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Freeman Dyson is a distinguished physicist, British-born and educated but based for nearly 50 years now at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. He is also the author of many influential and widely read books for a general audience, including Disturbing the Universe, Infinite in All Directions, Imagined Worlds, and, most recently, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (Oxford Univ. Press). In March of this year, Dyson received the 2000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, awarded annually "to a living individual for outstanding originality in advancing the world's understanding of God or spirituality." Earlier winners of the Templeton Prize, which this year carried a monetary award of just under one million dollars, include Mother Teresa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Billy Graham, Charles Colson, physicist Paul Davies, and the 1999 recipient, religion-and-science scholar Ian Barbour. Karl Giberson met with Dyson this summer.
Professor Dyson, you have recently won the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. It seems appropriate to start by asking you about the role that religion played in your life while you were growing up.
I was brought up in English schools where religion was taught with Scripture as part of the normal curriculum—as part of the culture, which I think is a good idea. You did not have to believe what you heard, but at least you got to hear it.
Was there any religion in your home?
Yes, my mother used to go to church quite regularly. My father was an organist so he played in the chapel. We were an average churchgoing family, Anglicans, not dogmatic at all; neither of my parents was in the least dogmatic. They had the same kind of freethinking attitude as I do—namely, that religion is a way of life and not a system of beliefs.
Did you ever have any intense religious experiences?
Well, in a certain sense. I started a new religion when I was 14. It was not a very successful adventure, but it was quite intense. At the time I was worrying about the injustice of the world—particularly that I was so privileged and most people were not. It occurred to me then that we are really all the same person, that injustice is only apparent but not real, since the person who is suffering is me anyway. I called that "cosmic unity," and I started preaching it, much to the dismay of my friends. I found that nobody took me very seriously. After about a year I decided that evangelism was not really my gift and that I should stick to science. I think I maybe made one convert, but that's about all.
Did you ever have a time of religious despair—that life had no meaning?
No, I wouldn't say so. Of course I've been through periods of depression, but it's not the same thing. I have never been a particularly religious person, so with most of my depression I don't think of it in religious terms; I just think of it as perhaps due to some bad chemistry in the brain!
You sound like a materialist! You talk a little bit in your autobiography about your early interest in mathematics. What first attracted you to math?
I was interested in numbers as a small child, and I was also interested in astronomy and stars and planets, but I don't think there was any connection there. I didn't do calculations about planets; I did calculations about numbers. I certainly had an attraction to numbers right from the beginning. I only learned about physics much later. Physics wasn't taught in the school where I was, and so that was a subject I came to through my own reading. But then I wanted to do all sorts of things! I wanted to be a medical doctor, for instance, but I found that the only talent I had was in mathematics. So, when it actually came to it I won a scholarship in mathematics to go to Cambridge. It was clear that this was what nature designed me to do. It wasn't so much that I had thought of mathematics as a career, it just happened that way.
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