Who was the most influential scientist?

00:00:07
Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, how many physicists are there in the world right now?

00:00:11
Speaker 2: Ooh, good question. I think there are about ten thousand physics professors just in the US.

00:00:17
Speaker 1: WHOA, but that's a lot of physics professors though, And now, how would you rank them if you had to rank them?

00:00:22
Speaker 2: That depends how you rain by height, by hygiene, by number of Nobel Prizes, so many different directions.

00:00:29
Speaker 1: I don't think you want to rate them by hygiene. I don't want to be the president who does that survey.

00:00:35
Speaker 2: I don't know what's more embarrassing most hygienic physicists or at.

00:00:38
Speaker 1: Least yeah, and which one gives you more cred as a physicist?

00:00:45
Speaker 2: I want to know the correlation between hygiene and Nobel Prizes.

00:00:49
Speaker 1: Well, that's a good metric, maybe Nobel prizes. Has anyone won more than one Nobel Prize in physics?

00:00:55
Speaker 2: One guy won the Nobel Prize twice. John Bardeen won in fifty six and seventy two. And there are some families where fathers and sons wanted.

00:01:03
Speaker 1: Must be quite a bookcase there in their house. But there must be a huge number of physicists who haven't won a Nobel Prize.

00:01:11
Speaker 2: Most of us.

00:01:12
Speaker 1: I guess maybe you could rank yourself as the number one physicists in the world named Daniel Whitson.

00:01:18
Speaker 2: I mean, I hope so.

00:01:20
Speaker 3: Have you looked?

00:01:21
Speaker 1: Are there any other I mean there must be other Daniel Whitson's out there.

00:01:25
Speaker 3: Could one of them be a physicist?

00:01:26
Speaker 2: There aren't many of us. I have a distant cousin in the UK named Daniel Whitson who's an artist.

00:01:31
Speaker 3: And then if they listen to this podcast and the technically they would be physicists too.

00:01:35
Speaker 2: I have some competition.

00:01:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll rank you both in the artistic ability.

00:01:40
Speaker 2: Sounds good.

00:01:56
Speaker 1: I am Horehemmerk, cartoonists and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.

00:02:00
Speaker 2: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and until recently I thought I was probably the number one Daniel Whitson particle physicist in the world.

00:02:07
Speaker 1: Until recently, you mean, like thirty seconds ago. Mm hm, yeah exactly. I just got downgraded. Yeah, well, maybe you need to take out the competition, cut off the podcast so that the other Daniel Whitson can't listen.

00:02:19
Speaker 2: No, I want to create more physicists, man, I'm just gonna have to work on my artistic skills to round out my portfolio.

00:02:25
Speaker 3: I thought you were going to say you wanted to create more. Daniel Whitson's how's that going.

00:02:31
Speaker 2: Well, I'm married to a biologist, so let's see if she can get cloning to work in the lab.

00:02:35
Speaker 3: Oh man, But if she clones you, would you still be with you? What if she picks a clone? What if she finds you the number two Daniel Whitson version.

00:02:46
Speaker 2: If we're clones, aren't we all the same? Are you gonna share credit? You know, it's just red me to take care of stuff.

00:02:51
Speaker 1: I don't know that this is an existential question, Daniel. Once the clone is created and they have a different experience of the world, they're technically a different Daniel.

00:02:59
Speaker 2: M And that's true. I guess we'll have to ask them what they think.

00:03:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, or your wife, I guess let's get her on. Well, first she has to clone you, which might be a little tricky and ethically questionable. Absolutely, but anyways, Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which we do our best to clone our curiosity and our joy for uncovering the mysteries of the universe. We want everyone out there to feel like a physicist, to think like a physicist, and to be a physicist, to use your brain to develop mathematical models of how the universe works and to bring it to bear, to master the universe in your own mind.

00:03:36
Speaker 3: That's right.

00:03:37
Speaker 1: We serve the entire universe and we try to find the biggest, the baddest, the most interesting questions out there about how everything works and how the cosmos is put together to bring to you here on the podcast.

00:03:49
Speaker 2: Because everybody deserves to understand the universe and to participate in unraveling its mysteries. Some of the greatest minds in history were not people who were academics or men of the figuring out the way the universe worked. They were just curious people who taught themselves to think about the nature of reality.

00:04:06
Speaker 3: That's right.

00:04:07
Speaker 1: There are a lot of amazing questions out there to ask in a lot of minds that have put their amazing powers of observation and experiments to try to figure out these answers. And so it's been an incredible history of humankind trying to find the solution to the biggest questions in the universe.

00:04:22
Speaker 2: And when we look back at the story of how humans have figured it all out. There are some names that stand out among the others. Of course, there are thousands of people toiling in anonymity, but a few people have really changed the course of science, really pivoted the way all humans thought about the nature of the world. Of course, people like Newton and Einstein and Galileo come to mind, but there are many, many more.

00:04:45
Speaker 3: Jam as well.

00:04:46
Speaker 2: Right, I was about to say, cham absolutely, yes, crest me off. It's alphabetical. Okay, maybe not alphabetical, but there are some bold face names that really have changed the way everybody thinks about the nature of our universe.

00:05:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of influential scientists out there throughout history, and so a question that you can ask is how do they rank in terms of their influence in science, just like I guess people rank sports stars.

00:05:13
Speaker 2: Right, there is this whole ridiculous cottage industry of like asking who is the greatest of all time? You know, is it Kobe Bryant, is it Lebron James, is it Michael Jordan? Is it Larry Bird? Everybody's got somebody in their camp arguing for them.

00:05:27
Speaker 1: Who's the goat, greatest of all time exactly.

00:05:31
Speaker 2: And mostly I think it's not actually serious. They don't really care who's number one. It's just like a fun way to have a conversation and to talk about these inspiring figures.

00:05:39
Speaker 1: I think some people care a lot about these rankings and who's the goat in basketball and baseball?

00:05:46
Speaker 2: So who's the greatest cartoonist of all time?

00:05:48
Speaker 1: Were he?

00:05:48
Speaker 2: Well?

00:05:49
Speaker 3: Cham comes to mind obviously?

00:05:51
Speaker 2: Which Cham was that again?

00:05:54
Speaker 3: The famous one?

00:05:55
Speaker 2: Okay, you mean Cham on Twitter? Whoever that is?

00:05:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's another hoe Cham.

00:06:02
Speaker 2: You told me there's some other guy who owns atjogete cham on Twitter.

00:06:05
Speaker 3: Oh no, I think somebody just opened that as me.

00:06:08
Speaker 2: It could be another hohrgete Cham.

00:06:10
Speaker 3: They stole me.

00:06:11
Speaker 1: Yeah no, no, it's pretty clear they're trying to me.

00:06:16
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, or unless he isn't me, maybe I don't know.

00:06:21
Speaker 2: Maybe he's your clone. But the back to the question, who is the greatest cartoonist of all time? Other than Jorge Cham? Oh?

00:06:27
Speaker 1: Well, it probably depends on who you ask, but I would probably say Waterson, Calvin Hobbs.

00:06:33
Speaker 2: Probably yeah, solid answer.

00:06:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, Peanuts, maybe Charles Schultz, those are all up there. But yeah, you can also maybe try to do that with scientists.

00:06:41
Speaker 2: Right, Absolutely, you can, and we're going to try so.

00:06:44
Speaker 1: To the end of the podcast, we'll be asking the question who was the most influential scientist? Are you trying to make scientists influencers?

00:06:57
Speaker 3: Daniel?

00:06:58
Speaker 2: Here, I'm trying to make some scientists as cool as sports stars. You know, there should be like science bars where people drink beer and argue loudly about who was the greatest scientist of all time?

00:07:08
Speaker 4: Hmm.

00:07:09
Speaker 1: Interesting Now if that greatest scientist happens to not be a physicist, though, what did you be offended or like? Are we asking scientists in general just greatest physicists?

00:07:19
Speaker 2: I think scientists Some of the folks that listeners mentioned were scientists before we even really had the concept of what physics was.

00:07:25
Speaker 3: So we're going broad here.

00:07:26
Speaker 2: Absolutely.

00:07:27
Speaker 1: And I noticed you put this question in the past tense, who was the most influential scientist? Do you think maybe the most influential scientists could be alive today or are we only looking at dead people?

00:07:37
Speaker 2: Oh that's a great point. I hadn't even thought about that. I'm reflecting my own bias here. I guess I was thinking about people who had an impact on history, and it's hard for somebody who just had an idea today to have an impact on history the way Einstein did, for example, So I think it takes a little while for that impact play out well.

00:07:56
Speaker 1: As usual, we were wondering how many people out there had thought about this question or have an opinion, beer or not about who is the most influential scientist.

00:08:04
Speaker 2: Thanks very much to everybody who participates in this segment of the podcast. We really appreciate your time, energy, and enthusiasm. If you'd like to share yours for the podcast, please don't be shy. Write to me two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. So think about it for a second. Who do you think is the most influential scientist? And I'm going to just give you the little suggestion that maybe I am one of the most influential scientists. But here's what people had to say. My guess would be the mathematician Urdos. I think it was Copernicus.

00:08:35
Speaker 5: I would say it was Nicholas Fleming, who fond about antibiotics.

00:08:40
Speaker 2: I would say Einstein.

00:08:42
Speaker 6: I think it has to be honest with Sonedjate reaction Einstein. But then when you start thinking about it, You've got likes of Faraday and Newton and Baul shortly out what box would you put him in? And could you tell he was in the box without opening it?

00:08:54
Speaker 3: Galileo Newton and Einstein.

00:08:57
Speaker 5: Albert Einstein stands out Newton because it all starts with him.

00:09:03
Speaker 2: Einstein's the winner there.

00:09:04
Speaker 3: Charles Starwin, Charles Darwin, Bill Ny the Science Guy saying he's the best, with Daniel of course coming in a close second.

00:09:12
Speaker 1: Every all right, some interesting answers and a lot of names you might expect Isaac Newton, Einstein, Galileo Darwin, Bill Ny, the science guy, Bill Ny, who's not actually a scientist by training.

00:09:29
Speaker 3: He's an engineer, which I think makes him even cooler.

00:09:32
Speaker 2: Mmm. Wow, that's pretty influential.

00:09:34
Speaker 1: But yeah, a lot of common names you might expect. Aristotle as well. Was he technically a scientist or a philosopher?

00:09:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a long debate about when the science began and who's doing science and who's doing philosophy and the exact distinction between them, which always comes down to arguing about definitions.

00:09:50
Speaker 1: So how are we going to rank people then if we don't even have a solid definition of science.

00:09:55
Speaker 2: I think most of the time in these conversations is spent arguing about how to argue about it. Really, that's the core question. It's like, how do you measure this? I know?

00:10:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I guess that happens in sports too, like most trophies, most the games, more points.

00:10:11
Speaker 2: Can you really be the greatest of all times if you never want a championship even if you have the scoring record? You know, how is Einstein's dribble against Galileo's rebounding? This kind of stuff?

00:10:22
Speaker 4: Yeah?

00:10:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so what are we going to use on the podcast here today? Where are we just going to argue about how to measure the influence?

00:10:29
Speaker 2: Well? I thought I was kind of looking forward to arguing about how to measure it.

00:10:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, you might have some opinions, So I see, we're not actually going to answer the question of the episode as usual.

00:10:43
Speaker 3: I want to argue got it now?

00:10:47
Speaker 2: I think probably lots of people have different opinions about who might be the most influential, But to me, I think the question is like who has shifted the course of human history or human thought the most? Who would have the most impact if you'd like deleted them from the.

00:10:59
Speaker 3: Historical record, assuming that nobody else would have figured it out.

00:11:02
Speaker 2: I guess, well, that is the question. You know, if you figured out something awesome, but there were ten people right on your tails about to figure it out, then did you really have a singular impact on the field. You just sort of like in first place, by zero point oh one seconds, you didn't really have that much of an impact on human history by that metric. But there might be some people who had a singular vision, who had an idea that nobody else was capable of, and if you deleted them from human history, it might take hundreds of years before we figured that thing out.

00:11:31
Speaker 1: It sounds like you're also just kind of thinking in terms of our thoughts and our theories about science and how the world works. I wonder if you thought about maybe like live say that could be another way to measure the impact of a scientist.

00:11:45
Speaker 2: Or you could also go darker and think about lives lost. You know, some of our most influential scientists helped develop nuclear weapons technology, for example, or other kinds of weapons technology that resulted in lots of deaths.

00:11:57
Speaker 1: Oh, we're also going dark We're also maybe consider during the warst scientists I mean.

00:12:04
Speaker 2: We just said influential, We didn't say have a positive influence, right. For example, if you create a doomsday device and destroy the entire planet, that's pretty influential.

00:12:13
Speaker 3: Right right right, you'd be the vote, the worst of all time.

00:12:18
Speaker 2: It's just the magnitude, not the sign that matters here.

00:12:21
Speaker 1: I feel like though, just by posing the question, we're implying some sort of positive influence.

00:12:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so. I mean, most scientists out there are trying to improve our lives, either specifically through developing some technology that makes life easier or more productive, or just in sheer understanding the nature of the universe. I think science overall has a positive goal, and most scientists have had a positive impact on.

00:12:45
Speaker 3: Our experience, right right. Nobody wants to be the vote.

00:12:48
Speaker 2: Nobody wants to be the vote.

00:12:50
Speaker 1: Although I noticed you said most scientists want to have a positive impact.

00:12:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, most of us at all. Not all. I mean, there's the guy who invented lead in gasoline, for example, he made a whole generation dumber.

00:13:01
Speaker 3: M Maybe he was the most influential signer.

00:13:04
Speaker 2: It could be, or it could have been the guy who figured that out and saved the next generation afterwards. There's so many ways to measure it. You know, within academia, we have our own metrics. Like if you're a professor and you're going up for promotion, then there are ways they measure your performance, all of which are deeply flawed, you know, like number of papers or number of citations of your paper. And then they have fancy metrics. One of them is called an H index, which is number of papers that have at least that many citations. So if you have an H index of one hundred, it means you have one hundred papers with at least one hundred citations for example.

00:13:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a famous index in academia. Have you measured yours, Daniel.

00:13:43
Speaker 2: Oh, I have a ridiculous H index because I have more than a thousand papers because I'm a member of the Atlas collaboration without dozens and dozens of papers every year. So it's just totally a broken metric for somebody like me.

00:13:55
Speaker 1: But if you exclude those crazy collaboration papers, isn't there like an adjustment factor or like a handicap.

00:14:02
Speaker 2: So my official H index is two hundred and eight, which is pretty bonkers.

00:14:07
Speaker 3: That's including the big collaboration papers.

00:14:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's including the big collaboration papers. So it's not real. I mean, just to calibrate. Somebody like Ed Witten, probably the smartest guy on the planet right now, has an h index of one eighty seven.

00:14:19
Speaker 3: I haven't heard of him, so I guess he maybe's not that influential.

00:14:23
Speaker 2: He basically invented string theory and won the Fields Medal, which is the best prize in mathematics as a physicist, So definitely a smart dude.

00:14:32
Speaker 1: Well, that's another way to measure things with prizes. You said there's a physicist who's won it twice.

00:14:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, there is one physicist who's won the Nobel Prize twice, and overall there are only like two hundred physicists who've ever won the Physics Nobel Prize.

00:14:44
Speaker 1: But only one that has won it twice. M yeah, maybe this person is the goat. Maybe, But the Nobel Prize is famously a flawed metric. I mean, super smart people, very well deserving like Vera Rubin and Jocelyn Burnell never won the Nobel Prize, probably because it's by a panel of dudes, and so it's famously biased against women and other underrepresented minorities. So maybe not the best metric, right.

00:15:08
Speaker 3: It's also biased against Daniel Whitson, which means it totally flawed obviously.

00:15:13
Speaker 2: No, it's probably actually biased towards me being a white male Jew. So if I haven't won the Nobel Prize so far, it's just my fault.

00:15:20
Speaker 3: Well, who's this person who's won it twice? I mean, what did they win it for?

00:15:23
Speaker 2: Well, he was a physicist and an electrical engineer. He won it in fifty six for the invention of the transistor and then in seventy two for a theory of super conductivity. So definitely a smart guy. What's his name, John Bardeen?

00:15:36
Speaker 1: John Bardeen invented the transistor, won the Nobel Prize for that, and then he invented super conductivity.

00:15:42
Speaker 2: He invented a theory to explain super conductivity. It's called the BCS theory. He's the b and BCS theory.

00:15:48
Speaker 1: So without this person, maybe we wouldn't have transistors, which means we wouldn't have computers.

00:15:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty influential.

00:15:54
Speaker 1: Wow, Okay, I would put him pretty high up on the Goad list, especially because he is an engineer, which automatically makes him great.

00:16:04
Speaker 2: That does score him a lot of points. Yes. Also, based on his picture from Wikipedia, he looks like he has pretty good hygiene.

00:16:11
Speaker 3: Oh oh boy, Yeah, that must be his engineering side.

00:16:14
Speaker 2: Obviously. I have to say, having been to an engineering conference or two, engineers definitely dress better than physicists.

00:16:22
Speaker 3: Oh it's not that hard. He's sitting in a little bar.

00:16:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, there's just a lot more ties and clean shirts at engineering conference.

00:16:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, blazers. Engineers are big into blazers.

00:16:35
Speaker 1: All right, Well, this is a big question. Obviously, we can spend several hours just talking about how to rank these. But Daniel, you happened to interview a writer who wrote a book sort of about this idea of who is the most influential scientist?

00:16:51
Speaker 2: That's right. I spoke to Ananio Baticharia. He's the author of a recent book called The Man from the Future, and in this book he lays out the case that John von Neumann might be the most influential scientist who ever lived.

00:17:05
Speaker 1: Interesting, and John van Neuman was a scientist or an or an engineer or.

00:17:10
Speaker 2: He's definitely a physicist. I don't know if he has any engineering credentials, but he has incredible impact over like abstract areas of mathematics, fundamental questions and quantum mechanics, he invented the architecture of the modern computer. He basically wrote the book on game theory. This was definitely a smart and influential guy.

00:17:28
Speaker 3: Hmmm interesting.

00:17:40
Speaker 1: All right, Well, here's Daniel's interview with author Ananio Badicharia, author of The Man from the Future.

00:17:48
Speaker 2: So then it's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast. Onna know about Acharia. He has a PhD in biophysics from Imperial College in London. He's been a science correspondent at The Economist and editor at Nature and medical researcher. Welcome to the podcast.

00:18:03
Speaker 5: Thanks very much, Daniel, it's a pleasure to be here.

00:18:06
Speaker 2: So you have a background in biophysics and you work as a science journalist. Help me understand why you decided to write a book about von Neuman.

00:18:15
Speaker 4: Ah.

00:18:15
Speaker 5: Yes, Well, my undergraduate degree was physics, so I've always kind of flitted from field to field. I moved from one thing that I knew something about into a new field that I've known nothing about. This book was pretty much the same. But the longer answer, I guess is that I'd been through a few journalism jobs. I'd worked at Nature, and then I ended up at the economist, and over the years, I found myself hearing von Neuman's name in all of these incredibly different contexts. So you'd have economics correspondence talking about the latest No Bell winner in economics, and that there would be the game theories of von Neuman's name would come up. There, there were people on the tech paths of the magazine and we're talking about quantum computing, and again you'd have von Noyman's name mentioned in that context. And then there was artificial intelligence, and you know the people that were writing stories of artificial intelligence. Yeah, you know, you kind of have a have to look at what von Noyman did back back then. So there was this guy who turned out been dead for seventy years almost and his name was coming up more than ever. So I really wanted to understand why that was. And when I looked into the why of this, rather than look around for his biography, I discovered that there hasn't really been an attempt to try and string all of his ideas together and explain the relevance of this person to the twenty first century. And so that's what I set out to do.

00:20:10
Speaker 2: Well. I think he did it very well. It's a really fun tour of all the amazing intellectual impacts that von Norman has had. And in the book you make a pretty strong case for him being one of the smartest people in the twentieth century, maybe one of the smartest people ever, which is pretty astounding. I thought it'd be fun for us to take the listeners on a little bit of a tour of some of his greatest accomplishments. And I want to start with something that we talk about on the podcast all the time, which is quantum mechanics. You're writing the book about how he didn't invent wave based quantum mechanics or matrix based quantum mechanics, but he did something maybe even more difficult, which is that he unified them. Help us understand why that was important and why it was so difficult.

00:20:53
Speaker 5: Right, So this is kind of von Neumann's post doc. Right he's at the University of Gerzingen, and he's right straight after his PhD. I think he's twenty two at this stage. And when he turns up at Gerzegan, I think on a fellowship from the Rockefeller he's there to do maths, you know, he's not there to do physics. So he's there because David Hilbert is the leading figure in mathematics of the of the day and he is head of the maths department at Kersingham, and so von Norman comes as kind of his apprentice, although in a way the apprentice has already begun to outshine the master. But at the same time as von Neuman's there, there's another kind of vonder kind, which is Heisenberg. And Heisenberg has recently invented this new science called quantum mechanics, the science I guess of atoms and atomic behavior. And his approach is through these matrices, which are grids of numbers. Now, Heisenberg wasn't actually deeply concerned with what these matrices were saying about the underlying nature of what was going on in the atom, right, So he had started with atomic spectra, which are like what happens when you excite an atom of neon or whatever. If you give an electric shock, the electrons get excited, they drop back down, and they release a photon of light of a particular wavelength. And so you had all these spectra of different atoms, and he was kind of trying to understand those, and that's how quantum mechanics really began trying to mathematize this. So he had these grids of numbers that told you about these different energy levels that the electrons were jumping between. Now, within a few months of this version of quantum mechanics coming out, there was another one, and that was by Schrodinger, and that was based on waves, which physicists were much more comfortable with than Heisenberg's matrices. In fact, nobody initially understood what matrices were or why they should be useful in this way, and it took some digging around to find out. And now matrices are kind of discussed in high school. Now, what von Neuman began to work on was uniting these two visions because people were like, well, you know, you've got these waves on the one hand, and you've got matrices on the other. You've got sort of electrons jumping around from between energy levels in Heisenberg's theory and enschroedingers you've got this idea that maybe particles have wave like properties. So which one is it? And what von Neuman does is he digs down to maths and he proves mathematically that these are essentially two sides of the same coin. And this is kind of like, and.

00:23:55
Speaker 2: Was it clear to everybody that that was going to be possible. I mean, I remember reading that this was sort of an acrimonious to be there was no love lost between Heisenberg and Schrodinger. I remember reading that Heisenberg found schrodinger theory called repulsive, you know, and was like offended by what Schrodinger was writing about the importance of visualizability of these ideas exactly.

00:24:16
Speaker 5: So Heisenberg, in fact, if you excuse the language, so basically Schrodinger's theory was crap and.

00:24:24
Speaker 2: In the original German somehow he said.

00:24:28
Speaker 5: Exactly. There was no lot of lost between them, and Heisenberg thought it was almost deeply unscientific to look beyond what the maths was telling you because you couldn't see inside an atom. And Schrodinger was hated matrices, so he just hated this mathematical formalization, and most physicists actually were very uncomfortable with it, so they were quite glad when Schrodinger came along with his waves. But what people could understand is why are these two incredibly different formalizations giving the same answers Who's right? And it turned out that they both were and physicists now will tend to use the matrix approach when a problem is more tractable with matrices, or they'll use waves when the Schrodinger equation, as it's known, gives you better results. So but van Noyman did this theoretical thing, and then he goes on and builds on that. And he builds on that in two ways. One he spins out this entire theory of how the operators, which is like I guess the functions, the stuff that tells you what to do to the maths, like if you want to find the energy, what do you do to the Schrodinger? What do you do to the description of the equation. He looked at the entire maths of this, and this in itself, this operator theory of Ornyman algebras is now really it's at the cutting edge of mathematics again. And then on the other hand, he went and laid out the entire high kind of mathematical groundwork of quantum mechanics, and by doing so he allowed people to ask philosophical more philosophical questions, which again where we're now coming back to, because if you want to build a quantum computer, for example, you want to know, well, will we ever be able to string cubits together? Will we ever be able to kind of entangle these cubits and be able to do real useful calculations with them? And to answer that question you have to go back to what von Neumann showed we could know with the maths. So these in some ways what he was doing at the time was became unfashionable in the sort of sixties, and I think it's all come back now, which is why his name kept coming up in this field.

00:27:00
Speaker 2: It's sort of amazing the impact that mathematicians have had on physics, just sort of like during their coffee breaks. You know, this is like not something Neuman was targeting. This is not like the central task of his life, and yet he made this enormous contribution. It reminds me of you know, Emmy and Another's theorem. It's just something she was sort of doodled, you know, while she was being distracted by her actual hard math problems, comes in and makes a fundamental impact on the whole shape of modern physics. Is that how we should understand Noyman's impact, That he is such a genius that essentially he can make this impact in a field that's not even his.

00:27:37
Speaker 5: Own, right, So this is I find absolutely fascinating about von Neumann.

00:27:44
Speaker 2: Right.

00:27:45
Speaker 5: So he writes later on this essay called The Mathematician, where he set out his philosophy of mathematics, and he really deeply felt that if mathematicians stray too far from physics and the physical world and they're looking for problems, he says that mathematics becomes baroque. I guess he means it becomes not beautiful, not interesting, too self absorbed. So he was constantly looking around at the world for ways to apply mathematics. And he had this extraordinarily logical mind, and he would kind of set something up in logical terms and formal logical terms and then kind of bulldoze his way through it, and a problem that it seemed completely complicated or intractable would suddenly become simple in his hands. And that was his approach. So from roots in looking at abstruse mathematical logic, which is where he started, he ends up applying kind of logic to almost every area of cutting edge science that you can think of.

00:28:53
Speaker 2: It is really amazing the impact he's had, and sometimes his impact seems to be so great because of his reputation that's almost closed off areas of research. Something I'm really fascinated by is his impact on the philosophy of quantum mechanics and these hidden variable theorems. He arrived at this big result, this no go theorem, essentially claiming that there could be no hidden variables in quantum mechanics. The quantum mechanics was absolutely random. There was no possibility for the outcome of these experiments to actually be determined by some hidden piece of information. And that shut off basically everybody from exploring that area and for decades until Bell and other folks Hermann for example, discovered that there was actually a flaw in his logic, right, that he had essentially made a mistake. Do you see that result as a sort of an embarrassment or a mistake or what does that tell us about von Neumann?

00:29:45
Speaker 5: So this is really interesting. So I explored this actually in my chapter on quantum mechanics, and I get reasonably tube into it, And the truth is, there's actually believe it or not. All these years later, there's still debate about what von Noyman meant. So let's unpack it a little bit. Hidden variables theory. So imagine you were a physicist back in I don't know, the nineteenth eighteenth century, and you were interested in the properties of a gas, right, so you might posit as they did, that there are these particles bouncing around inside a box, and when you warm them up, they bounce around even faster, and that gives rise to the properties that you can see, like whatever pressure and things like that you know in the temperature of the gas. And they're hidden because at the time nobody knew that these molecules really existed. Right now, in quantum mechanics, we still haven't found those hidden variables. Ultimately, what we know about quantum mechanics is it's still random. But you're a physicist and I'm sure you'll feel me in but deed down, it's random.

00:30:55
Speaker 4: Now.

00:30:55
Speaker 5: What von Noyman actually showed with his theorem wor that if you approached quantum mechanics in the way that he did, and to be fair to him, it is the only self consistent mathematical approach that we know of. In a way, he shows that if you use his maths, if you if it's a Hilbert space, as he called it, even though he'd done all the math. It's a Hilbert space type theory. There's no theory that's a Hilbert space type theory can be a hidden variables theory that explains this kind of randomness and strange you know what, you know, entanglement I hate you know, everybody hates it when I say this, especially physicists. But it's what Einstein referred to as you know, spooky action at a distance and so on that you know, beyond that, you know, you just have to accept that.

00:31:48
Speaker 2: Let's just remind the listeners what we're talking about here in terms of entanglement. Right, you have some situation where like a photon decays the two particles, and so you know something about the pair of particles. You know, because the photon is spin zero that then the two particles have to preserve that angle momentum. And so if one is spin up, the other one is spinned down. And we've talked on the podcast several times about how even if those particles are now far apart, if one is spin up, the other has to be spinned down, and so measuring one of them tells you about the other one. And the debate was about whether those things are already determined when the particles are created and they're flying apart, and the fact that you don't know whether one is spin up or spin down just reflects your lack of knowledge that it actually is already determined, or if the universe essentially waits, if it's undetermined and it's only fixed when you make the measurement, which is bizarre because if you're then measuring one particle far away from the other one, somehow they're both determined the moment you're measuring one of them. And so von Neuman's claim is to have proven that it's impossible to have any hidden information that actually determines this. But there's an important distinction right between local hidden variables and global hidden variables, right, isn't that the issue between Okay.

00:33:01
Speaker 5: Well, I'm going to leave that with you, But I think the sticking point is that what was von Nouman trying to show, So people now argue, was he really ruling out all possible theories, all possible invariable theories, or was he just ruling out a subset? And Okay, I'm biased. I go with the historians and the physicists who are arguing, actually he was just ruling out an important subset. But I think you should tell people about the Bells estined that it seems you know so far that you know this, this view has kind of survived quite well in a way.

00:33:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. The idea that there's local information that moves with the particles is ruled out by Bell's experiment, and so by Nooman was certainly right about that. I think what Bell was astounded by is that his experiment and all Nouman's theories don't rule out global hidden variables, the idea that there could be like some pilot wave controlling the universe. And I agree with you, that's a very strange idea of the universe. On the other hand, it's not ruled out by these experiments, right, it could actually be our universe. What's fascinating to me is the impact one man can have on the field. Whether he intended to rule out global hidden variables or not. That was the understanding. People were like, oh, well, you can't go there. Noman's been there, and you know he doesn't get stuff wrong. So if he shut the door, don't even bother opening it.

00:34:34
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, and that was purely based on his reputation for just coming in and solving problems, just solving these intractable problems. So you know, partly it's his fault because he never done worked back and said, well, actually, you know, that's not what I meant, because he's already moved on to something else. But there's a really interesting passage in Boehm, who came up with Bohemian you know, the Bomian sort of wave theory, which is hidden variable's theory, and he says he gave his lecture in front of von Neuman, and von Neuman didn't contradict me. So even Bohm is in awe of von Momen. Yeah, quite right.

00:35:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, it tells something about the power of personality. So let's move on to a completely separate topic where von Neuman made a huge impact, and that's two computers. As I think you were saying earlier, every computer we're using, almost every computer ever built, follows a von Neumann architecture. What does that mean? Why is it so influential?

00:35:39
Speaker 5: All?

00:35:39
Speaker 3: Right?

00:35:39
Speaker 5: Well, in short, it was the first description, the first logical description of a modern programmable computer, right, and it came out, I think with his first draft of a report on the DVAC, which I believe was nineteen forty six. So before this there were computers, but there were kind of plugboard type things, and if you wanted them to do something else, then you had to switch around the wires and unplug them. And this was a pretty involved job. Now, our smartphones don't work that way, our laptops don't work that way. They run programs. And what Fulnoyment described was, in broad terms, a machine that would have a very large working memory. It would have a kind of control unit central process, so that would shuttle instructions back and forth, and you know, input and output and so on, and that general architecture, general description of what a computer should look like, despite it having drawbacks. Right, there's something called the von Nooyment bottleneck. So if your computer ever freezes and you know, you see, you know, whatever whatever they have nowadays, if it's a whirling clock face or something like that, then it's got stuck in the full Noyment bottleneck. And that's because instruction. Too many instructions are trying to go in and out between the memory and the central process or at the same time. But we haven't really found a better way to do computing. I mean, people are working on it and sure there's attempts to do parallel computing, and of course deep neural networks don't work that way. But in terms of almost all the computers that we're likely to use, they still work on the ful noiment architecture.

00:37:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hard to overestimate the influence of this kind of piece of work. And when you're at the very beginning of the field, you can sort of like set the whole direction of the international community by making these choices about like how much memory do you have and how do instructions get moved from memory to the CPU, and the whole idea of having like a central processing unit and memory that seems so basic to us, But it could have gone another way, right, it could have been if we didn't have of Unknoyment or somebody else organized computers, our entire computer are chitecture could be different. It's fascinating to dig into these details that really at the foundation of our entire technological society.

00:38:08
Speaker 5: Yes, and of course, you know, I try and unpack these things in the book to show that unlike in many biographies of you know, in inverted coom as great men, right, von Neuman was influenced by others, and he influenced others, right, So I do think, and I tried to show that he came out with these nuggets these he was in the right place at the right time. But his ideas were built upon by lesions of people, and he drew also on the ideas of legions of people, and of course that got him into trouble. I mean, when you look at the Vat report, he was working with the group who had invented the Aniac computer. Now, the Aniac you have to get you know, your string of adjective is right when you come to describe these things. Otherwise computer historians get very annoyed with you. But it wasn't strictly programmable, but it was digital, it was electronic. It had lots of things going for it. But it was initially invented to calculate where shells would land during the war, which was a huge problem, and it was also a problem during the First World War. But by the time the NIAC was ready to run, the war was over and so they needed other problems for it to solve, and there had been some talk within the group. So Mockley and Ekert were the designers of the original Eniac and there were some too, well, we really should you have a big memory, and Ekert invented this big new memory, the Mercury delay line. And but what von Neuman did was, using this incredible logical mind that he had, was coalesced these ideas into a single document and then without his permission or the permission of the team, of course, this was circulated widely across the world to every group, practically every group in the world that was working on a kind of Nassin computer. And that was Goldstein who was involved in the any App project. And then there's this acrimonious falling out. But then Van Norman moves and he sets up his own computing project at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he puts all of the patterns in the public domain. But even more importantly, when they're building this computer, which is it's one of the first program computers, but it's not the first, he sends every single report, every progress report along the way is published. And this in fact proves to have an even bigger impact on computing than the EDVAC report where he describes this architecture. So it's kind of a true ProMED attack. And I say in the book that. Wow, I asked, more or less ask the question. It makes I think it makes him the godfather of open source computing as well, in a way becaus had Mocklely and Eckert succeeded in patenting the computer. It might be it might be a different world. Progress might be slower. Who knows.

00:41:17
Speaker 2: Who knows, because Van Norman is not just like a smart guy in some rooms scriveling with equations. He's a very clever man, right in terms of strategy, as you were saying, essentially invented game theory, starting from like analyzing how living room board games go all the way up to thinking about nuclear strategy. Tell us about the impact he made on game theory.

00:41:39
Speaker 5: Yeah, so some people see game theory as the product of a of a fairly cynical mind, and so he's had to bad press for that. But the more I kind of dug into his personality, the more I felt that that was a bit simple minded in a way, it was. It was a very complex person. So you have to bear in mind that he's Jewish, and he starts his life in a very wealthy, privileged Jewish family. Is dad's a banker. He's kind of used to living the good life. And I get the feeling that from his youth. Really he thinks more or less the best of people. He doesn't really understand people. He has a fairly you know, he's a mathematician, and he's extremely an extremely able mathematician, but I don't think he was completely ofa with how other people thought or felt.

00:42:40
Speaker 2: Right.

00:42:41
Speaker 5: But then what happens is there are two things. One is that in his native Hungary, in Budapest, a communist government installs itself after the First World War, and it's pretty brutal. But then they get overthrown by a kind of reactionary, sort of right wing government, and that that's even more bruce. Although in there are hangings in the street. It's just awful. And his message from this is like, I don't like totalitarianism at all. So he's he already begins to come out against that. And then by nineteen thirty he's already seeing something terrible is happening in Germany. He just censors it and in his letters start to get filled with premonitions of disaster, of a second World War. He thinks some you know, Germany, which he kind of sees as the center of the intellectual universe. Really he sees it beginning to go strive with anti Semitism, and so Princeton offers him a job in nineteen thirty and he's gone right, and he sees what's happening from Afar, and he hates the Nazis. He hates the Nazis, he hates Communism. He really really spises what's happening there. And he loses as a result of the Nazis. You know, this this great country that he saw, Germany, he sees, you know, the people getting behind Hitler or many of them, and he loses. He completely loses in someways his faith in human nature. So game theory is kind of the product of somebody who's trying to understand human nature and trying also to apply his logical mind to it, but almost in a kind of I can't really go know what's going on inside you, So I'm just going to try and do my best with what I've got, which is how you behave And the way that you've behaved recently is not that great, so you know, And famously his first wife divorces him, Marriott, she's also from a fairly wealthy Jewish background, and then she goes on to kind of great things herself. She becomes this amazing science administrator who sets up brooke Haven Lab. I think. She leaves him because he spends too much time thinking. She runs off for the post talk I think, and ends up getting married. So but their agreement for their daughter is still with us today, thankfully. Marina is that for the first fourteen I think years, she will spend most of her time with her mum, and then only spend the holidays with her dad, and then at fourteen, when she kind of reaches the age of maturity. From fourteen onwards, she'll stay with her dad most of the time and visit her mom and her stepdad shuring the holidays. Now, vol Nouman remarries pretty quickly to another Hungarian Jewish lady, Clara Dan, who ends up becoming the first modern computer programmer. Book. But it's kind of quite a tense household, as Marina says, it's it was quite naive of these two people to imagine that the teenage years are the age of rationality and reason, but that's what ended up happening, and so kind of game theories formulated to try and make some some sense, because you have to remember that before for Neumann, you know this, this was just considered impossible. And now game theory has become more complex and has tried to take into account real human behavior, right, but until for Neuman's early proofs, there was nobody had made any inroads on this at all.

00:46:47
Speaker 2: I think it's really impressive when people tackle a completely new field and try to bring it to heal mathematically something which seems maybe impossible to describe our ability any success to you know, describe the physical universe in all of its incredible complexity, using simple mathematical laws. I'm in awe of it when somebody can take the first stab, you know, that's like that's really doing science. And so in your book and some of the opening passages, you make this comment that many people think that von Neumann is smarter than Einstein, smarter than godel I actually pulled some of my listeners and I asked them, said, who do you think is the most influential scientists of all time? And you know, the results are basically what you would expect. Einstein gets a lot of mentions, Newton got Leo Darwin, somebody said Aristotle, somebody commented Bill kni a science guy. You know, Noimen wasn't up there. What do you think about this comparison? What's your argument that Norman was essentially one of the smartest people ever, one of the most influential scientists, And why do you think he hasn't penetrated to the wider public consciousness?

00:47:50
Speaker 5: So some people just get better pressed, right, I mean, Einstein had gray hair, think later in his life, and so people tend to forgive him various interesting parts of his personal life and so on. And you know, nobody remembers Paul Poincare, who had come up with quite a lot of the special theory of relativity before before Einstein, and you know, lots of names care forgotten and Gaus. You know, how could you not how could you not watching gas Yeah, exactly exactly, And I think I think part of the reason is, I think in the public mind there's this view of the great genius, right, they're working alone, they're usually a theorist, and Einstein just fits into this category brilliantly, doesn't he. And you can name what Einstein did, it's relativity, you know, And if if you're lucky, you remember a couple of years equals mc squared. I wanted von Neuman do Okay, if you get somewhere, you go, oh, he had something to do with the programmable computer. But the story is complicated. But he did all of these other things, and I think stringing those together and making sense of them is a difficult task. And I promise you I spent two half years on this. It wasn't easier. Mathematicians have told me told me this as well, So so it's a complicated story and making some sense of that is hard. And then I think von Neumann more than more than many. You have to tell the whole story. You have to show his influence, you have to follow it down to the present day, because for many years, in fact, what you got was von Neuman's, you know, stories of kind of arithmetical brilliance. So he'd turn up at some party and somebody would ask him, you know, some crazy puzzle and he'd solve it just like that. But that doesn't really tell you the deep stuff that he did, the fact that he was so ahead on so many things, from the computer to game theory, all of which really has aped modern life. So you know, we were just talking about game theory, and it's a little known fact that Google, Amazon, all of these companies their algorithms. You know, what gives them eighty percent of their profits is advertising, often and the algorithms that run their advertising platforms a game theoretical, right, So Vonnoima is responsible for that eighty percent, and then the other twenty percent comes from computing. That's the other as is responsible for that other twenty percent two. But to get there to truly appreciate that, you know, it's a it's a tough story, I think, and it's a tough sell. You can't just go, ah, yeah, it was this and this and it's how science works. But I don't think many people even now are ready to appreciate how science really works. And to appreciate Vonnoima properly, I think I think you need to kind of acknowledge that, yes, he was, as I say, one of the smartest people. Maybe you know, Einstein was in some ways a deeper thinker, and you know, he had a degree of scientific imagination, which I think von Norman envied. But then that wasn't what von Noyman was about. Von Norman was about distilling, almost like magic, the essential logic of particular things. And that's also a gift, and you know he was a mathematician and not a theoretical physicist.

00:51:28
Speaker 4: So yeah, well.

00:51:42
Speaker 2: What do you think is the value in this sort of like ranking the greatest genius in history? Is it sort of the way we talk about, you know, who was the best footballer ever? Was it Jordan or Lebron? The best basketball player ever? Is it just like a fun conversation or do you think there's like real historical or intellectual value in like trying to put these people on a spectrum?

00:52:03
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm not a fan of it. I'm not a fan of it, but you want to draw people into absolutely fascinating stories. And the way that I approach this story is more is almost a technological history of the twentieth twenty first century, right, So von Noyman is to me the essential thread that runs through everything from the atom bomb to game theory to his proof that machines can reproduce, which I fear we may yet think of as his most important work yet. So I think if we you know, you start ranking, it's a fun parlor game, but with the best of it, you start to probe, well, what do we actually mean by that? And you know who uses relativity day to day. We all use computers, right, I know, relativity is yes, everybody's to jump down my throat and say GPS blah blah blah setting satellites up. Yes, yes, yes, but you know the stuff that affects us from the economy to the way even though we think about optimizing our lives as if it's some game theory algorithm, you know, as if we're maximizing utility, right, that's the way. Certainly many people in Silicon Valley tend to think about these things. Well, hang on, what are the mathematical assumptions I underlie this how we ended up here of all places?

00:53:34
Speaker 1: Right?

00:53:34
Speaker 5: And so if we start to have those discussions, then great, rank away. But you know, if it's otherwise, it's just like a rather sterile debate, isn't it.

00:53:45
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think the real value is in just understanding the impact that one person can have on the world, and that just with your mind, just thinking, just solving puzzles and being curious, you can change the whole future history of the human race. Incredible. I hope that inspires young people out there, you know that who is the next von Neuman? It makes me wonder Well, thanks very much for joining us on the podcast today. It Brooke was really fun. I learned a lot about physics and technology and history. Tell everyone where they can find it.

00:54:16
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is available in all good bookshops and online. It's called A Man for the Future.

00:54:22
Speaker 2: All right, thanks very much for joining us today.

00:54:24
Speaker 5: Thank you very much, Saniel.

00:54:26
Speaker 3: All Right, Well, he makes a pretty good case for von Neuman.

00:54:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. One thing about von Neuman is that people who knew him tended to consider him the smartest person they ever met. Even people who like New Einstein and New Girdle and New Nuther and stuff like that. There's something about this guy that, just like Reedy, it's smartness when you talk to him, and that should count. I don't know if that should count, but it's one reason why he's so well respected among academics that I have met him, who have met him, Yeah, exactly. And the lore of von Neuman has also probably it through the field. I mean, in the interview we talked about that one time he made a claim about quantum mechanics which was technically incorrect and shut down a whole area of research for decades and decades because everybody was like, well, von Neuman figured that out, So I'm sure he was right even though he was actually wrong in that case.

00:55:16
Speaker 3: And so what he was wrong, Yeah, that doesn't sound like positive influence.

00:55:21
Speaker 2: Well, Anania makes the case that he wasn't wrong, he was just misunderstood. He was proving something else. So this is a long debate in philosophy ex science about what exactly von Norman was proving and whether people misunderstood him or whether he made a mistake or whatever.

00:55:36
Speaker 1: And remind me how many Nobel prizes did he win?

00:55:40
Speaker 2: Zero?

00:55:42
Speaker 3: Zero? That's too less than my guy.

00:55:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. And now that he's dead, he can't ever win any Nobel prizes, so he'll never catch up to your dude.

00:55:51
Speaker 3: Yep, yep.

00:55:52
Speaker 2: But that's only because he died young. He died in nineteen fifty seven, so he didn't really have a chance because you know, you can't win the Nobel Prize posthumously. So he had this huge impacts on science, and then he died, the Nobel Prize didn't really have a chance to give him any of these prizes.

00:56:06
Speaker 1: Well, I guess that's one thing you should add to your agenda is stay alive as long as possible to increase your chances of being the greatest of all time.

00:56:14
Speaker 2: Step one, figure out something awesome. Step two, stay alive to collect prizes. I'm still working on step one.

00:56:19
Speaker 3: Well no, now you have to figure out three amazing things to be my guy.

00:56:24
Speaker 2: True.

00:56:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Well, an interesting discussion about influence and science, about big ideas and how sometimes that influence can be positive or negative.

00:56:36
Speaker 2: Either way, everybody who's thinking about the universe is having an impact on the human experience. So go out there, keep thinking, asking questions, and pushing forward the forefront of human knowledge.

00:56:46
Speaker 3: And let the universe influence you.

00:56:48
Speaker 2: Even if you'll never be number one on his list.

00:56:51
Speaker 1: You can be number two, Daniel. You can be the number two Daniel Watson I've ever met.

00:56:55
Speaker 2: I don't want your pity. No thanks, I'm gonna earn it.

00:56:58
Speaker 4: Man.

00:56:58
Speaker 3: Wait, no, it's a great What are you talking about?

00:57:02
Speaker 2: Number two of two?

00:57:03
Speaker 3: Wow, it's better than being zero of two.

00:57:09
Speaker 2: Now zero is the first place, man, I count from zero. I'm a computer scientist.

00:57:13
Speaker 3: I thought you were a physicist. I don't think you have a degree in computer science.

00:57:18
Speaker 2: Then I have a Bachelor of Science and computer science. Oh all right, all.

00:57:21
Speaker 1: Right, all right, so yeah, all right, you're accredited. But anyways, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.

00:57:35
Speaker 2: For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media, where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.