It's grand and intimate, personal and cosmic, and about digital computing and archaic hunter gatherers. Every paragraph is a surprise." . Read and you will become aware of history you need to know, and of how the last few centuries of the human story sit within a much larger, epochal frame. Something. It works best as a digressive look at how advances in technology have constantly reshaped the world. I don’t mean it as a dig, either. Then Marconi, Edison, the invention of the vacuum tube. George Dyson transmutes memoir, history, and forecast into a page-turning tale in which Geronimo, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Catherine the Great, Kurt Gödel, and Steller's sea cow play roles. . 0.THE LEIBNIZ ARCHIPELAGOFrom Analog to Digital and BackIn July 1716, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a seventy-year-old lawyer, philosopher, and mathematician whose “tragedy was that he met the lawyers before the... "Pleasingly eccentric [and] impossibly wide-ranging . An extra treat is insight into the remarkable Dyson family." When reviewers say that some new book reminds them of some famous old book, it often ends up as a blurb on the paperback edition, so I want to be clear: when I say that George Dyson’s Analogia reminds me of Robert Pirsig’s New Age classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I do not mean it exactly as a compliment.. Analogia: The Entangled Destinities of Nature, Human Beings, and Machines (Allen Lane, £25, ISBN: 9781846147449) is an odd book. Dyson recounts the story of humans, technology and nature in a loving and leisurely manner, with enough lengthy digressions to make Victor Hugo say “steady on, mon pote”. It's grand and intimate, personal and cosmic, and about digital computing and archaic hunter gatherers. When reviewers say that some new book reminds them of some famous old book, it often ends up as a blurb on the paperback edition, so I want to be clear: when I say that George Dyson’s Analogia reminds me of Robert Pirsig’s New Age classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I do not mean it exactly as a compliment. . To withdraw your consent, see Your Choices. We are, Dyson reveals, on the cusp of a new moment in human history, driven by a generation of machines whose powers are beyond programmable control.Includes black-and-white illustrations. Read 6 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. But the key that unlocked it was the phrase ‘My mother, [the mathematician] Verena Huber-Dyson…’. George Dyson, a dual citizen of the United States and Canada, is an independent historian of technology whose subjects have included the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka, 1986), the evolution of artificial intelligence (Darwin Among the Machines, 1997), a path not taken into space (Project Orion, 2002), and the transition from numbers that mean things to numbers that do things in the aftermath of World War II (Turing’s Cathedral, 2012). Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman and John von Neumann all appear on stage. He was the creator of the near-mythical Project Orion, a plan to power huge, deep-space craft with exploding nukes. 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. Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café Racing from the Stone Age to the coming singularity, Dyson is in fine fettle . I don’t mean it as a dig, either. Our Privacy Notice has been updated to explain how we use cookies, which you accept by continuing to use this website. Dyson returns throughout ‘Analogia’ to the complex, shifting analogue and digital nature of humanity (e.g. Analogia book. 0.THE LEIBNIZ ARCHIPELAGOFrom Analog to Digital and BackIn July 1716, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a seventy-year-old lawyer, philosopher, and mathematician whose “tragedy was that he met the lawyers before the... "Pleasingly eccentric [and] impossibly wide-ranging . Please let us know if you agree to all of these cookies. A wondrous and stellar work.” —Andrei Codrescu, author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess. Analogia belongs on the shelf that holds Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival and Sebald's Rings of Saturn. It’s hard to classify. In 1716, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent eight days taking the cure with Peter the Great at Bad Pyrmont in Saxony, seeking to initiate a digitally-computed takeover of the world. While Dyson’s final conclusion is hardly ground-breaking, he deserves praise for so defiantly breaking out of conventional science and technology writing styles and formats. It’s something to do with the fact that natural technologies are analogue, involving a sliding scale with infinitely many variations; whereas modern technology is digital, with discrete sets. Seeing the intellectual excitement of 1950s physics from within is exhilarating; reading about years spent in the wilderness of the Canadian and Alaskan Pacific, the solitude and the grandeur, is thrilling. But (for me at least) the picture he sees never quite revealed itself. Between scenes from history, Dyson weaves in details from the life of his father, the physicist Freeman Dyson, including his involvement with the first nuclear reactor designed to shut down automatically, and his own, including a period he spent living in a tree house he built himself from scavenged driftwood. Analogia offers more serious fun than a dozen of the usual bestsellers." It's grand and intimate, personal and cosmic, and about digital computing and archaic hunter gatherers. One of Dyson’s best.” —Greg Bear, author of Darwin's Radio"George Dyson, over the distance of a mere 250 pages, ties together the fine strands of time, space, science, and self, in a gossamer web as beautiful and strong as a spider’s.

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