JF Ptak Science Books

Louis Turner's Review of Published Work on Nuclear Fission, 1934-1940.

With a List of Turner's References (Below)

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I've found this article¹ by physicist Louis A. Turner to be very helpful over the years.  He was an I-was-there guy (and actually an I-am-here guy) who wrote a stuccato article on the history of nuclear fission which was top heavy in references, and did so in 1940, just before the clamp came down on publication on the topic.  Certainly there are other more modern efforts in this area that are far more detailed, but few have managed to do so good a job in as limited space as Turner, which the fabulous John A. Wheeler recognized as a "great and timely" review².

Notes:

1. Louis Turner. "Nuclear Fission."  Lancaster:  American Physical Society,  1940. An article in the  Reviews of Modern Physics, vol 12/1, January 1940, pp 1-30  of an issue of 85pp   Original orange wrappers.  Fine condition.  Also contains articles by Seaborg and Zwicky.   

2.  J.A. Wheeler, "Fission in 1939, the Puzzle and the Promise" Annual Reviews, 1989. 

The original article can be purchased through our blog bookstore, here.

His 133 references can be read as a succession of one-line histories of the subject (barring the permissions to reproduce the entire article):

1. E. Fermi, Nature 133, 898 1934.
2. E. Amaldi, O. D'Agostino, F. Rassetti and E. Segrè, Proc. Roy. Soc. A146, 483 1934.
3. I. Noddack, Zeits. f. angew. Chimie. 37, 653 1934.
4. O. D'Agostino and E. Segrè, Gaz. Chim. Ital. 65, 1088 1935.
5. I. Curie, H. von Halban and P. Preiswerk, J. de phys. [7] 6, 361 1935; C.R. 200, 1841 1935; 200, 2079 1935.

A Graphical Representation of Journal Articles on Relativity Theory, 1896-1923

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I haven't often seen graphical representations showing the relative publishing interests in a particular discipline of the sciences, or the maths either for that matter.  But that's exactly what is found in the deep pages of Maurice Lecat's Bibliographie de la Relativité, suivie d'un appendice sur les déterminants à deux dimensions, le calcul des variations, les séries trigonométriques, et l'azéotropisme, published in Bruxelles by Lamertin in 1924. [The original text is offered for sale at our blog bookstore.]  The graph is called "Production Annuelle d'Ecrit sur la Relativite", and shows the total number of articles published in that area--or at least those identified by the verifiable Lecat, who finds more than 4,000 of them for the 1896-1922 1/2 period.

We track the year of publication on the X and the number of publications on the Y, and we can see that before the great 1905 special theory was published by Einstein that Lecat considered some dozens of other papers (actually more than 200)  to fall into that (pre-Einsteinian relativity) category. It is interesting to note that "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" paper (30 June 1905) is not indicated with a vertical "Einstein" for that year (like the for indicator for 1915/16), though Lecat does indicate the general decline in relativity papers in the 1914-1916 period  was probably caused by WWI.  The number of papers does triple and then quadruples in year one and two of the peace.

History of Blank and Missing Things: Who is Albert Einstein?

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1137

[Part of the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things series.]

There was a time when this was a real question, even though the subject of that question was in the process of changing physics. One of the most enigmatic strings of 12 words and numerals in the history of science, “Bern, June, 1905" appeared at the end of Albert Einstein’s special relativity paper, setting the question in motion..

This difficult publication–one of the most revolutionary in the history of physics–was written by a mystery man.  Its author was basically unknown–when readers tried to find Einstein, they went to the universities in Bern, naturally, but of course didn’t find him there.  No one would have guessed that he was a patent office grunt, one window at work to call his own.  There were no clues in the paper about the other, not really–not even a footnote.  An invisible man was changing the face of physics. 

1905 was, well, “busy” for Einstein.  Perhaps no one person has ever had a year like this, in any discipline. His four papers delivered during this time was nothing short of miraculous.  To start,  Einstein turned 26 on 14 March, and sent his magnificent  photoelectricity paper¹ to the Annalen der Physik  three days later.  At the end of April, Einstein sent in his doctoral dissertation to the University of Zurich² (the paper accepted and approved in July  and degree formally awarded on 15 January 1906). A few weeks later (a) his son Hans Albert celebrated his first birthday and (b)he got his big idea on the special theory.  Also in this same extraordinary month of May he sent the Annalen his Brownian Motion paper³, and then, a little more than a month later, Einstein sent his SRT ⁴ paper in to the same Annalen, and saw it published 26 September.

As Einstein’s great paper awaited publication he returned from a short vacation with his family and sent in his (a)  dissertation (on 19 August, and which is published in February 1906) and (b) his mass-energy equivalence paper⁵ (E=mc2). I can think of no other time for any other scientist in the history of the sciences who had so much fabulous stuff up in the air at the same time. Impossible, really.  And then, after most of the papers are published and appeared in the orange-wrappered physical journal Annalen der Physik, Einstein got a part-time job tutoring a student.

At the end of 1905 Einstein was becoming less Blank, but considering the power of his publications, I can’t think of anyone of equal power who was unequally unknown. 
   
Notes   

1. “On a Heuristic Point of View concerning the Production and Transformation of Light.” published June 9.
2. “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions.” (Published in 1906.)
3. “On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat.” published July 18.
4. “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” Received June 30, published 26 September.
5. “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon Its Energy Content?”

Seeing Vision: Examples of Light and Sight, Personified

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 976

(On seeing the morning’s rising sun): “Looks like light to me.” SpongeBob SquarePants 

“All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to answer the question, 'What are light quanta?' Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.”  A. Einstein

“Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another, and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter into their composition?” I. Newton, Opticks, 1704, Query 30.

Depicting the capacity of sight and nature of light has been both an easy and a knotty problem in the history of science. Over the successive theories on the basis of light the artistic presentation of the phenomenon has been generalized (generally) in a very simple way:  by straight lines.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, the lines are just parenthetic place-holders suggesting direction, not actual descriptors of what light “looks” like.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of images printed 1550-1850 to call upon to make this point, and I've selected but a few.  The first belongs to Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner and which appeared in his  Oculusm hoc est: fundamentum opticum...,printed in Innsbruck in 1619. His work is an out-and-out landmark in the history of optics,  physiological optics and ophthahlmometry, and provided a springboard for two generations following him, not the least of whom was Rene Descartes. The illustration above is the book's frontispiece, and features four camera obscuras demonstrating four principles of the eye, the middle ground of which is a beam of light 

Rene Descartes depicted the interpretation (in his  Principles of Philosophy of 1644) of light and its physiological reaction in the brain as follows:

the lines of sight depicting binocular vision, observed (and compressed) by the eye's "particles" and processed by the pineal gland which in turn manipulate the "fluids" in the control of nerves and muscles. 

Another example of even greater fame than the iconic image by Descartes is that of the diagram showing the connection between color and its reflective index by Isaac Newton, appearing in his Opticae of 1706.

 

Another fine example comes from Zacharias Traber's (1611-1679) beautifully illustrated classic of optics (and physiological optics) , Nervus Opticus sive Tractatus Theoricus..., published in Vienna in 1690.  Traber is a great collector and synthesizer of the work done during and before his time, using the work of Descartes, Kepler, Schott, Kircher, Scheiner and Aguilon (for example), and then further implementing their ideas especially in the areas of color theory  and light refraction.  The image certainly reflects Jesuit Traber's religious training, depicting the holy source of light (originating with the almighty force) which directs it to the sun; the light then is left to the inquisitive and playful hands of cherubs who reflect and magnify it, as well as use it to start a fire (from the condensing lens) and observe it through a telescope. The main cherub empties a sack containing a number of different optical tools, no doubt for the playful brethern beneath. 

 

And then of course there is the great, unstoppable, polymathic and sometimes incorrect Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.  This image appears in his masterwork Ars Magna lucis et umbrae, printed in Amsterdam in 1671, which deals with light and shadow, optical illusions, color, refraction, projection and distortion, sundials, mirrors, as well as astronomical subjects. Most of these subjects are clearly seen in the engraved frontispiece to the work (below), the source of all of the "rays" of light coming from the godhead, relayed through a telescope, reflected from a mirror, and gathered in a camera obscura. 

 

Other interesting images from the Kircher include this spotlight.

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):

Isaac Newton's Disappearing Name, 1711

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. I wrote briefly yesterday about a vast understatement on the work (“innovations”) of Isaac Newton lifting so little that virtually nothing else could exist, a black hole of a description of his life’s work.  An editorial oversight, I am perfectly sure.  I doubt that there is anything that I could actually add to the massive amount that has been written on the great and irascible man, though there is something that has stayed in my head for a long time without any real satisfactory answer.  Of the three superb, revolutionary works by  Newton, only one features the author’s name in near-fullness on the title page (Principia, 1687); the next, Opticks (first edition, 1704), appears with only his initials (“J.N”) at the end of the preface; and the third, his full treatment on his invention/discovery of the calculus (Analysis per Quantitatum Series, Fluxiones ac Differerntias cum Enumeratione Linearum,1711), appears with neither name nor initials.  The illustration on the front page features what may or may not be pure holy light emanating from the face of the creator; or is it Newton himself? It certainly looks like the old man, and among all of the great scientists and mathematicians of the modern age, Sir Isaac’s image is the best deserving of such an elevation.  In any event, I wonder why the disappearance of the name--it was not a standard practice, and the most immediate answer to me is that it was a (deserved, Leibniz notwithstanding) conceit.  I'm not sure.

Great Sceintific Understatement Department: Isaac Newton as the First and Only above Equals

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Earlier in this blog I’ve addressed some great understatements in the history of science and technology.  For example:

--the Wright brothers’ telegram to their father on the successful flight at Kitty Hawk, telling him to “inform Press” [sic], and misspelling Orville (“Orvelle”)

--the announcement of the invention of the telephone, giving Mr. Bell a scant 200-word mention in the London-based journal Nature.

--the alpha and omega element of the severe understatement of George Gamow on discovering the background radiation of the Big Bang.

--and the atomic bomb/nuclear Armageddon bit from the National Emergency Planning Council:  ( “Because of recent changes in the technology and potential tempo of war and because of the base power of force is in being (including equipment and supplies), there is general recognition that any future war in which the United States is engaged, especially if it is an unlimited nuclear war, may be decided without significant additional military demands upon the nation’s industrial economy.” Hmm. He continues: “That is not to say, however, that the post-attack economy would not face enormous logistical support problems.” There is no human element of this equation. “The logistic requirements of survival and recovery would present very heavy demands.”)

It is rare to see such terrific understatement concerning some of the scientific worthies, but this one (below) found in a  penetrating, interesting and very entertaining work  Devices of Wonder (2001) is really pretty remarkable.  The book illustrates an exhibition co-curated by Barbara Stafford (Chicago), and the passage comes in a part of the book by Frances Terpak.  I hate to take someone to task like this, particularly having written such a fine book, and further hate to drag anyone over coals that at all times wait for me, but Terpak' description of Newton's accomplishments as "innovations" (page 194)  goes far beyond the line.  Within two sentences she does discuss Newton's "monumental" stature and "great experiments", but alas the cat is out of the bag.  If Newton's Opticks and Principia and et cetera are "innovations", then virtually nothing else is; everything else being at least not-innovations, identifying a world of sameness.  I know that this is a simple editorial oversight, but it is a big one, at least in my head, and does fit perfectly (even if by mistake) into the blog's "great understatements" topology. 

1932 as an Annus Mirabilis

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My daughter Emma started a collection for my wife Patti last year--for Mother’s Day—of books with dates as the main part of their title. For example:  Roger Crowley’s 1453, James Chace 1912, Andrew Brieford 1066, Charles Mann’s 1491, David McCullogh’s 1776, and that elusive 1968 that I can never find.  It is a wonderful idea, and probably something that could be expanded as a real collection. 

I mention this because I was thinking about Big Years, enormous years, the annus mirabilis. 1905 is the first date that springs to mind in this category, but it is almost entirely dedicated to one person—Einstein—and not that much miraculously else, though it can probably be argued that those four papers in the Annalen were enough for enormous contributions spread across four very big people.  Einstein really did have that good a year.

I like the year (for the sciences, anyway) 1932.

It isn’t thought of in the same way, say, as 1543, which was a great year for things big and little. Nicolas Copernicus saw (finally, basically from his deathbed) his  "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) published in Nuremberg, while the Brussels-born, brilliant and troubled Andreas Vesalius had Johannes Oporinus  print his revolutionary treatment of the human body "De humani corporis fabrica" (On the Fabric of the Human Body). Copernicus said the things that any thinking person was thinking about the structure of the solar system and universe at large, while Vesalius conducted his brave overthrow of the deeply ancient Galenic system of anatomy.

1932 isn’t 1666, either, though 1-sign-of-the-devil’s stupendous nature was related in a way to that of 1543.  1666 saw a great heavenly event—the naming of the comet known as Halley’s—and a horrendous biological one, with the great plague of London,  which killed upwards of 100,000 people.  (It was a bad year overall for the city—the winter of 1665 was terrifically cold and was followed by the plague.  At the tail end of the plague came the Great Fire of London [the diarist Samuel Pepys referring to it as 'a most horrid malicious bloody flame']).  It seems more like an annus horriblius more than anything else. Except of course for Issac Newton, who had a very fine year this year.

And 1932 wasn’t 1453 or 1066 or 1968 or 1776 or 1918 or 1945.  Perhaps it is close to 1859, which saw the  publication of what may be the most revolutionary work of the 19^th century in  Darwin'  On the Origin of Species.  Bunsen and Kirchhoff added spectacular content when they figured out (with the aid of earlier work by Fraunhoeffer and others) the internal constitution of the stars with a telescope equipped with A spectroscope—truly an unthinkable breakthrough to even a well-rounded mid-19^th century mind. 

What happened in1932 was another sweeping array of discoveries in the large and small.  Carl Anderson identified the positron while James Chadwick discovered the neutron and the Joliot-Curies’ made their monumental discoveries in radiation (called “one of the most important discoveries of the century... the consequences of the discovery of artificial radioactivity are immense" from Segrè, From X-rays to Quarks, 198-199).  Iwanenko described the neutron as a constituent f the nucleus, while Heisenberg described the nucleus as composed of protons and neutrons.  Knoll and Ruska built the electron microscope, allowing a vision of the interior parts of the interiors of the smallest things, offering images almost as spectacularly new as Hooke’s two centuries earlier.  Looking up and out, in the same year, Lev Landau postulated the existence of neutron stars while Karl Jansky invented radio astronomy.  (Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler also had a big year this year.)*

It is tempting to include 16 months or so of 1925/6/7 in this list, if for no other reason than the people making the great innovations were so very young--the term for these German physicists is Knabenphysik (boy physics, boy physicists), and what they did was invent the new quantum mechanics and change the face of physics.  It all came about at the end of the era of the old quantum theory (which comprised the years 1900-1925), and pretty much all at the  University of Goettingen.  The 1925 players were Werner Heisenberg (age 23, with his PhD. under Sommerfeld), Paul Jordan (age 22 with his Ph.D. under Born), Wolfgang Pauli (25, with his doctorate under Sommerfeld) and P. (aul)A.M. Dirac (22, and who wrote the world’s first dissertation on quantum mechanics).  The odd person out in this group though was perhaps the strongest: Erwin Schroedinger was 37 in 1925, definitely the “Old Man” of this set.  On the other hand there were three men of mountainous importance in physics who also made vast contributions to the new physics, even though  they were, um, more mature:  Max Born (in his mid-forties), Niels Bohr (about the same age) and Arnold Sommerfeld (who was 60 when he founded the quantum mechanics of metals).

In any event, I like 1932.  Next time we'll look at another Big Year:  1948.

*Some of the books released in this year was also a bumper crop:  Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway; Light in August, William Faulkner; 1919, John Dos Passos; The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett; Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell; Young Lonigan, James Farrell; Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder; and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

 

Bad Ideas Department: First Image of a Hypnotized Chicken

JF Ptak Sciene Books LLC  Post 380

This non-metaphorical, truth-be-told image is the responsibility of the irrepressible everyone's-favorite-18th-century-Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher.  Fr. Kircher was extremely learned and had a superb memory and a great scientific bent; and for the stuff that he didn't know or hadn't read about or couldn't prove by experimentation or produce by logical means, well, he just made the stuff up and pressed on.  But there is *so* much that he got correct and he published such a terrific amount of material that we'll forgive these forays into The Twilight Zone  His detractors and critics  couldn't keep up with the man; almost nobody could--the bit about the hypnotized chicken that appears in his incredible Physiologia Kircheriana Experimentalis...(Amsterdam, 1680, edited and compiled by Kircher's pupil Johann Stephan Kestler), which is packed with so much diverse material that the chicken pretty much gets lost in the intellectual sauce.  Kircher's reach was deep, formalizing bunches of natural science expositions by physical and mathematical experimentation and proof, not the least of which was proving the lunar influence on the tides and the construction of a magic lantern (below) .

The hypno-chicken comes into the picture via Kircher's interests in the magnetic art and electricity, dabbling away at the edges of science in a precursor to Mesmerism.  He also came up a little short with his experimental proof that insects were born of animal dung, but, as I said, he got much more right than he did wrong, and forgive him his rush to publication on some things that he may not have been happy with.

To press the point only slightly (the list and breadth of his accomplishments is just too much for this prankish little post about the chicken), have a look at the partial list of his publications:

A partial list of Kircher's works include:

    * 1631 Ars Magnesia
    * 1635 Primitiae gnomoniciae catroptricae
    * 1636 Prodromus coptus sive aegyptiacus
    * 1637 Specula Melitensis encyclica, hoc est syntagma novum instrumentorum physico- mathematicorum
    * 1641 Magnes sive de arte magnetica
    * 1643 Lingua aegyptiaca restituta
    * 1645–1646 Ars Magna Lucis et umbrae in mundo
    * 1650 Obeliscus Pamphilius
    * 1650 Musurgia universalis, sive ars magna consoni et dissoni
    * 1652–1655 Oedipus Aegyptiacus
    * 1654 Magnes sive (third, expanded edition)
    * 1656 Itinerarium extaticum s. opificium coeleste
    * 1657 Iter extaticum secundum, mundi subterranei prodromus
    * 1658 Scrutinium Physico-Medicum Contagiosae Luis, quae dicitur Pestis
    * 1660 Pantometrum Kircherianum ... explicatum a G. Schotto
    * 1661 Diatribe de prodigiosis crucibus
    * 1663 Polygraphia, seu artificium linguarium quo cum omnibus mundi populis poterit quis respondere
    * 1664–1678 Mundus subterraneus, quo universae denique naturae divitiae
    * 1665 Historia Eustachio-Mariana
    * 1665 Arithmologia
    * 1666 Obelisci Aegyptiaci ... interpretatio hieroglyphica
    * 1667 China Monumentis, qua sacris qua profanis
    * 1667 Magneticum naturae regnum sive disceptatio physiologica
    * 1668 Organum mathematicum
    * 1669 Principis Cristiani archetypon politicum
    * 1669 Latium
    * 1669 Ars magna sciendi sive combinatorica
    * 1673 Phonurgia nova, sive conjugium mechanico-physicum artis & natvrae paranympha phonosophia concinnatum
    * 1675 Arca Noe
    * 1676 Sphinx mystagoga
    * 1676 Obelisci Aegyptiaci
    * 1679 Musaeum Collegii Romani Societatis Jesu
    * 1679 Turris Babel, Sive Archontologia Qua Primo Priscorum post diluvium hominum vita, mores rerumque gestarum magnitudo, Secundo Turris fabrica civitatumque exstructio, confusio linguarum, & inde gentium transmigrationis, cum principalium inde enatorum idiomatum historia, multiplici eruditione describuntur & explicantur. Amsterdam, Jansson-Waesberge 1679.
    * 1679 Tariffa Kircheriana sive mensa Pathagorica expansa
    * 1680 Physiologia Kicheriana experimentalis

Wordle Word Art: Einstein 1920 and Poincare 1905, Side by Side--Looking at Two Disparate Approaches to Relativity

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 254

Okay, okay--this is definitely apples and oranges here, but it is interesting nevertheless, even if I can't reference the apple and the orange to something that would make sense for both, for something that has shared grounds of commonality.   What we have here is the Wordle version of Henri Poincare's The Principles of Mathematical Physics (1905,and which I wrote about a little here accompanied by the paper's full text), which was his quai-popular attempt at explaining a modified version of what some people call his "relativity" paper of 1904 (On the Dynamics of the Electron, which appeared in the Comptes rednus):

View this ("contrast" being too hard, too unwieldy, too problematic) along with Einstein's 1920 Relativity:  the Special and theGeneral Theory, the book in which he makes a full frontal assault of a popular explanation of his special (1905) and general 1915/16) theories of relativity:

Very little in common, no?  It really is just an interesting set of images, really; I'd hate to think of this as anything approaching content analysis or anything besides this that might look like a "serious" attempt at comparing the two.  I think of them in very simple terms, these two Wordscapes--like looking at two rivers, the one meanderingly serene, while the other looks more contentious, robust, challenging.  At the end of it all the robust Einstein river, unlike the beautiful if not sanguine Poincare river, rushes towards a Niagra; the Poincare, not. 

Wordle Word Art: 200 Einstein Quotations

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 251

My thanks to Jeff De Cagna for the suggestion of Wordle-ing a favorite Einstein quotation--its a fine idea.  What I've done is take 200 or so quotes and made one large file of them and fed it into the Wordle-izer with the following results (below)  Again Wordle weights words in size according to the number of times it appears in a document, so the resulting image is a wort of word map, a lay of the land if you will of this collection of quotes, showing the words most often used by Einstein (at least in the quotes that I have selected).  The longish quote list is below in the continue reading section(unfortunately without source attribution). 
Clicking on the image will enlarge it and make it clearer.

It is interesting to note that the largest word here seems to be "can", followed closely by "one", which I think is really another way of his saying "you" or "us" or "we"--so, we get "you can" or "we can" or "one can", speaking to the possibility of possibility, of effort, of moving forward, of trying.  Imagination, effort, thought, creation--that's what the man was all about, and I think that's what we see in this word map. 

Wordle Word Art--Vocabulary from Einstein's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

Einstein's delayed 1923 acceptance speech for his hideously delayed Nobel prize--finally offered to him in 1921 for his "work on the photoelectric effect" of 1905--is generated here into a piece of Found Word Art, fashioned by the language-generator residing in the WORDLE site. As in the other cases of word art generated by Wordle, the work is the product of the vocabulary-digester at Wordle, which in this case consumed the entire text of the speech and displayed it according to the appearance of the most popularly-used words.  The results of these jaunts into Wordle have been fascinating to me, as I hope they are to you. 

The full text of the Einstein speech (which is tricky to find in full text versions) is below.  I'm sorry to say that I've messed up the equations, trying to fit them into typepad. 

Also you can click on the Wordle display to make it not only larger but clearer. 

Wordle Word Art--Vocabulary from Einstein's Complete List of Publications

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 248

This piece of Found Word Art is generated by the word-synthesizer at the lovely Wordle site which crunched and counted the occurrence of words in the titles and attributions of Albert Einstein's complete opus. (See our page on the Einstein publications which we used to generate this art here.)

If you click on the image it will become larger and clearer. 

Wordle Word Art--Vocabulary from our Particle Physics Chronology, 1895-1995

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

Up next in the expanding WORDLErama of creating FOUND WORD ART by dumping text blocks into the glorious WORDLE wonder-engine is my page devoted to the chronology of modern particle physics (1895-1995).  The most often recurring words are the largest, which produces some interesting and unexpected affects and results. 

If you click on the image it will be larger and clearer.

Wordle Word Art--Vocabulary from our Atomic Bomb Chronology

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

This is the newest installment of Found Word Art engineered by the good folks at WORDLE.:  this iteration uses the text block from my page on the chronology of the creation of the atomic bomb, with the entire thing dumped into the Wordle wonder-engine which produced this piece of art.  I should point out that the size of the word refers to relative appearances of the word in the post. 

If you click on the image it will get larger and clearer.