Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Fearful Symmetry Triptych

While grappling with the works of William Blake and his foremost literary interpreter, Northrop Frye in his book Fearful Symmetry, I came up with a triptych, where each of the three panels uses a different mode of expression and there is a vertical symmetry based on the pentagram that reflects the natures of the fallen and unfallen worlds.

The left panel (below) presents the basic information that is then presented schematically in the next or central panel, and then as images and art in the right panel:

Reflected in the central panel is the symmetry of Blake's unfallen and fallen worlds. The line inscribed on the Ouroboros is from Fearful Symmetry(p.135): "Selfhood: an earth-bound, cold-blooded and often venomous form of life imprisoned in its own cycle of death and rebirth."

The right hand panel is made up of two engravings by William Blake. The top engraving is referred to as The Dance of Albion, 1780. The lines between the engravings are from Blake's manuscript poem The Four Zoas, p.5 lines 10-12. The lower engraving is The Ancient of Days and portrays Urizen Creating the World, 1824-7?

Fearful Symmetry by Northrop Frye is available to borrow in PDF format at the Internet Archive:

Fearful Symmetry by Northrop Frye

Friday, May 31, 2019

An X-ray View of Space

If you had X-ray Vision what would space look like? Now NASA has revealed what you would see. Outer Space looking a whole lot busier than usual in an image Jackson Pollock might have admired:

Visit the NASA web page that explores this image:

NICER’s Night Moves Trace the X-ray Sky


The same image with some prominent x-ray sources labelled

NICER is NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR. Learn all about it at the...

NASA NICER Information Page

NASA also has some great education videos about all the different wavelengths of light that make up the electromagnetic spectrum, including x-rays:

The spectrum below displays the uses to which we put various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum:

For more on the above illustration, take the NASA Science:

Tour of the Electromagnetic Spectrum

Science at NASA video about x-rays

The TED Educational Service has an excellent video on the history and nature of x-rays:

How X-rays see through your skin - Ge Wang

X-ray Astronomy is a new way of looking at outer space and reveals much more than the light we see can reveal. The Chandra X-ray Observatory is NASA's flagship mission for X-ray astronomy and has a fascinating and informative website:

Chandra X-ray Observatory

Cambridge University provides an excellent multipage...

Introduction to X-Ray Astronomy

Sunday, January 27, 2019

Light Invisible

It is very humbling to contemplate the electromagnetic spectrum and the tiny sliver that encompasses the full range of colors we can perceive:

For his Chemistry Lab, Ken Costello considered this to mean that in terms of the full spectrum we are indeed...

"The entire light spectrum (also known as the electromagnetic spectrum) spans light waves that are miles long to waves that are extremely short. The light we see (visible light) only spans about 1.5% of the entire light spectrum. So we would be legally blind considering what we could see." Experiment 7: Light as a Tool

To clarify the extent of this blindness, Ken Costello compared full spectrum perception to the color picture of a mountain scene (left) and then removed all but 1.5 percent of the color (right) to emphasize the 1.5 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can actually perceive:

Clearly we are missing a lot and it is only by using powerful scientific instruments that we can find out what we are indeed missing. The spectrum below displays the uses to which we put various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum

For more on the above illustration, take the NASA Science:

Tour of the Electromagnetic Spectrum

Introduction:

Radio Waves:

Microwaves:

Infrared Waves:

Visible Light Waves:

Ultraviolet Waves:

X-Rays

Gamma Rays

But even though we humans are restricted to our narrow range of visible light, some animals are not!

Spectacular bird's-eye view? Compared to hummingbirds, humans are color blind!

Wild hummingbirds see a broad range of colors humans can only imagine

ScienceAlert Article:

Birds Can See a 'Colour' Humans Can't. Now Scientists Have Revealed This Hidden World.

The full text of the research paper by Cynthia Tedore and Dan-Eric Nilsson of the Zoological Institute, University of Hamburg:

Avian UV vision enhances leaf surface contrasts in forest environments

Spectral sensitivities of avian cones and multispectral camera channels. Solid lines show spectral sensitivities of avian cones and dashed lines show multispectral camera channels. Most terrestrially foraging birds are tetrachromats, having L, M, and either S(U) and U or S(V) and V cones⁶. L, M, S, V, and U stand for Long, Medium, Short, Violet, and Ultraviolet wavelengths, respectively

Monday, January 21, 2019

Observatable Universe in a Single Image

ScienceAlert Article:

The Entire Known Universe, in a Single Image.

Here's What It Looks Like

Created by musician and artist Pablo Carlos Budassi, there is lots more information available in his Blog:

Observable Universe Logarithmic Illustration Blog

The entire observable Universe can be featured because the distance scale diminishes exponentially the further you go out from the Earth according to the following scale:

This scale is featured on the version of the illustration that features helpful labels:

Further information on the logarithmic projection for maps is provided by Philippe Rivière including an interactive sample projection centered on Iceland which can be observed as variables are altered:

The Log-Azimuthal projection

As we look further and further away we also look further and further back in time since light although fast, does take time to travel long distances. NASA scientist James O'Donoghue created some animations to help visualize the speed of light:

First, light is able to travel 7.5 laps around the Earth every second: