up. and now, tonight's program. the world and have it at princeton university by alan turing and john von neumann more than seven decades ago seems distant and inaccessible in many ways. and yet the george dyson brilliant new book, "turing's cathedral: the origins of the digital universe," makes it as vivid and relevant as today. indeed, they could hardly be more relevant. the world we inhabit, the cathedral described by alan turing, is governed come powered and driven by new variations on the early code and machine to be envisioned and built. it would be simplistic to say that in von neumann's case the stories are important. because as dyson writes, the digital universe and hydrogen bomb were brought into existence by the same team. von neumann's team at the institute for advanced study in princeton. turing's cathedral deals with

those stories in detail, what is far more profound, however, what would also deal with tonight is the legacy and the implications of those fateful days. is at the hydrogen bomb itself is not faithful enough. at the center of it, john van norman, that petition, teacher, integer, towering intellect, the physicist edward teller describes john von neumann and is what it is a mentally superhuman race ever developed, its members would resemble johnny von neumann. this is not george dyson first attempt to help us understand both a technical and human level the way we coexist and co-create with computing. he is the author of "darwin among the machines" as well, two other books also, and he writes and speaks frequently on this subject. and this is not totally his day job because as you may know he is in addition to being a science bashing sciences can have sort and other, a boat builder and designer. ladies and gentlemen, please

join in welcomin me in welcomine dyson. [applause] >> thank you very much. welcome. >> thank you. >> so glad to have you here, george. >> a fantastic exhibit. in comprehensively good. >> thank you very much. we are delighted to hear and you are among friends but these are your people, george. [laughter] >> will have some fun tonight. let's talk about first the process of writing the book. now, you have an intensely personal connection to princeton and the advanced, the institute of advanced study because of your father, freeman dyson spent and my mother. >> to talk a bit about that, what it was like to grow up and be among people at ias? >> i've got to be careful what i say, but for a child, for a young boy who is not that

interesting a place because it was popular to many by theoris theorists. the most exciting thing really were the chalkboards. they still use chalkboard at the time but there was no powerpoint. but there was this outbuilding in the back where julian bigelow was building this machine. that's what interested me. so i spent a lot of my time poking around, taking things apart that were discarded as scrap. >> there's a famous story about your babysitter, einstein secretary. >> yeah. people behind every great man, there is somebody who keeps track, that was helen, who was fantastically intelligent woman. she was sort of, she was einstein's search engine.

[laughter] when einstein needed something, with howling, knew where everything was. but she didn't have her own children. she grew up in a family, i care member, 11 children? a huge number of children in her family. she missed that so she sort of adopted our family, i had four younger sisters. she really was their babysitter and my job was to make her life difficult while she was trying to babysit my sister's. but i was really being difficult one day and she said stop, you know, we will. i've read all the books. and she went to the shelf and pull down the book and gave it to me and said read this. that was the first adult book that i read. unit, that changed my life. >> that really did change her life spent and she had the perception to see. i don't think that was an accident. i'm going to give this give this book. >> so hang out with his crowd as

a kid, did it become a natural thing for you to be curious about who they were and about von neumann and the meaning of competing? >> that came later really thanks to esther, my sister who had influence on the community here. thanks to esther i started going to hurt technology conferences in the early '80s, and i saw this whole world, you know, personal computer was flourishing, and then i realized i knew that came from this outbuilding behind where i had grown up. and i wanted to understand the. that's when i became interested in sort of going back and finding out what really happened. and i have to say, out right, that i am less interested in who is, i'm not trying to find it was first. i'm trying to find out what really happened thank you specifically say this is not about the first spent that first

computer, not the first electronic computer. it's not the first stored program computer. you can almost say maybe it's the first computer with a fully random access memory, but even then there was a couple that were first. the first of nothing but it was the ancestor in the sense that it was the one that got copied, just like, you know, newton was the first iphone but it did make him the iphone's been up we have learned the hard way, to about 19 adjectives. >> don't say first and don't say in vent, you're safe. >> you told me a fascinating story about the treasure trove of papers that you are allowed to get access to, some that hadn't seen the light of day since the mid 1940s. can you talk about that? >> there were a number. the reason this book exists was people kind enough to let me

into their garages, their basements, in the case of the institute, sort of their own archives, had been very protective of their privacy, private organization. and thanks to charles, one of our benefactors, it was really charles who pushed the door open to let georgian and have access to the stuff. and i found unbelievably amazing things in there. unit, for someone like me it was just unbelievable to go there. my daughter came with me, we had a year, i think she does come every day i would poke around these documents all day and then come home and go back in the morning. i normally work in archives, i have 48 hours and sleeping on somebody's couch, have to pay a photocopier, it's amazing to have that access. >> you write about an amazing piece of paper you found, which

looks like it was torn from a notepad and crumpled up and thrown away, but then somehow retrieved and on crumpled and saved. talk about that. >> yes. this was in the papers that julian bigelow was the engineer who like most engineers say the things. so he saved a lot of papers, and when he died his family allowed me to sort of go through his papers. and in their was a scrap of lined paper that on the top said let a word be 40 bb, so that puts it before the bid, select 1946. to be 40 binary digits and command and address, 10 bits for the command and 10 bytes or digits for the command. so to me, i don't see anything earlier. that's like the tablets of moses

saying let there be the command line. [laughter] from the rest of the world, you know, came from there. where did these things start? tomorrow so when they said no, i've got a piece of paper in my basement that since 1943. which is quite possible. certainly did produce, probably earlier. >> lots of amazing things come out of basements and garages. this is the last question about the process, because you encountered an amazing number of people who were there at the time, and you could talk to as resources. >> i was a little bit. i should've have done this 10 years earlier, and, but there still were enough people left for me to get some first and. and i relied a lot on the oral histories that were done by william, the babbage institute

and nancy stern, a number of people who are thinking about this 20, 30 years ago and gathering oral histories. >> "turing's cathedral" is a metaphor, and i want to talk about von neumann in a moment but let's talk about alan turing for a minute, and specific let's talk about the title of the book and how you came to call this book "turing's cathedral." >> okay. the other thing, for context to imagine it's 100 years ago, sarah turing is five months pregnant. young alan is just about to come on the scene. i, you know, one of the good things about turing, he let very few papers easy read everything he wrote. with von neumann it's hopeless to try to read everything he wrote. so i read everything that turing wrote, and in 1950 he wrote

tremendously famous paper as famous as his 1936 paper on universal competition. this was a paper about artificial intelligence. and you could see the critic coming, sort of like intelligent design, you know, if you're going to create intelligent machines you are playing god and we shouldn't go there. he made the statement that when we create these intelligent machines we are in no more creating souls that we are in the process of creating children. we are simply creating mansions for the souls that only he can create. and i love that sentence, that phrase. in 2005 i went to google. i got invited and because that was 60 years since the project began, so they commemorated that. and engineers there gave me a very deep insight to her of what was going on. when i walked out of there i just, i was, you know, they were

really truly doing everything that turing had imagined, building a large machine that would answer all questions anyone could ask in a nondeterministic way. and i thought this is not turing's mansion. this is turing's cathedral. and that, boy, that phrase became the title of the book. and the second level is simply the cathedral is built by large numbers of anonymous people whose names are not remembered, but the cathedral remains spent over many years. >> those are all the people who did the real work. the cathedral wouldn't be there without jesse stone being there. >> they did overlap at princeton while turing was there doing his ph.d for two years. how much is known about the interaction between turing and von neumann? >> we know pretty much have interacted during this, 1936-1938. at that time the institute for which is part of the whole, the

incident has nothing to do with princeton university. people say at princeton, you think the university like the hoover institute is at stanford. but at the time they didn't have a building, so they made a deal with the nasty parts of the institute actually was parasitic on the math department or so turing and von neumann, even though the turing was at university when von neumann, they shared office space and have a lot of contact. turing was, that's where you put, director the final proof of this paper. he certainly had influence on von neumann. then what we don't know, what happened during the war when von neumann went off to england to work with the british and turing came to america to work with the americans. and that part is still sort of a black hole. like a lot of the stuff come it just may take a long time and eventually come out. >> you have any suppositions about that? >> i think von neumann was in england working on the nuclear

work, because the british made a lot of contributions in los alamos to a lot of the ideas came from britain. i think von neumann went over there to jumpstart some of the. von neumann was so good at everything that i can't believe they didn't bring him into the cryptography question. and came back, one of the forgotten things von neumann said explicitly was he got, he actually credited his ideas about programming through a visit he took to a computation laboratory in england. and he says that in writing. he doesn't mention any of the enigma were granting like that but, of course, you wouldn't mention that. >> there are a couple of changes in the book. may be more for you. you cite discussions that von neumann is a part of with colleagues there at ias, where von neumann explicitly says yes, that's one of the things

gentoo is working on. it seems that he was aware of turing's theories as he was working on his seminal paper, and it was already, the implication is it was already having some influence on his thinking about this whole area. >> it was, i mean, von neumann was a mathematical logician and he followed that stuff closely. i decided to do a little physical research rather than just speculation so i went and went and found von neumann's copy of turing's paper, and it's in the institute library, now in one of the shelves you have to turn the crank to open. nobody goes in there. that are all the volumes and they are all there with perfect bindings, all in fact, and there's one volume, volume 42 of turing's paper. if you take it out, all the papers take out. completely disintegrated from being read so many times. so i think that's pretty good

evidence that they read that paper. [laughter] >> so let's talk about von neumann the, and well-educated in budapest, goes to berlin, joined the academy, is a professor. the nazis begin to -- he resigns, flees, and disappointed to faculty at princeton. and as he goes to the iasc encounters really remarkable group who were already there and really a remarkable intellectual atmosphere, oppenheimer called it an intellectual hotel. setauket a little bit about the ias as von neumann would have experienced it. >> the thing we forget is, most people, remember the institute because of einstein and nuclear physicists and strength there is and mathematicians, people forget about the institute also had a very strong school in the history of art, school of

classical, i don't have to pronounce it, school of archaeologist. so all this other culture there, and, of course, she can take people like homer thompson, really great company was the model for raiders of the lost ark. and the art historian. so all these people do. it wasn't just math and physics. it was a very rich place and then oppenheimer came in, they invited t.s. eliot to be there. the position i had there was created for t.s. eliot, sort of strange outside artist who's allowed to come in and do something it doesn't belong to one of the schools. not have the school of biology. and about von neumann coming in, he didn't come alone. he came with eugene wagner. at the time princeton university was not hiring jewish professors. so they couldn't really hire von neumann flat out but they

found a loophole. there was no problem they could hire two hungarian's halftime. they couldn't hire one hungarian full-time. but they could hire two hungarian's halftime. so they offered johnny von neumann and eugene is half, to them which was 10 times what you could make in your. so that's at a suggested that so they got both of those guys that once. >> then we'll skip ahead ahead just slightly because i want you to talk a bit about how he wound up in los alamos. >> yeah, sort of everybody wound up in los alamos. there was coming in, almost a special train from new jersey to los alamos. von neumann didn't stay there. he was transient to get so much going on, both peoples, he went

to los alamos, you didn't leave until the war was over so you could now people go and leave. so if you went, you brought your family and your there. von neumann had a special pass, and get a trim an close to los alamos the prototype of all these great love for a choice. there's a deal deal made, very explicit that oppenheimer made. that we made a deal with the devil. we will build you this bomb but you have to let us, you know, we won't tell you how to use the bomb if you don't tell us how to do the science. we will do all the signs we want in the spare time. that's why so much great science can out of los alamos. >> he was both incredibly challenge and invigorated by the intellectual process of trying to think through the very complicated problem. but he was also increasingly, as the project moves forward, deeply troubled from an ethical standpoint as well, wasn't he?

>> von neumann? this. that's what i discovered from most remarkable body of documents i found was in marina von neumann's basement, next to a water heater, a filing cabinet. and then there you know, von neumann's known papers with elaborate of congress. this filing cabinet didn't go. and in the bottom drawer was all the handwritten correspondence between johnny and his wife from 1937 -- package a day by day firsthand picture of what people were really thinking at the time. >> he was using that as just a means of eating this out, right clicks his correspondence with her? >> it was like e-mail to us what he was at a full day of meetings and solving problems and still write 16 pages in fountain pen. they had a difficult marriage but they're always in different places because she was doing the

coding for these early bomb calculation. so she might be working on a eniac in aberdeen and he would be in los alamos, these letters went back and forth. >> did you know that this, this secret trove of letters -- >> i couldn't have imagined them. to me, the most interesting trait of american history. that carried him just before world war ii until sputnik. after sputnik we sort of have a very good record. it was a period there where, what people say, the oppenheimer trial was pretty good. they had people under oath and every to testify but that still not, what people rethink at the time. klara describes the day at which they sort of clothes the mousetrap on oppenheimer, what everybody's reactions were that day.

you will not get that anywhere else. >> how did you come upon that, that page? >> thanks to marina von neumann who knew through charles that i was doing this project, and she finally said, maybe you should come to ann arbor and look at the stuff. to her it was awkward because this was the woman that her father left her mother for. she didn't really want to look, they're very personal letters, but she trusted me to go through them and take out what was, then, what was useful for the history of computing. and it brings the book to life. i don't think it would be able to your that was a life without her voice and spirit. it's something about having english as a second language. they drive -- von neumann gets invited to do lectures in seattle. so they drive across the united states. she records that. route 66, yeah, stopping at a gas station. it's all there. her notes, her personal accounts

or just riveting. >> and she committed suicide at the end. kept the journal right to the end. she deserves a book of her own. >> in this incredibly peripatetic life that von neumann is leaving in 1944, he encounters others and they work on the eniac for the first time. talk a little bit about that encounter and then what happened. >> acord and moxley were way ahead. they had billed the eniac. there's no doubt. the eniac is a clear case of something that was first even though they could be traced to other people and you have jane smiley traced back to others, but the eniac, von neumann always said it was a pioneering

thing. because he was scientific adviser to the ballistic research board, he got to see. when he saw it, he just immediately saw what it could do. i think part of that is visual. and effort into the. when eniac is running, you are seeing the bits. you are seeing the life moving around. you can see the numbers and communist, you are within the computation, and he had that kind of mind, you know, visually. so i think the moment he saw that he could feel this other stuff coming spent the way the eniac was physically build your literate stand inside it. >> the eniac was very advanced. it was a multiple core processor but it was like your 16 core chip. where you divide the computation into a parallel path. >> herman goldstein, who was

instrumental, working with them, says when he saw it for the first time we saw the eniac, it changed his life for ever. >> for ever certainly. >> are there von neumann's own words that express what he was feeling? because suddenly everything that had been theoretical for him now becomes physical and real. >> yes. there are words. like for instance, in letters to klara. he fell in love with eniac. he saw that machine. he knew what it could do. and then it was this will very wonderful thing where he taught klara how to program it. he saw, well, who saw what first, but somebody saw that they were thinking, they were ready, already designing and institute machine and writing code for it, but the machine was a ready. and somebody said weekend we wire the eniac and run these

stories on the eniac. and klara went down and they spent six weeks we wire renewed. and getting it to run. that was really origins for all of our modern software. and that was just such a fruitful time. so is a mixture of, their marriage, the coding, it's an amazing. >> and she had no training whatsoever for any of this? >> no, she did have triggered that's the interesting thing. during the war when johnny went off to england to do what, we don't know, and klara was left behind in princeton and anybody was trying to help with the war, she got a wartime job. women could just apply. or wartime job was with the center for population research at princeton university, and her job was modeling population for people, what would happen if you create, you know, a new state in the middle east or something, so they modeled these growth

populations. and that's what she needed to solve these early bomb problems. it was all studying the population of neutrons, and vision is like having your children, and escape is like emigrating. so she learned, she taught herself the mathematics of population. that ended up being what they needed. it was strange accident. >> there's a point of controversy in history about von neumann's relationship to the intellectual work that acord and moxley were doing. and the paper that they produce, which was the design paper, and whether von neumann wanted to circulate that, was more of an open source guy to use a modern phrase didn't leave that this secret because he understood the power it could unleash should truly be secretive, or whether he played by the rules, so to speak. what do you think about that?

>> he certainly broke the rules, von neumann broke the rules. this is very controversial. there is no doubt that, you know, von neumann did not write that whole paper. they certainly were not all his ideas. he put them together. there's some debate what parts of the paper goldstein wrote and what parts of von neumann wrote. there's no question that a lot of the ideas came from eckert and moxley. but the paper was released under john von neumann's name. all i can do is find out what the truth is, and the truth is that yeah, it was released and it was considered a publication so it avoided the chance of patents on eniac. all i can tell you, you come in terms of smoking gun is a 1945 when von neumann signed a

consulting agreement with ibm, said he was already, this result was highly terrible for ibm, that there were no that restrictions on it, on these ideas. but i think from von neumann's point of you i don't think he was out, doing anything as group is that he thought this would be for the good of everybody. i think you remember that they're all coming out of world war ii were all these groups are later -- during the war they were all collaborative. rca and accurate and mauchly, they were all cooperating together. people from manchester coming from princeton. people from princeton were going to manchester, arguing about who should get credit came along later spent faq all come from world war ii. in fact, the war and. von neumann is headed back to ias. wants to transplant the entire eniac team and take them all and

continue to work. and eckert and mauchly decline. goldstein goes but eckert and mauchly decides they will pursue a commercial -- >> originally eckert, bigelow was supposed to be eckert. .. they had a contract for three machines with a government that would have put them firmly on the path that ibm tech and then they had their security clearance question and they lost the contract.

we don't know, there's a very sort of disturbing memo describing what had happened. i don't think they were a security risk but it really put their company off the path forward. >> von neumann was bitter about their decision, wasn't he? he was very critical of this. >> he was annoyed. he just wanted to go the ahead and they felt they were holding things up and they would feel differently. so i try not to take sides but i think there is truth on both sides. >> so in 1946, he put that aside and he does go back to ias and they begin working on this highly improved binary stored program successor to the eniac called the maniac. >> mathematical numerical and integrated calculator. that was then adopted.

>> and he said some very interesting things. first of all he is very practical. he says were not going to originate anything. we are simply going to work with the state-of-the-art at that moment. [inaudible] >> and that went back into crt memory as it existed at the time and 15 tons of air-conditioning. >> yes and maybe added wiring output and a lot of things. one was remember at that time you could not modify ibm equipment. it was like the old telephones. but they did modify ibm. they got punchcard machines and at that time still read 12 bits, on the 12 bit side and they converted the machine so it was on the eight bit side and that is the whole world, that is why we have 80 character line's. >> was that his innovation? >> no, it was hewitt crane who lived here and then moves to

sri, stanford research and only died, couple of people may know him, he just died a few years ago. he did that alone and got into real trouble. the ibm people came and said wait a minute, we could probably sell this and they did very well. that is what put them into the data processing business. >> frances buffered, the british author, had a great review of the book in the guardian in london today and we were talking about it earlier. he says no other book brings to life anything so vividly or appreciatively like the immense engineering difficulty of creating electronic logic for the first time. talk about the design, the team and to plan and von neumann's drive to do this. he was just tireless in bringing all these theories to live. >> he was trying to do the almost impossible. what they did was really crazy. they are making this 40 bit parallel machine, where one bit

of every word is in a different tube in these tubes are tubes that if you walk past wearing a wool sweater you might throw three of the bits off and nothing works. yet they got it working in new jersey which is like the least hospitable environment for delicate electronic equipment. >> you tell the story about every time a car one bite would wipe out the memory. >> thunderstorms and i mean they were so persistent and the fact that they got this thing working as well as they did is quite amazing. speak you used the phrase the deal with with the devil a minute ago talking about los alamos and the atomic on. there was another deal with the devil made in the development of the computer that von neumann wanted to build, wasn't there? >> yeah, i feel, and i think this is still, sort of a fable for the future but the deal was

made that you know, it's a metaphor but the deal with the devil was made that the devil could have this weapon that could destroy all of life on earth and von neumann and the scientist would get this computer that would reveal all knowledge. gives me everlasting life and i will give you my firstborn child sort of thing. and we think that you know, kind if we won the deal because at that time, it's incomprehensible to us today how real the threat of worldwide global nuclear war was at that time. in the 1950's it was really a 20 minute launch window to destroying the world and we survived that. we don't really worry about those bombs likely use to. so it seems like we got the better end of the deal. but i think what you have to remember is that computers could be equally threatening.

maybe the devil is out there saying i didn't really want the problems, i want the computers. and that is what i think we need to be watchful for, that we'd do not let this global computing network that is so beautiful, it is a cathedral but make sure it does not become the tool of some totalitarian maniac. >> in fact you talk about that and i want to get to that in a second but it was interesting, interesting is not the right were. it's incredibly compelling that von neumann could see both moving and parallel, having worked at los alamos he could see what the net result of the hydrogen bomb was likely to be and at the same time had this premonition of what computing taken to its complete, far extent could also turn out to be. >> right and you did not foresee the internet. earning credit for anything but not the internet. >> i understand. didn't they devise what you call

a real problem in the perfect cover, so they are working on thermonuclear explosion models, but they are also working on nonstrategic weather, and meteorology. >> meteorology. i don't think there was anything -- von neumann is just an opportunist. he was a genius at, so he did sort of needed cover for his work. meteorology was the perfect cover so he brought in real meteorologist and anytime you check your iphone and get a five day forecast, it's the same codes that they developed right there. it's just with better input data and infinitely more processing power. >> the two applications that seem to catch on, at exactly the same time as computing power increased, weapons and weather. >> they are both hydrodynamic. >> he so you talked about clari writing code for the eniac and this is one of the great

revelations of the book is that they are developing the monte carlo algorithm. von neumann is instructing clari and she is getting involved in writing code for monte carlo. has that been known before that clari von neumann was writing code? >> what is interesting is some of these codes, like there's one of them in an envelope. it's an envelope that you could mail with two stamps and it's a code. you know, it is what we would call a source code for the hydrogen bomb so it's the opposite today. this code would run and it would run and eniac for six weeks to get it one bit answer, a yes or no answer whereas now your screen is refreshed and you have used up so many bits. there are very different kinds of codes but i think incredibly

important and monte carlo i mean, it's a perfect example. he was recovering from a brain virus and they told him, don't think too much so he started playing solitaire and while playing solitaire he realized we could do computing this way. following random paths. [laughter] >> he how did monte carlo, which is an incredibly sophisticated way of going about writing software, how did that happen so early in the evolution of computing when the machines were so primitive and memory was so small? >> well they needed it is why it happened. they need to follow these population of neutrons and they didn't have the horsepower to do it in any analytical way so they have to do it in a statistical way. the beauty is, it's not an approximation. it actually is closer to the way the world of physics really

works. physics is at its essence a physical process, not deterministic. >> can you explain about that because there a lot of people here who will know about monte carlo but there may be other people watching or listening who don't. >> instead of trying to get an exact answer, you sort of develop a game of chance and approximate the problem and run a game of chance. the more you play the better your answer gets. like if you are gambling in a casino, if you gambled for a really long time he would get a very accurate estimate of how, what the take of the other side is. taking 2% or 3% and it's so beautiful. you couldn't imagine it was true but johnny and clyde von neumann meet and monte carlo at the casino, right?

johnny has gotten there and he is a system for roulette and he has lost all of his money. [laughter] his first marriage, he is still married to -- but he goes over to the bar and there is clari whose husband is a compulsive addictive gambler and she is unhappy. he knows her from childhood. she was this very attractive figure skater. and he buys her a drink. she buys him a drink. >> she had the money. >> she had the money, yeah, so they met. you couldn't make that a. >> it's a great story, it absolutely is. so work begins in 46 and in the summer of 1951 the team from los alamos comes to princeton. they load a very large thermonuclear calculation into the maniac. it runs for 24 hours without

interruption. >> for six weeks. >> for six weeks it learns. >> for 60 days. >> where they flabbergasted? were they confident? what was the reaction? >> again nobody was supposed to talk about it. we weren't even supposed to know the maniac was working. it have been publicly delegated with recorders much later but they got it working earlier and they ran it. we were desperate to know. that is when we were building the first big hydrogen bomb. so, there are a few people left. harris maher is still alive, who was there, and marcia ruttman who died not too long ago. by people, they were not supposed to talk about what they were doing. everybody was testing out the machine but they were actually running a real problem. you can tell by the dates at which it shows up.

[inaudible] >> he yesterday -- [inaudible] [inaudible] >> we will have to get you a mic. nick metropolis and stan frankel came with their los alamos drops and all their mail came from p.o. box 1663 los alamos new mexico. nick had a girlfriend in mexico. [laughter] shuja said he was so handsome.

[laughter] >> and then the hydrogen bomb is detonated. 60 years ago this year, november 1, 1952 in the south pacific. von neumann writes about knowing and he uses the phrase that they were creating a monster. but then he also goes on to say that he felt it would be unethical for the scientists not to see through to the end what they knew they were capable of. and i think it's very interesting that he juxtaposed ethics in that way. the monster being created, but the scientific obligation to see it through to its end. is that characteristic of the von neumann that you uncovered? >> yes, and stan berlon had a much more, it was marriage of -- who is strongly against the hydrogen bomb. they had the argument repeatedly and his answer was no, it's physics. we have got to do the physics.

we have got to know what happens. if there's a way to know what happens, it's our job to find out. it's not our job to say whether it is good or bad. >> the very next year the soviets detonate their hydrogen bomb. >> well, yeah. it wasn't very successful so it turned out just like with the germans, they were not as far along as we were afraid of. the thing to remember is von neumann at los alamos have been working and they direction working on the hydrogen bomb at this time that was not successful but we didn't know that at the time. then we found out that carlos fuchs was a russian spy so from the point of view the russians had as much knowledge as we did about, and might well be pushing for the hydrogen bomb. >> and then less than four years later, von neumann dies of cancer. >> yeah, tragically. >> and the team scatters.

>> yeah. >> the kettani t is because the plug is full, does not, it does not last. it essentially collapses. >> right, it goes back to computer science as a decade. they have this group going that was doing scientific computing for scientific or process which ibm picked up on. you know, the research center started doing that but there was a gap in between that was lost. but it's understandable too wiping is it too didn't want to become a computing center. so it was subeither kept it going and it was over. we have some audience questions. >> we do. there are lots of good questions here. let me ask about two or three things before we get to these. let's talk about the implications involved with this because you talk a lot about the

implications for computing is today and where it is going in the book. you said about a week ago that the last time you checked, but the digital universe and let's make sure i have these numbers right, is expanding by 2 trillion transistors a second and in processing power and 5 trillion bits per second in storage. >> right. hard disk storage. >> von neumann predicted the universe of 10,000 switches i think. >> he said that was all you needed for a computer, 10,000. you can go by transition but 10,000 switching units would be enough. >> with this unleashing is the computing power there are three things you talked about that i want to cover. one is artificial intelligence. you write, when the von neumann spoke of computers he never talked about artificial intelligence and turing talked of little else. so talk about that dichotomy, the two of them and where you

personally believe and he write about it in the book. >> i am more on the turing side. i love speculating artificial intelligence but he was very reserved. he never published anything until it was perfectly proved, you know, he spoke imperfect complete sentences. turing was very much the other way, sort of stuttered and said what he thought. so they were just very different characters. i think it is the tragedy of von neumann's death. he was ready for artificial intelligence but he didn't want to publish it until he had the complete very of that and he never got there. turing died at age 41 and von neumann at age 53. >> is what we are seeing the approximation of artificial intelligence as turing might've thought of it as? >> i think it's oddly close to what turing was looking at. people remember turing in his

1950 paper the one with the imitation game and they remember his 1936 paper, the universal machine. the one that i think is equally important, but less remembered is his 1938 paper which was his ph.d. dissertation at princeton. it was on nondeterministic machines and he called that oracle machines. these are machines that are deterministic but every once in a while they just take a jump like we do in thinking. we may think very logically and then do something illogical and we put it together and that is intelligence. turing in fact believe that he approved that a machine that never makes a mistake could never be intelligent. it is and i mean gödel proved that as well. it never makes mistakes so it will never be intelligent. if you look at for instance what google is doing you have this enormous deterministic machine

and these 1 million servers now that are all perfectly predictable and deterministic machines in the classical sense. we think of the turing machine is deterministic if they are connected by these nondeterministic links which are people. every time you are given 10 results and you click on one that is nondeterministic process. and then the deterministic machine incorporates the state of that nondeterministic lead into the deterministic machine and that is why google can get those results in a few seconds because it knows what other people, where their the people have found the meaning. and i think, you know, you can imagine sort of a more perfect blueprint form the oracle machine in what google is doing right here and that is not scary or anything else. it is just they are doing it and we love it. we could all could not live without it now. >> the second one i wanted to talk about was the computer as

an organism. and you talked a lot in the book about that this again, the juxtaposition of turing and von neumann. you say that many decades later we still face the same questions. subor's question was what it would take for machines to begin to think. von neumann's question was what would it take for machines to begin to reproduce? the notion of a replicating computer is in your book. you talk about that both logically and practically. what do you think the applications are? >> it is what happened and that is why we ended up with silicon valley. these machines became effectively self replicating. nobody is there making, and it works out, mick and computers and they are replicating themselves. i think that is why the von neumann machine is so important. even though there were other machines because it is the one that became the pattern. it is the machine that the chip

factories that used to be right here making millions every day. >> so is organism the word? >> no, i am more interested in codes and that is what the other, to pick the great characters in this book, it's von neumann and it's clari and julian to the low. he came with the idea that codes themselves could be viewed as oriented because they self reproduce and they replicate. they crossbreed and he looked at that in 1953 so i think in a way, the more stuff is happening on the coding side not the oracle side. the chips are just sort of the soup and which out of which dangers things happen. >> the third one is, big computers and he touched on it a little bit with google. von neumann envisioned a world which of course there was no

network to speak of that a few big computers would perform all of the world computations and you see that vision being realized in some respects now. >> are we going back to that? von neumann's vision there would be three or four big computers that you would dial in and do your computation and get your results over a network. a then it then we went to the vast distributed network and now we are going more towards things like google and facebook which essentially are large computers. they are very broad sense but you know in a way they are, of course the people in the industry have gone back and forth many times. intelligence being the terminal in the server and it just goes back and forth. >> okay let's get to some audience questions. here's one that says it's not unreasonable to say that theoretical computer science is still dominated by turing's

concepts. do think it's possible for that to change in the near future? >> yes. and i think the way it will change is not, not from the bottom up. i don't think we are ever going to escape this turing machine running on the von neumann matrix. the way to look at it is turing had the one dimensional model and von neumann had the implementation and i think we are stuck with that. it work so well and at a higher level on top of that i think we are now free of all sorts of different models of computation. >> here is a question from someone who went to the ias and a 1955 saw the computer that they had looked kludgy with vacuum tubes hanging out on stiff wires. was that a temporary situation or data generally look like that? >> they were doing some diagnostic things and might've been looking but i don't know.

i would like to know exactly when that was. >> 1955. >> they had monitors and that could've been what it was. they had tubes that they would go around and look in the memory from the outside. >> by the way there was a row conflict at the ias, wasn't there, among the physicists and mathematicians and what they called the computer guys. the computer people. the computer people were relegated. >> they were put in the basement. next to the boiler room and then they were put in the outbuildings. >> was that ever reconciled or do they just have to go on about their business? >> no, it has been reconciled now who -- who built the most fabulous luxurious building of the institute by a hungarian programmer. so now they have the quarter's. >> the hungarians had the last laugh. there is a suggestion here that

von neumann had to essentially charm the ias into making a machine, place it was mostly about theory was now going to get very real. is that your read? >> very true. >> talk about that. >> threatened to leave and it would be very embarrassing to them if he left. he got offers from chicago, m.i.t., they'll wax would have less to have him. he could have gone every -- anywhere. they couldn't live him go. >> if you were to describe what von neumann's vision was for the u.s., and society in this country as he found it and chose to make his home, do you know what that would be? >> i don't know. it's a very good question. what would he think of us now and what would he think of, if he had to fly to an airport and go through tsa. [laughter] you know, it's sad. so i don't know.

but he certainly had a great vision of a free democratic society and to avoid, and he also says explicitly or clari says how quickly this can change that the good guys can become the bad guys. so yeah he definitely, he loved america and he wanted to keep america strong but also -- >> another interesting person at ias at the time was norbert who was also doing theoretical work there and there is a question here about the conflict between von neumann and. >> norbert waller never did -- he visited the he was not a

member of m.i.t.. and again, we kind of play up these complex. actually they worked very closely together on a number of things and then norbert waller was very opposed to the hydrogen bomb and that is where -- there were a lot of very sad things that broke up friendships over the hydrogen bomb. they differed greatly in weather prediction. von neumann believed we could actually long-range predict the weather and the belief from the beginning that was did -- not deterministic and you could not predict it and norbert subsixteen was right. but they didn't really argue about it. >> there are a couple of questions here that were sent from bletchley park earlier today because we asked them

several questions. one is about the first draft of the report on axe, which was said to contain some of turing's own ideas but forwarded by someone else so if that was so, can you talk about which of those ideas were in that report, especially given turing's description of what you can also talk about was not published until almost a year later? >> gets very complicated because turing, the report was given to turing and the report was definitely based on the report but i do agree that they are based on turing's ideas. and i think that might be where he comes in. he knew turing's work better. i don't think and it's my opinion but i don't think eckhard and mockley you know where is up to speed on turing

as sublive was. but i would just like to leave it that they all had great ideas and they were cooperating at the time. we don't realize how much cross-fertilization there was when all those laborde tories were working together. >> is that part of the zone of history that we will never know? >> i think we will know if we go into an open-minded. radar was such a collaborative issue. neither side would have done it on their own but together, they got it done. >> another bletchley park question is, it's been said perhaps unkindly that's turing's's contribution to the pilot ace development was to leave the national physical laboratory altogether and let the team there get on with it. so was turing any more of a team the u.s. while in princeton? i think there are two questions there.

one was was turing ultimately not a team player and when he was a prince and was he more of a team player? >> although he joined the rugby team. [laughter] it is a team of a different sort. >> they had a game so i think in some ways he was a team player but he was a long-distance runner which is a lone thing rather than a team thing so yeah he had her reputation as being a loner, but i think he was just difficult to deal with. you know, there is a fantastic memo where he asks, the poor people who are handling him would have to ask, do you want to work halftime? the expression is, so i can play tennis in the morning when i feel like it. rather than feeling like he had to go to work in the morning. so that was the difficulty, keeping him discipline. >> these questions are from kevin who is very instruments

all their other national museum of computing. can it really be said that his best contribution was just to leave and let them get on with their work? >> i wouldn't say that but i don't know. i am not at all the expert on turing and i haven't done this kind of looking at archives or documents. but you know i think turing made great contributions everywhere he went. >> it maybe that kevin is looking for validation that that wasn't the was there another intellectual passion of von neumann besides this insatiably curious mind that he had? if you were to describe an intellectual passion what would it be? >> he was passionate about history particularly the history of the byzantine empire. he could recite, he had wide range of passion.

he loved mexican food. alcohol. [laughter] and women. i mean, he is interested in everything and it was hard to find something he wasn't interested in. he was fascinated by landmarks that have strange names. he would go to places like the devils post pile or we have this tradition in america of having, you have got to drive 40 miles to go see them and he always went. and he was superstitious. he would never turn a light switch off without turning it on and off seven times. [laughter] >> really? [laughter] how did that come to life? >> i don't know. i am taking clari's word for that but i think it's probably true.

>> she wrote that he, if he got a question in his mind, he would sulk and pout and be very temperamental so he worked it out. >> there are cases of people getting him through unsolvable problems just to watch him. [laughter] >> someone else said no one could be so physically indifferent as von neumann one is listening to a lecture or a talk that he had absolutely zero interest in. >> right, he had no time for smalltalk but small talk but he was very diplomatic. it's like lewis strauss who is in the navy, he was great how he could negotiate an agreement among the roomful of people who disagreed. that is one reason he got people like bigelow and goldstein who disagreed on everything. he got them to work together and we need people like that on the other hand the problem is to get

a lot of credit for things and suddenly get all the credit and it shouldn't go that far. >> which he didn't seek, and really any time that occurred, he seemed to be very good about pushing that away, didn't he? >> he was pretty good. he had his share of credit. >> but his ego didn't require that sort of continual feeding? is that what you are saying? >> it may have but i think it set itself. he didn't need other people. >> so we are going to do a reading. we like to have our authors read eco-'s somehow this is just so much more powerful when it comes to crossing your own voice and you picked a couple of passages out in the book that you are going to read. so i wanted you to close this with your giving us a bit about. >> okay, i picked the beginning and the end an leaving out everything in the middle.

[laughter] so, the acknowledgments whose title is in the beginning was the command line which is in honor of neal stephenson who helped tremendously with this book actually. in 1956 at the age of three, i was walking home with my father from his office at the institute for advanced study in princeton new jersey when i found a broken fan belt lying in the road. i asked my father what it was. it's a piece of the sun he said. i father was a theorist and protége of hunts data, the former wartime leader of the theoretical division of los alamos who won accepting his nobel prize for discovering the carbon cycle that fuels the stars, explains that stars have a lifecycle much like animals. they get worn, they grow, they go through a definite internal development and finally they die to give back the material of

which they are made so that new stars may live. to an engineer, fan belts exist between the crankshaft and the water pump. to to a physicist the fan belt exists briefly in the intervals between the stars. [laughter] that then julian bigelow gets introduced, and now i will read you the end of the book. the basement storeroom, the place where they were delegated to get out of everybody else's way next to the boiler room where the first workbenches were installed in 1946. it was the institute's main server room until recently connected to the outside world by some 504 optical fibers routed through a 45 megabit per second switch. in a reversal of attempts to incubate self propagating numerical organisms the

dedicated network monitoring system now watches over all traffic, trying to keep out the endless stream of self propagating numerical origins that are now attempting to get in. [laughter] the viruses are getting so intelligent that it's really an arms race the assistant administrator in 2005 explained. it's watching the traffic as it goes by. the machines, watch out for the machines. the arms race being slightly -- and now bloomberg will never be decided in favor of a completely deterministic over the probabilistic and incomplete. the well that is even if only a digital wilderness will always went. there are codes in machines that can do almost anything that can be given an exact description but it will never be possible to determine simply by looking at a acod what that code will do. no firewall that has been simple arithmetic can ever be made complete. the digital universe will always leave room for more mysteries

than robert frost could dream of. the twilight zone remains. the 32 by 32 by 40 bit matrix constructed at the end of the lane was initialized with coded instructions and then given 10 bit number with orders to go to that location and perform the next instruction which could've been an instruction to modify the existing instructions found at that address. even from so finite a beginning there was no way to predict the end result. in november 2000, the cardboard box turned up in the basement of the west building at the institute for advanced study where its presence has been overlooked. dispelled -- smell of burning belts permeated the dust that settled over a collection of printer service manuals that for some have not been thrown off in the maniacs output was switched to punch cards and paper paper tapered underneath was a carton of ibm data purchasing cards accompanied by a note written in pencil on half a sheet of lined paper disintegrated into several

fragments identifying the cards as baron shelley's drum codes with instructions for how should be loaded and run on the 2048 high-speed magnetic drum. along the stack of cards for three sheets of ledger paper filled with code specifying the laws of nature governing the universe it was preserving in the state of suspended animation on the cards. here were the dead sea scrolls. the note accompanying the card addressed to mr. baron shelley and signs twl concludes with the following statement. there must be something about this code that you have not explained yet. that is the end of the book. [applause] [applause] >> we have a shortage of many things in this country george, engineers are among them.

software, hardware, you name it that i am now convinced that maybe one of our other great shortages is a diligent, set of diligent and motivated historians who are going to go out and find these boxes of incredibly rare papers and these notes that really will help us understand the full scope of what has happened in history and what the implications are for the future. >> i agree but here we have a living history. he has the microphone. >> first of all let me say thank you to george dyson. [applause] , on, come on up. come on over here. >> take it share. i want to hear what it was like to join this project at age 17.

>> have a seat. you and george have a little calmer station. there you go. >> george and i have had several conversations, and perhaps it would be interesting to know how we met. i have a son in philadelphia and back in fort collins, colorado, i met a woman whose father had been woodrow wilson's taylor when woodrow wilson was the president of princeton university. imagine how long ago that was. and she was going back to princeton for a high school reunion. we decided we would meet at princeton for lunch, but since i got there early, i went out to the institute and the receptionist, when i told her my

little bit of history, said why don't you go over to the library. you might be interested in what is over there. and what was over there was a display of the institute's electronic computers 50 years ago. in the case i found onionskin copies of letters with my initials at the bottom. and you you know, all those yeas later site probably didn't remember writing those letters, but the librarian at the institute said, i think you might like to meet george dyson because he is writing a book about the electronic computer project. i left my telephone number, and the next day george telephoned

and they came back to princeton. we have had i think a friendship and i got to, if that is any interest to you but when i was 16 years old i graduated from a high school in philadelphia, william penn high school for girls, and my parents, my father who was a greek immigrant, made it very clear to me that i could not expect to go to college. nice greek girls found husbands and went to work and that was the end of it. but, a counselor at the high school -- i was at the top of my class. she said, we have gotten a request for a secretary at the university of pennsylvania, and

she sent me out there, and i met herman goldstein dressed in his ordinance uniform and his wife, adele goldstein and for some reason, they hired this naïve girl, who didn't even know algebra. and there i was thrown into this magic world that i think of as a miracle. and then, after the eniac was introduced, herman and a dell invited me to go to princeton and with them. for a year i commuted on the pennsylvania railroad from philadelphia to princeton junction and have any of you, i'm sure many of you have been to princeton.

how many? look at all the hands. did you take the train? he took the train from princeton junction into princeton. and i did that for a long time. and then, solomon ochsner who is -- was a mathematician, was going on a sabbatical to harvard and he wanted someone to stay with his wife. i got the privilege of living in the house a few blocks away from the institute where i had my own bathroom and my own bedroom and mrs. bochner took me in hand, and i was born a redhead. she told me, akrevoe you look like a renoir painting and you should wear blue and green. so, it changed my life, as you can imagine.

but, just going downstairs today, i saw a shot of me and the eniac display, so you never know where life takes you, do you? >> thank you. to me, the strangest -- [applause] all these papers at the institute are terribly disorganized and so we went down to the basement and looked at them. akrevoe said let me organize them. i didn't leave them in in the state of disorder. [laughter] and you don't have to pay me. just let me come in and the archives as you know they have to be preserved in the state in which they were found so they are still disorganized. >> but i think one of the things george talked about, the institute itself, and perhaps

some of you have been to the institute, but the institute is now and certainly at that time was a very unique place. it was founded by the family who owned department stores in newark. i think, and george can correct me, they certainly saw what was coming in europe and they brought her fasteners einstein and professor von neumann and herman file and the names that are all in the history books, brought them to the institute, to this absolutely beautiful landscape. and i remember seeing professor einstein walking with curt goodell coming to the institute,

and one christmas, the director of the institute, who was president of the university, invited all the secretaries to his house, to the mansion, to the manner and i was the youngest. i was probably 17 and all the other women were certainly much older and much more experience. and there was a knock on the door, and professor einstein came in with george's babysitter and had tea with us. and i embarrassed to say i don't remember the words he said. [laughter] [applause] and one other thing i remember was that professor von neumann,

in george's book he talks about the wonderful parties that the sub by's gave in one time they invited a computer group to go, and i were my prettiest black dress. as i say i had right red hair, and i got to dance with j. robert oppenheimer. [laughter] can anybody else say that? [laughter] >> thank you so much. [applause] one other quick thing, you were telling me earlier that you are thinking about writing your memoir, writing a book. talk about that and especially the title. >> today, i don't think young women are called secretaries. they are called administrative assistants.

they have pretty fancy titles, but in 1946, i was only the secretary. and i think that is what i wanted to title my little memoir, because you can do a lot of good as a secretary. i don't say you are very important, but they need you, and all of you probably have had secretaries, and were they important to you? [applause] and i also had a wonderful experience. i was a secretary at nyu because when i needed a job, i went to eniac. that was my experience, and i had great experiences being only the secretary. so, if i can learn to use my

computer -- [laughter] maybe i will write its. [applause] >> george dyson. [applause] >> he so my history of financial institutions is a history of learning about these things. so for example, in 1811, new york, the state of new york, created a new conservative bar which did two things. first, corporate law. and allowed anybody to set up a corporation with minimal restrictions. you used to have to go to the

legislature and get special permission and secondly, they created limited liability for investors. what that meant was is if you invested in the company in the company was later accused of wrongdoing, the complaints, the lawsuits could never go after your assets because you invested in the company. before that, people were afraid to invest in companies they didn't really know, so it made everything like a family business. you had to have people you trust. the law changed everything and that was copied over all the world. a friend of david maas has studied these carefully but i think it created a sense of pleasure and investing. people used to invest in lotteries. they love to gamble. that's another human trade. that was the excitement of finding out whether your member came up. by creating limited liability, it became fun. the same way a lottery is fun.

i mean, people have to enjoy life. they have to see something that makes you get out of bed in the morning and give you some excitement and so we design things that give you that feeling. that securities law has been the source of a lot of our innovations, because now investors go, it looks like they're playing again. it looks a little selfish but it drives our economy. other people, karl marx look at it and said it's gambling and he thought we should shut it down. worse than that, worse than that. but after years of experimenting with that people think, well maybe we have to let people indulge in these feelings, so okay. so let me move. i can go for another 10 or 15 minutes. i wanted to talk about the future and about some of the ideas that i talked about.

i will start and move a little bit more into the wild future. what happens tomorrow is president obama has said that he will sign the jobs act. that name is a little bit misleading maybe for some political reasons. it's not about jobs. it's called jumpstart business startups. and what it is, it's controversial. i like it though. notably, it's an experiment. it may or may not work well but let me tell you what is the most interesting part of the jobs act. the jobs act was created in response to a request from internet web site providers who wanted to create a crowd funding web site for entrepreneurs. so if you are trying to start a business, you can put it up on their web site and say, i am looking for money and then

thousands of investors or millions, all over the world, can send money and you can start a business. this is a wild sounding idea, isn't it? but it is indulge by a lot of internet people. i think it is just about as wild as wikipedia sounded at the beginning. if i came to you, same before wikipedia started and said i'm going to open an on line encyclopedia and i'm going to let anybody in the world add to it, my first reaction would have been, that is a idea, right? it's not going to be good encyclopedia but we learned something about how people can work together. so i think this is a good experiment. now what congress has done is, they are worried that there are a lot of chiefs out there and fortunately and someone is going to steal money from someone else this way. so one thing they have done in the legislation is, you have to

document your income to the web site and for people with incomes up to $40,000, you can't invest more than 2% of your income, which is $800. so it's small for each individual. and that protects people. it can go that bad that i think the maximum is $10,000 he can put in if you have a higher income. it is designed to protect people, but you know even if people can only invest $800, if you get enough of them you have got real capital. >> you can watch this and other programs on line at booktv.org. >> up next on booktv, after words. this week the latest release from seth jones "hunting the shadows" the pursuit of al qaeda since 9/11. the rand analyst developer of the graveyard of empires documents the entire u.s. war against al qaeda giving classified information from the cia and fbi as well as interviews with current and

former officials of the u.s. government. this week's guest host intelligence reporter kimberly dozier. >> host: said, welcome to booktv and now is my chance to ask you all the questions i have wanted to ask as i've watched your career move in the past few years. time on the ground in afghanistan come the top special operations commander is both here and in the field. and who had been in the think-tank world, so let's launch with your new book, "hunting the shadows." you talk about the three ways about qaeda violence and a possible third wave. before you get into the evolution of how you track back, how the u.s. intelligence and national security world has track back, can we talk about the health of the organization? we just passed a major milestone with the one-year anniversary of the osama bin laden rate.

how are they doing? >> guest: i think how is a qaeda doing depends on which part of the organization we are talking about. the core group based in pakistan that was led by osama bin laden until he was killed a year ago, that organization has definitely struggled somewhat. it has lost the range of its senior operational leaders. religious leaders and operatives. but it has survived to some degree. it still has some key founding members, including ayman al zawahiri involved in running the organization. à la leavey is now the number two. he has a wealth of experience in africa and a range of other places so the organization at the center has been weakened somewhat but i think as we will talk about in