Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

History Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Charles Kay Smith

2014

Discipline
Institution
Keyword

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in History

Innovative Representations Of Light, Behaving As Both Particles And Waves, Among The Paintings Of Monet And Renoir, Charles Smith Nov 2014

Innovative Representations Of Light, Behaving As Both Particles And Waves, Among The Paintings Of Monet And Renoir, Charles Smith

Charles Kay Smith

Monet and Renoir, friends collaborating in open air about 1865, discovered that sunlight filtering through a canopy of tree leaves does not produce the splotches and dapples that studio artists conventionally represented at the time but circles of light. Sometimes the circles of light punctuating the shade are clear, separate and crisp, as though light is being propagated as particles, but if the pin-hole gaps between leaves are very close together, they will project compound or superimposed circles that look like the waves that Thomas Young saw in his double slit experiment in 1803-4. Newton’s Opticks published in 1704 had …


Frederick Ii: Holy Roman Emperor Extraordinaire, Prose/Poem 7/23/2014, Charles Kay Smith Jul 2014

Frederick Ii: Holy Roman Emperor Extraordinaire, Prose/Poem 7/23/2014, Charles Kay Smith

Charles Kay Smith

Frederick avoided fighting the 6th Crusade by negotiating a peaceful sharing of Jerusalem by people of all faiths. No doubt it helped that he spoke Arabic and personally engaged in five months of negotiations rather than combat.


Blowin’ Against The Wind, Prose/Poem 7/17/2014, Charles Kay Smith Jul 2014

Blowin’ Against The Wind, Prose/Poem 7/17/2014, Charles Kay Smith

Charles Kay Smith

Thoughts on Science, Contemporary Poetry and Human Nature.


Dante And Islam, A Prose/Poem 6/19/2014, Charles Kay Smith Jun 2014

Dante And Islam, A Prose/Poem 6/19/2014, Charles Kay Smith

Charles Kay Smith

In this poem, Dante is revealed as a scholar of Islamic literature who was influenced by two islamic texts about Muhammad's visits to Purgatory and Hell narrated in the The Isra, and whose visit to Paradise was recorded in The Mirage. The concept of Limbo introduced by Dante in his Divine Comedy was an Islamic/Christian hybrid new to his first readers.


Jeanne D'Arc: Maid Of Oleans, A Prose/Poem 6/4/2014, Charles Kay Smith Jun 2014

Jeanne D'Arc: Maid Of Oleans, A Prose/Poem 6/4/2014, Charles Kay Smith

Charles Kay Smith

A poem introducing a theory of how Joan, an illiterate teenager, inspired a demoralized French army to defeat the English.


Born In 1930, Prose/Poem 3/7/2014, Charles Kay Smith Mar 2014

Born In 1930, Prose/Poem 3/7/2014, Charles Kay Smith

Charles Kay Smith

A homage to Presidrnt Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his America, political democracy was extended toward economic democracy. His policies began to be reversed in the 1980s. We are living in the desert of inequality created by that reversal.


Morale Boost For Modernity: Stephen Greenblatt's Lucretius., Charles Kay Smith Dec 2013

Morale Boost For Modernity: Stephen Greenblatt's Lucretius., Charles Kay Smith

Charles Kay Smith

In his book, The Swerve, on the re-discovery of Lucretius at the very end of the Middle Ages, Stephen Greenblatt wants us to believe that Lucretius’s epic poem De Rerum Natura initiated the Renaissance and ultimately made the world modern. I agree with very little of his broad brush history, but to win our assent, he creates a fable of a dark medieval world being enlightened by the genius of a Roman poet far ahead of his own time. Greenblatt wants to re-circulate Lucretius’s Epicurean philosophy to a wide modern audience hoping it will enable a widespread epicurean happiness i. …