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.

Astrophysical Meme: Jocelyn Bell Burnell's Pulsar, Little Green Men, Joy Division, and Beautiful Data

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 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.

Not only the discovery, but the presentation of the data is impressive and elegant. The diagram above (from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy) shows superimposed images of successive pulses. Stripped down to their essential information like sparklines (chart lines without annotation or axes, but drawn of course to a common scale) so their regularity really stands out, and they can be easily compared and contrasted. If you are used to looking at time series, you'll know that since they can be easily superimposed and the pulses line up, that the frequency is quite regular. The diagram is downright eloquent, and would warm Edward Tufte's heart. It appeared even earlier in the January 1971 edition of Scientific American article “The Nature of Pulsars” by Jeramiah P. Ostriker (shown above on pale blue) and 1974 graphic design book on data visualisation ‘Graphis Diagrams’(via Gia's Blog).

From there, the image began a sort of life of its own. The British rock band Joy Division included the image from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy in a folder of reference material for their 1979 album Unknown Pleasures submitted to Peter Saville, who designed the album cover- iconic in white on black, it's the pulsar data graphically on a square field (at left). It of course appeared as art, without explanation of its source. The beauty of the image itself, as well as the devotion of fans of the enigmatic album, lead to it propagating as a meme to this day. Peter Saville himself gives a great explanation of the life of this diagram in this video.


Data Visualization Reinterpreted by VISUALIZED from VISUALIZED on Vimeo.

Consider how the image has propagated, from tattoos

via Gia's Blog and tattoo by dodie

to sculpture

[unkn0wn pleaSures 1919] by Marvin Bratke, Lasercut Sculpture 40x40cm, wood/acrylic glass

to food

Brock Davis

through fashion (both consciously of its original source, and more tongue-in-check critique of our contemporary cult of images disconnected from their source - though ironically, I'm pretty sure the tee shirt was designed by someone who thought kids today should know Unknown Pleasures, rather than radioastronomy).

PULSAR 1919 SKIRT by lovelysally

Graphic artist Adam J. Kurtz has created this humorous t-shirt via laughing squid

We've arrived at something interesting to look at on tumblr, without reference to Joy Division or pulsars, an enigmatic but captivating image with an unknown source... an unknown pleasure if you will.

NaCl in Architecture and Song

I recently saw a building inspired by the chemistry of salt (↬The Fox Is Black). Architect David Jameson designed the NaCl House of Bethesda, Maryland, USA, to be white with a crystal-like structure mimicking mineral rock salt. While the lines are as rectilinear as most buildings, the varying scales, like a natural crystal, are unexpected and beautiful.

Crystals seem to be omnipresent in a lot of popular art and culture, but I had not previously seen their influence on architectural design (at least not in such an obvious and direct fashion).

When I was searching more more information about this, I found the proposal by Faulders Studio for the GEOtube Building for Dubai, which would be able to grow and expand, as it features a self-built exoskeleton made from accumulated sea salt deposits. Built of a structure of 'vascular pipes', the mesh around the building would employ solar power to pump salt water from its pond (which in turn would be pumped the 4.6 km from the high salinity Persian Gulf) to the roof, and then down through the vascular pipes (driven by gravity). The salt water would be misted from the pipes and salt would accrue on the mesh through evaporation (as shown in the images of meshes above). The water there is so salty that the building's transparent skin would rapidly take on a new crystalline appearance. After 15 to 20 years, the architects predict the skin would be opaque; then the salt could be harvested, and one presumes, the process begun anew. This strikes me as an innovative way to let the extremes of the local environment actually serve to benefit of, and to some degree, build the edifice. (&↬web urbanist)

What brought this to mind today, was actually CBC radio, who were playing a tribute concert to the late Kate McGarrigle. It included a cover of her composition, 'The Salt Song' by Jane Siberry, who called it a frighteningly honest love song. Here, I've found Kate and her sister Anna's own version for you. I find it delightful, happy yet bittersweet, though not salty, and effortlessly accurate.

Happy Pi (π) Day

The video was produced by Austin-based musician Michael John Blake via the New Scientist magazine.

Science Nation Army

Today, instead of 'art about science' I bring you 'science about art', if you will.
"Using real footage and sounds from a working science lab, the Inside Knowledge team have reconstructed the White Stripes song Seven Nation Army from scratch."



The equipment is from Imperial College's BLAST lab; like its name suggest, the scientists at the lab study the effects of explosions, specifically "the behaviour of the human skeleton under high impulse loading" from an inter-disciplinary perspective involving medicine, physics, bioengineering, and military research. You can imagine how the machinery might inspire a percussionist. The Inside Knowledge team consists of four science communication students who are interested in the scientific process, not just the sort of headline-grabbing results released at press conferences. They say they want to produce a unique multimedia diary of their time 'embedded' at the BLAST lab. I'm really impressed; this may not be what we think of as 'science communication' but the video did effectively give me a glimpse of what they actually do in the lab, piqued my interest and entertained me - all of which is far to rare in much of the scientific journalism out there.

(via Toronto Standard)

Mathemagical Solar System Song

Daniel Starr-Tambor’s Mandala (above) is a musical palindrome of 62 vigintillion (10⁶³) notes, which represents musically all the rotational frequencies of the planets (and Pluto) in our solar system! (via Brain Pickings) I've always been a fan of the palindrome (which is something which remains the same if write forward or backward) since my name (Ele) is one of the shortest palindromes. Mandala boasts that it is the longest palindrome ever written, and I do not doubt it.

It's perhaps surprising how lovely the music is to hear, for such a mathematical approach to music composition - though the two languages, math and music, are quite naturally intimately entwined. He's not the first to think of the planetary motions in terms of music. He alludes to Bach (and Bach’s The Art of the Fugue) explicitly, with its contrapunctal mathematical and arguably Pythagorean structure.* The concept of the Music of the Spheres was quite a common way for scholars to think about the motions of heavenly bodies, up to the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. It can be traced back to the ancient Greek mathematical-mystic Pythagoras, who first linked musical pitch to the length of a vibrating string which produced it. Further harmonious sounds were produced by strings with simple (rational) length ratios. This fit well with his adoration of rational numbers.** Pythagoras, in his theory of the Harmony of the Spheres, proposed that celestial bodies (Sun, Moon, and the known planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) each emitted a hum based on their period of revolution. Recall, that it was assumed that the Sun, moon and planets orbited around the Earth. Further, that the ratios were harmonious, like those produced by strings of simple length ratios. Thus, for Pythagoras, music and astronomy were two sides of a single mathematical coin. Ptolemy's model of the geocentric solar system, wherein each of Sun, Moon, known planets, and stars (quintessence) were more-or-less pinned to a series of transparent, nested, rotating spheres encapsulating the Earth, dominated the Western world view for 1500 years. Thus "Music of the Spheres" referred to the 'harmonies' of the motions of these imaginary spheres.



The first real shift in thinking is of course attributed to Copernicus, who proposed a heliocentric model, where the Earth, like the planets, circled the Sun, and the Moon circled the Earth. This model was famously improved by Kepler, who, thanks to Tycho Brahe's immaculately recorded data, was able to show that planetary orbits are in fact elliptical (slightly more oval than a perfect circle), with the Sun at one of the two foci of the ellipse. He further showed that a line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time. And, that the square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit. These three facts are known as Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion. You'll see that they refer to geometry and ratios, just like Pythagoras did before him. In fact, while we tend to honour Kepler as some sort of harbinger of modern science, his worldview was in many ways still Medieval. He did not think in terms of the simple, beautiful, elliptical solar system (as we still know it today). He was obsessed with proportions and attempted to explain astronomical (and worse, to the modern mind) astrological ratios in terms of music, in his own favorite publication Harmonices Mundi. His very first attempt to articulate his discoveries, now known as his three laws, was written in terms of musical notation (above). He wrote, "the movements of the heavens are nothing except a certain everlasting polyphony." (He ended up embroiled in a priority dispute with Robert Fludd, whose own harmonic theory is illustrated as the "THE MUNDANE MONOCHORD WITH ITS PROPORTIONS AND INTERVALS", the stringed instrument with planetary orbits, From Fludd's De Musica Mundana above). He also conceived of it in terms of polyhedra; he imagined the five Platonic solids (octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, cube) circumscribed by spheres, nested one within the other. This, he claimed, could explain the ratio of orbits of the six known planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). Kepler's insights, along with the concept of centrifugal force from Huygens, allowed Newton, Edmund Halley, and possibly Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke to deduce that gravitational attraction between the Sun and its planets decreased with the square of the distance between them. This in turn lead to Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation. So, we owe this groundbreaking idea as much to musical theory, and imaginary geometrical patterns, as rational, mathematically-based reasoning.

*For how Bach encoded his name into The Art of the Fugue, see one of my favorite books, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

**We all recall Pythagoras for Pythagoras' theorem (the square of the hypotenus is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides for right angle triangles). Imagine his, and his cult's horror when they realized that for one of the simplest triangles, where "the other two sides" each have length of 1 unit, the hypotenus must have an irrational √2 length! The irrationality of √2 did not fit into the tidy rational, mathematical world of the Pythagoreans. It was perhaps the first of a long series of instances where the beauty of mathematics was mistaken for something tidy and controllable.

infinity elephants

Something a little different today. Vi Hart has a whole series of videos called 'Doodling in Math Class' which are awesome (which you can find on YouTube). While she disavows having a love for numbers, seeming to favour geometry over algebra, these are wonderfully talky videos with a real love of the beauty of mathematics (over the unloveable way it is too often taught) and drawing.



I confess, I think in a very similar way sometimes. I'm flumoxed by the question, "What are you thinking?", because I'm unconvinced anyone wants to hear this sort of monologue, though I'm charmed hearing hers.

I also love the Möbius Strip Musical Box.


Find more on her website.

Cartographic Music

A three-dimensional city plan as rotating cylindrical pianola drum in Akko Goldenbeld's 'Stadsmuziek' turns map into music. Building height maps unto note intensity with this scale model of Eindhoven, Netherlands, where model buildings strike hammers which hit piano keys. You can 'hear' the urban plan, the density, distribution and size of buildings make unmelodic, but fascinating music.




(via le territoire des sens)

Historia Naturae

Speaking of musical, natural history-themed multimedia, I have to share the somewhat crazed, sliced and diced, musical wunderkammer of the 1967 short film Historia Naturae by Czech animator Jan Švankmajer (via form is void).

Biophilia

Well, this is garunteed to me my thing: science, technology, nature, art, music, multimedia and Björk. I am, in fact, amazed I did not know sooner, but blame that on actually being offshore when Björk's new Biophilia app was released (thanks to bioephemera for the link). This is an innovative way of releasing music, taking avantage of tablet (iPhone, iPad) technology and the opportunities for interactive audiovisual apps. Though I've been a fan of Björk since her Debut album, and confess both her music and her subject matter are likely to hook me, and further, that I have the sneaking suspicion that Sir David Attenborough could read the phone book in a voice which would still be mesmorizing, full of awe and wonder, but I think she deserves kudos for this project, and for cultural innovation.

Thus far the Cosmogony and Crystalline apps are available. Cosmogony contains an interactive stylized galaxy, like the animation in the video above, which the user can navigate to each of the other songs/apps and can use to play with (almost remix) samples of Björk's music by moving fingers on the touch-screen. The intro above, the song animated as a stylized geometrical score, the actual score and the lyrics are included. The song itself is structured to mimic astronomical cycles and the lyrics allude to origine myths and modern cosmology.



The video (directed by Michael Gondry) above gives you a hint of Crystalline. The app allows users to create their own 'crystals' and associated music. This hits on the crystals in comtemporary art and illustration trend, as well as the harkening back to the Victorian wunkerammer though the "nature, music, technology" formulation feels very modern. Describing humans as the link between the microscopic and the universal, she ties all her science-inspired songs/apps together (ranging from microscopic scales of the virus, through the planetary with moon, mutual core and solstice, and the galactic dark matter to universal cosmogony). Unlike the Victorian approach to natural history, and obsessive collecting of wunderkammer, which was fueled by nostalgia and a morbid fear of death, this project is permeated with wonder and optimism about the future, and the opportunities for technological advancement to lead to a more harmonious relationship with nature. The earth scientist in me can't wait to see what she comes up with for mutual core, which alludes to the structure of the Earth and plate tectonics. The artistic and musical interpretations of the subject matter are (thus far) more metaphorical than literal, but what I've seen is both engaging (mesmerizing, even) and surprisingly educational. I love the way the user is invited to participate, manipulating and creating more music. This is a very refreshing way of viewing fans as participants at minimum and possibly even collaborators rather than mere consumers. I love also the understanding that scientific explanations of the beauty we see around us makes these things more wonderful, not less.

Machine Music

Mix your analogue with your digital. See what can be done with vintage (low) technology and a microcontroller:

Sewing Machine Orchestra from Martin Messier on Vimeo.

Montreal-based composer, performer and video artist Martin Messier makes music with 8 (amplified) sewing machines. Samuel St-Aubin has interfaced them to the microcontroller so that the machines themselves control sound parameters like volume through the wheels. The machines can be remotely controlled through the computer interface too. Messier cites the evocative power of employing the vintage sewing machines. I think the silhouettes of the machines themselves add to the performance. (via Etsys Deutscher Blog)

Messier also milks bits of clocks for all their musical worth:

L'HORLOGER from Martin Messier on Vimeo.

And, inspired by the early twentieth century Italian futurist idea that "noise" be part of a musical composition, he made variations on Luigi Russolo's mysterious box the 'intonarumori'. His mechanisms are open and visible, rather than hidden. Both the 'intonarumori' and clocks are played in this performance:

LA CHAMBRE DES MACHINES from Martin Messier on Vimeo.