Peridot: The Gem of the Sun

reprised from Peridot: The Gem of the Sun.

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The peridot gemstone is a green beauty that is not as widely well-known as an emerald or sapphire but that has an equally fascinating story.

Peridot is the only gemstone that can be found in meteorites, which are called pallasites. The largest pallasite that was ever found was in 1882 called the Brenham Meteorite. A fragment of that meteorite was discovered in 2005 and weighed 1,430 pounds!

This green wonder is also created during volcanic action, which is why green crystals can be found in the black sands of Hawaii.

This gemstone was highly coveted and regarded as far back as 1500 B.C. The ancient Egyptians used to use peridot for carving out talismans and the “emeralds” that Cleopatra wore were actually dark green peridot. The Egyptians also considered peridot to be the gem of the sun. Egypt’s love affair with peridot is still present to this day; it is their national gemstone.

The largest peridot that was ever found was found on the island of Zabargad which is located in Southern Egypt on the Red Sea. This gemstone was 310 carats and now resides at the Smithsonian.

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Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Apparently this is old news now. However, I just recently heard of it, and find it fascinating. Here is the story of the largest known diamond in our galaxy.

On Friday, 13th February, 2004, the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe, released information about their latest discovery – a10 billion trillion trillion carat diamond.

The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon, the size of our Moon, 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is 4000kms wide and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds or 10 billion trillion trillion carats.

“You would need a jeweller’s loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond!” says astronomer Travis Metcalfe who leads the team of researchers that discovered the giant gem. The diamond has been called ‘Lucy’ – a tribute to the Beatles song ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, Technically known as BPM 37093, this huge cosmic gem, is actually a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

The white dwarf is not only radiant but also harmonious. It rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations. For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallized, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently. “The hunt for the crystal core of this white dwarf has been like the search for the Lost Dutchman’s Mine. It was thought to exist for decades, but only now has it been located,” says co-researcher Michael Montgomery.

The problem with proving the theory about the crystallization is that by the time the star has crystallized, it is no longer pulsating and is so cool, that they are impossible to detect. But BPM 37093 is so massive, that the star is crystallizing on the inside, as white light and sound continue to pulsate from the surface. The vibrations are detectable as colour shifts in the visible light emanating from the star. In this case, the right frequency makes it a diamond – blue green in tint.

“By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth. We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy’s largest diamond,” says Metcalfe.

Scientist Vince Ford, of the Australian National University’s Mount Stromio Observatory, said “This huge …..thing is sitting right down in the southern sky, in the constellation of Centaurus, just near the Southern Cross”. At approximately 4000kms in diameter, Lucy is roughly the same size as Australia and completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 530-carat Star of Africa that resides in the Crown Jewels of England. The Star of Africa was cut from the largest diamond ever found on Earth, a 3,100-carat gem.

Our Sun will also become a white dwarf when it dies 5 billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun’s ember core will crystallize as well, leaving a giant diamond in the centre of our solar system. The Sun is part of a group of stars called main sequence stars and most of these end their lives as white dwarves.

Sirius B, which is a known white Dwarf star, will also be a diamond in the future. Sirius B is currently around 25,000 degrees on the surface, and will begin to crystallize when it has cooled to about half that temperature.

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–reprised from Center for Astrophysics, Harvard-Smithsonian, 2-13-2004

It’s interesting to me, to imagine the possibility of somehow capturing this dead star and bringing it back to earth, where we value diamond as a rare commodity. Yet considering it’s great size, such an object brought to earth, would depreciate itself by its veritable massiveness. Scarcity is what increases value. A diamond the size of Australia, if it were suddenly available, would be about as worthless as the sand beneath our feet. Perhaps this is why the Aztecs couldn’t understand when the Spanish Conquistadors suddenly began to attack them for the gold adornments decorating their architecture and selves. Gold, readily available in South America, had no appreciable value for the local tribes in the sense it did as a rarity in Europe. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And vice versa, one man’s treasure is another man’s trash.

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fashion, pretty girls, and other things with price tags

The Playground

I spend a lot of time criticising the boys who work on Wall Street, but if you’re not after anything too cerebral they can be quite good fun to hang out with. Fraser and Kathleen started spending a lot of time together in a weird sexless mini-clique. There had been rumours flying round that her job wasn’t as secure as it might be, and I think she was keen to get close to anyone who could help her career.

As a girl, you get used to bawdy comments from guy-friends. One of the things that really shocked me about the city guys was the number of them who had been with call-girls. Usually on foreign trips where nobody knew them, but sometimes at home in New York. “Their work builds up a lot of testosterone,” Lina would say, “they have to let off steam somehow.”

“Does your brother go with…

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Again Athanasius

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A few posts back I mentioned I had originally been searching for images of those faces blowing wind, which you see on old maps. I came across these maps which happened to have been illustrated by Athanasius Kircher, who was a Benedictine scientist and authority of his time on many subjects, among them volcanology. It’s interesting to see the hypothetical depictions, circa 1668, of the views of how the earch was composed. By this time the world was known to be round. And although Jules Verne in the 19th century imagined that the core of the earth might be hollow, and even home to subterranean societies hidden from surface-dwellers, Kircher depicted the center as a seething pool of churning magma with various channels to the volcanos on the crust; which is basically accurate as we now know. He titled this piece “Pyrophylaciorum” for the fire in the middle. His second rendering depicts how water pools in subterranean depths all around the planet, the cavernous aquifers which feed the rivers at the surface, “Quo Exprimitur Aquarum”. It’s interesting that what he surmised, without being able to physically examine as we do today, with radar and ultrasound plumbing the depths. But in many ways his concepts were accurate.

The next phase in our physical understanding of our world would take us from deep within the earth, to deep within the physics of the atoms themselves. Unlike Kircher, who had no electronic means of detection, and relied on visual inspection, we now can journey deep inside matter itself. Leaping from models of atoms and molecules, we now can capture images of the particles inside of the atoms themselves, at the nano level, and even physically manipulate the atomic molecular arrangements. What’s interesting to me, is that at the micro levels of matter, patterns similar to those at the macro level are replicated reverse fractally, increasingly smaller Bucky balls of probability of energy and matter, time and empty space of particle physics….yet somehow patterned and predictable…

Which goes to show, that it is possible, to hear music in the spheres, and as the poem goes, to “see eternity in a grain of sand.”

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Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aeguptiacus

How could you not be intrigued by a title like that? lol!

Like Leonardo da Vinci, the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (ca. 1601-1680) was a true “Renaissance man.” Interested in both the arts and sciences, he wrote several dozen books on everything from medicine and geology to Egypt, cryptography, Noah’s Ark, and musical harmony.

Born near Fulda, in Buchonia, of the Hesse province, his name sometimes is epithet “Bucho,” “Buchonius” or “Fuldensis”. He was taught Hebrew by a rabbi, and studied philosophy and theology, although volcanoes were his passion. Several times in his life he had to flee Protestants who opposed the Catholics at the time of the Reformation. He joined the priesthood in 1628, and taught mathematics, ethics, and Hebrew/syriac at the University of Wurzburg, and developed an interest in Egyptian hieroglyphics. In 1633 he was called to Vienna by the emperor to succeed Johannes Kepler as chief Mathematician to the Habsburg court, however his ship was literally blown off course, and he ended up in Rome instead, where he based himself permanently at the Collegio Romano for several years before being fully devoted to his own research.

In 1661, Kircher discovered the ruins of a church said to have been constructed by Constantine on the site of Saint Eustace’s vision of Jesus Christ in a stag’s horns. He raised money to pay for the church’s reconstruction as the Santuario della Mentorella, and his heart was buried in the church on his death.

Kircher published a wide variety of scholarly texts at the time, with lengthy Latin names like “Physiologia Experimentalis” (1680), “Mundus Subterraneus” (1664),”Magneticum Naturae Regnum Sive Disceptatio Physiologica” (1667), “Ars Magna Sciendi Sive Combinatorica” (1669), about subjects such as “Arca Noe” (1675), “Sphinx Mystagoga” (1676), and “Obelisci Aegyptiaci” (1676). Probably his best known work is “Oedipus Aeguptiacus” (1652) one of the first truly encyclopedic resources in the field of Egyptology. He credited his sources as Chaldean astrology, the Hebrew Kabbalah, Arabian alchemy, latin philology, and Pythagorean mathematics. But the resource which was especially helpful to him, in the way the Rosetta Stone eventually would be to others that followed, was the acquisition of the Bembine Tablet–a diagram schematic identifying the host of Egyptian gods and symbols, confiscated from Cardinal Bembo after the Sack of Rome in 1527. Here it is:

Bembine Table of Isis

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Turris Babel

Turris Babel by Athanasius Kircher 1679

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I love serendipity!

I arrove at this image circuitously. As I had mentioned, in a much previous post, I had been searching to find the “blowing wind face” frequent on antiquated maps of the world. I finally did, and one of those maps I discovered, was drawn by Athanasius Kircher.

Like Leonardo da Vinci, the German scholar Athanasius Kircher (ca. 1601-1680) was a true “Renaissance man.” Interested in both the arts and sciences, he wrote several dozen books on everything from medicine and geology to Egypt, cryptography, Noah’s Ark, and musical harmony. Kircher was especially interested in the history of languages, and just a year before his death, he published Turris Babel, a history of the Tower of Babel.

According to the Bible, the people of Babylon attempted to build a huge tower that would reach all the way to heaven. After learning that they were constructing the tower for their own glory rather than His, however, God punished the Babylonians by making them all speak different languages. No longer able to communicate with each other, they stopped work on the tower, left Babylon, and went their separate ways. The tower not only became a symbol for human pride, but also helped explain the origin of languages.

In Turris Babel, Kircher suggested that rather than creating hundreds of languages at one stroke, God preserved Hebrew, which continued to be spoken by the descendants of Noah’s son Shem, and then created four new languages, which he assigned to the descendants of Noah’s other sons. These languages subsequently split apart even further over time, resulting in all the languages that are spoken today. Kircher singled out a few languages for special attention in the second half of his book. Considered the father of Egyptology, he was especially interested in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and he expands on one of his earlier works on this subject here.
lib.lsu.edu | Tower of Babel

I found the discovery that Kircher had illustrated the Tower of Babel as well, interesting in light of my recent posting also about the X-Seed 4000 Ultima Tower being designed right now, at two miles high, the largest human-built structure the world has ever seen.

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Ancient Astronaut?

ancient Iranian pendant

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Planes, Trains, Helicopters and Bees? ……………………………. Those Ancient Egyptians and Their Flying Machines

This article is reprinted from “Did Ancient Egyptians Use Aircraft in Battle”
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It was even before Christ that Greeks took a keen interest in the culture and history of people living on the banks of the Nile River. In 1848, one of numerous archeological expeditions working in Egypt discovered strange hieroglyphs at the height of about ten meters right above the entrance to the Seti Temple in Abydos. The walls were covered with the strange signs that greatly puzzled researchers. The only thing the researchers realized at once was that they had discovered some images of strange mechanisms that nobody ever saw before.

It is still unknown what exactly an artist living about 3,000 years ago engraved on the walls. The archeological expedition carefully copied the mysterious signs on the temple walls, and the hieroglyphs gave rise to endless disputes and heated debates among Egyptologists. As a result, majority of Egyptologists arrived at a conclusion that there were just four strange objects drawn in different variations. Unfortunately, researchers of the 19th century failed to understand what ancient Egyptians actually drew on the temple walls. Like any sensation the mysterious Abydos hieroglyphs were absolutely forgotten some time later.

In about 150 years, the respectable Arab newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat published several sensational photos taken in the Amon Ra Temple in Karnak. At that, the newspaper asked its readers whether they believed that ancient Egyptians knew about battle aviation. The question would have seriously puzzled readers under some different conditions. But the photos the newspaper published demonstrated the bas-reliefs of an ancient temple built under Seti I who ruled 3,000 years ago; and on the bas-reliefs an ancient artist engraved a battle helicopter with a distinct rotor and a tail unit. Nearby, the artist depicted several other aircrafts astonishingly resembling contemporary supersonic fighters and heavy strategic bombers!

After the sensational publication of the photos it became clear why Egyptologists of the 19th century could not tell what was depicted on the walls of the temple in Abydos. Indeed, the researchers did not know how helicopters and aircrafts look.

Pharaoh Seti I was always known as the most famous and successful regents in Ancient Egypt who actively expanded his estates and had to repulse attacks of enemies. Do the published sensational pictures mean that the Pharaoh even employed battle aviation to fight enemies?

Well-known Egyptologist Alan Alford left to the Nile banks to study the Abydos mystery. The researcher studied the mysterious hieroglyphs and made sure that what seemed absolutely incredible was in fact quite real. Alford told journalists that ancient Egyptians had depicted a real helicopter model as if they made the engravings from life.

So, researchers got two almost identical sets of drawings from Karnak and Abydos which seemed be not accidental at all. Skeptics recollected that “Bee” was one of the names of Pharaoh Seti I and stated that the mysterious drawings were in fact attempts of an ancient artist to draw a bee. They would not believe that Egyptians might know about helicopters.

At the same time, world-famous ufologist Richard Hogland declared that the mysterious drawings just proved his theory saying Egyptians descended from Martians who had once visited this planet. The researcher explains that Martians [Annunaki?] chose Ancient Egypt for landing because of its landscape wonderfully resembling the Martian one.

But the ufologist failed to explain the origin of a submarine which was also engraved nearby the battle helicopter on the walls of the temple in Abydos. And the drawing was incredibly detailed. And researchers had to confess they were still too far from solving the mystery of the hieroglyphs and the frescos. It is perfectly clear that there are no seas on Mars, and the drawings of a submarine thus could not be made by “descendants of Martians” as Hogland called Egyptians as they had no notion what a submarine may be.

In the past years of the 20th century, many of Mars researchers actively supported Hogland’s theory. They believed that failures of automated interplanetary space stations to land on Mars were closely connected with the mysterious hieroglyphs discovered on the walls of ancient temples. The researchers stated that millions of years ago a unique anti-missile shield was created around Mars for safe protection from curious and aggressive unwanted guests. When ufologists are told that some automated vehicles actually landed Mars and even took photos revealing there is no civilization on the planet, they say that terrestrials will be able to see only what Martians want and let us know about them.

bee-goddess Camiros, Rhodes

Famous Egyptologist Bruce Rowles gives another interesting hypothesis about the origin of the strange hieroglyphs. He says there were no interplanetary expeditions from other star systems to this planet in the old times. He supposes that Egyptian pagan priests knew many of nature secrets. It is a proven fact that 3,000 years ago Egyptians made the first batteries and generated electricity. Bruce Rowles also supposes that pagan priests in Ancient Egypt could look to the future where they quite probably saw battle helicopters, aircrafts and submarines. But Rowles’ hypothesis is as unstable as the theory of Hogland.

Today, the disputes about the mysterious hieroglyphs are still heated. Some researchers believe that Egyptians knew aeronautics secrets and could fly but later the secrets were lost. But others insist that enthusiasts are too imaginative if they see modern helicopters, aircrafts and submarines in Egyptian engravings and bas-reliefs. Let us forget the heated disputes and see what history says on the issue.

Popular scientific literature says that Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen died 3,300 years ago as a result of an air crash. Historian William Deutch made the sensational statement and also said that ancient Egyptians could go up to the clouds with balloons inflated with hot air and with primitive gliders. Such flights were available for the royal family and nobility only. Deutch says that many of the royal family in Ancient Egypt including Tutankhamun himself died with their legs broken and numerous wounds as if they tragically died as a result of an aircraft crash. The researcher is sure that strange objects depicted in discovered ancient engravings and drawings were in fact the first flying devices. Deutch even made many models of such aircrafts and found out that many of them could soar in the air. William Deutch says that aeronautics first appeared in Egypt and then spread to the territories currently known as Tibet, India, Mexico, Turkey, China and Guatemala, in other words those territories where air flows could hold aircrafts in the skies.

An elegant 4-centimeter item which was obviously used as an amulet or a pendant made not later than the first millennium B.C. is known as “the Columbia gold airplane”. As of today, researchers have found 33 items of the type on the territories of Columbia, Peru, Costa Rica and Venezuela. All of them are different on the outside but have the same principle of airplane construction with the horizontal and vertical keel empennage. Ancient artists often made them look like creatures covered with scales and with glowing eyes. But biologists of the world admit that the gold items cannot be identified with any known creature of fossil or contemporary fauna on the planet.

Contemporary aerotechnics experts believe that “the gold airplane” might be a model of an aerospace aircraft with an opening cockpit; a model of a freight aircraft for landing water for one-time use only and even a model of a sub-aquaplane. But in fact, experts could discern an airplane in the gold model long ago.

In 1956, “the gold airplane” was among exhibits of the Pre-Columbian Gold exhibition in Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The deltoid wing and the vertical plane of the tail unit atypical of birds drew attention of American aircraft designers. The directors of the exhibition allowed testing the ancient “aircraft” in a wind tunnel. It turned out that the gold model could soar at supersonic speed, the issue which was widely studied in that epoch. Amazingly, the ancient wooden model helped aircraft designers of Lockheed create a supersonic plane, the world’s best for that period.

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For more about this you may want to see also “Ancient Airplanes and Ancient Aliens”

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My What Big Eyes They Had

A posting before I lose track of the story shared from “one of those facebook pages”…this is a section of ancient Egyptian art depicting, if you look closely, what appears to be an Alien Grey in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt* (This is not photoshopped. It is a well known piece of art)

“The ancient Egyptians were artists and meticulous chroniclers of history. They adorned the walls of the tombs of the mighty with a record of the great person’s life, deeds, accomplishments. The paintings on the walls of the tomb also recorded for the gods the worthy one’s relationships and momentous occasions. Especially relationships with the Sky Gods and the meetings between gods and humans.
The sensational discovery of an extraterrestrial depicted by ancient Egyptian artist-chroniclers is not unique. Other such finds have been alluded to by researchers for more than 120 years. This is the first, however, that’s been smuggled out of the research archive division of the Egyptian Antiquities department of the governmental authorities in Cairo. Other examples are claimed to be in the British Royal Museum of Natural History. If true, the London curator and staff are not talking.

Some information that found its way to the public was of little consequence except to researchers of the arcane. Other information, however, is potentially world-changing, like the paintings of aliens that adorn some tombs of the ancient Egyptian kings.”

So whaddya think?

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The Patience Stone

The Patience Stone: “Sang-E Saboor”
by Atiq Rahimi
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“For far too long, Afghan women have been faceless and voiceless. Until now. With The Patience Stone, Atiq Rahimi gives face and voice to one unforgettable woman–and, one could argue, offers her as a proxy for the grievances of millions…it is a rich read, part allegory, part a tale of retribution, part an exploration of honor, love, sex, marriage, war. It is without doubt an important and courageous book.” from the introduction by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

In Persian folklore, Syngue Sabour is the name of a magical black stone, a patience stone, which absorbs the plight of those who confide in it. It is believed that the day it explodes, after having received too much hardship and pain, will be the day of the Apocalypse. But here, the Syngue Sabour is not a stone but rather a man lying brain-dead with a bullet lodged in his neck. His wife is with him, sitting by his side. But she resents him for having sacrificed her to the war, for never being able to resist the call to arms, for wanting to be a hero, and in the end, after all was said and done, for being incapacitated in a small skirmish. Yet she cares, and she speaks to him. She even talks to him more and more, opening up her deepest desires, pains, and secrets. While in the streets rival factions clash and soldiers are looting and killing around her, she speaks of her life, never knowing if her husband really hears. And it is an extraordinary confession, without restraint, about sex and love and her anger against a man who never understood her, who mistreated her, who never showed her any respect or kindness. Her admission releases the weight of oppression of marital, social, and religious norms, and she leads her story up to the great secret that is unthinkable in a country such as Afghanistan. Winner of the Prix Goncourt, The Patience Stone captures with great courage and spare, poetic, prose the reality of everyday life for an intelligent woman under the oppressive weight of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

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