A Man from the Future – John von Neumann’s nuclear vision

https://www.ft.com/content/8dc791a2-bde4-4f1f-a928-bde11d67aee5

by Hooke • 5 years ago

77 27 5 years ago

ft.com

sdesalas• 5 years ago

Hello paywall

greyface-• 5 years ago

https://archive.ph/34q2Z

walterbell3• 5 years ago

von Neumann was one of the "Martians of Budapest", https://web.archive.org/web/20211002112153/https://www.priva... & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28726489 (162 comments, Sept 2021)

The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a group of men with superhuman intellects, arriving from an obscure country speaking an incomprehensible foreign language and English with strong, characteristic accents (later popularized by Bela Lugosi in Dracula). Scientists typically thought to belong to the group include refugees from the University of Göttingen, early associates of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and members of The Manhattan Project.
Persons frequently included in the description: Paul Erdős, Paul Halmos, Theodore von Kármán, John G. Kemeny, John von Neumann, George Pólya, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner are included in The Martians group.

sinity• 5 years ago

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

For the reasons suggested by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending, Ashkenazi Jews had the potential for very high intelligence. They were mostly too poor and discriminated against to take advantage of it. Around 1880, this changed in a few advanced Central European economies like Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Austria didn’t have many Jews. Germany had a lot of Jews, but it was a big country, so nobody really noticed. Hungary had a lot of Jews, all concentrated in Budapest, and so it was really surprising when all of a sudden everyone from Budapest started winning Nobel Prizes around the same time. This continued until World War II, and then all anyone remembered was “Hey, wasn’t it funny that so many smart people were born in Budapest between 1880 and 1920?”
And this story is really, really, gloomy.
For centuries, Europe was sitting on this vast untapped resource of potential geniuses. Around 1880, in a few countries only, economic and political conditions finally became ripe for the potential to be realized. The result was one of the greatest spurts of progress in scientific history, bringing us relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear bombs, dazzling new mathematical systems, the foundations of digital computing, and various other abstruse ideas I don’t even pretend to understand. This lasted for approximately one generation, after which a psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone involved.
I certainly can’t claim that the Jews were the only people being crazy smart in Central Europe around this time. This was the age of Bohr, Schrodinger, Planck, Curie, etc. But part of me wonders even here. If you have one physicist in a town, he sits in an armchair and thinks. If you have five physicists in a town, they meet and talk and try to help each other with their theories. If you have fifty physicists in a town, they can get funding and start a university department. If you have a hundred, maybe some of them can go into teaching or administration and help support the others.

morpheos137• 5 years ago

Doubtless Hungarian Ashkenazim like von Neumann, Teller, Erdos, Soros were extraordinarily intelligent but I also wonder how much of this has to do with family environments and social connections vs. just innate capability. An upper middle class bourgeois upbringing can do wonders for intellectual development. Kind of a chicken vs. the egg problem.

Animats2• 5 years ago

Any hope of recovering the genetic sequences of that crowd?

walterbell3• 5 years ago

Very good question. Presumably it would be up to their families? Or already happened and was classified for N years.

photochemsyn2• 5 years ago

I was a bit curious about von Neumann's work in quantum mechanics and found this. There are a number of online sources (pdf) if you want to search for it.

Hilbert Space Theory and Applications in Basic Quantum Mechanics by Matthew R. Gagne

"Ultimately it was Von Neumann, while a student of Hilbert, who realized the equivalence of wave mechanics and matrix mechanics and proposed the current formulation. However, the argument at the time was largely heuristic and unconcerned with mathematical detail. In [CMMC] he argues that the bulk of the equivalence proof were and have been historically taken for granted. The reader can consult [CMMC] for more on the technicalities of equivalence proofs. While the theoretical and conceptual leaps that made the formulation of quantum mechanics possible came largely from Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger, Von Neumann is responsible for the last unifying mental leap and also for many of the technical mathematical achievements that accompanied it. We discuss Von Neumann and the mathematical perspective of these events next."

If you ever take a intro QM course or even a modern chemistry course, you'll get introduced to the Schrodinger Wave Equation and how it explains the hydrogen atom. However, on a computer, basically all QM calculations are done with matrix mechanics. JvN, as I read it (no QM physicist expert am I), mathematically tied these two conceptions together utilizing a complex abstraction called Hilbert space:

"Hilbert space gives a means by which one can consider functions as points belonging to an inÖnite dimensional space. The utility of this perspective can be found in our ability to generalize notions of orthogonality and length to collections of objects (i.e. functions) which don't naturally suggest the consideration of these properties."

Clearly that's a major achievement, in a head-spinningly complex area. However, in looking at several other areas of JvN's legacy - the invention of computation in its current form, and economic game theory - it's all a bit more curious and iffy.

With computation, there really seems to be a lot of controversy over where the credit for the theories and practice really belongs, i.e. Alan Turing on one hand and some of the people who actually engineered the first working American vacuum-tube computers on the other. Some of the literary efforts at cementing JvN's legacy in this area have been questionable, i.e. "Turing's Cathedral" which isn't really about Turing at all, it's a cloaked JvN hagiography.

As far as game theory as a mathematical basis of economics and 'rational nuclear war', it honestly seems to be, at this point, discredited on multiple grounds, such as humans not being rational actors. Neoclassical economic model projections based on such theories have failed spectacularly time and again (NAFTA outcomes, failure to foresee the 2008 crash, etc.) for example. Of course if this basic structure is pulled out from under the feet of neoclassical economists today, there's not much left... Could it be they're trying to build a statue to their hero to avoid that fate?

Furthermore, JvN made some predictions that were entirely off base in the area of climate, as he believed long-term forecasts were possible, meaning that he thought tickling the climate system at just the right point could cause a hurricane to hit a particular location. The discovery of chaos, aka sensitive dependence on initial conditions, by Ed Lorenz about a decade later, put the end to such dreams of climate warfare.

He certainly was a brilliant mathematician, but his other contributions are a bit more questionable. The concept of the 'universal genius' doesn't really seem to apply in practice. And, hagiography is bad bibliographic practice.

kaycebasques• 5 years ago

He had also seen into the mathematical heart of quantum mechanics — that subtle, far from intuitive account of the ultra-small world within atoms — developing concepts without which our 21st century’s internet economy would never have arisen.

How did quantum mechanics influence the "internet economy"?

christocracy• 5 years ago

Transistors are an implementation of QM. Without transistors…

IAmYourDensity3• 5 years ago

Quantum Mechanics led to the development of nuclear weapons which led to the development of the packet switched Internet Protocol designed to maintain connectivity even during a nuclear war. Internet Protocol led to the development of the internet economy.

xcambar• 5 years ago

packet switched Internet Protocol designed to maintain connectivity even during a nuclear war

Source please?

Animats2• 5 years ago

Well, not really. The atomic bomb didn't really require quantum mechanics to build. Certainly not the gun bomb. That's two hunks of enriched uranium forced together. Implosion was tougher, but mostly a hydrodynamics problem. H-bombs required much more theory.

analog31• 5 years ago

Lasers are what get large amounts of information from A to B

photochemsyn2• 5 years ago

Well, where QM really comes into play the most is probably in the chip fabrication industry, all the nanometer-scale processes involve rely heavily on that theory. If you get an applied physics / quantum mechanics PhD from a leading research university today you can get a very well paid job designing and troubleshooting the machines that go into a chip fabrication setup.

Claiming it wouldn't be possible with JvN is a bit much, though. It was Heisenberg who developed matrix mechanics the most, along with people like PAM Dirac. JvN put the mathematics on a firmer footing, but claiming he should be viewed like Einstein, it's kind of silly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_mechanics

aurelien• 5 years ago

No interest in a payed subscription article that is not available for free from the Apple One European subscription, because Apple make you pay the same price form Europe to US but not for the same stuff. So no your article is not interesting, because Apple says by the way that FT is not interesting.

walterbell3• 5 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687754

kwchk• 5 years ago

I sort of remember there is a novel about someone who travel back in time and use a nuclear mushroom cloud as a signal that he is from the future.

I think to avoid drawing attention (like talking about quark, dark energy etc.) each era must have something that is iconic in the future, but people in the same era does not aware of.

Imagine someone talked about Mac OS future version and that it will run under arm. That may alert that he is from the future without too much attention.

A Man from the Future – John von Neumann’s nuclear vision

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