Events at Physics |
Events on Tuesday, March 29th, 2016
- Chaos & Complex Systems Seminar
- Star-beings and stones: Origins and legends
- Time: 12:05 pm - 1:00 pm
- Place: 4274 Chamberlin Hall (refreshments will be served)
- Speaker: Herman Bender, Freelance Geologist
- Abstract: Native American myths, legends and oral traditions are rich with stories of giant beings existing in ancient times. They all talk of giant Thunderers or Thunder-beings, giant snakes and great Thunderbirds. Even the first humans were said to be giants, some half man, half animal. The Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) have a name for the giant beings their ancestors encountered during the early migration to the grasslands of the Great Plains. They called them haztova hotoxceo or “two-faced star people”. Other Plains tribes such as the Black Feet, Gros Ventres and Lakota have similar stories. These old stories may have real world counterparts. Discovered in a prehistoric effigy-mound group (the Kolterman Mounds) in southeastern Wisconsin (USA) is a human-like petroform effigy with a serpentine body and wing-like arms known as the ‘Star-Being’. Configured in stone, it is approximately 20 meters in length with a red colored, bison-shaped headstone aligned to face the summer solstice sunrise. However, it is not a lone or singular occurrence. The ‘Star-Being’ is but one of two human-like petroforms effigies discovered in southeastern Wisconsin. There is another of almost the same size called the Starman which also has a red-colored, bison-shaped headstone aligned to face the summer solstice sunrise. Both the Starman and Star-Being petroform complexes are codified by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin as archeological sites of Archaic age. Each giant effigy appears to be a reflection of certain constellations and stars, the ‘Star-Being’ a mirror-image of the (western) constellations of Scorpius and Libra (with Sagittarius); the Starman an almost exact representation of Taurus and the Pleiades. Both giant effigies are estimated to be 3500-6000 years old, embodiments of ancient legends and traditions writ large in stone and connected to ‘The People’ through ceremony and acts of cosmic renewal.
- Host: Clint Sprott
- Theory Seminar (High Energy/Cosmology)
- Type Ia Supernovae and Heavy Metals From Dark Matter
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Joseph Bramante, University of Notre Dame
- Abstract: Recent studies of low-redshift type Ia supernovae indicate
that at least half explode from sub-Chandrasekhar mass progenitor
white dwarfs. This talk explains how asymmetric dark matter would
ignite white dwarfs, and form star-destroying black holes inside old
neutron stars inhabiting regions densely populated with dark matter.
Links between dark matter and the anomalously high heavy metal
abundance of Reticulum II will also be discussed. - Host: Yang Bai