More or Less Modern
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POSTERMINARIES
More or Less Modern It is yet another sign that I am aging. More and more often when young researchers hand me a written report of their research, I find myself criticizing their introductory section: “You need to start your literature survey with the original papers on this topic. Go and read…” followed by a citation to some classic of the learned literature. Literature surveys nowadays rarely seem to extend back in time beyond the horizon of the electronic archives. Of course, electronic archives are reaching deeper into the past all the time, so things are improving, but there is still a horizon set by the fact that many of those pdf files are simply images of the printed pages, and are not “searchable text,” except through the archaic ritual of actually reading them. Heeding my own advice, the other day, I took off the shelf a book that I consider to be a timeless classic of the literature on a particular topic, and I was struck by the title of the second chapter: “Modern Theories of…” The publication date was 50 years ago—1957—and the subject matter is certainly still relevant, but the text of Chapter 2 would appear in a newer book with the heading “Classical Theories….” It is reassuring that the field has made some progress, so what once was modern now is classic. In materials science, the definition of “modern” is still quaintly time-dependent, but that is not universal. Physics, for example, has evolved a more modern definition of the word “modern,” in which Modern Physics includes anything that starts with quantum mechanics or relativity. The first decade of the 20th century will be forever modern, in physics, and the boundary between “modern” and “classical” has been established at a fixed point in time. Modern Jazz has a similarly fixed starting point (in the 1940s) defying the dictionary definition: “characteristic of the 984
present time” (OED). What is once declared modern, in these fields, can never become classical, however old it may become. So how can further progress be described? Architecture is yet another case in which “Modern” defines a fixed point in time, marked by the emergence of the minimalist conceptions of Mies van der Rohe and others. Unlike physics and jazz, however, architecture also defines an end of “the Modern.” What is more modern than Modern, if you design buildings, is Post-Modern. Oh, what tangled linguistic webs we weave when we abandon the general issue of relativity to the present time in the definition of “modern”—or if we adopt General Relativity as its definition. The areas in which “modern” starts a
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