Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

“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.