This has been described as one of the best books ever written about statesmanship. It's certainly a big chunky book. Churchill's WW1 memoirs were, notThis has been described as one of the best books ever written about statesmanship. It's certainly a big chunky book. Churchill's WW1 memoirs were, notoriously, "an autobiography disguised as a history of the universe." This work has a similar feel. Churchill can't help but give long background essays about warfare in the early 18th century, the structure of English politics, etc. He gives a broad narrative of the War of Spanish Succession, not just Marlborough's part.
This book has opinions. The author wants to glorify his subject. He therefore must excoriate Charles II, James II, and above all, Louis XIV.
The first 150 pages are surprisingly racy reading. The court of Charles II was like that. Young Marlborough got his start because his sister Arabella was mistress to the king's brother James (later James II). And then got a leg up by sleeping with Barbara Villiers, who was also mistress to the king. And then Marlborough's wife Sarah wound up being very special and possibly erotic friends with James' teenage daughter Anne (the future queen.)
It's also surprisingly polemical reading. Churchill is indignant about the negative portrayal of Marlborough in Macauley's history of England, and is at pains to rebut. There were claims that Marlborough was intriguing to bring back James in the early 1690s; Churchill digs very deep into the manuscript sources here to show this was a later fabrication.
Churchill's prose is lovely of course.
Odd as it may seem, ministers and military leaders, engaged in common enterprises, bound by a common duty, having much to gain by its successful discharge and all to lose by failure or misconduct, often consult together and talk things over in all the intimacy of a small circle of cabinet confederates. In fact, this close and constant contact, of which there is rarely any record, is often the main part of what happens.
I read the two-volume edition; this is the full text of the original, with high quality maps and foldouts etc....more
This is a biographical double-feature covering the two legitimate grandchildren of George III -- Princess Charlotte and her cousin Victoria. We also gThis is a biographical double-feature covering the two legitimate grandchildren of George III -- Princess Charlotte and her cousin Victoria. We also get a sketch view of their spouses, aunts and uncles.
To start the story from the beginning. George III had many children. The sons were mostly terrible people; they spent their lives drinking, gambling, having mistresses and generally being entitled privileged social parasites. George didn't marry off his daughters, and they mostly moped around Windsor Castle. They weren't terrible people but through no fault of their own, had pretty unhappy lives.
Mostly the sons failed at fathering children. The one exception is that the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, had a daughter with Caroline of Brunswick. Their marriage was famously a train wreck and Charlotte, the daughter, had an unhappy childhood. She ultimately married Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, and died tragically in childbirth. Leopold went on to be a social parasite and then king of the Belgians. (But I repeat myself.)
Meanwhile, at the buzzer, once it became clear that the succession was in peril, the Duke of Kent took a wife (Leopold's widowed sister Victoire) and managed to farther a child - Victoria. So Leopold, her cousin's husband, was also her uncle. Royalty is like that.
Victoria's father died when she was young and she was raised by her mother and her mother's conniving dishonest household comptroller, John Conroy. Conroy and the duchess had the startlingly melodramatic scheme to isolate Victoria from her family and persuade her she was incapable of decision making and that the two of them were indispensable for her. This blew up spectacularly once Victoria became queen.
Victoria as a teenager, including her first year or two as queen, was very much a teenaged girl. She had celebrity crushes. She liked clothes, and dancing, and parties. A difficulty with the dancing though is that she didn’t think she could waltz with her social inferiors. That meant she had about six eligible dance partners in Europe. Fortunately the tsarevich was on the list, visiting England, and a good lead. So she did get some dancing in.
The book has a few chapters about the courtship of Victoria and Albert. Her family, particularly Leopold, were pushing the match and she was at first resistant to that. And he was a bit nervous too since being a decorative spouse isn't that much fun. He was very much a nerd who didn't enjoy parties, or crowds, or the English. But she thought he was cute and did ultimately marry. The author frames this, with some reason, as a reversal of gender roles. She owned the house and had the job, he was there to look cute, keep her company and help make an heir. But in fact he was very shrewd, forward-thinking, and genuinely an excellent match.
One thing I learned is that 18th century medicine was super grim. Charlotte, and for that matter the Duke of Kent, might have lived if the doctors hadn't starved and bled them. ...more
"Confessions" is a good title for this book. It's mostly a memoir, but it's unusually reflective, unusually intimate, and unusually disjointed. The op"Confessions" is a good title for this book. It's mostly a memoir, but it's unusually reflective, unusually intimate, and unusually disjointed. The opening sections, describing how he was abused by his mother as a child, were painful reading. The last quarter of the book is largely "what I would do if I were president" -- and the answer is startlingly Trumpy, but not particularly convincing. Along the way, there are many apologies to friends who Cohen broke off contact with.
Cohen was a junior worker at Los Alamos (in uniform) and then after the war, made his career in the military-industrial complex, moving between institutions like RAND, Lockheed, and the Pentagon. He was a military analyst, not a scientist, and most of the people who mattered to him were in the military or intelligence community, not the scientific.
In the late 1950s, Cohen noticed that a small nuclear bomb, set off at the right altitude, would produce a strong neutron pulse, but very little blast damage or fallout. Far from being "a capitalist weapon to spare cities and kill their people", Cohen always intended this as a tactical weapon against enemy troops. It was to spare civilians, not kill them.
At a time when American nuclear strategy was mostly "megatons on cities" and when any sort of nuclear weapon was politically controversial, pushing for tactical weapons was a very lonely fight. Much of the book is about Cohen's repeated experiences of rejection, sometimes polite, sometimes nasty, sometimes apologetic as he tried to spread the gospel of, as he says, "discriminate nuclear weapons."
Cohen, by the time he wrote his memoir, was intensely bitter about American military decision making. He scolds Herman Kahn and his whole school of quantitative analysis for shoddy work; he's dismayed at members of congress more interested in reelection than in the best weapons; he's appalled by politicians who negotiate arms control treaties with only very flimsy intelligence to confirm whether the other side is following them. And he's outraged by people who work on think-tank and DoD analyses that are designed with the conclusion in mind at the start.
I thought the book was interesting and eye-opening, though somewhat too self-involved. It would have been better with an editor, but you get the memoirs you get. Worth reading if you want to understand how defense decision-making happens....more
John von Neumann was one of the preeminent scientists and thinkers of the second quarter of the twentieth century. This is nearly the only full-lengthJohn von Neumann was one of the preeminent scientists and thinkers of the second quarter of the twentieth century. This is nearly the only full-length biography of him; it doesn't quite do him justice but it's the best available.
The book's style is breezy and digressive; the author intrudes regularly. The book was started by another author and then finished by Macrae; it leans heavily on secondary sources like Richard Rhodes, Ulam's memoir, etc. However, the family did cooperate in the project and checked over the manuscript. The author is not a mathematician or scientist and repeatedly confesses to being overwhelmed by the technical details.
The big thing I learned from this book is that von Neumann was not so much "a math genius" as a genius, simply. He had no particular gift of physical intuition or geometric imagination. He did math by formal manipulation, which he could do in his head very well. He spoke seven languages; he was able to easily memorize anything he chose to; he was a wonderfully clear writer; his perceptions of world events were much more accurate than most of the people around him. (As Macrae points out, his reputation as being a right-wing maniac is undeserved; Johnny preferred Truman to Dewey, and was considerably to the left of E. O. Lawrence.)
Part of what is striking about him is that the big accomplishments of his career -- computing, game theory, and so forth -- aren't mathematically deep. They are major intellectual syntheses, but the complexity and insight isn't deep mathematically. Partly his skill was to wander into a new field and very rapidly apply the math he already knew. (For example, he introduced the use of octal to transcribe computer numbers; this is a clever use of mathematics, but not deep.)
There's a stereotype of the scientist who can't talk to people. Johnny famously could talk to anybody, and liked playing with children. (Teller once commented that he wondered if Johnny related to his fellow scientists in the same way he did with children.) He got along well with all his colleagues and had essentially no serious conflicts with anybody. He was a savvy bureaucratic maneuverer who played off the Army and Navy to maximize his independence when working on the IAS computer. ...more
Roughly year ago, I read Montefiore's "Stalin, the court of the red tsar", a biography of Stalin and his senior lieutenants, roughly the period 1930-1Roughly year ago, I read Montefiore's "Stalin, the court of the red tsar", a biography of Stalin and his senior lieutenants, roughly the period 1930-1954.
This is the prequel, focusing on Stalin from birth through 1918. As with the previous volume, this is a "personal" biography, not a professional one. We hear a lot about Stalin's family and childhood, his romances, and so forth. We hear less about his duties as member of the Central Committee and there is almost no detailed analysis of his famous paper on the nationalities question (though we do hear about the circumstances in which it was written.)
I thought the book was compelling reading, for three reasons. First, it illuminates one of the most influential rulers of the 20th century. Second, it shows how the Czarist regime ran and particularly how it tried to suppress internal dissent. Last, Montefiore spends considerable time exploring the relationships between Stalin and other revolutionaries. He documents that Lenin was in favor of Stalin's ruthlessness, suspicion, and brutality and pushed Stalin's career ahead exactly because of it.
As with the previous book, I live-blogged the bits that seemed most eye-catching as I was reading. Here they are: ------
There were persistent claims, starting in Stalin's childhood, that he was not the natural child of Beso Djugashvili, his legal father. One of the purported fathers was family friend Yakov Egnatashvili. In her memoirs, Stalin's mother wrote that Egnatashvili "always tried to assist us in the creation of our family." One wonders what she meant.
When he was ten, young Josef Djugashvili was a star choir-boy who was frequently in demand for paid singing gigs at weddings. He also arranged the choir group photograph (which was a big deal in the 19th century) -- he picked the photographer and the setting and arranged to have himself posed in his favorite spot (back center).
When he was an unknown poor teenager, Stalin submitted several poems to the leading newspaper in Georgia -- which published them. They were anthologized later, but still before the author was known as anybody. Later, when Stalin was a bank-robbing revolutionary, he quoted one of his poems to a bank clerk, who was so impressed and moved that he agreed to tell Stalin when large cash transfers were expected.
When he was 23, Stalin took a job in Batum working for the Rothschild-owned Caspian and Black Sea oil company. Within a month or two, the refinery was on fire and the workers were out on strike. The strike won a 30% pay increase at first -- follow by mass dismissals, rioting and an assassination attempt on the refinery manager. Revolution in action!
Something I had never previously understood. Before 1917, most of the Bolshevik leadership was in exile; Stalin was one of --perhaps the most -- prominent Bolshevik actually i the country doing things. As a result, he had backers and name recognition and was able to get himself a prominent place after the revolution.
Especially before 1906, Czarist prisons were strikingly mild. Stalin was arrested in 1902, and held at the prison in Batum. At one point he was reading the Communist Manifesto aloud to a prisoner in another cell. Suddenly they heard footsteps, and stopped. Then the guard said "Please don't stop, Comrade, please continue." [p89]
Stalin was exiled several times (to Siberia and the arctic); in each case he escaped before finishing his sentence, without any particular penalty for running away.
In Siberian exile around 1911, Stalin was meeting up with fellow revolutionaries. He told them "we must remain illegal until the revolution, because going legal would mean turning into a normal person." [p195]
Stalin was something of a newspaper man -- the party put him in touch of their weekly Petrograd paper Zvezda, which he turned into a daily -- Pravda. One of his colleagues there was Vyacheslav Skryabin -- who later adopted the name Molotov. [p210]
He was apparently good at it -- the teenaged daughters of his host-family (the Alliluyevs) would apparently read his editorials to eachother for entertainment. The experience also left him with a life-long habit of marking up memos with a blue editor's pencil.
---
During one of Stalin's periods of exile, he was roommates with Sverdlov. Stalin would systematically shirk the housework -- going out when it was his turn to tend the oven fire, pretending to be asleep when it was his turn to do chores, and so forth. [p214]
--
Before the First World War, Stalin was already notorious for violence, zealotry, and willingness to break laws and party rules. His rivals within the party pushed to have him removed from authority; Lenin steadfastly protected and promoted him, essentially because Lenin thought the party _needed_ a spirit of violence and rule-breaking.
--
In 1913, Stalin was staying in Vienna with the Troyanovsky family. He was in the habit of getting sweets for Galina, the family's daughter. At one point, he bet the mother that if they both called to her, Galina would go to Stalin, because sweets were more appreciated than everything else a mother did. Stalin won his bet. --
At a gathering in Siberia in 1915, the assembled exiled Bolsheviks were discussing what was life's greatest pleasure. Stalin said: "my greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed." (Quoted in Montefiore's Young Stalin, p255)
In retrospect, he probably didn't need the copy of The Prince that Kamenev gave him.
--
Stalin in power was notorious for his belief in conspiracies and spies everywhere. This makes more sense to me now that I've been reading about his early life. Before the revolution, the Bolshevik faction really was full of government spies and Stalin was engaged in intrigues to put any spy thriller to shame. Stalin had a network of informers within the police (some of whom were double-agents.) One of the top members of the Bolshevik party, Roman Malinovsky, was a secret-police agent. Malinovsky more than once personally betrayed Stalin to the police. ---
As a child when I was first reading histories that talked about Stalin, I got the impression that Stalin was absent during the revolution and came to power through bureaucratic maneuvering. This turns out to be sheer propaganda on the part of Trotsky. During the October Revolution, Stalin was busy running Pravda and was busy moving Lenin from safe-house to safe-house while serving as go-between for Lenin and the rest of the party. He was a prominent person immediately; he was in the first Politburo and (along with Trotsky) was one of the only two Bolsheviks with the right to barge into Lenin's office uninvited.
Stalin didn't just happen to come out on top: a lot of senior Bolsheviks, including Lenin, thought he'd be a suitable leader. ...more
Einstein is generally reputed as the greatest theoretical physicist of the 20th century. This biography has convinced me that Bohr might have been theEinstein is generally reputed as the greatest theoretical physicist of the 20th century. This biography has convinced me that Bohr might have been the most influential. Like Einstein, Bohr helped pioneer quantum mechanics, and like Einstein was awarded a Nobel prize for it. (In fact, Bohr won the year after Einstein.) The two were matched intellectually. In one of the more celebrated moments in the rise of quantum mechanics, they had a series of debates about the uncertainty principle at the Solvay conferences. Bohr was able to refute Einstein's (clever) thought experiments in near-real-time; at least once, Einstein had a clever proposal that seemed to defy the uncertainty principle, and Bohr was able to use Einstein's own General Relativity to refute him the next day.
Unlike Einstein, Bohr had a dominant social influence on physics. Bohr made Copenhagen into *the* place for physics. Just about everybody who was anybody in theoretical physics between 1925 and 1940 spent time at the Institute for Physics in Copenhagen. He was an inspired administrator, a wise, gentle, and pleasant leader, and a superb research advisor. Just about everybody knew Bohr, and he was a key node in the informal network that disseminated discoveries. He knew more or less everything that was happening, and was in a position to evaluate, compare, and synthesize.
This book is a general one-volume biography of Bohr. The author clearly approves of her subject, but just about everybody in physics approved of Bohr. The technical details are sufficient that I learned things, but the particular emphasis is on Bohr's involvement in politics. We hear a lot about Bohr's decision to stay in Denmark in the run-up to the war and the occupation and his later decision to flee to Sweden. We hear about his involvement in the Manhattan Project, and his (failed) efforts towards international control over nuclear weapons.
My sense is that the author is much too deferential to these efforts. In her telling, Bohr was the wise sage, Churchill an old reactionary, and if only Roosevelt would have lived, the Cold War might never have happened. But the possibility of nuclear cooperation with the Russians is one where Churchill, not Bohr, was the expert. The historical record available since this book was written seems to confirm the hawks here. There was no possibility of a deal that Stalin would agree to that would have preserved the liberty of Western Europe.
Overall, I consider this a good biography of a fascinating subject. I would have enjoyed a longer book; there was a great deal that could have been covered and wasn't. I might also have enjoyed a more recent book. Niels' son Aage Bohr won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1975, after this biography was written. I imagine a more recent writer would have talked more about the father-son relationship. Having a child win a Nobel Prize is perhaps not quite as impressive as inventing quantum mechanics, but it's a considerable achievement and it would be nice to hear more about what Niels was like as a father....more
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was one of the great scientists of the 19th century. In his own time, he was at the pinnacle of scientific prestige. He William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was one of the great scientists of the 19th century. In his own time, he was at the pinnacle of scientific prestige. He was the first scientist ever ennobled in the United Kington. His reputation, however, has fallen off considerably since his own time, and he mostly appears in the history of science as a cranky old man, opposing these new-fangled things like nuclear physics and relativity.
This biography paints a picture of the man, with particular emphasis on trying to understand the shifts in his reputation. I liked the book quite a bit, and I liked the new perspective it gave me on 19th century science. The book paints a generally sympathetic portrait of Thomson. The overall view it gave me is that he was a tremendously talented scientist, who did a very great deal of good, but whose reputation has suffered for three reasons: (1) he was an un-systematic thinker, poor at tracing which ideas he got from where; as a result, it's hard to give him credit for any large coherent breakthrough. (2) He devoted much of his energies to applied science, which gets less credit and memory than fundamental breakthroughs (3)
Kelvin is remembered today primarily for his work on thermodynamics. It was in honor this work that he had the SI unit of temperature named after him. As this biography discussed in detail, his legacy here is mixed. He was one of the first people in Europe to understand the importance of Carnot's work, to formulate a concept of entropy, and to discover the existence of an absolute thermodynamic zero point. However, it is not entirely clear which ideas were originally his and which he had adopted from others. Kelvin was a great borrower and sharer of ideas, without regard to original invention. Moreover, he had the bad habit, when he changed his mind, of denying that he had done so and claiming that he had that thought in mind all along.
Kelvin was fair-minded and generous enough to never object when others took credit for his ideas. For instance, he was the person who had suggested to George Stokes the theorem that now has Stokes' name.
Something that this biography emphasizes, which I had never heard before, is that Kelvin was one of the inventors of "applied physics." He was one of the first physicists to really push home the claim that the laws of classical physics can be used to resolve messy engineering questions. He devoted a great deal of time and energy to problems like engineering underwater telegraph cables, understanding the stability of ships, understanding and correcting for the deflection of magnetic compasses, and so forth. He thought of this applied work as having equal importance as theoretical inquiries. This was work of immense social value; he probably saved hundreds of lives with his compass work. Moreover, the project of tying together physics and engineering has been tremendously fruitful in engineering, mathematics and physics. And Kelvin deserves a great deal of the credit for pioneering this sort of inquiry.
Kelvin lived a very long time, and was engaged in a wide range of scientific topics. As a result, he was wrong about several major topics, notably aether and the age of the earth. Our current theories on these topics are some the most-celebrated achievements of the early 20th century, and so Kelvin necessarily enters the story as the mistaken representative of the old guard. He was in the old guard and he was wrong. But he was wrong for perfectly good reasons. It was a real advance to compute a bound on the age of the earth, based on its stored internal heat, and then to show that this was a problem for contemporary geography. Showing that disparate theories are incompatible is one of the ways science advances. Similarly with aether. Thomson spent decades trying to construct a mechanical theory of electromagnetism based on vibrations of an aether. This didn't work, and couldn't have worked, but the only way science advances is when lines of inquiry and possible theories are tested and tried out. Somebody had to give aether a fair go before scientists were justified in rejecting in, and it's Thomson's bad luck that he wound up taking the hit for that....more
This book is trying to do several things. It's one part childhood memoir. Orhan Pamuk grew up in a wealthy-but-declining Istanbul family; the grandfatThis book is trying to do several things. It's one part childhood memoir. Orhan Pamuk grew up in a wealthy-but-declining Istanbul family; the grandfather had made a lot of money in industry in the late Ottoman period, which was then gradually expended by the family. Efforts by Orhan's father and uncles to revive the family fortune were largely unsuccessful. It was also, at least in this account, an unhappy family, with the siblings squabbling and the parents fighting (and cheating).
Another part of the book is memoir about western and Turkish views of Istanbul, going back to the 18th century. Pamuk wants to chronicle how various visitors perceived the city, and how these were then refracted by Turkish intellectuals. As he notes, most literature about most places is by outsiders -- people, particularly before the 20th century, rarely described their own native cities in detail.
A third part of the book is about the city and its self-understanding. Pamuk talks, for instance, about the city's relationship with the Bosphorus, with the ferries, and so forth. Above all, he talks about the mood of _huzun_, or melancholy, and how the Turkish notion is not quite the same as the western. In the west, Pamuk claims, sadness is a private feeling, and in Turkey huzun is a public communal feeling.
All these strands are linked, of course; we hear about young Orhan's attempts at painting, based on western models. We hear about his walks around the city with his first girlfriend -- he liked the melancholy sensation of wandering through run-down neighborhoods, she didn't. We hear about what he read, and how it made him feel.
I have been to Turkey twice, including for my honeymoon, so the places and some of the sights in the book are familiar. The portrait of Istanbul, particularly Istanbul of the 60s and 70s, was interesting and informative. So too the portrayals of the Pamuk family. Neither the city nor the people come off well, exactly -- the city is run-down, and the family too, in its own way.
The book is well-illustrated with historic photos of the city and the Pamuks. It would have benefitted from captions, and from a map, however. I kept having to consult the Internet to understand exactly where these places were in relation to one another....more
John Quincy Adams was a great man, but not a very nice man. He was very smart, and very hard-working, and had firm principle. But one of his principleJohn Quincy Adams was a great man, but not a very nice man. He was very smart, and very hard-working, and had firm principle. But one of his principles was to put country over faction and family -- that is, he refused to help his friends get government jobs, and he would drag his family around to wherever his career took him, including miserable places like St Petersburg, where they were poor, cold, and socially isolated. His marriage was fraught with tension, and his children mostly turned out unhappy. The descriptions of his family were the most painful parts of the book for me.
Adams' deficiencies flowed in part from his own upbringing. When he was 11, his mother Abigail wrote him saying "dear as you are to me, I had much rather you should have found your Grave in the ocean you have crossd, or any untimely death crop you in your Infant years, rather than see you an immoral profligate or a Graceless child." His parents pushed him incredibly hard. On the other hand, they also gave him a remarkable freedom when young; at the age of 17 he was travelling independently throughout Central Europe.
We think of Adams as a president, but Traub is much more interested in two other periods of his career: his time as Secretary of State, and his time in Congress. By 1817, John Quincy Adams was the country's premier diplomat; not only was he Secretary of State, but he had held a succession of important ambassadorships (the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, and Britain) and had helped negotiate the peace ending the War of 1812. Traub focuses a great deal on this career, and in particular illustrates Adams' enthusiasm for American expansion. Apparently, Adams was the cabinet member who most vocally wanted to back Jackson's military adventures in Florida, and was fairly ruthless in using this as leverage to get Spain to surrender its New World claims.
The Adams presidency is passed over lightly. We get good descriptions of the political campaigns in both 1824 (when Adams won) and 1828 (when he didn't), but relatively little about his actual time in office. Much of what is described is from a “political” lens, rather than one of policy.
After leaving the White House, Adams had a long career in the House of Representatives, and here the narrative picks up again. In Traub’s account, Adams was extremely important in rallying the anti-slavery faction of the Congress. The House at the time had a rule that petitions concerning slavery would never be discussed; Adams focused his efforts on overturning this “gag rule”. He succeeded at this, campaigning doggedly and brilliantly, not directly against slavery, but for the right to discuss it and criticize it.
One episode stands out. In 1842, Adams delivered a petition from some citizens of Massachusetts, calling for dissolving the national union over slavery. The southern members of course went berserk, and demanded not merely his censure, but prosecution for treason. This gave Adams the right to defend himself, which he did with devastating effect. Adams had the clerk of the house read the Declaration of Independence — up to the bit about “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” This gesture was especially effective coming from Adams. Adams’ father had been on the committee that approved the Declaration; and Adams himself had been a personal intimate of Jefferson. The campaign against Adams collapsed, and a few years later, so did the gag rule....more
Hopper is one of the most famous early computing pioneers. But until I read this book I didn't really understand what she really did, or who she was. Hopper is one of the most famous early computing pioneers. But until I read this book I didn't really understand what she really did, or who she was. This book is not a general biography. The first 35 years of her life are dealt with in one chapter, as are the last 30 or so. Most of the book is dedicated to her time as a computing pioneer, roughly 1943 until 1960 -- from when she joined the navy until the adoption of the COBOL standard. That period involved quite enough achievement to justify a book.
At the start of 1942, Hopper was a successful tenured mathematics professor at Vassar. As the year went on, she found herself increasingly frustrated and increasingly eager to join the war effort. Late that year, she joined the WAVES, expecting to be put to work on cryptography. Meanwhile, Howard Aiken at Harvard had convinced the Navy to fund his computing project, and had requested mathematically talented officers to assist hijm. As usual with Navy personnel decisions, people didn't get what they wanted -- Hopper was sent off to Cambridge to serve under Aiken.
Aiken ran the Harvard Mark I like a warship. There was a team of officers, headed by Aiken and with Hopper as de facto #2, and then a set of enlisted ratings "standing watch" 24 hours a day running jobs on the machine. The programming environment was pretty minimal: a program was put in as a punched paper tape, with the holes in the tape setting machine switches for each instruction. There was also a plugboard, for what we might call microcode. Hopper (with her mathematical training) was responsible for writing these programs -- figuring out how to get the machine to do useful work, like producing ballistic tables of the appropriate precision or to numerically integrate complex partial-differential equations.
This background had two important consequences. After the war, she was one of the first people to see the importance of "automatic programming." She also had a valuable social network to draw on -- there was a substantial Harvard diaspora.
She really did invent the compiler, as much as anybody can be said to have done so. The first iterations of this ("A-0") were of course quite primitive -- more like macro assemblers than compilers as we know them. But even the insight of "we can write computer programs to translate higher-level text to machine language" is quite a profound one. And she followed that up by pushing for the highest-possible level of abstraction -- she understood exactly what the ultimate goal was.
She was an adroit bureaucratic maneuverer, and fought successfully to get her ideas standardized. She managed to stack the CODASYL language-design committee with her friends, and got them to adopt a spec for the "common business language" (COBOL) that was virtually identical to her existing "FlowMatic" system. There was a lot wrong with the COBOL design of course, but nobody had ever designed a language before and "make programming as english-like as possible" was a perfectly plausible idea that happened not to work.
The narrative is reasonably well told. There is enough technical detail and context for me to understand what she did and why it mattered; there was enough personal detail to understand who she was as a person. I do wish there had been more about her as a person -- I'd have liked a better understanding of what made her so talented and driven, and left her so willing to abandon her professorial career and start a new one....more
Schroedinger was one of the greats of 20th century physics. Anybody with a slight background in science will already know that he invented the quantumSchroedinger was one of the greats of 20th century physics. Anybody with a slight background in science will already know that he invented the quantum theory of wave mechanics, and that he had grave unease about the Copenhagen interpretation. (His famous hypothetical cat was meant as an argument against Bohr's views.) But Schroedinger was a much stranger and more interesting person than I had expected.
There's a lot else I did not know. Schroedinger was heavily influenced by Hindu mysticism, and talked about Brahama all his life. He also was something of a sex maniac -- he had a constant stream of love affairs, including with Hilde March, the wife of his assistant Arthur March. (His wife also had extra-maritcal romances, notably with the mathematician Hermann Weyl.) He was not well-behaved about it -- he would abruptly drop his partners when they got pregnant.
He also was one of the founders of modern biophysics. His early work was on the theory of color vision. Later in his career, he was one of the first and most prominent people to say "heredity must be carried as a code, embodied in an 'aperiodic crystal' -- that is, a molecule of definite structure but not built out of repeating units." This was exactly right, and Schroedinger was able to use the effect of X-rays on mutation rates to get a reasonable estimate the physical size of an individual gene, long before the discovery of DNA and the genetic code.
Part of the charm of a biography is that you learn not only about the subject, but about the setting. Schroedinger lived through some interesting places and times --the last days of the Hapsburg empire, inter-war Central Europe, Nazi Germany, the Anschluss, and Ireland during the war. As a result, he was forced to engage in fairly high-stakes politics. He did not acquit himself well. He had been mildly anti-nazi in the early 30s, but not enough to do anything about it. After the Anschluss, he wrote a somewhat craven letter about how he had seen the light and understood the need for a Fuehrer. He then fled to Ireland, where de Valera was happy to use him as an ornament for the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
This biography is a bit uneven. It's a little on the long and plodding side (there is an abridged version available.) The author is happy to lurch into writing down tensor equations, with minimal explanation. I have a fairly strong mathematical background and it wasn't always clear to me what point in the broader book the math was supposed to illustrate. Though I do now have a better sense what Schroedinger and Einstein were doing when they were working on "universal theories" in the 40s and 50s.
If you're interested in Schroedinger in particular, this is the book to read. If you just want a science biography and are not fussy about the subject, there are better ones....more
I somehow found this biography more gripping than any other I have read in the last year.
Lindemann was a prominent British physicist of the early 20thI somehow found this biography more gripping than any other I have read in the last year.
Lindemann was a prominent British physicist of the early 20th century. He was wealthy and socially well-connected and as a result, became friends with Churchill. They became political allies to argue against appeasement and for rearmament. During the war, Lindemann was one of Churchill's top advisors on scientific, technical, and economic questions, He also ran the Prime Minster's Statistical Section, responsible for maintaining accurate data about the state of the Allied military establishment. Lindemann might be unparalleled for any scientist in his proximity and influence on power.
He was a very peculiar person. Ferociously right-wing politically, vegetarian, socially withdrawn, and famously stubborn in his opinions. He managed to regularly annoy his Oxford colleagues, insisting that science should be given or social prominence and also more funding. When the wife of a classics professor airily said at a party, "oh, a good classics student can pick up science in two weeks," Lindemann answered "what a pity your husband has never had two weeks to spare."
Lindemann often enters WW2 histories as something of an anti-hero -- he was accused of opposing work on radar before the war, and was a firm proponent of area bombing of cities. Fort's biography largely clears him of these charges. Watson-Watt and R. V. Jones both claim that Lindemann was firmly in favor of radar work and was helpul in directing resources to it. Lindemann was a jerk to Tizard and other early radar scientists --- not because he opposed radar, but because he wanted more urgency both for radar and for other air-defense projects. And while he did advocate for area bombing, this was essentially the consensus view of the RAF and the Cabinet, and was in some sense the only option available. ...more
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