Computing with Quantum Cats (31 page)

The schoolboy Alan Turing in the mid-1920s.

A letter home that he wrote using a fountain pen he had made himself.

Twenty years later he was a talented long-distance runner.

Bletchley Park, Hut 3, where Turing worked on Enigma.

One of the Hut 3 teams at work.

Two Wrens working with Colossus, the world's first electronic programmable computer.

Two of the American computer pioneers, Presper Eckert
(left foreground)
and John Mauchly
(leaning on pillar),
with the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) at the University of Pennsylvania, around 1946.

Johnny von Neumann
(right)
with Robert Oppenheimer in front of the Institute for Advanced Study computer, 1952.

A brochure for the Bendix G-15 computer, 1955. This machine was based on Turing's ACE design.

Astronomer Fred Hoyle with a model “radio telescope” used in the TV production of his play
A for Andromeda
, which featured Julie Christie (1961).

A version of the “game of life” in which squares live, die, or reproduce according to their relationship with adjacent squares.

The greatest gathering of physicists ever—Solvay Congress, October 1927. Delegates included quantum pioneers Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Paul Dirac, and Erwin Schrödinger.

A set of “double-slit” diffraction patterns for light.