LANGUAGE OF ASTRONOMY RAS Speciallist discussion meeting Cosmology - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

MAPS AND THE VISUAL LANGUAGE OF ASTRONOMY

RAS Speciallist discussion meeting

Cosmology with maps

12/02/2016 Burlington House, London

“Pictures are undervalued in science. They are not

• trusted. That is partly the 200-year-old legacy of the

French mathematicians Lagrange and Laplace, who scrupulously labored to reduce all logical thought to precise formulae and carefully chosen words; sloppy diagrams were suspect. (…) The picture can now aid, not mislead (or replace!) the scientist. It permits instant comparison, instant comprehension.” Benoit Mandelbrot

Astronomers – mathematicians

• r natural historians?

Astronomers – mathematicians

• r natural historians?

Sidereus Nuncius (1610) Galileo Galilei

“Galileo lacked a sufficiently good telescope,

• r he could not be sufficiently attentive to those
• bservations of his, or, most likely, he was ignorant
• f the art of picturing and drawing, which art serves

this work greatly and no less than acute vision, patience, and toil.” Johannes Hevelius FRS

Selenographia (1647) Johannes Hevelius FRS

Selenographia (1647) Johannes Hevelius FRS

A universe and the Universe

Other half of the signal – Fourier phases

Original images Random phases Phases swapped

• M. S. Bartlett, J. R. Movellan, T. J. Sejnowski, IEEE 2002

(credit : Bruce Bassett)

MAPPING THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS