(urth) S&S vs. SF in BotNS

[Jeff Wilson]

On 12/23/2011 11:09 AM, Sergei SOLOVIEV wrote:
> You should not trust so much journalists, even scientific. Once I've
> seen a picture of a sort of orange solar disk
> and a smaller black disk crossing it - with the title "an exoplanet
> photographed. This was rubbish, because
> no telescope is powerful enough to make a star (except our Sun) visible
> as a disk, not to speak about
> an exoplanet. It was just a reconstruction (star is dimmer when the
> planet passes before it).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_extrasolar_planets#Direct_imaging

> And when they
> write "a photo of an electron" - what is it? The trace of some process
> on photographic film, usually
> with many intermediate steps and a lot of mathematical formulas and
> nuclear physics to convince
> you that it is related to an electron. Like they photograph flashes of
> light in big tank of pure water
> underground and they say that they photograph neitrinos (and you have to
> believe).

Do you believe any images that you see on television are truly 
representative? They also require many intermediate steps and 
manipulation via mathematical formulas and electromagnetic physics to 
relate them to the scene observed by those present.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC#Color_encoding

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL#PAL_signal_details


Can you name an instrument that produces a photograph that you agree is 
truly re3presentational?

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >