Mid-afternoon. You are waiting on a phone
call from Honda so that you may pick up the blue Accord. You and Carol had
Alta's excellent Tucson chicken veggie soup for lunch. Yesterday you were
surprised to have received an unannounced letter from Doug with an article
Nancy found in a recent "The Ohio State Magazine" titled,
"Hunting the Higgs". Here is what caught your imagination.
** **
". . . ATLAS, the largest detector, is bigger than a five-story
building. Kass, Kagan and Gan built its 'camera,' capable of capturing
subatomic particles created by the collisions.
Kass said, "The pixel detector measures the trajectory of
charged particles, including the ones that come from the decay of the Higgs. It
is like a digital camera on steroids. Imagine one with about 100 million pixels
that can take about a million pictures a second."
From: The Ohio State Magazine
** **
I
know about the Higgs but I never knew that about the camera. I am immediately
reminded of our high school days before the science fair and I was standing in
the Goss family dining room while Doug showed me his operating cloud chamber,
one he built himself by hand. It was awesome to observe the full experiment and
the cloud trail results of subatomic particles. That was during our junior or
senior year of high school. It is a memory burned in, at least the clouds are,
I saw them with my own eyes. Very, very cool it was, and still is as far as I
am concerned. How far science has come. What a time to be alive to witness such
events. First hand witnessing is better but second hand witnessing will do.
Suddenly your memory transports you to White
Sands Testing Grounds and standing on the spot where the first atomic bomb was
detonated in July 1945. You brought back small amounts of direct evidence of
that blast which is second hand witnessing enough for a good example of what
you are feeling.
Now,
how can we transfer that feeling into the character of Blake Williams who
suddenly realizes he is standing on earth in an alien ship talking within an
arm's distance with unlikely genetic cousins from the other side of the Milky
Way Galaxy? - Amorella
I cannot imagine how that experience would be first hand. (1529)
1958
hours. We picked up the car, came home, then headed for Kroger's to fill up the
car for tomorrow's trip to Columbus to have lunch with Mary Lou and Uncle John.
After Kroger's we had supper at Cracker Barrel. We both again had fish. Home
again. Carol is washing her hair. I looked at Discover (Magazine) online and
found two blogs of interest. The first is on Neanderthals breeding, not the
point of the article but two phrases I have not heard in a long time.
** **
By Razib Khan | January 30, 2013 3:05 am
With all the crazy talk about George Church and an
adventurous young woman conspiring to bring back Neanderthals, I do think it is
important to keep in mind that we can
bring back an individual with a predominantly Neanderthal genome in a very old
fashioned manner: controlled breeding. The most humane and viable manner
in which you might do this is simply start a religion in a Bene Gesserit
fashion where the prophesied Kwisatz Haderach is a Neanderthal. Over the
generations by selecting individuals within the population (which could draw in
converts) enriched for Neanderthal ancestry to mate assortatively one could
slowly increase the proportion of that ancestral component. The population
would become more and more “Neanderthal,” probably to the point of being
phenotypically distinctive in a dozen generations (even a minority of
non-modern human ancestry is probably significant, just as many individuals who
are 3/4 European and 1/4 African still exhibit features of their minority
heritage). One could apply the same logic to the Denisovans. . . .
Selected and edited from Discover online
** **
The Bene Gesserit and the Kwisatz Haderach are terms from
Frank Herbert's Dune series. When I checked on Wikipedia I saw where the
concepts came from (something I did not realize). Below is what I discovered at
Wikipedia.
** **
Kefitzat Haderech is a Jewish Kabbalic term that literally means "contracting
the path." It refers to miraculous travel between two distant places in a
brief time. The Talmud lists three biblical stories in which this miracle
occurs. In early stories of the Chasidic movement, wonder-working rabbis are
ascribed the ability to reach destinations with unnatural speed.
The name Kwisatz
Haderach from Frank Herbert's Dune series,
translated as "the Shortening of the Way", is presumably derived from
the term kefitzat haderech.
In
Agnon's work
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, an Israeli writer who won the 1966 Nobel Prize for literature,
incorporates this phenomenon into some of his plots. In an Agnon story based on
one of the above-mentioned Hasidic folktales, a righteous rabbi is given the
gift of kfitzat haderech and uses it to "jump" into the
treasuries of the Habsburg Empire, take sacks full of newly-minted gold coins,
and jump back to his shtetl, unnoticed by anybody. He uses the money to help
poor or persecuted Jews, and the story implies that the power would be taken
away should he take any of the gold to himself.
Later, when the Emperor plans to make decrees harmful to the Jews,
the Rabbi uses his power of kfitzat haderech in order to jump into the
audience chamber and beat the Emperor with his stick--being visible (and
tangible) to the Emperor himself, but invisible to his councilors and guards.
Edited from Wikipedia (underlining my own)
** **
The above reminds me of Merlyn 'jumping' from one time (in the Place
of the Dead) to another time. This would seem to be easier to do as a spirit
than as a full-blooded person. It is interesting because I had not realized the
similar connection. I did not teach Dune in my Futures Studies/Science
Fiction classes but I certainly suggested it as a great read for those who love
science fiction. This, of course, was before the two films on Dune were
created.
You might do more research on those
'biblical stories'. However, that has little to do with Pouch 11.
But it does have to do with 'thought and light physics' within the
blog. I wonder if 'thought' itself is a spiritual value rather than one of
physics, or could it be both at once? When we read an engrossing book we are
'transported' into the book's dimensions. We are here and there both at once.
In some ways it is like Du Maurier’s The House on the Strand. No drug is
needed though, just 'thought-like' transportation to the 14th century.
Do you wish you had such power, boy? -
Amorella
No. However I would like to use such power (in imagination) to
work into the Merlyn books.
How would it be different than it is now,
your imagination? - Amorella
Good question, Amorella. A very good question. To better clarify and
use Herbert's "Kefitzat Haderech"; how would I do this? How could I
clarify this as a 'spiritual' jump from one Place and Cultural Time of the Dead
to another Place and Cultural Time of the Dead (to make the story better, more
presentable for the imagination of what it is to be human and to be dead). (2043)
2226 hours. We watched Tuesday night's "White Collar" and
a selection of the news. How is it to meet an alien of the physical reality,
Amorella?
You do not remember meeting an alien? -
Amorella
No, not even in my imagination -- do you mean the 'aliens' I 'remembered'
under an induced hypnotic trance at the University of Cincinnati under the
watch of Dr. Payne back during the 1980's? That was supposedly (in context)
before I was born. Checking on Wikipedia in reference to the film AI:
**
**
. . .
Screenwriter Ian Watson has speculated, "Worldwide, A.I. was very
successful (and the 4th highest earner of the year) but it didn't do quite so
well in America, because the film, so I'm told, was too poetical and
intellectual in general for American tastes. Plus, quite a few critics in
America misunderstood the film, thinking for instance that the Giacometti-style
beings in the final 20 minutes were aliens (whereas they were robots of the
future who had evolved themselves from the robots in the earlier part of the
film) and also thinking that the final 20 minutes were a sentimental addition
by Spielberg, whereas those scenes were exactly what I wrote for Stanley and
exactly what he wanted, filmed faithfully by Spielberg."
Selected
and edited from Wikipedia - AI Artificial Intelligence
** **
So, it turns out that the aliens were really supposed to
be robots, but I had my hypnotic trance in the 1980's well before AI, the film
of 2001. Below is an example of Giacometti's work:
Giacometti's Walking Man
***
I
think I have my notes of that session somewhere in the basement. The problem is
that I, the observer in the trance, was not born yet. The "self-created
event" had happened between my sixth and seventh month as I was born more
than a month early, a real preemie weighing just over two pounds. My mother
could slide her wedding ring above my elbow, at least that is the family story
I heard more than once. Are those the aliens? There were three in the scene; one
wasn't more than three feet from me. I was on an operating table. I can almost
remember the scene; it was in color and had depth, similar to a full-blown
lucid dream. Dr. Payne just shook his head and said we make up things even in a
trance. I agreed wholeheartedly then and still do today.
