Computing with Quantum Cats Read Free

prerequisite to the transition, his future presented his parents with something of a conundrum. John made an impassioned plea to their parents not to send his unusual younger brother to Marlborough, which “will crush the life out of him,” and Sara Turing worried that her son might “become a mere intellectual crank” if he failed to adaptto public school life. The puzzle of what to do with him was solved by a friend of hers who was married to a science master at Sherborne, a school in Dorset established back in 1550 and brought into the modern public school system in 1869. The friend assured Sara that this would be a safe haven for her boy, and Alan started there in 1926.
    SHERBORNE
    He was due to arrive for the start of the summer term, on May 3, from Brittany, where his parents were living to avoid paying British income tax. On the ferry to Southampton, Alan learned that there would be no trains, because of the general strike; totally unfazed, and still a month short of his fourteenth birthday, he cycled the 60 miles to Sherborne, staying overnight at Blandford Forum. This initiative was sufficiently unusual to merit a comment in the Western Gazette on May 14. The same initiative and independence were shown a little later when Alan worked out for himself the formula known as “Gregory's series” for the inverse tangent, unaware that it had been discovered in 1668 by the Scottish mathematician James Gregory (inventor of a kind of telescope that also bears his name), and even earlier by the Indian mathematician Madhava.
    Alan soon settled into his old habit of largely ignoring lessons that he found boring, then doing well in examinations, while continuing his private chemistry experiments and amusing himself with advanced mathematics. At Sherborne, grades depended on a combination of continuous assessment and examinations, each marked separately but with a final combined mark. On one occasion, Alan came twenty-second out of twenty-three for his term's work, first in theexaminations, and third overall. His headmaster did not approve of such behavior, and wrote to Alan's father: “I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at a Public School, he must aim at becoming educated . If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist , he is wasting his time at a Public School.” But Alan escaped expulsion, and was rather grudgingly allowed to take the School Certificate examination, which had to be passed before he could move on to the sixth form at the beginning of 1929. His immediate future after school, however, was decided as much by love as by logic.
    As in all public schools, filled with teenage boys with no other outlet for their burgeoning sexuality, there were inevitably liaisons between older and younger pupils, no matter how much such relationships might be officially frowned upon. It was in this environment that Alan realized that he was homosexual, although there is no record of his having any physical relationships with other boys at school. He did, though, develop something more than a crush on a boy a year ahead of him at school, Christopher Morcom.
    The attraction was as much mental as physical (indeed, from Morcom's side it was all mental). Morcom was another mathematician, with whom Alan could discuss science, including Einstein's general theory of relativity, astronomy, and quantum mechanics. He was a star pupil who worked hard at school and achieved high grades in examinations, giving Alan, used to taking it easy and relying on brilliance to get him through, something to strive to emulate. The examination they were both working for, the Higher School Certificate (or just “Higher”), was a prerequisite to moving on to university. In the mathematics paper they sat, Alan scoreda respectable 1,033 marks; but Morcom, the elder by a year, scored 1,436.
    In 1929, Morcom was to take the examination for a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was eighteen, and