Just found out the Science channel is airing a two hour documentary on Alan Turing. It is being rebroadcast at midnight. Well, Eastern Standard Time here in America anyway.
I can personally and uncomfortably sympathize with what Turing was very probably feeling while working within the technical world. It is common that the technical experts can easily envision so very many solutions to the grand problems of warriors. But understandably, seldom does the warrior know to whom to listen. Living such a life leads to both highs of envisioned problem solving and lows of disillusionment at the realization that no one is going to hear or understand the solutions until it is too late to apply them. What saves such people’s solutions is the fact that usually there are other applications that will shortly arise and perhaps someone will be listening at that time… if the solution is remembered.
It is all very similar to the young having the health and often the wealth, but having no real clue as to what to do with it. To whom would they listen? By the time they discover what to do with what they had, they no longer have it.
I suspect that Turing’s most enlightened concepts will never be known. He wasn’t socially acceptable. And even that issue has a solution that is currently being ignored by those who have the ability but not the understanding. Genius and influence are seldom bedfellows.
From my desk, there is no problem throughout the entire world for which Man hasn’t the solution already formed and presented, except for the problem of Him not listening.
Turing’s life may have been unhappy because he never got much credit, but so many people are looking for immortality in there work, he may have that even though he’ll never know it.
his life was unhappy because he was a homosexual in a time where marriage was the last of their worries.
You must think I’m somewhat dim witted by now.
me? that’s your only post I even remember, and I only remember it because it’s right there
In that case you must, now, think I’m somewhat dim witted (I’m starting to have fun here on ilp, for once).
No I don’t think that, I don’t really know you very well. What you said was fine, even insightful, but I think it ignored what was probably a much bigger stressor in his life.
I just looked Turing up, I didn’t know about all that.
Yeah he was definitely too early for society in more ways than one. I’m ashamed that we treated one of the greatest minds of the 20th century that way.