Did Acoustics Arrange Stonehenge?

Placement of the monolithic stones at Stonehenge could be related to an acoustic phenomenon created when two pipers play the same note, according to a new theory from archaeoacoustician Steven Waller.

A person walking in a circle around the pipers hears the note's volume decrease at certain points where the two sound waves collide and cancel one another out. At these spots, it sounds as though a giant pillar is blocking the sound, Waller says.

According to New Scientist:

Perhaps, Waller proposes, the ancients thought these silent points were invisible walls from the spirit world. They may have then arranged Stonehenge and the stone circles like it as very physical, 40-tonne incarnations of these walls.  

To test whether the illusion holds true in real life, Waller took blindfolded volunteers out into an empty field and led them in a circle around two recorders that were playing the same note. Then he asked the volunteers to draw the space they thought they had walked through.  

All six of the volunteers drew a circle of pillars or archways between themselves and the recorders. 

"It's a very mystical phenomenon," Waller says, and would have been totally inexplicable to ancient people who didn't understand the physics of sound waves.

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What's the Light from El Castillo?

Is it an image of the cosmic power of a Mayan temple? Is it a Photoshop image designed to fool gullible viewers? Or is it a glitch in Hector Siliezar’s iPhone? Nobody is really certain.

Siliezar took the photo in 2009 in a series of three photos as he attempted to catch a lightning strike above the El Castillo pyramid in Chichen Itza. A thunderstorm was overhead and lightning was beginning to flash.

His first two photos show nothing out of the ordinary. When he took the third photo, the vertical beam of light from the pyramid’s apex was undetected by the naked eye. Everyone he immediately showed the photo was amazed. Of course the photo now is making the rounds of Mayan calendar sites.

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Mount Shasta Long Shrouded in Mystery

When John Muir, the noted explorer of the American West, first spotted Mt. Shasta in in 1874 in northern California, he wrote: "I was 50 miles away, afoot, alone and weary, yet all of my blood turned to wine and I have not been weary since."

The picturesque 14,162-foot peak has long elicited such awe. It has been touted as the site of an energy vortex that allows passage into the metaphysical dimension, called the birthplace of a spiritual foundation whose adherents believe they can ascend to the eternal realm, and is said to be a hot spot for UFOs that hide in the clouds and enter the mountain's core through mystery portals.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

A tale written a few years later (after Muir’s account) by a teenager from Yreka, just northwest of the mountain ~ a story of advanced beings living in a crystal city beneath the mountain ~ cemented Shasta's otherworldly reputation.  

Newer to the repertoire are sightings of Bigfoot (the word serves as both singular and plural, like fish and sheep), believed by some to conceal themselves by passing into a fifth dimension.  

In 2008, the Mount Shasta Herald reported that five people claimed to have witnessed a jellyfish-like craft that hovered noiselessly over neighboring McCloud, with what appeared to be a fire raging inside it. 

"Mt. Shasta has always had a spiritual drawing, but it's getting more and more popular," says, Karen Anderson, a supervisor in a local visitors bureau, who estimated that a fourth of the area's tourists are drawn by the mountain’s unusual reputation.

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Context of Our Existence on Earth

I'm a great fan of physicist Peter Russell, author of From Science to God and several other profound books. Here's a new video he just released on the composition of our universe and beyond, showing that we are "specks in infinity." For more of Peter's thoughts, writings and videos, visit his website.

String Theory May Explain Dimensions

We humans experience our universe in three dimensions, yet superstring theory claims there are 10 dimensions ~ nine spatial ones plus a dimension of time. Now some Japanese scientists think they may have an explanation for how a three-dimensional universe emerged from the original nine dimensions of space.

According to Discovery.com:

According to string theorists, there are the three full-sized spatial dimensions we experience every day, one dimension of time, and six extra dimensions crumpled up at the Planck scale like itty-bitty wads of paper. As tiny as these dimensions are, strings ~ the most fundamental unit in nature, vibrating down at the Planck scale ~ are even smaller.  

The geometric shape of those extra dimensions helps determine the resonant patterns of string vibration. Those vibrating patterns in turn determine the kind of elementary particles that are formed, and generate the physical forces we observe around us, in much the same way that vibrating fields of electricity and magnetism give rise to the entire spectrum of light, or vibrating strings can produce different musical notes on a violin.  

All matter (and all forces) are composed of these vibrations -- including gravity. And one of the ways in which strings can vibrate corresponds to a particle that mediates gravity.

Scientists believe string theory could be used to explore the infinitely tiny point of our universe's birth.

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Dreams Activate Brain As In "Real Life"

Scientists, for the first time, have analyzed the activity of the human brain during dreaming. Using lucid dreamers ~ people who are aware of their dreaming state and are able to alter a dream's content ~ they determined that brain activity during a dream matches the activity of the brain during a state of wakefulness.

According to ScienceDaily.com:

Methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have enabled scientists to visualize and identify the precise spatial location of brain activity during sleep. However, up to now, researchers have not been able to analyze specific brain activity associated with dream content, as measured brain activity can only be traced back to a specific dream if the precise temporal coincidence of the dream content and measurement is known. 

Whether a person is dreaming is something that could only be reported by the individual himself.

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, the Charité hospital in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig asked lucid dreamers to become aware of their dream actions while sleeping and then repeat certain actions while awake.

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