雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第4章:彼岸新星(98)
The machine seemed to be a contradiction.
It was particularly remarkable in England, where there existed no tradition of high status academic engineering, as there was in France and Germany and (as with Vannevar Bush) in the United States.
這在英國是尤其奇怪的，因爲這裏不存在學術工程師的說法，不像法國、德國或美國（比如範內瓦·布什）。Such a foray into the practical world was liable to be met with patronising jokes within the academic world.
這種向實體世界的跨越，對學術界而言簡直是胡鬧。
For Alan Turing personally, the machine was a symptom of something that could not be answered by mathematics alone.
但在艾倫·圖靈看來，機器可以解決某些單靠數學無法解決的問題。He was working within the central problems of classical number theory, and making a contribution to it, but this was not enough.
他在經典數論的核心問題上已經有了進展，但這並不能滿足他。The Turing machine, and the ordinal logics, formalising the workings of the mind; Wittgenstein's enquiries; the electric multiplier and now this concatenation of gear wheels–
圖靈機和序數邏輯、維特根斯坦的想法、電子乘法機，還有眼前這一堆齒輪，they all spoke of making some connection between the abstract and the physical.
這一切都表明了抽象和實體之間的某些聯繫。It was not science, not 'applied mathematics', but a sort of applied logic, something that had no name.
這並不是科學，也不是應用數學，但可以看作一種應用邏輯，一種沒有名字的東西。By now he had edged a little further up the Cambridge structure, for in July the faculty asked that he should give his lectures on Foundations of Mathematics again in spring 1940, this time for the full fee of 50 pounds.
現在，他在劍橋已經有了更大的立足之地，1940年春天，他再次受邀講授數學基礎，而且這次得到了全額薪水50英鎊。In the normal course of events he could have expected fairly soon to be appointed to a university lectureship, and most likely to stay at Cambridge forever, as one of its creative workers in logic, number theory and other branches of pure mathematics.
如果他是一個普通人，可能此時就會希望成爲專職講師，永遠留在劍橋，做一名純粹的邏輯和數論專家。But this was not the direction in which his spirit moved.
但對於艾倫·圖靈來說，這不是他想要的結果。
