By Peter Weiss
Like a defense lawyer in court, David G. Stork was eager to know whether his closing argument was winning over his audience. Would a jury vote to convict? Stork asked the group assembled at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center early this month. None of the of the 100 or so people in the Greenbelt, Md.–facility raised a hand–just the response that Stork, chief scientist of Ricoh Innovations in Menlo Park, Calif., was hoping for.
Stork is no lawyer, but he definitely has a group of people to defend. An investigator of pattern recognition and an amateur artist, he’s on a mission to scientifically disprove the assertion by renowned British-born artist David Hockney that many of Europe’s greatest artists of the 15th and 16th centuries secretly used mirrors or lenses to project traceable images onto their canvases and thereby achieve the arresting realism of their paintings.