Ptak Science Books

History of Dots Series: Dots of 1947

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1027

{Another in the History of Dots series.]

The molecular chemistry of dots of 1947 is a beautiful thing, worthy of a powers-of-ten episode, though I can only do a gigantically scaled down version of it (a powers-of-two maybe) given pixelation and its dot-defeating and necessary tendency to relieve roundness and introduce squares everywhere. 

 

The Exploding Dots of Falling Dominoes: Vietnam, 1954

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 996

This story is more about Ho Chi Minh's capture of French silk than about anything else--it is a peep into the future following the end of the French endgame in Vietnam, which came abruptly with their defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

[Detail/larger image below.]

The siege there started on the 13^th of March, and lasted 57 days, until May 7^th, 1954. The commanding general of the Viet Minh forces, Vo Nguy Giap, achieved an enormous victory over the French—the first time a guerrilla force readjusted itself into a conventional force to defeat a Western army. It was the end of the line for the French military involvement there and it just so happened to be the beginning of Vietnam as an object on the American foreign policy event horizon.

 Just a week after this notice appeared, Dwight Eisenhower made his domino speech:

“Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.conference…”

Vietnam was supposed to be one of those dominoes.  Evidently all of the dominoes were the same size regardless of the size or international presence of the country.  It was also the same sort of domino even if had appealed for American recognition of its democracy-laced post-WWII government. And it was a domino still even if the United States had helped fashion the events that necessitated the movement of that country toward domino-hood.  No matter.  The U.S. decided to back the French in reclaiming their war-lost possession, in spite of the fact that the French were still doing business during the war with the Japanese occupying force in Vietnam, and in spite of the fact that the French re-armed Japanese troops to help fight against the "insurgent" forces of Ho Chi Minh.  It was an ugly decision, and I suspect FDR was just too sick to deal with it properly. 

Nine years later, the French had finally been soundly defeated and Vietnam thought that it had finally gained independence.  Not so. 

The picture here is of dots--the field of battle at Dien Bien Phu, littered with silk parachutes--cargo dropped by the French air force to the defenders of the garrison....most of which, evidently, fell well outside the French-controlled perimeter and into the hands of the attacking Vietnamese army.  These were the exploding dots of the falling domino.

 

If these dots stood for something, they could stand for the coming wave of death and misery, a graphical representation of what was to come over the next 25 or so years.

I reckon there to be about 500 parachutes/dots in this picture.
Each of these dots could be assigned a number, each representing a gross statistic for the war, from  1950 to 1975:

U.S. forces killed in action:  100/dot (58,000 killed)

U.S. forces wounded in action: 300/dot  (313,000)

Army of the Republic of Vietnam, killed in action:  500/dot (263,000)

Army of North Vietnam, killed in action:  2,000/dot (1.1 million killed)

Civilian deaths, North & South Vietnam: 4000/dot (2 million killed)

Civilian deaths caused by North Vietnam during the war: 300/dot

Civilian deaths caused by "North" Vietnam, postwar consolidation and reeducation: 1,000/dot

Civilian deaths caused by the U.S.: 175/dot

All deaths for the war, 1950-1975: 8,000/dot (using a figure of 4 million).

A Note on "Opposite Sameness" in the History of Dots

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 968 

Part of the History of Dots series that I find so attractive is the dot’s great equalizing effect.  The dot has the potential of making everyone, everywhere, feel the wonder of mighty insignificance—the Earth, for example, depicted from far away, a dot in the cosmos, the solar system a dot in the galaxy, the galaxy a dot in the realm of galaxies.  And then back again, powering perspective back inside us, finding the common thread of humanity again at the cellular level, a dot of sameness.

For example, the map drawn by Sir William Herschel must have been a staggering thing to see when it was first published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1785--at least by the popular viewer.  The enormity and expanse of galaxies was not yet understood, and to see (at this time) our own sun relegated to a point of sameness in what he deduced to be a spiral-shaped Milky Way Galaxy among many others could well have been an astonishing experience to a first-time viewer.

So to for at the other end of the spectrum with the embryological work of Karl Ernst von Baer (an Estonian educated in Germany who worked in St. Petersburg) as it was published in his De ovi mammalium et hominis genesi (1827). 

His work established beyond all doubt that the reproductive processes for all mammals were generally the same—or without fundamental difference—from other animals.  And since “mammals” included “man”, it came as quite a shock to the popular audience that the basic facets of reproduction were little changed between dominant predator and all the other stuff. At the professional level Baer’s work was of enormous importance in the development of cell theory which would lead to natural selection…and he also established embryology as a discipline. 

And so the substance of dots at opposing ends of measurement, bringing about a similarity of recognition.  Dots.

Missing "Dots" and Not Seeing the Discovery of Platelets, 1842

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 918

{This post continues some new and unusual cross-categories in this blog, like Missing Things Making Holes; Bombs as Breads.  Today's bit combines the "Blank, Empty and Missing Things" with "The History of Dots" categories.]

Alfred Donne (1801-1878), physician, experimenter, microscopist and photographer, is best known for things other than what he should probably be best known for:  his discovery of the third element of the blood, platelets.  Donne had a wonderful vision, and was among the very first on the scene to write about and employ the spectacular invention of the daguerreotype in chemistry and microscopy.  As a matter of fact, Donne, along with his collaborator Leon Foucault,  produced the very first engraved images of photomicrographs for his cytology paper of 1840. (He was also the first to use electricity in producing a medical illustration, and was among the first modern physicians to write on the great efficacy of mothers using their own milk in breast feeding their children.)  The discovery of platelets paper of 1842¹--preceding two other works published in the same year--does indeed identify the new object, but actually fails to make a methodological examination of the new body, calling the new units "globulins du chyle" (or small globules, derived from plasma).  He also fails to make a drawing of what he saw; so, the combination of these two important elements asked the reader to accept his findings on faith, the tools of reproduction of his observations not being present. 

And so we remember Donne for some other significant things, and less so for his lightly-interpreted and un-illustrated, and missing, "dots".

Notes
1.Donne, Alfred. De l'origine des globules du sang, de leur mode de formation et de leur fin. Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1842, 14: 366-168. 

(Overall the history of the discovery of platelets is complicated:  Leewenhoek (1675) and Henson (1782)  were the first to fully describe the “undefined” particles of the blood; Donne’s work was then more fully described by Beale in 1850, and then again (identified as “small corpuscles” by Zimmerman in 1860 and then again by Schultze in 1874 and Laptschinski (also in 1874). William Osler then enters the scene in 1880, followed by Giulio Bizzozzero who was the first, in the years 1881 -1882, to establish central role of platelets not only in physiological haemostasis, but also in thrombosis.  Anyway it is a longish and not-clear-to-me history.)

A History of Dots, Periods & Points, Part I: Descartes and a Year-Ending Post

I posted this at the end of last year, the end of my first year of blogging--I quite like it.  A nice way to end the year. Again. On dots.

To
 

In closing out my first year of blogging, I'd like to take an incidental look at one of our language's most important fragments.  Like Mr. Eliot's observations of Baudelaire being a fragmentary Dante, and like the brilliantly arranged frammenti of Piranesi, the great bits of our communication processes owe a breathy thanks to the lowly period.  A dot.  A point.  It separates to provide analysis and coherent recognition of thought. 

A simple dot.  (.)  But dots are as little or as big as you need:  there's "Little Dot" (the cartoon character of Harvey Comics, created 1947, who was fascinated bylines and dots and dashes), "Admiral Dot", polka dots, Mama Dots.  Dots get considerably ratcheted up in quantum dots, and then expanded beyond that with the idea of the dot as an abbreviation for the multiplication sign, both of which increase things rather than bringing them to an end, a conclusion.  The dot used after a musical note delineates that there is an increase in time by half, which would be an interesting notation to adopt in literature, if we were somehow able to magnify and increase that which would normally have been ended by the same notation.

Dots have formed the background to some of the most significant scientific illustrations of all time, like these two images, the first of which Descartes' illustration of the decomposition of the rainbow, found in his Dioptrics, a fabulously important illustration. The second is from Descartes' Principia Philosophiae (1684) which display his theory of vortices, accommodating an idea of physics eliminating atoms and vacuums and joining matter and space, matter being constantly deflected from moving in a straight line, moving in vortices.  Then of course there's the fantastically appreciated advancement of Samuel Morse's telegraphic instrument and his abbreviated transmitting alphabet (his "code"), which fascilitated the distribution of information in the 1840's  in the same sort of way that the internet increased the flow and ease of data in the 1990's. (Actually that's only half correct for Morse, as his was a system of dots and dashes.)

Things get more interesting if we expand the idea of the "dot" to a "point", as just about everything we have discussed in math for thousands of years has been based upon the idea of a "point in space", forming the bits of the coat hanger on which the whole fabric of the heavens has been hung.  Going the other way, there's the decimal point, which brings us to negative powers of ten, into smaller and smaller worlds, to the incomprehensibly small, showing that "nothing" probably doesn't exist. (We'll leave the idea of "spot" alone, tonight.)

That's quite a bit of expansion from a word that starts out life in Middle English as the definer of the head of a boil.

But this year will end in about 50 minutes from now, and I wll be able to put the final keystroke to the final sentence to my final post of the year, and put it all to sleep.  And the year will end, at 11:59:59, precisely.  On the dot.

History of Dots (Circle Subcategory): Circles in Graphical Displays of Quantitative Data

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 889

I like bumping circles as modes of graphically conveying quantitative data—it is more unusual than most ways of portraying statistics and belongs mostly in the 19^th century. 

The first example is relatively early, in the first class of this sort of information display, published in Thomas Bradford’s (1802-1887) superior Comprehensive Atlas Geographical, Historical and Commercial in Boston in 1835. Circles are the entire métier of this chart, showing the sizes of the continents and oceans, concentric circles nested inside each other, then branching out into three columns of progressively smaller circles showing the comparative sizes of islands, seas and lakes, all (interestingly) presented on the same scale.  It is a virtual one-stop, single-image display showing the graphical sizes of 59 geographical entities in relation to one another, making the understanding of their comparative sizes a simple, understandable, matter. 

Prettier but (initially) more difficult to use are the next two charts, the first showing the areas and populations of countries compared to that of the United States (in 1890), and the second showing the public debts of those same countries.  At first the display looks a little confusing. But once you settle in and get your eyes accustomed to the manner of presentation, the charts are actually very easy to use and very useful. 

Moving over from circles to dots is this population map by Frère de Montizon Armand Joseph, Carte philosophique figurant la population de la France, published in 1830 (as the first of its kind).

The ubiquitous pie-chart only made its first appearance in 1801, the work of he gifted and possibly polymathic William Playfair.  He was an engineer (serving as apprentice to the inventor of the threshing machine, Andrew Meikle,  and personal assistant to James Watt) and economist, and occasional mathematician, who also invented  the line graph (1786),  bar chart (1801)and circlegraph(1801).  But for this and all of his other work, he died in poverty and not comfortable¹.  

 

NOTES

1.Works by William Playfair include:

• 1786. The Commercial and Political Atlas: Representing, by Means of Stained Copper-Plate Charts, the Progress of the Commerce, Revenues, Expenditure and Debts of England during the Whole of the Eighteenth Century.
• 1801. Statistical Breviary; Shewing, on a Principle Entirely New, the Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe. London: Wallis.
• 1805. A Statistical Account of the United States of America by D. F. Donnant. London: J. Whiting. William Playfair, Trans.
• 1807. An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations: Designed To Shew How The Prosperity Of The British Empire May Be Prolonged.

2. In general, the website by  Michael Friendly "Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization" is invaluable (and also located here).

 

 

Another Major Wrinkle in God’s Perfect Plan: Lots of Dots

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 826  Blog Bookstore

This installment of the continuing thread on the  history of dots questions the sublime machinery of the primum mobile in the work of Galileo, particularly in his The Siderreal Messenger (Sidereus nuncius) of 1610.   The reception of this extraordinary work was deep and profound, and the images of the “dots” were of extraordinary importance.

The perfection of the Creator’s plan was being shown to be not-so-perfect in the late Renaissance, a major chink showing up in the work of the dead Copernicus in 1543, which showed that the Earth was not the center of the great cosmological eye.  In the same year the body was also shown to be not so much built in god’s image with its bitter working revealed in one of the greatest anatomy books ever written, Vesalius’ revolutionary  De Humani Corporis Fabrica .  Problematic bits started showing up regularly wrapped in scientific proof:  the existence of a vacuum, thought to be impossible given the perfection of creation, was shown to exist in  Otto von Guericke's  Experiemnta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio (Amsterdam, 1672).

 The stupendous idea of additions to the night sky, which had been thought to be immutable and unchanging, came into being with Tycho Brahe’s 1572 discovery of a new star (Nova) in Cassiopeia and added to in 1602 by Kepler’s announcement of another new star—both events showing that the night sky was not complete and that it was actually changing.

When you consider Galileo and his use of the newly-invented telescope it is usually a little far down on the list of accomplishments that his explosion of the night sky is considered.  In addition to everything he did (applying mathematics to the study of physics, understanding the physics of motion, developing the telescope and the microscope and other precision physical instruments and so on) Galileo pointed the not-yet-astronomically-used telescope to the sky and expanded the size of the universe by a factor of ten.  It was so utterly astonishing an idea I can hardly think how the not-prepared mind of 1610 would’ve reacted to the idea.  Certainly it was not a happy acknowledgment coming from the Holy Father, though a simple defense could’ve been that this miracle was divinely revealed ,and that it was there all of the time but just unknown to humans, and so not threatening the orthodoxy of Christian belief.  But that wasn’t the case, and Galileo would soon enough be in trouble with the church and its inquisition in short order.

The dots in this image are the dots of never-before-seen stars, part of an unobserved sky that was revealed only under magnification.  The size and scope of the new bigness of the universe was staggering, and of course opened the question immediately to the possibilities of yet a larger universe revealed under yet more magnification.  I don’t know the answer to this, and I wonder where Galileo might have publicly mused about how big the universe might actually be, and if he ever dreamed about the possibilities of telescopes that were 15 feet across rather than just two inches, and what those beasts might reveal.

*I’ve looked at the use of the telescope in the hands of Galileo before HERE (The Telescope in Galileo’s Hands: the Expansion of the Universe, 1610).

Telegraph “Fax”, 1895. Transmitting Images by Wire & 120-Year-Old Emoticons

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 701     Blog Bookstore

This Scientific American article on the smart/odd/analog transmission of pictures via telegraph (14 September 1895) by W.H. Lowd, can make you say “ohhh, of course” out loud.  Mr. Lowd’s insight came fifty years after the Morse telegraph came into being, thirty years after it becomes the greatest means of communication, twenty after the first multiplex telegraph, and in the same year as Marconi’s first successful wireless transmission.   It was though an ingenious inspiration whose utility lasted for about 60 seconds—which is about how long it took to develop a smarter way of transmitting an image in its entirety.

Mr. Lowd recognized that he could transmit the outline of a picture by placing on opaque tracing of the picture on top of a telegraphic ciphering sheet and then transmitting the coordinates, which when received on the other end could be connected by short lines into the picture that was being transmitted from the sending end.  Images constructed of numbers and letters and such had been made for centuries before this; this however is a very early use of this idea that was employed to human-representational transmit the object electrically over distances by wire.  Emoticons—a more abstract version of this idea--such as we know them today are actually better than 150 years old.  They appear as early as 1857 in the telegraphers’ world, and somewhat earlier in the typesetter’s arsenal. (For example, a later attempt, taken from Puck Magazine No. 212, page 65, 30 March 1881, shows us something that we took to be “new” in the 1980’s as having roots that spread downwards into history by another 120 years.)

But Mr. Loud’s idea was pretty, I must admit, even though it was far from being the answer to the question it addressed, with a more pleasing, technology-based solution appearing by 1899. 

(A successful apparatus for the true transmission of an image by wire is seen here, below, and was produced in 1899/1900.)

The other bit that is interesting is that this transmission of an image necessitated an early Surrealist-like poem, dictated by the cipher/codes that were use by necessity to send the picture. 

A History of Dots: the Black Sun of Das Planeten Buch, 1541

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 694  Blog  Bookstore

History of Dots, Part 15

Soft on the Heals of the 1898 Planetary Visits post (earlier today) is this 1541 Books of the Planets (Das Planeten Buch. Von Natur, eygenthumb, und wirckung der siben Planeten…), which was published in Strassburg by Jacob Cammerkander..  It is a collection of medieval German accumulated astro-data and posie, cobbled together by an anonymous author, and strung together for the masses—it was evidently very popular, eager fingers pulling the many editions to pieces (and such), so that very few now exist. 

The dot that I have in mind here is the standard astronomical depiction of the sun, and it appears brilliantly-n-black in the bottom panel close-by the image of Saturn racing across the sky. 

                                                               

 

Dots in Revolutions of Modern Art: Seurat & Kandinsky

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 683  Blog Bookstore

Part of the History of Dots series

It is interesting to think of the importance of dots in the first revolutionary changes in 500 years in the history of art.  Honestly, there wasn’t anything epochal that happened between the re-discovery of perspective (ca. 1330-1400) and the arrival of Impressionism (and just afterwards of non-representational art) in the 1872/3/4-1915 period.  

Dots aren’t brought to bear formally in the revolutionary movement until the early 1880’s.  Impressionism for all intents and purposes is formed with the Societe Anonyme in 1872 (whose members included Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley, Morisot and eleven others), and perhaps more realistically in 1874 when the Societe exhibited its first salon.  (The first show held at the Nadar Studio in Paris in April 1874; a tiny, one month long affair, compared to mammoth exhibitions like the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867.) 

It was Georges Seurat who brought the whole world to the dot experience with his artisitc method of Pointilism, in particular with his magnificent Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte, an enormous work given its composition—dots.  The dots replaced the brushstroke, and their placement in relation to their color was an absolutely brilliant innovation, establishing a perfect result for the viewer when examining the work as a whole.  (It may well be that the French chemist an designer Michel Chevreul made this discovery a few decades earlier, noticing the effect and changes in color depending on placement and—in his case, with fabric—color in the dyes for his material.)

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), the discoverer of nothingness in art and the introduction of the first non-representational paintings in art history (1913) used his fair share of dots in his exploration of the previously invisible.  One good example is his 9 Points in Ascendance (1918), which is nothing but black dots, an impossible composition just two decades prior to its creation. 

In the middle of this appeared the half-tone illustration, the great liberator of photographic illustration in popular publication.  Invented in the late 1870’s by Stephen Henry Horgan and used in the Illustrated London News for the first time in 1881, it made the publication of accurate images much feasible and economical.  No longer were readers dependent on the accuracies of artists interpreting photographs or photographed scenes—the photographs themselves were now publishable at little cost and in high quality, vastly increasing the veracity of published reports dependent upon images.  This was revolutionary in its own way, democratizing the sharing of images and icons.

And so in just thirty years the lowly dot availed itself of some of the most spectacular achievements in modernism.  Of course we can say the same of the line, but this is, after all, a history of dots. 

Pale Horses and the Lake of Fire: a Map to the End of the World

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 649  Blog Bookstore

There are, in my experience, very few antiquarian images depicting the end of the world in which we see the entire globe exploding or in pieces or in flames. This sort of image gets more play in the 20^th century, especially after 8 August 1945, but prior to that it is really very scarce.  I own a few images that appear in the 17^th and 19^th centuries, and another from 1929 (Das Weltbild which show a “giant ice ball” colliding into and completely destroying the earth). .  Then there is this new find, S.L. Lacy’s The End of the World, (necessarily) self-published in West Point, Virginia, in 1941.  It is a short and stocky, and bound in orange wrappers—its spine title (The End of the World) begs the casual reader to pull it from the shelf. It’s a simple book—studying the Bible prophecies and revelations on the end of all things—and it annoys and is insulting but doesn’t disappoint.

I started to breeze through the book (back-to-front as always) and opened the book to Chapter XIII, finding this delicious chapter heading:  “The Chronological Order of Final Things”, this being a full page pre-PowerPoint summation of the time-shrinking fireball that is rolling inexorably towards us all.  To say that one is able to put a period at the end of the world's flow of time, that someone is able to identify the point in the future where the future is no more, is "presumptive"--this in the most understated fashion as to offend even the highest of high-Victorians' sense of restrained propriety.  Wrapped in a comfortable Christian chrysalis of pre- and post-apocalyptic religious certitude, Mr. Lacy delivers his interpretation of biblical prophecy for the coming of the end, hustling it to the front of the religious line of things to come.

It seems that in 1941 the end was beginning, and Lacy saw all of the images implied by prophecy that were necessary to announce the glorious final days of broad retribution. This includes the list if the ten things indicating "the sign of The Times", one of which (Number 5) was "The Automobile" and another (Number 7) was "Increased Knowledge and Travel" (announced by Nathum 2: 3,4 and old dependable Daniel. 12:4, respectively.  There's nothing that doesn't fit into Daniel's visions or revelations, though Mr. Cash has certainly made a lovely song of them.)  When everything fits perfectly into a predictive model with no possibility of falsification (or of proof or disproof), then the model has no validity outside of a belief system in itself. Very tidy.

It is an annoying, cloying minor treatise, promising little more than The Lake of Fire awaiting almost all of us, even the sleeping dead, who would be scraped from their graves to be spit into this burning tragedy. 

Lacy does a lot of inspired interpretation and philosophizing, much of which he doesn’t seem to bother separating from biblical quotations—I don’t think it is intentional, just bad writing.  A random find in Lacy’s thinking dislodges the following  nugget:

“Satan is in the atmosphere above the earth, with access to heaven and earth with a circumscribed power over the atmospheric elements and the earth including the inhabitants”. 

 Oh dear.

But enough of this nonsense. What brought me to this work is the folding schematic map at the front of the book.  It is a slightly complex jumble of semi-circles and circular reasoning, and I have no interest in straightening out this jumbled linguine. What has my interest is the dissolving Earth part of the diagram, a part of the dead earth that comes between Calvary  and Heaven-on-Earth.  What makes this image different from the others though is that the Earth reappears—different from its former self having been vanquished and cleansed by all consuming fire, but the Earth nevertheless.  Or something like it.  Or nothing like it. 

 

Maps of the Cosmos of Moles, 1671: Astrology, Pseudoscience & Furious Belief

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 646  Blog Bookstore

"The first principle [in science] is to not fool yourself."  R.P. Feynman

"The Woo-woo is all the same, everywhere, anytime, everytime.”—James Randi on the history of   the pseudosciences .

Self-deception and belief in Woo-woo (spurious pseudo-scientific beliefs) is some of the stuff that separates humans from animals.  And not in a good way, unless it was all chalked up to an expression of creativity and imagination.  I started this post as an entry in the History of Dots category, then in the Blank and Missing Things department, and then simply to the Bad Ideas category.  But the more I thought about mole mapping and how extraordinary it was, the less extraordinary it became, especially once the veil of age has been removed. As it turns out, mole mapping is neither more nor less extraordinary than any other system of belief.

Here’s a sentence one doesn’t get to write very often:  Richard Saunders (1613-1692) was perhaps the foremost historian, astrologer and seer of human moles and their predictive forces who ever lived.  He was far from being the solitary member of a one-unit class:  the use of moles as predictive and interpretive agents stretches back dozens of

centuries, so the claim of Saunder’s being its most famous practitioner is not empty, mega-pseudo-scientific or not.  The mystical commentary on the Torah, the Zohar (a part of the Kabbalah), gets right to the point of the significance of moles (“the stars of the body”), transferring the structure of the cosmos and the constellations to the skin.  The seer and soothsayer Melampus from Greek mythology, in one of his necessarily pseudographic works, writes on the importance of moles of the face and their zodiacal relations—an idea that was picked up 2000 years later by the extremely significant mathematician Jerome Cardano.  There was a decent amount of argument regarding the location of zodiac symbols on the face, as it turned out.

But the leading exponent of moles is Saunders, who was also one of the leading figures in a wide and very powdery period of European non-scientific sciences.  These wonderful images come from the second (!) edition of his cumbersome but accurately-titled work Saunders Physiognomie and Chiromancie, Metroscopie, the Symmetrical Proportions and Signal Moles of the Body, Fully and Accurately Explained; With Their Natural Predictive Significations Both to Men and Women (published in London, 1671, by Nathaniel Brook), in which he divines the psyche and the future with peoples’ moles. 

The first figure, detailing the mole locations of a man’s face, is a remarkable, weird accomplishment, not only because of the exhaustive treatment that is given to every location of every mole (g_d help us), but also because of the manner of the engraving.  If you look closely, you can see that it is Fresnel lens-like—it is an engraving composed of (almost) concentric circles.  I cannot recall seeing such a thing before—needless to say the practice of engraving would be laborious, and not much practiced.  I’m not even sure what great good it causes, though it does give a little different idea of depth and dimensionality to the image.  The effect that it achieves here though is to give a solar-system-like background to the moles—something that is much more spectacularly achieved in the next image.

The map of the moles of this woman’s body looks to me just like a constellation—and a constellation is just what they were for Saunders, who viewed the arrangement of moles on the body like an astronomer searching the night sky for a new comet.   But an astronomer would not be trying to force governing connections in the starry realms to occurrences on earth (or heaven, or whatever)—that would be the job of an astrologer, whose job would be enormously simplified since everything it conjures is fictional.  Had Robert Hooke been Richard Saunders-like when he made virtually the first microscopic investigations in human history, he would have been correlating the hairs and pores of the flea rather than making his minute and beautiful observations.

Saunders sees mole connections everywhere, even developing sub-classifications to sub-classes: this is seen in the lovely relational map of face moles to moles on other parts of the body. (I like the spare curved lines most.)

This all looks perfectly phenomenal, unbelievable even,  from out here in 2009.  The fact remains though that the vast majority of newspapers in his country still carry horoscopes, and most Americans believe in UFOs, and a not-small percentage of those folks say that they’ve actually been abducted by Outer Space Aliens. (I calculate that from the “first” UFO sighting near Roswell 50 years ago that a sighting has been made about every ten seconds since then.  Why all of this interest?  And here’s a question among the many that I have about this stuff--outside the astronomical chances of actually encountering the other life forms in the universe that do undoubtedly exist:  why do these crafts, which have spectacular, beyond-physics capacities, have little dotty lights on them?)

And so as bizarre as images like this might look, many (most?) folks in the present really haven’t left these ideas behind—they just get changed a little, upfitted, retro-ripped, and outfitted with flashing lights.

In a very long career of getting people to think  in spite of themselves, James Randi (scientific investigator, keeper of the scientific method, head of the James Randi Educational Foundation, and formerly “The Amazing Randi” from years ago) has one particular mythbust-lecture that I find phenomenal, with a very large “oh my good god!” capacity for the students at the end of it--if they would but allow it.  Listen:  Mr. Randi would explore the possibilities of astrology, asking the group or class who there believed in it, taking a census of belief.  He would then make a very strong, convincing case for the application of this hope in astrology (he is a very determined and logical speaker), and then give astrological “readings" to each member of the group.  The readings would turn out to be exact and persuasive—a second tally would be taken of  believers, with the usual results being that (unless they knew who Mr. Randi was or was already a skeptic or logically un-needy thinker) the class would now consist of an overwhelming percentage of astrology-believers.

Then Mr. Randi lets the high-wind boom swing free:  everyone received the same reading. (You can see a short snippet for one of these experience HERE--Mr. Randi has conducted this lecture many times for many different audiences.)  The shock of realization is palpable.

On the telephone this morning Mr. Randi graciously explained this lovely lesson—he also explained that even after the key ingredient of the lesson was revealed, and even after he lectured on thought and belief and superstition and logic and so on, that the people who had already believed in astrology would almost in every circumstance still maintain that belief.  Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, the idea of belief was no match for fact.  Truth, fact, explanation, method, logic—none of these could put a chink in the armor of belief, and is no match for self-deception.

“The Woo-woo is always the same, everywhere, all the time.  If its not astrology its something else, the basis for all of it is the same” (my paraphrase) says Mr. Randi. After approaching belief systems like UFOs and astrology and mentally bending spoons and mind-reading and on and on, Mr. Randi says that at their base, the stories have a common heritage of need. And they’re unbendable, and certainly unbreakable, for all of those who need the belief.  There’s no room for constructive debate and exchange in such belief systems, whether it is astrology or creationism (I just can’t call it by its other, cleaned-up name), as they cannot satisfy the basic tenets of knowledge growth and scientific inquiry which, according to RP Feynman, is the willingness to test your beliefs against falsity and to investigate all possibilities that might make them invalid.*  Mole mapping predictions and the fate of a life is no different from any of these other derivations in wishful/hopeful pseudosciences, either—just a different name for the same underlying system of beliefs, though the moles are a little long in the tooth. 

Anyway, creationism or astrology or life-after death--they might as well all be mapping moles.

As Feynman said:

The first principle [in science] is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

* Feynman on the scientific method:  "It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated " RP Feynman quoted by Ralph Leighton,  1985, p. 341 ).

The Invention of Small Things and the Coming of the Internet--Back to the Flea

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"A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines [which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in informationstorage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions." —J.C.R. Licklider,  his epochal “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, 1960

There is a famous and most likely apocryphal story made famous in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time where a famous “scientist” (I‘ve heard him described as James Jeans, for one and the nicest fit, others say Bertrand Russell though it matters not) is confronted by a member of his audience during a lecture on astronomy/cosmology.  A woman rises and confronts the speaker, determining that what has come to pass as fact regarding the universe is all rubbish, and that the Earth was in fact a flat object resting on the back of a turtle.  The speaker then asks her what the turtle is standing on; she replies immediately of course that it is another turtle, and that it is “turtles all the way down”.  It’s a nice story, and bears some resemblance to Native American stories of the Earth born on the back of a turtle, of the Hindu legend of the Earth being borne by an elephant standing on the back of a tortoise, and so on, all the way down.  Even Dr. Seuss’ Yertle the Turtle can make an appearance in this one.

This came to mind thinking about the contribution of (the not-entirely forgotten) John Benjamin Dancer (1812-1887) to photography and its relation to the history of the Internet.  Dancer was in the immediate second wave of the greats of photography following the short first wave of Niepce and Talbot and Daguerre, and did come up with a number of very good ideas at the birth of photography—one of them in theory is an early foundation stone for the technical distribution of data and information.(These two slides are  examples of Dancer's work and are reproduced from the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge.)

Dancer evidently went to work immediately after reading of Daguerre’s 1839 process.  The technical aspects of the Daguerre effort were les daunting than they were messy—he found the descriptions “crude and obscure”, and proceeded with his own series of experiments, producing a camera some six weeks later.  It is interesting too that he seemed to have based the camera on a camera obscura:  “being a practical optician the camera was one of my own construction, such as I had frequently supplied to artists for tracing the outline of views in the camera….”

He lectured later in that same year (1839), showing lantern slides of his accomplishments to crowds of up to 1500 people.  His great accomplishment was in the field of microphotography—I should say rather that he invented the field.  And it is of great interest that the first images that he made using the brand new invention of the camera coupled with a microscope was that of a flea.  In yesterday’s post I wrote about Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and his spectacular discovery of the fineness and detail of biological specks like the flea, showing audiences—the world—for the first time that these insignificant creatures represented an entirely new, just-discovered world, and that they were as tremendously well-developed as any other large living thing.  Back to the flea, as it were, went Dancer—I have no idea whether he knew he was calling on Hooke’s iconic image or not.  But it is at least a lovely coincidence.

Dancer also displayed images of documents that he reduced by a scale of 1/160, printing a fully-legible copy of a printed document that was only 3mm tall.  The significance of this invention seems to have been lost until it was picked up again in 1853 by the great John Herschel, who recognized the process as a way to archive significant documents.

 I like it more for its possible impact, perhaps, on some of the thinking on the construction of a world-wide distribution of knowledge, as a necessary step to get to the stage where Vannevar Bush—who was widely acknowledged as being the grandfather of the internet at a MIT Conference about a 20 years ago—could theorize about his own precursor to the internet--the Memex, describing it for the popular audience in the Atlantic Monthly in June*, 1945.    Among many other things, Bush—who was also, probably, one of the great figures of WWII for his heroic role in leading the U.S. scientific and technical war effort and seeming to make the correct decisions all of the time—foresaw a means of distributing data, more or less instantly, calling on the delivery of microfilmed information. Bush, who was also a great engineer and father of one of the countries best analog computers (in 1931/33), had the notion for a world wide technical distribution of knowledge, but, as he wrote this in 1945 (!), could not see far enough into the future development of the digital computer (the ENIAC just being born at that time, though it must be pointed out that Bush was open to the idea of magnetic storage).  His ideas were very far reaching, touching on microminiaturization and artificial intelligence, and his ideas even now aren’t so much coyly science fiction as they are, well, implemented.  There’s a lot of Bush’s memex that are in place today

So, the turtles and wondering about Dancer’s influence in the string of inventions and discoveries that gave birth to the www: how far down do these influences go?  The touchstone for the creation of the internet is usually seen as being with JCR Licklider (see quote above) in 1960, or with Paul Baran or Leonard Kleinrock a year later; but perhaps it is earlier still with the implementation of ARPA (set into place immediately after the launch of Sputnik).  Of course none of this is possible without computers, so you could work your way back through time to the transistor, to Bush, to the Stibitz (Bell)Relay Computer, to Johnny von Neumann, to the thermionic tube (Bush), and then all of the support discoveries and inventions that rolled into these, and so on.  Back to photography, back to Babbage’s plans for his analytical engine, back to the invention of moveable type, to the invention of paper, to the creation of libraries, to the general idea of the popular distribution of knowledge.  All the way down.  But I do think it worthwhile to think of Dancer’s contribution in so far as it allowed people to think of easier, quicker ways of moving around vast amounts of data and information.  And that I think is worth remembering. 

*I’ve also got to say that at the same time Bush was writing about the future of intelligence he was also at work developing the U.S.  response to the upcoming race in atomic weapons.  He and his team were busy crafting responses and policies and the reaction of the Soviets and the sharing of the atomic bomb data and all of that, and all before the test at Alamogordo. Really, the guy was spectacular.

 

 

The Dot and the Sphere—the Depiction of Multiple Dimensions

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The History of Dots, Part 10.

Edwin Abbott’s slender Flatland is perhaps one of the best books ever written on perception and dimensions, a beautifully insightful book that was quick and sharp, and in spite of all that was also a best-seller.  Written in 1884 when Abbott was 46 (Abbott would live another 46 years and enjoy the book’s popular reception), it introduces the reader to a two dimensional world with a social structure in which the more sides of your object equals power and esteem.  Thus the lowest class would be a triangle (three sides) while the highest (priestly) class would be mega-polygons whose shape would approach a circle.  Abbott’s magistry comes in explaining to the three-dimensional reader what it was like to be in a two-dimensional world.

And to this world one day came an epochal event.

It was a dot.  The dot was a magnificent new thing to the 2-D world, and what happened was this—it grew concentrically and outwardly, expanding and then contracting in a series of circles, morphing until it appeared as an entirely new and revolutionary form rising from the plane of Flatland.   It became a sphere.

The sphere was from Spaceland and amazed the population of Flatland (Lineland, actually); the story was (and the book’s title page saying it was written by) a Square, whose deep interest was immediately enhanced by its great imagination.  It turns out that once every millennium the good folks of Spaceland visit Flatland to return one its  inhabitants home to try and introduce them, educate them, to the idea of added dimensions.  Safely in Spaceland,   the Square was presented with the radical newness of the third dimension, it engaged the Sphere about the possibilities of yet higher (fourth, fifth and sixth) dimensions.  The Sphere was not altogether please—talk of higher dimensions in the3-D world was outlawed just as the discussion of the 3-D world was in Flatland.  Pissed, the Sphere returns the Square home to its land of lines. 

The Square finds it very difficult to be home again. (Did I ever mention here that my house is about a thousand feet away from Thomas Wolfe’s grave?) It finds it a very tough go to convince anyone of its journey and the existence of another dimension.  To complicate things further, Abbott has the Square dream a remarkable thing—a visit to Pointland, a totally self-involved dimension consisting of one ruler, a Point, which exists across all area and things.  Even Square’s introduction of an idea or question comes to the Ruler of Pointland as an idea from its own head, because nothing and no one else exists.  Fantastic!

Eventually, things go badly for the Square—the edict is described making it illegal for any further discussion of the third dimension, with dire consequences on a sliding scale according to class./caste/sides, with death the penalty for the Triangle.  The Square itself winds up in prison, an unhappy being locked “in” a cell and prohibited in its mind. 

But Abbott is certainly successful in relating the possibilities of higher-dimension thought by introducing the view from a higher- to a lower-dimension.  Still, it’s a tough go. 

19 years later dots came to further assistance to a mathematician and military man named Esprit Pascal Jouffret*, who wrote a remarkable and beautiful geometry book on picturing the fourth

dimension.  Actually, the book was more an example of how to discus the representation of the fourth dimension on a piece of paper, and didn’t’ offer a comprehensive  treatise on the matter.  But the images of depicting space and time would look extraordinarily familiar in just a decade in the paintings of the Cubists.  For example, the morally-lonely Picasso’s 1910 portrait of the movement-molding art dealer Ambroise Vollard looks very much like many of the images in the Jouffret book.  Marcel Duchamp—for me the true

 

hero of early modernism—also drew on the work of Jouffret, and made no secrets about the path of his intellectual foundation (unlike the squirrely Picasso). 

And so from the lowly dot comes a beauty unsuspected in soliphismy Pointland. 

 

 

The History of Dots and the Isotropic Universe: the Iconic Image of the Irregular, Dot-Filled Milky Way Galaxy of William Herschel

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Lucretius (95-55 BCE), in his Nature of the Universe, stated that  since there is nothing outside the universe, it must be infinite: “the universe stretches away…just the same in all directions without limit”;  it stretches far and wide into immeasurable depths.  All that is in it, he reasons, is distributed equally and in the same way.  But this is not the case, even in light of Edward Milne’s cosmological principle (1933),  stating that all  places in the universe is alike—which is true, except that there are vast disturbances in very large local areas that distinguish themselves from other places.  The work of Gamow/Alpher/Herman  (1939) and Penzias/Wilson in establishing the cosmic microwave radiation  (CMB)  shows that the observable universe to be very close to homogeneous and isotropic, and of course accelerating. (Suffice to say for this short post that there are models-- Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model for example-- which show the observable universe to be  "weakly" inhomogeneous and anisotropic; but generally and on average the isotropic models stand.) 

Perhaps the earliest published “bump” in the calm waters of the equal-distribution universe occurs with William Herschel (1738-1822), who in 1785 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 idea of a not-so-humano-centric idea into popular philosophy. This galacto-centric view remained until the work of Harlow Shapley's globular clusters in 1918.

This varied quite widely from the images of other astronomical observers and theorists such as Thomas Wright (1711-1786), who in his book An Original Theory of the Universe (1750) gives the Milky Way a friendlier, homogenous manner, overruling his earlier theory that the stars were “promiscuously distributed through mundane space” and delivering a theory of the stars organized in a regular pattern based upon a hierarchical center of some sort around which everything else was positioned.  He also provided this fabulous image of the centers of galaxies as an immutable, transcendent force, the eye of the creator, rather than the simple, positive dot.

This idea was picked up by Immanuel  Kant (1724-1804) who in his own work, The Theory of the Heavens (1755), expanded on the multiple centers of creation(s) (an “endless immensity in an unlimited plenum of creations”) of cascading and separate galaxies, and detailed a vast system of disk-shaped galaxies which revolved around centers which in turn revolved around other centers, becoming far vaster, though all were centered on a dominant, universal center.

But it was Herschel's images of the dots that came closest, longest, to the most accurate and appealing depiction of the universe, especially with the location of our solar system's principal dot seen as a dot among dots in a universe of dots.