How to conceive virtual entities: Peirce's proposal

The term “virtual entities” has a long tradition and a variety of meanings. My short article focuses on one particular meaning, as clearly defined by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1902. I will discuss the definition he provided and touch on the wide resonance it had and still has in science

Elastic and electronic properties of hexagonal rhenium sub-nitrides Re3N and Re2N in comparison with hcp-Re and wurtzite-like rhenium mononitride ReN

Very recently, two new hexagonal rhenium sub-nitrides Re3N and Re2N, which belong to a rather rare group of known metal-rich (M/N > 1) nitrides of heavy 4d,5d metals, have been successfully synthesized, and their potential technological applications as ultra-incompressible materials have been proposed. In this work we present a detailed ab initio study of novel rhenium sub-nitrides in comparison with hcp-Re and wurtzite-like rhenium mono-nitride ReN, with the purpose to evaluate the trends of the elastic, electronic properties and chemical bonding in the series of these hexagonal systems as a function of the Re/N stoichiometry: Re \rightarrow Re3N \rightarrow Re2N \rightarrow ReN.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Roadmap on photonic, electronic and atomic collision physics: I. Light-matter interaction

We publish three Roadmaps on photonic, electronic and atomic collision physics in order to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the ICPEAC conference. In Roadmap I, we focus on light-matter interaction. In this area, studies of ultrafast electronic and molecular dynamics have been rapidly growing, with the advent of new light sources such as attosecond lasers and X-ray free electron lasers. In parallel, experiments with established synchrotron radiation sources and femtosecond lasers using cutting- edge detection schemes are revealing new scientific insights that have never been exploited. Relevant theories are also being rapidly developed. Target samples for photon-impact experiments are expanding from atoms and small molecules to complex systems such as biomolecules, fullerene, clusters and solids. This Roadmap aims at looking back along the road, explaining the development of these fields, and looking forward, collecting contributions from twenty leading groups from the field

Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy

For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886

Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments with Verdi’s Otello

One day in his private home on the avenue Bugeaud, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the famous baritone Victor Maurel hosted a meeting which combined music with hypnotism of a young woman

Unsound Seeds

With this image of a curtain hiding and at the same time heightening some terrible secret, Max Kalbeck began his review of the first Viennese performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Theodor W. Adorno picked up the image of the curtain in the context of Strauss’s fabled skill at composing non-musical events, when he identified the opening flourish of Strauss’s Salome as the swooshing sound of the rising curtain. If this is so, the succès de scandale of the opera was achieved, in more than one sense, as soon as the curtain rose at Dresden’s Semperoper on 10 December 1905. Critics of the premiere noted that the opera set ‘boundless wildness and degeneration to music’; it brought ‘high decadence’ onto the operatic stage; a ‘composition of hysteria’, reflecting the ‘disease of our time’, Salome is ‘hardly music any more’.The outrage did not end there

Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera

It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut