The Placement of Lucian’s Novel True History in the Genre of Science Fiction

Among the works of the ancient Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata, well-known for his scathing and obscene irony, there is the novel True History. In this work Lucian, being in an intense satirical mood, intended to undermine the values of the classical world. Through a continuous parade of wonderful events, beings and situations as a substitute for the realistic approach to reality, he parodies the scientific knowledge, creating a literary model for the subsequent writers. Without doubt, nowadays, Lucian’s large influence on the history of literature has been highlighted. What is missing is pointing out the specific characteristics that would lead to the placement of True History at the starting point of Science Fiction. We are going to highlight two of these features: first, the operation of “cognitive estrangement”, which aims at providing the reader with the perception of the difference between the convention and the truth, and second, the use of strange innovations (“novum”) that verify the value of Lucian’s work by connecting it to historicity

Measuring the progress and impacts of decarbonising British electricity

Britain’s ambitious carbon targets require that electricity be immediately and aggressively decarbonised, so it is reassuring to report that electricity sector emissions have fallen 46% in the three years to June 2016, their lowest since 1960. This paper analyses the factors behind this fall and the impacts they are having. The main drivers are: demand falling 1.3% per year due to efficiency gains and mild winters; gas doubling its share to 60% of fossil generation due to the carbon price floor; and the dramatic uptake of wind, solar and biomass which now supply up to 45% of demand. Accounting conventions also play their part: imported electricity and biomass would add 5% and 2% to emissions if they were included. The pace of decarbonisation is impressive, but raises both engineering and economic challenges. Falling peak demand has delayed fears of capacity shortage, but minimum net demand is instead becoming a problem. The headroom between inflexible nuclear and intermittent renewables is rapidly shrinking, with controllable output reaching a minimum of just 5.9 GW as solar output peaked at 7.1 GW. 2015 also saw Britain’s first negative power prices, the highest winter peak prices for six years, and the highest balancing costs

Chiral magnetic effect (CME) at low temperature from instanton vacuum

In this talk, we report our present work on the chiral magnetic effect (CME) under a strong magnetic field at low temperature. To this end, we use the instanton vacuum with the finite instanton-number fluctuation Delta, which relates to the nontrivial topological charge Q_t. We compute the vacuum expectation values of the local chiral density , chiral charge density and induced electromagnetic current . We observed that the longitudinal EM current is much larger than the transverse one, |j_perp/j_parallel| ~ Q_t, and the equals to the ||. It also turns out that the CME becomes insensitive to the magnetic field as T increases, since the instanton effect decreases.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, Talk given at the international workshop "Hadron and Nuclear Physics" (HNP2009), 16~19 Nov 2009, Osaka, Japa