The Need for Heretics
Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
Commencement Address, given at the University of Michigan, December 18, 2005
When the Princess Rosalba was baptized, in Thackeray’s story, “The Rose and the Ring”, her father, King Cavalfiore of Crim Tartary, gave a banquet, and all the royal guests came with fine clothes and expensive presents and flattering speeches. Then at the end of the line of guests came the Fairy Blackstick, an ugly old lady with a long nose, carrying nothing in her hands but a plain black stick. She waved her stick over the baby and said, “As for this little lady, the best thing I can wish her is a little misfortune”. The King was furious and ordered his servants to remove the Fairy Blackstick from the hall. But of course the magic was done, and the Fairy Blackstick’s present turned out to be more valuable than all the other presents put together. I will tell you at the end how the magic worked.
I am grateful to the University of Michigan and to you, President Coleman, for giving me the privilege of talking at this celebration. I find it strange that I should be talking here. In this company I am the Fairy Blackstick. You students are proud possessors of the Ph.D. or some similar token of academic respectability. You have endured many years of poverty and hard labor, and now you are ready to go to your just rewards, to a place on the tenure track of a university or on the board of directors of a company. And here am I, a person who never had a Ph.D. myself and fought all my life against the Ph.D. system and everything it stands for. Of course I fought in vain. The grip of the Ph.D. system on academic life is tighter today than it has ever been. But I will continue to fight against it as long as I live. In short, I am proud to be a heretic. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of you may fill that role.
I will tell you briefly about three heresies that I am promoting. The first of my heresies says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing in their own models.
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