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In “A mobility of illusory forms immobilized in space.” James Joyce and the Pre-Einsteinian Universe James Joyce’s Ulysses is discussed as an ironic farewell to the pre-Einsteinian worldview. This paper aims at examining the “world picture” Joyce is sketching by reconstructing and juxtaposing the models of the Universe that his characters, Stephen and Bloom imagine. Joyce’s protagonists need to conceptualize the Universe; they crave to be able to mentally grasp every facet of external reality and the human place in it. The two protagonists in two diverse ways ‒ the “scientific” and the “artistic” ‒ visualize the earth among the stars and try to understand the nature of time. The pre-Einsteinian “scientific” way of Bloom fails him. Stephen is also accustomed to pre-Einsteinian physics but thanks to his “artistic” temperament he is able to add to his divagations an element of creative speculation. ABSTRAKT „A mobility of illusory forms immobilized in space.” James Joyce and the Pre-Einsteinian Universe odczytuje Ulissesa Jamesa Joyce’a jako pełne ironii pożegnanie newtonowskiej wizji Wszechświata. Artykuł rekonstruuje i przeciwstawia sobie nawzajem wyobrażenia kosmosu, jakimi – mniej lub bardziej świadomie – posługują się bohaterowie Joyce’a. Zarówno Stephen, jak i Bloom odczuwają potrzebę konceptualizacji Wszechświata, chcieliby wyobrazić sobie czas i przestrzeń oraz pojąć, jakie miejsce zajmuje w nich rasa ludzka. Na dwa odmienne sposoby Stephen „artysta” i Bloom „naukowiec” wizualizują Ziemię wśród gwiazd i dywagują na temat istoty czasu. Newtonowska wizja Wszechświata, którą wyznaje Bloom, okazuje się zawodna. Stephen również posługuje się fizyką newtonowską, ale dzięki „artystycznemu” temperamentowi dodaje element twórczy do swych dywagacji na temat czasu i przestrzeni.

“I found myself, as I grew older, increasingly writing about sexuality and its manifestations in human practice. And I found most of my raw material in the lumber room of the Western European imagination,” Angela Carter wrote in “Notes from the Front Line.” The passage is significant for several reasons. Carter identifies sexuality in its diverse manifestations as her main concern and acknowledges images derived from European popular tradition as the source of her “raw material.” Moreover, she characterises her prose as intertextual and identifies herself as a Caucasian Westerner. It is from this contemporary, Europe-centred perspective that she, first, surveys manifestations of sexuality, and then uses them to create her own—often allegorical—imaginative stories. This paper is concerned with the former stage of Carter’s intellectual endeavour: surveying expressions of sexuality in public discourse from a Western woman’s point of view.

Despite being written half a century before the term “eco-anxiety” (Gifford and Gifford) was coined, J. G. Ballard’s disaster fictions can be read in the context of the social psychodynamics of climate change. My aim in this article is to demonstrate that in J. G. Ballard’s fiction, climate catastrophes and the devastation of nature cause the characters to realize that the Earth is not going to be able to sustain human life much longer, and their psychological reaction is either subdued anger or strange numbness. In order to do this, I analyze two short stories by Ballard: “Deep End” (1961) and “Low-Flying Aircraft” (1975) and show how their protagonists are affected by the landscape they inhabit: de-populated wastelands whose wildlife is extinct or mutated. I argue that it is their awareness that human civilization on earth is coming to its end that results in the state of mind akin to eco-anxiety. The characters are immersed in their own inner space and in these stories clocks mark not the passage from past to future but a countdown to the end.

Since 1959, when C.P. Snow delivered his seminal lecture The Two Cultures on the lack of understanding between scholars working in the humanities and their colleagues from science departments, the gap between the two groups has been one of the most notorious clichés of contemporary Western culture. The aim of this article is to show that this seemingly insurmountable abyss between sciences and the humanities that was brought to the forefront during the mid-20th century is slowly receding into history. Literature studies today is heavily indebted to modern science. Biology (especially evolutionary biology), physics (especially quantum physics), and ecology (especially the Anthropocene studies) are among the most important subjects scholars of literature have to take into account. In order to prove this point I shortly describe literary genres which introduce modern science to the readers: science fiction, cyberpunk, solarpunk, lablit, quantum fiction, and cli-fi. I also refer to the newly-emerged schools of criticism-science fiction studies, ecocriticism and evocriticism-to show how scholars discuss these texts within the framework of the humanities. Additionally, I give a sample discussion of one of the cli-fi’s classics, J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and also shortly discuss two science fiction novels concerned with the civilisational conflict between science and humanities: Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.

By drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s cultural theory this paper aims to show how contemporary popular culture tells the stories of scientifically talented women of the past. In the course of my argument, I refer to books and films set in the past and focus on the women-and-science motif. Firstly, the stories of individual female scientists living long ago are analysed (Mileva Einstein, Joan Clarke), then, the collective female protagonists – wives of scientists living together in “togethervilles” (Los Alamos, Atomic City), and women scientists pictured in speculative fiction – are discussed. The cliches used in these texts – lonely forgotten geniuses, female worthies taken advantage of, ostracised women accused of not being feminine enough and devoted wives who help their men and their countries in World Wars I and II or the Cold War – reflect ideologies that Western culture used to believe in. Conversely, the two original presentations of past female scientists that I found both come from speculative fiction concerned with science and heavily influenced by the ideologies of science: science and pacifism, science and a sense of guilt, and science as a weapon in the quest for democracy and freedom.

This paper analyzes one kind of Ballardian landscape, wastelands created by nuclear explosions, and aims at interpreting them as a study of the un-making of the human-made world. Cityscapes of ruins, crumbling concrete concourses and parking lots, abandoned barracks and military stations, radiation and mutations make Nagasaki, Eniwetok and Mururoa wasteland snap-shots of the future. In the minds of the protagonists, the un-made landscape is strangely soothing; they are attracted by the post-nuclear imagery and gladly embrace the upcoming catastrophe. Nagasaki, Eniwetok and Mururoa are the harbingers of a future where one can experience the nirvana of non-being. In this paper, I discuss the Ballardian un-making of the world and, hopefully, point to the subliminal meaning of atomic explosions in his works. To do this, I first discuss the references to the atomic bomb in Ballard's non-fiction (A User's Guide to the Millennium, J.G.Ballard Conversations). Then, I isolate and describe the subsequent stages of the un-making of the world using his depictions of Nagasaki (Empire of the Sun, The Atrocity Exhibition); Eniwetok (The Atrocity Exhibition, The Terminal Beach), and Mururoa (Rushing to Paradise). Finally, I suggest a hypothesis explaining the subliminal meaning of nuclear bombs with reference to Freud's theories.

I would like to take, as my starting point, the famous 1959 lecture of C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, where science fiction is by and large ignored, and see how the consecutive points Snow is making are also discussed in the following decades of the 20th century by other philosophers of science, among them Stanisław Lem, Steven Weinberg, and Jonathan Gottschall. In 1959 Snow postulated re-uniting the two cultures through the reform of education. In the 1960s and 1970s Lem did not believe in any reform, but prophesied that science left alone would procure the final war and, probably, the self-inflicted technological death of the West. I am then going to juxtapose Snow’s argument with a science fiction novel concerned with the same civilizational crisis: Stanis law Lem’s His Master’s Voice.

The aim of this paper is to present the religious and the literary inspirations of the Los Alamos narratives by focusing on Oppenheimer, who both provides the literary contexts for the story of the bomb and becomes a hero of the tales that emerge. My principal sources are Richard Rhodes’s Making of the Atomic Bomb, a Pulitzer-winning detailed factual account of how the nuclear weapon was conceived and produced, as well as fictio- nal or semi-fictional depictions of the life Oppenheimer and his men led in the New Mexico desert. The latter include Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry by MIT graduate professor-turned-novelist Thomas McMahon; Los Alamos, a thriller by Joseph Kanon; and Atomic Dreams. The Lost Journal of Robert Oppenheimer, a graphic novel by Jonathan Elias and Jazan Wild.

This essay aims at adding to the critical debate on Angela Carter and myths from a more technical perspective and discusses her keen interest in the “lo and behold” moment of recognition. I claim that for Carter myths “work” in literary texts by producing a sudden illumination. At that moment, an image reveals itself to be interposed from an older story that has, or used to have, some cultural importance. In order to describe this phenomenon, I am going to refer to Aristotle’s definition of recognition in his Poetics and essays of C.G. Jung, for whom myths are instances of revelation. To prove that Carter was very much interested in the technicalities of recognition, I analyse her non-fiction devoted to Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Brontë. Carter’s sample mythic reading of Jane Eyre (1847) and her plans to re-write the last chapter of this novel provide me with enough material to risk a hypothesis regarding how, in her opinion, myths might intertextually enrich the reading experience.

Electric arc is a complex phenomenon occurring during the current interruption process in the power system. Therefore performing digital simulations is often necessary to analyse transient conditions in power system during switching operations. This paper deals with the electric arc modelling and its implementation in simulation software for transient analyses during switching conditions in power system. Cassie, Cassie-Mayr as well as Schwarz-Avdonin equations describing the behaviour of the electric arc during the current interruption process have been implemented in EMTP-ATP simulation software and presented in this paper. The models developed have been used for transient simulations to analyse impact of the particular model and its parameters on Transient Recovery Voltage in different switching scenarios: during shunt reactor switching-off as well as during capacitor bank current switching-off. The selected simulation cases represent typical practical scenarios for inductive and capacitive currents breaking, respectively.

This paper presents the method for obtaining the coefficients of the dynamic Cassie-Mayr electric arc model by means of annealing and genetic optimisation algorithms. The extraction of the coefficients can be obtained by means of the iterative fitting process based on e.g. multiple measurements results. However, this requires a significant effort and can generate significant costs. The approach presented in this paper relies solely on simulations. The methodology used herein consists in finding the match to the maximum produced TRV generated during high-voltage shunt reactor current breaking, for ideal switch and conductance based Cassie-Mayr circuit breaker models. This is done for a given chopping current value assigned to the ideal switch which is used as a target. The arc model coefficients are obtained by means of the optimisation process for various values of the desired chopping current level to be reflected by the Cassie-Mayr conductance-based electric arc model. As a result, an advanced conductance based model can be used for assessment of switching overvoltage. Genetic and simplex annealing algorithms have been selected for optimisation. The models as well as the optimisation process were conducted in EMTP-ATP software using its built-in functionalities. The article presents the error assessment and sample traces.

There was a time when Stanisław Lem was the best sold and read writer in Poland (though he was even bigger in the Soviet Union and East Germany). His popularity steadily grew from the time of his debut and reached its apogee in the late nineteen-sixties. For literary critics the death of Lem ten years ago, in 2006, is a closure of his rich and diverse oeuvre, and this has opened new perspectives on ‘lemology’, which at the Polish language departments of some universities is a minor branch of literary studies. Indeed, in different decades of the 20th century Polish academia discussed Lem from a range of vantage points. In his lifetime Lem provoked conflicts and antagonisms. The aim of this paper is to discuss the presentation of a motif Lem often comes back to, namely the motif of the robot, in four of his short stories from the Pilot Pirx cycle. I shall do so in such a way as to show how different critical traditions contribute to my full understanding of the text. The stories I have chosen are “Terminus”, “The Hunt”, “The Accident” and “The Inquest”. I will also allude to “The Mask”. First I need to briefly describe how ‘lemology’ evolved in Poland and how it was prompted by Western criticism. Thereafter I will present the stories I have chosen. Finally, I am going to portray the development of the robot motif in the Pirx cycle in reference to both Polish and foreign critics.

Glowworm Swarm Optimization algorithm is applied for the simultaneous capture of multipleoptima of multimodal functions. The algorithm uses an ensemble of agents, which scan thesearch space and exchange information concerning a fitness of their current position. Thefitness is represented by a level of a luminescent quantity called luciferin. An agent movesin direction of randomly chosen neighbour, which broadcasts higher value of the luciferin.Unfortunately, in the absence of neighbours, the agent does not move at all. This is anunwelcome feature, because it diminishes the performance of the algorithm. Additionally,in the case of parallel processing, this feature can lead to unbalanced loads. This paperpresents simple modifications of the original algorithm, which improve performance of thealgorithm by limiting situations, in which the agent cannot move. The paper provides resultsof comparison of an original and modified algorithms calculated for several multimodal testfunctions.

A simple, based on a relational database, system, for a management of a parallel and a distributedcomputer calculations, is presented. In the proposed system, the parallel calculationsare carried out according to a master/slave model. Because an input and an output data ofprograms are stored directly in the database, the use of files is reduced to a minimum. Themanagement system allows for a combination of computing power of many computers forsolving a single numerical problem.

This paper shows how Carter revitalizes the once-popular genre of catastrophic fiction. First I briefly characterize this genre and place Heroes and Villains in its con-text. Then I discuss decay and entropy depicted in the novel as symptomatic to the decay of pre-holocaust symbolic order. Next, I describe how the protagonist challenges the patriarchal social order based on the set of false binary oppositions and attempts to disrupt the old and to create a genuinely new feminist civilization. Similarly, Carter's novel disrupts old schemes and set formulas of disaster fiction and creates a radically new fantastic narrative of society ruled by women-aliens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]