Quotes from George B. Dyson

you can build an organ which can do anything that can be done, but you cannot build an organ which tells you whether it can be done."9 "This is connected with the theory of types and with the results of Gödel," he continued. "The question of whether something is feasible in a type belongs to a higher logical type.

It is characteristic of objects of low complexity that it is easier to talk about the object than produce it and easier to predict its properties than to build it.

But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the object.

An Internet search engine is a finite-state, deterministic machine, except at those junctures where people, individually and collectively, make a nondeterministic choice as to which results are selected as meaningful and given a click. These clicks are then immediately incorporated into the state of the deterministic machine, which grows ever so incrementally more knowledgeable with every click. This is what Turing defined as an oracle machine.

The good news is that, as Leibniz suggested, we appear to live in the best of all possible worlds, where the computable functions make life predictable enough to be survivable, while the noncomputable functions make life (and mathematical truth) unpredictable enough to remain interesting, no matter how far computers continue to advance.

The fundamental, indivisible unit of information is the bit. The fundamental, indivisible unit of digital computation is the transformation of a bit between its two possible forms of existence: as structure (memory) or as sequence (code). This is what a Turing Machine does when reading a mark (or the absence of a mark) on a square of tape, changing its state of mind accordingly, and making (or erasing) a mark somewhere else.

Globular clusters!

Life evolved, so far, by making use of the viral cloud as a source of backup copies and a way to rapidly exchange genetic code. Life may be better adapted to the digital universe than we think.

Billions of dollars were sunk into cables spanning six continents and three oceans, and a web of optical fiber engulfed the world. When the operation peaked in 1991, fiber was being rolled out, globally, at over 5,000 miles per hour, or nine times the speed of sound: Mach 9.

The survival of the fittest is a slow method for measuring advantages," Turing argued in 1950. "The experimenter, by the exercise of intelligence, should be able to speed it up.