Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Who was the most influential scientist?

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Daniel talks to Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of "The Man From the Future" about the life and impact of John von NeumannSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And how would you rank them? You have to rank them. That depends how you rank. By height, by hygiene, by a number of Nobel Prizes, so many different directions. I don't think you want to rate them by hygiene. I don't want to be the president who does that survey. I don't know what's more embarrassing. Most hygienic physicist or least.

Yeah. And which one gives you more credit as a physicist? I want to know the correlation between hygiene and Nobel Prizes. Well, that's a good metric, maybe Nobel Prizes. Has anyone won more than one Nobel Prize in physics? One guy won the Nobel Prize twice. John Bardeen won it in 56 and 72, and there are some families where fathers and sons won it.

Must be quite a bookcase there in their house. But there must be a huge number of physicists who haven't won a Nobel Prize. Most of us. I guess maybe you could rank yourself as the number one physicist. in the world named Daniel Whiteson. I mean, I hope so. Have you looked? Are there any other...

I mean, there must be other Daniel Whitesons out there. Could one of them be a physicist? There aren't many of us. I have a distant cousin in the UK named Daniel Whiteson, who's an artist. And then if they listen to this podcast and technically they would be physicists too. I have some competition. Yeah. I'll rank you both in the artistic ability.

Sounds good. Hi, I'm Jorge Ameri Cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and until recently, I thought I was probably the number one Daniel Whiteson particle physicist in the world. Until recently, you mean like 30 seconds ago? Yeah, exactly. I just got downgraded. Yeah, well, maybe you need to take out the competition. Cut off the podcast so that the other Daniel Whiteson can't listen. No, I want to create more physicists, man.

I'm just going to have to work on my artistic skills to round out my portfolio. I thought you were going to say you wanted to create more Daniel Whiteson's. How's that going? Well, I'm married to a biologist, so let's see if she can get cloning to work in the lab. Oh, man. If she clones you, would she still be with you? What if she picks a clone? What if she finds you the number two, Daniel Weitzen?

If we're clones, aren't we all the same? Are we going to share credit? You know, it's just me to take care of stuff. I don't know. This is an existential question, Daniel. Once the clone is created and they have a different experience of the world, they're technically a different Daniel. That's true. I guess we'll have to ask them what they think.

Yeah. Or your wife, I guess. Let's get her on. Well, first, she has to clone you, which might be a little tricky and ethically questionable. Absolutely. But anyways, welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the universe. a production of iHeartRadio.

In which we do our best to clone our curiosity and our joy for uncovering the mysteries of the universe. We want everyone out there to feel like a physicist, to think like a physicist, and to be a physicist, to use your brain to develop mathematical models of how the universe works and to bring it to bear to master the universe in your own mind. That's right. We survey the entire universe

and we try to find the biggest, the baddest, the most interesting questions out there about how everything works and how the cosmos is put together to bring to you here on the podcast. Because everybody deserves to understand the universe and to participate in unraveling its mysteries. Some of the greatest minds in history were not people who were academics or men of leisure figuring out the way the universe worked. They were just curious people who taught themselves to think about the nature of reality. That's right. There are a lot of amazing questions out there to ask and a lot of minds that have put their amazing powers of observation and experiments.

to try to figure out these answers. And so it's been an incredible history of humankind trying to find the solution to the biggest questions in the universe. And when we look back at the story of how humans have figured it all out, there are some names that stand out among the others. Of course, there are thousands of people toiling in anonymity,

but a few people have really changed the course of science, really pivoted the way all humans thought about the nature of the world. Of course, people like Newton and Einstein and Galileo come to mind, but there are many, many more. Cam as well, right? I was about to say cham, absolutely. Yes, you cut me off.

It's alphabetical. Okay, maybe not alphabetical. But there are some bold-faced names that really have changed the way everybody thinks about the nature of our universe. Yeah, a lot of influential scientists out there throughout history. And so a question that you can ask is,

how do they rank in terms of their influence in science? Just like, I guess, people rank sports stars, right? There is this whole ridiculous cottage industry of like asking who is the greatest of all time. You know, is it Kobe Bryant, is it LeBron James, isn't Michael Jordan, isn't Larry Bird? Everybody's got somebody in their camp arguing for them. Who's the goat? Greatest of all time. Exactly.

And mostly I think it's not actually serious. They don't really care who's number one. It's just like a fun way to have a conversation and to talk about these inspiring figures. I think some people care a lot about these rankings and who's the goat. in basketball and baseball. So who's the greatest cartoonist of all time, Jorge? Well, Cam comes to mine, obviously. Which champ was that again?

The famous one. Oh, okay. You mean at Jorge Cham on Twitter, whoever that is? Yeah, what? There's another Jorge Cham? You told me there's some other guy who owns at Jorge Cham on Twitter. Oh, no, I think somebody just opened that as me. It could be another Jorge Cham.

How do you know? They stole me. Yeah, no. No, it's pretty clear there. Trying to be me. Yeah, yeah. Or unless he isn't a me, maybe, I don't know. Maybe he's your clone.

But back to the question, who is the greatest cartoonist of all time other than Jorge Cham? Well, it probably depends on who you ask. But I would probably say Waterson, Calvin Hobbs, probably, yeah. Solid answer, yeah. Peanuts, maybe. Charles Schultz. Those are all up there. But yeah, you can also maybe try to do that with scientists, right?

Absolutely, you can. going to try. So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question. Who was the most influential scientist? Are you trying to make scientists influencers, Daniel here? I'm trying to make scientists as cool as sports stars. There should be like science bars where people drink beer and argue loudly about who was the greatest scientist of all time. Interesting. Now, if that greatest scientist happens to not be a physicist, though. What? Would you be offended?

Or are we asking scientists in general or just greatest physicists? I think scientists. Some of the folks that listeners mentioned were scientists before we even really had the concept of what physics was. So we're going brought here. Absolutely. And I noticed you put this question in the past tense, who was the most influential scientist? Do you think maybe the most influential scientist could be alive today? Or are we only looking at dead people?

Oh, that's a great point. I hadn't even thought about that. I'm reflecting my own bias here. I guess I was thinking about people who had an impact on history and it's hard for somebody who just had an idea today to have an impact on history the way Einstein did, for example. So I think it takes a little while for that impact to play out. Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had thought about this question or have an opinion, be or not about who is the most influential scientist. Thanks very much to everybody who participates in this segment of the podcast. We really appreciate your time, energy, and enthusiasm if you'd like to share.

yours for the podcast. Please don't be shy. Write to me to questions at Danielanhorpe.com. So think about it for a second. Who do you think is the most influential scientist? And I'm going to just give you the little suggestion that maybe I am one of the most influential scientists. But here's what people had to say. My guess would be the mathematician Erdos. I think it was Copernicus. I would say it was Nicholas Fleming who found about antibiotics. I would say Einstein. I think it has to be Isaac Newton.

So an idiot reaction, Einstein, but then when you start thinking about it, you've got likes of Faraday and Newton and Bo. Shortinger, what box would you put him in? And could you tell he was in the box without opening it? Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Albert Einstein stands out. It's Sir Isaac Newton, because it all starts with him. Einstein's the winner there.

Charles Darwin. It's Charles Darwin. Bill and I, the science guy. Not saying he's the best, with Daniel, of course, coming in and close. second aristotle all right some interesting answers and a lot of names you might expect Isaac Newton Einstein Galileo Darwin Bill Nye the science guy Bill Nye the science guy who's not actually a scientist by training he's a engineer which I think makes him even cooler wow that's pretty influential but yeah a lot of a common names you might expect Aristotle

as well was he technically a scientist or a philosopher yeah there's a long debate about when the science began and who is doing science and who's doing philosophy and the exact distinction between them, which always comes down to arguing about definitions. So how are we going to rank people then if we don't even have a solid definition of science? I think most of the time in these conversations is spent arguing about how to argue about it. So really that's the core question. How do you measure this? Yeah, yeah.

I guess that happens in sports too, like most trophies, most games, more points. Can you really be the greatest of all times if you never won a championship, even if you have the scoring record, you know, how is Einstein's dribble against Galileo's rebounding, this kind of stuff? Yeah, yeah. And so what are we going to use on the podcast here today? Where are we just going to argue about how to measure the influence? Well, I was kind of looking forward to arguing about how to measure it. Yeah, I thought you might have some opinions. Oh, I see.

So we're not actually going to answer the question of the episode. As usual. She's going to argue. Got it. I think probably lots of people have different opinions about who might be the most influential. But to me, I think the question is like, who has shifted the course of human history or human thought the most? Who would have the most impact if you'd like deleted them from the historical record? Assuming that nobody else would have figured it out, I guess.

Well, that is the question. You know, if you figured out something awesome, but that's the question. there were 10 people right on your tails about to figure it out, then did you really have a singular impact on the field? You just sort of like in first place by 0.01 seconds, you didn't really have that much of an impact on human history by that metric. But there might be some people who had a singular vision who had an idea that nobody else was capable of. And if you deleted them from human history, it might take hundreds of years before we figured that thing out. It sounds like you're also just kind of thinking in terms of our thoughts and our theories.

about science and how the world works. I wonder if you thought about maybe like lives saved, that could be another way to measure the impact of a scientist. Or you could also go darker and think about lives lost. You know, some of our most influential scientists help develop nuclear weapons technology, for example, or other kinds of weapons technology that resulted in lots of deaths. Oh, we're also going dark.

We're also maybe considering the war scientist to human time. We just said influential. We didn't say have a positive influence, right? For example, if you create a doomsday device and destroy the entire planet, that's pretty influential. Right, right, right. You'd be the wot, the worst of all time. It's just the magnitude, not the sign that matters here. I feel like, though, just by posing the question, we're implying some sort of positive influence.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, most scientists out there are trying to improve our lives, either specifically through developing some technology that makes life easier or more productive, or just in sheer understanding the nature of the universe. I think science overall has a positive goal, and most scientists have had a positive impact on our experience. Right, right. Nobody wants to be the wot.

Nobody wants to be the wote. Although I noticed he said most scientists want to have a positive impact. Yeah, most of us. Not all. Not all. I mean, there's the guy who invented lead in gasoline, for example. He made a whole generation dumber. Maybe he was the most influential scientist.

Could be. Or it could have been the guy who figured that out and saved the next generation afterwards. There's so many ways to measure it. You know, within academia, we have our own metrics. Like, if you're a professor and you're going up for promotion, then there are ways they measure your performance. All of which are deeply flawed, you know, like number of papers or number of citations of your paper. And then they have fancy metrics. One of them is called an H index, which is number of papers that have at least that many citations. So if you have an H. index of 100, it means you have 100 papers with at least 100 citations, for example. Yeah, it's a famous index in academia. Have you measured yours, Daniel? Oh, I have a ridiculous H index because I have more than 1,000 papers because I'm a member of the Atlas collaboration, and we put out dozens and dozens of papers every year. So it's just totally a broken metric for somebody like me.

But have you exclude those crazy collaboration papers? Isn't there like an adjustment factor or like a handicap? So my official H index is 200. which is pretty bonkers. That's including the big collaboration papers? Yeah, that's including the big collaboration papers. So it's not real. I mean, just to calibrate somebody like Ed Witten,

probably the smartest guy in the planet right now, has an H-index of 187. I haven't heard him, so I guess he maybe is not that influential. He basically invented string theory and won the Fields Medal, which is the best prize in mathematics, as a physicist, so he's definitely a smart dude. Well, that's another way to measure things with prizes. He said there's a physicist who's won it twice.

Yeah, there is one physicist who's won the Nobel Prize twice. And overall, there are only like 200 physicists who've ever won the physics Nobel Prize. But only one that has won it twice. Mm-hmm, yeah. Maybe this person is the goat. Maybe, but the Nobel Prize is famously a flawed metric. I mean, super smart people, very well deserving like Vera Rubin and Jocelyn Bernel never won the Nobel Prize, probably because it's selected by a panel of dudes.

And so it's famously biased against women and other underrepresented minorities. So maybe not the best metric. Right. It's also biased against Daniel Whiteson, which means it totally flawed, obviously. No, it's probably actually biased towards me being a white male Jew. So if I haven't won the Nobel Prize so far, it's just my fault. Well, who's this person who's won it twice? I mean, what did they win it for?

Well, he was a physicist and an electrical engineer. He won it in 56 for the invention of the transistor. and then in 72 for a theory of superconductivity. So definitely a smart guy. What's the name? John Bardeen invented the transistor. Won the Nobel Prize for that. And then he invented superconductivity?

He invented a theory to explain superconductivity. It's called the BCS theory. He's the B and BCS theory. So without this person, maybe we wouldn't have transistors, which means we wouldn't have computers. Yeah, pretty influential. Wow. Okay, I would put him pretty high up on the goat list.

especially because he is an engineer, which automatically makes him great. That does score him a lot of points, yes. Also, based on his picture from Wikipedia, he looks like he has pretty good hygiene. Oh, boy. Yeah, that must be his engineering side, obviously. I have to say, having been to an engineering conference or two, engineers definitely dress better than physicists. Oh, there you know. It's not that hard. No, it's a low standard.

You're setting a low bar. Yeah, I appreciate it. that. There's definitely a lot more ties and clean shirts at engineering conferences. Yeah, Blazers. Engineers are big into blazers. All right, well, this is a big question. Obviously, we can spend several hours just talking about how to rank these. But Daniel, you happen to interview a writer who wrote a book sort of about this idea of who is the most influential

scientist. That's right. I spoke to Ananyo Badacharya. He's the author of a recent book called The Man from the Future. And in this book, lays out the case that John von Neumann might be the most influential scientist who ever lived. Interesting. And John von Neumann was a scientist and or an engineer? He's definitely a physicist. I don't know if he has any engineering credentials, but he has incredible impact over like abstract areas of mathematics, fundamental questions in quantum mechanics. He invented the architecture of the modern computer. He basically wrote the book on game theory. This was definitely a smart and influential guy.

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I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be accessible and inclusive for all tennis fans, whether you play tennis or not. Tennis is full of compelling stories of late. Have you heard about icon Venus Williams' recent wild card bids or the young Canadian, Victoria Mboko, making a name for herself? How about Naomi Osaka getting back to form? To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart women's sports production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, well, here's Daniel's interview with author Annenyo Batacharya, author of The Man from the Future. So then it's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast, Ananobaracharya. He has a PhD in

biophysics from Imperial College in London. He's been a science correspondent at The Economist, an editor at nature and a medical researcher. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much, Daniel. It's a pleasure to be here. So you have a background in biophysics and you work as a science journalist. Help me understand why you decided

to write a book about Von Neumann. Ah, yes. Well, my undergraduate degree was physics. So I've always kind of flitted from field to field. I moved from one thing that I knew something about into a new field that I've known nothing about. and this book was pretty much the same. But the longer answer, I guess, is that I'd been through a few journalism jobs,

I'd worked at nature, and then I ended up at The Economist. And over the years, I found myself hearing von Neumann's name in all of these incredibly different contexts. So you'd have economics correspondence, talking about the latest Nobel winner in economics and it would be the game theory. So von Neumann's name would come up there. There were people on the tech part of the magazine

and were talking about quantum computing. And again, you'd have von Neumann's name mentioned in that context. And then there was artificial intelligence and, you know, the people that were writing stories in artificial intelligence go, yeah, you know, you kind of have to look at what Von Neumann did back then. So there was this guy who turned out had been dead for 70 years almost, and his name was coming up more than ever.

So I really wanted to understand why that was. And when I looked into the why of this rather than look around for his biography, I discovered that there hasn't really been an attempt to try and string all of his ideas together and explain the relevance of this person to the 21st century. And so that's what I set out to do. Well, I think he did it very well. It's a really fun tour of all the amazing intellectual impacts that Von Nomen has had. And in the book, you make a pretty strong case for him being one of the smartest people,

in the 20th century, maybe one of the smartest people ever, which is pretty astounding. I thought it would be fun for us to take the listeners on a little bit of a tour of some of his greatest accomplishments. And I want to start with something that we talk about on the podcast all the time, which is quantum mechanics. You're writing the book about how he didn't invent wave-based quantum mechanics or matrix-based quantum mechanics, but he did something maybe even more difficult, which is that he unified them. Help us understand why that was important and why it was so difficult. Right. So this is kind of von Neumann's postdoc, right? He's at the University of Göttingen

and he's right straight after his PhD. I think he's 22 at this stage and when he turns up at Gersigan, I think on a fellowship from the Rockefeller, he's there to do maths, you know, he's not there to do physics. So he's there because David Hilbert is the leading figure in mathematics of the day and he is head of the maths department at Kirtigern. And so von Neumann comes as kind of his apprentice, although in a way the apprentice has already begun to outshine the master. But at the same time as von Neumann's

there, there's another kind of Wunderkind, which is Heisenberg. And Heisenberg has recently invented this new science called quantum mechanics, the science, I guess, of atoms and atomic behavior. And his approach is through these matrices, which are grids of numbers. Now, Heisenberg wasn't actually deeply concerned with what these matrices were saying about the underlying nature of what was going on in the atom, right? So he had started with atomic spectra, which are like, what happens when you excite an atom of, uh, neon or whatever, if you give it an electric shock, the electrons get excited, they drop back down and they release a photon of light of a particular wavelength. And so you had all these

spectra of different atoms. And he was kind of trying to understand those. And that's how quantum mechanics really began, trying to mathematicize this. So he had these grids of numbers that told you about these different energy levels that the electrons were jumping between. Now, within a few months of this version of quantum mechanics coming out, there was another one, and that was by Schrodinger. And that was based on waves, which

physicists were much more comfortable with than Heisenberg's matrices. In fact, nobody initially understood what matrices were or why they should be useful in this way, and it took some digging around to find out.

And now matrices are kind of discussed in high school. Now, what von Neumann began to work on was uniting these two visions, because people were like, well, you know, you've got these waves on the one hand, and you've got matrices on the other. You've got sort of electrons jumping around between energy levels in Heisenberg's theory. And in Schrodinger's, you've got this idea that maybe particles have wave-like properties. So which one is it?

And what von Neumann does is he digs down to maths and he proves mathematically that these are essentially two sides of the same coin. And this is kind of like... And was it clear to everybody that that was going to be possible? I mean, I remember reading that this was sort of an acrimonious debate. There was no love lost between Heisenberg and Schrodinger. I remember reading that Heisenberg found Schrodinger's theory, quote, repulsive, you know, and was offended by what Schrodinger was writing about the importance of visualizability of these ideas.

Exactly. So Heisenberg, in fact, if you look, excuse the language, so basically Schrodinger's theory was crap. In the original German, somehow he said that, right? In the original German. Exactly. There's no loss between them. And now Heisenberg thought it was almost deeply unscientific

to look beyond what the maths was telling you because you couldn't see inside an atom. And Schrodinger was hated matrices. So he just hated this mathematical formalization. and most physicists actually were very uncomfortable with it so they were quite glad when Schrodinger came along with his waves but what people couldn't understand is why are these two incredibly different formalizations giving the same answers who's right

and it turned out that they both were and physicists now will tend to use the matrix approach when a problem is more tractable with matrices or they'll use waves when the Schrodinger equation as it's known, gives you better results. But von Neumann did this theoretical thing, and then he goes on and builds on that. And he builds on that in two ways.

One, he spins out this entire theory of how the operators, which is like, I guess, the functions, the stuff that tells you what to do to the maths, like if you want to find the energy, what do you do to the Schrodinger, what do you do to the description of the equation? He looked at the entire maths of this, and this in itself, this operator theory, Von Neumann Algebras, is now really, it's at the cutting edge of mathematics again. And then on the other hand, he went and laid out the entire kind of mathematical groundwork of quantum mechanics.

And by doing so, he allowed people to ask philosophical, more philosophical questions, which, again, we're now coming back to it. Because if you want to build a quantum computer, for example, you want to know, well, will we ever be able to string qubits together, will we ever be able to kind of entangle these qubits and be able to do real useful calculations with them? And to answer that question, you have to go back to what von Neumann showed we could know with the maths.

So these, in some ways, what he was doing at the time became unfashionable in the sort of 60s. And I think it's all come back now, which is why his name kept coming up in this field. It's sort of amazing the impact that mathematicians have had on physics, just sort of like during their coffee breaks. You know, this is like not something Norman was targeting. This is not like the central task of his life. And yet he made this enormous contribution. It reminds me of, you know, Emmy Nother. And Nother's theorem is just something she was sort of doodled, you know,

while she was being distracted by her actual hard math problems, comes in and makes a fundamental impact on the whole shape of modern physics. Is that how we should understand Noyman's impact, that he is such a genius that essentially he can make this impact in a field that's not even his own? Right. So this is, I find, absolutely fascinating. fascinating about von Neumann, right? So he writes later on this essay called The Mathematician

where he set out his philosophy of mathematics and he really deeply felt that if mathematicians stray too far from physics and the physical world when they're looking for problems, he says that mathematics becomes Baroque. I guess he means it becomes not beautiful, not interesting, too self-absorbed. So he was constantly looking.

looking around of the world for ways to apply mathematics and he had this extraordinarily logical mind

and he would kind of set something up in logical terms and formal logical terms and then kind of bulldoze his way

through it and a problem that had seemed completely complicated or intractable would suddenly become simple in his hands.

And that was his approach. So from roots in looking at abstruse mathematical logic, which is where he started. He ends up applying kind of logic to almost every area of cutting edge science that you can think of. It is really amazing the impact he's had. And sometimes

his impact seems to be so great because of his reputation that's almost closed off areas of research. Something I'm really fascinated by is his impact on the philosophy of quantum mechanics and these hidden variable theorems. He arrived at this big result, this no-go theorem, essentially claiming that there could be no hidden variables in quantum mechanics. The quantum mechanics was absolutely random. There was no possibility for the outcome of these experiments to actually be determined by some, like, hidden piece of information. And that shut off basically everybody from exploring that area for decades until Bell and

other folks, Herman, for example, discovered that there was actually a flaw in his logic, right? That he had essentially made a mistake. Do you see that result as a sort of an embarrassment or a mistake? or what does that tell us about von Neumann? So this is really interesting. So I explored this actually in my chapter on quantum mechanics. And I get reasonably deep into it. And the truth is there's actually, believe it or not, all these years later,

there's still debate about what von Neumann meant. So let's unpack it a little bit. Hidden variables theory. So imagine you were a physicist back in, I don't know, the 19th, 18th, 17th, and you're interested in the properties of a gas, right? So you might posit, as they did, that there are these particles bouncing around inside a box,

and when you warm them up, they bounce around even faster, and that gives rise to the properties that you can see, like whatever pressure and things like that, and they're, you know, in the temperature of the gas. And they're hidden because at the time, nobody knew that these molecules really existed, right? Now, in quantum mechanics, we still haven't found those hidden variables. Ultimately, what we know about quantum mechanics is it's still random,

but you're the physicist, and I'm sure you'll fill me in. But deep down, it's random. Now, what von Neumann actually showed with his theorem was that if you approached quantum mechanics in the way that he did, and to be fair to him, it is the only self-consistent mathematical approach that we know of, in a way, he showed that if you use his maths, if it's a Hilbert space, as he called it,

even though he'd done all the math, if it's a Hilbert space type theory, then no theory that's a Hilbert space type theory can be a hidden variables theory that explains this kind of randomness and strange, you know, what entanglement. I hate, you know, everybody hates it when I say this, especially physicists, but it's what Einstein referred to

is, you know, spooky action at a distance and so on, that, you know, beyond that, you know, you just have to accept that. Let's just remind the listeners what we're talking about here in terms of entanglement, right? You have some situation where like a photon decays to two particles, and so you know something about the pair of particles. You know that because the photon has spin zero, that then the two particles have to preserve that angle momentum. And so if one is spin up, the other one is spin down.

And we've talked down in the podcast several times about how even if those particles are now far apart if one is spin up the other has to be spin down and so measuring one of them tells you about the other one and the debate was about whether those things are already determined when the particles are created and they're flying apart and the fact that you don't know whether one is spin up or spin down just reflects your lack of knowledge that it actually is already determined or if the universe essentially waits if it's undetermined and it's only fixed when you make the measurement which is bizarre because if you're then measuring one particle uh far away from the other one, somehow they're both determined the moment you're measuring one of them.

And so von Neumann's claim is to have proven that it's impossible to have any hidden information that actually determines this. But there's an important distinction, right, between local hidden variables and global hidden variables. Isn't that the issue between Bell and von Neumann? Okay, well, I'm going to leave that with you. But I think the sticking point is that what was von Neumann trying to show, right? So people now argue, was he really ruling out all possible theories, all possible hidden variable theories, or was he just ruling out a subset?

And, okay, I'm biased. But I go with the historians and the physicists who are now arguing, actually he was just ruling out an important subset. But I think you should tell people about the Bells test and that it seems. you know, so far that, you know, this view has kind of survived quite well in a way. Yeah, that's right. The idea that there's local information that moves with the particles is ruled out by Bell's

experiment. And so Von Neumey was certainly right about that. I think what Bell was astounded by is that his experiment and also Noemann's theories don't rule out global hidden variables, the idea that there could be like some pilot wave controlling the universe. And I agree with you, that's a very strange. idea of the universe. On the other hand, it's not ruled out by these experiments, right? It could actually be our universe. What's fascinating to me is the impact one man can have on the field,

whether he intended to rule out global hidden variables or not. That was the understanding. People were like, oh, well, you can't go there. Noamann's been there. And, you know, he doesn't get stuff wrong. So if he's shut the door, don't even bother opening it. Yeah, I mean, and that was purely based on his reputation for just coming in and solving problems, just solving these intractable problems. So, you know, partly it's his fault because he never then went back and said, you know, well, actually, you know, that's not what I meant, because he's already moved on to something else. But there's a really interesting passage in Bohm, who came with BOMian, you know, the BOMian sort of wave theory, which is a hidden variables theory.

And he says he gave his lecture in front of von Neumann, and von Neumann didn't contradict me. So even Bome is in awe of von Neumann. Yeah, quite right. It tells you something about the power of personality. So let's move on to a completely separate topic where von Neumann made a huge impact, and that's to computers. As I think you were saying earlier, every computer we're using almost every computer ever built follows a von Neumann architecture.

What does that mean? Why is it so influential? All right. Well, in short, it was the first description, the first logical description of a modern programmable computer, right? And it came out, I think, with his first draft of a report on the EDFAC, which I believe was 1946. So before this, there were computers,

but they were kind of plugboard type. things. And if you wanted them to do something else, then you had to switch around the wires and unplug them. And this was a pretty involved job. Now, our smartphones don't work that way. Our laptops don't work that way. They run programs. And what von Neumann described was, in broad terms, a machine that would have a very large working memory. It would have a control unit, a central processor that would shuttle instructions back and forth and, you know, input and output and so on. And that general architecture, a general description of what a computer should look like, despite it having drawbacks, where there's something called the von Neumann

bottleneck. So if your computer ever freezes and, you know, you see, you know, whatever they have nowadays, if it's a whirling clock face or something like that, then it's got stuck in the von Neumann bottleneck, and that's because too many instructions are trying to go in and out between the memory and the central processor at the same time.

But we haven't really found a better way to do computing. I mean, people are working on it, and sure, there's attempts to do parallel computing and, of course, deep neural networks don't work that way, but in terms of almost all

the computers that we're likely to use, they still work on the fondle of an architecture. Yeah, it's hard to overestimate the influence of this kind of piece of work. And when you're at the very beginning of the field, you can sort of like set the whole direction of, you know, the international community by making these choices about like how much memory do you have and how do instructions get moved from memory to the CPU and the whole idea of having like a central processing unit and memory that seems so basic to us, but it could have gone another way, right? It could have been, if we didn't have Von Neumann or somebody else organized computers,

our entire computer architecture could be different. It's fascinating to dig into these details, really at the foundation of our entire technological society. Yes, and of course, you know, I try and unpack these things in the book to show that unlike in many biographies of, you know, in inverted commas, great men, right? Von Neumann was influenced by others. He influenced others, right? So I do think, and I try to show, that he came out with these nuggets.

He was in the right place at the right time, but his ideas were built upon by lesions of people, and he drew also on the ideas of lesions of people, and of course that got him into trouble. I mean, when you look at the EDVAC report, he was working with the group who had invented the ENIAC computer. Now, the ENIAC, you have to get your string of adjectives, right when you come to describe these things, otherwise computer historians get very annoyed

with you. But it wasn't strictly programmable, but it was digital, it was electronic. It had lots of things going for it. But it was initially invented to calculate where shells would land during the war, which was a huge problem. And it was also a problem during the First World War. but by the time the ENIAC was ready to run the war was over and so they needed other problems for it to solve and there had been some talk within the group so Mockley and Eckert were the designers of the original ENIAC and there was some talk well we really should

have a big memory and Eckert invented this big new memory the Mercury delay line but what von Neumann did was you using this incredible logical mind that he had was coalesced these ideas into a single document. And then without his permission or the permission of the team, of course, this was circulated widely across the world to every group, practically every group in the world that was working on kind of nascent computer. That was Goldstein, who was involved in the Ennih project. And then there's this acrimonious falling out.

But then von Neumann moves and he sets up his own computing project at the Institute for Advanced Study and he puts all of the patents in the public domain but even more importantly when they're building this computer which is one of the first program

or computers but it's not the first he sends every single report every progress report along the way is published and this in fact proves to have an even bigger impact on computing than the EDVAC report where he describes this architecture. So it's kind of a true-pronged attack.

And I say in the book that, well, I also, but more or less ask the question, I think it makes him the godfather of open source computing as well in a way. Because had Mockley and Eckert succeeded in patenting, the computer, it might be a different world, progress might be slower, who knows. Who knows? Because Von Neumann is not just like a smart guy in some room scribbling with equations. He's a very clever man, right, in terms of strategy. As you were saying, essentially invented game theory starting from like analyzing how living

room board games go all the way up to thinking about nuclear strategy. Tell us about the impact he made on game theory. Yeah. So some people see game theory is the product of a fairly cynical mind. and so he's had a bad press for that but the more I kind of dug into his personality the more I felt that that was a bit simple-minded in a way he was a very complex person

so you have to bear in mind that he's Jewish and he starts his life in a very wealthy privileged Jewish family his dad's a banker he's kind of used to living the good life and I get the feeling that from his youth really he thinks

more or less the best of people he doesn't really understand people he has a fairly you know he's a mathematician and he's an extremely able mathematician but I don't think he he was completely O'Fay

with how other people thought or felt right but then what happens is there are two things one is that in his native Hungary, in Budapest, a communist government installs itself after the First World War. And it's pretty brutal.

But then they get overthrown by a kind of reactionary sort of right-wing government. And that's even more brutal. I mean, there are hangings in the street. It's just awful. And his message from this is, like, I don't like totality.

at all. So he's already begins to come out against that. And then by 1930 he's already seeing something terrible is happening in Germany. He just senses it. And then his letters start to get filled with premonitions of disaster of a

Second World War. He thinks, you know, Germany, which he kind of sees as the center of the intellectual universe, really. He sees it beginning to go stride with anti-Semitism. And so Princeton, offers him a job in 1930 and he's gone, right?

And he sees what's happening from afar and he hates the Nazis. He hates the Nazis, he hates communism, he really, really despises what's happening there. And he loses as a result of the Nazis, you know, this great country that he saw, Germany. He sees, you know, the people getting behind Hitler, or many of them, and he completely loses in some ways his faith in human nature.

So game theory is kind of the product of somebody who's trying to understand human nature and trying also to apply his logical mind to it, but almost in a kind of, I can't really know what's going on inside you. So I'm just going to try and do my best with what I've got, which is how you behave. and the way that you've behaved recently is not that great.

So, you know, and famously, his first wife divorces him, Marriott. She's also from a fairly wealthy Jewish background. And then she goes on to kind of great things herself. She becomes this amazing science administrator who sets up Brookhaven Lab, I think. Yeah, yeah, she leaves him because he spends too much time thinking. She runs off for the postdoc, I think, and ends up getting married. But their agreement for their daughter is still with us today, thankfully Marina, is that for the first 14, I think, years she will spend most of her time with her mum

and then only spend the holidays with her dad. And then, at 14, when she kind of reaches the age of maturity, from 14 onwards, she'll stay with her dad most of the time and visit her mom and her stepdad during the holidays. Now, von Neumann remarries pretty quickly to another Hungarian Jewish lady, Clara Dan, who ends up becoming the first modern computer programmer, as I explained in the book. But it's kind of quite a tense household, as Marina says. It was quite naive of these two people to imagine that the teenage years are the age of rationality and reason. But that's what ended up happening. And so kind of game theory is formulated to try and make some sense. Because you have to remember that before von Neumann, this was just considered impossible.

And now game theory has become more complex and it's tried to take into account. real human behavior, right? But until von Neumann's early proofs, there was nobody had made any inroads on this at all. I think it's really impressive when people tackle a completely new field and try to bring it to heal mathematically, something which seems maybe impossible to describe our ability, any success to, you know, describe the physical universe and all of its incredible complexity using simple mathematical laws. I'm in awe of it when somebody can take the first stab, you know, that's like, that's really doing science. And so in your book, in some of the opening passages, you make this comment that many people think that

Van Neumann is smarter than Einstein, smarter than Godel. I actually pulled some of my listeners, and I asked them, said, who do you think is the most influential scientist of all time? And, you know, the results are basically what you would expect. Einstein gets a lot of mentions, Newton, Galo, Darwin. Somebody said Aristotle. Somebody commented, Bill Nye, the science guy, you know. Norman wasn't up there. What do you think about this comparison? What's your argument that Norman was essentially one of the smartest people ever, or one of the most influential scientists?

And why do you think he hasn't penetrated to the wider public consciousness? So some people just get better press, right? I mean, Einstein had great hair, I think, later on in his life. And so people tend to forgive him various interesting parts of his personal life. and so on. And, you know, nobody remembers poor Puancairé who'd come up with quite a lot of the special theory of relativity before Einstein and, you know, lots of names get forgotten.

And Gauss, you know, how could you not mention Gauss? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think part of the reason is, I think in the public mind, there's this view of the great genius, right? They're working alone. They're usually a theorist. and Einstein just fits into this category brilliantly, doesn't it?

And you can name what Einstein did, its relativity. And if you're lucky, you remember a couple of, E equals MC squared. What did von Neumann do? Okay. If you get somewhere, you go, oh, he had something to do with the programmable computer, but the story's complicated. But he did all of these other things. And I think stringing those together and making sense of them is a difficult task.

I promise you, I spent two half years on this. It wasn't easy. Mathematicians have told me this as well. So it's a complicated story. Making some sense of that is hard. And then I think von Neumann, more than many, you have to tell the whole story. You have to show his influence.

You have to follow it down to the present day. Because for many years, in fact, what you got was von Neumann, you know, stories of kind of arithmetical brilliance. So he'd turn up at some party and somebody would ask him, you know, some crazy puzzle and he'd solve it just like that.

But that doesn't really tell you the deep stuff that he did. The fact that he was so ahead on so many things from the computer to game theory, all of which really has shaped modern life. So, you know, we were just talking about

game theory and it's a little known fact that Google, Amazon, all of these companies, their algorithms, you know, what gives them 80% of their profits is advertising often and the algorithms that run their advertising platforms are game theoretical, right? So von Neumann's responsible for that 80%, and then the other 20% comes from computing, that's the other 20% too. But to get there, to truly appreciate that, you know, it's a tough story, I think. And it's a tough sell. You can't just go, ah, yeah, it was this and this.

And it's how science works, but I don't think many people even now are ready to appreciate how science really works. And to appreciate von Neumann properly, I think you need to kind of acknowledge that. Yes, he was, as I say, one of the smartest people. Maybe, you know, Einstein was in some ways a deeper thinker and, you know, he had a degree of scientific imagination, which I think von Neumann envied. But then that wasn't what von Neumann was about. Von Neumann was about distilling almost like magic, the essential logic of particular things. And that's also a gift. And, you know, he was a mathematician and not a theoretical physicist.

So, yeah. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like, you're not going to choose an adapted strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it, if it's going to be beneficial to you.

Because it's easy to say, like, go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore, to suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just, like, walk the other way. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denial is easier.

Drinking is easier. Yelling, screaming is easy. Complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have

taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweetie. Monica Patton. Elaine Welter-a. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them.

Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots, now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, Puzzlers. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy truthers who say that you were given all the answers believe in... I guess they would be conspiracy theorists. That's right. Are there Jeopardy Truthers? Are there people who say that it was rigged?

Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like, they gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like, they gave you the answers and you still blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special game show week of The Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle fix. Listen on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain, I'm breaking down the players from Rising Stars to

to legends chasing history, the predictions, well, we see a first-time winner and the pressure. Billy Jean King says pressure is a privilege, you know. Plus, the stories and events off the court and, of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very fancy, wonderfully experiential sporting event. I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be accessible and inclusive for all tennis fans, whether you play tennis or not. Tennis is full of compelling stories of late. Have you heard about Icon Venus Williams' recent wildcard bids? Or the young Canadian, Victoria Mboko, making a name for herself.

How about Naomi Osaka getting back to form? To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart Women's Sports production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Well, what do you think is the value in this sort of, like, ranking the greatest geniuses in history? Is it sort of the way we talk about, you know, who was the best footballer ever? Was it Jordan or LeBron, the best basketball player ever?

Is it just like a fun conversation? Or do you think there's, like, real historical or intellectual value in, like, trying to put these people on a spectrum? Yeah, I'm not a fan of it. I'm not a fan of it, but you want to draw people into absolutely fascinating stories. And the way that I approach his story is more as almost a technological history of the 20th, 21st century, right? So von Neumann is, to me, the essential thread that runs through everything from the atom bomb to game theory to his proof that machines can reproduce, which I fear we may yet. think of as his most important work yet. So I think if we, you know, you start ranking, it's a fun parlour game.

But with the best of it, you start to probe, well, what do we actually mean by that? And, you know, who uses relativity day to day? We all use computers, right? I know relativity is, yes, everybody's going to jump down my throat and say GPS, blah, blah, but setting satellites up, yes, yes, yes. But, you know, the stuff that affects us from the economy to the way even that we think about optimizing our lives as if it's some game theory algorithm, you know,

as if we're maximizing utility, right? That's the way certainly many people in Silicon Valley tend to think about these things. Well, hang on, what are the mathematical assumptions that underlie this? How have we ended up here of all places? right and so if we start to have those discussions then great rank away but you know if it's otherwise it's just like a rather sterile debate isn't it yeah well i think the real value is in just understanding the impact that one person can have on the world and that just with your mind just thinking just solving puzzles and being curious you can change the whole future history of the human race it's incredible i hope that inspires young people out there you know that Who is the next Von Neumann? It makes me wonder.

Well, thanks very much for joining us on the podcast today. Your book was really fun. I learned a lot about physics and technology and history. Tell everyone where they can find it. Yeah, it is available in all good bookshops and online. It's called The Man for the Future. All right. Thanks very much for joining us today.

Thank you very much, Daniel. All right. Well, he makes a pretty good case for Von Neumann. Yeah, one thing about von Neumann is that people who knew him tended to consider him the smartest person they ever met. Even people who like new Einstein and new girdle and new Nuther and stuff like that, there's something about this guy that just like radiated smartness when you talk to him. And that should count?

I don't know if that should count, but it's one reason why he's so well respected among academics. That I have met him. Who have met him, yeah, exactly. And the lore of Von Neumann has also propagated through the field. I mean, in the interview, we talked about that one time. He made a claim about quantum mechanics, which is technically incorrect, and shut down a whole area of research for decades and decades because everybody was like, well, Von Neumann figured that out.

So I'm sure he was right, even though he was actually wrong in that case. Well, he was wrong. Yeah, that doesn't sound like positive influence. Well, Ananyo makes the case that he wasn't wrong. He was just misunderstood. He was proving something else. So there's a long debate in philosophy of science about what exactly von Neumann was proving

and whether people misunderstood him or whether he made a mistake or whatever. And remind me, how many Nobel Prizes did he win? Zero. Zero. That's too less than my guy. Yeah, that's right. And now that he's dead, he can't ever win any Nobel Prizes,

so he'll never catch up to your dude. Yeah, yeah. But that's only because he died young. He died in 1957, so he didn't really have a chance. Because, you know, you can't win the Nobel Prize posthumously. So we had this huge impact on science, and then he died. The Nobel Prize didn't really have a chance to give them any of these prizes. Well, I guess that's one thing you should add to your agenda is stay alive as long as possible to increase your chances of being the greatest of all time.

Step one, figure out something awesome. Step two, stay alive to collect prizes. I'm still working on step one. Well, no, now you have to figure out three amazing things to beat my guy. That's true. All right, well, an interesting discussion about influence and science, about big. ideas and how sometimes that influence can be positive or negative. Either way, everybody who's thinking about the universe is having an impact on the human experience. So go out there,

keep thinking, asking questions, and pushing forward the forefront of human knowledge. And let the universe influence you. Even if you'll never be number one on Jorge's list. You're going to be number two, Daniel. You can be the number two Daniel Watson I've ever met. I don't want your pity. No thanks. I'm going to earn it, man. Wait, no. It's a great honor. What are you talking about? number two of two. Wow. It's better than being zero of two. No, zero is the first place, man. I count from zero. I'm a computer scientist.

I thought you were a physicist. I'm both. I don't think you have a degree in computer science, Daniel. I have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Oh, all right, all right. All right. So, yeah, all right. You're accredited. But anyways, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us.

See you next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Insta, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'm take it off.

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