The Matrix, 1935
SCIENTIST SAYS UNIVERSE FAKE
Dr. L. B. Tuckerman Makes Attempt to “Debunk” Savants’ Theory
By F. B. COLTON
(Associated Press Leased Wire)
WASHINGTON, Feb. 18.–The universe was shown up as a fake by a scientist who “debunked” it. and revealed it as a fool’s’ paradise for people – including some scientists – who really thought they knew what it was like.
The fake universe is the universe we know, and probably we’ll always have to get along the best we can with it, because the real one is likely to be a will o‘ the wisp just beyond our reach. We can’t measure the real world, time it, or take its temperature with anything like real accuracy, Dr. L. B. Tuckerman told the Washington Academy of Sciences recently.
Paradox
Paradoxically he is an expert measurer himself. He’s on the seat of the national bureau of standards. where the nation’s most accurate measuring is done.
There’s no cause to worry, for our “fake universe” isn’t different enough from the real one to cause inconvenience. We can get along with our foot rules that don’t really measure a foot, clocks that don’t measure an hour and thermometers that don’t actually tell how cold it is.
“Facts Fictions”
Many of our facts are fictions. Doctor Tuckerman said. For example under certain conditions there are right different ways of defining a straight line. It isn’t always just the shortest distance between two points. Nobody really knows the height of any mountain because heights are measured from sea level, and sea level at different points on earth is not the same.
There isn’t any such things as “absolutely zero,” the coldest possible cold, though recently some scientists succeeded in producing a temperature only 18 one-hundredths of a degree above this fictional point.
Time doesn’t actually flow on at an even, unchanging pace. There’s only a convenient fiction too.
Hamburg American Line, 1912
Vandenberg, Alibi, 1985
Mummy Paint, 1903
From New-York Tribune, December 20, 1903
MUMMIES GROUND UP FOR PAINT FOR PICTURES.
Afford Beautiful Tint for Brown Hair with Glint of Gold – Industry Threatened with Extinction from Lack of Material.
Mummy – powdered mummy – makes one of the best and most popular colors used by artists. Every large dealer in oil paints sells powdered mummy, and almost every manufacturer of pigments has a mummy department, where, in a spice laden atmosphere, amid surroundings picturesque and grewsome, young men and women grind up the dried bodies of Egyptian princesses and priests, mix the powder with poppy oil and bottle it for the market in little tubes of tin. Continue reading “Mummy Paint, 1903”
Happy Mother’s Day
85 years ago…
What, in substance, both the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this: the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” – Call of Cthulhu“To R.H. Barlow, Esq., whose sculpture hath given immortality to this trivial design of his obliged obedient servant, H.P. Lovecraft.11th May, 1934”
A sketch of a statuette depicting Cthulhu, drawn by his creator, H. P. Lovecraft.
A Fugitive From Fate
Like a meteor Spring-Heeled Jack spring upon the would-be assassin. “Look to yourself, Sir Whittaker,” screamed the knave, “the fiend himself is here!” “Ay, here to defend the right!” Jack thundered.
Spring-Heeled Jack, 1904, issue #10