeful future, these
letters, with their reenactment of what, at first, seems like a distant
past, reveal invaluable truths about human nature.
