Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium

The Evolution of Chad

Chad writes, "Based on Huxley's Man's Place in Nature." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ape_skeletons.png

Word of the Day: Astrarium

Lauren writes, "I'm not a scientist by trade, but I am, in fact, a huge nerd. I study 18th-century British literature, including scientific literature. It was a wild time to be in science. It was also the heyday of the orrery, which provided the initial impetus for my tattoo. (Orreries, as it turned out, involve too many circles to make them feasible for inking on a large scale.) Then I discovered & fell in love with the comprehensive diagrams in Giovanni de'Dondi's 1364 Il Tractatus Astarii--the plans for the first famous astrarium. My backpiece is of the Mercury wheelwork. Of course, you couldn't track Mercury with it--de'Dondi followed Ptolemy--but I find his Astrarium a lovely & impressive testament to human ingenuity & curiosity."

Carl: It took sixteen years for de'Dondi's astrarium to be built, but it was later destroyed. See a reconstruction here. And read about de'Dondi here.

The Universe Is Pocked

"Backstory: my parents met at a wedding on July 20, 1969, a very important date in the annals of human scientific achievement - the night humans first set foot on the moon. All my life, I have had a fascination with the moon not just as a tangible, graspable place (science fiction made real) but as a symbol for what the human race can achieve when we apply the best abilities of the best minds."

Carl: The moon was science's first glimpse of cosmic imperfection. For centuries, natural philosophers declared the heavens to be beyond decay and change. Everyone could see that the mooon was irregularly colored, but they explained it away in various ways--perhaps the reflection of the Earth itself, or the glint of sunlight bouncing off of celestial vapors. But when Galileo turned his telescope towards the moon, he saw clearly the moon's pock-like craters, changing with the shifting shadows. The moon is not timeless, but mature, its battered face the sign of experience; astronomy no longer has the purity of mathematics, but the fascinating quirks of biography.

Contemplating The Skeletal Self

"Original art by Vesalius, the founder of modern anatomy. Taken from Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden. As student of social science, I find the concept of man studying himself awesome."

Carl: A skeleton gazes at a skull, its hand draped lazily over the cranial vault. This image signifies more than just an anatomy lesson. Andreas Vesalius, the anatomist who drew it and many others, created a visual fault line that divided the ancient and the modern. Medieval European anatomists looked back to ancient authorities such as Galen for enlightenment. Anything they saw for themselves that did not seem to fit into the ancient systems must be their own errors, to be resolved by more careful reading of the Greeks and Romans. After all, God had given Adam perfect knowledge of nature, and human understanding had declined ever since his fall. Galen and the other classical writers were closer to creation, and thus further uphill on the downward slope of knowing.

Galen certainly was a brilliant anatomist, but his limitations were forgotten during the Dark Ages. He never even dissected a human cadaver, for example, contenting himself with pigs and other animals. It was not until the sixteenth century that someone noticed these shortcomings for what they were. Vesalius created an original anatomical guide, filled with drawings of his own, made from his own observations. He also helped spur a new approach to the human body (and the bodies of other animals): to challenge old beliefs and to learn with one's own eyes.

Some may see this image as a morbid reminder of death, a skinned "Alas poor Yorick." But I see it more as an embodiment of science, of one skull (and its resident brain) learning from another.

Original flickr source

God, The Void, and A Tattoo

Helen writes, "I am getting married soon, and I wanted to get a tattoo to commemorate who I was before, something to remember my old name (as I am going to take my future husband's surname when I get married), but I also wanted it to be a secret. So this is what I got..."

Carl: Helen wrote her name in ASCII, the lingua franca of computers. Before ASCII was developed in the 1960s, computers often had no way to send text to one another, with dozens of different systems for representing letters and numbers. Even after ASCII was created, it didn't become common until 1981, when IBM used it for the first personal computers. Now ASCII is ubiquitous--a rare thing for such an old computer technology.

But Helen's hidden name has roots that reach much further back than the Kennedy administration--centuries, in fact. ASCII is a binary code, which can be represented easily by an electric current flipping between two levels, or, numerically, as a string of 1s and 0s. Letters, numbers, and symbols can be represented in ASCII by an eight-digit number. Instead of the base-10 system we are all familiar with, this is a base-two number. (So 3 can be represented by 11 [2+1], for example.) The power of binary codes was understood long ago. The I Ching, for example, is a series of symbols built up from solid and broken bars. In Western mathematics, the father of binary codes was Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). Leibniz recognized that turning numbers into binary made them extremely simple to handly mathematically. In fact, he speculated, you could build a machine that would do math based on binary numbers by sifting marbles through slots--a dream of the computers that would come centuries later.

But Leibniz saw a deeper meaning in the binary. "One is enough to derive everything from nothing," he wrote. To Leibniz, 0 represented the void, and 1 represented God. Only by translating nature into binary numbers did Leibniz believe that we attain perfect knowledge of the divine, by seeing its underlying reality and beauty. It was no coincidence that seven--as in the seventh day of creation, when all was created--is 111.

To Leibniz, I'd imagine, a binary code tattoo would not say what we once were, but what will forever be.

(For those of you who want to decode Helen's surname, here's a handy converter.)

Vita Brevis...

"Here's my tattoo of a Latin Hippocrates quote. Translated it says "life is short, art is long".--Katie

Antique Microscope

"It's great to see that there are other uber-nerds out
there! I am a microbiologist so my obvious choice was a microscope. This one is an antique from 1893, and it is along the left side of my spine." --Jillian

Darwin's Tree

"Attached is a photo of a tattoo I got immediately after turning in the final paperwork a little over two weeks ago for the completion of my Ph.D. in biological anthropology. It's the first evolutionary tree that Darwin sketched in his 1837 Notebook B on the transmutation of species." --Julienne

See Darwin's original sketch here

Brain Hieroglyph

"I am a neuroscientist. As a graduate student, after successfully passing my qualifying exam, I celebrated by getting this tattoo. It is the hieroglyphic for the word “brain”. It is the earliest written reference to the brain dating back to the 17th century BC. I am convinced that the brain is the greatest mystery in the universe! "--Jason Trageser

The Tree of Life

"I'm a biochemist, but I've always been fascinated by evolution. Here's my tattoo representing the tree of life, based loosely on a couple of phylogenetic trees drawn by Ernst Haeckel. Here it is attached to the pictures that inspired it."--Kevin

Galileo

Pax writes, "My Galileo tattoo. I'm in computers, but it's a general sentiment.. I think it fits the thread."

[Note from Carl: See here for more on this quotation.]

Homonculus

"I’m an evolutionary biologist who investigates the evolution of sperm form, sperm-female interactions and sperm competition. So...yeah, it’s pretty much about sperm. Wanted to bring the concept of the homunculus to life, as all illustrations of it have always been rather cartoonish. Found a guy (Anil Gupta at Inkline Studio) with the skill and creativity to do it justice."

Scott Pitnick, Syracuse University

The Philosopher's Stone

Leigh writes: When I was a PhD student in philosophy, I did a lot of work in philosophy of science. Not science proper, but after all, philosophy was (and is) the beginning of science. ;)

Anyway, my tattoo is a riff on the history of both science and philosophy-- the hermetic symbols for the Philosopher's Stone (sulfur + mercury + salt, and some sort of time designation). Yep, that's right, alchemy.