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.

Figure 1 – Daguerreotype of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) by G. H. Jones 1850. Retouched by SmallJim. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Mark Twain has appeared a lot in this blog.  I think that it may have something to do both with the fact that his life spanned a critical time in the history of photography and because he didn’t suffer fools and hypocrites lightly.  In researching yesterday’s blog on CCAPs I came upon a really wonderful picture of Mr. Clemens when he was 15 years old in Hannibal, Missouri in 1850.  In this portrait, shown as Figure 1, Clemens is shown holding a printer’s composing stick with the letters SAM. It is a 1/6th plate Daguerreotype.

He was at the time an apprentice printer – following, I guess in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin. As we have discussed, there is something very special about Daguerreotypes and the captured faces of the nineteenth century that they preserve for us.  This picture is particularly  wonderful in that it captures a youthful image of an important historic and literary figure, and rare among Daguerreotypes it shows the trade of the person being photographed – here with the added whimsey of the name SAM.

I think also that in a strange way we tend to think of a person as really being two people: the youthful figure of childhood and the fully formed figure of maturity.  So when we see a picture of someone as a child it is almost as if it were a different person and we look for resemblances as we would between a father and a son.

It is certainly the case that you cannot look at this figure without thinking of all the, unknown to the subject, adventures that lay ahead of him.  And it is very difficult, indeed strange, to attempt to reconcile the youth in this with thick wavy dark hair and the wispy white haired sage of future times.

We have spoken of time travel.  In photography, at least, it is indeed possible to become unstuck in time and to travel at random through a person’s life.  In photography the paradox is that while you may flip randomly from moment to moment, each moment is rigidly defined as if stapled or glued to the fabric of space-time.  In Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” poor Guildenstern ponders the possible reasons why one might toss 90 heads in a row:

“Two: time has stopped dead, and the single experience of one coin being spun once has been repeated ninety times…”

Guildenstern finds this possibility doubtful and dubious.  It does however explain the play.

And it may contribute to our understanding of the paradoxical magic of photography.  These images are so real and so lifelike.  But they are moments frozen forever by the camera.  Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have no existence outside the play of Hamlet; so too these once vibrant, free-willed people have no other existence than the tangible photograph and the perception of it in our minds eye.

The photograph remains, however, a triumph over death.  It is eternal.  In his masterpiece Sonnet XVIII William Shakespeare speaks of his beloved.  Allow me to stretch the meaning of his words.  He might as well been writing about and old photograph:

“But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Figure 1 – The “Hand of God Nebula” image taken by NASA’s  Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array.  From NASA and in the public domain.

When I was in Junior High School, we were encouraged to read a little book called “How to Build a Better Vocabulary.”  This was actually quite an amusing book that in part taught through cartoons. Each chapter began with a cartoon.  I had two favorites.  The first was an ancient Roman ice skater in toga trying to complete a perfect figure VIII.  The second was a little boy talking excitedly to his mother.  “Mommy, mommy, I learned a new word today.  Can you surmise what it is?  I’ll give you three surmises.”  Well the word for today is “pareidolia.”

According to the Wikipedia: “Pareidolia (/pærɨˈdoʊliə/ parr-i-DOH-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant, a form of apophenia. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.”

Oh, hell! Now I have to look up apophenia.  Again Wiki to the rescue: “Apophenia /æpɵˈfiːniə/ is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term is attributed to Klaus Conrad by Peter Brugger, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”, but it has come to represent the human tendency to seek patterns in random information in general, such as with gambling and paranormal phenomena.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.  Well maybe.  OK; so stick with me.  Man in the moon, Moon rabbit, objects and faces in clouds, those we can understand.  Then there’s the famous “Virgin Mary on a toasted cheese sandwich.”  In 2004, when it was already ten years old, it sold on Ebay for $28,000.  My personal favorite is “The face of Mother Teressa on a cinnamon bun.”  I can see the face, but it looks more like a smurf to me.

These food pareidolia remind me of a story that one of my colleagues told me when I was in graduate school.  He was late for work one day because his young son had thrown a fit over breakfast.  The lad had decided that his pancake looked like a giraffe and when mom decapitated the supposed giraffe, all hell broke loose.  I asked if the flapjack did indeed resemble a giraffe and my friend said: “not really.”  Therein lies the difference between adults and children, I guess.  We don’t all construct the same associations. The pareidolia is, of course, the firm basis of the Rorschach or inkblot test.

NASA recently released the ultimate pareidolia from its high energy X-ray satellite, NuSTAR, (see Figure 1 blue). Lower-energy X-ray light previously detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is added and shown in green and red.  This object has been nicknamed the “Hand of God,” and it is technically a pulsar wind nebula, powered by the leftover, dense core of a star that blew up in a supernova explosion. The stellar corpse, called PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short, is a pulsar: it rapidly spins around, seven times per second, firing out a particle wind into the material around it — material that was ejected in the star’s explosion. These particles are interacting with magnetic fields around the material, causing it to glow with X-rays.

It does look like a hand or “The Hand of God.”  It is highly reminiscent of the nebulous hand that holds captive the Star Ship Enterprise in the first Star Trek series episode “Who mourns for Adonais.”

Such 3D pareidolia are interesting because the probably do not retain their cohesiveness in terms of what we see as you move around them.  Which in this case, of course, we cannot do.

I am personally quite sensitive to these associations.  I am forever seeing faces in the folds of drapes and clothing.  Also I have been informally been working for several years on a photoessay that I refer to as “The Quest for the Ents,” taking pictures of faces in trees.  The most successful, an image of a venerable sycamore, is shown in Figure 2 and was taken several years ago in Central  Park in New York City.

Perhaps the sweetest of pareidolia is contained in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when (IV.5) Ophelia says: “There’s pansies, that’s for thoughts.” The name pansy is derived from the French word pensée “thought”, and if you look closely and, perhaps squint just a bit, you will see a little pensive, perhaps lion-like, face in the pansy flower.

Figure 2 – “Old Tree-man” (c) DE Wolf 2012.