The Starship and the Canoe

Kenneth Brower

Harper & Row, Publishers

New York, 1983

ISBN 0-06-091030-5

Read sometime in the 1990s.

Distant Reflections: 2007 July 10

I wish I had written a review on this book, but did not. I only made the following note on a piece of scratch paper:

“A good reference on the conflict between technology and the call of nature.”

It is the joint biography of imminent physicist Freeman Dyson and his son George. Freeman gained fame during WW II by analyzing aircraft losses and determining that formations weren’t flying close enough together to be protected from flack. This could be determined from the lack of mid-air fender benders. Tightening up the formations made some of the statistical difference they were looking for. Later he was involved in many forward looking physics endeavors such as Project Orion, to blast a community-sized payload into space and travel around the solar system on A-Bombs, about one per second when thrusting. They secretly subcontracted to coke for their dispensing machine technology and actually made a dynamite-powered scale model work. But there were problems, not the least of which was that kiloton bombs are right in the terrorist threat regime. That’s the starship.

This in contrast to son George, who lives subsistence in the Pacific Northwest (maybe in Canada, I don’t remember) and travels around in canoes that he makes himself. Father and son were somewhat estranged but were reunited for a time by the author. It doesn’t seem like they have much in common. But, consider the cosmology of the natives quoted by George, that creation is all run by flocks of Ravens, versus a cosmology in which space itself is made of incredibly heavy particles, vibrating. Are these really that disparate? Not to a layman.

They used to have Freeman Dyson come out to JPL and give us lectures on space-science topics that we didn’t already know about. Things like comet flux from the Oort cloud, civilizations living in the focus of parabolic reflectors in the Kuiper Belt (and shining back at us!), Dyson spheres (containing an entire star at a distance of one astronomical unit so as to utilize all of its energy), the Society of Human Responsibilities (much less popular than Human Rights organizations), and Orion. I even went and chatted with him once during his “office hours.”

He doesn’t seem to come around anymore. He’s pretty old and maybe doesn’t leave Princeton much anymore. Or maybe our leadership decided to use JPL’s money for other things.