In the first period, mankind is subject to the forces of the sea, which are believed to be expressions of divine will. 2 In this geocentric epoch, planet Earth takes center stage. Joachim Radkau has called the period beginning around 1970 “the age of ecology,” others talk about “the great acceleration” around 1945 that catapults the Earth into a new geological era called the Anthropocene. Technocentrism has only intensified since the nineteenth century, but a new planetarianism whose perspective is geocentric emerges in the second half of the twentieth century. After this period of religious orientation and supremacy, an anthropocentric perspective in which humans challenged for and occupied the center prevailed until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a technocentric perspective characterized by the dominance of a technological mode of being replaced it. The first paradigm, which dominated until the mid-fifteenth century, is theocentric. Questions of clarity versus detail aside, the four maritime world pictures should first and foremost be regarded in their operational capacity and valued by their potential to serve as models of analysis. But rising above the muddy waters of daily history bring clarity. Abstractions like the one I am about to perform-extracting world pictures of “oceanic thinking” from historical periods-always entails the loss of historical details, nuances, and ambiguities. While the paradigms are serial and chronological, they never exist in their pure form but overlap and interpenetrate throughout history. To anticipate the main argument of the first part, the historical framework comprises four different paradigms in which the components of gods, humans, technology, and nature constitute variable hierarchies among themselves. The other is a reading of Herman Melville’s modern epic, Moby-Dick or, the Whale (1851), that aims to show how the four different world pictures coexist in the novel. One is a delineation of a history of four maritime world pictures through multiple sources. This first chapter is divided into two parts. In this chapter, I analyze a selection of exemplary representations of the sea drawn from some of these sources, aiming to outline the paradigmatic semantic shifts of the ocean in the cultural history of the West. The changing interpretations take the form of symbolic representations of the sea in a variety of sources ranging from religious texts, poems, epics, and prose stories to paintings, movies, diaries, logbooks, travelogues, and treatises of history, natural history, and philosophy. As humanity changes through the centuries, so do conceptions of the sea. With the briefness of human lives follows a fundamental mutability of humankind’s relationship to the ocean. What is constantly changing is man.” 1 If claims about the ocean’s constancy can be challenged in the light of climate change, microplastic, and the Anthropocene, Michelet does have a point in singling out the radical difference in temporal scale between the ocean and human history. Michelet, author of the influential and poetic La Mer, points to the ocean’s substantial solidity and claims it is humans and their perception of the ocean that change: “The element which we call fluid, mobile, and capricious, does not really change it is regularity itself. The sea’s fluctuating appearance has been subject to multiple interpretations throughout human history. For centuries, humans considered the substance of the sea to be unchanging and regarded its form as constantly changing. In Western history, from Greek-Roman antiquity to the present, the sea has served as a horizontal screen on which humanity’s cultural imagination has projected its changing social and metaphysical phantasms.
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5/29/2023 0 Comments Body temperature conversionWe also need to acknowledge the different ways of measuring temperature. Since this is a temperature conversion tool, it is only fair that we talk about units of temperature. Nevertheless, this is not the only thing we will talk about. Thinking about temperature and heat in terms of energy is very useful and helps us understand many of the things that happen around us. It is also interesting to note that once we think of temperature as a form of energy it becomes fairly clear that our body burns more calories when we try to burn calories by running vigorously, which, incidentally creates much more heat inside our bodies than light exercise. But this would, then, become a large essay on the physical concept of temperature, and there would not be space for a conversion tool.įortunately, we have the time and space to point out some interesting facts about temperature, like how any friction will end up creating heat, by converting kinetic energy from one source to another (and therefore increasing the temperature). Or the fact that when we mention speed we should technically speak of the average of all the speeds of all the particles. Image of a thermometer.Īs always, there's much more to these concepts than what we've mentioned here, like for example the fact that speed is related to the kinetic energy by means of a square root. Jump to our particles velocity calculator and thermal energy calculator to learn more. This is very closely related to the concept of thermal energy and means that heat is just another expression of kinetic energy. What this means is that the higher the temperature of something, the higher the particles velocity a.k.a.the molecules that make up that something vibrate faster. There is no need to worry, however, because when we dig deeper into what is temperature, the answer is fairly simple: temperature is speed, or rather the momentum of the atoms and molecules that make up a material. To do this we have to turn to physics, in particular to thermodynamics and statistical physics, which is like thermodynamics meets quantum physics. We all know what is hot or cold, but temperature? Temperature is much harder to define without getting technical, which is precisely why we will get technical. It is always hard to come up with a good definition for everyday terms, but with temperature, it is notoriously difficult. |