# The MANIAC  ## Metadata - Author: [[Benjamin Labatut]] - Full Title: The MANIAC - Category: #books ## Highlights - Ehrenfest sought relentlessly what he called der springende Punkt, the leaping point, the heart of the matter, as for him deriving a result by logical means was never enough: “That is like dancing on one leg,” he would say, “when the essence lies in recognizing connections, meanings and associations in every direction.” ([Location 130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=130)) - Tags: [[pink]] - For Ehrenfest, true understanding was a full-body experience, something that involved your entire being, not just your mind or reason. ([Location 132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=132)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The weight of the respect that Ehrenfest carried among so many outstanding physicists was due to his capacity to bring other people’s ideas into sharp focus and capture their fundamental essence, transmitting this knowledge with such passion and vim that his audience was brought in to his thinking as if under a spell. “He lectures like a master. I have hardly ever heard a man speak with such fascination and brilliance. Significant phrases, witty points and dialectic are all at his disposal in an extraordinary manner. He knows how to make the most difficult things concrete and intuitively clear. Mathematical arguments are translated by him into easily comprehensible pictures,” wrote the great German theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who both appreciated and feared Ehrenfest’s fame as the grand inquisitor of physics. ([Location 158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=158)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Where some saw the quantum revolution as a protean fire sparking novel results at an unrelenting pace, Ehrenfest saw mostly stagnation and even degeneration: “Those awful abstractions! That incessant focus on tricks and techniques! The mathematical plague that erases all powers of imagination!” he cried out bitterly before his students in Leiden. The direction in which theoretical physics was heading went completely against his grain: real, physical intuition was being replaced with brute-force artillery, and mathematical formulae were set in place of matter, atoms, and energy. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=186)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In nature, Nelly said, there are such things that surpass proportion and cannot be likened to any other. They obey no measure and refuse categorization, because they exist outside the order that encompasses all phenomena. These outliers, these singularities, these monstrosities, will not be governed or compared by means of a number, because they lie at the root of what is disharmonious, chaotic, and unruly about the world. ([Location 231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=231)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Nelly warned her audience; it may well be that nature is utterly chaotic, with no law able to subsume the apparent heterogeneity, no concept capable of whittling down its ever-increasing complexity. What if nature cannot be cognized as a whole? Our civilization had yet to come to terms with this terrifying possibility, and she very much doubted that it could, for it would be a death blow to science, philosophy, and rationality. Meanwhile, Nelly said, artists had already fully embraced it; she believed that the rediscovery of the irrational was the driving force behind all vanguard movements, movements that, even to a lay observer, were evidently suffused with a Faustian, boundless energy, a haste, a tragic fall in which everything was permitted. For modern art recognized no laws, no method, no truth, just a blind, uncontainable surge, a rush of madness that would not stop for anyone or anything but drive us onward even to the ends of the Earth. ([Location 250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=250)) - Tags: [[pink]] - One afternoon in the 1840s, as George Boole walked across a field near Doncaster, a thought flashed into his head that he believed was a religious vision. Boole suddenly saw how you could use mathematics to unlock the mysterious processes of human thought. The same symbols that were used in algebra could be used to describe what went on inside people’s heads as they followed a train of thought, expressing all the twists and turns in simple binary form. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=412)) - Tags: [[pink]] - David Hilbert, pope of 20th-century mathematics, sat in for his doctorate examination, and was so stunned by him that when his turn came to interrogate the twenty-two-year-old Hungarian student, he had just one question: “Pray, who is the candidate’s tailor?” ([Location 427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=427)) - Tags: [[pink]] - According to the story that my mother related over dinner (quite incapable of holding back her admiration or disguising the jealousy she felt for Jancsi’s mother, who had birthed that wondrous child), when Szegő came home after meeting the young prodigy he had tears in his eyes; he slumped down in his armchair and called out to his wife, who found him there, weeping, holding the crumpled folios where that ten-year-old had solved, with no apparent effort, questions that Gábor had labored over for months, and that would have racked the brains of any competent adult mathematician, staring at them without blinking, poring over every symbol and number as if those pages had been torn directly from the holiest Torah. I always thought that was just another legend—there are so many tall tales about Jancsi—but many years later, I had the chance to talk to Szegő, and he confessed to me, rather sheepishly, that he still had those pages, written by Jancsi on his father’s bank stationery. He told me that he had known, right there and then, that von Neumann would change the world, even if he could not imagine how. I asked him what had led him to believe something so outlandish, and he said that no sooner had he laid eyes on my friend’s enormous head than he had felt in the presence of something completely Other. ([Location 465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=465)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Although I would later devote my entire life to physics, in school I was an aspiring mathematician, so I knew just barely enough to intuit Jancsi’s unbelievable talent: he explained set theory to me—the basis of modern mathematics—in such a simple and clever way that I still find it hard to believe that he could have had such a profound understanding before he had even begun to shave. ([Location 504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=504)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Jancsi was trying to make sense of the world. He was searching for absolute truth, and he really believed that he would find a mathematical basis for reality, a land free from contradictions and paradoxes. To do so, he was determined to suck understanding out of everything. He read voraciously and studied day and night. I once saw him take two books to the toilet, for fear that he might finish the first one before he was done. ([Location 509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=509)) - Tags: [[pink]] - I have often wondered about the consciousness of animals, how it must be more shadowy than ours, more dreamlike and fleeting, small thoughts like half-burned candles, their outlines never fully formed. And perhaps that is also the case for many of us who must strain to think with clarity. I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me. Only he was fully awake. ([Location 545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=545)) - Tags: [[pink]] - I came to an important theorem. This, I said, this was exceedingly difficult. Not proven yet. Not by anyone. Lots had tried, yes, tried and failed. I myself was trying, for decades, using the class to test my proofs. I was getting close, I knew it. I could feel it. That is mathematics, see? A feeling. You feel, even before the answer you have the feeling. Ah! you say. Yes! This feels right! But you don’t know, not till the very end. And even at the end, sometimes you don’t know. Or you don’t understand. So I showed the problem to the class, showed the theorem and what I had done, and how it did not work, not yet. And then I told everyone, Discuss, discuss! Bright boys, very bright boys, all of them, all talking out loud. That is how I teach, you see? Some people cannot, but I like the noise, the questions, the fights! It’s how I do my best work. But von Neumann did not participate. Not a word. Not him. He just closed his eyes and then he raised his hand. When I called on him, he walked to the blackboard and wrote down a completely stunning proof. In a second. With no effort. No thinking even, only doing. I could not believe it. Years, all my years of work, passed by in a second. And this thing he did . . . it was so beautiful, so elegant, I remember asking myself, What is this? This boy . . . What kind of a boy is this? I still don’t know, but after that, I was afraid of von Neumann. ([Location 718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=718)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Absolutist and extreme, Hilbert’s program was really a symptom of its time, a desperate attempt to find security in a world that was spinning out of control. It took shape during an era of maximal change. Fascism was emerging all around us, quantum mechanics was unsettling our ideas about how matter behaved inside atoms, and Einstein’s theories were revolutionizing our concepts of space and time. But what Hilbert, von Neumann, and many others like them were after was perhaps even more primordial, because then as now, an ever-growing proportion of knowledge and technology rested on the exactitude and sanctity of the queen of the natural sciences. What else can we put our trust in? There are as many gods as there are people who believe in them, and the so-called human sciences are no better than philosophy, just mindless games played with meaningless words. Mathematics is different. It has always been held up as a torch, the true light of reason, blinding and unquestionable. But things started to change at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many mathematicians feared that the queen’s throne would start to wobble, and that her once-firm crown was now balanced precariously on her head. As more and more discoveries were made, it became apparent that mathematics did not really have a foundation everyone could agree upon. This nagging suspicion—that their entire kingdom rested on nothing—came to be known as the “crisis of the foundations of mathematics,” and it was the most profound questioning of the discipline since the time of the Greeks. The crisis was a strange affair that involved some of the most original thinkers and brightest minds on this planet, but when I look back on it, it seems no more than an Arthurian quest, one where reason strayed past its limits only to find itself holding an empty chalice. ([Location 761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=761)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Russell and Whitehead covered more than two thousand pages with dense notations and obscure logical schemes to try to create a consistent and complete foundation for mathematics, while von Neumann’s doctoral thesis was so concise, his set of axioms could be written down on a single sheet of paper. Although it later turned out that his attempt was also unsuccessful, his audacity and succinctness did not go unnoticed, and he soon became famous for it among his peers. His thesis was an early demonstration of the style that he applied to all of his later work: he would pounce on a subject, strip it down to its bare axioms, and turn whatever he was analyzing into a problem of pure logic. This otherworldly capacity to see into the heart of things, or—if viewed from its opposing angle—this characteristic shortsightedness, which allowed him to think in nothing but fundamentals, was not merely the key to his particular genius but also the explanation for his almost childlike moral blindness. ([Location 860](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=860)) - Tags: [[pink]] - I told him that he should stay in America, and never return to Germany, but there was no way to convince him. He said he was working on something very important. He could feel an idea taking shape in the back of his mind, and feared that if he could not interact with Hilbert and other members of the Göttingen circle, he might lose it. I told him that it was better to lose an idea than to lose his life, but he looked at me in a way that made it clear that he saw it the other way round. ([Location 900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=900)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Did I not know what was happening in quantum physics? It is all numbers, he said to me, these things do not behave like particles, they are not like bundles of matter or energy . . . They behave like numbers! And who better than us to comprehend that new reality? For Janos, it was not chemistry, industry, or politics that would shape the future of our world. It was mathematics. ([Location 903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=903)) - Tags: [[pink]] - So I failed him, failed him miserably in what is most important: I was unable to communicate the sanctity, the holiness of our discipline. I did not teach him what the “pure” in “pure mathematics” really means. It is not what people think. It is not knowledge for its own sake. It is not a search for patterns, nor is it a series of abstract, intellectual games completely unconnected from the real world and its many troubles. It is something quite other. Mathematics is the closest we can come to the mind of Hashem. And so, it should be practiced with reverence, because it has true power, a power that can be easily used for evil, as it is born from a faculty that only we possess, and that the Lord, blessed be He, gave us instead of teeth, claws, or talons, but that is equally dangerous and lethal. Of this, I taught him nothing. Whatever judgment awaits me, I cannot deny that I saw it before anyone else. ([Location 921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=921)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Lost faith is worse than no faith at all, because it leaves behind a gaping hole, much like the hollow that the Spirit left when it abandoned this accursed world. But by their very nature, those god-shaped voids demand to be filled with something as precious as that which was lost. The choice of that something—if indeed it is a choice at all—rules the destiny of men. ([Location 934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=934)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Jancsi was obsessed with history—especially with the fall of ancient empires—and though his hatred for the Nazis was essentially boundless, he was also convinced that he would know exactly when to leave. I now shudder at the accuracy of some of his prognoses, prophecies that no doubt came from his incredible capacity to process information and to sift the sand of the present through the currents of history. That gave him a certain sense of security, an overconfidence that would no doubt have betrayed a lesser man. But Janos was many moves ahead; he behaved as if he was looking back at things that had already happened. ([Location 979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=979)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Jancsi understood it immediately, but he could hardly accept it at first. If what Gödel was saying was correct, no matter what he did—no matter what anyone ever did—there would be no way to axiomatize mathematics, no way to unearth the logical foundations that he so desperately wanted to find. Gödel had shown him that if someone succeeded in creating a formal system of axioms that was free of all internal paradoxes and contradictions, it would always be incomplete, because it would contain truths and statements that—while being undeniably true—could never be proven within the laws of that system. Gödel had found what appeared to be an ontological limit, something that we could not think past. An unprovable truth is a mathematician’s nightmare, and it was a personal catastrophe for Jancsi, because it opened up a monumental rift that no future knowledge or theory could patch up. The philosophical implications of Gödel’s logic were astonishing, and his incompleteness theorems, as they later came to be known, are now considered a fundamental discovery, one that hints at the limits of human understanding. ([Location 1011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1011)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Janos never worked on the foundations of mathematics again. He remained in awe of Gödel for the rest of his life. “His achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental . . . a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time. The result is remarkable in its quasi-paradoxical ‘self-denial’: it will never be possible to acquire with mathematical means the certainty that mathematics does not contain contradictions . . . The subject of logic will never again be the same,” he wrote ten years after they had met for the first time, when he was doing everything he could to rescue Gödel from Nazi Germany, by trying to convince the United States government to grant him a visa. ([Location 1045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1045)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Kurt Gödel enjoyed an almost godlike status among scientists. Albert Einstein confided near the end of his life that his own work no longer meant much to him, and he went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study—where Gödel had been offered a professorship thanks largely to Jancsi’s interventions on his behalf—merely to have the privilege of walking to his office with the Austrian logician by his side. ([Location 1059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1059)) - Tags: [[pink]] - A lot has been written about Gödel’s mental decline, but most people agree that his particular form of paranoia was not just the cause of his downfall, but also lay at the root of his incredible mathematical achievements. One of his professors from the University of Vienna, who met him when he was a very young man, said that he could not figure out if it was the nature of his work that made him unstable, or if you actually had to be unstable to think in the way that Gödel did. I believe there is truth in both views. The few times I spoke to him, I could sense how logic and logical thinking were inextricably bound to his mounting derangement, because, in some sense, paranoia is logic run amok. “Every chaos is a wrong appearance,” wrote Gödel; he was of the firm belief that there was a reason for everything. If you think that way, it’s a small step to begin to see hidden machinations and agents operating to manipulate the most common, everyday occurrences. ([Location 1073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1073)) - Tags: [[pink]] - From Gödel onward, I was always afraid for him, because once he abandoned his juvenile faith in mathematics he became more practical and effective than before, but also dangerous. He was, in a very real sense, set free. ([Location 1110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1110)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In the United States, von Neumann became a renegade mathematician, a mind for hire, increasingly seduced by power and by those who could wield it. He would charge exorbitant fees to sit with people from IBM, RCA, the CIA, or the RAND Corporation, sometimes for no longer than a couple of minutes, and worked on so many private and government projects that he seemed to possess the ability to be in many places at the same time. ([Location 1113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1113)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Bethe once said to me that he sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s did not indicate a superior species, an evolution beyond man. I laughed, but then I met him. ([Location 1232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1232)) - Tags: [[pink]] - it was actually von Neumann who convinced them that they shouldn’t detonate the devices at ground level, but higher up in the atmosphere, since that way the blast wave would cause incomparably larger damage. He even calculated the optimal height himself—six hundred meters, about two thousand feet. And that is exactly how high our bombs were when they exploded above the roofs of those quaint wooden houses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ([Location 1319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1319)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Albert found Johnny childish and nihilistic, and once said to me that my husband was rapidly turning into a “mathematical weapon.” I told him so during one of our fights, I threw it at his face as a way to hurt him, but Johnny, being Johnny, reveled in his new nickname, and laughed about it with his friends. He must have felt some small measure of resentment, however, because one time, when Albert was supposed to go to New York, Johnny offered to drive him to the Princeton train station in a brand-new Cadillac he had just bought for me, and then purposely put him on a train going in the wrong direction. ([Location 1424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1424)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The thing about my husband that people don’t understand is that he truly saw life as a game, he regarded all human endeavors, no matter how deadly or serious, in that spirit. He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine. The problem with those games, the many terrible games that spring forth from humanity’s unbridled imagination, is that when they are played in the real world—whose rules and true purpose are known only to God—we come face-to-face with dangers that we may not have the knowledge or the wisdom to overcome. I know this because my darling husband thought up one of the most dangerous ideas in human history, one so devilish and cynical that it is a miracle that we have so far managed to survive it. ([Location 1440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1440)) - Tags: [[pink]] - one of von Neumann’s ideas: MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s how America chose to fight the Cold War, a game of chicken played out on a planetary scale with weapons powerful enough to blow up the entire world. MAD was a doctrine of deterrence and retaliation that said that the only way to avoid nuclear warfare between the superpowers was for the US and the USSR to amass such a gargantuan hoard of atomic weapons that any nuclear attack would result in the complete annihilation of both countries. It was perfectly rational insanity: ensuring global peace by taking us to the brink of Armageddon. ([Location 1452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1452)) - Tags: [[pink]] - economics. I felt as though I’d touched the Holy Grail. I never did anything that could compare to that during the rest of my life, but I can only speak for myself, of course, because for Johnny it was just one more thing, another achievement in a life that was chock-full of them. ([Location 1505](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1505)) - Tags: [[pink]] - He was one of the first to openly advocate for a surprise nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, not because he hated communists (well, he did) but rather because he was convinced that it was the only way to prevent World War III. And our theory—or at least his interpretation of it—did back his thinking. “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” That’s what Johnny said to Life magazine, but behind his awful glibness lay his conviction that peace required that we rain nuclear hell down on the USSR before they could develop their own atomic bombs. The future he envisioned, once the nuclear fallout dissipated and the many millions dead were tallied and counted, was a long-lasting Pax Americana, a period of stability unlike the world had ever known, gained at the highest cost we have ever paid. ([Location 1515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1515)) - Tags: [[pink]] - I still find myself questioning our central tenet: Is there really a rational course of action in every situation? Johnny proved it mathematically beyond a doubt, but only for two players with diametrically opposing goals. So there may be a vital flaw in our reasoning that any keen observer will immediately become aware of; namely, that the minimax theorem that underlies our entire framework presupposes perfectly rational and logical agents, agents who are interested only in winning, agents who pose a perfect understanding of the rules and a total recall of all their past moves, agents who also have a flawless awareness of the possible ramifications of their own actions, and of their opponents’ actions, at every single step of the game. The only person I ever met who was exactly like that was Johnny von Neumann. Normal people are not like that at all. Yes, they lie, they cheat, deceive, connive, and conspire, but they also cooperate, they can sacrifice themselves for others, or simply make decisions on a whim. Men and women follow their guts. They heed hunches and make careless mistakes. Life is so much more than a game. Its full wealth and complexity cannot be captured by equations, no matter how beautiful or perfectly balanced. And human beings are not the perfect poker players that we envisioned. They can be highly irrational, driven and swayed by their emotions, subject to all kinds of contradictions. And while this sparks off the ungovernable chaos that we see all around us, it is also a mercy, a strange angel that protects us from the mad dreams of reason. ([Location 1548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1548)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Once, when he and I were discussing his theories of nuclear deterrence, he asked me if I knew what had remained inside Pandora’s box after she had opened it and let out all the evils and ills into the world. “Right there,” he said, “at the bottom of the jar—because it was a large urn or a jar, you know, not a box at all—right there, waiting quietly and obediently was Elpis, which most people like to regard as the daimona of hope and counterpart to Moros, the spirit of doom, but to me, a better and more precise translation of her name and of her nature would be our concept of expectation. Because we don’t know what comes after evil, do we? And sometimes the deadliest things, those that hold enough power to destroy us, can become, given time, the instruments of our salvation.” I asked him why the gods would let out all the hurts, pains, illnesses, and iniquities to roam free while keeping hope trapped behind the lid of the jar. He winked and said that it was because they know things that we can never know. That is exactly how I feel about him, and the reason why I have always resisted condemning Jancsi, or judging him too harshly, because I believe that a mind like his—one of inexorable logic—must have made him understand and accept many things that most of us do not even want to acknowledge, and cannot begin to comprehend. ([Location 1586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1586)) - Tags: [[pink]] - He downed his scotch and, before Virginia dragged her whimpering husband out the door, told her, “I’m thinking about something much more important than bombs, my dear. I’m thinking about computers.” ([Location 1611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1611)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Turned out nobody wanted us there. The mathematicians were disgusted. Dirty men with dirty fingers would pollute their hallowed environment. “Engineers in my wing? Over my dead body!” Senior paleontologist said that. No kidding. ’Cause we actually soldered things, burned our hands, while they would just roam around like dinosaurs with their heads in the clouds trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe. We? We were building something. Something that would change their world. And they despised us for it. ([Location 1642](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1642)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It’s hard to overestimate the importance of what we did. Our computer wasn’t the first. Wasn’t even the third. But it was a stored-program computer. And the one that everyone copied. We published and made public every step of the process. So it was cloned in 1,500 places around the world. It became the blueprint. The DNA of the entire digital universe. ([Location 1655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1655)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Johnny made it clear from the beginning: We were there to build the machine that Turing had dreamed up in his 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” That describes a universal computer, or “Turing machine.” And that machine can—in principle—solve any mathematical problem presented to it in symbolic form. That limey bastard somehow managed to replicate the internal states of mind and symbol-manipulating abilities of our species, but on paper. Real stroke of genius. Problem is, his Turing machine is unbelievably abstract. A “head” that reads a strip of endless paper. Not something you can picture as real technology. But we turned that into a working, fully programmable computer. And things just exploded. ([Location 1661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1661)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Johnny came up with the architecture. The logical framework. The same one you have on your computer. Hasn’t changed a bit. Wonderfully simple. Just five parts. Input and output mechanisms and three units: one for memory, one for logic and arithmetic, and the control unit—the CPU. It’s really that simple. But it was hell to get it to work. ([Location 1676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1676)) - Tags: [[pink]] - They were dreaming big and deadly. But Johnny was thinking bigger. He was considering problems that were completely unassailable at the time. He wanted to mathematize everything. To spark revolutions in biology, economics, neurology, and cosmology. To transform all areas of human thought and grab science by the throat by unleashing the power of unlimited computation. ([Location 1698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1698)) - Tags: [[pink]] - We christened our machine the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer. MANIAC, for short. ([Location 1712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1712)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “By its very nature the hydrogen bomb cannot be confined to a military objective, but becomes a weapon which, in every practical effect, is almost one of genocide.” That’s what Fermi said. And Oppenheimer, well, he bashed against a lot of heads and tried everything he could to stop it from being built, he spent the last ounce of his influence as director of the Institute for Advanced Study opposing it. ([Location 1745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1745)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “Something I will never forget was the heat,” a physicist and friend of mine who was stationed twenty-five miles away from ground zero later told me. “It was a terrifying experience, because the temperature didn’t subside. With kiloton shots, like the one we saw at Trinity, it’s a flash and it’s over, but on that big hydrogen one the heat just kept on coming, getting stronger and stronger. You would swear that the whole world was on fire.” ([Location 1781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1781)) - Tags: [[pink]] - At Los Alamos we were euphoric after our first successful test and celebrated with wild drunken parties that went on for days, but the scientists who saw the world’s first thermonuclear explosion were terrified by the power they had unleashed. Many expressed instant regret. Herbert F. York, director of the weapons laboratory at Livermore, described Ivy Mike as “truly foreboding, something which marked a real change in history—a moment when the course of the world suddenly shifted from the path it had been on to a more dangerous one. Fission bombs,” he said, “as destructive as they might have been, were limited. Now, it seemed we had learned how to brush all limits aside, and to build bombs whose power was boundless.” ([Location 1785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1785)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The man who was perhaps most responsible for the creation of the hydrogen bomb was one of the Martians: Teller. According to Oppenheimer, during a briefing at the RAND Corporation Teller gave such an impressive account of the power that the hydrogen bomb would offer the United States that the Secretary of the Air Force, Thomas K. Finletter, jumped to his feet and shouted, “Give us this weapon and we will rule the world!” ([Location 1793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1793)) - Tags: [[pink]] - You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that. John von Neumann ([Location 1838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1838)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Von Neumann demonstrates that you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being. You need both things: to make a copy and to endow it with the instructions needed to build itself, as well as a description of how to implement those instructions. In his paper, he divided his theoretical construct—which he called the “automaton”—into three components: the functional part, a decoder that reads the instructions and builds the next copy, and a device that takes that information and inserts it into the new machine. The astounding thing is that right there, in that paper written in the late 1940s, he depicts the way in which DNA and RNA work, long before anyone had ever glimpsed the strange beauty of the double helix. The logical basis of all systems of self-replication is made so crystal clear by von Neumann that I can’t believe I wasn’t able to figure it out myself. I would have become an instant celebrity! But I simply wasn’t smart enough, I didn’t understand how you could apply his immaculate mathematical concepts to the messy world of biology. ([Location 1948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=1948)) - Tags: [[pink]] - I asked him how he thought to bring together his ideas on computation, self-replicating machines, and cellular automata with his newfound interest in the brain and the mechanism of thought, and his reply has lingered with me for decades, and still comes back to haunt me whenever some casual occurrence brings his detested name to memory. “Cavemen created the gods,” he said. “I see no reason why we shouldn’t do the same.” ([Location 2142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=2142)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “Gods are a biological necessity,” he said to me on a particularly warm night at his home in Georgetown, during that last summer when he could still get around on crutches, “as integral to our species as language or opposable thumbs.” According to Jancsi, faith had afforded the primeval peoples of the world a source of strength, power, and meaning that modern man lacked completely; and it was this lack, this profound loss, that now had to be addressed by science. “We have no guiding star,” he told me, “nothing to look up or aspire to, so we are devolving, falling back into animality, losing the very thing that has let us advance so far beyond what was originally intended for us.” Jancsi thought that if our species was to survive the twentieth century, we needed to fill the void left by the departure of the gods, and the one and only candidate that could achieve this strange, esoteric transformation was technology; our ever-expanding technical knowledge was the only thing that separated us from our forefathers, since in morals, philosophy, and general thought, we were no better (indeed, we were much, much worse) than the Greeks, the Vedic people, or the small nomadic tribes that still clung to nature as the sole granter of grace and the true measure of existence. We had stagnated in every other sense. We were stunted in all arts except for one, techne, where our wisdom had become so profound and dangerous that it would have made the Titans that terrorized the Earth cower in fear, and the ancient lords of the woods seem as puny as sprites and as quaint as pixies. Their world was gone. So now science and technology would have to provide us with a higher version of ourselves, an image of what we could become. Civilization had progressed to a point where the affairs of our species could no longer be entrusted safely to our own hands; we needed something other, something more. In the long run, for us to have the slimmest chance, we had to find some way of reaching beyond us, looking past the limits of our logic, language, and thought, to find solutions to the many problems that we would undoubtedly face as our dominion spread over the entire planet, and, soon enough, much farther still, all the way to the stars. ([Location 2343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=2343)) - Tags: [[pink]] - His analysis made no sense to me, and I said as much: there was no evidence for any of this. Billions of people still had unwavering faith in God, and their complete irrationality and incurable superstitions showed no signs of becoming weaker. Janos did not agree: “Those gods are living dead. They have lost their glory. They cannot give sense to the world because they are remnants, broken relics that we still carry around with us, just as sickly and powerless as those horse-drawn buggies you see in the streets of New York. Just because they are still here does not mean they are of any use. We mount our warheads on the tips of missiles that can reach around the globe, we do not strap them to the backs of mules.” ([Location 2360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=2360)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “How could machines start to have a life of their own? I can formulate the problem rigorously, in the same way in which Turing did for his mechanisms,” Jancsi wrote to me just a couple of months before he died. He purported to have already set down a scheme that seemed to prove that “there exists a type of automaton—we may call it Aleph-zero—which has the following property: if you provide Aleph-zero with a description of anything, it consumes it and produces two copies of the description.” Using the same logical methods and self-referential, recursive reasoning that Turing had employed to come up with the thought experiments that eventually led to the creation of the computer, and which Gödel used to prove his incompleteness theorems, Jancsi had managed to design a theoretical machine whose output would not just be strings of ones and zeros but real, physical objects. He also believed that there was a threshold, a tipping point that, if surpassed, would kick off an evolutionary process in his machines, leading to automata whose complexity would grow exponentially, akin to the way that biological organisms thrive and mutate under natural selection, creating the intricate beauty that surrounds us. This progression would allow members of succeeding generations to produce not just mirror copies of themselves, but offspring of an ever-increasing complexity. ([Location 2656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=2656)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.” ([Location 2699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=2699)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Hassabis’s investigation demonstrated that the faculties of memory and imagination share a common mechanism, rooted in the hippocampus. “My work was investigating imagination as a process. I wanted to know how we, as human beings, visualize the future, and then see what future computers will be able to conjure,” he said after publishing his research. ([Location 2969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=2969)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Those two neural networks allowed the DeepMind program to whittle down Go’s infinite complexity and reach a hitherto unimaginable level of play. It did not need to waste its vast computing powers searching through the endless possibilities that branch out from every single stone, since it could use the common sense of its Policy Network to consider only the best possible moves and prune the branches of its Monte Carlo search tree that it did not consider optimal; its Value Network, meanwhile, saved it from having to internally play out the entirety of each match to come to a conclusion about whether a particular move would bring it closer to winning or losing. The combination of those two systems—honed and perfected during millions and millions of games of self-play—is what allowed AlphaGo to range far beyond human knowledge and come up with radical strategies and counterintuitive moves like the one that it had flaunted during the second game against Lee Sedol. They also allowed it to have a precise estimate of how unlikely that particular move would seem to its human opponent. ([Location 3375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=3375)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “I used to have this sense of pride,” he said a couple of weeks later, after losing his third game against HanDol, when he was interviewed on a popular talk show that recapped his entire career. “I thought I was the best, or at least one of the best. But then artificial intelligence put the final nail in my coffin. It is simply unbeatable. In that situation, it doesn’t matter how much you try. I don’t see the point. I started playing when I was five. Back then, it was all about courtesy and manners. It was more like learning an art form than a game. As I grew up, Go started to be seen as a mind game, but what I learned was an art. Go is a work of art made by two people. Now it’s totally different. After the advent of AI, the concept of Go itself has changed. It is a devastating force. AlphaGo did not beat me, it crushed me. After that, I continued playing but I had already decided to retire. With the debut of AI, I’ve realized that I cannot be at the top, even if I make a spectacular comeback and return to being the number one player through frantic efforts. Even if I become the best that the world has ever known, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.” ([Location 3671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=3671)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Hassabis and the DeepMind team made a radical departure: they stripped Master, AlphaGo’s successor, of all its human knowledge—those many millions of games based on which it had first learned to play, and that formed the cornerstone of its common sense, the program’s unique ability to judge the value of an individual position, to estimate its chances of winning, and to see the board as a human being would, and left only its bare bones. Their aim was to create a more powerful and much more general artificial intelligence, one that was not restricted to Go in its learning capabilities and that did not rely on human understanding and knowledge as a crutch during its first formative baby steps. They took their algorithm and wiped it clean, leaving no human data from which it could learn, depriving it of its only direct connection with mankind. The results were terrifying. The new program defeated the version of AlphaGo that had pushed Lee Sedol into retirement one hundred games to zero. But it was only getting started. When they applied that same algorithm to chess, it proved to be just as strong: after two hours it had played more games against itself than have been recorded throughout all of history; after four hours it had already become better than any human; after eight it could defeat Stockfish, the reigning AI chess champion. “It plays like a human on fire,” said Matthew Sadler, the English grandmaster who was first exposed to it. Sadler described its style as extremely aggressive and reminiscent of the manner that Garry Kasparov used to play in, an opinion that was later ratified by the great Russian genius himself. After conquering chess, the system took on shogi, a Japanese game that is somewhat similar to chess but with higher complexity, as pieces are not fixed, and can be swapped from one army to the other, creating multiple variations that would never occur in chess; the new algorithm mastered shogi in under twelve hours, and beat the world’s strongest program—Elmo—in 90 percent of the games they played. For all these games, it considered no human experience: it was simply given the rules and allowed to play against itself. At first, it made completely random moves, but in next to no time it had evolved into an unbeatable force. It has now become the strongest entity the world has ever known at Go, chess, and shogi. Its name is AlphaZero. ([Location 3706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BRMK6615&location=3706)) - Tags: [[pink]]