Purity, Poetry, Prisms and Color

In the summer of 1665 plague swept through England, a country already wrecked by civil war and famine.  A young farmer's son named Isaac Newton traveled back to his family plot in Yorkshire to escape Cambridge, whose sweltering muck-splattered streets had become not only disgusting but deadly.  Instead of helping on the farm like his family wanted, Isaac retired to his room and delved into the mysteries of the universe, armed only with books, various scientific gadgets and his prodigious brain.  By the winter of 1666--still ensconced in his room--Newton was considered the one of greatest mathematicians in the world.  He was only 24 years old.

In addition to the whole theory of gravity thing and explaining circular motion, Newton turned his talents to an investigation of light.  Before Newton, people believed that sunlight was the among purest things in this crooked existance, as pure as God, and like God, impossible to reduce or to separate.  Newton had suspicions that this was wrong.

Newton got a prism, put it behind a cardboard screen with a slit in it, and waited for a beam of sunlight to pass through the prism at just the correct angle.  When it did, the prism scattered the light against the opposite wall into a rainbow of seven distinct colors.

This effect, while startling, was well-known.  It was believed that an impurity in the prism caused the pure white light to get rainbow-sullied.  What Newton did next to test this theory was the kind of thing that made Newton's name eternal.

If the rainbow effect of a prism was really caused by impurities in the prism, then it wouldn't matter what color light you fed into the prism--it would spit out a rainbow no matter what.  But if the prism was breaking light down into its elementary parts, then passing colored light through a prism should do nothing.  Newton positioned a second prism behind the first, and directed a single beam of colored light through it.

There was no change in the color of the light.  Newton moved the second prism so that inside the prism the rainbow was recombined into white light.  The prism could break light apart, and the same prism could put light back together.

Newton proved that white light wasn't really white at all, but instead a mix of seven constituent colors.  The greatest metaphor for simplicity and unity in the world turned out to be not to be as simple and unified as people had thought.

Not everyone was pleased with this result.  One of them was the German poet and erstwhile scientist, Johann Goethe, who lived about a century after Newton.  Goethe was more than just a dabbling science fan-boy.  After the publication of his famous epistolary suicidal novel the Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, Goethe became increasingly fascinated by science, conducting a wide range of curiously innovative experiments, and in the 1780s, some of these encouraged him to believe that Newton was wrong about what color was.

One afternoon Goethe was walking through a garden, gazing at some yellow crocuses.  This is standard behavior for a Romantic poet.  But when Goethe looked away, he saw a purple afterimage of the crocus remain on his eye for an instant.  Something was going on with how we perceived color that we still didn't understand.

Goethe decided to repeat Newton's experiment with the beam of light and prism--but couldn't.  His beams of light wouldn't split into a rainbow unless the distance between the prism and the thing that the beam hit was great enough.  This convinced Goethe that the way Newton had been thinking about color was all wrong.

In 1793 Goethe started work on a book called Zu Farbenlehre (On The Theory of Colors.)  He would spend the next two decades pondering, experimenting, writing, and studying.  When he was finished, the book--now more properly defined as a tome--ran to 1,400 pages.  Goethe was pretty happy with the results.

I do not pride myself at all on the things I have done as a poet. There have been excellent poets during my lifetime; still more excellent ones lived before me, and after me there will be others. But I am proud that I am the only one in my century who knows the truth about the difficult science of color.

There are many differences between Newton and Goethe's color theories.  Newton has seven colors, Goethe six.  Newton arranges the colors in a spectrum.  Goethe has his colors in a wheel.  Newton thinks that light is made up of 'globules'.  Goethe thinks color comes from an interplay between light and shadow.

But the biggest difference between the two men is why they studied color in the first place.  Newton wanted to figure out what light was.  He wanted a scientific theory, one that was as sure as the truths of mathematics.  But Goethe was interested in color--color, not as something that existed outside of a person, but color as it was experienced:  the color of a friend's hair in the sunlight, the color of a butterfly's wing in a dim attic, the color of the afterimage of a yellow crocus in a poet's eye.

Time wasn't kind to Goethe's color theory.  His concept of the color wheel influenced some artists, most notably J.M.W. Turner, but he was ignored by scientists.  Wittgenstein wrote a notoriously obtuse essay about Goethe called Remarks on Color, concluding that:

Goethe's theory of the origin of the spectrum isn't a theory of its origin that has proved unsatisfactory; it is really not a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted by means of it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline, of the sort we find in James's psychology.

This post was inspired by two radio shows, In Our Time's episode on Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment, and the latest Radiolab on Colors.

Of Barks And Bites

Dogs have been living with humans for at least 14,000 years. In this time the dog has picked up some human traits.  Number one is a capacity for joint attention.  This means that a dog can look at what you're looking at, and know that you're looking at it, too.

Simple, right?  Wrong.  Most animals--even our closest relatives like chimps and dull uncles--have only a tiny capacity for joint attention.

At Harvard Brian Hare tested the joint attention of chimps, wolves and dogs by hiding food in a container and having the creature guess where the treat was.  The trick of this experiment was that the experimenter stayed in the room with the animal, hinting vigorously towards the correct container--either by tapping it or staring at it.  Dogs--even puppies--could follow their human friend's attention to find the treat.  Chimps could not, and neither could wolves.

But while the dog curls at humanity's collective feet as we read our collective newspaper, we must sometimes wonder--what really goes on in that floppy-eared head?  What dog-dreams make dog legs twitch?  What dog words are dogs saying when they bark?

Bad Dogs

In an elegant experiment, Alexandra Horowitz at Barnard University in New York has figured out a way to peek into doggy brains.  Her subject is this.

This is the guilty look.  It is as common a pose in dogs as it is in humans when--in our roughs and tumbles--we happen to break a mug, or eat every piece of chocolate in the house even though we are told not to.  To figure out whether dogs are actually feeling guilt when they look guilty, Horowitz lied.

She brought fourteen dog owners and their dogs into a room with a tasty treat, and got the dog owners to tell the dogs not to eat the treat.  Then, the dog owners left the room.  Half of the dogs were allowed to eat the treat.  The other half were not.

But Horowitz told all the dog owners that their dogs had eaten the snack against their master's prohibition.  Predictably, the dog owners scolded their dog.  The dogs responded with the guilty look.

But all the dogs displayed the guilty look--even the dogs that hadn't eaten the forbidden treat.  This suggests that the dogs weren't feeling what we would call guilt--that is, remorse at doing something wrong.  How can you be guilty of something you have not done?  What we see as guilt in dogs must be some other kind of emotion--submission in the face of an irate master, perhaps?  A cringe at being yelled at?  But not guilt.

This is an enticing hint that what happens in doggy brains is different than we imagine.  But it is only a hint.  Now we will turn to the doggy bark.

Bark and Bite

Every dog on the planet barks, from Alaska to Australia.

But there is mystery, even in this truism.  While dogs bark, adult wolves don't.  This suggests that the bark is something essential that separates dogness from wolfness.  Sometime in the very earliest period of dog-development, dogs who barked were heavily selected for.

But the question is, why?  Barking is no good for hunting.  A bark--no matter how well-timed--just alerts your prey that you are coming.  And it's not like early humans enjoyed the sound of dog barks, even though they couldn't get the latest Okkervil River album.

It could be that dogs were neolithic security alarms.  Ancient humans might have put dogs on the outskirts of their camps, using their bark as a signal that a stranger was approaching.

Coda

And yet, for all this trouble trying to figure out the essence of dogginess, Pixar said it best.




My main sources for this post were Brian Boyd's On The Origin of Stories and Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn.

Why Gossip Is Good For You

Ever since humanity first distinguished itself from other species, we have wondered what it is exactly that marks the line between man and beast.  Here's a brief survey of failed attempts to find humanity's unique quality:

Tool use. But tons of animals use tools.  Woodpecker finches use cactus pines to pin tasty grubs.  Chimps fish for ants using stalks of grass.  Octopuses build homes from coconut shells.  Pigs can even learn to play pong.  Examples abound.

Language?  Nope.  Dolphins give themselves unique names, chimps and gorillas can learn sign language, and bees do a funny waggle dance to inform other bees about whatever it is bees need to know.

Even hedonism is not safe from animal emulation, as this video of actual real-life drunken monkeys can attest.



But humans do something unique on this crooked earth.  We gossip.

Children start to gossip as soon as can speak.  And only 10% of gossip is about good deeds.  Maybe that's why so many religions have taken a stand against gossip.  Historical punishments for gossiping include such special-ordered torture devices as the Dunking Stool and the Gossip's Bridle.

Why do we gossip if we think it's bad?  One reason might be that gossip as a kind of low-cost punishment to people who break social norms.  Instead of going up and hitting Ugbert on the head after he got too drunk at my feast, I can just talk smack about him behind his back.  I don't risk getting hit by Ugbert (unless he gets wind of my gossip) and everyone finds out that he's a bit of an ass after he's had a few brews.

Gossip is also educational.  It gives us examples about what our communities disapprove of, at the same time as it informs us about who in our communities is doing the deeds that need disapproving.  If my bitchy story about Ugbert and the twelve-steins-of-beer goes viral, and people start calling Ugbert Professor Twelve-Stein behind his back, it reinforces the social norm of holding your alchohol, and also shows us that Ugbert is a notorious breaker of this norm.

Finally, gossip is a great way of making friends.  When I gossip with Tugmert about Ugbert's regrettable projectile vomiting at my feast, I'm showing Tugmert that I trust her so much that I'm not scared that she's going to gossip to Ugbert about my gossiping.  I'm also showing that Tugmert is the person I gossip to, not the person I gossip about.

So next time you start polishing up your Dunking Stool looking to punish a gossip, please--forgive the poor gossip.  They're only being human.

My sources today are an article on the social psychology of gossip in In Mind Magazine--which has more than you ever needed to know about gossip, and the book On The Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd.

Five Surprisingly Cool Clocks

Clocks must be one of the most ho-hum pieces of technology in our modern techno-overwhelmed world.  So cheap that they are absolutely everywhere.  So everywhere that we forget they even exist.  But clocks used to be fantastically precious pieces of high technology, the culmination of all the mechanical genius of their time.

Today we'll be looking at five clocks that will remind you how cool telling the time actually is.

Drip Drop Instead Of Tick Tock

Time-keeping started when people watched the progress of shadows on the ground.  It just makes sense.  Should be easy.  Okay!  Blog post finished guys, everyone go home!

Except there's a problem with solar clocks.  Let's say that you want a particular event (religious ritual; bacchanal) to last the same amount of time every single day.  You stick a pole in the ground and mark the shadow cast at the beginning of the event, and then mark the shadow cast at the end of the event.  The next day you just start when the shadow hits the first mark, and finish when the shadow hits the second mark.  Problem solved, right?

Wrong.  You're forgetting that the sun rises and sets at a slightly different time every day, so the positions of those shadows will change as the year does its always going forward thing.

The water clock is an ingeniously simple solution to this problem.  Here's how it works:

• Take a basin.
• Puncture a hole in said basin.
• Fill Mr. Basin with water.
• Stick a measuring stick in the water.
• Wait.
• There you go.

The earliest water clock was found in the tomb of Pharoh Amenhotep back in 1500 B.C--it's the big jug thing pictured above.  But the water clock continued to be a useful way of keeping time for another three thousand years.

The water clock reached its finest expression in the Muslim scholar al-Jazari's book called Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices published in the beginning of the 13th Century.  In this tome al-Jazari describes the Castle Clock, a water-powered clock which had so many special features it was like a 12th Century Casio.  Not only did it show the time.  Not only could you reprogram the length of the hours to account for the changing seasons.  Not only did it show the position of the zodiac.  Not only did it reveal one of five musical mannequins every hour.  But the thing had two falcon robots that would drop a ball into a vase.  Take that, iPod.

Smells Like Turmeric--Must Be Two O'Clock

Of course, no matter how advanced your timepiece is, you're not going to be able to actually tell the time unless you can see the timepiece.  This was a problem during that long era before light-switches.  If you happened to want to know what time it was at night, you had a problem.

But for every problem there's a solution.  The genius of nocturnal time-keeping was enterprising French inventor called M. de Villayer, who created a spice clock.  The hour hand of the clock would point to a bowl of spices--a different one for every hour.  You followed the hour hand with your own hand, dipped a finger in the appropriate bowl, and literally tasted the correct time.

But like all great European inventions, this one was anticipated in the east by a good number of centuries.  Starting in the 10th Century the Chinese made incense clocks like the one pictured above.  These held specially calibrated sticks of incense known to burn at a particular rate.  The first hour would smell of sandalwood, for instance, and the next of cinnamon.  Instead of a sideways glance at your wrist-watch all you needed to do to tell the time was sniff.

Too Useful For You?

The clocks we've seen today are all built on a human scale.  If I know anything about my decadent readers it's that you want something a little bit more impractical.  Well our final clock is so lacking in applications, so abstract in conception, that it must stand either as one of the coolest things on earth--or one of the dumbest.  Or both.

Buried deep in a mountain in Texas, the 10,000 Year Clock will tick at the speed of continents drifting. It will tick once a year for ten-thousand years.  Why?  The short answer:  because.

Mock all you want, but I find the long answer is inspiring.  Our lives--everything that we ever will know and feel, every terror and every heartbreak, all the love and all the trouble, the sum of this incredibly important biological lump I call me--it comes to only an instant in the turning of the universe.  We are here, we proudly beat our chests--and then we are gone.  And it's staggering to think of how much time there has been before us, and how much time will indifferently move on after we are gone.  Around us the stars grind on, the arms of our galaxy slowly spin, our planet changes--and to those slow movements, does a me or a you really amount to much?  The 10,000 Year Clock stands for me as a metaphor for one of mankind's greatest virtue:  our ability to step up on our tippy-toes and look beyond our cramped perspective, seeing what lies beyond--the proud mountains washed away by ten thousand years of rain, the lakes dried by a hundred years of sun--the ape evolve into a man.

This post was inspired by the In Our Time episode on the Measurement of Time, which might be one of the finest forty minutes of erudite discussion I have ever had the pleasure of listening to.

A note:  surprisingly little documentation exists about the spice clock.  The only source I could find of it is a book by Carlo Cipolla called Clocks and Culture.  Check it out if you are interested.

Dolphins Play Awesome Dolphin Games

When I was a kid I thought that everyone knew the toy store was the best place on the planet.  Where else could you find Silly Putty, Frisbees, transforming robots, Slinkys, and all the other lumps of molded plastic that in human hands become gateways to wonder?  When I watched adults get together at dinner parties and stand around and talk to each other for hours without even the tiniest action figure appearing in their hands I was possessed by infinite pity.

Humans seem unique in the animal kingdom in the sheer ubiquity of our play.  Humans play in every single recorded culture.  We play sports, we play imagination games, we play Playstation--from Greece to the Gambia, from Kansas to the !Kung.

Today we'll be looking at another animal that plays games.  Dolphins.  No.  Not Dolphin Olympics.  We're talking about something that actually happens.

In the wild some dolphins blow bubbles from their blowholes to confuse fish--a little like an underwater smokescreen.  This is fine and pragmatic animal behavior because it gets the dolphins food.  But what's cool is that some dolphins have been observed not just blowing bubbles to get tasty fish--but blowing bubbles to have fun.

The basic game is that the dolphins blow bubble rings, like smokers blowing smoke rings.  Individual dolphins have individual takes on the behavior.  One dolphin blows two bubble rings and then nudges them together to make a super-big bubble ring.  Another makes a sort of floating helix in the water by blowing her bubble ring into her own wake.

Whatever these dolphins are doing, two things are certain.  It's not useful.  And it looks really fun.  Toy-makers out there:  why do I not have a bubble-blowing dolphin toy yet?

Drink For The Muses

Monkeys do it.  College students do it.  Even gigantic elephants do it!  So why don't we do it?

Let's do it!  Let's get tipsy!

For our creativity, of course!  Lordly science has proved that a quaff of fermented potato juice can help the mind.

Recent research at the University of Chicago has started to explain why there may be a link between intoxication and creativity.  In what may be one of the simplest experimental set-ups I have ever read about, Andrew Jarsosz and his collaborators brought forty people into the lab to do a "Remote Associates Test", a common test of creative thinking.  Twenty of these lucky experimental subjects were given vodka.  The others were left quietly sober.  The tipsy people did better on the test of creativity than the dry ones.  Score one for the drunken artist!

Why should a drug that mildly poisons your brain also help you think?  Jarsosz et al suggest that drinking might help us get into what they call a divergent mode of thought, one which makes it easier to answer questions that require you to think creatively.

I am firmly to the coffee side of the coffee-alcohol-writer-continuum, so until Jarsosz and his friends prove that cracking open a beer can help blogs suddenly get popular, and novels suddenly become published, I am going to stick to my bean-based stimulant.

I read about this research on the excellent BPS Research Digest.  Boring name, fascinating blog.

Learning Today: The Electrical Venus, The Leyden Jar, and the Stupid Early History of Electricity

Take a boy. String him from the ceiling by silken threads. Charge him with static electricity. If the boy extends his hands he will attract brass fibers. If you touch him, you'll get an electric shock.

This sounds like the internet's latest improvement on planking. But it was actually an 18th Century experiment that helped forward humanity's understanding of electricity.

(This 'experiment' reminds me of an anecdote about Alexander the Great. Disbelieving reports of a liquid that would burn, the great conquerer covered a boy in 'liquid asphalt' and then set the poor urchin alight. This according to Strabo via Will Durant. Something about science and the torture of young children go together, I guess.)

But we shouldn't leave the electrically-charged boy hanging. What was the deal? In the middle of the 18th century, people knew electricity existed--but not exactly what it was or what it was good for. Legions of peritactic scientist showmen prowled the lyceums of Europe, demonstrating the properties of electricity by doing stupid tricks. They made people's hair stand on end, and amused them by shooting electric shocks from the tips of their fingers. In a popular trick called the Electrical Venus, a woman stood on an insulated platform. An enterprising gentleman leaned forward for a kiss--and received a shock. Humanity is a simple species.

These early magic tricks might seem an ignoble beginning of the study of electricity, but it was this same spirit of exploititive entertainment that introduced educated Europe to the Leyden jar, the first electrical capacitor. The Leyden jar was a way of 'storing' an electrical charge. The jar's inventor Ewald Georg von Kleist, gave himself such a vicious electric shock in the process of making the Leyden jar that he recommended that no one ever try to make a jar ever seriously folks don't try this at home I'm not joking, at the same time as he provided detailed instructions on how to make one. People made Leyden jars in faddish haste, and proceeded to give each other crippling electrical shocks to the amusement of all survivors.

But there was a problem--in the contemporary understanding of electricity, the Leyden Jar shouldn't have worked at all. The theory needed to be changed. And it was this new theory--brought into the world by Mr. 100 Dollar Bill himself, Ben Franklin, which is the reason why we have computers, blogs, and massage wands. But if it hadn't been for stupid parlor tricks like the hanging boy and the electrical venus, we wouldn't have electricity at all.

Almost all the facts in this post come from Patricia Fara's contribution to this week's episode of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg.