Turing machines were coming to life, for the first stages of his relay multiplier actually worked.
图灵机即将来到这个世界了，它的初级阶段就是那个乘法机，现在它已经实际运转起来了。
Alan's rather surreptitious access to the physics workshop was, however, symbolic of the problem that he faced in creating that life, by overcoming the line drawn between mathematics and engineering, the logical and the physical.
艾伦走进了机械加工间，这是他的一小步，但却是一个重要的标志，这意味着他越过了数学与工程、逻辑与物理之间的界线，他开始面对这个实体的世界了。
As a cipher the idea was surprisingly feeble, the more so when set against his claim of a year earlier.
然后对于一个密码机来说，艾伦的想法完全不靠谱。
Did he not credit the Germans with being able to find the highest common factor of two or more numbers in order to find the 'secret number' used as key?
他应该注意到，德国人可以计算多个密文的最大公约数，然后就能得到那个作为密钥的乘数了。
Even if some added sophistication removed this loophole, it would still suffer from the crippling practical disadvantage that a single incorrectly transmitted digit would render the entire message indecipherable.
尽管艾伦后来做了一些改进，弥补了这个漏洞，但仍然还有其它严重的问题，比如，在传输过程中如果有一位数字发生了错误，那么整个密文都将无法解密。
It might be that it was never intended very seriously, and that he had gone off at a tangent in meeting the challenge of designing a binary multiplier.
这一点是他没有认真想过的，于是他干脆放弃了这个二进制乘法机的计划。
Every week there were frightening articles about German policy inside and outside the new Reich.
他每周都会收到从英国寄来的《新政客》注，其中会有一些恐怖的关于德国内外政策的文章。
Even if the prospect of war work was more the excuse to take up a 'dull and elementary' (but fascinating) sideline than anything like the call of duty, he would not have been alone if he found that Nazi Germany had resolved his qualms about 'morality'.
尽管对艾伦来说，做一些军事工作只是为了有趣，并不是为了什么责任感，但纳粹的种种行为已经使他相信，参与这种工作，不再需要有道德上的不安。
There was also another machine he had in mind, but this had nothing to do with Germany, except in the very different sense that it came out of the work of Riemann.
艾伦还思考着其它机器，但与德国没什么关系，这是一个完全不同的想法，
Its purpose was to calculate the Riemann zeta-function.
他想要计算黎曼的ζ函数。
Apparently he had decided that the Riemann hypothesis was probably false, if only because such great efforts had failed to prove it.
他认为黎曼猜想很可能是错误的，因为这么多大量的努力都不能证明它。