The Phenomena of Physics Illustrated with Psychedelic Art in an Influential 19th-Century Textbook

in Art, Physics, Science | December 19th, 2019

The sci­ence of optics and the fine art of sci­ence illus­tra­tion arose togeth­er in Europe, from the ear­ly black-and-white col­or wheel drawn by Isaac New­ton in 1704 to the bril­liant­ly hand-col­ored charts and dia­grams of Goethe in 1810. Goethe’s illus­tra­tions are more renowned than Newton’s, but both inspired a con­sid­er­able num­ber of sci­en­tif­ic artists in the 19th cen­tu­ry. It would take a sci­ence writer, the French jour­nal­ist and math­e­mati­cian Amédée Guillemin, to ful­ly grasp the poten­tial of illus­tra­tion as a means of con­vey­ing the mind-bend­ing prop­er­ties of light and col­or to the gen­er­al pub­lic.

Guillemin pub­lished the huge­ly pop­u­lar text­book Les phénomènes de la physique in 1868, even­tu­al­ly expand­ing it into a five-vol­ume physics ency­clo­pe­dia. (View and down­load a scanned copy at the Well­come Col­lec­tion.) He real­ized that in order to make abstract the­o­ries “com­pre­hen­si­ble” to lay read­ers, Maria Popo­va writes at Brain Pick­ings, “he had to make their ele­gant abstract math­e­mat­ics tan­gi­ble and cap­ti­vat­ing for the eye. He had to make physics beau­ti­ful.” Guillemin com­mis­sioned artists to make 31 col­ored lith­o­graphs, 80 black-and-white plates, and 2,012 illus­trat­ed dia­grams of the phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na he described.

The most “psy­che­del­ic-look­ing illus­tra­tions,” notes the Pub­lic Domain Review, are by Parisian intaglio print­er and engraver René Hen­ri Digeon and “based on images made by the physi­cist J. Sil­ber­mann show­ing how light waves look when they pass through var­i­ous objects, rang­ing from a bird’s feath­er to crys­tals mount­ed and turned in tour­ma­line tongs.”

Digeon also illus­trat­ed the “spec­tra of var­i­ous light sources, solar, stel­lar, metal­lic, gaseous, elec­tric,” above, and cre­at­ed a col­or wheel, fur­ther down, based on a clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem of French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul.

Many of Digeon’s images “were used to explain the phe­nom­e­non of bire­frin­gence, or dou­ble refrac­tion,” the Pub­lic Domain Review writes (hence the dou­ble rain­bow). In addi­tion to his strik­ing plates, this sec­tion of the book also includes the image of the soap bub­ble above, by artist M. Rap­ine, based on a paint­ing by Alexan­dre-Blaise Des­goffe.

[The artists’] sub­jects were not cho­sen hap­haz­ard­ly. New­ton was famous­ly inter­est­ed in the iri­des­cence of soap bub­bles. His obser­va­tions of their refrac­tive capac­i­ties helped him devel­op the undu­la­to­ry the­o­ry of light. But he was no stranger to feath­ers either. In the Opticks (1704), he not­ed with won­der that, “by look­ing on the Sun through a Feath­er or black Rib­band held close to the Eye, sev­er­al Rain-bows will appear.”

In turn, Guillemin’s lav­ish­ly illus­trat­ed ency­clo­pe­dia con­tin­ues to influ­ence sci­en­tif­ic illus­tra­tions of light and col­or spec­tra. “In order thus to place itself in com­mu­nion with Nature,” he wrote, “our intel­li­gence draws from two springs, both bright and pure, and equal­ly fruitful—Art and Sci­ence.” See more art from the book at Brain Pick­ings and the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

Goethe’s Col­or­ful & Abstract Illus­tra­tions for His 1810 Trea­tise, The­o­ry of Col­ors: Scans of the First Edi­tion

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete Dig­i­tal Scan

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Stephen Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox Explained in Animation

in Astronomy, Physics, Science | November 21st, 2019

Many of us have heard of Stephen Hawk­ing but know him only as a sym­bol of a pow­er­ful mind ded­i­cat­ed for a life­time to the thorni­est prob­lems in astro­physics. Even more of us have heard of black holes but know of them only as those dan­ger­ous things in sci-fi movies that suck in space­ships. But if we gain an under­stand­ing of Hawk­ing’s work on black holes, how­ev­er basic, we gain a much clear­er view of both enti­ties and what they mean to the human endeav­or of grasp­ing the work­ings of real­i­ty. What it all has to do with “one of the biggest para­dox­es in the uni­verse,” and why that para­dox “threat­ens to unrav­el mod­ern sci­ence,” pro­vide the sub­ject mat­ter for the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above.

In order to explain what’s called the “Black Hole Infor­ma­tion Para­dox,” astro­physi­cist Fabio Pacuc­ci must first explain “infor­ma­tion,” which in this usage con­sti­tutes every part of the real­i­ty in which we live. “Typ­i­cal­ly, the infor­ma­tion we talk about is vis­i­ble to the naked eye,” he says. “This kind of infor­ma­tion tells us that an apple is red, round, and shiny.” But what physi­cists care about is “quan­tum infor­ma­tion,” which “refers to the quan­tum prop­er­ties of all the par­ti­cles that make up that apple, such as their posi­tion, veloc­i­ty and spin.” The par­ti­cles that make up every object of the uni­verse have “unique quan­tum prop­er­ties,” and the laws of physics as cur­rent­ly under­stood hold that “the total amount of quan­tum infor­ma­tion in the uni­verse must be con­served.”

Smash the apple into sauce, in oth­er words, and you don’t cre­ate or destroy any quan­tum infor­ma­tion, you just move it around. But in the parts of space­time with grav­i­ty so strong that noth­ing can escape them, bet­ter known as black holes, that par­tic­u­lar law of physics may not apply. “When an apple enters a black hole, it seems as though it leaves the uni­verse, and all its quan­tum infor­ma­tion becomes irre­triev­ably lost,” says Pacuc­ci. “How­ev­er, this doesn’t imme­di­ate­ly break the laws of physics. The infor­ma­tion is out of sight, but it might still exist with­in the black hole’s mys­te­ri­ous void.”

Then we have Hawk­ing Radi­a­tion, the epony­mous genius’ con­tri­bu­tion to the study of black holes, which shows that “black holes are grad­u­al­ly evap­o­rat­ing,” los­ing mass over “incred­i­bly long peri­ods of time” in such a way that sug­gests that “a black hole and all the quan­tum infor­ma­tion it con­tains could be com­plete­ly erased” in the process. What might go into the black hole as an apple’s infor­ma­tion does­n’t come out look­ing like an apple’s infor­ma­tion. Quan­tum infor­ma­tion seems to be destroyed by black holes, yet every­thing else about quan­tum infor­ma­tion tells us it can’t be destroyed: like any para­dox, or con­tra­dic­tion between two known or prob­a­ble truths, “the destruc­tion of infor­ma­tion would force us to rewrite some of our most fun­da­men­tal sci­en­tif­ic par­a­digms.”

But for a sci­en­tist in the Hawk­ing mold, this dif­fi­cul­ty just makes the chase for knowl­edge more inter­est­ing. Pacuc­ci cites a few hypothe­ses: that “infor­ma­tion actu­al­ly is encod­ed in the escap­ing radi­a­tion, in some way we can’t yet under­stand,” that “the para­dox is just a mis­un­der­stand­ing of how gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty and quan­tum field the­o­ry inter­act, that “a solu­tion to this and many oth­er para­dox­es will come nat­u­ral­ly with a ‘uni­fied the­o­ry of every­thing,’ ” and most bold­ly that, because “the 2D sur­face of an event hori­zon” — the inescapable edge of a black hole — “can store quan­tum infor­ma­tion,” the bound­ary of the observ­able uni­verse “is also a 2D sur­face encod­ed with infor­ma­tion about real, 3D objects,” imply­ing that “real­i­ty as we know it is just a holo­graph­ic pro­jec­tion of that infor­ma­tion.” Big if true, as they say, but as Hawk­ing seems to have known, the truth about our real­i­ty is sure­ly big­ger than any of us can yet imag­ine.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawking’s Final Book and Sci­en­tif­ic Paper Just Got Pub­lished: Brief Answers to the Big Ques­tions and “Infor­ma­tion Para­dox”

Stephen Hawking’s Lec­tures on Black Holes Now Ful­ly Ani­mat­ed with Chalk­board Illus­tra­tions

Watch A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ Film About the Life & Work of Stephen Hawk­ing

Stephen Hawking’s Uplift­ing Mes­sage: You Can Get Your­self Out of Any Hole, No Mat­ter What Their Size

The Largest Black Holes in the Uni­verse: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion

Watch a Star Get Devoured by a Super­mas­sive Black Hole

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Richard Feynman’s Technique for Learning Something New: An Animated Introduction

in Education, Physics, Science | July 18th, 2019

I some­times won­der: why do peo­ple post ama­teur repair videos, made with smart­phones in kitchens and garages, with no obvi­ous com­mer­cial val­ue and, often, a lev­el of exper­tise just min­i­mal­ly above that of their view­ers? Then I remem­ber Richard Feyn­man’s prac­ti­cal advice for how to learn some­thing new—prepare to teach it to some­body else.

The extra account­abil­i­ty of mak­ing a pub­lic record might pro­vide added moti­va­tion, though not near­ly to the degree of mak­ing teach­ing one’s pro­fes­sion. Nobel-win­ning physi­cist Feyn­man spent the first half of his aca­d­e­m­ic career work­ing on the Man­hat­tan Project, dodg­ing J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI at the begin­ning of the Cold War, and mak­ing major break­throughs in quan­tum mechan­ics.

But he has become as well-known for his teach­ing as for his his­toric sci­en­tif­ic role, thanks to the enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar series of physics lec­tures he devel­oped at Cal­tech; his fun­ny, acces­si­ble, best-sell­ing books of essays and mem­oirs; and his will­ing­ness to be an avun­cu­lar pub­lic face for sci­ence, with a knack for explain­ing things in terms any­one can grasp.

Feyn­man revealed that he him­self learned through what he called a “note­book tech­nique,” an exer­cise con­duct­ed pri­mar­i­ly on paper. Yet the method came out of his ped­a­gogy, essen­tial­ly a means of prepar­ing lec­ture notes for an audi­ence who know about as much about the sub­ject as you did when you start­ed study­ing it. In order to explain it to anoth­er, you must both under­stand the sub­ject your­self, and under­stand what it’s like not to under­stand it.

Learn Feynman’s method for learn­ing in the short ani­mat­ed video above. You do not actu­al­ly need to teach, only pre­tend as if you’re going to—though prepar­ing for an actu­al audi­ence will keep you on your toes. In brief, the video sum­ma­rizes Feynman’s method in a three-step process:

  1. Choose a top­ic you want to under­stand and start study­ing it.
  2. Pre­tend you’re teach­ing the idea to some­one else. Write out an expla­na­tion on the paper…. When­ev­er you get stuck, go back and study.
  3. Final­ly do it again, but now sim­pli­fy your lan­guage or use an anal­o­gy to make the point.

Get ready to start your YouTube chan­nel with home­made lan­guage lessons, restora­tion projects, and/or cook­ing videos. You may not—nor should you, perhaps—become an online author­i­ty, but accord­ing to Fey­man, who learned more in his life­time than most of us could in two, you’ll come away great­ly enriched in oth­er ways.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Richard Feynman’s “Note­book Tech­nique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Is Now Com­plete­ly Online

The Draw­ings & Paint­ings of Richard Feyn­man: Art Express­es a Dra­mat­ic “Feel­ing of Awe”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Queen Guitarist Brian May Is Also an Astrophysicist: Read His PhD Thesis Online

in Astronomy, Music, Physics | July 1st, 2019

Pho­to by ESO/G. Huede­pohl, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Queen could­n’t pos­si­bly have been Queen with­out Fred­die Mer­cury, nor could it have been Queen with­out Bri­an May. Thanks not least to the recent biopic, Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, the band’s already larg­er-than-life lead singer has become even larg­er still. But its gui­tarist, despite the film’s sur­face treat­ment of his char­ac­ter, is in his own way an equal­ly implau­si­ble fig­ure. Not only did he show musi­cal promise ear­ly, form­ing his first group while still at school, he also got his A Lev­els in physics, math­e­mat­ics, and applied math­e­mat­ics, going on to earn a Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence in Physics with hon­ors at Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don.

Nat­u­ral­ly, May then went for his PhD, con­tin­u­ing at Impe­r­i­al Col­lege where he stud­ied the veloc­i­ty of, and light reflect­ed by, inter­plan­e­tary dust in the Solar Sys­tem. He began the pro­gram in 1970, but “in 1974, when Queen was but a princess in its infan­cy, May chose to aban­don his doc­tor­ate stud­ies to focus on the band in their quest to con­quer the world.” So wrote The Tele­graph’s Felix Lowe in 2007, the year the by-then 60-year-old (and long world-famous) rock­er final­ly hand­ed in his the­sis. “The 48,000-word tome, Radi­al Veloc­i­ties in the Zodi­a­cal Dust Cloud, which sounds sus­pi­cious­ly like a Spinal Tap LP, was stored in the loft of his home in Sur­rey.” You can read it online here.

Accord­ing to its abstract, May’s the­sis “doc­u­ments the build­ing of a pres­sure-scanned Fab­ry-Per­ot Spec­trom­e­ter, equipped with a pho­to­mul­ti­pli­er and pulse-count­ing elec­tron­ics, and its deploy­ment at the Obser­va­to­rio del Tei­de at Iza­ña in Tener­ife, at an alti­tude of 7,700 feet (2567 m), for the pur­pose of record­ing high-res­o­lu­tion spec­tra of the Zodi­a­cal Light.” Space.com describes the Zodia­cial Light as “a misty dif­fuse cone of light that appears in the west­ern sky after sun­set and in the east­ern sky before sun­rise,” one that has long tricked casu­al observers into “see­ing it as the first sign of morn­ing twi­light.” Astronomers now rec­og­nize it as “reflect­ed sun­light shin­ing on scat­tered space debris clus­tered most dense­ly near the sun.”

In his abstract, May also notes the unusu­al­ly long peri­od of study as 1970–2007, made pos­si­ble in part by the fact that lit­tle oth­er research had been done in this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject area dur­ing Queen’s reign on the charts and there­after. Still, he had catch­ing up to do, includ­ing obser­va­tion­al work in Tener­ife (as much of a hard­ship post­ing as that isn’t). Since being award­ed his doc­tor­ate, May’s sci­en­tif­ic activ­i­ties have con­tin­ued, as have his musi­cal ones and oth­er pur­suits besides, such as ani­mal-rights activism and stere­og­ra­phy. (Some­times these inter­sect: the 2017 pho­to­book Queen in 3‑D, for exam­ple, uses a VR view­ing device of May’s own design.) The next time you meet a young­ster dither­ing over whether to go into astro­physics or found one of the most suc­cess­ful rock bands of all time, point them to May’s exam­ple and let them know doing both isn’t with­out prece­dent.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gui­tarist Bri­an May Explains the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’

Bri­an May’s Home­made Gui­tar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motor­cy­cle Parts & More

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. The­sis, “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Watch 94 Free Lec­tures From the Great Cours­es: Dystopi­an Fic­tion, Astro­physics, Gui­tar Play­ing & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Pioneering Computer Scientist Grace Hopper Shows Us How to Visualize a Nanosecond (1983)

in Computer Science, Math, Physics | May 7th, 2019

Human imag­i­na­tion seems seri­ous­ly lim­it­ed when faced with the cos­mic scope of time and space. We can imag­ine, through stop-motion ani­ma­tion and CGI, what it might be like to walk the earth with crea­tures the size of office build­ings. But how to wrap our heads around the fact that they lived hun­dreds of mil­lions of years ago, on a plan­et some four and a half bil­lion years old? We trust the sci­ence, but can’t rely on intu­ition alone to guide us to such mind-bog­gling knowl­edge.

At the oth­er end of the scale, events mea­sured in nanosec­onds, or bil­lionths of a sec­ond, seem incon­ceiv­able, even to some­one as smart as Grace Hop­per, the Navy math­e­mati­cian who invent­ed COBOL and helped built the first com­put­er. Or so she says in the 1983 video clip above from one of her many lec­tures in her role as a guest lec­tur­er at uni­ver­si­ties, muse­ums, mil­i­tary bod­ies, and cor­po­ra­tions.

When she first heard of “cir­cuits that act­ed in nanosec­onds,” she says, “bil­lionths of a sec­ond… Well, I didn’t know what a bil­lion was…. And if you don’t know what a bil­lion is, how on earth do you know what a bil­lionth is? Final­ly, one morn­ing in total des­per­a­tion, I called over the engi­neer­ing build­ing, and I said, ‘Please cut off a nanosec­ond and send it to me.” What she asked for, she explains, and shows the class, was a piece of wire rep­re­sent­ing the dis­tance a sig­nal could trav­el in a nanosec­ond.

Now of course it wouldn’t real­ly be through wire — it’d be out in space, the veloc­i­ty of light. So if we start with a veloc­i­ty of light and use your friend­ly com­put­er, you’ll dis­cov­er that a nanosec­ond is 11.8 inch­es long, the max­i­mum lim­it­ing dis­tance that elec­tric­i­ty can trav­el in a bil­lionth of a sec­ond.

Fol­low the rest of her expla­na­tion, with wire props, and see if you can bet­ter under­stand a mea­sure of time beyond the reach­es of con­scious expe­ri­ence. The expla­na­tion was imme­di­ate­ly suc­cess­ful when she began using it in the late 1960s “to demon­strate how design­ing small­er com­po­nents would pro­duce faster com­put­ers,” writes the Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can His­to­ry. The bun­dle of wires below, each about 30cm (11.8 inch­es) long, comes from a lec­ture Hop­per gave muse­um docents in March 1985.

Pho­to via the Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can His­to­ry

Like the age of the dinosaurs, the nanosec­ond may only rep­re­sent a small frac­tion of the incom­pre­hen­si­bly small units of time sci­en­tists are even­tu­al­ly able to measure—and com­put­er sci­en­tists able to access. “Lat­er,” notes the NMAH, “as com­po­nents shrank and com­put­er speeds increased, Hop­per used grains of pep­per to rep­re­sent the dis­tance elec­tric­i­ty trav­eled in a picosec­ond, one tril­lionth of a sec­ond.”

At this point, the map becomes no more reveal­ing than the unknown ter­ri­to­ry, invis­i­ble to the naked eye, incon­ceiv­able but through wild leaps of imag­i­na­tion. But if any­one could explain the increas­ing­ly inex­plic­a­ble in terms most any­one could under­stand, it was the bril­liant but down-to-earth Hop­per.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Grace Hop­per, the Pio­neer­ing Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the His­toric Mark I Com­put­er (1906–1992)

The Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence: New Ani­ma­tion Presents a Sur­vey of Com­put­er Sci­ence, from Alan Tur­ing to “Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty”

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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An Animated Introduction to the Forgotten Pioneer in Quantum Theory, Grete Hermann

in Gender, Physics | November 19th, 2018

From Aeon Video comes a short, vivid­ly-ani­mat­ed trib­ute to Grete Her­mann (1901–1984), the Ger­man math­e­mati­cian and philoso­pher who made impor­tant, but often for­got­ten, con­tri­bu­tions to quan­tum mechan­ics. Aeon intro­duces the video with these words:

In the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, New­ton­ian physics was upend­ed by exper­i­ments that revealed a bizarre sub­atom­ic uni­verse rid­dled with pecu­liar­i­ties and incon­sis­ten­cies. Why do pho­tons and elec­trons behave as both par­ti­cles and waves? Why should the act of obser­va­tion affect the behav­iour of phys­i­cal sys­tems? More than just a puz­zle for sci­en­tists to sort out, this quan­tum strange­ness had unset­tling impli­ca­tions for our under­stand­ing of real­i­ty, includ­ing the very con­cept of truth.

The Ger­man math­e­mati­cian and philoso­pher Grete Her­mann offered some intrigu­ing and orig­i­nal answers to these puz­zles. In a quan­tum uni­verse, she argued, the notion of absolute truth must be aban­doned in favour of a frag­ment­ed view – one in which the way we mea­sure the world affects the slice of it that we can see. She referred to this idea as the ‘split­ting of truth’, and believed it extend­ed far beyond the lab­o­ra­to­ry walls and into every­day life. With a strik­ing visu­al style inspired by the mod­ern art of Hermann’s era, this Aeon Orig­i­nal video explores one of Hermann’s pro­found but under­val­ued con­tri­bu­tions to quan­tum the­o­ry – as well as her own split life as an anti-Nazi activist, social jus­tice reformer and edu­ca­tor.

The short was direct­ed and ani­mat­ed by Julie Gratz and Ivo Stoop, and pro­duced by Kellen Quinn.

via Aeon

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Read the “Don’t Let the Bas­tards Get You Down” Let­ter That Albert Ein­stein Sent to Marie Curie Dur­ing a Time of Per­son­al Cri­sis (1911)

Marie Curie Attend­ed a Secret, Under­ground “Fly­ing Uni­ver­si­ty” When Women Were Banned from Pol­ish Uni­ver­si­ties

Pop Art Posters Cel­e­brate Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists: Down­load Free Posters of Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace & More

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Women Philoso­phers: A New Web Site Presents the Con­tri­bu­tions of Women Philoso­phers, from Ancient to Mod­ern

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Stephen Hawking’s Final Book and Scientific Paper Just Got Published: Brief Answers to the Big Questions and “Information Paradox”

in Astronomy, Physics, Science | October 18th, 2018

How did it all begin?  Is there a god? Can we pre­dict the future? Is there oth­er intel­li­gent life in the uni­verse? For decades, many of us turned to Stephen Hawk­ing for answers to those ques­tions, or at least supreme­ly intel­li­gent sug­ges­tions as to where the answers might lie. But the cel­e­brat­ed astro­physi­cist’s death ear­li­er this year — after an aston­ish­ing­ly long life and career, giv­en the chal­lenges he faced — took that option away. It turns out, though, that we haven’t actu­al­ly heard the last of him: his last book, Brief Answers to the Big Ques­tions (whose trail­er you can watch just above), came out just this week.

“The book is quin­tes­sen­tial Hawk­ing,” writes physics pro­fes­sor Marce­lo Gleis­er at NPR. “He starts by address­ing the ques­tions in physics and cos­mol­o­gy that he ded­i­cat­ed his intel­lec­tu­al life to answer, using easy-to-fol­low argu­ments and draw­ing from every­day images and thought exper­i­ments.” Hawk­ing’s answers to the big ques­tions fig­ure into his view of not just the world but all exis­tence: he believes, writes Gleis­er, “that human­i­ty’s evo­lu­tion­ary mis­sion is to spread through the galaxy as a sort of cos­mic gar­den­er, sow­ing life along the way. He believes, even if not with­out wor­ry, that we will devel­op a pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship with intel­li­gent machines and that, togeth­er, we will redesign the cur­rent fate of the world and of our species.”

In par­al­lel with his career as a pub­lic fig­ure and writer of pop­u­lar explana­to­ry books, which began with 1988’s A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Hawk­ing per­formed sci­en­tif­ic research on black holes. The Guardian’s sci­ence edi­tor Ian Sam­ple describes it as a “career-long effort to under­stand what hap­pens to infor­ma­tion when objects fall into black holes,” capped off by a posthu­mous­ly pub­lished paper titled “Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair.” “Toss an object into a black hole and the black hole’s tem­per­a­ture ought to change,” writes Sam­ple. “So too will a prop­er­ty called entropy, a mea­sure of an object’s inter­nal dis­or­der, which ris­es the hot­ter it gets.” In the paper Hawk­ing and his col­lab­o­ra­tors show that “a black hole’s entropy may be record­ed by pho­tons that sur­round the black hole’s event hori­zon, the point at which light can­not escape the intense grav­i­ta­tion­al pull. They call this sheen of pho­tons ‘soft hair’.”

If that sounds tricky to under­stand, all of us who have appre­ci­at­ed Hawk­ing’s writ­ing know that we can at least go back to his books to get a grip on black holes and the ques­tions about them that get sci­en­tists most curi­ous. Much remains for future astro­physi­cists to work on about that “infor­ma­tion para­dox,” to do with where, exact­ly, every­thing that seem­ing­ly gets sucked into a black hole actu­al­ly goes. “We don’t know that Hawk­ing entropy accounts for every­thing you could pos­si­bly throw at a black hole, so this is real­ly a step along the way,” Hawk­ing’s col­lab­o­ra­tor Mal­colm J. Per­ry tells Sam­ple. “We think it’s a pret­ty good step, but there is a lot more work to be done.” As Hawk­ing sure­ly knew, the big ques­tions — in physics or any oth­er realm of exis­tence — nev­er quite get ful­ly answered.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawk­ing (RIP) Explains His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary The­o­ry of Black Holes with the Help of Chalk­board Ani­ma­tions

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. The­sis, “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Watch A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ Film About the Life & Work of Stephen Hawk­ing

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion

Watch Stephen Hawking’s Inter­view with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Record­ed 10 Days Before His Death: A Last Con­ver­sa­tion about Black Holes, Time Trav­el & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Particle Accelerators, 3D Modeling & Artificial Intelligence

in History, Physics, Science | September 25th, 2018

Every­one knows that Mount Vesu­vius erupt­ed in 79 AD, entomb­ing the Roman town of Pom­peii in ash. Almost every­one knows that it also did the same to sev­er­al oth­er towns, includ­ing wealthy Her­cu­la­neum on the Bay of Naples. Count­less schol­ars have ded­i­cat­ed their lives to study­ing these unusu­al­ly well-pre­served first-cen­tu­ry ruins and the his­tor­i­cal trea­sures found with­in. We now under­stand a great deal about the lay­out, the struc­tures, the social life of Her­cu­la­neum, but some aspects remain unknow­able, such as the con­tents of the scrolls, charred beyond recog­ni­tion, that fill its libraries — or at least that remained unknow­able until now.

“In the 18th cen­tu­ry, work­men employed by King Charles III of Spain, then in charge of much of south­ern Italy, dis­cov­ered the remains of a mag­nif­i­cent vil­la, thought to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caeson­i­nus (known as Piso), a wealthy states­man and the father-in-law of Julius Cae­sar,” writes Smith­son­ian’s Jo Marchant. There, “in what was to become one of the most frus­trat­ing archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies ever, the work­men also found approx­i­mate­ly 2,000 papyrus scrolls.” But since the heat and gas­es of Vesu­vius had turned them “black and hard like lumps of coal”  — and indeed, some of Charles III’s work­men mis­took them for coal and threw them away — attempts to open them “cre­at­ed a mess of frag­ile flakes that yield­ed only brief snip­pets of text.”

The time of Charles III bare­ly had suf­fi­cient know-how to avoid destroy­ing the scrolls of Her­cu­la­neum, let alone to read them. That task turns out to demand even the most cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy we have today, includ­ing cus­tom-made 3D mod­el­ing soft­ware, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and the most advanced x‑ray facil­i­ties in exis­tence. Marchan­t’s arti­cle focus­es on an Amer­i­can com­put­er sci­en­tist named Brent Seales (Pro­fes­sor and Chair of Com­put­er Sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky), whose quest to read the Her­cu­la­neum scrolls has become a quest to devel­op a method to vir­tu­al­ly “unroll” them. This requires not just the com­put­ing pow­er and log­ic to deter­mine how these black­ened lumps (Seales calls two of them “Fat Bas­tard” and “Banana Boy”) might orig­i­nal­ly have opened up, but the most advanced par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tors in the world to scan them in the first place.

You can read more about Seales’ work with the Her­cu­la­neum scrolls, which after twen­ty years has shown real promise, at Men­tal Floss and Newsweek. Though quite expen­sive (demand for “beam time” on a par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor being what it is), huge­ly time-con­sum­ing, and occa­sion­al­ly, in Seales’ words, “excru­ci­at­ing­ly frus­trat­ing,” the inven­tion of a reli­able method for read­ing these and oth­er seem­ing­ly lost texts from antiq­ui­ty could make sub­stan­tial addi­tions to what we think of as the canon. (The texts revealed so far have had to do with the ideas of Epi­cu­rus, a primer on whose phi­los­o­phy we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on Open Cul­ture.) But gain­ing the fullest pos­si­ble under­stand­ing of what our ances­tors knew in the first cen­tu­ry may first require a few more 21st-cen­tu­ry devel­op­ments in physics and com­put­er sci­ence yet.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hid­den Ancient Greek Med­ical Text Read for the First Time in a Thou­sand Years — with a Par­ti­cle Accel­er­a­tor

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

See the Expan­sive Ruins of Pom­peii Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Them Before: Through the Eyes of a Drone

2,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of the Ten Com­mand­ments Gets Dig­i­tized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Res­o­lu­tion

Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Res­o­lu­tion)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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