George Dyson: Turing's Cathedral, The Origins of the Digital Universe

Want to learn where the digital universe as we know it was born? Dyson sheds new light on the group of scientists and their government-funded lab at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton that started it all. In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses led by John von Neumann gathered for a joint project to create the theoretical universal machine, an idea that had been put forth by mathematician Alan Turing. The computer that they built not only led directly to the hydrogen bomb, but also the 20th-century technology that came to be the digital universe we know today.