9UNP0129SD_Michael Lynch_WordPress

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- I'm really grateful for this invitation to present at this meeting, very thankful to Jill for inviting me, and also to Amy and many other people who made all of this possible. I hope your name was mentioned in Jill's very nice introduction. As Jill said, this is very much a work in progress, that I'm going to present. But rather I'd say it's a proposed work that hasn't yet progressed. Earlier this month, I presented a grant proposal to start a project on visualization of nano-scale phenomena. I recently finished a book on a very different project that Jill mentioned. This is about the "Truth Machine," it's on forensic DNA profiling. It involves a little bit about visualization, actually, quite a lot. But it kind of went off in a different direction. 

And that project that led to the book has been going on for a better part of 20 years. But during that time, I maintained my interest in visualization in science. And I want to return to it more intensively. And the nano-scale phenomena was something that piqued my interest. Now I suppose that it's fitting that I'll be talking about future work that I might do on nano, because in its brief history, nano has established itself as talk about futures. To keep from getting carried away, I'll talk at some length about my work on visualization, published in the 1980s and 1990s, on light and electron microscopy, and in a project I did with art historian, science historian, Samuel Edgerton on digital image processing in astronomy. I'm confident that that earlier work applies to nano science and nanotechnology, nano imaging I'll call it. Though, of course, I want to find out what's different about that domain as well. Part of this talk is based on a joint paper that I have developed to some extent, relying very heavily on a collaboration with a former Cornell PhD student, Cyrus Mody, who's now in the history department at Rice University. It also relies upon his dissertation at Cornell University that was finished some years ago. 

Now my interest in nano also was inspired by attending a workshop at the University of South Carolina, where there's both a big center of nano science, nanotechnology research and a sizable group, I should say, not necessarily large groups in science and technology studies, but a sizable group of people doing ethical, historical, philosophical and social aspects of nanotechnology and nano science. I went there in October. It was about images at the nano scale. And I presented some of the material that I'll be presenting here. I found that I was very thrilled to find that much of what people who have been studying this for some time were doing. It seemed to relate rather specifically to work I had done in the past. So I thought there might be something to do by moving into this field about which I currently know very little. So before going into what I want to say about nano, allow me to review some background about the interest in visual images in science and technology studies, and my own interests in particular. For those of you in the audience, of which there are a few, who know me, I apologize that I'm going to be dragging out some fairly old pictures and fairly old themes. But I will try to bring it to this new topic. 

Okay, visualization is a term used in science and technology studies, we call it STS, which also covers science, technology and society. It's a nice acronym. To describe the material essential process of making research objects visible, and also making them analyzable and communicable. Bruno Latour published a seminal paper in the mid-1980s, in which he kind of tied together some of these themes. And visualization, after that, kind of became a term that crossed over a number of boundaries. The study of visualization includes the analysis of publicly presented images and textual illustrations. But it also includes much more, practices and instruments that render specimens and other research material intelligible, formally accessible, and mathematically tractable. It involves aesthetic considerations, such as those that -- and I explored with digital imaging in astronomy. But it also, more importantly, I'd say involves epistemological considerations, because of the importance of graphic and pictorial images in the dissemination and validation of experimental results and observations. Visual images in science have drawn interest from scholars in many different fields. 

Of course, here we are, in an art historian's department, an art historical department. And art historian, James Elkins had a nice phrase when he suggested that art history should expand its coverage to include images that are not art. And in addition, historians of science, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and others, have taken interest in visual construals, as David Gooding calls them, as distinctive modes of evidence and expressions of reasoning. Visual materials also have been important for demonstrating and critically elucidating how gendered assumptions have become objectified into images that are subsequently taken as iconic representations of body and nature. In addition to being a truly interdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary area, research on visualization in science and medicine has encouraged a profound shift in assumptions about the relations between art and science. Earlier, it was assumed by no less than Thomas Kuhn, that art had no serious generative place in scientific research after the 18th century. Jill, in her introductory remarks mentioned something to that effect, that often people think of art as after, when it deals with science images, rather than involved in the production. Today, it's almost commonplace to treat a broadened conception of art as intrinsic to modern scientific research. And scientists in some fields, particularly astronomy, have begun to take insights from art and art history seriously. Contemporary science studies research has raised the epistemic status of pictorial and graphic images so that they are increasingly viewed as original and irreducible sites of scientific work, communication and thinking. 

But particular interest for this proposal are historical and social scientific studies of visual images that treat them as materials that facilitate, express, and even make possible the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. In the past few decades, social and historical studies of the sciences have claimed that visual images and the practices that compose and disseminate them are primary sources of scientific innovation and insight. But this contrasts with the treatment of them as subsidiary to logical and mathematical reasoning. It also contrasts with treatments that limit them to textual illustrations or naturalistic pictures. Visualization embeds mathematics and natural order within textual and graphic form. It is not re-presentation in the sense of reproducing what is independently worked out through natural investigation and mathematical analysis. It is an integral part of investigation and analysis. Initiative for treating visualizations as distinctive and original sites of knowledge production, validation and communication goes back to Martin Rudwick's 1976 historical article, an abundantly illustrated article on the emergence on visual language in geology. One point that I found particularly interesting from Rudwick's work is the idea that early geologists exploited exposures of cliff faces, such as the image at the top there, from things like canyons and mining activities. They presented surfaces that could be read or transposed into graphic matrices for reading back time. 

Selection of good alignments, and then accentuating and coding the linear strata, as in the diagram below, afforded a way of reading the earth as a timetable. A key theme in studies of visualization is that the things seen are mediated by technology, including the mundane technology of paper, print and graphic tools. Now, their properties and even their holistic forms take novel configurations that are unfamiliar and can not easily be mapped onto familiar things. Consequently, there is a struggle over time, and often a contentious one, not only to make visible, but to validate which visible features are to be accepted. The visualizing of what can not be seen, such as in this slide here. That theme of visualizing what can not be seen is somewhat misleading, however. First, the things can be seen if you accept that you can see things through instrumental mediation. Moreover, the relationship is not simply to things that would be seen if we were capable of extending our perception to novel levels of scale. There often are indefinitely many ways to compose what is seen through the instrumental medium, or the graphic medium as well. This is especially obvious in cases in which data, for example, from X-ray telescopes or MRI scanners and probe microscopes can be translated into graphs, tables of numbers and pictures of various kinds. 

One thing that interests me is the way that the classic Gestalt themes can be reviewed as being performed with graphic work in these illustrations. There's a couple of themes here. One is a caricature, actually it was published in a French, I guess we'd call it a magazine today, called "Caricature," in which Louis-Philippe is progressively turned into a pear. The story is that later Louis-Philippe was so incensed by this that he outlawed the drawing of pears, because the pear became iconic for him. The other things is this picture of a very well-known Gestalt image. There's a detailed one in the middle, there, showing that graphically, you can shift it from the young woman to the old woman, whereas in its psychological use as a Gestalt image, it's used to allow you to see one way and then another way. Here, you see it displaced to the drawing itself. So in this case, you can see, or perhaps get a sense of how interpretation is done with a construction and reconstruction of visual materials, in the sense that a philosopher once expressed, "That the painter thinks with the end of his brush." In these cases, the lines in the drawing skew what we see, much in the way that verbal rhetoric can highlight and exaggerate in a way designed to impress and persuade. A characteristic form that much empirical visualization takes is not simply to convey an impression or to highlight one or another feature, but to rectify the appearance of things, to standardize, make measurable, to encode and record. 

These two images, separated by time and space, both exhibit an obsession with transposing bodies onto and through a grid. The woodcut, of course is the artist's portrait of linear perspective, while the anthropometric photos on the bottom, from Bertillon, conveyed a discipline of Bertillon's system for encoding bodies to control recidivism in the Paris criminal population. Distrusting the identity that goes with a name, Bertillon finds a series of measurements to identify individuals, and arranges to standardize the mug shot and the taking of measurement. So you can see that not only rectifying the image, standardizing the image through the kinds of linear perspective or instrumental gaze, you get a posing of the body, a disciplining of the body, the criminal body, even, to make it standardizable. Bruno Letour's conception of immutable mobiles suggested that graphic inscriptions on maps imposed a fixed textual form on things and landscapes, enabling them to be transferred across time and space, reproduced and subjected to graphic and mathematical operations, thus enabling a return to the original site with all of the armaments available to a laboratory science, sometimes backed by -- A crucial aspect of the epistemic authority of such inscriptions is that they appear to trace back to the hand of nature, mediated by techniques and technologies of mechanical reproduction, what Latour famously called inscription devices. Conceptions of visualization as site of fact production and communal validation were developed by ethnographic studies of laboratory practices beginning in the late 1970s. One aspect of these studies was the close attention they paid to the work of making specimen materials visually accessible and graphically analyzable. We could call such work, pardon the pun, ethno-graphics, where instead of being a branch of qualitative sociology or anthropology, it would refer to the participant's work of making graphic phenomena. Many pictorial and other materials that go into the making of images never leave the laboratory or field site, but are part of the material culture of the science, along with data recordings, notes, and preserved specimen material. Such images make up the archives that stand behind the relatively few figures that are prepared and selected for publication. 

Consequently, a methodological requirement for studying visualization is to examine, or at least re-trace the sequential pathways through which data, or specimen materials are transferred into images, and candidate images are selectively processed for specific analytical and presentational purposes. In a study of neuro anatomical investigations I found an analog to Martin Rudwick's geological graphics at the level of electron micro-graphic imagery. This schematic from an article published by the lab I studied shows a sequence of how a stratified region of the brain, the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, was exposed in a rat's brain and aligned with the planes of thick and thin sections to investigate changes in adjacent cell layers following a lesion to one of those layers. The brain was selectively framed so that comparisons could be made in a relatively stratagraphic area. The roughly linear alignment of the relatively homogenous cell layers was selectively aligned with a graphic plane and a page face, so that systematic comparisons and measurements could be made. Graphic orderings are not simply transposed from natural surfaces to graphic devices used for encoding and measuring activities. They also can be impressed into the materials or terrains analyzed. In this iconic image, the one on the left of the lizard and the territories. I've used this many times as a field guide, and I was told once by my friend who used to work at Xerox Park in California that I became known as "Lizard Toes" because of this image. In this field guide, a lizard is marked by clipping its toes, one of the more primitive forms of digital representation. 

They say it doesn't bother them too much. Then it's released and recaptured, and its identity is recorded where it happens to be located. And the terrain on which it's captured is marked with those little X's, which are stakes driven into the ground so that the ground itself in which the investigation is occurring is marked like a Cartesion coordinate. It's then transposed to the paper surface, so that the territories can then be mapped. The neuron in the lower part of the lower right there is encoded. You can see how old this is, with an old computer card. By being traced out on a grid, the numbers are then recorded and then stored electronically in a database. This, of course, is very ordinary work in science. And that's the point. It is ordinary. 

It's part of the routine work of making things into data. It's commonplace for multiple formats to be paired together and juxtaposed in images. In this case a diagram of a mitochondrion, a cellular organelle, in a text book is paired with an electron micrograph. And the two of them, the pair of them together complement each other, supplement each other and mark different, sort of epistemic regions and the difference between photography and drawing. Each member of the pair thus sort of complements the other. In the project with Samuel Edgerton in the 1980s and early 1990s, we were interested in some fairly early work for astronomy, where they were using charged coupled devices, or CCDs. That cartoon image at the top, that schematic of how the CCD works. It collects energy, electronic energy, photons, sometimes cosmic rays. And then sort of dumps them in a bucket brigade and tallies them up in that bottom thing. And so what it does is it produces, sort of a volume measure of the amounts of light hitting the different pockets. 

That's the analogy. The somewhat blurry pictures at the bottom are people working at an image processing center. Looking on the left, at an image of a field of stars. And then on the right, it's a table of numbers that a sectioned field would be converted to. And they use commands to modify the image in various ways, as I'll show. One standard thing they did, and this was on a touch screen, I actually have a touch screen in front of me here. One of the functions was called "smoothing." And so they had a smooth function. You hit smooth and it would average the pixels with the adjacent pixel, so you'd get a more rounded picture. That's a very simple type of thing. 

I think we can all do it on our computers these days at home. So you can get multiple renderings of the same data, or what would be called the same data. In this case, a deep space object, which is naturalized, de-pixilated, if you like. They also use different color palettes that translate intensity of data collected into a colored gradient. They can also convert things to map-like contoured things, and then more continuous gradients, such as in this image of a supernova remnant. Note that the raw data themselves, are worked over to remove artifacts, cosmetic defects and other features that are deemed irrelevant or out of place. It isn't just a matter of taking the same intensity numbers and converting them back and forth. It's also some work, not shown here, but where the data is cleaned in various ways to make it analyzable and presentable. This image here by a Boston University astronomer synthesizes various forms of data in one frame. So rather than juxtaposing different images, you see a kind of a cartoon image that embeds readings produced by a probe that went through the tail of a comet, or near the head of a comet. 

And in this case, the image processing was done to kind of juxtapose measurements, different sorts of images together. They used rather an interesting composition with this cartoon-like thing. Exposures using what was vernacularly called false color, smoothing and these other functions, are done to bring out salient detail, especially with data collected in non-visible spectra, such as radio infrared or X-ray. False color is used as a way of denoting variations in intensity. Often, light colors were used to denote higher intensities. But this is not a universal or necessary, and sometimes people would depart from it. In one case, an astronomer told me that a color break was taken by a graphic illustrator for "Scientific American," that's the two slides on the right, the two pictures on the right. That's from "Scientific American." The graphic images shows a blue and a yellow layer, and labels them as being as hot or cool gases inside this envelope of exploding gas from a supernova. The astronomer said that this was kind of inaccurate in the sense that there would be a continuous gradient in heat intensity in this object. 

So the imposition of the color break on the gas cloud, if you could call it that, creates a qualitative distinction, where it's basically produced by breaking the colors at a certain level of intensity in the measures that were produced. He said this was fairly harmless and maybe even pedagogically useful for interpreting the phenomena he was discussing in the article. Digital image processing has indefinite flexibility for rendering data into color, exposing or suppressing backgrounds, drawing lines discretely or in a continuous or hazy way. The different renderings are often related to different purposes of investigation. So for example, enhancing red and blue can make red shift or energies evident. Astronomers I spoke to back in the '80s and early '90s at Harvard and Boston University said they try not to cheat too far in enhancing colors when images are publicly exhibited. With non-optical sources of radiation, however, they're less bound by any kind of intrinsic color since there is none. Overall, there was a tension between exploiting the possibilities of the equipment to make things show up in novel ways, or in Harold Garfinkel's words, "making things look like what they are." Only in this case, there often is no "what they are" that acts as a reference point or standard. The term I came up with, epistemological nostalgia, is a way to indicate efforts that are done to make things appear familiar and sometimes in classic sorts of ways. 

There's an art historian named Elizabeth Kessler, who is actually working with material from the NASA Space telescope related to the history of art. You can see the kind of space telescope image at the bottom, in addition to indicated red shift type phenomena. And the intensities of the galaxy has kind of a composition that might be 19th century like. In the remainder of what I'm going to talk about today, I want to draw some of the themes that I very quickly walked through and relate them to the nano domain. I don't mean to suggest that there's nothing novel about nano images, though I think people are kind of counteracting the hype about nano by saying there isn't much new there. But I think there might be something interesting about it. But it is interesting in how that it's very image led, and also the images have some familiar features to them. Nano images and image galleries, many of which are readily accessible on the Internet. That's where most of this stuff is dumped off of. They appear to have a leading role in the promotion, and in a different way, in the production of nanotechnology and nano science. 

Nano images, as well as the futuristic writings that often surround them, such most famously, Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation," have gained a reputation for being manipulative and hyped as futuristic spectacles designed to spark popular interest and attract public and private sponsorship. Nano science and nanotechnology are heavily oriented to the future, dating back to physicist Richard Feynman's much quoted, much abused statement in 1959 about there's plenty of room at the bottom. I think that's true for sociology as well. Visionary writings, most notoriously by Drexler, are accompanied by images of molecular engines. The thing at the bottom right there is a Drexlarian engine-like thing that would be constructed at the nano scale by pushing atoms around. Some are depicted as sheer fantasy, while others convey variable degrees of realism and empirical reference. Fears notoriously of gray goo, created uncontrollably by nanobots creating other nanobots hitchhiked on the futuristic scenarios. This led to kind of a reaction a few years ago. Nano images seemed to reach backwards and forwards in time, using familiar conventions of visual realism to materialize the form of objects that may or may not exist, and of artifacts that may or may not ever be possible to build. In my own future work, which I hope will be possible, I intend to address these complex relations between image, object and practicality, by examining and reconstructing how nano images are prepared for analytical presentational purposes. 

The futuristic fantasy that was so much a part of early nano has encouraged skepticism about what, if anything, there is to the entire nano juggernaut. Such images have been sources of consternation, as well as means of promotion and sources of popular excitement. The consternation came to focus in efforts by many proponents, most famously Richard Smalley, to distance themselves from Drexlarian writings and imagery and publications in the early 2000's. Though Drexlarian nanobots and futuristic scenarios have been marginalized following Smalley's call for a more realistic orientation to physical limits, and possibilities at the nano scale. Images of nano scale phenomena, whether real or imaginary, or somewhat in between, remain important for ongoing efforts to establish nano as a broad-based movement in science and industry, analogous to molecular biology and genetic engineering. Many nano images are presented as pictures of molecular or atomic configurations, though the specific configurations are inflected with a presence and force of the instrumentation. Unlike magnetic resonance images or X-ray astronomy images, which often are composed along lines of established entities, like brains or known astronomical objects, in nano, there is often no familiar anatomy or conventional atlas with which to establish what nano scale images and landscapes should look like. The empirical reference point is less than obvious. The user does not simply trace a familiar surface with a probe. Instead the probe's interaction with the surface creates complex and noisy interference patterns. 

Nevertheless, the processing of such images often makes abundant use of conventional visual elements. Configurations of color and shape, and entire landscapes that make them appear to be realistic pictures, rather than abstract renderings of complex interference patterns or nano scale graffiti. So in this image here, it's an atomic force microscope image of a crystalline structure. It's in an online image gallery. It could easily be mistaken for a Martian landscape taken from an orbiting satellite. The most notorious nano images are freely detached from actual material interventions and possible modes of manufacture. Many of the most frequently exhibited nano images are drawn images, or animations of nanobots, carbon tubes and nano landscapes. As Scott Curtis observed in a recent talk, in a study of fantastic voyage cartoons, used to promote nano scale technology, showing landscapes, such images often have an airbrushed quality. Surfaces and edges are smoothed. They're depicted from an impossible vantage point that zooms freely through a clear space, unencumbered by noise. 

An example of a still image that exhibits some of these properties is the nano louse that was produced by photographer-illustrator Coneyl Jay, which won the 2002 Visions of Science Award prize. We discussed this in our conference at South Carolina, I mentioned earlier, because of a number of interesting things. The picture shows a transparent insect-like device with legs, latching onto a blood platelet, drawn in kind of hyper realistic fashion. It has this proboscis that punctures the cell membrane. You couldn't tell whether it's sucking something out or injecting something in. If it's a machine, it's probably injecting. The louse and the platelets are depicted in a clear, well-lighted space, portrayed with linear perspective, from a close-up vantage point. This image, and derivatives of it, and there are lots of derivatives of it on the web, have become iconic for nano, though the image is a transparent fantasy. It has been used to illustrate more mundane ventures into nanotechnology. I don't know if you can read that thing at the bottom, but it's from the Guardian Unlimited, UK, headline, "Nanotechnology Shown to Remove Arsenic From Drinking Water." 

It's about a method developed by Rice University scientists, which I assume has very little to do with the little nanobot creature. But that image is used to promote this rather mundane technology. I don't mean that it's not important, but it's certainly not something you would necessarily illustrate with that picture. To write off such nano art as sheer fantasy would, however, ignore the proactive value of images. Without necessarily buying into the Drexler vision, one can find examples in social studies of science of what Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay once called, "working conceptual hallucinations," referring to a drawing of a humanoid cartoon figure superimposed on a realistic cell membrane diagram. Unfortunately, my book has been stolen and I couldn't find an image to scan. While that figure was not mentioned to depict the process it represented, other drawings are more ambiguous. For example, the drawing I do have here from an article from an article by Alberto Cambrosio and colleagues, on Ehrlich's early models of antibodies. The early pictures of antibodies, this is the turn of the 20th century, touched a whole lot of controversy about whether antibodies would look anything like that, or whether this was sheer fantasy. To make a long story very short, in some respects, the pictures did lead research into what later would be called more accurate depictions or representations of the phenomena involved. 

Though at first, they were viewed as impossible cartoon fantasies. Some models, such as the schematic version of Watson and Crick's double helix-- I neglected to show it here, because everybody knows it. That one is impressed in everyday life. It could become iconic, even constructive images, for things that never or very rarely look like that. Although we think of the double helix as a molecular model pictures, try to find DNA that looks like that with a microscope. 
(laughter)
 Nano images are especially striking cases of representations that are made possible through technological intervention. Images made with a scanning tunneling microscope and related probe instruments are developed from measured fluctuations in interference patterns, creating by the probe's interaction with a surface. The numerical data that are generated that way, they're measures, basically, are then translated into visual images. But just what they are pictures of is far from intuitive. 

In their recent book on objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison suggest that it is mistaken to think that nano images through such microscopes are representations at all, or naturalistic pictures. They suggest, instead, that the most novel forms of nano images are demonstrations of technological feats, inscriptions of the most literal type, legible patterns written and drawn at an unprecedented scale of what they call haptic manipulation. These include the famous 1990 IBM inscription with xenon atoms. All of these are IBM copyrighted images. So the IBM thing, you've probably all seen that. It was drawn with a probe microscope of Xenon atoms on, I think, a graphite base. I'm not sure about that. These other things, like that little stick figure thing, you'll see lots of those in nano galleries, little smiley face things, and these kinds of things. They look like kids diagrams. Plus, the corral type of thing, which is again, produced through interference patterns. 

And the little false colored Hershey Kisses things are said to be representative of atoms in some sense. The resultive images demonstrate what can be engineered, rather than rendering a picture of a natural thing or landscape. Daston and Galison recognized that manipulation, a variant of Ian Hacking has called intervention, has long been a property, often a tacit one of scientific image making. However, they argue that it's the simultaneity of making and taking images with a probe microscope differs profoundly from the two-step process of, for example, first preparing specimens for light and electron microscopic analysis, and then taking images of them. This suggestion raises intriguing questions, not only for historical research, but also for ethnographic studies of detailed practices of visualization. The explicit way in which nano images demonstrate the production of what they represent or present makes them an especially attractive topic for close study of situated image production and use. If, as I believe is the case, nano images continue to be produced and used as empirical evidence, then the question is how do researchers exploit the novel and manipulative capacity to project their actions into previously unexplored spaces, and collectively to elucidate visible structures. How do they decide when the manipulation has gone too far? And how do they fend off the moral epistemological accusation that they've made up visual evidence? A possible start on an answer to this is that nano images are composed as visual configurations of shape and color that evoke a sense of what I earlier called epistemological nostalgia by taking the shape of familiar landscapes and discernable patterns. 

Though such nostalgic projections may seem fantastic, they provide the iconic shape that reality may later come to assume. One set of objects that Cyrus Mody and I have worked on is, in some sense, nano manipulative. But I think it's quite different from what we've seen so far. What we're relating to is a 19th century microscopic phenomenon that in earlier work, I discussed briefly under the heading of "Test Objects." The analogy then, is with the 19th century objects collected by microscopicist R.C. Goring to test the resolution and power of the instruments he had. Dr. Goring is said to have adopted test objects from reading Anthony von Leeuwenhock's work from two centuries earlier. He used various objects with regular properties, such as insect wings, arrays of rate regular cells, and certain types of materials or diatomes. The objects are selected for their regular geometric form, reminiscent of constructed alignments used for surveying. In this case, what is surveyed is the instrumental system through which the microscopic properties are made visible. 

So they are objects that test the instrument. The microscopist uses these objects to disclose a technically circumscribed-- I knew I shouldn't talk of that, I get tongue twisted. A relative perfection of form becomes a template for disclosing imperfection in the instrumental vantage point. Later, constructed objects using small rulers inscribed on glass were deployed. So following Goring, F.A. Nobert developed some tests where he could use contemporary technology to inscribe glass in a regular way. And he would make these etchings in glass at a measured fraction of the meter, in order to, again, test the resolution and reliability of the instruments he used. It can be useful to compare test objects with other epistemic things. These are research entities and complexes that integrate practices and disciplines in historical trajectories. Just to move very quickly, some of you might be familiar with these sorts of things. You have model organisms like the dracophylla or the Jackson lab mouse. 

You also have, kind of conventional tests. One of our former students at Cornell, John Downer, wrote a dissertation and published a paper on social studies of science called, "When the Chick Hits the Fan," about testing engines with bird strikes. This one is testing a canopy. Also, type specimens, where an individual or a collection of specimens is taken to represent a species or kind. Then finally, the kind of thing we're going to be talking about here, fabricated nano test objects, which are very similar to the inscribed glass lines we just saw. But they have quite a different function. Of course, manufacture has to be up to the task to produce the appropriately scaled reliable object, such as in the fabricated test object. However, when we think of test objects, such as this one here on the lower right, they act as tests of the fabrication itself, and not necessarily of the instrument. The scale of vertical lines, their clarity and their alignment point to a degree of control over the scattering of the electron beam that inscribes and visualizes them. Where Dr. 

Goring's test objects presume the geometric properties in the test object in order to check the optics of the observational instrument, this instrument presumes the adequacy of the observation to reveal the imperfection and the construction of the test object. Some nano inscriptions or etchings can display technical virtuosity with clear commercial implications. A couple of students I'm working with, Katherine and Hannah, pointed me to a very interesting theme from Norbert Wiener, written obviously decades ago, in which Wiener called a certain type of image, "Operative Images." And what he meant, was a kind of thing like a printed circuit, which in his day would be printed with a copper matrix and would actually be operated as a circuit. So the original might be a diagram, programs or encodes a machine to print out the circuits, and then it produces reproductions which are functional. So an operative image is an image that actually performs a function. And its relation to the original is not degraded, as in the classic theme of the reproduction of art. It can even upgrade the diagrammatic art. Now these images are somewhat different. These two little wedge shape things are nano images where they're inscribed. 

But they're non-functional. The matrix on which they're inscribed and the way they're inscribed would never convey a circuit. They wouldn't be useful as chip technology. They're more like demonstrations. Cyrus Mody and I, who are interested in these things, liken them to the kind of things that medieval craftsmen might make, where they would sculpt objects that would have no use, but which would demonstrate their virtuosity. These sorts of things can be used as demonstration objects in potentially commercially viable technologies. They have a property that we're calling, it's an oxymoron, abstract concreteness, in a sense that these devices are quite concrete. They're inscribed on a material matrix, silicon or something like it, a variant of silicon. And yet, they're abstract in the sense they're abstracted from any useful functional property. You can't do anything with them other than show them as a potential, or an inkling of a potential object. 

So they have both qualities. The abstract is important, because the demonstrability of what's done is done with a matrix that's usable and demonstrable. These objects may not yet be functional for quite some time. There's some more of them. Again, you can see that the game is to inscribe these things in a fine level of detail, with great reliability and linearity. You can see the measures in the one at the bottom that indicate at what level of scale they're doing it. But again, these, both the material and the way it's inscribed, would not be used for chip technology. I think I'm probably going to be winding down pretty soon. I have a lot of material on a particular test object that's very interesting. And I'll try to briefly go through what that's about without getting bogged down in detail. 

There's a thing that has been a focus of decades of work in what's called surface science. It's a variant of material science. And it feeds into chip technology and many other things. It's very important for the development of probe microscopes and for the field of nanotechnology. Cyrus Mody's dissertation and some of his later work is very much focused on this and related issues. I don't think I want to go into what the 7x7 is about. Maybe in the workshop, we can talk about that tomorrow. But it's a crystalline, a silicon crystal that's exposed of the surface of a cleaved silicon crystal. It has distinctive properties as a cleaved surface. And for decades, with different types of microscopes, but particularly with the scanning tunneling microscope, it became a kind of communal matrix for working out both the instrument and its properties and what the instrument was investigating. 

So like a model organism, like E. coli, certain strains of it, or the fruit fly. Collective labors on this thing sort of build up a progressive sense of what its genome looks like or in this case, what the crystalline structure looks like. And the instruments that are being used to investigate it are themselves evolving over time and being tested with respect to this thing. So unlike the previous test objects I showed you, where either the surface of the thing that's being investigated is taken for granted or the operations of the instrument that visualize it are taken for granted, both are kind of bootstrapping themselves together in this particular thing. Now that would be my explanation of how the silicon 7x7 works. It's on a Web site. It's actually probably a good explanation on the Web site. But we'll leave that by. It goes back to the 1950s, with Low Energy Electron Diffraction imaging. 

First working on this thing and then later in the 1970s, some big breakthroughs with the scanning type tunneling microscope were developed. But this crystalline structure, which is visualized in different ways, was an object of choice for a number of reasons. Part of which was that other people were working on it. But it had very regular properties. It was easily produced. It had inklings of commercially important technology because it was about silicon. And silicon, of course, has been the key thing for chip manufacture. The people working on this thing think the LEED pattern, and also the later patterns developed by machinery was very complex, and even beautiful in the way it was arranged. One point, I'm making this abstractly because we don't have time to go into the details of this thing, and I only very incompletely understand them, is that this thing, this surface, however we visualize it--. You see the bottom green sort of thing. 

You can see kind of an inkling of a regular pattern. It's not an atomic structure independent of the means of producing it. Because the probe and the slicing of this thing, the cleaving of its surface produces a unique surface that is then laboriously related through things like these paper models, which are actually made out of paper, to try and reconstruct what the three-dimensional structure might look like in a space un-interfered with by the probing microscopy. But the surface itself, the thing, if you like is an interface between a distinctive type of instrument or family of instruments and the surface being investigated. Cyrus came up with the idea that it's sort of a whetstone for new theoretical concepts. And one of the people he investigated or interviewed used the term that it was a Rosetta Stone for surface science, you know, something that could not only be useful in itself to investigate, but which could crack the code of other objects as well. Then once established as a work site, it became very important for the history of this field, developing as it developed along with it. Various models were worked with it and theories were developed on the models. Different measures, different modes of visualizing it were done. Let me get to my ending here. 

This thing at the top is a business card. And non-corporate scientists use the 7x7, and I've been using it as a background slide for many of these slides here itself. That's 7x7 material. It's become kind of iconic, like DNA has for molecular biology and many other fields, as screen savers, wallpaper, and the like. It is, as I said before, an epistemic thing. It integrates research communities around a common material focus and problem. In some ways, it's like a math problem that generations of mathematicians try to crack, because it was a surface configuration they're trying to model. It integrated commercial labs into a research field. And its concrete abstractness bridged academic theory and commercial research, evoking a sense of application while remaining purified. I wasn't kidding when I said at the outset of my talk that my study of nano images is not yet in progress. 

It's at the stage of raising questions to explore. So I'm going to end with questions rather than conclusions. I do have some hints and intuitions about how further study of this phenomenon will go. The 7x7 test object that I briefly glossed over gives us some appreciation of how at least one type of nano image is both a product of manipulation and a reference to and empirical object. But rather an object that arises at the interface between a probe and a largely unknown surface. It becomes simultaneously a test of novel instruments and a model system to explore with those very instruments. Now I want to go beyond where I'm heading. I want to go beyond the popularized images that I started out with that we see so often, and in some ways are very enjoyable to examine. But I want to pay more attention to the role of images in work-day research. I don't intend to ignore popularized images, since they may have a leading role, or once have had a leading role in promoting the very idea of nano. 

And it's an idea that's still rather hazy. And while I'm intrigued by Daston and Galison's observations about nano images being a new type of manipulated object, what they call a presentational rather than representational object, perhaps associated with an emerging form of objectivity, I suspect that I'll find that much of the manipulation is done in the service of getting access to things that are available at the nano scale. The things may not be so simple as rocks in the field that are simply dug up, since their conformation is bound up with the probe instruments used to visualize them. And visualize may not be quite the right idea. The probe generates interference patterns that need not be made into visual images, but interestingly, they often are. I also expect to find different kinds of nano images. I don't think they're all one story. Perhaps the haptic images are the most novel and interesting, but I'm willing to suspend judgment on that for now. So, again, like the field I propose to study, my talk on nano is largely about the future. Perhaps not a fantastic voyage, but an ethno-graphy of a specific kind. 

I'm left with lots of questions and I expect and hope that you will have some questions for me, as well. Thank you. 
(applause)
 So we could probably have lights so I can see people. 
(inaudible)
 
- I'll say I'm an engineer. The use of interference pattern, I have a feeling that you have a different meaning that what I would have when I say interference pattern. Because the images that you were showing are not created from interferometry, or any kind of interference, per se. So what do you mean when you're saying these were interference patterns? 

- It's a way of glossing how the tip is interacting with the surface and generating measures through the energies that are exchanged. Those are later converted through the programming of instruments into these images. 
- Light, also, you would say then is creating interference, because light is interacting? 
- It's not projecting through the tip, though. Is that right? 
- It depends on the kind of probe you're talking about. And one could say that the properties of the sample are existing, as light exists in the room, and that you're using a sensor to detect those properties. And so that's why I'm struggling with the term interference pattern. Are you saying that it's interference in a sense of not interferometric, but interference as in the sense that you're not allowed to get an accurate image because of the obstacle of the instrument being in your way? 
- I don't know. 

I think you're going, first of all, you're going way more technical than I'm capable of doing with this stuff. Where I got this idea of interference pattern is, I mentioned a conference I went to in October. There was a researcher who does nanotechnology. He told the audience, you know, that people look at these pictures and they think they're seeing images of atoms, right? The peaks and the things around corrals, or the whatever. And his take on that was that, well, in some of these images at least, they resolve into shapes that you could call them atoms, but that the shapes are created by interference patterns in the interaction of the tip with the surface. So that's what I was using as a resource there. Did that make sense to you? 
- There are some specific cases where that's true. But I think in the general terms, that's not necessarily. 

- Okay, well, I'd like to talk to you about that later. This is something that I would like to refine. The point is that with probe microscopy, there is this interaction between a surface and the probe that is very different from an optical type of interaction. And that's basically where I'd like to make the distinction for the purposes of my talk. But I'm sure you could instruct me greatly on where and how that comes into play. Yeah? 
- First of all, I love your epistemological nostalgia. It's a wonderful concept that's new to me. My question is about your question. How do they decide when nano manipulation has gone too far? 

Are you talking about visualizing nano scales? And then manipulating, what cues for you would kind of evoke gone too far? 
- Well I don't know for nano stuff, because, as I said, and I wasn't kidding. I'm proposing to go into an area that I haven't gone into yet. Where I developed that theme of epistemological nostalgia was in an investigation years ago of digital image processing in astronomy. I spent a lot of time with a guy who develops color-enhanced imagery of deep space phenomena like some of those things I showed you before. He had a conception of how much he could tease it by adding infrared to the mix of the red, green and blue color filters that he used. So there was this sense of not wanting to go too far in that direction. With nano, I don't know. I think it's probably very different in different fields, depending on what the preconception of the objects being examined would be. 

Whether, you know, going into freehand drawings of nanotubes would be okay, even though the imagery you would get of such things would be not looking like that. Or DNA for instance, we accept the model of DNA, even though it would be really quite remarkable to visualize DNA with any instrument that way. So it's a question that I want to ask to ethnographic sites where I would go visit. I don't have an answer to it, but it's the type of question I would want to ask to see how they resolve that question. 
- We had a question about interference, and whether the same could be said of photography, I hope this is a fair question. It comes from some of my own research on photography. Chemical soaked specimens, light sensitive chemicals, and the use of the contact prints, where in that case, the capacity for light to alter the thing, and also alter the paper, is part of the object that's produced for study, which one could call an epistemological thing. And also, an haptic process, even though we now understand the properties in an optical sense. So I guess I'm wondering if some of the questions you raise have implications for rethinking the history of what we have classified as optical. 
- I think you're right about that. 

The idea of the haptic and the manipulative quality of nano images is something in the recent book by Daston and Galison. And when I read that, I immediately thought of examples of things I had looked at in the past that seemed to have at least some of that quality. Whereas they want to make, kind of a big break through, because you can push atoms around with a probe microscope. But that's a lot different than using a light microscope where or a transmission electron microscope where you prepare the stuff in advance, and it's a lot of work doing that. But you're not actually using the optical apparatus to manipulate the field. But I think your point's well taken. There's a lot of work in the real time work of using the instruments, developing the stuff, where that kind of working with surfaces, certainly with digital images processing. There's lots and lots of that kind of work being done. It's an intriguing distinction. I think that historically, I would question it. 

I'm not an historian that would be able to really refute what they say with any kind of authority. But I think it raises intriguing questions that would take us back to earlier types of technologies that perhaps would allow us to see what some of us have seen about them already. Yes? 
(inaudible)
 
- The second thing that occurred to me was, I work with maps. 
(inaudible)
 You can utilize a representation to actually change what people think. That's something that I try to keep in mind. 
(inaudible)

 In visualizing social networks-- 
(inaudible)
 To try and create some kind of graphical visualization, and graphs of relationships. While I'm focused a lot on the mechanics of creating those and also making them look beautiful, I wonder about how much politically charged my message is, as I'm thinking about it. And the last point, is sort of based on that I'm also very much enrolled in the whole notion copyrights, particularly copyrights which relate specifically to protection of rights over creative expression. The idea behind science is that science is objective. I'm very actively involved in this whole movement of trying to make scientific data freely accessible to everyone, all because it's fact. It's not copyright. As you very well said, I work with satellite imagery, the photograph that you see is just a bunch of numbers on a disk. You know, as soon as you make it into a photograph, it becomes something that is copyrightable, while the numbers behind it are not copyrightable. 

That tension is kind of difficult to solve. I don't have a question, just random thoughts. 
- Again, as I predicted, the last one would be the one I remember. It's one that kind of piques me the most, because I actually teach an undergraduate course on law and science. I deal a lot with the patenting, you know the debates about patenting of largely biotechnical stuff. I haven't come across that issue with copyrighting. That's a very intriguing thing that you can copyright the image but not the numbers. That, I'd like to look into. That would be very interesting. And of course, this whole idea that science and art are kind of converging in a certain way does bring in copyrights. 

Again, in the world of patenting, you know, there's this distinction which has been pretty much blown out of the water in biotechnology between a thing of nature and an invention. And of course, social constructionists get blamed for getting rid of things of nature. But you know, the legal apparatus has done a much better job. The patent office and the patent apparatus have pretty much taken care of nature. Everything's patentable in invention right now. So it'd be interesting to see where that line would be drawn. 
(inaudible)
 Well there are interesting case laws. And I don't know about Dolly the sheep, but certainly about you know, who owns the genes of genetically re-modified plants. Interesting cases. 

But to have copyright in there is very interesting. 
(inaudible)
 
- You're not really talking about what you said that he was talking about, the phenomenon, representing what phenomenon really? 
- No, making things look like what they are. 
- Making things look like what they are? 
- Yeah, where he got that from, he was doing, I wouldn't call it a study, but I think he was talking to somebody who does advertising. So one of the things the advertisers try to do is to make the scenes look like recognizable scenes. So their art is to present these vignettes in a way that the things in vignette look like what they are. And in a paper I wrote years ago, I think I distributed it for the workshop tomorrow, I played around with the idea of simulating things to look like what they are. 

It relates to this epistemological nostalgia thing in the sense that given certain types of, well, with the case with the numbers, you can make the numbers look like a lot of different things. So the question is what are you going to make it look like? In many cases, it's made to look like something familiar. Or, you know, the thing that I think that's interesting for art historians, one of the things, would be where do they draw upon familiar conventions of art, or representation, or photography, in addition to the familiar looks of things that we know about. There would be familiar styles, color palettes, and things of that sort, in which things would appear. So it's part of that tension between the conservatism of innovation and the exploitation of novel tools and practices. So it's that tension. And nostalgia is to try to draw upon familiar tropes, familiar images, familiar ways of making things that appeal to the past in a sense. 
(inaudible)
 Again, I'm alert to this. 

I think it's going there. I think it would have to, to some extent. And yet, of course, a lot of about nano that has been hyped, at least in the popular domain is that it's completely new. This is, you know, this is something we haven't seen before. And even in Daston and Galison, there's a sense that there's a new form of objectivity being created at this domain. And yet, like the nano louse thing, I mean, there's a very hyper-realistic look to that, even though it's a complete fantasy, although the platelets look like hyper-real platelets. There is this sense of photographic realism being exploited.