Enlarge/ A photo of Gordon Bell speaking at the annual PC Forum in Palm Springs, California, March 1989.
Computer pioneer Gordon Bell, who as an early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) played a key role in the development of several influential minicomputer systems and also co-founded the first major computer museum, passed away on Friday, according to Bell Labs veteran John Mashey. Mashey announced Bell’s passing in a social media post on Tuesday morning.
“I am very sad to report [the] death May 17 at age 89 of Gordon Bell, famous computer pioneer, a founder of Computer Museum in Boston, and a force behind the @ComputerHistory here in Silicon Valley, and good friend since the 1980s,” wrote Mashey in his announcement. “He succumbed to aspiration pneumonia in Coronado, CA.”
Bell was a pivotal figure in the history of computing and a notable champion of tech history, having founded Boston’s Computer Museum in 1979 that later became the heart of Computer History Museum in Mountain View, with his wife Gwen Bell. He was also the namesake of the ACM’s prestigious Gordon Bell Prize, created to spur innovations in parallel processing.
Born in 1934 in Kirksville, Missouri, Gordon Bell earned degrees in electrical engineering from MIT before being recruited in 1960 by DEC founders Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson. As the second computer engineer hired at DEC, Bell worked on various components for the PDP-1 system, including floating-point subroutines, tape controllers, and a drum controller.
Bell also invented the first UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter) for serial communication during his time at DEC. He went on to architect several influential DEC systems, including the PDP-4 and PDP-6. In the 1970s, he played a key role in overseeing the aforementioned VAX minicomputer line as the engineering manager, with Bill Strecker serving as the primary architect for the VAX architecture.
In 1995, Bell joined Microsoft Research where he studied telepresence technologies and served as the subject of the MyLifeBits life-logging project. The initiative aimed to realize Vannevar Bush’s vision of a system that could store all the documents, photos, and audio a person experienced in their lifetime.
Bell was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the National Medal of Technology from President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and the IEEE’s John von Neumann medal in 1992.
“He was immeasurably helpful”
As news of Bell’s passing spread on social media Tuesday, industry veterans began sharing their memories and condolences. Former Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie wrote, “I can’t adequately describe how much I loved Gordon and respected what he did for the industry. As a kid I first ran into him at Digital (I was then at DG) when he and Dave were working on VAX. So brilliant, so calm, so very upbeat and optimistic about what the future might hold.”
Ozzie also recalled Bell’s role as a helpful mentor. “The number of times Gordon and I met while at Microsoft – acting as a sounding board, helping me through challenges I was facing – is uncountable,” he wrote.
Former Windows VP Steven Sinofsky also paid tribute to Bell on X, writing, “He was immeasurably helpful at Microsoft where he was a founding advisor and later full time leader in Microsoft Research. He advised and supported countless researchers, projects, and product teams. He was always supportive and insightful beyond words. He never hesitated to provide insights and a few sparks at so many of the offsites that were so important to the evolution of Microsoft.”
“His memory is a blessing to so many,” wrote Sinofsky in his tweet memorializing Bell. “His impact on all of us in technology will be felt for generations. May he rest in peace.”
Enlarge/ Daniel Dennett, a leading philosopher with provocative takes on consciousness, free will, and AI, has died at 82.
World renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will among other mind-bending subjects, died today at the age of 82.
(Full disclosure: This loss is personal. Dennett was a friend and colleague of my spouse, Sean Carroll. Sean and I have many fond memories of shared meals and stimulating conversations on an enormous range of topics with Dan over the years. He was a true original and will be greatly missed.)
Stunned reactions to Dennett’s unexpected passing began proliferating on social media shortly after the news broke. “Wrenching news. He’s been a great friend and incredible inspiration for me throughout my career,” the Santa Fe Institute’s Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, wrote on X. “I will miss him enormously.”
“He was a towering figure in philosophy and in particular in the philosophy of AI,” roboticist Rodney Brooks (MIT, emeritus) wrote on X, bemoaning that he’d never replied to Dennett’s last email from 30 days ago. “Now we have only memories of him.
A 2017 New Yorker profile described Dennett as “a cross between Darwin and Santa Claus,” with “a fluffy white beard and a round belly.” That jolly appearance was accompanied by an intellectual ferocity—generously embellished with his sparkling wit—as he battled such luminaries as Stephen J. Gould, John Searle, Noam Chomsky, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose, and Richard Lewontin, among others, over consciousness and evolution, free will, AI, religion, and many other topics.
Dennett’s many books, while dense, nonetheless sold very well and were hugely influential, and he was a distinguished speaker in great demand. His 2003 TED talk, “The Illusion of Consciousness,” garnered more than 4 million views. While he gained particular prominence as a leader of the “New Atheist” movement of the early 2000s—colorfully dubbed one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—that was never his primary focus, merely a natural extension of his more central philosopical concerns.
Enlarge/ David Wallace, Sean Carroll, and Daniel Dennett at the Santa Fe Institute in March.
Sean Carroll
David Wallace, historian and philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh, offered Ars Technica this succinct summation of Dennett’s extraordinary influence:
To me, Dan Dennett exemplified what it means to do philosophy in an age of science. He once said that there was no such thing as philosophy-free science, only science that didn’t interrogate its philosophical assumptions; equally, he saw more deeply than almost anyone that the deepest traditional questions of philosophy, from free will to consciousness to metaphysics, were irreversibly transformed by modern science, most especially by natural selection.
His approach, as much as his own towering contributions, has inspired generations of philosophers, far beyond cognitive science and the philosophy of mind (his ideas have been influential in the interpretation of quantum theory, for instance). He was one of the great philosophers of the last century, and one of the very few whose work has been transformative outside academic philosophy.
“Dan Dennett was the embodiment of a natural philosopher—someone who was brilliant at the careful conceptual analysis that characterizes the best philosophy, while caring deeply about what science has to teach us about the natural world,” Johns Hopkins University physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll told Ars. “At the same time, he was the model of a publicly-engaged academic, someone who wrote substantive books that anyone could read and who had a real impact on the wider world. People like that are incredibly rare and precious, and his passing is a real loss.”
Born in Boston in 1942, Dennett’s father was a professor of Islamic history who became a secret agent for the OSS during World War II, posing as a cultural attaché at the American Embassy in Beirut. Dennett spent his early childhood there until his father was killed in a plane crash while on a mission to Ethiopia. Dennett, his mother, and two sisters returned to Boston after that, and his family assumed he would attend Harvard just like his late father. But after graduating from the Phillips Exeter Academy, Dennett opted to attend Wesleyan University instead—at least until be came across Harvard logician and philosopher W.V.O. Quine‘s 1963 treatise, From a Logical Point of View.
Dennett ended up transferring to Harvard to study under Quine and become a philosopher, initially intent on proving Quine wrong. By the time he was a graduate student at Oxford University, he was known among his fellow students as “the village Quinean.” In his 2023 memoir, I’ve Been Thinking, Dennett traced his interest in applying his field to questions of science began during this period. He recalled experiencing the universal sensation of one’s hand falling asleep and feeling like an alien thing, rather than part of one’s own body. He wondered what was going on in the body and the brain.
Enlarge/ Dennett at a group dinner in February 2023. He was the inaugural speaker for the Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture series.
Sean Carroll
“The other philosophers thought, that’s not philosophy. I said, well, it should be,” he told Tufts Now last year. “So I started learning. I didn’t even know what a neuron was back then in the early ’60s, but I soon learned. I was lucky to get in on the ground floor of cognitive neuroscience. Some of the early pioneers in that field were my heroes and mentors and friends.”
Dennett’s first academic position was at the University of California, Irvine, and a revised version of his doctoral thesis became his first book: 1969’s Content and Consciousness. He moved to Tufts University in 1971, where he remained for the rest of his career. One of Dennett’s earliest collaborators was Douglas Hofstadter, author of the bestselling Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, who called Dennett “a lodestar in my life” in an email [quoted with permission] to colleagues after hearing of the latter’s death:
Dan was a deep thinker about what it is to be human. Quite early on, he arrived at what many would see as shocking conclusions about consciousness (essentially that it is just an emergent effect of physical interactions of tiny inanimate components), and from then on, he was a dead-set opponent of dualism (the idea that there is an ethereal nonphysical elixir called “consciousness”, over and above the physical events taking place in the enormously complex substrate of a human or animal brain, and perhaps that of a silicon network as well). Dan thus totally rejected the notion of “qualia” (pure sensations of such things as colors, tastes, and so forth), and his arguments against the mystique of qualia were subtle but very cogent.
Dennett was a a confirmed compatibilist on the fiercely debated subject of free will, meaning that he saw no conflict between philosophical determinism and free will. “Our only notable divergence was on the question of free will, which Dan maintained exists, in some sense of ‘free,’ whereas I just agreed that ‘will’ exists, but maintained that there is no freedom in it,” Hoftstadter recalled.
Screenshot/X
Johns Hopkins philosopher Jenann Ismael recalled corresponding with Dennett after her own book on free will, How Physics Makes Us Free, was published in 2016. She had not yet met Dennett, but his work was naturally a significant influence, even though her book was largely critical of his stance on the subject. Ismael opened her book by discussing Dennett’s fictional short story, “Where Am I?“, calling it “the best of piece of philosophical fiction ever written.” (Check out this short film based on the story, starring Dennett himself uttering such immortal lines as, “They made a sparkling new vat for my brain.”)
Dennett read her book and emailed Ismael with a few notes—not about how he felt she’d misrepresented his views (which he deemed of “no matter”) but correcting her mistakes about the plot of his short story. “It turns out I got the story wrong,” Ismael told Ars. “I’d read it so long ago, I just embellished it in my head and embarrassingly never realized. Where I criticized him in my book, he wasn’t as keen to correct me as he was excited to talk about the ideas.”
She found him to be filled with infectious warmth. “It was true that he could suck the air out of a room when he entered and even sitting at a round dinner table, he somehow became the center of it, he took possession of the discussion,” said Ismael. “But he also paid close attention to people, read voraciously, listened to and heard what others were saying, taking what he could and disseminating what he learned. He had immense curiosity and he wanted to share everything that he learned or liked.”
In his later years, Dennett wasn’t shy about sounding the alarm regarding AI, even writing an article for The Atlantic last year on the topic about the dangers ahead, particularly with the advent of large language models like ChatGPT. “The most pressing problem is not that they’re going to take our jobs, not that they’re going to change warfare, but that they’re going to destroy human trust,” he told Tufts Now. “They’re going to move us into a world where you can’t tell truth from falsehood. You don’t know who to trust. Trust turns out to be one of the most important features of civilization, and we are now at great risk of destroying the links of trust that have made civilization possible.”
Enlarge/ Dennett at our Baltimore home in February 2023, holding forth on philosophical matters.
Landon Ross
Dennett was not one to traffic in false modesty over his many accomplishments and always evinced a strong degree of self-confidence, fondly recounting in his memoir of the time fellow philosopher Don Ross wryly observed, “Dan believes modesty is a virtue to be reserved for special occasions.”
His myriad interests weren’t limited to the academic. Dennett loved art, music, sailing, pottery, trout fishing, windsurfing, ran his own cider press, and made his own Calvados on a Prohibition-era still. He could call a square dance, whittle a wooden walking stick, and was fond of pondering knotty philosophical questions while driving his tractor on his 200-acre farm in Blue Hill, north of Boston, which he bought in the 1970s. (He sold the farm around 2014.)
“Dan was a bon vivant, a very zesty fellow, who loved travel and hobnobbing with brilliance wherever he could find it,” Hoftstadter wrote in his tribute. “In his later years, as he grew a little teetery, he proudly carried a wooden cane with him all around the world, and into it he chiseled words and images that represented the many places he visited and gave lectures at. Dan Dennett was a mensch, and his ideas on so many subjects will leave a lasting impact on the world, and his human presence has had a profound impact on those of us who were lucky enough to know him well and to count him as a friend.”
Ismael recalled him sending her YouTube videos of “swing dancing and silly outfits” during the pandemic, his emails littered with colorful emojis. He was “a strange man, who didn’t take himself as seriously as you might think,” she said. “I really loved him, loved his spirit, his generosity, the expansiveness of his thinking, his delight in ideas, and his great good cheer. Philosophically, I think he had true greatness. It seems impossible he is gone.”
Daniel Dennett gives the Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture, 2023.
Enlarge/ A visibly emotional Peter Higgs was present when CERN announced Higgs boson discovery in July 2012.
University of Edinburgh
Peter Higgs, the shy, somewhat reclusive physicist who won a Nobel Prize for his theoretical work on how the Higgs boson gives elementary particles their mass, has died at the age of 94. According to a statement from the University of Edinburgh, the physicist passed “peacefully at home on Monday 8 April following a short illness.”
“Besides his outstanding contributions to particle physics, Peter was a very special person, a man of rare modesty, a great teacher and someone who explained physics in a very simple and profound way,” Fabiola Gianotti, director general at CERN and former leader of one of the experiments that helped discover the Higgs particle in 2012, told The Guardian. “An important piece of CERN’s history and accomplishments is linked to him. I am very saddened, and I will miss him sorely.”
The Higgs boson is a manifestation of the Higgs field, an invisible entity that pervades the Universe. Interactions between the Higgs field and particles help provide particles with mass, with particles that interact more strongly having larger masses. The Standard Model of Particle Physics describes the fundamental particles that make up all matter, like quarks and electrons, as well as the particles that mediate their interactions through forces like electromagnetism and the weak force. Back in the 1960s, theorists extended the model to incorporate what has become known as the Higgs mechanism, which provides many of the particles with mass. One consequence of the Standard Model’s version of the Higgs boson is that there should be a force-carrying particle, called a boson, associated with the Higgs field.
Despite its central role in the function of the Universe, the road to predicting the existence of the Higgs boson was bumpy, as was the process of discovering it. As previously reported, the idea of the Higgs boson was a consequence of studies on the weak force, which controls the decay of radioactive elements. The weak force only operates at very short distances, which suggests that the particles that mediate it (the W and Z bosons) are likely to be massive. While it was possible to use existing models of physics to explain some of their properties, these predictions had an awkward feature: just like another force-carrying particle, the photon, the resulting W and Z bosons were massless.
Enlarge/ Schematic of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Over time, theoreticians managed to craft models that included massive W and Z bosons, but they invariably came with a hitch: a massless partner, which would imply a longer-range force. In 1964, however, a series of papers was published in rapid succession that described a way to get rid of this problematic particle. If a certain symmetry in the models was broken, the massless partner would go away, leaving only a massive one.
The first of these papers, by François Englert and Robert Brout, proposed the new model in terms of quantum field theory; the second, by Higgs (then 35), noted that a single quantum of the field would be detectable as a particle. A third paper, by Gerald Guralnik, Carl Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble, provided an independent validation of the general approach, as did a completely independent derivation by students in the Soviet Union.
At that time, “There seemed to be excitement and concern about quantum field theory (the underlying structure of particle physics) back then, with some people beginning to abandon it,” David Kaplan, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, told Ars. “There were new particles being regularly produced at accelerator experiments without any real theoretical structure to explain them. Spin-1 particles could be written down comfortably (the photon is spin-1) as long as they didn’t have a mass, but the massive versions were confusing to people at the time. A bunch of people, including Higgs, found this quantum field theory trick to give spin-1 particles a mass in a consistent way. These little tricks can turn out to be very useful, but also give the landscape of what is possible.”
“It wasn’t clear at the time how it would be applied in particle physics.”
Ironically, Higgs’ seminal paper was rejected by the European journal Physics Letters. He then added a crucial couple of paragraphs noting that his model also predicted the existence of what we now know as the Higgs boson. He submitted the revised paper to Physical Review Letters in the US, where it was accepted. He examined the properties of the boson in more detail in a 1966 follow-up paper.
