Turing and Enigma, Poe and Cosmology, Me and GTA
I noted in a comment here, a few days ago, the New York
Review of Books article by Christian Caryl on Alan Turing [2/5/15, Saving Alan
Turing from his Friends, Page 19 ff.].
It’s a must-read for those who want to see how “facts” are
changed for entertainment purposes.
My point here is to note what I found interesting, even
though it has nothing to do with UFOs, exactly.
As many of you know, Turing (a genius and icon for some of
us) discovered the cryptic code of the Nazi Enigma machine, helping Britain in
WW II by showing the Nazi submarine attack plans – the Nazis having almost
decimated the British Navy in the Atlantic Seas.
You can read about this online, but here’s my observation:
Who was the creator of Enigma?
I don’t think it was a committee creation but even if it
were, who was the prime mover?
That person is a genius of the Turing ilk. Where did he or
she go after the war?
Were they killed? Did they end up in Russia? Or the United
States? Or South America?
Did they become part of the space programs here of in Soviet
Russia? Or did they just fade away, lost to history, without note?
Then there is another NYRB article in the issue [2/5/15]: Of
Edgar Allan Poe by Marilynne Robinson [Page 4 pp.] wherein she notes that Poe was an unprecedented genius with a prescience that has gone unnoticed pretty
much.
Here’s Ms. Robinson’s commentary:
“In the last year of his life, [Poe] wrote a prose poem,
Eureka, which would have established [the fact that his mind wasn’t
commonplace].
[Eureka] was so full of intuitive insight that neither his
contemporaries nor subsequent generations, until the late twentieth century,
could make any sense of it.
Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single
particle, from which ‘radiated’ the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute
dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the
effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter forming the physical
universe.
This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern
cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example
that space and ‘duration’ are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no
light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the
force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different
laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original
state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that
our present universe may be one in a series.”
She continues:
“And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for
any of [this]. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning –
therefore, he insisted, a poem.”
Again, Poe’s brilliance remains questionable to some, but
there it is.
And finally, there is a “mental quirk” known as Global
Transient Amnesia, which I had occasion to experience a few years back.
I came into the house from going to the mailbox, and ask
persons in the house who had placed bags of leaves on our porch.
We, including me, had actually put those bags on the porch a
few moments earlier.
I then pointed out things in the house that I found
unsettling and remained for a hour or so discussing things I found upsetting.
My fellows were alarmed as I was not me; that is, I was not
Rich Reynolds during the episode. I was a person who had come into the house
and, while having some connection with it, was not cognizant of my association.
I had no “me” – I wasn’t conscious of being me, nor did I
have any awareness of being conscious at all.
My body had become a vehicle for another being, one with no
relevance to my person.
Had my Earth-being intersected with my other dimension-being
for a brief time?
That is, did Rich Reynolds from elsewhere end up stepping
into my shoes for an hour or so, inadvertently or otherwise?
I have no recollection of the event, and if there had not
been witnesses, I would have disappeared for a period of time, moving without
sensate of where I was or what I was doing.
You can find more on GTA online, It’s an odd neurological
condition and may explain some UFO episodes, except that those experiencing a
UFO event while affected by GTA wouldn’t know they had had the experience
unless someone with them was there to confirm the experience.
Things in this world are odd, and stories or facts about
one’s life and activities often go unnoted or unrecounted for various reasons.
So one has to be cautious when dismissing stories out of
hand. Those stories may be incomplete or too odd to be reviewed sensibly.
That’s why I think UFO events are amenable to truths that
may be submerged by cavalier reporting, disingenuous motivations (as with
Turing movie), or a lack of knowledge about one’s thinking (as with Poe).
RR
posted by RRRGroup at
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
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