Reading the Ruins: “Coming Home,” Wharton’s Atrocity Story of the First World War

« Coming Home » est une des rares nouvelles écrites par Edith Wharton sur la Première Guerre mondiale. Cette nouvelle explore les moyens mis en œuvre pour représenter la guerre et construire un récit de guerre en s’appuyant sur un type de texte bien connu, le récit d’atrocités. Dans une œuvre écrite plus tard, « Writing a War Story », Wharton fait la satire des publications populaires en temps de guerre à travers le portrait d’une femme de lettres sans envergure à qui le responsable d’une revue demande « une bonne histoire de tranchée bien émouvante, se terminant par un retour à la maison… et une scène de Noël, si vous y arrivez ». La nouvelle « Coming Home » est bien éloignée de cette caricature. Wharton y recourt à l’ellipse et au non-dit pour faire sentir les ambiguïtés de la violence et les horreurs de la guerre. En empruntant des éléments au récit d’atrocités et en introduisant dans son texte une multiplicité de perspectives et de voix, Wharton crée un texte lisible à plusieurs niveaux qui exige une interprétation active du lecteur. Cet article revient d’abord sur le récit d’atrocités comme genre et sur l’intérêt que lui accorda Wharton, puis il propose une analyse détaillée du texte. Une des conclusions majeures est la suivante : en insérant entre les lignes du récit d’atrocités des questionnements sur les femmes, la décadence, le patriarcat et la nature de la vérité, Wharton réussit à utiliser et à remettre en question le genre de la nouvelle d’atrocités

A mathematical framework for inverse wave problems in heterogeneous media

This paper provides a theoretical foundation for some common formulations of inverse problems in wave propagation, based on hyperbolic systems of linear integro-differential equations with bounded and measurable coefficients. The coefficients of these time-dependent partial differential equations respresent parametrically the spatially varying mechanical properties of materials. Rocks, manufactured materials, and other wave propagation environments often exhibit spatial heterogeneity in mechanical properties at a wide variety of scales, and coefficient functions representing these properties must mimic this heterogeneity. We show how to choose domains (classes of nonsmooth coefficient functions) and data definitions (traces of weak solutions) so that optimization formulations of inverse wave problems satisfy some of the prerequisites for application of Newton's method and its relatives. These results follow from the properties of a class of abstract first-order evolution systems, of which various physical wave systems appear as concrete instances. Finite speed of propagation for linear waves with bounded, measurable mechanical parameter fields is one of the by-products of this theory

Reading the Ruins: “Coming Home,” Wharton’s Atrocity Story of the First World War

« Coming Home » est une des rares nouvelles écrites par Edith Wharton sur la Première Guerre mondiale. Cette nouvelle explore les moyens mis en œuvre pour représenter la guerre et construire un récit de guerre en s’appuyant sur un type de texte bien connu, le récit d’atrocités. Dans une œuvre écrite plus tard, « Writing a War Story », Wharton fait la satire des publications populaires en temps de guerre à travers le portrait d’une femme de lettres sans envergure à qui le responsable d’une revue demande « une bonne histoire de tranchée bien émouvante, se terminant par un retour à la maison… et une scène de Noël, si vous y arrivez ». La nouvelle « Coming Home » est bien éloignée de cette caricature. Wharton y recourt à l’ellipse et au non-dit pour faire sentir les ambiguïtés de la violence et les horreurs de la guerre. En empruntant des éléments au récit d’atrocités et en introduisant dans son texte une multiplicité de perspectives et de voix, Wharton crée un texte lisible à plusieurs niveaux qui exige une interprétation active du lecteur. Cet article revient d’abord sur le récit d’atrocités comme genre et sur l’intérêt que lui accorda Wharton, puis il propose une analyse détaillée du texte. Une des conclusions majeures est la suivante : en insérant entre les lignes du récit d’atrocités des questionnements sur les femmes, la décadence, le patriarcat et la nature de la vérité, Wharton réussit à utiliser et à remettre en question le genre de la nouvelle d’atrocités

Inflation and Dark Energy from spectroscopy at z > 2

The expansion of the Universe is understood to have accelerated during two epochs: in its very first moments during a period of Inflation and much more recently, at z < 1, when Dark Energy is hypothesized to drive cosmic acceleration. The undiscovered mechanisms behind these two epochs represent some of the most important open problems in fundamental physics. The large cosmological volume at 2 < z < 5, together with the ability to efficiently target high-$z$ galaxies with known techniques, enables large gains in the study of Inflation and Dark Energy. A future spectroscopic survey can test the Gaussianity of the initial conditions up to a factor of ~50 better than our current bounds, crossing the crucial theoretical threshold of $\sigma(f_{NL}^{\rm local})$ of order unity that separates single field and multi-field models. Simultaneously, it can measure the fraction of Dark Energy at the percent level up to $z = 5$, thus serving as an unprecedented test of the standard model and opening up a tremendous discovery space

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

The Dark Energy Survey : more than dark energy – an overview

This overview paper describes the legacy prospect and discovery potential of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) beyond cosmological studies, illustrating it with examples from the DES early data. DES is using a wide-field camera (DECam) on the 4 m Blanco Telescope in Chile to image 5000 sq deg of the sky in five filters (grizY). By its completion, the survey is expected to have generated a catalogue of 300 million galaxies with photometric redshifts and 100 million stars. In addition, a time-domain survey search over 27 sq deg is expected to yield a sample of thousands of Type Ia supernovae and other transients. The main goals of DES are to characterize dark energy and dark matter, and to test alternative models of gravity; these goals will be pursued by studying large-scale structure, cluster counts, weak gravitational lensing and Type Ia supernovae. However, DES also provides a rich data set which allows us to study many other aspects of astrophysics. In this paper, we focus on additional science with DES, emphasizing areas where the survey makes a difference with respect to other current surveys. The paper illustrates, using early data (from ‘Science Verification’, and from the first, second and third seasons of observations), what DES can tell us about the Solar system, the Milky Way, galaxy evolution, quasars and other topics. In addition, we show that if the cosmological model is assumed to be +cold dark matter, then important astrophysics can be deduced from the primary DES probes. Highlights from DES early data include the discovery of 34 trans-Neptunian objects, 17 dwarf satellites of the Milky Way, one published z > 6 quasar (and more confirmed) and two published superluminous supernovae (and more confirmed)

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29