杏吧原创

Leading the sighted

Question: Have there been, or are there currently, any successful blind
scientists? If so, what kind of research do they do?

Answer: Dr D. Kent Cullers, the NASA scientist who developed the computer
software radio astronomers use to hunt for alien microwave signals in the SETI
project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), has been blind since birth.
Cullers heads the SETI Institute鈥檚 Project Phoenix search of nearby Sun-like
stars and has devoted most of his professional life to seeking evidence of life
elsewhere in the Universe.

George Maestri

Los Angeles, California

Answer: Cullers was the inspiration for the blind radio astronomer Kent Clark
in the film Contact directed by Robert Zemeckis, and based on Carl
Sagan鈥檚 novel. It starred Jodie Foster and William Fichtner as Kent Clark.

Derek Bell

Electronic and Engineering Department

University College Dublin, Ireland

Answer: In mathematics, being blind is less of a disability than in most
other branches of science.

Nicholas Saunderson FRS (1682-1739) lost both eyes following smallpox at the
age of 12. From 1711 until his death he was the Lucasian professor of
mathematics at Cambridge University, where he was an effective and popular
teacher. Three mathematical books by him were published after his death, with
his text on algebra becoming very widely read.

Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), one of the greatest mathematicians, lost the
sight in his right eye in 1738, and was totally blind from 1771. Thereafter
Euler kept a team of colleagues and secretaries very busy with his continuous
work on mathematics, and he published more than any other mathematician has ever
done.

W. G. Bickley, professor of mathematics at Imperial College, became blind in
about 1960, but he quickly learned Braille and continued to work in his
field.

In 1959, Stephen Smale astonished mathematicians by proving a sphere could be
turned inside-out in a smooth manner 鈥攂ut he did not find a way of
actually performing the eversion. The blind mathematician Bernard Morin soon
constructed his renowned sequence of about 20 smooth transformations, which
shows how a sphere can be turned inside out.

Garry Tee

Department of Mathematics

University of Auckland

New Zealand

Answer: Your correspondent asks whether there have been any successful blind
scientists. There certainly have. One of the most famous was the Belgian
physicist Joseph Plateau (1801-1883), who was the inventor of the
stroboscope.

At the age of 28 he gazed at the midday sun for 20 seconds, with a view to
studying the after-effects. The effects turned out to be temporary blindness for
several days, followed by a gradual deterioration of vision and permanent
blindness at the age of 42. Despite this calamity, he continued his research on
subjective visual phenomena for the next forty years. His wife and son (and
later his son-in-law G. L. van der Mensbrugghe) performed the experiments, which
he devised and interpreted.

Even more remarkably, Plateau began to do experiments on the shapes of soap
films after he became blind. With the help of a sighted assistant, he measured
the angles between soap bubbles in a foam (the connecting edges are now called
Plateau borders in his memory), and performed hundreds of other original
experiments on the shapes and colours of soap films. He interpreted the results
in a great work Statique exp茅rimentale et th茅oretique des
liquides soumis aux seules forces moleculaires, where he was the first to
enunciate the role of intermolecular forces in film stability.

Len Fisher

Nunney, Somerset

Answer: Louis Braille, who was totally blind, invented the Braille system of
raised dots in the early 1800s to enable those with sight impairment to read and
write. From 1839 he worked with colleagues to make the first device for printing
Braille and his story is told in Triumph Over Darkness: The life of Louis
Braille by Lennard Bickel (1988, Allen and Unwin).

Joyce Sumner

Anstey, Leicestershire

Answer: You should consider Georg Everhard Rumpf or Rumphius (1627-1702), who
was also known as 鈥淧linius indicus鈥� or the 鈥渂lind seer of Ambon鈥�.

From 1653 he was a merchant in Ambon, Indonesia, with the Dutch East Indian
Company, but he also wrote extensive treatises on plants and animals.

In 1670 he became incurably blind because of glaucoma, in 1674 an earthquake
killed his wife and two daughters, and in 1687 his house was razed by fire. Yet
he overcame these obstacles and, from memory, he dictated his manuscripts again.
He described about 1200 plants, including where they grew and critical accounts
of their uses. You will also find amusing anecdotes in his writing which has an
inimitable style with a dry sense of humour. Even now reading them is a great
pleasure.

Rumpf also wrote instructions on how to build fortifications, advised on
sermons in the local language and started a dictionary which, unfortunately, was
stolen. He didn鈥檛 stop there. In 1679 he prepared a land description of Ambon
and its surroundings with detailed descriptions of the geography, geology,
ethnology and anything that might be of interest to a wide public.
Simultaneously he wrote a history of Ambon and its surrounding islands.

Another scientist for your list is Geerat J. Vermeij (who appeared in a
New 杏吧原创 supplement, 2 November 1996, p 10) professor of geology at
the University of California in Davis, who studies marine molluscs by touch. He
became blind when he was six. He has written several scientific books and a
biography, Privileged Hands published in 1997. He has received several
awards for his scientific work.

J. F. Veldkamp

Nationaal Herbarium Nederland

The Netherlands

This week鈥檚 questions

Sticky moments: How do insects stick to walls and ceilings? How can a spider
scuttle across my ceiling without falling off?

Hezekiah Brown

St Joseph, Michigan

TVs on strike: A lightning bolt recently struck the ground near my home. I
could accept the fact that local telephones were damaged, fuses were blown and
computers burned out, but other strange things happened.

Some television sets switched on spontaneously and showed perfect pictures,
yet those that were switched on normally after the strike had an odd colour
shift. Red became green, white became yellow and green became blue. If you
switched them off for a minute, then on again, the problem was cured. Why did
this happen?

It might not be significant, but at the time of the strike, burglar alarms
sounded spontaneously.

John Green

Esher, Surrey