If I Could Tell

In alternating first-person accounts, two primary and two secondary characters 'speak' the fictional narrative of If I Could Tell. As the title suggests, doubt is implicit in the narrative; there is no impediment, necessarily, to the story being told - 'I could tell it, if .. .' - but, rather, doubt about telling (from the characters' perspective) where the truth lies. An accumulation of first-person revelations forms, in four parts, an altogether more contestable version of the lives, thoughts and impulses of two 'siblings' Jessica (Jess) Morell and William (Willow) Morell/Osborne, a 'hitchhiker', Luna Fortune, and a nurse, Clare. In authoring themselves, each revealing a telling truth but misperceiving what is wholly true, they simultaneously create the narrative that, beyond their power, draws them together, then alienates them. As Luna says - essentially of the difficulty of deciding whether or not Willow is 'a nice guy' - 'My point being, you can't always tell how a story turns out for the person who's listening, because you can't tell what they're hearing, what the story means, because of stuff that's happened to them or stuff they know.' And the crisis of the novel lies at this nexus, the convergence of 'stuff that's happened' and 'stuff (the characters think) they know'. Plot and structure function together in exploring the limits and consequences of this intractability. Willow and Jess are the son and daughter of Frances and Alfred Morell, an airman reported missing in action in a distant conflict when they are infants, but a presence in their lives and their imaginations. After an obscure political upheaval compels them to move from the river settlement of their early years to the city to live with Alfred's unmarried brother, Geoffrey, the promise of a wholesome upbringing fades with a despairing Frances succumbing to drink. Through an accident of circumstance, her decline is associated with a serious injury Jess suffers in falling from a tree and, in the course of her recovery, the budding of an unnaturally intimate relationship with Willow. This intimacy comes to an incestuous climax on the night of their mother's burial, all but destroying their bond. They are estranged for some two decades. By the time they meet again as adults at Geoffrey's funeral, all the most important details of their relationship and their life story are found to be false or flawed - though neither of them knows the full extent. Only Jess knows that Willow is not in fact her brother, his own father having died at the time of her conception, and Willow is alone in knowing that Alfred Morell's fate is critically at odds with the lore they grew up with. As they begin their long journey home in Willow's car, each of them is privately transfixed by the risks and challenges of sorting truth from falsehood, and sealing the rapprochement they long for. Neither foresees the deranging impact of their glancing contact with Luna. The narrative is deliberately placed in an unnamed setting in the hope of freeing it from the burdens of a given history and the reflex associations that inevitably arise from assumptions of prior knowledge. The work is not entirely free, however, from a late-20th century backdrop of ideological contest and transition in which the tropes of personal and public accountability are discernible in the tension between the characters' private and social worlds. Their apparent willingness to discount the wider setting in favour of a more intimate order of interests seems often delusional, and is arguably akin to the author's evasive intentions. The three most prominent characters all have torments to reckon with, each of them in its way originating in the churn of History, though seeming capable of being weighed on a subjective scale. Yet it is probably the social context that is, if murkily, the agency of dissonance in the characters' relations. It falls to Willow to discover - or to show, without necessarily being conscious of the demonstration - that personal and public pasts converge ineluctably, with unpredictable consequences. If I Could Tell is the distillation of a long process of reading and thinking, and four years of writing and extensive revision. The fifth and final draft reveals significant departures from the structure and character development of the first. Influences vary widely, but in thinking through the themes of engaging or evading the historical process, of placing the individual in the muddle if not always the middle, certain texts stand out for their imaginative reach and technical achievements, among them W G Sebald's Austerlitz, Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, J M Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, Tolstoy's novella-length short story Haji Murat, Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Alain Robbe-Grillers The Erasers, Philip Roth's American Pastoral and, more recently, Martin Amis's House of Meetings. Throughout, I found myself returning to the notion expressed by the writer in Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, who says of his book, emerging 'quite different from what I had been trying to invent', that 'I wish it now to run freely, according to its bent, sometimes swift, sometimes slow; I choose not to foresee its windings'. Its appeal as a writerly credo comes, eventually, with the necessarily humble acknowledgement that doubt stimulated by perceptive supervision is an indispensable accompaniment

Electrically driven convection in a thin annular film undergoing circular Couette flow

We investigate the linear stability of a thin, suspended, annular film of conducting fluid with a voltage difference applied between its inner and outer edges. For a sufficiently large voltage, such a film is unstable to radially-driven electroconvection due to charges which develop on its free surfaces. The film can also be subjected to a Couette shear by rotating its inner edge. This combination is experimentally realized using films of smectic A liquid crystals. In the absence of shear, the convective flow consists of a stationary, azimuthally one-dimensional pattern of symmetric, counter-rotating vortex pairs. When Couette flow is applied, an azimuthally traveling pattern results. When viewed in a co-rotating frame, the traveling pattern consists of pairs of asymmetric vortices. We calculate the neutral stability boundary for arbitrary radius ratio $\alpha$ and Reynolds number ${{\cal R} e}$ of the shear flow, and obtain the critical control parameter ${\cal R}_c (\alpha, {{\cal R} e})$ and the critical azimuthal mode number ${m_c (\alpha, {{\cal R} e})}$. The Couette flow suppresses the onset of electroconvection, so that ${\cal R}_c (\alpha, {{\cal R} e}) > {\cal R}_c (\alpha,0)$. The calculated suppression is compared with experiments performed at $\alpha = 0.56$ and $0 \leq {{\cal R} e} \leq 0.22$.Comment: 17 pages, 2 column with 9 included eps figures. See also http://mobydick.physics.utoronto.c

On the Excess Dispersion in the Polarization Position Angle of Pulsar Radio Emission

The polarization position angles (PA) of pulsar radio emission occupy a distribution that can be much wider than what is expected from the average linear polarization and the off-pulse instrumental noise. Contrary to our limited understanding of the emission mechanism, the excess dispersion in PA implies that pulsar PAs vary in a random fashion. An eigenvalue analysis of the measured Stokes parameters is developed to determine the origin of the excess PA dispersion. The analysis is applied to sensitive, well-calibrated polarization observations of PSR B1929+10 and PSR B2020+28. The analysis clarifies the origin of polarization fluctuations in the emission and reveals that the excess PA dispersion is caused by the isotropic inflation of the data point cluster formed by the measured Stokes parameters. The inflation of the cluster is not consistent with random fluctuations in PA, as might be expected from random changes in the orientation of the magnetic field lines in the emission region or from stochastic Faraday rotation in either the pulsar magnetosphere or the interstellar medium. The inflation of the cluster, and thus the excess PA dispersion, is attributed to randomly polarized radiation in the received pulsar signal. The analysis also indicates that orthogonal polarization modes (OPM) occur where the radio emission is heavily modulated. In fact, OPM may only occur where the modulation index exceeds a critical value of about 0.3.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Hyperfast Interstellar Travel in General Relativity

The problem is discussed of whether a traveller can reach a remote object and return back sooner than a photon would when taken into account that the traveller can partly control the geometry of his world. It is argued that under some reasonable assumptions in globally hyperbolic spacetimes the traveller cannot hasten reaching the destination. Nevertheless, it is perhaps possible for him to make an arbitrarily long round-trip within an arbitrarily short (from the point of view of a terrestrial observer) time.Comment: The final version, close to (but better than) what will be published in Phys. Rev. D. The explanatory part is made more detaile

Some new class of Chaplygin Wormholes

Some new class of Chaplygin wormholes are investigated in the framework of a Chaplygin gas with equation of state $p = - \frac{A}{\rho}$, $A>0$. Since empty spacetime ($p = \rho = 0$) does not follow Chaplygin gas, so the interior Chaplygin wormhole solutions will never asymptotically flat. For this reason, we have to match our interior wormhole solution with an exterior vacuum solution i.e. Schwarzschild solution at some junction interface, say $r = a$. We also discuss the total amount of matter characterized by Chaplygin gas that supplies fuel to construct a wormhole.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, Accepted for publication in Mod.Phys.Lett.

Annular electroconvection with shear

We report experiments on convection driven by a radial electrical force in suspended annular smectic A liquid crystal films. In the absence of an externally imposed azimuthal shear, a stationary one-dimensional (1D) pattern consisting of symmetric vortex pairs is formed via a supercritical transition at the onset of convection. Shearing reduces the symmetries of the base state and produces a traveling 1D pattern whose basic periodic unit is a pair of asymmetric vortices. For a sufficiently large shear, the primary bifurcation changes from supercritical to subcritical. We describe measurements of the resulting hysteresis as a function of the shear at radius ratio $\eta \sim 0.8$. This simple pattern forming system has an unusual combination of symmetries and control parameters and should be amenable to quantitative theoretical analysis.Comment: 12 preprint pages, 3 figures in 2 parts each. For more info, see http://mobydick.physics.utoronto.c

Frame-dragging effects on magnetic fields near a rotating black hole

We discuss the role of general relativity frame dragging acting on magnetic field lines near a rotating (Kerr) black hole. Near ergosphere the magnetic structure becomes strongly influenced and magnetic null points can develop. We consider aligned magnetic fields as well as fields inclined with respect to the rotation axis, and the two cases are shown to behave in profoundly different ways. Further, we construct surfaces of equal values of local electric and magnetic intensities, which have not yet been discussed in the full generality of a boosted rotating black hole.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of "The Central Kiloparsec in Galactic Nuclei (AHAR 2011)", Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS), IOP Publishin

Generalized Slow Roll Conditions and the Possibility of Intermediate Scale Inflation in Scalar-Tensor Theory

Generalized slow roll conditions and parameters are obtained for a general form of scalar-tensor theory (with no external sources), having arbitrary functions describing a nonminimal gravitational coupling F(\phi), a Kahler-like kinetic function k(\phi), and a scalar potential V(\phi). These results are then used to analyze a simple toy model example of chaotic inflation with a single scalar field \phi and a standard Higgs potential and a simple gravitational coupling function. In this type of model inflation can occur with inflaton field values at an intermediate scale of roughly 10^{11} GeV when the particle physics symmetry breaking scale is approximately 1 TeV, provided that the theory is realized within the Jordan frame. If the theory is realized in the Einstein frame, however, the intermediate scale inflation does not occur.Comment: 14 pages, no figs. Accepted to Classical and Quantum Gravit