Science Goes To The Movies: ‘The Imitation Game’
Britain’s biggest weapon in World War II may have been…a mathematician. By cracking the German “enigma” code, Alan Turing derailed the Germans’ devastating U-boat campaign and helped shorten the war. Now a star-studded biopic brings Turing’s wartime code-breaking to the big screen. How much is true in this “based on a true” story? Cosmologist Janna Levin and cryptography expert Simon Singh break it down.
— Simon Singh (@SLSingh) December 19, 2014
Janna Levin is author of Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space (Knopf, 2016) and a physics and astronomy professor at Barnard College in New York, New York.
Simon Singh is a science journalist and author of The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Codebreaking (Fourth Estate, 1999) in London, England.