Photo by Carlo Columba

At that moment, waiting for my bus, the universe opened beneath my feet. I looked across the ecliptic to Jupiter and felt as though I were standing on the slope of a steep mountain at the edge of the sea, a lighthouse beaming across the darkness from the far shore. Below the line formed by Jupiter and Venus, I stared down into the depths of space.

To keep from feeling as if I were about to slip off the face of the Earth, I grabbed hold of the bus stop sign.

The Einstein Theory of Relativity 1923 from ricordidimenticati on Vimeo.

Historical amusement aside, it’s an entertaining and often beautiful way to learn about Albert Einstein’s famous theory.

Via Boing Boing.

This time-lapse video captures some of the magic of this wonderful city.

Photo by Vince Musi from National Geographic

As little as we know about the builders of Newgrange in Ireland, we know even less about the builders of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. What we do know about these monuments is that the first were built about 11,000 years ago, during the earliest years of the Eurasian Neolithic. In other words, Göbekli Tepe predates our current understanding of when agriculture began. (And yes, it also predates Stonehenge — by six or seven thousand years.) It’s hard to imagine what motivated tribes of hunter-gatherers to create such monumental architecture, full of animal sculptures and mysterious standing stones. It’s also hard to conceive of why each succeeding structure grew smaller and less sophisticated over time.

So this is where archaeology, science fiction, and poetry all converge. As a poet, archaeology enables me to explore that alien otherness while remaining grounded in the scientific reality of human experience.

More about Göbekli Tepe:

• Archaeology: The World’s First Temple
• Smithsonian: Göbekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? (with photo gallery)
• National Geographic: The Birth of Religion (with photo gallery)

Although the New York Times article summarizing the study focuses on the newsworthiness of these tools as the oldest, it makes a few other interesting points.

The story of human progress is unavoidably a story of technological innovation, Paleolithic designs fading into oblivion as Neolithic tools take their place. Right? Not necessarily.

In reality, it’s not always as simplistic as one technology giving way to the “next,” as these recently dated discoveries show. Older Oldowan tools were discovered alongside the more advanced Acheulean tools, indicating that “the two technologies are not mutually exclusive.”

Other highlights (or, things Andrew didn’t know):

• The first humans to leave Africa didn’t take the Acheulean technology with them.
• Acheulean technology wasn’t widely adopted for another several hundred thousand years.

Full NYTimes.com article via Boing Boing.

Like pilgrims more than 5,000 years ago, my first view of Newgrange came between the trees, atop its hill across the River Boyne. Of course, I was standing in the quite modern Brú na Bóinne Visitors Centre, but the effect was still awe-inspiring.

I waited for my assigned time slot (tours of Newgrange are only available through the Visitors Centre) and walked across the river to the shuttle bus stop, pausing on the bridge to look downriver, the Boyne meandering toward the Irish Sea. It began to rain.

The edifice dominates the hill Newgrange stands on, overlooking the Boyne valley with dozens of smaller unexcavated tombs dotting farmers’ fields below. (The reconstructed exterior is somewhat controversial — did Neolithic builders have the technology to create that white vertical wall? — though what’s visible today uses all original materials.) The front of the mound is faced by a circle of standing stones that cast shadows on the entrance at key times of the year.

One of the most impressive — and photographed — external features of Newgrange is the entrance stone, carved with abstract designs such as swirls and lozenges. In the Neolithic, the stone forced ancient visitors to climb over to cross the threshold into the sacred space within. Modern visitors are afforded wooden stairs (replete with metal handrails for “health and safety”).

Photography isn’t allowed inside. This sketch from 1903 gives a sense of the passage’s general dimensions, with the main chamber at the end.

As I stepped inside, the passage floor twisted upward toward the chamber. After squeezing past stones crushed out of alignment in their walls by the pressure from 5,000 years of the mound’s weight above, I stood in the chamber. Looking up, lines of corbelled stones stepped steeply upward toward the the vaulted ceiling in the darkness.

Each Winter Solstice, the rising sun shines through an opening above the entrance and illuminates the chamber. A rainy mid-afternoon in mid-June doesn’t have quite the same light, but thanks to a little modern technology (and just a hint of blarney from our guide), I stood in the interior of a 5,000-year-old passage tomb and saw light creep across the floor and touch the rear of the chamber as it did so long ago.

It was easy to imagine how celebrants must have felt in 3,200 BCE — that connection between something we humans have made and the nature with which we’re all still a part. But there’s also a deep sense of disconnection with that past, emphasized by one little piece of information I learned as the guide talked there in the dark with a halogen light shining up the tunnel.

The sun doesn’t shine exactly on the back of the chamber. It would be easy to dismiss this little fact as a lack of precision on the part of the Neolithic engineers or astronomers who designed Newgrange. In reality, the earth itself has shifted enough on its axis over the past 5,200 years that the passage and chamber are no longer aligned with the sun. The structure is so ancient that changes in the order of the universe itself have misaligned Newgrange from the Winter Solstice sun.

We have no idea what the carvings in and around Newgrange mean. We have no idea if it was even built as a tomb, or (quite probably) some type of solar observatory connected to religious faith. Despite all we’ve learned of their material culture and environment, the builders of Newgrange remain effectively a mystery. Nothing emphasizes this more than the failure of light from our sun to illuminate the modern darkness inside Newgrange the way it did in the Neolithic.

Axial precession will bring Newgrange back into alignment with the Winter Solstice in another 21,000 years. Will Newgrange still be standing? Will we still be around to find out?

Its ragged edges and rough sounds
catch the water and collect its story —

from sky to peak, through wood and moss,
off asphalt, boulders, steel. I’ll hear the patter

of rain on the earth above, crawl forth
and speak of the small things I see.

Mud and leaves, wet stones, moist bark.
I’ve waited too long. Now my work begins.

- Michael Shermer, quoted on page 345 of The God Delusion

Phacops rana trilobite, middle Devonian – 397-407 million years old

One of my dearest memories of the summer in 1994 that I spent working on an archaeological dig in Jordan was a weekend trip to Petra. We arrived from Amman late in the evening, but several of my fellow archaeology students couldn’t wait until morning to see the amazing structures carved from the sandstone 2000 years ago, so we snuck across wadi after wadi, avoiding the main paths. Once past the guard posts, we walked through the narrow gorge known as al-Siq — pitch black at night — until the passage opened in front of us to reveal Al Kazhneh, lit only by starlight.

ArzLan built his LEGO version of the Treasury for the Hong Kong Animation Festival, and features Indiana Jones in his Last Crusade visit to this UNESCO Heritage site.

Their purpose complete, we encase them
     in stone. If you follow this road
          due north, you’ll find
the old school facing the water. Tumbleweeds
     flit by its empty windows like neutrons
          dancing toward their new life.

Wind and soldiers have taken the wood
     from homes left behind
          to make way for all this science.
Submarines rust in pits.
     The salmon don’t run. There are no
          signs to explain what this place means.

That shimmer you feel on the wind,
     the way the ground sometimes shudders —
          the power we achieved
in those black buildings hangs in the air
     and lingers in the soil. Out there on the horizon,
          they will remain when all of us are gone.

Read about the experience that created this poem in “Stuck in a Hanford reactor building elevator.”