Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

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

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.

Turing’s question was what it would take for machines to begin to think. Von Neumann’s question was what it would take for machines to begin to reproduce.

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

Princeton University professors referred to “the Institute for Advanced Salaries,” while Princeton University graduate students referred to “the Institute for Advanced Lunch.”

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

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.”

“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.

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.