Chapter 8 - The Holy of Holies

I took this photo from roughly the position in which Prof tells Danny and Katy about time travel:

Here's a few tidbits related to the chapter:

  • Stephen Hawking wrote a book called A Brief History in Time, about the universe. He argues that time travel might be possible, but it would take an enormous amount of energy to do it.
  • The Egyptians dated the beginning of their year from when the start Sirius rose at the same time as the sun (it's briefly visible just before dawn). This is called the heliacal rising of Sirius. For 70 days of the year before this Sirius is not visible in the sky. The heliacal rising was around June 21, i.e. the summer solstice, a significant time for the Egyptians because this was when the Nile waters began to rise for the all-important flood.

A priest - with a bald head

 

 

Right - entrance to the  inner sanctuary of Amun

 

 

 

  • The silver cord idea comes from astral projection. Astral projection is supposed to be a way of leaving your body and flying wherever you want. It's related to out-of-body-experiences, which some people say have occurred to them when unconscious - for example knocked down in an accident. They find themselves floating above their body, watching it. Of course this could just be a dream, except that some have said they saw details like the colour of someone's clothes, which they could not have known without seeing them. In the 60s astral projection was a popular hippie-type idea in which you could  travel through the astral plane - whatever that is. Your astral body was connected to your real body by a silver cord, and it was not a good thing to break that cord.

  • In my late teens I had a go at astral projection. I would fall into a doze on my bed, in the afternoon, and have strange dreams where I felt that my arms or my legs left their true flesh selves and moved about. I would find these astral arms could move through the bed sheets, but not through other parts of my body. All a dream, you say. Probably. But one day I was snoozing on my bed in my room at Nottingham University, and I 'projected' my legs down through the bed. At least until they were stopped by something that was almost painful - some sort of bar across my lower legs. And when I woke up and looked underneath I found a metal bar in exactly the right place. Freaky, huh?

  • Here's a website all about it: http://www.astralvoyage.com/projection/index.html