Books: Three Cheers for Diversity INFINITE IN ALL DIRECTIONS

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Fortunately, just about everything interests Dyson: the origins of life, the prospects of immortality, the frontiers of space, the monarch butterfly. Unifying these and a dazzling array of other subjects is Dyson's belief in what he calls the "principle of maximum diversity," which "operates both at the physical and at the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible." Given this predilection, Dyson prefers facts over theories, pieces that do not fit any known design over solutions to puzzles. He pays full tribute to the great unifiers among scientists (Newton and Einstein in physics, Darwin in biology), but his heart is with the diversifiers, those who enjoy unearthing mysteries and contradictions: "If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed."

In his more down-to-earth activities, Dyson has served on a number of advisory panels and sees a problem: "We have been suffering from a surfeit of committees. Committees do harm merely by existing." He can explain as an interested and sometimes invited witness why technologies like nuclear power stations and the NASA space shuttle plod into disasters. Planners always assume that increased size means better results. Nonsense, says Dyson: "The important changes are qualitative, not bigger and better rockets but new styles of architecture, new rules by which the game of exploration is played."

The scattershot nature of Infinite in All Directions ultimately comes to seem its greatest virtue. To observe a mind uncommonly endowed with dexterity and knowledge hop from subject to subject is exhilarating. Dyson inspires the same awe he reports at watching a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis and fly away, "a symbol of evanescent beauty and a living proof that nature's imagination is richer than our own."