The Athenian army

So, having correctly guessed the Higgs announcement, I'll revert to normal.  Let's talk about the army.

If you were a guy in classical Athens, and your father was a citizen, then when you turned 18 you joined the army.  No exceptions.  You were in for 2 years, which was boot camp.  Boots were known as ephebes.  Nico protests on several occasions in the books that he's done his time as an ephebe.  That's his way of saying he's paid his dues and though he might look young, he's a for-real citizen of Athens with all the rights and privileges that implies.

Athens had its equivalent of the stereotypical boot camp sergeant.  The ephebes were grouped by their tribe membership, and each group had in charge of them a man over forty years of age; someone who was voted by the citizenry to be a fine, upstanding examplar to the lads, and likely to instill the necessary virtues.  Which meant he was really, really tough.

Ephebe training was as much about instilling moral character as toughening you up and teaching you how to fight in a phalanx.  After the first year, you were given a spear and shield by the state and swore an oath.

It seems the ephebes spent a lot of time on guard duty.  They also patrolled the countryside.  I suspect phalanx training was drilled mercilessly, because the last thing you need in a battle is some idiot pointing his spear the wrong way.

Phalanxes work like this:  there are three rows (probably).  The younger men at the front, then the middle-aged, then the old men at back.  The phalanx is a very dense rectangle of men.  There's no such thing as individual combat.  When properly lined up, a man has his spear in his right hand (tough luck for the lefties).   He has his huge, round hoplon shield on his left arm.  The shield covers the left half of his own body, plus the right half of his left-hand neighbour's body.  His right-hand neighbour's shield in turn covers his right half.  This overlap is a natural consequence of everyone holding a big shield in their left hand, but stop and think about it for a moment, so you'll see what happens next...

When a phalanx charges at the enemy, it runs on an ever-increasing angle to the right.  Why?  Because everyone depends on their right-hand neighbour for some of their shield protection.  Everyone wants to nudge themselves a little more behind their neighbour's shield, and the neighbour is busy doing the same.

Generals know this will happen and have a fair idea how much drift there'll be.  They position the units to account for it.

It's not such a bad idea anyway, because although there's a lovely row of shields down your left flank, down your right flank there's absolutely nothing but exposed right arms.  This is why the right hand side of the line is considered the position of honour.  You only put your best soldiers there.  If your right flank gets enveloped, it's going to be a bad day.

Once contact is made, the whole thing turns into a pushing match.  Think rugby scrum with sharp implements and you're probably fairly close.  The idea is to break the enemy line, not kill the individuals.  Once a line is broken, the soldiers are utterly exposed without their shield wall and will typically run.

Warfare is normally a citizen-only exercise, but interestingly, the Battle of Marathon is believed to be the first battle in history in which the slaves fought alongside their masters.


And now for something completely different...

A little while ago I mentioned on twitter the rumour that CERN will announce discovery of the Higgs particle next week.

It's only a rumour, okay?  But I got a few questions from people wanting to know what's a Higgs particle and why does anyone care?  So here's the (long) summary:

You know all matter is made of molecules.  A couple of hundred years ago people thought molecules must be the fundamental smallest building blocks of the universe.  But then it turned out there were teensier things called atoms.  

You can make all the millions of different types of molecule from only 92 different types of atom (number 92 is uranium).  For a while people thought atoms must be the fundamental smallest building blocks of the universe, but then it turned out that atoms had internal structure.  There were teensier things called particles.

All atoms are made up of three different particles: protons, neutrons and electrons.    The protons and neutrons stick together in the centre while the electrons whizz around the outside.  For a while people thought these three particles must be the fundamental smallest building blocks of the universe, but then it turned out there were actually hundreds of these supposedly fundamental particles.  Most of them have been given bizarre names, like the W particle, and the muon antineutrino, &/etc.

Then some of those "fundamental" particles showed signs of having internal structure.

That was kind of depressing because you might be noticing a trend here.  Physicists began to wonder if this chain of teensier and teensier things would ever end.

A fellow by the name of Murray Gell-Mann realized that, if you set aside 4 special particles to carry the known forces, and 6 particles that apparently had zero size (they're called leptons...the electron's one of those), then all the other particles could be explained by combining just 6 very weird looking things that he called quarks.  Gell-Mann was a huge fan of James Joyce, and quark is one of the made-up words in Finnegan's Wake.

This idea was unbelievably successful.  Using 6 quarks, 6 leptons, and 4 force carriers, you could cook them in different combinations to make every particle ever observed; hence build every atom; hence build every molecule; hence build everything.  What's more, the model allowed for combinations that made particles no one had ever seen before.  Physicists went looking for these, and promptly found every one of them, and never found anything that didn't fit.

So this is now known as the Standard Model.  Though I've called these things particles, when you do the mathematics behind this you treat all these things like fuzzy, amorphous blobs that only behave like particles when you look at them from far enough away.  When you look at them up close, they behave like fuzzy amorphous blobs.  The official name for the amorphous blobs is Quantum Field Theory.

The Standard Model doesn't explain why everything has mass.  Mass is the stuff that, when you kick something and it fails to move quickly, you stub your toe.  Mass is the reason why everything resists moving when you push it.

A bunch of guys thought about this, among them a certain Professor Higgs.  (That's Higgs, not Higgins.  The Professor Higgs of this tale is not known to have taught elocution to flower girls.)  Higgs et al. guessed that there must be another type of field (amorphous blob), that came to be known as a Higgs Field, that gave everything the semblance of having mass.  All the other particles are, in effect, swimming through treacle.  The treacle is the Higgs Field and the other particles have to push their way through it.

This was all pie-in-the-sky speculation.  But it was certain, given the way that Amorphous Blob Theory works, that if you concentrated the treacle enough and stepped back, then it would look and behave like a particle.  This inevitably became known as the Higgs Particle.

But no one had ever seen a Higgs Particle.  That was because, even in theory, the amount of energy required to concentrate the treacle field was simply enormous.

So they built the Large Hadron Collider to make concentrated Higgs treacle.  I'm not kidding.  The LHC cost about 4 billion dollars, and pretty much it's sole purpose is to find the Higgs Particle.  Because if we can find that, then we understand mass.  If we understand mass, then there's no telling what interesting things we might be able to do. 

So if the people at the LHC announce the discovery of the Higgs, then that's a very big deal.

Omniscient point of view

I don't do book reviews on this blog, since I'm firmly situated inside a glass house.   Despite which, I do occasionally receive a book or two from publishers, always with the firm understanding that I'm most unlikely to do anything other than read and enjoy the stories.

I want to mention though a book I received a few months ago from the nice people at Bloomsbury, because this book illustrates a very interesting technique that's rarely seen in detective stories.

The book's The Third Rail by Michael Harvey, and the technique is omniscient third person.  The Third Rail is a hardboiled PI detective tale starring an Irish ex-cop in Chicago.  All relatively standard stuff, you might think.

I was chugging along happily, rather liking the book's voice, watching the bodies pile up at a rate that would make even Nicolaos wince, when about halfway in, something unusual happened.  A bad guy decided to kill a whole lot of people (I'm tiptoeing around spoilers here...).  As each victim died, or was seriously injured, the book stopped to tell you what the victim's life would have been like if he or she hadn't been hurt.

Here's an example:
His fourth [shot] punched through the chest and burst the heart of forty-seven-year old Mitchell Case, a second-rate accountant who would never find out about the first-rate affair his wife was having, not to mention the malignant tumor percolating inside his skull.  Case's Corolla was traveling at twenty-eight miles an hour when he was struck.  The car hit the divider, jumped it, and plowed into a van heading north.  That driver, eighteen-year-old Malcolm Anderson, would never meet his daughter, Janine, because she'd never be born.

And so forth.  By the time this scene finished, it was a busy day at the office for the morgue attendants.

Now The Third Rail is written in close third person, which is the most common point of view.  But this scene has flipped into omniscient third, deliberately and to great effect.

Point of view is how the book tells its tale via a narrator.  (I'll call it POV from now on.)

First person POV is an "I" book.  I pulled out a knife.  I waved it around, because I thought it would scare her.  She laughed at me.  The Athenian Mysteries are written in first person from the point of view of Nicolaos.  In a first person book you always see inside the head of the narrator.

Close third person is a "he/she" book, in which we see inside the head of the narrator.  Fred pulled out a gun.  Jane thought he looked ridiculous.  She laughed at him. 

Distant third person is a "he/she" book in which we follow a particular character but don't see inside his head.

You surely know that in third person, it's easy to switch from one narrator to another.  In one scene we might be viewing the action from Jane's point of view, in the next scene we might see through Fred's eyes.  Changing narrator is a normal POV switch.

But here we have something else again.  This book does a POV switch into omniscient third. The new narrator is a godlike being -- not one of the characters -- a godlike being who looks down from above, and tells us what's going on. As you can see from the excerpt, omniscient narrators not only know everything, but they can also see the future, and the past, and look into alternate world lines.

Omniscient third is very rarely seen in detective fiction because, since the omniscient narrator sees all and knows all, including who the killer is right from the start, it's going to be a very short story.  You could, in theory, have an omniscient narrator who deliberately hides his knowledge from the reader, but that would mean the omniscient narrator is also an unreliable witness.  At this point the author feels a migraine coming on and has to take some headache pills and have a good lie down.
 
So all in all I thought Harvey did a great job of switching into omniscience, on that one big set piece scene, and then switching out of it.  By limiting his omniscience, so to speak, he managed to get the benefit without the usual drawbacks.