Twentieth-Century Interpretations

Cyril Cusack, A Player s Reflection on Playboy , in Thomas R. Whitaker (ed.). Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Playboy of the Western World (Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 49-55. 

Thompson, Poe s Fiction, p. 95. See also Fishei Playful Germanism, p. 363 Darrel Abel, A Key to the House of Usher, in Twentieth-Century Interpretations, p. 53 and James M. Cox, Edgar Poe Style as Pose, in Twentieth-Century Interpretations, p. 115. 

John von Neuman, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, believed that the sciences, in essence, do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret they mainly make models. By a model he meant a mathematical construct that, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. Stephen Hawking also believes that physical theories are just mathematical models we construct and that it is meaningless to ask whether they correspond to reality, just as it is to ask whether they predict observations. 

A mass of evidence seems to confirm that the mixing rate of radiocarbon in the atmosphere is rapid, and that with respect to its radiocarbon content the atmosphere can be considered as a homogeneous entirety. The contamination of samples with matter from an extraneous source can nevertheless invalidate this assumption. Two types of contamination can be differentiated physicochemical contamination and mechanical intrusion. There are two forms of physicochemical contamination. One is due to the dilution of the concentration of radiocarbon in the atmosphere by very old carbon, practically depleted of radiocarbon, released by the combustion of fossil fuel, such as coal and oil. The other is by the contamination with radiocarbon produced by nuclear bomb tests during the 1950s and later in the twentieth century. The uncertainties introduced by these forms of contamination complicate the interpretation of data obtained by the radiocarbon dating method and restrict its accuracy and the effective time range of dating. 

Alchemical thinking helped lead the Society to interpret the implications of modem atomic theory in a way that emphasized the unity of matter (and even of energy) that saw oneness, rather than disunity and distinctness, as a major substratum of atomic theory and that pushed to spiritualize this principle. This grasping for ever simpler and more basic unity is, of course, not so uncommon an impulse in twentieth-century physics. (Consider unified field theories, and even the Theory of Everything in more recent physics.) Alchemy allowed the scientists and Hermeticists of the Alchemical Society to re-enchant science by positing the origins of the modem scientific push for unity in ancient Hermetic spirituality. 

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were several isolated voices claiming for a revision of the Michelson-Morley interpretation. Hicks [52] performed a theoretical analysis of the Michelson-Morley experiment and concluded that data were consistent with a somewhat larger magnitude of the difference of speeds. More importantly, he noted that the data followed a periodic curve proportional to cos 20, where angle 0 refers to a rotation of the interferometer relative to the presumed direction of orbital velocity. The functional dependence present in the results is of the form to be expected if there existed E. 

As briefly recollected by Ohanian [107], the mechanical origin of spin was mentioned as a possibility at the beginning of the twentieth century. Quantum theory adopted a point model for particles, which completely closed the door to a mechanical interpretation of spin. Corben [108-111] tried to develop a relativistic composite model for particles, where the basic components were punctual, but allowing for a separation between the center of mass and the center of charge. Corben argued that one of the components could have negative mass. 

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