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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another Infinite Loops.
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Today I get to talk about one of my heroes, John von Neumann, who Ananyo Bhattacharya wrote the fascinating book, The Man From the Future: the Visionary Life of John von Neumann.
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Before I ask you to explain this absolutely fascinating man in some depth, just to give the scope of what one individual was able to accomplish in his relatively brief life, he died at 53, if I recall correctly.
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He was sort of the last mathematician who was equally comfortable in pure mathematics and applied mathematics.
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That's going to be important to our story later on.
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His contributions to physics, almost without him and his mathematical formulas, we have quantum kind of going sideways maybe for a little bit.
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Economics, game theory, one of my favorites because it touches what I do directly, computing, cellular automata, which is the idea of a universal constructor.
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Machines can create machines, self replication. The list is endless. Welcome.
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Tell me, how did John even exist?
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: I thought you were going to ask me how I got my head around all these ideas.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's next. That's next.
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: Yeah.
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The answer to that is with great difficulty. Yeah. How did he exist it?
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He obviously was blessed with an extraordinary mind, but I don't think that alone, can really explain his achievements.
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We have to look at his background a little bit.
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He's brought up in this incredibly rich, both culturally and in financially, background by mom and dad.
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Dad's an investment banker, so is in constant engagement with money and the real world and business, and he brings up his sons in such a way that they also engage in fairly practical matters.
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Miksa, Johnny's dad would bring home his business clients, as well as being grilled by him about whatever project they wanted him to fund, the boys would also give them a grilling.
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It's quite an upbringing, and I think that together with his natural talent for mathematics may go part of the way to explaining why von Neumann's able to range across these different fields.
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Then, lastly, there's history, the historical accident, there's the fact that this guy comes along at this kind of remarkable moment in the early 20th century, when so many things are just about to explode into being.
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We've got quantum mechanics being forged, you've got a major eruptions in pure maths, in set theory, which somehow is going to be connected to this awesome device that we're all going to end up using, the computer.
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He's there just at the right time, with the right kind of brain, with the right kind of background, and he's sane enough and social enough that he can somehow cruise through these different areas and contribute to all of them.
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I don't think we've come across, or I've come across brilliant mathematicians before, but very few with that ability to engage with the world and to, at least superficially, pass themselves off as normal in the way that he was able to do.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I want to get to, he was an incredibly colorful guy, with the parties, with the loud music that his colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Studies would complain often about, horrible driver who loved to drive while reading books, quite a character.
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My next question becomes about this idea of clusters, clusters of geniuses.
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I'm going to lead into it with just a straightforward question.
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Was the 20th century due to him?
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In other words, if he was hit by a bus at age 20, would all of these incredible innovations and discoveries have happened?
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: Right.
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Well, I think the short answer you're going to get from me is yes, probably, and maybe at different times and maybe later.
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The longer answer is that, this is just a huge question that we could spend the rest of the podcast discussing.
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How does technological progress and scientific progress occur and so on.
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My feeling, what I wanted to portray, really with this book, well, there are two things.
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One is that the message is here, that maths isn't just about arithmetic, it's not just about the stuff that most of us learn at school and then forget about.
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I'll never forget that I was having a maths lesson once in my high school, and the math teacher was asked, well, what's the use of learning this stuff?
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The poor man was kind of desperate for an answer, and he said, well, when you come out of the supermarket, you'll be able to check your receipt to make sure.
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I'm like, well, there's a bit more to it than that, and I wanted to talk about how there's this mathematical underpinning really to our modern life.
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Then there is the second aspect.
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As well as I hope showing this mathematical underpinning of our day-to-day lives, what I also wanted to do with the book is show how von Neumann seeds this stuff, but then also follow the other great minds that picked up on these ideas and then progress them.
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The idea was to show von Neumann's influence, but also the stuff that influenced him.
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Just as importantly, follow the development of these ideas, because that's really the way science and technology works.
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It's not about even a great human being, a great mind like von Neumann’s.
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They alone can't single-handedly shift the needle, I think, it takes a great many, both institutions and other minds to bring stuff together.
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I think the books, I hope, unusual in that I try and do that.
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Whether I'm successful or not, that's up to the readers to judge, but that's what I was trying to do.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think you were very successful because you cover- I think of von Neumann as a connector, in terms of not only was he brilliant at the language of the universe, mathematics, but he was also this rare intersection, and I see it
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very seldom, and we fund a lot of tech companies, we fund a lot of innovative companies, and there's this Venn diagram, which is almost always a nul set, which is deep understanding of the technical aspects of things, married to the ability to appear as a normal human and speak normy, but also speak the language of his colleagues. I think that this gets us into
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I think that this gets us into your idea of the cluster of Hungarian Martians.
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Talk to us a little bit about what was going on in Hungary at that time, that created all of these brilliant people who, dispersed around the world, but for a while it was all there.
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: This is quite remarkable, and I have to say that despite trying to grapple with this, I've not come away with a satisfactory explanation of what was in the water in Budapest at this time, because along with von Neumann, we have one of his best friends, Eugene Wigner, who'd later win the Nobel.
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We have Edward Teller who is going to become famous for persecuting Oppenheimer, quite soon with the new film coming out about Oppenheimer, I'm sure.
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Nevertheless, another great mind.
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There's all sorts of minds that are milling around Budapest at this time, and many of them are Jewish as well, and often from a very wealthy background.
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Now, part of the reason is Budapest is one of the few places in Europe, that's actually pretty welcoming towards those with Jewish backgrounds.
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If you want to be successful, that was one of the places as a Jew that you would probably choose to live.
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There are specific historical reasons around why the Jewish people at Budapest were encouraged to flourish as well.
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They were seen as a boardwalk in this incredible empire, the Austria-Hungarian empire, against the masses.
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We had this incredible, huge multicultural empire, but the old elites were very uncomfortable, that at any moment, they might lose their footing.
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These successful Jewish families were often an opal, they were given these titles like von and so on, and they were set up as a middleman between the old nobles, and they were allowed to do the jobs that the nobility didn't want to do, like banking, and law, and medicine, and things like that.
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Of course, you have this incredible elite, of course, educational system as well.
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There were these few very fantastic schools, and maths in particular, there was a nationwide elite maths exam that anybody that wanted to study maths would sit, and that garnered lots of prestige and so on, for the kids that were successful.
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The whole system of teaching was rather different too.
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So, you would expect the maths teachers, for example, at a school to have strong associations with the local university, and they were in this constant process of learning.
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After say six to eight months of teaching, they might go off to university and write a couple of academic papers as well, and then come back.
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There's this really rich environment there, and amongst that, that allowed these group of intellectuals to flourish.
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Even amongst them, Eugene Wigner was asked in later life at Los Alamos, how do you explain the Hungarian phenomenon?
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He said, well, there is only one phenomenon that is worthy of explanation, and that phenomenon is John von Neumann.
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He thought that Neumann had such an exceptional mind that even amongst this incredible glittering cast of characters that we get later at Los Alamos, von Neumann was still the standout.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: So many fascinating things in your reply, one of the things that I am struck by often, is this centuries long persecution of the Jews, absurd in my opinion, but nevertheless, there it was.
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They also were allowed to prosper, as you mentioned, in disciplines and fields that the landed gentry and aristocracy felt were beneath them.
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I think that's a code word, especially in the maths part for, they couldn't figure it out.
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The accommodation of these geniuses, wherever it happened, and it happened in different historical contexts, usually with brilliant Jewish practitioners.
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It makes me wonder, are there aspects of the Jewish religion that touch on this?
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For example, my children grew up here in Greenwich, Connecticut, had many Jewish friends, and the first bar mitzvah I went to, I was so struck by the veneration of learning.
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Loquacious provocateur is in my handle on Twitter, and when I see something that I think is really cool, I just can't shut up about it.
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What do you think of that mix? Was it cultural?
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Was it von Neumann basically just had this, he was a child prodigy as well.
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Help me understand the mix of genetics, of circumstances, of the ability to put together this extraordinary scene in mathematics, physics, at all.
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: Well, as I've said, von Neumann was clearly an exception amongst a lot of exceptional people, and he can't really write that off.
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I think it's difficult to say how rare a mind of his caliber is, but I'd estimate once in fifty to a hundred years or something.
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We look at this pure mathematical ability, and we talk about maybe Terence Tao or modern day mathematicians who are probably of that caliber, but then von Neumann has this extra spark, this extra interest that, to me, is clearly influenced by his upbringing and culture.
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Now, as for the Jewish love of learning and so on, I'm sure that played a role.
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One of the things that his father did was bought an entire library from somebody who's getting rid of those, and just installed it, and like many wealthy families, they received tutoring from a young age.
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He was the eldest of three brothers, and they're all taught multiple languages and so on.
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Part of the reason for that was Miksa was aware that at any time, the good times could come to an end, and he says this to them.
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He wants to prepare them to be able to survive under almost any circumstances, to be able to speak almost any language, to get by.
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He shared that in common with a lot of Jewish people of the time.
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The whole love of learning thing, I'm an Indian immigrant, my mom came across to England when I was three, and if you talk to a lot of Asian immigrants, like myself, look at our, Rishi Sinak is Prime Minister.
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The idea that you work hard at school is just, you try and excel academically, that is just ingrained.
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I think there is, amongst many migrants, this kind of mentality, and I think the Jewish people at the time probably, I'm sure shared that, like many migrants do too.
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Is there something more to it?
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There's a lot of crazy theories and, oh my word, I've looked at many of them, and as a fairly hard- nosed scientist, I've tried to look at them, and none of them really stand out for me.
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I'm not going to go down the road of speculating, because often that tends to result in some ugly consequences.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I couldn't agree more about various populations.
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India is a great example, in my opinion, of a country that also shares this love of learning, also has a very young switched on population, and I always look towards those places as potential centers of some pretty cool innovation.
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Von Neumann also had this extreme insecurity, that he was meant to produce unusual or extraordinary things, or in his own words, face extinction.
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Maybe talk a bit about that.
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: Yeah, well, that's right.
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That was the fear that accompanied European Jews all the way through the early 20th century, the late 19th century, and it wasn't unfounded, there were pogroms everywhere.
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The reason that this particular set of Jewish intellectuals did flourish, was that they weren't being persecuted, and it was unusual.
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Budapest at the time was a much friendlier environment than France or so many of other European countries.
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Even when von Neumann ends up in Princeton, they hire him kind of reluctantly.
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There's antisemitism in the air, all of these Jewish intellectuals are wanting to leave later in the 1930s, and Princeton is very careful about not wanting to employ too many Jewish people.
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Of course, black mathematicians faced, if anything, an even bigger barrier at the time.
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David Blackwell, an exceptional statistician who von Neumann would actually end up nurturing later on, so much so that Blackwell ended up writing about how important von Neumann's mentoring was to him later on.
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Now, Blackwell was kind of shunned by Princeton, and even with von Neumann's backing, he only got in there under Princeton being put under a lot of pressure.
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There were huge pressures, of course, operating on the Jewish people of the time.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm fascinated by that theme of, and it repeats itself through history, as a historian you know this, where the installed elites, let's put it that way, have this horrible habit of trying to either suppress, or silence, or in other ways ring-fence all of these geniuses.
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We don't have to look too far today to see it happening, right.
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Even though von Neumann got, I think it was 1933, that the Institute for Advanced Studies gave him lifetime tenure, one wonders about, which you mentioned Oppenheimer, if we bring David Bohm into the equation, the hidden variables, quantum physicist.
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I wrote a brief thread about how politics and prejudices applied to even the greatest minds, and Oppenheimer wanted to suppress Bohm's hidden variables, not because the science or math was wrong, but because apparently he was a communist, according to the authorities.
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I ended the thread by saying, if you want to understand how even the most brilliant minds sometimes reacted to social situations, the movie Mean Girls is a good reference for you.
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This is a more open-ended question, then we're going to get back to von Neumann, but why does this happen?
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What do you think is causing this?
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Because we experience it today as well.
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: Gosh.
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Well, one has to, I suppose, remember that science attracts some pretty odd people sometimes, and also people with strong views, but it's also a very social kind of enterprise.
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If you don't run with the pack, sometimes it can punish you.
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I think there is something also about science, which probably brings out, in some cases, the worst in people in certain situations.
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It has to be said that, when Oppenheimer himself was dragged in and put on trial for apparently being a traitor and a red, which of course he wasn't, well he was something of a red himself, but he wasn't a traitor.
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Then, most of the scientific community did stand by him including, von Neumnan, who was of course famous as something of a hawk and a patriot.
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Not entirely justifiably in my view, but von Neumann put his own reputation on the line and testified for Oppenheimer there.
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There's give and take, sometimes the scientific community can come together and get behind one of it's chosen when they see something truly silly happening and that's exactly what von Neumann felt about these sorts of witch trials that you had going on, which is that they were silly and pointless and a massive distraction, really.
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So yeah, I think that's part of the reason.
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But it's also kind of human nature, isn't it, I fear? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
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The quote that springs to mind is “when a genius comes into the world, a confederacy of dances aligns against him or her.
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” And yeah, we could turn this entire podcast into one on human OS and how it even infects the most brilliant circles of minds with all of these extraneous and unnecessary persecutions, et cetera.
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They absolutely fascinate me.
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Let's get back to von Neumann, and he said something in I think 1933 or 4, which I really love because it was a crack in the door of opening people's understandings that we are living in a probabilistic world, but most of us are deterministic thinkers.
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And I often append hilarity or tragedy often ensue.
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And von Neumann came up with something that he wanted to present and hoped to make current, which was a three value model for quantum in particular, in which it was yes, no, or maybe, and the maybe state was kind of one that, I think, showed his incredible understanding of trying to think in a linear fashion, trying to make it binary, yes, no, up, down was not going to cut it with the new scientific thinking.
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Talk to me about that and his contributions to just pure quantum physics writing, if you will, the script in the math that he was able to generate.
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: Yeah, so I mean, unlike Einstein, who was quite worried about what quantum mechanics had to say about reality and causality, von Neumann was relatively relaxed about it.
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I think he was more interested in the fact that the math worked and he wants to make sure that it really did work.
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So there were quite profoundly different attitudes to it.
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So von Neumann turned up at the University of Göttingen shortly after his PhD, which of course he finishes by the age of, I think, 21.
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And he arrives in Göttingen when he is 22 on a scholarship.
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Now he's at the University of Göttingen, not because it's about to become the center of quantum mechanics, the entire world, but because it already is the center of mathematics.
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And it's headed by this guy David Hilbert, who's a kind of a mentor but also a brilliant spokesperson for mathematics in the early 20th century.
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And it just so happens that there's another kind of whiz kid at Göttingen at the same time.
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And that's Werner Heisenberg.
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And Heisenberg's actually a year older than von Neumann, remarkable really.
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And Heisenberg's come up with this new science of the atom, which gets called matrix mechanics, and it deals with matrices to grids and numbers.
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And Heisenberg's approach to this is he's not going to get worried about what's actually going on inside the atom.
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He tries to explain what you can see.
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So like the spectra that these atoms emit when they get warm or whatever.
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And so by considering that, he comes up with matrix mechanics, which is remarkably successful, but physicists not very comfortable with it because the mathematics of matrices was really unfamiliar to them at the time, even though now if you are, I don't know, 16, 17, you learn about matrices in schools.
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But at the time, they were very unfamiliar.
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Now, within about a year of Heisenberg coming out with matrix mechanics, there's another version of quantum mechanics, which is called wave mechanics, that is invented by Schrödinger over in Vienna.
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And these two versions of quantum mechanics appear to give the same answers, but what they imply about the world is completely different.
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So if you kind of look at Heisenberg's maths and sort of squint, you can imagine the electrons jumping about inside the atom going from orbital to orbital and so on.
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And Schrodinger hated this.
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I mean, he found this repugnant and his mathematics dealt with waves, and physicists were much more familiar with waves and dealing with waves and wave equations.
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And so people were much more comfortable with this.
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But then what were these waves?
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And much later it turned out that there were sort of waves of probability, but initially they tried to explain them in all sorts of ways, like waves of electron density and stuff like that. Anyway, von Neumann...
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What's going on, and von Neumann comes along and one of the first things he does is that he shows mathematically that these two versions of quantum mechanics are actually two sides of the same mathematical coin.
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And then he works on this, and he sets down his thoughts in a book called the Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.
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And this is where he makes atomic physics and the quantum mechanics really, really rigorous for the first time.
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And that book is still very much how...
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It's still very much the most rigorous version of quantum mechanics that we have today, it's in Hilbert's space.
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And while I did physics many years ago, that was my undergrad degree and you wouldn't expect as a physicist to go near von Neumann's formulation of quantum mechanics, what you're going to learn is Dirac and a bit of matrix mechanics and it's Schrödinger equation and so on.
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You don't really talk about von Neumann's Hilbert's space very much beyond just saying, oh, yeah, that's the really rigorous way of looking at it, but it is still the most sort of watertight way of looking at science of the atom.
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And when he laid down that math, certain things began to be clearer to people.
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So there's the measurement problem.
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So you have in quantum mechanics the wave function, and then at some point, if you make an observation, the particle pops into being and has a location or whatever.
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And before that, we tend to now think that there isn't...
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It doesn't really make sense to talk about where the particle is before the measurement's made.
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And von Neumann's mathematics really shows this for the first time.
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Now, where is the particle sort of popping into being?
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Is it as a result of the measuring device?
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Is it something perhaps earlier? Is it something later?
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If we trace that process back all the way into the mind, is it our conscious perception of it?
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Now, von Neumann doesn't take a view on that, but he does the math and he shows that no matter where you make this point, which he, I think equals the cut, the mathematical result is the same.
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But you get this very discontinuous process of the particle being sort of everywhere and nowhere, and then suddenly it's somewhere.
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And that introduces all of the fun stuff that people have been debating kind of ever since about quantum mechanics, which is what's happened to causality.
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And you've introduced randomness into the process and could that underlie free will and human consciousness and all sorts of other things.
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But really for the first time we see these questions arising because von Neumann's expressed it so clearly with his mathematics.
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So this is something I think that wasn't very widely appreciated, physicists will tend to skirt over that.
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But historically, it's an incredibly important account.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree.
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And there seems to be a theme, especially with these incredible quantum leaps, I guess we could call them.
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Claude Shannon's information theory was sitting in a desk drawer for a long time, which other engineers and information theorists thought, yeah, that's interesting, but there's nothing we can do with it.
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And I thought the same about this specific book you mentioned with von Neumann.
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It's hard to argue with the math, and I just find it really funny that all of the other squabbles seem to take precedence.
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And that's maybe the interactive part of...
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We humans who are part of this, the observer effect and all of the above.
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But it's hard to argue with quantum rules and findings in that...
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Virtually much of the modern world is without quantum mechanics would be impossible, right?
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: Yeah, of course.
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I mean everything from electronics to GPS, but of course, everything's quantum ultimately, right?
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Of course.
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: It's simply a kind of deeper theory over what's going on.
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We don't see it, we don't see the manifestations of it, but it's there, underpinning everything.
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It was one of the incredible achievements of 20th century science, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
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And it's a bit like Bucky Fuller had a thing where he was trying to describe why regular people react, and often very brilliant regular people react, poorly to these new discoveries.
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And he put it in the framework of that people were either tuned in or not tuned in.
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And he used the microscopic world as an example of the first person to look through a microscope was like, "Oh, holy shit, there's a whole other world down there."
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But to socialize that idea, even among the most brilliant scientific minds, took a long time.
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And one of the things that I find interesting, I'm a huge fan of David Deutsch, particularly his book, The Beginning of Infinity, and I see this kind of as a becoming as it were.
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In other words, movement and progress to better explanations, and the better explanations can be confounding.
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And the thing that I liked about von Neumann is, as I said earlier, this sort of intersection...
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I mean, after all, Hilbert, when he was defending his thesis, this might be apocryphal, but wasn't Hilbert have said to only ask him one question, which was, "My dear men, where did you find those exquisite evening clothes?"
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: Yes. Yeah.
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Who's your tailor, I think, yeah. Yes.
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I mean, he was already a kind of favorite of Hilbert by this stage because of his role in helping to resolve these deep paradoxes in mathematics and set theory that were being discovered at the time, of course.
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So Hilbert was very positively predisposed towards von Neumann.
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And bear in mind that von Neumann's work on set theory, his first major contribution was published age 17, so he'd already made a mark on...
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that leads me to the area where I first became very interested in von Neumann because of game theory.
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It's very adjacent to what I did for most of my career, which is asset management, and a deep understanding of game theory can be very helpful in trying to understand why human actors act the way they do.
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And I run an account that I want your opinion on, and I can't remember...
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I keep copious notes, but I don't always attribute what I was reading.
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So I was going back through my older notes on game theory, and I had a quote in there where someone was asserting, "The thinking classes had to stay one step ahead of the militarists."
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And this author said, "That might have been one of the things that spurred von Neumann onto doing game theory, because it was in fact the game theory that led the militarists to conclude that we can't launch these weapons against each other because we'll all be destroyed, mutually assured destruction."
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But what do you think about that?
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Ananyo Bhattacharya: Whoa.
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Well, let's go back a little bit to the roots of game theory, right?
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I mean, because it's a mad project, isn't it?
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When you think about it, this idea that mathematicians or mathematics could have something to say about human behavior and politics I mean even now, it sounds like a massive overreach.
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And we also have to consider the terrible reputation that game theory had and still has amongst many people, is this kind of war-like discipline as a result of its use in nuclear strategy.
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But the roots of game theory are absolutely fascinating.
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And of course, it's partly to do with mathematicians interest in chess, but it's also partly came about because of this huge optimism at the turn of the 20th century, that it was in mathematical circles that maths had something to contribute.
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It had been so successful, it had something to contribute to society.
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And the people that first began looking at a mathematics of conflict amongst the greats of the time, what they wanted to do is help to bring about world peace.
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I mean, that's what it was about.
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The idea was maybe they could set up these sort of schools of mathematics that would bring a new discipline, really, to international relations.
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And instead of going to war all the time, maybe they could resolve this with pen and paper and some critical thinking.
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So that's the kind of root of it really, which was kind of very well-meaning.
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But there hadn't been much progress in that until von Neumann, again in his early twenties, comes up with the Minimax theorem.
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And that's really the first breakthrough.
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And the Minimax theorem says that every two player, zero-sum game, that is a game that one person's loss is the other person's game and there's nothing in between.
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All of those any two players zero-sum game must have a solution.
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And that solution's either going to be a strategy that one player or the other can pursue to win, or it's going to be what von Neumann called a mix strategy, which is basically some...
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Introduced some degree of randomness.
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So if you think about rock, paper, scissors, we know what the best strategy for rock, paper, scissors is, and that is, you randomize your choice and pull it out.
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Anybody that uses rock every time is going to stop losing quite quickly.
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So that's a mixed strategy.
47:00
And then nothing much happens because von Neumann loses interest in game theory after having come up with this.
47:05
And then he returned to it with Oskar Morgenstern, when Morgenstern arrives in Princeton.
47:12
And Morgenstern's an economist, and he's been thinking about this issue where of perpetual...
47:17
An infinite loop, if you like, which if you intervene in an economy in some way, people will kind of act to kind of minimize or maximize that intervention.
47:39
And immediately your model that you had, which you'd use to come up with that intervention, is instantly undermined and so becomes useless.
47:45
And Morgenstern had been trying to get his head around this, and he'd been complaining about it and saying that all attempts to model economies must fail.
47:57
And economists at the time didn't really like this very much, but then the Great Depression comes along the Wall Street crash, and Morgenstern is kind of suddenly in demand because everybody's going, "Oh, well, that guy was saying...
48:09
We didn't know what we're talking about. Look, he was right."
48:16
So Morgenstern comes along.
48:16
Now the problem is he has this insight, but he doesn't know what to do with it.
48:23
And it's only when he meets von Neumann, who is famous by this time, and they start talking about it, that von Neumann really starts to get deep into the mathematics of game theory and helps to kind of solve this conundrum with game theory.
48:45
And he does this as a hobby.
48:45
I mean, that's a remarkable thing, right?
48:45
He's busy helping design atom bombs at Los Alamos, and he's working on the first programmable computer, and he's got all of this stuff going on.
48:59
And in between all of that, he comes back to...
48:59
For instance, settles down with Morgenstern for a massive kind of session, and then he pops off again.
49:13
I think over about 18 months, two years, which is about how long it took me to write my book, they come up with this 600 page, kind of the Bible, really, of game theory, the first proper book on game theory.
49:30
Now, the weird thing is that von Neumann, even though he later gets his reputation as Dr.
49:36
Strangelove and Kubrick models Strangelove on him, because von Neumann's the one who ends up attending Atomic Energy Commission meetings in a wheelchair when he gets cancer.
49:53
Now, von Neumann is brought up and loves this central European environment, academic environment where it's quite natural for academics to kind of get together in bars or cafes and hash things out, and share kind of insights with each other and argue and debate.
50:18
And what comes out in their book on game theory is what's called cooperative game theory.
50:18
And this is really what is the best strategy given whatever n number of players that these people can come up with if they're allowed to form coalitions.
50:38
So they would look at, say, a three person game, and they would say, okay, well, what if two of them get together and gang up against the other guy?
50:58
It was all about forming these coalitions and reaching kind of a position where certain coalitions were stable.
51:04
This is what almost the entire book is about.
51:04
And this turns out not to be an incredibly productive way of proceeding with game theory.
51:12
So there's a lot of insights all the way through that book, but ultimately, cooperative theory is going to give way...
51:27
I mean, it's still useful in many contexts, but it's going to give way to John Nash's take, which comes along later.
51:36
And von Neumann, when Nash, the young Nash comes into his office later and says, "Look, I've got this different approach to game theory.
51:43
You should really take a look."
51:48
And it's kind of a non-cooperative, and so on... Von Neumann's really...
51:48
He doesn't like this one bit, and he just rejects it almost out of hand.
51:57
And Nash goes away and then develops this.
51:57
Nash rubs a lot of people up the wrong way, but him and von Neumann, they see each other again at Rand.
52:19
And von Neumann even introduces him and they debate, but they never really saw eye to eye on their approach to game theory, which is, to me, it's another irony because with von Neumann being portrayed as this hawk, it's quite funny to me that he found this idea of people communicating and trying to find some sort of working coalition to be attractive as opposed to John Nash.
52:54
That to me seems to be a bit of an irony.
52:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I was fascinated by that section in terms of...
52:57
So von Neumann basically builds game theory around, we have a problem, let's transform it to logic.
53:08
Let's develop simple rules to solve that.
53:16
And then let's bring in brute force, not computer brute force, but human mind brute force.
53:24
But to someone on Wall Street, the theory that we are all rational actors is a big assumption, and that we are also maximizers of our utility function, again, huge assumption.
53:38
There's a great book that I wrote a recommendation and thread on Twitter called The Genius of the Beast by Howard Bloom, talking about capitalism and saying what was missed was that capitalism is humans.
54:04
In other words, capitalism, free markets, et cetera, allow humans to express their preferences, which are often illogical, which are often not rational in a manner that it creates this massive, complex adaptive system.
54:19
And yet, as you look at von Neumann's rules, as it were for game theory, without them, we couldn't have Nash.
54:41
The fundamental takeaway that I always took when reading about this conflict between Nash and von Neumann is that von Neumann's were sort of strictly aimed at zero-sum games.
54:56
And I'm going to ask you to correct me if I'm wrong here, whereas Nash's interpretation was the one that really allowed for cooperation and application to non-zero sum games to positive sum games. Have I got that wrong?
55:12
Ananyo Bhattacharya: No, that is right.
55:15
Now, of course, von Neumann had tried to crack this problem of non-zero sum games, but he had this incredible Minimax theorem which was kind of the underpinning mathematics even now of game theory.
55:34
This was the big theorem, and you could look at Nash's proof as kind of a generalization of Von Neumann's Minimax, I'm told by mathematicians that's what it is, So to Von Neumann, this was kind of almost a trivial step, but because most of the world is non-zero sum, it was rather an important one.
55:56
Now, Von Neumann's approach to it in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which was the tome that he authored with Morgenstern, was to try and tackle non-zero sum games in this kind of weird way, where he almost had a kind of banker that would hold on to the extra utility and that would allow him to treat the rest of the game as non-zero sum, and then he'd sort of add the utility back.
56:24
And this was pretty unsatisfactory. Now, in his defense...
56:30
People, this idea that you could put human happiness on some sort of scale and compare them to each other, this was thought to be more or less impossible.
56:40
And yet, Von Neumann just settles down one afternoon, and he does it.
56:50
Now, he has some awkward assumptions, but nonetheless, this is about as big a step forward as you could possibly imagine at the time.
57:07
And it's allowed a good many things, both good and ill.
57:07
And now, some people blame Von Neumann's conception of utility theory on the rise of neoliberalism.
57:20
This idea that there's a market, the market is a solution for everything.
57:27
And I kind of almost see echoes of it sometimes in Silicon Valley, when you get some people who talk about, well, what can we do to help humanity 100 of years in the future?
57:42
But at the same time, the poverty on the doorstep will often get overlooked.
57:48
And I kind of see a little resonance of utility theory in that.
57:48
But it's important to say that without that first step, we wouldn't have gotten anywhere.
57:59
And secondly, because he formulated utility theory so clearly and stated its assumptions, it allowed other economists to come along later and sort of question them and look at them in more detail.
58:23
And then now we have, of course, behavioral economics, which modifies this utility theory to take into account what experiments tell us about what people really do when they're given these.
58:32
So to me, it was kind of an underpinning theory. It wasn't perfect.
58:39
It wasn't right the first time.
58:46
But as with so much that Von Neumann did, it turns out to be extraordinarily influential and useful.
58:55
And then lastly on game theory is, as I'm sure you know, there's evolutionary game theory, which also came along later.
59:00
Turned out you didn't need that assumption at all.
59:00
You didn't need to assume that there were rational actors, and you applied it to the natural world.
59:05
And it brought amazing insights into how evolution could give rise to particular behaviors, whether it's sort of altruistic behaviors or whatever, starting from some pretty straightforward assumptions about the ebb and flow of genes through populations.
59:29
So yes, it seems like an artificial assumption now, but it's been really rather useful.
59:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's a George Box's idea that all models are wrong, but some are useful and we need to use them as stepping stones to better explanations.
1:00:01
And that brings up Von Neumann's whole, ...
1:00:01
And we're going to get back to what a lot of people I'm sure, want to hear about, which is the Manhattan Project and what he contributed there.
1:00:16
But I'm fascinated by, again, just by the breadth of this man's understanding.
1:00:27
The almost seemingly endless, and one could posit that he was sort of the major-domo, as it were, of what became open source computing.
1:00:44
He was very, very particular that he wanted all of his details, his technical details put into the public domain, and which I think is amazing.
1:00:52
And I get this tension when I read your book and other books that I've read and stories that I've read about Von Neumann is, there's a tension between sort of the hyper-rational von Neumann and then the Von Neumann who drove his car reading a book, had wonderfully fun parties, connected with so many people.
1:01:23
Kind of a quant in the streets and a romantic in the sheets.
1:01:23
Can you elaborate on that?
1:01:29
Ananyo Bhattacharya: Yeah. I mean, it is difficult.
1:01:33
And his wife said at the end of his life, he was a mystery, even to her and was destined to remain so.
1:01:42
His daughter also didn't, couldn't reconcile these two sides of him, but it's quite clear that they were there.
1:01:49
Yeah, I mean, we have his letters to his second wife, Klara Dan, which are extraordinarily romantic.
1:01:57
He whips in just before the Second World War starts.
1:02:10
She's been divorced twice.
1:02:10
They've been waiting for her second divorce to come through, they get married, and then whoosh, they're gone to the States.
1:02:20
Now, my feeling was, that as a young man, he was an optimist and he kind of remained so.
1:02:32
But this optimism was radically undermined by what he saw happening in Europe, particularly in Hungary, during the first...
1:02:40
The communist revolution that took place.
1:02:47
And then later, of course, with the rise of the Nazis and von Neumann helped get a number of Jewish scientists and mathematicians out into safe harbor in the States.
1:02:55
But ever since that moment, he changed I think, fundamentally as a person, he became very cynical about human nature, and I think that shaped some of his interactions in later life.
1:03:14
And his daughter said that he almost switched seamlessly between this kind of jolly, sociable figure to this kind of cynical, somewhat calculating rationalist side, quite freely, sometimes in mid conversation.
1:03:40
Now, another aspect of this is of course, he was relatively socially kind of functional.
1:03:40
He enjoyed socializing, he liked to drink and stuff, but it struck me as I was reading about him that, and some of these strategies, they seem like coping mechanisms to me.
1:04:00
So he had a lot of these limericks memorized, that he would come up with at parties, and none of them have really stood the test of time particularly well, but he just sort of rolled them out.
1:04:15
And then he could also recount vast sections of history books and things or tales.
1:04:20
And this is the thing, if I was this kind of hyper-intelligent human who didn't quite understand fully their fellow human being, that that's the kind of thing that I might be tempted to do at a party.
1:04:43
So I think there's an element of that.
1:04:43
And also reading in some of the accounts of his behavior that maybe had some obsessive compulsive disorder as well.
1:04:50
He used to switch off light switches, switch them on and off before he could leave the room a set number of times, and open and close a drawer, which is again, his second wife, Klara noted.
1:05:05
So I think these aspects of his personality were in constant conflict.
1:05:15
I think when you examine his actual interactions with people, rather than what his famous pronouncements on taking a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union, you find that his actual interactions with people were a lot more humane than many people who claim to be kind of pacifist to make [inaudible].
1:05:39
I find that quite a nice aspect to his personality, that very few people in their day-to-day dealings with him, could say anything nasty about the way that he behaved.
1:05:53
At worst, he was sometimes a bit awkward, but I find that quite heartening, really.
1:06:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: As do I, and I'm fascinated by, as one gets further and further away, let's call it three standard deviations away from the mean of IQ, one sees constantly that there are, if you were to just...
1:06:17
That'd be a great book, I think, right?
1:06:28
To look at all these geniuses, at least in my readings, they all were not neuro typical, in terms of you their loves, their hatreds, et cetera.
1:06:37
One thinks about Isaac Newton spilling, I don't know, five times, the ink on Alchemy that he did on his breakthrough book that gave us Newtonian physics.
1:06:56
And watch the movie on Claude Shannon, read the book on him, very, what I would politely call eccentricities.
1:07:14
And so what do you think about that?
1:07:14
I know that you are aware and have studied deeply all of these fascinating men and women.
1:07:21
Do you think that's a feature, not a bug?
1:07:27
Ananyo Bhattacharya: That's really interesting.
1:07:27
I think I had sort of absentmindedly and subconsciously just somehow thought it was the price that you pay in some regards, for brilliance.
1:07:48
There's some part of the brain is, it's atrophied in comparison to the other part, which is immensely well-developed.
1:07:57
And you look at von Neumann and his friend said that, here's a man whose life, basically all of his enjoyable moments, were spent thinking, and that's what he enjoyed doing most.
1:08:11
I mean, Teller said that most people find to be painful.
1:08:17
For von Neumann what he lived for.
1:08:17
And of course, we see the consequences of that later when he is on his deathbed and his faculties are incredibly tragically slipping away from him.
1:08:32
And Teller's note on that is that this affected von Neumann and caused him more pain and suffering than Teller had seen anybody suffering under any circumstances, which is quite a thing to say.
1:08:58
So if you are like that, then to me, it's almost natural that you're not going to be able to hold up every single aspect of human life.
1:09:05
And if you are proceeding rationally and logically in certain matters.
1:09:24
And von Neumann, that was his mojo.
1:09:24
That was where he got his power, just unpicking what seems extraordinarily complex and laying it out in simple, logical terms, and then just bulldozing his way through it.
1:09:40
And if you think like that, then I think coping with people's foibles and irrationality must have been quite difficult.
1:09:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And you bring up his death.
1:09:52
And I was struck by that as well.
1:09:52
The pain that he felt and suffered by seeing his genius slip away.
1:10:02
I was also struck by the fact that he would recite the lines of Goethe's Faust to his brother, who was reading to him on his deathbed.
1:10:14
And von Neumann would, as his brother turned to page, von Neumann would give him the first few lines from memory.
1:10:30
And that's another thing that struck me in that potentially, an didactic memory on his part and maybe also his clinging to, I can still do that. And I still think...
1:10:39
You're a good author, maybe you should take a look at all the geniuses and see what unites them or divides them.
1:10:59
Let's step back in time to von Neumann and the Manhattan Project.
1:11:07
That's a fascinating vignette of all these great minds trying to deal with what they frankly would think of as quite lesser minds in the military and the politicians that they were dealing with.
1:11:23
Talk to us a bit about that and Von Neumann's role there.
1:11:30
Ananyo Bhattacharya: So von Neumann, he gets invited to Princeton in 1930, and he knows by this stage, that there is another world war coming, and he predicts it in some astonishing detail in letters.
1:11:47
And he also predicts that European Jews would face a mass...
1:11:54
Would be culled, basically.
1:11:54
And he writes about this, and his way of dealing with this is to try and help the United States and the United States military, and to prepare for what he knew was coming.
1:12:17
And his way of initially doing this, is to become an expert on explosions and the incredibly difficult mathematics of explosions, the non-linear dynamics and so on.
1:12:28
Again, I'm told that his work there was seminal.
1:12:28
I don't talk about it much in the book, but I've heard that it is.
1:12:37
And so he gets interesting explosions.
1:12:44
He starts consulting for the military, and pretty soon the army, the Navy, and the US Air Force are all after him for his time.
1:12:52
And in 1943, he gets sent on a secret mission for the Royal Navy in Britain.
1:13:03
So in wartime Britain, we still don't really know everything that he did during that time, but one of the things that he did was, the Royal Navy were trying to figure out how the German subs were laying their mines.
1:13:16
And he figured that out pretty quickly.
1:13:23
And so he saved dozens of British ships from sinking.
1:13:23
And we also know that he gets interested in computing again, because he comes across this mechanical calculator, which is a little bit more than a calculator, but used by the Royal Almanac office.
1:13:45
And that, he writes a kind of me computer program for it.
1:13:45
It's, in effect, a sort of mechanical computer.
1:13:53
And that fires his interest again in computing machines.
1:14:00
Now, in the midst of this, he gets this letter from Oppenheimer, and this is something else because Oppenheimer says, we are only in what can be described as a desperate need for your help on a Buck Rogers type project.
1:14:13
And obviously, Oppenheimer can't tell Von Neumann what this project is, but yeah, it's the Manhattan Project to build a bomb.
1:14:24
But you look at the tone of that letter.
1:14:31
And it's quite clear that despite being surrounded by these great minds, you have Enrico Fermi, you have so many other Nobel Laureates there.
1:14:37
And yet he's looking to get Von Neumann back. They're kind of stuck.
1:14:46
And so von Neumann flies back and he goes to Los Alamos, and within 24 hours he's made this vital contributions to the project.
1:14:54
And that is, at the time, there was the gun-type project.
1:15:01
So this was pretty straightforward in engineering terms.
1:15:07
You bring together two bits of uranium, they form critical mass, and then, boom, you get an explosion.
1:15:14
But then there was this other idea, which was the implosion bomb.
1:15:21
And this was important because plutonium, which looked as if it would be easier to get a hold of than uranium, and that was too reactive to work through the gun-type device.
1:15:35
And so you needed this implosion bomb to work.
1:15:35
But this was an incredibly difficult feat.
1:15:35
And the scientists on the project were comparing it to crushing a can of beer without spilling a drop.
1:15:50
And Feynman was really, he had a huge down on this idea, as did many of them.
1:15:50
But Von Neumann turns up and he goes, "No, no, no, you've been doing it all wrong, none of the experiments that you've been doing..."
1:16:04
And they've been getting these hollow bits of pipe and wrapping dynamite around them and trying to get them to crush evenly and none of that works.
1:16:10
He said, "No, no, you, you're doing this all wrong.
1:16:16
What you need is basically, explosives shape charges."
1:16:25
In which he was an expert by this stage, "In this configuration."
1:16:25
And the configuration is the same as a modern soccer ball.
1:16:31
So you've got the hexagons and the pentagons coming together in this configuration.
1:16:40
And he realizes that if you set off all of those shape charges at the same time, it creates this spherical wavefront that then crushes the plutonium uniformly and you get your explosion, you get the bomb.
1:16:53
And he figures this out really pretty quickly on arriving.
1:17:05
And then he stays involved.
1:17:05
And then later, when they are looking for more computational power, at the time of it, still pretty dependent on slide rules and teams of women working to do the calculations for them.
1:17:23
And they started looking abroad at the mechanical computers that were coming about.
1:17:30
And Von Neumann gets sent off as kind of a representative to find more computing power.
1:17:37
And this is of course, when he bumps into another mathematician, Herman Goldstine is working for the Army and discovers the ENIAC Project, which has been going on, he's for some reason, not been told about it, even though he's trusted by the military and he has to discover this incredible machine by mistake.
1:17:58
And it's the first electronic digital computer that was known about then.
1:18:07
And there's this episode on our training platform where Goldstine starts telling him about it, and then he gets involved in the ENIAC project in Philadelphia.
1:18:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And again, back to his charisma, wasn't he also the one who convinced the military not to abandon the ENIAC computer system?
1:18:38
Ananyo Bhattacharya: Right.
1:18:41
So within a week or two of arriving, his first main contribution is just keeping the money for the project flowing in.
1:18:47
So the ENIAC's just designed for one job, it's designed by Presper Eckert, who's kind of this electronics whiz kid, and Mauchley, who's a physics teacher.
1:19:03
And they both realized that the Moore School, which is where they're based, a lot of their time is being sucked into creating these artillery tables, and these artillery tables tell you how to fire a shell, how far you'd expect a shell to fly under different circumstances.
1:19:25
This was a big deal during the First World War.
1:19:25
It was a huge deal during the Second World War too.
1:19:33
It was taking up vast amounts of time to calculate these tables.
1:19:41
The whole point of the ENIAC was to speed up these calculations.
1:19:41
But it came a little bit too late. It did do some of that.
1:19:46
But by the time that it was doing it, the World War was over. Von Neumann... He has a lot of clout.
1:19:59
He convinces the military to give a second tranche of funding.
1:20:07
But what he also does is, whilst almost everybody on that project knew that the ENIAC was limited, von Neumann is charged with coming up with a report to convince the military and other people to help them build the next generation device, the EDVAC.
1:20:35
In that report, he distills out what is the modern programmable computer.
1:20:35
Our smartphones still run on what's called the von Neumann architecture.
1:20:45
You're in a much better position to explain what that is than I am.
1:20:50
But they're these serial machines that we've been stuck with ever since.
1:21:01
Of course, the EDVAC report then gets circulated by Goldstine without Von Neumann's knowledge and without certainly the knowledge of Eckert or Mauchly.
1:21:08
It gets sent out to all of these teams around the world who are trying to develop computers.
1:21:15
As a result, the first generation of computers are designed along this line.
1:21:19
It remains even down to the present day, apart from the quantum computers that are being developed now and various others.
1:21:34
Then, there's this massive falling out 'cause Mauchly and Eckert, poor souls, wanted to patent the project.
1:21:44
History might have worked itself out quite differently had they succeeded. But they didn't.
1:21:50
Part of the reason they didn't was because Goldstine had circulated this report to all and sundry.
1:21:55
But then, what happens next is the project people split, and Von Neumann goes off back to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he is, and then he convinces the IAS to stump up half the money for his computer project.
1:22:10
But he convinces the military to stump up the other half.
1:22:17
The really remarkable thing is that somehow he manages to convince all these generals and so on that the best thing for the United States is to make absolutely everything on the project publicly accessible.
1:22:31
You were talking about his charisma.
1:22:38
But that is quite astonishing.
1:22:38
Piece by piece, as they're putting this computer together, they publish everything from the specs of their diode to particular circuits of their adders and so on.
1:22:54
They circulated it world worldwide.
1:22:54
That, even more so than this EDVAC report...
1:22:54
That really shapes the first generation of computers.
1:23:03
Then, of course, IBM's first commercial computer ends up being a carbon copy of the IAS machine.
1:23:11
That's not a coincidence because Von Neumann is sneakily consulting for them with an enormous salary.
1:23:20
He's already got his enormous salary at the IAS.
1:23:27
The guy knew how to make money.
1:23:27
That, to me, is really where we should root the open source movement, not necessarily in the Californian freewheeling culture that I think we tend to think of it now.
1:23:46
But in this rather Mitteleuropa collaborative sense of...
1:23:46
"Well, we should do it that way because we get better science and technology if we just talk about stuff." Progressive.
1:24:01
They're both important, and they both come together.
1:24:01
But that's why I argue in the book that he should be seen as this godfather of the open source movement.
1:24:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I took that away quite strongly from the book.
1:24:20
It was something that I didn't know, which was really cool for me because it's like I passionately believe in open source verse closed source.
1:24:26
I think one of the reasons for that is it allows this incredible network to form around the ideas.
1:24:35
For example, for all of the hysteria right now going on around the development of artificial intelligence, I think that the United States, in particular our military, understands that open source is going to beat closed source.
1:25:04
If you put this in a US verse our adversaries, our adversaries are not what you'd call open source supporters.
1:25:17
They want to use the technology in a very limited panopticon way.
1:25:17
Whereas the open source, in my experience, correct me if I'm wrong here, leads to much more rapid discovery because it allows people whose ideas we couldn't even conceive of to contribute.
1:25:47
I think that one of the things that I've certainly taken away, the internet runs on open-source software.
1:25:51
It caused Steve Ballmer, over at Microsoft, to say, "That was communist," because he had a direct competitor and a dog in the hunt there.
1:26:09
Let's just wrap up on that idea.
1:26:09
Von Neumann, as you rightly put it...
1:26:17
He really was the father of open source in that he made all of this public and encouraged it to be sent hither and yon.
1:26:24
That proceeded to rapidly allow us to generate better and better computing/better and better underlying systems. What do you think?
1:26:44
If you were going to write an alternate history, what would've happened had he not been around? Yes.
1:26:49
I asked you at the top of our discussion, "Would these things have happened?" Yeah, probably. I agree with you.
1:26:59
But was he that singular magnetic force who not only understood the math, which is very, very complex and difficult but also seemed to understand, at least by the way I read it, the way humans interacted?
1:27:17
We're back to that tension between the hyper-rational and yet, "Oh, this is the way human OS really works." What do you think?
1:27:25
Ananyo Bhattacharya: Yeah.
1:27:28
I mean, it is remarkable.
1:27:28
We keep coming back to it.
1:27:28
You alluded to this earlier.
1:27:35
But as well as being this hyper-rational human being, Von Neumann turns out to be an amazing project manager. This is the weird thing.
1:27:42
People want to talk about Turing and so on.
1:27:42
But von Neumann is, in fact, the one who has placed himself at this incredible nexus.
1:27:51
He manages to convince the military of the importance of the project.
1:27:59
He convinces the IAS that he's going to leave, and the IAS is willing to do anything to keep him at that stage.
1:28:13
He ensures everything is out there.
1:28:13
By doing so, actually, his own project ends up being one of the last computers to be completed.
1:28:22
That only rules into life in the 1950s, a couple of years before he died.
1:28:31
But in the meantime, all of the other projects that have just been using his reports...
1:28:38
They've kicked in earlier, which is, I suppose, a warning to people who are very keen on open source that you will be overtaken.
1:28:51
He gets these highly-strung engineers to work together.
1:29:02
Now, Goldstine is not an easy person to work for.
1:29:02
Their chief engineer is also a crazy guy who refuses to get rid of his jalopy or whatever it is, and practically replaces every other part and just keeps it running along rather than buy a new car.
1:29:24
But he's this incredible engineer.
1:29:24
But neither of them see eye to eye.
1:29:24
But von Neumann had come along and say a soothing word here or there and just put oil on troubled waters.
1:29:31
They both noticed this after the project was complete.
1:29:38
But basically, he made everything run with minimal intervention.
1:29:44
He just managed to bring it together.
1:29:44
I really don't know how to explain it because he was not seen as somebody who had a deep understanding of human nature/of empathy.
1:29:53
Yet, you read his love letters and so on.
1:30:06
Other people used to joke that he was like an alien species that had studied humans and knew how to imitate them perfectly.
1:30:13
Like the other Martians, was it that he simply had made a study of his fellow human beings and figured out at least superficially what made them tick mean?
1:30:32
I mean, that was in what some of his childhood friends...
1:30:41
Their accounts of his childhood was that he always stood apart from the games that kids of his age were playing.
1:30:51
He would often be studying them.
1:30:51
Maybe that was just part of it.
1:30:51
It certainly, as an interest later in game theory, suggests that he had been watching the rest of us quite closely. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:31:06
That's how I think of him, actually.
1:31:11
I think that's the perfect description.
1:31:11
He was an alien who got stranded here, made a very close study of we humans, and figured, "Okay, I can do this.
1:31:18
I can contribute to this barbaric culture."
1:31:29
My son used to have a framework in which he was analyzing people.
1:31:29
They would be distinguished as either Jedis or aliens.
1:31:36
The Jedis were the ones who were good at getting people to bend to their will.
1:31:46
The aliens were more like von Neumann.
1:31:46
He seems to be a Jedi alien in comparison.
1:31:56
Well, as a final question about this extraordinary man...
1:32:06
When you started the book, I'm sure you had one conception of von Neumann and probably a very different one at the end of the book.
1:32:12
What were the big changes in your view that writing the book gave you on von Neumann?
1:32:24
Ananyo Bhattacharya: Again, I mean, there were two fairly pivotal moments.
1:32:30
There was his support for a preemptive strike.
1:32:36
This is so controversial that it's seen him as, I think, relegated to this backwater, really, of intellectual history when nobody really wanted to touch him, I think.
1:32:44
At the [inaudible], I think that's one of the reasons that he's been forgotten.
1:32:50
Another reason is, of course, he was so wide-ranging that only a complete fool would go about trying to write a book about his accomplishment.
1:33:00
But certainly, I think this brief period after the Second World War, where von Neumann quite openly supports a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union...
1:33:10
I think as I read more about that, whilst I don't justify it, and I want to leave people to make up their own minds about what a person he was after reading the book, I began to at least understand how he came to this conclusion.
1:33:33
Now, it's important to state, at the end of the Second World War, Von Neumann was convinced there was going to be a third world war with nuclear weapons within a decade.
1:33:43
Now, given how accurately he forecast the Second World War and given his sheer mental capacity, it's difficult to imagine if you have been right once before... You're that smart.
1:34:00
You're convinced you're right again.
1:34:07
You're as rational as he was almost anything seems a price worth paying to prevent an all-out nuclear catastrophe because there's no good end to a nuclear war, even now.
1:34:26
In that light, he said, "Well, this is what we could see.
1:34:26
Well, before the Soviet Union gets too big an arsenal, shouldn't we just take them out?
1:34:33
Shouldn't we take out their capacity or at least threaten to take them out so that they give up on their ambitions?
1:34:46
Now, within a few years, it was quite apparent that the Soviet arsenal was already too large for this to make any sense because then they had retaliatory power.
1:34:52
Of course, von Neumann is also the one that realizes the Soviets are actually ahead of the game in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles because he realizes they've shrunk thermonuclear bombs, the fusion bombs, down to a level where they might be launched on missiles.
1:35:19
He then, as chair of the Teapot Committee and various other ways, convinces the US to start down the track of developing ICPMs.
1:35:36
Now, the Soviet Union was ahead.
1:35:36
I think on the very same year that von Neumann passes, the Soviet Union would launch Sputnik and then use the same technology that they would use in their ICPMs.
1:35:50
He certainly wasn't wrong on that score. He changes his mind.
1:35:56
Then, the second mitigating factor, if you like, was that, actually, a preemptive strike was extraordinarily popular amongst not just the American public.
1:36:11
There was a strong minority view that this was the way to go.
1:36:11
But even amongst people that we regard as pacifists, like Bertrand Russell, who somehow, by being a lord and drinking tea and having an English accent, has managed to get away scot-free with his reputation intact, even though he also said that we should give the Soviet Union an ultimatum.
1:36:32
If they don't give up their nuclear ambitions, we should just bomb them.
1:36:39
There were quite a few intellectuals at the time who were thinking down this particular path.
1:36:46
This changed my conception of him.
1:36:46
Then, I think the thing that shakes people's view of him most is his deathbed, not conversion to Catholicism, but his reawakening of religious feeling that he had on his deathbed.
1:37:08
Now, like many Jewish people at the time, his family had converted.
1:37:19
In their case, it was after the death of their father.
1:37:25
That was to avoid persecution and to fit in.
1:37:25
But Van Neumann, on his deathbed, seems to have had this reawakening.
1:37:37
Now there are two ways that people regarded this.
1:37:48
One was that he was losing his faculties.
1:37:48
To somebody who had had an unimaginably powerful mind, this must have been quite a blow.
1:38:05
In the latter stages of his cancer, when his daughter would visit, he was asking her to even just ask him simple sums.
1:38:20
She just couldn't bear it anymore at that stage.
1:38:26
It must have been some solace even to a mind as rational as Von Neumann's to think that there might be eternal life.
1:38:43
The second, of course, rationalization of his decision was that it was Pascal's wager.
1:38:52
This is what his daughter thought, that he had told, I think, his mother that Catholicism was a hard religion to live in.
1:38:59
But it was the only one to die in.
1:39:05
Again, you might be in a better position to comment on that one.
1:39:15
There are these two conflicting views of why he did that.
1:39:15
It's whether you believe he stayed rational, although there are downsides to Pascal's wager.
1:39:24
How do you know got the right God?
1:39:35
I find it difficult to believe that he would go with Pascal's wager.
1:39:35
A man of such obvious logic may have followed the logic to his flawed conclusion, but maybe not. I don't know.
1:39:55
You can never, I think, ultimately make sense of this man.
1:39:55
But you can begin to have some understanding of both sides of his personality and where they might have met in the individual.
1:40:05
But the overall picture, I think, will remain forever a mystery.
1:40:13
I don't think we're going to get much further down that path.
1:40:20
Part of the reason being, of course, that he hardly wrote about himself at all.
1:40:25
He just let his mathematical papers and his achievements speak for him.
1:40:35
I think that's where we are today, really.
1:40:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Which is actually quite amazing.
1:40:39
I'm not a fan of Pascal's wager.
1:40:49
Well, you know all the problems with it.
1:40:49
I often sometimes joke that Pascal hit his head very badly and then came up with the wager. What's next for you?
1:40:55
What's your next project?
1:41:03
Ananyo Bhattacharya: Yeah.
1:41:03
Well, as anybody who's read the book might at least be able to sympathize with...
1:41:08
I felt quite intellectually burnt out after writing it.
1:41:16
I'm putting my brain back in order by writing a kid's science fiction novel at the moment, which I hope to get finished in a few months. We'll see how that goes.
1:41:28
Unfortunately, my moneymaking schemes are not as good as von Neumann's.
1:41:28
It's like, "write me a book about an obscure 20th-century mathematical genius and then write a science fiction novel, neither of which exactly surefire money-spinning schemes.
1:41:40
Then, after that, I've got a few ideas for another nonfiction science book.
1:41:56
I guess I like this notion of unpicking science.
1:42:09
We tend to imagine the great geniuses of the past as sitting around and then suddenly, "Boosh!"
1:42:17
An idea pops into their head out of the ether, or maybe just God gave it to them.
1:42:26
As anybody that's done any science knows, it's a lot more complicated than that.
1:42:26
Unpicking some of these great scientific ideas of the past appeals to me.
1:42:32
Maybe I'll do something on that again next.
1:42:42
The Man from the Future is both a biography and not a biography, as many people have been at pains to point out.
1:42:49
To me, it's a feature, not a bug.
1:42:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love the fact that your next project is science fiction for kids.
1:42:58
That really appeals to me because I think that this increased desire I think I see changing, that, "Stay in your lane. Stay in your lane." Why?
1:43:19
According to Walt Whitman, we all contain multitudes. You certainly do.
1:43:28
Well, listen, this has been great.
1:43:28
It reignited my joy in von Neumann.
1:43:28
When I was a younger guy, I was fascinated by him.
1:43:37
But I had to actually go to the library and read about him, as opposed to all of the resources that I have now.
1:43:44
Part of our Infinite Loops journey here is, at the end of the podcast, we always ask our extraordinarily diverse and talented, and smart guests if we made you the emperor of the world for one day... You can't kill anyone.
1:44:07
You can't advocate for a first strike.
1:44:07
You can't do anything that would lock people up.
1:44:16
But we handed you a magic microphone.
1:44:16
You could speak into it two things that would incept the entire 8 billion population of this earth to wake up whenever their next morning was with those two ideas.
1:44:34
But the hink here is they're going to think they thought of it themselves.
1:44:43
They're going to immediately start taking action along those two ideas.
1:44:50
What are you going to incept for us?
1:44:50
Ananyo Bhattacharya: Well, one is learn more maths and understand both the way the logic works and the limits of logic as well.
1:45:05
I guess the second is the world's burning.
1:45:05
Let's think about that and try and reconcile ourselves to cooperating a little bit instead of thinking in our nationalistic silos.
1:45:27
That might help us in a number of different ways and not just with the climate.
1:45:33
That's just off the top of my head.
1:45:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Those are two very good ones off the top of your head.
1:45:35
I'm always delighted by what my guests come up with.
1:45:43
The fact that you did it just right off the top of your head makes it even more interesting to me, both excellent things to get people thinking about.
1:45:48
Thank you so much for your time.
1:45:54
I've really enjoyed this and can't wait to see the next project, including your science fiction because I've got a lot of grandkids.
1:46:01
Ananyo Bhattacharya: Awesome.
1:46:03
Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah.
1:46:03
Buy them all a copy- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I will. Ananyo Bhattacharya: ...
1:46:08
when it finally comes out.
1:46:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I promise.
1:46:10
Ananyo Bhattacharya: Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure.