Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

From Barnes & Noble

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

William Poundstone

…a groundbreaking history of the Princeton computer. Though the English mathematician Alan Turing gets title billing, Dyson's true protagonist is the Hungarian-­American John von Neumann, presented here as the Steve Jobs of early computers—a man who invented almost nothing, yet whose vision changed the world…Turing's Cathedral, incorporating original research and reporting…is an expansive narrative wherein every character, place and idea rates a digression…The book brims with unexpected detail.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

An overstuffed meditation on all things digital sprouts from this engrossing study of how engineers at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, under charismatic mathematician John von Neumann (the book should really be titled Von Neumann’s Cathedral), built a pioneering computer (called MANIAC) in the years after WWII. To readers used to thinking of computers as magical black boxes, historian Dyson (Darwin Among the Machines) gives an arresting view of old-school mechanics hammering the first ones together from vacuum tubes, bicycle wheels, and punch-cards. Unfortunately, his account of technological innovations is too sketchy for laypeople to quite follow. The narrative frames a meandering tour of the breakthroughs enabled by early computers, from hydrogen bombs to weather forecasting, and grandiose musings on the digital worldview of MANIAC’s creators, in which the author loosely connects the Internet, DNA, and the possibility of extraterrestrial invasion via interstellar radio signals. Dyson’s portrait of the subculture of Von Neumann and other European émigré scientists who midwifed America’s postwar technological order is lively and piquant. But the book bites off more science than it can chew, and its expositions of hard-to-digest concepts from Gödel’s theorem to the Turing machine are too hasty and undeveloped to sink in. (Mar.)

Library Journal

In the 1940s and 1950s, scientists at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, worked to realize Alan Turing's dream of a universal machine, which led to computers, digital television, modern genetics, and more. Because their work was funded by the government, which therefore expected to benefit from the results, it also led to the creation of the hydrogen bomb. Distinguished science writer Dyson is the son of renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked at the institute in the 1950s, so you can expect an insightful book. With an eight-city tour.

Kirkus Reviews

That we live in a digital universe is indisputable; how we got there is a mesmerizing tale brilliantly told by science historian Dyson (Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957–1965, 2002, etc.) The author establishes late 1945 as the birth date of the first stored-program machine, built at the Institute for Advanced Study, established in Princeton in 1932 as a haven for theoreticians. It happened under the watch of the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann, fresh from commutes to Los Alamos where the atom bomb had been built and the hydrogen bomb only a gleam in Edward Teller's eye. Dyson makes clear that the motivation for some of the world's greatest technological advances has always been to perfect instruments of war. Indeed, von Neumann's colleagues included some who had been at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, where a dedicated-purpose computer, ENIAC, had been built to calculate firing tables for antiaircraft artillery. The IAS computer, MANIAC, was used to determine the parameters governing the fission of an atom device inside an H-bomb that would then ignite the fusion reaction. But for von Neumann and others, the MANIAC was also the embodiment of Alan Turing's universal machine, an abstract invention in the '30s by the mathematician who would go on to crack the Nazi's infamous Enigma code in World War II. In addition to these stories, Dyson discusses climate and genetic-modeling projects programmed on the MANIAC. The use of wonderful quotes and pithy sketches of the brilliant cast of characters further enriches the text. Who knew that eccentric mathematician-logician Kurt Gödel had married a Viennese cabaret dancer? Meticulously researched and packed with not just technological details, but sociopolitical and cultural details as well--the definitive history of the computer.

The Barnes & Noble Review

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