Having just finished reading it, I’ll join Ross and Rod and Will Wilkinson in strongly recommending Nicholas Davidoff’s profile of Freeman Dyson in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. It’s one of the most enjoyable pieces of this sort that I’ve read in quite a while. Here’s an especially choice bit:

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”

Read the whole thing, as we kids with our blogs are inclined to say.

     Filed under: environment, science/tech