Ptak Science Books

Roe v. Doe in the History of Science: Great Anonymous Literature, Darwin, Newton, Malthus, Paine

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 13

There was a brief point in Charles Darwin’s publishing life when the old (then young) man got stiffed.   Darwin’s magisterial contribution to Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of her Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1S26 and 1836…, (published in 1839) appeared in the third volume,  (by far and impossibly away the money volume), and was issued without his name on the title page, which as it turns out was okay by the standards of the day.  The real oddness turns up in  the publisher’s ads that appeared in the later issues of those volumes in late 1839 for what would be a separately-issued volume of Darwin’s contribution (Journal of Researches into the Geology…), where there was no mention of the author’s name.  I just don’t know what to say. (Captain Fitz-Roy,  the man whose name adorned those early volumes, was the Captain of the Beagle a man with problems and some interesting meteorological ideas; but both would be dead to one another soon enough.)  The recognition element was dismissed very quickly though when the work was actually published—his name was in the book but not in the advertisements. 

This is really just a little fly in the ointment though in the publishing history of major scientific works--anonymous literature (or in the Darwin case, really, seemingly purposely forgotten) isn’t that deep and long in the sciences, especially when you excuse ancient and middle-Renaissance period efforts.  Certainly the sciences don’t compare with other disciplines, where works by anonymous or pseudononymous abound.  The history of world literature ancient and modern abounds in silenced or self-silenced authors—there is even a four volume encyclopedia to help you identify the unidentified. . Political and religious work are also particularly heavily laden with unattributed or disguised efforts—the U.S. Constitution and the Federalist Papers are of course both anonymous (and of necessity), as was the most beautiful work of Voltaire.  The Declaration of Independence, on the other hand, and also of necessity, was not.  What is that  they say?  Anonymity is the best defense against the tyranny of the majority”?  It still feels a little Orwellian to see the unattributed source in the newspaper or read an anonymous editorial.   On the other hand Thomas Paine’s sublime “On Common Sense” may not have made it into print if its author had been required to identify himself. 

Art is perhaps the longest-lived area of anonymous work, the signed canvas being a relatively recent invention.  There are thousands of years of unknown hands and eyes represented in millions of works, but really we only get solid confirmation of the intellectual origin of a work through the invention of the ornament of the signature, and this just within the last 500 years.  And even after this defacement begins to appear there is still a relatively stout history of semi-anonymous works coming from painting studios doing work “in the manner of ____”.  Of course there were other considerations at play here, what with guilds and patrons and all—the artist was one person in a lengthy bureaucratic trail of aesthetic production.

Anonymous seems to come more into play in our present culture via the need for a place holder—when tallying and accounting the death of unknown people, for example, the name “John Doe” or “Jane Roe” is used (in the U.S.) to take up the forever empty space calling for The Departed’s name. (Our most famous “Jane Roe” is Norma McVorvey of Roe v. Wade; I think the Gary Cooper still ranks the highest for the male equivalent.)
Something has to go there, and so it is.  The practice of using such names is actually pretty old, and is practiced worldwide.  (see HERE  for an entertaining look at multi-cross-cultural “John Doe” equivalents.)

And now that I’ve had some time to think about non-Darwins examples from the sciences, I’m a little stumped.  Robert Boyle is a good example, what with more than a dozen of his works (at least according to John Fulton’s bibliography) were published without his name carrying the title page-but these were the philosophical and political works of a great scientist, and not scientific.  Same too for Pascal, who wrote his Pensees undercover—and again, not scientific but by a scientist.  Isaac Newton published his fabulous Opticks without his name on the title and in fact only used his initials (sort of) in the preface as his personal identifiers.  He was though in 1704 when this book was published a decade’s-long acknowledged super genius, and I’ve never been very comfortable with any explanation over this unNewtonesque shyness for his big optics book.

That leads us lastly to Thomas Malthus, who really did publish the first printing of his massively important Essay on Population without his name—it would make an appearance soon after, though, in the second edition of this contentious work making the first edition of this great near-scientific work one of the most influential anonymously published science books of the last 250 years.   Laying Malthus aside though and lifting the time-veil for just a peek, the best example in this genre turns out not to be an example at all.  Copernicus was the ultimate anonymous author of a scientific work because he didn’t publish it—fearing reprisals for his horrifically challenging and revolutionary work, Nicolas waited until he was b asically dead to have his effort put into print.  Then, once he was safely assured of his snug bed with the worms, free from fear of all anxiety and moral espionage, did he see the work brought to public display—with his name very boldly displayed on the title page. 

Seeing, Sight & Memory: Jevons, Bruno, Borges, Heller and Proust

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 12

Can We See More or Less than We Used To Be Able To See?

An early study of attention and perception (or “How Many Items Can it Embrace at Once?”) popped out at me while muscling my way through another year of Nature magazine for 1871.  The article was by  W. Stanley Jevons  ("The Power of Numerical Discrimination," 1871)  who contributes an interesting and very early experimental bit on the success of the brain to correctly formulate an accurate memory when in a flash shown a number of items. (That is to say, when shown a certain group of X-number of items instantaneously and then removed, how often will the mind be able to remember the correct number upon recall--and without committing them to memory per se or counting them?) In this fascinating study Jevons records not only right/wrong answers but how "close" the remembered fit is to the original number, and in effect is a pioneering scientific effort towards understanding our abilities and limits in information processing.

Its important to distinguish Jevons’ experimental work on apprehension from earlier (and much earlier) philosophical and semi-scientific work on memory formation and retention.  This of course goes back as far or as deep as you want to go—taking a stab at random we’ll use Simonides who while trying to organize poetry and other data in his head came upon the idea of using Mnemonics and using associative processes in art and poetry to establish his own history of memory. (I should point out that one of the early-modern experimenters in the formation of memory was Giordano Bruno  who wound up being tortured and burnt at the stake for other offense against The God while trying to formulate a truthful approach to science; evidently the memories that would be threatened by his scientific approach proved to be too much for the righteous in power, and he was removed before he could threaten corrective memory any further.) 

It is interesting that many of the crimes of science punished by the Catholic Church during this period (1450-1650) were as much crimes against memory than they were crimes against the future—changing and challenging collective memory often proved fatal.

Getting back to Jevons—who was a very smart guy and who applied himself to a number of fields, not the least of which was constructing a logic machine: his experiment proved to be a springboard for a host of others, some of which didn’t do Jevons justice, misreporting his finding, misrepresenting the stuffy, and so forth.  Perhaps the greatest of these was the greatest of the efforts based on his—Raymond Cattell —who for some reason stated in his very influential textbook of 1907 that humans can remember around 7 things (without counting) when the objects are flashed before their eyes.  And for a hundred years this figure stuck, even though the Jevons report issued a more complex summation, and saying, anyway, that the number was around 10. 

And what bothered me a bit with the Jevons experiment is what people remembered when shown the objects (beans)—would his results have varied if subjects were asked how many were shiny or odd-colored or deformed or whatever rather than just a simple number, the results could’ve been more interesting.  (I don’t doubt that these issues have been taken up in the 20th century but haven’t looked).  Sometimes people are just looking in the wrong places—for example operant psychology labs tested rats via visual stimuli until it was discovered that rats were olfactory geniuses and that humans were using them wrong all along. 

It would be interesting to know what the history is of human capacity for image formation.  Considering the growth of distractions and the enormous amount of true and trash stimuli—visual bombardment from television, outdoor advertisements, the sheer amount of  growth of human construction and interaction—have humans enhanced this spatial/memory information processing capacity?  Consider  the growth of (just) eye movements over the last few hundred years, with the visual sense being subjected (for all classes of people) to enormously and fractally-expanded print sources, television, digital communication and so on—has this expanded this neural capacity?  Has "space invaders" aided bean counting? 

I don’t know, though I do wonder (literally) what the effect exponentially-growing mass input of (mostly junk) data  might be doing to our noggins.  Maybe the effects lean more towards dissolving privacy and reflective time—when does a person think if interruptive stuff is coming into your head at all points of the day, with the brain trying to interpret incomplete and ambiguous strings of sensory inputs? 

Seems scary to me.  Maybe memory is affected, maybe it makes it go away, shriveled because recollection is being eliminated.  Or demented like the wonderful Yossarian (his first name is John, btw) from Joe Heller’s beautiful Catch-22 who develops for himself a condition in which he remembers everything twice (whatever that means).

It would be interesting to see a war of societies in which the sides were a culture that remember nothing versus a culture that remembered everything.  The unspeakably lovely Jorge Borges wrote something touching on this in "Fumes the Memorist," in which the humble narrator is capable of forgetting nothing, being able to recall explicitly everything within eyesight, perfectly—the problem is though that it takes a day to remember the events of another day.  What would happen in such a culture where everyone forgot nothing? 

And I’ve just been dealing here with visual memory, really—and as Proust makes plainly clear (and Borges and other prove), vision isn’t everything.

The Spine of Society and the Beginning of the Grid

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 12

I’m interested to know what anyone might know about the use of metaphors relating large-scale societal techno advances and biological functions?  I have no doubt that they go back to modern-ancient times (say to William Gilbert (1544-1603)  and his vis electrica)—but I’m stopped today by seeing this paper by J. Norman Lockyer called “Social Electrical Nerves” (in two issues of  Nature for 14 and 28 February 1878).  In this paper the great astronomer looks at elements of the “grid” as it was and seeing how the new networks of police and fire communications via telegraph  interacts with the existing electrical systems.  It seems to me an early use of  nervous system/electrical grid, in spite of the fact the first “electrical highways” (as Lockyer puts it 120 years before our own “information superhighway”) appeared in England 32 years earlier though apparently without these biological metaphors. 

The work pictured above is the electrically-draped world of the future, at least according to the vision of the wonderful Albert Robida, who was actually at work on these visions just at the time of the publication of the Lockyear paper . (Robida produced at least a trio of interesting and lovely and occasionally prescient works:  Le Vingtième Siècle (1883);  La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887); and Le Vingtième siècle-- La vie électrique (1890)).   Many of Robida’s visions of electrical connectivity seem to me to move beyond the nervous system metaphor and become a kind of societal “skin”—which is not terribly far from the truth, especially when looking at images of congested metropolitan centers ca. 1910, when utility poles fairly well sagged under 20 (!) horizontal crossbars carrying a dozen lines apiece.   At the very least, you knew that something or other was happening (fast forward to the massive ductworks of Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece, Brazil.  Check this out  for a wonderful cameo by De Niro coming to fix the neuronal duct-muck.) 

And now that the wireless age is starting to get ridges in its fingernails (the “wireless” age being at least 115 years old, beautifully borne by Heinrich Hertz and Marconi), are our bio-electrical  metaphors giving way?

Mondo Bizarro, Science Afflictions and the Dubious Mind—Bad Science, Part 1. NYC in Space (?!)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 11

I can hardly help myself oh my brothers, hardly contain myself from writing about some of the truly incredible, nonscience scientific works that I have collected over these last years.  One of the most interesting is the following work by David Gordon .  It isn’t so much “interesting” really as it is illustrated, where all of the interest is.  This is the only known example of the depiction of an extra-terrestrial New York City pictured with the earth in the background.  Huh?  Yes, this is the Big Apple in space—not its OWN space but THE space,  outer space—somehow, impossibly, removed to some something-or-other (actually in this case, a “bubble”) that, while not being the Moon, was something like it, though not actually a solid and without gravity, floating on a base of floating effluvia, but, well, you get the picture.  Whatever we’re floating on here (actually it is identified as the “perisohere” (don’t ask)) is very big and very very close to the home planet. 

Mr. Gordon, sweatily ensconced in a too-thick smoking jacket while pecking out this opus delectius, self published this effort in 1941, and then unleashed it on the world, or his neighborhood, asking such self-exiling questions as “why does the earth and other heavenly bodies remain in the air and submerged”.  I can get most of that except the “submerged” part.  That's where most of the efforts like this seem to go horribly wrong--the vestigial spark of insanity inserted into a almost-coherent thought, as in "The Yankees look like almost-contenders for 2008 if they could strengthen their pitching and adjust their over-aggressive use of middle relievers sanitary flux".  Well, this doesn't really apply here with Mr. Gordon, as normalcy is abandoned right at the outset, thanks to his very original cover art (and we are told on the title page that the cover art is actually "35 by 24 inches and in full colors" making it big and colorful and art brut). 

And then of course we get to the crux of the biscuit—the removal of New York City into a peripheral bubble. 

I don’t know why there is a rocket-propelled dirigible in the picture. 

Mr.  Gordon’s  idea would’ve been far less interesting if it wasn’t illustrated.  And it is easy to pass it by, as I almost did, because it is somewhat sci-fi mundane at first blush, until you realize that is New York in space.  (I can see the Daily News headline now as the city leaves the planet for someplace else:  “New York to World:  Drop Dead”.  This of course is a rip of one of the all-time headlines, ever, supplied by the New York Daily News when NYC appealed to the Feds for a bailout from bankruptcy in 1974.  Raisin-eyes Jerry of course said “no”, and the rest is history…)

I know that it is hard to believe, but according to OCLC/WorldCat there are no copies of this work in any libraries, period.  I can see why.  And now it at least is rescued from the great dustbin that awaits us all…

I just love this little pamphlet. 

The full title of this work:  “A Picture Story Explaining Our Earth in Space and the Motions in the Solar System, a New Conception, a Great Story Simply Told”, by David Gordon. 

Also—I’ve added a close-up of the Midtown-to-Downtown area, just so you can see the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island in the distance….it is definitely NYC. 

Things That Were But Almost Weren't, Part II: the Disappearance of Alex Bell

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 10

Part (A)--Alex Graham Bell as a Purposefully Forgotten Element in the History of the Telephone,
and
Part (B)  the Author Who Forgets Bell Fails to See the Future of the Telephone as a Communication Device.

Well, Alexander Graham Bell didn't totally disappear in these very early reports on the telephone (published in  the  very influential Nature, an Illustrated Weekly Journal of the Science, London, May and August, 1876), but might as well have.  The author of these two reports, published just on the heals of Bell's announcement in America in March 1876, was J. Munro and he was not a Bell-believer.  In these two reports Munro champions Elisha Gray   as the inventor of the telephone, and does so with the exclusion of discussing Bell. There are however numerous other references to others working in the field--which was crowded in 1875 and 1876--so at least according to my line of thought the omission of Bell needed to be accomplished with some severe and anti-penetrating thought. 

Now it must be stated that the history of the patent for the telephone from 1861 to 1876 is indeed complex and tricky , and there are at least four others who may be considered to have preceded Bell, in some regards that is, but the fact that Bell was granted the patent and that he resisted all claims and attempts at penetration against his patent(s) beginning even within a year of the invention, says something pretty rock-solid about his place in the priority of the invention.  Munro does come around to this , somewhat in his early summation and history of the telephone (Heroes of the Telegraph), but his desire for not-Bell comes through very strongly.  (It should be noted that Sir William Thomson  , who introduced the telephone to Europe in the fall of 1876, thought of it being the most perfect development of the telegraph, a "speaking telegraph" if you will, and hence the name of Munro's book.) 

In the second paper (the first appeared 15 May 1876, the second 24 August 1876)  Munro continues on with his appreciation of  the telephone's musical virtuosity to the exclusion of using the telephone for spoken communication. "There is a possibility here, we must admit, of a curious use of electricity. When we are going to a dancing party there will be no need to provide a musician", he writes, as the dancers will be able to pay their electrician for the privilege of getting their piano via wire. It is understandable to some degree to appreciate the telephone as a sort of radio, but Thomson had by this time made his report of the spectacular sensation of hearing *spoken words* coming from the telephone and what that experiment meant, and it is hard to understand (even at such great distance and hindsight) how Munro could've missed this report from Thomson, and how he could no make the intuitive leap to using the new invention for communication rather than amusement.  I think Munro just plain got it wrong, or got it only partially right, which in this case makes him totally wrong. 

(I should note here for the sake of clarity that when Thomson heard the spoken words that he missed, or the telephone missed, all of the monosyllables--still, one could assume that improvements would be made and that at some near point they could be understood.)

A New Class of Scientific Image? Synesthesia, Francis Galton and Picturing Thought

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 9

A Quick Note on an Interesting Image:
Is this the First Published Illustration of the Mental Imaging of an Active Thought?

I was stumbling through my collection of Nature (A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science, London) magazine when I found a fantastic article by Francis Galton  (“Visualized Numerals”, Thursday, January 15, 1880) concerning (in one aspect)  the mental visualization of the act of doing mathematics. That is to say, what images people formed in their brains as they performed mathematical functions--this was even illustrated (!)

Fascinating!  Scholars have pointed to this article as perhaps the earliest scientific effort on synesthesia , but what strikes me is how he tried to describe the intimate or logical function with the visualization of the act....I think that is what makes this effort so spectacular.

I'm not associating memory devices (like the memory palaces of Matteo Ricci or Robert Fludd’s spectacular creations from his Ars Memoriae, or the beautiful schematic of Civlio Camillo’s memory theater,  for example which are more (basely speaking) visual aids for restructuring already-completed thought patterns) with this question; l I'm not so sure that it applies. These are more issues of phylogenic memory, and concerned with memetics and semitoics rather than the actual formation of an idea.

People have certainly written on images in the mind before Galton--the question is if anyone has illustrated what they think this process looks like? I'm also not so sure if this directly relates to Aristotle's elements/colors affirmation or Pythagoras's numerals and colors or Scriabins music and color associations, or Cardano and his color/flavor and the planets associations....

I guess the question is—where does this image fall in the history of the illustration of abstract thought?  I'm not including famous examples of the physical aspects of sight as with Descartes etc; just the image of what people see in their heads as they are formulating thoughts and ideas.

We’ll have more later.  I just wanted to put something up here as people have wanted to see the Galton article and Nature (1880) is not a terribly common thing to find. 

It would also be just plain wrong not to mention two things at this point—the works of Frances Yates , which is a gorgeous and insightful work on memory.  And secondly, I need to acknowledge the work of Barbara Stafford (University of Chicago) who for decades has produced the most beautiful and the most interesting works on what scientific images *are*.