sgusers9的部落格

Source: The Santa Fe New MexicanNov.mini storage 05--The technology that allows people globally to tweet, email photos and become YouTube sensations has some of the same origins as a much different, more ominous tool -- the nuclear bomb.Historian George Dyson on Wednesday, Nov. 6, will discuss the nexus of people and places that led to development of the digital universe and the nuclear one in a Santa Fe Institute free public lecture at 7:30 p.m. at the James A. Little Theater, 1060 Cerrillos Road. It is the institute's final public lecture of the year.Dyson's book, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, details the rise of the digital world. It was selected as a best book of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews and The Wall Street Journal.Dyson calls his lecture "Ulam's Universe," after Stanislaw Ulam, a Polish mathematician who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dyson said Ulam "just happened to be in the center of both the development of modern computing and the development of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, from start to finish.""Both the idea of a digital universe and the idea of a Santa Fe Institute owe a huge debt to Stan," Dyson said recently in an email. "I hope people leave [the lecture] with a sense of what a remarkable person he was, what remarkable times he and his wife Francoise Aron Ulam, lived through, and the extent to which he and his colleagues envisioned the world in which we now live."Stanislaw Ulam and his buddy John von Neumann developed a statistical sampling theory for solving complicated mathematical problems that became known as the Monte Carlo method. Together, with physicist Richard Feynman, they developed some of the early computers at LANL. Ulam at the same time worked with physicist Edward Teller on the hydrogen bomb design and their work contributed to modern thermonuclear weapons.Dyson's work explores technology's evolution, its inventors and how it impacts society.The initial ideas that led to computer technology -- binary digits, or bits, and the concept of a machine that could process those bits -- had long been described by the time a team of scientists at Princeton set out to build one in the early 1950s.In 1936, a young English logician, Alan Turing, first described machines that could take bits and translate them both in space andself storagetime, as Dyson details in his book. Turing laid out the basics of a "universal machine" that, with an endless supply of tape and enough time, could decipher instructions.Turing "would probably be surprised at how many and how inexpensive and how powerful our versions of his universal machine are now," Dyson wrote in an email. "And he would be astonished that we are still using almost exactly the architecture he set down on paper [following von Neumann's lead] over a few weeks of work in 1946."Dyson theorizes that the Manhattan Project is better known and described because it was a wartime effort ordered by the government. The project "was centralized, if geographically dispersed, completed extremely quickly, and directed at a clearly defined goal -- achieved, through almost superhuman effort and cooperation, on July 16 1945," Dyson said. "The development of computers was bottom-up, largely disorganized, and we still do not really know what the goal is. So the history of computing, which developed over centuries and is still unfolding, has been difficult to unravel, and unwieldy to present."Though early computers and nuclear weapons developed almost simultaneously, Dyson thinks the digital universe would have developed anyway, independently. "Without the wartime Manhattan Project and more importantly the subsequent push to develop the H-bomb, we would certainly have still developed computers, and a robust computer industry," Dyson said. "But it might have taken a lot longer to make the leap from punched cards to vacuum tubes to transistors and then microprocessors--and England, not America, might have kept the lead."Santa Fe Institute's community lecture series is made possible through a donation from Los Alamos National Bank.Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com. Follow her on Twitter @stacimatlock.On the WebIf you can't attend the lecture, you can still listen in and participate live online. To watch this lecture as it happens, visitSanta Fe Institute's YouTube page. To participate in the live Twitter feed or ask questions of the speakers: @sfi_live or #sfi_live.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) Visit The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) at .santafenewmexican.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉