Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

Dyson reconstructs the creation of the first electronic digital computers at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in the late 1940s, where von Neumann assembled a team of engineers and mathematicians to build a machine that would change everything. The book is built on extensive archival research, including personal letters and institutional records that reveal the human tensions behind the technical breakthroughs. It connects the development of the stored-program computer to the hydrogen bomb project, Monte Carlo simulations, numerical weather prediction, and the origins of artificial life. Dyson — whose father Freeman was at the IAS — brings an intimate knowledge of the institution and its culture. The result is both a rigorous history of computing's birth and a meditation on what it means to build machines that exceed their creators' intentions.