Defining the Boundaries of London: Perambulation and the City in the Long Eighteenth Century

This paper explores how London was defined by the new interest in walking in the long eighteenth century. As Michel de Certeau famously wrote central to understanding the ‘practices of everyday life’ which create the urban milieu was the act of walking. However, such a notion can traced back beyond the modern flâneur to the eighteenth-century when perambulation was also seen as an important mode in the comprehension and experience of the city. This paper focuses on the periphery of the capital to consider how the outer London landscapes were understood by contemporaries through the act of strolling in their green spaces. It draws on a large body of urban literature and visual evidence, in the form of topographical prints, is also used to establish the significance of this new leisure activity in contributing to the character and culture of the outskirts and its architecture as a distinct metropolitan zone spatially and metaphorically. This was a landscape created by movement and its accessibility from the centre, by a variety of means of transport, among which pedestrianism was of crucial importance

Particle interference as a test of Lorentz-violating electrodynamics

In Lorentz-violating electrodynamics a steady current (and similarly a static charge) generates both static magnetic and electric fields. These induced fields, acting on interfering particles, change the interference pattern. We find that particle interference experiments are sensitive to small Lorentz violating effects, and thus they can be used to improve current bounds on some Lorentz-violating parameters.Comment: 5 page

Russell Square: a lifelong resource for teaching and learning

A quarter of a century ago, in 1978, Birkbeck College’s Faculty of Continuing Education (FCE, then the Department for Extra-Mural Studies of the federal University) moved to the offices that it now occupies in numbers 26 and 25 Russell Square. Then, as now, FCE was the one of the largest and most active extra-mural departments of any British university, with an enormous range of courses covering virtually every subject taught in ‘internal’ university departments and many more besides 1. Some of these courses have, from time to time, used Russell Square as a learning resource. Many more staff and students alike have (along with thousands of local workers, tourists and residents) used the square’s gardens for relaxation and recovery, without reflecting on its origins or present significance. This Occasional Paper examines the past and present fabric of Russell Square (‘the Square’) as a resource for teaching and learning. It is a composite narrative assembled by FCE staff whose disciplines range from nature conservation through garden history and architectural history to social policy. It deconstructs the Square as an entity and attempts to decipher some of its ‘meanings’ that provide links between subjects taught within FCE. We hope that it will stimulate discussion about the way this single ‘place’ – our Square - can be ‘seen’ or interpreted in different ways for diverse purposes, and about the way that it can be used as a resource for teaching and learning across disciplines

Electromagnetic Deflection of Spinning Particles

We show that it is possible to obtain self-consistent and physically acceptable relativistic classical equations of motion for a point-like spin-half particle possessing an electric charge and a magnetic dipole moment, directly from a manifestly covariant Lagrangian, if the classical degrees of freedom are appropriately chosen. It is shown that the equations obtained encompass the well-tested Lorentz force and Thomas--Bargmann--Michel--Telegdi spin equations, as well as providing a definite specification of the classical _magnetic_dipole_ force_, whose exact form has been the subject of recent debate. Radiation reaction---the force and torque on an accelerated particle due to its self-interaction---is neglected at this stage.Comment: 18 pp. (latex, uses revtex 3), UM-P-92/9