Professor Freeman Dyson, a great physicist, thinker and futurist, has been very active in scientific, literary and public policy activities throughout his career. As a tribute to him on the occasion of his 90th birthday and to celebrate his lifelong contributions in physics, mathematics, astronomy, nuclear engineering and global warming, a conference covering a wide range of topics was held in Singapore from 26 to 29 August 2013. Distinguished scientists from around the world, including Nobel Laureate Professor David Gross, joined Professor Dyson in the celebration with a festival of lectures.This memorable volume collects an interesting lecture by Professor Dyson, Is a Graviton Detectable?, contributions by speakers at the conference, as well as guest contributions by colleagues who celebrated Dyson's birthday at Rutgers University and Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.About Freeman DysonFreeman John Dyson FRS, born December 15, 1923, is an eminent English-born American physicist, mathematician, and futurist. He is famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, mathematics, astronomy and nuclear engineering, as well as a renowned and best-selling author. He has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the public. He has won numerous notable awards including the Enrico Fermi Award, Templeton Prize, Wolf Prize, Pomeranchuk Prize, and Henri Poincaré Prize.

This thesis focuses on the recent firewall controversy surrounding evaporating black holes, and shows that in the best understood example concerning electrically charged black holes with a flat event horizon in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime, the firewall does not arise. The firewall, which surrounds a sufficiently old black hole, threatens to develop into a huge crisis since it could occur even when spacetime curvature is small, which contradicts general relativity. However, the end state for asymptotically flat black holes is ill-understood since their curvature becomes unbounded. This issue is avoided by working with flat charged black holes in AdS. The presence of electrical charge is crucial since black holes inevitably pick up charges throughout their long lifetime. These black holes always evolve toward extremal limit, and are then destroyed by quantum gravitational effects. This happens sooner than the time required to decode Hawking radiation so that the firewall never sets in, as conjectured by Harlow and Hayden. Motivated by the information loss paradox, the author also investigates the possibility that “monster” configurations might exist, with an arbitrarily large interior bounded by a finite surface area. Investigating such an object in AdS shows that in the best understood case, such an object -- much like a firewall -- cannot exist.

This book is a sequel to the volume of selected papers of Dyson up to 1990 that was published by the American Mathematical Society in 1996. The present edition comprises a collection of the most interesting writings of Freeman Dyson, all personally selected by the author, from the period 1990–2014. The five sections start off with an Introduction, followed by Talks about Science, Memoirs, Politics and History, and some Technical Papers. The most noteworthy is a lecture entitled Birds and Frogs to the American Mathematical Society that describes two kinds of mathematicians with examples from real life. Other invaluable contributions include an important tribute to C. N. Yang written for his retirement banquet at Stony Brook University, as well as a historical account of the Operational Research at RAF Bomber Command in World War II provocatively titled A Failure of Intelligence. The final section carries the open-ended question of whether any conceivable experiment could detect single gravitons to provide direct evidence of the quantization of gravity — Is a Graviton Detectable? Various possible graviton-detectors are examined. This invaluable compilation contains unpublished lectures, and surveys many topics in science, mathematics, history and politics, in which Freeman Dyson has been so active and well respected around the world.

"Publication List [by] Vernon W. Hughes"--p. 223-252.

This is an in-depth study of not just about Tan Kah-kee, but also the making of a legend through his deeds, self-sacrifices, fortitude and foresight. This revised edition sheds new light on his political agonies in Mao's China over campaigns against capitalists and intellectuals.

Presents a step-by-step explanation of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity through a series of diagrams rather than equations.

The M.A.B. BÉG MEMORIAL VOLUME is based on scientific articles written in honor of the late Mirza Abdul Baqi Bég, a professor of physics at the Rockefeller University, New York. The contributed articles are partly based on talks given at the school on high energy physics and cosmology, held March 11 - 25, 1990 at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan, and partly on articles contributed by his colleagues and collaborators.Being a scientific tribute to Bég, the articles reflect the specific areas of his scientific research and the contemporary trends and open questions in elementary particle physics. Deciphering the mechanism of symmetry breaking with the help of known properties of elementary particles - their masses and couplings — and devising new experimental tests to find clues to the actual physical phenomena at work, are the recurring themes in this book. The role of higher symmetries, formulated in terms of the string and grand unified theories, likewise is elucidated in several articles.The book also contains one of the last articles authored by Bég, written in honor of Luigi Radicati, describing a scientific history of the crucial development from the quark model to the standard model which took place in the sixties.

Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology. Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother's casual remark, "I wish I'd used my calculus," hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world. The book begins with the return of Halley's comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration. When Computers Were Human is the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community. In the end, they were rewarded by a new electronic machine that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.