Nozick and Leftists

From this interview with Robert Nozick:

I had been at Harvard as an Assistant Professor in the mid-​sixties and then came back in 1969 as a Full Professor. That was immediately after the student uprisings, building takeovers, and so on, at Harvard the previous spring. When I arrived in the fall of 1969, there was a philosophy course listed in the catalog entitled “Capitalism.” And the course description was “a moral examination of capitalism.” Of course, for most students, then, it would be taken for granted that a moral examination would be a moral condemnation of capitalism. But that’s not what I intended. We were going to read critics of capitalism. But we were also planning to read defenses of capitalism, and I was going to construct some of my own in the lectures. Some of the graduate students in the philosophy department knew what ideas I held, and they weren’t very happy about a course being taught in the department defending those ideas. Now it was true that there was another course in the department on Marxism by someone who was then a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and students did not object to that. But still some students objected to my giving a lecture course on capitalism. I remember early in the fall (I guess I was scheduled to give the course in the spring term), a graduate student came to me at a departmental reception we had, and said, “We don’t know if you’re going to be allowed to give this course.” I said “What do you mean, not allowed to give this course?” He said, “Well, we know what ideas you hold. We just don’t know whether you will be allowed to give the course.” And I said, “If you come and disrupt my course, I’m going to beat the shit out of you!” And the student was taken aback and said, “But you are taking all this very personally.” And I said, “What do you mean, personally? You are threatening to disrupt my course! you can do other things; you can stand outside the room and hand out leaflets. You can ask students not to register for my course. But if you come into my classroom while I am lecturing and disrupt the class, then I take that very personally.” In fact, at some point later in the term, this student and some others said they were going to make up leaflets and hand them out outside of my classroom. I said, “That’s fine; that would be really exciting.” Then they didn’t get around to doing it, and so I prodded them, “Where are the leaflets? I was counting on something special happening with the leaflets.” But it turned out that it was a lot of trouble to write up a leaflet, to get them run off on a mimeograph machine, and so they never got around to doing it. Thus I never had the privilege of being “leafleted” at Harvard. It seemed to me that sort of antagonism only lasted for a very short period of time and diminished fast. There was no longer any strong personal animosity after that. Maybe it was the general toning down of things in the country in the early 70’s, and I just benefited from the de-radicalization of the university.

More fun photos from this old post Forever Young :-) 

Dialogs

In a high corner office, overlooking Cambridge and the Harvard campus.

How big a role is deep learning playing right now in building genomic predictors?

So far, not a big one. Other ML methods perform roughly on par with DL. The additive component of variance is largest, and we have compressed sensing theorems showing near-optimal performance for capturing it. There are nonlinear effects, and eventually DL will likely be useful for learning multi-loci features. But at the moment everything is limited by statistical power, and nonlinear features are even harder to detect than additive ones. ...

The bottom line is that with enough statistical power predictors will capture the expected heritability for most traits. Are people in your field ready for this?

Some are, but for others it will be very difficult.

Conference on AI and Genomics / Precision Medicine (Boston).

I enjoyed your talk. I work for [leading AgBio company], but my PhD is in Applied Math. We've been computing Net Merit for bulls using SNPs for a long time. The human genetics people have been lagging...

Caught up now, though. And first derivative (sample size growth rate) is much larger...

Yes. It's funny because sperm is priced by Net Merit and when we or USDA revise models some farmers or breeders get very angry because the value of their bull can change a lot!

A Harvard Square restaurant.

I last saw Roman at the Fellows spring dinner, many years ago. I was back from Yale to see friends. He was drinking, with serious intent. He told me about working with Wilson at Cornell. He also told me an old story about Jeffrey and the Higgs mechanism. Jeffrey almost had it, soon after his work on the Goldstone boson. But Sidney talked him out of it -- something to the effect of "if you can only make sense of it in unitary gauge, it must be an artifact" ... Afterwards, at MIT they would say When push comes to shove, Sidney is wrong. ...

Genomics is in the details now. Lots of work to be done, but conceptually it's clear what to do. I wouldn't say that about AGI. There are still important conceptual breakthroughs that need to be made.

The Dunster House courtyard, overlooking the Charles.

We used to live here, can you let us in to look around?

I remember it all -- the long meals, the tutors, the students, the concerts in the library. Yo Yo Ma and Owen playing together.

A special time, at least for us. But long vanished except in memory.

Wheeler used to say that the past only exists as memory records.

Not very covariant! Why not a single four-manifold that exists all at once?

The Ritz-Carlton.

Flying private is like crack. Once you do it, you can't go back...

It's not like that. They never give you a number. They just tell you that the field house is undergoing a renovation and there's a naming opportunity. Then your kid is on the right list. They've been doing this for a hundred years...

Card had to do the analysis that way. Harvard was paying him...

I went to the session on VC for newbies. Now I realize "valuation" is just BS... Now you see how it really works...

Then Bobby says "What's an LP? I wanna be an LP because you gotta keep them happy."

Let me guess, you want a dataset with a million genomes and FICO scores?

I've helped US companies come to China for 20+ years. At first it was rough. Now if I'm back in the states for a while and return, Shenzhen seems like the Future. The dynamism is here.

To most of Eurasia it just looks like two competing hegemons. Both systems have their pluses and minuses, but it's not an existential problem...

Sure, Huawei is a big threat because they won't put in backdoors for the NSA. Who was tapping Merkel's cellphone? It was us...

Humans are just smart enough to create an AGI, but perhaps not smart enough to create a safe one.

Maybe we should make humans smarter first, so there is a better chance that our successors will look fondly on us. Genetically engineered super-geniuses might have a better chance at implementing Asimov's Laws of Robotics.  

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Manifold man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve and Corey have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Music and Mathematics: Noam Elkies

Dinner with two old Harvard friends -- mathematician Noam Elkies and MSU physicist Dean Lee. Noam is in town this week to give a lecture, a colloquium, and perform a piano recital.

At 26 Noam became the youngest full professor in Harvard history, and the youngest to ever receive tenure. He has an amazing Wikipedia entry :-)

In 1981, at age 14, he was awarded a gold medal at the 22nd International Mathematical Olympiad, receiving a perfect score of 42 and becoming one of just 26 participants to attain this score,[3] and one of the youngest ever to do so. Elkies graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1982[4][5] and went on to Columbia University, where he won the Putnam competition at the age of sixteen years and four months, making him one of the youngest Putnam Fellows in history.[6] He was a Putnam Fellow two more times during his undergraduate years. After graduating as valedictorian at age 18 with a summa cum laude in Mathematics and Music, he earned his Ph.D. at the age 20 under the supervision of Benedict Gross and Barry Mazur at Harvard University.[7]

From 1987 to 1990 he was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.[8]

In 1987, he proved that an elliptic curve over the rational numbers is supersingular at infinitely many primes. In 1988, he found a counterexample to Euler's sum of powers conjecture for fourth powers.[9] His work on these and other problems won him recognition and a position as an associate professor at Harvard in 1990.[4] In 1993, he was made a full, tenured professor at the age of 26. This made him the youngest full professor in the history of Harvard.[10] Along with A. O. L. Atkin he extended Schoof's algorithm to create the Schoof–Elkies–Atkin algorithm.

Noam, Dean, and I are all veterans of the Malkin Athletic Center weight room, when it was old-school and gritty :-)

Here's an earlier version of the talk Noam gave tonight. Video should start with him constructing a canon from thin air!

Gunder Frank debates David Landes on world economic history

This C-SPAN video captures two hours of debate between Gunder Frank (ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age) and David Landes (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations), which took place at Northeastern University in 1998. The topic was deep economic history, the rise of the West, and globalization.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?116051-1/economic-history-debate

The debate is a bit tedious but at least one gets a sense of the main points of contention between Frank and Landes.

I was already familiar with both of their positions. I knew Landes a bit because he was a Senior Fellow when I was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. We dined together on many occasions. If memory serves, he even asked my opinion on some of these issues, perhaps because I was a scientist with broad interests, and of Asian heritage. In those conversations he was much less antagonistic with me than with Frank :-)

Some relevant links from this blog: China 1793, Koxinga, the Needham question.


This is just a screenshot, as I can't embed the video here:

Ken Wilson, dead at 77

Wilson was a hero to many, many theoretical physicists, including me. Wilson's father did his PhD with Linus Pauling, Wilson with Murray Gell-Mann, both at Caltech (see Defining Merit). To Wilson we owe much of our modern understanding of renormalization, effective field theory, phase transitions, lattice quantum field theory, and, of course, the renormalization group.

NYTimes: ... His colleagues hailed Dr. Wilson as a legend who had changed how theoretical physicists went about their work, especially in particle physics, the study of the elementary and fundamental constituents of nature. He was also a pioneer in using computers and then supercomputers to study the properties of quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons.

“He’s a giant in theoretical physics,” said Frank Wilczek, a Nobelist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calling his work “quite profound.”

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel winner at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “Ken Wilson was one of a very small number of physicists who changed the way we all think, not just about specific phenomena, but about a vast range of different phenomena.”

Kenneth Geddes Wilson was born on June 8, 1936, in Waltham, Mass., the first of three children of Edgar and Emily Buckingham Wilson. His father was a chemist at Harvard. His mother had been a physics graduate student before marrying. One grandfather was an engineering professor at M.I.T. and the other the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Kenneth Wilson entered Harvard at 16, majored in math and was the Ivy League mile champion. He obtained his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology under the legendary theorist Murray Gell-Mann, then did postdoctoral studies at Harvard as a junior fellow that included a year at CERN, the European nuclear research organization in Geneva. He joined Cornell as a physics professor in 1963.

... From the start, Dr. Wilson was drawn to difficult problems that could take years to solve, said Kurt Gottfried, a Cornell colleague. One such problem was phase transitions, the passage from water to steam or atoms lining up to make a magnet. At the critical point — the temperature at which the change happens — orderly behavior breaks down, but theorists had few clues to how to calculate what was happening.

Dr. Wilson realized that the key to the problem was that fluctuations were happening on all scales at once — from the jostling and zooming of individual atoms to the oscillations of the entire system — something conventional theory could not handle.

At the heart of Dr. Wilson’s work was an abstruse mathematical apparatus known as the renormalization group, which had been conceived by his thesis adviser, Dr. Gell-Mann, and Francis Low in 1951. They had pointed out that fundamental properties of particles and forces varied depending on the scale over which they are measured.

Dr. Wilson realized that such “scaling” was intrinsic to the problems in phase transitions. In a series of papers in the early 1970s, building on the work of Michael Fisher and Benjamin Widom at Cornell and Leo Kadanoff, then at the University of Chicago, he applied the renormalization idea to show how the critical phenomena could be solved by dividing the problem up into simpler pieces, so that what was happening at the melting point, for example, could be considered on one scale at a time.

The results showed that many seemingly unrelated systems — from magnets to liquids — could exhibit the same characteristic behavior as they approached the critical point. The concept proved to be of wide relevance in physics and was cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in presenting the Nobel.

Dr. Wilson went on to apply the same divide-and-conquer strategy to quantum field theory, the mathematical language that underlies the study of the most elementary particles and fundamental forces in nature. The theory was plagued by such vexing issues as infinities and other mathematical absurdities when physicists tried to calculate something like the mass of an electron. A method had been developed to work around these anomalies, but many physicists worried that they were just sweeping a fatal flaw in physics under the rug and that, in the words of Dr. Wilczek, “quantum field theory was doomed.”

Dr. Wilson’s new technique banished the infinities for good, putting the theory on a sounder footing. As the Caltech physicist John Preskill put it in a blog post, “Wilson changed that.”

Dr. Wilson’s ideas played a major role in the development of quantum chromodynamics, the branch of quantum theory that describes the behavior of quarks and the gluons that stick them together to form protons and neutrons. In 1974, in order to solve the equations of this theory numerically and gain a more precise understanding of this process, he invented a digitized version of the theory called lattice gauge theory, in which space is imagined as a kind of finely resolved jungle gym where every intersection of the bars represents a point in space-time.

From Wilson's 1982 Nobel Lecture:

... When I entered graduate school at California Institute of Technology, in 1956, the default for the most promising students was to enter elementary particle theory, the field in which Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, and Jon Mathews were all engaged. I rebelled briefly against this default, spending a summer at the General Atomic Corp. working for Marshall Rosenbluth on plasma physics and talking with S. Chandresekhar who was also at General Atomic for the summer. After about a month of work I was ordered to write up my results, as a result of which I swore to myself that I would choose a subject for research where it would take at least five years before I had anything worth writing about. Elementary particle theory seemed to offer the best prospects of meeting this criterion and I asked Murray for a problem to work on.

... In 1960 I turned in a thesis to Cal Tech containing a mish-mash of curious calculations. I was already a Junior Fellow at Harvard. In 1962 I went to CERN for a year. ... By 1963 it was clear that the only subject I wanted to pursue was quantum field theory applied to strong interactions. I rejected S matrix theory because the equations of S matrix theory, even if one could write them down, were too complicated and inelegant to be a theory; in contrast the existence of a strong coupling approximation as well as a weak coupling approximation to fixed source meson theory helped me believe that quantum field theory might make sense. As far as strong interactions were concerned, all that one could say was that the theories one could write down, such as pseudoscalar meson theory, were obviously wrong. No one had any idea of a theory that could be correct. One could make these statements even though no one had the foggiest notion how to solve these theories in the strong coupling domain.

... When I entered graduate school, I had carried out the instructions given to me by my father and had knocked on both Murray Gell-Mann’s and Feynman’s doors, and asked them what they were currently doing. Murray wrote down the partition function for the three dimensional Ising model and said it would be nice if I could solve it (at least that is how I remember the conversation). Feynman’s answer was “nothing”.

... My very strong desire to work in quantum field did not seem likely to lead to quick publications; but I had already found out that I seemed to be able to get jobs even if I didn’t publish anything so I did not worry about ‘publish or perish’ questions.

... This work showed me that a renormalization group transformation, whose purpose was to eliminate an energy scale or a length scale or whatever from a problem, could produce an effective interaction with arbitrarily many coupling constants, without being a disaster. The renormalization group formalism based on fixed points could still be correct, and furthermore one could hope that only a small finite number of these couplings would be important for the qualitative behavior of the transformations, with the remaining couplings being important only for quantitative computations. In other words the couplings should have an order of importance, and for any desired but given degree of accuracy only a finite subset of the couplings would be needed. In my model the order of importance was determined by orders in the expansion in powers of l/L. ...

From Wilson's Nobel biographical entry:

... My schooling took place in Wellesley, Woods Hole, Massachusetts (second, third/fourth grades in two years), Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Mass. (from fifth to eighth grade), ninth grade at the Magdalen College School in Oxford, England, and tenth and twelfth grades (skipping the eleventh) at the George School in eastern Pennsylvania. Before the year in England I had read about mathematics and physics in books supplied by my father and his friends. I learned the basic principle of calculus from Mathematics and Imagination by Kasner and Newman, and went of to work through a calculus text, until I got stuck in a chapter on involutes and evolutes. Around this time I decided to become a physicist. Later (before entering college) I remember working on symbolic logic with my father; he also tried, unsuccessfully, to teach me group theory. I found high school dull. In 1952 I entered Harvard. I majored in mathematics, but studied physics (both by intent), participated in the Putnam Mathematics competition, and ran the mile for the track team (and crosscountry as well). I began research, working summers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, especially for Arnold Arons (then based at Amherst).

My graduate studies were carried out at the California Institute of Technology. I spent two years in the Kellogg Laboratory of nuclear physics, gaining experimental experience while taking theory courses; I then worked on a thesis for Murray Gell-Mann. While at Cal Tech I talked a lot with Jon Mathews, then a junior faculty member; he taught me how to use the Institute's computer; we also went on hikes together. I spent a summer at the General Atomic Company in San Diego working with Marshall Rosenbluth in plasma physics. Another summer Donald Groom (then a fellow graduate student) and I hiked the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada from Yosemite Park to Mt. Whitney. After my third year I went off to Harvard to be a Junior Fellow while Gell-Mann went off to Paris. During the first year of the fellowship I went back to Cal Tech for a few months to finish my thesis. There was relatively little theoretical activity at Harvard at the time; I went often to M.I.T. to use their computer and eat lunch with the M.I.T. theory group, led by Francis Low.

IIRC Gell-Mann was twice nominated for the Society of Fellows and twice rejected! Was there ever a bigger mistake in personnel selection? :-) On the other hand, John Bardeen (JF '35) twice won the Nobel Prize in physics (once for the transistor, once for superconductivity), so the selection process must have something going for it! See these slides from a talk by Howard Georgi for some more details about theoretical physics at Harvard in the 1970s.

"They take students like you there."

The touching essay I quote from below is by Eddie Frenkel, a noted Berkeley mathematician. I recommend the whole thing. Eddie and I used to play in the regular Junior Fellows basketball game at Harvard's Malkin Athletic Center (MAC), where Spike Lee and Obama also played. I don't recall ever playing with Obama, but I do remember Spike, who was teaching a film class on campus. Spike is no baller, despite being such a big Knicks fan. For some reason I came up with the nickname "Kazakhstani Kid" for Eddie, which he never appreciated. During all the years I knew Eddie we never talked about anti-semitism. I did, however, hear such stories from Bob Nozick (from his Princeton years) and Stephen Greenblatt (Yale). They were, of course, from an earlier generation.

Perceptively, Nozick once asked me if I thought Asian-Americans were discriminated against by elite universities like Harvard. Perhaps he was aware of the 1990 investigation of Harvard by the Department of Education (our conversation would have been in the early 90s); I certainly was not. See also The bar is different.

New Criterion: ... It was 1984, my senior year at high school. I had to decide which university to apply to. Moscow had many schools, but there was only one place to study pure math: Moscow State University, known by its Russian abbreviation MGU, Moskovskiy Gosudarstvenny Universitet. Its famous Mekh-Mat, the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics, was the flagship mathematics program of the USSR. Since I wanted to study pure math, I had no choice but to apply there.

Unlike the U.S., there are entrance exams to colleges in Russia. At Mekh-Mat there were four: written math, oral math, an essay on literature, and oral physics. I had, by then, progressed far beyond high school math, so it looked like I would sail through these exams.

But I was too optimistic. ...

“What’s your name?” she said by way of greeting.

“Eduard Frenkel.” (I used the Russian version of “Edward’’ in those days.)

“And you want to apply to MGU?”

“Yes.”

“Which Department?”

“Mekh-Mat.”

“I see.” She lowered her eyes and asked:

“And what’s your nationality?”

I said, “Russian.”

“Really? And what are your parents’ nationalities?”

“Well. . . . My mother is Russian.”

“And your father?”

“My father is Jewish.”

...

“Do you know that Jews are not accepted to Moscow University?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that you shouldn’t even bother to apply. Don’t waste your time. They won’t let you in.” ...

But Eddie tried anyway, to no avail.

... We walked out of the room and entered the elevator. The doors closed. It was just the two of us. The examiner was clearly in a good mood. He said:

“You did very well. A really impressive performance. I was wondering: did you go to a special math school?”

I grew up in a small town, we didn’t have special math schools.

“Really? Perhaps, your parents are mathematicians?”

No, they are engineers.

“Interesting. . . . It’s the first time I’ve seen such a strong student who did not go to a special math school.”

I couldn’t believe what he was saying. This man had just failed me after an unfairly administered, discriminatory, grueling five-hour exam. For all I knew, he had killed my dream of becoming a mathematician. A sixteen-year-old student, whose only fault was that he came from a Jewish family. And now this guy is giving me compliments and expecting me to open up to him?!

But what could I do? Yell at him, punch him in the face? I was just standing there, silent, stunned. He continued:

“Let me give you some advice. Apply to the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas. They have an Applied Mathematics program, which is quite good. They take students like you there.”

The elevator doors opened and a minute later he handed me my thick application folder, with a bunch of my school trophies and prizes oddly sticking out of it.

“Good luck to you,” he said, but I was too exhausted to respond. My only wish was to get the hell out of there!

And then I was outside, on the giant staircase of the immense MGU building. I was breathing fresh summer air again and hearing the sounds of the big city coming from a distance. It was getting dark, and there was almost no one around. I immediately spotted my parents who had been waiting anxiously for me on the steps this whole time. By the look on my face, and the big folder I was holding in my hands, they knew right away what had happened inside.

A reader sent me this list of deceptively simple "Jewish problems" used in oral exams at Moscow State University (MGU): http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556.

Adventures of a Mathematician

I found my copy of Ulam's book Adventures of a Mathematician recently while preparing to move (it was in a box with other books and notes from Caltech). I had not looked at it since I was an undergraduate! Below are some interesting excerpts to go with the ones I posted here.

[p.60] ... the vacancy in the Society of Fellows at Harvard which I was invited to fill resulted from Chandrasekhar's acceptance of an assistant professorship at Chicago. 

[p.81] When we talked about Einstein, Johnny [von Neumann] would express the usual admiration for his epochal discoveries which had come to him so effortlessly ... But his admiration seemed mixed with some reservations, as if he thought, "Well, here he is, so very great," yet knowing his limitations. [ See also Feyerabend on the giants. ] ... I once asked Johnny whether he thought that Einstein might have developed a sort of contempt for other physicists, including even the best and most famous ones -- that he had been deified and lionized too much... Johnny agreed... "he does not think too much of others as possible rivals in the history of physics of our epoch."

[p.107] I told Banach about an expression Johnny had used with me in Princeton before stating some non-Jewish mathematician's result, "Die Goim haben den folgenden satz beweisen" (The goys have proved the following theorem). Banach, who was pure goy, thought it was one of the funniest sayings he had ever heard. He was enchanted by its implication that if the goys could do it, then Johnny and I ought to be able to do it better. Johnny did not invent this joke, but he liked it and we started using it.

There are many more interesting things, including the story behind the Ulam-Teller design for the hydrogen bomb.

What were they discussing?

Von Neumann, Feynman and Ulam, back in the day. (Probably Santa Fe or Los Alamos.)


 

Some Ulam quotes from his autobiography Adventures of a Mathematician.

One of the luckiest accidents of my life happened the day G. D. Birkhoff came to tea at von Neumann's house while I was visiting there. We talked and, after some discussion of mathematical problems, he turned to me and said, “There is an organization at Harvard called the Society of Fellows. It has a vacancy. There is about one chance in four that if you were interested and applied you might receive this appointment."

I came to the Society of Fellows during its first few years of existence ... I was given a two-room suite in Adams House, next door to another new fellow in mathematics by the name of John Oxtoby ... He was interested in some of the same mathematics I was: in set theoretical topology, analysis, and real function theory.

... While l was at Harvard, Johnny came to see me a few times and I invited him to dinner at the Society of Fellows. We would also take automobile drives and trips together during which we discussed everything from mathematics to literature and talked without interruption while still paying attention to our surroundings. Johnny liked this kind of travel very much.

... Edward [Teller] took up my suggestions, hesitantly at first, but enthusiastically after a few hours. ... Teller lost no time in presenting these ideas ... at a ... meeting in Princeton which was to become quite famous because it marked the turning point in the development of the H-bomb.

... It seems to me this was the tragedy of Oppenheimer. He was more intelligent, receptive, and brilliantly critical than deeply original. ... Perhaps he exaggerated his role when he saw himself as the "Prince of Darkness, the destroyer of Universes." Johnny used to say, "Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin."

... Banach once told me, "Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems or theories, the very best ones see analogies between analogies." Gamow possessed this ability to see analogies between models for physical theories to an almost uncanny degree ... It was along the great lines of the foundations of physics in cosmology and in the recent discoveries in molecular biology that his ideas played an important role. His pioneering work in explaining the radioactive decay of atoms was followed by his theory of the explosive beginning of the universe, the “big bang" theory (he disliked the term by the way) and the subsequent formation of galaxies.

Paleo man

Dan and I were Junior Fellows at the same time (even in the same year, IIRC). I was never that interested in "bone-diggin-ology" but Dan was always a good person to talk to about the subject. I wonder if Dan follows a paleo diet.

NYTimes: Among his academic peers, Daniel Lieberman, 47, is known as a “hoof and mouth” man.

That’s because Dr. Lieberman, an evolutionary biology professor at Harvard, spends his time studying how the human head and foot have evolved over the millenniums. In January, Harvard University Press published his treatise, “The Evolution of the Human Head.” ...

Q. Why heads?

A. Our heads are what make our species interesting. If you were to meet a Neanderthal or a Homo erectus, you’d see that they are the same as us — except from the neck up. We’re different in our noses, ears, teeth, how we swallow and chew. When you think about what makes us human, it’s our big brains, complex thought and language. We speak with our heads, breathe and smell with our heads. So understanding how we got these heads is vital for knowing who we are and what we are doing on this planet.

Q. Are there any practical benefits to your research?

A. There are. A majority of the undergraduates who register for my evolutionary anatomy and physiology class here at Harvard are pre-medical students. Learning this will help them become better doctors. Many of the conditions they’ll be treating are rooted in the mismatch between the world we live in today and the Paleolithic bodies we’ve inherited.

For example, impacted wisdom teeth and malocclusions are very recent problems. They arise because we now process our food so much that we chew with little force. These interactions affect how our faces grow, which causes previously unknown dental problems. Hunter-gatherers — who live in ways similar to our ancestors — don’t have impacted wisdom teeth or cavities. There are many other conditions rooted in the mismatch — fallen arches, osteoporosis, cancer, myopia, diabetes and back trouble. So understanding evolutionary biology will definitely help my students when they become orthopedists, orthodontists and craniofacial surgeons. ...

Q. Do you run barefoot?

A. Only in the summer. Obviously, you cannot run barefoot in a New England winter! Then, I use a shoe that brings me more toward the barefoot style. It’s called a “minimal shoe,” and it’s more like a glove for the foot. Some people tell me it looks silly. But I like the way it feels. And I love running barefoot when I can. You get all this wonderful sensory pleasure from your feet. You feel the grass and the sensation of the earth. You get bathed by sensation. There are a lot of sensory nerves in the feet.

Right now, every sports gear company is now developing a line of these minimal shoes. One company, I should inform you, has helped fund some of my laboratory research, though I’ve not had anything to do with their product.

Q. Is your research part of a trend?

A. It’s part of this movement to try to listen to evolution in our bodies. We evolved to eat different diets, to run differently and live differently from the ways we do today. People are looking to evolution to find out how our bodies adapted and what might be healthier for us. That’s good.

Forever Young

I found these in my iPhoto collection :-)


Jogging near CERN. No goats were harmed.



With Robert Nozick, back in the day. All of my suits were hand me downs from my brother the management consultant.



Two physicists and a poet, Christmas dinner.



My brother visits the Society of Fellows.



Scene from a wedding, duly noted in the New York Times M&A section. Wellesley and HBS merge with Caltech, MIT and Sloan. (See Bobos in Paradise p.42 :-)



A meal by the Seine.



Les Deux Magots.



Sagres, Portugal. Once thought to be the end of the world :-)





Conil, Espana.





Future bomb boy using IBM XT "portable" to calculate some wavefunctions at 150 S. Chester, Pasadena.



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The best and the brightest: McGeorge Bundy

Bundy was the first National Security Advisor under Kennedy and Johnson (at the time the position was special assistant to the president for national security affairs), and perhaps the most infamous of Harvard Junior Fellows. Bundy, with McNamara, played a key role in shaping America's war in Vietnam.

Below, Richard Holbrooke reviews Gordon Goldstein's new book on McGeorge Bundy in the Times. (Interview with Goldstein.)

How long will it be before the architects of our war in Iraq can admit their mistake? I suspect they are surpassed by Bundy not just in intelligence but, ultimately, integrity.

NYTimes: ...Bundy was the quintessential Eastern Establishment Republican, a member of a family that traced its Boston roots back to 1639. His ties to Groton (where he graduated first in his class), Yale and then Harvard were deep. At the age of 27, he wrote, to national acclaim, the ‘memoirs” of former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. In 1953, Bundy became dean of the faculty at Harvard — an astonishing responsibility for someone still only 34. Even David Halberstam, who would play so important a role in the public demolition of Bundy’s reputation in his classic, “The Best and the Brightest,” admitted that “Bundy was a magnificent dean” who played with the faculty “like a cat with mice.”

As he chose his team, Kennedy was untroubled by Bundy’s Republican roots —the style, the cool and analytical mind, and the Harvard credentials were more important. “I don’t care if the man is a Democrat or an Igorot,” he told the head of his transition team, Clark Clifford. “I just want the best fellow I can get for the particular job.” And so McGeorge Bundy entered into history — the man with the glittering résumé for whom nothing seemed impossible.

Everyone knows how this story ends: Kennedy assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson trapped in a war he chose to escalate, Nixon and Kissinger negotiating a peace agreement and, finally, the disastrous end on April 30, 1975, as American helicopters lifted the last Americans off the roof of the embassy.

...Bundy spoke only occasionally about Vietnam after he left government, but when he did, he supported the war. Yet it haunted him. He knew his own performance in the White House had fallen far short of his own exacting standards, and Halberstam’s devastating portrait of him disturbed him far more deeply than most people realized. After remaining largely silent, — except for an occasional defense of the two presidents he had served — for 30 years, Bundy finally began, in 1995, to write about Vietnam. He chose as his collaborator Gordon Goldstein, a young scholar of international affairs. Together they began mining the archives, and Goldstein conducted a series of probing interviews. Bundy began writing tortured notes to himself, often in the margins of his old memos — a sort of private dialogue with the man he had been 30 years earlier — something out of a Pirandello play. Bundy would scribble notes: “the doves were right”; “a war we should not have fought”; “I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution.” “What are my worst mistakes?” For those of us who had known the self-confident, arrogant Brahmin from Harvard, these astonishing, even touching, efforts to understand his own mistakes are far more persuasive than the shallow analysis McNamara offers in his own memoir, “In Retrospect.”

...As it happens, I was part of a small group that dined with Bundy the night before Pleiku at the home of Deputy Ambassador William J. Porter, for whom I then worked. Bundy quizzed us in his quick, detached style for several hours, not once betraying emotion. I do not remember the details of that evening — how I wish I had kept a diary! — but by then I no longer regarded Bundy as a role model for public service. There was no question he was brilliant, but his detachment from the realities of Vietnam disturbed me. In Ambassador Porter’s dining room that night were people far less intelligent than Bundy, but they lived in Vietnam, and they knew things he did not. Yet if they could not present their views in quick and clever ways, Bundy either cut them off or ignored them. A decade later, after I had left the government, I wrote a short essay for Harper’s Magazine titled “The Smartest Man in the Room Is Not Always Right.” I had Bundy — and that evening — in mind.

See also A Memory of McGeorge Bundy:

...In February, he and I overlapped briefly in Saigon, and we had one quiet talk. On my return to Washington, I learned that Mac had told the NSC staff he was optimistic about the war, but, much to my astonishment, that they they should wait to hear my very different views.

In 1968, after I wrote a critique of Vietnam policy in The Atlantic, Mac chastised me for betraying LBJ's trust. We didn't make up for eight years. By then I was running Harvard's Nieman Fellowships for journalists, and Mac came to talk to the fellows.

He was crisply articulate, but there was one persistent young man, who resembled Trotsky, needling Mac with questions about the war. Mac finally cut him off saying, "Your problem, young man, is not your intellect but your ideology."

Later, as we were clinking highballs, the Trotsky look-alike cornered Mac: " What about Vietnam?"

Bundy: "I don't understand your question."

Trotsky: "Mac, what about (italics)you(end italics) and Vietnam?"

Bundy: "I still don't understand."

Trotsky: "But Mac, you screwed it up, didn't you?"

Glacial silence. Then Bundy suddenly smiled and replied: "Yes, I did. But I'm not going to waste the rest of my life feeling guilty about it."

When he died, McGeorge Bundy was working on a book about the war whose main message was that Vietnam was a terrible mistake.

It's a loss that he did not live to write in full what he had learned from the Vietnam calamity.

I recommend The Color of Truth, Kai Bird's biography of the Bundy brothers. Bird wrote the recent biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus.