Alan Turing: The Enigma The Centenary Edition
Page 89
(7.53) Writing after AMT’s death to Mrs Turing, and as quoted in EST.
(7.54) Quoting from J. A. Symonds, Shelley (Macmillan, 1887).
(7.55) A manuscript of the result, and of Whitehead’s letters, are in KCC.
(7.56) Transcript in KCC. The BBC has not preserved the recording of this, nor of the January 1952 broadcast. Nor does any other tape-recording seem to have survived, so that AMT’s unusual voice is lost to posterity.
(7.57) Letter in KCC.
(7.58) This talk, ‘Intelligent Machinery, a Heretical Theory’ was given to the ‘51 Society’ at Manchester, presumably in or after 1951. The typescript is in KCC. It was reprinted in EST.
(7.59) The proceedings were printed by Ferranti Ltd. They also record AMT’s comments on other talks during the course of the conference.
(7.60) Manuscript in KCC. Only three pages survive, of which the section quoted here is from the first, and that quoted on page 519 is from the third. In between his story diverges from what actually happened in December 1951, bringing in different characters and locations. I have taken this to confirm my impression from other sources that AMT ‘knew the score’ in Manchester already; this was not his first Manchester pick-up, although it might well have been the first time that he invited someone home as a boyfriend. For this reason I have included a transitional passage on page 428. AMT’s story is also concerned to give equal space to ‘Alec’, i.e. himself, and ‘Ron’, and so contains phrases in which he imagines himself as seen by a hard-up youth: ‘… Didn’t seem to be very well dressed. What an overcoat! … No, he was having a furtive look. Just a bit shy. … Seemed to be quite a toff after all. You could tell by the way he talked ..’.
(7.61) Transcript in KCC.
(7.62) Lecture 30 of the 1939 course (see note 3.39).
On the Beach
(8.1) Documents relating to the case are held at Chester Record Office. They include the statements made by AMT and Arnold Murray, and the police account of what was said on the evening of 7 February 1952. See also note 8.17.
(8.2) Sunday Pictorial, 25 May, 1 June, 8 June 1952. The series reflected the fact that there had been correspondence on homosexuality in the British Medical Journal since a conference in September 1947; this in turn took off from more theoretical agitation of the 1930s and a government Report on the Psychological Treatment of Crime of 1939.
(8.3) Page 166 of G. Westwood (actually a pseudonym, for Michael Schofield), Society and the Homosexual (Gollancz, 1952).
(8.4) A.C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (W. B. Saunders, Philadelphia & London, 1948) page 261.
(8.5) Alderley Edge and Wilmslow Advertiser, 29 February 1952.
(8.6) J.W.S. Pringle, ‘The Origin of Life’, in no. VII of the Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, 1953.
(8.7) I am grateful to Professor W. Byers Brown for diary entries which give these details. Curiously, Prigogine later forgot about the discussions of AMT’s ideas at Manchester. In his paper (with G. Nicolis and A. Babloyantz), in Physics Today, November 1972, Prigogine included a historical passage (which can also stand here to indicate a Nobel prize winner’s assessment of the significance of AMT’s work): ‘The development of irreversible thermodynamics of open systems by the Brussels school had, by the 1950s, led to the investigation of non-linear processes. … It was only then that we noticed a remarkable paper by A.M. Turing (1952) who had actually constructed a chemical model showing instabilities. His work had previously escaped our attention because it dealt with the more specific subject of formation of morphogenetic patterns. The work we have undertaken since then has demonstrated the relation of this type of behaviour to thermodynamics as well as its wide applicability to biology’.
(8.8). The discussions were fully minuted in an internal Nuffield Foundation report, kindly made available to me.
(8.9) Blair Niles, Strange Brother (Liveright, New York, 1931).
(8.10) S.J. Glass, H.J. Duel and C.A. Wright, ‘Sex Hormone studies in Male Homosexuality’, Endocrinology 26 (1940).
(8.11) S.J. Glass and R.H. Johnson, ‘Limitations and Complications of Organotherapy in Male Homosexuality’, J. Clin. Endoain., 1944.
(8.12) C.W. Dunn, J. Amer. Med. Ass. 115, 2263 (1940).
(8.13) A. Karlen, Sexuality and Homosexuality (Macdonald, London, 1971), page 334.
(8.14) F.L. Golla and R. Sessions Hodge, ‘Hormone Treatment of the Sexual Offender’, The Lancet, 11 June 1949.
(8.15) D.E. Sands, ‘Further Studies on Endocrine Treatment in Adolescence and Early Adult Life’, J. Mental Science, January 1954.
(8.16) As note 8.3, pages 69, 70.
(8.17) In contrast to the committal proceedings, which are fully documented (note 8.1), the Quarter Sessions trial records are limited to bare statements of the charges and judgments, and the report in the Alderley Edge and Wilmslow Advertiser, 4 April 1952. Many questions thus remain unanswered. Was there a psychiatric report? Who suggested the hormone treatment, and what claims were made of it; at what point did AMT learn of it and agree to it? Did the Home or the Foreign Office intervene, and if so how? Unfortunately it is not even possible to discover how unusual the probation condition was: there are no statistics available for the administration of ‘organotherapy’.
(8.18) As note 8.15. The cited paper by S. Zuckerman was in Ciba. Found. Coll. Endocrin. 3 (1952).
(8.19) Writing in her introduction to EST.
(8.20) Quotation from Part Two of the Epilogue to War and Peace, tr. Rosemary Edmonds (Penguin, 1957).
(8.21) On 24 April 1978, the author was shown a list including a number of Scandinavian and Greek addresses, which happened to be among AMT’s unpublished work on morphogenesis. This address list (in AMT’s handwriting), has since been ‘lost’. This ‘loss’ occurred at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston.
(8.22) C.W. Wardlaw, ‘A Commentary on Turing’s Diffusion-Reaction Theory of Morphogenesis’, The New Phytologist 52 (1953). An article by the mathematician H.S.M. Coxeter, in Scripta Math. 19 (1953), referred briefly to the Fibonacci numbers in phyllotaxis, and to the expected appearance of a paper by AMT on how the numbers arise in the course of plant growth.
(8.23) Held in KCC.
(8.24) Much material on the draughts and love-letter programs are held in the Christopher Strachey archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford. But the quoted love-letter is one that the public knew about: according to S. Lavington, A History of Manchester Computers (National Computer Centre, Manchester, 1975) it appeared in the 1955 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia.
(8.25) Faster than Thought, ed. B. V. Bowden (Pitman, 1953). The glossary entry, even if hard on AMT in a tongue-in-cheek way, was in fact typical of the felicitous editing and commentary by Vivian Bowden, relieving the otherwise mundanely technical descriptions. It also reprinted the whole of Lady Lovelace’s memoir on the Analytic Engine.
(8.26) Translated from French and published as J. Piaget, Logic and Psychology (Manchester University Press, 1953).
(8.27) Photocopies of this and the subsequent letters from AMT to Robin Gandy are in KCC.
(8.28) C.G. Jung, ‘Approaching the Unconscious’, in the collection edited by him, Man and his Symbols (Aldus Books with W.H. Allen, 1964).
(8.29) This was a Symposium on Automatic Digital Computation, held at the NPL from 25 to 28 March 1953. AMT gave no talk. Notes made by Mike Woodger show that he commented on applications of computers to pure mathematics after a talk by J.C.P. Miller of Cambridge – mainly on the zeta function but also mentioning problems in algebraic topology.
(8.30) The Shirburnian, 1953.
(8.31) The attribution to 1953 may here be wrong. This fragment of a letter in KCC was headed only ‘May’; it might have been May 1954. It was a note of apology for not visiting the Newmans (who retained their house in a village outside Cambridge) when on a visit to Cambridge two weeks or so earlier. ‘I found such a round of gaieties had been arranged for me that it was quite impossible to get ou
t to see you.’ Nothing else of this correspondence has survived; my suspicion is that it probably held the most revealing and sophisticated psychological comment that he ever put into letters. But also, of course, an area where AMT’s life could not be separated from the privacy of others. Mrs Newman died in 1973.
(8.32) Letter to the author from Professor J. Polanyi, 6.10.78.
(8.33) Minutes of the University Council show that this had been decided by January or February 1953.
(8.34) As note 8.21.
(8.35) Fritz Peters, Finistère (Gollancz, 1951).
(8.36) Rodney Garland, The Heart in Exile (W.H. Allen, 1953).
(8.37) Depositions and post-mortem report are in KCC. The coroner’s remarks were reported in the local newspaper on 18 June 1954, in the Daily Telegraph on 11 June.
(8.38) Mrs Turing left the golden teaspoon in KCC.
(8.39) The last, at least, in the series in KCC.
(8.40) Letter in KCC.
(8.41) Unpublished work in KCC. The second paper, as drafted, fell into three parts: I. Geometrical and descriptive phyllotaxis. II. Chemical theory of morphogenesis. III. A solution of morphogenetical equations for the case of spherical symmetry. This last part was the work of Bernard Richards. The passage quoted, the ‘Outline of Development of the Daisy’, did not fall within any of these; it was in a mass of less coherent ancillary material which worked out in more detail some specific examples of the ‘chemical theory’.
(8.42) P.S. Novikov, Doklady Akad. Nauk. SSSR (N.S.) 85 (1952).
(8.43) A few pages of this work survive in KCC; not enough to see where it might have led. He seems to have been interested in reformulating the connection between spinors and vectors, ideas probably inspired by Dirac.
(8.44) P.A.M. Dirac, Nature 139, 323 (1937).
(8.45) Robin Gandy wrote to Newman very shortly after the death, and described these ideas. The letter is in KCC. The problem to do with quantum-mechanical ‘observation’, that ‘a watched pot never boils’, is still a live question. I owe Philip Pearle for a recent reference: Ahanarov et al., Phys. Rev. D 21, 2235 (1980).
(8.46) One negative point deserves mention: rumours floated about after AMT’s death that a second charge had been brought, but these had absolutely no foundation. One other curiosity reflects ambiguously upon his relationship with the state at the end of 1952, which was rather before the real crackdown began. On 28 November 1952 AMT wrote to Sir John Stopford, the Vice-Chancellor, saying that he had been ‘invited by the Foreign Office to give a number of lectures at five German universities’ in the spring, and that he would ‘very much like to go’ for the two weeks required. Perhaps this was a form of compensation for the loss of his consultancy work – but it is surprising that he should actually have been encouraged into the treacherous fields of post-war Germany. In the event he did not go after all. Permission was, of course, granted by the university, but on 22 January AMT wrote: ‘I have however now cancelled my tour, as I found myself unable to undertake the work that would be involved.’ Was this the real reason? There is obviously much more as yet unknown, and it can only be noted that British official silence regarding ‘security’ is total.
(8.47) Interim Report submitted to the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments by its Subcommittee on Investigations pursuant to S. Res. 280 (81st Congress). Reprinted in D.W. Cory, The Homosexual in America, (Greenberg, New York, 1951).
(8.48) Alan Moorehead, The Traitors (Hamish Hamilton, 1952).
(8.49) In contrast, British policy only emerged ten years later, on account of a case where in late 1953 the vetters had not made a very searching investigation, and where a press campaign forced the government to admit that it had employed a homosexual in the diplomatic service. The quotations are from the Report of the Tribunal appointed to Inquire into the Vassall Case and Related Matters, 1963. There is a very interesting contemporary account in fictional form of these issues in Rodney Garland, The Troubled Midnight (W.H. Allen, 1954).
(8.50) Here and elsewhere in this passage I draw on Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955).
(8.51) Hansard, Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 521, pages 526 and 1297.
(8.52) Hansard, Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 187, pages 737-767.
(8.53) Published in the Journal of Mental Science, April 1954.
(8.54) K. Sand and H. Okkels, in Endokrinologie 19 (1938).
(8.55) Hansard, Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 526, page 1866
(8.56) Quoting this report from Peter Wildeblood’s book.
(8.57) R.S. Cline, Secrets Spies and Scholars (Acropolis Books, Washington DC, 1976). Cline wrote as a retired deputy director of the CIA.
(8.58) This was certainly just the kind of thing that the CIA was supposed to know about, but apparently it did not. According to a letter of 29.11.79 to the author, the CIA has no records concerning AMT.
(8.59) As note 8.39.
(8.60) As note 8.49.
(8.61) In What I Believe, 1938, reprinted in the anthology Two Cheers for Democracy, as note BP 13.
(8.62) As note 8.28.
(8.63) An appreciation written by Robin Gandy and submitted to The Times to follow the more formal obituary by Max Newman, but not published. It is in KCC.
(8.64) Her introduction to EST.
(8.65) As note 8.61.
(8.66) See note 7.60
(8.67) The letter itself did not survive, although the fact that AMT did write to James Atkins in early 1937 is established by AMT’s reference in a letter home to his having sent an offprint of Computable Numbers to his friend. I have drawn on James Atkins’ recollection of the ‘apple’ and ‘electrical wiring’ mentioned in the letter, a recollection as clear and distinct and unsolicited as any that have come my way. The sceptical reader may wonder whether this was not a projection of the news of 1954 into a memory of 1937. Here again it is as clear as anything I have been told that James Atkins never knew that an apple had actually featured in AMT’s death, until he heard of it from me. It had not been mentioned in the Daily Telegraph, where he had read the report in 1954, and he had no knowledge that Mrs Turing or anyone else had written about it.
(8.68) As note 2.18.
(8.69) In The Challenge of our Time, a 1946 radio broadcast, published in Two Cheers for Democracy, as note BP 13. A rather more polemical critique of Forster was given by the author and David Hutter in With Downcast Gays (Pomegranate Press, London, 1974; Pink Triangle Press, Toronto, 1977).
Acknowledgements
The reproduction of Alan Turing’s letters and papers has been made possible by the kind permission of the Fellows and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, the A.M. Turing Trust, Robin Gandy, and P.N. Furbank. I am grateful to Donald Michie, Chairman of the A.M. Turing Trust, and to Peter Croft, Librarian of King’s College, Cambridge, for facilitating the granting of this permission. I am grateful also to the Headmaster of Sherborne School for permission to reproduce those records held at Sherborne.
Transcripts of Crown Copyright records in the Public Record Office appear by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. So do the extracts from British Intelligence in the Second World War. I am grateful also for specific permission to reproduce photographs of the Colossus and the Delilah.
Private letters and papers are reproduced by permission of the many individuals who have kindly made them available.
I am grateful to the London Mathematical Society, and to Harvester Press, for permission to reproduce long extracts. The authors and publishers of other quotations are acknowledged in the Notes above.
Index
Abdication (of Edward VIII) 121–3, 131, 140n, 308
accumulator (of computers) 323, 351, 391
ACE (Automatic Computing Engine):
Wormersley’s initiative 305–7, 317–8, 407–8;
AMT’s design for (the ACE report) 317–37;
compared with EDVAC 320, 323–4, 343, 354;
name given 317;
slow development of 337–40, 343, 348–53, 355–6, 365–8, 372, 375;
pilot models proposed 335–7, 351–2, 365;
‘Test Assembly’ for 365, 372;
AMT abandons project 367, 376–7;
Pilot ACE built 417–8, 442, 444
Adcock, F. E. 148, 160–1, 466
addition, modular 162, 228–9, 247, 274, 276
Admiralty see Navy, British
Admiralty Computing Service 316
Admiralty Signals Establishment 328
Adrian, R. H. 372
aerodynamics 300, 304, 317, 333, 344, 348, 413
after-life, AMT believes in 49, 50, 53, 75;
doubts 63–6, 68–70
Aiken, H. H., see Harvard
Air Force (British), communications of 165
Air Force (German), communications of see under Enigma
alcohol, used by computer 328
Alexander, A. V. 238
Alexander, C. Hugh O’D.:
as chess master 198, 207, 478;
in naval Enigma 198, 204, 221, 227, 234, 262, 268;
and GCHQ 496;
and trial 464, 472
algebra 11, 80, 333, 478; see also
groups; word problem; Boolean algebra
Allen, Clifford 461
almost periodic functions 95, 131
America see United States
analogue computer 295–7; see also differential analyser; zeta-function machine
Anderson, J. 386
Andrews, A. J. P. 22, 37, 39, 52
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 475
Annan, Noel 397
Anti-war movement 70–1, 87;
see also war
Apostles (Cambridge society), AMT not in 75, 371, 373, 509
apples 279, 427;
as forbidden fruit 9, 520;
death from 129, 149, 488–9, note 8. 67
Appleton, E. 340