Figure 1 – B. F. Skinner c 1950 from the Wikipedia, original work by Silly rabbit and in the public domain under GNU Free Documentation License,

In 1971 Harvard Psychology Professor B. F. Skinner(1904-1990) published his landmark and very annoying book “Beyond Freedom and  Dignity.”  For many, this book was annoying because it challenged the concept of free will – and we kinda like to think that our actions are our own choices – not preprogrammed choices.  I mean it is rather annoying to think that someone could ultimately create a mathematical model of behaviour that could predict human action.  Beyond the visceral reaction, I  found it annoying for another reason.  I could accept that fact that there were inputs and that laws governed how a psychological system dealt with this inputs and led us to an inevitable output.  But, we had already learned from physics that while, for instance, Newton’s laws could predict how the molecule of a balloon filled with helium interacted, provided you knew the starting condition, that the system was ultimately so complicated that we needed statistical mechanics to explain it, and statistical mechanics ultimately provided only randomness and probabilities.  Behavioural systems had to be perhaps even more complicated.  Even if in principle they were totally deterministic; in practice they were statistical – that effectively there would be free will.

Well all this aside, there is something truly insulting about the view that mathematics can predict our behaviour.  Well, a team of scientists at Princeton have done just that.  They have modeled the rise and fall of Facebook with mathematical models designed to study viral disease epidemics.  The prediction made by these models is that Facebook will lose 80% of its subscribers by 2015-2018.  This must be doubly insulting to the folks at Facebook.  Not only do they face imminent demise, but they are being likened to a disease.  And if you look at the meteoric rise and fall of MySpace and compare the latest data for Facebook, things really aren’t looking that rosy.

The company  admitted in October that its teen base is declining. And a study by IStrategy Labs indicates that Facebook had 25 percent fewer teenage users in 2013 compared to 2011. When this reached the news last fall, I heard a teen being questioned about it and she blamed the infestation of Facebook with adults.  She pointed out that when she posts a picture of herself, she wants her friends to say how pretty she looks, not her parents’ friends to say how much she looks like her mother.  Hmm!  The teens are moving on, not away from social networks, but to other forms and forums of social connection. As the Princeton study points out:

“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological model … Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest with the idea and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of “immunity” to the idea.”

We have spoken before about technologies that represent true quantum leaps and what I have referred to as transitional technologies – ones that are short-lived and bridge a gap. Social media is, I think, something different.  It has been made possible by major technological advances: e.g. computers and the internet.  But it is itself more an amorphous concept or meme than a physical thing.  Still I believe that social media is here to stay and is truly transforming the world.  But the specific vehicle, or is it merely a product, is very short-lived.

Fifers, July 4, 2013 – a voluntary time warp (c) DE Wolf 2013

We have spoken about how photographs enable us to transcend time and to get a look at the past – to become intimate with the past. In a science fiction sense, the photograph creates a “time warp.”  But this too may be totally contrived.  People may choose to create a time warp, and this can be done in a variety of ways.

I was thinking about this idea today as I was looking at the portfolios by Jennifer Greenburg: “The Rockabillies” and “Revising History.”  In “The Rockabillies” Ms. Greenburg photographs the lives of the Rockabilly culture.  These individuals try to live as closely as possible in the style of the 1950’s and 1960’s when Rockabilly music was king.  In  “Revising History” Ms. Greenburg cleverly takes snapshots from the period and superimposes her own head in the images.

The Rockabilly culture is reminiscent of  M. Night Shyamalan ‘s 2004 film “The Village.”  In the movie a group of people become so disgusted with the violent era we live in that they set up a compound where they can live a cultish and simpler life, perhaps at the end of the nineteenth century.  They have psychologically transported themselves in time.  In both cases the subjects have chosen to place themselves in a kind of time warp.

Arguably there are a number of religious groups, the Amish and Hasidim come to mind, who attempt to do the same thing.  The modern times around them become a necessary annoyance. And don’t we find it quaint and exotic to photograph these cultures.  Indeed the whole genre of “vanishing peoples” photography fall into this category.

But there are other, perhaps less extreme, examples of photographic subjects time warping themselves.  There are the reenactorsand there are a multitude of examples: revolutionary war reenactors, civil war reenactors, the Society for Creative Antiquities, the Renaissance Fair people.  And in all cases we love to photograph them.  These people have made time warping an act of love and they play the important role of connecting us with our past – of teaching us about our past.

In this category also falls the photo salons at tourist sites where you can have your picture taken in appropriate period gown.  And significantly also are the modern day photographers who keep alive the difficult photographic processes, such daguerreotype and wet colloidan in many cases choosing subjects fit for the period when these processes were dominant.

We recognize in all of this the desire to play act.  If we go back to Julia Margaret Cameron, for instance, we see a form of photography where the photographer set up elaborate sets and costumed characters to portray an earlier time, real or imagined.   Fortunately, there are still some few photographer who are willing to put in the time and effort to  still practice this art.

When the reenactment is from literature or mythology, we might be inclined to argue that it is somehow defective and unreal.  However, if I may be allowed to return to the context of parallel universes, what the artist/photographer is doing is creating a new parallel universe.  And therein lays the glory!

Figure 1 – With my grandparents, Mary and Louis Wolf, Bronx, NY, 1956, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

We’ve been having fun with our discussions of time travel. Or at least I have. 8<) I like the concept that a photograph fixes an instant in time and then that the observer can look at a set of photographs laid out on the table and flit between instances in a person’s life.  The observer, at least, becomes Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time.

But then we explored the meaning of instantaneous in photography and recognized that there is an uncertainty of time and space coordinates associated with it.  If you explore this further and go to the Oxford English Dictionary for a definition of the meaning of the word “instant,” what you find is two definitions for the noun: first a precise moment of time: come here this instant at that instant the sun came out; second very short space of time; a moment: for an instant the moon disappeared Photography achieves the second meaning.  There is always a broadness to the moment.

I wanted to share with you the little snapshot of Figure 1.  It shows me at five years old with my grandparents: Mary and Louis Wolf.  It’s not really all that clear, perhaps illustrating my points about fuzziness.  I am pretty sure that it was taken with my first “Brownie” Kodak camera, which was actually the mocha color of chocolate milk and the lens was both simple and not very good.  The pictures of my early youth were taken either with this camera or my father’s twin reflex Ciroflex.  For birthday parties he would haul out this array of spotlights that literally blinded you – you say after images for hours.

One point that I want to make about this picture is that I am always dismayed by the fact that my parents and grandparents have no web presence. Arguably they should all be allowed to rest in peace.  But we have come to associate web presence with significance.  And, a fool trapped in the spirit of my own Zeitgeist, I cannot abide thinking of them as not having significance.

But there is a point or meaning to this little snap.  I remember very vividly when we took it.  We had been visiting my grandparents, probably on a Sunday.  This was honestly a bit of a chore for a five year old.  As a squirmy five year old I had to sit there rather bored as everyone spoke in a language that I didn’t understand.  Still they were my grandparents and there is a special relationship between children and doting grandparents.  It was time to leave and Mary and Louis had walked downstairs with us.  Everyone was happy and we decided to arrange ourselves in this little pose to record the happiness and familiness.   And that’s the very point.  It was not a candid moment.  It was a contrived arrangement of people, all with grins on their faces.

That is what portrait snapshots tend to be – contrived moments.  I don’t mean this in a derogatory or sarcastic way.  It is just that the subject conspires with the photographer to create an image of the subject in a way that the subject wishes to be seen.  It is in that sense a contrivance.

The word “snapshot” always conjures up in my mind Joel Meyerowitz masterpiece, “An Afternoon at the Beach, 1983.”  It seems to be a simple snapshot until you realize that the same set of people appear multiple times at multiple places in the picture.  In a sense it is an exaggerated snapshot – that brings into ambiguity the concept of an instant in time.  When we spoke about time travel, we spoke about the concept of parallel universes.  Perhaps what Meyerowitz captures is the instantaneous convergence of a set of these parallel universes.

Figure 1 -Nuclear explosion photographed by rapatronic camera less than 1 millisecond after detonation. The fireball is about 20 meters in diameter. The spikes at the bottom of the fireball are due to what is known as the rope trick effect. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain because the image was taken by the government of the United States.

In my blog “The eternal photograph” I spoke about photography transcending time by isolating an image in time.  This isolation creates a kind of time warp.  A comment by a physicist friend got me thinking about what it means to be isolating and that is what I would like to speak about today.

To a physicist a photograph is two things: a measurement and an interaction between the observer (aka photographer or camera) and the observed (aka the subject).  Indeed,  if you think about it the photographer uses a camera to make a measurement of the subject.

I know that most people don’t think about a photograph as a measurement, unless the purpose of taking the picture is explicitly to make a measurement.  However, let’s think about the process of taking the picture just a bit.  When I take a photograph one of the first things that I do is check how sharp it is, how well it has resolved the spatial elements of the picture.  I am a real stickler for this and I often reject a picture in the camera before I even take it home.  Why isn’t a picture sharp.  Well, first there is the resolution (sharpness of the lens), then there is the pixel separation distance of the detector (or grain resolution of the film).  These constitute an absolute baseline sharpness.  That is to say there is a fundamental limit to how well we may place a given object in space (how well we know where it is).  But then we have to worry about how much the photographer’s hand is moving (or the tripod is moving in the wind) and, for that matter, if the subject is exactly still.  So to the degree that the photographer is trying to obtain a sharp image (s)he is trying to precisely say where the elements of the picture are.  That’s essentially what we mean by measuring position.

You already see how motion reduces the accuracy of measuring positional information.  Let’s explore this a bit further.  Suppose that we take a picture of a runner moving past us.  The picture tells us, to some precision, where the subject was within the exposure time.  The image blurs out because of the motion.  Indeed, if you measure the length of the blur and divide by the exposure time you get the velocity of the runner.  Cool!

Before I go any further, you need to realize that the precision of our “measurement” of velocity depends on how well (precisely) we define the length (sounds like sharpness to me) and how well we know the shutter speed.  The longer the exposure the longer the distance and the less it is limited by spatial resolution or sharpness.  So to measure velocity accurately you want to increase the exposure time.

But increasing the exposure time blurs the image and makes it harder to figure out where the runner is.  To increase you positional precision you want a decrease the exposure time. So the two are inversely related. Sharpness or position requires short exposure. Precise determination of velocity or speed requires long exposure.  This inverse relationship between two variables is common in physics, and physicists refer to such variables as “being canonically conjugate in the Hamiltonian sense.*”  I always loved that phrase. It was fun to drop it into the conversation at parties and see what happens. It is a great “pick-up line.”

This is related to but is not really an example of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.  The uncertainty principle is the recognition that there is an absolute limit to the precision (actually the product of the two precisions) that can be obtained.  This applies to quantum systems.  It really is an expression of the fact that you cannot measure something without perturbing it.  For instance, in our discussion of positional precision I ignored the question of whether there was enough light.  As you make the exposure shorter and shorter, you will eventually lose resolution and precision because you become light limited.  Of course, you can crank up the light.  Eventually it will perturb the subject by either blinding it, if it is a person, or burning it to a crisp, animate or not.  On a small scale things are worse. Light pushes on the subject causing it to move.  The more light you use the more likely you are to move it.

So all of this serves to illustrate the simple fact that there are limits to how precisely a photograph can locate or fix a subject in space.  Similarly, because you have to use a finite shutter speed in taking a picture, there are limits to how precisely a photograph fixes the subject in time.  15 year old Mark Twain becomes a little less defined.

* For you physics aficionados I want to point out that position and velocity coordinates are not the true Hamiltonian conjugate variables.  rather it is position and momentum, which is the product of mass and velocity.  This sounds like a semantic issue, but it actually has profound physical consequences.  Only geometric points or mass-less particles like the photons of light can travel at the speed of light.