The Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook

The Inspiration of Life and Death, 1928-1932

Another boy

Alan Turing

Christopher Morcom

No longer in a world of his own Alan Turing began to communicate. On-line extract from my book about how Alan Turing met Christopher Morcom, explaining in his own words how he felt in 1928 and 1929.

The picture below shows them playing noughts and crosses in late 1929, and talking about mathematics and astronomy when they were meant to be doing French.

The figure on the right hand edge shows, I think, that they were talking about the problem of the axiom of parallel lines in Euclidean geometry.

Alan Turing was in (unrequited) love.

In December 1929 they went to Cambridge together to sit the entrance examinations. Alan Turing described it...

Morcom got a scholarship and Turing didn't. Then —

The Nature of Inspiration

But he was still deeply involved with the implications of Christopher Morcom's death. In 1932 on a visit to the family Morcom home he wrote out a statement of belief in the survival of the spirit after death which brought in an appeal to the new science of quantum mechanics. It was headed "Nature of Spirit":

The whole essay is given in my book. It suggested that the traditional picture of determinism in physical theory, and the apparent conflict with the sense of free will, had been overturned by the new quantum physics. He thought that quantum physics was directly involved in the brain, an idea suggested by Arthur S. Eddington in The Nature of the Physical World.

Culture Clashes again Typically, Alan Turing had been drawn to the central arena where scientific and religious thought come into conflict over the nature of the human mind and human will. At the same time he had the conflict with society over his homosexuality. There was nothing like Youth Assistance Organization or Gay Youth UK or the Albert Kennedy Trust for young people then. Homosexuality was completely illegal and almost unmentionable in public. Alan Turing had good fortune in one way: King's College was notable for its private culture, fostered by liberal thinkers such as John Maynard Keynes, in which same-sex feelings were well understood.

The grand entrance to King's College, as I saw it on 24 June 2000, when King's held a day of events centred on Turing and Keynes.

But Alan Turing never fitted well into any culture: he was no 'aesthete', but liked rowing and running.

He was full of feeling which he shared with Christopher's mother, but not at the expense of his dedication to scientific explanation.

New physics, new brainwaves

Roger Penrose's most recent ideas are linked with the research of Stuart Hameroff on the possibility that the physiology of microtubules in the brain depends crucially on quantum-mechanical effects.

See the Journal of Consciousness Studies with the abstract of a further paper by Penrose and Hameroff.

In Psyche you can read a series of objections to Roger Penrose's thesis in Shadows of the Mind, and a response from Roger Penrose, Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow, adding further ideas about the physics of the brain... as well as further papers on quantum mechanics and consciousness.