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Fight Begins To Secure Turing Papers For Bletchley Park Museum
Blacklaw writes "Auction house Christie's is planning to sell offprints of Alan Turing's early work for an estimated £500,000 — and the fight has begun to raise the money so UK codebreaking museum and charity Bletchley Park can house the documents in the building where Turing performed his war-winning work and birthed the concept of a modern 'universal computer.' If the money isn't raised, the papers could disappear into a private archive, never to be seen again."
You are trolling, but for the sake of accuracy here is what is generally acknowledged to be the case.
- after the war he struggled to get the kind of role and financial support he should have been given without a quibble or a bat of the eye - he eventually got a very good job at the University of Manchester, which is a great place, but it is amazing that he wasn't treated as a national treasure (was it 2 of Hilberts challenges he solved? Even allowing for the secrecy around the work during the war someone in the know should have pushed it on that basis)
- he was targeted for blackmail due to being gay when it was illegal
- the police arrested him and he was prosecuted and punished with hormone therapy
- the depression caused by the therapy and the awful behavior of society towards him, and his own personal isolation caused him to take his life
- he did it in such a way to allow his mother to go on believing that it was an accident
In 1956 the UK government had no reason to kill him, in fact it never did - quite the opposite. Instead they treated a great man with indifference and contempt because of his sexuality. I can't say that I can think of a more pathetic story in all senses of the word.
If you want to feel worse about it (as a human) then think what might have been if he had lived 25 more years and had enjoyed the appropriate support
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
Indeed, that was my idea as well. Just make digital copies for the public, then make whoever wants buy the originals. As long as the information is preserved for the public, who cares...
These are off-prints, i.e., free sample copies of a journal article that authors are given.
Chances are, you can already go to a good university library and make photocopies of the articles.
If your university has a subscription, you can also see the articles on JSTOR:
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=au:(Turing)
This is an incredibly sad story, I always found it one of the most hateful stories about human behaviour but also a good lesson. People with extraordinary talent are used as long as they are needed, then the 'war' is over and the public doesn't care about them anymore. Then they turn into just another pawn that can be used for political games because they are 'different' in some way. Your past performances in no way protect you, as people take those for granted. In a way, it's the comparable to how soldiers/war heroes are treated, for example those with post traumatic stress. Locked away and forgotten.
It's a troll because you completely disregard history. It was not a selectively enforced law. Try reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol some time - lots of people went to prison for sodomy, the only requirement was evidence.
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I believe it was intended to reduce libido (chemical castration). "Turing agreed to take hormone therapy for a year instead of going to prison."
The headline is, as usual, misleading. These aren't Turing's papers (which usually means personal papers and notes belonging to the person named), they're copies of [professional] papers he wrote.
These aren't the equivalent to a famous painter's works, they are equivalent to the first run of prints that a publisher made from a painter's work. They are not the papers written by Turing, they are the first run from the printing press after the publisher took them and typeset them.
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