Posted by:
Amyjo
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)
Date: June 08, 2019 05:03PM
Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal of Alan Turing gave new life to him to a next generation of movie goers.
He made Turing look like a rock star. Turing was a pretty geeky nerdy guy to those who knew him. In the movie he was portrayed as arrogant and conceited owing to his peculiarity which made him stand apart from the crowd. And add: his genius.
He wasn't afraid to be different. That was part of his genius. But it isolated him, and caused him great misunderstanding and distrust of his peers because he was a nonconformist.
As Turing's purported death by suicide, it has been under a cloud of suspicion since it was established. "On 8 June 1954, Turing's housekeeper found him dead; he had died the previous day. Cyonide poisoning was established as the cause of death.[140] When his body was discovered, an apple lay half-eaten beside his bed, and although the apple was not tested for cyonide,[141] it was speculated that this was the means by which Turing had consumed a fatal dose. An inquest determined that he had committed suicide. Andrew Hodges and another biographer, David Leavitt, have both speculated that Turing was re-enacting a scene from the Walt Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), his favourite fairy tale. Both men noted that (in Leavitt's words) he took "an especially keen pleasure in the scene where the Wicked Queen immerses her apple in the poisonous brew."[142] Turing's remains were cremated at Woking Crematorium on 12 June 1954[143] and his ashes were scattered in the gardens of the crematorium, just as his father's had been.[144]
Philosophy professor Jack Copeland has questioned various aspects of the coroner's historical verdict. He suggested an alternative explanation for the cause of Turing's death: the accidental inhalation of cyonide fumes from an apparatus used to electroplate gold onto spoons. The potassium cyonide was used to dissolve the gold. Turing had such an apparatus set up in his tiny spare room. Copeland noted that the autopsy findings were more consistent with inhalation than with ingestion of the poison. Turing also habitually ate an apple before going to bed, and it was not unusual for the apple to be discarded half-eaten.[145] In addition, Turing had reportedly borne his legal setbacks and hormone treatment (which had been discontinued a year previously) "with good humour" and had shown no sign of despondency prior to his death. He even set down a list of tasks that he intended to complete upon returning to his office after the holiday weekend.[145] Turing's mother believed that the ingestion was accidental, resulting from her son's careless storage of laboratory chemicals.[146] Biographer Andrew Hodges theorised that Turing arranged the delivery of the equipment in order to deliberately allow his mother plausible deniability in regard to any suicide claims.[147]
Conspiracy theorists pointed out that Turing was the cause of intense anxiety to the British authorities at the time of his death. The secret services feared that communists would entrap prominent homosexuals and use them to gather intelligence. Turing was still engaged in highly classified work when he was also a practising homosexual who holidayed in European countries near the Iron Curtain. It is possible that the secret services considered him too great a security risk and assassinated one of the most brilliant minds in their employ.[148]
Turing believed in extrasensory perception,[149][150][clarification needed] and it has been suggested that his belief in fortune-telling may have caused his depressed mood. As a youth, Turing had been told by a gypsy fortune-teller that he would be a genius.[144] Shortly before his death, during a day-trip to St Annes-on Sea with the Greenbaum family,[when?] Turing again decided to consult a fortune-teller.[144] According to the Greenbaums' daughter, Barbara:
But it was a lovely sunny day and Alan was in a cheerful mood and off we went... Then he thought it would be a good idea to go to the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool. We found a fortune-teller's tent and Alan said he'd like to go in so we waited around for him to come back... And this sunny, cheerful visage had shrunk into a pale, shaking, horror-stricken face. Something had happened. We don't know what the fortune-teller said but he obviously was deeply unhappy. I think that was probably the last time we saw him before we heard of his suicide."[151]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing