Figure 1 – Pacific Typhoon Haiyan approaching the Phillipines on Nov. 6, 2013, Image Credit:
NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team, in the public domain.

As I am writing Typhoon Haiyan is barreling down on the central and southern Phillipines.  Robotic eyes from spacing are watching the whole story unfold, and despite the natural beauty of these space images, we are, unfortunately, certain to see much worse in the days to come as scenes of the human tragedy unfold.

Haiyan has achieved status as a Category 5 hurricane.  According to Brian McNoldy, a Senior Research Associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Miami, Fla.,”Haiyan has achieved tropical cyclone perfection. It is now estimated at 165kts (190mph), with an 8.0 on the Dvorak scale… the highest possible value.” Haiyan is approximately 500 mi in diameter.  Some believe it to be the most powerful typhoon ever recorded.  The image shown in Figure 1 was taken from the MODIS instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite on Nov. 7, 2013 at 04:25 UTC.

NASA has many robotic eyes trained on Haiyan.  These are the ever watchful sentinels of Earth. They study wind, temperature, and pressure.  The trouble with robotic eyes, at least for now, is their intrinsic lack of soul.  They do not feel or empathize. Still save many lives will be saved by virtue of the warnings that they provide and by the knowledge base that they build.  Looking at images like this, simultaneously so beautiful and so terrible, I cannot help but recall the words of  J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) and of all the world’s mythologies that his phrase evokes.

Figure 1 – A rare “selfie” of the author, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

I went out to lunch with my wife last Saturday, and we wound up checking out the Eileen Fisher Company Store.  This is a pretty husband friendly store.  They have a nice array of “husband chairs” and they do not clutter them up with piles of clothing.  You can also sit and watch an endless video loop on a  big screen TV about eco-friendly fabric dying and the sixteen ways to tie a scarf. So if you want to discuss either of these, I’m quite definitely your man!

But after a while the videos became old, and my wife had yet to emerge from the dressing room; so I took to reading the news on my cell phone.  There I came upon a blog by Helen A. S. Popkin for NBC News entitled “Don’t try this at home: all the selfies you’re hopefully never going to take.”  It is Popkin’s hypothesis, and I think a rather safe one, that all the hubbub about selfies in 2013 is only going to be eclipsed by the hubbub about them in 2014.  Basically this is the age of the selfie craze.

I strain to project my mind forward fifty years.  It is a humbling exercise, because we never know all the twists and turns that nature and mankind will take.  Still I am pretty sure that just as we today go to major museums, like the Metropolitan in NY, the MFA in Boston, or the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, to see retrospectives about, for instance, the Kodachrome Era or Snapshots of the Sixties, our progeny will head to these, or other, museums to see the great retrospective about The Golden Age of the Selfie.  You can pretty much count on it, and it will be fun for them to see and wonder what was going on in the minds of these self-possessed, just as we now look and wonder about those people in the Daguerreotypes.

Hmm!  It is easy enough to imagine this.  Where things get interesting is when you try to understand how monetary value will become attached to these selfies as collectors’ items.  People collect early photographs and great photographs.  Today they collect the memorabilia photographs of the mid-twentieth century.  The point is that these are on paper, glass, or metal.  They are by definition one-of-a-kind and rare.  How does this kind of collection translate going forward into this and future centuries?

Years ago you would met someone, say on a bus, and after a while you would pull out your wallet and show snapshots of your family, and yes even your pets.  Today you pull out your smart phone.  The smart phone has the same size, format, and perspective of the snapshots of old.  The are copyable and easily transferable.  Still the simple fact of their being merely stored as so many pixels and bytes makes them vulnerable in the long term.  You don’t even have to bother throwing them in the trash to send them to ignominious oblivion.

This simplicity of destruction will make them intrinsically rare.  So I am thinking that some entrepreneurial sort will find a way to make money selling them.  And that’s where it will all begin.

In her blog – you see they’re no longer columns or articles, but blogs – Pokin quotes  a user-submitted definition of “Selfie” on the crowd-sourced “Urban Dictionary:”

“The taking of a picture of yourself and posting it on Facebook because you have extremely low self-esteem and you need people to comment to tell you how hot or pretty you look.”

I predict that a some point those of these narcissistic examples of human vanity will become more than so.  They will make the transition to art – not just art, but collectable art.

Figure 1 – Photograph of an erupting solar prominence taken of September 24, 2013 by the SDO. From NASA and in the publi domain.

A few days ago I happened upon some of the beautiful images coming from NASA’s “Solar Dynamics Laboratory (SDO).” Two of these are shown in Figures 1 & 2.  These particular images were taken with the satellite’s deep ultraviolet camera.  I could go on for quite a while explaining why this region of the electromagnetic spectrum was chosen, how these cameras work, and why it’s important.  But I choose to focus instead on the simple point that these images are truly spectacular.

There is this fine line between science and art.  Here the images were chosen from a great many by a human being as one’s that appeal to a human aesthetic.  Similarly the colors chosen for the rendering again appeal to human sensibilities and in no small way to our sense of the mythic.  The red-orange images evoke association with the phrase “cauldron of the gods.”  Is the Sun’s fire the forge of Hephaestus?  As we know, the Sun is not made of fire but of insanely hot plasma, a state of matter where the atoms have been strip by the intense heat of their electrons.  But in our artistic mythic enthusiasm we forget the scientific facts and dwell a few moments in the romance of the image.

In such images, I believe we stand at the crossroads between science and art.  We see that ultimately there is a piece of both in all human intellectual effort.  Photography has always, at it does in the case of the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s images, occupied this liminal zone.  In what it reveals it is art.  In the chemistry and physics of how it works, and how it is practiced, it is science.

This dichotomy defines the sense of wonder that we have when looking at scientific images like these.  They took great science to produce.  But someone practiced in art selected then and selected how they would be displayed.  Please enjoy these pictures. Visit NASA’s SDO mission website to see more of them and their accompanying videos.  At the same time remember what Hamlet said:

Figure 2 – Deep UV image of a sunspot group showing the magnetic field lines and taken by the SOD from Januray 9-15, 2013. From NASA and in the public domain.