In this episode we talk about the great mathematician, cryptanalyst and social guy Alan Turing. We are joined by famed author George Dyson who recently wrote Turing’s Cathedral: The Origin of the Digital Universe.
We hope you enjoy listening to our opinions on the movie The Imitation Game, life in academia and conspiracy theories. Pictures from our interview on Instagram @sparkscience.
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>> Here we go.
[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element around
Jordan: Welcome to Spark Science where we explore stories of human curiosity. I’m Jordan Baker, improv specialist is my field. I also cut meat.
Dr. Regina: You study meat and you study improv comedy.
Jordan: Yeah, I study meat because it’s fun to study animals.
Regina: You’re an experimentalist.
Jordan: Yeah, in the kitchen. I’m here with my co-host, Regina Barber DeGraaff.
Regina: Yeah, that’s who was talking. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. I teach physics and astronomy at Western Washington University. We’re here today with author, kayak builder, George Dyson. Welcome to our show.
George: Thank you.
Regina: You’re current book — you’re like “no.”
George: No, my current book is not written and it’s a year overdue. It’s a depressing thought.
Jordan: You should probably get on that.
[Laughing.]
Regina: Well. You’re taking time to talk to us, so actually where very thankful for that.
George: Yes. I’m procrastinating. I’m very good at that.
Regina: That’s okay, I procrastinate all the time.
Jordan: Maybe we’re his inspiration.
Regina: Yeah. We’re gonna be a footnote. That would be really nice. The last book that you’re promoting is Turing’s Cathedral — I was gonna say castle. That’s alright. I was just watching Howl’s Moving Castle. This is your fourth book? Turing’s Cathedral was your fourth book?
George: Yes, it was my fourth book. They are increasingly more difficult and painful, which is the opposite of everything else in life, where it gets easier.
Regina: Really?
George: Yes.
Regina: Oh. I’m glad that we can help with the procrastination.
Jordan: I’m always a proponent of procrastination.
Regina: Yeah. You’re house gets cleaner and cleaner, right?
George: Yes, exactly. You do all the little things.
Regina: With me, I just spend more and more time with my daughter. I want to be that good parent, but really, I just don’t want to finish that paper.
George: Exactly.
Regina: Because you’re a scientific historian, I wanted to talk about Alan Turing, because I think this is somebody in history that a lot of people are getting more and more interested in with the movie, The Imitation Game. So, I’m going to actually show you — I got your book off of Amazon — and on it, there’s a sticker. I want to take a picture of this for our —
George: I have not seen that. That’s outrageous.
Regina: I wanted to show you. I’m actually glad that I showed you on air.
George: That’s horrifying.
Regina: Yeah. [Laughing.] I’m glad I didn’t show you this beforehand. I want to take a picture for our listeners, because on the front of Mr. Dyson’s book, it says, “Read about the computer revolution” and then it says, “then see the movie.”
George: Oh, that’s terrible. Nobody asked me about that. That’s illegal. That’s wrong.
Regina: Yeah. Maybe I will be a footnote.
George: My term for it is the irritation game.
[Laughing.]
Regina: Well, it was not a good movie.
George: No. It was a bad movie. We all knew the history would be wrong. The movie was excusable that the history was wrong, that’s okay. But the characterization was completely wrong. Alan Turing was not this loner at all. He had large numbers of friends. He had a tremendous sense of humor. He was very social. Immediately, they took this pigeonhole off the Hollywood shelf. He was gonna be an a-social lone. It was a tremendous insult to computer programmers everywhere who don’t have to be like that to be a good programmer.
Regina: I am so happy that you said that, because we actually had a show on computer science and we talked about this misperception of this stereotype. That’s what we try to do on this show is to bring all these scientists on and try to show that we’re not like that.
George: Right. We’re not like that at all. It was an enormous, sad mistake. Benedict, the actor, was so good. He could’ve played whatever role they gave him. If they gave him the guy with a sense of humor, he would’ve had a sense of humor. But they gave him — you gotta play this guy with no sense of humor.
That, by the way, is how Britain won the war. Britain was this island country being suffocated to death by the German U-boat fleet. What won the war wasn’t the enigma decryptions or radar or Americans coming with atomic bombs. It was the British sense of humor. That’s how they survived that war. Because the British, no matter how bad things were, and I can say this because my father is British.
[Laughing.]
They had a sense of humor about it. “Oh, we’ve been bombed 14 times today. Well, let’s go out and work in the garden.” I mean, they didn’t —
Regina: I never even thought of that.
George: The movie left that out. These guys were all going around being serious and hating each other and not talking.
Regina: You’re right. There were no jokes in that entire movie. That’s why I hated it.
Jordan: I actually — I think I was able to relate more to him just because that’s sort of my personality, where his cold jokes were for me hilarious. A lot of people just didn’t find it funny. I thought it was hilarious.
Regina: You mean when they did try jokes.
Jordan: No, no, no. They weren’t even jokes. He was just like — he was the straight man of straight men. He would just say these cold things, like “I don’t understand emotional cues” and he would just say stuff. I thought it was hilarious.
Regina: Right, but from a scientist’s —
Jordan: But the movie played it like it was serious.
Regina: Right. You’re right. A sprinkling of that is okay. But as a scientist, you don’t want to be seen as that total stereotype, which a lot of us do have these tendencies, these fidgety tendencies, and these social awkwardness. But, we’re not all that. We’re more than that. I agree, the character wasn’t very well developed in the movie. We’ll get back to that. I want to get back to that because we’re gonna book-end that with our show.
Let’s talk about Alan Turing, his upbringing. Let’s also talk about maybe academia in general. I think that it all kinda flows into that in his later life. Let’s talk about Alan Turing’s growing up. You were saying that he wasn’t a loner. Let’s talk about —
George: No, and he didn’t grow up really in an academic world. He grew up, his father was a civil servant living in India, so he grew up left alone in England while the parents were away. He was pushed into academia simply because of his genius. He was a math genius. This happens to certain children, just have it and certain kids don’t. He did, so he got into that world and did very well in it.
Of course, the war came along and he had a role to play but he wasn’t bred in the academic world, nor did he particularly stay in it. He was interested in building machines, breaking codes, and things like that, that were not particularly academic. It just happened that during the war, the people needed to solve that problem tended to come out of the academic world. But, he was quite comfortable outside of the academic world. That, in some ways, led to his downfall in the sense of having the love affairs with non-academic people. At that time, homosexuality was very strong in the academic world. There were whole colleges of — Cambridge — that were primarily homosexual.
Regina: Really? Like whole colleges?
George: Which again, the movie completely got wrong. That homosexuality was this illegal thing — it was technically illegal, but it was as it still is today — was very much a part of British upper-class government and schooling and the British system. You just weren’t supposed to go outside of that system. That was Alan Turing’s downfall was that he had a relationship with a working class homosexual that went bad. That’s how he got into trouble. It wasn’t because it was outside of the social norms.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ I would go out tonight
♪ But I haven’t got a stitch to wear
Jordan: You’re listening to Spark Science and we’re talking about the life of Alan Turing today with George Dyson.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ This man said “it’s gruesome
♪ That someone so handsome should care”
Regina: You were talking about child prodigies though. Growing up, you lived in this kind of academic world. Did you know other child prodigies or anybody because Jordan and I did not know any child prodigies?
Jordan: I know lots of them now. Growing up I didn’t.
Regina: I kind of want to know about that. How does one live after that?
George: It’s a blessing and it’s a curse. In my case, I happened to be born into a world where — my father was a definite prodigy of that kind who at the age of 5 or 6, he was clearly doing original mathematical work.
Regina: For our listeners that don’t know who your father is —
George: Freeman Dyson who’s known as all these other things, but at heart it’s just simply a mathematician. He just had a infatuation with numbers as a child that never went away. That’s really sort of my — to try to ever say what is the mark of genius. It’s that these geniuses — they behave like adults when they’re very young children. Then they behave like children when they’re adults.
My dad is now 92 and he looks at everything as if he’s a 6 year old child. Alan Turing was the same way. Of course, he died at 41. But he still looked at everything with the curiosity of a child, no matter what it was. That is rare and unpredictable. No one knows where it comes from. I’ve only seen it a few times.
Regina: I was thinking about that. That they act like adults when they’re children, and they act like children when they’re adults. Do you think — at least for me, because now that I teach at Western, I feel like the world of academia maybe allows you to be a child. Do you know what I mean?
George: Right, to be curious.
Regina: Right. You can be curious. You can be eccentric. You can chase things that you’re interested in without any worrying too much about money. You’re given this freedom. You live in this world where you’re sheltered in a way from the outside world, but you’re also given this freedom inside that little bubble. Like you were talking about, like Alan Turing — if he would’ve just stayed in that bubble, he would’ve been okay. But he didn’t. So you have a confined freedom, which is really — I don’t know, I never really thought about that until you just said that.
George: Yeah. It was true — of course everyone always talks about my father, but it’s true of my mother too who is a mathematician who lives in the Leopold here, like literally right down the street. In fact, they play KMRE over the intercom at the Leopold.
Regina: Oh, really? Maybe she has heard our show.
Jordan: “Hey Mrs. Dyson.”
Regina: Yeah. Dr. Dyson.
George: She was and is a group theorist, which is another very strange branch of mathematics.
Regina: Yeah, it’s the mathematics I don’t understand.
George: What Alan Turing was interested in, which was the foundations of logic, which seemed to be the last thing that would have any real value to the real world turned out to be incredibly important. It was oddly the same with group theory. It seemed that this very abstract kind of math that nobody would ever do anything with turned to the key to sort of understanding physics. So, you never know. It always comes from this odd left field.
Regina: Yeah, I mean, there’s so much that I don’t understand in that world. But, I do understand that — we just had a mathematician on — Amites who’s great.
George: He’s one of the only —
Regina: Dr. Sarkar.
George: His PhD advisor, close friend of my mother’s, one of the only people who ever would introduce me as the son of my mother rather than the son of my father. Béla Bollobás , who is a great combinatorist.
Regina: On that show, we were talking about these connections, the two degrees until you find somebody that we all know. Then he was talking about also — science is so great because you can study these things that are abstract that you don’t think have any application, but then one day they will turn up, like prime numbers. We were talking about cryptography. We can talk about cryptography.
Alan Turing, he’s in school, and I think the movie that we’ve talked about isn’t very good. But, they talked about, he had this best friend, so he was fairly social in a way, but then he gets to college. What is his life like when he’s at Cambridge?
George: At Cambridge, he’s very close with a lot of people. He lived very close there. He was a runner — a long distance runner. He was on the running team.
Regina: You can’t really be on a team without being somewhat close to —
George: The other thing that is completely forgotten is he came to America for two years, for most of two years.
Regina: Really?
George: Yes, before the war. In America, he was on the Princeton rugby team.
[Laughing.]
Regina: What a loner! [Sarcasm.]
George: You don’t go on the rugby team if you’re not somewhat social. At Cambridge, he was part of a very strong but somewhat underground gay culture. He wasn’t happy in America.
Regina: Why did he go to America?
George: He came to America because he had solved this enormous problem in logic, sort of one of the biggest problems there was. It happened by strange coincidence that someone else had more or less solved it in a similar way, Alonzo Church who was at Princeton. Nobody at Cambridge was of the level that — suddenly Alan Turing was above the level of all his professors. He had done something that they couldn’t and everybody knew the right thing for him to do was to go to America.
Regina: Was he in grad school then?
George: No, he was an undergrad. He came to America as a 24-year old undergrad to work with Alonzo Church and get his PhD. At that time, the British didn’t really subscribe to the whole PhD thing, so they sort of sent him to America because it was the right thing to do.
Regina: Really? I don’t know about this history. When did getting your PhD become the thing to do then?
George: When Americans made it into an industry. Germans really originated it, but the English didn’t subscribe to it because it was very German. In England you could do quite well without a PhD.
Regina: Wow. Because their education system is like undergrad and then it kind of continues so it’s kind of like a master’s bachelor’s.
George: You would start teaching or doing something or invent something. But you didn’t have to have a PhD. My father never had a PhD. So, Turing comes to America, gets his PhD for this —
Regina: In two years?
George: Yeah. Brilliant thesis that is still ignored, but it was just as important as his work that we all remember him for. His thesis that he did in Princeton, he was looking at non-deterministic computation, what you could do with computation where — he was fascinated with intuition, with what happens, how can people think non-logical things that make sense.
Regina: Yeah, that is fascinating.
George: His 1938 thesis written in America is just as interesting as the work that he’s remembered for, but it’s less remembered.
Regina: Now I have to go look it up. We’re gonna take a break real quick. When we come back, I want to talk more about then what happened after this two year Princeton PhD.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ Punctured bicycle
♪ On a hillside desolate
Regina: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science, I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff.
Jordan: I’m Jordan Baker. Today we’re joined by George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ When in this charming car
♪ This charming man
♪ Why pamper life’s complexity
♪ When the leather runs smooth
♪ On the passenger’s seat?
Regina: During the break, I was mentioning to you that I, as a physicist didn’t know who your dad was because I’m not very well versed in science history.
Jordan: But you watch Star Trek, right?
[Laughing.]
Regina: See, you are absolutely right. Is that my friend pointed out who your dad was and then I said, oh my god, Dyson spheres. He’s like, “he’s done so much more work than that. I can’t believe that’s the only thing you know.” I’m like, “I am sorry.”
Jordan: I’ve never heard of your dad either, so it’s fine.
Regina: But, you’re not a physicist, so you don’t have other physicists making fun of you about it. I did want to talk a little bit — I want to go back to academia because I find you fascinating. [Laughing.] I find the idea of being around that world, being around other physicists and having physicists or mathematician parents, and being at these Ivy League colleges while you’re a kid totally different from what I grew up. I’m in academia now at Western.
You kind of went the other way because you —
George: I wanted to get as far away from it as possible.
Regina: I kinda want to know about that. I know it’s kinda selfish of me, but that’s what I want to know about.
George: I was interested. My father was wonderful and my mother was wonderful. They shared their world with me, but I wanted to get away from it. That’s just the way kids are. So, I did. I left, I dropped out of high school at 16. I moved first to California and then to Vancouver, British Columbia. My sister — I had a much older sister who got married there. I came to her wedding. The day after the wedding, I saw an ad for a job on a boat. I just turned 17.
Regina: That’s so awesome.
George: I took the job and never looked back. I worked on boats for years, commercial boats, became a boat builder. That was my world. I became very fascinated by kayaks for some reason. It’s that childhood thing. At a very young age, I became fascinated with boats. I had access to all my father’s letters that he wrote home. When I was doing the Project Orion research, and I had a student here at Western who transcribed 300,000 words of these letters. In those letters, there is one letter where they take me out in a boat for the first time. We go out in a rowboat.
Regina: How old are you?
George: I’m like 5 and my sister is 6 — my older sister, Esther. Everybody thinks it must have been so hard to be Freeman Dyson’s son and live under that shadow. That was nothing compared to being Esther’s little brother. Because she was the perfect student. Everywhere I went I was a disappointment.
Regina: But she was only one year older than you?
George: Year and a half, which is just [inaudible.]
[Laughing.]
Anyway, in this letter, my father is telling his mother they took us out in this boat. At dinner, we always had a conversation at dinner. A very formal kind of existence. I said, well I finally figured it out. I was trying to figure out how does a boat move. When you pull the oars, it makes a hole in the water and the boat falls into it and moves forward. That was my — I was obsessed —
Regina: That’s pretty deep for a 5 year old.
George: Yeah, right. But then my sister, you know what she says? This is in the letter — my dad — she says, “Daddy, what’s so great about that? I can make the boat move forward without understanding it.” Yeah, so that was the rivalry between —
Regina: You’re more of a scientific approach.
George: Exactly.
Regina: I mean, as a parent. I don’t want to pick sides, but I would’ve liked your comments.
George: Esther, she could say something and Wall Street goes up or down. But, whereas I just try to understand it. I’m not trying to —
Regina: That’s the scientist in you. You have something in common with Jordan now. He also dropped out of school.
Jordan: Dropped out of school, moved to California.
George: Do you have an older sister?
Jordan: Older brother. Pretty close.
Regina: I do like this discussion about that you’re trying to get away from this academia, because I was trying to get in. I was just like — I had parents that didn’t go to college. I was in Lynden, which, it was not a very academic — what would you say, Jordan? We weren’t very academic-centric in Lynden.
Jordan: No, definitely more sports oriented.
Regina: Right. I was like, okay I can do this. I don’t know what physics is, but I’m gonna do it. This idea of being a professor and talking to other professors, you almost get this feeling, even if it’s not true, that every other professor had professor parents or had educated parents. It’s just this cycle that like professors make professors.
George: Maybe in the guild of professors, but in the world of science, the great contributions tend to come from people outside who come into it fresh. The Einstein’s didn’t have professors as parents. They came in and saw something new and different. I think this idea that it is hereditary, which is a problem in Italy. Italy is a hereditary system of professorships.
Regina: Really, I didn’t know that. We actually have an Italian listener. I think his name is Michaela [sp?].
George: My mother was born in Italy, but not to an academic family.
Regina: Wow. Like I said, it’s probably not true, but it’s this weird perception of the public thinking that this is what a professor is and this is what professor babies will look like, and their babies. I thought that growing up. I thought it was near impossible, but I was gonna do it.
George: Well, it’s changed and opened up, which is good, in a good way.
Regina: I think so. It’s very reassuring that you said a lot of great things in science come from people outside, because when people see Einstein, I think maybe people would just assume his parents were very well educated.
George: He was working at the patent office. When he left the patent office, it all kind of ended, which is what’s totally — not to be specific — but these institutions that think they’re gonna produce great science by making a very comfortable place, it doesn’t work.
Jordan: I think it’s very encouraging for me and having you drop out and I dropped out of high school. Just knowing that a lot of the great ones aren’t born into that. So I don’t have to worry about my future child just going even worse than I did.
Regina: Yeah, I mean I worry about that too. I was always very jealous in college where I’d hear like people’s parents and they’d be like, “you know, when you went to science camp when you were 6.” And I was like, “Ugh, I wish I had that.” But then I realized that my kid is that kid. My kid is the one I was jealous of.
Speaker: Where it makes a difference is high school. If you look at American Nobel Prizes in physics, it is frightening how many of those kids went to the Bronx High School of Science. If you look at World War II science, it’s frightening how many of the great scientists went to one high school in Budapest. It’s something about — high schools have a really great influence, but the younger stuff and the older stuff is not so important. But, high school is terribly important.
Regina: I went to Running Start, so I feel there’s a lot of people that are very much against Running Start, because they feel like it’s — there’s a money issue and a preparation issue and an advising issue.
George: Right, but it gave you that push when you needed it.
Regina: It gave me that false confidence that I needed.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ Ah ! A jumped-up pantry boy
♪ Who never knew his place
♪ He said “return the ring”
Regina: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff.
Jordan: I’m Jordan Baker. Today we’re talking about mathematician Alan Turing with George Dyson.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ He knows so much about these things
♪ He knows so much about these things
Regina: Let’s get back to Alan Turing. So, he’s done with his PhD in Princeton. He comes back to the UK.
George: Right. War is just starting back in 1939.
Regina: Okay. He starts to teach, doesn’t he?
George: Barely. He just pulled into Bletchley Park really quickly, which was the code breaking scene, which is not a secret, again, as the movie plays it up to be. It was known what was happening there.
Regina: Right. Well, how well was it known though? Known by other people in the government or known by people, like citizens?
George: Certainly known by people in academia and the government and even to the public. This was a facility that was dealing with codes and code breaking, but it was not — what was kept secret was how they did it.
Regina: But the recruiting wasn’t?
George: Recruiting was pretty open.
Regina: Right. Because they had to recruit.
George: Yeah.
Jordan: I was going to ask. I totally forgot that part of the movie. So, he was recruited? He didn’t get drafted?
George: No. My dad was recruited and said no. He thought he wanted a [inaudible.] He thought it was a desk job, so he went to work for the Royal Air Force. [Inaudible.] But the coding was not interesting enough.
Regina: Not as sexy.
George: Yeah.
Regina: Wow.
Jordan: If you can call it that. [Laughing.] Well, they made a movie about it, so that’s pretty sexy.
Regina: They did. He’s there. It’s not as secret as the movie seems.
George: It was full of women.
Regina: Right. All the computers, right?
George: Most of them were women. I gave a talk in Victoria when the book came out — Victoria, BC — after a long line of people — the last person was a very lively elderly woman who jumped up on stage and signed the book. She said, “We all loved Alan so much. We were so sad when he left Hut 8.” She was one of the girls in Hut 8. That was Alan. All the girls liked him because he — it was partly, again, because he wasn’t trying to hit on them. He was just charming and very sociable, friendly guy.
Regina: So, I can totally understand your frustration with this character, because he just wasn’t at all even talking to those women, right? I mean, there were the five other women in the movie. He wasn’t even connecting with them at all. So, he goes in there. He makes this machine to compute —
George: At Bletchley Park. That part was wrong too. He was not that involved. It was other people who built the machine. In a certain sense, the later work was based on Alan’s ideas. But the bomb, the machine that’s in the film was not a computer at all. Nobody ever thought of it as a computer. It was purely a sort of reverse engineering of the enigma. Running a bunch of enigmas backwards to try to — a very obvious thing to do. It was Polish and it was brought from Poland. Poland had already done this. They were in the war long before England. Those people still get very little credit. The Polish actually broke enigma the first time.
Regina: Oh wow. I knew that there was some inaccuracies with that, but I didn’t know it was that bad.
George: There was a later machine called Colossus, which really was a computer. It was definitely the first electronic computer that really worked and did powerful stuff. Alan Turing was on the periphery of that. He was fascinated by it. It’s still an enormous loss to history that that was kept secret. It was one of the tragic mistakes.
The British had their own reasons for keeping it secret, but they destroyed all the machines after the war. You could look at it in one way — well the Cold War had already started and they were capable of breaking all these codes and even the Americans were involved and didn’t want everything to pin on us being able to break these codes and not letting the world know that we could break them. You can take a very sinister view that that man had something to do with Alan Turing’s death. That he knew too much about this.
On another level, you can say simply that the British military establishment wanted the world to believe that Britain had won the war by the valiant effort of the Royal Air Force, not by breaking the codes. There were a number of reasons to keep this very secret. It was kept amazing — in the modern world, nothing would’ve been kept secret that long. It was the 1970s before even the existence of the Colossus machines was known to the public.
Regina: It’s like 30 years, less than that.
George: A long time to keep the idea of a computer —
Regina: I think the US has kept secrets longer than that.
George: We don’t know.
Jordan: We don’t know. I thought that was interesting in the movie where he finally cracks the code and then — my first reaction was the character in the movie’s first reaction was just let everybody know. It was like a strategic way of using it against them.
Regina: I think that could’ve been played even more, I guess. I talked to Amites, the mathematician we’re talking about, Dr. Sarkar. I told him that I just finished reading Cryptonomicon, which took me forever to read. I really liked it but it took me a long time. But, that whole book is about that. The entire book is about this strategic way you can use this information to make it seem like you do not know the information.
George: It was a moving target. The Germans knew their codes were being cracked and they kept upping by a huge factor making the codes more complicated.
Regina: Right. So, Alan Turing wasn’t the one that made this device that reverse engineered the code. What was he doing exactly then?
George: He was doing very profound statistical, unbelievably clever ways of narrowing the number of alternatives. There’s an astronomical number of alternatives that could be the key. He and his colleagues, people like Jack Good that he worked with, invented amazingly ingenious ways of sort of narrowing that search space down to narrow in on what — and with this —
Regina: With these key words?
George: No. The key to the code, because every code had a key, but how do you find it and how do you find it within 24 hours before the Germans change the key. They change the key every day.
What they did was real work of human intellect of sort of finding the weak points in cracking these things. Not assisted by brute force. The machines gave them sort of an edge of brute force. The brute force alone would never have been able to do it without these very ingenious — and the human stuff of figuring — which was in the film. That the Germans would start the messages the same way.
It turned out some of the weather ships were putting weather broadcasts using the same keys. That gave them an edge where all these things together, a tremendous amount of teamwork that would not have worked if they had adopted the American way of — like the CIA is not going to tell the FBI what the — you know, then suddenly your intelligence collapses. It was war and they were very much sharing.
Regina: So, in the movie that was the opposite of what you are saying. In the movie, it was very secretive. The one guy played by Mark Strong didn’t talk to the other man who I don’t know who he was.
George: Right. They sort of put that — when enough of your houses are being bombed, you kind of put that stuff aside and work together. That’s what happened during the war.
Regina: Right. What else about that part of the movie — about the strategic release of information and all that stuff — what else would you have liked to see then other than that? I guess I just said there was a lot more but —
George: I just would’ve liked to see more sense of humor, more sense of the British — you know, if you watch — the BBC does incredibly good drama, because they can’t get away with it. If the BBC does something and it’s historically wrong, they’ve got 1,000 people calling them up the next day “this is wrong.” So, whereas in America, you can get away with anything. It’s pretty amazing what you can get away with. It was definitely an American film. It’s too bad the British didn’t —
Regina: It was very shallow.
George: It was a Mick Jagger film about The Enigma. It was funded partly by Mick Jagger. It was not very good either.
Regina: Wait, like seriously Mick Jagger?
George: Yes. He put in the money. Quite a long time ago, I forget what it was called. But for some reason Alan Turing got left out. It was really strange. It was called Enigma or — it was funded by — the money came from Mick Jagger.
Regina: I’m just at awe right now. Why would Mick Jagger want to have a movie about Enigma without Alan Turing?
George: No, it was one of these classic horror stories where somehow it got left out on the cutting room floor. It’s a good film, but it’s not right.
Regina: It’s about World War II and the code breaking?
George: Yes. It’s about Bletchley Park.
Regina: Okay. I’m with you now.
Jordan: It’s a good movie, it’s just not right.
George: Yeah.
Regina: Well, we have talked on previous shows about the movie, The Core, which is apparently all geologists favorite movie ever because it’s super inaccurate but it’s super fun to watch.
George: Yeah. A lot of these movies have to get made like 9 times before they get it right.
Regina: Right. [Laughing.] So we’ll wait for another couple years and then the real imitation game version will be good.
We’re gonna take a break again. When we come back, we’ll talk more about the movie and we’ll talk more about later life of Alan Turing.
George: And death.
Regina: And death.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ When in this charming car
♪ This charming man
♪ Why pamper life’s complexity
♪ When the leather runs smooth
♪ On the passenger’s seat?
♪ I would go out tonight
♪ But I haven’t got a stitch to wear
♪ This man said “it’s gruesome
♪ That someone so handsome should care”
Speaker: This is Bellingham waterfront watchdog George Dyson. You’re listening to KMRE LP 102.3 FM in Bellingham. Your community, your voice, your station.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ He knows so much about these things
♪ He knows so much about these things
♪ I would go out tonight
♪ But I haven’t got a stitch to wear
♪ This man said “it’s gruesome
♪ That someone so handsome should care”
Regina: After Alan is done at Bletchley Park, war is won, what happens? How inaccurate is the movie?
George: Well the movie has ended.
Regina: That’s true. Well it kind of jumps forward.
George: He goes to Manchester where some of the best people have gone, where Max Newman has gone, who was really one of his closest friends. He was very close friends with Max Newman’s wife, Lyn who was actually in Princeton with her children while Alan was there. They were close.
So, in Manchester, they are actually starting to build machines. That’s sort of the sad thing is that they’re using this knowledge they gained during the war, but they’re not allowed to be public about it. They can’t say “oh, we did this already.” There’s wonderful letters between Max Newman and Alan and von Neumann saying, “Well, maybe you should try this. I can’t tell you why, but I can tell you it will work.” Because they had done it in secret during the war. [Inaudible.] Well, you can put two and two together but I can’t tell you. They were giving each other hints.
So, Manchester was way ahead. Manchester was ahead of — which is an interesting case of how — Manchester was a very industrial school.
Regina: Right. I like The Smith’s, I know.
George: Cambridge was the very theoretical intellect — sort of that’s making a gross distinction but —
Regina: Right. That’s okay.
George: But Manchester was ahead. The practical people were ahead of the theoreticians and the computing. That’s where Alan went, to help with the Manchester effort.
Regina: Did he have a teaching position there or did he just go?
George: They sort of let him do what he wanted. One time they offered him a raise, sort of like a full professorship and he said no. His answer was just in the book literally. He said, “I would rather keep the position I have and be able to play tennis in the morning if I feel like it.”
Regina: So he was like an adjunct?
George: Sort of. Everybody knew how great he was.
Jordan: Pretty awesome just to have like free reign and do whatever he wants.
George: He couldn’t be — in all honesty he was a bad teacher. He did try to teach but it didn’t work.
Regina: A lot of geniuses are bad teachers.
George: But he helped greatly with the design of — he wrote all kinds of reports, designed a machine that was in some ways very clumsy and complicated, but in other ways way ahead and had what was now we call a reduced instruction set.
He was deeply involved in a lot of exciting stuff. Machines were being built that he helped design. He insisted that this Manchester machine have a hardware random number generator in the computer. Intel didn’t give us that until 2013. All random numbers were generated algorithmically, which is of course how the NSA gets a backdoor. He could see that right away that he had to have a — he was interested in it more from the AI side. The machine had to be able to do unpredictable things if it was ever going to become intelligent.
Regina: Right, which we will talk about soon too.
George: So he was way ahead. By many accounts, quite happy. He wasn’t trying to move somewhere else.
Regina: Yeah. Financially he was sound and everything?
George: He was okay.
Regina: That’s why I’m asking about these jobs. I’m like, “how did people live?”
George: No, at that time, again, England didn’t have that sense of — anyone could get a flat. It wasn’t hard to live.
Regina: He didn’t have a family.
George: He didn’t support a family. He was doing fine. In the modern world, he would have consulted and made a lot of money.
Regina: Right. So, he does this and then he gets into trouble. This is what we alluded to.
George: Yes, he gets himself into trouble.
Regina: He gets himself into trouble, yeah.
George: Again, I’m trying to be open minded, but he was not persecuted for being gay. That’s a misconception that the government was out to persecute him for being gay. He got himself into trouble and he went to the police. The police weren’t out looking for him or trying to arrest people who were having gay relationships. He went to the police and in the course of this investigation, he admitted to this homosexual relationship and then he was charged with gross indecency. It would not have just happened out of the blue.
Regina: It’s very Oscar Wilde-esque.
George: Very much so.
Regina: Yeah. This idea where Oscar Wilde was like “how dare somebody do this to me? I will get him back.” He just kind of digs himself a hole deeper and deeper and deeper.
George: He didn’t play by the rules.
Regina: Right. The rules — very unfair at the time, but could be avoided, which is really sad. I wish those rules were not that way at the time. Obviously we all do. I think there’s a documentary on Netflix right now called Codebreaker, which discusses this. That Alan Turing did just admit straight-up to the police officer. If he hadn’t done that, he would’ve been fine.
George: Right.
Regina: Yeah, which is very, very unfortunate.
Jordan: Was what they said in the movie, was that like chemical —
George: He was offered the alternative of a jail sentence.
Regina: Right. Two years?
George: Something, I don’t remember the exact details. They didn’t have the same system we have here where it says 2 years, but it’s actually 3 months. It would have been what it said it would’ve been.
Regina: It would’ve been 2 years.
George: Or the estrogen treatment, which he took. He was given a program of estrogen.
Regina: I almost wish we had like a biologist or a chemist to talk about what happens to your body when you take that. I think the documentary kind of went into that. The longer you take this estrogen, you grow breasts and you like —
George: Yeah, it’s supposed to demasculinize you.
Regina: It’s terrible.
George: Yes. The odd thing was when he committed suicide — or when he died, he was at the end of it.
Regina: Right. The documentary talks about how debatable if it would’ve been reversible or not. Is that true?
George: I don’t know. My uniformed assumption would be that it’s reversible.
Regina: Right. It went down this long thing about how he might have been tormented because it was taking much, much, much longer than he had expected to reverse. There had been cases where it didn’t reverse, and so he was very much depressed about that.
George: Yeah, we don’t know. All we know is he was reasonably happy at the time. He talked with his mother. He talked with someone he went for a walk the evening before he died.
Regina: Wow. It documented that he poisoned himself.
George: We don’t know. We really don’t — it’s quite possible and quite likely he committed suicide, but there’s no proof he committed suicide. I got the original report of the investigators who got to him when the body was still warm and there’s nothing about suicide. It says, “Death appears to be due to violence,” which is a very broad term. But the death was caused by —
Regina: Are there conspiracy theories, that there might have been —
George: Yes, there’s lots of conspiracy theories.
Regina: How? I did not know this. Tell me more about this.
George: The one theory, personally I think — I mean there’s three theories. There’s three obvious ones. The most obvious was a suicide and it was very much of Alan Turing’s character that if he was going to commit suicide, he would maybe make it look ambiguous. I don’t think at all you can say it’s not suicide because he didn’t leave a note.
Regina: Right. I did know that much.
George: The other theory was it was an accident because he had his home lab, chemical lab, and he had cyanide in the lab. But I cannot believe that, because the body was massively full of suicide. I mean the investigation at the time, his liver was full of cyanide, brain smells of cyanide, his lungs — he took or was given a large amount of cyanide and died quickly. But that doesn’t rule out other theories.
I have this theory, which again is only a theory and I think it’s quite improbable, that he did know too much and he was a real threat to — we don’t realize how deep the cult of war was already happening by 1954. The Americans actually had a tremendous interest in breaking the Soviet codes and so on.
There was a number of Cambridge homosexuals who had gone to the Soviet side and Alan Turing was certainly a suspect. It could well have been a middle ground of what I would say — politely you would say that it was assisted suicide that say the people whose interest was to make sure that Alan Turing did not go to the Soviet side or maybe suspected him would go to visit him and say, “Alan, your life is sort of a disaster and it’s been a tragedy to your mother that you’ve been convicted of homosexuality and how bad do you want to make it be? There’s an easy way out. Just take this cyanide.”
Regina: What’s very weird about just the term “cyanide,” just that that’s the element that assisted his death, that’s so synonymous with spying and the Cold War. It totally is, right?
George: It’s the way to — if you want to kill somebody, it’s the way to make it look like suicide. It’s still what we do. It’s what the intelligence services are very good at. They make something look like suicide. It’s easy to make it look like suicide.
Jordan: I feel like I know too much right now.
Regina: Yeah. [Laughing.]
George: It’s most likely that he killed himself, but it’s entirely possible that he was killed.
Regina: But there’s that sliver of doubt.
George: It’s not fair to say he committed suicide; it’s not fair to his memory to say that. We don’t know that. We think that.
Regina: That’s true.
George: We think he committed suicide, but we have no proof. There’s no note. There’s no — his mother didn’t say “he called me in tears earlier in the evening.” All we have, and the original investigation says that, that they talked to the housekeeper who said, oh yeah she saw him the evening before and someone else saw him on a walk and he was getting involved in a bunch of new work. His life was not — you’d be much more likely to say — I’d be much more likely to believe it’s suicide if this had happened like before the trial or after the sentence or something. This was at the end of the — he was coming off the estrogen program.
Regina: That is a good point, because I think suicide is very much associated with the stigma. If you’re not absolutely sure, why continually say that.
George: I don’t know where the apple came from. I’ve never seen anything official that has this apple there — there’s this apple.
Jordan: What?
Regina: They like the relationship between Snow White and stuff. That was in the documentary they were talking about, but there’s no documentation of that.
George: Well, the post-mortem says nothing about an apple. It says nothing about a half-eaten apple was in his stomach or — they inspect the contents of his stomach. There’s nothing about an apple.
Regina: So you have no idea where this is from?
George: I don’t know where the apple came. Again, it’s the kind of thing, like [inaudible] let’s put the apple with a bite out of it next to him, which to me would be incriminating evidence of non-suicide if there’s an apple with a bite out of it beside him, yet the autopsy shows no half of bite of an apple in his stomach.
Regina: The cyanide is everywhere on his body.
George: Yeah.
Regina: He’d have to like rub the apple everywhere.
Jordan: The government’s smarter than that. They wouldn’t just put an apple right there.
George: Yeah, I don’t think it’s the government. It’s a very small, which again, we know how there were small factions within that intelligence community just as there are today that are doing some pretty black things in order to play their games, which were very real games at that time.
Regina: Yeah, this is fascinating.
George: The thing you have to remember, he was involved in voice decryption, which was the big thing then. It was a very secret program too, because we were encrypting voice with a system called Venona. He was involved with that and he would’ve been the guy who would also have known how to break it. That was a big deal because we were breaking the telephone conversations, Soviet telephone conversations. We were intercepting them.
Regina: Right. That’s really interesting.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ La, la-la, la-la, la-la, this charming man
♪ Oh, la-la, la-la, la-la, this charming man
Regina: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science, I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff.
Jordan: And I’m Jordan Baker. Today we’re talking about mathematician Alan Turing with George Dyson.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ Ah ! A jumped-up pantry boy
♪ Who never knew his place
♪ He said “return the ring”
♪ He knows so much about these things
♪ He knows so much about these things
Regina: Well, I want to kind of jump from the end of this sad story, or even maybe mysterious story. Let’s jump to something even more mysterious, this AI that Alan Turing was interested in. Because I think, when you were talking about voice decrypting, I was thinking about voice recognition and how we still don’t even have a very good grasp on that.
George: Pretty good, which is the tragedy. He died so young and he could’ve lived to see this. His world that he — you know he wrote chess playing programs when they were done on paper. To see it now where you buy a computer and the damn thing comes with a chess and you can’t get rid of them. It’s part of the operating system. It plays chess. It’s amazing how the things he dreamed of are now part of our lives.
Regina: Which is funny because the previous computer science show we had was talking about how in the ’70s a lot of academics thought that computers wouldn’t be used for games, because that would just be a waste of the memory and the storage and all this stuff. Of course they’re used for games.
Jordan: Think about this for a second.
Regina: Yes Jordan.
Jordan: These dark people, maybe —
Regina: That killed Alan?
Jordan: Yeah. That maybe they allowed him to get the first look at the aliens’ space ships when they landed.
Regina: Yeah, because that’s where they got their voice recognition from.
Jordan: Right. Then he was able to deal with all the artificial intelligence stuff that they had. That’s why he died.
Regina: Let’s just keep on going Jordan.
Jordan: He knew too much.
Regina: Maybe he’s not really dead.
George: Maybe he’s not dead, right?
Regina: Maybe he’s with Elvis in space.
George: He’s in Roswell, New Mexico.
Regina: We solved it. It’s done.
Jordan: You’re welcome guys.
Regina: Yeah.
George: But Alan was ahead — he was ahead of everybody. I think he would be sadly disappointed that we remember him for the Turing Test, which was sort of a joke. It wasn’t the real thing at all.
Regina: Well, yeah. It’s everywhere.
George: Same as von Neumann would be like just that we call the von Neumann architecture after him, which is this crappy architecture that he —
Regina: Yeah, I don’t even know about this architecture.
George: It’s like one of our greatest obstacles to progress and he saw that right away. But, they needed it to do the job, but if you told him 60 years later that you’re still using this and calling it the von Neumann architecture, he’d throw a tantrum.
Regina: [Laughing.] The Turing Test though, even though Alan Turing might find it offensive, it’s everywhere though. Blade Runner is basically the Turing Test. Do you know the movie Blade Runner?
George: Yeah.
Jordan: What is the Turing Test?
George: It’s this idea that the definition of computer intelligence is whether the computer can fool you into thinking that you can’t tell the difference between it and a person. To me it’s the opposite. The sign of a truly intelligent computer is it will not reveal its intelligence. Any intelligent computer wouldn’t reveal its intelligence.
Regina: That’s true. It would get shut down.
George: Right. Yeah. The first sign of intelligence of a computer is it will conceal its intelligence. It’ll be like Google. It will answer questions for you, trivial questions, but it won’t answer the deep ones, because that would get into trouble.
Regina: But it might accidentally tell a joke because right now computers can’t tell jokes.
George: Well, they’re acting like they can’t tell jokes.
Regina: [Laughing.]
George: So, the Turing Test means nothing at all. I don’t think Alan Turing particularly believed in it. It was sort of taken out of context.
Regina: What was the context that he wanted?
George: Context was his 1950 paper where he brings up this idea of the imitation game where you can through a text interface tell whether computer is — and he was basically proving, making the point that there’s no scientific answer to this question at all. Nobody can tell, are you really thinking? How can you convince me that you’re thinking? If I don’t believe you’re thinking, I don’t think you’re thinking. It’s an endless sort of regress.
Regina: [Laughing.] Yeah, it’s like a philosophy paper.
George: Machines are no different. It was a very small part — most of his paper was filled with much more interesting things, effectively mathematical proof that perfect machines can never be intelligent. Machines can only be intelligent if they make mistakes, if they’re non-deterministic and non-predictable. And that’s a much more important insight than whether they can imitate a conversation or not.
Regina: Right. I was gonna bring up that there was — there’s still people that try to do this. They make these computers and try to have people see if it’s a real person or not. There was just recently a group, I don’t know where they were in Europe. They made a website. They had this little boy. It was supposed to be like an 8-year-old boy. You could ask him anything and you needed to decide whether you were really talking to an 8-year-old boy or if you were talking to a robot or computer. It successfully convinced like —
George: It’s very hard to tell.
Regina: What he did was — what this 8-year-old robot did is just avoid questions. That’s all he did, or it did, which is I guess, very human.
George: Yes, exactly. It is hard to tell.
Regina: I do want to say, we spent so much time on how terrible we think the imitation game was. I just thought it was very shallow. Other than the Breaking the Code movie that you suggested before, is there any other accurate depictions of Alan? Or just science during that time, World War II and maybe the beginnings of the Cold War that you think is more accurate with all the research you’ve done?
George: For instance, I think Beautiful Mind, which had its own problems, I found better in the sense that it did capture the world of John Nash a little more accurately. I think we just have to wait. There’ll be better versions.
The BBC version was Derek Jacobi was the actor who did a very good job playing Turing. I think Turing will be with us. He had his first 100 years. Now he’s in the second 100 years and he’ll be with us for a long time. There will be great characters in history that there’s 10, 20 movies about. There will be more people doing it in different ways. I think he’ll be kept alive because he’s sort of such an icon for the world we live in, and it’s a tragedy and we love tragedies in a strange way.
Regina: Right. Yeah.
George: Then there’s the film that — I don’t understand why nobody made it — where he keeps living. Then what happens? That’s an interesting —
Regina: There’s tons of books that are like alternative history where you take these characters that have had these tragic ends or not tragic ends and you totally change history. How would history have — would we have won World War II? Would there have been a World War III? All this kind of stuff.
George: I was sent a play last year that I thought was wonderful. It’s Alan Turing and Robert Oppenheimer meet in a bar in Manchester for one night. They compare notes because they’ve both been persecuted by their governments. There were all these beautiful parallels. It’s like the play Copenhagen based on Niels Bohr and Heisenberg talking after the war. So this play is just Alan Turing, Robert Oppenheimer, and the bartender in a bar in Manchester.
Regina: Sounds like a good joke.
George: It was a brilliant idea for a play.
Regina: You can help them edit it.
George: I gave them the ending. I suggested the non-suicide ending, which actually ended up in the play.
Regina: Oh, really?
George: So Alan goes back to his flat, in the original version of the play, he goes back to his flat and commits suicide. In the final version, he goes back to his flat and the bartender is there who’s an MI5 agent, because the FBI heard that Oppenheimer was going to England. They knew Oppenheimer was a communist and they want to know who he’s gonna meet. It turns out he’s gonna meet this guy Alan Turing who the MI5 suspects is a communist. So the bartender’s actually a guy listening to them. At the bar, Alan tells Robert everything he did during the war, which is totally a violation of the Secrecy Act. Then he goes back to his flat. Guys are saying, well Alan, now we’ve got you for treason. Either take the cyanide or —
Regina: Now you must die. Wow, and that’s the end of the play.
George: That’s curtains at the play.
Jordan: [Laughing.]
Regina: Oh my gosh. Where is this play being performed?
George: It was shown in Austin, I think it was the only time it was performed.
Regina: I’m gonna look this up now. Wow.
George: I thought it was brilliant. It was true that — I hadn’t thought about it — how Oppenheimer and Turing both — Oppenheimer helped America win the war and Turing helped Britain win the war and they both were persecuted by their governments in this horrible way at the same time. The Oppenheimer hearing was 1954 and Alan Turing died —
Regina: McCarthy’s —
George: Anyway, they meet in a bar in Manchester.
Regina: I can’t ask for a better ending than that. Thank you for coming to talk to us.
George: Thank you.
Regina: I thought I did a lot of research on this, but you taught me a lot more than my research did.
George: Thank our wonderful host. We’re upstairs in a museum full of vacuum tubes and none of this would be here if not for the vacuum tube. This is one of the only places in the world that recognizes that. That’s a huge gift to Bellingham. Thank you.
Regina: Yeah, thank you to the Spark Museum.
George: John Jenkins Spark Museum.
Jordan: Thank you.
George: For bringing that, keeping that alive. This is an important museum. It’ll be here after many, many art museums are long forgotten.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
Regina: Thank you for joining us. We just spoke with author George Dyson about mathematician Alan Turing. If you missed any of the show, go to our website kmre.org and click on the podcast link. Our show is entirely volunteer run and if you’d like to help us out click on the button donate.
Jordan: We’ll be back again next week. Listen to us Sunday at 5pm, Wednesday at 9pm, and Saturday at noon.
Regina: Today’s episode, the life of Alan Turing, was produced in the KMRE Spark Radio Studios located in the Spark Museum on Bay Street in Bellingham. Our producer is Katie Knussen [sp?], our engineer for today’s show is Eric Fabureta [sp?], our theme music is “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackalicious. Our feature song today was “This Charming Man” by The Smiths.
[♪ The Smiths playing This Charming Man ♪]
♪ This man said “it’s gruesome
♪ That someone so handsome should care”
♪ Ah ! A jumped-up pantry boy
♪ Who never knew his place
♪ He said “return the ring”
[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
♪ Iodine nitrate activate
♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent and
♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients
♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop then
♪ And they hit the ground
[End of podcast.]