"roots that twist together"

Here's a short article which touches upon establishing a common source for both artistic and scientific inspiration and presents a slightly loopy etymology of ideas as a decoding of the formal similarities between William Blake and James Clerk Maxwell's drawings,

"An archeologist of ideas would trace the roots of Maxwell's field drawings back through Faraday to Faraday's mentor Humphry Davy to Davy's friend the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (and the idea of the universe as a "cosmic web") to... Somewhere in the subterranean passages of Europe's psyche, from which sprang Revolution and Romanticism, somewhere in the murky subconsciousness of the race, an archeologist following the thread of Maxwell's thought would encounter Blake's Tyger, burning bright in the forest of the night, physical force poised to spring, fearfully symmetric."

http://www.sciencemusings.com/musingsarchive/2005_05_22_musings.html

...more Flat Earth

The new president of the Flat Earth Society is interviewed in today's Guardian,

Inevitably, Shenton's argument forces him down all kinds of logical blind alleys – the non-existence of gravity, and his argument that most space exploration, and so the moon landings, are faked. But, while many flat Earthers have problems with the idea of orbiting satellites, Shenton navigates the London streets using GPS. He was also happy to fly from the US to Britain, but says an aircraft that flew over the Antarctic barrier would drop from the sky, and from the planet.

The Flat Earth Society was originally formed as the Universal Zetetic Society in 1884, after the Greek word zeteo, "to seek". Zeteticism, Shenton says, emphasises experience and reason over the "trusting acceptance of dogma" – or, it seems, overwhelming evidence. Only a personal trip into space to see the world as it is for himself would ­persuade him. "But even then, in seeing it, I would have to be convinced there weren't any tricks involved."

"Look at what special effects are capable of: you can produce any photograph, any video. I don't think there is solid proof. I'm not intentionally being stubborn about it, but I feel our senses tell us these things, and it would take an extraordinarily level of evidence to counteract those. How many people have actually investigated it? Have you?"

"I haven't taken this position just to be difficult. To look around, the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove ­decisively that it isn't. And I don't think that burden of proof has been met yet."

...I like this guy!

Society for Psychical Research

http://www.spr.ac.uk/main/

Sounding Space

I have loads to write about Keppler, and will do so in a separate post but for now I'll just post this film as there's a fair bit of explanation in there. He found harmony within geometry in all sorts of other natural structures and systems. The Harmonices Mundi derives from Kepplers assertion that the orbits are musically harmonius as well as mathematically. Music is maths is space, 1619.

The second film has a selection of recordings of low frequency, electromagnetic radiation emitted

by several different planets and moons passed by the voyager spacecraft as they zoom away

from earth, for ever.

I'm Very Excited about Very Low Frequency recordings at the moment. I'm just starting a project

based on these signals and the structures necessary to 'capture' them, (off to Maplins tomorrow

to buy loads of copper wire), so expect frequent dullard posts.

Also some pretty pictures on here too.

"This image represents the first view of another planet from a vantage point in space. It was taken on July 15th, 1965, when the space probe Mariner 4 flew by only 6,118 miles from the surface of Mars.

After the flyby of the planet it would take several hours for computers to process a real image. So while they were waiting, the engineers thought of different ways of taking the 1’s and 0’s from the actual data and create an image. After a few variations, it seemed most efficient to print out the digits and color over them based upon how bright each pixel was. So Mr. Grumm went to a local art store and asked for a set of chalk with different shades of gray. The art store replied that they “did not sell chalk” (as that was apparently too low for them, only convenience stores sold “chalk”), but they did have colored pastels. Richard did not want to spend a lot of time arguing with them, so he bought the pastels (actual pastels seen below), had the 1’s and 0’s printed out on ticker tape about 3in wide, and his team colored them by their brightness level (color key seen below).

Though he used a brown/red color scheme, the thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind. He really was looking for the colors that best represented a grey scale, since that was what they were going to get anway. It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual colors of Mars. It's as if they came right out of current images of the planet. I’ve seen some of the other color schemes he tried and it could have been green or purple!"

All of this is shamelessly lifted from directedplay.com/first_ tv_image_of_mars.html, so thanks for that.

I recently became aware of this through a bbc documentary, I defy you to find a better coming together (unfortunately I used the word synthesis in my last post...it was wasted) of art and science.

Space Rock(s)

Folie

It reminds of this a bit, as a synthesis of both elements.

Galileo beam stress theory

This guy might have had it going on regarding the planets, but as far as strength of material was concerned, he was way off!
It looks like he was too busy thinking about sculpture.

Clinamen

Lucretius wrote :

The atoms, as their own weight bears them down
Plumb through the void, at scarce determined times,
In scarce determined places, from their course
Decline a little - call it, so to speak,
Mere changed trend. For were it not their wont
Thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one,
Like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void;
And then collisions ne'er could be nor blows
Among the primal elements; and thus
Nature would never have created aught.

This text regards the concept of the "Clinamen", which represents a certain idea of indetermination or determination (depending on how you view it) in the existence of things.
Plenty of people have their take on it, and it generally appears to be rather a pseudoscientific and philosophical source of speculation on the origin of life than a hard edge scientific concept.
The fact that it represents a notion of movement in the course of gravity seems particularly interesting. We do fall constantly, but in our fall we will bump into something which will prevent there being absolutely nothing.

New Guns for Human Bullets

Flicking through these old issues of Popular Science (available on google books) you can really get a sense of how immediate and vital the beginning of the space race was following the end of WW2. Unsurprisingly, every single cover during the war is dedicated to morale-boosting coverage of advances in military technology, quickly ceeding to the potential new world of space travel at the end of the conflict, yet with some of the same language trailing through.

Flat Earth

"We maintain that what is called 'Science' today and 'scientists' consist of the same old gang of witch doctors, sorcerers, tellers of tales, the 'Priest-Entertainers' for the common people. 'Science' consists of a weird, way-out occult concoction of gibberish theory-theology...unrelated to the real world of facts, technology and inventions."

Flat Earth Society newsletter

Space Balloon

Really interesting documentation of an amateur, 'near space' balloon experiment here

http://www.natrium42.com/halo/flight2/

And making an appearance in art here