Bearcastle Blog

This week's historic beard belongs to Congressman John Fletcher Lacey (1841 – 1913).^* Mr. Lacey came to my attention while I was writing a short article on the introduction of starlings to North America ("Starlings Arrive in North America"), of all things. Just how his name came up should become clear shortly.

Here is my abridged version of his official biography (Biographical Directory of the United States Congress):

Representative from Iowa; born in New Martinsville, Va. (now West Virginia), May 30, 1841; moved to Iowa in 1855 with his parents, who settled in Oskaloosa; attended the common schools and pursued classical studies; engaged in agricultural pursuits; learned the trades of bricklaying and plastering; enlisted in Company H, Third Regiment, Iowa Volunteer Infantry, in May 1861[; ...] studied law; was admitted to the bar in 1865 and commenced practice in Oskaloosa, Iowa; [...] elected as a Republican to the Fifty-first Congress (March 4, 1889-March 3, 1891); unsuccessful candidate for reelection; elected to the Fifty-third and to the six succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1893-March 3, 1907); chairman, Committee on Public Lands (Fifty-fourth through Fifty-ninth Congresses); was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection; resumed the practice of law; died in Oskaloosa, Iowa, September 29, 1913….

These days we'd find it exceedingly odd to find the name of someone associated with the Republican party to be a leading conservationist, but times have changed and Lacey is remembered for two important legislative innovations in conservation: "The Lacey Act of 1900", and "The Antiquities Act of 1906".

"The Lacey Act of 1900", sponsored by the congressman, was "the first Federal law protecting game, prohibiting the interstate shipment of illegally taken wildlife, as well as the importation of injurious species. Enforcement of this Act became the responsibility of the Division of Biological Survey, U.S. Department of Agriculture." (source) The ban on the importation of "injurious species" was the connection with starlings and their introduction to North America, although the legislation came 10 years too late to halt that process.

A curious article from the Thoreau Institute ("State Fish & Wildlife Agencies") gives some background to the Lacey Act:

A legal tradition dating back thousands of years governed wildlife by a "rule of capture"–meaning that they are owned by no one unless killed or captured. Under U.S. common law, wildlife are owned by the people, and the states, rather than federal or local governments, have jurisdiction over their use.

Therefore, regulation of "market hunting" was up to the states. Some few did regulate the practice in the late 1800s, but most did not. This resulted in the common evasive practice of animals being killed illegally in one state and transported into another, where killing them was legal, for sale.

Efforts to ban or regulate commercial hunting accelerated in 1887 when Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell started the Boone and Crockett Club, which soon became the most powerful conservation organization in the country. The club is not as well known today, partly because it restricts its membership to 100 people, but those 100 people tend to be highly influential.

Bans on commercial hunting were difficult to enforce when hunters could take their wares across state lines. In 1900, Boone and Crockett Club member and Iowa Congressman John Lacey convinced Congress to pass a federal law prohibiting interstate shipping of wildlife taken in violation of a state game law. This effectively put commercial hunters out of business.

The Lacey Act was signed into law on May 25, 1900 by President William McKinley.

By the time Lacey introduced "The Antiquities Act of 1906", Congress had already been creating national parks for some 40 years, including Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone National Park, General Grant, Sequoia, Mount Ranier, and Casa Grande and Mesa Verde. (source). It was concern about vandalism and theft of antiquities from the two historic Indian sites that prompted the Antiquities Act. The bill, signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt on June 8, 1906, gave the President authority to restrict the use of particular public land owned by the federal government by using an executive order to designate a "national monument". The first use of the act: Roosevelt proclaimed Devils Tower National Monument, Wyoming, on September 24, 1906. (source)

While I was researching Congressman Lacey's contributions I came across one more interesting one worth noting, this having to do with the "Jefferson Bible". You may recall that this refers to Thomas Jefferson's highly abridged version of the New Testament in which he cut out all the miraculous and mystical stuff he didn't care for and kept the better ethical teachings of Jesus, ending up with a slim, svelt 82-page volume. The work has been published on several occasions, notably the Beacon Press, associated with the Unitarian Church.

Here reporter Cathrine Dunn ("Jefferson Bible returns to publication") takes up the story:

In 1886 Cyrus Adler found the book, which had been passed down through the Jefferson family. He bought the original copy and donated it to the National Museum – now the Smithsonian Institution – where Iowa Congressman John Lacey happened upon it at the turn of the century [i.e., c1900].

It was Lacey who initiated the idea of publishing the book, introducing legislation in Congress that would fund the printing and distribution of the Jefferson Bible to all senators and representatives at the start of their terms.

Lacey saw the book as an important "moral basis for representatives," said Bellevue University economics professor Judd Patton. "For a good government, we need to have good leaders with moral principles."

For unknown reasons the Government Printing Office stopped publishing the book in 1957, and its distribution to new congressional members ceased.

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^* Image source: collection National Conservation Training Center, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

This week's beard belongs to the youthful Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who established the intellectual starting point for this short discussion.

In Galileo's day [c. 1610], the study of astronomy was used to maintain and reform the calendar. Sufficiently advanced students of astronomy made horoscopes; the alignment of the stars was believed to influence everything from politics to health.

[David Zax, "Galileo's Vision", Smithsonian Magazine, August 2009.^*]

Galileo published The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), the book in which he reported his discovery of four new planets (i.e., moons) apparently orbiting Jupiter, in 1610. This business of looking at things and reporting on observations just didn't fit well with the prevailing Aristotelian view of nature and the way things were done.

Some of his contemporaries refused to even look through the telescope at all, so certain were they of Aristotle's wisdom. "These satellites of Jupiter are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can exercise no influence on the Earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist," proclaimed nobleman Francesco Sizzi. Besides, said Sizzi, the appearance of new planets was impossible—since seven was a sacred number: "There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head: two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth….From this and many other similarities in Nature, which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets must necessarily be seven."

[link as above]

Science as a an empirical pursuit was still a new idea, quite evidently.

At the time it was understood, for various "obvious" reasons (one of them apparently being that they could be seen), that the planets and the stars in the nearby "heavens" (rather literally) influenced things on Earth. There was no known reason why or how, but this wasn't a big issue because causality^‡ didn't play a very large role in scientific explanations of the day. Recall, for instance, that heavier objects rushed faster to tall to Earth because it was their nature to do so.

What I suddenly realized awhile back (I was reading the book by Robert P, Crease, Great Equations, but I don't really remember what prompted the thoughts) is the following.

Received mysticism today claims that astrology, the practice of divination through observation of the motions of the planets, operates through the agency of some unknown, mysterious force as yet unknown to science. Science doesn't know everything!

But this is wrong. In the time of Galileo there was no known "force" to serve as the "cause" for the planets' effect on human life, but it seemed quite reasonable. In fact, the idea of "force" wasn't yet in the mental frame. The notion of "force" as it is familiar to us today only began to take shape with the work of Isaac Newton c. 1687, when he published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which contained his theories of mechanics and gravitation, theories where the idea of "force" began to take shape, and to develop the ideas of causality.

But the notion that there is no known mechanism through which astrology might work we now see is wrong. The mechanism, arrived at by Newton, which handily explained virtually everything about how the planets moved and exerted their influence on everything in the known universe, was that of universal gravitation.

The one thing that universal gravitation did not explain was astrology. But even worse, this brilliant theory showed that the universal force behind planetary interaction and influence was much, much too small to have any influence whatsoever on humans and their lives.

Newton debunked astrology over 300 years ago by discovering its mechanism and finding that it could not possibly have the influence that its adherents claimed.

Some people, of course, are a little slow to catch up with modern developments.
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^* This is an interesting article that accompanies a virtual exhibit, "Galileo's Instruments of Discovery", adjunct to a physical exhibit at the Franklin Institute (Philadelphia).

^‡ Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that our modern notion of causes was quite a bit different from 15th century notions of causes.

This week's beard belongs to American composer Charles E. Ives (1874-1954). He's been a personal favorite ever since I tripped over some of his music a few decades ago.

It is hard to find a biography of Ives that does not use the phrases "iconoclastic" and "quintessentially American". (This nice one, also the source of the photo, from the Library of Congress uses "distinctly American"–and "iconoclastic"–just for a bit of variety.) I'm thinking that it could be the iconoclastic bit that attracted me to Ives; I admire the artistic fish that swim upriver.

Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut. New Englanders take their Americanism very seriously, but without wearing it on their sleeves, and there's lots of Americanism and overtones of rugged individualsim in Ives' music. To describe it in words can make it sound superficial, gimmicky, or even corny, but it is none of those. Ives' music is profound, unique, and uniquely American.

Discussions of his musical heritage always point out two things: that his father, George, was a band leader who was fond of making acoustical experiments, famously of having two bands playing different tunes marching simultaneously down intersecting streets, just to see what it sounded like and to stretch the ears a bit; and that hymn tunes play a big role in Ives' music.

It's true about the hymn tunes–they pop up absolutely everywhere–but to think of his music as somehow "hymn-tune based" trivializes what's going on. His first job, at the age of 14, was that of church organist. It's much more that the musical landscape of Ives' life was populated with hymn tunes and so his musical stream of consciousness often finds them floating by, so he incorporates them into the fabric of his compositions. Here's how the LoC bio (linked above) puts it:

To hear the music of composer Charles Ives is to hear a unique voice in American music, and indeed, in Western music as a whole. His work is at once iconoclastic and closely tied to his musical heritage; in its conception and form, both staggeringly complex and immediately accessible; and in its musical language, both universal and distinctly American.

Ives's work embodies a distillation of the diverse stylistic features of the music of his time, from the traditions of Romanticism prevalent in European art music of the late nineteenth century to the simplicity of traditional American hymn tunes, often juxtaposed in unexpected and even experimental combinations.

It all sounds a bit over the top, but I don't find any of that an exaggeration.

Ives went to Yale and studied music there, but did not become a professional musician. After graduating from Yale in 1898, Ives moved to New York and eventually gained a position in the actuarial department of the Mutual Insurance Company. Curiously, he stopped composing about the time of the first world war. Musically he was largely ignored for decades with his music rarely gaining performance. His first two symphonies were not premiered until the early 50s, half a century after their composition.

I could go on and on about Ives, but this is a holiday, so let's celebrate with a Fourth of July recital!

Variations on "America"

I like the flashy and silly, too, and this is one of my guilty pleasures: Ives' 'Variations on "America" ' for Organ; that's "America", the tune that starts "My country tis of thee…". Ives wrote these variations in 1891, when he was 17. The piece is frequently heard in an arrangement for orchestra made by William Schuman, but I much prefer the piquancy of it performed on organ.

I read an essay about the variations that called them "cheeky". That's probably true, but I don't think they go as far as "mocking". Ives treats the theme seriously enough and does up a clever set of treatments, including a very flashy and noisy toccata for a finale — watch for the pedal fireworks.

When I was in college, our college organist played this once on a recital. He hated the piece so he chose the most outlandish registrations he could think of, and it really bought the piece to life. For the finale he literally pulled out all the stops including the Zimbelstern (a little mechanical, tinkly bell device), which he happily left on and tinkling away when he left the organ bench at the end. Brilliant!

In this performance we haveTom Trenny playing the organ at Trinity Church, New York City. The performance is about 7.5 minutes long. (Note for friends at Facebook: I don't think the YouTube embedded videos survive this translation to Facebook, so you might like to visit the original blog page to enjoy the recital.)

As a bonus treat, here is a video of Virgil Fox playing the variations. I don't care for his performance so much, but he is Virgil Fox, and his introduction to the piece is not to be missed.

General William Booth Enters into Heaven

General William Booth was the founder and first "general" of the Salvation Army. Given what we know about Ives, ponder for a minute on the question of how he might go about a musical depiction of the General at the pearly gates. There's hymn singing, marching, a Salvation Army band, and lots of being "washed in the blood of the lamb". It's an amazing concoction, almost like a 6-minute opera. It appeared in Ives' privately published 114 Songs,^* but in this version (apparently by Ives), it's for baritone solo (Donnie Ray Albert), chorus (Dallas Symphony Chorus), and orchestra (Dallas Symphony), all directed by Andrew Davis.

I find it very evocative and very, very Ives.

String Quartet No. 1, 1st Movement, Fugue

The first string quartet is an early piece, composed c. 1900, but not premiered until 1957. (Two sets of notes about the quartet I enjoyed reading: one and the other.)

This is the first movement, a double fugue on two hymn tunes: "Missionary Hymn" (usually with the words "From Greenland's icy mountains….") and "Coronation" (often with words "All hail the power of Jesus' name…"). The former provides the main theme; the latter is heard later as a countersubject. Apparently the fugue (the entire quartet, actually) started life as service music for organ and strings, then was arranged into this quartet.

This particular fugue, which is unusually peaceful, non dissonant, and at first look uncharacteristically Ives, was reused later, orchestrated for a large orchestra, as the third movement of his Fourth Symphony.

Symphony No.4, 1st Movement, Prelude: Maestoso

Ives wrote his Fourth Symphony over a number of years from about 1910 to 1916 (see Wikipedia); it was not performed in its entirely in public until 1965, when Leopold Stowowski did that with the American Symphony Orchestra, which he had founded in 1962.

It is a massive work, scored for a very large orchestra. The second movement, the "comedy", is complex and forbidding and inscrutable and one can't really stop listening to it, either. There are layer upon layer upon layer of sound from which recognizable bits surface every now and then — it always makes me think of recognizable tunes churned up to the surface of a turbulent ocean and then pulled back under again. Perhaps it's Ives reconstruction of his father's "acoustical experiments". This movement is usually performed with two conductors just to keep it all sorted out.

However, it's the first movement that really turned me on originally to the Fourth Symphony. It is a setting with chorus, but no ordinary hymn-tune anthem, of "Watchman, Tell us of the Night"; the colors and mood and rhythmic irregularities are delicious and perplexing. This performance lasts just under 4 minutes.

As a bonus: an analysis / introduction from the Boston Symphony Orchestra's "Classical Companion" about Ives' Fourth Symphony.

Happy Fourth of July!
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^* I found (here)this lovely quotation from Henry Cowell's Charles Ives and his Music (pp. 80-81):

The 114 Songs forms the most original, imaginative, and powerful body of vocal music that we have from any American, and the songs have provided the readiest path to Ives's musical thinking for most people. Many of them have a touching lyrical quality; some are angry, others satirical. The best of them are musically very daring, with vocal lines that are hard for the conventionally trained artist, accompaniments that are often frightfully difficult, and rhythmic and tonal relations between voice and piano which require real work to master. Even when the melodic line alone presents no special problem, in combination with the accompaniment it offers a real challenge to musicianship. Surmounting the difficulties of this music creates an intensity in the performer that approaches the composer's original exaltation and has brought audiences to their feet with enthusiasm and excitement. But the simplest and least characteristic of the songs are still the most often performed. Like Schoenberg, whose fame rests on musical usages that had not yet appeared in the early pieces ordinarily performed on concert programs, Ives has been represented, as a rule, by pieces that have little or nothing to do with the music that made his reputation.

This week's beard belongs to^* author John R. Gribbin (1946– ), a science writer who started life as an astrophysicist. (His website.) I've read and mentioned a few of his books here in the last year or so, and I've been enjoying them so far.

The one that I most recently read and enjoyed is John Gribbin with Mary Gribbin, Stardust : Supernovae and Life—The Cosmic Connection (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000. xviii + 238 pages). Here is my book note.

The book is all about stellar nucleosynthesis: how the elements are made in stars and supernovae. As you may have realized, this is a subject I find fascinating, particularly the history of the discovery of nucleosynthesis. I'm especially keen on the late nineteenth controversy about the age of the sun, a controversy starring two big names in science, Darwin and Lord Kelvin, a controversy that couldn't be settled until the invention of quantum mechanics and the discovery of nuclear fusion.

That problem was finally cracked by Hans Bethe in two papers he published in 1939 in Physical Review ("Energy Production in Stars", first paper online, and second paper online. A very nice short, nontechnical summary of the importance of these papers ("Landmarks: What Makes the Stars Shine?") is also available online. I may have to write more about these sometime.

But the excerpt from Stardust that I wanted to share here has to do with a different question, one that came up in a discussion we had here ("Long Ago & Far Away") following a question Bill asked about the size of the expanding universe.

This doesn't address that question directly, but does answer another related question. I was unclear at the time whether celestial red-shift should be interpreted as the result of actual motion of objects in the universe apart from each other, or as the result of the expansion of space-time itself, or some combination.

The answer is unequivocal in this excerpt: red-shifts are due to expanding space-time. That is, the geometry of space-time itself is stretching out and this is what causes the apparent motion of cosmic objects away from us (with some actual relative motion through space-time going on).

Hard though it may be to picture, what the general theory of relativity tells us is that space and time were born, along with matter, in the precursor to the Big Bang, and that this bubble of spacetime full of matter and energy (the same thing—remember E = mc²) has expanded ever since. The galaxies fill the Universe today, and the matter they contain always did fill the Universe, although obviously the pieces of matter were closer together when the Universe was smaller. Since the cosmological redshift is caused not by galaxies moving through space but by space itself expanding in between the galaxies, it is certainly not a Doppler effect, and it isn't really measuring velocity, but a kind of pseudo-velocity. Partly for historical reasons, partly for convenience, astronomers do, though, continue to refer to the "recession velocities" of distant galaxies, although no competent cosmologist ever describes the cosmological redshift as a Doppler effect. [p. 116]

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^* The source of the photo is an (undated) article from American Scientist, "Scientists' Nightstand: John Gribbin", by Greg Ross, which has an interview with Gribbin and gives this thumbnail biography:

John R. Gribbin studied astrophysics at the University of Cambridge before beginning a prolific career in science writing. He is the author of dozens of books, including In Search of Schrödinger's Cat (Bantam, 1984), Stardust (Yale University Press, 2000), Ice Age (with Mary Gribbin) (Penguin, 2001) and Science: A History (Allen Lane, 2002).

This week's beard belongs to Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich^* (1874–1947), painter, lawyer, peace activist — any number of things, it seems. Excerpting some from biographical notes from the Nicholas Roerich Museum of New York

Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on October 9, 1874, the first-born son of lawyer and notary, Konstantin Roerich and his wife Maria. He was raised in the comfortable environment of an upper middle-class Russian family with its advantages of contact with the writers, artists, and scientists who often came to visit the Roerichs. At an early age he showed a curiosity and talent for a variety of activities. When he was nine, a noted archeologist came to conduct explorations in the region and took young Roerich on his excavations of the local tumuli. The adventure of unveiling the mysteries of forgotten eras with his own hands sparked an interest in archeology that would last his lifetime. [...]
In 1895 Roerich met the prominent writer, critic, and historian, Vladimir Stasov. Through him he was introduced to many of the composers and artists of the time — Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, and the basso Fyodor Chaliapin. At concerts at the Court Conservatory he heard the works of Glazunov, Liadov, Arensky, Wagner, Scriabin, and Prokofiev for the first time, and an avid enthusiasm for music was developed. Wagner in particular appealed to him, and later, during his career as a theater designer, he created designs for most of that composer's operas. [...]
The late 1890's saw a blossoming in Russian arts, particularly in St. Petersburg, where the avant-garde was forming groups and alliances, led by the young Sergei Diaghilev, who was a year or two ahead of Roerich at law school and was among the first to appreciate his talents as a painter and student of the Russian past.

This is the connection I was looking for this week because I wanted to note that we just passed an anniversary for the premiere of the ballet "The Rite of Spring" (originally "Le Sacre du Printemps"), subtitled "Pictures from Pagan Russia". It's notorious opening-night riot took place on 29 Mary 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris.

The music, of course, was by Igor Stravinsky; choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky; performance was by Les Ballets Russes. It was all produced by Serge Diaghilev. The original costumes and set designs were by Nicholas Roerich.

At first reading Roerich seemed to me an unlikely candidate for this activity, but the paragraphs above foreshadow it all: between his abiding interest in archeology and ancient (pagan) Russia, his growth as an artist, and his social connections among the liveliest of the artists working at the time, he was in the right place at the right time with the right ideas and talents, which strongly influenced the shape of the final work. As Wikipedia tells the story of the ballet's genesis:

The painter Nicholas Roerich shared his idea with Stravinsky in 1910, his fleeting vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death. Stravinsky's earliest conception of The Rite of Spring was in the spring of 1910, in the form of a dream: "… the wise elders are seated in a circle and are observing the dance before death of the girl whom they are offering as a sacrifice to the god of Spring in order to gain his benevolence," said Stravinsky. While composing The Firebird, Stravinsky began forming sketches and ideas for the piece, enlisting the help of Roerich.

The result was not only history, but historic. "The Rite of Spring" endures as a musical masterpiece of the ages, not just the twentieth century, as perhaps the most original and creative piece of musical writing ever. I find it perennially amazing and fresh. Plus, as Bernstein once said, it's "got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up".

And now I'm finding that Roerich is a fascinating person whom I have to investigate further. As one example of his artistic style, here is one of the set designs he did for the Diaghilev production of "Rite", a painting called "Kiss to the Earth (variant 1)", probably implemented as a painted drop.

For a nice collection of paintings by Roerich and his sons, visit the gallery of the Estonian Roerich Society. There are also museums with information and images online: The Nicholas Roerich Museum New York, The Museum by Name of Nicholas Roerich, in Moscow.

Also while I was looking for information, I found this curious article called "Utopia on the Roof of the World" from the magazine Cabinet. The article had something to do with the Shambhala myth and Buddhism, or something, but I read through it and could make much sense of it. However, at the top of the page is a beautiful portrait of Nicholas Roerich by his son Svetoslav Roerich. Apparently Roerich believe Shambhala was located in the Himalayan mountains.

So now I'm interested in knowing why so many people are interested in Nicholas Roerich.
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^* Photo credit: Nicholas Roerich Museum (of New York), link; original caption: "Nicholas Roerich. June 20, 1929. New York / NRM ref. No 400926"

This week's beard^* belongs to Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879). He did significant work in several fields (including statistical physics and thermodynamics, in which I used to research) but his fame is associated with his electromagnetic theory. Electromagnetism combined the phenomena of electricity and magnetism into one, unified field theory. Unified field theories are still all the rage. It was a monumental achievement, but there was also a hidden bonus in the equations. We'll get to that.

He published his equations in the second volume of his A Treatise on Electricity & Magnetism, in 1873. I think we should look at them because they're pretty; I suspect they're even kind of pretty regardless of whether the math symbols convey significant meaning to you. There are four (which you may not see in Bloglines, which doesn't render tables properly for me):

	;
	;

I don't want to explain much detail at all because it's not necessary for what we're talking about, but there are a few fun things to point out. The E is the electric field; the B is the magnetic field.

The two equations on the top say that electric fields are caused by electric charges, but magnetic fields don't have "magnetic charges" (aka "magnetic monopoles") as their source. The top right equation gets changed if a magnetic monopole is ever found.

The two equations on the bottom say that electric fields can be caused by magnetic fields that vary in time; likewise, magnetic fields can be caused by electric fields that vary in time. These are the equations that unify electricity and magnetism since, as you can easily see, the behavior of each depends on the other.

There's one more equation to look at. A few simple manipulations with some of the equations above lead to this result:

This equation has the form of a wave equation, so called because propagating waves are solutions to the equation. Maxwell obtained this result and then made a key identification. Just from its form the mathematician can see that the waves that solve this equation travel with a speed given by , which is related to the product of the physical constants and that appeared in the earlier equations.

The values of these were known at the time and Maxwell made the thrilling discovery that this speed

was remarkably close to the measured value of the speed of light. He concluded that light was a propagating electromagnetic wave. He was right.

That's fine for the electromagnetism part. What's the relationship with relativity? Let's keep it simple and suggestive. You know from the popular lore that Einstein came up with the ideas of special relativity from thinking about traveling at the speed of light, and that the speed of light (in vacuum) is a "universal speed limit". Only light — electromagnetic waves or photons depending on how your experiment is measuring it/them — travels at the speed of light.^†

In fact, Einstein's relativity paper (published as "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper", in Annalen der Physik. 17:891, 1905) was titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies". (Read an English version here; there are no equations at the start, so read the beginning and be surprised how familiar it sounds.) That's suggestive, don't you think?

Speaking of special relativity, you've no doubt heard of the idea of an "inertial reference frame", a concept that is central to special relativity. But, what exactly is an "inertial reference frame"?

I'm so glad you asked, since that was half the point of this post anyway. You surely realized by this time that Maxwell was partly a pretext. For our entertainment and enlightenment today we have educational films.

First, a quick introduction to the "PSSC Physics" course. From the MIT Archives:

In 1956 a group of university physics professors and high school physics teachers, led by MIT's Jerrold Zacharias and Francis Friedman, formed the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) to consider ways of reforming the teaching of introductory courses in physics. Educators had come to realize that textbooks in physics did little to stimulate students' interest in the subject, failed to teach them to think like physicists, and afforded few opportunities for them to approach problems in the way that a physicist should. In 1957, after the Soviet Union successfully orbited Sputnik , fear spread in the United States that American schools lagged dangerously behind in science. As one response to the perceived Soviet threat the U.S. government increased National Science Foundation funding in support of PSSC objectives.

The result was a textbook and a host of supplemental materials, including a series of films. In a discussion I was reading on the Phys-L mailing list recently, the PSSC course was discussed and my attention was drawn to two PSSC films that are available from the Internet Archive: "Frames of Reference" (1960) and "Magnet Laboratory" (1959). (Use these links if the embedded players below don't render properly.) Both are very instructive and highly entertaining. Each lasts about 25 minutes.

Let's look first at the film on magnets; it's quite a hoot. First, the background: when I was turning into a physicist I knew some people who went to work at the "Francis Bitter National Magnet Lab" (as it was known at the time) at MIT. This was the place for high-field magnet work.

Well, this film is filmed there when it was just Francis Bitter's magnet lab, and we're given demonstrations by Bitter himself, along with a colleague, not to mention a tech who runs a huge electrical generation and is called either "Beans" or "Beams"–I couldn't quite make it out. These guys have a lot of fun doing their demonstrations.

At one point in the film we hear the phone ringing. Beans calls out: "EB [?], you're wanted on the telephone." Bitter replies, without losing the momentum on his current demonstration, "Well, tell 'em to call me back later, I'm busy." Evidently multiple takes were not in the plan.

This is great stuff for people who like big machinery and big electricity and big magnets. Watch copper rods smoke while they put an incredible 5,000 amps of current through them. I laughed when Bitter started a demonstration: "All right, Beans, let's have a little juice here. Let's start gently. Let's have about a thousand amps to begin with." Watch as they melt and then almost ignite one of their experiments. It evidently happened often enough, because they have a fire extinguisher handy.

This next film on "Frames of Reference" is a little less dramatic, but the presenters perform some lovely simple but clever and illustrative experiments, demonstrations that would almost certainly be done today with computer animations so it's wonderful to see them done with real physical objects. After they make clear what inertial frames of reference are they take a look at non-inertial frames and really clarify some issues about the fictitious "centrifugal force" that appears in rotating frames.

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^* The photograph comes from the collection of the James Clerk Maxwell foundation.

^† Duh.

This week's pair of stylish, mid-nineteenth-century beards belong to Les Frères Tissandier,^* the brothers Albert Tissandier (1839-1906) on the left, and Gaston Tissandier (1843-1899). Albert was the artist, known as an illustrator, and Gaston was the scientist and aviator.^†

The Tissandier Brothers were pioneering adventurers (only Gaston did the flying) in high-altitude balloon ascensions. From the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission's "The Race to the Stratosphere":

During the nineteenth century, balloonists had blazed a trail into the upper air, sometimes with tragic results. In 1862 Henry Coxwell and James Glaisher almost died at 30,000 feet (9,144 meters). Sivel and Croc.-Spinelli, who ascended in the balloon Zénith in April 1875 with balloonist Gaston Tissandier, died from oxygen deprivation. The last men of the era of the nineteenth century to dare altitudes over 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) were Herr Berson and Professor Süring of the Prussian Meteorological Institute, who ascended to 35,500 feet (10,820 meters) in 1901, a record that stood until 1931.

The first men to reach 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) did not know what they were facing. It is now known that at an altitude of only 10,000 feet (3,048 meters), the brain loses 10 percent of the oxygen it needs and judgment begins to falter. At 18,000 feet (5,486 feet), there is a 30 percent decrease in oxygen to the brain, and a person can lose consciousness in 30 minutes. At 30,000 feet (9,144 meters), loss of consciousness occurs in less than a minute without extra oxygen.

About that harrowing experience, here is Gaston's account from his autobiography: Histoire de mes ascensions: recit de vingt-quatre voyage aériens (1868-1877).^‡

I now come to the fateful moments when we were overcome by the terrible action of reduced pressure (lack of oxygen). At 22,900 feet torpor had seized me. I wrote nevertheless, though I have no clear recollection of writing. We are rising. Croce is panting. Sivel shuts his eyes. Croce also shuts his eyes. At 24,600 feet the condition of torpor that overcomes one is extraordinary. Body and mind become feebler. There is no suffering. On the contrary one feels an inward joy. There is no thought of the dangerous position; one rises and is glad to be rising. I soon felt myself so weak that I could not even turn my head to look at my companions. I wished to call out that we were now at 26,000, but my tongue was paralyzed. All at once I shut my eyes and fell down powerless and lost all further memory.

He lost consciousness and their balloon ultimately descended while he was unconscious. When he awoke it was to find his two companions dead.

Gaston wrote quite a number of books, over 17 according to his Wikipedia entry. The majority are about ballooning, but it seems that he also had a passion for photography, which was then in its infancy. In fact, several of his titles appear to be in print, including A History and Handbook of Photography.

From Project Gutenberg, two books by Gaston Tissandier are available:

• En ballon! Pendant le siege de Paris (link)
• La Navigation Aérienne L'aviation Et La Direction Des Aérostats Dans Les Temps Anciens Et Modernes (link)

For photographic entertainment, visit this site at the Library of Congress Tissandier Collection of 975 photographs, etchings, and other images emphasizing the early history of ballooning in France; about half of the images are digitized and online.

Finally, because I love research librarians, here is the Library of Congress' Tracer Bullet on "Balloons and Airships".
———-
^* Crédit photo: Ministère de la Culture (France), Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine (archives photographiques) diffusion RMN / Référence: APNADAR022912 / Photograph by the studio of Nadar / source link.

^† You may have detected the buoyant-flight theme that has preoccupied BoW for a couple of weeks. It's because I recently read the very enjoyable Lighter than Air : An Illustrated History of Balloons and Airships, by Tom D. Crouch (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, in association with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 2009; 191 pages). My book note is here.

^‡ From Indiana University's Lilly Library, an online exhibit called "Conquest of the Skies: A History of Ballooning", provides a chance to see images from Gaston Tissandier's book Histoire de mes ascensions: recit de vingt-quatre voyage aériens (1868-1877) ("History of my [balloon] ascensions : accounts of 24 aerial trips").

This week's beard, the best example we've seen so far of an actual "goatee", belongs to Ludwig Dürr (1878–1955), remembered as the chief engineer who built the successful Zeppelin airships.

After an unsatisfactory one-year period in the navy, Dürr was hired, on 15 January 1899, as an engineer at Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH, the company that had been formed by Count Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin to build rigid, hydrogen-filled airships. While working at their design offices in Stuttgart he completed his last semester of the Royal School of Mechanical Engineering, took his final exams, then Immediately went back to work for Count Zeppelin, moving to the company's new location in Friedrichshafen, in southwest Germany on the north shore of Lake Constance ("Bodensee" ).

Zeppelin's company, in the beginning, was beset with difficulties raising money and avoiding disaster. The first dirigible, known as LZ 1 (LZ = "Luftschiff Zeppelin" or "Zeppelin Airship"), at 420 feet long and 32.8 feet in diameter (the largest thing ever built to fly at that time), the airship proved underpowered and hard to manage in strong winds. Bad publicity meant no hoped-for government funding. LZ 1 was broken up for scrap and the company dissolved.

However, Zeppelin kept Dürr around. A few years later King Karl of Württemberg lent his support and Zeppelin, with Dürr as his chief engineer, set out to build LZ 2. This new ship was the same size as LZ 1 but had more power engines (provided by Daimler, as before). It was launched in January1906 from its floating hanger on Lake Constance, as seen in this photograph.

Unfortunately, LZ 2 was also difficult to maneuver in strong winds, but Zeppelin and his crew managed an emergency landing when an engine failed. While they celebrated their safe landing, LZ 2 was destroyed by a storm.

LZ 3, launched that October, flew several flights successfully, but the government wasn't terribly impressed yet. They gave him money to continue some work, promising to buy LZ3 and LZ 4, provided the latter could stay in the air for 24 hours.

In August 1908 the new airship was taken for a flight up the Rhine Valley. Again, engine failure forced the dirigible down. A storm came along, blew the nose of the ship into a stand of trees, and a hole tore in the gas bags. Rubberized material, flapping the wind, generated a spark that ignited escaping hydrogen and LZ 4 went up in flames.

Now the indefatigable Zeppelin finally felt like the time had come to give up. But then, what happened?

Prepared at last to accept defeat, the seventy-year old Count was stunned by the public outpouring of support that would be remembered as "the miracle of Echterdingen." Almost without his noticing it, the Count, who had persevered in the face of overwhelming disappointments, emerged as a revered public figure. The old man and his airships decorated a wide range of consumer items, from children's candies to ladies' purses, hair brushes, cigarettes and jewelry cases. Copies of the soft white yachting cap that was the Count's sartorial trademark were sold in stores across Germany, along with an assortment of items from toys to harmonicas bearing Zeppelin's image. Schools, streets and town squares were renamed in his honor. And now, in his time of greatest need, the German people came to the support of the Count.

In an age of rampant nationalism, Germans looked to the Zeppelin airship as a symbol of national pride. From the Kaiser to the youngest schoolchild, Germans dispatched money to the Count, the sum eventually reaching 6.25 million marks. Those who could not afford to make a cash contribution sent farm products, home-made clothing, anything they thought might help. The ill-fated flight of LZ 4 up the Rhine, Zeppelin would later remark, had been his "luckiest unlucky trip".

[Tom D. Crouch, Lighter Than Air: An Illustrated History of Balloons and Airships (Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), p. 83.]

Zeppelin reformed his company, still with the loyal Dürr as chief engineer, and this time success was theirs and Zeppelin's name is etched in popular history.

Dürr's name is not quite so well known as Zeppelin's, but he's not forgotten. I was delighted to discover that there is a school in Friedrichshafen named in his honor — the Ludwig-Dürr-Schule — where they are justifiably quite proud of their namesake. Here is the google translation of the page "How has our school its name?" that I've enjoyed reading. Visit the welcome page and you can also see the staff plus the menus for lunch.

On the subject of zeppelins, here is a nice, short history by the US Centennial of Flight commission.

There is a Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen. Among many interesting exhibits there is a reconstruction of the passenger areas of the LZ 129 Hindenburg, which famously burst into flames and crashed during landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey on 6 May 1937, killing 35 of the 97 passengers and crewmen aboard. The tragedy brought an end to the practice of filling lighter-than-air ships with highly flammable hydrogen.

Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH is now known as Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH (in English), and they still build zeppelins. I read that, in conjunction with Airship Ventures, Inc., one of their new zeppelins is making commercial, mostly sightseeing, flights near San Francisco.

Finally, some visual dessert.

• This page has a nice collection of images of zeppelins in world stamps.
• This page, thanks to the generosity of the grandmother of one Charlie Grant, offers a collection of newspaper clippings about the Hindenburg and its tragic end.

This week's gorgeously multi-colored beard belongs to the newly out-as-gay David Ogden Stiers, beloved of many TV fans for his portrayal of Major Charles Winchester for six years on the television series "M*A*S*H". (Photo source.)

Excerpting from The Advocate:^*

Television and voice actor David Ogden Stiers has come out of the closet at age 66.

According to PopEater, when recently asked by the Gossip Boy blog if he is gay, Stiers succinctly said, "Yes, I am. Very proud to be so."
      [...]
"I could claim noble reasons as coming out in order to move gay rights forward, but I must admit it is for far more selfish reasons," Stiers said. "Now is the time I wish to find someone and I do not desire to force any potential partner to live a life of extreme discretion for me."

That is a fabulous reason to come out, in addition to all the other reasons one can think of. It's hard enough to find a boyfriend and what are sometimes known in gay circles as mixed marriages (one in, one out) can be very, very difficult to maintain harmoniously. Many differences between partners aren't necessarily serious friction in a relationship^†, but I've always felt that there were two serious impediments to harmony in a potential relationship: a big difference in economic status and a big difference in outness.

Not to mention that having a boyfriend facilitates coming out to one's friends, co-workers, and others. For we of the shy-homo ilk, it can be difficult to find an excuse for the bold and direct: "Hi! My name is Jeff! I'm gay!" However, having a new boyfriend provides many a pretext for the indirect, such as "Oh, my new boyfriend and I went to a movie this weekend." Of course, later on one reaches the simple and dignified "I'm Jeff, and this is my partner Isaac." Some day soon we'll probably even move on to the simpler and more dignified "I'm Jeff and this is my husband, Isaac."

So here's our wishing best of luck to Mr. Stiers on finding love and maybe even getting married if he wants to, an idea that was inconceivable back in the "M*A*S*H" days.

Today, of course, we are celebrating Maine's filling out the quincunx of states recognizing marriage equality for same-sex couples. This morning the Maine legislature finished all of its voting and sent the bill to Governor John Baldacci, who seemingly signed it within minutes. I suspect he didn't want to risk losing the #5 spot in the history books to the governor of New Hampshire, who is still prevaricating. One hopes he reads the remarks of Baldacci as he signed the legislation.

This action of Governor Baldacci is surprising and most satisfying. Only a few months ago he had made some noises along the usual "man-woman" line of platitudes, but in recent weeks he began hinting that his attitude was changing. No one seems to know exactly why, but it could be that, as he has said, he listened to people in his state debate the issue, and he reflected, and he realized that he and his state would be better off if he got out of the way of history (to paraphrase Steven Butterfield, House member from Bangor, whose remark was brought to our attention by Chris in the comments).

I want to quote some bits from the Governor's press release ("Governor Signs LD 1020, An Act to End Discrimination in Civil Marriage and Affirm Religious Freedom", 6 May 2009).

“I have followed closely the debate on this issue. I have listened to both sides, as they have presented their arguments during the public hearing and on the floor of the Maine Senate and the House of Representatives. I have read many of the notes and letters sent to my office, and I have weighed my decision carefully,” Governor Baldacci said. “I did not come to this decision lightly or in haste.”
      [...]
“In the past, I opposed gay marriage while supporting the idea of civil unions,” Governor Baldacci said. “I have come to believe that this is a question of fairness and of equal protection under the law, and that a civil union is not equal to civil marriage.”

“Article I in the Maine Constitution states that ‘no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor be denied the equal protection of the laws, nor be denied the enjoyment of that person’s civil rights or be discriminated against.’”

There are innumerable occasions when homophobes, during the so-called "debate" over "gay rights" say mean-spirited, hurtful, and hateful things, and I admit that I take them personally. After all when they talk about gay people, they mean me.

Well, the good news is that as each successive state surges forward into history and affirms marriage equality for same-sex couples, I take that personally, too, and it's a very nice feeling.
———-
^* Neal Broverman , "M*A*S*H Star Stiers Comes Out", Advocate.com, 5 May 2009.

^† I am, after all, speaking as an atheist married to a Catholic priest.

This week's stylishly modern-looking beard belongs to the unidentified subject of a painting, known as "Portrait of a Red-Bearded Man", attributed to Dutch painter Jan Anthonisz van Ravensteyn (c. 1570–1657), a man for whom I can find virtually no biographical information. Judging from dates painted on the canvas (outside the frame of my cropped image of the man), it was probably painted between 1604 and 1607.^*

This lovely portrait comes to our attention here at BoW HQ thanks to Bill M., friend of this blog, who recently returned from a trip to France. He spotted the BoW potential of this painting (his original photograph) on a visit to the château de Chenonceau, near Tours, where it hangs. (In what room seems to be information I don't have anywhere, or have since misplaced. Bill did mention that it hangs next to an "Adoration of the Magi" by Peter Paul Rubens)

This château, even if its name is not familiar, will probably look familiar in the photographs: it is the one we always see with its dramatic, long gallery built over the river Cher. (The official website, and one of Bill's photographs.) Here is a charming short history of the château from a group that organizes tours to that destination (and their website has a nice virtual tour):

Built in the early XVIth century by Catherine Briçonnet, the Château de Chenonceau got its splendor from the successive women who kept expanding and enhancing it throughout the centuries, including Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medicis, respectively best mistress and wife of Henry II, before Louise de Lorraine, Madame Dupin and Madame Pelouze.

(I'm thinking that "best mistress" might be an awkward translation of the original French "favorite", where just plain "mistress" would probably do. But I am not versed in the nomenclature and protocols of hierarchy of Royal French extra-marital affairs of the time.)
———-
^* Dates near 1600 seem to keep popping up in relation to things that I find interesting. There were interesting things happening in music, for example, not least among my favorites in England with the Elizabethans. Shakespeare was active. Art was blossoming. Tycho Brahe was still alive and making the measurements that his assistant, Johannes Kepler, would soon use to deduce that planetary orbits are elliptical. Galileo was active, Newton had not been born yet, and John Napier didn't publish his invention of logarithms until 1614, nor had Descartes published his book on analytical geometry yet. Imagine: plane geometry, as taught in Euclid, was the most advanced mathematics of the time.

This week's beard belongs to physicist and science-fiction author Gregory Benford. His official website, source of the photograph, tells us that

Benford [born in Mobile, Alabama, on January 30, 1941] is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. Benford conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experiment, and in astrophysics.

Around 1990, the last time I was on a sci-fi binge, I read a number of his books; I see from the official list of novels that I'm behind by a number of books. I should pick up where I left off. I remember Benford's writing as being very satisfactory from both a science viewpoint and from a fiction viewpoint, although I find that, in my mind, I confuse some of the story-memory details with plots by the late physicist and sci-fi author Charles Sheffield, to whom I give the edge in my preference for hard-science-fiction and adventuresome plots.

But, as is not unprecedented in this forum, Mr. Benford and his beard are really providing a pretext–a worthwhile pretext on several counts, clearly, but a pretext nonetheless, because I wanted to talk about "Benford's Law" and that Benford did not wear a beard.

Frank Benford (1883-1948) was a physicist, or perhaps an electrical engineer–or perhaps both; sources differ but the distinctions weren't so great in those days. His name is attached to Benford's Law not because he was the first to notice the peculiar mathematical phenomenon but because he was better at drawing attention to it.

I like this quick summary of the history (Kevin Maney, "Baffled by math? Wait 'til I tell you about Benford's Law", USAToday, c. 2000)

The first inkling of this was discovered in 1881 by astronomer Simon Newcomb. He'd been looking up numbers in an old book of logarithms and noticed that the pages that began with one and two were far more tattered than the pages for eight and nine. He published an article, but because he couldn't prove or explain his observation, it was considered a mathematical fluke. In 1963, Frank Benford, a physicist at General Electric, ran across the same phenomenon, tried it out on 20,229 different sets of data (baseball statistics, numbers in newspaper stories and so on) and found it always worked.

It's not a terribly difficult idea, but it's a little difficult to pin down exactly what Benford's Law applies to. Let's start with this tidy description (from Malcolm W. Browne, "Following Benford's Law, or Looking Out for No. 1", New York Times, 4 August 1998):

Intuitively, most people assume that in a string of numbers sampled randomly from some body of data, the first non-zero digit could be any number from 1 through 9. All nine numbers would be regarded as equally probable.

But, as Dr. Benford discovered, in a huge assortment of number sequences — random samples from a day's stock quotations, a tournament's tennis scores, the numbers on the front page of The New York Times, the populations of towns, electricity bills in the Solomon Islands, the molecular weights of compounds the half-lives of radioactive atoms and much more — this is not so.

Given a string of at least four numbers sampled from one or more of these sets of data, the chance that the first digit will be 1 is not one in nine, as many people would imagine; according to Benford's Law, it is 30.1 percent, or nearly one in three. The chance that the first number in the string will be 2 is only 17.6 percent, and the probabilities that successive numbers will be the first digit decline smoothly up to 9, which has only a 4.6 percent chance.

Take a long series of numbers drawn from certain broad sets, and look at the first digit of each number. The frequency of occurrence of the numerals 1 through 9 are not uniform, but distributed according to Benford's Law. Look at this figure that accompanies the Times article:

Here is the original caption:

(From "The First-Digit Phenomenon" by T. P. Hill, American Scientist, July-August 1998)

Benford's law predicts a decreasing frequency of first digits, from 1 through 9. Every entry in data sets developed by Benford for numbers appearing on the front pages of newspapers, by Mark Nigrini of 3,141 county populations in the 1990 U.S. Census and by Eduardo Ley of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1990-93 follows Benford's law within 2 percent.

Notice particularly the sets of numbers that were examined for the graph above: numbers from newspapers (not sports scores or anything sensible, just all the numbers from their front pages), census data, Dow Jones averages. These collections of numbers do have some common characteristics but it's a little hard to pin down with precision and clarity.

Wolfram Math (which shows a lovely version of Benford's original example data set halfway down this page) says that "Benford's law applies to data that are not dimensionless, so the numerical values of the data depend on the units", which seems broadly true but, curiously, is not true of the original example of logarithm tables. (But they may be the fortuitous exception, having to do with their logarithmic nature.)

Wikipedia finds that a sensible explanation can be tied to the idea of broad distributions of numbers, a distribution that covers orders of magnitude so that logarithmic comparisons come into play. Plausible but not terribly quantitative.

This explanation (James Fallows, "Why didn't I know this before? (Math dept: Benford's law)", The Atlantic, 21 November 2008) serves almost as well as any without going into technical details:

It turns out that if you list the population of cities, the length of rivers, the area of states or counties, the sales figures for stores, the items on your credit card statement, the figures you find in an issue of the Atlantic, the voting results from local precincts, etc, nearly one third of all the numbers will start with 1, and nearly half will start with either 1 or 2. (To be specific, 30% will start with 1, and 18% with 2.) Not even one twentieth of the numbers will begin with 9.

This doesn't apply to numbers that are chosen to fit a specific range — sales prices, for instance, which might be $49.99 or $99.95 — nor numbers specifically designed to be random in their origin, like winning lottery or Powerball figures or computer-generated random sums. But it applies to so many other sets of data that it turns out to be a useful test for whether reported data is legitimate or faked.

Here's yet another graph of first digits from vastly differing sets numbers following Benford's Law (from Lisa Zyga, "Numbers follow a surprising law of digits, and scientists can't explain why", physorg.com, 10 May 2007); again one should note the extreme heterogeneity of the number sets (they give "lottery" results to show that, as one truly wants, the digits are actually random):

The T.P. Hill mentioned above (in the caption to the first figure), is a professor of mathematics at Georgia Tech who's been able to prove some rigorous results about Benford's Law. From that institution, this profile of Hill (with an entertaining photograph of the mathematician and some students) gives some useful information:

Many mathematicians had tackled Benford's Law over the years, but a solid probability proof remained elusive. In 1961, Rutgers University Professor Roger Pinkham observed that the law is scale-invariant – it doesn't matter if stock market prices are changed from dollars to pesos, the distribution pattern of significant digits remains the same.

In 1994, Hill discovered Benford's Law is also independent of base – the law holds true for base 2 or base 7. Yet scale- and base-invariance still didn't explain why the rule manifested itself in real life. Hill went back to the drawing board. After poring through Benford's research again, it clicked: The mixture of data was the key. Random samples from randomly selected different distributions will always converge to Benford's Law. For example, stock prices may seem to be a single distribution, but their value actually stems from many measurements – CEO salaries, the cost of raw materials and labor, even advertising campaigns – so they follow Benford's Law in the long run. [My bold]

So the key seems to be lots of random samples from several different distributions that are also randomly selected: randomly selected samples from randomly selected populations. Whew, lots of randomness and stuff. Also included is the idea of "scale invariance": Benford's Law shows up in certain cases regardless of the units used to measure a property–that's the "scale" invariance–which implies certain mathematical properties that lead to this behavior with the logarithmic taste to it.

Another interesting aspect of Benford's Law is that it has found some applications in detecting fraud, particularly financial fraud. Some interesting cases are recounted in this surprisingly (for me) interesting article: Mark J. Nigrini, "I've Got Your Number", Journal of Accountancy, May 1999. The use of Benford's Law in uncovering accounting fraud has evidently penetrated deeply enough into the consciousness for us to be told: "Bernie vs Benford's Law: Madoff Wasn't That Dumb" (Infectious Greed, by Paul Kedrosky).

And just to demonstrate that mathematical fun can be found most anywhere, here is Mike Solomon (his blog) with some entertainment: "Demonstrating Benford's Law with Google".

This week's pious beard belongs to St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. He was given the name Francesco at his baptism the day after his birth on 25 May 1887. Continuing with his official Vatican biography

On 6 January 1903, at the age of sixteen, he entered the novitiate of the Capuchin Friars at Morcone, where on 22 January he took the Franciscan habit and the name Brother Pio. At the end of his novitiate year he took simple vows, and on 27 January 1907 made his solemn profession.

After he was ordained priest on 10 August 1910 at Benevento, he stayed at home with his family until 1916 for health reasons. In September of that year he was sent to the friary of San Giovanni Rotondo and remained there until his death.

He died on 23 September 1968 at the age of eighty-one.

Pio had a devoted following at the time of his death, a following that has only grown since he died. Apart from his saintly desire to live a simple life of servitude, he was notes and admired as a stigmatist, i.e., one who exhibits the stigmata of Jesus. In the words of the [US] National Centre for Padre Pio

On September 20, 1918 the five wounds of our Lord's passion appeared on his body, making him the first stigmatized priest on the history of the Catholic Church.

This is undoubtedly why images of Pio frequently show him standing in an orant posture (hands raised and apart), exhibiting the bloody bandages wrapping his hands.

Padre Pio was canonized by John Paul II on 16 June 2002 in a liturgy that broke attendance records at the Vatican.

Padre Pio became almost too familiar a face to us from our first visit to Rome in October 2001. Already then religious fervor was on the rise in anticipation of the canonization that was only a few months away (beatification was on 2 May, 1999), and images of Padre Pio were everywhere we looked.

Unfortunately, there weren't very many different images to choose from; the one we have here is one of maybe three that were very, very popular. On later trips we discovered that large statues were becoming popular in the trendier churches. I'm afraid we found the somewhat dour face of Pio became a little easy to make fun of after the first hundred or so little or big shines to him that one trips over.

I've seen that I'm not the only one. You might enjoy looking through the lovely items in the "Padre Pio Gift Shop Online" (from the Padre Pio Foundation of America). And I would be remiss if I did not draw your attention to this lovely Padre Pio Watch (from this page). Ah well. Although his popular images don't show it and his followers would probably be horrified, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Pio developed quite a sense of humor about it all in his eternal afterlife.

As I write I am sitting in front of my own 6-inch statuette, painted in not terribly life-like colors, of Padre Pio, a souvenir of a more recent trip to Rome. In his upraised stigmatic hand he holds a nice multi-color rosary made of small, wooden beads. I also have a beautiful 8-by-10-inch 3-D picture showing two of the more famous Pio images, the one above being one of them. I'd thought someday to assemble my own little shrine as a memento of our visits to Rome.

But let's end with something nice and less silly. On this page is a beautiful icon of Pio, painted by Terrance Nelson, along with an appreciation of Pio's life and sainthood.

This week's precisely styled beard belongs to Victorian artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912). This image I've cropped from his famous "Self-Portrait" of 1896. (visible, e.g., here.) I like the short biography at "Olga's Gallery", but perhaps the quick introductory summary from the longer Wikipedia article on Alma-Tadema will serve us here:

Born in Dronrijp, the Netherlands, and trained at the Academy of Antwerp, Belgium, he settled in England in 1870 and spent the rest of his life there. A classical-subject painter, he became famous for his depictions of the luxury and decadence of the Roman Empire, with languorous figures set in fabulous marbled interiors or against a backdrop of dazzling blue Mediterranean sea and sky.

Universally admired during his lifetime for his superb draftsmanship and depictions of Classical antiquity, he fell into disrepute after his death and only in the last thirty years has his work been reevaluated for its importance within nineteenth-century English art.

I have seen him referred to as "that painter of Victorians in togas", apparently a phrase coined for a 1973 show of paintings by Alma-Tadema at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a fact I deduced from the name of the catalog of the show: Victorians in Togas: Paintings by Sir LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA from the Collection of Allen Funt, March-April 1973 ; catalogue by Christopher Forbes.

It seems that it was an apt title. Alma-Tadema's favorite subjects in his mature works were ancient and classical settings, Egypt and Rome. What they lacked in historic accuracy they made up for with animation, color, and style. For some reproductions of paintings, look here, here, and here.

I've read various descriptions of his style, none of which struck me as quite right until I read that he had admired the pre-Raphaelites (some example paintings). That was the similarity that had struck me in the paintings I had seen: the idealized, quasi-classical scenes of an imagined golden age of humanity painted in high-tone colors. It's not a style I'm terribly fond of, but on the other hand, it's hard to dislike the pre-Raphaelites very much. Alma-Tadema also puts me very much in mind of the paintings of the somewhat peculiar Abbott Thayer.

This all came up because this past weekend our friends Tom and James visited and we went to the National Gallery of Art to see the exhibition "Pompeii and the Roman Villa". There had been much talk about it and it was a very interesting exhibit with a number of interesting artifacts. One of the things we saw there that surprised me was this painting:

It's "A Sculpture Gallery", painted in 1874 by Alma-Tadema. That's Alma-Tadema himself, posing as the art patron with the scarf around his head (and dashing beard), along with members of his family, looking over some Roman antiquities.

This imposing painting was in a separate room, accompanied by reproductions or borrowed examples of 6 of the artifacts shown in the painting. The NGA exhibition page for this gallery notes:

Alma-Tadema’s painting exemplifies the vogue for antiquities that peaked in the nineteenth century. The artist and his family are portrayed as ancient Romans being shown works of art for purchase. Sir Lawrence sits at left and gestures toward his wife, Laura, who stands next to their daughters. Laura’s sister and brother are seated at far left.

Follow the link for more information about the objects and as a way in to the online materials for the entire exhibition, which closes on 22 March.

"Mardis Gras 2002"   photo by highstrungloner

Today's beard belongs to the attractive gentleman in the leather coat enjoying street festivities during Mardi Gras, 2002, in the Latin Quarter of New Orleans. I might add that the Fu Manchu mustache his companion wears is certainly not chopped liver.^* I'm particularly enchanted by the sign for The Wishing Well LaunDRYteria.

Fu-Manchu man seems to have a good collection of "throw beads" going. I had trouble finding good information but the story seems to be that "throw beads" were "traditionally" thrown from floats in Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans when people called out "throw me something". Why they might call that out I don't really see, but this is how traditions go.

Of later vintage, however, the tradition seems to be that one increases ones collection of throw beads by exposing something to would-be throwers, breasts for the girls, dicks for the boys. I know this must be a popular "tradition" because I saw quite a number of nervous types explaining to other nervous types that it most definitely was not part of the real tradition and certainly not a requirement. Obvious sanctimonious spoil sports.

Mardi Gras is not in my canon of traditional observations, probably because it's strongly related to the religious observation of Lent, and not particularly noticed during my midwestern upbringing.

Some commenters seemed of the opinion that Mardi Gras was invented in New Orleans, but of course it's a much older tradition from Europe (otherwise known as "Carnival" in Italy and "Fasching" in Germany), largely associated with Catholicism but certainly not exclusively.

Lent, of course, is a period of fasting in those traditions, a time when partying was not allowed and certain foods were banned. Thus the day before Lent began was the obvious time to whoop it up and get rid of all those rich, soon-to-be forbidden foods.

So, although I don't observe Lenten restrictions I can definitely get behind the idea of a good party. Happy Mardi Gras!
———
^* I"m amusing myself by trying to imagine how this sentence would mean to non-English readers after being translated literally by google. I can't, of course, but I can try.

This week's iconic beard belongs to Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865), 16th President of the United States. As many have noted in this, his bicentennial year, it is also Charles Darwin's bicentennial year: Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same date in the same year.^* Last week we looked at Darwin's beard; this week^† it's Lincoln's beard–in stereo! I should point out that, although Lincoln wore a beard, at least in his mature years, he did not wear a mustache.

Last week I read in one of my regularly read blogs (no doubt in the sidebar list, but just who it was escapes me at the moment–remind me if you read this!) that the author was unable at the time to find any bloggy birthday celebrations that compared the contributions of Darwin and Lincoln. Now, while I know that the total dearth of such comparisons was strictly not true,^‡ it was an interesting question to think about. So I thought about it.

I finally settled on one thing for which both men should be held in the highest esteem: their ideas. These two ideas,

• common descent through evolution by means of natural selection; and
• emancipation of slaves in the United States.

Surely these are two of the most powerful ideas that shaped the course of history following their publication, the first in 1859, the second in 1862.

I think perhaps this is my point, too: these ideas were written, they were published. I have known people who claimed to think that words are merely words, that they have no power, that it is only actions that can effect change. Clearly I disagree with the viewpoint; I think it's utterly silly and, while one might be able to sustain the argument in a purely scholastic and trivial way, it has no useful meaning, and no utility except to win junior-debating points.

Humans inhabit a world of ideas. Indeed, it may be the fact that we have developed a culture in order to perpetuate ideas that identifies us as human. If I'm asked to name an event that separated humans from our not-quite-yet-human ancestors, I would name the invention of language.

It is with language, both spoken and written, that we use to embody ideas outside our own minds and share them with others of our kind. That ability gives us–each of us but also all of us–a past we can remember and learn from, and a future we can imagine.

That is a very profound, and very human similarity between Darwin and Lincoln: they gave us ideas that continue to echo in our minds and guide the growth of our culture. That, most definitely, is something to celebrate.
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^* Arnold Zwicky recently wrote about the conventions and ambiguities involved in saying they were born "on the same day"; later on (we're on safe ground saying "later on" at least) he wrote about the difficulty of referring to when he wrote that post (in "Time Stamps").

^† This week's photograph, which comes from the [US] Library of Congress' collection. (source; persistent URL) The Flickr page provided the following information; I was particularly interested to see that Lincoln's haircut was mentioned.

Walker, Lewis E., 1822-1880, photographer.
Hon. Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States
[Washington, D.C. : E. & H.T. Anthony], ©1865 Feb.
1 photographic print on stereo card : albumen silver ; mount 8.2 x 17.1 cm.
Notes:
"The short haircut was perhaps suggested by Lincoln's barber to facilitate the taking of his life mask by Clark Mills. Lincoln knew from experience how long hair could cling to plaster." "An 1865 stereograph long attributed to Mathew Brady was actually taken by Lewis Emory Walker, a government photographer, about February 1865 and published for him by the E. & H. T. Anthony Co., of New York." (Source: Ostendorf, p. 198-9)

Published in: Lincoln's photographs: a complete album / by Lloyd Ostendorf. Dayton, OH: Rockywood Press, 1998, p. 197.
Purchase; 1909; (DLC/PP-1909:43670).

^‡ For instance, I was quite interested to read at Language Log ("Lincoln vs. Darwin in the OED", 12 February 2009) that

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Darwin is credited with the first known English use of 144 different words, including creationist, phylogeny, archaeopteryx, alfalfa, and rodeo. And his birthday-mate Lincoln? Only one: Michigander.

From that list I am a bit confounded by rodeo. Why? Where?

This week's beard belongs to birthday boy Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), born 200 years ago on 12 February 1809. This photograph (which I have cropped) was taken in 1882 by the photographic company of Ernest Edwards, London.^*

Many people call Darwin's great idea, common descent through evolution by means of natural selection, the greatest scientific discovery ever. Maybe. It's certainly big. My hesitation is merely a reflection of my feeling that it's really difficult to prioritize the great ideas and discoveries of science and math into a hierarchy that would assign the top position to one idea alone. No doubt it's the over cautious precision of my inner scientist asserting itself.

Almost since the pages of Origin of Species were first sewn into a book there has been a cottage industry of trying to "disprove Darwin". So strongly associated is his name with the big idea that "Darwin" and "Darwinism" serve as effigies for those who revile the idea so much that they expend considerable energy looking for anything that might weaken the authority of the idea so that it can be toppled from its scientific pantheon.

Unfortunately for their efforts, they sorely misunderstand how science works and, therefore, how futile their efforts are. Detractors seem to believe they are operating under junior debating-society rules where locating any hint of a logical inconsistency in the "theory", or any modern deviation from what they think is Darwinian orthodoxy, is certain to be a fatal blow to the hated "theory". Alas, they hope to disprove Darwin but can only disapprove and look silly and naive.

The biggest impediment to tearing down the edifice of "Darwinism", of course, is reality. Scientists believe that reality has a separate, objective existence that affords no special place to humans. One corollary to this is that objective reality is what it is regardless of our most fervent desires, regardless of our prayers to a supernatural deity to change it, regardless of the stories we tell ourselves over and over about how we would like it to be. Deny reality for your own psychological benefit as needs must, but you will not alter reality by doing so.^†

But, suppose there are chinks in the armor of "Darwinism"–isn't that fatal? Well, no. Great ideas that flow into the vast river of science stay if they are useful ideas. Depending on utility they may change, grow, even evolve over time, but they're frequently treated as the same idea. Creators do not have veto power over how their scientific ideas are used, nor how they are changed or updated, although they continue to get the credit for great ideas. The way we understand and describe gravity is nothing recognizable to Newton, but he continues to get credit as the discoverer of "universal gravitation".

But aren't wrong theories, those that have been "disproven" by logical errors or deviations from precise descriptions of reality, immediately discarded as useless? Oh no, far from it. See the aforementioned Newtonian theory of gravity for but one ready example.^‡

This is the trade-off: a somewhat inaccurate (or "wrong") but productive theory is of far more use to science than a correct but sterile idea. By "productive" I refer to ideas that lead one to new ideas, new experiments, and new understandings. Compare that notion with what some would have you believe is the undeniable perfection of revealed truth from a divine creator: it is an investigative dead end, it leads to no new ideas whatsoever, it affords no solution beyond the parental disclaimer, "because".

"Why" is the path science follows, not "because". I believe that "why" is the more interesting and the more valuable path to follow, at least when it comes to understanding how the universe works. One may feel free to disagree on its value and utility, of course, but denying its reality is futile.
———-
^* The photograph is part of the wonderful collection of "Portraits of Scientists and Inventors" from the Smithsonian Institution, which we have sampled here before and undoubtedly will again and again, photographs they have contributed to the Flickr Commons Project. (The Flickr page; the persistent URL)

^† This is probably the source of the calm, know-it-all demeanor that atheists tend to exhibit, and that so inflames those who would consign us prematurely to the flames of hell: all the evidence we see about how the world really operates fails to suggest that a creator-deity exists–not to mention a personal-coach-deity–and no amount of wishful thinking can change reality.

^‡ Sometime we'll talk about the contingent nature of scientific "truth" and how uncomfortable that idea is for those with an absolutist predilection.

This week's beard–not to mention the accordion–belong to virtuoso Swiss accordionist Hans Hassler. Mere hours ago I knew nothing about Mr. Hassler, but thanks to the serendipity of free association with google images,^* I now know more.

Here is a thumbnail biography (source):

Hans Hassler was born in Switzerland in 1945. He studied accordion with Mogens Ellegaard in Copenhagen, and later learned to play clarinet, piano, and guitar. Hassler has performed musical styles ranging from opera to Dixieland. He used to perform in Zurcher Kammerorchester, and also recorded with the avant-jazz group Habarigani and — most notably — Mathias Ruegg's Vienna Art Orchestra and Swiss Art Orchestra. Hassler played in Ivano Torre Quintetto, Beat Follmi, and with Gebhard Ullmann during the mid- to late '90s

Sources disagree on whether he's from Chur, Switzerland, or Graubunden (Grisons),^† but as those two places are within about 10 km of each other (and also of Davos, which has been much in the news lately because of the World Economic Forum held there annually), I'm not going to fret over the detail. They're all in the mountain valleys of eastern Switzerland, looking very romantic from this distance.

It seems there was some excitement last year because Mr. Hassler finally had recorded a solo album, "Sehr Schnee – Sehr Wald, Sehr" ("Very snow – Very Forest, Very"). (Released by Intakt, who provide a very nice biography of Hassler, in German; translated by google here.) The album evidently exhibits the same eclecticism that has characterized Hassler's career:

Hans Hassler is the true Swiss king of accordion. Born 1945 in Graubunden the musician has kept us in suspense for over 30 years with his zigzag through different scenes: Swiss folk music, jazz, film music, free improvisation or classical interpretation.

Elusive in his stylistics yet unmistakably committed to his own way, Hans Hassler inspires us with his terrifically playful musical sense, with profound humour and startling border crossings. His outside appearance, his waggishness, his virtuosity and his outrageous spectrum from Landler to jazz make any performance of his a great experience. [source]

Without really trying very hard I found that he often plays with other artists on their recordings, for instance, Gebhard Ullmann and Andreas Vollenweider. He's apparently well known in some circles, particularly jazz, for his avoidance of pigeon-holing, stylistically speaking, as well as his notable virtuosity–and his notable beard, of course!

On the nature of Hassler's playing, I enjoyed this excerpt by Stuart Broomer from his review of "Sehr Schnee – Sehr Wald, Sehr" (source):

To say that Hans Hassler plays the accordion, even that he freely improvises on it, does not describe precisely or perhaps in any real sense what the words “play” and “accordion” might mean in this context. Yes, he plays the accordion, in the sense that anyone might play the instrument, but he also plays with the listener, with the putative heritage of the accordion and with whatever expectations the listener might have of the instrument, while rekindling his own associations and memories through the instrument. In this sense Hassler is a meta-accordionist, not simply playing the instrument but playing with any identity that we might impose on it or construct around it. At times here the accordion is literally a thing that makes sounds, thus we get the accelerated panting of the bellows or the clicking of the buttons and keys with notes unarticulated. At other times we get the sheer and sudden power of the accordion as a lap-top imitation of a cathedral organ, as in the 1’14” of “Accordplosion.” But it is also the accordion as instrument of sentiment and farce and object of derision.

You may have noticed already in this space that I have a particular fascination for the accordion, and those who play it. I didn't mention in last week's BoW entry that the film "Music from the Inside Out" had a fantastic segment where the Philadelphia Orchestra was on tour and were all called by a colleague to the lobby of a hall to listen to a fabulous accordion player rendering part of Vivaldi's "Four Season", solo, of course. It was a beautiful and telling segment, perhaps reason enough in itself to see the movie.

Then last year, thanks to a pointer by Chris, we enjoyed hearing the Trondheim Akkordion Ensemble playing the Toccata from Widor's Organ Symphony #5. And have I told the story of the recital we went to in Rome when we visited in 2001 that featured a young Albanian accordion virtuoso who was so fabulous? Well, perhaps another time.
———
^*You see, I was originally looking for an image of German composer Hans Leo Hassler (1564–1612), just to see if he had a beard. He does, btw. I had thought to write about the eventful recital we played a week ago, for which Isaac performed the lovely "Fantasy on Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La" by Hassler. But accordions rule, so I'll write later about the recital.

^†For what it's worth, search engines find 10 to 100 times the instances of "Hassler accordion chur" over "Hassler accordion graubunden", but I have to admit that I'm not even clear on whether "Graubunden" is a town or region name, and it's rather beside my point, which is why it's in this footnote.

This week's beard belongs to filmmaker Daniel Anker. Here's a convenient biographical sketch (from the 2007 Florida Film Festival, also the source of the photo):

Filmmaker Daniel Anker has been a producer/director of independent feature documentaries for more than a decade. His credits include Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, for which he received an Oscar nomination and an Emmy Award, and Music from the Inside Out, which had a successful theatrical release and was named one of the best films of the year by International Documentary Association. His film Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust has been shown at more than 70 film festivals worldwide and will be released theatrically in the fall. Anker has also produced numerous PBS programs, including the Peabody Award-winning Marsalis on Music. Among his new projects is The Moral Lens, a film about legendary director Sidney Lumet.

We know Mr. Anker a bit better now because we watched his film Music from the Inside Out a week ago, and we enjoyed it very much. It is a well put together documentary featuring members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. (Here is the distributor's page about the film, which has more information, nicely organized; here is the film's official website, all done in that horrible Flash style so that nothing's linkable, but clicking "about the film" and then "music" will get you to a list of all the music played in the film–it's a good selection.)

The marketing for the film leads us to believe that the subject of the film is the question, "What is music?" Well, that's maybe good marketing but it's hardly what the film is really about. Some of the musicians take a stab at answering the question–none very well–but it's hardly central to the film.

In fact it's not a simple film "about" a subject really, but through the interviews and observations, juxtaposed with all the episodes of musicians making music in different venues, the theme that I think emerges is "what is it like to be a musician", a deep question with no simple answer. Being a musician is a complex, life-time commitment, although one can make simple observations like "musicians are people who like to make music". This film goes well beyond that simple and superficial analysis, largely in a nonverbal way, by showing, and I think it largely succeeded in giving a very good impression of what it is like to be a musician.

The concert master (i.e., the principle first violinist) of the Philadelphia Orchestra, David Kim, featured prominently. That was not surprising because he was articulate and had fascinating stories to tell.^* The stories largely concerned his mother's great desire for him to become a famous violinist, and his own thwarted quest to be a touring soloist. I'd like to have dinner with Mr. Kim sometime, maybe even play that Schubert Quintet with him.

Speaking of the music, there was a great deal of it in this film. All of the musical pieces were performances by the musicians that were both part of the film and also some of the soundtrack underscoring. It worked well and the music was generally treated sensitively–I hate hearing familiar pieces of classical music mangled, truncated, or spliced randomly to provide soundtrack fodder–with two small exceptions.

At the end of the film the last movement of Brahms' First Symphony was used as the underscoring for the closing credits. I knew, just knew that they would fade out the music right in the middle of the coda, and they did, but I didn't really like it. Sure, the credits had ended but the music hadn't!

The other instance I found a bit jarring was the segment that used the Schubert C Major Quintet (2 violins, viola, 2 'cellos) for the underscoring, but also as a centerpiece featuring Kim playing with colleagues. Cuts were inevitable, but the segments of the music were not used in the order that they appear in the work, and that bothered me.

But please, those are tiny criticisms of a really very good film, a film about music and music making that I think will be very accessible even to classical neophytes, even to people who aren't so sure they like classical music. Although it's the Philadelphia Orchestra, and although "classical" music is what is heard most commonly^† throughout the film, it is music making itself, regardless of the music, that is the subject, and that should reach a very wide audience.

One of the featured musicians, Judy Geist,^‡ who was the principle viola at the time, is also an artist, a painter, and the connection between art, and color, and music was explored a bit. I didn't find that exploration terribly profound, but I was very moved by Ms. Giest's comment near the end of the film about how music is a performance art:

You're using living people as part of this sculpture of sound. There I am, playing in this mesh of sound, within the rhythm. In fact, all of us–we are in the art.

———-
^* Before this became a BoW entry I was intending to write about Kim's stories and make my case that they were interesting–that he was interesting–because he dramatized events, meaning he created a dramatic narrative, a story, rather than simply relating the events in an expository fashion. I felt there was a lesson in there about story-telling, but I haven't pulled it out yet.

^†There's also bluegrass and jazz, but my point is not to say "see, it's not all classical!"

^‡ Alas, I couldn't find much internet presence for Ms. Geist at all, which irritated me because the few glimpses I got of her art left me wanting to see more.

This week's majestic beard belongs to Sir William Thomson, Baron Kelvin^* (1824 – 1907) or, simply, Lord Kelvin as he's known to us in the physical sciences. This is the same "Kelvin" as in the SI unit "Kelvins", the degrees of the absolute thermodynamic temperature scale.

The photograph was taken c. 1900 by T. & R. Annan & Sons. I love the title given the photograph by the National Galleries of Scotland: "Sir William Thomson, Baron Kelvin, 1824 – 1907. Scientist, resting on a binnacle and holding a marine azimuth mirror".

A binnacle, Wikipedia tells me, is a box on the deck of a ship that holds navigational instruments ready for easy reference. One reason Kelvin might be leaning on one is suggested by this bit from the article on "binnacle"

In 1854 a new type of binnacle was patented by John Gray of Liverpool which directly incorporated adjustable correcting magnets on screws or rack and pinions. This was improved again when Lord Kelvin patented in the 1880s another system of compass and which incorporated two compensating magnets.

Kelvin also patented the "marine azimuth mirror" (see the description of "azimuth mirror" from the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History), so the photograph has narrative intent. It seems that Kelvin was an active and successful inventor.

I like this understated biography of Kelvin from the National Galleries of Scotland website (link in first footnote), where it accompanies the photograph:

A child prodigy, William Thomson went to university at the age of eleven. At twenty-two he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy in Glasgow where he set up the first physics laboratory in Great Britain and proved an inspiring teacher. He primarily researched thermodynamics and electricity. On the practical side he was involved in the laying of the Atlantic telegraph cable. He was also the partner of a Glasgow firm that made measuring instruments from his own patents.

"He primarily researched thermodynamics and electricity" is a bit of an understatement! Around the time this photograph was taken (c. 1900), Kelvin was pretty much the scientific authority in the world, the great voice of science, the scientist whose opinion on every matter scientific was virtually unassailable.

That unassailability was a huge problem for (at least) Charles Darwin and his theory of common descent by means of natural selection. The crux of the problem was the answer to this question: how old is the Earth?

These days we are quite accustomed to the idea that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. At the beginning of the 19th century is was very commonly believed that the Earth was only several thousand years old: Bishop Usher's calculated date of creation, 23 October 4004 BC, was seen at the time as a scholarly refinement of what everyone already pretty much knew to be true.

Perhaps the big idea growth during the 1800s was the dawning realization of the great antiquity of the Earth. This was accompanied by the realization that fossils might actually be animal remains of some sort; the emergence of geology as a science; and the concept of "uniformitarianism" (an interesting article on the topic), so central to geology, that geological processes in the past, even the deep past, were probably very much like geological processes in action today, so that the geological history of the Earth–and of fossil remains!–could be made sense of.^†

Throughout the 19th century discovery after discovery seemed to demand an ever-older Earth. I can imagine that an element of the scientific zeitgeist that precipitated Darwin's ideas on natural selection as a mechanism for evolution was this growing realization that the Earth might be very, very, very old and that something so remarkably slow as he knew natural selection would be, might be possible. In fact, his ideas went further out on the intellectual limb: he realized that it was necessary that the Earth be much, much older than was currently thought.

In fact, he staked his reputation on the great antiquity of the Earth. This was the critical prediction of his theory, really: the Earth must be vastly older than people thought at the time or else his theory of common descent by natural selection was wrong. It was a bold, seemingly foolhardy claim that he seemed certain to lose.

He was right, of course, but things looked grim at the time and his reasoning was not vindicated by physics until well after his death.

The biggest roadblock to widespread acceptance of the idea of an Earth old enough to allow evolution of humankind through natural selection was none other than Lord Kelvin.

Calculating the age of the Earth looked at the time to be a very challenging problem. But, if there was one thing Kelvin knew, it was that the Earth could not be older than the Sun, and he believed he could calculate the age of the Sun. He was the master of physics, particularly thermodynamics, so all he had to do was add up the sources of energy that contributed to the energy we saw coming from the Sun and figure out how long it might have been going on.

But what were the sources of the Sun's heat? Kelvin quickly concluded that it could not be any sort of chemical burning, like coal in a fireplace. There simply could not be enough coal. To keep this long story short, Kelvin finally settled on two leading possibilities. One was the energy that came from gravitation contraction of the primordial matter that formed the sun, in which case the sun heated up a great deal originally and then spent eons radiating away its heat. The other possibility that might contribute was the gravitational energy of meteors falling into the sun. (Here's an interesting and brief exposition of the arguments: S. Gavin, J. Conn, and S. P. Karrer, "The Age of the Sun: Kelvin vs. Darwin".)

Kelvin published his thoughts in an interesting, and very readable paper, called "On the Age of the Sun’s Heat" , Macmillan's Magazine, volume 5 (March 5, 1862), pp. 288-293. (html version; pdf version) In the conclusion to that paper Kelvin wrote:

It seems, therefore, on the whole most probable that the sun has not illuminated the earth for 100,000,000 years, and almost certain that he has not done so for 500,000,000 years. As for the future, we may say, with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth can not continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation.

What an irritant for Darwin! That was not nearly enough time!

These days it is a clichéd joke to say of something that "it violates no known laws of physics", but that's the punchline for this entire controversy. Kelvin, naturally, had to search for sources of the Sun's heat that violated no known laws of physics as they were known at the time, but there were new laws of physics lurking in the wings.

Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Kelvin published his paper in 1862. Radioactivity was only discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896. The radioactive decay of elements was not recognized for some time as a possible source of solar energy, but as understanding advanced it was realized that the transmutation of one element into another through radioactive decay involved a loss of mass–the materials before and after could be weighed.

The next domino fell in 1906, a year before Kelvin's death, when Einstein published his famous equation, , a consequence of his special theory of relativity. Understanding dawned that the loss of mass was related to a release of energy through the radioactive decay.

Our modern knowledge that the sun is powered by nuclear fusion through a process that releases enormous amounts of energy via fusion cycles (interesting, mildly technical paper on its discovery and elucidation) that consume hydrogen atoms to create helium atoms, and then consume those products to produce some heavier elements, was still decades in the future (generally credited to Hans Bethe's paper published in 1939).

But the message was clear: here was a possible new source of energy for the sun that Kelvin knew nothing about but that could vastly increase the likely age of the Sun.

To finish this part of the story, here is an excerpt from John Gribbin's The Birth of Time : How Astronomers Measured the Age of the Universe. (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1999. 237 pages.), a fascinating page-turner of a popular science book. (Book note forthcoming.)

If the whole Sun were just slightly radioactive, it could produce the kind of energy that we see emerging from it in the form of heat and light. In 1903, Pierre Curie and his colleague Albert Laborde actually measured the amount of heat released by a gram of radium, and found that it produced enough energy in one hour to raise the temperature of 1.3 grams of water from 0°C to its boiling point. Radium generated enough heat to melt its own weight of ice in an hour–every hour. In July that year, the English astronomer William Wilson pointed out that in that case, if there were just 3.6 grams of radium distributed in each cubic metre of the sun's volume it would generate enough heat to explain all of the energy being radiated from the Sun's surface today. It was only later appreciated, as we shall see, that the "enormous energies" referred to by Chamberlin are only unlocked in a tiny region at the heart of the sun, where they produce all of the heat required to sustain the vast bulk of material above them.

The important point, though, is that radioactivity clearly provided a potential source of energy sufficient to explain the energy output of the Sun. In 1903, nobody knew where the energy released by radium (and other radioactive substances) was coming from; but in 1905, another hint at the origin of the energy released in powering both the Sun and radioactive decay came when Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which led to the most famous equation in science, , relating energy and mass (or rather, spelling out that mass is a form of energy.) This is the ultimate source of energy in radioactive decays, where careful measurements of the weights of all the daughter products involved in such processes have now confirmed that the total weight of all the products is always a little less than the weight of the initial radioactive nucleus–the "lost" mass has been converted directly into energy, in line with Einstein's equation.

Even without knowing how a star like the Sun might do the trick of converting mass into energy, you can use Einstein's equation to calculate how much mass has to be used up in this way every second to keep the Sun shining. Overall, about 5 million tonnes of mass have to be converted into pure energy each second to keep the sun shining. This sounds enormous, and it is, by everyday standards–roughly the equivalent of turning five million large elephants into pure energy every second. But the Sun is so big that it scarcely notices this mass loss. If it has indeed been shining for 4.5 billion years, as the radiometric dating of meteorite samples implies, and if it has been losing mass at this furious rate for all that time, then its overall mass has only diminished by about 4 percent since the Solar System formed.

By 1913, Rutherford was commenting that "at the enormous temperatures of the sun, it appears possible that a process of transformation may take place in ordinary elements analogous to that observed in the well-known radio-elements," and added, "the time during which the sun may continue to emit heat at the present rate may be much longer than the value computed from ordinary dynamical data [the Kelvin-Helmholtz timescale]." [pp. 36--38]

Kelvin was not always right.
———-
^* I've taken this image from the Flickr Commons set uploaded by the National Galleries of Scotland, and cropped it some from the original: Source and National Galleries page.

^† The history of these ideas in the context of geology as an emerging science is very ably traced in Simon Winchester's The Map that Changed the World : William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (my book note).

This week's beard belongs to art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), seen here in a portrait painted by Pablo Picasso in 1910. The painting is currently in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow.

When I was much younger I could get quite excited about modern art and the avant garde. Now it seems more like youthful indiscretion and I'm not sure what I saw in it all (although I don't think I ever had positive feelings about serialism in music). It's not so much that I think it was all "ugly" ("beauty", as such, has not that much to do with my personal aesthetic theories) as in a number of cases I'm not sure it was worth the effort of getting excited,^* although I still have soft spots and friendly feelings of familiarity with earlier modernists I became acquainted with at the time.

I think now that one of the things that disenchanted me the most was cubism. I remember being thrilled at the idea that cubist painters were trying to look at reality in a new way, that all those apparent facets in their paintings were meant as different planes of the subject so that in a single, flat painting it was as though we were looking at many sides of the subject simultaneously. What a cool idea!

However, the more I looked, the less I saw. And now, in my advancing old age, cubist paintings don't look multi-faceted or multi-sided; they look more like badly designed jigsaw puzzles, bunches of gratuitous, geometric lines slashing across the image plane with the goal of obfuscating more than revealing. They still seem kind of pretty sometimes, kind of silly at other times, but mostly an exploitation of a gimmick instead of a revelation of seeing. Alas.

It turns out that there are interesting facets to M. Bollard's life even if the facets in the Picasso portrait are not so interesting. The photograph is documentation that he did, indeed, have a beard. (Here is an interesting short discussion of the Picasso portrait.)

Vollard was certainly a central figure in the birth of modernism. He opened his art gallery in Paris, Rue Laffitte, in 1893. Among the artists he represented were Cézanne, Gauguin, Maillol, Picasso, Renoir, Rouault, Rousseau, and Van Gogh.

There is also mystery surrounding Vollard's life–or rather, his death! A fascinating article by David D’Arcy, called "The Mysterious Mr. Slomovic" (artnet, undated; accessed 12 January 2009) describes a shady character from Yugoslavia (as it was then)–one Erich Slomovic–who, following Vollard's death in a car crash that some apparently think may well have been murder, somehow ended up with a good part of Vollard's collection.

Once Vollard dies in a car crash in 1939, the dispersal of his art holdings becomes complicated. Vollard’s estate was split between his brother, Lucien Vollard, and Madelaine De Galea, Ambroise Vollard’s longtime mistress and fellow reunionnaise — both were born in the remote Ile de la Réunion, a French colony in the Indian Ocean. But hundreds of works from Vollard’s inventory also ended up in the hands of Erich Slomovic, a young Croatian Jew who had come to Paris in the mid-1930s and befriended the aging dealer.

Complicated! Perhaps there are more interesting facets to the portrait of M. Vollard than I had realized.
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^* This was more than evident to me last year when I saw the Whitney Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, and laughed in deprecating manner at all the cutting-edge modern art.