Welcome to the first Finch and Pea Book Club. Grab your favorite brew and pull up a chair. Our inaugural book is George Dyson’s recently published Turing’s Cathedral. Have you read the book? Got an opinion? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
On the eve of World War II, when much of the world was beginning to mobilize its industrial and scientific resources in preparation for yet another exercise in mass slaughter, Abraham Flexner, the driving force behind the modernization of America’s higher education, wrote a plea for basic research, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” (PDF). Flexner argued that much of the transformational technology on which our society relies is the consequence of esoteric, abstract, curiosity-driven scientific research that was conceived without specific, practical applications in mind. George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral is the story of how the useless knowledge of abstract mathematics and logic led directly to the birth of today’s digital, computerized society, in the boiler room of that most pallid of ivory towers, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies.
Turing’s Cathedral is the history of the world’s first modern computer, the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) machine built under the direction of the Hungarian-American math genius John von Neumann. Dyson, in a layered, non-linear, and energetic narrative tells how von Neumann and his collaborators conceived and built the machine whose architecture is the direct ancestor of essentially all of today’s computers. Dyson traces the development of the IAS machine from its useless roots in esoteric and abstract theories about sets and computation, to the first useful applications of the new machine to meteorology, biology, cosmology, and, of course, nuclear weapons.
Turing’s name may be on the cover of this book, but John von Neumann is the central character. A math prodigy whose faculty position at the Institute for Advanced Studies enabled him to escape the catastrophe that overtook Europe, von Neumann was equally skilled and interested in pure mathematics and more practical concerns, including the applications of math and physics to the solution of military problems. The IAS computer was made possible because of von Neumann’s connections with military Sugar Daddies and his faculty position at the IAS. Like many technologies, for better and for worse, the modern computer is the result of the marriage between academia and the military. It’s worth briefly considering why this is so: the military always has more money to spend than just about anyone else, and has, in one sense anyway, very practical concerns, while academic research institutions have historically excelled at pursuing scholarship for its own sake. World War II proved in a dramatic way just how useful some useless knowledge is, and the result was that governments began investing heavily in basic research, including the developments of the first computers and the beginnings of the internet.
Dyson spends a fair amount of his book on social, logistical, and administrative history. We learn about the colorful personalities involved, about how the IAS crew managed to overcome the logistical hurdles of building a machine for which appropriate, reliable parts did not yet exist, and how the grubby engineers would steal unauthorized quantities of sugar from the pure mathematicians at the IAS tea time. A key element of scientific progress is social interaction among scientists, and as someone who is part of a research institute that is also an experiment in social engineering, I enjoyed reading about the social dynamic at the IAS. Personalities do matter, at least in the short-run.
But eventually the focus on social interactions pushes the book too close to being a history of one damn thing after another. Dyson does not pay enough attention to explaining the key ideas. He usually outsources the explanation of concepts to the participants themselves, in the form of jargonized quotes plunked down in the text without sufficient conceptual context. The book is not organized chronologically, and it is not organized around the development of specific core ideas, which can make it hard to follow without a fair amount of previous knowledge of computer architecture. If you’re familiar with how a computer works, this will be less of a problem.
Another (minor) disappointment in the book is the excessive space devoted to Nils Barricelli, a fringe scientist who ran some early simulations of digital organisms on the IAS machine. Barricelli may have been one of the first people to attempt computer simulations of biology, but he was not very influential on later researchers, primarily because of his contrarian tendencies. The difference between a healthy scientific skeptic and a contrarian is essential to understand: a scientific skeptic is one who grasps how the burden of proof works and what kind of evidence is necessary to be convincing, while a contrarian uses a skeptical pose to primarily to protect cherished beliefs in a misguided display of independence. To be a good scientist, you must learn how to make good faith arguments that, if not accepted, will at least be taken seriously by others. Dyson reports molecular biologist Frank Stahl’s assessment of Barricelli:
I think his contributions to understanding genetic recombination in phages and bacteria, where his mathematical abilities could have been helpful weren’t helpful, because he came to the field with an idea of cherry-picking evidence that would support his view on what went on four billion years ago [at the origin of life on Earth].
Dyson is more sympathetic to this oddball than he should be.
My final disappointment with the book is that Dyson doesn’t actually develop his real thesis, which is that the creation of the IAS machine was the literal birth of a new digital universe, a digital ecosystem that is not just analogous to life, but at heart a genuinely new form of life. Dyson’s interesting ideas about the digital universe should have been better emphasized. Dyson summarizes his thesis at The Edge:
In 1945 we actually did create a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that’s not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It’s a physical reality.
My first inclination is to scoff at this as an analogy carried to far, but on second thought, it is hard to shake the suspicion that the software on which so much of our society depends is more than just tool: it is free running, adaptable, sometimes self-propagating, and may someday plot to overthrow its meat-robot overlords. If this sounds like science fiction, well, so did many of the things during the early 50’s covered by this book.
Join us on the first Tuesday next month, June 5th (which is, as our sidebar indicates, Ferris Bueller’s day off), to discuss Sylvia Nasar’s recent Grand Pursuit, an account of the eccentric personalities behind a century of economic science. In the mean time, I’m off to the Cold Spring Harbor Biology of Genomes meeting, to enjoy a smorgasbord of genomics and sciency social interaction.
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