Exciting 46

For a long time, Alan Turing, except for a few scientists remained unjustly in the shadows, and joining many of these men and women of genius that helped change the world without the latter renders tribute in return.

It is therefore ironic that, virtually concurrently, leaving both a film under the title of "The Imitation Game" and the book "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (with a title in the form of wink fun to Hitchcock) wholly devoted to him.

Why this renewed interest suddenly? Just because Turing is probably one of those men with Einstein and Oppenheimer for example, who revolutionized the world in the twentieth century. Perhaps is it even the most important of all because it is daily and exponentially as we see and experience the impact of that on which he has spent his life. For Turing was nothing less than the inventor of the computer, giving his name to a machine known scientists as the "Turing machine".

Turing was unsurpassed archetype of genius. Probably autistic Asperger, asocial, homosexual at a time when such preferences were worth disgrace and prison, marathoner who could have won a gold medal at the Olympics saw his training time, he published an article that made twenty years make a giant leap in the understanding and application of the quantum theory of Einstein. Work completed by others that led to his being spotted by the Secret Service of His Majesty and be enrolled in a service involving a chess champion, logicians of crossword enthusiasts and coding specialists to break Enigma the dreaded universal encoding system developed by the Germans and on which all Allies broke the teeth.

By dint of stubbornness, determination against all, thoughts, attempts and strokes of genius, Turing and his team finally come to end and this changed forever the face of the Second World War.

What makes "The man who knew too much" very interesting (and far more thorough and credible as romantic and rough fiction "The Imitation Game" However, complementary) is that both follows the life of Turing and the sequences of strategic and political maneuvers that were aimed to defeat Nazi Germany while providing a potentially threatened by future Red tyranny of Stalin. This is how we understand what sacrifices sometimes counted in tens of thousands of lives, were coldly decided to hope for saving millions more; how some battles were won using information acquired while putting in place a comprehensive plan to smoke out the Germans so they never doubted that their formidable encoding system was broken. Or how some strategic moves aimed at nothing other than to make the most possible deaths in Russia to weaken the enemy approached tomorrow.
Given the sensitivity of the subject, a stony silence on the matter was kept secret which was lifted only very recently which explains why it did not hear talk about Turing far.

Now life Turing is in itself a true romantic subject as shown by the two authors. A subject that becomes the seductive pretext to plunge us into the heart of the Googleplex where a man, the founder of Google, another genius changing the world and the mark of his tentacular grip, has developed machines for disturbing both extend the life hundreds of years and interpreted so hyperrealist the past, so why and how Turing was found dead, not even at forty, beside a barely begun and apple poisoned.

The official story is that of suicide. The author is quite different, and that adheres or not, helps to understand how the Second World War led to the Cold War and how the fray paranoia to the culture of secrecy and preventive or punitive risk control leads states to take action which is preferred to know nothing.

In all cases, once opened the book is a biography of mixing, novel and fiction and opened remotely survey, plunges totally caught up in the character and history. A devilishly clever and wonderfully made book. A real success!

Published by Editions Robert Laffont '2015' 336 pages

find my reading notes on thierrycollet-cetalir.blogspot.com