Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science

Barrow is a scientist who writes accessibly about astrophysics and cosmology for both the general reader and the expert. Born in , in London, England, Barrow earned a B. Three years later he received his doctorate from Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a junior research lecturer in astrophysics at Oxford University from to and became a lecturer in astronomy at the University of Sussex in Brighton in The Origin and Evolution of the Expanding Universe in The book, which explains particle physics and its application to the creation and evolution of the universe, quickly won praise for its lucid style.

Barrow delved further into this topic in with The Origin of the Universe. In this work he explored such questions as the possibility of extra dimensions to space, the beginning of time, and how human existence is part and parcel of the origin and composition of the universe. He has also contributed many articles to such professional journals as New Scientist, Scientific American, and Nature. Some, like Robert Hooke's first microscopic views of the natural world, arose because of new technical capabilities Key Images in the History of Science.

He, for the first time, creates a structure that we now call the snowflake fractal. In a rather simplistic picture, all he does is draw a line, erect a triangle and then, on that triangle, he takes out the middle third of each side and erects another triangle, and then he takes the middle third out of that one, and so on, and he keeps going for ever. You have a structure that, if you look at it under the magnifying glass, has the same basic form as if you look at it full size.

So a fractal is an object which is self-similar, it is scale-invariant; it does not matter if you look at it magnified or reduced, it has the same basic distance symmetry from one scale to another. Later, people would invent other spectacular examples in three dimensions. There is a cube that Karl Menger created, and you keep hollowing it out in a systematic way, and you keep going for ever, and you have a structure which, in some sense, has a zero capacity, but it has a finite surface around it.

What Mandelbrot did was to use the power of IBM in the s, where he was a research scientist, to reveal the intricacy of these structures in ways that would have been completely impossible before there was that type of computer power. The whole study of complexity and chaos, which is now so much a key part of science, began in the mids, and it began because personal computers became available. These sorts of subjects cannot be studied just with pencil and paper.

They are not a system of simple equations that you can solve exactly. If you want to understand how a complicated interaction takes place between different populations of animals with different degrees of probability, you may not be able to solve it exactly, but you can tell the computer the rules of the game and watch the game unfold in a film or a sequence of stills. What happened with the personal computer revolution was that capability fell into the hands of individuals, or just small groups of people. There had long been computers, but they cost millions of pounds, and they were controlled by ferocious research groups who were very keen not to allow anyone else to do anything else with them.

They studied exploding bombs, the building of stars, predicting the weather or the economy - blockbusting problems. But in the mids, a single person could study something like the Mandelbrot set with a small computer. The Mandelbrot set is rather remarkable. It is a mathematical operation that takes a point in the plane and sends it somewhere else, and then keeps on repeating that operation over and over again ad infinitum.

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The rule is very simple but, if you keep applying the rule, most points will get sent a long way away. A black boundary shows you the points which stay at a finite distance so, if you start with these points, you can iterate as much as you like and they will not get sent far away. It has a funny cardioid-type structure - it looks like a heart - but the interest starts when you look at the boundary under a magnifying glass. It is infinitely complicated. If you look at part of the boundary again and again under greater magnification, what you find is the whole cardioid region reproduced over and over again, so there is no limit to the intricacy of the boundary.

If you keep looking at greater and greater magnification, you will just find more and more and more copies of itself on smaller and smaller scales. This is really something of paradigm in mathematics for the study of intricacy and complexity. Another striking technological development, which created new images, was high speed photography. High speed photography comes along only at the end of the s with a gentleman called Worthington, who set up a rather intricate array of cameras, all cleverly triggered at slightly different times.

If he drops a spot of milk into a bowl, he takes many, many photographs, all very slightly separated in time, to watch the whole sequence of the falling drop and the splash. His first pictures of milk splashes appeared in , and this is the beginning of high-speed photography. If you are of a particular age, you may remember the Milk Marketing Board, whose logo on its tankers was an object taken from one of Worthington's famous splash pictures. The whole business of high speed photography was very much souped up and taken over by an amazing group in America at MIT, known as the Strobe Alley Group, run by Edgerton, who created lots of the special effects that you would see in the movies.

He is the person who made the underwater cameras for Jacques Cousteau and for the discovery of the Titanic. He used to like to release pictures every so often, just to show you how clever he was. There is a famous sequence of bullets passing through playing cards, which are done by stroboscopic techniques. Such pictures are made automatically, but in many ways we have seen already how individuals with extraordinary skill play a key role in fashioning influential images. Leonardo was one of the creators of particular ways of visualising polyhedra in spectacularly impressive ways, but the great illustrators of the twentieth century are often forgotten when people talk about scientific imagery.

Generally, people regard the greatest scientific illustrator of the twentieth century as Irving Geis. Geis worked in the Second World War for the US intelligence services, making drawings and maps and things of that sort. It is a watercolour painting of the myoglobin protein from the sperm whale. It is a nice and large protein.

It was understood originally by Kendrew in the lates, for which he received the Nobel Prize. Kendrew worked with all manner of ball and stick models, and pictures taken from different angles by x-ray crystallographic techniques, and he had an extraordinary intuition for the three-dimensional geometry that was being shown in different directions. He dumped all this I think on Geis' desk and told him, "You'll have to make a picture. Everything on it has precise and exact meaning: It is a very remarkable picture.

In America there is a gallery that one of the big health companies has created of his work. She sent me a picture, which she hoped I would use. It had never been seen before, never been reproduced before, and she said it was simply that this is how she remembered her father when she was a very young child. The picture shows Geis sitting next to the picture, unfinished, taking a break between painting. She told me she remembered him wearing telescopic glasses, because he would be working sometimes with a single strand of the paintbrush in order to get the texture correct.

Geis died around Such pictures play a role in helping you visualise what is going on. If you did not have a picture like that, your job as a molecular biochemist would be really rather difficult. The next group of pictures that I will talk about show you show you something that most people are surprised to learn is a rather late arrival on the human intellectual scene: Everybody thinks the Greeks must have been drawing graphs, and Isaac Newton must have been drawing graphs.

Neither of them ever did! Nobody knows who drew the first graph that I, or anybody else so far, was able to find. It was drawn in the tenth century by an unknown monk in France. He was giving some lectures to his students, and he wanted to illustrate a passage from Pliny.

Rather than reproduce all the words about where the planets were here is Saturn, Mars and so forth he used 30 gradations, obviously the days of the month, and the 12 zodiacs, and he represents how they change with time. The picture is not quite as simple as it looks. He is using a different scale for every object, it turns out.

But this is the beginnings of graphs. Nobody else seems to have much used what he proposed. You have to wait until the mids before you find Erasme using graphs that he called latitudes in a slightly different way. They look like graphs, but they have no scales, they usually have no axes, and he uses them as a sort of shorthand. Sometimes you will find these pictures in miniature in a line of text, and instead of saying, "We are now going to think about motion where the speed increases for a while, then it stays the same, and then it falls off," he will say, "We are going to think about motion like this," and he will draw a little picture.

So it is like shorthand in the text. His motivation for doing it was because at this time, in the medieval period, he is enamoured by geometry, and he thinks the world is geometrical. It is important for him to try and make things appear geometrical, even if they do not at first seem like that; so reporting variations of speed against time in this way makes them seem geometrical.

But if you look at his other work, you begin to see perhaps some of his inspiration for creating the pictures. He was a serious musicologist, one of the first musicologists, and he evidently appreciated something that had also been done in the eleventh century: This is very much a graph, sound against time, and Erasme used musical scores, he discusses the relation between music and motion, and produced rather beautiful illuminated musical scores, invented so that the singers in one abbey would know that the singers in another abbey were sounding roughly the same when they were going to come together.

They deserve a place in any story about graphs. But the sort of graph that we have to draw at school is a rather late arrival on the scene. The earliest one I have found dates from , by Huygens, and is the sort of graph that will be interesting to the City actuaries.

Cosmic Imagery | W. W. Norton & Company

It shows how much longer you should expect to live if you are a particular age. So it is the first continuous function that is drawn as a graph. Huygens of course a great Dutch scientist, and a very skilful grinder of lenses. He sent Newton a wonderful lens which Newton used for his optics experiments, and you can see that on display in the Royal Society. By the end of the eighteenth century graphs are really appearing on the scene and being used by scientists and people interested in displaying information.

James Watt invented the pen recorder, an automatic device which tells him how the pressure is changing in his steam engines. However, I always find it slightly suspicious that the person who usually gets the credit for introducing all sorts of graphs wholesale into the world at large was somebody called William Playfair, that happened to be an apprentice to Watt in those early years. Playfair produced two wonderful books, one called Statistical Breviary, where he invented all the sorts of bar charts and pie charts that we are familiar with today.

Someone else who played a role was Florence Nightingale. She also invented some of the ways of displaying information in pie charts. The reason she was a successful nurse was partly because she was one of the pioneering founders of the Royal Statistical Society. She was a serious statistician. She used statistics to monitor which treatments were working and which were not, and stopped doing the ones that were not working.

The whole study, the presentation of information, comes along at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Statistics, of course, were very controversial, regarded by some people as a great evil. He thought they were a great evil because of concepts like the "average man" or the "average woman" which he regarded as just an excuse not to help individuals. The Government could say, "The average wage is increasing," even though many people were in poverty and destitution, so Dickens regarded this whole way of looking at the world as wrong.

I will now talk about a few things that are not so obvious, perhaps, about maps. Mercator's projection of the Earth, you all know, but less well-known is the cover of Gerardus Mercator's first book of maps in It contains a rather skinny-legged Greek titan. This is Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders, and this is why books of maps were ever after known as atlases, because Atlas appeared on the cover. The book had a particular paper size format, so atlas paper size then became the standard map paper size. Many, many generations of wonderfully drawn maps came on the scene.

I will mention a few which were influential in odd ways. Way back in the nineteenth century, Gall produced the first equal area projection of the globe of the Earth on to flat paper. Mercator's projection is distorting. As you move away from the Equator, countries appear to be much bigger in surface area than they really are. Greenland appears to be an enormous territory. If you go there, you will be surprised. Some people always felt that this was a bad distortion. There was a reason for the distortion: In , there was a great fuss in the world of cartography, known as the "map wars", when a fellow called Peters became very, very excited about recreating a projection, which he sold to the United Nations as being the way the world should be represented out of fairness to the third world and other emerging countries.

This is an equal area projection of the world, so the area of South America and Africa is correct. The shape certainly is not, and this is why this projection is not very popular. I think one cartographer described it as the Southern Hemisphere hanging out like washing on a line, spread across the Equator. But you can see what happens if you make an equal area projection, and why the whole issue of representing the world on maps is fraught with politics and controversy. Of course, if you live down in Australia, you can do the same thing and turn it upside down, and put Australia in the centre of the world.

But there are other maps, in some ways more interesting to us and less well known. If you look carefully, you can see it is the previous day's weather, so it enables you to understand what happened yesterday. Later, it graduated to telling you tomorrow's weather. The originator of weather forecasting and weather maps was Francis Galton, who invented fingerprinting and many controversial statistics as well. University College London have the original metal plates of his map in their library.

The map has many features that you recognise and I don't mean Ireland and Wales!

Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science

It has no isobars yet - that comes rather later. But this is the beginning of putting science in the newspapers for the public in a way that is supposed to be digestible. Another type of contemporary map that is unusual appeared when Apollo allowed us to look at the Earth from space.

We can take a picture of the Earth at night, as it were. We can look at parts that are in the shadow, and piece together a whole map, and it is a projection. What you see is a map of lighting and illumination over the Earth. What is striking about it is that the light does not really trace the population. There are huge regions with vast populations where there is not so much light, and some regions where there is not too much population where the light is completely dominant. The light traces the money.

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You can see that we have the ability to create many images of the Earth now in his way, to reflect difference in behaviour, difference in agricultural output, differences in pollution. So, there is no unique picture of the world.

Nowadays, we might also think of the world as not so much being made of geographical locations and places, but of connections. This is shown in a map of the internet information highway, just over North America, and it gives you a picture of the connectedness of the world - who is in contact with whom. If you look at a worldwide image of this, you can guess what it is going to look like, which places are included, which places are excluded.

We are suddenly creating in cyberspace a rather different sort of map of the world. The last map I want to discuss is one that is rather familiar, and it is also a map about connectedness. This is one of the very first London Underground maps, from , and when you look at it, really it is a bit of a mess.

This dates from just around the time when some of the lines were starting to merge. This is an ordinary map. The stations are place at the positions where they really are on the London surface, and that was the problem. People were not much using the London Underground in this period. It looked such a complicated and messy enterprise. By , Stingemore had produced a newer version of this map. It is still a geographical map, so the stations are still where they really are, and travelling from north to south, say, is a major enterprise.

It is not apparent how to make changes from one line to another. Not surprisingly, people were not much using the London Underground in the s. It looked like a major expedition, too complicated, and it was failing financially. Then in , a young man called Harry Beck came to work as a draftsman in the drawing office at the underground railway, and in his spare time he was allowed to do freelance work. One of the things he embarked upon, unbeknown to his employers, was to create a new map of the London Underground.

I have a reproduction from his exercise book, which shows the first time he drew his first draft for the map that we were eventually going to see. Beck first worked in electronics, and it is no accident that the London Underground map looks rather like a circuit board. All the lines are horizontal, vertical or at 45 degrees.

Gradually, over the next few years, he moved towards what he called the diagram, the Underground diagram - he never called it a map. Eventually, after some rejections, it was enthusiastically taken up by the company. They printed three-quarters of a million small and large copies of it and distributed them free of charge.

What he did here was rather revolutionary. This was the first topological map, so the positions of the stations do not reflect where they really are. That does not matter if you are travelling under ground - who cares where they really are?! All you want to know is the next station, and how to change to another station. What Beck did was to enlarge the inner region. He said he imagined himself looking through a lens which would enlarge the inner region and bring in the outer region.

So all those people living in Cockfosters and Morden and Richmond and Uxbridge really thought they were close to the centre of London - they were not of course, but this changed the way Londoners thought about London. It is how most of us think London is. It saved the day in that it made travelling from Uxbridge to Piccadilly Circus look really a rather short and simple journey.

Over many editions, he changed the way he represented the stations, and the exchange station notation. It is all rather clever and elegant, and one of the great classics of modern design. Eventually, the underground railway snatched it away from him.

I think he sold the rights for about a fiver - it is one of those stories! Eventually, there was a different sort of map that had to encompass the Victoria Line and so on. The last image I want to talk about is iconic. Einstein has come to represent science, physics, the conquest of the mind, if you like, in the public domain.

It is rather remarkable. He did not have an agent, never made a film, did not have a web site, and yet he is the most instantly recognised face probably on the planet. Also, strangely, his image has come to equate science and scientists with a slightly elderly gentleman with white hair or, even worse, a slightly eccentric gentleman, relaxing at the beach. This is strange to scientists, because we know that when he did his great work, he did not look like that at all.

He was a rather smartly dressed, dapper young Swiss scientist and patent worker. It was only when he came to the US, in later life, that his appearance and style changed. The interesting story there is that his style of doing science changed too. So when he was young, he had quite a different way of working, very intuitive, focusing on the physical phenomena, using as little mathematics perhaps as you need to represent it; but when he moved to America, he became ensnared and enamoured by mathematical formalisms, and he started with intricate formalisms and tried to force the world into those formalisms.

None of that later work really in America was successful; none of it really lasted.