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This article is about the remarkable explosion in the literature on thought experiments since the 1980s. It enters uncharted territory. The year 1986 is of particular interest: James R. Brown prese...

Over the course of four days in September, 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery turned four-fifths of central London to dust. Wandering the streets around his home three days after the Great Fire subsided, the diarist John Evelyn describes a city in ruins—its buildings and landmarks “mealted, & reduc'd to cinders by the vehement heats,” its “bielanes & narrower streetes … quite fill'd up with rubbish, nor could one have possibly known where he was, but by the ruines of some church, or hall, that had some remarkable towre or pinacle remaining.” John Dryden echoes Evelyn's sense of disorientation in Annus Mirabilis, his poem dedicated to the people of London and published in 1667; he describes “the Cracks of Falling houses,” the “Shrieks of Subjects” as the Fire “wades the Streets,” threatens the palace, and lays the city's famed financial centers “to waste.” And he describes, too, the desperate attempts by those left homeless by the Fire to make spaces for themselves in the ruins:Those who have [no home] sit round where once it was,And with full Eyes each wonted Room require:Haunting the yet warm ashes of the place,As murder'd Men walk where they did expire.

We review the contributions of ?ersted and Amp?re, who helped explain the magnetic effect of electric current and its resulting mechanical action. Because of their exceptional discoveries, which occurred in the summer of 1820, that year appears as an annus mirabilis in the history of the electric science.

This paper defines the ‘miraculous year’ as the most productive year in academics’ scientific careers. It tests the hypothesis that annual productivity is unevenly distributed with a Lotka-like distribution at both individual and group levels. To gain generalizability, we model distributions of annual publication productivity in three independent mini studies. The studies include Israeli star scientists, highly cited physicists, and economists in an elite American university. The findings show that most scientists enjoy a peak annus mirabilis with a minority having a few such peaks. Academic age at which the annus mirabilis takes place gravitates towards the center of a career, especially amongst older scientists. The results support the hypothesis that scientific careers are punctuated by exceptionally productive years. We discuss how administrative constraints may affect levels of productivity. The paper opens up a new empirical domain for further empirical tests of career productivity and calls for policy discussions around the implications of the idea of the annus mirabilis.

If 1989 was the annus mirabilis of Western democracy, 2016 was its nemesis. In that annus horribilis, British voters decided to leave the European Union, a club modeled on the very idea of open mar...

Today we have a solid, if incomplete, physical picture of how inertia is created in the standard model. We know that most of the visible baryonic `mass' in the Universe is due to gluonic back-reaction on accelerated quarks, the latter of which attribute their own inertia to a coupling with the Higgs field -- a process that elegantly and self-consistently also assigns inertia to several other particles. But we have never had a physically viable explanation for the origin of rest-mass energy, in spite of many attempts at understanding it towards the end of the nineteenth century, culminating with Einstein's own landmark contribution in his Annus Mirabilis. Here, we introduce to this discussion some of the insights we have garnered from the latest cosmological observations and theoretical modeling to calculate our gravitational binding energy with that portion of the Universe to which we are causally connected, and demonstrate that this energy is indeed equal to mc^2 when the inertia m is viewed as a surrogate for gravitational mass., 12 pages. Accepted for publication in EPJ-C

It is currently known that astronomical factors trigger the emergence of glacial and interglacial periods. However, nearly two centuries ago, the overall situation was not as apparent as it was with today’s scientists. In this article, I briefly discuss the astronomical model of ice ages put forward between the 19th and 20th centuries. This century was indeed annus mirabilis for scientists to understand the ice age phenomenon. Agassiz, Adhémar and Croll laid the foundation stones for understanding the dynamics of ice ages. But it was Milankovitch who combined empirical geology with mathematical astronomy. To put specifically, he identified the shortcomings of the preceding ice age models and modified his model accordingly. In what follows, I review former approaches to the ice age problem and show how they failed to meet their objectives. Next, I show how Milankovitch’s model managed to capture all sufficient astronomical elements. Last sections focus on Milutin Milankovitch’s genuine approach, including his accomplishment of tackling the problem mathematically.

This chapter looks at American composer Daniel Felsenfeld’s Annus Mirabilis (2007). From a wide choice of Felsenfeld’s varied works, this short, witty, and oddly poignant setting of the well-known Philip Larkin poem is a real find and an especially welcome addition to the limited repertoire for bass voice. It is ideal for histrionically gifted performers wishing to enliven a recital programme of more serious fare. Felsenfeld neatly captures the painfully ironic, rueful essence of the text, and, in incongruous parody, draws on quotations from Purcell as well as two of the Beatles’ hits. Also an experienced writer, he obviously relishes supplying pithy notes for the performers, such as ‘with overdone pathos’, ‘melodramatically grand’, and ‘eerily strict’. The piano takes a major role, veering from baroque gestures and direct quotes to bravura gestures, amid constantly changing tempos and frequent rubato.

Tatiana Alexeyevna Afanassjewa (from 1904 Tatiana Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa) was a mathematician, a physicist, and a teacher. All three of these vocations come together in her philosophy of geometry, which bases a novel approach to the teaching of geometry on her understanding of the proper roles of intuition and logical reasoning in geometry, grounded in our experience of concrete objects occupying physical space. Having been a student at Gottingen during the time of its greatest flowering as a centre of mathematical research, and a member of the physics community during the revolutionary period from Einstein’s annus mirabilis of 1905, she was close to the centre of some of the most exciting developments in science of her time. Since early on she was also deeply invested in teaching, and in developing new and better ways to communicate her subject to her students. Afanassjewa’s reflections on the teaching of geometry are thus those of a mathematician and a theoretical physicist who was passionate about scientific discussion and teaching: her ideas originate in her own experience as a student, researcher, and teacher, and in the debates with her scientific contemporaries—debates in which she played an active and important role.

This short chapter identifies 1529 as a hugely significant year both for the fortunes of the More–Rastell family and for the political nation as a whole. Drawing together a range of sources, it charts the dramatic consequences of the fall of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey, and the sudden elevation of Thomas More to replace him as lord chancellor. It draws out the significance of these events for the More circle, arguing that they were the principal stimulus for Heywood’s remarkable turn to political drama in this period. Heywood’s career as a playwright would be fundamentally energized as a result of his kinsman’s elevation to the highest of political and legal offices.

After a contentious and often-violent decade, 2015 proved to be an annus mirabilis in Serbian and post-Yugoslav non-heterosexual and trans activist organising. That year not only witnessed a relatively smooth unfolding of the Belgrade Pride Parade but the streets of the Serbian (and former Yugoslav) capital also welcomed, until then unprecedented, Lesbian March and Trans Pride. This surprising diversity testified, on the one hand, to the vital currents of LGBT activist engagement that survived, among other unfavourable circumstances, high levels of both institutionalised and socially widespread homophobia. On closer inspection, though, such an abundance of activist endeavours concentrated in a relatively short period of time pointed to an emotionally charged “underworld” of tensions, frustrations, and challenges that local activists faced in their efforts to advance the (heterogeneous) cause of LGBT emancipation.

Throughout the late medieval and early modern periods, loyalty to the monarchy remained a salient concept. In c. 1400, the Alliterative Morte Arthure recounted how King Arthur’s ‘lele lege-men’ were prepared to follow him unflinchingly, while in 1667 readers of John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis were treated to a portrayal of London’s ‘true Loyalty, invincible Courage, and unshaken Constancy’ in the face of naval warfare and the Great Fire. These two quotes, separated by more than 250 years, come from different contexts and epochs. The first is couched in terms of the feudal bond between lord and vassal, while the second focuses on municipal fidelity. Yet they share a common broad theme: that of demonstrating loyalty to the monarch, whilst perhaps also intimating a unifying effect which the virtue can engender. Scholars have suggested that ‘the core of loyalty does not change, but its shape is conformed’. It is axiomatic that any concept can evolve and be subjected to challenges over a period of three centuries, and the period between 1400 and 1688 was certainly a challenging one for the rulers of the British Isles: there was the Hundred Years War to contend with, two major civil wars, two Acts of Supremacy (three if one includes the Irish Act), countless rebellions and a multitude of depositions, in addition to numerous failed attempts. The purpose of this collection of chapters is to examine how the concept of loyalty to the monarchy in England and Scotland was encouraged, expressed and challenged in such a turbulent period. In doing so, readers will be encouraged to consider both continuity and change in this ever-present concept.

To make out in what way Einstein’s manifold 1905 ‘annus mirabilis’ writings hang together one has to take into consideration Einstein’s strive for unity evinced in his persistent attempts to reconcile the basic research traditions of classical physics. Light quanta hypothesis and special theory of relativity turn out to be the contours of a more profound design, mere milestones of implementation of maxwellian electrodynamics, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics reconciliation programme. The conception of luminiferous ether was an insurmountable obstacle for Einstein’s statistical thermodynamics in which the leading role was played by the light quanta paper. In his critical stand against the entrenched research traditions of classical physics Einstein was apparently influenced by David Hume and Ernst Mach. However, when related to creative momenta, Einstein’s 1905 unificationist modus operandi was drawn upon Mach’s principle of economy of thought taken in the context of his ‘instinctive knowledge’ doctrine and with promising inclinations of Kantian epistemology presuming the coincidence of both constructing theory and integrating intuition of Principle.

In the history of modernism, the year 1907, like 1922, represents an underappreciated annus mirabilis, a year of miracles. Among the many artistic events to occur that year, perhaps none is more significant than James Joyce's completion of what would become the final story in Dubliners (1914) and a work Richard Ellmann describes as ‘his first song of exile’, ‘The Dead’. ‘The Dead’ achieves the indispensable breakthrough of bringing to a close Joyce's initial project and inaugurates an unparalleled process of experimentation and invention that will extend through the rest of his career. At the heart of Joyce's experiment stands the figure of Gabriel Conroy, the story's prosperous and self-satisfied protagonist. Joyce diagnoses Gabriel's condition, and by extension that of all of Ireland's middle class at this crucial historical juncture, by staging a series of encounters that bear out Gabriel's failure to become a subject in all four of what Alain Badiou terms the conditions of truth—love, politics, science, and art. In this way, Joyce breaks through to a new mode of literary presentation, and hence an alternate pedagogy of desire—a form of the quintessential modernist operation the Russian Formalists name estrangement. A version of this practice is already at work in Gabriel's climactic realization of the full extent of his failure, and this paradoxically ends ‘The Dead’ on a cautious note of hope. Whether Gabriel achieves a remaking of his life beyond the story's conclusion, we have no way of knowing; however, we do know that in Joyce's case at least, it is precisely such a passage that enables him to become a subject, an artist, who continues to transform in unexpected ways our very sense of the possibilities of language. The approach I outline in this paper not only promises to transform how we understand Joyce's individual artistic development, but also, more generally, the trajectory of modernism, or, indeed, of any period of dramatic cultural change.

This article is about structural realism, historical continuity, laws of nature, and ceteris paribus clauses. Fresnel's Laws of optics support Structural Realism because they are a scientific structure that has survived theory change. However, the history of Fresnel's Laws which has been depicted in debates over realism since the 1980s is badly distorted. Specifically, claims that J. C. Maxwell or his followers believed in an ontologically-subsistent electromagnetic field, and gave up the aether, before Einstein's annus mirabilis in 1905 are indefensible. Related claims that Maxwell himself did not believe in a luminiferous aether are also indefensible. This paper corrects the record. In order to trace Fresnel's Laws across significant ontological changes, they must be followed past Einstein into modern physics and nonlinear optics. I develop the philosophical implications of a more accurate history, and analyze Fresnel's Laws' historical trajectory in terms of dynamic ceteris paribus clauses. Structuralists have not embraced ceteris paribus laws, but they continue to point to Fresnel's Laws to resist anti-realist arguments from theory change. Fresnel's Laws fit the standard definition of a ceteris paribus law as a law applicable only in particular circumstances. Realists who appeal to the historical continuity of Fresnel's Laws to combat anti-realists must incorporate ceteris paribus laws into their metaphysics.

This may come as a surprise to many cardiologists, but much of what we know about the normal structure and function of the heart and circulatory system and their disorders was first learned through careful postmortem dissections. Today, of course, we are drowning in information emanating from multiple sources of variable reliability―advances, big and small, are being reported almost daily. But the bedrock information, the foundation from which all new insights derived, came from seeing for one’s self ( autopsy is from the Greek, autos or self, and optos or seen) through actual observation of the human heart and circulation. Here, we undertake a brief historical survey of the autopsy as a source of discovery in cardiovascular medicine and look to its future role in the era of precision medicine. In the mid-16th century, human postmortem dissection was first used to define the anatomy and, by inference, the physiology of the cardiovascular system. In 1543 ( annus mirabilis or admirable year), De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium ( On Movements of Planets and Stars ) by Nicolaus Copernicus and De Humani Corporis Fabrica ( On the Building of the Human Body ) by Andreas Vesalius were published. Both authors were educated at the University of Padua, where, in 1597, students sent a letter to the university president (rector) saying, “Few or none of us have come here only for the sake of lecturers and all of us have come to learn practice. We do not lack for lecturers in our own country or elsewhere, and we also have books at home which we can just as well read there as here. It …

Recent studies in the science of success have shown that the highest-impact works of scientists or artists happen randomly and uniformly over the individual's career. Yet in certain artistic endeavours, such as acting in films and TV, having a job is perhaps the most important achievement: success is simply making a living. By analysing a large online database of information related to films and television we are able to study the success of those working in the entertainment industry. We first support our initial claim, finding that two in three actors are "one-hit wonders". In addition we find that, in agreement with previous works, activity is clustered in hot streaks, and the percentage of careers where individuals are active is unpredictable. However, we also discover that productivity in show business has a range of distinctive features, which are predictable. We unveil the presence of a rich-get-richer mechanism underlying the assignment of jobs, with a Zipf law emerging for total productivity. We find that productivity tends to be highest at the beginning of a career and that the location of the "annus mirabilis" -- the most productive year of an actor -- can indeed be predicted. Based on these stylized signatures we then develop a machine learning method which predicts, with up to 85% accuracy, whether the annus mirabilis of an actor has yet passed or if better days are still to come. Finally, our analysis is performed on both actors and actresses separately, and we reveal measurable and statistically significant differences between these two groups across different metrics, thereby providing compelling evidence of gender bias in show business., Comment: 6 Figures

At the turn of the 20th century, when electric light superseded chemically fueled lamps [1], new uses of light began to emerge. They regarded information processing and transmission rather than power and within a few decades resulted in the technological domain of photonics. These applications consisted of photocells, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), lasers, fiber optics, and holography. In that same span of years, progressing from the achievements of Maxell and Hertz [2], science advanced into new theories on light. After Max Planck?s (1858?1947) breakthrough of energy quanta of 1900, Albert Einstein (1879?1955) lived his annus mirabilis in 1905, when he published four papers in Annalen der Physik, each a milestone in theoretical physics. The first one, ??ber einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt? (?On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light? [3]) justified Planck?s result by means of the photoelectric effect, which deems light to consist of discrete quantized packets of energy. The theory was so innovative that it was accepted only after Robert Millikan?s (1868?1953) experimental confirmation in 1914. Ultimately both Einstein and Millikan won the Nobel Prize in physics, in 1921 and 1923, respectively, for these achievements. Still, Heinich Hertz had already observed the photoelectric effect in 1887, but he did not continue researching the subject and moved on to electromagnetic waves. The name ?photon? for the light quantum was accepted after the American physicist Arthur Compton (1892?1962, the 1927 Nobel Laureate in physics) used it in 1928. A major step ahead in the theoretical physics of light came in 1948, when Sin-Itiro Tomonaga (1906?1979), Julian S. Schwinger (1918?1994), and Richard P. Feynman (1918?1988) presented their independent but consistent models of quantum electrodynamics, aimed at describing the electromagnetic interactions between electrons and photons (i.e., between matter and light) in quantum form. For these works, they shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics [4].

The following presidential address was delivered at the 45th Annual Meeting of the ISPN held in Denver, CO, USA in October 2017.

The year 1922 has been known as the annus mirabilis (“miracle year”) of Anglo-American literary modernism, chiefly because of the near-simultaneous publication of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. The distinctive historical character of 1922 remains an ongoing concern: the year was at once a time of traumatic memory of World War I and a moment of renewed ambition for the radical experiments of modernism. During the war, Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf had enjoyed an unusual opportunity to revise and extend their aesthetic ambitions. Each of their works registers the more defiant provocation of postwar literature, but each confronts the powerful resistance of cultural and political authorities who saw the efforts, especially of Eliot and Joyce, as both meaningless and dangerous. The postwar period also saw the rapid expansion of new technologies (especially in transport and telecommunications) and a consumer society keen to enjoy the availability of freshly circulating material goods. D. H. Lawrence described the end of war as both a relief and a menace. This double valence captures the contrast between searing memories of battlefield death and anticipation of pleasure and plenitude in the Jazz Age. The central figures in this entry are at once newly confident in the adversarial mission of modernism and fully aware of the social complacency and cultural conservatism arrayed against them. The immediate felt disturbance of these works came through their formal challenge, in particular through the intersecting uses of many-voiced and multi-perspectival montage, an assemblage of fragmentary views, and a diversity of speaking tones. This conspicuous technique appears in closely related terms within the early films of Dziga Vertov and the postwar philosophy of logical atoms developed by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the formal inventiveness exhibited during the year is no more prominent than the social concern. Especially as in 21st century, historical studies of the period have recovered the depth of interest in questions of race, empire, sexual debility, and social failure.

In declaring 1836 the “Annus Mirabilis” of Transcendentalism, Perry Miller captured the emerging vitality of a new religious movement, described by Convers Francis as “the spiritual philosophy”. Francis first listed George Ripley’s Discourses on the Philosophy of Religion (1836) as a sign of the new movement. Ripley’s book, strongly influenced by William Ellery Channing’s sermon “Likeness to God” (1828), captured the metamorphosis of Transcendentalism from its Unitarian theological roots, and sheds light on the Transcendentalists’ theory of religious experience. Ripley presented Transcendentalism as the purist form of Christian theology. This new religious awareness enabled a realization of the divine “inner nature”, and described a religious life dedicated to the practice of spiritual self-cultivation. This new awareness brought with it “universal love”, and a vision of what it meant to partake of divinity.

Planck’s and Einstein’s steps toward quantization are discussed, including a historical comparison of these two very different thinkers, their motives and heuristics. Sect. 2.2 studies Albert Einstein’s arguments up to the 1905 paper and how the many important publications from this annus mirabilis and shortly afterwards until 1909 are interconnected. Max Planck’s second quantum theory 1909–13 serves as a contrast: with it Planck attempts to retract his hesitantly introduced quantization of energy from 1900 by blaming it on the material resonators inside an idealized radiator at equilibrium (a ‘black body’) and thereby uphold the theory of a continuous radiation field satisfying Maxwell’s equations. Other papers by Einstein banished this interpretative option by showing that Planck’s formula for the distribution of radiation already presupposes quantized energy in the radiation field itself. Sect. 2.5 discusses the variety of terms used by Einstein and his contemporaries during this work-in-progress. Most of the alternatives considered then, such as ‘light corpuscles’ or ‘energy projectiles’, have been forgotten since. Sect. 2.6 statistically retraces the slow rise of the term ’photon’ in common usage generally attributed to the physical chemist Gilbert N. Lewis (1926).

Perhaps I eat to persuade myself I am somebody. (1) --John Keats Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods, or in any immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; ... he is nauseated. (2) --Friedrich Nietzsche KEATS IS KNOWN TO HAVE AS PERPLEXED A RELATION TO THE SENSORY--particularly the savory--as any poet. Elizabeth Bishop remarks in a letter to Robert Lowell that "Except for his unpleasant insistence on the palate, he strikes me as almost everything a poet should have been in his day." (3) The view was shared by many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, including Carlyle, for whom Keats was "a miserable creature, hungering after sweets which he can't get, going about saying, `I am so hungry; I should so like something pleasant!'" (4) Yeats immortalized him as a school-boy with his face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window. (5) And critics since Lionel Trilling have read him as "possibly unique among poets in the extensiveness of his reference to eating and drinking and to its pleasurable or distasteful sensations." (6) Whether we believe, with Helen Vendler, that this preoccupation with gustatory taste represents a healthy relation to a world of vigorously taken pleasure, or, with Marjorie Levinson, that it signals a dysfunctional aesthetic attitude, the physical metaphor of taste informs both his poetry and poetic theory. (7) Keats's chameleon-poet famously "lives in gusto," a term derived from gustus (taste) and characterized by Hazlitt as an effect whereby the eye acquires "a taste or appetite for what it sees." (8) The "poetical character" is defined by its ability to "taste" and "relish" the world it perceives: "its relish of the dark side of things ... its taste for the bright one" (Letters 1: 387). And Keats himself, on December 31, 1818, the eve of his so-called annus mirabilis, declared that he had "not one opinion upon any thing except in matters of taste" (Letters 2: 19). (9) While it would be unwise to assume that Keats really did renounce everything but "matters of taste," we continue to grapple with this particular aspect of his own self-fashioning. As Keats's own experience never let him forget, it is the body that "tastes," or experiences pleasure metaphorically through taste, and in Keats's case, that body was a consumptive body--one that wasted away, consuming itself, as it literally starved to death. In the tragic account of his last days left by Joseph Severn, Keats constantly raved that he would die from hunger as his stomach, rather than nourishing the rest of his body, became instead its devourer: "his Stomach--not a single thing will digest--the torture he suffers all and every night--and the best part of the day--is dreadful in the extreme--the distended stomach keeps him in perpetual hunger or craving." (10) By the end of his life, he had suffered (in Severn's words) "a ghastly wasting-away of his body and extremities" (qtd. in KC 1: 202). The problem for a poet devoted to acts of self-definition through "matters of taste" is that to be hungry, to be physically driven by appetite, cancels all pretensions to taste. As Kant states concisely in his third critique: "Hunger is the best sauce; and people with a healthy appetite relish everything, so long as it is something they can eat. Such delight, consequently, gives no indication of taste having anything to say to the choice. Only when men have got all they want can we tell who among the crowd has taste or not." (11) Whereas the legendary figure of the chameleon feeds upon air (as Keats knew from reading Hamlet), Keats recognized that he himself could not be sustained on the transcendental food of airy infinity. This essay will show how Keats's frustrated effort to exist in the ethereal world of aesthetic taste thrust him (and the idealism implicit in romantic poetics) into the modernist condition of nausea. …

This engaging book presents the history of the development of the science of electromagnetism through the lives of two of its founders. The first seven chapters of this seventeen-chapter book belong to Michael Faraday, the story of whose rise to scientific prominence from an unprivileged background (his father was a blacksmith) is eternally appealing. Chapters eight through fifteen belong to James Clerk Maxwell, a truly great scientist whose name should be better known than it is. The book’s penultimate chapter introduces the ‘‘Maxwellians’’—the Britons Oliver Heaviside, Oliver Lodge, and George Francis Fitzgerald and their German colleague, Heinrich Hertz—and describes their achievements building on Maxwell’s and Faraday’s contributions. The final chapter takes us from Michelson and Morley’s 1887 experiment disproving the existence of the aether to Einstein’s annus mirabilis of 1905, in which, among other achievements, he explained the photoelectric effect, predicted the photon, and published his special theory of relativity. The book also contains a useful chronology of the main scientific breakthroughs covered in the book, as well as an eight-page insert of black-andwhite illustrations of not only the book’s two heroes at different times in their careers and of some of Faraday’s apparatus and laboratory, but also of William Thomson, who played a role in the life of each, and of other members of the tale’s dramatis personae, including Andre Marie Ampere, perhaps the most collegial of Faraday’s French colleagues; Faraday’s scientific hero and mentor Humphry Davy (though their relationship was ultimately damaged); Katherine Maxwell (who some considered his ‘‘awful wife’’); and the ‘‘Maxwellians’’ Heaviside and Hertz. In their acknowledgments, the authors share the book’s back story. As a graduate student in physics, one of the authors heard Nobel laureate C. N. Yang talk about the history of field theory, which led to major breakthroughs in modern physics and underlies the Standard Model. Yang traced field theory back to simple instruments

Both T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) detail the impossibilities of memorialising absence in textual form, representing instead the transmutation of private mourning into public trauma. This chapter considers these two works of the modernist annus mirabilis and their bold contestations of masculine potency and action in the context of rituals of mourning include cremation, embalming, and war memorials. These two texts are, in many ways, antithetical in their portrayal of mourning and gesture toward new models of memorialisation through radical experimentation with excision as a primary element of literary expression.

First published in The Phantom Rickshaw (1888), the fifth volume in A. H. Wheeler & Co.'s “Indian Railway Library” series, “The Man Who Would Be King” may be the best and is almost certainly the last story that Rudyard Kipling wrote while still living in India. It is, then, the culmination of an annus mirabilis that saw its twenty-three-year-old author publish six books, albeit short ones, and achieve widespread fame in India. He also garnered sufficient acclaim in England that he would decide to resign his editorial position at George Allen's two Anglo-Indian newspapers, the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer, in favor of a literary life in London. In light of these biographical facts, readers might reasonably expect the story to offer a summative, even authoritative, conclusion about life and empire on the subcontinent that Kipling had represented so abundantly all year.

We could posit a desire for communication which is so strong, so idealistic and hence so frustrated, that it becomes inevitably a dream-state. --Geoffrey Hartman, "I. A. Richards and the Dream of Communication" (1) IN A JOURNAL LETTER OF DECEMBER 1818-JANUARY 1819 TO GEORGE AND Georgiana in Kentucky, writing on the cusp of what will come to be hailed as his annus mirabilis, Keats offers his initial thoughts on the recent death of Tom and then meanders into a truly arresting thought experiment: [S]ometimes I fancy an immense separation, and sometimes, as at present, a direct communication of spirit with you.... Now the reason why I do not feel at the present moment so far from you is that I rememb{er} your Ways and Manners and actions; I known you manner of thinking, you manner of feeling [sic]: I know what shape your joy or your sorrow w{ou}ld take, I know the manner of you walking, standing, sauntering, sitting down, laugh{ing,} punning, and evey [sic] action so truly that you seem near to me. You will rem{em}ber me in the same manner-and the more when I tell you that I shall read a passage of Shakspeare every Sunday at ten o Clock-you read one {a}t the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room. (2) Keats's dispatch had begun by assuring his brother and sister-in-law that, in the wake of Tom's death, he has "scarce a doubt of immortality of some nature of [or] other" (LJK 2:4). Nor has he any doubt that souls in the afterlife engage in unmediated communication with each other, and enjoy, like Milton's angels, intuitive rather than discursive knowledge: "That will be one of the grandeurs of immortality--there will be no space and consequently the only commerce between spirits will be by their intelligence of each other--when they will completely understand each other" (LJK 2:5). But in the intriguing thought experiment that follows, Keats transposes the ease of immortal interaction to the real world; he imagines a situation whereby he and his correspondents might achieve a similar kind of instantaneous, reciprocal "intelligence of each other." Because each party possesses an abundant capacity for sympathetic imagination ("I known ... you manner of feeling" [sic]), if they were to engage in a coordinated reading of Shakespeare, they would establish an intimate transatlantic connection and overcome the "immense separation" between London and Kentucky. Remembering the name of the ship George and Georgiana took to America six months earlier, the Telegraph--which alludes to the late eighteenth-century semaphoric communications technology--while looking ahead to Mark Twain's 1891 satirical treatment of its electric successor, one might name this scene "mental telegraphy." One might even be tempted to call Keats's scenario Shakespearean Skype. After all, his proposal of synchronized reading raises the same question about time difference that the railway made newly urgent in the early nineteenth century, and which lives on in the scheduling of today's planned mediated interactions: "ten o Clock" in whose time zone? (3) But even as Keats indulges in this fantasy of instantaneous communication, he intimates its counterfactual nature and the obstacles to true contact. Note his final simile: he declines to liken his scenario to sighted individuals each sequestered in far-flung places and hence invisible to one another. That would be the more appropriate simile for the situation he narrates. That would also be a fitting, reflexive image for the very act of postal correspondence in which he is participating; as Charles Lamb confesses in "Distant Correspondents" to his addressee in Australia, "I cannot image to myself whereabout you are." (4) Instead, Keats scribbles off the converse simile of "blind bodies ... in the same room," as though to register, within his own fantasy, a sense that an ineluctable condition of isolation predominates even when individuals are as closely joined as two bodies in the same room. …

Overall, 2013 was certainly annus mirabilis for Singapore owing largely to major socio-political domestic issues seizing newspaper headlines. Domestic events have been so jarring to the Singaporean soul that some have even taken to describing such events as characteristic of a nation undergoing a mid-life crisis. 1 In comparison, issues related to foreign affairs were remarkably steady and tame. Moreover, discussions on economics — customarily at the forefront of Singaporeans’ minds — took a back seat to socio-political issues, with the economy doing better than expected as Gross Domestic Product grew by 3.7 per cent and median salaries increased by 3.9 per cent in real terms. With socio-political domestic issues consuming the attention of most, it is somewhat unsurprising that the year was bookended by a by-election loss for the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) candidate on 27 January and Singapore’s first riot in forty years by a large group of foreign workers in Little India 2 on 8 December.

This article identifies a biblical allusion in John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis not previously noted. It argues that Dryden describes the looting undertaken by Sir Robert Holmes’s sailors in their raid on the Vlie estuary in terms that associate them with Hophni and Phinehas, the sacrilegious sons of the high priest Eli, called “sons of Belial” in 1 Samuel. This allusion subverts the propagandist function of the poem by calling into question the morality of England’s economic and imperial expansion and lends credence to Dutch writers’ suggestion that the Great Fire of London represents divine retribution for Holmes’s Bonfire.

Albert Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis of 1905 saw the completion of his landmark seminal papers on the photoelectric effect law, Brownian motion, Special Relativity and the Mass–Energy Equivalence Prin...