(2012). Poisonous Vapours: Joseph Glanvill's Science of Witchcraft. Intellectual History Review: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 163-179. doi: 10.1080/17496977.2012.693741.

Systematic variation of anisotropic X-ray line broadening in vapour-deposited Pb films of various thicknesses on glass substrates is studied using dislocation model of strain anisotropy incorporated into a modified Williamson-Hall and modified Warren-Averbach procedure. For smaller film thicknesses in the range of about 100-200 nm, the dislocation network is less correlated and contains substantial screw component and twin or growth faults. The films of larger thicknesses , on the other hand, consist mostly of edge dislocations with a more regular and (...) correlated dislocation structure. The present study reveals the inadequacy of applicability of conventional Warren-Averbach analysis in regular and correlated dislocation structures. (shrink)

Texts and textures: approaching an age of human-made nature through the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. We have entered the Anthropocene era—a geological age of our own making, in which what we have understood to be nature is made by man. We need a new way to understand the dynamics of a new epoch. These volumes offer writings that approach the Anthropocene through the perspectives of grain, vapor, and ray—the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. The first three volumes—each (...) devoted to one of the three textures—offer a series of paired texts, with contemporary writers responding to historic writings. A fourth volume offers a guide to the project as a whole. Grain: Granular materials add up to concrete forms; insignificant specks accumulate into complex entities. The texts in this volume narrate some of the fundamental qualities of the granular. In one pairing of texts, Robert Smithson compares the accumulation of thoughts to the aggregation of sediment, and an environmental historian writes about the stakes for earthly knowledge today. Other authors include Alfred Russel Wallace, Denis Diderot, and Georges Bataille. Vapor: The vaporous represents matter's transformations. In this volume, a political scientist compares Kafka's haunting “Odradek” to “vibrant matter”; a media theorist responds to poems and diagrams by Buckminster Fuller; and more, including texts by Hippocrates, Italo Calvino, and James Clerk Maxwell. Ray: A ray is an act of propagation and diffusion, encompassing a chain of interdependencies between energy and matter. This volume includes texts by Spinoza (with a reconceptualization by a contemporary philosopher), Jacques Lacan (followed by an anthropologist's reflections on temporality), Thomas Pynchon (accompanied by an interpretation of Pynchon's “electro-mysticism”), and others. These volumes constitute a unique experiment in design and composition as well as content. The mingling of texts and the juxtaposition of different areas of knowledge represented in a variety of forms express the dynamics of a world in change. (shrink)

I argue that the imagination was a crucial concept for the understanding of marvellous phenomena, divination and magic in general. Exploring a debate on prophecy at the turn of the seventeenth century, I show that four explanatory categories were consistently evoked and I elucidate the role of the imagination in each of them. I introduce the term ‘floating concept’ to conceptualise the different ways in which the imagination and the related ‘animal spirits’ were understood in diverse discourses. My argument is (...) underpinned with a general discussion of the imagination, after which I focus on a unorthodox tradition which attributed special powers to this internal faculty. Many physicians had explained psychosomatic phenomena by referring to the influence of the imagination on the human body; but some philosophers held that the imagination could also exert power over external objects. During the renaissance these theories acquired negative associations and became linked with illicit magic. Furthermore, I show that the relation between both animal spirits and imagination, and the power of the latter over external bodies, points to the importance of a ‘history of vapours’; and this suggests an adjustment to Keith Hutchison’s argument on occult qualities in mechanical philosophy. The accompanying paper gives more evidence of these claims and elaborates on the relation between the natural and the moral. (shrink)

In the first paper of this pair, I argued the importance of theories of the imagination in debates on divination [Vermeir, K. . The ‘physical prophet’ and the powers of the imagination. Part I: A case-study on prophecy, vapours and the imagination . Studies in History and Philosophy of Science C, 35, 561–591]. In the present article, I will rely on these results in order to unearth the role of the imagination in a discussion on dowsing. References to the (...) imagination were often implicit because of its negative associations, but I show in detail how the imagination was used to negotiate between the material and the spiritual, and between the natural, the supernatural and the moral. Natural philosophers, theologians and moralists all struggled for authority over divinatory phenomena. The debate evolved around the questions whether moral states could be naturalised and whether subtle material vapours could have moral qualities. (shrink)

Relying on the results of the fist paper of this pair (Vermeir, 2004), which argued the importance of theories of the imagination in debates on divination, I unearth the role of the imagination in a discussion on dowsing. References to the imagination often stayed implicit because of its negative associations, but I show in detail how the imagination was used to negotiate between the material and the spiritual, and between the natural, the supernatural and the moral. Natural philosophers, theologians as (...) well as moralists struggled for authority over divinatory phenomena. The debate evolved around the questions whether moral states could be naturalised and whether subtle material vapours could have moral qualities. (shrink)

In 1911 the Wilson cloud chamber opened new possibilities for physics pedagogy. The instrument, which visualized particles’ tracks as trails of condensed vapour, was adopted by physicists to pursue frontier research on the Compton effect, the positron and the transmutation of atomic nuclei. But as the present paper will show, Wilson's instrument did not just open up new research opportunities, but the possibility of developing a different kind of teaching. Equipped with a powerful visualization tool, some physicists–teachers employed Wilson's instrument (...) to introduce their students to a wide range of phenomena and concepts, ranging from the behaviour of clouds to Einstein's photon, the wave–particle duality and the understanding of the nucleus. This paper uses the notes, books and prototypes of these pioneering physicists–teachers to compose a pedagogical history of the Wilson cloud chamber, documenting an episode of immense ingenuity, creativity and scientific imagination. (shrink)

Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι War is the father of all. New : Publication of my book : Histoire du libéralisme in Editions Ellipses, on Fnac or Amazon.1) HERACLITUS : 139 Fragments.a) Heraclitus (PDF) Original Greek text : Diels; English translation : John Burnet (1912), French translation of the English translation (1919), in PDFb) Heraclitus (unicode) : Parallel version or Interlinear version (Work in Progress) Original Greek text : Diels; English translation : John Burnet (1912), French translation of the English (...) translation (1919)c) Heraclitus : Original greek text : original pages of Hermann Diels edition (1912)2) The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911) : HERACLITUS (Ἡράκλειτος; c. 540-475 B.C.), Greek philosopher, was born at Ephesus of distinguished parentage. Of his early life and education we know nothing; from the contempt with which he spoke of all his fellow-philosophers and of his fellow-citizens as a whole we may gather that he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom. So intensely aristocratic (hence his nickname ὀχλολοίδορος, "he who rails at the people") was his temperament that he declined to exercise the regal-hieratic office of βασιλεύς which was hereditary in his family, and presented it to his brother. It is probable, however, that he did occasionally intervene in the affairs of the city at the period when the rule of Persia had given place to autonomy; it is said that he compelled the usurper Melancomas to abdicate. From the lonely life he led, and still more from the extreme profundity of his philosophy and his contempt for mankind in general, he was called the "Dark Philosopher" (ὁ σκοτεινός), or the "Weeping Philosopher," in contrast to Democritus, the "Laughing Philosopher." κακοὶ μάρτυρες Heraclitus is in a real sense the founder of metaphysics. Starting from the physical standpoint of the Ionian physicists, he accepted their general idea of the unity of nature, but entirely denied their theory of being. The fundamental uniform fact in nature is constant change (πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει); everything both is and is not at the same time. He thus arrives at the principle of Relativity; harmony and unity consist in diversity and multiplicity. The senses are "bad witnesses" (κακοὶ μάρτυρες); only the wise man can obtain knowledge. To appreciate the significance of the doctrines of Heraclitus, it must be borne in mind that to Greek philosophy the sharp distinction between subject and object which pervades modern thought was foreign, a consideration which suggests the conclusion that, while it is a great mistake to reckon Heraclitus with the materialistic cosmologists of the Ionic schools, it is, on the other hand, going too far to treat his theory, with Hegel and Lassalle, as one of pure Panlogism. Accordingly, when he denies the reality of Being, and declares Becoming, or eternal flux and change, to be the sole actuality, Heraclitus must be understood to enunciate not only the unreality of the abstract notion of being, except as the correlative of that of not-being, but also the physical doctrine that all phenomena are in a state of continuous transition from non-existence to existence, and vice versa, without either distinguishing these propositions or qualifying them by any reference to the relation of thought to experience. " Every thing is and is not'"; all things are, and nothing remains. So far he is in general agreement with Anaximander (q.v.), but he differs from him in the solution of the problem, disliking, as a poet and a mystic, the primary matter which satisfied the patient researcher, and demanding a more vivid and picturesque element. Naturally he selects fire, according to him the most complete embodiment of the process of Becoming, as the principle of empirical existence, out of which all things, including even the soul, grow by way of a quasi condensation, and into which all things must in course of time be again resolved. But this primordial fire is in itself that divine rational process, the harmony of which constitutes the law of the universe (see LOGOS). Real knowledge consists in comprehending this all-pervading harmony as embodied in the manifold of perception, and the senses are "bad-witnesses," because they apprehend phenomena, not as its manifestation, but as "stiff and dead." In like manner real virtue consists in the subordination of the individual to the laws of this harmony as the universal reason wherein alone true freedom is to be found." The law of things is a law of Reason Universal (λόγος), but most men live as though they had a wisdom of their own." Ethics here stands to sociology in a close relation, similar, in many respects, to that which we find in Hegel and in Comte. For Heraclitus the soul approaches most nearly to perfection when it is most akin to the fiery vapour out of which it was originally created, and as this is most so in death, " while we live our souls are dead in us, but when we die our souls are restored to life." The doctrine of immortality comes prominently forward in his ethics, but whether this must not be reckoned with the figurative accommodation to the popular theology of Greece which pervades his ethical teaching, is very doubtful. The school of disciples founded by Heraclitus flourished for long after his death, the chief exponent of his teaching being Cratylus. A good deal of the information in regard to his doctrines has been gathered from the later Greek philosophy, which was deeply influenced by it. BIBLIOGRAPHY.—The only authentic extant work of Heraclitus is the περὶ φύσεως. The best edition (containing also the probably spurious Ἐπιστολαί) is that of I. Bywater, Heracliti Ephesii reliquiae (Oxford, 1877); of the epistles alone by A. Westermann (Leipzig, 1857). See also in A. H. Ritter and L. Preller's Historia philosophiae Graecae (8th ed. by E. Wellmann, 1898); F. W. A. Mullach, Fragm. philos. Graec. (Paris, 1860); A. Fairbanks, The First Philosophers of Greece (1898); H. Diels, Heraklit von Ephesus (2nd ed., 1909), Greek and German. English translation of By water's edition with introduction by G. T. W. Patrick (Baltimore, 1889). For criticism see, in addition to the histories of philosophy, F. Lassalle, Die Philosophie Herakleitos' des Dunklen (Berlin, 1858; 2nd ed., 1892), which, however, is too strongly dominated by modern Hegelianism; Paul Schuster, Heraklit von Ephesus (Leipzig, 1873); J. Bernays, Die heraklitischen Briefe (Berlin, 1869); T. Gomperz, Zu Heraclits Lehre und den Uberresten seines Werkes (Vienna, 1887), and in his Greek Thinkers (English translation, L. Magnus, vol. i. 1901); J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892); A. Patin, Heraklits Einheitslehre (Leipzig, 1886); E. Pfleiderer, Die Philosophie des Heraklit us von Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee (Berlin, 1886); G. T. Schäfer, Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus und die moderne Heraklilforschung (Leipzig, 1902); Wolfgang Schultz, Studien zur antiken Kultur, i.; Pythagoras und Heraklit (Leipzig, 1905); O. Spengler, Heraklit. Eine Studie ilber den energetischen Grundgedanken seiner Philosophie (Halle, 1904); A. Brieger, "Die Grundzüge der heraklitischen Physik " in Hermes, xxxix. (1904) 182-223, and "Heraklit der Dunkle" in Neue Jahrb. f. das klass. Altertum (1904), p. 687. For his place in the development of early philosophy see also articles IONIAN SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY and LOGOS. Ancient authorities: Diog. Laert. ix.; Sext. Empiric, Adv. mathem. vii. 126, 127, 133; Plato, Cratylus, 402 A and Theaetetus, 152 E; Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 45, 48; Arist. Nic. Eth. vii. 3, 4; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, v. 599, 603 (ed. Paris). (J. M. M.) Copyright. (shrink)

Resumen:La obra capital de Phillip Mainländer se compone de seis capítulos (Analítica de la facultad cognoscitiva, Física, Estética, Ética, Política, Metafísica) y un Anexo (Crítica de las doctrinas de Kant y Schopenhauer). Seis capítulos y un anexo que hacen gala de la intempestividad de su autor. De esa cualidad presente en pocos pensadores y que condiciona la valoración de su obra al paso del tiempo. De esa cualidad que permite pensar más allá de los límites que impone la época. Curiosamente (...) un pensador del siglo XIX ilumina los tiempos que corren. Unos tiempos signados por prácticas ecocidas y sus derivaciones ecosuicidas (Baquedano: 37-38), y cuyas primeras manifestaciones físicas sobre la naturaleza comenzaron, llamativamente, en dicho momento, a saber, en 1784 cuando James Watt patentó su máquina de vapor. (shrink)

In this paper we describe a propagation experiment to measure the one-way velocity of electromagnetic radiation. The experiment utilizes the rotation of the earth to interchange the positions of two rubidium vapor frequency standards over12 h, thereby canceling initial clock phase differences. It is demonstrated that although the drift characteristics of modern rubidium atomic clocks may be large for long-term absolute timing requirements, the short-term random fluctuations are small. It is found that over a24-h period, the long-term drift can be (...) accurately parameterized in retrospect and removed, thereby permitting the detection of temporal variations less than1 nsec in magnitude. With coherent summing techniques this value may be significantly reduced, and it becomes realistic to consider an experiment where the clocks are separated by distances of the order of several hundreds of meters in order to detect velocities of the order of that of the solar system with respect to the center of the galaxy(≈10 5 m sec −1 ), thus ensuring that the rotational motion of the earth has a negligible effect in altering the relative inertial characteristics of the reference frames of each clock. It is demonstrated that under such conditions the measurement of the one-way speed of propagation of electromagnetic radiation is not only meaningful, but can be simply implemented with commercially available instrumentation. (shrink)

From a modern point of view, compounds are contrasted with elements of which they are composed, and the two categories combine to give the category of substances. Mixtures, on the other hand, might be understood to contrast with pure substances (substances in isolation), so that mixtures are quantities of matter containing several substances (be they compounds or uncombined elements) whereas pure substances are understood to be quantities of matter exhausting the material contents of a region of space which contain only (...) one substance, and might be either a compound or an element. But heterogeneous quantities of matter (comprising several phases) might also be understood to be mixtures. Thus, it is common to speak of a mixture of ice, liquid water and water vapour in equilibrium at the triple point of water, although there is only a single substance present. The general concept of mixture as treated by Gibbs’ phase rule is a quantity of matter comprising either several substances or several phases, “or” being used in the inclusive sense. Gibbs’ phase rule is a relatively recent development in the history of the concept of chemical substance, dating from the latter half of the nineteenth century. The concepts and distinctions it presupposes have not always been apparent. I trace some of the important conceptual developments underlying the important distinctions at issue here from Aristotle, who didn’t distinguish either substance and phase, or what are now called compounds and solutions. (shrink)

What causes winds was regarded as one of the most difficult questions of early modern natural philosophy. Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architectural author, put forth an alternative to Aristotle’s theory by likening the generation of wind to the actions of the aeolipile, which he believed made artificial winds. As Vitruvius’s work proliferated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, numerous natural philosophers, including Descartes, used the aeolipile as a model for nature. Yet, interpretations of Vitruvius’s text and of the relation of (...) the aeolipile to natural winds varied according to definitions and conceptions of air, wind, rarefaction, condensation, and vapor. (shrink)

It is an experimental fact that \ -decays produce in a cloud chamber at most one track and that this track points in a random direction. This seems to contradict the description of decay in Quantum Mechanics: according to Gamow a spherical wave is produced and moves radially according to Schrödinger’s equation. It is as if the interaction with the supersaturated vapor turned the wave into a particle. The aim of this note is to place this effect in the context (...) of Schrödinger’s Quantum Mechanics. We shall see that the properties of the initial wave function suggest the introduction of a semiclassical formalism in which the \ -wave can be described as a collection of semiclassical wavelets; each of them interacts with an atom and forms an entangled state. The interaction can be regarded as a semiclassical inelastic scattering event. The measurement selects the wave function of one of the ions, with a probability given by Born’s rule. This ion interacts with the atoms nearby leading to the formation of a droplet. One can reasonably assume that also the wavelet entangled with the selected ion has probability one to remain as part of the description of the system. The measurement process is therefore represented by a unitary operator. The wavelet remains sharply localized on a classical path \ It is still a probability wave: it determines the probability that another atom be ionized. This probability is essentially zero unless the atom lies on \ . This gives the visible track. (shrink)

This paper is going to deal with water absorption in different types of wood such as: pine, oak, beech, and fir. The amount of water absorbed by these types of wood is known as water absorption and it is determined using the material's initial state and after their immersion in water. The major goal of this study is to explain the effects of water absorption in hardwood materials and to demonstrate the changes that will take place in them over the (...) course of 48 hours. Water can be absorbed by wood in a variety of ways, as a liquid, or as an atmospheric vapor. Despite the fact that wood can absorb other liquids and gases, water is the most important. Because of its hygroscopicity, wood, whether as part of a living tree or as a material, always contains moisture. The experiment will be focused on the selection of different types of wood (most popular in the Albanian context), analyzing their water absorption and moisture level. The wooden samples will be submerged in water for 24 and 48 hours in order to obtain the appropriate results. Their moisture level and water level due to capillarity will be analyzed too. The purpose of the study is to follow the behavior of wooden frames in different environments. (shrink)

In Beyond Rigidity I argue that, like ‘red’, ‘water’ can be used both as a singular term, and as a predicate – as illustrated by and. 1a. Red is a color. b. Bill’s shirt is red. 2a. Unlike gold, which is an element, water is a compound. b. The liquid in the glass is water. Just as ‘red’ designates a kind instances of which constitute the extension of the predicate ‘is red’, so ‘water’ designates a kind instances of which constitute (...) the extension of the predicate ‘is water’. This observation is used in analyzing examples of the necessary aposteriori like those in, which have the force of quantified conditionals in which both the grammatical subjects and ‘is H2O’ function as mass predicates, true of all instances of the associated kinds. 3a. Water is H2O. b. Ice is H2O. c. Water vapor is H2O. (shrink)