This year is the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prizes. On 10 December 1901, Röntgen received the first prize. Since then, some 700 Nobel Laureates have received the same honour. No prize in the world, at least no prize for science, has reached the same level of glory. How did it come to be so?

Africa is a European invention. When the Romans finally defeated Carthage, they turned the place into a province and called it Africa. Originally this referred only to a small part of Tunisia and Algeria, but it later became the name of the entire continent. The same happened to Asia, another province of the Roman Empire, in what is now called the Near East. The names of the two other continents demonstrate even more obviously their European origins: America was named after an Italian traveller – and not even Columbus! – and the term Australia comes from the fact that European voyagers who had some vague idea about the existence of this continent but knew nothing about it, called it ‘The Unknown Southland’, Terra australis incognita.

There are few weeks in which the news media do not announce some great breakthrough in medical or biological science, usually inferring some immediate benefit to mankind. Alas, the promise of these benefits is nearly always premature and leads to disappointment. However, the frequency of the reports does indeed reflect an astonishing rate of new discovery in a field of great complexity.

Chronology has been called the backbone of history and it is true that the linear time model in the shape of a chronology is an indispensable tool always at hand in the historian's workshop. It furnishes him or her with the four parameters of sequence, duration, setting and frequency, all necessary and most useful in the deployment of the historian's material. The chronological concept of time also underlines the irreversibility of time, which is part of the historian's creed and an assumption that governs his or her ideas of causality. The influences emanating from the physical time-scale are, in fact, far-reaching and some of them may easily deceive the scholar in his interpretation of the Past. Among these are the magic of figures, the concept of continuity as well as the idea of universality and the determinist view of the Past, and, furthermore, the ideas of contemporaneity, globalization and the uniqueness of phenomena. This paper maintains that the Universe of the Past is inexhaustible and heterogeneous. It cannot be measured by a common chronological standard. Periods based on chronology alone are empty vessels in which many times and many ages roll back and forth in contrast to periods with an individuality of their own (such as the Renaissance or the Enlightenment). After all, periodization is a process involving a combination of the two dimensions of setting and sequence, this means an intriguing operation imbued with puzzles, which the historian has in common with the social scientist.

We are beginning to understand how the brain is organized and works, how it evolved in the remote past and how it continually forms during the embryonic development of individual organisms. The study of the brain and its activity has recently advanced at an accelerating pace thanks to the convergence of a number of research strategies. At least three research lines occupy a particular position among these strategies: genetics and the molecular biology of neural cells and the central nervous system; cognitive science; and brain imaging. If the brain is the subject of biological studies at the cellular, intercellular and circuitry levels, the approach to the study of mind should be more subtle. Nonetheless, science has progressed a long way in this direction. Some recent advances in this field are briefly reviewed here, with particular emphasis on brain evolution and development, the role of sensory organs, coding and the processing of sensorial information, memory, rationality, meaning and consciousness.

Television claims to report reality but largely creates its own reality. There is very little autonomy, largely because the competition for ‘market share’ is so intense. The pressure to fill the space is strong; hence, it must be something for everyone. Everyone is looking over their shoulder to see what their rivals are saying; to know what to say, you need to know what everyone else is saying. This leads to homogenization and political conformity. Politics and economics lead to an internal censorship. ‘News’ is selective, favouring the extremes, blood, sex, crime, riots, not what ordinary people experience. Television calls for dramatization and the exaggeration of the importance of events. In debate, the fast, superficial thinker is favoured over the original and profound. Can you refuse to talk on television? There is a desire to be seen that is exploited.

Speaking of a ‘lack of time’, do we mean the same ‘thing’ as the variable ‘t’ in a graph of some time-dependent development? The following article tries to show that both concepts are extreme examples of the two sides, or faces, of the single phenomenon of time, as common and trivial as it is mysterious. Scientific, numerical time is considered first, followed by the time of the common human experience, the time in the present. It is on the basis of this curious ability to ‘keep in presence’ various events that follow one another, that the scientific concept of linear time has been established and, with it, the possibility to measure the time for scientific and practical purposes.

The question of effectiveness is the main theme of this article, notably as this refers to the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and to the main issues at stake today. The second part of the article, explains the role played by the European Convention on Human Rights among all the universal and regional instruments for the protection of human rights. Finally there is a critical look at what might be termed a degree of ‘inflation’ of the fundamental rights.

This paper begins from a definition of the modern polity as characterized by the mutual embedding of politics and media. It sketches the consequences of this state of affairs for 20th century notions of citizenship, arguing that unprecedented knowledge goes hand in hand with more or less complete inefficacy on the part of most citizens. This is the more marked since the ownership of media, defended by those at an advantage as a matter of freedom from partisanship and favour, is now more concentrated than ever before. This bodes ill for citizens whose only foreseeable recourse is to keep up the good but slight work of criticism and intellectual independence.

It is clear that European unification will affect legal education in Europe. Political integration and the increasing coming together of the legal systems in Europe need a new approach from universities teaching law studies. This article examines the goals of legal education and how they can be reached. In addition, it defends the thesis that a law faculty must not teach law, but must train lawyers: they must become technicians able to solve social and human problems by the legal route and they must be agents of peaceful change. It is argued that, in addition to national law schools, top law schools in Europe should be structured on the American model with very strict selection.

One of the discernible trends in the historiography of recent decades – especially in that which concerns the early modern centuries – has been the emergence of a literature that describes itself as Atlantic History. This paper seeks to identify positive and negative reasons why the once-popular history of exploration and discovery has given way to this new subject, it identifies some fresh meanings that may be drawn from some well-known sources when they are reappraised in an Atlantic context, and it suggests some possibly fruitful lines of enquiry that would lead to a better understanding of how an Atlantic world was fashioned and functioned during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, the paper draws a distinction between Atlantic history and Global history and suggests that the latter is a subject that belongs more properly to the nineteenth and subsequent centuries.

The concept of time has always played a dominant role in philosophy and science. In modern physics, and also in philosophy of physics, it is the anisotropy of time that attracts particular attention. Taking up work by Grünbaum and others, the thermodynamic arrow of time is considered in detail, and this discussion is then extended to other time-asymmetric processes, whose relation to this arrow of time remains controversial. After that, some remarks are made about experienced time. It is the gestalt-like character of time that, in contrast to the arrow of time, reflects time in the everyday world.

The definition of the term culture has become so vague as to be almost synonymous with human life; as an analytic term it has become nearly valueless. Of course, it can be used as a description of artistic activity, but this also becomes dubious when applied to popular mass culture. Culture often carries a sense of superior ethical values, but this too declines into confusion when multiculturism is opposed to culture as a whole.

A distinctive German culture no longer exists, it has become merged into Western culture. De-Nazification foundered and the old elites and the émigrés re-emerged and came together. The November revolution in the GDR was not one of either the workers or of a cultural elite but one of the grassroots, the ordinary people; however the GDR lacked any cultural modernity. When a country loses a war, cultural policy has to serve the need for revenge. France and Germany have competed on which was more revolutionary in the past and who had the greater potential for future revolutions. The current dilemma, however, over the enlargement of Europe rests more on harsh economic problems of how to reconcile the desires of the have-nots with the desire of the haves to have more, and who feel threatened by the have-nots.

Problem-based learning (PBL), besides a number of advantages, also has drawbacks. It makes it very difficult for students to identify with a good teacher, and aims, rather, at identification with a peer group. Therefore, it seems more suited for adolescents than for young adults capable of secondary identification. Furthermore, this form of staff–student contact, i.e. the teaching group, does not motivate staff to share knowledge with the students. The knowledge acquired through PBL tends to remain unorganized. It is therefore more suited for disciplines in which a compilation of factual knowledge is important (e.g. medicine) than where a systematic approach is needed (e.g. statistics).

Organisms possess an internal ‘body clock’ that measures the passage of the day, although they respond directly to the influences of the sun. The site of this clock, its properties, and its molecular and genetic mechanisms are now beginning to be discovered. In humans, the clock enables the processes required for daytime activities and nocturnal sleep to be separated; but the system can go wrong or cause difficulties, as in the blind, anybody after a time-zone transition or during night work

From the psychonomic point of view time is the conscious experiential product of the processes that enable the (human) organism to organize itself adaptively so that its behaviour stays tuned to the sequential contingencies afforded by its environment. This paper reviews some recent insights into the functioning of the timekeepers – clocks and regulators, organic and virtual – that make up the human ‘sense of time’.

However valuable as a term defining – by a shared language – a grouping of nations, ‘la Francophonie’ proves imprecise and divisive on closer analysis. In the field of literature, ‘Francophone’, despite its etymology (and the consequent absurdity of the phrase ‘Francophone literature’), has paradoxically come to exclude white writers from metropolitan France. At a time when the population of France is becoming increasingly multi-ethnic, any exclusion tainted with racism is particularly inappropriate. The centralizing mentality of France, politically motivated in the seventeenth century and entrenched over the years, is at odds with the ambition of universality except in terms of an assumed superiority through conquest or paternalism. The ‘mission civilisatrice’ has become the more insinuating ‘présence française’. For the literary scholar alert both to postcolonial discourses and to the heretofore marginalized texts of French literature dealing with blacks as well as to the dynamic contribution by black writers to literature in French, a new term is proposed: ‘la Francographie’. To replace the binary polarisation of French and Francophone, which fosters oppositional stances, comes a new model appropriate for our computer age: the net.

Media, education and democracy are inseparably connected, as an educated citizenship is fundamental to the proper working of democracy. The mass media have a demonstrated and vital capacity to educate, especially beyond the parameters of formal education. The nature of such education is both civic and social, deliberate and unintentional. Vigilance is required to separate education from persuasion, information from propaganda. Given the centrality of media to democracy, not only do the media have an obligation to educate the citizenship, but the universities need to educate the citizenship about the media. Without such education, democracy itself is threatened.

The 30 years between the 1960s and the 1980s of the 20th century are recalled today as a golden age of European theatre. They seem to have revived, continued and re-created the previous golden age brought about by the historical theatre avant-garde movements during the first decades of the 20th century (approximately 1900–1930). Then, Adolphe Appia, Jacques Copeau, Edward Gordon Craig, Leopold Jessner, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Max Reinhardt, Alexander Tairov, Evgeni Vakhtangov and others had striven for what they called a retheatricalization of theatre.