Tea at Trianon: New Findings on the Earth’s Interior

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

New Findings on the Earth’s Interior

From SciTechDaily:

There are places that will always be beyond our reach. The Earth’s interior is one of them. But we do have ways of gaining an understanding of this uncharted world. Seismic waves, for instance, allow us to put important constraints about the structure of our planet and the physical properties of the materials hidden deep within it. Then there are the volcanic rocks that emerge in some places on the Earth’s surface from deep within and provide important clues about the chemical composition of the mantle. And finally there are lab experiments that can simulate the conditions of the Earth’s interior on a small scale.

A new publication by Motohiko Murakami, Professor of Experimental Mineral Physics, and his team was featured recently in the journal PNAS and shows just how illuminating such experiments can be. The researchers’ findings suggest that many geoscientists’ understanding of the Earth’s interior may be too simplistic. (Read more.)