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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

I am always amazed by the sheer brainpower at the Manhattan Project. Has that level of talent ever been assembled before or since?

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Try the 1927 Solvay Conference on Electrons and Photons:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/87a8ea/1927_group_pho...

Schrödinger, Pauli, Heisenberg, Dirac, de Broglie, Bohr, Planck, Curie, Lorentz, Einstein... the number of Nobel Prizes here is left as an exercise.

But John von Neumann wasn't there for the conference and he was there for the Manhattan Project.

Those are a lot of the same people from the Manhattan project though, no?

Has something on that scale happened since, with an unrelated set of people?

Actually this conference was largely from a previous generation of scientific thinkers. According to their Wikipedia bios, Niels Bohr was the only one of those 10 names involved in the Manhattan Project. Einstein wrote a letter alerting President Roosevelt to the possibility of a German atomic bomb which may have helped inspire the project. Heisenberg was also involved in the war effort but "knew little of the Manhattan Project, so, if he were captured, he would have little intelligence value to the Germans".

Wow.

You quote -- without attribution -- wikipedia, and you get the antecedent wrong.

I'll italicize the exact words you quote after their preceding sentence in the Werner Heisenberg article on wikipedia:

"Godusmit was selected for this task because he had physics knowledge, he spoke German, and he personally knew a number of the german scientists working on the German nuclear energy project. He also knew little of the Manhattan Project, so, if he were captured, he would have little intelligence value to the Germans."

Note that the "he" in the second sentence is Godusmit, not Heisenberg.

Heisenberg was, according to Meitner, straightforwardly a supporter of the Nazi regime. Whether or not he was ideologically committed to the party, Heisenberg was most definitely involved in the war effort -- on the German side! [ https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/07/us/letter-may-solve-nazi-... -- first sentence, "The leader of the Nazi atomic bomb program, Werner Heisenberg, revealed its existence ..." a paragraph later: "Heisenberg never expressed moral qualms about building a bomb for Hitler or hinted that he might be willing to sabotage the project, the documents reveal" with a follow-up here https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/07/world/new-twist-on-physic... ].

Further (and much more detailed) discussion from 2016 at APS Physics: https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201607/heisenberg....

Thanks for this correction! I had hurriedly checked Wikipedia bios for each participant and completely missed the main point of Heisenberg's wartime activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg#1945:_Alsos_...

It makes the story even more interesting to see Bohr and Heisenberg participating on opposite sides.

I think the Internet has two competing effects here: 1. Ideas and inventions disseminate quickly and become part of open source knowledge almost immediately if useful, and when people do learn of a new idea they are unlikely to know who invented it; and 2. Because of this openness of information and 'democratization of invention,' there are fewer recognized centers of invention (mostly being universities and special projects teams working on mostly unpublished work at big tech companies), and so great minds are less likely to gravitate to the same spot.

Another consideration here is that the hottest field is software, where innovation suffers from the open-sourcing/attribution problem to a greater degree than any other field.

And intellect is more easily widely monetized today: e.g. high frequency trading, data mining, DL applications, ad algorithms.

>>software, where innovation suffers from the open-sourcing/attribution problem to a greater degree than any other field.

Suffers? What a curious choice of word! I would claim quite the contrary, where innovation flourishes due to the ease and speed of dissemination of ideas.

Can you explain why you think innovation is dampened?

Sentence structure could have been better -- I think the Internet a net positive for innovation, but in this particular regard (aggregating great minds to get concentrated breakthroughs, and being recognized for those breakthroughs), it is dampened.

I appreciate the clarification. (and agree) There are many cases of lack-of-attribution or no respect for open-source licensing.

For theoretical computer science, Berkeley in 80s and 90s was a fantastic place: the foundations of cryptography and complexity theory were developed here. A sample: Goldwasser, Micali, Blum, Impagliazzo, Rudich, Arora, Sudan, Karp, the Vazirani's, Rubenfeld, Naor, Sipser, and more. These are the who's who of cryptography and complexity theory, and they all overlapped in time over 1982-92.

Bletchley Park has to be up there too. Existential threats seem to be good for assembling dream teams.

I've always considered Bell Labs to be the ultimate brain team. They're like the Dream Team of math, science and engineering.

I think there are plenty of teams of this caliber out there. They're just working on less impactful or more stubborn projects. If Bell Labs hadn't existed, I believe it wouldn't have been long before most of the breakthroughs that came from there came from other places instead.

Really? Just off the top of my head, here are some of the people that worked at Bell Labs:

Claude Shannon, Richard Hamming, William Shockley, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, John Hopcroft & Brian Kernighan. (I am probably forgetting several Nobel prize and Turing award recipients)

Did they work there at the same time? What were the respective team sizes.

I get the feeling the Manhattan Project is pretty high up with regard to Nobel Prizes / Scientists employed, at least if you count only the research team at the Los Alamos site (the total team was in the 6-digits IIRC because of "Computers", Military staff, and all the physical work of enrichment and metalworking)

I think there's one school in Budapest that might have more laureates among an even smaller student body. Coincidently (or not) there's a rather large overlap of that group an Los Alamo (.

Some people at the time felt that C and Unix were a setback to computing compared with Lisp, in the same way that Microsoft Windows was a setback compared to Unix. Bell Labs is the canonical example of "Worse is Better", also called the "New Jersey Philosophy".

One could also argue that both Windows and Unix were necessary phases for general computing given limited hardware resources, and only now is the stateless functional paradise envisioned at MIT in the 1960's actually possible.

Progress comes in waves. Windows might have been a set back from Apple, but it was more easily available.

While their practical achievements have had tremendous affect on a specific level of a revolutionary industry: Von Neumann alone was smarter and more influential than any three of them combined (maybe excluding Shannon).

To be fair that's also true of almost any three people involved in the Manhattan Project too.

Not a maybe for Shannon. He is still having a trememdous impact. Information theory has developed by Shannon is so fundamental that we forget about it these days. But big.

I could argue for Shockley and Hamming, but they were more on an engineering side.

RAND corporation in both depth and longevity is pretty impressive.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/a/asimov_isaac.html

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/v/vonneumann_john.html

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/baran_paul.html

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/n/nash_john_f.html

https://www.rand.org/about/history/nobel/bibliography.html

Well, Shannon yes.

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan, on the other hand, aren't of the same caliber as people like Shannon and Feynman (and the Manhattan project all-stars).

They've had a huge influence on programming, and on IT, but not always for the better from an academic and quality perspective (e.g. Worse is Better), and more as pragmatic hackers and tinkerers than deep thinkers.

This is almost certainly true. Breakthroughs in science, mathematics, technology, and engineering occur when the conditions are ripe; if you look into every major famous breakthrough, you find that it was being duplicated or research along similar lines being pursued elsewhere in a very close timeframe. Geniuses are fungible.

For artists, yes: The Chelsea Hotel.

https://medium.com/@bagelboy/make-america-bohemian-again-de8...

Socrates and Plato worked together, as did Plato and Aristotle. Was Aristotle too young to connect with Socrates or did they meet?

The Impressionists.

The Lost Generation with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Elliot, and everyone passing through Paris.

Bebop in the 40s and 50s.

Socrates was executed in 399 BCE, before Aristotle was born (384 BCE). Plato's Academy [1] would probably count though, as might Athens as a whole.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy

The events around the founding of America brought together a group of people of staggering intellect and morality, definitely unrivaled. (Although their efforts ultimately failed, as predicted by one of them.)

I don't think that people in the past were smarter so I would think that at places like CERN you have the same level of talent but information gets out much easier these days so it's hard to stay ahead. The internet levels the playing field a lot.

Obligatory Nuclear Secrecy reference: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/02/do-we-want-another...

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