Symmetry and symmetry breaking in nature

Abstract

According to Hermann Weyl and in the words of Richard P. Feynman, an object is symmetric if one can subject it to a certain operation and it appears exactly the same after the operation. This paper generalises this definition of symmetry of objects in space to symmetries of the laws of nature. Consequences of the laws of physics that follow from their symmetries are derived and compared with the experimental evidence. It is pointed out that unobservability is at the root of all symmetries in the natural sciences. Symmetries of the laws of physics can be hidden by asymmetries of realisable states that follow from a lack of symmetry in the ground state of the system. If that is the case, transitions from states that share the symmetries of the laws, to states in the neighbourhood of the ground state that do not, involve symmetry breaking through self-organisation.     

'Political' personae: the poem from prison of Michael Glykas: Byzantine literature between fact and fiction

Abstract

Byzantine vernacular literature, much of it in verse, has long been seen as material for Quellenforschung into the historical or social conditions of its time. Following the precepts for literary history set down by such pioneers of Byzantine studies as Karl Krumbacher, the study of these texts has concentrated on authors rather than on the texts themselves as autonomous objects of historical study, whose form and content should guide our understanding of their original intention and reception by Byzantine audiences. The 'Poem from Prison' by Michael Glykas illustrates both the shortcomings of the focus on authors and the alternative potential for renewed engagement with Byzantine texts as objects of imagination and creativity.     

Symmetry Its Significance in Science and Art

Abstract

Five types of symmetry are discussed: isometry, homoeometry, antisymmetry, colour symmetry, and symmetry of the most general kind. Examples are drawn from many different fields of science and art, including music and poetry. The inclusion of dissymmetry, or perturbed symmetry, is especially important in providing access to some of the most profound aspects of nature and art. Finally, the question of why symmetry plays such an important part in so many fields is raised.     

The Medieval Trade of the Ports of the Wash

Abstract

An Increase in reported finds of metal ampullae enables a reappraisal of this distinctive class of pilgrim souvenir in England and Wales, Norfolk in particular: their form, decoration, distribution, context and the physical signs of their production and use. This sheds light on an aspect of late-medieval culture and custom; additionally, it encourages reflection on the kinds of data that metal-detectorists currently record and report. The thesis is that 15th- to mid16th-century ampullae were associated especially with rural communities and deposited in fields as votive objects, often after intentional 'destruction'.     

Aquatic spaces and women's places: a comparative reading of George Eliot's The Millon the Floss and Alexandros Papadiamantis's H ϕóνıσσα

Abstract

This article will attempt a comparative reading of George Eliot' The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Alexandros Papadiamantis's H ?óν?σσα (1903), aiming to illustrate how both texts are preoccupied with the problem of inventing spaces for their deviant and superfluous female characters. Although enmeshed in the dominant ideologies of their time, such as the evolutionary pattern of life as a sign of progress, and women's marginalisation and domestication within this model, these novels simultaneously reject these ideologies. Interestingly, both Eliot's and Papadiamantis's problematic heroines are associated with water and experience a cathartic death by water. As a deus ex machina, the overflowing waters of the river in the first case, and the rising waves of the sea in the latter, provide a sanctuary, an intermediate space, where the two exiled heroines escape from traditional definitions of women as homeless containers or empty receptacles. George Eliot's Maggie and Papadiamantis's Frangoyannou discover an alternative geography in water, as the Darwinian aquatic space, a site of contestation, is reappropriated and transformed into a nursing space. This return to an intrauterine bliss, however, apart from its revolutionary potential, signifies also a return to essentialism and suggests the impossibility of ascribing any space to women except for that of endless metaphoricity. In the open-endedness of these two texts, women are floating signifiers, both promoting and transcending female archetypes.     

Disobedient objects: material readings of enclosure protest in sixteenth-century England

ABSTRACT

Responding to calls for scholars to address ‘material worlds’ in our analyses of protests past, the paper examines the more-than-human historical geographies of enclosure and enclosure protest in sixteenth-century England. It argues that negotiating enclosure – in the sense of both promoting and resisting private property rights – was dependent on particular assemblages of people, animals and things and their convergence within specific spaces and temporalities. Particular attention is paid to mundane and everyday objects entangled in enclosure protest and the ways these assemblages might transform objects’ meanings, rendering them threatening or disobedient. Moreover, repurposing these things offered opportunities to re-make space, concretising or resisting particular claims to access or possession at the local level. It contributed too to the ongoing debate out of which new concepts of property eventually emerged, so that interrogating the materialities of enclosure protest offers vital space in which to rethink the makings of our modern world.     

'Selling the rain', resisting the sale: Resistant identities and the conflict over tourism in Goa

This paper discusses the development of Goa as a tourist site within India and examines the economic, cultural and environmental impacts of such tourism development upon Goan communities. In so doing, the paper argues that while Goa has become a dispensable space for the exigencies of contemporary tourist development it has also engendered various forms of resistance to this process. The paper utilizes Manuel Castells' notion of 'resistance identity' and David Harvey's notion of 'militant particularism' to interpret some of these resistances. In Goa, these have taken the form of 'active minorities' whose most immediate source of self-recognition and autonomous organization is their locality: resistance is practised, at least in part, as a defensive articulation of identity to protect collective resources.     

Gay Games: Performing 'community' out from the closet of the locker room

Matters of community, performativity, bodies, space, belonging, oppression, resistance and their relationship to culture are explored in this paper within the context of Sydney's 2002 Gay Games. I begin the paper considering how the everyday meaning and practices of sports produce spaces that are oppressive to many gay men. I then introduce the Gay Games as a site of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and intersex resistance, established to rupture stereotypes of heteronormativity in sports. Drawing upon my own research of Sydney's Gay Games I next explore how willingness to participate amongst self-identifying gay men depends upon how they understood their performance within the context of the event. I conclude the paper by arguing that willingness to participate in Sydney's Gay Games illustrates fundamental issues about the connectedness of bodies and space through the discursive body as space and the material body in space.     

Teaching Civil Liberties: The Missing Dimension

Abstract

What kind of existence do fictional beings have? What are non-existent objects? Neither logic nor cognitive science gives complete answers, but theology might help.     

'Missing dates': the 'Mϵρϵς' poems of C. P. Cavafy

Abstract

In this article, the five poems with the word 'M?ρ??' in their titles are discussed, and possible explanations for the dates in the titles suggested. The poems were written and revised between 1909 and 1932, but it is argued here that their initial composition dates are closer together than previously thought. The article examines revisions to the five poems; their positions, where applicable, in Cavafy's thematic collections, and the dates in their titles in relation to events in the poet's life and other writings from the same period. A history of composition and publication, including an account of all extant published revisions, is provided and the implications of this kind of bibliographical and biographical approach are discussed.     

Languages of Hegemony on the Eighteenth-Century Kazakh Steppe

ABSTRACT

Were the Kazakhs part of the Russian Empire after Khan Abulkhayir's 1731 oath? For many decades, Russian scholarship insisted that they were, although the work of Virginia Martin, Noda Jin and others has recently suggested other interpretations. My article shows that neither Kazakhs nor Russian officials thought of their relationship as a form of annexation. Instead, the Kazakhs used the arrival of the Qing Empire in Central Eurasia in the 1750s to triangulate between their two more powerful neighbors, maintaining a constant distance from Russian power. For Russian officials, this kind of relationship proved to be advantageous, ultimately because Kazakh mediation enabled Russian trade with Xinjiang. The final incorporation of the Kazakhs starting in 1822 had more to do with the withdrawal of Qing power from the steppe than the expansion of Russian authority.     

The Egyptian “book of the two ways”

Abstract

Science and cartography have had an intimate history which has not been simply the creation of ever more accurate scientific maps but one in which science, cartography and the state have co‐produced the knowledge space that provides the conditions for the possibility of modern science and cartography. The central cartographic process is the assemblage of local knowledges and, as such, is a particular form of the assembly processes fundamental to science. The first attempts by the state to create a space within which to assemble cartographic knowledge were at the Casa da Mina and the Casa de la Contratación, and hence they can be described as the first scientific institutions in Europe. Their failure to create a knowledge space can be attributed to the nature of the portolan charts. The triangulation of France and the linking of the Greenwich and Paris Observatories established the kind of knowledge space that now constitutes the dominant form within which modem science and cartography are produced. However, resistance to the hegemony of modern scientific knowledge space remains possible through finding alternative ways of assembling local knowledge.     

Within sacred boundaries: the limitations of saintly justice in the province of Narbonne around the year 1000

ABSTRACT

Around the year 1000, judges from the ecclesiastical province of Narbonne (southern France and Catalonia) crafted judicial strategies that reinforced the region's Visigothic Code with the power of saints – conceived as gatekeepers to God's heavenly courtroom – to validate the oaths of witnesses. This practice merged liturgically grounded ideas about supernatural forces and space with a law code that prioritised secular authority. To forestall opposition to rulings, officials sometimes held proceedings in churches. This paper examines two unusual cases illustrating the challenges such strategies faced, given the perception that saints were not omnipresent. These disputes raise questions about the nature of saints, the degree of agency humans attributed to them and the utility of sacred spaces for legal ritual. In the province, saints were powerful, but constrained by their inability to act beyond the walls of consecrated sanctuaries housing their relics. This relegated saints to supplementary roles in law.     

Derrida and fidelity to history

In the first part of this paper Hugh Rayment-Pickard challenges Mark Bevir's assumption that Derrida does not care about historical or other kinds of truth. A consideration of Derrida's early work on Husserl shows deconstruction to be a kind of skepsis or epoche launched in search of the truth. Yet deconstruction reveals the truth as ‘undecidable’, which means that Derrida's commitment to the truth must take the form of ‘faith’. The second part of the paper considers an example of definite intentional meaning given in Mark Bevir's Logic: Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux. On examination, Petrach's motivation can be seen to be radically divided between secular and religious concerns, a split vividly illustrated in his imaginary dialogue with St Augustine: The Secret. Finally, Rayment-Pickard looks briefly at Derrida's own dialogue with St Augustine, ‘Circumfession’, which also argues that human intentions are irreducibly complex and plural.     

Visual and aural intellectual histories: an introduction

ABSTRACT

If the subject matter of intellectual history is the study of past thoughts, the intellectual history of the visual arts and music may be characterised as the study of past thoughts as they were expressed visually and aurally. Yet this is not always how an intellectual history of art and music has been practiced. More attention is often paid to verbal texts about art or music, rather than to the visual or the aural per se. If we accept that ideas can have visual and aural, as much as verbal form, then the histories of art and music are significant repositories of thoughts of individuals and networks of individuals (creative artists, patrons, institutions) within a given culture and period. But the ways in which those thoughts are articulated as aural or visual “texts”, and the ways in which they can be accessed by those who seek to understand them, will be specific to each art form, and represent a distinctive kind of intellectual activity in each field.     

Derrida and fidelity to history

In the first part of this paper Hugh Rayment-Pickard challenges Mark Bevir's assumption that Derrida does not care about historical or other kinds of truth. A consideration of Derrida's early work on Husserl shows deconstruction to be a kind of skepsis or epoche launched in search of the truth. Yet deconstruction reveals the truth as ‘undecidable’, which means that Derrida's commitment to the truth must take the form of ‘faith’. The second part of the paper considers an example of definite intentional meaning given in Mark Bevir's Logic: Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux. On examination, Petrach's motivation can be seen to be radically divided between secular and religious concerns, a split vividly illustrated in his imaginary dialogue with St Augustine: The Secret. Finally, Rayment-Pickard looks briefly at Derrida's own dialogue with St Augustine, ‘Circumfession’, which also argues that human intentions are irreducibly complex and plural.     

'The mystical character of commodities': the consumer society in 18th-century England

Abstract

This article argues for an alternative response to the 'consumer society' hypothesis for 18th-century England, which is seen to focus on large-scale development and obscure the relations between people and objects. Returning to Marx's theories regarding 'consumer fetishism' and utilising Bruno Latour's work on hybrids and the human and the non-human, the paper considers the manner in which people used objects and objects used people. Utilizing the courtesy books and 'it-narratives' of the 18th century and the later works of Jane Austen, the paper argues that goods should not be seen only as commodities.     

‘NOBLESSE DE ROBE’ IN A CLASSLESS SOCIETY

This article deals with the effect of ownership and control of land on women's remarriages in early modern Western Norway. Marrying a tenant widow gave her new husband the right to tenure. On freeholder farms the eldest son, according to Norwegian odelsrett and åseterett, had the right to inherit the farm. When land-seeking youngsters obtained tenure by marrying tenant widows, these widows became highly attractive marriage partners, in contrast to widows of freeholder peasants where no secure position could be obtained for the new husband. Legal succession rights thus highly restricted the decisions of freeholder peasants' widows. Tenant widows had a wider range of choices closely linked to their control over land and land transfer. They were not mere passive marriage objects. In an open tenant land market widows could choose between running their farm by hired labour or with assistance from their children, they could remarry and thus acquire male labour in their household or they might benefit from giving up their tenure. Their decisions to a considerable degree influenced succession patterns on Norwegian tenant farms in the early modern period.     

Receiving Royals in Later Medieval York: Civic Ceremony and the Municipal Elite, 1478–1503

Abstract

This article examines the later medieval royal entry ceremony in York from the perspective of the social groups that designed and produced the spectacle. Deliberations of York's civic council comprise the main body of evidence for this study. It is argued that a mercantile oligarchy controlled the production of ceremony at every level. York's merchants dominated the design of civic receptions by excluding other secular and ecclesiastical groups native to the city from the decision-making process, and by resisting external interference by groups such as the nobility. The civic council made use of the topography of the city to reinforce the mercantile dimensions of the ceremony and to create a ceremonial space where they could communicate with the royal visitor. The merchant élite also adapted the form and content of the city's nuanced Corpus Christi celebrations to the royal entry. By these means they displayed and consolidated their position at the pinnacle of urban society at a time when their dominance over the city's economic, social and political structures was weakening.     

Red Aesthetics,Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949

Abstract

This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptualised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or constructs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s.