Boltzmann’s Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivier Darrigol
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Mechanics ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The Past

In this last chapter, the reader will find synthetic reflections on Boltzmann’s sources, on the basic components of his theory, and on the ways it was received. The basic components are arranged according to the natural order in which they occurred in Boltzmann’s theory making: constructive tools, chief constructions, crucial predictions, underlying concepts, bridges between different approaches. To fully understand his enterprise, one must embrace his theory as an entire whole organism. This is a difficult and time-consuming task, which this book is meant to ease. In the past, Boltzmann’s readers fortunately did not need a historian’s thoroughness in order to benefit from his multiple constructs and insights. These elements, even taken out of context, had enough power to propel diverging theoretical projects from Boltzmann’s times to ours. In many ways, Boltzmann’s theory anticipated the richness, diversity, and residual opacity of modern statistical mechanics.

Green Comedy

2018 ◽  
pp. 249-262
Author(s):  
Steve Mentz
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Natural Structure ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Past ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Order And Disorder ◽  
Ecological Thinking

The marriage-driven and reconciliatory structures of Shakespeare’s comic form resemble traditional ecological understandings of the interconnections in nature. Over the past forty years, literary ecocriticism has explored parallels between the way literary texts are formed and ecological structures. One seminal claim that helped launch the ecocritical movement in the 1970s was biologist Joseph Meeker’s assertion that comedy is the genre of ecological harmony. This chapter tests Meeker’s adaptive theory by looking at As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Putting Meeker’s sentimental notions of natural harmony in touch with post-equilibrium ecological thinking and twenty-first-century ecocritical work that recognizes catastrophe as a ‘natural’ structure produces a more dynamic notion of comedy. By juxtaposing green pastoral spaces with their blue oceanic opposites, Shakespeare’s comedies offer global and expansive notions of natural order and disorder, ones better suited to an age of ecological disaster.

Prediction of Thermal Contact Conductance in Vacuum by Statistical Mechanics

1998 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Leung ◽  
C. K. Hsieh ◽  
D. Y. Goswami
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Mechanics ◽  
Statistical Model ◽  
Thermal Contact ◽  
Thermal Contact Conductance ◽  
Contact Conductance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Interfacial Pressure ◽  
Order Of Magnitude ◽  
Good Order ◽  
True Contact

Despite substantial theoretical studies of thermal contact conductance in the past, the application of statistical mechanics in this field has never been attempted. This paper addresses contact conductance from macroscopic and microscopic viewpoints in order to demonstrate the promise of the statistical mechanics approach. In the first part of the derivation, the Boltzmann statistical model is applied to determine the most probable distribution of asperity heights for a homogeneously, isotropically rough surface. The result found is equivalent to Gaussian distribution, which has only been assumed but not rigorously substantiated in the past. Subsequently, the Boltzmann statistical model is applied to predict the distribution of true contact spots when two such surfaces are pressed together, resulting in a relationship between the total thermal contact conductance and the relative interfacial pressure. The numerical results are compared to published empirical data, and a good order-of-magnitude agreement is found.

scholarly journals AVANT-GARDE MEXICAN REVOULTIONARY NATIONALISM: UNIVERSALIZATION OR COSMOPOLITANIZATION ? DAVID ALFARO SIQUEIROS’ “THREE CALLS…” AND MANUEL MAPLES ARCE’S ACTUAL NO. 1 (1921)

ARTis ON ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 57-66
Author(s):  
David Murrieta Flores
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
International Context ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Specific Relationship

This essay compares two foundational manifestos of the Mexican 20th century avant-garde, both from 1921: David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “Three calls…” and Manuel Maples Arce’s Actual No. 1. Resulting from the ideological milieu of the Mexican Revolution, these texts contain distinct proposals to think about the place of the nation within an international context, after the successful entry of Mexico to modernity via revolution. In the muralist Siqueiros’ case, to think the Mexican nation implies a process of what he calls ‘universalization’, and which is driven primarily by a classical understanding of the ‘natural order’ and a specific relationship to the past. In the estridentista Maples Arce’s case, his call for a ‘cosmopolitanization’ derives from the notion that modernity is an implacable process, the access to which necessitates no relationship to the past and which rejects the ‘natural order’ in favor of a conception of the modern as urban.

Individualism in Twelfth-Century Religion. Some Further Reflections

1980 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Morris
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emergence Of Institutions ◽  
Western Civilisation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First Time

In an article in the last number of this JOURNAL, Caroline Walker Bynum drew attention to the way in which historians during the past few decades have written of the twelfth century in terms which would once have been thought more appropriate to the fifteenth. We have become used to hearing about the twelfth-century renaissance, about the classical revival and the growth of humanism and about the discovery of the individual. The period has been credited with a rapidly growing awareness of the regularity of the natural order and with an increased confidence in the power of reason. The idea has now been widely accepted that the twelfth century saw the emergence of institutions and sensitivities which were to become characteristic of western civilisation, but which previously did not exist or played only a subordinate cultural role. It is then, as R. R. Bolgar has expressed it, that we can discern for the first time the lineaments of modern man. This is obviously not to say that the attitudes displayed were the same as those in subsequent centuries; it would be absurd to look for the humanism of the fifteenth century, the rationalism of the eighteenth, or the individualism of the nineteenth, in the writings of Cistercians or magitri. Some phrases will strike us by their modernity, but the context of thinking is usually different in important ways from our own. The question is not whether there is a cultural identity between the twelfth century and the modern world, for there obviously is not, but whether in the twelfth century we can discern elements of respect for humanity, reason and individuality which were largely lacking during the preceding five hundred years, and which were to have a lasting impact on the growth of.western culture.

Interlanguage Variability in Narrative Discourse: Style Shifting in the Use of the Past Tense

1987 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rod Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Planning Time ◽  
Linguistic Feature ◽  
The Past ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Style Shifting ◽  
Determining Factor

This study examines style shifting in the use of three past tense morphemes (regular past, irregular past, and past copula) by 17 intermediate L2 learners of English. It differs from previous studies in that style shifting is examined within a single discourse mode—narrative discourse—according to the amount of planning time made available. Data were collected under three conditions: (a) planned writing, (b) planned speech, and (c) unplanned speech. Different patterns of style shifting were observed for three morphemes, suggesting that the nature of the linguistic feature under investigation is a determining factor. For regular past, greatest accuracy was most evident in planned writing and least evident in unplanned speech, with planned speech intermediate. Little style shifting took place in irregular past, whereas style shifting for past copula occurred only between planned speech and unplanned speech. The three conditions produced different accuracy orders for regular and irregular past, suggesting that the so-called “natural” order may not be a stable phenomenon. The paper concludes with a number of important questions requiring further investigation.

Living in the past: urban, rural and ethnic themes in the 1992 and 1996 elections in Ghana

1999 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Nugent
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Democratic Consolidation ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Democratic Transitions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Opposition Parties

A comparative literature on democratic transitions in Africa has sought out points of similarity across the continent in order to yield generalisations about the prospects for democratic consolidation. The underlying contention of this article is that history needs to be taken seriously in any such exercise, not least because politicians and voters alike are guided by their readings of the past. These, in turn, have a bearing on democratic prospects. The first part of this article demonstrates how, in the run-up to the 1996 Ghanaian elections, the opposition parties were guided by an assessment of their historic strengths. The parties which belonged to one or other of the great traditions – Nkrumahism and the Busia/Danquah tradition – regarded themselves as the natural rulers and treated the bearers of the rival standard as the principal threat under normal conditions. The ruling National Democratic Congress, which was regarded by each of them as a mere usurper of the natural order, exhibited a much more ambiguous attitude towards history. The second half of the article scrutinises the election results and seeks to establish the underlying patterns. Particular attention is paid to rural/urban and ethnic/regional voting patterns. The article concludes that while the opposition improved on its 1992 performance, its inroads were actually fairly limited. It further posits that the opposition parties of both traditions fundamentally misread the historical evidence and hence misjudged the scale of the task confronting them. It concludes by raising the possibility that the misfit between perceptions and electoral realities could prove destabilising to Ghana's fledgling democracy.

scholarly journals Darwin and the Tree of Life: the roots of the evolutionary tree

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nils Petter Hellström
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Tree Of Life ◽  
Evolutionary Tree ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Evolutionary Trees ◽  
The Past

To speak of evolutionary trees and of the Tree of Life has become routine in evolution studies, despite recurrent objections. Because it is not immediately obvious why a tree is suited to represent evolutionary history – woodland trees do not have their buds in the present and their trunks in the past, for a start – the reason why trees make sense to us is historically and culturally, not scientifically, predicated. To account for the Tree of Life, simultaneously genealogical and cosmological, we must explore the particular context in which Darwin declared the natural order to be analogous to a pedigree, and in which he communicated this vision by recourse to a tree. The name he gave his tree reveals part of the story, as before Darwin's appropriation of it, the Tree of Life grew in Paradise at the heart of God's creation.

Observations of the continuum near the galactic centre

1967 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 405
Author(s):  
F. J. Kerr
Keyword(s):  
Galactic Centre ◽  
The Past ◽  
Centre Region ◽  
The Continuum

A continuum survey of the galactic-centre region has been carried out at Parkes at 20 cm wavelength over the areal11= 355° to 5°,b11= -3° to +3° (Kerr and Sinclair 1966, 1967). This is a larger region than has been covered in such surveys in the past. The observations were done as declination scans.

The Origin of the Moon and its Relationship to the Origin of the Solar System

1962 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 133-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold C. Urey
Keyword(s):  
Solar System ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Origin Of The Moon

During the last 10 years, the writer has presented evidence indicating that the Moon was captured by the Earth and that the large collisions with its surface occurred within a surprisingly short period of time. These observations have been a continuous preoccupation during the past years and some explanation that seemed physically possible and reasonably probable has been sought.

On The Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. W. Small
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

It is generally accepted that history is an element of culture and the historian a member of society, thus, in Croce's aphorism, that the only true history is contemporary history. It follows from this that when there occur great changes in the contemporary scene, there must also be great changes in historiography, that the vision not merely of the present but also of the past must change.

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