The science of science- An attempt at explanation.
To explain the mind of God, to root experience in Laws, to catalogue the Real. The goal[gaol] of scientific endeavour over the past five centuries has been to finally describe Life, and by it, the universe. Why? is the driver[cyber] of these people. Leonardo, against the laws of his time, explored the human cadaver to further his understanding of the design of Life. He designed apparatus to ease his tasks as an human and an artist. Muybridge pioneered advances in high_sensitivity film and high_speed shutter mechanisms. Freud explored new drugs and techniques for triggering the mind. The scientists optimising the Visible Human datasets develop 3d software interfaces to virtually explore an healthy human frame from within. And those of the Human Genome Project speed the laborious process of singling and de_coding the 3 000 000 000 characters representing the sequence of base pairs in the DNA string. To define normal life, in order to repair faulty humans, normalising and optimising the gene_pool.

Muybridgeıs goal was to provide a complete and comprehensive document of Human motion. To be a gentleman was to be worldly and knowledgeable. Science was the pursuit of such gentlemen. The photograph, at a time when the means of photography meant the study of chemistry and the optics of light. Exposing 20 000 frames of film finally published as 781 plates, Muybridge exploded the knowledge of the physical body in motion. More noted at the time was the success of a wager, profiting on behalf of his patron Lord Stanford, gold miner, former govenor of California and railway boss, the man who drove in the historic railroad spike at Promontory Point, Utah, finally linkng the east to the west. No doubt winning a pint of the finest on top of his bet, this show of correctitude cost Stanford $ 42 000. The locale of Stanfordıs ranch where many of Muybridgeıs further investigations were carried out, is Palo Alto, now known for the USıs leading technology research facility, PARC [ Palo Alto Research Centre ], the birth place of the facsimile, the photocopier, the personal computer and the machines of the internet.

This period on the cusp of the twentieth century seems saturated with the great Light of Progress. Between 1872 when Lord Stanfordıs wager was resolved, and 1877 when the serious work on Animal Locomotion was resumed, Charles Darwin produced The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals and Etienne_Jules Marey published his La Machine Animal, Animal Mechanism : a Treatise on Terrestrial & Aerial Locomotion 1873.
Developing an unique approach to truely objective experimentation, Marey concluded that not only "..the ineffectiveness of our senses to discover truths, and .. the inadequacy of language to communicate those truths we have discovered"² but that current conventions of scientific pratice impeded the ability of experiment to produce objectivity. That is, the procedure of most experiementation impinged on the subject to some degree, thereby influencing the result. This is exactly what has been much discussed with the popularity of Chaos Theory. Schrodingerıs Cat indicates this, in that the act of observation influences outcome. His solution was photographic. Marey requested Muybridge's "..aid and support to solve certain physiological problems so difficult to solve by other means." By 1881 when they began working together, Marey had developed a new technique not involving mulitple camera's, but a single rapid_fire shutter utilizing a single strip of film, pioneering the principle of the motion picture camera.

Panorama of San Francisco July 1877 Library of Congress "Other states and cities may be greater and in many respects more attractive, but none can equal California and San Francisco in the panoramic scenic effect"³ Now the hub of the digital world, San Francisco is the site of this first panoramic photograph; the technicians of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley use this city as their basepoint. Muybridge capitalized on the success of the earlier painted Panoramic depictions, popular in the States and Europe. A key, refering to numbers inscribed over the landscape identify features of the city, now the largest [ area to population ] in the world, affording it easily readable. Two panorama's were taken from this position at the top of California Street, about four months apart. In the intervening period, the cable_car track had been laid.