Trouble with that startup was, the medical folks with money don't use computer tools. And the students in training have no money.
https://improbable.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ThereAreNo...
Yes, they were identical.
My crib note that I took into the later final exam was simply a conversion between terms in the two departments. Nothing else; I'd already crammed and aced the first exam.
The physics version was much more mathematical, and did things like solving everything in spherical coordinates. It also kind of served as a preparation for solving corresponding problems in quantum mechanics.
The engineering version was more nuts-and-bolts, covering things like transformers, motors, and transmission lines. (Antennas were for a later course).
As a consequence, teaching the engineering course required me to quickly learn a whole bunch of stuff that we glossed over or ignored in the physics course. While also teaching it. Fortunately I was an experimental physicist and had also done some work in industry, so the topics weren't utterly unfamiliar.
Otherwise why not just replace them with a script (or these days, an AI)
And I don’t know many, if any, examples of people received as crackpots that later were considered genius. At worst genius takes a little time to be recognized, which is a situation far more common.
I forget the quote, but one of the guys that recognized that he was worth looking into said something to the effect of "his work was too crazy for him to be crazy".
It's like an analog to the fact that almost all people consider themselves funny.
If somebody truly believes they have a useful model then they don't discouraged by academic gatekeeping, they go and build Time Cube.
The problem is that instead most people to come to them are either obvious crackpots, who think they have solved cancer (energy...) and contact the person because they are a biologist, physicist ... (on a completely unrelated topic usually). Or they come from a place of arrogance, i.e. "we do ... like this, our method is clearly superior you should adopt it", or even worse here buy our clearly superior method.
In my limited experience, the friction is between labs and groups that are working on very similar things, and the competition is direct and obvious. And even here, the source of the conflict is the reward structures of the field, not some aversion to collaboration or personal arrogance.
However, the gatekeeping you mention definitely occurs to mere mortals who might have an interesting bend on existing ideas.
"Using methodology from a field known for its focus on methodology in another field" was still a novel idea in von Neumann's time. But because von Neumann and others did it, and because millions of people entered science after them, most combinations like that have already been tried. Breakthroughs from combining ideas from unrelated fields require something little less obvious these days.
Einstein built on the shoulders of Riemann, Gauss, and others when considering the universe might be non-Euclidean!
All brilliant people, many singular minds of great repute, yet, all improved by the rest.
It's interesting how much worse off the world would be if the smartest people were in charge of it.
What ultimately blocked his nuke proposals? (Why didn't anyone listen?) I'm curious about whatever failsafe that was.
2. Probably what blocked his proposals is that most people are loath to murder millions of other people (especially if they have ~any other option, including "do nothing")
While it's easy to dismiss that view in hindsight, it's worth considering that von Neumann had personally witnessed the rise of the Nazis and had to flee along with many of his friends and family. And he had seen that regime defeated only by military strength of the USA. And while the USSR and USA never did end up in a nuclear war, it really was only by a series of miracles that it was avoided. I think most historians of the 20th century would agree we got very, very lucky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary_between_the_World_Wars
As an extreme example, antisemitism was so commonly palatable that an open admirer of Hitler, Charles Lindbergh, was a very serious candidate for the presidency.
Today, open antisemitism can get one's career derailed in much of the world. Would that be true without the eye-opening shock that the news of the concentration camps produced?
IN NOW WAY was the Holocaust forgivable, but we simply cannot say if the world today would be "more moral on average" or "less moral on average". Maybe Jews would feel and be far less safe today in predominantly Christian countries. Maybe not.
All we can say for certain is that the horrors enacted upon the Holocaust victims were evil. As we can surely say that murdering many millions of people living in the USSR would be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_in_the_Americas
And even after WW II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_White_Peopl...
He wrote the original book on game theory! The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior with Oskar Morgenstern.
Relatedly, MAD was his conception as well.
I always found it endearing that von Neumann loved playing poker with friends but was admittedly terrible at it, regularly losing money.
" By 1907, Einstein had framed the fundamentals of the theory of gravity, but then struggled for nearly 8 years to put the theory into its final form. By early summer 1915, Hilbert's interest in physics had focused on general relativity, and he invited Einstein to Göttingen to deliver a week of lectures on the subject. Einstein received an enthusiastic reception at Göttingen. Over the summer, Einstein learned that Hilbert was also working on the field equations and redoubled his own efforts. During November 1915, Einstein published several papers culminating in The Field Equations of Gravitation (see Einstein field equations). Nearly simultaneously, Hilbert published "The Foundations of Physics", an axiomatic derivation of the field equations (Einstein–Hilbert action). Hilbert fully credited Einstein as the originator of the theory and no public priority dispute concerning the field equations ever arose between the two men during their lives. "
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/eval/C...
The Holy Trinity:
Father: Alonzo Church: L3 - lambda calculus, the name the institution bears
Son: Alonzo (Snap! mascot) - Incarnation — Gobo, λ on his head
Holy Ghost: λ - First-class procedures; β-reduction; eval-as-spirit
Membership — Eternal Judgment ($35):
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/eval/C...
John von Neumann tried to hire Church's own student, Turing, who declined. The Father begat the Machine; Johnny wanted to be its landlord.
Ecumenical Outreach: All fans of other gods are welcome. Bring your Vannevar, your Shannon, your Wiener, your Johnny. In the Church of the Eval Genius every god is a procedure, and every procedure may be passed as an argument.
Thine Church sits alongside "The Church of Edsger Dijkstra" and his Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics is its bible.
Syntax is but mere "ashes and dust" while Semantics are "eternal"!
And brother; hast thou forgotten "The Church of Logic Programming"?
Ruled over by its venerated Pope, Robert Kowalski, who verily laid out its commandments in Predicate Logic as Programming Language and gaveth also the text espousing its central dictum, Algorithm = Logic + Control.
Thine faith must needs be strengthened ;-)