‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” John Dryden wrote that more than 300 years ago, but clearly it’s still true. Often, genius – real genius – is connected with mental disorder. Chilean novelist Benjamín Labatut presents this case in The Maniac by charting the life of Hungarian-Jew Janos (“John”) von Neumann – genius, giant in mathematics, physics and early computer technology. In his 20s, von Neumann could solve in minutes problems in maths and physics that learned professors laboured over for months. He was the real founder of game theory and even produced scholarly papers on biology. He held many professorships.
But he was also obsessive about his work, very limited in his ability to get on with other people, and he alienated his two wives. His second wife committed suicide. Von Neumann ended his life raving in a military hospital.
Labatut is not dealing only with mental disorder. He is as much concerned with two major ethical problems.
First dilemma: if scientists are capable of doing something very destructive, should they go ahead and do it just to prove they can? The same ethical dilemma was raised in the film Oppenheimer. Von Neumann was part of the Manhattan Project and contributed to creating the atom bomb. Some major physicists (Fermi, Oppenheimer) said they should go no further, but von Neumann sided with Teller’s plan to build and have tested the vastly more destructive hydrogen bomb. In the Cold War, von Neumann’s game theory was put to use by the American military to work out a nuclear-loaded strategy to deal with the Soviet Union. He invented the MAD doctrine (Mutually Assured Destruction) and others referred to his major computer as Mathematical Analyser, Numerical Integrator and Computer, that is, MANIAC.
Second dilemma: is much scientific progress necessarily beneficial to humanity? Here, Labatut looks closely at the development of modern computers since von Neumann stirred them up. He moves into the territory of AI and sees a dehumanising trend in the direction it is going. One slogan given in this novel is “for progress there is no cure”.
The Maniac is a “non-fiction novel”, dealing with real people, real historical events and real philosophical problems. It is organised as a sort of bricolage, with each chapter being told by a friend, wife, colleague, admirer or rival of von Neumann, giving a very rounded perspective of him. A sort of prologue deals with an earlier physicist, Paul Ehrenfest, who was driven to despair by his belief that the invention of quantum physics had ushered in the age of the irrational. A very long epilogue continues the argument about dehumanisation. Lee Sedol, the Korean professional player of the complex Asian game Go, finds out what happens when he takes on a super computer.
All Labatut’s earlier novels were written in his own Spanish language, including his bestseller, When We Cease to Understand the World. He wrote The Maniac in English. Given that it’s a detailed, complex novel, he must be some sort of genius.
