Ulam Quotes

...pwede nga ring yung TV ang may sumpa. dahil ang TV, para ring drugs, pero ligal. isipin mo, bakit isa ito sa mga unang-unang ipinupundar ng mga Pilipino kahit gaano sila kahirap? kasi malaking tulong ang telebisyon para lumimot. para tumakas sa realidad. kahit mag-isa ka lang sa bahay, nababawasan ang lungkot kung may TV. nakakatanggal-buryong kung wala kang trabaho. mas entertaining kesa sa diyaryo, at mas accessible kesa sa sine. pwede rin itong tagapag-alaga ng mga anak mo. pwedeng ulam kung sakto lang ang budget pambili ng ng bigas. at pwedeng bintana kung parang bartolina lang ang tirahang tinutulugan ng mag-anak mo, dahil may magaganda itong lugar at magagandang tao. kumpleto sa sayawan, kantahan, tawanan, pantasya, at boksing. burado ang mga suliranin mo. pag sinuswerte ka, pwede ka pang manalo.

I remember what seemed to me a bright remark he made after a month's stay in England about the difference between Polish and English "intellectual" conversations. He said that in Poland people talked foolishly about important things, and in England intelligently about foolish or trivial things.

pwede nga ring yung TV ang may sumpa. dahil ang TV, para ring drugs, pero ligal. isipin mo, bakit isa ito sa mga unang-unang ipinupundar ng mga Pilipino kahit gaano sila kahirap? kasi malaking tulong ang telebisyon para lumimot. para tumakas sa realidad. kahit mag-isa ka lang sa bahay, nababawasan ang lungkot kung may TV. nakakatanggal-buryong kung wala kang trabaho. mas entertaining kesa sa diyaryo, at mas accessible kesa sa sine. pwede rin itong tagapag-alaga ng mga anak mo. pwedeng ulam kung sakto lang ang budget pambili ng ng bigas. at pwedeng bintana kung parang bartolina lang ang tirahang tinutulugan ng mag-anak mo, dahil may magaganda itong lugar at magagandang tao. kumpleto sa sayawan, kantahan, tawanan, pantasya, at boksing. burado ang mga suliranin mo. pag sinuswerte ka, pwede ka pang manalo.

Ulam spiral,

There must be a trick to the train of thought, a recursive formula. A group of neurons starts working automatically, sometimes without external impulse. It is a kind of iterative process with a growing pattern. It wanders about in the brain, and the way it happens must depend on the memory of similar patterns.

ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life,” von Neumann explained to Stan Ulam, “gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race.

The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor approach. Textbooks showed students only the rare non-linear systems that would give way to such techniques. They did not display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned. When people stumbled across such things-and people did-all their training argued for dismissing them as aberrations. Only a few were able to remember that the solvable, orderly, linear systems were the aberrations. Only a few, that is, understood how nonlinear nature is in its soul. Enrico Fermi once exclaimed, "It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!" The mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam remarked that to call the study of chaos "nonlinear science" was like calling zoology "the study of nonelephant animals.

Castle Bravo had been built according to the “Teller-Ulam” scheme—named for its co-designers, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam—which meant, unlike with the far less powerful atomic bomb, this hydrogen bomb had been designed to hold itself together for an extra hundred-millionth of a second, thereby allowing its hydrogen isotopes to fuse and create a chain reaction of nuclear energy, called fusion, producing a potentially infinite amount of power, or yield. “What this meant,” Freedman explains, was that there was “a one-in-one-million chance that, given how much hydrogen [is] in the earth’s atmosphere, when Castle Bravo exploded, it could catch the earth’s atmosphere on fire. Some scientists were extremely nervous. Some made bets about the end of the world.

Some could say it is the external world which has molded our thinking-that is, the operation of the human brain-into what is now called logic. Others-philosophers and scientists alike-say that our logical thought (thinking process?) is a creation of the internal workings of the mind as they developed through evolution "independently" of the action of the outside world. Obviously, mathematics is some of both. It seems to be a language both for the description of the external world, and possibly even more so for the analysis of ourselves. In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents. The very existence of mathematics is due to the fact that there exist statements or theorems, which are very simple to state but whose proofs demand pages of explanations. Nobody knows why this should be so. The simplicity of many of these statements has both aesthetic value and philosophical interest.

on his first visit to the Los Alamos Tech Area, when he had encountered von Neumann discussing theory with dark, intense Edward Teller, the “tremendously long formulae on the blackboard” had scared him. “Seeing all these complications of analysis, I was dumbfounded, fearing I would never be able to contribute anything.” But the equations stayed on the board from day to day, which meant to Ulam that the pace of invention was relatively slow, and he soon regained confidence.1340 “I found out that the main ability to have was a visual, and also an almost tactile, way to imagine the physical situations, rather than a merely logical picture of the problems.

When I was a boy I felt that the roll of rhyme in poetry was to compel one to find the un-obvious- because of the necessity of finding a word which rhymes. This forces novel associations, and almost guarantees deviations from routine chains or trains of thought. It becomes, paradoxically, a sort of automatic mechanism of originality.

Online dating is not bad. Just tedious and mediocre. It's like going to the karinderya and they've got plenty of ulam (viands) but you don't fancy any of the ulam. Or you see something you like but it's overcooked or has too much oil or too little flavor. Bland and tasteless, a drink that doesn't refresh, a meal that gorges but doesn’t sate.

Complexity is self-generating. The diversity of our world is understandable because it is possible to design imaginary self-consistent worlds potentially as complex as our own.     This is no mere restatement of common sense. Everyone daydreams alternate worlds, but the imagination soon tires of filling in details. Ulam, Von Neumann, and Conway showed that a few recursive rules can paint in all the details. Creation can be simple.

Ironically, this first-day problem for Ulam in 1943 would later become a critical part of Ulam's work with Cornelius Everett in 1950 in which he demonstrated that Teller's design for the Super bomb was impractical.

Carson Mark

Stan Ulam visited whenever he could. “He never complained about pain, but the change in his attitude, his utterances, his relations with Klári, in fact his whole mood at the end of his life were heartbreaking,” he remembers. “At one point he became a strict Catholic. A Benedictine monk visited and talked to him. Later he asked for a Jesuit. It was obvious that there was a great gap between what he would discuss verbally and logically with others, and what his inner thoughts and worries about himself were.” Von Neumann’s scientific curiosity and his memory were the last things he let go. “A few days before he died,” adds Ulam, “I was reading to him in Greek from his worn copy of Thucydides a story he liked especially about the Athenians’ attack on Melos, and also the speech of Pericles. He remembered enough to correct an occasional mistake or mispronunciation on my part.”26

There would be brief spurts of conversation, a few lines would be written on the table, occasional laughter would come from some of the participants, followed by long periods of silence during which we just drank coffee and stared vacantly at each other. The cafe clients at neighboring tables must have been puzzled by these strange doings. It is such persistence and habit of concentration which somehow becomes the most important prerequisite for doing genuinely creative mathematical work.

In fact, it took the resources of three countries to produce the bomb: the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. But there was more to it than that. In some sense it took some of the most valuable scientific talent of all Europe to do it. Consider this partial list: the Hungarians John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller; the Germans Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls; the Poles Stanislaw Ulam and Joseph Rotblat; the Austrians Victor Weisskopf and Otto Frisch; the Italians Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segrè; Felix Bloch from Switzerland; and, from Denmark, the Bohrs, Niels and his son Aage. This talent, the B-29 heavy bomber program that could deliver the bombs, plus Manhattan Project efforts—all together cost more than fifty billion in today’s dollars. Wilhelm

The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam once said that calling a problem nonlinear was like going to the zoo and talking about all the interesting nonelephant animals you see there. His point was that most animals are not elephants, and most equations are not linear. Linear equations describe simple, idealized situations where causes are proportional to effects, and forces are proportional to responses. If you bend a steel girder by two millimeters instead of one, it will push back twice as hard. The word linear refers to this proportionality: If you graph the deflection of the girder versus the force applied, the relationship falls on a straight line.

When we were in graduate school we heard about another physicist, whose name we’ve unfortunately long forgotten, who was said to have Ulam’s capacity for “feeling” quantum equations with his whole body. During seminars, if a speaker presented equations resulting in atomic interactions that were too loose, the man would slump in his chair. If the equations forced the atoms to pack too tightly, he would scrunch up as if desperately in need of the men’s room. Speakers could “read” his opinion of their work long before he ever opened his mouth to comment.

Von Neumann too wondered about the mystery of his and his compatriots’ origins. His friend and biographer, the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, remembers their discussions of the primitive rural foothills on both sides of the Carpathians, encompassing parts of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, populated thickly with impoverished Orthodox villages. “Johnny used to say that all the famous Jewish scientists, artists and writers who emigrated from Hungary around the time of the first World War came, either directly or indirectly, from those little Carpathian communities, moving up to Budapest as their material conditions improved.

Terrified by the prospect of his own imminent death, von Neumann asked to see the hospital’s Catholic priest and returned to the faith he had ignored ever since his family had converted to it decades earlier in Budapest. ‘There probably is a God,’ he had once told his mother. ‘Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.’ Nicholas could not bring himself to believe that his brother would ‘turn overnight into a devout Catholic’. The change worried von Neumann’s friends too. Ulam wrote to Strauss declaring himself ‘deeply perturbed about the religious angle as it developed’. Marina says her father was thinking of Pascal’s wager and had always believed that in the face of even a small possibility of suffering eternal damnation the only logical course is to be a believer before the end.

Oppenheimer had, in his own mind at least, exaggerated his role in the making of the atomic bomb and, correspondingly, exaggerated his guilt, seeing himself as, in the Bhagavad-Gita, Death the destroyer of worlds. Von Neumann agreed. “Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin,” von Neumann liked to tell Ulam.

TRUTH It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs. Stanislaw Ulam

Textbooks showed students only the rare nonlinear systems that would give way to such techniques. They did not display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned. When people stumbled across such things—and people did—all their training argued for dismissing them as aberrations. Only a few were able to remember that the solvable, orderly, linear systems were the aberrations. Only a few, that is, understood how nonlinear nature is in its soul. Enrico Fermi once exclaimed, “It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!” The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam remarked that to call the study of chaos “nonlinear science” was like calling zoology “the study of non elephant animals.

The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time. “It is an irony of fate,” observes Françoise Ulam, “that much of the high-tech world we live in today, the conquest of space, the extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man’s monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.

The question of whether the energy produced by a small fission explosion could be channeled outward to drive the propulsion of a space vehicle was similar to the question of whether this energy could be channeled inward to drive the implosion of a thermonuclear bomb. Ulam’s idea was the hydrogen bomb turned inside out.