Turing's Cathedral

by George Dyson

  Weather Bureau, U.S., 9.1, 9.2, 9.3

  weather modification and control, 8.1, 9.1

  weather prediction, see numerical weather prediction

  Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (Richardson, 1922)

  “Weather Proposal, Outline of” (Zworykin, 1945)

  Weaver, Warren, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.1, 8.2

  Web 2.0

  Weisskopf, Victor

  WEIZAC (Weizmann Automatic Computer), 15.1, 18.1

  Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot), 15.1, 18.1, 18.2

  Wells, H. G.

  Weyl, Hermann, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 4.2, 6.1

  Wheeler, David, 14.1, 15.1

  Wheeler, John, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2

  Whitehead, Alfred North

  Who Invented the Computer? (Burks and Burks, 2003)

  Wiener, Norbert (1894–1964), 3.1, 7.1, 9.1, 12.1, 14.1, 15.1, 15.2, 16.1

  and antiaircraft fire control

  on applied mathematics

  and Julian Bigelow, 7.1, 7.2

  and Brownian motion

  career between World War I and World War II

  and ECP, 5.1, 7.1

  and Leibniz

  and MIT

  and numerical weather prediction, 9.1, 18.1

  on quantum mechanics

  on theory of communication

  and von Neumann, 5.1, 14.1

  warnings about technology

  in World War I, 3.1, 3.2

  in World War II, 7.1, 7.2

  Wigner, Eugene (1902–1995), 4.1, 10.1, 15.1, 18.1

  on von Neumann, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3

  Wilkes, Maurice (1913–2010)

  Williams, Frederic C. (1911–1977), 7.1, 8.1, 8.2

  Williams, Samuel B.

  Williams (memory) tubes, 1.1, 8.1, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 17.1, 18.1, 18.2

  difficulties with, 8.1, 9.1

  vs. Selectron

  and storage vs. display

  Wilson, John W., 8.1, 8.2

  Wilson, Woodrow, 3.1, 3.2

  Windansea Beach (La Jolla), 18.1, 18.2

  Wisconsin, University of

  Wizard of Oz, The

  Woese, Carl

  Wolfe, Kirke, 12.1, 12.2

  Wolfe, Tom

  Wolfowitz, Jacob

  Women’s Royal Navy Service (WREN)

  Womersley, John. R., 13.1, 13.2

  Woodrow Wilson School (Princeton University)

  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

  Woolf, Harry

  words (of memory), 5.1, 5.2

  “Work of Many People, The” (Teller, 1955)

  world government, 6.1, 6.2

  World Set Free, The (Wells, 1914)

  World War I, 3.1, 6.1, 6.2, 9.1

  World War II, 4.1, 9.1, 11.1

  World Wide Web

  as pulse-frequency coded system

  Worth, Joseph

  X-ray crystallography, 8.1, 18.1

  X rays, 5.1, 8.1, 12.1

  York (refrigeration unit), 8.1, 9.1

  Zuse, Konrad, on self-reproducing automata

  Zworykin, Tatiana

  Zworykin, Vladimir Kosma, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 8.1, 8.2, 9.1, 9.2, 12.1, 18.1

  childhood and education, in Russia

  and the ENIAC

  on evolution of electronics

  and FBI

  and numerical weather prediction

  and origins of ECP

  and RCA

  in World War I and Bolshevik Revolution

  Zygalski, Henryk

  The digital universe in 1953. A 32-by-32 array of charged spots—serving as working memory, not display—is visible on the face of a Williams cathode-ray storage tube (stage thirty-six) in this diagnostic photograph from the maintenance logs of the Institute for Advanced Study Electronic Computer Project, February 11, 1953. (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study)

  In the beginning was the command line. “Orders: Let a word (40bd) be 2 orders, each order = C(A) = Command (1–10, 21–30) • Address (11–20, 31–40),” reads the top line of this undated note, saved by Julian Bigelow and evidently written, given the use of the abbreviation bd for binary digit, in late 1945 or early 1946, before the introduction of the term bit. (Bigelow family)

  An IAS General Arithmetic Operating Log entry for March 4, 1953, notes “over to” a thermonuclear weapons design code, immediately after Nils Barricelli’s numerical evolution code (terminating at memory location 18,8) is run for the first time. (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study)

  Alan Turing at age five. (King’s College Archive, Cambridge; courtesy of the Turing family)

  John von Neumann at age seven. (Nicholas Vonneumann and Marina von Neumann Whitman)

  Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” was published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society shortly after Turing’s arrival in Princeton in 1936. The Institute for Advanced Study’s copy was consulted so frequently it became unbound. (Institute for Advanced Study)

  Colossus at Bletchley Park in 1943. To help decipher digitally encrypted enemy telecommunications during World War II, British cryptanalysts built a series of versatile, if not yet universal, logical computing machines. Supervised by Dorothy Du Boisson and Elsie Booker, “Colossus” compares a coded sequence stored in an internal vacuum-tube memory with a sequence stored on external punched paper tape by scanning at high speed with photoelectric reading heads. (National Archives Image Library, Kew, U.K.)

  Alan Turing (far left) in 1946. With the war over, Turing began designing the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) to be constructed at the National Physical Laboratory in London, while von Neumann began designing the Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer (MANIAC) to be constructed at the IAS. Turing’s design was influenced by von Neumann’s implementation, and von Neumann’s implementation was influenced by Turing’s ideas. (King’s College Library, Cambridge)

  John von Neumann and the MANIAC in 1952. At hip level are 12 of the 40 Williams cathode-ray memory tubes, storing 1,024 bits in each individual tube, for a total capacity of 5 kilobytes (40,960 bits). In the foreground is the 7-inch-diameter 41st monitor stage, allowing the contents of the memory to be observed while in use. (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study; photograph by Alan Richards)

  “The Road from York to Delaware Falls,” formerly a Lenni Lenape footpath across the “waist” of New Jersey between the Raritan and Delaware estuaries, with Greenland’s Tavern at the halfway point. The diagonal line marks the division between East and West New Jersey, decided by a meeting at the tavern in 1683. The site of the Stony Brook Quaker settlement and future town of Princeton is near the center of the illustration, just below the f in “from,” in this detail from “A new mapp of East and West New Jarsey: being an exact survey taken by Mr. John Worlidge,” London, 1706. (Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)

  Fuld Hall, headquarters of the Institute for Advanced Study, was constructed in 1939 at Olden Farm in Princeton, New Jersey, on land that had changed hands only twice since the ownership of William Penn. (Abraham Flexner, I Remember [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940])

  Oswald Veblen, nephew of Thorstein Veblen (who coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 The Theory of the Leisure Class), was a topologist, geometer, ballistician, and outdoorsman who, as a student, earned one prize in sharpshooting and another in math. The first professor hired by the Institute for Advanced Study, in 1932, it was Veblen who had suggested the idea of an autonomous mathematical institute to Simon Flexner, at the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1923. (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study; photograph by Wilhelm J. E. Blaschke, Oslo, 1936)

  Norbert Wiener (far right), with U.S. Army mathematicians at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, 1918, worked on ballistics with Oswald Veblen in World War I and founded the field of cybernetics based on his work on antiair
craft fire control with Julian Bigelow in World War II. (MIT Museum)

  Abraham Flexner, who began his career as a high school teacher in Louisville, Kentucky, envisioned the Institute for Advanced Study as a refuge from “dull and increasingly frequent meetings of committees, groups, or the faculty itself. Once started, this tendency toward organization and formal consultation could never be stopped.” (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study)

  On the eve of war in Europe, in October 1939, Abraham Flexner announced in Harper’s Magazine that, “among the most striking and immediate consequences of foreign intolerance I may, I think, fairly cite the rapid development of the Institute for Advanced Study … a paradise for scholars who, like poets and musicians, have won the right to do as they please.” (Harper’s Magazine)

  Founder’s Rock, at the entrance to the six-hundred-acre Institute Woods. The Bambergers, Newark dry goods merchants who endowed both Flexner’s educational experiment and Veblen’s land acquisitions, urged that less attention be devoted to land and buildings, and more attention “to the cause of social justice which we have deeply at heart.” (Courtesy of the author)

  IAS School of Mathematics, meeting in Fuld Hall, 1940s. Left to right: James Alexander, Marston Morse, Albert Einstein, Frank Aydelotte, Hermann Weyl, and Oswald Veblen (dressed, as usual, for the woods). Von Neumann was likely absent due to wartime consulting work. (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study)

  Oskar Morgenstern (left) and John von Neumann (right), coauthors of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, at Spring Lake, New Jersey (the closest beach to Princeton), in 1946. “We often went to Sea Girt,” remembers Morgenstern in John von Neumann, a documentary produced by the Mathematical Association of America in 1966. “Not to swim, because he didn’t like that kind of exercise, but to walk along the beach. We had very serious discussions, and these walks sort of crystallized them. Then we would go home and write things down.” (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study; photograph courtesy of Dorothy Morgenstern)

  Albert Einstein (left) and Kurt Gödel (right) arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study during its first year of operation in 1933. Gödel’s later years were dominated by two interests: the work of G. W. Leibniz, which Gödel believed contained hidden insights into the nature of digital computing, and an unorthodox solution to Einstein’s equations, implying a rotating universe, which Gödel, with Einstein’s encouragement, had derived for himself. (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study; photograph by Oskar Morgenstern)

  John von Neumann doing mathematics at age eleven, with his cousin Katalin (Lili) Alcsuti observing, in 1915. “She greatly admired, but didn’t understand what John was writing,” explains Nicholas Vonneumann. “He used such graphics as the letter sigma and so on.” (Nicholas Vonneumann and Marina von Neumann Whitman)

  John von Neumann (top left, sitting on gun barrel), visiting an Austro-Hungarian Army artillery position, ca. 1915, with mother Margit (née Kann), father Max von Neumann, and, diagonally along the gun carriage to lower right: brother Michael,?, cousin Lili Alcsuti, and brother Nicholas (still clothed in a dress). (Nicholas Vonneumann and Marina von Neumann Whitman)

  John von Neumann (far left) at breakfast in Budapest, early 1930s, after the marriage of his cousin Katalin (Lili) Alcsuti to Balazs Pastory. Seated, left to right: John, the newlyweds, Mariette Kövesi von Neumann, the Pastorys, Michael von Neumann, Lily Kann Alcsuti, Agost Alcsuti. (Nicholas Vonneumann and Marina von Neumann Whitman)

  John von Neumann’s identity card issued by the University of Berlin before he resigned in protest against the Nazi purge in 1933. “The German trains from Dresden are full of soldiers,” he reported on a visit five years later. “I looked at Berlin very seriously. It may be for the last time.” (Von Neumann Papers, Library of Congress; courtesy of Marina von Neumann Whitman)

  “He seemed to be always willing to go wherever the action was,” says Françoise Ulam of John von Neumann. “For a non-athletic, non-outdoorsy person he could surprise you sometimes!” According to Atle Selberg, “he was very good at estimating things. For instance, with one glance he could look at a pearl necklace around a lady’s neck and tell you about how many pearls there were.” (Stanislaw Ulam papers, American Philosophical Society)

  Princeton in the 1930s. Left to right: Angela (Turinsky) Robertson, Mariette (Kövesi) von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Amelia Frank Wigner, John von Neumann, Edward Teller, and, on the floor, Howard Percy (“Bob”) Robertson (teaching relativity to Alan Turing at the time). Except for physicists H. P. Robertson (from Hoquiam, Washington) and Amelia Frank (from Madison, Wisconsin), the celebrants on this occasion, probably during the 1936–1937 winter holidays, were all from Budapest. “He did have the ability, at a party, to show off by drinking anyone under the table,” says Marina von Neumann of her father in an interview on May 3, 2010. “But I never saw him ever drink anything alone.” (Marina von Neumann Whitman)

  John von Neumann, Richard Feynman, and Stanislaw Ulam, at the lodge at Bandelier National Monument (near Los Alamos), 1949. “We used to go for walks … in the canyons … and von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in,” says Feynman. “So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice.” (Photograph by Nicholas Metropolis; courtesy of Claire and Françoise Ulam)

  Trinity nuclear test (20 kilotons) at the Alamogordo Bombing Range, White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, twelve seconds after detonation at 5:29 a.m., July 16, 1945. The high-explosive-driven implosion that triggered the plutonium-fueled explosion was designed using von Neumann’s theory of reflected shock waves and led directly to the development of the hydrogen bomb. (U.S. Army/Los Alamos National Laboratory/National Archives and Records Administration Record Group Number 434)

  The U.S. Army’s ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was publicly unveiled at the Moore School, University of Pennsylvania, on February 16, 1946. According to von Neumann, this was “an absolutely pioneer venture, the first complete automatic, all-purpose digital electronic computer.” Left to right: Homer Spence, Presper Eckert (setting function table), John Mauchly, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, Herman Goldstine, Ruth Licterman (with punched card input-output equipment at far right). (University of Pennsylvania Archives)

  The “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” issued by the Moore School on June 30, 1945, established what would become known as the “von Neumann Architecture,” characterized by the distinction between Central Arithmetic, Central Control, Memory, and Input, Output, Recording Medium—identified here as “cards, tape.” A “standard number” (soon to be termed a “word”) is specified as 30 binary digits. (Princeton University Libraries)

  Vladimir Zworykin (center), pheasant hunting near Amwell, New Jersey, with Bogdan Maglich (right) and an unidentified RCA engineer (left) in 1978. Zworykin began working on the problem of television with Boris Rosing in Russia in 1906, and, after leading RCA’s development of commercial television in the United States, became the director of RCA’s Princeton Laboratories in 1941. (Bogdan Maglich)

  “Meeting #1” of the Institute for Advanced Study Electronic Computer Project was held on November 12, 1945, in Vladimir Zworykin’s office at RCA. “Words coding the orders are handled in the memory just like numbers,” it was announced. This mingling of data and instructions broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things, allowing code to take over the world. (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study)

  Bernetta Miller, pictured here with her Moisant-Blériot monoplane in 1912, was the fifth woman to earn a pilot’s license in the United States, and became the Institute for Advanced Study’s administrative secretary in 1941. (Courtesy Joseph Felsenstein; photographer unknown)

  Akrevoe Kondopria (now Emmanouilides), Herman Goldst
ine’s secretary on the ENIAC project in Philadelphia, was invited by Goldstine and von Neumann to join the IAS Electronic Computer Project and reported to work on June 3, 1946. Seventeen years old at the time, she remained with the project until 1949. (Photograph by Willis Ware, ca. 1947; courtesy of Akrevoe Emmanouilides)