The site and blog of author W. Patrick McCray
Screen Shot 2015-10-17 at 3.46.55 PM Screen Shot 2016-08-25 at 5.12.39 PM If you check on my blog from time to time, you'll have noticed that I've slowed down with posting new entries. I'm currently writing a new book and that's been getting the majority of my attention (in addition to all the other professor-y things I do like teach classes).The new book is under contract with The MIT Press . I'm…
When your event’s promotional poster promises that, for a mere $3 a ticket, “You will hear the body broadcast its sounds * You will see without light * You will see dancers float on air” and concludes with “It’s Important That You Attend,” there’s bound to be some disappointment. The location for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering only fed into audience and critics' anticipation. Television host…
“Fantasy, dreams, superhuman, science fiction…” – this was how artist Alex Hay described his ideas when first meeting with Billy Klüver and other engineers from Bell Labs. The occasion was a series of planning meetings for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering , a formative moment for the American art & technology movement. “I had ideas,” Hay told an interviewer 1966 about his interest in "machines…
In August 1966, when Life magazine reported on the burgeoning art and technology scene, it highlighted the role of Johan Wilhelm “Billy” Klüver . According to the article, the 38-year-old engineer was “the Edison-Tesla-Steinmetz-Marconi-Leonardo da Vinci of the American avant-garde.” Besides working as a researcher at Bell Labs, Klüver had already collaborated with major artists like Jasper Johns…
50 years ago, accomplished professionals from two supposedly very different communities – high-tech research and avant-garde art – came together and fused at the 69 th Regiment Armory building in New York City. More than three dozen engineers from nearby Bell Laboratories, arguably the world’s preeminent corporate research laboratory, joined with artists like Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and…
Note: This blog post is adapted from a recent essay - a review of Jonathon Keats’s new book You Belong to the Universe - I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books . Enjoy... There are two possible views of Buckminster Fuller. Consider: “Bucky” to friends and family – Fuller was a true American visionary, a solitary innovator who forged ahead as corporate research and development displaced the…
The folks at Science Friday included me today in a story about the ways in which the laser migrated from scientists' labs to art galleries and planetariums . If you liked the show, here's more of the story... This advertisement, published just a few years after the first optical lasers were demonstrated , asked the question: “Where does the laser go from here?” One of the places it went was the…
Yesterday – the anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering spaceflight – Russian billionaire Yuri Milner made international headlines with his announcement of an initial $100 million investment called the Breakthrough Starshot . Starshot’s proposed plan would unfold like this: sometime, decades hence, a rocket ship would deliver a thousand or more craft, each about the size of deck of…
One of the most read - and misread - poems of the 20th century is Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Pervasive in high school English courses, titles of self-help books, and even car advertisements , Frost's poem may have been a celebration of individualism. Or, if read more cruelly, it is a reflection on self-deception used to rationalize one's life choices.Engineer Frank J. Malina certainly…
At the beginning of The Magic Mountain , Thomas Mann’s classic Bildungsroman , Hans Castorp visits a sanitarium high in the Swiss Alps. Originally intending a short visit, Castorp ends up spending seven years in the small town of Davos, transforming from a callow youth to a cosmopolitan man headed for the killing fields of World War One. Last week, I too was in Davos, but as part of the academic…
Can artists help astronomers resolve this unpleasant truth? The places where scientists build telescopes often belonged to other people there before them. For example - before the Spanish arrived, the native Luiseño people occupied land around today's Palomar Observatory. In 1958, American astronomers started building telescopes on Kitt Peak in Arizona, part of the tribal reservation of the Tohono…
Two years ago, the UN General Assembly declared 2015 as the International Year of Light . This “global initiative” is to highlight the “importance of light and optical technologies” in the lives of the world’s citizens. Which technologies? Consider the laser. I’ll bet there’s one within 30 feet of you – in a CD player, a computer mouse, a checkout scanner. Maybe you’re using one to amuse your…
Frank J. Malina had three careers. His first, the one he is best known for – but not nearly well enough – was as an aeronautical engineer. Although Wernher von Braun received the press attention and Time magazine covers, it was the American-born Malina who researched and developed the U.S.'s first space-capable rockets. ((MG Lord's excellent book Astro Turf discusses the historical injustice of a…
(Bloggy Note: I recently appeared on the radio show Science Friday. Host Ira Flatow and I spoke about the history of another collaborative artist/engineer effort . This was the Art and Technology Program that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ran from 1966-1971. After a 50 year hiatus, LACMA has recently rebooted the program. Although very different from the original incarnation, the new…
"[F]rom all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us." (Anglican Book of Common Prayer) In 1972 London’s Birkbeck College invited British-born physicist Freeman J. Dyson to give the school’s annual Bernal Lecture. The lecture series was named after John Desmond Bernal , an Irish crystallographer and molecular biologist. For his lecture topic, Dyson decided to…
“NO MORE SEX!” London’s Daily Herald brought this unexpected news to readers in February 1929. Those intrigued or alarmed enough to continue reading found yet more startling news – “MEN WITH EARS UNDER LUNGS” and “WHAT HUMANS MAY BE LIKE ANOTHER DAY.” All of this was revealed by John Desmond Bernal, a young Irish scientist who had taken a “PEEP INTO THE FUTURE” with his new daring book, The World,…
In 2013, shortly after The Visioneers came out, the publisher sent me on a short book tour. At talks I gave - from San Jose, Los Angeles, & Philadelphia to Seattle and Washington DC - the question I heard most from audiences was "Who is a visioneer today?" My answer was always " Elon Musk ."This week, a new biography of Musk by tech journalist Ashlee Vance comes out. I'm looking forward very much…
Note - A few years ago, I was asked to review Elizabeth Kessle r's 2012 book Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime . The review came out in a fairly obscure academic journal with far less exposure than Kessler's fine book warrants. With the 25th anniversary of the launch of Hubble this week, I wanted to present the review to a wider audience and make a…
Saul, so we’re told, had his conversion experience on the road to Damascus. Astronomers had theirs in labs and machine shops starting in the 1960s.By this, I mean that astronomers developed tools and instruments to convert traditional photographs – made of glass and emulsion – to digital zeros and ones. This began a process that would completely reshape how astronomers work. Once data was in a…
DNA is just chemists' shorthand for deoxyribonucleic acid. Discovered in 1869 by Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss physician, it was the iconic molecule of the 20th century. And now an art and design material for the 21st... For much of the late 20 th century, scientists, writers, and the general public imagined the beautiful, elegant double helix of DNA as information. It was code in the form of a…