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Rolling for aye through Space and Time
It is Alan Turing's hundredth birthday. It has been for some hours now in the country where he was born, but I'm on Eastern Standard Time. I spent much of my week fighting with computers, but I like to think he wouldn't mind being blamed for there being anything there to fight with at all. Google certainly thinks so.
I have been writing about Alan on and off for years—e-mails, online, longer than it took for the poem to find its shape. (Morphogenesis. He was a shape-changer, only partly of his own will.) He ghosts in my dreams and I can lay no claim to him; he was a dead man for longer than his lifetime when I discovered him, first in the person of an actor I loved, slowly emerging into his own tight smile and his schoolboy's dark-parted hair and his voice that everyone agrees was difficult, that I will never hear for myself because neither of his radio talks was recorded: I didn't know him. (You can listen to some who did. "He was not your typical Achilles figure, not a warrior king this man." I can add Odysseus now to the scrim of stories it's hard not to see him through, but if he ever told his way home, it was long after, in another country of electrons and equations, the static spark of a screen.) He became important to me nonetheless. He seems to be important to a great many other people. He should be: and for all the reasons that are worth celebrating as well as the ones that still hurt. At this distance, the apple can't be separated from the cyanide. You take the dead as you find them, bitter and sweet.
And there was another occasion in the executive mess, when Alan was holding forth on the possibilities of a 'thinking machine'. His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: 'No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.' The room was paralysed, while Alan nonchalantly continued to explain how he imagined feeding in facts on prices of commodities and stock, and asking the machine the question 'Do I buy or sell?' All afternoon the phone was ringing in his laboratory, with people asking who on earth it was.
—Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983)
Do something scientific this weekend. Do something transgressive. Enjoy strawberries and cream. Do something really new.
I have been writing about Alan on and off for years—e-mails, online, longer than it took for the poem to find its shape. (Morphogenesis. He was a shape-changer, only partly of his own will.) He ghosts in my dreams and I can lay no claim to him; he was a dead man for longer than his lifetime when I discovered him, first in the person of an actor I loved, slowly emerging into his own tight smile and his schoolboy's dark-parted hair and his voice that everyone agrees was difficult, that I will never hear for myself because neither of his radio talks was recorded: I didn't know him. (You can listen to some who did. "He was not your typical Achilles figure, not a warrior king this man." I can add Odysseus now to the scrim of stories it's hard not to see him through, but if he ever told his way home, it was long after, in another country of electrons and equations, the static spark of a screen.) He became important to me nonetheless. He seems to be important to a great many other people. He should be: and for all the reasons that are worth celebrating as well as the ones that still hurt. At this distance, the apple can't be separated from the cyanide. You take the dead as you find them, bitter and sweet.
And there was another occasion in the executive mess, when Alan was holding forth on the possibilities of a 'thinking machine'. His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: 'No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.' The room was paralysed, while Alan nonchalantly continued to explain how he imagined feeding in facts on prices of commodities and stock, and asking the machine the question 'Do I buy or sell?' All afternoon the phone was ringing in his laboratory, with people asking who on earth it was.
—Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983)
Do something scientific this weekend. Do something transgressive. Enjoy strawberries and cream. Do something really new.
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I have some lovely little red red native strawberries...
Nine
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You're welcome. There doesn't seem to be anything centenary going on in Boston, but I wanted to say something.
I have some lovely little red red native strawberries...
Perfect. It's the season. And you could watch the stars, as Alan did (and wrote about to Christopher) in 1929:
Anything like 'making a spectrograph' was far beyond the resources Alan enjoyed at Guildford, but he got hold of an old spherical glass lampshade, filled it with plaster of Paris, covered it with paper (which made him think about the nature of curved surfaces) and set out to mark in the constellations of fixed stars. Typically, he insisted on doing it from his own observation of the night sky, although it would more easily and accurately have been done from an atlas. He trained himself to wake at four o'clock in the morning so that he could mark in some stars not visible in the December evening sky, thus waking up his mother, who thought she had heard a burglar.
From their separate houses, they saw the same comet.
no subject
From their separate houses, they saw the same comet.
Stitched forever on one thread of light. That's almost mythic. Beautiful.
Nine