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It’s not a screen shot from some 8-bit nostalgia game. It’s a graphic representation of the Arecibo Message, transmitted from the Arecibo radio telescope on 16 November, 1974, aimed at the globular star cluster M13 twenty-five thousand light years from Earth.
In other words, it will take the message twenty-five thousand years to reach its destination. By that time, the star cluster won’t even be in the same position. The message will continue through empty space at the speed of light, weakening in signal as it expands in space, for untold hundreds of millions of years. The originators of the Arecibo Message knew this; their reasons for going ahead with the quixotic transmission have more to do with telling a story to ourselves.
The message was sent in the form of a three-minute radio transmission modulated to represent 1679 binary digits. 1679 is a number divisible by two prime numbers, 73 and 23; when the binary digits are arranged in 73 rows of 23 columns, the design above can be produced (in the design, ones are pixels, zeroes are empty; the colors here were added to differentiate different parts of the message).
Devised by astrophysicist Frank Drake and a team of scientists and grad students with the consultation of Carl Sagan, the Arecibo Message encodes the atomic numbers of the elements in DNA, formulas for sugars and bases in nucleotides, and the number of such nucleotides in the human genome (as understood at the time); graphic representations of the double helix, a human figure, our solar system (with Pluto coded as the ninth planet), and the dish of the Arecibo telescope. Its structure is devised to be absolutely transparent and radically readable to any system sufficiently advanced to receive it. And yet it comes crowded with assumptions—and to an alien intelligence, such assumptions are only noise. Chief among them: that a grid of ones and zeroes can be reduced to something like an image—that images-as-such are meaningful at all. Sent in the late twentieth century, when a science of images seemed one possessed of extraordinary power, the Arecibo Message is a reminder of the extraordinary place of images in the scientific imagination.
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The Crab Nebula. Image from the Hubble space telescope by NASA, ESA, CXC, JPL-Caltech, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State Univ.), R. Gehrz (Univ. Minn.), and STScI.
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but color is—where exactly? One place it seems that it might be, in rather spectacular fashion, is outer space, as demonstrated by the truly stunning images recorded by the orbiting Hubble telescope. Although to place these particular colors in outer space would be as problematic as relegating them to our subjectivity—this is *not what these extraterrestrial phenomena would look like, if we flew out there and looked at them ourselves, without a lens. And without a computer. These colors have been added to the images—after the Hubble has transmitted its data to earth, but before those images are released to an adoring public. However, to call them false color because of that would be equally false: the colors are not added to make things more palatable to the general public, but to highlight various kinds of frequencies and physical processes in the data. The false color (astrophysicists prefer the term “representative color”) actually contributes to the informational quotient of the image. And that is a counterintuitive wonderment indeed.
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The hand of x-ray discoverer Wilhelm Röntgen’s wife Anne, mit Ringen, in a print of the first x-ray image made on December 22, 1895. Physicians today have an astonishing array of imaging technologies at their disposal, and their visual toolkit only continues to grow. But it’s important to remember that the lenses through which we peer into the medicalized body are as blinkered as they are varied: they reveal the body now as a shadow of x-rays, now as a watershed of streaming positrons, now as a source of interference for magnetic fields. It’s as if the body is a vast, darkened library, the doctor wandering its stacks with a flashlight that only reveals certain qualities: one lens illuminates the bindings, another the paper, a third only catches all the letters E… (image via Amanda French/@amandafrench)
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Magdeburg Spheres, experiment by Otto von Guericke, 1654. Engraving by Gaspasr Schott, 1657. To demonstrate the effectiveness of his vacuum pump, Otto von Guericke created two metal hemispheres designed to fit together without gaps. The hemispheres were simply placed together, not welded or affixed. The internal area was then drained of air through a valve, creating a vacuum. To demonstrate both the existence of the vacuum, and its force, two teams of horses were hitched up to each hemisphere; they were unable to pull them apart. This engraving by Gaspar Schott illustrates not only the experiment itself, but the aesthetic considerations inherent in all scientific imagery. These are easier to see in older images, where the parallax renders them more jarring to contemporary eyes. The carefully rendered landscape? To us, extraneous. The redrawn and labelled spheres in the sky? To us, ridiculous. Which raises the significant question, what aspects of our current scientific imagery will be deemed extraneous or ridiculous to the eyes of tomorrow? (post by Peggy Nelson/@otolythe)
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At first, Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melancholia 1 (1514) might not seem to be about science, per se. But it contains meticulously rendered images of the tools of the trade: the compass, the scale, the hourglass, the lathe; all of which served a practical purpose in the lab, as well as an allegorical purpose about the pursuit and limits of knowledge. The engraving also represents less tangible but no less essential scientific tools: mathematics, in the form of the magic square (in which Dürer has also embedded the date of the engraving); and the interior tools of inspiration and despair, personified here by the winged yet fallen angel, as well as the title. Much has been made of the truncated geometric form on the left, “Dürer’s solid:” what is it, what should it be? My hypothesis is that it is a symbol for the gap between theory and practice: despite the theoretical perfection (of geometry, mathematics, logic, or the latest predictions of subatomic physics); all experimentation leaves room for improvement, and manifestation never reaches perfection. (post by Peggy Nelson/@otolythe)
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A Mandelbrot set is a particularly evocative example of self-similarity—the capacity of a geometric shape to be broken into parts at various dimensions, all of which resemble the whole. Named for Benoit Mandelbrot, the splendid mathematician who passed away earlier this year, and who described aspects of the set in a 1980 paper, the image has become an icon of our culture’s emergent relationship with number, which hinges on the insight that we’re surrounded with mathematical phenomena. From the toothed edges of leaves to the look of a coastline, we’re up to our eyeballs in fractals. —image via Tim Carmody/@tcarmody
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From Euclid’s Elements, diagram accompanying the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. No manuscript of the Elements from Euclid’s hand, much less his time (the 3rd century BCE) survives to this day; the earliest manuscripts upon which modern editions are based were compiled in the 4th and 9th centuries of the common era. It’s astonishing to think that the diagrams of Euclid’s Elements were handed down by the agency of more than a millennium of scribal labor before the advent of sophisticated printing techniques; the version above appears in a manuscript of 13th-century Persian mathematician Nasrudeen al-Din al-Tusi. —image via Tim Carmody/@tcarmody
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The seventeenth-century polymath Athanasius Kircher doesn’t fit the modern mold of the scientist. A subversive, eclectic dabbler, Kircher is seen today as an avatar of the arts more than the sciences, a precursor to Jorge Luis Borges and a postmodernist avant la lettre. And yet for Kircher as for Leonardo, these magisteria still overlapped. This image (1679) illustrates his argument concerning the impossibility of the Biblical Tower of Babel, a powerful early example of the exposure of sacred topics to scientific thought. —image via Tom Nealon (@pazzobooks)
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Maybe we can think of fossilization as an instance of “found” scientific imagery?Certainly, the fossils of Archaeopteryx, a late-Jurassic protobird. Fossil evidence for Archaeopteryx was first discovered in the form of a single fossil feather in Germany in 1860; the image above, the so-called Berlin Archaeopteryx unearthed in about 1875, is the most complete. —image via Debbie Chacra/@debcha
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Vesalius, 1555. —image via Jeremy Dibbell/@JBD1
