Westward Expansion

WESTWARD EXPANSION

FAKELORE

MIGRATION

DREAM WORLD

SURFACE WORLD

migration

EXILE

ILLUSION

REALITY

Kon-Tiki Trip Ends on Pacific Reef; Party Safe After 4,000-Mile Drift Raroia Reef, Tuamotu Archipelago, Aug. 7 (delayed) - The Kon-Tiki Raft is on the reef here. The six of us who were its crew are safe and unhurt on an uninhabited island.

This marks the conclusion - and, as such, the success- of our expedition that set out April 28 from Peru to drift across the Pacific, as pre-Inca voyagers are believed to have drifted from South America to Polynesia.

Thor Heyerdahl (October 6, 1914 – April 18, 2002) was a Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer with a background in biology, zoology, botany, and geography. He became notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he sailed 8,000 km (5,000 mi) across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition was designed to demonstrate that ancient people could have made long sea voyages, creating contacts between apparently separate cultures.

KON-TIKI DEMONSTRATED THAT IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR A PRIMITIVE RAFT TO SAIL THE PACIFIC WITH RELATIVE EASE AND SAFETY, ESPECIALLY TO THE WEST (WITH THE

DISTANCE FROM SANTA FE, NM TO VALENCIA, CA (BY WAY OF AUSTIN, TX)

TRADE WINDS).

2010-2013 1,535 mi 114 gallons

MIGRATION [IS] A FORM OF

3 rental properties

‘CREATIVE DES TRUCTION’;

40 freelance jobs

IT RENEWS AND ENRIC HES

12 Egg McMuffins

SOME COMMUNITIES WHILE ERODING OTHERS.

8 Almond Joys 20+ radio plays of Gotya’s, “Somebody That I Used To Know”

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”

The Old Spanish Trail is a historical trade route which connected the northern New Mexico settlements near or in Santa Fe, New Mexico with that of Los Angeles, California and southern California. Approximately 1,200 mi (1,900 km) long, it ran through areas of high mountains, arid deserts, and deep canyons. It is considered one of the most arduous of all trade routes ever established in the United States.

"Pioneers! O Pioneers!" is a poem by the American poet Walt Whitman. It was first published in ‘Leaves of Grass’ in 1865.

The poem was written as a tribute to Whitman's fervor for the great Westward expansion in the United States that led to things like the California Gold Rush and exploration of the far west.

ALL THE PULSES OF THE WORLD, FALLING IN THEY BEAT FOR US, WITH THE WESTERN MOVEMENT BEAT, HOLDING SINGLE OR TOGETHER, STEADY MOVING TO THE FRONT, ALL FOR US, PIONEERS! O PIONEERS!

During World War II, he briefly joined the Merchant Marine and the U.S. Navy, and after the war, in 1947, he met Neal Cassady, with whom he would in the late 1940s begin crisscrossing the country by automobile.

CA <-----NM----->ATX

PECOS BILL IS AN AMERICAN COWBOY, APOCRYPHALLY IMMORTALIZED IN NUMEROUS TALL TALES OF THE OLD WEST DURING AMERICAN WESTWARD EXPANSION INTO THE SOUTHWEST OF TEXAS, NEW MEXICO, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, AND ARIZONA. THEIR STORIES WERE PROBABLY INVENTED AS SHORT STORIES AND A BOOK BY EDWARD S. O’REILLY IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY AND ARE CONSIDERED TO BE AN EXAMPLE OF ‘FAKELORE’. PECOS BILL WAS A LATE ADDITION TO THE “BIG MAN” IDEA OF CHARACTERS, SUCH AS PAUL BUNYAN OR JOHN HENRY.

Pecos Bill had a love interest named Slue-Foot Sue, who rode a giant catfish down the Rio Grande. Shake, Widow-Maker, and Slue-Foot Sue are as idealized as Pecos Bill.

NORTH! TO

LHASA GO NORTH

THERE’S

GOLD

THE RUSH

IN THEM

IS ON!

THAR

HILLS WE PRIMEVAL FORESTS FELLING, / WE THE RIVERS STEMMING, VEXING WE AND PIERCING DEEP THE MINES WITHIN, / WE THE SURFACE BROAD SURVEYING, WE THE VIRGIN SOIL UPHEAVING, / PIONEERS! O PIONEERS!

EXILE IS THE DOMINANT THEME OF OUR TIMES. IT CAN BE FOUND IN THE FORCED MIGRATION of populations but also in the temporal, cultural and physical alienation of the individual’s experiences of the postmodern world.

This is a world of unstable, shifting identities dominated, and perhaps most acutely expressed by, the fluidity of the visual image.

Below: The ecology of the Tibetan Plateau, noted the ministry of land and resources two years ago, is “extremely fragile”. Any damage, it warned, would be difficult or impossible to reverse. But, it went on, the China National Gold Group, a state-owned company, had achieved “astonishing results” in working to protect the environment around its mine near the region’s capital, Lhasa.

On march 29th at least 83 of the mine’s workers lay buried under a colossal landslide. Its cause is not yet certain, but critics of Tibet’s mining frenzy feel vindicated.

Foreign reporters are rarely allowed into Tibet, least of all to cover sensitive incidents. The official media have avoided speculation about any possible link between the landslide and mining activities in the area. They say the landslide covered a large area with 2m cubic meters of rubble. By the time The Economist went to press, 66 bodies had been pulled out by teams of rescuers with sniffer dogs. The high altitude and lack of oxygen made rescue work hard.

The Removal Act paved the way for the reluctant—and mostly forcible—migration of tens of thousands of American Indians to the West, an event widely known as the “Trail of Tears.”

The first removal treaty signed after the Removal Act was the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek on September 27, 1830, in which Choctaws in Mississippi ceded land east of the river in exchange for payment and land in the West. A Choctaw chief, thought to be Thomas Harkins or Nitikechi,

was quoted in the Arkansas Gazette as saying the 1831 Choctaw removal was a “trail of tears and death”. The Treaty of New Echota, signed in 1835, resulted in the removal of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. The Seminoles and other tribes did not leave peacefully; along with fugitive slaves they resisted the removal.

The Second Seminole War lasted from 1835 to 1842 and resulted in the forced removal of Seminoles.

Only a small number remained, and around 3,000 were killed

amongst American soldiers and Seminoles.

Between 1803 and 1861 the people and the institutions of the United States expanded into what is now Oklahoma. This phenomenon did not take place in isolation, nor was it a sequence of random events that were of little consequence to the basic sweep of national development. Instead, it was part of a much larger story that was programmed intentionally by eastern centers of power to meet predetermined objec-

tives. The agents of expansion, consequently, usually found in Oklahoma what they were looking for exploitable natural resources, commercial opportunities, an agricultural paradise, a Great American Desert, a resettlement zone, and a military and administrative problem.

Between 1.5 and two million Tibetan pastoralists have been forcibly displaced from their pastoral lands, while mines for gold and copper ore extraction have been mushrooming.

A nomad is a person with no settled home, who moves from place to place as a way of obtaining food, finding pasture for livestock, or otherwise making a living. The word nomad comes from a Greek word that means one who wanders for pasture. Most nomadic groups follow a fixed annual or seasonal pattern of movements and settlements. Nomadic peoples traditionally travel by animal or canoe or on foot. Today, some nomads travel by motor vehicle. Most nomads live in tents or other portable shelters.

“The Chinese government says the pastoralists are being resettled mainly to conserve the grassland that it claims is being degraded because of unsustainable pastoral practices,” he added.

“But what you are seeing is that these Tibetans are being removed so that their age-old pastoral lands can be rampantly mined and that actually has led to huge environmental destruction.”

Although no official records are available, researchers with the Central Tibetan Administration office say the number of mining sites has reached nearly 240 and that most of them are in the pastoral areas that were once home to nomads.

It has been a silent crisis Some Chinese academics have also expressed reservation on the removal of pastoralists from their native lands.

“The culture of traditional pastoralism has resulted from a long-term interaction with local dynamic ecosystems and social organisations...Rangeland policies that ‘reform’ pastoral society have simultaneously weakened pastoral culture and customs, and changed traditional pastoral living styles.”

C OP P E R

C HR OMI TE

GOLD

You can’t have a mine operating in an area that is meant to be exclusively reserved for rehabilitation of a degraded rangeland.

URANIUM

BORAX

OIL Left: Newly arrived Tibetan refugees at Pokhara, Nepal

GLOBAL NOMADS:

THE EMERGENCE OF THE TIBETAN DIASPORA

20% 5%

MONASTIC

45%

CHILDREN AND STUDENTS SEEKING A TIBETAN EDUCATION NOMADS AND UNEMPLOYED

Once imbued in an aura of adventure, remoteness, and exoticism, the region of the high Himalayan and Central Asian plateau is a global hot spot for ethnic, national, and territorial conflicts.

Tibetans in both indigenous and diaspora contexts participate in high levels of internal migration and out-migration that pose unique challenges and opportunities to their continued existence as a distinctive culture and people.

Since 1959, when Tibet’s leader, the 14th Dalai Lama, fled to India, Tibetans in exile have managed to keep their culture and language alive. They have successfully reconstituted their institutions in exile, dispersing into cohesive and fluid transnational networks to form a key emerging diaspora.

Territories designated as Tibet or Tibetan historically were defined by the high-altitude ecosystem and the inhabitants who were ethnic Tibetans. In marked contrast, the Han Chinese and Indians/Nepalis were agrarian peoples living in the fertile lower-altitude plains that stretched out from the base of the Tibetan highlands and Himalayan foothills.

Traditionally, Tibet included three traditional provinces or regions: Amdo in the northeast, Kham in the southeast, and U-Tsang in the west. After 1959, China demarcated only U-Tsang as the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), the region designated as Tibet on contemporary maps (see map to the left).

Thereafter, TAR was and remains squarely under the dominance of Beijing, with limited Tibetan representation or autonomy. The loss of autonomy and self-governance was even more dramatic in the eastern provinces of Amdo and Kham, where most Tibetans are born and raised.

The regions of Amdo and Kham were absorbed within the expanded borders of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, and, to a lesser extent, Yunnan provinces, outside the borders of TAR. In some of the more remote and rural areas of these provinces, seminomadic Tibetans lived in protected areas comparable to North American Indian reservations.

30% FARMERS

FIGURE 1. COMPOSITION OF RECENT ARRIVALS FROM TIBET IN SOUTH ASIA

ACCORDING TO INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR FREE TIBET, AROUND 2,500-3,500 TIBETANS FLEE TIBET INTO INDIA AND NEPAL ANNUALLY.

IT’S HARD TO DESCRIBE THIS FOR SOMEONE WHO CAN’T SEE IT, BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING IN THE SURFACE WORLD EXPERIENCE THAT PREPARES PEOPLE TO SEE SOMETHING LIKE THIS. IT JUST IS UNLIKE ANYTHING ELSE ON EARTH. Bob Forrest is known for a lot of things in Carlsbad, a quiet city of 25,000 on the edge of new Mexico’s empty, endless chihuahuan desert. He was mayor here for 16 years. He’s chairman of the local bank and owns the spanking new Fairfield inn, which sits next to the new chili’s and the new wal-mart. And he helped bring 200,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste to town.

That’s not a bad thing—at least not here. Unlike thousands of other places in America, where the thought of trucking in barrels of radioactive garbage from atomic weapons plants would lead to marches, face paint and, invariably, pandering politicians (witness Nevada’s stalled yucca mountain project), Carlsbad has a different take. “It’s really a labor of love,” says Forrest. “We’ve proven that nuclear waste can be disposed of in a safe, reliable way.” This attitude—“yes in my backyard,” if you will—has brought near permanent prosperity to this isolated spot that until recently had no endemic economic engine.

Unemployment sits at 3.8%, Versus 6.5% Statewide and 8.5% Nationally. And thanks to this project—euphemistically known as the waste isolation pilot plant, or WIPP—new Mexico has received more than $300 million in federal highway funds in the past decade, $100 million of which has gone into the roads around Carlsbad. WIPP is the nation’s only permanent, deep geologic repository for nuclear waste. The roads have to be good for the two dozen trucks a week hauling in radioactive drums brimming with the plutonium-laden detritus of America’s nuclear weapons production.

Carlsbad has a goldilocks geology that is the best solution yet found for entombing nuclear waste safely. Yucca mountain’s volcanic tuff is prone to cracks and faults from seismic activity, which might, over thousands of years, let water seep in. Salt, on the other hand, is nearly impervious to seismic activity, quickly healing any cracks or faults and remaining completely impermeable—with no way for any water to get in or for any radiation to escape. Carlsbad sits atop the biggest salt deposit in America, stretching from new Mexico clear to Kansas. It was deposited 250 million years ago in the Permian period, when the seas receded from the shore of the ancient continent Pangaea. The salt has lain undisturbed ever since.

Trapped within the salt are microscopic pockets of 250-millionyear-old seawater. Because heat increases the solubility of salt in water, the more heat, the more salt dissolved. One theory suggests that high heat will attract nearby water toward the waste canisters, potentially corroding them. Ned Elkins, Los Alamos lab’s chief salt repository scientist, who works at WIPP, says all current modeling indicates that neither the heat nor water should pose any significant problems, “but we have to let the science speak for itself, to erase all doubt.”

“IT LOOKS SO LUNAR” The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, is a series of caverns mined out of underground salt beds. The department of energy has been burying “transuranic” waste there for 11 years. The waste includes gloves, equipment and chemicals contaminated — probably with plutonium — during the making of nuclear weapons. It’s dangerous stuff but fairly easily handled. That’s what WIPP was built to take. But the federal government has a lot of other really hot, high-level waste to get rid of — especially spent fuel from reactors.

New Mexico legislator john heaton says they’ll take it.

“The geology has been demonstrated that it can actually handle that kind of waste,” heaton says. “In fact, we think that WIPP meets all the requirements that would be necessary for a high-level waste repository.” Heaton represents the Carlsbad region of new Mexico. He’s seen the town profit from the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government has spent here to bury transuranic waste. He says expanding WIPP to accept the really hot stuff is not a geological problem. “There’s really no other concern except political philosophy,” he says.

That’s not what don hancock believes. He’s a nuclear analyst with the southwest research and information center, an environmental group that has monitored WIPP from the start. “It’s the geology that doesn’t permit it,” Hancock says.

He cites nearby oil and gas fields, and the fact that the high heat from the spent fuel would attract water from below the salt beds. Doe scientists say the underground water is too far from WIPP to pose a hazard. But spent fuel isn’t like the waste that’s in WIPP now. It’s very hot. Hot enough to change even the nature of the salt and rock.

Carlsbad Cavern is one of over 300 limestone

James Larkin White (July 11, 1882 – April 26, 1946), better known as

caves in a fossil reef laid down by an inland Sea 250 to 280 million years ago. Twelve to fourteen thousand years ago, American Indians lived in the Guadalupe Mountains; By the 1500s, Spanish explorers were passing through present-day west Texas and southeastern New Mexico.

Spain claimed the southwest until 1821 when Mexico revolted against her and claimed independence. Mexico, fighting the westward expansionist United States in the late 1840s, lost the southwest to the US. In 1850, New Mexico Territory was created, and for the next 30 years the cultural conflict between American Indians and the US government continued.

Eddy, New Mexico, the future Carlsbad, was established in 1888 and New Mexico became a state in 1912.

TEN NINE E IG H T SE V E N SIX F IV E F OU R T H RE E T WO ONE L IF TOF F

Jim White, was a cowboy, guano miner, cave explorer, and park ranger for the National Park Service.

Beginning in 1901, White made the first known extensive explorations of the Carlsbad CavernS. He was chiefly responsible for bringing the attention of the public, scientific groups and the federal government to the importance and significance of the caverns.

The Underground Lunchroom

IF THE GEOLOGICAL MARVELS OF CARLSBAD

In the southeast, where Carlsbad is, attitudes are different.

Ron Curry, who runs the state environment department, grew up in the southeast.

He says it’s a mining culture that’s used to living — and making money — from risky work.

caverns came into being in the time before history, the Underground Lunchroom represents the time before arugula. First established in 1926, the Lunchroom was renovated in the 1970s and it shows. The food and souvenir stations are housed in sandy, brown booths that remind me of the drive-thru bank architecture of my childhood. The food-- box lunches of cold chicken or ham sandwiches, wedges of pie in plastic wedge-shaped containers-- is the sort of fare my grade school washed down with Shasta cola on the Freedom Train field trip in ‘76. Not long after the bicentennial, middle Americans started eating better and dressing better and calling nature the environment, but the Underground Lunchroom is a throwback to our unpretentious if unenlightened past.

I spent a couple hours walking down through the caverns, and this is what I saw. I saw 14 football fields of treasures, things with names like Witch’s Finger, Totem Pole, Mirror Lake, formations described as popcorn and soda straws in

places called the Boneyard or the Hall of Giants. I don’t know how to describe the magnificence of Carlsbad Caverns without making it sound like a cartoon or a drug trip or a cartoon of a drug trip.

The only thing I can say is that it is one of those dear places that make you love the world.

So when I came to the end of the last trail, I wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to the cave. I felt all dreamy, and I didn’t want the feeling to end. I look up at the ceiling of the Lunchroom, which is, of course, the ceiling of the cave.

It looks so lunar I can’t help but think of a certain astronaut. In 1971, Apollo 14’s Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the moon. Gearing up to face the profundity of the universe, this man brought sporting goods with him into space. Who can blame him? That’s what we Americans do when we find a place that’s really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves, and we are a nation of fun-loving dopes.

CARLSBAD HAS A GOLDILOCKS GEOLOGY THAT IS TH

YOU C AN N OT ESC A P E A N ATO M I C BO MB but there is something practical and patriotic you can do to prepare for atomic attack. A millionaire could not construct a complete A-bomb-proof shelter, but the average house-holder can make a worthwhile refuge room in the average basement. By building your family foxhole, you will also be building the state of mind that can resist the pressures of aggression as well as the shocks OF ACTUAL ATOMIC WAR. Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, as a result of the Manhattan Project. The new test site, named the White Sands Proving Ground, was built in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range (now part of the White Sands Missile Range).

The Trinity Explosion, 16 Ms After Detonation.

Ground Control to Major Tom/ Ground Control to Major Tom/ Take your protein pills/and put your helmet on HYPERBARIC MEDICINE, ALSO KNOWN AS HYPERBARIC OXYGEN THERAPY (HBOT), IS THE MEDICAL USE OF OXYGEN AT A LEVEL HIGHER THAN ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE. THE EQUIPMENT REQUIRED CONSISTS OF A PRESSURE CHAMBER, WHICH MAY BE OF RIGID OR FLEXIBLE CONSTRUCTION, AND A MEANS OF DELIVERING 100% OXYGEN. HBOT FOUND EARLY USE

any cover is better than none when the fallout rains down. where the fallout falls depends on where the bomb hits and which way high-altitude winds blow.

IN THE TREATMENT OF DECOMPRESSION SICKNESS, AND HAS ALSO SHOWN GREAT EFFECTIVENESS IN TREATING CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING. BOOKS ARE ALLOWED INTO THE CHAMBER, AND FILMS ARE PROJECTED ONTO THE WALL TO HELP PASS THE TIME DURING TREATMENTS.

Now it’s time to leave the capsule/ if you dare.

‘Basics’ will include beds, food, water, sanitation facilities, lighting and a radio. To alleviate boredom, the designers experimented with variations in lighting. Both incandescents and fluorescents were used.

Switching different ones off and on at intervals helped convey a feeling of the passage of time.

HE BEST SOLUTION YET FOUND FOR ENTOMBING NUCLEAR WASTE SAFELY.

CEREBRAL HYPOXIA OCCURS WHEN THERE IS NOT ENOUGH OXYGEN GETTING TO THE BRAIN. THE BRAIN NEEDS A CONSTANT SUPPLY OF OXYGEN AND NUTRIENTS TO FUNCTION. IT CAN BE TREATED WITH BILEVEL POSITIVE AIRWAY PRESSURE (BPAP), A CONTINUOUS POSITIVE AIRWAY PRESSURE (CPAP) MODE USED DURING NONINVASIVE POSITIVE PRESSURE VENTILATION. IT

DELIVERS A PRESET INSPIRATORY POSITIVE AIRWAY PRESSURE (IPAP) AND EXPIRATORY POSITIVE AIRWAY PRESSURE (EPAP).

The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1781) is thought to be one of the classic depictions of sleep paralysis perceived as a demonic visitation.

But consider the issue of skepticism. The skeptical arguments of Descartes (1641) have had an enormous influence on both the history and practice of epistemology. He suggests certain scenarios that threaten to undermine all of our empirical knowledge of the world. It could be that right now you are dreaming. If you were, everything might appear to you just as it currently does; dreams are sometimes very real. It is also possible that a powerful demon might be deliberately deceiving you; there may not be an external world at all, and all your perceptual experience and perceptual beliefs may be simply planted in your mind by this evil entity.

SP

{

AWAKENING

THE EVENT HORIZON OF A BLACK HOLE IS THE BOUNDARY (‘HORIZON’) BETWEEN ITS ‘OUTSIDE’ AND ITS ‘INSIDE’; THOSE OUTSIDE CANNOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THINGS (‘EVENTS’) WHICH HAPPEN INSIDE.

REM SLEEP WAKEFULNESS REM ATONIA (PARALYSIS) COMMON FEATURES OF SLEEP PARALYSIS: Sleep paralysis is often characterized by a transient inability to move or speak during sleep transitions. In general, the ability to move your eyes is preserved.

Some people try to scream or call out for help, but this may manifest only as a soft vocalization. Others describe a sense of floating, flying or falling.

Vivid hallucinations may be part of this experience. [and] can be divided into visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile experiences. [Some] report that they see flashes, bright colors or lights. Many people hear various noises. It is most common for people to hear voices. The language used

Many people have a sense of suffocating or breathlessness during sleep paralysis, which likely relates to the limited muscles that are active to help you breathe. During REM sleep, the diaphragm acts as a bellows to help you inflate your lungs and breathe, but few of the other accessory muscles of breathing are active.

might seem foreign. There may the perception of whispering, screaming and laughing. Nearly as often, a loud buzzing or static noise is reported, much like the sound of a radio that is on but not tuned to a station.

MAYA (SANSKRIT MĀYĀA), IN INDIAN RELIGIONS, HAS MULTIPLE MEANINGS, CENTERED AROUND THE CONCEPT OF “ILLUSION”.

Maya is the principal deity that manifests, perpetuates and governs the illusion and dream of duality in the phenomenal Universe. For some mystics, this manifestation is real. Each person, each physical object, from the perspective of eternity, is like a brief, disturbed drop of water from an unbounded ocean. The goal of enlightenment is to understand this — more precisely, to experience this: to see intuitively that the distinction between the self and the Universe is a false dichotomy. The distinction between consciousness and physical matter, between mind and body (refer bodymind), is the result of an unenlightened perspective.

Subsequently, in Mahayana Buddhism, illusion seems to play a somewhat larger role. Here, the magician’s illusion exemplifies how people misunderstand themselves and their reality, when we could be free from this confusion. Under the influence of ignorance, we believe objects and persons to be independently real, existing apart from causes and conditions. We fail to perceive them as being empty of a real essence, whereas in fact they exist much like māyā, the magical appearance created by the magician. The magician’s illusion may exist and function in the world on the basis of some props, gestures, and incantations, yet the show is illusory. The viewers participate in creating the illusion by misperceiving and drawing false conclusions. Conversely, when appearances arise and are seen as illusory, that is considered more accurate.

Left: illustration by René Descartes of what he considered to be the dualism between mind and body

Muller-Lyer illusion Perception is a central issue in Epistemology, the theory of knowledge.

At root, all our empirical knowledge is grounded in how we see, hear, touch, smell and taste the world around us.

a

b

a b

One does not necessarily come to acquire perceptual beliefs in virtue of simply seeing the world. The lines above look as though they are of different lengths, the [a] line being longer than [b]. If we have seen the illusion before, then we do not believe our eyes.

Instead, we believe that the lines are the same length (which they are).

YOU ’ V E AWA K E NED I NTO T H E D R EAM WORL D

the final frontier

BLACK HOLES ARE COSMIC OBJECTS THAT HARBOUR A GRAVITATIONAL FIELD SO POWERFUL THAT NOTHING CAN ESCAPE. THEY ARE FORGED IN THE FURNACES OF DYING STARS.