Symington Vsi-miq-tonV William (b. October 1763, Leadhills, Lanarkshire, Scot.—d. March 22, 1831, London, Eng.) British engineer. Educated for the ministry, he became a mechanic instead. He created a working model of a steam-driven road carriage in 1786 and first used steam for marine purposes the following year. In 1801-02 he developed a successful steam-driven paddle wheel and used it to propel one of the first practical steamboats, the Charlotte Dundas. Though his engine was used successfully on the Forth and Clyde Canal in 1802, cautious man¬ agers caused the project to be abandoned in 1803.
symmetry In geometry, the property by which the sides of a figure or object reflect each other across a line (axis of symmetry) or surface; in biology, the orderly repetition of parts of an animal or plant; in chemis¬ try, a fundamental property of orderly arrangements of atoms in molecules or crystals; in physics, a concept of balance illustrated by such funda¬ mental laws as the third of Newton's laws of motion. Symmetry in nature underlies one of the most fundamental concepts of beauty. It connotes balance, order, and thus, to some, a type of divine principle.
Symonds Vsi-msndzX, John Addington (b. Oct. 5, 1840, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng.—d. April 19, 1893, Rome) English essayist, poet, and biographer. He traveled extensively for his health, finally settling in Switzerland. His chief work, Renaissance in Italy (1875-86), is a series of extended essays on cultural history. His writings include translations, travel sketches, and studies of personalities such as Percy B. Shelley, Ben Jonson, Sir Philip Sidney, Michelangelo, and Walt Whitman. His poetry served primarily as a release from his difficult emotional life. A Problem
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Symons ► syndicalism I 1857
in Greek Ethics (written 1871) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1881) were among the first serious works treating homosexuality.
Symons Vsi-monzV Arthur (William) (b. Feb. 28, 1865, Mil¬ ford Haven, Pembrokeshire,
Eng.—d. Jan. 22, 1945, Wittersham,
Kent) English poet and critic. He contributed to The Yellow Book, an avant-garde journal, and edited The Savoy (1896). His Symbolist Move¬ ment in Literature (1899), the first English work championing the French Symbolist movement in poetry, summed up a decade of interpreta¬ tion and influenced William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot. His poetry, mainly disillusioned in feeling, appears in such volumes as Silhou¬ ettes (1892) and London Nights (1895). He also translated the poetry of Paul Verlaine and wrote travel pieces. After a nervous breakdown in 1908, he produced little apart from Confessions (1930), a moving account of his illness.
symphonic poem or tone poem Musical work for orchestra inspired by an extramusical story, idea, or “program,” to which the title typically refers or alludes. It evolved from the concert overture, an over¬ ture not attached to an opera or play yet suggestive of a literary or natu¬ ral sequence of events. Franz Liszt, who coined the term, wrote 13 such works. Famous symphonic poems include Bedrich Smetana’s The Moldau (1879), Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894), Paul Dukas’s The Sorceror’s Apprentice (1897), Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote (1897), and Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia (1900).
symphony Long musical composition for orchestra, usually in several movements. The term (meaning “sounding together”) came to be the stan¬ dard name for instrumental episodes, and especially overtures, in early Italian opera. The late-17th-century Neapolitan opera overture, or sinfo- nia, as established especially by Alessandro Scarlatti c. 1780, had three movements, their tempos being fast-slow-fast. Soon such overtures began to be performed by themselves in concert settings, like another forerun¬ ner of the symphony, the concerto grosso. The two merged in the early 18th century in the symphonies of Giovanni Battista Sammartini (1700/ 01-75). In c. 1750 German and Viennese composers began to add a minuet movement. Joseph Haydn, the “father of the symphony,” wrote more than 100 symphonies of remarkable originality, intensity, and brilliance in the years 1755-95; since Haydn, the symphony has been regarded as the most important orchestral genre. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote about 35 original symphonies. Ludwig van Beethoven’s nine symphonies endowed the genre with enormous weight and ambition. Later symphonists include Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Anton Bruckner, Johannes Brahms, Antonin Dvorak, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Gustav Mahler; their 20th-century successors include Ralph Vaughan Williams, Jean Sibelius, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Witold Lutoslawski.
symposium In ancient Greece, an aristocratic banquet at which men met to discuss philosophical and political issues and recite poetry. It began as a warrior feast. Rooms were designed specifically for the proceedings. The participants, all male aristocrats, wore garlands and leaned on the left elbow on couches, and there was much drinking of wine, served by slave boys. Prayers opened and closed the meetings; sessions sometimes ended with a procession in the streets. In Plato’s famous Symposium, an imagi¬ nary dialogue takes place between Socrates, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and others on the subject of love. Aristotle, Xenophon, and Epicurus wrote symposium literature on other subjects.
synagogue In Judaism, a community house of worship that also serves as a place for assembly and study. Though their exact origins are uncer¬ tain, synagogues flourished side by side with the ancient Temple cult; they existed long before Jewish sacrifice and the established priesthood were terminated with Titus’s destruction of the Second Temple (ad 70). There¬ after, synagogues took on even greater importance as the unchallenged focal point of Jewish life. There is no standard synagogue architecture. A
typical synagogue contains an ark (where the scrolls of the Law are kept), an “eternal light” burning before the ark, two candelabra, pews, a bimah (see bema), and sometimes a ritual bath ( mikvah ).
synapse \'si-,naps\ Site of transmission of electric nerve impulses between two nerve cells or between a nerve cell and a gland or muscle cell. At chemical synapses, impulses are transmitted across microscopic spaces via chemical substances called neurotransmitters. In electric syn¬ apses, direct communication between nerve cells whose membranes are fused is possible because ions flow between the cells through channels. Electric synapses are found mainly in invertebrates and lower vertebrates; they transmit messages faster than chemical synapses. Chemical trans¬ mission seems to have evolved in large, complex vertebrate nervous sys¬ tems, in which multiple messages must be transmitted over long distances.
Synchromism Ysiq-kro-.mi-zonA Art movement concerned with the purely abstract use of colour. Founded in Paris in 1912-13 by the U.S. artists Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, Synchromism (“colours together”) was based on theories of colour with analogies to musical patterns. It has much in common with the Orphism of Robert Delaunay. The first Synchromist work, Russell’s Synchromy in Green (1913), was exhibited at the Salon des Independants in 1913. Synchromism briefly attracted several other U.S. artists, including Thomas Hart Benton.
synchronized swimming Swimming sport in which the movements of one or more swimmers are synchronized with a musical accompani¬ ment. The sport developed in the U.S. in the 1930s and was admitted as an Olympic event (solo and duet only) in 1984; in 1996 the rules were changed to allow only teams of eight women. Teams are judged on com¬ pulsory and optional routines.
synchrotron Vsiq-kre-.tranV Cyclic particle accelerator in which the par¬ ticle is confined to its orbit by a magnetic field. The strength of the mag¬ netic field increases as the particle’s momentum increases. An alternating electric field in synchrony with the orbital frequency of the particle pro¬ duces acceleration. Synchrotrons are named according to the particles they accelerate. The Tevatron, a proton synchrotron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, U.S., produces the highest particle energies achieved so far.