Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe

by Paul Sen

With time to think, Turing focused on what he felt was the fascinating confluence of mathematics, computing, and biology. From 1947 to 1948, he wrote groundbreaking papers on the way nerve cells in the brain might work and on how machines might emulate that process. Then in 1948, Max Newman, also a code breaker from Bletchley Park and now professor of mathematics at Manchester University, recruited Turing. Newman had also secured funding to research and build computers and knew, rightly, that Turing’s expertise would be invaluable. The machines that Turing and his colleagues then developed in Manchester were vast in size and limited in power. The first version, known as Baby, weighed one ton and could carry out little more than basic arithmetic. Turing himself wrote the code that enabled Baby to do long division. But Baby and its successors pioneered concepts such as random-access memory (RAM) that are essential to all modern computers. Turing played a crucial role by testing these machines’ capabilities by running ever-more-complex software on them.