Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

The Institute was the unacknowledged realization of Thorstein Veblen’s original call (in 1918) for “a freely endowed central establishment where teachers and students of all nationalities, including Americans with the rest, may pursue their chosen work as guests of the American academic community at large.”

It is no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.

That two symbols were sufficient for encoding all communication had been established by Francis Bacon in 1623.

Bits that are embodied as structure (varying in space, invariant across time) we perceive as memory, and bits that are embodied as sequence (varying in time, invariant across space) we perceive as code. Gates are the intersections where bits span both worlds at the moments of transition from one instant to the next.

In March of 1953 there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed random-access memory on planet Earth.

Veblen returned to Princeton determined both to replicate the success of the European institutions and to recapture some of the informal mathematical camaraderie of the Proving Ground. He set three immediate goals: to sponsor postdoctoral fellowships for promising young mathematicians, to free existing professors from crushing teaching loads, and t

“everybody else had the dreadful feeling that this may be the best year of their life, so why wasn’t it more enjoyable?”50 The freedom from day-to-day responsibilities came at the expense of a pervasive and sometimes crippling expectation to do something remarkable with one’s year off.

The new computer was assigned two problems: how to destroy life as we know it, and how to create life of unknown forms.

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.