Et le soleil n’est point nommé, mais sa puissance est parmi nous
…………………………………………………………………………– Saint-John Perse
Most films which require a classroom scene with an important scientist or inspirational lecturer will show a large blackboard covered in ‘furiously’ chalked formulae and proof. These equations are invariably partial, spurious, or nonsensical, and either pure invention or copied haphazardly from textbooks. Although it now tends to be placed almost out-of-shot, ‘Perot’s spokes’, a design first seen in the 1943 Greer Garson movie Madame Curie, will almost always often feature amongst the meaningless runes.
The film tailors Curie’s story for dramatic effect, and to pander to the tastes of the day: nowhere in the movie, for example, does Marie express her devotion to the cause of Polish nationalism, beyond the single phrase ‘I love Poland’. The diagram is briefly visible behind Professor Perot as he delivers a physics lecture at the Sorbonne (where he stands, one assumes, for Count Jozef Wierusz-Kowalski, Pierre’s real-life sponsor). While it’s no surprise to hear him take Newton as his subject – ‘Your Galileo’, he tells young Marie, her face radiantly lit to suggest that we behold nothing less than the great Tuscan’s parousia – the sketch behind him is another matter, and appears to represent a complex conjugate of vector space.
This is anachronistic not only for Newton’s era or Paris in 1894, but the year of the film’s release. The spoked diagram perfectly describes the internal/external distinction as it relates to epistemic and aleatory uncertainty, something the literature would not adequately parse until the 1980s. (Even now, some claim the border between the two to be porous, but epistemic uncertainty can be eliminated by the addition of knowledge, whereas the aleatory – the product of variation in a system’s inputs and internal parameters – is irreducible by definition.) An almost identical diagram was later discovered in the notebooks of Joseph Parsi (c. 1450), where it formed part of a schematic for a new kind of astrolabe, but this is clearly happenstance.
Whatever the mystery of their origin, the routine incorporation of Perot’s Spokes marks it as no mere caprice. Although not as ubiquitous in the popular consciousness as the Wilhelm or Howie Screams, or the infamous ’Hopper’s Silhouette’, often seen fleetingly in the shadows during sequences depicting heightened paranoia and fear, it is nonetheless a motif each new generation of set-dressers will reliably and perhaps superstitiously reprise. Its appearance always immediately precedes some dramatic intervention of fate or chance, but whether this is simple coincidence, or deliberately prefigures some narrative choice already made, or whether such turns are merely intrinsic to the trope of ‘the classroom scene’ per se – only the guild could tell us.
Aenigmata, XC