Sad end to a life of a genius
World War 2 Is amongst the significant historical event. Everyone
knows about World War 2, but very few people know how it ended & who helped
end it. After World War 1 every nation was paranoid and to enhance security
they made their security measures more extreme. Germans did the same and came
up with a machine which was called Enigma. The Enigma machine is an encryption
device developed and used in the mid-20th century to protect any
kind of communication. Pre- War it was used to emphasize fast, mobile forces and
tactics which depended on radio communication for command and coordination. Since
anyone could intercept radio signals messages that’s why the code was protected
with secure encoding. As World War 2 started they used this machine to send
coded orders to the U-boats for military communications.
As World War 2 continued, 50 miles from London in Bletchley
Park a secret group was being compiled that composed of great mathematicians and
cryptographers. The engine of this group was Alan Turing by whom the mystery of
enigma was solved. Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer
scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist and was
the only man who knew that a machine can only be taken down by a machine and
not by manual labor. As everyone spent days and night on trying to decrypt the
code of enigma manually, Alan kept working on his machine and he finally his
hard work paid off, he figured the machine out it that was electromechanical
machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine and took him and his fellows 9 months with 12
miles of wiring and 9700 machines to build a prototype. He made an impossible
dream come true. He saved 2 million lives and shortened the war by 2 years.
Now think, a man with that caliber and what everyone must
owe to him. They should have made him a symbol of excellence but on the
contrary his services were kept a secret for more than 30 years and he didn’t
have much issue with that because to him enigma was a puzzle rather than a
mission. So, he moved on from enigma as anyone would after solving a puzzle. Further
he continued his work at University of Manchester and was making significant discoveries
that helped develop Manchester computers but his life much has more in stored
for him.
In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for homosexual act; the
Labouchere Amendment of 1885 has mandated that “gross indecency” and it was a
criminal offence in the UK. This changed the path of his life as it became public,
he got fired from lost his job as a code breaker. He accepted chemical castration
treatment as an alternative to prison. When he started the treatment, he began to
lose everything that made him who he was, the treatment had horrific side
effects that destroyed his mental and physical capabilities. After suffering a
lot, he finally gave up and took his own life in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd
birthday from cyanide poisoning.
After 55 years, September 2009 he was finally acknowledged
on the fact that he saved millions and was finally given a public apology for
how they treated him. But was that enough, could it bring back the life of a
hero who spent his life making a machine to save those who killed him. Honoring
him now won’t bring him back or apologizing for what they did to him is no
redemption for their crime. This is the most inhumane way of treating someone
who you probably owe your life to. How do you pay a man back by saving your
lives? Simple by giving him horrific hormones treatment for a disease that
didn’t exist in the first place and by which he was not endangering anyone.
If he had refused to take on this impossible challenge and
had just gone off to live his life in peace maybe he would have lived a happier
life because he would have gone unnoticed and wouldn’t have raised eyebrows because
of his secret mission. He was treated worse than animals. If because of
religion they gave him this punishment, what would have happened after he died,
according to them he would have gone to hell right? But I can bet that his life
was worse than hell. Such a brilliant mind and they made him go crazy. Just because
he didn’t fit their “requirements” as a human being. This is a sad reality of
our society back then and even now. If a person doesn’t fit a profile or isn’t
“normal” what is the solution, it is to drive him insane, insane enough to take
his own life or isolate him so much that even if he doesn’t want to he will end
up hurting himself or anyone just to fit in some kind of a category that people
can understand or that will make him feel normal. No matter what kind of a
person he is or what qualities he might have or what kind of positivity he might
bring to this world it doesn’t simply matter. The only thing that matters is
that we don’t understand him so to deal with it is to drive him crazy enough to
take his own life.
What happened to Alan Turing is one of the saddest events in
the history of the world. But the only thing we can do is learn from it so that
it doesn’t happen to anyone else. I’m not saying that you might be a person who
is the reason behind taking a life of a genius but even if a person isn’t a genius
he has every right to live his life the way he wants and not be discriminated on
the basis of anything. Because it is everyone’s right to play the leading role
of their lives. Whatever you do just think about how you treat anyone and how
you might ostracize them and make their life not worth living.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb44bGY2KdU
Comments
Post a Comment