George Dyson

How did computers take over the world? In late 1945, a small group of brilliant engineers and mathematicians gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their ostensible goal was to build a computer which would be instrumental in the US government's race to create a hydrogen bomb. The mathematicians themselves, however, saw their project as the realization of Alan Turing's theoretical 'universal machine.' In Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson vividly re-creates the intense experimentation, incredible mathematical insight and pure creative genius that led to the dawn of the digital universe, uncovering a wealth of new material to bring a human story of extraordinary men and women and their ideas to life. From the lowliest iPhone app to Google's sprawling metazoan codes, we now live in a world of self-replicating numbers and self-reproducing machines whose origins go back to a 5-kilobyte matrix that still holds clues as to what may lie ahead.

The Origins of the Digital Universe

Turing's Cathedral

Bryan Alexander

I'm fascinating by the history of computing. There are so many delights there, both geeky and otherwise: glimpses of our present, odd characters, brilliant technical solutions, politics. Turing's Cathedral is a delightful and useful contribution to this field.

George Dyson's book takes place during the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on the extraordinary collection of geniuses in Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and who created a huge amount of modern computing. A large part of Turing's Cathedral consists of biographical sketches of key players in early computing, including Stan Ulam, Nils Barracelli, Klari Dán Von Neumann, Thorstein Veblen's nephew, Alan Turing, of course, and especially Johnny von Neumann. This is really von Neumann's book. He gets the lion's share of the text (and photos), becoming the Institute's prime driver and most productive thinker. Turing's Cathedral essentially ends with von Neumann's death.

Other chapters explore the hardware and theory of early computing, from cathode ray tubes and punch cards to stored program architecture and the Monte Carlo method. Dyson also races off in related directions with something like glee, showing, for example, how the IIS was right on top of major Revolutionary War sites, and how one scientist was related to Olivia Newtown John. 

Arching across all of these themes is the intertwined history of atomic weapons and computing. This is a controversial theme in cyber-history, and Dyson assembles a great deal of evidence to demonstrate their deep connections.

Turing's Cathedral is filled with energy and some fun writing. A few quotes demonstrate this:
What if the price of machines that think is people who don't? (314)

"Information was never 'volatile' in transit; it was as secure as an acrophobic inchworm on the crest of a sequoia." -Julian Bigelow (137)

Our ever-expanding digital universe is directly descended from the image tube that imploded in the back seat of [Vladimir] Zworykin's car. (81)

We owe the existence of high-speed digital computers to pilots who preferred to be shot down intentionally by their enemies rather than accidentally by their friends. (116)

Von Neumann made a deal with "the other party" in 1946. The scientists would get the computers, and the military would get the bombs. This seems to have turned out well enough so far, because, contrary to von Neumann's expectations, it was the computers that exploded, not the bombs. (303)

"It is an irony of fate that much of the high-tech world we live in today, the conquest of space, the extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man's monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not." -Francoise Ulam (216)

"A clock keeps track of time. A modern general purpose computer keeps track of events." This distinction separates the digital universe from our universe, and is one of the few distinctions left. (300)

"We are Martians who have come to Earth to change everything - and we are afraid we will not be so well received. So we try to keep it a secret, try to appear as Americans... but that we could not do, because of our accent. So we settled in a country nobody ever has heard about and now we are claiming to be Hungarians." -Edward Teller (40)


The book has plenty of gems, like the Swedish scientist Hannes Alfvén and his utopian novel about an AI-ruled future, von Neumann's possibly accidental vision of what post-robotic economics might look like (289), and Nils Barracelli's early visions of artificial life. The sheer ambition, nigh unto mad science, of these early explorers, seeking even to control the weather, is infectious.

There are a few weaknesses, starting with Dyson's aphoristic tendency occasionally backfiring (I don't buy the return of analog idea). Some of the explanations aren't as lucid as they need to be - I'm still not sure what template-based addressing means. And the focus on Princeton and some historical figures doesn't recognize their extraordinary privilege. I was also surprised that Tyson didn't reference Howard Rheingold's groundbreaking and accessible Tools for Thought. 

But that's nitpicking. Turing's Cathedral is a treat for geeks, history buffs, and anyone interested in how our digital era came to be.

Turing's Cathedral The Origins of the Digital Universe

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