Life's Greatest Secret by Matthew Cobb Read Free Book Online Page A

in human and animal conduct and on the other hand how purpose can be imitated by mechanical and electrical means.’ 21 Von Neumann was a mathematician and a pioneer of game theory – mathematical models that describe and predict simple behaviours. He played an important role in developing the models that came to dominate much of postwar economics, and which also constituted a strand in the thinking of evolutionary biologists. Above all, von Neumann played a leading role in the Manhattan Project.
    Eight months after the meeting of the Teleological Society, the world changed utterly, in two terrifyingly destructive flashes of light. On 6 August 1945, the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, causing unimaginable devastation, instantly killing up to 80,000 people, with a similar number condemned to a slow death over the following months. Three days later, on 9 August, the city of Nagasaki was destroyed by a second bomb, which used plutonium rather than uranium and employed an implosion ignition procedure developed by von Neumann.
    The Manhattan Project was a success, but many of the scientists involved were horrified at their part in the destruction. The prime reason behind the Manhattan Project – fear of being beaten to the bomb by the Nazis – had been eradicated by the surrender of Germany in May 1945. Furthermore, it soon became apparent that the Germans had not been close to success. All except the most naive or unworldly scientists came to recognise that the development and deployment of the atomic bomb showed that the Allies had something else in mind – the bomb was used to threaten the USSR. Von Neumann was quite comfortable with this. He had helped decide which two Japanese cities were to be smashed; as a committed anti-communist he accepted that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were primarily warnings to the USSR, and considered that the attendant death and destruction were quite justified. 22
    Wiener took a very different attitude. He was concerned about the moral issues raised by the use of the bomb against Japan, and by the potential for infinitely greater destruction in the future, to the extent that he considered abandoning science altogether. As he told a friend in October 1945:
    Ever since the atomic bomb fell I have been recovering from an acute attack of conscience as one of the scientists who has been doing war work and who has seen his war work a[s] part of a larger body which is being used in a way of which I do not approve and over which I have absolutely no control. … I have seriously considered the possibility of giving up my scientific productive effort because I know no way to publish without letting my inventions go to the wrong hands.
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    Wiener’s wartime experience had convinced him that science should be as open as possible, and should not be tied to the private sector or the military. Von Neumann, in contrast, was keen to put his snout as deep as possible into the trough of the military–industrial complex that was beginning to dominate the US economy. His twin aims were to obtain funding to build the computer he had dreamt up, and to counter what he saw as the threat from the USSR.
    Despite their profound differences, the two men continued to work together, most notably in the organisation of a conference that took place in March 1946 under the cumbersome title ‘The Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biology and the Social Sciences Meeting’ (more commonly known as the Macy conference, after the sponsors, the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation). The attendees were basically the same crowd as the people who had heard Wiener outline his negative feedback vision in 1942, with the addition of the ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and some others. 24 Wiener and von Neumann presented their project of electronic computer brains, with von Neumann drawing a parallel between the human nervous system and the digital, stored-program computer he was