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jimmysoni303 karma

Thanks for the question coryrenton!

The biggest discrepancy involved whether or not Einstein and Shannon had tea together at Princeton, and our approach to it should give you a sense of how we attacked things like this.

As the story goes, Albert Einstein and Claude Shannon had tea together, accompanied by their wives. The anecdote has been repeated often, so it’s lodged itself into “Claude Shannon lore.”

This is a famous story—but is most likely false. Shannon and Einstein did overlap at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), but we couldn’t find the evidence for a tea.

For one thing, by 1940, Shannon had done some interesting, important work, but nothing that would have attracted Einstein’s attention. Also, he wasn’t a physicist. So it wasn’t like Einstein would have sought Shannon out.

Shannon might wanted to get Einstein’s attention, but Shannon just also wasn’t the type to fight for that kind of audience. Shannon was enough of an introvert that he didn’t go out seeking his idols. And there’s nothing in Shannon’s behavior that would have indicated his desire to subject Einstein to a newly-minted PhD’s thoughts on this or that.

That was one problem with this account. The other is that Shannon never mentioned having tea with Einstein. He did however mention other Einstein run-in stories: He mentioned that he saw Einstein walking around in bedroom slippers, and that he once dropped by a class Shannon was teaching. But that was it.

Shannon was a modest guy, but it seems strange that he would share those about Einstein—and tell them excitedly!—and then not share a story about having tea with him. Ultimately, it was too implausible for our taste. In the interest of completeness and because the story had made the rounds, we included it in the book—but with our disclaimers and analysis.

With each moment in the book that had some controversy, we researched, interviewed, dug around, and did the best determination we could. We also had several people read and re-read the book at various stages to fix and find errors. Hopefully we got the story right!

jimmysoni256 karma

That's actually one of the most interesting things about his life and work: There's a lot for us to take away from it. Sometimes when you think of figures like Einstein or Turing, they can seem like they're on Mount Olympus--and that all of us mere mortals can study them from afar but not embrace the way they did their work because it was so unique.

Shannon's work had similar scientific force and impact, but he was also down-to-earth. A few of the lessons that stood out to us:

1) Learn to be by yourself and in quiet places -- Shannon was an introvert, but we think contributed to his scientific imagination. He was comfortable being alone and thinking hard for long stretches of time. He also did this in places that lent themselves to that kind of thought: spartan bachelor apartments, an office whose door was usually closed. We can't imagine him trying to bang out information theory at Starbucks.

2) Study many disciplines -- Yes, Shannon was a train mathematician and engineer. But he was an equally skilled machinist and gadgeteer, one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence, a unicyclist, a juggler, and a lot of other things. He had an omnivorous curiosity and it served him well. He was able to use all these disparate things to create the work that he did.

3) Don't worry about external recognition so much -- Shannon could barely be bothered about awards and honors. He found them amusing diversions from the work. Sometimes his wife or a mentor had to force him to actually go to the trouble of accepting awards. And even when he did, he did it with levity. (For instance, he hung all the honorary degrees he won from a rotating tie rack!). Why does this matter? Because he was running his own race. He wasn't trying to go after a specific award or honor, so he was free to do what he did his entire life: let his curiosity wander to the places it wanted to go.

Those are just some of the lessons. We wrote more of them up here, and happy to go into any of these in further depth .

jimmysoni149 karma

So the answer to that--or at least the best answer we have--is that he came in, stood in back, paused, whispered something to a student and then left. Later, Claude Shannon asked what Einstein had whispered. He was looking for directions to the men's room.

jimmysoni138 karma

Let me add one more that I think about a lot: work with your hands. This was something Shannon did for basically his entire life. He would take things apart, put them back together, and see if he could improve on how they worked. Even at the very end stages of his life, when he was in a nursing home battling alzheimer's, he would take apart his walker and try to imagine a better design for it.

Why does that matter? Because I think it gave him a quality that one engineer described as "not only the ability to think about things but through things." It was a powerful part of his work--and I think it's something we might take for granted in our own.

My guess is that the problem-solving and tactile pieces of working with your hands offer some brain-enhancing effects. But I also think there's a broader point about appreciation and craftsmanship. There's a great book on the topic called Shopclass as Soulcraft that's worth checking out.

I think Shannon could anticipate future robotics because he didn't just write papers, he built robots. He could imagine an artificially intelligent world because he built an artificially intelligent mouse. I don't know how to reclaim that sort of thing exactly, but I know it's a powerful part of what made him who he was.

jimmysoni78 karma

So there's a lot alike between the two of them. They are both quiet. They are both introverted, preferring their own company to that of others. They both advanced computing very far. They both participated in the worlds of encryption, cryptography, and code-breaking during WWII. They are both brilliant--and their smarts were evident to those around them, people who were in a position to pass those kinds of judgments.

The most obvious difference between the two of them: Shannon didn't have the same tragic story as Turing. Outside of a possibly mild depressive episode in his 20s, Shannon's life was largely lived on an even keel. Shannon wasn't the most social guy in the world, but we imagine that Turing's social awkwardness was just a notch or two higher.

The biography that's the must-read on Turing is called "The Enigma." And I think that title is pretty revealing: Turing was enigmatic and tough to get at. That's common in a lot of genius-level minds, but as we said earlier, it's actually part of what makes Shannon so refreshing. He wasn't an open book, per say, and as biographers, we knew he had more IQ points than us, but he definitely wasn't inaccessible in the same way that Turing was.

Shannon's work had a hard-headedness and practicality; we could watch YouTube vides of Theseus the mouse or the Ultimate Machine. We could make sense of his chess playing machine. I admire Alan Hodges for taking on Turing as a subject. I don't think we would've had the courage to do it.

One final thought: Probably my favorite chapter to write in the book was the one that focuses on the meeting between Turing and Shannon. These two guys--so brilliant, and so fond of being alone--actually ended up becoming friends. They got together for daily tea at Bell Labs during war-time, when Turing was on a tour of the United States, checking to make sure that American encryption machines passed muster with the British government.

Turing visited Shannon at his home--which probably put him in a company of less than five people to do so. They talked about building computer brains. They talked about artificial intelligence. They talked about everything except...codebreaking. They had to be cagey about that because the work was as secretive as any being done at the time. But in a way, it freed them up to talk about so many other interesting things.

Shannon ended up visiting Turing later in the UK after the war. They played around with a computer he had in his basement and ended up picking up right where they left off. The story is tragic because Turing died shortly thereafter, but there's also something fitting in the fact that these two war-time code-breakers reunited and nerded out.

It's amazing to imagine those teas and that meeting now, knowing what an impact they both had. We wouldn't have had the chops to join them, but it would have been interesting to eavesdrop into what they saying over their Earl Greys.