Thirty Minutes Before the Dawn

Carr, Alan

doi:10.2172/1764862

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

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“…Jokes change and grow and adapt between performances -and comedians aren't picky as to whether the original wording stays or not. Jimmy Carr (2021) Comedians change their wording, flow, pace, and delivery all the time. They want their jokes to be laughed at, whatever their final form.…”

Section: Benign Violation Spectrum As a Framework For Joke Improvementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humour and the Appearance of Authenticity in Live Comedy

Sparrow

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Comedians often ironically present morally bad ideas solely for comedic effect – views they do not genuinely hold. They also lean into providing a sense of authenticity in their work; essentially an appearance of being themselves onstage. While many people know that comedians are performing an exaggerated, or even fictional, version of themselves, many people remain unaware of this. It is possible, then, for an audience member with genuinely held morally bad beliefs to misinterpret those jokes as an assertion of the comedian’s authentic beliefs. This unfortunate state of affairs is worsened if the audience member further misinterpreted the jokes as an endorsement of their own morally bad behaviour. This thesis provides a framework for avoiding audience misinterpretation of jokes as authentically held beliefs of the comedian in stand-up comedy.To provide a solution to this problem, I answer two questions: i) what is comedy? and ii) what does authenticity mean for comedians? Answering these questions takes into account both that aesthetic rules of humour must be observed, and that philosophical notions of authenticity need to be navigated. To focus only on the humour risks misinterpretation; to focus only on authenticity risks losing the funny. In the first chapter I critically assess the three primary philosophical theories of humour (relief, incongruity, and superiority). I then argue that the benign violation theory – a more detailed version of incongruity theory – provides comedians with the parameters they need to write and perform successful, i.e. funny, jokes. In the second chapter, I draw on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Martin Buber, and their different versions of authenticity (based around the individual, the group, and one-on-one relationships, respectively). I argue that these notions can inform different stages of joke creation, shedding light on how to ethically navigate the appearance of authenticity in stand-up comedy during the joke drafting, editing, and finalisation process. Together, these chapters form a framework for navigating the appearance of authenticity in live comedy by avoiding misinterpretation, without reducing joke funniness or the range of joke topics.

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Section: Benign Violation Spectrum As a Framework For Joke Improvementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humour and the Appearance of Authenticity in Live Comedy

Sparrow

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Who Invented the Trinity Nuclear Test’s Christy Gadget? Patents and Evidence from the Archives

Chadwick

2021

Nuclear Technology

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The Christy Gadget is the informal name for the plutonium device detonated in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. In September 1944 in the theoretical implosion group, proposed a novel concept that altered the design of the nuclear core in Fat Man. While scientists originally intended to use a hollow sphere of plutonium, this design entailed substantial risk, due to the likelihood of asymmetries resulting from implosion. Christy proposed changing the design to a solid sphere of plutonium with a modulated neutron source, and the design was eventually adopted, tested at Trinity, and used in the attack on Nagasaki. While there is no question regarding the important role that Christy played in demonstrating its feasibility as a reliable design, there is a debate as to who initially proposed the idea; though most sources have attributed this invention to Christy, some historical sources have attributed credit to Christy's group leader, Rudolf Peierls, or indeed other scientists. This paper seeks to outline and resolve this dispute. We present new unclassified evidence extracted from previously unavailable sources (to unclassified audiences) from the National Security Research Center archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This evidence consists of 1945-1946 patent documentation, oral history interview tapes of Christy and Peierls, and monthly 1944 progress reports from the Theoretical Division. Though Christy and Peierls share joint credit on the patent, both Christy's and Peierls' words and writings, together with sources from Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, support the traditional view that Christy was indeed the originator of the idea. While Christy does deserve the majority of the credit for the invention and design, we acknowledge the important role Peierls and von Neumann played in its development.

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The Taming of Plutonium: Plutonium Metallurgy and the Manhattan Project

2021

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We describe the wartime challenges associated with the rapid developments in plutonium chemistry and metallurgy that were necessary to produce the core of the Trinity Device. Beginning with microgram quantities of plutonium metal late in 1943, initial measurements showed a wide and confusing variance in density and other properties. These confusing results were the first clues to the astounding complexity of plutonium. As this complexity was revealed, it introduced new challenges for the fabrication of kilogram-scale parts. In a remarkable period from January 1944 to June 1945, Manhattan Project scientists made rapid progress in understanding plutonium chemistry and metallurgy. By early 1945, they had discovered five of the six ambient-pressure phases of unalloyed plutonium and reported the density of these phases to within a value of 0.1 g/cm 3 of those accepted today. They solved the stability problem introduced by these phases with a rapid alloy development program that ultimately identified gallium as the preferred element to stabilize the delta-phase, producing a plutonium alloy still of scientific and technical interest today. We conclude with a description of post-war developments in these areas, including applications of wartime plutonium metallurgy to civilian applications in nuclear reactors. We dedicate this paper to the memory of Ed Hammel, the Manhattan Project plutonium metallurgist whose previous description and documentation of plutonium history during the war has been essential in our research.

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Thirty Minutes Before the Dawn

Cited by 4 publications

References 9 publications

Humour and the Appearance of Authenticity in Live Comedy

Humour and the Appearance of Authenticity in Live Comedy

Who Invented the Trinity Nuclear Test’s Christy Gadget? Patents and Evidence from the Archives

The Taming of Plutonium: Plutonium Metallurgy and the Manhattan Project

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