Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

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.

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.

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

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.”

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

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.

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

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