Professor FreemanDyson, one of the world's pre-eminent physicists, who once said that theologians should be abolished, has won the 2000 Templeton Prize for progress in religion.
This book, which describes the descendants of a civilisation that has converted the material in its planets into a giant ringlike structure around its sun, was inspired by Freeman Dyson's idea that a truly technologically advanced species would endeavour to capture as much light as possible by building a spherical shell around its central star.