Freeman Dyson has died.

[NNadir]

5. I was certainly aware of the climate change "heresy" and was careful not to bring it up.

He was of a generation of people who thought it wise to OK to engage in planetary scale engineering, hence the science fiction idea of the "Dyson sphere."

I went to his office though to admire a mind great enough to swim against the stream.

Because he was one of the world's most brilliant thinkers does not imply that he was right about everything. I met him in a large lounge at the Advanced Institute, which was kind of run down, and unsurprisingly there was a bust of Einstein in it. Most of the time that Einstein was there, at the Institute, he was still arguing ideas that were wrong. There is a nice biography of Einstein - the one written by Pais, who knew him personally - in which Einstein was arguing against complementarity,, which was well established by then, asking if Pais thought the moon still existing after it went behind a cloud.

The lecture I missed was one in which he was addressing graduate students at Princeton. Maybe your experience indicates what he might have said.

Thanks for your story.