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.

Women Meat Pioneers, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 570

(Science Book Blog)

This simply irresistible, charmingly uncomfortable, and semi-surreal title is an excellent example of what I’ve come to know (and forget) in my career of doing whatever it is I’m doing. Generally though the thousand or so titles in my Naive Surreal collection belong to pamphlets and the occasional book, but the occasional advertisement makes its way into the fray. (None really come quite close to the work of the immortal Otto Fleiss, who produced America’s greatest work on making art with fat, White Art in the Meat Food Business. A Practical Handbook for
Butcher, Pork Stores, Restaurants, Hotels and Delicatessens on How to
Make Lasting and Transferable White Art Decorations out of Bacon Fat
Back for Window Displays, Ornaments on Meat Food Cold Buffets and for
Exhibits and Advertising Purposes. Enrich yourself with Personal
Knowledge. It is a toweringly fantabulous work, and is one of this blog’s most-viewed posts.)

This ad is innocent enough: appearing in the 1 November 1943 issue of LIFE magazine, it was simply encouraging the modern housewife to go adventuring into cuts of meat that had been deemed unacceptable before rationing and the war, which brought about a meat drought. (The Brits had a far worse time–this issue of LIFE also contained a photo of a leggy London showgirl posing with a “real lemon” which was being raffled off to raise hundreds of pounds for the general welfare.)

I’m sorry to say that this image reminded me of an older, finer, more whimsical but far more damning and stern woodcut. The two aren’t terribly-well related, I know, but as I shocked myself in being able to locate it I’m bound to use it now before it slips back into my misty print purgatory.

This image is probably the work of Georg Pencz and appeared in Hans Sachs’ Nachred das grewlihc laster...published in Nuremberg in 1535 The booklet was a work directed against the evils of libel and lying and spreading rumor. Pencz’ woodcut personified all of this wrapped up in the form of a vice-charmed woman.

The libel-charged rumor-mongre woman (watched from under a tree by a poet who is protected from her by a fellow with an imperial seal and stanchion) is outfitted with very feathery wings and a crowned seat on a collection of snakes. She carries a lidded pot, an offering of some sort, while she hides a knife behind her back with her other hand. She advances with a breast barred and another breast vut and bleeding, while she tugs along in her wake a ball and chain, which sets her traveled path on fire. All-in-all, Pencz paints a dismal picture of womanhood.

As I said, it has little to do with the original image of a Pioneer Meat Woman, but they sort of looked similar in my memory.

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Locating Chaos: Giovanni Della Porta’s Natural Magic and Chaos in the Sky

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 571

Giovani Baptista della Porta was a magus, or a natural
magician*, who searched nature for similarities that would serve to build a
broad template of forced understanding of seeming likenesses, looking for the great connector
in the exceptional and the unusual, the stuff outside of the formerly
Aristotlean world. Natural Magic is his magnum opus, an expansion of its earlier
version (Magna naturalis) published in Latin in 1558, which Porta expanded to twenty sections in 1589. It was an encyclopedic work of vast proportions, a
gold-mine of information and clever wishfulness, and very accessible due to
Porta’s wide inter-personal travel**,
very wide reading and critical abilities, clear reasoning and deep vision: the book was hugely successful, going into at
least twelve Latin, four Italian, seven French, two German, and two English
editions in the early modern era. Natural
Magic, which first appeared in English in 1658, concerned itself with
magic, alchemy, optics, geometry, cryptography, magnetism, agriculture, the art
of memory, munitions, and many other topics, all grouped together and refined,
distilled, into a cloudy assemblage of natural knowledge—it would end up that the magical
whole was worth far less than the sum of its parts.

But the parts were pretty considerable, and much of the
information was spot-on for the time, not the least of which was a very capable
demonstration and explanation of a lensed camera obscura.

What I’m interested in right now though is the title page of
the book.

It turns out and as we can see in the top image of the
title page, Chaos is not some subspace trajectory of cellular automata, or in
Dr. Brown’s/Einstein’s dancing dust—it is right above us. This recognition of its regular, localizable structure
probably does not support parameterization, or anything else for that matter,
except to say that it is definitely “pretty”.
The title page has nine illustrated compartments: the four corners depict the four elements,
the two opposing middles show art and nature; the bottom shows the author,
illuminated by the knowing sun. The top
center image is the element showing “chaos”, which I’ve chosen to use a map,
identifying where exactly chaos might be.
I’ve not seen an antiquarian map identifying chaos, though I have seen a
number showing lots of other non-existent places, like heaven and hell and
purgatory and Eden and the Kingdom of Prester John, to name a few. But not chaos.

On the other hand there are many different, substantiated, anthropomorphic objects that wind up in the sky in antiquarian images: there haven’t yet been anything spelling out chaos, though there are many Hebrew names for the g*d incised and cut into plates of wood and metal. There are all manners of hands-of-the-creator, gearworks for the Primum Mobile, eyes, doves, geometric shapes, blazing fires, blazing iconic people, multiple worlds, flying people, and so on. But no chaos.

These are just two examples of the alternative-to-the-sun-in-the-sky category, a wonderful image from Kenelem Digby’s Demonstratio immortabiliitatis animae rationalis, printed in 1664. The other is a very striking example from J.B.von Helmont’s surviving and prodigal (and prodigiously brilliant) son Franciscus Mercurius’ Das Geheimnuess der Schoepflung. Printed in 1701, two years after FM’s death (and years after his other brothers succumbed to the Plague), the book was a bit of an amalgamation of the author’s vast and undisciplined interests, which sloshed over into the areas of magic, conjuring, Kaballa and astrology.
He had more success editing and translating his father’s works.

I admit I’m taking a wide liberty with “chaos”, and that the the first image could simply be the creator stepping in to rid the heavens of chaos, but I liked the idea of chaos being located on a map better. Mea culpa.

* Porta writes in the first chapter, defining the word “magic”: Magic took her name and original [sic] from

Persia.
. . . In the Persian language, a Magician is nothing else but one that expounds
and studies divine things; and it is the general name of wise-men in that
country. . . . Magic was begun in Persia by Zoroastres.”

** A fair amount of information in this book was derived
from his own house-bound Academia de
Secreti—a name I now love!—a society of friends and scholars who discussed
topics ranging from physiognomy to optics to cosmology to conjuring.

The Chapters/books of Natural
Magick are shown here below to give an idea of what the book is about:

The First Book of Natural
Magick “Of the Causes of Wonderful Things.”
“Wherein are searched out the
causes of things which produce wonderful effects”

The Second Book of Natural Magick “Of the Generation of Animals.”
“Showing how living creatures of
diverse kinds, may be mingled and coupled together, that from them, new and yet
profitable kinds of living creatures may be generated.”

The Third Book Of Natural Magick “Of the Production of New Plants.”
Which delivers certain precepts of
Husbandry, and shows how to intermingle sundry kinds of Plants and how to
produce new kinds.

The Fourth Book Of Natural Magick “Of Increasing Household-Stuff.”
Which teaches things belonging to
house-keeping; How to prepare domestic necessities with a small cost; And how
to keep them when they are procured.

The Fifth Book Of Natural Magick “Of Changing Metals.” “Which treateth of Alchemy, showing how
metals may be altered and transformed, one into another”

The Sixth Book Of Natural
Magick “Of Counterfeiting
Glorious Stones.“

The Seventh Book Of
Natural Magick “Of the Wonders of
the Load-Stone.“

The Eighth Book Of Natural
Magick “Of Physical
Experiments”

The Ninth Book Of Natural
Magick “Of Beautifiying
Women.”

The Tenth Book Of Natural
Magick “Of Distillation.“

The Eleventh Book Of
Natural Magick “Of Perfuming.
“

The Twelveth Book Of
Natural Magick “Of Artificial
Fires.“

The Thirteenth Book Of
Natural Magick “Of Tempering Steel.
“

The Fourteenth Book Of
Natural Magick “Of Cookery.“

The Fifteenth Book Of Natural Magick “Of Fishing, Fowling, Hunting, etc. ”
(Complete)

The Sixteenth Book Of
Natural Magick “Of Invisible Writing.“

The Seventeenth Book Of
Natural Magick “Of Strange Glasses.“

The Eighteenth Book Of
Natural Magick “Of Static Experiments.“

The Nineteenth Book Of
Natural Magick “Of Pneumatic
Experiments.“

The Twentyth Book Of
Natural Magick “Of the Chaos. “

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Locating Chaos (Addendum): The Land of Chaos in the “Atlas of Experience”

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 571 and a half

The ink on my last post hadn’t really dried when my wife, Patti Digh, said that she had seen another a map of Chaos. And of course she was right–it was sitting happily in the beauty-bending The Atlas of Experience by Louise van Swaaig and Jean Klare. This is a most unusual work, using familiar mapping skills and general topography to create geographic landscapes for lands of ideas, concepts and emotions. They provide maps for Secrets, Knowledge, Bad Habits, Home, Boredom (my favorite!), Health, Stream of Ideas, The Isles of Forgetfulness, Passion, Mountains of Work, Growth, The Void, Adversity, Chaos, Adventure, Haute Cuisine, Pleasure, Change, Mortality, and Elsewhere (my second favorite). This just a damned lovely book.

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On Degrees of Wrongness: Holocaust Denial and Checking Out a Footnote

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 572

In researching an unusually early pamphlet on the
extermination camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau (Les Camps d’Extermination Allemands Auschwitz et Birkenau, published
in Paris in the July/August 1945) I stumbled upon—slid threw, I should say—a
reference to it from a paper by Carlo Mattongo published by the Institute of Historical Review. The IHR is a decades-old organization
dedicated to the denial of the Holocaust (though they would call their work
something different, like challenging plagued historicism and that sort of
thing). Now I’d soon as talk about this
as I would the Creationist anti-evolutionary beliefs, but the author of the
much-referenced paper footnoted the
scarce Camps publication, citing it
as an example of incorrect reporting and thus supporting his Holocaust denial
stuff. Well, there are many dozens of
footnotes like these in the IHR paper, but since I had the source reference
right in my hand, I thought that I’d check out the scholarship a little and see
what the complaint was all about.

(The founders of the IHR had deep roots in such
organizations as the (British) National Front (a white-only, far far right
suprematist group which seems to spend a lot of time denying that they are
Nazis) and the Liberty Lobby. The
Liberty Lobby was founded by a man who philosophy was absed onbt eh work of a
disturbed Nazi-hagiograph named Francis Yockey (who wrote undethe name of Ulick
Varange). His own connections are a
catechism of hate groups: he worked and had associations with The
German-American Bund, the German-American
National Alliance, William Dudley Pelley‘s Silver
Shirts, Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union
Movement, George Sylvester Viereck, H.
Keith Thompson, Gerald L.K. Smith, and James
H. Madole‘s National Renaissance Party. Such is the
intellectual heritage of the IHR.)

What Mattongo uses to bolster his anti-Holocaust claim is
the Les Camps Exterminer description
of the crematoria at Birkenau, which he says differs with another report (above ground
versus underground crematoria). This difference in description is evidently a
terrifically damning contradiction for that author, and in an O.J.-glove-like
move uses it to question the entire edifice of the Holocaust.

The issue of the location of the crematoria is unclear in my
reading of the document.

What is terrifically crystal clear is what comes on the very
next page, just paragraphs down, from Mattongo’s citation:

“En principe les Juifs seulement sont mis a mort par le gaz:
les Aryens tres rarement, car on leur administer generalement le “traitement
special” par fusillade..” (p. 18). This
states that it was pretty much only the Jews who were gassed, while everyone
else was shot to death.

I guess Mattongo
liberalizes this statement to be inadmissible since the report had mentioned
that the crematoria may have been underground rather than above ground. What is more deeply remarkable is that this
report is one of the earliest published documents to get a close estimate on
the number of Jews exterminated: there
is a table on page 32 that calculates the number of Jews exterminated at
Auschwitz and Birkenau from April 1942 to April 1944. That number is 1.765 million. It is
a big number, and it is a number dedicated solely to the Jews. Even in the groundbreaking May 1945 report
issued by the Eisenhower investigation the Jewish element of those exterminated
in these camps was not emphasized. For
Mattongo and the Holocaust deniers, all of this becomes nothing, the fabric of
history caught and unraveled, as it were, snared on a bit of a mostly-imaginary
nail head.

The Holocaust deniers are deep in their own secret and dark
world, inventing useful denying tools as they go along. In this case, a reference is unclear, and the
document was mined solely for supporting detritis, while ignoring every other
remarkable item in it. Here’s another example
of their not-so-minor tricks that I’ve noticed in this journal—the overuse of
quotation marks. They are sometimes used
properly, sort of, when quoting source material–but quotation marks are also
liberally employed in general use, like when referring to words like “proof”
and “murder” and “witness” and “Holocaust” when referring to them as ideas. And so what happens is that the quoted and
footnoted materials (however miserable and inaccurate they might be) are mixed
in with the unattributed quotation marks, making them all look vaguely
referenced in some way. What the authors
are doing is exterminating the value of the words used by others for ideas that
they do not believe in. An inmate’s first-hand account of extermination at Auschwitz thus becomes a “witness”, and then becomes less
than that, calling into question the absolute veracity of the first hand
account. Insidious, really.

I’m sorry to have spent time thinking about this. But sometimes when you’re slapped in the face
with a big paddle of Wrong you just have to react.

Here’s something else: when I went web-cruising for information on some of the founders of these IHR-like movements, I came across some very plain vanilla biographies of their Nazi/fascist heritage-makers in Wikipedia. Obviously the entries were made by people who had some form of belief in their subject, and then granted the world access to their research via the online encyclopedia. Now I know anyone can edit these entries to reflect a more more cogent, comprehensive, appraisal of founders of hate groups, but no one had. I bump into questionable stuff like this in Wiki a lot. My question is: how much wrong must there be to make something valueless? If the Encyclopedia Britannica was known to be 8% wrong, does it still have value? If the PDR was 4% incorrect, would people still use it? What about Wiki? How wrong does something need to be before it needs to be started all over gain?

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Unusual Collections Department: a Collection of Roads

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 573

In my time I’ve encountered interesting people with advanced, iconic and unusual collections: there’s one fellow with a superb collection of (better than 20,000) cds with basically nothing to play them on (but of course he knew all of the music, and listening was almost but not quite secondary); there’s another with an audio outfit worth better than a quarter million with literally almost nothing to play on it. Then there was the delightful fellow in the salvage business who collected cornerstones (!) and giant iron puddlers. And of course the bee collector with dozens of thousands of specimens. Oh yes! And there was that time when I had a meeting with a man on something (on the day the Challenger exploded) unrelated to the spectacular collection he showed to me: the world’s largest, privately-owned 19th century mechanical toys. It was really just unbelievable. So was the man, who in the course of the day, as we sat watching the Challenger story unfold, performed on of the most amazing feats I’ve ever seen in my life.

My friend Marty Weil chronicles the wants and needs of collectors of all manner of things, from bus passes to matchbooks to god-knows-what, in his excellent ephemera blog. I collect dirt and antiquarian artwork by children, among other things. Also, once upon a time I owned a very large collection of lower gastrointestinal dissections as well as gorgeously prepared wet dissections of salivary glands.

And so it was that when I came upon this unusual image in The Illustrated London News for 21 May 1932 I felt a certain tenderness. This is a pictre of a road collection, located somewhere in the U.S., and includes shelf upon shelf of cross sections of roads. They happen to look like cubes of fat to me. (We’ll leave the bags of eyes story for another time.) I understand the need for such a collection for engineering purposes; I just happened to like the idea (and the picture) of A Road Collection, and have it undisturbed by any explanation or insight. Just a collection of roads.

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On the Under- , Partial and Full Discoveries of Oxygen

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 574

Our sea of air is composed of atoms, and the atoms are
mostly nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), and the atoms are of course all around us; though
as obvious as it is, as present as it is, the most active component of air, oxygen,
remained under-discovered until relatively late in human history. Oxygen is present in all major classes of
structural molecules in living organisms and in all manner of inorganic
compounds, and is When it was
discovered, it really wasn’t; or it wasn’t discovered and recognized until the
second time around. But the stuff that
was whirling around its near discoveries were important in themselves for their
constituent parts.

Johann Joachim Becher (born in 1635 and dead at 47 in 1682)
got part of the way there, though he didn’t discover oxygen—he discovered the
thing that oxygen wasn’t:
phlogiston. But the phlogiston
theory worked a little, but not a lot.
The theory appeared in his book Physica
subterranean profundam subterraneorum genesin e principiis bucusque ignotis…and
was published in 1669. (Actually, his Subterranean book was published just a
few years after our old friend Athanasius Kircher’s masterpiece Mundus Subterreaneus. Just a tired note
from the small-world category.) Actually
what the phlogiston theory “did” was explain the process of fire and
oxidation—phlogiston was the colorless/odorless/undetectable stuff that was released
from the combustibles of the four elements of the Greeks when they rusted or
caught on fire. Once the phlogiston was released, the true nature of the
material that once held it was then revealed.
As James Conant wrote in. The Overthrow of Phlogiston Theory: The
Chemical Revolution of 1775–1789. Cambridge :
Harvard University Press (1950, page 14):

“…in general, substances that burned in air were said to be
rich in phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space
was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a
definite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it
would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor would a metal
heated in it yield a calx; nor could phlogisticated air support life, for the
role of air in respiration was to remove the phlogiston from the body.”

The other thing that happened was that the phlogiston
released into the air could not on its own support life. That meant it wasn’t not oxygen, it was the
opposite of oxygen: anti-oxygen. Anti-oxygen is an interesting, very science
fiction-y topic, a very cool brick for
the edifice of contracting imaginary worlds. But in the world of the late 17^th
century and for another hundred years, it as the material of theory.

Becber’s
Physica was actually not that at all,
either: it was a work on chemistry, and
alchemy, and addressed itself too to the positive possibilities of
transmutation. On the other hand, Becher
was the very first to attempt to construct a theory of chemistry. As stated by Thompson in his history of
chemistry: “(Becher) was the first
person who can with propriety be said to have attempted to construct a theory
of chemistry; Boyle, who was responsible for hastening the downfall of
alchemical and other onions, did not attempt to set out (such a theory)…”

Joseph
Priestly on the other hand did actually discover oxygen in 1774—or at the very
least was the first to get into print about the discovery, establishing priority
over Carl Wilhelm Scheele who seems to have
discovered oxygen first in 1773 but was second in print on the matter–but he couldn’t believe
his own results enough to dislodge phlogiston, and went to his grave an
unredeemed phlogistonist. ((I admit to being pretty flippant here, as Priestly
was an enormously talented man, at high rank in part of the great panoply of
scientists; he was also a great political observer and pamphleteer who paid dearly
for his morality.) It took Antoine Lavoisier’s beautiful
experiment in 1777 that established the work of Priestly and Boyle beyond
question, killing phlogiston once and for all.
As a matter of fact Lavoisier also published his account along with a
general treatise on chemistry in his Traité élémentaire de chemie—a book that looks remarkably fresh for being
printed in 1789—completely it at age 47, just four years before he was
guillotined for being seen as an enemy to the people of France. But that (along with the exceptional Mme.
Lavoisier, is another story).

_____

The illustration above is actually from the 1738 edition of Becher.

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An Outline Map of a Great Complexity: the ENIAC, 1948

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 575

“The ENIAC exists independent of its history”–Brainerd and Sharpless

The
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, b. 1943-45) was, basically, the world’s first
operational, high-speed digital computer, and the father of the computer
industry. What we see to the left is the floor plan for the
computer-with-no-monitor—I know to most people working today with a computer
that the idea of a “floor plan” for anything that is not in a dark place at NSA
is not easily conceivable. The 30-ton,
18,000 tube, 125 KHz ENIAC’s space was about 1800 square feet, where it was able to
add about 5000 numbers/second, which was vastly faster than anything else in
existence. It operated with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 5
million hand-soldered joints and 6,000 manual switches. It was a magnificent achievement.

There are many sites dedicated to the history of the ENIAC—all
I want to do here is surface this detailed floor plan of the computer, which seems
not to be online. The diagram comes from
an article by J.K. Brainerd and T.K. Sharpless (Sharp brain!), “The ENIAC”,
from the February 1948 issue of Electrical
Engineering, which defines the machine and its components in full. The abstract states: “The ENIAC is the only
electronic large-scale general-purpose digital computing device now in
operation. Its speed of operation
compares favorably with other electric and mechanical computers. Developed under wartime pressures, it has
been of value not only in producing results but in pointing the way toward
improvements for future designs.”
Indeed. The authors, both of whom
worked on the construction of the machine from 1943 onwards, describe it in the
following ten points:

“1. Large-scale 2.General purpose 3. Digital 4. Electronic 5. Uses
10-digit numbers 6. Uses decimal system 7. High
speed 8. Synchronous operation 9. Some parallel operations possible 10. Complete
flexibility within limits of programming capacity” (page 170).

The authors make the following (qualified) understatement: “electrical
engineers in the United States
have had a major interest in development of large-scale computing devices”
mentioning the major players as MIT, Moore
School (U PA), GE, Bell
Telephone, Harvard and the spelled-out “International Business Machine corporation”. Within ten years of the end of WWII the second generation of computer was nearly functional, and (as can be seen in the wonderful computer tree below) there were dozens of new machines in operation. By 1960, the explosion was getting ready with the advent of microminiaturization.

The computers in operation from 1938 to 1948 include the
following alphabetical hodgepodge: Z1 Z2 Z3 Z4, ABC, Bell Model II, S1, Mark I,
Mark II, Elliot 152, ARC, Mark II, SSEM, and the more poetic Colossus and
Demon. (Zuse Z1 1938; Atanasoff ABC 1939;
Zuse Z2 1939; Bell Labs Complex Calculator aka Model I1940; Zuse Z3 1941; Zuse S1 1942; Bell Labs Model II; 1943
Bletchley Colossus Mark I 1943; Zuse S2 1943; Bletchley Colossus Mark II 1944;
Harvard Mark I 1944; Zuse Z4 1944; Bell Labs Model IV 1945; Bell Labs Computer Model V 1947; Elliott 152 1947; Elliott 153 1947; Moore School ENIAC 1947; Birkbeck ARC 1948; Harvard Mark II 1948;
Manchester University SSEM 1948; NSA DEMON
1948.)

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The Most Important Menu in the History of Computing–the NORC, John von Neumann, & the Weather

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 576

“There is no mystery about these machines[computers]. The mystery is how the human brain has been able to develop them. These devices are merely small tools which men have devised to help them do a better job.”–Thomas J. Watson, chairman of the board of IBM, 1954

[I need to thank my friend P.J. Mode for pointing this connection out to me years ago!]

Here is something that one doesn’t get to say very often: this is perhaps the most important memory in the history of computing.

This is the luncheon menu for the dedication of the NORC “Calculator” (the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator) a computer which was constructed principally with IBM parts and built at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia. The NORC was the world’s first supercomputer, and the most powerful computer on the planet for about ten years (from 1954 to 1963, until it was surpassed by Seymour Cray’s CDC 6600 in 1964).

The NORC was an astonishing accomplishment, difficult to summarize simply, really, though a very good example is that provided by Dr. Paul Herget, the director of the Cincinnati Observatory. Dr,. Herget used the NORC in 1956 to make precise calculations of the earths orbit for the 1920-2000 period. Dr. Herget said: “We used nine hours of running time and completed more computations than had ever before been done at one time in the history of astronomy.’”

Outside of celebrating the accomplishment of the NORC, the luncheon was also important for the remarks of the principal speaker, John von Neumann. Von Neumann of course was perhaps the most expansive mind of the century–a thinker of phenomenal proportions and the father of the modern computer. His brain was impossibly big. Impossible.

During the luncheon von Neumann made prescient and extraordinarily wide remarks on the future utility of the computer. Some of the highlights (from the entire address, included below):

–it is now “practical and feasible” to forecast, with the NORC, the weather for an entire hemisphere thirty or sixty days ahead

–calculation of the tidal motions of all the oceans, the marginal movements near the continents as well as the main motions of the oceans

–the hydrodynamics of the earth’s fluid core

–“In the statistical field, dealing with matters which are not wholly mechanical, such as troop operations and logistic operations which involve purely accidental factors like the prevailing weather during the operation, command decisions which have not yet been officially made can be stipulated and various solutions for various alternatives calculated. This has been done before on a minor scale but it takes too long to do on a large scale. “In this field the importance of NORC is enormous…”

–in the first four hours of operations the NORC performed more work than any calculator of ten years ago has performed in its entire lifetime. He termed this performance “completely fantastic; I doubt if it has ever been done before.”

The last section of von Neumann’s comments:

“The last thing, which is very important, is said in fewer words, but I think that it is none the less important. And it is this: In planning new computing machines, in fact, in planning anything new, in trying to enlarge the domain of parameters with which one can work, it is of course customary and very proper that one should consider what the demand is, what the price is, whether it will be more profitable to do it in a bold way than in a cautious way, and so on. This type of consideration is necessary — the world would very quickly go to pieces if these rules were not observed in 99 cases out of a hundred.

“It is terribly important that there should however be one piece in a hundred where it is done differently.

“And that one uses the definition which Dr. Haven (?) pointed out 20 minutes ago, namely to occasionally do what the U. S. Navy did in this case and what IBM accepted in this case: to write a specification essentially to build the most powerful machine that is possible in this day with the present state of the art. I just hope that this will be repeated very soon and will never be forgotten. http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/54nord/

It may be the last statement that is the most important–pressing those of the present and future to perform

The NORC group caption from the IBM Archive website:
“At the NORC dedication in Watson Lab, 2 December 1954: IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson, Rear Admiral E.A. Solomons (Executive Office, Secretary of the Navy), Jeannette Watson (Mrs. Watson Senior), Columbia Professor Wallace Eckert, John von Neumann, Captain C.K. Bergin (Director, R&D, Bureau of Ordnance, Dept of the Navy), Rear Admiral C.G. Warfield (Executive Office, Secretary of the Navy).” The Navy is happy here because they wound up with the computer at Dahlgren. Von Neumann was happy because he got to play von Neumann his whole life long.

The IBM press release for the NORC included the following summary of the event and the von Neumann address:

NORC Press release//The following is the text of a December 2, 1954 IBM press release regarding the first public demonstration of NORC and its official “delivery” to the U.S. Navy.

The first public demonstration of NORC (Naval Ordnance Research Calculator), fastest and largest capacity electronic calculator in existence, which has been built by International Business Machines Corporation for the Bureau of Ordnance, U.S. Navy, was conducted today at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University in the presence of approximately 150 representatives of the U.S. Navy and other Government departments, education and scientific research institutions and industrial companies. The machine was accepted on behalf of the Bureau of Ordnance by Captain C. K. Bergin, USN, Assistant Chief of research and development of the Bureau, from Thomas J. Watson, Jr., president of IBM.

At a luncheon following the demonstration, Professor John Von Neumann, of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and an appointee to the Atomic Energy Commission, discussed possible uses for the NORC other than for the immediate problems of the Bureau of Ordnance, instancing the field of geophysics as having great possibilities.

It is now “practical and feasible” to forecast, with the NORC, the weather for an entire hemisphere thirty or sixty days ahead, by calculations occupying perhaps 24 hours, with results about as good as those obtained by an experienced subjective weather forecaster, “which are very good.” Calculations similar to those now made, forecasting weather over the area of the United States for 24 hours in advance, could be made on the NORC in perhaps half a minute, he stated.

Complete calculation of the tidal motions of all the oceans, the marginal movements near the continents as well as the main motions of the oceans, is now, with the NORC, a matter of days and therefore feasible. He also declared that calculation of the hydrodynamics of the earth’s fluid core, the movements of which are responsible for the main phenomena of terrestrial magnetism, “becomes probably accessible for the first time.”

In the statistical field, dealing with matters which are not wholly mechanical, such as troop operations and logistic operations which involve purely accidental factors like the prevailing weather during the operation, command decisions which have not yet been officially made can be stipulated and various solutions for various alternatives calculated. This has been done before on a minor scale but it takes too long to do on a large scale. “In this field the importance of NORC is enormous,” Dr. Von Neumann said.

He concluded by pointing out that the NORC was assembled less than two months ago and put on test less than two weeks ago, yet in a test yesterday (Wednesday. Dec. 1) it ran for four hours without an error, doing in this period more work than any calculator of ten years ago has performed in its entire lifetime. He termed this performance “completely fantastic; I doubt if it has ever been done before.”

Dr. Grayson L. Kirk, president of Columbia University, stated that during the test period the NORC will be available to the University for important research projects, particularly in the field of nuclear physics, before it is shipped to the Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren, Va. to be installed in the Computation Laboratory already established there.

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Lonesomeness, Anti-Humans, Vestie Davis and the Quark

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 577

I arrived at the subject of Lonesomeness in a roundabout way–taking my first look at the lovely 3 Quarks Daily site and thinking about Muster Mark and Humphrey Earwicker and Leon Ledermann and the quark’s (pronounced “quork”, by the way, this from the master’s voice) phenomenologically-obsessed creator, Murray Gell-Mann.

[The story of the discovery of the quark is a little tricky; Gell-Mann was the first to publish his discovery, preceding the independently-established work and findings of George Zweig. Zweig’s quarks were called “aces”, and after publishing his results in an internal CERN document, had considerable difficulty in placing the paper in The Physical Review, so much so that he abandoned the effort, only placing the paper in print years later. The CERN paper by Zweig is beautiful, even to someone like me–his high visual thinking (as with Richard Feynman) is highly apparent. Gell-Mann has been insistent on referring to Zweig’s work and its significance ever since its appearance in the first year of publication of the European Physics Letters in 1964.]
It is when fast forwarding through the experimental voyage for the picturing of the quark that we meet Leon Ledermann, whose animated semi-serious reference to the discovery of the anti-quark leading was his speculation on “anti-humans”. The idea of “anti-humans” is quite a lot to think about, and is something much deeper than simply not have humans being there. But also something different from the anti-neutron, the anti-quark, anti-matter.

The anti-human led me to the “not being there” part, and then to the depiction of that idea, and the idea of Lonesomeness, in art. For me the very compelling imagery of lonesomeness is found in this painting at Coney Island by “part-time undertaker, newsstand dealer, and mortuary organist” Vestie E. Davis (1928-1978). It is a scene desolate of interaction, Even when Davis begins to add people into his paintings (making them “sell better”), the populations seem as brittle as Eliot’s utterly precise diction in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In meek forebearance I add the artwork of Edward Hopper Both of these men seem to give their canvases a reality that is stretched so thin

that it crystalizes the singular moment, and captures the lonesomeness of it all in the instant before the fabric tears. This is lonesomeness no matter if the seen is vacant or filled with people; Hopper and Davis introduce a finite nothingness that too me is as cold and scary as the antiquarian tombstone for the unnamed “Wife of____”, standing smaller and apart from the dead husband.

Maybe its the colors–or rather, for me, maybe its the color white. White is largely absent in nature, at least big (excluding clouds), at least that’s what poets like Wordsworth said. It is Goethe’s vexing color, Melville’s lonesomeizer. White works to distance everything in the images I’m presenting here, helping to make it possible for lonesomeness to exist in a bleak landscape as well as one with lots of people.

And so there you have it–I’m nowhere in this post except to have it serve as a placeholder for some sort of idea about quarks and space and absence and lonesomeness. Just an exploration.

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Outsider Logic — Perspective
Redefining “the Present”: Bitter Bierce, James Joyce and H.G. Wells

I do not define time, space, place and motion, as being well known to all. Isaac Newton, Principia, 1687

I had some lingering thoughts about my post from two days ago which briefly touched on Joyce’s dreamy Finnegan’s Wake (published in 1939, just two years before the author’s death), which led me to the language-creating, never-endingness of one day in his Ulysses* (1922). It is also a novel of time, reprocessing its time-units lile old Zeno, finding halves of time in regressive size and in greater numbers, roiling around like fly-swatted mercury; we never do get to the bottom of time although it does slow it down considerably. It follows a slight but powerful literary history, treating time somewhat like the earlier (earliest?) Poe, and especially like that clock ticking in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), where action is laid bar to exhaustive and minute interpretation, waiting for no person.

A little later on comes Ambrose (“Bitter”) Bierce, a crummudeonly misanthrope with a razor eye for criticism for everything beyond himself. My guess is that every other person in the U.S. past the age of 30 has read his Alabama-based “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1893) in which a lifetime or so could be lived in the moment that it takes for a man killed by hanging. (I have a feeling that this was a very apt way for Bierce to look at his own life, right up to the moment where he rode into infinity in the Mexican desert.) The prgoression of time is interrupted to tell the tale, everything taking place in the time that it takes to travel eight feet. What I didn’t know when I read the story for the first time was how unusual, groundbreaking, it was for the distortion of time in this way in literature. Monet and Impressionism Inc. were at it for a little from the 1860’s or so, but it seems to me that in literature this fracturing of time was pretty scarce.

These authors were performing experiments with the vast horizon of time, creating a new space in the very slim spectrum that we call the “present”. In another way, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past explores past action in a way that redefines what we can think of as a “normal” present. Looking forward, too, can have a pulling effect on the present, as we can see in the novels of the future by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

Time in physics is the orders-of-magnitude incendiary to this discussion–it is the fundamental, measurable scalar unit from which stuff like motion and energy and fields are derived. Things get really interesting in the history of science once you move through Galileo and Newton and Maxwell and get to the time of Planck and Einstein and Minkowski . Interestingly, the most significant changes occurring in the treatment of time and the definition of the present come in the period from 1865-1915–a particularly fertile period of revolution and modernity, where nearly every discipline undergoes a radical, fundamental change. Everything except political studies, where the only really new thing to come into the fray at that time was the introduction of the concentration camp during the Boer War. Everything else changes in remarkable ways: physics, mathematics, art, music, literature, theater, dance. Astonishing.

If I was really clever I would find a way for this post to be circuitous, but I can’t, so I’ll just end by saying that I’m out of time.

*I’ve included the first lines of the Joyce novels in the continued reading section, along with a few choice others.

**For several years in the early 1980’s I read all of Anthony Burgess’ novels, collecting them as well. I always liked A Clockwork Orange for its dark humor and inventiveness, and for each of the few times that I met Burgess I had a copy of the book for him to sign. He was always very gracious, signing my books with appropriate flourishes–with music, or Arabic, or whatever was implied by the subject of the book. The exploding orange is far and away my favorite.

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1932 Continued–More on the Beginning of the End

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 580

Science Store (Blog with Books for Sale)

Yesterday I wrote about leafing through a 1932 issue of the Illustrated
London News, piecing my way around unexpected bits of historical
bric-a-brac, surprising myself with the oddness of it all, until I came
to the reporting of the 1932 German election and the beginning of the
Nazi takeover of Germany. The beginning of the end. So it was like a
bit of enjoyable, entertaining historical surprises until bumping into
the Nazi cancer. But 1932 stuck with me a bit. Thinking about it a
little more, today, I realized that there was much more that the year
had to offer in the way of epochal beginnings, many of which related in
some fashion to the beginning and end of WWII (and particularly to the
May-August 1945 period).

1932 was a very big year in physics,
especially in the sub-atomic world, most of which would result in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as five (!) Nobel prizes. Irene Curie
and Frederick Joliot produced proton emission from alpha-ray irradiated
beryllium in January; James Chadwick discovered the neutron in February
(getting the Nobel physics three years later); that same month E.O.
Lawrence and M.S. Livingston developed the cyclotron (getting the Nobel
in 1939 for it); J.D. Cockroft and ETS Walton produced the conversion
of an element (He) (winning the Nobel in 1959); C.D. Anderson
discovered the positron (receiving the Nobel for it in 1936); Werner
Heisenberg introduced the proton-neutron nuclear model; and H.C. Urey
last in that year discovered deuterium (winning the Nobel in 1934). It
is an astonishing and long series of significant developments for a
single year.

On the seer-ing theoretical part of 1932 came Carl W. Spohr’s “The Final War”, with appeared as a short story in the magazine Astounding Stories.
Spohr’s story involved the creation of a bi-polar world shared by two
superpowers both of whom were kept in check with the threat of Mutually
Assured Destruction–ultimately the MAD scenario fails and the atomic
bombs fly, devastating the earth. The Spohr idea of
scientifically-induced Earth-shredding was preceded by others including
H.G. Wells (in 1912?) and Pierrepont Noyes (1927). (Actually, Noye’s
first edition of his novel depicting nuclear holocaust was sleepily
called “The Pallid Giant”; when re-issued in 1947 he renamed it with
more teeth, Gentlemen You Are Mad. Noyes is also the son of
the founder of the socialistic/semi-utopian Oneida society in upstate
New York. There was a complex of religious pullings going on up there,
not the least of which was the living a new human life in the
post-second-coming of Christ earth, complex marriage, and free love, a
term Noyes’ father coined, and which did not go over well outside the
community. For his part, the younger Noyes settled on a more practical
end to the community’s social and business life, and established a
silver- and flat-ware company that became the world’s largest of its
kind.) Spohr was six years before A.G. Street’s Already Walks Tomorrow,
probably the first science fiction/futuristic depiction of worldwide
apocalypse via environmental disaster and dystopia. It was also in
1932 that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published, which
was the first depiction of a nightmarish end to failed and run-agog
utopian planning. (The novel begins in the year 632 A(fter) F(ord),
some years after civilization had been destroyed by war. Ford’s selection here is also ironic because of his heavily-disputed but well-documented anti-semitism and admiration for Hitler*) Huxley’s
novel follows by two years the related work of Laurence Manning and
Fetcher Pratt, whose City of the Living Dead tells another story of Utopian collapse, this time of the brain deadening possibilities of alternative and virtual realities.

On
the political end–in addition to Hitler’s victory in the German
elections–was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, which may well be
the true place to start the beginning of World War II. In 1933 Fritz
Lang’s movie Das Testament des Dr Mabuse is a thinly-veiled
tale of a brutish criminal organization taking control of the state via
criminal means and is almost immediately banned by the new German
government. The Lang film is basically replaced in the next year by
the primum mobile of Nazi propaganda films Triumf des Willens
by the filmmaker who wouldn’t die, Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl lived
to 101, long past the disgust that she presented so beautifully in her
vile lickspittle hearts-and-minds film. (Few artists have lived to
100; I’m not so sure that any other filmmakers have.)

And so for 1932. This might all be too free-wheeling, but the more I thought about it, the heavier the year seemed to become. Perhaps there is something there.

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