Journal TTK Ciar's Journal: Shook Hands with a Legend 3
I was sitting in my office just now at the Internet Archive monitoring some data transfers when Brewster walked in and announced some visitors (as he is apt to do at times -- all visitors get to poke their heads in every door so Brewster can describe the functions of the different departments). A family flowed through the doorway, and the gentleman in the lead was introduced to me as Freeman Dyson.
Freeman Dyson.
Personal childhood hero, Freeman Dyson.
"Dyson Sphere" Freeman Dyson.
The Orion Project's Freeman Dyson.
Unifier of the field of quantum electrodynamics, Freeman Dyson.
I shook his hand, and lost all of my cool immediately, blurting "THE Freeman Dyson?!?", at which the younger man still standing at the door (perhaps Dyson's son?) looked very cross. Oops.
Mr. Dyson answered "One of them anyway", and returned his attention to Brewster. I sat at my console and tried not to panic.
Brewster turned to me at one point and asked "How many non-web items do we have in the Archive?", to which I blanked and answered the first thing that came to mind, which was the number of data items I was trying to transfer, which of course was off by two orders of magnitude. Brewster looked a bit perplexed, but being himself he saved very well. How the hell am I supposed to perform when he springs a living legend on me like this? I just want to close and lock the door and dissolve.
I've met some great people at The Archive, but I never lost my composure like this. Ack. Still in shock, maybe I'd better take a walk.
Egads
-- TTK
Heh. (Score:1)
"Dyson Sphere" (Score:1)
I had thought the "Dyson Sphere" was invented like, a hundred years ago. (and that's the only "Dyson" related thing i'd heard of, other than that vacuum thingy).
Dyson and Orion (Score:1)
He brought up the dyson sphere idea [wikipedia.org] in 1960 .. the 1960's were a time for engineers to think big, and cast an ambitious eye towards problems and the means of solving them.
One of my all-time favorite ambitious engineering efforts was Project Orion [wikipedia.org], actually a group of related efforts to develop rockets driven by thermonuclear explosions. They never got off the ground for various reasons (qv the book The Spaceship And The Canoe [amazon.com] which documents part of the saga in an entertaining way), and today even the mi