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“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.
During the 1940s and 1950s, a group of eccentric masterminds at the Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study pursued research that continues to change our world. This new book is best described by Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly: "The most powerful technology of the last century was not the atomic bomb, but software—and both were invented by the same folks. Even as they were inventing it, the original geniuses imagined almost everything software has become since. At long last, George Dyson delivers the untold story of software's creation. It is an amazing tale brilliantly deciphered."
— Vicki Powers
In early 1947, Jack Rosenberg, a bored researcher in Princeton University's Physics Department, heard about an intriguing new job opportunity. As he told George Dyson, the author of Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe: "I was informed that at the Institute for Advanced Study, a famous scientist was looking for an engineer to develop an electronic machine of a sort no one but he understood."
That "famous scientist" was a Hungarian émigré mathematician called John von Neumann, and the electronic machine he was developing at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was, of course, the computer, the central product of today's networked society. And it's this story, of von Neumann's attempt to assemble a team of the world's most brilliant twentieth-century scientists at IAS, that forms the central narrative in this sparkling new book by one of America's most talented historians of technology.
The book's title refers to the profoundly simple quotation by the English mathematician Alan Turing. "It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computational sequence," the then twenty-four-year-old Turing wrote in 1936. And Turing's Cathedral is the story of the pioneering efforts at IAS to build this "single machine," one that, as David Rosenberg notes, only von Neumann "understood."
As digital devices are woven into our lives with increasing ubiquity, we take for granted the elegant interconnection of our networked electronics. But, of course, that overall structure — the seamless architecture of computer hardware, operating system, and software — had to be invented. That's the "cathedral" von Neumann and his IAS team helped construct. And Dyson's book is both a lucid and accessible story of how that cathedral got built as well as being a kind of cathedral of its own in honor of its architects.
But the greatest strength of Turing's Cathedral lies in its luscious wealth of anecdotal details about von Neumann and his band of scientific geniuses at IAS. Dyson himself is the son of Freeman Dyson, one of America's greatest twentieth-century physicists and an IAS member from 1948 onward, and so Turing's Cathedral is, in part, Dyson's attempt to make both moral and intellectual sense of his father's glittering and yet severely compromised scientific generation.
Dyson leaves us with a memorable portrait of John von Neumann (known as Johnny to friends and family), a scion of a wealthy Catholic Budapest family, who came to America in the 1930s and who, in spite of his love of fast cars, gambling, and women, always remained an enigma. "If a mentally superhuman race ever develops, its members will resemble Johnny von Neumann," says IAS member Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, who credits a "neural superconductivity" with Neumann's unique genius.
Neumann's genius, Dyson explains, was in many ways an ability to recognize the genius in others. And Turing's Cathedral is in large part constructed of the vivid stories of those other scientists whom von Neumann brought to Princeton in the 1930s and 1940s and assembled as an all-star team of scientific missionaries. There's the amateur aviator and computer engineer Julian Bigelow, for example, who stored aircraft engines in the living room of his house, a former blacksmith's shop in central Princeton. Then there's the Austrian émigré mathematician Kurt Gödel, who was so "eccentric" that, as a young man, he developed a fear of being poisoned and would only eat food provided by his family. Even the woman who wrote the menus at the IAS cafeteria, Bernetta Miller, had been one of the first female pilots and had demonstrated monoplanes for the U.S. Army.
Best of all, though, is Dyson's portrait of von Neumann's closest friend and intellectual collaborator, the brilliant mathematician Stan Ulam, a Polish Jew from a wealthy Lwów family who fled to the United States in the summer of 1939. Dyson is excellent in not only describing what he calls "Ulam's demons" but also in charting the special friendship and working relationship between Ulam and von Neumann, two aristocrats from a disappearing world whose unique intellects would reinvent the new world.
It's a pleasure to marvel at these remarkable minds and the great changes they set in motion. But the reverse of the story is sobering. Dyson shows that von Neumann's government-funded invention of the computer was inextricably linked to the development of both the atomic and hydrogen bombs. You see, the mathematics that made possible the architecture of computers was also the mathematics that would simulate the consequences of thermonuclear fusion. The moral costs then, Dyson estimates, of IAS's discovery of our digital universe are as enigmatic as Johnny von Neumann himself, a mentally superhuman mathematician who died at the age of only fifty-four. The cause was bone cancer, which, some speculate, was derived from his attendance at the 1951 Bikini nuclear tests.
Andrew Keen is author of The Cult of the Amateur, which has been translated into fifteen languages. He hosts "Keen On," the popular weekly media and culture show on Techcrunch.com and regularly tweets at www.twitter.com/ajkeen.
Reviewer: Andrew Keen
Preface
POINT SOURCE SOLUTION
I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.
—John von Neumann, 1946
There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky.
In late 1945, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Hungarian American mathematician John von Neumann gathered a small group of engineers to begin designing, building, and programming an electronic digital computer, with five kilobytes of storage, whose attention could be switched in 24 microseconds from one memory location to the next. The entire digital universe can be traced directly to this 32-by-32-by-40-bit nucleus: less memory than is allocated to displaying a single icon on a computer screen today.
Von Neumann’s project was the physical realization of Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, a theoretical construct invented in 1936. It was not the first computer. It was not even the second or third computer. It was, however, among the first computers to make full use of a high-speed random-access storage matrix, and became the machine whose coding was most widely replicated and whose logical architecture was most widely reproduced. The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann, broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Our universe would never be the same.
Working outside the bounds of industry, breaking the rules of academia, and relying largely on the U.S. government for support, a dozen engineers in their twenties and thirties designed and built von Neumann’s computer for less than $1 million in under five years. “He was in the right place at the right time with the right connections with the right idea,” remembers Willis Ware, fourth to be hired to join the engineering team, “setting aside the hassle that will probably never be resolved as to whose ideas they really were.”
As World War II drew to a close, the scientists who had built the atomic bomb at Los Alamos wondered, “What’s next?” Some, including Richard Feynman, vowed never to have anything to do with nuclear weapons or military secrecy again. Others, including Edward Teller and John von Neumann, were eager to develop more advanced nuclear weapons, especially the “Super,” or hydrogen bomb. Just before dawn on the morning of July 16, 1945, the New Mexico desert was illuminated by an explosion “brighter than a thousand suns.” Eight and a half years later, an explosion one thousand times more powerful illuminated the skies over Bikini Atoll. The race to build the hydrogen bomb was accelerated by von Neumann’s desire to build a computer, and the push to build von Neumann’s computer was accelerated by the race to build a hydrogen bomb.
Computers were essential to the initiation of nuclear explosions, and to understanding what happens next. In “Point Source Solution,” a 1947 Los Alamos report on the shock waves produced by nuclear explosions, von Neumann explained that “for very violent explosions . . . it may be justified to treat the original, central, high pressure area as a point.” This approximated the physical reality of a nuclear explosion closely enough to enable some of the first useful predictions of weapons effects.
Numerical simulation of chain reactions within computers initiated a chain reaction among computers, with machines and codes proliferating as explosively as the phenomena they were designed to help us understand. It is no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time. Only the collective intelligence of computers could save us from the destructive powers of the weapons they had allowed us to invent.
Turing’s model of universal computation was one-dimensional: a string of symbols encoded on a tape. Von Neumann’s implementation of Turing’s model was two-dimensional: the address matrix underlying all computers in use today. The landscape is now three-dimensional, yet the entire Internet can still be viewed as a common tape shared by a multitude of Turing’s Universal Machines.
Where does time fit in? Time in the digital universe and time in our universe are governed by entirely different clocks. In our universe, time is a continuum. In a digital universe, time (T) is a countable number of discrete, sequential steps. A digital universe is bounded at the beginning, when T = 0, and at the end, if T comes to a stop. Even in a perfectly deterministic universe, there is no consistent method to predict the ending in advance. To an observer in our universe, the digital universe appears to be speeding up. To an observer in the digital universe, our universe appears to be slowing down.
Universal codes and universal machines, introduced by Alan Turing in his “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” of 1936, have prospered to such an extent that Turing’s underlying interest in the “decision problem” is easily overlooked. In answering the Entscheidungsproblem, Turing proved that there is no systematic way to tell, by looking at a code, what that code will do. That’s what makes the digital universe so interesting, and that’s what brings us here.
It is impossible to predict where the digital universe is going, but it is possible to understand how it began. The origin of the first fully electronic random-access storage matrix, and the propagation of the codes that it engendered, is as close to a point source as any approximation can get.
Overview
“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 ...