“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean thi...

A technology historian presents a startling look back at the analog age and life before the digital revolution—and an unsettling vision of what comes next.Named one of WIRED's "The Best Pop Culture That Got Us Through 2020""A pleasingly eccentric, impossibly wide-ranging tech treatise/memoir. . . . A thoughtful—and most thought-provoking—exploration of where our inventions have taken and will take us." — Kirkus Reviews

Named one of WIRED**’s "The Best Pop Culture That Got Us Through 2020"**In Analogia**, technology historian George Dyson presents a startling look back at the analog age and life before the digital revolution—and an unsettling vision of what comes next.**In 1716, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent eight days taking the cure with Peter the Great at Bad Pyrmont...

“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean thi...

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the l...

What is time?This deceptively simple question is the single most important problem facing science as we probe more deeply into the fundamentals of the universe. All of the mysteries physicists and cosmologists face—from the Big Bang to the future of the universe, from the puzzles of quantum physics to the unification of forces and particles—come down to the nature of time.The fact that time is real may seem obvious. You experience it passing every day when you watch clocks ...

The machine that kills secrets is a powerful cryptographic code that hides the identities of leakers and hacktivists as they spill the private files of government agencies and corporations bringing us into a new age of whistle blowing. With unrivaled access to figures like Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and Jacob Applebaum, investigative journalist Andy Greenberg unveils the group that brought the world WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, and BalkanLeaks.This powerful technology has been...

Papyrus rolls and Twitter have much in common, as each was their generation's signature means of "instant" communication. Indeed, as Tom Standage reveals in his scintillating new book, social media is anything but a new phenomenon.From the papyrus letters that Roman statesmen used to exchange news across the Empire to the advent of hand-printed tracts of the Reformation to the pamphlets that spread propaganda during the American and French revolutions, Standage chronicles the incre...

Renowned historian Stephen Greenblatt's works shoot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. With The Swerve, Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion. "More wonderfully illuminating Renaissance history from a master scholar and historian."-Kirkus Reviews, starred review

A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers.Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them...

IBM is in serious trouble. Big Blue, as the company is known, tends to rely on magical thinking for its success, but that magic ran out a long time ago. The trouble began back in the 1990s and IBM had to hire, for the first time, an outside CEO. Lou Gerstner saved the day, pushing IBM into services with spectacular results, but not without consequence. As services became commoditized, IBM could compete only by offshoring the work. Quality suffered. In addition, Gerstner's compensation was ...

James Gleick has long been fascinated by the making of science -- how ideas order visible appearances, how equations can give meaning to molecular and stellar phenomena, how theories can transform what we see. In Chaos, he chronicled the emergence of a new way of looking at dynamic systems; in Genius, he portrayed the wondrous dimensions of Richard Feymnan's mind. Now, in Isaac Newton, he gives us the story of the scientist who, above all others, embodied humanit...