Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, how many physicists are there in the world
Speaker 1: right now?
Speaker 2: Ooh, good question. I think there are about ten thousand
Speaker 2: physics professors just in the US.
Speaker 1: WHOA, but that's a lot of physics professors though, And now,
Speaker 1: how would you rank them if you had to rank them?
Speaker 2: That depends how you rain by height, by hygiene, by
Speaker 2: number of Nobel Prizes, so many different directions.
Speaker 1: I don't think you want to rate them by hygiene.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be the president who does that survey.
Speaker 2: I don't know what's more embarrassing most hygienic physicists or at.
Speaker 1: Least yeah, and which one gives you more cred as
Speaker 1: a physicist?
Speaker 2: I want to know the correlation between hygiene and Nobel Prizes.
Speaker 1: Well, that's a good metric, maybe Nobel prizes. Has anyone
Speaker 1: won more than one Nobel Prize in physics?
Speaker 2: One guy won the Nobel Prize twice. John Bardeen won
Speaker 2: in fifty six and seventy two. And there are some
Speaker 2: families where fathers and sons wanted.
Speaker 1: Must be quite a bookcase there in their house. But
Speaker 1: there must be a huge number of physicists who haven't
Speaker 1: won a Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2: Most of us.
Speaker 1: I guess maybe you could rank yourself as the number
Speaker 1: one physicists in the world named Daniel Whitson.
Speaker 2: I mean, I hope so.
Speaker 3: Have you looked?
Speaker 1: Are there any other I mean there must be other
Speaker 1: Daniel Whitson's out there.
Speaker 3: Could one of them be a physicist?
Speaker 2: There aren't many of us. I have a distant cousin
Speaker 2: in the UK named Daniel Whitson who's an artist.
Speaker 3: And then if they listen to this podcast and the
Speaker 3: technically they would be physicists too.
Speaker 2: I have some competition.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll rank you both in the artistic ability.
Speaker 2: Sounds good.
Speaker 1: I am Horehemmerk, cartoonists and the author of Oliver's Great
Speaker 1: Big Universe.
Speaker 2: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and until recently I
Speaker 2: thought I was probably the number one Daniel Whitson particle
Speaker 2: physicist in the world.
Speaker 1: Until recently, you mean, like thirty seconds ago. Mm hm,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly. I just got downgraded. Yeah, well, maybe you
Speaker 1: need to take out the competition, cut off the podcast
Speaker 1: so that the other Daniel Whitson can't listen.
Speaker 2: No, I want to create more physicists, man, I'm just
Speaker 2: gonna have to work on my artistic skills to round
Speaker 2: out my portfolio.
Speaker 3: I thought you were going to say you wanted to
Speaker 3: create more. Daniel Whitson's how's that going.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm married to a biologist, so let's see if
Speaker 2: she can get cloning to work in the lab.
Speaker 3: Oh man, But if she clones you, would you still
Speaker 3: be with you? What if she picks a clone? What
Speaker 3: if she finds you the number two Daniel Whitson version.
Speaker 2: If we're clones, aren't we all the same? Are you
Speaker 2: gonna share credit? You know, it's just red me to
Speaker 2: take care of stuff.
Speaker 1: I don't know that this is an existential question, Daniel.
Speaker 1: Once the clone is created and they have a different
Speaker 1: experience of the world, they're technically a different Daniel.
Speaker 2: M And that's true. I guess we'll have to ask
Speaker 2: them what they think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or your wife, I guess let's get her on. Well,
Speaker 1: first she has to clone you, which might be a
Speaker 1: little tricky and ethically questionable. Absolutely, but anyways, Welcome to
Speaker 1: our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio in which we do our best to clone
Speaker 1: our curiosity and our joy for uncovering the mysteries of
Speaker 1: the universe. We want everyone out there to feel like
Speaker 1: a physicist, to think like a physicist, and to be
Speaker 1: a physicist, to use your brain to develop mathematical models
Speaker 1: of how the universe works and to bring it to bear,
Speaker 1: to master the universe in your own mind.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: We serve the entire universe and we try to find
Speaker 1: the biggest, the baddest, the most interesting questions out there
Speaker 1: about how everything works and how the cosmos is put
Speaker 1: together to bring to you here on the podcast.
Speaker 2: Because everybody deserves to understand the universe and to participate
Speaker 2: in unraveling its mysteries. Some of the greatest minds in
Speaker 2: history were not people who were academics or men of
Speaker 2: the figuring out the way the universe worked. They were
Speaker 2: just curious people who taught themselves to think about the
Speaker 2: nature of reality.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of amazing questions out there to
Speaker 1: ask in a lot of minds that have put their
Speaker 1: amazing powers of observation and experiments to try to figure
Speaker 1: out these answers. And so it's been an incredible history
Speaker 1: of humankind trying to find the solution to the biggest
Speaker 1: questions in the universe.
Speaker 2: And when we look back at the story of how
Speaker 2: humans have figured it all out. There are some names
Speaker 2: that stand out among the others. Of course, there are
Speaker 2: thousands of people toiling in anonymity, but a few people
Speaker 2: have really changed the course of science, really pivoted the
Speaker 2: way all humans thought about the nature of the world.
Speaker 2: Of course, people like Newton and Einstein and Galileo come
Speaker 2: to mind, but there are many, many more.
Speaker 3: Jam as well.
Speaker 2: Right, I was about to say, cham absolutely, yes, crest
Speaker 2: me off. It's alphabetical. Okay, maybe not alphabetical, but there
Speaker 2: are some bold face names that really have changed the
Speaker 2: way everybody thinks about the nature of our universe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of influential scientists out there throughout history,
Speaker 1: and so a question that you can ask is how
Speaker 1: do they rank in terms of their influence in science,
Speaker 1: just like I guess people rank sports stars.
Speaker 2: Right, there is this whole ridiculous cottage industry of like
Speaker 2: asking who is the greatest of all time? You know,
Speaker 2: is it Kobe Bryant, is it Lebron James, is it
Speaker 2: Michael Jordan? Is it Larry Bird? Everybody's got somebody in
Speaker 2: their camp arguing for them.
Speaker 1: Who's the goat, greatest of all time exactly.
Speaker 2: And mostly I think it's not actually serious. They don't
Speaker 2: really care who's number one. It's just like a fun
Speaker 2: way to have a conversation and to talk about these
Speaker 2: inspiring figures.
Speaker 1: I think some people care a lot about these rankings
Speaker 1: and who's the goat in basketball and baseball?
Speaker 2: So who's the greatest cartoonist of all time?
Speaker 1: Were he?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 3: Cham comes to mind obviously?
Speaker 2: Which Cham was that again?
Speaker 3: The famous one?
Speaker 2: Okay, you mean Cham on Twitter? Whoever that is?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's another hoe Cham.
Speaker 2: You told me there's some other guy who owns atjogete
Speaker 2: cham on Twitter.
Speaker 3: Oh no, I think somebody just opened that as me.
Speaker 2: It could be another hohrgete Cham.
Speaker 3: They stole me.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, no, it's pretty clear they're trying to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, or unless he isn't me, maybe I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe he's your clone. But the back to the question,
Speaker 2: who is the greatest cartoonist of all time? Other than
Speaker 2: Jorge Cham? Oh?
Speaker 1: Well, it probably depends on who you ask, but I
Speaker 1: would probably say Waterson, Calvin Hobbs.
Speaker 2: Probably yeah, solid answer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Peanuts, maybe Charles Schultz, those are all up there.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you can also maybe try to do that
Speaker 1: with scientists.
Speaker 2: Right, Absolutely, you can, and we're going to try so.
Speaker 1: To the end of the podcast, we'll be asking the
Speaker 1: question who was the most influential scientist? Are you trying
Speaker 1: to make scientists influencers?
Speaker 3: Daniel?
Speaker 2: Here, I'm trying to make some scientists as cool as
Speaker 2: sports stars. You know, there should be like science bars
Speaker 2: where people drink beer and argue loudly about who was
Speaker 2: the greatest scientist of all time?
Speaker 4: Hmm.
Speaker 1: Interesting Now if that greatest scientist happens to not be
Speaker 1: a physicist, though, what did you be offended or like?
Speaker 1: Are we asking scientists in general just greatest physicists?
Speaker 2: I think scientists Some of the folks that listeners mentioned
Speaker 2: were scientists before we even really had the concept of
Speaker 2: what physics was.
Speaker 3: So we're going broad here.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: And I noticed you put this question in the past tense,
Speaker 1: who was the most influential scientist? Do you think maybe
Speaker 1: the most influential scientists could be alive today or are
Speaker 1: we only looking at dead people?
Speaker 2: Oh that's a great point. I hadn't even thought about that.
Speaker 2: I'm reflecting my own bias here. I guess I was
Speaker 2: thinking about people who had an impact on history, and
Speaker 2: it's hard for somebody who just had an idea today
Speaker 2: to have an impact on history the way Einstein did,
Speaker 2: for example, So I think it takes a little while
Speaker 2: for that impact play out well.
Speaker 1: As usual, we were wondering how many people out there
Speaker 1: had thought about this question or have an opinion, beer
Speaker 1: or not about who is the most influential scientist.
Speaker 2: Thanks very much to everybody who participates in this segment
Speaker 2: of the podcast. We really appreciate your time, energy, and enthusiasm.
Speaker 2: If you'd like to share yours for the podcast, please
Speaker 2: don't be shy. Write to me two questions at Daniel
Speaker 2: and Jorge dot com. So think about it for a second.
Speaker 2: Who do you think is the most influential scientist? And
Speaker 2: I'm going to just give you the little suggestion that
Speaker 2: maybe I am one of the most influential scientists. But
Speaker 2: here's what people had to say. My guess would be
Speaker 2: the mathematician Urdos. I think it was Copernicus.
Speaker 5: I would say it was Nicholas Fleming, who fond about antibiotics.
Speaker 2: I would say Einstein.
Speaker 6: I think it has to be honest with Sonedjate reaction Einstein.
Speaker 6: But then when you start thinking about it, You've got
Speaker 6: likes of Faraday and Newton and Baul shortly out what
Speaker 6: box would you put him in? And could you tell
Speaker 6: he was in the box without opening it?
Speaker 3: Galileo Newton and Einstein.
Speaker 5: Albert Einstein stands out Newton because it all starts with him.
Speaker 2: Einstein's the winner there.
Speaker 3: Charles Starwin, Charles Darwin, Bill Ny the Science Guy saying
Speaker 3: he's the best, with Daniel of course coming in a
Speaker 3: close second.
Speaker 1: Every all right, some interesting answers and a lot of
Speaker 1: names you might expect Isaac Newton, Einstein, Galileo Darwin, Bill Ny,
Speaker 1: the science guy, Bill Ny, who's not actually a scientist
Speaker 1: by training.
Speaker 3: He's an engineer, which I think makes him even cooler.
Speaker 2: Mmm. Wow, that's pretty influential.
Speaker 1: But yeah, a lot of common names you might expect.
Speaker 1: Aristotle as well. Was he technically a scientist or a philosopher?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a long debate about when the science began
Speaker 2: and who's doing science and who's doing philosophy and the
Speaker 2: exact distinction between them, which always comes down to arguing
Speaker 2: about definitions.
Speaker 1: So how are we going to rank people then if
Speaker 1: we don't even have a solid definition of science.
Speaker 2: I think most of the time in these conversations is
Speaker 2: spent arguing about how to argue about it. Really, that's
Speaker 2: the core question. It's like, how do you measure this?
Speaker 2: I know?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I guess that happens in sports too, like
Speaker 1: most trophies, most the games, more points.
Speaker 2: Can you really be the greatest of all times if
Speaker 2: you never want a championship even if you have the
Speaker 2: scoring record? You know, how is Einstein's dribble against Galileo's rebounding?
Speaker 2: This kind of stuff?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so what are we going to use on
Speaker 1: the podcast here today? Where are we just going to
Speaker 1: argue about how to measure the influence?
Speaker 2: Well? I thought I was kind of looking forward to
Speaker 2: arguing about how to measure it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you might have some opinions, So I see, we're
Speaker 1: not actually going to answer the question of the episode
Speaker 1: as usual.
Speaker 3: I want to argue got it now?
Speaker 2: I think probably lots of people have different opinions about
Speaker 2: who might be the most influential, But to me, I
Speaker 2: think the question is like who has shifted the course
Speaker 2: of human history or human thought the most? Who would
Speaker 2: have the most impact if you'd like deleted them from the.
Speaker 3: Historical record, assuming that nobody else would have figured it out.
Speaker 2: I guess, well, that is the question. You know, if
Speaker 2: you figured out something awesome, but there were ten people
Speaker 2: right on your tails about to figure it out, then
Speaker 2: did you really have a singular impact on the field.
Speaker 2: You just sort of like in first place, by zero
Speaker 2: point oh one seconds, you didn't really have that much
Speaker 2: of an impact on human history by that metric. But
Speaker 2: there might be some people who had a singular vision,
Speaker 2: who had an idea that nobody else was capable of,
Speaker 2: and if you deleted them from human history, it might
Speaker 2: take hundreds of years before we figured that thing out.
Speaker 1: It sounds like you're also just kind of thinking in
Speaker 1: terms of our thoughts and our theories about science and
Speaker 1: how the world works. I wonder if you thought about
Speaker 1: maybe like live say that could be another way to
Speaker 1: measure the impact of a scientist.
Speaker 2: Or you could also go darker and think about lives lost.
Speaker 2: You know, some of our most influential scientists helped develop
Speaker 2: nuclear weapons technology, for example, or other kinds of weapons
Speaker 2: technology that resulted in lots of deaths.
Speaker 1: Oh, we're also going dark We're also maybe consider during
Speaker 1: the warst scientists I mean.
Speaker 2: We just said influential, We didn't say have a positive influence, right.
Speaker 2: For example, if you create a doomsday device and destroy
Speaker 2: the entire planet, that's pretty influential.
Speaker 3: Right right right, you'd be the vote, the worst of
Speaker 3: all time.
Speaker 2: It's just the magnitude, not the sign that matters here.
Speaker 1: I feel like though, just by posing the question, we're
Speaker 1: implying some sort of positive influence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so. I mean, most scientists out there
Speaker 2: are trying to improve our lives, either specifically through developing
Speaker 2: some technology that makes life easier or more productive, or
Speaker 2: just in sheer understanding the nature of the universe. I
Speaker 2: think science overall has a positive goal, and most scientists
Speaker 2: have had a positive impact on.
Speaker 3: Our experience, right right. Nobody wants to be the vote.
Speaker 2: Nobody wants to be the vote.
Speaker 1: Although I noticed you said most scientists want to have
Speaker 1: a positive impact.
Speaker 2: Yeah, most of us at all. Not all. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's the guy who invented lead in gasoline, for example,
Speaker 2: he made a whole generation dumber.
Speaker 3: M Maybe he was the most influential signer.
Speaker 2: It could be, or it could have been the guy
Speaker 2: who figured that out and saved the next generation afterwards.
Speaker 2: There's so many ways to measure it. You know, within academia,
Speaker 2: we have our own metrics. Like if you're a professor
Speaker 2: and you're going up for promotion, then there are ways
Speaker 2: they measure your performance, all of which are deeply flawed,
Speaker 2: you know, like number of papers or number of citations
Speaker 2: of your paper. And then they have fancy metrics. One
Speaker 2: of them is called an H index, which is number
Speaker 2: of papers that have at least that many citations. So
Speaker 2: if you have an H index of one hundred, it
Speaker 2: means you have one hundred papers with at least one
Speaker 2: hundred citations for example.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a famous index in academia. Have you measured yours, Daniel.
Speaker 2: Oh, I have a ridiculous H index because I have
Speaker 2: more than a thousand papers because I'm a member of
Speaker 2: the Atlas collaboration without dozens and dozens of papers every year.
Speaker 2: So it's just totally a broken metric for somebody like me.
Speaker 1: But if you exclude those crazy collaboration papers, isn't there
Speaker 1: like an adjustment factor or like a handicap.
Speaker 2: So my official H index is two hundred and eight,
Speaker 2: which is pretty bonkers.
Speaker 3: That's including the big collaboration papers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's including the big collaboration papers. So it's not real.
Speaker 2: I mean, just to calibrate. Somebody like Ed Witten, probably
Speaker 2: the smartest guy on the planet right now, has an
Speaker 2: h index of one eighty seven.
Speaker 3: I haven't heard of him, so I guess he maybe's
Speaker 3: not that influential.
Speaker 2: He basically invented string theory and won the Fields Medal,
Speaker 2: which is the best prize in mathematics as a physicist,
Speaker 2: So definitely a smart dude.
Speaker 1: Well, that's another way to measure things with prizes. You
Speaker 1: said there's a physicist who's won it twice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there is one physicist who's won the Nobel Prize twice,
Speaker 2: and overall there are only like two hundred physicists who've
Speaker 2: ever won the Physics Nobel Prize.
Speaker 1: But only one that has won it twice. M yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe this person is the goat. Maybe, But the Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize is famously a flawed metric. I mean, super smart people,
Speaker 1: very well deserving like Vera Rubin and Jocelyn Burnell never
Speaker 1: won the Nobel Prize, probably because it's by a panel
Speaker 1: of dudes, and so it's famously biased against women and
Speaker 1: other underrepresented minorities. So maybe not the best metric, right.
Speaker 3: It's also biased against Daniel Whitson, which means it totally
Speaker 3: flawed obviously.
Speaker 2: No, it's probably actually biased towards me being a white
Speaker 2: male Jew. So if I haven't won the Nobel Prize
Speaker 2: so far, it's just my fault.
Speaker 3: Well, who's this person who's won it twice? I mean,
Speaker 3: what did they win it for?
Speaker 2: Well, he was a physicist and an electrical engineer. He
Speaker 2: won it in fifty six for the invention of the
Speaker 2: transistor and then in seventy two for a theory of
Speaker 2: super conductivity. So definitely a smart guy. What's his name,
Speaker 2: John Bardeen?
Speaker 1: John Bardeen invented the transistor, won the Nobel Prize for that,
Speaker 1: and then he invented super conductivity.
Speaker 2: He invented a theory to explain super conductivity. It's called
Speaker 2: the BCS theory. He's the b and BCS theory.
Speaker 1: So without this person, maybe we wouldn't have transistors, which
Speaker 1: means we wouldn't have computers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty influential.
Speaker 1: Wow, Okay, I would put him pretty high up on
Speaker 1: the Goad list, especially because he is an engineer, which
Speaker 1: automatically makes him great.
Speaker 2: That does score him a lot of points. Yes. Also,
Speaker 2: based on his picture from Wikipedia, he looks like he
Speaker 2: has pretty good hygiene.
Speaker 3: Oh oh boy, Yeah, that must be his engineering side.
Speaker 2: Obviously. I have to say, having been to an engineering
Speaker 2: conference or two, engineers definitely dress better than physicists.
Speaker 3: Oh it's not that hard. He's sitting in a little bar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, there's just a lot more
Speaker 2: ties and clean shirts at engineering conference.
Speaker 3: Yeah, blazers. Engineers are big into blazers.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, this is a big question. Obviously, we
Speaker 1: can spend several hours just talking about how to rank these.
Speaker 1: But Daniel, you happened to interview a writer who wrote
Speaker 1: a book sort of about this idea of who is
Speaker 1: the most influential scientist?
Speaker 2: That's right. I spoke to Ananio Baticharia. He's the author
Speaker 2: of a recent book called The Man from the Future,
Speaker 2: and in this book he lays out the case that
Speaker 2: John von Neumann might be the most influential scientist who
Speaker 2: ever lived.
Speaker 1: Interesting, and John van Neuman was a scientist or an
Speaker 1: or an engineer or.
Speaker 2: He's definitely a physicist. I don't know if he has
Speaker 2: any engineering credentials, but he has incredible impact over like
Speaker 2: abstract areas of mathematics, fundamental questions and quantum mechanics, he
Speaker 2: invented the architecture of the modern computer. He basically wrote
Speaker 2: the book on game theory. This was definitely a smart
Speaker 2: and influential guy.
Speaker 3: Hmmm interesting.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, here's Daniel's interview with author Ananio Badicharia,
Speaker 1: author of The Man from the Future.
Speaker 2: So then it's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2: Onna know about Acharia. He has a PhD in biophysics
Speaker 2: from Imperial College in London. He's been a science correspondent
Speaker 2: at The Economist and editor at Nature and medical researcher.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 5: Thanks very much, Daniel, it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2: So you have a background in biophysics and you work
Speaker 2: as a science journalist. Help me understand why you decided
Speaker 2: to write a book about von Neuman.
Speaker 4: Ah.
Speaker 5: Yes, Well, my undergraduate degree was physics, so I've always
Speaker 5: kind of flitted from field to field. I moved from
Speaker 5: one thing that I knew something about into a new
Speaker 5: field that I've known nothing about. This book was pretty
Speaker 5: much the same. But the longer answer, I guess is
Speaker 5: that I'd been through a few journalism jobs. I'd worked
Speaker 5: at Nature, and then I ended up at the economist,
Speaker 5: and over the years, I found myself hearing von Neuman's
Speaker 5: name in all of these incredibly different contexts. So you'd
Speaker 5: have economics correspondence talking about the latest No Bell winner
Speaker 5: in economics, and that there would be the game theories
Speaker 5: of von Neuman's name would come up. There, there were
Speaker 5: people on the tech paths of the magazine and we're
Speaker 5: talking about quantum computing, and again you'd have von Noyman's
Speaker 5: name mentioned in that context. And then there was artificial intelligence,
Speaker 5: and you know the people that were writing stories of
Speaker 5: artificial intelligence. Yeah, you know, you kind of have a
Speaker 5: have to look at what von Noyman did back back then.
Speaker 5: So there was this guy who turned out been dead
Speaker 5: for seventy years almost and his name was coming up
Speaker 5: more than ever. So I really wanted to understand why
Speaker 5: that was. And when I looked into the why of this,
Speaker 5: rather than look around for his biography, I discovered that
Speaker 5: there hasn't really been an attempt to try and string
Speaker 5: all of his ideas together and explain the relevance of
Speaker 5: this person to the twenty first century. And so that's
Speaker 5: what I set out to do.
Speaker 2: Well. I think he did it very well. It's a
Speaker 2: really fun tour of all the amazing intellectual impacts that
Speaker 2: von Norman has had. And in the book you make
Speaker 2: a pretty strong case for him being one of the
Speaker 2: smartest people in the twentieth century, maybe one of the
Speaker 2: smartest people ever, which is pretty astounding. I thought it'd
Speaker 2: be fun for us to take the listeners on a
Speaker 2: little bit of a tour of some of his greatest accomplishments.
Speaker 2: And I want to start with something that we talk
Speaker 2: about on the podcast all the time, which is quantum mechanics.
Speaker 2: You're writing the book about how he didn't invent wave
Speaker 2: based quantum mechanics or matrix based quantum mechanics, but he
Speaker 2: did something maybe even more difficult, which is that he
Speaker 2: unified them. Help us understand why that was important and
Speaker 2: why it was so difficult.
Speaker 5: Right, So this is kind of von Neumann's post doc.
Speaker 5: Right he's at the University of Gerzingen, and he's right
Speaker 5: straight after his PhD. I think he's twenty two at
Speaker 5: this stage. And when he turns up at Gerzegan, I
Speaker 5: think on a fellowship from the Rockefeller he's there to
Speaker 5: do maths, you know, he's not there to do physics.
Speaker 5: So he's there because David Hilbert is the leading figure
Speaker 5: in mathematics of the of the day and he is
Speaker 5: head of the maths department at Kersingham, and so von
Speaker 5: Norman comes as kind of his apprentice, although in a
Speaker 5: way the apprentice has already begun to outshine the master.
Speaker 5: But at the same time as von Neuman's there, there's
Speaker 5: another kind of vonder kind, which is Heisenberg. And Heisenberg
Speaker 5: has recently invented this new science called quantum mechanics, the
Speaker 5: science I guess of atoms and atomic behavior. And his
Speaker 5: approach is through these matrices, which are grids of numbers. Now,
Speaker 5: Heisenberg wasn't actually deeply concerned with what these matrices were
Speaker 5: saying about the underlying nature of what was going on
Speaker 5: in the atom, right, So he had started with atomic spectra,
Speaker 5: which are like what happens when you excite an atom
Speaker 5: of neon or whatever. If you give an electric shock,
Speaker 5: the electrons get excited, they drop back down, and they
Speaker 5: release a photon of light of a particular wavelength. And
Speaker 5: so you had all these spectra of different atoms, and
Speaker 5: he was kind of trying to understand those, and that's
Speaker 5: how quantum mechanics really began trying to mathematize this. So
Speaker 5: he had these grids of numbers that told you about
Speaker 5: these different energy levels that the electrons were jumping between. Now,
Speaker 5: within a few months of this version of quantum mechanics
Speaker 5: coming out, there was another one, and that was by Schrodinger,
Speaker 5: and that was based on waves, which physicists were much
Speaker 5: more comfortable with than Heisenberg's matrices. In fact, nobody initially
Speaker 5: understood what matrices were or why they should be useful
Speaker 5: in this way, and it took some digging around to
Speaker 5: find out. And now matrices are kind of discussed in
Speaker 5: high school. Now, what von Neuman began to work on
Speaker 5: was uniting these two visions because people were like, well,
Speaker 5: you know, you've got these waves on the one hand,
Speaker 5: and you've got matrices on the other. You've got sort
Speaker 5: of electrons jumping around from between energy levels in Heisenberg's
Speaker 5: theory and enschroedingers you've got this idea that maybe particles
Speaker 5: have wave like properties. So which one is it? And
Speaker 5: what von Neuman does is he digs down to maths
Speaker 5: and he proves mathematically that these are essentially two sides
Speaker 5: of the same coin. And this is kind of like, and.
Speaker 2: Was it clear to everybody that that was going to
Speaker 2: be possible. I mean, I remember reading that this was
Speaker 2: sort of an acrimonious to be there was no love
Speaker 2: lost between Heisenberg and Schrodinger. I remember reading that Heisenberg
Speaker 2: found schrodinger theory called repulsive, you know, and was like
Speaker 2: offended by what Schrodinger was writing about the importance of
Speaker 2: visualizability of these ideas exactly.
Speaker 5: So Heisenberg, in fact, if you excuse the language, so
Speaker 5: basically Schrodinger's theory was crap and.
Speaker 2: In the original German somehow he said.
Speaker 5: Exactly. There was no lot of lost between them, and
Speaker 5: Heisenberg thought it was almost deeply unscientific to look beyond
Speaker 5: what the maths was telling you because you couldn't see
Speaker 5: inside an atom. And Schrodinger was hated matrices, so he
Speaker 5: just hated this mathematical formalization, and most physicists actually were
Speaker 5: very uncomfortable with it, so they were quite glad when
Speaker 5: Schrodinger came along with his waves. But what people could
Speaker 5: understand is why are these two incredibly different formalizations giving
Speaker 5: the same answers Who's right? And it turned out that
Speaker 5: they both were and physicists now will tend to use
Speaker 5: the matrix approach when a problem is more tractable with matrices,
Speaker 5: or they'll use waves when the Schrodinger equation, as it's known,
Speaker 5: gives you better results. So but van Noyman did this
Speaker 5: theoretical thing, and then he goes on and builds on that.
Speaker 5: And he builds on that in two ways. One he
Speaker 5: spins out this entire theory of how the operators, which
Speaker 5: is like I guess the functions, the stuff that tells
Speaker 5: you what to do to the maths, like if you
Speaker 5: want to find the energy, what do you do to
Speaker 5: the Schrodinger? What do you do to the description of
Speaker 5: the equation. He looked at the entire maths of this,
Speaker 5: and this in itself, this operator theory of Ornyman algebras
Speaker 5: is now really it's at the cutting edge of mathematics again.
Speaker 5: And then on the other hand, he went and laid
Speaker 5: out the entire high kind of mathematical groundwork of quantum mechanics,
Speaker 5: and by doing so he allowed people to ask philosophical
Speaker 5: more philosophical questions, which again where we're now coming back to,
Speaker 5: because if you want to build a quantum computer, for example,
Speaker 5: you want to know, well, will we ever be able
Speaker 5: to string cubits together? Will we ever be able to
Speaker 5: kind of entangle these cubits and be able to do
Speaker 5: real useful calculations with them? And to answer that question
Speaker 5: you have to go back to what von Neumann showed
Speaker 5: we could know with the maths. So these in some
Speaker 5: ways what he was doing at the time was became
Speaker 5: unfashionable in the sort of sixties, and I think it's
Speaker 5: all come back now, which is why his name kept
Speaker 5: coming up in this field.
Speaker 2: It's sort of amazing the impact that mathematicians have had
Speaker 2: on physics, just sort of like during their coffee breaks.
Speaker 2: You know, this is like not something Neuman was targeting.
Speaker 2: This is not like the central task of his life,
Speaker 2: and yet he made this enormous contribution. It reminds me
Speaker 2: of you know, Emmy and Another's theorem. It's just something she
Speaker 2: was sort of doodled, you know, while she was being
Speaker 2: distracted by her actual hard math problems, comes in and
Speaker 2: makes a fundamental impact on the whole shape of modern physics.
Speaker 2: Is that how we should understand Noyman's impact, That he
Speaker 2: is such a genius that essentially he can make this
Speaker 2: impact in a field that's not even his.
Speaker 5: Own, right, So this is I find absolutely fascinating about
Speaker 5: von Neumann.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: So he writes later on this essay called The Mathematician,
Speaker 5: where he set out his philosophy of mathematics, and he
Speaker 5: really deeply felt that if mathematicians stray too far from
Speaker 5: physics and the physical world and they're looking for problems,
Speaker 5: he says that mathematics becomes baroque. I guess he means
Speaker 5: it becomes not beautiful, not interesting, too self absorbed. So
Speaker 5: he was constantly looking around at the world for ways
Speaker 5: to apply mathematics. And he had this extraordinarily logical mind,
Speaker 5: and he would kind of set something up in logical
Speaker 5: terms and formal logical terms and then kind of bulldoze
Speaker 5: his way through it, and a problem that it seemed
Speaker 5: completely complicated or intractable would suddenly become simple in his hands.
Speaker 5: And that was his approach. So from roots in looking
Speaker 5: at abstruse mathematical logic, which is where he started, he
Speaker 5: ends up applying kind of logic to almost every area
Speaker 5: of cutting edge science that you can think of.
Speaker 2: It is really amazing the impact he's had, and sometimes
Speaker 2: his impact seems to be so great because of his
Speaker 2: reputation that's almost closed off areas of research. Something I'm
Speaker 2: really fascinated by is his impact on the philosophy of
Speaker 2: quantum mechanics and these hidden variable theorems. He arrived at
Speaker 2: this big result, this no go theorem, essentially claiming that
Speaker 2: there could be no hidden variables in quantum mechanics. The
Speaker 2: quantum mechanics was absolutely random. There was no possibility for
Speaker 2: the outcome of these experiments to actually be determined by
Speaker 2: some hidden piece of information. And that shut off basically
Speaker 2: everybody from exploring that area and for decades until Bell
Speaker 2: and other folks Hermann for example, discovered that there was
Speaker 2: actually a flaw in his logic, right, that he had
Speaker 2: essentially made a mistake. Do you see that result as
Speaker 2: a sort of an embarrassment or a mistake or what
Speaker 2: does that tell us about von Neumann?
Speaker 5: So this is really interesting. So I explored this actually
Speaker 5: in my chapter on quantum mechanics, and I get reasonably
Speaker 5: tube into it, And the truth is, there's actually believe
Speaker 5: it or not. All these years later, there's still debate
Speaker 5: about what von Noyman meant. So let's unpack it a
Speaker 5: little bit. Hidden variables theory. So imagine you were a
Speaker 5: physicist back in I don't know, the nineteenth eighteenth century,
Speaker 5: and you were interested in the properties of a gas, right,
Speaker 5: so you might posit as they did, that there are
Speaker 5: these particles bouncing around inside a box, and when you
Speaker 5: warm them up, they bounce around even faster, and that
Speaker 5: gives rise to the properties that you can see, like
Speaker 5: whatever pressure and things like that you know in the
Speaker 5: temperature of the gas. And they're hidden because at the
Speaker 5: time nobody knew that these molecules really existed. Right now,
Speaker 5: in quantum mechanics, we still haven't found those hidden variables. Ultimately,
Speaker 5: what we know about quantum mechanics is it's still random.
Speaker 5: But you're a physicist and I'm sure you'll feel me
Speaker 5: in but deed down, it's random.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 5: What von Noyman actually showed with his theorem wor that
Speaker 5: if you approached quantum mechanics in the way that he did,
Speaker 5: and to be fair to him, it is the only
Speaker 5: self consistent mathematical approach that we know of. In a way,
Speaker 5: he shows that if you use his maths, if you
Speaker 5: if it's a Hilbert space, as he called it, even
Speaker 5: though he'd done all the math. It's a Hilbert space
Speaker 5: type theory. There's no theory that's a Hilbert space type
Speaker 5: theory can be a hidden variables theory that explains this
Speaker 5: kind of randomness and strange you know what, you know,
Speaker 5: entanglement I hate you know, everybody hates it when I
Speaker 5: say this, especially physicists. But it's what Einstein referred to
Speaker 5: as you know, spooky action at a distance and so
Speaker 5: on that you know, beyond that, you know, you just
Speaker 5: have to accept that.
Speaker 2: Let's just remind the listeners what we're talking about here
Speaker 2: in terms of entanglement. Right, you have some situation where
Speaker 2: like a photon decays the two particles, and so you
Speaker 2: know something about the pair of particles. You know, because
Speaker 2: the photon is spin zero that then the two particles
Speaker 2: have to preserve that angle momentum. And so if one
Speaker 2: is spin up, the other one is spinned down. And
Speaker 2: we've talked on the podcast several times about how even
Speaker 2: if those particles are now far apart, if one is
Speaker 2: spin up, the other has to be spinned down, and
Speaker 2: so measuring one of them tells you about the other one.
Speaker 2: And the debate was about whether those things are already
Speaker 2: determined when the particles are created and they're flying apart,
Speaker 2: and the fact that you don't know whether one is
Speaker 2: spin up or spin down just reflects your lack of
Speaker 2: knowledge that it actually is already determined, or if the
Speaker 2: universe essentially waits, if it's undetermined and it's only fixed
Speaker 2: when you make the measurement, which is bizarre because if
Speaker 2: you're then measuring one particle far away from the other one,
Speaker 2: somehow they're both determined the moment you're measuring one of them.
Speaker 2: And so von Neuman's claim is to have proven that
Speaker 2: it's impossible to have any hidden information that actually determines this.
Speaker 2: But there's an important distinction right between local hidden variables
Speaker 2: and global hidden variables, right, isn't that the issue between Okay.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm going to leave that with you, But I
Speaker 5: think the sticking point is that what was von Nouman
Speaker 5: trying to show, So people now argue, was he really
Speaker 5: ruling out all possible theories, all possible invariable theories, or
Speaker 5: was he just ruling out a subset? And Okay, I'm biased.
Speaker 5: I go with the historians and the physicists who are arguing,
Speaker 5: actually he was just ruling out an important subset. But
Speaker 5: I think you should tell people about the Bells estined
Speaker 5: that it seems you know so far that you know this,
Speaker 5: this view has kind of survived quite well in a way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. The idea that there's local information that
Speaker 2: moves with the particles is ruled out by Bell's experiment,
Speaker 2: and so by Nooman was certainly right about that. I
Speaker 2: think what Bell was astounded by is that his experiment
Speaker 2: and all Nouman's theories don't rule out global hidden variables,
Speaker 2: the idea that there could be like some pilot wave
Speaker 2: controlling the universe. And I agree with you, that's a
Speaker 2: very strange idea of the universe. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: it's not ruled out by these experiments, right, it could
Speaker 2: actually be our universe. What's fascinating to me is the
Speaker 2: impact one man can have on the field. Whether he
Speaker 2: intended to rule out global hidden variables or not. That
Speaker 2: was the understanding. People were like, oh, well, you can't
Speaker 2: go there. Noman's been there, and you know he doesn't
Speaker 2: get stuff wrong. So if he shut the door, don't
Speaker 2: even bother opening it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, and that was purely based on his
Speaker 5: reputation for just coming in and solving problems, just solving
Speaker 5: these intractable problems. So you know, partly it's his fault
Speaker 5: because he never done worked back and said, well, actually,
Speaker 5: you know, that's not what I meant, because he's already
Speaker 5: moved on to something else. But there's a really interesting
Speaker 5: passage in Boehm, who came up with Bohemian you know,
Speaker 5: the Bomian sort of wave theory, which is hidden variable's theory,
Speaker 5: and he says he gave his lecture in front of
Speaker 5: von Neuman, and von Neuman didn't contradict me. So even
Speaker 5: Bohm is in awe of von Momen. Yeah, quite right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it tells something about the power of personality. So
Speaker 2: let's move on to a completely separate topic where von
Speaker 2: Neuman made a huge impact, and that's two computers. As
Speaker 2: I think you were saying earlier, every computer we're using,
Speaker 2: almost every computer ever built, follows a von Neumann architecture.
Speaker 2: What does that mean? Why is it so influential?
Speaker 5: All?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 5: Well, in short, it was the first description, the first
Speaker 5: logical description of a modern programmable computer, right, and it
Speaker 5: came out, I think with his first draft of a
Speaker 5: report on the DVAC, which I believe was nineteen forty six.
Speaker 5: So before this there were computers, but there were kind
Speaker 5: of plugboard type things, and if you wanted them to
Speaker 5: do something else, then you had to switch around the
Speaker 5: wires and unplug them. And this was a pretty involved job. Now,
Speaker 5: our smartphones don't work that way, our laptops don't work
Speaker 5: that way. They run programs. And what Fulnoyment described was,
Speaker 5: in broad terms, a machine that would have a very
Speaker 5: large working memory. It would have a kind of control
Speaker 5: unit central process, so that would shuttle instructions back and forth,
Speaker 5: and you know, input and output and so on, and
Speaker 5: that general architecture, general description of what a computer should
Speaker 5: look like, despite it having drawbacks. Right, there's something called
Speaker 5: the von Nooyment bottleneck. So if your computer ever freezes
Speaker 5: and you know, you see, you know, whatever whatever they
Speaker 5: have nowadays, if it's a whirling clock face or something
Speaker 5: like that, then it's got stuck in the full Noyment bottleneck.
Speaker 5: And that's because instruction. Too many instructions are trying to
Speaker 5: go in and out between the memory and the central
Speaker 5: process or at the same time. But we haven't really
Speaker 5: found a better way to do computing. I mean, people
Speaker 5: are working on it and sure there's attempts to do
Speaker 5: parallel computing, and of course deep neural networks don't work
Speaker 5: that way. But in terms of almost all the computers
Speaker 5: that we're likely to use, they still work on the
Speaker 5: ful noiment architecture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hard to overestimate the influence of this kind
Speaker 2: of piece of work. And when you're at the very
Speaker 2: beginning of the field, you can sort of like set
Speaker 2: the whole direction of the international community by making these
Speaker 2: choices about like how much memory do you have and
Speaker 2: how do instructions get moved from memory to the CPU,
Speaker 2: and the whole idea of having like a central processing
Speaker 2: unit and memory that seems so basic to us, But
Speaker 2: it could have gone another way, right, it could have
Speaker 2: been if we didn't have of Unknoyment or somebody else
Speaker 2: organized computers, our entire computer are chitecture could be different.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating to dig into these details that really at
Speaker 2: the foundation of our entire technological society.
Speaker 5: Yes, and of course, you know, I try and unpack
Speaker 5: these things in the book to show that unlike in
Speaker 5: many biographies of you know, in inverted coom as great men, right,
Speaker 5: von Neuman was influenced by others, and he influenced others, right,
Speaker 5: So I do think, and I tried to show that
Speaker 5: he came out with these nuggets these he was in
Speaker 5: the right place at the right time. But his ideas
Speaker 5: were built upon by lesions of people, and he drew
Speaker 5: also on the ideas of legions of people, and of
Speaker 5: course that got him into trouble. I mean, when you
Speaker 5: look at the Vat report, he was working with the
Speaker 5: group who had invented the Aniac computer. Now, the Aniac
Speaker 5: you have to get you know, your string of adjective
Speaker 5: is right when you come to describe these things. Otherwise
Speaker 5: computer historians get very annoyed with you. But it wasn't
Speaker 5: strictly programmable, but it was digital, it was electronic. It
Speaker 5: had lots of things going for it. But it was
Speaker 5: initially invented to calculate where shells would land during the war,
Speaker 5: which was a huge problem, and it was also a
Speaker 5: problem during the First World War. But by the time
Speaker 5: the NIAC was ready to run, the war was over
Speaker 5: and so they needed other problems for it to solve,
Speaker 5: and there had been some talk within the group. So
Speaker 5: Mockley and Ekert were the designers of the original Eniac
Speaker 5: and there were some too, well, we really should you
Speaker 5: have a big memory, and Ekert invented this big new memory,
Speaker 5: the Mercury delay line. And but what von Neuman did was,
Speaker 5: using this incredible logical mind that he had, was coalesced
Speaker 5: these ideas into a single document and then without his
Speaker 5: permission or the permission of the team, of course, this
Speaker 5: was circulated widely across the world to every group, practically
Speaker 5: every group in the world that was working on a
Speaker 5: kind of Nassin computer. And that was Goldstein who was
Speaker 5: involved in the any App project. And then there's this
Speaker 5: acrimonious falling out. But then Van Norman moves and he
Speaker 5: sets up his own computing project at the Institute for
Speaker 5: Advanced Study, and he puts all of the patterns in
Speaker 5: the public domain. But even more importantly, when they're building
Speaker 5: this computer, which is it's one of the first program computers,
Speaker 5: but it's not the first, he sends every single report,
Speaker 5: every progress report along the way is published. And this
Speaker 5: in fact proves to have an even bigger impact on
Speaker 5: computing than the EDVAC report where he describes this architecture.
Speaker 5: So it's kind of a true ProMED attack. And I
Speaker 5: say in the book that. Wow, I asked, more or
Speaker 5: less ask the question. It makes I think it makes
Speaker 5: him the godfather of open source computing as well, in
Speaker 5: a way becaus had Mocklely and Eckert succeeded in patenting
Speaker 5: the computer. It might be it might be a different world.
Speaker 5: Progress might be slower. Who knows.
Speaker 2: Who knows, because Van Norman is not just like a
Speaker 2: smart guy in some rooms scriveling with equations. He's a
Speaker 2: very clever man, right in terms of strategy, as you
Speaker 2: were saying, essentially invented game theory, starting from like analyzing
Speaker 2: how living room board games go all the way up
Speaker 2: to thinking about nuclear strategy. Tell us about the impact
Speaker 2: he made on game theory.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so some people see game theory as the product
Speaker 5: of a of a fairly cynical mind, and so he's
Speaker 5: had to bad press for that. But the more I
Speaker 5: kind of dug into his personality, the more I felt
Speaker 5: that that was a bit simple minded in a way,
Speaker 5: it was. It was a very complex person. So you
Speaker 5: have to bear in mind that he's Jewish, and he
Speaker 5: starts his life in a very wealthy, privileged Jewish family.
Speaker 5: Is dad's a banker. He's kind of used to living
Speaker 5: the good life. And I get the feeling that from
Speaker 5: his youth. Really he thinks more or less the best
Speaker 5: of people. He doesn't really understand people. He has a
Speaker 5: fairly you know, he's a mathematician, and he's extremely an
Speaker 5: extremely able mathematician, but I don't think he was completely
Speaker 5: ofa with how other people thought or felt.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: But then what happens is there are two things. One
Speaker 5: is that in his native Hungary, in Budapest, a communist
Speaker 5: government installs itself after the First World War, and it's
Speaker 5: pretty brutal. But then they get overthrown by a kind
Speaker 5: of reactionary, sort of right wing government, and that that's
Speaker 5: even more bruce. Although in there are hangings in the street.
Speaker 5: It's just awful. And his message from this is like,
Speaker 5: I don't like totalitarianism at all. So he's he already
Speaker 5: begins to come out against that. And then by nineteen
Speaker 5: thirty he's already seeing something terrible is happening in Germany.
Speaker 5: He just censors it and in his letters start to
Speaker 5: get filled with premonitions of disaster, of a second World War.
Speaker 5: He thinks some you know, Germany, which he kind of
Speaker 5: sees as the center of the intellectual universe. Really he
Speaker 5: sees it beginning to go strive with anti Semitism, and
Speaker 5: so Princeton offers him a job in nineteen thirty and
Speaker 5: he's gone right, and he sees what's happening from Afar,
Speaker 5: and he hates the Nazis. He hates the Nazis, he
Speaker 5: hates Communism. He really really spises what's happening there. And
Speaker 5: he loses as a result of the Nazis. You know,
Speaker 5: this this great country that he saw, Germany, he sees,
Speaker 5: you know, the people getting behind Hitler or many of them,
Speaker 5: and he loses. He completely loses in someways his faith
Speaker 5: in human nature. So game theory is kind of the
Speaker 5: product of somebody who's trying to understand human nature and
Speaker 5: trying also to apply his logical mind to it, but
Speaker 5: almost in a kind of I can't really go know
Speaker 5: what's going on inside you, So I'm just going to
Speaker 5: try and do my best with what I've got, which
Speaker 5: is how you behave And the way that you've behaved
Speaker 5: recently is not that great, so you know, And famously
Speaker 5: his first wife divorces him, Marriott, she's also from a
Speaker 5: fairly wealthy Jewish background, and then she goes on to
Speaker 5: kind of great things herself. She becomes this amazing science
Speaker 5: administrator who sets up brooke Haven Lab. I think. She
Speaker 5: leaves him because he spends too much time thinking. She
Speaker 5: runs off for the post talk I think, and ends
Speaker 5: up getting married. So but their agreement for their daughter
Speaker 5: is still with us today, thankfully. Marina is that for
Speaker 5: the first fourteen I think years, she will spend most
Speaker 5: of her time with her mum, and then only spend
Speaker 5: the holidays with her dad, and then at fourteen, when
Speaker 5: she kind of reaches the age of maturity. From fourteen onwards,
Speaker 5: she'll stay with her dad most of the time and
Speaker 5: visit her mom and her stepdad shuring the holidays. Now,
Speaker 5: vol Nouman remarries pretty quickly to another Hungarian Jewish lady,
Speaker 5: Clara Dan, who ends up becoming the first modern computer programmer. Book.
Speaker 5: But it's kind of quite a tense household, as Marina says,
Speaker 5: it's it was quite naive of these two people to
Speaker 5: imagine that the teenage years are the age of rationality
Speaker 5: and reason, but that's what ended up happening, and so
Speaker 5: kind of game theories formulated to try and make some
Speaker 5: some sense, because you have to remember that before for Neumann,
Speaker 5: you know this, this was just considered impossible. And now
Speaker 5: game theory has become more complex and has tried to
Speaker 5: take into account real human behavior, right, but until for
Speaker 5: Neuman's early proofs, there was nobody had made any inroads
Speaker 5: on this at all.
Speaker 2: I think it's really impressive when people tackle a completely
Speaker 2: new field and try to bring it to heal mathematically
Speaker 2: something which seems maybe impossible to describe our ability any
Speaker 2: success to you know, describe the physical universe in all
Speaker 2: of its incredible complexity, using simple mathematical laws. I'm in
Speaker 2: awe of it when somebody can take the first stab,
Speaker 2: you know, that's like that's really doing science. And so
Speaker 2: in your book and some of the opening passages, you
Speaker 2: make this comment that many people think that von Neumann
Speaker 2: is smarter than Einstein, smarter than godel I actually pulled
Speaker 2: some of my listeners and I asked them, said, who
Speaker 2: do you think is the most influential scientists of all time?
Speaker 2: And you know, the results are basically what you would expect.
Speaker 2: Einstein gets a lot of mentions, Newton got Leo Darwin,
Speaker 2: somebody said Aristotle, somebody commented Bill kni a science guy.
Speaker 2: You know, Noimen wasn't up there. What do you think
Speaker 2: about this comparison? What's your argument that Norman was essentially
Speaker 2: one of the smartest people ever, one of the most
Speaker 2: influential scientists, And why do you think he hasn't penetrated
Speaker 2: to the wider public consciousness?
Speaker 5: So some people just get better pressed, right, I mean,
Speaker 5: Einstein had gray hair, think later in his life, and
Speaker 5: so people tend to forgive him various interesting parts of
Speaker 5: his personal life and so on. And you know, nobody
Speaker 5: remembers Paul Poincare, who had come up with quite a
Speaker 5: lot of the special theory of relativity before before Einstein,
Speaker 5: and you know, lots of names care forgotten and Gaus.
Speaker 5: You know, how could you not how could you not
Speaker 5: watching gas Yeah, exactly exactly, And I think I think
Speaker 5: part of the reason is, I think in the public
Speaker 5: mind there's this view of the great genius, right, they're
Speaker 5: working alone, they're usually a theorist, and Einstein just fits
Speaker 5: into this category brilliantly, doesn't he. And you can name
Speaker 5: what Einstein did, it's relativity, you know, And if if
Speaker 5: you're lucky, you remember a couple of years equals mc squared.
Speaker 5: I wanted von Neuman do Okay, if you get somewhere,
Speaker 5: you go, oh, he had something to do with the
Speaker 5: programmable computer. But the story is complicated. But he did
Speaker 5: all of these other things, and I think stringing those
Speaker 5: together and making sense of them is a difficult task.
Speaker 5: And I promise you I spent two half years on this.
Speaker 5: It wasn't easier. Mathematicians have told me told me this
Speaker 5: as well, So so it's a complicated story and making
Speaker 5: some sense of that is hard. And then I think
Speaker 5: von Neumann more than more than many. You have to
Speaker 5: tell the whole story. You have to show his influence,
Speaker 5: you have to follow it down to the present day,
Speaker 5: because for many years, in fact, what you got was
Speaker 5: von Neuman's, you know, stories of kind of arithmetical brilliance.
Speaker 5: So he'd turn up at some party and somebody would
Speaker 5: ask him, you know, some crazy puzzle and he'd solve
Speaker 5: it just like that. But that doesn't really tell you
Speaker 5: the deep stuff that he did, the fact that he
Speaker 5: was so ahead on so many things, from the computer
Speaker 5: to game theory, all of which really has aped modern life.
Speaker 5: So you know, we were just talking about game theory,
Speaker 5: and it's a little known fact that Google, Amazon, all
Speaker 5: of these companies their algorithms. You know, what gives them
Speaker 5: eighty percent of their profits is advertising, often and the
Speaker 5: algorithms that run their advertising platforms a game theoretical, right,
Speaker 5: So Vonnoima is responsible for that eighty percent, and then
Speaker 5: the other twenty percent comes from computing. That's the other
Speaker 5: as is responsible for that other twenty percent two. But
Speaker 5: to get there to truly appreciate that, you know, it's
Speaker 5: a it's a tough story, I think, and it's a
Speaker 5: tough sell. You can't just go, ah, yeah, it was
Speaker 5: this and this and it's how science works. But I
Speaker 5: don't think many people even now are ready to appreciate
Speaker 5: how science really works. And to appreciate Vonnoima properly, I
Speaker 5: think I think you need to kind of acknowledge that, yes,
Speaker 5: he was, as I say, one of the smartest people.
Speaker 5: Maybe you know, Einstein was in some ways a deeper thinker,
Speaker 5: and you know, he had a degree of scientific imagination,
Speaker 5: which I think von Norman envied. But then that wasn't
Speaker 5: what von Noyman was about. Von Norman was about distilling,
Speaker 5: almost like magic, the essential logic of particular things. And
Speaker 5: that's also a gift, and you know he was a
Speaker 5: mathematician and not a theoretical physicist.
Speaker 4: So yeah, well.
Speaker 2: What do you think is the value in this sort
Speaker 2: of like ranking the greatest genius in history? Is it
Speaker 2: sort of the way we talk about, you know, who
Speaker 2: was the best footballer ever? Was it Jordan or Lebron?
Speaker 2: The best basketball player ever? Is it just like a
Speaker 2: fun conversation or do you think there's like real historical
Speaker 2: or intellectual value in like trying to put these people
Speaker 2: on a spectrum?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm not a fan of it. I'm not a
Speaker 5: fan of it, but you want to draw people into
Speaker 5: absolutely fascinating stories. And the way that I approach this
Speaker 5: story is more is almost a technological history of the
Speaker 5: twentieth twenty first century, right, So von Noyman is to
Speaker 5: me the essential thread that runs through everything from the
Speaker 5: atom bomb to game theory to his proof that machines
Speaker 5: can reproduce, which I fear we may yet think of
Speaker 5: as his most important work yet. So I think if
Speaker 5: we you know, you start ranking, it's a fun parlor game,
Speaker 5: but with the best of it, you start to probe, well,
Speaker 5: what do we actually mean by that? And you know
Speaker 5: who uses relativity day to day. We all use computers, right,
Speaker 5: I know, relativity is yes, everybody's to jump down my
Speaker 5: throat and say GPS blah blah blah setting satellites up. Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 5: but you know the stuff that affects us from the
Speaker 5: economy to the way even though we think about optimizing
Speaker 5: our lives as if it's some game theory algorithm, you know,
Speaker 5: as if we're maximizing utility, right, that's the way. Certainly
Speaker 5: many people in Silicon Valley tend to think about these things. Well,
Speaker 5: hang on, what are the mathematical assumptions I underlie this
Speaker 5: how we ended up here of all places?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 5: And so if we start to have those discussions, then great,
Speaker 5: rank away. But you know, if it's otherwise, it's just
Speaker 5: like a rather sterile debate, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think the real value is in just
Speaker 2: understanding the impact that one person can have on the world,
Speaker 2: and that just with your mind, just thinking, just solving
Speaker 2: puzzles and being curious, you can change the whole future
Speaker 2: history of the human race. Incredible. I hope that inspires
Speaker 2: young people out there, you know that who is the
Speaker 2: next von Neuman? It makes me wonder Well, thanks very
Speaker 2: much for joining us on the podcast today. It Brooke
Speaker 2: was really fun. I learned a lot about physics and
Speaker 2: technology and history. Tell everyone where they can find it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is available in all good bookshops and online.
Speaker 5: It's called A Man for the Future.
Speaker 2: All right, thanks very much for joining us today.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much, Saniel.
Speaker 3: All Right, Well, he makes a pretty good case for
Speaker 3: von Neuman.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One thing about von Neuman is that people who
Speaker 2: knew him tended to consider him the smartest person they
Speaker 2: ever met. Even people who like New Einstein and New
Speaker 2: Girdle and New Nuther and stuff like that. There's something
Speaker 2: about this guy that, just like Reedy, it's smartness when
Speaker 2: you talk to him, and that should count. I don't
Speaker 2: know if that should count, but it's one reason why
Speaker 2: he's so well respected among academics that I have met him,
Speaker 2: who have met him, Yeah, exactly. And the lore of
Speaker 2: von Neuman has also probably it through the field. I mean,
Speaker 2: in the interview we talked about that one time he
Speaker 2: made a claim about quantum mechanics which was technically incorrect
Speaker 2: and shut down a whole area of research for decades
Speaker 2: and decades because everybody was like, well, von Neuman figured
Speaker 2: that out, So I'm sure he was right even though
Speaker 2: he was actually wrong in that case.
Speaker 3: And so what he was wrong, Yeah, that doesn't sound
Speaker 3: like positive influence.
Speaker 2: Well, Anania makes the case that he wasn't wrong, he
Speaker 2: was just misunderstood. He was proving something else. So this
Speaker 2: is a long debate in philosophy ex science about what
Speaker 2: exactly von Norman was proving and whether people misunderstood him
Speaker 2: or whether he made a mistake or whatever.
Speaker 1: And remind me how many Nobel prizes did he win?
Speaker 2: Zero?
Speaker 3: Zero? That's too less than my guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. And now that he's dead, he can't
Speaker 2: ever win any Nobel prizes, so he'll never catch up
Speaker 2: to your dude.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep.
Speaker 2: But that's only because he died young. He died in
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty seven, so he didn't really have a chance
Speaker 2: because you know, you can't win the Nobel Prize posthumously.
Speaker 2: So he had this huge impacts on science, and then
Speaker 2: he died, the Nobel Prize didn't really have a chance
Speaker 2: to give him any of these prizes.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess that's one thing you should add to
Speaker 1: your agenda is stay alive as long as possible to
Speaker 1: increase your chances of being the greatest of all time.
Speaker 2: Step one, figure out something awesome. Step two, stay alive
Speaker 2: to collect prizes. I'm still working on step one.
Speaker 3: Well no, now you have to figure out three amazing
Speaker 3: things to be my guy.
Speaker 2: True.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Well, an interesting discussion about influence and science,
Speaker 1: about big ideas and how sometimes that influence can be
Speaker 1: positive or negative.
Speaker 2: Either way, everybody who's thinking about the universe is having
Speaker 2: an impact on the human experience. So go out there,
Speaker 2: keep thinking, asking questions, and pushing forward the forefront of
Speaker 2: human knowledge.
Speaker 3: And let the universe influence you.
Speaker 2: Even if you'll never be number one on his list.
Speaker 1: You can be number two, Daniel. You can be the
Speaker 1: number two Daniel Watson I've ever met.
Speaker 2: I don't want your pity. No thanks, I'm gonna earn it.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 3: Wait, no, it's a great What are you talking about?
Speaker 2: Number two of two?
Speaker 3: Wow, it's better than being zero of two.
Speaker 2: Now zero is the first place, man, I count from zero.
Speaker 2: I'm a computer scientist.
Speaker 3: I thought you were a physicist. I don't think you
Speaker 3: have a degree in computer science.
Speaker 2: Then I have a Bachelor of Science and computer science.
Speaker 2: Oh all right, all.
Speaker 1: Right, all right, so yeah, all right, you're accredited. But anyways,
Speaker 1: we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See
Speaker 1: you next time.
Speaker 2: For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media,
Speaker 2: where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant,
Speaker 2: and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
Speaker 2: and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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