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Surely you're trolling, user paganel.
Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know this is a cynic take, It’s worse than that. This take is a trivial restatement of history, namely that whites and men had most of the power, while amplifying outrage with people already agreeing with you, not contributing to lessening the divide, and causing people like myself to self censor by replying using throwaway accounts.
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> started "idolising" past scientists [..] whose primary purpose on life had become, basically, how to best kill other people
We all should be careful to judge people in history with our current set of morals. The scientists in the photo all experienced the horrors of WWII. I don’t think it requires to much mental gymnastics to have the position that the deterrence of nuclear weapons would lead to a safer world, especially in the post WWII context. Note that this is not a blanket statement against judging people in history. I just don’t think this applies to the scientists here.
Re: Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
#23[flagged]
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Re: Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
#24No post body was provided.
Re: Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know this is a cynic take, It’s worse than that. This take is a trivial restatement of history, namely that whites and men had most of the power, while amplifying outrage with people already agreeing with you, not contributing to lessening the divide, and causing people like myself to self censor by replying using throwaway accounts.
Quoted post unavailable.
I think what people are having trouble understanding about these kind of statements is what do you want to do about it? What kind of idolizing are you actually against? I have never seen these people being used as examples of morally virtuous people. Even in this thread/article nobody is calling them morally virtuous. Are you against saying anything positive about them?
Re: Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
#26I have no idea why, but it is always interesting and inspiring to read about how known figures of historic interest were related to each other and how their (normally seperatly told) stories intertwined. Thanks!
I've read a handful of biographies of 20th century physicists recently, which I enjoyed for the same reasons. Ulam was a Los Alamos mathematician (and a great friend of Von Neumann). Anderson discovered the meson, which Yukawa had predicted. Fritzsche named nuclear fission (after doing important work on it). Elasser was a wandering scientist, who (to me) seemed to be "on the outside of the inside"; he gives accounts…
If you haven't read it The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is in the same vein and excellent. It doesn't focus on a single physicist but covers a lot of the physics and chemistry that led to the construction of the atomic bomb.
Re: Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
#27[flagged]
There’s a recent article in Scientific American loosely related to your concerns that I suspect you will find insightful.
Re: Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
#28I have no idea why, but it is always interesting and inspiring to read about how known figures of historic interest were related to each other and how their (normally seperatly told) stories intertwined. Thanks!
You might like this story about Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman having a road trip:
https://youtu.be/1Rr3ZWt1ULQ (the whole interview is very interesting and contains a lot of stories of meeting other physicists and mathematicians, it’s broken up into a series of snippets of a few minutes each on youtube)
In the end this trip lead to one of Dyson’s biggest contributions to physics, he could talk to Feynman about his research on the road trip and visited Schwinger afterwards and as such was in a unique position to recognise and formalise the equivalence of Feynman’s, Schwinger’s and Tomanaga's formulations of quantum electrodynamics. This was an important step towards the acceptance of Feynman diagrams.
I also really liked "Maker of Patterns”, Dyson’s autobiography through letters.
Re: Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
#29Re: Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
#30[flagged]
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Dumb, predictable flamewars are, to say the least, uninteresting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to ask you not to do this more than once before. Continuing to do it will eventually get your account banned here, so please don't.