Category: History of Science and Engineering

I am standing on the shoulders of giants.

Aharonov-Bohm Effect

It is often called the simplest example of topology impacting physics (Topology like “the shape of space”, like coffee mugs being donuts!). Charged particles move under the the influence of electric and magnetic fields. The concept of fields was once introduced to replace action at a distance: If one charge tugs on another, it does…
Postal Scales Now and Then

I’ve tried to stage it properly. But it just looks sad. Functional – and not inspiring: The white plastic casing already starts to yellow at the top, from years of bombardment with UV photons. Its function in our office had been replaced … by not sending invoices or contracts on paper anymore. Edit: The original…
Poetry: Representations

Finally, a revelation! I was asking myself: Why do I often find ancient, terse, illustration-free textbooks easier to follow than their modern, friendly, playful, illustrated, multi-media-enhanced counterparts? Case in point (and I know that not everybody will agree): Paul Dirac’s legendary Principles of Quantum Mechanics or the definitive course on theoretical physics, the volumes by…
Magneto Compass – Inverted Art

It has been quite a while since I have drawn my antique rotary phone as “negative art”. This phone features white letters on black background. At that time I had no idea that white gel pens exist, for drawing such letters. So, I “invented” inverted art – as usual, only to discover that many artists…
On Descriptive Geometry

I keep forgetting I am writing for an international audience here! Having referred to Descriptive Geometry (DG) often, I doubt that everybody associates similar mental images with it. Anybody remembering the trace of a plane, for example? Learning about the history and culture of Descriptive Geometry, I realize it is rooted in a European tradition…
Coping with the AI Apocalypse

Painstakingly, I was putting the finishing touches on my analog geometric art – when this video popped into several of my social media feeds: We Need To Talk About AI… by Cool Worlds Podcast Cool Worlds Podcast is run by a team at Columbia University and usually features guests interviewed by physicist David Kipping. This…
Rounded Brass Things

All the rounded things in our lives disappear. The red alarm alarm clock in your nightstand, waking you up with their jarring twin bells. The desk phone with its circular rotary dial and its harmonious ring tone. The elegant wall clock whose soothing ticking has been hypnotic. Merchant’s scales that seem to look at you,…
Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship #0 – The Plan

There was a time before computer-based three-dimensional visualization. There was a time before any software at all. When James Clark Maxwell sculpted thermodynamic functions with clay. When Louis Poinsot described the motion of the gyroscope in terms of three cones embracing each other, boiling down the essence of a free spinning top’s motion. Today, we…
Circles to Circles #5. Following the Rules.

Engineering is the art of creating solutions under constraints. The more rigid the constraints, the more creative you need to get. Art benefits from constraints, too. A long time ago, I discovered the joy of following – my own – silly rules when creating Found Poetry: Creating the labyrinth from which you want to escape.…
Circles to Circles #1. On Descriptive Geometry.

I am not a hoarder. I parted with school memorabilia long ago. When I started reading books on e-readers, the remaining books felt like an odd time capsule. They were not representing my reading self anymore. So, I got rid of most books, too. There was one exception: I still have my high school Descriptive…
Poinsot’s Gyroscope and the Magic of Precession.

Nobel prize winners have been fascinated by it: You can learn about the underlying mathematics. You can solve differential equations. But do you really feel why it does not fall? When gravity tries to topple a spinning top, the top escapes sideways, sort of, by precessing: The axis of rotation is changing slowly. There is…
“The Over-All Space-Time View”

… is an expression Richard Feynman had used in his 1949 paper Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics. It seems to be one of the earliest publications featuring his famous diagrams. Feynman diagrams are related to interactions of particles, and they look like cartoon illustrations of particles bumping into each other. But they are actually mnemonics…
$Celebration of Diffraction$

Celebration of Diffraction

It has been a while since elkement’s diffraction art has been presented to the world the first time ever. It was you, netizens(*) of the blogosphere(*), who saw it first – three years ago!(*) This is is internet dinosaur jargon This is the original Ribbon of Diffraction: Each image shows the same virtual sculpture from…
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Nostalgia Overload.

The cosmos is all there is, ever was, and ever will be. So he says, standing at the metaphorical shores of the cosmos in episode 1 – The Shores of the Cosmos. All episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos are available on the Internet Archive. I hope I can trust them to have sorted out the…
Remembering Prof. Wilhelm Macke

A recent migration of (some of my) domains made a link on Wikipedia go into the void of a 404. It was a brief, German article on another – now extinct – German website of mine, linked by the article on Wilhelm Macke. In order to keep it alive though, I am copying the article…
Light Bulb Trapped in a Science Museum

It is lonely. It is not glowing anymore from the inside. But it is radiating though. Reflecting the colors of the science museum at night. Maybe it is still happy? Can poetry help to understand my bulb better? I am googling for the title of the poem in a private browser window, and take a…
Echo of Stellar Corona. Reflect It Wholly.

Last year I created a series called Atoll of Diffraction – mathematically exact diffraction curves mounted on a circle (created with threejs/javascript). I forced myself to pick four images – four different “configuration parameters” of diffraction gratings. But for every image I picked, there was a second one that nearly made it into my finally…
Lissajous Trilogy 123

It is a humble pencil drawing. Created slowly, using traditional paper, pencil, ruler, and compass. Following the principles of descriptive geometry. No need to install something. No need to debug why version x of a tool does not play nicely with operating system y. All the code, all the documentation, all the steps of your…