Earth, sky and prayer in harmony: aspects of the interesting life of Father Edward Pigot, SJ, BA, MB, BCh (1858-1929), Part 2 (1911-1929)

2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Branagan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Solar Radiation ◽  
Solar Eclipse ◽  
Earth Tides ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
World War ◽  
Eclipse Observations

Edward Francis Pigot (1858-1929) spent the last twenty-four years of his life as Director of the Riverview Observatory of the Jesuit St Ignatius ‘Riverview’ College, Sydney. The onset of World War I caused the cancellation of the proposed International Seismological Congress in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1914. But he received plans of Galitsin's seismograph and one was later built in Sydney and installed at Riverview Observatory. From 1914, in addition to seismology Pigot participated in studies of earth deformation, earth tides, Foucault pendulums and solar radiation. In 1919, in preparation for astronomical work at Riverview, Pigot visited major US observatories. His support of US astronomers in the 1922 solar eclipse observations played a part in the attempts to confirm Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

Verifying the theory of relativity

1976 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-260 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
World War ◽  
Clay Pipes ◽  
Egyptian Government ◽  
White Clay

THE events I want to talk about took place more than fifty years ago. They are centred during World War I and the years immediately following. The principal actors in those events are famous men; they were, at least to their contemporaries, among the great men of science. I am not in a position to judge whether those men will be treated with the same reverence today as they were during my years in Cambridge, in the early and in the middle 1930s. Still, I hope that none of us will feel inclined to be disrespectful of the men and events I shall recall. Let me begin, then, with a conversation that took place in the Senior Combination Room in Trinity College, after dinner in hall, during the Christmas recess of 1933. During the Christmas recess, very few people normally dine in the College. On this particular occasion there were only five of us: Lord Rutherford, Sir Arthur Eddington, Sir Maurice Amos (at one time, during the 1920s, the Chief Judicial Advisor to the Egyptian government), Dr Patrick Du Val (a distinguished geometer), and myself. After dinner, we all sat around a fire and everyone, except myself, was smoking long white clay pipes—a traditional English custom during Christmas. Rutherford was in great form and was naturally the centre of the conversation.

scholarly journals The ionospheric responses to the 11 August 1999 solar eclipse: observations and modeling

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Le ◽  
L. Liu ◽  
X. Yue ◽  
W. Wan
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Solar Radiation ◽  
Solar Eclipse ◽  
Ionospheric Disturbance ◽  
Low Latitude ◽  
Ionospheric Response ◽  
Latitude Range ◽  
Eclipse Observations ◽  
E Region ◽  
Low Latitude Ionosphere

Abstract. A total eclipse occurred on 11 August 1999 with its path of totality passing over central Europe in the latitude range 40°–50° N. The ionospheric responses to this eclipse were measured by a wide ionosonde network. On the basis of the measurements of foE, foF1, and foF2 at sixteen ionosonde stations in Europe, we statistically analyze the variations of these parameters with a function of eclipse magnitude. To model the eclipse effects more accurately, a revised eclipse factor, FR, is constructed to describe the variations of solar radiation during the solar eclipse. Then we simulate the effect of this eclipse on the ionosphere with a mid- and low-latitude ionosphere theoretical model by using the revised eclipse factor during this eclipse. Simulations are highly consistent with the observations for the response in the E-region and F1-region. Both of them show that the maximum response of the mid-latitude ionosphere to the eclipse is found in the F1-region. Except the obvious ionospheric response at low altitudes below 500 km, calculations show that there is also a small response at high altitudes up to about 2000 km. In addition, calculations show that when the eclipse takes place in the Northern Hemisphere, a small ionospheric disturbance also appeared in the conjugate hemisphere.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

The Anarchist Press in Egypt before World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Education ◽  
World War I ◽  
State Power ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

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