Benjamin Labatut
Publisher: Anagrama
Original publication year: 2023
How far can the human mind go? What is the limit of your capacity? That seems to be the hidden premise of this critically praised MANIAC. But to answer these questions, Benjamin Labatut has resorted to what he knows how to do best, scientific dissemination, to talk about people who existed and whose lives help us get an idea of the frontier of our species, with a direct and concise style, devilishly amusing.
Because this novel sometimes escapes its own definition and can be understood as three independent stories with weak connections. It opens with the suicide of scientist Paul Ehrenfest and the sacrifice of his son with Down Syndrome. A man, a close friend of Albert Einstein, in love with physics but with a spirit prone to depression, which led him to passionately love his wife, his lover, his discipline and even his son… But he was unable to overcome the changes that the society of his time suffered, with the arrival of the Nazis and the scientific advances, which would lead to the development of quantum physics.
The most intelligent man of the 20th century
But the central body of the book is the story of Johnny von Nuemann. The Hungarian mathematician was the most privileged mind of his generation. “The only awake man,” according to his best friend, Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Eugene Wigner. And that is, precisely, one of the keys to MANIAC. That Von Neumann’s story is told through the voices of friends, family and colleagues close to him, in a mosaic that allows us to admire the different faces of a tremendously unique man.
And although Labatut imagines all these narrators and approaches each text with a spirit that is as lyrical as it is informative, his extensive documentation and extensive knowledge of the subject allow the text to advance in a perfect balance between historical facts and literary entertainment.
Thus, we accompany Von Neumann from his childhood, with the comments of his own mother or his little brother, through his rise to the mathematical elite, listening to the voice of his classmates and teachers, until his forced exile to the United States and his involvement in the development of the atomic bomb and the creation of one of the first computers, the MANIAC, listening to his most distinguished colleagues and co-workers.
To the limit… and beyond
MANIAC closes with the story of Lee Sedol, Grand Master of Go, a type of Asian checkers game, and his famous confrontation with AlphaGo, a computer capable of playing like a true expert. A game that marked a before and after in the development of artificial intelligences, because, for the first time, they were able to go one step beyond the limits of human beings.
But those three seemingly unconnected stories, united, outline the limits of our brain. From the abysses of a mind that, despite being above average, was not able to survive the drama of being human, passing through the most privileged brain of the entire century, to the first man who verified how his own species he was capable of creating something that surpassed it, pushing the limit even further.
2024-01-05 10:52:26
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