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    Freeman Missed Opportunity

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    Antone Calot

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    Freeman Missed Opportunity

    Uploaded by

    Antone Calot
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    freeman missed opportunity

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    Freeman Missed Opportunity

    Uploaded by

    Antone Calot

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 1

    BULLETIN OF THE

    AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY


    Volume 78, Number 5, September 1972

    MISSED OPPORTUNITIES1
    BY FREEMAN J. DYSON

    It is important for him who wants to discover not to confine him-


    self to one chapter of science, but to keep in touch with various others.
    JACQUES HADAMARD

    1. Introduction. The purpose of the Gibbs lectures is officially defined


    as "to enable the public and the academic community to become aware
    of the contribution that mathematics is making to present-day thinking
    and to modern civilization." This puts me in a difficult position. I happen
    to be a physicist who started life as a mathematician. As a working
    physicist, I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between
    mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past
    centuries, has recently ended in divorce. Discussing this divorce, the
    physicist Res Jost remarked the other day, "As usual in such affairs,
    one of the two parties has clearly got the worst of it." During the last
    twenty years we have seen mathematics rushing ahead in a golden age
    of luxuriant growth, while theoretical physics left on its own has become
    a little shabby and peevish. So I am forced to give this lecture an emphasis
    different from that intended by the founders. Instead of talking about
    "the contribution that mathematics is making to present-day thinking"
    in my field, I shall talk about the contribution that mathematics ought
    to have made but did not. I shall examine in detail some examples of
    missed opportunities, occasions on which mathematicians and physicists
    lost chances of making discoveries by neglecting to talk to each other.
    My purpose in calling attention to such incidents is not to blame the
    mathematicians or to excuse the physicists for our failure in the last
    twenty years to equal the great achievements of the past. My purpose
    is not to lament the past but to mould the future.
    It is obviously absurd for me to imagine that I can mould the future
    with a one-hour lecture. The fact that Hilbert in 1900 [1] and Minkowski
    in 1908 [2] succeeded in doing it does not give me any confidence that
    I can do it too. But at least I have learned from Hilbert and Minkowski
    that one does not influence people by talking in generalities. Hilbert
    and Minkowski gave specific suggestions of things that mathematicians
    and physicists could profitably think about I shall try to follow their
    1
    Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture, given under the auspices of the American Mathematical
    Society, January 17, 1972; received by the editors January 17, 1972.
    Copyright © American Mathematical Society 1972

    635

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