An Eden after the Fall

John von Neumann and Richard Feynman worked together at Los Alamos. In 1943, when the American atomic bomb effort was reaching its desperate fever pitch, von Neumann was forty years old, Feynman twenty-five. Feynman was a brash and brilliant young man, a new Ph.D. and a group leader in the theoretical section, the contributor of a crucial formula for estimating the efficiency of a nuclear explosion. A rising star, he was noted by Robert Oppenheimer as the most dazzling talent on the mesa. Von Neumann had a reputation to match. The prodigy from Budapest had matured into a mathematician of remarkable breadth and stunning facility. Since his naturalization in 1937 he had begun consulting more and more for the U.S. military on applied mathematics, leaving his mark on ballistics and shock waves as he had earlier on logic and pure mathematics. Toward the end of the war, one of these consultancies brought him through Los Alamos, where he worked out the theory of implosion for the plutonium bomb. It was this last connection that put him in touch with Feynman, for the two collaborated on developing a new mode of solution for the implosion problem. Their new tool was the computer. Although Feynman is remembered as one of the foremost scientists of the century, he is not remembered as one of the pioneers of computing. After the war, returning to ordinary life, Feynman tried to put Los Alamos behind him. He returned to the sort of problems that had occupied him before the war, when he had worried about how to describe how electrons act on themselves. He wanted to escape from Los Alamos, from the relentless practicality it had demanded and the oppressive visions it had provoked. Practical computing was something he largely left behind. Von Neumann, on the other hand, continued to work on computing until his death and was canonized as one of

History · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments