Freeman Dyson, free Astronomy Lecture

Freeman J. Dyson (b. 1923)

On Friday, October 21, 2011, the Amateur Astronomer Association of New York City will present the first in the lecture series they sponsor every year. This is a superb lecture series, and is free.

The lectures are held at the American Museum of Natural History, in the Kaufmann Theatre. The best way to get to the Kaufmann Theatre for these lectures is to go to the middle of the block on 77th Street. There is an arching stone stairway; the entrance is underneath that arching stairway. There your bags will be checked, and you can enter the museum. Ahead you will see a giant dug-out canoe, made by the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest. Turn left. You will be heading toward the "Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins", and you will see three skeletons in front of you: a chimpanzee, a Neanderthal human, and a modern human. Before you enter that exhibit hall, you will see a cafeteria to your left and a hall to your right with display cases of wonderful shells. Go up that hallway. Shortly, you will see another hallway to your left, and the theater entrance at the end of it. That is it!

The lecture inaugurating the 2011-2012 series will by by Freeman J. Dyson. Freeman Dyson is a legendary figure in science. He is one of the great figured of Twentieth-Century science, a colleague and friend of Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, John Wheeler, Kurt Goedel, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, Kip Thorne, Carl Sagan, Oliver Sachs, etc.

The subject of Freeman Dyson's lecture is "Other Ways of Looking for Life in the Sky".

Freeman Dyson is 87 years old. The probability of having another opportunity to attend a free lecture by him is rapidly diminishing. Even if you are shy about attending lectures in English, and in particular lectures on a technical subject, such as science, I would strongly suggest taking the opportunity to attend the lecture. This is New York City! If you are not going to make use of the unique opportunities here, you might as well be somewhere else. And this lecture is something you can tell your children and grandchildren about some day, if they are interested in science or history, and for those of you that are interested in science already, this will be a very interesting event indeed.