“I like solving problems, Commander. And Enigma is the most difficult problem in the world,” says Alan Turing.
“Enigma isn't difficult. It's impossible. The Americans, the Russians, the French, the Germans, everyone thinks Enigma is unbreakable” says Commander Denniston.
“Good. Let me try then. And we'll know for sure, won't we?”
It is not these adamant words of Professor Turing that confound the commander. It is the other ones, “I am the greatest mathematician in the world,” that do.
Eccentric as professors come, Alan Turing from Cambridge is determined to help decipher the codes of Nazi Germany – which Nazis decrypt using Enigma machines - on his own machine to help Britain win the war.
Watching this scene, and many others, in the gripping biopic The Imitation Game this week, I felt Benedict Cumberbatch deserves an Oscar for playing the quirky professor to the hilt.
But among his competitors is another Oscar nominee Eddie Redmayne who plays another Professor in another biopic, A Theory of Everything. Eddie plays Stephen Hawking.
So, among this year’s Oscar nominees are these two films and two actors - who are playing two professors; with both professors from Cambridge.
In fact, Stephen Hawking is still there. He is the current Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in the University of Cambridge.
If it were not for these biopics, I wonder how many of us would actually learn about, and learn from, these greats that history bestowed us.
I remember someone saying that, after watching the movie Gandhi (1982) at a cinema in Poland, he overheard these words: “Wow! What a movie! If we didn’t know it was a movie, we would have thought that such a man had really existed!”
That could be an anomaly. But the amazing power of a ‘motion picture’ in conveying inspiration from those lives that changed our world cannot be denied.
And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deserves praise for recognizing movies of this genre.
The machines Alan Turing built – whatever his sexual orientation was – were amazing precursors to computers.
If he were alive, I wonder what Turing would have said of the astonishing processing speed of today’s supercomputer Tianhe-2, at 33.86-petaflops! One petaflop, by the way, is equal to a quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating point operations per second (FLOPS).
The insights into Time-and-Space that Stephen Hawking gave us – despite the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which gradually paralysed him– are considered monumental contributions to interdisciplinary studies of general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Many in the West would have learnt more of politics in Asia from biopics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962), ‘Gandhi (1982) and The Last Emperor (1987), than from their history textbooks.
Similarly, many occidentals must have learnt more about the West from movies like Schindler’s List (1993) and Lincoln (2012) than from their school teachers.
Biopics that won Oscars for Best Picture, which portrayed a range of inspiring lives, were on scientists like The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), mathematicians like A Beautiful Mind (2001), writers like The Life of Emile Zola (1937), activists like Erin Brockovich (2000), political leaders like Disraeli (1930), military generals like Patton (1970), music composers like Amadeus (1984), entertainers like Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), and sports people like Raging Bull (1980).
And biopic genre of movies today is what biographical literature in books was in the past.
No comments:
Post a Comment