Myths of
History
The legendary mass
suicide at Masada may be just that--legendary. The story of the mountaintop
where outnumbered Jewish rebels are said to have committed suicide rather than
give in to a Roman siege--chronicled by first century historian Flavius
Josephus--has been a part of popular Jewish history for centuries; the site is
now one of Israel's most heavily visited tourist attractions. In the 1960s,
eminent Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin claimed to have found the bones of
960 martyrs there, thus confirming Josephus' account of their deaths. But the
current issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review calls Yadin's conclusions--and
his scholarly procedures--into question. In the cover story, Joseph
Zias, former curator of archaeology and anthropology at the Israel Antiquities
Authority, claims that the bones Yadin found belonged to Roman
soldiers--and that Yadin knew it. Zias says Yadin misrepresented and suppressed
evidence, including the fact that pig bones were found alongside the skeletons
he claimed belonged to the Jews. (Jews would not have been likely to eat pork,
which is not kosher.) Accompanying articles explore other Masada-related
confusions: Josephus' text is ambiguous about where the martyrs actually fell,
and the site itself was probably a center of political administration rather
than a civilian refuge.
Bad
Timing
Just in time for
millennium celebrations, theoretical physicist Julian
Barbour will publish the results of more than 30 years of reflection,
in which he argues that time as we understand it does not exist. Even before
the book's publication, the claim has stirred up controversy among theoretical
physicists. Barbour bases his thesis on a highly abstract but oddly
common-sensical application of quantum mechanics that amounts to taking
literally the implications of the fact that a synonym for "infinite" is
"timeless." The practical implications for things such as train schedules,
magazine deadlines, and the minimum wage have not even begun to be
contemplated.
Unfeathered
Nests
Scientists at the
University of Turku in Finland have established that air pollution can hamper
the sex drive of birds. According to an article published in November in the British magazine New
Scientist , Tapio Eeva and his colleagues report that because pollutants
from a copper smelter in the town of Harjavalta dull the plumage of local
great tits,
they are unable to perform a courtship dance that relies on the display of
bright feathers. Worse, toxins from the plant have greatly reduced the
availability of a staple of the tits' diet: green caterpillars. Without
caterpillars, the tits cannot produce the bright yellow breast feathers they
need to do the dance and thus cannot attract mates.
Fifth
Wheel
Physicists may also be on
the verge of discovering the fifth
dimension . This dimension's theoretical existence was first posited in
the 1920s by the German mathematicians Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein, who
hypothesized that "each point of normal space is actually a loop in [the] fifth
dimension." They thought the fifth dimension also accounted for forces such as
gravity and electromagnetism. In October the Times Higher Education
Supplement reported that, thanks to advances in supercollider technology
that enable the precise calibration of subatomic quantum energy and computer
programs that are able to model the behavior of this energy with previously
unheard-of speed and precision, we may soon have a glimpse of the real thing.
"Some physicists," the paper reports, "have suggested that we might one day
unroll such a dimension [and] travel along it." But others are skeptical.
"Traveling along [the fifth dimension]," says one, "wouldn't get you
anywhere."
Melville and the
Whale
As Herman Melville once
famously asked in Moby-Dick , why don't whales collapse under the
pressure of all the water they swim under? According to a law of physics called
Boyle's law, the pressure times the volume of a gas is always a
constant--increasing pressure makes volume decrease, and vice versa. In the
fall issue of American Scholar , Rutgers physicist Grace Marmor Spruch
reveals the answer. As Melville pointed out, if a sperm whale can spend more
than an hour swimming at depths of up to 6,000 feet, and a sperm whale is
composed mostly of gas (air-filled lungs and blubber), then Boyle's law would
dictate that, as Spruch puts it, "a whale of regulation size at the surface
should, at the pressures a thousand fathoms down, decrease its volume to the
size of a bathtub!"--becoming a "miniwhale." But, in fact, the whale's gaseous
chambers (i.e., his lungs) are not particularly large to begin with. They do
collapse on a long dive, but the viscera move into the space. In short, most of
the whale is incompressible.
Faster, Pussycats!
Cook! Cook!
Students at the Rhode
Island School of Design have unveiled the "kitchen of the future." The utopian
prototype, called the Universal Kitchen, is designed for maximum efficiency in
cooking and cleaning: The 400 steps it now takes to prepare a modest dinner in
an ordinary kitchen would be reduced to 100. Its oven would perform all the
functions of a microwave, a broiler, and a conventional oven, as well as
steam-cooking and steam-cleaning. According to Jane Langmuir, director of the
project, "water and heat come together and create a totally new appliance." The
model is currently on display at the Cooper-Hewitt
Museum in New York City. If it's ever built, the kitchen will come in two
sizes, "min" and "max."
Dead Letters
...
The world's oldest and
largest university press--Oxford--has just announced that it is canceling its
poetry list. According to the Guardian , Oxford, which is, after Faber
and Faber, the leading publisher of contemporary poetry in Britain, has cut
loose its living poets, including such respected figures as Craig Raine and
D.J. Enright. The dead poets Oxford publishes--including Lord Byron, Edmund
Spenser, and William Wordsworth--will remain in print.
... and the Living
Arts
The Modern Language Association has commissioned a
documentary on the history of oral performance, from Homer to poetry
slams--raucous readings in which the quality of poems is judged by the ferocity
of audience response. Some critics find the popularity of the events an
encouraging sign in a media-saturated age. But others--notably Harold Bloom and
Helen Vendler--view the rise of the slam with alarm. Bloom, after reading the
work of some contest winners, declared them "of a badness not to be
believed."
