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English-born theoretical physicist (became a U.S. citizen in 1957), president of the Space Sciences Institute, and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, who has proposed several novel ideas in the field of SETI and of advanced space propulsion (see Project Orion). Dyson has speculated how advanced civilizations might be able to travel between stars (see interstellar travel),¹ continue to survive in the far future of the universe, and capture the bulk of the radiative output of their host stars by immense structures that have become known as Dyson spheres.² As one of the characters in Larry Niven's Ringworld explains:

Dyson was one of the ancient natural philosophers, pre-Belt, almost pre-atomic. He pointed out that civilization is limited by the energy available to it. The way for the human race to use all the energy within its reach, he said, is to build a spherical shell around the Sun and trap every ray of sunlight.