scholarly journals Was physics ever deterministic? The historical basis of determinism and the image of classical physics

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marij van Strien
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Equations Of Motion ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Classical Physics ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Historical Basis

AbstractDeterminism is generally regarded as one of the main characteristics of classical physics, that is, the physics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. However, an inquiry into eighteenth and nineteenth century physics shows that the aim of accounting for all phenomena on the basis of deterministic equations of motion remained far out of reach. Famous statements of universal determinism, such as those of Laplace and Du Bois-Reymond, were made within a specific context and research program and did not represent a majority view. I argue that in this period, determinism was often an expectation rather than an established result, and that especially toward the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was often thought of as a presupposition of physics: physicists such as Mach, Poincaré and Boltzmann regarded determinism as a feature of scientific research, rather than as a claim about the world. It is only retrospectively that an image was created according to which classical physics was uniformly deterministic.

Einstein: the classical physicist

2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.S Rowlinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Quantum Theory ◽  
Statistical Mechanics ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Physics ◽  
Foundations Of Physics ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Einstein is remembered for his contributions to the re-ordering of the foundations of physics in the first years of the twentieth century. Much of his achievement was, however, based on the classical physics of the late nineteenth century and it was his work on statistical mechanics that underlay his first contributions to quantum theory. This essay is an account of an aspect of his achievement that is often overlooked.

Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nile Green
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction looks at the methods used by individuals, organizations, and states to spread multiple versions of Islam around the world. Since the late nineteenth century, publications, missions, congresses, and pilgrimages have contributed to the communication and evolution of Islam. At the start of the twentieth century, the infrastructure of European empire allowed for the widespread communication of Islamic beliefs. During a period of secularism in the mid-twentieth century, global Islam became more accessible and, in some cases, more political. How have today’s broadcasting and smartphone technologies changed the face of global Islam? Will communication technologies reconcile the contradictions between variations of the faith, or will they create new ones?

A New Pablik: Abdul Halim Sharar, volunteerism, and the Anjuman-e Dar-us-Salam in late nineteenth-century India

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1049-1090 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. RYAN PERKINS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Effective Mass ◽  
Voluntary Association ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

AbstractIn the second half of the nineteenth century an increasing number of Indians entered the world of volunteerism and public activism. One such individual was the prolific Urdu writer Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926), who served as the secretary for a short-lived voluntary association, the Anjuman-e Dar-us-Salam, during the late 1880s in Lucknow, India. Using readers’ letters as printed in Sharar's widely circulating monthly periodical, Dil Gudāz, this article seeks to understand the reasons behind the increasing role of volunteerism as part and parcel of a modern sharīf Muslim identity in the post-1857 period. Having adopted the role of a community activist, Sharar began using his periodical, soon after its inception, to mobilize and recruit his readers to participate in what he described as a passionate movement sweeping through the ‘Islami pablik’. Both rhetorical and descriptive, such an idea provided hope for a divided and struggling community to overcome the divisions that were central to their many challenges in a post-1857 world. Through the study of the vicissitudes and challenges faced by Sharar and his fellow activists, this article underscores the ways in which public activism and volunteerism simultaneously represented the possibility for Muslims to use their own resources to bring about real social and political change, and also reminded them of their shortcomings and the limits of an informal activism. This article seeks to show that ultimately, even such ‘failed’ and ephemeral attempts were foundational for more effective mass mobilization efforts in the following decades and into the twentieth century.

Glazunov and the String Quartet

Tempo ◽  
1965 ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Gerald Abraham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chamber Music ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Music ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The Russian string quartet has a considerably longer history than the Russian symphony; Alyabiev wrote his first string quartet in 1815, to say nothing of the three quartets by a certain Taneev—possibly an ancestor of one or both of the two late-nineteenth-century Taneevs—published by Breitkopf at the end of the eighteenth century, of which the last traceable copies seem to have been destroyed in the Dresden holocaust of 1945. Yet the quartet has never achieved the importance in Russian music that it enjoys in other countries; numerically there are plenty of quartets but they are the stepchildren of Russian music. The Balakirev circle was in its early days actively hostile to chamber music, though Borodin eventually conquered his friends by his two fine compositions. Tchaikovsky's three are not as bad as seems to be commonly supposed but they can hardly be reckoned among his masterpieces, and the world would be little poorer if it were for ever deprived of the quartets of Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov. The only nineteenth-century Russians who took the quartet seriously enough to write a whole series of them were Glazunov and S.I. Taneev (whose unrelated or only distantly related namesake, A. S. Taneev, also produced three respectably written but very lightweight quartets), and their only twentieth-century successors have been Myaskovsky and Shostakovich.

Which Mystic has the Revelation?

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-291
Author(s):  
James R. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Basic Point ◽  
Positive Side ◽  
Perennial Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
World Report

Since the late nineteenth century, studies of mysticism have presented us with two contrasting conclusions. The first is that mystics all over the world report basically the same experience, and the second is that there are great differences among the reports, and possibly among the experiences. On the positive side there are such works as Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, with its claim that all mystics say that all beings are manifestations of a Divine Ground, that men learn of this by direct intuition, that men have two natures, one phenomenal and one eternal, and that identification with his eternal nature is the purpose of man. Walter Stace supports this view, in a modified way, with his observation that, while each mystic seems to advance a peculiar explanation of his experience, their statements collectively exhibit strong similarities. Mystics commonly report a consciousness of unity, carrying with it feelings of objectivity, blessedness, and holiness. They describe their experience in paradoxical language, and say that ultimately it is ineffable. These twentieth-century observations are repetitions of those of William James, so that this basic point has become a cliché, and, as R. C. Zaehner says, ‘We have been told ad nauseum that mysticism is the highest expression of religion and that it appears in all ages and in all places in a more or less identical form, often in a religious milieu that would seem to be the reverse of propitious.’

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Chinese toms in the making of the drum kit: Localization and exoticism

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
New Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw the drum kit emerge as an assemblage of musical instruments that was central to much new music of the time and especially to the rise of jazz. This article is a study of Chinese drums in the making of the drum kit. The notions of localization and exoticism are applied as conceptual tools for interpreting the place of Chinese drums in the early drum kit. Why were distinctly Chinese drums used in the early drum kit? How did the Chinese drums shape the future of the drum kit? The drum kit has been at the heart of most popular music throughout the twentieth century to the present day, and, as such, this article will be beneficial to educators, practitioners and scholars of popular music education.

scholarly journals Leprosy and the elusive M. leprae: colonial and imperial medical exchanges in the nineteenth century

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 13-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Disease Models ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Morbid Anatomy ◽  
Models Of Disease

In the 1800s, humoral understandings of leprosy successively give way to disease models based on morbid anatomy, physiopathology, and bacteriology. Linkages between these disease models were reinforced by the ubiquitous seed/soil metaphor deployed both before and after the identification of M. leprae. While this metaphor provided a continuous link between medical descriptions, Henry Vandyke Carter's On leprosy (1874) marks a convergence of different models of disease. Simultaneously, this metaphor can be traced in popular and medical debates in the late nineteenth century, accompanying fears of a resurgence of leprosy in Europe. Later the mapping of the genome ushers in a new model of disease but, ironically, while leprosy research draws its logic from a view of the world in which a seed and soil metaphor expresses many different aspects of the activity of the disease, the bacillus itself continues to be unreceptive to cultivation.

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