Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Simon Singh, author of "Fermat's Enigma" and "The Code Book," talks about once and future cryptography.
Nov 4, 1999 | Simon Singh is not a man to shirk a challenge. In 1997 he set out to make a documentary about the solving of the world's most famous (some would say infamous) mathematical problem, Fermat's Last Theorem. Having bamboozled the planet's finest mathematical minds for 350 years, Fermat's challenge had finally been laid to rest by the retiring English mathematician Andrew Wiles. The solution, which took up more than 1,000 pages of densely packed equations, cut a swath through some of the most fiendishly difficult areas in all of math. How on earth could this be presented to a television audience? The marvel is that despite the impenetrability of the math, Singh produced an immensely human and poignant film -- seen in the United States on the PBS series "Nova." He later turned the subject into the bestselling book "Fermat's Enigma," which, he tells me, he wrote as an exercise -- just to see if he could.
Trained as a particle physicist at Cambridge University -- his research topic was the elusive "top quark" -- Singh spent several years working at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) before swapping a life in the lab for one behind the camera at the BBC's science department. Who could be better, then, to tackle the subject of cryptography? In his recently published "The Code Book," Singh follows the development of secret codes from ancient Rome to the latest advances in quantum cryptography. At the end of the book he invites readers to test their own code-breaking skills with a forbidding-looking cipher challenge. The first person to crack all 10 codes will be rewarded with a prize of $15,000 from Singh's own purse.
It strikes me that there is a continuity between your two books -- solving Fermat's Last Theorem was like cracking a huge mathematical puzzle, and that is not unlike solving a complex code.
If you look at code makers and code breakers, they're driven by the same things that mathematicians are driven by. They're obsessive, they love puzzles, they love conundrums. There's a certain innocence about the code breaker, but at the end of the day, what the code breaker does has a major impact on wars, battles, lives, deaths and so on. Yet all that's at a much higher level -- the political level, the military level. The actual code breaker sitting at his or her desk is a puzzle solver, so there is that in common with mathematicians.
The other thing the two books have in common is that they're both historical -- both go back to 500 B.C., and from my point of view that's a great context for talking about science.
It's interesting that history is often seen as an impediment to presenting science. You get the idea from many scientists that all the really good stuff has happened in the last few years, if not last week, and that anything older is out-of-date and irrelevant. But in both books you put the science into a historical context, telling stories with great characters -- like Mary, Queen of Scots, and Charles Babbage -- and lots of human drama.
From a professional point of view -- as a scientist -- you always have to strip out the personal perspective. When you write up research papers it's always in the passive voice: "The beaker was heated," not "I heated the beaker, and actually that day I was feeling pretty good." So often it's difficult for scientists to put in emotional content -- though there are some extraordinary exceptions who do. For me, coming from television -- where people will switch off if they aren't engaged -- you have to put in the characters and emotional drama. So I write the way I make TV programs.
Is there one story that particularly stands out for you in the history of cryptography?
The story of the British discovery of public-key cryptography [a form of encription technology crucial to the process of putting powerful privacy tools in public hands]. The science of secrecy is a secret science, so often cryptographic work cannot be talked about publicly, sometimes for many years. This story actually only emerged while I was writing the book, this 25-year-old untold story of the greatest discovery in the history of cryptography. It turns out that some years before the Americans came up with public-key encryption, British mathematicians working secretly at the GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters] had already discovered this, but it was all hushed up because of the military significance. This was the first time these three code makers -- James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson -- could have their story told, and I feel honored to be able to tell it. The tragedy is that Ellis died just three weeks before the announcement was made, so he never lived to see the credit he deserved.
That doesn't undermine the work of the American discoveries of public-key encryption. The work they did was quite independent. Furthermore, if they hadn't made their breakthrough GCHQ might never have gone public, and the information age would never have been where it is now if we didn't have this breakthrough.
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