Tony Hey - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution

GYURI PPAY is a senior research Fellow at the IT Innovation Centre at Southampton University, U.K. His main research interests are high-performance computing, event simulations, and numerical algorithms.

There are many popular books on science that provide accessible accounts of the recent developments of modern science for the general reader. However, there are very few popular books about computer science arguably the science that has changed the world the most in the last half century. This book is an attempt to address this imbalance and to present an accessible account of the origins and foundations of computer science. In brief, the goal of this book is to explain how computers work, how we arrived at where we are now, and where we are likely to be going in the future.

The key inspiration for writing this book came from Physics Nobel Prize recipient Richard Feynman. In his lifetime, Feynman was one of the few physicists well known to a more general public. There were three main reasons for this recognition. First, there were some wonderful British television programs of Feynman talking about his love for physics. Second, there was his best-selling book Surely Youre Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character , an entertaining collection of stories about his life in physics from his experiences at Los Alamos and the Manhattan atomic bomb project, to his days as a professor at Cornell and Caltech. And third, when he was battling the cancer that eventually took his life, was his participation in the enquiry following the Challenger space shuttle disaster. His live demonstration, at a televised press conference, of the effects of freezing water on the rubber O-rings of the space shuttle booster rockets was a wonderfully understandable explanation of the origin of the disaster.

Among physicists, Feynman is probably best known for Feynman diagrams, the work that brought him his Nobel Prize in 1964. The diagrams constitute a calculational tool kit that enables physicists to make sense of not only Quantum Electrodynamics, the theory that underpins electricity and magnetism, but also of the relativistic quantum field theories believed to describe the weak and strong interactions of elementary particles. But Feynman was not only a great researcher: his Feynman Lectures on Physics are a masterly three-volume introduction to modern physics based on lectures that he gave at Caltech in the 1960s. He was also a visionary: Feynmans after-dinner talk Theres Plenty of Room at the Bottom in 1959 first introduced the ideas of nanotechnology the behavior of devices at length scales approaching atomic dimensions.

By the early 1980s, Feynman had become interested in computing, and for the last five years of his life, he gave a lecture course on computing. In the first two years, he collaborated on an ambitious computing course with two Caltech colleagues, Carver Mead and John Hopfield. In the third year, assisted by Gerry Sussman, a computer scientist on sabbatical from MIT, Feynman gave his own version of the course. The lectures contained a fascinating mixture of standard computer science material plus discussion of the thermodynamics of computing and an analysis of a quantum computer. Before he died, Feynman asked Tony Hey to edit his notes for publication, and the lectures eventually saw the light of day as The Feynman Lectures on Computation . Feynman also acted as a consultant to the Thinking Machines computer company, founded by MIT researcher Danny Hillis.