During my exploration of scientific brilliance, I encountered ‘The Man from the Future’—Ananyo Bhattacharya’s electrifying biography of the visionary genius John von Neumann. Intrigued by the narrative, I approached the author for an interview to gain deeper insights into the life of one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable scientists. In this exchange, Bhattacharya offers an insightful perspective on the book and its subject.
So, why John von Neumann?
While I was working as a science correspondent at The Economist, I found his name cropping up in different contexts. He was mentioned in pieces about quantum mechanics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Among the economics correspondents, he was known for game theory. Once, I pulled popular science books off my shelf at random and found his name in the index of about half of them, but in wildly different contexts. Why should the name of a mathematician who had died nearly seventy years ago be cited with increasing frequency in stories about contemporary science and technology? The book is my attempt to answer that question.
That’s interesting because while reading your book, a similar curiosity arose within me, not about von Neumann, but your own journey. I looked forward to learning more about the path that led you to explore his life. Notably, your identity remains detached from the book’s narrative. Was this a conscious decision?
The purpose of the book was to explain and contextualize von Neumann’s mathematics and show how mathematics is omnipresent in our modern lives, much of it sparked by his thinking from nearly a century ago. I felt readers would be interested in his story-not mine!
Fair point. Another aspect that piqued my curiosity was your writing style. There were paragraphs that could easily have been part of a fiction novel. As a fellow writer, I’m intrigued to understand how you weave facts and information into storytelling or vice versa.
It’s nice that a science fiction writer should notice this! Of course, the title and premise of the book is meant to sound as if it is speculative fiction—but the staggering thing is that everything I say in the book is a matter of fact. Von Neumann’s ideas were so futuristic that some of my favourite writers, including Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K Dick, for example, wrote novels based around them. The book isn’t really a biography of von Neumann, of course. It’s a biography of von Neumann’s ideas, which had a life of their own.
That’s a nice way to put it. Speaking of fiction, an astrophysicist friend of mine, who is also an avid cinephile, offered a fascinating insight. She compared making a movie to completing a PhD, outlining notable parallels between the process in both fields. Building upon this analogy, do you see any connections between the art of writing and the pursuit of scientific inquiry? If so, how?
I left research in part because I had always wanted to write but also because I found lab work frustrating. The real world does not always behave as we would wish. With science writing, the battle is one of understanding difficult concepts and then explaining them in a way that I hope excites the reader. If you write something boring and impenetrable, then you really only have yourself to blame. Depending on what day you ask me, that fact is either liberating or terrifying. So, I think writing is fundamentally quite different from any lab-based science.
Communicating complex scientific concepts to a broader audience is indeed as challenging as its exciting. It reminds me of a similar topic. A recent piece I penned for Club SciWri explores how Science Fiction Brings People Closer to Science. Given your background and experiences, do you share an affinity for sci-fi, or perhaps, do you plan to dabble in that genre in the future?
There are so many scientists (particularly physicists) who say they were first drawn to science as a result of reading science fiction that I think it’d be foolish to deny the link. At its best, the genre explores the social consequences of science, and that’s something I hope scientists think about.
As a teenager, I loved science fiction. I started off reading a lot of Golden Age authors (Asimov and Heinlein among the Americans, John Christopher and John Wyndham), then later cyberpunk (Gibson, Sterling) and Phillip K Dick, who I think is in a strange league of his own. Ursula K. Le Guin’s, a favourite. After a long gap, I started reading science fiction again about a decade ago, so I only discovered Cixin Liu and Ted Chiang relatively recently. Chiang is quite possibly the best short story writer in the English language today.
I recently finished the first draft of a children’s science fiction novel but I have no idea if some version of it will ever see the light of day.
Fantastic news! We’re already looking forward to potential future discussions about your novel. My anticipation aside, I’d like to shift our focus back to science writing. Within this domain, what aspects do you find most captivating and personally fulfilling?
All of it. What’s particularly gratifying is those moments when you’ve been pushing to understand an idea, and finally, you have it well enough in your head to actually be able to describe it in simple-ish terms to an innocent bystander. I’ll get a bit obsessed with whatever I happen to be writing about sometimes, so if someone catches me at the wrong time, they might get an impromptu lecture on how obscure problems in set theory contributed to the birth of the programmable computer. That feeling’s not unique to science writing, of course.
So, what’s next? Can we anticipate any forthcoming literary endeavors besides the children’s novel?
I’ve started thinking about another non-fiction book about the upheavals in our understanding of space and time that began in around the middle of the nineteenth century.
In your book, you touched upon Neumann’s contribution to ‘Fat Man’ and his association with the Manhattan Project. Additionally, it was interesting to discover his influence on the character of Dr. Strangelove. Since it’s one of the hottest topics this year, I am curious to know your thoughts on the movie Oppenheimer. Further, would you anticipate a cinematic homage to John Neumann someday?
I loved Oppenheimer. The best biopic of a scientist I’ve seen. I was disappointed but not surprised that von Neumann wasn’t in it, even though he actually designed the bomb that’s shown behind Oppenheimer in the movie poster!
The whole reason I wrote my book, after all, is that von Neumann is so often overlooked. His life, I think, would be suited to a Tom Stoppard-style play. His second wife, Klari Dan, though, had a truly cinematic, if tragic, life starting from her childhood in roaring twenties Budapest, to becoming Hungary’s national ice skating champion at fourteen, to penning the first modern computer programs, simulating a nuclear chain reaction inside an atom bomb. Her publisher dropped her after six years of working on her fabulously-written memoirs, and her story was forgotten. I do hope there’s a film about her one day. Until then, you can read my article on her and listen to the second season of The Lost Women of Science podcast, which was all about her.
In exploring the life of John von Neumann and now unearthing the forgotten chapters of Klari Dan’s story, Ananyo Bhattacharya has not only delivered a compelling biography but also sparked a curiosity that extends beyond the confines of scientific history. Our conversation and “The Man from the Future” left me in awe of the formidable power of storytelling to illuminate the hidden gems of science.
The Man from the Future- Korean cover
Ananyo Bhattacharya is a science writer who has worked at the Economist and Nature. Before journalism, he was a medical researcher at the Burnham Institute in San Diego, California. He holds a degree in physics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in protein crystallography from Imperial College London.
Author-
Dhara Parekh, a business professional with an unwavering passion for science and astronomy, found her true calling as a science fiction author. She melds her diverse experiences from living like a nomad into writing novels. When her fingers aren’t prancing on the keyboard, she’s either learning about the next fresh interest she has stumbled upon or reading fiction in a painful position, or finding hacks to understand humans. An alien on the pale blue dot converting her bizarre thoughts into Times New Roman.
Editor- Roopsha Sengupta
