The man from the future: the visionary life of John von Neumann

Ananyo Bhattacharya

London, 2021

Abstract

Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome. Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through so many different fields of science, sparking revolutions wherever he went.

Quotes from this work

‘I was an idiot not to have studied math even as a sideline at the University of Vienna, instead of this silly philosophy, which took so much of my time and of which so little is left.’

‘Whenever I talked with von Neumann,’ Wigner said of his friend, ‘I always had the impression that only he was fully awake.

Physicists ruefully joke that though new interpretations of quantum physics arrive with astonishing regularity, none ever go away.

The abrupt transition from quantum to classical that is implied by wave function collapse is ‘a “magic” process’, he wrote to Jammer in 1973, quite unlike other physical processes, which ‘obey perfectly natural continuous laws’. The ‘artificial dichotomy’ created by the ‘cut’, he said, is ‘a philosophic monstrosity’.

What had become the longest trial in the history of the federal court system concluded with the ruling that the most valuable invention of the twentieth century could not be patented. The open source movement, born a decade or so later, would soon shun corporate secrecy, lauding the benefits of freely sharing information to drive forward innovation. Thanks to von Neumann those principles were baked into computing from the very beginning.