Interview with Andrew Hodges. Part 3

This week concludes the serialisation of my interview with Andrew Hodges. The final questions I asked looked at the much bigger picture of Alan's legacy.

Once again, if you are interested in reading more about Andrew Hodges you can find his website here and his book can be bought from here.

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What is your opinion of the successful 2009 poll to have the government apologise for Alan’s treatment?

Well I disagreed with the wording of the petition because it was too specific to Turing; it didn’t take into account the hundreds of thousands of other people who were in similar positions. But on the other hand I warmed to it a lot as Gordon Brown’s apology was very, very, good and brought out all of these wider points and linked them in a similar way to that which I had done in my book.

Gordon Brown's apology to Alan Turing. Signed and donated to Bletchley Park by Gordon Brown.

My point of view, coming from the gay rights perspective, is that Turing’s case was simply an extreme example of what society was like, what the effect of legislation was like here and what it will be like in other countries now. The evil is not what happened to the individual it is what it happens generally and Alan illustrates this very clearly with his story. That is how it struck me in ’73 and I haven’t changed from that point of view. The story is very vivid but the message is much more general. So I think this apology is too much mixed up in people thinking that we have to rescue this great scientist, rather than seeing a human rights question in general.

It is hard to know what Alan would have thought but I believe he would have thought the whole system was wrong rather than simply wanting an excuse for himself.

Does your interest in Turing’s story still continue? For example have you taken an interest in Bletchley Park recently getting Alan’s papers back?

Ah well let me put you right there. They didn’t get his papers back. They simply got Max Newman’s copies of Turing’s published papers. More positively, its great that Turing’s actual papers are preserved at King’s College, Cambridge.

Back to your original question, I revived my interest in the mid 90s as the internet was beginning to grow and I’ve written another shorter book on Turing as a philosopher as well as a number of smaller academic papers. On the whole I am very happy to leave everything to other people who have become great experts in some particular area of his life, whereas my strength was to see all of these links as a whole.

Interview with Andrew Hodges. Part 2.

This week we continue the serialisation of my interview with Andrew Hodges. Below, I probe deeper into what Andrew got out of writing the book.

Once again, if you are interested in reading more about Andrew Hodges you can find his website here and his book can be bought from here.

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When/ how/ why did you start thinking about writing a biography about Turing?

Well, when I learned I had these three connections with the man and he had such a story I knew I had to tell it. However, it would’ve been very difficult simply to write an article. All of the connections as I’ve just described were hidden at this time. No one even knew the story of the computer because of Bletchley Park being so secret!

I also sensed that there was a big fascinating story to tell about how all of these links came together in just one person. I had a feeling that it would be possible to present something modern in its social and political point of view but about something unexpected, namely the history of technology, science and the Second World War. Although at the beginning I didn’t realise just how big the story would become and how difficult it would be to get all of the information.

Because it was so difficult did you ever get frustrated?

It was difficult to do, but the discipline of writing a biography means that you have the unifying feature of a single person’s vision and you don’t have to cover everything that was going on in the world at that time, which is what historians have to do. I liked the idea of working through someone else’s life and remembering that they never knew what was going to happen next. That is one of the things that kept me going during the difficult times. It was hard work interviewing people about subjects that, at the time, where either secret or difficult to talk about. I also acquired a lot of scientific material, which in the beginning I knew nothing about.

What kind of character was Turing?

 He was certainly odd. But in mathematics we have a slightly different picture of what you expect people to be like. Many of the things that strike people as odd came across to me as traits that anyone involved in deep concentration, not just mathematicians, would have.

One way of putting it is that he lived a lot like people did 20 years later.

That is quite an interesting point as, having read your book, Alan seems to come across as a relatively normal person.

Yes, but normal for a number of decades later. I would say that rather as his ideas (computation and morphogenesis) were ahead of his time, so was his lifestyle. We just wouldn’t have made such a fuss about his oddness during the sixties and seventies.

Interview with Andrew Hodges. Part 1.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to have the chance of interviewing Andrew Hodges about his experience of writing a biography of Alan Turing, "Alan Turing: The Enigma". Since we spoke for quite a while I've decided to serialise the interview over the next few weeks. This week I introduce Andrew and ask what set him on his path of writing the book.

If you are interested in reading more about Andrew Hodges you can find his website here and his book can be bought from here.

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Firstly, for those who do not know of your career, could you just give an outline of how you came to where you are?

I am in an unusual situation, because the Turing material is something that took me off from my normal trajectory. It was not a direct part of my normal progress as I was already a post doctoral researcher in quite a different field, mathematical physics; working with Roger Penrose. Although I took time off to do it I managed to mix it in with my research over the six years, from 1977 to 1983

In 1985 I received an advanced Science and Engineering Research Council fellowship, which really established me in Oxford, where I have been ever since.

You did your Phd in 1975 in twistor theory and continue to work in this area to this day. Can you explain a little about what this is? It is linked to string theory isn’t it?

It is really very different from string theory, although there is more overlap now.

String theory is about adding in extra dimensions to space and time and structures within those. Twister theory is simply a different way of describing the four dimensions that we know about. So in that way it is less radical!

What do you get out this description that the normal view of space and time doesn’t give you?

Instead of thinking about the four dimensions as physical description of three space dimensions and one dimension of time we instead think about of two dimensions plus two dimensions. It is based on a set of light rays which are the fundamental objects.

This description fits very nicely with the way the whole of fundamental physics has gone which puts emphasis on objects that have zero mass. The ideas behind the Higgs field and gluons also fit beautifully into this point of view.

Since you work in such a different field to Turing how did you first hear about him

In 1969 I was a Cambridge undergraduate and at that time his name wasn’t well known to most undergraduates. I read a lot of maths that was not on the syllabus and I discovered his work on Turing machines. So his name at least meant something to me at that time and I was very surprised during 1972-73 when his name came up in quite a different way. I met many people in the Gay Liberation movement who had actually known him.

So Alan was more famous in the gay community than the mathematical one?

Oh no. He was by no means a household name. It was simply coincidence of meeting the older generations and having seen his name before. Very few people knew of this connection to Turing. Of course, it is well known now, but at the time it was something no one wanted to talk about.

The third connection was that in the mid 70s, books started leaking the details of the work done in Bletchley Park. Also the BBC had a very good programme on how the Enigma was broken but it didn’t really highlight Turing’s role. It mentioned that he was there but didn’t discuss his work, whereas through my connections I gathered that he wasn’t just “there” but actually he was the most important figure in the whole project.

And is that true? Turing is often praised as being the genius behind the breaking of Enigma but there were plenty of others there working with him who should also not be forgotten.

I don’t think any of the other big people (Donald Michie, Max Newman, Jack Good and Shaun Wylie to name but a few) would have questioned his importance… on the scientific side of course. There were many important people running the infrastructure, engineering of the machines and linguists, but on the scientific side there is no question of his influence. He was both the first serious scientific person into the field of decryption and the most innovative.

He had a very unobvious idea of how the Enigma machine worked and also developed all of the statistical theory which they used.