Thoreauvian pond studies.

In Hannah Hinchman’s wonderful book on seeing the details of the world, A Trail Through Leaves, she wrote:

Thoreau, with his insatiable appetite for phenomena, relished and reported on the unmeasurable as well as the measurable. The twentieth century has produced no scientific literature about the way light and wind work on the surface of a pond, for instance, unless the adherents of chaos theory are at work on it. There are no papers published about it, no seminars, no grants given to study it. And because no named category exists for that and similar phenomena, most of us don’t see them.

No scientific literature perhaps, but Edward Tufte has proposed a new type of high resolution data flow graphic based precisely on the way light and wind work on the surface of a pond, called the wavefield.

As far as I can tell, wavefields have never been been used for data display – other than to display the data of which they actually consist, which is to say what the surface of the pond behind Tufte’s house in Connecticut looks like sometime in the early summer.

But perhaps, as Hinchman suggests, that data is enough. Perhaps capturing, displaying, understanding, representing the way light and wind interact with the surface of a pond is a hard enough problem on its own. Perhaps we need to study that.

This isn’t scientific literature, of course, and it’s not measurement either, nor chaotic theory. This is careful observation of complex phenomena, presented clearly, accurately, and precisely, in a way that removes distraction and concentrates the attention on the specific phenomenon at hand. This is, once again, that point where abstraction and concrete detail are the same.