A conversation with theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson

CHARLIE ROSE:  So the world is getting warmer.

FREEMAN DYSON:  No, I went to Greenland myself, where
the warming is most extreme. And it’s quite spectacular,
of course, what you see in Greenland.

CHARLIE ROSE:  OK, but do you believe that if in fact
there continues to be global warming in those regions,
that we will eliminate the ice and, therefore there will
be a rising of the water level, and, therefore, at some
point it will threaten us all?

FREEMAN DYSON:  No.  I don’t believe that.  I mean, the
point is that the sea level has been rising for 12,000
years.  And it has nothing to do with global warming.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Nothing?

FREEMAN DYSON:  It’s a separate problem.  I mean.

CHARLIE ROSE:  But does global warming contribute to it?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Probably.  But we don’t know how much.
And it’s certainly not -- the main problem when you’re
dealing with a rising ocean -- I mean, we know it’s been
going on for 12,000 years.  We know it has very little
to do with human activities.  So it will be a great --
it will be a terrible mistake to think you solved the
problem of the rising ocean when you’re only dealing with
climate.

CHARLIE ROSE:  OK, so is global warming bad?

FREEMAN DYSON:  No, I would say warming is certainly real,
but it’s mostly happening in cold places at high latitudes,
and it’s also happening more in winter than in summer, and
it’s also happening more at night than in daytime.

CHARLIE ROSE:  But is the emission of so much CO2 into the
atmosphere a good thing?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Even though it breaks -- whatever it does
up there?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes, I would say it’s a very good thing.
It makes plants grow better.

CHARLIE ROSE:  So all the CO2 doesn’t bother you, even
though.

FREEMAN DYSON:  No, that’s a big plus.  And then against
that, you have possible harmful effects of warming.  But
I think it is most important that warming is happening in
places that are cold.  It’s happening in places where’s
it’s winter rather than in summer, and at night rather
than in daytime.  So it means that it’s essentially
evening out the climate rather than just making everything
hotter.

CHARLIE ROSE:  What’s interesting is that you are not
arguing with the facts.  You are arguing with the
conclusions.

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  What concerns you today?  What do you worry
about?

FREEMAN DYSON:  I worry about nuclear weapons.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Yeah.  There is this idea that physics has
had its century, that was the 20th century, and the 21st
century belongs to molecular biology and brain science.

FREEMAN DYSON:  I think that’s quite likely to be true.
I mean, that -- it’s certain that physics has slowed down
during my lifetime, largely just because the experiments
have become so slow.  But biology, at the same time, has
been speeding up.  So, I think it’s probably true that
this century is the century of biology.

CHARLIE ROSE:  What did you determine about the origins
of life?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Well, I’m simply speculating that it
actually had two origins.

FREEMAN DYSON:  That we had -- our living creatures are
made of two components, which is sort of hardware and
software, like computers.  And the hardware being.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Wait, living creatures are made of two
components, hardware and software?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.  The hardware being sort of the
chemistry of things, what they call metabolism, the
eating and drinking and processing chemicals.  All the
real processing, all the active things like nerves and
muscles and so on are made of hardware, proteins.  And
then there is the software, which is the genes, the
genomes, and which is just the instructions for how to
build it.

And so we have these two components, which are very
separate in life, as we know it. So I’m making the
hypothesis that really, it was unlikely that they both
were there from the beginning.  It’s much more likely
that they originated separately. So that…

CHARLIE ROSE:  Simultaneously or…

FREEMAN DYSON:  No, on the contrary.  You had the
hardware first, and then you had life evolving without
genes for a long time.  And then genes were then an
independent creature, which originally were parasites,
and then took over the direction, so they became then
-- became then a symbiosis, a collaborative system,
which both of them worked together.  That seems to me
a reasonable point of view, but I don’t claim it’s true.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Are you optimistic about all of us?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  In the end?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Oh, very optimistic.  It’s quite
amazing how much we’ve been able to do in the short
time we came down from the trees.  We have talents,
which to me are quite extraordinary, because they
don’t have any obvious survival value. Like for
example, calculating numbers. I mean, who needs to
calculate numbers in order to survive? It’s not at
all clear.  Why should we be able to compose string
quartets?  Why should we be able to paint paintings?
Everything we do is so much more than you require
just to survive.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Have we been kind to the planet?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.  I would say on the whole, yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Whom you look a bit like (ph).

FREEMAN DYSON:  No, the fact is of course, we’ve done
a lot of damage to the planet, but we also repair the
damage. I grew up in England, and England was far more
filthy then  than it is now.  Because we had the
industrial revolution first. So England was much more
polluted than the United States ever has been, and
England now is quite comparatively clean.  You can go
to London and your collar doesn’t get blacked in one
day.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Have you been to Beijing?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  And you’re not bothered by that? And you
want them to build every coal-burning plant they want to
build?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.  They should clean up the coal, but
of course that you can do. The global warming people
don’t make a distinction between carbon dioxide, which is
essentially, in my view, harmless, and the other things
in coal which are horrible -- soot and smog and nitrogen
oxide and all that stuff.  There’s a lot of very ugly
stuff in coal, which you can get rid of by scrubbing the
coal and scrubbing the gases that come out of the fire
station.  And so, the Chinese certainly can do a lot more
of that, and they are doing a lot more of that.

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