5/24/2023 0 Comments Turing enigma book![]() ![]() Seriousness is not solemnity: readers will find here a delightful story about Keynes admiring Alan Turing’s fingernails at King’s College, Cambridge. Yet by taking his personal life and sexual identity seriously, Davenport-Hines achieves an outstanding unification. Richard Davenport-Hines has divided up his account into ‘seven lives’. ![]() My fourth pick is another biography, of the economist John Maynard Keynes. ![]() The theory is highly controversial but has set a remarkable twenty-first-century agenda, inspiring new experiments to push at the boundaries in many fields. His humour and wonderful pictures enhance the direct personal engagement. Penrose’s books are not about science, they are actually doing scientific thinking. Turing famously promoted the prospects for computer-based Artificial Intelligence, but he would have taken this anti-AI thesis more seriously than any other argument: it takes up his own interests and develops his own kind of thinking. It claims that the brain must exploit quantum-mechanical physics that no computer can emulate. This book explains the theory he developed. Years later, Penrose announced an astonishing thesis relating logic and physics. This greatly impressed a student, Roger Penrose, who was also studying the quantum mechanics and relativity that had first fascinated the young Turing. In 1955, Turing’s colleague Max Newman gave a talk on logic in his honour. My second choice relates more subtly to Turing’s sudden end in 1954. ![]()
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