| I first read about John Aristotle Phillips back in the late 1970's when I was perusing a copy of Reader's Digest at the dentist's office. It's not on-line, but as this 2003 Village Voice mini-feature recalls, Phillips was a very 'unmotivated' student who had gotten through high school without much effort. But he arrived at his junior year as a physics major at Princeton University - where Einstein wound up on the faculty, after all - in bad shape. He had already been fired from the marching band as the cowbell player (no, that was long before the famous Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken "need more cowbell" routine) and was wearing the tiger mascot costume at football games. And his grades were ... well, borderline.
And so for his required junior research paper, he chose a topic that he felt would motivate himself sufficiently: "How to Build Your Own Atomic Bomb" which came to him after attending a nuclear proliferation seminar.
All physics majors were assigned a faculty adviser to help them through this project - but his adviser Freeman Dyson told him that with that subject: he'd be on-his-own, that no help could be given at all - and did he still want to proceed? When Phillips said "yes", he was handed a list of only the most elemental nuclear physics texts and simply told, "Good luck".
And this did, indeed, motivate him. He became a pest at libraries throughout the region: gleaning a kernel off one paper, something from another. Eventually librarians saved him articles that had just become declassified (due to age and outdated work). As essayist Paul Collins wrote:
Phillips did this while camped out with a broken typewriter in the campus Ivy Club. For extra surrealism, the club members who observed his mysterious work included fellow student Parker Stevenson. Yes, the Hardy Boys' star Parker Stevenson.
His mathematical calculations were becoming immense, too but - as I recall from the original story - he felt that he was lacking a catalyst, and so telephoned the research department at DuPont (on a Friday afternoon when, he felt, employees would be in a relaxed mood). When he told a researcher about a suggestion his professor made about the use of an exploding blanket to cause an explosion he was laughingly told, "That went out with the Stone Ages - we use (redacted) nowadays". With that information, he handed in the paper and went to the physics department offices the following week when they were available after grading.
"Mr. Phillips, we've been expecting you" was the secretary's response. "Your paper got an A, and they want to see you down in the dean's office".
The excerpt that I read was serialized from the book Mushroom : The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid from 1979.
Now, Professor Dyson and others have stated that the design he submitted would not have functioned (and others have questioned parts of Phillips' accounts as well) but the story resonated, as this 2007 Vanity Fair article noted: his paper was eventually classified and the book was optioned for a movie - which never came to fruition.
Nonetheless, Phillips (whom Professor Dyson noted "loved his middle name") parlayed this into two consecutive runs for the US Congress from his home state of Connecticut - and as a Democrat. But he lost both times to the Republican incumbent - the late Stewart McKinney who died in 1987 brought about by complications of AIDS.
 
And it was running for Congress that brought him to his career path, as Vanity Fair notes:
Phillips put in a request with Connecticut's board of elections for the list of registered voters in his district. Such records were kept by every state, but obtaining them was no easy task. While technically public information, these lists were often jealously controlled by local party bosses. To gain access, a candidate had to have the right connections-or be willing to pay.
"There was a realization: if we can't get [the voter list], which we're entitled to, then we're dead," Phillips says. Without it, he could not perform the basic tasks of a field campaign-sending mailers, knocking on doors, making phone calls.
Eventually he did acquire the list, and he had his brother, Dean, write a program, on his sleek new Apple II, to format it. The equivalent of a simple spreadsheet application, the program was advanced for its time.
This he has parlayed into a career in data mining, and he has long been the CEO of the firm named - appropriately enough - Aristotle after his middle name. He and others in the field can determine who votes for whom in some rather astonishing detail.
To tell you just how influential he has become in politics, just consider who have been his clients. The RNC, Rudy Giuliani, Christopher Dodd, Tom Tancredo, John McCain, former Los Angeles mayor James Hahn - and even Viktor Yushchenko, the former president of the Ukraine.
I would suggest that you read the Vanity Fair article to see how data mining works. Again, I have no particularly negative or positive feelings about him - perhaps some of the commenters here can offer more perspective? - but perhaps the best summation comes from an old nemesis of ours on the right:
Aristotle's massive private database contains detailed information about roughly 175 million American voters. "It's not that [Aristotle's] list is good-they're considered to have the only list," says Richard Viguerie, the venerable conservative strategist. "Aristotle is the premier company in that area. If you want to get into demographics, I don't know that they even have a competitor". |
