Turing's Cathedral Read online

  The computer building’s plain concrete-block core had been paid for jointly by the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Department and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). To reconcile the terms of the government contract, specifying a temporary structure, with the sentiments of the neighboring community, the Institute for Advanced Study had paid the additional $9,000 (equivalent to about $100,000 today) to finish the building with a brick veneer.

  There were close ties between the IAS and the AEC. J. Robert Oppenheimer was director of the IAS and chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the AEC. Lewis Strauss was chairman of the AEC and president of the IAS Board of Trustees. The freewheeling mix of science and weaponeering that had thrived at Los Alamos during the war had been transplanted to Princeton under the sponsorship of the AEC. “The Army contract provides for general supervision by the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the Army,” it was noted on November 1, 1949, “whereas the AEC provides for supervision by von Neumann.”7 As long as the computer was available for weapons calculations, von Neumann could spend the remaining machine time as he pleased.

  In 1953, Robert Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss—who had engineered Oppenheimer’s appointment as director of the Institute in 1947, and would turn against him in 1954—were still on friendly terms. “There is a case of Chateau Lascombes waiting for you with my compliments at Sherry Wine & Spirits Co., 679 Madison Avenue (near 61st Street),” Strauss informed Oppenheimer on April 10, 1953. “I hope you and Kitty will like it.”8

  “We picked up the wine two days ago, and opened a bottle that night,” Oppenheimer replied on April 22. “It was very good; and now Kitty and I can thank you, not merely for your kindness, but for the great pleasure that you have made us.”9 Robert and Kitty had drunk from the poisoned chalice. One year later, the man who had done so much to deliver the powers of atomic energy into the hands of the U.S. government, but had then turned against his masters to oppose the development of the hydrogen bomb, would be stripped of his security clearances after a dramatic hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission’s Personnel Security Board.

  While the computer was still under construction, a small team from Los Alamos, led by Nicholas Metropolis and Stanley Frankel, quietly took up residence at the Institute. There were two separate classes of membership at the IAS: permanent members, who were appointed for life by a decision of the faculty as a whole, and visiting members, who were invited by the individual schools, usually for one year or less. Metropolis and Frankel did not belong to either group and mysteriously just showed up. “All I was told was that what Metropolis came out for was to calculate the feasibility of a fusion bomb,” remembers Jack Rosenberg, an engineer who had designed, built, and installed a hi-fi audio system in Albert Einstein’s house for his seventieth birthday in 1949, using some of the computer project’s spare vacuum tubes and other parts. “That’s all I knew. And then I felt dirty. And Einstein said ‘that’s exactly what I thought they were going to use it for.’ He was way ahead.”10

  The new machine was christened MANIAC (Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer) and put to its first test, during the summer of 1951, with a thermonuclear calculation that ran for sixty days nonstop. The results were confirmed by two huge explosions in the South Pacific: Ivy Mike, yielding the equivalent of 10.4 million tons of TNT at Enewetak on November 1, 1952, and Castle Bravo, yielding 15 megatons at Bikini on February 28, 1954.

  The year 1953 was one of frenzied preparations in between. Of the eleven nuclear tests, yielding a total of 252 kilotons, conducted at the Nevada Test Site in 1953, most were concerned not with trying to make large, spectacular explosions, but with understanding how the effects of more modest nuclear explosions could be tailored to trigger a thermonuclear reaction resulting in a deliverable hydrogen bomb.

  Ivy Mike, fueled by 82 tons of liquid deuterium, cooled to minus 250 degrees in a tank the size of a railroad car, demonstrated a proof of principle, whereas Castle Bravo, fueled by solid lithium deuteride, represented a deployable weapon that could be delivered, in hours, by a B-52. It was von Neumann, in early 1953, who pointed out to the air force that rockets were getting larger, while hydrogen bombs were getting smaller. Delivery in minutes would be next.

  The Americans had smaller bombs, but the Russians had larger rockets. Plotting the increasing size of rockets against the decreasing size of warheads, von Neumann showed that the intersection resulting in an intercontinental ballistic missile—a possibility he referred to as “nuclear weapons in their expected most vicious form”—might occur in the Soviet Union first.11 The air force, pushed by Trevor Gardner and Bernard Schriever, formed a Strategic Missiles Evaluation Committee chaired by von Neumann, and the Atlas ICBM program, which had been limping along since 1946, was off the ground. The year 1953 was the first one in which more than $1 million was spent on guided missile development by the United States. “Guided” did not imply the precision we take for granted now. “Once it was launched, all that we would know is what city it was going to hit,” von Neumann answered the vice president in 1955.12

  Numerical simulations were essential to the design of weapons that were, as Oppenheimer put it, “singularly proof against any form of experimental approach.” When Nils Barricelli arrived in Princeton in 1953, one large thermonuclear calculation had just been completed, and another was in the works. The computer was usually turned over to the Los Alamos group, led by Foster and Cerda Evans, overnight. It was agreed, on March 20, that “during the running of the Evans problem there would be no objection to using some time on Saturday and Sunday instead of operating from midnight to 8:00 a.m.”13 Barricelli had to squeeze his numerical universe into existence between bomb calculations, taking whatever late-night and early-morning hours were left.

  During the night of March 3, 1953, as Barricelli’s numerical organisms were released into the computational wilderness for the first time, Joseph Stalin was sinking into a coma in Moscow, following a stroke. He died two days later—five months short of witnessing the first Soviet hydrogen bomb test at Semipalatinsk. No one knew who or what would follow Stalin, but Lavrentiy Beria, director of the NKVD secret police and supervisor of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, was the heir apparent, and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission made it their business to fear the worst. After Barricelli’s “Symbiosis Problem” ran without misadventure overnight, the machine log notes “over to blast wave” on the morning of March 4. Later in the day the log simply reads “over to” followed by a pencil sketch of a mushroom cloud.

  Three technological revolutions dawned in 1953: thermonuclear weapons, stored-program computers, and the elucidation of how life stores its own instructions as strings of DNA. On April 2, James Watson and Francis Crick submitted “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” to Nature, noting that the double helical structure “suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” They hinted at the two-bits-per-base-pair coding whereby living cells read, write, store, and replicate genetic information as sequences of nucleotides we identify as A, T, G, and C. “If an adenine forms one member of a pair, on either chain, then on these assumptions the other member must be thymine; similarly for guanine and cytosine,” they explained. “If only specific pairs of bases can be formed, it follows that if the sequence of bases on one chain is given, then the sequence on the other chain is automatically determined.”14

  The mechanism of translation between sequence and structure in biology and the mechanism of translation between sequence and structure in technology were set on a collision course. Biological organisms had learned to survive in a noisy, analog environment by repeating themselves, once a generation, through a digital, error-correcting phase, the same way repeater stations are used to convey intelligible messages over submarine cables where noise is being introduced. The transition from digital once a generation to digital all the time began in 1953.

  The race was on to begin decoding living processes from the top down. And with the seeding of an empty digital univ
erse with self-modifying instructions, we took the first steps toward the encoding of living processes from the bottom up. “Just because the special conditions prevailing on this earth seem to favor the forms of life which are based on organo-chemical compounds, this is no proof that it is not possible to build up other forms of life on an entirely different basis,” Barricelli explained.15 The new computer was assigned two problems: how to destroy life as we know it, and how to create life of unknown forms.

  What began as an isolated 5-kilobyte matrix is now expanding by over two trillion transistors per second (a measure of the growth in processing and memory) and five trillion bits of storage capacity per second (a measure of the growth in code).16 Yet we still face the same questions that were asked in 1953. Turing’s question was what it would take for machines to begin to think. Von Neumann’s question was what it would take for machines to begin to reproduce.

  When the Institute for Advanced Study agreed, against all objections, to allow von Neumann and his group to build a computer, the concern was that the refuge of the mathematicians would be disturbed by the presence of engineers. No one imagined the extent to which, on the contrary, the symbolic logic that had been the preserve of the mathematicians would unleash the powers of coded sequences upon the world. “In those days we were all so busy doing what we were doing we didn’t think very much about this enormous explosion that might happen,” says Willis Ware.

  Was the explosion an accident or deliberately set? “The military wanted computers,” explains Harris Mayer, the Los Alamos physicist who was working with both John von Neumann and Edward Teller at the time. “The military had the need and they had the money but they didn’t have the genius. And Johnny von Neumann was the genius. As soon as he recognized that we needed a computer to do the calculations for the H-bomb, I think Johnny had all of this in his mind.”17

  TWO

  Olden Farm

  It was the Lenni Lenape! It was the tribes of the Lenni Lenape! The sun rose from water that was salt, and set in water that was sweet, and never hid himself from their eyes.… It was but yesterday that the children of the Lenape were masters of the world.

  —James Fenimore Cooper, 1826

  PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, in summer has been described as “like the inside of a dog’s mouth.” The area’s original inhabitants, the Lenni Lenape (“original people” or “Men of Men”) abandoned the interior of New Jersey in summer and headed either to the Jersey Shore or to encampments on the estuaries of Delaware Bay. “From thence [June] to this present Month [August],” reported William Penn during his first summer on the Delaware River, in 1683, “we have had extraordinary heats.”1 Penn had landed in Delaware Bay on October 27, 1682, after a passage (from Deal, England) of fifty-nine days aboard the Welcome, during which smallpox broke out and thirty-one of his ninety-nine fellow colonists died. Penn, who had survived smallpox at the age of three, ministered to the sick during the voyage and arrived in excellent health.

  The Lenni Lenape, a subset of the Algonquin people, were called Delawares by the Dutch, Swedish, and English settlers who arrived in the seventeenth century, following the visit of the Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524. The Lenape met the newcomers with diplomacy, but the colonists had technology and immunity on their side. “What is the Matter with us Indians,” asked Chief Tenoughan of the Schuylkill River, according to Penn, “that we are thus sick in our own Air, and these Strangers well?”2

  The Lenni Lenape around Princeton belonged to the Unami nation, identified with the Turtle clan. European observers were never quite sure whether the Unami belonged to the Turtle, or the Turtle to the Unami. New Jersey was home to eleven species of turtle, adapted to all conditions, from hibernating at the bottom of frozen ponds to basking in the midsummer sun. To an American snapping turtle, a species unchanged for sixty million years, only the blink of a double-lidded eye separates us from William Penn.

  In 1609, Henry Hudson, representing the Dutch East India Company, explored the Newark estuary before sailing up the river that bears his name. In 1614, Cornelius Jacobsen Mey, also Dutch, explored Delaware Bay and entered the Delaware River, navigable as far as the site of present-day Trenton, or Delaware Falls. Upon his restoration in 1660, Charles II challenged the Dutch claims to North America, granting the entire territory between Virginia and New France to his brother, the Duke of York (later James II), in 1664. The territory was named New York, and a portion of it, between the Delaware and Hudson rivers, was subdivided further, with the west half (bordering the Delaware River and Delaware Bay) assigned to Lord Berkeley and the east half (bordering the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean) assigned to Sir George Carteret. The province was named New Jersey, and soon fell into the hands of Quakers, or the Society of Friends.

  In 1675, Lord Berkeley sold his interest in West New Jersey for £1,000 to John Fenwick and Edward Byllynge, two Quakers whose subsequent dispute over the property was referred for arbitration to William Penn. Fenwick sailed for America with his family and a group of fellow Quakers aboard the Griffin (or Griffith), founding a colony at “a pleasant rich spot” (Salem) on the Delaware, while Byllynge fell into debt and eventually transferred his interest to a group of creditors that now included Penn.3

  Penn, who had studied law in London, took the lead in drafting a constitution for the new colony, issued in 1676 as the “Concessions and Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders, and Inhabitants of the Province of West New Jersey.” One hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, this document established a representative democracy with freedom of religion and assembly, trial by jury, economic liberty, and other principles that would later be incorporated into the constitutions of Pennsylvania and eventually the United States. Penn also joined a partnership that purchased East New Jersey at auction in 1682 for £3,400 from Carteret’s estate.

  William Penn was the rebellious son of Admiral Sir William Penn, who led the English fleet in two wars against the Dutch and captured Jamaica (for Cromwell) in 1655. During the English Civil War, he sided with Parliament against the king, but secretly offered to switch sides and subsequently became a favorite of the king’s brother James. The younger Penn was sent to Oxford at age fifteen and soon expelled, for conducting religious services in his room and refusing to attend chapel or wear a gown. After a two-year tour of Europe he was entrusted with the management of his father’s estates in Ireland, where he took up with the Quakers, a rapidly growing nonconformist sect. He was promptly arrested and imprisoned, the first of some seven times. “Mr. William Pen[n], who is lately come over from Ireland, is a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing,” noted Samuel Pepys on December 29, 1667.

  Upon his return to London, Penn began pamphleteering, with “The Sandy Foundation Shaken” (questioning the Trinity) landing him in the Tower of London for eight months (during which he wrote the book No Cross, No Crown and several inflammatory tracts). In August 1670 he was again arrested in London, this time with William Mead, for preaching in the street after the Quaker meetinghouse in Grace-church Street was padlocked by the authorities, who charged that Penn and Mead “unlawfully and tumultuously did Assemble and Congregate themselves together, to the Disturbance of the Peace of the said Lord the King.”4

  After two weeks in Newgate Prison, Penn and Mead pled not guilty. “We did not make the Tumult, but they that interrupted us,” argued Penn. “ ’Tis very well known that we are a peaceable People, and cannot offer Violence to any Man.”5 The jury’s verdict was not guilty, upon which they, too, were imprisoned, for contempt of court. “You shall not be dismist till we have a Verdict, that the Court will accept; and you shall be lock’d up, without Meat, Drink, Fire, and Tobacco; you shall not think thus to abuse the Court; we will have a Verdict, by the help of God, or you shall starve for it,” they were instructed by the Crown.6 This miscarriage of justice provoked an outcry that led to the release of Penn and Mead, along with their jurors, and precipitated a change in English law. Penn would soon be back i
n prison, sentenced to six months for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the king, in 1671.

  Admiral Sir William Penn died in 1670, leaving an unresolved £16,000, officially for £11,000 in “victualling expenses,” plus interest, owed to him by the Crown. Rumors lingered that the admiral had covered the king for a gambling debt. His son William petitioned the king, in 1680, for a settlement, proposing that the Crown grant him “a tract of land in America, lying north of Maryland, on the east bounded with Delaware River, on the west, limited as Maryland is, and northward to extend as far as plantable, which is altogether Indian.”7 Charles and James said yes—resolving the debt, and exporting Penn. The colony of Pennsylvania, with its capital, Philadelphia, was the result.

  Penn arrived in 1682, assumed the governorship, and traveled extensively into the surrounding wilderness, learning the Lenni Lenape language well enough to converse without an interpreter and contrasting the justice and equality he found among the Indians to the injustices and inequalities he had left behind. “I find them … of a deep natural sagacity,” he wrote to his friend Robert Boyle of the Royal Society in 1683. “The low dispensation of the poor Indian out shines the lives of those Christians, that pretend an higher.”8

  To the west of Pennsylvania lay open wilderness, while to the east the wilds of New Jersey were now squeezed between two growing populations centered upon Philadelphia and New York. The most direct connection between the two settlements was overland across the “waist” of New Jersey, between the head of navigation on the Delaware River (near present-day Trenton, upstream from Philadelphia) and the head of navigation on the Raritan River (near present-day New Brunswick, upstream from New York). This well-worn Lenni Lenape footpath became, in succession, a trail passable by horses, a wagon road, the “King’s Highway” for stagecoaches, and finally State Routes 27 and 206.