Ultimate khandoer: a Shaolin kung fu fighter

Today's Dayriffer lead points to a March Nat Geo article on the methods of  a centuries-old martial arts training center at Shaolin Monastery in China. Feast your eyes on this action figure:

(Nat Geo photo, cropped)

Turing & Oppenheimer: WWII Khandoits

Waves and Particles

Civilians as well as soldiers carried the conflict against Germany, Italy and Japan in WWII. In this entry, I will demonstrate some parallels between two exceptional scientists who tilted the war toward the Allies. In the name of their countries, they seized their opportunities to help.

Prometheus’ nephews

At the same time in history, during the last three years of WWII, two scientists worked on tools to defeat the Axis allies, Germany and Japan, but their respective work would have a deep impact on their fields and on humanity. The effects are dramatic still. The two were Robert Oppenheimer in the US and Alan Turing in England. Turing’s product would be an intellectual one: a computer method to decode German codes and so anticipate the movements of German forces. The team led by Oppenheimer would make a physical tool: an ignitable nuclear bomb to be used on the most populous island of Japan.

Oppenheimer tends his flock

By late 1944, Robert Oppenheimer had constructed a laboratory complex and complete living facilities at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and been named its director. Under his astute management, physicists and technicians worked at creating a chain of nuclear reactions on such a scale that it could destroy an entire city.

Oppenheimer himself was a first-rate scientist whose research anticipated developments in quantum behaviors and in black holes.

The high and strikingly beautiful land of New Mexico deeply affected Oppenheimer, with its expanse of multi-colored rocks and skies. In contrast to this openness, the compound of the Manhattan Project was was to be strictly closed, more secure than any base operated by the US military. Yet, Oppenheimer, a left-leaning reader of Eastern philosophical thought and master of many languages, received the very highest security clearance. The chain of command ran like this: Oppenheimer, then Major General Leslie R. Groves, then up to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and finally to President Franklin Roosevelt (and, later, to President Harry Truman).

Because of the graceful management Oppenheimer provided, scientists and technicians (to include Fermi of Italy, the Hungarians Edward Teller and Leo Szilard, and Neils Bohr from Denmark) didn’t need to bother with paperwork, funding or approvals.

Work began in September 1942 and reached success in mid-July of 1945. It was built on original principles worked out at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago and the Oak Grove Laboratory in eastern Tennessee.

What they did

Having no science training, I will simplify, I hope accurately, the essence of the Los Alamos work. The aims were to a) take purified U-235, a fissionable isotope of Uranium, and b) pack a tiny amount in very tight quarters. Then they were expected c) to initiate a nuclear reaction that would split one atomic nucleus and set off an imbalance, a nuclear reaction. Such an action, under the law of physics would bring on further nuclear reactions (little explosions over nanoseconds) until the material reached immense power and a huge explosion occurred. The final step d), was to devise a method of igniting the first reaction. (Packaging the bomb would be a matter divided between engineers and physicists).

Oppenheimer’s directive was to oversee the development of such a bomb. To get an idea of the atomic bomb’s power: when one atom is split the resulting energy is on the order of 100s of millions of volts.

Prometheus Starts the Fire

Three years prior, in the fall of 1942, FDR had approved the start of the project. Under Oppenheimer, it succeeded with the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Harry Truman would ponder its use during the succeeding weeks.

From a site named “History of the Atomic Bomb & The Manhattan Project” under the heading “Testing the Gadget AKA the Atomic Bomb” comes this dramatic testimony.

The brilliant light from the detonation pierced the early morning skies with such intensity that residents from a faraway neighboring community would swear that the sun came up twice that day. Even more astonishing is that a nearly blind girl saw the flash 120 miles away.

Oppenheimer’s work was done. As a result of this success, Oppenheimer would gain the title of ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’.

Turing, ULTRA and the Code

In England, Alan Turing reported every day to a gray and green London suburb, Bletchley Park, where secretaries recorded German radio traffic for decryption, technicians handled computing machinery, and mathematicians and logicians wrestled with the codes. The secret project at Bletchley was called ULTRA. Turing was a principal member of the math team (His closest colleague was Gordon Welchman. Also at Bletchley, was Ian Fleming!).

Day after day, in the manner of their physics cousins in New Mexico, Bletchley Park theorists and experimenters would formulate a promising trial. Output from these trials was evaluated – what had worked was kept (often amounting to nothing at all). Depending on the results, the decoders scrapped the prevailing theory, kept moving or started at another point. When a series of logical operations worked, they’d retest it the next day against new data. The pattern here is no surprise; it refers to the looping figure traced by applying the scientific method.

Code-breakers at Bletchley rode these curving loops at breathtaking speed, driven by the urgency to understand Nazi radio transmissions. One obstacle was the delay of a day – the unknown code-key of the “Enigma” machine, the complicated ‘typewriter’ that composed German messages, remained a mystery on any given day; therefore, that night’s radio transmissions could not be decoded. The project’s efforts aimed at finding the coding method and, at the same time, making sense of the physical control mechanisms of Enigma — four-plus settings, both physical and electrical.*

Standing on Solid Shoulders

In an act of extreme courage three British sailors retrieved a then current (1943) naval Enigma machine and codebook. The three sailors dove the U-Boat, U559, naked. The ship was sinking while they were looking to take anything of use to the Allies. The sailors saw a strange machine and notebook lying next to it, things that looked worth capturing. One of the sailors got out undetected, laboring under the burden. Two sailors would not survive and received posthumous recognition. Bletchley scientists delved into the codebook and the captured device and saved months of brute force work.

ULTRA received a great benefit from the solid theoretical and practical work of Polish logicians and mathematicians, who were ‘deciphering’ versions of pre-war Enigmas.

Cross-Eyed

Once German codes had finally been broken, Churchill, FDR and Stalin would have the advantage of anticipating the Enemy’s movements.

Despite the vivid and exciting challenges math and technical personnel faced, daily life was a nervous grind. Along with the anxious boredom of constant security came the tedium of entering test data and programming, which first required setting on and off light bulbs of a machine called ‘Colossus’, one of several types of ‘Bombe’ (an eerie coincidence here) that Turing and Welchman had colleague made. Once the program had run through Colossus, a pattern of lighted and dark bulbs formed the electrical ‘answer’. (The lights were read as ‘lighted = 1 and unlighted = 0.).

Finally, led by Turing’s ULTRA team, a code-breaking method was found. In this way current exchanges in the Luftwaffe, the Army, and (from a later-decoded Enigma) the German Navy, were read and passed on to Allied commanders and the civilian leadership.

Significance of signs

As a result of Bletchley work and earlier academic research Turing had proven the concept of a General Purpose Computer, in which algorithmic steps and data were coupled to form the first Internally Stored Modifiable Program in history.

John van Neumann, originally Hungarian, wrote an article at Princeton based on these principles just months before Turing’s write-up. The substance depended heavily on Turing’s work in the 1930’s. particularly the 1936-7 paper on computable numbers and ‘undecidability’ in mathematics (a proof produced by the German Kurt Goedel. (While showing that not all numbers can be be produced by computers that he himself could imagine, it seemed possible to make computer procedures to duplicate any logical process.

The Lights that Shone

From his early training in logic and math at Cambridge, Turing's genius pushed him to to write revolutionary, create brilliant experiments, and perform a critical wartime task. His extraordinary practical accomplishment is the invention of computer software and design. Papers he wrote which talked of a General Purpose Computer**, and a test he created to liken a computer’s answers to a person’s (the ‘Turing test’), cement his place as a pioneer of computer science. It is legitimate to call Alan Turing, ‘the Father of Computing’.

To review all competitors to Turing’s title, see Andrew Hodges’ authoritative site on Alan Turing’s life and work.  Hodges wrote the exemplary Enigma, a definitive work in print, and is Turing’s principal biographer.

Suspicion

In a coming post, I will share some notes on the later lives of Oppenheimer and Turing. After the Allied victory, their nations showed other responses besides gratitude.

No matter where his boat was to go, each had started a tide that comes in — gray rocks splitting incoming waves, particles spraying into the air –and goes out again.

*These variables are initial position of the rotors, wheel order, ring settings and plug settings.

**The sole rightful competitor is the team of Atanasoff and

Berry at Iowa State University, whose work incorporates all the primary theoretical elements of a General Purpose Computer. They furthermore built a working machine incorporating these elements, making them the builders of the first full-fledged modern computer.