fallslikesnow

A Sun of the Nineteenth Century’; cartoon from Puck magazine showing Charles Darwin as a shining sun, chasing the clouds of religion and superstition from the sky, 1882

This first page of the Cosmic Call 1999 message, shown above, involves only numbers Cosmic Call Physicists are announcing today that they have designed a message to be broadcast in the direction of nearby stars in order to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. This project is being presented by Dr. Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas from the Defence Research Establishment Valcartier, near Quebec City (Canada), to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, TX. This is the first time in a quarter of a century that such a cosmic call will be attempted.   The complete message is about 400,000 bits long and will be transmitted three times over a 3-hour period in the direction of the four selected stars. Then, it will be followed by a series of greetings from people around the world. The transmission will start on March 15 1999. Finding a transmitter for this task was not easy; the project will use a 70 m (230 ft) Ukrainian antenna equipped with a 150 kW transmitter b...

  Pioneer plaque The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold - anodized aluminium plaques which were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft , featuring a pictorial message , in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 are intercepted by extraterrestrial life . The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. [1] The Pioneer spacecraft were the first human-built objects to leave the solar system . The plaques were attached to the spacecraft's antenna support struts in a position that would shield them from erosion by stellar dust . Physical properties Material: 6061 T6 gold-anodized aluminum Width: 229 mm (9 inches) Height: 152 mm (6 inches) Thickness: 1.27 mm (0.05 inches) Mean depth of engraving : 0.381 mm (0.015 inches) Mass: approx. 0.120 kilograms Wikipedia  At the far right, the ...

The first page of figures from Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis from 1763. Figure 1 is the force curve which received so much attention from later natural philosophers such as Joseph Priestley, Humphrey Davy, and Michael Faraday. The ordinate is force, with positive values being repulsive, and the abscissa is radial distance.    Ruđer Josip Bošković (see names in other languages ; 18 May 1711 – 13 February 1787) was a theologian , physicist , astronomer , mathematician , philosopher , diplomat , poet , Jesuit , and a polymath [ 1 ] from the city of Dubrovnik in the Republic of Ragusa (today in Croatia ), who studied and lived in Italy and France

  "Lingua Cosmica." A language for extraterrestrial communication developed by Hans Freudenthal, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Utrecht. Details of it are presented in Freudenthal's book 1 published in the Netherlands in 1960. LINCOS represents an extension of the logistic language of mathematics developed by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. It is intended to be conveyed by unmodulated radio signals of varying duration and wavelength which represent phonemes. The signals would be combined to make up concepts or words. Lancelot Hogben, who himself described a code for communication with alien intelligence, called Astraglossa , discussed Freudenthal's work. The Internet Encyclopedia of Sciemce Chapter III: Behaviour 3 00 1. For the time being it would be premature to try to describe  human behaviour by a system of general rules like the mathematical  and chronometric rule...

Abū 'l-Walīd Muḥammad bin Aḥmad bin Rushd ( Arabic : أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد ‎), better known just as Ibn Rushd ( Arabic : ابن رشد ‎), and in European literature as Averroes (pronounced /əˈvɛroʊ.iːz/ ) (1126 – December 10, 1198), was an Andalusian Muslim polymath ; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy , Islamic theology , Maliki law and jurisprudence , logic , psychology , politics , Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine , astronomy , geography , mathematics , physics and celestial mechanics . He was born in Córdoba , Al Andalus , modern-day Spain , and died in Marrakech , modern-day Morocco . His school of philosophy is known as Averroism . He has been described by some [1] as the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe and "one of the spiritual fathers of Europe ," [2] although other scholars oppose such claims. Wikipedia Averroes (Abonlwalid Mo'hammed ibn Abmed ibn Mo'hnmmed ibu-Roschd) was ...

  This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. Sandia National Laboratories  

"From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined. that 1+1=2"

Lincos : Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse , published in 1960 by Hans Freudenthal , expands upon Astraglossa to create a general-purpose language derived from basic mathematics and logic symbols. A new generation Lincos has been developed since 2000 by Alexander Ollongren, as a part of the more general Astrolinguistics .   Wikipedia Lincos consists of a variety of mathematical terms and phrases, to be encoded into specific combinations of radio pulses and signal shapes and then beamed out into space. It is devised purely in terms of semantics and human logic, and accomplishes understanding by building from simple beginnings. Statements are arranged in words, sentences, and paragraphs. Freudenthal’s program begins by establishing the meaning of the terms "plus" and "equals." He would, for instance, send signals something like "beep bloop beep tweet beep beep" (1 + 1 = 2), perhaps followed by "beep bloop beep beep...

An early radioglyph scheme for interstellar communication (see CETI ) proposed by the British mathematician Lancelot Hogben . He gave details of it in a 1952 lecture to the British Interplanetary Society , entitled "Astraglossa, or First Step in Celestial Syntax," and later described it in a book. 1 Hogben suggested that numbers be represented as ordinary pulses (e.g. five pulses for the number five) and mathematical concepts, such as "plus,""minus," or "equal," each by a distinctive signal – a radioglyph. The Internet Encyclopedia of Science

hongo2 Originally uploaded by thatwhichfalls During the season of rains in certain regions of Japan, the forests begin to fill with small lights: in the trunks of the trees and the humid ground hundreds of bioluminescent fungi grow, that thanks to a chemical reaction produced by an enzyme, emit a light that shines in a greenish tone. from

Millions of years ago, rivers ran in Antarctica through craggy mountain valleys that were strangely similar to the modern European Alps, Chinese and British scientists reported on Wednesday. In a study published by the British journal Nature, the scientists described a vast terrain that had been hidden beneath ice up to two miles thick for eons, until new imaging technology recently uncovered them.

Menlo Park, Calif.—True muonium, a long-theorized but never-seen atom, might be observed in future experiments, thanks to recent theoretical work by researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Arizona State University. True muonium was first theorized more than 50 years ago, but until now no one had uncovered an unambiguous method by which it could be created and observed.

A drawing of the innermost part of the CMS detector, bristling with silicon tiles, took inspiration from the nine circles of hell in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy .

The New York Times : "In recent years, neuroscientists have found evidence that psychopathy scores reflect physical differences in brain function. Last April, Canadian and American researchers reported in a brain-imaging study that psychopaths processed certain abstract words - grace, future, power, for example - differently from nonpsychopaths."

"I understood this myself when I read your novel The Time Machine. All human conceptions are on the scale of our planet. They are based on the pretension that the technical potential, although it will develop, will never exceed ‘terrestrial limit’." "If we succeed in establishing interplanetary communications, all our philosophies, moral and social views will have to be revised." V.I. Lenin in conversation with H.G. Wells from Emerald City

In 1950, John von Neumann said that "science and technology will shift from a past emphasis on motion, force, and energy to communication, organization, programming, and control." Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lectures