title: Violin

text: Violins make up a large part of an orchestra, and are usually divided into two sections, known as the first and second violins. Composers often assign the melody to the first violins, typically a more difficult part using higher positions. In contrast, second violins play harmony, accompaniment patterns or the melody an octave lower than the first violins. A string quartet similarly has parts for first and second violins, as well as a viola part, and a bass instrument, such as the cello or, rarely, the double bass.


title: Violin

text: The earliest references to jazz performance using the violin as a solo instrument are documented during the first decades of the 20th century. Joe Venuti, one of the first jazz violinists, is known for his work with guitarist Eddie Lang during the 1920s. Since that time there have been many improvising violinists including Stéphane Grappelli, Stuff Smith, Eddie South, Regina Carter, Johnny Frigo, John Blake, Adam Taubitz, Leroy Jenkins, and Jean-Luc Ponty. While not primarily jazz violinists, Darol Anger and Mark O'Connor have spent significant parts of their careers playing jazz.


title: Violin

text: The Indian violin, while essentially the same instrument as that used in Western music, is different in some senses. The instrument is tuned so that the IV and III strings (G and D on a western-tuned violin) and the II and I (A and E) strings are sa–pa (do–sol) pairs and sound the same but are offset by an octave, resembling common scordatura or fiddle cross-tunings such as G3–D4–G4–D5 or A3–E4–A4–E5. The tonic sa (do) is not fixed, but variably tuned to accommodate the vocalist or lead player. The way the musician holds the instrument varies from Western to Indian music. In Indian music the musician sits on the floor cross-legged with the right foot out in front of them. The scroll of the instrument rests on the foot. This position is essential to playing well due to the nature of Indian music. The hand can move all over the fingerboard and there is no set position for the left hand, so it is important for the violin to be in a steady, unmoving position.


title: Violin

text: Up through at least the 1970s, most types of popular music used bowed string sections. They were extensively used in popular music throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. With the rise of swing music, however, from 1935 to 1945, the string sound was often used to add to the fullness of big band music. Following the swing era, from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, strings began to be revived in traditional pop music. This trend accelerated in the late 1960s, with a significant revival of the use of strings, especially in soul music. Popular Motown recordings of the late 1960s and 1970s relied heavily on strings as part of their trademark texture. The rise of disco music in the 1970s continued this trend with the heavy use of string instruments in popular disco orchestras (e.g., Love Unlimited Orchestra, Biddu Orchestra, Monster Orchestra, Salsoul Orchestra, MFSB).


title: Violin

text: With the rise of electronically created music in the 1980s, violins declined in use, as synthesized string sounds played by a keyboardist with a synthesizer took their place. However, while the violin has had very little usage in mainstream rock music, it has some history in progressive rock (e.g., Electric Light Orchestra, King Crimson, Kansas, Gentle Giant). The 1973 album "" by Italy's RDM plays violins off against synthesizers at its finale ("La grande fuga"). The instrument has a stronger place in modern jazz fusion bands, notably The Corrs. The fiddle is sometimes a part of British folk rock music, as exemplified by the likes of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span.


title: Violin

text: The popularity of crossover music beginning in the last years of the 20th century has brought the violin back into the popular music arena, with both electric and acoustic violins being used by popular bands. Dave Matthews Band features violinist Boyd Tinsley. The Flock featured violinist Jerry Goodman who later joined the jazz-rock fusion band, The Mahavishnu Orchestra. James' Saul Davies, who is also a guitarist, was enlisted by the band as a violinist. For their first three albums and related singles, the British group No-Man made extensive use of electric and acoustic solo violin as played by band member Ben Coleman (who played violin exclusively).


title: Violin

text: Pop-Punk band Yellowcard has made a mainstay of violin in its music. Violinist Sean Mackin has been a member of the band since 1997. Los Salvadores also combine punk and ska influences with a violin. Doom metal band My Dying Bride have used violin as a part of their line-up throughout many of their albums. The violin appears prominently in the music of Spanish folk metal group Mägo de Oz (for example, in their 1998 hit "Molinos de viento"). The violinist (Carlos Prieto a.k.a. "Mohamed") has been one of the group's most popular members with fans since 1992. The instrument is also used often in symphonic metal, particularly by bands such as Therion, Nightwish, Within Temptation, Haggard, and Epica, although it can also be found in Gothic Metal bands such as Tristania and Theater of Tragedy. The alternative rock band Hurt's vocalist plays violin for the band, making them one of few rock bands to feature violin without hiring a session worker. The folk metal band Ithilien use violin extensively along their discography. Progressive metal band Ne Obliviscaris feature a violin player, Tim Charles, in their line-up.


title: Violin

text: Independent artists, such as Owen Pallett, The Shondes, and Andrew Bird, have also spurred increased interest in the instrument. Indie bands have often embraced new and unusual arrangements, allowing them more freedom to feature the violin than many mainstream musical artists. It has been used in the post-rock genre by bands such as A Genuine Freakshow, Sigur Rós, Zox, Broken Social Scene, and A Silver Mt. Zion. The electric violin has even been used by bands like The Crüxshadows within the context of keyboard based music. Lindsey Stirling plays the violin in conjunction with electronic/dubstep/trance rifts and beats.


title: Violin

text: Eric Stanley improvises on the violin with hip hop music/pop/classical elements and instrumental beats. The successful indie rock and baroque pop band Arcade Fire use violins extensively in their arrangements. Indian, Turkish, and Arabic pop music is filled with the sound of violins, both soloists and ensembles.


title: Violin

text: Like many other instruments used in classical music, the violin descends from remote ancestors that were used for folk music. Following a stage of intensive development in the late Renaissance, largely in Italy, the violin had improved (in volume, tone, and agility), to the point that it not only became a very important instrument in art music, but proved highly appealing to folk musicians as well, ultimately spreading very widely, sometimes displacing earlier bowed instruments. Ethnomusicologists have observed its widespread use in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.


title: Violin

text: When played as a folk instrument, the violin is usually referred to in English as a "fiddle" (although the term "fiddle" can be used informally no matter what the genre of music). Worldwide, there are various stringed instruments such as the wheel fiddle and Apache fiddle that are also called "fiddles". Fiddle music differs from classical in that the tunes are generally considered dance music, and various techniques, such as droning, shuffling, and ornamentation specific to particular styles are used. In many traditions of folk music, the tunes are not written but are memorized by successive generations of musicians and passed on in what is known as the oral tradition. Many old-time pieces call for cross-tuning, or using tunings other than standard GDAE. Some players of American styles of folk fiddling (such as bluegrass or old-time) have their bridge's top edge cut to a slightly flatter curve, making techniques such as a "double shuffle" less taxing on the bow arm, as it reduces the range of motion needed for alternating between double stops on different string pairs. Fiddlers who use solid steel core strings may prefer to use a tailpiece with fine tuners on all four strings, instead of the single fine tuner on the E string used by many classical players.


title: Violin

text: Electric violins have a magnetic or piezoelectric pickup that converts string vibration to an electric signal. A patch cable or wireless transmitter sends the signal to an amplifier of a PA system. Electric violins are usually constructed as such, but a pickup can be added to a conventional acoustic violin. An electric violin with a resonating body that produces listening-level sound independently of the electric elements can be called an "electro-acoustic violin". To be effective as an acoustic violin, electro-acoustic violins retain much of the resonating body of the violin, and often resemble an acoustic violin or fiddle. The body may be finished in bright colors and made from alternative materials to wood. These violins may need to be hooked up to an instrument amplifier or PA system. Some types come with a silent option that allows the player to use headphones that are hooked up to the violin. The first specially built electric violins date back to 1928 and were made by Victor Pfeil, Oskar Vierling, George Eisenberg, Benjamin Miessner, George Beauchamp, Hugo Benioff and Fredray Kislingbury. These violins can be plugged into effect units, just like an electric guitar, including distortion, wah-wah pedal and reverb. Since electric violins do not rely on string tension and resonance to amplify their sound they can have more strings. For example, five-stringed electric violins are available from several manufacturers, and a seven string electric violin (with three lower strings encompassing the cello's range) is also available. The majority of the first electric violinists were musicians playing jazz fusion (e.g., Jean-Luc Ponty) and popular music.


title: Violin

text: Violin authentication is the process of determining the maker and manufacture date of a violin. This process is similar to that used to determine the provenance of art works. This can be an important process as significant value may be attached to violins made either by specific makers or at specific times and locations. Forgery and other methods of fraudulent misrepresentation can be used to inflate the value of an instrument.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Mississippi Burning is a 1988 American crime thriller film directed by Alan Parker that is loosely based on the 1964 murder investigation of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi. It stars Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as two FBI agents investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers in fictional Jessup County, Mississippi, who are met with hostility by the town's residents, local police, and the Ku Klux Klan.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Screenwriter Chris Gerolmo began the script in 1985 after researching the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. He and producer Frederick Zollo presented it to Orion Pictures, and the studio hired Parker to direct the film. The writer and director had disputes over the script, and Orion allowed Parker to make uncredited rewrites. The film was shot in a number of locations in Mississippi and Alabama, with principal photography from March to May 1988.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: On release, "Mississippi Burning" was criticized by activists involved in the civil rights movement and the families of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner for its fictionalization of events. Critical reaction was generally positive, with praise aimed towards the performances of Hackman, Dafoe and Frances McDormand. The film grossed $34.6 million in North America against a production budget of $15 million. It received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won for Best Cinematography.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: In 1964, three civil rights workers – two Jewish and one black – go missing while in Jessup County, Mississippi, organizing a voter registry for African Americans after having being shot dead in their car by pursuants. The FBI sends Alan Ward and Rupert Anderson to investigate. Ward is a Northerner, senior in rank but much younger than Anderson, and approaches the investigation by the book. In contrast, Anderson, a former Mississippi sheriff, is more nuanced in his approach. The pair find it difficult to conduct interviews with the local townspeople, as Sheriff Ray Stuckey and his deputies influence the public and are linked to a branch of the Ku Klux Klan. The wife of Deputy Sheriff Clinton Pell reveals to Anderson in a discreet conversation that the three missing men have been murdered and their bodies buried in an earthen dam. Pell beats his wife brutally in retribution after discovering her betrayal.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Ward and Anderson's different approaches spill over into a physical fight which Ward wins but concedes his methods have been ineffective and gives Anderson carte blanche to deal with the problem his way. Anderson devises a plan to indict members of the Klan for civil rights violations, instead of murder, as civil rights are federal charges where conviction is more certain compared to a state-level charge of murder. The FBI arranges a kidnapping of Mayor Tilman, taking him to a remote shack, where he is left with a black man, who threatens to castrate him unless he speaks out. Tilman gives him a complete description of the killings, including the names of those involved. The abductor is revealed to be an FBI operative assigned to intimidate Tilman. Although the obtained information is not admissible in court due to coercion, it does prove valuable to the investigators.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Anderson and Ward concoct a plan, luring identified Klan collaborators to a bogus meeting, but the men soon realize they have been set up and leave without discussing the murders. The FBI then concentrates on Lester Cowens, a Klansman of interest who exhibits a nervous demeanor, which the agents believe might yield a confession. The Feds pick him up and interrogate him. Anderson stages a tussle with Pell at the local barbershop in retaliation for the attack of his wife and takes off. Later, Cowens is at home when a shotgun blast shatters his window. After seeing a burning cross on his lawn, he attempts to flee in his truck but is caught by several hooded men who intend to hang him. The team arrives to rescue him, having staged the entire scenario where the hooded men are revealed to be other FBI agents.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Cowens, believing that his fellow rednecks have threatened his life because of his admissions to the FBI, incriminates his accomplices. The Klansmen are all charged with civil rights violations, as this can be prosecuted at the federal level. Most of the perpetrators are convicted, while Stuckey is acquitted of all charges. Tilman is later found dead by the FBI from suicide. Mrs. Pell returns to her home, which has been completely ransacked by vandals. She resolves to stay and rebuild her life, free of her husband. Before leaving town, Anderson and Ward visit an integrated congregation, gathered at an African-American cemetery, where the black civil rights activist's desecrated gravestone reads, "Not Forgotten."


title: Mississippi Burning

text: On June 21, 1964, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were arrested in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, and taken to a Neshoba County jail. The three men had been working on the "Freedom Summer" campaign, attempting to organize a voter registry for African Americans. Price charged Chaney with speeding and held the other two men for questioning. He released the three men on bail seven hours later and followed them out of town. After Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner failed to return to Meridian, Mississippi, on time, workers for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) placed calls to the Neshoba County jail, asking if the police had any information on their whereabouts. Two days later, FBI agent John Proctor and ten other agents began their investigation in Neshoba County. They received a tip about a burning CORE station wagon seen in the woods off Highway 21, about 20 miles northeast of Philadelphia. The investigation was given the code name "MIBURN" (short for "Mississippi Burning"), and top FBI inspectors were sent to help with the case.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: On August 4, 1964, the bodies of the three men were found after an informant nicknamed "Mr. X" in FBI reports passed along a tip to federal authorities. They were discovered underneath an earthen dam on a 253-acre farm located a few miles outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. All three men had been shot. Nineteen suspects were indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for violating the workers' civil rights. On October 27, 1967, a federal trial conducted in Meridian resulted in only seven of the defendants, including Price, being convicted with sentences ranging from three to ten years. Nine were acquitted, and the jury deadlocked on three others.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: In 2002, Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter for "The Clarion-Ledger", discovered new evidence regarding the murders. He also located new witnesses and pressured the state of Mississippi to reopen the case. Stevenson High School teacher Barry Bradford and three of his students aided Mitchell in his investigation after the three students chose to research the "Mississippi Burning" case for a history project.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: The identity of Mr. X was a closely held secret for 40 years. In the process of reopening the case, Mitchell, Bradford and the three students discovered the informant's identity. Mr. X was revealed to be Maynard King, a highway patrolman who revealed the location of the civil rights workers' bodies to FBI Agent Joseph Sullivan. In 2005, one perpetrator, Edgar Ray Killen, was charged for his part in the crimes. He was convicted of three counts of manslaughter, and received a 60-year sentence. Killen died in prison on January 11, 2018.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: In 1985, screenwriter Chris Gerolmo discovered an article that excerpted a chapter from the book "Inside Hoover's F.B.I.", which chronicled the FBI's investigation into the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. While writing a draft script, Gerolmo brought it to producer Frederick Zollo, who had worked with him on "Miles from Home" (1988). Zollo helped Gerolmo develop the original draft before they sold it to Orion Pictures.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: The studio then began its search for a director. Filmmakers Miloš Forman and John Schlesinger were among those considered to helm the project. In September 1987, Alan Parker was given a copy of Gerolmo's script by Orion's executive vice president and co-founder Mike Medavoy. When Parker traveled to Tokyo, Japan, to act as a juror for the 1987 Tokyo International Film Festival, his colleague Robert F. Colesberry began researching the time period, and compiled books, newspaper articles, live news footage and photographs related to the 1964 murders. Upon returning to the United States, Parker met with Colesberry in New York and spent several months viewing the research. The director also began selecting the creative team; the production reunited Parker with many of his past collaborators, including Colesberry, casting directors Howard Feuer and Juliet Taylor, director of photography Peter Biziou, editor Gerry Hambling, costume designer Aude Bronson-Howard, production designer Geoffrey Kirkland, camera operator Michael Roberts, and music composer Trevor Jones.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Gerolmo described his original draft script as "a big, passionate, violent detective story set against the greatest sea-change in American life in the 20th century, the civil rights movement". For legal reasons, the names of the people and certain details related to the FBI's investigation were changed. On presenting Clinton Pell's wife as an informant, Gerolmo said, "... the fact that no one knew who Mr. X, the informant, was, left that as a dramatic possibility for me, in my Hollywood movie version of the story. That's why Mr. X became the wife of one of the conspirators." The abductor of Mayor Tilman was originally written as a Mafia hitman who forces a confession by putting a pistol in Tilman's mouth. Gerolmo was inspired by Gregory Scarpa, a mob enforcer allegedly recruited by the FBI during their search for Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: After Parker was hired to direct the film, Gerolmo had completed two drafts. Parker met with Gerolmo at Orion's offices in Century City, Los Angeles, where they began work on a third draft script. Both the writer and director however had repeated disagreements over the focus of the story. To resolve the issue, Orion executives in New York gave Parker one month to make uncredited rewrites before green-lighting the project.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Parker made several changes from Gerolmo's original draft. He omitted the Mafia hitman and created the character Agent Monk, a black FBI specialist who kidnaps Tilman. The scene in which Frank Bailey brutally beats a news cameraman was based on an actual event; Parker and Colesberry were inspired by a news outtake found during their research, in which a CBS News cameraman was assaulted by a suspect in the 1964 murder case. Parker also wrote a sex scene involving Rupert Anderson and Mrs. Pell. The scene was omitted during filming after Gene Hackman, who portrays Anderson, suggested to Parker that the relationship between the two characters be more discreet. By January 4, 1988, Parker had written a complete shooting script, which he submitted to Orion executives. Gerolmo did not visit the production during principal photography, due to the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Parker held casting calls in New York, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Orlando, New Orleans, Raleigh and Nashville. The filmmakers did not retain the names of actual people; many of the supporting characters were composites of people related to the murder case. Gene Hackman plays Rupert Anderson, an FBI agent and former Mississippi sheriff. Brian Dennehy was briefly considered for the role before Orion suggested Hackman. As the script was being written, Parker frequently discussed the project with Hackman. Hackman said that "it felt right to do something of historical import. It was an extremely intense experience, both the content of the film and the making of it in Mississippi."


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Orion was less resolute in terms of who they wanted for the role of Agent Alan Ward. After filming "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988), Willem Dafoe expressed interest in playing Ward, and Parker traveled to Los Angeles, where he met with the actor to discuss the role. Dafoe was cast shortly thereafter. To prepare for the role, Dafoe researched the time period and Neshoba County. He also read Willie Morris's 1983 novel "The Courting of Marcus Dupree", and looked at 1960s documentary footage detailing how the media covered the murder case. Frances McDormand plays Mrs. Pell, the wife of Deputy Sheriff Clinton Pell. On working with Hackman, McDormand said: ""Mississippi Burning", I didn't do research. All I did was listen to [Hackman]. He had an amazing capacity for not giving away any part of himself (in read-throughs). But the minute we got on the set, little blinds on his eyes flipped up and everything was available. It was mesmerizing. He's really believable, and it was like a basic acting lesson."


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Gailard Sartain plays Ray Stuckey, the sheriff of Jessup County – a character based on former Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey. Sartain described Stuckey as "an elected official ... who has to be gregarious – but with sinister overtones". Stephen Tobolowsky plays Clayton Townley, a Grand Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The character is based on White Knights leader Samuel Bowers. Michael Rooker plays Frank Bailey, a Klansman involved in the murders of the three civil rights activists. Pruitt Taylor Vince, who had a small role in Parker's previous film "Angel Heart", plays Lester Cowens, a Klansman who unknowingly becomes a pawn in the FBI's investigation. Vince described the character as "goofy, stupid and geeky" and stated, "I never had a prejudiced bone in my body. It gave me a funny feeling to play this guy with a hood and everything. But when you're in the midst of it, you just concentrate on getting through it."


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Kevin Dunn joined the production in February 1988, appearing in his acting debut as FBI Agent Bird. Tobin Bell, also making his feature film debut, plays Agent Stokes, an FBI enforcer hired by Anderson to interrogate Cowens. Bell was first asked by Parker to read for the role of Clinton Pell, a role that was ultimately given to Brad Dourif.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Appearing as the three civil rights activists are Geoffrey Nauffts as "Goatee", a character based on Michael Schwerner; Rick Zieff as "Passenger", based on Andrew Goodman; and Christopher White as "Black Passenger", based on James Chaney. Producers Frederick Zollo and Robert F. Colesberry also make appearances in the film; Zollo briefly appears as a news reporter, and Colesberry appears as a news cameraman who is brutally beaten by Frank Bailey. While scouting locations in Jackson, Mississippi, Parker arranged an open casting call for local actors and extras. He and Colesberry met music teacher Lannie McBride, who appears as a gospel singer in the film.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: During the screenwriting process, Parker and Colesberry began scouting locations. They visited eight states based on suggestions made by the location department. The shooting script required that a total of 62 locations be used for filming. In December 1987, Parker and Colesberry traveled to Mississippi to visit the stretch of road where Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were murdered. The filmmakers were initially reluctant about filming in Mississippi; they expressed interest in filming in Forsyth County, Georgia, before being persuaded by John Horne, head of Mississippi's film commission. Parker also met with Mississippi governor Ray Mabus, who voiced his support of the film's production.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Principal photography began on March 7, 1988, with a budget of $15 million. Filming began in Jackson, Mississippi, where the production team filmed a church being burned down. The sequence required a multiple-camera setup; a total of three cameras were used during the shoot. On March 8, the production team filmed a scene set in a motel where Anderson (Hackman) delivers a monologue to Ward (Dafoe). On March 10, production moved to a remote corner of Mississippi, where the crew filmed the burning of a parish church.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: On March 11, the production filmed scenes set in a pig farm, where a young boy is confronted and attacked by three perpetrators. A night later, the crew shot the film's opening sequence, in which the three civil rights workers are murdered. From March 14 to March 18, the crew filmed the burning of several more churches, as well as scenes set in a farm. On March 22, the crew filmed scenes set in a morgue that was located inside the University of Mississippi Medical Center, exactly the same location where the bodies of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were transported. A day later, Parker and the crew filmed a scene set in a cotton field. The art department had to dress each plant with layers of cotton, as the cotton plants had not fully bloomed. The crew also filmed the abduction of Mayor Tilman (R. Lee Ermey) and his subsequent interrogation by FBI agent Monk (Badja Djola). On March 24, the production moved to Raymond, Mississippi, where the crew filmed a scene at the John Bell Williams Airport. Depicting Monk's departure, the scene was choreographed by Parker and the cast members so that it could be filmed in one take.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: The production then moved to Vaiden, Mississippi to film scenes set in the Carroll County Courthouse, where several courtroom scenes, as well as scenes set in Sheriff Ray Stuckey's office were filmed. The production moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where the crew filmed a funeral procession. On April 11, 1988, the crew filmed a scene set in the Cedar Hill Cemetery. From April 15 to April 16, the production moved to the Mississippi River valley to depict the FBI and United States Navy's search for the three civil rights workers. The art department recreated a Choctaw Indian Village on the location, based on old photographs. On April 23, the crew filmed a scene depicting a Citizens' Councils rally with 750 extras. On April 25, the crew returned to Jackson, Mississippi, where an unused building was to recreate a diner that was found in Alabama during location scouting. A day later, Hackman and Dafoe filmed their opening scene, in which the characters Anderson and Ward drive to Jessup County, Mississippi.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: On April 27, the production moved to LaFayette, Alabama, for the remainder of filming. From April 28 to April 29, Parker and his crew filmed scenes set in Mrs. Pell's home. On May 5, the production shot one of the film's final scenes, in which Anderson discovers Mrs. Pell's home trashed. On May 13, the crew filmed scenes in a former LaFayette movie theatre, which had now become a tractor tire store. The art department restored the theatre's interiors to reflect the time period. Filming concluded on May 14, 1988, after the production filmed a Ku Klux Klan speech that is overseen by the FBI.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: The score was produced, arranged and composed by Trevor Jones; it marked his second collaboration with Parker after "Angel Heart". In addition to Jones's score, the soundtrack features several gospel songs, including "Walk on by Faith" performed by Lannie McBride, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" performed by Mahalia Jackson and "Try Jesus" performed by Vesta Williams. A motion picture soundtrack album was released by the recording labels Antilles Records and Island Records.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: "Mississippi Burning" held its world premiere at the Uptown Theatre in Washington, D.C., on December 2, 1988, with various politicians, ambassadors and political reporters in attendance. United States Senator Ted Kennedy voiced his support of the film, stating, "This movie will educate millions of Americans too young to recall the sad events of that summer about what life was like in this country before the enactment of the civil rights laws." The film was given a platform release, first being released in a small number of cities in North America before opening nationwide. It opened in Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto and New York City on December 9, 1988. Orion was confident that the limited release would help qualify the film for Academy Awards consideration, and generate strong word-of-mouth support from audiences. The film opened in wide release on January 27, 1989, playing at 1,058 theaters, and expanding to 1,074 theatres by its ninth week.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: "Mississippi Burning"s first week of limited release saw it take $225,034, an average of $25,003.40 per theater. The film grossed an additional $160,628 in its second weekend. More theaters were added during the limited run, and on January 27, 1989, the film officially entered wide release. Over its first weekend of wide release, the film grossed $3,545,305, securing the number five position at the domestic box office with a domestic gross to date of $14,726,112. The film generated strong local interest in the state of Mississippi, resulting in sold-out showings in the first four days of wide release. After seven weeks of wide release, "Mississippi Burning" ended its theatrical run with an overall gross of $34,603,943. In North America, it was the thirty-third highest-grossing film of 1988 and the seventeenth highest-grossing R-rated film of that year.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: "Mississippi Burning" was released on VHS on July 27, 1989, by Orion Home Video. A "Collector's Edition" of the film was released on LaserDisc on April 3, 1998. The film was released on DVD on May 8, 2001, by MGM Home Entertainment. Special features for the DVD include an audio commentary by Parker and a theatrical trailer. The film was released on Blu-ray on May 12, 2015, by the home video label Twilight Time, with a limited release of 3,000 copies. The Blu-ray presents the film in 1080p high definition, and contains the additional materials found on the MGM DVD. Kino Lorber reissued the film on Blu-ray on June 18, 2019, with a new 4K transfer and all the previously-available extras.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes sampled 26 reviews, and gave "Mississippi Burning" a score of 85%, with an average score of 6.8/10. The consensus reads, ""Mississippi Burning" draws on real-life tragedy to impart a worthy message with the measured control of an intelligent drama and the hard-hitting impact of a thriller." Another review aggregator, Metacritic, assigned the film a weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on 11 reviews from mainstream critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: In a review for "Time" magazine entitled "Just Another Mississippi Whitewash", author Jack E. White described the film as a "cinematic lynching of the truth". Columnist Desson Howe of "The Washington Post" felt that the film "speeds down the complicated, painful path of civil rights in search of a good thriller. Surprisingly, it finds it." Jonathan Rosenbaum lightly criticized Parker's direction, commenting that the film was "sordid fantasy" being "trained on the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, and the feast for the self-righteous that emerges has little to do with history, sociology, or even common sense." Rita Kempley, also writing for "The Washington Post", criticized for viewing "the black struggle from an all-white perspective", and drew comparisons to "Cry Freedom" (1987), writing that both films had "the right story, but with the wrong heroes." Pauline Kael, writing for "The New Yorker", praised the acting, but described the film as being "morally repugnant".


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" praised the film's fictionalization of history, writing, "The film doesn't pretend to be about the civil-rights workers themselves. It's almost as if Mr. Parker and Mr. Gerolmo respected the victims, their ideals and their fate too much to reinvent them through the use of fiction." In his review for the "Chicago Sun-Times", Roger Ebert surmised, "We knew the outcome of this case when we walked into the theater. What we may have forgotten, or never known, is exactly what kinds of currents were in the air in 1964." On the syndicated television program "Siskel and Ebert and the Movies", Ebert and his colleague Gene Siskel gave the film a "two thumbs up" rating. On his year-end top ten films list, Ebert ranked Mississippi Burning the #1 movie of 1988. Writing for the "Chicago Tribune", Siskel praised Hackman and Dafoe's "subtle" performances but felt that McDormand was "most effective as the film's moral conscience".


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Like Siskel, "Variety" magazine also praised the performances, writing, "Dafoe gives a disciplined and noteworthy portrayal of Ward ... But it's Hackman who steals the picture as Anderson ... Glowing performance of Frances McDormand as the deputy's wife who's drawn to Hackman is an asset both to his role and the picture." Sheila Benson, in her review for the "Los Angeles Times", wrote, "Hackman's mastery at suggesting an infinite number of layers beneath a wry, self-deprecating surface reaches a peak here, but McDormand soars right with him. And since she is the film's sole voice of morality, it's right that she is so memorable."


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Following its release, "Mississippi Burning" became embroiled in controversy over its fictionalization of events. Gerolmo and Parker have admitted taking artistic license with the source material describing it as essentially a <nowiki>"work of fiction"</nowiki>. The killing itself, as portrayed in the film, differed from the actual events in several ways. In the film, during the car stop precipitating the murder, the driver is white (presumably either Andrew Goodman or Michael Schwerner), and the black civil rights volunteer (presumably James Chaney) is in the back seat. In reality, James Chaney had been driving the car because he was familiar with the area. The film presents the murders as having been committed at the scene of the stop while the victims were in their car, beginning with Frank Bailey putting a revolver to the temple of the car's driver and shooting. In reality, all three victims were removed from the car and driven to another location, where both Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were shot once in the heart, followed by James Chaney who had been shot three times. Much of the violence and intimidation of the black people in the film is drawn from events that occurred at the time, although not necessarily in relation to this investigation. The title itself comes from the FBI code name for the investigation and some of the dialog is drawn directly from their files. A lot of the fictional elements surround the actions of the two main FBI agents.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., boycotted the film, stating, "How long will we have to wait before Hollywood finds the courage and the integrity to tell the stories of some of the many thousands of black men, women and children who put their lives on the line for equality?" Myrlie Evers-Williams, the wife of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers, said of the film, "It was unfortunate that it was so narrow in scope that it did not show one black role model that today's youth who look at the movie could remember." Benjamin Hooks, the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), stated that the film, in its fictionalization of historical events, "reeks with dishonesty, deception and fraud" and portrays African Americans as "cowed, submissive and blank-faced".


title: Mississippi Burning

text: Carolyn Goodman, mother of Andrew Goodman, and Ben Chaney Jr., the younger brother of James Chaney, expressed that they were both "disturbed" by the film. Goodman felt that it "used the deaths of the boys as a means of solving the murders and the FBI being heroes." Chaney stated, "... the image that younger people got (from the film) about the times, about Mississippi itself and about the people who participated in the movement being passive, was pretty negative and it didn't reflect the truth." Stephen Schwerner, brother of Michael Schwerner, felt that the film was "terribly dishonest and very racist" and "[distorted] the realities of 1964".


title: Mississippi Burning

text: On a Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 16, 1989) episode of ABC's late-night news program "Nightline", Julian Bond, a social activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement, nicknamed the film ""Rambo" Meets the Klan" and disapproved of its depiction of the FBI: "People are going to have a mistaken idea about that time ... It's just wrong. These guys were tapping our telephones, not looking into the murders of [Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner]." When asked about the film at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, filmmaker Spike Lee criticized the lack of central African-American characters, believing the film was among several others that used a white savior narrative to exploit blacks in favor of depicting whites as heroes.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: In response to these criticisms, Parker defended the film, stating that it was "fiction in the same way that "Platoon" and "Apocalypse Now" are fictions of the Vietnam War. But the important thing is the heart of the truth, the spirit ... I defend the right to change it in order to reach an audience who knows nothing about the realities and certainly don't watch PBS documentaries."


title: Mississippi Burning

text: On February 21, 1989, former Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey filed a lawsuit against Orion Pictures, claiming defamation and invasion of privacy. The lawsuit, filed at a United States district court in Meridian, Mississippi, asked for $8 million in damages. Rainey, who was the county sheriff at the time of the 1964 murders, alleged that the filmmakers of "Mississippi Burning" had portrayed him in an unfavorable light with the fictional character of Sheriff Ray Stuckey (Gailard Sartain). "Everybody all over the South knows the one they have playing the sheriff in that movie is referring to me," he stated. "What they said happened and what they did to me certainly wasn't right and something ought to be done about it." Rainey's lawsuit was unsuccessful; he dropped the suit after Orion's team of lawyers threatened to prove that the film was based on fact, and that Rainey was indeed suspected in the 1964 murders.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: "Mississippi Burning" received various awards and nominations in categories ranging from recognition of the film itself to its writing, direction, editing, sound and cinematography, to the performances of Gene Hackman and Frances McDormand. It was named one of the "" by the National Board of Review. The organization also awarded the film top honors at the 60th National Board of Review Awards: Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress.


title: Mississippi Burning

text: In January 1989, the film received four Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama (Hackman), though it failed to win any of the awards at the 46th Golden Globe Awards. In February 1989, "Mississippi Burning" was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor; its closest rivals were "Rain Man" leading with eight nominations, and "Dangerous Liaisons", which also received seven nominations. On March 29, 1989, at the 61st Academy Awards, the film won only one of the seven awards for which it was nominated, Best Cinematography. At the 43rd British Academy Film Awards, the film received five nominations, ultimately winning for Best Sound, Best Cinematography and Best Editing. In 2006, the film was nominated by the American Film Institute for its 100 Years ... 100 Cheers list.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The 2009 FIA Formula One World Championship was the 63rd season of FIA Formula One motor racing. It featured the 60th Formula One World Championship which was contested over 17 events commencing with the on 29 March and ending with the inaugural on 1 November.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: Jenson Button and Brawn GP secured the Drivers' Championship and Constructors' Championship titles, respectively, in the Brazilian Grand Prix, the penultimate race of the season. It was both Button and Brawn's first championship success, Brawn becoming the first team to win the Constructors' Championship in their debut season. Button was the tenth British driver to win the championship, and following Lewis Hamilton's success in 2008 it was the first time the championship had been won by English drivers in consecutive seasons, and the first time since Graham Hill (1968) and Jackie Stewart (1969) that consecutive championships had been won by British drivers. Also notable was the success of Red Bull Racing, as well as the poor performance of McLaren and Ferrari compared to the previous season.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: Ten teams participated in the championship after several rule changes were implemented by the FIA to cut costs to try to minimise the financial difficulties. There were further changes to try to improve the on-track spectacle with the return of slick tyres, changes to aerodynamics and the introduction of kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) presenting some of the biggest changes in Formula One regulations for several decades.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The Brawn team, formed as a result of a management buyout of the Honda team, won six of the first seven races, their ability to make the most of the new regulations being a deciding factor in the championship. Red Bull Racing caught up in an unpredictable second half of the season, with the season being the first time since that all participating teams had scored World Championship points. Sebastian Vettel and Button's teammate Rubens Barrichello were his main challengers over the season, winning six races between them to finish in second and third, respectively.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The following teams and drivers competed in the 2009 FIA Formula One World Championship: Teams competed with tyres supplied by Bridgestone.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: Honda withdrew ahead of the 2009 season, and the team was bought by a consortium led by team principal Ross Brawn. Brawn renamed the team Brawn GP, and raced with Mercedes engines, but retained Honda drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello. Force India also raced with Mercedes engines, after running with Ferrari engines in .


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The only offseason driver change was following the retirement of Red Bull's David Coulthard after 14 years in Formula One. He was replaced by Sebastian Vettel, who had raced for Toro Rosso in 2008. Vettel's seat at Toro Rosso was taken by the Swiss driver Sébastien Buemi, who was Red Bull's test driver in 2008.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: Following the German Grand Prix, Toro Rosso's Sébastien Bourdais was dropped by the team, with Toro Rosso principal Franz Tost claiming that the partnership had not met his expectations. Bourdais was replaced by Jaime Alguersuari ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix. Alguersuari had been racing in Formula Renault 3.5 Series in 2009, and had only signed a deal to replace Brendon Hartley as Toro Rosso's test driver two weeks prior. Bourdais was advised by counsel to file suit for breach of contract by Toro Rosso. Toro Rosso settled the matter with a $2.1 million payment to Bourdais to avoid litigation.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: After sustaining an injury during qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix, Ferrari's Felipe Massa missed the remainder of the season. He was replaced for the next two races by Ferrari test driver Luca Badoer, but after Badoer failed to score a single point in his two races, Ferrari replaced him with Giancarlo Fisichella who had signed a deal to be a Ferrari test driver for 2010 and had driven for Force India throughout the 2009 season. Fisichella's seat at Force India was taken by Vitantonio Liuzzi, who was Force India's test driver.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: Following the Hungarian Grand Prix, Renault parted ways with Nelson Piquet Jr. as he had failed to score a single point and allegations that he had intentionally crashed during the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix surfaced. Piquet was replaced by Romain Grosjean, who was Renault's test driver.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: In qualifying for the Japanese Grand Prix, Toyota's Timo Glock crashed heavily at the last corner and was airlifted to hospital with a leg injury. As he was not fit to race, Jarno Trulli was the only driver representing Toyota at the Japanese Grand Prix. On 11 October, Toyota confirmed that its test driver Kamui Kobayashi would make his race debut in the Brazilian Grand Prix, as Glock had suffered further complications from his accident, resulting in a cracked vertebra and he would not be guaranteed to be fit in time to race in Brazil. Kobayashi retained the seat in the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The following rounds were included on the provisional calendars published by the FIA but were cancelled:


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The FIA released preliminary technical regulations for the 2009 season on 22 December 2006, and these were revised several times to accommodate the findings of the Overtaking Working Group (formed in response to concerns that passing in wheel-to-wheel racing was becoming increasingly rare) and the increasing need for cost-cutting in the sport to minimise financial costs.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: FIA President Max Mosley announced dramatic rule changes for the 2009 season in a bid to improve the spectacle of the sport, with the cars undergoing major changes in an effort to increase overtaking. The design changes significantly altered the design of the cars, incorporating wider and lower front wings, taller and narrower rear wings, and a reduction on aerodynamic bodywork. Also introduced were slick tyres and Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems, as well as implementing cost-cutting measures in a response to the rising costs of competing.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: Honda announced in December 2008 they would be leaving Formula One with immediate effect, as a result of the automotive industry crisis. After a winter of uncertainty, it was confirmed on 5 March 2009 that the team would compete in the 2009 season as Brawn GP, with Mercedes engines, following a management buyout led by team principal Ross Brawn, and would retain the services of both Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello as drivers. Anthony Davidson, who competed for the Honda-backed Super Aguri team before their early withdrawal in 2008, joined Brawn as a test driver.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: Force India joined Brawn GP in using the Mercedes engines by signing a five-year deal until 2013, having ended their previous supply contract from Ferrari. The retirement of Red Bull Racing driver David Coulthard led to the appointment of Sebastian Vettel as his replacement, who left the Scuderia Toro Rosso team after a successful previous season including winning the Italian Grand Prix. Toro Rosso, a team designed to develop new Formula One drivers, saw co-owner Gerhard Berger sell his half-stake back to Red Bull, claiming that the new regulations would "leave no room for improvement for a small team like STR", Franz Tost took over as team boss. Filling Vettel's race seat in Toro Rosso was Sébastien Buemi, who as part of the Red Bull Junior Team competed for Trust Team Arden in the GP2 Series.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The World Drivers' Championship would be decided in the traditional manner of points scored after Bernie Ecclestone's idea that the driver who won the most races be declared as the champion was scrapped following protests from the Formula One Teams Association. The teams were less successful in their attempts to have the long-running French and Canadian Grands Prix kept on the calendar, with the organisers of both events pulling out due to financial issues. The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix made its début appearance as the last round of the season, at the Hermann Tilke-designed Yas Marina Circuit. The race, starting at sunset, was Formula One's first day-night race.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The first multi-team testing session took place at Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona in November 2008, two weeks after the end of previous season. All teams, except Toyota, took part in the testing session where some teams tested their new aerodynamics package and slick tyres. The new look cars did not suit everyone's taste, with BMW Sauber's test driver, Christian Klien, labelling the car the ugliest car he'd ever seen. On 9 March, testing at Barcelona featured for the first time Brawn GP, who made an immediate impact by leading the times early in the day. The test, the first in which all teams used their 2009 cars, had BMW Sauber leading the times while Brawn GP finished fourth. On day three, Brawn GP's Jenson Button was fastest by just over one second to Ferrari's Felipe Massa, while Button's teammate Rubens Barrichello went even faster the next day. At the other end of the timing sheets, reigning champion Lewis Hamilton's McLaren team were struggling to adapt to the new regulations, often 1.5 seconds off the pace. Massa stated he had never seen McLaren so far behind.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: A major source of controversy throughout the winter season were the rear diffusers. Three teams – Toyota, Williams and Brawn GP – launched their cars with a diffuser that uses the rear crash structure in order to generate additional downforce, labelled "double diffusers". These designs were quickly protested, and just days after the cars were unveiled, rival teams asked the FIA for a clarification on the matter.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: On the Wednesday of the season opening race in Australia, an official complaint was launched by the seven other teams against the rear diffusers of the Williams FW31, Toyota TF109 and the Brawn BGP 001 saying that they were illegal. The FIA scrutineers disagreed, declaring the cars legal. The other six teams filed an unsuccessful appeal which was heard on 14 April 2009 – the week prior to round three of the championship, the .


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The first testing held by Bahrain International Circuit, Bahrain in 16–19 February, and second and final testing held by Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Spain in 9–12 March.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The season opened at the , won by Jenson Button with teammate Rubens Barrichello in second, giving the team a 1–2 on its début. Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel had been running in second until he collided with BMW Sauber's Robert Kubica. The accident meant the race finished behind the safety car, with Toyota's Jarno Trulli eventually classified third despite McLaren's false protest he had illegally overtaken Lewis Hamilton. Reigning champion Hamilton was disqualified from the Australian race for lying to the stewards and at the following Malaysian Grand Prix there were reports he was on the verge of quitting. The race was equally dramatic, being stopped because of monsoon-like conditions, meaning only half points were awarded for only the fifth time in F1 history. Button mastered the changing conditions for his second win, while quick starting Nico Rosberg dropped to eighth when the race was stopped. In the interval between races, the controversial double diffusers, used by Brawn, Williams and Toyota, were declared legal by the FIA, ending the fight over their use. The Chinese race also took place in wet conditions, with the rain throughout the duration of the race necessitating a safety car start and causing several accidents. Vettel led teammate Mark Webber to Red Bull's first win in Formula One, ahead of the two Brawns and McLarens.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: Dry conditions at Bahrain saw the Toyota team gain the front of the grid, but Button managed to fight up from a fourth-place start, and overtook race leader Timo Glock on his first pit stop. Hamilton and Räikkönen, in fourth and sixth respectively, gave their championship winning teams the best finishes of a disappointing season start. The was a battle between the Brawn teammates, with Barrichello getting ahead of polesitter Button while a first lap incident forced the retirement of four drivers. Button followed a different pit-stop strategy and passed Barrichello during his stop, leading Brawn's second one-two of the season. Red Bull was the closest team to Brawn finishing third and fourth, while Felipe Massa's fuel shortage lost him places as he slowed to finish the race. Button won in dominant fashion at Monaco, leading the majority of the race from pole position ahead of his teammate Barrichello and Räikkönen, who scored Ferrari's first podium in 2009. At the Vettel started on pole but lost the position to Button on the first lap. Button went on to win, followed by Webber and a closely pursuing Vettel. Barrichello's car developed a gearbox problem, and incidents with Heikki Kovalainen and Adrian Sutil resulted in Brawn's first retirement of the season. By winning six out of the first seven races, Button had opened up a 26-point lead on his teammate, with Vettel a further six points behind.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The British Grand Prix was seen as a turning point, being dominated by Red Bull with Vettel leading home Webber, in dry conditions. Button was not on the podium for the first time this season, finishing sixth. Red Bull also dominated the following German Grand Prix with Webber taking his first pole and race win, despite being given a drive through penalty. Ferrari were also showing signs of improvement, Felipe Massa finishing third in what would be his final race of the season. He was hospitalised after being hit on the helmet by a flying spring when he was travelling at 162 mph in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix. The accident overshadowed the race, with a lightly fueled Fernando Alonso on pole retiring early in the race, which was won by Lewis Hamilton. Jaime Alguersuari finished his début race ahead of Buemi, the Toro Rosso test driver replacing the fired Sébastien Bourdais. Post-race, the Renault team received a suspension for the European Grand Prix, for an incident where Alonso's tyre came loose on the race track following a pit-stop error. An appeal overturned the decision, and the team raced in Valencia.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: During the summer break, BMW Sauber announced their withdrawal from Formula One racing due to poor results and lack of financial sustainability. The team would compete until the end of the season, while BMW attempted to sell the organisation. Seven-time champion Michael Schumacher was originally set to replace the injured Massa, but the seat was taken by test driver Luca Badoer due to Schumacher's neck injuries. Also replaced was Renault driver Nelson Piquet Jr., who complained of unfair treatment by team management, in favour of GP2 driver Romain Grosjean.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The in Valencia provided the first win for Rubens Barrichello after Hamilton lost the lead with an error in the pits; he finished second while both Red Bulls failed to score. At the Giancarlo Fisichella gained Force India's first pole position, and his second-place finish behind Kimi Räikkönen gave their first points. Button's title charge was undermined by poor qualifying and a crash, involving him, Hamilton, Alguersuari and Grosjean, ending their races. Following the race Badoer, who had qualified and finished last in both races, was replaced with Giancarlo Fisichella after his performance at the Belgian race. Vitantonio Liuzzi in turn took the vacant Force India drive. Brawn returned to form in Italy, with Barrichello leading home the team's fourth 1–2 of the season. Lewis Hamilton crashed on the penultimate lap, but came back by winning the next race at Singapore. Webber's crash ended his chance of winning the championship. Vettel kept the opportunity of winning the Drivers' title with a dominant display in the , with Toyota's Trulli gaining what would prove to be Toyota's final podium before their withdrawal at the end of the season. Toyota teammate Glock was injured during qualifying, and a cracked vertebra meant he was replaced by reserve Kamui Kobayashi for the final two races.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: The Drivers' and Constructors' championships were both decided at the penultimate race in Brazil. Storm-affected qualifying at Interlagos gave Barrichello pole during Formula One's longest qualifying session, while title rivals Button and Vettel started from 14th and 16th respectively. During the first lap, three incidents led to the retirement of three cars and a fire in the pit-lane, with Button taking advantage to move up the grid. Button fought up to fifth position by the race end, securing enough points to clinch the title. Mark Webber took the lead after Barrichello pitted and won the race, followed by Robert Kubica, to give BMW Sauber their joint best result of their final season and his only podium result in 2009. Lewis Hamilton completed the top three after starting 17th on the grid, moving him and McLaren above Kimi Räikkönen and Ferrari respectively in the championships. The inaugural Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, taking place at sunset, rounded out the season, with another win for Vettel and Red Bull's fourth 1–2 result of the year, awarding Vettel and the team second place in both championships.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: In a scandal dubbed "Crashgate" by the media, allegations of race-fixing during the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix emerged during the second half of the 2009 season from former Renault driver Nelson Piquet Jr. Over the course of the 2009 Belgian Grand Prix, Piquet, who had been sacked weeks earlier by Renault, claimed he was asked to crash at the Singapore race in a strategy designed to aid teammate and eventual race winner Fernando Alonso. Renault were handed a two-year suspended ban from the sport after the FIA World Motor Sport Council decided the team's managing director, Flavio Briatore and its executive director of engineering, Pat Symonds had asked Piquet to crash. Both had left the team before the WMSC hearing, where they were given life and five-year suspensions respectively. It had been rumoured Renault were prepared to quit the sport at the end of the 2009 season had the team been heavily punished, but the FIA found Briatore and Symonds solely to blame and chose to suspend Renault's ban.


title: 2009 Formula One World Championship

text: If two or more competitors had the same number of points (including 0 points), their positions in the championship were fixed according to the quality of their places. Under this system one first place was better than any number of second places, one second place was better than any number of third places, and so on.


title: Slavic languages

text: The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in a Balto-Slavic group within the Indo-European family.


title: Slavic languages

text: The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features) divided into three subgroups: East, South, and West, which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish, Czech and Slovak (of the West group) and Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern dialects of the South group), and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (western dialects of the South group). In addition, Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number of Slavic microlanguages: both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well-established Slavic languages.


title: Slavic languages

text: The current geographical distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages includes the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, and all the way from Western Siberia to the Russian Far East. Furthermore, the diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world. The number of speakers of all Slavic languages together was estimated to be 315 million at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is the largest ethno-linguistic group in Europe.


title: Slavic languages

text: Since the interwar period, scholars have conventionally divided Slavic languages, on the basis of geographical and genealogical principle, and with the use of the extralinguistic feature of script, into three main branches, that is, East, South, and West (from the vantage of linguistic features alone, there are only two branches of the Slavic languages, namely North and South). These three conventional branches feature some of the following sub-branches:


title: Slavic languages

text: Some linguists speculate that a North Slavic branch has existed as well. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group.


title: Slavic languages

text: Mutual intelligibility also plays a role in determining the West, East, and South branches. Speakers of languages within the same branch will in most cases be able to understand each other at least partially, but they are generally unable to across branches (which would be comparable to a native English speaker trying to understand any other Germanic languages besides Scots).


title: Slavic languages

text: The most obvious differences between the East, South, and West Slavic branches are in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages (and Western South Slavic languages – Croatian and Slovene) are written in the Latin script, and have had more Western European influence due to their proximity and speakers being historically Roman Catholic, whereas the East Slavic and Eastern South Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic and, with Eastern Orthodox or Uniate faith, have had more Greek influence. Two Slavic languages, Belarusian and Serbian, are biscriptal, commonly written in either alphabet. East Slavic languages such as Russian have, however, during and after Peter the Great's Europeanization campaign, absorbed many words of Latin, French, German, and Italian origin.


title: Slavic languages

text: The tripartite division of the Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. Of these, certain so-called transitional dialects and hybrid dialects often bridge the gaps between different languages, showing similarities that do not stand out when comparing Slavic literary (i.e. standard) languages. For example, Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian (East Slavic) are bridged by the Rusyn language/dialect of Eastern Slovakia and Western Ukraine. Similarly, the Croatian Kajkavian dialect is more similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language.


title: Slavic languages

text: Although the Slavic languages diverged from a common proto-language later than any other groups of the Indo-European language family, enough differences exist between the various Slavic dialects and languages to make communication between speakers of different Slavic languages difficult. Within the individual Slavic languages, dialects may vary to a lesser degree, as those of Russian, or to a much greater degree, like those of Slovene.


title: Slavic languages

text: Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic, their immediate parent language, ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of all Indo-European languages, via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE.


title: Slavic languages

text: A minority of Baltists maintain the view that the Slavic group of languages differs so radically from the neighboring Baltic group (Lithuanian, Latvian, and the now-extinct Old Prussian), that they could not have shared a parent language after the breakup of the Proto-Indo-European continuum about five millennia ago. Substantial advances in Balto-Slavic accentology that occurred in the last three decades, however, make this view very hard to maintain nowadays, especially when one considers that there was most likely no "Proto-Baltic" language and that West Baltic and East Baltic differ from each other as much as each of them does from Proto-Slavic.


title: Slavic languages

text: The imposition of Old Church Slavonic on Orthodox Slavs was often at the expense of the vernacular. Says WB Lockwood, a prominent Indo-European linguist, "It (O.C.S) remained in use to modern times but was more and more influenced by the living, evolving languages, so that one distinguishes Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian varieties. The use of such media hampered the development of the local languages for literary purposes, and when they do appear the first attempts are usually in an artificially mixed style." (148)


title: Slavic languages

text: Lockwood also notes that these languages have "enriched" themselves by drawing on Church Slavonic for the vocabulary of abstract concepts. The situation in the Catholic countries, where Latin was more important, was different. The Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski and the Croatian Baroque writers of the 16th century all wrote in their respective vernaculars (though Polish itself had drawn amply on Latin in the same way Russian would eventually draw on Church Slavonic).


title: Slavic languages

text: Although Church Slavonic hampered vernacular literatures, it fostered Slavonic literary activity and abetted linguistic independence from external influences. Only the Croatian vernacular literary tradition nearly matches Church Slavonic in age. It began with the Vinodol Codex and continued through the Renaissance until the codifications of Croatian in 1830, though much of the literature between 1300 and 1500 was written in much the same mixture of the vernacular and Church Slavonic as prevailed in Russia and elsewhere.


title: Slavic languages

text: The most important early monument of Croatian literacy is the Baška tablet from the late 11th century. It is a large stone tablet found in the small Church of St. Lucy, Jurandvor on the Croatian island of Krk, containing text written mostly in Čakavian dialect in angular Croatian Glagolitic script. The independence of Dubrovnik facilitated the continuity of the tradition.


title: Slavic languages

text: More recent foreign influences follow the same general pattern in Slavic languages as elsewhere and are governed by the political relationships of the Slavs. In the 17th century, bourgeois Russian ("delovoi jazyk") absorbed German words through direct contacts between Russians and communities of German settlers in Russia. In the era of Peter the Great, close contacts with France invited countless loan words and calques from French, many of which not only survived but also replaced older Slavonic loans. In the 19th century, Russian influenced most literary Slavic languages by one means or another.


title: Slavic languages

text: The Proto-Slavic language existed until around AD 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones.


title: Slavic languages

text: There are no reliable hypotheses about the nature of the subsequent breakups of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old East Slavic language, which existed until at least the 12th century.


title: Slavic languages

text: Linguistic differentiation was accelerated by the dispersion of the Slavic peoples over a large territory, which in Central Europe exceeded the current extent of Slavic-speaking majorities. Written documents of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries already display some local linguistic features. For example, the Freising manuscripts show a language that contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar to Slovene dialects (e.g. rhotacism, the word "krilatec"). The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin-script continuous text in a Slavic language.


title: Slavic languages

text: The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre-existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of the Hungarians in Pannonia in the 9th century interposed non-Slavic speakers between South and West Slavs. Frankish conquests completed the geographical separation between these two groups, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria (Moravians) and those in present-day Styria, Carinthia, East Tyrol in Austria, and in the provinces of modern Slovenia, where the ancestors of the Slovenes settled during first colonisation.


title: Slavic languages

text: In September 2015, Alexei Kassian and Anna Dybo published, as a part of interdisciplinary study of Slavic ethnogenesis, a lexicostatistical classification of Slavic languages. It was built using qualitative 110-word Swadesh lists that were compiled according to the standards of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project and processed using modern phylogenetic algorithms.


title: Slavic languages

text: The resulting dated tree complies with the traditional expert views on the Slavic group structure. Kassian-Dybo's tree suggests that Proto-Slavic first diverged into three branches: Eastern, Western and Southern. The Proto-Slavic break-up is dated to around 100 A.D., which correlates with the archaeological assessment of Slavic population in the early 1st millennium A.D. being spread on a large territory and already not being monolithic. Then, in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., these three Slavic branches almost simultaneously divided into sub-branches, which corresponds to the fast spread of the Slavs through Eastern Europe and the Balkans during the second half of the 1st millennium A.D. (the so-called Slavicization of Europe).


title: Slavic languages

text: The Slovenian language was excluded from the analysis, as both Ljubljana koine and Literary Slovenian show mixed lexical features of Southern and Western Slavic languages (which could possibly indicate the Western Slavic origin of Slovenian, which for a long time was being influenced on the part of the neighboring Serbo-Croatian dialects), and the quality Swadesh lists were not yet collected for Slovenian dialects. Because of scarcity or unreliability of data, the study also did not cover the so-called Old Novgordian dialect, the Polabian language and some other Slavic lects.


title: Slavic languages

text: The above Kassian-Dybo's research did not take into account the findings by Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak who stated that in the 11th century Novgorod language differed from Kiev language as well as from all other Slavic languages much more than in later centuries, meaning that there was no common Old East Slavic language of Kievan Rus' from which Ukrainian, Russian and Belorussian languages diverged, but that the Russian language developed as the convergence of Novgorod language and other Russian dialects, whereas Ukrainian and Belorusian were continuation of the development of respective Kiev and Polotsk dialects of Kievan Rus'.


title: Slavic languages

text: Also Russian linguist Sergey Nikolaev, analysing historical development of Slavic dialects’ accent system, concluded that a number of other tribes in Kievan Rus came from different Slavic branches and spoke distant Slavic dialects.


title: Slavic languages

text: Zaliznyak and Nikolaev's points mean that there was a convergence stage before the divergence or simultaneously, which was not taken into consideration by Kassian-Dybo's research.


title: Slavic languages

text: Ukrainian linguists (Stepan Smal-Stotsky, Ivan Ohienko, George Shevelov, Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo) deny the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. According to them, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages.


title: Slavic languages

text: The following is a summary of the main changes from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) leading up to the Common Slavic (CS) period immediately following the Proto-Slavic language (PS).


title: Slavic languages

text: The Slavic languages are a relatively homogeneous family, compared with other families of Indo-European languages (e.g. Germanic, Romance, and Indo-Iranian). As late as the 10th century AD, the entire Slavic-speaking area still functioned as a single, dialectally differentiated language, termed "Common Slavic". Compared with most other Indo-European languages, the Slavic languages are quite conservative, particularly in terms of morphology (the means of inflecting nouns and verbs to indicate grammatical differences). Most Slavic languages have a rich, fusional morphology that conserves much of the inflectional morphology of Proto-Indo-European. The vocabulary of the Slavic languages is also of Indo-European origin. Many of its elements, which do not find exact matches in the ancient Indo-European languages, are associated with the Balto-Slavic community.


title: Slavic languages

text: This inventory of sounds is quite similar to what is found in most modern Slavic languages. The extensive series of palatal consonants, along with the affricates *ts and *dz, developed through a series of palatalizations that happened during the Proto-Slavic period, from earlier sequences either of velar consonants followed by front vowels (e.g. *ke, *ki, *ge, *gi, *xe, and *xi), or of various consonants followed by *j (e.g. *tj, *dj, *sj, *zj, *rj, *lj, *kj, and *gj, where *j is the palatal approximant (, the sound of the English letter "y" in "yes" or "you").


title: Slavic languages

text: The biggest change in this inventory results from a further general palatalization occurring near the end of the Common Slavic period, where "all" consonants became palatalized before front vowels. This produced a large number of new palatalized (or "soft") sounds, which formed pairs with the corresponding non-palatalized (or "hard") consonants and absorbed the existing palatalized sounds . These sounds were best preserved in Russian but were lost to varying degrees in other languages (particularly Czech and Slovak). The following table shows the inventory of modern Russian:


title: Slavic languages

text: This general process of palatalization did not occur in Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian. As a result, the modern consonant inventory of these languages is nearly identical to the Late Common Slavic inventory.


title: Slavic languages

text: Late Common Slavic tolerated relatively few consonant clusters. However, as a result of the loss of certain formerly present vowels (the weak yers),


title: Slavic languages

text: The sound occurs only in some languages (Russian and Belarusian), and even in these languages, it is unclear whether it is its own phoneme or an allophone of /i/. Nonetheless, it is a quite prominent and noticeable characteristic of the languages in which it is present.


title: Slavic languages

text: Common Slavic also had two nasal vowels: *ę and *ǫ . However, these are preserved only in modern Polish (along with a few lesser-known dialects and microlanguages; see Yus for more details).


title: Slavic languages

text: Other phonemic vowels are found in certain languages (e.g. the schwa in Bulgarian and Slovenian, distinct high-mid and low-mid vowels in Slovenian, and the lax front vowel in Ukrainian).


title: Slavic languages

text: An area of great difference among Slavic languages is that of prosody (i.e. syllabic distinctions such as vowel length, accent, and tone). Common Slavic had a complex system of prosody, inherited with little change from Proto-Indo-European. This consisted of phonemic vowel length and a free, mobile pitch accent:


title: Slavic languages

text: The modern languages vary greatly in the extent to which they preserve this system. On one extreme, Serbo-Croatian preserves the system nearly unchanged (even more so in the conservative Chakavian dialect); on the other, Macedonian has basically lost the system in its entirety. Between them are found numerous variations:


title: Slavic languages

text: Similarly, Slavic languages have extensive morphophonemic alternations in their derivational and inflectional morphology, including between velar and postalveolar consonants, front and back vowels, and a vowel and no vowel.


title: Slavic languages

text: The following is a very brief selection of cognates in basic vocabulary across the Slavic language family, which may serve to give an idea of the sound changes involved. This is not a list of translations: cognates have a common origin, but their meaning may be shifted and loanwords may have replaced them.


title: Slavic languages

text: Most languages of the former Soviet Union and of some neighbouring countries (for example, Mongolian) are significantly influenced by Russian, especially in vocabulary. The Romanian, Albanian, and Hungarian languages show the influence of the neighboring Slavic nations, especially in vocabulary pertaining to urban life, agriculture, and crafts and trade—the major cultural innovations at times of limited long-range cultural contact. In each one of these languages, Slavic lexical borrowings represent at least 15% of the total vocabulary. This is potentially because Slavic tribes crossed and partially settled the territories inhabited by ancient Illyrians and Vlachs on their way to the Balkans.


title: Slavic languages

text: Max Vasmer, a specialist in Slavic etymology, has claimed that there were no Slavic loans into Proto-Germanic. However, there are isolated Slavic loans (mostly recent) into other Germanic languages. For example, the word for "border" (in modern German , Dutch ) was borrowed from the Common Slavic . There are, however, many cities and villages of Slavic origin in Eastern Germany, the largest of which are Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden. English derives "quark" (a kind of cheese and subatomic particle) from the German , which in turn is derived from the Slavic , which means "curd". Many German surnames, particularly in Eastern Germany and Austria, are Slavic in origin. The Nordic languages also have /"torv" (market place) from Old Russian () or Polish , (hops),


title: Slavic languages

text: Finnic and Slavic languages have many words in common. According to Petri Kallio, this suggests Slavic words being borrowed into Finnish languages, as early as Proto-Finnic. Many loanwords have acquired a Finnicized form, making it difficult to say whether such a word is natively Finnic or Slavic.


title: Slavic languages

text: The Czech word is now found in most languages worldwide, and the word "pistol", probably also from Czech, is found in many European languages.


title: Slavic languages

text: A well-known Slavic word in almost all European languages is vodka, a borrowing from Russian () – which itself was borrowed from Polish (lit. "little water"), from common Slavic ("water", cognate to the English word) with the diminutive ending "". Owing to the medieval fur trade with Northern Russia, Pan-European loans from Russian include such familiar words as "sable". The English word "vampire" was borrowed (perhaps via French ) from German , in turn derived from Serbo-Croatian (), continuing Proto-Slavic , although Polish scholar K. Stachowski has argued that the origin of the word is early Slavic , going back to Turkic .


title: Slavic languages

text: Several European languages, including English, have borrowed the word (meaning "large, flat plain") directly from the former Yugoslav languages (i.e. Slovene and Serbo-Croatian). During the heyday of the USSR in the 20th century, many more Russian words became known worldwide: , "Soviet", , , , , etc. Another borrowed Russian term is (lit. "self-boiling").


title: Slavic languages

text: The following tree for the Slavic languages derives from the Ethnologue report for Slavic languages. It includes the ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-3 codes where available.


title: Roger Penrose

text: Sir Roger Penrose (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge and University College London.


title: Roger Penrose

text: Penrose has contributed to the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology. He has received several prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems, and one half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". He is regarded as one of the greatest living physicists, mathematicians and scientists, and is particularly noted for the breadth and depth of his work in both natural and formal sciences.


title: Roger Penrose

text: Born in Colchester, Essex, Roger Penrose is a son of medical doctor Margaret (Leathes) and psychiatrist and geneticist Lionel Penrose. His paternal grandparents were J. Doyle Penrose, an Irish-born artist, and The Hon. Elizabeth Josephine, daughter of Alexander Peckover, 1st Baron Peckover; his maternal grandparents were physiologist John Beresford Leathes and Russian Jewish Sonia Marie Natanson. His uncle was artist Roland Penrose, whose son with photographer Lee Miller is Antony Penrose. Penrose is the brother of physicist Oliver Penrose, of geneticist Shirley Hodgson, and of chess Grandmaster Jonathan Penrose. Their stepfather was the mathematician and computer scientist Max Newman.


title: Roger Penrose

text: Penrose spent World War II as a child in Canada where his father worked in London, Ontario. Penrose studied at University College School. He attended University College London and attained a first class degree in mathematics from University of London in 1952.


title: Roger Penrose

text: In 1955, whilst a student, Penrose reintroduced the E. H. Moore generalised matrix inverse, also known as the Moore–Penrose inverse, after it had been reinvented by Arne Bjerhammar in 1951. Having started research under the professor of geometry and astronomy, Sir W. V. D. Hodge, Penrose finished his PhD at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1958, with a thesis on tensor methods in algebraic geometry supervised by algebraist and geometer John A. Todd. He devised and popularised the Penrose triangle in the 1950s, describing it as "impossibility in its purest form", and exchanged material with the artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it. Escher's Waterfall, and Ascending and Descending were in turn inspired by Penrose.


title: Roger Penrose

text: Penrose spent the academic year 1956–57 as an assistant lecturer at Bedford College, London and was then a research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. During that three-year post, he married Joan Isabel Wedge, in 1959. Before the fellowship ended Penrose won a NATO Research Fellowship for 1959–61, first at Princeton and then at Syracuse University. Returning to the University of London, Penrose spent two years, 1961–63, as a researcher at King's College, London, before returning to the United States to spend the year 1963–64 as a visiting associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He later held visiting positions at Yeshiva, Princeton, and Cornell during 1966–67 and 1969.


title: Roger Penrose

text: In 1964, while a reader at Birkbeck College, London, (and having had his attention drawn from pure mathematics to astrophysics by the cosmologist Dennis Sciama, then at Cambridge) in the words of Kip Thorne of Caltech, "Roger Penrose revolutionised the mathematical tools that we use to analyse the properties of spacetime". Until then, work on the curved geometry of general relativity had been confined to configurations with sufficiently high symmetry for Einstein's equations to be solvable explicitly, and there was doubt about whether such cases were typical. One approach to this issue was by the use of perturbation theory, as developed under the leadership of John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton. The other, and more radically innovative, approach initiated by Penrose was to overlook the detailed geometrical structure of spacetime and instead concentrate attention just on the topology of the space, or at most its conformal structure, since it is the latter – as determined by the lay of the lightcones – that determines the trajectories of lightlike geodesics, and hence their causal relationships. The importance of Penrose's epoch-making paper "Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities" was not its only result, summarised roughly as that if an object such as a dying star implodes beyond a certain point, then nothing can prevent the gravitational field getting so strong as to form some kind of singularity. It also showed a way to obtain similarly general conclusions in other contexts, notably that of the cosmological Big Bang, which he dealt with in collaboration with Dennis Sciama's most famous student, Stephen Hawking. The Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems were inspired by Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri's Raychaudhuri equation.


title: Roger Penrose

text: It was in the local context of gravitational collapse that the contribution of Penrose was most decisive, starting with his 1969 cosmic censorship conjecture, to the effect that any ensuing singularities would be confined within a well-behaved event horizon surrounding a hidden space-time region for which Wheeler coined the term black hole, leaving a visible exterior region with strong but finite curvature, from which some of the gravitational energy may be extractable by what is known as the Penrose process, while accretion of surrounding matter may release further energy that can account for astrophysical phenomena such as quasars.


title: Roger Penrose

text: Following up his "weak cosmic censorship hypothesis", Penrose went on, in 1979, to formulate a stronger version called the "strong censorship hypothesis". Together with the Belinski–Khalatnikov–Lifshitz conjecture and issues of nonlinear stability, settling the censorship conjectures is one of the most important outstanding problems in general relativity. Also from 1979, dates Penrose's influential Weyl curvature hypothesis on the initial conditions of the observable part of the universe and the origin of the second law of thermodynamics. Penrose and James Terrell independently realised that objects travelling near the speed of light will appear to undergo a peculiar skewing or rotation. This effect has come to be called the Terrell rotation or Penrose–Terrell rotation.


title: Roger Penrose

text: In 1967, Penrose invented the twistor theory which maps geometric objects in Minkowski space into the 4-dimensional complex space with the metric signature (2,2).


title: Roger Penrose

text: Penrose is well known for his 1974 discovery of Penrose tilings, which are formed from two tiles that can only tile the plane nonperiodically, and are the first tilings to exhibit fivefold rotational symmetry. In 1984, such patterns were observed in the arrangement of atoms in quasicrystals. Another noteworthy contribution is his 1971 invention of spin networks, which later came to form the geometry of spacetime in loop quantum gravity. He was influential in popularizing what are commonly known as Penrose diagrams (causal diagrams).


title: Roger Penrose

text: In 1983, Penrose was invited to teach at Rice University in Houston, by the then provost Bill Gordon. He worked there from 1983 to 1987. His doctoral students have included Claude LeBrun, Tristan Needham, Richard Jozsa, Richard S. Ward, Andrew Hodges, Asghar Qadir, John McNamara, Lane Hughston and Tim Poston.


title: Roger Penrose

text: In 2004, Penrose released "", a 1,099-page comprehensive guide to the Laws of Physics that includes an explanation of his own theory. The Penrose Interpretation predicts the relationship between quantum mechanics and general relativity, and proposes that a quantum state remains in superposition until the difference of space-time curvature attains a significant level.


title: Roger Penrose

text: Penrose is the Francis and Helen Pentz Distinguished Visiting Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.


title: Roger Penrose

text: In 2010, Penrose reported possible evidence, based on concentric circles found in Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data of the cosmic microwave background sky, of an earlier universe existing before the Big Bang of our own present universe. He mentions this evidence in the epilogue of his 2010 book "Cycles of Time", a book in which he presents his reasons, to do with Einstein's field equations, the Weyl curvature C, and the Weyl curvature hypothesis (WCH), that the transition at the Big Bang could have been smooth enough for a previous universe to survive it. He made several conjectures about C and the WCH, some of which were subsequently proved by others, and he also popularized his conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) theory. In this theory, Penrose postulates that at the end of the universe all matter is eventually contained within black holes which subsequently evaporate via Hawking radiation. At this point, everything contained within the universe consists of photons which "experience" neither time nor space. There is essentially no difference between an infinitely large universe consisting only of photons and an infinitely small universe consisting only of photons. Therefore, a singularity for a Big Bang and an infinitely expanded universe are equivalent.


title: Roger Penrose

text: In simple terms, Penrose believes that the singularity in Einstein's field equation at the Big Bang is only an apparent singularity, similar to the well-known apparent singularity at the event horizon of a black hole. The latter singularity can be removed by a change of coordinate system, and Penrose proposes a different change of coordinate system that will remove the singularity at the big bang. One implication of this is that the major events at the Big Bang can be understood without unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics, and therefore we are not necessarily constrained by the Wheeler–DeWitt equation, which disrupts time. Alternatively, one can use the Einstein–Maxwell–Dirac equations.


title: Roger Penrose

text: Penrose has written books on the connection between fundamental physics and human (or animal) consciousness. In "The Emperor's New Mind" (1989), he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Penrose proposes the characteristics this new physics may have and specifies the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics (what he calls "correct quantum gravity"). Penrose uses a variant of Turing's halting theorem to demonstrate that a system can be deterministic without being algorithmic. (For example, imagine a system with only two states, ON and OFF. If the system's state is ON when a given Turing machine halts and OFF when the Turing machine does not halt, then the system's state is completely determined by the machine; nevertheless, there is no algorithmic way to determine whether the Turing machine stops.)


title: Roger Penrose

text: Penrose believes that such deterministic yet non-algorithmic processes may come into play in the quantum mechanical wave function reduction, and may be harnessed by the brain. He argues that computers today are unable to have intelligence because they are algorithmically deterministic systems. He argues against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer. This contrasts with supporters of strong artificial intelligence, who contend that thought can be simulated algorithmically. He bases this on claims that consciousness transcends formal logic because factors such as the insolubility of the halting problem and Gödel's incompleteness theorem prevent an algorithmically based system of logic from reproducing such traits of human intelligence as mathematical insight. These claims were originally espoused by the philosopher John Lucas of Merton College, Oxford. G. Hirase has paraphrased Penrose' argument and reinforced it.


title: Roger Penrose

text: The Penrose–Lucas argument about the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem for computational theories of human intelligence has been criticised by mathematicians, computer scientists and philosophers. Many experts in these fields assert that Penrose's argument fails, though different authors may choose different aspects of the argument to attack. Marvin Minsky, a leading proponent of artificial intelligence, was particularly critical, stating that Penrose "tries to show, in chapter after chapter, that human thought cannot be based on any known scientific principle." Minsky's position is exactly the opposite – he believed that humans are, in fact, machines, whose functioning, although complex, is fully explainable by current physics. Minsky maintained that "one can carry that quest [for scientific explanation] too far by only seeking new basic principles instead of attacking the real detail. This is what I see in Penrose's quest for a new basic principle of physics that will account for consciousness."


title: Roger Penrose

text: Penrose responded to criticism of "The Emperor's New Mind" with his follow-up 1994 book "Shadows of the Mind", and in 1997 with "The Large, the Small and the Human Mind". In those works, he also combined his observations with those of anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff.