Letters to the Editor
walter_map
Published Letters: 1420 Editor's Choice: 20
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elitist & Emyth
[Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]He needs to be taken down hard so that he doesn't confuse the public.
It's been done. The guy just keeps getting up and talking again, mostly because morons who know even less than he does like what he says because it supports their political and religious agendas.
Surely someone has come up with a nice, sharply cutting label for this intellectual fallacy by now.
How about pompous twit? Dyson suffers from sophomorism. He knows just enough about a variety of subjects to say something about them without being able to say anything intelligent about them. You see a lot of this in second-year high-school students. Dyson is sophomoric by his own admission.
He's not a polymath. He's a dilettante in multiple subjects. He never earned a Ph.D. because he just doesn't have the stuff, and he's admitted that too. Any serious scientist would wipe the floor with him in a debate, which is why he refuses such debates.
For me, science is just a box of tricks, and I enjoy playing with them.
Which is true, for him. This is his way of confessing that he does not understand science. He does not even understand his own unification of three of the four forces, because his one and only 'accomplishment' amounted to fiddling with algebraic equations until he accidentally fit them together - the mathematical equivalent of working a jigsaw puzzle, and requiring no more understanding than that.
Let's ping him on just a couple of factual errors, shall we?
Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder.
Let's drop him in the Sahara and try that again, shall we?
But in fact, the bears are doing very well. The numbers of bears in the Arctic are increasing rather than decreasing. On the whole, they like it to be warm.
This is patently false. It's bizarre. They're going extinct. Polar bears are adapted to a cold climate and tolerate warm temperatures badly. A clear demonstration of Dyson's dismissal of plain facts.
the living world consisted of primitive cells and genes, which are really the same thing as viruses, traveling around exchanged from cell to cell.
Preposterous. A cell is not a virus, and neither is a gene. Neither do genes simply float around freely like gas molecules. They never have, and they don't, even when they are transferred. The guy's just talking out his ass. Send him back to freshman biology.
It's remarkable that people even listen to this guy, because he's a hack, and he knows it:
"And the 22-year-old has become even less reliable now that he's 82."
'Nuff said.
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Dyson and sunlight.
[Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...sunlight is distributed very evenly over the globe.
Really?
Explain ice caps. Explain why the tropic are warmer than the poles.
How pathetic can you get?
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Dyson and computers.
[Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The biggest part of the computer industry is computer games.
No, the biggest part of the computer industry is transaction processing in retail and finance.
Dyson should stick to subjects he knows something about.
No telling what that might be. The guy's a cesspool of misinformation.
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Dyson and religion.
[Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For me, religion is much more about a community of people than about belief. It's fine literature and music. As far as I can tell, people who belong to my church don't necessarily believe anything.
That's not religion. That's claptrap. Apparently he doesn't know how to use a dictionary.
Somebody should explain what religion is to Dyson. Use very small words.
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Barnardsstar
[Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And Dyson did offer up the theoretical Dyson sphere once upon a time: a system of satellites meant to capture the entire energy output of a star.
That's not a Dyson sphere. A Dyson sphere is a sphere that encloses a star. A Dyson sphere isn't possible. Can you explain why?
As much as his ability to "do the math" is impressive, I applaud his imagination.
I'm not impressed. Shuffling algebraic equations around, as I've pointed out, is the mathematical equivalent of working a jigsaw puzzle - without looking at the picture the puzzle represents. So it's not physics, either. It's Tinkertoys.
You're sucking up to a flim-flam. Don't do that to yourself.