BOOK REVIEW: Today philosophers are more interesting than philosophy (Freeman Dyson)
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- Written by Hank Berger
These days "[t]he philosophers are more interesting than the philosophy," Freeman Dyson opines in the latest number of the New York Review of Books after reading Jim Holt's account of interviewing the world's "leading modern philosophers" to discover their views about why the world exists.[1] -- Dyson thinks they can all be lumped into two categories: "materialists" and "Platonists." -- "Materialists imagine a world built out of atoms. Platonists imagine a world built out of ideas. . . one [group] obsessed with matter and the other [group] obsessed with mind." -- Unfortunately, neither group has much of interest to say about why the universe exists, if Dyson is to be believed. -- At 88, the famous physicist is still a crotchety curmudgeon, one who doesn't mind telling the reader that, sad to say, "Compared with the giants of the past, [20th- and 21st-century philosophers] are a sorry bunch of dwarfs." -- "They are historically insignificant," Dyson says, and there ("probably") hasn't been a philosophical masterpiece since Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. -- He seems to make an at least partial exception for Wittgenstein, however, and describes a memorable encounter he had with the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in (apparently) 1948 or 1949....
BOOK REVIEW: Computations for H-bombs funded by AEC birthed the digital revolution
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- Written by Marie Neptune
Last month MIT physicist and historian of science David Kaiser reviewed George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (2012) in the London Review of Books. -- Dyson's book shows that it was John von Neumann's need to track, "in some quantitative way, the likely outcomes when neutrons were introduced into a mass of fissionable material" that gave birth to the impetus for the digital revolution.[1] -- "[H]ydrogen bombs[, whose] internal dynamics, driven by a subtle interplay between roiling radiation, hot plasma, and nuclear forces, were far more complicated to decipher . . . required, or so von Neumann concluded, a fully automated means of solving many complicated equations at once. They required an electronic, digital computer that could execute stored programs." -- "The institute computer project was fueled largely by contracts from the Atomic Energy Commission, the postwar successor to the Manhattan Project. The contracts stipulated that virtually no information about thermonuclear reactions was to be released to the public -- a position Truman reiterated when, on the last day of January 1950, he committed the United States to the crash-course development of an H-bomb. As a cover for their main task, therefore, von Neumann’s team also worked on unclassified problems as they put their new machine through its paces. Meteorology, for example, featured many of the kinds of complicated fluid flow that von Neumann and Co. had to understand if they were to design the innards of their H-bombs. Other early applications of the computer included simulations of biological evolution, whose branching processes fanned out like so many scattered neutrons inside a nuclear device." ...
COMMENTARY: 'Betrayal of mentors,' not Internet, caused the collapse of literary culture
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- Written by Hank Berger
In a world in which even literary academics have given up quoting literature, commentary on the collapse of literary culture is perhaps superfluous. -- But Sally Thomas, reviewing Emory prof Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30 (Tarcher, 2008), didn't think so. -- "The real outcome of Internet technology, argues Bauerlein, is not that it makes high culture readily available but that it usurps high culture's place altogether," she wrote in the journal First Things.[1] -- "Bauerlein offers page after page of studies that suggest e-literacy is merely newspeak for illiteracy.” -- He claims that “the genuine significance of the Web to a seventeen-year-old mind [is] not the universe of knowledge brought to their fingertips, but an instrument of non-stop peer contact.” -- But ultimately Bauerstein looks beyond the Internet to blame the adults who created it for a new trahison des clercs — what he calls "the betrayal of the mentors." -- BACKGROUND: Mark Bauerlein did his Ph.D. at UCLA, where he wrote a dissertation on Whitman. -- In 2011 he converted to Roman Catholicism....