JF Ptak Science Books Post 2768
Here's one of those languid, curling, endless river bends research stories that takes you totally away from where you wanted/needed to go. After a chat with my friend Eric that involved conspiratorial otherworlders I had the idea of checking out some other other-minded folks who I would normally never consult for some possible angle I might have missed in a long-simmering research topic. I've been looking in bits and pieces for the first publication of the world's most famous equation, E=mc^2: as it turns out this is not a trivial question. I'm not talking about the idea of mass-energy equivalence, but the appearance of equation that everyone on the planet knows. The first derivation that appeared in Einstein's 1905 paper would not be recognizable as such by a general reader, nor would many of the others. The first appearance of E=mc^2 under Einstein's name after some considerable digging is in 1946 (!), in the inaugural issue of Science Illustrated; withina few months the equation appeared in the upper level of an atomic bomb mushroom cloud on the cover of Time magazine...but that all is another and more complicated story.
Anyway my idea was to look at some anti-Einstein-relativity books to see what I might be missing, and in a short time I found a reference to the equation and Gustave Le Bon in a 1914 issue of the Comptes Rendus. Luckily I have that run, and so I checked out the paper--it did not contain the equation, of course, though it did have some references to him claiming to have had the idea of mass-energy equivalence in a series of papers published in Revue Scientifique (Rose) int eh early 1900s to 1905. I decided to check these out to because, with luck again, I have these down in the studio.
Le Bon is an interesting/odd guy, who may or may not have been the great polymath he played in his script in life, though he was formidable enough to be considered for the Nobel Prize in 1903. So I worked from 1888 forward in the Revue (called "Rose" because the wrappers each weekly came in were rose colored) and bumped into Le Bon quite a bit. The man was interested in everything, and traveled to those ends to meet his curiosity. In one paper in 1892 he wrote on the origins of the arts of India (as he also happened to be a pioneer anthropologist), and I saw that the article proceeding it was in an area I was working in for a customer relating to the planet Mars. (This was by Norman Lockyer, editor of Nature, who wrote on Mars and it canals, canali, the "canals" part of their interpretation mightily disapproved-of by the old gent.) The Lockyer referenced something in I was actually looking for, an article by Henri Jules Perrotin (in the same journal but in 1888) who wrote of his observations of the planet, happily reporting that he did find the at-that-time-evasive canals, but also noted the disappearance of a Martian continent under what he suspected might be periodic "flooding". Anyway on the return to the Lockyer I went too far and with great satisfaction found the following drawing:
That was quite a wide turn--anti-Einstein, where the hell is E=mc^2?, Gustave Le Bon's 1905 A-bomb, Lockyer's review of how to communicate with Martians, Perrotin's disappearing continents--to get to this lovely drawing, no? It was almost worth it! This lovely thing (and oh to be able to render this in 3-D!) appeared in an article on a new application of photography to the surveying art/craft, M. Laussedat's "Historique de l'Application de la Photographie au Lever des Plans", November 5 1892. Its an interesting article, and two of the illustrations for are excellent pieces of art, in and out of context:
I know that was a long way to drag the reader to share two drawings, but I needed to get rid of the story...
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