He was on the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, maintainers of the nuclear Doomsday Clock, which now stands at 100 seconds to midnight. There was far more to nuclear weapons, he knew, than the science that had spawned them. He wrestled with the moral questions they raised, studying game theory in an effort to work out when, if ever, it might make sense to use such a weapon in anger.
弗里曼是《原子能科學家公報》的贊助者之一，該報紙是核末日時鐘的維護者，現在距離象征末日的午夜還有100秒。他知道，核武器遠不只限于孕育他們的科學。弗里曼糾結于核武器引發的道德問題，研究博弈論，試圖找出何時在憤怒時使用這種武器可能是有意義的，如果它會出現的話。
The problem of nuclear war, it seemed to him, was fundamentally not technical but human and historical. He was an iconoclast, too, and enjoyed being known as one. Heretics were useful in science. It was far better to be contradicted than ignored; better to be wrong than vague. As a colleague said, whenever consensus was forming like ice hardening on a lake, he would do his best to chip away at it. He dared to challenge natural selection as the only driver of evolution, and he queried climate change: not the fact that it was happening, but the usefulness of the models that aimed to predict its effects.
對他來說，核戰爭的問題從根本上來說不是技術上的問題，而是人性和歷史的問題。他也是一名反社會習俗者，并且享受作為這樣一個人。異端分子在科學上是有用的。被否定遠遠好于被忽略；犯錯比含糊不清要好。正如一位同事所說，每當共識形成時，就像湖面上的冰變硬了一樣，他就會盡自己最大的努力去打破它。弗里曼敢于挑戰自然選擇作為進化的唯一驅動力，他質疑氣候變化：不是它正在發生的事實，而是旨在預測其影響的模型的有效性。
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In any case, some of those effects might be beneficial—a longer growing season, for example, and fewer deaths from the cold. Environmentalism struck him as more a religion than a science. Not that he was against religion; he supported it, in a diffident Church of England way. To get back beyond the Big Bang, certainly, you needed religion. But the real faith that sustained him was a boundless belief in the power and possibilities of science. He had witnessed at first hand how it could give mere mortals the power to destroy their own world. Perhaps they could use science to save it, too—or, if not, leave it for another altogether.
無論如何，氣候變化的一些影響可能是有益的-生長周期更長，因寒冷死去的人更少。他認為環保主義更多的是一種宗教，而不是一種科學。這并不表示他反對宗教；他支持宗教，以一種缺乏自信的英國國教的方式。當然，為了回到宇宙大爆炸之后，你需要宗教。但是支撐他的真正信念是對科學的力量和可能性的無限信念。弗里曼親眼目睹了科學如何賦予凡人摧毀自己世界的力量。也許他們也可以用科學來拯救世界——或者，如果沒有做到的話，把它完全留給另一個人來做。
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