Ptak Science Books

Wheels of Fortune and Destiny--Beautiful Circles of Robert Fludd, Lorenzo Spirito and Sigismondi Fanti (continued)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1429

(1)  Destiny
Robert Fludd’s (1574-1637), title page for his  Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia (1617) features this complicated astrological wheel with a Vitruvian-man-like image at the vortex of the imaged pulls and pushes of the cosmos.  In addition to everything else, real and imagined, Rosicrucianism and astrology and puffy-birds, Fludd, who was  an English physician, delved deeply into the real stuff of the world in this book in addition to all of the other make-believe--optics, the musical intervals, perspective drawing, hydraulic engineering, construction of lifting machines, military engineering and many other interesting, physical science topics.  But this drawing, right there on the title page, reveals Fludd’s real interests and shows what governs what he does.  Everything else, the math and and the physics, services this need.  Of course the image is beautiful, which is why it is here, but it is also a deeply personal, exploitative, cover-all for the things that Fludd *wanted* to find. 

I can't resist adding the following Fludd image, which appears in the same book and may be one of the most iconic images of the Fludd opus, these beautiful circles showing the areas of thought and consciousness of the human being:

(2)  Wheels of Forture

In Le Passetemps de la Fortune des dez, written by Lorenzo Spirito in the late 15th century¹ and published in this pictured format in 1559--a delightful little book with many² zodical illustrations and the first printed illustrated book on fortune-telling—appears this gorgeous wheel of fortune wood engraving.

“There are 20 questions, grouped around a wheel of fortune on which are represented four men; to each man a reference is added to a list of kings… These 20 kings in their turn guide the enquired to 20 planets; the table of dice casts attached to these planet contain 56 references to the 20 spheres of the planets. After one has found their way through these stages, they finally reach 20 prophets who each have 56 three-line answers to give….”

The wheel sends the reader to a king; the king to a sign; the sign, with a throw of dice, to a wheel; the wheel to a prophet, and then to the peek into the future.

Spirito 2

Referring to the image below: “In this opening, the leopard (left) is cut in a thick outline and modeled with precise curved lines. The leopard's formal pose is particularly appealing because it projects a dignity commensurate with the animal's position in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom. The dolphin (right) is similarly cut and set within a sea of curved lines against a well-defined architectural background. The dolphin's design reflects classical

origins. The animal projects an aggressive attitude, suggesting the dolphin's importance as protector of the city of Venice. The well-designed woodcut borders of the hunt (left) and the putti at play (right) are symbols of the vagaries of life, in which good fortune and calamity are equally possible.

(3) Wheels of Destiny 2

In Sigismondo Fanti’s Triompho di Fortuna (Triumph of Fortune), printed in Venice in 1526, the second illustrated fortune-telling book to appear in print.  Fanti's book, like Spirito’s, functions as a game in which the seeker follows cues that lead from figures of Fortune to houses and then to wheels, spheres, and astrologers, the path determined by either a throw of the dice or the time of day at which the book is consulted.

As this is not really an area I know very much about I’ll just quote the commentary on this illustration from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

“When the reader reaches the indicated page, a choice must be made between two wheels. The upper one represents all the possible combinations (twenty-one) to result from a throw of the dice, while the lower is bordered by the first twenty-one hours of the day. If no dice are handy\—and it's not too late at night\—the seeker can turn to the lower wheel and choose the segment that corresponds to the current hour.”

“The pages representing wheels are bordered by eight alternating frames containing a series of musicians, astronomers, artists, writers, popes, rulers, and other distinguished figures of the past and present, labeled differently at each appearance. Among the artists named are Andrea Mantegna, Raphael of Urbino, and Baldassare Peruzzi, the designer of the frontispiece. On the page shown here, at right, the astronomer and artist are identified respectively as the book's author, Sigismondo Fanti, and the painter Dosso Dossi (died 1542), who was also from Ferrara and who has been plausibly credited with the design of the figural borders.”

NOTES

1.  Lorenzoi Spirito's book was very popular, going into at least five printings in the 15th century alone following the first printed edition of 1482.  Fortune-telling works such as this were extremely popular and well-used--so much so that it has led experts in this area to conclude that the books were basically worn out of existence, which might explain why so few of them have survived to the present day.

2.Description of the Spirito book from Christie's auction house:  38 leaves. Roman type. 56 lines and headline. 2 woodcut full borders (one incorporating Da Ponte device) repeated to 6 impressions, full-page woodcut wheel of fortune, 20 woodcut portraits of kings from 15 blocks printed 4 to a page, 20 pages of dice throws with 20 woodblocks of signs, 20 circular woodcuts of signs within wheel of text set within one of two borders, 20 portraits of prophets and other Biblical figures."

A Great Anniversary: Identifying the Telescope as a True and Not-Deviating Instrument, 24 March 1611

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1385

Celebrating the 400th anniversary of recognizing that sense enhancers--like the telescope--do detect "real" things: Galileo and the Collegio Romano, March 24, 1611. 

Is it possible that there are private realities for things, seeable by only one observer? Can the instrument that allowed such observations possible also provides them, the stuff existing purely for the instrument and nothing else?  To some degree this is what was thought of Galileo and his revolutionary discoveries with the telescope, at least in the early days of verifying his work.  Galileo's work was problematic for the Church because it provided yet more evidence for  ancient and incorrect assertions of Ptolemaic astronomy, separating the distance between what was written in the scriptures about nature and the knowledge of the world and its physical and biological systems, and what actually existed int he world.  It was an especially hard blow for Galileo to have revealed far more stars than anyone had thought possible, in the West at least--the stars int he Heavens had been a perfect assembly for many generations, and for their to be nearly an order of magnitude more  observable stars through the telescope ran directly in the face of church doctrine.  There was also the unwholesome bit about the Copernican system and our's being  a heliocentric system, which was an old debate being lashed at still by the church even after many decades of superior evidence that could in no way support an Earth-centric system.  Evidence and logic united to banish the Church's cosmology into a belief system.

It seemed to some as though the new stars that for the first true time expanded the celestial vault existed only within the slim optical tube with which their observer--Galileo--saw them.  Ditto the moon of Jupiter.  It came to pass within the confining walls of Vatican-recognized astronomy that the only verifiable and comprehensible observations of the heavens could be made with the naked eye.  Galileo's instrument was difficult to use¹ but it seemed also that when his contemporaries could see his discoveries that they simply wouldn't.  Early in 1611 Galileo wrote to Kepler about the fantastic reluctance of his colleagues to be able to see what he saw:  "What do you think of the chief philosophers of our gymnasium who, with the stubbornness of a viper, did not want to see the planets, the moon, or the telescope, even though I offered them the opportunity a thousand times?"  Galileo was convinced that they needed not to see nature, but rather tried to reconcile the idea of what was being said was being seen with existing ideas and ideologies,  saying that their "...truth is to be sought not in the world and in, nature, but in comparison of texts (as they call it)".  ("Stress in the book of nature: The supplemental logic of Galileo's realism". MLN 118(3), 557-585, by Mario Biagioli.)

Galileo's 1610 discoveries were published later that same year in his Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger)², but there was no real independent verification of his work for nearly another twelve months.  The business end of the question, the lens that focused the entire issue so to speak, wasn't necessarily the issue of more stars or a craggy moon or Jupiter having moons or the Copernican system--it had to do with whether the telescope, but the very virtue of its placing a piece of glass between the human observer and nature, was altering the very perception of nature itself.  Was the tube an imaginarium?  Did it create the images seen by the observer?  Did it materially change the things that the observer saw?  Was the nature of the observing unit the thing that was changing nature rather than by showing it closer? 

These questions really didn't receive an official answer until 24 March 1611, when four Jesuit mathematicians at the Collegio Romano reported to Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621, and the church's chief defender of orthodoxy) that, yes indeed, Galileo's discoveries were real, that he had reported them accurately.  The collision of the scholastic and humanist world views represented by the Catholic Church and Galileo wasn't a  happy one, and  this didn't mean that the Church necessarily accepted what Galileo had to say--far from it, as they wound up pursuing the old man, taking him to trial finally in 1633 (when he was 69 years old, following by 17 years the admonition and false injunction of 1616), convicting him of violating an injunction on teaching, discussing and writing about the Copernican system, and placing him under house arrest for the stuff he thought and wrote about.  He died blind and still under house arrest  at his villa in Arcetri, just north of Florence, in 1642.

But it is this business of the optics found to be not physically or theologically objectionable by the Collegio in 1611 that seems so incredibly important to me right now--that the telescope was found to be an instrument, that the human eye could be aided, and that this tube was not a place in which imaginary things happened or in which reality was bent, that was so very important.

The Inquisition's ban on most of Galileo's writings was lifted by the Church in in 1718, though his Dialago remained untouchable and condemned, a prohibition which remained mostly in place in 1758, when a lightly censored version of the book appeared and the general prohibition of works on heliocentrism was mostly dropped.³ It really wasn't until 1835, more than 225 years after the first publication of the Sidereus, that all traces of prohibition vanished from the registry of the Catholic Church.

It is a little odd to think about the Collegio and the telescope in the light of the invention of the microscope.  There seemed to be no vestigial growth from the Church into the microscopic world or with the microscope itself, though most of these developments did come much later...except for the work of Hans and Zacharias Janssen, who did manage to make the first microscope in 1590, twenty years before Galileo's observations were published.  But the monumental year for the microscope came twenty-five years after Galileo's death, with the publication of the spectacular Micrographia of Robert Hooke in 1667.  And then in 1675 came Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who made close, micrographic investigations of blood, and who saw more deeply into the small world of humanity (being the first to describe cells and bacteria) than anyone ever before.  But the Church seemed little interested in this or the instrument, hardly seen Hooke/Leeuwenhoek as a new, threatening Galileo or the microscope as the invasive telescope.  But I do see where a similarity could exist.

NOTES

1. The telescope was a tough one to operate, though Galileo himself was a skillful practioner.  The 'scope was big (more than three feet long), its field of view very narrow, and its aperture dropped down to a few centimeters. And of course there was the steadiness question.  All in all, not an easy instrument to bring to bhear on your subject. 

2. This was also of course the first scientific treatise on astronomy using the obervations obtained with a telescope.  In it were also reported the very rough appearance of the surface of the Moon, the differences in the appearanes of the stars and the planets, the moons of Jupiter and the large number of never-before-seen stars. 

3. Uncensored versions of the Dialogo and De Revolutionibus were still prohibited. 

The Tipping Point of Degeneracy: a Look Back at Robert Oppenheimer's Black Hole that Wasn't his Post War Existence

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1354

Its easy to forget about the pre-Los Alamos Oppenheimer, especially for those who aren't necessarily interested in the history of 20th century physics. I was preparing to write something about a very brief window that seemed to have been opened in the 72 hours or so after the second atomic bomb was dropped....or perhaps from the time of he Hiroshima bomb.  In any event, it was a short period, measurable in terms of dozens of hours, where people--even Robert Oppenheimer--had a sense of a sea-change regarding the bomb and peace, and that perhaps the thing was so terrible and so controllable that it might bring about the end of war.  But the gloom of the reality of the future of the weapon--and the future weapon systems--settled in, and that illusory window was closed, if indeed it was ever actually open, which it really wasn't.  

Not long after this, Oppenheimer was shuttled into the Oval Office to meet for the first time with President Truman--it must've been a worlds-in-collision moment, though it seems Oppenheimer was no quite himself, not quite as filled up as he should've been.  Depressed, I'm sure, after having just gone through a bit of rough business as to who would be controlling the future of the bomb.  Anyway, he met with Truman on 25 October 1945, in there with Truman for a 10:30 appointment, and things did not go well.  Truman "asked" (apparently rhetorically) Oppenheimer his opinion on when the Soviets would develop the bomb.  Oppenheimer simply said that he didn't know.  Truman shot back "never", that the Soviets would never develop the bomb.  I have no idea if Truman believed this or just was pissed with what he thought of his meeting with a "cry baby" Oppenheimer.  Truman evidently told a number of different versions of this story, but one thing was for certain:  he did say that he "never wanted to see that son of a bitch again".

If Oppenheimer wasn't depressed when he went into the Oval Office at 10:30, he was when he was promptly shuttled out for Truman's 11:00 meeting, which was with the postmaster of Joplin Missouri, Mr. Leslie Travis.  My feeling (completely unsubstantiated) was that equal weight was given by Truman to both the 10:30 and the 11:00.But the man was a definite force in the relatively short time he spent in the high community, from the late 1920's to about 1942. 

But just four years before, and the decade or so preceding it, Oppenheimer was a brilliant new force in the American physics community, a  remarkable, brilliant talent with a big insight.  And this is what brought m back to Oppenheimer on the first day of WWII.

People tend to think of black holes as a Stephen Hawking-era phenomenon while the facts of the matter are that they began perhaps hundreds of year earlier, probably with Cambridge John Michell (1724-1793), back in the year of the end of the American Revolution, 1783 (and perhaps before).  His famous experiment (known as the "Cavendish Experiment") was really only rediscovered in the 1970's in Michell's correspondence with Henry Cavendish.  In those pages he hypothesized that there may evolve a star so massive (which he referred to as a "dark star' in Newtonian theory) that light itself might not be able to escape fro it, that the escape velocity for the light could never be reached, and that its phenomenal gravity would make the star impossibly dense.  This was very similar to the dark star hypothesis of Simon Pierre de Laplace in his epic Exposition du Systeme du Monde which was published in 1796. Karl Schwarzchild's 1916 paper using Einstein's relativity paper of the same year discussed the possibilities of singularity (the Schwazchild limit of the diameter of black holes), as did (the beautiful) Subrahmany Chandrasekhar (one of the last men able to know everything) in 1928. 

In hunting for a number of Richard Feynman papers here at the warehouse I happened to find this extraordinary effort by J. Robert Oppenheimer and G.M. Volkhoff in the 15 February 1939 issue of America's greatest journal contribution to physics, The Physical Review.  Here (along with a preceding paper by Richard C. Tolman, issued in the same issue just above Oppenheimer, which were the analytic analysis used by O+V to base their estimates of nuclear forces) was established the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkhoff limit, which stated that if the state of evolution of  neutrons forming a degenerate Fermi gas of extremely dense masses in neutron stars was more  massive than .07 solar masses that it would collapse into a black hole or exotic/quark star; if the mass was below that limit, the star would not collapse due to the degeneracy pressure of neutrons and the strong force.  The black hole part was left really to a second paper of 1 September 1939 (the day that the Nazis attacked Poland and the fighting began in World War II in Europe) when Oppenheimer teamed up with Hartland Snyder to write "On Continued Gravitational Contraction", when the two wrote about the singularity of the event.  the paper met with little appreciation at the time, though the two papers today have lead to some of the most progressive ideas in 21st century astrophysics. (This paper is available at our blog bookstore, here.)

Picturing the Unseen World #`1--the Discovery of the Complex World of Splashes, 1877.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1350

 
A.M. Worthington published his extraordinary researches in capturing drops and splashes  just a year after the invention of the telephone--seeing his very quietly magnificent work would've been worth the phone call, even at those heady rates at the beginning of the new medium. Worthington was the first in his field, and for a short while, before he told anyone, he was the only person on the planet who had ever seen the fantastic complexity of this very common and previously-simple event.   In its own way these photographs showing the deformation of a drop of milk (and mercury) were as much a revolution as the images shown by Robert Hooke in his epochal Micrographia in which he (just about the next-best-thing to Newton) introduced the fabulous complexities of the previously microscopical world(s). 

Worthington and Hooke are two in a long line of people who brought  unseen worlds into the visible sphere.  Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) reflecting telescope (1672) gave a brighter vision to the observable universe; Galileo Galilei created an observable universe an order of magnitude larger than ahead ever been seen before in just one action, in one evening.  Christoph Scheiner put a face on the sun in 1611, Henry Mosely gave geometrical growth patterns to the nautilus shell in 1838, James Fraunhoefer found out the chemical constituents of the sun in 1814, Watson/Crick (and Rosalind Franklin, really) emerged the helix of DNA in 1953, Wilhelm Roentgen presented pictures of the internal structure of living humans without a single drop of blood in 1895,  and on and on, all providing us with spectacular images of what these people saw.

Chladni's images of the vibrations made from a bow on a violin string caught on sand-topped metal plates:

Adding mercury to mercury: the sensational drawings by the Weber brothers as they observed the changing wave frontsmade by a drop of mercury into a pool of mercury:

 

Worthington's visions into the small, oblique world of ephemeral occurrences gave these things a wider world to themselves; seeing their structure, their complexities, and getting the viewer into their tiny worlds made everyone who could think about such things a better person for doing so.

The series of semi-photographic images that Worthington was able to make of the drops and splashes could not be readily reproduced in his short article ("On Drops") published in the Scientific American  (25 August 1877, and available for purchase at our blog bookstore) at this time--the half-tone was still a few years away, and the only way outside of making a drawing after the photograph in 1877 would've been a process (like, say, the Woodburytype) that would have been much too expensive to use in a mass-market publication like SciAm. Also, the photographic plates in 1876/7 weren't quite up to the task of fixing an image exposed so quickly.  Even when Worthington's book is published on this subject--a popular effort in 1895--it reproduces the photographs as halftones but there are still many interpretative drawings of those images. (The belief in the Civil War images reproduced as woodcuts in places like Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's was very high--it was enough to know the woodcut was being executed after a photograph and not from drawings made on the spot by the magazines' field artists.)

This was some pretty sophisticated stuff, being able to freeze the action of a drop of milk as it exploded in slow stages on a flat surface--especially, again, when you consider that photography wasn't yet 40 years old and was really only a half-decade or so into its first major revolution since the early 1850's. 

Perhaps though the most spectacular thing of all about seeing this dedicated series of images of an exploding drop of milk was that you could look at the series and imagine it all taking place in reverse . 

The drawings and photos below are taken from his 1895 work, The Splash of a Drop:

Selling and Costing-Out Digital Computers, 1959--When "Computers Didn't Sell Themselves"

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1296

"Computers do not as yet sell themselves."--Lehman, 1959

Question:  what had 1000 transistors, 5000 diodes, 2000 resistors and 1000 capacitors, a team of ten and took 18 months to build?  

Answer: an inexpensive, $12,000 digital computer in 1959.  

Mind you this is legions better than what was happening in the mid-1940's, with teams of hundreds and costs in the many millions, and much better than in the early 1950's, when these numbers were of an order of magnitude greater.

It seems to me that this short 1959 paper is at the upper end of a beginning concern--costing -out the price of a digital computer for second-tier interests.  "The Specification Development of a Cost-Limited Digital Computer" (by M. Lehman of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and available here for purchase) was written for those businesses and schools with a definite low-end budget, the upper range of which was set by Lehman at $12,000 for "peripherals, hardware and programming  (or about $125,000 in 2010 dollars, sort of¹). This figure was also exclusive of maintenance outside of the cost (at 15-20% of the construction costs overall) of designing and building the machine.

This was some new thinking on providing lower-cost digital computers to a new market:  "in just ten years there has emerged a multimillion dollar industry largely dominated....by the giants of the electronics and data-processing industries...".  Lehman was saying that there was a new opportunity for business to supply computers to "smaller research groups" who were "finding it increasingly difficult to obtain the backing which would enable them...to build an actual machine".  There were other ways of doing it, and Lehman laid out the basic understanding of that procedure.  

Lehman's leading quote for this post was accurate--computers needed to be "sold", as in salesmen and businesses actively engaged in contacting clients who would ("might") benefit from having computeriaed part of their business. The computer manufacturer's "staff will often spend many months investigating customer's problems, possibly reorganizing his techniques and generally preparing teh ground for the installation of a Digital System..."

 

(The figures in the right column are indeed dollars.)

Lehman was doing some groundbreaking work here at the end of the '50's, still far ahead of the time--and probably a full generation--where computers didn't necessarily have to be shown as being 'needed" let alone
"necessary".  The computer would be "selling itself" on the low-end of the market soon enough, but really not until the Reagan years when it was beyond question that the computer could be used by virtually any person or business--at affordable rates.  

Notes

1.  Sort of, indeed.  Straight CPI translation would put this figure at about $125,000, but the other cost of things in 1959 compared to 2010 is a different structure.  Sure, it might cost out to 125k, but that $12k in  1959 could've been traded for a decent working-class house in a big city; you couldn't trade that $125k for the same thing today, no way, no how.  

History of Dots Series--International Dot Day, September 15, 2010

In celebration of the children's book author Peter H. Reynolds (the storyteller responsible for the great The Dot and Ish books, among others) I offer up here a link to my own series of posts on The History of Dots. There's three or more dozen of them by now, forming a background to the story of dots, periods and points in mathematics, physics, chemistry, art and social history:  there are posts on the the ends of a geometrical line,  the homunucleus, bacterial and cellular dot events, mole maps, a dot as the picture of the speed of light, pointilism, half-tones, televisions, stars, the great confrontation of dots and spheres in the multi-dimensional fights of Edwin Abbott's Flatland, and a bunch more.

There of course there is the History of Holes series, but that is another matter...

Ovaries and Ovens--a Chance Encounter in the History of the Subjugation of Women

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1109

A friend of mine started her facebook post writing “Ovary shipped out...”, a great piece of found story-beginnings, a great opening line, especially when ovariotomically removed from the rest of the sentence.  Alex is an artist and medical/anatomical illustrator by trade, so I knew what she meant–but forgetting that made the segment even more lovely. 

Aside from the fiction that the three words created and the half-word that I created/butchered, I wondered about when ovaries were first surgically removed, and then about how the ovary was seen (almost forever) as the home and birthing place of the fully-formed human delivered to it by men in the act of ya’ know.  Ovarian surgery really didn’t exist until the early 19th century, when it was practiced with great success (especially for its time¹) by Ephraim McDowell (1771-1830), in 1809 in Virginia–and it was also about the first great American contribution to gynaecology as well  His first patient (“Mrs. Crawford”) sang her way through an anaesthesia-less procedure, surviving her illness and the surgery at a time when non-amputational surgery was half-fatal.² There were other, limited reports of this procedure, but for reasons not clear to me it didn’t really start appearing as a general procedural possibility until mid-century.  Anyway, before the 19th century, women with ovarian cysts were pretty much out of luck.       

But the issue of the ovaries as ovens--of homunuclus and palingenesis and epigenesis, the imaginary male-dominant anatomy of reproduction–was pretty much somewhat solved by the end of the 18th century.  Or at least the homunculus, the tiny but perfectly formed miniature human traveling along in sperm, was.  This character is pictured here, riding in the squinty-eyed imagination of researcher  Nicholas Hartsoeker³, who desperately wanted to see the thing, and which found itself published in his book Essai Dioptrique  in 1695. 

The woman as a simple baker of a gift of preformed life was a medical belief that helped perpetuate the supposed inferiority of women, and that the woman’s part in the procreative process was a simple oven.  It was a difficult image/belief to resist, persisting well into the 19th century.  Anyway, this is where my thinking took me–to the anatomically-inspired subjugation of women–from Alex’s comment.
____
Notes

1. This was still in the deep, dark time for hospitals and surgery, in general.  Remember that Joseph Lister was still a half-century in the future with his revolutionary surgical practices that were invaluable to the cause of successful surgery.  And hospitals in general were bad throughout Europe, though their story in England at this point was entirely different.  The Brits really took steps forward in the treatment of the sick, and especially in the treatment of the poor sick, thanks to being a little awash, splashing around in waves of money provided by their contributions to the industrial Revolution.  Funny how it takes major mounds of money-making to initiate good works like that, but, never mind the details–it was done, and hospitals in England during this period were comparative oases in regards to European/Continental hospitals. 

** McDowell’s first three cases were all successful , finally published in the Eclectic Repository for 1816.  This was the first real foray into this field by the pioneering American medical institutions; obstetrics and gynaecology before this, and particularly in the 18th century, was pretty much in the hands of the French (especially obstetrics) and the English, and to some degree the Italians (particularly with Mascagni, Santorini and Spallanzani).

**This is probably unkind and not particularly true of Hartsoeker, who never said that he actually saw the little men of sperm, and had simply postulated them.  Maybe the squinty-eyed part was imbued in the minds of others, though it was Hartsoeker who drew the images of the homunucli to begin with.  I think that he should’ve rested in his better cups–he was a gifted mathematician and a particularly good microscopist and optical person, and probably should’ve restricted his published biological theories to his notes. 

Unfathomable Dots–324,198 Stars and Knowing the Structure of the Milky Way, 1873

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1107
[A continuation of our History of Dots #31 series.]

The history of dots must have some fair share of its content filled with a very varied history of astronomy, which just goes to show that even within the seeming-sameness of microscopic investigations of dots that its subcategories could be so vast and differentiated. (The image to the left is a small detail from the following image, below.)

Dots aren’t necessarily just dots–even in representing the stars, dots have a rich history. The first star-dots published in the West appear in 1482, taken from the work of the first century astronomer and philosopher Hyginius¹, and is a book that contains maps of the constellations composed of such beautiful light-encrusted bits.  There wouldn’t be another work like this one, strangely, for another 75  years. Alessandro Piccolomini’s² work of 1559 (which would be the first true star atlas), and again we see the familiar representation. 

Galileo’s dots were very aggressive.  By 1610 he had produced his fifth and most powerful telescope, allowing things to be seen one thousand times closer, using it to make enormous discoveries–discoveries so big in fact that their towering significance is a but hard to understand today in the context of early 17th century knowledge. It was all published in his fantastic Sidereus Nuncius on March 4, 1610—the extraordinary  very title page³ of the book proclaiming some of the great discoveries of Galileo’s adventure.

One monumental outcome of Galileo’s work was expanding the number of stars in the sky, which was basically mucking around with the perfect plan of the creator–formerly a cornerstone for the existence of a divine being.  With the exception of comets and eclipses the sky had remained immutable, a perfect score of the creator’s creation, until 1572, when Tycho Brahe noticed something new in Cassiopeia, something that was not a comet—a “something” that was a star. This was momentous because the night sky had been seen for centuries as being complete—a new star, the Nova of Brahe, contradicted this high belief, offering the possibilities of newness where there had not been one previously.  And so too with Kepler’s new star of 1602.

One of the things that Galileo brought to the world was an entirely new sky, revealed to him through his telescope—so many stars that he could only guess (though he reckoned that there was an order of magnitude more stars than previously known “stars in myriads, which had never been seen before….and which surpasses the old, previously known, stars by ten times”).
   
Which brings me to the images that I stumbled on today from “Statement of Views respecting the Sidereal Universe”⁴which was  the work of the astronomer and great popularizer,  Richard A. Proctor (“B.A. (Cambridge), Honorary Fellow of King's College, London”).

Proctor’s dots challenge all dots that have come before so far as theorizing on the structure (and extent) of the Milky Way is concerned.  Proctor refers to William Herschel’s⁵--the man who first gave the Milky Way its shape and who fixed our own sun in an inferior and not-particualrly-special place inside that map--statement that the extent and constitution of the Milky Way is “unfathomable”. 
 
Proctor gets there by presenting a map of the night sky with stars visible to the naked eye:

 
And then the double hemisphere map of the northern and southern skies “We have here the first step towards just views of the constitution of the Milky Way, or rather the next step beyond the great, but little noticed, discovery of Sir W. Herschel's, that the bright clouds of the Milky Way are for the most part spherical clusters of stars.”(Page 546.)

Finally is the crux of the matter: two sections of an fantastic map displaying 324,198 stars visible via a 2.5 inch aperture telescope.

(The following being a small detail in the above section:)

He comments:“I assert, without the slightest fear of contradiction by any possessing such knowledge, that the broad teaching of the equal-surface chart. 0/3 24,000 stars disposes finally of all theories of the constitution of the sidereal universe which had previously been enunciated. The chart does not definitively indicate a new theory—rather it suggests the idea that the constitution of the sidereal universe is too complex to be at present ascertained. But it completely negatives (i), the stratum theory (even in the modified form apparently retained by Sir W. Herschel) ; (ii), the flat-ring theory of Sir John Herschel ; and (iii) the infinitely extended stratum theory, with condensation towards the mean plane, which Struve adopted.” (Page 547)

I think that for 1873 the verbose Mr. Proctor got his point across.     

Notes

1. Hyginius Mythographus (fl. 1st century A.D.). Poeticon astronomicon. Edited by Jacobus Sentinus and Johannes Lucilius Santritter. Venice: Erhard Ratdolt, 14th October 1482. The first star atlas per se, standing alone in its field for a century.

2. Piccolomini, Alessandro.  De la Sfera del Mondo.  1559                              

3.  Galilei, Galilei  Sidereus Nuncius (known in English as Starry Messenger), published 1610
The title page reads: Great and very wonderful spectacles, and offering them to the consideration of every one, but especially of philosophers and astronomers; which have been observed by Galileo Galilei … by the assistance of a perspective glass lately invented by him; namely, in the face of the moon, in innumerable fixed stars in the milky-way, in nebulous stars, but especially in four planets which revolve round Jupiter at different intervals and periods with a wonderful celerity.

4. Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Paper, Abstracts and Reports of the Proceedings of the Society from Niovember 1872 to June 1873, vol XXXIII, London, printed by John Strangeways, 1873.                    

5. It seems that few people now remember Frederick William Herschel as a great discoverer of alternative existences, but, well, that's pretty much what he did--and he did it during a time that must've made his astronomical discoveries seem like science fiction .For example, in 1785 Herschel published a revolutionary image of the “Stellar System” (the Milky Way), showing its irregular pattern and the off-center placement of our sun amidst a panoply of other stars.
(His image was remarkably and substantially correct, with the most grievous error being the placement of the sun too close to the center of the galaxy.) It was an image which bought the concept of a not so humano-centric idea into popular philosophy, and that our sun was a star among stars in a sea of stars.

Horse Poop and the Stars: Robert Hooke, 1673 (No, it Wasn't Pegasus)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1097

Had there been no Newton every school child would know the name of Robert Hooke (1635-1703) in its place—he was polymathic, totally energized, big-thinking non-sleeping experimentalist and theoretician who worked across numerous disciplines (physics and astronomy, to chemistry, biology, and geology, to naval technology), not the least of which was architecture (having helped Christopher Wren in the design of the new St. Paul’s).  Hooke was a superb instrumentalist and inventor who also (for the most part) introduced humanity to the previously-unseen microscopic world (in his gorgeous and revolutionary Micrographia¹..) .He was an enormous figure who was also never below a fight or argument, and whose grasp of his own very considerable accomplishments never seemed to be limited by what he had actually done in spite of his own tremendous and prodigious output.  Some people lay the blame for Hooke’s obscurity upon Newton’s great and tireless vindictiveness against Hooke, but that’s by far from the whole story of Hooke’s troublesome personal legacy.  Not only is his portrait not on the coin of the realm (like Newton's) nor hanging everywhere in the halls of academia, but there is no known lifetime surviving portrait of the man, and the exact location of his burying place is not known. He came a little close to Newton’s enormity, and in the absence of  Jupiter and Saturn even the Earth starts to look a little bit big.among the rest of the planets.

In addition to high genius and a man largely responsible for keeping together (and moving forward) the Royal Society, Hooke was also a hypochondriacal, meanish, semi-miser prone to receiving insults real or imagined, always very well aware of his place in history of of history's possible sleights against him, and also prone to vindictive attack if the mood moved him. Newton too could be as sharp as sand in the eye, but he survived as a person, and Hooke sorta didn't.  I'm not sure why, really, he seems so mostly-forgotten nowadays, priggishly envious idea-appropriating vindictive Despicable Me character or not--his swath of accomplishments was wide and deep as almost anyone else coming out of Britain for 200 years, which should be enough to send a lot of the historical personal detritus into the lost memory bin...but it doesn't, or something else, but popular history just doesn't work for the man.

Stephen Inwood's The Forgotten Genius recalls the 1673 letter that Robert Hooke wrote to the Council of the Royal Society, complaining of a new wrinkle in his ever-wrinkling private life:  the garden that had been just outside his rooms had been converted into a "coaching inn and stables", meaning that there were mounds of festering summertime horse poop within nostrils' reach.  He wrote to the Council that he needed a new accommodation, to "free himselfe from sitting as he now doth in the suffocating stink of the stables hors dung and Jakes [privy], which hath bin a great cause of his late illness". [The portrait is supposed to be that of Hooke, which is fine by me--I like this one.  It shows a very thin man under the wig and bulky clothing, clear blue eyes, tight mouth, translucent skins, surrounded by the implements and directions of his thought, not the least of which is the night sky over the sitter's shoulder.]

The changes were agreed to, but not quickly, and it was still December 1673 or so that Hooke got his hands on Johannes Hevelius' new Machina Coelestis, a book which contained what Hooke saw to be germinal flaws, fatal flaws to the advancement of astronomy--and of course varied affronts to his own innovations in astronomical instrumentation--but which were preventable. By him. Hooke had it within himself to attack anything or anyone, and so it came to be Hevelius' turn, monumental stature or not. (Newton's turn would come soon after.)

Now there is only contrived evidence that the horse dung and suffocating stink threw Hooke over the edge--but I do like the idea of this being the case, and though probably no real historian would go this way, I like to think that it was this High Stink that helped Hooke in his large attack upon Hevelius.  Of course Hooke needed no pushing or prodding from outside sources, even if those outside  sources were already sort of within him.  But I do like the image of his pen and razor-sharp mind fueled by the poop mounds and privies.  

I can imagine his knuckles turning an easy white as he read the book that charged against his superior optical method of sighting instrumentation for astronomical work, Hevelius clinging to some methods of the 16th century.  They fought, of course, and for the most part it was a lonely (if correct) fight by Hooke, his possible benefactors and allies at the Royal Society  turning out not to be so given personality clashes and such.  But I can imagine the Hevelius, and the knuckles, and the wrongness of it all, all brewing in the stank of late summer swelter of horse dung mounds, filling Hooke's nostrils and wigs and everything else with a rage for a rage that already existed.

And here's a line I won't very often get to use to close anything out:  the poop couldn't've hurt..

Notes:

1. The 28-year old Hooke published the results in a gorgeous and revolutionary book, Micrographia (a lovely e-text edition appears at Gutenberg, here) in 1665, which became an instant best seller and highly praised and valued. (Samuel Pepys, perhaps among the shiniest stars whose imprimatur was like a royal blessing, said the book (was) "the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life.") There is no telling what the people of the mid-17^th century thought of seeing such incredible discoveries in the little semi-invisible stuff that made up their normal, daily lives.  The only thing that somewhat equates to this would be if the first images of the Hubble were those of Earth-bound objects whose detail had previously been unknown.  Hooke’s observations and drawings of things like the common flea were just an astonishment—that such a creature of “low order” could have such intricate detail and design was a complete revelation.  The drawings of the fly's eye, too, was an inescapable wonder, an incredible object to consider as having any detail pre-microscope, and then revealed to have unimaginable design and elegance.

History of Dots #29: Making Things Abstract and Concrete at the Same Time

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1078

[History of Dots series #29//Note: all images below except for Lichtenstein's "Drowning Girl" are from Simon & Kirby comic books.]

How are deep abstractions visualized?  Science and art were becoming more densely abstract at about the same time, the new modern age for both beginning 1905-1930¹ or thereabouts, when so many of the revolutionary advancements were made.

 The representational world of art was slipping and disappearing (with the beginning of Cubism(s), Dadaism, De Stijl, Abstract and so on), replaced by forms and shades and colors, the subject of the art becoming less and less recognizable  as “things” until, finally, the recognition of the general stuff of nature (except for color) was gone.  Light, the interaction of molecules, the motion of atoms, were all becoming less comfortable as visual images and were being represented in terms of mathematics 

How do we get to Roy Lichtenstein from here? I think that it is via abstraction and his connection to  the found non sequitor² of the speech balloons in comic book images.  Lichtenstein’s style is very heavily derived from comic books and strips, except that he painted his images based on Ben-Day dots, strong lines and ultra-vibrant primary

colors of Golden Age era comics.  And I must say that his work–in images and in captions--seem much less non sequitor than the enormous amount of these things that you can pull out at random from the history of comic books–that is, one can still see where the frames that he was painting came from in the sequence of the comic book story.  It seems more interesting to me if the one frame being depicted could mean absolutely anything, and that the story line was completely obliterated, sop that this one frame out of context really had no context at all.

Lichtenstein’s style came about around the time that he started teaching at Rutgers, and in short order–in less than five years–he had a solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery (1962). His work was instantly recognizable, a true Popular Art, almost everyone having some sense of recognition for the origin of his artwork.  Beyond that, and whether his art was seen as art, is another story³.

But what I’m trying to get at here is this: did  Roy Lichtenstein create a template of  an abstract dialogic equivalent in a concrete, non-abstract way of the non-representational creation of Kandinsky and Braque and Mondrian?  Are the Ben-day dots that are the foundations of Lichtenstein’s style–and the images that can be simply found in comics from the Golden Age–the very concrete bits that compose a very concrete, non-abstract image-with-text that is totally recognizable but without any apparent meaning?  Just decades after dots–the compositions that were normally used to visually introduce ideas in physics and astronomy and chemistry and biology–were abandoned as the visual signifiers of enigmatic and increasingly-abstract domains, they were adopted as the foundation stones for an art that moved in the opposite direction from abstraction, except that its message was anything if not abstract.    

I think that it is in this way that images of Schroedinger’s cat should’ve been illustrated using the Ben-day dot method, plucked from the pages of a Golden Era comic, all basic red, yellow and black, the uncertain image never at rest, always with the possibility of being the same and not the same, its great and simple representation having not necessarily anything at all to do with its message, a concrete thing that is totally abstract.
____________

Notes

1. You could break this period out a bit, expanding it from, say the pre-Impressionists (1860 or so) to the period just after Abstract art and the introduction of the new quantum theory (again, say 1930). Epochal changes took place across the sciences, medicine, the arts, literature….virtually everything. I cannot think of any period in intellectual history that approaches this 70-year period. Actually, the gargantuan changes can be shaved down to the period of Einstein’s living memory beginning with the stunning discovery of Roentgen’s x-rays in 1895 to the invention of non-representational painting in 1911. But for the larger piece, the longer time reference, we have Roentgen, Poincare, Boltzmann, Planck,  Strindberg,  Schoenberg, Cezanne, Seurat, Picasso, Braque, Leger, Joyce, Woolf, Malevich, Duchamp,  Kandinsky, Klee, Bohr, Heisenberg, and. Einstein–to name just a few–of the folks making monumental changes in their field. 

2. By “non sequitor” I simply mean to say that the image, or text, or both, when pulled out of context, when removed from the story line, are almost entirely without reference to what happened before the panel or what would happen next.

3.  Maybe Lichtenstein is art, maybe not.  Another art, Art Spiegelman,  commented that "Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup”.  Maybe so. :ichtenstein did say this about his own art:"I think my work is different from comic strips- but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Lichtenstein#cite_note-rlf-Coplans-1

This might all seem terribly wrong, and maybe–worse yet–it might seem like nothing at all.  Perhaps if it were nothing it would be more appropriate, in keeping with what Lichtenstein said about his own work, what seems to me to be an inscrutable nothingness: “"The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content. However, my work is entirely transformed in that my purpose and perception are entirely different. I think my paintings are critically transformed, but it would be difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument".

 

 

 

History of Dots #28: Cellular, Topical and Astronomical (1512-1888)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1074

This is  the 28th installment in the history of dots series, looking at dots big and small, existent and non-existent, cute and level, individuals and groups.  This selection looks at some dots on the micro/cellular level, the tactile visible level and the astronomical level. 

Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) entered his contribution to the history of dots with his Mikroskopische Untersuchungen ueber die Uebereisnstimmung in der Struktur und dem Wachstum der Thiere und Pflanzen^₁ published in 1839, the same year as the announcement of the invention of photography by Daguerre.  Schwann–a young experimenter and theorist and former pupil of the great physiologist Joahannes Peter Mueller-- generalized Matthias Schleiden’s general and evolutionary-necessary idea of cell-formation² and developed it into an overall theory for the basis of life. 

Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) looked at cellular dots and determined (with enormous interest) that they were very significantly altered with the introduction of disease.  These images from his Die Cellularpathologie (published in 1858)–a major work which basically founded the field of cellular pathology and introduced a rigorous new approach to scientific medicine--show the differences between normal and abnormal liver cells after having been subjected to disease. 

A less-necessary but much larger dot that filled in the spaces of medical service to humanity is found in Der scaepherder Kalengier (“The Shepherd’s Calendar”), a beautifully-designed book printed in 1512.  The book was an encyclopedic compendium of contemporary medicine, but it also contained s little less than that, having a section of zodiacal dots and semi-dots in relations to principal points on the body that could be used for bloodletting. 

Between the images of the sun/moon and the cell fit the dots of cowpox blisters on the hand and fingers of Sarah Nelmes, famously and inspirationally observed and understood by the Edward Jenner (1749-1823)³.  He extracted fluid from the blistered hand of Sarah the milkmaid and injected them into a very young “assistant” named James Phipps–essentially it was human experimentation carried out by a country doctor far removed from the culture of London, but who had a brilliant idea.  He continued extracting the injecting the pus from the blister until it came one day that Jenner tried the efficacy of his anti-small-pox innoculations with the real thing, exposing the boy to the dreaded disease.  Phipps did get sick but recovered in a few days⁴, documenting the revolutionary idea of Jenner and taking a great step forward in the treatment of disease. (It took years, by the way, for Jenner’s discovery to be recognized by the medical elite, whose opinion of Jenner was low given his simple medical life as a country doctor.)

Notes

1.  An English edition was published in London in 1847 under the title Microscopical Researches into the Accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants
2. For example, a plant is a community of cells and the cell is the essential unit of the individual plant.

3. Famously reported in his 1798 publication An inquiry into the causes and effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, a disease discovered in some of the western counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire, and known by the name of the cow-pox.
4. Described by Jenner so: “On the seventh day he complained of uneasiness in the axilla, and on the ninth he became a little chilly, lost his appetite, and had a slight head-ache....." but on the 10th day he was perfectly well....    In order to ascertain whether the boy, after feeling so slight an affection of the system from Cow-pox virus, was secure from the contagion of the Small-pox, he was inoculated the 1st of July following with variolous matter (Small-pox matter, ed.) immediately taken from a pustule......No disease followed.... Several months afterwards, he was again inoculated with variolous matter, but no sensible effect was produced on the constitution."









                    

History of Dots 27: Killing Bacteria--Human Experimentation with Conscientious Objectors, 1955

JF Ptak Science Books  1073

Medical and scientific experimentation on humans has a long and painful history.  In the early days it seemed much more acceptable to perform tests on people while they were alive more so than to cut up and autopsy their bodies when they were dead. 

William Beaumont–the “father of gastric physiology” –was also perhaps a very early leader in the field of bioethics.  Beaumont’s most famous series of experiments¹ were performed on a living subject, but only with the patient’s full knowledge of the procedure and consent (and also with te ability to terminate the procedures).  (Part of the defense of the Nazi concentration camp doctor-monsters brought Beaumont into their courtroom as an example of early American compliance to their bestialities, but purposely failed to mention the pertinent rights of Beaumont’s patients, whereas their thousands and thousands of human subjects were in concentration camps and were treated without regard to any moral, ethical or humanitarian consequences.)  Claude Bernard–one of the 19th century’s leading experimental medical researchers and physiologists–reported in his monumental 1865  Study of Experimental Medicine... that a physician must  “... perform an experiment on man whenever it can save his life, cure him or gain him some personal benefit."  Hopkins’ great William Osler (in 1907)  was entirely on board with the Bernard appraisal of the duties of the physician, saying that any new procedure or pharmaceutical must be used on humans before general release.         

Then of course three’s the other side of the coin: the STD experimentation in the infamous Tuskegee case (1932), the widespread studies of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, the Cornell Medical School’s wincingly bad study that gave the name to the placebo effect, th e1942 Chicago malaria studies on inmates, the long series of atomic and nuclear weapons tests with passive involvement of sailors and soldiers, and on and on, back into dim history. (The experiments by the Nazi doctors and their Japanese Unit 731 counterparts  deserve their own categories.)

This photo from Life magazine on the story (“Conscientious Eaters of an Atomic Diet”) of 1955 must be among the most wholesome general cover stories in the history of the idea of human experimentation.  These young conscientious objectors² declared (for whatever reason, ethic, moral or religious) their inability to serve in the armed forces, and were sent to a different task to replace military service.  Their exchange would be to test the effects of nuclear radiation on food products. (This was the process of using radiation to kill bacteria and insects and whatever other living badie in food that might cause disease or illness of cause the food to spoil.  The long-term result for the military could be enormous, allowing for more inexpensive and less difficult ways to keep food for longer periods of time for troops, and could also keep troops healthier by eliminating certain food-borne illness that could spread from one person to another.)

Still, what was being asked of these young men was far beyond the "debt" implied by their CO status. The effects of this sort of exposure were still not well known, and these men were absolutely being place in harm's way, and for the cameras of Life.  The ideas of “Radiation sickness” and “Acute Radiation Syndrome”--created by the two atomic bombs detonated in Japan in August 1945--were only about ten years old at the point where these young men were licking the irradiated grease form their plates. (As a matter of fact there was no immediate medical research team in place to study the biological effects of the bombs in those two cities; after a few weeks and by the end of August there was a organization in place, headed by Colonel Ashly Oughterson.) These men weren't going to suffer any radiation poisoning from the process (the ionizing radiation used by irradiators "was not strong enough to disintegrate the nucleus of even one atom of a food molecule") , but the effects of irradiating food at this point were still not known.

Notes:

1. Published in his 1838 Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion.

2. The business of conscientious objection to military service is milennia old; in the United States it goes back easily to the Revolutionary War.  It becomes a little less defined in the Civil War, where a CO or anyone else faced with military service could purchase a stay of service for $300 or provide someone in his place.   (In the CSA the same could be done but for a little more–$500.)    The whole business got considerably tightened up by WWI, and in WWII–when there was a spike in declarations by Cos–the code for declaration of objection to military service was considerably clarified, though not making it any less painful experience for the CO to endure.      In 1948 the worldwide  issue of the right to “conscience” was addressed by the United Nations General Assembly  in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, part of which reads:  “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom...”
     
During WWII the CO declaration form/questionnaire DSS 47 asked these ten questions:

1. Describe the nature of your belief which is the basis of your claim.
2. Explain how, when, and from whom or from what source you received the training and acquired the belief which is the basis of your claim.
3. Give the name and present address of the individual upon whom you rely most for religious guidance.
4. Under what circumstances, if any, do you believe in the use of force?
5. Describe the actions and behavior in your life which in your opinion most conspicuously demonstrate the consistency and depth of your religious convictions.
6. Have you ever given public expression, written or oral, to the views herein expressed as the basis for your claim made above? If so, specify when and where.
7. Have you ever been a member of any military organization or establishment? If so, state the name and address of same and give reasons why you became a member.
8. Are you a member of a religious sect or organization?
9. Describe carefully the creed or official statements of said religious sect or organization as it relates to participation in war.
10. Describe your relationships with and activities in all organizations with which you are or have been affiliated other than religious or military.

For human experimentation, see also:

Hoerni B. [Medical ethics. Evolution century after century] Hist Sci Med. 2003 Jul-Sep;37(3):331-8.

Lyon J. Experimenting with humans. Part I: History and context. Second Opin. 1987;6:63-89

Numbers RL. William Beaumont and the ethics of human experimentation.  J Hist Biol. 1979 Spring;12(1):113-35.

For more on radiation studies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

Archives: Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. Issues in Science and Technology. Spring 1997. FindArticles.com. 21 Apr. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3622/is_199704/ai_n8759128.

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (2008, Apr 19). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 21 Apr. 2008.

ABCC Collection at John P. McGovern Historical Collections and Research Center (Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library).

Radiation Effects Research Foundation Home website in English and Japanese

Resolving Dots into New Worlds & Discovering Multiple Shadows

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1054    The  History of Dots series

[Thanks to Randall Rosenfeld of the University of Toronto for sparking this post!]

It seems that few people now remember Frederick William Herschel as a great discoverer of alternative existences, but, well, that's pretty much what he did--and he did it during a time that must've made his astronomical discoveries seem like science fiction .For example, in 1785 Herschel published a revolutionary image of the “Stellar System” (the Milky Way), showing its irregular pattern and the off-center placement of our sun amidst a panoply of other stars.

(His image was remarkably and substantially correct, with the most grievous error being the placement of the sun too close to the center of the galaxy.) It was an image which bought the concept of a not so humano-centric idea into popular philosophy, and that our sun was a star among stars in a sea of stars¹.

Not only that, but Herschel also made observations on double stars that showed that Newton's laws of gravitation extended throughout the universe, and that it was possible for the stars themselves to submit to these laws and react to each other.  After constructing his mammoth four-foot telescope, Herschel expanded the observable sky multifold, showing that there was a possible 75 million stars now available for study.  And if the stars were behaving like planets then the actions of our own solar system seem perhaps to be not so unique; and with all of these new stars the possibilities for new planets and new solar system (and with that the possibilities for other life forms) seems a greater possibility.  

And on these new worlds in these new solar systems there was therefore the possibility of two or more suns, meaning that there could be sets of shadows cast by anyone/thing on the surfaces of any of these new worlds.  

In fact Herschel was able to show that our own Sun was following a prescribed path through the Milky Way, making Sol much less of spectacular enigma of mythical importance and more of just another starry dot in a sea of dots.  And while he was making the Sun into a starry dot he was also resolving those other starry dots into something of greater understanding and significance, bringing them into a systemic mechanism of the universe.

Herschel also made an alpha/omega kind of discovery, as well--he marveled at  nebulous "holes"² that he was finding in the Milky Way, thinking that, perhaps, he was looking into the very soul of the universe, at the place where stars were born. 

This is extraordinary stuff coming to use from 200 years ago.  Few people have made such enormous and concrete contributions with such far reaching intellectual and philosophical implications.  So hats-off tonight to Frederick William Herschel, a man with big eyes.

Notes:

1. This galacto-centric view remained until the work of Harlow Shapley's globular clusters in 1918.

2. Specifically his famous and luscious "Coalsack" nebula.

History of Dots Series: Missing the Beginning of the Stars as Dots

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1029

[History of Dots series]

I was wondering when it was that stars began to appear as dots in celestial atlases or astronomical works–dots rather than starry stars, decorated spheres with crusty circular fire rings about them.
I felt that at some near point in the history of astronomy that t he conventional antiquarian way of representing a star would fall away with magnification, or clarity, just as has been the opposite case with the magnification of simple dots to reveal complex structures, say with the amplification of the flea eye...even a graphite pencil’s period at the end of a sentence on a piece of paper will turn itself from a dot into something as complex as the coastline of England (given enough magnification).
The first star atlas published in 1482 after the work of the first century astronomer and philosopher Hyginius¹ contains maps of the constellations composed of such beautiful light-encrusted bits.  There wouldn’t be another work like this one, strangely, for another 75  years. Alessandro Piccolomini’s² work of 1559 (which would be the first true star atlas), and again we see the familiar representation.  I thought that this would change with the invention of the telescope, so I checked out Galileo’s³ beautiful account (pictured at left) of his discoveries in the Sidereus–again the same complicated, sawblade stars. 

This has not been a very scientific search thus far, only checking handy notes and images that I’ve made.  But the same result has been true for the star images in Bayer⁴, Cellarius⁵, Hevelius⁶(at right), Coronelli⁷, Flamseed⁸,  Doppelmay^r9 and Bode¹⁰. Even William Herschel’s fabulous map of the galaxy is a collection of these pointed stars.  I think that I’ve just missed what is normally seen by regular folks as a conventional reassignment of star images to something more “modern”–and if that’s the case it has simply passed me by. (It seems though that among all of these that Hevelius comes closest--he inverts the familiar star pattern to the interior of a sphere.)  And I continue to miss it.  I’ve worked my incomplete survey now pretty close to the end of the 18th century, and I simply do not have a close answer..If anyone out there does have it, please let me know.  
Notes:
1. Hyginius Mythographus (fl. 1st century A.D.). Poeticon astronomicon. Edited by Jacobus Sentinus and Johannes Lucilius Santritter. Venice: Erhard Ratdolt, 14th October 1482. The first star atlas per se, standing alone in its field for a century.
2. Piccolomini, Alessandro.  De la Sfera del Mondo.  1559                               
3.  Galilei, Galilei  Sidereus Nuncius (known in English as Starry Messenger), published 1610
4.  Bayer, Johann.  (1572 – March 7, 1625) Uranometria 1603, which was the first atlas to cover the entire celestial sphere.
5. Cellarius, Andreas  (c. 1596 – 1665): Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660, 1661, 1708).
6. Hevelius, Johannes (1611 – 1687): Firmamentum Sobiescianum, sive Uranographia (1690).
7. Coronelli, Vincenzo (1650 – 1718):
8. Flamsteed, John (1646 – 1719): Atlas Coelestis (1729, 1753).
9. Doppelmayr, John Gabriel (1677 – 1750): Atlas Coelestis (1742).
10. Bode, Johann Elert (1747 – 1826): Vorstellung der Gestirne auf XXXIV Tafeln (1782).

History of Dots: Television, 1947

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1028

Television is composed of dots--or at least for the greatest part of its history it was. I wonder if we measured the amount of televised images entering the eye/eyes of everyone around the world this year if that total numbers of hours is multiples of all television watched by everyone everywhere for the 1928-1995 period?  My gut wonders if it is orders (?) of magnitude more as there are more people, more television, more programming, more everything, everywhere, at any time.  And when you throw in hulu and tvshack and so on, doubt grows that the history of television to 1995 could hold its own against whatever it is people are seeing today. 

This comes from seeing this ad (below, from which these details are pulled) for Paul Jones whiskey in a 1947 issue of LIFE magazine.  Big, 15" screen for the fights on a Friday night, the built-in radio with its 12" speaker ready to go, a pipe and matches (and no tobacco) at hand, and of course a very over-sized bottle of Paul Jones whiskey:  if we kept a constant perspective that bottle I reckon would've been about two feet tall, accompanied by foot-tall glasses.  

Television was still in its formative period so far as mass acceptance and affordability goes--there were still only 14,000 sets in the U.S. in 1947. Today there are something like 250,000,000 sets in this country, or about 8 for every 10 people.  Worldwide the figures are pretty different:  on a  list of 209 countries for televisions per capita (where the U.S. is third) only the top 24 have tvs for every other person (the U.K. with 504/1000 is number 24) while countries with tvs for every third person comes in at #53 (Czech republic).  Jamaica, listed at #100, has 168/1000 per capita, which means tv distribution for the rest of the 109 countries on this list gets pretty scratchy--no doubt because a television would represent a sizable chunk of a family's gross income for the year. Actually,  about 50 countries on that list have a population that survives on One Dollar a day--which doesn't leave much for Sony and whoever might advertise on the set that these people can't buy.  (Fox I understand is even now figuring a plan for a programming-over-food venue as a means to domination in a new post-Colonial world--Cuba won over, finally, with reruns of "Dallas", making the population revolutionary over the stuff that J.R. Ewing has that they don't but want..)

The televised world is the thin veneer of the existing world that isn't.  Anyway, here's the start of it, all in beautiful black and white dots, selling a bad whiskey.

The "Television Schedule"  is there, with an odd eye-on-compass logo that is barely visible before magnification.