Back To The Cretaceous

From Pete Von Sholly's Extremely Weird Tales. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Your Atomic Surgeon has now departed for the Late Cretaceous of Alberta where he will be investigating weird phenomena until the end of the summer.

Stay tuned for periodic posting from the Past!

The Secret Origin of Spider Webs

Art © Frank Cho. Spider Woman © Marvel Comics.

From over at the Palaeoblog.

And where exactly does the web come from?

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How did the Universe begin? Many scientists would regard this as one of the most profound questions of all. But to Stephen Hawking, who has perhaps come closer than anyone to answering it, the question doesn't in fact even exist.

Virgil Finlay

Hawking and Thomas Hertog are about to publish a paper claiming that the Universe had no unique beginning. Instead, they argue, it began in just about every way imaginable (and maybe some that aren't).

That, they insist, is the only possible conclusion if we are to take quantum physics seriously. "Quantum mechanics forbids a single history," says Hertog.

Thomas Hertog and Hawking call their theory 'top-down' cosmology, because instead of looking for some fundamental set of initial physical laws under which our Universe unfolded, it starts 'at the top', with what we see today, and works backwards to see what the initial set of possibilities might have been. In effect, says Hertog, the present 'selects' the past.

Within just a few seconds after the Big Bang, a single history had already come to dominate the Universe, he explains. So from the 'classical' viewpoint of big objects such as stars and galaxies, things happened only one way after that point. Other 'histories', say, one in which the Earth formed only 4,000 years ago, have made no significant contribution to this cosmic evolution.

But in the first instants of the Big Bang, there existed a superposition of ever more different versions of the Universe, instead of a unique history. And most crucially, Hertog says that "our current Universe has features frozen in from this early quantum mixture". http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060619/full/060619-6.html

Eric Explains It All:

Thanks to Val Armorr(U of C) for this story.

The Laws Have Changed

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EQUALS:

"What you have already lost consider as totally lost"

Plucking our hero, the 5th century saint Simon Stylites, who preached from atop a pillar for 37 years, from the 1965 film, “Simon of the Desert” by Luis Buñuel, he ends up in an ersatz version of the Night Club scene in The Beatles “A Hard Day’s Night”, thanks to the seductive charms of the devil herself.



The video for The New Pornographers "The Laws Have Changed” (click for realplayer version) is subtitled with dialogue from the film. The band only shows up (I think) in the photo that the saint passes to the bartender. Dig the Hep Cat in the sunglasses straight outta "AHDN."

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Winnie The Pooh

Jeff McMillan (top) after Ryder Noyes (bottom)

Cartoon Brew as an article on LA artists who have taken pre-schoolers drawings of a Winnie The Pooh story and reinterpreted them. The new work is on sale at Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight as a partial fund raiser for The Hollywood School that the kids attend.

Father of Cryogenics Born This Day

Link

Willem Hendrik Keesom was a Dutch physicist who pioneered cryogenics and was the first to solidify helium under pressure (1926). In work done with M. Wolfke, after studying discontinuities in several properties of helium at very low temperatures (1927) they suggested that it may be due to a phase change. They called the helium above the transitional helium I and the helium below the transition helium II. In 1932, he produced a temperature just two degrees above absolute zero (-272°C ).

When you’re trapped on an ice world with no hope of rescue, who do you want with you?

Today In History: LPs Introduced

Today in 1948, the first successful long-playing microgroove phonograph records were introduced to the public at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Made of nonbreakable Vinilyte plastic, and designed for the new speed of 33-1/3 r.p.m., the records were developed by Dr. Peter Goldmark of Columbia Records. The 12 inch record could play 23 minutes per side, as compared to only 4 minutes per side on the earlier 78 rpm record. The first LP featured violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Columbia originated the term "LP" itself, which was copyrighted. Thus, although many other firms could make long-playing records, only Columbia could make an LP. Link

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