title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1804 Sir John Barrow became Second Secretary of the Admiralty, a post he held until 1845. Barrow began pushing for the Royal Navy to find a Northwest Passage over the top of Canada and to navigate toward the North Pole, organizing a major series of expeditions. Over those four decades explorers including John Ross, David Buchan, William Edward Parry, Frederick William Beechey, James Clark Ross (nephew of John Ross), George Back, Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson led productive expeditions to the Canadian Arctic. Among those explorers was John Franklin, who first travelled to the region in 1818 as second-in-command of an expedition towards the North Pole in the ships "Dorothea" and "Trent". Franklin was subsequently leader of two overland expeditions to and along the Canadian Arctic coast, in 1819–22 and 1825–27.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: By 1845 the combined discoveries of all these expeditions had reduced the unknown parts of the Canadian Arctic that might contain a Northwest Passage to a quadrilateral area of about . It was into this unexplored area that the next expedition was to sail, heading west through Lancaster Sound, then west and south – however ice, land and other obstacles might allow – with the goal of finding a Northwest Passage. The distance to be navigated was roughly .


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Barrow was now 82 years old and nearing the end of his career. He felt that the expeditions were close to finding a Northwest Passage, perhaps through what Barrow believed to be an ice-free Open Polar Sea around the North Pole. Barrow deliberated over who should command the next expedition. Parry, his first choice, was tired of the Arctic and politely declined. His second choice, James Clark Ross, also declined because he had promised his new wife that he had finished polar exploration. Barrow's third choice, James Fitzjames, was rejected by the Admiralty for his youth. Barrow considered Back but thought he was too argumentative. Francis Crozier, another possibility, was of humble birth and Irish, which counted against him. Reluctantly, Barrow settled on the 59-year-old Franklin.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The expedition was to consist of two ships, and , both of which had been used for James Clark Ross's expedition to the Antarctic in 1841–1844, during which Crozier had commanded "Terror". Franklin was given command of "Erebus"; Crozier was appointed his executive officer and was again made commander of "Terror". Fitzjames was appointed second-in-command of "Erebus". Franklin received command of the expedition on 7 February 1845, and his official instructions on 5 May 1845.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: "Erebus" (378 tons bm) and "Terror" (331 tons bm) were sturdily built and well equipped, including several recent inventions. Steam engines were fitted, driving a single screw propeller in each vessel; these engines were converted former locomotives from the London & Croydon Railway. The ships could make on steam power, or travel under wind power to reach higher speeds and/or save fuel.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Other advanced technology in the ships included reinforced bows constructed of heavy beams and iron plates, an internal steam heating system for the comfort of the crew in polar conditions, and a system of iron wells that allowed the screw propellers and iron rudders to be withdrawn into the hull to protect them from damage. The ships also carried libraries of more than 1,000 books and three years' supply of food, which included tinned soup and vegetables, salt-cured meat, pemmican and several live cattle. The tinned food was supplied from a provisioner, Stephen Goldner, who was awarded the contract on 1 April 1845, a mere seven weeks before Franklin set sail. Goldner worked frantically on the large order of 8,000 tins. The haste required affected quality control of some of the tins, which were later found to have that was "thick and sloppily done, and dripped like melted candle wax down the inside surface".


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Most of the crew were English, many from Northern England, with smaller numbers of Irish, Welsh and Scottish members. Two of the sailors were not born in the British Isles: Charles Johnson was from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and Henry Lloyd was from Kristiansand, Norway. The only officers with prior experience of the Arctic were Franklin, Crozier, "Erebus" First Lieutenant Graham Gore, "Terror" assistant surgeon Alexander McDonald and the two ice-masters, James Reid ("Erebus") and Thomas Blanky ("Terror").


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Franklin had been Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania, Australia) from 1837 to 1843. The crew included two members with close family connections to explorers of Australia who later died on expedition. Commander Henry Le Vesconte was the first cousin of William John Wills, the co-leader of the 1861 Burke and Wills expedition, the first European to cross the Australian mainland from south to north; both Burke and Wills perished on the return journey. William Gibson, a steward on "Terror", was the elder brother of Alfred Gibson, who disappeared on an 1874 expedition led by Ernest Giles to cross the deserts of Western Australia from east to west, and was honoured in the naming of the Gibson Desert. Giles recorded the connection in his journal entry of 21 April 1873:


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: I remarked to Gibson as we rode along that this was the anniversary of Burke's and Wills's return to their depot at Coopers' Creek and then recited to him, as he did not appear to know anything whatever about it, the hardships they endured, their desperate struggles for existence and death there; and casually remarked that Mr Wills had a brother [sic] who also lost his life in the field of discovery, as he went out with Sir John Franklin in 1845. Gibson then remarked, "Oh, I had a brother who died with Franklin at the North Pole and my father had a great deal of trouble getting his pay from Government".


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The expedition set sail from Greenhithe, Kent, on the morning of 19 May 1845, with a crew of 24 officers and 110 men. The ships stopped briefly in Stromness, Orkney Islands, in northern Scotland. From there they sailed to Greenland with and a transport ship, "Barretto Junior"; the passage to Greenland took 30 days.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: At the Whalefish Islands in Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, 10 oxen carried on "Barretto Junior" were slaughtered for fresh meat which was transferred to "Erebus" and "Terror". Crew members then wrote their last letters home, which recorded that Franklin had banned swearing and drunkenness. Five men were discharged due to sickness and sent home on "Rattler" and "Barretto Junior", reducing the final crew to 129 men. In late July 1845 the whalers "Prince of Wales" (Captain Dannett) and "Enterprise" (Captain Robert Martin) encountered "Terror" and "Erebus" in Baffin Bay, where they were waiting for good conditions to cross to Lancaster Sound. The expedition was never heard of again by Europeans.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Only limited information is available for subsequent events, pieced together over the next 150 years by other expeditions, explorers, scientists and interviews with Inuit. The only first-hand information on expedition's progress is the two-part "Victory Point Note" found in the aftermath on King William Island. Franklin's men spent the winter of 1845–46 on Beechey Island, where three crew members died and were buried. After travelling down Peel Sound through the summer of 1846, "Terror" and "Erebus" became trapped in ice off King William Island in September 1846 and are thought never to have sailed again. According to the second part of the Victory Point Note dated 25 April 1848 and signed by Fitzjames and Crozier the crew had wintered off King William Island in 1846–47 and 1847–48 and Franklin had died on 11 June 1847. The remaining crew had abandoned the ships and planned to walk over the island and across the sea ice towards the Back River on the Canadian mainland, beginning on 26 April 1848. In addition to Franklin, eight further officers and 15 men had also died by this point. The Victory Point Note is the last known communication of the expedition.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: From archeological finds it is believed that all of the remaining crew died on the subsequent 400 km long march to Back River, most on the island. Thirty or 40 men reached the northern coast of the mainland before dying, still hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost of Western civilization.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The Victory Point Note was found eleven years later in May 1859 by William Hobson (lieutenant on the McClintock Arctic expedition) placed in a cairn on the north-western coast of King William Island. It consists of two parts written on a pre-printed Admiralty form. The first part was written after the first overwintering in 1847 and the second part was added one year later. From the second part it can be inferred that the document was first deposited in a different cairn previously erected by James Clark Ross in 1830 during – at a location Ross named "Victory Point". The document is therefore referred to as "Victory Point Note".


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The second and final part is written largely on the margins of the form owing to lack of remaining space on the document. It was presumably written on 25 April 1848.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1859 Hobson found a second document using the same Admiralty form containing an almost identical duplicate of the first message from 1847 in a cairn a few miles southwest at Gore Point. This document did not contain the second message. From the handwriting it is assumed that all messages were written by Commander James Fitzjames. As he did not take part in the landing party that deposited the notes originally in 1847, it is inferred that both documents were originally filled in by Fitzjames on board the ships, with Lieutenant Graham Gore and Mate Charles Frederick Des Voeux adding their signatures as members of the landing party. This is further supported by the fact that both documents contain the same factual errors namely the wrong date of the wintering on Beechey Island. In 1848, after the abandonment of the ships and subsequent recovery of the document from the Victory Point cairn, Fitzjames added the second message signed by him and Crozier and deposited the note in the cairn found by Hobson eleven years later.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: After two years had passed with no word from Franklin public concern grew and Jane, Lady Franklin, as well as members of Parliament and British newspapers, urged the Admiralty to send a search party. Although the Admiralty said it did not feel any reason to be alarmed it responded by developing a three-pronged plan, which in the spring of 1848 sent an overland rescue party, led by John Richardson and John Rae, down the Mackenzie River to the Canadian Arctic coast.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Two expeditions by sea were also launched, one, led by James Clark Ross, entering the Canadian Arctic archipelago through Lancaster Sound and the other, commanded by Henry Kellett, entering from the Pacific. In addition the Admiralty offered a reward of £20,000 (£ as of ) "to any Party or Parties, of any country, who shall render assistance to the crews of the Discovery Ships under the command of Sir John Franklin". When the three-pronged effort failed British national concern and interest in the Arctic increased until "finding Franklin became nothing less than a crusade." Ballads such as "Lady Franklin's Lament", commemorating Lady Franklin's search for her lost husband, became popular.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Many joined the search. In 1850 11 British and two American ships cruised the Canadian Arctic, including "Breadalbane" and her sister ship . Several converged off the east coast of Beechey Island, where the first relics of the expedition were found, including remnants of a winter camp from 1845 to 1846. Robert Goodsir, surgeon on the brig "Lady Franklin," found the graves of John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine. No messages from the Franklin expedition were found at this site.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In the spring of 1851 passengers and crew aboard several ships observed a huge iceberg off Newfoundland, which bore two vessels, one upright and one on its beam ends. The ships were not examined closely. It was suggested at the time that the ships could have been "Erebus" and "Terror" but it is now known that they were not; it is likely that they were abandoned whaling ships.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1852 Edward Belcher was given command of the government Arctic expedition in search of Franklin. It was unsuccessful; Belcher's inability to render himself popular with his subordinates was peculiarly unfortunate in an Arctic voyage and he was not wholly suited to command vessels among ice. Four of the five ships (, "Pioneer", and "Intrepid") were abandoned in pack ice, for which Belcher was court-martialled but acquitted.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: One of those ships, HMS "Resolute", was later recovered intact by an American whaler and returned to the United Kingdom. Timbers from the ship were later used to manufacture three desks, one of which, the Resolute desk, was presented by Queen Victoria to the US President, Rutherford B. Hayes; it has often been chosen by presidents for use in the Oval Office in the White House.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1854, Rae, while surveying the Boothia Peninsula for the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), discovered further evidence of the expedition's fate. Rae met an Inuk near Pelly Bay (now Kugaaruk, Nunavut) on 21 April 1854, who told him of a party of 35 to 40 white men who had died of starvation near the mouth of the Back River. Other Inuit confirmed this story, which included reports of cannibalism among the dying sailors. The Inuit showed Rae many objects that were identified as having belonged to Franklin and his men.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In particular, Rae brought from the Inuit several silver forks and spoons later identified as belonging to Franklin, Fitzjames, Crozier, Fairholme and Robert Orme Sargent, a shipmate aboard "Erebus". Rae's report was sent to the Admiralty, which in October 1854 urged the HBC to send an expedition down the Back River to search for other signs of Franklin and his men.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Next were Chief Factor James Anderson and HBC employee James Stewart, who travelled north by canoe to the mouth of the Back River. In July 1855, a band of Inuit told them of a group of "qallunaat" (Inuktitut for "whites", or "Europeans", perhaps best translated as "foreigners") who had starved to death along the coast. In August, Anderson and Stewart found a piece of wood inscribed with "Erebus" and another that said "Mr. Stanley" (surgeon aboard "Erebus") on Montreal Island in Chantrey Inlet, where the Back River meets the sea.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Despite the findings of Rae and Anderson, the Admiralty did not plan another search of its own. Britain officially labelled the crew deceased in service on 31 March 1854. Lady Franklin, failing to convince the government to fund another search, personally commissioned one more expedition under Francis Leopold McClintock. The expedition ship, the steam schooner "Fox", bought via public subscription, sailed from Aberdeen on 2 July 1857.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In April 1859, sled parties set out from "Fox" to search on King William Island. On 5 May, the party led by Lieutenant William Hobson found a document in a cairn left by Crozier and Fitzjames. It contained two messages. The first, dated 28 May 1847, said that "Erebus" and "Terror" had wintered in the ice off the northwest coast of King William Island and had wintered earlier at Beechey Island after circumnavigating Cornwallis Island. "Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition. "All well"," the message said. The second message, written in the margins of that same sheet of paper, was much more ominous. Dated 25 April 1848, it reported that "Erebus" and "Terror" had been trapped in the ice for a year and a half and that the crew had abandoned the ships on 22 April. Twenty-four officers and crew had died, including Franklin on 11 June 1847, just two weeks after the date of the first note. Crozier was commanding the expedition, and the 105 survivors planned to start out the next day, heading south towards the Back River. This note contains significant errors; most notably, the date of the expedition's winter camp at Beechey Island is incorrectly given as 1846–47 rather than 1845–46.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The McClintock expedition also found a human skeleton on the southern coast of King William Island. Still clothed, it was searched, and some papers were found, including a seaman's certificate for Chief Petty Officer Harry Peglar, Captain of the Foretop, HMS "Terror". However, since the uniform was that of a ship's steward, it is more likely that the body was that of Thomas Armitage, gun-room steward on "Terror" and a shipmate of Peglar, whose papers he carried.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: At another site on the western extreme of the island, Hobson discovered a lifeboat containing two skeletons and relics from the Franklin expedition. In the boat was a large amount of abandoned equipment, including boots, silk handkerchiefs, scented soap, sponges, slippers, hair combs, and many books, among them a copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield" by Oliver Goldsmith. McClintock also took testimony from the Inuit about the expedition's disastrous end.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Two expeditions between 1860 and 1869 by Charles Francis Hall, who lived among the Inuit near Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island and later at Repulse Bay on the Canadian mainland, found camps, graves, and relics on the southern coast of King William Island, but he believed none of the Franklin expedition survivors would be found among the Inuit. In 1869, local Inuit took Hall to a shallow grave on King William Island containing well-preserved skeletal remains and fragments of clothing. These remains were taken to England and interred beneath the Franklin Memorial at Greenwich Old Royal Naval College, London.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The eminent biologist Thomas Henry Huxley examined the remains and it was concluded that they belonged to HTD Le Vesconte, second lieutenant on "Erebus". An examination in 2009 suggested that these were actually the remains of Harry Goodsir, assistant surgeon on "Erebus". Although Hall concluded that all of the Franklin crew were dead, he believed that the official expedition records would yet be found under a stone cairn. With the assistance of his guides Ipirvik and Taqulittuq, Hall gathered hundreds of pages of Inuit testimony.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Among these materials are accounts of visits to Franklin's ships, and an encounter with a party of white men on the southern coast of King William Island near Washington Bay. In the 1990s, this testimony was extensively researched by David C. Woodman, and was the basis of two books, "Unravelling the Franklin Mystery" (1992) and "Strangers Among Us" (1995), in which he reconstructs the final months of the expedition. Woodman's narrative challenged existing theories that the expedition's survivors all perished over the remainder of 1848 as they marched south from Victory Point, arguing instead that Inuit accounts point strongly to most of the 105 survivors cited by Crozier in his final note actually surviving past 1848, re-manning at least one of the ships and managing to sail it down along the coast of King William Island before it sank, with some crew members surviving as late as 1851.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The hope of finding other additional expedition records led Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka of the U.S. Army to organise an expedition to the island between 1878 and 1880. Travelling to Hudson Bay on the schooner "Eothen", Schwatka, assembling a team that included Inuit who had assisted Hall, continued north by foot and dog sled, interviewing Inuit, visiting known or likely sites of Franklin expedition remains, and wintering on King William Island. Although Schwatka failed to find the hoped-for papers, in a speech at a dinner given in his honour by the American Geographical Society in 1880, he said that his expedition had made "the longest sledge journey ever made both in regard to time and distance" of 11 months and four days and , that it was the first Arctic expedition on which the whites relied entirely on the same diet as the Inuit, and that it established the loss of the Franklin records "beyond all reasonable doubt". However, Schwatka was successful in locating the remains of one of Franklin's men, identified by personal effects as John Irving, third lieutenant aboard "Terror". Schwatka had Irving's remains returned to Scotland, where they were buried with full honours at Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh on 7 January 1881.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The Schwatka expedition found no remnants of the Franklin expedition south of a place now known as Starvation Cove on the Adelaide Peninsula. This was about north of Crozier's stated goal, the Back River, and several hundred miles away from the nearest Western outpost, on the Great Slave Lake. Woodman wrote of Inuit reports that between 1852 and 1858 Crozier and one other expedition member were seen in the Baker Lake area, about to the south, where in 1948 Farley Mowat found "a very ancient cairn, not of normal Eskimo construction" inside which were shreds of a hardwood box with dovetail joints.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In June 1981, Owen Beattie, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, began the 1845–48 Franklin Expedition Forensic Anthropology Project (FEFAP) when he and his team of researchers and field assistants travelled from Edmonton to King William Island, traversing the island's western coast as Franklin's men did 132 years before. FEFAP hoped to find artefacts and skeletal remains in order to use modern forensics to establish identities and causes of death among the lost 129.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Although the trek found archaeological artifacts related to 19th-century Europeans and undisturbed disarticulated human remains, Beattie was disappointed that more remains were not found. Examining the bones of Franklin crewmen, he noted areas of pitting and scaling often found in cases of Vitamin C deficiency, the cause of scurvy. After returning to Edmonton, he compared notes from the survey with James Savelle, an Arctic archaeologist, and noticed skeletal patterns suggesting cannibalism. Seeking information about the Franklin crew's health and diet, he sent bone samples to the Alberta Soil and Feed Testing Laboratory for trace element analysis and assembled another team to visit King William Island. The analysis would find an unexpected level of 226 parts per million (ppm) of lead in the crewman's bones, which was 10 times higher than the control samples, taken from Inuit skeletons from the same geographic area, of 26–36 ppm.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In June 1982, a team made up of Beattie and three students (Walt Kowall, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Alberta; Arne Carlson, an archaeology and geography student from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia; and Arsien Tungilik, an Inuk student and field assistant) was flown to the west coast of King William Island where they retraced some of the steps of McClintock in 1859 and Schwatka in 1878–79. Discoveries during this expedition included the remains of between six and fourteen men in the vicinity of McClintock's "boat place" and artifacts including a complete boot sole fitted with makeshift cleats for better traction.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: After returning to Edmonton in 1982 and learning of the lead level findings from the 1981 expedition, Beattie struggled to find a cause. Possibilities included the lead solder used to seal the expedition's food tins, other food containers lined with lead foil, food colouring, tobacco products, pewter tableware, and lead-wicked candles. He came to suspect that the problems of lead poisoning compounded by the effects of scurvy could have been lethal for the Franklin crew. However, because skeletal lead might reflect lifetime exposure rather than exposure limited to the voyage, Beattie's theory could be tested only by forensic examination of preserved soft tissue as opposed to bone. Beattie decided to examine the graves of the buried crewmen on Beechey Island.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: After obtaining legal permission, Beattie's team visited Beechey Island in August 1984 to perform autopsies on the three crewmen buried there. They started with the first crew member to die, Leading Stoker John Torrington. After completing Torrington's autopsy and exhuming and briefly examining the body of John Hartnell, the team, pressed for time and threatened by the weather, returned to Edmonton with tissue and bone samples. Trace element analysis of Torrington's bones and hair indicated that the crewman "would have suffered severe mental and physical problems caused by lead poisoning". Although the autopsy indicated that pneumonia had been the ultimate cause of the crewman's death, lead poisoning was cited as a contributing factor.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: During the expedition, the team visited a place about north of the grave site to examine fragments of hundreds of food tins discarded by Franklin's men. Beattie noted that the seams were poorly soldered with lead, which had likely come in direct contact with the food. The release of findings from the 1984 expedition and the photo of Torrington, a 138-year-old corpse well preserved by permafrost in the tundra, led to wide media coverage and renewed interest in the Franklin expedition.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Subsequent research has suggested that another potential source for the lead may have been the ships' distilled water systems rather than the tinned food. K. T. H. Farrer argued that "it is impossible to see how one could ingest from the canned food the amount of lead, 3.3 mg per day over eight months, required to raise the PbB to the level 80 μg/dL at which symptoms of lead poisoning begin to appear in adults and the suggestion that bone lead in adults could be 'swamped' by lead ingested from food over a period of a few months, or even three years, seems scarcely tenable." In addition, tinned food was in widespread use within the Royal Navy at that time and its use did not lead to any significant increase in lead poisoning elsewhere.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: However, and uniquely for this expedition only, the ships were fitted with converted railway locomotive engines for auxiliary propulsion which required an estimated one tonne of fresh water per hour when steaming. It is highly probable that it was for this reason that the ships were fitted with a unique desalination system which, given the materials in use at the time, would have produced large quantities of water with a very high lead content. William Battersby has argued that this is a much more likely source for the high levels of lead observed in the remains of expedition members than the tinned food.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: A further survey of the graves was undertaken in 1986. A camera crew filmed the procedure, shown in "Nova"'s television documentary "Buried in Ice" in 1988. Under difficult field conditions, Derek Notman, a radiologist and medical doctor from the University of Minnesota, and radiology technician Larry Anderson took many X-rays of the crewmen prior to autopsy. Barbara Schweger, an Arctic clothing specialist, and Roger Amy, a pathologist, assisted in the investigation.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Beattie and his team had noticed that someone else had attempted to exhume Hartnell. In the effort, a pickaxe had damaged the wooden lid of his coffin, and the coffin plaque was missing. Research in Edmonton later showed that Sir Edward Belcher, commander of one of the Franklin rescue expeditions, had ordered the exhumation of Hartnell in October 1852, but was thwarted by the permafrost. A month later, Edward A. Inglefield, commander of another rescue expedition, succeeded with the exhumation and removed the coffin's plaque.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Unlike Hartnell's grave, the grave of Private William Braine was largely intact. When he was exhumed, the survey team saw signs that his burial had been hasty. His arms, body, and head had not been positioned carefully in the coffin, and one of his undershirts had been put on backwards. The coffin seemed too small for him; its lid had pressed down on his nose. A large copper plaque with his name and other personal data punched into it adorned his coffin lid.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1992, Franklin scholar Barry Ranford and his colleague, Mike Yarascavitch, discovered human skeletal remains and artefacts of what they suspected to be some of the lost crewmen of the expedition. The site matches the physical description of McClintock's "boat place". In 1993, a team of archaeologists and forensic anthropologists returned to the site, which they referenced as "NgLj-2", on the western shores of King William Island in Erebus Bay, to excavate these remains. These excavations uncovered nearly 400 bones and bone fragments, and physical artefacts ranging from pieces of clay pipes to buttons and brass fittings. Examination of these bones by Anne Keenleyside, the expedition's forensic scientist, showed elevated levels of lead and many cut-marks "consistent with de-fleshing". On the basis of this expedition, it has become generally accepted that at least some groups of Franklin's men resorted to cannibalism in their final distress.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: A study published in the "International Journal of Osteoarchaeology" in 2015 concluded that in addition to the de-fleshing of bones, thirty-five "bones had signs of breakage and 'pot polishing,' which occurs when the ends of bones heated in boiling water rub against the cooking pot they are placed in," which "typically occurs in the end stage of cannibalism, when starving people extract the marrow to eke out the last bit of calories and nutrition they can."


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1992, Franklin author David C. Woodman, with the help of magnetometer expert Brad Nelson, organised "Project Ootjoolik" to search for the wreck reported by Inuit testimony to lie off the waters of Adelaide Peninsula. Enlisting both a National Research Council and a Canadian Forces patrol aircraft, each fitted with a sensitive magnetometer, a large search area to the west of Grant Point was surveyed from an elevation of . Over sixty strong magnetic targets were identified, of which five were deemed to have characteristics most congruent to those expected from Franklin's ships.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1993, Joe McInnis and Woodman organised an attempt to identify the priority targets from the year before. A chartered aircraft landed on the ice at three of the locations, a hole was drilled through the ice, and a small sector-scan sonar was used to image the sea bottom. However, due to ice conditions and uncertain navigation, it was not possible to exactly confirm the locations of the holes, and nothing was found although hitherto-unknown depths were found at the locations that were consistent with Inuit testimony of the wreck.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1994, Woodman organised and led a land search of the area from Collinson Inlet to (modern) Victory Point in search of the buried "vaults" spoken of in the testimony of the contemporary Inuit hunter Supunger. A ten person team spent ten days in the search, sponsored by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and filmed by the CBC "Focus North". No trace of the vaults was found.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1995, an expedition was jointly organised by Woodman, George Hobson, and American adventurer Steven Trafton – with each party planning a separate search. Trafton's group travelled to the Clarence Islands to investigate Inuit stories of a "white man's cairn" there but found nothing. Hobson's party, accompanied by archaeologist Margaret Bertulli, investigated the "summer camp" found a few miles to the south of Cape Felix, where some minor Franklin relics were found. Woodman, with two companions, travelled south from Wall Bay to Victory Point and investigated all likely campsites along this coast, finding only some rusted cans at a previously unknown campsite near Cape Maria Louisa.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1997, a "Franklin 150" expedition was mounted by the Canadian film company Eco-Nova to use sonar to investigate more of the priority magnetic targets found in 1992. The senior archaeologist was Robert Grenier, assisted by Margaret Bertulli, and Woodman again acted as expedition historian and search coordinator. Operations were conducted from the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker "Laurier". Approximately were surveyed, without result, near Kirkwall Island. When detached parties found Franklin relics – primarily copper sheeting and small items – on the beaches of islets to the north of O'Reilly Island the search was diverted to that area, but poor weather prevented significant survey work before the expedition ended. A documentary, "Oceans of Mystery: Search for the Lost Fleet", was produced by Eco-Nova about this expedition.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Three expeditions were mounted by Woodman to continue the magnetometer mapping of the proposed wreck sites: a privately sponsored expedition in 2001, and the Irish-Canadian Franklin Search Expeditions of 2002 and 2004. These made use of sled-drawn magnetometers working on the sea ice and completed the unfinished survey of the northern (Kirkwall Island) search area in 2001, and the entire southern O'Reilly Island area in 2002 and 2004. All of the high-priority magnetic targets were identified by sonar through the ice as geological in origin. In 2002 and 2004, small Franklin artefacts and characteristic explorer tent sites were found on a small islet northeast of O'Reilly Island during shore searches.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In August 2008, a new search was announced, to be led by Robert Grenier, a senior archaeologist with Parks Canada. This search hoped to take advantage of the improved ice conditions, using side-scan sonar from a boat in open water. Grenier also hoped to draw from newly published Inuit testimony collected by oral historian Dorothy Harley Eber. Some of Eber's informants have placed the location of one of Franklin's ships in the vicinity of the Royal Geographical Society Island, an area not searched by previous expeditions. The search was to also include local Inuit historian Louie Kamookak, who has found other significant remains of the expedition and would represent the indigenous culture.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: On 1 September 2014, a larger search by a Canadian team under the banner of the "Victoria Strait Expedition" found two items on Hat Island in the Queen Maud Gulf near Nunavut's King William Island: a wooden object, possibly a plug for a deck hawse, the iron pipe through which the ship's chain cable would descend into the chain locker below; and part of a boat-launching davit bearing the stamps of two Royal Navy broad arrows.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: On 9 September 2014, the expedition announced that on 7 September it had located one of Franklin's two ships. The ship is preserved in good condition, with side-scan sonar picking up even the deck planking. The wreck lies in about of water at the bottom of Wilmot and Crampton Bay in the eastern portion of Queen Maud Gulf, west of O'Reilly Island. On 1 October at the House of Commons, Prime Minister Stephen Harper confirmed that the wreck is indeed HMS "Erebus". A documentary, "Hunt for the Arctic Ghost Ship", was produced by Lion Television for Channel 4's "Secret History" series in 2015.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In September 2018, Parks Canada announced that the "Erebus" has deteriorated significantly. "An upwards buoyant force acting on the decking combined with storm swell in relatively shallow water caused the displacement," according to a spokesperson. The underwater exploration in 2018 totalled only a day and a half due to weather and ice conditions and was to continue in 2019. Also in September 2018, a report provided specifics as to ownership of the ships and contents: the UK will own the first 65 artifacts brought up from HMS "Erebus", while the wreck of both ships and other artifacts will be owned by Canada and the Inuit.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: On 12 September 2016, it was announced that the Arctic Research Foundation expedition had found the wreck of south of King William Island in Terror Bay, at at a depth of , and in "pristine" condition.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 2018, a team examined the wreck of HMS "Terror" using a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) that collected photos and video clips of the ship and a number of artefacts. The group concluded that the "Terror" had not been left at anchor, since the anchor cables were seen to be secured along the bulwarks.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The FEFAP field surveys, excavations and exhumations spanned more than 10 years. The results of this study from King William Island and Beechey Island artefacts and human remains showed that the Beechey Island crew had most probably died of pneumonia and perhaps tuberculosis, which was suggested by the evidence of Pott disease discovered in Braine. Toxicological reports pointed to lead poisoning as a likely contributing factor. Blade cut marks found on bones from some of the crew were seen as signs of cannibalism. Evidence suggested that a combination of cold, starvation and disease including scurvy, pneumonia and tuberculosis, all made worse by lead poisoning, killed everyone in the Franklin party.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: More recent chemical re-examination of bone and nail samples taken from Hartnell and other crew members has cast doubt on the role of lead poisoning. A 2013 study determined that the levels of lead present in the crew members' bones had been consistent during their lives, and that there was no isotopic difference between lead concentrated within older and younger bone materials. Had the crew been poisoned by lead from the solder used to seal the canned food or from the ships' water supplies, both the concentration of lead and its isotopic composition would have been expected to have "spiked" during their last few months. This interpretation was supported by a 2016 study that suggested the crew's ill health may in fact have been due to malnutrition, and specifically zinc deficiency, probably due to a lack of meat in their diet. This study used micro-X-ray fluorescence to map the levels of lead, copper and zinc in Hartnell's thumbnail over the final months of his life, and found that apart from during his last few weeks lead concentrations within Hartnell's body were within healthy limits. In contrast, levels of zinc were far lower than normal and indicated that Hartnell would have been suffering from chronic zinc deficiency, sufficient to have severely suppressed his immune system and left him highly vulnerable to a worsening of the tuberculosis with which he was already infected. In the last few weeks of his life, his illness would have caused his body to start breaking down bone, fat and muscle tissues, releasing lead previously stored there into his bloodstream and giving rise to the high lead levels noted in previous analysis of soft tissues and hair.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Franklin's chosen passage down the west side of King William Island took "Erebus" and "Terror" into "a ploughing train of ice ... [that] does not always clear during the short summers", whereas the route along the island's east coast regularly clears in summer and was later used by Roald Amundsen in his successful navigation of the Northwest Passage. The Franklin expedition, locked in ice for two winters in Victoria Strait, was naval in nature and therefore not well equipped or trained for land travel. Some of the crew members heading south from "Erebus" and "Terror" hauled many items not needed for Arctic survival. McClintock noted a large quantity of heavy goods in the lifeboat at the "boat place" and thought them "a mere accumulation of dead weight, of little use, and very likely to break down the strength of the sledge-crews".


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 2017, Douglas Stenton, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and former director of Nunavut's Department of Heritage and Culture, suggested that four sets of European human remains found on King William Island could possibly be women. He initially suspected that DNA testing would not offer up anything more, but to his surprise they registered that there was no 'Y' chromosomal element to the DNA. Stenton acknowledged that women were known to have served in the Royal Navy in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, but he also pointed out that it could be that the DNA had simply degraded as further tests proved ambiguous and he concluded the initial findings were "almost certainly incorrect".


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1993, three bodies were found at site NgLj-3 near Erebus Bay. The remains had originally been found by McClintock's expedition in 1859, and were rediscovered and buried by Schwatka two decades later. In 2013, a team led by Stenton had the remains exhumed for DNA testing and forensic facial reconstruction. The team's report, published in "Polar Journal" in 2015, indicated that the reconstructions of the two intact skulls from the remains resembled Lieutenant Gore and Ice-Master Reid of the "Erebus"; however, it was determined the remains could not have belonged to Gore, as the Victory Point note stated that Gore had died before the abandonment of the ships in April 1848.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In May 2021, one of the bodies was positively identified as that of Warrant Officer John Gregory, "Erebus" engineer. A genealogy team tracked down Gregory's great-great-great-grandson, Jonathan Gregory, residing in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and confirmed the familial match through DNA testing.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The most meaningful outcome of the Franklin expedition was the mapping of several thousand miles of hitherto unsurveyed coastline by expeditions searching for Franklin's lost ships and crew. As Richard Cyriax noted, "the loss of the expedition probably added much more [geographical] knowledge than its successful return would have done". At the same time, it largely quelled the Admiralty's appetite for Arctic exploration. There was a gap of many years before the Nares expedition and Sir George Nares' declaration there was "no thoroughfare" to the North Pole; his words marked the end of the Royal Navy's historical involvement in Arctic exploration, the end of an era in which such exploits were widely seen by the British public as worthy expenditures of human effort and monetary resources. Given how difficult and risky it was for professional explorers to cross the Northwest Passage, it would be impossible for the average merchant ships of the day to use this route for trade.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: As a writer for "The Athenaeum" put it, "We think that we can fairly make out the account between the cost and results of these Arctic Expeditions, and ask whether it is worth while to risk so much for that which is so difficult of attainment, and when attained, is so worthless." The navigation of the Northwest Passage in 1903–05 by Roald Amundsen with the "Gjøa" expedition ended the centuries-long quest for the route.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Franklin’s expedition explored the vicinity of what was ultimately one of many Northwest Passages to be discovered. While the more famous search expeditions were underway in 1850, Robert McClure set out on the little-known McClure Arctic expedition on to also investigate the fate of Franklin’s voyage. While he did not find much evidence of Franklin’s fate, he did finally ascertain an ice-bound route that connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. This was the Prince of Wales Strait, which was far to the north of Franklin’s ships.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: "October 31st, the Captain returned at 8.30. A.M., and at 11.30. A.M., the remainder of the parting, having, upon the 26th instant, ascertained that the waters we are now in communicate with those of Barrow Strait, the north-eastern limit being in latitude 73°31′, N. longitude 114°39′, W. thus establishing the existence of a NORTH-WEST PASSAGE between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans."


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: McClure was knighted for his discovery. While the McClure expedition obviously fared much better than Franklin's voyage, it was similarly beset by immense challenges (including the loss of the "Investigator" and four winters on the ice) and a number of controversies, including allegations of selfishness and poor planning on McClure’s part. His decision to place numerous message cairns along his route ultimately saved his expedition, who were ultimately found and rescued by the crew of .


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1855, a British parliamentary committee concluded that Robert McClure "deserved to be rewarded as the discoverer of a Northwest Passage". Today, the question of "who discovered the Northwest Passage?" is a subject of controversy, as all the different Passages have varying degrees of navigability. Although he did confirm the first geographical Northwest Passage that is navigable by ship under ideal conditions, McClure is rarely credited in modern times due to his troubled expedition, his poor personal reputation, the fact that his expedition was after Franklin’s (who has a claim to be the first discoverer, see below), and the fact that he never traversed the strait that he found, instead choosing to portage over Banks Island.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Members of the Franklin expedition crossed the southern shore of King William Island and made it onto the Canadian mainland; this is evident by the fact that human remains from the expedition have been found inland on the Adelaide Peninsula. This may have involved walking across the Simpson Strait which is now known as a way through from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is possible that the Franklin expedition did discover that this is a Passage. As none of the members of the party made it out alive, it is not known whether any member of the party had realized this. George Back had discovered the strait in 1834 but did not realize it was a Northwest Passage. In any case, by 1854, it was widely believed that the remnants of the party had crossed the strait, and Lady Franklin was informed of such on 12 January by the Admiralty.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Franklin’s claim to having discovered the Passage is strengthened by Charles Richard Weld’s assertion that Franklin had long suspected that the Simpson Strait did connect the two oceans.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 1860, Francis McClintock ascertained that the Simpson Strait was indeed a Northwest Passage. Following this discovery, to honour John Franklin’s legacy, the Royal Geographical Society declared that his lost expedition was the first expedition to discover the Passage. Lady Franklin was given a medal in his name.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The Northwest Passage would not be fully navigated by boat until 1906, when Roald Amundsen famously traversed the passage on the "Gjøa", via the Simpson Strait.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: For years after the loss of the Franklin Party, the Victorian media portrayed Franklin as a hero who led his men in the quest for the Northwest Passage. A statue of Franklin in his home town bears the inscription "Sir John Franklin – Discoverer of the North West Passage", and statues of Franklin outside the Athenaeum in London and in Tasmania bear similar inscriptions. Although the expedition's fate, including the possibility of cannibalism, was widely reported and debated, Franklin's standing with the Victorian public was undiminished. The expedition has been the subject of numerous works of non-fiction.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The mystery surrounding Franklin's last expedition was the subject of a 2006 episode of the NOVA television series "Arctic Passage"; a 2007 television documentary, "Franklin's Lost Expedition", on "Discovery HD Theatre"; as well as a 2008 Canadian documentary, "Passage". In an episode of the 2009 ITV1 travel documentary series "", presenter Connolly and his crew visited Beechey Island, filmed the gravesite, and gave details of the Franklin expedition. NOVA revisited Franklin's expedition in the 2015 documentary "Arctic Ghost Ship", which covered the Victoria Strait Expedition and its use of Inuit testimony as well as the latest technology to successfully locate the Erebus.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In memory of the lost expedition, one of Canada's Northwest Territories subdivisions was known as the District of Franklin. Including the high Arctic islands; this jurisdiction was abolished when the area was set off into the newly created Nunavut Territory on 1 April 1999.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: On 29 October 2009, a special service of thanksgiving was held in the chapel at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, to accompany the rededication of the national monument to Franklin there. The service also included the solemn re-interment of the only remains from the "Erebus" to be repatriated to England, entombed within the monument in 1873 (previously thought to be Second Lieutenant Henry Le Vesconte, but may actually have been Harry Goodsir, the assistant surgeon). The following day, a group of polar authors went to London's Kensal Green Cemetery to pay their respects to the Arctic explorers buried there.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Many other veterans of the searches for Franklin are buried there too, including Admiral Sir Horatio Thomas Austin, Admiral Sir George Back, Admiral Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield, Admiral Bedford Pim, and Admiral Sir John Ross. Franklin's wife Jane Griffin, Lady Franklin, is also interred at Kensal Green in the vault, and commemorated on a marble cross dedicated to her niece Sophia Cracroft.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: From the 1850s through to the present day, Franklin's last expedition inspired numerous literary works. Among the first was a play, "The Frozen Deep", written by Wilkie Collins with assistance and production by Charles Dickens. The play was performed for private audiences at Tavistock House early in 1857, as well as at the Royal Gallery of Illustration (including a command performance for Queen Victoria), and for the public at the Manchester Trade Union Hall. News of Franklin's death in 1859 inspired elegies, including one by Algernon Charles Swinburne.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Fictional treatments of the final Franklin expedition begin with Jules Verne's "Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras", (1866), in which the novel's hero seeks to retrace Franklin's footsteps and discovers that the North Pole is dominated by an enormous volcano. Verne also remembers the efforts of Jane Franklin to discover the fate of her husband in his novel "Mistress Branican" (1891) which stages a similar plot but situated in Oceania and Australia instead of the North Pole. Mark Twain briefly satirized the fate of the expedition and its subsequent searches in the beginning of the story "Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls" (1875). The German novelist Sten Nadolny's "The Discovery of Slowness" (1983; English translation 1987) takes on the entirety of Franklin's life, touching only briefly on his last expedition.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Other recent novelistic treatments of Franklin include William T. Vollmann's "The Rifles" (1994), John Wilson's "North With Franklin: The Journals of James Fitzjames" (1999); and Dan Simmons's "The Terror" (2007), which was developed as a 2018 AMC television series also called "The Terror". The expedition has also been the subject of a horror role-playing game supplement for "Call of Cthulhu", "The Walker in the Wastes". Most recently, Clive Cussler's 2008 novel "Arctic Drift" incorporates the ordeal of the Franklin expedition as a central element in the story, and Richard Flanagan's "Wanting" (2009) deals with Franklin's deeds in both Tasmania and the Arctic. On 12 January 2012, BBC Radio 4 broadcast "Erebus", a radio play based on the Franklin expedition by British poet Jo Shapcott. Kassandra Alvarado's 2013 novel "The White Passage" presents a vaguely science-fiction take on an alternative history of the lost expedition.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Michael Palin's 2018 book, "Erebus, The Story of a Ship", was described by "The Guardian" newspaper as 'lively and diligent.' He also produced a one man show based on his book.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: A children's novel, "Chasing Ghosts – An Arctic Adventure" by Nicola Pierce featuring the expedition was published in 2020.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In 2017, "The Breathing Hole", a play written by Colleen Murphy, premiered at the Stratford Festival, directed by Reneltta Arluk. In this play, the fates of the crew of "Erebus" and "Terror" are featured within the context of an epic saga spanning five-hundred years. Commissioned to mark Canada's 150th Anniversary and met with critical acclaim, the work involved artists from both Nunavut and the rest of Canada, including collaborations with Qaggiavuut Nunavut Performing Arts. In 2020, the play was published in a dual-language edition in English and in Nattilingmiut syllabics—the Inuktitut dialect from where the story takes place in the Western Arctic.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: In the visual arts, the loss of Franklin's expedition inspired a number of paintings in both the United States and Britain. In 1861, Frederic Edwin Church unveiled his great canvas "The Icebergs"; later that year, prior to taking it to England for exhibition, he added an image of a broken ship's mast in silent tribute to Franklin. In 1864, Sir Edwin Landseer's "Man Proposes, God Disposes" caused a stir at the annual Royal Academy exhibition; its depiction of two polar bears, one chewing on a tattered ship's ensign, the other gnawing on a human ribcage, was seen at the time as in poor taste, but has remained one of the most powerful imaginings of the expedition's final fate. The expedition also inspired numerous popular engravings and illustrations, along with many panoramas, dioramas, and magic lantern shows.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: Franklin's last expedition also inspired a great deal of music, beginning with the ballad "Lady Franklin's Lament" (also known as "Lord Franklin"), which originated in the 1850s and has been recorded by dozens of artists, among them Martin Carthy, Pentangle, Sinéad O'Connor, and The Pearlfishers. The Scottish pirate metal band Alestorm's song "Magnetic North" is dedicated to the expedition. Other Franklin-inspired songs include Fairport Convention's "I'm Already There", James Taylor's "Frozen Man" (based on Beattie's photographs of John Torrington) and Iron Maiden's "Stranger In A Strange Land". The ballad "Northwest Passage" by Stan Rogers also mentions Franklin.


title: Franklin's lost expedition

text: The influence of the Franklin expedition on Canadian literature and culture has been especially significant. Among the best-known modern Franklin ballads is "Northwest Passage" by the late Ontario folksinger Stan Rogers (1981), which has been referred to as the unofficial Canadian national anthem. The distinguished Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood has also spoken of Franklin's expedition as a sort of national myth of Canada, remarking that "In every culture many stories are told, (but) only some are told and retold, and these stories bear examining ... in Canadian literature, one such story is the Franklin expedition." Notable treatments by Canadian poets include a verse play for radio, "Terror and Erebus" which was commissioned from Gwendolyn MacEwen, broadcast by CBC Radio (10 January 1965) and subsequently published in her collection "Afterworlds" (1987); and David Solway's verse cycle, "Franklin's Passage" (2003). The events have also featured prominently in Canadian novels, including Mordecai Richler's "Solomon Gursky Was Here" (1989) and Dominique Fortier's 2008 French language novel, "Du bon usage des étoiles", which creatively considers the Franklin expedition from a variety of perspectives and genres and was both shortlisted and a finalist for several literary awards in Canada (2009 Governor General's Awards). Sheila Fischman's translation of Fortier's novel, "On the Proper Use of Stars", was shortlisted for the 2010 Governor General's Awards for French to English Translation. Irish-Canadian writer Ed O'Loughlin's novel "Minds of Winter" was shortlisted for the 2017 Giller Prize.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: Kevin Elliot Pollak (born October 30, 1957) is an American actor, comedian, impressionist and podcast host. He has appeared in over 80 films; his roles include Sam Weinberg in Rob Reiner's legal film "A Few Good Men", Jacob Goldman in "Grumpy Old Men" and its sequel "Grumpier Old Men"; Todd Hockney in "The Usual Suspects", Phillip Green in Martin Scorsese's "Casino", and Bobby Chicago in "End of Days".


title: Kevin Pollak

text: From 2016 to 2022, the actor played a recurring role in "Better Things". Since 2017, Pollak has been a regular cast member on "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" on Amazon.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: Pollak was born on October 30, 1957 in San Francisco, California. He is the younger son of Elaine Harlow and Robert Pollak. He has one older brother, Craig, who lives in San Jose, California. He attended high school at Pioneer High School in San Jose. Pollak was raised in Reform Judaism.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: As an actor, Pollak's roles include the best friend or confidant characters to the leading men, as he did in "Ricochet" (1991), "A Few Good Men" (1992), "End of Days" (1999), and "The Wedding Planner" (2001). However, he has also played a wide variety of parts, such as a comical brownie in "Willow" (1988), a criminal in "The Usual Suspects" (1995), the philandering brother of Sarah Jessica Parker in "Miami Rhapsody" (1995), and a gangster in "The Whole Nine Yards" (2000). He also briefly hosted "Celebrity Poker Showdown" in its first season. His most substantial role to date was in "Deterrence" (1999), in which he played the main character, a vice president who must take over for a deceased President and deal with a nuclear crisis.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: In December 2006, he played Karl Kreutzfeld in the Sci Fi Channel miniseries "The Lost Room". Through 2008, he had a recurring role as a district attorney on the television series "Shark". In March 2008, Pollak played himself in the web series "The Writers Room" on Crackle. In 2010, he portrayed Sheriff Tom Wagner in "Choose".


title: Kevin Pollak

text: In January 2010, Pollak was scheduled to host "Our Little Genius" on FOX, but the series was pulled before it could air on television. Pollak was then seen hosting "Million Dollar Money Drop" for FOX at the end of 2010; the show ran for 12 episodes.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: In 2014, Pollak began a recurring role as Alvin Biletnikoff on the CBS sitcom "Mom". His time on the show ended with the death of his character.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: Starting in 2016, Pollak played the role of Marion in the FX series Better Things. His character was recurring throughout all five seasons.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: In 2017, Pollak joined the cast of the Golden Globe–winning "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel", an original series from Amazon, as Moishe Maisel, the main character's father-in-law.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: In 2019, Pollak appeared in five episodes of the fourth season on Showtime's "Billions", as Douglas Mason.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: Pollak's directorial debut was on the horror web series "Vamped Out", featured on the internet television platform Babelgum. Jason Antoon, Seana Kofoed, Samm Levine and Pollak all acted in the ensemble cast. The screenbook was based on a simple joke that Antoon and Pollak had between them. Most recently, Pollak's feature film directorial debut, the comedy documentary "Misery Loves Comedy", premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The film sold North American rights to Tribeca Film, a US distribution company.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: Pollak directed the comedy film "The Late Bloomer", starring Johnny Simmons, which was released in 2016.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: As a comedian, Pollak's most famous work was his 1991 HBO special "Stop with the Kicking", directed by fellow comedian David Steinberg and produced by comedy writer Martin Olson. In July 2010, "The Littlest Suspect", his most recent comedy special, was aired on Showtime. Comedy Central named Kevin one of the Top 100 Comedians of All Time.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: In April 2009, Pollak partnered with Jason Calacanis on a weekly Internet talk show, "Kevin Pollak's Chat Show". Guests for the show include film directors Kevin Smith and Mike Binder, comedians Jimmy Pardo and Bill Burr, and actors Nia Vardalos, Illeana Douglas, Bryan Cranston, Dana Carvey, Matthew Perry, Jon Hamm, Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla, Anthony Cumia, Jason Alexander, Seth MacFarlane, Tom Hanks, Larry David and Jason Lee.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: The guest interviews are very in-depth and typically longer than an hour in duration, sometimes exceeding two hours. Common topics include the guests' childhoods, how they got into the business they are in (typically show business), how they got inspired to start certain creative endeavors, and unique experiences they have had while working. Viewers can interact via chat room during the show, and sometimes questions for the guest posed in the chat room are answered live.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: In 2012, Pollak began a new podcast called "Talkin Walkin" in which he spends an hour or more with a new guest in character as Christopher Walken. After three episodes, the show was rated in the top 5 of all comedy podcasts by iTunes.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: He is the only person to ever go "2 for 2" (two exact matches), as a guest on the Sklar Brothers/Daniel Van Kirk podcast "Dumb People Town", in the "Guess the Age" game. The feat was completed on the episode released on April 2, 2018.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: In 2018, Pollak began hosting a comedy improvisation podcast called "Alchemy This", on the network iHeartRadio. It features a regular cast of 5 members, Craig Cackowski, James Heaney, Chris Alvarado, Vanessa Ragland, and Joey Greer, as well as several guests.


title: Kevin Pollak

text: Pollak is an avid poker player. He finished 134th out of 6,598 entrants in the 2012 World Series of Poker and won $52,718. He also hosts weekly home games with Hollywood celebrities.


title: Mass

text: Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different elementary particles, theoretically with the same amount of matter, have nonetheless different masses. Mass in modern physics has multiple definitions which are conceptually distinct, but physically equivalent. Mass can be experimentally defined as a measure of the body's inertia, meaning the resistance to acceleration (change of velocity) when a net force is applied. The object's mass also determines the strength of its gravitational attraction to other bodies.


title: Mass

text: The SI base unit of mass is the kilogram (kg). In physics, mass is not the same as weight, even though mass is often determined by measuring the object's weight using a spring scale, rather than balance scale comparing it directly with known masses. An object on the Moon would weigh less than it does on Earth because of the lower gravity, but it would still have the same mass. This is because weight is a force, while mass is the property that (along with gravity) determines the strength of this force.


title: Mass

text: There are several distinct phenomena that can be used to measure mass. Although some theorists have speculated that some of these phenomena could be independent of each other, current experiments have found no difference in results regardless of how it is measured:


title: Mass

text: The mass of an object determines its acceleration in the presence of an applied force. The inertia and the inertial mass describe this property of physical bodies at the qualitative and quantitative level respectively. According to Newton's second law of motion, if a body of fixed mass "m" is subjected to a single force "F", its acceleration "a" is given by "F"/"m". A body's mass also determines the degree to which it generates and is affected by a gravitational field. If a first body of mass "m" is placed at a distance "r" (center of mass to center of mass) from a second body of mass "m", each body is subject to an attractive force , where is the "universal gravitational constant". This is sometimes referred to as gravitational mass. Repeated experiments since the 17th century have demonstrated that inertial and gravitational mass are identical; since 1915, this observation has been incorporated "a priori" in the equivalence principle of general relativity.


title: Mass

text: The International System of Units (SI) unit of mass is the kilogram (kg). The kilogram is 1000 grams (g), and was first defined in 1795 as the mass of one cubic decimetre of water at the melting point of ice. However, because precise measurement of a cubic decimetre of water at the specified temperature and pressure was difficult, in 1889 the kilogram was redefined as the mass of a metal object, and thus became independent of the metre and the properties of water, this being a copper prototype of the grave in 1793, the platinum Kilogramme des Archives in 1799, and the platinum-iridium International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK) in 1889.


title: Mass

text: However, the mass of the IPK and its national copies have been found to drift over time. The re-definition of the kilogram and several other units came into effect on 20 May 2019, following a final vote by the CGPM in November 2018. The new definition uses only invariant quantities of nature: the speed of light, the caesium hyperfine frequency, the Planck constant and the elementary charge.


title: Mass

text: In physical science, one may distinguish conceptually between at least seven different aspects of "mass", or seven physical notions that involve the concept of "mass". Every experiment to date has shown these seven values to be proportional, and in some cases equal, and this proportionality gives rise to the abstract concept of mass. There are a number of ways mass can be measured or operationally defined:


title: Mass

text: In everyday usage, mass and "weight" are often used interchangeably. For instance, a person's weight may be stated as 75 kg. In a constant gravitational field, the weight of an object is proportional to its mass, and it is unproblematic to use the same unit for both concepts. But because of slight differences in the strength of the Earth's gravitational field at different places, the distinction becomes important for measurements with a precision better than a few percent, and for places far from the surface of the Earth, such as in space or on other planets. Conceptually, "mass" (measured in kilograms) refers to an intrinsic property of an object, whereas "weight" (measured in newtons) measures an object's resistance to deviating from its current course of free fall, which can be influenced by the nearby gravitational field. No matter how strong the gravitational field, objects in free fall are weightless, though they still have mass.


title: Mass

text: The force known as "weight" is proportional to mass and acceleration in all situations where the mass is accelerated away from free fall. For example, when a body is at rest in a gravitational field (rather than in free fall), it must be accelerated by a force from a scale or the surface of a planetary body such as the Earth or the Moon. This force keeps the object from going into free fall. Weight is the opposing force in such circumstances and is thus determined by the acceleration of free fall. On the surface of the Earth, for example, an object with a mass of 50 kilograms weighs 491 newtons, which means that 491 newtons is being applied to keep the object from going into free fall. By contrast, on the surface of the Moon, the same object still has a mass of 50 kilograms but weighs only 81.5 newtons, because only 81.5 newtons is required to keep this object from going into a free fall on the moon. Restated in mathematical terms, on the surface of the Earth, the weight "W" of an object is related to its mass "m" by , where is the acceleration due to Earth's gravitational field, (expressed as the acceleration experienced by a free-falling object).


title: Mass

text: For other situations, such as when objects are subjected to mechanical accelerations from forces other than the resistance of a planetary surface, the weight force is proportional to the mass of an object multiplied by the total acceleration away from free fall, which is called the proper acceleration. Through such mechanisms, objects in elevators, vehicles, centrifuges, and the like, may experience weight forces many times those caused by resistance to the effects of gravity on objects, resulting from planetary surfaces. In such cases, the generalized equation for weight "W" of an object is related to its mass "m" by the equation , where "a" is the proper acceleration of the object caused by all influences other than gravity. (Again, if gravity is the only influence, such as occurs when an object falls freely, its weight will be zero).


title: Mass

text: Although inertial mass, passive gravitational mass and active gravitational mass are conceptually distinct, no experiment has ever unambiguously demonstrated any difference between them. In classical mechanics, Newton's third law implies that active and passive gravitational mass must always be identical (or at least proportional), but the classical theory offers no compelling reason why the gravitational mass has to equal the inertial mass. That it does is merely an empirical fact.


title: Mass

text: Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity starting with the assumption that the inertial and passive gravitational masses are the same. This is known as the equivalence principle.


title: Mass

text: The particular equivalence often referred to as the "Galilean equivalence principle" or the "weak equivalence principle" has the most important consequence for freely falling objects. Suppose an object has inertial and gravitational masses "m" and "M", respectively. If the only force acting on the object comes from a gravitational field "g", the force on the object is:


title: Mass

text: This says that the ratio of gravitational to inertial mass of any object is equal to some constant "K" if and only if all objects fall at the same rate in a given gravitational field. This phenomenon is referred to as the "universality of free-fall". In addition, the constant "K" can be taken as 1 by defining our units appropriately.


title: Mass

text: The first experiments demonstrating the universality of free-fall were—according to scientific 'folklore'—conducted by Galileo obtained by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. This is most likely apocryphal: he is more likely to have performed his experiments with balls rolling down nearly frictionless inclined planes to slow the motion and increase the timing accuracy. Increasingly precise experiments have been performed, such as those performed by Loránd Eötvös, using the torsion balance pendulum, in 1889. , no deviation from universality, and thus from Galilean equivalence, has ever been found, at least to the precision 10. More precise experimental efforts are still being carried out.


title: Mass

text: The universality of free-fall only applies to systems in which gravity is the only acting force. All other forces, especially friction and air resistance, must be absent or at least negligible. For example, if a hammer and a feather are dropped from the same height through the air on Earth, the feather will take much longer to reach the ground; the feather is not really in "free"-fall because the force of air resistance upwards against the feather is comparable to the downward force of gravity. On the other hand, if the experiment is performed in a vacuum, in which there is no air resistance, the hammer and the feather should hit the ground at exactly the same time (assuming the acceleration of both objects towards each other, and of the ground towards both objects, for its own part, is negligible). This can easily be done in a high school laboratory by dropping the objects in transparent tubes that have the air removed with a vacuum pump. It is even more dramatic when done in an environment that naturally has a vacuum, as David Scott did on the surface of the Moon during Apollo 15.


title: Mass

text: A stronger version of the equivalence principle, known as the "Einstein equivalence principle" or the "strong equivalence principle", lies at the heart of the general theory of relativity. Einstein's equivalence principle states that within sufficiently small regions of space-time, it is impossible to distinguish between a uniform acceleration and a uniform gravitational field. Thus, the theory postulates that the force acting on a massive object caused by a gravitational field is a result of the object's tendency to move in a straight line (in other words its inertia) and should therefore be a function of its inertial mass and the strength of the gravitational field.


title: Mass

text: In theoretical physics, a mass generation mechanism is a theory which attempts to explain the origin of mass from the most fundamental laws of physics. To date, a number of different models have been proposed which advocate different views of the origin of mass. The problem is complicated by the fact that the notion of mass is strongly related to the gravitational interaction but a theory of the latter has not been yet reconciled with the currently popular model of particle physics, known as the Standard Model.


title: Mass

text: The concept of amount is very old and predates recorded history. Humans, at some early era, realized that the weight of a collection of similar objects was directly proportional to the number of objects in the collection:


title: Mass

text: where "W" is the weight of the collection of similar objects and "n" is the number of objects in the collection. Proportionality, by definition, implies that two values have a constant ratio:


title: Mass

text: An early use of this relationship is a balance scale, which balances the force of one object's weight against the force of another object's weight. The two sides of a balance scale are close enough that the objects experience similar gravitational fields. Hence, if they have similar masses then their weights will also be similar. This allows the scale, by comparing weights, to also compare masses.


title: Mass

text: Consequently, historical weight standards were often defined in terms of amounts. The Romans, for example, used the carob seed (carat or siliqua) as a measurement standard. If an object's weight was equivalent to 1728 carob seeds, then the object was said to weigh one Roman pound. If, on the other hand, the object's weight was equivalent to 144 carob seeds then the object was said to weigh one Roman ounce (uncia). The Roman pound and ounce were both defined in terms of different sized collections of the same common mass standard, the carob seed. The ratio of a Roman ounce (144 carob seeds) to a Roman pound (1728 carob seeds) was:


title: Mass

text: In 1600 AD, Johannes Kepler sought employment with Tycho Brahe, who had some of the most precise astronomical data available. Using Brahe's precise observations of the planet Mars, Kepler spent the next five years developing his own method for characterizing planetary motion. In 1609, Johannes Kepler published his three laws of planetary motion, explaining how the planets orbit the Sun. In Kepler's final planetary model, he described planetary orbits as following elliptical paths with the Sun at a focal point of the ellipse. Kepler discovered that the square of the orbital period of each planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit, or equivalently, that the ratio of these two values is constant for all planets in the Solar System.


title: Mass

text: On 25 August 1609, Galileo Galilei demonstrated his first telescope to a group of Venetian merchants, and in early January 1610, Galileo observed four dim objects near Jupiter, which he mistook for stars. However, after a few days of observation, Galileo realized that these "stars" were in fact orbiting Jupiter. These four objects (later named the Galilean moons in honor of their discoverer) were the first celestial bodies observed to orbit something other than the Earth or Sun. Galileo continued to observe these moons over the next eighteen months, and by the middle of 1611, he had obtained remarkably accurate estimates for their periods.


title: Mass

text: Sometime prior to 1638, Galileo turned his attention to the phenomenon of objects in free fall, attempting to characterize these motions. Galileo was not the first to investigate Earth's gravitational field, nor was he the first to accurately describe its fundamental characteristics. However, Galileo's reliance on scientific experimentation to establish physical principles would have a profound effect on future generations of scientists. It is unclear if these were just hypothetical experiments used to illustrate a concept, or if they were real experiments performed by Galileo, but the results obtained from these experiments were both realistic and compelling. A biography by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani stated that Galileo had dropped balls of the same material, but different masses, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass. In support of this conclusion, Galileo had advanced the following theoretical argument: He asked if two bodies of different masses and different rates of fall are tied by a string, does the combined system fall faster because it is now more massive, or does the lighter body in its slower fall hold back the heavier body? The only convincing resolution to this question is that all bodies must fall at the same rate.


title: Mass

text: A later experiment was described in Galileo's "Two New Sciences" published in 1638. One of Galileo's fictional characters, Salviati, describes an experiment using a bronze ball and a wooden ramp. The wooden ramp was "12 cubits long, half a cubit wide and three finger-breadths thick" with a straight, smooth, polished groove. The groove was lined with "parchment, also smooth and polished as possible". And into this groove was placed "a hard, smooth and very round bronze ball". The ramp was inclined at various angles to slow the acceleration enough so that the elapsed time could be measured. The ball was allowed to roll a known distance down the ramp, and the time taken for the ball to move the known distance was measured. The time was measured using a water clock described as follows:


title: Mass

text: Galileo found that for an object in free fall, the distance that the object has fallen is always proportional to the square of the elapsed time:


title: Mass

text: Galileo had shown that objects in free fall under the influence of the Earth's gravitational field have a constant acceleration, and Galileo's contemporary, Johannes Kepler, had shown that the planets follow elliptical paths under the influence of the Sun's gravitational mass. However, Galileo's free fall motions and Kepler's planetary motions remained distinct during Galileo's lifetime.


title: Mass

text: Robert Hooke had published his concept of gravitational forces in 1674, stating that all celestial bodies have an attraction or gravitating power towards their own centers, and also attract all the other celestial bodies that are within the sphere of their activity. He further stated that gravitational attraction increases by how much nearer the body wrought upon is to its own center. In correspondence with Isaac Newton from 1679 and 1680, Hooke conjectured that gravitational forces might decrease according to the double of the distance between the two bodies. Hooke urged Newton, who was a pioneer in the development of calculus, to work through the mathematical details of Keplerian orbits to determine if Hooke's hypothesis was correct. Newton's own investigations verified that Hooke was correct, but due to personal differences between the two men, Newton chose not to reveal this to Hooke. Isaac Newton kept quiet about his discoveries until 1684, at which time he told a friend, Edmond Halley, that he had solved the problem of gravitational orbits, but had misplaced the solution in his office. After being encouraged by Halley, Newton decided to develop his ideas about gravity and publish all of his findings. In November 1684, Isaac Newton sent a document to Edmund Halley, now lost but presumed to have been titled "De motu corporum in gyrum" (Latin for "On the motion of bodies in an orbit"). Halley presented Newton's findings to the Royal Society of London, with a promise that a fuller presentation would follow. Newton later recorded his ideas in a three-book set, entitled "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" (Latin: "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"). The first was received by the Royal Society on 28 April 1685–86; the second on 2 March 1686–87; and the third on 6 April 1686–87. The Royal Society published Newton's entire collection at their own expense in May 1686–87.


title: Mass

text: Isaac Newton had bridged the gap between Kepler's gravitational mass and Galileo's gravitational acceleration, resulting in the discovery of the following relationship which governed both of these:


title: Mass

text: If is non-zero, the fraction is well-defined, which allows us to measure the inertial mass of "m". In this case, "m" is our "reference" object, and we can define its mass "m" as (say) 1 kilogram. Then we can measure the mass of any other object in the universe by colliding it with the reference object and measuring the accelerations.


title: Mass

text: The primary difficulty with Mach's definition of mass is that it fails to take into account the potential energy (or binding energy) needed to bring two masses sufficiently close to one another to perform the measurement of mass. This is most vividly demonstrated by comparing the mass of the proton in the nucleus of deuterium, to the mass of the proton in free space (which is greater by about 0.239%—this is due to the binding energy of deuterium). Thus, for example, if the reference weight "m" is taken to be the mass of the neutron in free space, and the relative accelerations for the proton and neutron in deuterium are computed, then the above formula over-estimates the mass "m" (by 0.239%) for the proton in deuterium. At best, Mach's formula can only be used to obtain ratios of masses, that is, as "m" / "m" =  / . An additional difficulty was pointed out by Henri Poincaré, which is that the measurement of instantaneous acceleration is impossible: unlike the measurement of time or distance, there is no way to measure acceleration with a single measurement; one must make multiple measurements (of position, time, etc.) and perform a computation to obtain the acceleration. Poincaré termed this to be an "insurmountable flaw" in the Mach definition of mass.


title: Mass

text: Typically, the mass of objects is measured in terms of the kilogram, which since 2019 is defined in terms of fundamental constants of nature. The mass of an atom or other particle can be compared more precisely and more conveniently to that of another atom, and thus scientists developed the dalton (also known as the unified atomic mass unit). By definition, 1 Da (one dalton) is exactly one-twelfth of the mass of a carbon-12 atom, and thus, a carbon-12 atom has a mass of exactly 12 Da.


title: Mass

text: In some frameworks of special relativity, physicists have used different definitions of the term. In these frameworks, two kinds of mass are defined: rest mass (invariant mass), and relativistic mass (which increases with velocity). Rest mass is the Newtonian mass as measured by an observer moving along with the object. "Relativistic mass" is the total quantity of energy in a body or system divided by "c". The two are related by the following equation:


title: Mass

text: The invariant mass of systems is the same for observers in all inertial frames, while the relativistic mass depends on the observer's frame of reference. In order to formulate the equations of physics such that mass values do not change between observers, it is convenient to use rest mass. The rest mass of a body is also related to its energy "E" and the magnitude of its momentum p by the relativistic energy-momentum equation:


title: Mass

text: So long as the system is closed with respect to mass and energy, both kinds of mass are conserved in any given frame of reference. The conservation of mass holds even as some types of particles are converted to others. Matter particles (such as atoms) may be converted to non-matter particles (such as photons of light), but this does not affect the total amount of mass or energy. Although things like heat may not be matter, all types of energy still continue to exhibit mass. Thus, mass and energy do not change into one another in relativity; rather, both are names for the same thing, and neither mass nor energy "appear" without the other.


title: Mass

text: Both rest and relativistic mass can be expressed as an energy by applying the well-known relationship "E" = "mc", yielding rest energy and "relativistic energy" (total system energy) respectively:


title: Mass

text: The "relativistic" mass and energy concepts are related to their "rest" counterparts, but they do not have the same value as their rest counterparts in systems where there is a net momentum. Because the relativistic mass is proportional to the energy, it has gradually fallen into disuse among physicists. There is disagreement over whether the concept remains useful pedagogically.


title: Mass

text: In bound systems, the binding energy must often be subtracted from the mass of the unbound system, because binding energy commonly leaves the system at the time it is bound. The mass of the system changes in this process merely because the system was not closed during the binding process, so the energy escaped. For example, the binding energy of atomic nuclei is often lost in the form of gamma rays when the nuclei are formed, leaving nuclides which have less mass than the free particles (nucleons) of which they are composed.


title: Mass

text: Mass–energy equivalence also holds in macroscopic systems. For example, if one takes exactly one kilogram of ice, and applies heat, the mass of the resulting melt-water will be more than a kilogram: it will include the mass from the thermal energy (latent heat) used to melt the ice; this follows from the conservation of energy. This number is small but not negligible: about 3.7 nanograms. It is given by the latent heat of melting ice (334 kJ/kg) divided by the speed of light squared ("c" ≈ ).


title: Mass

text: In general relativity, the equivalence principle is the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass. At the core of this assertion is Albert Einstein's idea that the gravitational force as experienced locally while standing on a massive body (such as the Earth) is the same as the "pseudo-force" experienced by an observer in a non-inertial (i.e. accelerated) frame of reference.


title: Mass

text: However, it turns out that it is impossible to find an objective general definition for the concept of invariant mass in general relativity. At the core of the problem is the non-linearity of the Einstein field equations, making it impossible to write the gravitational field energy as part of the stress–energy tensor in a way that is invariant for all observers. For a given observer, this can be achieved by the stress–energy–momentum pseudotensor.


title: Mass

text: In classical mechanics, the inert mass of a particle appears in the Euler–Lagrange equation as a parameter "m":


title: Mass

text: After quantization, replacing the position vector "x" with a wave function, the parameter "m" appears in the kinetic energy operator:


title: Mass

text: In the ostensibly covariant (relativistically invariant) Dirac equation, and in natural units, this becomes:


title: Mass

text: where the "mass" parameter "m" is now simply a constant associated with the quantum described by the wave function ψ.


title: Mass

text: In the Standard Model of particle physics as developed in the 1960s, this term arises from the coupling of the field ψ to an additional field Φ, the Higgs field. In the case of fermions, the Higgs mechanism results in the replacement of the term "m"ψ in the Lagrangian with formula_21. This shifts the explanandum of the value for the mass of each elementary particle to the value of the unknown coupling constant "G".


title: Mass

text: A tachyonic field, or simply tachyon, is a quantum field with an imaginary mass. Although tachyons (particles that move faster than light) are a purely hypothetical concept not generally believed to exist, fields with imaginary mass have come to play an important role in modern physics and are discussed in popular books on physics. Under no circumstances do any excitations ever propagate faster than light in such theories—the presence or absence of a tachyonic mass has no effect whatsoever on the maximum velocity of signals (there is no violation of causality). While the "field" may have imaginary mass, any physical particles do not; the "imaginary mass" shows that the system becomes unstable, and sheds the instability by undergoing a type of phase transition called tachyon condensation (closely related to second order phase transitions) that results in symmetry breaking in current models of particle physics.


title: Mass

text: The term "tachyon" was coined by Gerald Feinberg in a 1967 paper, but it was soon realized that Feinberg's model in fact did not allow for superluminal speeds. Instead, the imaginary mass creates an instability in the configuration:- any configuration in which one or more field excitations are tachyonic will spontaneously decay, and the resulting configuration contains no physical tachyons. This process is known as tachyon condensation. Well known examples include the condensation of the Higgs boson in particle physics, and ferromagnetism in condensed matter physics.


title: Mass

text: Although the notion of a tachyonic imaginary mass might seem troubling because there is no classical interpretation of an imaginary mass, the mass is not quantized. Rather, the scalar field is; even for tachyonic quantum fields, the field operators at spacelike separated points still commute (or anticommute), thus preserving causality. Therefore, information still does not propagate faster than light, and solutions grow exponentially, but not superluminally (there is no violation of causality). Tachyon condensation drives a physical system that has reached a local limit and might naively be expected to produce physical tachyons, to an alternate stable state where no physical tachyons exist. Once the tachyonic field reaches the minimum of the potential, its quanta are not tachyons any more but rather are ordinary particles with a positive mass-squared.


title: Mass

text: This is a special case of the general rule, where unstable massive particles are formally described as having a complex mass, with the real part being their mass in the usual sense, and the imaginary part being the decay rate in natural units. However, in quantum field theory, a particle (a "one-particle state") is roughly defined as a state which is constant over time; i.e., an eigenvalue of the Hamiltonian. An unstable particle is a state which is only approximately constant over time; If it exists long enough to be measured, it can be formally described as having a complex mass, with the real part of the mass greater than its imaginary part. If both parts are of the same magnitude, this is interpreted as a resonance appearing in a scattering process rather than a particle, as it is considered not to exist long enough to be measured independently of the scattering process. In the case of a tachyon, the real part of the mass is zero, and hence no concept of a particle can be attributed to it.


title: Mass

text: In a Lorentz invariant theory, the same formulas that apply to ordinary slower-than-light particles (sometimes called "bradyons" in discussions of tachyons) must also apply to tachyons. In particular the energy–momentum relation:


title: Mass

text: (where p is the relativistic momentum of the bradyon and m is its rest mass) should still apply, along with the formula for the total energy of a particle:


title: Mass

text: This equation shows that the total energy of a particle (bradyon or tachyon) contains a contribution from its rest mass (the "rest mass–energy") and a contribution from its motion, the kinetic energy.


title: Mass

text: When "v" is larger than "c", the denominator in the equation for the energy is "imaginary", as the value under the radical is negative. Because the total energy must be real, the numerator must "also" be imaginary: i.e. the rest mass m must be imaginary, as a pure imaginary number divided by another pure imaginary number is a real number.


title: Katherine Knight

text: Katherine Mary Knight (born 24 October 1955) is an Australian murderer and the first woman in the country's history to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. She was convicted for the murder of her partner, John Charles Thomas Price, in February 2000, and is currently imprisoned at the Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre in New South Wales. Knight stabbed Price to death, skinned him, and then put his skin on a meat hook. She then cooked his head and parts of his body with the intention of feeding them to Price's children but was stopped by police.


title: Katherine Knight

text: Katherine Knight was born and raised in an unconventional and dysfunctional family environment. Her mother, Barbara Roughan (née Thorley), had been married to a man named Jack Roughan and lived with him in the small town of Aberdeen in New South Wales' Hunter Valley. Knight's parents had four sons before Barbara began an adulterous relationship with Ken Knight, a friend and co-worker of her then-husband.


title: Katherine Knight

text: Local backlash forced Barbara and Ken to move to Moree. None of her four sons went with her; the two eldest boys continued to reside with their father and the two younger sons were sent to be raised by an aunt in Sydney. Barbara had four additional children with Ken, including twin girls born in 1955 in Tenterfield; Katherine Knight was one of these twin daughters. In 1959, when Knight was four, Jack Roughan died and his two older boys, who had been living with him, moved in with Barbara and Ken.


title: Katherine Knight

text: Ken Knight was a violent alcoholic who would rape Barbara up to ten times per day. Barbara, in turn, often told her daughters intimate details of her sex life and how much she hated sex and men. Later, when Katherine complained to her mother that one of her partners wanted her to take part in a sex act she did not want to perform, Barbara told her to "put up with it and stop complaining." Katherine claims she was frequently sexually assaulted by several members of her family (though not by her father), which continued until she was aged 11. Although there are doubts about the details, psychiatrists accept her claims and the events have been largely confirmed by other members of the family.


title: Katherine Knight

text: Barbara's great-grandmother was an Indigenous Australian from the Moree area who had married an Irishman. Barbara was proud of this fact and identified as Aboriginal. This was kept a family secret as there was considerable racism in the area at the time, and Barbara's descent was a source of tension for the children. Apart from her twin sister, the only person whom Katherine was close to was her uncle, Oscar Knight, a champion horseman. She was devastated when he committed suicide in 1969 and continues to maintain that his ghost visits her. The family moved back to Aberdeen the same year.


title: Katherine Knight

text: When she attended Muswellbrook high school, Katherine became a loner and is remembered by classmates as a bully who stood over smaller children. She assaulted at least one boy at school with a weapon and was once injured by a teacher – who was subsequently found to have acted in self-defense. By contrast, when not in a rage, Knight was a model student and often earned awards for her good behaviour. Upon leaving school at 15, without having learned to read or write, she gained employment as a cutter in a clothing factory. Twelve months later, she left to start what she referred to as her "dream job": cutting up offal at the local abattoir. There, she was quickly promoted to boning and was given her own set of butchers' knives. At home, the knives were hung over her bed so, as Knight said, that they "would always be handy if I needed them", a habit she continued–until her incarceration–everywhere she lived.