The United States and Imperial Japan had been at war since December 7, 1942 when the Japanese carrier-based aircraft had bombed the Naval and Army facilities of Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, then a territorial possession of the united States in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The assault was the launch of a three pronged attack on the Philippines and Hong Kong-Malaysia which the Japanese required for their war in China.
Since 1937, the Japanese had been at war with mainland China, seeking to shift the balance in the Chinese civil war between the Nationalists and the communists by hoping to restore the Manchu dynastic Emperor. Japan had signed an alliance with the Axis Powers of Germany and Italy prior to the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. The war in Europe between the United Kingdom and France on one side and the Axis Powers on the of the began in August, 1939 when Germany attacked Poland in an alleged defense of the German population living in Danzig, or the Polish corridor between two parts of Germany called East and West Prussia. Japan was an ally of Nazi Germany and the Fascist Italian state headed by Mussolini.
Background
Artist interprets modern oil painting.
The Second World War is considered by many knowledgeable historians to be the second phase of the Great War (1914-1918) , called World War One, because of the close relation in Europe between the Treaty ending that war and the commencement of the Second. The situation in Asia complicates this idea of a second phase of a two part greater war because Japan had changed sides in the Second World War, having initially been an ally of Britain and France in the First World War. Italy too changed sides in Europe and from 1939 to 1941 the USSR had sided with the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
The loss of sensory-factual form for abstract expressionism.
Lavender mist, Jackson Pollack, Oil on Canvass, American, post war.
This is the context in which the scientific research into the structure of matter which eventually discovered fission and produced the atomic bomb took place. The photograph we see on this page is the immediate aftermath of the detonation of an atomic bomb that was the product of forty years of advances in physics and engineering. The bomb was also the product of a race for supremacy in science between Germany and the Anglo, French and American efforts to understand atoms and nuclear physics. In the final analysis the bomb was the explicit product of a joint military and civilian effort in the US and the UK, called the Manhattan Project to specifically build an atomic explosive device. Work on the Manhattan Project was headed by General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer, a renowned physicist. Instigated by two Hungarian refugees, who were physicists, named Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, the manhattan project took four years, four major industrial laboratories, and two billion dollars to construct three bombs using uranium and its by-product plutonium. The explosive devices were ready in July 1945, however, three months after Germany and Italy had surrendered in Europe.
The Apian Way
Ancient Roman road, ruts trodden in the stone
Chariot wheels over the centuries when the road was in recurrent use from the 2d century BCE to the 5th century ACE.
The road runs south from Rome to Calabria on the Adriatic coast.
Along the Apian Way in suburban Rome, Italy.
Time keeping: the accurate measure of duration was to change the world in three distinct ways. Initially duration was captured accurately, secondarily the regularity of accounting for elapsed 'time' permitted measurements that were comparable from place to place [space] and event to event. Finally, the mechanization of the sequential periods of the day and night made it possible beyond mere comparisons, to perfect the accuracy of accounting for elapsed periods, predict the frequency of events [and as a consequence eventually determine longitude accurately), and then to allow for the imitation of any repeated motions that could be controlled by gears, pulleys, levers or weights.
Clocks that imitated the heavens on earth in motion.
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Arched clock tower of with lion of Venice, Italy. |
Analog–twelve-hour–clock face
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A-top the Venetian clock tower are two automatons that strike the bell at regular intervals controlled by the timing mechanism. |
Clock tower with movable figures called "automata" from the Renaissance, was constructed in Venice Italy marking a significant association of public or civic space with the new machinery of the clock to regularize the passages of time during the day and night. Few other mechanized creations from the late middle ages had the impact of the clock on the daily activities, social organization, secular ordering and even personal behaviors of people as the establishment of the Arabic (after the Su Sung's clock in China) time keeping mechanical contrivance into the churches, cities and –eventually– homes of western Europeans after the 1100s until the 1800s.
An important sequel to the introduction of the clock, and eventually its miniaturizations as a series of ever smaller and accurate watches, is the establishment of a new set of "temporal facts." By temporal facts we mean observable natural processes that can be imitated. Such temporal facts also imaginatively fed our beliefs about the universe and in metaphors reveal a series of fictions by which we now live to the degree of taking the idea of "time" for granted.
Fact: duration, frequency, elapsed intervals and the rate at which repeated occurrences are accounted for exist.
Watch from Hiroshima that stopped precisely at 8:15 AM that August morning when an atomic bomb obliterated its owner and the target city.
Fiction: These beliefs about time that we have expressed in phrases such as:
- "What time is it?"
- "Now is the time for all of you to have recess."
- "Can you tell me the time?"
- "The clock keeps time, 'tells the time,' or "it is time to go."
All these expressions suggest that time–as measured by a clock (watch) or digital time device–actually is a facet of existence. We imagine that the world is defined by time, as opposed to a world that is based on an imitation of the universal forces of motion that are this earth's rotation on its axis and revolution about the sun in a solar system where planets observed in the heavens move according to geometrical laws that we can measure.
Our solar system.
The machine allows for us to count, measure and add or subtract identical units of duration we call time. But we often habitually think that seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks can be disassociated from the cosmic relations of the earth, moon, and sun that have since prehistoric periods influenced animal, plant, and human behavior.
Vaults are composed of the intersection of two arches at right angles (perpendicular).
The use of the arch is a fundamental architectural feature of classical design and the arches that comprise the vault, which is a stronger arrangement of its constituent parts.
Geometry of light
"the rational depiction of light effects"
"Analytical description refers to a form of representation* in which aspects of appearance are remade–literally re-presented–on the basis of an intuitive or intellectual understanding of the nature** of what is being seen, how it is seen, and how it may be depicted in such a way as to convey 'information' to an attuned observer. The tools for such remaking include the projective system of linear perspective***, the rational depiction of light effects through shadow and the modulation of color, and the structural bases of natural form (such as human anatomy or geology).
Source, Kemp, Visualizations, pp. 5-6.
