The Auk

The Auk

who was asked a simple question

The Auk, a prominent member of the Aetheric Concord, at the height of his standing. The flightless bird was his chosen device. He is remembered for one answer.

Flourished	c. 1855–1875; the dates of birth and death, like the name, unrecorded
Member of	The Aetheric Concord (prominent)
Known for	A single attempt at an answer
Emblem	A flightless bird (in hindsight, apt)
The question	Outstanding
The answer	Continues

The Auk was a prominent member of the Aetheric Concord who, for all his standing in the aether circle, is remembered by posterity for a single public moment: asked, at a sitting, the plainest of questions, he replied at very great length and did not arrive at an answer.^[1] He is known now by his chosen emblem—a flightless bird—and by the one question he was asked: his answer survives, his name does not.

The question

He was asked, plainly, by what instrument a distance is measured when a far thing—a mountain, a light—is seen further off than it ought to be.^[1]

The answer

His reply, preserved in full, ran:

"One uses the optical glasses, you understand, and magnifies. And that is—well, I cannot say; perhaps; I think perhaps what the gentleman would be driving at is the matter I raised before, touching the resolution of angles. For the thing stands thus, d'ye see: I speak of optics as they bear upon my own point in space—which is to say, relative to my lenses, my eye—yet should I then take up a telescope, I do thereby alter my resolution; and it is for that reason that, in drawing a thing near with the glass, one loses the field about it. Which is, in truth, a perfect account of the whole matter: of how distant things converge, and seem to fall away over the edge—or, that is, to fall away, though they do not curve from us, for one could never see a curve, it going off away from one. What one sees, rather, is the convergence of the sky and the ground, and—at bottom—the limit set by a certain criterion of resolution, whereby the two are no longer told one from the other. And so there is, you understand, a most intense limit of angle in it."
— The Auk, on being asked how a distance is measured

He named no instrument; the criterion he invoked, for its part, had a difficulty of its own.^[3] He had opened by allowing that he could not say, and he concluded—having returned to no point in particular—appearing, by the account of those present, uncertain himself where he had been going.^[2] The reply, like the bird he had taken for his device, neither took flight nor came to land. A second member, invited to add his thoughts, seconded the notion—though none had been put.

It is the only utterance for which he is remembered, and it settled nothing: the question remains, as this encyclopedia files it, outstanding.

See also

• The Aetheric Concord — of which he was a prominent member
• Rayleigh criterion — the resolution limit he invoked, decades early
• The Mud Geometer — likewise known only by an epithet

References

1. ^ The occasion survives in a single account of a public sitting; the question is recorded in full, being short.
2. ^ By the report of those present. The answer, too, is preserved in full; it is the length of it that is chiefly preserved.
3. ^ The criterion of resolution he invoked was not to be formulated for some decades; the Auk is recorded as the first to cite it, and the only man to have done so before it existed.