Leo Szilard, the Intellectual Bumblebee (lecture by William Lanouette)

 

This is a nice lecture on Leo Szilard by his biographer William Lanouette. See also ‘An Intellectual Bumblebee’ by Max Perutz.

Wikipedia: Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear fission reactor in 1934, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.

How Alexander Sachs, acting on behalf of Szilard and Einstein, narrowly convinced FDR to initiate the atomic bomb project: Contingency, History, and the Atomic Bomb. 

Szilard wrote children's stories and science fiction. His short story My Trial as a War Criminal begins after the USSR has defeated the US using biological weapons.

I was just about to lock the door of my hotel room and go to bed when there was a knock on the door and there stood a Russian officer and a young Russian civilian. I had expected something of this sort ever since the President signed the terms of unconditional surrender and the Russians landed a token occupation force in New York. The officer handed me something that looked like a warrant and said that I was under arrest as a war criminal on the basis of my activities during the Second World War in connection with the atomic bomb. There was a car waiting outside and they told me that they were going to take me to the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Apparently, they were rounding up all the scientists who had ever worked in the field of atomic energy ...

This story was translated into Russian and it had a large impact on Andrei Sakharov, who showed it to his colleague Victor Adamsky:

A number of us discussed it. It was about a war between the USSR and the USA, a very devastating one, which brought victory to the USSR. Szilard and a number of other physicists are put under arrest and then face the court as war criminals for having created weapons of mass destruction. Neither they nor their lawyers could make up a cogent proof of their innocence. We were amazed by this paradox. You can’t get away from the fact that we were developing weapons of mass destruction. We thought it was necessary. Such was our inner conviction. But still the moral aspect of it would not let Andrei Dmitrievich and some of us live in peace.

See also The Many Worlds of Leo Szilard (APS symposium). Slides for Richard Garwin's excellent summary of Szilard's work, including nuclear physics, refrigeration, and Maxwell's Demon. One of Garwin's anecdotes:

Ted Puck was a distinguished biologist, originally trained in physics. ‘With the greatest possible reluctance I have come to the conclusion that it is not possible for me personally to work with you scientifically,’ he wrote Szilard. ‘Your mind is so much more powerful than mine that I find it impossible when I am with you to resist the tremendous polarizing forces of your ideas and outlook.’ Puck feared his ‘own flow of ideas would slow up & productivity suffer if we were to become continuously associated working in the same place and the same general kind of field.’ Puck said, ‘There is no living scientist whose intellect I respect more. But your tremendous intellectual force is a strain on a limited person like myself.’

Puck was a pioneer in single cell cloning, aided in part by Szilard:

When Szilard saw in 1954 that biologists Philip Marcus and Theodore Puck were having trouble growing individual cells into colonies, he concluded that “since cells grow with high efficiency when they have many neighbors, you should not let a single cell know it’s alone”. This was no flippant excursion into psychobiology. Rather, Szilard’s idea to use a layered feeder dish worked, while the open dish had not (Lanouette, 1992: 396–397).

After the war Szilard worked in molecular biology. This photo of Jacques Monod and Szilard is in the seminar room at Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Monod credits Szilard for the negative-feedback idea behind his 1965 Nobel prize.

“I have … recorded” in my Nobel lecture, said Monod, “how it was Szilard who decisively reconciled me with the idea (repulsive to me, until then) that enzyme induction reflected an anti-repressive effect, rather than the reverse, as I tried, unduly, to stick to.”

 

Contingency, History, and the Atomic Bomb: Alexander Sachs

[ Financier Alexander Sachs, Look Magazine, March 14, 1950. Article: How FDR Planned to use the A-Bomb ]

Last month I received an astonishing email, partly excerpted below.

Stephen,

By way of introduction, my grandfather, General Groves, led the Manhattan Project. I’m now working on a documentary series about the making of the bomb.

I first came across Robert Jungk’s account of the Sachs-FDR meetings not in Jungk's book, but in your “Contingency, History, and the Atomic Bomb” posting online. Thank you.

It’s an important episode that appears in almost none of the histories, Rhodes’ Making of the Atomic Bomb included. And it’s relevant: anyone who has had to pitch a complicated idea or project knows that getting the initial approval and funding can be more challenging than completing the work proposed.

I’ve since found quite a bit of material pertaining to the story. I thought you might find it interesting.

...

I imagine some graduate history, science, or economics student could turn this into a PhD thesis. (Why did FDR always have time for Sachs? I see some hints that Sachs may have been ahead of his time in macroeconomics.) Or – Szilard and Wigner’s efforts to get the matter in front of FDR could be a management case study.

Anyway, thank you for posting the story. The full version will definitely make it into my production.

Dick Groves

From Contingency, History, and the Atomic Bomb (excerpt from Jungk):

How Alexander Sachs, acting on behalf of Szilard and Einstein, narrowly convinced FDR to initiate the atomic bomb project. History sometimes hangs on a fragile thread: had the project been delayed a year, atomic weapons might not have been used in WWII. Had the project completed a year earlier, the bombs might have been used against Germany.

See also A Brief History of the Future, as told to the Masters of the Universe.

... It was nearly ten weeks before Alexander Sachs at last found an opportunity, on October 11, 1939, to hand President Roosevelt, in person, the letter composed by [Leo] Szilard and signed by [Albert] Einstein at the beginning of August [1939]. In order to ensure that the President should thoroughly appreciate the contents of the document and not lay it aside with a heap of other papers awaiting attention, Sachs read to him, in addition to the message and an appended memorandum by Szilard, a further much more comprehensive statement by himself. The effect of these communications was by no means so overpowering as Sachs had expected. Roosevelt, wearied by the prolonged effort of listening to his visitor, made an attempt to disengage himself from the whole affair. ...

Sachs, however, was able, as he took his leave, to extort from the President the consolation of an invitation to breakfast the following morning. "That night I didn't sleep a wink," Sachs remembers.

...

[ The next morning, at the White House ]

After Sachs finished speaking the President remained silent for several minutes. Then he wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to the servant who had been waiting at table. The latter soon returned with a parcel which, at Roosevelt's order, he began slowly to unwrap. It contained a bottle of old French brandy of Napoleon's time, which the Roosevelt family had possessed for many years. The President, still maintaining a significant silence, told the man to fill two glasses. Then he raised his own, nodded to Sachs and drank to him.

Next he remarked: "Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up?"

"Precisely."

It was only then that Roosevelt called in his attaché, [Brigadier] General [Edwin] "Pa" Watson, and addressed him—pointing to the documents Sachs had brought—in words which have since become famous:

"Pa, this requires action!

Sachs was a trusted but largely anonymous advisor to Roosevelt. He advised Roosevelt through the Great Depression and foresaw the rise of Hitler and the military threat from Germany. From the profile in Look Magazine:

... only one word describes him: genius. A story about how he helped President Roosevelt to understand the atomic energy problem in 1939 throws light on why Dr. Sachs is so described. ...

... Schooled at Columbia and Harvard, he never left the school of self-education.

Dr. Alexander Sachs' career has been in economics, with a special emphasis on the mathematics of statistics. But the range of his intellectual interests embraces religion, science, history, and politics. ...

Technically Sweet

Regular readers will know that I've been interested in the so-called Teller-Ulam mechanism used in thermonuclear bombs. Recently I read Kenneth Ford's memoir Building the H Bomb: A Personal History. Ford was a student of John Wheeler, who brought him to Los Alamos to work on the H-bomb project. This led me to look again at Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun: The Making of Hydrogen Bomb. There is quite a lot of interesting material in these two books on the specific contributions of Ulam and Teller, and whether the Soviets came up with the idea themselves, or had help from spycraft. See also Sakharov's Third Idea and F > L > P > S.

The power of a megaton device is described below by a witness to the Soviet test.

The Soviet Union tested a two-stage, lithium-deuteride-fueled thermonuclear device on November 22, 1955, dropping it from a Tu-16 bomber to minimize fallout. It yielded 1.6 megatons, a yield deliberately reduced for the Semipalatinsk test from its design yield of 3 MT. According to Yuri Romanov, Andrei Sakharov and Yakov Zeldovich worked out the Teller-Ulam configuration in conversations together in early spring 1954, independently of the US development. “I recall how Andrei Dmitrievich gathered the young associates in his tiny office,” Romanov writes, “… and began talking about the amazing ability of materials with a high atomic number to be an excellent reflector of high-intensity, short-pulse radiation.” ...

Victor Adamsky remembers the shock wave from the new thermonuclear racing across the steppe toward the observers. “It was a front of moving air that you could see that differed in quality from the air before and after. It came, it was really terrible; the grass was covered with frost and the moving front thawed it, you felt it melting as it approached you.” Igor Kurchatov walked in to ground zero with Yuli Khariton after the test and was horrified to see the earth cratered even though the bomb had detonated above ten thousand feet. “That was such a terrible, monstrous sight,” he told Anatoli Alexandrov when he returned to Moscow. “That weapon must not be allowed ever to be used.”

The Teller-Ulam design uses radiation pressure (reflected photons) from a spherical fission bomb to compress the thermonuclear fuel. The design is (to quote Oppenheimer) "technically sweet" -- a glance at the diagram below should convince anyone who understands geometrical optics!

In discussions of human genetic engineering (clearly a potentially dangerous future technology), the analogy with nuclear weapons sometimes arises: what role do moral issues play in the development of new technologies with the potential to affect the future of humanity? In my opinion, genetic engineering of humans carries nothing like the existential risk of arsenals of Teller-Ulam devices. Genomic consequences will play out over long (generational) timescales, leaving room for us to assess outcomes and adapt accordingly. (In comparison, genetic modification of viruses, which could lead to pandemics, seems much more dangerous.)

It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. -- Oppenheimer on the Teller-Ulam design for the H-bomb.

What is technically sweet about genomics? (1) the approximate additivity (linearity) of the genetic architecture of key traits such as human intelligence (2) the huge amounts of extant variance in the human population, enabling large improvements (3) matrices of human genomes are good compressed sensors, and one can estimate how much data is required to "solve" the genetic architecture of complex traits. See, e.g., Genius (Nautilus Magazine) and Genetic architecture and predictive modeling of quantitative traits.

More excerpts from Dark Sun below.

Enthusiasts of trans-generational epigenetics would do well to remember the danger of cognitive bias and the lesson of Lysenko. Marxian notions of heredity are dangerous because, although scientifically incorrect, they appeal to our egalitarian desires.

A commission arrived in Sarov one day to make sure everyone agreed with Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko's Marxian notions of heredity, which Stalin had endorsed. Sakharov expressed his belief in Mendelian genetics instead. The commission let the heresy pass, he writes, because of his “position and reputation at the Installation,” but the outspoken experimentalist Lev Altshuler, who similarly repudiated Lysenko, did not fare so well ...

The transmission of crucial memes from Szilard to Sakharov, across the Iron Curtain.

Andrei Sakharov stopped by Victor Adamsky's office at Sarov one day in 1961 to show him a story. It was Leo Szilard's short fiction “My Trial as a War Criminal,” one chapter of his book The Voice of the Dolphins, published that year in the US. “I'm not strong in English,” Adamsky says, “but I tried to read it through. A number of us discussed it. It was about a war between the USSR and the USA, a very devastating one, which brought victory to the USSR. Szilard and a number of other physicists are put under arrest and then face the court as war criminals for having created weapons of mass destruction. Neither they nor their lawyers could make up a cogent proof of their innocence. We were amazed by this paradox. You can't get away from the fact that we were developing weapons of mass destruction. We thought it was necessary. Such was our inner conviction. But still the moral aspect of it would not let Andrei Dmitrievich and some of us live in peace.” So the visionary Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who first conceived of a nuclear chain reaction crossing a London street on a gray Depression morning in 1933, delivered a note in a bottle to a secret Soviet laboratory that contributed to Andrei Sakharov's courageous work of protest that helped bring the US-Soviet nuclear arms race to an end.

Contingency, History, and the Atomic Bomb

[ More on Sachs -- profile in Look Magazine 1950. ]

How Alexander Sachs, acting on behalf of Szilard and Einstein, narrowly convinced FDR to initiate the atomic bomb project. History sometimes hangs on a fragile thread: had the project been delayed a year, atomic weapons might not have been used in WWII. Had the project completed a year earlier, the bombs might have been used against Germany.

See also A Brief History of the Future, as told to the Masters of the Universe.

Excerpts below are from Robert Jungk's Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists. (Note the book contains inaccuracies concerning the wartime role of German physicists such as Weizsacker and Heisenberg.)

Alexander Sachs:

... This international financier could always obtain entry to the White House, for he had often amazed Roosevelt by his usually astonishingly accurate forecasts of economic events. Ever since 1933 Sachs had been one of the unofficial but extremely influential advisers of the American President, all of whom had to possess, by F. D. R.'s own definition, 'great ability, physical vitality, and a real passion for anonymity'.

... It was nearly ten weeks before Alexander Sachs at last found an opportunity, on October 11, 1939, to hand President Roosevelt, in person, the letter composed by [Leo] Szilard and signed by [Albert] Einstein at the beginning of August [1939]. In order to ensure that the President should thoroughly appreciate the contents of the document and not lay it aside with a heap of other papers awaiting attention, Sachs read to him, in addition to the message and an appended memorandum by Szilard, a further much more comprehensive statement by himself. The effect of these communications was by no means so overpowering as Sachs had expected. Roosevelt, wearied by the prolonged effort of listening to his visitor, made an attempt to disengage himself from the whole affair. He told the disappointed reader that he found it all very interesting but considered government intervention to be premature at this stage.

Sachs, however, was able, as he took his leave, to extort from the President the consolation of an invitation to breakfast the following morning. "That night I didn't sleep a wink," Sachs remembers. "I was staying at the Carlton Hotel [two blocks north of the White House]. I paced restlessly to and fro in my room or tried to sleep sitting in a chair. There was a small park quite close to the hotel. Three or four times, I believe, between eleven in the evening and seven in the morning, I left the hotel, to the porter's amazement, and went across to the park. There I sat on a bench and meditated. What could I say to get the President on our side in this affair, which was already beginning to look practically hopeless? Quite suddenly, like an inspiration, the right idea came to me. I returned to the hotel, took a shower and shortly afterwards called once more at the White House."

Roosevelt was sitting alone at the breakfast table, in his wheel chair, when Sachs entered the room. The President inquired in an ironical tone:

"What bright idea have you got now? How much time would you like to explain it?"

Dr. Sachs says he replied that he would not take long.

"All I want to do is to tell you a story. During the Napoleonic wars a young American inventor came to the French Emperor and offered to build a fleet of steamships with the help of which Napoleon could, in spite of the uncertain weather, land in England. Ships without sails? This seemed to the great Corsican so impossible that he sent [Robert] Fulton away. In the opinion of the English historian Lord Acton, this is an example of how England was saved by the shortsightedness of an adversary. Had Napoleon shown more imagination and humility at that time, the history of the nineteenth century would have taken a very different course."

After Sachs finished speaking the President remained silent for several minutes. Then he wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to the servant who had been waiting at table. The latter soon returned with a parcel which, at Roosevelt's order, he began slowly to unwrap. It contained a bottle of old French brandy of Napoleon's time, which the Roosevelt family had possessed for many years. The President, still maintaining a significant silence, told the man to fill two glasses. Then he raised his own, nodded to Sachs and drank to him.

Next he remarked: "Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up?"

"Precisely."

It was only then that Roosevelt called in his attaché, [Brigadier] General [Edwin] "Pa" Watson, and addressed him—pointing to the documents Sachs had brought—in words which have since become famous:

"Pa, this requires action!"

More on the challenges:

Teller criticizes as follows one of these excessively rosy views of the early history of the American atom bomb: 'There is no mention of the futile efforts of the scientists in 1939 to awaken the interest of the military authorities in the atomic bomb. The reader does not learn about the dismay of scientists faced with the necessity of planned research. He does not find out about the indignation of engineers asked to believe in the theory and on such an airy basis to construct a plant.'

Wigner remembers the resistance. 'We often felt as though we were swimming in syrup,' he remarks. Boris Pregel, a radium expert, without whose disinterested loan of uranium the first experiments al Columbia University would have been impossible, comments: 'It is a wonder that after so many blunders and mistakes anything was ever accomplished at all.' Szilard still believes today that work on the uranium project was delayed for at least a year by the short-sightedness and sluggishness of the authorities. Even Roosevelt's manifest interest in the plan scarcely accelerated its execution. ...

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: Seminar and Photos

Last week I visited Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to give a seminar.

The new material is in slides 13-17. See also Live Long and Prosper: Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits and Disease Risk Predictors. I believe the sibling validation results are extremely important: typically most of the predictive power persists in within-family validation tests. We have not released this paper but will soon -- the slides are a preview. To be honest I fully anticipated these results: the large number of out of sample predictor validations using unrelated individuals strongly suggests that real genetic effects are at work. However, many people are irrationally biased against -- have strong priors against -- genetic causation of complex traits (even disease risks). These family designs provide important "gold standard" evidence, which, one can hope, will enlighten even the most stubborn. The sad alternative is progress one funeral at a time...

Otherwise the talk is similar to the one I gave at the Berkeley/UCSF Innovative Genomics Institute last summer. Video of IGI talk.

Title: Genomic Prediction of Complex Traits and Disease Risks via AI/ML and Large Genomic Datasets

Abstract: The talk is divided into two parts. The first gives an overview of the rapidly advancing area of genomic prediction of disease risks using polygenic scores. We can now identify risk outliers (e.g., with 5 or 10 times normal risk) for about 20 common disease conditions, ranging from diabetes to heart diseases to breast cancer, using inexpensive SNP genotypes (i.e., as offered by 23andMe). We can also predict some complex quantitative traits (e.g., adult height with accuracy of few cm, using ~20k SNPs). I discuss application of these results in precision medicine as well as embryo selection in IVF, and give some details about genetic architectures. The second part covers the AI/ML used to build these predictors, with an emphasis on "sparse learning" and phase transitions in high dimensional statistics.

Some photos. The ones on the wall of the seminar room capture a golden era in molecular biology and the study of DNA. Leo Szilard on the right in the one below. Also, Jacques Monod, Crick and Watson, Wally Gilbert, Max Delbruck, Frank Stahl, Francois Jacob, David Baltimore. Of these individuals I have known four in person. I would give a lot to have met Crick and especially Szilard. While at CSHL I learned that James Watson is still alive and intellectually active.

See H. Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation (PDF) for a brilliant but readable history of the golden age of molecular biology.

Intellectual history

I want to recommend a book I've been reading recently, The Eighth Day of Creation by H.F. Judson. It's the most detailed intellectual history of molecular biology I've yet found, covering not just the science but the scientists as well. Someone described it as a New Yorker-style book covering the discovery of DNA, RNA and protein synthesis.

It may be chauvinistic, but I can't help noticing the prominent role played by physicists who crossed over into molecular biology: Bragg, Delbruck, Crick, Wilkins, Gamow, Szilard (yes, the Gamow and Szilard you know from big bang cosmology and the atomic bomb, respectively), Walter Gilbert, etc. The influence of Schrodinger's little book What is Life? is pervasive.

It's hard for me to think of many scientific histories as good as this one, in which the writer has a deep understanding of both the science and the personalities involved. Two examples are Subtle is the Lord (Abraham Pais on Einstein) and QED and the Men Who Made It (Sam Schweber on quantum electrodynamics), but these border on unreadable for the non-specialist. Perhaps Genius, Gleick's biography of Feynman, and The Enigma, Andrew Hodge's biography of Turing, also qualify. Can anyone suggest others?

The nature of intuition

From an excellent blog post by Emanuel Derman. Derman contrasts Kahneman's use of "intuition" as quick insight with the physicist or mathematician's use of "intuition" to describe deep understanding operating at a subconscious level.

Kahneman’s "intuition" = a quick guess; I mean by intuition the insight that can come only after long mental struggles.

Kahneman is concerned with the biases of intuition. I am impressed with its occasional glimpses of absolute essence. Think Newton, Ampere, Maxwell, Einstein, Feynman, Spinoza or Freud or Schopenhauer maybe … That kind of intuition plays a major role in the discovery of nature’s truths.

Intuition is comprehensive. It unifies the subject with the object, the understander with the understood, the archer with the bow. Intuition isn’t easy to come by, but is the result of arduous struggle.

In both physics and finance the first major struggle is to gain some intuition about how to proceed; the second struggle is to transform that intuition into something more formulaic, a set of rules anyone can follow, rules that no longer require the original insight itself. ...

THE INSIGHTFUL KEYNES ON THE GREAT NEWTON SEES INTUITION THE WAY I DO:

I believe that the clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentrated introspection. . . . His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted. Anyone who has ever attempted pure scientific or philosophical thought knows how one can hold a problem momentarily in one’s mind and apply all one’s powers of concentration to piercing through it, and how it will dissolve and escape and you find that what you are surveying is a blank. I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary—“so happy in his conjectures,” said De Morgan, “as to seem to know more than he could possibly have any means of proving.”

Wigner on Einstein's intuition versus von Neumann's raw intellectual power:

I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me.

... But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.

See also Ulam:

[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."

Theodore A. Postol: Nuclear Weapons, Missile Technology, and U.S. Diplomacy — Manifold #12

Theodore A. Postol is professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is widely known as an expert on nuclear weapons and missile technology. 

Educated in physics and nuclear engineering at MIT, he was a researcher at Argonne National Lab, worked at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and was scientific advisor to the Chief of Naval Operations. 

After leaving the Pentagon, Postol helped to build a program at Stanford University to train mid-career scientists to study weapons technology in relation to defense and arms control policy. 

He has received numerous awards, including the Leo Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society for "incisive technical analysis of national security issues that [have] been vital for informing the public policy debate", the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility for "uncovering numerous and important false claims about missile defenses", and the Richard L. Garwin Award "that recognizes an individual who, through exceptional achievement in science and technology, has made an outstanding contribution toward the benefit of mankind." 

Steve and Ted discuss: 

0:00 Introduction 

2:02 Early life in Brooklyn, education at MIT, work at the Pentagon 

20:27 Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense plan 

28:26 U.S. influence on Russia and China’s second-strike capabilities 

54:41 Missile defense: vs nuclear weapons, scuds, anti-ship missiles (aircraft carriers), hypersonics 

1:11:42 Nuclear escalation and the status of mutually assured destruction 

1:32:24 Analysis of claims the Syrian government used chemical agents against their own people 

1:44:45 Media skepticism 

Transcript.

Resources: 

Theodore Postol at MIT 

https://sts-program.mit.edu/people/emeriti-faculty/theodore-postol/ 

A Flawed and Dangerous US Missile Defense Plan, G. Lewis and T. Postol, Arms Control Today 

https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2010-05/flawed-dangerous-us-missile-defense-plan 

Review Cites Flaws in US Antimissile Program, NY Times May 17 2010 

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/world/18missile.html 

Improving US Ballistic Missile Defense Policy, G. Lewis and F. von Hippel, Arms Control Today, May 2018 

https://sgs.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/2019-10/lewis-vonhippel-2018.pdf 

Whose Sarin? by Seymour Hersh (2013) 

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/seymour-m.-hersh/whose-sarin

Here is an excerpt from the transcript: 

Ted Postol: ... So, you've got to listen to Putin's voice dispassionately. And when you listen to him, he makes it clear numerous times, numerous times that he doesn't think American missile defense is a worth anything, but he also is worried about an American president who might believe otherwise, and who might take steps against Russia, that would then lead to an action-reaction cycle that would get us, get us all killed. 

In other words, he's not just worried about the system, whether it can work, he's worried about American political leadership and what they think, or if they think, or if they know. And that was, you know, I was very receptive to understanding that because that's exactly what I went through, you know, 30 years earlier when I was at the Pentagon, looking at this dog of a missile defense. 

And so, the Chinese look at this, they know the Americans are lying to them all the time. I could give you a good story about South Korea and the way we lied to the South Koreans and lied to the Chinese. 

I was really furious with that. That was under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And my view is... 

Steve: THAAD? 

Ted Postol: THAAD, right. THAAD in South Korea. 

And my view is if you're lying to an ally and you're lying, you know, I have very good friends. I'm very, very proud to say I have some very good friends who are high-level diplomats, and I've asked every one of them, would you lie in a negotiation? And every one of them has said, no. In other words, your credibility depends on your honesty. You might not say something that, you know, could be relevant to a negotiation relevant to your adversary's thinking, but you would never lie because your credibility will, you'll never be believed again. That's their view of this. 

And here we were under Hillary Clinton lying to an ally and lying to the Chinese, who I knew through my personal contacts, understood that we were lying to them. I know from personal contacts with the Chinese.  

So, how do you expect people to treat you when they know you're a liar? To me, it's just simple human relations. And, and I now understand that because I have friends who are both diplomats and soldiers, and I know, if you have to lie to make a point there's something wrong and you're, you're jeopardizing your credibility with other professionals if, if you do that. 

So, we should not be surprised that the Chinese are increasing their forces. 

And when Putin marched out this horrifying Poseidon underwater torpedo, could potentially carry a hundred megaton warhead. It's nuclear-powered. It can travel at some very high speed, 50, 60 knots or more, and then it can go quiet, sneak into a Harbor, know coastal Harbor and detonate underwater, and destroy out to 30 or 40 kilometers, a complete area, urban area. And he has this weapon. He made it obvious that he had it. He showed plans for it. 

Ted Postol: Well, what he was doing is he was saying to an American president who knows nothing. All right, assuming that the president knows nothing, that your missile defenses will not do anything about this weapon. That's what he did it for. He was an insurance policy toward bad decision-making by American political leadership. That's why he built that weapon. That's why he ordered that weapon built. 

So not because, I mean, he may be a monster. That's another issue, but it's not because he was a monster, it's because he made a strategic calculation that that kind of weapon would cause any person, even if they were totally without knowledge and thought of how missile defense could work, to understand that you will not escape retribution if you attack Russia. That's why that weapon was built.

Wrong, Trivial, Not Original

The three stages of reaction to a new scientific result:

1. It's wrong

2. It's trivial

3. I did it first

I made this up myself while still a grad student, after a particularly exasperating interaction with a referee. However, I was amused recently to find that a similar quote is attributed to Szilard in this book (see list of quotations at the end; unfortunately not available in the Google Books preview I link to).

In my case, the referee 1. claimed the paper was wrong, then, after processing a detailed reply, 2. admitted the result was correct, but then claimed it was trivial (not worth publishing; lots of things are difficult to understand at first but when clearly explained suddenly become "trivial"). A second referee agreed the result was correct and nontrivial, but of course 3. demanded we cite his earlier related work 8-)

"Only he was fully awake"

A great quote from this review of George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral. Despite the title, von Neumann is the central character.

... mathematician John von Neumann, ... was incomparably intelligent, so bright that, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner would say, "only he was fully awake."

More Wigner quotes:

I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me.

... But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.

Von Neumann in action.

I'm doing my best to increase the number of future humans who will be "fully awake" ;-) My current estimate is that one or two hundred common mutations (affecting only a small subset of the thousands of loci that influence intelligence) are what separate an ordinary person from a vN. There's plenty of additive variance to be exploited, and many desirable human phenotypes that have never been realized. (Also some dangerous ones.)

... The most extensive selection experiment, at least the one that has continued for the longest time, is the selection for oil and protein content in maize (Dudley 2007). These experiments began near the end of the nineteenth century and still continue; there are now more than 100 generations of selection. Remarkably, selection for high oil content and similarly, but less strikingly, selection for high protein, continue to make progress. There seems to be no diminishing of selectable variance in the population. The effect of selection is enormous: the difference in oil content between the high and low selected strains is some 32 times the original standard deviation.

The mystery of genius at Slate Star Codex

Three excellent posts at Slate Star Codex. Don't miss the comments -- there are over a thousand, many of them very good.

THE ATOMIC BOMB CONSIDERED AS HUNGARIAN HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT

A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local women.

The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.

The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project. ...

See also

HUNGARIAN EDUCATION II: FOUR NOBEL TRUTHS

and

HUNGARIAN EDUCATION III: MASTERING THE CORE TEACHINGS OF THE BUDAPESTIANS

... Laszlo Polgar studied intelligence in university, and decided he had discovered the basic principles behind raising any child to be a genius. He wrote a book called Bring Up Genius and recruited an interested woman to marry him so they could test his philosophy by raising children together. He said a bunch of stuff on how ‘natural talent’ was meaningless and so any child could become a prodigy with the right upbringing.

This is normally the point where I’d start making fun of him. Except that when he trained his three daughters in chess, they became the 1st, 2nd, and 6th best female chess players in the world, gaining honors like “youngest grandmaster ever” and “greatest female chess player of all time”. Also they spoke seven languages, including Esperanto.

Their immense success suggests that education can have a major effect even on such traditional genius-requiring domains as chess ability. How can we reconcile that with the rest of our picture of the world, and how obsessed should we be with getting a copy of Laszlo Polgar’s book? ...

The diffusion of knowledge

Szilard and Wigner told Einstein about their recent calculations... how the fission process might create chain reactions and nuclear bombs. "Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht," said Einstein -- I did not think about that at all!

In the past two weeks I gave talks at ISIR2019 (Minneapolis), the Institute of Biomedical Sciences (Academia Sinica, Taipei -- home of the Taiwan biobank), Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI = CRISPR central, UC Berkeley and UCSF) and at OpenAI (AGI in San Francisco).

Title: Genomic Prediction of Complex Traits and Disease Risks via AI/ML and Large Genomic Datasets

Abstract: The talk is divided into two parts. The first gives an overview of the rapidly advancing area of genomic prediction of disease risks using polygenic scores. We can now identify risk outliers (e.g., with 5 or 10 times normal risk) for about 20 common disease conditions, ranging from diabetes to heart diseases to breast cancer, using inexpensive SNP genotypes (i.e., as offered by 23andMe). We can also predict some complex quantitative traits (e.g., adult height with accuracy of few cm, using ~20k SNPs). I discuss application of these results in precision medicine as well as embryo selection in IVF, and give some details about genetic architectures. The second part covers the AI/ML used to build these predictors, with an emphasis on "sparse learning" and phase transitions in high dimensional statistics.

Slides for the first part of the talk.

I also appeared on Dilbert creator Scott Adams' show.

Another species, an evolution beyond man

Readers might be interested in this interview I did, which is on the MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute, in Berkeley) website. Some excerpts below.

... I think there is good evidence that existing genetic variants in the human population (i.e., alleles affecting intelligence that are found today in the collective world population, but not necessarily in a single person) can be combined to produce a phenotype which is far beyond anything yet seen in human history. This would not surprise an animal or plant breeder — experiments on corn, cows, chickens, drosophila, etc. have shifted population means by many standard deviations (e.g., +30 SD in the case of corn).

... I think we already have some hints in this direction. Take the case of John von Neumann, widely regarded as one of the greatest intellects in the 20th century, and a famous polymath. He made fundamental contributions in mathematics, physics, nuclear weapons research, computer architecture, game theory and automata theory.

In addition to his abstract reasoning ability, von Neumann had formidable powers of mental calculation and a photographic memory. In my opinion, genotypes exist that correspond to phenotypes as far beyond von Neumann as he was beyond a normal human.

I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me. – Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner

You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me. – Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi to his former PhD student Herb Anderson.

One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how The Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes. – Herman Goldstine, mathematician and computer pioneer.

I always thought Von Neumann’s brain indicated that he was from another species, an evolution beyond man. – Nobel Laureate Hans A. Bethe.

The quantitative argument for why there are many SD's to be had from tuning genotypes is so simple that I'll summarize it here (see also, e.g., here or here).  Suppose variation in cognitive ability is

1. highly polygenic (i.e., controlled by N loci, where N is large; N is almost certainly more than 1k -- perhaps roughly 10k), and

2. approximately linear (note the additive heritability of g is larger than the non-additive part).

Then the population SD for the trait corresponds to an excess of roughly Sqrt(N) positive alleles. A genius like vN might be +6 SD, so would have roughly 6 Sqrt(N) more positive alleles than the average person (e.g., 200 extra positive alleles if N = 1000). But there are roughly +Sqrt(N) SDs in phenotype to be had by an individual who has essentially all of the N positive alleles. As long as Sqrt(N) >> 6, there is ample extant variation for selection to act on to produce a type superior to any that has existed before. (The probability of producing a "maximal type" through random breeding is ~ exp( - N), and for large N the historical human population is insufficient to have made this likely.)

This basic calculation underlies the work of animal and plant breeders, who have in many cases (corn, drosophila, cows, dogs) moved the "wild type" population by many SD through selection. See, e.g., this essay by famed geneticist James Crow of Wisconsin.

Reliable Organization of Unreliable Components

It's hard to imagine Murray reacting like this but he was a young man at the time (22 or 23) and, well, von Neumann is von Neumann.

Turing's Cathedral: ... Brueckner and Gell-Mann were able to show that even with logical components that had "a 51% probability of being right and a 49% probability of being wrong," they could design circuits so that "the signal was gradually improved." They were trying to show exponential improvement, and were getting close. "... The project hired various consultants, including von Neumann (vN) for one day" Gell-Mann adds ... 

In late 1951, vN wrote up these ideas in a short manuscript, "Reliable Organization of Unreliable Elements," and in January 1952 he gave a series of five lectures at Caltech, later published as Probabilistic Logic and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components, in which he began to formulate a theory of reliability, in his characteristic, axiomatic way. ... He thanked Brueckner and Gell-Mann for "some important stimuli on this subject," but not in any detail. ... Gell-Mann: "I thought, my God, this great man is referring to me in the footnote. I'm in the footnote! I was so flattered, and I suppose Keith was, too."

AIP Oral History (primarily on JASON) with Brueckner.

In the introduction to Probabilistic Logic and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components (see also here), von Neumann writes:

Our present treatment of error is unsatisfactory and ad hoc. It is the author’s conviction, voiced over many years, that error should be treated by thermodynamical methods and be the subject of a thermodynamical theory, as information has been by the work of L. Szilard and C.E. Shannon.

Wigner recollections

It is always a pleasure to browse the library when visiting another research institute. Although some books are found in every physics library, one often makes esoteric discoveries. I was less than impressed by the Collected Works of Theodore Von Karman, but charmed by The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner, from which I quote below.

On John von Neumann. Why is there no definitive biography of this man?

I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me.

... But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.

On Einstein and quantum mechanics.

Einstein plainly saw that the statistical view was a quite novel way of interpreting physical events; he realized, perhaps even before many of its backers, that accepting the statistical view implied a need to reexamine a great many things, including human volition and desire. Einstein did not want to reexamine all that. So he made light of the statistical view. "How about the sun," he would say, "Is that also a probability amplitude?"

[Contrast with Hawking's observation that many worlds is "trivially true" once we assume that quantum mechanics applies to each and every component of the universe.]

On quantum mechanics and the limits of human intelligence.

Until 1925, most great physicists, including Einstein and Planck, had doubted that man could truly grasp the deepest implications of quantum theory. They really felt that man might be too stupid to properly describe quantum phenomena. ...the men at the weekly colloquium in Berlin wondered "Is the human mind gifted enough to extend physics into the microscopic domain ...?" Many of those great men doubted that it could.

On specialization.

But it is sad to lose touch with whole branches of physics, to see scientists cut off from each other. Dispersion theorists do not know axiomatic field theory; cosmologists do not know nuclear physics. Quantum mechanics is hard to explain to a chemist ... and yet the best theoretical chemists really ought to know quantum mechanics.

Specialization of science also robbed us of much of our passion. We wanted to grasp science whole, but by then the whole was something far too vast and complex to master. Only rarely could we ask the deep questions that had first drawn us to science.

Machine Dreams

We're on break right now, so I have time to do some deeper reading. I'd like to recommend the book Machine Dreams by the economist and intellectual historian Philip Mirowski. Mirowski ruffled quite a few feathers in economics with his earlier book More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics, in which he argued that much of the mathematical and conceptual framework of neoclassical economics was lifted from 19th century physics. In particular, he argued that maximization of utility was inspired by ideas about energy, and that market equilibrium was inspired by thermodynamics. Origins aside, whether these ideas are useful for the description of complex, nonlinear systems comprised of thinking participants is another question, addressed directly in this book.

Machine Dreams is, if anything, more ambitious than the earlier work. In it, Mirowski traces the influence of ideas concerning information and computation, largely developed by figures like von Neumann, Turing, Shannon and Szilard, on the field of economics since the 1930's. Mirowski refers to these individuals as cyborgs, and their area of interest as the cyborg sciences. He adopts an amusing tone throughout the 600 pages of his book, even as he delivers devastating blows to sacred cows of the economics orthodoxy.

This is a controversial book because it demolishes not just the conventional history of the discipline, but its foundational assumptions. For example, once you start thinking about the information processing requirements that each agent (or even the entire system) must satisfy to find the optimal neoclassical equilibrium points, you realize the task is impossible. In fact, in some cases it has been rigorously shown to be beyond the capability of any universal Turing machine. Certainly, it seems beyond the plausible capabilities of a primitive species like homo sapiens. Once this bounded rationality (see also here) is taken into account, the whole notion of optimality of market equilibrium becomes far-fetched and speculative. It cannot be justified in any formal sense, and therefore cries out for experimental justification, which is not to be found.

But there is more. Mirowski reveals that tenets of rationality and utility maximization were already at odds with results of game theory experiments conducted at RAND as early as the 1950s. He traces von Neumann's (vN's) influence on the discipline, which he claims has been deliberatedly ignored and obfuscated in the official histories. In his summary, he writes

This scientific titan [vN], who could only spare a vanishing fraction of his intellectual efforts upon a science he regarded as pitifully weak and underdeveloped has somehow ended up as the single most important figure in the history of 20th century economics. This mathematician who held neoclassical theory in utter contempt throughout his own lifetime has nonetheless so bewitched the neoclassical economists that they find themselves dreaming many of his formal models, and imperiously claiming them for their own. This polymath who prognosticated that "science and technology would shift from a past emphasis on subjects of motion, force and energy to a future emphasis on subjects of communications, organization, programming and control," was spot on the money.

Mirowski's book has drawn significant attention within the economics community. I suggest the following review by E. Roy Weintraub, a mathematical economist at Duke (Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Vol. 53 (2004) 419–434):

Philip Mirowski is a singular historian of economics. Every one of his works has made a difference in our understanding of the development of economics. He is brash, uncompromising, and dedicated to producing magnificent historical studies. Nevertheless he raises his colleagues’ blood pressures because his work has both transcended and transformed the subdiscipline, and few are intellectually flexible enough to enjoy rethinking accepted ideas.

...In his new work, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, Mirowski (2002) reconstructs the history of neoclassical economics to the modern period, writing that history against and intertwined with the emergence of the cyborg sciences concerned with information—computer science, cybernetics, statistics, operations research, game theory, gaming and simulation, etc.—in the World War II and subsequent Cold War period. His major historiographic point, continuous with his past writing, is that one cannot construct a coherent narrative of the emergence of modern neoclassical economics in the postwar period without looking outside economics proper for both the dramatis personae, and the punch lines. His use of methods from history, sociology, and anthropology frames the best that Science Studies has to offer to help one construct a compelling narrative.

...Overall, this is the single most important totalizing narrative of the history of economics that we have had in the last twenty years. Important does not however mean that it will be loved. Mirowski’s writing is vivid and forceful. He enjoys the sound of words and the rhythm of the sentences he constructs. He writes with a musical fluidity. Yet to say that Mirowski is verbally facile, sharp-tongued, and acerbic hardly does justice to the blood he draws from rapier slashes, and cleaver smashes, to the august and famous. It is, given the author’s critical program, an angry book.

Withal, Mirowski is a scholarly treasure. There are few of us who make an immense difference, who see things differently and can maintain that vision through a sustained scholarly life, and who can show others how to make that vision their own. We need to take this book seriously.

For a meta-review of reviews, see Boland, and for a response by Mirowski to several critics, see here (contribution to a symposium on Machine Dreams published by the Journal of Economic Methodology).