A12.Inglish BCEnc. Blauwe Kaas Encyclopedie, Duaal Hermeneuties Kollegium.
Inglish Site.12.
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TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
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Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
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This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
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Index.
53.William Gibson?s TimeTravel.
54.Algebraic topology.
55.Alan Turing?s Reading List.
56.Alternate history or alternative reality.
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53.William Gibson?s TimeTravel.
Science fiction author William Gibson?s work, from cyberpunk classic Neuromancer to his more recent, less overtly futuristic novels, is usually more concerned with smart cultural analysis than plotting the mechanics of new technology. Gibson has given us a lens to see everything from high fashion to virtual reality, coining the term ?cyberspace? to refer to what would soon become a ubiquitous computer network in the real world (?And they won?t let me forget it,? he quipped after being introduced with that factoid in the TV show Wild Palms.)
But time travel is one of the most mechanical genres around ? not necessarily in scientific rationale, but in the rigorous attempt to fit together pieces of the past, present, and future without leaving loose ends or, at worst, unresolved paradoxes. And Gibson?s latest novel, The Peripheral, fits at least a few of its tropes. It?s a lot more complicated than that, and it?s not any less concerned with how our present-day world could look after a few decades. Our review of The Peripheral went up yesterday, but we also got to talk with Gibson last month about predicting the future, insulting the past, and the societal half-life of 3D-printed cronuts.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity; it includes mild spoilers for The Peripheral.
How do you write something that could be called a time travel story without getting stuck in exposition or explanation of how it works?
I always liked a story that two friends of mine published in the '80s, in which they got rid of the paradox angle by proposing that each time the past is contacted, it splits into another timeline, so it's actually an alternate reality story rather than a time travel story, and that frees you of the head-hurting or pleasurable, depending on how you look at it, paradoxes of imagining time travel. And in the case of my friends' story and The Peripheral, it frees the future to try to outsource the past. In that story ? which is called "Mozart in Mirrorshades" by Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling ? the uncaring future is exploiting physical resources from any number of alternate realities with no care for what happens to the inhabitants of those worlds. And I didn't want to do that either, because I didn't want it to be directly physical. I wanted it to be emailing the past and taking it from there.
I doubt if it's any more plausible in terms of known physics, but I found it had a very different feel. I'm continually grateful for not being in the middle of writing a physical time travel story like the ones that I'd grown up on. But as our geography slowly dissolves into the digital, then it gets very interesting. Because if you can sit in a hangar in Kansas and fly a drone bomber over Pakistan, and give yourself really bad jet lag by doing that long enough, where are we actually?
"THE CRONUTS ARE DEPICTED AS HAVING RUN THEIR FULL NATURAL CYCLE."
In that vein, I'm curious how exactly you chose the present-day things that you were going to put in. Some of them feel very specifically designed to be dated, like cronuts.
Well, [Flynne?s] time frame is some vague number of years from now, and when the cronuts found their way into the story, the cronuts were already slightly dated. But by the time of the story, probably the only place that people are having cronuts is from one of the global food outlets in this tiny backwater town. The cronuts are depicted as having run their full natural cycle from hot hipster novelty to being something at McDonalds.
What about everything else? You've talked before about trying to create science fiction that's not necessarily predictive but allowing people to situate themselves in the time in which it's written.
Well, I think I'm still doing that in The Peripheral, but there are a couple of other agendas going on, some of which I probably haven't figured out yet myself. One thing I wanted particularly to look at was how we culturally view the past and the people in the past and how we culturally view the future and the people in the future. One of my starting points from looking at that myself, as I started to write, was my own fondness and appreciation of Deadwood. Because I loved that Deadwood sort of opens on this little dirt-street town that we know, really, from our popular culture. But once you're there for a while, we realize that these people in the past, some of them not only aren't rubes, but they're clever and badder than we are! We'd have a really hard time if we had to deal with them directly, because they're both ruthless and very smart, and in their own way very sophisticated.
On the other hand, when we look at the future, in fiction, it's quite common to find the people in the future depicted as decadent and lacking in our vigor.
"THE PAST ARE HICKS, AND THE FUTURE ARE SUCKERS."
The Eloi [from H.G. Wells? The Time Machine.]
Exactly. And I find that comic that we do it that way. The past are hicks and the future are suckers. And we're obviously "the business" somehow, so as I got going with the story, I realized that I wanted to introduce the inhabitants of a decadent far future, or at least something that Netherton thinks of as a decadent far future, to really sophisticated hicks, and rednecks, in our very near present. I mean, Flynne's town ? which is never named and indeed the state is never named, nor did I have one in mind ? isn't that much of a stretch for us. There are parts of that future that have definitely already arrived in the less fortunate parts of the rural United States.
I do a lot of virtual reality coverage, and I can't get through an interview or talk without someone bringing up the quote from Neuromancer about consensual hallucinations. I'm curious what you think about virtual reality and how you feel about being such a significant part, psychologically, to people.
Only recently, like in the last two months, did I get to try what I get was the latest developer version of Oculus Rift. I couldn't get a full sense of it, because I'm too nearsighted for the accessory lens set to give me 20/20 in the simulation. But in kind of a fuzzy way, I got it. And the first thing I asked the person who was running this demonstration for me was, why couldn't they do this in the late ?80s, early '90s, when it was the cover of every tech magazine on the planet? I was wondering, why is this all happening now? And the demonstrators said well, you're essentially looking at a smartphone. The smartphone technology and the smartphone industry have evolved to the point where we can do this smoothly, and more smoothly in a few months.
"I DIDN'T FEEL THAT [VR] WAS THAT ORIGINAL, WHEN I WAS WRITING."
As far as my cultural association with it, whatever it is that I represent to people in the VR business that would cause them to quote that line from Neuromancer, I guess it's fair enough. But when people can go back and do all of the results on art in the 1980s, I don't think I'll really hold up as being the person who really, really saw that. I think that it's become associated with me in a kind of often really, really dubious attribution that the internet provides. I didn't feel that it was that original, when I was writing.
I had, a decade earlier, read a Harlan Ellison story called "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," which takes place in a virtual world, within the programming of an AI. And you're decades since I read that story. I don't think I've read it since I wrote Neuromancer. It just doesn't have any of our technical language as it came to exist subsequently. But the environment was there. And it probably wasn't the first place I'd run into that riff in science fiction. I definitely felt like I was using a kind of known stock part of this. Not as frequently used in the past as the rocket ship, but still, science fiction readers were going to have no trouble getting their heads around the construct.
And then it didn't arrive. It kind of arrived, made a fuss, and then went away while the smartphone industry evolved the stuff they need to actually do it.
"THE REAL FUTURE ... IS TOO PECULIAR TO MAKE ENTERTAINING SCIENCE FICTION."
It feels like there are a lot of people trying to make science fiction happen ? the Oculus Rift is a bunch of people trying to imitate science fiction stories, in a lot of experiences right now. Do you think that's a good way of actually going about technology, or does it send us down the wrong path?
I know for sure that that happens to some extent, and that people who build real things can be inspired to a real extent by having read a piece of science fiction. But it seems to me that it's a morally neutral proposition. Except? on one or two occasions, things have occurred to me in the course of writing a piece of science fiction that I put into the story and then shortly thereafter went back and removed it, because I didn't want anyone to do it. I didn't want anyone to even think about doing it. And so something that had initially delighted me as being, "Oh, that's obvious! But I don't think anyone that I know of has ever suggested that you could do that," you kind of wake up the next morning and go, naah, I'm taking that out and I'm never mentioning it anywhere. Because I don't want to give anybody that idea.
And that doesn't happen very often. One of the reasons it doesn't happen very often is that I don't purely invent very much of the imaginary future technology in my work. I'm more likely to collage it up out of something that exists now. It might be something that just barely exists now, it might be something that existed in the past that some people aren't aware of. Like the technical future of my books is necessarily, I think, a collage. If, for instance, I had an idea and a scientific rationale for some technology that no one's ever dreamed of, some people would think that that would be really good for me! Because "originality," and I'd be the first person who thought of it. But in reality, I think if I had that, I'd probably wind up finding out that I couldn't actually use it. Because it's too totally unfamiliar.
Along the same lines ? and for me beginning to prove it ? is trying to imagine what it would have been like if somewhere in the 1960s, some science fiction writer had completely and very, very accurately envisioned cellphones. Cellular telephony, which wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye in the '60s, aside from Dick Tracy's wrist radio television and things like that. What if someone had just gotten that and written a novel around it? How would it have been received? I don't even think it would have been publishable. It would just have been too bizarre for people. I don't think it would have worked. The real future, when it arrives, which it constantly does, is too peculiar to make entertaining science fiction, if that makes any sense.
I was thinking of trying ? and because I'm mentioning it, it probably means I've decided I won't be doing it ? to write a novel in which someone is researching the biography of a prolific but largely unpublished science fiction writer who was born in the late 1920s and lived and kept writing into the early years of the 21st century. So there are these stacks and stacks of rejected novels sitting in a storage segment somewhere. And someone's going through them. And what they discover is that this guy predicted everything. He got everything. But what the reader in the story would know, because they'd be in a version of the real world, is that he got the technology, but he never got what people did with it. So that every excerpt from his unpublished work would be unintentionally hilarious, from his point of view. He wasn't trying to be funny.
"PROSE FICTION IS A REMARKABLY EFFICIENT TOOL FOR THAT PARTICULAR KIND OF STORYTELLING."
Do you think that science fiction's native form still should be text? Do you think the medium for the most effective kinds of storytelling about the weirdness of the present or the future has changed?
No, I don't. I'm slightly prejudiced, and it could completely be age, towards the idea that prose fiction is a remarkably efficient tool for that particular kind of storytelling. Or it can be. You don't really see it optimally played that often. But I don't know. I think it's an impulse we have that can be expressed in whatever form we want to express it in. I don't think anything really, even prose, has completely the edge now. I'm not even sure what it will mean to us eventually.
I often think that if I could know one thing, and one thing only, about the future, it would be what they think of us. If I knew that, I'd be able to infer what had happened, I think in fairly considerable detail. In a way that when we think about the Victorians, what we think about them would appall them. They wouldn't be able to get their heads around it, because they thought they were doing really well.
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54.Algebraic topology.
Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics that uses tools from abstract algebra to study topological spaces. The basic goal is to find algebraic invariants that classify topological spaces up to homeomorphism, though usually most classify up to homotopy equivalence.
Although algebraic topology primarily uses algebra to study topological problems, using topology to solve algebraic problems is sometimes also possible. Algebraic topology, for example, allows for a convenient proof that any subgroup of a free group is again a free group.
Below are some of the main areas studied in algebraic topology:
Homotopy groups.
In mathematics, homotopy groups are used in algebraic topology to classify topological spaces. The first and simplest homotopy group is the fundamental group, which records information about loops in a space. Intuitively, homotopy groups record information about the basic shape, or holes, of a topological space.
Homology.
In algebraic topology and abstract algebra, homology (in part from Greek ???? homos "identical") is a certain general procedure to associate a sequence of abelian groups or modules with a given mathematical object such as a topological space or a group.
Cohomology.
In homology theory and algebraic topology, cohomology is a general term for a sequence of abelian groups defined from a co-chain complex. That is, cohomology is defined as the abstract study of cochains, cocycles, and coboundaries. Cohomology can be viewed as a method of assigning algebraic invariants to a topological space that has a more refined algebraic structure than does homology. Cohomology arises from the algebraic dualization of the construction of homology. In less abstract language, cochains in the fundamental sense should assign 'quantities' to the chains of homology theory.
Manifolds.
A manifold is a topological space that near each point resembles Euclidean space. More precisely, each point of an n-dimensional manifold has a neighbourhood that is diffeomorphic to the Euclidean space of dimension n. Lines and circles, but not figure eights, are one-dimensional manifolds. Two-dimensional manifolds are also called surfaces. Examples include the plane, the sphere, and the torus, which can all be realized in three dimensions, but also the Klein bottle and real projective plane which cannot be realized in three dimensions, but can be realized in four dimensions.
Knot theory.
Knot theory is the study of mathematical knots. While inspired by knots that appear in daily life in shoelaces and rope, a mathematician's knot differs in that the ends are joined together so that it cannot be undone. In precise mathematical language, a knot is an embedding of a circle in 3-dimensional Euclidean space, R3. Two mathematical knots are equivalent if one can be transformed into the other via a deformation of R3 upon itself (known as an ambient isotopy); these transformations correspond to manipulations of a knotted string that do not involve cutting the string or passing the string through itself.
Complexes.
A simplicial complex is a topological space of a certain kind, constructed by "gluing together" points, line segments, triangles, and their n-dimensional counterparts (see illustration). Simplicial complexes should not be confused with the more abstract notion of a simplicial set appearing in modern simplicial homotopy theory. The purely combinatorial counterpart to a simplicial complex is an abstract simplicial complex.
A CW complex is a type of topological space introduced by J. H. C. Whitehead to meet the needs of homotopy theory. This class of spaces is broader and has some better categorical properties than simplicial complexes, but still retains a combinatorial nature that allows for computation (often with a much smaller complex).
An older name for the subject was combinatorial topology, implying an emphasis on how a space X was constructed from simpler ones (the modern standard tool for such construction is the CW-complex). In the 1920s and 1930s, there was growing emphasis on investigating topological spaces by finding correspondences from them to algebraic groups, which led to the change of name to algebraic topology. The combinatorial topology name is still sometimes used to emphasize an algorithmic approach based on decomposition of spaces.
In the algebraic approach, one finds a correspondence between spaces and groups that respects the relation of homeomorphism (or more general homotopy) of spaces. This allows one to recast statements about topological spaces into statements about groups, which have a great deal of manageable structure, often making these statement easier to prove. Two major ways in which this can be done are through fundamental groups, or more generally homotopy theory, and through homology and cohomology groups. The fundamental groups give us basic information about the structure of a topological space, but they are often nonabelian and can be difficult to work with. The fundamental group of a (finite) simplicial complex does have a finite presentation.
Homology and cohomology groups, on the other hand, are abelian and in many important cases finitely generated. Finitely generated abelian groups are completely classified and are particularly easy to work with.
In general, all constructions of algebraic topology are functorial; the notions of category, functor and natural transformation originated here. Fundamental groups and homology and cohomology groups are not only invariants of the underlying topological space, in the sense that two topological spaces which are homeomorphic have the same associated groups, but their associated morphisms also correspond ? a continuous mapping of spaces induces a group homomorphism on the associated groups, and these homomorphisms can be used to show non-existence (or, much more deeply, existence) of mappings.
One of the first mathematicians to work with different types of cohomology was Georges de Rham. One can use the differential structure of smooth manifolds via de Rham cohomology, or ?ech or sheaf cohomology to investigate the solvability of differential equations defined on the manifold in question. De Rham showed that all of these approaches were interrelated and that, for a closed, oriented manifold, the Betti numbers derived through simplicial homology were the same Betti numbers as those derived through de Rham cohomology. This was extended in the 1950s, when Eilenberg and Steenrod generalized this approach. They defined homology and cohomology as functors equipped with natural transformations subject to certain axioms (e.g., a weak equivalence of spaces passes to an isomorphism of homology groups), verified that all existing (co)homology theories satisfied these axioms, and then proved that such an axiomatization uniquely characterized the theory.
Classic applications of algebraic topology include:
The Brouwer fixed point theorem: every continuous map from the unit n-disk to itself has a fixed point.
The free rank of the nth homology group of a simplicial complex is the n-th Betti number, which allows one to calculate the Euler-Poincaré characteristic.
One can use the differential structure of smooth manifolds via de Rham cohomology, or ?ech or sheaf cohomology to investigate the solvability of differential equations defined on the manifold in question.
A manifold is orientable when the top-dimensional integral homology group is the integers, and is non-orientable when it is 0.
The n-sphere admits a nowhere-vanishing continuous unit vector field if and only if n is odd. (For n = 2, this is sometimes called the "hairy ball theorem".)
The Borsuk?Ulam theorem: any continuous map from the n-sphere to Euclidean n-space identifies at least one pair of antipodal points.
Any subgroup of a free group is free. This result is quite interesting, because the statement is purely algebraic yet the simplest proof is topological. Namely, any free group G may be realized as the fundamental group of a graph X. The main theorem on covering spaces tells us that every subgroup H of G is the fundamental group of some covering space Y of X; but every such Y is again a graph. Therefore its fundamental group H is free. On the other hand this type of application is also handled more simply by the use of covering morphisms of groupoids, and that technique has yielded subgroup theorems not yet proved by methods of algebraic topology. (See the book by Higgins listed under groupoids.)
Topological combinatorics.
The discipline of combinatorial topology used combinatorial concepts in topology and in the early 20th century this turned into the field of algebraic topology.
In 1978 the situation was reversed ? methods from algebraic topology were used to solve a problem in combinatorics ? when László Lovász proved the Kneser conjecture, thus beginning the new study of topological combinatorics. Lovász's proof used the Borsuk-Ulam theorem and this theorem retains a prominent role in this new field. This theorem has many equivalent versions and analogs and has been used in the study of fair division problems.
In another application of homological methods to graph theory Lovász proved both the undirected and directed versions of a conjecture of Frank: Given a k-connected graph G, k points v1,...,vk? V(G), and k positive integers n1,n2,...,nk that sum up to |V(G)|, there exists a partition {V1,...,Vk} of V(G) such that vi? Vi, |Vi|=ni and Vi spans a connected subgraph.
In 1987 the necklace splitting problem was solved by Noga Alon using the Borsuk-Ulam theorem. It has also been used to study complexity problems in linear decision tree algorithms and the Aanderaa?Karp?Rosenberg conjecture. Other areas include topology of partially ordered sets and bruhat orders.
Additionally, methods from differential topology now have a combinatorial analog in discrete Morse theory.
Important theorems in algebraic topology;
Borsuk?Ulam theorem
Brouwer fixed point theorem
Cellular approximation theorem
Eilenberg?Zilber theorem
Freudenthal suspension theorem
Hurewicz theorem
Künneth theorem
Poincaré duality theorem
Universal coefficient theorem
Van Kampen's theorem
Generalized van Kampen's theorems
Whitehead's theorem
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55.Alan Turing?s Reading List.
Alan Turing?s Reading List: What the Computing Pioneer Borrowed From His School Library by Maria Popova.
What Alice in Wonderland has to do with electromagnetic theory, relativity, and Pluto.
?You are a mashup of what you let into your life,? it?s been said. Since creativity is combinatorial, the architecture of mind and character is deeply influenced by the intellectual stimulation we choose to engage with ? including the books we read. There is hardly anything more fascinating than the private intellectual diet of genius ? like this recently uncovered list of books computing pioneer and early codehacker Alan Turing borrowed from his school library. Though heavy on the sciences, the selection features some wonderful wildcards that bespeak the cross-disciplinary curiosity fundamental to true innovation. A few personal favorites follow.
SIDELIGHTS ON RELATIVITY (1922)
Sidelights on Relativity, published in 1922, is a two-part book based on a series of lectures Albert Einstein gave between 1920 and 1922. It begins with ?Ether and the Theory of Relativity,? explores the nature of ether and the idea that the universe is not mechanical through the lens of Newton, Maxwell, and Lorentz?s work, and the implicit contraction of ?space without ether.? The second part, ?Geometry and Experience,? considers the concept of infinity through Euclidean geometry.
The book is available as a free download from Project Gutenberg.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1871)
The follow-up to Lewis Carroll?s Alice?s Adventures in Wonderland (also on Turing?s reading list), Through The Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There ? one of the best classic children?s books with timeless philosophy for grown-ups ? has a palpable philosophical undercurrent running beneath the seemingly nonsensical dialogue and situations, inviting the reader to extract his or her own conclusive existentialism.
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!? ~ The Queen
A study in contrasts and opposites, the book is as much escapism from reality as it is a journey into our most authentic, uninhibited selves.
Also in the public domain, the book was the 12th text to be digitized by Project Gutenberg.
SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD (1925)
Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead, originally published in 1925, is one of the seminal texts of modern science, presaging nearly a century of cutting-edge discoveries by examining science in the richer context of culture and the humanities as a force of social progress ? a conceptual predecessor to what Jonah Lehrer has termed ?the fourth culture?.
Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, re-fashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and?so far as may be?efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.?
The Internet Archive has a free download.
THE UNIVERSE AROUND US (1929)
English astrophysicist Sir James Jeans was an early champion of ?popular science.? In The Universe Around Us, he set out to make cosmogony, evolution, and the general structure of the universe ?intelligible to readers with no special scientific knowledge? by rewriting and reforming lectures and ?wireless talks? he had given to academic audiences.
In the second edition of the book, Jeans added a discussion of ?the new planet Pluto,? whose planetary status has since been revoked, as well as the rotation of the Milky Way and ?the apparent expansion of the universe.? By the fourth edition in 1943, Jeans had distilled the discovery of atomic nuclei, suggesting it could ?not only give a satisfactory account of the radiation of the sun and stars, but can also explain many hitherto puzzling stellar characteristics.? In a way, the changes across the four editions offer a fascinating footprint of some of the most important discoveries in modern science, narrated in near-real-time by a scientist who made it his life?s work to foster a popular understanding of the scientific method.
MATTER AND MOTION (1876)
In 1876, pioneering physicist James Clerk Maxwell, best-known for formulating electromagnetic theory, penned Matter and Motion ? the first comprehensive guide to the fundamental principles of elementary physics, pulling the curtain on the logic and rationale of the concepts his work built upon, presented in order of complexity in an effort to build a layered understanding of the timeless laws of physics.
Physical science, which up to the end of the eighteenth century had been fully occupied in forming a conception of natural phenomena as the result of forces acting between one body and another, has now fairly entered on the next stage of progress ? that in which the energy of a material system is conceived as determined by the configuration and motion of that system, and in which the ideas of configuration, motion, and force are generalised to the utmost extent warranted by their physical definitions.
To become acquainted with these fundamental ideas, to examine them under all their aspects, and habitually to guide the current of thought along the channels of strict dynamical reasoning, must be the foundation of the training of the student of Physical Science.
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56.Alternate history or alternative reality.
Alternate history or alternative reality is a genre of fiction consisting of stories that are set in worlds in which one or more historical events unfolds differently from how it did in reality. It can be variously seen as a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction; different alternate history works may use tropes from any or all of these genres. It is sometimes abbreviated AH. Another occasionally used term for the genre is "allohistory" (literally "other history"). See also fictional universe.
Since the 1950s, this type of fiction has to a large extent merged with science fictional tropes involving cross-time travel between alternate histories or psychic awareness of the existence of "our" universe by the people in another; or ordinary voyaging uptime (into the past) or downtime (into the future) that results in history splitting into two or more time-lines. Cross-time, time-splitting, and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another. "Alternate History" looks at "what if" scenarios from some of history's most pivotal turning points and presents a completely different version, sometimes based on science and fact, but often based on conjecture. The exploration of how the world would look today if various changes occurred and what these alternate worlds would be like forms the basis of this vast subject matter.
In French, Italian, Spanish, and German, the genre of alternate history is called uchronie / ucronía, which has given rise to the term Uchronia in English. This neologism is based on the prefix u- (as in the word Utopia, a place that does not exist) and the Greek for time, chronos. A uchronia, then, is defined as a time that does not exist, a "non-time". This term apparently also inspired the name of the alternate history book list, uchronia.net.
In writing an alternate history, the author makes the conscious choice to change something in our past. According to Steven H Silver, alternate history requires three things: 1) the story must have a point of divergence from the history of our world prior to the time at which the author is writing, 2) a change that would alter history as it is known, and 3) an examination of the ramifications of that change.
Several genres of fiction have been confused as alternate histories. Science fiction set in what was the future but is now the past, like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Nineteen Eighty-Four, are not alternate history because the author has not made the conscious choice to change the past. Secret history, works that document things that are not known to have happened historically but would not have changed history had they happened, is also not to be confused with alternate history. Another copy of the foregoing is available, and a different definition of "secret history" by the same writer is also searchable.
Alternate history is related to but distinct from counterfactual history?the term used by some professional historians when using thoroughly researched and carefully reasoned speculations on "what might have happened if..." as a tool of academic historical research.
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Inglish Site.12.
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TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
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Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
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This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
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Index.
53.William Gibson?s TimeTravel.
54.Algebraic topology.
55.Alan Turing?s Reading List.
56.Alternate history or alternative reality.
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53.William Gibson?s TimeTravel.
Science fiction author William Gibson?s work, from cyberpunk classic Neuromancer to his more recent, less overtly futuristic novels, is usually more concerned with smart cultural analysis than plotting the mechanics of new technology. Gibson has given us a lens to see everything from high fashion to virtual reality, coining the term ?cyberspace? to refer to what would soon become a ubiquitous computer network in the real world (?And they won?t let me forget it,? he quipped after being introduced with that factoid in the TV show Wild Palms.)
But time travel is one of the most mechanical genres around ? not necessarily in scientific rationale, but in the rigorous attempt to fit together pieces of the past, present, and future without leaving loose ends or, at worst, unresolved paradoxes. And Gibson?s latest novel, The Peripheral, fits at least a few of its tropes. It?s a lot more complicated than that, and it?s not any less concerned with how our present-day world could look after a few decades. Our review of The Peripheral went up yesterday, but we also got to talk with Gibson last month about predicting the future, insulting the past, and the societal half-life of 3D-printed cronuts.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity; it includes mild spoilers for The Peripheral.
How do you write something that could be called a time travel story without getting stuck in exposition or explanation of how it works?
I always liked a story that two friends of mine published in the '80s, in which they got rid of the paradox angle by proposing that each time the past is contacted, it splits into another timeline, so it's actually an alternate reality story rather than a time travel story, and that frees you of the head-hurting or pleasurable, depending on how you look at it, paradoxes of imagining time travel. And in the case of my friends' story and The Peripheral, it frees the future to try to outsource the past. In that story ? which is called "Mozart in Mirrorshades" by Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling ? the uncaring future is exploiting physical resources from any number of alternate realities with no care for what happens to the inhabitants of those worlds. And I didn't want to do that either, because I didn't want it to be directly physical. I wanted it to be emailing the past and taking it from there.
I doubt if it's any more plausible in terms of known physics, but I found it had a very different feel. I'm continually grateful for not being in the middle of writing a physical time travel story like the ones that I'd grown up on. But as our geography slowly dissolves into the digital, then it gets very interesting. Because if you can sit in a hangar in Kansas and fly a drone bomber over Pakistan, and give yourself really bad jet lag by doing that long enough, where are we actually?
"THE CRONUTS ARE DEPICTED AS HAVING RUN THEIR FULL NATURAL CYCLE."
In that vein, I'm curious how exactly you chose the present-day things that you were going to put in. Some of them feel very specifically designed to be dated, like cronuts.
Well, [Flynne?s] time frame is some vague number of years from now, and when the cronuts found their way into the story, the cronuts were already slightly dated. But by the time of the story, probably the only place that people are having cronuts is from one of the global food outlets in this tiny backwater town. The cronuts are depicted as having run their full natural cycle from hot hipster novelty to being something at McDonalds.
What about everything else? You've talked before about trying to create science fiction that's not necessarily predictive but allowing people to situate themselves in the time in which it's written.
Well, I think I'm still doing that in The Peripheral, but there are a couple of other agendas going on, some of which I probably haven't figured out yet myself. One thing I wanted particularly to look at was how we culturally view the past and the people in the past and how we culturally view the future and the people in the future. One of my starting points from looking at that myself, as I started to write, was my own fondness and appreciation of Deadwood. Because I loved that Deadwood sort of opens on this little dirt-street town that we know, really, from our popular culture. But once you're there for a while, we realize that these people in the past, some of them not only aren't rubes, but they're clever and badder than we are! We'd have a really hard time if we had to deal with them directly, because they're both ruthless and very smart, and in their own way very sophisticated.
On the other hand, when we look at the future, in fiction, it's quite common to find the people in the future depicted as decadent and lacking in our vigor.
"THE PAST ARE HICKS, AND THE FUTURE ARE SUCKERS."
The Eloi [from H.G. Wells? The Time Machine.]
Exactly. And I find that comic that we do it that way. The past are hicks and the future are suckers. And we're obviously "the business" somehow, so as I got going with the story, I realized that I wanted to introduce the inhabitants of a decadent far future, or at least something that Netherton thinks of as a decadent far future, to really sophisticated hicks, and rednecks, in our very near present. I mean, Flynne's town ? which is never named and indeed the state is never named, nor did I have one in mind ? isn't that much of a stretch for us. There are parts of that future that have definitely already arrived in the less fortunate parts of the rural United States.
I do a lot of virtual reality coverage, and I can't get through an interview or talk without someone bringing up the quote from Neuromancer about consensual hallucinations. I'm curious what you think about virtual reality and how you feel about being such a significant part, psychologically, to people.
Only recently, like in the last two months, did I get to try what I get was the latest developer version of Oculus Rift. I couldn't get a full sense of it, because I'm too nearsighted for the accessory lens set to give me 20/20 in the simulation. But in kind of a fuzzy way, I got it. And the first thing I asked the person who was running this demonstration for me was, why couldn't they do this in the late ?80s, early '90s, when it was the cover of every tech magazine on the planet? I was wondering, why is this all happening now? And the demonstrators said well, you're essentially looking at a smartphone. The smartphone technology and the smartphone industry have evolved to the point where we can do this smoothly, and more smoothly in a few months.
"I DIDN'T FEEL THAT [VR] WAS THAT ORIGINAL, WHEN I WAS WRITING."
As far as my cultural association with it, whatever it is that I represent to people in the VR business that would cause them to quote that line from Neuromancer, I guess it's fair enough. But when people can go back and do all of the results on art in the 1980s, I don't think I'll really hold up as being the person who really, really saw that. I think that it's become associated with me in a kind of often really, really dubious attribution that the internet provides. I didn't feel that it was that original, when I was writing.
I had, a decade earlier, read a Harlan Ellison story called "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," which takes place in a virtual world, within the programming of an AI. And you're decades since I read that story. I don't think I've read it since I wrote Neuromancer. It just doesn't have any of our technical language as it came to exist subsequently. But the environment was there. And it probably wasn't the first place I'd run into that riff in science fiction. I definitely felt like I was using a kind of known stock part of this. Not as frequently used in the past as the rocket ship, but still, science fiction readers were going to have no trouble getting their heads around the construct.
And then it didn't arrive. It kind of arrived, made a fuss, and then went away while the smartphone industry evolved the stuff they need to actually do it.
"THE REAL FUTURE ... IS TOO PECULIAR TO MAKE ENTERTAINING SCIENCE FICTION."
It feels like there are a lot of people trying to make science fiction happen ? the Oculus Rift is a bunch of people trying to imitate science fiction stories, in a lot of experiences right now. Do you think that's a good way of actually going about technology, or does it send us down the wrong path?
I know for sure that that happens to some extent, and that people who build real things can be inspired to a real extent by having read a piece of science fiction. But it seems to me that it's a morally neutral proposition. Except? on one or two occasions, things have occurred to me in the course of writing a piece of science fiction that I put into the story and then shortly thereafter went back and removed it, because I didn't want anyone to do it. I didn't want anyone to even think about doing it. And so something that had initially delighted me as being, "Oh, that's obvious! But I don't think anyone that I know of has ever suggested that you could do that," you kind of wake up the next morning and go, naah, I'm taking that out and I'm never mentioning it anywhere. Because I don't want to give anybody that idea.
And that doesn't happen very often. One of the reasons it doesn't happen very often is that I don't purely invent very much of the imaginary future technology in my work. I'm more likely to collage it up out of something that exists now. It might be something that just barely exists now, it might be something that existed in the past that some people aren't aware of. Like the technical future of my books is necessarily, I think, a collage. If, for instance, I had an idea and a scientific rationale for some technology that no one's ever dreamed of, some people would think that that would be really good for me! Because "originality," and I'd be the first person who thought of it. But in reality, I think if I had that, I'd probably wind up finding out that I couldn't actually use it. Because it's too totally unfamiliar.
Along the same lines ? and for me beginning to prove it ? is trying to imagine what it would have been like if somewhere in the 1960s, some science fiction writer had completely and very, very accurately envisioned cellphones. Cellular telephony, which wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye in the '60s, aside from Dick Tracy's wrist radio television and things like that. What if someone had just gotten that and written a novel around it? How would it have been received? I don't even think it would have been publishable. It would just have been too bizarre for people. I don't think it would have worked. The real future, when it arrives, which it constantly does, is too peculiar to make entertaining science fiction, if that makes any sense.
I was thinking of trying ? and because I'm mentioning it, it probably means I've decided I won't be doing it ? to write a novel in which someone is researching the biography of a prolific but largely unpublished science fiction writer who was born in the late 1920s and lived and kept writing into the early years of the 21st century. So there are these stacks and stacks of rejected novels sitting in a storage segment somewhere. And someone's going through them. And what they discover is that this guy predicted everything. He got everything. But what the reader in the story would know, because they'd be in a version of the real world, is that he got the technology, but he never got what people did with it. So that every excerpt from his unpublished work would be unintentionally hilarious, from his point of view. He wasn't trying to be funny.
"PROSE FICTION IS A REMARKABLY EFFICIENT TOOL FOR THAT PARTICULAR KIND OF STORYTELLING."
Do you think that science fiction's native form still should be text? Do you think the medium for the most effective kinds of storytelling about the weirdness of the present or the future has changed?
No, I don't. I'm slightly prejudiced, and it could completely be age, towards the idea that prose fiction is a remarkably efficient tool for that particular kind of storytelling. Or it can be. You don't really see it optimally played that often. But I don't know. I think it's an impulse we have that can be expressed in whatever form we want to express it in. I don't think anything really, even prose, has completely the edge now. I'm not even sure what it will mean to us eventually.
I often think that if I could know one thing, and one thing only, about the future, it would be what they think of us. If I knew that, I'd be able to infer what had happened, I think in fairly considerable detail. In a way that when we think about the Victorians, what we think about them would appall them. They wouldn't be able to get their heads around it, because they thought they were doing really well.
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54.Algebraic topology.
Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics that uses tools from abstract algebra to study topological spaces. The basic goal is to find algebraic invariants that classify topological spaces up to homeomorphism, though usually most classify up to homotopy equivalence.
Although algebraic topology primarily uses algebra to study topological problems, using topology to solve algebraic problems is sometimes also possible. Algebraic topology, for example, allows for a convenient proof that any subgroup of a free group is again a free group.
Below are some of the main areas studied in algebraic topology:
Homotopy groups.
In mathematics, homotopy groups are used in algebraic topology to classify topological spaces. The first and simplest homotopy group is the fundamental group, which records information about loops in a space. Intuitively, homotopy groups record information about the basic shape, or holes, of a topological space.
Homology.
In algebraic topology and abstract algebra, homology (in part from Greek ???? homos "identical") is a certain general procedure to associate a sequence of abelian groups or modules with a given mathematical object such as a topological space or a group.
Cohomology.
In homology theory and algebraic topology, cohomology is a general term for a sequence of abelian groups defined from a co-chain complex. That is, cohomology is defined as the abstract study of cochains, cocycles, and coboundaries. Cohomology can be viewed as a method of assigning algebraic invariants to a topological space that has a more refined algebraic structure than does homology. Cohomology arises from the algebraic dualization of the construction of homology. In less abstract language, cochains in the fundamental sense should assign 'quantities' to the chains of homology theory.
Manifolds.
A manifold is a topological space that near each point resembles Euclidean space. More precisely, each point of an n-dimensional manifold has a neighbourhood that is diffeomorphic to the Euclidean space of dimension n. Lines and circles, but not figure eights, are one-dimensional manifolds. Two-dimensional manifolds are also called surfaces. Examples include the plane, the sphere, and the torus, which can all be realized in three dimensions, but also the Klein bottle and real projective plane which cannot be realized in three dimensions, but can be realized in four dimensions.
Knot theory.
Knot theory is the study of mathematical knots. While inspired by knots that appear in daily life in shoelaces and rope, a mathematician's knot differs in that the ends are joined together so that it cannot be undone. In precise mathematical language, a knot is an embedding of a circle in 3-dimensional Euclidean space, R3. Two mathematical knots are equivalent if one can be transformed into the other via a deformation of R3 upon itself (known as an ambient isotopy); these transformations correspond to manipulations of a knotted string that do not involve cutting the string or passing the string through itself.
Complexes.
A simplicial complex is a topological space of a certain kind, constructed by "gluing together" points, line segments, triangles, and their n-dimensional counterparts (see illustration). Simplicial complexes should not be confused with the more abstract notion of a simplicial set appearing in modern simplicial homotopy theory. The purely combinatorial counterpart to a simplicial complex is an abstract simplicial complex.
A CW complex is a type of topological space introduced by J. H. C. Whitehead to meet the needs of homotopy theory. This class of spaces is broader and has some better categorical properties than simplicial complexes, but still retains a combinatorial nature that allows for computation (often with a much smaller complex).
An older name for the subject was combinatorial topology, implying an emphasis on how a space X was constructed from simpler ones (the modern standard tool for such construction is the CW-complex). In the 1920s and 1930s, there was growing emphasis on investigating topological spaces by finding correspondences from them to algebraic groups, which led to the change of name to algebraic topology. The combinatorial topology name is still sometimes used to emphasize an algorithmic approach based on decomposition of spaces.
In the algebraic approach, one finds a correspondence between spaces and groups that respects the relation of homeomorphism (or more general homotopy) of spaces. This allows one to recast statements about topological spaces into statements about groups, which have a great deal of manageable structure, often making these statement easier to prove. Two major ways in which this can be done are through fundamental groups, or more generally homotopy theory, and through homology and cohomology groups. The fundamental groups give us basic information about the structure of a topological space, but they are often nonabelian and can be difficult to work with. The fundamental group of a (finite) simplicial complex does have a finite presentation.
Homology and cohomology groups, on the other hand, are abelian and in many important cases finitely generated. Finitely generated abelian groups are completely classified and are particularly easy to work with.
In general, all constructions of algebraic topology are functorial; the notions of category, functor and natural transformation originated here. Fundamental groups and homology and cohomology groups are not only invariants of the underlying topological space, in the sense that two topological spaces which are homeomorphic have the same associated groups, but their associated morphisms also correspond ? a continuous mapping of spaces induces a group homomorphism on the associated groups, and these homomorphisms can be used to show non-existence (or, much more deeply, existence) of mappings.
One of the first mathematicians to work with different types of cohomology was Georges de Rham. One can use the differential structure of smooth manifolds via de Rham cohomology, or ?ech or sheaf cohomology to investigate the solvability of differential equations defined on the manifold in question. De Rham showed that all of these approaches were interrelated and that, for a closed, oriented manifold, the Betti numbers derived through simplicial homology were the same Betti numbers as those derived through de Rham cohomology. This was extended in the 1950s, when Eilenberg and Steenrod generalized this approach. They defined homology and cohomology as functors equipped with natural transformations subject to certain axioms (e.g., a weak equivalence of spaces passes to an isomorphism of homology groups), verified that all existing (co)homology theories satisfied these axioms, and then proved that such an axiomatization uniquely characterized the theory.
Classic applications of algebraic topology include:
The Brouwer fixed point theorem: every continuous map from the unit n-disk to itself has a fixed point.
The free rank of the nth homology group of a simplicial complex is the n-th Betti number, which allows one to calculate the Euler-Poincaré characteristic.
One can use the differential structure of smooth manifolds via de Rham cohomology, or ?ech or sheaf cohomology to investigate the solvability of differential equations defined on the manifold in question.
A manifold is orientable when the top-dimensional integral homology group is the integers, and is non-orientable when it is 0.
The n-sphere admits a nowhere-vanishing continuous unit vector field if and only if n is odd. (For n = 2, this is sometimes called the "hairy ball theorem".)
The Borsuk?Ulam theorem: any continuous map from the n-sphere to Euclidean n-space identifies at least one pair of antipodal points.
Any subgroup of a free group is free. This result is quite interesting, because the statement is purely algebraic yet the simplest proof is topological. Namely, any free group G may be realized as the fundamental group of a graph X. The main theorem on covering spaces tells us that every subgroup H of G is the fundamental group of some covering space Y of X; but every such Y is again a graph. Therefore its fundamental group H is free. On the other hand this type of application is also handled more simply by the use of covering morphisms of groupoids, and that technique has yielded subgroup theorems not yet proved by methods of algebraic topology. (See the book by Higgins listed under groupoids.)
Topological combinatorics.
The discipline of combinatorial topology used combinatorial concepts in topology and in the early 20th century this turned into the field of algebraic topology.
In 1978 the situation was reversed ? methods from algebraic topology were used to solve a problem in combinatorics ? when László Lovász proved the Kneser conjecture, thus beginning the new study of topological combinatorics. Lovász's proof used the Borsuk-Ulam theorem and this theorem retains a prominent role in this new field. This theorem has many equivalent versions and analogs and has been used in the study of fair division problems.
In another application of homological methods to graph theory Lovász proved both the undirected and directed versions of a conjecture of Frank: Given a k-connected graph G, k points v1,...,vk? V(G), and k positive integers n1,n2,...,nk that sum up to |V(G)|, there exists a partition {V1,...,Vk} of V(G) such that vi? Vi, |Vi|=ni and Vi spans a connected subgraph.
In 1987 the necklace splitting problem was solved by Noga Alon using the Borsuk-Ulam theorem. It has also been used to study complexity problems in linear decision tree algorithms and the Aanderaa?Karp?Rosenberg conjecture. Other areas include topology of partially ordered sets and bruhat orders.
Additionally, methods from differential topology now have a combinatorial analog in discrete Morse theory.
Important theorems in algebraic topology;
Borsuk?Ulam theorem
Brouwer fixed point theorem
Cellular approximation theorem
Eilenberg?Zilber theorem
Freudenthal suspension theorem
Hurewicz theorem
Künneth theorem
Poincaré duality theorem
Universal coefficient theorem
Van Kampen's theorem
Generalized van Kampen's theorems
Whitehead's theorem
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55.Alan Turing?s Reading List.
Alan Turing?s Reading List: What the Computing Pioneer Borrowed From His School Library by Maria Popova.
What Alice in Wonderland has to do with electromagnetic theory, relativity, and Pluto.
?You are a mashup of what you let into your life,? it?s been said. Since creativity is combinatorial, the architecture of mind and character is deeply influenced by the intellectual stimulation we choose to engage with ? including the books we read. There is hardly anything more fascinating than the private intellectual diet of genius ? like this recently uncovered list of books computing pioneer and early codehacker Alan Turing borrowed from his school library. Though heavy on the sciences, the selection features some wonderful wildcards that bespeak the cross-disciplinary curiosity fundamental to true innovation. A few personal favorites follow.
SIDELIGHTS ON RELATIVITY (1922)
Sidelights on Relativity, published in 1922, is a two-part book based on a series of lectures Albert Einstein gave between 1920 and 1922. It begins with ?Ether and the Theory of Relativity,? explores the nature of ether and the idea that the universe is not mechanical through the lens of Newton, Maxwell, and Lorentz?s work, and the implicit contraction of ?space without ether.? The second part, ?Geometry and Experience,? considers the concept of infinity through Euclidean geometry.
The book is available as a free download from Project Gutenberg.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1871)
The follow-up to Lewis Carroll?s Alice?s Adventures in Wonderland (also on Turing?s reading list), Through The Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There ? one of the best classic children?s books with timeless philosophy for grown-ups ? has a palpable philosophical undercurrent running beneath the seemingly nonsensical dialogue and situations, inviting the reader to extract his or her own conclusive existentialism.
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!? ~ The Queen
A study in contrasts and opposites, the book is as much escapism from reality as it is a journey into our most authentic, uninhibited selves.
Also in the public domain, the book was the 12th text to be digitized by Project Gutenberg.
SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD (1925)
Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead, originally published in 1925, is one of the seminal texts of modern science, presaging nearly a century of cutting-edge discoveries by examining science in the richer context of culture and the humanities as a force of social progress ? a conceptual predecessor to what Jonah Lehrer has termed ?the fourth culture?.
Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, re-fashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and?so far as may be?efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.?
The Internet Archive has a free download.
THE UNIVERSE AROUND US (1929)
English astrophysicist Sir James Jeans was an early champion of ?popular science.? In The Universe Around Us, he set out to make cosmogony, evolution, and the general structure of the universe ?intelligible to readers with no special scientific knowledge? by rewriting and reforming lectures and ?wireless talks? he had given to academic audiences.
In the second edition of the book, Jeans added a discussion of ?the new planet Pluto,? whose planetary status has since been revoked, as well as the rotation of the Milky Way and ?the apparent expansion of the universe.? By the fourth edition in 1943, Jeans had distilled the discovery of atomic nuclei, suggesting it could ?not only give a satisfactory account of the radiation of the sun and stars, but can also explain many hitherto puzzling stellar characteristics.? In a way, the changes across the four editions offer a fascinating footprint of some of the most important discoveries in modern science, narrated in near-real-time by a scientist who made it his life?s work to foster a popular understanding of the scientific method.
MATTER AND MOTION (1876)
In 1876, pioneering physicist James Clerk Maxwell, best-known for formulating electromagnetic theory, penned Matter and Motion ? the first comprehensive guide to the fundamental principles of elementary physics, pulling the curtain on the logic and rationale of the concepts his work built upon, presented in order of complexity in an effort to build a layered understanding of the timeless laws of physics.
Physical science, which up to the end of the eighteenth century had been fully occupied in forming a conception of natural phenomena as the result of forces acting between one body and another, has now fairly entered on the next stage of progress ? that in which the energy of a material system is conceived as determined by the configuration and motion of that system, and in which the ideas of configuration, motion, and force are generalised to the utmost extent warranted by their physical definitions.
To become acquainted with these fundamental ideas, to examine them under all their aspects, and habitually to guide the current of thought along the channels of strict dynamical reasoning, must be the foundation of the training of the student of Physical Science.
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56.Alternate history or alternative reality.
Alternate history or alternative reality is a genre of fiction consisting of stories that are set in worlds in which one or more historical events unfolds differently from how it did in reality. It can be variously seen as a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction; different alternate history works may use tropes from any or all of these genres. It is sometimes abbreviated AH. Another occasionally used term for the genre is "allohistory" (literally "other history"). See also fictional universe.
Since the 1950s, this type of fiction has to a large extent merged with science fictional tropes involving cross-time travel between alternate histories or psychic awareness of the existence of "our" universe by the people in another; or ordinary voyaging uptime (into the past) or downtime (into the future) that results in history splitting into two or more time-lines. Cross-time, time-splitting, and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another. "Alternate History" looks at "what if" scenarios from some of history's most pivotal turning points and presents a completely different version, sometimes based on science and fact, but often based on conjecture. The exploration of how the world would look today if various changes occurred and what these alternate worlds would be like forms the basis of this vast subject matter.
In French, Italian, Spanish, and German, the genre of alternate history is called uchronie / ucronía, which has given rise to the term Uchronia in English. This neologism is based on the prefix u- (as in the word Utopia, a place that does not exist) and the Greek for time, chronos. A uchronia, then, is defined as a time that does not exist, a "non-time". This term apparently also inspired the name of the alternate history book list, uchronia.net.
In writing an alternate history, the author makes the conscious choice to change something in our past. According to Steven H Silver, alternate history requires three things: 1) the story must have a point of divergence from the history of our world prior to the time at which the author is writing, 2) a change that would alter history as it is known, and 3) an examination of the ramifications of that change.
Several genres of fiction have been confused as alternate histories. Science fiction set in what was the future but is now the past, like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Nineteen Eighty-Four, are not alternate history because the author has not made the conscious choice to change the past. Secret history, works that document things that are not known to have happened historically but would not have changed history had they happened, is also not to be confused with alternate history. Another copy of the foregoing is available, and a different definition of "secret history" by the same writer is also searchable.
Alternate history is related to but distinct from counterfactual history?the term used by some professional historians when using thoroughly researched and carefully reasoned speculations on "what might have happened if..." as a tool of academic historical research.
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