Early on in this darkly fascinating novel based on real people and events, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest speaks of a “strange new rationality” that’s taking shape as the old certainties of classical physics crumble around him. He describes it as “a spectre haunting the soul of science… both logic-driven and utterly irrational… preparing to thrust itself into our lives through technology by enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control”.
Ehrenfest is speaking from the depths of a breakdown but his warning sets the tone for the rest of Benjamín Labatut’s book, which explores how these clever men and women (though mostly men) set about unleashing that spectre with dazzling and devastating consequences. After a short, riveting account of Ehrenfest’s demise – he killed himself and his son in 1933 as the Nazis rose to power – we meet John von Neumann, the formidably intelligent Hungarian mathematician, physicist and computer scientist who contributed to the Manhattan Project, laid the foundations of modern computing (Maniac is the name of a computer he developed) and foresaw the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Then we flash forward to the rise of AI, whose promises enrapture its developers even as they fret over its apocalyptic potential.
