1912-1935
1912-1935 |
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Again by coincidence, the building has a most interesting history. In 1938 Sigmund Freud, when he became a refugee from Vienna, stayed there.
Here is a photograph of Freud outside the hotel.
I hope soon to extend this into a full page on Turing's birthplace.
Alan and his elder brother John at Hastings. |
The house in Hastings where they lived |
The sketch (now reproduced in the volume of the Collected Works concerning Turing's theory of biological growth) was uncannily prophetic.
In the midst of the General Strike of 1926, Alan Turing started at Sherborne School, a Public School (in the British sense) in the town of Sherborne, in deepest Dorset. He completely ignored the antiquated literary culture of the school system and got very bad reports:
The English report says: "I can forgive his writing, though it is the worst I have ever seen, and I try to view tolerantly his unswerving[?] inexactitude and slipshod, dirty, work, inconsistent though such inexactitude is in a utilitarian; but I cannot forgive the stupidity of his attitude towards sane discussion on the New Testament." Bottom of the class.
He did better in Latin, only second from bottom: "He ought not to be in this form of course as far as form subjects go. He is ludicrously behind".
The maths and science reports were better but still complained "His work is dirty". He was nearly stopped from taking the School Certificate (as became O-levels, later GCSE.)
On the sixth form everything changed because of Christopher Morcom.
 Alan Turing |
 Christopher Morcom |
This page (shown half-size) shows them playing noughts and crosses in late 1929, and talking about maths and astronomy when they were meant to be doing French.
The figure on the right hand edge is a reference to the problem of the axiom of parallel lines in Euclidean geometry.
In December 1929 they went to Cambridge together to sit the entrance examinations. Morcom got a scholarship and Turing didn't. This is part of the account Alan Turing later wrote:
Then Christopher Morcom suddenly died, on 13 February 1930: a shattering event for Alan Turing, but he came through it and won a scholarship himself to King's College, Cambridge, the following year.
From October 1931 Alan Turing was an undergraduate student at King's.
Although this opened up a new intellectual and social world 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 quantum mechanics. It was headed "Nature of Spirit":
His essay started by suggesting that the traditional picture of determinism in physical theory, and its implications for human free will, had been overturned by the discovery that elementary particles require a quantum-mechanical description. (The whole essay is given in my book.)
Quantum mechanics was then really "new physics", but sixty years later the question of whether it has something to do with the nature of Mind, is still very lively. In fact the question of the scientific description of consciousness has come to the foreground of serious enquiry as never before.
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, which is a long paper (25 pages, 130k) adding further ideas about the physics of the brain.
...as well as further papers on quantum mechanics and consciousness.
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.
Further references on the science and philosophy of consciousness are given by the philosopher David Chalmers.
More speculations will be found in the Physics and Consciousness Group.
In 1932, it was reading von Neumann's new book on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics that first brought Alan Turing to the edge of new work in mathematics.
From then on he made rapid progress. In 1935 he was elected to a Fellowship of the college, and in the same year conceived the idea of the Turing Machine --- on the next Scrapbook Page.
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 Alan Turing Home Page |
 Bibliography |
Last updated 10 July 1997.
Feedback, new links, to me at andrew.hodges@wadh.ox.ac.uk
