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C M Y KID NAME: Nxxx,2006-02-28,F,001,Bs-4C,E1 YELO MAG CYAN BLK 3 7 15 25 50 75 85 93 97
F1N
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2006
By KATY BUTLER
From infancy until he reached the threshold ofmanhood, the beatings Daniel W. Smith received at hisolder brother’s hands were qualitatively different fromroutine sibling rivalry. Rarely did he and his brotherjust shove each other in the back of the family car overwho was crowding whom, or wrestle over a toy fire-truck.
Instead, Mr. Smith said in an interview, his brother,Sean, would grip him in a headlock or stranglehold andpunch him repeatedly.
“Fighting back just made it worse, so I’d just take itand wait for it to be over,” said Mr. Smith, who was 18months younger than his brother. “What was I going to
do? Where was I going to go? I was 10 years old.” To speak only of helplessness and intimidation, how-
ever, is to oversimplify a complex bond. “We playedkickball with neighborhood kids, and we’d go off explor-ing in the woods together as if he were any other friend,”said Mr. Smith, who is now 34 and a writing instructor atSan Francisco State University. (Sean died of a heart at-tack three years ago.)
“But there was always tension,” he said, “becauseat any moment things could go sour.”
Siblings have been trading blows since God firstplayed favorites with Cain and Abel. Nearly murderoussibling fights — over possessions, privacy, pecking or-ders and parental love — are woven through biblicalstories, folktales, fiction and family legends.
In Genesis, Joseph’s jealous older brothers strip
him of his coat of many colors and throw him into a pit inthe wilderness. Brutal brother-on-brother violence dom-inates an opening section of John Steinbeck’s “East ofEden,” and in Annie Proulx’s short story “BrokebackMountain,” the cowboy Ennis del Mar describes an olderbrother who “slugged me silly ever’ day.”
This casual, intimate violence can be as mild as ashoving match and as savage as an attack with a base-ball bat. It is so common that it is almost invisible. Par-ents often ignore it as long as nobody gets killed; re-searchers rarely study it; and many psychotherapistsconsider its softer forms a normal part of growing up.
But there is growing evidence that in a minority ofcases, sibling warfare becomes a form of repeated, in-escapable and emotionally damaging abuse, as was thecase for Mr. Smith.
In a study published last year in the journal ChildMaltreatment, a group of sociologists found that 35 per-cent of children had been “hit or attacked” by a sibling inthe previous year. The study was based on phone in-terviews with a representative national sample of 2,030children or those who take care of them.
Although some of the attacks may have been fleet-ing and harmless, more than a third were troubling ontheir face.
According to a preliminary analysis of unpublisheddata from the study, 14 percent of the children were re-peatedly attacked by a sibling; 4.55 percent were hit hardenough to sustain injuries like bruises, cuts, chippedteeth and an occasional broken bone; and 2 percent werehit by brothers or sisters wielding rocks, toys, broom
Continued on Page 6
Beyond Rivalry, a Hidden World of Sibling Violence
It is so common it often goes
unnoticed. Parents dismiss it as
sibling rivalry. Scientists rarely
study it. But physical abuse by a
sibling can leave long-lasting
emotional scars.
LeaveYour
BrotherAlone!
A study of 2,030
children found:
35%had been
hit or attacked
by a sibling.
Of those attacked:
13%Were
injured.
6%Were
attacked with a
weapon.
40%Were
attacked repeatedly.
Source: David Finkelhor, Univ. of New Hampshire
The New York TimesRuth Marten
By KIRK JOHNSON
DENVER, Feb. 27 — Video game technol-ogy and Einstein’s work on relativity mayat first seem as unlikely a couple as Oscarand Felix.
One bobs in the froth of commercial cul-ture, dodging the scornful radar of educa-tors and parents who wish students were offdoing something else like, say, studying Ein-stein. The other is as highbrow as sciencegets in its lofty waltz of theoretical physics,where time and space warp in otherworldlyways that have given brain aches to genera-
tions of physics students.But to Andrew J. S. Hamilton, a professor
of astrophysics at the University of Colora-do, they are perfect together.
What gamer programs do with increasingspeed, sophistication and computationalmuscle, Dr. Hamilton said, is visualizethings that have never been seen in the realworld. And what Einstein described, espe-cially in his theory of general relativity, areforces of time and space literally outside thereal world we know, or can know.
“What if you could take people through awormhole the way Einstein’s equations saidit would be?” he said in interview in his of-
fice on the Boulder campus. “And what ifyou could bring art and science together in away that compromised neither?”
That is where black holes come in. Dr.Hamilton’s marriage of video game soft-ware and relativity, which he has fashionedinto a “Black Hole Flight Simulator,” is atthe heart of a new show at the Denver Mu-seum of Nature and Science that takes view-ers on a 23-minute thrill ride to what the pro-gram notes call “the other side of infinity.”
The show is built on the crunching of num-bers that even a black hole might envy:some segments produced by the NationalCenter for Supercomputing Applications at
the University of Illinois required 90 hoursof supercomputer calculation for each sec-ond on screen.
The central goal, Dr. Hamilton said, isboth simple and mind-bendingly paradox-ical: to visualize what cannot be seen.
Because not even light can escape thegravitational pull of a black hole, the interi-or of a hole is perhaps the ultimate terra in-cognita. The absence of light coming outmeans an absence of all information. Mostof what science knows about these objects isthus entirely inferential — from gravitation-al effects on other objects like nearby stars.
The simulator, to be featured this year in a
“Nova” program on PBS about black holes,seeks to lift the veil. Using Einstein’s equa-tions and a graphics language called OpenGL, developed by Silicon Graphics, Dr. Ham-ilton told the computer to show how individ-ual vectors of light should behave at the no-man’s frontier of the black hole, called theevent horizon, and inside the hole itself.
That meant not only creating a visual rep-resentation of Einstein’s work, but also in areal sense creating from scratch a worldthat cannot be known. “When I started this, Ihad no idea what would emerge from theequations,” Mr. Hamilton said. Part of the
Continued on Page 4
Images from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science
BLACK HOLE ADVENTURE The planetarium at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science relies on video game technology to enable viewers to see the impossible — what a flight through a black hole might be like. In the se-quence, the viewer approaches the black hole at the center of our galaxy, enters it, crosses the event horizon beyond which nothing emerges, finds that there is an exit via a wormhole, and witnesses a kind of ultimate chaos.
Theoretical Physics, in Video: A Thrill Ride to ‘the Other Side of Infinity’
S C I E N T I S T AT W O R K / A N D R E W H A M I L T O N
THE APPROACH FIRST GLIMPSE ACROSS THE HORIZON NO EXIT THE HEART OF CHAOS
Israel’s Patient-in-ChiefThe Doctor’s World: Ariel Sharon toldhis medical team to talk to the public.
By Lawrence K. Altman, M.D. Page 5
Personal Health: EyesightSteps to take now to protect your visionagainst macular degeneration.
By Jane E. Brody Page 7
Before You Go to MarsScience Illustrated: How cosmic rayswould imperil astronauts in deep space.
By Frank O’Connell Page 4
A ‘Lost Kingdom,’ Frozen in TimeIn Indonesia, scientists find remainsfrom an 1815 volcano catastrophe.
By John Noble Wilford Page 4 Conceptual illustrationby Frank O’Connell/The New York Times
Æ Readers can discuss sibling violence in a
Web forum and watch a video interview
on evolution with Niles Eldredge of the
American Museum of Natural History:nytimes.com/science.
Æ The weekly Science Times Podcast fea-
tures interviews with writers and scien-
tists: nytimes.com/podcasts.
Æ John Noble Wilford answers readers’
questions: [email protected].
More Science: Just Click