The Ship of Theseus, and our Photographs

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@hatsnp started this, at the Battery-Capture thread…

For those not familiar, from the Wikipedia page:

" The Ship of Theseus , also known as Theseus’s Paradox , is a paradox and common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other."
ref: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

The thread discussion centered around historical restoration, where we take an artifact degraded over time and restore it to its condition at a specific time in its life. Sometimes, a lot of work is required to do that, to the point that one might question whether we’re looking at the same artifact.

For a post in another thread in another galaxy, I came across this shot I took a couple of years ago:

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The restored locomotive, switching cars on a track where its former tender happened to reside. Beautiful new, and performant, structure was crafted for the replacement, down to using rivets for its construction. The old one had sat along with it’s locomotive in a city park for almost 50 years, daily being showered by lawn sprinklers, so it wasn’t about to hold water, literally.

While not as evident, the locomotive’s cab is really a complete Ship-O-Theseus. The carpenter who re-built it literally took the old one apart stick-by-stick; he’d take a stick of wood to his shop, make an identical copy, then install it into the new cab. None of these parts were in any condition to perform on an operable locomotive, which was the objective of the restoration.

We’re really doing the same sort of thing in our photography. We take a scene and, from the moment of capture on, replace its components with alternatives that allow us to take the scene to other places to show to folks. The continuous, mixed-wavelength light is collimated in a lens, then segmented into discrete pixels. The information-rich wavelengths are encoded into narrow-band RGB triples, their position in the spectrum chosen to trick the human eye into seeing an equivalent hue in the scene for a given encoding. Even our choice of point-of-view collapses the scene into a specific story, when moving left or right might tell a completely different story. Oh, what a deconstruction…

Thing is, the objectives of both historical restoration and photography are the same: to communicate. That the operating locomotive is not the same article as the one that operated in the 1880s is less-important a concern than communicating to folks in 2025 how such things operated back in the day. Our photographs are after the same thing, to communicate how things were in a scene to people regarding in another place and/or time. Both are done in a process of de- and re-construction.

No, the artifact presented is not the original, but it tells a story…

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It continually amazes me how brittle existenance is when met with time.

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Ship of Theseus only applies to things that can be touched and changed. The question is whether a whole (locomotive) can be replaced in parts and the result is still the old original. It is the discrepancy between the perceived surface and the inner state, which has been renewed in whole or in part. Photography is always only a surface. You need equipment to take photographs and to view them, yes, and this equipment can be renewed in whole or in part. But it is only a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver when repairing a locomotive. A locomotive exists in reality, photography only in the imagination.

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This is a great and unexpected analogy. I agree 100%

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Indeed. Wood is not a building material for the ages. Susceptible to all manner of decay, water is not its friend. Drive through Iowa sometimes, count the number of collapsed barns.

Well-done stone, on the other hand, has very good longevity. I’ve spent exactly 2 days in the Middle East, the following is from a tour guide: Herod was a builder who recognized the persistence of stone, evidenced in his constructions that survive to this day. I recall his edifices had well-positioned, still sharply rectangular stones; other roman construction was jumbled and eroded.

But, even all that looks pathetic when placed in the context of interstellar travel. Vessels that need to survive thousands of years of exposure to the debris of space aren’t going to be built with any construction technique we currently understand. I posit to myself sometimes, if we had been able to intercept Oumuamua we might have found intelligent aliens who’d tell us, “we couldn’t figure out how to construct long-voyage spaceships, so we just hollowed out this rock…”

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Yeah, might be a bit of a stretch, but I still can’t ignore the corollary.

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A similar distinction, and it may or may not be relevant to this discussion, is that between a replica and a reproduction.

An example would be, if Carroll Shelby were still alive and he made a copy of a mid-60s Cobra, it would be a replica. But if some other person made the exact same thing, it would only be a reproduction.

I was thinking that the rebuilt locomotive in this discussion lies somewhere between being the original object and a reproduction of that object.

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The major parts of the original engine itself are still there, boiler/smokebox, cylinders, wheels, frame. The railroads themselves did a lot of part-swapping, but the locomotive numbers tended to follow the boiler.

The term ‘replica’ is usually given to ‘ground-up’ construction from scratch, all new parts. Or, mostly ‘new’ parts; things like bells and whistles migrate around the yard quite a bit.

It’s funny, the railroads back in the day had no compunction against switching parts, but in historic preservation we have to be careful about representing a specific period of an article’s history. #168 is part of a ‘historic trainset’, one that represents a train of the 1920s, so all parts/paints/etc. have to be anchored in that period.

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This is why the Pantheon was my favorite thing when visiting Rome. It’s hard to fathom an almost 2000 year old build being so well preserved and pristine (on the inside). It really shows that stone, and less raw materials like concrete and brick, really last if they are only exposed to ‘light’ elements. The Parthenon in Athens almost had a similar history, were it not for the Turks to fill it with explosives during a siege, believing that no-one would attack such a precious historical monument, only for it to be completely blown up by a mortar shell from the attacking forces.

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Yes, wood is in general a less lasting material than stone – moisture being its enemy no 1, sunlight (UV) and various insects are other.

But, if wood is let drying up regularly and maintained, alternatively choked off from oxygen, it may last for centuries as the Norwegian stave churches (up to 800 years old) Stave church - Wikipedia and viking ships (about 1200 years old) Viking ship - Wikipedia are evidence of.

EDIT: And about the lack of “reality”/truth in our images, I agree fully.

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From an engineering perspective: the objective is not to build a locomotive, building, or spaceship that just “survives” a given timespan of exposure to weather, meteorites, space dust, or whatever.

It is understood that all objects need maintenance and repair after a while. The point to design the object so that this can be done in a convenient and economic fashion over the designed lifespan.

Locomotives are interesting because they are relatively expensive machinery, so they are frequently operated well outside the design lifespan because it is cheaper than replacing a whole fleet and/or upgrading the tracks.

Eg Hungarian State Railways runs a lot of Bzmot diesel locomotives today, designed in the late 1970s in (then) Czechoslovakia. Many of them are 4+ decades old, refurbished multiple times.

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Thanks for sharing that. I think that question comes up a lot with art restoration. Some art experts claims The Last Supper has been restored so many times that the original was lost, and may even look different today.

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Interesting topic. I have a self-coined saying “What you got is not what you saw” …

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Come to think of it, the USS Constitution is the world’s oldest commissioned ship and is still on the registry as an active ship in the US Navy, is probably a real life Thesuess.

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Indeed. It’s interesting how the US navy manages a forest simply for repairing that ship. In the early kingdom of Portugal our kings planted lots of pines, near where I live, to stop the encroaching dunes. Not even 200 years later they served as the main source of wood for our shipbuilding that propelled the start of the Age of “Discovery”

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That ship is well maintained, but its comms and combat system are way out of date… :joy:

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I had to go look, in the Wikipedia page for the Constitution, the Navy organization responsible for programming the ship’s maintenance estimates that 10-15% of the original wood remains:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constitution#Present_day

Gotta say, on the baggage car it’s a bit poignant to tear apart a rotten segment and come across square nails and such that help to date the structure…

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