Orfeo: A Dialog between Robert Hunter and Terence McKenna This is Part OnePart TwoPart ThreePart FourPart Five (current) Terence, in reading your books I was struck with how closely your DMT experiments paralleled my own. I wasn't surprised by the confirmation, as you might guess. I considered myself a serious DMT explorer between 1967-69. I stopped only because I was told to, in no uncertain terms, by the Boss of that place. Robert Hunter Greetings Bob-- I was interested in what you had to say about being an explorer of the DMT world until the management told you to stay away. I enjoy the idea of a slow moving dialog, I hope this can continue. Best, T Terence, I suppose the "facts" of DMT might as well be written in cunieform on our breastbones for all the good it does to know about it, as opposed to "dwelling in the know of it." My personal take on the "secret" of DMT: it was long, hard work making this world real. My take could be way off base but anything more Gnostic is off-putting. We need a few verbs and prepositions to explain ourselves.
A Brief History Of Nothing : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture Using my recent interview on To The Best Of Our Knowledge about the Krauss and the "Universe From Nothing" controversy as a pretext, I thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about what physics says of "nothing," and how this tricky notion evolved. (Here is something I wrote for 13.7 on this a few weeks back.) We may start with Aristotle, who decided that "Nature abhors a vacuum" and thus declared that there was no such thing as nothing, understood as absolute emptiness. Spaced was filled up with aether, the same stuff that made up all celestial objects, from the moon up. Aristotle was reacting to the atomists, who, before him, had declared that matter was made of indivisible atoms moving in the void. Fast forward to the early 17th century and Descartes also states that there is no such thing as empty space. The ping pong continued in the 19th century, when Maxwell figured out that light was made of waving electric and magnetic fields.
Telescope Targets Black Holes' Binges And Burps The NuSTAR telescope, seen in this artist's illustration, will soon be sending back data that researchers will use to study black holes. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption itoggle caption NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA's newest space telescope will start searching the universe for black holes on Wednesday. Scientists hope the NuSTAR X-ray telescope, which launched about six weeks ago and is now flying about 350 miles above the Earth, will help shed some light on the mysteries of these space oddities. Mission control for the telescope is a small room on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, where about a dozen people with headsets rarely look up from their screens. Fiona Harrison, a professor of physics and astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, is the principal scientist for the mission. The beginning of a space telescope's life is particularly stressful. Now, the $170 million telescope is just about ready to begin its hunt for black holes.
Cosmic latte Cosmic Latte is a name assigned to the average color of the universe, given by a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. Discovery of the color[edit] In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper,[1] in which they reported that their survey of the color of all light in the universe added up to a slightly beigeish white. The survey included more than 200,000 galaxies, and measured the spectral range of the light from a large volume of the universe. The finding of the "color of the universe" was not the focus of the study, which was examining spectral analysis of different galaxies to study star formation. Glazebrook's and Baldry's work was funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Naming of the color[edit] The color was displayed in a Washington Post article. References[edit] External links[edit] The Cosmic Spectrum Official project website
Close Shave: Asteroid To Buzz Earth Next Week hide captionThis computer image from a NASA video shows the small asteroid 2012 DA14 on its path as it passes by Earth on Feb. 15. An asteroid the size of an office building will zoom close by Earth next week, but it's not on a collision course, NASA says. Still, some people think this near-miss should serve as a wake-up call. "It's a warning shot across our bow that we are flying around the solar system in a shooting gallery," says Ed Lu, a former astronaut and head of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting humanity from asteroids. The asteroid known as 2012 DA14 was first spotted last year by astronomers in Spain. It will whiz past Earth on Feb. 15, going about 5 miles per second. NASA officials say this event is one for the record books — the first time scientists have been able to predict something so big coming so close. It will come closer than satellites in a geosynchronous orbit around 22,000 miles up, but is extremely unlikely to hit any of those as it goes by.
Magnetosphere in Sound One of NASA's newest missions has recorded the radio waves coming from our magnetosphere. Musicians: Sample away. A graphic of Earth's twin rings of plasma known as the Van Allen Radiation Belts in our planet's magnetosphere (NASA) Surrounding our planet are rings of plasma, part of Earth's magnetosphere, which are pulsing with radio waves. The noises, often picked up here on Earth by ham-radio operators, are called Earth's "chorus" as they are reminiscent of a chorus of birds chirping in the early morning.
Elon Musk at SXSW: "I Would Like to Die on Mars, Just Not on Impact" AUSTIN — The most popular name on Twitter during day two of South by Southwest was Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX. During his keynote address at the conference, Musk said he would one day like to set foot on Mars, but only if he knew his company could carry on without him and the technology could get him there safely. The old joke, Musk told NowThisNews, was that he would like to die on Mars, just not on impact. Musk also said he hopes contact with life from another planet would come some day, and that it will be peaceful. "So far we haven't seen any signs of life from other worlds," he said. "We haven't detected anything. In 2012, SpaceX made history as the first privately held company to send a cargo payload to the International Space Station. For more of Musk's keynote address, check out the video above. Would you spend the rest of your life on Mars if you were given the chance? Thumbnail image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Elon Musk's Mission to Mars | Wired Science Maverick entrepreneur Elon Musk Photo: Art Streiber When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching Mars—sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific—you need to find another diagnosis. That’s the thing about extreme entrepreneurialism: There’s a fine line between madness and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the world. All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. I have never met an entrepreneur who fits this model more than Elon Musk. And he is leading the private space race with SpaceX, which is poised to replace the space shuttle and usher us into an interplanetary age. It’s no wonder the character of Tony Stark in Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr., was modeled on Musk: This is superhero-grade stuff.
It All Began in Chaos The dust speck had been plucked from the tail of a comet more than 200 million miles away. Now, under an electron microscope in a basement lab at the University of Washington, its image grew larger, until it filled the computer screen like an alien landscape. Zooming in on a dark patch that looked like a jagged cliff, Dave Joswiak upped the magnification to 900,000. The patch resolved into tiny, jet-black grains. The dust speck has a name: Inti, for the Inca god of the sun. Scientists have long known that the planets, comets, and other bodies orbiting the sun were born, some 4.5 billion years ago, from a spinning disk of dust and gas called the solar nebula. “We were dumbfounded,” says Donald Brownlee, head of the Stardust team and Joswiak’s boss. When most of us were growing up, the solar system seemed reliable and well behaved. Newton himself knew that reality was messier. In practice no one saw evidence that planetary orbits had ever changed. The first clue came from Pluto.
The final frontier of a son’s awe – and abject fear For most people, Feb. 1, 2003, passed like any other day. Sure, a pretty big disaster dominated the headlines: The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered the atmosphere, raining down bits of metal and debris on the lawns of some Texans. But at the end of the news cycle, most people ate dinner and drifted off to sleep. For me, however, it was different. It was the first time I realized my father might very well die in prime time. Growing up the son of an astronaut sounds glamorous, and in many ways it is. I didn’t quite understand how lucky we were to have that access, but I always expected it to be there. Columbia changed all that. The news networks milked the disaster as long as they could, then moved on. My father’s previous spaceflight (STS-100) had occurred less than two years before Columbia, which meant that, regardless of scheduling changes related to the disaster, he wouldn’t be flying again any time soon. Then, in early 2008, Dad got a new assignment.
Science, Religion, and the Big Bang 'Brighter than a full moon': The biggest star of 2013... could be Ison - the comet of the century - Science - News Comet Ison could draw millions out into the dark to witness what could be the brightest comet seen in many generations – brighter even than the full Moon. It was found as a blur on an electronic image of the night sky taken through a telescope at the Kislovodsk Observatory in Russia as part of a project to survey the sky looking for comets and asteroids – chunks of rock and ice that litter space. Astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok were expecting to use the International Scientific Optical Network's (Ison) 40cm telescope on the night of 20 September but clouds halted their plans. It was a frustrating night but about half an hour prior to the beginning of morning twilight, they noticed the sky was clearing and got the telescope and camera up and running to obtain some survey images in the constellations of Gemini and Cancer. When the images were obtained Nevski loaded them into a computer program designed to detect asteroids and comets moving between images.