text:
Futurism (disambiguation)

Futurism is an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.

Futurists are people specializing or interested in the study of the future.

Futurism or futurist may also refer to:

Cultural movements

 * Futurism (Christianity), an interpretation of the Bible in Christian eschatology
 * Futurism (literature), a modernist avant-garde movement in literature
 * Futurist architecture, an architectural movement begun in Italy in 1904
 * Africanfuturism, an African subculture and literature genre
 * Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture
 * Cubo-Futurism, the main school of painting and sculpture practiced by the Russian Futurists
 * Ego-Futurism, a Russian literary movement of the 1910s
 * Indigenous Futurism, a movement consisting of art, literature, comics, games
 * Neo-futurism, a contemporary art and architecture movement
 * Retrofuturism, a modern art movement
 * Russian Futurism, a movement of Russian poets and artists

Music

 * Futurism (music), a movement in music

Albums

 * Musica Futurista, an album of Futurist music
 * Futurist (Alec Empire album), 2005
 * Futurist (Keeno album), 2016
 * The Futurist (Robert Downey Jr. album), 2004
 * The Futurist (Shellac album), 1997
 * Futurism, an album by Danny Tenaglia

Songs

 * "Futurism", a bonus track from the Muse album Origin of Symmetry
 * "Futurism", from the Deerhunter album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?

Other uses

 * Futurism.com, a science and tech website formerly owned by Singularity University
 * Futurist (comics), a Marvel Comics character
 * Retro Futurism, a Korean play
 * Futurist Theatre, a theatre and cinema in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England
 * Futurist Political Party, an Italian political party

title: Futurism (disambiguation)


text:
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti is best known as the author of the Manifesto of Futurism, which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.

Childhood and adolescence
Emilio Angelo Carlo Marinetti (some documents give his name as "Filippo Achille Emilio Marinetti") spent the first years of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father (Enrico Marinetti) and his mother (Amalia Grolli) lived together more uxorio (as if married). Enrico was a lawyer from Piedmont, and his mother was the daughter of a literary professor from Milan. They had come to Egypt in 1865, at the invitation of Khedive Isma'il Pasha, to act as legal advisers for foreign companies that were taking part in his modernization program.

His love for literature developed during the school years. His mother was an avid reader of poetry, and introduced the young Marinetti to the Italian and European classics. At age seventeen he started his first school magazine, Papyrus; the Jesuits threatened to expel him for publicizing Émile Zola's scandalous novels in the school.

He first studied in Egypt then in Paris, obtaining a baccalauréat degree in 1894 at the Sorbonne, and in Italy, graduating in law at the University of Pavia in 1899.

He decided not to be a lawyer but to develop a literary career. He experimented with every type of literature (poetry, narrative, theatre, words in liberty), signing everything "Filippo Tommaso Marinetti".

Futurism
Marinetti and Constantin Brâncuși were visitors of the Abbaye de Créteil c. 1908 along with young writers like Roger Allard (one of the first to defend Cubism), Pierre Jean Jouve, and Paul Castiaux, who wanted to publish their works through the Abbaye. The Abbaye de Créteil was a phalanstère community founded in the autumn of 1906 by the painter Albert Gleizes, and the poets René Arcos, Henri-Martin Barzun, Alexandre Mercereau and Charles Vildrac. The movement drew its inspiration from the Abbaye de Thélème, a fictional creation by Rabelais in his novel Gargantua. It was closed down by its members early in 1908.

Marinetti is known best as the author of the Futurist Manifesto, which he wrote in 1909. It was published in French on the front page of the most prestigious French daily newspaper, Le Figaro, on 20 February 1909. In The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti declared that "Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice." Georges Sorel, who influenced the entire political spectrum from anarchism to Fascism, also argued for the importance of violence. Futurism had both anarchist and Fascist elements; Marinetti later became an active supporter of Benito Mussolini.

Marinetti, who admired speed, had a minor car accident outside Milan in 1908 when he veered into a ditch to avoid two cyclists. He referred to the accident in the Futurist Manifesto: the Marinetti who was helped out of the ditch was a new man, determined to end the pretense and decadence of the prevailing Liberty style. He discussed a new and strongly revolutionary programme with his friends, in which they should end every artistic relationship with the past, "destroy the museums, the libraries, every type of academy." Together, he wrote, "We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman."

The Futurist Manifesto was read and debated all across Europe, but Marinetti's first 'Futurist' works were not as successful. In April, the opening night of his drama Le Roi bombance (The Feasting King), written in 1905, was interrupted by loud, derisive whistling by the audience and by Marinetti himself, who thus introduced another element of Futurism, "the desire to be heckled." Marinetti did, however, fight a duel with a critic he considered too harsh.

His drama La donna è mobile (Poupées électriques), first presented in Turin, was not successful either. Nowadays, the play is remembered through a later version, named Elettricità sessuale (Sexual Electricity), and mainly for the appearance onstage of humanoid automatons, ten years before the Czech writer Karel Čapek invented the term robot.

In 1910 his first novel, Mafarka il futurista, was cleared of all charges by an obscenity trial. That year, Marinetti discovered some allies in three young painters (Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo), who adopted the Futurist philosophy. Together with them (and with poets such as Aldo Palazzeschi), Marinetti began a series of Futurist Evenings, theatrical spectacles in which Futurists declaimed their manifestos in front of a crowd that in part attended the performances to throw vegetables at them.

The most successful "happening" of that period was the publicization of the "Manifesto Against Past-Loving Venice" in Venice. In the flier, Marinetti demands "fill(ing) the small, stinking canals with the rubble from the old, collapsing and leprous palaces" to "prepare for the birth of an industrial and militarized Venice, capable of dominating the great Adriatic, a great Italian lake."

In 1911, the Italo-Turkish War began and Marinetti departed for Libya as war correspondent for a French newspaper. His articles were eventually collected and published in The Battle of Tripoli. He then covered the First Balkan War of 1912–13, witnessing the surprise success of Bulgarian troops against the Ottoman Empire in the Siege of Adrianople. In this period he also made a number of visits to London, which he considered 'the Futurist city par excellence', and where a number of exhibitions, lectures and demonstrations of Futurist music were staged.

Marinetti sought to establish an English Futurism and initially had an ally in Harold Monro, editor of Poetry and Drama, a London literary journal. Monro devoted the September 1913 issue to Futurism, praising Marinetti in a long editorial. However, although a number of artists, including Wyndham Lewis, were interested in the new movement, only one British convert was made, the young artist C.R.W. Nevinson. Marinetti’s campaign both threatened and influenced Ezra Pound, who founded his own literary movement, Imagism, and wrote manifestos to publicize it while attacking Futurism. One result of Pound’s strong reaction to Marinetti was his advocacy of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Joyce was exposed to Futurism while living in Trieste. The movement’s techniques are reflected in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake, one section of which alludes to “crucial elements of Futurism."

Futurism was an important influence upon Lewis's Vorticist philosophy. Vorticism, named by Pound, was founded with the publication of Blast, to which Pound was a major contributor. An advertisement promised Blast would cover "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and All Vital Forms of Modern Art”. Blast was published only twice, in 1914 and 1915. Writing to Monro, Marinetti said he was saddened by the reviews of Vorticism in the English press unfavorably comparing it with Futurism and would rather have worked in collaboration with the Vorticists. He and Pound later became friends, and in Canto LXXII, written in Italian, Pound meets the spirit of the recently deceased Marinetti.

About the same time Marinetti worked on a very anti-Roman Catholic and anti-Austrian verse-novel, Le monoplan du Pape (The Pope's Aeroplane, 1912) and edited an anthology of futurist poets. But his attempts to renew the style of poetry did not satisfy him. So much so that, in his foreword to the anthology, he declared a new revolution: it was time to be done with traditional syntax and to use "words in freedom" (parole in libertà). His sound-poem Zang Tumb Tumb, an account of the Battle of Adrianople, exemplifies words in freedom. Recordings can be heard of Marinetti reading some of his sound poems: Battaglia, Peso + Odore (1912); Dune, parole in libertà (1914); La Battaglia di Adrianopoli (1926) (recorded 1935).

Wartime
Marinetti agitated for Italian involvement in World War I, and once Italy was engaged, promptly volunteered for service. In the fall of 1915 he and several other Futurists who were members of the Lombard Volunteer Cyclists were stationed at Lake Garda, in Trentino province, high in the mountains along the Italo-Austrian border. They endured several weeks of fighting in harsh conditions before the cyclists units, deemed inappropriate for mountain warfare, were disbanded.

Marinetti spent most of 1916 supporting Italy's war effort with speeches, journalism, and theatrical work, then returned to military service as a regular army officer in 1917. In May of that year he was seriously wounded while serving with an artillery battalion on the Isonzo front; he returned to service after a long recovery, and participated in the decisive Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto in October 1918.

Marriage
After an extended courtship, in 1923 Marinetti married Benedetta Cappa (1897–1977), a writer and painter and a pupil of Giacomo Balla. Born in Rome, she had joined the Futurists in 1917. They'd met in 1918, moved in together in Rome, and chose to marry only to avoid legal complications on a lecture tour of Brazil. They had three daughters: Vittoria, Ala, and Luce.

Cappa and Marinetti collaborated on a genre of mixed-media assemblages in the mid-1920s they called tattilismo ("Tactilism"), and she was a strong proponent and practitioner of the aeropittura movement after its inception in 1929. She also produced three experimental novels. Cappa's major public work is likely a series of five murals at the Palermo Post Office (1926–1935) for the Fascist public-works architect Angiolo Mazzoni.

Marinetti and Fascism
In early 1918, Marinetti founded the Partito Politico Futurista or Futurist Political Party, which only a year later merged with Benito Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. Marinetti was one of the first affiliates of the Italian Fascist Party. In 1919 he co-wrote with Alceste De Ambris the Fascist Manifesto, the original manifesto of Italian Fascism. He opposed Fascism's later exaltation of existing institutions, terming them "reactionary". After walking out of the 1920 Fascist party congress in disgust, he withdrew from politics for three years; however, he remained a notable force in developing the party philosophy throughout the regime's existence. For example, at the end of the Congress of Fascist Culture that was held in Bologna on 30 March 1925, Giovanni Gentile addressed Sergio Panunzio on the need to define Fascism more purposefully by way of Marinetti's opinion, stating, "Great spiritual movements make recourse to precision when their primitive inspirations—what F. T. Marinetti identified this morning as artistic, that is to say, the creative and truly innovative ideas, from which the movement derived its first and most potent impulse—have lost their force. We today find ourselves at the very beginning of a new life and we experience with joy this obscure need that fills our hearts—this need that is our inspiration, the genius that governs us and carries us with it."

As part of his campaign to overturn tradition, Marinetti also attacked traditional Italian food. His Manifesto of Futurist Cooking was published in the Turin Gazzetta del Popolo on 28 December 1930. Arguing that "People think, dress[,] and act in accordance with what they drink and eat", Marinetti proposed wide-ranging changes to diet. He condemned pasta, blaming it for lassitude, pessimism, and lack of virility, — and promoted the eating of Italian-grown rice. In this, as in other ways, his proposed Futurist cooking was nationalistic, rejecting foreign foods and food names. It was also militaristic, seeking to stimulate men to be fighters.

Marinetti also sought to increase creativity. His attraction to whatever was new made scientific discoveries appealing to him, but his views on diet were not scientifically based. He was fascinated with the idea of processed food, predicting that someday pills would replace food as a source of energy, and calling for the creation of "plastic complexes" to replace natural foods. Food, in turn, would become a matter of artistic expression. Many of the meals Marinetti described and ate resemble performance art, such as the "Tactile Dinner", recreated in 2014 for an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum. Participants wore pajamas decorated with sponge, sandpaper, and aluminum, and ate salads without using cutlery.

During the Fascist regime Marinetti sought to make Futurism the official state art of Italy but failed to do so. Mussolini was personally uninterested in art and chose to give patronage to numerous styles to keep artists loyal to the regime. Opening the exhibition of art by the Novecento Italiano group in 1923, he said: "I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage anything like a state art. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The state has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view." Mussolini's mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, successfully promoted the rival Novecento Group, and even persuaded Marinetti to be part of its board.

In Fascist Italy, modern art was tolerated and even approved by the Fascist hierarchy. Towards the end of the 1930s, some Fascist ideologues (for example, the ex-Futurist Ardengo Soffici ) wished to import the concept of "degenerate art" from Germany to Italy and condemned modernism, although their demands were ignored by the regime. In 1938, hearing that Adolf Hitler wanted to include Futurism in a traveling exhibition of degenerate art, Marinetti persuaded Mussolini to refuse to let it enter Italy.

On 17 November 1938, Italy passed The Racial Laws, discriminating against Italian Jews, much like the discrimination pronounced in the Nuremberg Laws. The antisemitic trend in Italy resulted in attacks against modern art, judged too foreign, too radical and anti-nationalist. In the 11 January 1939 issue of the Futurist journal, Artecrazia, Marinetti expressed his condemnation of such attacks on modern art, noting Futurism is both Italian and nationalist, not foreign, and stating that there were no Jews in Futurism. Furthermore, he claimed Jews were not active in the development of modern art. Regardless, the Italian state shut down Artecrazia.

Marinetti made numerous attempts to ingratiate himself with the regime, becoming less radical and avant garde with each attempt. He relocated from Milan to Rome. He became an academician despite his condemnation of academies, saying, "It is important that Futurism be represented in the Academy."

He was an atheist, but by the mid 1930s he had come to accept the influence of the Catholic Church on Italian society. In Gazzetta del Popolo, 21 June 1931, Marinetti proclaimed that "Only Futurist artists...are able to express clearly...the simultaneous dogmas of the Catholic faith, such as the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception and Christ's Calvary." In his last works, written just before his death in 1944 L'aeropoema di Gesù ("The Aeropoem of Jesus") and Quarto d'ora di poesia per the X Mas ("A Fifteen Minutes' Poem of the tenth MAS"), Marinetti sought to reconcile his newfound love for God and his passion for the action that accompanied him throughout his life.

There were other contradictions in his character: despite his nationalism, he was international, educated in Egypt and France, writing his first poems in French, publishing the Futurist Manifesto in a French newspaper and traveling to promote his ideas.

Marinetti volunteered for active service in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and the Second World War, serving on the Eastern Front for a few weeks in the Summer and Autumn of 1942 at the age of 65.

He died of cardiac arrest in Bellagio on 2 December 1944 while working on a collection of poems praising the wartime achievements of the Decima Flottiglia MAS.

Writings

 * Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Il Fascino dell'Egitto (The Charm of Egypt), A. Mondadori – Editore, 1933, https://archive.org/details/marinetti_fascino_1933A/page/n3/mode/2up, Italian version available online
 * Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Mafarka the Futurist. An African novel, Middlesex University Press, 1998, ISBN 1-898253-10-2, French version available online
 * Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Selected Poems and Related Prose, Yale University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-300-04103-9
 * Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Critical Writings, ed. by Günter Berghaus, New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006, 549p., ISBN 0-374-26083-4, pocket edition 2008: ISBN 0-374-53107-2
 * Carlo Schirru, Per un’analisi interlinguistica d’epoca: Grazia Deledda e contemporanei, Rivista Italiana di Linguistica e di Dialettologia, Fabrizio Serra editore, Pisa-Roma, Anno XI, 2009, pp. 9–32
 * Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Le Futurisme, textes annotés et préfacés par Giovanni Lista, L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1980
 * Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Les Mots en liberté futuristes, préfacés par Giovanni Lista, L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1987
 * Giovanni Lista, F. T. Marinetti, Éditions Seghers, Paris, 1976
 * Marinetti et le futurisme, poèmes, études, documents, iconographie, réunis et préfacés par Giovanni Lista, bibliographie établie par Giovanni Lista, L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1977
 * Giovanni Lista, F. T. Marinetti, l’anarchiste du futurisme, Éditions Séguier, Paris, 1995
 * Giovanni Lista, Le Futurisme : création et avant-garde, Éditions L’Amateur, Paris, 2001
 * Giovanni Lista, Le Futurisme, une avant-garde radicale, coll. "Découvertes Gallimard" (n° 533), Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2008.
 * Giovanni Lista, Journal des Futurismes, Éditions Hazan, coll. "Bibliothèque", Paris, 2008 (ISBN 978-2-7541-0208-7)
 * Antonino Reitano, L'onore, la patria e la fede nell'ultimo Marinetti, Angelo Parisi Editore, 2006
 * Barbara Meazzi, Il fantasma del romanzo. Le futurisme italien et l'écriture romanesque (1909–1929), Chambéry, Presses universitaires Savoie Mont Blanc, 2021, 430 pp., ISBN 9782377410590

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti


text:
Talk:Fermi paradox

Untitled
TODO: Add the actual Fermi paradox solution's critical key element (besides it being a compound solution within to observations compatible components) for deduction & its resulting dynamic of the solution:

Ethical explanation
It is possible that ethical assessment of general forms of evolution of life in the universe constitutes the central issue which intelligent alien species' macroscopic decision-making, such as for the topic of natural panspermia, directed panspermia, space colonization, megastructures, or self-replicating spacecraft, revolves around. If the result of utility evaluations of enough and sufficiently in time extended initial or lasting portions of expected or prospective cases of evolution is among all other ethically relevant factors the dominant ethical concern of intelligent alien species, and if furthermore a large enough negative expected utility is assigned to sufficiently common forms of expected or prospective cases of evolution, then foregoing directed panspermia, space colonization, the construction of megastructures, sending out self-replicating spacecraft, but also active attempts to mitigate the consequences of interplanetary and interstellar forms of natural panspermia may follow. While in the case of space colonization it might ultimately stay too uncontrollable to - by technical or educational means - ensure settlers or emerging space colonies themselves consistently keep acting in accordance to the awareness of by colonizer considered major ethical dangers accompanying physical interstellar space exploration, and for the case of interstellar self-replicating spacecraft, due to potential prebiotic substances in interstellar clouds and exoplanets' atmospheres and soils, it may forever stay impossible to ensure their sterility to avoid contamination of celestial bodies which may kick-start uncontrollable evolution processes, reasons to forego the creation of a megastructure, even if such may be beneficial to an intelligent alien species and also to some other intelligent alien species imitators, may mainly have psychological origin. Since certain megastructures may be identifiable to be of unnatural, intelligent design requiring origin by foreign intelligent alien species, for as long as the by an intelligent alien species expected number of (especially less experienced or less far developed) from them foreign intelligent alien species capable of identifying their megastructure as such is large enough, the by them rather uncontrollable spectrum of interstellar space endeavor related influences this may have on those foreign intelligent alien species might constitute a too strong ethical deterrence from creating megastructures that are from outer space identifiable as such, until eventually a lasting state of cosmic privacy may be attained by natural or technological means.

And so consequently, the steady-state solution of the Fermi Paradox consists of naturally emerging civilizations that just stay on their home-world, hide and by their location of emergence are assigned a region of space around them in which they can exercise local cosmic intervention operations for the macro-ethical good, until a galaxy is covered by regions of civilizations' local influences, similar to a mathematical minimal packing problem, but for covering a galaxy with the least required amount of civilizations in order to keep as much of it overall as sterile as possible for as long as possible. And for the case of a spiral galaxy, chances are that the majority - if not all - of such civilizations will inhabit star systems moving together with the main-stream of stars around the galactic center, since for wrong-way-driver star systems, due to their severely increased interaction rates with different galaxy regions, both the emergence of a civilization as well as their continued long-term presence is at far higher risk. The only exception to this general behavior might arise near the very end of the universe's development when galaxies have ran out of material with which to keep stars burning, darkened severely with "the lights having gone out", and planets have cooled out sufficiently far, so that the risk of accidental or intentional, direct or indirect causation by civilizations of lasting, uncontrolled evolutions of wildlife has upon astronomically slow, gradual decay finally diminished to a sufficiently low level as to potentially conceivably provide macro-ethical allowance or even justification for civilizations to not have to hide and be silent anymore.

based on the following reasoning:

1. Axiom of Importance: The ethical importance of an issue increases alongside the number of therein involved sentient lifeforms, the time duration during which they are affected by it, and the vastness of the affected space to the extent to which changes of it affect the lifeforms. Or more directly, it increases with the absolute difference in caused, resulting time-integrals over all (with receptor-specific intensities weighed) pleasure & pain receptor-signals for any and all sentient beings.

2. Extreme case: By the in the above statement defined abstract, general standard, according to the current body of humanity's knowledge, general forms of evolution of life (if on earth or on exoplanets) forever constitute the most ethically important issue to exist in the universe: With billions of species - each with numerous individual lifeforms - together with durations on the scale of billions of years, and spacial extension of at least a whole planet, it dwarfs any other conceivable ethical issue's level of importance.

3. Valuation Axiom for the extreme case: According to many scientific studies, such as by Richard Dawkins, Brian Tomasik, Alejandro Villamor Iglesias, Oscar Horta, pain and suffering dominates over joy for animal wildlife in general forms of Darwinian evolution of life due to the global war-like situation commonly framed as survival of the fittest (rather than the demise of all unfit), and therefore - when accumulated across all logically entangled parameters such as duration and count of involved individuals - instances of such forms of evolution of life has to be kept at a minimum in the universe, as there never was and never will be anything that could be more important, to change the conclusion of this Anti-Panspermia-implying directive.

1. Macro-Ethical Scale of Evolution of Life: Certainly, if evolution of life happens somewhere or not is a very big deal in (macro) ethical terms since easily millions of species can be subjected to it, be involved in it, for several hundreds of millions, possibly even billions of years.

2. Macro-Ethical Importance of Evolution of Life: Now, what also is surely very agreeable is that evolution can play out in extremely many different ways and with extremely large variety in its short- and long-term dynamic, with that depending on all kinds of events (of various qualitatively different types) happening during it at all or not, or later or sooner. And so the window, or (in terms of all in the process aggregated joy and suffering) distance between the worst kinds of an instance of evolution of life and the best kinds of it surely is astronomically huge, providing the subject matter with monumental relevance, importance due to its scale. And this is independent of where (i.e. wholly on the negative side or between the negative and the positive side, or entirely on the positive side) such an interval or window consisting of the whole range or spectrum of cases of evolution of life between the worst and the best cases lies on any continuous axis (from - infinity to + infinity) meant to account for the ethical evaluation of the whole, once everything of ethical relevance related to it has finished happening.

3. Nearly guaranteed expectable decision-making- or design-improvement, rapidly in short time: Also, certainly any randomly intentionally or accidentally, maybe even unnoticed, kind of initiated instance of evolution elsewhere would not with any sufficiently high likelihood result in a form of evolution of life that is anywhere close among whatever the better actually plausible possible cases of it may be. And at the same time, science and technologies progress rapidly and surely can keep progressing speedily for millennia, if not hundreds of thousands of years, putting humanity then into a position with far greater holistic overview and comprehension of the matter. And given how gargantuan of a macro-ethically important matter this is, even if in the future we only could turn it into e.g. a 5% (relative to the window width) better version than any now possibly as such then irreversible version of evolution of life, the absolute difference would be unimaginably titanic.

4. Humanity's historical, contextually as empirical reference frame relevant, abysmal track record: As our history repeatedly shows, humanity does not have a track record of managing complex large-scale matters anywhere near perfectly right, the 1st time around, in part due to unaccounted for side-effects. Huge problems tied in with them are more the norm than an exception. And on top of this, unfortunately there is several factors that likely make it harder for contemporary people to care about this topic, such as all the crises we had and still have here on earth, but also that it's about a huge risk for others, not ourselves, and it'd not be humans (though it could also eventually lead to species with human level intelligence being subjected to it) but wildlife animals (which generally are by people judged to have a lower priority of care compared to other humans), and the disaster would unfold far in the future (long past the lifetime of anyone that lives currently) and far away, and the means by which it'd happen would be in a very subtle manner of which the comprehension, understanding of all that is made less accessible by the interdisciplinary complexity of the subject and that it has to be explained in rather little time, as it doesn't take long anymore for future space missions and activities in general carrying these grave risks with them. And so it seems that just about all odds stand in opposition rather than in favor of people taking it seriously with the right mindset about it.

5. It holds true that there is lack of any urgency or need for near-future final decision-making, by which to lock humanity out of otherwise currently still available, significant alternatives.

Conclusion: Unchallengeably, unquestionably it makes sense and is entirely far safer for humanity to have discipline, patience, and hold itself back from all its outer space activities that carry at least the slightest forward contamination risks.

Besides all of this, the same general line of reasoning would apply for all intelligent aliens with exo-biospheres of different biological constitution analogously. And not just that either, but all alien civilizations would have to account for all biologically distinct kinds of evolution of life possible in the universe - for if distinct kinds do exist - depending on the general distribution of habitable candidate worlds specific to each of them individually, and so in particular, intelligent aliens would have to account for our DNA-based kind of biosphere, and vice versa, humanity would have to account for the possibility of the emergence of biologically distinct cases of evolution of life.

--- — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.192.195.234 (talk) 03:14, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Refutation of the dark forest hypothesis as well as Dyson swarms (informally worded):

In regards to this topic, imagine a single civilization separated so much from all others and in manners such that the very civilization could know for certain that this is the case. They then would have no one to worry about in terms of "inter-galactic threats". Or take a civilization that just happens to "have nothing to fear (from any other civilization) anymore" because any response reaction to whatever they did (if they hadn't throughout all the time they existed already been detected yet anyway) wouldn't matter to them anymore because it'd just take far too long and they could be aware of that, safely so, and then just unhide however they liked, if they wanted to do so anyway at that old age. And stars get separated, ejected out of galaxies not that rarely, and they can form elsewhere in separation, too, and there's small galaxies as well and especially galaxies with 90% dark matter making them up with (relatively speaking, compared to normal galaxies) "barely any stars" in them to have to within how long(?), 1 million, 10 million, 100 million years search over and check out to confirm "no, there's no aliens over there either", so that even in small galaxies, aliens within their life-span could be able to know/make sure they're alone and then (again, if they wanted) "do whatever they wanted". And so no, the dark forest hypothesis has this problem that it cannot resolve. It's close but flawed. It cannot be what deters aliens from building Dyson swarms or such (assuming those were possible in the first place). At that point, even the dark forest hypothesis would rely on statistics or chance, namely that none of these exception cases (and maybe more if I'd give myself few more minutes to think of them) have happened so far.

Oh, and I guess if one were to be working within the (il-)logical framework of "civilizations would expand generally when possible but would also hide as long as possible but would at some point have more reasons to stop hiding rather than continue hiding, if other threats are too high and hiding would be too limiting to their options for addressing those risks", then when it comes to checking which exoplanet may have aliens on them, one could look for all the kinds of cosmic threats that we can predict and which would happen "soon" elsewhere and which would threaten other places, to then see if nothing happens on those places or if instead processes looking alike preparations for addressing such threat is observable instead.

Also (since the potential "complete unfathomability" of aliens' psyche comes up often), as long as such aliens do genetic research and try to do animal uplifting (in cognitive, mental terms), at least they may come around other aliens thinking just like us, contributing the same kinds of ideas, having such considerations, intentions etc. that we're familiar with; because it may easily be a mistake to think aliens would live as the only humanly (or beyond) intelligent species on their planet after 1 or 10 or 100 million years passed. So yes, they may additionally have species among them that think very different, but unless that'd be part of or be the reason for why they'd not create other intelligent species just like us, they could just as much have "aliens thinking just like us" on their planet, too.

Surely if a civilization (within the dark forest framework) would by cosmic predictable nearby threats be forced to react to that and expand or flee by means that uncover them, or die out, with these kinds of threats being up to absolutely certain ones, there'd be situations where the speculated threats coming from other civilizations nearby possibly trying to make use of their situation for if they'd allow themselves to be visible to them, to take them out, they'd rather enter that speculative risk than the physical certain one, and they may even consider trading information to nearby civilizations for in return being spared from aggression. They could be useful to potential nearby dangerous civilizations and use this fact for their own survival for if they needed to become visible, and yet we don't see them, or at least aren't seeing Dyson swarms etc., which if it indicates/shows anything, it's that apparently it's a very high priority in "current times around this region of the cosmos" to not make oneself visible, to stay hidden. So this way, that the by cosmic forces towards potential extinction pressed civilizations also could leverage their usefulness to other civilizations in trade for being spared by them would be another problem of the dark forest hypothesis as explanation that advocates of it would have to address, I guess. And once such trades would've happened already, even collaborative, friendly relationships (in/despite the dark forest theory framework) could (happen to) be established as result. With other civilizations, one could negotiate, but not with the forces of the cosmos.

So anyway, it seems at least either the dark forest hypothesis is busted or the Dyson swarm concept, but that'd not be the only expectable way in how expansion of a civilization may be visible if they'd do that, but variations of it, of collecting a star's energy, should be covered in the case of the general rationale used for the refutation, too. And while normally, one would think that for being able to negotiate between civilizations in different star systems, they'd already need to be aware of each other, have located each other, this wouldn't necessarily be so, as a civilization (e.g. pressed to flee or expand, again in the dark forest framework) may either try to communicate indiscriminately outward in all directions if signals could be set up to go out in all directions, or they could pick all the plausible nearby exoplanets and send messages there without knowing that another civilization is there, and ask for response if there'd be willingness for trades, deals of any kind.

And then there's another differentiation to point out, namely that the energy requirements for via hypothetical space-ships (or forms of attacks) to reach other star systems isn't the same everywhere, at least not across vast enough distances, because e.g. a civilization living in a globular star cluster "high up the galactic gravitational well" may have it far easier to "drop something down there into the pond that is the galactic disc", than what the energy requirements for a civilization within the disc may be for sending something the other direction; and so such kinds of minimum energy requirement differences for attacks or travel (or for the situation not being symmetric here) can mean that some civilizations could possibly only then become dangerous relative to specific other civilizations nearby if they e.g. built a Dyson swarm, and since building such a thing can take very long and may already be observable to be in construction development by another nearby civilization that could in principle be in danger but only far in the future once such construction project were to be completed, this can mean that the presence of small enough or incomplete enough stages of hypothetical Dyson swarms are compatible with (or allowable to happen within) the dark forest hypothesis (because other civilizations nearby could estimate the minimum further required time for a civilization with small Dyson swarm present already for making it larger to become a threat to them, and estimate what the latest point for themselves would be for taking them out before the others with already present partial Dyson swarm could become a threat to them), and yet we see none of them. However, I suppose a civilization could also always have a lot of energy stored invisibly by other means (though there'd also be limits to that, and potential conflict with other priorities for uses of such stored energy).

But e.g. when it comes to the topic of swing-by chains accessible to a civilization to be used for travel or attacks, there can be major differences, and from afar very accessible to assess ones, possible to be estimated, so that'd be another strong example of differences/asymmetries between where the developmental thresholds would be for 1 civilization with its environmental circumstances in space to become a threat to another civilization either by aggression or by possibly reaching other exoplanets at all or before them. And not only that but also specifically when it comes to hypothetical means of interstellar travel (or attack) via chains of swing-by events, then the plane orientation within which all the planets (more or less) sit becomes important, too, and this can mean that 1 civilization's plane in which their planets sit may (if as plane extended far enough outward) contain (or be very close to containing) another civilization's system but not vice versa. And if one considers the set of all star systems with their relative locations to each other in space in combination with their planes in which their planets sit (or if one only considers those star systems that have especially many or heavy planets usable for swing-by chain maneuvers), then one could obtain a kind of travel-graph or a directed graph of connections where travel is (relatively speaking, within the realm of the anyway already at least nearly impossible) much easier than traveling in different directions that are rather orthogonal to such plane orientation (which though would be the fewer directions).

And a qualitatively different kind of approach for a refutation of the dark forest hypothesis would be to try to argue scenarios, situations in which some towards expansion or galaxy dominance ambitious civilization may "just go for it" and try to outpace any other possibly in the galaxy present civilizations' potential efforts in containing/inhibiting them in that process, and given that it's always been said that within some millions or hundreds of millions of years allegedly a civilization could "take over a galaxy", yet for even isolated galaxies we don't see them full of Dyson swarms or such, it indicates that no dominant civilization monopoly for any dwarf galaxy or globular star cluster exist either. And I suppose at least in regard to "relativistic objects" sent after a civilization meant to have to hide out of fear of such, if a supernova happens or just some dense space dust eventually in some millions of years move between them and any other potential civilizations (which from just 1 or few supernovae within a small time period would be plausible to happen, especially since the timing of supernovae can come "rather simultaneously" if the stars were formed from the same starburst phase; and a civilization can be located rather on the edge of a spiral galaxy's disc, too and could have "in wise foresight" scanned at first all the remaining star systems that'd not be or not as early be covered behind a dense huge dust or gas cloud in interstellar space to be able to rule out threats from remaining places), blocking off a civilization from such kinds of threats would provide them the opportunity to be safe and expand, use that opportunity to afterward be not anymore easily taken out (if one would stay in this framework, including the hypothetical possibility of interstellar travel), and such cases apparently don't happen either. So then at most intense laser-focusing-based threats for wavelengths that could ignore and go through space dust and gas could conceivably prevent that.

Or another case could be for civilizations to "play the waiting game" (unless civilizations anyway could expand while hiding at all times, but then at some point there'd be no need to hide anymore) and check if the other civilization's life-span naturally may end sooner than that of the own civilization, based on development of their star, and similarly so for other civilizations, though more and more young new civilizations could emerge and become a threat before old threatening civilizations were gone, but then one could also try to prevent that from happening via sterilization of places (to the extent possible) or contamination preventions, though one couldn't necessarily keep control over all planets in a small galaxy long-term this way, and while it may be the case that if all current civilizations in a galaxy could try to do the same to have a chance to eventually expand, even if they may naturally not have as long to live as known other civilizations, the ones that would be gone sooner could hypothetically counter-act sterilization plans of the civilization that would live the longest (to then take over a galaxy) by contaminating other planets to possibly allow new civilizations as new threats to arise.

Very interesting, so the smallest known dwarf galaxies only have a few thousands of stars (and can be very old nonetheless), and yet there is no Dyson swarms or any techno-signatures even though civilizations emerging in any of them could "in no time" check if they're "the only civilization in town" and (presumably, within the fictional dark forest hypothesis framework) dominate such dwarf galaxy.

Two more reasons/arguments against the dark forest hypothesis: 1. Civilizations make mistakes by which they can become visible to other civilizations (for if that would be the only thing saving them from being attacked, namely not having been found yet, rather than any other reasons making sure they are safe even if they were visible, and in the latter case, if they were visible, they might as well stop caring about hiding then unless growth in energy availability would be seen and would be what would instigate aggression, rather than visibility in and of itself), by either not realizing this kind of risk or not thinking in this kind of (game theory) mindset (and people have pointed out that aliens may have a different psyche after all), or by contaminating nearby planets in ways or with microbes that couldn't naturally have gotten there, changing the other planet(s)' atmosphere in detectable manner from afar to then but not prior contain a techno-signature, e.g. if maybe a star's wind would be so strong that microbes wouldn't make it to a planet closer to the star from a biosphere on a further away planet in the system, especially the heavier it is so that the heavier (and rarer) of asteroids would have to knock into them for any kind of ballistic litho-panspermia to happen with protected microbes within a space rock ejected from the planet despite strong stellar winds. And so if there would be no other civilization present (or none that hasn't due to making a mistake and becoming visible been taken out yet) within a (small) galaxy or within the whole region around a civilization in which any aggression toward them would be feasible in theory but not from any place further outward anymore, then a remaining civilization could start expanding and allow itself to be visible. 2. Even if civilizations make no mistake per se by which they become visible, with the right kind of circumstances e.g. for stellar gravitational lensing for viewing exoplanets and stars precisely enough with high resolution, they could be found and presumably be taken out (and possibly make Dyson swarms irrelevant in the context in such cases). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.192.195.234 (talk) 11:06, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Original conversation
This section is long and not that interesting. Can it be shortened? 88.212.128.82 (talk) 13:27, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

 * ✅. I agree and took a crack at shortening it. –CWenger ( ^ •  @ ) 21:25, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Alistair Reynolds "Inhibitor" hypothesis probably needs a mention
In the Revelation Space Universe of several novels he suggests that early in the life of our galaxy one of the the first space-faring civillizations came to the conclusion that it is harmful for a society to expand beyond its home star system and so the set up a way of detecting and destroying space-faring cultures whenever they arose. Steve77moss (talk) 05:47, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

 * Meta comment: start including pop culture (Dark Forest) in a science article, and it'll attract more.... Geogene (talk) 15:28, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I think what we actually need is to demand WP:SECONDARY WP:DUE-establishing coverage of stuff like this. Our own interpretations of these novels is not enough. We need secondary reliable sources to establish these connections for us. That is also how we, through WP:RSUW, prevent over-proliferation of these pop culture one-off mentions. — Shibboleth ink  (♔ ♕) 16:51, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

This article is about real life alien intelligences, not about fictional ones. Works of fiction are not valid references. Cambalachero (talk) 22:41, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Okay, but if a fictional scenario brings our attention to a real-universe possibility? You needn't mention the books, it could just say "Explanation xxx: an aggressively anti-spacefaring culture or other entity may be snuffing out interstellar travel whenever it arises".

To me that's a real non-fictional hypothesis. I do though agree that this article isn't the place for sharing about our favourite stories... Steve77moss (talk) 03:27, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

Is this relevant?
Harvard physicist plans expedition to find ‘alien artefact’ that fell from space Doug Weller  talk 15:36, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

 * The only real news is that they will search for that object. It is of scientific interest because it is a meteor that came from beyond the Solar System, and that's a thing even if no aliens were involved. But as for using it on Wikipedia, I think that right now it's only relevant for the biography of Avi Loeb. The meteor itself may have an article, if it's retrieved, studied and there's something to say about it. I don't think it is relevant for this article. Cambalachero (talk) 16:09, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Doug Weller  talk 16:12, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

It is worthwhile to mention the origin of this term
According to articles published in the peer-reviewed journal Astrobiology (journal), the term "Fermi paradox", though widely known, inaccurately reflects Fermi's views regarding the feasibility of interstellar travel and the potential existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. In addition, it incorrectly attributes ideas primarily from Hart and Tipler to Fermi, using his reputation for endorsement. Furthermore, it suggests a logical inconsistency where there isn't one.

1. The Fermi Paradox Is Neither Fermi's Nor a Paradox

2. Fermi's Paradox Is a Daunting Problem—Under Whatever Label

3. The So-Called Fermi Paradox Is Misleading, Flawed, and Harmful

I think this is worth mentioning. I added this but was removed immediately with the reason: "unattributed opinions".

On the contrary, all the sources cited in the very first paragraph introducing the "Fermi paradox" are online media websites. I don't understand how online media websites are more reliable than a serious peer-reviewed scientific journal (except for the most prestigious multidisciplinary journals like Nature and Science, Astrobiology (journal) is likely the best in this area).

Ortsaxu (talk) 22:48, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Those seem like extravagant claims to source from two WP:PRIMARY papers in a single journal. Whats more, they were stated in Wikivoice and added directly to the lead. Geogene (talk) 23:30, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Fermi paradox


text:
Franz Mesmer

Franz Anton Mesmer (23 May 1734 – 5 March 1815) was a German physician with an interest in astronomy. He theorized the existence of a process of natural energy transference occurring between all animate and inanimate objects; this he called "animal magnetism", later referred to as mesmerism. Mesmer's theory attracted a wide following between about 1780 and 1850, and continued to have some influence until the end of the 19th century. In 1843, the Scottish doctor James Braid proposed the term "hypnotism" for a technique derived from animal magnetism; today the word "mesmerism" generally functions as a synonym of "hypnosis". Mesmer also supported the arts, specifically music; he was on friendly terms with Haydn and Mozart.

Early life
Mesmer was born in the village of Iznang (now part of the municipality of Moos), on the shore of Lake Constance in Swabia. He was a son of master forester Anton Mesmer (1701–after 1747) and his wife, Maria Ursula (née Michel; 1701–1770). After studying at the Jesuit universities of Dillingen and Ingolstadt, he took up the study of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1759. In 1766 he published a doctoral dissertation with the Latin title De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body), in which he discussed the influence of the moon and the planets on the human body and disease.

Building largely on Isaac Newton's theory of the tides, Mesmer expounded on certain tides in the human body that might be accounted for by the movements of the sun and moon. Evidence assembled by Frank A. Pattie suggests that Mesmer plagiarized most of his dissertation from other works, including De imperio solis ac lunae in corpora humana et morbius inde oriundis (1704) by Richard Mead, an eminent English physician and Newton's friend. However, in Mesmer's day doctoral theses were not expected to be original.

In January 1768, Mesmer married Anna Maria von Posch, a wealthy widow, and established himself as a doctor in Vienna. In the summers he lived on a splendid estate and became a patron of the arts. In 1768, when court intrigue prevented the performance of La finta semplice (K. 51), for which the twelve-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had composed 500 pages of music, Mesmer is said to have arranged a performance in his garden of Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne (K. 50), a one-act opera, although Mozart's biographer Nissen found no proof that this performance actually took place. Mozart later immortalized his former patron by including a comedic reference to Mesmer in his opera Così fan tutte.

Animal magnetism
In 1774, Mesmer produced an "artificial tide" in a patient, Francisca Österlin, who suffered from hysteria, by having her swallow a preparation containing iron and then attaching magnets to various parts of her body. She reported feeling streams of a mysterious fluid running through her body and was relieved of her symptoms for several hours. Mesmer did not believe that the magnets had achieved the cure on their own. He felt that he had contributed animal magnetism, which had accumulated in his work, to her. He soon stopped using magnets as a part of his treatment.

In the same year Mesmer collaborated with Maximilian Hell.

In 1775, Mesmer was invited to give his opinion before the Munich Academy of Sciences on the exorcisms carried out by Johann Joseph Gassner (Gaßner), a priest and healer who grew up in Vorarlberg, Austria. Mesmer said that while Gassner was sincere in his beliefs, his cures resulted because he possessed a high degree of animal magnetism. This confrontation between Mesmer's secular ideas and Gassner's religious beliefs marked the end of Gassner's career and, according to Henri Ellenberger, the emergence of dynamic psychiatry.

The scandal that followed Mesmer's only partial success in curing the blindness of an 18-year-old musician, Maria Theresia Paradis, led him to leave Vienna in 1777. In February 1778, Mesmer moved to Paris, rented an apartment in a part of the city preferred by the wealthy and powerful, and established a medical practice. There he would reunite with Mozart, who often visited him. Paris soon divided into those who thought he was a charlatan who had been forced to flee from Vienna and those who thought he had made a great discovery.

In his first years in Paris, Mesmer tried and failed to get either the Royal Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society of Medicine to provide official approval for his doctrines. He found only one physician of high professional and social standing, Charles d'Eslon, to become a disciple. In 1779, with d'Eslon's encouragement, Mesmer wrote an 88-page book, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, to which he appended his famous 27 Propositions. These propositions outlined his theory at that time. Some contemporary scholars equate Mesmer's animal magnetism with the qi (chi) of Traditional Chinese Medicine and mesmerism with medical Qigong practices.

According to d'Eslon, Mesmer understood health as the free flow of the process of life through thousands of channels in our bodies. Illness was caused by obstacles to this flow. Overcoming these obstacles and restoring flow produced crises, which restored health. When Nature failed to do this spontaneously, contact with a conductor of animal magnetism was a necessary and sufficient remedy. Mesmer aimed to aid or provoke the efforts of Nature. To cure an insane person, for example, involved causing a fit of madness. The advantage of magnetism involved accelerating such crises without danger.

Procedure
Mesmer treated patients both individually and in groups. With individuals he would sit in front of his patient with his knees touching the patient's knees, pressing the patient's thumbs in his hands, looking fixedly into the patient's eyes. Mesmer made "passes", moving his hands from the patient's shoulders down along their arms. He then pressed his fingers on the patient's hypochondrium (the area below the diaphragm), sometimes holding his hands there for hours. Many patients felt peculiar sensations or had convulsions that were regarded as crises and were supposed to bring about the cure. Mesmer would often conclude his treatments by playing some music on a glass harmonica.

By 1780, Mesmer had more patients than he could treat individually, and he established a collective treatment known as the "baquet." An English doctor who observed Mesmer described the treatment as follows:"In the middle of the room is placed a vessel of about a foot and a half high which is called here a 'baquet'. It is so large that twenty people can easily sit round it; near the edge of the lid which covers it, there are holes pierced corresponding to the number of persons who are to surround it; into these holes are introduced iron rods, bent at right angles outwards, and of different heights, so as to answer to the part of the body to which they are to be applied. Besides these rods, there is a rope which communicates between the baquet and one of the patients, and from him is carried to another, and so on the whole round. The most sensible effects are produced on the approach of Mesmer, who is said to convey the fluid by certain motions of his hands or eyes, without touching the person. I have talked with several who have witnessed these effects, who have convulsions occasioned and removed by a movement of the hand..."

Investigation

In 1784, without Mesmer having requested it, King Louis XVI appointed four members of the Faculty of Medicine as commissioners to investigate animal magnetism and Mesmerism. At the request of these commissioners, the king appointed Baron de Breteuil, minister of the Department of Paris, to establish investigative commissions. One was composed of individuals from the Royal Academy of Sciences, and the other of individuals from the Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine. The investigative teams included the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, and the American ambassador Benjamin Franklin.

The commission conducted a series of experiments aimed not just at determining whether Mesmer's treatment worked, but whether he had discovered a new physical fluid. The commission concluded that there was no evidence for such a fluid. Whatever benefit the treatment produced was attributed to "imagination". One of the commissioners, the botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu took exception to the official reports, authoring a dissenting opinion.

The commission did not examine Mesmer specifically, but instead observed the practice of d'Eslon. They used blind trials, blindfolding the subjects, in their investigation, and found that Mesmerism seemed to work only when the subject was aware of it. Their findings are considered the first observation of the placebo effect. Even d'Eslon himself was convinced by the commission, stating that, "the imagination thus directed to the relief of suffering humanity would be a most valuable means in the hands of the medical profession."

Mesmer was driven into exile soon after the investigations on animal magnetism. However, his influential student, Amand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis of Puységur (1751–1825), continued to have many followers until his death.

Mesmer continued to practice in Frauenfeld, Switzerland, for a number of years. He died in 1815 in Meersburg, Germany.

Works

 * De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (Über den Einfluss der Gestirne auf den menschlichen Körper) [The Influence of the Planets on the Human Body] (1766).
 * Mémoire sur la découverte du magnetisme animal, Didot, Genf und Paris (1779) . View at Gallica, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).
 * Sendschreiben an einen auswärtigen Arzt über die Magnetkur [Circulatory letter to an external[?] physician about the magnetic cure] (1775).
 * Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal (1779)
 * Précis historique des faits relatifs au magnétisme animal (1781)
 * Théorie du monde et des êtres organisés suivant les principes de M…., Paris, (1784) . View at Gallica, BnF.
 * Aphorismes de M. Mesmer (1785)
 * Mémoire de F. A. Mesmer,...sur ses découvertes (1798–1799) . View at Gallica, BnF.
 * Mesmerismus oder System der Wechselwirkungen. Theorie und Anwendung des thierischen Magnetismus als die allgemeine Heilkunde zur Erhaltung des Menschen [Mesmerism or the system of inter-relations. Theory and applications of animal magnetism as general medicine for the preservation of man]. Edited by Karl Christian Wolfart. Nikolai, Berlin (1814) . View at Munich Digitization Center, from the Bavarian State Library.

Dramatic portrayals
In Mozart's 1790 opera buffa Così fan tutte, Mesmer is dramatized as Despina, who cures two characters of poisoning using magnets.

In Gregory Ratoff's 1949 film Black Magic, Mesmer was portrayed by Charles Goldner. In Roger Spottiswoode's Mesmer (1994), he was portrayed by Alan Rickman.

title: Franz Mesmer


text:
Foix–Alajouanine syndrome

Foix–Alajouanine syndrome, also called subacute ascending necrotizing myelitis, is a disease caused by an arteriovenous malformation of the spinal cord. In particular, most cases involve dural arteriovenous malformations that present in the lower thoracic or lumbar spinal cord. The condition is named after Charles Foix and Théophile Alajouanine who first described the condition in 1926.

Signs and symptoms
The patients can present with symptoms indicating spinal cord involvement such as (paralysis of arms and legs, numbness and loss of sensation and sphincter dysfunction), and pathological examination reveals disseminated nerve cell death in the spinal cord.

Diagnosis
Clinically, the patient may present with neurological symptoms such as numbness, weakness, loss of reflexes, or even sudden or progressive paralysis. The affected portion of the body will correlate to where the lesion lies within the spinal cord. The disease typically has an insidious onset, but symptoms may manifest suddenly. A thorough physical exam may lead a physician toward targeted imaging, with MRI being the most appropriate imaging modality for initial diagnosis. A spinal MRA will serve as a superior imaging technique to visualize the extent of the arteriovenous malformation within the cord and may be especially useful if surgical treatment is attempted.

Treatment
Surgical treatment may be attempted with endovascular embolization or ligation of the arteriovenous malformation within the spinal cord.Corticosteroids may be used acutely to help slow the progression of symptoms or they may be used chronically in a poor surgical candidate. In either case, physical therapy will be an important part of the recovery process in helping the patient regain strength and coordination.

title: Foix–Alajouanine syndrome


text:
Ferromagnetism

Ferromagnetism is a property of certain materials (such as iron) that results in a significant, observable magnetic permeability, and in many cases, a significant magnetic coercivity, allowing the material to form a permanent magnet. Ferromagnetic materials are noticeably attracted to a magnet, which is a consequence of their substantial magnetic permeability.

Magnetic permeability describes the induced magnetization of a material due to the presence of an external magnetic field. For example, this temporary magnetization inside a steel plate accounts for the plate's attraction to a magnet. Whether or not that steel plate then acquires permanent magnetization depends on both the strength of the applied field and on the coercivity of that particular piece of steel (which varies with the steel's chemical composition and any heat treatment it may have undergone).

In physics, multiple types of material magnetism have been distinguished. Ferromagnetism (along with the similar effect ferrimagnetism) is the strongest type and is responsible for the common phenomenon of everyday magnetism. An example of a permanent magnet formed from a ferromagnetic material is a refrigerator magnet.

Substances respond weakly to three other types of magnetism—paramagnetism, diamagnetism, and antiferromagnetism—but the forces are usually so weak that they can be detected only by lab instruments.

Permanent magnets (materials that can be magnetized by an external magnetic field and remain magnetized after the external field is removed) are either ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic, as are the materials that are attracted to them. Relatively few materials are ferromagnetic. They are typically pure forms, alloys, or compounds of iron, cobalt, nickel, and certain rare-earth metals.

Ferromagnetism is vital in industrial applications and modern technologies, forming the basis for electrical and electromechanical devices such as electromagnets, electric motors, generators, transformers, magnetic storage (including tape recorders and hard disks), and nondestructive testing of ferrous materials.

Ferromagnetic materials can be divided into magnetically soft materials (like annealed iron), which do not tend to stay magnetized, and magnetically hard materials, which do. Permanent magnets are made from hard ferromagnetic materials (such as alnico) and ferrimagnetic materials (such as ferrite) that are subjected to special processing in a strong magnetic field during manufacturing to align their internal microcrystalline structure, making them difficult to demagnetize. To demagnetize a saturated magnet, a magnetic field must be applied. The threshold at which demagnetization occurs depends on the coercivity of the material. Magnetically hard materials have high coercivity, whereas magnetically soft materials have low coercivity.

The overall strength of a magnet is measured by its magnetic moment or, alternatively, its total magnetic flux. The local strength of magnetism in a material is measured by its magnetization.

Terms
Historically, the term ferromagnetism was used for any material that could exhibit spontaneous magnetization: a net magnetic moment in the absence of an external magnetic field; that is, any material that could become a magnet. This definition is still in common use.

In a landmark paper in 1948, Louis Néel showed that two levels of magnetic alignment result in this behavior. One is ferromagnetism in the strict sense, where all the magnetic moments are aligned. The other is ferrimagnetism, where some magnetic moments point in the opposite direction but have a smaller contribution, so spontaneous magnetization is present.

In the special case where the opposing moments balance completely, the alignment is known as antiferromagnetism; antiferromagnets do not have a spontaneous magnetization.

Materials
Ferromagnetism is an unusual property that occurs in only a few substances. The common ones are the transition metals iron, nickel, and cobalt, as well as their alloys and alloys of rare-earth metals. It is a property not just of the chemical make-up of a material, but of its crystalline structure and microstructure. Ferromagnetism results from these materials having many unpaired electrons in their d-block (in the case of iron and its relatives) or f-block (in the case of the rare-earth metals), a result of Hund's rule of maximum multiplicity. There are ferromagnetic metal alloys whose constituents are not themselves ferromagnetic, called Heusler alloys, named after Fritz Heusler. Conversely, there are non-magnetic alloys, such as types of stainless steel, composed almost exclusively of ferromagnetic metals.

Amorphous (non-crystalline) ferromagnetic metallic alloys can be made by very rapid quenching (cooling) of an alloy. These have the advantage that their properties are nearly isotropic (not aligned along a crystal axis); this results in low coercivity, low hysteresis loss, high permeability, and high electrical resistivity. One such typical material is a transition metal-metalloid alloy, made from about 80% transition metal (usually Fe, Co, or Ni) and a metalloid component (B, C, Si, P, or Al) that lowers the melting point.

A relatively new class of exceptionally strong ferromagnetic materials are the rare-earth magnets. They contain lanthanide elements that are known for their ability to carry large magnetic moments in well-localized f-orbitals.

The table lists a selection of ferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic compounds, along with their Curie temperature (TC), above which they cease to exhibit spontaneous magnetization.

Unusual materials
Most ferromagnetic materials are metals, since the conducting electrons are often responsible for mediating the ferromagnetic interactions. It is therefore a challenge to develop ferromagnetic insulators, especially multiferroic materials, which are both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric.

A number of actinide compounds are ferromagnets at room temperature or exhibit ferromagnetism upon cooling. PuP is a paramagnet with cubic symmetry at room temperature, but which undergoes a structural transition into a tetragonal state with ferromagnetic order when cooled below its TC = 125 K. In its ferromagnetic state, PuP's easy axis is in the ⟨100⟩ direction.

In NpFe2 the easy axis is ⟨111⟩. Above TC ≈ 500 K, NpFe2 is also paramagnetic and cubic. Cooling below the Curie temperature produces a rhombohedral distortion wherein the rhombohedral angle changes from 60° (cubic phase) to 60.53°. An alternate description of this distortion is to consider the length c along the unique trigonal axis (after the distortion has begun) and a as the distance in the plane perpendicular to c. In the cubic phase this reduces to. Below the Curie temperature

 * $$\frac{c}{a} - 1 = -(120 \pm 5) \times 10^{-4},$$

which is the largest strain in any actinide compound. NpNi2 undergoes a similar lattice distortion below, with a strain of (43 ± 5) × 10−4. NpCo2 is a ferrimagnet below 15 K.

In 2009, a team of MIT physicists demonstrated that a lithium gas cooled to less than one kelvin can exhibit ferromagnetism. The team cooled fermionic lithium-6 to less than 150 nK (150 billionths of one kelvin) using infrared laser cooling. This demonstration is the first time that ferromagnetism has been demonstrated in a gas.

In rare circumstances, ferromagnetism can be observed in compounds consisting of only s-block and p-block elements, such as rubidium sesquioxide.

In 2018, a team of University of Minnesota physicists demonstrated that body-centered tetragonal ruthenium exhibits ferromagnetism at room temperature.

Electrically induced ferromagnetism
Recent research has shown evidence that ferromagnetism can be induced in some materials by an electric current or voltage. Antiferromagnetic LaMnO3 and SrCoO have been switched to be ferromagnetic by a current. In July 2020, scientists reported inducing ferromagnetism in the abundant diamagnetic material iron pyrite ("fool's gold") by an applied voltage. In these experiments, the ferromagnetism was limited to a thin surface layer.

Explanation
The Bohr–Van Leeuwen theorem, discovered in the 1910s, showed that classical physics theories are unable to account for any form of material magnetism, including ferromagnetism; the explanation rather depends on the quantum mechanical description of atoms. Each of an atom's electrons has a magnetic moment according to its spin state, as described by quantum mechanics. The Pauli exclusion principle, also a consequence of quantum mechanics, restricts the occupancy of electrons' spin states in atomic orbitals, generally causing the magnetic moments from an atom's electrons to largely or completely cancel. An atom will have a net magnetic moment when that cancellation is incomplete.

Origin of atomic magnetism
One of the fundamental properties of an electron (besides that it carries charge) is that it has a magnetic dipole moment, i.e., it behaves like a tiny magnet, producing a magnetic field. This dipole moment comes from a more fundamental property of the electron: its quantum mechanical spin. Due to its quantum nature, the spin of the electron can be in one of only two states, with the magnetic field either pointing "up" or "down" (for any choice of up and down). Electron spin in atoms is the main source of ferromagnetism, although there is also a contribution from the orbital angular momentum of the electron about the nucleus. When these magnetic dipoles in a piece of matter are aligned (point in the same direction), their individually tiny magnetic fields add together to create a much larger macroscopic field.

However, materials made of atoms with filled electron shells have a total dipole moment of zero: because the electrons all exist in pairs with opposite spin, every electron's magnetic moment is cancelled by the opposite moment of the second electron in the pair. Only atoms with partially filled shells (i.e., unpaired spins) can have a net magnetic moment, so ferromagnetism occurs only in materials with partially filled shells. Because of Hund's rules, the first few electrons in an otherwise unoccupied shell tend to have the same spin, thereby increasing the total dipole moment.

These unpaired dipoles (often called simply "spins", even though they also generally include orbital angular momentum) tend to align in parallel to an external magnetic field – leading to a macroscopic effect called paramagnetism. In ferromagnetism, however, the magnetic interaction between neighboring atoms' magnetic dipoles is strong enough that they align with each other regardless of any applied field, resulting in the spontaneous magnetization of so-called domains. This results in the large observed magnetic permeability of ferromagnetics, and the ability of magnetically hard materials to form permanent magnets.

Exchange interaction
When two nearby atoms have unpaired electrons, whether the electron spins are parallel or antiparallel affects whether the electrons can share the same orbit as a result of the quantum mechanical effect called the exchange interaction. This in turn affects the electron location and the Coulomb (electrostatic) interaction and thus the energy difference between these states.

The exchange interaction is related to the Pauli exclusion principle, which says that two electrons with the same spin cannot also be in the same spatial state (orbital). This is a consequence of the spin–statistics theorem and that electrons are fermions. Therefore, under certain conditions, when the orbitals of the unpaired outer valence electrons from adjacent atoms overlap, the distributions of their electric charge in space are farther apart when the electrons have parallel spins than when they have opposite spins. This reduces the electrostatic energy of the electrons when their spins are parallel compared to their energy when the spins are antiparallel, so the parallel-spin state is more stable. This difference in energy is called the exchange energy. In simple terms, the outer electrons of adjacent atoms, which repel each other, can move further apart by aligning their spins in parallel, so the spins of these electrons tend to line up.

This energy difference can be orders of magnitude larger than the energy differences associated with the magnetic dipole–dipole interaction due to dipole orientation, which tends to align the dipoles antiparallel. In certain doped semiconductor oxides, RKKY interactions have been shown to bring about periodic longer-range magnetic interactions, a phenomenon of significance in the study of spintronic materials.

The materials in which the exchange interaction is much stronger than the competing dipole–dipole interaction are frequently called magnetic materials. For instance, in iron (Fe) the exchange force is about 1,000 times stronger than the dipole interaction. Therefore, below the Curie temperature, virtually all of the dipoles in a ferromagnetic material will be aligned. In addition to ferromagnetism, the exchange interaction is also responsible for the other types of spontaneous ordering of atomic magnetic moments occurring in magnetic solids: antiferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism. There are different exchange interaction mechanisms which create the magnetism in different ferromagnetic, ferrimagnetic, and antiferromagnetic substances—these mechanisms include direct exchange, RKKY exchange, double exchange, and superexchange.

Magnetic anisotropy
Although the exchange interaction keeps spins aligned, it does not align them in a particular direction. Without magnetic anisotropy, the spins in a magnet randomly change direction in response to thermal fluctuations, and the magnet is superparamagnetic. There are several kinds of magnetic anisotropy, the most common of which is magnetocrystalline anisotropy. This is a dependence of the energy on the direction of magnetization relative to the crystallographic lattice. Another common source of anisotropy, inverse magnetostriction, is induced by internal strains. Single-domain magnets also can have a shape anisotropy due to the magnetostatic effects of the particle shape. As the temperature of a magnet increases, the anisotropy tends to decrease, and there is often a blocking temperature at which a transition to superparamagnetism occurs.

Magnetic domains

The spontaneous alignment of magnetic dipoles in ferromagnetic materials would seem to suggest that every piece of ferromagnetic material should have a strong magnetic field, since all the spins are aligned; yet iron and other ferromagnets are often found in an "unmagnetized" state. This is because a bulk piece of ferromagnetic material is divided into tiny regions called magnetic domains (also known as Weiss domains). Within each domain, the spins are aligned, but if the bulk material is in its lowest energy configuration (i.e. "unmagnetized"), the spins of separate domains point in different directions and their magnetic fields cancel out, so the bulk material has no net large-scale magnetic field.

Ferromagnetic materials spontaneously divide into magnetic domains because the exchange interaction is a short-range force, so over long distances of many atoms, the tendency of the magnetic dipoles to reduce their energy by orienting in opposite directions wins out. If all the dipoles in a piece of ferromagnetic material are aligned parallel, it creates a large magnetic field extending into the space around it. This contains a lot of magnetostatic energy. The material can reduce this energy by splitting into many domains pointing in different directions, so the magnetic field is confined to small local fields in the material, reducing the volume of the field. The domains are separated by thin domain walls a number of molecules thick, in which the direction of magnetization of the dipoles rotates smoothly from one domain's direction to the other.

Magnetized materials

Thus, a piece of iron in its lowest energy state ("unmagnetized") generally has little or no net magnetic field. However, the magnetic domains in a material are not fixed in place; they are simply regions where the spins of the electrons have aligned spontaneously due to their magnetic fields, and thus can be altered by an external magnetic field. If a strong-enough external magnetic field is applied to the material, the domain walls will move via a process in which the spins of the electrons in atoms near the wall in one domain turn under the influence of the external field to face in the same direction as the electrons in the other domain, thus reorienting the domains so more of the dipoles are aligned with the external field. The domains will remain aligned when the external field is removed, and sum to create a magnetic field of their own extending into the space around the material, thus creating a "permanent" magnet. The domains do not go back to their original minimum energy configuration when the field is removed because the domain walls tend to become 'pinned' or 'snagged' on defects in the crystal lattice, preserving their parallel orientation. This is shown by the Barkhausen effect: as the magnetizing field is changed, the material's magnetization changes in thousands of tiny discontinuous jumps as domain walls suddenly "snap" past defects.

This magnetization as a function of an external field is described by a hysteresis curve. Although this state of aligned domains found in a piece of magnetized ferromagnetic material is not a minimal-energy configuration, it is metastable, and can persist for long periods, as shown by samples of magnetite from the sea floor which have maintained their magnetization for millions of years.

Heating and then cooling (annealing) a magnetized material, subjecting it to vibration by hammering it, or applying a rapidly oscillating magnetic field from a degaussing coil tends to release the domain walls from their pinned state, and the domain boundaries tend to move back to a lower energy configuration with less external magnetic field, thus demagnetizing the material.

Commercial magnets are made of "hard" ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic materials with very large magnetic anisotropy such as alnico and ferrites, which have a very strong tendency for the magnetization to be pointed along one axis of the crystal, the "easy axis". During manufacture the materials are subjected to various metallurgical processes in a powerful magnetic field, which aligns the crystal grains so their "easy" axes of magnetization all point in the same direction. Thus, the magnetization, and the resulting magnetic field, is "built in" to the crystal structure of the material, making it very difficult to demagnetize.

Curie temperature
As the temperature of a material increases, thermal motion, or entropy, competes with the ferromagnetic tendency for dipoles to align. When the temperature rises beyond a certain point, called the Curie temperature, there is a second-order phase transition and the system can no longer maintain a spontaneous magnetization, so its ability to be magnetized or attracted to a magnet disappears, although it still responds paramagnetically to an external field. Below that temperature, there is a spontaneous symmetry breaking and magnetic moments become aligned with their neighbors. The Curie temperature itself is a critical point, where the magnetic susceptibility is theoretically infinite and, although there is no net magnetization, domain-like spin correlations fluctuate at all length scales.

The study of ferromagnetic phase transitions, especially via the simplified Ising spin model, had an important impact on the development of statistical physics. There, it was first clearly shown that mean field theory approaches failed to predict the correct behavior at the critical point (which was found to fall under a universality class that includes many other systems, such as liquid-gas transitions), and had to be replaced by renormalization group theory.

title: Ferromagnetism