Toccata and brain drain back and forth

The digital Big Bang occurred in 1950 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, coinciding with the stay of none other than Albert Einstein, although he had nothing to do, at least not directly, with its birth.

The leading voice was the Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann, from the Manhattan Project.

While IBM had previously developed a—to us—primitive but promising portable calculator, Von Neumann yearned to go further, much further. And he would achieve this thanks to the dazzling work of the young English mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing, who during the war had been part of the team assembled at Bletchley Park, north of London, that achieved the feat of deciphering Enigma, the secret and supposedly unbreakable language used by the Nazis.

A very bad trick

Despite his brilliance and his invaluable contribution to the Allied victory, his homosexuality was to play a very bad trick on Turing, trapped as he was in a society as prudish as it was reactionary, on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1952, back in England, his sexual orientation cost him a year in prison, and he would die in 1954, at the age of 41, after undergoing an inhumane hormonal treatment designed to "cure" him of his homosexuality. Destroyed in body and soul, he may have committed suicide, or maybe not. Whatever the case, the tragic loss of his life belongs to us all in some way.

Before the war, Turing was an avid long-distance runner, and one day in 1936, after running a few miles through the beautiful English countryside, he stretched out to catch his breath in a soft meadow.

Still panting, he suddenly conceived an abstract machine capable of solving a problem of pure logic. It would consist of a series of zeros and ones (0-1) recorded on an infinite tape that, once scanned, could express any letter or number. We owe our computers, smartphones, tablets, and so on to this epiphany.

Turing had arrived at Princeton before the war with nothing. Von Neumann, convinced of his genius, offered him a position at the Institute, but aware of the imminence of war in Europe, he declined and returned home. And the Hungarian had no qualms about appropriating his work.

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The two world wars served the United States, among other things, to populate its universities with the cream of the European intelligentsia, and not only in the sciences or medicine. Many European believers and artists sought political refuge and decent salaries in America, while Yankee soft power, with no small amount of help from the CIA, invaded the entire world. And it has remained that way, more or less, until Donald Trump's second term.

More and more brains who fled Europe and other places around the world to take advantage of the opportunities offered in the United States are now considering returning home. Trump is after them. And it's no surprise given the avalanche of indiscriminate cuts and the dismantling of ongoing scientific programs. Uncertainty and fear are growing. At any moment, they could be fired—Trump's specialty—or expelled from the country.

This deplorable situation offers Europe a golden opportunity it cannot afford to miss. Let the current Von Neumanns and Turings stay home. And let the best minds from the United States and around the world come here to research. We need them, as much or more than the rearmament already underway.