Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

The Legend of the Teapot

But globes are too easy, too boring. A teapot is more sophisticated with its lid, spout and handle. Rotated in virtual space and with simulated lighting coming from certain angles the spout and handles can be made to cast shadows elsewhere on the pot.

There are around the water coolers where graphics artists congregate two legends about how the teapot became something of a symbol for computer graphics, a model for students to learn by and a demonstration for different software programs. The first is that it is Russell’s Atheist Celestial Teapot, a sort of antithesis of “What hath God wrought.” The other legend is that a computer graphics student at the University of Utah, Martin Newell, needed a 3D object to work with for his PhD thesis and his wife had suggested the family’s teapot.  That teapot is now on display in the Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.  The picture of the teapot in this book is not a painting of a teapot by an artist and it is not a photograph. It is a computer generated image. The very shape of the teapot in 3D space is represented by a series of X, Y and Z values—every point, every dot, every pixel or whatever you want to call them could be written out as a long list of numbers, put in a spreadsheet or a data file.

It is important here to make a distinction between what an artist paints or a photographer shoots and the computer generated image. All are representations of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. But the painting or the photograph are produced by actual reflected light. Many factors control how much light is reflected at any place on the image: where the light comes from, how bright it is, how direct or diffused the light is, the color and shininess of the surface. But the one thing it never is is the proximity of any part of the object to a camera or the eye of an artist. It may seem that way at times but it is because a close feature is affected by any of the other factors mentioned above.