You've evoked my interest: could you expand on that a bit more? Whose narrative, and how?
Look to the West Volume IX: The Electric Circus
- Thread starter Thande
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Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone.
Interesting you say so - I'm certainly not knowledgeable about this part of the world and was basically just basing it on the kind of brinksmanship one sees in plenty of other regions as well.
As in the 'Western' or world narrative about Japan, which tends to portray sakoku Shogunate Japanese civilisation as always 'backward' or 'native' and easy prey for the Russians. Pointing out that the Japanese used to be considered a (little-known to Europe but still) major civilisation in the 1500s and 1600s, whose members travelled overseas to Mexico and invaded Korea, etc., goes against that narrative. My inspiration here was how British/general European colonialism in India is often now implicitly portrayed as coming with a technological advantage for the British/Europeans vs the Indian states, which is almost completely untrue and driven by hindsight and stereotypes. (I've even seen many Indians be unaware of this).
Thanks - I think that first [16] shouldn't be there at all.
Ah, the in-universe narrative, gotcha. (Thought you were referring to OTL perspectives.)
My impression was that the British in 18th century India, militarily speaking, didn't have so much a technological advantage as an organizational one?
I wonder what narrative is prevalent enough TTL that what seems to be a general history of Ayutthaya is considered the "other side"?
The Siamese Empire atavistically focuses on political unity at the expense of the cultural flowering of its non-Thai peoples, especially the Annamese.
Thande
Donor
It's supposed to represent an incensed conviction by certain Ayutthais in OTL that 'the American media' in TTL are 'spouting separatist propaganda', so this is the edgy REAL story. I meant to add a line about that but forgot.
That was the sense I got too, that in the present day Siam is somewhat more committed to presenting "its view" as true even than most nations, and perhaps beynod simple Diversitarian pressure; perhaps more like certain nationalist views of history OTL.
Of course, maybe this is because unlike all the other "points of controversy", Siamese breakup is still going on in the present day of TTL so it's a lot easier for a person to go around supporting "Free Annam" (or whatever) than remembering some atrocity that occurred a century or more ago. It may also depend on who exactly is supporting these separatists internationally; perhaps the ENA or China is backing them up. It could also just be that a large number of displaced people from the region settled in the area, although the ENA never did seem to attract as many immigrants as OTL's USA; if anything I'd expect more of those refugees to end up in, say, California instead.
320
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Part #320: Death and Denial
“SCHEHERAZADE RETURNS!
Mehmet Ertegun’s 1983 hit-craze sale-breaker is BACK at the Alhambra Odeon, Victor Street, for ONE WEEK ONLY!
Honour the late, great Latife Hurkus’ life by once again experiencing her magnum opus of acting in the title role of this epic of Near Eastern filmery!
ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS – ONE MILLION AND ONE THRILLS!
Available with both the original 1985 authorised dub or the 2004 retranslated subtitles – ask at the box office desk.
“SCHEHERAZADE” – NOVEMBER 23rd-28th ONLY – GET YOUR TICKETS BEFORE THEY SELL OUT!
See Motext page 10V-105”
*
(Lt Black’s note)
That Thai lecture was a bit uncomfortable, wasn’t it? Fortunately, it seems not all the lectures we’ve recorded took quite such a confrontational approach to contentious issues. There’s some other world politics we need to cover to explain the leadup to the Sunrise War, and the Middle East is a part of that. Now Bob, where’s my cliff notes, you know I have trouble keeping all those Turkish politicians straight…
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “Land of War, Land of Peace” by Dx Tsanna Iskandar, Daburah bint Yusuf al-Tamimi and Saliha Halayik, recorded October 26th, 2020—
Welcome, everyone. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the other lectures in this festival looking at the culture and history of other nations. If so, you may have gathered that some people think that the proper exercise of Diversitarian values should be represented by yelling at each other from three feet away. (Slightly uncertain audience chuckles) My colleagues, here, and I have a different perspective. We believe that you, our audience, can only truly exercise your freedom of thought if you hear different perspectives from all of us – expressed respectfully when we differ – and then to make up your own minds. (Mixed reaction from audience)
Another way we differ from some other lectures you may have seen is that I don’t have a handler. (Brief murmur) That is, I’m here speaking for myself, not going through an American. To understand why, I should first introduce myself. My name is Doctrix Tsanna Iskandar. I was born in Cairo, I won’t say when, (A few chuckles) and studied at the University of Alexandria, where I met my husband. He is in the diplomatic service, and for the past ten years he has been part of the Egyptian Embassy staff here in Fredericksburg. I have been awarded a visiting chair at Augusta University and lecture there on Egyptian and broader Asian and African history.[1] That is my day job, and evidently I have been here long enough that they trust me to handle one of these lectures by myself. (A few chuckles and other reactions)
But I’m not alone, of course. I have my two friends here to assist me, and they’ve had much more exciting lives than me. Please introduce yourselves.
‘Interesting’ is one choice of word…thank you, Tsanna. Er, hello, I’m Daburah al-Tamimi, or should I say salaam aleikoum, as we say in Araby. It is a greeting but it means ‘peace be with you’.
Peace being something that has frequently been in short supply in our homelands, it is sad to say.
Perhaps…I originally came here to the Empire as a dancer in the opera, and then I was ‘discovered’ by Nassau Street.[2] I’ve sung contralto in a number of productions since then. Never top billing though!
You underestimate yourself, Dab, or perhaps you’re just looking for pity. (Slightly nervous audience chuckles) As you won’t, as they say here, blow your own trumpet, I’ll just tell the ladies and gentlemen that you were most recently in Il Consigliere as Giovanna on its run back in May of this year. (Impressed reactions from some parts of the audience) And you, Saliha?
I’m not sure what to say now, Tsanna! Ah…I was in California as an actress for some time, and then I married a New Englander (Mixed cheers and boos) and I’ve since been something in the Boston theatre scene. Nothing on Dab’s level though!
I think the critics who wowed over your Lady Macbeth last year would say otherwise, Saliha. (More impressed reactions) Well, now you know who we are as people. But it’s also important you know where we’re from. I’m Egyptian, and more specifically I’m niremenkhemi. You normally say a Copt. Al-Qibt in Arabic. We are the original people of Egypt, from which Egypt gets its name in English – the ‘gypt’ part. Lots of people in Egypt now consider themselves Copts, but traditionally Copts were Christians like me. It gets complicated…
Don’t overdo it this early, Tsanna, you’ll lose them. (Chuckles) I’m from Araby, as I mentioned, and from the Banu Tamim tribe. We’re all over the place now, but I’m from the deep desert of Najd originally, though my father moved our family to Couaite when I was a little girl.[3] And as far as faith goes, I’m a Sunni Muslim.
Whereas I’m a Turk, from Aintab.[4] My people are part of the minority of Turks who escaped the rule of the Eternal State and have fully preserved our heritage and language. I’m a Sunni Muslim also.
Thank you Dab, Saliha. Well, hopefully now you can see that we offer different perspectives here on our part of the world, the Near and Middle East as you usually call it in English.[5] It’s been a contentious and troubled area for longer than any of us have been alive, though we all hope that peace is now possible.
Of course. No-one is quite happy with the Treaty of Jerusalem, but that is diplomatic compromise for you.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Dab. Now our lands are home to the oldest civilisations in history – sorry, China! (Audience chuckles and ‘oohs’) A contrast to the young history of this land, at least since colonisation. So we could go back five thousand years or more and be here all day – but we won’t. To understand the Near and Middle East today, the best place to start is with the Ottoman Empire before its fragmentation.
Yes, the Ottoman Empire still casts a shadow over the way we think. Our idioms, our phrases. In some ways it is as though we are still expecting a Sultan in Stamboul, that is, Constantinople, to be looking over our shoulder.
But in order to understand that, Saliha, the good people here first need to understand what the Ottoman Empire truly was. First of all, that’s not technically a name which anyone who lived under it used. Like the Byzantine Empire before it – nobody called that ‘Byzantine’ except historians in hindsight. That Christian-led empire based in Constantinople, which finally fell in 1453…the people who lived there just called themselves Romans. They might speak Greek, they might have adopted forms of government and faith which Cicero and Caesar wouldn’t recognise, but they were Romans nonetheless, in continuity with a state stretching back two millennia to Romulus and the founding of Rome.
The early Ottomans also focused heavily on that continuity. The Sultanate of Rum, or Rome, in Anatolia far from the city of Rome…but Rome is an idea, not just a city.
Very true, Saliha. I may be the professional historian here, but you two keep me on my toes! (Audience chuckles) Yes, the Ottoman Sultan considered himself the heir to Rome. He was the Caliph, the Commander of the Muslim Faithful, the Shadow of God on Earth, Lord of the Horizon, and a whole host of other titles. And at the empire’s height, he had the temporal might to lend credence to his claims.
Yes, trying to understand the Ottoman Empire is always a challenge, isn’t it? All those centuries of history…
And in some ways, less change across them than one might expect.
In some ways, yes. Not in others.
Outsiders never truly understood it. They didn’t even call it by the right name.
That’s what I was saying. Like Byzantium. As far as the people of the empire were concerned, it was the Sublime Ottoman State. Some Europeans called it the Sublime Porte, but really that was a name for the gateway into Topkapi Palace.
Ottoman being another way of saying House of Osman. Named for the dynasty, not a people.
Yes, like when Danubia was just called the Hapsburg empire. Europeans sometimes just called it Turkey or the Turkish Empire, but that was never really the case. Turks sometimes had privileges, of course, but under Ottoman rule people from all kinds of backgrounds – Egyptians, Arabs, Albanians, Bulgars, Greeks, Armenians – could rise to positions of power.
Providing they didn’t try to form their own state and break away, of course. Then the iron fist came down. In some ways, proto-Societist. (Audience murmurs)
No, I don’t agree with that, Dab. People say that about lots of things. Yes, the Ottoman state structure was against nationalism and self-determination. But so had been the Byzantines and Romans before it. It was not global Societism, but the idea that peculiar citizenship of the empire came first before tongue or blood.
Well, we can agree to disagree. Which, I suppose, was the principle the empire often ran under.
You might say so. The way the empire worked was always difficult for outsiders to understand. Many parts of it seemed very archaic, while others were radical and alien to how Europeans thought. And often Novamundines and Chinese as well. I won’t go into detail here, but I’ll touch on a few points. The Ottoman army, historically, resembled the structure of Turkic steppe armies from centuries before, long after Turks had settled down and founded the empire.
Like the Banners in old Qing China.
True. Now the Ottoman approach to matters like citizenship and slavery still owed a lot to the classical world and the Romans, which often confused Europeans. Here in the Novamund, you are used to the idea that a slave can only mean someone with no rights who carries out backbreaking labour on a plantation. (A few murmurs) In the Ottoman system, it was possible for someone to be a titular slave while rising to a position of power. The Janissary corps were founded, back in the 1300s by your calendar, by levying a tax of boys from Christian subject family of the empire and raising them as Muslim soldiers and, technically, slaves. (More murmurs) Yet the Janissaries became an integral part of the state and, at one point, were effectively appointing and disposing of emperors on their say-so.
They were also forbidden to marry before the age of forty, back in the day. I really do think the inspiration for the Societist Celatores was—
Another time. And what of that Sultan? Sultans were descended from Osman I, but in the Ottoman system the succession passed down sideways through brothers, rather than directly to sons. So any brothers of a Sultan were a potential threat, and sometimes they would succeed at an advanced age. Some Sultans were powerful and effective rulers, such as Suleiman the Magnificent, who conquered vast swathes of territory, in many ways the height of empire. But, especially from the seventeenth century, many were ineffectual. A tradition had arisen of raising successors under house arrest in the Kafes, the ‘gilded cage’, luxury apartments that were part of the Imperial Harem. Needless to say, raising future monarchs completely isolated from the outside world was not a recipe for success.
But that’s another thing the Europeans didn’t understand – the influence that the women of the harem exerted, especially the Valide Sultan.
Usually the mother of the Sultan, yes. That point’s been over-egged by Cythereans before – I don’t think Doctrix Lacklin or Lady Bidwell would like to win political power through being a concubine! (Shocked audience laughter) But it is true to an extent, and yes, Europeans did not understand it.
In general, there was a sense by many outsiders – especially the Russians – that the empire was perpetually in a state of decline and about to fall over at any moment, simply because the Ottoman system of governance was so alien to them that they could not understand it.
Yet in some ways, it was just the same as the Byzantine Empire that those Russians idolised. Cutthroat emperors and scheming viziers had been par for the course there, as well.
It’s a fair point. The Ottomans were judged differently not only because they were dominated by a people alien to Europe – the same could be said of the Hungarians, after all – but because of the Islamic faith. Those two things together, especially with the military power the empire exerted in times of triumph like under Suleiman, meant Europe would always hate and fear the empire.
A whole culture was built along the Military Frontier between the Ottomans and Danubia, or what became Danubia. And a lot of feuding Catholic countries came together to oppose the empire’s navy in the Battle of Lepanto in the 1500s.
Yes. Well, that’s a brief description of the empire. I’m passing over centuries of history here, of course, to focus on the most relevant points for our discussion. Some things did change over time. It wasn’t necessarily a backwards place for science and technology, despite the impression that’s sometimes given in period dramas, and it was a state that prized art and literature. To really understand what happened to the lands today that were once part of the empire, though, we probably have to start with the turn of the nineteenth century.
By the Gregorian calendar, yes. Well, the empire went through a period of dominance from 1806 by a Bosniak war hero general turned vizier called Damat Melek Pasha, whom you may have heard of. (A few murmurs) Damat Melek rose to a greater height of power than most viziers and at one point he was effectively appointing Sultans, with the support of the Janissaries.
While alienating the Mamelukes who were ruling over Egypt at the time. Baba Ismail Pasha led a faction-
Yes, don’t worry, I’ll be talking about that later. But when Damat Melek died in 1816 after a decade in power, that left a power vacuum.[6] Opposition forces had been building for years in many parts of the empire, and multiple vizier hopefuls were assassinated in the streets of Constantinople. Unity essentially collapsed. They called it the Time of Troubles.
And outsiders took advantage of the empire’s weakness to expand at its expense – the Hapsburgs, the Russians, the Persians.
Yes, though perhaps to a lesser extent than any of them had hoped. All those opposition forces from within – Azadis in Iraq, or Mesopotamia as some of you may know it as, Wahhabis in Araby, Janissary extremists in Rumelia, Esad Ali Bey at the Omani court in Muscat… [7]
The Wahhabi extremists have ever been a plague on Araby. Unfortunately, they weren’t totally eradicated by the Time of Troubles, either.
No. I won’t go into the full details of that very complex period, but the empire stabilised into three main power groups; the Balkan Party, or Janissary Sultanate, which controlled Rumelia; the Shadow Faction which controlled Anatolia; and then there was the rest. The Mamelukes under Ibrahim Bey had tried to break away with help from Sennar, but they were stopped by Abdul Hadi Pasha, wali of Egypt, and his allies from Esad Ali Bey and the Azadis.
Do you not root for Ibrahim Bey today, Tsanna, in Egypt? After all, did he not try to declare independence as the Sultanate of Egypt?
Not really, Dab. Abdul Hadi was a popular reformer, and nobody really thinks of the Mamelukes as ‘ours’ anymore. They were foreign rulers, just the same as the Achaemenids or the Ptolemies in ages past. If the Mamelukes had managed to regain sole power in Egypt, it would not have been an Egypt for the Egyptians.
In your opinion.
…Yes. (Awkward pause) Well, regardless, Abdul Hadi Pasha emerged triumphant. He defeated the Wahhabis, seized the Islamic holy places, and controlled Egypt, Araby, Mesopotamia – essentially, all the empire except Rumelia and Anatolia. By 1825, with the end of the civil war and the foreign interventions, he had destroyed the Shadow Faction and taken back all but Rumelia.[8]
Then the empire would be divided for decades between Abdul Hadi and the Rumelian remnant – the Janissary Sultanate.
Another anachronistic name, not used at the time. Both groups claimed to be the only legitimate Ottoman state, of course. That caused all sorts of problems. Without an unambiguous single holder of the Caliphal office, all sorts of unscrupulous madmen could take advantage – like the Mahdi in India, who ignited the Great Jihad. (Audience murmurs)
The so-called Janissary Sultanate finally collapsed in 1848 after losing a war to the Greek rebels. Then the empire was finally reunited after thirty years.
It’s important to dwell on this, isn’t it, Tsanna, because it helps us understand why people in the 1930s expected the empire to reunite then as well, yes?
That’s right, Saliha. That’s a good point. Everyone was so used to the idea of a united Ottoman Empire that it would have shocked them to learn that nearly a century has passed and the empire has gone from another two-way division, like it was in Abdul Hadi’s time, to a complete fragmentation.
For better and for worse.
Yes. But let’s get there first. After the empire was reunited in 1848, there were a lot of reforms to governance and the military. The Janissaries were gone, of course, and a lot of other useless archaicisms were thrown out. They called it the Devrim Period, that’s the Reform Period.
The millet system was rationalised to improve relations between the faiths. Like the change to the Three Faiths Under One Flag banner.
Yes, well, not everyone saw it that way, but yes. The military reforms were put on full display when the new navy, the Donanmasi, unexpectedly reconquered Algiers in 1861.[9] That shocked many Europeans who had thought the empire was in inevitable decline.
Of course, by that point Abdul Hadi has passed away. Only about a year before, I think. That happened under Huseyin Yusuf Pasha.
But it was probably Abdul Hadi’s plan. Anyway, after that success, the empire focused on gradual expansion into Africa, building railways into the interior and competing with the Persians and Omanis around the Moon Lakes. In some ways the pace of reform did slow down after the 1870s, but still, one might have expected gradual progress to continue.
And then the Pandoric War happened.
Yes…but before we come to that, I think we should take a moment to look at just why the late Long Peace was something of a lost golden age. It wasn’t perfect, but…
No, you’re right. There was greater freedom of speech and less censorship than had been experienced for a long time, under the liberal vizier Hafiz Mustapha.
The Bulgar convert?
Yes, that’s the one. Not technically a Pomak, I suppose.[10]
He gets exaggerated too much as though he was the only one, though. There were quite a few influential liberal ministers in the Tricameron.[11] Utudjian, the Armenian, who was vizier before Abdullah Seyyid, he did a lot to liberalise censorship when he was Minister for the Interior.
Aydub, aydub, I suppose it is always more complex than that. There were freer newspapers, an expansion of popular literature and the printing press, and European-style plays for the first time.
Though operas began quite a while before that.[12]
True. You may recognise some of the names – Dab, you’re the expert.
Well, there’s Deukmejian’s, ah, in English you translate it as The Costermonger, there’s Koprulu the Younger’s The Little World, you know, the one that relates the Imperial Harem and the Kafes to the Platonic Cave…
Or just Constantinople! ? (Murmurs of recognition from audience)
Well, if you want to be modern about it…
Er, if I can get a word in, there’s literature too. From every corner of the empire, of course. Who would have thought that a Sennari author would write a novel that would wow millions of readers across Europe and the Novamund? But that’s exactly what happened with Ibn Adlan’s The Voice of the Desert. (Another murmur of recognition) Perhaps better known from the film adaptations these days.
If you really consider ibn Adlan to be a Sennari, I mean, he grew up in Souan…[13]
Well, let’s not start another Heritage Point of Controversy. (Slightly uncertain chuckles from audience) The point is, it was something of a golden age for culture.
There were still a lot of problems. Valide Sultans aside, Cythereanism was finding it hard making headway, slavery wasn’t completely abolished, there was still a lot of discrimination against Christians and other minorities.
But still, I think it’s fair to say that things would have improved without the war.
Though, of course, that might have made it hard for certain homelands to win their freedom. But there’s no profit in counterfactual questions. Yes, let’s talk about the Pandoric War, or as it’s usually known in our region, the Trebizond Disaster.
Yes. The Empire proclaimed neutrality at the outbreak of the war in 1896. (A few murmurs from the audience). That neutrality was maintained until 1898.
You may have seen the film The Vienna Mission, with Curt Smith, you know, which dramatises the events leading up to it – not very accurately, but you’ll get a general idea.
Yes…an aerodrome, a rather early and unreliable one, was sent from Constantinople to Vienna in June of that year to negotiate for Ottoman entry into the war. Archking Ferdinand of Danubia was desperate. The Pressburg Pact, that’s Germany, Danubia and Poland, were losing the war with Russia, and Ferdinand was willing to try anything to tip the scales.
Grand Vizier Abdullah Seyyid had been of the peace party, but when court opinion turned against peace, well, he had Archking Ferdinand over a barrel. He got him to sign Servia over to Constantinople’s control after the war. (Audience murmurs) And the Danubians did keep their promis e. But the war went badly, after some initial victories.[14]
They didn’t coordinate with the French peace efforts, and ended up isolated and facing the full force of the Russians when Germany and Danubia made peace.
Yes. There is a story that the hopes had been pinned on an alliance with Persia, and then the Persians refused to honour a treaty…but a lot of records were lost later, and there’s no proof.
No. In fact, if Abdullah Seyyid had been relying on the Persians, he got a rude awakening when they accused the Ambassador of murdering their Chancellor and then mobilised their army on the border with Iraq. It didn’t come to blows, but it meant there were even fewer troops to field against the Russians in the Caucasus. And so Trebizond was lost.
Isn’t that when the Sultan deposed the Mamaliks in Iraq?
That came a bit later, I think, after the war, but the process started then. The idea that they were unreliable and had been infiltrated by the Persians. Whether it was true or not, I don’t know.[15]
Well, regardless, the people were certainly angry when they found out all the confident pronouncements of victory in the papers were misplaced. And, sadly, they turned on Christians like yourself, Tsanna.
Well, not usually Copts, but yes, they turned on Armenian and Bulgarian Christians, claiming that they had acted as cryptic reservists for the Russians. It was a grim period of public persecution and rioting. Then the Sultan tried to appease the people by having Abdullah Seyyid executed...
Not realising how popular he was in Araby. Abdullah Seyyid was a rare example of a full-blooded Bedouin having worked his way up to the highest office in the land, in the face of sneering and prejudice. The killing drove his Arab brothers and sisters to a renewed fury and a sense of injustice.
Yes...maybe it’s a testament to how successful Abdullah Seyyid was, until the war at least, that enough people in the City seemed to have forgotten he was a rustic Arab at all, and missed those consequences.
And they replaced him with a Sennari. An actual Sennari, not like ibn Adlan...
Don’t start that again. Yes, Fadil Karim Pasha became Grand Vizier and stayed in office for a decade.[16] He was focused on trying to save his homeland from the Societists...
Well, in the beginning it was more about expanding the empire’s power to the Moon Lakes, as it took a while before Barkalus was really pushing into Africa. But yes, that was the priority, and it didn’t always sit well with others.
The Societists were always a growing threat in the background. Both on the frontier in Darfur or Kitara, and in the underground coffee-houses of the City.
Not at first. But eventually. Of course, the so-called Constantinople School Societists ran afoul of the authorities when their cobelligerents with Barkalus started attacking Darfur.[17]
For better or for worse. If more heterodox Societists had stuck around, it would probably have been harder for them to take over later.
Mm, controversial. (Subtle audience reactions) Anyway, you’re right that that growing war in the background meant that the First Interbellum was a more tense era for the Empire than for a lot of nations. Murad X became Sultan as a young man and his mother the Valide Sultan, Mehveş Sultan, became one of the most powerful and influential women in Ottoman history.
For better and for worse. Mehveş Sultan had ambitions to repair the losses of the so-called Trebizond Disaster – I won’t call it the Trebizond Backstab, that’s what those who blamed it on the Christians called it – but she also underestimated the depths of continuing unrest in Araby after the crackdown.
She’s a controversial figure in Egypt today, of course.
Well, she would be. She was certainly always regarded as an Egyptian through and through even before the Black Twenties, but I don’t know if she would have approved of how Egyptians sometimes see her legacy.
Not that we all see it the same way.
No. Well, we had the unrest in Araby, we had clashes between innovative youth groups and authoritarians in the City...you must remember that that antebellum golden age of culture we were discussing was not universally felt throughout the Empire.
No. It was mostly in the City, a few places in Rumelia, the big cities of Egypt and Iraq, a little in Anatolia. The countryside everywhere often remained as backward as it ever had been, no matter the push for universal education, and Araby was...
Araby was backward, you can say it. Isolated, proud, traditionalist, poor. Resentful of being looked down on, resentful of the killing of Abdullah Seyyid, and that’s before the One-Way Hajj.
Well, yes, we’ll get to that. Before the Black Twenties, Mehveş Sultan had cemented her power as the most powerful woman in the Empire. She had ambitions, and saw the Khivan War – as it was then known – as an opportunity.
We wanted Trebizond back, of course, but there was no desire to back the Persians against the Russians after they stabbed us in the back in the last war. And obviously even less to support the Russians. So Mehveş Sultan’s idea was to use the opportunity to attack and reclaim Greece (Audience murmurs), taking advantage of the fact that the European powers were engaged in a massive war and could not afford to antagonise the City.
They couldn’t lose access to the Sinai Canal.
No. That was the calculation. At first, the peace party still held the Tricameron, but then Said Izzet Pasha died of the plague—
Actually it was scarlet fever. This was before the plague reached us.[18]
Really? Strange...anyway, Mehveş Sultan was able to make Ferid Ibrahim Pasha Grand Vizier.
The Butcher of Belgrade. (Audience murmurs)
He was certainly better known for his brutality towards the Servs than his battlefield prowess. But in 1923 Mehveş Sultan was able to launch her surprise attack. Victory was won over the Greeks, at least on the mainland, but the Russians had been misread, and Tsar Paul declared war, no matter how many other foes he had.
It was a stupid decision on his part. He was already overstretched. The rational position would be what the Bouclier allies did – be furious, but try to cover it up with diplomatic rhetoric, knowing they had to keep the Empire on side.
Yes, it was an emotional decision. Under normal circumstances he’d probably have had cause to regret it. But then the plague reached us...
It hurt everyone, but we had the misfortune to be facing the one Russian general – Belosselsky – who had a good idea how to combat the plague.
Well, Vorobyov and Vershinin did, and Belosselsky knew to trust them.[19] He managed to break through to Erzurum and Erzincan and capture the railways intact. He took advantage of Kemal Fevzi Pasha’s disarray. Then he was able to use the railways to keep pushing until his armies reached Malatya, and then Adana and the Mediterranean.
The so-called Tarsus Salient. Cutting the empire in two.
Yes. Under any normal circumstances it would have been very vulnerable to being squashed from both sides, but with the plague and the mountainous terrain, it somehow endured for more than a quarter of a century through war and peace. A kind of frozen conflict.[20]
Belosselsky also got Tsarevich Mikhail killed too, and they ended up replacing him with Pazukhin. He was the one who held the salient through the fighting.
While Mehveş Sultan fled to Egypt.
She didn’t ‘flee’, she was trying to get more food shipments when the farmers were plague-ridden and the people were starving.
Still, it meant she wasn’t around when Ahmet Ismail, that brilliant general of Rumelia, got conned by some Neo-Azadis into launching a coup in the City that got her son and Ferid Ibrahim killed.
No. And that’s what started the process of disintegration towards Societism and the Eternal State.[21]
The worst Societists, from our perspective, were not the ones who took out Ahmet Ismail, nor Barkalus’ lot in Africa. They were the ones in the Nusantara. The ones who drove Javanese refugees from their land in millions, only for the damned Siamese to foist them on us...
Yes, the One-Way Hajj. It was a terrible time. Common decency meant one had to sympathise with those poor people...
Islamic brotherhood.
I might as well say Christian charity. But, fine. The point is that even the most sympathetic person in Araby knew what they brought with them.
The plague. It wasn’t their fault. It was the vile pagan Siamese’s fault. Blood was – is – on their hands. (Audience murmurs) Then that was an excuse for Jizani to rile up the people, proclaim the end was at hand, and march on Mecca.
While Algiers rose up as well. And the Kurds. The empire was disintegrating.
Not quite yet. Mehveş Sultan managed to stop Jizani’s mujahideen, reclaim Mecca and reassert her authority over everywhere but Algiers and Tunis, but the split of the Russian salient became permanent. Rumelia was separated once more, and this time, so was western Anatolia.
And at the time, people assumed the empire would one day reunite, just like it had after the Time of Troubles when the Janissary Sultanate fell. But not this time.
Well, a traditionalist might say it’s too early to say. (Slightly uncertain audience chuckles)
If the Pharaoh decides to don the mantle of a caliph again, I’ll be the first to know, I’m sure. (More reassured audience laughter) When the dust settled after the Black Twenties – it’s sometimes known as the War of the Schism to us – we were left with Mehveş Sultan and the boy sultan Murad XI in Alexandria ruling over the remnants of the empire. The Alexandrine Empire, as some called it.
They had actually done quite well in the Sudan. Building on Fadil Karim’s legacy. In the 1940s they managed to push the Societists out of Darfur, once Barkalus had gone back to South America.
Yes, and that was important for world history - all the pictures in the world papers showing what had been uncovered there, the forlorn abandoned Biblioteka Mundial centres and Celator training camps, the mass graves...but it’s another topic.
A grim one. So, how do we broach the topic we really came here to discuss – how the so-called ‘Alexandrine Empire’ fell apart.
Well, it unquestionably began with the food riots in 1929. Mostly the empire was held together – there was another period of unrest in Araby...
Trying to integrate the new Javanese population, with no support from Alexandria...should we be surprised there was unrest?
That wasn’t an accusation, Dab. Also, it didn’t help that the ringleaders of the unrest could always go and hide out over the border in Yemen when the police were sent to arrest them.
The ‘police’. You could call them that...
Well, anyway. The instability was such that Tunis was lost altogether to the Italians under that silly Romulan regime. After that, Mustafa Kamil in Alexandria tried to do a deal with Ahmet Ismail Pasha – while he was still alive, I mean-
I rather think that goes without saying, Tsanna.
Shut up, Dab...to crush the Russian salient after they’d been embarrassed by the Sikhs and thrown out of India. In 1936.
But Mehveş Sultan betrayed him and attacked Rhodes instead. So the salient survived, Ahmet Ismail was overthrown by the Societists, and the Corfiote Greeks almost managed to reconquer continental Greece due to the infighting.
That was probably the final nail in the united empire’s coffin. Certainly, the avalanche seems to have started then.
Either then or when Mehveş Sultan died in 1939. Then you had Princess Fawzia, the widow of Murad X, succeeding her as Valide Sultan...
Use her proper name, Tsanna. Not Fawzia Sultan. Call her (inaudible) Queen Cleopatra. (Audience reaction)
Not that old saw, Dab...
Come on. You can’t deny the cynicism of it. Right when the archaeological tourist trade was at its height? When every European and Novamundine was eager to explore the Pyramids and learn about Ramses and Shoshenq? When you had Russians putting on accents and showing fake Polish passports because they were so desperate to get around the ban? It just so happens that, ahem, Fawzia decided to start going around putting on a stripey headdress and signing autographs of tourists who said they’d loved her in Dawson’s Anthony and Cleopatra?
Oh, don’t exaggerate, Dab. Yes, obviously it was a time where the fascination with our ancient history started to influence our latter-day culture and identity. Finally being able to read those ancient records, as the Iraqis and Persians already had for decades, to bring vanished eras of history to life?[22] But that doesn’t mean we’d all become a bunch of interthesps as you clearly mean. (Mutters under breath) And for the record, it’s called a nemes, not a ‘stripey headdress’.
Well, it didn’t go well down in Araby, let me tell you. All sorts of rumours that you had started bowing down to statues of Ra and Horus, practising idolatry, turning your backs on Islam...
Some of us had never been Muslims to start with, Dab.
Well, that’s not the point. And with a Sultan who was still young and experienced, the caliphal authority was weakened. Every angry mullah could stir up a group of equally angry young men.
To torch a few Javanese homes, yes, but...
Not by this point. Oh, sometimes, I suppose, but by this point the Javanese were angry right alongside us. Muslim brothers.
Well...you’re being quiet, Saliha.
I was just practising the Societist Doctrine of the Last Throw; waiting for you two to kill each other so I could win the argument. (Audience laughter and a few ‘ooh’s) But some of what Daburah said was felt in Aintab and the other scraps of free Turkish land too. There were a lot of rumours that Egypt was not only drifting away from Islam, but that you were all, well, having parties and growing rich while we struggled on the frontiers. There were raids back and forth over the border with Kurdistan, and nobody quite agreed whether it was independent, Russian or Persian...no legal recourse. A lot of people chose to leave, if they could. It’s around this time that so many Turks fled, either from my land, from the Salient or out from under Societist rule in the Eternal State, and went overseas. Especially to California.
Where you all seem to have become involved in the film industry.[23]
That’s a stereotype...but there is a grain of truth to it. Certainly, it was felt it was the only way to become prosperous and safe. That or go into business in Pérousie or somewhere. The wealth in Egypt didn’t reach us.
It’s true the 1940s were a time of prosperity in Egypt, or at least in the big cities like Alexandria. Just like a lot of places in the world. And I know the shift to the Gold Standard wasn’t, ah, universally popular...
You can say that again. There were lots of factors behind the rebellion when it finally came. Stories of Arabs facing persecution and discrimination in Egypt.[24] The Iraqis were worried that they would be the front line of another war with Persia, and Russia. The tax regime being reformed.
Always the money. But yes, I get it. I do. I do regret what happened. Even though part of me is happy that Egypt is Egypt, and not just one part of a wider empire, even if the richest and most powerful part.
Poor you. No, sorry, that was unworthy. I know you and your people have had your own troubles.
Thank you.
Well, there was unrest long before the revolt began in earnest. You mentioned Yemen, well, the same applied to the Persian kleinkriegers blowing up Russian occupiers and then high-tailing it over the border to Iraq.
I know things were never the same after Hoseyin Pasha died in that drome crash in 1946. I know a lot of Arabs had seen him as the last hope—
It’s not as simple as that. Hoseyin Pasha wasn’t really an Arab – well, he was a Levantine Arab, Syrian. He was married to a Jewess.
...and what’s wrong with that?
Uh, nothing, Saliha, I just mean, he wasn’t seen as one of us.
But his policies were still popular, right? The tax reform? He was seen as a defender of the Arabs? Including the Peninsular Arabs, I mean.
All right, yes, I just think it’s an exaggerated point. All that stuff about everyone supposedly thinking he was murdered by the establishment, or the Societists or someone. Look, we all knew how unreliable dromes still could be in the 1940s, we weren’t stupid. It wasn’t about Egypt allegedly offing Hoseyin Pasha. It was about the idea that Egypt was so consumed with its parties and its high living that it never bothered to think about us and our needs enough to imagine it would need to off Hoseyin Pasha.
I mean...you were partly right. It is true that there was an embrace of ancient Egyptian fashion and culture by some – like our version of the Archie subculture in some other countries. Alexandria, and Cairo and some other cities, had thriving cultural scenes and the same kind of prosperity that the so-called Naughty Forties is associated with here in America, or in Europe or China. Giza expanded enormously as the tourist trade was built around the pyramids and the tombs of the ancient kings. Half the plays and operas were about Hatshepsut or Taharqa. Maybe your people were barely exaggerating to say we were worshipping them. Or we were worshipping the mammon they got us from the tourists.
I didn’t mean...
We still idolise that period now, really. So do a lot of foreigners. A time of historical epic films being made there, of glamorous leading ladies smoking hookahs while men dressed as centurions gamble away their savings at the casino. Where mysterious spies and exotic detectives intrude from the world of fiction into that of fact.
It does sound intoxicating.
That’s the word, probably. There was still strife. Struggle around the Moon Lakes, pushing the Societists out of Darfur. Initially there was suspicion of the ASN; nobody trusted the French and the Abyssinians were a bit suspect, too. But in time we would be one of the most important members. We had the grand cause of opposing Societism. Anything, really, to stop us thinking about the poor of Araby, the Javanese refugees, the borderlands with Russia in Iraq and the Levant, those who would be in the firing line when the golden age came to an end.
When you put it that way. I know we still have strife today. That arrangement in the Levant after all the fighting and disputes is...not universally popular. When I think about all that was unleashed, well, despite all our problems in that era before them, I can see why you’d see it as a golden age. One whose end you would mourn.
Exactly. And come to an end it did. In 1957...
*
(Lt Black’s note)
We will leave it there, lest we intrude into an era we have not yet adequately prepared the ground for. Next time, I’m bowing out, as apparently we need to hear about the world of physics...
[1] Augusta University is the institution that was founded in Lexington, Virginia both OTL and TTL in 1749 as Augusta Academy. In OTL it eventually became Washington and Lee University.
[2] The usual metonym for the theatre district in New York City in TTL, as opposed to Broadway in OTL.
[3] ‘Kuwait’ is normally still given with Portuguese-influenced spelling in English in TTL, even though it hasn’t been Portuguese for a long time.
[4] I.e. Gaziantep.
[5] These terms became remarkably confused in OTL. The Western distinction between Near East and Far East ultimately descends from the Greek geographer Ptolemy’s dividing line of the Ganges river; the Far East was ‘India beyond the Ganges’ to Ptolemy, the Near East was everything between the Ganges and Europe. In OTL they became applied increasingly specifically to smaller areas, and then the term ‘Middle East’ arose in the nineteenth century and, confusingly, was treated as synonymous to ‘Near East’ and eventually displaced it. In TTL, ‘Near East’ has come to mean Anatolia, the Levant and sometimes Egypt; ‘Middle East’ means the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Iran, and ‘Far East’ (like OTL) means China and its neighbours – thus cutting the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia/Indochina out of the scheme altogether. This somewhat artificial distinction has had the historiographic effect of implying more of a cultural separation between the Levant and Arabia or Iraq than, perhaps, actually exists.
[6] See Parts #85 and #99 in Volume II.
[7] See Part #102 in Volume III. ‘Rumelia’ here is usually used to mean all of ‘Turkey-in-Europe’ or the Ottoman Balkans.
[8] See Parts #108, #113 and #116 in Volume III.
[9] See Parts #168 in Volume IV and #207 in Volume V.
[10] The Pomaks are a Balkan demographic descended from Bulgarians who converted to Islam over the course of Ottoman rule. In OTL they have sometimes become persecuted, and the term Pomak is sometimes now considered offensive. The distinction made here is that Hafiz Mustafa (not his birth name) was raised an Orthodox Christian and converted to Islam in adulthood for reasons of political ambition, rather than being descended from Bulgarians who had converted much earlier and on a larger scale.
[11] I.e. the Yuchyu Meclis or triple assembly – see the introduction to Part #238 in Volume VI.
[12] In OTL the first Ottoman play (by the European definition) was performed in 1860. It is thought that the first opera was performed at the Topkapi Palace in 1797, but public performances (initially of Italian operas translated into Ottoman Turkish) began in 1840. Operas and operettas by Ottoman writers also began to be performed from the 1870s. In OTL the arts in the Ottoman Empire suffered from the endemic border conflicts and internal political strife over reform from the late 1870s onwards. This is largely avoided in TTL, allowing a longer-lasting cultural flowering.
[13] Souan is the Coptic form of the name Aswan in Arabic.
[14] See Parts #241, #242 and #247 in Volume VI.
[15] From 1704, Ottoman Iraq was ruled over by semi-autonomous Mamluks (not to be confused with the specific Egyptian rulers with which the term Mamluk or Mameluke is usually associated); Mamluks were freed slaves who had converted to Islam and then been trained for administration. The Mamluks who ruled Iraq were of Georgian and Circassian descent. In OTL, Mamluk Iraq lasted from 1704 to 1831 when the Ottomans reimposed direct rule from Constantinople. In TTL, that state of affairs lasted for almost a century longer, though in practice the Devrim reforms had already de facto centralised much of the actual political power and the Ottomans left the Mamluks in place more as a symbolic gesture towards special status for the militarised border region of Iraq.
[16] See Part #255 in Volume VII.
[17] See Part #268 in Volume VII.
[18] See Part #281 in Volume VIII.
[19] See Part #286 in Volume VIII. The Russian breakthrough was also born of sheer Russian luck and Ottoman incompetence as well as just Belosselsky’s proactive approach to plague control keeping his army fighting fit against weaker opponents.
[20] Compare the OTL Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh in an adjacent mountainous region, which remained static for 26 years between 1994 and 2020 before shooting war erupted again.
[21] See Part #296 in Volume VIII.
[22] Recall that as the Rosetta Stone was never discovered, in TTL hieroglyphs were not deciphered until the twenty-first century, so the Egyptomania craze is delayed (and largely replaced with an earlier fascination with Babylonia/Sumer instead).
[23] The (stereotypical) role of Turks in the Californian film industry in TTL can be somewhat compared to that of Armenians in OTL – though obviously it’s not as simple as that, and TTL has many Armenians in cinema just as OTL has many Turks. Note that the film classic Scheherazade mentioned in the introduction, based on a work of Arab literature, had people with Turkish names both as the leading lady and in the director’s chair.
[24] The elephant in the room to a viewer from OTL is that, in TTL, Egyptians generally do not consider themselves Arab. The identification of Egypt with pan-Arabism in OTL is mostly a twentieth century phenomenon (although this a complex and contentious subject). Even many experts on Egypt in foreign offices around the world were surprised and confused when Egypt began to embrace a pan-Arab identity in the 1930s and especially the 1950s with Nasserism. The difference is partly due to historical factors; in OTL Egypt and states across the Middle East shared a common hostility to colonialism (which can be argued to go back to Napoleon) and later to the existence of Israel, promoting a shared identity. In TTL, by contrast, Egypt is still seen as a distinct part of the Ottoman Empire, was the central authority of the ‘Alexandrine’ imperial remnant, and is embracing its newly-rediscovered ancient history and identity at a crucial time. Egypt in TTL still mostly speaks Arabic, of course, but TTL’s Egypt has a vested interest in emphasising the significant differences between Egyptian and Levantine or Peninsular Arabic (as they are known in OTL). By contrast, Egyptian media by 2020 TTL has largely swamped the other North African varieties of Arabic (especially in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica a.k.a. Libya) and replaced it with a standardised Egyptian form. There are still people in 2020 Egypt who consider themselves Arabs, but they are treated as a minority, and one outnumbered by the Coptic Christians (‘Copt’ alone does not imply Christian in the same way it does in OTL).
“SCHEHERAZADE RETURNS!
Mehmet Ertegun’s 1983 hit-craze sale-breaker is BACK at the Alhambra Odeon, Victor Street, for ONE WEEK ONLY!
Honour the late, great Latife Hurkus’ life by once again experiencing her magnum opus of acting in the title role of this epic of Near Eastern filmery!
ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS – ONE MILLION AND ONE THRILLS!
Available with both the original 1985 authorised dub or the 2004 retranslated subtitles – ask at the box office desk.
“SCHEHERAZADE” – NOVEMBER 23rd-28th ONLY – GET YOUR TICKETS BEFORE THEY SELL OUT!
See Motext page 10V-105”
- Advertising poster seen on Harley Crescent, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Sgt Bob Mumby, December 2020
Photographed and transcribed by Sgt Bob Mumby, December 2020
*
(Lt Black’s note)
That Thai lecture was a bit uncomfortable, wasn’t it? Fortunately, it seems not all the lectures we’ve recorded took quite such a confrontational approach to contentious issues. There’s some other world politics we need to cover to explain the leadup to the Sunrise War, and the Middle East is a part of that. Now Bob, where’s my cliff notes, you know I have trouble keeping all those Turkish politicians straight…
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “Land of War, Land of Peace” by Dx Tsanna Iskandar, Daburah bint Yusuf al-Tamimi and Saliha Halayik, recorded October 26th, 2020—
Welcome, everyone. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the other lectures in this festival looking at the culture and history of other nations. If so, you may have gathered that some people think that the proper exercise of Diversitarian values should be represented by yelling at each other from three feet away. (Slightly uncertain audience chuckles) My colleagues, here, and I have a different perspective. We believe that you, our audience, can only truly exercise your freedom of thought if you hear different perspectives from all of us – expressed respectfully when we differ – and then to make up your own minds. (Mixed reaction from audience)
Another way we differ from some other lectures you may have seen is that I don’t have a handler. (Brief murmur) That is, I’m here speaking for myself, not going through an American. To understand why, I should first introduce myself. My name is Doctrix Tsanna Iskandar. I was born in Cairo, I won’t say when, (A few chuckles) and studied at the University of Alexandria, where I met my husband. He is in the diplomatic service, and for the past ten years he has been part of the Egyptian Embassy staff here in Fredericksburg. I have been awarded a visiting chair at Augusta University and lecture there on Egyptian and broader Asian and African history.[1] That is my day job, and evidently I have been here long enough that they trust me to handle one of these lectures by myself. (A few chuckles and other reactions)
But I’m not alone, of course. I have my two friends here to assist me, and they’ve had much more exciting lives than me. Please introduce yourselves.
‘Interesting’ is one choice of word…thank you, Tsanna. Er, hello, I’m Daburah al-Tamimi, or should I say salaam aleikoum, as we say in Araby. It is a greeting but it means ‘peace be with you’.
Peace being something that has frequently been in short supply in our homelands, it is sad to say.
Perhaps…I originally came here to the Empire as a dancer in the opera, and then I was ‘discovered’ by Nassau Street.[2] I’ve sung contralto in a number of productions since then. Never top billing though!
You underestimate yourself, Dab, or perhaps you’re just looking for pity. (Slightly nervous audience chuckles) As you won’t, as they say here, blow your own trumpet, I’ll just tell the ladies and gentlemen that you were most recently in Il Consigliere as Giovanna on its run back in May of this year. (Impressed reactions from some parts of the audience) And you, Saliha?
I’m not sure what to say now, Tsanna! Ah…I was in California as an actress for some time, and then I married a New Englander (Mixed cheers and boos) and I’ve since been something in the Boston theatre scene. Nothing on Dab’s level though!
I think the critics who wowed over your Lady Macbeth last year would say otherwise, Saliha. (More impressed reactions) Well, now you know who we are as people. But it’s also important you know where we’re from. I’m Egyptian, and more specifically I’m niremenkhemi. You normally say a Copt. Al-Qibt in Arabic. We are the original people of Egypt, from which Egypt gets its name in English – the ‘gypt’ part. Lots of people in Egypt now consider themselves Copts, but traditionally Copts were Christians like me. It gets complicated…
Don’t overdo it this early, Tsanna, you’ll lose them. (Chuckles) I’m from Araby, as I mentioned, and from the Banu Tamim tribe. We’re all over the place now, but I’m from the deep desert of Najd originally, though my father moved our family to Couaite when I was a little girl.[3] And as far as faith goes, I’m a Sunni Muslim.
Whereas I’m a Turk, from Aintab.[4] My people are part of the minority of Turks who escaped the rule of the Eternal State and have fully preserved our heritage and language. I’m a Sunni Muslim also.
Thank you Dab, Saliha. Well, hopefully now you can see that we offer different perspectives here on our part of the world, the Near and Middle East as you usually call it in English.[5] It’s been a contentious and troubled area for longer than any of us have been alive, though we all hope that peace is now possible.
Of course. No-one is quite happy with the Treaty of Jerusalem, but that is diplomatic compromise for you.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Dab. Now our lands are home to the oldest civilisations in history – sorry, China! (Audience chuckles and ‘oohs’) A contrast to the young history of this land, at least since colonisation. So we could go back five thousand years or more and be here all day – but we won’t. To understand the Near and Middle East today, the best place to start is with the Ottoman Empire before its fragmentation.
Yes, the Ottoman Empire still casts a shadow over the way we think. Our idioms, our phrases. In some ways it is as though we are still expecting a Sultan in Stamboul, that is, Constantinople, to be looking over our shoulder.
But in order to understand that, Saliha, the good people here first need to understand what the Ottoman Empire truly was. First of all, that’s not technically a name which anyone who lived under it used. Like the Byzantine Empire before it – nobody called that ‘Byzantine’ except historians in hindsight. That Christian-led empire based in Constantinople, which finally fell in 1453…the people who lived there just called themselves Romans. They might speak Greek, they might have adopted forms of government and faith which Cicero and Caesar wouldn’t recognise, but they were Romans nonetheless, in continuity with a state stretching back two millennia to Romulus and the founding of Rome.
The early Ottomans also focused heavily on that continuity. The Sultanate of Rum, or Rome, in Anatolia far from the city of Rome…but Rome is an idea, not just a city.
Very true, Saliha. I may be the professional historian here, but you two keep me on my toes! (Audience chuckles) Yes, the Ottoman Sultan considered himself the heir to Rome. He was the Caliph, the Commander of the Muslim Faithful, the Shadow of God on Earth, Lord of the Horizon, and a whole host of other titles. And at the empire’s height, he had the temporal might to lend credence to his claims.
Yes, trying to understand the Ottoman Empire is always a challenge, isn’t it? All those centuries of history…
And in some ways, less change across them than one might expect.
In some ways, yes. Not in others.
Outsiders never truly understood it. They didn’t even call it by the right name.
That’s what I was saying. Like Byzantium. As far as the people of the empire were concerned, it was the Sublime Ottoman State. Some Europeans called it the Sublime Porte, but really that was a name for the gateway into Topkapi Palace.
Ottoman being another way of saying House of Osman. Named for the dynasty, not a people.
Yes, like when Danubia was just called the Hapsburg empire. Europeans sometimes just called it Turkey or the Turkish Empire, but that was never really the case. Turks sometimes had privileges, of course, but under Ottoman rule people from all kinds of backgrounds – Egyptians, Arabs, Albanians, Bulgars, Greeks, Armenians – could rise to positions of power.
Providing they didn’t try to form their own state and break away, of course. Then the iron fist came down. In some ways, proto-Societist. (Audience murmurs)
No, I don’t agree with that, Dab. People say that about lots of things. Yes, the Ottoman state structure was against nationalism and self-determination. But so had been the Byzantines and Romans before it. It was not global Societism, but the idea that peculiar citizenship of the empire came first before tongue or blood.
Well, we can agree to disagree. Which, I suppose, was the principle the empire often ran under.
You might say so. The way the empire worked was always difficult for outsiders to understand. Many parts of it seemed very archaic, while others were radical and alien to how Europeans thought. And often Novamundines and Chinese as well. I won’t go into detail here, but I’ll touch on a few points. The Ottoman army, historically, resembled the structure of Turkic steppe armies from centuries before, long after Turks had settled down and founded the empire.
Like the Banners in old Qing China.
True. Now the Ottoman approach to matters like citizenship and slavery still owed a lot to the classical world and the Romans, which often confused Europeans. Here in the Novamund, you are used to the idea that a slave can only mean someone with no rights who carries out backbreaking labour on a plantation. (A few murmurs) In the Ottoman system, it was possible for someone to be a titular slave while rising to a position of power. The Janissary corps were founded, back in the 1300s by your calendar, by levying a tax of boys from Christian subject family of the empire and raising them as Muslim soldiers and, technically, slaves. (More murmurs) Yet the Janissaries became an integral part of the state and, at one point, were effectively appointing and disposing of emperors on their say-so.
They were also forbidden to marry before the age of forty, back in the day. I really do think the inspiration for the Societist Celatores was—
Another time. And what of that Sultan? Sultans were descended from Osman I, but in the Ottoman system the succession passed down sideways through brothers, rather than directly to sons. So any brothers of a Sultan were a potential threat, and sometimes they would succeed at an advanced age. Some Sultans were powerful and effective rulers, such as Suleiman the Magnificent, who conquered vast swathes of territory, in many ways the height of empire. But, especially from the seventeenth century, many were ineffectual. A tradition had arisen of raising successors under house arrest in the Kafes, the ‘gilded cage’, luxury apartments that were part of the Imperial Harem. Needless to say, raising future monarchs completely isolated from the outside world was not a recipe for success.
But that’s another thing the Europeans didn’t understand – the influence that the women of the harem exerted, especially the Valide Sultan.
Usually the mother of the Sultan, yes. That point’s been over-egged by Cythereans before – I don’t think Doctrix Lacklin or Lady Bidwell would like to win political power through being a concubine! (Shocked audience laughter) But it is true to an extent, and yes, Europeans did not understand it.
In general, there was a sense by many outsiders – especially the Russians – that the empire was perpetually in a state of decline and about to fall over at any moment, simply because the Ottoman system of governance was so alien to them that they could not understand it.
Yet in some ways, it was just the same as the Byzantine Empire that those Russians idolised. Cutthroat emperors and scheming viziers had been par for the course there, as well.
It’s a fair point. The Ottomans were judged differently not only because they were dominated by a people alien to Europe – the same could be said of the Hungarians, after all – but because of the Islamic faith. Those two things together, especially with the military power the empire exerted in times of triumph like under Suleiman, meant Europe would always hate and fear the empire.
A whole culture was built along the Military Frontier between the Ottomans and Danubia, or what became Danubia. And a lot of feuding Catholic countries came together to oppose the empire’s navy in the Battle of Lepanto in the 1500s.
Yes. Well, that’s a brief description of the empire. I’m passing over centuries of history here, of course, to focus on the most relevant points for our discussion. Some things did change over time. It wasn’t necessarily a backwards place for science and technology, despite the impression that’s sometimes given in period dramas, and it was a state that prized art and literature. To really understand what happened to the lands today that were once part of the empire, though, we probably have to start with the turn of the nineteenth century.
By the Gregorian calendar, yes. Well, the empire went through a period of dominance from 1806 by a Bosniak war hero general turned vizier called Damat Melek Pasha, whom you may have heard of. (A few murmurs) Damat Melek rose to a greater height of power than most viziers and at one point he was effectively appointing Sultans, with the support of the Janissaries.
While alienating the Mamelukes who were ruling over Egypt at the time. Baba Ismail Pasha led a faction-
Yes, don’t worry, I’ll be talking about that later. But when Damat Melek died in 1816 after a decade in power, that left a power vacuum.[6] Opposition forces had been building for years in many parts of the empire, and multiple vizier hopefuls were assassinated in the streets of Constantinople. Unity essentially collapsed. They called it the Time of Troubles.
And outsiders took advantage of the empire’s weakness to expand at its expense – the Hapsburgs, the Russians, the Persians.
Yes, though perhaps to a lesser extent than any of them had hoped. All those opposition forces from within – Azadis in Iraq, or Mesopotamia as some of you may know it as, Wahhabis in Araby, Janissary extremists in Rumelia, Esad Ali Bey at the Omani court in Muscat… [7]
The Wahhabi extremists have ever been a plague on Araby. Unfortunately, they weren’t totally eradicated by the Time of Troubles, either.
No. I won’t go into the full details of that very complex period, but the empire stabilised into three main power groups; the Balkan Party, or Janissary Sultanate, which controlled Rumelia; the Shadow Faction which controlled Anatolia; and then there was the rest. The Mamelukes under Ibrahim Bey had tried to break away with help from Sennar, but they were stopped by Abdul Hadi Pasha, wali of Egypt, and his allies from Esad Ali Bey and the Azadis.
Do you not root for Ibrahim Bey today, Tsanna, in Egypt? After all, did he not try to declare independence as the Sultanate of Egypt?
Not really, Dab. Abdul Hadi was a popular reformer, and nobody really thinks of the Mamelukes as ‘ours’ anymore. They were foreign rulers, just the same as the Achaemenids or the Ptolemies in ages past. If the Mamelukes had managed to regain sole power in Egypt, it would not have been an Egypt for the Egyptians.
In your opinion.
…Yes. (Awkward pause) Well, regardless, Abdul Hadi Pasha emerged triumphant. He defeated the Wahhabis, seized the Islamic holy places, and controlled Egypt, Araby, Mesopotamia – essentially, all the empire except Rumelia and Anatolia. By 1825, with the end of the civil war and the foreign interventions, he had destroyed the Shadow Faction and taken back all but Rumelia.[8]
Then the empire would be divided for decades between Abdul Hadi and the Rumelian remnant – the Janissary Sultanate.
Another anachronistic name, not used at the time. Both groups claimed to be the only legitimate Ottoman state, of course. That caused all sorts of problems. Without an unambiguous single holder of the Caliphal office, all sorts of unscrupulous madmen could take advantage – like the Mahdi in India, who ignited the Great Jihad. (Audience murmurs)
The so-called Janissary Sultanate finally collapsed in 1848 after losing a war to the Greek rebels. Then the empire was finally reunited after thirty years.
It’s important to dwell on this, isn’t it, Tsanna, because it helps us understand why people in the 1930s expected the empire to reunite then as well, yes?
That’s right, Saliha. That’s a good point. Everyone was so used to the idea of a united Ottoman Empire that it would have shocked them to learn that nearly a century has passed and the empire has gone from another two-way division, like it was in Abdul Hadi’s time, to a complete fragmentation.
For better and for worse.
Yes. But let’s get there first. After the empire was reunited in 1848, there were a lot of reforms to governance and the military. The Janissaries were gone, of course, and a lot of other useless archaicisms were thrown out. They called it the Devrim Period, that’s the Reform Period.
The millet system was rationalised to improve relations between the faiths. Like the change to the Three Faiths Under One Flag banner.
Yes, well, not everyone saw it that way, but yes. The military reforms were put on full display when the new navy, the Donanmasi, unexpectedly reconquered Algiers in 1861.[9] That shocked many Europeans who had thought the empire was in inevitable decline.
Of course, by that point Abdul Hadi has passed away. Only about a year before, I think. That happened under Huseyin Yusuf Pasha.
But it was probably Abdul Hadi’s plan. Anyway, after that success, the empire focused on gradual expansion into Africa, building railways into the interior and competing with the Persians and Omanis around the Moon Lakes. In some ways the pace of reform did slow down after the 1870s, but still, one might have expected gradual progress to continue.
And then the Pandoric War happened.
Yes…but before we come to that, I think we should take a moment to look at just why the late Long Peace was something of a lost golden age. It wasn’t perfect, but…
No, you’re right. There was greater freedom of speech and less censorship than had been experienced for a long time, under the liberal vizier Hafiz Mustapha.
The Bulgar convert?
Yes, that’s the one. Not technically a Pomak, I suppose.[10]
He gets exaggerated too much as though he was the only one, though. There were quite a few influential liberal ministers in the Tricameron.[11] Utudjian, the Armenian, who was vizier before Abdullah Seyyid, he did a lot to liberalise censorship when he was Minister for the Interior.
Aydub, aydub, I suppose it is always more complex than that. There were freer newspapers, an expansion of popular literature and the printing press, and European-style plays for the first time.
Though operas began quite a while before that.[12]
True. You may recognise some of the names – Dab, you’re the expert.
Well, there’s Deukmejian’s, ah, in English you translate it as The Costermonger, there’s Koprulu the Younger’s The Little World, you know, the one that relates the Imperial Harem and the Kafes to the Platonic Cave…
Or just Constantinople! ? (Murmurs of recognition from audience)
Well, if you want to be modern about it…
Er, if I can get a word in, there’s literature too. From every corner of the empire, of course. Who would have thought that a Sennari author would write a novel that would wow millions of readers across Europe and the Novamund? But that’s exactly what happened with Ibn Adlan’s The Voice of the Desert. (Another murmur of recognition) Perhaps better known from the film adaptations these days.
If you really consider ibn Adlan to be a Sennari, I mean, he grew up in Souan…[13]
Well, let’s not start another Heritage Point of Controversy. (Slightly uncertain chuckles from audience) The point is, it was something of a golden age for culture.
There were still a lot of problems. Valide Sultans aside, Cythereanism was finding it hard making headway, slavery wasn’t completely abolished, there was still a lot of discrimination against Christians and other minorities.
But still, I think it’s fair to say that things would have improved without the war.
Though, of course, that might have made it hard for certain homelands to win their freedom. But there’s no profit in counterfactual questions. Yes, let’s talk about the Pandoric War, or as it’s usually known in our region, the Trebizond Disaster.
Yes. The Empire proclaimed neutrality at the outbreak of the war in 1896. (A few murmurs from the audience). That neutrality was maintained until 1898.
You may have seen the film The Vienna Mission, with Curt Smith, you know, which dramatises the events leading up to it – not very accurately, but you’ll get a general idea.
Yes…an aerodrome, a rather early and unreliable one, was sent from Constantinople to Vienna in June of that year to negotiate for Ottoman entry into the war. Archking Ferdinand of Danubia was desperate. The Pressburg Pact, that’s Germany, Danubia and Poland, were losing the war with Russia, and Ferdinand was willing to try anything to tip the scales.
Grand Vizier Abdullah Seyyid had been of the peace party, but when court opinion turned against peace, well, he had Archking Ferdinand over a barrel. He got him to sign Servia over to Constantinople’s control after the war. (Audience murmurs) And the Danubians did keep their promis e. But the war went badly, after some initial victories.[14]
They didn’t coordinate with the French peace efforts, and ended up isolated and facing the full force of the Russians when Germany and Danubia made peace.
Yes. There is a story that the hopes had been pinned on an alliance with Persia, and then the Persians refused to honour a treaty…but a lot of records were lost later, and there’s no proof.
No. In fact, if Abdullah Seyyid had been relying on the Persians, he got a rude awakening when they accused the Ambassador of murdering their Chancellor and then mobilised their army on the border with Iraq. It didn’t come to blows, but it meant there were even fewer troops to field against the Russians in the Caucasus. And so Trebizond was lost.
Isn’t that when the Sultan deposed the Mamaliks in Iraq?
That came a bit later, I think, after the war, but the process started then. The idea that they were unreliable and had been infiltrated by the Persians. Whether it was true or not, I don’t know.[15]
Well, regardless, the people were certainly angry when they found out all the confident pronouncements of victory in the papers were misplaced. And, sadly, they turned on Christians like yourself, Tsanna.
Well, not usually Copts, but yes, they turned on Armenian and Bulgarian Christians, claiming that they had acted as cryptic reservists for the Russians. It was a grim period of public persecution and rioting. Then the Sultan tried to appease the people by having Abdullah Seyyid executed...
Not realising how popular he was in Araby. Abdullah Seyyid was a rare example of a full-blooded Bedouin having worked his way up to the highest office in the land, in the face of sneering and prejudice. The killing drove his Arab brothers and sisters to a renewed fury and a sense of injustice.
Yes...maybe it’s a testament to how successful Abdullah Seyyid was, until the war at least, that enough people in the City seemed to have forgotten he was a rustic Arab at all, and missed those consequences.
And they replaced him with a Sennari. An actual Sennari, not like ibn Adlan...
Don’t start that again. Yes, Fadil Karim Pasha became Grand Vizier and stayed in office for a decade.[16] He was focused on trying to save his homeland from the Societists...
Well, in the beginning it was more about expanding the empire’s power to the Moon Lakes, as it took a while before Barkalus was really pushing into Africa. But yes, that was the priority, and it didn’t always sit well with others.
The Societists were always a growing threat in the background. Both on the frontier in Darfur or Kitara, and in the underground coffee-houses of the City.
Not at first. But eventually. Of course, the so-called Constantinople School Societists ran afoul of the authorities when their cobelligerents with Barkalus started attacking Darfur.[17]
For better or for worse. If more heterodox Societists had stuck around, it would probably have been harder for them to take over later.
Mm, controversial. (Subtle audience reactions) Anyway, you’re right that that growing war in the background meant that the First Interbellum was a more tense era for the Empire than for a lot of nations. Murad X became Sultan as a young man and his mother the Valide Sultan, Mehveş Sultan, became one of the most powerful and influential women in Ottoman history.
For better and for worse. Mehveş Sultan had ambitions to repair the losses of the so-called Trebizond Disaster – I won’t call it the Trebizond Backstab, that’s what those who blamed it on the Christians called it – but she also underestimated the depths of continuing unrest in Araby after the crackdown.
She’s a controversial figure in Egypt today, of course.
Well, she would be. She was certainly always regarded as an Egyptian through and through even before the Black Twenties, but I don’t know if she would have approved of how Egyptians sometimes see her legacy.
Not that we all see it the same way.
No. Well, we had the unrest in Araby, we had clashes between innovative youth groups and authoritarians in the City...you must remember that that antebellum golden age of culture we were discussing was not universally felt throughout the Empire.
No. It was mostly in the City, a few places in Rumelia, the big cities of Egypt and Iraq, a little in Anatolia. The countryside everywhere often remained as backward as it ever had been, no matter the push for universal education, and Araby was...
Araby was backward, you can say it. Isolated, proud, traditionalist, poor. Resentful of being looked down on, resentful of the killing of Abdullah Seyyid, and that’s before the One-Way Hajj.
Well, yes, we’ll get to that. Before the Black Twenties, Mehveş Sultan had cemented her power as the most powerful woman in the Empire. She had ambitions, and saw the Khivan War – as it was then known – as an opportunity.
We wanted Trebizond back, of course, but there was no desire to back the Persians against the Russians after they stabbed us in the back in the last war. And obviously even less to support the Russians. So Mehveş Sultan’s idea was to use the opportunity to attack and reclaim Greece (Audience murmurs), taking advantage of the fact that the European powers were engaged in a massive war and could not afford to antagonise the City.
They couldn’t lose access to the Sinai Canal.
No. That was the calculation. At first, the peace party still held the Tricameron, but then Said Izzet Pasha died of the plague—
Actually it was scarlet fever. This was before the plague reached us.[18]
Really? Strange...anyway, Mehveş Sultan was able to make Ferid Ibrahim Pasha Grand Vizier.
The Butcher of Belgrade. (Audience murmurs)
He was certainly better known for his brutality towards the Servs than his battlefield prowess. But in 1923 Mehveş Sultan was able to launch her surprise attack. Victory was won over the Greeks, at least on the mainland, but the Russians had been misread, and Tsar Paul declared war, no matter how many other foes he had.
It was a stupid decision on his part. He was already overstretched. The rational position would be what the Bouclier allies did – be furious, but try to cover it up with diplomatic rhetoric, knowing they had to keep the Empire on side.
Yes, it was an emotional decision. Under normal circumstances he’d probably have had cause to regret it. But then the plague reached us...
It hurt everyone, but we had the misfortune to be facing the one Russian general – Belosselsky – who had a good idea how to combat the plague.
Well, Vorobyov and Vershinin did, and Belosselsky knew to trust them.[19] He managed to break through to Erzurum and Erzincan and capture the railways intact. He took advantage of Kemal Fevzi Pasha’s disarray. Then he was able to use the railways to keep pushing until his armies reached Malatya, and then Adana and the Mediterranean.
The so-called Tarsus Salient. Cutting the empire in two.
Yes. Under any normal circumstances it would have been very vulnerable to being squashed from both sides, but with the plague and the mountainous terrain, it somehow endured for more than a quarter of a century through war and peace. A kind of frozen conflict.[20]
Belosselsky also got Tsarevich Mikhail killed too, and they ended up replacing him with Pazukhin. He was the one who held the salient through the fighting.
While Mehveş Sultan fled to Egypt.
She didn’t ‘flee’, she was trying to get more food shipments when the farmers were plague-ridden and the people were starving.
Still, it meant she wasn’t around when Ahmet Ismail, that brilliant general of Rumelia, got conned by some Neo-Azadis into launching a coup in the City that got her son and Ferid Ibrahim killed.
No. And that’s what started the process of disintegration towards Societism and the Eternal State.[21]
The worst Societists, from our perspective, were not the ones who took out Ahmet Ismail, nor Barkalus’ lot in Africa. They were the ones in the Nusantara. The ones who drove Javanese refugees from their land in millions, only for the damned Siamese to foist them on us...
Yes, the One-Way Hajj. It was a terrible time. Common decency meant one had to sympathise with those poor people...
Islamic brotherhood.
I might as well say Christian charity. But, fine. The point is that even the most sympathetic person in Araby knew what they brought with them.
The plague. It wasn’t their fault. It was the vile pagan Siamese’s fault. Blood was – is – on their hands. (Audience murmurs) Then that was an excuse for Jizani to rile up the people, proclaim the end was at hand, and march on Mecca.
While Algiers rose up as well. And the Kurds. The empire was disintegrating.
Not quite yet. Mehveş Sultan managed to stop Jizani’s mujahideen, reclaim Mecca and reassert her authority over everywhere but Algiers and Tunis, but the split of the Russian salient became permanent. Rumelia was separated once more, and this time, so was western Anatolia.
And at the time, people assumed the empire would one day reunite, just like it had after the Time of Troubles when the Janissary Sultanate fell. But not this time.
Well, a traditionalist might say it’s too early to say. (Slightly uncertain audience chuckles)
If the Pharaoh decides to don the mantle of a caliph again, I’ll be the first to know, I’m sure. (More reassured audience laughter) When the dust settled after the Black Twenties – it’s sometimes known as the War of the Schism to us – we were left with Mehveş Sultan and the boy sultan Murad XI in Alexandria ruling over the remnants of the empire. The Alexandrine Empire, as some called it.
They had actually done quite well in the Sudan. Building on Fadil Karim’s legacy. In the 1940s they managed to push the Societists out of Darfur, once Barkalus had gone back to South America.
Yes, and that was important for world history - all the pictures in the world papers showing what had been uncovered there, the forlorn abandoned Biblioteka Mundial centres and Celator training camps, the mass graves...but it’s another topic.
A grim one. So, how do we broach the topic we really came here to discuss – how the so-called ‘Alexandrine Empire’ fell apart.
Well, it unquestionably began with the food riots in 1929. Mostly the empire was held together – there was another period of unrest in Araby...
Trying to integrate the new Javanese population, with no support from Alexandria...should we be surprised there was unrest?
That wasn’t an accusation, Dab. Also, it didn’t help that the ringleaders of the unrest could always go and hide out over the border in Yemen when the police were sent to arrest them.
The ‘police’. You could call them that...
Well, anyway. The instability was such that Tunis was lost altogether to the Italians under that silly Romulan regime. After that, Mustafa Kamil in Alexandria tried to do a deal with Ahmet Ismail Pasha – while he was still alive, I mean-
I rather think that goes without saying, Tsanna.
Shut up, Dab...to crush the Russian salient after they’d been embarrassed by the Sikhs and thrown out of India. In 1936.
But Mehveş Sultan betrayed him and attacked Rhodes instead. So the salient survived, Ahmet Ismail was overthrown by the Societists, and the Corfiote Greeks almost managed to reconquer continental Greece due to the infighting.
That was probably the final nail in the united empire’s coffin. Certainly, the avalanche seems to have started then.
Either then or when Mehveş Sultan died in 1939. Then you had Princess Fawzia, the widow of Murad X, succeeding her as Valide Sultan...
Use her proper name, Tsanna. Not Fawzia Sultan. Call her (inaudible) Queen Cleopatra. (Audience reaction)
Not that old saw, Dab...
Come on. You can’t deny the cynicism of it. Right when the archaeological tourist trade was at its height? When every European and Novamundine was eager to explore the Pyramids and learn about Ramses and Shoshenq? When you had Russians putting on accents and showing fake Polish passports because they were so desperate to get around the ban? It just so happens that, ahem, Fawzia decided to start going around putting on a stripey headdress and signing autographs of tourists who said they’d loved her in Dawson’s Anthony and Cleopatra?
Oh, don’t exaggerate, Dab. Yes, obviously it was a time where the fascination with our ancient history started to influence our latter-day culture and identity. Finally being able to read those ancient records, as the Iraqis and Persians already had for decades, to bring vanished eras of history to life?[22] But that doesn’t mean we’d all become a bunch of interthesps as you clearly mean. (Mutters under breath) And for the record, it’s called a nemes, not a ‘stripey headdress’.
Well, it didn’t go well down in Araby, let me tell you. All sorts of rumours that you had started bowing down to statues of Ra and Horus, practising idolatry, turning your backs on Islam...
Some of us had never been Muslims to start with, Dab.
Well, that’s not the point. And with a Sultan who was still young and experienced, the caliphal authority was weakened. Every angry mullah could stir up a group of equally angry young men.
To torch a few Javanese homes, yes, but...
Not by this point. Oh, sometimes, I suppose, but by this point the Javanese were angry right alongside us. Muslim brothers.
Well...you’re being quiet, Saliha.
I was just practising the Societist Doctrine of the Last Throw; waiting for you two to kill each other so I could win the argument. (Audience laughter and a few ‘ooh’s) But some of what Daburah said was felt in Aintab and the other scraps of free Turkish land too. There were a lot of rumours that Egypt was not only drifting away from Islam, but that you were all, well, having parties and growing rich while we struggled on the frontiers. There were raids back and forth over the border with Kurdistan, and nobody quite agreed whether it was independent, Russian or Persian...no legal recourse. A lot of people chose to leave, if they could. It’s around this time that so many Turks fled, either from my land, from the Salient or out from under Societist rule in the Eternal State, and went overseas. Especially to California.
Where you all seem to have become involved in the film industry.[23]
That’s a stereotype...but there is a grain of truth to it. Certainly, it was felt it was the only way to become prosperous and safe. That or go into business in Pérousie or somewhere. The wealth in Egypt didn’t reach us.
It’s true the 1940s were a time of prosperity in Egypt, or at least in the big cities like Alexandria. Just like a lot of places in the world. And I know the shift to the Gold Standard wasn’t, ah, universally popular...
You can say that again. There were lots of factors behind the rebellion when it finally came. Stories of Arabs facing persecution and discrimination in Egypt.[24] The Iraqis were worried that they would be the front line of another war with Persia, and Russia. The tax regime being reformed.
Always the money. But yes, I get it. I do. I do regret what happened. Even though part of me is happy that Egypt is Egypt, and not just one part of a wider empire, even if the richest and most powerful part.
Poor you. No, sorry, that was unworthy. I know you and your people have had your own troubles.
Thank you.
Well, there was unrest long before the revolt began in earnest. You mentioned Yemen, well, the same applied to the Persian kleinkriegers blowing up Russian occupiers and then high-tailing it over the border to Iraq.
I know things were never the same after Hoseyin Pasha died in that drome crash in 1946. I know a lot of Arabs had seen him as the last hope—
It’s not as simple as that. Hoseyin Pasha wasn’t really an Arab – well, he was a Levantine Arab, Syrian. He was married to a Jewess.
...and what’s wrong with that?
Uh, nothing, Saliha, I just mean, he wasn’t seen as one of us.
But his policies were still popular, right? The tax reform? He was seen as a defender of the Arabs? Including the Peninsular Arabs, I mean.
All right, yes, I just think it’s an exaggerated point. All that stuff about everyone supposedly thinking he was murdered by the establishment, or the Societists or someone. Look, we all knew how unreliable dromes still could be in the 1940s, we weren’t stupid. It wasn’t about Egypt allegedly offing Hoseyin Pasha. It was about the idea that Egypt was so consumed with its parties and its high living that it never bothered to think about us and our needs enough to imagine it would need to off Hoseyin Pasha.
I mean...you were partly right. It is true that there was an embrace of ancient Egyptian fashion and culture by some – like our version of the Archie subculture in some other countries. Alexandria, and Cairo and some other cities, had thriving cultural scenes and the same kind of prosperity that the so-called Naughty Forties is associated with here in America, or in Europe or China. Giza expanded enormously as the tourist trade was built around the pyramids and the tombs of the ancient kings. Half the plays and operas were about Hatshepsut or Taharqa. Maybe your people were barely exaggerating to say we were worshipping them. Or we were worshipping the mammon they got us from the tourists.
I didn’t mean...
We still idolise that period now, really. So do a lot of foreigners. A time of historical epic films being made there, of glamorous leading ladies smoking hookahs while men dressed as centurions gamble away their savings at the casino. Where mysterious spies and exotic detectives intrude from the world of fiction into that of fact.
It does sound intoxicating.
That’s the word, probably. There was still strife. Struggle around the Moon Lakes, pushing the Societists out of Darfur. Initially there was suspicion of the ASN; nobody trusted the French and the Abyssinians were a bit suspect, too. But in time we would be one of the most important members. We had the grand cause of opposing Societism. Anything, really, to stop us thinking about the poor of Araby, the Javanese refugees, the borderlands with Russia in Iraq and the Levant, those who would be in the firing line when the golden age came to an end.
When you put it that way. I know we still have strife today. That arrangement in the Levant after all the fighting and disputes is...not universally popular. When I think about all that was unleashed, well, despite all our problems in that era before them, I can see why you’d see it as a golden age. One whose end you would mourn.
Exactly. And come to an end it did. In 1957...
*
(Lt Black’s note)
We will leave it there, lest we intrude into an era we have not yet adequately prepared the ground for. Next time, I’m bowing out, as apparently we need to hear about the world of physics...
[1] Augusta University is the institution that was founded in Lexington, Virginia both OTL and TTL in 1749 as Augusta Academy. In OTL it eventually became Washington and Lee University.
[2] The usual metonym for the theatre district in New York City in TTL, as opposed to Broadway in OTL.
[3] ‘Kuwait’ is normally still given with Portuguese-influenced spelling in English in TTL, even though it hasn’t been Portuguese for a long time.
[4] I.e. Gaziantep.
[5] These terms became remarkably confused in OTL. The Western distinction between Near East and Far East ultimately descends from the Greek geographer Ptolemy’s dividing line of the Ganges river; the Far East was ‘India beyond the Ganges’ to Ptolemy, the Near East was everything between the Ganges and Europe. In OTL they became applied increasingly specifically to smaller areas, and then the term ‘Middle East’ arose in the nineteenth century and, confusingly, was treated as synonymous to ‘Near East’ and eventually displaced it. In TTL, ‘Near East’ has come to mean Anatolia, the Levant and sometimes Egypt; ‘Middle East’ means the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Iran, and ‘Far East’ (like OTL) means China and its neighbours – thus cutting the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia/Indochina out of the scheme altogether. This somewhat artificial distinction has had the historiographic effect of implying more of a cultural separation between the Levant and Arabia or Iraq than, perhaps, actually exists.
[6] See Parts #85 and #99 in Volume II.
[7] See Part #102 in Volume III. ‘Rumelia’ here is usually used to mean all of ‘Turkey-in-Europe’ or the Ottoman Balkans.
[8] See Parts #108, #113 and #116 in Volume III.
[9] See Parts #168 in Volume IV and #207 in Volume V.
[10] The Pomaks are a Balkan demographic descended from Bulgarians who converted to Islam over the course of Ottoman rule. In OTL they have sometimes become persecuted, and the term Pomak is sometimes now considered offensive. The distinction made here is that Hafiz Mustafa (not his birth name) was raised an Orthodox Christian and converted to Islam in adulthood for reasons of political ambition, rather than being descended from Bulgarians who had converted much earlier and on a larger scale.
[11] I.e. the Yuchyu Meclis or triple assembly – see the introduction to Part #238 in Volume VI.
[12] In OTL the first Ottoman play (by the European definition) was performed in 1860. It is thought that the first opera was performed at the Topkapi Palace in 1797, but public performances (initially of Italian operas translated into Ottoman Turkish) began in 1840. Operas and operettas by Ottoman writers also began to be performed from the 1870s. In OTL the arts in the Ottoman Empire suffered from the endemic border conflicts and internal political strife over reform from the late 1870s onwards. This is largely avoided in TTL, allowing a longer-lasting cultural flowering.
[13] Souan is the Coptic form of the name Aswan in Arabic.
[14] See Parts #241, #242 and #247 in Volume VI.
[15] From 1704, Ottoman Iraq was ruled over by semi-autonomous Mamluks (not to be confused with the specific Egyptian rulers with which the term Mamluk or Mameluke is usually associated); Mamluks were freed slaves who had converted to Islam and then been trained for administration. The Mamluks who ruled Iraq were of Georgian and Circassian descent. In OTL, Mamluk Iraq lasted from 1704 to 1831 when the Ottomans reimposed direct rule from Constantinople. In TTL, that state of affairs lasted for almost a century longer, though in practice the Devrim reforms had already de facto centralised much of the actual political power and the Ottomans left the Mamluks in place more as a symbolic gesture towards special status for the militarised border region of Iraq.
[16] See Part #255 in Volume VII.
[17] See Part #268 in Volume VII.
[18] See Part #281 in Volume VIII.
[19] See Part #286 in Volume VIII. The Russian breakthrough was also born of sheer Russian luck and Ottoman incompetence as well as just Belosselsky’s proactive approach to plague control keeping his army fighting fit against weaker opponents.
[20] Compare the OTL Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh in an adjacent mountainous region, which remained static for 26 years between 1994 and 2020 before shooting war erupted again.
[21] See Part #296 in Volume VIII.
[22] Recall that as the Rosetta Stone was never discovered, in TTL hieroglyphs were not deciphered until the twenty-first century, so the Egyptomania craze is delayed (and largely replaced with an earlier fascination with Babylonia/Sumer instead).
[23] The (stereotypical) role of Turks in the Californian film industry in TTL can be somewhat compared to that of Armenians in OTL – though obviously it’s not as simple as that, and TTL has many Armenians in cinema just as OTL has many Turks. Note that the film classic Scheherazade mentioned in the introduction, based on a work of Arab literature, had people with Turkish names both as the leading lady and in the director’s chair.
[24] The elephant in the room to a viewer from OTL is that, in TTL, Egyptians generally do not consider themselves Arab. The identification of Egypt with pan-Arabism in OTL is mostly a twentieth century phenomenon (although this a complex and contentious subject). Even many experts on Egypt in foreign offices around the world were surprised and confused when Egypt began to embrace a pan-Arab identity in the 1930s and especially the 1950s with Nasserism. The difference is partly due to historical factors; in OTL Egypt and states across the Middle East shared a common hostility to colonialism (which can be argued to go back to Napoleon) and later to the existence of Israel, promoting a shared identity. In TTL, by contrast, Egypt is still seen as a distinct part of the Ottoman Empire, was the central authority of the ‘Alexandrine’ imperial remnant, and is embracing its newly-rediscovered ancient history and identity at a crucial time. Egypt in TTL still mostly speaks Arabic, of course, but TTL’s Egypt has a vested interest in emphasising the significant differences between Egyptian and Levantine or Peninsular Arabic (as they are known in OTL). By contrast, Egyptian media by 2020 TTL has largely swamped the other North African varieties of Arabic (especially in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica a.k.a. Libya) and replaced it with a standardised Egyptian form. There are still people in 2020 Egypt who consider themselves Arabs, but they are treated as a minority, and one outnumbered by the Coptic Christians (‘Copt’ alone does not imply Christian in the same way it does in OTL).
announcement of hiatus
Thande
Donor
I hope everyone enjoyed that part - as I said above, that will be the last update to LTTW until September, as I am firstly away on holiday and then have been called for jury duty. Thank you everyone for your comments and we will continue Volume IX to its conclusion when I return!
Hopefully Volume VI will go on sale before I leave for my holiday, I will post it here if it does (or at a later day otherwise).
Hopefully Volume VI will go on sale before I leave for my holiday, I will post it here if it does (or at a later day otherwise).
Kaiphranos
Donor
Hmm, now I'm curious about alternate hieroglyphic decipherment routes. With more interest in cuneiform, maybe we get something like the Caylus Vase but going the other way - using one of the other languages to decipher the hieroglyphs? It's a pity the Treaty of Kadesh would probably require quite a leap to use as a bilingual - we have the text in both languages but I don't think they occur together. Maybe there is a Demotic/Greek bilingual out there? Or even Latin? Giving the decipherment date as the 21st century makes me wonder if a process like the decipherment of Linear B might work, if one assumes that the hieroglyphs effectively encode a form of Coptic - a language which probably gets increased study ITTL...
Huh. The Eternal State only covers part of the Ottoman Empire? That...
That seems odd. I always figured the Embrace of a flavor of Societism was part and parcel of the need to weld all the parts of the Empire together, but if we're talking just part of Anatolia and the Balkans... that hardly seems diverse enough to need Societism.
I am left with many questions. Future updates will no doubt answer them.
That seems odd. I always figured the Embrace of a flavor of Societism was part and parcel of the need to weld all the parts of the Empire together, but if we're talking just part of Anatolia and the Balkans... that hardly seems diverse enough to need Societism.
I am left with many questions. Future updates will no doubt answer them.
Look to the West Volume VI now on sale
Thande
Donor
Dear all,
I can announce that Look to the West Volume VI: The Death of Nations is now on sale from the Amazon store!
AMAZON LINK THE DEATH OF NATIONS
Another fantastic cover by Jack Tindale.
As a reminder, "The Death of Nations" is written in prose style, unlike the other volumes (really it's my homage to Harry Turtledove's style in series like Worldwar and TL-191). It can be bought normally or also viewed for free on Kindle Unlimited. The author is paid for the latter by page count, so given how long LTTW is, no surprises that I usually make more from that than I do from the people who buy it normally
I hope you all enjoy it - the published version includes a lot of additional media not found in the original thread, including new maps of North America and India (among other places) and Air Force Roundels of the Pandoric War.
As always, Amazon reviews really do help more than you can imagine so anyone who leaves one (preferably a positive one ) for this book, or any other of mine, has my undying gratitude and any cameo they like in Volume X
Thanks everyone for reading and I will see you again on this thread in September!
Thande
I can announce that Look to the West Volume VI: The Death of Nations is now on sale from the Amazon store!
AMAZON LINK THE DEATH OF NATIONS
Another fantastic cover by Jack Tindale.
As a reminder, "The Death of Nations" is written in prose style, unlike the other volumes (really it's my homage to Harry Turtledove's style in series like Worldwar and TL-191). It can be bought normally or also viewed for free on Kindle Unlimited. The author is paid for the latter by page count, so given how long LTTW is, no surprises that I usually make more from that than I do from the people who buy it normally
I hope you all enjoy it - the published version includes a lot of additional media not found in the original thread, including new maps of North America and India (among other places) and Air Force Roundels of the Pandoric War.
As always, Amazon reviews really do help more than you can imagine so anyone who leaves one (preferably a positive one
) for this book, or any other of mine, has my undying gratitude and any cameo they like in Volume X Thanks everyone for reading and I will see you again on this thread in September!
Thande
Last edited:
321
Thande
Donor
Part #321: The Universe Turned Upside Down
“The Frontiers of the Stars – the Frontiers of the Mind
Whither Science in the Twenty-first Century?
The Empire’s own Dr David Farquharson and Bengal’s Prof Pradeep Choudhury
With Cart Recording Contributions from England’s Dr Edgar Oswald, Russia’s Dx Valtenina Komanova
Tune into I-STN 6 pm Arc Time, January 14th!”
– Advertising poster outside Chamberlain Hall lecture theatre, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Sgt Dom Ellis, December 2020
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Physics Revolution” by Alan Holmes and Dr Mackenzie Todd, recorded October 28th, 2020—
In 1908, the eminent physicist Professor Sir Michael C. Williams, of Harvard, famously stated that all the great truths of physics had been discovered, and all that remained was to clean up a few rounding errors to our calculations. (Audience reaction) Of course, less than fifty years later, every man on Earth, even the least scientifically educated, knew how wrong he had been.[1]
There wasn’t one single point of failure in what, in hindsight, we now call classical or pre-inversion physics. Rather, it was a series of small but indisputable anomalies, holes in theories, that began to accumulate. The mathematical pioneer Dr Adrian Cooke, best known for creating the voting system we all know and love today, (A few audience chuckles) referred to these as ‘epicycles’.
Yes, Alan. He was speaking by analogy to the great scientific dispute of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, geocentrism versus heliocentrism. Aristotle, and the majority of ancient Greek philosophers – as well as many others – had held that the Earth was the fixed centre of the universe and celestial bodies rotated around it. Copernicus, Galileo and Brahe were not the first to suggest alternatives. Even back in ancient Greece, Aristarchus had proposed that the Earth orbited the Sun. But what changed matters was that the debate was no longer framed in terms of pure philosophy. Telescopes and rigorous record-keeping helped demonstrate that the supposed orbits of the planets around the Earth were very far from the perfect circles that the old theory had envisaged. They possessed ‘epicycles’, points at which they seemed to rotate back on themselves. As astronomers’ equipment and techniques grew more and more sophisticated, rather than learning more, the picture seemed to grow even murkier. The epicycles multiplied more and more, the planetary orbits growing even more complex and unsatisfactory. But if one simply placed the Sun at the centre of the system, these intricate epicycles fell away, replaced with simple loops. Ellipses, not circles, but that was a controversy for another day.
Yes. So, by analogy, when mounting evidence starts to undermine other established theories, there is a tendency by the scientific establishment to try to shore up and defend the theories. After all, those in power in that establishment have effectively staked their reputations and worldviews on believing those theories. It is only when the sheer weight of evidence, the multiplying epicycles trying to explain it away, grow to a certain threshold that the whole edifice comes crashing down.
Poetic, Alan. In practice, we could be even more cynical and suggest that what’s really important is that stick-in-the-mud generation just retiring – or dying off – to make way for a new one. (Audience chuckles and oohs) We are also arbitrary in what we describe as a ‘disproven’ theory. We present the state of phlogiston theory in the mid-eighteenth century as a stepping stone towards our modern understanding, yet it bares so little resemblance to that understanding that we could just as easily say it has been ‘disproven’ and replaced. (Audience murmurs) We could say the same about Newtonian physics, or Paleian environmental breeding.[2]
There’s more office politics in science than we like to think.
That brings us to the subject of today’s talk.
Today, we’re hear to talk to you about the Physics Revolution of the early twentieth century. So much of the world around us, the world we take for granted, owes its existence to those breakthroughs. Not since the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century had so many discoveries been made so fast, so many comfortable assumptions brought down in a fit of iconoclasm.
Some demologists have suggested that such progress in science reflects a similar revolutionary mood among the people in other fields.[3] The Scientific Revolution in Europe, which Alan just mentioned, came alongside the Protestant Reformation. Isaac Newton lived at the time of the English Civil War and the First Glorious Revolution. His ideas were refined and developed further by the French Revolutionary mathematician Laplace, who today is a controversial figure for his association with Jacobin rule in Pérousie. (Audience murmurs)
And the Physics Revolution of the early twentieth century, which is what we’ll be talking about today, came in the aftermath of the upheavals of the Black Twenties, the growth of Societism, and the beginnings of the Diversitarian response. The old assumptions were falling away. Even the Recky subculture among the youth of the day reflected those feelings, a need that the ideas of the past could no longer stand up.
Right. The Physics Revolution was also unusual for another reason. It was, perhaps, the first scientific movement to be truly multi-national, with people from all nations, all corners of the terraqueous globe making contributions.
Debatable, but yes. There are precursors in other fields. Engineering had already become transoceanic, spurred on by competitive grand architecture and showing off machinery at the WorldFests. Literature as well. Even ratiocinic fiction, if you count that as literature. (Mixed audience reactions) But science, physics in particular, had long been treated as a peculiarly European field, reluctant even to accept contributions from here in the Novamund. (Indignant audience reaction) That had begun to change in the nineteenth century. But even at the turn of the twentieth, even advanced civilisations like China were often viewed as merely copying and implementing European breakthroughs when they built factory engines or aerodromes.
What changed this? There is no simple answer. Societism and Diversitarianism are part of it, how both forced Europeans to start thinking of the people of distant climes as people in their own right. But then there is that other aspect of the Black Twenties, the plague. The Chinese and Siamese responses to the outbreak were recognised as superior in some ways to controlling the disease, at least at first. Siamese scientists were also arguably the first to develop a plague vaccine. Guinea and Bengal had their own responses, their own agency. The military success of the Matetwa. All of these were relevant factors.
Yes. It remains a matter of debate whether the Physics Revolution can be solely attributed to the fact that more viewpoints, from a wider diversity of minds from distinct nations the world over, now offered a broader and deeper view than Europe alone had provided, able to see new ways to interpret the data. After all, most of the scientists involved in the major breakthroughs were still European, or American. (Audience cheers) But it’s undoubted that this diversity of thought played a role in exposing the flaws in classical physics.
We’ll go through these in turn. The new theories developed to explain and rationalise the data, I should say, are not always truly related to one another. The term that has caught on, and is present in textbooks in our time, is ‘Inversion Theory’ or ‘Inverted Physics’. This was a term that was originally invented by its detractors, who stated that the new ideas were turning the world, the universe, on its head.
Yes. At the time, it was more common to call it simply New Physics. But, as those events now took place a century ago, that term now feels inappropriate. Derogatory though it is, we’ll have to stick to the commonplace term of Inversion Theory.
But it’s not one theory, as I said. It’s several, and not necessarily related, except that they all carry the same esprit du temps of bold iconoclasm. If I were a demologist I could even bring in other controversial theories of the time, such as continental mutation, for all that they have little to do with the state of high physics.[4]
High physics, yes, but the flaws that exposed the problems with classical theory were often rather mundane. Trailing threads on the tapestry of our understanding, maybe, yet if we tugged on one, the whole thing started to unravel before our eyes.
No wonder many establishment scientists were frightened. Now, to understand just why these theories were so controversial, we first have to understand where physics stood before them. That is no simple exercise.
No. Most of us, I think, are somewhat familiar with Newton’s laws of motion from our schooldays. (Slightly sceptical or indecisive audience murmurs) Newton’s key breakthrough was that, for the first time, his mathematically rigorous laws accurately described the behaviour of the universe both in terms of the Moon orbiting the Earth, say, and of me dropping this pen on the lectern. (Distant clicking sound) “As above, so below”. The same rules controlled both the motion of the moon and the pen. The universe ran on the same consistent principles, all the way down to the bottom, all the way up to the top. They only look different to us because of our perspective from down here. We think things falling downward is ‘normal’, and wonder why the Moon does not fall down as well. In fact, the Moon is falling, but it travels forward at such a speed that the Earth curves away from it just as fast as it falls, so it never hits us. Newton imagined a cannon atop a high mountain, firing a cannonball forward at a similarly high speed. As the Earth curved away, the cannonball would never come down, but would circle the Earth forever. Newton had imagined the artimoon, more than three centuries before it was achieved in reality. The same physics that ruled the heavens was accessible to the hand of Man.
Quite. Newton described the motion of objects in terms of forces acting upon them. There was politics behind how his work was seen, an intellectual front of the kind of eighteenth-century ‘quiet war’ between British and French culture, as we learn about in school. The Wars of Supremacy, as Churchill the Younger called it. Not only were our redcoats clashing with French soldiers at Louisbourg or Wolfeston, but it was also a war of ideas. Britain, the idea which lives on here through the Empire far more than it does in the old homeland itself, was about political liberalism, constitutional monarchy, Protestantism, economic freedoms, and yes, Newtonian mechanics. The France of the day was despotism, absolute monarchy and centralism, Catholicism, top-down autarchy and Cartesian philosophy. Frenchmen who admired Britain for other reasons would also be fascinated by Newton’s work, and discuss and propagate it. Émilie du Châtelet, today a Cytherean heroine, translated Newton’s great work, the Principia, into French. Though some of these philosophical undercurrents would give birth to the darkness of the Jacobins, they also ultimately ensured that the British ideals would have their way in France. Indeed, France would arguably go on to implement them more consistently than the homeland did. Newton’s theories were given an even more mathematically rigorous foundation by the work of Laplace, as we mentioned earlier. Further developments in mathematics in the nineteenth century would pave the way for more breakthroughs.
Yes, it’s quite remarkable really, how some of the mathematical ideas necessary for the theories we’ll be discussing actually predate them by years. Sometimes it almost feels as though they were just waiting for someone to come along and use them.
Sometimes, when people talk about the Physics Revolution, they give the impression that the classical physics of the day had sat there for years and become calcified. That’s not really true, however, as many of the accepted assumptions only dated back to the development of the Fundamental Model in the 1880s.[5]
We won’t go into how the Fundamental Model was devised, as it’s quite complicated.
Suffice to say that it was so well formulated that, despite being based on classical assumptions, it did not require significant revision for the later discoveries we’re going to be discussing. Bietmann demonstrated that, quite by accident, the Fundamental Model theories of electromagnetism developed to explain Lectel-related phenomena would also provide a scientific foundation for one of the most basic, fundamental questions about our reality: what is light?
Yes. Now, we thought we knew. Light is a form of electromagnetic wave, emitted by vibrating particles with electrical charge, rising and falling in energy – what we call oscillating, like a pendulum, maybe, or a bouncing spring…approximately.
Importantly, the light we see is also just one small part of a much larger spectrum. Visible light has wavelengths of around a millionth of an inch, with red light having longer wavelengths than violet light, at the other end of the rainbow. But what we think of is a glorious rainbow is just a tiny fraction of all the light there is, if we only had the eyes to see it. Below red, with wavelengths too long for our eyes to see, is the realm of infralight. First comes subrubric light, which is the invisible heat we feel on the back of our necks when the sun shines. It is also how many telecommand devices work, with much smaller amounts, lest you try to set someone’s hat on fire with your motoscope telecommand! (Audience laughter) Extend the wavelength yet further and you obtain Photrack waves, which, in addition to in Photrack itself, are used in wavecookers. Further still, and we have the Photel waves that carry our communications, including motoscopy as well as Photel itself.[6]
What about what lies above violet, paralight? Well, supracynthic light first, which you have probably seen examples of, those novelty invisible lights that make certain substances glow for a nice visual effect. Then comes osteographic light, which has saved so many lives by showing broken bones, for all that too much exposure is unwholesome. Finally, deleterious paralight, or del-para, the deadly rays of the threshold bomb or the malfunctioning paradox engine.
Yet even then, del-para has saved lives, used to sterilise surgical equipment, for example.[7]
Indeed – no scientific discovery is morally positive or negative in itself, it all comes down to how people choose to employ it. (Audience murmurs)
You’ll notice that while we can have Photel passing through us all the time, we would not be too comfortable with having osteolight or del-para doing the same. (A few chuckles) That’s no coincidence. The energy of the light goes up from what we might call the red end of the spectrum to the violet end – starting far below red and ending way above violet, of course.
This was one of the strangest discoveries of the period, and an early sign that our classical understanding might be flawed. Why would blue light have more energy than red light? Surely it is the brightness of the light that should matter, not the colour?
Right. To explain this, here’s a conceptual experiment. Imagine going to a bowling alley and being told to knock down all nine pins, but you are handed a red diamondball to do so. You’ll protest and say the diamondball is too light to knock down the pins. Even if you hit them, they’ll just stay stuck to their magnetic bases. Aydub, says the attendant, and hands you a whole box of red diamondballs. But it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how many red diamondballs you have if they’re all individually too light to move the pins. But if you’re given one blue bowling ball, you can knock them all down.
Exactly. Having a brighter red light is just like having more diamondballs. In this analogy the balls are like corpuscles of light.[8] So there are chemical reactions which can be triggered by a small amount of blue light, but not by the brightest red light. The blue chromocytes in your retina can only see blue because they have such a chemical reaction in them. (Audience murmurs). Where the analogy breaks down is that you can also have situations where too much energy won’t knock the pins down, as well as too little. The point is, things are not a continuum of infinitely many values, as they looked from a distance. Only certain energies are available, like shelves on a wall; one cannot have an object floating halfway between two shelves. We say the system is ‘discrete’, which is contrary to, anathema to, classical physics.[9]
That brings us on to the first of our observations that showed cracks in the foundation of classical physics – the Paralight Paradox…
*
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
Holmes and Todd then went on to discuss the ‘ultraviolet catastrophe’, as we call it. As this was already covered in Edwards’ lecture,[10] I will omit it from this transcript and pick back up later.
*
…so Gottlieb now had an equation that would predict the real distribution of energies from the heat source. But he did not have a theoretical framework that would explain it. That came later. Thermokinetics had begun as a rough and ready field, a realm of horny-handed engineers and practical mathematicians, but its discoveries were shaking the foundations of the refined physics in the ivory towers of universities.
Very poetic. It wasn’t the only problem. Newton’s wonderful laws of motion predicted the orbits of the planets precisely – almost. Previously, a discrepancy in the orbit of Dionysus had led to the discovery of Ariadne and her gravitational effects. Surely, a theory that could predict planets out of nowhere was unimpeachable.[11]
But now there was another discrepancy, a tiny one, in the orbit of not a distant planet, but the one closest to the Sun – Mercury.
I emphasise it was a tiny discrepancy. Many scientists simply thought that limitations of equipment were at fault. Others used the same trick that had worked before, and predicted a previously unknown planet which orbited even closer to the Sun than Mercury, called Hephaestus.[12]
They were wrong, and their idea was ridiculed as unrealistic for years in lectures just like this one. Ironically enough, in the last few years astronomers have found evidence for ultraplanets orbiting distant stars just as close as Hephaestus was predicted to, so perhaps those theorists had the last laugh.[13] No workable theory was proposed at the time to explain this, but the fact that it was resolved by Popham-Webb Theory was a valuable piece of evidence in support of it.
Now we come to the crux of it. The partnership between David Popham, an English amateur scientist who was a clergyman in his day job, and the maverick Harvard professor Harold Webb. The two didn’t even meet until their third joint paper in 1934, corresponding entirely by letters and Lectel. Just as Newton did much of his best work while in quarantine from the Plague of 1665, Popham and Webb used their time in isolation during the Black Twenties to begin the development of what has become known as Isoluminal Relativity, or just Isolumism for short.[14]
Yes. Relativity was already a notion going back to Galileo and the seventeenth century, though it’s still not widely understood today. People at the time argued that the world couldn’t be rotating because then, if we dropped one of Alan’s diamondballs, it would fly off to the side from our perspective as the moving Earth left it behind. Now Galileo is a somewhat overrated figure, blown up by anti-Catholic propaganda and his own self-aggrandisement into taking credit for many things he never said or did (Audience murmurs) but considering the time he lived in, his relativistic argument is genuinely impressive. It would be easy nowadays to show it on a train, but remember he lived at a time without such rapid transport. Instead, he talked about being in the hold of a ship moving at speed. Galileo noted that if one dropped a ball then, we know from everyday experience that the ball doesn’t deviate towards the back of the ship; it seems to fall straight from our perspective.
If the ship has a big window in the side and an observer from a pier draws a line showing how the ball falls from her perspective, then she draws a diagonal line. Even though from my perspective it looks straight down. That’s relativity.
Yes. Another example. If there’s a pool of water in the bottom of the ship, I can swim either towards the prow or the stern and it’s equally easy to me. I’m going at the same speed either way. But to our observer, I seem to be going faster when I’m travelling with the motion of the ship rather than against it.
As we just said, it’d be easier to show on a train nowadays, or even a mobile. If I’m driving at fifty miles per hour, wind down the window and shoot a gun forward – I’d probably be arrested. (Audience chuckles) But say the bullet travels at 500 miles per hour. A police Photrack trap will record it as passing at 550 miles per hour, as the speed of the car is added to the speed of the bullet. If I fired backwards instead, then they would record a speed of 450 miles per hour, as the speed of the car is subtracted from that of the bullet. And so on.
We don’t always stop to think about it, but this principle of relativity was well understood in physics at the turn of the twentieth century. But Popham-Webb Theory turned it on its head.
People had been trying to measure the speed of light for more than two centuries, and had gradually got close to its actual figure of 671 million miles per hour. (Audience murmurs) Again, this was understood. We didn’t know how light propagated through space from the Sun to the Earth. In those days, people imagined the aether was an actual substance, like normal matter, and the Earth was actually travelling through it like a drome through the air.
An experiment showed that this was wrong. The aether had a very different nature, one we are still struggling to understand to this day. Light did not need matter to propagate.[15]
Yes. We had an idea of this speed. But Popham and Webb, using topological mathematics previously developed by Markov of Petrograd and Ruiz of Saragossa, demonstrated that this speed was not merely fast, but immovably fast.
One cannot add to the speed of light. If instead of shooting my gun out of the window of my mobile, I shine my lectorch, then the light doesn’t hit the target at 671 million and fifty miles per hour. It’s always 671 million mph, no matter how fast the car is going. What’s going on?
Popham and Webb had demonstrated a fundamental rule, one that is not obvious to us in our daily lives because we don’t see anything travelling close to the speed of light. Descartes has thought that we lived in a world where everything could be defined by giving three coordinates.
Little St James is x miles west of me, y miles north of me, and z miles above sea level, say.
Er…well, to be consistent…ah, it doesn’t matter. Yes, you can define the location of anything by giving those three coordinates, length, height, breadth. And also, we live in a world where one event follows another. People are born before they die. There was once a time before Little St James was built. Maybe I need to state what years it exists in when I give the coordinates as well. (Audience murmurs)
See, it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it. We don’t think that way. We mainly think about the way the world is now, or cause and effect happening in a room. I shoot my gun, I kill someone, I get arrested. (Less enthusiastic audience laughter) We don’t usually put that in the same thought as trying to place where things are geographically.
But Popham and Webb found that those are intimately linked. We don’t live in a world with three coordinates locating places in space and one number defining time. We live in a world of four dimensions, or, as Webb named it, chronotopic space.[16] (Sceptical audience murmurs) We imagine that if I in Fredericksburg am making toast and am hearing, via Photel, the voice of Chancellor Weiss giving a speech, then the two events are happening simultaneously – me making toast, and the Chancellor speaking. But this is not true, and not simply because the interview may be pre-recorded. It will always take time for the Photel transmission from Germany to reach my Photel set.
Photel is a form of light, and travels at the speed of light. Ah, you may say, then if we know the speed of light is constant, we could work out the time it takes to travel, and say we definitely know that Chancellor Weiss said those words ‘n’ seconds before I press the button on my toaster. (Slightly confused audience sounds) But, in fact, one of the strangest consequences of Popham-Webb theory is that simultaneity no longer exists. There is, in fact, no objective, immovable passage of time that we can relate occurrences to. Events are not three-dimensional happenings in space which happen on an unrelated, unconnected timeline defined by a clock ticking. Rather, they are four-dimensional happenings in chronotopic space (or, today, simply ‘the chronotope’), and one cannot change the location in space without also affecting the time. (More scepticism) Yes, it was a radical claim at the time. In our everyday life, we never reach such speeds of movement that such effects are noticeable – or, at least, so it seems. Today, things are a little different, as we’ll see.
At the time Popham and Webb, and their supporters such as Valdemar Lopez in California and Mashobane Mazibuko in Matetwa, argued using conceptual experiments. Imagine an ultratellurian space-ship accelerated to speeds of over ninety percent of the speed of light...
*
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
These illustrations are fairly similar to ones from OTL used to illustrate the Lorentz contraction, so I’ll skip ahead.
*
...for some years, the Popham-Webb chronotope was nothing more than a controversial theory. Yes, it explained the deviations in the predicted precession of the orbit of Mercury with no need for a Hephaestus, but this hardly seemed sufficient evidence to throw out practically the entirety of classical physics. One other implication of Popham-Webb theory was noted. Newtonian theory predicted that large masses would bend light, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Popham-Webb theory predicted the same, but that the effect would be twice as great as that calculated by Newton.
Here seemed a simple, solid way to test the theories. The trouble is that, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, there were relatively few ways to observe potential gravitational lensing. Today, with modern telescopes, it is not only relatively trivial, but actually used for practical purposes; we can use the gravity of a nearer island universe as a way to magnify one in the background, and we even sometimes see a double or quadruple image of the farther unisland in the same way we would with a normal glass lens. If physicists ever sound rather aggravated that people still express scepticism about isolumism, this is why; it is like you boasting about your new Studebaker Trailblazer to me, and me saying that I doubt internal combustion engines are even possible. (Mixed thoughtful response and chuckles from audience) Isolumism is an everyday, reliable occurrence to astronomers.
But getting back to the Electric Circus era. Several astronomers, including Pérousien Alain Bouloux, noted that asimconic imagery taken of a solar eclipse which crossed Pérousie in September 1922 showed the occluded Sun passing in front of stars. With the Sun’s glare hidden by the eclipsing Moon, it might be possible to measure the level of gravitational lensing from the apparent, aberrant movement of the stars as they passed behing the eclipse.[17] While this was first posited as early as Popham and Webb’s first publication in 1925, the Black Twenties made impossible any attempts to organise the kind of global expeditions that would be needed to study future solar eclipses from multiple points. Early attempts in the immediate aftermath were also limited. It was not until the solar eclipse of April 1930, which crossed North America, that sufficient evidence was collected to say one way or the other. Ironically, while the data did not fit the Newtonian prediction, it was also somewhat removed from the Popham-Webb prediction. It was enough for many former sceptics to believe that Popham and Webb were on the right track and it was time to abandon the totalist Newtonian view – but it was clear that Popham-Webb theory was still incomplete.
We then reach the so-called ‘Great Divergence’ of the mid to late 1930s. It was clear across the world that the basic problem with Popham-Webb isolumism is that it did not directly integrate gravity itself into the theory. Just as the Newtonian model treated time as a separate, unrelated thing, so too did basic PW theory with gravitation. What was needed was a way to incorporate gravitation, but this proved mathematically very challenging.
We ended up with two primary competing models of gravitational isolumism. It was eventually proved, by Stieg Arnstad in the 1970s, that the two are actually mathematically equivalent, and the argument between the two was as pointless as the earlier disputes between the fluxions of Newton and the calculus of Leibniz. But it did illustrate how importance hearing diverse voices and worldviews from around the world was to the progress of science. One route alone could have failed. Two allowed for debate and rethinking.
Yes. Here in the Empire, as well as in England, France and Germany, the dominant formulation is what has become known as Goliasch-Bouquard Revised Isolumism. Conversely, in China, Pérousie, the Russias – Russia, I’m sorry – and Belgium, it has been more common to use the model developed from the great mind of Jiao Zhuoqiang.
I think most people are familiar with the story of Professor Jiao, as he is usually known in the English-speaking world, after that biopic film with Ye Jinhe from the eighties, remember? I’ll be brief. Jiao worked as a middle-level civil servant, or mandarin, in the transit authority in the city of Kaifeng. In his spare time, he insatiably studied mathematics, including many breakthroughs made by European mathematicians in the nineteenth century.[18]
Thus the irony that China has followed a theory built on European geometric foundations, while most of Europe instead cleaves to a theory built on fluid dynamics – something which China, and indeed Belgium, had spent much of its history obsessed with to avoid being flooded out![19]
The great problem was one of accelerating reference frames. Regular Popham-Webb theory worked well for circumstances where everything was in inertial reference frames, in other words, travelling at a constant speed.
Or at rest...but, of course, one of the consequences of PW theory is that we can no longer truly call any object at rest anymore. (Confused audience reaction) There will always be a point of view from which it seems to move.
Professor Jiao’s great intellectual breakthrough was the realisation that acceleration and gravitation are equivalent and, indeed, indistinguishable. If we wake up in a lighthouse-like building with no windows, and a ball drops from a shelf near the top, then we are not surprised that it falls to the floor. That is gravity, the gravity we have known all our lives. But I could then tell you that this is not a lighthouse, but the interior of a rocket ship in space, its rocket motor burning so that it accelerates forward – or, from your perspective, upward – at thirty-two feet per second squared. That is the same as the gravitational constant of Earth.
Or imagine you’re in a small, square room with no windows in a rocket ship, and you suddenly feel yourself weightless, like Dick Banks in “Critical Failure”, remember? (Vague assent from audience) Well, obviously, the rocket motor has stopped, so now you’re in zero gravity. Except what if I was lying to you about being in a rocket ship? What if you were in an elevator cabin on Earth, and the cable has snapped? (Audience reaction)People in a falling elevator, what we call free fall, feel just as weightless as people in space do. Because acceleration and gravity are the same thing.
Jiao’s work might have remained obscure, except his immediate boss, Cui Deliang, was unexpectedly selected as one of the One Hundred and Eight Mandators for the 1938 selection cycle. Cui respected Jiao’s work and promoted it to academics in Hanjing and Nanjing.
Meanwhile, in France and Germany, Bouquard and Goliasch developed their own mathematical interpretation. Whereas Jiao had made extensive use of dimensionally transcendental matrices, or transtrices for short, the Europeans preferred four independent fields.[20] Jiao modelled his interpretation of a gravitational chronotope as being equivalent to curvature; a common analogy reduces it to two dimensions, like a rubber sheet, with weights on it like the masses of planets. Conversely, Bouquard and Goliasch argued that the chronotope, which they identified with the aether, should be seen as like a room filled with fog, which becomes more concentrated near masses and less so away from them. Rather than geometric curvature, they thought of how light would propagate more slowly through higher concentrations of aether, which would be seen as equivalent to bending via refraction.
This division separated physicists for many years, and became quite heated at times. Old friendships were broken and conferences even had to declare their allegiance, some denying entry to those who held to one theory or the other. A Siamese student even took a shot at Professor Jiao in 1945, which you may remember from the film, though they zagged up the incident a bit to make it more exciting. In Belgium, Professor Laurens Bergkamp became Europe’s premier chapion of Jiao’s curvature. Popham was distraught at what his theory and Webb’s had unleashed on the world. The Societists were playing catch-up in the aftermath of their Silent Revolution, when many of their top scientists had been purged, and were forced to decide who to copy. In the end, they developed their own theories which were much closer to Jiao’s than Goliasch’s and Bergkamp’s.
It’s often claimed that a lack of understanding of isolumism is why so many rocket launches failed in the 1930s and 40s. That’s not really true, because the problems which claimed most of those rockets were unrelated. However, it is true that isolumism was not taken into account, and this began to cause problems when the nations began launching artimoons after the shock of the Sol Invictus 1 launch in 1950. The Germans had hit on the idea of launching an artimoon which would use clockwork timers to trigger an automated camera when passing over Russian military bases, then return to Earth so the film could be developed.[21] They called it Project Wotan, after the single, all-seeing eye of the king of the gods in Germanic mythology.
As I said before, one cannot deny the existence of isolumism today. The military, and now even some civilians, make use of an artimoon navigation system that, if it did not take isolumist corrections into account, would start to drift off course in a matter of days. The same effect scuppered Wotan. The Germans had plenty of other problems with their artimoons and launch vehicles, but when Wotan-9 finally succeeded in 1956, they were disappointed to find that its recovered asimcon film showed images dozens or hundreds of yards out from the intended targets. Time had slowed down for the artimoon and its preprogrammed instructions no longer put the target base under the cameras when they were triggered. As a result, the Germans did not obtain accurate pictures of Russian military movements in the months preceding the outbreak of the Sunrise War – if they had, perhaps it could have been averted. (Audience reaction)
That’s one way in which isolumism has changed the world. But, of course, the biggest impact of the New Physics on the twentieth century is the one we all know – the development of the threshold bomb...
*
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
This is followed by a description of atomic theory and its history which would be redundant with Jefferson Edwards’ lecture which we previously covered. There is one part which may be relevant for now, however...
*
We often act as though the threshold bomb came out of nowhere. Perhaps it seemed like that to people who did not follow the news. But even if one was not conversant with science fact, scientific romance had held clues. Atoms were not indivisible after all, one of the discoveries that led to the disparaging name ‘inversion theory’. Atomic caryii were held together by the Local Von Guericke Force, when electromagnetic forces should have flung their definos apart. If that trapped energy could be unlocked, it would be a limitless source of power...or an unimaginably potent weapon. (Audience murmurs)
The question was, how. We knew that it could happen. Benedetta Nuvoli had shown that xanthine salts spontaneously broke down to barotium and xenine, something impossible under classical chemical theories – this was alchemy! Elements transmuting! But one xanthine atom at a time breaking apart did not yield much energy. What if it was possible to create a chain reaction, in which each carytic disintegration would generate fragments that would strike another caryus and break it up as well? Or more than one?
Think of it like a disease, like the terrible hyperflu we all remember – spreading not just from one person to the next, but to a whole group of people in a crowded theatre like this one. (Audience reaction) Don’t worry, I’m not going to sneeze. (Nervous laughter) That was the holy grail – or the unholy grail, if you prefer – of carytic physics. Many thought it was impossible. Others thought it would spread uncontrollably and consume the whole world.
The wisest knew, as had been hypothesised for years, that carytic reactions were behind the light and heat of the Sun, whose proven longevity – from the age of the Earth – other sources, such as combustion, could not explain. All the sunlight we feel on our shoulders, that makes our crops grow and keeps our planet warm amid the cold and distant stars, is the result of carytic reactions, like millions of threshold bombs going off at once. (Audience murmurs) It was definitely possible to do. The question was, would the nations gain the capability within our lifetimes?
There was a hint, for those there to see it. In 1952, a team led by Sergei Tishchenko, at the University of Petrograd, published a paper on their findings from studying the breakup of xanthine nuclei under more controlled conditions. This eliminated the objections of alleged contamination that had been made to previous French experiments by Giraud. Many physicists eagerly awaited the next findings from Tishchenko, but then he and his research group fell mysteriously silent. It was as though the Russian government had concluded that the course of his research was something that, like the development of new rockets or explosives, should not be shared with other nations...
*
(Lt Black’s note)
Alright, you’ve put everyone to sleep, Bob. Now let’s get to the Diplomatic Rage, for pity’s sake.
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
Spoilsport. Sir.
[1] In OTL a similar quote is circulated, attributed to Lord Kelvin, stating that all that remained to uncover in physics was to refine things beyond the sixth decimal place. Like most famous quotes, he never said it. It is an out-of-context paraphrase of something Albert A. Michaelson said in 1894, which he attributed to an unnamed ‘emininent physicist’. One might have cause to wonder whether TTL’s Prof Williams actually said what is being claimed, either.
[2] In OTL this is similarly arbitrary. Todd’s second and third example (the third referred to as Darwinian evolution in OTL) are cases which are usually presented as being refined rather than disproven in OTL, whereas in OTL (but not TTL) phlogiston theory is treated as being ‘disproven’ and replaced.
[3] ‘Demology’ is a term used in OTL to mean roughly what we would be ‘sociology’ – words that evoke ‘society’ have a certain stigma due to association with Societism, especially in academia, which is commonly accused of having Societist sympathies.
[4] I.e. continental drift, which was similarly controversial in OTL.
[5] See Part #254 in Volume VII for the Fundamental Model (roughly analogous to the development of Maxwell’s Equations in OTL).
[6] Subrubric light = infrared light, Photrack = radar (and here also used to mean ‘microwaves’), telecommand = remote control.
[7] Supracynthic light = ultraviolent light, osteolight = X-rays, deleterious paralight = ionising radiation, or more specifically gamma rays.
[8] I.e. photons. The older term ‘corpuscle’ is used in TTL out of defensive continuity with Newton, when the scientific establishment was accusing Inversion Theorists of futurist iconoclasm.
[9] The term used in OTL is ‘quantised’, hence ‘quantum theory’.
[10] Part #312 in this volume.
[11] Recall that Dionysus and Ariadne are the names in TTL for Uranus and Neptune (respectively) – see Interlude #12 in Volume III.
[12] In OTL this hypothetical planet was named Vulcan (no, not that one). The choice of name in both OTL and TTL (Hephaestus is the Greek counterpart of the Roman Vulcan) is simply because mythological beings associated with forges makes sense for a planet that was thought to be orbiting incredibly close to the fires of the Sun.
[13] To take an early one of many examples discovered in OTL, Dimidium (51 Pegasi b) which orbits less than 5 million miles from its parent star, as opposed to about 93 million miles from the Earth to the Sun. The science of ultraplanet (exoplanet) hunting in TTL lags behind OTL due to technological differences, but only by about ten years (Dimidium was discovered in OTL in 1995).
[14] One will note that in TTL the term ‘relativity’ is not the oft-quoted buzzword part of the theory as it is in OTL – which is arguably objectively quite unlikely as it’s not a straightforward word to pronounce! A peculiar consequence of this is that TTL has been spared OTL’s ridiculous period in the twentieth century when a vague, superficial understanding that ‘relativity’ was the latest scientific breakthrough led to people latching onto it as support for any number of completely unrelated positions in unconnected fields, such as moral or artistic relativism. In fact, as Ian Stewart once pointed out, the important part about Einsteinian relativity is not that ‘everything’s relative’ – which, as stated in the text, we already knew – but that one thing is unexpectedly absolute and unchangeable, the speed of light. In TTL, this ‘isoluminal factor’ (and, more broadly, the principle that the laws of physics are invariant and immovable in all inertial reference frames) has instead become the crux of the usual philosophical argument between Societists and Diversitarians. Societists argue that this universality of physics implies support for their position of human universality, whereas Diversitarians claim that these very scientific breakthroughs were only possible because they were contributed to by many people of different scientific traditions from different cultures across the world. Repeat ad infinitum.
[15] This relates to the Michaelson-Morley Experiment from OTL. Note that it is much less celebrated in TTL because scientists in TTL have chosen to ‘reformulate’ the concept of the luminiferous aether rather than state it is disproven. In OTL the idea that the vacuum is ‘empty’ now looks very outdated; TTL’s scientists have simply chosen to redefine ‘aether’ to mean a host of things related to spacetime, vacuum energy and what we would call the Higgs field.
[16] Referred to as ‘spacetime’ in OTL. This is an English calque of the German term ‘Raumzeit’ used by Minkowski, and is not the most logical construction in English (confusing quite a few students of physics) – Webb has instead opted for a slightly pretentious compound Greek adjective, always a default option in science of this era.
[17] In OTL this was tried with the 1919 ‘Eddington Experiment’ with the solar eclipse of that year. In practice, in hindsight many scientists believe the data were flawed and the initial triumphal claims made of confirmation of Einstein’s theory were subject to confirmation bias. Many further expeditions to measure gravitational lensing from solar eclipses followed. The other difference in TTL is that the eclipse method is tried before general relativity came along. One of the more ‘unrealistic’ things about the progress of science in OTL is that both special and general relativity came from the mind of the same man, ten years apart, when it seems more ‘reasonable’ that the latter would require the tearing down of assumptions of the former by an isonoclastic newcomer. Of course, this ignores the fact that many others made contributions to the progress of relativity whom are often ignored, including Minkowski, Hilbert and Grossmann.
[18] These, rather vaguely passed over here, should be considered roughly equivalent to the works of Gauss, Riemann and Ricci in OTL, at least as far as their relevance to differential geometry goes.
[19] Predictably, there are some holes in this snappy observation – the European theory is as much based on field mechanics as fluid dynamics, for a start.
[20] Transtrices are referred to in OTL as tensors. The Goliasch-Bouquard formulation bears some resemblance to OTL’s Palatini tetrad formulation, but then heads off in a different direction when it comes to visual interpretation. Jiao’s work is much closer to what we would recognise as mainstream visualisations of general relativity from OTL. The important distinction is that OTL has many different ‘formalisms of’ or ‘solutions to’ the Einstein field equations, which are treated as viable or subordinate derivations of it. Conversely, in TTL the Jiao and Goliasch-Bouquard general relativistic theories are treated as competing derivations of Popham-Webb (i.e. special relativity on Minkowski spacetime) with the implicit assumption that they cannot both be true. The fact that they were eventually proved to be mathematically equivalent (so, two interchangeable ways of looking at the same basic theory) had important implications for Diversitarian and Societist social interpretations of the progress of science.
[21] This is essentially how the earliest spy satellites (such as the Soviet Zenit series) worked in OTL, except that the more rapid pace of computer technology in OTL meant that programming instructions could be transmitted to the satellite. Wotan is much more reliant on timers (and the timers themselves are more primitive), giving more time in each mission for relativistic effects to lead to deviation.
“The Frontiers of the Stars – the Frontiers of the Mind
Whither Science in the Twenty-first Century?
The Empire’s own Dr David Farquharson and Bengal’s Prof Pradeep Choudhury
With Cart Recording Contributions from England’s Dr Edgar Oswald, Russia’s Dx Valtenina Komanova
Tune into I-STN 6 pm Arc Time, January 14th!”
– Advertising poster outside Chamberlain Hall lecture theatre, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Sgt Dom Ellis, December 2020
*
Extract from recorded lecture on “The Physics Revolution” by Alan Holmes and Dr Mackenzie Todd, recorded October 28th, 2020—
In 1908, the eminent physicist Professor Sir Michael C. Williams, of Harvard, famously stated that all the great truths of physics had been discovered, and all that remained was to clean up a few rounding errors to our calculations. (Audience reaction) Of course, less than fifty years later, every man on Earth, even the least scientifically educated, knew how wrong he had been.[1]
There wasn’t one single point of failure in what, in hindsight, we now call classical or pre-inversion physics. Rather, it was a series of small but indisputable anomalies, holes in theories, that began to accumulate. The mathematical pioneer Dr Adrian Cooke, best known for creating the voting system we all know and love today, (A few audience chuckles) referred to these as ‘epicycles’.
Yes, Alan. He was speaking by analogy to the great scientific dispute of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, geocentrism versus heliocentrism. Aristotle, and the majority of ancient Greek philosophers – as well as many others – had held that the Earth was the fixed centre of the universe and celestial bodies rotated around it. Copernicus, Galileo and Brahe were not the first to suggest alternatives. Even back in ancient Greece, Aristarchus had proposed that the Earth orbited the Sun. But what changed matters was that the debate was no longer framed in terms of pure philosophy. Telescopes and rigorous record-keeping helped demonstrate that the supposed orbits of the planets around the Earth were very far from the perfect circles that the old theory had envisaged. They possessed ‘epicycles’, points at which they seemed to rotate back on themselves. As astronomers’ equipment and techniques grew more and more sophisticated, rather than learning more, the picture seemed to grow even murkier. The epicycles multiplied more and more, the planetary orbits growing even more complex and unsatisfactory. But if one simply placed the Sun at the centre of the system, these intricate epicycles fell away, replaced with simple loops. Ellipses, not circles, but that was a controversy for another day.
Yes. So, by analogy, when mounting evidence starts to undermine other established theories, there is a tendency by the scientific establishment to try to shore up and defend the theories. After all, those in power in that establishment have effectively staked their reputations and worldviews on believing those theories. It is only when the sheer weight of evidence, the multiplying epicycles trying to explain it away, grow to a certain threshold that the whole edifice comes crashing down.
Poetic, Alan. In practice, we could be even more cynical and suggest that what’s really important is that stick-in-the-mud generation just retiring – or dying off – to make way for a new one. (Audience chuckles and oohs) We are also arbitrary in what we describe as a ‘disproven’ theory. We present the state of phlogiston theory in the mid-eighteenth century as a stepping stone towards our modern understanding, yet it bares so little resemblance to that understanding that we could just as easily say it has been ‘disproven’ and replaced. (Audience murmurs) We could say the same about Newtonian physics, or Paleian environmental breeding.[2]
There’s more office politics in science than we like to think.
That brings us to the subject of today’s talk.
Today, we’re hear to talk to you about the Physics Revolution of the early twentieth century. So much of the world around us, the world we take for granted, owes its existence to those breakthroughs. Not since the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century had so many discoveries been made so fast, so many comfortable assumptions brought down in a fit of iconoclasm.
Some demologists have suggested that such progress in science reflects a similar revolutionary mood among the people in other fields.[3] The Scientific Revolution in Europe, which Alan just mentioned, came alongside the Protestant Reformation. Isaac Newton lived at the time of the English Civil War and the First Glorious Revolution. His ideas were refined and developed further by the French Revolutionary mathematician Laplace, who today is a controversial figure for his association with Jacobin rule in Pérousie. (Audience murmurs)
And the Physics Revolution of the early twentieth century, which is what we’ll be talking about today, came in the aftermath of the upheavals of the Black Twenties, the growth of Societism, and the beginnings of the Diversitarian response. The old assumptions were falling away. Even the Recky subculture among the youth of the day reflected those feelings, a need that the ideas of the past could no longer stand up.
Right. The Physics Revolution was also unusual for another reason. It was, perhaps, the first scientific movement to be truly multi-national, with people from all nations, all corners of the terraqueous globe making contributions.
Debatable, but yes. There are precursors in other fields. Engineering had already become transoceanic, spurred on by competitive grand architecture and showing off machinery at the WorldFests. Literature as well. Even ratiocinic fiction, if you count that as literature. (Mixed audience reactions) But science, physics in particular, had long been treated as a peculiarly European field, reluctant even to accept contributions from here in the Novamund. (Indignant audience reaction) That had begun to change in the nineteenth century. But even at the turn of the twentieth, even advanced civilisations like China were often viewed as merely copying and implementing European breakthroughs when they built factory engines or aerodromes.
What changed this? There is no simple answer. Societism and Diversitarianism are part of it, how both forced Europeans to start thinking of the people of distant climes as people in their own right. But then there is that other aspect of the Black Twenties, the plague. The Chinese and Siamese responses to the outbreak were recognised as superior in some ways to controlling the disease, at least at first. Siamese scientists were also arguably the first to develop a plague vaccine. Guinea and Bengal had their own responses, their own agency. The military success of the Matetwa. All of these were relevant factors.
Yes. It remains a matter of debate whether the Physics Revolution can be solely attributed to the fact that more viewpoints, from a wider diversity of minds from distinct nations the world over, now offered a broader and deeper view than Europe alone had provided, able to see new ways to interpret the data. After all, most of the scientists involved in the major breakthroughs were still European, or American. (Audience cheers) But it’s undoubted that this diversity of thought played a role in exposing the flaws in classical physics.
We’ll go through these in turn. The new theories developed to explain and rationalise the data, I should say, are not always truly related to one another. The term that has caught on, and is present in textbooks in our time, is ‘Inversion Theory’ or ‘Inverted Physics’. This was a term that was originally invented by its detractors, who stated that the new ideas were turning the world, the universe, on its head.
Yes. At the time, it was more common to call it simply New Physics. But, as those events now took place a century ago, that term now feels inappropriate. Derogatory though it is, we’ll have to stick to the commonplace term of Inversion Theory.
But it’s not one theory, as I said. It’s several, and not necessarily related, except that they all carry the same esprit du temps of bold iconoclasm. If I were a demologist I could even bring in other controversial theories of the time, such as continental mutation, for all that they have little to do with the state of high physics.[4]
High physics, yes, but the flaws that exposed the problems with classical theory were often rather mundane. Trailing threads on the tapestry of our understanding, maybe, yet if we tugged on one, the whole thing started to unravel before our eyes.
No wonder many establishment scientists were frightened. Now, to understand just why these theories were so controversial, we first have to understand where physics stood before them. That is no simple exercise.
No. Most of us, I think, are somewhat familiar with Newton’s laws of motion from our schooldays. (Slightly sceptical or indecisive audience murmurs) Newton’s key breakthrough was that, for the first time, his mathematically rigorous laws accurately described the behaviour of the universe both in terms of the Moon orbiting the Earth, say, and of me dropping this pen on the lectern. (Distant clicking sound) “As above, so below”. The same rules controlled both the motion of the moon and the pen. The universe ran on the same consistent principles, all the way down to the bottom, all the way up to the top. They only look different to us because of our perspective from down here. We think things falling downward is ‘normal’, and wonder why the Moon does not fall down as well. In fact, the Moon is falling, but it travels forward at such a speed that the Earth curves away from it just as fast as it falls, so it never hits us. Newton imagined a cannon atop a high mountain, firing a cannonball forward at a similarly high speed. As the Earth curved away, the cannonball would never come down, but would circle the Earth forever. Newton had imagined the artimoon, more than three centuries before it was achieved in reality. The same physics that ruled the heavens was accessible to the hand of Man.
Quite. Newton described the motion of objects in terms of forces acting upon them. There was politics behind how his work was seen, an intellectual front of the kind of eighteenth-century ‘quiet war’ between British and French culture, as we learn about in school. The Wars of Supremacy, as Churchill the Younger called it. Not only were our redcoats clashing with French soldiers at Louisbourg or Wolfeston, but it was also a war of ideas. Britain, the idea which lives on here through the Empire far more than it does in the old homeland itself, was about political liberalism, constitutional monarchy, Protestantism, economic freedoms, and yes, Newtonian mechanics. The France of the day was despotism, absolute monarchy and centralism, Catholicism, top-down autarchy and Cartesian philosophy. Frenchmen who admired Britain for other reasons would also be fascinated by Newton’s work, and discuss and propagate it. Émilie du Châtelet, today a Cytherean heroine, translated Newton’s great work, the Principia, into French. Though some of these philosophical undercurrents would give birth to the darkness of the Jacobins, they also ultimately ensured that the British ideals would have their way in France. Indeed, France would arguably go on to implement them more consistently than the homeland did. Newton’s theories were given an even more mathematically rigorous foundation by the work of Laplace, as we mentioned earlier. Further developments in mathematics in the nineteenth century would pave the way for more breakthroughs.
Yes, it’s quite remarkable really, how some of the mathematical ideas necessary for the theories we’ll be discussing actually predate them by years. Sometimes it almost feels as though they were just waiting for someone to come along and use them.
Sometimes, when people talk about the Physics Revolution, they give the impression that the classical physics of the day had sat there for years and become calcified. That’s not really true, however, as many of the accepted assumptions only dated back to the development of the Fundamental Model in the 1880s.[5]
We won’t go into how the Fundamental Model was devised, as it’s quite complicated.
Suffice to say that it was so well formulated that, despite being based on classical assumptions, it did not require significant revision for the later discoveries we’re going to be discussing. Bietmann demonstrated that, quite by accident, the Fundamental Model theories of electromagnetism developed to explain Lectel-related phenomena would also provide a scientific foundation for one of the most basic, fundamental questions about our reality: what is light?
Yes. Now, we thought we knew. Light is a form of electromagnetic wave, emitted by vibrating particles with electrical charge, rising and falling in energy – what we call oscillating, like a pendulum, maybe, or a bouncing spring…approximately.
Importantly, the light we see is also just one small part of a much larger spectrum. Visible light has wavelengths of around a millionth of an inch, with red light having longer wavelengths than violet light, at the other end of the rainbow. But what we think of is a glorious rainbow is just a tiny fraction of all the light there is, if we only had the eyes to see it. Below red, with wavelengths too long for our eyes to see, is the realm of infralight. First comes subrubric light, which is the invisible heat we feel on the back of our necks when the sun shines. It is also how many telecommand devices work, with much smaller amounts, lest you try to set someone’s hat on fire with your motoscope telecommand! (Audience laughter) Extend the wavelength yet further and you obtain Photrack waves, which, in addition to in Photrack itself, are used in wavecookers. Further still, and we have the Photel waves that carry our communications, including motoscopy as well as Photel itself.[6]
What about what lies above violet, paralight? Well, supracynthic light first, which you have probably seen examples of, those novelty invisible lights that make certain substances glow for a nice visual effect. Then comes osteographic light, which has saved so many lives by showing broken bones, for all that too much exposure is unwholesome. Finally, deleterious paralight, or del-para, the deadly rays of the threshold bomb or the malfunctioning paradox engine.
Yet even then, del-para has saved lives, used to sterilise surgical equipment, for example.[7]
Indeed – no scientific discovery is morally positive or negative in itself, it all comes down to how people choose to employ it. (Audience murmurs)
You’ll notice that while we can have Photel passing through us all the time, we would not be too comfortable with having osteolight or del-para doing the same. (A few chuckles) That’s no coincidence. The energy of the light goes up from what we might call the red end of the spectrum to the violet end – starting far below red and ending way above violet, of course.
This was one of the strangest discoveries of the period, and an early sign that our classical understanding might be flawed. Why would blue light have more energy than red light? Surely it is the brightness of the light that should matter, not the colour?
Right. To explain this, here’s a conceptual experiment. Imagine going to a bowling alley and being told to knock down all nine pins, but you are handed a red diamondball to do so. You’ll protest and say the diamondball is too light to knock down the pins. Even if you hit them, they’ll just stay stuck to their magnetic bases. Aydub, says the attendant, and hands you a whole box of red diamondballs. But it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how many red diamondballs you have if they’re all individually too light to move the pins. But if you’re given one blue bowling ball, you can knock them all down.
Exactly. Having a brighter red light is just like having more diamondballs. In this analogy the balls are like corpuscles of light.[8] So there are chemical reactions which can be triggered by a small amount of blue light, but not by the brightest red light. The blue chromocytes in your retina can only see blue because they have such a chemical reaction in them. (Audience murmurs). Where the analogy breaks down is that you can also have situations where too much energy won’t knock the pins down, as well as too little. The point is, things are not a continuum of infinitely many values, as they looked from a distance. Only certain energies are available, like shelves on a wall; one cannot have an object floating halfway between two shelves. We say the system is ‘discrete’, which is contrary to, anathema to, classical physics.[9]
That brings us on to the first of our observations that showed cracks in the foundation of classical physics – the Paralight Paradox…
*
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
Holmes and Todd then went on to discuss the ‘ultraviolet catastrophe’, as we call it. As this was already covered in Edwards’ lecture,[10] I will omit it from this transcript and pick back up later.
*
…so Gottlieb now had an equation that would predict the real distribution of energies from the heat source. But he did not have a theoretical framework that would explain it. That came later. Thermokinetics had begun as a rough and ready field, a realm of horny-handed engineers and practical mathematicians, but its discoveries were shaking the foundations of the refined physics in the ivory towers of universities.
Very poetic. It wasn’t the only problem. Newton’s wonderful laws of motion predicted the orbits of the planets precisely – almost. Previously, a discrepancy in the orbit of Dionysus had led to the discovery of Ariadne and her gravitational effects. Surely, a theory that could predict planets out of nowhere was unimpeachable.[11]
But now there was another discrepancy, a tiny one, in the orbit of not a distant planet, but the one closest to the Sun – Mercury.
I emphasise it was a tiny discrepancy. Many scientists simply thought that limitations of equipment were at fault. Others used the same trick that had worked before, and predicted a previously unknown planet which orbited even closer to the Sun than Mercury, called Hephaestus.[12]
They were wrong, and their idea was ridiculed as unrealistic for years in lectures just like this one. Ironically enough, in the last few years astronomers have found evidence for ultraplanets orbiting distant stars just as close as Hephaestus was predicted to, so perhaps those theorists had the last laugh.[13] No workable theory was proposed at the time to explain this, but the fact that it was resolved by Popham-Webb Theory was a valuable piece of evidence in support of it.
Now we come to the crux of it. The partnership between David Popham, an English amateur scientist who was a clergyman in his day job, and the maverick Harvard professor Harold Webb. The two didn’t even meet until their third joint paper in 1934, corresponding entirely by letters and Lectel. Just as Newton did much of his best work while in quarantine from the Plague of 1665, Popham and Webb used their time in isolation during the Black Twenties to begin the development of what has become known as Isoluminal Relativity, or just Isolumism for short.[14]
Yes. Relativity was already a notion going back to Galileo and the seventeenth century, though it’s still not widely understood today. People at the time argued that the world couldn’t be rotating because then, if we dropped one of Alan’s diamondballs, it would fly off to the side from our perspective as the moving Earth left it behind. Now Galileo is a somewhat overrated figure, blown up by anti-Catholic propaganda and his own self-aggrandisement into taking credit for many things he never said or did (Audience murmurs) but considering the time he lived in, his relativistic argument is genuinely impressive. It would be easy nowadays to show it on a train, but remember he lived at a time without such rapid transport. Instead, he talked about being in the hold of a ship moving at speed. Galileo noted that if one dropped a ball then, we know from everyday experience that the ball doesn’t deviate towards the back of the ship; it seems to fall straight from our perspective.
If the ship has a big window in the side and an observer from a pier draws a line showing how the ball falls from her perspective, then she draws a diagonal line. Even though from my perspective it looks straight down. That’s relativity.
Yes. Another example. If there’s a pool of water in the bottom of the ship, I can swim either towards the prow or the stern and it’s equally easy to me. I’m going at the same speed either way. But to our observer, I seem to be going faster when I’m travelling with the motion of the ship rather than against it.
As we just said, it’d be easier to show on a train nowadays, or even a mobile. If I’m driving at fifty miles per hour, wind down the window and shoot a gun forward – I’d probably be arrested. (Audience chuckles) But say the bullet travels at 500 miles per hour. A police Photrack trap will record it as passing at 550 miles per hour, as the speed of the car is added to the speed of the bullet. If I fired backwards instead, then they would record a speed of 450 miles per hour, as the speed of the car is subtracted from that of the bullet. And so on.
We don’t always stop to think about it, but this principle of relativity was well understood in physics at the turn of the twentieth century. But Popham-Webb Theory turned it on its head.
People had been trying to measure the speed of light for more than two centuries, and had gradually got close to its actual figure of 671 million miles per hour. (Audience murmurs) Again, this was understood. We didn’t know how light propagated through space from the Sun to the Earth. In those days, people imagined the aether was an actual substance, like normal matter, and the Earth was actually travelling through it like a drome through the air.
An experiment showed that this was wrong. The aether had a very different nature, one we are still struggling to understand to this day. Light did not need matter to propagate.[15]
Yes. We had an idea of this speed. But Popham and Webb, using topological mathematics previously developed by Markov of Petrograd and Ruiz of Saragossa, demonstrated that this speed was not merely fast, but immovably fast.
One cannot add to the speed of light. If instead of shooting my gun out of the window of my mobile, I shine my lectorch, then the light doesn’t hit the target at 671 million and fifty miles per hour. It’s always 671 million mph, no matter how fast the car is going. What’s going on?
Popham and Webb had demonstrated a fundamental rule, one that is not obvious to us in our daily lives because we don’t see anything travelling close to the speed of light. Descartes has thought that we lived in a world where everything could be defined by giving three coordinates.
Little St James is x miles west of me, y miles north of me, and z miles above sea level, say.
Er…well, to be consistent…ah, it doesn’t matter. Yes, you can define the location of anything by giving those three coordinates, length, height, breadth. And also, we live in a world where one event follows another. People are born before they die. There was once a time before Little St James was built. Maybe I need to state what years it exists in when I give the coordinates as well. (Audience murmurs)
See, it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it. We don’t think that way. We mainly think about the way the world is now, or cause and effect happening in a room. I shoot my gun, I kill someone, I get arrested. (Less enthusiastic audience laughter) We don’t usually put that in the same thought as trying to place where things are geographically.
But Popham and Webb found that those are intimately linked. We don’t live in a world with three coordinates locating places in space and one number defining time. We live in a world of four dimensions, or, as Webb named it, chronotopic space.[16] (Sceptical audience murmurs) We imagine that if I in Fredericksburg am making toast and am hearing, via Photel, the voice of Chancellor Weiss giving a speech, then the two events are happening simultaneously – me making toast, and the Chancellor speaking. But this is not true, and not simply because the interview may be pre-recorded. It will always take time for the Photel transmission from Germany to reach my Photel set.
Photel is a form of light, and travels at the speed of light. Ah, you may say, then if we know the speed of light is constant, we could work out the time it takes to travel, and say we definitely know that Chancellor Weiss said those words ‘n’ seconds before I press the button on my toaster. (Slightly confused audience sounds) But, in fact, one of the strangest consequences of Popham-Webb theory is that simultaneity no longer exists. There is, in fact, no objective, immovable passage of time that we can relate occurrences to. Events are not three-dimensional happenings in space which happen on an unrelated, unconnected timeline defined by a clock ticking. Rather, they are four-dimensional happenings in chronotopic space (or, today, simply ‘the chronotope’), and one cannot change the location in space without also affecting the time. (More scepticism) Yes, it was a radical claim at the time. In our everyday life, we never reach such speeds of movement that such effects are noticeable – or, at least, so it seems. Today, things are a little different, as we’ll see.
At the time Popham and Webb, and their supporters such as Valdemar Lopez in California and Mashobane Mazibuko in Matetwa, argued using conceptual experiments. Imagine an ultratellurian space-ship accelerated to speeds of over ninety percent of the speed of light...
*
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
These illustrations are fairly similar to ones from OTL used to illustrate the Lorentz contraction, so I’ll skip ahead.
*
...for some years, the Popham-Webb chronotope was nothing more than a controversial theory. Yes, it explained the deviations in the predicted precession of the orbit of Mercury with no need for a Hephaestus, but this hardly seemed sufficient evidence to throw out practically the entirety of classical physics. One other implication of Popham-Webb theory was noted. Newtonian theory predicted that large masses would bend light, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Popham-Webb theory predicted the same, but that the effect would be twice as great as that calculated by Newton.
Here seemed a simple, solid way to test the theories. The trouble is that, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, there were relatively few ways to observe potential gravitational lensing. Today, with modern telescopes, it is not only relatively trivial, but actually used for practical purposes; we can use the gravity of a nearer island universe as a way to magnify one in the background, and we even sometimes see a double or quadruple image of the farther unisland in the same way we would with a normal glass lens. If physicists ever sound rather aggravated that people still express scepticism about isolumism, this is why; it is like you boasting about your new Studebaker Trailblazer to me, and me saying that I doubt internal combustion engines are even possible. (Mixed thoughtful response and chuckles from audience) Isolumism is an everyday, reliable occurrence to astronomers.
But getting back to the Electric Circus era. Several astronomers, including Pérousien Alain Bouloux, noted that asimconic imagery taken of a solar eclipse which crossed Pérousie in September 1922 showed the occluded Sun passing in front of stars. With the Sun’s glare hidden by the eclipsing Moon, it might be possible to measure the level of gravitational lensing from the apparent, aberrant movement of the stars as they passed behing the eclipse.[17] While this was first posited as early as Popham and Webb’s first publication in 1925, the Black Twenties made impossible any attempts to organise the kind of global expeditions that would be needed to study future solar eclipses from multiple points. Early attempts in the immediate aftermath were also limited. It was not until the solar eclipse of April 1930, which crossed North America, that sufficient evidence was collected to say one way or the other. Ironically, while the data did not fit the Newtonian prediction, it was also somewhat removed from the Popham-Webb prediction. It was enough for many former sceptics to believe that Popham and Webb were on the right track and it was time to abandon the totalist Newtonian view – but it was clear that Popham-Webb theory was still incomplete.
We then reach the so-called ‘Great Divergence’ of the mid to late 1930s. It was clear across the world that the basic problem with Popham-Webb isolumism is that it did not directly integrate gravity itself into the theory. Just as the Newtonian model treated time as a separate, unrelated thing, so too did basic PW theory with gravitation. What was needed was a way to incorporate gravitation, but this proved mathematically very challenging.
We ended up with two primary competing models of gravitational isolumism. It was eventually proved, by Stieg Arnstad in the 1970s, that the two are actually mathematically equivalent, and the argument between the two was as pointless as the earlier disputes between the fluxions of Newton and the calculus of Leibniz. But it did illustrate how importance hearing diverse voices and worldviews from around the world was to the progress of science. One route alone could have failed. Two allowed for debate and rethinking.
Yes. Here in the Empire, as well as in England, France and Germany, the dominant formulation is what has become known as Goliasch-Bouquard Revised Isolumism. Conversely, in China, Pérousie, the Russias – Russia, I’m sorry – and Belgium, it has been more common to use the model developed from the great mind of Jiao Zhuoqiang.
I think most people are familiar with the story of Professor Jiao, as he is usually known in the English-speaking world, after that biopic film with Ye Jinhe from the eighties, remember? I’ll be brief. Jiao worked as a middle-level civil servant, or mandarin, in the transit authority in the city of Kaifeng. In his spare time, he insatiably studied mathematics, including many breakthroughs made by European mathematicians in the nineteenth century.[18]
Thus the irony that China has followed a theory built on European geometric foundations, while most of Europe instead cleaves to a theory built on fluid dynamics – something which China, and indeed Belgium, had spent much of its history obsessed with to avoid being flooded out![19]
The great problem was one of accelerating reference frames. Regular Popham-Webb theory worked well for circumstances where everything was in inertial reference frames, in other words, travelling at a constant speed.
Or at rest...but, of course, one of the consequences of PW theory is that we can no longer truly call any object at rest anymore. (Confused audience reaction) There will always be a point of view from which it seems to move.
Professor Jiao’s great intellectual breakthrough was the realisation that acceleration and gravitation are equivalent and, indeed, indistinguishable. If we wake up in a lighthouse-like building with no windows, and a ball drops from a shelf near the top, then we are not surprised that it falls to the floor. That is gravity, the gravity we have known all our lives. But I could then tell you that this is not a lighthouse, but the interior of a rocket ship in space, its rocket motor burning so that it accelerates forward – or, from your perspective, upward – at thirty-two feet per second squared. That is the same as the gravitational constant of Earth.
Or imagine you’re in a small, square room with no windows in a rocket ship, and you suddenly feel yourself weightless, like Dick Banks in “Critical Failure”, remember? (Vague assent from audience) Well, obviously, the rocket motor has stopped, so now you’re in zero gravity. Except what if I was lying to you about being in a rocket ship? What if you were in an elevator cabin on Earth, and the cable has snapped? (Audience reaction)People in a falling elevator, what we call free fall, feel just as weightless as people in space do. Because acceleration and gravity are the same thing.
Jiao’s work might have remained obscure, except his immediate boss, Cui Deliang, was unexpectedly selected as one of the One Hundred and Eight Mandators for the 1938 selection cycle. Cui respected Jiao’s work and promoted it to academics in Hanjing and Nanjing.
Meanwhile, in France and Germany, Bouquard and Goliasch developed their own mathematical interpretation. Whereas Jiao had made extensive use of dimensionally transcendental matrices, or transtrices for short, the Europeans preferred four independent fields.[20] Jiao modelled his interpretation of a gravitational chronotope as being equivalent to curvature; a common analogy reduces it to two dimensions, like a rubber sheet, with weights on it like the masses of planets. Conversely, Bouquard and Goliasch argued that the chronotope, which they identified with the aether, should be seen as like a room filled with fog, which becomes more concentrated near masses and less so away from them. Rather than geometric curvature, they thought of how light would propagate more slowly through higher concentrations of aether, which would be seen as equivalent to bending via refraction.
This division separated physicists for many years, and became quite heated at times. Old friendships were broken and conferences even had to declare their allegiance, some denying entry to those who held to one theory or the other. A Siamese student even took a shot at Professor Jiao in 1945, which you may remember from the film, though they zagged up the incident a bit to make it more exciting. In Belgium, Professor Laurens Bergkamp became Europe’s premier chapion of Jiao’s curvature. Popham was distraught at what his theory and Webb’s had unleashed on the world. The Societists were playing catch-up in the aftermath of their Silent Revolution, when many of their top scientists had been purged, and were forced to decide who to copy. In the end, they developed their own theories which were much closer to Jiao’s than Goliasch’s and Bergkamp’s.
It’s often claimed that a lack of understanding of isolumism is why so many rocket launches failed in the 1930s and 40s. That’s not really true, because the problems which claimed most of those rockets were unrelated. However, it is true that isolumism was not taken into account, and this began to cause problems when the nations began launching artimoons after the shock of the Sol Invictus 1 launch in 1950. The Germans had hit on the idea of launching an artimoon which would use clockwork timers to trigger an automated camera when passing over Russian military bases, then return to Earth so the film could be developed.[21] They called it Project Wotan, after the single, all-seeing eye of the king of the gods in Germanic mythology.
As I said before, one cannot deny the existence of isolumism today. The military, and now even some civilians, make use of an artimoon navigation system that, if it did not take isolumist corrections into account, would start to drift off course in a matter of days. The same effect scuppered Wotan. The Germans had plenty of other problems with their artimoons and launch vehicles, but when Wotan-9 finally succeeded in 1956, they were disappointed to find that its recovered asimcon film showed images dozens or hundreds of yards out from the intended targets. Time had slowed down for the artimoon and its preprogrammed instructions no longer put the target base under the cameras when they were triggered. As a result, the Germans did not obtain accurate pictures of Russian military movements in the months preceding the outbreak of the Sunrise War – if they had, perhaps it could have been averted. (Audience reaction)
That’s one way in which isolumism has changed the world. But, of course, the biggest impact of the New Physics on the twentieth century is the one we all know – the development of the threshold bomb...
*
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
This is followed by a description of atomic theory and its history which would be redundant with Jefferson Edwards’ lecture which we previously covered. There is one part which may be relevant for now, however...
*
We often act as though the threshold bomb came out of nowhere. Perhaps it seemed like that to people who did not follow the news. But even if one was not conversant with science fact, scientific romance had held clues. Atoms were not indivisible after all, one of the discoveries that led to the disparaging name ‘inversion theory’. Atomic caryii were held together by the Local Von Guericke Force, when electromagnetic forces should have flung their definos apart. If that trapped energy could be unlocked, it would be a limitless source of power...or an unimaginably potent weapon. (Audience murmurs)
The question was, how. We knew that it could happen. Benedetta Nuvoli had shown that xanthine salts spontaneously broke down to barotium and xenine, something impossible under classical chemical theories – this was alchemy! Elements transmuting! But one xanthine atom at a time breaking apart did not yield much energy. What if it was possible to create a chain reaction, in which each carytic disintegration would generate fragments that would strike another caryus and break it up as well? Or more than one?
Think of it like a disease, like the terrible hyperflu we all remember – spreading not just from one person to the next, but to a whole group of people in a crowded theatre like this one. (Audience reaction) Don’t worry, I’m not going to sneeze. (Nervous laughter) That was the holy grail – or the unholy grail, if you prefer – of carytic physics. Many thought it was impossible. Others thought it would spread uncontrollably and consume the whole world.
The wisest knew, as had been hypothesised for years, that carytic reactions were behind the light and heat of the Sun, whose proven longevity – from the age of the Earth – other sources, such as combustion, could not explain. All the sunlight we feel on our shoulders, that makes our crops grow and keeps our planet warm amid the cold and distant stars, is the result of carytic reactions, like millions of threshold bombs going off at once. (Audience murmurs) It was definitely possible to do. The question was, would the nations gain the capability within our lifetimes?
There was a hint, for those there to see it. In 1952, a team led by Sergei Tishchenko, at the University of Petrograd, published a paper on their findings from studying the breakup of xanthine nuclei under more controlled conditions. This eliminated the objections of alleged contamination that had been made to previous French experiments by Giraud. Many physicists eagerly awaited the next findings from Tishchenko, but then he and his research group fell mysteriously silent. It was as though the Russian government had concluded that the course of his research was something that, like the development of new rockets or explosives, should not be shared with other nations...
*
(Lt Black’s note)
Alright, you’ve put everyone to sleep, Bob. Now let’s get to the Diplomatic Rage, for pity’s sake.
(Sgt Mumby’s note)
Spoilsport. Sir.
[1] In OTL a similar quote is circulated, attributed to Lord Kelvin, stating that all that remained to uncover in physics was to refine things beyond the sixth decimal place. Like most famous quotes, he never said it. It is an out-of-context paraphrase of something Albert A. Michaelson said in 1894, which he attributed to an unnamed ‘emininent physicist’. One might have cause to wonder whether TTL’s Prof Williams actually said what is being claimed, either.
[2] In OTL this is similarly arbitrary. Todd’s second and third example (the third referred to as Darwinian evolution in OTL) are cases which are usually presented as being refined rather than disproven in OTL, whereas in OTL (but not TTL) phlogiston theory is treated as being ‘disproven’ and replaced.
[3] ‘Demology’ is a term used in OTL to mean roughly what we would be ‘sociology’ – words that evoke ‘society’ have a certain stigma due to association with Societism, especially in academia, which is commonly accused of having Societist sympathies.
[4] I.e. continental drift, which was similarly controversial in OTL.
[5] See Part #254 in Volume VII for the Fundamental Model (roughly analogous to the development of Maxwell’s Equations in OTL).
[6] Subrubric light = infrared light, Photrack = radar (and here also used to mean ‘microwaves’), telecommand = remote control.
[7] Supracynthic light = ultraviolent light, osteolight = X-rays, deleterious paralight = ionising radiation, or more specifically gamma rays.
[8] I.e. photons. The older term ‘corpuscle’ is used in TTL out of defensive continuity with Newton, when the scientific establishment was accusing Inversion Theorists of futurist iconoclasm.
[9] The term used in OTL is ‘quantised’, hence ‘quantum theory’.
[10] Part #312 in this volume.
[11] Recall that Dionysus and Ariadne are the names in TTL for Uranus and Neptune (respectively) – see Interlude #12 in Volume III.
[12] In OTL this hypothetical planet was named Vulcan (no, not that one). The choice of name in both OTL and TTL (Hephaestus is the Greek counterpart of the Roman Vulcan) is simply because mythological beings associated with forges makes sense for a planet that was thought to be orbiting incredibly close to the fires of the Sun.
[13] To take an early one of many examples discovered in OTL, Dimidium (51 Pegasi b) which orbits less than 5 million miles from its parent star, as opposed to about 93 million miles from the Earth to the Sun. The science of ultraplanet (exoplanet) hunting in TTL lags behind OTL due to technological differences, but only by about ten years (Dimidium was discovered in OTL in 1995).
[14] One will note that in TTL the term ‘relativity’ is not the oft-quoted buzzword part of the theory as it is in OTL – which is arguably objectively quite unlikely as it’s not a straightforward word to pronounce! A peculiar consequence of this is that TTL has been spared OTL’s ridiculous period in the twentieth century when a vague, superficial understanding that ‘relativity’ was the latest scientific breakthrough led to people latching onto it as support for any number of completely unrelated positions in unconnected fields, such as moral or artistic relativism. In fact, as Ian Stewart once pointed out, the important part about Einsteinian relativity is not that ‘everything’s relative’ – which, as stated in the text, we already knew – but that one thing is unexpectedly absolute and unchangeable, the speed of light. In TTL, this ‘isoluminal factor’ (and, more broadly, the principle that the laws of physics are invariant and immovable in all inertial reference frames) has instead become the crux of the usual philosophical argument between Societists and Diversitarians. Societists argue that this universality of physics implies support for their position of human universality, whereas Diversitarians claim that these very scientific breakthroughs were only possible because they were contributed to by many people of different scientific traditions from different cultures across the world. Repeat ad infinitum.
[15] This relates to the Michaelson-Morley Experiment from OTL. Note that it is much less celebrated in TTL because scientists in TTL have chosen to ‘reformulate’ the concept of the luminiferous aether rather than state it is disproven. In OTL the idea that the vacuum is ‘empty’ now looks very outdated; TTL’s scientists have simply chosen to redefine ‘aether’ to mean a host of things related to spacetime, vacuum energy and what we would call the Higgs field.
[16] Referred to as ‘spacetime’ in OTL. This is an English calque of the German term ‘Raumzeit’ used by Minkowski, and is not the most logical construction in English (confusing quite a few students of physics) – Webb has instead opted for a slightly pretentious compound Greek adjective, always a default option in science of this era.
[17] In OTL this was tried with the 1919 ‘Eddington Experiment’ with the solar eclipse of that year. In practice, in hindsight many scientists believe the data were flawed and the initial triumphal claims made of confirmation of Einstein’s theory were subject to confirmation bias. Many further expeditions to measure gravitational lensing from solar eclipses followed. The other difference in TTL is that the eclipse method is tried before general relativity came along. One of the more ‘unrealistic’ things about the progress of science in OTL is that both special and general relativity came from the mind of the same man, ten years apart, when it seems more ‘reasonable’ that the latter would require the tearing down of assumptions of the former by an isonoclastic newcomer. Of course, this ignores the fact that many others made contributions to the progress of relativity whom are often ignored, including Minkowski, Hilbert and Grossmann.
[18] These, rather vaguely passed over here, should be considered roughly equivalent to the works of Gauss, Riemann and Ricci in OTL, at least as far as their relevance to differential geometry goes.
[19] Predictably, there are some holes in this snappy observation – the European theory is as much based on field mechanics as fluid dynamics, for a start.
[20] Transtrices are referred to in OTL as tensors. The Goliasch-Bouquard formulation bears some resemblance to OTL’s Palatini tetrad formulation, but then heads off in a different direction when it comes to visual interpretation. Jiao’s work is much closer to what we would recognise as mainstream visualisations of general relativity from OTL. The important distinction is that OTL has many different ‘formalisms of’ or ‘solutions to’ the Einstein field equations, which are treated as viable or subordinate derivations of it. Conversely, in TTL the Jiao and Goliasch-Bouquard general relativistic theories are treated as competing derivations of Popham-Webb (i.e. special relativity on Minkowski spacetime) with the implicit assumption that they cannot both be true. The fact that they were eventually proved to be mathematically equivalent (so, two interchangeable ways of looking at the same basic theory) had important implications for Diversitarian and Societist social interpretations of the progress of science.
[21] This is essentially how the earliest spy satellites (such as the Soviet Zenit series) worked in OTL, except that the more rapid pace of computer technology in OTL meant that programming instructions could be transmitted to the satellite. Wotan is much more reliant on timers (and the timers themselves are more primitive), giving more time in each mission for relativistic effects to lead to deviation.
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Thande
Donor
Yes, as I promised, I'm back now we're in September and I had my birthday yesterday. No more time to work as I had hoped (I had to write half of this today) but never mind. This update is scientifically focused and won't be for everyone, but we'll get back into geopolitics with the next update in a fortnight's time.