Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves (24 page)

He finally resumed his trip to England, where he underwent further treatment. There, Muybridge studied the newest photography techniques—and improved on them. He soon was granted two patents for photo-related inventions.

When he returned to San Francisco in 1867, he was no longer a publisher’s agent and bookseller but rather a professional photographer with cutting-edge skills and an artistic talent none of his friends had previously seen. He quickly gained wide renown.

His big break came in 1872, when former California governor Leland Stanford, a wealthy racehorse owner, asked Muybridge to undertake a very specific photographic study. This involved an issue debated endlessly in racing circles: whether all four feet of a horse are ever off the ground at the same time while the animal is trotting or galloping.

No one could tell by simply watching. Artists had always painted galloping horses with either one foot on the ground or all four feet in the air simultaneously—often with the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear. Stanford wanted to know once and for all. He offered Muybridge a handsome sum if he could settle the debate.

Muybridge did not fool around. He took a series of photos in 1878 by positioning numerous glass-plate cameras in a line along the edge of a track. The horse would trigger each camera in sequence by hitting a thread attached to the shutter as it passed by. Muybridge hung up white sheets behind the cameras to reflect the maximum amount of light during these stop-action brief exposures. Later he assembled the photos as silhouettes onto a spinning disk that fit easily onto a tabletop. The viewer would look at the spinning disk through a slit and see one photo at a time. It imparted the striking illusion of smooth motion. Muybridge invented this device, which he called a zoopraxiscope.

It not only clearly revealed the running horse’s gait but also became all the rage. Scientific American did a story on it in which Muybridge was portrayed as a modern Isaac Newton. (History regards the device as so groundbreaking that in 2012, on its one hundredth anniversary, Google ran a continuous repeating Google Doodle of the “movie.”)

Soon called The Horse in Motion (or, alternatively, Sallie Gardner at a Gallop), it is not only the world’s first bit of cinema but also opened the floodgates for others’ stop-action images, which uncovered the hidden, blurry universe of ultrafast physical events. The zoopraxiscope itself was the main inspiration for Thomas Edison’s first commercial film-viewing system, the kinetoscope.

As for the horse-gait debates, Muybridge’s sequence reveals not just a galloping horse with all four feet off the ground. It also shows that this fully airborne moment did not happen when the horse’s legs were extended to the front and back, as depicted by eighteenth-and nineteenth-century illustrators. Rather, a horse is fully airborne only with all its legs bunched beneath its body, during the moment when it is transitioning from “pulling” with the front legs to “pushing” with the back ones.

This, plus later high-speed photographic sequences Muybridge created, such as a famous “movie” of a trotting bison, might conclude his relevance to our story, except that his life in San Francisco kept getting too weird to let us leave him just yet.

In 1872, at age forty-two, he married a twenty-one-year-old divorcée named Flora Shallcross Stone. Three years later, Muybridge happened upon a letter to his young wife from one of her friends, the drama critic Major Harry Larkyns, which made him suspect that Larkyns might be the father of their seven-month-old son, Florado. (His suspicions may not have been too far-fetched; unbeknownst to him, she’d already sent Larkyns a photo of the boy with the caption LITTLE HARRY.)

On October 17, 1875, Muybridge embarked on the six-hour trip from San Francisco to the tiny town of Calistoga, in Napa County, where he tracked down Larkyns. Finding himself face-to-face with the man, Muybridge said, melodramatically, “Good evening, Major. My name is Muybridge, and here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife.”

With that, Muybridge shot him in the chest at point-blank range. When Larkyns died that night, Muybridge was arrested, locked in jail, and charged with murder. The story gained continual headlines in the gossipy city to the south, as did the subsequent trial.

This, too, proved high theater. Leland Stanford, the former governor, helped pay for a top-notch defense attorney, who pleaded insanity on behalf of his client and produced a series of longtime Muybridge friends who testified that his personality had become unstable after the stagecoach accident fifteen years earlier. But the photographer undercut the insanity plea by insisting that he had killed his wife’s suspected lover deliberately and, indeed, had planned it ahead of time.

The jury didn’t know what to make of the man sitting in the defendant’s chair, who alternated between vacant, Parkinson’s-like detachment and loud emotional outbursts. Was he crazy or not? In the end they rejected the insanity defense but found him not guilty anyway, because they viewed Larkyn’s murder as an instance of justifiable homicide.

Muybridge sailed to South America on an extended photo shoot after his acquittal. His wife, Flora, tried to obtain a divorce while he was gone, but her petition was rejected by a judge. Five months after the trial, she fell ill and died at the age of twenty-four. Their son, Florado Helios Muybridge, was placed in an orphanage by Muybridge, who had almost nothing to do with him thereafter. (Later photographs of the fully grown Florado Muybridge show him strongly resembling Muybridge and not Larkyns.) The boy worked all his life as a ranch hand and gardener and in 1944, at the age of seventy, was run over and killed by a car in Sacramento. Muybridge himself continued perfecting stop-action photography using a new shutter design he developed, which featured previously unheard-of speeds of a thousandth of a second. In 1894, after the prolific photographer produced more than one hundred thousand action sequences, he returned to England, where he authored two bestselling books of his photographs, Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901). He died at age seventy-four while living with his cousin Catherine Smith.

Muybridge paved the way for stop-action photography and slow-motion cinematography, and others soon followed, until the invisible high-speed world was available to everyone. The Austrian physicist Peter Salcher captured a bullet in flight in 1886, and by the middle of the twentieth century technicians were able to achieve shutter speeds in the microsecond range, a thousand times faster than Muybridge’s. One image, taken at a shutter speed of just three-millionths of a second, freezes the spine-chilling opening moments of an atomic bomb blast.

The fastest events require the fastest shutter speeds. A special US government rapatronic camera captured this 1952 atomic bomb test one millisecond after detonation. The exposure was three millionths of a second. Notice the tower still momentarily remains unvaporized. Eerie “rope tricks” of heat, like feelers, spread downward along the unseen mooring cables as they are being vaporized. (US Air Force 1352nd Photographic Group, Lookout Mountain Station)

Most of this high-speed action coexists with our everyday lives. We readily perceive the flicker in old silent movies, which run at sixteen frames per second. But we see a steady light in modern cinema’s seventy-two frames per second.4 The human “flicker fusion threshold” is widely regarded as twenty flashes per second. You can experiment yourself if you still have an old strobe light in the attic left over from those psychedelic 1970s parties. Set it to twenty, then twenty-five, then thirty, and see when separate flashes seem to be replaced by solid illumination.

Some say they can perceive those annoying fluorescent lightbulbs flicker, even though the motion must occur at a minimum of three times the usual flicker fusion threshold rate. The ability to detect flickering varies considerably from person to person. Reactions to fast events vary among animals as well. We go to swat a fly, but it leaps out of the way. Faced with a looming swatter, a fly’s tiny brain calculates the threat’s location, creates an escape plan, and places its legs in an optimal position to hop in the opposite direction—all within a tenth of a second, which happens to be the same duration as an eyeblink.

This maneuver on the part of the fly outwits some fast-reacting animals, such as cats, who can’t reliably catch flies. But monkeys can; they seem to live in a faster time and appear to almost effortlessly pick flies up. Chickens, too, routinely peck flies off a surface.

These events and processes unfold continually around us. In the animal kingdom, the fastest natural motions are the startle reflexes. Such lightning-quick defensive responses often involve an instinct to escape from a sudden threatening situation. They work by using neural electrical mechanisms that completely bypass cerebral processing and voluntary control. Because the circuits involved are shorter, the durations of startle reflexes are also much shorter than those of voluntary actions. In people, such reflexes can occur in an impressive one-thirtieth of a second. Rats can react even faster, with responses measured at speeds as swift as a thousandth of a second.

Even actions in nonemergency situations can be virtually eyeblink fast. The mandibles of certain ants close around prey in just one-seventeenth of a second and clamp down at eighty miles per hour. Moles, which most of us hardly regard as sprightly, react as soon as their nasal appendages contact a potential food source underground. They strike out in a seventh of a second, about the time it takes to say the second “pa” in the word papa.

Among the all-time fastest routine reaction speeds in nature are those observed recently in skipper butterflies. When confronted with a sudden bright light, they respond with a startle reflex in one-sixtieth of a second. Who would imagine that butterflies rank among Earth’s quickest-reacting creatures?

Nonbiological processes often proceed faster—much faster—than those in animals and humans. Some chemical reactions happen ten million times faster than an eyeblink, although other reactions, such as iron oxidation (rusting), can take years to unfold.5 The very speediest? It’s nothing exotic: the creation of water from the bonding of oxygen and hydrogen. The protons assume their new positions on a picosecond timescale—a few trillionths of a second.

The odd thing is: Why is water a liquid? Composed mostly of the tiniest, lightest atom in the cosmos, it’s such a small, featherweight molecule that it ought to be a gas at room temperature. Other molecules of water’s size are gases. Compounds such as methane (CH4) and stinky hydrogen sulfide (H2S) closely resemble water in terms of mass and size. Yet they’re gases in all natural earthly conditions, even in the Antarctic. Methane boils from liquid to gas at minus 258 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly five hundred degrees lower than water’s 212 degrees Fahrenheit. If water behaved “normally,” our veins would be filled with vapor, meaning that Earth would be lifeless.

Water’s bizarre fluid nature happens because of geometry: when its hydrogen and oxygen atoms connect, they form an odd bend slightly greater than a right angle. This gives the molecule a bit of a polarity, a charge, that lets it weakly connect with other water molecules. It takes a lot more kinetic energy (heat) to break the hydrogen bonds and free the water molecules as a gas. Recent studies show that such hydrogen bonding involves no more than three molecules at a time and takes place in about a trillionth of a second. In a picosecond, the momentarily larger triad structure makes the molecule act as if it’s much bigger than it really is. Thus water behaves as a liquid at room temperature even though those fragile threesomes come and go hundreds of times each billionth of a second.

We couldn’t laugh until we cried—or salivate or bleed or own a brain—without these momentary ultrafast connections.

Picosecond-level activities lie beyond our imagination. Such a time frame requires an example to be even roughly grasped. A photon, then, traveling at the speed of light can circle the earth eight and a half times in one second, but such a light particle would only be able to travel the width of two human hairs in a picosecond, a trillionth of a second.

A trillion seconds? That’s thirty-two thousand years. A trillion seconds have not elapsed since we first gained the ability to make fire. A trillion is truly enormous; a trillionth unimaginably tiny.

Even trying to conceive of a mere nanosecond, a paltry billionth of a second, can tax our minds, though the word billion has become commonplace in today’s technologies. We now routinely exploit events that happen in a nanosecond when we use distance-finding devices, for example. The new laser measuring tools, available in any hardware store, shoot pulses of light across a room. A built-in photometer perceives the pinpoint beam reflected from the far wall and calculates the time it takes for the light to make the round-trip. Each nanosecond delay in the light’s echo translates to a distance of 11.8 inches. Aim the device next at the adjoining wall and it’ll calculate the room’s area. Now you know how much paint or carpet to buy. You can toss the old tape measure.

Not all chemical or physical reactions are that fast, of course. Reaction speed depends on the concentration of the substance; whether it’s a gas, liquid, or solid; its temperature; and sometimes even bizarre factors such as the room’s brightness. Brightness? Since light is energy, it can provide the reacting particles with additional oomph and push them over the edge from slow to fast. Chemists love to demonstrate this by mixing ordinary natural gas with chlorine. When this is done in a dark room, the reaction barely happens at all. It’s totally sluggish. Under dim light the reaction speeds up greatly. Do it in direct sunlight, however, and you get an explosion. Light makes the reaction instantaneous.

But the greatest motion influencer is temperature. Turn up the heat, and things speed up. Actually, heat is simply our word for atoms moving, nothing more. It makes sense, then, that the hotter something is the faster its reactions proceed, since electrical bonds between molecules are being broken, electron excitations are occurring, and there is more contact between atoms.