(Post Scriptum to my note “I’m coming out of the madhouse alone” 10 III 2023)

The technical appendix — a continuation of Lermontov’s verse «I’m coming out on the way alone”.

HOW do they “talk”?

Obviously, blinking.

This can be done either by variable stars that change their ACTUAL brightness (radiation power), or are eclipsed by some large planets — their satellites, or by binary or triple stars with sharply different luminosity (such as triple Alpha Centauri, where two stars form a closely spaced pair, and the third star, like a planetary satellite, orbits this pair, as around a single central star, at some distance from it. By the way, this is the NEAREST star to us, Proxima!)

I admit that Lermontov’s “lyric-psychopathic” hero hardly understood such subtleties of astronomy and did not know about the aforementioned options.

But for an observer from the Earth’s surface, the stars also “TWINKLE”, and randomly, not as in previous cases, but randomly due to fluctuations in the optical density of the atmosphere caused by sporadic changes in the temperature of its layers, etc.

So, the hero could catch the “conversation” of the stars. But this “conversation” requires knowledge of Morse code!

Samuel F.B. Morse, an American artist, neither an engineer nor a mathematician, invented it in 1837, which immediately made it possible to transmit information by telegraph.

Morse returned to America from the “Old World” in 1832 on a ship on which sailed the American chemist Charles T. Jackson, who had previously attended lectures in Paris on electromagnetism and, as a memento of them, carried with him a small electromagnet, about the features and properties of which he told Morse. AND Morse THEN told Jackson that applying current to an electromagnet or interrupting it could serve to transmit SIGNALS (for us, INFORMATION) over a wire!

HERE IT IS, the BASIC IDEA, transformed five years later into Morse Code, and, in fact, IT was the real REAL CREATOR of the telegraph!

In America, Morse and his assistant, Alfred Vail, built a device in which current pulses fed into wires at one end triggered an electromagnet at the other end, to the movable core of which was attached a pencil (or ink-wetted pen), tracing dashes or dots on a slow-moving paper tape, depending on the DURATION. current pulse.

Morse ingeniously (without knowing any binary system) decided that various combinations of these two characters, dashes and dots, can serve as an analogue of any letter of the alphabet! And even punctuation marks!

Thus was born the Morse Code, which still serves us till today!

Technological evolution is very similar to biological evolution. In both cases, new machines or organisms carry the atavistic features of their previous prototypes. It is not for nothing that with the advent of radio, it has long been called “Wireless telegraphy”, as well as the street tram – “Electric horse-car”.

Lermontov wrote this verse in the year of his death, 1841, so he could have already heard about this invention and quite “logically” attributed the knowledge of Morse Code to heavenly bodies, “which, however, are still able to burn the stigma of insignificance on people,” according to Friedrich Nietzsche, that is, the exchange of information between them through light signals and Morse code is generally a kind of routine of their existence, idle chatter, shortly. It’s not for nothing that his character, the “Lyric-psychopathic” one, had a penchant for all sorts of delusional conclusions!

A funny example of the smooth transition of science and technology into art and vice versa.

9 VIII 2025