IBM, and other critical defense contractors, von Neumann was a formidable force bringing order and vision to the chaos of programs and military factions in the 1950s, even as the United States seemed to fall behind the Soviet Union in critical capabilities. Virtually the entire panoply of defense of the United States bore the imprint of von Neumann’s brilliance.
Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and long an admirer of von Neumann, told the story of his death of pancreatic cancer at the age of 5 3 in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC — dying, in all likelihood, of his exposure to radiation while observing nuclear tests. “Gathered round his bedside, and attentive to his last words of advice and wisdom, were the Secretary of Defense and his deputies, the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and all the military Chiefs of Staff…. I have never witnessed a more dramatic scene or a more moving tribute to a great intelligence.” They all realized, within the aura of his presence, that they were near to the center of the sphere.
After World War II, the most transformative development in science and technology was the emergence of information technology. As Edward Teller sagely observed, it was information technology — the rise of computer capabilities and their miniaturization on microchips, nearly all following the von Neumann architecture — that saved U.S. technical leadership during the Cold War when the United States seemed to slip behind even the Soviet Union.
In government-run bureaucracies, swathed in secrecy, riddled with espionage, and paralyzed by pettifoggery and creden-tialism, U.S. science and technology could not even outperform the equally secret and bureaucratic programs of the Soviet Union. The Soviets developed more powerful bombs and missiles after World War II than did the United States. They launched Sputnik. They built nuclear weapons and exploded a hydrogen bomb.
What saved the United States were not the secret programs of the Pentagon or Los Alamos and other laboratories but the open enterprises of the computer industry. Created by scores of Silicon Valley companies, full of immigrants from Europe, microchips enabled the United States to miniaturize all the control functions in the payloads of their smaller missiles and to create the MIRV (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles) system that secured the U.S. lead.
Anticipated in part by Einstein, fiber optics and lasers from Corning and Bell Labs gave computers the bandwidth to connect with one another around the globe. The rise of information technology in the United States also revitalized the U.S. economy, yielding the resources necessary to win the Cold War while also endowing an ever-growing population with an expanding array of goods and services based on electronics.
In touting the twentieth century as an era of Jewish science, I am resorting to a heuristic device. With some daunting difficulty and grievous lacun?, one could even write a history that left out Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, von Neumann, Feynman, and all the other great Jewish figures. Rutherford, Planck, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, de Broglie, von Laue, Fermi, Dirac, Tomo-naga, and especially Godel, Turing, and Shannon, all gentiles, played essential roles in the evolution of twentieth-century science and technology. In recent decades, from Silicon Valley to China, Carver Mead of Caltech became a polymathic figure arguably as influential in the science and technology of his own time as von Neumann had been in his.
Science is a collaborative effort. The Jewish contribution, while crucial and vastly out of proportion to the number of Jews in the population, was not self-sufficient or even always paramount. Nonetheless, Jews were especially central to advances in mathematics and algorithms. Once in 1934, David Hilbert, who had brought von Neumann to the great German University of Gottingen, found himself seated at a dinner next to Hitler aide Bernhard Rust. The Nazi education minister turned to Hilbert and asked pleasantly: “How is mathematics in Gottingen, now that it has been freed of the Jewish influence?” Hilbert replied: “Mathematics in Gottingen? There is really none any more.”
Von Neumann did not make as significant contributions to quantum theory as Schrodinger, or greater contributions to the atomic bomb than Fermi; neither did he have more important insights into computer science than Turing, nor on information theory than Shannon. Nonetheless, an objective observer must acknowledge that without the constant contributions of Einstein, von Neumann, and their many associates — without what the Nazis insisted was “Jewish science” — there might be a mathematician or two in Gottingen, but “there would not,” as Churchill said, “be a free man in Europe.”
Twentieth-century science was not a religious competition. But twentieth-century history was engulfed in a war against Jewish scientists and capitalists, and their flight to the West was indispensable to the Western triumph. Von Neumann remains the only figure to bridge all the most critical physical sciences, technologies, and policy decisions of the era. Von Neumann was the unelected avatar and personification of the Jewish triumph and the Israel test.
Now, in an era long after von Neumann’s, we face a new Israel test, based on yet another war against wealth and individual genius. Israel is at the forefront of the next generation of technology and on the front lines of a new war against capitalism and Jewish individuality and genius. Israel is not a peripheral player or a superficial issue of Middle Eastern history and politics. It is at the center of the sphere.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius. Let us define it as the ability to devise inventions and enterprises and to create works of art and science that enhance human survival and prosperity. At any one time, genius is embodied in probably fewer than 50,000 individuals, a creative minority that accounts for the majority of human accomplishment and wealth. Cities and nations rise and flourish when they welcome entrepreneurial and technical genius; when they overtax, criminalize, or ostracize their creative minority, they wither.
During the twentieth century, an astounding proportion of geniuses have been Jewish, and the fate of nations from Russia westward has largely reflected how they have treated their Jews. When Jews lived in Vienna and Budapest early in the century, these cities of the Hapsburg Empire were world centers of intellectual activity and economic growth; then the Nazis came to power, the Jews fled or were killed, and growth and culture disappeared with them. When Jews came to New York and Los Angeles, those cities towered over the global economy and culture. When Jews escaped Europe for Los Alamos and, more recently, for Silicon Valley, the world’s economy and military balance shifted decisively. Thus many nations have faced a crucial moral test: Will they admire, reward, and emulate a minority that has achieved towering accomplishments? Or will they writhe in resentment and plot its destruction?
Today, an outsized share of the world’s genius resides in Israel. Israel has become a center of innovation second in absolute achievement only to the United States, and on a per capita basis dwarfing the contributions of all other nations, America included. How Israel is treated by the rest of the world thus represents a crucial test for human civilization and indeed survival.
My interest in Israeli innovation began in 1998, when I invited an Israeli physicist named David Medved to speak at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm conference. Medved described the promise of “free-space optics” — what most of us call “light” — for high-end communications among corporate buildings and campuses. He also spoke of air force experiments in Israel that used the still-higher frequencies and shorter waves of ultraviolet light for battlefield communications. At a time when most of the world’s communications, wired and wireless, were migrating to the electromagnetic spectrum, some of the most important explorations of electromagnetic technology, I realized, were taking place in Israel.
Author of a scientific book on scripture,
I had long known that many American microchip companies located laboratories and design centers in Israel. I knew that, in a real sense, much American technology could reasonably bear the label ISRAEL INSIDE. I was skeptically familiar with a few showcase Israeli start-ups, such as “A Better Place,” the electric-car company launched by the fashionplate innovator Shai Agassi, which brashly bypassed the entire auto industry in redesigning
