Two years ago, a series of animated science videos began to pop up on a Vimeo account called HarvardX Neuroscience. As its name suggests, it’s coming out of Harvard University, and, with the help of animators, they originally created a series of scientific shorts pitched between the layman and the serious scientist. In the last month, however, they’ve stepped further into the arts realm with a mini-series of animations (five and counting as of this writing) that look to poetry to explain what science renders dry and academic.
The new video series features “representations of perception and sensation” as realized through the poems of Walt Whitman, America’s great transcendentalist poet, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams (whose own reading is used as the audio for a video). Opening all the senses to the wonders of the world is “the origin of all poems” according to Whitman, and this curation focuses on smell, taste, sight, touch, and sound to prove his point.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
It is one of the most famous experiments in all of science history, but there’s significant doubt about whether it actually took place. Did Galileo drop objects of differing mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in 1589 to demonstrate the theories proposed in his unpublished text De motu (“Of Motion”)? Rice University’s Galileo Project notes that scholars have long thought Galileo’s references to experiments he conducted “were only rhetorical devices.” As PBS’s NOVA writes, “it’s the kind of story that’s easy to imagine, easy to remember, but whether he ever performed the experiment at the tower is debatable.” That’s not to say Galileo didn’t test any of his ideas while he taught at the University of Pisa during 1589 and 1592, only that his most famous theory about the effects of gravity on free-falling objects rests mainly on a conceptual thought experiment.
In fact, it would have been impossible for Galileo to fully demonstrate his theory because of the effects of air resistance. Subtract the atmosphere, however, and we can easily confirm Galileo’s hypothesis that any two objects, regardless of weight, shape, or material of composition, will fall at exactly the same rate when dropped. One of the most memorable times this experiment did take place was not in Italy or anywhere else on earth, but on the Moon, when astronaut David Scott, commander of the Apollo 15 mission, dropped a geologic hammer and a falcon’s feather at the same time in 1971 (above).
As cool as Commander Scott’s experiment is, it’s still not as dramatic as the version of the experiment at the top of the post, conducted at NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio in the world’s largest vacuum chamber. A great deal of the drama comes courtesy of physicist Brian Cox, who presents the experiment for BBC Two’s Human Universe, explaining the history and construction of the vacuum chamber, which simulates the conditions of outer space. Then we’ve got the multiple camera angles and dramatic music… typical TV show stuff, effective nonetheless at setting us up for the big drop. Even though we “know how the experiment will end,” points out io9, and may have seen it performed before—on the Moon even—this demonstration is something special.
First, we get an anticlimactic drop of the objects—a bowling ball and a feather—while the chamber is still full of air. As expected, the ball plummets, the feathers gently drift. Then, in a sequence right out of a sci-fi film, engineers seal off the enormous chamber, and the three-hour removal of air is telescoped into a few second montage of pushings of buttons and mumblings into intercoms. What happens next will… well, you know the clickbait verbiage. But it certainly surprises Cox and a roomful of NASA engineers. Cox goes on to explain, using Einstein’s theory of general relativity, that the reason the objects fall at the same rate is “because they’re not falling; they’re standing still.” The science may be common knowledge, but seeing it in action is indeed pretty mind blowing.
At the lower range of hearing, it’s said humans can hear sound down to about 20 Hz, beneath which we encounter a murky sonic realm called “infrasound,” the world of elephant and mole hearing. But while we may not hear those lowest frequencies, we feel them in our bodies, as we do many sounds in the lower frequency ranges—those that tend to disappear when pumped through tinny earbuds or shopping mall speakers. Since bass sounds don’t reach our ears with the same excited energy as the high frequency sounds of, say, trumpets or wailing guitars, we’ve tended to dismiss the instruments—and players—who hold down the low end (know any famous tuba players?).
In most popular music, bass players don’t get nearly enough credit—even when the bass provides a song’s essential hook. As Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones joked at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1995, “thank you to my friends for remembering my phone number.” And yet, writes Tom Barnes at Mic, “there’s scientific proof that bassists are actually one of the most vital members of any band…. It’s time we started treating bassists with the respect they deserve.” Research into the critical importance of low frequency sound explains why bass instruments mostly play rhythm parts and leave the fancy melodic noodling to instruments in the upper range. The phenomenon is not specific to rock, funk, jazz, dance, or hip hop. “Music in diverse cultures is composed this way,” says psychologist Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster University Institute for Music and the Mind, “from classical East Indian music to Gamelan music of Java and Bali, suggesting an innate origin.”
Trainor and her colleagues have recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggesting that perceptions of time are much more acute at lower registers, while our ability to distinguish changes in pitch gets much better in the upper ranges, which is why, writes Nature, “saxophonists and lead guitarists often have solos at a squealing register,” and why bassists tend to play fewer notes. (These findings seem consistent with the physics of sound waves.) To reach their conclusions, Trainer and her team “played people high and low pitched notes at the same time.” Participants were hooked up to an electroencephalogram that measured brain activity in response to the sounds. The psychologists “found that the brain was better at detecting when the lower tone occurred 50 MS too soon compared to when the higher tone occurred 50 MS too soon.”
The study’s title perfectly summarizes the team’s findings: “Superior time perception for lower musical pitch explains why bass-ranged instruments lay down musical rhythms.” In other words, “there is a psychological basis,” says Trainor, “for why we create music the way we do. Virtually all people will respond more to the beat when it is carried by lower-pitched instruments.” University of Vienna cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch has pronounced Trainor and her co-authors’ study a “plausible hypothesis for why bass parts play such a crucial role in rhythm perception.” He also adds, writes Nature:
For louder, deeper bass notes than those used in these tests, people might also feel the resonance in their bodies, not just hear it in their ears, helping us to keep rhythm. For example, when deaf people dance they might turn up the bass and play it very loud, he says, so that “they can literally ‘feel the beat’ via torso-based resonance.”
Painfully awkward revelers at weddings, on cruise ships, at high school reunions—they just can’t help it. Maybe even this dancing owl can’t help it. Some of us keep time better than others, but most of us feel and respond physically to low-frequency rhythms.
Bass instruments don’t only keep time; they also play a key role in a song’s harmonic and melodic structure. In 1880, an academic music textbook informed its readers that “the bass part… is, in fact, the foundation upon which the melody rests and without which there could be no melody.” As true as this was at the time—-when acoustic precursors to electric bass, synthesizers, and sub-bass amplification provided the low end—it’s just as true now. And bass parts often define the root note of a chord, regardless of what other instruments are doing. As a bass player, notes Sting, “you control the harmony,” as well as anchoring the melody. It seems the importance of rhythm players, though overlooked in much popular appreciation of music, cannot be overstated.
Darwin had no real use for the original manuscript once galley proofs came back from the publisher. So one can imagine father Charles giving his kids the only worthwhile paper in the house to draw on. It seems flippant now, but at the time, it was perfectly normal.
Researchers surmise that the majority of the art comes from three of the 10 children, Francis, George, and Horace, all of whom went into the sciences as adults. The illustrations are colorful and witty, drawn in pencil and sometimes colored in watercolor. Birds and butterflies are drawn and colored with attention to detail. Some creatures are imaginary, like the green fish with legs carrying an umbrella, and there are short stories about fairies and battles too.
Overall, the drawings show a Darwin who was a family man and not a reclusive scientist. We’re just glad that the kids let dad do his work in relative silence.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
I’ve spent the past week on a road trip across America, and, during it, experienced perhaps my most intense case of déjà vu ever. Rolling into Memphis for the first time in my life, I walked into the lobby of the hotel at which I’d reserved a room for the night and immediately felt, in every fiber of my being, that I’d walked into that lobby before. But I then realized exactly why: it followed the same floor plan, to the last detail — the same front desk, the same business center computers, the same café with the same chalkboard asking me to “Try Our Classic Oatmeal” — of the one I’d visited the previous day in Oklahoma City.
Should we chalk this up to generic American placemaking at its most efficient, or can we find a more interesting psychological phenomenon at work? Michio Kaku, though best known for his work with physics, has some ideas of his own about what we experience when we experience déjà vu. “There is a theory,” says Kaku in the Big Think video above,“that déjà vu simply elicits fragments of memories that we have stored in our brain, memories that can be elicited by moving into an environment that resembles something that we’ve already experienced.”
But wait! “Is it ever possible on any scale,” he then tantalizingly asks, “to perhaps flip between different universes?” And does déjà vu tell us anything about our position in those universes, giving us signs of the others even as we reside in just one? Kaku quotes an analogy first made by physicist Steven Weinberg which frames the notion of a “multiverse” in terms of our vibrating atoms and the frequency of a radio’s signal: “If you’re inside your living room listening to BBC radio, that radio is tuned to one frequency. But in your living room there are all frequencies: radio Cuba, radio Moscow, the Top 40 rock stations. All these radio frequencies are vibrating inside your living room, but your radio is only tuned to one frequency.” And sometimes, for whatever reason, we hear two signals on our radio at once.
Given that, then, maybe we feel déjà vu when the atoms of which we consist “no longer vibrate in unison with these other universes,” when “we have decoupled from them, we have decohered from them.” It may relieve you to know there won’t be an exam on all this. While Kaku ultimately grants that “déjà vu is probably simply a fragment of our brain eliciting memories and fragments of previous situations,” you may get a kick out of putting his multiverse idea in context with some more traditional explanations, such as the ones written about in venues no less dependable than Scientific American and Smithsonian. But in any case, I beg you, Marriott Courtyard hotels: change up your designs once in a while.
When you learned about The Periodic Table of Elements in high school, it probably didn’t look like this. Above, we have a different way of visualizing the elements. Created by Professor William F. Sheehan at Santa Clara University in 1970, this chart takes the elements (usually shown like this) and scales them relative to their abundance on the Earth’s surface. In the small print beneath the chart, Sheehan notes “The chart emphasizes that in real life a chemist will probably meet O, Si, Al [Oxygen, Silicon and Aluminum] and that he better do something about it.” Click here to see the chart — and the less abundant elements — in a larger format. Below we have a few more creative takes on the Periodic Table.
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Founded and directed by physicist Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State’s Origins Project has for several years brought together some of the biggest minds in the sciences and humanities for friendly debates and conversations about “the 21st Century’s greatest challenges.” Previous all-star panels have included Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Brian Greene, and Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawking has graced the ASU Origins Project stage, as has actor and science communicator Alan Alda. And this past March, in a sold-out, highly-anticipated Origins Project event, Krauss welcomed Noam Chomsky to the stage for a lengthy interview, which you can watch above.
Although Krauss says he’s wary of hero worship in his laudatory introduction, he nonetheless finds himself asking “What Would Noam Chomsky Do” when faced with a dilemma. He also points out that Chomsky has been “marginalized in U.S. media” for his anti-war, anarchist political views. Those views, of course, come widely into play during the conversation, which ranges from the theory and purpose of education—a subject Chomsky has expounded on a great deal in books and interviews—to the fate of political dissidents throughout history.
Chomsky also gives us his views on science and technology, particularly in the Q&A portion of the talk above, in which he answers questions about artificial intelligence—another subject he’s touched on in the past—and animal experimentation, among a great many other topics. Krauss mostly hangs back during the initial discussion but takes a more active role in the session above, offering views on medical and scientific ethics that will be familiar to those who follow his atheist activism and championing of rationality over religious dogma.
As Chomsky puts it, “the environment, the commons… they’re a common possession, but space is even more so. For individuals to allow institutions like corporations to have any control over it is devastating in its consequences. It will also almost certainly undermine serious research.” He refers to the example of most modern computing—developed under publicly-funded government programs, then marketed and sold back to us by corporations. Krauss makes a case for unmanned space exploration as the cost-effective option, and both thinkers discuss the problem of militarizing space, the ultimate goal of Cold War space programs before the fall of the Soviet Union. The conversation is rich and revealing and makes an excellent supplement to the already rich discussion Krauss and Chomsky have in the videos above.
The Apollo program, launched in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, flew its first manned mission in 1968, and the following summer, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin met the program’s mandate, making their historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing. In the ensuing few years, several more spacecraft and crews either orbited or landed on the Moon, and for a brief moment, popular magazines and newspapers regularly featured photographs of those expeditions on their covers and front pages. Looking every bit the authentic vintage Hasselblad photos they are, the images you see here were taken by Apollo astronauts on their various missions and sent home in rolls of hundreds of similar pictures.
These astronauts snapped photos inside and outside the spacecraft, in orbit and on the moon’s surface, and in 2004 NASA began digitizing the resulting cache of film. Luckily for the public, devoted space enthusiast and archivist, Kipp Teague—an IT director at Lynchburg College in Virginia—has posted a huge number of these photos (8,400 to be exact) on his Project Apollo Archive Flickr account.
Teague initially began acquiring the photos in collaboration with Eric Jones’ Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, “a record of the lunar surface operations conducted by the six pairs of astronauts who landed on the Moon from 1969 to 1972.” Understandably, so many people expressed interest in the photographs that Teague reformatted them in higher resolution and gave them their own home on the web. The Planetary Society informs us, “every photo taken on the lunar surface by astronauts with their chest-mounted Hasselblad cameras is included in the collection.”
While Teague and Jones’ other sites use photos that have been processed to increase their clarity, lighting, and color, the photos on Project Apollo Archive remain in their original state. “Browsing the entire set,” writes the Planetary Society, “takes on the feeling of looking through an old family photo album.” Indeed, especially if you grew up in the late-sixties/early-seventies at the height of the space program’s popularity.
A good many of the photos are rather procedural shots of craters and clouds, especially those from earlier missions. But quite a few frame the breathtaking vistas, technical details, and awestruck, if exhausted, faces you see here. So many photos were taken and uploaded in succession that clicking rapidly through a photostream can produce an almost flipbook effect. You can browse the archive by album, each one representing a reel from different Apollo missions—including that famous 11th (top, and below)—though Teague has yet to post high resolution images from Apollo 8 and 13.
It seemed after Apollo’s demise in the mid-seventies that photographs like these documented a lost age of NASA exploration, and that the once-great government agency would cede its innovative role to private companies like Elon Musk’s Space X, who have been much less forthcoming about releasing media to the public, making proprietary claims over their space photography in particular. But thanks in part to Space X and the cooperation of Canadian, European, Russian, and Japanese space programs, NASA’s International Space Station has raised the agency’s public profile considerably in the past several years. Though still painfully underfunded, NASA’s cool again.
Even more profile-raising is the Mars Rover program, whose recent finding of water has refueled speculations about life on the Red Planet. As films like the recent, astronaut-approvedThe Martian and a raft of others show, our collective imagination has long bent toward human exploration of Mars. Establishing a base on Mars, after all, is Space X’s stated mission. Looking at these stunning vintage photos of the Apollo Lunar missions makes me long to see what the first astronauts to walk on Mars send back. We probably won’t have to wait long once they’re up there. We’ll likely get Instagram uploads, maybe even some with fake vintage Hasselblad filters. It won’t be quite the same; few current events can compete with nostalgia. But I like to think we can look forward in the near future to a renaissance of manned—and woman-ed—space exploration.
See many hundreds more Apollo Lunar Mission photos at Project Apollo Archive and follow the archive on Facebook for updates.
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