Science Goes To The Movies: ‘The Imitation Game’
22:09 minutes
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.
[How to detect a gravitational wave.]
If you heard me on @scifri talking about “The Imitation Game” then this is me and my Enigma pic.twitter.com/aIFkRMfotq
— Simon Singh (@SLSingh) December 19, 2014
Segment Guests
Janna Levin
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
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.
Related Links
Meet the Producer
About Annie Minoff
@annieminoffAnnie Minoff is a producer for The Journal from Gimlet Media and the Wall Street Journal, and a former co-host and producer of Undiscovered. She also plays the banjo.