When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Author:Jim Holt [Holt, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374146702
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

16

Dr. Strangelove Makes a Thinking Machine

The digital universe came into existence, physically speaking, late in 1950, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the end of Olden Lane. That was when and where the first genuine computer—a high-speed, stored-program, all-purpose digital-reckoning device—stirred into action. It had been wired together, largely out of military surplus components, in a one-story cement-block building that the Institute for Advanced Study had constructed for the purpose. The new machine was dubbed MANIAC, an acronym of “Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer.”

And what was MANIAC used for, once it was up and running? Its first job was to do the calculations necessary to engineer the prototype of the hydrogen bomb. Those calculations were successful. On the morning of November 1, 1952, the bomb they made possible, nicknamed Ivy Mike, was secretly detonated over a South Pacific island called Elugelab. The blast vaporized the entire island, along with eighty million tons of coral. One of the air force planes sent in to sample the mushroom cloud—reported to be “like the inside of a red-hot furnace”—spun out of control and crashed into the sea; the pilot’s body was never found. A marine biologist on the scene recalled that a week after the H-bomb test he was still finding terns with their feathers blackened and scorched and fish whose “skin was missing from a side as if they had been dropped in a hot pan.”

The computer, one might well conclude, was conceived in sin. Its birth helped ratchet up, by several orders of magnitude, the destructive force available to the superpowers during the cold war. And the man most responsible for the creation of that first computer, John von Neumann, was himself among the most ardent of the cold warriors, an advocate of a preemptive military attack on the Soviet Union, and one of the models for the film character Dr. Strangelove. “The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time,” the historian of science George Dyson has observed. Von Neumann had seemingly made a deal with the devil: “The scientists would get the computers, and the military would get the bombs.” And many scientists at the institute were by no means happy with this deal—including one who wrote STOP THE BOMB in the dust on von Neumann’s car.

It was not just the military impetus behind the project that evoked opposition at the institute. Many felt that such a number-crunching behemoth, whatever its purpose, had no place in what was intended to be a sort of Platonic heaven for pure scholarship. The Institute for Advanced Study was founded in 1930 by the brothers Abraham and Simon Flexner, philanthropists and educational reformers. The money came from Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld, who sold their interest in the Bamberger’s department store chain to Macy’s in 1929, just weeks before the stock market crash. Of the eleven million dollars of the proceeds they took in cash, the Bambergers committed five million dollars (equivalent to sixty

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