{"id":30542,"date":"2016-09-26T19:55:35","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T02:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/lawrence-krauss-versus-freeman-dyson-on-gravitons"},"modified":"2017-06-04T14:13:07","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T21:13:07","slug":"lawrence-krauss-versus-freeman-dyson-on-gravitons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/lawrence-krauss-versus-freeman-dyson-on-gravitons","title":{"rendered":"Lawrence Krauss Versus Freeman Dyson on Gravitons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/lawrence-krauss-versus-freeman-dyson-on-gravitons.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, in the <i>New York Review of Books<\/i>, Freeman Dyson analyzed a trio of recent books on humanity\u2019s future in the larger cosmos<i>. <\/i>They were <i>How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Space Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight<\/i>; <i>Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets; <\/i>and <i>All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>Dyson is \u201ca brilliant physicist and contrarian,\u201d as the theoretical astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss recently told <i>Nautilus<\/i>. So I was waiting, as I read his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2016\/10\/13\/green-universe-a-vision\/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR Space higher education Cuba&utm;_c Space higher education Cuba+CID_49e1b156587a7eb211fd07e0d69cb4d6&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=The Green Universe A Vision\" target=\"_blank\">review<\/a>, to come across his profound and provocative pronouncement about these books, and it came soon enough: \u201cNone of them looks at space as a transforming force in the destiny of our species,\u201d he writes. The books are limited in scope by looking at the future of space as a problem of engineering. Dyson has a grander vision. Future humans can seed remote environments with genetic instructions for countless new species. \u201cThe purpose is no longer to explore space with unmanned or manned missions, but to expand the domain of life from one small planet to the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dyson can be just as final in his opinions on the destiny of scientific investigation. According to Krauss, Dyson once told him, \u201cThere\u2019s no way we\u2019re ever going to measure gravitons\u201d\u2014the supposed quantum particles underlying gravitational forces\u2014\u201cbecause there\u2019s no terrestrial experiment that could ever measure a single graviton.\u201d Dyson told Krauss that, in order to measure one, \u201cyou\u2019d have to make the experiment so massive that it would actually collapse to form a black hole before you could make the measurement.\u201d So, Dyson concluded, \u201cThere\u2019s no way that we\u2019ll know whether gravity is a quantum theory.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/nautil.us\/blog\/lawrence-krauss-versus-freeman-dyson-on-gravitons\">http:\/\/nautil.us\/blog\/lawrence-krauss-versus-freeman-dyson-on-gravitons<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson analyzed a trio of recent books on humanity\u2019s future in the larger cosmos. They were How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Space Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight; Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets; [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,38,412,48,1617,6,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-engineering","category-genetics","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics","category-robotics-ai","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30542"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66141,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30542\/revisions\/66141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}