Carl William Blegen...Homer, "Iliad", Troy

Carl William Blegen
January 27th, 1887 to August 24th, 1971

Carl William Blegen was an archaeologist who unearthed evidence that supported and dated the sack of Troy recorded in Homer's Iliad. Storage jars, skeletons and ash piles (which he interpreted as evidence of the city's fiery destruction) reinforced his conviction. He also discovered, in 1939, clay tablets dating from about 1250 BC. At the fabled palace of King Nestor, a major figure in the Trojan War, nearly 1,100 clay tablet records of palace transactions were found there over 15 years. These were inscribed with the earliest known examples of European writing, enabling cryptographers to find the key by which the ancient tablets could be decoded, proving the existence of a Greek civilization where none was formerly thought to exist.

Carl William Blegen [Wikipedia]

The "face of God" not to be revealed just now

"Hints fade of elusive physics 'God particle'"

by

Kerry Sheridan

August 23rd, 2011

AFP

International scientists searching to solve the greatest riddle in all of physics said Monday that signs are fading of the elusive Higgs-Boson particle, which is believed to give objects mass.

Just last month, physicists announced at a European conference that a big atom-smasher experiment had shown tantalizing hints of the Higgs-Boson, as the search to identify the particle enters the final stretch with results expected late next year.

Sometimes described as the "God particle" because it is such a mystery yet such a potent force of nature, the Higgs-Boson -- if it exists -- represents the final piece of the Standard Model of physics.

"At this moment we don't see any evidence for the Higgs in the lower mass region where it is likely to be," said physicist Howard Gordon, deputy US ATLAS operations program manager.

ATLAS is the biggest particle collider lab at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)'s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

"I think it is true that the hints that we saw in July are not as significant -- they weren't very significant in July -- but they have gotten less significant now," Gordon told AFP.

However, physicists are not ready to rule out the possibility that it exists, and atom-smasher experiments must still sift through an immense amount of data at the low-end of the spectrum, he said.

"Basically the data has increased by about a factor of two since the report from the European Physical Society meeting in July because the Large Hadron Collider is producing lots of data," Gordon said.

"I think it has always been a possibility that the Higgs would not be there but I don't think we are ready to say that at this moment."

A statement summarizing the latest data, released at a conference in Mumbai, India, said the LHC's "ATLAS and CMS experiments excluded with 95 percent certainty the existence of a Higgs over most of the mass region from 145 to 466 GeV."

CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci whether the particle exists or not, scientists expect to know more by next year.

"Discoveries are almost assured within the next 12 months. If the Higgs exists, the LHC experiments will soon find it. If it does not, its absence will point the way to new physics," said Bertolucci.

The LHC, located near Geneva, Switzerland, is designed to accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together in house-sized labs where detectors record the seething sub-atomic debris.

The smashups briefly stoke temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun, fleetingly replicating conditions which prevailed split-seconds after the "Big Bang" that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

In addition to ATLAS, CERN's CMS experiment, short for Compact Muon Solenoid, is a general-purpose detector that is also searching for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and the essence of dark matter.

"Whatever the final verdict on Higgs, we're now living in very exciting times for all involved in the quest for new physics," said CMS spokesman Guido Tonelli.

Deceased--John Howard Davies

John Howard Davies and Robert Newton

John Howard Davies
March 9th, 1939 to August 22nd, 2011

"John Howard Davies, the quintessential Oliver Twist, Dies at 72"

by

Mark Wallace

August 23rd, 2011

Classic Films

John Howard Davies took the title role in David Lean's classic 1948 Oliver Twist, and later directed such comedy classics as Monty Python and Fawlty Towers.

John Howard Davies, the screen's most memorable Oliver Twist, died yesterday 22 August 2011 aged 72. David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) was Davies's first film, and he was discovered when an exhaustive search for a suitable Oliver proved fruitless, and Jack Davies, a scriptwriter and friend of Lean's, told the director that his son, then aged eight, would be ideally suited to the role. And he was. Pale, blonde, and thin, with sensitive features and a timid expression, Davies fitted the bill of the character who is described in the novel as: "A very good-looking boy. There's an expression of melancholy in his face which is most interesting." (by the undertaker Mr Sowerberry (Chapter 4)).

Davies’s performance in Oliver Twist was particularly naturalistic, partly because some of the time he wasn’t even aware the cameras were rolling, according to the revealing documentary “A Profile of Oliver Twist” found on recent editions of Lean’s film. Lean also kept Davies’s dialogue to a minimum, allowing his expressive face to do the acting. The result was a film still acknowledged as one of the greatest Dickens adaptations cinema has seen – in terms of critical prestige, its only rival for best Dickens film is Lean’s other effort, 1946’s Great Expectation.

Davies also gave a notable performance in The Rocking-Horse Winner, a very interesting 1949 adaptation of a D.H. Lawrence short story. As an actor, though, that was his peak. There was only a lead in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, in which the frail, delicate Davies was somewhat miscast, and a few minor appearances before Davies left the business altogether while still in his teens. The pressure of being a leading child star following his star turn in Oliver Twist didn’t sit well with him, and in a 2008 interview with BBC Radio 4 he candidly stated that he felt at the time that he was neither a talented enough for a character actor nor good-looking enough for a lead.

John Howard Davies [Wikipedia]

Lunar Orbiter 1 and snap of home

The Writer's Almanac...

On this date in 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of the Earth from space. The Orbiter program began in 1964; its purpose was to take pictures of as much of the Moon's surface as possible so that scientists could scout potential landing sites for the upcoming Apollo missions. Lunar Orbiter 1 was launched on August 10 and recorded images from the 18th to the 29th. There were five Orbiters in all — the last one launched on August 1, 1967 — and by the time the project was completed, they had images of 99 percent of the lunar surface. The data was recorded on large magnetic tapes, and the resolution wasn't great by modern standards, but it proved invaluable for mapping purposes. It's since been restored and digitized, and the level of detail has allowed scientists to study the weather patterns of that day.

On August 23, just as Orbiter 1 was about to pass behind the Moon, mission controllers sent the command to change the angle of the cameras so that they were pointing at the Earth rather than the surface below. They just managed to capture our home planet's first portrait: a silvery, cloud-swirled crescent rising over the Moon's pockmarked face. Down on Earth, the Beatles were preparing for their last concert at Shea Stadium, the Vietnam war was raging, Muhammad Ali was applying for a "conscientious objector" exemption from the draft, and Star Trek, one of the most influential depictions of space travel in pop culture history, would premiere only two weeks later.

Move over Clyde Tombaugh...Milton L. Humason had first crack at Pluto

Milton L. Humason
August 19th, 1891 to June 18th, 1972

According to Wikipedia...

Due to merest chance, Humason missed discovering Pluto. Eleven years before Clyde Tombaugh, Humason took a set of four photographs in which the image of Pluto appeared.* There is persistent speculation that he missed discovering the planet because it fell on a defect in the photographic plate. This is unlikely given that it appeared in four separate photographs over three different nights.

*Nicholson, Seth B.; Mayall, Nicholas U. (January 1931). "Positions, Orbit, and Mass of Pluto". Astrophysical Journal 73.

Now, Humason was a very interesting person who had no formal education--not even a high school diploma let alone a Ph.D. but yet he worked through the ranks from a floor sweeper to a meticulous Mt. Wilson staff member appointed by George Ellery Hale.

And, it has even been mentioned that "The myth that the expansion of the Universe was discovered by Hubble was first propagated by Humason (1931). The true nature of this discovery turns out to have been both more complex and more interesting."

Read...

"DISCOVERY OF THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE" by Sidney van den Bergh

Crystals

Crystals and Crystal Growing

by

Alan Holden and Phylis Morrison

ISBN: 0262580500

There are other crystal growing books and Internet references and there are even crystal growing kits. Just Google.

Nature's contribution...

Ray Bradbury...a writer...a science fiction writer

The Writer's Almanac...

It's the birthday of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, born in Waukegan, Illinois (1920). He's the author of many books of science fiction, including The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). One of his ancestors, Mary Bradbury, was burned as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, and he said he got from her his anxiety about fearmongering and thought control. He said, "Science fiction is a wonderful hammer; I intend to use it when and if necessary, to bark a few shins or knock a few heads, in order to make people leave people alone." He told Paris Review, "I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past — a combination of both." He didn't go to college, because the family couldn't afford it, but he did go to libraries ... at least three times a week for 10 years. He wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library.

As a boy, he read Edgar Allan Poe and The Wizard of Oz. And when he was 12, a traveling carnival came to town, and he met a magician named Mr. Electrico, who believed young Ray was the reincarnation of a friend who had died in his arms in World War I. Later, at the show, Mr. Electrico touched people in the front row with his electrically charged sword, making their hair stand on end. "When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, 'Live forever.' And I decided to."

Soooooo, you want to be a writer...a science fiction writer?

Ray Bradbury:Story of a Writer

1963

Ray Bradbury [Wikipedia]


Dimension X's "There Will Come Soft Rain--Zero Hour"...old time radio offering #3

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