Future Ricardian Technology:
When Walls Have Ears--and Eyes--and Paintings Talk
The science of recovering ancient voices trapped in paintings,and sound and moving images absorbed into ancient
walls.
I wish I had £1 for each time I've read,in the annals of research carried out by historians rather than scientists,that "we will never know" the answer to this mystery or that,such as for example the truth surrounding the Kennedy assassination,the identity of Jack the Ripper,or of course the fate of the Princes in the Tower.
But you know,as a scientifically inclined guy I'm not so sure about that.
On this page I will introduce you to just some of the future technological possibilities by which long-standing mysteries of the past might one day be resolved.
When Paintings Talk
Have you ever had a good look at an old vinyl record under a powerful magnifying glass? On each side of the record there is one long groove, which goes round and round the centre of the record and eventually spirals in towards the centre.
But if you look close, you'll see that the groove isn't perfectly smooth. Instead it seems to quiver and shake from side to side as you follow it along, rather like the wavy line you might see on a sound graph of somebody talking.
And that is exactly what the groove is: it is a wavy 'graph' line which perfectly records the singer’s voice. Then, as the old stylus needle tracks along the groove, the stylus vibrates variously from side to side in perfect keeping with the original singer’s voice, and this in turn causes a small electric current to vary in just the same way, which, when the current is amplified, enables you to hear the original singers voice through a speaker.
Now suppose, however, that in the distant past, a man, say Richard III for instance, was sitting in front of a painter of fine art, having his portrait painted. And suppose that, during the long and boring hours that he would have to sit there, advisers and courtiers came in and out of the chamber and conversed with him and he with them.
Now if the artist were painting a particularly fine line at that time, such as for example a hair, a facial contour or a fold in a fine garment, then the sound waves from the voice in the room would hit the painters arm, and the paintbrush itself, and cause the extremely accurate, delicate line that he was painting to microscopically fluctuate, to wave, from side to side exactly in accordance with the voice that was producing the sound waves in the first place.
In other words, the fine line in the painting would record the man's voice just as the grooves do on a record!!
Now if we wish to reproduce the original voice from the painting, then in principle at least, all that needs to be done is to identify these wavy fluctuations in the fine lines in the portrait, accurately reproduce them in the shape of the grooves in a new vinyl record -- and then put the record on!
In practice, of course, its not that simple (is it ever?). Microscopic analyses of every suspect line in the portrait will need to be done, and owing to the extremely low amplitude of any sound-induced fluctuations, and to the natural shaking of the artist on a minute level, as well as other factors such as the variations in the speed at which the artist painted the various lines, and the elastic flow of the oils before drying, due to gravity and to surface tension, a powerful computer will be required to assess just where a sound-induced variation is present and where one is not.
But just imagine, when this work is all done, what incredible things we might hear!! In theory, we could hear any historical character, whose contemporary portrait is still extant, talking about, or being talked to about, any single thing.
We can only imagine what the response of the historian would be, if we could offer him the chance of standing in some mysterious old record shop, stacked high with dusty old LPs, each of which contained genuine conversations, unheard by history, of real historical characters.
It is therefore every bit as daunting to wonder, every time we stand in a gallery looking at hundreds or even thousands of fine paintings, just what secret voices they all conceal, in the faces that look out at us, and just what those voices have to say.
When Walls Have Ears--and Eyes
In terms of technological achievability, what you have just read is going to be a Piece of Cake compared to what you are about to read. But nevertheless, what follows is nothing short of a revolutionary possibility for historical research in this coming century.
If you were to stand in an old castle ruin, perhaps in the old keep at Middleham, or in the chamber in the Tower where the Princes were allegedly murdered, having a conversation with someone, with the sunlight shining on you and reflecting off you, then both the sound and the light from you will instantaneously be absorbed into the castle walls all around you.
When this happens, the molecules in the stone (in the case of the sound) and the atoms in the stone (in the case of the light) will begin to oscillate or vibrate.
Now in theory these oscillations never quite die down to nothing. Instead, their amplitude dies off exponentially, reaching very low levels in a very short time, yet never quite reaching zero even after a million years.
Suppose, just suppose, that we could learn to read these oscillations?? Then, we could put together real, moving pictures, together with sound, of everything that ever happened in front of those walls.
Now the technology required to do this is, for the moment at least, beyond us. Almost certainly by another 50 years, or perhaps even a century. The problems involved are truly horrendous. Nevertheless, what follows is however an insight into the direction in which the necessary research will have to focus, in order to someday make this possibility a reality.
Recovering Sound
First,to recover the sound from a voice from,say,500 years ago, it would be necessary to calculate the precise levels to which the amplitude of the molecular vibrations will have decreased, to within very fine limits. Also, to screen out as much interference as possible, it would be necessary to consider this molecular vibration in a very specifically selected plane. A further problem would of course lay in the fact that the amplitude of one's voice varies during the course of normal speech, and so different parts of the voice would be broken down and filed in different time-epochs if we select vibrations on the basis of amplitude only.
Further complexity is introduced by the fact that every molecule in the wall will have been hit many millions of times from many millions of different events at different times (albeit never from precisely the same angle), and so only the vectorial oscillation in a specific plane must be considered. This might in turn offer a solution to the problem encountered in the last half of the preceding paragraph, on the basis that all molecular oscillation, regardless of amplitude, which we see in a particular very finely defined plane, might only come from a single event; however molecular rotation and especially random molecular vibration due to seasonal temperature changes might introduce considerable interference even here.
If these problems can be overcome--and it must be said that thankfully science, despite frequently taking longer that anticipated, very rarely bangs its head against impossibilities--then it should be possible, using computers as yet unborn, to compare millions of vibrating molecules, all identified as being from the same event, and synthesise the original voice which created the oscillations in the first place.
But between you and me, I would hate to be the scientist who had to write the program.
Recovering Images
Second, in the case of recovering pictures, it gets even worse. For one thing, atoms have this infernal habit of absorbing and then re-emitting the light quanta which hit them, so that no information would seem to remain behind in order to record the fact that they have ever been hit. Here there is one hope: if the atoms are held together by electromagnetic forces in a lattice, as the atoms in a solid are ,then when hit by an energy quantum they might recoil and vibrate to and fro in the specific plane in which they were hit, and the frequency of this motion might tell us something about the frequency (=colour) of the original quantum, and the amplitude conceivably something about the time epoch as it decays exponentially.*
Further, an atom might, and much sooner rather than later will, encounter more than one photon of light from more than one person standing there at more than one time in history. However again we might be able to resolve this problem by concentrating on the fact that these encounters will scarce if ever come from precisely the same direction, and so hopefully the oscillation of an atom in a particular vectorial plane will be due to one event only-- but in this we are being specific to the smallest angular scales permissible in physics.
We could glean information about the precise oscillatory motion of atoms in the wall by firing quanta of precisely known energy levels into them and then by observing doppler and other energy level modifications in the reflected quanta. But again the technology required to do this adequately is in its infancy.
If these problems can be overcome--and again science very rarely encounters the impossible-- then it might be possible to obtain a picture of an object in front of the wall from centuries ago, by dividing the wall into a grid of mosaic squares and then considering the differing readings from each square, which readings date back only to a very specific time in history, as measured from decaying amplitude levels, etc. In this way, a mosaic picture could then be built up, of whatever was standing in front of the wall at that time.
Further--and this gets even more horrendous (but still no more daunting to us, notice, than a piece of modern PC software might be to a Victorian)--if we can calculate oscillatory amplitude levels from an event 500 years ago to within 1/25 of a second (!),then we could repeat the whole image forming process to produce another original image, dating back to 1/25 second after the first, and so on, thereby creating moving pictures of the original object, or person, in front of the wall.
Yet further, the voice of the moving image of a speaking person could also be captured in another way at this point, through the fact that a computer capable of producing images in this way would also easily be complex enough to lip-read the person's moving image and almost simultaneously broadcast his voice as his lips moved.
Well, so much for the theory. In practice once again I cannot even begin to emphasise the truly horrendous nature of the problems that will be encountered, when the research is eventually embarked upon.
However, despite all these objections and many others besides, if we allow for another 50 -100 years of progress in computer technology, in electronics and in quantum physics, I believe it is reasonable to look forward to seeing actual moving pictures, with sound, of historical characters from the past, sound and pictures which have spent centuries locked up in the castle walls which first absorbed them.
"We will never know" the answer to this mystery and that? So says the non-scientific historian. Fiddlesticks! Of course we will.
But an equally interesting question to ask ourselves in the meantime might be: do we really want to know the answers to our greatest and most intriguing mysteries? For then, of course, there would be no mystery left for us to ponder.
--- Michael Alan Marshall
* There is in fact
a law in physics which states that "absorptivity equals emissivity" and that an atom absorbing an energy quantum
will quickly expel precisely that same amount of energy again, leaving no
traces behind. Although most of this energy is lost quickly as the electronic
orbital shells energize and then discharge, there is now evidence that a small
amount of energy is left behind in the atom for a considerable period. Recently
in astrophysics, for example, it has been found that the doppler effect may not
be the correct explanation for the observed redshift in distant galaxies; instead an older theory has come back into play to the
effect that light reddens over long interstellar distances because it loses a
tiny amount of energy each time it is absorbed and then re-emitted by
interstellar material. This lost energy of course has to go somewhere, and the
most likely explanation is that it becomes the kinetic energy of the
absorbing atom as it either recoils due to momentum transfer by virtue of the
mass-equivalence of the absorbed energy quantum, or moves due to its
acquisition of thermal energy, before then oscillating in an amplitude-decaying
manner, under the balance of the electrostatic forces from its atomic or subatomic
neighbours, as it slowly gives up its new energy to eventually satisfy the absorptivity/emissivity
law. Wherever this energy goes, if it causes any amount of
differentiation which can be measured over time, as is likely, then we will not
be prohibited by the laws of physics in achieving our objective
here.