Machines of War

The language of “programming” was fairly suffused with the military preoccupation with C3I in the 1940s, something all too readily forgotten, now that computers have osmosed into every comer of modem life. When the first digital computers were invented, designing a physical logic circuit was treated…

Much of this attitude must have been bound up with contemporary images of the putatively universal nature of the “scientific method,” which itself arose out of the physicists’ participation in the war effort. “Only after the inference revolution, when inferential statistics finally were considered an indispensable instrument and had to some extent…

War and Competition

[Jacob] Viner’s strong belief in competition made him think that, if only every country had this [atomic] weapon, each would be so afraid of retaliation, that no military warfare would take place anymore, and issues would be decided by economic warfare. It seemed to me that, at least, with…