For the underlying science of radar, every introductory text will discuss the free-electron model of metals; Richard P. Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) uses his wise-guy tone to show how quantum electrodynamics can explain in far more accurate detail what really happens when radar pulses and metals meet.
TURING AND COMPUTERS
The book that restored Turing’s reputation was Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges (London: Vintage, 1993; original edition 1983). Even more than the Hamilton biography of Faraday, it’s written at a level that far surpasses the usual run of science histories: Hodges is a literary craftsman of the highest rank. He’s particularly good at showing how the very concept of transitory, deftly shifting software could have come from Turing’s years of having to pass as heterosexual, in a world wary of gays. The key years at Princeton and the importance of Turing’s sexuality are a running theme in Neal Stephenson’s terrific page-turner of a novel, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon, 1999). An ideal account of the Bletchley Park days is Simon Singh’s The Code Book (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), in which the details of cryptography become as compelling to the reader as they were to Turing.
Mathematically inclined readers will note that since ciphers can be applied and reversed in sequence, they follow the rules of group theory from abstract algebra—which is why mathematicians receive high salaries at GCHQ and the NSA. Israel Herstein’s perennial Topics in Algebra (Lexington, MA: Xerox College Publications, 1975) suggests what sophisticated codebreaking techniques this permits, and gives a feeling for the beauty that abstraction can give. Constance Reid’s tenderly written biography Hilbert (New York: Copernicus, 1996; original edition 1969), based on interviews with many of Hilbert’s colleagues, is the ideal nontechnical introduction to the seemingly fearsome Entscheidungsproblem. Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art, by Arthur I. Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), gracefully explicates the links that allow a Turing to see things no one had before.
For the early history of computing, Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Müller, Charles Babbage, and George and Edvard Scheutz, by Michael Lindgren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) has a fun look at the two Swedish engineers who actually built Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1—but then found, in the 1840s, that no one was ready to buy it. Turing and the Universal Machine: The Making of the Modern Computer, by Jon Agar (Cambridge, England: Icon Books [published in the U.S. by Totem Books], 2001) points out the way that the growth of social security programs and large bureaucracies in general made computers almost inevitable. The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklier and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal, by M. Mitchell Waldrop (London and New York: Viking, 2001), shows how the need to personalize the serried ranks of 1950s missile defense consoles led to the personal computer. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence, by Pamela McCorduck (Natick, MA: A.K. Peters, 2003; updated reissue of 1979 W. H. Freeman edition), brings alive the first generations of researchers who carried on, often with more enthusiasm than success, Turing’s dream of artificial intelligence.
Anyone who’s struggled to make large computer systems work—and anyone who’s wondered why it’s so hard—will enjoy my favorite of all books from a working system designer: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, anniversary edition 1995); it’s brought up to date by Eric Raymond’s bardlike collection The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 1999). Georgina Ferry’s A Computer Called Leo: Lyons Teashops and the World’s First Office Computer (London: Fourth Estate, 2003) is a plucky look at the not-quite-successful early British efforts to create a computer industry. Danny Hillis’s The Pattern on the Stone (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998) is the perfect brief introduction to the science of computing; Neil Gershenfeld’s The Physics of Information Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) is a more advanced look at how it’s done.
TRANSISTORS AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson interviewed a large number of the participants from the race to create a working transistor, which gives their Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) a great immediacy and authority. Hoddeson took a similar approach in her biography of the modest theorist who led the Bell Labs team, True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen, coauthored with Vicki Daitch (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2001). Both books show how a technology that seems obvious in retrospect can be cloudy and tentative at the moment it’s being born.
The underlying science is fundamental to every quantum mechanics text; two good examples are Quantum, by Jim Al-Khalili (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), and the somewhat more historically based The Quantum Universe, by Tony Hey and Patrick Walters (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987), which has such tidbits as an account of the unfortunate British radar engineer G. W. A. Dummer, who in 1952 came up with detailed plans for an integrated circuit—yet ended up being ignored, owing to the same administrative stodginess that had crushed Turing. His plans were independently developed in America to immense success nearly a decade later.
John Polkinghorne’s Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) is a stylish summary by a longtime Cambridge don, including the best brief recap I know of band structure within crystalline solids. Lawrence Krauss’s Fear of Physics: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Basic Books, 1994) is a playful yet sharp survey of the range of modern physics.
Rudolf Peierls gives a personal account of the key concept of “holes” in his whimsical, wise Bird of Passage: Recollections of a Physicist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). More-systematic analyses of each stage in this new science’s development are in Out of the Crystal Maze: Chapters from the History of Solid State Physics, edited by L. Hoddeson, E. Braun, J. Teichmann, and S. Weart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Readers with even a little German will enjoy exploring the wild psychological roots of Pauli’s conception of the Exclusion Principle, in Wolfgang Pauli und C. G. Jung. Ein Briefwechsel 1932–1958, ed. C. A. Meier (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 1992).
Two important technologies that didn’t have a place in this book are well introduced in Tube: The Invention of Television, by David E. Fisher and Marshal Jon Fisher (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1996), and How the Laser Happened, by Charles Townes (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1999). Aside from modestly recalling the quiet morning, waiting on a park bench in Washington, DC, when he first came up with the idea for a laser, Townes also describes his invention’s applications in industry, as well as the giant lasers that have formed naturally in outer space. The mix of billions of years of time, low density of matter, and massive available energy sources produced the ideal conditions for these beams to light up.
RESEARCH LABS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES
When you work at an organization that developed yet failed to profit from the mouse, the concept of digital folders, scrolling, pointing and clicking, and indeed almost all key properties of the personal computer, you get rather attuned to issues of a research laboratory’s failures and successes. This is perhaps why John Seely Brown, long-term director of Xerox PARC (where those failures occurred, though before his tenure) has written, with Paul Duguid, the very best account of how innovation in companies and in society actually operates: The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).
To go with that, Up the Infinite Corridor: MIT and the Technological Imagination, by Fred Hapgood (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993), is a calm anthropology of that strange, world-transforming creature known as the MIT engineer; Richard Rhodes’s edited anthology Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems and the Human
World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) samples the discussions about what they’ve achieved. Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998) belies its massive size: it’s a wonderfully readable account of how societies change, with a long chapter on creativity in Elvis Presley’s Memphis, Tennessee—right at the moment when transistor technology was about to arrive. The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, by John R. McNeill and William H. McNeill (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), puts information transformations at center stage in the history of civilization; in my estimation their book will be seen as a seminal guide to what our twenty-first century has to offer.
THE MIND AND BEYOND
There’s excellent background on every area of physiology in Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett’s beautifully illustrated The Oxford Companion to The Body, edited by Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Hodgkins’s own detailed account of the state of play two decades after his and Huxley’s main breakthrough is The Conduction of the Nervous Impulse (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963); even more telling for his own experiences is the quiet, long autobiography he wrote in 1992: Chance and Design (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press). For the brain overall, Susan GreenWeld provides a schoolmistressly brisk account in The Private Life of the Brain (New York: John Wiley, 2000); John McCrone’s Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness (London: Faber and Faber, 1999) is a more easygoing, detailed exploration. David Hubel’s Eye, Brain and Vision (San Francisco: Scientific American Library, 1988) is a fine vision of what seeing entails, presented by the scientist who did much to reveal it. He also writes well, forgoing the usual phrases about ions transferring across membranes, for the vividness of “little machine-like proteins…which seize ions and eject them from the cell.”
A beautiful intellectual history is From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie, by Leonora Cohen Rosenfield (New York: Octagon Books, 1968), which shows, in appropriately teleological fashion, how the intellectual preconceptions the nineteenth-century physiologists needed came about. P. Cranefield’s article “The organic physics of 1847 and the biophysics of today” in The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 12 (October 1957) goes into the seminal, semi-secret meeting in Berlin in 1847 when four young scientists decided it was time to break from all prior religious authority and measure the finite speed of electric currents within nerves; Leo Koenigsberger’s biography Hermann von Helmholtz: A Life, translated by F. A. Welby (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1906) shows the tension the most important thinker of that group felt as their project was about to begin. Thomas Kuhn’s essay “Energy Conservation As an Example of Simultaneous Discovery” in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977) puts their work in context, showing that from the moment of Faraday’s 1831 experiment (which finally disproved Volta’s vague contact theory of electrical generation), the stage was set for at least half a dozen investigators in the subsequent two decades to “independently” discover the conservation of energy. A Short History of Anesthesia, by G. B. Rushman et al. (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996), traces scientific physiology infiltrating into the most hidebound of surgical practices.
On the developments in brain receptors that led to our targeted mood-altering drugs, Solomon Snyder’s Brainstorming: The Science and Politics of Opiate Research (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) shows the author as a wise, avuncular laboratory chief; the memoir by one of his most disgruntled ex-colleagues, Molecules of Emotion, by Candace Pert (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), presents a somewhat different view. In either case, Snyder’s survey Drugs and the Brain (San Francisco: Scientific American Library, 1986) is a good sourcebook for the basic operation of synapses and receptors. For what the Prozac revolution means, there’s no text better than Peter Kramer’s kind, insightful Listening to Prozac (London: Fourth Estate, 1994).
Finally, to explore more from the part introductions and epilogue, the late Heinz Pagels’s The Cosmic Code (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982) is a poetic masterpiece on the microworld and macroworld, while Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (London: Deutsch, 1977) shows how even simple high school equations, properly understood, are capable of describing the universe’s Wrst moments in tremendous detail. Martin Rees’s Our Cosmic Habitat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), and also The Five Ages of the Universe, by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) demonstrate the grandeur and perspective that the Wnest of astrophysicists can provide.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Once again this book grew out of lectures from my years of teaching at Oxford, for which many thanks are owed to Ralf Dahrendorf, Avi Shlaim, and Roger Owen, all then of St. Anthony’s College. The idea of turning it into a text that dealt as much with practical technology as with the underlying science came in part from time I spent with research or scenario teams at a number of great enterprises, most especially Microsoft, BMW, Shell, and PWzer; in part that angle also came from my extended family’s laconic attitude toward the world: a feeling that it is an odd and marvelous place, but that with calm understanding—and a respect for practical skills—we can navigate our way within it.
My uncle Murray Alpert, who died just as I was finishing this text, was exceptionally kind in passing that attitude on to me. He was one of the longest serving members of the U.S. Air Force, joining the Army Air Corps shortly before World War II, and finishing in the era of F-117 Stealth fighters. He had a calm attitude to technological jobs, making little distinction between putting in the plumbing for a house’s shower on a quiet weekend and supervising the electrical system for one of these massive military jets. I loved watching him work.
The book itself begins with my late father, first as a little boy, and then as a young man moving to Chicago in the 1920s; it ends with my mother, who was the Ohio farm girl who met him shortly after World War II, and with whom she began the family that was around her, nearly sixty years later, when she shared his first love letters. Any insight this book might have comes from what I’ve learned from them. My mother’s two brothers, Len and Gene Passell, and her sisters, Sarah Alpert and Doris Easton, also shared a wonderfully no-nonsense attitude: I remember with great affection, when they were all in their seventies or eighties, watching the television news together at the farmhouse in Ohio and realizing: there is more than four hundred years of accumulated memory here, and I’m getting to share that through their apt, wise words.
A great number of friends helped at various stages of the project, including Rebecca Abrams, Shanda Bahles, Sunny Bates, Julia Bindman, Jasmine Birtles, Doug Borden, Richard Cohen, Esther Eidinow, Janet Evans, Anne and Chris Finn, Betty Sue Flowers, Brandy Freisinger, Matt Golde, Rhonda Goldstein, Joe Hajnal, Tim Harford, Matthew Hoffman, Natasha Illum Berg, Joanna Kalmer, Tara Lemay, Adam Levy, Suzanne Levy, Sue Liburd, Karen Liebrich, Peter Main, Terry Manning, Arthur Miller, Fran Monks, Dan Newman, Mia Nybrant, Teresa Poole, Ramana Rao, Marica Rosengard, Harriet Rubin, Jonathan Ruffle, Tira Shubart, Julia Stuart, Jennifer Sullivan, Ilan Troen and above all Gabrielle Walker. I’d like to thank them all individually, but for once I’m lost for words: all I can note is that their kindness, and insight, transformed the book for the better.
This project was begun at Crown with Emily Loose and ably completed by Rachel Klayman, all under the helpful supervision of Kristin Kiser and Steve Ross; their forbearance in dealing with an author who always seemed to want “just one more change” is most appreciated. Crown is a big firm, but somehow makes authors feel part of a community. I remember one time, chatting with Rachel and Kristin and Steve, and exploring just for fun how Erik Larson put together his books: that led to my turning to Isaac’s Storm, and from it getting the idea for the it
alicized framing pages that set the electricity story in a wider astronomical perspective. Without their conversation, I never would have tried that.
The actual writing was begun with the author and his papers spread out on the front seat of a parked Land Cruiser 6,000 feet up in Tanzania, windows rolled up in a vain attempt to block the howling gale up from the Great Rift Valley, while an enthusiastic Scandinavian friend was calling out—it was hard to hear her over the wind’s roar—that it wasn’t usually this cold! That any moment now the wind would fade! She was right, albeit off by a few hours, and sitting on her balcony a little later, watching the sunset and regaining my circulation, gossiping about this and that, and then half-closing my eyes to listen to her read aloud, I realized what the tone of the book could be. The world is old, but electricity is older. It shaped the Masai Hills I could vaguely see; it’s shaped the lives of everyone who’s walked across those hills as well.
The book is now being completed, five miles over the Atlantic, jetting in tranquil comfort beside my eight-year-old daughter, home soon to her big brother. How they helped they will only realize later. When there was a lot of writing to do they chimed in with a cascade of eager questions; when I lost focus in any of the chapters, I’d try out fresh stories as we walked, skipped, scooted and otherwise locomoted our way to school in the morning.
I did some of the writing at night but mostly took to getting up very early and doing it then. We have a big kitchen, with big windows, and I loved waking in the dark, with London quiet outside; then puttering to the kitchen, and making coffee or tea before spreading out my papers on the wooden table where we’d later have our breakfast. Usually I’d have stopped to look in on the kids in their rooms—Sam with his giant Homer Simpson cut-out; Sophie with the fairy castles on the wall—but even when I hadn’t, I felt a great tranquillity just from knowing they were there.
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