This biography begins bedecked with errors. Then it presents the most implausible suggestion about what happened to eponymous inventor of the high preThis biography begins bedecked with errors. Then it presents the most implausible suggestion about what happened to eponymous inventor of the high pressure engine used in most trucks, railroads, and some cars. Then proceeds to show why the unlikely is the sole possible explanation accounting for the facts behind Rudolf Diesel’s 1913 “death.”
Before praising Caesar, I must bury him under the constant special pleading proffered by author Donald Brunt. The Diesel engine is NOT the “most disruptive technology in history.” Sorry, that award goes to Gutenberg’s printing press. And Otto von Bismarck was NOT the most influential figure in Europe since Charlemagne—that crown goes to Napoleon or Metternich. These errors, along with a See-Dick-and-Jane-walk-up-the-hill writing style suggest the book is pitched to those completely unfamiliar with European history.
But such elementary errors recede in Brunt’s last 15 percent of the book, which take a surprising turn. I did not expect the speculation provided. And, having stated the thesis, I never expected the author to prove something that took place 110 years ago. But Brunt does, and it’s fascinating. All I will say (no spoilers) is the notion is somewhere between “Reilly, Ace of Spies” and “The Man Who Never Was,” each of which are mentioned in this book.
Absent the early mistakes, this would been a five-star analysis of a true-life mystery. Yet, I admire the author’s well-supported speculations. Call it four-and-a-half stars....more
Tremendous mystery of the mathematical minds running together in some families. The younger ones aren’t committed and they are not necessarily going tTremendous mystery of the mathematical minds running together in some families. The younger ones aren’t committed and they are not necessarily going to tie gravitation to strong/weak nuclear force, and if you haven’t received your “genius grant of $5m by the time he or she is 30–is a waste”—-not even Einsteinein.
But this book is a riddle wrapped in a math equation surrounded by love stories, and the charm is both in puzzling out the math AND trying to fit the cousins club together in a way that the romance makes sense. I must say, it kept me guessing ‘till the end....more
It’s hard to imagine a more light-weight read. From the same author who who wrote the awe-inspiring “Making of the Atomic Bomb”. If you want to undersIt’s hard to imagine a more light-weight read. From the same author who who wrote the awe-inspiring “Making of the Atomic Bomb”. If you want to understand the industry and ideas, stick with Daniel Yeargin.
Most of the book is nothing new. Only at the end does Rhodes provide some useful stats. Such as nuclear power has caused the least number of deaths of any energy production technology. And in 1996, half of Americans were alive only because of technological improvements.
No only a difficult read, but largely wrong. I'm a "Popperite"--an experimentalist. Advances in science normally come slowly and carefully, exceptionsNo only a difficult read, but largely wrong. I'm a "Popperite"--an experimentalist. Advances in science normally come slowly and carefully, exceptions Kuhn cites such as Copernicus and Newton notwithstanding. Mostly, science is hypothesis, testing, checking r(squared), reformulating hypothesis, and so on. Paradigm shifts are as rare as Einstein and Bohr.
It may be no coincidence that the generation weaned on Kuhn went on to predict "hockey stick" global warming, when actual temp measurements consistently are recorded below that predicted by "warmists'" fantastically complicated models. Who ya gonna believe--that black-box software, or your own eyes? Too late to ask Kuhn....more
Blecch. It's a good thing I knew something about Information Theory before reading this book. Because not only didn't authors Soni & Goodman, but theyBlecch. It's a good thing I knew something about Information Theory before reading this book. Because not only didn't authors Soni & Goodman, but they failed to communicate what little they had (especially how the switch to digital transmission could overcome most signal-to-noise issues, by making use of technologies like complex modulation or forward error correction, both invented after Shannon's most productive years).
This bio instead focuses in Shannon-the-mad-genius, slighting the genius. In a brief summer at Bell Labs, I met people who had worked with him (indeed, the Labs kept an office for him at least until divestiture). They told me more than this facile, skin-deep volume ever could.
To be fair, both mentioned Shannon's "Ultimate Machine", now in the MIT museum: a largish box with a single switch. When you flicked the switch "On", the box lid would open, a hand would snake out, turn the switch "Off", then the hand would reteat and the lid close. Yet, unlike this book's authors, Shannon's contemporaries understood the box's purpose--limits to Artificial Intelligence: could a machine-brain shut itself down. No carnival trick, this crude demonstration remains relevant today, even as AI has advanced spectacularly.
Find me a Shannon bio written by authors who understand AI, or at least its technological and legal ramifications. Skip this one.
ADDED Aug. 18th: The authors also confuse Beethoven with Mozart, calling the former a child prodigy pushed by his father. ...more
It's better than Seven Lessons on Physics, to be sure. But I was disappointed. Most drawings and explanations were pitched in the middle: not enough iIt's better than Seven Lessons on Physics, to be sure. But I was disappointed. Most drawings and explanations were pitched in the middle: not enough info for the somewhat knowledgeable; too brief and disjointed for the novice. Plus, the author's left-wing academic bias occasionally interfered--needlessly.
As an example, Lemons has a diagram on the impossibility of a perpetual otiomachine long before he introduces the second law of thermodynamics (entropy always increases). It is, indeed interesting that the (essentially geometric) proof came before the law, but the author never makes the connection. And when describing Boyle's law, the author is more concerned with apeing Boyle's actual lab equipment than explaining gas pressure. I'm unsure anyone who didn't already know Boyle's law would learn much.
To be sure, some of the better chapters (strong nuclear force and curve of binding energy) came towards the end. Yet these were balanced by a diagram proving earth's atmosphere keeps the planet warm enough for life (true enough) while somehow claiming this proved CO2 affected temperature, so global warming was a fact. Despite these flaws, Lemons is far better than Bill Nye. Low bar, I know....more
Lucid, fun, only occasionally bumping off track into progressive politics, Ellenberg is eager, if not anxious, to convince that math is both useful anLucid, fun, only occasionally bumping off track into progressive politics, Ellenberg is eager, if not anxious, to convince that math is both useful and not impossibility difficult. His approach is somewhat unusual: he bans all formulas more complex than algrabra, and compensates with simplified Bayesian boxes--which I found surprisingly helpful. (N.B.: I took about 8 semesters of college math & statistics.) It was hard not to be amused by the cheeky tone and punning historical footnotes, including the obligatory Tom Lehrer reference.
Yet: there seemed to be no particular order or organization to the book. Certainly not chronological, it also didn't divide neatly into branches of the field, i.e., set theory, topographical structures, non-Euclidian geometries, Ken Arrow's proof of imperfect voting axioms, game theory. All were present, but the ordering seemed all but random; some chapters built directly on the preceding material, while others didn't.
Never mind. Some moments were laugh-out-loud funny, and most everything was interesting. It didn't convince me to return to math (I tried Calculus again about a decade ago, finding I remembered differential equations, but could not, after a wasted week, do Integrals). Yet that's not the point: this is math for anyone with an open mind. No grades involved....more
Vastly overrated, this book just isn't very interesting. Part science, part feminist history, it ends up being neither.
Sobel, the author of the magnifVastly overrated, this book just isn't very interesting. Part science, part feminist history, it ends up being neither.
Sobel, the author of the magnificent "Longitude", concatenates endless facts with breathless anticipation: as if something momentous is about to happen. But the most important discovery, Hubble's Law, takes place off-stage by a man, notwithstanding a late effort to rename it after one of the featured women. And the second most important realization--the way to calculate a star cluster's distance by comparing its diameter and magnitude--is poorly explained.
I never doubted it: chicks can do math. But this book doesn't advance the case....more
I had no idea what to expect. What I got exceeded any expectations--and my greatest expectations.
Levi, an Italian Jewish Chemist, managed to get a PhDI had no idea what to expect. What I got exceeded any expectations--and my greatest expectations.
Levi, an Italian Jewish Chemist, managed to get a PhD and stay employed until the Italians initially toppled Mussolini's Fascist government, provoking a Nazi invasion that returned Italy to the Axis, albeit as an occupied territory. Levi and his friends took to the mountains to fight as partisans, but were inexperienced and caught almost immediately. Levi admitted he was a Jew and was transferred to Auschwitz.
All this I knew, and is told in Levi's autobiographical works such as "If This Is A Man"--that I have yet to read. "The Periodic Table" is different. A set of 21 short essays, each named after an element, and linked to its chemical nature, they form a rough autobiography of Levi. But not every essay is personal; some are imaginative tales of "types" (one an over-obvious tying of the German mentality to a certain element); others political metaphors of fictional characters. Only a single chapter, Cerium, is written about Levi's time in Auschwitz, though about half the book is post-war--and Levi plainly never recovers.
Yet, for all that, this is a tremendous science book. (I come from a long line of chemists; I'm the aberration.) Plus a worms-eye view of Italian history. And some of the most beautiful writing:
"Our hands were at once coarse and weak, regressive, insensitive: the least trained part of our bodies. Having gone through the first fundamental experiences of play, they had learned to write, and that was all. They knew the convulsive grip around the branches of a tree, which we loved to climb out of a natural desire and also (Enrico and I) out of a groping homage to the origin of the species; but they were unfamiliar with the solemn, balanced weight of the hammer, the concentrated power of a blade, too cautiously forbidden us, the wise texture of wood, the similar and diverse pliability of iron, lead, and copper. If man is a maker, we were not men; we knew this and suffered from it."
"The factory of which he was the owner was on the outskirts of Milan, and I would have to move to Milan. It produced hormonal extracts: I, however, would have to deal with a very precise problem, that is, research into a new cure for diabetes, which would be effective if taken orally. Did I know anything about diabetes? Not much, I replied, but my maternal grandfather had died of diabetes, and also on my paternal side, several of my uncles, legendary devourers of pasta, had shown symptoms of the disease in their old age. Hearing this, the "Commendatore" became more attentive and his eyes smaller: I realized later that, since the tendency to diabetes is hereditary, it would not have displeased him to have at his disposal an authentic diabetic, of a basically human race, on whom he could test certain of his ideas and preparations."
"And yet Cerrato aroused my curiosity… He had not been compromised by Fascism, and he had reacted well to the reagent of the racial laws. He had been an opaque but reliable boy in whom one could trust: and experience teaches us that just this, trustworthiness, is the most constant virtue, which is not acquired or lost with the years. One is born worthy of trust, with an open face and steady eyes, and remains such for life. He who is born contorted and lax remains that way: he who lies to you at six lies to you at sixteen and sixty."
The penultimate chapter, called "Vanadium," is the work's apex--riveting, emotional, and yet (typically) unresolved. The final chapter is a revision of a story/poem Levi first wrote while studying for his PhD. Despite its grounding in organic chemistry (Do they still make those CRC manuals? Brutal.), it's almost Eastern in its cyclic mysticism.
Levi was depressed for years. He died in 1987 after falling three stories from his balcony. The coroner called the death a suicide. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel disagreed: "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later." This book has vastly more joy than depression, especially for those who enjoy puzzles of any sort, even when translated into the search for chemical knowledge....more
This is not the history of the GPS project--or at least, not much. Instead, it is a punch-drunk weave of examples attempting to convince that the exisThis is not the history of the GPS project--or at least, not much. Instead, it is a punch-drunk weave of examples attempting to convince that the existence of GPS has, or "may be altering the nature of human cognition--possibly even rearranging the gray matter in our head." My first thought: is Mr Milner the last believer in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck?
The beginning recounts the now familiar story of Polynesian Eastern migration via a system that those used to Cartesian space --Captain Cook among them -- found almost impossible to grasp. Polynesians didn't move from island to island, but charted turn points by checking the stars *as if seen at those islands*. This was at odds with European views of the Pacific Ocean as a place to get *through* to arrive at their destination. Such navigation skills died long before GPS. This would be one of many quasi-pointless digressions in the book.
The actress Hedy Lamarr gets her due, as the inventor of "spread spectrum" technology in the early 1940s--no patents, of course. I've looked for a book on Lamar-to-GPS-to-Qualcomm, but this isn't it, and was filler here.
The best part of the book is the middle third, telling the history of the fits, starts, and plausible alternatives to GPS. Appalled by the Viet Nam-era waste of munitions, the failure of interdiction, not to mention civilian casualties, an Air Force Colonel/Professor named Parkinson dreamed of a delivery system so accurate it could drop five bombs accurately: four bombs into the same crater made by the first. The design came together in 1973, but funding a 24 (now 31) satellite constellation still seemed difficult.
Until Spring 1999, when President Clinton ordered accurate strikes on Belgrade in response to Serbian aggression in Kosovo. GPS-targeted munitions worked brilliantly. "But there is a corollary to being able to drop five bombs in the same hole: what if you have the wrong hole?" The CIA used an outdated map, and walloped the Chinese Embassy. With great precision. So sorry. Funding GPS thereafter was not a problem.
The other genuinely interesting issue -- one in which I was involved personally -- was civilian access to GPS. The US military argued it made no sense to create a system that could send a missile into the fifth floor, fourth window from the left in the Kremlin, only to allow anyone to use the same technology--possibly against America. But then KAL007 strayed over Soviet airspace, and was rewarded with two missiles up the kazoo, killing nearly 300. President Reagan announced a compromise where the military got a more precise signal (better than 10 m accuracy) than offered to civilians (~100 m accuracy). Civilian GPS also won't work above a certain altitude or faster than a certain speed (I'm not telling).
Almost immediately, the early GPS entrepreneurs, such as Trimble, realized they didn't need to know how to decode the military channel; merely discovering its existence allowed building cheap receivers that could compare the phase shift of the unreadable military channel with the civilian transmission, improving the precision of the consumer product to near equal the military. Plus ground-based transmitters radiate the same GPS signal -- called differential GPS -- allowing, for example, civil aircraft to land via GPS when runways otherwise would be blanketed by fog. The military did that years before; now, the technology exists to allow an autopilot on a Part 121 passenger airline to land at about half the airports in Europe and North America. (Except were the pilot Egyptian or the plane Malaysian…)
GPS is free; paid for by US tax dollars, given to the world. It spawned a multi-billion dollar, global consumer product market. Ford just announced it will build driverless cars, GPS enabled, of course. Such consumer-driven pressure means President Reagan's decision to open GPS to civilians never could be reversed. Yet Russia, Europe and China all have, or are building, their own satellite navigation systems to "compete" with free GPS. Why? One wonders why the EU, in particular, throws € billions at "Galileo", rather than building a better fence around Romania, Bulgaria and Greece.
Anyway, that's the good stuff. The rest of the book is nonsensical, if harmless, speculation, about our ability to navigate devolving to smartphones, with some interesting tidbits about how GPS assists in earthquake measurements and (following all those failed missions to Mars) helped make the Mars Curiosity Lander mission a success--navigating "away from earth by using GPS in the rearview mirror."
The book's psychological padding is both too speculative and too off-course. Two books would be better: a technical history of GPS (for the layman); and a "What If?" that could be filed between Thor Heyerdahl and L. Ron Hubbard....more
This may be the single greatest socio-political-economic history ever written. The only comparable book is "A Splendid Exchange," which has a far broaThis may be the single greatest socio-political-economic history ever written. The only comparable book is "A Splendid Exchange," which has a far broader scope yet, as my review indicates, is marred by an annoying trope of academia. A history of the Industrial Revolution, this book explains why the changes took place when and where they did, and the (forgive me) locomotive force that drove exponential growth rates, ending Malthusian nightmares. "The miracle of sustainable invention [is] the most powerful idea in the world."
At bottom, William Rosen's answer is that the revolution was not Industrial, but Inventiveness. Or, as Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "the most important invention of the Industrial Revolution was invention itself." At the end of the book, the author even provides the Price Law formula: the number of individuals responsible for half of all inventions is equal to the square root of the number of total contributors. Thus, it takes a village to make a baker, and a town to make a flower mill, a point Adam Smith states less poetically in his 1776 "Wealth of Nations."
More controversially, the book takes a swipe at explaining why "invention" (still) is dominated overwhelmingly by the Anglosphere. The author is neither a Whig (great man theory) nor a Marxist (scientific determinism) historian. Instead, he's a small "d" democrat, convinced that the ability to invent is latent in everyone, but it took the Anglophone Rule of Law to democratize the nature of invention. And that change was simple: 17th Century Britain's insistence that ideas were a kind of property, i.e., patents.
Much of the book is a satisfying refresher of the great names: Newcomen, Watt, Smeaton, Arkwright and Stephenson--the Industrial Revolution runs essentially contemporaneous with the reign of George III. But the theoretical underpinnings are even more interesting. The United Provinces of the Netherlands was richer than England before 1700, but one reason for its fade in the global league tables was that patent laws protect ideas only within a country's own borders. Inventors in smaller nations "would have been silly" to patent any easily reverse-engineered product (such as steam engines); the lack of legal protection tended to shift investment into industries like dyes and chemicals, where trade secrets (properly managed) might work. But that allowed Britain literally to race ahead of Holland (the Third Anglo-Dutch War helped).
China, by contrast, resembled Tudor England in granting legal monopolies ("letters patent") to court favorites, for a share of the booty. But to preserve the secrecy of specialized knowledge funding the country, the Qing Dynasty destroyed nearly every copy of China's relatively Westernized encyclopedia. France had neither disadvantage--but the Revolution, then Napoleon, set its inventors a generation behind Britain's. (Jacobins, remember, guillotined the chemist Antoine Lavoisier.) Compare all this with the trade-off inherent in an Anglosphere patent: in return for a limited-time monopoly, the inventor has to publicize fully his work, available to all--and for anyone to try inventing an improvement.
A few other points struck me. Because Britain's ill-conceived Mercantile system lasted until the Corn Laws were repealed, colonies were NOT a source of raw materials for the mother-ship; instead, they were a stash of captive consumers. And there's a splendid chapter on those who historian E.J. Hobsbawm described as "engaging in collective bargaining by riot":
"Luddites were on one side of a newly violent debate about…labor and property. Opposing them was the newfangled notion that IDEAS were property; the Luddites argued (with crowbars and torches) that their SKILLS were property.…[Their] thesis, which might be abbreviated as 'property equals labor plus skill' was less attractive than the idea that 'property equals labor plus ideas.' The victory of the latter was decided not by argument, but by economics: it produced more wealth, not just for individuals, but for an entire nation.…One lesson of the Luddite rebellion specifically, and the Industrial Revolution generally, is that maintaining the prosperity of those closed communities--their pride in workmanship as well as their economic well-being--can only be paid for by those outside the communities: by society at large."
It's odd to read a book in which one actually played an (un-credited) part. So much of this book is fun for me to read; much of it is right; a great tIt's odd to read a book in which one actually played an (un-credited) part. So much of this book is fun for me to read; much of it is right; a great tale about how an International Telecommunication Union vote was won is wrong--I was there. It's a shame that some key contributors (not me) go un-mentioned.
And although I haven't bothered to look up the statute of limitations on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the author could have described astoundingly audacious events without naming the names--especially since the major recipient (who is named) is dead.
I'm in no danger--I wasn't on the inside then. That doesn't mean I didn't guess the truth. Nor does it mean I didn't learn about it later, since a major investor -- one pictured in the photo section -- has the office next to mine. He cashed out of Iridium years ago--at a healthy profit, he says.
It's sad that the majority of the book is so boring. I can't imagine a non-insider caring over-much. It's true that Iridium never could have been rescued without the tireless efforts of Dan Colussy (from the outside) and Dorothy Robyn (sounds like Ro-bine) (inside the White House). But Herb Wilkins, and his $30 million, doesn't get enough credit--even though he has perhaps the best line: "I think, for the first time, I'm gonna back a White-run business."
Much later, I became involved in the company a second time, legally I assure you. And all the fuster-clucks about the non-U.S. Gateway earth stations absolutely were true. I was trying to "fix" Central and South America, which proved impossible. Almost as hard was dealing with the Radio Astronomy crowd, still looking for "Klaatu", while Iridium was trying to communicate.
The funniest moment in the book is near the end. Son-of-Iridium turned cash-flow positive three and a half years after Colussy's team bought it out of bankruptcy. It was May 9, 2004, and something was wrong; the system was crashing; overloading; calls were dropping. Technicians checked for the dreaded "anomaly"--some catastrophic event that might have destroyed one or more satellites. But, no, the spacecraft constellation looked fine. Still, what could explain the problem? Iridium could handle 98,586 simultaneous calls, and the company only had 140,000 handsets in service. It turns out it WAS possible to overload the system, IF by some odd set of circumstances, massive numbers of people were communicating to the SAME satellite:
"And that's what was happening. It was a holiday in the United States, and there were 146,000 American troops in Iraq, and there was only one phone they could depend on. Technically you weren't supposed to use an Iridium phone for a "morale call," but when you absolutely, positively had to get your call through at a certain time to a certain person, every soldier, sailor, Marine, and airman knew there was only one solution. The only solution that could max out the Iridium system was Mother's Day in a combat zone."
The collapse of Motorola is another story of the hollowing-out of American industry. But Iridium didn't fail like Detroit; it was over-engineered. And Steve Jobs stole the company's consumer market in one day.
At $6.5 billion, Iridium never could be profitable. At $25 million in bankruptcy court, debt free, with a government contract from day one, it was a sure winner. That's why the guy in the next office is a Florida (no income tax) resident, and only pops in occasionally. While I arrive every morning at 6:00 AM.
ADDED 6/14/16
Ok, I may have been a bit harsh on the book. I may have been too close to some of the players involved to be objective. The author was trying to write another "Moneyball". But John Bloom is no Michael Lewis; at best, the book comes off like the near-worthless movie adaptation of the book, where the lesson seemed to be "nice guys can win." There's no doubt Dan Colussy is a nice guy; no doubt that Motorola screwed over the Iridium system (contrary to press reports, Motorola lost only about $2 billion on Iridium). And, by virtue of buying off-the-shelf 200 gallon tanks for the hydrazine used to keep satellites in orbit, then deciding to fill them when only 50 gallons originally had been planned, the Iridium satellites supposedly designed for five years of orbital life still work after sixteen and counting.
So a final quote is appropriate:
"Three years after [Iridium was purchased out of bankruptcy], a writer for USA Today was casting about for some parallel inhuman history, but he couldn't find a precise equivalent for a $6.5 million cash outlay that resulted in possession of a resource that probably never again would be available in the whole future history of the United States. The one he came up with was from the nineteenth century, when a Virginian short of cash had to borrow $15 million to satisfy a disagreeable French dictator who controlled a lot of real estate. That deal was called the Louisiana Purchase."
ADDED July 2, 2016:
Ok, I'm still too hard on it. It's the lead book review in this week's Economist; they picked up on the same point about the hydrazine tanks. But Herb Wilkins still isn't named--he's "an American media mogul"; many will assume that refers to Bob Johnson, who ultimately didn't invest.
Still, I'm upping it a star. But I decline to check the statue of limitations on the foreign corrupt practices act....more
David Cassidy, the author of the original definitive biography, updated it seven years ago when new Soviet and DDR materials became declassified. He bDavid Cassidy, the author of the original definitive biography, updated it seven years ago when new Soviet and DDR materials became declassified. He believes Heisenberg never calculated the "diffusion equation" that would have revealed how much U-235 Germany would have needed to separate from U-238 in order to build a Uranium bomb (a la Hiroshima). But Heisenberg certainly knew reactors produced Plutonium; that Plutonium easily could be separated by chemical means; and he spent much of 1944 and early '45 -- when Germany plainly was beaten -- frantically trying to complete a reactor that would produce a chain reaction of neutrons and Plutonium (not knowing Fermi succeeded years before in the University of Chicago squash courts).
What was Heisenberg doing, bicycling all over a cratered Germany at night to gather remaining uranium scraps if not trying to make Plutonium? Was he doing it out of scientific curiosity (as he claimed) or to create a war-winning "super-weapon" (as his harshest critics charged)?
Post war, Heisenberg--conceiver of the uncertainty principle; winner of the Physics Nobel for "the invention of quantum mechanics"--himself was caught between two inconsistent states. He "was concerned that [his] research effort[s] should be seen not only as morally untainted but also highly competent, despite its poor showing." This post-hoc rationalization both is internally contradictory and a bridge too far: taken to its logical conclusion, it would mean that only German atomic physicists, working for the Nazi regime, bore no moral responsibility for creation of the bomb.
And what of Heisenberg's famous 1941 visit to Neils Bohr in Copenhagen? Heisenberg later portrayed it as an attempt to achieve mutually inverted non-destruction: if you Allies don't build one and drop it on Germany, we German scientists won't pursue it. Yet, though he lived until 1976, Heisenberg never explained why he would deliver such a message in Nazi-occupied Denmark to a man then not working for the Allies. Thus, it remains a mystery, despite the interest generated by Michael Frayn's brilliant 2000 play "Copenhagen," which caused the Bohr family to release a pile of nasty, but never sent, letters from Bohr to Heisenberg remonstrating about the latter's attempt to cajole a sympathetic gloss on the meeting at their next meeting, after the war, in 1947.
But what would you do? Assuming you love your country, are at the top of the scientific and cultural pecking order, and actual dissent will result in the lifespan of Munich's "White Rose" protesters--about four days. Heisenberg's great failure was he believed that compromising with Hitler would allow him to survive the war and keep the flame of German science alive in the next government. As a result, he put physics over people and principles. He should have left: Hitler's Germany was not his Germany.
We who know what Nazis do -- Commies too -- cannot rely on such nonsense. Whether Heisenberg lied or deceived himself, his example prevents anyone from using that same excuse today....more
Excellent book on the match -- the chess and the antics -- though the authors get a bit over their heads trying to relate it to contemporary Cold War Excellent book on the match -- the chess and the antics -- though the authors get a bit over their heads trying to relate it to contemporary Cold War politics. Fischer is a one-of-kind loony, beyond any game theory the Rand Corporation could invent....more
Why is everyone so crazy for this book? It's written about the most abstract generalities (yet he can't resist including the general relativity equatiWhy is everyone so crazy for this book? It's written about the most abstract generalities (yet he can't resist including the general relativity equation for gravity without explanation). It's a high-level history almost anyone could have written, with one chapter expressing the favorite European flavor of the day: "we're doomed."
Without footnotes pointing to the more exacting details of physics, what is the audience for this book? The Sunday Supplements? The readers won't learn much--for example, the first chapter purports to be about special and general relativity, but doesn't explain it. The next chapter is about Quantum Mechanics, and says: yes, there are a lot of elementary particles (quarks, gluons, Higgs Boson), but no one has the foggiest idea how to simplify it--at least that chapter was honest, if potentially confusing to the uninitiated.
There's a very short chapter on cosmology, saying space is curved and expanding, but then he's off talking about black holes, without mentioning the "Schwarchild Radius", where even light cannot escape.
Ponderous in places, fast moving in others, this is the best attempt to capture Turing the man and mathematician. Always awkward; always shy in socialPonderous in places, fast moving in others, this is the best attempt to capture Turing the man and mathematician. Always awkward; always shy in social situations, he grew to be "a man with a quite powerful build, yet with with the movements of an ' undergraduate' or a 'boy', without an attractive face.
A scholarship boy to a "public (i.e., private) school", Turing suffered the humiliations familiar (since Arnold's day) to any boy who was a loner and terrible at team sports. He hero worshiped (and more) a classmate who encouraged him to study for entrance to Cambridge; Turing, fatefully as it turned out, was admitted to Kings College, Cambridge -- his school chum having died of TB in the interim. A degree followed, where Turing produced his only real scholarly paper, "On Computable Numbers", where he became the first person to imagine a computer. Alan was rewarded by a Kings Fellowship and a one-year Fellowship at Princeton (amidst the great and the greater, yet, on the whole, Alan was too shy to interact with Einstein, or any of the others -- neither public school, nor Cambridge nor Princeton deflected Alan from being "a confirmed solitary."
How much this has to do with being a homosexual is unknown--Turing was remarkably frank about disclosing that fact to his friends. In the end, it proved his undoing.
In any event, the war intervened, and Alan was spirited to Bletchley Park. Although Alan had no talent for management or personnel (nor the inclination to spend any precious time on either), he did, singularly, have the ability to see the big picture when it came to the Nazi's toughest code, the Naval Enigma. That required a limited sub-set of a Universal Turing machine (capable of understanding all instructions it read), but Turing was better than anyone else. And when he thought his department wasn't getting sufficient resources, he wrote to Churchill himself to clear the blockage.
So Britain wins the war--but loses the peace. The economy is in terrible shape for almost a decade; the Empire is dismembered; and Britain becomes the junior partner in the "special relationship" with America. Alan meanwhile, chose one of three government posts offered to build this "electronic brain" he promises. But he chooses poorly, and none of the three really see that it is both a mathematical as well as an engineering challenge--whereas Alan had been working with actual machinery since Bletchley Park days, and knew the two had to be combined. But his social awkwardness prevents him from making the point, and little progress is made.
Alan kept to his principles throughout his life, and he became especially open about his homosexuality after the war. So much so that, when he was burglarized by the friend of a boy he'd picked up, he called the police, not realizing that as a "sex criminal", he was outside the law himself. The burglary was of little interest to the police, but a sex criminal with secrets was. Burgess and MacLean -- also from Kings College, and also homosexuals -- just had defected, astonishing the Brits, who had assumed the "old school tie" was a sufficient security check.
So Turing was convicted of the unspeakable crime, and sentenced not to jail but to chemical castration via estrogen treatments. Which suppressed libido, and made him grow breasts. But Truing's treatment was a year's complete--when he committed suicide by eating a cyanide-poisoned apple at his home. Why then, his friends wondered--"his death came as a shock to those who knew him. . . The trial was two years in the past, the hormone treatments had ended a year before, and he seemed to have risen above it all."
There is no proof, but the reason is either Turing understood, or the British MI6 told him, that he could never work on important government projects anymore. "[T]here was a solid logic to the mind of security, one that could not be expected to take an interest in notions of freedom of development. He had no right to such things, as he would be first to admit. . . [W]hen it came to questions that mattered, there was no doubt he had placed himself under military law." Without access to the latest information about computers, without contact with his American peers, and with probable termination of his government contracts, Alan Turing was to be placed in a position where his mind was not free to do the work he wanted. Writing to Churchill wasn't going to help this time--so suicide seemed the sole rational alternative.
Hodges's book is a bit long, but likely is to be considered the definitive psychological treatment of the subject, with sufficient math to keep folks such as me interested....more
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