One of my lecturers for my first degree was Gordon Preston. He worked with Turing at Bletchley, and apparently used to play Go with him quite regularly. He will have known Turing quite well, both professionally and, insofar as was possible at the time, socially.
I knew Preston quite well - he mentored me in the scholar program - but I never knew of his connection with Turing. When I did find out I started to make enquiries about re-establishing contact, but Preston now has advanced dementia and doesn't recognize even close family.
Such a lost opportunity, primarily because I was young, self-absorbed, ignorant, but believing I was clever and knowledgeable. And now the chance is gone forever. This is why I now try to take every opportunity to connect with people who have stories to tell, and encourage them to talk.
> young, self-absorbed, ignorant, but believing I was clever and knowledgeable.
Well, don't beat yourself up too much. It is existentially wrenching to think about the missed opportunity but such is the folly of youth. Equally Preston could have shared more. Like tears in rain and all that.
Though I look at that statue of Turing and I really want to shake his hand and thank him. Sometimes life is terribly unfair.
Now that I am actively seeking out people and deliberately spending time with them, the one thing I consistently find is that they are very reluctant to initiate conversations about these things. I've now spent time with Charlie Duke, Alan Bean, and TK Mattingly, and without exception it takes time to get them to open up and talk about these things.
I used to wonder why, but I had an in-depth conversation with someone a while ago who was similarly reluctant. She said:
People ask, but usually they don't really care.
And if they do care, they usually won't make
the effort to understand.
And if they do make the effort to understand,
they usually don't have the background or
experience to understand.
And if they do understand, I don't need to have
explained.
Taking the time, making the effort, explicitly acknowledging that you'll never fully understand and yet being willing to make the effort to appreciate their experience, then you can get people to tell their stories.
I understand why, and I know how most of us are. But it does make me sad that these harrowing experiences get smothered by polite conversation. FWIW my grandparents escaped the Soviet gulags and were likewise reluctant to discuss it. So the stories and lessons are lost.
I remember sitting chatting for a day with Ivan Moscovich. his story[0] is compelling and horrifying in equal measure. I am privileged to count him as a friend, and to have had him open up and talk quietly about some of his experiences.
>Now that I am actively seeking out people and deliberately spending time with them, the one thing I consistently find is that they are very reluctant to initiate conversations about these things. I've now spent time with Charlie Duke, Alan Bean, and TK Mattingly, and without exception it takes time to get them to open up and talk about these things.
It also depends on the person asking and how he goes about it.
I have a couple of friends who people will tell them absolutely anything, their whole life drama, 10-20 minutes after meeting them.
There, I was with a small group of about twenty
mathematicians, assisted by about 250 WRENS, in
what was called the Newmanry. M H A Newman, the
MHAN, was the head of this group, and the assistant
head was Shaun Wylie.
Apropos of nothing in particular, Shaun Wylie supervised Frank Adams, who supervised Béla Bollobás[1], who supervised me.
At least in mathematics, I've heard he was something of a machine.
Here's another article with some biographical information but more about his work (for those that don't know the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy it's a good, free, online resource for philosophy related subjects).
Love the letter on solving solitaire. Encouragement to talk to kids about maths.
Are there any good scientific books for kids/toddlers anyway? For things to answer to the "why" questions if you are an atheist. I'd like to explain evolution for example.
I think the content would be what I am looking for, but unfortunately the artwork and layout is too overblown, making it hard to read. My kid is 3 - obviously the text would be too complicated anyway, but it would be nice to at least have some nice, clear pictures to talk about.
It has some good ideas, though - for example it shows a stack of photographs of our ancestors, one photograph for every ancestor, and talks about the height of that stack. Nice idea, but horrible graphics imo (artistically good graphics, but not so well suited as illustration).
This is about math and more for older children, but I like these in particular. It's great for a summer. A kid in Jr high to HS can leaf through and find some illustration that looks intriguing and then there are something like 2-4 pages to read about maybe fibseq or knots or whatever.
Or it could have been that Turing was a friendly person. The fact he was gay doesn't mean that any interactions he had with men where on the basis of attraction.
Turing even went with the Greenbaum family on
a day trip to the seaside resort of St Annes.
But Barbara recalls it ended badly.
"Alan turned up at our house in a very strange
outfit, which looked like his school cricket
whites. White trousers which came half-way up
his ankles and a white shirt which was very
creased and crumpled. But it was a lovely sunny
day and Alan was in a cheerful mood and off
we went.
"Then he thought it would be a good idea to go
to the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool. We found a
fortune-teller's tent and Alan said he'd like
to go in so we waited around for him to come
back.
"And this sunny, cheerful visage had shrunk into
a pale, shaking, horror-stricken face.
Something had happened. We don't know what the
fortune-teller said but he obviously was deeply
unhappy. I think that was probably the last time
we saw him before we heard of his suicide."
Gee, that's strange...
The inquest decided that Turing had killed himself
using cyanide. A partially eaten apple was by his
side in bed but as it was never tested it's
impossible to say if it was laced with poison as
has been suggested.
Oh really?
An alternative interpretation is that he inhaled
or ingested cyanide by accident during a chemistry
experiment.
So your telling me... That someone with an analytical mind like Turing's... just decided to go waste some money on a fortune teller (because it's not like they're bullshit artists or anything)... while on a sudden, random trip to the sea shore...
And then, he emerges with his mood so visibly shattered, that a young girl never forgets the drastic, unexpected shift in personality, not even decades later does she forget this transient event. A short time later, he's dead. And it's a suspicious suicide.
Someone involved in developing machines to attack german Nazi military ciphers, with years of experience conducting efforts under secrecy with high-level government security clearance, while cities across the channel are being annihilated with firebombing, and futuristic ballistic missiles are falling from the sky.
This man tells a little girl he's going to indulge in a superstitious visit with a "fortune teller", and the liason blanches him white with fear.
That was no fortune teller. He was meeting with some shadowy figure involved in who-knows-what, and was either directly threatened by that person (because of some old-fashioned indignant opinions about his personal life and the respectable nature of his choices, and how they reflect upon his peers) and told that he had crossed an unforgivable line with his indiscretions...
...or he was told some truly disturbing news, maybe along the lines that a leak or a mole was discovered, and that his identity and level of participation in the war effort was now known by dangerous enemies, and his personal safety was very seriously compromised.
In my opinion, the involvement of cyanide seems to favor a professional murder, not a suicide, not mental illness, not bipolar mood swings induced by horomones, not a hobbyist's science experiment gone awry.
I feel that it's entirely possible, given the realm of secrecy and paranoia that Turing operated within earlier in life, that everyone relaxed just a little too much after the war ended, and some bitter post-war animosity had not fully evaporated, and someone knew him or found out about him, blamed him for their wartime misfortunes, and went after him.
>So your telling me... That someone with an analytical mind like Turing's... just decided to go waste some money on a fortune teller (because it's not like they're bullshit artists or anything)... while on a sudden, random trip to the sea shore...
While your explanation might also be plausible, you'd be surprised.
If you know people well, you'll find out that a perfect "analytical mind" is not at all incombatible with believing a fortune teller or even more bizarre things.
People can open and shut such "analytical" capacities at will and sort of compartmentalize their lives.
Heck, I know several of extremely analytical people, in hard sciences even, that in their personal lives border on hysteria or take note of such things as omens (sometimes laughingly, but you can see it still disturbs them).
And to get to the other side, people like Randi or Sagan are not totally sceptic because of their analytical minds. It's rather because of their life-long tendency to be sceptic, a tendency that's based on a subconscious decision (e.g it's not really a "rational" choice itself). That's why they are not just sceptic, but passionate about it.
I'm not ruling out that, as a sociable human being, he might like to have a little fun, and try out a carnival side show, and be open to patronizing superstition, while out and about on a sunny weekend afternoon.
I do take issue with the idea that such a triviality could so easily take a visibly obvious, and lasting emotional toll on him, and ruin his day.
I knew Preston quite well - he mentored me in the scholar program - but I never knew of his connection with Turing. When I did find out I started to make enquiries about re-establishing contact, but Preston now has advanced dementia and doesn't recognize even close family.
Such a lost opportunity, primarily because I was young, self-absorbed, ignorant, but believing I was clever and knowledgeable. And now the chance is gone forever. This is why I now try to take every opportunity to connect with people who have stories to tell, and encourage them to talk.