Life and Death in New Jersey.

[NNadir]

A friend turned me on to this very beautifully written blog post, and I thought I'd share it. It's about the graves in New Jersey of Kurt Goedel, John Von Neumann, and the grave of Bell Labs.



For convenience, here the opening paragraphs are excerpted, with the link to the full thing below:

Life And Death In New Jersey
By Wavefunction on Monday, May 13, 2019


On a whim I decided to visit the gently sloping hill where the universe announced itself in 1964, not with a bang but with ambient, annoying noise. It’s the static you saw when you turned on your TV, or at least used to back when analog TVs were a thing. But today there was no noise except for the occasional chirping of birds, the lone car driving off in the distance and a gentle breeze flowing through the trees. A recent trace of rain had brought verdant green colors to the grass. A white-tailed deer darted into the undergrowth in the distance.

The town of Holmdel, New Jersey is about thirty miles east of Princeton. In 1964, the venerable Bell Telephone Laboratories had an installation there, on top of this gently sloping hill called Crawford Hill. It was a horn antenna, about as big as a small house, designed to bounce off signals from a communications satellite called Echo which the lab had built a few years ago. Tending to the care and feeding of this piece of electronics and machinery were Arno Penzias – a working-class refuge from Nazism who had grown up in the Garment District of New York – and Robert Wilson; one was a big picture thinker who enjoyed grand puzzles and the other an electronics whiz who could get into the weeds of circuits, mirrors and cables. The duo had been hired to work on ultra-sensitive microwave receivers for radio astronomy.

In a now famous comedy of errors, instead of simply contributing to incremental advances in radio astronomy, Penzias and Wilson ended up observing ripples from the universe’s birth – the cosmic microwave background radiation – by accident. It was a comedy of errors because others had either theorized that such a signal would exist without having the experimental know-how or, like Penzias and Wilson, were unknowingly building equipment to detect it without knowing the theoretical background. Penzias and Wilson puzzled over the ambient noise they were observing in the antenna that seemed to come from all directions, and it was only after clearing away every possible earthly source of noise including pigeon droppings, and after a conversation with a fellow Bell Labs scientist who in turn had had a chance conversation with a Princeton theoretical physicist named Robert Dicke, that Penzias and Wilson realized that they might have hit on something bigger. Dicke himself had already theorized the existence of such whispers from the past and had started building his own antenna with his student Jim Peebles; after Penzias and Wilson contacted him, he realized he and Peebles had been scooped by a few weeks or months. In 1978 Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize; Dicke was among a string of theorists and experimentalists who got left out. As it turned out, Penzias and Wilson’s Nobel Prize marked the high point of what was one of the greatest, quintessentially American research institutions in history...

Life and Death in New Jersey

I have always meant to take a part of a day and wander through the Princeton Cemetery, but have never done it.

[monmouth4]

1. I worked at Bell Labs in the early '60s. Beautiful campus, Crawford Hill was lovely. n/t

[NNadir]

2. It's a shame that the corporate model it represented has disappeared from our culture.

There are still these little islands of hope, I suppose.

Today I'm working in the Princeton University Engineering Library; the Friend Center. Downstairs - on the way to the Men's room there are these posters, many of which reflect on the industrial history of American innovation.

I do see some great science still in this country, and I work around it in a peripheral way, but somehow, it's just not the same as an institution like Bell Labs or the early days of Hewlett Packard.

It must have been a little bit like heaven to work there, at Bell Labs, I'd imagine, at least until it all started to go bad.

[hunter]

3. This post has been gnawing on me. Bell Labs is nowhere near the best we can be.

It was an accident of white male brilliance and government regulated corporate monopoly.

I experienced some Shockley racist fucktard shit firsthand, including an introduction to the man.

My own Apollo Project engineer grandfather lost his shit and boycotted my wedding to "a Mexican Girl." Men in his Wild West White family simply didn't do that. To his credit, he got over it. My wife is brilliant. So are my children. I got lucky. They got it from her.

I've been a Forrest Gump witness to the development of the Internet and GMO pharmaceuticals such as human insulin and factor VIII. Got some sort of corporate accolades for the implementation of Hepatitis C testing.

I was there for the first releases of BSD Unix, and I was there when they were grinding up snails in the blender for gene sequencing. I was there just before the development of the Mosaic web browser.

Never thought once about money. I've been homeless and alienated from my family. I've been locked in mental wards.

I once declined a job offer at Wolfram to be the stay at home parent to our children, which is one of the few things I've done that wasn't crazy, that I don't regret.

I may be a cranky old sexagenarian, but I'll always be a hot mess and very dangerous fellow when I don't know what I'm doing.

Is it possible Kurt Gödel's paranoia was justified?

Is it possible there were other von Neumanns waiting in the wings, he just happened to be the first?

[NNadir]

4. One should never confuse scientific brilliance in a narrow area with wisdom, ethics or basic decency

Some years back, wandering around the stacks in Princeton's Firestone Library I came across this book, written by the Nobel Laureate Johannes Stark:

Adolf Hitlers ziele und persönlichkeit, von dr. Johannes Stark. 70. tausend.

Author
Stark, Johannes, 1874-1957 [Browse]

Format
Book

Language
German

Published/​Created
München, Deutscher volksverlag, Dr. E. Boepple [c1932]
Description
32 p. 22 cm.

It was published in 1932, before Hitler came to power, "Adolf Hitler's Time and Personality."

(It has now been moved out of the stacks and is in storage in RECAP.)

My German is not as good as it once was, but as I read it, somewhat stunned, alternately fascinated and disgusted, it was a treatise on how wonderful Hitler was for German science. It may have been the first evocation of "German Physics" as distinct from physics itself, and was filled, as I recall, with rationalizations about this incredible claim.

Stark was a raving mad Nazi.

The fact that he was a horrible human being has no bearing on whether the wave functions of electrons are effected by electric fields, what we now call the "Stark Effect" even though Stark had no idea what a wave function was because Physics had passed him by and he was bitter that despite his Physics Nobel he was no longer competent to comprehend physics. So he and fellow Nobel Laureate Philip Lenard, created the derogatory (in their minds) term "Jewish Physics."

(It is interesting that Lenard discovered experimentally the effect that Albert Einstein would win the Nobel Prize for explaining, the photoelectric effect.)

The Stark Effect is real, as is the photoelectric effect. Despite the fact that Shockley was a racist, the transistor works, and it has changed the world, overall, I think, for the better.

The problem with men like Stark, Lenard and Schockley is that their narrow brilliance is sometimes invoked by small Trump scale minds to engage in the logical fallacy of "Appeal to Authority." Schockley's expertise in semiconductors implies no competence whatsoever in genetics, the distribution of abilities, nor does the fact that he was intelligent in one area imply even that he knows what intelligence is.

There are less dramatic cases of this same effect actively in the public sphere. Let's consider the case of one of my bête noire, the horrible and incredibly ignorant fool and extremely unethical Ed Lyman, the "nuclear expert" at the so called "Union of Concerned Scientists."

This moron has been parading around for years saying that "nuclear power is dangerous" even though it is a fact that seven million people die each year from air pollution from dangerous fossil fuel and dangerous biomass combustion wastes. Now, Ed Lyman has a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell, and the abysmal fool Gregory Jackzo who actually headed up the NRC and who agrees with Ed Lyman, also has a Ph.D in Physics.

But the experimental fact that over half a century of nuclear operations has not killed as many people as will die this week from air pollution demonstrates that a Ph.D in Physics from a prestigious university cannot prevent one from being an idiot, particularly if one steps completely and totally out of one's area of expertise.

Schockley may have been brilliant when asked about solid state diodes, but he knew nothing at all about what intelligence was or is, or what "race" might be, and even the basic facts about genetics or, equally important and only in very recent times appreciated epigenetics. Therefore his rantings on the topic were pure crank stuff.

The fact that Nobel Laureate Kerry Mullins dropped (or drops) acid and surfs, does not imply that dropping acid and surfing is good for a scientific career, even in molecular biology.

As for where your children "got" their brilliance, I have a certain perspective on that since both my sons are way smarter than I ever was, particularly when I was there age, and certainly far more accomplished than I was at their age.

Regrettably, not really regrettably since she was in horrible pain and was going blind, my mother-in-law died a few weeks ago. Pondering the successes of my sons, my wife and I were amused when she associated their brilliance with "good genes," meaning of course her genes. Old people become "cute" when they near the end of their lives. Now, I had my problems with her over the years but at the end of the day, I loved my mother-in-law dearly and wanted her to go out of the world happily contemplating her wonderful genes.

Before I became a father, I was a 100% a nuture vs nature kind of guy, and I'm hardly that at all today. I can see my father in law in my oldest son - the personality traits he shares with my wife - a tendency to see disaster where disaster is not necessarily even likely. All through his college career, my son kept informing me - "breaking it to me" - that he was going to fail out of school, but graduated with a perfect 4.0 in a difficult program with a double concentration. My father-in-law, a Doctor, could panic at the drop of a hat, as can my wife. I can see myself, and my mother - who neither of my sons ever met, she was dead decades before they were born - in my youngest son, this inner life, and this quiet confidence in his own intellect, intellect that remained largely unsuspected by anyone who knew him when he was an adolescent. (Even I didn't know it.) These qualities of personality may have a genetic basis, but the ethical and practical intelligence surely do not.

Where does my boy's success - and your children's success - come from? In my case, I very much doubt it's "genes." My father didn't finish the 8th grade; my mother didn't finish the 10th grade. My paternal grandfather was a terrible violent alcoholic who was murdered in a bar fight. My maternal grandfather, from what I learned recently, was a pervert.

Looking back on my life, I realize I fell way short of my potential, because although my parents did everything in their power to see that I became educated, they were ill equipped to explain to me how the politics and practice of learning to read, and then to think, worked.

Because it took me a long time to learn these things on my own, and to struggle with my weaknesses, and because I became a father relatively late in life, I was in a position to guide my sons, and I'm still guiding them even though they are men. Because my wife was raised by indifferent (or even at times, hostile) parents, she made extra effort to be involved with my kids.

Probably your kids are brilliant not because your wife is brilliant, but because their father didn't take that job at Wolfram, but rather stayed home with them.

That would be my guess. My sons are doing well; I'm very proud of them, but it was guidance, not genes, that made them the men they have become. They could have done very, very, very poorly with exactly the same genes the grandparents gave them.

There is something in genes I suppose that gives one certain perceptual abilities - I know this because when I understood that my oldest son is dyslexic I finally understood my entire paternal family's history - and perhaps takes some away. But genes are like words and letters; it is useful to have them to make a language, but letters and words cannot make a language beautiful or useful or deep.

Children take time, and the time spent with them is the rain by which they grow and thrive.

As for Gödel, I can say nothing at all. He starved himself to death, out of paranoia. I think it sad.

My interest is in this piece is my New Jersey quasifascist attitude; it is in the community of Princeton, where I have waited on a line for felafel with Toni Morrison, where I saw John Nash buying teriyaki, or riding on a train - he did look a little bit "out of it" - or see Andrew Wiles walking down the street on his way back from work, or take my kids - this actually happened - to meet and spend a couple of hours chatting with Freeman Dyson, a town where they had a little picture of Albert Einstein over his favorite table at the (now defunct) Lahier's restaurant, etc, etc, and where, one can find the tombstones of Jon Von Neumann, and Kurt Gödel, and indeed, the "almost Trump," who America avoided narrowly, Aaron Burr.

My youngest son was born in the same hospital where Albert Einstein died. (It's subsequently been demolished.) It's silly, but I love that fact.

As for Bell Labs, the institution was a reflection of the times; as bad as things are now in the age of the Orange Idiot, the 1960's and 1950's were unbelievably more racist and sexist than these times. I am not a pure socialist nor a pure capitalist; I believe in well regulated capitalism, a well managed mixture of freedom and well measured restraint. Bell labs had that, I think.

The institution of Bell Labs, and similar industrial research teams of those times, reflected the idea that pure science is a necessary underpinning of industrial strength, a point I made here some time ago when reproducing some comments that Vannevar Bush made to President Truman. Perhaps Bell Labs would have been a better institution were it more diverse, but the science done there, despite being done largely by white men, some with severe personality and ethical flaws, has served the world well, and there was room to do pure science.

A hard rain is going to fall, and I feel for these young people, but I somehow trust them to be better than we were, and now, at the end of my life, this thought makes my life all the more wondrous, all the more hopeful, despite all the risks with which we've left them.

If I had advice for them, I think they'd be well served by building another organization like Bell Labs, maybe a better version, but certainly something along the same lines.

[hunter]

5. Imagine an institution like Bell Labs that fully represented the people of the U.S.A.

Male, female, white, black, LBGTQ... a rainbow of people.

It would have to start with an education system that nurtured talent wherever it arose, in neighborhoods wealthy or poor.

Children who grow up in places of poverty, or in anti-intellectual, racist, and misogynistic cultures are at a great intellectual disadvantage these days. It's not likely they'll get a good high school education, especially math and science, and worse if they are not male and white.

They'll be less likely to get the college and university education, and the research opportunities, that might land them a position in some modern equivalent of Bell Labs.

I've been thinking about this because one of my nieces recently graduated with a math related undergraduate degree, heavy in statistical science, one potentially very valuable to a company like Google or even a pharmaceutical company. She's been accepted to graduate school but recently she's been second-guessing herself and one of the reasons is that it's a field dominated by unusually sexist men.

I have another niece who thinks calculus and statistics are fun. (I had classmates like that in college and I was in awe of them.) Graduating at the top of her high school class she would have been welcome by most engineering or physical science programs but she graduated from Berkeley as a biologist. Maybe that's the future, but the field of engineering is poorer for it. (Maybe I'm channeling my engineer grandfather here who was greatly disappointed in me when I changed my own major from engineering to biology.)

The situation for women is better than it was in the 'fifties, and better than it was when I started college in the 'seventies, but women still have a much rougher road to travel in many engineering and scientific disciplines.

One can't help but imagine what human progress might be if our society wasn't actively obstructing the intellectual development of so many people, often starting before birth and continuing for people who are the "wrong" color, sex, or sexuality.

Add to that the anti-intellectualism of many U.S.A. communities, especially certain religious communities, and it's a miracle we make any progress at all.

Thank you for your wonderful thought provoking original post and long response to my unfocused musing.

Unix was a Bell Labs creation and your post returned me to my early BSD days, which seemed to me then a time of miracles.

[NNadir]

6. I fully agree. On a personal level, if, as an uncle, you are in a position to advise your nieces...

...I know for a fact that many good engineering and other STEM graduate (and undergraduate) schools go out of their way to recruit women engineering students.

The way to change the world with respect to the full utilization of its human resources, and to push aside sexist (and racist) men is to be there.

I don't watch PBS or any television all that much anymore, but I made an exception this week for the excellent series Chasing the Moon, which did an outstanding job not only of discussing the technical and political aspects of the "Race to the Moon" but also evoking the sociological aspects, particular with respect to racism and sexism of the times.

As for women engineers, the series focused quite a bit of attention on Frances "Poppy" Northcutt, who was the first female engineer on the mission control team: She was also not a formally trained as an engineer, but was a pure math major, BS level.

Now - and she says this in her interviews in the show - she got a lot of attention because she was good looking; it helped for sure in those times, but she is the person who actually calculated the orbital dynamics pretty much on the fly that allowed Apollo 8 to circle the moon and equally important, the return of Apollo 13 after the explosion in the command module. She let them know, in unstinting terms that she was far more than "good looking."

She ultimately went on to become a feminist lawyer working on women's rights, and was the President of NOW in Texas.

I actually believe that the extreme ugliness of Trump and his enablers will have a rebound effect that can set the world on a better path, since these lying, racist, weakling freaks have been exposed for what they are by experiment.

The thing is that Frances Northcutt was there and she got it. She has made the world a better place, because she was there. I personally believe, while we have not escaped the trivialities our culture imposes, that it is no longer true that to be a great woman engineer, one needs to rely on looks. In her interview for the show, Ms. Northcutt made a point that she worked hard to go beyond the role she was assigned, that she spent her nights teaching herself orbital mechanics to show her mind mattered more than her blonde hair and pretty face.

You know, I made a point of meeting my wife - this sounds puerile and it is - because of her looks. And I pursued her, as did many of the men in my school's chemistry and physics and mathematics undergraduate programs, for her looks. She never gave a shit about her looks though, and perhaps the reason I became her best friend, then her lover, then her husband, and then the father of her children is because the reason I have come to love her as deeply as I do is because of all the things that have nothing to do with her looks, these properties that have remained with her and grown in her, thereafter.

Frances Northcutt is a 75 year old woman now, and is, I think, more beautiful than when she was when she was an engineer at NASA.

About 30% of my son's Materials Science Engineering class consists of women, which is not 50% or 55% but is better than 10% or 5%. From what I understand, they are there to be engineers, not women engineers.

He has taken classes with three women materials science professors, all excellent scientists. His boss's boss at ORNL this summer is a woman, an outstanding scientist (and human being).

We need women, who are not a minority, and people who do belong to minorities, to be unafraid to make those changes by being there. Nothing addresses and reverses bigotry better than familiarity.

As for engineering, a degree in biology should allow, should your niece be interested, in graduate degrees in biological engineering, a burgeoning field that is rather in the place where computers were in the 1970's, and with a degree in mathematics, in my opinion, one can do whatever he or she wants, since mathematics is the language of the universe. If you speak that language, you are far above the idiots in our current government can ever be.