DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Men, Minds, and Machines

The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science
By Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 210 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

Once in a while, when the full significance of a scientific discovery or development has established itself in the public consciousness, we learn of a pivotal event that occurred many years earlier, in relative obscurity. I recall taking my leave of a senior colleague a few years ago on a Copenhagen street and glanced back at him as he disappeared into the crowd, on his way to catch a bus. I marveled at the way he blended in with the passers-by, who were oblivious of the role he had played in world history. I wondered what they would have said if they realized that they were rubbing shoulders with one of the two people who made the famous back-of-the-envelope calculation of the amount of uranium needed for a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, thereby paving the way for production of the first atomic bomb.