The Loaded Tangent

A miscellany from the crossroads of the arts, science, culture and technology

Tag: physics

December 16, 2011

Log House Rocket Man

In The Loaded Tangent’s last post, a musical line of digression connected philosopher Thomas “Leviathan” Hobbes to the Russian Futurists (both the early 20th Century literary/arts movement and the same-named band from Toronto), and it’s to Russia we return here, via American engineer K. Eric Drexler.

Drexler is a fascinating character – the world’s foremost expert on, and champion-in-chief of, molecular nanotechnology. While he appears to have borrowed his name from Ian Fleming’s unused stockpile of preposterous villains, his clipped intonation belongs to the school of Niles Crane, fictional brother of Frasier. He has the air of a weary genius, a man who has grown tired of defending his theories, and he sports a silvering beard.

As a summary of Drexler’s standing within his chosen field, this 2010 WSJ article holds up well. It reviews his laudable efforts to popularize and develop concepts first alluded to by Richard Feynman (pictured bottom left) in the landmark 1959 Caltech lecture, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, and highlights the too-often blurred differences between common-or-garden commercial nanotech (which focuses on the chemistry/materials science of smart paints, fabrics, medicines and the like) and pure Drexlerian atomic-scale nanotech (a revolutionary branch of engineering which could transform what it means to be human).

On 10 November 2011, Drexler gave the Inaugural Lecture at the Oxford Martin Programme: Exploring a Timeless Landscape: Physical Law and the Future of Nanotechnology. To support a key thread within his argument – that well-established physical principles have historically defined the boundaries of “possibility space” into which great innovators have boldly stepped – he highlights the amazing career of rocketry pioneer, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935, top left).

Like Drexler, Tsiolkovsky received a fair degree of flack for his early theoretical and conceptual work, but was ultimately vindicated. He was honored as a Soviet hero and buried in state. Remarkably, Tsiolkovsky deduced the fundamentals of rocketry and space travel without ever leaving smalltown Russia. As Drexler puts it:

“He worked out the principles of rocket propulsion in space, space suits, closed ecological life support systems, and a range of other technologies that are central to the enterprise of taking human life and moving it into space . . . [and] he did this while living in a log house in rural Russia, south of Moscow, teaching [mathematics in] high school.”

Drexler clearly feels a bond of kinship with Tsiolkovsky, who was known in the vicinity of Kaluga as something of an eccentric. The Russian believed humanity would one day colonize the Milky Way (bottom right), and was inspired by the science fiction of Jules Verne. In turn, he influenced a host of sci-fi writers, among them Stanislaw Lem (bottom middle), who name-checked Tsiolkovsky in Tales of Pirx the Pilot. The log house above (top middle) was photographed on Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky, who directed the brilliant 1972 movie version of Lem’s Solaris.

A generation down the line, at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, American rocketry pioneer Jack Parsons (top right) – who “no doubt contacted Tsiolkovsky” according to Parsons’ biography Sex and Rockets – contributed his own fair share of eccentricity to the science of space flight. He pursued a keen interest in the occult, was hand-picked by Aleister Crowley to lead a Californian branch of the magical organisation, Ordo Templi Orientis, and  knocked around with L. Ron Hubbard, pre-Scientology.

Parsons was killed, 17 June 1952, in an explosion at his home garage (possibly an accident, possibly at the hand of bent cop Earle Kynette, himself no stranger to explosive materials), not far from Caltech, where Feynman would give his groundbreaking lecture, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom . . .

Since this tangent is now wobbling around like a knuckleball, maybe it’s time to step back from the plate. This excellent video by Spanish band Dúo Cobra materializes for no apparent reason, along with 372 others, when “log house” is typed into Vimeo. It’s really rather good.

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December 12, 2011

Cross-Over Leviathans

Thanks for tracking down the debut post from The Loaded Tangent – part-blog, part-immersion in a roiling ferment of ideas fueled as much by culture and the arts as by science and technology. Connections will be forged, disciplines crossed, fields switched, minds expanded, and fresh discoveries made.

Here, the geek and the fop, the techie and the poet, the code-writer and the novelist, the rocket-scientist and the artist are on an equal footing. Men and women of letters will trade inspiration with number-crunchers, as each freely explores the others’ territory and, hopefully, somewhere down the line, thoughts new and brilliant will materialize like so many cosmic flashes. Then we can all celebrate with wine, song and fierce conversation, and the great timeless feedback loop of inspiration will keep on doing its thing.

First up, a motley crew of exceptional talents, united not only by a greater-than-average degree of genius, but also by an irresistible impulse to switch fields: to swerve off from their main area of specialism at an unexpected, hugely rewarding tangent. Post-Elizabethan philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) – pictured top left – made his big switch relatively late in life, inspired by Euclid’s Elements of Geometry to apply the methods of science to politics and society. As Philip Ball notes in his excellent book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another:

“It was not until 1629 that the forty-year-old Hobbes, a committed classicist, had his eyes opened to the power of scientific and mathematical reasoning.”

The result was Leviathan, published in 1651, for which Hobbes handsomely deserves his status as cross-disciplinary hero and pioneer.

Hedy Lamarr (top middle) supplemented her Hollywood day-job with a sideline in wireless electronics, as co-inventor (with like-minded polymath George Antheil) of a frequency-hopping technology for torpedoes; Babe Ruth (top right) started out as a pitcher before immortalizing himself as The Sultan of Swat (there’s a great piece on the science of the Babe here); actress Ida Lupino (bottom left) broke more than one mould when she made her move behind the camera, and became the first woman to direct a film noir, The Hitch-Hiker (1953); and biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey (bottom right) followed the field-switching example set by the likes of physicist-turned-molecular biologist Francis Crick (bottom middle) when he moved his focus from artificial intelligence to aging.

Every one of these game-changers nutmegged predictability, and sold expectation a glorious dummy, by daring to strike out in a new direction. (In the case of Babe Ruth, maybe “head off” works better than “strike out”). Their willingness to traverse boundaries, coupled with a talent for redirecting and re-sharpening their focus, makes them honorary cross-over leviathans. Expect more of their ilk from The Loaded Tangent, as the voyage into cross-disciplinary idea-space continues . . .

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