[rollei_list] Re: Don's Dream & Memory
- From: Don Williams <dwilli10@xxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2011 23:48:51 -0600
At 03:04 AM 1/15/2011, Dave Wyman wrote:
DAW
That's a vivid dream, Don, particularly the details about "a weak
vinegar solution and washed again." And the dream does seem to
somewhat parallel your old memory.
Are you sure there was no conclusion to the dream? You got what you
needed: you made dim images viewable, and then you fixed them, even
if you don't know what the images was/were
Aren't those images, though, the metaphor for you life. Were you
attempting to understand and "fix" yourself in the world in which
you find yourself? That "special place," away from your home. Is
that not the place to which you've journeyed over the course of your
life, the place from which you look back to fix, in your mind, in
the depths of your soul, who you are?
Of course I'm probably wrong. Maybe you just had a dream mixed with
some magical elements of your childhood. None-the-less, I find your
dream illuminating, if not to you, to me. And it's a special kick
sharing that thought on the Rollei list.?
Thanks for the comments. Maybe I am going back to my childhood days,
coming up on 79 this spring, or . . . .
The fact is I do remember the subjects in the dream photos. There
were three prints involved, two were people of some importance to me
or to someone, and the third was a star plate, with the stars as
negatives, and somewhat blurry, as if of galaxies. Now I have never
handled a star plate from a major telescope, but have visited Mt.
Wilson and used to live near enough to Palomar to get up there every
year or so. Maybe the dream had something to do with one of those
two telescopes.
Now here is the kicker. I have never been an astronomer, at least in
the optical range. I did, however, do my masters thesis (for UCLA)
in Radio Astronomy, while living in San Diego. I uses a mile-long
array far out in the desert, then owned by General Dynamics, to
measure the absolute flux density of 4 major radio sources. This
resulted in a job with the Netherlands Organization for Pure Research
(= Our National Science Foundation) in Leiden, where I worked on the
engineering aspects of what was, at the time, the Benelux Cross
Radiotelescope Project. It ended up as the Westerbork Array, a sad
name during WWII but now home to several radiotelescopes.
Anyhow, the key astronomers in Leiden during my time there were Prof.
Dr. Oort (look up Jan Oort or the Oort Cloud)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Oort
and H.C. Van De Hulst* :
http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/vdhulst_e.html
Since they were primarily optical astronomers, maybe the pictures in
my dream had something to do with that place, The Sterrewacht.
Van de Hulst, in particular, would be of interest to camera folks
because he edited a book on the scattering of light by small
particles, I don't have the book and can't remember the details.
As for me, I created quite a stir there, later being referred to, I'm
told, as "That American". I believed that we had the technology in
hand and published technical summaries and recommendations to proceed
with the actual project, not continue on a pilot instrument we
had. I learned, far later, that there were serious economic problems
at the time (Belgium and Luxemburg both dropped their sponsorship
early on), and only after some time passed did money become available
to do the actual construction. As it turned out, the delay allowed
the project to switch from some special low noise front ends being
developed by Philips Electronics, to the advanced devices that are
used today in high sensitivity antenna systems.
So, there you have it, Sigmund Freud and all.
Regards,
DAW
*He said "Just call me Hank" when my wife and I went over to dinner,
through an 8' tall door to his apartments in the main building. Oort
occupied apartments at the opposite end. There's more but it isn't
relevant to this list.
There is something not clearly stated in the citations above. During
WWII the observatory was allowed to do work, but only theoretical
work. Oort gave van de Hulst the problem of looking for energy state
jumps in hydrogen gas that might create radio frequencies, a
theoretical problem allowed by the Germans. van de Hulst produced
calculations that predicted the 21 cm hydrogen line, now useful for
doing velocity measurements of distant radio sources, sources beyond
what we can see with optical instruments.
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