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The man behind the sphere, Freeman Dyson, is dead at 96:
Freeman Dyson, a physicist whose interests often took him to the edge of science fiction, has died at the age of 96. Dyson is probably best known for his idea of eponymous spheres that would allow civilizations to capture all the energy radiating off a star. But his contributions ranged from fundamental physics to the practicalities of using nuclear weapons for war and peace. And he remained intellectually active into his 90s, although he wandered into the wrong side of science when it came to climate change.
Degrees? Who needs 'em?
It's difficult to find anything that summarizes a career so broad, but a sense of his intellectual energy comes from his educational history. Dyson was a graduate student in physics when he managed to unify two competing ideas about quantum electrodynamics, placing an entire field on a solid theoretical foundation. Rather than writing that up as his thesis, he simply moved on to other interests. He didn't get a doctorate until the honorary ones started arriving later in his career. His contributions were considered so important that he kept getting faculty jobs regardless.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday February 29 2020, @04:01AM (8 children)
No alien megastructures found in time for him to see it. Tabby's Star [wikipedia.org] looks like a bust.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Touché) by barbara hudson on Saturday February 29 2020, @04:28AM (3 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @04:49AM (2 children)
We need a new mod, an "ouch" mod, or a "totally inappropriate" mod. Perhaps, a "dead war criminal" mod.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @08:58AM (1 child)
It's called touche.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @10:17PM
No, touche is tasked with so much here, that it makes ambiguous. Touche to me means that there was a good come-back line -- usually a funny one or a sarcastic one. Rarely do I think we use it to mean "good point". Anyway, to make it try to mean more than that makes it less useful in the long run.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday February 29 2020, @05:12AM (3 children)
Lots of interesting quotes [wikiquote.org], including this one:
Too bad the arsetechnica author elevates himself over an acknowledged master.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Saturday February 29 2020, @05:22AM (2 children)
I think this is how falsifiability [britannica.com] is described. It also helps in the office and in documentation, when being wrong can be confirmed and/or corrected, but being vague devolves to "miscommunications", leading to long email chains that people forget the initial point of after keeping up with them for ~5 replies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @09:01AM (1 child)
The only strange thing is that you think this is abnormal. This is the normal state of human affairs. Any deviation from it is a rare, and productive, event.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 01 2020, @03:18PM
Telling someone else what they think, doesn't make them think that way.