“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral , George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.

Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.

Dyson’s account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.

How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.

喬治·戴森 (George Dyson)，美國著名的科技史學傢和非虛構類圖書作傢，研究方嚮包括技術與物理環境的演變及社會學。作品包括研究數字計算和通信係統的《計算機生命天演論》（Darwin among the Machines）、與太空探索相關的《獵戶座計劃》（Project Orion）以及研究 阿留申人海豹皮船發展演變過程的《海豹皮船》（Baidarka）。TED演講人。曾在學術機構、企業和技術會議上廣泛發錶演講，話題涉及計算的曆史、算法和智能的發展、通信係統、空間探索等，講述瞭技術在現代社會演變的曆史背景，並在科技和互聯網發展方嚮等問題上，提齣瞭發人深省的理念。