Birds, bombs, silence. Listening to nature during wartime and its aftermath in Britain, 1914-1945

This cultural history explores how the sounds, rhythms and quietude of the natural world were listened to, interpreted and used amid the pressures of modernising Britain between 1914 and 1945. By engaging with the sounds of nature as objects of study, the meanings of modern noise have been considered in relation to the much older sounds and listening practices rooted in English pastoral traditions. But this is also a broader exploration of human perceptions of and responses to mechanised modern life. The thesis concentrates on four listening scenarios during the period that illuminate the perspectives of soldiers, civilians, broadcasting and sound recording authorities, as well as natural historians, especially ornithologists. First, the Western Front trench experience, in which the fantasies and realities of birdsong are set alongside the cultivation of battle ‘sonic mindedness’. Second, the debates about the return of shell-shocked officers and rank-and-file soldiers to the quietude of the pastoral as a recuperative environment. Third, the ideas associated with nature’s sounds, stillness and silence – earthly and cosmic – that were part of the philosophy of early BBC broadcasting. And lastly, the place of recorded and broadcast British birdsong on the home front during the Second World War. This investigation has drawn upon diverse primary sources that include soldiers’ writings, the archives of shell shock hospitals, natural history texts, together with broadcasting accounts in wireless magazines, the publications of BBC personnel and the BBC’s Written Archive. The core question addressed is this: in what ways have the sounds of nature been part of the British social and cultural consciousness in times of chaos and threat from war and its shadow? The thesis argues that mechanised modernity has been endured and managed in part by drawing upon the security and harmony found in the sounds and rhythms of nature

Nature’s Sonic Order on the Western Front

Sound scholars and historians have made much of the noise of warfare. In the trenches of the Western Front, however, there was more to hear than the unprecedented noise of shelling, and the cultivation of listening for danger and for safety brought other sounds to the ear that could offer relief from the intensity of the conflict. Often these were the sounds of nature: birdsong, trees and the stillness of the heavens above the battlefields. Soldiers’ writing (letters, diaries, memoirs and poems) reveals a deep engagement with these sounds as part of an effort to make sense of the fearsome environment in which men were contained. Birdsong in particular gave harmony and rhythm to a fractured and unpredictable sound-world. It made coherent, if only for a moment, the possibility of continuity and survival. High above the trenches, it was the cascading song of the lark that cleansed the air and drew eyes further upwards to an imaginative cosmic escape.Les spécialistes du son et les historien.nes ont beaucoup exploré le bruit de la guerre. Néanmoins, dans les tranchées du front de l’Ouest, il y avait plus à entendre que le bruit inédit des bombardements. Une culture de l'écoute orientée vers le danger et la sécurité n’excluait pas d'autres sons qui pouvaient offrir un soulagement face à l'intensité du conflit. Ces sons provenaient souvent de la nature : le chant des oiseaux, les arbres et le calme du ciel au-dessus des champs de bataille. Les écrits des soldats (lettres, journaux intimes, mémoires et poèmes) révèlent un intérêt profond pour ces sons en tant qu’ils participaient d’un effort pour donner un sens à l'environnement redoutable au sein duquel les hommes étaient confinés. Le chant des oiseaux, en particulier, donnait de l'harmonie et du rythme à un monde sonore fracturé et imprévisible. Il donnait une cohérence, ne serait-ce que pour un instant, à la possibilité d’une continuité et d’une survie. Au-dessus des tranchées, c’étaient les jaillissements du chant de l'alouette qui purifiaient l'air et élevaient le regard vers une évasion cosmique imaginée

The Blackholic energy and the canonical Gamma-Ray Burst

We outline the main results of our GRB model, based on the three interpretation paradigms we proposed in July 2001, comparing and contrasting them with the ones in the current literature. Thanks to the observations by Swift and by VLT, this analysis points to a "canonical GRB" originating from markedly different astrophysical scenarios. The communality is that they are all emitted in the formation of a black hole with small or null angular momentum. The following sequence appears to be canonical: the vacuum polarization process creating an optically thick self accelerating electron-positron plasma; the engulfment of baryonic mass during the plasma expansion; the adiabatic expansion of the optically thick "fireshell" up to the transparency; the interaction of the remaining accelerated baryons with the interstellar medium (ISM). This leads to the canonical GRB composed of a proper GRB (P-GRB), emitted at the moment of transparency, followed by an extended afterglow. The parameters are the plasma total energy, the fireshell baryon loading and the ISM filamentary distribution around the source. In the limit of no baryon loading the total energy is radiated in the P-GRB. In this limit, the canonical GRBs explain as well the short GRBs.Comment: 163 pages, 89 figures, to appear on the "Proceedings of the XIIth Brazilian School of Cosmology and Gravitation", M. Novello, S.E. Perez-Bergliaffa (editors), AIP, in pres

Floating sensor platform for the monitoring of water quality in urban and white-water environments

In the present paper the project of an embeddedsolution for the realization of a floating sensor platform for themonitoring of the water and ambient quality in a flowing waterenvironment is described. First results regarding the monitoringof the water conductivity and the ambient noise level underharsh environmental conditions in a karstic river and in the finalpart of a river going towards the Mediterranean Sea arepresented. It is further discussed how this kind of system can bemodified in order to serve as urban waterway multisensoryplatform, adding important features like connectivity, energyharvesting and determination of the platform position.

Singular Coexistence-curve Diameters: Experiments and Simulations

Precise calculations of the coexistence-curve diameters of a hard-core square-we ll (HCSW) fluid and the restricted primitive model (RPM) electrolyte exhibit mar ked deviations from rectilinear behavior. The HCSW diameter displays a $|t|^{1- alpha}$ singularity that sets in sharply for $|t|\equiv |T-T_c|/T_c\lesssim 10^{-3}$; this compares favorably with extensive data for ${SF}_6$, also reflec ted in C$_2$H$_6$, N$_2$, etc. By contrast, the curvature of the RPM diameter va ries slowly over a wide range $|t|\lesssim 0.1$; this behavior mirrors observati ons for liquid alkali metals, specifically Rb and Cs. Amplitudes for the leading singular terms can be estimated numerically but their values cannot be taken li terally.Comment: 9 pages and 4 figure

Corrections to the black body radiation due to minimum-length deformed quantum mechanics

Planck spectrum of black body radiation is usually derived by considering of quantized free electromagnetic field at a finite temperature. The minimum-length deformed quantization affects field theory both at the first and second quantization levels. Performing an exact calculation to the first order in deformation parameter, both of the corrections turn out to be of the same order. Nevertheless, the correction at the second quantization level has some qualitative difference, that may be interesting for future study to differentiate between these two sorts of corrections. In itself the correction to the black body radiation seems to be innocuous in light of the big-bang nucleosynthesis whenever the minimum length is less or equal to $10^{-19}$cm.Comment: 8 pages, Paper has been substantially revised - version to appear in Phys. Lett.

The Blackholic energy and the canonical Gamma-Ray Burst IV: the "long", "genuine short" and "fake - disguised short" GRBs

(Shortened) [...] After recalling the basic features of the "fireshell model", we emphasize the following novel results: 1) the interpretation of the X-ray flares in GRB afterglows as due to the interaction of the optically thin fireshell with isolated clouds in the CircumBurst Medium (CBM); 2) an interpretation as "fake - disguised" short GRBs of the GRBs belonging to the class identified by Norris & Bonnell [...] consistent with an origin from the final coalescence of a binary system in the halo of their host galaxies with particularly low CBM density [...]; 3) the first attempt to study a genuine short GRB with the analysis of GRB 050509B, that reveals indeed still an open question; 4) the interpretation of the GRB-SN association in the case of GRB 060218 via the "induced gravitational collapse" process; 5) a first attempt to understand the nature of the "Amati relation", a phenomenological correlation between the isotropic-equivalent radiated energy of the prompt emission E_{iso} with the cosmological rest-frame \nu F_{\nu} spectrum peak energy E_{p,i}. In addition, recent progress on the thermalization of the electron-positron plasma close to their formation phase, as well as the structure of the electrodynamics of Kerr-Newman Black Holes are presented. An outlook for possible explanation of high-energy phenomena in GRBs to be expected from the AGILE and the Fermi satellites are discussed. As an example of high energy process, the work by Enrico Fermi dealing with ultrarelativistic collisions is examined. It is clear that all the GRB physics points to the existence of overcritical electrodynamical fields. In this sense we present some progresses on a unified approach to heavy nuclei and neutron stars cores, which leads to the existence of overcritical fields under the neutron star crust.Comment: 68 pages, 50 figures, in the Proceedings of the XIII Brazilian School on Cosmology and Gravitation, M. Novello, S.E. Perez-Bergliaffa, editor

Critical Dynamics of Singlet Excitations in a Frustrated Spin System

We construct and analyze a two-dimensional frustrated quantum spin model with plaquette order, in which the low-energy dynamics is controlled by spin singlets. At a critical value of frustration the singlet spectrum becomes gapless, indicating a quantum transition to a phase with dimer order. This T=0 transition belongs to the 3D Ising universality class, while at finite temperature a 2D Ising critical line separates the plaquette and dimerized phases. The magnetic susceptibility has an activated form throughout the phase diagram, whereas the specific heat exhibits a rich structure and a power law dependence on temperature at the quantum critical point. We argue that the novel quantum critical behavior associated with singlet criticality discussed in this work can be relevant to a wide class of quantum spin systems, such as antiferromagnets on Kagome and pyrochlore lattices, where the low-energy excitations are known to be spin singlets, as well as to the CAVO lattice and several recently discovered strongly frustrated square-lattice antiferromagnets.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, additional discussion and figure added, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Light incoherence due to quantum-gravitational fluctuations of the background space

Based on the theory of mutual coherence of light from an extended incoherent quasi-monochromatic source (providing a basis of stellar interferometry) we estimate the degree of light incoherence due to quantum-gravitational fluctuations of the background metric. It is shown that the stellar interferometry observational data considered in the literature for a last few years as a manifestation against the Planck scale quantum-gravitational fluctuations of the background metric have no chance for detecting such an effect.Comment: 5 pages; Version to appear in Astroparticle Physic