Turing's Cathedral

The Origins of the Digital Universe

De: George Dyson

Narrado por: Arthur Morey

“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.

A Book Better in Print for Non-Coders

I think it is a book chock full of info, but it is presented in such a random manner: 1903, 1956, 1943, 1998, that I couldn’t keep it straight. Now digital data is part of analog machines...now analog machines are being used in a future time (surely that can’t be so!)...I finally began ignoring the dates and tried to hang onto the names—with about equal success.

The recording was so slow I increased the speed to 1.25

If you want to know why the modern world is the way it is, you’ll want to read tbos

“Turning’s Cathedral” is one of the most fascinating history books I’ve read or listen to. It’s not a conventional book but Dyson’s sense of the importance of this somewhat hidden (in lain sight) history fascination with his subject, and clarity of writing will draw you in.
The metaphor of cathedral is apt, since like the peasants, craftsmen and nobility in a medieval town we all now live and work in the shadow of what Gödel, Turning, Johnny and Klari von Neumann, and the others began constructing.

Tremendous

A tremendous walk through the foundations of our modern digital world. If you have av interest in how we got to a world with smart phones, Google, Facebook, and broadband Internet, this audiobook is well worth your time.

Good history, strange theories, terrible narration

In sheer amount of research as well in the ability to assemble the data into a cogent narrative, this is an impressive book. I learned a great deal about the history of computing and other areas of science and engineering in the early 20th century. The book discusses both the technical details and the political and cultural implications of inventions, which gives it incredible richness. It does make some potentially controversial claims, most basically in its very premise that the IAS computer, aka MANIAC, was the primary event in the creation of what Dyson terms the "digital universe." This term itself, which he does not use lightly, hints at the hard-to-believe notion he promotes, namely that the internet is a living thing, or at least a medium inhabited by software life. He presents this as an observatin on the present state of software, not a prediction. He also seems to take for granted that the development of the hydrogen bomb, which many of the book's protagonists were involved with, was evil, and so he reports on which of them expressed remorse for this invention, but does not explain the rationales of those, such as von Neumann, who never regretted it. All of these claims are interesting and I would certainly have liked to hear the arguments favouring them, and refuting their refutations, in greater depth. I feel the book is weekend by taking such ideas somewhat for granted.

The narration was awful. I feel bad criticising Arthur Morey, who sounds like a nice guy, especially since I would probably be an awful narrator myself. But I am disturbed by the number of interesting books that use him as narrator here on Audible. He sounds equal parts indifferent and puzzled by what he reads. His voice is grating, tired, monotone. He seems to misplace the emphasis nearly every other sentence. On its face, such a miss rate makes spoken English nearly unintelligible, unless I make the conscious effort of guessing what he was trying to say. I listen to audiobooks so that I can read in distracting circumstances such as commuting or lunch. I do not welcome this additional source of distraction. I have come to think twice before spending a credit on book narrated by him. I wish they would redo all of them with someone who seems to care about and understand the text.

A fascinating look at the people behind it all

What did you love best about Turing's Cathedral?

It gave an interesting perspective about how and why the modern day computer was invented, including some amusing insights to some of the brightest minds of the 20th century.

What did you like best about this story?

That it was real :)

What about Arthur Morey’s performance did you like?

I thought it was well executed, as the book doesn't really feature any dialog or characters the "neutral" delivery was appreciated.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Nothing in particular, but there were a lot of little chuckles when it came to some of these people's behaviour. In no small part because it makes these mythical people human.

Any additional comments?

I wish there would have been a bit more attention being paid to other pioneers in the computing field, but having said that, their legacy really lives on by the technology I use right now to write these words so: *raises glass*