There's always massive open questions because every question you answer generates more questions.
Which is also why most science published is hard to verify. Pretty much every topic out there is niche enough that the amount of people able to review it (let alone test it) is extremely small and they all know each other.
There was an incredible cadre of scientists from Hungary in the early 20th century. Sadly they were exiled by fascism.
There were still lots of smart people in Nazi Germany, as evidenced by Operation Paperclip which brought ~1,600 Nazi scientists over to the US to work on rockets and help the US fight the USSR in the Cold War and space race.
Well, yes, as that's the defining characteristic of the group and why they moved to the United States and became known as the martians.
Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar did not persecute Jews, in fact allowed them safe passage from Vichy France.
Italy really turned antisemitic after more than a decade with the alliance with Germany to appease Hitler mostly. There's a nice book on the topic, in Italian, "Mussolini Razzista Riluttante" by Antonio Spinosa.
> alienation is core to fascism
Fascism, a neighbour of Futurism, idolises technology, of only for its semiotic power. But then so did Soviet Communism. Stalin executed all the "bourgeois engineers" and Bolsheviks who built the industrial engine of the CCCP. Alternatively, the great leap forward in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia both rounded up the thinkers, teachers and engineers first.
So I don't think it's unique to fascism. What is common?
Seems it's a hallmark of the treachery of totalitarianism. Tyrants fear but use intellectuals. They need actual smart people to gain power, but then who is more threatening than people who know how the system works because they built it for you? So they are always betrayed. Consider Oppenheimer. Many of the great scientists and artists are put out to pasture once they've done what's useful for the party.
> "alienates the best thinkers" seems like a good litmus test.
Almost the whole Frankfurt School were Jewish intellectuals who fled to America.
I've written (probably in Digital Vegan) on how the Silicon Valley Billionaires, once they've built their "Social Media Digital Utopia" - a pageant of vanity, fear and cybernetic governance - would simply dispose of the coders (perhaps not as directly as Stalin). Maybe an indicator of that came early with the layoffs when some got a bit too moist about "AI". I think they hope that "AI" will be the way to pull up the ladder, leaving no challenging class.
Of Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, the people credited with the establishment of "modern" (pre WWI & WWII) sciences of society all were "political" philosphers | thinkers that looked at the behaviour of societies.
Max Weber (1864 – 1920) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber was a German of some influence, and the pre and inbetween World War periods were a time of intense political debate in France, Germany, and surrounds.
Who are "they" to whom you refer, and what is "political" as opposed to "social" ?
One might guess (and its just that, a guess) that such regimes target the social sciences first because such departments (eg economics, political studies) are adjacent to live politics, the regime's people think they understand them and can make contributions (in reality, trying to take control of course) and of course because the hard sciences require the payment of a hard tax of mathematical skills to say anything useful, which most political hacks do not have.
And would you have preferred that Japan be left to the mercies of the Soviets, turning them into what North Korea and Cuba are today?
Childish naïveté, world wars, and postwar geopolitics don't mix.
So it's just a matter of time an "intellectual", or any individual really, says or does something that will be used as a pretext to accuse them of not being a good enough member of in-group (this will earn the accuser status as a guardian of purity). Soon enough the society is full of people accusing others and also of those that want to appease "the authorities" by proposing the most extreme ways of purifying and enhancing the in-group. It's easy to see this is not the best environment for seekers of truth.
Not sure if that’s a typo
But of the people born with his tools? How many were born into a setting that even cared for intellectual things? How many of them would be born into a wealthy family that could afford to hire private tutors for all their kids?
- Hans Bethe
I would, however, like to point out that 20th century had many, many great minds, also working in the same timeframe. Claude Shannon comes to mind first, but there were many others whose contributions are the basis of technology today.
Word of caution, relative to most of you folks I am a mathematical toddler. The book may be overly simple but my calculus professor really enjoyed it.
I recommend reading about Srinivasa Ramanujan
In some contrast, von Neumann seems to have been able to take his enormous fluid intelligence and speed and apply it to pretty much whatever problem he decided, and he did it across many areas, including non-scientific ones. The stories about him are tinged with a little unease, and it's a little harder to see the human underneath his achievements.
Anecdottally, my father was only introduced to vectors and vector based calculations when at the uni. My generation was taught vectors in primary school already.
I think they opted for the different approach to make a more visual representation of the concepts, so younger minds could more easily grasp them.
I think one can learn math and physics without being at the frontier. One can appreciate the beauty of solutions of classical problems by discussing the problem in a historical context.
Building on your sentiment, I have always felt that schools (in the US, at least) tend to teach students what to think rather than how to think. There is a huge emphasis on "here is the answer, now go find the questions" where I posit more focus should be placed on guiding a student to problem solve, think critically, and discover a few things for themselves, especially at the younger ages
Maybe you should look into Laslo Polgar. Another Hungarian who taught his daughters how to beat chess grandmasters.
It's incredibly inspiring. What other complicated fields are just waiting for the right person to come along and discover their fundamental laws? I have a vague suspicion that partial differential equations are criminally underused in modeling for software developmemt and system design.
[1]: I wrote a short review at https://two-wrongs.com/war-what-is-it-good-for.html if anyone is curious.
Then the next year they'd do it again.
We'd occasionally catch them at it when in Chemistry they'd tell us electrons worked one way and in Physics they'd say they worked another.
Anyway, I can definitely see how an enquiring mind might want to move past all this and find out The Truth.
Once you get to the edge, the game changes a fair bit. You'll need to know the actual experts, rather than just watching YouTube lectures or reading textbooks.
In terms of difference at the level you're talking about, the one big difference is that von Neumann's parents recognized how smart he was, and could afford to hire appropriate tutors to accelerate his learning.
There's this thing called Bloom's Two Sigma, though I'm no expert on the area it would appear that having a tutor improves results considerably. Now imagine one of the smartest kids ever born having parents who got him tutors.
That's pretty much how anything is taught in high school (and even most undergraduate programs). It's considered confusing to teach students that a lot of what we "know" is known to be incomplete and will change. I've kept some of my textbooks on immunology and other biomedical topics from the 1990s and parts of them are basically unrecognizable to what we are working on today. Sure, the basics haven't changed but the details certainly have.
You don't need to be a genius just reasonably good and interested. I would think 10% of all kids take part.
Check out UKMT for the equivalent in the UK or Kangaroo competitions.
Secondary schools has a 130! year old journal (KOMAL) for competition Maths (again various difficulties) but those who go on to become mathematicians (an extremely selective subject in Hungary) pass the hardest tests as well.
So Hungary has various levels of gifted children support programs and has it for the last 100+ years (across 3-4 different government structures)
Is there a difference to the way it’s taught now compared to whenever von Neumann was studying.
What I mean is, the way I was taught maths and science in general was with a feeling of “look we basically know everything just learn this and you’ll be fine”.
Rather than that there are MASSIVE open questions and things we don’t understand at all. Please learn maths and physics and fix them, will you?
I’m basically curious how a fairly young person gets into their head a thought like “Hey, why don’t I just revolutionise a few things? That seems totally reasonable for me to do that.”