Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
Mar 2012 · Sold by Pantheon
4.3star
13 reviews
Ebook
432
Pages
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About this ebook
“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.
Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.
Dyson’s account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.
How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.
Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.
Dyson’s account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.
How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.
Ratings and reviews
4.3
13 reviews
A Google user
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March 30, 2012
A fascinating piece of history, marred by the author's illiteracy in the fields of math and computer science. There are small violations of trust: "a finite but unbounded length of tape". There are larger violations of trust: the author's bizarre conception of social networks and search engines as an instance of analog computing. And there are huge violations of trust: the long painful chapter on the crank, Barricelli's theories of digital evolution. The subject of the book is a brief golden period in Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study during which the great minds of the early computer period all came together in one place. Einstein, Godel, von Neumann, Stan Ulam, and Turing all wander the oak-panelled walls of the Institute for Advanced Study, while John Bigelow builds the MANIAC computer (an important and influential early digital computer) in the basement, out of scavenged surplus war parts. The history is wonderful. The stories are breathtaking. But Dyson's consistent inability to draw a bright line between what's wonderful and what's unmitigated woo is constantly irritating. If only this book could have been written by somebody else.
Vasile Jureschi
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August 26, 2013
This is my first and last purchase on Play Books. For everybody looking to buy books through Play Books, the formats are not freely transferable between devices (yeah I should have looked that up first). My setup is Android Phone, Arch Linux desktop and rooted Nook. As Play Books uses the clusterfuck that is acsm (although on the download link it says "Download EPUB" ) if you do not have a Windows computer AND Adobe Digital Editions AND and account on the Adobe servers you are stuck reading only on device
3 people found this review helpful
Blake H
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November 27, 2016
A fantastic summary of the history of computers, their janitors, and the interactions of those groups with their neighbors.
1 person found this review helpful
About the author
George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests include the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka), the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines), and the exploration of space (Project Orion).
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