The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

in 1932, at the end of a meeting of three dozen of Europe’s best physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, a parody of Faust was staged to celebrate the centennial of Goethe, and Paul was cast as the great scholar Heinrich Faust himself, unwilling to be convinced by the demon Mephistopheles, portrayed by Wolfgang Pauli, of the existence of the neutrino, a newly postulated fundamental particle.

Ernst Mach, a staunch positivist who contended that physicists should not speak of atoms as anything but theoretical constructs—since, at the time, there was no direct evidence for their existence—hounded and mocked Boltzmann without end, interrupting one of his lectures on atoms with the mean-spirited question: “Have you ever seen one?”

“infinite Heisenberg-Born-Dirac-Schrödinger sausage-machine factory”

If you discovered something disharmonious in nature, Nelly explained, something that negates the natural order entirely, you should never speak of it, not even to yourself, but instead do everything within your means to remove it from your thoughts, purge your memory, watch your speech, and even stand guard against your own dreams, lest the wrath of the gods fall upon you.

in the beginning of September he visited Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, where he mediated a conference, at the end of which he opened up about his depression and suicidal thoughts to the least likely person imaginable, the English physicist Paul Dirac, a wild, unworldly genius who was portrayed by one of his colleagues as “the strangest man alive,” utterly unequipped to understand the intricacies and contradictions of Ehrenfest’s character. Paul opened up to him nonetheless, and spoke about his fears for the future of his family, and especially of young Wassik, for surely the influence of Nazism, with its loathing of Jews, eugenic pseudoscience, and murderous hate for all things “other,” would soon pour out from Germany and spread to all its neighboring countries, fueled, as it no doubt was, by a dark, unconscious impulse that was driving us to a future where our species would have no place, substituted, sooner than later, by something completely monstrous.

One afternoon in the 1840s, as George Boole walked across a field near Doncaster, a thought flashed into his head that he believed was a religious vision. Boole suddenly saw how you could use mathematics to unlock the mysterious processes of human thought. The same symbols that were used in algebra could be used to describe what went on inside people’s heads as they followed a train of thought, expressing all the twists and turns in simple binary form. If this, then that. If that, then not this. And in 1854, Boole wrote a book that caused a sensation. It was called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Its aim, “to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind, by which reasoning is performed” . . . Boole was driven by an almost messianic belief that he had been allowed a glimpse, by God, into the truth of the human mind. But there were those who doubted this; the philosopher Bertrand Russell was astonished by the brilliance of Boole’s mathematics, but he didn’t believe that what Boole had discovered was anything to do with human thought. Human beings, Russell said, do not think like that. What Boole was really doing was something else . . . Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head

There are two kinds of people in this world: Jancsi von Neumann and the rest of us.

This nagging suspicion—that their entire kingdom rested on nothing—came to be known as the “crisis of the foundations of mathematics,” and it was the most profound questioning of the discipline since the time of the Greeks. The crisis was a strange affair that involved some of the most original thinkers and brightest minds on this planet, but when I look back on it, it seems no more than an Arthurian quest, one where reason strayed past its limits only to find itself holding an empty chalice.

had delivered the day before, to little effect. Because of that, no one really paid any attention when he began to speak with a stutter, so low and so awkwardly that the conference notetaker failed to record his words, which should rightly be famous, but are lost to history, since they were not included in the meeting’s final report. As such, his monumental discovery could have gone completely unnoticed at the time were it not for Jancsi, who was the only person there who realized what had just happened. “I b-believe that we can p-p-postulate, within any consistent f-formal system, a statement that is t-t-true but that can never be pr-proven within the rules of said system.” That is the gist of what Gödel said, according to Jancsi. His remark was met with silence, because those who did not simply ignore him couldn’t wrap their heads around what they had heard. How could a statement be considered true if there was no way of proving it? It did not make sense to anyone, except for Janos, who suddenly broke out in a sweat and had trouble breathing.

We were all little children with respect to the situation which had developed, namely, that we suddenly were dealing with something with which one could blow up the world.

Is there really a rational course of action in every situation? Johnny proved it mathematically beyond a doubt, but only for two players with diametrically opposing goals. So there may be a vital flaw in our reasoning that any keen observer will immediately become aware of; namely, that the minimax theorem that underlies our entire framework presupposes perfectly rational and logical agents, agents who are interested only in winning, agents who pose a perfect understanding of the rules and a total recall of all their past moves, agents who also have a flawless awareness of the possible ramifications of their own actions, and of their opponents’ actions, at every single step of the game. The only person I ever met who was exactly like that was Johnny von Neumann.