February 13, 2025 : Wondercab Mini (85A)

Superdinoflagellistic!

So, people really seemed to like last week’s dabble amidst the nanoworlds of Michael Benson. Indeed, we got all sorts of calls and private missives along the lines of “More! More! Please, please, feed us more!” And just to reiterate, you will all be getting a chance to vantage a whole lot more this fall when Michael publishes his Nanocosmos volume by way of Abrams. But in the meantime, Michael graciously allowed us to sample a few other instances of his electro-microscopic deep dives into the itsy bitsy superdinoflagellistic sea—that is, the world of these exquisitely tiny organisms, or rather, as we explained last time, the armored outer cellulose casings these gooey single-celled sea creatures build up to comfortably cruise around within (powered about by whiplike flagellate propellers piercing the casing’s outer wall). So here you go, and note that this time, I myself have then zeroed in on some even more exquisitely nuanced details by way of screengrabs off of Michael’s originals. So enjoy, and then let’s meet up on the far side for some questions I’ll be having for Michael—and his responses.

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Across my correspondence with Benson these last few weeks, I’ve been asking him a few questions about this current nano-practice of his, and he’s been responding in some depth. For instance, at one point he suggested that the raking light used in these images wasn't exactly ordinary light (as we experience it, looking out a window, say) but rather some sort of reflection of the electron beam aimed up the object in question. I asked if he could clarify, if only briefly.

You're right {he replied}, it isn't ordinary light, in fact it's not light at all... This is crucial, and it is behind what enables such magnifications in the first place. Instead of photons, Scanning Electron Microscopes use electrons, which operate at far shorter wavelengths than visible light, which effectively allows them to penetrate into the interstices of extremely small objects, such as those dinoflagellates, far better than the long-wavelength photons that our eyes, or ordinary cameras, use. In the introduction to my eventual book, I will be comparing the SEM process to bat echolocation (this due to a realization I had when reading Thomas Nagel's landmark text on the philosophy of mind, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?).

Okay, I in turn responded, but if we ourselves were to be miniaturized a la Raquel Welch and her crewmates in Fantastic Voyage (1966)

(and by the way, isn’t it weird how some of your dinoflagellates look quite like the mini-subs that crew tooled around in?), only even smaller, much smaller, would we "see" something like those things floating around? Granted, our eyes would themselves have become tiny tiny tiny, and maybe quantum vision would be an entirely different beast altogether. To which he responded,

Yeah, I had much the same Fantastic Voyage sub-submersible associations as you did when first gazing upon some of those dinoflagellates.

As to what we ourselves could see by way of ordinary photons, were we ever to be miniaturized to that extent, that's a real question and presumes that our (multi-cellular) eyes could also be miniaturized to contemplate unicellular creatures... On the other hand, check out this mind-blower.... So I guess the answer to your question may be, "Sure, if you could equip yourself with a planktonic ocelloid!"

In granting us permission to use some of his dinoflagellate imagery by way of preview for his upcoming Nanocosmos book, he wanted us to make clear that such creatures were only one kind of the many sorts of things he has been training his Scanning Electron Microscope upon these last several years, and he offered up this other image, just by way of tantalizing example—a close-up detail of a dragonfly’s wing:

He also sent me an early draft of that eventual introduction to the book, which is going to be absolutely terrific, trust me. (You’ll just have to wait till the fall, though it’s good to have something to look forward to, these dread-filled days, in the months ahead.) He was, however, willing to allow us to offer up the epigram with which he will be launching that essay, by way of preview, so here it is:

For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes; the end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy. Equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. What else can he do, then, but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end? All things have come out of nothingness and are carried onwards to infinity.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

Not bad. Not bad.

Note: As some of you may have gathered, those last little flourishes are not the three little asterisks with which we customarily close each issue of this Cabinet. Nor are they dinoflagellates. They actually constitute massively enlarged electron microscopic images of radiolaria, likewise unicellular planktonic sea creatures with their own (in their case) siliceous-based exteriors, but an entirely different phylum from dinoflagellates (as incidentally, Benson tells me, is the drum-shaped diatom at the top of my initial sequence of dinoflagellates—not a dinoflagellate and likewise an entirely different phylum). But supercool nonetheless, and perhaps, by way of envoy, you might like a wider vantage, your wish being our command:

See you next week!