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A Note on Gustav Holst

David Manning

in Vaughan Williams on Music

Gustav Holst was a great composer, a great teacher, and a great friend. These are really only different aspects of the same thing—his pupils were his friends, his friends were always learning from ... More

Gustav Holst was a great composer, a great teacher, and a great friend. These are really only different aspects of the same thing—his pupils were his friends, his friends were always learning from him, his music made friends for him all over the world, even among those who had never seen him, and will continue to make more friends for him in the years to come. Holst never fumbles; he says what he means without circumlocution; he is not afraid of a downright tune such as both the tunes in “Jupiter.” On the other hand, where the depth of the thought requires recondite harmony, he does not flinch. The strange chords in “Neptune” make “moderns” sound like milk and water. These chords never seem “wrong,” nor are they incongruous; the same mind is evident in the remote aloofness of Egdon Heath and the homely tunes of the St Paul's Suite.Less

Gustav Holst: A Great Composer

David Manning

in Vaughan Williams on Music

Gustav Holst was a great composer, a great teacher, and a great friend. These are really different aspects of the same fact. It was his intense human sympathy that fostered his musical invention. In ... More

Gustav Holst was a great composer, a great teacher, and a great friend. These are really different aspects of the same fact. It was his intense human sympathy that fostered his musical invention. In one of his lectures he speaks of the almost mystical unity that must necessarily exist between master and pupil, between friend and friend. Art and craft are travellers alongside each other. In England one does not always realise this. It is this very sureness of purpose which makes his music distasteful to some of the less bold hearted of his critics, who seem to think that the tunes from “Jupiter” and St. Paul's Suite are little less than an insult to the intelligence of the intelligentsia. However, Holst gets his own back in “Neptune” and Egdon Heath, with harmonies compared with which the wildest efforts of our young “moderns” are so much milk and water.Less

The Devil in the Detail

Mary Orr

in Flaubert's Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and Science

Devil's rides into space are a well‐worked topos in literature, but this chapter points out for the first time their literal realities in the Montgolfier balloons and Garnarin's parachute that ... More

Devil's rides into space are a well‐worked topos in literature, but this chapter points out for the first time their literal realities in the Montgolfier balloons and Garnarin's parachute that constitute the 19th‐century ‘transports’ of Antoine's literary‐scientific imagination. The chapter then offers further appraisal of what the Devil ‘shows’ Antoine in space, namely (1) the (19th‐century) heliocentric solar system with the new planets, Uranus and Neptune discovered through understanding of gravitational pull, and (2) the huge literary‐scientific joke behind the Devil's transformations as the Norman mathematician Laplace's famous ‘demon’. The chapter ends by rethinking the genesis of the Tentation through the modern mystères of Le Poittevin's Bélial and Byron's Cain as among Flaubert's personal demons.Less

Uranus, Neptune, and Exoplanets

Andrew P. Ingersoll

in Planetary Climates

This chapter focuses on the climates of Uranus, Neptune, and exoplanets. Uranus spins on its side, which allows a comparison between sunlight and rotation for their effects on weather patterns. In ... More

This chapter focuses on the climates of Uranus, Neptune, and exoplanets. Uranus spins on its side, which allows a comparison between sunlight and rotation for their effects on weather patterns. In contrast to Venus, Uranus is only weakly affcted by tides from the Sun because it is so far away. Models of planet accretion give a gradual clumping of small bodies into medium-sized bodies and then into large bodies, until finally only a few large bodies are left. The final collisions, which involved these large bodies, would have been quite violent and were capable of knocking Uranus on its side. After providing an overview of Uranus's rotation, insensitivity to seasonal cycles, and wind profile, the chapter considers Neptune's winds, effective radiating temperature, and Great Dark Spot. It also explains the radial velocity method and the transit method of detecting extrasolar planets.Less

Heavenly Bodies

Peter Wothers

in Title Pages

We don’t know for sure where the names of the longest-known elements come from, but a connection was made early on between the most ancient metals and bodies visible ... More

We don’t know for sure where the names of the longest-known elements come from, but a connection was made early on between the most ancient metals and bodies visible in the heavens. Figure 1 shows an engraving from a seventeenth-century text with the title ‘The Seven Metals’ (translated from the Latin). It isn’t immediately obvious how the image is meant to depict seven metals until we explore the connections between alchemy and astronomy. However strange such associations seem to us now, we shall see that new elements named in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have had astronomical origins. We can’t properly understand why some of the more recent elements were named as they were without first understanding these earlier historical connections. As we look into the night sky, the distant stars remain in their same relative positions and seem to move gracefully together through the heavens. Of course, we now know that it is the spinning Earth that gives this illusion of movement. The imaginations of our ancestors joined the bright dots to pick out fanciful patterns such as the Dragon, the Dolphin, or the Great Bear—the latter being more often known today (with rather less imagination) as the Big Dipper, the Plough, or even the Big Saucepan. But, while these patterns, the constellations, remained unchanging over time, there were seven objects, or ‘heavenly bodies’, that seemed to move across the skies with a life of their own. They were given the name ‘planet’, which derives from the Greek word for ‘wanderer’ (‘planetes asteres’, ‘πλάνητες ἀστέρες’, meaning ‘wandering stars’). These seven bodies were the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, all of which were documented by the Babylonians over three thousand years ago. Until the sixteenth century, the most commonly held view was that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe and that the seven bodies revolved around the Earth, with the relative orbits shown schematically in Figure 2. Less

Susu

Cheryl Colopy

in Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia's Water Crisis

“You’ll never get a dolphin with a digital camera,” Sushant Dey said, as we floated with the current on the Ganga. “They’re only on the surface for a second. By the ... More

“You’ll never get a dolphin with a digital camera,” Sushant Dey said, as we floated with the current on the Ganga. “They’re only on the surface for a second. By the time the shutter clicks, it’s already gone.” Early one morning in April 2007 I walked down to the bottom of a wide concrete stairway just outside Bhagalpur in the Indian state of Bihar to board an old fishing boat. Where the stairs met the river, the prow of the twenty-foot-long boat rested on the riverbank. A narrow plank, its ends positioned on the bank and the edge of the prow, allowed me to board. Sushant Dey and his brother Subhasis were taking me out to look for dolphins before the heat built up, when the dolphins might still be looking for food. Dolphins jump out of the water when they’re hunting, which they typically do early in the morning and again in the evening. The boatman tried repeatedly to start the wooden boat’s old diesel engine. Finally it coughed and caught; we chugged upriver a short way. He turned off the engine and we floated. After a few minutes, I heard a swish of water. A slick muscular body slipped back into the river before I could get a good look. A few minutes passed: another swish. I was looking in the wrong place and missed him. In spite of Sushant’s warning that my effort would be in vain, I tried again and again to catch a dolphin, pointing my camera to a likely spot on the opaque graygreen water where the animal might surface after I had missed a breach. Then I missed again. The Ganga flowed smoothly. It was about a half mile wide now, in the dry season. In the monsoon it grows to three miles wide and can be twenty-five feet higher in some places. The boatman took us to places where the dolphins were known to rest in the deep waters. I got half a dozen good glimpses as a dolphin surfaced briefly to breathe: an arc of dark gray, a shiny comma. Less

Where the Rivers End

Cheryl Colopy

in Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia's Water Crisis

It’s not yet dawn. The Bon Bibi is anchored. Some members of the crew have risen and one has brought hot water to the dining room. I have some tea to warm me as I lean ... More

It’s not yet dawn. The Bon Bibi is anchored. Some members of the crew have risen and one has brought hot water to the dining room. I have some tea to warm me as I lean on the deck rail, looking out over the silent river this December morning. Our guide and my fellow travelers are still asleep below in cozy bunks draped with mosquito nets. Looking to the nearby shore where we walked yesterday, I see the forest guards’ cottages, crumpled by cyclone Sidr’s winds and water. All is quiet. And the fishing skiff that anchored near us yesterday evening is silent too. Perhaps the men fished all night and are still sleeping in the morning chill. I walk around to the other side of the deck. Just a few yards away there’s a log floating down the gentle current toward the Bay of Bengal. Or wait. Maybe, it’s a crocodile heading obliquely across the wide mouth of the river? No, it must be just a clump of vegetation moving in the slight swells of water. Then the clump sinks slightly at both ends. I feel a surge of excitement. The shape is closer to me than any of the crocodiles the boat captain tried to approach as they sunned themselves on the shore upriver yesterday. They always slithered back down the sand and into the water before we could get a good look. There’s little light now, and still unsure, not trusting my aging eyes, I peer intently at the dark hump. It seems to sink imperceptibly again, until finally it slips under the water altogether. The shape moved as quietly and slowly as leaves floating on the surface of the water might, but clumps of vegetation don’t usually vanish underwater quite like that. Fifteen minutes later our young, long-haired Bangladeshi guide asks me, smiling slyly, if I had my glasses on when I made this sighting. When I insist I did, he’s convinced this is a good sign. Apparently this is the first sighting of a crocodile near the Bay since cyclone Sidr the previous month. Less

Conclusion: Crossing the Sea

David Abulafia

in The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

It is tempting to try to reduce the history of the Mediterranean to a few common features, to attempt to define a ‘Mediterranean identity’ or to insist ... More

It is tempting to try to reduce the history of the Mediterranean to a few common features, to attempt to define a ‘Mediterranean identity’ or to insist that certain physical features of the region have moulded human experience there (as Braudel strongly argued). Yet this search for a fundamental unity starts from a misunderstanding of what the Mediterranean has meant for the peoples who have inhabited its shores and islands, or have crossed its surface. Rather than searching for unity, we should note diversity. At the human level, this ethnic, linguistic, religious and political diversity was constantly subject to external influences from across the sea, and therefore in a constant state of flux. From the earliest chapters of this book, where the first settlers in Sicily were described, to the ribbon developments along the Spanish costas, the edges of the Mediterranean Sea have provided meeting-points for peoples of the most varied backgrounds who have exploited its resources and learned, in some cases, to make a living from transferring its products from better-endowed to ill-endowed regions. From within its waters came fish and salt, two ingredients of the much-traded garum sauce of ancient Rome, and the basis for the early prosperity of one of the greatest of Mediterranean cities, Venice. As predicted in the preface, fishermen have not featured prominently in this book, in part because the evidence they have left behind is often very slight, but in part too because fishermen seek what is by definition under the surface of the sea and are less likely to make contact with communities on the opposing shores of the Mediterranean. The great exceptions are within the narrows near Malta, where the Genoese established a colony at Tabarka on the coast of Tunisia between 1540 and 1742 specializing in coral-fishing, and where Tunisian fishermen have now joined Sicilian fleets in the matanza, the great seasonal slaughter of tuna. Even more than fish, which keeps well only after salting or drying, grain has long been the major product carried across the sea, originally grown around its shores or brought down from the Black Sea, but, by the seventeenth century, increasingly of north European origin. Less

Astrophysics and Nucleosynthesis

Eric Scerri

in The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance

Having now examined attempts to explain the nature of the elements and the periodic system in a theoretical manner, it is necessary to backtrack a little in order to ... More

Having now examined attempts to explain the nature of the elements and the periodic system in a theoretical manner, it is necessary to backtrack a little in order to pick up a number of important issues not yet addressed. As in the preceding chapters, several contributions from fields outside of chemistry are encountered, and the treatment proceeds historically. So far in this book, the elements have been treated as if they have always existed, fully formed. Nothing has yet been said about how the elements have evolved or about the relative abundance of the isotopes of the elements. These questions form the contents of this chapter. It also emerges that different isotopes show different stabilities, a feature that can be explained to a considerable extent by appeal to theories from nuclear physics. The study of nucleosynthesis, and especially the development of this field, is intimately connected to the development of the field of cosmology as a branch of physical science. In a number of instances, different cosmological theories have been judged according to the degree to which they could explain the observed universal abundances of the various elements. Perhaps the most controversial cosmological debate has been over the rival theories of the big bang and the steady-state models of the universe. The proponents of these theories frequently appealed to relative abundance data, and indeed, the eventual capitulation of the steady-state theorists, or at least some of them, was crucially dependent upon the observed ratio of hydrogen to helium in the universe. Chapters 2, 3, and 6 discussed Prout’s hypothesis, according to which all the elements are essentially made out of hydrogen. Although the hypothesis was initially rejected on the basis of accurate atomic weight determinations, it underwent a revival in the twentieth century. As mentioned in chapter 6, the discoveries of Anton van den Broek, Henry Moseley, and others showed that there is a sense in which all elements are indeed composites of hydrogen. Less

Synthetic Elements

Eric Scerri

in The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance

The periodic table consists of about 90 elements that occur naturally ending with element 92 uranium. This lack of precision is deliberate since one or two elements ... More

The periodic table consists of about 90 elements that occur naturally ending with element 92 uranium. This lack of precision is deliberate since one or two elements such as technetium were first created artificially and only later found to occur naturally on earth. This kind of occurrence provides a foreshadowing of things to come when we begin to discuss the transuranium elements, meaning those beyond uranium that have been artificially synthesized. Chemists and physicists have succeeded in synthesizing some of the elements that were missing between hydrogen (1) and uranium (92). In addition, they have synthesized a further 25, or so, new elements beyond uranium, although, again, one or two of these elements, like neptunium and plutonium, were later found to exist naturally in exceedingly small amounts. The existence of superheavy elements raises a number of interesting questions that pertain to the field of philosophy of science and also sociology of science. In fact, the very question of whether these superheavy elements actually exist needs to be dissected further, as it will be in the course of this chapter. The synthetic elements are extremely unstable, and only the lightest ones among them have been created in amounts large enough to be observed. Roughly speaking, the heavier the atom, the shorter its lifetime is. For example, the heaviest element for which there is now conclusive evidence is element 118, a few atoms of which have been created in just one single isotope form and with a half-life of less than a millisecond. Laypersons and specialists alike have asked themselves in what sense these elements can really be said to exist. The superheavy elements also have philosophical implications for the study of the periodic system as a whole and the question of whether there is a natural end to chemical periodicity. A related question, which has now become quite pressing, is the possible extension of the periodic table to include a new g-block which in formal terms should begin at element 121. Less

Voyager Redux, Galileo, and Magellan

Peter J. Westwick

in Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004

This chapter shows that despite the failure of the SSEC plan—the bloated Mars Observer, the deferral of Mariner Mark II—the decade of the 1980s closed on a generally upbeat note. The optimism of ... More

This chapter shows that despite the failure of the SSEC plan—the bloated Mars Observer, the deferral of Mariner Mark II—the decade of the 1980s closed on a generally upbeat note. The optimism of 1985, dashed by Challenger, returned. Mars Observer and CRAF/Cassini, although expanding beyond austerity, were still under way. Voyager meanwhile continued to sustain the lab with encounters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, and together with Galileo and Magellan it combined to restore confidence at JPL. Amid the drought in planetary launches, the main sustenance for planetary scientists in this period came from Voyager 2's encounters at Uranus and Neptune, which extended Voyager's triumphal tour of the outer solar system. The encounters, however, did not simply entail sitting back and waiting for the spacecraft to get there but required much new work.Less

A Professor of Eloquence

David Clarke

in Reflections on the Astronomy of Glasgow: A story of some 500 years

This chapter covers the life of John Pringle Nichol who, as the 5th Regius Professor of Astronomy (1836 to 1859), influenced extra-mural interest in the subject to a passion that the local citizens ... More

This chapter covers the life of John Pringle Nichol who, as the 5th Regius Professor of Astronomy (1836 to 1859), influenced extra-mural interest in the subject to a passion that the local citizens funded a substantial observatory on Horselethill, beyond the precincts of the city. A few years after the build (1841), it was saved from financial collapse by the University. Part of the difficulties had arisen through Nichol's extravagance in purchasing unnecessarily expensive equipment including an Ertel transit telescope from Germany - gold instead of silver. Horselethill Observatory was kept in operation for 100 years. Nichol was a prolific writer and populariser of Astronomy; his books Contemplations on the Solar System and Views of the Architecture of the Heavens, the latter expanding on the Nebular Hypothesis, and one describing the discovery of Neptune, received international acclaim; his writings had influence on other giants in the literary arena beyond science including George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas de Quincey. A remarkable read is his Memorials From Ben Rhydding which includes a description of his opium addiction and of its cure. Both he and his son are immortalised in the magnificent memorial stained glass window of the University's Bute Hall.Less

The Initial Situation on the Allied Side

Joachim Ludewig

in Rückzug: The German Retreat from France, 1944

Chapter 2 outlines the strategies formulated by the Allies at the Second Cairo Conference and the Teheran Conference in preparation for the invasion of France. The objective of Operation Overlord, ... More

Chapter 2 outlines the strategies formulated by the Allies at the Second Cairo Conference and the Teheran Conference in preparation for the invasion of France. The objective of Operation Overlord, which was scheduled for a duration of ninety days of combat, was to establish for the Allied forces a sufficiently large lodgement area on the Continent, from which the follow-on offensives could be launched toward the Reich.Less

Big Planets, Dwarf Planets, and Small Bodies

Claude A. Piantadosi

in Mankind Beyond Earth: The History, Science, and Future of Human Space Exploration

This chapter discusses the exploration of areas beyond Mars, or the outer system. The inner and outer systems are separated by a void between Mars and Jupiter populated by thousands of remnants of ... More

This chapter discusses the exploration of areas beyond Mars, or the outer system. The inner and outer systems are separated by a void between Mars and Jupiter populated by thousands of remnants of the ancient Solar System, the main asteroid belt. The outer system is six times larger than the inner system. Mars, comparable to Antarctica, is balmy compared with the objects here. While the lowest recorded temperature on the Antarctic plateau is −89.5°C(−128.5°F), or 183.5 K, in Ceres it is 167 K, Jupiter's moon Callisto is 120 K, and Saturn's moon Titan is 90 K. Uranus's Shakespearian twins, Oberon and Titania, are ~60 K. Neptune's Triton, the coldest moon of all, is 35 K.Less

Mary Fairfax Greig Somerville (1780–1872)

Daniel R. Altschuler and Fernando J. Ballesteros

in The Women of the Moon: Tales of Science, Love, Sorrow, and Courage

This chapter is about the Scottish scientific writer Mary Somerville: her life and her relationships with the main scientists of the time.