The Waste Land 100 Years On

Grover Smith: On "The Waste Land"

The Waste Land summarizes the Grail legend, not precisely in the usual order, but retaining the principal incidents and adapting them to a modern setting. Eliot's indebtedness both to Sir James Frazer and to Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (in which book he failed to cut pages 138-39 and 142-43 of his copy) is acknowledged in his notes. Jessie L. Weston's thesis is that the Grail lege...

Clustering Voices in The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land is often interpreted as collection of voices which appear multiple times throughout the text. Here, we investigate whether we can automatically cluster existing segmentations of the text into coherent, expert-identified characters. We show that clustering The Waste Land is a fairly difficult task, though we can do much better than random baselines, par...

100 years of servitude.

Physics in 100 years

Here I indulge in wide-ranging speculations on the shape of physics, and technology closely related to physics, over the next one hundred years. Themes include the many faces of unification, the re-imagining of quantum theory, and new forms of engineering on small, intermediate, and large scales. When Leon Cooper, on behalf of Brown University, asked me to contribute to their 250th anniversary ...

The concept of transmitter receptors: 100 years on.

It is nearly one hundred years since John Langley of Cambridge developed the idea of the 'receptive substance' or 'receptors' as we now call them. This historical review traces the background to his introduction of this concept of the transmitter receptor and of how succeeding generations built on his ideas to generalise the applicability of this concept to synapses in general. It starts with a...