Today, more on images and reality. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
This week's issue of
Mechanical Engineering features an article
entitled "Relief for Weary Bones." It seems the
Smithsonian's Triceratops skeleton has been on
display since 1905. It may've been the first
Triceratops ever put on display. Those old
bones were protected by their
sixty-five-million-year burial in the earth. But a
century of mounted public display has taken its
toll. The bones need to be treated and put away in
padded cases.
Enter now a company called Virtual Surfaces,
Inc. They do stereolithography, and
they've been making three-dimensional digital scans
of the bones. Now they're casting them in urethane.
If a left rib is missing, they mirror-image the
right rib and use it. They pull the iron supports
and give the model a stance that's more reasonable
in the light of current paleontology. They
gradually fill in blanks and produce a complete and
accurate skeleton that most of us would
mistake for the real thing.
So what do we have when they're done? Are we being
fooled or enlightened? While you think about that,
here's a similar story from five and a half
centuries ago. Gutenberg saw a chance to make a
pile of money by making imitation manuscript books.
He took the old art of printing to new heights, and
began producing Bibles that were almost
indistinguishable from real hand-written books. But
his Bibles didn't have the inevitable errors that
scribes made -- or the erasures or the
nonuniformity of handwriting.
In neither case has anyone been deceived, but in
both cases reality becomes blurred in disturbing
ways. And the Smithsonian's Triceratops is only one
example of something that's now very widespread.
Our capacity for replicating, and even distorting,
any reality is outrunning our ability to tell
what's real.
You can now buy a CD of Rachmaninoff playing his
own music. The recording was made from the best
player-piano rolls. But then, like that Triceratops
skeleton, the imperfections have been filled in and
the music made complete. It's no longer the old
piano roll. Neither is it really Rachmaninoff. At
the same time it is, quite possibly, the best
window into Rachmaninoff's genius that we have.
Go to the movies these days and tell me, if you
can, where reality leaves off and imagination kicks
in. Which of us didn't gasp as footage of the
sunken Titanic took on color, life, and
beauty.
The nagging subcutaneous question is, "Where's all
this going?" It took a full generation after
Gutenberg for society to feel the effects of the
new presses. By the time they did, the shape of
human knowledge, and how we used it, was being
turned inside out.
Now we're increasing the flow and availability of
knowledge orders of magnitude beyond Gutenberg. But
we're also making a new reality of images. Most
perplexing of all, we're gradually removing the
need for much of the corporeal world that
lies somewhere in the background of all that
stunning unreality.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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