Editorial
 
You might be forgiven for thinking that the Newsletter had become an annual event. Certainly, there has seldom been much to write about, and I have been hampered by health problems, but, thank goodness, those are now past and I can get about again. Once I was ready to buckle down to it, a further difficulty was caused by my computer deciding to block all my files, including material I had already prepared for the Newsletter, and in order to get it going again I was forced to reconfigure the horrible machine from scratch. However, all is well again, so at last here is the December Newsletter.

The big event of the year has been our conference on Holography in the Modern Museum. Having tried in vain some years ago to interest the major UK museums in the possibilities of holography, I was none too optimistic about the possible attendance at the conference; but in the event some fifty delegates came, including many from the museums themselves. The high spot of the conference was a presentation by our President to the National Maritime Museum of the hologram of Harrison’s famous chronometer. A summary of the proceedings is included in this Newsletter, and you can download a recording of the entire proceedings, with notes, courtesy of Kaveh Bazargan, who recorded it live and complete on the day, from this website http://rivervalley.tv/conferences/himm2008/media.

I was privileged to represent the Group at the two-day event at the Motorcycle Museum last month, sponsored by Jessops, at which a number of distinguished members of the photographic fraternity gave presentations on their specialities, as well as representatives from the major camera manufacturers. Others represented included the Historical, Architectural & Heritage, Digital, Technical & Scientific and Nature Groups. I am pleased to say that there was considerable interest in holography, and I was kept pretty busy on both days. I also understand that the RPS recruited some thirty new members, which has to be a good thing.

It is sad to have to report the death of another pioneer of holography, the seemingly indestructible Harriet Casdin-Silver. A short appreciation of her contribution to holography is included.

Finally, the time for nominations for RPS Annual Awards is here again. The Awards Ceremony, held early in October, is a big occasion, and this year I was disappointed to find that I was the only representative of the Holography Group present. Nomination papers are available from Jo McDonald at RPS HQ. You can nominate anyone – they don’t have to be RPS members, and the Awards Committee is always anxious to have as many names as possible. There are sixteen different categories of Award, and if you can think of just one person who might be considered for one of these, get in touch with Jo.

And now, a very happy Christmas and a successful New Year to all our readers!

Graham Saxby

Harriet Casdin-Silver, 1925-2008

Harriet Casdin-Silver has been described as the international doyenne of holography, and was arguably the most important artist in the early history of the medium. She was certainly one of the earliest, beginning her work as early as 1968 and producing one of her most famous works, the pseudoscopic Equivocal Forks (1977) at a time when replay by laser was more or less mandatory. Another notorious image was A Woman, a 360º cylindrical stereogram of her own head, opened out to a wide arc and displaying all the inevitably resulting distortions. She had her own studio in Boston, close to MIT, but also worked at labs in Europe, and was a frequent visitor to the UK. She had a number of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Holography in New York, and was responsible for a pioneering open-air exhibition at MIT. Harriet was an ardent feminist, and devoted her final years to depictions of the female body in very large digital prints. To call her personality eccentric is perhaps a little unfair; but she certainly impressed her character on everyone who met her. Her funeral was attended by more than a hundred well-wishers.

Holography in the Modern Museum
Holography in museums began in the 1970s in the Soviet Union, once Yuri Denisyuk’s revolutionary discoveries had been accepted by the authorities, and almost immediately assumed considerable importance in the USSR, as it was now possible to mount travelling exhibitions of holograms of the numerous artefacts found throughout this vast and archaeologically important area. Visitors to one such exhibition in London were astonished by the quality of the Soviet images, made as they were by such a fundamentally simple process. Holography has so far nor really caught on in Western museums. Indeed, as I mentioned in my editorial, when I attempted some years ago to interest British museums in the technology, my efforts were met with universal apathy and even hostility – though the V&A had shown interest in the fine-art images produced at the Royal College of Art, and had even purchased some of these. So it was gratifying at this conference to see such a good attendance – and enthusiasm.

I suspect that one of the reasons at the time for the indifference to holography in museums was less an antipathy to ‘souvenir shop gimmicks’ (as the British Museum not very tactfully put it) than to the then lack of colour. Although the Soviet holograms were all monochrome, they varied in hue from golden to almost white, and thus were close to the colour of the ancient artefacts. Plainly, though, this would not have been adequate in the depiction of Greek vases or Georgian jewellery. Our first speaker, Hans Bjelkhagen (current Chairman of the Holography Group) made this clear. His presentation was largely concerned with the accuracy of colour reproduction in full-colour holography. Most holography in colour is carried out as in photography with three basic colours, red, green and blue. The difference in holography is that the illuminants are lasers, which operate at single wavelengths, and objects that have a peak reflection in between these wavelengths show degradations in saturation and errors in overall hue. Using standard test cards, the speaker showed that using just three wavelengths resulted in errors amounting to 30% or more. He then showed that by introducing a fourth source and choosing appropriate wavelengths, the errors could be reduced to 3– 4% and this was plainly the way colour holography should go. However, the beautiful colour images that he showed demonstrated that there is still a lot of mileage in three-laser work, provided the subject matter is chosen carefully. He finished by confidently predicting the future adoption of holography by museums once colour holography became widespread.

The next speaker was John Webster, a former Chairman of the Group, and an old hand with regard to applied holography, having at one time worked in holographic metrology for the CEGB at Marchwood. He told us of the importance of the ruby pulse laser in the interferometric measurement of distortion and deterioration in ancient artefacts, illustrating this by his work in Rome on the 2nd century equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which had suffered over the centuries from botched attempts at conservation. He also described the medical uses of holography, and holographic methods for the detection of subsurface damage in old oil paintings. He was followed by Dietmar Öhlmann of Syn4D GmbH, who had stepped in at short notice to replace Dr Vladimir Markov, who was indisposed. Dietmar described the work of his company in setting up exhibitions in German art museums, and discussed the role of digitally created holograms in such exhibitions. The next item was a joint presentation by Yves Gentet of the Art & Science Holographic Studios, Bordeaux, and Michael Shevtov, a former collaborator with Yuri Denisyuk at the Vavilov Institute in St Petersburg. They described their collaboration in developing a process whereby a digital image in full colour could be won from a museum artefact, and reproduced, also digitally, as a hologram in full colour; they backed this up with some remarkable (if a little garish) colour 3D images.

To conclude the morning, Martin Richardson of De Montfort University described how he, along with Jeff Blyth of Smart Holograms and Mike Medora of Colour holographic, had succeeded in making holograms of Harrison’s famous chronometer, the timepiece that enabled mariners for the first time to pinpoint their exact geographical position at sea. The culmination of the morning’s events was a presentation by our President Barry Senior of copies of the two holograms to Jonathan Betts of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. A photograph by Barry’s wife Fiona Alison FRPS of the presentation appears on our cover [see top of this page].

After an excellent buffet lunch, during which there was time for viewing a small exhibition of relevant (and top quality) holograms staged by Jonathan Ross, our Treasurer, the afternoon session was opened by Andy Pepper, who examined the psychology of the visual processes associated with viewing three-dimensional images, showing some amusing candid photographs taken at exhibitions of holography. He was followed by Matthias Lauk, one of the earliest collectors of fine-art holograms, who has been associated with the curating of over 300 exhibitions of holography. Calling his presentation ‘A Modern Sleeping Beauty Syndrome’, he compared the histories of photography and holography, and the initial reluctance of the body of art critique to accept either as an art form. He suggested that holography might now be on the point of being accepted by the art fraternity, largely owing to vast improvements in technique over the past ten years.

Hiroshi Yoshikawa of Kun Shan University, Taiwan, brought us back to earth with a detailed account of research by Nikon University, Japan, into digital 3D imaging, explaining how members of the Department of Electronics had succeeded in solving many of the problems faced by Stephen Benton’s team at MIT, and were now in a position to produce holographic video at full running speed and a resolution of 4096 × 8192 dots in full colour and full parallax. Next was Sarah Maline of the University of Maine at Farmington, USA, a regular attendee at holographic conferences, who discussed the aesthetics and philosophy behind the making and display of art holography. The conference was wound up by a presentation by Frank de Freitas, whose website is well known among holographic net surfers. Frank was unable to attend personally, but had sent a video of a project by Englewood High School, Jacksonville, Florida, which he had helped to oversee, to make holograms of exhibits in the Civil War section of the Jacksonville Museum of Science and History.

The exhibition closed with a vote of thanks to the organisers of the Conference, in particular Dr Martin Richardson, who had arranged all the accommodation and catering, and to the President for his part in the presentation ceremony.

The Holographic Universe Revisited.
In the past, as regular readers of the Newsletter will be aware, I have been more than somewhat dismissive of the homespun philosophies that assert that the human brain is a kind of hologram, or even that the entire universe is a hologram. Most of these ideas emanate from characters who plainly know little or nothing about either neurophysiology or astrophysics. One or two, however, are worth a second look. For example, the late David Baum, a protagonist in the more obscure reaches of quantum physics, produced a book in the 1980s called Wholeness and the Implicate Order. The first half was a fairly straightforward introduction to the ideas behind quantum physics. The second half introduced his more arcane ideas, culminating in a theory of human consciousness that suggested a holographic model. This section became progressively dense and obscure (to the point of total opacity, at least as far as I was concerned). It seems I was not alone, as the book was received by the scientific community in a blaze of apathy. The problem of human (and animal) consciousness has now reverted more or less completely to the realms of neurophysiology, where it probably belongs, and the holographic metaphor seemed to have lapsed into limbo.

In the December issue of Physics World, the house journal of the Institute of Physics, there is an extended review of a book by the distinguished American physicist Leonard Susskind, whom many regard as another Richard Feynman, with the same legacy of wit and humour, but without the silly pranks. The reviewer is John Preskill, who was one of Susskind’s star students. The Black Hole War, published by Little, Brown, deals basically with the problem of the way in which black holes may, surprisingly, leak information –  something discovered by Stephen Hawking some years back. However, in the Hawking universe this information can never be complete, which is the reason for the book’s subtitle My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. Skipping over the arguments, which involve some neat footwork with string theory, Susskind’s thesis is a development of an idea put about by the Dutch physicist Gerard ’t Hooft in the 1980s, which suggests that as in a hologram all the information about a 3D solid can be encoded on its 2D surface, so it must be possible to construct explicit models of quantum gravity that exhibit this holographic duality. (Hawking did finally concede that information may in fact be totally conserved.)

As most physicists are aware, the case for string theory is still far from watertight, and theories of this type rest on fairly shaky foundations. But the thought is certainly interesting. I haven’t yet had time to get down properly to the book itself, but I am about to do so, so watch this space. At the very least, there is something here for the DPBI to get its teeth into: see the following effusion!

Graham Saxby

Department of Partly-Baked Ideas
Taking the hint from the above, the DPBI has been having a hard think about its more mundane implications. Certainly you can record and replay 3D information on and from a two-dimensional surface: every ten-pound note provides evidence for this, though an embossed surface isn’t strictly 2D. But the information could equally have been coded in dark and light stripes, and would then work equally well as a true two-dimensional record of a 3D object. The idea of coding for ‘one dimension up’ applies to a lower dimension count too: the last years of Yuri Denisyuk’s research were largely devoted to producing one-dimensional holograms that encoded 2D objects. This suggests that if a two-dimensional hologram can encode a 3D subject, perhaps a three-dimensional hologram might encode a 4D subject?

In 1884 Edwin Abbott wrote an allegorical novella entitled Flatland, in which a two-dimensional world was peopled by geometric shapes. When a sphere happened to cross the plane they lived in, they were unable to comprehend this, as all they could perceive was a point that swelled into a circle and then shrank to a point again before disappearing. This interesting concept has been used by philosophers of physics to suggest that there may be a fourth dimension orthogonal to the three we usually perceive, but which we cannot comprehend. Certainly the idea doesn’t raise any mathematical objections: there are no problems in introducing such a dimension into vector algebra. The depiction of a four-dimensional object faces practical difficulties, of course. The concept can best be built up by considering the way each dimension can be folded so as to give the next. If you take a straight line, you can put an equal line on each side, add one more, and fold it to produce a square. If you take a square, add a square on each side and add one more, you can fold the result to make a cube. Now take a cube, put a cube on each side and add one more, and plainly you should have the basis for folding it into a 4D object or ‘hypercube’. Such a figure is called a tesseract, and one of these appears, perhaps whimsically, on the face of the Saxby Medal. But how to go about folding it?

(A number of valiant attempts appear in Wikipedia under Tesseract.) The DPBI remembers a short story in which an eccentric character builds a house in the shape of a tesseract, and during a freak storm the house collapses into a four-dimensional cube, with the result that anyone leaving the bedroom might find himself in the kitchen or dining room, and in going out of the front door would find himself walking into the bedroom!

Some aspects of string theory do indeed require extra dimensions in the theory’s attempts to tie up the wave and quantum aspects of matter with gravity; supporting evidence is eagerly being looked for via the Large Hadron Collider (once it is up and running). But for the meantime the DPBI contents itself with the problem of producing a three-dimensional hologram to replay a hypercube for the world to gaze at. What it will look like, and how it will behave, is a matter that seems at present to be beyond the creative imagination of Wikipedia. How to create the hologram, and how to replay it, is a problem that the DPBI now throws open to the holographic fraternity.