Chapter 9 Los Alamos senior researchers

Los Alamos senior researchers From an outsider's perspective, the decision to fire these senior researchers should have been easy to make.They're a bunch of old guys living a laid-back life while being paid ridiculously high salaries.On the surface, things are as they seem.The team of senior researchers is made up of six longtime Los Alamos members like Cowan.These people made outstanding contributions to the Los Alamos laboratory, so they were hired as senior researchers in the laboratory.They are not responsible for any specific administrative affairs, nor are they busy in officialdom.Their only job as a group was to meet once a week in a coffee shop and occasionally advise the lab director on various policy issues.

But in fact, these senior researchers are very active people, these people often get a new position and say, "Thank God, I can finally do something." He had held important administrative positions at the Los Alamos laboratory, so whether the current director of the laboratory liked it or not, they would not be shy about telling him what to do.So when Cowan told them that he wanted to set up a research institute and wanted advice and support from them, he got a satisfactory response. People like Pete Carruthers, for example, immediately hit it off with Cowan: They both believed that some new idea was in the bud.He thinks this opportunity is already knocking on our door.The slovenly, sarcastic Carruthers is passionate about the study of "complex" systems.Complexity theory, he declared, is "the next major thrust of science."He has reason to think so.He came to Los Alamos from Cornell University in 1973 as chair of the theory department.He came to Los Alamos on the recommendation of a talent acquisition committee headed by Cowan.Since his arrival, nearly a hundred new researchers have been hired, and six new research groups have been established, all while laboratory funding has declined. In 1974, at his insistence, he recruited a few wild young men to work on what was then an obscure subdiscipline, nonlinear dynamics. [Carruthers said his deputy, Mike Simmons, asked him at the time, "What am I going to pay them? Go find them some money elsewhere." Under his leadership, the branch of nonlinear dynamics developed rapidly, and Los Alamos became the world's research center for what was later called chaos theory.So if Cowan's idea was based on nonlinear dynamics, Carruthers would be more than happy to help him.

Another senior researcher, astrophysicist Stirling Colgate, enthusiastically supports Cowan's idea for another reason. "We need anything that organizes and strengthens the intellectual power of America," he said.For all its might, Los Alamos is open to the outside world, but it remains a scientific outlander, towering above the real world in its splendid solitude.Colgueta, who spent ten years as director of the Socorro New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, 200 miles from Los Alamos, knew very well that New Mexico outside of Los Alamos was a beautiful and backward place.The billions of dollars the federal government has poured into the region since the forties have had depressingly little effect on the region's schools and industrial base.The best universities in the state are also average.That's largely because high-tech entrepreneurs looking to move out of overcrowded California head straight across the Rio Grande Valley toward Austin and east.Colgueta and Carruthers have recently been working hard to improve the New Mexico university system, but they quickly gave up because of hopelessness.This state is really poor.So Cowan's graduate program seemed to him like the last and most likely hope.He said: "Anything that can improve the level of knowledge in this state is not only related to our personal interests, the interests of the laboratory, but also the interests of our country."

Senior researcher Nick Metropolis liked Cowan's idea because Cowan emphasized the importance of computers.He does it from his perspective.Metropolis was almost Mr. Computer in Los Alamos.It was he who directed the construction of the laboratory's first computer in the forties.The computer was built on the brainchild of the amazing Hungarian-born mathematician Johan von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.Von Neumann was also a consultant and frequent visitor to Los Alamos. (The name of this first computer, MANIAC, is a combination of the first letters of each word for mathematical analyzer, integrator, calculator, and computer.) It was Metropolis and Polish mathematician Stanislas Together with Stanislaus Ulam, they pioneered computer simulation.Another major contribution of Metropolis was to give Los Alamos the most powerful and fastest supercomputer on earth.

But Metropolis feels the lab isn't very creative right now, even in computing.He and Gian-Carlo Rota, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting researcher who often comes to Los Alamos for a short stay, pointed out to the senior fellows at the same table that computer science is at a critical moment in relation to biology and biology. Nonlinear science is in the same turmoil.Computer hardware design is being revolutionized, he said.Computers that can do one step at a time are running out of speed, and hardware designers are designing computers that can do hundreds, thousands, or even millions of calculations at a time.And that's a very good thing: Anyone who really wants to do serious work on problems of the kind of complexity Cowan says will need such a computer.

But computer science is much more than that.Rota feels that the role of computers is especially manifested in the fact that it can be extended to the study of the human brain—he believes that the thinking of the human brain and the processing of information by computers are basically the same thing in essence.The field he refers to, known as cognitive science, is a hot subject, and getting hotter.Done right, the discipline can connect brain neuroscientists who study the connections of neural networks, psychologists who study the second-by-second processes of higher-level thinking and reasoning, and artificial intelligence researchers who try to use computers to mimic the thought processes of the human brain. It is even possible to synthesize the research results of linguists who study the results of human language and human scientists who study human culture.

Rota and Metropolis told Cowan that it would be worthwhile to set up a local research institute for such an interdisciplinary subject. Another visitor, David Pines, also began participating in this discussion in the midsummer of 1983 at the invitation of Metropolis.Paines is a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois, editor-in-chief of Reviews of Modern Physics, and chairman of the Advisory Board of the Los Alamos Division of Theoretical Physics.He also became someone who echoed Cowan's claims of grand scientific integration.Much of his research since his doctoral dissertation in the 1950s has focused on creatively understanding the "integrated" behavior of systems composed of many particles.His research ranged from vibrational forms of a large number of atomic nuclear particles to the quantum flow of liquid helium.Paines also publicly speculated that such analyzes might lead to a better understanding of human group behavior in organizations and societies. "I favor Cowan's vision as an intellectual preference," he said.Paines was an enthusiastic supporter of Cowan's vision for a new scientific institute.And he has some experience in this area as founder and director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Illinois and co-founder of the Center for Physics in Aspen, Colorado. "Just follow your plan," he told Cowan.He can't wait to be a part of creating this institution. “I always find it very interesting to bring together very strong scientists to discuss new problems. Starting a new scientific research institution is as interesting as writing a good scientific paper,” he said.

In this way, these senior researchers discussed the establishment of the institution with great interest, sometimes to the point of getting carried away.For example, one day, when they thought that they might create a "new Athens", a center for intellectual exploration of truth comparable to the city-state that gave birth to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, everyone became agitated. Be very excited.But turning to more realistic discussions, they argued over a myriad of issues.How much space is needed to build this institution?How many students should be admitted?Or should students be admitted?How close should it be to Los Alamos?Need to establish a permanent faculty?Or do people just come to the institution on a rotational basis and then return to their research units?In this way, although they themselves have not fully realized it, this imaginary research institution has gradually become clearer and clearer in their minds.

But unfortunately, the only problem is that everyone has a different opinion. "Every week, we talked and talked and went back to the first basic point, and it went back and forth endlessly." Cowan sighed. The most critical and fundamental question is: What exactly should this research institution study? Metropolis and Rota take the same view.They believed that this research institute should be devoted entirely to computer science.They say that the idea of ​​a grand scientific "integration" is all well and good, but if the people sitting here can't clearly define that integration, how can anyone be expected to invest $400 million in it?The investment required to create this institution is roughly equivalent to the creation of the Rockefeller Institute in New York.Of course, raising such a large sum of money will not be easy under any circumstances.But at least if you focus on information processing and cognitive science, at least you can include many of the research aspects that Cowan proposed, and maybe you can also get it from the newly emerging young billionaires who made their fortunes on computers A sum of money was raised.

But Carruthers, Paines and most others disagree.Computers, they thought, were good.Metropolis and Rota also had their reasons for raising money.But, hell, are we going to create another computer center?Is creating a computer center really an idea that will drive everyone crazy?Creating this institution should be much more than that, even if they can't figure out exactly what it should be like right now.And that's where the problem lies.As senior researcher Darraph Nagle points out: “We can’t offer a different alternative with great clarity.” Everyone feels that Cowan is right, that some kind of new thinking is brewing .But beyond vague references to a "new way of thinking," no one has been able to say exactly what it is.

Cowan has kept a low profile on the issue.He knows exactly what his original intention is.He privately thinks of the institution as a "survival art institute."For him, this meant that the project could be as expansive as it could be, as free as it could be.But at the same time, he believes, reaching a consensus on the direction of the institute is far more important than raising funding or anything concrete.He felt that if the Institute was a one-man show, it would not make any progress.Thirty years of experience in administration had convinced him that the only way to make such a thing successful was to inspire a lot of enthusiasm for it. "You have to convince the really good people that what we're doing is a really important thing. By the way, I'm not talking about democracy. I'm talking about getting the best 0.5 percent of The elite believes in you. Once you succeed in gaining the approval of the elite, the money problem, well, it’s not going to be easy to solve, but it’s a relatively small problem.” It's like a slow-motion argument, with everyone overloaded with research on all fronts. (Cowan, in particular, is immersed in experiments detecting solar neutrinos, nearly invisible particles that emanate from the sun's inner core.) But the debate can't go on forever. On August 17, 1983, Cowan called the senior researchers into a conference room on the fourth floor of the laboratory's administrative building and suggested that it was time to get down to business in earnest.Some of his friends talked about offering fifty to one hundred hectares of land as a site for the institute.But his friend hoped that at least let him know what the institute was for. But the debate still went nowhere.They were divided amicably but firmly into two factions.By the end of the meeting, opinions were no more aligned than before.It just so happened that the couple who had promised to donate the land divorced a few months later, and the original land donation plan was cancelled.Cowan had to start wondering if this thing was going to make any headway.