Oxford University Press's Blog, page 226

A quarter century into the exoplanet revolution

In 1969, half a century ago, astronauts first landed on Earth’s sole moon. The first successful robotic landers touched down on the much more distant Venus and Mars in 1970 and 1976, respectively, and in the same decade spacecraft flybys provided the first, fleeting close-ups of Jupiter and Saturn. It was not until two decades later, however, that missions that explicitly targeted these giant planets revealed how fundamentally distinct these worlds are from our own.

The Galileo satellite started exploring the Jupiter system in late 1995, swinging by moon after moon. The Cassini-Huygens mission reached Saturn in 2004, exploring the giant planet, its rings and satellites, and even sending a lander onto Titan, the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere. These spacecraft uncovered a fascinating diversity of environments on dozens of moons: many are cold worlds enrobed in miles-thick ice; some with volcanoes spewing molten rock but others whose volcanoes somehow gush liquid water or nitrogen; and then there is Titan with its seas of liquid methane and ethane. Their pictures are as stunning and diverse as the scientific discoveries enabled by these spacecraft.

As the close-up exploration of the largest planets in the solar system got underway, a revolution was about to befall astronomers looking much further out. It started in 1995 with the announcement of the first exoplanet, now known as 51 Pegasi b, orbiting a star like our own Sun. There are now some 4,000 exoplanetary systems on the books (more than half found with NASA’s Kepler satellite), but the number expected to exist is vastly larger: by carefully quantifying what our available methods can and cannot observe, scientists estimate that there are over a hundred billion planetary systems in our Milky Way galaxy alone, with perhaps some ten billion planets with some similarity to Earth.

Image credit: ‘Artist’s impression of the exoplanet 51 Pegasi b’ by European Southern Observatory. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Apart from its very existence, 51 Pegasi b had another surprise in store: at 150 Earth masses and orbiting its star almost 20 times closer than Earth does the Sun, this “hot Jupiter” should not have existed by theories of the time. These and many subsequent observations have changed our ideas on how planetary systems form and evolve: we now realize that orbits can change so that planets may be discovered well away from where they formed; planets can engage in gravitational fights that can cause losers to be ejected as lone “nomads” into interstellar space; planets exist that have two stars to cast twin shadows on their surfaces; … Many planets orbit their stars at distances where water, if there is any, may exist in liquid form on their surface for billions of years, as enabled Earth the development of life.

These discoveries have intensified the astronomers’ hunt for extraterrestrial life in which also solar-system scientists participate. Organic molecules cause the haze in the icy-cold atmosphere of Saturn’s Titan and are vented in cry-volcanic plumes rising from the ice-locked deep ocean of Saturn’s Enceladus. There are many sizable moons and dwarf planets in the solar system that are rich in water, although most of it is frozen solid. The combination of liquids and organics in many places around our solar system fuels theories of life and plans for space missions designed to look for life near to home.

But exoplanet astronomers have the advantage of the vast number of systems. Their challenge is that even the largest telescopes cannot image exoplanets any better than as a single dot, and even that only for a few so far. In fact, most of what we learn about exoplanets comes from analyzing how their star’s light is modified in brightness or color by the exoplanets, either by adding some reflected starlight or by taking away some light should they move in front of their star during their orbit. Careful study of these effects as observed with the most powerful telescopes can reveal which gases contribute to the changes. This is already happening, but it will receive a big boost from future telescopes being built, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope planned for launch in 2021. So much was discovered in the past 25 years; what will the next decades bring?

Featured image credit: ‘io-jupiter-planet-astronomy-2773533’ by flflflflfl. CC0 1.0 via Pixabay.

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Missing Persons? Aboriginal people in Western Australian mental hospitals

Indigenous Australians, like most indigenous peoples, have a long history of engaging with European-style mental health services both in and out of the colonial era. However, their history is poorly documented and largely unexplored. We can’t even say for certain how many indigenous people in Australia used mental health services since first contact, and we know even less about what their experiences were.

Why is this? It may be partly because public mental health records in Australia are under 75- to 100-year restriction, making it challenging to access primary sources. These records don’t always identify Aboriginal people, or identified them by guesswork. Australian mental health records are also a patchwork—each State government runs its own mental health system, with predictable fluctuations in the quality of historical reporting and the types of data gathered.

Thanks to a larger project that provided me with access to restricted patient records, Dr Sophie Davison and I were able to rebuild an outline of indigenous use of public mental health services in Western Australia—the largest and most sparsely-populated of the six Australian states—from 1903 to 1966. Aboriginal people now make up a substantial proportion of mental hospital admissions in Western Australia, but this wasn’t always the case—it turns out that patient numbers were very low before the 1960s, with just 167 people identified as Aboriginal admitted in a 70-year period.

We also tried to provide some account of what their experiences may have been like. We could count admissions from the registers, but to re-create experiences we had to rely entirely on newspaper articles and oral history interviews with white staff. The firsthand voices of Aboriginal people in mental hospitals have been almost completely lost, and the secondary sources are not much better.

So who were these people? On one level, they looked like the white admissions profile: more males than females, many admissions in poor physical health, and a high death rate within a year of admission. But indigenous admissions were much younger than other admissions, and they were far more unwell, both mentally and physically. They were also almost all from very distant regions of the State, usually the far north which is at least 1,000 kilometres away.

And what was it like for them? Through oral history, I was able to record intriguing glimpses of indigenous people in the wards—fighting with staff and failed escapes, mixed with accounts of mutual respect and courtesy. Staff also recollected frustration with senior medical staff who did not always understand the particular needs of Aboriginal people who had come from remote areas, and were frightened and confused.

The firsthand voices of Aboriginal people in mental hospitals have been almost completely lost, and the secondary sources are not much better.

Most of these patients had to be brought long distances to be admitted to hospitals in the metropolitan area, so it’s likely that this was a last resort when they could no longer be managed in their local community. The high death rate is almost certainly linked to their poor physical health, as well as other factors such as separation from their traditional country and local communities. This seems to confirm my earlier research on Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century in Western Australia, where the public mental health system was the last port of call for Aboriginal people with serious mental illness.

Ideas about mental health and illness are culturally shaped, and it’s always challenging to see how a European-style government interacted with indigenous people and diagnosed mental illness among them, knowing comparatively little about their own ideas of mental and emotional well-being. Although Aboriginal people in Western Australia also have a long history of being imprisoned under various laws, it’s unlikely that the mental hospital system was used merely for incarceration—for one thing, it was far too expensive to keep a person in a mental hospital in Western Australia, compared to a prison.

The missing piece of the puzzle is now a study of the admission rate from 1966 onwards. Historically, Aboriginal people were statistically more likely to avoid a mental hospital admission than whites, but they now seem statistically more likely to be admitted than whites. Deinstitutionalisation released hundreds of non-indigenous patients from Western Australia’s mental hospitals, but seems to have left the indigenous ones behind. The reasons why would be well worth exploring: changes in mental health policy and administration, as well as major changes in Aboriginal communities since the 1960s, may well have intersected to produce this effect.

Featured image credit: Travel map by Kevin Hale. 

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This Side of Paradise —Looking Back, A Century Later

F Scott Fitzgerald wrote the following words in This Side of Paradise approximately a hundred years ago.

“He fancied that in a hundred years he would like having young people speculate on whether his eyes were brown or blue.”

While speculation on the eye color of Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald’s protagonist, may not currently be top of mind, the author himself, as well as his debut novel, most assuredly are. Recently, I led a discussion of the book in the leafy summer Reading Room of Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library. Mr Fitzgerald, what a shame that you died at 44, believing you were a failure, with copies of The Great Gatsby moldering in a warehouse and less than $1000 in the bank. Today, that iconic 1925 novel sells more than a half-million copies every year, and remains both a staple on school reading list and a cash cow for its publisher, Scribner’s. Approximately 25,000,000 copies of the novel have been sold worldwide—apart from the 100,000-plus e-books grabbed up annually. By the last count, there were translations into 42 languages.

The tentacles of Fitz-mania extend far beyond Gatsby. The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s unfinished final novel, for example, enjoyed a recent run as an Amazon television limited series, as did a series based on Zelda Fitzgerald. If you set a Google alert for F. Scott Fitzgerald, every day you will get a hit along these lines, in this case, from Bloomberg News: “The Summer of Gin” may sound like the name of an obscure F. Scott Fitzgerald story, but the truth is, The Great Gatsby author’s favorite liquor is enjoying a popularity not seen since those Prohibition days.”

Not bad for a college dropout.

It’s Fitzgerald—ahem, Amory Blaine’s—college years at Princeton—“the pleasantest country club in America”—that are immortalized in This Side of Paradise, the book that catapulted the author to fame in 1920 at the age of only 23. Within three days, 3000 copies of the slim novel were sold—no extra charge for typos, since Mr. Fitzgerald could have benefited from Spellcheck. While This Side of Paradise did not prove to be Fitzgerald’s most praised book, it was his best seller. In its first year, “Paradise” was reprinted eight times. By the end of 1921, almost 50,000 copies were sold, and Fitzgerald’s income ballooned from only $879 in 1919 to $18,850—nearly $250,000 in today’s dollars. While critics didn’t celebrate the novel with unilateral praise, and some found it insufferably puerile, adjectives like “honest,” “clever” and “astonishing” nonetheless cropped up in most reviews. At the very least, next to other potboilers of the day—every one by authors forgotten by today’s readers—This Side of Paradise displayed originality.

 The novel’s freshness may have sprung from a combination of desperation and chutzpah. 

The novel’s freshness may have sprung from a combination of desperation and chutzpah. Fitzgerald submitted his manuscript twice before it was accepted, thanks to the championing by Scribner’s youngest editor, Maxwell Perkins, who encouraged Fitzgerald to revise considerably. Not only did the author switch from first-person to third-person, but he also retitled the manuscript from The Romantic Egotist, picking “This Side of Paradise” from a Rupert Brooke poem. In addition, he laced it with his own poetry, portions of a play he’d written at Princeton, and passages from love letters sent to him by Zelda Sayre, a flirtatious flapper he’d met in Montgomery, Alabama. Fitzgerald’s efforts paid off both professionally and personally. Not only did he sell the book, he got the girl. With success pending, Zelda, who’d broken off with her suitor because she doubted his ability to support her, accepted his proposal. The young lovers were married in the rectory of Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral on April 3, 1919, a week after Scribner’s said “yes.”

Zelda’s literary stunt double appears twice in This Side of Paradise, as Rosalind (“dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty” with “a voice musical as a waterfall”) and Eleanor (“I’m too bright for most men, and yet have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect…”). But just as Amory becomes disenchanted with Princeton, he walks away from love—always when his dream-girls start to display irritating signs of individuality.

A prescient early reviewer, Burton Roscoe, observed that “ten years from now, Fitzgerald could not have written this book . . . At 35, caution would have killed its disarming frankness.” That proved to be true, with Fitzgerald’s later books strategically plotted, dissecting people far more complex and well-formed. This Side of Paradise is a consummate coming-of-age novel that accurately reflects its era. If you want the complete Fitzgerald experience, do not miss the novel that launched an iconic career.

Feature image: “This Side of Paradise dust jacket” by W. E. Hill, published by Scribners. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Imagining lost books in the age of Cambridge Analytica

Last spring, I—along with a substantial portion of my friends and acquaintances—followed some instructions I’d read online and successfully downloaded a copy of my Facebook data. Amongst other things, I was reminded of the fact that I had joined the social network on 21 February 2007 at 06:02 UTC and that my (semi-accurate, but handily alphabetized) list of commercially viable interests includes “Academic journal,” “Adaptation,” “Atlantic Ocean,” “Beast (Canadian band),” “Books,” “Cooperation,” “County Louth,” and “Current Events,” to name just a few. For the record, I’m really no more partial to Louth than County Tipperary, say, or Mayo, and I can’t confirm with absolute certainty that I’ve ever heard a song by Beast. At any rate, scrolling back through a written history of comments and conversations that I thought had long since disappeared, I experienced a disconcerting realization: by cross-referencing this Facebook data report with a trawl through my Gmail account, I could probably reconstruct with reasonable precision what I’d been up to on any given date in the previous decade. After all, when I became a Gmail user on 16 January 2006, I took Google’s claims that they’d “keep giving people more space forever” at face value and essentially stopped deleting my emails, both sent and received. This means I can now tell you, for example, that on the morning of 23 September 2008 I forgot my password for the online bookstore at Wilfrid Laurier University, where I would soon be instructing undergraduate classes on “Arthurian Traditions” and “Shakespeare and Company”; I imagine this came to my attention because I was trying to finalize the reading lists. Later that same day, I RSVP’d for my friend Jon’s upcoming birthday party—I think it was his 29th—and spent time in my Toronto apartment waiting for the delivery of a new Acer Aspire. I presume that I also ended up going to the “book history thingy from 5–7 and then drinks after” that I flagged to my boyfriend (now husband) in my online correspondence. In the age of big data and cloud storage, the old dog-ate-my-homework routine has become even less persuasive, and it can feel like nothing we’ve ever written, no matter how mundane, can be truly lost—not even those things that we might want to forget.

I don’t think it coincidental that, at approximately the same historical moment when online sites and services began (both overtly and covertly) preserving and mining our textual interactions en masse, wider culture evinced a perceptible surge of interest in the lost books of past, pre-digital eras. In my own scholarly field of early modern literary studies, this manifested, for instance, in the 2009 establishment of a wiki-style Lost Plays Database, where contributors continue to compile a wealth of information about lost English plays in the period from 1570–1642. And this attraction to lost books is not strictly academic. Various works of nonfiction aimed at broader readerships, such as Stuart Kelly’s Book of Lost Books (2005) or Giorgio van Straten’s In Search of Lost Books (first published in 2016 as Stogie di libri perduti), have capitalized upon and showcased the nostalgic allure of textual loss. What is more, a bibliophile’s hunt for a lost book of great historical and/or literary significance is a plot device that recurs with surprising regularity in recent imaginative works. It would seem that bookish lacunae are becoming ever more seductive and easily romanticized in our own, increasingly loss-resistant world.

…at approximately the same historical moment when online sites and services began (both overtly and covertly) preserving and mining our textual interactions en masse, wider culture evinced a perceptible surge of interest in the lost books of past, pre-digital eras.

Back in 2013, I found myself reading widely as I was conducting research for an article I was then writing on contemporary representations of Marlowe and the so-called School of Night. Falling somewhat outside of my ordinary research area, this initial line of enquiry alerted me, in turn, to the existence of a substantive body of popular literature in which various early modern English authors and/or their literary outputs have been fictionalized. As I began curiously sampling such works, I found myself struck by just how frequently post-millennial novels have engaged (often in strikingly similar ways) with the idea of the lost Shakespearean text, in particular—an issue to which I have returned in my more recent research. I am aware of no fewer than four novels published in relatively quick succession between 2003 and 2009 that chronicle a protagonist’s suspenseful, adventure-style quest to find either Love’s Labour’s Won or Cardenio: William Martin’s Harvard Yard, Jennifer Lee Carrell’s The Shakespeare Secret (published in the US as Interred with Their Bones), Jean Rae Baxter’s Looking for Cardenio, and A.J. Hartley’s What Time Devours. These roughly contemporaneous works share not only vital plot elements, but also particular preoccupations and themes, not the least of which is their quasi-elegiac celebration of literary loss itself (spoiler alert: in only one of these four texts is Love’s Labour’s Won or Cardenio successfully located and revived). Does this remarkably homogenous group of novels merely represent an aughties flash in the pan, or is Martin, Carrell, Baxter, and Hartley’s collective fascination with lost Shakespearean books—and, by extension, the ultimate irrecoverability of the pre-modern past—a harbinger of things to come? As I skim over my Facebook data report and probe the profundity of the 19,593 (and counting) personal conversations currently lodged in the “Primary” section of my Gmail inbox, I’m inclined to think the latter.

Featured image credit: Photo by Lin Kristensen, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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2018 Midterm Elections HQ | Oxford University Press

The United States midterm elections will decide who controls the Senate and House during the remaining years of the Trump Administration’s first term. In order for the Democrats to gain control over the House, they would need to see a net gain of 24 seats. To regain control of the Senate, Democrats would need to keep all of their seats and capture two of the Republican seats for a 51-49 majority. Of the seats up for election, 35 are held by Democrats, and nine are held by Republicans.

We’ve pulled together a collection of related books, articles, and social media content to help our readers better understand these elections. Be sure to check back each week for more Midterms 2018 content.

Build a ballot-ready bookshelf.

Not sure where to get started? We’ve put together a flowchart to help you find the Oxford resource that’s right for you!

Download the full-size flowchart as a JPEG or PDF.

Read between the headlines.

COMING SOON: a selection of articles below to read-up on some of this year’s key political issues.

Get informed.

In the lead-up to the 2018 Midterm Elections, we’ll be publishing elections-related content on the OUPBlog, Medium, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Stay tuned for weekly excerpts, quotes, quick facts, and more.

Featured image credit: “United States Capitol west front edit2” provided by Ottojula. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Animal of the month: an interactive experience with the eastern cottontail rabbit

Earlier this month, we explored the world of rabbits and facts to enhance our knowledge of the ubiquitous mammal. Now on international rabbit day, we would like to take to focus on the eastern cottontail rabbit, the most common species in North America. What makes it different from other rabbit species? What commonalities can be found across species? Hover over the icons in the picture below to learn more.

Thinglink image credit: Eastern Cottontail by Gareth Rasberry. CC BY-SA 3.0 US via Wikimedia Commons .

Featured image credit: Eastern Cottontail Rabbit (Sylvilagus floridanus) by Jim, the Photographer. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Paradigms lost, wisdom gained

Tycho Brahe lived with a hand-crafted nose made of brass after his real one was sliced off in a duel. Mr. Brahe was a renowned 16th-century Danish astronomer and a great empirical scientist whose data were used to formulate Johannes Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion. But for our purposes, Tycho Brahe is especially interesting for something other than his prosthetic schnoz or his contributions to astronomy, but for a notable mistake.

Confronted with his own irrefutable evidence that the known planets of his day (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) revolved around the Sun, Brahe was nonetheless committed to the prevailing biblical view of a geocentric universe. So he devised an ingenious model in which those planets indeed revolved around the Sun … but with the resulting conglomeration obediently circling a central and immobile Earth!

Modern versions of Brahe’s Blunder abound, in which people accept – begrudgingly – what is forced upon them, whilst desperately clinging to their pre-existing beliefs: what they want to be true. It’s a version of denial in which the truth isn’t so much rejected outright as finessed, leaving the individual with a version of reality that feels satisfying but falls short of accuracy. Recent prominent cases include granting that the Earth’s climate is heating up (the data are as clear as that confirming planetary orbits), but refusing to accept that human beings are responsible, or agreeing that evolution is real (when it comes to microbial antibiotic resistance, for example) but denying that it produced human beings. A good paradigm is a tough thing to lose.

This, in turn, may contribute to what appears to be a “war on science” these days, manifested most notably by a triad of resistances: to evolution, to human-caused climate change, and to medical vaccinations. There are doubtless many reasons for this unfortunate situation, including religious fundamentalism (evolution), economic interest on the part of fossil fuel companies and their minions (global warming), and misinformation deriving at least in part from a wholly discredited but nonetheless influential medical report (vaccinations).

Of course, other factors are also at work, but an especially important contributor to this anti-science epidemic – and one that hasn’t received the attention it warrants – is the simple fact that scientific “wisdom” isn’t static, combined with the widespread public reluctance to modify an opinion once established. Just consider how much easier it is to change your clothes than to change your mind. Most people aren’t as inventive as Tycho Brahe, and so reversals of scientific consensus have left many people feeling jerked around, and thus, confused and increasingly resistant to the whole enterprise. This resistance is all the stronger when new paradigms reduce our status, as happened when the Earth was demoted from the center of the universe to a small planet orbiting an insignificant star in the corner of a relatively minor galaxy.

Much of the power of science derives, paradoxically, from the fact that – unlike opinion, whether public or private – it is open to dramatic changes if the evidence so demands. Scientific paradigms are constantly tested and revised, which in turns leads to the false impression that science itself is somehow unreliable. Most people, in short, have a hard time dealing with the accumulating debris of scientific paradigms lost – to the extent that confidence in science itself has become a victim. Ultimately, however, science is uniquely and profoundly reliable; indeed it offers our most dependable insights into the nature of the real world and of ourselves (allowing, of course, for the malleability of its wisdom… which is a crucial part of that wisdom).

In the past, the death of certain paradigms has been largely metabolized by the informed but non-professional public. Thus, most citizens don’t have much difficulty – at least these days – replacing the Ptolemaic, earth-centered system with its Copernican, sun-centered version, or superseding Newtonian physics by Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics (so long as they aren’t asked to explain the latter two!), or even recognizing, with Freud, that much of human mental life occurs in our unconscious.

There have been many more highly specific but nonetheless consequential tremors in the received wisdom of biological science that now constitute paradigms lost. For example, we know that not all “germs” are bad (many – perhaps the majority – are necessary for a healthy life), that contrary to earlier dogma, many neurons are capable of regenerating, cellular differentiation isn’t necessarily a one-way street (“Hello, Dolly!”), seemingly “altruistic” behavior arises as a result of natural selection and thus isn’t evidence for divine intervention and although individual lives are fragile, life itself is remarkably robust (living organisms have been found in some of the bleakest, most toxic and extreme environments).

Milton’s great poem, intended to “justify the ways of God to men,” described the consequences of Adam and Eve disobeying God and eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Ours is a lesser punishment: loss of paradigms instead of paradise. But in the end, what justifies science to men and women is something more valuable and, yes, even more, poetic than Milton’s masterpiece: the opportunity to consume the fruits of our own continually re-evaluated, deeply rooted, profoundly nourishing Tree of Scientific Knowledge. And to do so without committing Brahe’s blunder.

To do so, however, we need to know that in science, a paradigm lost is merely another phrase for wisdom gained and that in the process we can see the world and ourselves through a glass brightly, and not at all darkly.

Featured image credit: “light-bulb-glow-lighting” by Aritio. CC0 via Pixabay .

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Are spirits in space? Exploding spirits and absolute theories of space and time

Humans exist in space. Our bodies are three dimensional: we have length, breadth, and depth. In the 17th century, philosophers worried about what else exists in space. Teapots. Trees. Planets. All these things seem to exist in space too. What about spirits?

Spirits are souls, the source of a person’s consciousness and emotions. Descartes characterised spirits as ‘thinking things’. Spirits aren’t solid or blocky like material bodies. Spirits are immaterial. Most Judaeo-Christian systems believe our spirits will survive bodily death. In the afterlife, our spirits will join God, an eternal and infinite spirit.

Spirits seem quite different from human bodies, teapots, or trees. This led philosophers to ask, “Are spirits in space?” Until the 17th century, thinkers generally held one of two theories.

Nullibism claims spirits do not exist in space. Spirits are utterly unlike human bodies or trees, and they are non-spatial. An attraction of this view is its simplicity: spirits aren’t in space, end of story. A problem with this view is that some spirits do seem to be in space: your soul seems to be where your body is. When my body walks to the grocery store, my spirit goes with it. When my body gets on a train to Paris, my spirit goes to. If my body is in London, I can’t send my spirit to New York.

Holenmerism claims spirits do exist in space, yet in a very different way to bodies. Consider a particular body, a tree. Its parts are ‘spread out’ through space: the roots are under the ground, the trunk emerges in one place, and its leaves are spread through different places in the air. In contrast, holenmerists believe a spirit is not spread out through space. Even though your spirit is ‘in’ your whole body, your spirit doesn’t have parts. The whole of your spirit is in each part of your body, so your whole spirit is in your left little finger and your heart and your nose. The attraction of holenmerism is that it explains why your spirit seems to be where your body is: your spirit is where your body is. Your spirit co-exists in space with your body. The problem with holenmerism is that it is difficult to understand, and sounds downright strange.

Nonetheless, holenmerism was defended by many philosophical greats, including arguably Plotinus, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, and Newton. Consequently, it came as a shock in the 1650s when holenmerism was vociferously attacked by English philosophers.

One critique came from Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 Leviathan. Hobbes ridiculed the ‘absurdities’ of holenmerism, the idea that a man’s whole soul can be ”All of it in his little Finger, and All of it in every other Part of his Body”. Hobbes’ attack didn’t come as too much of a surprise. Hobbes was once described as a ‘confident Exploder’ of spirits out of the world: he famously denied the existence of spirits, including arguably God. What did come as a surprise was the critique from Henry More, a devout Christian. In his 1659 Immortality of the Soul, More argued holenmerism is a ‘mad Jingle’, verging on ‘profound Nonsense’. Unlike Hobbes, More didn’t use anti-holenmerism arguments to deny the existence of spirits. Instead, More got creative.

More reasoned, but you can’t chop off a piece of my soul. More compared spirits to light. Just as sunlight spreads through a forest yet can’t be divided, so a spirit spreads through a body yet can’t be divided.

More’s 1671 Enchiridion Metaphysicum rejects nullibism and holenmerism  (More actually invented these labels in the course of making his arguments.) The book describes these theories as ‘two vast mounds of darkness’, and sets out a new, alternative third theory. More believes spirits do exist in space, yet he can’t stomach holenmerism. Where does that leave him? More argues spirits exist in space, in a way quite similar to how bodies do. Like bodies, spirits are spread out through space. One part of my soul is in my heart, and another part is in my nose. The difference between the parts of a spirit, and the parts of a body, is that the parts of a spirit cannot be separated from each other. You can chop my finger off, More reasoned, but you can’t chop off a piece of my soul. More compared spirits to light. Just as sunlight spreads through a forest yet can’t be divided, so a spirit spreads through a body yet can’t be divided.

This new theory provided More with a sensible way of explaining how human spirits co-exist in space with bodies. Ultimately, this led him to a new account of space. More was coming to believe that space was ‘absolute’: infinite, eternal, and real. If you were listing The Contents of the Universe, space would be on it. Yet, the devout More worried, how could anything other than God be infinite, eternal, and real?

His solution lies in the fact that God, an infinite and eternal spirit, is spread out through space. If God and space are infinite and eternal, and God is spread through space, perhaps God is space. More concluded that space is God’s immensity or presence in the world. Similarly, time or duration is God’s eternity.

More’s theory of how spirits exist in space didn’t catch on, but his absolute theories of space and time did. They were taken up by all kinds of thinkers, including arguably John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and Newton. Although these absolute space and time theories have evolved, their descendents are still widely held today. Although these absolute space and time theories have evolved, their descendents are still widely held today. Amongst other things, More’s theory of time is responsible for changing the way Europeans perceived mountains.

I don’t know whether spirits exist, although I lean towards Hobbes’ view we should explode them out of the world. I do know that, archaic though these debates sound, they are crucial to understanding the history of our space and time theories.

Featured image credit: Forest, wilderness, ray and sunlight by Timothy Meinberg. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Science, where are we going? From intellectual passion to a market-driven system

With over 10 million active researchers, more than 2 million scientific articles published each year, and an uncontrolled spread of bibliometric indicators, contemporary science is undergoing a profound change that is modifying consolidated procedures, ethical principles that were deemed inalienable and traditional mechanisms for the validation of scientific outputs that have worked successfully for the last century. To give an idea of what I am talking about, just look at the picture of the famous Solvay Conference of 1927 on “Electrons and photons”. Of the 29 participants in the picture, 17 of them were Nobel Prize winners, and the others were giants in the field; their scientific contributions are now part of university textbooks. This was a small conference, with a huge concentration of talent. Today, in physics alone, meetings are attended by 10,000 or more scientists, and in medicine it is not unusual to have meetings with 20,000 and even 50,000 attendees.

Image credit: ‘Fifth Solvay conference on “Electrons and photons” (1927)’ by I Harsten.  CC BY 2.0  via Flickr.

Just a few numbers are sufficient to give an idea of how things have changed from the time when I started my career. During my PhD at the Freie Univesität in Berlin in the early ‘80s, I regularly went to the library. Among others, I browsed the Journal of Physical Chemistry. In 1980, the magazine was publishing an issue every two weeks, for a total of about 3700 pages in the entire year. It was already twice the amount published by the same journal 20 years before, in 1960. But for me it was possible to follow almost every article published in the area in which I was active at the time. Today the journal has been divided into four parts, each dedicated to a sub-sector of physical chemistry, publishing one issue per week, with more than 170 issues and a total of 60,000 pages per year. And this for a single journal! Needless to say that the number of journals in physical chemistry simply exploded since that time, as happened in every other field. The frustrating result is that the amount of information produced is much higher than what one can reasonably read, digest, and utilize.

The exponential growth of academic research that we have witnessed over the last 20 years, combined with the emergence of modern communication tools in the internet era, have contributed profoundly to changing the way science is done. We assist in a steady growth in publications, however, this does not correspond to an equal growth of ideas and topics, as documented by a recent Science paper. While the number of scientists grows exponentially, research funding worldwide grows only linearly, which results in an extremely competitive environment. Under such a strong pressure, young scientists feel they have to produce miracles in order to emerge, secure an academic job, or simply get funded. And cases of scientific misconduct (plagiarism, fraud, data falsification, irreproducible results) are also growing. From a passion for a few motivated and inspired individuals, science has become a profession for many, perhaps too many.

There are a number of consequences. The main one is the emergence of an industry that revolves around science, which creates the concrete risk that science will end up being entirely dominated by market laws. Scientific publishers, agencies that rank universities and research centres, companies that assist with the writing of research papers and projects, and organizations offering a long list of scientific (or pseudo-scientific) meetings in beautiful locations are just some of the entities that benefit from the economic activities that blossomed around the production of scientific knowledge. With 10 million active scientists as potential customers, this is all but surprising.

The number of non-reproducible scientific results is increasing, in particular in clinical studies. Image credit: ‘Study Participant Receives NIAID/GSK Candidate Ebola Vaccine’ by NIAID. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Alongside solid, trustable and respectable publishers and journals, today we assist the proliferation of materials from publishers of doubtful quality, journals of little or no relevance, and to the rise of the very dangerous phenomenon of predatory journals, including open access journals that have been created with the only purpose to make profit without any quality checks on the papers published.

Science remains fundamental in responding to the great challenges of our society (aging, overpopulation, energy supply, economic sustainability, and so on). Science has robust internal mechanisms of control and verification of the advancement of scientific knowledge. But an overproduction of scientific results, often of doubtful quality and low reproducibility, can cast serious doubts and reduce the credibility of the entire system. The risk is an overall discredit of the research community, with serious consequences for our society.

We need to change direction. We need to progressively modify our evaluation mechanisms, focusing increasingly on quality rather than quantity. We need to convey to our students and young co-workers the fundamental ethical principles on which science is based. We need to rediscover the interest in discussing, thinking, understanding and sometimes proving ourselves wrong, and we need to make time for it. Changing consolidated attitudes and research standards will not be easy. But it is time to start discussing these issues, and becoming aware of the dangers associated to some emerging trends. Before is too late.

Featured image credit: ‘VLA Radio Telescope, Socorro, New Mexico at Dawn’ by Donald Giannatti. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Selecting repertoire for upper voices – a conductor’s perspective

There is plenty of wonderful repertoire dating back to Hildegard von Bingen through the Renaissance, Schubert, Brahms, Holst, and Poulenc, for SATB choirs, but conductors of upper voice choirs don’t have the same breadth of older music to choose from. Fortunately, there is now a huge amount of new music and arrangements being written for upper voice choirs, meaning that conductors have some fantastic options to choose from.

However, as well as the usual musical and thematic programming considerations, there are some other more specific criteria to look for when deciding whether or not to add a piece to your upper voice choir’s repertoire.

Choosing texts appropriate to young people can be tricky. Most teenagers don’t want to sing texts that are childish or could be condescending in any way. Adult humour is different to that of young people, and often ‘funny’ texts that work for young children or even adult female choirs in an ironic way, don’t work so well for teenagers or university students. Take care that the text is appropriate: themes of love can work for all ages and genders, but care does need to be taken with the choice. Themes of nature or seasons and sacred texts, in English or other languages, work well for all ages and genders, as long as the subject isn’t too obscure, and has broader themes, images, or messages beyond the specific text.

Immaculata University Music Department Spring 2012 Choral Concert by Jim, the Photographer. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Another very important consideration when selecting music for upper voices, particularly for children and young people, is the range of the parts. For example, alto parts shouldn’t sit too low. Although you may need your alto part to go to a low G, avoid selecting music for young people where the part sits for too long below middle C. Also check that your top soprano part isn’t too high for too long; sopranos will be comfortable singing up to a top E and will be able to reach G and A, but their part shouldn’t sit above E for a significant amount of time. Make sure there is interest in all the vocal lines and that the lines all flow and are rewarding to sing. It’s great if the middle or bottom parts can also sing the melody at some point and are not set too low in their range.

When choosing music for young people, the harmonic language doesn’t have to be simplistic or cheesy. It’s possible to find music with fairly straightforward lines, but with interest and imagination, even in arrangements. This also applies to the accompaniment. It can be very useful to have some repertoire with straightforward accompaniment for young people and community choirs, but so often these are simplistic or ‘plonky’. Try to look for imaginative writing with the variety of textures that the keyboard can provide.

Whether we are programming music for upper-voices or SATB choirs, good word-setting is crucial. All singers like to feel that they can engage with the text. Check that the composer has set the text to allow them to tell the complete story as much as possible, avoiding (unless specifically using a technique for word-painting) breaking up words or segments of text in parts that don’t have the melodic line.

It is more difficult to get singers engaged with the words and the meaning behind them if they only get to sing part of a word or indeed if words are missing from a line of text that ends up with their part not making any grammatical sense! Make sure that all stressed syllables end up on stronger beats of the bar; think of the natural rhythm of the spoken text. It makes it harder for the singer to navigate the text (and then memorise the piece) if it feels wrong rhythmically.

So, the recipe for a piece your choir will love is a good choice of text, interest and flow in all the lines, care of range, and of course a sprinkling of a composer’s own musical magic dust!

Featured image: Birds flying at sunset by Phillip Bishop / EyeEm . 

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