How did evolution produce specific characteristics, such as the feet of amphibians, or the eye and brain that allow us to read these words? Museum curator Kenneth McNamara delves into the fascinating field of heterochrony to show the errant results when a normal pattern of embryological development is gently nudged off-course. 60 illustrations.

Shapes of Time explores how concepts of time and history were spatialized in early twentieth-century German thought. Michael McGillen locates efforts in German modernism to conceive of alternative shapes of time—beyond those of historicism and nineteenth-century philosophies of history—at the boundary between secular and theological discourses. By analyzing canonical works of German modernism—those of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musil—he identifies the ways in which spatial imagery and metaphors were employed to both separate the end of history from a narrative framework and to map the liminal relation between history and eschatology. Drawing on theories and practices as disparate as constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, photography, and urban architecture, Shapes of Time presents original connections between modernism, theology, and mathematics as played out within the canon of twentieth-century German letters. Concepts of temporal and spatial form, McGillen contends, contribute to the understanding not only of modernist literature but also of larger theoretical concerns within modern cultural and intellectual history.

This book addresses the notion of time and temporality and its various conceptualizations in the theories of the new physics, utilized as a thematic and formal framework in the British novel of the twenty-first century. As the Newtonian conception of reality does not provide a reliable framework within which to situate human experience and generate meaning, fiction writers have recognized quantum mechanics as a potent source from which to draw in search of new metaphors. The quantum has become a part of the understanding of reality, and its concepts and assumptions have been absorbed into the textual structure and content of literary fiction. Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction examines human temporality as mediated by the timeshapes imagined within the context of the new physics, and explores the philosophical implications for human temporality and identity of situating an individual within the realm of physical time. Its chapters deal with various concepts of the new physics connected with temporality, and their appropriation in a selected novel: parallel universes in Andrew Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia (2008), eternal recurrence and Poincaré’s theorem in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), chaos theory in Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness (2009), and the end of time in Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y (2006). Each of them corresponds to a different conceptual shape of time: tree, concertina, spiral and snapshot, respectively, which is enacted on the formal level. Analyzing the new time constructs in a narrative, this book thus uncovers passages between scientific and humanistic standpoints, and reveals quantum fiction to be an effective tool for visualizing the subjective non-homogenous experience of private time.

This book is an introduction to the simple math patterns that can be used to describe fundamental, stable spectral-orbital physical systems (represented as discrete hyperbolic shapes, i.e., hyperbolic space-forms), the containment set has many dimensions, and these dimensions possess macroscopic geometric properties (where hyperbolic metric-space subspaces are modeled to be discrete hyperbolic shapes). Thus, it is a description that transcends the idea of materialism (i.e., it is higher-dimensional so that the higher dimensions are not small), and it is a math context can also be used to model a life-form as a unified, high-dimension, geometric construct that generates its own energy and which has a natural structure for memory where this construct is made in relation to the main property of the description being, in fact, the spectral properties of both (1) material systems and of (2) the metric-spaces, which contain the material systems where material is simply a lower dimension metric-space and where both material-components and metric-spaces are in resonance with (and define) the containing space.

Peter C. Hodgson explores Hegel's bold vision of history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom. Following an introductory chapter on the textual sources, the key categories, and the modes of writing history that Hegel distinguishes, Hodgson presents a new interpretation of Hegel's conception of freedom. Freedom is not simply a human production, but takes shape through the interweaving of the divine idea and human passions, and such freedom defines the purpose of historical events in the midst of apparent chaos. Freedom is also a process that unfolds through stages of historical/cultural development and is oriented to an end that occurs within history (the 'kingdom of freedom'). The purpose and the process of history are tragic, however, because history is also a 'slaughterhouse' that shatters even the finest human creations and requires a constant rebuilding. Hegel's God is not a supreme being or 'large entity' but the 'true infinite' that encompasses the finite. History manifests the rule of God ('providence'), and it functions as the justification of God ('theodicy'). But the God who rules in and is justified by history is a crucified God who takes the suffering, anguish, and evil of the world into and upon godself, accomplishing reconciliation in the midst of ongoing estrangement and inescapable death. Shapes of Freedom addresses these themes in the context of present-day questions about what they mean and whether they still have validity.

This book brings together, in a novel way, an account of the structure of time with an account of our language and thought about time. Joshua Mozersky argues that it is possible to reconcile the human experience of time, which is centred on the present, with the objective conception of time, according to which all moments are intrinsically alike. He defends a temporally centreless ontology along with a tenseless semantics that is compatible with - and indeed helps to explain the need for - tensed language and thought. This theory of time also, it is argued, helps to elucidate the nature of change and temporal passage, neither of which need be denied nor relegated to the realm of subjective experience only. The book addresses a variety of topics including whether the past and future are real; whether temporal passage is a genuine phenomenon or merely a subjective illusion; how the asymmetry of time is to be understood; the nature of representation; how something can change its properties yet retain its identity; and whether objects are three-dimensional or four-dimensional. It is a wide-ranging examination of recent issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language and the philosophy of science and presents a compelling picture of the relationship of human beings to the spatiotemporal world.

Many things around us have properties that depend on their shape--for example, the drag characteristics of a rigid body in a flow. This self-contained overview of differential geometry explains how to differentiate a function (in the calculus sense) with respect to a "shape variable." This approach, which is useful for understanding mathematical models containing geometric partial differential equations (PDEs), allows readers to obtain formulas for geometric quantities (such as curvature) that are clearer than those usually offered in differential geometry texts. Readers will learn how to compute sensitivities with respect to geometry by developing basic calculus tools on surfaces and combining them with the calculus of variations. Several applications that utilize shape derivatives and many illustrations that help build intuition are included.

This book constitutes the proceedings of a very topical workshop aimed at understanding the shapes of the baryonic and dark matter components of galaxies. Several groups presented their recent results from observations and numerical N-body simulations.

Spectral Geometry of Shapes presents unique shape analysis approaches based on shape spectrum in differential geometry. It provides insights on how to develop geometry-based methods for 3D shape analysis. The book is an ideal learning resource for graduate students and researchers in computer science, computer engineering and applied mathematics who have an interest in 3D shape analysis, shape motion analysis, image analysis, medical image analysis, computer vision and computer graphics. Due to the rapid advancement of 3D acquisition technologies there has been a big increase in 3D shape data that requires a variety of shape analysis methods, hence the need for this comprehensive resource.

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.