Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson, c. 2012, In Progress

An incredible book.

Development of the computer.

To some extent, a biography of John von Neumann, and short biographies of many other players.

Chapter 1: 1953

Chapter 2: Olden Farm

Chapter 3: Veblen's Circle

Chapter 4: Neumonn Janos

Chapter 5: MANIAC

Chapter 6: Fuld

Chapter 7: 6J6

Chapter 8: V-40

Chapter 9: Cyclogenesis/Weather Forecasting

A break from warfare, nuclear weapons. Turning to forecasting weather.

Meteorology: we owe it all to the Norwegians.

Excerpts from the book (for personal use only; do not use this blog as source; get the book.)

Carl-Gustaf Rossby, a Swedish-born, Norwegian-trained meteorologist transplanted to the University of Chicago, where he was training prospective weather officers -- eventually 1,700 of them -- for the war (WWII).  In May of 1942, as soon as classes were over, [Philip Duncan] Thompson enlisted in the Army Air Corps in order to join Rossby's group. After completing his training, he was stationed in Newfoundland, monitoring the North Atlantic weather systems that led the Scandinavians to develop the theory of frontal waves and otherwise lead the way in understanding what the weather might do next. At the end of the war, Thompson was assigned to Long Beach Air Force Base in California, as weather officer liaison to Norwegian meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes at UCLA, where he became close friends with Jule Charney, who had just received his PhD.

In 1945 meteorology had become a science, while forecasting remained an art. Forecasts were generated by drawing up weather maps by hand, comparing the results with map libraries of previous weather conditions and then making predictions that relied partly on the assumption that the weather would do whatever it had done previously and partly on the forecaster's intuitive feel for the situation and ability to guess. On average, forecasts beyond 24 hours were still no better than "persistence" -- predicting that the weather tomorrow will be the same as it was today.

A several page biography of a pioneer in forecasting, Lewis Fry Richardson, follows (pp155 - 158).

Twenty-six years later, Philip Thompson picked up where Richardson had left off.

Philip Thompson was recruited by von Neumann, and was able to get the military to send Thompson to Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies (where Einstein, et al, were working).

Meteorology had been part of the computer project from the start. 

Von Neumann (and others) pointed out the military advantages of accurate long-range weather intelligence, and this seemed to justify the cost of such a venture, estimated at about $200,000. Had the decision to make the computer not been taken in 1945, the thermonuclear program might have been delayed long enough for the Soviets to have had the first weapons. This was far from the minds of anyone when Von Neumann initiated the project. (He was looking for a highly complicated program to test his computer technology, and weather was about as complicated as you could get.)

Thermonuclear weapons, however, were very much on von Neumann's mind in late 1945. l thought this would have been kept secret from Zworykin (at RCA, which eventually turned to television and away from computing). Preparations were already under way for the thermonuclear calculation that would begin running on the ENIAC on December 10, 1945, and, acutely aware of the limitations of the ENIAC, the weaponeers were scrambling to start building its successor without delay.

Meteorology offered both a real challenge for the computers (what von Neumann was looking for) and a cover for the work on bombs.

Von Neumann was convinced weather forecasting would be more important than nuclear weapons.

More than a dozen meteorologists end up at Princeton by the summer of 1945. 

The reaction of most meteorologists toward computer-assisted forecasting paralleled that of the Institute mathematicians toward computer-assisted mathematics: skepticism that a machine could improve upon what they were doing with brains alone.

Then a very interesting short biography of Jule Gregory Charney, pp 163 - 164. 

Charney was working on his own meteorology, since it was perfect for mathematics.

In the middle of his PhD thesis, he ends up studying under Rossby, who invited him to the Princeton conference in August, 1946, where me met von Neumann, learned of his ambitions, and sensed that there was a bit too much mathematics, and too little meteorology, at the IAS. He and his wife sailed for Bergen and Oslo in the spring of 1947, where he worked among the Norwegians until returning to Princeton in the early spring of 1948.

Charney had been at the right place at the right time. The computer was undergoing initial testing, and the first problems were being coded in anticipation of there being a machine on which they could run. A rotating contingent of Norwegian meteorologists, led by Arnt Eliassen and Ragnar Fjortoft, joined the group. Charney became the liaison between the hands-on experience of the Norwegian forecasters and the mathematical world of von Neumann. 

The primary reason for Richardson's failure, Charney noted in the first progress report he prepared for the Office of Naval Research, may be attributed to his attempt to do too much too soon.

It was the meteorological community as a whole who solved Richardson's first problem: gathering sufficient data to establish initial conditions -- it soon being recognized that within days the notion of "boundary conditions" disintegrated and it was necessary to have hemispheric knowledge, the boundary between Northern and Southern hemispheres being the only one that held up over time.

It was von Neumann, Goldstine, and Bigelow who solved Richardson's second problem: supplying enough computer power to do the job. 

And it was Charney who did the most to solve Richardson's third problem: formulating equations whose solutions did not quickly become more unstable than the weather itself. The key was to filter out the noise.

First meteorological forecast: March 5, 1950: a 12-hour forecast. Thirteen days later, two different 24-hour forecasts. Over the course of the next week, they made two more twenty-four forecasts.

In the course of the four 24-hour forecasts about 100,000 standard IBM punch cards were produced and 1,000,000 multiplications and divisions were performed. Once the bugs were worked out, the computation time for a 24-hour forecast was about 24 hours, that is, they were just able to keep pace with the weather.

Charney: it mattered little that the twenty-four hour prediction took 24 hours to make; that was purely a technological problem. Two years later they were able to make the same prediction in five minutes, on the same machine.

An early example: Charney's group chose Thanksgiving 1950, when a severe storm struck the central and eastern United States. The weather system, whose development was missed by the forecasts available at the time, caused 300 deaths, unprecedented property damage, and even blew part of the roof off the Palmer Physical Laboratory at Princeton University. It was the perfect storm.

The storm of November 25 - 27 was first noted on the surface weather map of 1230 GMT, November 24 as a small low developing over North Carolina and western Virginia. Over the next forty-eight hours the disturbance grew to become the worse storm ever recorded over the United States. Coburn Creek, West Virginia, received 62 inches of snow. Records of minus 1 degree Fahrenheit were set in Louisville, KY, and Nashville, TN, and 30 inches of snow fell in Pittsburgh, bringing the steel industry to a half. 

The Princeton meteorologists did not catch the cyclogenesis but their "forecasts" correctly noted that "something was brewing." But the 24-hour prediction was successful, requiring 48 minutes of computing time: 750,000 multiplications and divisions, 10,000,000 additions and subtractions, and executed 30,000,000 distinct orders.

By 1958, numerical forecasts were running neck and neck with manual ones, and by 1960 they had pulled ahead. Starting with 24-hour forecasts, there was an improvement of about 24 hours per decade in extending the forecast range.

Chapter 10: Monte Carlo

From page 187: The next six months brought intense activity: the Trinity test, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the surrender of Japan, and, behind the scenes, the completion of ENIAC, the first H-bomb calculations, and the launching of the computer project at IAS.

From page 188: "The new mathematical tool was not the only experiment that Johnny [von Nuemann] wanted to try in this connection," Klari [his wife] remembers. "He also wanted to see how someone who had none or very little experience in the field, how such a person would take to this novel way of doing mathematics. For this experiment he needed a guinea-pig, preferably a mathematical moron and, unquestionably for this purpose the ideal subject was right there within easy reach -- namely me." Klari had passed her high school examinations in algebra and trigonometry, but only because "my math teacher rather appreciated my frank admission, that I really did not understand a single word of what I had learned."

"Long before the machine was finished I became Johnny's experimental rabbit," she says. "It was lots and lots of fun. I learned how to translate algebraic equations into numerical forms, which in turn then have to be into machine language n the order in which the machine has to calculate it either in sequence or going round and round until it has finished with one part of the problem and then go on some definite which-a-way, whatever seems to be right for it to do next." Klari found programming to be a "very amusing and rather intricate jig-saw puzzle," and soon "became one of the first 'coders', a new occupation which is quite wide-spread today."

"The machine would have to be told the whole story, given all the instructions of what it was expected to do at once, and then be permitted to be on its own until it ran out of instructions," Klari explains. "There already existed fast, automatic special purpose machines, but they could only play one tune ... like a music box ... In contrast, the 'all purpose machine' is like a musical instrument."

Page 194: the first programmers; three teams -- a) Foster and Cerda Evans, a husband and wife team; b) Rosalie and Harris Mayer, a husband and wife team; and, c) Klari and and Marshall Rosenbluth, who was a bachelor. Nick Metropolis and Klari taught the others how to program the machine.

Page 195: instead of tabulating the statistics of human populations, Klari was tabulating the statistics of populations of neutrons, as they underwent scattering (equivalent to travel), fission (equivalent ot reproduction), escape (equivalent to emigration), or absorption (equivalent to death). By following enough generations, it was possible to determine whether a given configuration would go critical or not. Klari could hardly have prepared herself better for bomb design than by her apprenticeship at the Office of Population Research.

Simply an incredible chapter. Needs to be read again.

Chapter 11: Ulam's Demons

Maxwell's Demon (I first read about Maxwell's Demon this past week while simultaneously reading James Gleick's The Information). 

Super. The hydrogen bomb.

The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time. "It is an irony of fate," observes Francoise Ulam, "that much of the high-tech world we live in today, the conquest of space, the extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man's monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.

The first man to die because of the H-bomb: Jimmy Priestly Robinson -- one of two pilots flying F-84's into the first mushroom cloud to monitor the radiation. Shortly after entering, spun out, recovered, but ran out of fuel. Body never recovered. His wingman/leader Colonel Meroney had just made it back to airstrip when he flamed out. -- p. 222

Ends with lead-in to DNA.

Chapter 12: Barricelli's Universe

Max Born: Olivia Newton -John's grandfather.

"The scientific community needs a couple of Barricellis each century," says Gaure, while acknowledging that Barricelli "balanced on a thin line between being truly original and being a crank." According to Wolfe, he "was a world unto himself, caught up in whatever work he was doing at the time."

Four weeks after Barricelli began his experiments at IAS/Princeton, James Watson and Francis Crick announced their determination of the structure of DNA -- wow.

To what degree are genes, viruses, phages?

Chapter 13: Turing's Cathedral

The history of IAS at Princeton. A nice chapter.

Chapter 14: Engineer's Dreams

The story of Julian Bigelow; one of the best chapters in the book.

Chapter 15: Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata

Scary.

Chapter 16: Mach 9

It is incredible the number of women who played such a huge role in the information revolution, the story of DNA, and physics from the 18th century onward.

The story of Hedi Selberg.

Hedi Selberg remained with the MANIAC for the machine's entire life, from the first hydrogen bomb calculations to the last stellar evolution model that was running when the university pulled the plug. "I never really knew about the hydrogen bomb research going on at ECP at night," says Ingrid [her daughter], whereas, according to Freeman Dyson, "Hedi always said the computer was working on bombs."  When the engineers or the "AEC boys" left questions in the machine log books, the answers are often signed "H.S." -- p. 297

Chapter 17: The Tale of the Big Computer

The story of the Swedish astrophysicist Hannes Alfven.

Chapter 18: The Thirty-ninth Step

This chapter brought tears to my eyes. George Dyson gave me the feeling that I had been living with these physicists.

At exactly midnight on July 15, 1958, in the machine room at the end of Olden Lane, Julian Bigelow turned off the master control, shut down the power supplies, picked up a blunt No. 2 pencil, and made the following entry in the machine log: "Off -- 12:00 Midnight -- JHB." Knowing there would be no log entries to follow, he extended his signature diagonally across the rest of the page." -- p. 315.

The chapter then provides a short epilogue, how IAS engineers, physicists, mathematicians broke up, separated, went their own ways.

Klari returns to Princeton to look after Johnny's personal effects and to publish his previously published papers in one publication... Washington, DC ....3,689 pages, six volumes, published in 1963, the Collected Works.

The scales were tipped away from the UNIVAC and toward IBM's "Defense Calculator," later known as the IBM 701 -- the first copy of which was delivered to Los Alamos in 1953. Eckert and Mauchly fell increasingly into debt, until they were forced, in 1950, to sell their company (and patent portfolio) to Remington Rand -- whose vice president was General Leslie Groves ... after acquiring Eckert and Mauchly's Electronic Control Company, Remington Rand filed patent-infringement suits against many of their competitors -- except IBM, with whom they established a cross-licensing agreement in 1956. -- p. 321.

James Pomerene joined IBM in 1956...

Jack Rosenberg left the IAS for a position at General Electric in Syracuse in 1951, moved to Los Angeles in 1954, .....UCLA....

Gerald and Thelma Estrin....Israel

Andrew and Kathleen Booth returned to England ...

Joseph and Margaret Smagorinsky helped found the Princeton Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory....

The Robert Oppenheimer story --- p. 323 and following... a sad story ...

Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer's nemesis, p. 324 ...

Abraham Flexner, died in 1959, had little more to do with the IAS after the end....

Vladimir Zworykin, died in 1982....

Norbert Wiener died of cardiac arrest on a visit ot Stockholm in 1964 ...

Stan Ulam lived until 1984, dividing his time between Los Alamos, Boulder, and later Santa Fe.

Edward Teller outlived von Neumann by 46 years ... p. 325.....

Oppenheimer, still struggling with what role the Institute should play with regard to Einstein's papers, was at a loss over what to do when von Neumann's literary godfather appeared. This was "Captain" I. Robert Maxwell, the Czechoslovakian-born publishing magnate and future member of Parliament who offered to undertake the publication of the Collected Works, assuring Klari (and Oppenheimer) that "my role in this project is that of the 'mechanic' who has the facilities and the 'know-how" for such a task, and may I say that I am glad to be able to assist with this noble cause. Maxwell had visited Los Alamos while launching his Pergamon Press, and in addition to befriending the von Neumanns, he became particularly close to the Ulams.....p. 326 - 327.

Kurt Godel died in Princeton on January 14, 1978, weighing only 65 pounds and with malnutrition listed as the cause of death. He never made it to Hanover to search for the Leibniz manuscripts for the clues he believed existed as to where digital computing, logical calculus, and universal language were destined to end up....p. 335.

Nils Barricelli died in Oslo in 1993...

Julian Bigelow died in Princeton on February 17, 2003 ...

An incredible book. Among my information theory, science books, this has to be placed among the top five. Needs to be re-read. I still don't understand how Turing conceptualized the universal calculating machine. One does wonder if these folks were extraterrestrial aliens as Teller suggested.....