On the morning of September 25, 1933, Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest entered the Pedagogical Institute for Afflicted Children of Professor Jan Waterink, shot his 15-year-old son Vassily in the head, and then turned the gun on himself.
The first paragraph of MANIAC already indicates where Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut intends to take us: the tragic limits of science.
The central character is Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, a genius who worked on the development of the first atomic bombs and designed the architecture of the modern computer. But his name only briefly appears in the first section of the book, which is centered on Ehrenfest, a scientist tragically crushed by the indeterminate and incomprehensible universe opened up by quantum mechanics.
Born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and living in Chile since he was 14, Labatut, now 44, is internationally celebrated for his imaginative approach to the scientific universe. He writes in Spanish and English.
When we stop understanding the world, Labatut’s books, The Stone of Madness and MANIAC, narrate the lives and accomplishments of real scientists. Labatut is generally faithful to the facts but treats his characters with wide creative freedom. Therefore, he is a fiction writer – and excellent at his craft.
In artistic terms, MANIAC can be compared to a triptych: a large central panel on von Neumann, flanked by smaller panels on Ehrenfest and a computer program that defeated a Go champion, the ancient Chinese game more complex than chess.
According to the book, quantum physics did not cause Ehrenfest’s depressive state but contributed to exacerbating it. When the Nazis came to power, Ehrenfest – who taught in Germany and was Jewish – tried to save his son from the regime’s eugenics programs. He took Vassily, who had Down syndrome, to a care facility in the Netherlands. Later, it was there that he killed him, then committed suicide.
“He was the smartest human of the 20th century. An alien among us,” Labatut announces in the opening of the section on the book’s main character. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration.
John von Neumann knew how to recite books from childhood memory and had a prodigious calculating ability. He obsessively dedicated himself to various fields of study: quantum physics, game theory, nuclear weapons, computing.
In MANIAC, von Neumann’s life is narrated through a sequence of first-person testimonies. From family members – his mother, brother, two wives, only daughter – to scientists like Eugene Wigner – the 1963 Nobel Laureate in Physics, who was von Neumann’s schoolmate – each of them gains their own voice.
From this range of perspectives emerges the portrait of a man charmed by knowledge but indifferent to its destructive potential. His mathematical brain did not recognize moral boundaries: after World War II, von Neumann even proposed that the Americans drop atomic bombs on the Soviet Union to prevent the communists from developing their nuclear arsenal.
To do the calculations for the hydrogen bomb, von Neumann conceived the MANIAC computer (acronym for Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer). This work led him to prescient speculations on artificial intelligence, which he was still working on when he died of cancer in 1957, at the age of 53.
In the chapter on the development of the first atomic bomb, the irreverent American physicist Richard Feynman recounts that von Neumann liked Go but played very badly. This is a bridge to the final section of the book.
In 2016, South Korean Lee Sedol, an unbeatable Go champion, lost four out of five games against a program developed by DeepMind, a startup launched six years earlier. Named AlphaGo, the program developed its skills by playing against itself, thanks to machine learning.
DeepMind is led by Englishman Demis Hassabis, a follower of von Neumann’s ideas. In MANIAC, the narrative of the parallel lives of Sedol and Hassabis captures all the fascination and fear inspired by the defeat of human intelligence by artificial intelligence.
Only good writers can achieve this subtle ambiguity. But let’s await the artificial intelligence capable of creating good literature.
MORE ABOUT VON NEUMANN
Source
Arwen Volkov, A graduate of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland with a degree in International Finance, Arwen specializes in sustainable finance and green investments. She began her career at an investment bank in London, where she developed financing models for environmentally friendly projects. Known for her analytical and strategic thinking skills, Arwen is a sought-after financial consultant. In her spare time, she mentors fintech startups, contributing to their growth strategies. She is also a nature enthusiast and an amateur photographer.
