20.486 matters of scale and imagination

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 486.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: Matt Jensen <mattj_at_newsblip.com> (21)
         Subject: Re: 20.483 matters of scale and imagination

   [2] From: "Rabkin, Eric" <esrabkin_at_umich.edu> (115)
         Subject: RE: 20.483 matters of scale and imagination

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2007 07:08:06 +0000
         From: Matt Jensen <mattj_at_newsblip.com>
         Subject: Re: 20.483 matters of scale and imagination

>Do we have photographs of the earth from 10**9 meters?

A billion miles? I think Voyager 1 took a picture of Earth from the
neighborhood of Neptune. Google Image is failing me right now, though.

>Can we in fact see DNA nucleotide building blocks (at 10**-9
>meters) with the right sort of microscopy?

You can see individual atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope
(STM), though they look somewhat like balls under a blanket.

>It is interesting to reflect on the role of computing in this sweep
>from macro- to microcosmic -- and the sort of childhood, with its
>imagination, that is shaped in play with such toys from the
>beginning. It is easy to dig up the old cliche about yet another blow
>to human vanity, following in the wake of Copernicus, Darwin, Freud,
>but that seems a jaded and not very imaginative reaction, and not the
>sort a child or child-like person would have.

Personal view: I first saw the short "Powers of Ten" film when I was
about ten. I was blown away, and loved it ever since. When Google
Earth came out (first as Keyhole), I was blown away again. The zoom
feature makes it my favorite app in twenty years.

Matt Jensen
NewsBlip
Seattle

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2007 07:10:31 +0000
         From: "Rabkin, Eric" <esrabkin_at_umich.edu>
         Subject: RE: 20.483 matters of scale and imagination

Dear Willard,

I think that growing up in a screen-mediated environment, rather than
more specifically a computer-mediated environment, is likely to inform
one's default epistemology when it comes to matters of scale. The Eames
_Powers of Ten_ film, which older Humanists may remember seeing on a
screen in school or on TV, continues to go strong and offers a web site
(http://powersof10.com/) on which to explore what scalar changes look
like. But "look" is an interesting concept here because every image is
the same size and the same distance from the viewer, right there on the
screen. "Look" has been divorced from "feel." Seeing the film or the
applet is not what it's like standing at the end of a long road watching
the approach of a person who is small but unconsciously felt to be tall
or, as Matthew's Gospel has it, trying to notice the beam or mote in
one's own eye or one's brother's. Yes, computers allow us to shift
scale rapidly, but so have our eyes always, raising them at night
outdoors from the sight of the white end of one's clipped fingernail
instantly to the crescent moon.

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their
sport."

The book that in my experience most overpoweringly engages the
imagination in vast and dramatic contrasts of scale is Olaf Stapledon's
_Star Maker_. Here's an example. The unnamed narrator, like Dante at
the beginning of _The Divine Comedy_, has "tasted bitterness," walked
out into the night, climbed a hill, and then, after contemplating his
family in their home in the English suburb below him, he attends to the
world about.

"On every side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featureless sea
extended beyond sight. But the hawk-flight of imagination followed them
as they curved downward below the horizon. I perceived that I was on a
little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air,
whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of the little grain
all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and
blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit.
And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its
philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolution, its increasing
hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of
stars."

The artistic genre that deals with the imagination of scale most
consistently, of course, is science fiction. And the intellectual
domains that do so are physics (in which I include astronomy) and
religion, the twin pillars of much science fiction. Stapledon, as it
happens, was, besides being a best-selling author of science fiction, a
lecturer in philosophy.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...."

Yours,

Eric

-------------------------------------------------
Eric S. Rabkin 734-764-2553 (Office)
Dept of English 734-764-6330 (Dept)
Univ of Michigan 734-763-3128 (Fax)
Ann Arbor MI 48109-1003 esrabkin_at_umich.edu
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~esrabkin/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Humanist Discussion Group
> [mailto:humanist_at_Princeton.EDU] On Behalf Of Humanist
> Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty
> <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>)
> Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2007 04:27
> To: humanist_at_Princeton.EDU
> >
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 483.
> Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
>
> www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/hum
> anist.html
> www.princeton.edu/humanist/
> Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu
>
>
>
> Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2007 09:16:59 +0000
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
> Subject: scale and imagination
>
> For a vivid idea of the range of human perception within the
> scale of the physical world, see "Secret Worlds: The Universe
> Within", a Java toy demonstrated at
> http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powerso
> f10/index.html.
> I count 3 orders of magnitude (from 10**1 to 10**-1 meters)
> in a scale of 40 without any kind of prosthetic. Perhaps
> someone here can provide a count beyond those 3 orders of
> magnitude of actual images we are capable of generating with
> current physical systems. Do we have photographs of the earth
> from 10**9 meters? If so, we would not be seeing the moon's
> orbit as a band of light, so even at that magnitude
> imagination becomes the more powerful instrument, as it were.
> Can we in fact see DNA nucleotide building blocks (at 10**-9
> meters) with the right sort of microscopy?
>
> It is interesting to reflect on the role of computing in this
> sweep from macro- to microcosmic -- and the sort of
> childhood, with its imagination, that is shaped in play with
> such toys from the beginning. It is easy to dig up the old
> cliche about yet another blow to human vanity, following in
> the wake of Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, but that seems a jaded
> and not very imaginative reaction, and not the sort a child
> or child-like person would have. Nor would it seem a blow to
> the love of literature, properly understood, to use our tools
> to zoom down to the levels beneath which a literary
> perception is formed nor up to the body of all literature
> (that Frye inferred but, I'd guess, not even he could
> actually have in view). Nor, perhaps, to probe in consequence
> of having the tools we now have where physical nature and
> cultural nurture meet.
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
>
> Dr Willard McCarty | Reader in Humanities Computing | Centre
> for Computing in the Humanities | King's College London |
> http://staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/.
>
Received on Mon Mar 05 2007 - 02:20:10 EST