Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)

https://www.privatdozent.co/p/privatdozent-photo-edition-4

by privatdozent • 5 years ago

72 23 5 years ago

nvalis3• 5 years ago

I have no idea why, but it is always interesting and inspiring to read about how known figures of historic interest were related to each other and how their (normally seperatly told) stories intertwined. Thanks!

lehmannerich• 5 years ago

A great post on that: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html

nvalis3• 5 years ago

That was an interesting read, thank you.

jo_in_europe• 5 years ago

I've read a handful of biographies of 20th century physicists recently, which I enjoyed for the same reasons. Ulam was a Los Alamos mathematician (and a great friend of Von Neumann). Anderson discovered the meson, which Yukawa had predicted. Fritzsche named nuclear fission (after doing important work on it). Elasser was a wandering scientist, who (to me) seemed to be "on the outside of the inside"; he gives accounts of his dealings with most of the atomic era players.

- Adventures of a Mathematician (Ulam)

- What Little I Remember (Frisch)

- Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age (Elasser)

- The Traveller (Yukawa)

- Discovery of Anti-Matter (Carl Anderson)

Also Freeman Dyson's and Feynman's stuff. I'm ever open to recommendations from readers who enjoy the same stuff.

fgh2• 5 years ago

If you are also a little bit interested in philosophy, Heisenberg's "Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations" is a wonderful recommendation.

gww• 5 years ago

If you haven't read it The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is in the same vein and excellent. It doesn't focus on a single physicist but covers a lot of the physics and chemistry that led to the construction of the atomic bomb.

Trex_Egg• 5 years ago

Thanks for the details

brummm• 5 years ago

If you are a physicist, Abraham Pais' "Subtle is the Lord" about Einstein's accomplishments in physics is an absolutely unique and amazing book. However, I didn't ask if you are a physicist for no reason. It talks mainly about the science and not about Einstein's personal life and you will need a physics education to follow along.

edge17• 5 years ago

Thanks for the recommendations, I do read a lot of biographies and find the overlap of the stories of these important people to be particularly interesting. Some good ones I have read:

- American Prometheus - About J. Robert Oppenheimer's life. Lots of stories of lots of scientists and politicians, bureaucrats, etc throughout his life.

- Benjamin Franklin's autobiography - Wasn't a great book, but towards the end made mention that he wanted to meet Issac Newton when he went to England on some government business. Until reading it, I hadn't realized they were contemporaries.

- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - Lots of stories with people well known inside the technology industry.

jangstrom• 5 years ago

Thanks for the pointers. I'll check them out.

I recently read

- The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom

- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Paul Erdős)

The Dirac book is by a physicist, as opposed to a professional biographer. I very much enjoyed it. Dirac crossed paths and interacted with all of the great quantum physicists in the 20th century. He and his work never captured the public imagination in the same way Einstein did, nor did his personality and propensity for teaching resonate like Feynman or Sagan. (Feynman was, of course, an exceedingly brilliant physicist, but I think he was known more by the public for his personality than his QED). But he had a lot of ideas that were ahead of his time, and he was driven by the notion of mathematical beauty. Hell, the Dirac equation was a work of inspired genius that seemed to come from the annals of his mind alone.

Similar to Einstein, his work got away from him, and later in life he was resistant to the beast he helped create (quantum field theory).

Erdős was a prolific, unparalleled genius in number theory, as well as a wandering academic. He was quite inept at self-care, and found shelter based on the hospitality of his friends and colleagues. He never held a permanent position, spending his time trotting the globe to collaborate with interesting folks. I came away from the book feeling quite melancholy about the man and his life. But he seemed to have followed his passion in a way few do. On the other hand, he would likely pity me, the mathematician-turned-physicist-turned-industrial-researcher.

mudita• 5 years ago

You might like this story about Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman having a road trip:

https://youtu.be/1Rr3ZWt1ULQ (the whole interview is very interesting and contains a lot of stories of meeting other physicists and mathematicians, it’s broken up into a series of snippets of a few minutes each on youtube)

In the end this trip lead to one of Dyson’s biggest contributions to physics, he could talk to Feynman about his research on the road trip and visited Schwinger afterwards and as such was in a unique position to recognise and formalise the equivalence of Feynman’s, Schwinger’s and Tomanaga's formulations of quantum electrodynamics. This was an important step towards the acceptance of Feynman diagrams.

I also really liked "Maker of Patterns”, Dyson’s autobiography through letters.

vmchale• 5 years ago

I had no idea either - Gödel's was extremely mentally ill, didn't realize how long it was.

dang2• 5 years ago

Einstein isn't wearing jeans there is he? It looks like he might be, but I assume 1952 was much too early for that.

nvalis3• 5 years ago

What makes you think it's denim? I would say it looks quite similar to the trousers the others are wearing (especially the ones of Whitney Oates).

Solely going by the timeline described in [0] it's rather unlikely that these are denim.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17101768

raxxorrax• 5 years ago

Probably some form of cloth pants. Stylish though, definitely works with that haircut.

privatdozent• 5 years ago

The photograph has been artificially colourized. Original here: https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/26078/lot/22/

dang2• 5 years ago

Ah, that's certainly what did it. Thanks!

tagoregrtst• 5 years ago

This is why I despise artificial coloration.

Its fine as a filter I can privately turn on to delude myself. But when the pictures spread it reinforced our modern biases in the past

ArtWomb• 5 years ago

Just stumbled upon an interview with Robert Oppenheimer where he discusses the creative culture at IAS circa mid-1950s. Under 100 fellows at the time, but spanning the spectrum from George Kennen to Niels Bohr. Sacred grounds ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSG_G5CVVlM

publicola1990• 5 years ago

Is it Yevegny Lifshetz?

throwaway81523• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Lefschetz I believe.

mjreacher• 5 years ago

On the topic of von Neumann and Solomon Lefschetz, a while back I saw a documentary about Paul Halmos that discussed them, unfortunately it seems to have been removed for copyright but the trailer is still accessible [0].

The gist of what he said was that while he admired von Neumann greatly, particularly for his incredible speed and clarity of understanding, sometimes he felt a greater respect and closeness for Lefschetz, who lost both of his hands in an industrial accident and despite saying that Lefschetz's style of thinking was 'incredibly confused' in the sense he [Lefschetz] didn't have a full understanding of what he himself [Lefschetz] was thinking, he wanted to get to know him more. More evidence comes from a quote of J. Barkley Rosser which goes as follows [1]:

"If Church said it's obvious, then everybody saw it a half hour ago. If Weyl says it's obvious, von Neumann can prove it. If Lefschetz says it's obvious, it's false."

He also notes unlike Lefschetz von Neumann was not considered by some mathematicians to be a great mathematician because there wasn't one big thing or field that he became the best in the world at or contributed the most too, noting that in mathematics he would likely be best remembered for his work in rings of operators (now known as von Neumann algebras). This lines up with several other stories I've read in math history where many considered much of von Neumann's work past the 1940s (where he was working primarily in applied mathematics and other applied fields) a waste of his talent.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONvYPldXoZs

[1] https://web.math.princeton.edu/oral-history/c21.pdf

Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)

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