Sublime

Fermi and the Manhattan Project embodied an age of discovery that rewarded quality over quantity in expertise. In nuclear physics, the 1930s and 1940s were an age of fundamental breakthroughs, and when it came to making those breakthroughs, one Enrico Fermi was worth thousands of less brilliant physicists. American leadership in this era was built

These are worlds that will be revealed not by better instruments but by new models and frameworks that allow us to see the familiar world in unfamiliar ways—to transform domains described into domains rigorously quantified and observations informally sensed into those formally understood.

He regularly invited top computer scientists to his office to explain emerging trends in hardware and software. He had three home computers. He was typing a future bestseller, Earth in the Balance, on an early laptop. He went to computer-industry conferences, wrote articles for Scientific American, and fluently spoke the language of VLSI and AI, RA

we cannot assume that everything interesting is at the same scale as ourselves.

There was an irony in the inventor of the assembly line being himself outorganized. As one historian, Thomas McCraw, puts it, “What Ford did for physical machines, Sloan did for human beings.”

how to write algorithms that could change their code and get smarter as they develop. We now call this evolutionary programming.

“This,” comments Dyer, “is one of the lessons of the Zone: sometimes a man doesn’t want to do what a man thinks he wants to do.”

Roland Joffe’s 1989 film on the Manhattan Project, Fat Man and Little Boy.