by Oliver Sacks
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NO EFFORT OR EXPENSE was spared in this enterprise. The vast atom smashers, the particle colliders of Berkeley, Dubna, and Darmstadt, were all enlisted in the quest, and scores of brilliant workers devoted their lives to it. Finally, in 1998, after more than thirty years, the work paid off. Scientists reached the outlying shores of the magic island: they were able to create an isotope of 114, albeit nine neutrons short of the magic number. (When I met Glenn Seaborg in December 1997, he said that one of his longest-lasting and most cherished dreams was to see one of these magic elements—but, sadly, when the creation of 114 was announced in 1999, Seaborg had been disabled by a stroke, and may never have known that his dream had been realized.)
Since elements in the vertical groups of the periodic table are analogous to one another, one can say with confidence that one of the new elements, 113, is a heavier analogue of element 81, thallium. Thallium, a heavy, soft, leadlike metal, is one of the most peculiar of elements, with chemical properties so wild and contradictory that early chemists did not know where to place it in the periodic table. It was sometimes called the platypus of elements. Is thallium’s new, heavier analogue, “super-thallium,” as strange?
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SIMILARLY, the other new element, 115, is certain to be a heavier analogue of element 83, bismuth. As I write, I have a lump of bismuth in front of me, prismatic and terraced like a miniature Hopi village, glittering with iridescent oxidation colors, and I cannot help wondering whether “super-bismuth,” if it could be obtained in massive form, would be as beautiful—or perhaps more so.
And it could be possible to obtain more than a few atoms of these superheavy elements, for they may have half-lives of many years, unlike the elements preceding them, which vanish in split seconds. Atoms of element 111, the heavier analogue of gold, break down in less than a millisecond, and it is difficult to have more than an atom or two at a time, so we may never hope to see what “super-gold” looks like. But if we can make isotopes of 113, 114 (super-lead), and 115, which may have half-lives of years or centuries, we will have three enormously dense and strange new metals.
Of course, we can only guess at what properties 113 and 115 will possess. One can never tell in advance what the practical use or scientific implications of anything new might be. Who would have thought that germanium—an obscure “semimetal” discovered in the 1880s—would turn out to be crucial to the development of transistors? Or that elements like neodymium and samarium, regarded for a century as mere curiosities, would be essential to the making of unprecedentedly powerful permanent magnets?
Such questions are, in a sense, beside the point. We search for the island of stability because, like Mount Everest, it is there. But, as with Everest, there is profound emotion, too, infusing the scientific search to test a hypothesis. The quest for the magic island shows us that science is far from being coldness and calculation, as many people imagine, but is shot through with passion, longing, and romance.
Reading the Fine Print
I have just had a new book published, but I am unable to read it because, like millions of others, I have impaired vision. I need to use a magnifying glass, and this is cumbersome and slow because the field is restricted and one cannot take in a whole line, let alone a paragraph, at a glance. What I really need is a large-print edition, one that I can read (in bed or in the bath, where I do most of my reading) like any other book. Some of my earlier books existed in large-print editions, invaluable when I was asked to give a public reading. Now I am told a printed version is not “necessary”; instead, we have e-books, which allow us to blow up the size of the type as much as we want.
But I do not want a Kindle or a Nook or an iPad, any one of which could be dropped in the bath or broken, and which has controls I would need a magnifying glass to see. I want a real book made of paper with print—a book with heft, with a bookish smell, as books have had for the last 550 years, a book that I can slip into my pocket or keep with its fellows on my bookshelves, where my eye might alight on it at unexpected times.
When I was a boy, some of my elderly relatives, as well as a young cousin with poor eyesight, used magnifying glasses for reading. The introduction of large-print books in the 1960s was a great boon for them, as it was for all partly sighted readers. Publishing firms that specialized in large-print editions for libraries, schools, and individual readers sprang up, and one could always find these in bookshops or libraries.
In January of 2006, when my vision began to decline, I wondered what I would do. There were audiobooks—I had recorded some of them myself—but I was quintessentially a reader, not a listener. I have been an inveterate reader as far back as I can remember—I often hold page numbers or the look of paragraphs and pages in my mind almost automatically, and I can instantly find my way to a particular passage in most of my books. I want books that belong to me, books whose intimate pagination will become dear and familiar. My brain is geared towards reading—and the answer, for me, clearly, is large-print books.
But one is hard put now to find any large-print books of quality in a bookshop. This I discovered when I went recently to the Strand, a bookshop famous for its miles of shelves, to which I have been going for fifty years. They did have a (small) large-print section, but it consisted mostly of how-to books and trashy novels. There were no collections of poetry, no plays, no biographies, no science. No Dickens, no Jane Austen, none of the classics—no Bellow, no Roth, no Sontag. I came out frustrated, and furious: did publishers think the visually impaired were intellectually impaired, too?
Reading is a hugely complex task, one that calls upon many parts of the brain, but it is not a skill humans have acquired through evolution (unlike speech, which is largely hardwired). Reading is a relatively recent development, arising perhaps five thousand years ago, and it depends on a tiny area of the brain’s visual cortex. What we now call the visual word form area is part of a cortical region near the back of the left side of the brain that evolved to recognize basic shapes in nature but can be redeployed for the recognition of letters or words. This elementary shape or letter recognition is only the first step.
From this visual word form area, two-way connections must be made to many other parts of the brain, including those responsible for grammar, memories, association, and feelings, so that letters and words acquire their particular meanings for us. We each form unique neural pathways associated with reading, and we each bring to the act of reading a unique combination not only of memory and experience, but of sensory modalities, too. Some people may “hear” the sounds of the words as they read (I do, but only if I am reading for pleasure, not when I am reading for information); others may visualize them, consciously or not. Some may be acutely aware of the acoustic rhythms or emphases of a sentence; others are more aware of its look or its shape.
In my book The Mind’s Eye, I describe two patients, both gifted writers, who each lost the ability to read as a result of brain damage to the visual word form area (patients with this sort of alexia can write but cannot read what they have written). One of them, Charles Scribner, Jr., though a publisher himself and a lover of print, turned at once to audiobooks for “reading,” and he began dictating, rather than writing, his own books. He found the transition easy—indeed, it seemed to occur by itself. The other man, a crime novelist, Howard Engel, was too deeply rooted in reading and writing to give them up. He continued to write (rather than dictate) his subsequent books, and to find, or devise, an extraordinary new way of “reading”—his tongue started to copy the words in front of him, tracing them on the back of his teeth—he was reading, in effect, by writing with his tongue, employing the motor and tactile areas of his cortex. This, too, seemed to occur by itself. Each man’s brain, using its unique strengths and experiences, found the right solution, the right adaptation to the loss.
For someone who is born blind, with no visual i
magery at all, reading may be essentially a tactile experience, through the raised print of braille. Braille books, like large-print books, are less and less available now, as people turn to the cheaper and more readily available audiobooks or computer voice programs. But there is a fundamental difference between reading and being read to. When one reads actively, whether using the eyes or a finger, one is free to skip ahead or back, to reread, to ponder or daydream in the middle of a sentence—one reads in one’s own time. Being read to, listening to an audiobook, is a more passive experience, subject to the vagaries of another’s voice and largely unfolding in the narrator’s own time.
If we are forced, later in life, to learn new ways of reading—to accommodate a loss of vision, for instance—we must each adapt in our own way. Some of us may turn from reading to listening; others will continue reading as long as possible. Some may enlarge print on their e-book readers, others on their computers. I have never adopted either of these technologies; for now, at least, I am sticking to the old-fashioned magnifying glass (I have a dozen, in different shapes and strengths).
Writing should be accessible in as many formats as possible—George Bernard Shaw called books the memory of the race. No one sort of book should be allowed to disappear, for we are all individuals, with highly individualized needs and preferences—preferences embedded in our brains at every level, our individual neural patterns and networks creating a deeply personal engagement between author and reader.
The Elephant’s Gait
A recent issue of the science journal Nature had a fascinating article, by John Hutchinson and others, entitled “Are Fast-Moving Elephants Really Running?” The elephants tested—there were forty-two of them—were marked with paint dots over their shoulder, hip, and limb joints and videotaped as they moved along a thirty-meter course (they had ten meters at each end to accelerate and slow down). It was clear that at high speed there was an abrupt change of gait, but it was not so easy to interpret this. Should their rapid shuffle be regarded as “running”?
Seeing a photo of a marked-up elephant made me think of how Étienne-Jules Marey, a hundred and fifteen years earlier, had made a pioneer investigation of elephant gaits, using not video analysis, of course, but still photography, and marking up his elephants in much the same fashion. I had just read a book on Marey, as it happened—a marvelous book by Marta Braun, entitled Picturing Time—along with Rebecca Solnit’s acclaimed biography of Eadweard Muybridge, River of Shadows.
Marey and Muybridge were exact contemporaries—they were both born and died within a few weeks of each other. They also shared the same initials, EJM, but were otherwise about as different as could be. Muybridge was impulsive, flamboyant, a brilliant peripatetic artist and photographer, drawn in many different creative directions, while Marey was quiet, modest, concentrated, and systematic, spending his entire creative lifetime in his physiology laboratory. And yet, for a brief and crucial time, their lives came together, their ideas interacted, and with this a revolution occurred that not only paved the way for the development of cinematography but created a new tool for science, for the study of time, and for the representation of time and motion in art.
The name of Muybridge is widely known—he is almost an American icon—but Marey has been all but forgotten, though he was famous in his lifetime. Marey’s legacy is in many ways richer than Muybridge’s, but it was essentially the conjunction of the two men that brought about the great change. Neither alone could have achieved it.
Marey’s lifelong fascination with movement started with the internal movements and processes of the body. He had been a pioneer here, inventing pulse meters, blood-pressure graphings, and heart tracings—ingenious precursors of the mechanical instruments we still use in medicine today. Then, in 1867, he moved to the analysis of animal and human locomotion. He used pressure gauges, rubber tubes, and graphic recordings to measure the movements and positions of the limbs, as well as the forces they exerted, when a horse galloped or trotted. From these recordings he made drawings, and these he rotated in a zoetrope, reconstructing in slow motion the movements of the horse.
It had never occurred to him, apparently, to use photography—this, it must have seemed to him and all his contemporaries, was technically impossible. Cameras at this time had no shutters; one still had to remove the lens cap and replace it by hand, so exposures of much less than a second were impossible. Photographic emulsions were not too sensitive, so that an exposure of much less than a second, even if mechanically possible, might fail to admit enough light to create an image on the desperately slow wet plates then in use. And even if one were, somehow, to obtain a single “instantaneous” photograph, how could one obtain ten or twenty in a single second, when each photographic plate took several minutes to develop?
Muybridge, on the other hand, a gifted photographer, had had no special interest in animal movement prior to the 1870s, though he was, as Solnit brings out, always haunted by a sense of the ephemeral, a need to “fix,” photographically, the fugitive and the transient (this had earlier led him to make studies of the incessantly changing patterns of clouds). It was only when he met the immensely wealthy railroad baron Leland Stanford, who owned a large racing stable, that Muybridge’s future career was determined.
Racing men often debated among themselves as to whether, in galloping, a horse ever had all four hooves off the ground at the same moment—Stanford himself had taken a large bet on this, and he commissioned Muybridge to secure a photo of a horse in mid-gallop if he could. To do this, Muybridge had to make great technical advances, developing faster emulsions and designing shutters that could give an exposure of as little as 1⁄200th of a second. Having done so, he produced, in 1873, a single instantaneous photograph of a horse that showed (though not quite as convincingly as Stanford would have liked, for it was not much more than a blurred silhouette) all four hooves indeed suspended in midair.
This might have been the end of the matter, had Stanford not received and excitedly read, at this juncture, Marey’s just-published Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial Locomotion. Here Marey described in exhaustive detail his mechanical and pneumatic means of recording animal motion, showing the sequence of drawings he had constructed from his measurements and how he could bring these to life with the use of a zoetrope. (One of his drawings showed a galloping horse in midair, all of its hooves apparently off the ground.) Stanford saw in a flash that all the postures and movements of the horse as it galloped and trotted could, in principle, be captured photographically in this way, and that one might achieve the miracle of picturing motion—and this, he told Muybridge, was what he must do.
Muybridge, a superb and inventive photographer (his extraordinary pictures of Yosemite, taken with a vast wet-plate camera from the most unexpected angles and viewpoints, are still unmatched today), saw at once that the challenge was to get the horse to take its own photographs. The brilliant notion he conceived and finally brought to perfection was to set up a series of twelve (and later twenty-four) cameras along a measured track, where their shutters would be tripped in quick-fire sequence by the horse as it galloped past. Finally, in 1878, after four years of experiment, he was able to publish his legendary serial photographs. Nothing like these had ever been seen before. Artists had tried to represent the postures of galloping horses for hundreds of years, but with indifferent success and little agreement, for the movements of a galloping horse were too fast for the eye to take in.
Marey, still locked into his own laborious methods, after eleven years of experiments, was stunned when he saw a reproduction of Muybridge’s photographs in a magazine, and wrote an urgent and admiring letter to the editor of the magazine: “I am filled with admiration for Mr. Muybridge’s instantaneous photographs,” he wrote. “Could you put me in touch with [him]?” He imagined a collaboration with Muybridge that would eventuate in seeing “all imaginable animals in their true paces…animated zoology.” And he f
oresaw, as Muybridge did, that such photographs could be “for artists…a revolution, since they will be provided with the true attitudes of movement, those positions of the body in unstable balance for which no model can pose. You see,” he concluded, “my enthusiasm is boundless.”
Muybridge responded with equal generosity and grace, telling Marey that his “celebrated work on animal movement first inspired…the idea…of resolving the problem of locomotion with the help of photography.” The two of them subsequently met, cordially, in Paris.
Marey, guided by his previous method of graphic representation—“kymograms,” which overlaid, in diagrammatic form, the successive positions of joints and limbs in motion—now devised a photographic parallel to it. Using a single camera with its lens open, he positioned behind the lens a slotted metal disk, which would rotate and serve as a shutter, allowing him to get a dozen or more exposures superimposed on a single plate. These composites, which compressed time into a single frame, Marey called “chronophotographs,” and they not only were visually striking (a famous early example was a plate showing the successive positions of a cat as it rotated and righted itself while falling to the ground), but also permitted, as Muybridge’s separate frames did not, accurate visualization and analysis of the biomechanics involved.
Towards the end of the 1880s, with the development of flexible celluloid film, both Muybridge and Marey went on to develop cine-cameras, though neither was interested in “cinema” as such, but rather, as Braun puts it, in “capturing the invisible rather than reconstituting the visible.”
Marey, with his chronophotographs, went on to study gymnasts and other athletes, workers on assembly lines, and the movement and forces of air and water (he was the first to make wind tunnels) and to pioneer time-lapse underwater photography, which could make the almost invisibly slow movements of sea urchins visible and intelligible. Muybridge focused more on the representation of social interaction and gesture. Both, however, retained their love for “animated zoology,” and both, in the mid-1880s, photographed elephants in motion.
