The late Freeman Dyson visited my small college as a guest lecturer for a short seminar series many years ago. I had the privilege of taking part as a Physics major, and while I don’t remember too many specifics of his visit, I strongly remember a sense of being around someone very special, someone who did not shy away from challenging conventional thought and taking up a diverse array of topics from first principles. A short YouTube clip hit my feed recently, discussing climate, and brought back some memories. Having read up on regenerative agriculture recently, this hit home.
“Q: If climate change does cause problems, how might we realistically be able to engineer solutions? There are all sorts of ways. There were a couple of farmers in Minnesota I was just reading about that decided to change from feed lots to grass. They are raising beef. These are farmers that are raising cows for beef, and a certain amount of milk as well… and they decided to switch from feed lots – which of course is a fashionable way of raising cows. You keep them on a very crowded feed lot and feed them on corn. So you’re growing corn to feed to the animals. Instead of that you put them out to grass, but you manage the grass in a clever way – moving fences around – so they eat the grass much more evenly. It turns out this pays, and they’re doing extremely well – just going back from feed lots to grass. And it has a big effect on the CO2 in the atmosphere, in proportion to the area that they are using. That means that if the whole of the middle west would do this, it would make a substantial difference to the CO2 in the atmosphere. So that is the sort of practical thing you can do, just managing the land more intelligently…. …it’s not all that spectacular, but it actually works. So changing from feed lots to grass doesn’t solve the whole problem, but it solves a certain chunk of the problem. There are other things you can do, doing less plowing.”
And in his final interview, days before his death in 2020 he touched again on quantum cryptography with a sobering view:
"In the real world, crypto-systems are usually broken by exploiting human errors in the day-to-day operations of the users. Human errors will probably be as prevalent in quantum systems as they are in classical systems. So long as humans are involved in the practical use of crypto, no system will be secure against hackers."
I think I'll crack open some of his excellent books... it's been too long.
“Q: If climate change does cause problems, how might we realistically be able to engineer solutions? There are all sorts of ways. There were a couple of farmers in Minnesota I was just reading about that decided to change from feed lots to grass. They are raising beef. These are farmers that are raising cows for beef, and a certain amount of milk as well… and they decided to switch from feed lots – which of course is a fashionable way of raising cows. You keep them on a very crowded feed lot and feed them on corn. So you’re growing corn to feed to the animals. Instead of that you put them out to grass, but you manage the grass in a clever way – moving fences around – so they eat the grass much more evenly. It turns out this pays, and they’re doing extremely well – just going back from feed lots to grass. And it has a big effect on the CO2 in the atmosphere, in proportion to the area that they are using. That means that if the whole of the middle west would do this, it would make a substantial difference to the CO2 in the atmosphere. So that is the sort of practical thing you can do, just managing the land more intelligently…. …it’s not all that spectacular, but it actually works. So changing from feed lots to grass doesn’t solve the whole problem, but it solves a certain chunk of the problem. There are other things you can do, doing less plowing.”
And in his final interview, days before his death in 2020 he touched again on quantum cryptography with a sobering view:
"In the real world, crypto-systems are usually broken by exploiting human errors in the day-to-day operations of the users. Human errors will probably be as prevalent in quantum systems as they are in classical systems. So long as humans are involved in the practical use of crypto, no system will be secure against hackers."
I think I'll crack open some of his excellent books... it's been too long.
