Welcome back to the Deep Dive. You've brought
us a truly monumental stack of sources today,
and it's all focused on a figure who often feels,
I don't know, more like a legend than a real
person. Ellen Turing. He really does. We're not
just talking about a mathematician here. We're
talking about really the theoretical architect
of the entire digital age. Yeah. And it's almost
impossible to overstate his importance. Turing
was a polymath in, you know, the truest sense
of the word. A mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst,
philosopher, and then later in life, a theoretical
biologist. Right. But his most immediate impact,
the thing we have to start with, was on the survival
of the free world. I think the cognitive scientist
Douglas Hofstadter framed it perfectly. He said,
I'm quoting here, we owe much to Alan Turing
for the fact that we are not under Nazi rule
today. Wow. OK, that sets the bar incredibly
high. So our mission today is to, I guess, synthesize
the timeline of that genius. We need to trace
this trajectory of his mind from. creating these
abstract theories in an ivory tower to his role,
saving millions of lines in world war two. And
then finally to the tragic, just. agonizing irony
of how the country he saved later turned on him.
Exactly. And I think we can structure this deep
dive around what you could call the three pillars
of his genius. They really define his core identity.
First, formalizing the concept of the algorithm
with what we now call the universal Turing machine.
Second, designing the mechanical and crucially
the statistical methods that cracked the enigma
cipher, the ultra intelligence. Right. And third,
creating the foundational blueprint for the stored
program computer, the automatic computing engine,
or ACE. So let's journey back to his beginnings.
Let's do it. Turing was born in 1912 in Maida
Vale, London, but under these kind of peculiar
circumstances where his father, Julius, was serving
in India with the civil service. Right. And his
parents were adamant they strongly believed their
children had to be raised and educated in Britain,
which, you know, set him up for a very traditional,
if often conflicting, English education. And
the signs that he was different, that he was
exceptional, they were there almost immediately.
Oh, right away. His headmistress at St. Michael's
Precatory School saw this unique mind and explicitly
called him a genius. But then as soon as he enters
the formal system at Sherbourne School, you know,
at age 13, that genius immediately starts to
clash with tradition. Sherbourne at the time
was what? deeply invested in the classics. Latin
Greek. All of it. Latin Greek, history. The whole
focus was on rhetoric and the traditional humanities,
not the hard sciences that just fascinated Turing.
So his interests were seen as a problem. Precisely.
His dedication to, you know, these unauthorized
self -directed science experiments and deep mathematical
puzzles, it put him constantly at odds with the
schoolmasters. His brilliance was seen more as
a distraction than a virtue. It got so bad that
the headmaster actually expressed this genuine
worry, fearing that Turing might fall between
two stools. Meaning what exactly? Meaning he'd
failed to become a proper classical scholar,
but also failed to succeed academically because
he just wouldn't conform. It's an incredible
thing to say about a genius. It speaks volumes
that even with that deliberate discouragement,
his aptitude just broke through anyway. We read
that by 1927, he was already tackling advanced
mathematical problems on his own. on his own
without the benefit of formal instruction he
was even solving problems that needed a grasp
of elementary calculus which he hadn't been taught
and that's just the beginning At age 16, he encounters
Albert Einstein's work. Yeah, and the sources
highlight this really astonishing example of
his intuitive leap. Just from reading the text,
he was able to deduce the fundamental questions
Einstein was posing about the limits of Newton's
laws of motion. Questions the textbook didn't
even state. Exactly. He wasn't just processing
information. He was seeing the next step, the
deeper problem underneath. But before that intellectual
journey could really mature, his life was just
completely upended. by a deeply personal tragedy.
We have to talk about his relationship with Christopher
Morecambe at Sherbourne. We do. It was, by all
accounts, an all -consuming relationship for
him. Biographers often describe it as his first
love. They were intellectual kindred spirits.
They shared a passion for science, math. Science,
mathematics, astronomy. Morecambe was probably
the only person at Sherbourne who truly understood
and appreciated Turing's mind on its own terms.
So the loss, then. When Morecambe died so suddenly
in February 1930, must have been just devastating.
It was shattering. Morecambe died from complications
of bovine tuberculosis, which he probably contracted
years earlier from infected milk. And Turing,
reeling, he tried to cope by intellectualizing
the loss, just pouring himself entirely into
their shared scientific interests. There's that
poignant letter he wrote to Morecambe's mother,
Frances. It's heartbreaking. He vows to put as
much energy, if not as much interest, into their
shared work as if Christopher were still there.
He believed that was the tribute Morcombe would
have wanted. And what's fascinating is how that
grief seems to have, I don't know, redirected
his whole philosophical compass, especially on
the concept of mind and matter. Yeah, that loss
was a major catalyst. It pushed him toward atheism
and materialism. He had previously held this
belief, you see it in his letters, in the idea
of a spirit surviving the body and finding a
new body sooner or later. But the reality of
Morcombe's death changed that. the sudden brutal
reality of it seems to have focused his mind
away from metaphysics and toward the purely scientific
seeking explanations in the mechanics of the
material world it demanded a scientific framework
for how ideas could persist which led him really
directly toward the idea of computation and that
framework arrives in his 1936 paper on computable
numbers. This is the paper with the foundation
of the Turing machine. He wrote it right after
getting a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge.
He did. And it's a slightly amusing historical
footnote that his dissertation, which proved
a version of the central limit theorem, was later
found to have already been proven by someone
else years earlier. Oh, so he wasn't the first.
Not on that specific theorem, no. But his fellowship
was secured based on the sheer originality of
his methodology. The real breakthrough, though,
came in that 1936 paper. It was published right
after Alonzo Church's work on the same problem.
Right, on the question of decidability in mathematics.
But where Church used the really abstract language
of lambda calculus, Turing introduced this concrete,
formal, hypothetical device. Okay, let's pause
there because the difference between those two
approaches is so critical. What made the Turing
machine... and not Church's lambda calculus,
the intuitive jump -off point for modern computers?
That's a great question because mathematically
they both define the same class of computable
functions. That's the Church -Turing thesis.
But Church's lambda calculus, it approaches computability
through formal logic, manipulating functions.
It's purely abstract. And Turing's was... Mechanical.
He provided a mechanical, almost physical analogy.
He imagined a machine that followed simple, finite
rules, reading and writing symbols on an infinitely
long strip of tape. So the genius wasn't just
the logic. It was the embodiment of the logic
in a machine you could actually picture. Exactly.
The Turing machine immediately gave people the
conceptual blueprint for a physical device that
could perform any calculation. And within that,
he proposed the single most important concept
of all. The universal Turing machine. The universal
machine. Yeah. What's the fundamental idea there
that makes it more than just a fancy calculator?
Well, a standard machine is designed to do one
specific thing, say, multiply two numbers. The
universal machine is a machine that could perform
the task of any other Turing machine. How? Simply
by reading the other machine's program description
from its tape. So instead of needing a thousand
different specialized machines, you only need
one machine, which can be reprogrammed over and
over again. That is the conceptual foundation
of the modern stored program computer. The software
is separate from the hardware. Absolutely. The
universal Turing machine provided that conceptual
link between abstract math and physical reality.
It basically solved the philosophical problem
of what computation actually is. And the paper
did something else, something equally profound.
It did. It established the limits of computation
by tackling Hilbert's and Scheiding's problem
or the decision problem. And this is where we
get the famous halting problem. Right. Turing
proved that there are fundamental mathematical
questions that an algorithm simply cannot decide,
specifically the halting problem. There is no
universal algorithm that can look at any given
computer program and determine in a finite amount
of time whether that program will eventually
finish or just run forever in an infinite loop.
So in one paper, he defines the entire potential
of computation, everything that can be calculated.
And at the same time, he defines the fundamental
unshakable boundary of what cannot. That is the
ultimate so was of this single paper. John von
Neumann, when he was designing America's first
computers after the war, he acknowledged that
the entire conceptual framework of the modern
computer was owed directly to Turing's 1936 paper.
It stands as arguably the most influential single
mathematical paper of the 20th century. And we
transition now from those abstract limits of
calculation to the massive real world computation
needed to crack the German war machine. Turing's
theoretical knowledge immediately becomes the
world's most critical military asset. Right.
He starts working for the government common cipher
school, GCNCS, part time in 1938 and reports
full time on September 4th, 1939, the day after
Britain declares war. The transition from King's
College fellow to wartime cryptanalyst was immediate.
Immediate and incredibly demanding. And critically,
his work was cloaked in absolute secrecy. Like
everyone at Bletchley Park, he signed the Official
Secrets Act, with the condition that his silence
had to continue indefinitely after the war ended.
Which explains the decades of historical anonymity
and contributes to the ultimate tragedy we'll
get to later. But his first task was the Enigma
Machine. What made that thing so fiendishly difficult
to crack? Well, the German Enigma used this complex
system of rotors and a plug board. The number
of possible settings, the combination of rotor
order, ring settings, plug board connections.
It was just astronomical. We're talking numbers
that are hard to even imagine. I mean, the basic
three rotor Enigma had something on the order
of 10 to the 19 possible states. Checking every...
Possibility manually was just utterly impossible.
And the four -rotor naval version was even worse,
reaching 10 to the 22. Yeah, that's more than
grains of sand on many beaches. So how did Turing
even start to approach bringing those numbers
down to a manageable size? His solution, the
bomb, was an electromechanical machine, a huge
improvement on a pre -war Polish design. And
its genius, which he specified within weeks of
arriving, was based on exploiting a fundamental...
weakness of the Enigma machine. Which was? An
encoded letter could never be the same as the
original letter. An A could never be enciphered
as an A. Ah, okay. So the bomb didn't try to
find the solution. It tried to find the settings
that could possibly be the solution. Exactly.
The core of the bomb's function was the logical
principle of contradiction. Cryptanalysts would
first get a crib. a fragment of probable plaintext
they suspected might be in the message. Like
a weather report or hail Hitler or something?
A predictable phrase, exactly. The bomb would
then run through potential Enigma settings. And
if a setting caused a contradiction like that
A turning into an A, that said, it was instantly
ruled out. It performed thousands of these logical
deductions per second, just dramatically reducing
the number of possibilities. But even with this
groundbreaking machine, we get to a point in
1941 where progress is being stifled not by complexity,
but by, well, bureaucracy. Yes. And this is a
critical moment. By late 1941, the German military
is increasing message traffic. They're adding
new procedures. procedures and Bletchley needs
to move faster. Turing and his colleagues, Gordon
Welchman, Hugh Alexander, Stuart Milner -Berry,
they felt they had the scientific answer, but
they were just critically short of resources.
Not enough staff, not enough new bombs being
built. And their internal appeals were just going
nowhere. So they decided to go around the chain
of command. They bypassed the entire command
chain. They wrote a letter directly to Prime
Minister Winston Churchill. They argued that
while their requirements in money and staff were
tiny compared to the overall military budget,
the assistance they could offer could potentially
save the entire war effort. And Churchill's response?
Legendary. And absolutely immediate. Churchill
wrote the now famous memo, action this day. And
then he continued, make sure they have all they
want on extreme priority and report to me that
this has been done. Wow. That must have cut through
years of potential bureaucratic delay in a single
day. Milner -Berry later said that almost from
that day, the rough ways began miraculously to
be made smooth. Production scaled up rapidly.
They had over 200 bombs running by the end of
the war, providing that constant intelligence
flow. And Turing himself took on one of the toughest
challenges at Bletchley, working in Hut 8 on
the German naval Enigma. Why was the naval code
so much harder? The naval Enigma used stricter
security procedures and a much more complex indicator
system for transmitting the message key. The
traffic was often sparse, and the consequences
of failure U -boat attacks in the Atlantic were
catastrophic. And he tackled this particularly
difficult problem largely by himself. He did.
He cracked the essential part of the naval indicator
system in December 1939. And this led to one
of his most critical statistical innovations,
a technique with a very unusual name. Ban Burismas.
Ban Burismas. It sounds strange. It's one of
his most underrated contributions because it
stayed secret for so long. It was a sequential
statistical technique. To put it simply. It wasn't
just brute force trial and error. It was a way
of managing probability based on overlapping
letters in pairs of messages. So he was quantifying
uncertainty. Yes. He was assigning numerical
weights of evidence to potential settings. He
called the unit of this evidence the ban, which
is basically a logarithmic measure of probability.
what we might now call a decibin in information
theory. So it made the bombs more efficient.
Drastically. It accelerated the process, made
the search for the cribs more efficient, and
cut down the required machine time. The fact
that his papers on this weren't declassified
by GCHQ until 2012 tells you just how foundational
this concept was. In this high -spakes, hyper
-secret, just mentally exhausting environment,
Turing developed some legendary quirks. The nickname
Prof. Oh, he was deeply eccentric. There's the
famous image of him cycling around Bletchley
wearing a gas mask. Not because of gas attacks,
but to ward off hay fever pollen. Yeah. And then
there was his bicycle. The chain would fall off
at mathematically predictable intervals. So rather
than fix it, he calculated precisely how many
pedal rotations he could get before the break.
And he would just stop, hop off, manually adjust
the chain and continue on his way. That is the
ultimate example of a genius applying a rigorous
mathematical solution to a simple mechanical
problem. Exactly. And of course, there's the
story of the mug chained to the radiator. He
just decided the only logical solution to a disappearing
mug was to secure it with a padlock. But beyond
the quirks, he maintained this incredible physical
regimen. He was a serious, almost world -class...
A phenomenally gifted long -distance runner.
He often ran the 40 miles from Bletchley to London
for meetings. His marathon time was competitive
on a global level. He was only 11 minutes slower
than the 1948 British Olympic silver medalist.
And his reason for training with that level of
intensity was so telling. It really was. He said,
I have such a stressful job that the only way
I can get it out of my mind is by running hard.
It's the only way I can get some release. Running
wasn't just a hobby. for him, it was a critical
psychological coping mechanism. And his work
went beyond just Enigma. He also made critical
contributions to tackling the superior Lorenz
cipher codenamed Tunney. Right. The Lorenz cipher
was even more complex, used for high level communications.
In 1942, Turing devised Turingery, which was
another statistical technique designed to crack
the underlying wheel patterns of the Lorenz machine.
And while others went on to use that foundation
to build Colossus, the world's first programmable
digital electronic computer. Turingery provided
that essential conceptual framework for finding
the patterns in the first place. And then there
was Delilah, his attempt at secure voice communications.
Yes, lay in the war. A portable, secure voice
scrambler. He managed a successful demonstration,
famously encrypting and decrypting a recording
of a Winston Churchill speech. But it was just
completed too late, and its distance limitations
made it impractical, so it was never adopted.
So when we look at the totality of his wartime
achievements, what is the ultimate verdict from
the official historians? The official war historian,
Harry Hinsley, gave the definitive estimate.
The ultra -intelligence, which was driven by
Turing's core advances, shortened the war in
Europe by more than two years. More than two
years. It's a staggering metric that confirms
he wasn't just a contributor. He was a central
pillar of the Allied victory. It's astounding
that immediately after winning the war, Turing
just pivots right back to the theory he loved,
applying his insights to design the future. His
first post -war project was the blueprint for
the first stored program computer. From 45 to
47, he was at the National Physical Laboratory,
the NPL, and there he delivered the first really
comprehensive, detailed design for a stored program
computer, the Automatic Computing Engine, or
ACE. This was happening around the same time
as John von Neumann's work in the U .S. It was,
but the ACE design... was generally considered
to be far more specific and technically detailed,
but it got delayed. And here we find this tragic
irony that ties right back to the secrecy of
Bletchley Park. The Official Secrets Act. The
irony is just profound. The act that demanded
his silence about code breaking now actively
crippled his peacetime work. When Turing tried
to explain the rationale for certain design choices,
why the machine needed a certain speed or how
it should interact with operators, that knowledge
came directly from his wartime experience. And
he couldn't explain the why. He couldn't explain
why he knew these things. So the NPL administration
was slow to grasp the novelty and the necessity
of his design. The delays were just maddening
for him. So he's designing the future based on
lessons he's legally forbidden from sharing.
Exactly. The delays were maddening, and he got
disillusioned. By the time he left NPL for good,
they'd only managed to build a scaled -down version,
the Pilot ACE. Which still proved the concept.
Oh, absolutely. The Pilot ACE executed its first
program in May 1950. Even as a smaller version,
its principles were hugely influential. So in
1948, Turing joins the University of Manchester.
He becomes deputy director of the Computing Machine
Laboratory, working on software for the Manchester
Mark I. Right, so the focus shifts from pure
hardware design to the practical challenges of
programming. He wrote the first programmer's
manual for the Mark I. He was essentially translating
the theoretical machine into physical code. And
while he's in Manchester, we find this wonderful
anecdote that ties his wartime paranoia to a
very personal failure of cryptanalysis. The buried
silver story. It's a classic. It reflects the
lasting mental toll of the war. In the 40s, he
got consumed by this fear that Germany might
invade. The banks would collapse. So he bought
two massive silver bars. A small fortune. About
48 ,000 pounds in today's money. He wrapped them
up and buried them in a wood near Bletchley Park.
And he didn't just mark the location, he coded
it. He used cryptography to code the location.
And later, when he tried to retrieve them, he
discovered that either the landscape had changed
or, in a perfect piece of irony, he couldn't
break his own complex location cipher. He lost
them forever. Lost them forever. A testament
to the secrets he was forced to keep. Okay, let's
jump to the concept that made him famous outside
of military history. The Turing Test and the
Foundation of Artificial Intelligence. This was
his landmark 1950 paper, Computing Machinery
and Intelligence. This paper just changed the
whole conversation. Instead of asking the loaded
question, can machines think, which he just dismissed
as being too vague, he proposed an operational
substitute, the imitation game. What we now call
the Turing Test. Can you walk us through it?
Sure. The test involves three participants, a
human interrogator, another human, and a machine.
The interrogator communicates with the other
two only through text, like a chat. If the interrogator
can't reliably tell the machine apart from the
human... Then the machine passes. It passes.
And Turing suggested we should then be willing
to call that machine intelligent. But what's
so insightful is the development strategy he
proposed. He didn't suggest programming an adult
genius. That's the brilliant part that's often
overlooked. He argued that trying to simulate
a fully formed adult mind was too difficult.
Instead, he proposed that developers should create
a relatively simple program that simulates a
child's mind, a machine child, and then subject
that program to a rigorous course of education.
The learning process, he believed, was the key.
It's astonishing that this is still central to
AI discussions today. and we see a reverse application
of his test every single time we log in online.
We do. The TPCA chest, completely automated public
Turing test to tell computers and humans apart,
is a direct inverse application. Its sole purpose
is to prove that you are the human and not the
sophisticated computer. We can't leave this section
without talking about Turochamp, his chest program.
It gives us one of the most endearing images
of early computing struggles. Turochamp was developed
by Turing and his colleague D .G. Champernown
in 1948. It was a theoretical program, an algorithm
written down with rules for piece values, board
evaluation, and so on. But they had no physical
machine that could actually run it. And when
they finally tried to run it on the Ferranti
Mark I in 1952, it was still too primitive. So
Turing did the only logical thing. He became
the processor. He ran the TuraChamp program manually.
He would flip through the pages of the algorithm,
calculate the outcomes of potential moves according
to the program's rules, and carry out the instructions
on a chessboard. How long did that take per move?
About half an hour for every single move. A monumental
commitment to proving a concept. He eventually
lost the game to a colleague, but the point was
made. Garry Kasparov later reviewed the game
and confirmed the algorithm played a recognizable
game of chess, proving that a rule -based system
could indeed approach complex human tasks. Just
when we think we have the measure of him, Turing
makes this dramatic late career pivot. In 1951,
he shifts his focus from computing to the mechanics
of life itself. His final major paper, The Chemical
Basis of Morphogenesis. It's fascinating. He
was applying his understanding of complex self
-organizing systems knowledge from designing
computers to solve a fundamental biological problem.
Morphogenesis is the process of how patterns
and shapes develop. Essentially, why do zebras
have stripes and leopards have spots? And he
proposed a completely counterintuitive explanation.
based on chemistry. He proposed the reaction
-diffusion system. This mathematical model suggests
that patterns can spontaneously emerge in a completely
uniform homogenous system if you have two chemicals,
an activator and an inhibitor, and they diffuse
across space at different rates. Okay, break
that down for us. The activator and the inhibitor.
Right. Chemical A is the activator. It's an autocatalyst,
meaning when it reacts, it produces more of itself.
A positive feedback loop. Chemical B is the inhibitor,
which slows down the production of A, but the
crucial part is... the diffusion rate. They have
to be different. Why? If they diffused at the
same rate, the system would just stay uniform.
But if the activator A is short range, it diffuses
slowly, and the inhibitor B is long range, it
diffuses much faster, then a pattern emerges.
The activator creates a spot, but the faster
moving inhibitor moves out and suppresses other
spots from forming nearby. Which creates a regular
predictable spacing. A regular predictable spacing.
It was revolutionary, especially since it was
published before the structure of DNA was even
fully understood. His model even predicted phenomena
that hadn't been observed yet, like oscillating
chemical reactions. And how seminal is this work
in modern biology? It's extremely seminal. It
showed that self -organization could be explained
by local chemical interactions creating a global
structure. Today, it's used across biology. Professor
James Murray used Turing principles to model
the specific space basing of spots on cat fur.
It's linked to everything from the growth of
feathers to the branching in our lungs. So has
this theory been proven in a real living context?
That's the most exciting recent development.
In 2023, researchers published a detailed verification.
They conducted an experiment using growing chia
seeds in a uniform layer. By manipulating moisture
levels, which acted as the diffusion factors,
they were able to reliably reproduce Turing -type
patterns using living vegetation. Wow. A real
world confirmation 70 years later. A definitive
one. It's a difficult and essential transition
to move from the sheer intellectual triumph of
that last paper to the stark reality of the national
tragedy that followed. We have to address his
conviction for gross indecency. The legal background
is just crucial to understanding the cruelty
of the time. In the UK, homosexual acts were
serious criminal offenses under an 1885 law.
This was the discriminatory framework that ultimately
shattered Turing's life. And the actual events
that led to his prosecution didn't even start
with a morality sting. It started with a simple
crime. That's right. In late 1951, Turing, who
was 39, began an intimate relationship with a
19 -year -old man, Arnold Murray. The catastrophe
began in January 1952 when Turing's home was
burgled. When he reported it, Murray was implicated.
And during the police investigation, Turing,
who was always brutally honest. He just admitted
it. He felt compelled to admit that he had a
sexual relationship with Murray. And that admission
led directly to charges against both of them
for gross indecency. Yes. He was facing a society
that just didn't distinguish between a consensual
private relationship and a criminal act. He was
advised to plead guilty, which he did in March
1952. And he was given this terrible choice by
the judge. two years in prison, or one year of
probation if he underwent hormonal treatment.
What we now call chemical castration. Correct.
Turing, terrified of what prison time would do
to his mind, chose the probation. For a year,
he received regular injections of stillburstrol,
a synthetic estrogen. The treatment had devastating
physical consequences, impotence, the growth
of breast tissue. It was a state -mandated violation
of his body. There's that heartbreaking quote
from a letter he wrote during this time. Yeah,
he tried to maintain a clinical distance, writing,
No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different
man, but quite who I've not found out. It's just
a chilling statement of profound forced change.
And the professional damage was immediate, especially
considering the timing. This was the height of
the Cold War. The Cambridge Five spy defections
had caused massive paranoia. Anyone identified
as homosexual was flagged as a potential security
risk on the assumption they could be blackmailed.
So Turing, the man who provided the most critical
intelligence of the war, suddenly loses his security
clearance. Instantly. He's barred from any consultancy
work for GCHQ. He was suddenly viewed not as
a genius, but as a security threat to the very
nation he had saved. An unbelievable betrayal.
It was. He was marginalized, monitored, and cut
off from the work that was his passion. And this
period of immense humiliation and trauma brings
us to his controversial death in 1954. He died
on June 7, 1954, at his home, aged 41. The cause
was cyanide poisoning. The inquest ruled it a
suicide. And the enduring image is that of the
half -eaten apple found beside his bed, which
was speculated to have been dipped in cyanide.
But the suicide verdict is heavily disputed.
There are significant arguments against it. The
philosopher Jack Copeland noted the autopsy findings
were more consistent with cyanide inhalation
rather than ingestion. Turing had a gold electroplating
apparatus in his spare room, which used potassium
cyanide, and he was often careless with it. And
his demeanor just before his death didn't really
align with someone planning to end his life.
Not at all. His nephew, Dermot Turing, and others
said he'd endured the treatment with good humor.
He was making cheerful plans. Crucially, he had
left a list of tasks he intended to complete
when he returned to his office after the holiday.
That kind of planning is highly inconsistent
with suicide. So some biographers even suggest
he might have staged it. That's the theory from
his biographer, Andrew Hodges. He theorized Turing
might have deliberately staged the scene, the
famous apple, to look like a science accident,
a casual mistake specifically to protect his
mother, who was deeply religious and never accepted
the suicide verdict. The shadow of this injustice
hung over his legacy for decades until the 21st
century brought this campaign for redemption.
It began in earnest with a public petition in
2009. Prime Minister Gordon Brown responded,
releasing an official public apology on behalf
of the government for the appalling way he was
treated. He called it utterly unfair. But an
apology isn't legal absolution. That required
years of further campaigning. Right. Led by figures
like MP John Leach, supported by Stephen Hawking,
the campaign sought a royal pardon. It was granted
by Queen Elizabeth II in December 2013. Which
is exceptionally rare. Only the fourth such pardon
granted since World War II. It was a rare use
of royal prerogative to correct a moral historical
wrong. And the final act of societal redress
was the Alan Turing Law in 2017. Yes. The law,
informally named in his honor, went far beyond
just Turing. It retroactively pardoned or exonerated
thousands of other men and women who had been
convicted under those same historical laws. It
was a monumental acknowledgement that the state's
failure was systemic. From the abstract power
of the universal machine, through his role shortening
World War II by two years, to his late -life
pioneering work, we are looking at a singular
intellectual force. His contribution spans every
major field of 20th century science. He left
a seminal foundational paper in every field he
touched. The recognition is finally visible.
His portrait is on the 50 pound note released
on his birthday in 2021. He was the essential
architect of the digital world we all now inhabit.
And yet that triumph is forever intertwined with
the tragic fact that the very nation he protected
subjected him to a state mandated persecution
that contributed directly to his early death.
That tension persists. Just last year, Defense
Secretary Ben Wallace suggested Turing should
get a permanent statue on the fourth plinth of
Trafalgar Square, calling him probably the greatest
war hero. He's being championed as a national
hero and a national martyr at the same time.
So given the scale of his achievements and the
scale of the injustice, this deep dive really
leaves you with this question. When you look
back at his life, where do you draw the line
between the genius who helped us win the war
and the individual that nation failed in peacetime?
What part of his extraordinary, tragic story
should history remember most clearly? And maybe,
what would the landscape of science, computing,
and even biology look like today if that genius
had been permitted to live out his full potential
without prejudice? We'll leave you to ponder
those profound questions. Thank you for joining
us for this deep dive.