Alan Turing: the enigma

He has now got to find this general law of motion for bodies. It will, of course, have to satisfy the general Principle of Relativity. He does not actually give the law, which I think is a pity, so I will. It is: 'The separation between any two events in the history of a particle shall be a maximum or minimum when measured along its world line'....

This study arose out of his own initiative, and Eperson [his mathematics master] did not know about it. He was thinking quite independently of his environment, which offered him little but nagging and scolding. He had had to look to his totally bewildered mother for a little encouragement. But then something happened to put him into contact with the world.

There was a boy in another house... whose name was Morcom. As yet he was nothing but 'Morcom' to Alan although later he became 'Christopher'. Alan had first noticed Christopher Morcom early in 1927, and had been very struck by him, partly because he was surprisingly small for his form. (He was a year older than Alan and a year ahead in the schoool, but fair-haired and slight.) It was also, however, because he 'wanted to look again at his face, as he felt so attracted.' Later in 1927, Christopher had been away from school and then had returned looking, Alan noticed, very thin in the face. He shared with Alan a passion for science, but he was a very different person. The institutions that were for Alan such stumbling-blocks had been for Christopher Morcom the instruments of almost effortless advance, the source of scholarships, prizes and praise. He again returned late to school this term, but when he arrived Alan was waiting for him.

His utter loneliness was pierced at last. It was difficult to make friends with an older boy from another house. Nor was Alan good at conversation. But he found an entrée in mathematics. 'During the term Chris and I began setting one another our pet problems and discussing our pet methods." It would be impossible to separate the different aspects of thought and feeling. This was first love, which Alan would himself come to regard as the first of many for others of his own sex. It had that sense of surrender ('worshipped the ground he trod on') , and a heightened awareness, as of brilliant colour bursting upon a black and white world. ('He made everyone else seem so ordinary.') At the same time, it was most important that Christopher Morcom was someone who took scientific ideas seriously. And gradually, though with considerable reserve, he took Alan seriously. ('My most vivid recollections of Chris are almost entirely of the kind things he said to me sometimes.') So these elements were all present, and had the effect of giving Alan reason to communicate.

Before and after Eperson's classes Alan might talk to Christopher about relativity, or might show him other pieces of work. He had, for example, calculated &pi to thirty-six places of decimals at about this time, perhaps making use of his own series for the inverse tangent function, and being much annoyed to find an error in the last decimal place. After a time, Alan found another opportunity to see Christopher. By accident he discovered that during a certain period on Wednesday afternoons set for provate study, Chris went to the library and not to his house. (Ross did not allow boys to work unsupervised, fearing the sexual potential in unregulated associations.) 'I so enjoyed Chris' company there,' wrote Alan, 'that ever since I always used to go to the library instead of my study.'

Yet another chance arose through the gramophone society which the progressive Eperson had started. Christopher, a fine piano player, was a keen member. Alan had little interest in music, but sometimes on Sunday afternoons he would go to Eperson's lodgings with Blamey (who also had a gramophone and records in their shared study.) There he could sit and steal glances at Christopher while the 78's played out their disjointed versions of the great symphonies. This was, incidentally, part of Blamey's noble effort to show Alan that there were other things in life besides mathematics. He also showed Alan how to make a crystal wireless recveiver out of basic materials, having notices that Alan had little pocket money for such things. Alan insisted on winding the coils for the variometer and was delighted to find that his clumsy hands had made something that actually worked, even if he could never aspire to Christopher's dexterity.

... In the new year of 1929 there was another shuffle, and Alan joined the sixth form proper, so that he did all his classes with Christopher. He made a point of sitting next to him in every class right from the start. Christopher, Alan wrote,

made some of the remarks I was afraid of (I know better now) about the coincidence but seemed to welcome me in a passive way. It was not long before we began doing experiments together in Chemistry, and we were continually changing our ideas on all sorts of subjects.