interpretations of quantum physics

Physicists ruefully joke that though new interpretations of quantum physics arrive with astonishing regularity, none ever go away. For many, that joke is turning sour. ‘It is a bad sign’, theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg noted recently, ‘that those physicists today who are most comfortable with quantum mechanics do not agree with one another about what it all means.’ --The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann - pg 42 months.

‘He [von Neumann] was ill at ease with people who were self-made or came from modest backgrounds,’ says Ulam of von Neumann in Princeton. ‘He felt most comfortable with third- or fourth-generation wealthy Jews.’
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Even Oppenheimer’s landlady in Berkeley was a communist.

Soon after Hilbert issued his challenge, the intellectually dynamic but psychologically frail Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel would demonstrate that it is impossible to prove that mathematics is either complete or consistent. - pg 111

отрывок показательный

однако описание работы Гёделя на стр 113-114 - пожалуй лучшее из всего, что я читал. и еще на стр. 118 описание работ Чёрча и Тюринга.

This seems odd today, but von Neumann, Turing, Norbert Wiener and other thinkers who contributed to the foundations of the field that became known as ‘artificial intelligence’ did think about computers as ‘electronic brains’. Today using ‘brain’ or ‘neuron’ in the context of computers seems laughably naive. - pg 122

laughably naive my ass. дальше там описывается "архитектура фон Неймана" - как я и ожидал, довольно дурацкая история. зато про память на линиях задержки, которую вовсе не фон Нейман изобрел, интересно.