Dan Snow's History Hit - The Forgotten Einstein

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

John von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived, a man who was in his day as well-known as Einstein and considered smarter. Von Neumann was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first-ever programmable digital computer, prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome.Ananyo Bhattacharya, science writer and former medical researcher, joins Dan on the podcast. They discuss the story of the 20th century’s foremost forgotten intellectual - who von Neumann was and his remarkable contributions to mathematics that continue to impact our lives today.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This is a wild podcast you're about to listen to.

I'm interviewing Onono Bhattacharya. He's a science writer who's worked at The Economist, Nature, and he used to be a medical researcher at the Burnham Institute in San Diego, California. Now, listen, he's got a degree in physics from Oxford. He's got a PhD in protein crystallography from the Imperial College. He's no fool. But compared to the man he has just written about, compared to John von Neumann,

he doesn't know anything. John von Neumann was born in Budapest at the turn of the last century. He's called the forgotten Einstein. And frankly, I think he was more brilliant than Einstein. It's bonkers. Game theory, evolutionary biology, nuclear weapons, smartphones, computers,

they all were contributed to by John von Neumann. He talked about all the things we're talking about now. He talked about AI. He talked about nanotechnology. He helped program the first digital computer. He talked about the interaction, the ethics of humans and machines. He could not enter a field of science without sparking a revolution. It's an unbelievable story and I'm very excited to bring it to you right here on Dinosaur's History Hit. If you want to listen to other exciting podcasts but without the ads, or you want to watch amazing history documentaries, which I can highly recommend, go to History Hit TV. We got all the

best old documentaries on there. We make new documentaries every week. It's all happening at History Hit TV. Join the ever-growing army of subscribers by just clicking the link in the description of this podcast. All you've got to do is get that thumb working. Click. Takes you through. Get two weeks free if you sign up today and you enter a world that will expand your mind. You'll end up being like John von Neumann. You'll end up being the forgotten Einstein if you watch all that content, let me tell you. In the meantime, though, folks, here is Onono Bhattacharya. Enjoy.

Onono, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. Thank you. All right, man. You're going to blow my mind. You're going to blow the mind of everyone listening. Tell us, tell us about this revolution, this brilliant man. Right. Well, he was a Hungarian-American mathematical genius born in 1903 to a wealthy Jewish family

in Budapest, and he died in 1957 in Washington, D.C. He was a sort of genius's genius, really. in Washington, D.C. He was a sort of genius's genius, really. I mean, during his pretty short life, he was almost irresistibly drawn to applying maths wherever he could. And unusually for a mathematician, he loved applying maths to real world problems. What I argue in my book is that more than 70 years after he's died, we're just understanding now the full impact of his ideas. Was he obviously brilliant from the start? Was he one of these kids that was just like off the scale?

Because I'm looking at my kids and I'm wondering if there's any potential shreds of genius left in them. I'm worried. Yeah, he was a child prodigy. I mean, he could speak ancient Greek at five, and he was known to be able to multiply eight digit numbers together at six. He learned calculus at eight. And at the time, a branch of mathematics called set theory was really cutting edge. Set theory sort of been absorbed into how mathematicians work. It's what they use to prove their theorems. And by 11, he was lecturing his best friend about it.

Now, his best friend was Eugene Wigner. And Wigner won the Nobel Prize in physics years later for work he did in collaboration with von Neumann. I mean, von Neumann passed away by that time. Von Neumann wrote his first serious maths paper when he was 17, and it's considered a classic even now. But there was something going on here, isn't it? These remarkable Jewish figures coming out of Eastern Europe at this time who would have such a huge impact on subsequent history? So he lived through pretty turbulent times. Obviously, there was the First World War, but because his father was an investment banker, they were quite shielded from the First World War. But then immediately afterwards, there was a communist revolution in Hungary, and it was a

very short-lived communist regime. And at that point, they flee Budapest for a while, but then come back. But then he settles into school, and his schooling is pretty much undisrupted. And he does his PhD. And at the same time, he's doing a degree in chemical engineering as a sort of backup because his dad says, oh, mathematicians never make any money. So you better have a backup. And he ends up by 1930, he sort of has almost a premonition of the Second World War. And he's writing letters to his friends, where he's predicting that essentially Jewish people are going to get murdered. And he's worried by this. But by that stage, by 1930, he's had an incredibly lucrative job offer from Princeton. So he decides to leave and he goes to the States.

And really that's where much of the work that he did happens. And some of that is massive consulting for the military and some of it's pure maths and some of it's this incredible side projects that he had going on. Yeah. I mean, I read worryingly that even his side hustle, like his hobby, what he did in the downtime was history. And he was widely acknowledged to be better at history than many of the area specialists, the academics that he would work alongside at universities. So as a 10-year-old, his dad had purchased this massive 45-volume history of the world. old, his dad had purchased this massive 45 volume history of the world. And he just made his way steadily through it. And he could recite bits of it, like 20 years later, word for word perfectly.

And so having a memory like that really helps. But he was sort of a closet expert in Byzantine history, and managed to put professors to shame. Well, you've written a work of history here that certainly puts me to shame. So, you know, you're a man in his mould. Anyway, tell me, after he graduates from childhood, how does it go? Well, that's very kind. Okay, so he finishes his PhD at 22. And at this time, the University of Göttingen in Germany is a mathematical mecca.

It's where every brilliant mathematician wants to be. It's headed by David Hilbert. But also, coincidentally, what's going on there is there's this guy, Werner Heisenberg, who's just a year older than Johnny, young Johnny von Neumann. And he starts formulating this new science called quantum mechanics, which I guess the shorthand is, it's really the science of the submicroscopic world, the science of the atom. And it's raising all sorts of weird puzzles. Particle can be both a wave and a particle. And according to some of the stuff that was going on, some of the interpretations suggested that the particle wasn't really anywhere until it was observed.

And so von Neumann's drawn to all of these new puzzles. And one of the first things that he does is there are two quite radically different looking interpretations. One suggests that you can treat particles as waves, and that's by Schrodinger. You've maybe heard of the Schrodinger wave equation. And the other one is Heisenberg. He's just not really interested in a way in what's actually going on. He just wants to be able to look at the things that you can see and explain them with maths. And his style of quantum mechanics is called matrix mechanics. And everybody's really puzzled because both these types of quantum mechanics seem to explain all these puzzling results that have been cropping up. And it's von Neumann that first sees the deep connection, the mathematical connection between them.

And he sort of resolves that. And then he keeps thinking about the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. And eventually he comes out with a book in, I think, 1932. mechanics. And eventually he comes out with a book in, I think, 1932. And that book is the first rigorous mathematical take on this new science. And even now, some of the questions that scientists ask around, well, what does quantum mechanics mean? And more practically, will we ever build, for example, a quantum computer, which in theory might be vastly more powerful than the computers that we have now, those questions are rooted in von Neumann's analysis of 70, 80 years ago. So after this, he gets this amazing job offer from Princeton and he starts getting involved in

America in military work and he becomes a US citizen. What he's interested in at this point, there's some very complex maths behind optimising explosions. It's essentially how to get the biggest bang for the military's buck. He gets heavily involved in that, and he realises that explosions above the ground, because of sort of the reflection of the explosion off the ground, can be far more powerful than just exploding a missile, say, or a shell on the ground. He starts to make himself pretty indispensable to the American military. And he's sent off in 1943 on a top secret mission by the US Navy to England to help the Royal Navy look and understand German mine laying patterns in the Atlantic. But he's called back quite suddenly after about six months by Robert Oppenheimer.

And Oppenheimer begs him to come back and join this project, which you can't tell him anything about. And of course, it is the top secret American project to build the atom bomb at Los Alamos. Yeah, I suppose this is a point in world history, the Second World War, where a very brilliant scientist can have a big impact on the course of the war. So he takes part in the Manhattan Project, the project to build the first nuclear weapon. Yeah, he does. In particular, there is a bomb, the implosion bomb. Now, there are two types of design. One was a sort of pretty straightforward gun-type bomb, where you just chuck two bits of uranium together really fast,

and it goes boom. But for plutonium, there was worries that that wouldn't work. There was worries that essentially the plutonium was so reactive that by the time you'd brought it together, it would have melted. So you needed a different way of doing it. And von Neumann really championed another way, which was to put the plutonium at the centre of the bomb, surround it by explosives and sort of crush it from all sides until the bomb detonated. And until he arrived, everybody had put this on the back burner because they didn't really think it would work. And until he arrived, everybody had put this on the back burner because they didn't really think it would work. They compared it to trying to squish a can of beer without spilling a drop.

And he showed how it could work. And that was the bomb that was tested at Trinity during the Trinity test. And later, it was the Fat Man bomb, which was detonated over Nagasaki. It was the Fat Man bomb, which was detonated over Nagasaki. Now, he developed this reputation for clear-eyed, rather unsentimental strategising. And so he was also asked to chair the committee that chose the Japanese targets for the bomb. The more you learn about Trinity, the more you learn about the Manhattan Project, you realise what an extraordinary collection of people they gathered together for this. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, so after he got his job at Princeton, there was a new institute set up in Princeton called the Institute for Advanced Study. And he was one of the first recruits. In

fact, he was the youngest recruit. And amongst the half dozen or so people that they also hired was Albert Einstein. Everybody that knew them both said von Neumann is faster. His mind was just unimaginably fast. Didn't so much crunch numbers and sort of grind them to dust. And there was other esteemed figures like the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Turing turned up as von Neumann's assistant. And at Los Alamos, it was a sort of who's who of 20th century physics, really. There was a lot of Hungarians and Edvard Teller. Teller and Szilard all were educated in Budapest,

so they all knew each other. And they were all pretty much in awe of von Neumann. And yet, you know, these names have lasted a lot better than his in some ways. What is going on in Eastern Europe at this time? Why do we get this cluster of geniuses coming out of these Jewish networks in Eastern Europe? So there are lots of theories. And in Hungary at the time, anti-Semitism wasn't very prevalent. So actually, there were a lot of wealthy Jewish

people in lots of professions, like banking. A huge proportion of doctors and lawyers in Budapest were Jewish. And the Hungarian gentry, they held sort of political offices, but some of them were not particularly wealthy, and they still didn't want to touch these useful jobs. So essentially, the new migrants, the Jews, were sort of left to fill these things that the gentry were above. And then there were also these amazingly selective private schools there in Budapest and these incredibly difficult mathematics exams that everybody competed in. And so this vast amounts of selection going on. And he felt that there was a constant pressure to succeed because there was an impending sense of doom hanging over you in the 20s and

30s. There was a sense that something was going to go terribly wrong and that in order to survive, you had to be absolutely brilliant. And that's what he attributed to. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're learning all about the forgotten Einstein. It's incredible. More coming up. How can toilet training cows help save the planet? Should we start renting our clothes? And why on earth is Bez from the Happy Mondays now keeping bees? I'm Jimmy Doherty, TV presenter, farmer and conservationist. And these are just a few of the questions we'll be answering on my new podcast on Jimmy's Farm from History Hit.

Join me on the farm to hear from the likes of the founder of the Eden Project, Sir Tim Smith. It is only people who don't know what they're doing that can do marvellous things in some areas, because received wisdom will sometimes, you'll talk yourself out of it if you've got lots of people who've done it before. Professor Dieter Helm on how to stop climate change. There may be all sorts of products like avocados and everything will have palm oil in it, etc. And these have not just long distances involved in it, but they're not actually producing what could be produced on the land and the frame that it's set. And my old friend, Jamie Oliver. could be produced on the land and the frame that it's set.

And my old friend, Jamie Oliver. I think I was stupid enough, naive enough, and unspoiled enough about the world that we live in. Listen to On Jimmy's Farm now, wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. It feels like it must have been an exciting time to be a scientist. The defence budgets, the R&D, the innovation, I mean, there was money. That must be so exciting for a man like that. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I think that's very much the case with von Neumann. He gets very interested in bombs and atom bombs. And after the war, he starts crisscrossing America in search of really more computational power for bomb-related calculations. And now his old friend Edward

Teller has been thinking about an even more destructive bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and he's trying to help him out. And almost by accident, he meets another mathematician on a railway platform called Hermann Goldstein. And he discovers that Goldstein is working on this massive room-filling computer called the ENIAC. And the ENIAC is going to be one of the world's first fully electronic digital computers. And von Neumann joins the ENIAC project, but he probably more than anybody working on that project suddenly realizes really well what its limitations are, because the ENIAC's been designed for just one job. And that was calculating artillery trajectories. And now the war's over, nobody's really interested in that anymore. So he wants to design something more flexible.

he wants to design something more flexible. And he goes away and he produces a report, which was called the EDVAC report. This machine that he thinks about could be programmed to carry out any task without having to be rewired. And in essence, what he's done is he's come up with the blueprint for the modern stored program computer. And just like a smartphone or pretty much every laptop, they can store and execute different programs. So he has come up with this design and he's realized that what you need is this massive working memory that you can feed these programs into. And then you can execute these programs step by step through the central processor unit. You don't need to have to rewire everything. You can just give the computer a certain number of limited commands and it will do anything.

And his second wife, because he's remarried by this stage, his first wife, Mariette, divorces him because she's tired of playing second fiddle to all of his other projects. So Clara Dan essentially rewires the ENIAC and turns it into a sort of early modern stored program computer. And she writes the first programs for it. These programs are bomb simulations, and they're arguably the first complex modern programs ever to run on a computer. Nowadays, every computer, pretty much, that you'll come across, runs on something called the von Neumann architecture, and it's named after von Neumann because he sketched out what these computers should look like.

Okay, so his list of achievements is so bewildering. Is it possible to talk about what were his greatest contributions? Wow. Well, certainly the blueprint for the modern computer has to be on there. But he then went on and almost as a hobby, he wrote a massive book with the economist Oscar Morgenstern. It was about game theory. It was really the book that put game theory on the map. He pretty much invented modern game theory with that book. And game theory is rigorous mathematics of conflict and cooperation. And the first game theorists to win the Nobel were back in 1994, and that included John Nash, who was made famous by the film A Beautiful

Mind. But in the same year that Nash was collecting his prize, that was when game theory really hit the big time because there were auctions designed by game theorists that were used to sell off massive chunks of the radio spectrum. And that would make just billions for the American government. And then pretty much every country in the world just adopted these auctions to sell off their radio spectrum for mobile phones or whatever later on. And nowadays, game theory is used to also make billions for the tech companies like Google and Amazon through auctions that sell keywords for online ads. But it's also really the branch of economics that deals well with

how do monopolies and oligopolies form? So why is it that Amazon is now so dominant in selling books and stuff over the internet? How do you design laws or how do you design regulations to prevent that sort of thing and to keep the market competitive? So depending on whether you're in economics or in computer science, you'll have different opinions of what is most important contribution, but there are probably two of them. Tell me about his wife, because she's almost as remarkable as him. I don't know how these people meet. Before dating apps, it's extraordinary. Yeah, so she was also Hungarian from an incredibly wealthy family. And she was a champion ice skater when she was younger.

And then she was packed off to boarding school in England. But after 18, she never had any further education. And she ended up meeting von Neumann in Monte Carlo. And he was trying out one of his crazy systems and lost all his money. And she was there with her first husband, who was an inveterate gambler and only interested in also losing lots of money. So she ends up buying von Neumann a drink and they get on like a house on fire. And then when he gets divorced from his first wife, Mariette, Mariette goes on to become this amazing administrator of scientific laboratories. That's how she makes her career. And in the meantime, von Neumann goes back and strikes up his friendship again with Clary Dan, and they get married. And she comes over and she happens to be in the right place at

the right time and gets interested in computing. Now, during the war, she's actually helping out in Princeton to do these massive population studies, looking at the ebb and flow of populations and population forecasts. And she's so good at it, despite having no university level maths at all, that they offer a position at Princeton, math at all that they offer a position at Princeton, which she declines. So she joins von Neumann and she gets into the whole computing side and she's trusted with these secrets about the atom bomb. And she turns sort of all these algorithms into programming code. into programming code. And it's the first time you see some of the things that you see now every day in modern computer programs, these loops that run the same algorithm again and again. And you know, you're seeing these for the first time. And she's doing all of this before the Manchester Baby runs its first program. Now, the Manchester Baby is usually considered

the first proper modern stored program computer, but she's done this months before. Man, you're breaking my heart here. You're telling me that Alan Turing is now not the granddaddy of modern computing? Well, I mean, the Colossus was, of course, chuntering away in secret, breaking codes, but we wouldn't really hear about that until I think the 1970s. So it had no impact at all on the development of the modern computer as a result.

It also wasn't a stored program computer either. It was also designed for one job, but it was fully electronic. And so it beat the ENIAC to being the first electronic digital computer, if only we'd known about it, which nobody did. Now, please tell me these people had children, because if so, they should clearly be the most intelligent people in the history of the human race. Well, actually, Clara didn't. They never had children. He did have one child, didn't. They never had children. He did have one child, Marina von Neumann. That was with his first wife. And she became a top economist. And she was the first female economic advisor ever to the US president. And she sat on various boards. She was brilliant. I mean, she's still alive and she still has an incredible mind.

And she was great fun to talk to. So what's he do next? He's not finished yet, is he? Yeah. So he starts getting interested in computers in a big way. And one of the things to spin out of this is his theory of self-reproducing automata. the things to spin out of this is his theory of self-reproducing automata. And this is his mathematical proof that machines can make more machines. And he just proves this with pen and paper. And the proof is just so complex. It's like what he designs is essentially a two-dimensional

machine that runs itself and starts building another machine some distance away. Now, it's so complex that nobody would be able to actually see if it works for decades. And the first computer program where they tried to emulate this thing that he'd come up with, the cellular automaton, only happened in the 90s. And by the time the guys who'd written the program published their paper their program was still running and hadn't reproduced itself it took over a year and a half of computing time but now if you just go on you can find an emulator that will do it for you on your laptop and this is also the first real computer virus that was ever designed because now this thing will just keep reproducing itself and reproducing itself.

Now, this would inspire ideas about sending spacecraft into deep space, and they would make copies of themselves and crisscross the galaxy looking for life. And nowadays they're called von Neumann probes, this idea of reproducing spacecraft. And nowadays they're called von Neumann probes, this idea of reproducing spacecraft. And it also inspired some of the early nanotechnologists who were thinking about tiny machines that would make other machines. Now, he gets bone cancer in the late 50s. He collapses and he starts to deteriorate quite slowly. None of the treatments work. But whilst he's in hospital, he's living out his final 11 months in a hospital he starts thinking again about computers and brains and he starts writing a set of lectures called the computer

and the brain and he's commissioned to give these lectures but he's very apologetic because that's clearly not going to happen and he doesn't finish them but for the first time really he makes this comparison and he concludes that whilst the computers that he helped to design are sort of serial they do one job at a time brains are massively parallel and so despite being these rather clumsy blobs of organic matter, they are incredibly powerful, even though they're incredibly also error prone, because they are running so many different jobs at the same time, they can sort of error correct as they go in a way that his serial machines can't. And that's been a really lasting insight from those incomplete lectures.

lasting insight from those incomplete lectures. As the cancer spreads, his mind starts to deteriorate and this is just unbearable for him because you can imagine he's been used to being the smartest, fastest person in any room for his entire life. And I think it's probably partly because of this that he returns to religion and to Catholicism, actually, because his family converted back in the 1930s to Catholicism just to fit in, as many Jews did. He talks to the hospital priest and he asks for a Catholic burial, which he does get. And it absolutely shocks some of his oldest friends and his brothers. They just don't understand how he could do such a thing. The most powerful, most rational minds that we know of probably in history turn to God at the end. He's done such an important job, forcing us to remember this scientist.

at the end. He's done such an important job, forcing us to remember this scientist. Well, I really hope so. I mean, it was a complicated project because it's not like doing a biography of, say, Einstein, where if somebody says, Einstein, you're quite likely to get the answer back, relativity. But with von Neumann, his contributions were just so widespread, he just darted from one field to another, that it's quite a different kind of biography. I felt I had to deconstruct a little bit and follow up his ideas so that we really understood where they'd got to and why this guy was important. this guy was important. So I don't know whether anybody will be able to make it into a film. It just sprawls across all of these different lands. And of course, you know, there was this cynical side of him. He joined the Rand Corporation, he was consulting for them, and game theory becomes this tool immediately after the Second World War, a tool of thinking strategically about the Cold War. And that would inspire all of these figures like Herman Kahn and Albert Volstetter to do their studies and think the unthinkable.

And so game theory became infamous and von Neumann's name was sort of associated with all of that kind of thing as well. Where did he come down on this issue of artificial intelligence? Tell me he was relaxed about the galloping speed and processing power of computers and how they wouldn't eventually rise up and destroy humans. He was deeply worried by the fast pace of technology and by the bombs that he was helping to bring into being and also by the computers. He invented the term singularity and used it for the first time to mean this point at which technological progress just disappears into a point unimaginable now. One of his last essays

was actually titled, Can We Survive Technology? And his conclusion was that he didn't know, and we would have to bring the best human qualities to bear, our inventiveness and our moral sense to it. But immediately after the Second World War, in particular, he felt that a conflict with the Soviet Union was almost inevitable, an arms nuclear conflict. And so he actually initially supported this idea of a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union. And he famously said in an interview that 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 at one o'clock? But I think that what's forgotten is the terror that a lot of intellectuals had after the Second World War, that there would, within a decade, be another one, such that people like Bertrand Russell, who was supposedly a pacifist, was also for a while in favour of a pre-emptive strike. strike so von neumann changed his mind about that as soon as russia had armed himself he realized that there would be no preemptive war that war would eventually if there was a nuclear war it

would be long and painful and there was no way of trying to preempt it by bombing the ussr no thank you very much for coming on the podcast it's a wonderful project tell everyone what it's called it's called the man from the future thank you for coming on thank you very much it's a wonderful project. Tell everyone what it's called. It's called The Man from the Future. Thank you for coming on. Thank you very much, Dan. It's a pleasure. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All the traditions of our school history, our songs,

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War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.