Stephen Edelston Toulmin (25 March 1922 - 4 December 2009) was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning. Throughout his writings, he sought to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind moral issues. His works were later found useful in the field of rhetoric for analyzing rhetorical arguments. The Toulmin Model of Argumentation, a diagram containing six interrelated components used for analyzing arguments, was considered his most influential work, particularly in the field of rhetoric and communication, and in computer science.

Biography[link]

Stephen Toulmin was born in London, England, on 25 March 1922 to Geoffrey Edelson Toulmin and Doris Holman Toulmin.^[1] He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from King's College, Cambridge in 1942. Soon after, Toulmin was hired by the Ministry of Aircraft Production as a junior scientific officer, first at the Malvern Radar Research and Development Station and later at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Germany. At the end of World War II, he returned to England to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1947 and a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University, subsequently publishing his dissertation as An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950). While at Cambridge, Toulmin came into contact with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose examination on the relationship between the uses and the meanings of language shaped much of Toulmin’s own work.

After graduating from Cambridge, he was appointed University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at Oxford University from 1949 to 1954, during which period he wrote a second book, The Philosophy of Science: an Introduction (1953). Soon after, he was appointed to the position of Visiting Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Melbourne University in Australia from 1954 to 1955, after which he returned to England, and served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds from 1955 to 1959. While at Leeds, he published one of his most influential books in the field of rhetoric, The Uses of Argument (1958), which investigated the flaws of traditional logic. Although it was poorly received in England and satirized as "Toulmin’s anti-logic book" by Toulmin’s fellow philosophers at Leeds, the book was applauded by the rhetoricians in the United States, where Toulmin served as a visiting professor at New York, Stanford, and Columbia Universities in 1959.^[2] While in the States, Wayne Brockriede and Douglas Ehninger introduced Toulmin’s work to communication scholars, as they recognized that his work provided a good structural model useful for the analysis and criticism of rhetorical arguments. In 1960, Toulmin returned to London to hold the position of director of the Unit for History of Ideas of the Nuffield Foundation. He was married to June Goodfield^[3] and collaborated with her on a series of books on the history of science.

In 1965, Toulmin returned to the United States, where he held positions at various universities. In 1967, Toulmin served as literary executor for close friend N.R. Hanson, helping in the posthumous publication of several volumes. While at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Toulmin published Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972), which examines the causes and the processes of conceptual change. In this book, Toulmin uses the unprecedented comparison between conceptual change and Darwin’s model of biological evolution to purport the process of conceptual change as an evolutionary process. The book confronts major philosophical questions as well.^[4] In 1973, while a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he collaborated with Allan Janik, a philosophy professor at La Salle University, to publish Wittgenstein’s Vienna, which advanced a thesis that underscores the significance of history to human reasoning: Contrary to philosophers who believe the absolute truth advocated in Plato’s idealized formal logic, Toulmin argues that truth can be a relative quality, dependent on historical and cultural contexts (what other authors have termed "conceptual schemata").

From 1975 to 1978, he worked with the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, established by the United States Congress. During this time, he collaborated with Albert R. Jonsen to write The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988), which demonstrates the procedures for resolving moral cases. One of his most recent works, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990), written while Toulmin held the position of the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University, specifically criticizes the practical use and the thinning morality underlying modern science.

Toulmin held distinguished professorships at numerous universities, including Columbia, Dartmouth, Michigan State, Northwestern, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Southern California School of International Relations.

In 1997 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) selected Toulmin for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.^[5][6] His lecture, "A Dissenter's Story" (alternatively entitled "A Dissenter's Life"), discussed the roots of modernity in rationalism and humanism, the "contrast of the reasonable and the rational," and warned of the "abstractions that may still tempt us back into the dogmatism, chauvinism and sectarianism our needs have outgrown."^[7] The NEH report of the speech further quoted Toulmin on the need to "make the technical and the humanistic strands in modern thought work together more effectively than they have in the past."^[8]

On 4 December 2009 Toulmin died of a heart failure at the age of 87 in Los Angeles, California .^[9]

Meta-philosophy[link]

Objection to absolutism & relativism[link]

Throughout many of his works, Toulmin pointed out that absolutism (represented by theoretical or analytic arguments) has limited practical value. Absolutism is derived from Plato’s idealized formal logic, which advocates universal truth; accordingly, absolutists believe that moral issues can be resolved by adhering to a standard set of moral principles, regardless of context. By contrast, Toulmin asserts that many of these so-called standard principles are irrelevant to real situations encountered by human beings in daily life.

To reinforce his assertion, Toulmin introduced the concept of argument fields; in The Uses of Argument (1958), Toulmin states that some aspects of arguments vary from field to field, and are hence called “field-dependent,” while other aspects of argument are the same throughout all fields, and are hence called “field-invariant.” The flaw of absolutism, Toulmin believes, lies in its unawareness of the field-dependent aspect of argument; absolutism assumes that all aspects of argument are field invariant.

In Human Understanding (1972), Toulmin suggests that anthropologists have been tempted to side with relativists because they have noticed the influence of cultural variations on rational arguments; in other words, the anthropologist or relativist overemphasizes the importance of the “field-dependent” aspect of arguments, and becomes unaware of the “field-invariant” elements. In an attempt to provide solutions to the problems of absolutism and relativism, Toulmin attempts throughout his work to develop standards that are neither absolutist nor relativist for assessing the worth of ideas.

In Cosmopolis (1990), he traces philosophers' "quest for certainty" back to Descartes and Hobbes, and lauds Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Rorty for abandoning that tradition.

Humanizing modernity[link]

In Cosmopolis Toulmin seeks the origins of the modern emphasis on universality (philosophers' "quest for certainty"), and criticizes both modern science and philosophers for having ignored practical issues in preference of abstract and theoretical issues. The pursuit of absolutism and theoretical arguments lacking practicality, for example, is, in his view, one of the main defects of modern philosophy. Similarly, Toulmin sensed a thinning of morality in the field of sciences, which has diverted its attention from practical issues concerning ecology to the production of the atomic bomb. To solve this problem, Toulmin advocated a return to humanism consisting of four returns: a return to oral communication and discourse, a plea which has been rejected by modern philosophers, whose scholarly focus is on the printed page; a return to the particular, or individual cases that deal with practical moral issues occurring in daily life (as opposed to theoretical principles that have limited practicality); a return to the local, or to concrete cultural and historical contexts; and, finally, a return to the timely, from timeless problems to things whose rational significance depends on the time lines of our solutions. He follows up on this critique in Return to Reason (2001), where he seeks to illuminate the ills that, in his view, universalism has caused in the social sphere, discussing, among other things, the discrepancy between mainstream ethical theory and real-life ethical quandaries.

Argumentation[link]

The Toulmin Model of Argument[link]

Arguing that absolutism lacks practical value, Toulmin aimed to develop a different type of argument, called practical arguments (also known as substantial arguments). In contrast to absolutists’ theoretical arguments, Toulmin’s practical argument is intended to focus on the justificatory function of argumentation, as opposed to the inferential function of theoretical arguments. Whereas theoretical arguments make inferences based on a set of principles to arrive at a claim, practical arguments first find a claim of interest, and then provide justification for it. Toulmin believed that reasoning is less an activity of inference, involving the discovering of new ideas, and more a process of testing and sifting already existing ideas—an act achievable through the process of justification.

Toulmin believed that for a good argument to succeed, it needs to provide good justification for a claim. This, he believed, will ensure it stands up to criticism and earns a favourable verdict. In The Uses of Argument (1958), Toulmin proposed a layout containing six interrelated components for analyzing arguments:

Claim

A conclusion whose merit must be established. For example, if a person tries to convince a listener that he is a British citizen, the claim would be “I am a British citizen.” (1)

Ground (Evidence, Data)

A fact one appeals to as a foundation for the claim. For example, the person introduced in 1 can support his claim with the supporting data “I was born in Bermuda.” (2)

Warrant

A statement authorizing movement from the ground to the claim. In order to move from the ground established in 2, “I was born in Bermuda,” to the claim in 1, “I am a British citizen,” the person must supply a warrant to bridge the gap between 1 and 2 with the statement “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British citizen.” (3)

Backing

Credentials designed to certify the statement expressed in the warrant; backing must be introduced when the warrant itself is not convincing enough to the readers or the listeners. For example, if the listener does not deem the warrant in 3 as credible, the speaker will supply the legal provisions as backing statement to show that it is true that “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British citizen.”

Rebuttal

Statements recognizing the restrictions which may legitimately be applied to the claim. The rebuttal is exemplified as follows: “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British citizen, unless he has betrayed Britain and has become a spy of another country.”

Qualifier

Words or phrases expressing the speaker’s degree of force or certainty concerning the claim. Such words or phrases include “probably,” “possible,” “impossible,” “certainly,” “presumably,” “as far as the evidence goes,” and “necessarily.” The claim “I am definitely a British citizen” has a greater degree of force than the claim “I am a British citizen, presumably.”

The first three elements, “claim,” “data,” and “warrant,” are considered as the essential components of practical arguments, while the second triad, “qualifier,” “backing,” and “rebuttal,” may not be needed in some arguments.

When Toulmin first proposed it, this layout of argumentation was based on legal arguments and intended to be used to analyze the rationality of arguments typically found in the courtroom. Toulmin did not realize that this layout could be applicable to the field of rhetoric and communication until his works were introduced to rhetoricians by Wayne Brockriede and Douglas Ehninger. Only after Toulmin published Introduction to Reasoning (1979) were the rhetorical applications of this layout mentioned in his works.

Toulmin's argument model has inspired research on, for example, the Goal Structuring Notation (GSN), widely used for developing safety cases, and argument maps and associated software.

Ethics[link]

Good Reasons approach[link]

In Reason in Ethics (1950), his doctoral dissertation, Toulmin sets out a Good Reasons approach of ethics, and criticizes what he considers to be the subjectivism and emotivism of philosophers such as A. J. Ayer because, in his view, they fail to do justice to ethical reasoning.

The revival of casuistry[link]

By reviving casuistry (also known as case ethics), Toulmin sought to find the middle ground between the extremes of absolutism and relativism. Casuistry was practiced widely during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to resolve moral issues. Although it largely fell silent during the modern period, casuistry is being revived in the post-modern period.^{[citation needed]} In The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988), Toulmin collaborated with Albert R. Jonsen to demonstrate the effectiveness of casuistry in practical argumentations during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Casuistry employs absolutist principles, called “type cases” or “paradigm cases,” without resorting to absolutism. It uses the standard principles (for example, sanctity of life) as referential markers in moral arguments. An individual case is then compared and contrasted with the type case. Given an individual case that is completely identical to the type case, moral judgments can be made immediately using the standard moral principles advocated in the type case. If the individual case differs from the type case, the differences will be critically assessed in order to arrive at a rational claim.

Through the procedure of casuistry, Toulmin and Jonsen identified three problematic situations in moral reasoning: first, the type case fits the individual case only ambiguously; second, two type cases apply to the same individual case in conflicting ways; third, an unprecedented individual case occurs, which cannot be compared or contrasted to any type case. Through the use of casuistry, Toulmin demonstrated and reinforced his previous emphasis on the significance of comparison to moral arguments, a significance not addressed in theories of absolutism or relativism.

Philosophy of Science[link]

The Evolutionary Model[link]

In 1972, Toulmin published Human Understanding, in which he asserts that conceptual change is an evolutionary process. This book attacks Thomas Kuhn’s account of conceptual change in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn believed that conceptual change is a revolutionary process (as opposed to an evolutionary process), during which mutually exclusive paradigms compete to replace one another. Toulmin criticized the relativist elements in Kuhn’s thesis, arguing that mutually exclusive paradigms provide no ground for comparison, and that Kuhn’ made the relativists’ error of overemphasizing the “field variant” while ignoring the “field invariant” or commonality shared by all argumentation or scientific paradigms.

In contrast to Kuhn’s revolutionary model, Toulmin proposed an evolutionary model of conceptual change comparable to Darwin’s model of biological evolution. Toulmin states that conceptual change involves the process of innovation and selection. Innovation accounts for the appearance of conceptual variations, while selection accounts for the survival and perpetuation of the soundest conceptions. Innovation occurs when the professionals of a particular discipline come to view things differently from their predecessors; selection subjects the innovative concepts to a process of debate and inquiry in what Toulmin considers as a “forum of competitions.” The soundest concepts will survive the forum of competition as replacements or revisions of the traditional conceptions.

From the absolutists’ point of view, concepts are either valid or invalid regardless of contexts. From the relativists’ perspective, one concept is neither better nor worse than a rival concept from a different cultural context. From Toulmin’s perspective, the evaluation depends on a process of comparison, which determines whether or not one concept will improve explanatory power more than its rival concepts.

Notes[link]

1. ^ Stephen Edelston Toulmin (*62B32)'s lineage has been traced all the way back to John Toulmin (1733 - 180?) and Milcah Pooler (1754 - 1829). See Calvert-Toulmin, Bruce, (2006). Toulmin Family Home Page. Trees Obtained October 23, 2006. See also 62B32 . . : . . . . Stephen Edelston TOULMIN 1922 - Kings Coll. Cambridge (BA 1943, MA 1946, PhD 1948); Junior Sci. Offr, Ministry of Aircraft Prod. 1942-5; Fellow Kings Coll. 1947-51; Lecturer in Philosophy of Science, Oxford; acting head Dept. of History & Methods of Science, Melbourne; Prof. of Philosophy, Leeds 1955-60; Director of Nuffield Found. Unit for History of Ideas from 1960 (State Serv). Later posts in US; prof. Brandeis Univ. nr Boston (PNT), etc. A Cabinet Office file (PRO CAB124/1768) is titled "Science Policy Research Group ... correspondence with Dr Stephen Toulmin", dated November 1963 - September 1964. Author "Place of Reason in Ethics" (CUP 1950; Brit.Lib. 8412.dc.21) etc (Brit.Lib. lists 11 titles); with June Goodfield (2nd wife) of "The Fabric of the Heavens" etc. (Pelican A612, 714, 855, 1963-7). . . : . . . . =(1)Margaret Alison COUTTS 1919 - 1988 Newnham College, Cambridge (MA 1952). (Divorced; m. 2ndly, July 1966, Sir Thomas Bromley, diplomatic service - last posting: ambassador, Addis Ababa.)
2. ^ Loui, Ronald P. (2006). "A Citation-Based Reflection on Toulmin and Argument". In Hitchcock, David; Verheij, Bart. Arguing on the Toulmin Model: New Essays in Argument Analysis and Evaluation. Springer Netherlands. pp. 31–38. DOI:10.1007/978-1-4020-4938-5_3. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/1-234-56789-0|1-234-56789-0]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=3xE5ichwr5MC&lpg=PA31&ots=gGspeEoAs-&dq=A%20Citation-Based%20Reflection%20on%20Toulmin%20and%20Argument&pg=PA31#v=onepage&q=A%20Citation-Based%20Reflection%20on%20Toulmin%20and%20Argument&f=false. Retrieved 2010-06-25. "Toulmin's 1958 work is essential in the field of argumentation" 
3. ^ The Discovery of Time. Penguin. 1967. 
4. ^ Westfall, Richard. "Review: Toulmin and Human Understanding". The Journal of Modern History 47 (4): 691–8. 
5. ^ Jefferson Lecturers at NEH Website (retrieved January 22, 2009).
6. ^ "California Scholar Wins Government Honor," New York Times, February 12, 1997.
7. ^ Stephen Toulmin, "A Dissenter's Life" (text of Toulmin's Jefferson Lecture) at USC website.
8. ^ "The Jefferson Lecture", report on 1997 lecture, at NEH website.
9. ^ "Stephen Toulmin, a Philosopher and Educator, Dies at 87 ", Death of Toulmin.

Works[link]

• An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950) ISBN 0-226-80843-2
• An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (1953)
• The Uses of Argument (1958) 2nd edition 2003: ISBN 0-521-53483-6
• Metaphysical Beliefs, Three Essays (1957) with Ronald W. Hepburn and Alasdair MacIntyre
• The Riviera (1961)
• Seventeenth century science and the arts (1961)
• Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry into the Aims of Science (1961) ISBN 0-313-23345-4
• The Architecture of Matter (1962) with June Goodfield ISBN 0-226-80840-8
• The Fabric of the Heavens: The Development of Astronomy and Dynamics (1963) with June Goodfield ISBN 0-226-80848-3
• Night Sky at Rhodes (1963)
• The Discovery of Time (1966) with June Goodfield ISBN 0-226-80842-4
• Physical Reality (1970)
• Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) ISBN 0-691-01996-7
• Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1972) with Allan Janik
• Knowing and Acting: An Invitation to Philosophy (1976) ISBN 0-02-421020-X
• An Introduction to Reasoning (1979) with Allan Janik and Richard D. Rieke 2nd edition 1997: ISBN 0-02-421160-5
• The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (1985) ISBN 0-520-05465-2
• The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988) with Albert R. Jonsen ISBN 0-520-06960-9
• Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990) ISBN 0-226-80838-6
• Social Impact of AIDS in the United States (1993) with Albert R. Jonsen
• Beyond theory - changing organizations through participation (1996) with Björn Gustavsen (editors)
• Return to Reason (2001) ISBN 0-674-01235-6

See also[link]

• Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club
• Toulmin method

External links[link]

• Stephen Toulmin: An Intellectual Odyssey
• Stephen Toulmin
• Interview with Stephen Toulmin in JAC
• Works by or about Stephen Toulmin in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

References[link]

• Toulmin, Stephen. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: University Press, 1958.
• Long, William. “Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973).” 22 November 2004. 10 February 2006.
• "Stephen Toulmin." Rhetoric and Media Studies. Willamette. 10 February 2006.
• Hitchcock, D. & Verheij, B. (eds.) Arguing on the Toulmin Model. New Essays in Argument Analysis and Evaluation. Springer: Dordrecht, 2006.

This article's lead section may not adequately summarize its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of the article's key points. (September 2010)

Rupert Sheldrake
Born	(1942-06-28) 28 June 1942 (age 69) Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire
Education	M.A. (Cantab), Ph.D.
Alma mater	University of Cambridge, Harvard University
Occupation	Biochemist, parapsychologist, writer
Employer	Perrot-Warrick Project, administered by Trinity College, Cambridge
Website
www.sheldrake.org

Alfred Rupert Sheldrake^[1] (born 28 June 1942) is an English scientist and author. He is known for having proposed a non-genetic account of morphogenesis and for his research into parapsychology. His books and papers stem from his theory of morphic resonance, and cover topics such as animal and plant development and behaviour, memory, telepathy, perception and cognition in general. His publications include A New Science of Life (1981), Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1995), Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (1999), and The Sense of Being Stared At (2003), The Science Delusion: Freeing the spirit of enquiry (2012).

Biography[link]

Early life and education[link]

Sheldrake was born in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire to Doris (née Tebbutt)^[2] and Reginald Alfred Sheldrake (b.1903),^[3][4] a family of Methodists. His father graduated from Nottingham University with a degree in pharmacy,^[5] was also an amateur naturalist and microscopist, and encouraged his son's interest in plants and animals.^[6]

He attended Worksop College, an Anglican boarding-school, and specialized in science. Sheldrake obtained a scholarship to study Biology at Clare College, Cambridge. He specialized in biochemistry, graduated with double-first-class honours, and won the University Botany Prize.^[7] He won a Frank Knox fellowship to study philosophy and history at Harvard University at around the time Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) was published, which he writes informed his view on the extent to which the mechanistic theory of life is just a paradigm. He returned to Cambridge, where he obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry.^[6]

Career[link]

He became a Fellow at Clare College, director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 1974 to 1985, he worked in Hyderabad, India, where he was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. For a year and a half he lived in the ashram of Bede Griffiths, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.^[6][7]

As a biochemist, Sheldrake researched the role of auxin, a plant hormone, in the cellular differentiation of a plant's vascular system. He ended this line of study when he concluded, "The system is circular, it does not explain how [differentiation is] established to start with. After nine years of intensive study, it became clear to me that biochemistry would not solve the problem of why things have the basic shape they do."^[8] More recently, drawing on the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson, Sheldrake has proposed that memory is inherent to all organically formed structures and systems. Where Bergson denied that personal memories and habits are stored in brain tissue, Sheldrake goes a step further by arguing that bodily forms and instincts, while expressed through genes, do not have their primary origin in them. Instead, his hypothesis states, the organism develops under the influence of previous similar organisms, by a mechanism he has dubbed morphic resonance.^[9]

In September 2005 until 2010, Sheldrake received the Perrott-Warrick Scholarship^[10][11] for psychical research and parapsychology, which is administered by Trinity College, Cambridge.^[7][12] Sheldrake then took his current position as Academic Director for the Learning and Thinking Program at The Graduate Institute in Bethany, Connecticut.^[13]

In April 2008, Sheldrake was stabbed in the leg during a lecture at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was presenting as part of the tenth annual International Conference on Science and Consciousness. Sheldrake has since recovered. The assailant, Japanese born laborer Kazuki Hirano, allegedly stabbed Sheldrake because he believed that Sheldrake was using mind control techniques on him. He had followed Sheldrake to New Mexico from England to purportedly ask him how to block mental telepathy when he stabbed him. Sheldrake fears that if he is released and extradited to Japan, he will continue to stalk him.^[14]

Sheldrake has a Methodist background but after a spell as an atheist found himself being drawn back to Christianity when in India, and is now an Anglican.^[15]

Sheldrake has made appearances in popular media, both on radio and on television. He was one of the subjects of a six-part documentary series called Heretic, broadcast on BBC 2 in 1994. On May 18, 2009, he appeared on The Museum of Curiosity on BBC Radio 4.

Sheldrake has entered into a scientific wager with fellow biologist Lewis Wolpert on the importance of DNA in the developing organism. Wolpert bet Sheldrake "a case of fine port"^{[dubious – discuss]} that by the First of May 2029, "given the genome of a fertilised egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities." Sheldrake denies that DNA contains a blueprint of morphological development. If the outcome is not obvious, the British Royal Society will be asked to determine the winner.^[16][17]

Research[link]

Morphic field[link]

"Morphic field" is a term introduced by Sheldrake. He proposes that there is a field within and around a "morphic unit" which organizes its characteristic structure and pattern of activity.^[18] According to Sheldrake, the "morphic field" underlies the formation and behaviour of "holons" and "morphic units", and can be set up by the repetition of similar acts or thoughts. The hypothesis is that a particular form belonging to a certain group, which has already established its (collective) "morphic field", will tune into that "morphic field". The particular form will read the collective information through the process of "morphic resonance", using it to guide its own development. This development of the particular form will then provide, again through "morphic resonance", a feedback to the "morphic field" of that group, thus strengthening it with its own experience, resulting in new information being added (i.e. stored in the database). Sheldrake regards the "morphic fields" as a universal database for both organic (living) and abstract (mental) forms.

That a mode of transmission of shared informational patterns and archetypes might exist did gain some tacit acceptance when it was proposed as the theory of the collective unconscious by renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. According to Sheldrake, the theory of "morphic fields" might provide an explanation for Jung's concept as well. Also, he agrees that the concept of akashic records, term from Vedas representing the "library" of all the experiences and memories of human minds (souls) through their physical lifetime, can be related to "morphic fields",^[19] since one's past (an akashic record) is a mental form, consisting of thoughts as simpler mental forms (all processed by the same brain), and a group of similar or related mental forms also have their associated (collective) "morphic field". (Sheldrake's view on memory-traces is that they are non-local, and not located in the brain.)^[20]

Morphic resonance[link]

Essential to Sheldrake's model is the hypothesis of morphic resonance.^[21] This is a feedback mechanism between the field and the corresponding forms of morphic units. The greater the degree of similarity, the greater the resonance, leading to habituation or persistence of particular forms. So, the existence of a morphic field makes the existence of a new similar form easier.

Sheldrake proposes that the process of morphic resonance leads to stable morphic fields, which are significantly easier to tune into. He suggests that this is the means by which simpler organic forms synergetically self-organize into more complex ones, and that this model allows a different explanation for the process of evolution itself, as an addition to Darwin's evolutionary processes of selection and variation.

Morphogenetic field[link]

For the concept in developmental biology, see Morphogenetic field.

Morphogenetic fields are defined by Sheldrake as the subset of morphic fields which influence, and are influenced by living things.

The term [morphic fields] is more general in its meaning than morphogenetic fields, and includes other kinds of organizing fields in addition to those of morphogenesis; the organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory.

—Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past (Chapter 6, page 112)

The term morphogenetic field generally referred to a "collection of cells by whose interactions a particular organ formed"^[22] in 1920s and 1930s experimental embryology. "The genetics program of biology was originally in direct opposition to the concept of morphogenetic fields... an alternative to the gene as the unit of ontogeny."^[22] Due to the success of genetics, the term fell into widespread disfavor in the 1960s, although it could be still be found in developmental biology literature regarding limb and heart fields. "In such instances, no claims are usually made other than that these areas of mesoderm are destined to form these particular structures".^[22] Sheldrake commented on the distinction between his usage and that of the biologist, whom he said uses the term "morphic field" as a heuristic device, which is conceptually distinct from his own use of the term. He says that most biologists regard morphogenetic fields as "a way of thinking about morphogenesis rather than something that really exists."^[23]

Books[link]

[edit] A New Science of Life

In his first book, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance,^[24] Sheldrake proposed that phenomena – particularly biological ones – become more probable the more often they occur, and therefore biological growth and behaviour become guided into patterns laid down by previous similar events. As a result, newly acquired behaviors are subject to inheritance by subsequent generations – a form of Lamarckism.^[25] He suggested that this underlies many aspects of science, from evolution to laws of nature. Indeed, he suggested that the laws of nature are mutable habits that have evolved since the Big Bang.

Sheldrake's primary focus in this book is morphogenesis, which includes both embryonic cell differentiation and the development of the embryo as a whole.^[26] In chapter 2, "Three Theories of Morphogenesis," Sheldrake states that there are three historical approaches to morphogenesis: materialism (August Weismann), vitalism (Hans Driesch), and organicism (Alfred North Whitehead). Sheldrake describes his own hypothesis as fitting within the third tradition,^[27] which rejects a vitalistic principle exclusive to life but also denies that a strictly materialistic explanation will ever account for the holistic nature of organic forms.^[28] The next three chapters address form as a general topic, the traditional concept of morphogenetic fields, and the possibility that past forms directly influence current organic activity. He introduces his main idea in chapter 6, "Formative Causation and Morphogenesis" and devotes the remaining chapters to subsidiary topics such as inheritance, behavior, instinct and learning, and so on.

The book was discussed in a variety of scientific and religious publications, receiving mixed reviews.^[29] Then in September 1981, Nature published an editorial written by John Maddox, the journal's senior editor, entitled "A book for burning?" In it, Maddox said:

Sheldrake's argument is an exercise in pseudo-science. Many readers will be left with the impression that Sheldrake has succeeded in finding a place for magic within scientific discussion – and this, indeed, may have been a part of the objective of writing such a book.^[30]

Maddox's comments raised what Anthony Freeman called "a storm of controversy".^[29] The New Scientist inquired whether Nature had abandoned the scientific method for "trial by editorial".^[31]

Maddox did not act concerned by the criticism his comments received, and according to Freeman, the "furore that grew out of the assault in Nature put an end to [Sheldrake's] academic career and made him persona non grata in the scientific community."^[29] In a 1994 BBC documentary on Sheldrake's theory, Maddox elaborated on his views:

Sheldrake's is not a scientific theory. Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned, in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reasons: it is heresy.^[32]

[edit] The Presence of the Past

The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988) puts forward morphic resonance, one aspect of the "formative causation" hypothesis Sheldrake introduced in A New Science of Life, and presents evidence for it.^[33]

Sheldrake writes, "Since these past organisms are similar to each other rather than identical, when a subsequent organism comes under their collective influence, its morphogenetic fields are not sharply defined, but consist of a composite of previous similar forms. This process is analogous to composite photography, in which 'average' pictures are produced by superimposing a number of similar images. Morphogenetic fields are 'probability structures,' in which the influence of the most common past types combines to increase the probability that such types will occur again."^[34]

In support of his hypothesis, Sheldrake cites replications of William McDougall's experiment with rats in a water maze and Mae-Wan Ho's replication of CH Waddington's experiment with fruit flies, as well as several psychology experiments involving human learning. Sheldrake contends that a number of biological anomalies are resolved by morphic resonance, including personal memory (which he contends would otherwise require the existence of an elaborate information-storage mechanism in the brain), atavism and parallel evolution. He argues that the existence of organizing fields – with or without inherent memory – would explain phenomena ranging from coordinated behavior among social insects, flocks of birds and schools of fish to the regeneration of severed limbs by salamanders or a sense of phantom limbs among amputees, as the organizing field of a limb would remain even after the limb itself had been lost.^[9][34]

[edit] Seven Experiments That Could Change the World

In 1994 Sheldrake proposed a list of Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, which included, among other things, the seed of his study of Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home (1999). In Seven Experiments ... he encouraged lay people to contribute to scientific research, and argued that scientific experiments similar to his own could be conducted on a shoestring budget.^[35]

[edit] The Sense of Being Stared At

In 2003, Sheldrake published The Sense of Being Stared At on the psychic staring effect, including an experiment where blindfolded subjects guessed whether persons were staring at them or at another target. He reported that, in tens of thousands of trials, 60% of subjects reported being stared at when being stared at; 50% of subjects reported being stared at when they were not being stared at. According to Sheldrake, this suggested a weak sense of being stared at but no sense of not being stared at. He also claimed that these experiments were widely repeated, in schools in Connecticut and Toronto and a science museum in Amsterdam, with consistent results.^[36]

[edit] The Science Delusion

Sheldrake's most recent title (2012) summarises much of his previous work and encapsulates it into a broader critique of modern materialism, with the title mimicking the controversial book by one of Sheldrake's critics Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion. [In an interview with Fortean Times, Sheldrake denied that Dawkins' book was the inspiration for his own. "The title was at the insistence of my publishers, and the book will be re-titled in the USA as "Science Set Free". Dawkins is far less important outside Britain (...) Dawkins is a passionate believer in materialist dogma, but the book is not a response to him - although I do object to his dumbed-down representation of science"]. ^[37] Sheldrake proposes a number of questions as the theme of each chapter which seek to elaborate on his central premise that science is predicated on the belief that the nature of reality is fully understood, with only minor details needing to be filled in. This delusion is what Sheldrake argues has turned science in to a series of dogmas rather than a genuinely open minded approach to investigating phenomena, and that there exist many powerful taboos that circumscribe what scientists can legitimately direct their attention towards.

Later work[link]

In 2003 Sheldrake published research on human telepathy in an experiment where subjects guessed which of four people was going to telephone or send an email. Sheldrake reported that the subject guesses the person correctly about 40% of the time instead of the expected 25% (p=.05).^[38]

Sheldrake's work was the theme of a plenary session titled "Anomalies of Consciousness" of the 2008 Toward a Science of Consciousness conference.^[39] where he presented his work on telepathy in animals and humans,^[40] followed by three critiques of his work on the sense of being stared at.^[41][42]

Reception[link]

Sheldrake's work has little support in the mainstream scientific community. Members of the scientific community consider Sheldrake's claims to be currently unfalsifiable and therefore outside of the scope of scientific experiment. The "morphic field" concept is believed by many to fall into the realm of pseudoscience.^[30][43][44]

Some within the parapsychological community have supported the theories of Sheldrake as they believe it may explain the phenomena of extrasensory perception. Paranormal writers and parapsychologists such as Arthur Koestler,^[45] Brian Inglis^[46] and John L. Randall have supported the work of Sheldrake.^[47]

Sheldrake's ideas have resonated with the general public and some physicists such as David Bohm.^[48] The idea that fields may influence cells has even received cautious support from biologists Janis Roze and Sue Ann Miller.^[8] However, Sheldrake's work has met with a hostile reception from other scientists.^[29] Neurophysiologist and consciousness researcher Christof Koch, for example, has stated that discussing Sheldrake's ideas is a "waste of time," given the absence of hard, physical evidence and Sheldrake's lack of understanding of modern neurobiology.^[29] Henry Bauer compared Sheldrake's ideas to Wilhelm Reich's generally discredited claims of orgone energies.^[49] In his Skeptic's Dictionary, Robert Todd Carroll stated, in an article highly critical of Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, that "although Sheldrake commands some respect as a scientist because of his education and degree, he has clearly abandoned conventional science in favor of magical thinking."^[50]

Germano Resconi and Masoud Nikravesh are sympathetic to Sheldrake's ideas, and base their concept of morphic computing directly upon Sheldrake's morphic fields and morphogenetic fields, but acknowledge that "Morphic fields and its subset morphogenetic fields have been at the center of controversy for many years in mainstream science and the hypothesis is not accepted by some scientists who consider it a pseudoscience."^[51]

Some quantum physicists have supported Sheldrake's hypothesis.^[8] The late David Bohm suggested that Sheldrake's hypothesis was in keeping with his own ideas on what he terms "implicate" and "explicate" order.^[8] Hans-Peter Dürr has called for further discussion of Sheldrake's hypothesis, describing it as one of the first to reconcile 20th-century breakthroughs in physics, which emphasize fields and the indivisible nature of matter, with biology, which he says for the most part remains rooted in 19th-century Newtonian concepts of particles and separateness.^[8][52] Others, like biologist Michael Klymkowsky, disagree, contending that "[w]e live in a macroscopic world. Quantum effects are essentially irrelevant".^[8] For more details on this topic, see quantum biology.

The concept has attracted speculation from neurolinguistic programming, as an explanation for action at a distance.^[53] Sheldrake's book The Presence of the Past: A Field Theory of Life was positively reviewed by the physicist Amit Goswami.^[54]

Scientific reception[link]

Morphic resonance predicts that memories of one generation are automatically passed on to the next generation, though unconsciously, or to other conspecifics. A neuroscientist and memory expert, Steven Rose, has been critical of this view. A major reason for the criticism is that Rose does not feel there to be any anomalous phenomena which require the theory of morphic resonance as an explanation. Rose suggested an experiment to resolve the matter. In Rose's opinion the resulting study, done in collaboration with Sheldrake, disproved morphic resonance,^[55] but Sheldrake has challenged this.^[56]

Sheldrake's ideas have often met with a hostile reception from some scientists, including accusations that he is engaged in pseudoscience,^[8][30][29] and at least two respected scientists who have sought to discuss his work, thoroughgoing metaphysical naturalists Lewis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins, reportedly refused to even examine his evidence—a fact cited as illustrating the dogmatic nature of mainstream science alluded to in Sheldrake's book The Science Delusion.^[57]

Testing formative causation[link]

In 1990 neurobiologist Steven Rose experimented jointly with Sheldrake to test the hypothesis of morphic resonance. The experiment involved training day-old chicks to react negatively to a small yellow light when the light was followed 30 min later by an injection which caused temporary illness. Chicks become strongly averse to pecking the stimulus again. Sheldrake predicted that successive batches of day-old chicks would progressively become more averse to pecking the light for the first time, because morphic resonance would cause them to "remember" the experience of previous generations of chicks. Rose predicted that no such effect would be observed.^[58][59]

Rose wrote that he and several scientists who reviewed the data were convinced that there was no evidence of morphic resonance.^[58] Sheldrake, however, said that the proportion of test chicks taking longer than 10 sec for the first peck, compared with control chicks, gradually increased in successive batches and believed therefore that the experiment supported his theory.^[59]

In a separate paper, Rose responded that there were several confounding details of the experiment which skewed the results, such as the experimenter improving his skills with practice over the course of the experiment. Rose said there was no trend for an increase in the latency, in fact a slight decrease, thus disconfirming Sheldrake's prediction. In an independent analysis of the data, biologist Patrick Bateson agreed with Rose that the results ran counter to the prediction of morphic resonance.^[60]

Sheldrake responded that Rose's analysis omitted a significant portion of the data, thus skewing the results. Sheldrake contended that repeating Rose's analysis with the full set of data shows that the trends in aversion were in fact significantly different and morphic resonance was confirmed, not disconfirmed.^[61] Rose and other researchers in the field, however, rejected this interpretation of the results.^[58]

Tests of the staring effect[link]

David Marks and John Colwell, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer (2000), criticized the experimental procedures Sheldrake had developed for tests designed to demonstrate the existence of the staring effect.^[62] Apart from the fact that Sheldrake had encouraged the involvement of lay members of the public in research of the effect, Marks and Colwell suggested that the sequences used in tests followed the same patterning that people who guess and gamble like to follow.^[62] These guessing patterns have relatively few long runs and many alternations.^[62] The non-randomness of test sequences could thus lead to implicit or explicit pattern learning when feedback is provided.^[62] When the patterns being guessed mirror naturally occurring guessing patterns, the results could go above or below chance levels even without feedback.^[62] Thus significant results could occur purely from non-random guessing.^[62] Non-randomization is one of seven flaws in parapsychological research identified by Marks.^[63]

Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American (2005) that there were a number of objections to Sheldrake's experiments on the sense of being stared at, reiterating Marks' and Colwell's points about non-randomization and the use of unsupervised laypeople, and adding confirmation bias and experimenter bias to the list of potential problems; he concluded that Sheldrake's claim was unfalsifiable.^[64]

Sheldrake (2004, 2005) responded to the criticisms by stating that the experiments had been widely replicated; the results from an independent meta-analysis, which had excluded all data from unsupervised tests, were shown to be highly significant; and the Marks-Colwell suggestion of non-randomization had been refuted by thousands of trials with different randomization methods, including coin-tossing, yielding positive and highly statistically significant results, whatever the randomization method.^[65][66]

2006 British Association controversy[link]

In September 2006, Sheldrake and Peter Fenwick (a near-death experience researcher) were invited by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) to speak at an event at the University of East Anglia, which resulted in criticism from Lord Winston, Peter Atkins, Richard Wiseman and the Royal Society^{[67][68][69][70][71][72][73]}

See also[link]

• Fritjof Capra
• Lyall Watson
• Epigenetics
• Hundredth monkey effect
• Synchronicity
• Bodo Sperling
• Noosphere

Works[link]

• "The Science Delusion: Freeing the spirit of enquiry", London: Coronet, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4447-2795-1.

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• SheldrakeTV - Rupert Sheldrake online premium videos
• Sheldrake in the video Cognition Factor
• On Overlapping Morphic Fields: Dr. Sheldrake in an interview.
• Interview (audio and transcript): Dr. Rupert Sheldrake on Parapsychology and Skepticism
• Global Lens Interview(VIDEO)
• Eckart Löhr: A review of the book “The Presence of the Past” by Rupert Sheldrake

Freeman Dyson
Long Now Seminar, San Francisco, 5th October, 2005
Born	(1923-12-15) December 15, 1923 (age 88) Crowthorne, Berkshire, England
Nationality	American British
Fields	Physics, Mathematics
Institutions	Royal Air Force Institute for Advanced Study Duke University Cornell University
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	Hans Bethe
Known for	Dyson sphere Dyson operator Advocacy against nuclear weapons Dyson conjecture Dyson's eternal intelligence Dyson number Dyson tree Dyson's transform
Influences	Richard Feynman
Notable awards	Heineman Prize (1965) Harvey Prize (1977) Wolf Prize (1981) Templeton Prize (2000) Pomeranchuk Prize (2003) Fermi Award (1993)
Notes He is notably the son of George Dyson (composer), and father of Esther Dyson, Dorothy Dyson, Mia Dyson, Rebecca Dyson, Emily Dyson, and George Dyson (science historian).

Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is a British-born^[1] American^[2] theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.^[3] Dyson has lived in Princeton, New Jersey, for over fifty years.^[4]

Biography[link]

Personal[link]

Dyson's father was the English composer Sir George Dyson; his mother was trained as a lawyer but after Dyson was born worked as a social worker.^[5] Despite sharing a last name, he is not related to the early 20th century astronomer Frank Watson Dyson, but as a small boy Freeman Dyson was aware of Frank Watson Dyson. Freeman credits the popularity of an astronomer with the same last name as having inadvertently helped to spark his interest in science.^{[citation needed]}

Dyson has six children, two of them (Esther and George) with his first wife, mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, and the other four with his second wife, Imme Dyson, a masters runner who married him in 1958.^[4] Due to issues with some of his children not being recognized as British citizens he abjured his allegiance to Britain, and became a naturalized American citizen.^[1][2]

His eldest daughter Esther is a digital technology consultant. His son George is a historian of science,^[6] one of whose books is Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957–1965.

Friends and colleagues describe him as shy and self-effacing with a contrarian streak that his friends find refreshing but his intellectual opponents find exasperating. "I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice," physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg said of him. His friend, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, said: "A favorite word of Freeman's about doing science and being creative is the word subversive. He feels it's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he's done that all his life."^[4]

Career[link]

Although Dyson has won numerous scientific awards, he has never won a Nobel Prize, which has led Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg to state that the Nobel committee has "fleeced" Dyson. Dyson has said that “I think it’s almost true without exception if you want to win a Nobel Prize, you should have a long attention span, get hold of some deep and important problem and stay with it for 10 years. That wasn’t my style.”^[4]

Dyson was a Scholar at the renowned Winchester College from 1936 to 1941. He was received (as one of 20 distinguished Old Wykehamists) on 4 May 2011 at the Ad Portas celebration, the highest honour that the College bestows. After leaving Winchester he joined the operational research section at RAF Bomber Command, where he remained for the rest of World War II.^[7] After the war, he obtained a BA in mathematics from the University of Cambridge (1945) and was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1946 to 1949. In 1947 he moved to the US, on a fellowship at Cornell University and thence joined the faculty there as a physics professor in 1951 without a PhD. In 1953, he took up a post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In 1957, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Dyson is best known^[8] for demonstrating in 1949 the equivalence of the formulations of quantum electrodynamics that existed by that time – Richard Feynman's diagrams, on the one hand, and, on the other, the operator method developed by Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Dyson was the first person (besides Feynman) to appreciate the power of Feynman diagrams, and his 1949 paper (written in 1948) was the first paper using them. He said in that paper that Feynman diagrams were not just a computational tool, but a physical theory. He developed rules for the diagrams that completely solved the renormalization problem. Dyson's paper and also his lectures presented Feynman's theories of QED (quantum electrodynamics) in a form that other physicists could understand and undoubtedly facilitated the physics community's acceptance of Feynman's work. Robert Oppenheimer, in particular, was persuaded by Dyson that Feynman's new theory was as valid as Schwinger's and Tomonaga's. Oppenheimer rewarded Dyson with a lifetime appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study, "for proving me wrong," Oppenheimer said.^[9]

The same year, in related work, Dyson invented the Dyson series.^[10] It was this Dyson paper that inspired John Ward to derive his celebrated Ward identity.^[11]

Dyson also did work in a variety of topics in mathematics, such as topology, analysis, number theory and random matrices.^[12] There is an interesting story involving random matrices. In 1973 the number theorist Hugh Montgomery was visiting the Institute for Advanced Study and had just made his pair correlation conjecture concerning the distribution of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function. He showed his formula to the mathematician Atle Selberg who said it looked like something in mathematical physics and he should show it to Dyson, which he did. Dyson recognized the formula as the pair correlation function of the Gaussian unitary ensemble, which has been extensively studied by physicists. This suggested that there might be an unexpected connection between the distribution of primes 2,3,5,7,11,... and the energy levels in the nuclei of heavy elements such as uranium.^[13]

From 1957 to 1961 he worked on the Orion Project, which proposed the possibility of space-flight using nuclear pulse propulsion. A prototype was demonstrated using conventional explosives, but a treaty, which he was involved in and supported, banned the testing of nuclear weapons other than underground, and this caused the project to be abandoned.

In 1958 he led the design team for the TRIGA, a small, inherently safe nuclear reactor used throughout the world in hospitals and universities for the production of isotopes.

A seminal work by Dyson came in 1966 when, together with Andrew Lenard and independently of Elliott H. Lieb and Walter Thirring, he proved rigorously that the exclusion principle plays the main role in the stability of bulk matter.^[14][15][16] Hence, it is not the electromagnetic repulsion between electrons and nuclei that is responsible for two wood blocks that are left on top of each other not coalescing into a single piece, but rather it is the exclusion principle applied to electrons and protons that generates the classical macroscopic normal force. In condensed matter physics, Dyson also did studies in the phase transition of the Ising model in 1 dimension and spin waves.^[12]

Around 1979, Dyson worked with the Institute for Energy Analysis on climate studies. This group, under the direction of Alvin Weinberg, pioneered multidisciplinary climate studies, including a strong biology group. He is not an unqualified believer in the predictions being made by the believers in global warming (see below).^[17] Also during the 1970s, Dyson worked on climate studies conducted by the JASON defense advisory group.^[4]

He retired from the Institute for Advanced Study in 1994.^[18] In 1998, Dyson joined the board of the Solar Electric Light Fund. As of 2003^[update], Dyson is the president of the Space Studies Institute, the space research organization founded by Gerard K. O'Neill. Dyson is a long-time member of the JASON defense advisory group.

Dyson is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Honors and awards[link]

In 1952 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society^[19]

Dyson was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1966, Max Planck medal in 1969 and the Harvey Prize in 1977.

In 1977, Dyson supervised Princeton undergraduate John Aristotle Phillips in a term paper that outlined a credible design for a nuclear weapon. This earned Phillips the nickname The A-Bomb Kid.

In the 1984–85 academic year he gave the Gifford lectures at Aberdeen, which resulted in the book Infinite In All Directions.

In 1989, Dyson taught at Duke University as a Fritz London Memorial Lecturer. In the same year, he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

Dyson has published a number of collections of speculations and observations about technology, science, and the future. In 1996 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science.

In 1993, Dyson was given the Enrico Fermi Award.

In 2000, Dyson was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

In 2003, Dyson was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado.

Concepts[link]

Biotechnology and genetic engineering[link]

Dyson cheerfully admits his record as a prophet is mixed, but "it is better to be wrong than to be vague."^[21]

"To answer the world's material needs, technology has to be not only beautiful but also cheap."^[22]

Dyson sphere[link]

Artist's concept of Dyson rings, forming a stable Dyson swarm, or "Dyson sphere".

In 1960 Dyson wrote a short paper for the journal Science, entitled "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation".^[24] In it, he theorized that a technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization might completely surround its native star with artificial structures in order to maximize the capture of the star's available energy. Eventually, the civilization would completely enclose the star, intercepting electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths from visible light downwards and radiating waste heat outwards as infrared radiation. Therefore, one method of searching for extraterrestrial civilizations would be to look for large objects radiating in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Dyson conceived that such structures would be clouds of asteroid-sized space habitats, though science fiction writers have preferred a solid structure: either way, such an artifact is often referred to as a Dyson sphere, although Dyson himself used the term "shell". Dyson says that he used the term "artificial biosphere" in the article meaning a habitat, not a shape.^[25] The general concept of such an energy-transferring shell had been advanced decades earlier by author Olaf Stapledon in his 1937 novel Star Maker, a source that Dyson has credited publicly.^[26][27]

Dyson tree[link]

Dyson has also proposed the creation of a Dyson tree, a genetically-engineered plant capable of growing on a comet. He suggested that comets could be engineered to contain hollow spaces filled with a breathable atmosphere, thus providing self-sustaining habitats for humanity in the outer solar system.

Space colonies[link]

Dyson has been interested in space travel since he was a child, reading such science fiction classics as Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. As a young man, he worked for General Atomics on the nuclear-powered Orion spacecraft. He hoped Project Orion would put men on Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970. He's been unhappy for a quarter-century on how the government conducts space travel:

He still hopes for cheap space travel, but is resigned to waiting for private entrepreneurs to develop something new—and cheap.

Dyson also has proposed the use of bioengineered space colonies to colonize the Kuiper Belt on the outer edge of our Solar System. He proposed that habitats could be grown from space hardened spores. The colonies could then be warmed by large reflector plant leaves that could focus the dim, distant sunlight back on the growing colony. This was illustrated by Pat Rawlings on the cover of the National Space Society's Ad Astra magazine.

Space exploration[link]

Dyson's transform[link]

Dyson also has some credits in pure mathematics. His concept "Dyson's transform" led to one of the most important lemmas of Olivier Ramaré's theorem that every even integer can be written as a sum of no more than six primes.

Dyson series[link]

The Dyson series, the formal solution of an explicitly time-dependent Schrödinger equation by iteration, and the corresponding Dyson time-ordering operator Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \mathcal T\,,

an entity of basic importance in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, are also named after Dyson.