Adventures With Cassiopaea

Chapter 30

John Forbes Nash was big and brainy, handsome and arrogant. He had virtually no social graces or redeeming qualities despite the fact that he was carefully brought up in an environment that one would have thought to have inculcated some human values. He was, indeed, a star of the mathematical scene that promoted human rationality as the supreme virtue, and for ten years he was viewed as a kind of wunderkind who was going to push the mathematical boundaries of Games of Strategy, economic rivalry, computer architecture, the shape of the inverse and geometric space, number theory, and more. Some commentators suggested that Nash had that "extra human spark." But reading his story, one comes to the idea that he had very little human about him at all. It wasn't a beautiful mind, it was a deadly efficient machine; unnatural and mysterious.

And then, curiously, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, he suddenly manifested "paranoid schizophrenia," psychotic delusions, and was in and out of mental hospitals for a period. After his wife divorced him, his mother died, and his sister could no longer cope with his psychosis, he became a "phantom," haunting the halls and corridors of Princeton for twenty years as the resident idiot savant. If any of the readers have watched the very funny movie "Sheer Genius," they will remember the strange character of Laszlo, the "burned out genius" who used a closet in a dorm room as an entry to a vast underground laboratory, a secret world hidden from the eyes of the university authorities. It's rather a somewhat sympathetic and idealized portrait of Nash during his psychotic years at Princeton.

In the 1990s, Nash's "illness" more or less went into "remission." The question has been raised: did he really suffer from schizophrenia? Psychotic symptoms do not, as psychiatrists now agree, make a schizophrenic. And, absence of overt evidence of psychosis does not mean a person is cured of whatever afflicted them. They can most certainly still be suffering, but having learned to cope with it, are able to conceal it. Nash himself described his long illness as a persistent dreamlike state and bizarre beliefs not unlike those of other people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Mostly, however, he noted that his illness consisted in being unable to reason. Despite claims of recovery, Nasar quotes him as telling several people that he is still having "paranoid thoughts" and still hears "voices," though the noise level is greatly modulated. He has compared his "recovery" to simply learning how to police his thoughts, to recognize paranoid ideas and to reject them.

Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking […] the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort. […] A key step was a resolution not to concern myself in politics relative to my secret world because it was ineffectual. […] This in turn led me to renounce anything relative to religious issues, or teaching or intending to teach. [Nasar]

Nash's son has also been diagnosed as being paranoid schizophrenic. His illness became apparent when he "disappeared one day. When he came back he'd shaved his head and had become a born-again Christian." He began to read the Bible obsessively and had fallen under the influence of a fundamentalist cult called "The Way." Not too long after, it was clear the he was hearing voices and believed that he was a great religious figure who had to save the world. Reportedly, he occasionally talked about extraterrestrials, and once threatened a history professor. But, somehow, in spite of his illness, he managed to get a Ph.D. Despite his lack of a high school or college diploma, he was admitted to Rutgers on a full scholarship. That fact raises questions of its own.

Let's leave Nash for the moment, and come back to Armand Wyler. There is, in physics and mathematics, something called the Fine Structure Constant. The Fine-Structure Constant has a value very near 137, and many physicists think that this indicates fundamental characteristic of space, time and matter. Armand Wyler came along and suggested that it is a geometrical property of a suitably defined seven-dimensional space-time, and that the correct theoretical value is: 1/137.03608. He then related this to proton-electron mass ratios.

12-26-98
Q: […] It came to my mind that perhaps Einstein, when you spoke about variable physicality, that Einstein was afraid when he understood that in his work. I thought about this and I think that Einstein determined that the future must be determined from the past and present, and when he found that he had a theory where the future was open, he dismissed it and was afraid. Is this a good guess that variable physicality, mathematically, means a theory where there is a freedom of choosing the future when past and present are given?
A: Yes.
Q: (A) Is it related to the fact that we should use higher order differential equations, not second order?
A: Yes. Einstein found that not only is the future open, but also the present and the past. Talk about scary!!
Q: (A) All you have said so far points to an idea by a Swiss guy named Armand Wyler. This Wyler found a way to compute from geometry so-called Fine Structure Constant, which is a number and can be found experimentally. Then, of course, he was invited to Princeton to explain how he did it, and apparently he failed to explain himself, and he ended in an asylum for the mentally deranged. The question is: if I follow his way of thinking, can I succeed in deriving and understanding the nature of this Fine Structure Constant?
A: Yes.
Q: (A) Well, if I do it, should I keep it a secret so that I won't end up in an asylum?
A: The problem with Wyler was with the audience, not the speaker.
Q: (A) What does that mean? (L) I guess it means that the people he was talking to couldn't grasp it, not that he couldn't explain it. Did he really lose his mind, or was he sort of 'helped' to go crazy?
A: He suffered a "breakdown."

The fact that Wyler was locked away in an institution for the insane is not widely known. We only learned it directly from a fellow Swiss physicist who was in Geneve at the time and had direct knowledge of the event. He told us over lunch one day that Wyler had "lost it" while AT Princeton, and was sent home and institutionalized.

The question that occurred to me at this point was: what was Nash working on when he went bonkers? In Nash's biography, we discover an interesting passage:

He apparently had devoted what little time he spent at the Institute for Advanced Study that year talking with physicists and mathematicians about quantum theory. Whose brains he was picking is not clear; Freeman Dyson, Hans Lewy, and Abraham Pais were in residence at least one of the terms. […] Nash made his own agenda quite clear. "To me one of the best things about the Heisenberg paper is its restriction to the observable quantities," he wrote, adding that "I want to find a different and more satisfying under-picture of a non-observable reality."

It was this attempt that Nash would blame, decades later in a lecture to psychiatrists, for triggering his mental illness - calling his attempt to resolve the contradictions in quantum theory, on which he embarked in the summer of 1957, "possibly overreaching and psychologically destabilizing." [Nasar]

One might also conjecture that such a program would attract certain attention. We also notice the presence of Freeman Dyson mentioned in reference to both Wyler and Nash, and both men went mad upon probing too deeply into hyperdimensional physics.

After we had discussed Wyler, we moved on to Everett..

Continue to page 267

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