Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a dazzling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI 'Monstrously good... Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller' Mark Haddon John von Neumann was a titan of science. A Hungarian wunderkind who revolutionized every field he touched, his mathematical powers were so exceptional that Hans Bethe - a Nobel Prize-winning physicist - thought he might represent the next step in human evolution. After seeking the foundations of mathematics during his youth in Germany, von Neumann emigrated to the United States, where he became entangled in the power games of the Cold War; he designed the world's first programmable computer, invented game theory, pioneered AI and digital life, and helped create the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was the darling of the military industrial complex, but when illness unmoored his mind, his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych about the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI. It begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and close friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master, Lee Sedol, and the AI program AlphaGo. Braiding fact with fiction, Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey to the frontiers of rational thought, where invention outpaces human understanding and offers godlike power, but takes us to the brink of Armageddon.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 420
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
The MANIAC
Benjamín Labatut
Pushkin Press
To Juana, Julieta, Kali and Pina
I saw a queen, wearing a gold dress, and her dress was full of eyes, and all the eyes were transparent, like fiery flames and yet like crystals. The crown she wore on her head had as many crowns, one above the other, as there were eyes in her dress. She approached me dreadfully fast and put her foot on my neck, and cried out in a terrible voice: “Do you know who I am?” And I said: “Yes! Long have you caused me pain and woe. You are my soul’s faculty of reason.”
Hadewijch of Brabant,thirteenth-century poet and mystic(adapted by Eliot Weinberger in Angels & Saints)
Contents
PAULor The Discovery of the Irrational
On the morning of the twenty-fifth of September 1933, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest walked into Professor Jan Waterink’s Pedagogical Institute for Afflicted Children in Amsterdam, shot his fifteen-year-old son, Vassily, in the head, then turned the gun on himself.
Paul died instantly, while Vassily, who suffered from Down syndrome, was in agony for hours before being pronounced dead by the same doctors who had cared for him since his arrival at the institute, in January of that same year. He had come to Amsterdam because his father had decided that the clinic where the boy had spent the better part of a decade, located in Jena, in the heartland of Germany, was no longer safe for him with the Nazis in power. Vassily—or rather Wassik, as almost everyone called him—had to endure severe mental and physical disabilities during his short life; Albert Einstein, who loved the boy’s father as if they were brothers and was a regular houseguest at the Ehrenfests’ home in Leiden, nicknamed Wassik “patient little crawlikins,” for he had such trouble getting around, and would sometimes feel so much pain in his knees that he could not stand. And yet, even then, the child did not lose his seemingly boundless enthusiasm, dragging himself along the carpet, with his useless legs trailing behind, to meet his favorite “uncle” at the door. Wassik spent most of his life institutionalized, but he was a cheerful child nonetheless, often sending postcards to his parents in Leiden featuring quaint German landscapes, or letters with accounts of his daily life, written in his unsure hand, telling them what new things he had learned, how his best friend had fallen ill, how hard he was trying to be a good boy, just as they had taught him, and how in love he was with not one but two girls in his class, as well as his teacher, Mrs. Gottlieb, who was the most caring and wonderful person he had ever met, a thought that would bring tears to his father’s eyes, as Paul Ehrenfest was, first and foremost, a teacher.
Paul had suffered from extreme melancholy and bouts of crippling depression all his life. Like his son, he had been a weak boy, often ill. When he was not nursing nosebleeds, coughing due to his asthma, or dizzy and wheezing from lack of breath after escaping the bullies who teased and taunted him at school—Pig’s ear, donkey’s ear, give ’em to the Jewthat’shere!—he would feign some other ailment, a fever perhaps, a cold, or an unbearable stomachache, just to stay at home in his mother’s arms, hidden from the outside, safely wrapped in her embrace, as if deep down, in some way, little Paul, the youngest of five brothers, could foretell that she would die when he was ten, and all his prior suffering was nothing but a premonition, an anticipation of loss that he dare not speak of, to himself or to others, afraid that if he said it out loud, found the courage to put it into words, her death would somehow hasten forward to meet him; so he remained silent, fearful, and sad, shouldering a weight that no child should bear, a dark foreknowledge that haunted him past her death, past his father’s demise six years after hers, and that would follow behind him like the toll of a bell up to the day of his undoing, by his own hand, at fifty-three years of age.
However much he was at odds with himself and the world, Paul was the most gifted member of his household and the best student of any class he ever took part in. He was well liked by his friends, highly esteemed by his classmates, and appreciated by his teachers, but nothing could convince him of his self-worth. Yet he was by no means an introvert; on the contrary, he would pour out everything he took in, delighting those around him with fabulous displays of knowledge and his uncanny ability to translate the most complicated ideas into images and metaphors that anyone could understand, threading together concepts from disparate fields that he drew from the ever-growing number of books he fed on with ravenous, spongelike intelligence. Paul was capable of absorbing everything around him while making no differentiations. His mind was fully porous, lacking, perhaps, some essential membrane; he was not so much interested in the world as he was invaded by its many forms. With nothing to keep him safe, he felt raw and exposed to the information flowing constantly back and forth across his blood-brain barrier. Even when he obtained his PhD and became firmly established as a distinguished professor, after succeeding the great Hendrik Lorentz in the theoretical physics chair at the University of Leiden, the only thing that really sparked joy in Paul was giving himself to others, to the point that, as one of his many beloved students remarked, “Ehrenfest distributed all that was living and active in him,” such that sometimes it looked like “he gave away everything he had found or observed, without building up a reserve, a kind of stronghold, within himself.”
As a physicist, he made no earth-shattering discoveries, but he enjoyed the full respect of such towering figures as Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, and Wolfgang Pauli. Albert Einstein wrote that, no more than a few hours after having met Paul, he felt “as though our dreams and aspirations were meant for each other.” These friends of Paul’s admired not only his critical and intellectual capacities but something rather different, a virtue that is usually lacking among giants: ethics, character, as well as a deep, some would say overwhelming, desire to understand, to grasp the core of things. Ehrenfest sought relentlessly what he called der springende Punkt, the leaping point, the heart of the matter, as for him deriving a result by logical means was never enough: “That is like dancing on one leg,” he would say, “when the essence lies in recognizing connections, meanings and associations in every direction.” For Ehrenfest, true understanding was a full-body experience, something that involved your entire being, not just your mind or reason. He was an atheist, a doubter and a skeptic with such a rigid standard for truth that he sometimes became a figure of fun among his peers: 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. They called him the Conscience of Physics, and while there was a hidden barb in that nick-name due to Ehrenfest’s undeterred opposition to the road that not only physics but the whole of the exact sciences seemed to be taking during the first decades of the twentieth century, many of his colleagues would visit him regularly at his home in Leiden, just across the river from the university, to try their ideas on him, and on his wife, since Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanassjewa was an accomplished mathematician in her own right. She coauthored some of Ehrenfest’s most important scientific papers, including the one that first made his name (though it did almost nothing for her career) and eventually led to his appointment as successor to the much-revered Lorentz: it was a summary article on statistical mechanics, a favored subject of his mentor, the ill-fated Ludwig Boltzmann. Boltzmann was one of the strongest advocates of the atomic hypothesis, a veritable trailblazer who first discovered the role that probability plays in the behavior and properties of atoms. Like Ehrenfest, Boltzmann also suffered greatly during his restless and unhappy life, crippled as he was by severe bouts of uncontrollable mania and abysmal depression, the effects of which were compounded by the vicious antagonism that his revolutionary ideas bred among his peers. 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?” The Bull, as his friends called Boltzmann due to his corpulence and his stubborn tenacity, despaired at the ferocity of his critics, and even though he laid down one of the fundamental equations of modern physics, his statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics, in his personal life he could not escape the slow and constant advance of his mental disorder, which seemed, like the entropy of the universe he had so wonderfully captured in his equation, to be constantly and irreversibly increasing, leading to inevitable randomness and decay. He admitted to his colleagues that he lived in perpetual fear that he might suddenly lose his mind during a lecture. Toward the end of his life he could hardly breathe from his asthma, his eyesight dimmed to the point where he could no longer read, and his headaches and migraines became so utterly unbearable that his physician ordered him to completely abstain from any scientific activity. In September 1906, Boltzmann hanged himself with a short rope from the crossbars of the window frame in a room at the Hotel Ples, during a summer holiday in Duino, near Trieste, while his wife and young daughter were out swimming in the calm, turquoise waters of the Adriatic.
Speakthetruth,writewithclarity,anddefendittoyourveryendwas Boltzmann’s personal motto, and Paul, his disciple, took it to heart. The weight of the respect that Ehrenfest carried among so many outstanding physicists was due to his capacity to bring other people’s ideas into sharp focus and capture their fundamental essence, transmitting this knowledge with such passion and vim that his audience was brought in to his thinking as if under a spell. “He lectures like a master. I have hardly ever heard a man speak with such fascination and brilliance. Significant phrases, witty points and dialectic are all at his disposal in an extraordinary manner. He knows how to make the most difficult things concrete and intuitively clear. Mathematical arguments are translated by him into easily comprehensible pictures,” wrote the great German theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who both appreciated and feared Ehrenfest’s fame as the grand inquisitor of physics. Paul did not shy away from pointing out flaws in other people’s arguments with the same pitiless criticism with which he would chastise himself; that role of his was particularly important during the fateful Solvay Conference of 1927, when classical physics and quantum mechanics faced off, forever changing the foundations of that branch of science. Ehrenfest mediated between the two major players—Einstein, who abhorred the weight that chance, indeterminacy, probability, and uncertainty were given in the new science of the quantum, and Bohr, who sought to enthrone a fundamentally different type of physics for the subatomic world. At one point, Ehrenfest took to the stage among the gaggle of some thirty-odd Nobel Prize winners screaming over each other in French, English, German, Dutch, and Danish and scribbled a couple of verses from the Bible on the blackboard: The Lord did there confound the languagesof all the Earth. Everyone laughed, but the arguments continued to rage on for days, with quantum mechanics coming out victorious over the classical scheme of physics, in spite of, or perhaps due to, the fact that it was completely opposed to common sense. Although Ehrenfest was firmly on the side of the new, and much more open than his friend Einstein to the revolutionary principles coming from Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, and Dirac, he could not shake the feeling that a fundamental line had been crossed, that a demon, or perhaps a genie, had incubated in the soul of physics, one that neither his nor any succeeding generation would be able to put back in the lamp. If one were to believe the novel rules governing the inner realm of the atom, suddenly the entire world was no longer as solid and real as it once was. “Surely there is a special section in purgatory for professors of quantum mechanics!” Paul wrote to Einstein when he returned from Solvay to Leiden, but all his attempts at humor could not slow his descent into the dark pit toward which he seemed to be spiraling down at a faster and faster pace, not least due to the strange direction that his hallowed discipline was taking, filled as it now was with logical contradictions, uncertainties, and indeterminacies that he could no longer explain to his beloved students, as he had no way of understanding them himself. In May 1931, Ehrenfest confessed his fears to Niels Bohr in a letter: “I have completely lost contact with theoretical physics. I cannot read anything anymore and feel myself incompetent to have even the most modest grasp about what makes sense in the flood of articles and books. Perhaps I cannot at all be helped anymore. Every new issue of the ZeitschriftfürPhysikor the Physical Review immerses me in blind panic. I know absolutely nothing!” Bohr wrote back to console his friend, pointing out that it was not just Ehrenfest, but the whole of the physics community that was having problems dealing with the latest discoveries, only to receive an even longer letter in return, in which Paul decried that he felt like a dog that, totally exhausted, was running after a streetcar carrying his master out of sight. Where some saw the quantum revolution as a protean fire sparking novel results at an unrelenting pace, Ehrenfest saw mostly stagnation and even degeneration: “Those awful abstractions! That incessant focus on tricks and techniques! The mathematical plague that erases all powers of imagination!” he cried out bitterly before his students in Leiden. The direction in which theoretical physics was heading went completely against his grain: real, physical intuition was being replaced with brute-force artillery, and mathematical formulae were set in place of matter, atoms, and energy. Paul detested the likes of John von Neumann, that Hungarian wunderkind, with his “terrifying mathematical guns and unreadably complicated formula apparatus,” as much as he despised the indigestion that the “infinite Heisenberg-Born-Dirac-Schrödinger sausage-machine factory” caused him. He lamented the attitude of his younger students, who “no longer noticed that their heads had been turned into relays in a telephone network for communicating and distributing sensational physics messages” without realizing that, like almost all modern developments, mathematics was hostile to life: “It is inhuman, like every truly diabolic machine, and it kills everyone whose spinal marrow isn’t conditioned to fit the movement of its wheels.” His already excruciating self-criticism and inferiority complex became truly unbearable, for although he knew mathematics, it was not simple for him. He was not a computer. He could not calculate with ease, and his inability to keep up with the times fueled a self-destructive streak that was his constant companion and torturer, an inner voice that whispered to him, and continuously betrayed him. By 1930, his letters to his friends spoke of nothing but death and despair: “I clearly feel I’ll destroy my life if I don’t succeed in pulling myself together. Every time I have a chance to review my affairs, I see some sort of chaos in front of me—a gambler or alcoholic has to see similar pictures when sober.” His inner turmoil mirrored the economic and political turbulence that was beginning to tear Europe apart. Paul was officially nondenominational; Jews were not allowed to marry Christians in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and both he and Tatyana had given up their respective religions to marry each other back in 1904. But with anti-semitism growing on all sides, he began to entertain increasingly morbid thoughts. In 1933, he wrote to his friend Samuel Goudsmit with a macabre plot to shock German society out of its Nazi-induced trance: “What if a group of eminent, elderly Jewish academics and artists collectively commit suicide, without any demonstration of hatred or issuance of demands, in order to prick the German conscience?” Goudsmit wrote back in a fury, sick of his friend’s obsession with suicide and disgusted by the utter absurdity of his idea: “A group of dead Jews can do nothing, and their deaths would merely delight das teutonische Volk.” Three days before Ehrenfest wrote that letter, Hitler’s regime, barely two months old, had enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, putting all Jews who held government jobs at risk, a move that convinced Ehrenfest that “the remarkably open and carefully planned extermination of the Jewish ‘plague’ from German art, science, jurisprudence, and medicine would quickly be 90 percent effective.” During the last year of his life he used his contacts and influence to help Jewish scientists find work outside of Germany, even though he had lost all faith in a possible future for himself. His thoughts went around in a furious circle, with money never far from his mind: his Leiden home was mortgaged many times over. He longed to put an end to his own suffering, but he could not bear to leave his wife with the care of poor Wassik—she had lost all her investments in Russian stock in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution—or inflict such a lifelong burden of charge on his two eldest daughters, Tatyana and Galinka, or his older son, Paul Jr. His suicidal fantasies, which up to that point had been exclusively centered on his own death, began to include his youngest child: “Surely you understand my wish that Galinka and Tanitschka should not in the future have to work themselves to the bone simply to keep their idiot brother alive?” he wrote to Nelly Posthumus Meyjes, an art historian with whom he was having an intense love affair that brought him a small measure of joy and happiness, but also inflamed his already disordered mental state.
The affair began with his wife’s tacit permission: at the onset of the relationship, Tatyana would even send Nelly her regards. She was as worried as anybody else about her husband’s mental breakdown, and thought that an extramarital adventure, while clearly a risk, could perhaps soothe his mind and turn him away from his obsession with chess and the never-ending list of hobbies—the model aircraft he built, the now-rotting herb garden, the abandoned stamp collection, the homemade telescope, the artisanal brewery in his basement—on which Paul fretted away his time to avoid finishing his physics investigations and long-overdue articles, because the mere thought of sitting down to work on them would often send him into a spiraling panic. Up to that point, Tatyana had been all that Paul had ever wanted, and while she would spend long seasons away, staying in Russia with her family, their marriage had always been a happy one, based as it was on a profound mutual understanding and many shared intellectual interests. Tatyana had a keen mind and was respected and admired by all of Paul’s colleagues. His lover, Nelly, however, was not only smart, she had a dark side that rivaled Ehrenfest’s own death wish, but she appeared to be fully able to control it. The first time he saw her was during one of her lectures in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem: Paul was smitten by her intelligence and good looks, and by the subject of her talk, an old Pythagorean myth that spoke of the disharmony of the world and the discovery of the irrational, which became the prime focus of his obsessions during the final year of his life, and a perfect counterpoint to his increasing worries about the rise of the Nazis in Germany.
In nature, Nelly said, there are such things that surpass proportion and cannot be likened to any other. They obey no measure and refuse categorization, because they exist outside the order that encompasses all phenomena. These outliers, these singularities, these monstrosities, will not be governed or compared by means of a number, because they lie at the root of what is disharmonious, chaotic, and unruly about the world. For the Greeks, she explained, the discovery of the irrational was a heinous crime, an act of unforgivable impiety, and the divulgence of that knowledge, an offense punishable by death. Nelly spoke of the two surviving accounts of the Pythagorean sage who defied this fundamental commandment: in one version, the man who discovered the irrational was banished from his community, and his friends erected a tomb for him, as though he were already dead; in the other, he was drowned at sea by members of his own family, or perhaps by the gods themselves dressed as his wife and his two children. 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. The harmony of nature was to be preserved above all things, as it was older than the Titans, wiser than the Oracle, more sacred than Mount Olympus, and as sacrosanct as the lifeblood that animates this and all other worlds. To acknowledge even the possibility of the irrational, to recognize disharmony, would place the fabric of existence at risk, since not just our reality, but every single aspect of the universe—whether physical, mental, or ethereal—depended on the unseen threads that bind all things together. This taboo was not merely a concern for the ancients, Nelly explained, but lies at the heart of western philosophy and science: Kant had written that science demands that we be able to think of nature as a totality. You start by classifying the simplest aspects of the world—the shimmering tendrils of a creeping vine, the iridescent body of a beetle—and follow by ordering these phenomena in species, then genus, then family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain, working, all the while, under the premise that every conceivable wing, feather, root, rivulet, coil, and appendage will fall somewhere in that order, occupying its rightful place in a system that encompasses the entire universe, fruit of a wisdom so profound that it underlies and upholds the manifest and unmanifested forms of existence. But perhaps that wasn’t really the case, Nelly warned her audience; it may well be that nature is utterly chaotic, with no law able to subsume the apparent heterogeneity, no concept capable of whittling down its ever-increasing complexity. What if nature cannot be cognized as a whole? Our civilization had yet to come to terms with this terrifying possibility, and she very much doubted that it could, for it would be a death blow to science, philosophy, and rationality. Meanwhile, Nelly said, artists had already fully embraced it; she believed that the rediscovery of the irrational was the driving force behind all vanguard movements, movements that, even to a lay observer, were evidently suffused with a Faustian, boundless energy, a haste, a tragic fall in which everything was permitted. For modern art recognized no laws, no method, no truth, just a blind, uncontainable surge, a rush of madness that would not stop for anyone or anything but drive us onward even to the ends of the Earth.
Paul was entranced. He approached Nelly and bombarded her with questions before she even had the time to pick up her papers, and they talked all through the day, increasingly fascinated by each other’s intelligence. They spent that night together at a nearby hotel. Perhaps due to the strange chemical effects of new love, or owing to the consequences of his lifelong depression, which can wreak havoc on the brain, Paul became convinced that he was somehow related to the Pythagorean sage from the legend that Nelly had spoken about, and he began seeing disharmony and turbulence everywhere. He could no longer distinguish any type of reasonable order to the universe, no natural laws, no repeating patterns, just a vast, sprawling world without measure, riddled with chaos, infected by nonsense, and lacking any sort of meaningful intelligence behind it; he could perceive the rise of the irrational in the mindless chants of the Hitler Youth spewing over the radio waves, in the rants of warmongering politicians, and in the blind proponents of endless progress, but he could also distinguish it, ever more clearly, in the papers and lectures of his colleagues, brimming over with supposedly revolutionary ideas that he regarded as nothing but the industrialization of physics. He wrote of his dismay to Einstein—whose youngest son, Eduard, was schizophrenic and had been institutionalized on several occasions, so Paul felt his friend was weighed down by part of his same burdens—decrying in his letter what he saw as a dark, unconscious force that was slowly creeping into the scientific worldview, one in which rationality had become somehow confused for its very opposite: “Reason is now untethered from all other deeper, more fundamental aspects of our psyche, and I’m afraid it will lead us by the bit, like a drunken mule. I know that you see it as well as I do, but most of the time I feel alone, as if I were the only human being bearing witness to how far we have fallen. We lie on our knees, praying to the wrong god, a childish deity who hides at the center of a corrupted world that he can neither govern nor understand. Or is it that we have made him ourselves, in our own fetid image, but then forgotten we have done so, as young boys birth the monsters and demons who haunt their dreams, without ever realizing that they have only themselves to blame?” Afraid of what she now saw in him, Nelly encouraged Paul to write down all recollections of his childhood, an exercise meant to find the driving force behind his depression, but he could not manage to do so, as he felt increasingly disconnected, from others and from himself. His memories, his past, his family and friends, all those ties and treasured reveries now belonged to some other person, a man whom he would sometimes catch a glimpse of in the mirror—pint-sized, bespectacled, and heavyset, with spiky hair cut short and a thick mustache over buckteeth that looked as if they were shying away from each other—and whom he failed to recognize. He was torn between the sincere devotion he felt for his wife and the painful euphoria that Nelly kindled in him, but neither of those women could steer him away from the path that some unknown force seemed to have chosen for him, with a bullet waiting at the end. “Why are people like me condemned to continue living?” he wrote to his lover during his last summer. “If you or Tatyana were to ask me whether I love you, there’s only one answer, and Tatyana knows it already: in utter helplessness I crave your proximity, and if that craving gives me neither warmth nor strength, then I am overcome by desolation. Love is such a mightily divisive element. All the suffering it brings! Surely it’s one’s duty to put an end to one’s life as soon as possible, before causing hideous destruction.” Seeing that Paul could make no headway against his demons, Tatyana asked for a divorce. Paul begged her to take him back, and she finally agreed to stop the proceedings, which were already in their final stage, on the condition that he leave Nelly. Paul agreed but did not have the strength to stop seeing his lover, nor could he restore his relationship with his wife. Whatever had held them steadfast during more than three decades had been lost in the space of a few months. Finally, Paul gave up and filed for divorce himself, without confessing to Tatyana that he had already written—though not yet sent—his suicide note, a letter that his closest friends would receive a couple of days after the hideous tragedy at the Waterink Institute had taken place: “My dear friends: Bohr, Einstein, Franck, Herglotz, Joffé, Kohnstamm, and Tolman! I absolutely do not know any more how to carry further during the next few months the burden of my life which has become unbearable. I cannot stand it any longer to let my professorship in Leiden go down the drain. I must vacate my position here. Perhaps it may happen that I can use up the rest of my strength in Russia … If, however, it will not become clear rather soon that I can do that, then it is as good as certain that I shall kill myself. And if that will happen sometime, then I should like to know that I have written, calmly and without rush, to you whose friendship has played such a great role in my life … In recent years it has become ever more difficult for me to follow the developments in physics with understanding. After trying, ever more enervated and torn, I have finally given up in desperation. This made me completely weary of life … I did feel condemned to live on mainly because of the economic cares for the children. I tried other things but that helped only briefly. Therefore I concentrate more and more on the precise details of suicide. I have no other practical possibility than suicide, and that after having first killed Wassik. Forgive me … May you and those dear to you stay well.”
In May 1933, he took a train from Leiden to Berlin. There, he saw Nazi Brownshirts storming trade unions, labor banks, and cooperatives. He read the news reports describing the mob of morally outraged students who had attacked the Institute of Sex Research, and he walked through the ashes left in front of the State Opera, where the pages of twenty thousand books had gone up in flames, illuminating the faces of giddy boys and girls, members of the Deutsche Studentenschaft, who had raided the libraries of their universities in search of all “un-German” publications, journals, and magazines, singing, chanting, and swearing oaths as they fed an enormous bonfire, while senior members of the Nazi Party murmured incantations, and Goebbels screamed to a crowd of thousands, No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! Paul saw soldiers on the streets, marching to the sound of the military music that blared from all radio stations, interrupted by the shrieks of Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler, who endorsed Roosevelt’s world disarmament proposal and demanded an immediate revision of the Treaty of Versailles. By the end of May, Germany had legalized eugenic sterilization, and less than two months later, when the Nazi Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases was approved, allowing the State to render incapable of procreation by means of a surgical operation anypersonsufferingfromahereditarydisease, if the experience of medicalscienceshowsthatitishighlyprobablethathisdescendantswouldsufferfromsomeseriousphysicalormentalhereditarydefect, a dictum that included not only those afflicted with congenital mental deficiency, schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s, hereditary blindness, deafness, or any other hereditary deformity, but even those who suffered from severe alcoholism, Paul traveled to the Johannes Trüper Youth Sanatorium, in Jena, and took young Wassik to Amsterdam, where he began to receive care at the Waterink Institute. During the first year of the law, more than sixty-four thousand people were forcibly sterilized, after being deemed unfit by Genetic Health Courts composed of a judge, a medical officer, and a medical practitioner.
In July, as the light of summer started to brighten the skies above his home in Leiden, Paul’s dark mood lifted enough for him to outline the beginning of a new investigation with Hendrik Casimir on one of the great unsolved mysteries of classical physics: turbulence, that sudden phenomenon by which any smooth-flowing liquid breaks down into a wild chaos of eddies within eddies within eddies, racing in so many directions at the same time that their movement cannot be predicted by any known model. Turbulence is ubiquitous in nature, so common, in fact, that even young children playing in the white waters of a brook have some unconscious knowledge of its mechanisms, even if they are unaware that it is also present in the torrent of blood their puppy hearts rush through their veins; it can be seen in the most mundane substances, invoked by a drop of milk in a coffee cup or a simple puff of smoke, and yet, mathematically, it is both bewildering and profound. Some of the most brilliant minds have tried to tame it, but all have failed, so Paul was very surprised to discover that his own mind, frenzied and fractured as it was, had suddenly developed a wondrous affinity for fluid equations, so powerful that it not only took over his waking hours but also seeped into his dreams. At night, he would see dark water all around him, his naked body pounded by savage currents, sucked in by a colossal maelstrom that spun around an unfathomable void. While these nightmares hounded him, he would wake strangely transfixed, not by images of ocean horror but by a remarkable feeling of enlightened calm, a gripping certainty that, deep down, for reasons that went beyond his understanding, his wife and lover, his sons and daughters, his friends, colleagues, and students, even his home country would all be well, because however hopeless his own situation seemed at the time, things were protected, safe and sound, each in its place, shielded by a force that wed pain to pleasure, darkness to light, and order to chaos, with life and death caught up in the same dizzying spiral, intertwined in so many ways that we could not tell them apart. As soon as he woke, he would jump out of bed, covered in sweat as if he were the sole survivor of a shipwreck, and work feverishly in his study, sending off such a flood of letters to Casimir that he knew his colleague would find it impossible to follow his train of thought, because one missive was quickly contradicted by the next, and then replaced by another in which his argument had turned around and swallowed its own head. He tried to calm down and develop his ideas serenely, but his enthusiasm, and the joy of working once more, free from the heavy fog of melancholia, was simply too much for him to contain. It was this work, and this alone, that would tie his name to history: a solution to the irregular and unpredictable behavior of turbulence, a law behind its irreducible randomness. On the verge of the one thing that he had been denied his entire career, he could think of nothing else, and abandoned himself completely. But even in the midst of his ecstasy, he continued to worry. Why had he suddenly been granted this strange gift? Why him, why now? He had done nothing to deserve it. The last years of his life had been a waste, and ever since he had met Nelly, his entire consciousness had been consumed by the many trivial worries of romantic love. Though perhaps that was the key to all of this: possession, a sudden invasion from without, work that was not the product of thought or will but, as the Greeks knew well, of rapture and ardor. He needed to get out of the way, to let things pass through him, and be changed. He wiped tears from his eyes as his pen flew across the page, each term in his equations flowing softly into the next, all ideas not considered but inspired by this force that had come into him, this strength that went beyond any he had known, but that left him as abruptly as it had come. His mania spent, he ordered the jumble of papers strewn across his study but dared not approach them for days. The horror of his false epiphany was so apparent to him that he did not need to sit down before his desk to know that his mistakes were too many to tally, his ambitions too large to anchor in reality, and his equations so flawed and incomplete that they could never be re-deemed by experiment.
When August came, he spent a couple of days wandering alone in the national park on the island of Schiermonnikoog, and 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. There was nowhere to run, Paul said, no place to hide, because although he had rescued his boy from the claws of his would-be assassins, already sharpening their axes to cut down and prune back what they considered to be the sickened limbs of Deutschland’s Great Oak, he felt, nevertheless, unable to protect him from his own reckless drive toward death and self-destruction, and knew of no way to keep him safe from the strange new rationality that was beginning to take shape all around them, a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence that was completely indifferent to mankind’s deepest needs; this deranged reason, this specter haunting the soul of science, which Paul could almost see as an incorporeal wraith, an unholy spirit hovering over his colleagues’ heads at meetings and conferences, peering over their shoulders, or nudging their elbows, ever so slightly, as they wrote down their equations, a truly malignant influence, both logic-driven and utterly irrational, and though still fledgling and dormant it was undeniably gathering strength, wanting desperately to break into the world, preparing to thrust itself into our lives through technology by enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control. Paul sensed its budding influence, could hear the faint stirring of its tendrils as it slowly crawled toward us, and yet he could not name or place it, and hardly dared to speak of it out loud, for how could he tell if this morbid imagining, this inexplicable bane that he felt it was his duty to arrest, was the fruit of genuine foresight, or just another malignant growth of the delusion that was slowly overcoming his mind? A confounded Dirac listened to Ehrenfest’s confession without knowing what to say and finally blurted out some meaningless words of encouragement, praising Paul’s invaluable role as a mediator in physics, a modern-day Socrates without whose questioning, something fundamental would surely be lost. Dirac tried being as supportive as he could while quietly shying away from the Austrian physicist who had grasped him firmly by the arm, his face soaked in tears, telling him that he could not imagine what such praise meant to a man who had lost all will to live.
At first light on September 25, 1933, Paul opened his eyes, served himself a sparse breakfast, donned his hat and coat, and walked from his home to the Leiden train station with a gun in his pocket. He bought a ticket to Amsterdam, but since the train left at nine thirty, he still had an hour to kill, so he dropped by the house of Arend Rutgers, one of his former PhD students, who lived close by. They drank water (Paul abhorred liquor and even refused to drink coffee or tea) and talked physics and religion, Paul confessing that, although he himself had lost faith as a very young boy, he had always appreciated pious men such as Rutgers, and would have been unable to survive without constant congress with actively religious individuals, for in their belief in a sacred order upholding the entire world, however naïve and misplaced, he found a small measure of hope. Ehrenfest not only cherished their proximity but thought that all searchers of truth formed a community for lost souls, a refuge of sorts, the hearth, he said, of the home that we have lost due to reason’s destructive influence, which has ruined our capacity for living. Paul, who had placed all his faith in physics, now felt let down, cast out from a paradise that, due to the increasing influence of quantum mechanics and the unstoppable spread of the mathematical plague, was retreating into a darkness deeper than the abyss within atoms. Rutgers tried his best to console him—Would he not consider staying for lunch?—but Ehrenfest replied that it was much too late for him, and left in a hurry, almost sprinting out the door, leaving his hat behind.
In truth he still had time, perhaps too much of it, and when he arrived at the train station and sat down to wait, he felt a sudden urge to turn back, to return to his friend’s house, or to his own home, to escape to any moment other than the present. As he looked at the clockface on the opposing side of the rails, its hands appeared to stop and stick in place. Paul closed his eyes and could almost see the gears frozen inside the mechanism; when he was a child, his grandmother, the old woman who had given him the love and attention that his father had denied him, would hand him a chest full of broken clocks when he came to visit her, discards from a shop that had gone out of business, and Paul, that thin, nervous, polite, and inquisitive little boy, would spend the whole afternoon playing with cogs, springs, and coils, trying to put them back together again, a game he endlessly enjoyed, even though he never succeeded in repairing a single one. Those few blissful days stuck out in his memory and gnawed at him like fleas on a dog, each one an example of an irreversible process, little windows through which he could see his former self sketching out the floor plan of his family’s apartment after his older brother, Arthur, who seemed to know everything there was to know about the world, showed him how to do so, in the winter of 1896, when he was the same age that Vassily, poor little Wassik, poor little crawlikins, was now, an age when Paul had gone through his “calendar craze,” collecting all the almanacs, yearbooks, and calendars that he could lay his hands on, or drawing them himself on pieces of scrap paper and food wrappers, arranging the days in neat rows, flicking the corners of the pages to make the months and years pass by in fractions of a second, time flowing on and on and on, in a never-ending series that reminded him of “Chad Gadya,” the Passover song he was taught by the rabbis in school, one he would sing to himself in the many nights during which sleep felt like something that only others could enjoy, a nursery rhyme that tells the story of a father who buys a young goat for two farthings, but then the kid—who the wise men said represented Israel in its purest, most innocent state—is killed by a cat, which is bitten by a dog, which is wounded by a stick, which is burned by fire, which is quenched by water, which is drunk by an ox, which is slaughtered by a man, in an unbroken chain of cause and effect, sin and penance, crime and punishment, that reaches all the way to heaven, where the Mighty Lord himself, the Holy One, Blessed be He, smites the angel of death, establishing the Kingdom of God, a rhyme the true meaning of which Paul had never been able to understand till then, when the hands on the clock started moving again and he felt shaken, strangely chilled, as he checked his pocket to make sure it was still there, afraid, or perhaps hoping, that his ticket had been lost somewhere along the way; but it was there, all things were in their place, exactly where they should be, waiting for the train to arrive, now, now, now, at any moment now, even though he could not hear it, could not feel its faint rumbling in the distance, he still knew that it would come, there was no way of stopping it, in fact it had just arrived, he could see it rolling slowly into the platform, smoke billowing all around him as the whistle shrieked, but even then he still had time to turn back, the dog, the stick, to stand, take stride, the cat, the angel of death, and walk away, he still had time, and yet he stood, machinelike, propelled by a force he neither recognized nor understood, and took five steps with his legs as stiff as an automaton’s, to board the wagon and take his place among the rest.
He would be there by ten.
JOHNor The Mad Dreams of Reason
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
He was the smartest human being of the 20th century.
An alien among us.
David Hilbert, pope of 20th-century mathematics, sat in for his doctorate examination, and was so stunned by him that when his turn came to interrogate the twenty-two-year-old Hungarian student, he had just one question: “Pray, who is the candidate’s tailor?”
