bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Song of My Selves
Authors: Costello Bonnie
Published: May 2018

This chapter begins with a discussion of the plurality of the self. Auden viewed the plurality of the self as an inevitable condition of being and consciousness, and a check to narrow subjectivity and repressive will, rather than a flaw to be overcome. The Double Man (1941) does not decide questions but poses them. Its major poem, “New Year Letter,” offers a dialogue between poetry and prose and between his own words and those he has read. The epigraph cites Montaigne (by way of Charles Williams): “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.” In many ways, Auden is a modern-day Montaigne, looking at his society by engaging in a dialogue with and about himself—not in the form of idealizing self-love, but rather humble and skeptical self-regard. The remainder of the chapter provides a reading of The Orators.
Acknowledgments
Authors: McNeill William H.
Published: May 2018

THESE ESSAYS were originally prepared for delivery at Baylor University, March 31–April 1, 1982, as the fourth Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures. Professor Rufus B. Spain arranged the invitation and chose the topic from among several I suggested; thus he can justly claim part credit for what follows....
Microparasitism, Macroparasitism, and the Commercial Transmutation
Authors: McNeill William H.
Published: May 2018

IN MY FIRST lecture I traced the development of humanity to its achievement of a potentially stable pattern of life under conditions of civilization. By about 1 A.D., commands issued from a sovereign center and applied locally by bureaucratic agents of a distant ruler acting in uneasy collaboration with local landlords, chieftains, and other men of power could regulate and (more or less) safeguard the sorts of mutual dependency that urban specialization had called into being among populations living hundreds of miles apart from one another. Such territorially extensive states as the Han, Roman, Parthian, Mauryan, and Kushan empires may therefore be considered as constituting an institutionally adequate response to the novelties inherent in the urban transmutation that began about 4000 B.C. in Mesopotamia....
Prologue
Authors: von Plato Jan
Published: May 2018

It may sound paradoxical, but if around 1930 Kurt Gödel had not thought very deeply about the foundations of mathematics, there would be no information society in the form in which we have it today. Gödel’s solitary work was the single most important factor in the development of precise theories of formal languages, ones that through the coding he invented could be handled by a machine. Likewise, his work led to precise notions of algorithmic computability from which a direct path led to the first theoretical ideas of a computer, in the work of Alan Turing in 1936 and John von Neumann some years later....
The Emergence of Foundational Study
Authors: von Plato Jan
Published: May 2018

This chapter looks at how modern foundational study has twofold mathematical roots. One is the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, especially the proof of independence of the parallel postulate by Eugenio Beltrami in 1868, in his Saggio di interpretazione della geometria non-euclidea (Treatise on the interpretation of non-Euclidean geometry). The other root is arithmetical, retraceable through Peano and others to the 1861 book Lehrbuch der Arithmetik für höhere Lehranstalten (Arithmetic for higher institutions of learning) by the high school teacher Hermann Grassmann. In each of these two cases, one has to set things straight: To prove independence in geometry, one has to ask what the axioms are, and maybe even the principles of proof.
Russell: Adding Quantifiers to Peano’s Logic
Authors: von Plato Jan
Published: May 2018

This chapter analyzes how the pursuit of truth in logic had begun with Gottlob Frege and was continued by Bertrand Russell and the rest, so that axiomatic logic had become the norm by the 1920s. The axioms were supposed to express the most basic logical truths, and just two rules of proof expressed the passage from instances of axioms to the theorems of logic. The latter were, supposedly, the less basic truths, but sometimes theorems were simpler than axioms. There was another aspect to axiomatic logic, namely a fundamental relativity in the choice of the basic notions. Russell's axiomatization of propositional logic, from the Principia Mathematica, uses disjunction and negation as the primitive connectives and became a standard.
John Stuart Mill and the Poetics of Social Pain
Authors: Ablow Rachel
Published: May 2018

This chapter describes John Stuart Mill's attempt to redefine sensory experience as a way to reimagine the social order posited by the utilitarianism of both his father, James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham. While James Mill describes pain as profoundly personal, interiorized, and private, in his Autobiography, John Stuart stages his famous mental crisis as a way to introduce a different model of pain that casts it as something we learn as well as something we feel. Pain is something each of us may experience alone, Mill concludes, but we only ever understand it through our encounters with others. Ultimately this notion of pain suggests a model of liberal sociality organized like a Wittgensteinian language game in which the terms of the discussion may be endlessly renegotiated among individuals who share the same fundamental pain of self-alienation.
Harriet Martineau and the Impersonality of Pain
Authors: Ablow Rachel
Published: May 2018

This chapter argues that one of the most famous invalids of the age—and one of the most important political theorists—used her many writings on illness to imagine a model of impersonality uniquely well suited to the responsibilities of legislation. The relation of the legislator to the community represents a recurring problem for utilitarianism: if self-interest is the only reliable motivation, it becomes difficult to account for the legislator's—and hence, the ideal citizen's—supposed commitment to the common good. In Harriet Martineau's account, only the enlightened sufferer is able to regard all persons as equally valuable, and hence, their own pain is of no greater or lesser consequence than that experienced by anyone else.
Pain and Privacy in Villette
Authors: Ablow Rachel
Published: May 2018

This chapter shifts away from politics to the novel, yet remains focused on pain's ability to configure the relation of the subject to the social. Specifically, this chapter argues that Charlotte Brontë's novel uses the phenomenology of pain as a way to imagine the compatibility of privacy—offered as the locus of the individual's value—with community. It argues that these carefully staged refusals of readers' sympathy constitute an attempt to offer recognition and acknowledgement in place of an implicitly normalizing fellow-feeling. We may not be able to enter into one another's feelings, Brontë insists, but we can nevertheless recognize that we all possess them.
The Fantasy of the Speaking Body
Authors: Ablow Rachel
Published: May 2018

This concluding chapter offers a very brief account of what epistemological accounts of pain can look like when conceived in isolation from social life. This way of thinking about pain does not originate in the nineteenth century, but it is importantly reformulated during this period. The chapter describes the nature of this reformulation and begins to point to the consequences of its lingering pervasiveness. As has been suggested in the previous chapters, this volume asserts a basic compatibility between a model of atomistic individualism often identified with liberalism and an exclusively epistemological model of pain, and this chapter attends to a few symptoms of this compatibility.
Going Berserk for Punishment
Authors: Kohler-Hausmann Julilly
Published: May 2018

This chapter illustrates how California politicians went “berserk in terms of punishment” and helped balloon the prison system to a scale few could have imagined possible in the early 1970s. While determinate sentencing in itself does not ratchet up punishment, the ensuing battles in California over setting prison terms became a vehicle for the ascendance of the so-called “toughness imperative.” “Law-and-order” politicians in both parties used the displacement of the rehabilitative ideal to assert a new vision for the prison. They interpreted the upheaval in California's prisons as evidence that corporal containment and harsh, degrading punishment were the only viable response to street crime.
Conclusion
Authors: Kohler-Hausmann Julilly
Published: May 2018

This concluding chapter discusses how chronicling the recent history of the U.S. welfare state presents different challenges. Instead of making visible the towering institutions in plain sight, scholars have the challenge of keeping the light on something that much political rhetoric insists has already retreated or will soon retreat into irrelevance. The chapter highlights those sections of the safety net that have attenuated to mere gossamer threads and bring into view the robust state supports obscured by claims of their recipients' deservingness and independence. This is critical because social welfare programs continue to figure prominently in low-income communities. Welfare programs have become more privatized, shifted strategies, and redirected resources but have not abdicated responsibility for social regulation.
Conclusion
Authors: Weitzman Steven
Published: May 2018

This book has examined what scholars know—or believe they know—about the origin of the Jews, how that thinking changes from period to period, how scholarly approaches to the issue differ, and what makes the matter extremely difficult to resolve. It has discussed origin as if it were something that can be investigated using the tools of history, anthropology, archaeology, or genealogy, but it turns out to have many of the qualities of a religious concept like God. This conclusion reflects on the prospects of whether we can ascertain the origin of the Jews through a search for their ancestors. It considers postmodernism's effort to question the ontological status of origins and notes that genealogy offers a potential path forward for probing Jewish origins. Finally, it argues that scholars should not give up on trying to tell the story of the origin of the Jews.
The Formative Years of Relativity
Authors: Renn Jürgen , Gutfreund Hanoch
Published: May 2018

First published in 1922 and based on lectures delivered in May 1921, Albert Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity offered an overview and explanation of the then new and controversial theory of relativity. The work would go on to become a monumental classic, printed in numerous editions and translations worldwide. Now, this book introduces Einstein's masterpiece to new audiences. The volume contains Einstein's insightful text, accompanied by important historical materials and commentary looking at the origins and development of general relativity. The book provides fresh, original perspectives, placing Einstein's achievements into a broader context for all readers. It tells the rich story behind the early reception, spread, and consequences of Einstein's ideas during the formative years of general relativity in the late 1910s and 1920s. Relativity's meaning changed radically throughout the nascent years of its development, and the book describes in detail the transformation of Einstein's work from the esoteric pursuit of one individual communicating with a handful of colleagues into the preoccupation of a growing community of physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, and philosophers. The book quotes extensively from Einstein's correspondence and reproduces historical documents such as newspaper articles and letters. Inserts are featured in the main text giving concise explanations of basic concepts, and short biographical notes and photographs of some of Einstein's contemporaries are included. The first-ever English translations of two of Einstein's popular Princeton lectures are featured at the book's end.
Einstein’s Lectures
Authors: Gutfreund Hanoch , Renn Jürgen
Published: May 2018

This chapter reproduces the extant text of the two lectures. In these two lectures, Einstein explains very thoroughly the principles and conceptual foundations of, first, special and then general relativity with a minimum of mathematical apparatus. He also includes qualitative discussions of the main experiential evidence supporting his theories, such as the Michelson-Morley experiment (which Einstein calls the Michelson experiment) as support for the validity of the relativity principle, and also of the propagation of light. The guiding theme is the principle of relativity, which he begins to explain in basic kinematic terms. In the conclusion of both his lectures, he emphasizes, first, that the most important task of a physical theory is to reduce the number of independent assumptions rooted in experience, and that, second, spatial and temporal aspects of reality are inevitably tied up with all other physical laws.
Biographical Notes
Authors: Gutfreund Hanoch , Renn Jürgen
Published: May 2018

THIS COLLECTION OF BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES MAY BE CONSULTED SELECTIVELY FROM THE text or read sequentially to get an impression of the scope of scientific networking during the formative period. To help those who prefer the second option, we have added at the end of each note the context in which an individual is mentioned in the text....
Introduction
Authors: Heller Daniel Kupfert
Published: May 2018

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Betar youth movement in Poland in the 1930s. Like dozens of Zionist youth movements operating in the country at the time, Betar promised to prepare its members for a new life in the Yishuv—the Jewish community of prestate Palestine—by providing vocational training, Hebrew classes, and lessons in Jewish history. What set Betar apart was its commitment to the military training of Jewish youth, as well as its support of several prominent policies of the European Right. They deemed rifles, not ploughs or shovels, to be the most important tools to fulfill Zionism's goals. Like the vast majority of Zionist activists between the two world wars, Betar's leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, sought to capture the hearts and minds of Jews living in Poland. His Union of Revisionist Zionists, founded in 1925, would go on to become one of the most popular Zionist organizations in the interwar period.
Obedient Children, Reckless Rebels
Authors: Heller Daniel Kupfert
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses how Vladimir Jabotinsky deftly used his distinctive brand of “youth politics” to withstand challenges to his leadership from the Revisionist movement's moderates and radicals alike. Jabotinsky believed that he could invoke ideas sweeping across Europe about the nature of youth, their role in politics, and the challenges of “generational conflict” to convince his followers that his increasingly authoritarian behavior was the only mode of leadership available to Zionist leaders in the 1930s. The chapter then demonstrates how his deliberately ambiguous and provocative writing about generational conflict, as well as the innovative ways in which he delimited “youth” from “adult” in his movement's regulations, allowed him to further embrace authoritarian measures within the movement without publicly abandoning his claim to be a firm proponent of democracy.
Biomedical Odysseys
Authors: Song Priscilla
Published: May 2018

Thousands of people from more than eighty countries have traveled to China since 2001 to undergo fetal cell transplantation. Galvanized by the potential of stem and fetal cells to regenerate damaged neurons and restore lost bodily functions, people grappling with paralysis and neurodegenerative disorders have ignored the warnings of doctors and scientists back home in order to stake their futures on a Chinese experiment. This book looks at why and how these individuals have entrusted their lives to Chinese neurosurgeons operating at the forefront of experimental medicine, in a world where technologies and risks move faster than laws can keep pace. The book shows how cutting-edge medicine is not just about the latest advances in biomedical science but also encompasses transformations in online patient activism, surgical intervention, and borderline experiments in health care bureaucracy. The book opens up important theoretical and methodological horizons in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. It illuminates how poignant journeys in search of fetal cell cures become tangled in complex webs of digital mediation, the entrepreneurial logics of postsocialist medicine, and fraught debates about the ethics of clinical experimentation. Using innovative methods to track the border-crossing quests of Chinese clinicians and their patients from around the world, the book maps the transnational life of fetal cell therapies.
Borderline Tactics
Authors: Song Priscilla
Published: May 2018

This chapter takes a closer look at the institutional practices that have enabled medical entrepreneurs to survive and even thrive in the fluctuating regulatory regime of China's emergent “market socialism.” Rather than producing better modes of governance, formal regulation has encouraged experimental practices that circumvent administrative oversight. Facing increasing challenges to their professional identities and their very livelihoods, Dr. Huang and his compatriots deploy myriad borderline tactics ranging from exploiting bureaucratic loopholes to capitalizing on technological advances in order to evade government scrutiny and attract new patients. These experimental forms of health care are pushing the limits of medical practice as they remake the boundaries between public and private, legal and illegal, ethical and unethical.
i-Witnessing
Authors: Song Priscilla
Published: May 2018

As Dr. Huang and the New Century staff members were busy devising new methods to document the effects of their experimental human olfactory ensheathing glial cell transplantation surgery, patients and their families also developed their own ways of assessing whether the experimental procedure worked. This chapter focuses on how fetal cell recipients and their families have engaged questions of efficacy in the transnational realm of experimental medicine. Prospective transplantation candidates carefully parsed online reports of others' surgical experiences and analyzed the credibility of Chinese neurosurgeons' claims, while postoperative patients monitored their bodies for signs of difference and parsed these changes online. It is argued that the digitally mediated forms of knowledge they have produced offer a poignant challenge to what counts as expertise and data in the quest for “evidence” in experimental medicine.
The Self and the Soul
Authors: El Shakry Omnia
Published: May 2018

This chapter reconstructs a historical interlude between Sufism and psychoanalytic psychology in postwar Egypt. It considers how we might think through the relationship between psychoanalysis and the Islamic tradition, while respecting the “ontological stakes” of the latter, namely, the belief in divine transcendence and divine discourse. The chapter addresses this question through a detailed exploration of the writings of Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani and his mentor Muhammad Mustafa Hilmi, both prominent Egyptian intellectuals who expounded Sufi ideas for a broader reading public, beginning in the 1940s. Situating these figures within the larger intellectual and religious context of mid-twentieth-century Egypt, this chapter explores the elective affinities between Sufism and certain strands of psychoanalysis in terms of a dialogical relationship between the self and the Other, as mediated by the unconscious.
Understanding Elites’ Religious Behaviors in the Middle Roman Republic
Authors: Champion Craige B.
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses some theoretical positions and methodologies in order to elucidate the religious behaviors of republican elites in the Middle Roman Republic. Using the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance, it considers what the elites were doing in creating, practicing, and maintaining the state religion. To better understand the Roman ruling elite's religious behaviors, the chapter examines the military juncture during the First Roman–Syrian War, and particularly the action of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus at a critical moment in the campaign against Antiochus III. It also looks at the tradition of Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus' supposed evocatio of “Juno Caelestis” before the fall of Carthage before concluding with an analysis of accumulative civic polytheism and the idea of a dominant-cultural paradigm, arguing that both Roman elites and nonelites were held together only sporadically and tenuously as far as religious culture went.
Epilogue
Authors: Flower Harriet I.
Published: May 2018

The characteristic ubiquity of lares in the Roman home, town, and countryside is matched by the impressive survival of their cults throughout antiquity. Most of the previous discussion has investigated lares in republican and early imperial times, but they survived well into the world of late antiquity, despite increasingly heated competition from an army of new and exotic gods, some of whom made elaborate promises of personal salvation and a future life of bliss. This epilogue draws upon a section of the Theodosian Code (published on February 15 AD 438) to provide a fitting way to conclude this study, which considered many small case studies and individual pieces of evidence to offer a mosaic picture of life with lares. The Theodosian Code here quotes a law promulgated on November 8 AD 392 at Constantinople that bans traditional Roman practices.
Noncooperative Games
Authors: Hespanha João P.
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses the key principles of noncooperative game theory with the aid of several examples. To characterize a game, several items must be specified; for example, the players are the agents that make decisions. For a mathematical solution to a game, it is also important to make assumptions on the player's rationality, regarding questions such as: Will the players always pursue their best interests to fulfill their objectives? Will the players form coalitions? Will the players trust each other? The chapter proceeds by using the rope-pulling game to examine the motivation and implications of assuming a noncooperative vs. cooperative framework. It also considers the robust design problem and its formalization into a resistive circuit design game, a network routing game, and the Nash equilibrium before concluding with a practice exercise related to the network routing game, complete with solution.
Minimax Theorem
Authors: Hespanha João P.
Published: May 2018

This chapter deals with the Minimax Theorem and its proof, which is based on elementary results from convex analysis. The theorem states that for every matrix A, the average security levels of both players coincide. In a mixed policy, the min and max always commute. For every constant c, at least one of the players can guarantee a security level of c. The chapter first considers the statement of the Minimax Theorem before discussing the convex hull and the Separating Hyperplane Theorem, one of the key results in convex analysis. It then demonstrates how to prove the Minimax Theorem and presents the proof. It also shows the consequences of the Minimax Theorem and concludes with a practice exercise related to symmetric games and the corresponding solution.
Classes of Potential Games
Authors: Hespanha João P.
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses several classes of potential games that are common in the literature and how to derive the Nash equilibrium for such games. It first considers identical interests games and dummy games before turning to decoupled games and bilateral symmetric games. It then describes congestion games, in which all players are equal, in the sense that the cost associated with each resource only depends on the total number of players using that resource and not on which players use it. It also presents other potential games, including the Sudoku puzzle, and goes on to analyze the distributed resource allocation problem, the computation of Nash equilibria for potential games, and fictitious play. It concludes with practice exercises and their corresponding solutions, along with additional exercises.
One-Player Dynamic Games
Authors: Hespanha João P.
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on one-player discrete time dynamic games, that is, the optimal control of a discrete time dynamical system. It first considers solution methods for one-player dynamic games, which are simple optimizations, before discussing discrete time cost-to-go. It shows that, regardless of the information structure (open loop, state feedback or other), it is not possible to obtain a cost lower than the cost-to-go. A computationally efficient recursive technique that can be used to compute the cost-to-go is dynamic programming. After providing an overview of discrete time dynamic programming, the chapter explores the complexity of computing the cost-to-go at all stages, the use of MATLAB to solve finite one-player games, and linear quadratic dynamic games. It concludes with a practice exercise and the corresponding solution, along with an additional exercise.
State-Feedback Zero-Sum Dynamic Games
Authors: Hespanha João P.
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on the computation of the saddle-point equilibrium of a zero-sum discrete time dynamic game in a state-feedback policy. It begins by considering solution methods for two-player zero sum dynamic games in discrete time, assuming a finite horizon stage-additive cost that Player 1 wants to minimize and Player 2 wants to maximize, and taking into account a state feedback information structure. The discussion then turns to discrete time dynamic programming, the use of MATLAB to solve zero-sum games with finite state spaces and finite action spaces, and discrete time linear quadratic dynamic games. The chapter concludes with a practice exercise that requires computing the cost-to-go for each state of the tic-tac-toe game, and the corresponding solution.
Factoring Graphs
Authors: Benjamin Arthur , Chartrand Gary , Zhang Ping
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on Hall's Theorem, introduced by British mathematician Philip Hall, and its connection to graph theory. It first considers problems that ask whether some collection of objects can be matched in some way to another collection of objects, with particular emphasis on how different types of schedulings are possible using a graph. It then examines one popular version of Hall's work, a statement known as the Marriage Theorem, the occurrence of matchings in bipartite graphs, Tutte's Theorem, Petersen's Theorem, and the Petersen graph. Peter Christian Julius Petersen introduced the Petersen graph to show that a cubic bridgeless graph need not be 1-factorable. The chapter concludes with an analysis of 1-factorable graphs, the 1-Factorization Conjecture, and 2-factorable graphs.
Drawing Graphs
Authors: Benjamin Arthur , Chartrand Gary , Zhang Ping
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers the concept of planar graph and its underlying theory. It begins with a discussion of the Three Houses and Three Utilities Problem and how it can be represented by a graph. It shows that solving the Three Houses and Three Utilities Problem is equivalent to the problem of determining whether the graph that represents it can be drawn in the plane without any of its edges crossing. It then describes the Euler Identity and the Euler Polyhedron Formula, along with the proposition that every planar graph contains a vertex of degree 5 or less. It also examines Kuratowski's Theorem, introduced by the Polish topologist Kazimierz Kuratowski, and the problem of crossing number. Finally, it provides an overview of the Art Gallery Problem, Wagner's Conjecture, and the Brick-Factory Problem.
Coloring Graphs
Authors: Benjamin Arthur , Chartrand Gary , Zhang Ping
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers the concept of coloring the vertices of a graph by focusing on the Four Color Problem. It begins with a discussion of three mathematics problems that involve conjecture, attributed to Pierre Fermat, Leonhard Euler, and Christian Goldbach. It then examines one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the Four Color Problem, which addresses the question of whether it is always possible to color the regions of every map with four colors so that neighboring regions are colored differently. After an overview of the origins of the Four Color Problem, the chapter goes on to analyze the Four Color Conjecture, Alfred Bray Kempe's proof of the Four Color Conjecture, and the Five Color Theorem. Finally, it looks at the Four Color Problem in the twentieth century, along with vertex colorings and their applications.
Graph Theory: A Look Back—The Road Ahead
Authors: Benjamin Arthur , Chartrand Gary , Zhang Ping
Published: May 2018

This book concludes with an epilogue, which traces the evolution of graph theory, from the conceptualization of the Königsberg Bridge Problem and its generalization by Leonhard Euler, whose solution led to the subject of Eulerian graphs, to the various efforts to solve the Four Color Problem. It considers elements of graph theory found in games and puzzles of the past, and the famous mathematicians involved including Sir William Rowan Hamilton and William Tutte. It also discusses the remarkable increase since the 1960s in the number of mathematicians worldwide devoted to graph theory, along with research journals, books, and monographs that have graph theory as a subject. Finally, it looks at the growth in applications of graph theory dealing with communication and social networks and the Internet in the digital age and the age of technology.
Party, Popularity and Dissent
Authors: Bourke Richard
Published: May 2018

This chapter details Burke's political life from 1765 to 1774. During his early years in parliament, developments in Britain and Ireland proved formative politically and intellectually for Burke. Throughout the course of his first years in the Commons, the main threat to domestic consensus seemed unlikely to come from the growth of religious conflict. In 1772, he opposed the idea of relieving the Anglican clergy of the duty of subscribing to the tenets of the established Church on the grounds that the security of religion required a community of belief based on agreed doctrines and a uniform liturgy. Yet he insisted that this should be accompanied by generous toleration. In 1769, the exclusion of John Wilkes from parliament betrayed government contempt for liberty and a disregard for popular sentiment. In response, Burke provided his party with a probing analysis of the causes for the growing alienation of the public from the administration.
Representation and Reform
Authors: Bourke Richard
Published: May 2018

This chapter details Burke's political life from 1774 to 1784. In sitting as a member of parliament for a populous commercial city, Burke was forced to think seriously about his obligations as a representative. In doing so he could draw on his experience in the House of Commons as well as on his efforts in mobilizing opinion out of doors. By 1779, his energies were more deeply absorbed in constitutional reform. By 1780, conflict with the colonies was reaching the apogee of crisis, discontent in Ireland was contributing to popular militancy, and public protest was affecting confidence in the British system of government. Shorter parliaments were advocated along with manhood suffrage. The commitment to a more equal representation spread. Yet for Burke proposals of the kind were merely tokens of innovation often inspired by incoherent ideas about natural rights in politics.
Consent and Conciliation
Authors: Bourke Richard
Published: May 2018

This chapter details Burke's political life from 1774 to 1783. His first three years in parliament as a member for Bristol were dominated by the deteriorating situation in the colonies. The following six were devoted to retrieving them for the Empire. Relations were first soured by a group of “intolerable” Acts passed during the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party. Among these the Massachusetts Bay Regulating Act, which received the royal assent on 20 May 1774, overturned the province's 1691 charter. Another intolerable measure was the new Bill for the government of Quebec that was debated in the Commons the same summer. The discussion centered on the obligations imposed on victors after a conquest.
The Opening Of The Hastings Impeachment, 1786–1788
Authors: Bourke Richard
Published: May 2018

In the spring of 1789, Burke was immersed in the process of prosecuting Hastings; that April he was hard at work on the details of the sixth article of impeachment. But it had taken years of labor to reach this stage in the proceedings. The preliminaries for mounting a compelling case against the accused had been underway since February 1786. This chapter takes the story from the beginning of that process to the great speech that opened the impeachment two years later. Between 4 April and 5 May 1786, Burke's twenty-two articles of charge outlining allegations of high crimes and misdemeanors against the Governor General were delivered to the House of Commons. It was on the basis of these articles that the Commons was to decide either to impeach Hastings before the House of Lords or to abandon all accusations against him.
Conclusion
Authors: Bourke Richard
Published: May 2018

This chapter reflects on the nature of the society into which Burke was born in comparison with the one he departed. During Burke's lifetime, British affairs were increasingly shaped by the Empire. In his childhood, the North American and West Indian colonies were key elements of imperial trade and power. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the volume of trans-Atlantic commerce increased by more than a factor of twelve, constituting about a third of Britain's overall trade by 1772. British policy began to drive thirteen of the colonies into rebellion. Then, between 25 May and 17 September 1787, the terms for a federal government were finally agreed for an independent United States of America. Burke publicized his admiration for the newly constructed nation. In the 1780s and 1790s, India commanded his attention.
An Evolving Solar System
Authors: Chambers John , Mitton Jacqueline
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on Charles Darwin's argument that all living species are descended from common ancestors. Each organism inherits a mixture of characteristics from its parents together with a few random mutations. Some descendants are better suited to their surroundings than others, and these descendants thrive while their ill-adapted cousins do not. As a respected geologist as well as a naturalist, Darwin also believed that Earth changes gradually due to natural processes. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, also suggested as much, and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace developed his own theory of evolution independently of Darwin. For many people, however, the challenge was how to reconcile these evolutionary ideas with the account of creation and the great flood described in the Old Testament of the Bible.
Meteorites
Authors: Chambers John , Mitton Jacqueline
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses how countless small rocks from space encounter Earth each day, burning up completely in the atmosphere as meteors. Most meteors are tiny, no larger than a grain of sand. These disappear in the upper atmosphere in a matter of seconds. However, the boulder at the center of the 1992 fireball incident in the United States was much larger—too large to burn up entirely—and it plowed straight through the upper atmosphere, continuing toward the ground. As the boulder reached the lower atmosphere, where the air is densest, the wind resistance became strong enough to tear the boulder to pieces. At least one piece of the boulder survived to reach the ground, where it became a meteorite—a lump of rock that literally fell from the sky.
Worlds of Gas and Ice
Authors: Chambers John , Mitton Jacqueline
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on the giants of the solar system. Astronomers know somewhat less about the giant planets—except Jupiter—since no probes have gone down through their atmospheres and examined them directly. However, remote observations show that they have much in common with Jupiter. The low densities of all four giants mean they are mostly made of much lighter stuff than their terrestrial cousins. As on Jupiter, most of this bulk is gaseous in the outer layers but must be compressed into liquids in the interior. None of the giants has a solid surface, and the transition between gas and liquid is not a sharp one. Astronomers refer to the outer part of the fluid envelope as the atmosphere, although the depth of the base of the atmosphere is rather arbitrary.
The Outermost Solar System
Authors: Chambers John , Mitton Jacqueline
Published: May 2018

This chapter illustrates how, until the mid-20th century, little was known about the true nature of asteroids and comets. Asteroids looked like single points of light through a telescope, and astronomers tended to think of them as miniature planets, albeit ones with somewhat more elliptical and inclined orbits. Comets seemed to constitute a separate family, distinct from asteroids. They grew much brighter as they approached the Sun, becoming enormously extended objects with a diffuse coma and one or more tails that could extend for millions of kilometers. The most puzzling aspect of comets was how they had managed to survive for the age of the solar system. Comets had such low masses that they could not be measured, yet they shed large amounts of material each time they passed close to the Sun to form their coma and tails.
Epilogue: Paradigms, Problems, and Predictions
Authors: Chambers John , Mitton Jacqueline
Published: May 2018

This concluding chapter talks about how astronomers and space agencies in dozens of countries are helping to see the solar system as never before, transforming points of light into real worlds, and even bringing samples of those worlds back to Earth. At the same time, the stunning discovery of hundreds of other planetary systems in the galaxy has provided a powerful stimulus to understand how planetary systems form and evolve, and to find out what makes one system different from another. Moreover, in 2010, NASA announced its latest science plan. One of the key goals for NASA's future planetary science program is to learn how the Sun's family began and how it has changed over time. The chapter argues that the rapid pace of recent developments makes now a good time to take stock of what scholars know, even though the story is still incomplete.
The Epistemologia Imaginabilis in Eighteenth-Century Science and Philosophy
Authors: Ferrone Vincenzo
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the change in science's image and the revelation of the philosophers of science's so-called epistemologia imaginabilis in the context of eighteenth-century science and philosophy. Many eminent scholars, from Thomas Hobbes to Denis Diderot, have engaged in the epistemological debate over extending the methods of the natural sciences to the study of human experience. The idea of the unity of knowledge across all disciplines on the basis of scientific methodology reached its peak with Immanuel Kant. Among the great historians, Marc Bloch was the one who best understood the role that a radically new conception of science could play in redefining and reviving the legitimacy of historical knowledge. The chapter considers the intense intellectual debate between historians of science and philosophers of science on the foundations of knowledge and how modern science acquired definitive legitimacy as a new form of knowledge over the course of the eighteenth century.
P and NP
Authors: Fortnow Lance
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses P and NP through Frenemy, an imaginary world where every pair of people comprises either friends or enemies. Frenemy has about 20,000 inhabitants. Every individual seems normal, but put two in close vicinity and a strange thing happens. Either the two take an instant liking to each other, immediately becoming the best of friends, or they take one look at each other and immediately become the worst of enemies. By examining social networking data such as Facebook and Twitter, computer scientists at the Frenemy Institute of Technology have put together a nearly complete database showing which pairs of people are friends and which pairs of people are enemies. The chapter then shows what these researchers can and cannot do with this data. It also presents other NP problems from a few other scientific fields where there is no known efficient algorithms.
The Prehistory of P versus NP
Authors: Fortnow Lance
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores two separate paths that led to the P versus NP question. In the end it was Steve Cook in the West and Leonid Levin in the East who would first ask whether P = NP. Science does not happen in a vacuum, and both sides have a long history leading to the work of Cook and Levin. The chapter covers just a small part of those research agendas, the struggle in the West to understand efficient computation and the struggle in the East to understand the necessity of perebor. Both would lead to P versus NP. Today, with most academic work available over the Internet and with generally open travel around the world, there is now one large research community instead of two separate ones.
Dealing with Hardness
Authors: Fortnow Lance
Published: May 2018

This chapter demonstrates several approaches for dealing with hard problems. These approaches include brute force, heuristics, and approximation. Typically, no single technique will suffice to handle the difficult NP problems one needs to solve. For moderate-sized problems one can search over all possible solutions with the very fast computers available today. One can use algorithms that might not work for every problem but do work for many of the problems one cares about. Other algorithms may not find the best possible solution but still a solution that's good enough. Other times one just cannot get a solution for an NP-complete problem. One has to try to solve a different problem or just give up.
The Future
Authors: Fortnow Lance
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores some of today's great challenges of computing. These challenges include parallel computation, dealing with big data, and the networking of everything. The chapter then argues that P versus NP goes well beyond a simple mathematical puzzle. The P versus NP problem is a way of thinking, a way to classify computational problems by their inherent difficulty. P versus NP also brings communities together. There are NP-complete problems in physics, biology, economics, and many other fields. Physicists and economists work on very different problems, but they share a commonality that can give great benefits from sharing tools and techniques. Tools developed to find the ground state of a physical system can help find equilibrium behavior in a complex economic environment. Ultimately, the inherent difficulty of NP problems leads to new technologies.
The Road to Relativity
Authors: Gutfreund Hanoch , Renn Jürgen , Stachel John
Published: May 2018

This richly annotated facsimile edition of “The Foundation of General Relativity” introduces a new generation of readers to Albert Einstein's theory of gravitation. Written in 1915, this remarkable document is a watershed in the history of physics and an enduring testament to the elegance and precision of Einstein's thought. Presented here is a beautiful facsimile of Einstein's original handwritten manuscript, along with its English translation and an insightful page-by-page commentary that places the work in historical and scientific context. The concise introduction traces Einstein's intellectual odyssey from the special to the general theory of relativity, and the chapter “The Charm of a Manuscript” provides a delightful meditation on the varied afterlife of Einstein's text. The book also includes a biographical glossary of the figures discussed in the book, a comprehensive bibliography, suggestions for further reading, and numerous photos and illustrations throughout.
The Charm of a Manuscript
Authors: Gutfreund Hanoch , Renn Jürgen
Published: May 2018

This section discusses the story of how Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity evolved into a full-fledged theory. Einstein's manuscript, “The Foundation of General Relativity,” marks the conclusion of his intellectual odyssey toward his General Theory of Relativity. He submitted the manuscript for publication to Wilhelm Wien, the editor of Annalen der Physik, on March 19, 1916 and was published on May 11 of the same year. The general relativity manuscript is now part of the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In July 1923, Einstein asked Heinrich Loewe, a prominent member of “The Preparatory Board of the Hebrew University and the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem” to sell the manuscript. This section explains how the manuscript of “The Foundation of General Relativity” made its way to the Hebrew University.
Einstein’s Intellectual Odyssey to General Relativity
Authors: Gutfreund Hanoch , Renn Jürgen
Published: May 2018

This section discusses the development of Albert Einstein's ideas and attitudes as he struggled for eight years to come up with a general theory of relativity that would meet the physical and mathematical requirements laid down at the outset. It first considers Einstein's work on gravitation in Prague before analyzing three documents that played a significant role in his search for a theory of general relativity: the Zurich Notebook, the Einstein–Grossmann Entwurf paper, and the Einstein–Besso manuscript. It then looks at Einstein's completion of his general theory of relativity in Berlin in November 1915, along with his development of a new theory of gravitation within the framework of the special theory of relativity. It also examines the formulation of the basic idea that Einstein termed the “equivalence principle,” his Entwurf theory vs. David Hilbert's theory, and the 1916 manuscript of Einstein's work on the general theory of relativity.
Fin-de-Siècle Salonica
Authors: Hanioğlu M. Şükrü
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's childhood in the ancient Macedonian capital of Salonica. The future founder of the Turkish Republic was born one winter, either in 1880 or in 1881. His upbringing was more liberal than that of most lower-class Muslims. No one in his family's circle of friends and relatives, for instance, practiced polygamy. Likewise, his father reportedly drank alcohol, which was abhorred by conservatives. The confusing dualism produced in Ottoman society by the reforms of the nineteenth century had its first imprint on Mustafa when his parents entered into a heated argument about his education. There is little doubt that Mustafa Kemal's deep-seated predilection for new institutions and practices owed much to his years as one of a handful of students in the empire who had their primary education at a private elementary school devoid of a strong religious focus.
The Secular Republic
Authors: Hanioğlu M. Şükrü
Published: May 2018

This chapter addresses Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's secularism. If popular expectations were any guide, two paths to global leadership lay wide open to Mustafa Kemal in 1922: he could either capitalize on Ottoman possession of the caliphate in order to seize the mantle of pan-Islamic leadership, or he could set himself up as an anti-imperialist model for Asian and African socialists. However, it was at this juncture that Mustafa Kemal's Turkist, scientistic, and pro-Western leanings became manifest, leading him and the Turkish nation down an uncharted path that combined intense nationalism with an extreme commitment to Western secularism. The popular philosophy of scientism, serving as a deus ex machina, provided the overall framework of this new secularism and shaped Mustafa Kemal's views of Islam.