George Dyson Books

In a world where humans coexist with technologies they no longer control or understand, who holds the future? George Dyson plots a thrilling and unexpected course through 300 years of history and science to reveal the hidden connections that underpin the digital transformation of the current age, ending with a premonition of what might follow. From an eighteenth-century Russian expedition to the furthest reaches of North America, to the mirror signals that heralded the age of digital long-range communications and invention of the vacuum tube, Analogia interweaves historical adventure wit scientific insight in a deeply personal story that frame the pursuit - and cost - of the digital revolution in a captivating new light.

A Wall Street Journal Best Business Book of 2012 A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012 In this revealing account of how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II, George Dyson illuminates the nature of digital computers, the lives of those who brought them into existence, and how code took over the world. In the 1940s and ‘50s, a small group of men and women—led by John von Neumann—gathered in Princeton, New Jersey, to begin building one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. The codes unleashed within this embryonic, 5-kilobyte universe—less memory than is allocated to displaying a single icon on a computer screen today—broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things, and our universe would never be the same. Turing’s Cathedral is the story of how the most constructive and most destructive of twentieth-century inventions—the digital computer and the hydrogen bomb—emerged at the same time.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020How did we end up in a world where humans coexist with technologies we can no longer fully control or understand?George Dyson plots an unexpected course through the past 300 years to reveal the hidden connections that underpin our digital age, ending with a premonition of what lies ahead.From an eighteenth-century Russian voyage across the North Pacific, to the mirror signals that heralded the age of digital telecommunications and the invention of the vacuum tube, Analogia interweaves historical adventure with scientific insight in a deeply personal story that frames the pursuit - and cost - of the digital revolution in a captivating new light.

Paul Reps' Sammlung von Zen-Texten gehört zu den echten Klassikern des Zen und erfreut sich seit über 30 Jahren einer ungebrochenen Beliebtheit. 500 Jahre Zen-Erfahrung der großen chinesischen und japanischen Meister in einem Band bestehend aus: den 101 Zen-Geschichten, der Koan-Sammlung Mumonkan - Das torlose Tor oder Die torlose Schranke und den 10 Bildern des Ochsen, dem sogenannten Ochsengleichnis über die Stufen des Erwachens. Eine originelle Ergänzung sind die Lehrsprüche aus dem 4000 Jahre alten Sanskrit-Werk Auf die Mitte zu, das in erstaunlicher Weise bereits den Geist des Zen atmet und als Urahn aller späteren Zen-Literatur gelten könnte.