Atomic Number Generator
INCOHERENT EXPOSITION ON A WORK IN PROGRESS -- NO COMPLAINTS!
The intertwined developments of automatic computation, mathematical table and
nuclear technology, and their effects on the very landscape we live in are
largely hidden from view, and rarely are they considered together; how further
from geological earth could mathematical tables appear to be?
This installation and it's constellation of support works attempts to make some
of these connections visible and humanly tangible, by combining nuclear
("atomic", in my preferred early cold-war parlance) decay, the production (and
ruination) of math tables, and mining and poverty. Centuries of intellectual
labor to improve mankind's scientific ability to know the world, made obsolete
in a mere historic moment by Cold War computing machinery
At the historic moment of math-table obsolescence, when machines were finally
able to achieve Charles Babbage's 18th-century dream -- mechanical production
of mathematical tables -- in the very bowels of the premiere Cold War
illuminati stronghold, the RAND Corporation, anti-human nuclear decay was used
to produce a "math table" that literally contains \i{no information} -- a table
of truly random numbers. This table was created by a UNIVAC digital computer
using special-built equipment that invoked random, informationless aspects of
atomic nuclear decay.
The purpose of this book? Critical data necessary for simulation of nuclear
fission explosions.
At the nexus of this tale is the Atomic Number Generator, an apparatus that,
like that original RAND device, the details of which remain secret (or at least
unknown), conjures true random numbers from the isotopic decay from natural
rock; uranium ore mined largely by the misled, underpaid local, largely native,
population of the American South West.
FIXME Contemporaneous but certainly not directly related were
semi-randomization techniques developed by Brion Gysin (with precedent possibly
by Tristan Tzara http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up\_technique) made "famous"
by his friend William Burroughs, nice juxtaposition, that. "When you cut into
the present the future leaks out." Also THE SOFT MACHINE -- date?
The ANG, in it's installation, attempts to exploit the black humor in millenia
of human pursuit of pure order culminating in instant obsolescence and a book
of pure disorder; and the not so funny ruining of beautiful landscape and the
harm done people who live on it.
Here's a small conceptual
movie of no great import.
Construction of the ANG; stuffing the assembly in the box,
layout and fabrication of the front panel.
First pass at a front panel layout. Rectangularity is OK to work out space
issues, but it's boring, and not the easiest to use. |
Much better use of space. Just lined up by eye. |
Detail documentation. |
Detail documentation. |
Fitting the guts into the box. Clockwise from upper left corner: Arduini Diecimela, power supply, audio and lamp driver,
mail board; black object is the HV supply. |
Rear panel; Arduino USB access, WPS serial buss, AC power. |
Detector tube connector detail. It's a BNC chassis female. I didn't have high-voltage
cable (the detector tube runs at 1400V nominal), just ordinary PVC 300V wire; so I stuck it in
some flexible sheathing. Now it's mostly air insulated. |
Junk in the box, with front panel controls dangling, awaiting
front panel fab. |
The front panel drawing is taped to the panel
for centerpunching. |
I worked up a detailed front panel design in
Inkscape; it has hole location info in red and
the silkscreen artwork in black. However, the
printer was out of red ink so that didn't
print. |
It was easier to use a compass to put interval marks in pencil on the
spiral loudspeaker porting than it was to figure out how to do this
in Inkscape. |
After centerpunching. |
Front panel holes drilled and panel sanded with 320 grit paper. |
This is the detector tube, likely a minor variant of a Geiger-Mueller tube.
This was made in 1946 almost certainly by Fermi's techs in the University of
Chicago's euphemistic "Metallurgical Laboratory", which was the site of the
first "atomic pile", so-called because it was assembled as a huge, filthy,
stack of unranium metal and graphite bricks. It still works! I've got a stack
of these but the rest have hand-inked 1948 "Argonne Lab" stickers.
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Junk in the box, with front panel controls dangling, awaiting
front panel fab.
The front panel drawing is taped to the panel
for centerpunching.
