My Amazon Review of Ananyo Bhattacharya's "The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann"

 

Genius

 

Something was in the water in fin de siècle Budapest. Out of that community came Nobel Laureates in physics Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard, the rocket pioneer Theodore von Karman, and the subject of Ananyo Bhattacharya biography John von Neumann. I would note that the book is more a biography of von Neumann’s ideas rather than a full biography of his life.

 

Von Neumann was born into a very upper-middle class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary in 1903. He was a child prodigy from the beginning and received his math Ph.D. before he was twenty. The then studied engineering and before he was thirty, he authored "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” which integrated Heisenberg’s matrices with Schrodinger’s waves, a monumental accomplishment.

 

But that was only the beginning. He developed Minimax theory and at the Army’s Ballistic Research Lab he became an expert at the trajectory of artillery shells. That led him to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos where developed the implosion lens necessary for the creation of the Atomic Bomb. He also conceived of stored program computer which had yet to be invented. Indeed, his second wife Klara was among the very first computer programmers.

 

Along the way he coauthored with Oskar Morgenstern “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” which revolutionized economics and was found to be very useful in business and war strategies, especially concerning the use of nuclear weapons. After World War II he divided his time among Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Los Alamos’ Weapons Lab, and the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

 

While at Rand he instrumental in the development of ICBM’s and he came up with the idea of self-replicating computers. In essence he was the progenitor of artificial intelligence.

 

Bhattacharya tells the story of a true genus who also loved to party hard. My one criticism is that several of the science and math parts of the book can be a real slog for the lay reader.

 

The full Amazon URL is at: Genius (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Craig Nelson's "The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era"

Three Books in One

Craig Nelson has really written three books. The first one on the history of nuclear physics from 1890 – 1960 and physicists involved is terrific. The second one is on the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War and here his biases show and he leaves much to be desired. The third book embedded in “Radiance” is a history of nuclear power where he emphasizes the three big disasters of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima which highlights the incompetence and the corruption of the nuclear industry. Here he is on pretty solid ground. And he recognizes that despite the disasters nuclear power might in the long run be better than carbon burning power plants.

His history of the science is easy to follow for the lay reader and he draws great insights into the personalities of Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szillard, John von Neumann and Otto Hahn. He is at his best when he discusses the life and work of Lise Meitner who rightly deserves credit for her Nobel Prize work with Otto Hahn in splitting the atom. Einstein rightly called her “our (meaning German) Curie.”  Also of note is his discussion of the coincidence of so many leading physicists and mathematicians all being born in early 1900s Budapest. What was in the Danube at that time?

Where he goes astray is in his views on the Cold War. To him Russia is always reacting to moves by the United States. Yet nowhere in the book is a discussion of the massive Soviet build-up that took place in the 1970s. His villain is Edward Teller, the co-developer of thermo-nuclear weaponry and the instigator of Reagan’s strategic defense initiative (SDI) known as “Star Wars”. His animus towards Teller goes back 1940s Los Alamos and his testimony critical of Oppenheimer during his security clearance hearing. To be sure Teller had his faults, but Nelson goes overboard. Nelson also fails to understand that a less than perfect SDI would have great deterrent value because it would increase the uncertainty with respect to a first strike.

So the way I would score it would be 5 stars for the history of science section, 4 stars for nuclear power and 3 stars for the Cold War portion. Net, net 4 stars.  

The full Amazon URL is: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/ARLU1JUPKL532/ref=pdp_new_read_full_review_link?ie=UTF8&page=1&sort_by=MostRecentReview#RWOBQF77JOL3U