Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War

单集文稿 ...

• 00:00

  I try to lay out the context of this.

• 00:02

  I mean this was after the most destructive war that the world had ever known.

• 00:06

  Millions of people had died and von Neumann had predicted this and the Holocaust very successfully,

• 00:15

  years in advance and he now was convinced that within a decade there would be a third world war with nuclear weapons.

• 00:29

  Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Anano Baracharia,

• 00:33

  who is a science writer who has worked at The Economist and at Nature.

• 00:39

  And most recently, he's the author of The Man from the Future,

• 00:43

  The Visionary Life of John von Neumann.

• 00:46

  And it was an extremely enjoyable read, super interesting.

• 00:49

  And so before we jump into the questions, Anano,

• 00:52

  I'm wondering if you can kind of give context to my audience and summarize the life of this giant.

• 00:59

  Well that's not an easy task but I'll give it a go.

• 01:02

  So he was born in Budapest in around 1903 to this wealthy Jewish family and pretty early on they realised that there's something quite special about him.

• 01:16

  So he can do these long six figure calculations in his head by six and he's learned calculus by eight.

• 01:27

  and he's teaching himself the finer points of set theory by kind of 11.

• 01:34

  So he's going on long walks with Eugene Wigner who was a childhood friend of his and a future Nobel Prize winner and Wigner's a year older than him and he's teaching Wigner set theory at that age.

• 01:49

  So it's kind of clear that even among geniuses he would be later on at Los Alamos,

• 01:58

  for example, or at the Princeton and at the Institute for Advanced Study,

• 02:04

  where he'd be recruited along with Einstein,

• 02:07

  that he was kind of a cut above even all of these incredibly clever people.

• 全部文稿