Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

George Dyson talks about "Von Neumann's Universe."

Von Neumann came from Hungary and was appointed to Princeton during the Depression. In the office above him was Kurt Goedel who was stuck in a Catch 22 trying to emigrate. The Germans finally allowed Goedel to leave Austria once they realized he wasn't a Jew, but he got classified as an enemy alien by the US because Germany had conquered Austria. In 1943 he finally got his US citizenship and was immediately drafted. Goedel was, however, paranoid. He would only eat food off his sister's plate because he was worried about being poisoned. He was influential on von Neumann who came back from Los Alamos thinking that computing was going to be more important than bombs. Immediately after the war, von Neumann joined IBM where he designed the architecture of computers...building on Goedel's idea that you could take logical processes, encode them in numbers, and get results.

He describes the culture in the group von Neumann built at Princeton, reminiscent of geek culture, right down to a memo complaining that they're using too much sugar in their tea. They built a compuer with 3,400 tubes, more powerful than the Eniac that had many times that number. No proprietary rights were kept.

Dyson says von Neumann's problem is how you build a reliable computer out of sloppy parts — tubes are not digital — which is the same problem this audience has building something reliable out of the Internet. Dyson was given permission by Princeton to open up seven boxes of archived material and has fantastic scans of logs and letters.

Von Neumann, a biologist, also saw that the digital world could give rise to digital evolution. Dyson shows printouts of generations of transforms that look like the cellular automata that Wolfram is doing. In fact, von Neumann was working on a book on creating self-reproducing automata.

He died of bone cancer at 54, probably from inhaling radioactive material at Los Alamos.

[Fantastic talk.]