Reviews

Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson

kathrinpassig's review

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3.0

"So mittelmäßig, aber trotzdem interessant", lautete die Empfehlung von Franz Scherer, und so war es dann auch. Über fehlende technische Detailkenntnis wird stellenweise hinwegimprovisiert, die Zusammenhänge bleiben oft rätselhaft, aber es sind viele gute Stellen drin, und immerhin interessiert sich hier mal jemand für abstrakte Konzepte und nicht nur für eine Aufzählung von Hardwareerfindungen.

davidsteinsaltz's review

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4.0

I guess Turing's name sells more books than von Neumann, which is who the book is really about. Still, it's a fascinating look at a crucial time in the development of the modern world, when bombs, Boole, and biology came together.

iacobus's review against another edition

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2.0

I have complicated thoughts about this book. I want to like it, but so much of it was not something I wanted.

First, as a history of IAS, von Neumann, the atomic bomb and early computing, I enjoyed the book throughly. It was definitely disjointed and many times wrong or very vague (as other reviewers point out). I don't think Dyson fully understood a lot of the tech that he was trying to write and ended up just blowing that task. But as a biography and the parts about people were more than a good balance.

That said, from the mid point about the hydrogen bomb on, the book goes down a crazy rabbit hole. At one point, in all honesty, Dyson attempts to argue that digital things, like the Internet, are a form of ET style alien life. Computer programs, from Google to Angry Birds, are sentient living and conscious organisms. It was like reading the writings of an insane person.

My take away: read the first half and stop at the h bomb.

blackoxford's review

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4.0

Knowledge To Kill For

This is not your average paean to the pioneers of the high-tech industry. Who knew, for example, that Turing’s insight had to overcome two centuries of mathematical obsession with Newton’s (but not Leibniz's) infinitesimal calculus? And who knew that the development of the first digital computers was triggered by the military drive to create the hydrogen bomb? And who knew that the victory of binary arithmetic would be ensured by molecular biology? Certainly not me, and I suspect a number of other ignorant sods who presumed that this industry ‘just happened’, like milk suddenly appearing on the supermarket shelves with no clue about its origins in muck and mud.

Dyson, a son of the manse so to speak (son of Freeman Dyson, brother of Esther Dyson, and the grandson of Sir George Dyson), can be as concise as he is illuminating: “Three technological revolutions dawned in 1953: thermonuclear weapons, stored-program computers, and the elucidation of how life stores its own instructions as strings of DNA.” When these events are considered together rather than as independent strands of modern science, it becomes clear that nothing in our lives almost 70 years later is unconnected to war and the organisation for war provoked directly by the Second World War (and indirectly by the First). The American President Eisenhower’s concerns about the ‘military-industrial complex’ were proven justified not just about the defence industry but also about a new global society built upon inherently lethal knowledge.

The sources of this lethal knowledge were places like the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, the Los Alamos compound in New Mexico, and the Institute for Advanced Research In Princeton, New Jersey. These were modern monastic establishments whose existence was justified not by prayer but by thought, largely mathematical, and not by the construction of physical edifices but the creation of weapons of destruction. These were the forerunners of what would later be known as ‘think tanks’ and ‘skunk works,’ organisational entities devoted exclusively neither to economic success nor industrial productivity but technological innovation that would facilitate mass killing.

These new centres of thought were not isolated academic enclaves. They did assemble and concentrate the best intellects and coordinated their collective efforts in highly abstruse areas. But they also set agendas for university (and even high school) scientific education, successfully lobbied government about the priorities for military research spending, and shaped the interests of the most important private foundations that funded research from medicine to astrophysics.

Because they had no factories, no significant labour force, and no immediately commercial products, these establishments engaged in a sort of parallel politics. Although they were the driving force of the new military industrial complex, they were functionally invisible, in part because their work was confidential, but mostly because no one outside them could really understand what they were up to. They effectively constituted an independent empire of the mind, a Platonic haven of pure rationality, or at least what military requirements implied as rationality.

Most of the men (and they were almost all men) recruited into these establishments as thinkers or administrators were undoubtedly exceptionally clever in their respective fields. However, it is clear from the personal and institutional biographical detail which Dyson provides that very few of them would have achieved their ‘potential’ without this new form of scientific organisation. It is likely that they would have spent their lives in interesting but inconclusive research in dispersed academic institutions, or teaching Latin to high school seniors. The legendary names - Shannon, von Neumann, Ashby, Wiener, Mandelbrot, etc - would probably have been known but not with anything like the cultural force that they now have. These new organisations were intellectual king-makers.

So these military/intellectual enterprises, dedicated to refining the efficiency of human conflict, have transformed scientific culture. The concentration of intellectual talent, money and professional dominance means that there is only one path to scientific innovation - national defence, however widely that might be defined. Subsequent commercialisation, organised on similar lines in the Silicon Valleys and University Science Parks of the world, are functional subsidiaries of an invisible network, which few of us know anything about except when some ‘breakthrough’ (or breakdown) is announced in Wired or featured in Fast Company.

My lifetime is almost exactly contemporaneous with the digital epoch (Von Neumann died on my 10th birthday; Steve Jobs had just turned 2; Gates had just begun to walk). The presumptions, intentions, and fallacies of this epoch are things I share intellectually and emotionally with my generational cohort. This is Turing’s Cathedral, a cultural state of mind rather than a physical edifice. It took substantially less time to build than its medieval version. But its cultural influence is at least as great. Whether it will maintain itself as durably or with continued centrality is an open question, the answer to which seems to depend upon our fundamental but repressed attitude toward the god of war.

thomcote's review

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2.0

The historical portions are semi-interesting, if a bit dry, but as others have pointed out in the reviews it's apparent that Dyson doesn't really understand that much about how computers actually work, and definitely is not able to make it clear in this book.

It's clear he's more interested in speculating about the future of artificial intelligence and how technology and biology interact. All well and good, and he does connect it to some speculations made by Von Neumann and others. But Dyson frequently veers off into "are we using the computers or are they using us"-type hypotheticals where he compares the Internet and neural nets to biological beings with will instead of the very human-dependent systems held together by duct tape that they are. These sections of the book gave me a strong sense that Dyson is very passionate about technology but has rarely if ever actually worked with computers at a systems level.

I also felt Dyson needed to better address the fact that the early computers he writes about were built in large part for military purposes, particularly the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Maybe because his father was Freeman Dyson and he knew some of the subjects of the book personally, or for some other reason, he rarely engages with the role the IAS computers and the people who worked on them had in the perpetration of the two largest war crimes in history and the subsequent half century of cold war. I would say there are (must be) books with more objective and knowledgeable histories of the computer.

beckydham's review

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2.0

I was so interested to learn more about this, and found myself frustrated by all the jumping around and the blizzard of names and random anecdotes.

brittany_n_henke's review

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2.0

DNF because I couldn’t get into it. This book was just not for me!

benrogerswpg's review

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4.0

The History of Computing

I really enjoyed this book.

I got a lot out of it, as I myself am a programmer analyst.

This was quite interesting. I like learning about the history of computing.

Would recommend!

4.2/5

almartin's review against another edition

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4.0

one part micro-history of the MANIAC project @ the institute for advanced study/princeton, one part meditation on the reach/speed/scope of the digital universe. a history and philosophy of science indeed; dyson is alternates between reporting back the minutiae (logs, parts sourcing and internecine internal politics) of the the IAS computer and free-associating on the deep symmetry between digital systems and biological life.

fascinating; many stars for successfully tackling the past and future history of computing/math; many-1 stars for sometimes perplexing decisions to leap erratically around the chronology of events.

zfeig's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

3.5

A really interesting read, the book focuses on the simultaneous development of the computers and nuclear technology. It makes the argument that the advancement of computers is inextricably tied to the modeling needs of hydrogen bomb design and testing. It follows a Von Neumann and a few other key computing and weapons researchers that moved from the Manhattan Project to Princeton to push the limits of computing after WW2. The book makes it's claims by leaning on newly released archives from Princeton concerning Von Neumann's work, which shows much closer links between academic and defense research. It is interesting, but I didn't get a lot of new information from reading this book. A hidden gem was learning about the work of Nils Barricelli, who pioneered using algorithms to model evolution.