The Sweet Lightness of Valentine's Day

 
When covering the Antigravity beat, you're bound to encounter messiahs, angels, gods, and saints, and this being St. Valentine's Day, I thought it wise to trot out the appropriate figure, with Antigravitational angels in attendance.

This image then, painted by Jacobo Bassano in or around 1575, shows St. Valentine baptizing St. Lucilla:


Admittedly, this is not everyone's idea of a romantic interlude, but let it be noticed that the angels hovering over this scene are extremely cupid-like (see my post of 12/25/08 by clicking here), and though Valentine did not, as near as we can tell, lead a sexually indulgent life before embarking on his career as a model of Christian virtue, his feast day, which the world has adopted as a celebration of earthly love, is said to mark the beginning of mating season for birds.


The latter claim holds some local interest for me, since I heard the mourning doves in my lady love's garden start cooing just two days ago--for the first time this year. Such song would suggest that some billing and other intimate behavior have begun to happen here in the borough of Brooklyn, as they may well have done in your neighborhood as well. At least in the northern hemisphere, the days lengthen, and the building of nests and the flowering of crocuses cannot be far away. So thanks again, St. Valentine: You do make a happy marker on our calendars.

As for St. Lucilla, she seems to have been a fairly run-of-the-mill martyr, which doesn't necessarily mean that her soul ascended to heaven in a run-of-the-mill sort of way. Martyrdom, let us remember, was considered a great blessing during Christianity's early centuries, for it guaranteed eternal life in celestial realms. (Does any of this sound familiar?) To reach back a bit to the mourning doves and the lyrics to a sentimental 19th-century song, Lucilla must have been happy to feel her spirit "pluming for flight."

Farewell gravity, hello heaven. What more could you ask for?

P.S. Sweet greetings to lovers everywhere. Please remember that true love is forever kind and courteous, speaking no word in callousness or wrath.
 

Has Antigravity Been Writ Large in the Sky?

 
The year 2001 saw the publication of British journalist Nick Cook's bestselling book The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology.

"Inside" was a bit of an overstatement, since antigravity technology is one of the most classified areas of U.S. government defense-related research, and it is questionable whether anyone is entirely "inside" it, given that its hypothetical advances are shielded in so many ways from so many eyes. Probably not even the president, if he cared to take an interest, would be capable of accessing every corner of whatever super-sensitive developments are taking place in this field.

Nick Cook claims, and it is a hard claim to refute, that the power of antigravity, if harnessed to serve human purposes, would completely revolutionize every area of technological progress, not just our military capabilities.

Altered sources of clean energy would abound. Our methods of constructing tall buildings would utterly change as our present hoisting cranes disappeared from the skyline, to be replaced by antigravitational devices that would float the most massive materials from ground level to upper floors with ridiculous ease.

The shape of our aircraft would be transformed from modified bird forms to perfect disks, and unidentified flying objects would become a thing of the past as our own identifiable saucers filled the sky. Such vehicles would whisk us across our great oceans in minutes and, possibly, open nearby galaxies to our astronauts as antigravitational force was used to propel our spacecraft to the speed of light.

Is there any actual evidence that real breakthroughs have been made in this field? Well, perhaps. Over the years Nick Cook has pursued a number of leads in this almost impenetrable subject area, and if you read his book you'll discover some interesting hypotheses about what might be forthcoming in the field of antigravity. But you must prepare yourself to be more mystified than enlightened.

The state of antigravity studies is revealed by the questions surrounding the photograph above (not from Cook's book), which was apparently taken of the skies over southern England and shows what may or may not be the contrail of a hypersonic vehicle that may or may not employ antigravity technology to push its speed far beyond that of any officially recognized aircraft. What's certain is that the pictured contrail is unlike any that most of us have ever seen, since the engine or engines creating it seem to be pulsing out energy in a way that's entirely different from what we're accustomed to.

This entire area remains highly problematical (you might say Area 51-ish), and our understanding of it is further complicated by the fact that many effects (like magnetic levitation) which mimic antigravitational states be can actually be explained by conventional technology. Still, speculation about scientific concepts of antigravity can be fascinating, and there is nothing in the world that will ever stop it or even slow it down.
 

When Gravity Dreams

 

 

9/11: The Triumph of Fanaticism, Fire, and Gravity

 

But the abyss of gravity shall be
forced to release our dead,
and light supernal shall
shine upon them.

 

Another Compelling Reason to Become a Devout Antigravitarian

If the force of gravity should
suddenly double, something like
this would begin to happen:

This particular vision is the English artist
John Martin's as he painted it in 1853.
(Warning: Clicking on this image will
magnify a number of very gory details.)

Love Conquers Gravity

Yet another image showing how the power
of love can overcome the force of gravity:

The Flight of the Firebird

Here's another clue about
what's happening on this
sometimes mysterious blog:


(This image is worth clicking on
to examine close up, for it chiefly
consists of a photograph of the rather
gorgeous gilded phoenix that appears
in low relief on the facade of the
main Brooklyn [NY] Public Library.)

From our friends at Wikipedia:

“A phoenix is a mythical bird with a tail of beautiful gold and red plumage (or purple and blue, by some sources. It has a 500 to 1,000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again. The new phoenix is destined to live as long as its old self. The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe, thus being almost immortal and invincible — it is also said that it can heal a person with a tear from its eyes and make them temporarily immune to death. The phoenix is a symbol of fire and divinity . . . [It eventually became] a symbol of Christ representing His resurrection, immortality, and life-after-death.”

"Sunrise" by Giangiorgio Cresponi