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The title is a little pun about the Dyson sphere, Freeman Dyson's main claim to fame and the source of his name-check in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Outside of the ranks of science fiction fans, Freeman Dyson is known for being an award-winning physicist and the author of several popular science books. Dyson spoke at Town Hall on Monday to promote his latest collection of book reviews and essays, The Scientist As Rebel. Dyson was introduced by his offspring, science historian George Dyson, who told funny family stories, complete with slides of embarassing childhood paraphenalia.
F. Dyson's remarks didn't concern rebellious scientists. He read from prepared remarks speculating about the future domestication of biotechnology and the end of Darwinian evolution. And that's another name on the list of people insanely smarter than we are.
During the Q&A period Dyson said, rather opaquely, that he was a fox, not a hedgehog. Surely this made sense in context, but we had lost the ability to concentrate about two hours in.
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I didn't see Dyson, but the fox/hedgehog dichotomy is this: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
Dilettantes vs. specialists, basically.
I have a synopsis of the lecture I duct taped together here.
I think that his reference to hedgehogs may have been referring to reductivist scientists and the fox reference to those working the opposite way on ideas like emergence.