Konrad Zuse

Travelling a little bit further, the story continues in the middle of the war in the 1940s.

Even though Konrad Zuse's computer was the stuff of genius, the use of relay switches made it too slow to really be of any use.

That's why people in the 40s looked to vacuum tubes as the way of the future.

During the heat of World War II, the US military had human computers calculate the angle at which missiles should be fired for different weather conditions.

I think David Lynch, um, understood, uh, some of these things deeply.

In this essay, "Nuking the Matrix", I talk about a, um, German computer scientist by the name of Konrad Zuse, who beginning around 1937, from 1937 to 1941, this guy built the first computers.

And while Alan Turing is widely celebrated in the West as the, you know, inventor of, uh, you know, what, what we call like, um, um, Turing programming languages and, you know, um, Turing machines and so forth.

Actually, Alan Turing was playing catch up with this particular Nazi, Konrad Zuse.

He was enlisted by the Allies to understand what Zuse was doing and to catch up with him.

Uh, which he never did, by the way.

Right? Which made Einstein very nervous because it's a non-deterministic system and behaves very bizarrely compared to macroscopic phenomena other than psi, right? I mean, psi is the only macroscopic phenomenon that we have that behaves the way the quantum domain does.

And so you have people like Einstein talking about quantum entanglement as spooky action at a distance.

the early kabbalists basically saw the world this way, and they were right.

And we know they were right because we have physicists and computer scientists like John Archibald Wheeler, and before him, the, the German computer scientist Konrad Zuse, who showed in great depth and detail how what we think of as fundamental physics can be extrapolated from out of the dynamics of computation.

And that actually, if you, if you analyze, you know, quantum physical phenomena, the best explanation for why they behave the way they do is that they are outgrowths of an information processing system.

So there's a whole essay I have in, in Occult Horizons, uh, on Konrad Zuse, who was basically the German Alan Turing, except he was slightly ahead of Alan Turing.

Alan Turing was playing catch-up during World War II with Konrad Zuse.

And Zuse built the first computers in, uh, the late 1930s, okay? By the 1940s, he had developed what we call a Turing, you know, programming language for computers before Alan Turing did.

Again, Alan Turing was-

I generally use simulacrum.

A pile of folk landed on the same design all at once in total isolation.

George Stibitz, Konrad Zuse, John Atanasoff, and a few others all worked out that binary number systems were the key to a new kind of calculating device.

Their logic was all basically the same.

You can make circuits that operate on binary numbers.

In fact, the Boolean piece, the actual math side, is just as important as the hardware piece.

If you look at all the different folk that arrived at binary logic in the '30s, about half of them also land on how important it is to be able to use Boolean math to describe their new circuits.

Even Konrad Zuse, in near total isolation, arrived at that conclusion.

Binary is a package deal, and that package is very attractive.