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From The Maniac, Benjamin Labatut, Penguin Press, 2023:
[...] At the time, Edward Teller was the darling of generals and warmongers because he kept pushing for the hydrogen bomb, even though his initial designs simply didn’t work. He kept insisting until Stan Ulam, von Neumann’s little buddy, came up with the idea that would become the prototype for Ivy Mike, to which Teller then made some modifications. That Ulam… was astonishingly lazy, one of those strange scientists who, despite being brilliant, true geniuses, didn’t feel like working, or simply saw no advantage in putting their ideas into practice. His story is incredible. You see, he came down with a brain illness, he contracted encephalitis, and nearly died. One night he woke up with a terrible headache, and when he tried to speak, he could only babble nonsense. They rushed him to the hospital, drilled into his skull, filled it with penicillin, and he went into a coma. He should have died. Seriously, he should have.
It’s a miracle he survived without major brain damage or impairment of his intellectual abilities, or at least that’s what the doctors told his wife. In fact, the opposite happened: after the encephalitis, he devoted himself to some of his best work, and one of his brightest ideas came while he was still convalescing. The doctors had told him not to think too much. Or rather, he should try not to think at all. If he overworked his brain, he could seriously die. So what does this brilliant mathematician do? He takes up solitaire. Playing hand after hand, with his mind in standby mode, an activity that requires almost no effort.
When you play solitaire, you don’t need to think, right? You don’t have to make any choices; it’s almost entirely automatic. Yet he began to notice a recurring pattern, he realized he could predict, with some degree of accuracy, the outcome of a hand after just a few cards. He analyzed it and came up with the Monte Carlo method, essentially a computational method, a way to make statistical predictions and solve complex problems without truly confronting them, but through a series of approximations. Suppose you want to know the odds of winning a hand of solitaire with a particular card layout: normally, you’d have to calculate, approach the problem abstractly. Instead, with Monte Carlo, you play a huge number of hands, say a thousand, and based on the outcomes, you simply count the number of winning hands and infer the answer you need.
Monte Carlo is a way of using randomness as a tool, a method to sift through immense amounts of data and derive meaning, a technique to make predictions and handle uncertainty by simulating the many possible futures of complex situations and choosing among the various branches that arise from random events. It’s incredibly powerful and also a bit humbling, because it exposes the limits of traditional calculation, of our step-by-step logical and rational thinking.
It turned out to be exactly what the MANIAC needed to carry out the vast numerical simulations and complex hydrodynamic calculations necessary to confirm the feasibility of the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design. And so those damned devices came to life within the digital circuits of a computer before ever exploding in our world. Thermonuclear weapons would have been almost impossible to create if not for the birth of von Neumann’s mind. The fate of his machine was tied to those weapons from its very conception, because the race to build the bomb accelerated Johnny’s desire to build his computer, and the push to build the MANIAC received renewed urgency from the nuclear arms race.
It’s terrifying how science works. Think about it for a second: the most creative and the most destructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time. A huge portion of the high-tech world we live in today, with space exploration and extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, owes itself to the single-minded obsession of one man and the need to develop electronic computers to determine whether an H-bomb could be built. Or think of Ulam. This Polish mathematician nearly died, had one foot, actually two, in the grave, but from his mental turmoil emerged this incredible technique, opening a new field in mathematical physics at exactly the right moment, precisely when the right technology was ready and waiting. And then the world caught fire.