JF Ptak Science Books

Albert Einstein: Part Time Civil Servant.

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   The History of Blank and Empty Things series

"Albert Einstein, Part Time Civil Servant."

I can almost see this title as a eggshell-white comic strip in a Sunday Featureette with everything else in color-- it just sounds so, well, wrong, and colorless.  Fact is though that at this time Einstein was working on weapons projects for the U.S. Navy, and evidently he needed to account for his work time just like everyone else.  

The "part time" was what interested in this. What was he doing not being part time? 

It was actually a little more than that, the "part time" part.  Because until he was hired by the Navy on 2 May 1943, Einstein worked "no time" on the war effort.  Not full time, not part time: no time.  The FBI thought him not trustworthy, and he was rejected by Army G2 in July 1940 as not clearable..  Einstein was out--in spite of the fact that he wanted desperately to work on something to help defeat the Nazis, and he would have made a pretty good go-to guy.  In May '43 though he was cleared by the Office of Naval Intelligence and he went to work--at $25/day-- on sub warfare and HE projects, much to his high happiness.

Einstein did so without the Navy haircut, as he liked to tell.

I have this post in my Blank, Empty and Missing Things series for the missing/absence/emptiness of trust and judgment extended to Einstein in wartime.  

In addition to this there are three other images, all hiosted  by the U.S. National Archives, here: http://research.archives.gov/description/597840

Einstein, Frisch, Cockcroft: Atomic Physics Film, 1948

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I had never seen this video/film before last night--it is pretty solid, and interesting, and I'm a little surprised because for a general-public sort of production it makes some good-sized presumptions of its audience in relation to any physics background. Most of all though there are appearances of Albert Einstein (at 52:15 and 1:01:14), Otto Frisch (1:03:00) and J.D. Cockcroft (1:17:50).

Source: U.S. National Archives  http://research.archives.gov/description/88106

The First Image of a Child's Art in a Painting? (1515)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2426  

Part of the Children's Art series

I've written a number of times on this blog on art created by children--actualyl antiquarian children's art, art made by kids from, say, before 1900.  That, and the depiction of kids' art in work by painters through the centuries but before the last one. The second seems to be much more uncommon than the uncommon first category. For many good reasons, artwork made before (an arbitrary) 1900 seems to be fairly scarce, and when you to to <1850, scarcer yet, particularly when you remove the work of the privileged classes.  For the majority of people unused paper was not a common thing, certainly nothing as it is today when you can get a ream of paper for virtually nothing; in the 1850s, a child with access to paper and the means to express themselves on it would certainly have been a restricted minority.  

As a "collector"of sorts of antique art by children most of what I have as doodles and artwork drawn on the blank pages of books, or their covers, or in ledgers,  really more like  kidlife marginalia, expressions of creativity on whatever paper was available.  It seems to me that the majority of kids would not have had much access to these means of production, especially if their major outlet for writing in school was slate and chalk.  Add to this difficulty the fact that the artwork would have to have survived the whims and taste and etc. of four or five and more generations of moves and house cleaning and so on, and the chances of childhood art's survival become thinner and thinner. 

This all comes up again because today for the first time I have seen this fantastic painting by Giovanni Francesco Caroto "Portrait of a Young Boy holding a Child's Drawing" (Ritratto di Fanciullo con Disegno,), painted around 1515. I'm certain that I've never seen any artwork earlier than this and in an article that I saw in The Independent the author claims that this is the first artwork to depict a child's artwork. It is a remarkable thing, seeing this drawing so proudly displayed by the child. Also it is not common to see someone in portraiture at this early stage with such a big toothy smile!  

It is also incredible how in nearly all cases in recovering art by children that they basically look pretty much the same, for thousands of years. Perhaps with the vast majority of children performing artworks they all have about the same facility to reproduce what they were feeling or seeing, and so the continuing historical sameness.  

This is no less than a great classic in the history of art by children.

 

Notes

 

I've researched this painting a little and don't care too much for what I've found in some cases, in the interpretation of the painting--just a little unsettling with an uncomfortable fit. In one instance Harry Angelman, the identifier/discoverer of Angelman's Syndrome¹, saw this painting while in Italy and was much taken with it and associated the child with the children ad the disorders that he was studying.  In other cases there are associations drawn between this painting and Jean Dubuffet's Art Brut, which is another direction that I really don't care for too much.  

1. Angelman Syndrome:  "is a neuro-genetic disorder characterized by severe intellectual and developmental disability, sleep disturbance, seizures, jerky movements (especially hand-flapping), frequent laughter or smiling, and usually a happy demeanor."

For some interesting reading in the history of childhood:   

The classic by Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962)

Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977)

Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983)

 

Graphs of Astronomical Discovery

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post        Reference Series    

This interesting graph of cosmic discovery (and re-discovery) is found in the open pages of Martin Harwitt's Cosmic Discovery, the Search, Scope, and Heritage of Astronomy, Basic Books, 1981 (page 14).  It is an interesting advanced-introductory book which has a number of surprises, including this astro-discovery graph (below). There's another unusual display of historical data in an optical power of telescopes graph,  which plots "Sensitivity improvement over the eye" of telescopes with astronomers and observatories over time, from Galileo to 1980 (and which is found on page 175). They're handy and useful and tell in a quickish glance some parts of the history of astronomy.  

A Simple Map of Possible Intention (1943/3)

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Given my non-existent Spanish skills, the closest I can come to interpreting this tiny pamphlet (published in 1943 and received by the Library of Congress three days before D-Day in 1944 and me in 1998)  is that it was a word of caution.  The warning is obvious--that Yugoslavia was of interest to the Soviet Union--but in 1943 given the state of the war and Yugoslavia being occupied by several Axis forces the concerns of being overtaken by Moscow seem to be way down the to-do list.  The Soviets did provide limited assistance, and they did leave Yugoslavia at teh end of the war, and there was a Communist government established there in 1946--but by 1948 there was a break in relations between it and the USSR, and Yugoslavia attempted to remain non-aligned.  

The map is simplified and very direct, which makes it pretty effective.  Why it was printed in Spanish, I don't know.  

Selling Radium--a LOT of Radium (1925)

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Welcome to this  piece of historical advertisement!  Of all of the many ads I've seen in Nature (spending a fair amount of time in the journal years from 1869-1945) this one (for December 12, 1925) is among the top-percenters causing real pause.  Beginning a few years after its discovery in 1898 (by Marie and Pierre Curie), radium had taken on a life of its own in the public sphere, as being a possible cure for diseases, problematic sexual potential, dull fingernails, luminous watch faces, and such. It entered popular culture and stayed there for decades, right up to being shoveled into firey furnaces that power ant-gravity something-or-there engines in a floating city in a Flash Gordon movie¹, and suffered  itself into the public conscience as a redeemer and restorer of youth².

 [I've written before on radium-lust--here, for example: "Radioactive Suppository Sex Aids & Radium Toothpaste: Shining Lethal Nonsense" in 2010 .]  I hadn't seen an ad however for purchasing the raw material before--let alone 20,000 "tubes" (of undetermined size) of it.  It does make one wonder about storage, and handling.

Evidently the source of the radium was for gunsights of rifles, to illuminate the sight (or scope?) at night, or in the dark. 

“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world." --Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Notes

1. This is from one of the Flash Gordon serials, appearing in 1936.  See here for a good summation and description. 

2. This was a portable pack of a device called "Saratoga Springs" that utilized water and god-knows-what and radium salts into water that the purchaser would consume. This appeared in Popular Science Monthly for June 1929. 

Build Your Own Chemical Slide Rule!

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2425

Well, not a chemical-chemical slide rule/computer, not a biological thing, "just" a push-pull homemade bit cut-out from an article on chemical equivalents from 1814. But very neat, and  a major bit of thinking and articulation for the early 19th century. The original occurs in 1814 in a paper published by the Royal Society in the Philosophical Transaction by the eminent chemist William Wollaston, and a good description of the effort appears on Carmen Giunta's excellent Chemistry Classics site (http://web.lemoyne.edu/giunta/):

“In late 1813 he read a paper [published in 1814] that included an extensive compilation of "equivalent weights" or combining masses (closely related to molar masses) and a sort of chemical slide rule on which the weights were arranged. Wollaston's paper included not only a table of equivalent weights but a summary of data from which he compiled the table, mainly analyses published by other chemists...”

The copy of the slide rule that I'm using here is found in the great encyclopedia by Abraham Rees and which was published a few years later (1818)--its just a sharper copy with different design details than found in the original.

And a photograph of an antiquarian version from the Science Museum (U.K.): 
[Source, #2, below)

Notes:

1. Full text of the 1814 paper:  William Hyde Wollaston, "A Synoptic Scale of Chemical Equivalents," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 104, 1-22 (1814).

Another good article from the Chemical Heritage Foundation (“The Golden Rule”) :http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/media/magazine/articles/29-3-the-golden-rule.aspx

2. And another from the Science Museum (UK) http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/online_science/explore_our_collections/objects/index/smxg-12515

Squares and Squares within Squares in Book Design

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I picked up  Bayard Tuckerman's History of English Prose Fiction (printed in New York City in 1886) part of my Borgesian-Eccoian anti-Library, and found this fantastic design on the free endpaper and pastedown:

 And a close-up, which is about one square inch:

There are about 5000 of these on a 10x6" space, some 15,000 lines.  That's a lot of work in a small space, about 289 squares per square inch.  Tiny.  Impressive.  

Q:  Oh: how many squares and rectangles are there here?  A: a lot.

Great Babies: Baby Einstein, Baby Feynman, Baby Schroedinger, and More

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2425

Here's an interesting set of delightful photographs (and one painting) of some great scientists as babies and kids.  Many of them are obvious, I think, and you can see their developed and mature faces in themselves from very early on.  For example in the first photo is Niels Bohr, his arched eyebrows and halfways-kinda-grin already there at age 4 or 5.  Paul Dirac is gorgeous as a kid and he keeps those eyes throughout his life. The Einstein is an uncommon images, plucking him from a class photo--I guess you can see him in there, somewhere, though it isn't as Einstein-y as some of the other early photos of him where his eyes are just unmistakable.  Feynman looks like Feynman, sly and smart-as-hell; and the impish and sparkling Turing seems as he would be decades on.  On the other hand the fabulous Kurt Goedel baby could be almost anyone--though I have to say it isn't often you see photos with the baby's arm raised.  

Four of these came from a very nice post on exactly this topic at Kuriositas: (http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/10/famous-scientists-as-children.html) though even at the outset there are more science babies and kids together here than I can find elsewhere.  

Niels Bohr, 1890, age about 5. Source: http://www.nbi.ku.dk/english/www/niels/bohr/barndom/

 

Einstein and Fermi Immigration Papers, National Archives

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Below are two immigration reports for Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi--interesting how the Einstein is simply torn away from the loose leaf binder.  

Albert Einstein, Declaration of Intention for Immigration

Source: National Archives: http://research.archives.gov/description/596270

Enrico Fermi

Source: National Archives: http://research.archives.gov/description/281852

A Review of Dirac's Quantum Mechanics (2nd Ed)

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Years ago when I still had a big, open bookstore specializing in books in used/rare physics/maths I had several bookcases dedicated to quantum mechanics. In general I had the standard works and great classics, and few were more "standard" and "classic" at the same time than P.A.M. Dirac's  Principles of Quantum Mechanics.  

[Paul Dirac (1902-1984), in 1907, Image source]

On rare occasions I would have all four editions (the first of 1930 is very scarce and valuable nowadays) but usually there would be editions 2, 3, and 4. In order to respond intelligently to the differences between the editions I went to the library and photocopied reviews of each (this in the pre-intertubeweb days).  Today I managed to bump into the most interesting of the reviews (for the second edition of 1935 and published in the September 14, 1935 issue of Nature) which I reproduce below.  

My Two-Cent Opinion on the Penny and the Diminution of the Number 9

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My friend Jeff Donlan  (who writes a fine and insightful blog, At the Library) cent (ha!) me this  article on the false tyranny of the penny--rather it is about getting rid of the penny, which the author claims has run its course of usefulness, swallowed by the history of economic need for it. Maybe it takes more money to deal with the one-cent piece than it is worth, I don't know--the author of the article goes through that along with a short history of other currencies dumping their minuscule and antiquarian denominations.  

What I wonder about is what happens to the number "9"?

My made-up statistical reference notes that about half of all prices on all the stuff in the U.S. use at least one nine; many use two.  What happens to people excitedly advertising ",..and all your's for only three small payments of $19.99!!!  And what about gasoline prices which are $2.89 and 9/10?  Assuming that we keep the nickel, prices will have to re-adjust to accommodate the five-cent piece, dropping the "9" in millions of prices.  No doubt tens of millions of people will think that prices have been raised across-the-board.  

And what will we do with this enormous surplus of 9s? 

Seriously though why not just get rid of the whole lot of less-than-a-dollar currency?  I know that would be very problematic, but no doubt it there will be less time between the introduction of the penny to its demise than there will be from now to the elimination of all coin-and-paper currency,  After all, in for a penny, in for a pound.  

The Incidental Absurdity of Near-Nothingness

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post     Part of the Unintentional/Incidental Absurdist series

Sometimes there's nothing better in finding the absurdity in quiet mundane than actually finding it, rather than creating it. This is the case with the following images, all of which have a certain flat, blatant, absurd quality to them--for their conversation (or lack of it), poses, stares, direction of vision, and so on.  All of them come from "Maintaining Good Relationships" a chapter in the provocatively-named Tested Selling Methods (1939).  None of the following conversations say very much, and on the face of them (presented without their captions) most are about nothing, or seem to be.  

Women of course are approached differently from the men, almost like children, though mostly salesmen were warned to place women in the position of making decisions for the household.

Seems like good postcard material to me.  

A Picture of the Near-Future: Czechoslovakia, 1938

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This is a picture of the future--the main square, Eger, Czechoslovakia in June 1938, from the page of the Illustrated London News.  It depicts the massive outpouring for two slain Sudeten farmers, supposedly murdered by Czech border guards. If you look a little closely, you'll see that everyone is giving the Nazi salute.  This comes just a few months after the Nazi seizure of Austria in the Anschluss (March 11-13, 1938), and a few months before the Sudetenland was handed away to Hitler in the Munich Agreement (September 29, 1938). Then it would all be over.  

It is a picture of the future--the very near future.  Hitler would be in that same square in a few months, on a "goodwill tour"; the next year he would return as the conqueror. Six years later, the war would be over, and the great figurative majority of the people in this photo would be gone. 

It is a big picture of a big group of people making a big mistake.  

Reading the Floor: Wittgenstein, Vonnegut, Breton

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2423

Never pass the opportunity to pick up a dropped book.  Picking books up from the floor (in bookstores, libraries) has proven to be a definite education for me. It is where I first learned of the name of Ludwig Wittgenstein when I was (picking up the skinny Tractatus... which was not only on the floor but open and upside down, in D.C. in 1974), and the first exposure I had to Kurt Vonnegut (in the old Brentanos in Manhattan in 1969, finding Player Piano), just to name a few.  I know it would be interesting to make a list of all of the good and bad that I've found on the floor, but the lost books are lost to uncaring and neglect of memory.  One that came up just today is Andre Breton's selection of Black Humor--found on the floor of a bookstore I can't remember the name of but was on Rue Milton in Montreal in 1978. This was interesting because even though it was upside down it had an interesting rear cover design--flipped over it became a must-buy.  I'm pretty sure I had heard of Breton at that point but had never read him--and there he was, in an unusual-looking little paperback, waiting for me to buy it for two dollars. I bumped into this old friend this morning, moving a box to get to a pile of the journal Comptes Rendus..., and then losing sight of the Angelo Secchi papers on spectroscopy from 1866 I was supposed to find in favor of looking through the in-the-way box.  And in the bottom of the box was the Breton.

[I like the "i" in "noir" most of all.]

It was a collection of people who wrote wincingly and oddly and funny-bitterly, exposing things with uncomfortable not-sustained laughter.  Breton includes selections form the work of 45 writers, many of which I admit to having never heard of before, and a number of others whose names were under years of braindust, and most of which I cannot read now with my mostly-failed French.  

The book was published in 1940 and was immediately banned by the Petain French State government of occupied and controlled France, the government that was known more familiarly known by the name of the town in which the government's center was in, at Vichy. Breton (1896-1966) escaped France and spent the war in the U.S. and Canada and the Caribbean, but returned to Paris in '46 and saw his anthology (one of his many books) back into print in 1947.  It was re-issued in 1966 (my copy) as the "definitive edition", though I am not sure that it is any different from the two earlier printings.  That's okay, because it was Breton who moved out of Dada to found Surrealism, so he can say what he wants to say while saying it and not saying it.  

Good French or bad, the references are still very useful--so far as I can recall, all of these writers were worth pursuing.  (I left Picasso off the list even though he is represented in the collection because, well, I just don't like or need him.)

I'm certain that Breton would approve of this floor-reading education.  

________

And by the way some give the term "black humor" to Breton.  It is much older than that in the history of medicine, as a bilous, disease-causing agency. (For example, it is found in Shakespeare Love's Labour's Lost i. i. 228   "Besedged with sable coloured melancholie, I did commende the blacke oppressing humour to the most holsome phisicke of thy health-geuing ayre".) It may well be: the OED finds an obscure 1916 reference using the term as it is intended today ("C. V. Stanford & C. Forsyth Hist. Mus. x. 212   They [sc. Russian songs] give utterance to a ‘yearning without hope’... Humour there is. But it is the black humour of the drunken headsman") and then another for 1951.  No mention of anything in the mid-ground.  Perhaps it is the first common usage of the phrase...

The contributors: