Kepler's Dream: Speculative Fiction in Early Science

The idea of the Music of the Spheres, like a symphony made by the motions of the cosmos is ancient. Sometimes Kepler is presented as a modern thinker who took the heliocentric Copernican model and placed it on a mathematical footing, correcting the circular orbits with ellipses (with our Sun at one focus). The truth is messier. Kepler started with music! Influenced by these mystical ideas, Kepler published Harmonices Mundi making his case that musical intervals and harmonies described the known planets and moon. He thought they made an inaudible harmony which could be heard by the soul. He also proposed that the planetary orbits were in the same proportions as a nested series of the five regular Platonic solids. His famous 3 laws of orbital motion were more of an afterthought and even then, he related angular speeds to musical intervals. The image is my Copernicus linocut with Kepler’s scales for planets and moon. 

In retelling the history of science it can often be presented as a series of facts or discoveries, sanitized of wrong turns, misleading presentations and striped of the story of how it was communicated to contemporaries. (I should point out that I'm not talking about how historians of science retell the history of science, but more everyone else). We rarely learn that the giants upon whose shoulders we stand were often also just lucky or got to the right answer for the wrong reasons or simultaneously believed some very strange, unsubstantiated things. There's a story to be told by the way thinkers and early scientists communicated their ideas to their contemporaries, and it's not a story which is well-known.

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”

-Alexander Pope, 1688

It's occurred to me that basically, I'm railing against Pope, cause that's nonsense. Don't get me wrong. I'm a physicist by training. Newton's impact on physics and science broadly was tremendous. Newton's laws of motion, Newton's law of universal gravitation, and optics were genuinely revolutionary. But they didn't occur in a vacuum (no pun intended). Our knowledge of Newton's science is not due to his existence and the sudden consequential enlightenment for us all. Newton was a piece of work. We owe the publication of his grand book the Principia (1687) largely to the patience, diplomacy and determined persuasion of Edmond Halley (of comet fame) because otherwise, Newton might have taken much of his knowledge to the grave in a paranoid and antisocial fashion. Newton also had some very odd, arguably heretical religious and occultist beliefs and practised alchemy, which while it was a precursor of chemistry, was definitely filled with ideas that were not scientific and based on ideas about magic. Further, other scientists were working toward similar scientific ideas as Newton, which belies the lone genius myth. Robert Hooke (another real character) had deduced that gravitation was an inverse square law; the two argued over who had first made this discovery and I suspect Newton added Hooke to his long list of enemies. But even Newton acknowledged that Hooke and others knew the form of the law of gravitation by the 1660s.  Halley himself had a weird and incorrect hollow Earth theory. We learn about Johannes Kepler's brilliant laws of planetary motion, building on Copernicus's heliocentric model, but it's rarely stressed that he came to his ideas not just through mathematics. It's not often that teachers point out that Kepler's model was based first on music and what frequencies of revolution would make nice harmonies if they were interpreted as notes and later on the proportions of regular Platonic solids, rather than simply trying to model Tycho Brahe's observations (though in his defence, it would decades before the long-awaited publication of the Principia, which would have provided him the tools needed). But my point being, this is not a story of confusion punctuated by insights which suddenly clear everything up. This is a much messier story.

Kepler's Platonic solid model of the Solar System, from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)

I think we also often forget that a standard protocol of professional peer review scientific journals is quite recent. Scientific societies go back centuries, and did publish and otherwise disseminate scientific results but quality was mixed, and certainly influenced by biases like the sex, nationality, race, class and rank of the author. There was not a standard method for presenting results. Some discoveries were announced in letters to say, the Royal Society, which can be seen as an early precursor to scientific papers as we know them. Many early discoveries were presented in books. Something I find interesting is how they were combined with literature, in several instances, though not always without danger and risking accusations of heresy. Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake after including some imaginative speculation with his science, arguing the universe is infinite and filled with innumerable potentially inhabitable worlds in 1600. Galileo presented his evidence supporting the Copernican model in 1632 in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo) which is quite literally written as a dialogue between two philosophers and a layman. The staunch anti-Copernican follower of Ptolemy and Aristotle is name Simplicio as a broad hint to the reader! Galileo, like others including Hooke and Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens*, sometimes announced new results in an anagram, to establish priority without actually revealing what they discovered!  English clergyman and natural philosopher John Wilkins wrote The Discovery of a World in the Moone in 1638, inferring from the recent discovery of lunar mountains that it might also have inhabitants. Jesuit scholar and polymath Athanasius Kirchner (who disagreed with Kepler and Galileo) wrote only two pieces of imaginative fiction, but one was a mystical dialogue about space travel between an angel and a narrator called Itinerarium exstaticum in 1656. Huygens also wrote a book length speculation about extraterrestrial life, Cosmotheoros, in Latin, which he had published posthumously in 1698 for fear of censure (written partially as an annoyed response to Kirchner). It was translated in English as The Celestial Worlds Discover'd. When Margaret Cavendish, the first and one of the only women who was able to attend a Royal Society meeting for centuries (as her wealth, rank and connections helped supersede the bias against her sex) and one of the first women to publish in her own name wrote Observations upon Experimental Philosophy in 1666, she appended one of the earliest science fiction novels, a sort of imaginative complement to the science: The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, better known as The Blazing World, a fantasy, utopian satire. So with this sort of context, perhaps it makes sense that Kepler thought to try and write persuasively about his knowledge of lunar astronomy in the form of fiction, and in fact, an even earlier** example of science fiction. 

Margaret Cavendish and the Blazing World linocut 11" x 14", 2018, by Ele Willoughby

Kepler wrote his Somnium (or The Dream) in 1608 and it was published posthumously in 1634 by his son. Its origin is even earlier. It harkens back to his frustrations with his dissertation of 1593 where he argued that an observer on the moon would see the Earth move just as we see the moon move from our frame of reference. But the Tübingen faculty, who disallowed new Copernican astronomy (and forced Kepler's mentor Maestlin to keep his thoughts to himself) vetoed debate on this idea. Kepler was able to graduate and continue with his career, but never forgot how this irked him. He eventually publishing a mystical combination of Aristotelian and Copernican astronomy called Mysterium Cosmographicum, which landed him a job with Danish astronomer and Imperial Mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor, Tycho Brahe. Kepler inherited both Brahe's position but more importantly his unparalleled decades of observational data, which ultimately allowed him to deduce his law of ellipses published in his Astronomia Nova in 1609. Then his friend and ecclesiastical advisor to Emperor Rudolph, Wackher von Wackenfels asked him what he thought caused shadows on the moon. Unlike the Aristotelian Emperor who thought they were shadows of Earth's land masses, Kepler knew they were mountains and other geological features. Wackenfels encouraged Kepler to publish his own thoughts on this. So Kepler reimagined his thesis as Somnium, an imaginative story to get around the objections of the Aristotelians and to allow him to introduce a supernatural means of travelling to the moon to give him a reason to speculate about the lunar surface. 

Like Cavendish, he inserts himself into the story, but only as a framing device. Also like Cavendish, his prose is pretty clunky. The plot of the story is that Kepler himself falls asleep, reading a book of legends, and has a dream. He dreams he's reading a book! The book tells of a young 14 year old Icelandic boy named Duracotus, being raised by his widowed mother Fiolxhilde, a wise woman who earns her living selling pouches of herbs to the sailors at port, as lucky charms with healing powers. The boy curiously cuts open a pouch and looses its contents. His mother sells him to the sailor in a fit of pique. Luckily for the boy, the sailor sails promptly to Denmark to deliver a letter to Tycho Brahe, who questions the boy, deems him clever, and decides to train him in astronomy, much to his delight. After five years, he takes his leave and returns home to find his mother had suffered after her rash decision and was overjoyed to see him. He tells her of his experience and training and she is thrilled. She reveals she has her own source of astronomical knowledge, the Daemon of Lavania, or spirit of the moon. Even more astonishingly, it is possible to travel to Lavania (the moon) with the Daemon's help and she proposes they both make the voyage. After sunset, she summons the Daemon and they make the voyage of "fifty thousand German miles" to the moon. This is about a factor of 5 too small, but it's the right order of magnitude and a decent estimate for the day.

Kepler's Somnium, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2022

The voyage is four hours and very difficult, and travellers are "hurled just as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas," (to overcome what we now know is gravity) and thus are drugged with opiates to avoid shock. Damp sponges are used to allow them to breathe. The speed is so great the body instinctively rolls up and continues (due to what we now know as inertia) to move forward. They can only travel at the eclipse (notably a maximum of 4.5 hours, long enough for their 4 hour trip) to avoid the solar radiation in transit. The exhausted travellers are immediately brought to a cave, to shelter from the sun, and meet other daemons to learn about the moon's geography. This is an excuse for our author to basically dump all of his lunar astronomy knowledge so there's a long section of facts which don't advance the story as Kepler retells his thesis research. Then he describes a  moon divided into Subvolva (which is below Volva, aka the Earth) and Privolva which never sees Volva (our far-side of the moon). Our moon is tidally-locked to the Earth so we only ever see one side. Kepler explains that the lunar day is a month of two weeks of scorching heat and two weeks of cold. He imagines the Earth, Volva, has a moderating effect on climate. He describes geography like our own but exaggerated with soaring mountains and plunging valleys. Likewise his imagined lifeforms are monstrous in size. He imagines nomadic Privolvans, some with legs larger than camels, or wings, following receding water in boats or diving under water (to survive the extremes of climate). Thus he's imagined intelligent extraterrestrials, which was a radical (and arguably heretical) idea in his time. He imagines Subvolvan like giant serpents wit spongy skin and animals shaped like pinecones. The story ends abruptly. 

Kepler did not get the opportunity to publish this manuscript during his lifetime, but he did circulate it amongst friends. He lost control of the manuscript in 1611 and strangers, not up on the latest debates in science got access to it. Though he literally put himself into the story as the dreamer, readers saw the boy Duracotus trained by Tycho Brahe as a self-insert for Kepler. So they deduced that the fictional mother Fiolxhilde, wise woman and herb seller who communes with a demon, was a stand-in for Kepler's mother Katherine Kepler, an herbalist who was known to her neighbours for her vile temper, raised by an aunt, who had been burned as a witch. Ironically, it is really the Daemon of Lavania who is the voice of Kepler, revealing his lunar knowledge. By 1615, Katherine was arrested on suspicion of being a witch. Kepler's scheme to express his ideas and knowledge in fiction, to avoid the ire of the Aristotelians, had backfired badly, contributing to his mother getting caught up in the witch-craze. Kepler appreciated the danger and dropped all work to fight to exonerate his mother. The fight took 5 years, some of which she spent in prison, and the ordeal hastened her death two years later. Kepler felt culpable and her loss weighed on him. All of his work was set aside during this fight and publishing the Somnium in particular was out of the question. Over the last decade of his life he added 223 footnotes to the text, to insert most of the hard science. Having already faced such extreme consequences he no longer feared reprisals from Aristotelians. But, he died in 1630 with only 6 pages typeset. His son-in-law Jacob Bartsch took over, but he too died suddenly before it was published. Finally, his son Lucas published the book in an effort to help with his mother's financial distress. While not widely known today, the strange text casts has influenced science fiction and a marks one of the earliest scientific studies of an extraterrestrial planetary body.

*Huygens had his own dispute with Hooke over who invented the balance spring to regulate portable watches. 

**But in my book, by no means the earliest. See for instance A True Story by Lucian of Samosata (2nd century CE) which includes space exploration, aliens and interplanetary warfare - and which Kepler owned. There is also a near contemporary Copernican lunar science fiction story written by English historian Francis Godwin (1562-1634), The Man in the Moone, written in the 1620s and published 1638. Of course, clearly defining what counts as science fiction isn't entirely straightforward either.

References

The Somnium Project, accessed March, 2022

Somnium (novel), Wikipedia, accessed March, 2022

Gale E. Christianson, Kepler's Somnium: Science Fiction and the Renaissance Scientist, Science Fiction Studies, #8, vol. 3, part 1, March 1976

Greg Gbur, Somnium, by Johannes Kepler, Skull in the Stars blog, February 23, 2018

Emily Lord Fransee, Mistress of a New World Early Science Fiction in Europe’s “Age of Discovery” , The Public Domain Review, October 11, 2018

Hugh Aldersey-Williams, The Uncertain Heavens, Christiaan Huygens’ Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life, The Public Domain Review, October 21, 2020

Historical physics and astronomy as .gifs

 

Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642. Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti, 1613.

Put Galileo's 1612 drawings of sunspots together and what do you get (via Houghton Library, Harvard University)? 

Gifs taken from a 1929 film by Nobel laureate William Lawrence Bragg demonstrating his research into surface tension and spectroscopic analysis of light reflected from a soap film. (via the Royal Institution tumblr)

NASA imagery of Pioneer via the US National Archives on GIPHY

This work from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology,  Celestial scenery, or, The Wonders of the planetary system displayed (1845) was written by Thomas Dick, a Scottish minister and science educator. (via the Smithsonian)

And of course Eadweard Muybridge:

Owl, Pussycat, Scientific Illustration and Other Nonsense by Edward Lear

owl illustration by Edward Lear

Edward Lear's illustration of a cat, Private collection promised to the Ashmolean Museum

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea 

In a beautiful pea-green boat, 

They took some honey, and plenty of money, 

Wrapped up in a five-pound note. 

The Owl looked up to the stars above, 

And sang to a small guitar, 

‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, 

What a beautiful Pussy you are, 

You are, 

You are! 

What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear

illustration of a lioness by Edward Lear

Poet Edward Lear (1812–1888), remembered affectionately for his delightful nonsense poems like 'The Owl and the Pussycat' or 'The Jumblies' is less well remembered for his exceptional, carefully observed scientific illustration but he was a talented and sought-after natural historian and illustrator. He believed in working from life, if not in the field, at least observing animals in zoos and menageries, rather than basing drawings of flora and fauna on museum collections of dead animals. He wrote “I am never pleased with a drawing unless I make it from life,” in 1831. He befriended zookepers to gain access and make measurements of animals; his work was praised by Charles Darwin and John James Audubon. He apprenticed with scientist Prideaux Selby, gaining confidence in his bird illustraions. His work shows a real understanding of how animals move and their 'personalities'which can be missing from work produced from drawing dead specimen. His first publication was a book about parrots, Illustrations of the Family Psittacidae or Parrots, published when he was only 19. It was the first book published about a family of birds. Then he worked for scientific illustrators John and Elizabeth Gould, helping him illustrate the birds of Europe and her illustrate birds for Darwin’s Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, as well as producing illustrations for William Buckland, Thomas Bell, and William Jardine. His careful observation and illustrations lead Lear to identify several new species and several are named after him like Lear's macaw (Anodorhynchus leari), a large blue Brazilian parrot.

Culminated Toucan, Ramphastos culminatus (mid 1830s).
Plate 1 in Lear's Monograph of the Family of Toucans.

 

A Stanley parakeet, one of 42 plates in Edward Lear's Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots. Biodiversity Heritage Library/CC BY 2.0

His nonsense poems came after, and in a sense, out of his scientific illustration. He was commissioned to illustrate the collection of parots in the menagerie of naturalist Edward Smith-Stanley, the 13th Earl of Derby at his home Knowsley Hall near Liverpool. He was treated like the help, and ate with the servants in the basement, but became a great hit with Lord Derby's grandchildren and began entertaining them with cartoons and limericks and this was how he began creating work for children. The Earl began inviting him to eat upstairs with guests and other nobles. He meanwhile gained a real reputation for his painting and even became the personal drawing instructor to Queen Victoria. So when he first began published Book of Nonsense, in 1846, he used a pen name to avoid tarnishing his reputation as a serious painter and scientific illustrator. He revealed his name only after his poems became a great success, a great surprise to him. This was a great boon to him as his ailing health and eyesight meant he could no longer work as a zoological draughtsman, and this new success came when he really needed it.

His scientific illustration and nonsense come together delightfully in his “Nonsense Botany” series, like this Piggiwiggia Pyramidalis! (Image courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University. MS Eng 797.1 [20])

Edward Lear's Cockatooca Superba from the Nonsense Botany series

Edward Lear's Crabbia Horrida from the Nonsense Botany series

References

Beth Marie Mole, Poetry and Pictures, circa 1830, The Scientist, November 2012.

GrrlScientist, Edward Lear featured at the Royal Society, The Guardian blog site, 2016 

Donna Ferguson, How Edward Lear's artistic genius led to the Owl and the Pussycat, The Guardian, Sunday, 31 January, 2021. 

Anna Lena Phillips, Serious Nonsense, American Scientist,.com

'Edward Lear', illusrtaion History resource from the Norman Rockwell Museum

Art, Nonsense and Science, The Biologist 64(6) p24-27

Double laureate Marie Skłodowska-Curie & the hunt for elements

Marie Curie, details of linocut with glow-in-the-dark ink, by Ele Willoughby, 2014

The most well-known woman in the history of physics - or perhaps science - was born almost a century and a half ago today. The famous Polish-born, naturalized-French physicist and chemist Marie Skłodowska-Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was the first woman to win a Nobel prize, the only woman to ever win TWO Nobel prizes, and the only person ever to win in two different sciences: physics and chemistry! Happy birthday Madame Curie! You can read more about her in my post for Ada Lovelace Day, 2014.

How the Earth's Crust is Born: Marie Tharp "girl talk" and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

Marie Tharp and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,
9" x 12" linocut on Japanese paper, by Ele Willoughby, 2015

Happy birthday to American geologist and oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp (July 30, 1920- August 23, 2006), whose pioneering, thorough and complete ocean floor maps made with her partner in science Bruce Heezen revealed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The mid-ocean ridge itself, based on their 1957 physiographic map, is illustrated behind her, along with the sort of echo sounder or precision depth recorder tracks she used, in front of her.

Tharp had struggled to find the the right university major; she wanted something she could do, and enjoy, but there were not many options for women in her day. More opportunities opened up during WWII and she took the chance to return to school and study geology and then math. Looking for something challenging (but not tedious) she contacted Maurice 'Doc' Ewing at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia, who hired her to draft data, including the thousands of echo sounder profiles they were gathering. Women were still not allowed to participate in research cruises, but they could work with the data. Before long, Heezen came to Lamont and required so much drafting work that Tharp worked exclusively with him.

Scientists once imagined the ocean floor as a largely featureless plain. Early depth measurements were taken with lead weights (such as canon balls) and a whole lot of rope! As early as the late 19th century, such laboriously collected datasets began to hint at a broad rise in the centre of the Atlantic. By the mid 20th century, there was a push to try and map these submarine mountains.

Tharp spent months painstakingly "plotting, drawing, checking, correcting, redrawing and rechecking" profiles of the North Atlantic. The ship tracks across the Atlantic were a sparse web, but when Tharp compared half a dozen more or less parallel transects she noticed no only the general similarities of the ridge, but a V-shaped notch in the centre of all the profiles. She suspected they coincided because they indicated a rift valley all along the ridge crest. The early ideas about plate tectonics or the "continental drift" theory were still quite controversial and unpopular. Heezen dismissed Tharp's observation as "girl talk" for looking too much like continent drift - as in fact it was indeed a vital piece of the plate tectonics puzzle. We now know that surface of the Earth is itself a jigsaw puzzle of pieces known as tectonic plates, jostling one another at a stately, geological pace. Mid-ocean ridges are underwater volcanic mountain chains which roughly bisect all ocean basins. They are all cut by a rift valley which is the spreading centre. These rifts are where new crust is born, pushing upwards and outward. This drives the two plates on either side slowly apart over geological time. On our own timescales of everyday life, we notice the bumps in this slow ride: the sporadic earthquakes, rather than the slow creep (though today, we can meticulously measure both).

Tharp believed the rift was real though her contour maps hadn't convinced Heezen. In 1952, they began working on physiographic maps, which would show seafloor topography as if you were flying just above it, and the water were drained away. These had the advantage of really giving a sense of the variety of geology, from plains to mountains, seamounts to trenches. Also, unlike detailed contour maps, physiographic maps were not US Navy classified information, so Tharp and Heezen would be able to publish what they produced. Further, they were beginning to gather much better precision depth recorder data, which revealed far more features, along with better navigation to plot ships' positions along tracks more accurately. A second project in their research group involved plotting earthquakes, and Heezen insisted they work at the same scale. Heezen then noticed that ocean earthquake epicentre data also formed long lines - and in fact, when one map was placed above the other on a light table they found the earthquakes formed near continous lines along the Mid-Atlantic ridge right where Tharp had indicated there was a rift valley. Using the earthquake data to extrapolate and plot the rift position where there was no seafloor sounding data, they found that the rift extend landward into the Rift Valley of East Africa - a well-known, easy to observe terrestrial rift valley. Heezen was then convinced. They had discovered a worldwide mid-ocean ridge system, tens of thousands of kilometres long. Tharp was able to mine existing data to show the Mid-Atlantic Ridge extended to the south Atlantic and found similar features in other oceans. These all similarly lined up neatly with earthquake epicentres. Ewing and Heezen announced their findings in 1956. In 1957 Tharp and Heezen published their North Atlantic physiographic map; I've shown my version of their map behind her. The ridge snakes from top to bottom (north to south-south-west), above and almost mimicking the line of her arm.

They continued this work, extending to other oceans over the next 25 years, ultimately producing detailed physiographic maps of the world oceans. Their pioneering work mapping the oceanic plate boundaries, and showing their clear alignment with seismic data helped fuel the revolution in geology and geophysics, the paradigm shift of plate tectonics.

Tharp's work was largely in the background during her university career, though she won a number of prizes during her retirement and has continued to gain posthumous recognition for the importance of her work and observations. I was very pleased to see her recognized recently in Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Cosmos reboot. I want to bring her incredible insight and excellent work to a wider audience as both artist and marine geophysicist myself.


(cross posted from the minouette blog)

Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the LGM-1

Jocelyn Bell and the LGM-1, linocut portrait by Ele Willoughby 2014

Happy birthday to astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burrell (born, 1943), who discovered pulsars! As I wrote previously:

In November, 1967, Jocelyn Bell (Burnell) was just a graduate student when she discovered the first radio pulsar (or pulsating star), a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation. This radiation (light in the radio frequency band) can only be observed when the star is point towards us; so, like the light from a distant lighthouse, it appears to pulse at a precise frequency. She had been working with her supervisor Antony Hewish and others to construct a radio telescope to study quasars (quasi-stellar objects which emit radio waves). She noted some "scruff" on her chart-recorder, and then that the pulses were incredibly regular, occurring every 1.337 seconds. Hewish was initially scornful and insisted the regular pulses must be noise from a human made source. He first dubbed this object, emitting with such regularity 'LGM 1' for "Little Green Men 1", a playful joke about their uncertainty about what could emit radiation so regularly - obviously it could only be a communication from extraterrestrials hahaha! Only after she found other such sources, in different places with different frequencies, were her colleagues convinced and this lead to the development of the pulsar model. It is now known PSR B1919+21.

The 1968 paper announcing this discovery in Nature has five authors, lead by Hewish, followed by Jocelyn Bell. In 1974, Hewish won the Nobel Prize for this discovery, along with fellow radioastronomer Marlin Ryle). Jocelyn Bell was not included as it was assumed that the "senior man" was responsible for the work. This was controversial and has been condemned by many leading astronomers like Fred Hoyle (who with Thomas Gold was first able to explain the signals as due to a rapidly rotating neutron star). Jocelyn Bell Burnell herself has stated she was not upset. Bell Burnell has a great on-going career and won many honours after her impressive start, but her exclusion from the Nobel win, based on her own research strikes me and many others as one of the more blatant and egregious examples of gender bias in the selection of Nobel prize recipients.

Read the full post about how her beautiful dataset itself has lead a life of its own as a cultural meme.

Chien-Shung Wu & the Violation of Parity

Madame Wu and the Violation of Parity, 2nd ed. linocut, 2012, Ele Willoughby

Happy birthday to Mme. Wu! Chien-Shiung Wu (May 31, 1912- February 16, 1997, Chinese-born American physicist, whose nicknames included the “First Lady of Physics”, “Chinese Marie Curie,” and “Madame Wu”) came up with a truly beautiful experiment to test whether the weak force conserves parity (whether beta decay would be the same if reflected in the mirror). In my print on the left I show Mme. Wu in her lab and a schematic diagram in the box of her beautiful experiment. On the right I show her reflection, as in the mirror, and in the box I show the mirror reflection of the experimental set-up and the shocking result, that the reaction is not the mirror opposite.

In 1956, theoretical physicists Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang suggested that perhaps the weak force might not be the same 'through the looking-glass'. The idea that the "Law of Conservation of Parity" might be broken was hard to believe. The laws of physics are the same in the mirror for anything else. Face a friend, as in the mirror. If you drop a pencil from your right hand, and your friend mirrors you and drops a pencil with his or her left, the pencils will fall at the same rate. This is because Parity is conserved by the force of gravity - as it is with the electromagnetic force and even the strong (nuclear) force within atomic nuclei. Lee and Yang pointed out that no one had checked to make sure that the weak force, which controls beta decay in radioactive materials, also conserves parity. Lee convinced the brilliant experimentalist to test this.

Madame Wu did a subtle and technically difficult experiment with her collaborators which is shown schematically in the print. She took Cobalt-60 (shown as the cobalt blue sphere in the box), which is radioactive. Its neutrons spontaneously give off electrons and become protons. The electrons are the tiny blue dots. On the left, we see that the Cobalt-60 in an electromagnet (a wire wrapped metal horseshoe with a source of power). Because of the spiral-wrap of the wire, we know that the North pole of the magnet will be on the bottom (you can figure this out by mimicking the curl of the wire with the fingers of your right hand and look at the direction your thumb points). It turns out that the emitted electrons are given off preferentially towards the North pole.

Next, she reversed the set-up as in the mirror. On the right you see the horseshoe and wire spiral reflected. If you use your right hand to check the direction of the magnet field, you'll see that it is the opposite way; the North pole is now on the top. It turns out that the electrons are preferentially emitted upwards toward the North pole. Thus, beta decay IS NOT the same in the mirror! Madame Wu showed that a "Law" of physics did not hold! This result was staggering and shocked the physics world. Lee and Yang won the Nobel prize for their theoretical work. Many physicists thought Mme. Wu should have been included in this win.

She won many honours for her incredible career. Wu took part in the Manhattan Project (she is believed to be the only Chinese person to do so) and literally wrote the book on beta decay. She was the first: Chinese-American to be elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; Female instructor in the Physics Department of Princeton University; Woman with an honorary doctorate from Princeton University; Female President of the American Physical Society, elected in 1975; winner of the Wolf Prize in Physics (1978); Living scientist to have an asteroid named after her. She won many awards and fellowships including: the Research Corporation Award 1958; the Achievement Award, American Association of University Women 1960; John Price Wetherill Medal, The Franklin Institute, 1962; Comstock Prize in Physics, National Academy of Sciences 1964; Chi-Tsin Achievement Award, Chi-Tsin Culture Foundation, Taiwan 1965; Scientist of the Year Award, Industrial Research Magazine 1974; Tom W. Bonner Prize, American Physical Society 1975; National Medal of Science (U.S.) 1975; the aforementioned Wolf Prize in Physics, Israel 1978; Honorary Fellow Royal Society of Edinburgh; Fellow American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science; Fellow American Physical Society. And I bet you hadn't heard of her! I'm trying to redress that.

There be dragons...

"Carta Marina" by Olaus Magnus Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

What to do at the edge of known territory, or how to demark the gaps in data in any sort of data visualization - geographical maps in particular - has long been an issue we grapple with. Medieval and even Renaissance mapmakers famously decorated the unmapped regions of their maps with fanciful creatures. These creatures would not fit with our modern conceptions of science, but in fairness, were not necessarily complete fabrications, but actual attempts to document animals which had been described by early explorers, but unseen by the mapmakers, rather than simple mythological ornaments. It's also been argued that they intended to scare foreign fishermen away from certain waters and reflected the idea land creatures had a marine equivalent (sea dogs, sea cows, even sea chickens apparently - see the Tetrapod Zoology review of Sea Monsters of Medieval and Renaissance Maps). The early map of Scandinavia, the Carta Marina by Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), is a prime example of the sorts of fabulous creatures of the maps. You can find the same creatures, including the ziphius (a whale sized creature) porcus marinus (like it sounds, essentially a pig mermaid, or boar-whale perhaps an attempt to depict a sea lion), and the rosmarine (or boar-whale, a tusked creature perhaps derived from the walrus) on many other maps, often appearing to be copied or inspired by previous maps.

A ziphius sea monster eats a seal, while attacked by another monster
(detail of the 1575 edition of the Carta Marina by Olaus Magnus)

Toronto artist Bailey Henderson has done a magical thing. She's created a series of bronze sculptures, Monstorum Marines, depicting these creatures in full textured 3D. Each is coloured with pigments and acrylics. The texture both micmics the lines of woodcut maps, like the Carta Marina, and enhances further, creating a naturalistic yet fantastic creature.

A ziphius eats a seal while biten by another creature in naturalist Conrad Gesner's 1560 Icones Animalium 

Famous cartographer Abraham Ortelius's 1603 edition of his well-known Theatrum Orbis Terrarum map includes this tame whale with fearsome teeth, he calls the Steipereidur, explaining that it "fights other whales on behalf of fishermen."

Bailey Henderson,

Ziphius et Orca

2014

Cold cast bronze, acrylic paint, powdered pigment

17 3/4 x 11 1/4 x 7 inches

Henderson writes,

Ziphius is based on a sea monster commonly depicted on renaissance and medieval maps. It was believed to cut boats in half with its sharp dorsal fin. Here sculpted in a life-like form. Creatures like Orca are based on whales, and were commonly depicted on maps in various forms.

I see a little Ortelius and Gesner, by way of Magnus in this sculpture.

Rosmarine, or boar-whale by Gesner, 1555

detail, Carta Marina (1575) by Olaus Magnus, including the rosmarine or pinniped with his tusks

Bailey Henderson, Pinniped,

2013

Cast Resin, acrylic paint

11 x 4.75 x 4.75

Sea pig, detail from Olaus Magnus' 1539 Carta Marina. This purported creature was compared to heretics that "distorted truth and lived like swine" (according to Hanah Waters, "The Enchanting Sea Monsters on Medieval Maps" on Smithsonian.com)

Of the sea pig, or hog, Olaus Magnus wrote, "Now I shall revive the memory of a monstrous Hog that was found afterwards, Anno 1537, in the same German Ocean, and it was a Monster in every part of it. For it had a Hog's head, and a quarter of a Circle, like the Moon, in the hinder part of its head, four feet like a Dragon's, two eyes on both sides of his Loyns, and a third in his belly inkling toward his Navel; behind he had a Forked-Tail, like to other Fish commonly."(via strange science)

Bailey Henderson, Porcus Marinus

2014

Cold cast bronze, powdered pigment, acrylic paint

16 x 8 1/2 x 7 inches

Be sure to the rest of her portfolio, for other sculpture creatures and illustrations.

Inge Lehmann & the Earth's Solid Inner Core

Inge Lehmann, linocut, 8" x 8", by Ele Willoughby, 2011

Happy birthday to Inge Lehmann! Inge Lehmann (May 13, 1888 – February 21, 1993) was a Danish seismologist who first demonstrated that the Earth's core is not one single molten sphere, but contained an inner (solid) core, in 1936. She was a pioneer woman in science, a brilliant seismologist and lived to be 105, so I've selected her for my offering for the Mad Scientists of Etsy April challenge on earthquake seismology. Each is 8" (20.5 cm) square and printed in dark cyan and red-orange ink on white Japanese kozo (mulberry) paper.

We now know, as she first postulated, that the earth has roughly three equal concentric sections: mantle, liquid outer core and solid inner core. The crust, on which we live is merely a thin, um, scum really, on top of this slowly boiling pot. The only way to probe deep into the earth's core is to employ massive earthquakes, the waves they generate and the paths they follow. There are two main types of seismic waves used for studies of the globe, unimaginatively named Primary (or P, or compressional) and Secondary (or S, or shear). Imagine a glass of water with a straw; the straw will appear broken at the air-water interface, because light bends as it enters the water. Just like light travelling through different media, these seismic waves can bend, reflect or be transmitted at any boundary. The difference in physical properties between the mantle and outer core causes a P-wave shadow. (For S-waves, the shadow zone is absolute because liquids, like the outer core, do not support shear - imagine trying to cut water with a pair of shears and you can see this for yourself. Thus, no shear waves can make it through the outer core, and thus we can be certain the outer core is fluid). That means, the compressional waves from an earthquake can be recorded at seismic stations out to 105 degrees from an epicentre and then there is a zone which is in the core's shadow. Lehmann found that there were some late-arriving P-waves are much larger angles (142 to 180 degrees) which had been vaguely labelled 'diffractions'. She showed that these could be explained instead by deflections of the waves which travelled through the outer core at her postulated inner core boundary.

She later discovered a discontinuity in the mantle (confusingly also called the Lehmann discontinuity). She did important work well into her 70s.

When she received the Bowie medal in 1971 (she was the first woman to receive the highest honour of the American Geophysical Union), her citation noted that the "Lehmann discontinuity was discovered through exacting scrutiny of seismic records by a master of a black art for which no amount of computerization is likely to be a complete substitute...".

I think her accomplishment is downright astonishing. To have the exactitude to work with the data and the daring to neglect the irrelevant and offer up a simple, elegant - correct! - explanation is a rare and marvellous thing. To be the top of her field in 1936, when she was a pioneer for women in science and had to compete in vain with incompetent men (her words) is heroic.

I based my portrait on an earlier photo, to match the date of her phenomenal P' paper. I also show her model of the earth in red-orange ink, complete with mantle, inner and outer core, and travel paths for rays through the layers, including into the shadow zone.

Florence Nightingale; Nursing, Statistics and Data Visualization Pioneer

Florence Nightingale, 2nd edition linocut on kozo, Ele Willoughby, 2014

I confess that Florence Nightingale (12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) wasn't on my shortlist of women in science I wished to portray. I felt a little like she was an old-fashioned heroine, from a time where if a woman wasn't going to be defined strictly as a person who served and cared for her family, it was okay if (and only if) she cared for other people. This bias was somewhat reinforced by my own family history: my mother is a nurse, her mother was a nurse, whereas I am a physicist. I know my grandmother wanted to be a pharmacist, and my mother felt her career options were school teacher or nurse. Plus, I take after my father's side of the family and have been known to have a vasovagal response to the mere description of medical procedures; I have a high pain threshold, but am squeemish, and faint like the rest of them. All of which means I partially define myself by not being a nurse. However, I was (luckily) commissioned to make a portrait of Florence Nightingale. The more I read, the more interesting she became to me.

Nightingale earned the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp" during the Crimean War, from a phrase used by The Times, describing her as a “ministering angel” making her solitary rounds of the hospital at night with “a little lamp in her hand”. The image was immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem Santa Filomena in the stanza:

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

So, I’ve shown Nightingale with her little lamp, based on contemporary photos and illustrations. But inventing modern nursing wasn't her only accomplishment. Taking up a profession, travelling to a war zone, nursing the wounded, taking on hospital administration and the training of a professional class of nurses weren't the only things she did which were so unusual for a woman of her time to do. It turns out that her father fostered her gift for mathematics, and she made significant contributions to statistics and data visualization too.

Behind Nightingale is her own ‘Diagram of Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East’ plotted as a polar area diagram – her own statistical and data visualization innovation, sometimes called a Nightingale Rose Diagram. It illustrates the causes of death in the military hospital she managed during the Crimean War. April 1855 to March 1856 is shown on the left and April 1854 to March 1855 to the right. When she researched the causes of mortality, looking back at the data, she saw clearly that the lack of hygiene was a far greater risk to soldiers’ lives than being wounded. The sections represent one month of data {J,F,M,A,M, J,J,A,S,O,N,D} for each month of the year. The green “wedges measured from the centre of the circle represent area for area the deaths from Preventible or Mitigable Zymotic diseases, the [yellow] wedges measured from the centre the deaths from wounds, & the [orange] wedges measured from the centre the deaths from all other causes. The […] line across the [yellow] triangle in Nov. 1854 marks the boundary of the deaths from all other causes during the month. In October 1854, & April 1855, the [orange] area coincides with the [yellow], in January & February 1856, the [green] coincides with the [orange]. The entire areas may be compared by following the [green], the [yellow], & the […] lines enclosing them.” This "Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East" was published in Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army and sent to Queen Victoria in 1858.

This experience influenced her later career and she campaigned for sanitary living conditions, knowing how dangerous unsanitary conditions can be to survival. She also made extensive use of similar polar area diagrams on the nature and magnitude of the conditions of medical care in the Crimean War, or sanitation conditions of the British army in rural India, to make such statistics transparent to Members of Parliament and civil servants who would have been unlikely to read or understand traditional statistical reports. This is an excellent example of how careful selection of how data is presented can influence whether the information is successfully communicated and how important that can be - occassionally even influencing people's survival!

In 1859, Nightingale was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. She later became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.

Though her own opinion  of other women was often harsh, she has been credited with contributing to feminist literature with a book she wrote while sorting out her thoughts on her role in the world, including the essay Cassandra, which protested the over-feminisation of women into near helplessness. She helped abolish laws regulating prostitution that were overly harsh to women. She also clearly expanded the acceptable forms of female participation in the workforce.

This, and in particularly, the way she insisted on making decisions based on scientific evidence, and using data to save lives, makes her an apt addition to the women in science portrait series.

Caroline Herschel: Scientific Cinderella to Comet Sweeper

Caroline Herschel, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2014

Happy birthday Caroline Herschel! German-born Caroline Herschel (16 March 1750 – 9 January 1848), while overshadowed by her brother William (who discovered Uranus, amongst his other astronomical accomplishments), was a real pioneer as a woman in astronomy and made her own important contributions. In fact, she became the first salaried female scientist, when King George III hired her to assist her brother, at a time when there were few professional scientists anywhere. Hers was a real life sort of Cinderella story, where rather than marrying a prince, she made a life and career for herself. Marriage was the expected role for a woman of her time, but she was deemed unmarriageable, since a childhood bout of typhus stunted her growth. Her mother thought she should train to be a servant, and purposely stood in the way of her learning French, or music, to prevent her from seeking employment as a governess. She wanted a perpetual unpaid maid. Her father sometimes managed to include her in William's lessons when their mother was absent. William had fled to England after the Seven Years War and made a life as a musician and composer in Bath. William managed to rescue his younger sister from their mother's clutches, under the pretext that she might have the voice to be a solo singer in Handel's oratorios, as she too was a natural musician. Of course, he also wanted a woman to manage his bachelor household. Meanwhile, he developed a real passion for astronomy. So, by the time she arrived, all his spare time away from music was devoted to astronomy and she found that despite her singing talent, she was roped into assisting with the construction of telescopes, rather than receiving music lessons. By 1781, William had discovered a new planet - Uranus , which he cannily dubbed the 'Georgian Star' after King George III. This had the desired effect of securing himself a pension, so that he could spend his time on astronomy (so long as he would present it to the King when asked).

William and Caroline worked together at Slough, observing the night sky with a variety of telescopes. William built some very large telescopes and had Caroline take notes of what he observed, while she used smaller 'sweeper' telescopes to sweep the skies for interesting object. She discovered 11 nebulae (2 of which turned out to be galaxies) which were previously unknown! She also found 8 or 9 comets, as well as making and sharing observations of comets discovered by others. The portrait is based on a miniature of Caroline, as well as her own notes and diagrams from 1 August 1786, when she discovered her first comet, now known as Comet C/1786 P1 (Herschel). On the left, her sketches of the object "like a star out of focus" which she correctly identified as a comet, is at the centre of the three circular diagrams labelled I, II and III. On the right, her Fig I and Fig II show her observations the following night, noting the position of the comet relative to the constellations of Ursa Major and Coma Berenices.

She also independently re-discovered Comet Encke in 1795, first recorded by Pierre Méchain in 1786. Later, in 1819, her observations help Johann Franz Encke recognize it was a periodic comet, like Halley's comet. Encke was able to calculate its orbit, partially due to her observations. The comet shown behind Caroline is based on a recent photo of Comet Encke, which returns every 3 years.

In order to calculate orbits of newly discovered comets, it was important to let other astronomers know as soon as possible. The letter post was often not fast enough, if the weather turned cloudy. She discovered her 8th comet while her brother was away. So, she took matters into her own hands. After an hour's sleep, she saddled a horse, and road the roughly twenty-six miles to the Greenwich Observatory of the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, much to his astonishment.

One of her important impacts on astronomy was that her early success showed her brother how even an amateur using a small telescope could find previously unobserved nebulae, and hence that there was real value in making systematic sweeps of the night sky. Partnering together, with William sweeping the sky with his 20 foot telescope and Caroline taking notes by lamplight just inside the window, they went on to discover 2507 nebulae and clusters over two decades of work. Further, she acted as 'computer', doing the mathematical grunt work for her brother's observations. William's study completely revolutionized astronomy, and it couldn't have happened without Caroline's help.

They worked side by side nightly until 1788, when William married (at age 49). Caroline was no longer needed to run his household, and he offered her money as compensation. She, however, convinced him to request her own salary from the King, which she received. She moved to a cottage in the garden. She did a lot of her own observing for the next nine years (while William was otherwise occupied at nights), and gained more fame in her own right.

In 1797 the standard star catalogue used by astronomers was published by John Flamsteed. It was tough to use since it appeared in two volumes, with discrepancies. William suggested that a proper cross-reference would be a great help and a project for Caroline. She produced the resulting Catalogue of Stars, published by the Royal Society in 1798. It contained a index of all of Flamsteed's observed stars, all of the errors in his volumes and a further 560 additional stars.

When William died in 1822, she returned to Hanover, where she was born, but she continued her cataloguing and confirming of William's observations. Her catalogue of nebulae aided her nephew John Herschel in his astronomical work. The Royal Astronomical Society presented her with their Gold Medal in 1828 for this catalogue. She was the first woman to receive the honour (and remained the only woman until Vera Rubin in 1996).

She and Mary Sommerville were the first women admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society, when they were elected Honorary Members in 1835. In 1838 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. In 1846, at age 96 she also received a Gold Medal from the King of Prussia, for her astronomical work (presented by none other than Alexander von Humboldt). An asteroid and moon crater have been named in her honour.

You can find more in the great article  on Caroline Herschel by Micheal Hoskin AAS Comittee on the Status of Women site (to which this blog post is indebted), Caroline Herschel's wikipedia entry,  and the ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY entry on her notes.