by Adrian Berry
*We, being amateurs, our forgery was very far from being undetectable. The CIA’s former chief photo analyst for forgeries, , has this to say of it:
‘While the picture displays good proportion and composition, it was relatively easy to determine that it was faked. The sources of light on the Queen and are clearly different. The source for is a soft one, probably stage lighting, and comes from above and to the left. The source for the Queen, on the other hand, comes from her side and slightly to the right. The intensity of this light, especially on her face, elbow and gown, indicated a flash source at her height and at a fairly close range.
‘Note the light on the crown of ’s head. The light on his brow is casting a shadow on his eye socket, and his nose is casting a shadow on his lips and chin. His jaw is clearly outlined and his neck is in shadow. To conform to ’s light source, the crown of the Queen’s hair would have been highlighted, her cheek darkened rather than highlighted, her jaw outlined as clearly as ’s, and her neck in the same dark shadow as ’s.
‘There is something fraudulent about the shadow to the left of ’s shoe. It is not consistent with the contour of the shoe or the shadow being cast by its tip. The Queen’s neck would not be casting a shadow on her stole, and the top of her stole would have been highlighted rather than in shadow.
‘I note also that the Queen’s left hand is gloved but that her right hand on ’s shoulder is not. If I hadn’t known that this was ’s dancer’s hand I should easily have deduced this because the fingers on the gloved hand are larger than those without. And I am sure that the Queen would have enjoyed immensely dancing with , and there would have been a smile of pure joy on her face.’
An expensive business it is not. A personal computer and the appropriate software, costing about £200, is all that is needed.
So how is it done? In the old days, a picture could be altered by deleting one image and, if necessary, pasting in a new one. In digital imaging - a process first invented merely to ‘enhance’ photographs - the picture is treated in the same way as a word processor treats a document. But instead of words it manipulates the ‘pixels’, the millions of tiny dots which make up the picture.
With a computer equipped with a CD-ROM drive which can hold gigantic quantities of data as well as huge collections of pictures, the owner has a pictorial database of almost unlimited power. Photographs can be merged with each other just as easily as the text of two or more word-processed documents.
Manipulating with colour is more difficult than with black and white - but not much. The colours of the pixels, which might originally have been blue, red or yellow, can be changed, moved to another part of the picture or scrapped altogether.
Moving film is not immune from alteration. The film of ’s novel, Rising Sun - in which a piece of film is doctored to falsify evidence of murder - has already shown the possibilities. This can only work if the film is digitally stored and not on tape. But plans to digitize up to 50,000 films - all the films ever made in the Western world - may provide temptations.
, who created our picture, says: ‘It needed a lot of patience. I merged two pictures of and the Queen. I removed the girl he was dancing with and replaced her with the Queen.
‘But since the Queen’s feet were not showing, I gave her the original girl’s right foot. Then I tilted the Queen backwards a bit so that she looks up into ’s face. Finally I put the girl’s hand on ’s shoulder, and made sure the shadows from the two original pictures matched.’
‘Pictures like this can seem dependable evidence of what did not take place,’ said , of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of an article in Scientific American. To prove it, produced pictures of with her arm around , and President giving a lecherous kiss in the White House garden.
The New Scientist has shown a highly convincing forged picture of chatting with on the steps of Number 10. It is easy to fool people who want to be fooled. ’s creator believed passionately in fairies. Someone obligingly photographed some young girls and superimposed them on a flower. insisted they were fairies.
In 1986, an anti-nuclear group sent the CBS TV network a picture purporting to show that the Chernobyl disaster was even worse than it was. CBS told , retired resident picture analyst at the CIA, that they were about to air the picture as proof that two reactors had melted down. ‘Only an idiot would make such a statement,’ said Brugioni, who recognized that the background was not of Chernobyl at all. CBS nonetheless went ahead and made the broadcast.
once spotted a ‘double’ of Mao Tse-tung by the shape of the man’s ear, since ears are as distinctive as fingerprints. ‘While this new technology can be beneficial -in identifying missing children who have aged, for example -it can also be very dangerous,’ he said. ‘It is a new way of inflicting harm.
‘People are sceptical about the authenticity of written documents, but they find it difficult to believe that a picture can be false. With an outdoor picture I can tell you the exact date and time of day it was taken by the angle of the shadows. If the foliage doesn’t match the data, then the picture’s a fake.
‘You can also tell whether the picture is probable. When links arms with , the President ought to look more excited at the attention of so beautiful a girl.’
Energy Without Limit
One of the most fascinating conjectures about future space technology, which attracted less attention than it deserved when aired at the 1994 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, was that our descendants might put in orbit a mini black hole to attract limitless energy from it.
Proposed by Ian Fells, professor of energy conservation at Newcastle University, the idea was that gaseous matter, streaming towards the hole on its way to being devoured, would be travelling at such speed that it could be made to drive turbines.
‘It may sound far-fetched, but 200 years ago the idea of harnessing the electric force that makes lightning to produce electricity sounded equally far-fetched,’ said Fells, acknowledging that he had not made any attempt to work out the practical details.
The idea was given further respectability by the Astronomer Royal, , who told the meeting that such a black hole, to be useful and safe, would have the weight of a large mountain but would be compressed by its own gravity until it was smaller than an atom.
The project’s obvious difficulties only make it seem more interesting. The energy would indeed be limitless, since the hole would never get any smaller. But it might prove very difficult to construct. Black holes — collapsed matter with so strong a gravitational field that nothing, not even light, can escape from them - could perhaps be created by compressing the iron that is found in galactic dust. I did some of the calculations when writing my 1977 book The Iron Sun: Crossing the Universe through Black Holes, and they seemed to be workable.
But my calculations applied only to black holes of several stellar masses. Mini black holes, according to cosmological theory, were created by the violent convulsions of the early universe, and it is by no means certain that we could reproduce such conditons. Moreover, has predicted that black holes do not remain permanently ‘black’. They explode with unimaginable violence (although according to his mathematics this would occur long after the Solar System had disappeared).
There would be two other advantages to the scheme. It would not only provide energy; it would also, being a black hole, give us infinite facilities for garbage disposal. And it could resist attempts by environmentalists to halt it; for once construction of the hole had begun - such is the nature of gravity - it would be physically impossible to halt.
Fells, appropriately, has a healthy contempt for mindless environmental oppositon to energy projects. ‘We could still build an 8,000-megawatt reactor, adding six per cent to Britain’s energy production, from the tidal energies of the Severn estuary. Environmentalists oppose this on the grounds that it would somehow be disadvantageous to wading birds. But the birds would be perfectly happy to wade somewhere else.’
The O
deon in your Living-room
As our television screens get larger, resolution and sound-effects better and video recorders ‘smarter’, the disappearance both of cinemas and the television broadcasting industry looms ever closer. Christmas just won’t be the same . . .
Movie-watching at home with a rented video will have all the pleasures of a visit to the cinema, but with none of the inconveniences - like having to queue for entry in the rain, often to be told that all seats are taken, and then walking on sticky floors to expensive and uncomfortable seats where eating, drinking, smoking and talking are forbidden.
A growing number of Americans are spending thousands of dollars setting up the appropriate equipment at home -and a tour of what is available in high-tech British shops like those in London’s Tottenham Court Road reveals that many Britons are doing the same.
The only obstacle, according to an article in the latest Fortune, is what the magazine calls WAF - the ‘Wife Acceptance Factor’. Assembling large amounts of electronic apparatus with dozens of dials and switches, preferably brightly coloured, is a pastime that appeals mostly to males. If the wife is not consulted beforehand ‘she may be understandably reluctant to have the living-room made to resemble the control room of the starship Enterprise.’’ But, assuming it can be done without divorce, the practical details are straightforward.
The first important step is to install a large-enough TV screen. A metre is about the minimum to ensure cinema-like realism. Next, put in several speakers. The average home TV has only one, making reception far inferior to that in a cinema. Since it is sensible to build incrementally, and not try to achieve perfection at once with all the inevitable bugs, the next step is to increase the number of speakers still further, with one central one and several subsidiary ones to each side. This will ensure that, wherever you are sitting, sounds appear to come from sources that you see on the screen, and that the room has no ‘cheap seats’.
This can best be done by installing a Dolby ‘surround sound’ with decoding circuitry. It will give the illusion that one is actually in the place depicted in the film. In Jurassic Park, for example, one would be able to hear the central thump of the footsteps of Tyrannosaurus Rex in the foreground as well as the lesser background sounds made by the wind and the cicadas.
The right equipment must be bought with great care. Many experts believe the purchases involved in each step should take several days. Bjorn Dybdahl, owner of Bjorn’s Audio Video shop in San Antonio, Texas, said: ‘If you walk into a shop and say you’re interested in home theatre, and the salesman says: I have one you can buy right over here, turn around and walk out.’
However, films with stories written in their entirety by someone else may soon be antiquated. Connect a personal computer to the apparatus, with future ‘artificial intelligence’ software, and it will be possible to see a film whose plot unfolds differently because the person watching it becomes one of the characters. Even sex with imaginary lovers becomes possible. We will enter another world and mould its destiny.
This process can be taken still further with coming generations of computer games where the on-screen graphics will be as lifelike as at the cinema. This could ultimately create illusions like those in ’s 1961 novel The City and the Stars, where people take part in fantastic adventures in ways that are indistinguishable from reality.
These technologies will obviously bring great social change. When they have become as cheaply available as colour television was a decade ago, publicly scheduled television will largely vanish.
Forget the ceaseless interviews with politicians, forget the feeble ‘chat shows’ that people only look at because they have nothing else to watch, and forget the expensive commercials that companies only pay for because audiences are sufficiently large. When the number of watchers starts to shrink towards zero, an entire industry will quietly disappear. As for the effects on society itself, they will surely be incalculable.
Heavenly Computers
Designers of computers of the future have found inspiration in a most unlikely source - the theological Doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
The doctrine states that there are three ‘Persons’ in the one God: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, absolutely co-equal in authority. It was agreed on by nearly all the major philosophers of the Middle Ages, but it sounds alien to modern unbelievers more used to hierarchical chains of command.
According to the Creed of St Athanasius in the fourth century, supported later by St Augustine of Hippo, St Thomas Aquinas and, in Ireland, St with his shamrock: ‘In the Trinity none is afore or after; none is greater or less than another; but the whole three Persons are co-eternal together; and co-equal.’
In a hierarchical system, the sergeant takes orders from the colonel, and the colonel from the general. Computers as we know them are ruled by a single chip, the so-called ‘central processing unit’, which commands all the others. However, computer scientists are looking at new ways of rearranging the command chain, using a horizontal model taken from the Three Persons Doctrine.
, an astrophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, California, said: ‘The doctrine represents a revolutionary form of logic which is ideal for new forms of computer systems.’ Writing in Spaceflight, the monthly journal of the British Interplanetary Society, he suggests that computer scientists who study St Augustine’s De Trinitate will find a way to build machines that can make decisions intuitively, like humans, rather than with the coldly formal - and often infuriatingly stupid -logic we now associate with computers.
Instead of having just one master control-chip, a Trinity computer would have three. Each would be an independent entity, acting as the head of an independent command structure comprising three subsidiary chips. This would make a total of nine, a number that some management studies have concluded is ideal for taking the decisions in an organization. All decisions by the computer would be a result of a ‘vote’ among the ruling three.
In human affairs, horizontal - or trinitarian - authority has not always been a success. The Roman Republic was twice ruled by triumvirates, and on each occasion the paranoid jealousies of the three rulers led to civil war. Computer chips, however, do not try to destroy each other; they only decide ‘yes’, or ‘no’. The British computer expert said: ‘A Trinity computer might be able to do things without being told how to do them. This will be a vital component of what we expect in future machine intelligence .
‘In processing huge amounts of data, it would be able to see patterns that are often invisible to conventional machines. It would thus be able to think intuitively , mimicking some of the almost infinitely different ways in which people think.
‘They would be adept at lateral thinking, otherwise known as fuzzy logic, where the solution to a problem lies outside the system being studied. No conventional computer, for example, would ever suggest that an adult illness might have been caused by a childhood vaccination.’
Modern religious philosophers may look at trinitarian computers with an indulgent eye. Father , a Jesuit theologian, said: ‘As far as logic is concerned,
is perfectly right. The Three Persons, although equal in authority, have different roles. As defined by St Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century, the Father is the creator, the Son the redeemer, and the Holy Ghost the sanctifier.’
The medieval philosophers have had a bad press. said they ‘filled the world with long beards and long words and left it as ignorant as they found it’. But an epoch of new logic demands a second look at old logic. It will be a courageous manufacturer who changes from the single master-chip computer architecture invented by in the 1940s. Many will insist on staying with the equivalent of the Sabellian Heresy.
The Libyan bishop Sabellius rejected the Trinity, believing the Father alone had authority. Modern Sabellians will have to be overthrown as their forefathers were seventeen centuries ago.
Cars without Drivers
In a film version of ’s novel The Invisible Man, a traffic
policeman stops a car that is being driven above the speed limit. To his astonishment and horror, there is no driver at the wheel.
This situation has occurred in real life - without the policeman - when a mini-van made one of the most remarkable journeys since the invention of the motor car. It travelled 400 kilometres by motorway from Pittsburgh to , at an average speed of 92 kilometres per hour, without a human driver.
The van was almost entirely driven by a computer and attached robots, with a human supervisor - of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh - sitting beside the steering wheel but seldom touching it. He called the experience ‘hands-off, feet-off, brains-off driving’. His supervision made the experiment so safe that he did not need to warn the police.
A forward-pointing video camera mounted just below the rearview mirror ‘read’ the road in front of the van, taking in such information as the positions of other vehicles, lane markings and distances to the kerb and to the motorway’s central barrier. It sent this data to a laptop computer sitting between the two front seats. The computer processed the data and continually instructed an electric motor to move the steering wheel left or right. Electric power for the entire system came from the van’s cigarette lighter.
To make things still more interesting, the last 24 kilometres of the journey were not on the comparatively predictable motorway but on a minor road, the George Washington Parkway, which has many curves, overhanging trees and other features liable to ‘confuse’ the machine.
The system has several bad habits which have not yet been cured. It does not recognize red lights and will drive straight through them if not stopped. It cannot tell the difference between sunlight and the headlights of an oncoming car. It cannot change lanes by itself and sometimes, for some inexplicable reason, it turns into exit roads without being told to do so.