ἐπιλαβόμενοί τε αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ τὸν Ἄρειον Πάγον ἤγαγον, λέγοντες· Δυνάμεθα γνῶναι τίς ἡ
καινὴ αὕτη ἡ ὑπὸ σοῦ λαλουμένη διδαχή; ξενίζοντα γάρ τινα εἰσφέρεις εἰς τὰς ἀκοὰς ἡμῶν·
βουλόμεθα οὖν γνῶναι τίνα θέλει ταῦτα εἶναι.
2
Table of Contents
Xenizonta: An Explanation
5
Time and Deadlines – Rosemary Bennett
6
Time, Memory, History – Roy Peachey
8
The Art of Remembrance: Laurent Binet’s HHhH & Historical Fiction
– Charlotte Burrows
13
The History Manifesto: A Review – Lucia Keijer-Palau
17
The Study of History: More Harm than Good? – Tim Woffenden
19
‘You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’: A discussion of memory
research and its practical applications – Dr Cassie Stevenson
23
Selling Geological Time – Nicole Boyd
27
Mantle Plumes – Dr Marie Pears
33
Time: A Musician’s View – John McCutcheon
41
Shakespeare and Comic Timing – Emma Corrin
43
Time and Eternity in Mid-Thirteenth Century Thought: A Review
– Susannah Peppiatt
49
12 Stunden Deutschland – Nicole Boyd
55
The Final Word
59
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Contributors
Rosemary Bennett is Social Affairs Correspondent of The Times.
Nicole Boyd is in the Upper 6th at Woldingham School and will be studying Geology
at university next year.
Charlotte Burrows is in the Upper 6th at Woldingham School and will be studying
History at university next year.
Emma Corrin is on a Gap Year and will be studying Education with English and
Drama at St John’s College, Cambridge next year.
Lucia Keijer-Palau is the Upper 6th at Woldingham School and will be studying
History at university next year.
In addition to teaching percussion at Woldingham School, John McCutcheon has been
working as a professional musician for 30 years. He works with orchestras based
mainly in London but his work takes him all over the world.
Roy Peachey is Head of Higher Education and Careers at Woldingham School.
Dr Marie Pears left Woldingham School in 2003 after finishing 4 A Levels in
Mathematics, Physics, Geography and Religious Studies. She then attended
University College London where she attained a 1st in her Geophysics MSci. She has
just completed a PhD at University College London.
Susannah Peppiatt is in the Upper 6th at Woldingham School and will be studying
Theology and Religion at university next year.
Dr Cassie Stevenson is Head of Psychology at Woldingham School.
Tim Woffenden is chair of the Woldingham Education Committee, formerly head of
History and Director of Studies at Haileybury, currently senior History examiner for
the International Baccalaureate, and author of Three Dictators - a study of Hitler, Mao
and Castro.
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Xenizonta: an explanation
ξενίζοντα - n. pl. strange things
In Ancient Athens there was a place called the Areopagus, a council where
philosophers, thinkers and politicians could toss ideas around as they searched for
wisdom, practical or otherwise. No idea, however strange it appeared to be, was off
limits in the Areopagus, as we hear in the Acts of the Apostles, when some Epicurean
and Stoic philosophers asked St Paul, “what this new teaching is which you present?
For you bring new and strange things (xenizonta) to our ears.”
Schools are, or should be, like the Areopagus. Places where ideas can be
explored, challenged and developed. Places where strange things can shake us out of
our intellectual complacency, compelling us not just to think, but also to live,
differently.
This journal aims to be an Areopagus for our times, for our place. In creating
Xenizonta, we are providing our talented students with a forum in which they can
discuss their interests, whether they fit into the confines of the examination syllabus
or not. But it’s more than that. This journal, like the Areopagus, is a meeting place for
what is too often kept apart. Students, teachers, parents, governors, and alumnae
bring school, universities and the world of work into one location. Sometimes we will
concentrate more on the world of work and sometimes on what is going on in the field
of higher education, but in every edition of this biannual, online Areopagus, we will
always concentrate on the connections.
So why Xenizonta, a word from Ancient Greece? Because, with Faulkner, we
believe that the past is never dead, that it’s not even past. Because we believe that if
we open our minds to strange things, we will make some fascinating discoveries.
Because, as St Paul demonstrated when he brought xenizonta to the intellectual capital
of the ancient world, what is strange and foreign has the power to change us.
5
Time and Deadlines
Rosemary Bennett
At 8.30 pm on a Sunday evening in 2003, the news broke that Tony Blair had been
treated in hospital for an irregular heartbeat. It was 40 minutes before the first edition
of The Times went to press. As the duty political correspondent it fell to me to write,
at the kitchen table, the 800 word front-page story explaining a medical problem of
which I had no prior knowledge, the treatment Mr Blair had undergone, the political
significance of a leader with a health problem and something about the protocol when
a Prime Minister is ill. It is fair to say it was not a beautiful piece of writing. It glossed
over the medical details I didn’t have time to check or couldn’t understand. A few
historical precedents of prime ministers with poor health were missing. It certainly
didn’t win any prizes for style, but I met the deadline and sometimes that is the most
important part of the job of a newspaper reporter.
Other episodes of frenzied panic stick in my mind. Finding a middle-class
heroin addict to interview the day Hollywood actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died
from an overdose was a challenge. Writing a 1000-word colour piece from the 2010
election campaign on a rural railway platform before my phone ran out of power was
fraught. Anything that happens at night is problematic and America’s west coast is
the worst time zone to work in.
A journalist’s life is dictated by deadlines, these days more than ever. I am old
enough to remember when there was just one deadline a day. Since the arrival of the
internet we are surrounded by them. We are lucky to have time to think before
pressing the button on a tweet. Reporters regularly fire off a story for the online edition
of their newspaper half way through a press conference.
Deadlines are tighter and there are more of them. Smartphones mean there is
no excuse for not being able to file story at any time from any event. It feels like every
deadline is five minutes ago.
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So what have I learnt about dealing with them?
The first thing is to manage is your own expectations. Much as I would love to
spend weeks researching every story, it is not realistic. News stories are not postdoctoral theses. They are typically 500 words and I often write three a day. They
should tell readers something new, be lively, informative and to the point. To expect
every story to change the world is unrealistic.
The second is having good contacts. Stories are easier to get and write quickly
if you know who to go to and have their mobile number. Many hours can be wasted
trawling through cuttings or on the internet to see what else has been written about a
subject and who looks interesting to talk to. Having a bank of reliable contacts reduces
dramatically the time it takes to complete the task. An articulate expert will be able to
explain in seconds a complex change in Government policy or how a new drug
treatment works. Time spent chatting to contacts is never a waste.
Third -- prioritise. There are stories that are so important they deserve
undivided attention, painstaking research, hours of interviews and patience.
Newspapers are remembered for their scoops, their investigations and their
campaigns. Sometimes it is vital to focus on that one thing even if it means days pass
when there is nothing in the newspaper with my name on it, a source of deep anxiety.
It is important to hold your nerve for the big one.
Finally deadlines are your friend. They focus the mind. It is quite astonishing
what can be accomplished in an hour if an hour is all you have. Deadlines get the
work done. Inspiration and brilliance come and go. They are unreliable. Not like
deadlines. There are always deadlines.
7
Time, Memory, History
Roy Peachey
Deep inside a mountain in western Texas a remarkable clock is being built. A clock
which only tells the correct time if you ask it. A clock 200 feet tall. A clock whose
chimes are designed never to repeat themselves over 10 millennia.
This is the 10,000 Year Clock, designed by The Long Now Foundation. If you
want to see it, you will have to be determined: it is a day’s hike from anywhere anyone
is ever likely to visit. But that’s the point. This is a clock that is designed to last, that is
meant to remind us of the long-term, that is supposed to force us to think beyond the
immediate.
Or, if you prefer something closer to home, you might want to visit Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, where you can see a wonderful clock with no hands or
digital numbers, a clock which is topped by a Chronophage, a time-eater, an enormous
grasshopper which devours seconds, minutes, hours. This clock does the unexpected,
telling relative as well as what we are accustomed to think of as actual time.
Another option for the horologically curious can be found in a different Corpus
Christi College, this time in Oxford. The Corpus sundial is mounted by a pelican
feeding its young rather than by a grasshopper in the latter stages of evolution. Built
in 1581, it moves to a different metrical beat. In fact, it doesn’t beat at all. Sun, shadow
and mathematical symbols are what matter here.
We take it for granted that time is under our control, that we can measure it,
but even a cursory glance at the history of clockmaking, as we see in Nicole Boyd’s
prize-winning German poem, tells another story. Time is tricky. It is difficult to pin
down.
In a deeply resonant passage in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the narrator recalls a
visit to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, where Austerlitz gave a memorable
discourse on the nature of time. Time, he said, was “by far the most artificial of all our
8
inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less
arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees, or the
duration required for a piece of limestone to deteriorate”. (141-2) What Austerlitz, the
unnamed narrator and Isaac Newton believed was that, if time was a river like the
Thames, then it could be said to have not merely direction but limits too. Time, like a
river, requires banks to enable it to exist.
Austerlitz is a book haunted by time, memory and history. It is a book about
trauma, about one man’s attempts to make sense of the moment when, in the 1930s,
he was put on one of the kindertransport from Prague to England, leaving his parents
behind to be caught up in the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Compelled to start
entirely afresh, Austerlitz cut himself adrift from the past, lost his memory and
developed instead an obsession with the nature of time. His story, at once personal
and particular, takes on a much wider significance for the narrator of this multifaceted
book when he comes to see that Austerlitz’s experience is an expression of the shared
human condition: “The dead are outside time, the dying and the sick at home or in
hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune
is enough to cut us off from the past and the future.” (143)
Time. Memory. History. These are the themes of this first volume of Xenizonta,
notions that affect a remarkable range of disciplines. As Lee Smolin, an admittedly
controversial physicist, has written in Time Reborn, the deceptively simple question,
what is time? “is the single most important problem facing science as we probe more
deeply into the fundamentals of the universe. All of the mysteries physicists and
cosmologists face – from the Big Bang to the future of the universe, from the puzzles
of quantum physics to the unification of forces and particles – come down to the
nature of time.” (xi)
It is a question that seems inescapable. We have quoted Austerlitz but, time and
again, the nature of time is questioned in fiction, another recent example being Donna
Tartt’s The Goldfinch: "Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own
mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the
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house said something different and time didn't actually correspond to the standard
measure but instead meandered along its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of
his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glue version of the
world." (395) It is in this contra-historical reality (what the narrator later calls a
"crossfade between past and present") that Pip, whose life recalls that of Pip in Great
Expectations, finds healing. We could go on because history and memory are the
subjects of many recent novels, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and
Jérôme Ferrari’s Le Sermon Sur la Chute de Rome.
As Charlotte Burrows demonstrates in her review of another intriguing piece
of French writing, Laurence Binet’s genre-bending HHhH, and as Tim Woffenden
argues in his article on whether the study of history does more harm than good, the
very fact that time, memory and history are contested makes them ripe for
exploration, and not just by novelists and historians. John McCutcheon and Emma
Corrin show in their different ways that time and timing is crucial for musicians and
actors, while Dr Marie Pears and Nicole Boyd take us a step further, showing how
significant geological time is, not least for anyone who wants to understand volcanic
activity or anyone who wants to make a business out of it. Time, memory and history
are never merely theoretical, and if you are not convinced, take a look at the article by
Dr Cassie Stevenson about memory and memory loss.
So how do we respond to these big issues of time? One answer, that of the Long
Now Foundation, is to take the long view but, as Jo Guldi and David Armitage point
out in The History Manifesto, reviewed in this journal by Lucia Keijer-Palau, “Even
those who have assigned themselves the task of inspecting the future typically peer
only shortsightedly into the past. Stewart Brand’s Clock of the Long Now points
10,000 years ahead but looks barely a century backwards.” The literary critic, Wai
Chee Dimock, attempts to remedy that mistake in her book, Through Other Continents:
American Literature Across Deep Time, by asking “[w]hat would happen if we go beyond
1776 and 1620, if we trace threads of relation to the world that antedate these allegedly
founding moments? What would American literature look like then, restored to a
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longue durée, a scale of enlargement along the temporal axis that also enlarges its
spatial compass”? It would look very interesting, but why stick with American
literature, we might ask? American novelists such as E. L. Doctorow have already
made use of the longue durée (his City of God: A Novel starts with the Big Bang) but they
are not the only ones: the Israeli author Dror Burstein, for example, takes in both the
origin and the end of the universe in his Netanya.
Of course, there is nothing new in this approach. An interest in time and
memory stretches back a very long way in literature, as in other areas of intellectual
endeavour, extending not just into the past but into eternity as well. As Eric Auerbach
pointed out in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, “Dante …
took over earthly historicity into his beyond; his dead are cut off from the earthly
present and its vicissitudes, but memory and the most intense interest in it stirs them
so profoundly that the atmosphere of the beyond is charged with it.” (193) Dante was
not writing in a philosophical vacuum, of course, but was rather drawing upon a rich
vein of 13th Century philosophical and religious thought about the nature of time, as
Susannah Peppiatt shows in her review of Rory Fox’s Time and Eternity in MidThirteenth Century Thought.
We need to do more than simply go back in time. We need to know what to do
with history once we have it. Maybe one weakness of Lee Smolin’s otherwise
fascinating book is that he doesn’t take past thinkers seriously enough, assuming too
often that philosophical and religious reflections on the nature of time are much less
nuanced than is actually the case. This is certainly not the case with the French
historian François Hartog, who has argued powerfully in Régimes d'historicité:
Présentisme et expériences du temps (recently translated into English) and in Croire en
l’histoire, that our contemporary age is dominated by what he calls presentism. If every
society is marked by a particular way of expressing and organising experiences of time
(what he calls a “regime of historicity”), then ours is overwhelmed by an omnipresent
presentism, which can be perceived either as emancipation or as enclosure, depending
on one’s position in society. Shaped by consumerism, technological change, the media
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and other socio-political and intellectual developments, our current regime of
historicity starts and too often ends with the present. For Hartog, the contemporary
obsession with memory and with heritage is simply a symptom of its obsession with
the present. When history is judged almost entirely from the perspective of the
present, it not only declines into entertainment but it also loses the power to challenge.
When the present is valorised, memory rather than history becomes all-powerful, and
history descends into heritage. When presentism reigns, we lose both the past and the
future. If we don’t take time, memory and history seriously, we will be condemned to
live in an eternal present. Is this likely? Only time will tell.
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The Art of Remembrance: Laurent Binet’s HHhH & Historical Fiction
Charlotte Burrows
It’s 27th May 1942. Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, two Czech parachutists are undercover
in Nazi-occupied Prague, about to try and take the life of Reinhard Heydrich, the
notorious mastermind behind the Holocaust, as part of Operation Anthropoid. Binet’s
novel tells the story of this thrilling assassination attempt, from the preparations in
Britain to the horrific aftermath. Yet this ‘story’, is so much more than a story.
Let’s start with the name. HHhH is an acronym for Himmler’s Hirn heisst
Heydrich. In English, ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich’. The anti-conformist nature
of this book, from its title to its layout and its style, demonstrates how we must not
read this book as if any other – it demands to be treated differently. Chapter sizes
range from a sentence to pages and page numbers are absent throughout. Interwoven
throughout the gripping narrative are Binet’s own struggles faced while researching
about the parachutists. Although the comic updates on his relationship status and
anecdotal stories add a sense of playful lightness to the novel, he raises some insightful
issues concerning the difficulties faced whilst doing historical research. In an attempt
to make this historical novel entirely historically accurate, Binet is forever scolding
himself for perceived flights of fancy. He soon realises that to achieve perfect accuracy
whilst writing a piece of fiction is no easy task, if it is possible at all. Thus he calls his
work an ‘infranovel’, one that is consistently examining its own particular claim to
truth.
One topic that Binet doesn’t explicitly discuss, yet which is an integral part of
the novel, is remembrance. From the outset Binet explains that he is writing this book
because he finds the story of the assassination attempt fascinating, and has done ever
since his father first told it to him as a young boy. Later on it becomes apparent that
he is also writing in order to remember the parachutists, all who helped them during
the operation and all who perished as a result, including the citizens of Lidice. He also
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wishes to raise awareness of this fascinating story, which played a large role in the
Czechoslovakian resistance movements during the war. In this way Binet encourages
the reader to research around the subject, emphasising that this story is never-ending
and deserves respect.
However, the importance and the crucial desire in this novel for the
remembrance of the parachutists and the assassination really cannot be tackled
without an understanding of what remembrance is. Yet that is a more complex
question than it appears to be. What is remembrance? Is all history remembrance? Is
simply learning about others remembrance considering you show them recognition?
Or is it the physical act of commemoration that constitutes remembrance? Perhaps it
is even more personal, such as a memory or a recollection? Need something relate to
your life to be properly remembered? The list goes on.
In HHhH, the main focus of remembrance is about paying tribute, and doing so
accurately. Binet constantly criticises other works, so much so that his critique on The
Kindly Ones by Jonathon Littell, a prize-winning novel, had to be removed before
publication. He is depressed when told that his friend thought a chapter on Heydrich
giving orders to his colleagues included dialogue that was made up, not from official
archive resources. He becomes frustrated when he cannot find out whether
Heydrich’s Mercedes was black or green, and even spends more than one chapter
pondering over this conundrum. More generally however, Binet is ashamed that he
can not include every individual involved in the assassination attempt in his book,
that he cannot know every role however small played by individuals, and that he
cannot pay tribute to them. He shows his respects by attempting to forge strong
relationships with the parachutists, through re-meeting the people they met and reliving the feelings they felt thanks to documents, interviews and diaries. He even
spends time sitting with them in the crypt of the church in Prague before they
committed suicide, reliving their last moments with them before sentimentally
writing that:
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‘Kubis is dead. I wish I didn’t have to write that. I would have liked to get to know him
better. If only I could have saved him.’
The sense of powerlessness when it comes to remembrance implied by this
statement adequately questions the purpose of remembrance., By writing statements
such as this in HHhH, Binet strongly engages the reader in the emotions of the
characters in the novel. Throughout the story we learn so much about the characters,
from the personality of Heydrich’s domineering wife to the way that Kubis likes his
tea, that the reader comes to truly appreciate the difficulties faced in this suicidal
mission, and thus the extreme bravery exemplified by the two parachutists. Touching
on the ideas on Collingwood, the importance of understanding the thoughts of
historical characters and immersing yourself into a time period, Binet is remembering
in order to respect.
Remembrance is part of our everyday lives, subliminally present everywhere
we go, from museums, school, galleries, to everything we watch: documentaries,
television shows, films, adverts. In each of these instances our remembrance is being
influenced, controlled. Although many, like Binet, write history because it interests
them and they wish to pay tribute to others who have greatly influenced the world or
whom they deem worthy of respect, it must be remembered that remembrance is often
institutionalized and out of our control. We remember what we do for a specific
purpose. For example, we are encouraged to honour those who fell fighting for our
country so that if circumstances arise we, as national citizens, would hopefully act in
the same way, with the same priorities. We honour them so that soldiers continue to
fight for the nation today. We honour them so as to prevent atrocities happening
again. We honour them so as to not feel guilty. We honour them for many different
and controversial reasons.
Remembrance raises too many intricate questions to be accepted. It must be
embraced and it must be challenged. History creates the opportunity for us to break
out of the conventional cycle of remembrance, to explore the evidence for ourselves,
forge our own arguments, make our own conclusions. Binet clearly demonstrates that
15
this enquiry, as is the case with many others, has no boundaries, and its research no
end. He thus hands the responsibility over to the reader to continue his pursuit of true
remembrance.
This story is held strongly and proudly in Czech popular memory, where the
assassination of Heydrich is viewed as one of the most significant acts of the
Czechoslovak anti-Nazi resistance movement. Just last year, Czech President Milos
Zeman and representatives of the ministries and the military commemorated the
anniversary of seven Czechoslovak paratroopers of Operation Anthropoid in a
ceremony outside the church where the parachutists spent their last moments.
However, in contrast, this story does not feature as an integral part of British students’
studies on World War II. The fact that, by sheltering the Czech government in exile
and training the parachutists, Britain played an important role in the operation is little
known here. Even many of the inhabitants of the small British village that was
responsible for sheltering the MI6 operatives who contacted the parachutists during
the operation are ignorant of the event. The name of this small village? Woldingham
of course.
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The History Manifesto: A Review
Lucia Keijer-Palau
According to Jo Guldi and David Armitage the spectre that is “haunting our time” is
not, as it was when Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, the
spectre of communism but ‘the spectre of the short term’. The basic premise of The
History Manifesto, Cambridge University Press’ first open access project, is that we ‘live
in a moment of accelerated crisis that is characterised by the shortage of long-term
thinking.’ This shortage is traced back to roughly the 1970s with the increased
specialisation of historians to certain fields - gender, race, class - which ‘reflected a call
of conscience, a determination to make the institutions of history align with a more
critical politics’. Specialisation came at the cost of a longer-term vision.
They contend, however, that the longue durée is experiencing something of a
revival, one which is linked to global issues such as inequality and global warming.
We are, further, told that in this “age of global warming and coming wars over land
and water, histories of class struggles over resources and their distribution, within
societies and among them, are needed now more than ever.” The notion is vague, as
are other parts of the Manifesto (how long, exactly, is their proposed longue durée?)
but it does seem fair. Their final chapter and discussion on the possibilities for
historians created by the rise of technology and ‘big data’ are genuinely exciting: the
opportunities arising from the use of ‘tools that synthesise enormous amounts of data’
seem near endless.
With the General Election having recently taken place, the most obvious largescale synthesising of data is that of opinion polls, notably on the New Statesman’s
May2015 website. The last five years have been virtually unique in British
constitutional history in that the date of the next election was known from the get-go,
making Guldi and Armitage’s suggestion that we are living ‘in the age of the
permanent campaign’ all the more pertinent. The necessarily forward-looking
17
language of political campaigning - from New Labour’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’
soundtrack in 1997 to the Conservative’s 2015 Manifesto with its promise of ‘A
Brighter, More Secure Future’ - obscures the long term trends that have risen in the
public consciousness this Spring. Guldi and Armitage’s call to a return to the long
term and the need for historians to take an active role in public debates could not be
more timely: to understand the surge in support for Scottish Nationalism we need to
look not just to the Scottish backlash to New Labour or the devolution debates of the
1970s but to the nature of the Union of 1707 and what bound it together afterwards;
if, as Linda Colley argues in Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, Empire and enemies
were central to constructions of Britishness, is there a distinctly postcolonial aspect to
growing cries for Scottish Independence?
For all its imperfections The History Manifesto is both timely and necessary.
Historians ought to speak truth to power and have much to contribute to the all to
often short-termism of public debate and policy making. That the project was
Cambridge University Press’s first open access one is a bold and interesting move in
itself and it will hopefully set an example for many other works and projects as too
should websites such as History and Policy (www.historyandpolicy.org) which
“publishes high quality historical research freely accessible online and creates
opportunities for historians, policy makers and journalists to connect.” When Fernand
Braudel discussed the longue durée in his 1958 ‘Historie et Sciences sociales’ he
concluded that his essay was ‘a call for discussion’. The History Manifesto is a sign of a
welcome resurgence of such a discussion.
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The Study of History: more harm than good?
Tim Woffenden
Bitter memories of a 14th century battle in Kosovo inflame Serbian nationalism and
ignited the Balkan Wars; commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne by Orangemen in
Northern Ireland annually infuriates the Catholic minority; Russian bitterness at the
loss of empire in 1991 fuels Vladimir Putin’s dangerous and aggressive nationalism;
the Turks find it almost impossible to forgive the Greek seizure of precious territory
in the aftermath of the First World War, and enmity continues. History can be a prison.
The world is littered with conflicts rooted in the past: would not collective amnesia
prove at least a partial solution?
History is arguably the most political of subjects. Its distortion at the hands of
unscrupulous regimes has stoked up militarism and belligerence and fooled
unsuspecting populations into accepting oppression and prejudice. Think of Nazi
teaching of anti-Semitism, the betrayal of Germany by the November criminals and
the necessity to exact revenge for the First World War. Open almost any page of the
Stalinist History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (required reading) to find
the gross distortion and lies with which the Russian population were to be deceived.
History in the wrong hands can be truly dangerous. On a more benign level, even
British schoolchildren were once treated to an ultra-patriotic and highly selective
version of the past, namely the Whiggish approach, satirised mercilessly by Sellars
and Yeatman in 1066 and all that, which glamourised those events which had led to a
splendid democratic imperial present. The horrors of slavery and periods of national
failure, such as the fifteenth century, were omitted in favour of landmarks such as
Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution and victories at Quebec, Plassey and
Trafalgar. Similarly, students in the United States have not, until recently, been made
aware of the deception of native Americans and the crushing of their way of life. While
we have studied endlessly the Holocaust at the hands of the Germans, we are far less
19
aware that Hitler’s evil work was completed after the war, when surviving Jews were
prevented from returning to their homes in eastern Europe by the jealous, the greedy
and the anti-Semitic.
And can we learn lessons from history? Not as much we like to think. If we are
not careful we plan and decide on the basis of a past which can be the enemy of
original thought. It has become axiomatic that armies fight wars with strategies based
on previous campaigns, and are then wrong-footed. Policies which worked in the past
may not work in the future because circumstances change and each historic event is
unique, as those who have tried to formulate laws of history have found to their cost.
Leaders who have the most impact often break with the past, and take their inspiration
not from precedent, but from clear-sighted recognition of what is necessary – take Mrs
Thatcher’s smashing of the post-war corporatist consensus, for example. Some of the
countries which have achieved the most spectacular economic prosperity since the
Second World War have had their history shattered, and have had to reinvent
themselves – think of Japan, South Korea and West Germany. Forward thinking, not
basking in past glories, brings success.
In any case, what exactly is history? Can we ever know the truth? How can we
base decisions based on the past when the judgements about the past can only ever be
provisional? Reinterpretation of known evidence or the discovery of something new,
leading to endless ‘revisionism’ is the stock-in-trade of the historian, but is entirely
unhelpful to planners and policy-makers. Historians have debated, for example, the
wisdom of appeasement, the true nature of the regime in Mao’s China and the extent
of the so-called ‘Blitz spirit;’ they just cannot agree on responsibility for the emergence
of the Cold War. In our own country, rules about the disclosure of high level
discussions mean that it can be over 30, or even 50, years before we can come close to
a true understanding of controversial events. For example, it was only in 1986 that we
learned of the true extent of our duplicitous diplomacy at the time of the Suez crisis.
Entering the mind of the person sitting next to us in a classroom or boardroom is
difficult enough, let alone trying to comprehend the motives of people we know far
20
less intimately, and who may no longer be with us. The historian has an impossible
task.
I am not arguing that the study of history can do no good. Of course, many take
inspiration from the great figures of the past, whether they be Mother Theresa,
Mandela, or Churchill. Neither am I arguing that history should not be studied. It is
self-evident that the present cannot be understood without a knowledge of the past,
and history creates our identity. For example, the distinctiveness of American culture,
with its aversion to taxation and its championing of the entrepreneurial spirit is rooted
in the origins of a state which resisted unfair fiscal practices and believed in Manifest
Destiny. If students are not taught historical method then they are, and will be in
adult life, easy prey for the unscrupulous propagandist. Moreover, mature and
confident countries should make a conscious effort to come to terms with their past.
The way current German leaders have confronted the legacy of Nazism is admirable:
other nations complicit in Nazi crimes should learn from them. The self-critical
approach of historians such as Max Hastings, who has shown that, while populated
by heroes, the British effort in the Second World War was often shambolic and poorlyled, is typical of an admirable characteristic of post-war British scholarship. And there
are lessons from the past, of course. Politicians more aware of the history of the 1930s
would surely have been less keen to deregulate the banks in the years leading up to
2008. Those who insisted on punishing Germany at Versailles in 1919 would have
done well to remember the wisdom of Bismarck when treating the Austrians so
sensitively after defeating them in 1866.
What I am arguing is that when ‘History’ is claimed as justification for present
day arguments and policies, we should keep our critical faculties very much alive.
‘History’ should be treated with the same caution as we would a politician citing
statistics during an election campaign. Be aware of history as distorted polemic, and
try to see the broader picture. When celebrating VE Day, remember that the European
War was won by the Americans, and even more, the Russians. Historians engaged by
the press to bolster spurious arguments may have their own political agenda: their
21
views should not be put on a pedestal. Sadly, I believe that, for the reasons I have
outlined, history is very often bad for us. However, its study is inescapable; as an
academic discipline it provides a magnificent vehicle for the honing of the mind, and
a balanced and judicious approach to the past can truly enrich the life of a nation and
its citizens. Everyone should study it, for a nation without history is truly
impoverished.
22
‘You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’: A discussion of
memory research and its practical applications
Dr Cassie Stevenson
Postulations regarding how the mind works have been proposed since the days of
Aristotle and remain an area of keen debate across the fields of Philosophy to
Medicine to Molecular Biology. The mechanisms underlying one of the most
fascinating cognitive processes, memory, remains to be elucidated. Memory
represents the ability to store, retain and retrieve information; the critical role it plays
in our lives, in many cases defining who we are, is highlighted, like many things, by
its absence. In the technological era we live in, it is commonly assumed that computers
have far superior memories than humans possess and people feel that if they could
take a pill to enhance their own memory their intelligence and chance of success in life
would dramatically improve, and indeed there is much research into this area of
cognitive enhancement. However, our memory is so much more than just a slightly
faulty record of current events and information around us. When one witnesses the
horrific impact that a loss of memory can have on one’s life, through physical trauma,
psychological trauma or diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease we realise that in
essence the very nature of who we are is based upon our memories. One specific
aspect of memory, episodic memory, is particularly sensitive to the effects of aging,
disease and brain trauma and therefore research in this area is imperative in order to
elucidate the neural networks underlying this process to enable the development of
potential treatments for such devastating disorders.
Episodic memory is one type of long-term memory (see diagram below),
defined as memory for unique, personally experienced events which inherently
involves phenomenological aspects such as a subjective awareness of time and an
autonoetic awareness to be incorporated into the recollection of the memory. In
essence our autobiographical memory is experienced as a sort of film that we can see
23
in our mind’s eye, which replays earlier events. This memory system is also essential
to enable us to imagine and plan future events and give us our sense of identity.
Without this process we would not be able to dream, appreciate the passing of time
or know anything about ourselves that a mirror reflection could not tell us.
The appalling consequences of the loss of episodic memory is often the central
feature of many a psychological thriller (such as ‘Before I go to Sleep, or ‘Memento’)
and anyone who has experienced a loved one suffering from Alzheimer’s disease
appreciates how progressive damage to the hippocampal formation (see below) can
gradually erase an entire lifetime of memories, with devastating effects. However, a
concerning prospect which affects us all is that our memories are unnervingly
inaccurate and can be relatively easily modified by even the most subtle pieces of
information, an idea known and exploited by magicians, lawyers and advertisers
alike! However, if we did not unquestionably believe our most personal memories
then we would rapidly descend into paranoia and mental breakdown.
After studying Neuroscience at degree level, I was
fortunate enough to be able to pursue a PhD exploring
episodic memory and the region of the brain thought to be
central to this process, the hippocampus. The research
focus was on elucidating the neural networks supporting
episodic memory with the focus on developing potential therapies for Alzheimer’s
24
treatment but along the way my colleagues and I discovered some intriguing and, for
numerous reasons, quite terrifying features of our memory.
At a very basic level, memory is thought to be the strengthening and weakening
of communication between neurons (brain cells) through a process called long-term
potentiation and long-term depression, with the pattern of activation of cellular
networks thought to depict a memory. This process involves protein synthesis
(making new proteins) to enable a memory to be retained long term and thus, through
artificial intervention, we can manipulate memories by upgrading memories, which
should have been forgotten, into long term memories, whilst weakening other
memories which should have been stored long term but are forgotten. More recently,
one of my colleagues, Roger Redondo, working in Tonegawa’s lab, published some
ground breaking research whilst working at MIT to show that we can now implant
false memories and artificially modify fear memories into neutral memories and
neutral memories into fearful ones. There are some great applications of this, e.g.
treating patients with post-traumatic stress syndrome, phobias, etc., but there are also
huge ethical questions which arise and evidently research in the wrong hands could
have some very grave consequences indeed.
Another aspect of my research focussed on a type of neuron called ‘place cells’,
which are predominantly located within the hippocampus, and their role in episodic
memory. These remarkable neurons selectively fire (are activated) in different regions
of the environment. Thus, by measuring the activities of such neurons in real time you
can estimate a person’s position in space and more interestingly when the individual
thinks about being in a certain position in space the same cells are activated,
suggesting that they can also represent space in the mind’s eye. This research has far
reaching applications from those in Sports Science to those in Sleep Research. For
example, there is evidence which demonstrates that the same networks of place cells
are replayed in the same specific order during REM sleep as that displayed during a
practical task in the day, suggesting that during sleep we are rehearsing and practising
25
skills learned in the day, providing support for the idea of spaced learning and
daytime naps!
Overall my research further elucidated the critical role the hippocampal
formation plays in spatial and episodic memory and provides evidence for a more
general role for the hippocampus in imagining both past and future events, in order
to successfully navigate, learn and enable past experience to influence our intended
future plans and decisions. Since the end of my PhD, research in this field has rapidly
advanced and led to many new exciting discoveries and techniques, yet we are still
far from solving the number one cause of death in women in the UK, dementia, with
over 1.5 million people awaiting the benefits of dementia treatments.
26
Selling Geological Time
Nicole Boyd
My mineral and gemstone collection began aged 7, when I was gifted a piece of
Amethyst from my grandfather. Now with a collection of 586 worldwide specimens,
people often ask what I see in a rock. To put it simply, I find it absolutely fascinating
that each individual rock is just that, completely unique and individual. For me, each
rock is just as special as the next, whether it's a Diamond or Leopard Skin Jasper. Since
setting up my jewellery business, I have learnt an awful lot more about rocks, the
geological time scale and the jewellery industry. I hope that I can part with some of
this information, and provide some insight into the rocks themselves.
Just to provide some background, there are three main types of rock, which are
classified by their main formation. Igneous rocks form by cooling, hardening and
crystallising of molten lava. Metamorphic rocks form by alteration of pre-existing rock
through heat and/or pressure. Sedimentary rocks form by the compaction and
cementation of sediments, the precipitation of dissolved chemicals in water or the
accumulated organic matter being compressed. The geological time scale is quite
difficult to fully comprehend. I think that Keith Meldahl summed it up quite nicely
saying - "Earth Processes that seem trivially slow in human time can accomplish
stunning work in geologic time". While prediction methods for hazards are
improving, rock movements still do surprise us. Each rock will record events of the
past, which we are then able to study to help predict what the Earth was like during
a given time period. Some of these events are recorded in the rocks, but no longer
occur, such as huge meteorite impacts, while others occur so slowly that it becomes
difficult for us to measure them, such as sea-floor spreading - which can take hundreds
of years for a few metres of movement. However, there are some events which occur
very quickly with catastrophic consequences, such as volcanic eruptions, landslides
and earthquakes.
27
Our Earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old. The oldest rocks that we have
discovered are ~4.4 billion years old (plus or minus 1% as no dating is completely
accurate). This is because our Earth is dynamic as it is made up of tectonic plates,
which move on the semi-molten mantle. While these plates are responsible for the
creation and destruction of many of Earth's features, such as mountain ranges and
earthquakes, this movement also destroys the crust, and recycles it, therefore meaning
that rocks themselves are continually recycled. Therefore the oldest rocks will be
found on the continental crust, as the oceanic crust is always subducted first. The
oldest rocks found were Zircon grains in Jack Hills, Australia, which are ~4.4 billion
years old. These zircons originated from recycled rock, which had interactions with
cold water due to the high isotopic ratios of oxygen and the presence of quartz. The
significance of these zircons is immense. As they were formed on continental crust,
they suggest that continental crust, tectonic plates' movement and processes e.g.
subduction, were occurring from early in the Earth's history. This insight is vital when
decoding the Earth's geologic past.
Radiometric dating is the most commonly used system of ageing rocks. It is
based on the principle of radioactive decay - in which naturally occurring radioactive
materials break down at known rates. If the rate is known, then an estimation of the
length of time over which decay has been occurring can be calculated. Radioactive
decay occurs by the release of particles and energy producing sub-atomic particles
and energy. Radiometric dating has been used to refine the current geological time
scale. As with all subjects, geology has its own terms, designed to confuse us nonheavy-rock-lovers. "Mya" is a common abbreviation meaning "million years ago",
though I would understand if you confused it with Mya - the 35-year-old American
R&B singer. The first eon on Earth is the Pre-Archean (3,800-4,600 Mya), for which
there is no evidence for life and very few rocks. The next was the Archean (2,500-3,800
Mya), which means "ancient". During this eon we see the first single-celled organisms,
and also that they began to evolve. One of the most important of these species is
Cyanobacteria, which scientists believe turned the atmosphere to the oxygen-rich
28
atmosphere, which enabled further species growth. Cyanobacteria were the first
organisms able to photosynthesise and are autotrophic organisms, meaning they can
live on land and in water. They are heavily found in the Proterozoic Limestone and
are still around today. The third eon is the Proterozoic (545-2,500 Mya), in which
simple organisms lived. Evidence of bacteria and algae have been found. The
Phanerozoic eon (Recent - 545 Mya) directly followed the Proterozoic. The
Phanerozoic eon is separated into three eras, the Paleozoic (248-545 Mya), the
Mesozoic, (65-248 Mya) and the Cenozoic (Recent-65 Mya). Each of these can be
further separated, but here is an overview. The Paleozoic, meaning "ancient life"
contains fossil records of many animals e.g. trilobites. Some are still found today,
while others are now extinct. The Mesozoic is perhaps the most famous, due to the
dinosaurs. Other life forms from this era include conifers and cycads. The Cenozoic,
meaning "recent life" contains mammals, birds and flowering plants, as well as some
finned fishes. Life became more abundant and wide-spread during this time.
The Paleozoic is separated into Cambrian (490-545 Mya), Odrovician (443490 Mya), Silurian, (417-443 Mya) Devonian (354-417 Mya), Carboniferous (290-354
Mya) and Permian (248-290 Mya). The Cambrian period encompasses the period of
abundant life on Earth, as most of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil
record. The Ordovician Period contains diverse marine in vertebrates. The Silurian
encompasses the first appearance of Coral reefs, as well as early spiders and
centipedes. The Devonian period saw the first trees and forests appearing as well as
new kinds of fish flourishing in the oceans. The Carboniferous period encompasses
the first appearance of tree ferns and insects e.g. the dragonfly. It is also important for
coal, which formed during this time. The Permian period contained the highest
amount of diversity; however the end of the period is marked by the Earth's largest
mass extinction in which 99% of all species were wiped out.
The Mesoszoic is separated into the Triassic (206-248 Mya), Jurassic (144-206
Mya) and Cretaceous (65-144 Mya). The Triassic saw the appearance of ammonites
and mosses, as well as any survivors from the Permian extinction. The Jurassic is when
29
dinosaurs roamed the earth, and the oceans were full of fish, squids and
ammonites. However, during this period only plant-eating dinosaurs were
around. The Cretaceous period that followed is less known when compared to the
Jurassic, though it is more significant. During the Cretaceous the first "modern"
mammal and bird groups began and the dinosaurs were a massive amount of the
Earth's population. However, at the end of this period, there was another mass
extinction, which killed all the dinosaurs and many ammonites, as well as other
species.
The Cenozoic Era is separated into the Tertiary (2-65 Mya) and the Quaternary
(Recent - 2 Mya). The Tertiary followed the large Cretaceous extinction, however
many species that survived are still found today. There is evidence of early
perissodactyla species e.g. the zebra or the horse. The Quaternary period saw the early
humans and other mammals e.g. the grey wolf, as well as glacial zones, which covered
much of the world's temperate zones.
Within each period, different gemstones and minerals have formed and been
altered. Also, several gemstones form within several periods and in several locations,
while others form only in specific periods in certain locations, e.g. Tanzanite. The
geology of an area is the most vital factor in decisions of possible mining locations, as
many gemstones are deep in the Earth's crust, such as the Peridot, which forms
anywhere from 20-55 miles into the crust. Gemstones have been valued by humans
since time began, with jewellery as one of the oldest forms of decorative art. The oldest
pieces of jewellery found are about 7,000 years old. The first people to be interested in
the ages of the gems were the miners in the early 1500s, as they tried to use the age to
help them find new deposits of these highly prized gemstones. They thought that all
gems of the same age would lie on the same rock plane. They weren't completely
wrong, it’s just that bedding planes don't lie completely horizontal, as they fold or
fracture in times of high pressure. An example of this is Fold Mountains, which form
when two tectonic plates collide, causing the rocks to crumple up, thus folding the
layers up. Excellent examples can be seen globally, with The Alps as our nearest
30
range. Since the 1910s the range of gems on offer has increased rapidly, with new
varieties of gemstones being discovered as you read this. However, while most names
of gemstones do reflect the gem honestly, some have been given names that are
misleading to non-industry professionals. This mostly occurs with highly prized
gems, in which good qualities and amounts are hard to find, and expensive when they
are found. A prime example is Emerald Quartz. While it is a member of the quartz
family, Mariposite (as it is properly known) shares no chemical resemblance to its
Corundum family so-called counterpart, Emerald. While many customers think they
are buying "emerald quartz" and getting a great deal, they are in fact falling into one
of the new tricks within the genuine gemstone industry. Since setting up my jewellery
business, this is just one of the tricks I have learnt how to avoid.
After my GCSEs in June 2013, I set-up my jewellery business in my bedroom. I
started by investing all my savings and a £500 loan from the bank of Mum and Dad. I
only sell genuine gemstones in genuine metal, and enjoy the flexibility that running
my own company provides, considering I am still at school working hard to complete
my A-Levels. I have known my suppliers for many years, and enjoy the knowledge
that they share, not only about the gems, but also the industry. I now have over 100
customers in 5 countries worldwide, and am still based in my bedroom. The jewellery
industry itself is incredibly varied in terms of international brands down to the local
family-run jeweller. I'm a big fan of both, don't get me wrong, but this huge range
does leave many customers brutally confused. One of the things I am asked most
frequently about are the four Cs- Cut, Clarity, Carat Weight and Colour. Cut is one of
the Cs, and is vitally important to the gemstone. If the gemstone is cut incorrectly or
the wrong cut is chosen, the specimen's value can decrease drastically. Although
cutting techniques have existed for hundreds of years, the methods are constantly
being updated in order to cut the least amount of the rock and get the best final
product. While the oldest cuts are still the most widely used and popular, there are a
few new ones which emerge every few years. While the cut is important, it is heavily
dependent on the clarity and carat weight of the gem, as the larger the specimen, the
31
easier it is to cut but the more is at stake, as one mistake can devalue a gem heavily. The
clarity of a gem is determined the inclusions. Inclusions are minuscule natural features
within gems that generally add character and individuality. They record the
relationship between the Earth and the gem. By judging the amount and the location
of these inclusions within the gem, the grade of clarity can be awarded. The higher the
clarity, the higher the value of the gem. Mostly, inclusions don't impact the sparkle of
the gem, and in certain gems lead to a higher value, e.g. Star Sapphire and Rubies. Not
all gemstones are found with inclusions such as Aquamarine, while others are
generally always full of inclusions, such as Emerald. Carat weight is the weight of the
gemstone, which originates from the use of carob seeds to weigh gems in the Middle
East and Asia. In 1907, the weight was standardised to one fifth of a gram. Generally,
as the carat weight increases, the price per carat also increases. However the price
doesn't increase in line with the weight of the gem, as larger weights are always much
more rare than small weights. Colour is the most important factor for jewellers. Bright,
rich and intense colours generally demand higher values, as they absorb more
light. However, some gems are valued for their paleness, such as Morganite. It does
also depend on personal preference, as everyone looks for slightly different colours in
their jewellery. At the end of the day, each gem will have slightly different features,
which adds to their uniqueness. I would always recommend looking at a gem in as
many possible lights before buying it, to ensure it is perfect for you.
In conclusion, the gemstones that we enjoy are heavily linked to the geological
time scale. The more we learn about the Earth beneath us, the more we are able to
appreciate Mother Nature’s treasures. Please feel free to contact me regarding any
information in this article or if you are interested in my jewellery. You can contact me
at [email protected]
32
Mantle Plumes
Dr Marie Pears, from her PhD Thesis “Stall and Collapse in Mantle Plumes: An
experimental and numerical fluid dynamics perspective.”
Space missions have enabled information to be gathered on the planets of the solar
system, through which it was discovered that Earth is the only planet where plate
tectonics currently exist. Despite this knowledge of plate tectonics, understanding
Earth’s inner workings remains difficult, due to the extremes of pressure and
temperatures that exist in the planet’s interior. Lava expelled from Earth via volcanoes
reveals information about the interior; the chemical composition and structure of the
mantle. Nonetheless, the fluid dynamics of Earth are challenging to understand and
numerous unknowns remain that are critical to our understanding of Earth’s mantle,
including its evolution and circulation (Bercovici, 2007).
The surface plate motions of Earth reflect the solid-state thermal convection of
the mantle, which provides a framework for interpreting volcanism at plate
boundaries. Yet there are prominent features on Earth’s surface, such as linear chains
of oceanic islands and seamount chains, which cannot be explained by plate tectonics.
These locations where anomalous volcanism is present are called hotspots. The
volcanism at hotspots is unlike that associated with island arcs and spreading ridges.
Hawaii is the archetypal hotspot, with 107 volcanoes in sea-mounts, ridges and islands
which stretch 6,000 km into the northern Pacific (Bargar and Jackson, 1974).
One of the most enduring problems in geoscience is the persistence of hotspot
volcanoes over geological time (Jellinek and Manga, 2004). Each hotspot location such
Hawaii and Iceland is likely to have been generated from one magma source from the
deep mantle. The lifetime of each hotspot may be 100 Myr (Million years), but they
remain transient features on Earth’s surface (Schubert et al., 2001). The timespan of
hotspots can be divided into three categories:

100 Myr or younger are deemed active.
33

100-140 Myr are either “wandering” or “failing”.

150 Myr or older generally have no active trace (Farnetani and Hofmann, 2011;
Courtillot et al., 2003).
The number of hotspots has varied over the years from 20 in 1971 to 117 in the
1980s. The total number is still debated but has been modified to 40-50 (Richards et
al., 1988; Sleep, 1990). As more data becomes available and investigations occur it has
been determined that there is likely to be more than one type of hotspot on Earth,
related to where in the mantle the plume originates. Namely ‘Primary’ hotspots,
which originate in the lower mantle, ‘Secondary’ hotspots originating at the bottom of
the transition zone and ‘Tertiary’ hotspots, which are upper mantle features associated
with tensile stresses.
Morgan (1971) was the first person to put forward the idea that the surface
signatures of hotspots were due to the rise and melting of hot plumes in the mantle.
A plume is a narrow region of mantle material that is hotter than the surrounding
mantle, which allows the material to rise to the surface. Once at the surface, it is able
to melt the lithosphere and then erupt as an intra-plate volcano. A plume has been
hypothesized to have a mushroom shape- a thin tail (conduit) attached to the source
of the magma and a large head.
The main problem with gaining understanding of mantle plumes is that it is
impossible to access the mantle due to the extremes of pressure and temperatures.
However, their existence and presence can be investigated by seismic tomography.
This is a technique for imaging Earth’s subsurface characteristics in order to obtain an
understanding of the deep geologic structure and is like taking a CT scan of Earth.
Scientist use seismic waves, such as compressional waves (p-waves) and shear waves
(s-waves), to travel through Earth up to the surface and when they reach the surface
they shake the ground. Seismometers record these motions as up-and-down and sideto-side motions on seismograms, which are then decoded to create a high- resolution
image of Earth’s interior, to understand regions of the deep mantle and image mantle
plumes. One of the most thoroughly investigated hotspots is Iceland. A cylindrical
34
region of low velocity has been observed between 100-400km beneath Iceland. This
was concluded to be a hot, narrow plume of upwelling mantle material.
Morgan’s theory has had a lasting impact on geoscience, although vast
amounts still remain to be explained. The mantle plume topic is an active area of
research among the geodynamic community and the overall theory is widely
accepted. However, it is a topic of much debate and a few scientists argue vehemently
against their existence, with their research actively attempting to disprove the theory
(White, 2010).
Despite a considerable volume of research, our understanding of plumes in
Earth’s mantle is still rudimentary. There is still no general consensus on the important
questions concerning plumes in the mantle: their depth of origin, morphology,
longevity and their very existence (Ribe et al., 2007). Therefore, there is much scope
for continued investigation. The work of my PhD focused on the conditions which
would lead to plumes failure or survival in the mantle.
I investigated plumes via experiments and numerical simulations at University
College London in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics laboratory. The experimental
aspect of the work involved the use of corn syrup, a light yellow viscous fluid, as an
analogue for Earth’s mantle. A cubic Plexiglas tank (26.5cm inner sides) was used with
a 2cm diameter point heat source mounted centrally in the base of the tank. This heat
source was switched on at the beginning of each experiment at a set temperature and
remained active for the duration of each experiment. When activated, the fluid close
to the heater becomes hotter than the ambient temperature of the fluid and less dense.
After a period of time a plume begins to form as the hotter less dense syrup rises
upwards through the denser fluid.
35
Experimental
plume
Plume head
Plume
conduit
Figure 1 Shadowgraph image of an experimental plume (Pears 2015).
In order to obtain meaningful information from the experiments two noninvasive visualisation techniques were used for imaging the forming plumes. The first
of these was a quick and simple method called the shadowgraph technique, which
involves shining a light through the experimental tank and recording the resultant
images. The principle of the plume experiments is that the coldest material appears
white
and
Experimental
plume
the
hottest
material
appears
Plume head
Plume
conduit
36
dark
(
Figure 1). When there is an object present rays are refracted, bent and deflected from
their original path to produce the shadow patterns.
Figure 2 The experimental tank and one of the cameras for the Particle Image
Velocimetry visualisation. In the image I am finishing the set up of the system prior
to adding the syrup (Pears 2015).
The second visualization used was a more complex method (Figure 2) called
Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) which involved a large amount of set up. The corn
syrup was seeded with paint powder. A light was shone through the tank and a pair
of cameras used to image the planes of the tank. By comparing successive images of
each plane through time, the velocity of the particles within the syrup can be mapped.
This allows conclusions to be drawn on the velocity and shape evolution of the
plumes. In addition to experimental methods, I also engaged in numerical simulations
of plume formation and evolution, simulating the tank conditions and physical
properties of the experimental fluid in order to attempt to reproduce the experimental
observations.
Tank
Came
ra
Heater
Lig
ht
37
Figure 3 The surviving plumes at 60°C in all three methods. Left the shadowgraph
method, Centre the PIV plume with velocity vectors, Right the numerical plume.
The results from all three of these methods were complementary in some
aspects. At high temperatures (from 42°C-60°C), the plumes all rose to the surface and
survived (Figure 3). These would be the plumes that would generate the volcanism at
locations such as Hawaii. In the medium temperatures (from 26°C-41°C) the
shadowgraph and PIV plumes collapsed (Figure 4). The numerical plume however,
stalled but did not collapse. These collapsing plumes could lead to the volcanism at
the surface to decrease. As the PIV plume showed that some material continued to rise
to the surface but the majority fell to the base of the tank or remained in the centre of
the tank. Iceland is a hotspot location that has periods of time where the volcanism
decreases and this is likely to occur when the plume is in its failing/collapsing stage.
The experiments conducted in this study play a fundamental role in identifying
new fluid phenomena which is of interest in the scientific community. The collapse
was unexpected when the heater remains on for the whole experiment. It is likely that
the collapse is due to the heat diffusing out the plumes quicker than the heat travels
up the conduit of the plume.
38
Figure 4 Collapsing plume at 30.1°C in the shadowgraph (left) and PIV (centre)
plume. The numerical plume (right) stalled and did not reach the top of the tank.
References
BARGAR, K. E. & JACKSON, E. D. 1974. Calculated volumes of individual shield
volcanoes along the Hawaiian-Emperor Chain. J. Res. U.S Geol. Surv, 2, 545-550.
BERCOVICI, D. 2007. Mantle Dynamics Past, Present, and Future: An Introduction
and Overview. Treatise on Geophysics. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
COURTILLOT, V., DAVAILLE, A., BESSE, J. & STOCK, J. 2003. Three distinct types
of hotspots in the Earth's mantle. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 205, 295-308.
FARNETANI, C. G. & HOFMANN, A. W. 2011. Mantle Plumes. Encyclopedia of Solid
Earth Geophysics. Springer Netherlands.
JELLINEK, A. M. & MANGA, M. 2004. Links between long-lived hot spots, mantle
plumes, D//, and plate tectonics. Reviews of Geophysics, 42, RG3002.
MORGAN, W. J. 1971. Convection Plumes in the Lower Mantle. Nature, 230, 42-43.
PEARS, M. I .B. 2015. Stall and Collapse in Mantle Plumes: An experimental and
numerical fluid dynamics perspective. PhD Thesis. University College London
RIBE, N. M., DAVAILLE, A. & CHRISTENSEN, U. 2007. Fluid Dynamics of Mantle
Plumes. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
RICHARDS, M. A., HAGER, B. H. & SLEEP, N. H. 1988. Dynamically Supported
Geoid Highs Over Hotspots: Observation and Theory. Journal of Geophysical Research,
93, 7690-7708.
39
SCHUBERT, G., TURCOTTE, D. L. & OLSON, P. 2001. Mantle Convection in the Earth
and Planets, Cambridge University Press.
SLEEP, N. H. 1990. Hotspots and Mantle Plumes: Some Phenomenology. Journal of
Geophysical Research, 95, 6715-6736.
WHITE, W. M. 2010. Oceanic Island Basalts and Mantle Plumes: The Geochemical
Perspective. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 38, 133-160.
Time: a Musician’s View
John McCutcheon
When we are born we enter this world and immediately become part of time with our
body clock ticking down right until our last breath. A bit of a daunting thought! We
live our lives within a framework of different amounts of time: our working day,
40
roughly eight hours, (if you’re lucky!) our week, seven days, or our year, twelve
months. All are simply different amounts of time elapsing.
As musicians we need a heightened awareness of time. We have to be able to
work within a specific time frame when playing otherwise our music simply sounds
a jumbled mess. We also need to develop an internal metronome so we can play ‘in
time’ particularly when working with others.
When learning an instrument we are encouraged by our teacher to count
evenly, setting out a regular pulse for us to build on. (A bit like constructing a house
by laying the foundations first then adding the walls, windows and roof later.)
Musicians use bars, (musical amounts of time, not alcohol serving ones!) as our
marker for time elapsing. Music timing or rhythm is set out in such a way that larger
notes can be accurately broken down into smaller notes. We can subdivide semibreves
into minims or crotchets and then further into quavers and semi-quavers. By doing
this we can accurately place notes within a broader time frame.
When composers begin writing a piece of music one of the first decisions they
make relates to time. The time signature as it is known (6/8, 2/4 etc) lays down a pulse
and specific time signatures help create specific styles. Lots of nursery rhymes for
example are set in 6/8 time as it gives the impression of a happy lilting feel. Think of
Humpty Dumpty!
So the pulse and speed help to define a piece’s character. To aid the listener
further the musician may emphasise the first beat and play the remaining beats
slightly quieter. A march for example has four beats in a bar and a waltz has three
beats. Add the melody and the listener is able to recognise it as a march or a waltz
and can tap their foot or clap their hands along with the beat.
This sense of rhythm or time can vary from person to person. Being able to
control and develop it can be the difference between mastering an instrument to a
high degree or not. Someone with a poor sense of rhythm finds it difficult to clap in
time to music and on occasion they may be totally unaware they are clapping out of
41
time! They are often unable to synchronise their movements accurately if they are
dancing.
If we look at boy bands, (love them or hate them) they need to sing in time to
the backing track and their dance moves must fit the music’s pulse exactly in order to
create an overall coherent effect.
Musicians playing in groups no matter how large or small, from a symphony
orchestra to a duo singing in a pub, all need to be able to keep time so that the music
works.
From an orchestral musician’s point of view, we can find ourselves part of an
ensemble of up to 150 players and this in itself creates a problem… how do you get
lots of people to sound together when they can be very spread out across the stage?
Once the sound from our colleagues in the far corners of the orchestra reaches our ears
and we try to play with it, our sound arriving at the audience is late. I am sure you
have been told in the back of the orchestra at Woldingham that it’s sounding late! To
combat this we need to anticipate the sound. In other words we have to play to what
we see, not to what we hear.
If you go to a concert and sit behind the orchestra in the choir seats (so you are
facing the conductor) the timpani and percussion sections may sound ahead of the
strings from where you’re sat. This is because the percussionists are slightly ignoring
what they hear and playing to what they see…the conductor’s beat. (Known as
playing on top of the beat.) The overall mix out the front in the auditorium should be
perfectly together. (Providing the conductor is doing their job well!) Joking aside, it’s
a fine art to get this balance right, particularly if the music is slow.
Time, or our perception of it, can create other issues for musicians. For example
on one occasion a famous orchestra was playing alongside musicians from the Welsh
and Scots Guards. The conductor accused the percussion section in the orchestra of
pushing the speed in a march. (He’d perceived the speed to be slower than it was) It
was later pointed out that the percussionists were merely following the military
band’s tempo. (The soldiers being trained to march at a speed of 120 beats per minute)
42
In some music however (such as Chopin) the timing is subtly altered within the
framework of the pulse. Also when jazz musicians are improvising their timing can
appear very fluid and if you listen to a Viennese waltz, the accompanying three beats
are not always equidistant. It is only the best players and conductors who give a sense
of the pulse without rigidly sticking to it.
Going to the other extreme, musicians can be asked to play totally out of time
with the rest of their colleagues. This can take you out of your comfort zone initially
as it goes against everything we are taught about playing in time! There are examples
in operas where the timpani are required to play at an unrelated speed to the orchestra
and singers in order to create an effect. (Madame Butterfly being one example)
When an orchestra is recording music for a film, exact time and timing are all
part of the process. Musicians wear headphones with a click track playing. This is a
pre recorded click sound sometimes with a different pitched click for the first beat of
each bar. Some click tracks even have ritardandos and accellerandos (slowing down
or getting quicker) built in as well as changing time signatures within the piece. Again
when you first encounter this it feels a very alien way of making music.
So there we are, whatever our level of involvement is with music from listening
to it for pleasure, to making a career from it, time plays its part to some degree.
Musician or not, we all have one internal metronome of sorts, one that stays with us
throughout our lives and one we simply cannot live without… our heartbeat.
Shakespeare and Comic Timing
Emma Corrin
43
In the wise words of director Peter Hall, ‘In Shakespeare’s house of language there are
no forbidden rooms.’1 When it comes to this Elizabethan literary prodigy, we must
understand he was the unconscious inventor of both the modern tradition of
characterisation and of naturalistic speech.
With respect to language, it is to
Shakespeare that we owe the invention of many of the expressions, colloquialisms,
phrases and speech patterns we use today. Sadly, however, as much as we see his
influence reflected in parts of our language, we cannot hope to find the authenticity
of the performance as Shakespeare himself would have seen it; history holds that
forever secret. But this is healthy: in order for society to advance language must
change; language cannot lie dormant any more than the world can lie dormant.
As in Shakespeare’s time, we live in a world of inconsistency, vulnerability and
diversity. This, I think, was something Shakespeare understood entirely, revealing
unusual foresight for a writer of his time. In my studies over the summer at Lamda,
the head of drama, Rodney Cottier, said something profound, giving new dimension
to my understanding of Shakespeare’s work: through his writing, Shakespeare was
telling us that man and speech are at the centre of the world. To exemplify this, he
created a circular performance space which he called the Globe; he placed man, the
actor, in the centre, and gave him lines to speak in the form of the iambic pentameter
- a measure of speech that mirrors the human heartbeat. In this way, Shakespeare’s
works dynamically explore the extremities of human nature - creating the richest
source of literary analysis for centuries’ worth of students, worldwide; however, one
theme usually overlooked is comedy, more specifically the skills needed to perfect
comic timing in the context of Shakespeare’s verse and prose.
To begin to explore comic timing in all its depth, a distinction needs to be made
between comic timing and slapstick comedy. Both combine to fall under the umbrella
that is the genre of comedy; however, the two could not be more contrasting in the
effects they deliver to the audience and the technique they require from the actor.
1
Hall, Peter 2012: Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players: Oberon Books, pp159
44
Slapstick comedy originated from Comedia dell’ Arte, a form of drama dealing
with stock character and exaggerated physical activity. We can see this translated into
plays through the history of theatre and, in Shakespeare’s work, through characters
such as the court fool and the jester. For instance, in Much Ado About Nothing we have
Dogberry, in Henry IV there is Falstaff, and one well-loved and aptly named fool is, of
course, Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Whilst slapstick comedy is shown
through Shakespeare’s characters, more obviously it is seen in his plot lines. Take The
Comedy of Errors, for example, with its many chase scenes and beatings. Equally, there
are cases of mistaken identity which feature in many of Shakespeare’s plays, most
notably Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Most importantly, the emphasis is on the
exaggerated nature of Slapstick Comedy, making it stand out from the intricate and
delicate nature of comic timing; what Robert Maslen calls ‘the precariously contingent
state’ of the comic moment2 - and his description is very apt.
Across Shakespeare’s comedies, predictably, we witness his fascination with
the comic moment and enjoy the skilled penmanship with which he uses it; ‘the jest
out of time, the joke that goes too far.’ Yet it appears also - and somewhat less
predictably - in his tragedies, working to diffuse tension - for example, the pranks
played on Othello by Iago, the crazed laughter by Aaron in Titus Andronicus. What
Maslen goes on to develop in his writing is an argument for the narrow margins by
which tragedies and comedies are separated.
When it comes to comic timing, it’s all in the rhythm and the language, the feel
of the line that is intrinsic to an audience’s understanding and entertainment.
The comedy lies precisely in these elements:
• The language in the verse or the prose
• The iambic pentameter or lack thereof
• Expression and physicality used
2
Maslen, Robert 2014: Shakespeare and Comedy, Arden Critical Companions: A&C Black, pp5
45
Without proper attention to these three key aspects, an actor will fail to deliver
the correct comic timing and the audience will miss the punch line. Actors need
constantly to consider their audience and never more so than when performing
Shakespeare’s verse. We have all been in a Shakespeare performance where a line is
spoken on stage, but only a few laughs have arisen from the audience - most probably
from those with an appreciation of Shakespeare sufficient to pick up the intricacies
and deeper meaning of his writing; however, for the most part, audiences rely on the
careful crafting and delivery of lines in order to access the comic effect Shakespeare
intended.
You FEEL the rhythm of the line building. You sense it’s trajectory, how it’s unfolding.
You know where the up-and-coming comic word should fall given the expected beat of iambic
pentameter. But you change it. You skip the beat, or slow it down, or quicken it. The
momentary change creates dramatic tension. You place your word, comic in its emphasised
position.
To try and exemplify the nature of comic timing. I will use dialogue from The
Taming of the Shrew, the first meeting of Katharine and Petruchio. I performed this
scene during a Shakespeare course at LAMDA last summer. Our director began by
asking us to translate Shakespeare’s verse into our own language, teasing apart the
meaning behind each line. From this came our sense of how we wanted the comedy
in the scene to come across, how to use the language most effectively for a
contemporary audience. We then examined the rhythm, tempo and pause in this
scene, noting how it follows iambic pentameter to begin with and then, as the energy
of the scene escalates, changes and becomes more irregular - this irregularity lending
itself to the comic timing of the last lines of the scene. Once confident with the timing
of the lines we moved on to creating the scene physically. We decided on minimal
movement, so that attention would be drawn to expression and the language itself.
Petruchio: Alas good Kate. I will not burden thee. For knowing thee to be but
young and light –
46
Katharine: Too light for such a swain as you to catch. And yet as heavy as my
weight should be.
Petruchio: Should be – should buzz!
Katharine: Well ta’en. And like a buzzard.
Petruchio: O slow-winged turtle, as he takes a buzzard.
Katharine: Ay. For a turtle he takes a buzzard.
Petruchio: Come, come, you wasp. I’faith, you are too angry.
Katharine: If I be waspish, best beware my sting.
Petruchio: My remedy is then to pluck it out.
Katharine: Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.
Petruchio: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting. In his tail.
Katharine: In his tongue.
Petruchio: Whose tongue?
Katharine: Yours, if you talk of tails. And so farewell.
I have highlighted in bold the words or places in which I played with rhythm,
tempo and pause which provided an opportunity for comedy.
The scene itself is one extended example of comic timing and how to use it well.
Kate and Petruchio demonstrate some vocal sparring: they play with words and,
indeed, with rhyme and sound in a battle of oneupmanship. The key to mastering the
comic timing in this scene is to keep the lines flowing fast and the energy heightened.
Katharine’s replies must be immediate, especially when encountering lines such as ‘In
his tongue’. A short line here means quick delivery. Katharine is about to leave and so
this is her final stab at dignity, preserving her voice in the argument. The energy
should climax and her words should quickly follow his, but with deliberate
enunciation. Even with no prior knowledge of the context of this scene, it will be
obvious that Petruchio is trying to woo Katharine and she is ‘having none of it’. On
account of this vocal sparring the scene has to move swiftly, and each line delivers
47
another dig, another insult or another observation all shown through an actor’s use of
rhythm, tempo and pause.
For example: ‘Should be – should buzz’
This is one of my favourite lines in the dialogue. Shakespeare has given the
actors repeated ‘s’ and ‘b’ syllables accompanied by the last word of the line ‘buzz’ such an exhilarating sound that is comic in itself, giving the actor an opportunity to
really use the line to full effect. What Petruchio is saying here is: ‘Should be? Maybe
you should be the subject of some buzz.’ To which she effectively replies ‘buzz off
buzzard’ - of course incorporating his use of the word ‘buzz’ into a new insult of her
own, comparing him to a stalking bird of prey. Therefore in this line the comic timing
is found through the emphasis of the word ‘buzz’ and the use of the alliteration given
by the playwright.
One final consideration to consider is the aspect of ‘addressing’ - to whom the
line is spoken. Addressing a line to the audience is often used in performing comic
scenes in Shakespeare. It breaks the fourth wall and includes the audience in the
action, often increasing the comic effect as the character confides and rhetorically asks
an opinion of them. One example of this is found in As You Like It, when Rosalind,
disguised as a boy, realises the female Shepherdess has fallen for her. This realisation
is relayed to the audience, ‘Od’s my little life. I think she means to tangle my eyes too.’
Another example is from the same scene with Petruchio and Kate when she has
accused him of looking like a crab apple. He then replies, ’what, you mean my face?’
to which she sarcastically retorts, ‘well aimed of such a young one!’ Here she is
patronising him, saying ‘what a clever child he is.’ If we direct Katharine’s words to
the audience, then she is not only patronising him but also humiliating him, sharing
her ‘roll of the eyes’ moment with the audience, including them in the joke and
increasing the comic effect. (For additional information on an actor’s preparation of
comic timing please see Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s Shakespeare Masterclass
which can be found on Youtube. ) If I can end with one obvious, but irresistible truism:
for comic timing, it all lies in the delivery. In the acting. No surprise.
48
Time and Eternity in Mid-Thirteenth Century Thought: A Review
Susannah Peppiatt
In his book, Time and Eternity in Mid-Thirteenth Century Thought, Dr Rory Fox
considers the positions of various thirteenth century thinkers on several issues related
49
to time. The book is arranged thematically beginning with a discussion of the
terminology used by thirteenth century writers, then considering how thirteenth
century thinkers viewed the topological (or structural) nature of time, before moving
onto a discussion of the temporal metric (time when considered as a measure) and
then considering thirteenth century views on the aevum and eternity and finally the
relationship between God and time.
In this exploration of thirteenth century views of Time, Dr Fox draws largely
on St Thomas Aquinas, as well as some of his contemporaries such as Bonaventure,
Albert the Great, Alexander of Hales and Averroes, among others. It is important to
note the context in which these men were writing, as part of the Catholic Church at a
time when many of Aristotle’s works were newly rediscovered by the Western world,
now available in Latin translation when they had previously been just in their original
Greek or translated into Arabic. Aristotle’s philosophical ideas often formed the basis
of the philosophies of thirteenth century thinkers; his authority was almost
unquestionable and his importance so undoubted that he was widely referred to
simply as “the Philosopher”. The importance of Christian theology in defining the
views of thirteenth century thinkers also cannot be underestimated. As a
demonstration of how all-encompassing Christian theology was at the time, the
religious division was not, as it might be today, between theist and atheist, or even, as
it was to be a few centuries later, between Catholic and Protestant; it was more often
between Franciscan and Dominican. Thirteenth century thinkers were often,
therefore, striving to form a synthesis a synthesis between Aristotelian philosophy
and Christian theology. In this book, Dr Fox argues that “faith and philosophy were
pulling in different directions, directions which it seems thirteenth century thinkers
were not always able to reconcile.”
This divergence between Aristotle and the Church not only posed a problem
for thirteenth century thinkers themselves, but also for contemporary philosophers
struggling to understand the complexities of their philosophies which are made so
much more complex by the necessity of making certain theological allowances. One
50
example of this is the disagreements over the nature of the aevum (or aeviternity; the
time inhabited by the angels). There seems to have been a broad consensus that the
aevum was non-extended because non-extended particulars (such as angels) must
exist in a non-extensional duration, just as extended particulars (such as humans) exist
in an extensional time. However, as Dr Fox notes, Bonaventure feared that a nonextended aevum undermined the transcendence of God because there is then little
separating the aevum from eternity and therefore little separating the angels from
their Creator. Aquinas, again adapting Aristotle’s philosophy to meet theological
needs, proposed that angelic time was different from both time and eternity by virtue
of it being discrete. That is, as angelic motion (or change) takes the form of discrete
acts of volition rather than continuous movement through space, the time which
measures these changes could also be described as discrete. In this way, angelic time,
while constructed from discrete, non-extended instants (and thus maintaining its
distinction from what we might call natural time) is also capable of measuring distinct
changes and successive states (and therefore remains distinct from eternity). This
complexity of differing views among thirteenth century thinkers is well explained and
not oversimplified as might be tempting.
Dr Fox’s decision to refer always to the Latin translation of Aristotle’s works
that St Thomas and his contemporaries would have had access to and not to the
original Greek is one example of where he is endeavouring to place thirteenth century
theses in their own contexts and not unfairly impose contemporary philosophical
insights onto them. However, large parts of this book are dedicated to considering
how thirteenth century thinkers would have responded to contemporary questions
about time and contemporary dilemmas. Answering these questions as thirteenth
century thinkers would have done seems to involve a considerable amount of
extrapolation as often the problems are not ones that could have been seriously
considered within the thirteenth century understanding of the cosmos.
The task of discerning how thirteenth century thinkers would have responded
to these questions is made even harder because thirteenth century thinkers often used
51
words now considered sharply distinct quite interchangeably and sometimes
confused issues regarding temporal metric with those regarding temporal topology.
To explain this distinction: if time has a unified metric and topology, it is simply one
set of events following after each other with only one measure, as time is generally
considered when one does not think too much about it. It is also theoretically possible
to have more than one time stream, while still having only one temporal metric so that
there are two sets of events which do not affect each other but which could nonetheless
be measured by the same metric, (ie. a clock might read the same time in both streams;
this scenario is what is called a “parallel universe” in science fiction). As well as this,
it is theoretically possible to have two temporal streams which also have different
temporal metrics (because in one of them time progresses faster, for example) or two
time streams with the same metric but different topological properties (such as if time
progressed at the same speed in both time streams but in one of them it occasionally
paused, or if one time stream split into two every 5 years etc.).
The distinction between the temporal metric and the topology of time is very
important to contemporary philosophers but not always appreciated by thirteenth
century thinkers. We find, therefore, that there are many cases when an argument
regarding the temporal metric is used in response to a topological problem or vice
versa. One particularly key example is found when discussing the topic of the unity
of time. Thirteenth century thinkers often seem to have taken it for granted that time
is unified and to have attempted to explain why this is the case rather than to prove
that it is. This is perhaps largely due to Aristotle’s definition of simultaneity: “Those
things which are said to be simultaneous… came into being at the same time, for
neither is before or after” because this defines out of question any contemplation of
things being in a separate time as that which is neither before nor after must be
simultaneous and cannot for example, just be in a separate time stream as in the cases
discussed above. The most widely adopted argument for the unity of time seems to
have been Averroes’ argument which follows Aristotle’s assertion that everything
must be either an accident or a substance depending on whether or not it can be
52
considered to exist independently of anything else (a substance, such as an elephant)
or must inhere within something else (an accident, such as the colour grey). As time
was considered as the measure of motion, it was therefore intrinsically tied to motion
and it was widely considered that time could not exist in the absence of any motion.
As time could not exist in the absence of motion, it was therefore categorised as an
accident and it inhered within the Primum Mobile (or “Prime Mover”) which encircles
and spins around the cosmos and causes all other motion to occur within it. Averroes
therefore proposed that the unity of time was as a result of the fact that there was but
one Primum Mobile which caused all motion and therefore all time. Bonaventure,
however, threw a spanner in the works by raising the question of what might happen
if there were two Prima Mobili. Although this is a topological challenge, Albert
responded with a metrical solution; namely that while the number of motions
multiplies, the notion of time is not ‘in’ each substance but rather has a derivative
existence and therefore time remains unified because it is still measured in the same
way.
Another question considered by Dr Fox is how thirteenth century thinkers
would approach what is now known as the Causal Theory of Time. This is the theory
that causal sequences and temporal sequences are always the same, ie. a cause is
always and necessarily temporally prior to that which it effects. Dr Fox asserts here
that although many have read Aquinas and his contemporaries as rejecting the Causal
Theory of Time quite clearly, it is quite possible that they subscribed to it more than is
often widely considered. The confusion arises partly from the way that thirteenth
century thinkers had adopted Aristotle’s Four Causes as their way of understanding
causal relationships. When considering these causal relationships, thirteenth century
thinkers would often discuss the Final Cause, which, as the ultimate aim or ideal
outcome of the action, could easily exist in the future. However, it is the Efficient
Cause which is the one that we would consider today as being the cause of an effect
and therefore, it is the temporal location of the Efficient Cause that is most important
in this context.
53
Although thirteenth century thinkers were generally committed to the Causal
Theory of Time, there were specific theological cases which obliged them to accept
that this was not necessarily always the case. In the case of the fall of Lucifer, for
instance, Tarentaise held that “these four were simultaneous: the desire of Lucifer, his
beckoning of the others; their seeing him and their agreement with him”. It was also
necessary to allow for simultaneous causation in the case of the Trinity, as orthodox
doctrine held that there was no time before the Son was begotten and thus he must
have been begotten simultaneously with the existence of God and there cannot
therefore be any delay between the cause and the effect. Other Church Doctrines such
as the absolution of the Old Testament Patriarchs and the Institution of the Eucharist
even depended on a cause being temporally after the effect, as both of these examples
were dependent on Jesus’ freely chosen suffering which did not occur until long after
the absolution of the Patriarchs and a day or so after the first instance of the Eucharist.
Finally, thirteenth century thinkers were committed to God having causal power
within time, despite also being committed to God’s atemporality, and so are possibly
open to the idea of effects within time being effected by non-temporal beings. Aquinas
explains this phenomenon by asserting that God is simultaneous with nature at
creation. However, as Dr Fox points out, we must be wary of interpreting Aquinas’
use of “simul” to mean “temporally simultaneous” as the same word “simul” was also
often used to express “simultaneous by nature” without the temporal connotations.
Dr Fox concludes therefore that despite a general commitment to the Causal Theory
of Time, “Causal ordering and temporal ordering could be, at least to some extent in
thirteenth century thought, uncoupled”.
Despite being separated from the men he is discussing by over 700 years, and
dealing with texts written in a now dead language which discussed issues pertaining
to a completely different conception of cosmology to a modern understanding of the
universe, Dr Fox presents thirteenth century views on important issues about time
and eternity very effectively in this book. While it perhaps not possible to approach
this book without any existing understanding of philosophical discussions about time,
54
it is possible to appreciate much of his argument without a detailed understanding of
thirteenth century philosophy or philosophers. This book provides a good insight not
only into the interactions between different thirteenth century thinkers, but also
between thirteenth century thinkers and contemporary philosophers, providing a
detailed exposition of the issues faced by contemporary philosophers attempting to
understand thirteenth century thinkers and the complexities arising from their
attempts to create a synthesis between Aristotelian philosophy and Christian
theology.
12 Stunden Deutschland
Nicole Boyd
Sie begrüßt uns jede Stunde
mit Luthers Vaterunser
aus Gold und Messing
1589 fertiggestellt.
55
Zur Ersten, der Westfälische Frieden
die politische Unterhaltung des Jahrhunderts
die im Dreißigjährigen Krieg endete
8 Millionen Todesfälle.
Bei Zwei liest Kants
lange ,,Kritik der reinen Vernunft´´ 1781
Zeit und Raum sind
Konstrukte des Geistes.
Um Drei, 1812, veröffentlichten die Brüder Grimm
die erste Märchensammlung
mit 80 Geschichten
genau genommen nicht für Kinder geeignet.
Bei Vier, signalisierte die Vereinigung
1871 der Beginn der blühenden Jahre
Deutschland als Führungsmacht
z.B. in der chemischen Industrie.
Um Fünf, ging Deutschland in den Krieg
mehr als 9 Millionen starben
in 51 Monaten
Europa ist für ewig geprägt.
Bei Sechs, litten die Sparsamen
Durch Reparationszahlungen verursacht
an der Hyperinflation 1923
Wir beobachten den drehenden Automaten.
Die siebte Stunde währt, Weltkrieg zwei
Von ein paar Männern verursacht
weltweit über 70 Millionen starben
der tödlichste Krieg in der Menschheitsgeschichte.
Um Acht wurde die Nation in Zonen geteilt
Westdeutschland und Ostdeutschland entstanden
Mit vier ausländischen Regierungen
mit unterschiedlichen politischen Zielen.
Bei Neun fiel die Berliner Mauer
am 9. November 1989
56
dies bedeutet das neue Zeitalter für Deutschland
als Weltmacht.
Um Zehn, 400 Jahre seit
der Gründung der Uhr
der Geschichte einer Nation
voller Kultur, Leiden und Unverwüstlichkeit.
Gegen Elf gedenken wir den Verstorbenen
für wen auch immer sie gekämpft
der Automat dreht sich wieder
unbewusst der Vergangenheit.
Bei Stunde zwölf oder null
was bringt die Zukunft für diese Uhr
dieses deutsche Nation, das deutsche Volk
und das Land das alle überlebt?
12 Hours of Germany
It welcomes us each hour
with Luther´s Lord´s Prayer
made from gold and brass
withstanding the course of time
and completed in 1589.
Its first hour saw the Peace of Westphalia
57
the political chat of the century
which ended thirty years of war
but accounted for 8 million deaths.
The second hour read Kant's 1781
unreadable Critique of Pure Reason
which summarises that time and space are
only constructs of the mind.
At 3, the brothers Grimm wrote their stories
the first fairytales collection published in 1812
made up of 80 stories
regarded not suitable for children's minds.
The 4th hour signalled the unification of Germany
in 1871, the beginning of prosperous years
ultimately leading to Germany as a leading power
e.g. in the chemical industry.
At 5, Germany went to war against the allies
more than 9 million men died
over a 4 year and 3 month period
Europe is forever scarred by this time.
Half way through, at 6, the savers suffered
As Germany plunged into hyperinflation in 1923
Caused by reparations payments and poor management of government funds
We watch the automata swirl, unaware of the suffering around.
The seventh hour endures the WW2
Caused by a few men
over 70 million died worldwide
the deadliest war in all human history.
At 8, the nation was split into 4 zones
West Germany and East Germany were born
At opposite political ends with one population
under two countries and 4 foreign governments.
The 9th hour witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall
on the 9th November 1989
This signifies the new age for Germany
as a world power and leader.
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The 10th hour shows us the 400 years
since the creation of the clock
and the history of a nation
full of culture, suffering and resilience.
At 11, we remember all those who died
Whatever cause they fought for
The automata swirl again, unaware of the passed time
the engraved gold and brass remains.
At hour 12 or 0 depending on your view
what does the future hold for this clock
this German nation, the German people
and the land that survived it all?
The Final Word
medieval, adj. & n.
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The Middle Ages are back, in political rhetoric if nowhere else, with David Cameron
commenting that: “The cruelty being meted out [in Syria …] is literally medieval in
character”.
On the face of it, this is curious because, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, the Middle Ages was: "The period in European history between ancient
and modern times, now usually taken as extending from the fall of the Roman Empire
in the West (c500) to the fall of Constantinople (1453) or the beginning of the
Renaissance (14th cent.); the medieval period; esp. the later part of this period, after
1000."
When exactly were the Middle Ages? It really depends who you ask and in
what context. According to C.S. Lewis in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: "the
very idea of the 'medieval' is a humanistic invention. (According to Lehmann it is in
1469 that the expression media tempestas first occurs.) And what can media imply
except that a thousand years of theology, metaphysics, jurisprudence, courtesy,
poetry, and architecture are to be regarded as a mere gap, or chasm, or entre-acte?
Such a preposterous conception can be accepted only if you swallow the whole creed
of humanism at the same time."
‘Media tempestas’ may have entered the language in 1469 but the first use of
the English word ‘medieval’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, came as late
as 1817, when it was used entirely positively. It was only from 1883 onwards that it
developed negative connotations.
But connotations do not come out of nowhere. If we are to make sense of the
popular definition of ‘medieval’ (and if we are to make sense of politicians’ speeches),
we need to look to the propaganda of earlier ages, to Camden who wrote in 1605 that
“I will onely giue you a taste of some of midle age, which was so ouercast with darke
clouds, or rather thicke fogges of ignorance” and to Wotton who, in 1624, wrote about
“the reuiuing and repolishing of good Literature, (which the combustions and tumults
of the middle Age had vnciuillized).”
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How we understand the ‘medieval’ varies from person to person, and from age
to age. Ask me and I would say that the “vnciuillized” Literature of pre-Reformation
England is one of our greatest treasures. And that’s my final word on the matter.
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