{"id":3267,"date":"2011-06-19T12:22:36","date_gmt":"2011-06-19T20:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=3267"},"modified":"2011-06-20T07:52:55","modified_gmt":"2011-06-20T15:52:55","slug":"fathers-day-stan-ulam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/19\/fathers-day-stan-ulam\/","title":{"rendered":"Fathers Day. Stan Ulam."},"content":{"rendered":"

First a word about Father\u2019s Day. I\u2019m lucky enough to have children and to have known my father. It\u2019s wonderful to think about the generations rolling on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I hope all fathers and sons get some nice hammock time today or a reasonable equivalent thereof. Slack.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When my father died, he had very few possessions. I \u201cinherited\u201d\u009d four or five things of his, including a worn cardigan sweater, a Swiss knife, and an egg-cup that my daughter Georgia had made for him.<\/p>\n

Thinking about the \u201crolling onward\u201d\u009d and \u201ceternal recurrence\u201d\u009d aspects of being a son or a father, I took a picture of Pop\u2019s eggcup with a little can of Royal Baking Powder that happens to be in the Spanish language. The cool thing about the Royal label, well known to mathematicians and cartoonists, is that it incorporates an endless regress.<\/p>\n

I think I got hold of this can about 25 years ago, soon after moving to CA, when I was still surprised to see Spanish, and I (with deliberate incongruity) used the name \u201cPolvo Para Hornear\u201d\u009d for the name of a landmark in my novel The Hacker And The Ants<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Switching topics now, I\u2019ve been doing research on Stanislaw Ulam this week. He\u2019s going to appear as a character in my novel Turing & Burroughs<\/em>. I like this photo of Ulam happy with some device he\u2019s cobbled together perhaps to model some arcane physical concept like the notion of a nonlinear springs he discussed in his classic \u201cFermi-Pasta-Ulam\u201d\u009d paper, FPU for short.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For more on this topic, see the software and papers on my Capow <\/a>page, where I used continuous-valued cellular automata software to run the FPU simulation, reproducing some of Ulam\u2019s results, such as the ergodic long-term reoccurrence of states for the cubic nonlinear CA.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Wikipedia <\/a>has a good entry on Ulam, but I also found a very interesting essay (although somewhat eccentric and perhaps overly critical) by his mathematician friend (?) Gian-Carlo Rota: The Lost Cafe<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Summary: Rota says Ulam was lazy, didn\u2019t like to work out the details, preferred the flash of insight. He was as sort of alienated and sarcastic, didn\u2019t like authority, felt that ultimately everything was meaningless. Undisciplined. Generous and kind. Liked getting into new fields and picking off the interesting big results. Often didn\u2019t get around to publishing his results, just shared them informally. He had green eyes.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Classic photo of Ulam and the MANIAC computer with his daughter Claire. I first saw this photo in Ulam\u2019s autobiography, Adventures of a Mathematician<\/em>. I wrote LANL and got permission to use it as an illo in my Lifebox <\/a><\/em>tome.<\/p>\n

Ulam is known for his work on the H-bomb, indeed he\u2019s sometimes called the father of the H-bomb. Ulam and Edward Teller made a joint application for a patent on the H-bomb! <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In wondering if Ulam was \u201cevil\u201d\u009d for helping to invent the H-bomb, keep in mind that he was from a Jewish family in Lwow, Poland, and that he and his brother happened to escape to the US in 1938. The rest of his family died in the holocaust. Perhaps this motivated him to help the military of his new home country.<\/p>\n

Another factor in Ulam\u2019s work here was that of scientific obsession. Ulam didn\u2019t get along with Edward Teller, and he developed his design for the H-bomb partly in a desire to demonstrate the Teller\u2019s original design for such a weapon was wrong. Teller then jumped on Ulam\u2019s design and worked on it some more. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Photo of an A-bomb fireball, from a photo-rich Russian site<\/a>. Note the Joshua trees about to be consumed. I\u2019m intrigued by the irregular spots on the fireball. No natural phenomenon is ever completely uniform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First a word about Father\u2019s Day. I\u2019m lucky enough to have children and to have known my father. It\u2019s wonderful to think about the generations rolling on. I hope all fathers and sons get some nice hammock time today or a reasonable equivalent thereof. Slack. When my father died, he had very few possessions. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3267"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3276,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3267\/revisions\/3276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}