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Wittgenstein, Kreisel and “mining the Baltic”

Brian Leiter

Mathematician Craig Larson (Virginia Commonwealth University) writes:

There's an obscure comment of Crick in his autobiography ("What Mad Pursuit"), regarding his friend Kreisel, reiterated in Crick's Kreiselania piece, regarding Wittgenstein's idea for mining the Baltic in WWII (Crick worked on magnetic mines during the war):

"I never did discover exactly what Kreisel was doing at West Leigh. There was a war on and I had plenty of urgent problems of my own to deal with. I believe that one of his first efforts was to apply the methods of Wittgenstein (whom he had known at Trinity) to the problem of mining the Baltic. I would dearly like to read this paper but Collingwood was believed to have locked it away in his safe (could it have been a threat to security?) and it has almost certainly not survived."

In the autobiography, Crick calls it Kreisel's "first paper".

Maybe one of your readers might add some further explanation? Googling did not help.

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6 responses to “Wittgenstein, Kreisel and “mining the Baltic””

  1. Richard Baron

    You might find something in the papers from the Mine Design Department and Mining Establishment. These are the papers labelled ADM 253 down the right hand side of this page and subsequent pages ("next 30" and so on):

    http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C1961/cfirst

    There does seem to be rather a lot of material there, and it might take a while to find anything useful. I got nowhere using either "Wittgenstein" or "Kreisel" as a search term. And of course some material might still be secret.

    It is an odd thing for Crick to have said. Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein (see "Kreisel" in the index) indicates that Kreisel did not think much of Wittgenstein as a technical logician, so one suspects not as a mathematician either. Is it possible that Crick mis-remembered and that it was not Wittgenstein at all? (He would not have mis-remembered that it was Kreisel, given their friendship.)

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  2. Dean C. Rowan

    1. Is that quote really from the Crick autobiography? Not according to Google Books.
    2. Peter Smith at Cambridge inquired about a Kreisel bibliography in 2008: https://www.cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2008-August/012996.html Did he produce one?
    3. Kreisel's later papers are at Stanford: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt4k403759/admin/#ca Odds are slim that a paper from mid-'40s would be among the records, but you never know.
    4. Page 58 in Robert Cecil Olby, Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 2009) refers to the West Leigh connection; p.59 refers to Wittgenstein. I can't tell if there's a thematic link between the two. http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b17658165~S1 Maybe worth skimming?

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  3. Craig Larson

    The quote here is from Kreiseliana (1996), p.26.

    A very similar account is in the autobiography (1988), p.16:

    "I also asked my close friend Georg Kreisel, now a distinguished mathematical logician. I had run across him when he came, at the age of nineteen, to work in the Admiralty under Collingwood. Kreisel’s first paper—an essay on an approach to the problem of mining the Baltic, using the methods of Wittgenstein—Collingwood had wisely locked away in his safe."

    It is worth noting Wittgenstein did study engineering at Manchester, and had a patent on a propeller design.

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  4. Peter Smith

    No, Peter Smith didn't produce a Kreisel bibliography — though about ten years ago I was given a copy of a bibliography by Dan Isaacson, and if I recall correctly, that originated from Dana Scott.

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  5. Dean C. Rowan

    Another (tenuous) lead, the Francis Crick Papers at UCSD: https://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/findingaids/mss0660.html

    Box 5, folders 3-10 include correspondence with Kreisel from 1947. Box 2, folder 6 includes correspondence from that year with Collingwood (who is identified in error in the scope note of the finding aid as Edward *C.* Collingwood).

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  6. Kenneth Derus

    I’ve typed 5000+ pages of Kreisel correspondence into the computer, but never got around to asking him about the mine-design business. Isaacson, Macintyre and Scott have my additions to Scott’s bibliography. These include items published in Eureka in 1944, an Admiralty report, and his final papers. Recently discovered items not on my list include several early essays, including ‘The Devil’ (published when GK was 18). Kreisel materials dating from the years of his retirement are at Konstanz, not Stanford.

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