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Moderation:

Moderation is the process of eliminating or lessening extremes.

A way of life emphasizing perfect amounts of everything, not indulging in too much of one thing, hence moderation.

On Internet websited that invite users to post comments, a moderation system is the method the webmaster chooses to sort contributions that are irrelevant, obscene, illegal, or insulting with regards to useful or informative contributions.

On the internet is
* Supervisor moderation: group of people are chosen by webmaster
* Distributed moderation: 
    * User moderation: any user moderates any pther user
    * Spontaneous moderation: where no official moderation exists. Without any ability to moderate comments, users will spontaneously moderate their peers through posting their own comments about others' comments. Because spontaneous moderation exists, no system that allows users to submit their own content can ever go completely without any kind of moderation.

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Předmluva ( Zbyněk Zeman):

"Zdá se, že americké sny se týkají budoucnosti, kdežto většina Evropanů je zasněna do minulosti."

"Národ je umělý výtvor, křehký a dočasný."

České snění se netýká, řekněme, pokroku nebo osobního úspěchu, a národ je jeho společným jmenovatelem. Sní se kolektivně a i jednotlivci hrají výlučně národní role."

Sen o moři:
"Zatímco téměř každý píšící Španěl, Angličan nebo Rus si na moři mohl připadat tak trochu jako dobyvatel vzdálených světů (neboť patřil k národu, který tyto světy po celé zeměkouli kolonizoval),  Češi na moři si počínali spíš jako cestující."

TGM: " Pravda, nám chybí moře, nám chybí vědomí, že na druhé straně je také světů sedíme jako žáby v rybníce a kuňkáme na sebe."

Karel Čapek: "Nelze li plouti, lze alespoň myslet, brázdit letkami ducha svět široký a vysoký; povídám, ještě je dost místa pro výpravy a pro velké lodi. Ano, je nutno stále vyplouvatů moře je všude, kde je odvaha"

Sen o koloniích:
" Zatímcoslavní dobyvatelé Afriky prý běžně používali násilí, aby dosáhli svého vytyčeného cíle, Holub se snažil vítězit laskavostí. " I ve chvílích nejzoufalejších," psal Valenta

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Soubor šestnácti českých snů, které byly většinou dříve či později odsouzeny k nepříjemnému vystřízlivění, které ale zároveň nechtěly být prohlédnuty, byť se přece jen v průběhu času přetransformovaly v deziluzi národa, je zároveň vyprávěním o touze Čechů po velikosti a obdivuhodnosti, po historii a kořenech, jejichž hloubka by mohla konkurovat německým, po většinu dobu nepřátelským, tradicím a dějinám. Pocit méněcennosti a útlaku se prolíná všemi Kosatíkovými kapitolami a spolu vytvářejí sny - jako jakousi vnitřní národní katarzi po přežitých tragédiích. Touha po tom - být hybatelem evropských historických událostí a ne se jenom nechat hýbat někým jiným - s sebou nese tvorbu umělých dějin, (ne)slavných rukopisů, u kterých v devatenáctém století nezáleželo na jejich pravosti, ale na naději v něco velkého, co s sebou přinášely. Největší plagiátoři se stávali národními buditeli a hrdiny (autor zde však sám polemizuje nad „vinou" domnělých autorů Hanky a Lindy - jelikož kromě falza stvořili nepochybně umělecká díla), vědci „mlčeli" nebo zatemňovali své logické úsudky, aby mohli potvrdit pravost něčeho, co by v jiném případě rezolutně odmítli, lidé nenáviděli odpůrce, kteří jim brali jejich český sen.
Ten zobrazoval vítězné bitvy a vysokou kulturní vyspělost pradávných předků. Iluzi o vítězství, hrdinství a potřebnosti si Češi pěstovali i po První světové válce, kdy bitva u Zborova, v podstatě nijak zvlášť významná část světových bojů, byla pojímána (a dosud je) jako velkolepá přehlídka udatnosti československých prvně zformovaných legií.
Jan Lucemburský byl ve světle těchto mýtů brán jako hrdina, když v bitvě u Kresčaku vjel slepý a slabý do bitevní vřavy, prý aby byl mohl lépe sťat nepřítele, v podstatě se ale jednalo o sebevraždu.
Mýtus vyrovnání se s Němci, mohlo by se zdát, Čechům vyšel, když během divokých odsunů decimovali německé ženy, děti a staré lidi a muže zavírali do českých koncentráků, nicméně po letech vystřízlivění se tento „splněný sen" stal hanbou, která pošpinila odkaz demokracie, kterou si s sebou nesla rozsypaná První republika spolu s československým poválečným čelním představitelem Edvardem Benešem. Kam zmizla ta demokracie, když Beneš a celý stát mluvil o „kolektivní vině" celého německého národa a ospravedlňoval si tak brutalitu, kterou vůči svým bývalým sousedům a někdy i přátelům užíval. Jak jsme vyrostli z dob „oko za oko - zub za zub", tak jsem se tam zase rychle vrátili.
České snění není klidným čtením. V paralele se současností vyvstávají otázky, kde jsme vlastně teď a kam kráčíme, a zbyly nám ještě vůbec aspoň ty sny?

„Když Slováci využili nečekané liberalizace poměrů v roce 1968 k prosazení federace, vnímali to na české straně jako ústupek, který je potřebné učinit, ale který zároveň pro české země a jejich obyvatele nemá podstatný význam. A výbuch slovenských národně emancipačních snah po roce 1989 přinesl Čechům největší polistopadové překvapení. Starší bratr si vždy myslí, že mladšímu rozumí, i když ho třeba vůbec neposlouchá."

„Takto třeba o své činnosti v Rusku v roce 1917 Masaryk informoval československou vládu na její první schůzi, jíž se zúčastnil, 23. prosince 1918: ‚V Kyjevě dostanu pojednou zprávu, že bolševici jsou na Kyjev. Mám k dispozici 20 000 lidí. My jsme tam drželi ruskou frontu proti Němcům. Přiznávám se, že jsem si někdy myslel: co teď? Já je mohu zničit a mohu jíti do Moskvy a Petrohradu. Pomýšlel jsem na to, ale rozhodl jsem se, že se do ruských bojů nepustíme.' Snad se Masaryk, poprvé v životě na zasedání vlády, zcela neovládal - ale pokud to tak nebylo a popisoval pravdu, muselo pro něj být velmi zvláštní žít s pocitem, že se v dané situace mohl rozhodnout také úplně jinak, možná lépe - a předurčit dějinám úplně jinou cestu."

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Soubor šestnácti českých snů, které byly většinou dříve či později odsouzeny k nepříjemnému vystřízlivění, které ale zároveň nechtěly být prohlédnuty, byť se přece jen v průběhu času přetransformovaly v deziluzi národa, je zároveň vyprávěním o touze Čechů po velikosti a obdivuhodnosti, po historii a kořenech, jejichž hloubka by mohla konkurovat německým, po většinu dobu nepřátelským, tradicím a dějinám.

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Imagined Communities – Benedict Anderson philosophically

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Imagined Communities – Benedict Anderson philosophically

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Nation is imagined political community
Ernest Gelner
Problems of Nationalism – Nations are something pretty new except Nationalism sees it really old
Politicaly it has power, not philosophically

It is human need to identify in the groupNation is imagined political communityErnest Gelner Problems of Nationalism – Nations are something pretty new except Nationalism sees it really oldPoliticaly it has power, not

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Reading option week 1mbined Introduction and Chapter 10 Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities

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Parametric design is a process based on algorithmic thinking that enables the expression of parameters and rules that, together, define, encode and clarify the relationship between design intent and design response.

Parametric design is a paradigm in design where the relationship between elements is used to manipulate and inform the design of complex geometries and structures.

The term parametric originates from mathematics ( parametric equation) and refers to the use of certain parameters or variables that can be edited to manipulate or alter the end result of an equation or system. While today the term is used in reference to computational design systems, there are precedents for these modern systems in the works of architects such as Antoni Gaudí, who used analog models to explore design space.

Parametric modeling systems can be divided into two main types:

Propagation-based systems where one computes from known to unknowns with a dataflow model.

Constraint systems which solve sets of continuous and discrete constraints.

Form-finding is one of the strategies implemented through propagation-based systems. The idea behind form-finding is to optimize certain design goals against a set of design constraints.

History (early examples)

One of the earliest examples of parametric design was the upside down model of churches by Antonio Gaudi. In his design for the Church of Colònia Güell he created a model of strings weighted down with birdshot to create complex vaulted ceilings and arches. By adjusting the position of the weights or the length of the strings he could alter the shape of each arch and also see how this change influenced the arches connected to it. He placed a mirror on the bottom of the model to see how it should look upside-down.

Features of Gaudi's method

Gaudi's analogue method includes the main features of a computational of a parametric model (input parameters, equation, output):

The string length, birdshot weight and anchor point location all form independent input parameters

The vertex locations of the points on the strings being the outcomes of the model

The outcomes are derived by explicit functions, in this case gravity or Newtons law of motion.

By modifying individual parameters of these models Gaudi could generate different versions of his model while being certain the resulting structure would stand in pure compression. Instead of having to manually calculate the results of parametric equations he could automatically derive the shape of the catenary curves through the force of gravity acting on the strings.

Where Gaudi used physical laws to speed up his calculation of parametric equations, Ivan Sutherland looked to the processing power of digital computers.

Sutherland created an interactive computer-aided design program called Sketchpad. Using a light pen, users could draw lines and arcs that could be related to each other using constraints. These constraints contained all the essential properties of parametric equations. Users could experiment and explore different designs by altering the parameters of an entity and let Sketchpad do the calculations and redraw the geometry according to the constraints imposed upon it.

Nature has always served as inspiration for architects and designers.[citation needed ] Computer technology has given designers and architects the tools to analyse and simulate the complexity observed in nature and apply it to structural building shapes and urban organizational patterns. In the 1980s architects and designers started using computers running software developed for the aerospace and moving picture industries to "animate form".

One of the first architects and theorists that used computers to generate architecture was Greg Lynn. His blob and fold architecture is some of the early examples of computer generated architecture. Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport's new Terminal 3, finished in 2013, designed by Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas, with parametric design support by the engineering firm Knippers Helbig, is an example for the use of parametric design and production technologies in a large scale building.

Parametric urbanism is concerned with the study and prediction of settlement patterns. Architect Frei Otto distinguishes occupying and connecting as the two fundamental processes that are involved with all urbanisation. Studies look at producing solutions that reduce overall path length in systems while maintaining low average detour factor or facade differentiation[clarification needed ].

[Power Surfacing]

Power Surfacing is a SOLIDWORKS application for industrial design / freeform organic surface / solids modeling. Tightly integrated with SOLIDWORKS, it works with all SOLIDWORKS commands. Reverse Engineer scanned meshes with Power Surfacing RE.

CATIA (Computer Aided three-dimensional Interactive Application) was used by architect Frank Gehry to design some of his award-winning curvilinear buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Gehry Technologies, the technology arm of his firm, have since created Digital Project, their own parametric design software based on their experience with CATIA.

Autodesk 3ds Max is a parametric 3D modeling software which provides modeling, animation, simulation, and rendering functions for games, film, and motion graphics. 3ds Max uses the concept of modifiers and wired parameters to control its geometry and gives the user the ability to script its functionality. Max Creation Graph is a visual programming node-based tool creation environment in 3ds Max 2016 that is similar to Grasshopper and Dynamo.

Autodesk Maya is a 3D computer graphics software originally developed by Alias Systems Corporation (formerly Alias|Wavefront) and currently owned and developed by Autodesk, Inc. It is used to create interactive 3D applications, including video games, animated film, TV series, or visual effects. Maya exposes a node graph architecture. Scene elements are node-based, each node having its own attributes and customization. As a result, the visual representation of a scene is based on a network of interconnecting nodes, depending on each other's information. Maya is equipped with a cross-platform scripting language, called Maya Embedded Language. MEL is provided for scripting and a means to customize the core functionality of the software, since many of the tools and commands used are written in it. MEL or Python can be used to engineer modifications, plug-ins or be injected into runtime. User interaction is recorded in MEL, allowing novice users to implement subroutines.

Grasshopper 3d (originally Explicit History) is a plug-in for Rhinoceros 3D that presents the users with a visual programming language interface to create and edit geometry.

Components or nodes are dragged onto a canvas in order to build a grasshopper definition. Grasshopper is based on graphs (see Graph (discrete mathematics)) that map the flow of relations from parameters through user-defined functions (nodes), resulting in the generation of geometry. Changing parameters or geometry causes the changes to propagate throughout all functions, and the geometry to be redrawn.

Autodesk Revit is building information modeling (BIM) software used by architects and other building professionals. Revit was developed in response to the need for software that could create three-dimensional parametric models that include both geometry and non-geometric design and construction information. Every change made to an element in Revit is automatically propagated through the model to keep all components, views and annotations consistent. This eases collaboration between teams and ensures that all information (floor areas, schedules, etc.) are updated dynamically when changes in the model are made.

Dynamo is an open source graphical programming environment for design. Dynamo extends building information modeling with the data and logic environment of a graphical algorithm editor.

GenerativeComponents, parametric CAD software developed by Bentley Systems, was first introduced in 2003, became increasingly used in practice (especially by the London architectural community) by early 2005, and was commercially released in November 2007. GenerativeComponents has a strong traditional base of users in academia and at technologically advanced design firms.[citation needed ] GenerativeComponents is often referred to by the nickname of 'GC'. GC epitomizes the quest to bring parametric modeling capabilities of 3D solid modeling into architectural design, seeking to provide greater fluidity and fluency than mechanical 3D solid modeling.[citation needed ]

Users can interact with the software by either dynamically modeling and directly manipulating geometry, or by applying rules and capturing relationships among model elements, or by defining complex forms and systems through concisely expressed algorithms. The software supports many industry standard file input and outputs including DGN by Bentley Systems, DWG by Autodesk, STL (Stereo Lithography), Rhino, and others. The software can also integrate with Building Information Modeling systems.

The software has a published API and uses a simple scripting language, both allowing the integration with many different software tools, and the creation of custom programs by users.

This software is primarily used by architects and engineers in the design of buildings, but has also been used to model natural and biological structures and mathematical systems.

Generative Components runs exclusively on Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Marionette is an open source[citation needed ] graphical scripting tool (or visual programming environment) for the architecture, engineering, construction, landscape, and entertainment design industries that is built into the Mac and Windows versions of Vectorworks software. The tool was first made available in the Vectorworks 2016 line of software products. Marionette enables designers to create custom application algorithms that build interactive parametric objects and streamline complex workflows, as well as build automated 2D drawing, 3D modeling, and BIM workflows within Vectorworks software.

Built in the Python programming language, everything in Marionette consists of nodes which are linked together in a flowchart arrangement. Each node contains a Python script with predefined inputs and outputs that can be accessed and modified with a built-in editor. Nodes are placed directly into the Vectorworks document and then connected to create complex algorithms. Since Marionette is fully integrated into Vectorworks software, it can also be used to create entirely self-contained parametric objects that can be inserted into new and existing designs.

Modelur is a parametric urban design software plug-in for Trimble SketchUp, developed by Agilicity d.o.o. (LLC).. Its primary goal is to help the users create conceptual urban massing. In contrast to common CAD applications, where the user designs buildings with usual dimensions such as width, depth and height, Modelur offers design of built environment through key urban parameters such as number of storeys and gross floor area of a building.

Modelur calculates key urban control parameters on the fly (e.g. floor area ratio or required number of parking lots), delivering urban design information while the development is still evolving. This way it helps taking well-informed decision during the earliest stages, when design decisions have the highest impact.

Archimatix is a node-based parametric modeler extension for Unity 3D. It enables visual modeling of 3D models within the Unity 3D editor.

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Parametric design is a process based on algorithmic thinking that enables the expression of parameters and rules that, together, define, encode and clarify the relationship between design intent and design response. Parametric design is a paradigm in design where the relationship between elements is used to manipulate and inform the design of complex geometries and structures.

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Conditional Design is a design method formulated by the graphic designers Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey, Roel Wouters and the artist Edo Paulus which foregrounds process over finished products. As a design strategy, it is defined by playfully designed sets of rules and conditions that stimulate collaboration between participants and lead to unpredictable outcomes.

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Zeitgeist[1] ( German pronunciation Zeitgeist ) is a concept from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century German philosophy, meaning "spirit of the age". It refers to an invisible agent or force dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.[2]

Now the term is usually associated with Georg W.F. Hegel, contrasting with Hegel's use of Volksgeist "national spirit" and "world-spirit", but its coinage and popularization precedes Hegel, and is mostly due to Herder and Goethe. Other philosophers who were associated with such concepts include Spencer[year needed ] and Voltaire.[year needed ]

Contemporary use of the term may, more pragmatically, refer to a schema of fashions or fads that prescribes what is considered to be acceptable or tasteful for an era, e.g. in the field of architecture.

Hegel in Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) uses both Weltgeist and Volksgeist, but prefers the phrase Geist der Zeiten "spirit of the times" over the compound Zeitgeist.

The Hegelian concept contrasts with the Great Man theory as by Thomas Carlyle, which sees history as the result of the actions of heroes and geniuses, as Hegel perceived such "great men", specifically Napoleon, as the "embodiment of the world-spirit" ( Die Weltseele zu Pferde "the world-soul on horseback")

A "zeitgeist theory of leadership" has been contrasted with Thomas Carlyle's great man theory by Forsyth (2009). In his theory, Carlyle stresses that leaders do not become leaders by fate or accident. Instead, these individuals possess characteristics of great leaders and these characteristics allow them to obtain positions of power.

According to Forsyth, Leo Tolstoy disagreed with Carlyle's perspective, instead believing that leadership, like other things, was a product of the "zeitgeist",[year needed ][page needed ] the social circumstances at the time.

Great man theory and zeitgeist theory may be included in two main areas of thought in psychology. For instance, great man theory is very similar to the trait approach. Trait researchers are interested in identifying the various personality traits that underline human behaviors such as conformity, leadership, or other social behaviors. Thus, they agree that leadership is primarily a quality of an individual and that some people are pre-dispositioned to be a leader whereas others are born to follow these leaders. In contrast, situationist researchers believe that social behavior is a product of society. That is, social influence is what determines human behaviors. Therefore, situationism is of the same opinion as zeitgeist theory-leaders are created from the social environment and are molded from the situation. The concept of zeitgeist also relates to the sociological tradition that stems from Émile Durkheim and recently developed into social capital theory as exemplified by the work of Patrick Hunout.

These two perspectives have been combined to create what is known as the interactional approach to leadership. This approach asserts that leadership is developed through the mixing of personality traits and the situation. Further, this approach was expressed by social psychologist, Kurt Lewin, by the equation B = f(P, E) where behavior (B) is a function (f) of the person (P) and the environment (E).

In self-help and business models

Executives, venture capitalists, journalists, and authors have argued that the idea of a zeitgeist is useful in understanding the emergence of industries, simultaneous invention, and evaluating the relative value of innovations. Malcolm Gladwell argued in his book, , that entrepreneurs who succeeded often share similar characteristics-early personal or significant exposure to knowledge and skills in the early stages of a nascent industry. He proposed that the timing of involvement in an industry, and often in sports as well, affected the probability of success. In Silicon Valley, a number of people ( Peter Thiel, Alistair Davidson, Mac Levchin, Nicholas G. Carr, Vinod Khosla) have argued that much innovation has been shaped by easy access to the Internet, open source software, component technologies for both hardware and software (e.g., software libraries, software as a service), and the ability to reach narrow markets across a global market. Peter Thiel has commented: "There is so much incrementalism now."

In a zeitgeist market, the number of new entrants is high, differentiation in high value products (the strongest predictor of new product success) is more difficult to achieve, and business models emphasizing service and solution over product and process, will enhance success. Examples include innovation in product experience, legal rights and bundling, privacy rights, and agency (where businesses act on behalf of customers).

Hegel believed that art reflected, by its very nature, the culture of the time in which it is created. Culture and art are inextricable because an individual artist is a product of his or her time and therefore brings that culture to any given work of art. Furthermore, he believed that in the modern world it was impossible to produce classical art, which he believed represented a "free and ethical culture", which depended more on the philosophy of art and theory of art, rather than a reflection of the social construct, or Zeitgeist in which a given artist lives.

This use of zeitgeist is taken in the sense of intellectual or aesthetic fashion or fad. Research from empirical aesthetics investigated the relation between zeitgeist as temporal context and the evaluation of creative works. In a study of the musical originality of 15,618 classical music themes, the importance of objective characteristics and zeitgeist for popularity was examined. Both the musical originality of a theme relative to its contemporary works (the zeitgeist), as well as its "absolute" originality influenced in similar magnitude the popularity of a theme. Similarly, objective features and temporal context both influenced the evaluation of linguistic originality.

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Zeitgeist [1] ( German pronunciation Zeitgeist ) is a concept from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century German philosophy, meaning "spirit of the age". It refers to an invisible agent or force dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.[2] Now the term is usually associated with Georg W.F.

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Anne Francoise Schmidt – The X type objects

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Anne Francoise Schmidt – The X type objects

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What does it mean to understand a contemporary object? It means to make a wager that cannot be entirely justified by the history of epistemology. But a wager that, nonetheless, is not merely arbitrary, that is not simply a conjecture or a figment of the imagination.

We are led to make such a wager, once we perceive that we are unable to understand certain contemporary objects without excluding something from them, without somehow mutilating the object that we wished to understand.

Our problem, then, is that we begin with a conviction, a common sense, that these objects exist, and that they harbour important questions for us. And yet when we describe them within any one discipline, or even a so-called 'interdisciplinary' combination, we always miss our target, and end up with a partial description.

I myself was led to this conclusion by reflecting upon the contemporary position of the researcher. Myself and my collaborator Jean-Marie Legay discovered that our colleagues, whatever their disciplines, had great difficulty in interpreting their results, that is to say, in placing them in a relatively coherent set. Perhaps the problem was that of defining the object of research. And then the question arose: would admitting complex objects change something in the practice of research itself?

It seemed to us that classical theories of epistemology could not account for the multiplicity of contemporary manifestations and methods of science.

Epistemology had always functioned according to an image of science based on the opposition, or the complementarity, or the continuum, between theory and fact, between theory and observation, between theory and experience, between justification and verification. This structure was able to offer a kind of homogeneous space for the heterogeneity of scientific phenomena. But this was achieved only at the price of reducing this heterogeneity to a matter of differences between disciplinary practices.

Science was said to be a question of accounting for facts through theories, in various domains. Objects that did not sit neatly within a domain were accounted for through a division into various sub-disciplines, each with its own authority.

The consequence of such a structure is that certain other important ingredients that are a part of the scientific approach, are seen either as some kind of intermediary between those two major poles, helping us to move between facts and theories; or as practices that are a sort of pragmatic appendage of science, but do not belong to what can truly be said to be 'scientific'.

In this way, when one tried to fit them into these classical terms, models and modelisation often came to be understood as 'mediators' between theory and experience, and simulation as a quasi-factual construction between experience and the real. Or else, they were treated as linguistic, as pragmatic means to create zones of communication and exchange between scientific disciplines, without really being a part of what is identified as science. Of course, they may well be intermediaries and languages, but this doesn't mean we can avoid the fact that they are excluded from science, and in fact are often treated as suspect, as a part of science that will be discarded once one reaches a theory.

I have proposed a way of treating this problem, which is to admit, in their relative autonomy, all the ingredients that one encounters in science, without placing them into that structure, by rendering them generic - that is to say, relatively independent of the disciplines in which they happen to be constituted. There is theory, there is observation, there is experience, there are models, there are simulations, there are measurements, and they do not have to be related to one another according to the same order of magnitude or the same 'grain' of science. The type of computational precision available today, no longer places side by side just mathematics and observable phenomena, but mathematics, information technology, and fragments of various scientific disciplines (for example, biology and materials science, in synthetic biology). We must therefore open up the epistemological field of science.

Given the amount of time scientists spend building, testing and revising models, especially complex computer simulations, they can't any longer be understood in the classical terms of epistemology cannot account for them.

What does this mean for objects? Classical epistemology allows us to think objects that are complex, in the sense that they cannot be characterised by one discipline alone. The interesting thing about complex objects is that, in one sense, they are given, they propose themselves to us as problems (how can we describe bilharzia, how can we describe a farm, etc...), and then we hope that disciplinary perspectives will allow us to 'recover' the object. The biologist Jean-Marie Legay, who developed the idea of the complex object in this sense, said he is very interested by Poincaré's theorem on the forms that cover a surface. This is also a way of thinking about interdisciplinarity.

But it seems that we must, alongside complex objects, introduce a new type of objects, which treat otherwise what is unknown, which take account of the intentions or projections on or in the object as almost instantaneous objective appearances of the object; Non-manipulable objects, which no longer oppose subject and object across a phenomenological distance. I have called these 'integrative objects'.

This is not only a philosophical point, it also has a direct significance in scientific methodology and practice.

For example, take a genetically-modified fish, as the object of a research project. We can treat it as a fish plus a genetic manipulation, so that the principal discipline will be molecular biology, with other disciplines having to make an appearance subsequently, to resolve obstacles that are met with along the way (traceability, law, international commerce, consumer perception, and, in the end, the study of the risks involved, and ethics). But instead, I suggest we could treat this object as a kind of unknown 'X' whose properties are distributed in an unprecedented way between different disciplinary forms of knowledge. An object with multiple dimensions, each of which is a discipline.

This is exactly the way that designers and inventors think: Not by seeing the object as the result of a disciplinary rationality, even a composite one, but by putting an unknown X into relation with islands of knowledge that cannot all be foreseen in advance.

As is the case for designers, such integrative objects would not be obtained through a relation of proximity (by taking a list of existing objects, and proposing a supplementary variation), nor through a combinatory algebra (by extracting and re-integrating different properties to make new objects), but by under-determination (what does an object become if we hypothetically subtract from it a property considered to be natural?) We are then constrained to seek other types of knowledge, of knowhow, to constitute a new object X.

The interest in speaking of integrative objects is that they are unknown (we have to treat them as an 'X'), and that they are never entirely accounted for by disciplines. In fact, we cannot ever put the pieces together and entirely synthesise them. None of the disciplinary characterisations gives a rule of unity for the whole of the object. But also, each time a researcher 'remakes' such an object, it is shaped by their intentions and their partial perspective.

Faced with objects that, from the point of view of any particular scientific discourse, are partial and incomplete, but are treated by common sense as real, such an epistemology tries to provide the theoretical means to account for their objective appearance of unity, without 'reducing' them.

Robin Mackay has remarked that such a notion of the object could apply quite well to pressing contemporary problems, such as obesity, depression, or environmental change, which have, at once, biological, social, economic, political and even aesthetic dimensions.

Another characterisation of these objects is that they are not the realisation of possibilities, but that they first and foremost propose an impossibility, for which one has to generate new relations between knowledges. A little like in algebras of extension, where the solution of an impossible equation gives us the rules to construct a new set.

Isn't this precisely the kind of object we would like to address today? We are faced with objects that are, at once, acts of aggression and choreographed performances and technological simulations and training exercises. We have to find a new way to describe such objects; in a certain sense, they exist in a properly interdisciplinary or non-disciplinary place, a place described by the points at which they becomes unknown to each discipline.

Moreover, with reference to the question of models and simulations, this position enables us to think of models, neither as 'abstractions of reality' or particularizations of theory. Like design solutions, models and simulations belong in the interstices between the search for systematic knowledge (reduction to the simple and elementary), and practical demands (where one has to handle complex objects that do not entirely fall within any one domain of knowledge). This has a pertinence for me when I am trying to rethink the relation between theory and facts in science. But perhaps it could also be useful in thinking about the relation between virtual scenarios and real facts, in the case of something like a wargame - maybe it is even a return of the gap that Clausewitz himself understood as always existing, in between the theoretical strategic model and the fog of war.

Can one transcribe an 'integrative' object in pertinent fashion in art? In any case, with such objects, the classical limits between science, art, technique, aesthetics and ethics have to be rethought. None of these categories, as useful as they may be, can account for a contemporary art object. There is the image, art, computation, algorithms, military strategies, gaming, partial forms of projections, and thus ethics. All these characterisations might momentarily appear to account for the unity of what one 'sees', 'perceives', 'understands' 'acts', or 'simulates' in it. But they do not allow us to give a full concept, or a rule of the 'real' of the work. But doubtless the meaning of all these terms will be modified, with and without the traditional perspective, or the traditional division of disciplines.

The integrative object is not a limitation of classical knowledge, but a treatment of knowledges of this 'X' type, whose effects are distributed in different modes and without synthesis. Through this approach, we can make partially coincide, in sciences, in art, in philosophy, aspects that were treated separately, and we can separate aspects that were overhastily identified with each other. The distinction between art, sience, philosophy, is no longer given, but reconstructed via hypotheses.

The theoretical framework is what I call a non-standard epistemology, which does not claim to describe the disciplines directly, but allows us to enumerate them as a number of neutralised states, without disciplinary authority or sufficiency. Each state can be understood as theory, as exercise, as simulation, as strategy, as projection of the 'I', and 'others', like a cloning of the real -- but none of them will provide a continuous vision of this real.

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What does it mean to understand a contemporary object? It means to make a wager that cannot be entirely justified by the history of epistemology. But a wager that, nonetheless, is not merely arbitrary, that is not simply a conjecture or a figment of the imagination.

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Zeitgeist phenomena – Schwamping, Sealander

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Zeitgeist phenomena – Schwamping, Sealander

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For lidt over 200 år siden gjorde den tyske mestertænker G.W.F. Hegel filosofien dynamisk. I stedet for at kolportere stivnede verdensbilleder og celebrere og cirkulere evige idéer, skulle filosofisk tænkning bringe samtiden på begreb, dvs. sammenfatte sin tid i tanker. Fordringen lød og betød, at det ikke bare var filosofiens opgave at komme på højde med tidsånden, da denne ofte fremstod overfladisk, fordrejet og flagrende. Og fordi filosofien som Minervas ugle først fløj ud i skumringen sidst på dagen, så sig tilbage og tænkte systematisk over de indhøstede erfaringer, var det ikke bare muligt, men også en pligt at skabe sand erkendelse.

Hegel lancerede friheden til at tænke samtidshistorisk og radikalt moderne. Han stak tankens termometer ind i tidsånden og skrev nye og hidtil ukendte erkendelser frem, mens han forrykkede skalaerne for, hvad ånden kunne og ikke mindst burde kunne begribe. Han forlod sig ikke på enkeltvidenskaberne, hverdagssproget eller folkekulturen, men gravede adskillige spadestik dybere.

Til gengæld var han også mester for nogle gevaldige fejlskud. Eksempelvis hævdede han at have set ikke bare tidsånden, men selveste verdensånden til hest, da han så den sejrende Napoleon ride ind i Jena i 1806.

EN BEKVEM EL-MOTORISERET "WASSERBETT" BYDER SIG TIL

Stående over for tidsåndsfænomenet, hybridkøretøjet, den konkrete og nye fysiske gestaltning 'Schwamping', som det/den kaldes i en begejstret reportage i den fremragende tyske ugeavis Die Zeit, skrevet af Julius Schophoff: "Ja, der kann schwimmen!" (12.sept. 2019, s.78) er jeg derfor kommet på lidt af en opgave. I slipstrømmen på Hegels medrivende virkningshistorie har jeg simpelthen fået uventede lektier for.

Der er tale om en funklende hvid minicampingvogn, designet for to og bygget i Kiel. Den kan både rulle efter en personbil og sejle på vandet, deraf neologismen der kobler verbet 'schwimmen' (svømme) med substantivet 'camping'. Amfibiekøretøjet koster knap 22.000 Euro i basismodellen og 140 Euro pr. dag at leje. Men man kommer ikke langt uden anhængerkoblingen, der koster 47 Euro/Tag at få fingre i.

'Schwampingvognen' er udstyret med et minikøkken, elektricitet, lamper, mahognibord og en elektropåhængsmotor med fem gear. Den store bagklap kan løftes, så to voksne kan kigge uforstyrret op mod stjernerne i deres soveposer fra noget, der bogstaveligt talt må kaldes - og i artiklen bliver kaldt - for en "Wasserbett".

Journalisten er ovenud begejstret for sin udlejnings- Sealander, som produktet hedder, og tester den sammen med sin ven på den store svenske Siljansø, der blev dannet, da en asteroide faldt ned på jorden for ca. 370 millioner år siden. Søen er gennemsnitlig 55 km bred, og utallige nysgerrige svenskere misser lettere vantro og måske også en kende misundeligt med øjnene, når de to tyskere kører hen til søbredden og sejler ud på søen med smil om læberne. Nu skal der fiskes, spilles backgammon og slappes af. Og så slipper man for at slå telt op med bedrevidende og altobserverende sjæle omkring sig, og der er heller ikke så mange myg ude på søen og frem for alt ingen andre mennesker inden for syns-, høre- eller rækkevidde.

Det er klart, at der ikke er tale om et nyt fænomen. Mange af os husker amfibiekøretøjer fra 1960'erne, ligesom vi husker andre vidtløftige og mere eller mindre futuristiske transportmaskiner: flyvende aerodynamiske biler, helikopterlandingspladser på skitsetegninger af moderne énfamiliehuse, individuelle rygaggregater med motoriserede vinger...

"SCHWAMPINGVOGNEN" TYDET HEGELIANSK

Tydet og 'læst' hegeliansk fortætter 'Schwampingvognen' mange moderne drømme på én gang for det forkælede by- og civilisationsmenneske. Der er tale om en fleksibel, bekvem og quasi-friluftslivsagtig opfindelse, der skænker dig ro og afkobling i afmålt tid fra det accelererende arbejds-, forbrugs- og transportsamfund. Der er med andre ord tale om en decelerationsteknologi til en overkommelig pris.

At du både kan være on the road med alle de andre idioter og sikre dig friheden til at forsvinde for en stund ud på vandet udtrykker en dialektik, der indfanger tidsåndens vekselstrøm: tæt på (indkøb, byer, caféer, forlystelser, seværdigheder...) og langt fra (ro, ingen støj, ensomhed eller tosomhed). Samtidig undgår man irriterende småkravl, knoter, myg, bier, våd jord og fugt - og kan med et behændigt vupti-snuptag trække klappen for, igen, hvis det skulle formaste sig til at regne.

Der er også mikro-spatiale grænser for, hvor mange skrigende børn og mavesure teenagere, der overhovedet kan få access til det sejlende mini-paradis. Og få minutter efter man er kommet på land igen, kan bilturen gå videre mod andre søer.

Det synes dog mere tvivlsomt, om den små 4-5 kvadratmeter store 'flåde' med den meget ringe motorkraft (det påtales i artiklen...) kan tage livtag med det rigtige hav: Vesterhavet, Nordsøen, Atlanterhavet, Biscayen, Middelhavet, Adriaterhavet.... eller sågar Østersøen, Store Bælt og Øresund. Nordmændene kalder som bekendt en frisk vind for en "laber brise"; men jeg vil gerne have mig frabedt en laber tur i brændingen.

OXYMORONER TIL HAVS OG PÅ VEJ

Paradoksalt formuleret er man ude i naturen uden at være ude i den. Man er både ude i naturen og inde i Sealander'en. In-betweeners on tour. We go native i et orgie af glasfiber. Vi sparer på det hele, men skal være rede til at købe noget nyt. Vi bruger el-batterier, der ikke er faldet ned fra himlen. Vi kører i bil for at blive fri for bilen.

Der er efter min mening ingen tvivl om, at disse oxymoroner indfanger tidsånden på en facon, der kan supplere og udvide den hegelianske arv og alle hans anmassende dialektiske erkendelse. Samtidens frihedsjagt fører til nye 'folkelige' indespærringer i let tilgængelige objekter på hjul og vand. Naturherredømmet kobles til lige dele romantiske naturbesyngelser, bæredygtighedsevangelier (vi down-grader med en ressourcebevidst Sealander) og nye andennaturkreationer, der fjerner os langt fra førstenaturen.

Hvor førstenaturen fungerer ud fra devisen: uden mad, drikke, tag over hovedet og en evne til vellykket forplantning og yngelpleje ingen menneskehed - så står den på civilisationsforfinede naturtransformationer inden for andennaturen, eksempelvis: på rensdyrsteg med nyopgravede lokale kartofler, Bourgogne, Sealander-eventyr, teknologisk understøttede parringsteknologier, dobbelt lønarbejde og børnepenge...et sted derhjemme i det tyske indland.

Vi er den art, der ikke kan lade være med at ændre på naturen - både på vores egen og 'den ydre'. Det er vores natur at være kulturskabende, og der er ingen vej tilbage til en 'ren' natur. Vi er natur-plus-aktører og aner ikke vores levende råd, når vi skal definere, hvad natur er. Er vi fx inde i den eller ude af den? Er Sealander 'en en løsning eller en del af problemet?

Den nulevende og højproduktive tyske filosof Peter Sloterdijk skrev allerede for 30-40 år siden, at vi er blevet 'oplyst falsk bevidste'. Vi ved godt, at vi handler mod bedre vidende, og bliver alligevel ved med at sidde i kø på motorvejen, overforbruge verdens ressourcer og bilde os ind, at vi lever både sund og grønt. På moderne dansk kan man sige: Vi handler ind; men vi handler ikke... eller måske kun efter længere tids pres. Vi er på én gang træge og hyper-mobile.

TO TANKEVÆKKENDE NEGATIVITETER

Det er altid lettest at tænke på V ia Positiva: at opregne alt det, vi ved, og alt det vi har. Helt og aldeles umiddelbart, givetheds- og kendsgerningsorienteret. Mere udfordrende er det at betræde Via Negativa og at tænke i negativiteter, fx i fravær og at skærpe blikke for en al den ikke-viden og ikke-væren, der trænger sig på omkring os, hvad enten vi sidder i sofaen, kører rundt på vejene eller tøffer ud på vandet. Så lad os afslutte dette lille essay med en række negativ-betragtninger. Sealander'en har hverken gjort os til geparder eller fisk, til automobiler eller ænder. Sealander'en er et medie, der formgiver ferielivet. Den er et rullende potentiale for simple living, adspredelse og nydelse.

Men den dobbelt-negative hybridkonstruktion, der nådigt skænker civilisationsmennesket en ny udfoldelsesform som en på én gang motoriseret ikke-langsom landkrabbe og samtidig sejlende i en ikke-våd stue er sikkert kun attråværdig, så længe verden ikke bliver overbefolket af Sealanders.

Hvis den bliver en landeplage, lige så udbredt som camp-let'en i 1970'erne, så må der givetvis lovgives om dens færden i den frie våde natur. Måske bliver der oprettet særlige reservater til den inkl. regelsæt for dens færden. Vi kan jo ikke have, at den forstyrrer fuglelivet og fiskeynglen, eller at den ødelægger faunaen og krænker frednings- og naturbeskyttelsesbestemmelserne. Men alene det faktum, at den ligner en ikke alt for komfortabel fattigmands-miniature-udgave af en 'rigtig' autocamper og en luksuscampingvogn af mærket Knaus, gør nok, at de rigere samfundssegmenter ikke vil værdige den et blik endsige anskaffe sig én. Så meget desto større chance har den så sikkert for at blive et veldresseret modstands-hypet hipster-brand. Den skal bare lige have nogle flere farver på æggeskallen og en effen Tesla-bådemotor.

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'Schwamping' - Deciphered as the Zeitgeist at Sea and On the Road

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Parole describes contemporary phenomena through the eyes of design. This is design critique. Design as discourse, design as intentions, design as relations, design as materialized manifestations of ideas. Parole is a website publishing design critique and an archive for design research.

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Oceanizing history podcast – TBA Academy

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Oceanizing history podcast – TBA Academy

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People living on Islands, the impact on society

KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION,
Marine science
postcolonial studies
SPECULATIVE HISTORIES
POLITICAL IMAGINATION

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A digital organism for decentralized research and knowledge sharing through the lens of the Ocean.

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Allogenic engeneers
– Beavers change both the distribution and the abundance of many organisms in the area.
– Caterpillar worms are creating shelters for other organisms which may occupy them either simultaneously or subsequently
– woodpeckers or other birds who create holes in trees for them to nest in.

Autogenic engineers
Autogenic engineers modify the environment by modifying themselves. Trees are a good example, because as they grow, their trunks and branches create habitats for other living things

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An ecosystem engineer is any organism that creates, significantly modifies, maintains or destroys a habitat. These organisms can have a large impact on the species richness and landscape-level heterogeneity of an area. As a result, ecosystem engineers are important for maintaining the health and stability of the environment they are living in. Since all organisms impact the environment they live in in one way or another, it has been proposed that the term "ecosystem engineers" be used only for keystone species whose behavior very strongly affects other organisms.

Jones et al. identified two different types of ecosystem engineers:

Allogenic engineers modify the biophysical environment by mechanically changing living or nonliving materials from one form to another. Beavers are the original model for ecosystem engineers; in the process of clearcutting and damming, beavers alter their ecosystem extensively. The addition of a dam will change both the distribution and the abundance of many organisms in the area. Caterpillars are another example in that by creating shelters from leaves, they are also creating shelters for other organisms which may occupy them either simultaneously or subsequently. An additional example may be that of woodpeckers or other birds who create holes in trees for them to nest in. Once these birds are through with them, the holes are used by other species of birds or mammals for housing.

Autogenic engineers modify the environment by modifying themselves. Trees are a good example, because as they grow, their trunks and branches create habitats for other living things; these may include squirrels, birds or insects among others. In the tropics, lianas connect trees, which allow many animals to travel exclusively through the forest canopy.

Being able to identify ecosystem engineers in an environment can be important when looking at the influence these individuals may have over other organisms living in the same environment - especially in terms of resource availability.

The presence of some ecosystem engineers has been linked to higher species richness at the landscape level. By modifying the habitat, organisms like the beaver create more habitat heterogeneity and so can support species not found elsewhere. Thoughts may be that similar to other umbrella species by conserving an ecosystem engineer you may be able to protect the overall diversity of a landscape. Beavers have also been shown to maintain habitats in such a way as to protect the rare Saint Francis' satyr butterfly and increase plant diversity.

Biodiversity may also be affected by ecosystem engineer's ability to increase the complexity of processes within an ecosystem, potentially allowing greater species richness and diversity in the local environments. As an example, beavers have the capacity to modify riparian forest and expand wetland habitats, which results in an increase of the diversity of the habitats by allowing a greater number of species to inhabit the landscape. Coral-reef habitats, created by the ecosystem engineer coral species, hold some of the highest abundances of aquatic species in the world.

Species are able to be transported across all parts of the world by humans or human-made vessels at boundless rates resulting in foreign ecosystem engineers changing the dynamics of species interactions and the possibility for engineering to occur in locations that would not have been accessible by engineers without the mediation by humans.

Introduced species, which may be invasive species, are often ecosystem engineers. Kudzu, a leguminous plant introduced to the southeast U.S., changes the distribution and number of animal and bird species in the areas it invades. It also crowds out native plant species. The zebra mussel is an ecosystem engineer in North America. By providing refuge from predators, it encourages the growth of freshwater invertebrates through increasing microhabitats. Light penetration into infected lakes also improves the ecosystem, resulting in an increase in algae. In contrast to the benefits some ecosystem engineers can cause, invasive species often have the reverse effect.

Humans are thought to be one of the most dramatic ecosystem engineers. Niche construction has been prevalent since the earliest days of human activity. Through urban development, agricultural practices, logging, damming and mining, humans have changed the way they interact with the environment. This interaction is more studied in the field of human ecology.

Due to the complexity of many communities and ecosystems, restoration projects are often difficult. Ecosystem engineers have been proposed as a means to restore a given area to its previous state. While ideally these would all be natural agents, with today's level of development some form of human intervention may be necessary as well. In addition to being able to assist in restoration ecology, ecosystem engineers may be a helpful agent in invasive species management. New fields are developing which focus on restoring those ecosystems which have been disrupted or destroyed by human activities as well as developing ecosystems that are sustainable with both human and ecological values.

Besides the previously mentioned beaver acting as an ecosystem engineer, other terrestrial animals do the same. This may be through feeding habits, migration patterns or other behaviors that result in more permanent changes.

Research has suggested primates as ecosystem engineers as a result of their feeding strategies - frugivory and folivory - making them act as seed dispersers. As a whole primates are very abundant and feed on a large quantity of fruit that is then distributed around their territory. Elephants have also been designated ecosystem engineers as they cause very large changes to their environment whether it be through feeding, digging or migratory behavior.

Not only animals are ecosystem engineers. Fungi are able to connect regions that are distant from one another and translocate nutrients between them. Doing so they create nutritional niches for xylophagous invertebrates, supply trees with N translocated from previously predated animals or even form an "underground pipeline" that redistributes carbon between trees. Thus fungi are engineers controlling nutrient cycles in ecosystems.

Prairie dogs are another terrestrial form of allogenic ecosystem engineers due to the fact that the species has the ability to perform substantial modifications by burrowing and turning soil. They are able to influence soils and vegetation of the landscape while providing underground corridors for arthropods, avians, other small mammals, and reptiles. This has a positive effect on species richness and diversity of their habitats which results in the prairie dogs being labelled as keystone species.

In marine environments, filter feeders and plankton are ecosystem engineers because they alter turbidity and light penetration, controlling the depth at which photosynthesis can occur. This in turn limits the primary productivity of benthic and pelagic habitats and influences consumption patterns between trophic groups.

Another example of ecosystem engineers in marine environments would be scleractinian corals as they create the framework for the habitat most coral-reef organisms depend on. Some ecosystem engineers such as coral have help maintaining their environment. Parrotfish often help maintain coral reefs as they feed on macroalgae that competes with the coral. As this relationship is mutually beneficial, a positive feedback cycle is formed between the two organisms, making them both responsible for creating and maintaining coral reef ecosystems.

Buse, J; Ranius, T; Assmann, T (2008). "An endangered longhorn beetle associated with old oaks and its possible role as an ecosystem engineer". Conservation Biology. 22 (2): 329-337. doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2007.00880.x. PMID 18261146.

Crawford, KM; Crutsinger, GM; Sander, NJ (2007). "Host-plant genotypic diversity mediates the distribution of an ecosystem engineer". Ecology. 88 (8): 2114-2120. doi:10.1890/06-1441.1. PMID 17824442.

Commito, J. A.; Celano, E. A.; Celico, H. J.; Como, S.; Johnson, C. P. (2005). "Mussels matter: postlarval dispersal dynamics altered by a spatially complex ecosystem engineer". Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. 316 (2): 133-147. doi:10.1016/j.jembe.2004.10.010.

Wright, JP; Jones, CG (2006). "The concept of organisms as ecosystem engineers ten years on: progress, limitations, and challenges". BioScience. 56 (3): 203-209. doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2006)056[0203:tcooae]2.0.co;2.

A lecture by Moshe Shachak, the developer of the concept of ecosystem engineers (together with CG. Jones and JH. Lawton) during the 90's.

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An ecosystem engineer is any organism that creates, significantly modifies, maintains or destroys a habitat. These organisms can have a large impact on the species richness and landscape-level heterogeneity of an area. As a result, ecosystem engineers are important for maintaining the health and stability of the environment they are living in.

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Tate Modern –Imaginary of the Oceans deep

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Tate Modern –Imaginary of the Oceans deep

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Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep

Past Exhibition

Aquatopia, installation view, Nottingham Contemporary, 2013. Photography by Andy Keate.

Ninety percent of the earth's oceans remain unexplored. Science knows outer space better than the ocean deep. Scores of new species, weirder than any fiction, are found each time a submersible descends to the ocean's deepest trenches.

In the absence of knowledge the deep is a site where imagination has full rein. The ocean has always bred monsters, and like outer space has been a setting for science fiction since Jules Verne. But unlike outer space, the oceans are part of our own planet - and by extension a part of us too.

Throughout recorded history the deep has been the site of shared myths, subconscious fears and unnamed desires. Aquatopia, then, is less about the ocean as it actually is - it is about how it lives in our heads.

This major exhibition brings together over 150 contemporary and historic artworks that explore how the deep has been imagined through time and across cultures. Sea monsters, sirens, sperm whales, giant squids, octopi, submarines, drowned sailors and shipwrecks are all portrayed here by many of art history's "greats" JMW Turner, Odilon Redon, Hokusai, Barbara Hepworth and Oskar Kokoshka among them. Steve Claydon, Wangechi Mutu, Juergen Teller, Alex Bag, Christian Holstad and Mikhail Karikis are some of the many celebrated contemporary artists amongst whose oceanic - inspired artworks are shown here too.

The exhibition is a collaboration with Tate St Ives in Cornwall, where it was shown from 12 October to 26 January 2014.

A fully illustrated catalogue is available through our online shop for £22.99 plus posting packing. It includes new essays by Philip Hoare, Simon Grant, Kodwo Eshun and Alex Farquharson, it also presents an anthology of sub-aquatic texts by Stacy Alaimo, Maya Deren, Celeste Olalquiga, James Hamilton-Paterson, Marcus Rediker, David Toop, Marina Warner and Wendy Williams, as well as literacy works by Hugo, Lovecraft, Shakespeare, China Mieville, Adrienne Rich, Jules Verne, Derek Walcott and Vernon Watkins.

The imaginary oceans these artworks explore represent both the limits of our knowledge and the crossing of existential thresholds. Oceans are places of metamorphosis where "we suffer a sea change into something rich and strange", according to Shakespeare in the Tempest. Our wild imaginings about the ocean aren't simply escapist. The ocean is the keeper of political histories that continually resurface in the present day. Ocean myths both ancient and contemporary have been shaped by conquest and colonialism, and by the tide
of gender politics too.

Some of the world's great literature draws on the ocean, and Aquatopia has strong links with literature too. Books it refers to include The Odyssey, The Tempest, The Ancient Mariner, Moby Dick and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Allusions to this great tradition of maritime literature can be found in many of the art works. The exhibition catalogue, published in partnership with Tate, contains both classic literary texts and essays by leading contemporary thinkers on the sea.

Aquatopia begins in Nottingham, the city furthest from the coast, but at the centre of an island nation whose history has been shaped by its relationship to the sea.

In October 2013 it travelled to Tate St Ives, our partners in this exhibition, whose galleries overlook a relentless surf.

Exhibition:

Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep

Artists:

Alex Bag & Ethan Kramer, Hernan Bas, John Bellany, Guy Ben-Ner, Ashley Bickerton, Rudolf & Leopold Blaschka, Marcel Broodthaers, Bernard Buffet, Spartacus Chetwynd, Steven Claydon, David Cox the Elder, Liz Craft, Dorothy Cross, Salvador Dalí, Francis Danby, Alan Davie, Mark Dion, Mati Diop, Gustave Doré, Ant Farm, Dee Ferris, Stanhope Forbes, Lucian Freud, Vidya Gastaldon & Jean-Michel Wicker, Ernst Haeckel, Barbara Hepworth, Katsushika Hokusai, Christian Holstad, Herbert James Draper, Mikhail Karikis, Oskar Kokoschka, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Sean Landers, William Lionel Wyllie, Andrea Mantegna, Ana Mendieta, Madsen Mompremier, Wangechi Mutu, Willem Ormea, The Otolith Group, Jean Painlevé, Eric Ravilious, Odilon Redon, Germaine Richier, Henry Scott Tuke, Shimabuku, Simon Starling, Ricky Swallow, Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tillmans, JMW Turner, Marcel Van Eeden, Alfred Wallis, Edward Wadsworth, George Wallace Jardine, Karl Weschke, Jennifer West, Hannah Wilke, Frantz Zéphirin

Curator:

Alex Farquharson with Martin Clark

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Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep

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Past Exhibition Aquatopia, installation view, Nottingham Contemporary, 2013. Photography by Andy Keate. Ninety percent of the earth's oceans remain unexplored. Science knows outer space better than the ocean deep. Scores of new species, weirder than any fiction, are found each time a submersible descends to the ocean's deepest trenches.

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Large parts of the sea are used in a similar fashion as the countryside: wind and tidal farms deliver renewable energy...

The sea is the new countryside.

It's not feasible to claim ownership of the oceans'main constutuent - water.
Oceans slip away from national and personal wnership, just as they slip away from national and personal liability.

THE PROPISION FOR PETS: OCTOPUSES
Octopuses gained popularity for thein decentralized brain, their enormous flexibility and their unique ability to camouflage their surface and form.

We have to feel safe to let others in. We have to secure our privacy to avoid resentment and xenophobia. That's why the next thrillion-dollar enterprise won't be about connecting but about keeping one's distance.

While social media allows us to get in contact, without any effort wherever we are, this endeavour will allow us to be us to be by ourselves without any effort wherever we are.

On the sea, there is no place to hide beyound the outlines of one's vessel. Here it's even more urgent to establish a new mode of privacy than on land. And in fact it's easier.

On a level field without any fixed obstacles where all object follow a rather straight course at a steady speed, there isn't too much computatuon needed to keep them all at a proper distance to smoothly altering their speed and direction.

On international waters most vessels are already on autopilot, monitored via authomatic identification system.

The ocean turns truly in common and not just for human kind.
Nobody hugs more evenly, more expansively, more patiently than the sea.

To hug a tree is a unilateral, paternalistic gesture. The tree can't initiate, return, refuse, or escape the encounter. When we let the sea hug us, we take the receptive, enduring position that we used to assign to the sea.

We can experience this hug on our own, together with friends, Or we build circles and gently bump into unknown parts of others' bodies, We can reconfigure as a floating chain, thath can stop certain ships from entering a harbor. The chain manifests in collective humming, singing, and swinging. Or we build circles and gently bump into unknowh parts of  others's bodies.

It is sea that created us. We are not limited ti mystical ('oceanic') contemplation, we can actually enter the sea and celebrate our origins in amphibious devotion.

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DIS is a streaming platform for entertainment and education - edutainment. We enlist leading artists and thinkers to expand the reach of key conversations bubbling up through contemporary art, culture, activism, philosophy, and technology. Every video proposes something - a solution, a question - a way to think about our shifting reality.

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Anne–Francoise Schmid – Object and disciplines

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Anne–Francoise Schmid – Object and disciplines

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For example, take a genetically-modified fish, as the object of a research project. We can treat it as a fish plus a genetic manipulation, so that the principal discipline will be molecular biology, with other disciplines having to make an appearance subsequently, to resolve obstacles that are met with along the way (traceability, law, international commerce, consumer perception, and, in the end, the study of the risks involved, and ethics). But instead, I suggest we could treat this object as a kind of unknown 'X' whose properties are distributed in an unprecedented way between different disciplinary forms of knowledge. An object with multiple dimensions, each of which is a discipline.

This is exactly the way that designers and inventors think: Not by seeing the object as the result of a disciplinary rationality, even a composite one, but by putting an unknown X into relation with islands of knowledge that cannot all be foreseen in advance.

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Ekologicko ideologický manifest Grafických designerů a fotografů

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Ekologicko ideologický manifest Grafických designerů a fotografů

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Artist Jaakko Niemelä (b. 1959) has prepared a research project on memories of sea captain Erkki Niemelä. The artist has travelled in his father's footsteps on ocean-going ships and explored the places he visited, documenting his journeys by drawing, writing, taking photographs and video. Niemelä will use the materials he has been collecting since 2012 to create a new installation in one of the arched upstairs galleries.

The exhibition will make use of the tall structures that dramatically dominate the space. The installation will include two large projected animations featuring a ship on stormy seas and the collapse of the ship's structure. The soundscape will consist of a grand choral piece by Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti and ambient music composed by Jaakko Niemelä's nephew Antti Niemelä.

The exhibition is curated by Heli Harni from HAM.

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Artist Jaakko Niemelä (b. 1959) has prepared a research project on memories of sea captain Erkki Niemelä. The artist has travelled in his father's footsteps on ocean-going ships and explored the places he visited, documenting his journeys by drawing, writing, taking photographs and video.

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Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett 2015 Video clip 1001st Island

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Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett 2015 Video clip 1001st Island

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John Ruskin – Ignorance an truth in water

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John Ruskin – Ignorance an truth in water

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Ruskin's "Of Truth of Water" defines water as "the best emblem of unwearied, unconquerable power, the wild, various, fantastic, tameless unity of the sea. " He suggests the "most wonderful" substance, water, consistent with "changefulness of beauty" — hence, why Ruskin compares its capturing to the capturing one's soul on canvas. Within the prophetic writing, Ruskin deems the element uncapturable — at least perfectly — is painting water truthfully "is beyond the power of man."

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Home

Description

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.
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Product details

Format Paperback | 196 pages

Dimensions 127 x 203 x 11mm | 200g

Publication date 31 Oct 2008

Publisher BiblioLife

Publication City/Country Charleston SC, United States

Language English

Illustrations note black & white illustrations

ISBN10 0559286511

ISBN13 9780559286513

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Frondes Agrestes. Readings in 'Modern Painters'

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We use cookies to give you the best possible experience. By using our website you agree to our use of cookies. Home This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process.

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Arnold Bocklin St. Anthony Preaching to fishes

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Arnold Bocklin St. Anthony Preaching to fishes

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v Utopii neexistuje soukromé vlastnictví, obyvatelé žijí skromně a prostě: navštěvují společné jídelny, společně obdělávají půdu a konají řemeslné práce, jeho Utopie představuje ideální, spravedlivý stát, ostrov na němž neexistuje utrpení mas spjaté s přechodem společnosti ke kapitalismu a mamonu peněz, základní společenskou jednotkou je rodina, která je takřka posvátná, najdeme zde však mnoho prvků, které odporují myšlence svobodného života jednotlivců, nejeví se nám tedy jako dokonalý případ utopie (což je problematické u všech utopií), jsou zde tresty smrti za nevěru a za jiné zločiny se člověk stává otrokem, lidé mají omezenou možnost

Relevance for Today:
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9odW1hbml0aWVzdmlld3BvaW50cy5wb2RvbWF0aWMuY29tL3JzczIueG1s&episode=aHR0cHM6Ly9odW1hbml0aWVzdmlld3BvaW50cy5wb2RvbWF0aWMuY29tL2VudHJ5LzIwMTYtMDItMjZUMTBfNDFfMDctMDhfMDA&hl=cs&ved=2ahUKEwjotLrry9vnAhVswosKHZD4CWUQjrkEegQIARAM&ep=6

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https://slideplayer.com/slide/4966323/

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& Movement of Plankton

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Nejstarší postupy – frotáž z kamene (stone rubbing). Kamenné stély – rozměrné. Pro účely učenců a státní správy a pro účely tisku posvátných (kanonických) textů, aby byl text a obraz přenesen v nezměněné podobě.

Účinný znak je jednoduchý, snadno zapamatovatelný a znázornitelný, charakteristický. S čím více znaky systém operuje, tím větší nároky jsou kladeny na jejich tvůrce i příjemce (recipienty).

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Za Dinastie  SIngů (kolem r. 100)

Dřevěné pohyblivé bloky (movable type print) vynalezeny Bi Shengem r. 1041. Tisk ze dvou stolů a z bloku papírů, pohyblivé štočky umožňovaly barevný soutisk

-  Tisk z mědi - -pohyblivé bloky. Čínský typ písma ovšem nepřál rozvoji tomuto typu tisku pro obrovské množství potřebných znaků. Tisk z jedné matrice je výhodnější.

V Číně tisk úzce spjat s centrální správou státu a potřebou distribuovat na velkém území informace v nezměněné podobě, nikoliv zajistit pluralitu názorů.

Polanecký, Skripta, Teorie Grafického Designu I.,II.

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Entrepreneur or precarious worker? These are the terms of a cognitive dissonance that turns everyone's life into a shaky project in perennial start-up phase. Silvio Lorusso guides us through the entreprecariat, a world where change is natural and healthy, whatever it may bring. A world populated by motivational posters, productivity tools, mobile offices and self-help techniques. A world in which a mix of entrepreneurial ideology and widespread precarity is what regulates professional social media, online marketplaces for self-employment and crowdfunding platforms for personal needs. The result? A life in permanent beta, with sometimes tragic implications.

"A compelling and relentless j'accuse: debunking the social and political myths that push an increasing number of persons to perform in the entrepreneurship circus - with no safety nets."
- Antonio Casilli, author of En attendant les robots, 2019

With a foreword by Geert Lovink and an afterword by Raffaele Alberto Ventura.

Designed by Superness (Federico Antonini & Alessio D'Ellena).

Order the book on Onomatopee's website.

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Entrepreneur or precarious worker? These are the terms of a cognitive dissonance that turns everyone's life into a shaky project in perennial start-up phase. Silvio Lorusso guides us through the entreprecariat, a world where change is natural and healthy, whatever it may bring. A world populated by motivational posters, productivity tools, mobile offices and self-help techniques.

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ČT24 - Nejdůvěryhodnější zpravodajský web v ČR - Česká televize

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Eric. D. Beinhockder  – Reflexivity, complexity, and the nature of social science Eric D. Beinhocker

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Eric. D. Beinhockder  – Reflexivity, complexity, and the nature of social science Eric D. Beinhocker

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Systems can be classified along a ‘spectrum of complexity’ and that under specific conditions not only social systems but also natural and artificial systems can be considered ‘complex reflexive.’ The epistemological challenges associated with scientifically understanding a phenomenon stem not from whether its domain is social, natural, or artificial, but where it falls along this spectrum.

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William F. Ruddiman – Early Anthropocene Hypothesis

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William F. Ruddiman – Early Anthropocene Hypothesis

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Version 4.1

What is the Holacracy Constitution?

This "Constitution" defines rules and processes for the governance and operations of an organization. The "Ratifiers"are adopting these rules as the formal authority structure for the "Organization" specified upon the Constitution's adoption, which may be an entire entity or a part of one that the Ratifiers have authority to govern and run. The Ratifiers and anyone else who agrees to take part in the governance and operations of the Organization (its "Partners") may rely upon the authorities granted by this Constitution, and also agree to be bound by its duties and constraints.

Below is the current version in English (Version: 4.1, Release Date: June 2015, Contribution History)

1.1 DEFINITION OF A ROLE

The Organization's Partners will typically perform work for the Organization by acting in an explicitly defined Role. A"Role" is an organizational construct with a descriptive name and one or more of the following:

(a) a , which is a capacity, potential, or unrealizable goal that the Role will pursue or express on behalf of the Organization.

(b) one or more , which are things the Role may exclusively control and regulate as its property, on behalf of the Organization.

(c) one or more "Accountabilities", which are ongoing activities of the Organization that the Role will enact.

1.2.1 PROCESSING TENSIONS

You are responsible for monitoring how your Role's Purpose and Accountabilities are expressed, and comparing that to your vision of their ideal potential expression, to identify gaps between the current reality and a potential you sense (each gap is a "Tension"). You are also responsible for trying to resolve those Tensions by using the authorities and other mechanisms available to you under this Constitution.

1.2.2 PROCESSING PURPOSE & ACCOUNTABILITIES

You are responsible for regularly considering how to enact your Role's Purpose and each of your Role's Accountabilities, by defining:

(a) "Next-Actions", which are actions you could execute immediately and that would be useful to execute immediately, at least in the absence of competing priorities; and

(b) "Projects", which are specific outcomes that require multiple sequential actions to achieve and that would be useful to work towards, at least in the absence of competing priorities.

1.3 AUTHORITY TO ACT

As a Partner assigned to a Role, you have the authority to execute any Next-Actions you reasonably believe are useful for enacting your Role's Purpose or Accountabilities.

However, you cannot exert control or cause a material impact within a Domain owned by another Role or another sovereign entity, unless you have their permission. The authority granted in this paragraph is further limited by Section 2.1.3.

1.4 AUTHORITY OVER DOMAINS

As a Partner assigned to a Role, you have the authority to control and regulate each Domain of your Role. You may do this on a case-by-case basis when others request permission to impact one of your Domains, by considering the request and allowing or withholding permission.

You may also define "Policies" for your Domains, which are either grants of authority that allow others to control or cause a material impact within a Domain, or limits on how others may do so when otherwise authorized. Before a Policy is valid, you must first publish it in a forum convenient to all Partners who may be impacted.

The authorities granted to you in this section may be further limited by constraints defined under Section 2.1.3.

2.1 CIRCLE BASICS

A is a Role that may further break itself down by defining its own contained Roles to achieve its Purpose, control its Domains, and enact its Accountabilities. The Roles a Circle defines are its "Defined Roles", and anyone filling one of its Defined Roles is a "Circle Member" of that Circle.

2.1.1 DEFINING ROLES & POLICIES

Each Circle will use the "Governance Process" described in Article III of this Constitution to define or amend Roles within the Circle or Policies governing the Circle's Domain. No one may define or amend a Circle's Roles or Policies outside of its Governance Process, unless explicitly allowed by another rule of this Constitution.

Further, each Circle may control its own functions and activities, as if a Domain of the Circle, for the purpose of defining Policies that limit the Circle's Roles.

2.1.3 DELEGATION OF CONTROL

When a Circle defines a Domain upon one of its Roles, the Circle's authority to impact, control, and regulate that Domain is instead delegated to that Role and removed from the Circle.

However, the Circle retains the right to amend or remove that Domain delegation, or to define or modify Policies that further grant or constrain the Role's authority within the Domain.

By default, any Domains delegated in this way exclude the authority to dispose of the Domain itself or any significant assets within the Domain, or to transfer those assets outside of the Circle, or to significantly limit any rights of the Circle to the Domain. A Circle may delegate these retained authorities as well, by explicitly granting the desired permissions in a Policy of the Circle.

In any case, all Domain delegations are always limited to whatever authority the Circle itself had in the first place.

2.2 CIRCLE LEAD LINK

Each Circle has a "Lead Link Role" with the definition given in Appendix A and the further responsibilities and authorities defined in this Section.

The person filling the Lead Link Role, while acting in that capacity, is referred to as the Circle's "Lead Link".

2.2.2 DEFINES PRIORITIES & STRATEGIES

A Circle's Lead Link may define relative priorities for the Circle. In addition, the Lead Link may define a more general"Strategy" for the Circle, or multiple Strategies, which are heuristics that guide the Circle's Roles in self-identifying priorities on an ongoing basis.

2.3 CORE CIRCLE MEMBERS

Some Circle Members are allowed to take part in a Circle's Governance Process, and are thus "Core Circle Members"of the Circle.

The Core Circle Members are determined using the following rules:

2.5 ELECTED ROLES

Each Circle includes a "Facilitator Role", a "Secretary Role", and a "Rep Link Role" with the definitions given in Appendix A. These are the Circle's "Elected Roles", and the person filling each becomes the Circle's "Facilitator","Secretary", or when acting in the capacity of the Elected Role.

2.5.4 SURROGATES FOR ELECTED ROLES

A surrogate may temporarily fill an Elected Role when one is unfilled, or when the person who normally fills the Role is unavailable for a Circle meeting or feels unable or unwilling to enact the Role's duties.

In any given instance where a surrogate is needed, the surrogate is, in this order of precedence:

2.6 SUB-CIRCLES

A Circle may expand its Defined Roles into full Circles, via its Governance Process. When it does, the new Circle becomes its "Sub-Circle", while it becomes the "Super-Circle" of that new Sub-Circle.

2.6.1 MODIFYING SUB-CIRCLES

A Circle may modify the Purpose, Domain, or Accountabilities on a Sub-Circle.

A Circle may also move its own Defined Roles or Policies into a Sub-Circle, or move any from within the Sub-Circle into itself.

Any of these modifications may only be done via the Governance Process of the Circle.

Beyond these allowed changes, a Circle may not modify any Defined Roles or Policies held within a Sub-Circle.

2.7 CROSS LINKING

A Circle may create a "Cross Link Policy" to invite any entity or group to participate within another Circle's Governance Process and operations. The entity or group that is invited to participate is the "Linked Entity", and it may be external to the Organization, or it may be another Role or Circle within the Organization. The Circle that will receive this link is the"Target Circle", and it must be the Circle creating the Policy, or one of its Sub-Circles.

Once a Cross Link Policy is adopted, the Linked Entity may assign a representative to participate in the Target Circle under the terms of this section, unless alternate terms are defined in the Policy.

2.7.1 CROSS LINK ROLE

If the Linked Entity is a Role, then that Role may participate in the Target Circle as described below. It becomes the"Cross Link Role", with the person filling it becoming the "Cross Link".

If the Linked Entity is a Circle or a group, then a new special-purpose Cross Link Role is automatically created instead, and resides within both the Linked Entity and the Target Circle, much like a Rep Link. In this case, the Cross Link Role has the same Purpose and Accountabilities as a Rep Link, but with the "Circle" referenced in the Rep Link Role description instead meaning the Linked Entity, and the "Super-Circle" instead meaning the Target Circle.

If the Linked Entity lacks both a clear Purpose and any clear Accountabilities, then the Cross Link Policy must further clarify what the Cross Link Role will represent within the Target Circle.

2.7.2 CROSS LINK ASSIGNMENT

If the Linked Entity is a Circle or group, it may assign someone to fill the Cross Link Role using whatever process it already has for assigning people to fill Defined Roles or similar work functions.

If a Linked Entity represents a group with no single locus of authority to do that assignment, then the Target Circle may instead assign someone to the Cross Link Role, unless otherwise specified in the Cross Link Policy.

In all cases, only one person may be assigned to each Cross Link Role, unless allowed by the Cross Link Policy.

Whenever a Cross Link Role is unfilled, it is considered non-existent and has no default assignment or effect.

3.1 SCOPE OF GOVERNANCE

The Governance Process of a Circle has the power to:

At any given time, the then-current results of a Circle's Governance Process define its acting "Governance".

Only those outputs listed in this section are valid Governance for a circle; no one may capture other outputs within the Circle's Governance records.

3.2 CHANGING GOVERNANCE

Any Core Circle Member of a Circle may propose changing its Governance, thus making a "Proposal" as a"Proposer".

Before a Proposal is adopted, all Core Circle Members must have the opportunity to raise Tensions about adopting the Proposal. Each Tension so raised is considered an "Objection" if it meets the criteria defined in this section, and the person who raised it becomes the "Objector".

Proposals are considered adopted and amend the Governance of the Circle only if no Objections are so raised. If Objections are raised, the Proposer and each Objector must find a way to address the Objections before the Circle may adopt the Proposal, after which all Core Circle Members must have another opportunity to raise further Objections before the Proposal is adopted.

3.2.1 Making Proposals

Any Core Circle Member may make a Proposal within a "Governance Meeting" of the Circle called under the terms of Section 3.3.

Alternatively, a Core Circle Member may distribute a Proposal to all other Core Circle Members asynchronously, outside of a Governance Meeting, using any written communication channel approved for this purpose by the Circle's Secretary. When this happens, the Facilitator may either apply the same process and rules used within a Governance Meeting, or may allow each Core Circle Member to directly declare whether or not he or she has Objections to integrate. Further, at any point before an asynchronous Proposal is adopted, the Facilitator or any Core Circle Member may stop the asynchronous processing by requesting the Proposer escalate the Proposal to a Governance Meeting, and notifying the Circle's Secretary.

A Circle may adopt Policies to further constrain when or how Proposals may be made or processed outside of a Governance Meeting. However, no Policy may limit the right to stop asynchronous processing by escalating to a Governance Meeting. A Circle may also use a Policy to create a time limit for responding to asynchronous Proposals, upon which any asynchronous Proposal is automatically adopted if no Objections or escalation requests are raised.

3.2.4 Criteria for Valid Objections

Some Tensions do not count as Objections, and may be ignored during the processing of a Proposal. A Tension only counts as an Objection if it meets all of the criteria defined in (a) through (d) below, or the special criteria defined in (e):

However, regardless of the above criteria, a Tension about adopting a Proposal always counts as an Objection if:

(e) Processing or adopting the Proposal breaks the rules defined in this Constitution, or prompts the Circle or its members to act outside of the authority granted under this Constitution. For example, Next-Actions, Projects, and specific operational decisions are typically not valid Governance outputs per the terms of Section 3.1, so anyone involved could raise an Objection that a Proposal to enact these outputs would violate the rules of the Constitution.

3.3 GOVERNANCE MEETINGS

The Secretary of a Circle is responsible for scheduling Governance Meetings to enact the Circle's Governance Process.

In addition to any regular, recurring Governance Meetings the Secretary schedules, the Secretary is responsible for scheduling additional special Governance Meetings promptly upon request of any Core Circle Member.

The Facilitator is responsible for presiding over all Governance Meetings in alignment with the following rules and any relevant Policies of the Circle.

3.3.4 Agenda Building

The Facilitator must build an agenda of Tensions to process within a Governance Meeting by soliciting and capturing agenda items from all participants. This must be done within the meeting and not beforehand, and each participant may add as many agenda items as desired. Participants may add additional agenda items during the meeting as well, in between the processing of any existing agenda items.

(a) Agenda Item Format: Each agenda item in a Governance Meeting represents one Tension to process, sensed by the participant who added it to the agenda. When adding an agenda item, a participant may only provide a short label for the Tension, and may not explain or discuss the Tension further until processing of that agenda item actually begins.

(b) Ordering the Agenda: The Facilitator may determine the order in which to process agenda items, using any process or criteria the Facilitator deems appropriate. However, the Facilitator must place any agenda item calling for an election of any of the Circle's Elected Roles before all other agenda items, if requested by any meeting participant. Further, if the meeting was scheduled at the special request of one participant, the Facilitator must place all agenda items raised by that participant before any raised by others, unless that participant allows otherwise.

(c) Processing Agenda Items: Once the Facilitator determines an initial order for the agenda, the Facilitator must lead participants through processing each agenda item, one at a time. To process an agenda item that calls for an election, the Facilitator must use the "Integrative Election Process" defined in Section 3.3.6. To process any other agenda item, the Facilitator must use the "Integrative Decision-Making Process" defined in Section 3.3.5.

3.3.5 Integrative Decision-Making Process

The Facilitator must enact the Integrative Decision-Making Process as follows:

3.3.6 Integrative Election Process

The Facilitator must enact the Integrative Election Process as follows:

3.5.3 Process Restoration

Whenever an authorized party declares a Process Breakdown within a Circle, the following occurs:

These authorities are temporary and cease as soon as the Facilitator of the Super-Circle concludes that due process has been restored within the Circle.

4.1.2 Duty of Processing

You have a duty to promptly process messages and requests from your fellow Circle Members, as follows:

4.1.3 Duty of Prioritization

You have a duty to prioritize where to focus your attention and resources in alignment with the following constraints:

4.2.3 Facilitation & Process

The Facilitator must normally use the following process for Tactical Meetings:

A Circle may adopt a Policy to add to or change this required process.

5.4 LEGACY POLICIES AND SYSTEMS

Any existing policies and systems the Organization has in effect before adopting this Constitution continue in full force after adoption, even if they include constraints or authorities that are not reflected in Governance records. This may include compensation systems, hiring and firing processes, work-related policies, etc.

However, these legacy policies and systems will lose all weight and authority as soon as Governance is defined that replaces or contradicts them. In addition, they may not be modified or added to in their legacy form. Anyone wishing to do so must first capture or otherwise empower the policy or system using the Governance Process defined in this Constitution.

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Version 4.1 This "Constitution" defines rules and processes for the governance and operations of an organization. The "Ratifiers" are adopting these rules as the formal authority structure for the "Organization" specified upon the Constitution's adoption, which may be an entire entity or a part of one that the Ratifiers have authority to govern and run.

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In graph theory, the shortest path problem is the problem of finding a path between two vertices (or nodes) in a graph such that the sum of the weights of its constituent edges is minimized.

The problem of finding the shortest path between two intersections on a road map may be modeled as a special case of the shortest path problem in graphs, where the vertices correspond to intersections and the edges correspond to road segments, each weighted by the length of the segment.

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In probability theory and related fields, a stochastic or random process is a mathematical object usually defined as a family of random variables. Historically, the random variables were associated with or indexed by a set of numbers, usually viewed as points in time, giving the interpretation of a stochastic process representing numerical values of some system randomly changing over time, such as the growth of a bacterial population, an electrical current fluctuating due to thermal noise, or the movement of a gas molecule. Stochastic processes are widely used as mathematical models of systems and phenomena that appear to vary in a random manner. They have applications in many disciplines including sciences such as biology, chemistry, ecology, neuroscience, and physics as well as technology and engineering fields such as image processing, signal processing, information theory, computer science, cryptography and telecommunications. Furthermore, seemingly random changes in financial markets have motivated the extensive use of stochastic processes in finance.

Applications and the study of phenomena have in turn inspired the proposal of new stochastic processes. Examples of such stochastic processes include the Wiener process or Brownian motion process, used by Louis Bachelier to study price changes on the Paris Bourse, and the Poisson process, used by A. K. Erlang to study the number of phone calls occurring in a certain period of time. These two stochastic processes are considered the most important and central in the theory of stochastic processes, and were discovered repeatedly and independently, both before and after Bachelier and Erlang, in different settings and countries.

The term random function is also used to refer to a stochastic or random process, because a stochastic process can also be interpreted as a random element in a function space. The terms stochastic process and random process are used interchangeably, often with no specific mathematical space for the set that indexes the random variables. But often these two terms are used when the random variables are indexed by the integers or an interval of the real line. If the random variables are indexed by the Cartesian plane or some higher-dimensional Euclidean space, then the collection of random variables is usually called a random field instead. The values of a stochastic process are not always numbers and can be vectors or other mathematical objects.

Based on their mathematical properties, stochastic processes can be grouped into various categories, which include random walks, martingales, Markov processes, Lévy processes, Gaussian processes, random fields, renewal processes, and branching processes. The study of stochastic processes uses mathematical knowledge and techniques from probability, calculus, linear algebra, set theory, and topology as well as branches of mathematical analysis such as real analysis, measure theory, Fourier analysis, and functional analysis. The theory of stochastic processes is considered to be an important contribution to mathematics and it continues to be an active topic of research for both theoretical reasons and applications.

A stochastic or random process can be defined as a collection of random variables that is indexed by some mathematical set, meaning that each random variable of the stochastic process is uniquely associated with an element in the set.[4][5] The set used to index the random variables is called the index set. Historically, the index set was some subset of the real line, such as the natural numbers, giving the index set the interpretation of time.[1] Each random variable in the collection takes values from the same mathematical space known as the state space. This state space can be, for example, the integers, the real line or -dimensional Euclidean space.[1][5] An increment is the amount that a stochastic process changes between two index values, often interpreted as two points in time.[49][50] A stochastic process can have many outcomes, due to its randomness, and a single outcome of a stochastic process is called, among other names, a sample function or realization.[29][51]

A stochastic process can be classified in different ways, for example, by its state space, its index set, or the dependence among the random variables. One common way of classification is by the cardinality of the index set and the state space.

When interpreted as time, if the index set of a stochastic process has a finite or countable number of elements, such as a finite set of numbers, the set of integers, or the natural numbers, then the stochastic process is said to be in discrete time. If the index set is some interval of the real line, then time is said to be continuous. The two types of stochastic processes are respectively referred to as discrete-time and continuous-time stochastic processes. Discrete-time stochastic processes are considered easier to study because continuous-time processes require more advanced mathematical techniques and knowledge, particularly due to the index set being uncountable. If the index set is the integers, or some subset of them, then the stochastic process can also be called a random sequence.

If the state space is the integers or natural numbers, then the stochastic process is called a discrete or integer-valued stochastic process. If the state space is the real line, then the stochastic process is referred to as a real-valued stochastic process or a process with continuous state space. If the state space is -dimensional Euclidean space, then the stochastic process is called a - dimensional vector process or - vector process.[52][53]

The word stochastic in English was originally used as an adjective with the definition "pertaining to conjecturing", and stemming from a Greek word meaning "to aim at a mark, guess", and the Oxford English Dictionary gives the year 1662 as its earliest occurrence. In his work on probability Ars Conjectandi, originally published in Latin in 1713, Jakob Bernoulli used the phrase "Ars Conjectandi sive Stochastice", which has been translated to "the art of conjecturing or stochastics". This phrase was used, with reference to Bernoulli, by Ladislaus Bortkiewicz who in 1917 wrote in German the word stochastik with a sense meaning random. The term stochastic process first appeared in English in a 1934 paper by Joseph Doob. For the term and a specific mathematical definition, Doob cited another 1934 paper, where the term stochastischer Prozeß was used in German by Aleksandr Khinchin, though the German term had been used earlier, for example, by Andrei Kolmogorov in 1931.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, early occurrences of the word random in English with its current meaning, which relates to chance or luck, date back to the 16th century, while earlier recorded usages started in the 14th century as a noun meaning "impetuosity, great speed, force, or violence (in riding, running, striking, etc.)". The word itself comes from a Middle French word meaning "speed, haste", and it is probably derived from a French verb meaning "to run" or "to gallop". The first written appearance of the term random process pre-dates stochastic process, which the Oxford English Dictionary also gives as a synonym, and was used in an article by Francis Edgeworth published in 1888.

The definition of a stochastic process varies, but a stochastic process is traditionally defined as a collection of random variables indexed by some set. The terms random process and stochastic process are considered synonyms and are used interchangeably, without the index set being precisely specified. Both "collection", or "family" are used while instead of "index set", sometimes the terms "parameter set" or "parameter space" are used.

The term random function is also used to refer to a stochastic or random process,[5][75][76] though sometimes it is only used when the stochastic process takes real values.[29][74] This term is also used when the index sets are mathematical spaces other than the real line,[5][77] while the terms stochastic process and random process are usually used when the index set interpreted as time,[5][77][78] and other terms are used such as random field when the index set is -dimensional Euclidean space or a manifold.[5][29][31]

A stochastic process can be denoted, among other ways, by ,[57] ,[70] [79] or simply as or , although is regarded as an abuse of function notation.[80] For example, or are used to refer to the random variable with the index , and not the entire stochastic process.[79] If the index set is , then one can write, for example, to denote the stochastic process.[30]

One of the simplest stochastic processes is the Bernoulli process,[81] which is a sequence of independent and identically distributed (iid) random variables, where each random variable takes either the value one or zero, say one with probability and zero with probability . This process can be linked to repeatedly flipping a coin, where the probability of obtaining a head is and its value is one, while the value of a tail is zero.[82] In other words, a Bernoulli process is a sequence of iid Bernoulli random variables,[83] where each coin flip is an example of a Bernoulli trial.[84]

Random walks are stochastic processes that are usually defined as sums of iid random variables or random vectors in Euclidean space, so they are processes that change in discrete time. But some also use the term to refer to processes that change in continuous time, particularly the Wiener process used in finance, which has led to some confusion, resulting in its criticism. There are other various types of random walks, defined so their state spaces can be other mathematical objects, such as lattices and groups, and in general they are highly studied and have many applications in different disciplines.

A classic example of a random walk is known as the simple random walk, which is a stochastic process in discrete time with the integers as the state space, and is based on a Bernoulli process, where each Bernoulli variable takes either the value positive one or negative one. In other words, the simple random walk takes place on the integers, and its value increases by one with probability, say, , or decreases by one with probability , so index set of this random walk is the natural numbers, while its state space is the integers. If the , this random walk is called a symmetric random walk.[93][94]

The Wiener process is a stochastic process with stationary and independent increments that are normally distributed based on the size of the increments. The Wiener process is named after Norbert Wiener, who proved its mathematical existence, but the process is also called the Brownian motion process or just Brownian motion due to its historical connection as a model for Brownian movement in liquids.

Playing a central role in the theory of probability, the Wiener process is often considered the most important and studied stochastic process, with connections to other stochastic processes.[1][2][3][99][100][101][102] Its index set and state space are the non-negative numbers and real numbers, respectively, so it has both continuous index set and states space.[103] But the process can be defined more generally so its state space can be -dimensional Euclidean space.[92][100][104] If the mean of any increment is zero, then the resulting Wiener or Brownian motion process is said to have zero drift. If the mean of the increment for any two points in time is equal to the time difference multiplied by some constant , which is a real number, then the resulting stochastic process is said to have drift .[105][106][107]

Almost surely, a sample path of a Wiener process is continuous everywhere but nowhere differentiable. It can be considered as a continuous version of the simple random walk. The process arises as the mathematical limit of other stochastic processes such as certain random walks rescaled, which is the subject of Donsker's theorem or invariance principle, also known as the functional central limit theorem.

The Wiener process is a member of some important families of stochastic processes, including Markov processes, Lévy processes and Gaussian processes. The process also has many applications and is the main stochastic process used in stochastic calculus. It plays a central role in quantitative finance, where it is used, for example, in the Black-Scholes-Merton model. The process is also used in different fields, including the majority of natural sciences as well as some branches of social sciences, as a mathematical model for various random phenomena.

The Poisson process is a stochastic process that has different forms and definitions. It can be defined as a counting process, which is a stochastic process that represents the random number of points or events up to some time. The number of points of the process that are located in the interval from zero to some given time is a Poisson random variable that depends on that time and some parameter. This process has the natural numbers as its state space and the non-negative numbers as its index set. This process is also called the Poisson counting process, since it can be interpreted as an example of a counting process.

If a Poisson process is defined with a single positive constant, then the process is called a homogeneous Poisson process. The homogeneous Poisson process is a member of important classes of stochastic processes such as Markov processes and Lévy processes.

The homogeneous Poisson process can be defined and generalized in different ways. It can be defined such that its index set is the real line, and this stochastic process is also called the stationary Poisson process.[123][124] If the parameter constant of the Poisson process is replaced with some non-negative integrable function of , the resulting process is called an inhomogeneous or nonhomogeneous Poisson process, where the average density of points of the process is no longer constant.[125] Serving as a fundamental process in queueing theory, the Poisson process is an important process for mathematical models, where it finds applications for models of events randomly occurring in certain time windows.[126][127]

Defined on the real line, the Poisson process can be interpreted as a stochastic process,[50][128] among other random objects.[129][130] But then it can be defined on the -dimensional Euclidean space or other mathematical spaces,[131] where it is often interpreted as a random set or a random counting measure, instead of a stochastic process.[129][130] In this setting, the Poisson process, also called the Poisson point process, is one of the most important objects in probability theory, both for applications and theoretical reasons.[23][132] But it has been remarked that the Poisson process does not receive as much attention as it should, partly due to it often being considered just on the real line, and not on other mathematical spaces.[132][133]

A stochastic process is defined as a collection of random variables defined on a common probability space , where is a sample space, is a - algebra, and is a probability measure; and the random variables, indexed by some set , all take values in the same mathematical space , which must be measurable with respect to some -algebra .[29]

In other words, for a given probability space and a measurable space , a stochastic process is a collection of -valued random variables, which can be written as:[81]

Historically, in many problems from the natural sciences a point had the meaning of time, so is a random variable representing a value observed at time .[134] A stochastic process can also be written as to reflect that it is actually a function of two variables, and .[29][135]

There are others ways to consider a stochastic process, with the above definition being considered the traditional one.[69][70] For example, a stochastic process can be interpreted or defined as a -valued random variable, where is the space of all the possible -valued functions of that map from the set into the space .[28][69]

The set is called the index set[4][52] or parameter set[29][136] of the stochastic process. Often this set is some subset of the real line, such as the natural numbers or an interval, giving the set the interpretation of time.[1] In addition to these sets, the index set can be other linearly ordered sets or more general mathematical sets,[1][55] such as the Cartesian plane or -dimensional Euclidean space, where an element can represent a point in space.[49][137] But in general more results and theorems are possible for stochastic processes when the index set is ordered.[138]

The mathematical space of a stochastic process is called its state space. This mathematical space can be defined using integers, real lines, -dimensional Euclidean spaces, complex planes, or more abstract mathematical spaces. The state space is defined using elements that reflect the different values that the stochastic process can take.[1][5][29][52][57]

A sample function is a single outcome of a stochastic process, so it is formed by taking a single possible value of each random variable of the stochastic process.[29][139] More precisely, if is a stochastic process, then for any point , the mapping

is called a sample function, a realization, or, particularly when is interpreted as time, a sample path of the stochastic process .[51] This means that for a fixed , there exists a sample function that maps the index set to the state space .[29] Other names for a sample function of a stochastic process include trajectory, path function[140] or path.[141]

An increment of a stochastic process is the difference between two random variables of the same stochastic process. For a stochastic process with an index set that can be interpreted as time, an increment is how much the stochastic process changes over a certain time period. For example, if is a stochastic process with state space and index set , then for any two non-negative numbers and such that , the difference is a -valued random variable known as an increment.[49][50] When interested in the increments, often the state space is the real line or the natural numbers, but it can be -dimensional Euclidean space or more abstract spaces such as Banach spaces.[50]

For a stochastic process defined on the probability space , the law of stochastic process is defined as the image measure:

where is a probability measure, the symbol denotes function composition and is the pre-image of the measurable function or, equivalently, the -valued random variable , where is the space of all the possible -valued functions of , so the law of a stochastic process is a probability measure.[28][69][142][143]

For a measurable subset of , the pre-image of gives

so the law of a can be written as:[29]

For a stochastic process with law , its finite-dimensional distributions are defined as:

where is a counting number and each set is a non-empty finite subset of the index set , so each , which means that is any finite collection of subsets of the index set .[28][147]

For any measurable subset of the -fold Cartesian power , the finite-dimensional distributions of a stochastic process can be written as:[29]

The finite-dimensional distributions of a stochastic process satisfy two mathematical conditions known as consistency conditions.

Stationarity is a mathematical property that a stochastic process has when all the random variables of that stochastic process are identically distributed. In other words, if is a stationary stochastic process, then for any the random variable has the same distribution, which means that for any set of index set values , the corresponding random variables

all have the same probability distribution. The index set of a stationary stochastic process is usually interpreted as time, so it can be the integers or the real line. But the concept of stationarity also exists for point processes and random fields, where the index set is not interpreted as time.

When the index set can be interpreted as time, a stochastic process is said to be stationary if its finite-dimensional distributions are invariant under translations of time. This type of stochastic process can be used to describe a physical system that is in steady state, but still experiences random fluctuations.[148] The intuition behind stationarity is that as time passes the distribution of the stationary stochastic process remains the same.[152] A sequence of random variables forms a stationary stochastic process only if the random variables are identically distributed.[148]

A stochastic process with the above definition of stationarity is sometimes said to be strictly stationary, but there are other forms of stationarity. One example is when a discrete-time or continuous-time stochastic process is said to be stationary in the wide sense, then the process has a finite second moment for all and the covariance of the two random variables and depends only on the number for all .[152][153] Khinchin introduced the related concept of stationarity in the wide sense, which has other names including covariance stationarity or stationarity in the broad sense.[153][154]

A filtration is an increasing sequence of sigma-algebras defined in relation to some probability space and an index set that has some total order relation, such in the case of the index set being some subset of the real numbers. More formally, if a stochastic process has an index set with a total order, then a filtration , on a probability space is a family of sigma-algebras such that for all , where and denotes the total order of the index set .[52] With the concept of a filtration, it is possible to study the amount of information contained in a stochastic process at , which can be interpreted as time .[52][155] The intuition behind a filtration is that as time passes, more and more information on is known or available, which is captured in , resulting in finer and finer partitions of .[156][157]

A modification of a stochastic process is another stochastic process, which is closely related to the original stochastic process. More precisely, a stochastic process that has the same index set , set space , and probability space as another stochastic process is said to be a modification of if for all the following

holds. Two stochastic processes that are modifications of each other have the same law and they are said to be stochastically equivalent or equivalent.

Instead of modification, the term version is also used, however some authors use the term version when two stochastic processes have the same finite-dimensional distributions, but they may be defined on different probability spaces, so two processes that are modifications of each other, are also versions of each other, in the latter sense, but not the converse.

If a continuous-time real-valued stochastic process meets certain moment conditions on its increments, then the Kolmogorov continuity theorem says that there exists a modification of this process that has continuous sample paths with probability one, so the stochastic process has a continuous modification or version.[161][162][164] The theorem can also be generalized to random fields so the index set is -dimensional Euclidean space[165] as well as to stochastic processes with metric spaces as their state spaces.[166]

Two stochastic processes and defined on the same probability space with the same index set and set space are said be indistinguishable if the following

holds.[142][158] If two and are modifications of each other and are almost surely continuous, then and are indistinguishable.[167]

Separability is a property of a stochastic process based on its index set in relation to the probability measure. The property is assumed so that functionals of stochastic processes or random fields with uncountable index sets can form random variables. For a stochastic process to be separable, in addition to other conditions, its index set must be a separable space, which means that the index set has a dense countable subset.

More precisely, a real-valued continuous-time stochastic process with a probability space is separable if its index set has a dense countable subset and there is a set of probability zero, so , such that for every open set and every closed set , the two events and differ from each other at most on a subset of .[169][170][171] The definition of separability[c] can also be stated for other index sets and state spaces,[174] such as in the case of random fields, where the index set as well as the state space can be -dimensional Euclidean space.[31][150]

The concept of separability of a stochastic process was introduced by Joseph Doob, where the underlying idea is to make a countable set of points of the index set determine the properties of the stochastic process. Any stochastic process with a countable index set already meets the separability conditions, so discrete-time stochastic processes are always separable. A theorem by Doob, sometimes known as Doob's separability theorem, says that any real-valued continuous-time stochastic process has a separable modification. Versions of this theorem also exist for more general stochastic processes with index sets and state spaces other than the real line.

Two stochastic processes and defined on the same probability space with the same index set are said be independent if for all and for every choice of epochs , the random vectors and are independent.[177]:p. 515

Two stochastic processes and are called uncorrelated if their cross-covariance is zero for all times.[178]:p. 142 Formally:

.

If two stochastic processes and are independent, then they are also uncorrelated.[178]:p. 151

Two stochastic processes and are called orthogonal if their cross-correlation is zero for all times.[178]:p. 142 Formally:

.

A Skorokhod space, also written as Skorohod space, is a mathematical space of all the functions that are right-continuous with left limits, defined on some interval of the real line such as or , and take values on the real line or on some metric space.[179][180][181] Such functions are known as càdlàg or cadlag functions, based on the acronym of the French expression continue à droite, limite à gauche, due to the functions being right-continuous with left limits.[179][182] A Skorokhod function space, introduced by Anatoliy Skorokhod,[181] is often denoted with the letter ,[179][180][181][182] so the function space is also referred to as space .[179][183][184] The notation of this function space can also include the interval on which all the càdlàg functions are defined, so, for example, denotes the space of càdlàg functions defined on the unit interval .[182][184][185]

Skorokhod function spaces are frequently used in the theory of stochastic processes because it often assumed that the sample functions of continuous-time stochastic processes belong to a Skorokhod space. Such spaces contain continuous functions, which correspond to sample functions of the Wiener process. But the space also has functions with discontinuities, which means that the sample functions of stochastic processes with jumps, such as the Poisson process (on the real line), are also members of this space.

In the context of mathematical construction of stochastic processes, the term regularity is used when discussing and assuming certain conditions for a stochastic process to resolve possible construction issues. For example, to study stochastic processes with uncountable index sets, it is assumed that the stochastic process adheres to some type of regularity condition such as the sample functions being continuous.

Markov processes are stochastic processes, traditionally in discrete or continuous time, that have the Markov property, which means the next value of the Markov process depends on the current value, but it is conditionally independent of the previous values of the stochastic process. In other words, the behavior of the process in the future is stochastically independent of its behavior in the past, given the current state of the process.

The Brownian motion process and the Poisson process (in one dimension) are both examples of Markov processes in continuous time, while random walks on the integers and the gambler's ruin problem are examples of Markov processes in discrete time.

A Markov chain is a type of Markov process that has either discrete state space or discrete index set (often representing time), but the precise definition of a Markov chain varies. For example, it is common to define a Markov chain as a Markov process in either discrete or continuous time with a countable state space (thus regardless of the nature of time), but it has been also common to define a Markov chain as having discrete time in either countable or continuous state space (thus regardless of the state space). It has been argued that the first definition of a Markov chain, where it has discrete time, now tends to be used, despite the second definition having been used by researchers like Joseph Doob and Kai Lai Chung.

Markov processes form an important class of stochastic processes and have applications in many areas. For example, they are the basis for a general stochastic simulation method known as Markov chain Monte Carlo, which is used for simulating random objects with specific probability distributions, and has found application in Bayesian statistics.

The concept of the Markov property was originally for stochastic processes in continuous and discrete time, but the property has been adapted for other index sets such as -dimensional Euclidean space, which results in collections of random variables known as Markov random fields.[205][206][207]

A martingale is a discrete-time or continuous-time stochastic process with the property that, at every instant, given the current value and all the past values of the process, the conditional expectation of every future value is equal to the current value. In discrete time, if this property holds for the next value, then it holds for all future values. The exact mathematical definition of a martingale requires two other conditions coupled with the mathematical concept of a filtration, which is related to the intuition of increasing available information as time passes. Martingales are usually defined to be real-valued, but they can also be complex-valued or even more general.

A symmetric random walk and a Wiener process (with zero drift) are both examples of martingales, respectively, in discrete and continuous time.[208][209] For a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables with zero mean, the stochastic process formed from the successive partial sums is a discrete-time martingale.[212] In this aspect, discrete-time martingales generalize the idea of partial sums of independent random variables.[213]

Martingales can also be created from stochastic processes by applying some suitable transformations, which is the case for the homogeneous Poisson process (on the real line) resulting in a martingale called the compensated Poisson process. Martingales can also be built from other martingales. For example, there are martingales based on the martingale the Wiener process, forming continuous-time martingales.

Martingales mathematically formalize the idea of a fair game, and they were originally developed to show that it is not possible to win a fair game. But now they are used in many areas of probability, which is one of the main reasons for studying them. Many problems in probability have been solved by finding a martingale in the problem and studying it. Martingales will converge, given some conditions on their moments, so they are often used to derive convergence results, due largely to martingale convergence theorems.

Martingales have many applications in statistics, but it has been remarked that its use and application are not as widespread as it could be in the field of statistics, particularly statistical inference. They have found applications in areas in probability theory such as queueing theory and Palm calculus and other fields such as economics and finance.

Lévy process

Lévy processes are types of stochastic processes that can be considered as generalizations of random walks in continuous time.[50][224] These processes have many applications in fields such as finance, fluid mechanics, physics and biology.[225][226] The main defining characteristics of these processes are their stationarity and independence properties, so they were known as processes with stationary and independent increments. In other words, a stochastic process is a Lévy process if for non-negatives numbers, , the corresponding increments

are all independent of each other, and the distribution of each increment only depends on the difference in time.

A Lévy process can be defined such that its state space is some abstract mathematical space, such as a Banach space, but the processes are often defined so that they take values in Euclidean space. The index set is the non-negative numbers, so , which gives the interpretation of time. Important stochastic processes such as the Wiener process, the homogeneous Poisson process (in one dimension), and subordinators are all Lévy processes.[50][224]

A random field is a collection of random variables indexed by a -dimensional Euclidean space or some manifold. In general, a random field can be considered an example of a stochastic or random process, where the index set is not necessarily a subset of the real line.[31] But there is a convention that an indexed collection of random variables is called a random field when the index has two or more dimensions.[5][29][227] If the specific definition of a stochastic process requires the index set to be a subset of the real line, then the random field can be considered as a generalization of stochastic process.[228]

A point process is a collection of points randomly located on some mathematical space such as the real line, -dimensional Euclidean space, or more abstract spaces. Sometimes the term point process is not preferred, as historically the word process denoted an evolution of some system in time, so a point process is also called a random point field.[229] There are different interpretations of a point process, such a random counting measure or a random set.[230][231] Some authors regard a point process and stochastic process as two different objects such that a point process is a random object that arises from or is associated with a stochastic process,[232][233] though it has been remarked that the difference between point processes and stochastic processes is not clear.[233]

Other authors consider a point process as a stochastic process, where the process is indexed by sets of the underlying space[d] on which it is defined, such as the real line or -dimensional Euclidean space.[236][237] Other stochastic processes such as renewal and counting processes are studied in the theory of point processes.[238][239]

Probability theory has its origins in games of chance, which have a long history, with some games being played thousands of years ago, but very little analysis on them was done in terms of probability. The year 1654 is often considered the birth of probability theory when French mathematicians Pierre Fermat and Blaise Pascal had a written correspondence on probability, motivated by a gambling problem. But there was earlier mathematical work done on the probability of gambling games such as Liber de Ludo Aleae by Gerolamo Cardano, written in the 16th century but posthumously published later in 1663.

After Cardano, Jakob Bernoulli wrote Ars Conjectandi, which is considered a significant event in the history of probability theory. Bernoulli's book was published, also posthumously, in 1713 and inspired many mathematicians to study probability. But despite some renown mathematicians contributing to probability theory, such as Pierre-Simon Laplace, Abraham de Moivre, Carl Gauss, Siméon Poisson and Pafnuty Chebyshev, most of the mathematical community did not consider probability theory to be part of mathematics until the 20th century.

In the physical sciences, scientists developed in the 19th century the discipline of statistical mechanics, where physical systems, such as containers filled with gases, can be regarded or treated mathematically as collections of many moving particles. Although there were attempts to incorporate randomness into statistical physics by some scientists, such as Rudolf Clausius, most of the work had little or no randomness. This changed in 1859 when James Clerk Maxwell contributed significantly to the field, more specifically, to the kinetic theory of gases, by presenting work where he assumed the gas particles move in random directions at random velocities. The kinetic theory of gases and statistical physics continued to be developed in the second half of the 19th century, with work done chiefly by Clausius, Ludwig Boltzmann and Josiah Gibbs, which would later have an influence on Albert Einstein's mathematical model for Brownian movement.

At the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900, David Hilbert presented a list of mathematical problems, where his sixth problem asked for a mathematical treatment of physics and probability involving axioms. Around the start of the 20th century, mathematicians developed measure theory, a branch of mathematics for studying integrals of mathematical functions, where two of the founders were French mathematicians, Henri Lebesgue and Émile Borel. In 1925 another French mathematician Paul Lévy published the first probability book that used ideas from measure theory.

In 1920s fundamental contributions to probability theory were made in the Soviet Union by mathematicians such as Sergei Bernstein, Aleksandr Khinchin, and Andrei Kolmogorov. Kolmogorov published in 1929 his first attempt at presenting a mathematical foundation, based on measure theory, for probability theory. In the early 1930s Khinchin and Kolmogorov set up probability seminars, which were attended by researchers such as Eugene Slutsky and Nikolai Smirnov, and Khinchin gave the first mathematical definition of a stochastic process as a set of random variables indexed by the real line.

In 1933 Andrei Kolmogorov published in German, his book on the foundations of probability theory titled Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, where Kolmogorov used measure theory to develop an axiomatic framework for probability theory. The publication of this book is now widely considered to be the birth of modern probability theory, when the theories of probability and stochastic processes became parts of mathematics.

After the publication of Kolmogorov's book, further fundamental work on probability theory and stochastic processes was done by Khinchin and Kolmogorov as well as other mathematicians such as Joseph Doob, William Feller, Maurice Fréchet, Paul Lévy, Wolfgang Doeblin, and Harald Cramér. Decades later Cramér referred to the 1930s as the "heroic period of mathematical probability theory". World War II greatly interrupted the development of probability theory, causing, for example, the migration of Feller from Sweden to the United States of America and the death of Doeblin, considered now a pioneer in stochastic processes.

After World War II the study of probability theory and stochastic processes gained more attention from mathematicians, with significant contributions made in many areas of probability and mathematics as well as the creation of new areas. Starting in the 1940s, Kiyosi Itô published papers developing the field of stochastic calculus, which involves stochastic integrals and stochastic differential equations based on the Wiener or Brownian motion process.

Also starting in the 1940s, connections were made between stochastic processes, particularly martingales, and the mathematical field of potential theory, with early ideas by Shizuo Kakutani and then later work by Joseph Doob. Further work, considered pioneering, was done by Gilbert Hunt in the 1950s, connecting Markov processes and potential theory, which had a significant effect on the theory of Lévy processes and led to more interest in studying Markov processes with methods developed by Itô.

In 1953 Doob published his book Stochastic processes, which had a strong influence on the theory of stochastic processes and stressed the importance of measure theory in probability. Doob also chiefly developed the theory of martingales, with later substantial contributions by Paul-André Meyer. Earlier work had been carried out by Sergei Bernstein, Paul Lévy and Jean Ville, the latter adopting the term martingale for the stochastic process. Methods from the theory of martingales became popular for solving various probability problems. Techniques and theory were developed to study Markov processes and then applied to martingales. Conversely, methods from the theory of martingales were established to treat Markov processes.

Other fields of probability were developed and used to study stochastic processes, with one main approach being the theory of large deviations. The theory has many applications in statistical physics, among other fields, and has core ideas going back to at least the 1930s. Later in the 1960s and 1970s fundamental work was done by Alexander Wentzell in the Soviet Union and Monroe D. Donsker and Srinivasa Varadhan in the United States of America, which would later result in Varadhan winning the 2007 Abel Prize. In the 1990s and 2000s the theories of Schramm-Loewner evolution and rough paths were introduced and developed to study stochastic processes and other mathematical objects in probability theory, which respectively resulted in Fields Medals being awarded to Wendelin Werner in 2008 and to Martin Hairer in 2014.

The theory of stochastic processes still continues to be a focus of research, with yearly international conferences on the topic of stochastic processes.

Although Khinchin gave mathematical definitions of stochastic processes in the 1930s, specific stochastic processes had already been discovered in different settings, such as the Brownian motion process and the Poisson process. Some families of stochastic processes such as point processes or renewal processes have long and complex histories, stretching back centuries.

The Bernoulli process, which can serve as a mathematical model for flipping a biased coin, is possibly the first stochastic process to have been studied. The process is a sequence of independent Bernoulli trials, which are named after Jackob Bernoulli who used them to study games of chance, including probability problems proposed and studied earlier by Christiaan Huygens. Bernoulli's work, including the Bernoulli process, were published in his book Ars Conjectandi in 1713.

In 1905 Karl Pearson coined the term random walk while posing a problem describing a random walk on the plane, which was motivated by an application in biology, but such problems involving random walks had already been studied in other fields. Certain gambling problems that were studied centuries earlier can be considered as problems involving random walks. For example, the problem known as the Gambler's ruin is based on a simple random walk, and is an example of a random walk with absorbing barriers. Pascal, Fermat and Huyens all gave numerical solutions to this problem without detailing their methods, and then more detailed solutions were presented by Jakob Bernoulli and Abraham de Moivre.

For random walks in -dimensional integer lattices, George Pólya published in 1919 and 1921 work, where he studied the probability of a symmetric random walk returning to a previous position in the lattice. Pólya showed that a symmetric random walk, which has an equal probability to advance in any direction in the lattice, will return to a previous position in the lattice an infinite number of times with probability one in one and two dimensions, but with probability zero in three or higher dimensions.[284][285]

The Wiener process or Brownian motion process has its origins in different fields including statistics, finance and physics. In 1880, Thorvald Thiele wrote a paper on the method of least squares, where he used the process to study the errors of a model in time-series analysis. The work is now considered as an early discovery of the statistical method known as Kalman filtering, but the work was largely overlooked. It is thought that the ideas in Thiele's paper were too advanced to have been understood by the broader mathematical and statistical community at the time.

The French mathematician Louis Bachelier used a Wiener process in his 1900 thesis in order to model price changes on the Paris Bourse, a stock exchange, without knowing the work of Thiele. It has been speculated that Bachelier drew ideas from the random walk model of Jules Regnault, but Bachelier did not cite him, and Bachelier's thesis is now considered pioneering in the field of financial mathematics.

It is commonly thought that Bachelier's work gained little attention and was forgotten for decades until it was rediscovered in the 1950s by the Leonard Savage, and then become more popular after Bachelier's thesis was translated into English in 1964. But the work was never forgotten in the mathematical community, as Bachelier published a book in 1912 detailing his ideas, which was cited by mathematicians including Doob, Feller and Kolmogorov. The book continued to be cited, but then starting in the 1960s the original thesis by Bachelier began to be cited more than his book when economists started citing Bachelier's work.

In 1905 Albert Einstein published a paper where he studied the physical observation of Brownian motion or movement to explain the seemingly random movements of particles in liquids by using ideas from the kinetic theory of gases. Einstein derived a differential equation, known as a diffusion equation, for describing the probability of finding a particle in a certain region of space. Shortly after Einstein's first paper on Brownian movement, Marian Smoluchowski published work where he cited Einstein, but wrote that he had independently derived the equivalent results by using a different method.

Einstein's work, as well as experimental results obtained by Jean Perrin, later inspired Norbert Wiener in the 1920s to use a type of measure theory, developed by Percy Daniell, and Fourier analysis to prove the existence of the Wiener process as a mathematical object.

The Poisson process is named after Siméon Poisson, due to its definition involving the Poisson distribution, but Poisson never studied the process. There are a number of claims for early uses or discoveries of the Poisson process. At the beginning of the 20th century the Poisson process would arise independently in different situations. In Sweden 1903, Filip Lundberg published a thesis containing work, now considered fundamental and pioneering, where he proposed to model insurance claims with a homogeneous Poisson process.

Another discovery occurred in Denmark in 1909 when A.K. Erlang derived the Poisson distribution when developing a mathematical model for the number of incoming phone calls in a finite time interval. Erlang was not at the time aware of Poisson's earlier work and assumed that the number phone calls arriving in each interval of time were independent to each other. He then found the limiting case, which is effectively recasting the Poisson distribution as a limit of the binomial distribution.

In 1910 Ernest Rutherford and Hans Geiger published experimental results on counting alpha particles. Motivated by their work, Harry Bateman studied the counting problem and derived Poisson probabilities as a solution to a family of differential equations, resulting in the independent discovery of the Poisson process. After this time there were many studies and applications of the Poisson process, but its early history is complicated, which has been explained by the various applications of the process in numerous fields by biologists, ecologists, engineers and various physical scientists.

Markov processes and Markov chains are named after Andrey Markov who studied Markov chains in the early 20th century. Markov was interested in studying an extension of independent random sequences. In his first paper on Markov chains, published in 1906, Markov showed that under certain conditions the average outcomes of the Markov chain would converge to a fixed vector of values, so proving a weak law of large numbers without the independence assumption, which had been commonly regarded as a requirement for such mathematical laws to hold. Markov later used Markov chains to study the distribution of vowels in Eugene Onegin, written by Alexander Pushkin, and proved a central limit theorem for such chains.

In 1912 Poincaré studied Markov chains on finite groups with an aim to study card shuffling. Other early uses of Markov chains include a diffusion model, introduced by Paul and Tatyana Ehrenfest in 1907, and a branching process, introduced by Francis Galton and Henry William Watson in 1873, preceding the work of Markov. After the work of Galton and Watson, it was later revealed that their branching process had been independently discovered and studied around three decades earlier by Irénée-Jules Bienaymé. Starting in 1928, Maurice Fréchet became interested in Markov chains, eventually resulting in him publishing in 1938 a detailed study on Markov chains.

Andrei Kolmogorov developed in a 1931 paper a large part of the early theory of continuous-time Markov processes. Kolmogorov was partly inspired by Louis Bachelier's 1900 work on fluctuations in the stock market as well as Norbert Wiener's work on Einstein's model of Brownian movement. He introduced and studied a particular set of Markov processes known as diffusion processes, where he derived a set of differential equations describing the processes. Independent of Kolmogorov's work, Sydney Chapman derived in a 1928 paper an equation, now called the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation, in a less mathematically rigorous way than Kolmogorov, while studying Brownian movement. The differential equations are now called the Kolmogorov equations or the Kolmogorov-Chapman equations. Other mathematicians who contributed significantly to the foundations of Markov processes include William Feller, starting in the 1930s, and then later Eugene Dynkin, starting in the 1950s.

Lévy processes

Lévy processes such as the Wiener process and the Poisson process (on the real line) are named after Paul Lévy who started studying them in the 1930s, but they have connections to infinitely divisible distributions going back to the 1920s. In a 1932 paper Kolmogorov derived a characteristic function for random variables associated with Lévy processes. This result was later derived under more general conditions by Lévy in 1934, and then Khinchin independently gave an alternative form for this characteristic function in 1937. In addition to Lévy, Khinchin and Kolomogrov, early fundamental contributions to the theory of Lévy processes were made by Bruno de Finetti and Kiyosi Itô.

In mathematics, constructions of mathematical objects are needed, which is also the case for stochastic processes, to prove that they exist mathematically. There are two main approaches for constructing a stochastic process. One approach involves considering a measurable space of functions, defining a suitable measurable mapping from a probability space to this measurable space of functions, and then deriving the corresponding finite-dimensional distributions.

Another approach involves defining a collection of random variables to have specific finite-dimensional distributions, and then using Kolmogorov's existence theorem to prove a corresponding stochastic process exists. This theorem, which is an existence theorem for measures on infinite product spaces, says that if any finite-dimensional distributions satisfy two conditions, known as consistency conditions, then there exists a stochastic process with those finite-dimensional distributions.

When constructing continuous-time stochastic processes certain mathematical difficulties arise, due to the uncountable index sets, which do not occur with discrete-time processes. One problem is that is it possible to have more than one stochastic process with the same finite-dimensional distributions. For example, both the left-continuous modification and the right-continuous modification of a Poisson process have the same finite-dimensional distributions. This means that the distribution of the stochastic process does not, necessarily, specify uniquely the properties of the sample functions of the stochastic process.

Another problem is that functionals of continuous-time process that rely upon an uncountable number of points of the index set may not be measurable, so the probabilities of certain events may not be well-defined.[168] For example, the supremum of a stochastic process or random field is not necessarily a well-defined random variable.[31][60] For a continuous-time stochastic process , other characteristics that depend on an uncountable number of points of the index set include:[168]

To overcome these two difficulties, different assumptions and approaches are possible.

One approach for avoiding mathematical construction issues of stochastic processes, proposed by Joseph Doob, is to assume that the stochastic process is separable. Separability ensures that infinite-dimensional distributions determine the properties of sample functions by requiring that sample functions are essentially determined by their values on a dense countable set of points in the index set. Furthermore, if a stochastic process is separable, then functionals of an uncountable number of points of the index set are measurable and their probabilities can be studied.

Another approach is possible, originally developed by Anatoliy Skorokhod and Andrei Kolmogorov, for a continuous-time stochastic process with any metric space as its state space. For the construction of such a stochastic process, it is assumed that the sample functions of the stochastic process belong to some suitable function space, which is usually the Skorokhod space consisting of all right-continuous functions with left limits. This approach is now more used than the separability assumption, but such a stochastic process based on this approach will be automatically separable.

Although less used, the separability assumption is considered more general because every stochastic process has a separable version.[264] It is also used when it is not possible to construct a stochastic process in a Skorokhod space.[173] For example, separability is assumed when constructing and studying random fields, where the collection of random variables is now indexed by sets other than the real line such as -dimensional Euclidean space.[31][321]

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In probability theory and related fields, a stochastic or random process is a mathematical object usually defined as a family of random variables.

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In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries the gravitational force. Thus, string theory is a theory of quantum gravity.

String theory is a broad and varied subject that attempts to address a number of deep questions of fundamental physics. String theory has contributed a number of advances to mathematical physics, which have been applied to a variety of problems in black hole physics, early universe cosmology, nuclear physics, and condensed matter physics, and it has stimulated a number of major developments in pure mathematics. Because string theory potentially provides a unified description of gravity and particle physics, it is a candidate for a theory of everything, a self-contained mathematical model that describes all fundamental forces and forms of matter. Despite much work on these problems, it is not known to what extent string theory describes the real world or how much freedom the theory allows in the choice of its details.

String theory was first studied in the late 1960s as a theory of the strong nuclear force, before being abandoned in favor of quantum chromodynamics. Subsequently, it was realized that the very properties that made string theory unsuitable as a theory of nuclear physics made it a promising candidate for a quantum theory of gravity. The earliest version of string theory, bosonic string theory, incorporated only the class of particles known as bosons. It later developed into superstring theory, which posits a connection called supersymmetry between bosons and the class of particles called fermions. Five consistent versions of superstring theory were developed before it was conjectured in the mid-1990s that they were all different limiting cases of a single theory in 11 dimensions known as M-theory. In late 1997, theorists discovered an important relationship called the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence (AdS/CFT correspondence), which relates string theory to another type of physical theory called a quantum field theory.

One of the challenges of string theory is that the full theory does not have a satisfactory definition in all circumstances. Another issue is that the theory is thought to describe an enormous landscape of possible universes, which has complicated efforts to develop theories of particle physics based on string theory. These issues have led some in the community to criticize these approaches to physics, and to question the value of continued research on string theory unification.

Fundamentals

In the 20th century, two theoretical frameworks emerged for formulating the laws of physics. The first is Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, a theory that explains the force of gravity and the structure of spacetime at the macro-level. The other is quantum mechanics, a completely different formulation, which uses known probability principles to describe physical phenomena at the micro-level. By the late 1970s, these two frameworks had proven to be sufficient to explain most of the observed features of the universe, from elementary particles to atoms to the evolution of stars and the universe as a whole.

In spite of these successes, there are still many problems that remain to be solved. One of the deepest problems in modern physics is the problem of quantum gravity. The general theory of relativity is formulated within the framework of classical physics, whereas the other fundamental forces are described within the framework of quantum mechanics. A quantum theory of gravity is needed in order to reconcile general relativity with the principles of quantum mechanics, but difficulties arise when one attempts to apply the usual prescriptions of quantum theory to the force of gravity. In addition to the problem of developing a consistent theory of quantum gravity, there are many other fundamental problems in the physics of atomic nuclei, black holes, and the early universe.

String theory is a theoretical framework that attempts to address these questions and many others. The starting point for string theory is the idea that the point-like particles of particle physics can also be modeled as one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how strings propagate through space and interact with each other. In a given version of string theory, there is only one kind of string, which may look like a small loop or segment of ordinary string, and it can vibrate in different ways. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string will look just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In this way, all of the different elementary particles may be viewed as vibrating strings. In string theory, one of the vibrational states of the string gives rise to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries gravitational force. Thus string theory is a theory of quantum gravity.

Studies of string theory have also yielded a number of results on the nature of black holes and the gravitational interaction. There are certain paradoxes that arise when one attempts to understand the quantum aspects of black holes, and work on string theory has attempted to clarify these issues. In late 1997 this line of work culminated in the discovery of the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence or AdS/CFT. This is a theoretical result that relates string theory to other physical theories which are better understood theoretically. The AdS/CFT correspondence has implications for the study of black holes and quantum gravity, and it has been applied to other subjects, including nuclear and condensed matter physics.

One of the challenges of string theory is that the full theory does not have a satisfactory definition in all circumstances. The scattering of strings is most straightforwardly defined using the techniques of perturbation theory, but it is not known in general how to define string theory nonperturbatively. It is also not clear whether there is any principle by which string theory selects its vacuum state, the physical state that determines the properties of our universe. These problems have led some in the community to criticize these approaches to the unification of physics and question the value of continued research on these problems.

The application of quantum mechanics to physical objects such as the electromagnetic field, which are extended in space and time, is known as quantum field theory. In particle physics, quantum field theories form the basis for our understanding of elementary particles, which are modeled as excitations in the fundamental fields.

In quantum field theory, one typically computes the probabilities of various physical events using the techniques of perturbation theory. Developed by Richard Feynman and others in the first half of the twentieth century, perturbative quantum field theory uses special diagrams called Feynman diagrams to organize computations. One imagines that these diagrams depict the paths of point-like particles and their interactions.

In theories of particle physics based on string theory, the characteristic length scale of strings is assumed to be on the order of the Planck length, or meters, the scale at which the effects of quantum gravity are believed to become significant. On much larger length scales, such as the scales visible in physics laboratories, such objects would be indistinguishable from zero-dimensional point particles, and the vibrational state of the string would determine the type of particle. One of the vibrational states of a string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries the gravitational force.

The original version of string theory was bosonic string theory, but this version described only bosons, a class of particles that transmit forces between the matter particles, or fermions. Bosonic string theory was eventually superseded by theories called superstring theories. These theories describe both bosons and fermions, and they incorporate a theoretical idea called supersymmetry. In theories with supersymmetry, each boson has a counterpart which is a fermion, and vice versa.

There are several versions of superstring theory: type I, type IIA, type IIB, and two flavors of heterotic string theory ( and ). The different theories allow different types of strings, and the particles that arise at low energies exhibit different symmetries. For example, the type I theory includes both open strings (which are segments with endpoints) and closed strings (which form closed loops), while types IIA, IIB and heterotic include only closed strings.

Extra dimensions

String theories require extra dimensions of spacetime for their mathematical consistency. In bosonic string theory, spacetime is 26-dimensional, while in superstring theory it is 10-dimensional, and in M-theory it is 11-dimensional. In order to describe real physical phenomena using string theory, one must therefore imagine scenarios in which these extra dimensions would not be observed in experiments.

Compactification can be used to construct models in which spacetime is effectively four-dimensional. However, not every way of compactifying the extra dimensions produces a model with the right properties to describe nature. In a viable model of particle physics, the compact extra dimensions must be shaped like a Calabi-Yau manifold. A Calabi-Yau manifold is a special space which is typically taken to be six-dimensional in applications to string theory. It is named after mathematicians Eugenio Calabi and Shing-Tung Yau.

A notable fact about string theory is that the different versions of the theory all turn out to be related in highly nontrivial ways. One of the relationships that can exist between different string theories is called S-duality. This is a relationship that says that a collection of strongly interacting particles in one theory can, in some cases, be viewed as a collection of weakly interacting particles in a completely different theory. Roughly speaking, a collection of particles is said to be strongly interacting if they combine and decay often and weakly interacting if they do so infrequently. Type I string theory turns out to be equivalent by S-duality to the SO(32) heterotic string theory. Similarly, type IIB string theory is related to itself in a nontrivial way by S-duality.

Another relationship between different string theories is 1/ T-duality. Here one considers strings propagating around a circular extra dimension. T-duality states that a string propagating around a circle of radius R is equivalent to a string propagating around a circle of radius R in the sense that all observable quantities in one description are identified with quantities in the dual description. For example, a string has momentum as it propagates around a circle, and it can also wind around the circle one or more times. The number of times the string winds around a circle is called the winding number. If a string has momentum p and winding number n in one description, it will have momentum n and winding number p in the dual description. For example, type IIA string theory is equivalent to type IIB string theory via T-duality, and the two versions of heterotic string theory are also related by T-duality.

In general, the term duality refers to a situation where two seemingly different physical systems turn out to be equivalent in a nontrivial way. Two theories related by a duality need not be string theories. For example, Montonen-Olive duality is an example of an S-duality relationship between quantum field theories. The AdS/CFT correspondence is an example of a duality that relates string theory to a quantum field theory. If two theories are related by a duality, it means that one theory can be transformed in some way so that it ends up looking just like the other theory. The two theories are then said to be dual to one another under the transformation. Put differently, the two theories are mathematically different descriptions of the same phenomena.

In string theory and other related theories, a brane is a physical object that generalizes the notion of a point particle to higher dimensions. For instance, a point particle can be viewed as a brane of dimension zero, while a string can be viewed as a brane of dimension one. It is also possible to consider higher-dimensional branes. In dimension p, these are called p-branes. The word brane comes from the word "membrane" which refers to a two-dimensional brane.

Branes are dynamical objects which can propagate through spacetime according to the rules of quantum mechanics. They have mass and can have other attributes such as charge. A p-brane sweeps out a ( p+1)-dimensional volume in spacetime called its worldvolume. Physicists often study fields analogous to the electromagnetic field which live on the worldvolume of a brane.

In string theory, D-branes are an important class of branes that arise when one considers open strings. As an open string propagates through spacetime, its endpoints are required to lie on a D-brane. The letter "D" in D-brane refers to a certain mathematical condition on the system known as the Dirichlet boundary condition. The study of D-branes in string theory has led to important results such as the AdS/CFT correspondence, which has shed light on many problems in quantum field theory.

Branes are frequently studied from a purely mathematical point of view, and they are described as objects of certain categories, such as the derived category of coherent sheaves on a complex algebraic variety, or the Fukaya category of a symplectic manifold. The connection between the physical notion of a brane and the mathematical notion of a category has led to important mathematical insights in the fields of algebraic and symplectic geometry and representation theory.

Prior to 1995, theorists believed that there were five consistent versions of superstring theory (type I, type IIA, type IIB, and two versions of heterotic string theory). This understanding changed in 1995 when Edward Witten suggested that the five theories were just special limiting cases of an eleven-dimensional theory called M-theory. Witten's conjecture was based on the work of a number of other physicists, including Ashoke Sen, Chris Hull, Paul Townsend, and Michael Duff. His announcement led to a flurry of research activity now known as the second superstring revolution.

Unification of superstring theories

In the 1970s, many physicists became interested in supergravity theories, which combine general relativity with supersymmetry. Whereas general relativity makes sense in any number of dimensions, supergravity places an upper limit on the number of dimensions. In 1978, work by Werner Nahm showed that the maximum spacetime dimension in which one can formulate a consistent supersymmetric theory is eleven. In the same year, Eugene Cremmer, Bernard Julia, and Joël Scherk of the École Normale Supérieure showed that supergravity not only permits up to eleven dimensions but is in fact most elegant in this maximal number of dimensions.

Initially, many physicists hoped that by compactifying eleven-dimensional supergravity, it might be possible to construct realistic models of our four-dimensional world. The hope was that such models would provide a unified description of the four fundamental forces of nature: electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity. Interest in eleven-dimensional supergravity soon waned as various flaws in this scheme were discovered. One of the problems was that the laws of physics appear to distinguish between clockwise and counterclockwise, a phenomenon known as chirality. Edward Witten and others observed this chirality property cannot be readily derived by compactifying from eleven dimensions.

In the first superstring revolution in 1984, many physicists turned to string theory as a unified theory of particle physics and quantum gravity. Unlike supergravity theory, string theory was able to accommodate the chirality of the standard model, and it provided a theory of gravity consistent with quantum effects. Another feature of string theory that many physicists were drawn to in the 1980s and 1990s was its high degree of uniqueness. In ordinary particle theories, one can consider any collection of elementary particles whose classical behavior is described by an arbitrary Lagrangian. In string theory, the possibilities are much more constrained: by the 1990s, physicists had argued that there were only five consistent supersymmetric versions of the theory.

Although there were only a handful of consistent superstring theories, it remained a mystery why there was not just one consistent formulation. However, as physicists began to examine string theory more closely, they realized that these theories are related in intricate and nontrivial ways. They found that a system of strongly interacting strings can, in some cases, be viewed as a system of weakly interacting strings. This phenomenon is known as S-duality. It was studied by Ashoke Sen in the context of heterotic strings in four dimensions and by Chris Hull and Paul Townsend in the context of the type IIB theory. Theorists also found that different string theories may be related by T-duality. This duality implies that strings propagating on completely different spacetime geometries may be physically equivalent.

At around the same time, as many physicists were studying the properties of strings, a small group of physicists were examining the possible applications of higher dimensional objects. In 1987, Eric Bergshoeff, Ergin Sezgin, and Paul Townsend showed that eleven-dimensional supergravity includes two-dimensional branes. Intuitively, these objects look like sheets or membranes propagating through the eleven-dimensional spacetime. Shortly after this discovery, Michael Duff, Paul Howe, Takeo Inami, and Kellogg Stelle considered a particular compactification of eleven-dimensional supergravity with one of the dimensions curled up into a circle. In this setting, one can imagine the membrane wrapping around the circular dimension. If the radius of the circle is sufficiently small, then this membrane looks just like a string in ten-dimensional spacetime. Duff and his collaborators showed that this construction reproduces exactly the strings appearing in type IIA superstring theory.

Initially, some physicists suggested that the new theory was a fundamental theory of membranes, but Witten was skeptical of the role of membranes in the theory. In a paper from 1996, Hořava and Witten wrote "As it has been proposed that the eleven-dimensional theory is a supermembrane theory but there are some reasons to doubt that interpretation, we will non-committally call it the M-theory, leaving to the future the relation of M to membranes." In the absence of an understanding of the true meaning and structure of M-theory, Witten has suggested that the M should stand for "magic", "mystery", or "membrane" according to taste, and the true meaning of the title should be decided when a more fundamental formulation of the theory is known.

Matrix theory

In mathematics, a matrix is a rectangular array of numbers or other data. In physics, a matrix model is a particular kind of physical theory whose mathematical formulation involves the notion of a matrix in an important way. A matrix model describes the behavior of a set of matrices within the framework of quantum mechanics.

The development of the matrix model formulation of M-theory has led physicists to consider various connections between string theory and a branch of mathematics called noncommutative geometry. This subject is a generalization of ordinary geometry in which mathematicians define new geometric notions using tools from noncommutative algebra. In a paper from 1998, Alain Connes, Michael R. Douglas, and Albert Schwarz showed that some aspects of matrix models and M-theory are described by a noncommutative quantum field theory, a special kind of physical theory in which spacetime is described mathematically using noncommutative geometry. This established a link between matrix models and M-theory on the one hand, and noncommutative geometry on the other hand. It quickly led to the discovery of other important links between noncommutative geometry and various physical theories.

Black holes

Bekenstein-Hawking formula

In the branch of physics called statistical mechanics, entropy is a measure of the randomness or disorder of a physical system. This concept was studied in the 1870s by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who showed that the thermodynamic properties of a gas could be derived from the combined properties of its many constituent molecules. Boltzmann argued that by averaging the behaviors of all the different molecules in a gas, one can understand macroscopic properties such as volume, temperature, and pressure. In addition, this perspective led him to give a precise definition of entropy as the natural logarithm of the number of different states of the molecules (also called microstates) that give rise to the same macroscopic features.

In the twentieth century, physicists began to apply the same concepts to black holes. In most systems such as gases, the entropy scales with the volume. In the 1970s, the physicist Jacob Bekenstein suggested that the entropy of a black hole is instead proportional to the surface area of its event horizon, the boundary beyond which matter and radiation are lost to its gravitational attraction. When combined with ideas of the physicist Stephen Hawking, Bekenstein's work yielded a precise formula for the entropy of a black hole. The Bekenstein-Hawking formula expresses the entropy S as

Like any physical system, a black hole has an entropy defined in terms of the number of different microstates that lead to the same macroscopic features. The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula gives the expected value of the entropy of a black hole, but by the 1990s, physicists still lacked a derivation of this formula by counting microstates in a theory of quantum gravity. Finding such a derivation of this formula was considered an important test of the viability of any theory of quantum gravity such as string theory.

Derivation within string theory

In a paper from 1996, Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa showed how to derive the Beckenstein-Hawking formula for certain black holes in string theory. Their calculation was based on the observation that D-branes-which look like fluctuating membranes when they are weakly interacting-become dense, massive objects with event horizons when the interactions are strong. In other words, a system of strongly interacting D-branes in string theory is indistinguishable from a black hole. Strominger and Vafa analyzed such D-brane systems and calculated the number of different ways of placing D-branes in spacetime so that their combined mass and charge is equal to a given mass and charge for the resulting black hole. Their calculation reproduced the Bekenstein-Hawking formula exactly, including the factor of 1/4. Subsequent work by Strominger, Vafa, and others refined the original calculations and gave the precise values of the "quantum corrections" needed to describe very small black holes.

AdS/CFT correspondence

One approach to formulating string theory and studying its properties is provided by the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence. This is a theoretical result which implies that string theory is in some cases equivalent to a quantum field theory. In addition to providing insights into the mathematical structure of string theory, the AdS/CFT correspondence has shed light on many aspects of quantum field theory in regimes where traditional calculational techniques are ineffective. The AdS/CFT correspondence was first proposed by Juan Maldacena in late 1997. Important aspects of the correspondence were elaborated in articles by Steven Gubser, Igor Klebanov, and Alexander Markovich Polyakov, and by Edward Witten. By 2010, Maldacena's article had over 7000 citations, becoming the most highly cited article in the field of high energy physics.

Overview of the correspondence

In the AdS/CFT correspondence, the geometry of spacetime is described in terms of a certain vacuum solution of Einstein's equation called anti-de Sitter space. In very elementary terms, anti-de Sitter space is a mathematical model of spacetime in which the notion of distance between points (the metric) is different from the notion of distance in ordinary Euclidean geometry. It is closely related to hyperbolic space, which can be viewed as a disk as illustrated on the left. This image shows a tessellation of a disk by triangles and squares. One can define the distance between points of this disk in such a way that all the triangles and squares are the same size and the circular outer boundary is infinitely far from any point in the interior.

One can imagine a stack of hyperbolic disks where each disk represents the state of the universe at a given time. The resulting geometric object is three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space. It looks like a solid cylinder in which any cross section is a copy of the hyperbolic disk. Time runs along the vertical direction in this picture. The surface of this cylinder plays an important role in the AdS/CFT correspondence. As with the hyperbolic plane, anti-de Sitter space is curved in such a way that any point in the interior is actually infinitely far from this boundary surface.

This construction describes a hypothetical universe with only two space dimensions and one time dimension, but it can be generalized to any number of dimensions. Indeed, hyperbolic space can have more than two dimensions and one can "stack up" copies of hyperbolic space to get higher-dimensional models of anti-de Sitter space.

Applications to quantum gravity

The discovery of the AdS/CFT correspondence was a major advance in physicists' understanding of string theory and quantum gravity. One reason for this is that the correspondence provides a formulation of string theory in terms of quantum field theory, which is well understood by comparison. Another reason is that it provides a general framework in which physicists can study and attempt to resolve the paradoxes of black holes.

In 1975, Stephen Hawking published a calculation which suggested that black holes are not completely black but emit a dim radiation due to quantum effects near the event horizon. At first, Hawking's result posed a problem for theorists because it suggested that black holes destroy information. More precisely, Hawking's calculation seemed to conflict with one of the basic postulates of quantum mechanics, which states that physical systems evolve in time according to the Schrödinger equation. This property is usually referred to as unitarity of time evolution. The apparent contradiction between Hawking's calculation and the unitarity postulate of quantum mechanics came to be known as the black hole information paradox.

Applications to nuclear physics

In addition to its applications to theoretical problems in quantum gravity, the AdS/CFT correspondence has been applied to a variety of problems in quantum field theory. One physical system that has been studied using the AdS/CFT correspondence is the quark-gluon plasma, an exotic state of matter produced in particle accelerators. This state of matter arises for brief instants when heavy ions such as gold or lead nuclei are collided at high energies. Such collisions cause the quarks that make up atomic nuclei to deconfine at temperatures of approximately two trillion kelvin, conditions similar to those present at around seconds after the Big Bang.

The physics of the quark-gluon plasma is governed by a theory called quantum chromodynamics, but this theory is mathematically intractable in problems involving the quark-gluon plasma. In an article appearing in 2005, Đàm Thanh Sơn and his collaborators showed that the AdS/CFT correspondence could be used to understand some aspects of the quark-gluon plasma by describing it in the language of string theory. By applying the AdS/CFT correspondence, Sơn and his collaborators were able to describe the quark-gluon plasma in terms of black holes in five-dimensional spacetime. The calculation showed that the ratio of two quantities associated with the quark-gluon plasma, the shear viscosity and volume density of entropy, should be approximately equal to a certain universal constant. In 2008, the predicted value of this ratio for the quark-gluon plasma was confirmed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Applications to condensed matter physics

So far some success has been achieved in using string theory methods to describe the transition of a superfluid to an insulator. A superfluid is a system of electrically neutral atoms that flows without any friction. Such systems are often produced in the laboratory using liquid helium, but recently experimentalists have developed new ways of producing artificial superfluids by pouring trillions of cold atoms into a lattice of criss-crossing lasers. These atoms initially behave as a superfluid, but as experimentalists increase the intensity of the lasers, they become less mobile and then suddenly transition to an insulating state. During the transition, the atoms behave in an unusual way. For example, the atoms slow to a halt at a rate that depends on the temperature and on Planck's constant, the fundamental parameter of quantum mechanics, which does not enter into the description of the other phases. This behavior has recently been understood by considering a dual description where properties of the fluid are described in terms of a higher dimensional black hole.

Phenomenology

In addition to being an idea of considerable theoretical interest, string theory provides a framework for constructing models of real-world physics that combine general relativity and particle physics. Phenomenology is the branch of theoretical physics in which physicists construct realistic models of nature from more abstract theoretical ideas. String phenomenology is the part of string theory that attempts to construct realistic or semi-realistic models based on string theory.

Partly because of theoretical and mathematical difficulties and partly because of the extremely high energies needed to test these theories experimentally, there is so far no experimental evidence that would unambiguously point to any of these models being a correct fundamental description of nature. This has led some in the community to criticize these approaches to unification and question the value of continued research on these problems.

Particle physics

The currently accepted theory describing elementary particles and their interactions is known as the standard model of particle physics. This theory provides a unified description of three of the fundamental forces of nature: electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Despite its remarkable success in explaining a wide range of physical phenomena, the standard model cannot be a complete description of reality. This is because the standard model fails to incorporate the force of gravity and because of problems such as the hierarchy problem and the inability to explain the structure of fermion masses or dark matter.

String theory has been used to construct a variety of models of particle physics going beyond the standard model. Typically, such models are based on the idea of compactification. Starting with the ten- or eleven-dimensional spacetime of string or M-theory, physicists postulate a shape for the extra dimensions. By choosing this shape appropriately, they can construct models roughly similar to the standard model of particle physics, together with additional undiscovered particles. One popular way of deriving realistic physics from string theory is to start with the heterotic theory in ten dimensions and assume that the six extra dimensions of spacetime are shaped like a six-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold. Such compactifications offer many ways of extracting realistic physics from string theory. Other similar methods can be used to construct realistic or semi-realistic models of our four-dimensional world based on M-theory.

The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution. Despite its success in explaining many observed features of the universe including galactic redshifts, the relative abundance of light elements such as hydrogen and helium, and the existence of a cosmic microwave background, there are several questions that remain unanswered. For example, the standard Big Bang model does not explain why the universe appears to be the same in all directions, why it appears flat on very large distance scales, or why certain hypothesized particles such as magnetic monopoles are not observed in experiments.

Connections to mathematics

In addition to influencing research in theoretical physics, string theory has stimulated a number of major developments in pure mathematics. Like many developing ideas in theoretical physics, string theory does not at present have a mathematically rigorous formulation in which all of its concepts can be defined precisely. As a result, physicists who study string theory are often guided by physical intuition to conjecture relationships between the seemingly different mathematical structures that are used to formalize different parts of the theory. These conjectures are later proved by mathematicians, and in this way, string theory serves as a source of new ideas in pure mathematics.

Mirror symmetry

After Calabi-Yau manifolds had entered physics as a way to compactify extra dimensions in string theory, many physicists began studying these manifolds. In the late 1980s, several physicists noticed that given such a compactification of string theory, it is not possible to reconstruct uniquely a corresponding Calabi-Yau manifold. Instead, two different versions of string theory, type IIA and type IIB, can be compactified on completely different Calabi-Yau manifolds giving rise to the same physics. In this situation, the manifolds are called mirror manifolds, and the relationship between the two physical theories is called mirror symmetry.

Enumerative geometry studies a class of geometric objects called algebraic varieties which are defined by the vanishing of polynomials. For example, the Clebsch cubic illustrated on the right is an algebraic variety defined using a certain polynomial of degree three in four variables. A celebrated result of nineteenth-century mathematicians Arthur Cayley and George Salmon states that there are exactly 27 straight lines that lie entirely on such a surface.

By the year 1991, most of the classical problems of enumerative geometry had been solved and interest in enumerative geometry had begun to diminish. The field was reinvigorated in May 1991 when physicists Philip Candelas, Xenia de la Ossa, Paul Green, and Linda Parks showed that mirror symmetry could be used to translate difficult mathematical questions about one Calabi-Yau manifold into easier questions about its mirror. In particular, they used mirror symmetry to show that a six-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold can contain exactly 317,206,375 curves of degree three. In addition to counting degree-three curves, Candelas and his collaborators obtained a number of more general results for counting rational curves which went far beyond the results obtained by mathematicians.

Originally, these results of Candelas were justified on physical grounds. However, mathematicians generally prefer rigorous proofs that do not require an appeal to physical intuition. Inspired by physicists' work on mirror symmetry, mathematicians have therefore constructed their own arguments proving the enumerative predictions of mirror symmetry. Today mirror symmetry is an active area of research in mathematics, and mathematicians are working to develop a more complete mathematical understanding of mirror symmetry based on physicists' intuition. Major approaches to mirror symmetry include the homological mirror symmetry program of Maxim Kontsevich and the SYZ conjecture of Andrew Strominger, Shing-Tung Yau, and Eric Zaslow.

Monstrous moonshine

Group theory is the branch of mathematics that studies the concept of symmetry. For example, one can consider a geometric shape such as an equilateral triangle. There are various operations that one can perform on this triangle without changing its shape. One can rotate it through 120°, 240°, or 360°, or one can reflect in any of the lines labeled , , or in the picture. Each of these operations is called a symmetry, and the collection of these symmetries satisfies certain technical properties making it into what mathematicians call a group. In this particular example, the group is known as the dihedral group of order 6 because it has six elements. A general group may describe finitely many or infinitely many symmetries; if there are only finitely many symmetries, it is called a finite group.

Mathematicians often strive for a classification (or list) of all mathematical objects of a given type. It is generally believed that finite groups are too diverse to admit a useful classification. A more modest but still challenging problem is to classify all finite simple groups. These are finite groups that may be used as building blocks for constructing arbitrary finite groups in the same way that prime numbers can be used to construct arbitrary whole numbers by taking products. One of the major achievements of contemporary group theory is the classification of finite simple groups, a mathematical theorem that provides a list of all possible finite simple groups.

This classification theorem identifies several infinite families of groups as well as 26 additional groups which do not fit into any family. The latter groups are called the "sporadic" groups, and each one owes its existence to a remarkable combination of circumstances. The largest sporadic group, the so-called monster group, has over elements, more than a thousand times the number of atoms in the Earth.

A seemingly unrelated construction is the of number theory. This object belongs to a special class of functions called modular functions, whose graphs form a certain kind of repeating pattern. Although this function appears in a branch of mathematics that seems very different from the theory of finite groups, the two subjects turn out to be intimately related. In the late 1970s, mathematicians John McKay and John Thompson noticed that certain numbers arising in the analysis of the monster group (namely, the dimensions of its irreducible representations) are related to numbers that appear in a formula for the j-function (namely, the coefficients of its Fourier series). This relationship was further developed by John Horton Conway and Simon Norton who called it monstrous moonshine because it seemed so far fetched.

In 1992, Richard Borcherds constructed a bridge between the theory of modular functions and finite groups and, in the process, explained the observations of McKay and Thompson. Borcherds' work used ideas from string theory in an essential way, extending earlier results of Igor Frenkel, James Lepowsky, and Arne Meurman, who had realized the monster group as the symmetries of a particular[which? ] version of string theory. In 1998, Borcherds was awarded the Fields medal for his work.

Since the 1990s, the connection between string theory and moonshine has led to further results in mathematics and physics. In 2010, physicists Tohru Eguchi, Hirosi Ooguri, and Yuji Tachikawa discovered connections between a different sporadic group, the , and a certain version[which? ] of string theory. Miranda Cheng, John Duncan, and Jeffrey A. Harvey proposed a generalization of this moonshine phenomenon called umbral moonshine, and their conjecture was proved mathematically by Duncan, Michael Griffin, and Ken Ono. Witten has also speculated that the version of string theory appearing in monstrous moonshine might be related to a certain simplified model of gravity in three spacetime dimensions.

Early results

Some of the structures reintroduced by string theory arose for the first time much earlier as part of the program of classical unification started by Albert Einstein. The first person to add a fifth dimension to a theory of gravity was Gunnar Nordström in 1914, who noted that gravity in five dimensions describes both gravity and electromagnetism in four. Nordström attempted to unify electromagnetism with his theory of gravitation, which was however superseded by Einstein's general relativity in 1919. Thereafter, German mathematician Theodor Kaluza combined the fifth dimension with general relativity, and only Kaluza is usually credited with the idea. In 1926, the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein gave a physical interpretation of the unobservable extra dimension-it is wrapped into a small circle. Einstein introduced a non-symmetric metric tensor, while much later Brans and Dicke added a scalar component to gravity. These ideas would be revived within string theory, where they are demanded by consistency conditions.

String theory was originally developed during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a never completely successful theory of hadrons, the subatomic particles like the proton and neutron that feel the strong interaction. In the 1960s, Geoffrey Chew and Steven Frautschi discovered that the mesons make families called Regge trajectories with masses related to spins in a way that was later understood by Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen and Leonard Susskind to be the relationship expected from rotating strings. Chew advocated making a theory for the interactions of these trajectories that did not presume that they were composed of any fundamental particles, but would construct their interactions from self-consistency conditions on the S-matrix. The S-matrix approach was started by Werner Heisenberg in the 1940s as a way of constructing a theory that did not rely on the local notions of space and time, which Heisenberg believed break down at the nuclear scale. While the scale was off by many orders of magnitude, the approach he advocated was ideally suited for a theory of quantum gravity.

Working with experimental data, R. Dolen, D. Horn and C. Schmid developed some sum rules for hadron exchange. When a particle and antiparticle scatter, virtual particles can be exchanged in two qualitatively different ways. In the s-channel, the two particles annihilate to make temporary intermediate states that fall apart into the final state particles. In the t-channel, the particles exchange intermediate states by emission and absorption. In field theory, the two contributions add together, one giving a continuous background contribution, the other giving peaks at certain energies. In the data, it was clear that the peaks were stealing from the background-the authors interpreted this as saying that the t-channel contribution was dual to the s-channel one, meaning both described the whole amplitude and included the other.

The result was widely advertised by Murray Gell-Mann, leading Gabriele Veneziano to construct a scattering amplitude that had the property of Dolen-Horn-Schmid duality, later renamed world-sheet duality. The amplitude needed poles where the particles appear, on straight-line trajectories, and there is a special mathematical function whose poles are evenly spaced on half the real line-the gamma function - which was widely used in Regge theory. By manipulating combinations of gamma functions, Veneziano was able to find a consistent scattering amplitude with poles on straight lines, with mostly positive residues, which obeyed duality and had the appropriate Regge scaling at high energy. The amplitude could fit near-beam scattering data as well as other Regge type fits and had a suggestive integral representation that could be used for generalization.

Over the next years, hundreds of physicists worked to complete the bootstrap program for this model, with many surprises. Veneziano himself discovered that for the scattering amplitude to describe the scattering of a particle that appears in the theory, an obvious self-consistency condition, the lightest particle must be a tachyon. Miguel Virasoro and Joel Shapiro found a different amplitude now understood to be that of closed strings, while Ziro Koba and Holger Nielsen generalized Veneziano's integral representation to multiparticle scattering. Veneziano and Sergio Fubini introduced an operator formalism for computing the scattering amplitudes that was a forerunner of world-sheet conformal theory, while Virasoro understood how to remove the poles with wrong-sign residues using a constraint on the states. Claud Lovelace calculated a loop amplitude, and noted that there is an inconsistency unless the dimension of the theory is 26. Charles Thorn, Peter Goddard and Richard Brower went on to prove that there are no wrong-sign propagating states in dimensions less than or equal to 26.

In 1969-70, Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen, and Leonard Susskind recognized that the theory could be given a description in space and time in terms of strings. The scattering amplitudes were derived systematically from the action principle by Peter Goddard, Jeffrey Goldstone, Claudio Rebbi, and Charles Thorn, giving a space-time picture to the vertex operators introduced by Veneziano and Fubini and a geometrical interpretation to the Virasoro conditions.

In 1971, Pierre Ramond added fermions to the model, which led him to formulate a two-dimensional supersymmetry to cancel the wrong-sign states. John Schwarz and André Neveu added another sector to the fermi theory a short time later. In the fermion theories, the critical dimension was 10. Stanley Mandelstam formulated a world sheet conformal theory for both the bose and fermi case, giving a two-dimensional field theoretic path-integral to generate the operator formalism. Michio Kaku and Keiji Kikkawa gave a different formulation of the bosonic string, as a string field theory, with infinitely many particle types and with fields taking values not on points, but on loops and curves.

In 1974, Tamiaki Yoneya discovered that all the known string theories included a massless spin-two particle that obeyed the correct Ward identities to be a graviton. John Schwarz and Joël Scherk came to the same conclusion and made the bold leap to suggest that string theory was a theory of gravity, not a theory of hadrons. They reintroduced Kaluza-Klein theory as a way of making sense of the extra dimensions. At the same time, quantum chromodynamics was recognized as the correct theory of hadrons, shifting the attention of physicists and apparently leaving the bootstrap program in the dustbin of history.

String theory eventually made it out of the dustbin, but for the following decade, all work on the theory was completely ignored. Still, the theory continued to develop at a steady pace thanks to the work of a handful of devotees. Ferdinando Gliozzi, Joël Scherk, and David Olive realized in 1977 that the original Ramond and Neveu Schwarz-strings were separately inconsistent and needed to be combined. The resulting theory did not have a tachyon and was proven to have space-time supersymmetry by John Schwarz and Michael Green in 1984. The same year, Alexander Polyakov gave the theory a modern path integral formulation, and went on to develop conformal field theory extensively. In 1979, Daniel Friedan showed that the equations of motions of string theory, which are generalizations of the Einstein equations of general relativity, emerge from the renormalization group equations for the two-dimensional field theory. Schwarz and Green discovered T-duality, and constructed two superstring theories-IIA and IIB related by T-duality, and type I theories with open strings. The consistency conditions had been so strong, that the entire theory was nearly uniquely determined, with only a few discrete choices.

First superstring revolution

In the early 1980s, Edward Witten discovered that most theories of quantum gravity could not accommodate chiral fermions like the neutrino. This led him, in collaboration with Luis Álvarez-Gaumé, to study violations of the conservation laws in gravity theories with anomalies, concluding that type I string theories were inconsistent. Green and Schwarz discovered a contribution to the anomaly that Witten and Alvarez-Gaumé had missed, which restricted the gauge group of the type I string theory to be SO(32). In coming to understand this calculation, Edward Witten became convinced that string theory was truly a consistent theory of gravity, and he became a high-profile advocate. Following Witten's lead, between 1984 and 1986, hundreds of physicists started to work in this field, and this is sometimes called the first superstring revolution.[citation needed ]

During this period, David Gross, Jeffrey Harvey, Emil Martinec, and Ryan Rohm discovered heterotic strings. The gauge group of these closed strings was two copies of E8, and either copy could easily and naturally include the standard model. Philip Candelas, Gary Horowitz, Andrew Strominger and Edward Witten found that the Calabi-Yau manifolds are the compactifications that preserve a realistic amount of supersymmetry, while Lance Dixon and others worked out the physical properties of orbifolds, distinctive geometrical singularities allowed in string theory. Cumrun Vafa generalized T-duality from circles to arbitrary manifolds, creating the mathematical field of mirror symmetry. Daniel Friedan, Emil Martinec and Stephen Shenker further developed the covariant quantization of the superstring using conformal field theory techniques. David Gross and Vipul Periwal discovered that string perturbation theory was divergent. Stephen Shenker showed it diverged much faster than in field theory suggesting that new non-perturbative objects were missing.[citation needed ]

In the 1990s, Joseph Polchinski discovered that the theory requires higher-dimensional objects, called D-branes and identified these with the black-hole solutions of supergravity. These were understood to be the new objects suggested by the perturbative divergences, and they opened up a new field with rich mathematical structure. It quickly became clear that D-branes and other p-branes, not just strings, formed the matter content of the string theories, and the physical interpretation of the strings and branes was revealed-they are a type of black hole. Leonard Susskind had incorporated the holographic principle of Gerardus 't Hooft into string theory, identifying the long highly excited string states with ordinary thermal black hole states. As suggested by 't Hooft, the fluctuations of the black hole horizon, the world-sheet or world-volume theory, describes not only the degrees of freedom of the black hole, but all nearby objects too.

Second superstring revolution

During this period, Tom Banks, Willy Fischler, Stephen Shenker and Leonard Susskind formulated matrix theory, a full holographic description of M-theory using IIA D0 branes. This was the first definition of string theory that was fully non-perturbative and a concrete mathematical realization of the holographic principle. It is an example of a gauge-gravity duality and is now understood to be a special case of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa calculated the entropy of certain configurations of D-branes and found agreement with the semi-classical answer for extreme charged black holes. Petr Hořava and Witten found the eleven-dimensional formulation of the heterotic string theories, showing that orbifolds solve the chirality problem. Witten noted that the effective description of the physics of D-branes at low energies is by a supersymmetric gauge theory, and found geometrical interpretations of mathematical structures in gauge theory that he and Nathan Seiberg had earlier discovered in terms of the location of the branes.

In 1997, Juan Maldacena noted that the low energy excitations of a theory near a black hole consist of objects close to the horizon, which for extreme charged black holes looks like an anti-de Sitter space. He noted that in this limit the gauge theory describes the string excitations near the branes. So he hypothesized that string theory on a near-horizon extreme-charged black-hole geometry, an anti-de Sitter space times a sphere with flux, is equally well described by the low-energy limiting gauge theory, the N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. This hypothesis, which is called the AdS/CFT correspondence, was further developed by Steven Gubser, Igor Klebanov and Alexander Polyakov, and by Edward Witten, and it is now well-accepted. It is a concrete realization of the holographic principle, which has far-reaching implications for black holes, locality and information in physics, as well as the nature of the gravitational interaction. Through this relationship, string theory has been shown to be related to gauge theories like quantum chromodynamics and this has led to a more quantitative understanding of the behavior of hadrons, bringing string theory back to its roots.[citation needed ]

Number of solutions

To construct models of particle physics based on string theory, physicists typically begin by specifying a shape for the extra dimensions of spacetime. Each of these different shapes corresponds to a different possible universe, or "vacuum state", with a different collection of particles and forces. String theory as it is currently understood has an enormous number of vacuum states, typically estimated to be around , and these might be sufficiently diverse to accommodate almost any phenomenon that might be observed at low energies.

Many critics of string theory have expressed concerns about the large number of possible universes described by string theory. In his book Not Even Wrong, Peter Woit, a lecturer in the mathematics department at Columbia University, has argued that the large number of different physical scenarios renders string theory vacuous as a framework for constructing models of particle physics. According to Woit,

The possible existence of, say, consistent different vacuum states for superstring theory probably destroys the hope of using the theory to predict anything. If one picks among this large set just those states whose properties agree with present experimental observations, it is likely there still will be such a large number of these that one can get just about whatever value one wants for the results of any new observation.

Some physicists believe this large number of solutions is actually a virtue because it may allow a natural anthropic explanation of the observed values of physical constants, in particular the small value of the cosmological constant. The anthropic principle is the idea that some of the numbers appearing in the laws of physics are not fixed by any fundamental principle but must be compatible with the evolution of intelligent life. In 1987, Steven Weinberg published an article in which he argued that the cosmological constant could not have been too large, or else galaxies and intelligent life would not have been able to develop. Weinberg suggested that there might be a huge number of possible consistent universes, each with a different value of the cosmological constant, and observations indicate a small value of the cosmological constant only because humans happen to live in a universe that has allowed intelligent life, and hence observers, to exist.

String theorist Leonard Susskind has argued that string theory provides a natural anthropic explanation of the small value of the cosmological constant. According to Susskind, the different vacuum states of string theory might be realized as different universes within a larger multiverse. The fact that the observed universe has a small cosmological constant is just a tautological consequence of the fact that a small value is required for life to exist. Many prominent theorists and critics have disagreed with Susskind's conclusions. According to Woit, "in this case [anthropic reasoning] is nothing more than an excuse for failure. Speculative scientific ideas fail not just when they make incorrect predictions, but also when they turn out to be vacuous and incapable of predicting anything."

Compatibility with dark energy

It remains unknown whether string theory is compatible with a metastable, positive cosmological constant. Some putative examples of such solutions do exist, such as the model described by Kachru et al. in 2003. In 2018, a group of four physicists advanced a controversial conjecture which would imply that no such universe exists. This is contrary to some popular models of dark energy such as Λ-CDM, which requires a positive vacuum energy. However, string theory is likely compatible with certain types of quintessence, where dark energy is caused by a new field with exotic properties.

Background independence

One of the main criticisms of string theory from early on is that it is not manifestly background-independent. In string theory, one must typically specify a fixed reference geometry for spacetime, and all other possible geometries are described as perturbations of this fixed one. In his book The Trouble With Physics, physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics claims that this is the principal weakness of string theory as a theory of quantum gravity, saying that string theory has failed to incorporate this important insight from general relativity.

Others have disagreed with Smolin's characterization of string theory. In a review of Smolin's book, string theorist Joseph Polchinski writes

[Smolin] is mistaking an aspect of the mathematical language being used for one of the physics being described. New physical theories are often discovered using a mathematical language that is not the most suitable for them... In string theory, it has always been clear that the physics is background-independent even if the language being used is not, and the search for a more suitable language continues. Indeed, as Smolin belatedly notes, [AdS/CFT] provides a solution to this problem, one that is unexpected and powerful.

Polchinski notes that an important open problem in quantum gravity is to develop holographic descriptions of gravity which do not require the gravitational field to be asymptotically anti-de Sitter. Smolin has responded by saying that the AdS/CFT correspondence, as it is currently understood, may not be strong enough to resolve all concerns about background independence.

Sociology of science

Since the superstring revolutions of the 1980s and 1990s, string theory has been one of dominant paradigms of high energy theoretical physics. Some string theorists have expressed the view that there does not exist an equally successful alternative theory addressing the deep questions of fundamental physics. In an interview from 1987, Nobel laureate David Gross made the following controversial comments about the reasons for the popularity of string theory:

The most important [reason] is that there are no other good ideas around. That's what gets most people into it. When people started to get interested in string theory they didn't know anything about it. In fact, the first reaction of most people is that the theory is extremely ugly and unpleasant, at least that was the case a few years ago when the understanding of string theory was much less developed. It was difficult for people to learn about it and to be turned on. So I think the real reason why people have got attracted by it is because there is no other game in town. All other approaches of constructing grand unified theories, which were more conservative to begin with, and only gradually became more and more radical, have failed, and this game hasn't failed yet.

Several other high-profile theorists and commentators have expressed similar views, suggesting that there are no viable alternatives to string theory.

Many critics of string theory have commented on this state of affairs. In his book criticizing string theory, Peter Woit views the status of string theory research as unhealthy and detrimental to the future of fundamental physics. He argues that the extreme popularity of string theory among theoretical physicists is partly a consequence of the financial structure of academia and the fierce competition for scarce resources. In his book The Road to Reality, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose expresses similar views, stating "The often frantic competitiveness that this ease of communication engenders leads to bandwagon effects, where researchers fear to be left behind if they do not join in." Penrose also claims that the technical difficulty of modern physics forces young scientists to rely on the preferences of established researchers, rather than forging new paths of their own. Lee Smolin expresses a slightly different position in his critique, claiming that string theory grew out of a tradition of particle physics which discourages speculation about the foundations of physics, while his preferred approach, loop quantum gravity, encourages more radical thinking. According to Smolin,

String theory is a powerful, well-motivated idea and deserves much of the work that has been devoted to it. If it has so far failed, the principal reason is that its intrinsic flaws are closely tied to its strengths-and, of course, the story is unfinished, since string theory may well turn out to be part of the truth. The real question is not why we have expended so much energy on string theory but why we haven't expended nearly enough on alternative approaches.

Smolin goes on to offer a number of prescriptions for how scientists might encourage a greater diversity of approaches to quantum gravity research.

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8. ^ Givental, Alexander (1998). A mirror theorem for toric complete intersections. Topological Field Theory, Primitive Forms and Related Topics. pp. 141-175. arXiv:alg-geom/9701016v2. doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-0705-4_5. ISBN 978-1-4612-6874-1. S2CID 2884104.

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10. ^ Borcherds, Richard (1992). "Monstrous moonshine and Lie superalgebras" (PDF). Inventiones Mathematicae. 109 (1): 405-444. Bibcode:1992InMat.109..405B. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.165.2714. doi:10.1007/BF01232032. S2CID 16145482. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-11-15.

11. ^ Cheng, Miranda; Duncan, John; Harvey, Jeffrey (2014). "Umbral Moonshine". Communications in Number Theory and Physics. 8 (2): 101-242. arXiv:. Bibcode:2012arXiv1204.2779C. doi:10.4310/CNTP.2014.v8.n2.a1. S2CID 119684549.

12. ^ Weinberg, Steven (1987). "Anthropic bound on the cosmological constant". Physical Review Letters. 59 (22): 2607-2610. Bibcode:1987PhRvL..59.2607W. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.59.2607. PMID 10035596.

13. ^ Wolchover, Natalie (9 August 2018). "Dark Energy May Be Incompatible With String Theory". Quanta Magazine. Simons Foundation. Archived from the original on 15 November 2020.

14. Polchinski, Joseph (2007). "All Strung Out?". American Scientist. 95: 72. doi:10.1511/2007.63.72.

15. ^ Smolin, Lee (April 2007). "Response to review of The Trouble with Physics by Joe Polchinski". kitp.ucsb.edu. Archived from the original on November 5, 2015.

Bibliography

Becker, Katrin; Becker, Melanie; Schwarz, John (2007). String theory and M-theory: A modern introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86069-7.

Duff, Michael (1998). "The theory formerly known as strings". Scientific American. 278 (2): 64-9. Bibcode:1998SciAm.278b..64D. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0298-64.

Gannon, Terry. Moonshine Beyond the Monster: The Bridge Connecting Algebra, Modular Forms, and Physics. Cambridge University Press.

Hori, Kentaro; Katz, Sheldon; Klemm, Albrecht; Pandharipande, Rahul; Thomas, Richard; Vafa, Cumrun; Vakil, Ravi; Zaslow, Eric, eds. (2003). Mirror Symmetry (PDF). Clay Mathematics Monographs. Vol. 1. American Mathematical Society. ISBN 978-0-8218-2955-4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-09-19.

Maldacena, Juan (2005). "The Illusion of Gravity" (PDF). Scientific American. 293 (5): 56-63. Bibcode:2005SciAm.293e..56M. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1105-56. PMID 16318027. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 1, 2014.

Penrose, Roger (2005). The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-45443-4.

Smolin, Lee (2006). The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. ISBN 978-0-618-55105-7.

Wald, Robert (1984). . University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-87033-5.

Woit, Peter (2006). Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. Basic Books. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-465-09275-8.

Yau, Shing-Tung; Nadis, Steve (2010). The Shape of Inner Space: String Theory and the Geometry of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02023-2.

Zwiebach, Barton (2009). A First Course in String Theory. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-88032-9.

Further reading

Popular science

Greene, Brian (2003). The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-05858-1.

Greene, Brian (2004). The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Bibcode:2004fcst.book.....G. ISBN 978-0-375-41288-2.

Penrose, Roger (2005). The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-45443-4.

Smolin, Lee (2006). The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. ISBN 978-0-618-55105-7.

External links

Websites

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In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other.

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Holacracy: A Radical New Approach to Management | Brian Robertson | TEDxGrandRapids

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the ocean and our species belong to the same planet, and by extension the deep is a part of us.

transcultural voyage through the oceanic imaginary via contemporary and historical art works and objects which cross continents, centuries, schools and movements.

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...i Ostrov po vyrovnání 2WW

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Co mohlo být naše

Text Jiří Škoda

Průkopníky osídlování světa byli v případě Čechů především jednotlivci, případně malé skupinky našich obyvatel. V krátké historii naší republiky ale byly chvíle, kdy jsme se snažili být světoví a získat rozsáhlá území pro vlastní potřebu.

Kdyby se uskutečnily všechny připravované záměry našich předků, mohli jsme jezdit na dovolenou na české území do rovníkové Afriky či dokonce na Tahiti. A při cestě na Jadran jsme vůbec nemuseli opustit republiku. Prvním významným koloniálním vizionářem byl Milan Rastislav Štefánik, který v roce 1910 přijel za pozorováním Halleyovy komety na Tahiti. Ostrov ho zaujal natolik, že začal přemlouvat Slováky, aby se na něm usazovali. Založil dokonce společnost, která koupila rozsáhlé území pro účely kolonizace. Nápad dostal název Nové Slovensko. Bohužel skončil zároveň s tragickou smrtí Štefánika, jednoho ze zakladatelů Československa. Na jeho myšlenku navázal v roce 1923 Miloš Řivnáč. Ten sice pocházel z velmi vážené rodiny, ale vedl velmi divoký život náročný na finance. Dostal se dokonce do konfliktu se zákonem a tak utekl z republiky právě na Tahiti. Inspiroval se Štefánikovým nápadem a oslovil veřejnost s vlastním projektem československé kolonie v údolí Papenoo. Zaslal do pražských novin několik dopisů, ve kterých tvrdil, že na Tahiti koupil 14 tisíc hektarů kvalitní půdy, kde by mohli žít a pracovat čeští osadníci. Život budoucích kolonistů líčil naprosto idylicky. Noví kolonisté se mohli například věnovat pěstování vanilky, kávy, kakaa, bavlny a cukrové třtiny, které tam prý rostly takřka samy. Zveřejněné dopisy nalákaly desítky lidí, kteří prodali veškerý majetek a odjeli osídlovat Tahiti. Projekt sice nevyšel, ale Čechoslováci už se tam usadili natrvalo a dodnes je na Tahiti hotel nesoucí Řivnáčovo jméno. Pro pořádek dodejme, že i záměr kolonizovat souostroví Markézy měl podobný příběh. S jiným návrhem přišel v roce 1915 Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Ve svých prvních plánech na vytvoření samostatného státu Čechů vycházel z myšlenky jakési federace všech slovanských státních útvarů, vzniklých z Rakouska- Uherska. Jeho součástí byl kuriózní požadavek na koridor, vedoucí z našeho území do tehdejšího Království Srbů, Chorvatů a Slovinců. Jeho smyslem bylo získat přímé spojení s našimi slovanskými spojenci na jihu a zároveň oddělit území Rakouska od Maďarska a tím paralyzovat snahy o případné opětovné spojení do silnějšího státu. Koridor měl být široký 50 až 100 kilometrů a vedl by na rakouské straně podél hranice s Maďarskem. Na tuto myšlenku neméně zajímavým způsobem navázali v 70. letech českoslovenští inženýři.

Ti připravili studii na vybudování rychlostní železnice, která by převážně pod zemí spojovala jih Československa s pobřežím Jaderského moře. Železniční tunel měl ústit na umělém mořském ostrově Adriaport, vzniklém z vytěžené horniny, který by byl majetkem státu. Celková délka trati měla být 410 km, z toho 350 km by připadalo na tunely. Ačkoliv projekt vznikl z popudu tehdejšího ministerstva vnitra, k jeho realizaci mimo jiné kvůli velké finanční náročnosti nedošlo. Nejvíce originálních nápadů se vyrojilo hned po vzniku samostatné republiky v roce 1918. V Pařížské mírové konferenci 1919, na které se přerozděloval svět na základě výsledků první světové války, totiž mnoho československých politiků a snílků cítilo příležitost. Například v hlavě diplomata Jana Klecandy, který působil jako velvyslanec v Brazílii a dalších jihoamerických zemích, se zrodil nápad, že bychom se po skončení 1. světové války měli podílet na rozdělení kolonií poraženého Německa. Jako nejvhodnější se zdálo být třímilionové africké Togo. Když se o tom začalo psát v domácím tisku, okamžitě se ozvali první zájemci o přesídlení do této země, ležící v Guinejském zálivu. Klecanda ve své brožurce s názvem České kolonie zámořské také popisuje, jak výhodné by bylo pro nový stát získat třeba Kamčatku nebo Novou Guineu. Jednání na konferenci však nakonec dospěla k závěru, že Československo žádné zámořské území nedostane. Sen o exotickém kousku země se tak na nějaký čas rozplynul. Přesto však dnes jeden vlastníme. V roce 1987 jsme se stali členy mezinárodní organizace Interoceanmetal, zaměřené na těžbu nerostných surovin z mořského dna. Díky tomu jsme získali území o rozloze celých 75 tisíc km2 u ostrova Clipperton v Tichém oceánu. Na dovolenou se tam ale zřejmě nevypravíte.

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Text Jiří Škoda Průkopníky osídlování světa byli v případě Čechů především jednotlivci, případně malé skupinky našich obyvatel. V krátké historii naší republiky ale byly chvíle, kdy jsme se snažili být světoví a získat rozsáhlá území pro vlastní potřebu. Kdyby se uskutečnily všechny připravované záměry našich předků, mohli jsme jezdit na dovolenou na české území do rovníkové Afriky či dokonce na Tahiti.

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Projekt prof. Petra Žlábka, železniční tunel s umělým přístavem z vytěžené zeminy

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V 70. letech minulého století vznikla v bývalém Československu do detailů propracovaná projektová studie profesora Karla Žlábka o vybudování rychlostní železnice, která by většinou pod zemí spojovala jih Československa s pobřežím Jaderského moře. Železniční tunel by pak ústil na umělém mořském ostrově Adriaport, který by byl majetkem československého státu. Celková délka trati měla být 410 km, z toho 350 km by připadalo na tunely. Ačkoliv projekt vznikl z popudu tehdejšího ministerstva vnitra, k jeho realizaci nedošlo kvůli finanční náročnosti. Svou roli však sehrála i politika.

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zašlapané projekty: tunel na jadran — česká televize

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Zašlapané projekty: Tunel na Jadran - Česká televize

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
V 70. letech minulého století vznikla v bývalém Československu do detailů propracovaná projektová studie profesora Karla Žlábka o vybudování rychlostní železnice, která by většinou pod zemí spojovala jih Československa s pobřežím Jaderského moře. Železniční tunel by pak ústil na umělém mořském ostrově Adriaport, který by byl majetkem československého státu.

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Everything is made out of chaos

The whole earth seethed, and sky and sea: and the long waves raged along the beaches round and about at the rush of the deathless gods: and there arose an endless shaking.

And in the bitterness of his anger Zeus cast him into wide Tartarus. And from Typhoeus come boisterous winds which blow damply, [870] except Notus and Boreas and clear Zephyr.

These are a god-sent kind, and a great blessing to men; but the others blow fitfully upon the sea. Some rush upon the misty sea and work great havoc among men with their evil, raging blasts; [875] for varying with the season they blow, scattering ships and destroying sailors. And men who meet these upon the sea have no help against the mischief.

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Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song [105] and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, [110] and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. These things declare to me from the beginning, you Muses who dwell in the house of Olympus, [115] and tell me which of them first came to be.

In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, [120] and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.

From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, [125] whom she conceived and bore from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods. And she brought forth long hills, graceful haunts [130] of the goddess Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the hills. She bore also the fruitless deep with his raging swell, Pontus, without sweet union of love. But afterwards she lay with Heaven and bore [the Titans] deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, [135] Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire. And again, she bore the Cyclopes, overbearing in spirit, [140] Brontes, and Steropes and stubborn-hearted Arges, who gave Zeus the thunder and made the thunderbolt: in all else they were like the gods, [145] but one eye only was set in the midst of their foreheads. And they were surnamed Cyclopes (Orb-eyed) because one orbed eye was set in their foreheads. Strength and might and craft were in their works. And again, three other sons were born of Earth and Heaven, great and doughty beyond telling, Cottus and Briareos and Gyes, presumptuous children. [150] From their shoulders sprang a hundred arms, not to be approached, and fifty heads grew from the shoulders upon the strong limbs of each, and irresistible was the stubborn strength that was in their great forms. For of all the children that were born of Earth and Heaven, [155] these were the most terrible, and they were hated by their own father from the first.

And he used to hide them all (Titans and monsters) away in a secret place of Earth so soon as each was born, and would not suffer them to come up into the light: and Heaven rejoiced in his evil doing. But vast Earth [160] groaned within, being straitened, and she thought a crafty and an evil wile. Forthwith she made the element of grey flint and shaped a great sickle, and told her plan to her dear sons. And she spoke, cheering them, while she was vexed in her dear heart: [165] "My children, gotten of a sinful father, if you will obey me, we should punish the vile outrage of your father; for he first thought of doing shameful things."

So she said; but fear seized them all, and none of them uttered a word. But great Cronos the wily took courage and answered his dear mother: [170] "Mother, I will undertake to do this deed, for I reverence not our father of evil name, for he first thought of doing shameful things." So he said: and vast Earth rejoiced greatly in spirit, and set and hid him in an ambush, and put in his hands [175] a jagged sickle, and revealed to him the whole plot. And Heaven came, bringing on night and longing for love, and he lay about Earth spreading himself full upon her. Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and in his right took the great long sickle [180] with jagged teeth, and swiftly lopped off his own father's members and cast them away to fall behind him. And not vainly did they fall from his hand; for all the bloody drops that gushed forth Earth received, and as the seasons moved round [185] she bore the strong Erinyes and the great Giants with gleaming armour, holding long spears in their hands and the Nymphs whom they call Meliae all over the boundless earth.

And so soon as he had cut off the members with flint and cast them from the land into the surging sea, [190] they were swept away over the main a long time: and a white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh, and in it there grew a maiden. First she drew near holy Cythera, and from there, afterwards, she came to sea-girt Cyprus, and came forth an awful and lovely goddess, and grass [195] grew up about her beneath her shapely feet. Her gods and men call Aphrodite, and the foam-born goddess and rich-crowned Cytherea, because she grew amid the foam, and Cytherea because she reached Cythera, and Cyprogenes because she was born in billowy Cyprus, [200] and Philommedes because she sprang from the members. And with her went Eros, and comely Desire followed her at her birth at the first and as she went into the assembly of the gods. This honor she has from the beginning, and this is the portion allotted to her amongst men and undying gods,-- [205] the whisperings of maidens and smiles and deceits with sweet delight and love and graciousness.

But these sons whom he begot himself great Heaven used to call Titans (Strainers) in reproach, for he said that they strained and did presumptuously [210] a fearful deed, and that vengeance for it would come afterwards. And Night bore hateful Doom and black Fate and Death, and she bore Sleep and the tribe of Dreams. [214] And again the goddess murky Night, though she lay with none, [213] bare Blame and painful Woe, [215] and the Hesperides who guard the rich, golden apples and the trees bearing fruit beyond glorious Ocean. Also she bore the Destinies and ruthless avenging Fates, Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos, who give men at their birth both evil and good to have, [220] and they pursue the transgressions of men and of gods: and these goddesses never cease from their dread anger until they punish the sinner with a sore penalty. Also deadly Night bore Nemesis (Indignation) to afflict mortal men, and after her, Deceit and Friendship [225] and hateful Age and hard-hearted Strife.

... But Rhea was subject in love to Cronos and bore splendid children, Hestia, Demeter, and gold-shod Hera [455] and strong Hades, pitiless in heart, who dwells under the earth, and the loud-crashing Earth-Shaker, and wise Zeus, father of gods and men, by whose thunder the wide earth is shaken. These great Cronos swallowed as each [460] came forth from the womb to his mother's knees with this intent, that no other of the proud sons of Heaven should hold the kingly office amongst the deathless gods. For he learned from Earth and starry Heaven that he was destined to be overcome by his own son, [465] strong though he was, through the contriving of great Zeus. Therefore he kept no blind outlook, but watched and swallowed down his children: and unceasing grief seized Rhea. But when she was about to bear Zeus, the father of gods and men, [470] then she besought her own dear parents, Earth and starry Heaven, to devise some plan with her that the birth of her dear child might be concealed, and that retribution might overtake great, crafty Cronos for his own father and also for the children whom he had swallowed down. And they readily heard and obeyed their dear daughter, [475] and told her all that was destined to happen touching Cronos the king and his stout-hearted son. So they sent her to Lyctus, to the rich land of Crete, when she was ready to bear great Zeus, the youngest of her children. Him did vast Earth receive from Rhea [480] in wide Crete to nourish and to bring up. To that place came Earth carrying him swiftly through the black night to Lyctus first, and took him in her arms and hid him in a remote cave beneath the secret places of the holy earth on thick-wooded Mount Aegeum; but to the mightily ruling son of Heaven, the earlier king of the gods, [485] she gave a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. Then he took it in his hands and thrust it down into his belly: wretch! he knew not in his heart that in place of the stone his son was left behind, unconquered and untroubled, [490] and that he was soon to overcome him by force and might and drive him from his honors, himself to reign over the deathless gods. After that, the strength and glorious limbs of the prince increased quickly, and as the years rolled on, great Cronos the wily was beguiled by the deep suggestions of Earth, [495] and brought up again his offspring, vanquished by the arts and might of his own son, and he vomited up first [500] the stone which he had swallowed last. And Zeus set it fast in the wide-pathed earth at goodly Pytho under the glens of Parnassus, to be a sign thenceforth and a marvel to mortal men.

And he set free from their deadly bonds the brothers of his father, sons of Heaven whom his father in his foolishness had bound. And they remembered to be grateful to him for his kindness, and gave him thunder and the glowing thunderbolt [505] and lightning: for before that, huge Earth had hidden these. In them he trusts and rules over mortals and immortals. Now Iapetus took to wife the neat-ankled maid Clymene, daughter of Ocean, and went up with her into one bed. And she bore him a stout-hearted son, Atlas: [510] also she bore very glorious Menoetius and clever Prometheus, full of various wiles, and scatter-brained Epimetheus who from the first was a mischief to men who eat bread; for it was he who first took of Zeus the woman, the maiden whom he had formed. But Menoetius was outrageous, and farseeing Zeus [515] struck him with a lurid thunderbolt and sent him down to Erebus because of his mad presumption and exceeding pride. And Atlas through hard constraint upholds the wide heaven with unwearying head and arms, standing at the borders of the earth before the clear-voiced Hesperides; [520] for this lot wise Zeus assigned to him. And ready-witted Prometheus he bound with inextricable bonds, cruel chains, and drove a shaft through his middle, and set on him a long-winged eagle, which used to eat his immortal liver; but by night the liver grew [525] as much again everyway as the long-winged bird devoured in the whole day. That bird Heracles, the valiant son of shapely-ankled Alcmene, slew; and delivered the son of Iapetus from the cruel plague, and released him from his affliction--not without the will of Olympian Zeus who reigns on high, [530] that the glory of Heracles the Theban-born might be yet greater than it was before over the plenteous earth. This, then, he regarded, and honored his famous son; though he was angry, he ceased from the wrath which he had before because Prometheus matched himself in wit with the almighty son of Cronos.

[535] For when the gods and mortal men had a dispute at Mecone, even then Prometheus was forward to cut up a great ox and set portions before them, trying to deceive the mind of Zeus. Before the rest he set flesh and inner parts thick with fat upon the hide, covering them with an ox paunch; [540] but for Zeus he put the white bones dressed up with cunning art and covered with shining fat. Then the father of men and of gods said to him: "Son of Iapetus, most glorious of all lords, good sir, how unfairly you have divided the portions!" [545] So said Zeus whose wisdom is everlasting, rebuking him. But wily Prometheus answered him, smiling softly and not forgetting his cunning trick: "Zeus, most glorious and greatest of the eternal gods, take which ever of these portions your heart within you bids." [550] So he said, thinking trickery. But Zeus, whose wisdom is everlasting, saw and failed not to perceive the trick, and in his heart he thought mischief against mortal men which also was to be fulfilled. With both hands he took up the white fat and was angry at heart, and wrath came to his spirit [555] when he saw the white ox-bones craftily tricked out: and because of this the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars. But Zeus who drives the clouds was greatly vexed and said to him: "Son of Iapetus, clever above all! [560] So, sir, you have not yet forgotten your cunning arts!"

So spake Zeus in anger, whose wisdom is everlasting; and from that time he was always mindful of the trick, and would not give the power of unwearying fire to the Melian race of mortal men who live on the earth. [565] But the noble son of Iapetus outwitted him and stole the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel stalk. And Zeus who thunders on high was stung in spirit, and his dear heart was angered when he saw amongst men the far-seen ray of fire. [570] Forthwith he made an evil thing for men as the price of fire; for the very famous Limping God formed of earth the likeness of a shy maiden as the son of Cronos willed. And the goddess bright-eyed Athena girded and clothed her with silvery raiment, and down from her head [575] she spread with her hands an embroidered veil, a wonder to see; and she, Pallas Athena, put about her head lovely garlands, flowers of new-grown herbs. Also she put upon her head a crown of gold which the very famous Limping God made himself [580] and worked with his own hands as a favor to Zeus his father. On it was much curious work, wonderful to see; for of the many creatures which the land and sea rear up, he put most upon it, wonderful things, like living beings with voices: and great beauty shone out from it. [585] But when he had made the beautiful evil to be the price for the blessing, he brought her out, delighting in the finery which the bright-eyed daughter of a mighty father had given her, to the place where the other gods and men were. And wonder took hold of the deathless gods and mortal men when they saw that which was sheer guile, not to be withstood by men. [590] For from her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth. And as in thatched hives bees [595] feed the drones whose nature is to do mischief--by day and throughout the day until the sun goes down the bees are busy and lay the white combs, while the drones stay at home in the covered hives and reap the toil of others into their own bellies-- [600] even so Zeus who thunders on high made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil.

And he gave them a second evil to be the price for the good they had: whoever avoids marriage and the sorrows that women cause, and will not wed, reaches deadly old age [605] without anyone to tend his years, and though he at least has no lack of livelihood while he lives, yet, when he is dead, his kinsfolk divide his possessions amongst them. And as for the man who chooses the lot of marriage and takes a good wife suited to his mind, evil continually contends with good; [610] for whoever happens to have mischievous children, lives always with unceasing grief in his spirit and heart within him; and this evil cannot be healed. So it is not possible to deceive or go beyond the will of Zeus: for not even the son of Iapetus, kindly Prometheus, [615] escaped his heavy anger, but of necessity strong bands confined him, although he knew many a wile. But when first their father was vexed in his heart with Obriareus and Cottus and Gyes, he bound them in cruel bonds, because he was jealous of their exceeding manhood and comeliness [620] and great size: and he made them live beneath the wide-pathed earth, where they were afflicted, being set to dwell under the ground, at the end of the earth, at its great borders, in bitter anguish for a long time and with great grief at heart. But the son of Cronos and the other deathless gods [625] whom rich-haired Rhea bore from union with Cronos, brought them up again to the light at Earth's advising. For she herself recounted all things to the gods fully, how with these they might gain victory and a glorious cause to vaunt themselves. [630] For the Titan gods and as many as sprang from Cronos had long been fighting together in stubborn war with heart-grieving toil, the lordly Titans from high Othrys, but the gods, givers of good, whom rich-haired Rhea bore in union with Cronos, from Olympus. [635] So they, with bitter wrath, were fighting continually with one another at that time for ten full years, and the hard strife had no close or end for either side, and the issue of the war hung evenly balanced. But when he had provided those three with all things fitting, [640] nectar and ambrosia which the gods themselves eat, and when their proud spirit revived within them all after they had fed on nectar and delicious ambrosia, then it was that the father of men and gods spoke amongst them: "Hear me, bright children of Earth and Heaven, [645] that I may say what my heart within me bids. A long while now have we, who are sprung from Cronos and the Titan gods, fought with each other every day to get victory and to prevail. But show your great might and unconquerable strength, and [650] face the Titans in bitter strife; for remember our friendly kindness, and from what sufferings you are come back to the light from your cruel bondage under misty gloom through our counsels."

So he said. And blameless Cottus answered him again: " [655] Divine one, you speak that which we know well: no, even of ourselves we know that your wisdom and understanding is exceeding, and that you became a defender of the deathless ones from chill doom. And through your devising we have come back again from the murky gloom and from our merciless bonds, [660] enjoying what we looked not for, O lord, son of Cronos. And so now with fixed purpose and deliberate counsel we will aid your power in dreadful strife and will fight against the Titans in hard battle." So he said: and the gods, givers of good things, applauded when [665] they heard his word, and their spirit longed for war even more than before, and they all, both male and female, stirred up hated battle that day, the Titan gods, and all that were born of Cronos together with those dread, mighty ones of overwhelming strength [670] whom Zeus brought up to the light from Erebus beneath the earth. A hundred arms sprang from the shoulders of all alike, and each had fifty heads growing from his shoulders upon stout limbs. These, then, stood against the Titans in grim strife, [675] holding huge rocks in their strong hands. And on the other part the Titans eagerly strengthened their ranks, and both sides at one time showed the work of their hands and their might. The boundless sea rang terribly around, and the earth crashed loudly: wide Heaven was shaken and [680] groaned, and high Olympus reeled from its foundation under the charge of the undying gods, and a heavy quaking reached dim Tartarus and the deep sound of their feet in the fearful onset and of their hard missiles. So, then, they launched their grievous shafts upon one another, [685] and the cry of both armies as they shouted reached to starry heaven; and they met with a great battle-cry.

Then Zeus no longer held back his might; but straight his heart was filled with fury and he showed forth all his strength. From Heaven and from Olympus [690] he came immediately, hurling his lightning: the bolts flew thick and fast from his strong hand together with thunder and lightning, whirling an awesome flame. The life-giving earth crashed around in burning, and the vast wood crackled loud with fire all about. [695] All the land seethed, and Ocean's streams and the unfruitful sea. The hot vapor lapped round the earthborn Titans: flame unspeakable rose to the bright upper air: the flashing glare of the thunderstone and lightning blinded their eyes for all that they were strong. [700] Astounding heat seized Chaos: and to see with eyes and to hear the sound with ears it seemed even as if Earth and wide Heaven above came together; for such a mighty crash would have arisen if Earth were being hurled to ruin, and Heaven from on high were hurling her down; [705] so great a crash was there while the gods were meeting together in strife. Also the winds brought rumbling earthquake and duststorm, thunder and lightning and the lurid thunderbolt, which are the shafts of great Zeus, and carried the clangor and the warcry into the midst of the two hosts. A horrible uproar [710] of terrible strife arose: mighty deeds were shown and the battle inclined. But until then, they kept at one another and fought continually in cruel war. And amongst the foremost Cottus and Briareos and Gyes insatiate for war [715] raised fierce fighting: three hundred rocks, one upon another, they launched from their strong hands and overshadowed the Titans with their missiles, and hurled them beneath the wide-pathed earth, and bound them in bitter chains when they had conquered them by their strength for all their great spirit, [720] as far beneath the earth as heaven is above earth; for so far is it from earth to Tartarus. For a brazen anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth: and again, a brazen anvil falling from earth nine nights and days [725] would reach Tartarus upon the tenth. Round it runs a fence of bronze, and night spreads in triple line all about it like a neck-circlet, while above grow the roots of the earth and unfruitful sea.

There by the counsel of Zeus who drives the clouds the Titan gods [730] are hidden under misty gloom, in a dank place where are the ends of the huge earth. And they may not go out; for Poseidon fixed gates of bronze upon it, and a wall runs all round it on every side. There Gyes and Cottus and great-souled Obriareus [735] live, trusty warders of Zeus who holds the aegis. And there, all in their order, are the sources and ends of gloomy earth and misty Tartarus and the unfruitful sea and starry heaven, loathsome and dank, which even the gods abhor. [740] It is a great gulf, and if once a man were within the gates, he would not reach the floor until a whole year had reached its end, but cruel blast upon blast would carry him this way and that. And this marvel is awful even to the deathless gods. There stands the awful home of murky Night [745] wrapped in dark clouds. In front of it the son of Iapetus stands immovably upholding the wide heaven upon his head and unwearying hands, where Night and Day draw near and greet one another as they pass the great threshold [750] of bronze: and while the one is about to go down into the house, the other comes out at the door. And the house never holds them both within; but always one is without the house passing over the earth, while the other stays at home and waits until the time for her journeying comes; [755] and the one holds all-seeing light for them on earth, but the other holds in her arms Sleep the brother of Death, even evil Night, wrapped in a vaporous cloud. And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. [760] The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him [765] is pitiless as bronze: whomever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods. There, in front, stand the echoing halls of the god of the lower-world, strong Hades, and of awful Persephone. A fearful hound guards the house in front, [770] pitiless, and he has a cruel trick. On those who go in he fawns with his tail and both his ears, but suffers them not to go out back again, but keeps watch and devours whomever he catches going out of the gates of strong Hades and awful Persephone.

[775] And there dwells the goddess loathed by the deathless gods, terrible Styx, eldest daughter of backflowing Ocean. She lives apart from the gods in her glorious house vaulted over with great rocks and propped up to heaven all round with silver pillars. [780] Rarely does the daughter of Thaumas, swift-footed Iris, come to her with a message over the sea's wide back. But when strife and quarrel arise among the deathless gods, and when any one of them who live in the house of Olympus lies, then Zeus sends Iris to bring in a golden jug the great oath of the gods [785] from far away, the famous cold water which trickles down from a high and beetling rock. Far under the wide-pathed earth a branch of Oceanus flows through the dark night out of the holy stream, and a tenth part of his water is allotted to her. [790] With nine silver-swirling streams he winds about the earth and the sea's wide back, and then falls into the main ; but the tenth flows out from a rock, a sore trouble to the gods. For whoever of the deathless gods that hold the peaks of snowy Olympus pours a libation of her water and is forsworn, [795] must lie breathless until a full year is completed, and never come near to taste ambrosia and nectar, but lie spiritless and voiceless on a strewn bed: and a heavy trance overshadows him. But when he has spent a long year in his sickness, [800] another penance more hard follows after the first. For nine years he is cut off from the eternal gods and never joins their councils or their feasts, nine full years. But in the tenth year he comes again to join the assemblies of the deathless gods who live in the house of Olympus.

[805] Such an oath, then, did the gods appoint the eternal and primeval water of Styx to be: and it spouts through a rugged place. And there, all in their order, are the sources and ends of the dark earth and misty Tartarus and the unfruitful sea and starry heaven, [810] loathsome and dank, which even the gods abhor. And there are shining gates and an immovable threshold of bronze having unending roots, and it is grown of itself. And beyond, away from all the gods, live the Titans, beyond gloomy Chaos. [815] But the glorious allies of loud-crashing Zeus have their dwelling upon Ocean's foundations, even Cottus and Gyes; but Briareos, being goodly, the deep-roaring Earth-Shaker made his son-in-law, giving him Cymopolea his daughter to wed.

[820] But when Zeus had driven the Titans from heaven, huge Earth bore her youngest child Typhoeus of the love of Tartarus, by the aid of golden Aphrodite. Strength was with his hands in all that he did and the feet of the strong god were untiring. From his shoulders [825] grew a hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues, and from under the brows of his eyes in his marvellous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from his heads as he glared. And there were voices in all his dreadful heads [830] which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable; for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud ungovernable fury; and at another, the sound of a lion, relentless of heart; and at another, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear; [835] and again, at another, he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed. And truly a thing past help would have happened on that day, and he would have come to reign over mortals and immortals, had not the father of men and gods been quick to perceive it. But he thundered hard and mightily: and the earth around [840] resounded terribly and the wide heaven above, and the sea and Ocean's streams and the nether parts of the earth. Great Olympus reeled beneath the divine feet of the king as he arose and earth groaned thereat. And through the two of them heat took hold on the dark-blue sea, [845] through the thunder and lightning, and through the fire from the monster, and the scorching winds and blazing thunderbolt. The whole earth seethed, and sky and sea: and the long waves raged along the beaches round and about at the rush of the deathless gods: and there arose an endless shaking. [850] Hades trembled where he rules over the dead below, and the Titans under Tartarus who live with Cronos, because of the unending clamor and the fearful strife. So when Zeus had raised up his might and seized his arms, thunder and lightning and lurid thunderbolt, [855] he leaped from Olympus and struck him, and burned all the marvellous heads of the monster about him. But when Zeus had conquered him and lashed him with strokes, Typhoeus was hurled down, a maimed wreck, so that the huge earth groaned. And flame shot forth from the thunderstricken lord [860] in the dim rugged glens of the mount, when he was smitten. A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapor and melted as tin melts when heated by men's art in channelled crucibles; or as iron, which is hardest of all things, is shortened [865] by glowing fire in mountain glens and melts in the divine earth through the strength of Hephaestus. Even so, then, the earth melted in the glow of the blazing fire. And in the bitterness of his anger Zeus cast him into wide Tartarus. And from Typhoeus come boisterous winds which blow damply, [870] except Notus and Boreas and clear Zephyr. These are a god-sent kind, and a great blessing to men; but the others blow fitfully upon the sea. Some rush upon the misty sea and work great havoc among men with their evil, raging blasts; [875] for varying with the season they blow, scattering ships and destroying sailors. And men who meet these upon the sea have no help against the mischief. Others again over the boundless, flowering earth spoil the fair fields of men who dwell below, [880] filling them with dust and cruel uproar. But when the blessed gods had finished their toil, and settled by force their struggle for honors with the Titans, they pressed far-seeing Olympian Zeus to reign and to rule over them, by Earth's prompting. So he divided their dignities amongst them.

[885] Now Zeus, king of the gods, made Metis his wife first, and she was wisest among gods and mortal men. But when she was about to bring forth the goddess bright-eyed Athena, Zeus craftily deceived her [890] with cunning words and put her in his own belly, as Earth and starry Heaven advised. For they advised him so, to the end that no other should hold royal sway over the eternal gods in place of Zeus; for very wise children were destined to be born of her, [895] first the maiden bright-eyed Athena, equal to her father in strength and in wise understanding; but afterwards she was to bear a son of overbearing spirit king of gods and men. But Zeus put her into his own belly first, [900] that the goddess might devise for him both good and evil. Next he married bright Themis who bore the Horae (Hours), and Eunomia (Order), Dike (Justice), and blooming Eirene (Peace), who mind the works of mortal men, and the Moerae (Fates) to whom wise Zeus gave the greatest honor, [905] Clotho, and Lachesis, and Atropos who give mortal men evil and good to have... Also he came to the bed of all-nourishing Demeter, and she bore white-armed Persephone whom Aidoneus carried off from her mother; but wise Zeus gave her to him. [915] And again, he loved Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair: and of her the nine gold-crowned Muses were born who delight in feasts and the pleasures of song. And Leto was joined in love with Zeus who holds the aegis, [920] and bore Apollo and Artemis delighting in arrows, children lovely above all the sons of Heaven. Lastly, he made Hera his blooming wife: and she was joined in love with the king of gods and men, and brought forth Hebe and Ares and Eileithyia. But Zeus himself gave birth from his own head to bright-eyed Athena, [925] the awful, the strife-stirring, the host-leader, the unwearying, the queen, who delights in tumults and wars and battles. But Hera without union with Zeus--for she was very angry and quarrelled with her mate--bare famous Hephaestus, who is skilled in crafts more than all the sons of Heaven. [929a] But Hera was very angry and quarrelled with her mate. And because of this strife she bore without union with Zeus who holds the aegis a glorious son, Hephaestus, who excelled all the sons of Heaven in crafts. [929e] But Zeus lay with the fair-cheeked daughter of Ocean and Tethys apart from Hera . . . deceiving Metis (Thought) although she was full wise. But he seized her with his hands and put her in his belly, for fear that she might bring forth something stronger than his thunderbolt: [929j] therefore did Zeus, who sits on high and dwells in the aether, swallow her down suddenly. But she straightway conceived Pallas Athena: and the father of men and gods gave her birth by way of his head on the banks of the river Trito. And she remained hidden beneath the inward parts of Zeus, [929o] even Metis, Athena's mother, worker of righteousness, who was wiser than gods and mortal men. There the goddess (Athena) received that whereby she excelled in strength all the deathless less ones who dwell in Olympus, she who made the host-scaring weapon of Athena. [929t] And with it (Zeus) gave her birth, arrayed in arms of war.

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Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song [105] and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear.

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Steven Strogatz – Spontaneous synchronization

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Steven Strogatz – Spontaneous synchronization

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Requirements for spontaneous synchronization?
Do you need a brain?

Synchrony in nature: bird flock (hejno, shluk), fish in organized schools, swarms.... creatures that are not choreographed, but choreographing themselves,

Swarm works in the way
1) they are aware of the nearest neighbours
2) Every individuals have tendency to line up
3) They are attracted to each other, but they keep a bit of distance
...4) when the predators are coming, "get out of the way" .. selfish Darwinian behavior

If they seems to be thinking as a group, they are not.

Advantage:
If you are unlucky, your odds of being unlucky one are reduced compared to small group. Waves of panic propagate, when predator comes.
Sending message over great distances.

Fireflies ignore each other. But in south east asia, male ones synchronise.

We do not need to be alive to do the spontaneous order. You can be only rythmical power... frequency. Inanymate things can synchronise.

When the Tacoma Narrows Bridge started to move, you can't help it, you are forced by the movement of the bridge to get into step to be able to move further.

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TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Mathematician Steven Strogatz shows how flocks of creatures (like birds, fireflies and fish) manage to synchronize and act as a unit -- when no one's giving orders. The powerful tendency extends into the realm of objects, too.

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Víš odkud tyto kapky pochází?
Tyto kapky jsou z pramene Nilu. Nabrané mladou otrokyní do hliněného džbánu. Vylité na zhrbená záda jejího pána. Rozplynuny se, když dívka větrala lázeň. Tato voda byla mořem, vystoupila nad hradby Assuánu, kde se dostaly do větrného stínu nad pouští. Tam dlouho nezůstali, protože věčnost vody nespočívá v nehybnosti, ale ve věčných návratech. Tato voda, co ti stéká po dlaních byla mořem, i ledovou krou, která dvakrát obepula svět.

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Kapitola 6: Globalizace jako multifaktoriální proces

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Kapitola 6: Globalizace jako multifaktoriální proces

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Globalization involves reductions of barriers to such transworld social contacts.
s. 59

A great deal of globality is mafested through communications. s. 67

Contemporary globalization has encouraged increased complexity in respect of the constituencies that states serve.  s. 193

Instead, states in a more global world have tended to become arenas of collaboration and competition between a complex array of national and transnational players. s. 193

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The paper proposes that systems can be classified along a ‘spectrum of complexity’ and that under specific conditions not only social systems but also natural and artificial systems can be considered ‘complex reflexive.’ The epistemological challenges associated with scientifically understanding a phenomenon stem not from whether its domain is social, natural, or artificial, but where it falls along this spectrum. Reflexive systems present particular challenges; however, evolutionary model-dependent realism provides a bridge between Soros and Popper and a potential path forward for economics.

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In 1987, George Soros introduced his concepts of reflexivity and fallibility and has further developed and applied these concepts over subsequent decades. This paper attempts to build on Soros's framework, provide his concepts with a more precise definition, and put them in the context of recent thinking on complex adaptive systems. The paper proposes that systems can be classified along a 'spectrum of complexity' and that under specific conditions not only social systems but also natural and artificial systems can be considered 'complex reflexive.' The epistemological challenges associated with scientifically understanding a phenomenon stem not from whether its domain is social, natural, or artificial, but where it falls along this spectrum. Reflexive systems present particular challenges; however, evolutionary model-dependent realism provides a bridge between Soros and Popper and a potential path forward for economics.

Additional information

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the support of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and thanks the participants of the workshops on reflexivity at Central European University, Budapest, November 2011 and October 2013 for their comments and suggestions. The author also benefited enormously from George Soros's insights and his Popperian 'critical attitude.' All errors are the author's.

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Reflexivity, complexity, and the nature of social science

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In 1987, George Soros introduced his concepts of reflexivity and fallibility and has further developed and applied these concepts over subsequent decades.

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(2200 př. n. l. Kolaps na celé severní hemisféře
Kolaps je základní součástí lidské společnosti
mizí vzdělanost, řídící struktury.

Kolaps se nedá předopovídat
Základní dlouhodobé problémy, kterými člověk prochází jsou:  Náboženský, sociální, hystorický, rasový

Co se mění v transformaci? Složitost systému.
(Komplexita systému – Egypt stejně komplexní jako naše civilizace, krom informačních technologií a bankovního sektoru)

Egypt: Projekty které zaměstnávali
Nepotismus: Nárůst zájmových skupin (obsazení rodinných příslušníků do řízení)

– stávající paradigma na které jsme zvyklí končí
– je třeba definovat koncept státu na další období a ne jen "zlepšovat jeho komponenty"
– důraz na udržitelnost rozvoje a autarktnost
– George Soros: hledání zásadních problémů vzniklích kolem r. 2012 hledejte v Bundes Bance, ta si myslela, že nastavování systémů funguje ve společnosti stejně, jako v přírodě. V tom ekonomie v r. 2008 selhala
.... Vědy:
společenské: lidské bytosti si zakládají svá vlastní pravidla, mají vlastní rozhodnutí, která se zakládají an nedokonalém pochopení reality.
Přírodní: Trvalé a univerzální zákony (jako gravitace)

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TEDxPrague - Miroslav Bárta - Život s kolapsy - čeho si všímat v minulosti

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– "Out of Aftrica theory"
duscussed topic in human history (every human can trace their rooths back to the east)
– how humas colonised the globe is the most discussed topic
– early philosophical theories:
O.U.T., Every human have lived together in Aftica, we love to socialise. Only the Africa wasn't hte best place to stay, so we went to the north, but in The area of fertile Crescent (oblast půlměsíce, "kolébka lidstva" Mezopotámie), humans decided to spread trough the continents in different directions.
– people decided to move somewhere, they had no idea they are going. They had to guide the society with the basic necessities of life.
–  Since they settled, they begun to organise and focus on government, culture and philosophy, in Italy and Greece.
–pre-socratic thinking is metaphysical: how everything around us is made and how do we get here. Socrates: epystomology: how do we know that we know this
– Thales: first philosopher, genial businessmann,  rational explanations for all,  "Everything around us is made out of wather." – World is floating as a bouat on the huge ocean, the water is essential to everything (Milesian school) ... how the world is composed and dependend  https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%ADl%C3%A9tsk%C3%A1_%C5%A1kola

Hesiond – Theogony book

Heracleitos – Was asking for some universal cosmic law, that governing all things. All the things are constainly chainging, so you can't really define what something really is.
RIVER:
you can't step in the same river twice – when you step in the fiver, water touches your feet.You get wet, if you put the foot out and put it back again, it will be the completely different set of molecules.It is constantly changing, but humans see the river as the entire piece.

Democratos: Everything around us consist of the moleculs, athoms and empty space, you are made of atoms and so you have no after life.

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Today we discussed the "Out of Africa" theory, the adversity of early humans, the term "Pre-Socratic", the first philosopher Thales, the meanest philosopher Heraclitus and Democritus, the godfather of the theory of atomism.

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Episode #001 ... Pre-Socratic Philosophy - Ionian

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Today we discussed the "Out of Africa" theory, the adversity of early humans, the term "Pre-Socratic", the first philosopher Thales, the meanest philosopher Heraclitus and Democritus, the godfather of the theory of atomism.

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The book he designed himself consist of one sovereign man consist of so many human bodies

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as monstrous and terrifying, kind of like the alpha-predator of the ocean

“His sneezings flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn.
Smoke went up from his nostrils, and devouring fire from his mouth; glowing coals flamed forth from him.

And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads.”

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The sa THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. TWO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS:

1)  why do humans need government in the first place or how did people come to realize that government was a good idea at all?

2)  what is the role of government in the lives of the individual citizens, or how much authority should that government have.

...you have signed the social contract in your birth, the choice was made for you by thousands of years of human civilization.

The opposite is the “state of nature" with no rules. All crime is legal,... (as the movie Purge). If there is no private property, nothing belongs to everyone or everything belongs to everyone.

T. H. quote: “In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea,... the worst of all – contiunal fear" ...Morality doesn't exist

T. H. quote: "Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude.”

In state of nature there is no goal to "good" or "bad", there is only your "good" in sense of "self preservation" We are self-oriented survival machines looking fro our self-preservation.

SO:
People would do WAR in state of nature:
So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel (hádka).
1) Competition 2) Diffidence 3) Glory (sláva)
"...if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies, and in the way to their End"

After this people realise that they can achieve the self-preservation more easily and effectively if they communicate with each other and seek peace.

TWO WAYS:
1) Natural gifts to others, buy them as a slaves. But it doesn't work, other also have the natural sources.
2) Sighning a contract to do the self-preservation together in order to do it more effectively under the contract. But shaking hands is not enough. (it is underestimated because  human can be very selfish). It so quickly goes into the state of bargaining (smlouvání).

For this we need the leader (the LEVIATHAN)  The leader with absolute authority to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants in the interest of maintaining the contract. His job, is to keep us OUT of that terrible, perpetual state of war that we would otherwise find ourselves in.

Those becomes the moral orther that you follow. The state of nature is the state of war.  The social contract is the opposite: the state of peace.

Hobbes says you may not understand why the laws are put in place, but because you benefit from the fruits of society, you should follow the laws of the sovereign because they are meant to keep the peace, they are meant to prevent us from declaring war on each other.

The collection of self-preservation possibilities is Natural law.
If the main goal is self-preservation, then any act that is destructive to yourself in any way in the long term, is bad.

Natural Law is ultimately what follows as a set of fundamentals to live by.

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Episode #026 ... Thomas Hobbes pt. 1 - The Social Contract

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Hranice a re- spekt před hranicemi mohou tedy i chránit slabé - v ekonomii stejně jako v sociální oblasti, v právu právě tak jako v politice. I když to odporuje du- chu doby, obrana hranic může být i aktem humanity. Ve světě bez hranic triumfoval vždy jen silnější. Ovšem kdy a jakou funkci hranice mohou musí převzít, je třeba rozhodovat případ od případu. Vystavovat hranice paušálnímu podezření, je nesmysl.

Sice souhlasí, že hranice roz- štěpují, kopají příkopy, staví zdi – hranice se tak mohou stát manifestací nehumánnosti. Ale platí také: chránit hranice, dávat jistotu, uspořádávat svět, vyzývat, aby byl druhý ctěn a respektován hranice proto také patří k podmínkám dobrého života.

... Hranice jsou proto principiálně měnitelné, mohou se posouvat a nově vytyčovat, mohou být propustné nebo přísně střežené, lze je učinit nepřekonatelnými, a přece budou pře- konány.

(s. 124)

Každé hranice -i to se rádo přehlíží – jsou paradoxem. Oddělují a sou- časně spojují. Ať hranice oddělují cokoli, ať se kdokoli nachází na jedné i na druhé straně hranic, tyto hranice jsou jejich společnou hranicí. Hranice proto značí i blízkost a sousedství. Společná hranice spojuje navzájem i ty, kteří nemají společného nic jiného než právě tuto hranici.
... Hranice, at už se chtějí určovat jakkoli, at už je střetneme kdekoli, nás staví před prastarý problém veškeré morálky: Co mám dělat. Kde je možné vše, tam se také nemusí dít nic. Hranice omezují možnosti, a právě proto provokují: k nějakému pokusu, reflexi, protestu, pohledu, překročení. Ale opatrně: Překročit hranice proti vůli toho, kdo se skutečně či metaforicky nachází na druhé straně, bylo vždy agresivním aktem a vždy jím také zůstane. lintegrita individuí a společenství je v dvojím smyslu slova omezená.

(s. 125)
Viděno celosvětově, navzdory či kvůli globalizaci, hranic přibývá. Kde vznikají nové státy, kde se emancipují menšiny, kde se rozpadají impéria, vznikají ihned nové hranice: na Balkáně, v Africe, v oblasti bývalého Sovět- ského svazu, na Blízkém Východě. Pocit, že jedno panství se sesulo a ko- nečně si člověk může vytvořit společenství vlastního práva, se ihned proje- vuje v etablování hranic. Táhnou ostrou dělicí čáru vůči bývalému mocnáři a mají nyní nově vzniklé politické společenství chránit alespoň tak dlouho, dokud se ještě bude cítit nejisté a ohrožené. Pro lidi, kteří, ať už z jakýchkoli důvodů, chtějí vlastní stát, jsou proto hranice vždy i linií touhy, její realizace je vždy i znakem toho, že jejich přání suverenity se stalo skutečností. Poz- ději, když se poměry uvolní, mohou takové hranice opět ztratit na významu, mnohdy zcela zmizet.

(s. 126)

Za aktuálních podmínek by propa- govaná bezhraničnost vedla spíše ke světové občanské válce, než k novému humánnímu uspořádání poměrů. Dokud existují diference politických ústav společenství, dokud existují různé formy společností, dokud existuje silná obliba úrovně blahobytu u zemí a regionů, dokud jsou životní podmínky a životní šance na této planetě rozděleny nerovnoměrně, budou muset existovat i odpovídající hranice, které budou vždy dvojí: signály vyloučení i příslib lepšího života.

(s. 127)

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Všichni mluví o vzdělání. Stalo se sekulární naukou spásy, od níž si slibujeme řešení všech problémů - od potírání chudoby až k integraci migrantů, od změny klimatu až k boji proti teroru. Zatímco se však „vzdělání" jako heslo stalo všudypřítomným, vzdělanec, vlastní cíl všech těchto vzdělanostních snah, nejen zmizel ze slovní zásoby, ale každý...

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Vzdělání jako provokace - Konrad Paul Liessmann | Kosmas.cz - internetové knihkupectví

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Všichni mluví o vzdělání. Stalo se sekulární naukou spásy, od níž si slibujeme řešení všech problémů - od potírání chudoby až k integraci migrantů, od změny klimatu až k boji proti teroru. Zatímco se však „vzdělání" jako heslo stalo všudypřítomným, vzdělanec, vlastní cíl všech těchto vzdělanostních snah, nejen zmizel ze slovní zásoby, ale každý...

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Přečetl jsem doslova v horečce na jeden zátah. Skvostné. Díky téměř nadpozemskému překladu je toto jeden z nejkrásnejších textů v češtině, co jsem kdy četl.

Knížka, která se asi nedá uchopit po jednom přečtení. Pro mě nejsilnější stránkou jsou obrazy z divoké kolonizace Konga a úvahy o civilizačním nátěru, který se z nás dokáže za určitých okolností velice rychle sloupnout. Nedokázala jsem ale sledovat postavu Kurtze, která sice má být ústřední, ale pro mě (na rozdíl od filmu Apokalypsa) zůstala zvláštně nepochopitelná. Vč. toho, proč byl vlastně takovou legendou.

Příběh se rozbíhá pomalu a váhavě, stejně jako z vody vyzdvižený parník kapitána Marlowa. Autor nás námořníkovým prostřednictvím, kromě dramatického koloniálního dobrodružství, zahrnuje temnými filozofickými úvahami, přičemž upozorňuje na velký rozdíl mezi (relativně ušlechtilými) kolonizátory a krutými dobyvateli, které pokládal za vrahy a zloděje. Není to snadné čtení.
80% (je nás 251 hodnotících s modrým průměrem 76%).
...
„Obyvatelstvo se odtud vystěhovalo už před dávnou dobou. Ovšem, představte si, že by houf záhadných černochů, vyzbrojených všemi možnými strašnými zbraněmi, náhle začal cestovat po silnici mezi Dealem a Gravesendem a že by chytali napravo nalevo venkovany, aby jim nosili těžké náklady - myslím, že by se všechny dvorce a chalupy v okolí brzy vyprázdnily."

Pod povrchním nátěrem dobrodružného příběhu se skrývá dílo obtížně zařaditelné i uchopitelné, až tak, že vím, že jedno přečtení mi k odhalení všech jeho vrstev nepostačilo.
Záchranná výprava do hlubin necivilizované Afriky pro tajemného pana Kurtze, jehož všemi uctívaná či obávaná osobnost zůstává až do samého konce stejně neobjasněnou a nepoznanou "chimérou", je jen pozadím, na nějž si každý čtenář promítne svou verzi Srdce temnoty. Objevitelská cesta z civilizace do divočiny jako metafora pro odvahu ke konfrontaci s pravou, nepřikrášlenou přirozeností a realitou vně i uvnitř...s mocí i nemocí těla i ducha...třeba.
Hypnotická, ponurá a tísnivě tajemná atmosféra plná barev, zvuků a přízraků africké džungle je jen dokonalou třešinkou navrch.

Kniha vyžaduje velké soustředění, pozorné čtení a proplutím řekou s vypravěčem konečně dojde k poznání srdce temnoty.
Bylo to i předlohou filmu Apokalypsa od F..F.Coppoly.
Killingjoke
Londýn, konec 19. století. Zkušený mořský vlk Charles Marlowe vypráví svým třem přátelům příběh ze své minulosti, kdy se nechal zaměstnat jako kapitán lodi plavící se do tajemného srdce Konga, aby zde vyhledal jistého Kurtze a dopravil jej zpět. Pro zkušeného námořníka na první pohled jednoduchý úkol, k jehož splnění je však neodvratné, aby Marlowe poznal samotné srdce temnoty... Souhlasím s tím, že tohle vůbec není jednoduchá kniha, jak formou tak ani obsahem a vyžaduje plné čtenářské soustředění. Protože ač se dá knížka přečíst za jedno odpoledne, její jazyk je tak košatý a metaforický, že se rozhodně nejedná o odpočinkové čtení. O to víc však není jednoduché téma, které autor vypráví. Je totiž hned několik hledisek toho, jak pochopíte, co to srdce temnoty skutečně je. Vzhledem k době vzniku knihou rezonuje odpor ke kolonialismu neprobádaných míst Afriky (v případě Konga hlavně majetnického vykořisťovatele a belgického krále Leopolda II., jenž se prohlásil za majitele Konga) a pak téma metamorfózy lidské mysli při srážce se strašidelnou divočinou a vidinou velkého bohatství... Není to jednoduchá kniha, ale nějakým zvláštním způsobem se mi dostala pod kůži. Osobně bych ji označil za nadčasovou, protože mnohdy jsou její události platné v té či oné formě do dnešních dní. Rozhodně si Srdce temnoty ještě v budoucnu znovu přečtu.

Srdce temnoty není jednoduchá knížka. Zdánlivě přímočarý příběh je napsán neuvěřitelným stylem plným metafor. Čtenář se musí docela soustředit. Věty jsou dlouhé a složité. Nečte se to snadno, někoho kniha odmění, jiný se ztratí v temnotě. Přesto je to všechno zvláštním způsobem přitažlivé. Tajemný příběh, cesta do nitra „něčeho", těch interpretací je příliš mnoho. Někdy si až říkám, zda v této a v podobných knihách někteří nevidí něco, co neexistuje, něco co zdaleka nebylo autorovým záměrem. Kniha je to rozhodně zvláštní a rozhodně není pro každého. Přesto se k ní v budoucnu alespoň jednou vrátím.

Teprve tady na DK a pak na ČSFD jsem zjistila, že proslulá Apokalypsa Francise Forda Coppoly vznikla podle tohoto neuvěřitelného, pochmurného a děsivého Conradova románu. Tohle je velké čtení, s potřebou soustředění a vnímání každého autorova slova. Osobně si nemyslím, že je třeba číst mezi řádky, Conrad - alespoň pro mne - psal navýsost srozumitelně. Možná tomu napomohla moje vizuální představa plynoucí z Coppolova filmu, ale i tak se mi temný děj doslova odvíjel před očima. Asi se už na leccos z temné kolonizátorské minulosti dnešních evropských velmocí také pozapomnělo. A asi si málokdo uvědomuje, že právě z ní pramení aktuální problémy, s nimiž se stará dobrá (a ach, tak humánní!)
Evropa potýká. Podobné knihy by měly být povinnou četbou nejen ve školách českých, ale hlavně francouzských, britských, německých, belgických...atd.
Za mne plný počet a doporučuji.

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Přečetl jsem doslova v horečce na jeden zátah. Skvostné. Díky téměř nadpozemskému překladu je toto jeden z nejkrásnejších textů v češtině, co jsem kdy četl. Knížka, která se asi nedá uchopit po jednom přečtení. Pro mě nejsilnější stránkou jsou obrazy z divoké kolonizace Konga a úvahy o civilizačním nátěru, který se z nás dokáže za určitých okolností velice rychle sloupnout.

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- Culture as the essential, binding fabric of the European project
- Includes theoretical models and straightforward, concrete and provocative examples
- Antennae series: Award Dutch Best Book Designs 2015 by the student panel of judges

Editor: Pascal Gielen
Design: Metahaven
Series: Antennae, Arts in Society

2015, Valiz | supported by Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg, European Cultural Foundation, Amsterdam, BOZAR, Brussels | paperback | 224 pp. | 21 x 13,5 cm (h x w) | English | ISBN 978-94-92095-03-9

Over the past decade, the European Union has fallen into a drawn-out crisis, politically as well as economically. In this book, the authors argue that analyses of this crisis miss an important element: culture. Faith in politics is first and foremost a cultural issue; democracy is a matter of political culture. So, culture as a shared frame of reference and as something that lends meaning to people's lives is not the superstructure but the very foundation of all societies.
No Culture, No Europe analyses theoretical models and provides straightforward examples that clarify the central proposition of this book: culture is the basic source to give meaning and form to societies. It is the essential, binding fabric of investigating and assessing identity, human activities and political awareness, enabling us to act politically. The European project will never succeed if it does not recognize culture as its main raison d'être.

Contributors: Rosi Braidotti, Kurt De Boodt, Pascal Gielen, Barend van Heusden, Andreas Kinneging, György Konrád, Thijs Lijster, Isabell Lorey, Jan Masschelein, Anoek Nuyens, Maarten Simons, Naema Tahir

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Culture as the essential, binding fabric of the European project- Includes theoretical models and straightforward, concrete and provocative examples- Antennae series: Award Dutch Best Book Designs 2015 by the student panel of judges Editor: Pascal GielenDesign: Metahaven Series: Antennae, Arts in Society 2015, Valiz | supported by Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg, European Cultural Foundation, Amsterdam, BOZAR, Brussels | paperback | 224 pp.

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Czech Expansion around 1301 – Václav II. 

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Czech Expansion around 1301 – Václav II. 

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czech expansion around  1257 – Přemysl Otakar II.

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czech expansion around  1257 – Přemysl Otakar II.

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Díky těžení stříbra, tehdejšího kovu na mince

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S vládou Václava I. je spojena změna víceméně obranné české politiky na politiku ofenzivní. Společně se svým synem, moravským markrabětem a pozdějším českým králem Přemyslem Otakarem II., se jim podařilo na čtvrt století pod svoji vládu přivést i rakouské země a Otakarovo panství se rozkládalo za Alpy až k Jaderskému moři. Král Přemysl Otakar II. byl významnou postavou nejen českých, ale i středoevropských dějin.[1] Po silném otřesu české státnosti následujícím po bitvě na Moravském poli a smrti Přemysla Otakara II. však moc v Rakousku natrvalo získali Habsburkové. Přemyslův syn Václav II. obrátil svou pozornost na sever a východ, kde se mu podařilo získat polskou a pro svého syna Václava III. uherskou korunu. Panství Václava III. tak sahalo od Uher až k Baltskému moři.

Přemyslovci by ale pravděpodobně nemohli dosáhnout svých úspěchů bez finančních prostředků plynoucích z těžby jihlavského a kutnohorského stříbra. V době Václava II. se totiž v Čechách těžilo asi 40 % veškerého evropského stříbra, které tehdy bylo nejdůležitějším cenným kovem.

Přemyslovský rod, tato první a jediná původem česká panovnická dynastie, vymřel po meči zavražděním mladého krále českého, polského a uherského Václava III. v Olomouci za nevyjasněných okolností dne 4. srpna 1306.

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The Myth of Globalisation – Peter Alfandary Also The myth of Global village: There is actually huge cultural and communicative differences on each places.  Cross culture dilema = if dominance of english spoken, dominance of technology (easy communication speaking), do we really understand each other? (We write emails in vacuum, sending to somewhere where it is not culturally global.) Cultural shock has been hidden by technology, but it is still there.

The key is cultural intelligence, it is understanding other cultures, but also, understanding our own culture within those new parameters. “The last thing that the fish notices is the water he is swiming in.”

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The myth of globalisation | Peter Alfandary | TEDxAix

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Honza Zamojski – Fishing & Graphic design

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Honza Zamojski – Fishing & Graphic design

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For an observer standing on the ground with h = 2 metres (6 ft 7 in), the horizon is at a distance of 5 kilometres (3.1 mi). For an observer standing on a hill or tower 30 metres (98 ft) above sea level, the horizon is at a distance of 19.6 kilometres (12.2 mi).

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The horizon or skyline is the apparent line that separates earth from sky, the line that divides all visible directions into two categories: those that intersect the Earth's surface, and those that do not. At many locations, the true horizon is obscured by trees, buildings, mountains, etc., and the resulting intersection of earth and sky is called the visible horizon.

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Ahoj, neviem nájsť momentálne fotky. Šli sme navštíviť Shiranu, teda jej štúdio, fotografka ktorá má fotky na color library napríklad, manželka Dimitriho zo studia Norm. Bolo to po rieke, tak sme zobrali člny, nafukovací kolesa, niekto len tak plával a o pol hodinky sme boli v cíli. Veľa ľudí sa takto plavilo s floating bagom. Osušilo, oblieklo a pokračuje pešo. Skusim nájsť fotky ale žiaden oficiál link nemám. Bola to spontánna vec, aspoň naša konkrétna experience

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Studying at the Floating University (by Martin)

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Sloterdijk popisuje naší společnost jako pěnovou.

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The final volume in Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated Spheres trilogy, on the phenomenology of community and its spatial peripheries.

"So the One Orb has imploded-now the foams are alive."-from Foams

Foams completes Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated Spheres trilogy: his 2,500-page "grand narrative" retelling of the history of humanity, as related through the anthropological concept of the "Sphere." For Sloterdijk, life is a matter of form and, in life, sphere formation and thought are two different labels for the same thing. The trilogy also offers his corrective answer to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, reformulating it into a lengthy meditation on Being and Space-a shifting of the question of who we are to a more fundamental question of where we are.

In this final volume, Sloterdijk's "plural spherology" moves from the historical perspective on humanity of the preceding two volumes to a philosophical theory of our contemporary era, offering a view of life through a multifocal lens. If Bubbles was Sloterdijk's phenomenology of intimacy, and Globes his phenomenology of globalization, Foams could be described as his phenomenology of spatial plurality: how the bubbles that we form in our duality bind together to form what sociological tradition calls "society." Foams is an exploration of capsules, islands, and hothouses that leads to the discovery of the foam city.

The Spheres trilogy ultimately presents a theology without a God-a spatial theology that requires no God, whose death therefore need not be of concern.

As with the two preceding volumes, Foams can be read on its own or in relation to the rest of the trilogy.

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The final volume in Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated Spheres trilogy, on the phenomenology of community and its spatial peripheries. "So the One Orb has imploded-now the foams are alive."-from Foams Foams completes Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated Spheres trilogy: his 2,500-page "grand narrative" retelling of the history of humanity, as related through the anthropological concept of the "Sphere."