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A review by josh_paul
Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
4.0
The points made in the 1 and 2-star reviews of this book are largely accurate:
1) Dyson includes a history of the Princeton, NJ area going back to pre-Columbian times, which has no clear direct relevance to the main topic of the book.
2) The book is highly digressive, occasionally wandering off into discussions of the author's own crackpot hypotheses. Personally, I found a lot of these interesting, but I could see getting irritated if you were looking for a straightforward history.
3) He probably gets some technical points about computer architecture wrong.
4) Some folks criticized the book because he spends a lot of time focused on John von Neumann. While it's true that he spends a lot of time talking about von Neumann, criticizing him for that is a bit like criticizing a book on evolution for focusing heavily on Darwin.
Whatever the book's flaws though, I believe Dyson did a great job of weaving together several stories that are often told separately, namely those of the Manhattan Project, the first digital computers, the early development of game theory, and evolutionary biology. Computers are at the center of this, but I took a big part of Dyson's point to be that you can't talk about early computing without talking about those other fields.
Since Dyson, presumably, wanted to keep the book under 250,000 pages he inevitably left out or glossed over some of the finer points, but that's a strategic choice, not a bug.
1) Dyson includes a history of the Princeton, NJ area going back to pre-Columbian times, which has no clear direct relevance to the main topic of the book.
2) The book is highly digressive, occasionally wandering off into discussions of the author's own crackpot hypotheses. Personally, I found a lot of these interesting, but I could see getting irritated if you were looking for a straightforward history.
3) He probably gets some technical points about computer architecture wrong.
4) Some folks criticized the book because he spends a lot of time focused on John von Neumann. While it's true that he spends a lot of time talking about von Neumann, criticizing him for that is a bit like criticizing a book on evolution for focusing heavily on Darwin.
Whatever the book's flaws though, I believe Dyson did a great job of weaving together several stories that are often told separately, namely those of the Manhattan Project, the first digital computers, the early development of game theory, and evolutionary biology. Computers are at the center of this, but I took a big part of Dyson's point to be that you can't talk about early computing without talking about those other fields.
Since Dyson, presumably, wanted to keep the book under 250,000 pages he inevitably left out or glossed over some of the finer points, but that's a strategic choice, not a bug.