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In February 2009, Jonathan Lyons published 'The House of Wisdom', a riveting history which reveals the vital role the Islamic civilisation played in knowledge creation and how this treasure reached the West. In this fascinating and thoughtful book, Jonathan Lyons restores credit to the contribution of the Arabs and Muslims in the human long and patient effort of building human civilisation, explores and reveals the extent of their learning and describes the intrepid adventures of the European intellectuals of the high Middle Ages who went in search of it and who, in doing so, laid the foundations of what we now call the Renaissance.
Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. The House of Wisdom: Model of the institutional setting of science in Islam
3. Outline of a vibrant and dynamic tradition of knowledge creation
4. Instances of originality and impact on the West
5. The European Middle Ages vs. Islamic Enlightment
6. Endorsements
7. About the author
8. Table of contents
9. Resources and bibliography
* * *
Book review of The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization By Jonathan Lyons. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, February 2009. Hardback, 272 pages. ISBN-10: 1596914599 - ISBN-13: 978-1596914599. Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches.
Figure 1: Front cover of The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization by Jonathan Lyons (Bloomsbury, 2009).
In his book The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization published recently, Jonathan Lyons describes the most salient aspects of the vibrant tradition of Islamic learning and narrates the fascinating story of the various ways in which this learning was transferred to the West and how it helped to transform profoundly Western civilisation in the later Middle Ages. The title of the book is inspired by the emblematic Abbasid academic institution Bayt al-hikma or the House of Wisdom, founded in Baghdad in the early 9th century. However, the book goes beyond this early episode of Islamic civilisation and lays a profound focus on the encounters between the East and West and how these encounters shaped the rise of the West.
The structure of the book is arranged roughly according to the divisions of the times of prayers in Islam. The four parts of the book are entitled respectively Al-Isha/Nightfall (part 1), Al-Fajr/Dawn (part 2), Al-Zuhr/Midday (part 3), and Al-'Asr/Afternoon (part 4). They correspond to the raise of Islamic civilisation, the wide-ranging scope of its political and social power, coupled with a dynamic intellectual and scientific vitality, and its beneficial influence on the civilisation of the pre-modern Western world. This original structure of the book, organised in function of the daily Muslim prayer times, starts with Isha (nightfall) in the 10th century, when the Crusades first began and Europe was shrouded in darkness. Fajr (dawn) and Zuhr (midday) are devoted to a description of the events in the period around the 11th and 12th centuries when Muslim civilisation was at its zenith. 'Asr (afternoon) corresponds to the 14th century and marks the first appearance of "the West". Even though Lyons does not ask what happened at Maghrib (sunset), there is certainly an assumption that it represents the "end" or decline of science and learning in Islamic lands. However, such a view should take into account that the cyclic vision of civilisations must consider the role of interculturality in handing on the products of human spirit to the next civilisation, where they continue to live and to prosper in a new context.
The historical context of the rise of civilisation in the lands conquered by Muslims since the middle of the 7th century and the context of the intercultural transmission of knowledge around the Mediterranean Sea can be summarized as follows. For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was backward and benighted, locked into the Dark Ages and barely able to tell the time of day. Augustine had decreed that belief, not reason, should be the guiding light of Christian thinking and partially as a result Europeans lived in a world of nominal literacy and subsistence farming, where blind faith, superstition and sorcery took the place of medicine, and the church harnessed nascent aggression among the kingdoms to its own ends in the pursuit of astonishingly violent and cruel holy wars - the Crusades.
Islamic culture, however, was thriving and had become a powerhouse of intellectual exploration and discussion that dazzled the likes of Adelard of Bath who ventured to the Near East in search of the scientific riches pouring out of cities like Antioch, Baghdad or Cairo, whose libraries held hundred thousands books at a time when the best European libraries housed, at most, several dozen. In the frame of a dynamic scientific and intellectual tradition, the scholars of Islam could measure the earth's circumference, a feat not matched in the West for eight hundred years; they discovered algebra; were adept at astronomy and navigation, developed the astrolabe and other astronomical instruments, translated all the Greek scientific and philosophical texts, including the whole corpuses of Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, etc.; they made paper, produced lenses and mirrors, and developed theoretical as well as practical branches of knowledge. Without them, and the knowledge that travellers like Adelard brought back to the West, Europe would in all likelihood have been a very different place over the last millennium.
Figure 2: Photo of author and journalist Jonathan Lyons (Source).
In this fascinating and thoughtful book Jonathan Lyons restores credit to the contributions of the classical world of Islam, explores and reveals the extent of their learning and describes the intrepid adventures of those who went in search of it and who, in doing so, laid the foundations of what we now call the Renaissance.
Among the examples the author presents we quote the following contributions:
- The ability to accurately tell time and determine dates. Here, the chief instrument was the astrolabe, the most powerful analog computer before the modern age.
- The art of alchemy, forerunner of modern chemistry.
- Trigonometry and spherical geometry – invaluable for making maps, navigation, and locating cities.
- Algebra, geometry, trigonometry and our contemporary number system.
- Star tables and almanacs capable of predicting celestial events, like lunar eclipses, with considerable accuracy.
- Our modern technical lexicon: from azimuth to zenith, from alcohol to zero.
- Many of the foods we eat – apricots, oranges, artichokes, hard wheat for pasta, to name but a few.
- Natural philosophy, scientific cosmology and optics.
- And, most important of all, the notion that religion and science, faith and reason, could coexist; this gave medieval Western intellectuals 'permission' to explore the universe without impinging on the majesty of God.
The list of the protagonists of this intellectual and scientific adventure of creation of knowledge and its spread westward include:
- Al-Khwarizmi: Mathematician and astronomer, born around 783 near the Aral Sea in modern-day Uzbekistan. He was affiliated with the House of Wisdom, and his star tables and works on arithmetic, algebra, the astrolabe, and the Hindu-Arabic numerals profoundly influenced the West.
- Al-Ma'mun: Abbasid caliph from 813 to 833. He took a direct interest in science and philosophy and actively promoted scholars at the House of Wisdom and elsewhere.
- Ibn Sina (Avicenna): 11th-century polymath and leading Muslim philosopher and medical scholar. His influence on Western culture lasted for centuries, in various fields, from philosophy to medicine.
- Ibn Rushd (Averroes): The famous Andalusian philosopher Abu 'l-Walid Muhammed Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd. He flourished in Cordoba and Marrakech in the 12th century. He exerted an enormous influence on Christian and Jewish thought, primarily as a commentator on Aristotle, and also as an original author in philosophy, logic, astronomy and medicine.
- Al-Idrisi (Dreses): North African geographer and scientific director of King Roger II of Sicily's World Map project, completed in 1154.
- Adelard of Bath: Pioneering explorer of the Islamic learning, who brought the wonders of geometry, astronomy and other fields to the medieval West.
- Frederick II: The Holy Roman Emperor and enthusiastic proponent of Arabic culture. He was patron of Michael Scot and underwrote translations of Ibn Rushd's commentaries on the Aristotelian corpus.
2. The House of Wisdom: Model of the institutional setting of science in Islam
Figure 3: Aristotle teaching astronomy. The Arab scientific tradition was greatly influenced by the work of the classical Greek scholars, whose "natural philosophy" represented a complete system of knowledge that encompassed both the physical sciences and metaphysics, and upon which the scholars of the Islamic tradition commented extensively. © Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul (Source: House of Wisdom Gallery).
Bayt al-hikma or The House of Wisdom was a scientific institution founded in Baghdad by the caliph al-Ma'mun. Its principal activity was the translation of philosophical and scientific works from the Greek originals which, according to tradition, a delegation sent by the caliph had brought from the country of Rum. Its directors were Sahl b. Harun and Salm, assisted by Sa'id b. Harun. It included an important staff of translators, of whom the most famous were the Banu 'l-Munaddjdjim, as well as copyists and binders. It appears in fact that the library so constituted, and often called Khizanat al-hikma, had already existed in the time of Harun al-Rashid and the Barmakids who had begun to have Greek works translated. Al-Ma'mun may only have given a new impetus to this movement, which was to exert a considerable influence of the development of Islamic thought and culture.
To the same institution were attached two astronomical observatories (marasid), one installed at Baghdad, the other at Damascus, where Muslim scholars devised in particular new astronomical tables (zij or zidj), correcting the astronomical data inherited from the ancient, especially those furnished by Ptolemy.
The Bayt al-hikma properly so called does not appear to have survived the reign of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil, which began with a sensible political shift from that of his immediate predecessors, although there is subsequent mention in Iraq, during the 3rd/9th century, of several scientific libraries, owing their existence to private initiative and the fact that the caliph al-Mu'tadhid had sought to favour the work of various scholars whom he had installed in his place. Only the Fatimids were later to found similar official academies, of which the most important was the Dar al-hikma established by Al-Hakim in 395/1005.
Indeed, since the short-lived appearance of the Bayt al-hikma of al-Ma'mun, several libraries had been founded in Iraq and Persia providing not only information on traditional learning, but also an introduction to classical sciences ('ulum al-awa'il).Such establishments were very successful in Egypt under the Fatimids, where Shi'idoctrines provided a favourable climate for the development of Greek sciences. The Cairo palace soon housed a large collection, and one of its librarians was the writer al-Shabushti(d. 388/998). The vizier of al-'Aziz, Ya'qub b. ?illis (d. 380/990), organized meetings of men of letters, jurists, and theologians in his own residence, and granted them financial allowances, but this initiative was soon over-shadowed by the Dar al-hikma (sometimes dar al-'ilm) which Al-Hakim housed in the north-western part of the western Palace. It contained a library and reading-room, and served as a meeting-place for traditionists, jurists, grammarians, doctors, astronomers, logicians and mathematicians. The Cairo Dar al-hikma was administered by the Da'ial-du'at, who invited learned men to meet there twice weekly. It was closely associated with the propagation of Shi'idoctrine, and charged to give instruction in Isma'ilidoctrine, which has also been called hikma since the time of al-Mu'izz. In 435/1045 a new catalogue was prepared, and it listed at least 6500 volumes on astronomy, architecture and falsafa (philosophy). The institute was closed at the end of the 5th/11th century by the vizier al-Aftal, but al-Ma'mun reopened it in 517 H/1123 CE in another building, to the south of the eastern Palace. It had already been looted in 461 H/1068 CE, in the reign of al-Muntasir during the civil wars, and when the Fatimid dynasty came to an end (in 567 H/1171 CE) the library was once more closed. Salah al-Din Al-Ayyubi sold the palace treasures, including the books, but fortunately some of them were re-purchased by enlightened men and therefore preserved.
3. Outline of a vibrant and dynamic tradition of knowledge creation
Figure 4: A page from the manuscript of Al-Qanun fi 'l-tib (The Canon of Medicine) by Ibn Sina, written in the 11th century. It served as the leading medical text in the West for more than five hundred years. © National Museum, Damascus (Source).
When Baghdad opened its gates as the new capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the prime site in the city was occupied by the royal library. Both the city and the library, completed around 765, were built by Caliph al-Mansur, who devised a method for measuring the circumference of the Earth and was second in a long line of Abbasid caliphs who valued thought and learning above all else. The Abbasids created, shaped and developed one of the most rich and fertile periods of science in human history.
The library was officially called "the House of Wisdom". It was a monumental structure, accommodating translators, copyists, scholars, scientists, librarians and the swelling volumes of Persian, Sanskrit and Greek texts that flooded into Baghdad. Not surprisingly, it became a magnet for seekers of knowledge from across the Muslim empire.
Jonathan Lyons tells the story of the House of Wisdom, the caliphs who supported it and the people who worked there, at a riveting, breakneck pace. In quick succession we meet scholars such as al-Khwarizimi, the illustrious Muslim mathematician and founder of algebra, the geographer al-Mas'udi, who described major sea routes to Persia, Cambodia and as far as the Malay peninsula in The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, and al-Kindi, the first Arab philosopher. But Lyons is more concerned with how what was happening in Baghdad and other Muslim cities was transferred to Europe. So he focuses on a string of colourful translators and scholars who travelled to the Muslim world and took its knowledge and discoveries back with them.
Adelard of Bath, for example, travelled to Antioch and Sicily in his dogged pursuit of what he called studia arabum, the learning of the Arabs. An early pioneer of Arabic teaching, he translated numerous works of spherical and theoretical astronomy, including al-Khwarizimi's astronomical tables, which introduced a new body and vocabulary of mathematical knowledge to the West. His translation work enabled Adelard to write his treatise on the use of the astrolabe, which revolutionised the way Western men understood the Universe. Another Briton, Michael Scot, could not get enough of Muslim learning. His extensive translations of the works of Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, undertaken during the 13th century, introduce corpus of Greek and Arabic philosophy to the West.
Figure 5: A Muslim and a Christian playing a duet on the lute in 13th-century Spain. This work was dedicated to Alfonso the Wise, the Christian ruler of Castile, Leon, and Galicia. © Monasterio de El Escorial, El Escorial, Spain/The Bridgeman Art Library (Source).
But interest in Arabic learning was not limited to scholars and translators. Many rulers, such as the Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick II, realised that Arab knowledge was a source of power. Europe knew that the scholars of Islam phisticated navigation techniques; and books such as al-Biruni's The Determination of the Coordinates of Cities could provide accurate methods for determining geographic locations. It was this realisation that motivated the upstart king of the once-Muslim Sicily, Roger II, to commission the first global map of the world from the Muslim geographer al-Idrisi. The map, completed about 1138, depicted the world as occupying one full hemisphere, or 180 degrees, stretching from Korea in the East to the Canary Islands in the West. Al-Idrisi also wrote an accompanying text, Amusements for Those Who Long to Traverse the Horizon, known as The Book of Roger, which provided a description of the peoples, lands and cultures of the seven climates.
Islamic thought and learning transformed medieval Christendom beyond recognition, Lyons writes. A key import was natural philosophy, the precursor to modern science, and the idea that came with it: the notion of a university as an intellectual, cultural and social institution. Roger Bacon, the 13th-century English scientist and philosopher, travelled through Muslim Spain dressed as an Arab and was among the first to teach natural philosophy in Paris. Without these imports, Lyons says, the Renaissance would not have been possible and European "progress" as we know it would have been inconceivable. Arabic learning gave Europeans their ideological and intellectual identity - indeed, Lyons suggests, "the West" itself is a Muslim invention.
But the West's gratitude to Islam was expressed in its willful forgetting of the debt it owed to the Muslim world. This process began with the successors of Adelard and Scot and had four core themes: Islam distorts the word of God; it is spread solely by the sword; it perverts human sexuality; and its prophet, Muhammad, was a charlatan, an anti-Christ. It was thus necessary to write the Arab learning out of history and to claim direct descent from Greece. As Petrarch, one of the most prominent 14th-century anti-Arab intellectuals, declared: "I shall scarcely be persuaded that anything good can come from Arabia." Scot's mastery of Arab learning led Dante to dump him in the lower depths of Hell, among the sorcerers.
Thanks to enlightened modern efforts, such as those of Jonathan Lyons and others, those simplistic judgements, founded on religious hostility rather than being rooted in real historical facts, are decisively corrected.
4. Instances of originality and impact on the West
Figure 6: A European copy of al-Idrisi's map of the world, originally created at the commission of Roger II the ruler of Sicily, in the mid-12th century. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (Source).
In his review of two books published recently on Muslim Heritage and its impact on world science, Philip Ball wrote in the The Sunday Times: "Last November [2008], scientists using the Hubble space telescope reported the first sighting with visible light of a planet circling a star other than our own sun. It orbits 25 light years away around one of the brightest stars in the sky, called Fomalhaut. Isn't that a curious name for a star? Not obviously mythological, it sounds as if it derives from some forgotten French astronomer. Not so; it is, in fact, from the Arabic fum u'l haut, meaning 'mouth of the fish'. And Fomalhaut is not alone in having an Arabic derivation - there are well over 100 others, including Betelgeuse, Aldebaran and Deneb. How did the Arabs get to name stars?"
The answer is that they once led the world in astronomy. Muslim scientists were mapping the heavens, and pondering our place in them, while Europeans were still gazing at the night sky with baffled awe. To judge from some scientific narratives, the baton of knowledge about astronomy passed directly from the Greek Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE to Copernicus in the Renaissance. In fact, just about everything that the Western world knew of the celestial sphere in the 16th century had come to it via Arabic learning, including Ptolemy's works, which were translated and refined between the 9th and the 13th centuries. Actually, the scholars of Islam didn't just read Ptolemy; they added to and challenged him, with data gathered at observatories such as the one established in the 820s in Baghdad by the greatest of the "scientific" rulers, al-Mamun of the Abbasid caliphate.
Astronomy is just one example of the enormous debt that the West owes to the achievements of Islamic science during the periods we still insist on calling the Dark and Middle Ages. While Europeans struggled until at least the 12th century with the mere rudiments of mathematics and natural philosophy, the Abbasid caliphs of the 8th to 13th centuries were promoting a rationalistic vision of Islam within which it was a sacred duty to inquire into the workings of the world. This programme was founded on the remnants of Roman and Hellenic culture, to which the Muslims had direct access in centres such as Alexandria, Harran and all intellectual centres of that Middle East they pacified and unified. They prepared Arabic versions of the works of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and Archimedes, and set up schools and libraries such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
As well as preserving classical scholarship, Muslim thinkers also innovated in many fields: astronomy, optics, cartography and medicine. The camera obscura, for instance, a kind of pinhole camera in which an outside scene is projected onto a wall in a darkened chamber as light enters through a small hole, was first studied experimentally by the Iraqi physicist and mathematician who settled in Egypt Al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) in the 11th century. Roger Bacon later used the device to study solar eclipses, and old masters from Van Eyck to Vermeer may have employed the projection method to achieve their micro-realist detail.
Islamic mapmakers, meanwhile, were drawing recognisable outlines of Europe, the Gulf and the Indian subcontinent while Westerners were still dividing a disc world into absurdly stylised quadrants. (It was a Muslim map that guided Vasco da Gama beyond the Cape of Good Hope to India at the end of the 15th century.) And in chemistry the Arabs went far beyond the tentative efforts of the classical world, bequeathing us words such as alkali and alcohol, alembic, elixir and alchemy. The standard theory of the alchemical transmutation of metals was laid out in the writings ascribed to the 8th-century scholar Jabir ibn-Hayyan, in which nitric, hydrochloric and sulphuric acids - central to practical chemistry then and now - made their debut.
The Muslims also benefited from contact with China, from where they learnt how to make paper, and India, from where they got the "Arabic" numerals that were far superior to the cumbersome Roman system for arithmetic calculations, along with the concept of zero (the word itself is Arabic). These and other discoveries were passed on to the West in due course.
The fruits of the golden age of Islamic science are summarised briskly and engagingly in the book of Jonathan Lyons. His book, The House of Wisdom is keen to dismantle the myth that Islam is fundamentally opposed to science, and he shows clearly that the Islamic civilisation was driven by a strong thirst for knowledge and rational inquiry.
Lyons's more specific focus is on the story of how this knowledge opened Western eyes in the 12th century, a period now regarded as a kind of medieval renaissance. The hero of his book is an Englishman, Adelard of Bath, one of the few Europeans open-minded enough to see that they had much to learn from the "heathens". Too often dismissed as a mere translator, Adelard not only gave the West its first view of Euclid's Elements and the astronomy and algebra of the Baghdad mathematician al-Khwarizmi (whose name is preserved now in the word algorithm), but was also an original thinker who helped introduce medieval Europe to the Islamic vision of a universe governed by the rational design of a hands-off God.
5. The European Middle Ages vs. Islamic Enlightenment
Figure 7: In November, scientists using the Hubble space telescope reported the first sighting with visible light of a planet circling a star other than our sun. The discovered planet orbits 25 light years away around one of the brightest stars in the sky, called Fomalhaut or Alpha Piscis Austrini (Source). The name Fomalhaut is derived from fum u'l hût (mouth of the fish), the Arabic initial name of this star. Fomalhaut is not alone in having an Arabic origin: there are well over 100 other stars, including Betelgeuse, Aldebaran and Deneb (see FSTC, Arabic Star Names: A Treasure of Knowledge Shared by the World).
Probably, it is in Chapter 2, entitled "The Earth Is Like a Wheel", that Jonathan Lyons' objective in the book is the most apparent. Here the author describes the state of knowledge, or rather absence of secular knowledge, that characterized Europe during the Middle Ages.
In contrast with the thriving later intellectual tradition that flourished in Europe from the 17th century, the second chapter of Jonathan Lyons' book describes how European intellectuals in the Middle Ages were knocking on the gates of the learned and sophisticated Islamic lands. He explains that Fibonnaci's father sent him to a Muslim family to learn his math - he would have learned double-entry bookkeeping, an innovation that had not yet reached the North.
When European monestaries might hold a couple of dozen volumes, Arabic libraries held hundreds of thousands of books. When a Muslim ruler decided to donate books to a new school, he sent 80,000 from his personal collection.
Adelard of Bath was born around 1080 in England's west country. His father was a powerful ally of the local bishop, and he was a wealthy, highly educated man who'd studied at cathedral schools in France. But he condemned contemporary learning and longed for an idealized past - "I judge the ancients eloquent and call the moderns dumb."
He had no interest in crusading. Instead, he resolved to learn Arabic and return with Arabic learning. We believe he was in Antioch in 1114, based on evidence of an earthquake he survived. He know he learned to wash a cadaver until the neural systems emerge from under the skin to study their structure.
He came home a changed man, determined to teach his peers about the wonders he studied in the East. He is worried that his peers reject modern scholarship from the Arab world at their peril and overfocus (as he had) on the classics of Greek literature. He brings back a book of alchemy which teaches how to tan leather, color glass and dye cloth green. And he brings back the astrolabe, the most powerful computer of its day, capable of telling time, defining true north, and measuring the height of a building. Alas, they only work if you know the latitude - we can read astrolabes based on what latitude they're set up for.
Read more of this chapter below in the following extract (Chapter 2, The Earth is like a Wheel, p. 28 ff.):
"Seven years before the earthquake that shook the moral foundations of Crusader Antioch, Adelard surveyed the world around him and pronounced it rotten. His recent studies at the famed French cathedral school at Tours had provided him with the best education of his day. He enjoyed the support and patronage of the powerful bishop of Bath, the French court physician and scholar John de Villula. He practiced the art of hunting with falcons, a sign of his noble rank and the life of leisure it generally afforded. And he was an accomplished musician, who years later still fondly recalled the time he had been invited to play the cithara, a forerunner of the guitar, for the queen.
"In short, Adelard of Bath was the model country gentleman. His father, Fastrad, was one of Bishop John's richest tenants and most senior aides, ensuring a life of privilege for his son. The family appears sporadically in official documents of Church and state. The Pipe Rolls, or royal accounts, later list Adelard as the beneficiary of a pension from the revenues of Wiltshire, in southwest England. Still, young Adelard saw little of value in the contemporary world, and he despaired at the state of Western learning in particular. "When I examine the famous writings of the ancients – not all of them, but most – and compare their talents with the knowledge of the moderns, I judge the ancients eloquent, and call the moderns dumb," he proclaimed in the opening line of his coming-of-age essay and first known work, On the Same and the Different.
"Adelard's disdain for the "the moderns" was understandable, for the West at the end of the 11th century was a mess. Daily life staggered under the burden of rampant violence and social instability. Bands of mercenaries, answerable neither to king nor God, prowled the countryside, their commanders' word the only law of the land. Across Europe, primitive farming techniques could no longer keep pace with a growing population, while antiquated inheritance laws left many impoverished and desperate. Violence – inflamed by the weakness of central political authority and uninhibited by the tenuous moral grip of the Catholic Church – was the currency of the day. As Pope Urban had acknowledged at Clermont when he called the First Crusade, religious leaders were helpless to halt the chaos across the continent. The best the Church could do was to redirect its flock's baser nature against the infidels to the East.
"Not even Adelard's remote corner of England was immune to the troubles. It was just two decades since the Norman Conquest, and political and social strife still plagued the land. The uneasy relationship – for centuries punctuated by bouts of armed conflict – between what today comprise the distinct nations of England and France was a regular feature of late medieval life. At the same time, political, cultural, and personal ties ran deep, and so it was not surprising that Adelard could pursue higher education in Tours and that many leading officials and courtiers, like Bishop John, hailed from the European mainland. In 1086, as a young child, Adelard had seen his native West Country town of Bath, including its once-proud abbey of black-robed monks, almost burned to the ground during an uprising against the heir to the throne, William the Red [William Rufus]. The rebels had hoped to secure the rule of William's brother, Robert of Normandy, but their bid for power ended in bloody failure and considerable destruction. Robert, eldest son of William the Conqueror, later died a royal prisoner.
"Things were little better inside the elite cathedral schools. The chaos and disorder that swept in with the barbarian invasions of the western Roman Empire, beginning in the 4th century CE, had just about destroyed formal education and the perpetuation of classical knowledge. The Muslim conquests three hundred years later sealed the West's isolation by choking off easy access to the Byzantine Christians based in far-off Constantinople, where some traces of the Greek intellectual tradition could still be found. The wonders of classical learning were all but forgotten, or at the best pushed to the extreme margins of European consciousness. Invaluable texts were lost through inattention, destroyed by the illiterate hordes, or simply rendered unintelligible by the general ignorance of would-be scholars or simply by the lost ability to read Greek. The aristocracy of the Roman Empire read the Greek masters in the original, so there was no need at the time for Latin translations of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the engineering wonders of Archimedes, or the geometry of Euclid. The wholesale disappearance of Greek as the language of learning meant centuries of knowledge virtually vanished from the collective mind of Latin-speaking Europe.
Figure 8: Photo of Dar Al-Hekma College in Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The name of the college refers to the importance of the name to the memory of the Arab people. Dar Al-Hekma College is a private higher education institution. Its mission is to provide selected degree programmes of the highest quality to academically qualified women. The College fosters creativity and emphasizes the important role in society of women as the first builders of the family and the first educators of the nation.
"There were a few outposts – scattered monasteries in Ireland, northern England, Catalonia, and southern Italy – where the monks laboured to keep the classical traditions alive. Yet the results were meagre in comparison to the heights once scaled by the Greeks, or to the new and exciting work being carried out in the Arab world. At the West's leading centre of mathematical studies, the cathedral school of Laon, the best minds of Adelard's day had no grasp of the use of zero. The masters at Laon taught the latest techniques employed by King Henry I, who ruled both England and Normandy in the early 12th century, to manage his treasury. These included the use of a special tablecloth, marked out in rows and columns like a chessboard, and based on the principles of the abacus which had reached France from Arab Spain some years before. The cloth was known as the scaccarium, Latin for chessboard, and is the origin of the English term for the treasury, "the Exchequer." Despite the importance of this royal mission, the standard of learning at Laon remained very low; one contemporary textbook reveals consistent errors in even the most basic calculations.
"More vexing than sloppy royal accounting was the inability to measure the hours of the day or keep the calendar. Even by the sleepy standards of medieval Christendom, time was a serious business, linked as it was with the pursuit of heavenly salvation. The Rule of St. Benedict, which governed tens of thousands of monasteries from the 6th century onwards, required eight sets of prayers at specific times every twenty-four hours. The practice was based on a reading of two verses in Psalm 119: "Seven times a day I praise thee" and "At midnight I rise to give thee thanks." This was relatively simple during the day, when the changing position of the sun could provide a rough guide to the hour, but at night the monks of the Latin West were left literally in the darkness of their own ignorance".
- 'A wonderful and important book which for the first time presents the Western debt to medieval Arabic learning in a clear, accessible manner. A fascinating book.' – William Dalrymple (on the back cover of the book)
- "The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization is a 320-page treasure trove of information for the uninitiated that packs a powerful punch of science, history, geography, politics and general knowledge at a time when so much disinformation about the Arab world is swirling around in various media."— Magda Abu-Fadil, Director of Journalism Training Program at the American University of Beirut, on www.HuffingtonPost.com
- "Jonathan Lyons tells the story of the House of Wisdom, the caliphs who supported it and the people who worked there, at a riveting, breakneck pace."— Ziauddin Sardar, Times (UK)
- "Sophisticated and thoughtful… In The House of Wisdom, Jonathan Lyons shapes his narrative around the travels of the little-known but extraordinary Adelard of Bath, an English monk who traveled to the East in the early 12th century and learned Arabic well enough to translate mathematical treatises into English… Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant." – Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal, New York
- "Jonathan Lyons vividly conveys the excitement young European scholars travelling east must have felt as they glimpsed a dazzling new world of learning." – Jo Marchant, New Scientist (UK)
Author and journalist Jonathan Lyons has spent his professional and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West. After more than 20 years as an editor and foreign correspondent for Reuters — mostly in the Muslim world —, he is now a researcher at the Global Terrorism Research Centre and a PhD candidate in sociology of religion at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He lives in Washington DC and teaches courses on Islam and how to cover it journalistically at George Mason University in Virginia, USA. For more information on the author and the book, visit: www.jonathanlyonsportfolio.com.
Note to Readers ix
Significant Events xi
Leading Figures xv
Prologue: Al-Maghrib/Sunset 1
Part I Al-Isha / Nightfall 7
1. The Warriors of God 9
2. The Earth Is Like a Wheel 28
Part II Al-Fajr / Dawn 53
3. The House of Wisdom 55
4. Mapping the World 78
Part III Al-Zuhr / Midday 101
5. The First Man of Science 103
6. "What Is Said of the Sphere ..." 125
7. "The Wisest Philosophers of the World" 142
Part IV Al-Asr / Afternoon 163
8. On the Eternity of the World 165
9. The Invention of the West 186
Acknowledgments 203
Notes 205
Selected Bibliography 229
Index 237
- Abu-Fadil, Magda, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization. Posted February 2, 2009: book review and author interview.
- Al-Khalili, Jim, It's Time to Herald the Arabic Science That Prefigured Darwin and Newton. Published 3 January 2009 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- 'Awwad, Kurkis, Khaza'in kutub al-'iraq al-'amma, in Sumer (Baghdad), vol. ii, 2, 1946, pp. 214-218.
- Buchan, James, Invaders of the mind, The Guardian, 28 February 2009.
- Burnett, Charles, Mont Saint-Michel or Toledo: Greek or Arabic Sources for Medieval European Culture? Published 25 February 2009 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- Burnett, Charles, The Appreciation of Arabic Science and Technology in the Middle Ages. Published 16 May 2007 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- Burnett, Charles, Tracing the Impact of Latin Translations of Arabic Texts on European Society. Published 1 July 2008 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- FSTC, The Impact of Islamic Science and Learning on England: Adelard of Bath and Daniel of Morley. Published 13 October 2004 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- Folkerts, Menso, and Lorch, Richard, The Arabic Sources of Jordanus de Nemore. Published 11 July 2007 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- FSTC, Muslim Scholars: Muslim Scholars of the Past is a huge list of analytic and historical biographies compiled by FSTC Research Division about famous Muslim Scholars of the past: click to browse through the list, by name or by year.
- FSTC, Scientific Contacts and Influences Between the Islamic World and Europe: The Case of Astronomy. Published 25 January 2007 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- FSTC, A Plea for the Recovery of the Forgotten History of Muslim Heritage. Published 10 January 2009 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- Recognizing a Decisive Tribute: Islam's Contribution to Western Civilization. (Review of What Islam Did For Us: Understanding Islam's Contribution to Western Civilization by Tim Wallace-Murphy, Watkins Publishing, 2006). Published 4 September 2007on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- FSTC, How Islam Created the Modern World. (Review of How Islam Created the Modern World by Mark Graham, Amana Publications, 2006). Published 13 September 2007 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
FSTC, Remembering the Language of History and Science: When the World Spoke Arabic. Published 1 January 2009 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- Healey, John, The Syriac-speaking Christians and the Translation of Greek Science into Arabic. Published 2 April 2007 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- Mubaidin, Omar, Tentative Global Timeline of Contacts between the World of Islam and Western Europe: 7th -20th Centuries. Published 19 February 2008 on www.MuslimHeritage.com.
- Khan, Yasmin, Shining light upon light. Published 3 April 2009 on www.MuslimHeritage.com).
- Ormsby, Eric The Islamic Enlightenment: Recalling an era when science and scholarship were prized, Wall Street Journal, 14 February 2009.
- O'Shea, Stephen, The House of Wisdom' by Jonathan Lyons. A look at the significant impact of the Arabic world on Western civilization, Los Angeles Times, March 27 2009.
- Pinto, O., Le biblioteche degli Arabi nell'eta degli Abbassidi, Florence 1928, pp. 12-14.
- Rifa'i, A. F., 'Asr al-Ma'mun, Cairo 1928, vol. 1, pp. 375-76.
- Sardar, Ziauddin, "Book Review: The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization by Jonathan Lyons", The Times, 22 January 2009.
- Sourdel, D. "Bayt al-Hikma." Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, vol. I, p. 1141, column 1.
- Sourdel, D. "Dar al-hikma." Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, vol. II, p. 126, column 2.
- The Library of Congress Webcasts, How Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, online video featuring a lecture by Jonathan Lyons at The African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress on 26 February 2008 (56 minutes).


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Philosophy of physics
Philosophy of physics, philosophical speculation about the concepts, methods, and theories of the physical sciences, especially physics.
The philosophy of physics is less an academic discipline—though it is that—than an intellectual frontier across which theoretical physics and modern Western philosophy have been informing and unsettling each other for more than 400 years. Many of the deepest intellectual commitments of Western culture—regarding the character of matter, the nature of space and time, the question of determinism, the meaning of probability and chance, the possibility of knowledge, and much else besides—have been vividly challenged since the inception of modern science, beginning with the work of Galileo (1564–1642). By the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), a lively conversation between physics and a distinctly modern Western philosophical tradition was well under way, an exchange that has flourished to the present day. That conversation is the topic of this article.
This article discusses the logical structures of the most general physical theories of modern science, together with their metaphysical and epistemological motivations and implications. For treatment of the elements of scientific inquiry from a philosophical perspective, see science, philosophy of.
The philosophy of space and time
The Newtonian conception of the universe
According to Newton, the physical furniture of the universe consists entirely of infinitesimal material points, commonly referred to as particles. Extended objects, or objects that take up finite volumes of space, are treated as assemblages of particles, and the behaviours of objects are determined, at least in principle, by the behaviours of the particles of which they are composed. The properties of particles include mass, electric charge, and position.
The Newtonian conception is both complete and deterministic. It is complete in the sense that, if it were possible to list, for each moment of past time, what particles existed, what their masses, electric charges, and other intrinsic properties were, and what positions they occupied, the list would represent absolutely everything that could be said about the physical history of the universe; it would contain everything that existed and every event that occurred. The Newtonian conception is deterministic in the sense that, if it were possible to list, for a particular moment of time, the position and other intrinsic properties of each particle in the universe, as well as how the position of each particle is changing as time flows forward, the entire future history of the universe, in every detail, would be predictable with absolute certainty. Many thinkers, however, have regarded this determinism as incompatible with deep and important ideas about what it is to be a human being or to lead a human life—ideas such as freedom and responsibility, autonomy, spontaneity, creativity, and the apparent "openness" of the future.
The logical structure of Newtonian mechanics
The rate at which the position of a particle is changing at a particular time, as time flows forward, is called the velocity of the particle at that time. The rate at which the velocity of a particle is changing at a particular time, as time flows forward, is called the acceleration of the particle at that time. The Newtonian conception stipulates that force, which acts to maintain or alter the motion of a particle, arises exclusively between pairs of particles; furthermore, the forces that any two particles exert on each other at any given moment depend only on what sorts of particles they are and on their positions relative to each other. Thus, within Newtonian mechanics (the science of the motion of bodies under the action of forces), the specification of the positions of all the particles in the universe at a particular time and of what sorts of particles they are amounts to a specification of what forces are operating on each of those particles at that time.
According to Newton's second law of motion, a certain very simple mathematical relation invariably holds between the total force on any particle at a particular time, its acceleration at that time, and its mass; the force acting on a particle is equal to the particle's mass multiplied by its acceleration: F = ma
The application of this law (hereafter "Newton's law of motion") can be illustrated in detail in the following example. Suppose that one wished to calculate, for each particle i in a certain subsystem of the universe, the position of that particle at some future time t = T. For each particle at some initial time t = 0, one is given the particle's position (x0i), velocity (v0i), mass (mi), electric charge (ci), and all other intrinsic properties.
One way of performing the calculation is by means of a succession of progressively better approximations. Thus, the first approximation might be to calculate the positions of all the particles at t = T by supposing that their velocities are constant and equal to v0i at t = 0 throughout the interval between t = 0 and t = T. This approximation would place particle i at x0i + v0i(T) at t = T. It is apparent, however, that the approximation would not be very accurate, because in fact the velocities of the particles would not remain constant throughout the interval (unless no forces were at work on them).
A somewhat better approximation could be obtained by dividing the time interval in question into two, one interval extending from t = 0 to t = T/2 and the other extending from t = T/2 to t = T. Then the positions of all the particles at T/2 could be calculated by supposing that their velocities are constant and equal to their values at t = 0 throughout the interval between t = 0 and t = T/2; this would place particle i at x0i + v0i(T/2) at T/2. The forces acting on each of the particles at t = 0 could then be calculated, according to the Newtonian conception, from their positions at t = 0 together with their masses, charges, and other intrinsic properties, all of which were given at the outset.
The velocities of the particles at T/2 could be obtained by plugging the values of these forces into Newton's law of motion, F = ma, and assuming that, throughout the interval from t = 0 to t = T/2, their accelerations are constant and equal to their values at t = 0. This would make the velocity of particle i equal to v0 + a0i(T/2), where a0i is equal to the force on particle i at t = 0 divided by particle i's mass. Finally, the position of particle i at t = T could be calculated by supposing that i maintains the new velocity throughout the interval between t = T/2 and t = T.
Although this approximation would also be inaccurate, it is an improvement over the first one because the intervals during which the velocities of the particles are erroneously presumed to be constant are shorter in the second calculation than in the first. Of course, this improvement can itself be improved upon by dividing the interval further, into 4 or 8 or 16 intervals.
As the number of intervals approaches infinity, the calculation of the particles' positions at t = T approaches perfection. Thus, given a simple-enough specification of the dependence of the forces to which the particles are subjected on their relative positions, the techniques of integral calculus can be used to carry out the perfect calculation of the particles' positions. Because T can have any positive value whatsoever, the positions of all the particles in the system in question at any time between t = 0 and t = ∞ (infinity) can in principle be calculated, exactly and with certainty, from their positions, velocities, and intrinsic properties at t = 0.
What is space?
Relationism and absolutism
Newtonian mechanics predicts the motions of particles, or how the positions of particles in space change with time. But the very possibility of there being a theory that predicts how the positions of particles in space change with time requires that there be a determinate matter of fact about what position each particle in space happens to occupy. In other words, such a theory requires that space itself be an independently existing thing—the sort of thing a particle might occupy a certain part of, or the sort of thing relative to which a particle might move. There happens to be, however, a long and distinguished philosophical tradition of doubting that such a thing could exist.
The doubt is based on the fact that it is difficult even to imagine how a measurement of the absolute position in space of any particle, or any assemblage of particles, could be carried out. What observation, for example, would determine whether every single particle in the universe suddenly had moved to a position exactly one million kilometres to the left of where it was before? According to some philosophers, it is at least mistaken, and perhaps even incoherent, to suppose that there are matters of fact about the universe to which human beings in principle cannot have empirical access. A "fact" is necessarily something that is verifiable, at least in principle, by means of some sort of measurement. Therefore, something can be a fact about space only if it is relational—a fact about the distances between particles. Talk of facts about "absolute" positions is simply nonsense.
Relationism, as this view of the nature of space is called, asserts that space is not an independently existing thing but merely a mathematical representation of the infinity of different spatial relations that particles may have to each other. In the opposing view, known as absolutism, space is an independently existing thing, and what facts about the universe there may be do not necessarily coincide with what can in principle be established by measurement.
On the face of it, the Newtonian system of the world is committed to an absolutist idea of space. Newtonian mechanics makes claims about how the positions of particles—and not merely their relative positions—change with time, and it makes claims about what laws would govern the motion of a particle entirely alone in the universe. Relationism, on the other hand, is committed to the proposition that it is nonsensical even to inquire what these laws might be.
The relationist critique of absolute space originated with the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), and the defense of absolutism began, not surprisingly, with Newton himself, together with his philosophical acolyte Samuel Clarke (1675–1729). The debate between the two positions has continued to the present day, taking many different forms and having many important ramifications.
Kant on incongruent counterparts
About 150 years after Newton's death, the essential features of the debate were vividly demonstrated in a thought experiment proposed by the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1720–1804). According to Kant, relationism cannot be correct, because it recognizes fewer spatial facts about the world than there manifestly are.
Consider a pair of possible universes, in one of which the only object is a right-handed glove and in the other of which the only object is an (otherwise identical) left-handed glove. The two universes do not differ with respect to any spatial facts recognized by the relationist: the spatial relations between the particles that make up the right-handed glove are the same as those between the particles that make up the left-handed glove (that is, the gloves are "relationally identical"). Nevertheless, the two universes are different, because the shapes of the gloves are such that they cannot be made to coincide exactly, no matter how they may be turned or rotated. Therefore, Kant concluded, relationism is false.
The relationist response to Kant's argument was essentially to deny that the two universes (or gloves) are intrinsically different in the way that Kant suggested. The response can be expressed in general form as follows.
Consider the set of all mathematically possible material shapes—that is, all mathematically possible arrangements of particles. Some of these shapes can, and some cannot, be made to coincide exactly with their mirror images. Pants and hats, for example, can be made to coincide with their mirror images, whereas gloves and shoes cannot; the latter are "handed" and the former are "nonhanded." But whereas right-handedness and left-handedness are not legitimate relationist predicates, handedness itself certainly is. That is, whether or not a certain shape is handed depends only on the distances between its constituent particles. Furthermore, whether the handedness of any two relationally identical objects, such as a pair of gloves, is the same or different—whether the two objects can be made to coincide exactly with each other in space—is determined entirely by the distances between constituent particles of the first object and corresponding constituent particles of the second object (for example, the particle at the tip of the thumb of the first glove and the particle at the tip of the thumb of the second glove). There is nothing over and above these spatial relations that could possibly make a difference.
If the only thing that determines whether the handedness of a pair of relationally identical objects is the same or different is the spatial relations between their corresponding particles, then there cannot be any "intrinsic" difference between two oppositely handed objects. The impression that there must be such a difference can be traced to the fact that the particular sort of relation in question—notwithstanding that it is perfectly and exclusively spatial—is one that no combination of three-dimensional rotations and translations can ever alter.
It follows from this analysis that there cannot be any matter of fact regarding whether the two gloves of Kant's thought experiment have the same handedness. This is because there cannot be any spatial relations at all between the corresponding particles of gloves that constitute two separate and distinct universes.
The debate between absolutism and relationism did not progress appreciably beyond this point until the middle of the 20th century, when new fundamental physical laws were discovered that apparently cannot be expressed in relationist language. The laws in question concern the decay products of certain elementary particles. The spatial configurations in which their decay products appear are invariably handed; moreover, some of these elementary particles are more likely to decay into a right-handed version of the configuration than a left-handed one (or vice versa). These laws, of course, are simply not sayable in the vocabulary of the relationist.
But relationists were able to argue that the laws could be reformulated to say only that (1) given a single such elementary particle, its decay products will necessarily display a handed configuration of a certain sort, (2) the configurations of the decay products of any large group of such elementary particles are likely to fall into two oppositely handed classes, and (3) these two classes are likely to be unequal in size.
Although the internal consistency and empirical adequacy of the relationist position is unassailable, it comes at a certain conceptual price, for it appears that the laws of the decays of the particles in question now have a curiously "nonlocal" character, in the sense that they seem to require action at both a spatial and a temporal distance. That is, in this construal of the world, what the laws apparently require of each new decay event is that it have the same handedness as the majority of the decays of such elementary particles that took place elsewhere and before.
The question of motion
Long before Kant, Newton himself designed a thought experiment to show that relationism must be false. What he hoped to establish was that relationism defeats itself, because there can be no relationist account of those properties of the world that relationism itself seeks to describe.
Consider a universe that consists entirely of two balls attached to opposite ends of a spring. Suppose that the length of the spring, in its relaxed—unstretched and uncompressed—configuration is L. Imagine also that there is some particular moment in the history of this universe at which (1) the length of the spring is greater than L and (2) there are no two material components of this universe whose distance from each other is changing with time—that is, there are no two material components whose relative velocity is anything other than zero. Suppose, finally, that one wishes to know something about the dynamical evolution of this universe in the immediate future: Will the spring oscillate or not?
In the conventional way of understanding Newtonian mechanics, whether the spring will oscillate depends on whether, and to what extent, at the moment in question, it is rotating with respect to absolute space. If the spring is stationary, it will oscillate, but if it is rotating at just the right speed, it will remain stretched. The trouble for the relationist is that relationism cannot accommodate rotation with respect to absolute space. The relationist, who must hold that there is no matter of fact about whether the spring is rotating, cannot predict whether the spring will oscillate or explain why some such springs eventually begin to oscillate and others do not.
The standard relationist response to this argument is to point out that the actual universe contains a great deal more than the hypothetical universe of Newton's thought experiment. The idea is that there is myriad other stuff that might serve as a concrete material stand-in for absolute space—a concrete material system of reference on which a fully relationist analysis of rotation could be based.
The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916), speaking in absolutist language, pointed out that the universe itself appears not to be rotating (that is, the total angular momentum of the actual universe appears to be zero). As far as the actual universe is concerned, therefore, rotation with respect to absolute space amounts to precisely the same thing as rotation with respect to the universe's own centre of gravity or to its "bulk mass" or to its "fixed stars" (which were thought, in Mach's time, to make up the overwhelming majority of the universe's bulk mass). Mach's proposal, then, was that rotation simply be defined as rotation with respect to the bulk mass of the universe and that motion in general simply be defined as motion with respect to the bulk mass of the universe. If this proposal were accepted, then a relationist theory of the motions of particles could be formulated as F = ma, where a is understood as acceleration with respect to the bulk mass of the universe.
Note that the cost to relationism in this case, as in the case of the relationist response to the argument from incongruent counterparts, is nonlocality. Whereas the Newtonian law of motion governs particles across the face of an absolute space that is always and everywhere exactly where the particles themselves are, what the Machian laws govern are merely the rates at which spatial relations (distances) between different particles change over time—and these particles may in principle be arbitrarily far apart (see below Nonlocality).
There is at least one other way of realizing the relationist's aspirations in the context of a classical mechanics of the motions of particles. The idea would be not to look for a concrete material stand-in for absolute space but to discard systematically the commitments of Newtonian mechanics regarding absolute space that do not bear directly on the rates at which distances between particles change over time, keeping all and only those that do.
Once the problem is conceived in these terms, its solution is perfectly straightforward. A complete relationist theory of the motions of particles could be formulated as follows:
A given history of changes in the distances between certain particles is physically possible if, and only if, it can be conceived to take place within Newtonian absolute space in such a way as to satisfy F = ma.
This theory, like Mach's, satisfies all of the standard relationist desiderata: it is exclusively concerned with changes in the distances between particles over time; it makes no assertions about the motion of a single particle alone in the universe or about the motion of the universe's bulk mass; and it is invariant under all transformations that leave the time-evolutions of interparticle distances invariant.
Unlike Mach's theory, however, this one reproduces all of the consequences of Newtonian mechanics for the time-evolutions of interparticle distances. It can explain why the spring of Newton's thought experiment does or does not oscillate, because it need not assume that the total angular momentum of the universe is zero. Although the theory is no less nonlocal than Mach's, it entails that the law of motion governing isolated subsystems of the universe will make no reference to what is going on in the rest of the universe.
It is clear that the empiricist considerations that have been brought to bear on questions about the nature of space also have implications for the nature of time. Note, first of all, that one's position within "absolute time" is no more detectable than one's location within absolute space. Therefore, from an empiricist perspective, there cannot be any matter of fact about what absolute time it currently is. Mach reasoned, moreover, that there can be no direct observational access to the lengths of intervals of time; the most that can be determined is whether a given event occurs before, after, or simultaneously with another event.
In Newtonian mechanics, a "clock" (or a "good clock") is a physical system with a certain sort of dynamical structure. From a relationist perspective, whether something is a clock (or a good clock) has nothing to do with correlations between the configuration of the clock face and "what time it is" or between changes in the configuration of the clock face and "how much time has passed"—since, for a relationist, there are no facts about what time it is or about how much time a certain process takes. A good clock is simply a physical system with parts whose positions are correlated with the physical properties of the rest of the universe by means of a simple and powerful law. To the extent that time intervals are even intelligible, on this view, they are not measured but rather defined by changes in clock faces.
The technique used above for fashioning a relationist theory of space can be applied more generally to design a relationist theory of both space and time. That is, one proceeds by systematically discarding the commitments of Newtonian mechanics regarding absolute space and absolute time that do not bear directly on sequences of interparticle distances, keeping only those that do.
The resulting theory can be formulated as follows:
A given history of changes in the distances between certain particles is physically possible if, and only if, it can be conceived to take place within Newtonian absolute space-time in such a way as to satisfy F = ma.
Naturally, the concluding points in the preceding section—about the empirical equivalence of the relationist theory to Newtonian mechanics, about locality, and about the applicability of the theory to isolated subsystems of the universe—apply also to the relationist theory of space and time.
The special theory of relativity
Imagine two observers, one of whom is at rest with respect to absolute space and the other of whom is moving along a straight line with a constant velocity. Observers such as these, whose accelerations with respect to absolute space are zero, are referred to as "inertial." Each observer can be said to represent a comprehensive frame of reference, of which he is the spatial origin. Call one of these observers (and his associated frame of reference) K and the other (and his associated frame of reference) K′. Relative to these frames of reference, any spatiotemporally localized event can be assigned a unique triplet of spatial coordinates and a time. Call the spatiotemporal coordinate axes of K x, y, z, and t, and call the spatiotemporal coordinate axes of K′ x′, y′, z′, and t′. Finally, suppose that K′ is in motion relative to K in the positive x direction with velocity v, and suppose that K and K′ coincide at the time t = t′ = 0.
Then it follows from what appear to be elementary and unavoidable geometrical considerations that the relationship between the spatiotemporal address that K assigns to any event and the spatiotemporal address that K′ assigns to the same event is given by the so-called Galilean transformations: x = x′ – vt; y = y′; z = z′; t = t′. Two trivial consequences of these transformations will figure in the discussion that follows: (1) if a body is traveling in the x direction with velocity j as judged from the perspective of K, then it is traveling in the x′ direction with velocity j – v as judged from the perspective of K′, and (2) the acceleration of any body as judged from the perspective of K is always identical to its acceleration as judged from the perspective of K′ (indeed, it will be identical to its acceleration as judged from the perspective of any observer who is not accelerating with respect to K).
If K measures the positions and velocities and accelerations of particles relative to himself, what he will find, according to Newtonian mechanics, is that those quantities all evolve in time in accord with the equation F = ma. All observers will agree with K on the mass of each particle and on the magnitude and direction of the forces to which each particle, at any particular time, is being subjected. Furthermore, given (2) above, all observers not accelerating with respect to K will agree with K on the acceleration of each particle at any particular time. Therefore, if the motions of all of the particles in the universe are such that they obey F = ma with respect to absolute space, then they will necessarily obey F = ma with respect to any frame of reference moving with a constant velocity with respect to absolute space. F = ma is thus described in the physical literature as "invariant under transformations between different inertial frames of reference."
It follows from this account that motion with a constant velocity with respect to absolute space is completely undetectable, in a Newtonian universe, by means of any sort of physical experiment. It is for precisely this reason that the debate between absolutists and relationists about the nature of space, time, and motion is entirely taken up with cases of acceleration and rotation. By the middle of the 19th century, the very general thesis that all of the fundamental laws of physics must be invariant under transformations between different inertial frames of reference—invariant under "boosts"—had become a profound article of faith in theoretical physics.
In the second half of the 19th century, however, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell proposed a fundamental physical theory, the theory of electromagnetism, according to which the velocity of light as it propagates through empty space is always the same. A law like this would not be invariant under Galilean transformations. Surprisingly, a variety of experimental attempts at measuring the velocity of light from the perspectives of different inertial frames of reference all yielded the same result: the velocity was precisely the value predicted by Maxwell's theory.
The first significant attempt to account for this fact was primarily due to the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928). Lorentz's approach involved explicit violations of the invariance of the fundamental laws of physics under "boost" transformations. He proposed to account for the puzzling outcomes of the experiments described above by means of a theory of the systematic and lawlike "malfunctioning" of clocks and measuring rods that are in motion with respect to absolute space. Thus, according to Lorentz, there are real and physically significant facts about the velocities of bodies with respect to absolute space that, as a matter of principle, cannot be experimentally verified.
The second and ultimately far more important attempt to come to terms with the anomaly represented by Maxwell's theory was due to Albert Einstein (1879–1955). Einstein's approach was to see what might follow from the resolute insistence that the velocity of light is the same with respect to all inertial frames of reference. The only way to satisfy the requirements of Einstein's program was to reject the "elementary and unavoidable geometrical considerations" that led to the Galilean transformations in the first place. And this was nothing less than to abandon every previously entertained idea about the structure of space and time.
By means of a number of very straightforward thought experiments, Einstein was able to show that, if it is a law that the velocity of light is constant and if this law is invariant under transformations between relatively moving frames, then whether two events are simultaneous must depend on the frame the events are viewed from. More generally, facts about the time intervals and spatial distances between given events must also depend on the frame of reference. Such judgments are on a par with judgments about which objects are to the right or to the left of which others: they are matters about which there are simply no absolute facts, since they depend on one's perspective, or physical point of view.
These results can be extended without much difficulty into a more complicated set of equations for transforming between frames of reference that are in motion relative to each other with uniform velocities. The so-called Lorentz transformations represent a special-relativistic replacement of the Galilean transformations mentioned above. Thus, the physical content of the special theory of relativity essentially consists of the demand that the fundamental laws of physics be invariant under the Lorentz, rather than the Galilean, transformations.
The relativity of simultaneity is just the thesis that there is no such thing as a perspective-independent "present." In other words, there is no perspective-independent fact about what is happening, in any given location, precisely now. The thesis proved particularly shocking to conventional philosophical views of time, which held (for example) that only the present is real or that time passes through a continuous succession of "now"s or that the past (but not the future) is metaphysically settled.
On the other hand, the popular notion that the upshot of Einstein's great achievement is that in some sense all physical phenomena are "relative" is certainly not true and probably not even intelligible. After all, the special theory of relativity was explicitly designed to guarantee that the velocity of light in empty space is everywhere and always approximately 186,000 miles (300,000 km) per second. Moreover, the theory entails that there is a certain algebraic combination of spatial and temporal distances between any pair of events—the so-called "spatiotemporal interval"—on which all inertial observers necessarily will agree. This is why the special theory of relativity is often described as the discovery that what had previously been referred to as space and time are both parts of a single geometrical structure called space-time.
Interestingly, the special theory of relativity is much less accommodating to relationist aspirations than the Newtonian conception of the universe. Indeed, all of the standard relationist strategies turn out to be impossible in the context of special relativity. Thus, it is impossible to replace talk about the time-evolutions of positions in absolute space with talk about the time-evolutions of interparticle distances, because, in a relativistic context, no such purely spatial distances exist. Likewise, the project of formulating a fundamental physical theory that is invariant under transformations between relatively accelerating frames of reference fares no better, because, in a relativistic context, global frames of reference for accelerating observers cannot be coherently defined.
The general theory of relativity
Consider a society of two-dimensional beings living on a surface that is almost perfectly flat. In one place the surface contains a bump, which is visible from the perspective of a larger three-dimensional space in which the surface is contained.
From the three-dimensional perspective, imagine a point P at the top of the bump, a circle L at its base, and several lines, R1, R2, R3, ... Rn, running from P to different points on L.
The two-dimensional beings will have no trouble confirming, entirely by means of measurements carried out with their two-dimensional rulers on their two-dimensional surface, that all of the lines R have the same length and that therefore all of the endpoints of the lines R on L are equidistant from P. In other words, it will be easy for them to confirm that P is a circle. The beings can also easily carry out a measurement of L's circumference. When they do so, however, they will discover that the ratio between the circumference of this circle and its radius (the length of any line R) is smaller than 2π. In this way the beings will be able to discover that the surface inside L is not flat: their world contains an extra dimension that they cannot experience directly themselves.
Until about the middle of the 19th century, no one entertained the slightest suspicion that considerations like these might apply to three-dimensional space—that ordinary space might contain extra dimensions that humans cannot experience directly. The mathematical possibility of spaces of three and higher dimensions that are curved, and whose curvature could in principle be discovered by observers within them, was articulated in magnificent and profoundly illuminating detail by Bernhard Riemann (1826–66), Nicolay Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792–1856), and others. They developed a powerful and intuitive generalization of the notion of a "straight line" for non-Euclidean geometries: a line that is precisely as straight as the space it traverses will accommodate. These "generalized straight lines" are referred to in the mathematical literature as geodesics.
Einstein was intrigued by the fact that the mass that figures in Newton's law of motion, F = ma—the mass that measures the resistance of material bodies to being accelerated by an impressed force (inertial mass)—is invariably exactly the same as the mass that determines the extent to which any material body exerts an attractive gravitational force on any other. The two concepts seem to have nothing to do with each other. In the context of Newtonian mechanics, the fact that they are always identical amounts to an astonishing and mysterious coincidence.
It is this equivalence that entails that any given gravitational field will accelerate any two material bodies, whatever their weights or their constitutions, to precisely the same degree. This equivalence also entails that any two material bodies, whatever their weights or their constitutions, will share precisely the same set of physically possible trajectories in the presence of a gravitational field, just as they would in empty space.
The observation that the effects of a gravitational field on the motions of a body are completely independent of the body's physical properties positively cried out for a geometrical understanding of gravitation. The idea would be that there is only a single, simple law of the motions of material bodies, both in free space and in the presence of gravitational fields. The law would state that the trajectories of material bodies are geodesics rather than Euclidean straight lines and that gravitation is not a force but rather a departure from the laws of Euclidean geometry. Such a law would be out of the question if the geometry involved were that of three-dimensional physical space.
Einstein began by proposing a principle of the local equivalence of inertial and gravitational fields, a more powerful and more general version of the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass. According to this principle, the laws that govern the time-evolutions of all physical phenomena relative to a frame of reference that is freely falling in a gravitational field are precisely the same as the laws that govern the time-evolutions of those phenomena relative to an inertial frame. After years of prodigious effort, Einstein was able to develop this principle into a fully relativistic and fully geometrical theory of gravitation: the general theory of relativity.
What Einstein produced in the end was a set of differential equations, the so-called Einstein field equations, relating the geometry of space-time to the distribution of mass and energy within it. The general theory of relativity consists of a law to the effect that the four-dimensional geometry of space-time and the four-dimensional distribution of mass and energy within space-time must together amount to a solution to the Einstein field equations.
In this theory, space-time is no longer a fixed backdrop against which the physical history of the world plays itself out but an active participant in its own right, a dynamical entity on a par with all others. Although this may suggest a relationist conception of space-time, it is now widely agreed that such a project is impossible. General relativity is committed to claims regarding which motions are and are not possible for a single particle entirely alone in the universe, and it also allows for the existence of universes whose total angular momentum is other than zero. Moreover, it inherits all of the structural hostility to relationism characteristic of the special theory, as described above.
There are solutions to Einstein's field equations that result in universes that are finite but have no boundary or "outside"—universes in which, for example, a straight line extended far enough in any direction in space will eventually return to its starting point. Other solutions result in universes in which time travel into the past is possible. This particular example has been the subject of much scientific and philosophical scrutiny in recent years, since it seems to lead to outright logical contradiction—as in the case of the person who travels into the past and murders his parents before his own birth.

subset: commoncrawl


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Category Archives: Playa de la Mar Bella
Barcelona – the perfect nakation?
I know that public nudity is now banned in Barcelona, but given the number of fantastic naturist beaches within close proximity, I wondered whether Barcelona is the best place to go for the perfect nakation?
Let me know what you think.
Here's what Barcelona has to offer naked traveller:
1. Playa de las Rocas
This beach located just west of Calella's main town beach has several coves where nudists.
Click here for some photos showing the coves and the town's main beach.
See map below for location.
View Larger Map
2. Platja de la Musclera
This popular beach is located to the north of Barcelona in Arens de Mar. The beach is just off the coastal highway N-II therefore access is easy. Car parking provided.
The fantastic Bare Beaches book describes the beach as the following:
"A well managed official naturist beach of clean fine-grain sand, looked after by the local authority. Popular with families, young people and male groups. Care required when swimming – steeply shelving shore with some submerged rocks."
The beach is located between Arenys de Mar and Caldes d'Estrac and easily reached by the train from Barcelona.
Train –
The rail journey from Barcelona is 35 minutes; get off the train at Caldes and it's a 10 minute walk along the promenade towards Arenys, by the Restaurant Hispania and the sailing club. The nude beach is clearly signposted.
Road –
Take the N11 along the coast for 37km north-east of Barcelona and turn for the beach by the km-marker 655.
View Larger Map
3. Playa de la Mar Bella
Just a few kilometers from Barcelona's central square, this may well be the most urban nude beach in the world. This beach is almost always very crowded, and nudists are almost always a rather small minority even though nudity is perfectly acceptable.
Bare Beaches describes the beach as:
"Swimming is good but steer clear of the breakwater. It has bars, showers, toilets, children's play areas, parking, disabled access, lifeguards and safe drinking water.
Location –
The beach is next to the Mar Bella sports centre at Villa Olimpica, 1km north of the marina and 2km from the Christopher Columbus statue in the city centre. Nearest metro stations are: Poblenou (line IV); or Selva de Mar (line IV). Buses 36, 71 and 141.
See link for map of the beach
View Larger Map
4. Playa de Sant Sebastià (Barceloneta)
Playa de Sant Sebastia lies at the southern end of Barceloneta and is covered in golden sand and is 1.1 km long.
Playa de Sant Sebastia offers everything that you can expect from a city beach: showers, toilets, lifeguard stations, etc. The beach has a high number of local visitors plus Barcelona's surf community meets here when the swell is good.
The nudist area is at the southern end of the beach.
See link below for map of the beach
View Larger Map
In addition to the above beaches, there are also weekend naturist sessions at Bernat Picornell Olympic pool. Click here for details.
If any of you have been to these beaches we would love to here from you.
We are planning a trip to Barcelona next year and are looking for any nudist-friendly properties that we could stay in. If anyone has any ideas please let us know!


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Obama's OFA has Reagan echoes
President Barack Obama's decision to transform his campaign into the freestanding lobbying group "Organizing for Action" is groundbreaking in many ways — but the idea of creating an outside organization to put pressure on Capitol Hill dates back at least to Ronald Reagan.
President Bill Clinton even tried to create one 20 years ago. In 1993, seeking to to marshal grassroots support for his health-care reform effort, his team's first impulse was to set up a standalone entity that could anonymously raise and spend large sums of money on polling, petition drives, phone banks and TV commercials.
Story Continued Below
( PHOTOS: Obama's first term in cartoons)
Obama's got big plans for OFA, and the group's leaders are heavy on ambition for what they'll be able to do to make the president's agenda on issues like gun control and immigration a reality. But while campaign finance laws have changed over the years, some of the same problems — in both the law and public perception — that hounded previous White House-connected outside influence efforts could lay ahead for Obama. And, so far, neither the White House nor OFA is saying much about how they plan to avoid them.
By June 1993, "The National Health Care Campaign" to support Clinton's health plan was up and running with 27 staffers in a downtown Washington office, funded by $100,000 in seed money from the Democratic National Committee, according to a Washington Post article at the time. The group's goal: raise up to $37 million in large chunks from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.
( PHOTOS: 18 defining Obama moments)
But the group came under attack over ethical questions about how an entity so closely connected to the White House would seek large sums of money from business interests that could be dramatically affected by health reform.
As with Obama's new OFA, the Clinton effort immediately raised questions about what control White House officials would have over the new group's activities and fundraising. Lawyers in the Clinton White House advised that officials could "pass paper" to the new organization, but could not coordinate with them, the Post reported.
However, the precautions didn't squelch the critics.
"This is the smelliest ethical thing they've done so far," Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster told Newhouse News at the time. "If you are a pharmaceutical company and you get a call to contribute, it's kind of hard to say no."
Critics also disputed the Clinton-era group's claim to be independent of the DNC.
"We started out as a separate entity and that, itself, became an issue," recalled Heather Booth, a top organizer for the National Health Care Campaign. "Those who didn't want health care reform came after us. … It was such an issue that it was decided that it was easier to move it back into the DNC than to waste energy defending it."
( PHOTOS: The Obama-Clinton relationship)
On the same day as the Post's front-page article, the DNC announced it was reversing course, pulling the plug on the freestanding 501c4 lobbying group, and bringing its work back in house. The effort continued on at the DNC but was ultimately swamped by the insurance industry's "Harry and Louise" ad campaign, which eventually spent $60 million to defeat Clinton's plan.
"We didn't have the money we really needed to do that sort of thing," Clinton adviser Harold Ickes told POLITICO last week. "I'm not sure [we] moved one vote."
"We tried to figure out different ways, figure out some external apparatus or support for health reform," recalled Chris Jennings, one of Clinton's top health care policy advisers. "It was very tough, as I recall. I don't know if it was political or policy or legal or some combination."


text: With temps consistently in the teens & 20's the last month ... I'm climbing the walls. Booked a foursome at a golf simulator place - they have dozens of famous courses to play & you play it like a real course - go through all the clubs in your bag. Any tips or what to expect from those who have played one of these simulators ? Thx


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(AP) — American Airlines says it will modify seats on 49 more planes to prevent rows of seats from coming loose during flight.
It's addressing the same problem that caused the airline to ground 48 planes last week — the seat rows aren't locking properly into tracks on the floor.
Crews will add a "secondary locking device" to seats in most of American's Boeing 767s, spokeswoman Andrea Huguely said Friday. Those are wide-body planes used on international flights.
Seats came loose on three U.S. flights involving two different Boeing 757s earlier this month. There have been no similar mid-flight incidents with the Boeing 767s, but the airline is reinforcing the locking systems as a precaution, Huguely said.
Work started late Thursday and will be done by Oct. 21, she said. The work will be done overnight and the airline won't have to cancel any flights this time. It canceled at least 94 flights because of seat problems with the 757s.
American said the Federal Aviation Administration has approved its plan for working on the seats, including the ability to keep flying planes that have not yet undergone the modifications. The FAA did not immediately comment.
The seats on both types of planes are made by Weber Aircraft LLC, which did not immediately return calls for comment.
Loose seats on the 757s raised safety concerns and turned into a public-relations nightmare for American, the nation's third-largest airline, which has been flying under bankruptcy protection since last November.
American first gave one explanation for the problem aboard its 757s, then gave another two days later, saying pins that hold the seats to the floor had become gummed up over time from dirt and by passengers spilling sodas and coffee.


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LOCAL OLYMPIAN: 'Busco woman recalls her time in the pool
CHURUBUSCO — As Sharon Jones, 60, of Churubusco prepares for another season of driving the bus that will take youngsters to elementary school in Arcola, she can't help but keep tabs on the swimming results coming out of London.As she joins husband Dave with the day-to-day operation of the couple's flower, plant and vegetable shop in Churubusco; her mind harkens back 44 years to Mexico City when the smell of chlorine was sharp in her nostrils and she made two trips — not to the living room to watch coverage of Olympic swimming, but to the podium to receive gold and bronze medals for the breast stroke."I enjoy watching the swimming events," Jones said. "They have so much better technology and cameras today. It's fun seeing my events and remembering what it was like back then."On Sunday, Jones will be speaking about her Olympic experiences and how it helps in her life today. Pastor Paul White of the Churubusco Church of the Nazarene asked Jones to tell of her experiences to coincide with his sermon entitled "The Christian Athlete."When Jones won the gold and bronze medals, she was only 16 years old. Her given name was Sharon Wichman, and she lived in Fort Wayne with her sister and two older brothers and parents."I have always loved swimming. My two older brothers (Russell and Michael) were very good swimmers and were fairly well-known for their outstanding skills," said Jones.Jones became serious about swimming at the tender age of 12 and joined a winter league. "I won a lot of races back then and I lost a lot of races as well," said Jones.It was in the locker room of the nationals where she first heard about the Olympics."The Olympics weren't talked about like they are today. I never dreamed that I could go to the world stage and compete. But I heard the older girls (including Judy Humbarger) talk about their experiences at the Olympics, and I wanted to go. So I made the decision right then and there that I was going for the gold. I worked very hard at it for the next few years," said Jones.She wanted to get Coach Steven Hunyadfi's attention so she began swimming slower. "I got his attention alright and he never stopped coaching me. He was great," she said.She spent a great deal of her training at the former Club Olympia in Fort Wayne. Upon making the 1968 United States Swimming team she and the others trained in Colorado Springs with coaches Sherm Schavoor and Frank Elm."We trained for four weeks in the high altitude. It's a real disadvantage to train without it," said Jones.That was hard for Jones as she didn't see her family for six weeks.But there was another advantage looming.Her father had just secured a job in Mexico so the family was able to drive there and watch Jones compete.In 1968, she received the Bronze Medal in the 100 Meter Breast Stroke. Her time was 1:16.1.Djurdica Bjedov of Yugaloslavia won the Gold with a time of 1:15.8. The Silver Medal was won by Galina Stepanova-Prozumenshchykova of the Soviet Union. "It was so strange. There was five of us in a room after that race. Officials knew who had won the gold medal but it was the rest of the placings that they had to sort out," she said.Jones is quick to point out the Olympics didn't have all of the modern technology and cameras they do today in the pools.Another American swimmer, Mark Spitz, was getting success in Mexico too. Jones was surprised when he came up to her and said hi to her."I asked Mark how he knew my name. He told me that Katie Ball told him about me. I competed against her and she won Nationals in Oklahoma. I ended up in the middle of that competition. So I was really surprised when Mark knew me," said Jones.Later that year, Jones and Spitz, along with 10 other swimmers traveled to Germany together.Then it was on to the 200 Meter Breast Stroke where Jones won gold swimming with a time of 2:44.4. Ironically the two swimmers who beat Jones in the 100 Meter race received second and third behind her in the 200 Meter.Jones held the record for the 200 Meter race until 2004 when American Amanda Beard beat her time with 2:23.37 in Greece."She held that record for 36 years and NBC never even mentioned it. But we know," said Dave Jones.That was the very year that little known 14-year-old Michael Phelps was on his way to becoming the most decorated Olympic Swimmer of all time."Michael is amazing. He has a natural swimmer's body. But I am also amazed by Missy Franklin," said Jones. "When I was in the Olympics I was this shy and quiet skinny kid from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Missy could be Miss America as far as I'm concerned. She is a natural athlete and she is so outgoing. I really enjoy watching her succeed."Today Jones just swims for fun and teaching lessons to her family. She and Dave work 16 hours per day at their nursery. "Both of my sons and their wives live in Fort Wayne," said Jones. "I have taught all of my grandchildren to swim. That's the best thing. I even helped my daughter-in-law to swim. She wanted to learn the breast stroke right away but she had to learn the basics first," said Jones."Three of my grandchildren are on year-round swim teams and one of them has a very natural swimmer's body. I'm excited about their future in swimming," she said.Her mantra is working hard, whether it is teaching her family to swim or working in the nursery or driving school bus … it's clear that Jones still has the heart of an Olympian.


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How does your resume read? Cum Laude graduate, rising star, VP for ten years, mother of three for five years? I spend a lot of time talking to moms who are interested in re-entering the work force on a flexible basis through contract or project work. Their number-one question is "What do I do with the "gap" in my resume since my last full-time job"? How do you explain that, although you've been out of the workforce for five years raising children, you have kept your certifications current, you have remained immersed in your industry, you have been a leader in the community, and--with three kids under the age of five--you have become a multitasking chaos management pro?
There are several ways to demonstrate how you have utilized and enhanced your professional skills while focusing on your family:
Acknowledge Your Choice
I firmly believe that employers welcome sincere and honest candidates, so be upfront about the reason why you have a "gap" in your corporate experience. Confidently state that you chose to off-ramp in order to focus on your family responsibilities. But, you can demonstrate that your professional skills did not take a hiatus by using some of the ideas below.
Include Your Volunteer Experience
In standard professional resumes, your extracurricular volunteer experience is usually relegated to the end of the page. For the "Professional Mom" resume, bring it front and center! Did you chair the school fall festival that resulted in a 120% increase in attendance and double the profit? Did you put your marketing skills to work for a local non-profit? Did you hone your leadership skills by running the PTA or a committee in your church? Take a good look at all the "non-paying" roles you've played and you'll see numerous professional skills that you've kept active.
Highlight Project Engagements
Whether you've accepted short-term projects from a former employer, used your professional skills to help out a friend who owns their own business, or have found opportunities through companies like Mom Corps , short-term projects are a great way to keep your skills sharp and your professional network active. Employers will be impressed by the demonstration of your ability to proactively seek opportunities that fit into your current life-style choice.
Don't Forget Your Entrepreneurial Activities
Much has been made in the national press about the "Mompreneur" – the women who have opted out of traditional professional life and have found ways to earn income by starting a business. Make sure to acknowledge any entrepreneurial activity that you have experienced. Have you represented a home show line or hosted a home show? Have you turned an artistic gene or crafty hobby into a product for sale? Employers will be impressed by your initiative and business acumen!
Most of all: Show confidence in your abilities, both as a mother and as an employee.


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Publications: Jonas-Dwyer, Diana
Journal Article
Metcalfe, H., Jonas-Dwyer, D., Saunders, R. and Dugmore, H. (2015) Using the Technology: Introducing point of view video glasses into the simulated clinical learning environment. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 33 (10). pp. 443-447.
Phillips, R., Cummings, R., Lowe, K. and Jonas-Dwyer, D. (2004) Rethinking flexible learning in a distributed learning environment: A University‐wide initiative. Educational Media International, 41 (3). pp. 195-205.
Conference Paper
Metcalfe, H., Jonas-Dwyer, D., Saunders, R., Dugmore, H. and Tambree, K. (2013) Lights! Camera! Action!: A case-study on using point of view (POV) video glasses for self-assessment. In: 6th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (iCERi) 2013, 18 - 20 Spain 2013, Seville, Spain
Jonas-Dwyer, D., Sudweeks, F., McGill, T.J. and Nicholls, P.K. (2011) Learning to learn with virtual microscopes. In: Informing Science and IT Education Conference (InSITE) 2011, 18 - 23 June, Novi Sad, Serbia pp. 269-283.
Jonas-Dwyer, D., Nicholls, P.K., Sudweeks, F. and McGill, T. (2006) Students' reflections on the introduction of virtual microscopy into general pathology training. In: Western Australian Society for Microscopy Conference, 23 - 25 September, Margaret River, Western Australia
Jonas-Dwyer, Diana (2010) The impact of virtual microscopes on learning. PhD thesis, Murdoch University.
Atkinson, R., McBeath, C., Jonas-Dwyer, D. and Phillips, R. (2004) Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning Tertiary Education (ASCILITE).