James G. R. Cronin

At 5:29:45 am Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb exploded one hundred feet over a portion of the southern New Mexico desert known as the Jornada del Muerto – the Journey of the Dead Man. The site of which Oppenheimer named "Trinity". Oppenheimer later said this name was from one of John Donne's (1572–1631) Holy Sonnets . Donne’s sonnet opening: “Batter my heart, three-person'd God” ruefully encapsulates the project’s quest to split atomic particles. On seeing the fireball and mushroom cloud, J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a passage from Hindu sacred scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become death the destroyer of worlds." In Critical Assembly artist Jim Sanborn has recreated one of the labs used in the Trinity experiment for Terror and the Sublime: Art in an Age of Anxiety at the Crawford Gallery of Art, Cork, but is this art? Sanborn thinks it is. Sanborn spoke of the “seductive” quality of the Trinity project for the sci...

At the end of October Edward De Bono was invited to speak in Cork as part of a creative film forum. I was fortunate to attend this talk in which he presented an entertaining overview of his life's work in the field of creative thinking. In the talk De Bono explained his theory of Parallel Thinking. De Bono defines Parallel Thinking as a thinking process where focus is split in specific directions. When done in a group it effectively avoids the consequences of the adversarial approach. In adversarial debate the objective is to prove or disprove statements put forward by the parties (normally two). However, in Parallel Thinking, participants put forward as many statements as possible in several parallel tracks. This leads to exploration of a subject where all participants can contribute, in parallel, with knowledge, facts, feelings etc. Crucial to the method is that the process is done in a disciplined manner, and that all participants plays along and contributes in parallel. Thus ea...