JF Ptak Science Books – A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

History of Vacations; The Great Depression and Cowboy Chaps, 1934

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The Depression didn’t stop professional theorists from working
on the issue of what people should do with what was seen as the impending
explosion of leisure time. Arthur Pack (The
Challenge of Leisure, 1934) for example wondered about the impact of free-ish
time and the implementation of “constructive leisure”. Walter Lippmann worried
about the impact of “commercialized pleasures” rather than those that were
creative and involving an idea. Still,
in 1934, the ideas of leisure and pleasure as institutions were a distant,
deeply fuzzy notion to most Americans.

In 1935 the Depression in the U.S.(which started with the
October Crash of 1929) had bottomed out, the worst of it all behind us (except
for the recession of 1937). Industrial
production was coming back (it had fallen about 45% by 1932), home building was
making a rebound (coming around from an 80% drop in 1932 and after 274,000
people had been evicted in 1933), the bank failures had stabilized (having
reached about a 40% failure rate in 1933), and the unemployment rate had “fallen”
to 20% (following a 3% rate in 1929 and a 25% high in 1934). In 1932 the corporate profit rate had dropped
90% as had the value of the stock market, industrial production was off by about
half, immigration had fallen to one-tenth of its 1929 figures, and over two
million people were roaming around the country, forced from farms or homes,
seeking destiny in trucks loaded with all of their possessions, walking, or
riding the rails.

But that doesn’t mean that the other segments of the
American economy, those happy and personally unaffected in the Depression,
couldn’t remain so: there was money and
money to be spent, and spent well in the dwindling power of the mid 1930’s
dollar, the purchasing power of the wealthy growing as the economy declined.

Which brings us to this pamphlet for Flaming-Arrow dude
ranch and the kids outfitted in the high, big-chaps fashion of thin-lipped,
vocabularily-challenged cowboy stars of the 30’s matinee. But by Neptune’s
soggy trousers, the kid on the front cover just looks so wrong—historical placement
and societal understanding aside. Kids were
sent to Flaming-Arrow (“for the discriminating family”) near Bozeman to spend the
summer in a “semi-military” fashion, comforted in fine cabins with first-class appointments,
all for about $395 for eight weeks. That
figure would have been out of reach for a great majority of Americans (the average
income at this point for a family having fallen to about $1500 a year), costing
about a quarter of all family yearly money.

I’m not so sure why this cover is so disturbing to me—maybe it
is just something so simple as the war between the enjoyed leisure time of people
with money and the enforced unpleasant leisure time of the unemployed and unmonied.

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Title Page Art, Beautiful
Welsh Mining Boys and Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier”

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I came across this pamphlet this morning and it reminded
immediately of George Orwell’s description of Northern
England mining life in his work The Road to Wigan Pier. Not that the (1946) pamphlet wasn’t arresting
on its own—particularly the “boys” part, which actually doesn’t identify an age
more than a period of time (“the time for leaving school”). The pamphlet makes a good, strong recruiting

effort for younger blood in one of the most demanding harsh-environment jobs on
the globe–which is a tough thing to do, as these kids would be married to
short handled shovels, moving earth and coal deep underground in a foul-air
enclosure if they signed on.

“There is a hint of mystery about a colliery” the pamphlet
states, but doesn’t explain, though several of the photos of working miners
must certainly have slapped a bit of reality into the mind of the reader. Being a miner was bitter-tough, but if this
is what your work landscape was composed of, and this is what your father did,
I guess that this is the life you got used to, familiar with, as time wore down
mining’s “mysterious” edges.

Miners performed amazing tasks of physical endurance and
mental acuity in a tediously difficult and unhealthy endlessly-challenging surrounding. Deep underground.

It was in The Road to Wigan Pier that Orwell may have
reached his highest heights of social insight and reporting—particularly in
bringing out the conditions of the working poor and the psychology, morality
and neurosis of unemployment.. But it is
his description of the miner’s environment that stays in my head. Orwell observes that the 7.5 hour shift
miners would only being their workday once they had arrived at their particular
station—and as Orwell beautifully points out, miners had to “travel” to their
work zone once they arrived in the mine.
Some of these commutes were 90 minutes or more, each way—most were
moving at least a half-hour before getting to
the point where their day would being.
It was a crouching, spine-slashing, knee-crunching scramble through
dark, sharp areas not four feet high, interrupted by crawling through smaller
spaces…and always with your head up so that you could see where you were
going. It was a whole new set of muscles
that you had to develop for this travel…and then, after that, then you went to
work.

As Orwell writes:

“You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a
few hundred yards. You start off, stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery,
eight or ten feet wide and about five high, with the walls built up with slabs
of shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire. Every yard or two there are
wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders have buckled
into fantastic curves under which you have to duck. Usually it is bad going
underfoot—thick dust or jagged chunks of shale, and in some mines where there
is water it is as mucky as a farm-yard….

A page later:

“At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a
joke that soon wears off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but
when the roof falls to four feet or less it is a tough job for anybody except a
dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend double, you have also got to keep
your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders and dodge them
when they come. You have, therefore, a constant crick in the neck, but this is
nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs. After half a mile it becomes (I
am not exaggerating) an unbearable agony. You begin to wonder whether you will
ever get to the end—still more, how on earth you are going to get back. Your
pace grows slower and slower. You come to a stretch of a couple of hundred
yards where it is all exceptionally low and you have to work yourself along in
a squatting position. Then suddenly the roof opens out to a mysterious
height—scene of and old fall of rock, probably—and for twenty whole yards you
can stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this there is another
low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams which you have to
crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a relief after the
squatting business. But when you come to the end of the beams and try to get up
again, you find that your knees have temporarily struck work and refuse to lift
you. You call a halt, ignominiously, and say that you would like to rest for a
minute or two. Your guide (a miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles
are not the same as his. ‘Only another four hundred yards,’ he says encouragingly;
you feel that he might as well say another four hundred miles. But finally you
do somehow creep as far as the coal face. You have gone a mile and taken the
best part of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than twenty minutes.
Having got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get your strength
back for several minutes before you can even watch the work in progress with
any kind of intelligence.

“Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are
already tired out but because the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill.
You get through the low places at the speed of a tortoise, and you have no
shame now about calling a halt when your knees give way. Even the lamp you are
carrying becomes a nuisance and probably when you stumble you drop it;
whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams becomes more
and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck. You try walking head
down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Even the miners bang their backbones fairly often. This is the reason
why in very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half naked, most of
the miners have what they call ‘buttons down the back’—that is, a permanent
scab on each vertebra. When the track is down hill the miners sometimes fit
their clogs, which are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails and slide
down. In mines where the ‘travelling’ is very bad all the miners carry sticks
about two and a half feet long, hollowed out below the handle. In normal places
you keep your hand on top of the stick and in the low places you slide your
hand down into the hollow. These sticks are a great help, and the wooden
crash-helmets—a comparatively recent invention— are a godsend. They look like a
French or Italian steel helmet, but they are made of some kind of pith and very
light, and so strong, that you can take a violent blow on the head without
feeling it. When finally you get back to the surface you have been perhaps
three hours underground and travelled two miles, and you, are more exhausted
than you would be by a twenty-five-mile walk above ground. For a week
afterwards your thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a difficult
feat; you have to work your way down in a peculiar sidelong manner, without
bending the knees. Your miner friends notice the stiffness of your walk and
chaff you about it. (‘How’d ta like to work down pit, eh?’ etc.) Yet even a
miner who has been long away front work—from illness, for instance—when he
comes back to the pit, suffers badly for the first few days.

And the first paragraph of chapter 3:

“When the miner comes up from the pit his face is so pale
that it is noticeable even through the mask of coal dust. This is due to the
foul air that he has been breathing, and will wear off presently. To a
Southerner, new to the mining districts, the spectacle of a shift of several
hundred miners streaming out of the pit is strange and slightly sinister. The
exhausted faces, with the grime clinging in all the hollows, have a fierce,
wild look. At other times, when their faces are clean, there is not much to
distinguish them from the rest of the population. They have a very upright
square-shouldered walk, a reaction from the constant bending underground, but
most of them are shortish men and their thick ill-fitting clothes hide the
splendour of their bodies. The most definitely distinctive thing about them is
the blue scars on their noses. Every miner has blue scars on his nose and
forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which the air
underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over it and forms
a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is. Some of the older men have
their foreheads veined like Roquefort cheeses from this cause.”

Now THAT is some good observation and reporting. Orwell did a spectacular job in relating the
viciously difficult jobs done by these thousands of outstanding men.

Notes for Reading on Orwell

Crick, Bernard.. George Orwell: a life. London : Secker and Warburg, 1981.

Davison, Peter. George Orwell: a literary life. London: Macmillan, 1996.

Pearce, Robert. Revisiting Orwell’s Wigan Pier. History 82: 267 pp. 410-424

Rodden, John.. The politics of literary reputation: the making and claiming

of ‘St. George’ Orwell. New York/Oxford , 1989.

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Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Weird Questions and Weirder Answers Department: Curing Insanity

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Dr. C. Sterling Cooly wrote an incredibly-titled pamphlet of slim means called Should Insanity be Cured? How could anyone proceed further than this? Dr. Cooley wasn’t a eugenic apologist, nor was he an accountant for a life insurance firm—he was advocating a drugless cure for all different sorts of “insanity”, which was a term he doesn’t really stop to identify and classify, which of course is deeply problematic.

Or it is so until you hear how one can treat the insane via his new drugless method: chiropractic. I didn’t see that one coming. “An insane mind is a sick brain, a sick body is an insane body” writes Dr. Cooley with leading confidence, claiming that chiropractic can release “the power within…marvels of healing are performed not only in mental cases but in virtually ALL forms of disease”. That’s a lot to live up to in theory, let alone in practice.

Dr. Cooley was evidently a deeply important founder father of modern chiropractic, with a 50 year career in the area (1908-1957), and who was also very prolific–this is one work that he probably should’ve edited out of the publishing phase.

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Outsider Logic
Big Mathematics 1816: Manuscript Notes and Found Math Art

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In my science bookstore business one of my principle interests is antique manuscript notebooks in the sciences. It is a pleasure to see someone working through a problem, or finding what the writer thought to be the most interesting point in a lecture on a particular subject, and to read the occasional doodles and see the timely gloss every now and then. I’ve had notebooks from an advanced and very careful student for a course given by the great Robert Bunsen that was filled with hundreds of pages of what the master was trying to communicate to his pupils.

There’s also a series of notebooks from the spectacular period of Cornell physics history (1948-1949), including 6 notebooks of classes with Richard Feynman, including several hundred pages from his 1948/9 course in advanced quantum mechanics, which included (a very early) use of the Feynman diagrams. The thing that makes these observant, advanced notes taken during Feynman’s classes have more than a pedagogical interest (which is substantial and enough on its own)—they have a capacity to show the logic behind the man’s thinking and how he presented his ideas over a period of some months. Also, and curiously, notebooks like these seem to have not survived.

Then there’s the notebooks taken by the team of Charlotte and Fritz John when they were pursing doctoral degrees at Goettingen (1929-1933), until forced to leave with the enforcement of the Nazi laws against non-Aryans. Goettingen happened (and happens) to be the seat of a long, great mathematical heritage, home of Felix Klein, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert and Bernhard Riemann (among many others). The notebooks—some two linear feet of them—represented four years of advanced interactions with some of the finest mathematical minds in Germany. I was told by Mrs. John that they were required to take such full notes—but let me tell you, these notebooks were typed transcriptions of the daily handwritten notes, compiled over the course of a class, and then bound. They are beautiful, and go far beyond my concept of “required”. Mrs. John told me the story of the class notes that she and Dr. John took while taking a course with the great Hermann Weyl (who had taken his doctorate under the iconic David Hilbert, and who was also forced to flee Goettingen because his wife was Jewish): everyone of course was required to take extensive notes during the day and work on them during the night, turning them in the following day for appraisal. She told me that she still vividly remember placing their notes on a long wooden table at the front of the class, and then picking that set of note up the next day. After a month of this, she, said, they became convinced that Weyl was not looking at the notes at all, as everything seemed always to be in the spot that they left it in. One week they decided to see if the notes were being moved, and placed a hair carefully on the interior page, reasoning that if the notes were reviewed, the hair would be gone. For a week, the hairs stayed in place. “And so, what did that mean to you?”

Mrs. John replied that it really didn’t mean anything, and that they continued to do the notes as they would, and leave them on the long wooden table. They never slacked off (which I can fully imagine). She said that they did it for themselves, of course, but also they did it for Dr. Weyl, fully expecting that the day that they missed handing in their notes would be the day that they were looked for by Dr. Weyl. Plus they were studying with a famous and fabulous thinker, and did not want to disappoint themselves or their instructor.

I do enjoy the historic or significant material like this, but I also quite the naïve, homegrown, elementary manuscript attempts by children at doing math or understanding physics. Cipher books have always been a little hard to find in my field, wit many of them (I think) winding up in the genealogy area), and they just don’t seem to be very much on the findable side of things anymore.

The example I’ve reproduced here are from an anonymous (but dated 1818) work on different elementary areas of mathematics. What makes this special to me is the precision of the penmanship and the extreme effort that is being used for a simple display of division. It would certainly convey the message if the author had used two five-figure numbers to display division rather than these enormous, never-to-be-encountered numbers.

Surely there were pages and pages of scrap used to get to this point as the operator machined his numbers down, showing us the result rather than the real process. But what is left to us in this effort is a thing of considerable beauty—the found art of practicing elementary math.

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Anniversary and Thank You

A small bit of news: this blog has just received its 250,000th visitor, far more than I ever thought possible. The milestone comes on my 599th day of blogging and 757th post, some 400,000 words and 4,000 images or so after this all first started in February 2008. My thanks to everyone who has taken the time to stop by. This has been an enormous amount of fun, and I’m so very happy that someone is out there enjoying it.

I must also thank my brilliant, beautiful and always interesting wife, Patti Digh, who encouraged me to actually start writing and whose constant support and help has been the great difference for me in keeping this blog going. MMB.

*Patti is a professional writer and speaker and has a number of blogs of her own, including the very widely popular 37days.

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Uncategorized
Skeleton of the Sun and Sky: Henry Van de Velde pre-Abstract Art, 1884

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I wonder if Henry van de Velde (1863-1957) as one of the earliest people to paint what he saw as an x-ray of the stuff of existence. His artwork, “Sun at Ocean (Rhythmic Synthesis”) which I found in Werner Hoffman’s Turning Points in Twentieth century Art, 1890-1917 and which was executed in 1888/9, looks to me to be absolutely incredible

for its time, a nearly non-representational, proto-abstract something, done three decades before these genres came into being.

His representation of known objects seems to be nearly, completely, removed—what we have left here is the representation, or impression, of the subject of the painting. We can see the sky and sun and ocean there still, but just barely: their representation in skeletal form shows us the bare bones of the world, like a pre-X-Ray X-Ray (which didn’t come around until the very ready and able Wilhelm Roentgen bumped into it in the winter of 1895).

It is hard to think of how unusual this artwork would’ve been, even given some historical consulting. The Impressionists, who had crept up into the artworld existence to their first show in 1874, were seen as being a radical, revolutionary, avant garde movement. Their reception was not a cordial one, as they were threatening the established order of the instructionally-regulated world of art that had stood for centuries. Van de Velde’s work was far outside of Impressionism, or at least it would seem so to me, making it more radical still.

I’m not sure where van de Velde’s work stands in the history of Modernism (ca. 1875-1916, when virtually very major discipline encountered massive change). It doesn’t seem to be a prototype for abstract art, which doesn’t seem to have precedents in the 19th century outside of found-art in mathematics of the fourth dimension. This new world of art seems to begin suddenly in 1907 with the work of Braque and Picasso, and then Marcel Duchamp, and Nayral (1910) and Gris (1911), followed by many others including Gleizes and Marcoussis and Metzinger and Villon (all in 1912). The Impressionists on the other hand have a very rich history of impressionistic works leading up to their major debut in 1874: like Courbet’s “Portrait of Baudelaire” (1848/50), or Cezanne’s “Man with a Blue Cap” (1865), or Bourdin’s “Cloud Study” (ca. 1859), on Monet’s “Still Life” (1859, with the disappearing bread), or Degas’ “Semiarmis…” (1861) or Pissarro’s “The Road” (1864), or the glorious modern self portrait of Cezanne done in 1865. There are many others.

Van de Velde’s art leaves me puzzled, probably because I really don’t know about the painting phase of his life (an activity he gave up in 1892); probably because I just don’t know enough, and am not art scholar. I don’t know why this isn’t significant, unless, of course, the work was not seen, or was unknown, or was simply rejected.

But that still leaves us with the artwork itself: a skeleton. Scaffolding. Stage setting. Fragments of the remaining object. Simplification: a rediscovery of the material of the world reduced to its barest essentials, to a geometrical simplicity of nothing but lines, dashes, suggesting a larger form. It is the amount of weight in the “suggestion” of form that makes this work so incredible—up to this time, I think, there weren’t any other works of art where so much was open to interpretation, and so much of the optical characteristics of the subject had been removed. (Rodin’s statue of Balzac, showing the author seemingly ripping himself from his stone, was much hated when it was shown in 1897, the “unfinished” parts seen as ugly and crude by many. This would seem a good example of the weight of suggested form in pre-20th century art.)

1889. Decades before Malevich, Rodchenko, Balla, Severini, Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Klee, Kandinsky. (And Mondrian, the biggest question mark for me and greatest possible inheritor of this work.) I just don’t get it where van de Velde “went”. He did go on to a terrific career in design and architecture in worlds outside of this effort; I just don’t know what happened to “Sky and Sea’…maybe Henry just didn’t like itpreferring his gorgeous nouveau design motifs. After all, he survived this artwork by almost 70 years (!), and perhaps he laid it aside as a youthful flourish. As I said, I really don’t know.

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Art History — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Perception
Visionaries, Ice People, and the Marriage of Stupid and Brutal.

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The ‘twenties is know as the “speed” decade—everything was
going faster, increasing its speed, expanding to the limit: this was true for the ability to communicate
via telephone, the appearance of commercial radio, the great increase in the
speed of trains and planes and automobiles; the music was fast, the movies were
talking.

There are many iconic images relating speed and the roaring twenties—generally
though this spectacular cover for Otto Willi Gail’s Mit Raketenkraft ins
Weltenal…vom Feurerwagen zum Raumschiff (1928) is much less frequently seen, though it
certainly does get the message across.
Otto Gail was a creative German science fact and science fiction writer
with a strong background in following the scientific and technical
accomplishment in rocketry of the age, especially the works of Max Valier¹ and Hermann
Oberth². Raketenkraft was more a peek into the future and pop techy work for
kids than a straight-out scifi novel like his The Moon Stone, which was a story
that brought us Atlantis, space travel and hidden ancient culture in the
underground Ice World.

It’s the unfortunate Ice World that attracts my attention
around Gail, swimming around his interesting and tech-involved scifi world like a
melting and failing Moon made of hundred-year NYC garbage scows, the idea of a
good engineer-turned-trash cosmologist named Hans Horbiger, whose ideas wound
up being whispered into the ears of many monsters. Horbiger had some sort of
vision-dream about stuff in 1894 and spent the next 30+ years fleshing out the idea,
which sounds bad from the very start when the author admits to finding “Newton wrong”. Anyway without losing too many minutes
thinking about this time-hole, Horbiger’s theory worked ice up to being the
primary and primordial ingredient of all processes in the universe, with ice
planets circled by ice moons, and some sort of gooey ice ether to make it all
go ‘round. Oh yes: there were superior ice people living in the interior of the
earth. Horbiger died in 1931, but his many
followers managed to work the theory into a presentable Jewish-baiting
anti-relativity Deutsche Physik form
for the new government of Adolph Hitler in 1933, and it was there that his
ideas took hold in the cancerous Himmler and Hitler and others, a happy
marriage at last, the ridiculous to the unspeakable. I’m not sure where the
ice people are today, but I did saw some awful History Channel show that
stated that Hitler never did die in the bunker and was removed by submarine to
the interior ice people of earth, flying around the insides of our globe “in a
UFO”.

And so I associate poor Gail (1896-1956) with the Horbiger
mess, and not his good work in science reporting and popularization. So it goes.

The other thing that you can say about Horbiger—he had a
full-out behemothian mustache. That’s
about it.

Notes

1. Valier seems to have been the first person killed in a rocket-related incident, blistered by his exploding rocket-car.

2. Oberth is another one of those Germans working at Peenemunde (along with Wernher von Braun and a great host of others) trying to kill as many people in the UK as possible who wound up in Huntsville, working for our government. It is all so problematic. It is interesting that there is little in the Air and Space Museum (as part of the Smithsonian system) that mentions von Braun. He is burioed in a simple grave in a cemetery next door to a Jewish cemetery in Alexandria , Virginia. I also remember going to some restaurant in the diamond district that, in very high bad taste, served up a beer called the Wernher von Brown–von Braun certainly had his hands covered in Jewish blood at least to the wrists, and to have a product so stupidly named as that in that place was just one of those impossible things that happen every day.

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The Overworked Working Poor of 1914: Women and Children and What They Didn’t Get Paid

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An income of $10,000 dollars a year, in the Depression year
of 1936, was a huge, fabulous fortune, controlling a major buying power for
food and cars and housing. (A fine brick
home for the solid middle class family of five would’ve cost well less than the 10K
per year—which means that this 1936 income would correlate somewhat to a 300,000/year income in 2009 dollars so far as buying power goes.) Unfortunately the author of
this pamphlet directed it at doctors who could supplement or insure their
income by selling their patients the pamphlet’s products: “Anabolic Food Products”, a quacky vitamin
supplement that evidently had really little use except to expand the
income.

This reminded me of another pamphlet from a slightly earlier
period on the over-worked working poor. Report
to the Louisiana State Commission to Study the Conditions
of Working Women and Children… (published in 1914), chronicled the averages incomes
more so than the conditions of their work—and the statistical package was
simply not a pretty story. Reading through the
numbers hammered home how far away and mountainous $10,000 a year meant.

That big bump in the bar graph for factory wages shows that
the most frequent average weekly wage for women and children was about $3.75, with about a quarter of all of those
polled workers making less than that, and about half making 5.00 a week or so.
Multiply those figures by 52 and they don’t come out to much—specifically, they
don’t really approach the average income for a worker in the U.S. in 1914,
which was about $650 a year. It looks
like only 10% or so of all of these workers met this standard of $12.50 per
week. And this was for factory workers—things
get worse for most all other types of jobs—except for workers at a telephone
exchange (and that wouldn’t last for very long).

The conclusions the pamphlet reached are inescapable: “we can arrive at but one conclusion, namely:
that no matter what are the causes determining wages, the earnings of women in
industry are exceedingly low in a great many cases, and scarcely enough for
subsistence……the striking facts is that nearly three-fourths of all women in
industry are between 18 to 35 years of age, meaning that they are spending the
best years of their lives …at the lowest rate of wages…”

In 2009 women are still paid less than men–about 77-cents on the dollar less. Generally speaking the U.S. now imports most of its child labor produced goods–out of sight, out of mind.

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Statistics–Fossil, Found, Odd, Forgotten
Going from “Nothing” to Everything in a Few Years: Einstein at the Solvay Conference, 1911

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By “nothing” I mean Einstein’s relative “nothing” of early
1905 compared to the rest of the hard-working, Ph.D. laden physics field in the
major universities of Germany. And
certainly Einstein was nothing and somewhat nowhere in this regard just prior
to his momentous year of 1905*, scrounging around the fringes of the academic
world, working as a patent examiner, trying to get his doctorate hammered out
and accepted.

Then come the summer of 1905, and the dates June 9, July 18, September 26 and November 21—the publication
dates of his four papers in the Annalen der Physik, and with them a new epoch
in the history of physics, a true modernizing, revolutionary effect takes
place.

But Einstein quietly gets his dissertation accepted (and his
degree confirmed in January 1906 from the University of Zurich), and his revolution
is started, absolutely certain of his results, but privately worried about
whether all of it would be as beautiful as Newton ’s theories. The ball is forever set in
motion. And to make a little extra
money, Einstein takes a private student for instruction at the end of the
year. He is 26 years old.

The odd thing (although not odd when explained by Abraham
Pais in any of his three books relating to Einstein) is that Einstein would
remain at the patent office for another four years, though he is promoted to
second class expert in 1907. Einstein
does become a private college lecturer in 1908, but stays with the patent
office until October 1909 (even though he is awarded his first honorary
doctorate in July from the University of Geneva) when he begins work as an
associate prof for theoretical physics at Zurich.

Things speed up for Einstein from this point, and he is
suddenly and rightfully acknowledged as being one of the most important
thinkers in the field of physics in the world by being invited to the
ultra-exclusive Solvay Conference for theoretical physics in 1911. (By the time of the conference, Einstein
had been a professor at the German University in Prague, in 1910.) At 32
he is the youngest person there, surrounded by some of the best minds in the
business.

[Invited attendees for the 1911
Solvay Conference at the Hotel Metropole. included Seated
(L-R): W. Nernst, M.
Brillouin, E. Solvay, H.
Lorentz, E. Warburg, J. Perrin, W. Wien,
M. Curie,
and H. Poincaré. Standing (L-R): R. Goldschmidt, M. Planck,
H.
Rubens, A. Sommerfeld, F. Lindemann, M. de Broglie, M.
Knudsen, F. Hasenöhrl, G. Hostelet, E. Herzen, J.H. Jeans, E.
Rutherford, H. Kamerlingh Onnes, A.
Einstein and P. Langevin.]

Einstein is evidently not moved by the proceedings, writing
that he had heard “nothing new”, at least at the formal meetings. The conference was for a full week,but since
everyone was staying at the same hotel (which would’ve been a pretty potent
address for that week) I assume that a lot was discussed in private—evidently Einstein
was extremely quiet during the official proceedings, but became animated in
private, post-conference conversations.

My point for this post, really, is quite simple—the extraordinary
academic rise in Einstein’s fortunes during the 1909-1911 period, captured in
this famous photo. Einstein was a bona fide powerhouse (the powerhouse) by this point, what with
his revolutionary 1905 papers, plus the blockbusters of 1906, 1908 and 1911,
and still yet getting stronger. (Incidentally, I always wondered about Einstein’s
hand position in photos like this, showing one hand seemingly forming a neat
zero with index and thumb. Actually, that hand is in the same position for this
photo and for the other Solvay Conferences that Einstein attended (the 2^nd,
5^th and 6^th)—the mystery for me was solved by my friend
Dr. Raymond Cooper, who pointed out to me that it was just Einstein holding his
pipe.

*It really is hard to overstate the importance of Einstein’s
efforts in this year. Really.

The four papers in volume 17 of the Annalen der Physik:

–Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes
betreffenden heuristishen Gesichtspunkt, (“On a Heuristic Point of View
concerning the Production and Transformation of Light.”) being the photoelectricity/quantum
of light paper, received March 18 and published June 9.

–Die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von
in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen, (“On the Movement of
Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic
Theory of Heat”), being the Brownian
Motion of particles/atomic theory paper, received May 11, published
July 18.

–Elektrodynamic bewegter Körper, (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving
Bodies”), being the special relativity theory paper,. received
June 30 and published 26 September.

–Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieeinhalt
abhängig? (“Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon Its Energy Content?”),
being the mass-energy equivalence paper (and the kernel of E=mc²),
received September 27 and published November 21.

A List of the Solvay Conferences (the number, followed by
its year, a translation of the title of the conference, and the conference
chair):

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Physics — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Missing Body for a Famous Head: Ernest Solvay at the Solvay Conference, 1911

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Blank and Missing People, #54 (Continued from yesterday’s post.)

I wonder who the missing man is in this photograph of the
great 1911 Solvay Conference on Physics?
Ernest Solvay (1838-1922), a wealthy industrialist who funded the event,
was absent when this photo was made, but is certainly pictured here, seated
between Brillouin and Lorentz. If you
look closely you can see that M. Solvay’s head is far larger than it should be,
the result of a poor paste-up of a darkroom artist who fit Solvay’s head over
the torso of a sit-in for the sponsor. I
wonder who this bow-tied fellow was, and what he was thinking about sitting
there in the midst of such high-caliber intellectual firepower.

Invited attendees for the 1911
Solvay Conference at the Hotel Metropole. included Seated
(L-R): W. Nernst, M.
Brillouin, E. Solvay, H.
Lorentz, E. Warburg, J. Perrin, W. Wien,
M. Curie,
and H. Poincaré. Standing (L-R): R. Goldschmidt, M. Planck,
H.
Rubens, A. Sommerfeld, F. Lindemann, M. de Broglie, M.
Knudsen, F. Hasenöhrl, G. Hostelet, E. Herzen, J.H. Jeans, E.
Rutherford, H. Kamerlingh Onnes, A.
Einstein and P. Langevin.

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JF Ptak

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of
The Telescope in Galileo’s Hands: the Expansion of the Universe, 1610
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It bothers me how
long people had access to something like a telescope and used it as a toy, or a
contrivance, or as an insurance tool or a gear in the machine of war before the
instrument made its ways into Galileo’s mind.
There are many rivalries for the term of “inventor” of the telescope,
with descriptions of undoubtedly very primitive telescopes going back to
Egyptian and Arabian legend, to Chaucer, to Roger Bacon’s “glasses or
diaphanous bodies”, to the theoretical accomplishments of Thomas Digges and
terrestrial interests of Dr. John Dee. These investigations no doubt made their
influence in the development of the telescope, but seem minor compared to great
strides made in 1608, when the telescope seemed to be everywhere (at least in
Germany and Holland and Italy and France) in advanced development. But particular high distinction goes to Holland, with Jan Lippershey and James Metius who
(was it in 1608?) filed petitions for the exclusive rights to sell their
instruments for seeing things at a distance.

But still, people
were still not actually pointing these instruments “up”—and then there was a
class of aristocrats and well-do-dos who were shown these optical tools as toys
and pastimes. But all of this changed monumentally
when news of the telescope came to Galileo’s attention in May 1609—by August 29
he had fabricated one of superior quality and effect (three diameters and nine times
larger), though the first public demonstration was used to spot ships’ sails
over an horizon that was invisible to the naked eye. By 1610 he had produced his fifth and most
powerful telescope, allowing things one thousand times closer, which he
instantly used and made enormous discoveries of such significance that they are
hard to understand today in the context of early 17^th century
knowledge.

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 Galleon
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”).

All of this was
published in his fantastic Sidereus
Nuncius on March 4, 1610—extraordinarily, the very title page¹ of the book
proclaiming some of the great discoveries of Galileo’s adventure. Of course there was also his investigations
of the Milky Way and the impossible discovery of four new “planets” (moons) around
Jupiter, and the disruption of the happy belief in a smooth and luminous
Moon.

It is difficult today to estimate the impact Galileo’s
innovation and the subsequent (and immediate) publication of Sidereus had on society. The challenges to long-defined orthodoxy and
the bending of theological constraints (though the church would have its turn
on Galileo later); expanding the size and scope of the universe, applying mathematics
to the study of physics, understanding the physics of motion, developing the
telescope and the microscope and other precision physical instruments, are all
such deeply important changes that it is difficult to resize them in terms of
21^st century advancement.

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.”
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Astronomy