Galileo to Kepler, 1597
Like you, I accepted the Copernicun position several years ago and discovered from thence the causes of many natural effects which are doubtless inexplicable by the current theories. I have written up many of my reasons and refutations on the subject, but I have not dared until now to bring them into the open, being warned by the fortunes of Copernicus himself, our master, who procured immortal fame among a few but stepped down among the great crowd (for the foolish are numerous), only to be derided and dishonored. I would dare publish my thoughts if there were many like you; but, since there are not, I shall forebear.

Kepler to Galileo, 1597
I could only have wished that you, who have so profound an insight, would choose another way. You advise us, by your personal example, and in discreetly veiled fashion, to retreat before the general ignorance and not to expose ourselves or heedlessly to oppose the violent attacks of the mob of scholars (and in this you follow Plato and Pythagoras, our true perceptors). But after a tremendous task has been begun in our time, first by Copernicus and then by many very learned mathematicians, and when the assertion that the Earth moves can no longer be considered something new, would it not be much better to pull the wagon to its goal by our joint efforts, now that we have got it under way, and gradually, with powerful voices, to shout down the common herd, which really does not weigh the arguments very carefully? Thus perhaps by cleverness we may bring it to a knowledge of the truth. With your arguments you would at the same time help your comrades who endure so many unjust judgments, for they would obtain either comfort from your agreement or protection from your influential position. It is not only your Italians who cannot believe that they move if they do not feel it, but we in Germany also do not by any means endear ourselves with this idea. Yet there are ways by which we protect ourselves against these difficulties...

Be of good cheer, Galileo, and come out publicly. If I judge correctly, there are only a few of the distinguished mathematicians of Europe who would part company with us, so great is the power of truth. If Italy seems a less favorable place for your publication, and if you look for difficulties there, perhaps Germany will allow us this freedom.

Galileo to Kepler, 1610
My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632
To this end I have taken the Copernican side in the discourse, proceeding as with a pure mathematical hypothesis and striving by every artipee to represent it as superior to supposing the earth motionless–not, indeed absolutely, but as against the arguments of some professed Peripatetics. These men indeed deserve not even that name, for they do not walk about; they are content to adore the shadows, philosophizing not with due circumspection but merely from having memorized a few ill-understood principles.

Papal Condemnation of Galileo, 1633
We say, pronounce, sentence and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of these things which have been detailed in the trial and which you have confessed already, have rendered yourself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspect of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine that is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: namely that Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture. Consequently, you have incurred all the censures and penalties enjoined and promulgated by the sacred Canons and all particular and general laws against such delinquents. We are willing to absolve you from them provided that first, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, in our presence you abjure, curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and every other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic Church in the manner and form we will prescribe to you.

Furthermore, so that this grievous and pernicious error and transgression of yours may not go altogether unpunished, and so that you will be more cautious in future, and an example for others to abstain from delinquencies of this sort, we order that the book Dialogue of Galileo Galilei be prohibited by public edict.

We condemn you to formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure. As a salutary penance we impose on you to recite the seven penitential psalms once a week for the next three years. And we reserve to ourselves the power of moderating, commuting, or taking off, the whole or part of the said penalties and penances.

Abjuration of Galileo, 1633
I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors general against heretical depravity throughout the whole Christian Republic, having before my eyes and touching with my hands, the holy Gospels – swear that I have always believed, do now believe, and by God's help will for the future believe, all that is held, preached, and taught by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church. But whereas – after an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, and that I must hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture – I wrote and printed a book in which I discuss this doctrine already condemned, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favor, without presenting any solution of these; and for this cause I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves.

Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this strong suspicion, reasonably conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Holy Church; and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any heretic, or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor and ordinary of the place where I may be. Further, I swear and promise to fulfill and observe in their integrity all penances that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me by this Holy Office. And, in the event of my contravening, (which God forbid) any of these my promises, protestations, and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canons and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents. So help me God, and these His holy Gospels, which I touch with my hands.

I, the said Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration, and recited it word for word at Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, this twenty-second day of June, 1633.

I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above with my own hand.

quotes taken from Famous Trials: Trial of Galileo Galilei

Update: Peter writes:

I wonder if there has been any statement regarding Galileo, or at least his ideas, by the church since 1633.

In October 1992, Pope John Paul II released this statement.

From the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment down to our own day, the Galileo case has been a sort of "myth", in which the image fabricated out of the events was quite far removed from reality. In this perspective, the Galileo case was the symbol of the Church's supposed rejection of scientific progress, or of "dogmatic" obscurantism opposed to the free search for truth. This myth has played a considerable cultural role. It has helped to anchor a number of scientists of good faith in the idea that there was an incompatibility between the spirit of science and its rules of research on the one hand and the Christian faith on the other. A tragic mutual incomprehension has been interpreted as the reflection of a fundamental opposition between science and faith. The clarifications furnished by recent historical studies enable us to state that this sad misunderstanding now belongs to the past.

Okay, Galileo, you can stop burning now.

Update: Peter once again replies:

Your article contains at the end of sub-section 9 a paragraph:

"Cardinal Poupard has also reminded us that the sentence of 1633 was not irreformable, and that the debate which had not ceased to evolve thereafter, was closed in 1820 with the imprimatur given to the work of Canon Settele.(7)"

This suggested to me an additional significant date in this sequence, 1820. I looked at the end of the document hoping to read a little more only to discover that this reference was omitted from the bibliography.

Using google I think I may have found the missing reference...

And here is the reference in question:

Book Review of Copernico, Galilei e la chiesa:
Fine delta controversia (1820) gli atti del Sant'Uffizio by Brandmuller and Greipl. (1992)

This book was the work cited by Pope John Paul II in his discourse to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1992 as evidence that the Church had already reversed Galileo's sentence of 1633 against teaching Copernicanism when it granted the imprimatur for the publication of Canon G. Settele's Astronomia in 1820. Therefore, the author states, "This explains the subtitle: in that year, 1820, the Copernican controversy was effectively terminated, although it took an extensive search by the authors through the acts of the Holy Office to find that out."

Also following Peter's suggestion, Googling for "imprimatur Canon Settele" brings up some interesting takes on this.

Point of view: Nothing to see here
The Galileo Affair - George Sim Johnston

Galileo's condemnation was certainly unjust, but in no way impugns the infallibility of Catholic dogma. Heliocentricism was never declared a heresy by either ex cathedra pronouncement or an ecumenical council. And as the Pontifical Commission points out, the sentence of 1633 was not irreformable. Galileo's works were eventually removed from the Index and in 1822, at the behest of Pius VII, the Holy Office granted an imprimatur to the work of Canon Settele, in which Copernicanism was presented as a physical fact and no longer as an hypothesis.

Point of view: Secular
Results of the Victory over Galileo

The edition of the Index published in 1819 was as inexorable toward the works of Copernicus and Galileo as its predecessors had been; but in the year 1820 came a crisis. Canon Settele, Professor of Astronomy at Rome, had written an elementary book in which the Copernican system was taken for granted. The Master of the Sacred Palace, Anfossi, as censor of the press, refused to allow the book to be printed unless Settele revised his work and treated the Copernican theory as merely a hypothesis. On this Settele appealed to Pope Pius VII, and the Pope referred the matter to the Congregation of the Holy Office. At last, on the 16th of August, 1820, it was decided that Settele might teach the Copernican system as established, and this decision was approved by the Pope. This aroused considerable discussion, but finally, on the 11th of September, 1822, the cardinals of the Holy Inquisition graciously agreed that ``the printing and publication of works treating of the motion of the earth and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the general opinion of modern astronomers, is permitted at Rome.'' This decree was ratified by Pius VII, but it was not until thirteen years later, in 1835, that there was issued an edition of the Index from which the condemnation of works defending the double motion of the earth was left out.

This was not a moment too soon, for, as if the previous proofs had not been sufficient, each of the motions of the earth was now absolutely demonstrated anew, so as to be recognised by the ordinary observer. The parallax of fixed stars, shown by Bessel as well as other noted astronomers in 1838, clinched forever the doctrine of the revolution of the earth around the sun, and in 1851 the great experiment of Foucault with the pendulum showed to the human eye the earth in motion around its own axis. To make the matter complete, this experiment was publicly made in one of the churches at Rome by the eminent astronomer, Father Secchi, of the Jesuits, in 1852 - just two hundred and twenty years after the Jesuits had done so much to secure Galileo's condemnation.

A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom - Andrew Dickson White 1896

Point of view: Anti-Heliocentric (!)
Robert Sungenis - Catholic Apologetics International

Fourth, regarding Canon Settele, he appealed to Pope Pius VII and the pope referred the matter to the Congregation of the Holy Office. On August 16, 1820, they decided to allow Settele to publish his book. Then on September 11, 1822, the cardinals worded their allowance with the following words: "...the printing and publication of works treating of the motion of the earth and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the general opinion of modern astronomers, is permitted at Rome." This decree was ratified by Pius VII, but it was not until thirteen years later, in 1835, that an edition of the Index which contained no reference to a condemnation of works expressing the motion of the earth.

The most significant fact for this discussion is HOW the cardinals worded their 1822 statement. They do not endorse Copernicanism as an established fact, nor do they suggest that they agree with works asserting Copernicanism. As far as we can tell, the Church is still endorsing Geocentrism. They only thing they state to the contrary is that they will allow works to be published that are in accord with the "general opinion of modern astronomers." Notice that they refer to the OPINION of the astonomers. As far as the Church is concerned, nothing has been proven regarding heliocentrism. It is merely an "opinion" of the astronomers of that day. Thus, citing the Settele case does not prove anything for those who think the Church has adopted heliocentrism.

Plain of Jars

On a windy plateau in northern Laos, hundreds of three- to ten-foot-tall stone urns, some weighing as much as seven tons, lie scattered across a grassy plain. The local inhabitants say that the jars were made to celebrate a great military victory 1,500 years ago. The plain, so the story goes, was ruled by an evil king, named Chao Angka, who oppressed his people so terribly that they appealed to a good king to the north, named Khun Jeuam, to liberate them. Khun Jeuam and his army came, and after waging a great battle on the plain, defeated Chao Angka. Elated, Khun Jeuam ordered the construction of large jars to be used in making wine for a victory celebration.

The jars are at least as old as the legend claims, but if any were used for making wine, that was not their original function. In the 1930s, French archeologist Madeline Colani documented the jars in a 600-page monograph, The Megaliths of Upper Laos, concluding that they were funerary urns carved by a vanished Bronze Age people...

...Then who created the Plain of Jars? Colani, who was more willing to speculate than most modern archeologists, suggested that the sites in Laos were part of a far-ranging Bronze Age culture. She pointed out that some stone jars discovered in the North Cachar Hills of northeastern India, more than 600 miles to the northwest, had roughly the same design and dimensions as the urns in Laos. J.P. Mills and J.H. Hutton, the English scholars who discovered the Indian urns in 1928, found fragments of human bones in them, which they concluded were human remains. They noted that cremation was still being practiced by some of the Kuki, a people who had lived in the North Cachar Hills for centuries.

Colani also called attention to Sa Huynh, a site south of the city of Da Nang, Vietnam. There, urns of baked earth containing some human remains were found buried in the sand dunes along the shores of the South China Sea. Although these remains had not been cremated, the objects interred with them—including ceramic vases, small bronze bells, and beads—resembled those discovered on the Plain of Jars.

"If our interpretation is correct," Colani proposed, "we are in the presence of three links from the same chain: the ancient monoliths of Cachar, the stone jars of Tran Ninh [Xieng Khouang], and the necropolis of Sa Huynh." According to Colani, prehistoric salt traders had followed a caravan route from Sa huynh to Luang Prabang, located near the northwest edge of the Plain of Jars. Perhaps, she concluded, that route once extended all the way to the North Cachar Hills, and the people who lived along it shared a similar culture, burying their dead (cremated or not, depending upon local custom) in megalithic jars. Colani even drew a map with a line connecting the three sites, and suggested that explorers venturing along this line would find yet more jar sites.

Most scholars, including Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy, the Laotian government’s director general of the Department of Museums and Archeology and the country’s only trained archeologist, assign a tentative age of 2,000 years to the stone urns of Xieng Khouang, with outside dates of 500 B.C. to A.D. 300. By the latter date, complex societies based on Indian models were already prospering in the coastal regions and along the major rivers of peninsular Southeast Asia. The rise of the great kingdoms of Angkor (in Cambodia), Champa (in Vietnam), and Pagan (in Myanmar), which reached their zenith by A.D. 1000, long prevented Laos from becoming an independent power. The first kingdom of Laos was established in 1353, with its capital in the uplands at Luang Prabang. By then, the stone jars scattered over the nearby plain belonged to a forgotten past. [more...]

That site in the North Cachar Hills of north-eastern India is mentioned briefly here.

The Plain of Jars is one of the great unanswered questions of Asian archaeology. Who made the enormous megaliths, how they built them, and why, are mysteries which have long been the subject of speculation. Whatever their purpose, one thing is clear - they were the products of an advanced society which flourished in the mountains of northern Laos many centuries ago...

...Mr Thongsa has already made some progress towards solving the mystery of the Plain of Jars. "We presume that the Plain of Jars at Phonsavan was a necropolis, and it serviced a big city," he says.

Excavations at the Plain and at two smaller sites nearby yielded bones enclosed in ceramic urns, or in burial pits covered by tombstones. The jars may have been used as sarcophagi for the initial interment of important citizens, who were subsequently buried in the ground near the jars. Iron objects found during excavation date the civilisation from between the fourth century BC and the second century AD.

A distinctive figure inscribed on several of the funeral urns, known as the ‘frogman’, may link the civilisation to cultures as far afield as Yunnan and Indonesia.

A survey was undertaken to discover the site of the city which the cemetery serviced, and three ancient settlements were identified. In the course of the survey Mr Thongsa also discovered the quarry where the jars were carved, about six kilometres from the main site. It contained several unfinished jars which had been chiselled from stone using iron tools, which the society possessed in abundance. [more...]

The Plain of Jars: Megalithic Culture in Northern Laos (abstract)

Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy

Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Faculties, Australian National University

The megalithic culture related to the Plain of Jars is surrounded by mystery, since the function and history of the jars remains unravelled. There are approximately 40 stone jar sites scattered throughout the province of Xieng Khuang, Northern Laos; the biggest one contains 250 stone jars. The stone jars are made of quarried sandstone that has been shaped and hollowed out; they are more or less cylindrical in shape and measure from 1 to 3.5 m in height with a diameter of 0.5 to 2.5 m. They weigh from between several to more than 20 tons; how they were transported from the quarry site to the "necropolis" site remains unexplained.

According to local legends, these stone jars were used to ferment rice wine so the great army of Khun Cheuang could drink while celebrating the great victory won over a redoubtable enemy. Other legends suggest that the jars were used to store rice, foods or water. Archaeological research has shown that they were related to mortuary practices, but whether they were used as sarcophagi or funerary monuments remains unclear. Secondary burials and pottery jar burials have been found in the ground around the much larger stone jars. Grave goods were composed of: bronze ornaments, iron tools, and a variety of beads made from carnelian, glass and semi-precious stones. If one considers that these grave goods items represented "tradeable" objects, they could thus provide us with an insight into economic aspects of the past society.

None-the-less, the wealth or/and the power possessed by the stone jar users remains far to be fully understood. The costs involved in the manufacture of the stone jars, and also probably in the performance of ritual ceremonies associated with the jars can hardly be estimated, since ownership of the jars remains an open question. Faced also with the paradigms of megalithic monuments, particularly with regards to their functions, one is stunned with the incredible amounts of energy, time and resources that were involved not only in their construction, but also in the realisation of related rites. Some authors, such as Heine-Geldern, have suggested that the megalithic monument served as a symbolic object regulating the survival of the whole group, as it was meant to be built and maintained as a collective operation and in many cases it refers to "the cult of fecundity" or similar beliefs which command the "reproduction" of the community.

When and how the cult of the stone jar ceased in Northern Laos is another mystery although we can attribute this culture to the Metal Age on the ground that objects made of bronze and iron had been uncovered.

What is the legacy the constructors of the stone jars have left us?

Plain of Jars Photo Album

Many interesting things await discovery at the bottom of the Black Sea.

Researchers announced today their discovery of the shipwrecked remains of an ancient trading vessel over 2,300 years old that sank in the Black Sea off the coast of present-day Bulgaria. The vessel dates to the 5th to 3rd century B.C., an era known to scholars as the classical period of ancient Greece—the time of Plato when Athens reached the height of power and Zeus was believed to rule the celestial firmament. The shipwreck is the oldest ever found in the Black Sea. It joins a relatively small handful of other known shipwrecks of the Greek period... Hiebert postulates that the ship may have begun its journey on the south coast of the Black Sea, sailed north across the sea following prevailing currents to the Crimean peninsula, where it loaded its amphora with freshwater catfish, then sailed west along the northern coast of the Black Sea bound for Greece. "This allows us to construct an idea of what Black Sea trade would have been like in the 5th to 4th century B.C.," said Hiebert. "We find many similarities between the southern coast of the Black Sea and the northern coast of the Black Sea. Now we're finding those same similarities with the western coast of the Black Sea," said Hiebert. Hiebert indicated that a growing body of archaeological research in the region is leading scholars to revise their understanding of the Black Sea as a central—rather than peripheral—region of maritime culture. "This is changing our textbooks because here we have a whole culture area that we have to consider. For [those of] us in archaeology and ancient history, this is very exciting," he said. The researchers said they are anxious to return to wreck later this summer to map and excavate the site and gather more amphora samples to further test their hypothesis. "From text and archaeology we've been able to learn quite a bit about the Greek presence in the Black Sea and about the interaction of the Greeks with the people who were already living. But it's only been through indirect evidence that we've been able to approach the trade networks that existed," said maritime archaeologist Cheryl Ward, an assistant professor of archaeology at Florida State University in Tallahassee who has also worked closely with Ballard and Hiebert in the Black Sea region. "This shipwreck provides the first opportunity to see [direct evidence of] that early trade in action."... Crossroads of the Ancient World The Black Sea region has long intrigued undersea explorers and archaeologists. The region lay at the crossroads of ancient Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Evidence suggests that the region was a center of maritime trade for millennia, stretching from Roman and Greek times as far back as the Bronze Age. The Black Sea is also the only sea with a deep-water anoxic layer, oxygen-deprived waters where wood-boring mollusks cannot survive. Because of this, wooden shipwrecks of antiquity can remain in a high state of preservation for thousands of years. The 70-year reign of the Soviet-era Iron Curtain during most of the 20th century prevented many Western explorers and archaeologists from conducting research in much of the Black Sea. "It has only been since the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the Black Sea as an economic unit as we see it today that we're able to actually go in and study [the region] as it actually was in the ancient world—a sort of maritime province itself," said Hiebert. "We're just beginning our research," Hiebert said. "It's only time before an older shipwreck is found." [More...]

The Black Sea is an exciting area for marine archaeology because it is anoxic (i.e. without any dissolved oxygen) and impregnated with Hydrogen sulphide (H₂S). While this has a corrosive effect on metal, it does a good job in preserving organic material. Why is it annoxic? Paradoxically, it's because the Black Sea is fed by so many fresh-water rivers:

[I]t is the rivers which dominate the Black Sea. Only three major rivers - Rhône, Nile and Po - run into the far bigger Mediterranean. But the Black Sea receives five: the Kuban, the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester and, above all. the Danube whose drainage basin extends across the whole of eastern and central Europe aid almost to the borders of France. The Danube alone carries 203 cubic kilometric of fresh water into the Black Sea every year, more than the entire flow of river water into the North Sea. It is these rivers, source of so much life, which over tens of thousands of years extinguished life in the Black Sea depths. The inrush of organic matter from the rivers was too much for the bacteria in sea-water which would normally decompose it. They feed by oxidizing their nutrients, using the dissolved oxygen normally present in sea-water. But when the organic inflow is so great that the supply of dissolved oxygen is used up, then the bacteria turn to another biochemical process: they strip the oxygen from the sulphate ions which are a component of sea-water, creating in this process a residual gas: hydrogen sulphide, or H₂S. This is one of the deadliest substances in the natural world. A full breath of it is usually enough to kill a human being. Oil workers know and dread it; they watch for its rotten-eggs reek and at the first whiff they run. They are right to do so. Hydrogen sulphide almost instantly destroys the sense of smell, so that after the just sniff it is impossible to tell whether one is inhaling more. The Black Sea is the world's biggest single reservoir of hydrogen sulphide. Below a fluctuating depth of between 150 and 200 metres, there is no life. The water is anoxic, without dissolved oxygen, and impregnated with H₂S; because much of the Black Sea is deep, this means that some 90 per cent of the Sea's volume is sterile. It is not the only place in the oceans where H₂S has accumulated. There are anoxic areas on the floor of the Baltic Sea, and under some Norwegian fjords where water circulation is slight. Off the Peruvian coast, hydrogen sulphide is sometimes brought welling up from the depths to the surface in the periodic catastrophes known as ('el Nino', where it kills the entire ecosystem, destroying the coastal fisheries and reacting with paint on ships' bottoms to turn them black (the 'Callao Painter' effect). But the Black Sea deeps remain the largest mass of lifeless water in the world. And yet, until the last hundred years, the Black Sea has seemed to human beings a place of almost monstrous abundance. The poisonous darkness lay far below, unknown to anyone. Above the hundred-fathom line, the 'haloclyne' or 'oxyclyne' which marks the upper limit of anoxia, the Sea boiled with life. Salmon and huge sturgeon - the beluga can reach the length and weight of a small whale - crowded up the big rivers to spawn (caviar was so plentiful that in fourteenth-century Byzantium it was the food of the poor).

Black Sea : The Birthplace of Civilisation and Barbarism by Neal Ascherson, Vintage 1996 pages 4 - 5

Digital photography that's better than film

As you can see the sensor's ability to capture detailed resolution, both in the grayscale and colour resolution goes way beyond what we could expect from even the best Bayer pattern sensors. Images from the new Foveon X3 sensor are more reminicent of super high quality slide scans, but go even beyond that with no trace of grain. Very impressive. This could be the first sensor to truly surpass film.
Foveon X3 exclusive preview

Last November I excerpted from a year old interview with Carver Mead by the American Spectator.

Mead makes some pretty interesting points about the state of obscurantism that typifies our current interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is something he blames on Neils Bohr and the Copenhagen school. Einstein was never happy with the Copenhagen formulation which he thought represented an incomplete understanding of nature.

Mead agrees with Einstein and goes on to claim that a lot of the confusion and counter-intuitiveness of quantum mechanics would go away if we stopped imagining quantum elements like electrons and protons as tiny point particles and instead simply saw them as waves. Of course it helps to have already had a stellar career in solid-state physics under your belt before you start kicking around scientific giants of the likes of Neils Bohr.

Any way, what I wasn't aware of until quite recently was that Carver Mead and his company Foveon have been very much in the news over the past year. Foveon has introduced into the highly competitive digital camera market a new colour imaging technology that seems set to revolutionise consumer and professional digital photography. If you are in the market for a digital camera like I am, it might be prudent to hold on to your cash just a little longer, this technology is hot and makes nearly every digital camera on the market right now look pretty near to obsolete.

At the risk of this sounding a bit like a sales brochure (unpaid mind you), I thought that the details of Foveon's X3 Technology were interesting enough to report here. The way digital cameras work at the moment is pretty brain-dead. Conventional capture technology works by using a single layer of photo detectors arranged in a mosaic pattern to capture the red, green, and blue components of light.






Each photo detector filters for a single colour and it is only though the combination of signals from adjacent detectors that it is possible to calculate the correct colour of each pixel.



One downside of this scheme is that colour filters are very inefficient. A blue filter throws away all red and green information, a green filter throws away all red and blue information and a red filter throws away all green and blue information. In effect, an arrangement like this only uses about one third of the available light.


Also, in order to reconstruct the correct colour of a pixel, the camera needs to perform a large series of interpolations - about 100 calculations per pixel. If you double the resolution of the camera, you need to quadruple number of interpolations. This places a rather large computational burden on the camera which translates into increased battery drain.


Another problem with interpolation is that, at best, it is only an approximation. At worst, it's a major source of artifacts like colour jaggies, rainbows and moiré patterns. This is especially noticeable with fine textures and text.


X3 does far better than this approach, capturing all three colours per pixel by layering the three colour detectors on top of each other in a manner similar to conventional 35mm colour film.




By doing this it becomes possible to take advantage of the natural colour-separating properties of the silicon itself i.e. that light of different wavelengths is absorbed at different depths in the silicon: blue light near the surface (0.2-0.5 microns), green light farther down (0.5-1.5 microns) and red light even deeper (1.5-3.0 microns).




X3 arranges photo detectors at each depth to read the colour components for each pixel directly and without any need for colour interpolation.


In effect you get a camera with increased light sensitivity, more accurate colour measurement, sharper images and far less distortion.

A Side-by-Side Comparison

Foveon X3 technology visibly improves image quality, as any comparison of equivalent pixel counts will demonstrate. In this case, a 2-megapixel file taken with a mosaic sensor is compared to a 2-megapixel file taken with Foveon X3 technology (more fully described as "2 MP x 3 layers" to reflect that each pixel measures three colors instead of one).

Mosaic Capture Foveon X3 Capture

Sharpness Mosaic Foveon X3

As you can see, the camera equipped with Foveon X3 technology takes sharper pictures. That's because it captures twice as much green as mosaic image sensors, and the green wavelengths of light are critical in defining image detail.

Color Detail Mosaic Foveon X3

These pictures demonstrate how Foveon X3 technology improves color detail. The difference is that Foveon X3 image sensors measure full color at each and every pixel location, while mosaic sensors capture 50% of the green and just 25% of the red and blue.

Artifacts Mosaic Foveon X3

As shown here, Foveon X3 technology offers resistance to unpredictable artifacts. A mosaic image sensor is more vulnerable to artifacts, largely because it must rely on complex processing to interpolate the colors it missed. No amount of processing power can completely take the guesswork out of color interpolation.

The Sigma SD 9 is currently the only camera sporting the X3 sensor. At around USD $2000 it's out of the range of most us happy snappers although Foveon claims that cheaper cameras around the USD $400 mark will be on the market fairly soon. thanks to Peter for the original pointer

I thought this review at Amazon of Carver Mead's book by Munir Frederick Bhatti was interesting. Maybe I'll even buy the book one day...

Despite his preface upbraiding physicists for their work of the past 50-75 years, the main text makes reasonable claims based upon well-founded experimental and theoretical results. The book endorses earlier work of Einstein, Feynmann, Reimann, Lorentz, Maxwell, Planck, and others while making computational and conceptual adjustments to accommodate modern experimental results.

Also in the text, Bohr and other die-hard quantum statisticians are continually under attack for their poo-pooing of possible phenomena, algorithms, and concepts behind the observed quantum behavior. Bohr and his clan, apparently, claimed that the statistics made up the whole baseball team of quantum physics--and that we should not, and could not, look further.

In refuting this micro-labotomic approach of Bohr, Dr. Mead makes reference to systems--macroscopic in size--that exhibit quantum behaviors. While he mentions lasers, masers, semiconductors, superconductors, and other systems in the text, the primary results of the book hinge upon experimental results from the field of superconductors. He points out that physics can be split into several areas:

Classical Mechanics explains un-coherent, uncharged systems such as cannon balls, planets, vehicles, etc. Classical Electrodynamics explains un-coherent, charged systems such as conductors, currents, and their fields. Thermodynamics explains how macroscopic statistics, such as temperature and entropy, guide the time evolution of systems. Modern Quantum Mechanics tries to explain coherent, charged systems.

Here 'coherent' refers to quantum coherency, where many particles/atoms march to the same drum such as the photons in a laser, or the electrons in a superconductor, or any isolated one or two particles. Another description of coherency is that the states are quantum entangled; their time-evolution depends upon each other.

The thrust of Carver's book: QM applies to all matter--not just small systems or isolated particles--is well made. He brings up experimental data from superconductors to illustrate that the phenomenon of coherent quantum entanglement can, and does, occur at macroscopic scales; and that such behavior is very quantum. Thus he proves, quite convincingly, that quantum mechanics applies to all coherent systems.

He then closes by making some very important points.

1. He shows that quantum behavior of such systems can be expressed in quantum language (wave function), relativistic language (four-vectors), or electrodynamics (vector potential, scalar potential) in an equivalent fashion. This is important, as it proves that a superconductor is macroscopic, exhibits quantum behavior, and that these quantitative results agree with those found from the other approaches.
   
2. He makes the point that the quantum and relativistic equations show that electromagnetic phenomena consist of two parts: one traveling forward in time; the other backward in time. Feynmann and others have said this for a long time, and he shows how thermodynamics (or un-coherent behavior) forces what we see as only time-evolution in one direction in un-coherent systems.
   
3. He illustrates, modeling single atoms as tiny superconducting resonators, that two atoms that are coherently linked will start exchanging energy. This causes an exponential, positive-feedback loop that ends with each atom in a quantum eigenstate. Thus quantum collapse is neither discontinuous, nor instantaneous; and in fact makes a lot of sense.
   
4. He explains, using four-vectors, that all points on a light-cone are near each other in four space. This point--together with (2)--shows that there's no causality contradiction between relativity and quantum mechanics. For example, he explains that two entangled particles, such as photons light years apart, can affect each other immediately if one falls into an eigenstate, since the four-dimensional distance between them (R1 dot R2) is zero. Although separated in three space, they're neighbors in four space. Through these demonstrations and proofs, he successfully suggests that there is a way to further develop the 'behavior of charged, coherent systems' such that quantum mechanics and relativity will agree--but the conceptual changes he suggests are necessary and must be further developed. Also, he admits that a better, more appropriate mathematical and computational methods will be needed, since the complexity of coherent systems runs as n^2.

Pleasantly, then, the book makes elegant, defensible, mathematical and conceptual steps to resolve some nagging points of understanding. Also, the narrative gives the best introduction to electrodynamics and quantum mechanics that I've ever seen. Since the theoretical criticisms and experimental data are quite valid, his proposed resolutions are eye-opening and valuable. The methods he suggests greatly simply thinking about complicated quantum/classical problems. New approaches for future theoretical research are also suggested. Despite the dark tone in the preface, the book is positive, enlightening, and well anchored to accepted, modern experimental results and theoretical work.

It's a short book, about 125 pages, and well worth the read. Familiarity with classical and quantum physics, and special relativity, is required to get the most out of it. As you can tell, I enjoyed it tremendously.