JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
The enduring intellectual legacy of Alan Turing's childhood reading in the delightful (and deeply insightful) book Natural wonders every child should know (1912, 1939), by Edwin Tenney Brewster (1866-1960) can clearly be seen throughout the book, given its absorbing and penetrating curiosity. It is a very disarming book, and I think could be easily under-read, even though it has some semi-lofty writing given its audience, but if you give it a chance, there is a LOT going on in it. The possible influence of the book, for example, in relation to Turing's relationship with thinking machines, can be seen in chapter 35, “The Living Automobile”, on pp 238-240, something that must have given the young Turing some considerable stuff to think about:
“If you will think back over what you have already learned in this book, you will see that we began by finding out something about how we men, the animals, and the plants come to have any such things as bodies at all.... We found about something of what animals cannot do, and what they can do, and how they do...We learned how animals of various sorts, and plants as well, see and feel and act; and we learned also something about how we ourselves do our thinking, which is so very different, and so very-much better done, than that of any animal or plant.
“Now we turn to a different matter. We have taken up being, and doing, and thinking. Now we shall consider living. We shall learn about how the body of the plant or animal feeds itself and keeps alive, and how the different parts of it, the bones and skin and leaves and bark, manage to get on with one another, and work together like a well-made machine.”
“For, of course, the body is a machine. It is a vastly complex machine, many, many times more
complicated than any machine ever made by hands; but still after all a machine. It has been likened to a steam engine. But that was before we knew as much about the way it works as we know now. It really is a gas engine; like the engine of an automobile, a motorboat, or an airplane.”
"We are, then, gas engines.”
Full text of the 1939 edition is found here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924001126055;view=2up;seq=8
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