Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss appeared in my mind’s eye when I encountered the lines about Strauss being the person John von Neumann was speaking to on the telephone when the latter collapsed and was subsequently diagnosed with cancer; the person by von Neumann’s bedside as he lay dying; and the person who delivered von Neumann’s eulogy at the Princeton Cemetery.
It was Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer that I imagined when he was quoted as saying, “With the creation of the atom bomb physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose”; and when he was mentioned opposing the building of the hydrogen bomb through the MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer) — The MANIAC, whose chief architect was von Neumann.
The movie, Oppenheimer, and its characters are still fresh in our minds. But who is John von Neumann? And why doesn’t he figure in the film when these people were his contemporaries and colleagues, and when he played such a huge role in the Manhattan Project, aside from being credited for calculating the optimal height for the detonation of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The second question can be answered by various speculations. Benjamin Labatut answers the first: He was the smartest human being of the 20th century.
“The cleverest man in the world… a genius, a very great genius,” according to Albert Einstein. The back cover sums up von Neumann as, “…the individual who birthed the modern computer, laid down the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, written the equations for the implosion of the atomic bomb, fathered the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, heralded the arrival of digital life, self-reproducing machines, artificial intelligence, and the technological singularity…”
Labatut, rockstar that he is, goes beyond what we can find in Wikipedia; simplifies alien quantum talk into plain language; constructs a complex and eerie portrait of a flawed superhuman through the different lenses of von Neumann’s peers, rivals, friends, and family; and charts the seemingly unstoppable advancement of AI.
The book highlights the irony of what comes hand in hand with technological progress, how the rise of the computer was tied to and hastened by the nuclear arms race: “Just think about this for a second: the most creative and the most destructive of human inventions arose at exactly the same time. So much of the high-tech world we live in today, with its conquest of space and extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man’s monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.”
In the first chapter we find an account of Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest waiting for the train and heading to his suicide, and it makes for a strong allegory for the shared fate of humanity and technology: “…even though he could not hear it, could not feel its faint rumbling in the distance, he still knew that it would come, there was no stopping it, in fact it had just arrived, he could see it rolling slowly into the platform, smoke billowing all around him as the whistle shrieked, but even then he still had time to turn back…and walk away, he still had time, and yet he stood, machinelike, propelled by a force he neither recognized nor understood, and took five steps with his legs as stiff as an automaton’s, to board the wagon and take his place among the rest.”
By reading this book, one can see why it was important for Labatut to write it: The portrait of John von Neumann is the portrait for, and of, our age.
Who needs science fiction when reality is this chilling?
The Book-Butterfly 