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Carrion Luggage #1097212 added September 12, 2025 at 7:59am
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Teamwork
This Nautilus article is fairly old, and long, and honestly may not be of interest to anyone but me.
And no, he wasn't a Vulcan.
Not wanting to risk another run-in that night, Pitts stayed hidden until the library closed for the evening. Alone, he wandered through the stacks of books until he came across Principia Mathematica, a three-volume tome written by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead between 1910 and 1913, which attempted to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic.
While I'd never heard of Pitts before this, the Principia Mathematica is something I'd known about. A lot of work went into that ponderous set of tomes before Russell apparently came to the conclusion that it can't be done.
But this is more than a story about a fruitful research collaboration. It is also about the bonds of friendship, the fragility of the mind, and the limits of logic’s ability to redeem a messy and imperfect world.
One of the lessons of the story of PM itself is that there are some things that can never be proven within a logical framework. Another is that it certainly seems weird even to arithmophobes that it took over 350 pages to show that 1+1=2.
McCulloch, 42 years old when he met Pitts, was a confident, gray-eyed, wild-bearded, chain-smoking philosopher-poet who lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m. Pitts, 18, was small and shy...
And yet, the two died within half a year of each other.
The moment they spoke, they realized they shared a hero in common: Gottfried Leibniz. The 17th-century philosopher had attempted to create an alphabet of human thought, each letter of which represented a concept and could be combined and manipulated according to a set of logical rules to compute all knowledge—a vision that promised to transform the imperfect outside world into the rational sanctuary of a library.
Liebniz is better known as Newton's rival in mathematics. The two developed calculus independently.
McCulloch, Pitts, and Lettvin were all poets at heart and in practice, and McCulloch and Lettvin regularly published their verse.
I'm just including this bit to show how you don't have to be a Writer to be a writer.
There is, of course, a lot more at the article, and it delves into the development of neuroscience and computer science, among other tough subjects. So, like I said, I understand if it's a little overwhelming. But personally, I like reading about the people doing the science, because they are, after all, people, with all the illogical and poetic crud that implies. |
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