The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet
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"Writing with great passion and compassion of his view of solar energy, genetics, and the Internet, Dyson shows how each fits into an ethical science of the 21st century. Anyone who believes that science and a happier, more equitable world are incompatible must read this book." --John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, author of The Cambridge Quintet and Paradigms Lost
"There could be no better guide to what the new century and millennium may hold than Freeman Dyson, who bring a rare lucidity and humanity, along with wide-ranging scientific and historical intelligence, to everything he writes. In The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet Dyson considers the potential impact of new scientific and technological advances on individual lives and on society in general; it is a most engaging and important book, as accessible as it is profound."--Oliver Sacks, M.D.
"Freeman Dyson, a legendary figure in the sciences, has given us a thoughtful and thought-provoking glimpse into t
Product Description
In this visionary look into the future, Freeman Dyson argues that technological changes fundamentally alter our ethical and social arrangements and that three rapidly advancing new technologies -- solar energy, genetic engineering, and worldwide communication -- together have the potential to create a more equal distribution of the world's wealth. Dyson begins by rejecting the idea that scientific revolutions are primarily concept driven. He shows rather that new tools are more often the sparks that ignite scientific discovery. Such tool-driven revolutions have profound social consequences: the invention of the telescope turning the medieval view of the world upside down, the widespread use of household appliances in the 1950s replacing servants, to cite just two examples. In looking ahead, Dyson suggests that solar energy, genetics, and the Internet will have similarly transformative effects, with the potential to produce a more just and equitable society. Solar power could bring electricity to even the poorest, most remote areas of third-world nations, allowing everyone access to the vast stores of information on the Internet and effectively ending the cultural isolation of the poorest countries. Similarly, breakthroughs in genetics may well enable us to give our children healthier lives and grow more efficient crops, thus restoring the economic and human vitality of village cultures devalued and dislocated by the global market. Written with passionate conviction about the ethical uses of science, The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet is both a brilliant reinterpretation of the scientific process and a challenge to use new technologies to close, rather than widen, the gap between rich and poor.
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John Randall was in 1939 a thirty-four-year-old English physicist who had made an undistinguished career in solid-state physics. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
John Randall was in 1939 a thirty-four-year-old English physicist who had made an undistinguished career in solid-state physics. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I've read other books from the same author and I liked them, but not this one. I bought it because the title is really catchy. I was deceived because the book is a (too sort) compilation of several talks and articles, may be not very carefully arranged. I did not see a real line of discourse, or conclusions.
Positive aspects of the book are the strong ethical content of Freeman's attitude towards science and his provocative predictions for the future (very much in the line of Freeman's style). You may like them or not, but you cannot deny his originality.
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16 reviews
32 of 34 people found the following review helpful
Low-key, mostly closer-to-home essays
16 Jun 1999
Format:Hardcover
Adapted from a lecture series hosted by the New York Public Library, the essays in this slender volume cover traditional Dyson subjects (ethics and technology, the politics and "sociology" of scientific research, the settlement of the solar system) plus something new; speculation on how the three titular entities might be used to bring prosperity and dynamism back to village life in the Third World.
In addition to being an awfully short book, with great wide margins, there's disappointingly little meat on these bones. The chapters in past collections, like the incomparable _Disturbing the Universe_, started out as essays and articles; these transcribed lectures don't quite compare.
If you haven't read anything by Dyson, you might want to start here. Otherwise, my recommendation is to buy it, and loan it to people who need beach reading or an airline book.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Reaching the web from the Congo! Prebuilt homes on Mars!
16 May 1999
Format:Hardcover
Dyson focuses on how scientific revolutions are made and suggests the best strategies, considering cost and politics, of making important progress. He spells out ways that technologies can improve our quality of life and, not incidentally, reduce the gap between rich and poor.
Looking ahead to the next 100 years he gives us a feel for the kind of thing humankind might expect when we begin to apply new technologies to the poor, underpopulated parts of the world and we begin to populate the other bodies in the universe. He sees the power of the sun directly harnessed to providing access to the internet for everyone in the world through revolutions in the understanding of genes.
Dyson, emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, is a legendary figure in the sciences. He writes with passionate conviction, style and a profound knowledge of the people and the work, and a deep understanding of how scientific things get done.
Even though I'm not specially interested in the sun or the genome, I found this book riveting. It will appeal to any curious person. There is no science prerequisite beyond knowing the difference between a telescope and a gene.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Practical Vision, Actionable Predictions
24 May 1999
Format:Hardcover
The books shelves are full of millenium views and prognostications. But none with the scientific support and historical perspective of this book. Surprisingly easy to read, Dyson puts these three socio-techno forces in an order that is not only logical, but also quite inspiring. (Wait until you read that we only need two inventions to break the next big DNA code. . .and what they are!) The downside of the book is the intermittant rambling antecdotes of personal stories. They simply don't seem to connect either to each other or to the point. Fortunately, you can skim over these and not lose much. This book is quite digestable -- I'll be quoting it tomorrow and using it in my "future world" presentations.
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