To summarize a couple of the highlights:
In 1936 Germany, Konrad Zuse began developing the Z1, a mechanical calculating machine programmed via perforated 35mm film. By 1937, he had broadened its architecture toward universal digital computation in the vein of Alan Turing. Although completed in 1938, the machine struggled with mechanical inaccuracies -- the same challenge which plagued Charles Babbage's much earlier work on the Difference Engine. Zuse overcame these mechanical hurdles in 1941 with the Z3, an operational digital computer capable of universal computation.
In fact, the Z3 was the world's first working machine physically capable of universal computation. The first real computer.
Zuse was also one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. In a book he published titled "Calculating Space," He was the first to surmise that our universe is computable by a deterministic computer program. Every "simulation hypothesis" and "mathematical universe" theory is downstream of Zuse. (One could argue that the Pythagoreans and neo-Pythagoreans, who held that the world was at root mathematical, were truly first, but Zuse made important and original contributions nevertheless.) It's important to note that, to this day, there are no physical observations which contradict Zuse's notion, as he wrote it, of a computable universe.
I would think that the German state or EU should provide funding for his museum. If that's not the case, it's a shame.
Check out this cool crank-powered self-assembling tower thing that he made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odwgpKRnWM8&t=1s
And his work on self replication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxv4vDMOFCo
I know very little about Zuse or his work and I lament that this museum is closing down as I am moving to Europe next year and had intended to use the opportunity to research his work.
Neil Gershenfeld has a quip that "computer science is the worst thing to happen to both computers and science because it prematurely froze the model of computation around 1950s designs' and I think there's some truth to this. The resource limitations that Zuse experienced in Germany during the depression and war that forced him down a design path of mechanical design over electromechanical and exposed him to the more fundamental idea that computation is ultimately a physical process -- 'there's no such thing as software just different states of hardware'. I have a feeling that the next big technological revolution will be based around self-replicating machines that more fully unify computation with matter.
Please an expert chime in to complement, but I believe simulation in quantum mechanics is a quite interesting and not so simple topic.
I believe the more correct thing to say is that quantum mechanics is approximable than simply computable. Don't forget, QM and current physical theories use real numbers, which are not digitally representable; although it seems also the case that information is locally bounded. The finite distribution of states and probabilistic dynamics is I believe is fundamentally what makes information bounded, (which forbids for example naive hypercomputation and I think several paradoxes that might arise from unbounded local information) but don't forget in general the dynamics is still based on continuous quantities as far as we know, not discrete quantities like in a computer. QM is about discrete states within a continuum set interacting with continuum dynamics, I think is accurate to say. Quantum field theory probably complicates things more but similar conclusions might be valid. This continuum dynamics can't be computed exactly, at most you could achieve a pretty good approximation; you'd also need to provision probabilities, either from pseudorandomness (which technically would invalidate the probabilistic model, although in practice this invalidation is not feasibly distinguishable by an observer of current human-scale computing power) or gathering environmental noise.
It's really interesting to me how nature is kind of surprising and defiant of simple hypothesis we come up with. But I think each of those characteristics plays a role, is an important part of existence somehow, and we should keep trying to understand why each aspect of nature is the particular way it is for their numerous insights into our condition and existence.
Regarding the continuum, the final word hasn’t been spoken with regard to the physical world, and probably also with regard to mathematics, since there is some level of controversy about the continuum even in the foundations of mathematics. We know for example that the continuum hypothesis is independent of ZFC, so what’s up with that. It might very well turn out that there is no continuum in physical reality. However, it seems highly unlikely that it’ll be anything like the naive conception of a cellular automaton.
For things like light frequencies I believe we are not even sure if they are truly unquantized, so they might be discretely computable for all we know
Time is the tricky one. But if you get away from computing the whole universe and just try to compute the viewpoint of one observer that might be quite solvable
Source: ENIAC in Action p255.
There is another Museum of his, which is still funded.
I concur with the OP when they said Zuse is being waaay underappreciated. He is one of the fathers of the modern computational age.
There is no model capable of simulating the universe either.
I also wonder what such an observation would have to look like. Observations per se are unique and recorded and therefore can be reconstructed via trivial computation. Which brings us to the laws of physics. You may believe that they are utterly wrong and the universe is deterministic after all, but then the burden of proof is upon you.
In any case, the laws of physics are not yet settled, and determinism is still a very live option. The notion of a continuum is, to me, even more bizarre than the notion of a deterministic universe -- and is also more bizarre than Everett's notion of a "wave function of the universe."
His efforts received enormous amounts of funding from the Nazis.
Much of his specialized 'computers' were explicitly for the war effort, including planes.
He was a big fan of utilizing computing for racial and genealogy research. The Nazis had plans drawn out to murder orders of magnitude more people based on this sort of research had they won (Generalplan Ost).
It was not like he was forced at gunpoint to participate, he was all in for the funding. Much like Von Braun, but did not have the luck to be paperclipped.
You might be surprised how many UK and US scientists of that time supported eugenics, see for example https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014
and as for computers and atrocities, see IBM's history from the time or perhaps some more recent tech companies.
Few of us are saints.
correct is that he was a conservative engineer who happened to be intelligent and live in that era, and who was lucky enough to work in his domain instead of dying a cannon fodder somewhere. did they build weapons? sure thing. does that make him a convinced fascist? certainly not.
he wasn't even member of the NSDAP party.
here is a short biography based off complete archive material:
Deutsche Biographie - Zuse, Konrad https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118637436.html
Anyway, three minutes ago, after reading about the museum's likely fate (sigh!) on HN, I've booked tickets to Berlin in October.
Hoyerswerda or bust!
And overall, I'd wager you'd nerd snipe yourself at DT anyway. Not just with computers but with trains, waterships, aeroships cameras---you name it. That's an easy ~5h to kill at least. I only had to leave because I got tired. The curiosity is strong but the legs are, alas, fragile.
Also, this museum is closer to Dresden than to Berlin...
I guess its only a matter of time until we put the final nail in Röntgen's coffin and the Deutsche finally start using the proper term: X-rays.
Apart from a quite a few museums having his machines (or replicas).
In Dresden, Leipzig or Berlin, 30.000 visitors a year could have been reached.
I like exhibitions of this sort and I might have taken the 500 km long trip to see Zuse's museum, if I knew about it. I am only learning now.
Playlist showcasing the current restoration work: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtpOUadaBh31n6Pdscwhwopmh...
IIRC they also have sensible documentatioin about his Nazi connections that puts this work into appropriate context.
I especially enjoyed ZCOM when at one point the Fabmobil visited them and I learned a couple of nice people. Not only computer hacking people but also craftsmans etc too.
Also a couple of times the ZCOM gave us space for our computer club (PPP, rip) in the hope we can benefit from each other. But unfortunately the interests stick to a few great "hardcore" people only, although we offered great and free pizza ;)
Fun times. Not even too long ago...
I first heard of Zuse when I spent a week in class in the Zuse conference room at DEC Spit Brook Road, Nashua aka ZKO1. (there were many rooms in that facility named after computing pioneers...)
There were pictures of Zuse and the Z3 in that room, but also an original Konrad Zuse oil painting. I wonder what happened to that painting...
I am sorry for the meta comment but websites like these should be on the black list imho (and it escapes me why the german watch dog is sleeping at the wheel so often).
Current legal doctrine is that _forcing_ payment (i.e. cash for privacy) is not allowed, that does not mean you cannot offer a subscription that disables tracking: you just have to offer a free option as well, which they do.
Datenverarbeitungen von Werbeanbietern einschl. personalisierter Werbung mit Profilbildung.
Zustimmung erforderlich für kostenfreie Nutzung
(Do note I try to go to Berlin once or twice a year to visit friends - so the news of the (more impending than I realized!) closure of the Hoyerswerda museum simply made me get this fall's visit booked...)
I haven't been to the Deutsches Technikmuseum since October 2024, so I'll probably make another visit there.
> the museum didn't really do much to let itself known either
Sure. But you can only do so much with probably not even a handful people and limited budget...
I wouldn't call this perfect...
There's a huge difference between "a conservative engineer who happened to be intelligent and live in that era" and leading a weapons lab attracting enormous amounts of funding, and fantasizing about how computing could be used to advance race science research.
mind to share sources to that part? that's saying "Nazi" btw.
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/der-erste-computer-d...
> that's saying "Nazi" btw.
No more than allowing chips on drones makes Nvidia/Intel VPs terrorists, but there's certainly culpability.
Z3 is an example of an accidentally Turing-complete machine.
Kind of easy to let that pass though, given the "imitation game" wasn't even introduced by Turing until way after the Z3 machine was completed.
Even the deterministic part has problems, like why does quantum mechanics appear random when it's not or why we see ourselves as having free will. Science can never answer the first one and the second will always be an open question because explaining why something evolved in nature is hard.
A god is no better or worse than alien simulations, or an infinite multiverse, or the anthropic principle (aka giving up), or any other possible explanation for why the universe is the way it is.
None of the things you listed are paradoxes. A paradox is something that is self-contradictory.
> Even the deterministic part has problems, like why does quantum mechanics appear random when it's not or why we see ourselves as having free will.
Something can easily appear random when it is in fact not. Any random number your computer gives you is not truly random. Any hash looks random but is completely deterministic.
> A god is no better or worse than alien simulations, or an infinite multiverse, or the anthropic principle (aka giving up), or any other possible explanation for why the universe is the way it is.
Hard disagree. Not all attempts at explanations are equally valid or invalid. Some are more "out there" than others. And it should not stop us from trying to understand the universe more and more.
This was the claim, and OP has a point, which you are misinterpreting as religion vs physics.