My history-teacher wife liked Bletchley a lot more than TNMOC, where I lingered too long, but I did like both. Even though the Bombe replica was down for repairs that day.
My history-teacher wife liked Bletchley a lot more than TNMOC, where I lingered too long, but I did like both. Even though the Bombe replica was down for repairs that day.
I don't know about Science. There's a lot of math and logic puzzle solving at Bletchley, but the other crash projects of WWII have a lot more science, Los Alamos obviously, translating from "In principle nuclear fission is a more powerful bomb than anything previously made" to an actual weapon you can use to destroy a Japanese city. But also the invention of the Cavity Magnetron - a little box can make enough radio waves to make a radar for your night fighter so you can figure out where the enemy planes are relative to you - or it can use those waves to heat a delicious baked potato in a few minutes...
So mathematics yes, Turing was always interested in that, but always applicability was on Turing's mind. In the early twentieth century Turing's "machine" in a paper he wrote at Princeton (before the war) was just an idea, but er, obviously with the exception of the need for an "infinite" paper tape you can realise Turing's machine, it's a computer, familiar to everybody today.
Even after Bletchley Turing wasn't a Software Engineer. The meta-applicability isn't something which would occur to a mathematician. That took Grace Hopper. Grace understood that the problem her people were tasked with (mechanically convert instructions to the code for the actual machine) is exactly the same sort of task the machine is doing anyway, and she invents the Compiler.
The nuclear bomb was more of a backup plan for if the Germans actually managed to defeat Stalin.