By Barry Bergman, Berkeley News | SEPTEMBER 27, 2013
“There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky,” George Dyson writes in the preface to Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. “In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky.” Turing’s Cathedral, the focus of Berkeley’s “On the Same Page” program this year, chronicles the birth of the digital era in the mud of World War II and the work of brilliant mathematicians like John von Neumann – a lover of all things military who turned his passion for designing the world’s most destructive weapons to creating its most intelligent computers – and a group of engineers he assembled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J, in 1945.