A worthy successor to Labatut’s debut When We Cease to Understand the World, this is a three-part novel about Paul Ehrenfest, John von Neumann, and Lee Sedol’s match with AlphaGo. The von Neumann sections form the bulk of the book (as the title implies, since MANIAC is the name of the computer designed by von Neumann at IAS), and definitely the most compelling. Labatut’s depiction of von Neumann as a genius manchild---the foremost of the Hungarian “Martians” who left an indelible mark on twentieth century science---brings the him down to earth as a man of startling duality. The man who immediately understood the implications of Godel’s presentation of his incompleteness theorems is also the same man who does not understand his wife; the man who co-invented game theory with Oskar Morgenstern is the same man who gleefully proposed a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.
Perhaps von Neumann is the starkest example of the seductive powers of science and technology, how our pursuit of their advancement in the extreme, to the detriment of everything else, betrays a kind of atavistic impulse born from something beyond reason. Wigner’s depiction of von Neumann’s spiritual turn at the end of his life brings this home:
We were stunted in all arts except for one, techne, where our wisdom had become so profound and dangerous that it would have made the Titans that terrorized the Earth cower in fear, and the ancient lords of the woods seem as puny as sprites and as quaint as pixies. Their world was gone. So now science and technology would have to provide us with a higher version of ourselves, an image of what we could become.
In making technologies of terrible power, we made ourselves gods---John von Neumann foremost among us. And yet even at death’s door, something we must all pass, he “behaved like a child, as if death was something that only happened to others, something that he had never really considered and so was completely unprepared for.” There is something noble about this childishness, as it means that he never resigned himself to limits that most of us would have already accepted. But it is a childishness all the same. So even von Neumann, god as he is, remains a puny, pathetic god.