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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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No, actually I hadn't. His mother would have liked it.
(I am skeptical, because I do not know how important it is to the author for Turing not to be a suicide, because of whatever that seems to say about him; if death by misadventure lets society off the hook in a way that an unambiguous bite of cyanide wouldn't. But it's interesting that people are still looking at the story all these years later. Getting under the myth is important.)
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If it was an accident, I wonder whether Turing is currently laughing at everyone, or annoyed that his work was interrupted early.