Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War

Speaker 1 I try to lay out the context of this. I mean this was after the most destructive war that the world had ever known.

Speaker 1 Millions of people had died and von Neumann had predicted this and the Holocaust very,

Speaker 1 you know, successfully years in advance and he now was convinced that within a decade there would be a third world war with nuclear weapons.

Speaker 2 Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Anano Bhattacharya, who is a science writer who has worked at The Economist and at

Speaker 2 Nature. And most recently, he's the author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann.
And it was an extremely enjoyable read, super interesting.

Speaker 2 And so, before we jump into the questions, Anano, I'm wondering if you can kind of give context to my audience and summarize the life of this giant.

Speaker 1 Well, that's not an easy task, but I'll give it a go. So he was

Speaker 1 born in Budapest in around 1903 to this wealthy Jewish family, and pretty early on, they realized that there's something quite special about him.

Speaker 1 So he can do these long six-figure calculations in his head by six, and he's learned calculus by eight, right? And he's teaching himself the finer points of set theory

Speaker 1 by kind of eleven.

Speaker 1 So he's going on long walks with Eugene Wigner, who is a childhood friend of his and a future Nobel Prize winner. And Wigner's a year older than him, and he's teaching Wigner set theory at that age.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's kind of clear that even among geniuses, as he would be later on at

Speaker 1 Los Alamos, for example, or

Speaker 1 at the Princeton and at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he'd be recruited along with Einstein, that he was kind of a cut above even all of these incredibly clever people.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so, yeah, so he grows up in this

Speaker 1 quite privileged Budapest surroundings.

Speaker 1 Their

Speaker 1 home was

Speaker 1 often visited by

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 greats of the time.

Speaker 1 It was an incredibly cultured city and

Speaker 1 his

Speaker 1 father Max was a kind of successful banker. So they were quite wealthy.
I mean he was a self-made man

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 he had as a result von Neumann who was one of three brothers actually

Speaker 1 is the eldest he had the benefits of kind of a top-flight education as well.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So, you know,

Speaker 2 right before we did the interview, I was thinking about what, you know, I have a computer science degree and I was thinking about, okay, what portion of my computer science degree can be traced back directly to von Neumann.

Speaker 2 I was just going through just like an initial glance at a few of the classes that I took where like a large part of the fraction of the content came from von Neumann, right?

Speaker 2 So you could like, okay, algorithms, linear programming, you know, merge sort, like probably like a quarter of my curriculum,

Speaker 2 quantum computing, you know, density and density matrix,

Speaker 2 von Neumann entropy, hardware, von Neumann,

Speaker 2 the von Neumann architecture for the computers.

Speaker 2 Even like my organizational ethics class,

Speaker 2 game theory

Speaker 2 that comes up.

Speaker 2 Theoretical computing, finite state machines, cellular automata. So

Speaker 2 it's astounding to me that this person is responsible for probably like a third of everything I learned in college.

Speaker 2 And so it was very interesting to then get to read the history of this person and the ideas that he came up with and interacted with.

Speaker 2 Now, one very interesting part about the

Speaker 2 context surrounding von Neumann's work is, you know, he was part of this group, as you talk about, called the Martians.

Speaker 2 There were Hungarian and Central European Jews who migrated to the United States in the early 20th century.

Speaker 2 Scott Alexander has a fun blog post title about this. He says,

Speaker 2 the nuclear bomb was a high school science project for a bunch of Hungarians because

Speaker 2 a lot of the scientists worked on the nuclear bomb

Speaker 2 went to the same high school. So what was the cultural or other factors that made this group of people so

Speaker 2 I mean, it produced so many geniuses?

Speaker 1 Right. So they were all Jewish

Speaker 1 and von Neumann attributed this kind of pressure to succeed

Speaker 1 to growing up in kind of Central Europe between the two world wars,

Speaker 1 being surrounded by sort of anti-Semitism. Now, Budapest was relatively tolerant, but it was in the air of Central Europe at the time.
And he said that

Speaker 1 he felt a pressure to

Speaker 1 succeed or face extinction. I mean, they were constantly under this huge, relentless

Speaker 1 kind of psychological pressure to kind of do the impossible. And you know, von Neumann in his letters from 1930,

Speaker 1 by which time he's safely in the US, he's predicting disaster.

Speaker 1 He predicts pretty accurately that there will be a Second World War and he predicts that European Jews will face

Speaker 1 extinction.

Speaker 1 So he is very acutely aware of this. Of course,

Speaker 1 there are circumstances around Budapest at the time which

Speaker 1 were as able, which meant that geniuses of

Speaker 1 this sort were nurtured. So there were private schools, and they were all inevitably private schools, and they were almost all boys' schools as well.

Speaker 1 And von Neumann went to one of three, I think, elite schools in Budapest at the time. Teller, for example, and Wigner and

Speaker 1 Szillard

Speaker 1 are all part of these Martians, part of this group called the Martians later.

Speaker 1 They all went to these kind of elite schools and von Neumann was spotted quite early on by his maths teacher who told his father, you know, your boy's exceptional, let me arrange special tutoring for him.

Speaker 1 So von Neumann gets picked out even from this group of exceptional people and he's given a special course at the University of Budapest and

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 his teachers are all just amazed at his abilities.

Speaker 1 So the joke was later on when all these guys met again at Los Alamos to work on the American bomb project that they had these funny Hungarian accents and they had these almost supernatural

Speaker 1 intellectual abilities. So the joke was they must be from another planet.
Now when Wigner was asked about this he said,

Speaker 1 there is no Hungarian phenomenon. The only phenomenon that needs explaining is Johnny von Neumann.
So you can tell from those sorts of comments what kind of person he was.

Speaker 2 I'm actually curious to boil down

Speaker 2 what exactly was going on that produced so many geniuses. I mean,

Speaker 2 one thing you proposed was maybe it was a private schools, but I mean, as you just said, you know,

Speaker 2 he had taught himself integral and differential calculus by the time he was 10 and knew like four languages. So

Speaker 2 maybe that

Speaker 2 aided his growth. But I'm curious, it seems like he was already on the path to becoming like a world star scientist.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, he was renowned as a mathematician really early on. I mean,

Speaker 1 as soon as he finished his PhD, where he resolves this incredibly difficult

Speaker 1 paradox in set theory, he helps to resolve it by

Speaker 1 22. And then he goes to Goethe

Speaker 1 where quantum theory is being invented by another whiz kid actually Werner Heisenberg of course who's just a year older than von Neumann and von Neumann gets really interested in quantum mechanics and he produces this first mathematically rigorous version of it

Speaker 1 in a few years later

Speaker 1 So, I mean von Neumann clearly, I mean he was just an exceptional, he had an exceptional brain. Now, his

Speaker 1 grandfather was apparently, although he wasn't academically

Speaker 1 particularly successful, he had started his own very successful business. But what was interesting was that he had these calculational abilities that were actually better than von Neumann's.

Speaker 1 So von Neumann remembers asking his granddad these incredibly long sums and his granddad would come back with

Speaker 1 answers pretty quickly. And von Neumann, despite all of his genius, he was never able to

Speaker 1 match

Speaker 1 these abilities himself. And of course, there's a lot more to higher mathematics, as we know, than being able to do really long sums.
But it's kind of interesting that there's some

Speaker 1 genetic

Speaker 1 predisposition there that

Speaker 1 we can see.

Speaker 2 One interesting possibility that I've heard is you have Jewish emancipation in Europe in, like,

Speaker 2 was it the 18th or 19th century? And then, afterwards, you have this tremendous streak of Jewish achievement that's halted by the Holocaust.

Speaker 2 So, you know, you have this brief window where this group of extraordinary people are able to achieve great things

Speaker 2 before they're forced to emigrate or other things happen.

Speaker 2 And it makes what happened in Europe during that time even more tragic when you consider what was stopped. So, you know, one question I have is:

Speaker 2 you have this person who is incredibly prolific. Would he have been able to achieve as much as he did if he were born, say,

Speaker 2 today, given that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked?

Speaker 2 Is it just that he got into science and mathematics at a time that there was just so many different ideas combining and left to explore?

Speaker 2 Or, I mean, do you think that at any other time, a person like von Neumann would have been able to be as prolific?

Speaker 1 No, I think you've really hit the nail on the head there. I think there was definitely a historical moment.

Speaker 1 I mean, in terms of people with brains like von Neumann, they're pretty hard to think of, but you know, in terms of raw mathematical ability, you look at somebody like Terence Tao

Speaker 1 today, or

Speaker 1 you know, you consider

Speaker 1 there's a few other pure mathematicians who could maybe

Speaker 1 match von Neumann's sort of brain. I mean

Speaker 1 it was extraordinarily unusual but maybe not you know once in a century unusual but extremely unusual. But I think

Speaker 1 there are a few things that kind of mark him out. One is yeah the historical moment.
So he arrives on the scene in

Speaker 1 kind of you know 1910 1920s and he's immersed in

Speaker 1 kind of a maths that's going through this logical crisis and it's gonna spur people like Alan Turing and Kurt Goodell to think really hard about these step-by-step proofs.

Speaker 1 How do we prove stuff properly without getting into these awful paradoxes?

Speaker 1 And that would lead later on that step-by-step thinking would be extremely influential when people came to think about programming and you know and algorithms and things like that.

Speaker 1 So there's um so there's that side of things and then of course science just explodes you know you've got um masses of funding of course quantum mechanics becomes the atom bomb basically within a space of 25 years you have huge amounts of money suddenly being thrown at um at science and and then you get big science and

Speaker 1 You know, economics, you know, thanks to von Neumann in large part, becomes suddenly more mathematical. But now

Speaker 1 with that massive funding and the continued funding of science, I think there's been a great degree of specialism.

Speaker 1 I think the time when one genius of von Neumann's stature could contribute so productively to kind of, you know, everything from pure mathematics right the way through quantum mechanics to various fields of physics to you know non-linear equations and

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 distill out the modern form of the computer, the programmable computer, to automata theory,

Speaker 1 come up with a proof that

Speaker 1 machines could reproduce themselves. I think sadly that that was really

Speaker 1 a brief moment of the 20th century that made it possible. But the second

Speaker 1 thing that's incredibly rare about von Neumann that I noticed,

Speaker 1 actually embraced this idea of applying maths to real-world problems whereas many mathematicians many academics of all sorts actually

Speaker 1 would rather eschew you know the real world they don't want very much to do with it they

Speaker 1 when it comes to mathematicians they'd rather be left alone in their ivory tower to prove theorems and von Neumann did a lot of that he left behind a you know a massive

Speaker 1 amount of pure mathematics. But really my book focuses on

Speaker 1 the stuff that he left behind that came about from engaging with the real world. And there's a huge amount of that.
And

Speaker 1 I think that's also what made him really quite exceptional.

Speaker 1 The only other person that I can think of that was that is now as gifted mathematically as he was and has shown some interest in these sort of practical affairs, is Stephen Wolfram.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 but you know, Wolfram was born at the wrong time, I think.

Speaker 1 Perhaps if he'd have been born in 1903, you know, he might have been a von Neumann-esque figure. But so, there's definitely a combination there of good luck,

Speaker 1 a historical moment, and just you know, a particular attitude.

Speaker 1 Maybe because he was brought up in a you know by a banker father who was not afraid to get his hands dirty I mean this was an he was an investment banker happily investing in firms in technology for the technology firms of the time people

Speaker 1 you know he invested in a Jacquard loom company

Speaker 1 which used used punch cards to program looms you know that that made a an impact on von Neumann obviously at the time so I think yeah there's

Speaker 1 a combination of reasons that von Neumann was so influential.

Speaker 2 Wolfram could have been a great scientist at another time. I guess he just ended up

Speaker 2 writing some mathematical software in our time.

Speaker 2 Not to say he hasn't tried other things.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you suggest that maybe

Speaker 2 it was a time he spent working on practical problems that helped him achieve so much. And I wonder if the opposite may not be true.

Speaker 2 That is it possible that because he got recruited into all these different projects that the government had going at the time, especially because of World War II, you know, ballistics research, nuclear implosion devices, and then advising with like Cold War strategy.

Speaker 2 Was this in some sense a distraction from the

Speaker 2 basic research that he might have otherwise done and been more productive at?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean,

Speaker 1 you know, Bronowski thought, you know, that von Neumann had kind of wasted his incredible incredible talent but to me the more I looked at his work the more I realized that for him this engagement with the real world was actually vitally important and

Speaker 1 you know it need not have been the work for the military but that is where at the time in the in the unfortunately in the early to mid 20th century a lot of the challenging problems were I mean designing the the the atom bomb which is where he made some key contributions And then later on, of course, the emergence of the computer is deeply, deeply linked to the mathematics of the

Speaker 1 atom bomb. And

Speaker 1 arguably,

Speaker 1 it was his engagement with these areas that led him to

Speaker 1 think and be in a position to kind of spur computing. And as I argue, he was kind of a godfather of the open source movement.

Speaker 1 You know, his

Speaker 1 proof

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 that automata could reproduce themselves and evolve, all of this thinking came about because he was, I think, deeply engaged with the real world. And that makes him unusual.
And he argues as much

Speaker 1 quite openly in an essay that he did called The Mathematician.

Speaker 1 and where he says that if mathematicians retreat too far kind of into their ivory towers, if the maths becomes just maths for the sake of maths with no

Speaker 1 input from

Speaker 1 kind of the real world, then

Speaker 1 he said it became Baroque

Speaker 1 and not interesting.

Speaker 1 So I find it really difficult.

Speaker 1 to believe that if von Neumann had sheltered himself away and somehow been left alone or didn't engage with the sort of problems that he did, whether it was the computer or to his military work, that he would have left behind the kind of interesting Eeuvre that he did.

Speaker 1 He wouldn't have been von Neumann, right? I mean

Speaker 1 you can see it's so deeply ingrained in his personality to be

Speaker 1 to be out there thinking all the time and to be thinking about

Speaker 1 key problems that

Speaker 1 it's difficult to imagine a von Neumann that wasn't like that, that was tucked away.

Speaker 1 And I think that as a kind of intellectual biographer, that makes him kind of incredibly interesting, but also incredibly challenging to tackle.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what makes your book so interesting, is that you are a biographer of ideas.

Speaker 2 So, you know, a lot of other biographies about scientists really frustrate me because you get to hear all these details about their life,

Speaker 2 which is also interesting. But you never get to engage with their ideas, which is probably a big part of what reading about a scientist should be about.
And you do that really well.

Speaker 2 So, you know, that was super fun.

Speaker 2 Did John von Neumann have a miracle year?

Speaker 1 You know what?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 And maybe you've looked at his publication record more closely than I have and counted up the papers.

Speaker 1 But, you know, whilst Einstein, for example, and Kurt Gerdell, when they were placed into this perfect environment that was the Institute for Advanced Study, right, they didn't have, you know, to teach anybody anything, they had massive holidays, they could do what they wanted.

Speaker 1 Well, Einstein's time there was

Speaker 1 really not very productive. He had, you know, his miracle year, right, in the kind of early 20th century, which was incredible.

Speaker 1 But then his time at the IAS was not particularly productive. He was trying to find his theory of everything.

Speaker 1 And Goebdel, after this incredible work in Europe on his incompleteness theorems, again, he spent a lot of time at the IAS going for nice walks with Einstein and

Speaker 1 chatting to von Neumann.

Speaker 1 But of course,

Speaker 1 there wasn't much coming out there in comparison. Now,

Speaker 1 when you look at von Neumann's productivity at the IAS, I mean, he was inventing whole new fields of mathematics. He was

Speaker 1 bringing about the birth of the modern computer. You know, he had this project at the IAS

Speaker 1 to bring a computer to them against, you know, it has to be said, against the wishes of many of the IAS staff. But,

Speaker 1 you know, he was he was he'd written three volumes worth of

Speaker 1 operator theory, and he always joked, right, that

Speaker 1 you know, a mathematician's productive years are over

Speaker 1 at 30 or at 28. And it was always 10 years away from however old he was at the time.
So,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 he clearly felt that he had a lot more to do, and I think that's what made his kind of untimely death all the more tragic for everybody but you know it was

Speaker 1 incredibly painful for him. You know nobody enjoys staring death in the face but for von Neumann it was

Speaker 1 extraordinarily painful.

Speaker 2 And I think you mentioned the theory that it might have had to do with his spending time around nuclear tests, the bone cancer he got, which is

Speaker 2 ironic, but still tragic.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we know him very well for his work on computers. I'm curious why his research on cellular automata and constructors hasn't taken off and why that isn't considered,

Speaker 2 why that hasn't been researches, I guess, as fundamental as computers are.

Speaker 2 David Deutsch has recently published about constructor theory.

Speaker 2 His claim is that a universal constructor is as fundamental a tool as a universal computer is, something that can construct anything else. Why did this train of thought kind of languish?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, that's fascinating, isn't it? Because I mean, the the book's called The Man from the Future, right? And I I loved von Neumann's

Speaker 1 proof of his automata theory,

Speaker 1 you know, his proof

Speaker 1 that automata could could reproduce. And you know, he combines Turing's universal

Speaker 1 computer with

Speaker 1 with this idea of a

Speaker 1 a construction unit and so he produces the universal constructor, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think in a sense this is an idea that's still kind of ahead of its time. Just after I published

Speaker 1 The Man from the Future in the UK, this group in the States

Speaker 1 published their paper on Xenobots.

Speaker 1 And these are kind of stem cells and they sort of whirl around and collect other stem cells together in little groups and then these stem cells themselves start to whirl around and collect more together.

Speaker 1 So I suddenly realized, wow, you know, this is

Speaker 1 the embodiment of von Neumann's self-reproducing automata. And it's only taken, what, you know, 70 years for them to make an appearance.
And these stem cells were designed by

Speaker 1 kind of

Speaker 1 a neural net, so artificial intelligence. And here we are, you know, all of von Neumann's little influences coming together in this neat, neat package.

Speaker 1 I think maybe in another 10 years' time we'll be asking the same question again. Why didn't anybody realize this stuff was important?

Speaker 1 I mean when von Neumann's first biographer, Norman McRae, wrote about automata theory, he was extremely dismissive, barely gave it a few pages as if it's like something quirky.

Speaker 1 And now we're beginning to see kind of its influence of this extraordinarily powerful idea, if nothing else. We know that it inspired

Speaker 1 those early pioneers in nanotechnology to think about universal constructors at the molecular level.

Speaker 1 We know that RepRap, this idea of a 3D printer where you could print most of its parts, you know, I talked to the inventor of that and he said he was inspired by this

Speaker 1 idea von Neumann's idea and you know in the 50s and 60s and 70s you had people thinking about well how do we explore the universe well why don't we make a probe that can make more copies of itself you know out in space by foraging on the planets it finds it's this incredibly fertile idea and I think we're still just at the at the beginning of really working out where this goes and it's kind of dangerous and it's kind of exciting.

Speaker 1 And who knows where it's going to end.

Speaker 2 I think,

Speaker 2 for me, at least,

Speaker 2 his work here and the suggestion, the implications of it are even more scary than the counterintuitive implications from his game theory work. Because

Speaker 2 Robin Hanson has this paper, I forget the title, but the idea is:

Speaker 2 whatever force or civilization or whatever is expanding fastest will be the one that controls most of the universe, at least unless impeded by another one.

Speaker 2 And so if it's the case that this sort of von Neumann probes almost spread like a virus around the universe and turning everything into goop, maybe like the expected outcome of colonization is just that that's what the universe ends up looking like, where the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, has been

Speaker 2 burned away by such probes. And it it's an interesting, like futuristic hypothesis and one I don't really hear much talked about, which I think is interesting.

Speaker 1 Well, Well, you know, that's one way it could go. Let's hope it doesn't go that way.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 1 maybe they'll, you know, build us a new home after we've trashed this one. Who knows?

Speaker 1 But yeah, I think, of course, you know, these sorts of science fiction elements, maybe, maybe

Speaker 1 part of it

Speaker 1 is that no, you know, nobody wants to talk about automata theory because it's got these unsavory science fiction elements attached to it.

Speaker 1 You know, people would rather stick to the von Neumann architecture and all that sort of stuff.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 it's the fecundity really of the idea more than the mathematics, isn't it? It just, you know, that somebody can take

Speaker 1 this

Speaker 1 question

Speaker 1 that philosophers have been kicking around for sort of centuries. You know, can machines make more machines? Can machines have babies? Can machines reproduce?

Speaker 1 And he just says, yeah, well, let's let's look at this mathematically, shall we? And then he solves it, and you know, we have the answer. And that's what I find gripping about von Neumann's work.

Speaker 1 And it's kind of what I found

Speaker 1 overall as I was approaching this book that I wanted to show that people, when you look at kind of popular science books or popular mathematics books, the majority of them are really about kind of celebrating the maths or the science in and of itself, right?

Speaker 1 They rarely actually talk about maths as this kind of existential thing that humans have invented that underpins our technological world. We don't really think of it like that often.
And

Speaker 1 with von Neumann, as I was writing about von Neumann, it became impossible not to, right? So take game theory.

Speaker 1 What was he trying to do there? Well, this was rooted again in this very early 20th century idea amongst mathematicians that maths was extraordinarily successful.

Speaker 1 So we can apply it to kind of anything.

Speaker 1 And, you know, why should we leave the human mind and human behavior to psychologists when they've been so terribly unsuccessful in actually getting anywhere with understanding it?

Speaker 1 Let's try to do the maths on this. And so

Speaker 1 kind of that, I think it was that impetus that really drove a lot of mathematicians, including von Neumann, to tackle the theory of games, which is really about conflict and cooperation.

Speaker 1 And I think that was kind of his motivation there. And

Speaker 1 again, you've got, you know,

Speaker 1 the very

Speaker 1 thing that kind of some pure mathematicians would say, oh, yeah, you know, von Neumann was wasting his time by being so involved with military work or, you know, this practical stuff.

Speaker 1 He was whizzing about looking for computational power well you know without that part of his personality

Speaker 1 would he have been so interested in in game theory would he have done would he have achieved what he did um

Speaker 2 you know in in those terms which is recasting economics in a you know in a completely different light really yeah yeah it's almost like he foresaw the replications uh crisis in psychology or something um you know speaking of his work on game theory I think that part was

Speaker 2 especially relevant today.

Speaker 2 I'm curious how

Speaker 2 his min-max theorem and theory of zero-sum games, that makes it really easy to

Speaker 2 model two-player games, two-player zero-sum games,

Speaker 2 like the one we had against the Soviet Union. I'm curious how he would have thought about a multipolar world where more than two parties have nuclear weapons and are possibly roughly equal in power.

Speaker 2 How would a game theory generalize to that kind of problem?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean so it's not at all clear, right, that von Neumann thought about nuclear strategy in kind of mini-max terms as a zero-sum game. In fact, there's quite a lot of evidence that he didn't.

Speaker 1 I mean his

Speaker 1 He, for example, he took very little interest in the prisoner's dilemma. That wasn't cooked up by him.

Speaker 1 It was cooked up by people at rand who were kind of inspired and influenced by him and of course prisoner's dilemma isn't a zero-sum game it's a it's a non-zero-sum game but it became this um

Speaker 1 template with which many people thought

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 1 nuclear strategy in the cold war

Speaker 1 now

Speaker 1 if you look at what von neumann wrote in theory of games and economic behavior with Morgenstern.

Speaker 1 What he was concerned with, his kind of solutions were based around cooperation.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 he was like, were there stable solutions to games

Speaker 1 if a number of the players cooperated? And, you know, was this an optimal solution to the game?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you could imagine,

Speaker 1 Right, say if you play, I don't know, Monopoly, and there's three you,

Speaker 1 often what you'll notice is one player will start winning, and then the two other players, even without talking to each other, they'll sort of gang up on them, right? They'll form a kind of alliance.

Speaker 1 And, you know, kind of von Neumann's

Speaker 1 early

Speaker 1 look at game theory was based around increasing numbers of these kind of

Speaker 1 alliances.

Speaker 1 So if you wanted to know about a 10 player game, von Neumann tried to kind of think about how, you know, within this 10-player group, you could get different alliances that were kind of stable and would lead to a winning solution.

Speaker 1 It wasn't entirely successful, and it took

Speaker 1 John Forbes Nash later on to kind of develop this idea of non-cooperative game theory, which was

Speaker 1 hugely successful.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 that kind of doesn't chime well, really, with this idea of von Neumann viewing the world in these zero-sum terms, right?

Speaker 1 He came from this rather Central European background where they were used to discussing ideas and kind of bars and cafes over a drink and talking about

Speaker 1 stuff quite freely and sharing and giving credit. to others when it's due.

Speaker 1 And so, I mean, he was obviously proud of his own contributions and he was quite defensive about them but he was also reasonably honest if he had culled an idea from somebody else he would totally be

Speaker 1 be honest about that and give them credit and so

Speaker 1 this

Speaker 1 kind of thread of thinking I think was

Speaker 1 was quite important

Speaker 1 and it's been weirdly overlooked when it came to kind of this caricature of von Neumann that developed as a result of Kubrick using him as one inspiration for Doctor Strangeler later on.

Speaker 1 Now von Neumann's actual thoughts on nuclear strategy, he penned a paper in the 50s before he died

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 in that

Speaker 1 he makes it clear that he doesn't he's not really talking about this preempt the idea of a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union anymore it's a lot more complicated it's more like what evolved at ran later so

Speaker 1 you know he was deeply uncomfortable with this idea that you know we had two or more sides with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the world many times over so he thought that if nuclear weapons ever were used

Speaker 1 you know you would have to be insane to just go all out so you know he he talked about kind of holding holding back. And, you know, you toss it, if one person tosses a nuclear weapon over and

Speaker 1 blows at the city, then the other person does. And it proceeds a little bit more

Speaker 1 slowly. It doesn't escalate all at once into this massive, catastrophic nuclear war.

Speaker 1 But the thing that people picked up most about his thinking was, of course, in this brief period after the Second World War, where he famously said, if you say, bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today.

Speaker 1 If you say four o'clock, why not two o'clock? And you know, it's not entirely clear that he meant that in all seriousness.

Speaker 1 I mean, his daughter certainly thinks he was advocating for a preemptive strike, or at least he was asking people to think quite rationally about whether a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union might be worthwhile, given that he felt that it was almost inevitable Stalin, as soon as he developed nuclear weapons, would launch a kind of

Speaker 1 strike on the United States.

Speaker 1 He was sort of arguing, well, you know, if we're in this situation where we're thinking about it, why sh shouldn't we do it sooner rather than later?

Speaker 1 And shouldn't we do it before the Soviet Union has enough weapons that

Speaker 1 they can fight back? And shouldn't we do something to ensure that nuclear power doesn't get into the wrong hands?

Speaker 1 And whether that's a world government or whether the United States functions as a de facto guardian of nuclear technology you know it wasn't it wasn't clear.

Speaker 1 I think the other thing that I sort of say in my book is I try to lay out the context of this. I mean this was after the most destructive war that the world had ever known.

Speaker 1 Millions of people had died and von Neumann had predicted this and the Holocaust very

Speaker 1 you know successfully years in advance and he now was convinced that within a decade there would be a third world war with nuclear weapons now if you imagine that and if you think that and if your past predictions have come true then it allows you incredible scope to think in this kind of rather kind of ruthless manner about well maybe we may be bombing you know, the Soviet Union and wiping out, you know, 100,000 people's lives at the push of a button.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's not as bad as

Speaker 1 it could be when you consider that millions of people are going to be dead in a decade and

Speaker 1 potentially bringing all of human civilization to an abrupt

Speaker 1 end.

Speaker 1 Well, maybe we can stop that from happening. And

Speaker 1 it turns out that it's a surprisingly common idea at the time in America and elsewhere.

Speaker 1 I mean, Bertrand Russell for example the famous pacifist also argued for a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union if they didn't give up their you know their nuclear ambitions and you you know you dig around in the post kind of in the late 40s

Speaker 1 in this brief window after the Second World War when the US seemed to have a virtual monopoly on on nuclear weapons and you find suddenly that

Speaker 1 a lot more people

Speaker 1 supported this idea, including

Speaker 1 a large proportion, by the way, of the American public,

Speaker 1 than you think is possible.

Speaker 2 You know, as you talk about in the book, there's like a very interesting but extremely scary, precarious scenario where two sides think

Speaker 2 two sides have a nuclear weapon or think that both sides have a nuclear weapon, but neither one has developed the ability yet to defend their nuclear silos against initial attack.

Speaker 2 So then, you know, both of them think that the other one, if they they launch a first strike, there would be no deterrence.

Speaker 2 So then both of them are incentivized to launch that first strike, which is kind of like the opposite of mad. And

Speaker 2 that's one worry. If, like, I don't know, if

Speaker 2 nuclear technology gets better, in some ways, that could make a nuclear war much more likely because

Speaker 2 people could start thinking, okay, but we can just take out all their

Speaker 2 entire arsenal, so they have no way to retaliate.

Speaker 2 I'm curious what

Speaker 2 you mentioned, you know, he had a good way of thinking about escalation. I'm curious how he would have thought about,

Speaker 2 you know, one problem we have today is like that you can have cyber warfare, which is immensely destructive in an economic sense, but doesn't warrant or seem to warrant a sort of land war.

Speaker 2 And then you can have a land war, like, I don't know, China takes over Taiwan, or, you know, you have what's going on in Ukraine, but it seems like way too harsh to react with nuclear war.

Speaker 2 And I'm curious how von Neumann would have been able to think about these kinds of problems.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 von Neumann, I mean, he was recruited by Rand, but the work that he did, and RAND became this kind of hothouse for nuclear strategic thinking, right, in the Cold War, and it influenced American policy.

Speaker 1 But von Neumann, apart from this paper on

Speaker 1 nuclear strategy, he seems to have taken remarkable little interest in the whole thing. I mean, when he was at RAND, he was

Speaker 1 computing various solutions um

Speaker 1 to kind of duels so you know he'd worked out the minimax theorem and um so he was busy well you know if you have a a plane and a um

Speaker 1 i don't know a tank or you know whatever a submarine and a ship you know and they they can see each other coming at what point should they fire at what you know at what point should they do this and so he got kind of involved in that and computing.

Speaker 1 And he kind of lost interest in game theory again

Speaker 1 as soon as computing came to the fore. So he helped, so whilst he was doing this, he ended up helping Rand kind of realize their own ambitions of having a computer.

Speaker 1 So it's not at all clear to me how much he'd still carry on being involved in the strategy, you know,

Speaker 1 in the

Speaker 1 nuclear strategy side. But of course, I mean this idea of kind of if you are

Speaker 1 coming up with your best strategy, then you have to think

Speaker 1 what

Speaker 1 you know your opponent will make of that and you have to imagine that they're also you know, an intelligent opponent who's going to be out for themselves.

Speaker 1 And that thinking is very deeply embedded into Minimax and

Speaker 1 and you know, and

Speaker 1 that was clearly very influential

Speaker 1 later on.

Speaker 2 One thing I find very interesting about von Neumann's work with the government and in aiding these kinds of strategic conversations is,

Speaker 2 at least from my understanding, it seems that a lot of the scientists during that time were somewhat radical and sympathetic to socialism, like Bertrand Russell or Oppenheimer.

Speaker 2 And von Neumann seems to be a very practical, non-radical person.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 you can think that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it seems like he broke from the conventional,

Speaker 2 I guess, elite scientific culture at the time. I'm curious, what about his personality or background? Do you think made him that way? Or am I even characterizing the situation in the correct way?

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I think that's fair. In fact, if anything, he was considered

Speaker 1 kind of right-wing, or at least a Cold War hawk in certain circles.

Speaker 1 I think if you look at him quite closely, I mean you could argue in many ways he was you know something of a liberal but you know

Speaker 1 at the time some you know a lot of people felt that he was quite hawkish.

Speaker 1 Now the reason for that is that

Speaker 1 there was a

Speaker 1 shortly after the First World War in Hungary, there were two things that happened.

Speaker 1 One was there was a very short-lived communist uprising and that government lasted for six months and it was pretty brutal

Speaker 1 you know they they

Speaker 1 reclaimed private property from wealthy fam wealthy families and and there was just general chaos and beatings on the street and stuff and

Speaker 1 but then

Speaker 1 something happened afterwards and a military

Speaker 1 essentially a you know a military government just marched in led by General Horthy and they took control and that turned out to be even worse. I mean they there was public hangings and and rapes and

Speaker 1 you know thousands of people ended up dead and

Speaker 1 many Jewish people at that time were seen to have been collaborating with the earlier communist

Speaker 1 government so you know many Jews were basically shot on the streets as well. Now the von Neumans were

Speaker 1 you know

Speaker 1 by dint of their wealth

Speaker 1 they were kind of protected from this but von Neumann saw all of this as he was growing up. And then of course later with the rise of the Nazis

Speaker 1 in Germany, he,

Speaker 1 you know, he had left Germany by then, but a lot of his formative years as a scientist or as a mathematician were spent in Germany and he adored

Speaker 1 kind of interwar Germany in the at least in the late 20s and for him it was this perfect intellectual climate and you have to remember that Germany was you know scientifically and mathematically definitely kind of the center of the world then I mean America just was nothing at the time

Speaker 1 it was only

Speaker 1 you know

Speaker 1 kind of during the Second World War and post the Second World War that

Speaker 1 from the 30s

Speaker 1 late 30s onwards that America became this scientific and technological kind of powerhouse, really.

Speaker 1 And you know, it benefited from many of these European scientists who left as a result of the Nazis. Now, he'd seen this, and his lesson was that authoritarianism, you know,

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 something that we shouldn't tolerate. And so, when he came to the States, his priority was to put his expertise into the hands of the democratic government there.
And whilst he definitely was

Speaker 1 advising them,

Speaker 1 he,

Speaker 1 you know, I got the feeling that, you know,

Speaker 1 he wasn't interested in making decisions on their behalf because, you know, this was a democratically elected government. I think deep down he was a democrat.

Speaker 1 He felt he should work as hard as possible to give the US government the tools that it needed to overcome the Nazis and to,

Speaker 1 you know, and to um

Speaker 1 you know main maintain uh their lead as kind of the preeminent um

Speaker 1 democracy in the world but um so he was kind of um

Speaker 1 kind of i think more more allergic to authoritarianism where as i think

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 you know before

Speaker 1 the second world war happened and before we knew what was happening under stalin there were many intellectuals who were willing to give the communism,

Speaker 1 deep left

Speaker 1 thinking, more of a chance. Whereas von Neumann had kind of seen what that turned into

Speaker 1 in Hungary, and he'd seen that

Speaker 1 essentially it became a kind of authoritarian regime.

Speaker 1 He was deeply suspicious of Stalin

Speaker 1 from day one for the very same reason and he'd had these experiences of you know Europe being turned upside down by the Nazis and I think that really

Speaker 1 shaped him very profoundly

Speaker 1 he became quite cynical about human nature as well at the same time I think you know deep down he was you know superficially he was

Speaker 1 kind of a good man and

Speaker 1 he you know he he was nice to people

Speaker 1 and I think that's really where he started. You know, in his day-to-day interactions with people, he was nice.

Speaker 1 He would do these incredible things very quietly behind people's backs that many other scientists wouldn't dream of.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, this builder, Hungarian builder, contacted him in the middle of the Second World War and said, I want to learn more about maths, but I'm in America basically building stuff.

Speaker 1 Where do I find out more about math? So he writes to his friend in wartime Hungary and gets them to send over a bunch of Hungarian maths textbooks. I mean and and later on you've got people like

Speaker 1 Mandelbrot who came over

Speaker 1 thanks to his reference and you know he was at Princeton and the IAS

Speaker 1 and years later when Mandelbrough ran into problems with his boss

Speaker 1 he goes looking for work elsewhere and he finds that like whatever

Speaker 1 a decade earlier long after you know and this is long after von Neumann was dead you know, von Neumann had sent out letters and talked to people saying, you know, Mandelbrough is doing really important work, but you know, he may struggle because what he's doing is so cutting-edge.

Speaker 1 So if he does and he comes looking for a job, please, you know, give him a job because this guy's brilliant. And, you know, he does these little things and he, of course, helps scientists leave

Speaker 1 kind of Europe before the Nazis make that impossible. He gets he helps to get Gödel out

Speaker 1 of Germany, for example. So he's this very conflicted personality.

Speaker 1 So I think he's, as you would expect, quite a complex

Speaker 1 thoughtful human being, and he's not easily characterized as Dr. Strangelove or

Speaker 1 a bleeding heart liberal.

Speaker 2 I understand what you meant, but out of context, he was superficially a good man. Has got to be the best backhanded compliment ever.

Speaker 2 So, the final question, I want to be restaurant for your time. You know, you're a researcher yourself.

Speaker 2 You know, you have a PhD in protein crystallography, you were a medical researcher, and now you've analyzed John Morneum's life, you know, probably one of the greatest, probably the greatest

Speaker 2 genius of all time. What are, do you, have you extrapolated some lessons about how to be prolific or how to come up with new insights in different fields?

Speaker 1 Not at all, but I would thoroughly recommend if you're going to write a book that you try not to give up your day job a year before the worst pandemic

Speaker 1 descends that we've known about for decades, descends on and engulfs the planet,

Speaker 1 thus ensuring that instead of working on your book about the cleverest person of the 20th century who works on abstruse set theory. You end up having to homeschool a recalcitrant 10-year-old.

Speaker 1 So that's that's one, you know, if you want to be productive, don't do that. Okay.

Speaker 1 But in other terms, I think, you know

Speaker 1 it's it's dangerous trying to

Speaker 1 you know, come out with a kind of self-help book based on von Neumann's lifestyle, right?

Speaker 1 I mean his first wife left him because he was too busy thinking and you know she took up with essentially a graduate student Horna Cooper who was you know a physics graduate student and you know and she was

Speaker 1 quite

Speaker 1 the thinker herself she ended up becoming this mover and shaker in

Speaker 1 science admin

Speaker 1 And, you know, his second wife was very clever herself, Clara Dan.

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 he thought incessantly

Speaker 1 from morning to night. And, you know, even at the cocktail parties that he threw,

Speaker 1 he would sometimes just find noise conducive to work. And he would just rush off, cocktail in hand, to write down some theorem.
I mean,

Speaker 1 what do you draw?

Speaker 1 What kind of lessons do you draw from that? You know, the only lesson I draw is that

Speaker 1 just don't do that.

Speaker 1 You know, try and try and forge some sort of work schedule that that kind of works for you we can't all be superhuman and you know his you know as we see his relationships his human relationships suffered and he

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 you know deeply troubled as he as he went out at the close of his life as as

Speaker 1 you know cancer was eroding his mental capabilities I mean he he

Speaker 1 kind of rediscovered Catholicism. He had converted when he was younger, but he had this, he was overtaken by this fear of mortality.

Speaker 1 And I think, you know, when we think about a productive life, I think, you know, we probably all want to go out on something of a high and not go out in abject terror.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, you know, read about this incredible human being, but don't try to draw too many life lessons from it, I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, no,

Speaker 2 that's definitely very fair. You're an Ajahn Moyneman, almost certainly.

Speaker 2 So, Onanio, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Speaker 1 Thanks very much.

Speaker 1 It was a pleasure.