Echoes of Alamogordo

Randomness, civilizational suicide, the corners into which one paints oneself, and the possibility of escape.

The last great conclave in human history was in New Mexico in the 1940s. The greatest minds from multiple disciplines, from half the nations on earth, showed up. They came with the most compelling, nearly proven theories of what the world was made of and how it worked. And they were on a deadline.

The council of Nicaea was Canasta night by comparison. Los Alamos and Alamogordo still echo through our lives. The Manhattan Project still guarantees our money, informs our prejudices, outlines our sense of history and punctuates the twilight language of what we don’t say.

Nuclear weapons weren’t often spoken of when I was a kid, but they loomed large. The Manhattan Project seemed important from the moment I first learned about it. Moments from Richard Rhodes’ two books on the subject were all over my poems in my twenties. One night at a bowling alley in Sunset Park, I met a famously eccentric bartender and we talked about Enrico Fermi tickling the dragon’s tail until I had to be hurried home. I remember asking my wife for chicken and an ambulance, and accused the old man of poisoning me. One of us did.

The bomb is a towering achievement or an unforgivable folly. Recently someone tried to face up to it with a blockbuster movie. Even though it felt like the movie missed the point, it captured the import.

Untangling the revelation

At Los Alamos and Alamogordo, a new dispensation was handed down. The test worked. Reality was decided. Power was confirmed. And for the first time in almost fifteen hundred years, we almost knew what time it was. It wasn’t a good time, necessarily, maybe the last few minutes of humanity. But it was decided. A new time, a new damnation.

At the center of all this, as at the center of a lot of things in the 20th century was John von Neumann. Genetics, astronomy, mathematics, Frank Black songs and even far-out Long-Island conspiracy theories - the guy is quietly everywhere. This particular center that von Neumann was at was the center of the plutonium bomb. It’s the one detonated by compressing a globe of the material to a critical density with precisely timed spherical lenses of explosives.

That was the least of the problems involved. They had to build two towns just to refine the fissile material. Collapsing spheres of plutonium with shells of dynamite was just one of the problems that had to be solved. And since the problems created by the detonation of a nuclear bomb were completely unknown, they needed a way of gauging the probability of an outlandishly large array of outcomes.

To do this, they created a method of simulating possible outcomes of equations with multiple variables, eventually called the Monte Carlo method, of which von Neumann was a co-creator. The simulation depends on using random numbers for each variable.

But therein lies the rub. Random numbers don’t grow on trees.

The useful sin

“Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.” - This von Neumann quote is how Forget This Good Thing co-creator Matthew Dublin opens his description of the road to the realm of random numbers.

The problem is that numbers are ordered, and orderly. To use numbers to create numbers with no sequence is more than a tall order. It’s a violation.

It’s a little like the thought experiment, don’t think of a polar bear for the next minute. It’s a task that works in direct opposition to the tools. It’s black magic. Under threat of civilizational death, von Neumann opened the grimoire.

The task is a little like what’s required to think something outside of what you already think. It’s the sorcery that shows up in the Zen koans that aim to short-circuit your logic. It’s hopeful blasphemy that may yet save us from the corner into which we’ve talked ourselves.

A fulcrum outside the world

You could move the whole world, if you had a lever long enough and a fulcrum to set it against, was Archimedes’ old boast. And the long lever isn’t the problem, but the fulcrum, which has to be set on something outside of the world. But what’s outside the world?

In random-number generation, that fulcrum outside the world is the seed - the starting number that the code starts with. If that seed is truly random, then a pseudorandom algorithm like the Mersenne Twister can produce something very near actual randomness. A random seed is a way of including an exception to the logic of the random number-generator at its very beginning, to get a result that’s slightly closer to being truly random from a mathematical process that’s, in the end, a mathematical process.

The trick is to have a seed that’s always changing. That could be the processor temperature of a mobile phone or the 12th decimal in the Unix epoch time. Or it could be the processor temperature inside of a mobile device. Do that, and you’re suddenly in touch with real randomness.

Mechanism for a mystery

With Forget This Good Thing, that contact with randomness, and the unpredictability of the experience is derived from a complex algorithmic design based on a seed supplied by the physical world.

Your mobile device generates its own thermal signals from the heat of its processor. And because this varies depending on how often you use it, where you keep it, and how many apps you’re running, this is an ever-varying a source of statistically random seeds upon which to run the random-number generator.

When using the web-based version, we have to rely on different seeds, like the time that you swipe to the next aphorism. In short, through your own action, you are creating the unpredictability of your own experience.

Ploughshares

The jury’s out on the Manhattan Project. It killed a lot of people. Did it prevent the next World War, or at least delay it meaningfully? Maybe. Some people argue that nuclear weapons only moved violence - like energy - from an expended to a potential state, where it will all come due all too soon.

After World War II, people tried to find other uses for nuclear fission. Atomic energy is effective, but risky in a lot of ways. It’s a hard sell for good reasons. One time, they detonated a nuke twice the size of the Hiroshima bomb deep under the soil in New Mexico, to free up natural gas. It created a cavern as big as if you stuck a football field underground and spun it on a stick. The gas was unusable. Oh well.

Bad logic

One thing about nuclear obliteration is that it’s so total and so nightmarish that it gives us occasion to challenge our existing frames of reference. The movies and TV shows of my youth were full of mid-level technocrats and military officers choosing whether to follow orders and launch the nukes.

That was the Cold War. The logic was different. Now it’s less about clear conflict and more a mass of probabilities - a lot of bad news with little in the way of overarching context. It’s a lot of responses. It seems to make people tired and reflexively pessimistic, like we’re sleepwalking inexorably towards ruin.

The nudge from outside

The logic of our days is always hard to step out of. The aches and pains of our bodies, and the arrangement of furniture in our homes reinforces that logic.

But stepping out of it might be a way to wake up. In a dream, how do you wake up? You can’t just will your way out. You try to reach out of the dream and nudge yourself awake. But that’s impossible.

What you need is a poke from something outside the dream. You need the formula to deliver a number outside its own parameters. You need to hear something you didn’t ask for. That’s why we created Forget This Good Thing.

Selected Bibliography

Richard Rhodes’ books on the making of the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb

Frank Black song that name checks von Neumann

Forget This Good Thing – Try it now

Forget This Good Thing – The app for iPhone and iPad

Forget This Good Thing - Paper book 1 - Paper book 2

Forget This Good Thing - All About It

Forget This Good Thing - Its creation - What it can do for you - Why it matters - Thirteen descriptions - The Risks - Case Study - Case Study #2