Experimental Blog # 143

Quotations and notes from "Turing's Cathedral" - The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson

"A digital universe - whether 5 kilobytes or the entire Internet - consists of two species of bits: differences in space, and differences in time."
"That two symbols were sufficient for encoding all communication had been established by Francis Bacon in 1623." "That zero and one were sufficient for logic as well as arithmetic was established by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1679..."

"In March of 1953 there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed random-access memory on planet Earth."{in about 15 separate computers}"Each island in the new archipelago constituted a universe unto itself."

"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. 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. ... the eleven nuclear tests, yielding a total of 252 kilotons, conducted at the Nevada Test Site in 1953..."

"...the largest fission weapon ever produced .... the Super Oralloy Bomb yeilded 500 kilotons in the Ivy King test at Enewetak on November 15, 1952, and was intended to demonstrate that for any conceivable military purpose, half a megaton should be enough."

"The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time."

"The bombs ... were a spectacular success. ... there had been forty-three explosions at Enewetak and twenty-three at Bikini, for a total yield of 108 megatons. The computers did their job perfectly, but on Castle Bravo, ... there was a human error, perhaps the largest human error in history, in failing to account for the generation of tritium from lithium-7 as well as lithium-6. The explosion, on March 1, 1954, was expected to yield some 6 megatons, but yielded over 15 megatons instead."