The Science Museum's Alan Turing exhibition

But another, more practical problem is that it is rather difficult to build a compelling museum exhibition (or a film, or a documentary) around computers.

With the spacecraft, for instance, you can see where the astronauts sat, you can imagine the module nestled inside a rocket fairing, and the scorch marks on the heat shield are ample evidence of the fiery re-entry it was built to withstand.

A cut-away section reveals a breathtaking gossamer tangle of internal wiring that link its circuit-boards together.

Happily, being a quarter-century older and many orders of magnitude simpler, the centrepiece of the Turing exhibition comes as close as anything can to providing a visceral appreciation of just what it is that an electronic computer does.

The Pilot-ACE computer (shown above), a prototype of a machine designed by Turing in the aftermath of the war, is a beautiful piece of kit.

The machine is complicated enough to be impressive, but simple enough that it is just about possible to grasp, that this is indeed a functional machine made up of interconnected, working parts.

Less-known again than Turing's foundational role in the computer revolution is the breadth of his other interests, an imbalance that David Rooney, the exhibit's curator, says he is keen to address.

Towards the end of his life, Turing became interested in the mathematics that describe "morphogenesis", the almost miraculous process by which a symmetrical blob of undifferentiated embryonic cells gives rise to all the structure and complexity of a fully-formed living creature, and sketches and drawings from his research into the topic are available to inspect.

Towards the end of his life, Turing became interested in the mathematics that describe "morphogenesis", the almost miraculous process by which a symmetrical blob of undifferentiated embryonic cells gives rise to all the structure and complexity of a fully-formed living creature, and sketches and drawings from his research into the topic are available to inspect.

There are glimpses into Turing's private life, too, in particular his unrequited love, when he was still a schoolboy, for a boy by the name of Christopher Morcom.

Nor was that Turing's only eccentricity: elsewhere we learn that he was interested in the possibility of psychic powers and the paranormal.