Did an erotic siren lure Percy Fawcett to his death as he searched for a lost city in the Amazon?

It is an unsolved riddle which has inspired explorers and writers for nearly 80 years. Yet now, after a decade of research, one British writer and director has shed unexpected light on the murky fate of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett and those who followed him deep into the Brazilian jungle.

It has long been assumed that the missing colonel, a celebrated explorer who knew the popular adventure writers Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, must have been murdered by Amazonian tribesmen in 1925 during his fabled expedition to find the Lost City of Z. The truth, however, turns out to be stranger than the myth.

According to previously hidden private papers, it appears that Fawcett had no intention of ever returning to Britain and, perhaps lured by a native she-god or spirit guide whose beautiful image haunts the family archive, he planned instead to set up a commune in the jungle, based on a bizarre cult.

'The English go native very easily, he once wrote. 'There is no disgrace in it. On the contrary, in my opinion it shows a creditable regard for the real things in life.'

More than 13 separate expeditions have so far failed to discover what happened to Fawcett in the darkest Amazonian jungle and 100 people have died in the attempt. Only eight years ago a group following his footsteps into the Mato Grosso region had to be rescued after they were held hostage by Kalapalo tribesmen and put in fear of their lives. But the veil is at last lifting.

After visiting this remote jungle, then gaining permission to search through Fawcett's correspondence for the first time, theatre and television director Misha Williams now believes the other expeditions have all been travelling in the wrong direction and looking for the wrong things.

Fawcett, he claims, hoped to follow what he privately described to friends and family as 'the Grand Scheme'. He wanted to set up a secret community which would be based on a mixture of unusual beliefs involving both the worship of his own son, Jack, and the tenets of the then-fashionable credo of theosophy.

'I can now show that there were scores of associates who were planning to go out and join Fawcett to live in a new, freer way,' said Williams, who has become a confidant of Fawcett's descendants. He has also uncovered a drawing of a beguiling and ageless 'sith' or female 'spirit guide' who he suspects is near the heart of the mystery. Appearing only to the Fawcett family and to those who try to track the expedition's path, the erotic siren draws white men into the jungle.

Williams's revelations have already inspired a new expedition into the region. Mark Beken of the travel company High and Wild is hoping to take a group into the jungle next summer to follow up the new evidence about Fawcett's story.

'We will be taking a different route to previous expeditions because of Misha's findings,' said Beken, who hopes that his team will have more luck than earlier attempts. 'In the past it has been very dangerous because it was still bow-and-arrow territory and because of malaria and yellow fever.'

Williams explains that much of the uncertainty surrounding the disappearance of the colonel can be put down to the Fawcett family's own attempts to protect their father's reputation. His surviving son, Brian, even went so far as to write a bestselling book, Exploration Fawcett , in a deliberate effort to put up a 'smoke screen', said Williams, who has written his own play about Fawcett which opens next month at the Bridewell Theatre in London.

The man at the centre of the puzzle was born in Torquay in 1867 and first fell in love with South America when he helped the Bolivian government to survey its frontier with Brazil.

He served with distinction in the First World War, but today his real fame stems from the moment when, at the age of 58, he set out with his eldest son and his son's friend, Raleigh Rimmell, to look for a hidden 'city of gold', known in mythology as Z.

The last word was heard from the group as they crossed the Upper Xingu, a south-eastern tributary of the Amazon. Repeated rescue missions followed, as did rival theories about Fawcett's demise. Either he had been eaten by jaguars, was still living alone as a native, had starved or been killed by the indigenous people, the Kalapalo. Bones unearthed in 1951 proved on examination not to belong to Fawcett and the mystery grew.

'This is one of the great adventure stories of the past century,' said Williams, 'and at last we are finding out what really happened. Fawcett was a kind of Indiana Jones figure and his children have fought hard to keep his good name, in spite of interest from Hollywood and countless books.

'His secret plans for a new and unconventional way of life have only just emerged from the letters he wrote to friends.'

Source: Guardian Unlimited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/brazil/story/0,12462,1174589,00.html 

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Time travel has long been a staple of science fiction - and this year sees more films and books on the theme - but could it happen in reality?

Who wouldn??™t want to travel in time? It is the most romantic of all science-fictional dreams. A time machine would be jolly handy for visiting a long-lost lover, correcting a mortifying mistake or reliving a triumph over and over again. You could put historians out of business. You could jump back to the future and return with sufficient insider know-how to change history, save a life, even rule the world.

Crackpots, mystics and movie scriptwriters adore the infinite paradoxical possibilities. The BBC is to explore them once again by dusting off the Tardis and regenerating its iconic character Dr Who. Hollywood has also embraced the theme of time travel with Primer, about two small-time inventors whose experimental time machine has a disastrous impact on their lives; and The Butterfly Effect, in which current teen favourite Ashton Kutcher has the mysterious ability to travel back in time to alter aspects of his childhood, with unexpected and creepy sideeffects.

Meanwhile, Audrey Niffenegger??™s haunting first novel, The Time Traveller??™s Wife, has become an international bestseller and has been optioned by New Line and Plan B, the production company of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.
  
Niffenegger has rejected traditional time machines and instead plumped for Chrono- Displacement Disorder, a genetic illness of the future. Henry DeTamble, the hero of her tale, is the first to be diagnosed and the possible harbinger of a new species of human. He tends to revisit the most stressful, pivotal points of his life, such as the decapitation of his mother as she drives her white 1962 Ford Fairlane. Although the six-year-old Henry time-travels out of danger, he returns endlessly to the grim scene.

Sometimes, there are two Henrys. Often there is none at all. This is most likely what attracted Aniston and Pitt to the celluloid possibilities. But what of any real-life possibilities?

We all have a ???subjective??? clock in our heads that, with tinkering, could change our perception of time, and a circadian timepiece that harnesses our body rhythms to the rising and setting sun. But the possibilities raised by altering various ???clock genes??? (described, along with vanishing genetically modified time-travelling rodents, by the novel??™s resident boffin, Dr David Kendrick) fall far short of the temporal hopes that Niffenegger describes.

But who cares? This is fiction. She uses the disorder as a bold, interesting (sometimes illogical) conceit for encouraging the reader to think about the intimacy of time, how ineffable it is and how it shapes us.

Although scientists cannot imagine how genes could ever make time travel possible, they are all happy to confirm that a ???weak??? form is very much a reality. ???Travel into the future is not only possible, we??™ve done it,??? declares Paul Davies, of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology and the author of How to Build a Time Machine.

Experiments with atomic clocks on aircraft and spacecraft have demonstrated what scientists call time dilation, a consequence of the special theory of relativity unveiled by Albert Einstein in 1905. If an object moves almost as fast as light, or is exposed to strong gravity near a neutron star or black hole, time for it is stretched relative to you and me.

The classic demonstration of this effect involves twins. Imagine you had a twin sister who set off in a spaceship that travelled at near-light speed. If she came back to earth after what seemed to you to be 20 years, she would think that far less time had passed. You, however, will look, feel and be much older. ???This is travel into the future for one twin,??? said Davies.

Given the speeds typically attained by even the fastest people on earth, the effects are so modest that they hardly make for a Dr Who-style caper. Richard Gott, a Princeton theorist and the author of Time Travel in Einstein??™s Universe (who came up with one time-machine design), calculated that Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev is 0.02 of a second younger than he would be if he had not ventured repeatedly into space.

We can go faster, of course. If a space ship went very near the speed of light (the cosmic speed limit), it might seem to the astronaut on board that the trip to the heart of our galaxy had taken only a few years.

The same goes for high gravity. An astronaut who managed to navigate into the closest possible orbit around a rapidly spinning black hole ??” without falling in ??” could, in a subjectively short period, view an immensely long time span unfold around him. But the downside, according to physicist Professor Stephen Hawking, is that, when he returned home, everyone he knew would be dead and forgotten.

Travel into the past also seems possible: no known law of nature seems to rule it out. But this has triggered deep unease among scientists and philosophers because it allows "time loops", in which events in the future ???cause??? events in the past that then ???cause??? their own causes.

They mutter darkly about the grandfather paradox, where you would travel back into the past and kill your grandfather, so that your mother, and therefore you yourself, were never born. In which case, you could not have gone back in time to kill your grandfather ??” and so on.

Time travel destroys the all-too-reasonable idea of cause and effect. As Niffenegger??™s Henry remarks: "Things get kind of circular, when you??™re me. Cause and effect get muddled."

Science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov created the notion of busy "time police" to keep people from murdering their grandmothers. Others have proposed the principle of selfconsistency. Niffenegger makes a nod in this direction because her hero can??™t take anything with him ("If we time travellers started to move things around in time, pretty soon the world would be a big mess") or prevent harm coming to a little girl ("I wanted to warn her mother and I couldn??™t"), raising issues about free will. But she does allow him to cart information back and forth to teach his younger self the art of pickpocketing, give stock tips and win the lottery.

Scientists are still arguing about time travel, even if it was first given serious lab cred decades ago ??” in 1949 ??” by the great logician Kurt Godel while considering a rotating universe. Godel used the general theory of relativity (which tells you how to change the shape of a blend of space and time called spacetime and is the descendant of Einstein??™s special theory) to create temporal loops: the river of time can contain whirlpools and eddy currents.

Several later theorists also used general relativity this way to make short cuts through spacetime that allow journeys into the past.

Even the great Einstein, while working with Nathan Rosen in Princeton in the 1930s, discovered that his equations could bridge time, without realising it. Such an "Einstein-Rosen bridge" ??” which we now call a wormhole ??” could lead to the possibility of movement through cosmic distances. But he did not seem to appreciate that by moving one end of the bridge, a wormhole might just as well link two different times as two different places.

However, the wormhole itself does not exist for long. In effect, gravity quickly slams this portal shut. This proved to be a headache when the late astronomer Carl Sagan decided to write a sciencefiction novel, Contact.

Sagan wanted to fix this problem to allow his heroine to travel from Earth to a point near the star Vega. In 1985, he approached Kip Thorne at the California Institute of Technology for help. He in turn enlisted the aid of his students.

Thorne, Michael Morris and Ulvi Yurtsever speculated that with the help of quantum theory ??” the somewhat bizarre theory that governs the subatomic world in terms of probabilities, not certainties ??” it might indeed be possible to travel between different places and times. In 1987, they reported that for a wormhole to be held open, its throat would have to be threaded by some form of exotic matter, or some form of field, that would exert negative pressure or negative energy and have anti-gravity associated with it.

Other researchers hunting for flaws argued against such theoretical time machines. In 1990, for example, Hawking proposed a chronology protection conjecture, which says that the laws of physics disallow time machines. Three years later, Amos Ori, of the Technion in Israel, concluded that the possibility of constructing a time machine from conventional materials could not be ruled out. "There are loopholes in Hawking??™s arguments," he said.

Hawking describes in his recent book The Universe in a Nutshell how he tried to put his chronology protection idea on a firm theoretical basis. With Michael Cassidy, Hawking investigated what are called rotating Einstein universes, which admit time loops ??” time travel ??” and found that the probability of their having sufficient warping for a time machine to function is almost zero.

The probability that Thorne could go back and kill his grandfather was less than one in 10 with a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion zeros after it, according to Cassidy. "That??™s a pretty small probability," said Hawking. ???But if you look closely at a picture of Kip, you may see a slight fuzziness around the edges. That corresponds to the faint possibility that some bastard from the future came back and killed his grandfather, so he??™s not really there.???

Tongue in cheek, Hawking adds that there is experimental evidence that time travel doesn??™t exist: "We have no reliable evidence of visitors from the future. (I??™m discounting the conspiracy theory that UFOs are from the future and that the government knows and is covering it up. Its record of cover-ups is not that good.)"

Perhaps time-travellers are models of discretion. Henry remarks in Niffenegger??™s book: "If everybody time-travelled, it would get too crowded."

But it seems highly likely that if time travel were possible, we would have had thrill-seekers from the future converging on Afghanistan years ago to assassinate Osama bin Laden, attempting to prevent the horrors of September 11, saving the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, and so on.

Scientists who defend the right to time travel point out that it is not possible to use these sorts of time machines to venture back to before the machine was built. You can voyage to the future and come back to where you started, but no farther. This may explain why no time travellers from our future have yet visited us.

And there may even be a way around the paradoxes, too, according to David Deutsch of Oxford University. He argues that time travel shifts between different branches of reality, basing his claim on the so-called "many-worlds" formulation of quantum theory. This was first glimpsed by the great quantum pioneer Erwin Schrodinger, but actually published in 1957 by Hugh Everett III, when wrestling with the problem of what actually happens when an observation is made of something of interest ??” such as an electron or an atom ??” with the intention of measuring its position or its speed.

In the traditional brand of quantum mechanics, a mathematical object called a wave function, which contains all possible outcomes of a measurement experiment, "collapses" to give a single real measurement. Everett came up with a more audacious interpretation: the universe is constantly and infinitely splitting, so that no collapse takes place. Every possible outcome of an experimental measurement occurs, each one in a parallel universe.

If one accepts Everett??™s interpretation, our universe is embedded in an infinitely larger and more complex structure called the multiverse, which as a good approximation can be regarded as an ever-multiplying mass of parallel universes. Every time there is an event at the quantum level ??” a radioactive atom decaying, for example, or a particle of light impinging on your retina ??” the universe is supposed to ???split??? into different universes.

Accordingly, when Niffenegger??™s Henry moves to a different era, he arrives in a different parallel universe. "We do not create a new reality. We just go to an existing reality and make things happen there," says Deutsch. "And they start happening when we arrive, not when we do the 'paradoxical' thing."

In this way, the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics allows a time traveller to alter the past without producing problems such as the notorious grandfather paradox.

It remains a matter of taste whether going to a parallel universe counts as true time travel. "If it became possible to receive messages from the future, few would quibble about terminology just because it was the future of a slightly different universe," he says.

The controversy over the possibilities of time travel is likely to rumble on for years. Indeed, there are even those who don??™t believe in time at all. In his book The End of Time, physicist Julian Barbour departs radically from the conventional view of time ??” that it is a primary constituent of the universe, analogous to space ??” and argues that the universe is timeless. Barbour therefore thinks that time travel is impossible because there is no time in which to travel.

Intriguingly, Niffenegger??™s hero, Henry, muses on whether we live in a "block cosmos", where past, present and future coexist: this echoes Barbour??™s timeless universe. Barbour also believes that we already do something much more impressive than using a time machine for a temporal hop: "Through memories and anticipations in our present 'Now', we are in a very real sense also present in 'Nows0' in our past and our future."

This chimes with the constant yearning of the book??™s heroine to be reunited with her beloved Henry, as Niffenegger explores the incredible gravitational tug of human memory.

Source: theage.com
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/21/1079823223001.html 

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A physics professor will try to turn back time in an experiment at the Miami Museum of Science.

It's back to the future all over again -- at least, that's what Carlos Dolz has in mind.

The Florida International University physics professor plans to take time to task at 10 a.m. Wednesday, when he presents an experiment that involves using acceleration to speed up a digital clock by four seconds.

Dolz's experiment -- which takes six hours to finish -- will become part of Playing With Time, the current exhibit at the Miami Museum of Science.

Dolz, who has been a lecturing theoretical physicist for nine years, really doesn't know where his experiment could lead.

''The point of this is to question how things really work,'' he said. ``This goes beyond common understanding.''

The aptly titled ''Time Shift Experiment'' combines some of the most complicated physics concepts with simple machines and -- Dolz said -- may prove that time travel is possible.

Time shifts are not uncommon, the professor said. There have been experiments in the past that compared atomic clocks on fast-flying planes to those on the ground. The clocks on board the planes showed a slight shift forward, Dolz said.

He said he became even more fascinated by time when he was studying gravity -- he found that he could not truly understand one without the other.

He began fiddling with time shifts in his experiments and was approached by Museum of Science officials in late 2003.

They had decided to host the time exhibit to pique public interest in the abstract concept of time.

''[Time] is a hands-on phenomenon,'' said Sean Duran, director of exhibits at the Museum of Science. 'This exhibit helps [people] to get some of those `big-picture' questions that were posed by the big guys like Einstein.''

They wanted Dolz to come aboard with his presentation.

But unlike the other time experiments on display, which are already proven and made for learning, Dolz's is an authentic first-time experiment made for both learning and discovery.

He hopes to stir up the public's preconceptions about time, gravity and acceleration.

''A big problem for science is common sense. It works for most everything in people's lives, but not in physics,'' he said. ``It's limited to point of view and perspective, [so] it's really not enough.''

The experiment involves putting a digital clock under immense force by spinning it on a centrifuge.

The basic idea behind the experiment is to speed up the frequency of the pulses, or ticks, produced by the clock with force to push it ahead.

Dolz said it takes about six hours to move the clock ahead four seconds.

While past experiments were expensive and produced minimal results, Dolz said he is taking an economical approach and shooting for a range of results.

''He can use very simple tools to come to some of the same grand conclusions,'' said Duran, adding that Dolz's experiment could prove Einstein's theory that time is only relative.

Dolz's four-second time shift, when compared to the plane experiments, is considered a huge change -- so much so that scientists from various universities will be monitoring the experiment to certify the results.

Dolz said he is looking forward to sharing his discovery, claiming contending that understanding time helps people in everything they do.

But in the science world, Dolz has no idea what kind of impact his experiment could have -- much like the great scientists of the past.

''Did [Benjamin] Franklin know that his fiddling around would take us where we are today?'' he asks. ``We may be seeing the beginnings of time travel, but I have no idea. I'm like Franklin, Columbus and [Michael] Faraday: we [just] do what we are capable of doing.''

Source: The Miami Herald
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/states/florida/counties/miami-dade/cities_neighborhoods/west/8234518.htm 

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CBS President Frank Stanton was one of six private citizens secretly recruited and granted authority by President Eisenhower to run major components of the government if a Soviet attack wiped out many American leaders.

No public announcement of the appointments was made. Their existence was confirmed by recently publicized Eisenhower administration letters.

A few weeks after the Soviets launched the first manmade satellite in 1957, shattering America's sense of security, Stanton was summoned to the White House to see Eisenhower.

Stanton knew his friend was agonizing over how to respond to Sputnik and the terrorizing thought that permeated America: Had the Soviets gained a huge first-strike advantage in the nuclear arms race?

But Stanton learned Eisenhower also was wrestling with how best to ensure the U.S. government could function in an emergency.

Stanton, who had no experience or ambitions in government, was taken aback when the president asked if he would be willing to oversee a federal communications agency after such an attack.

"I was surprised and startled by the breadth of the assignment," said the 96-year-old Stanton, who lives in Boston.

Nervous about the awesome task of keeping the nation's telephone, radio and television systems operating after an attack, Stanton said he nevertheless "agreed to do my chore."

"The president was planning for the unthinkable," said retired Army Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster, Eisenhower's staff secretary. "He wanted to bring in the wisdom and competence to reinforce whatever elements of the government survived and provide some assurance that our government could not be decapitated."

Presidents are granted vast powers under the Constitution to lead the nation in times of war or enemy attack.

Shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, President Bush created a shadow government of 75 to 150 officials who worked in mountainside bunkers outside Washington to ensure the government would function if the capital came under attack.

All those officials already were in government when they were given the assignment. Eisenhower is believed to be the first president to go outside government to look for leaders in a crisis.

"Eisenhower went beyond the normal lines of succession, which I think was a reflection of the widespread paralyzing fear that swept the country in the 1950s," said Peter Kuznick, a history professor and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

Besides Stanton, the appointees included George Baker, a Harvard Business School professor who was tapped to oversee transportation; Harold Boeschenstein, president of Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp., in charge of manufacturing and production; Aksel Nielsen, president of the Title Guaranty Co., housing; J. Ed Warren, senior vice president of the First National City Bank of New York, energy; and Theodore Koop, vice president of CBS, to oversee an emergency censorship agency. Koop would have had 40 civilian staff members to monitor and control wartime information about the devastation.

Eisenhower also appointed two Cabinet secretaries and Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin to emergency posts for currency stabilization, food and labor.

"The people Eisenhower chose, while they were his friends, they were also the captains of industry of his day. People like Bill Gates today," said Bill Geerhart, editor of a Web site called Conelrad, or Control of Electromagnetic Radiation. That was the name of nation's first emergency broadcasting system, established by President Truman.

The site posted the Eisenhower documents after obtaining them from the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kan.

The selections were based as much on the appointees' geographic location and personal relationships with Eisenhower as their expertise. Nielsen, for example, was Eisenhower's regular fishing buddy.

The presidential form letters dated March 6, 1958, provide for the appointees to immediately take office in the event of a national emergency. Until then, they were asked to keep their status secret. They were promised an undisclosed salary but there were few specifics about their jobs.

The documents show the secret group met in July 1960 with the now-defunct Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization to discuss staffing for their agencies. But work barely got started before the group was relieved of its duties by President Kennedy, who took office in 1961.

Still, subsequent administrations have made contingency plans for government continuity _ often involving citizens outside government _ in the event of a devastating attack. For example, Kennedy's director of emergency planning, Frank Ellis, said in 1961 that the president had emergency appointees for transportation, agriculture and communications.

During the Reagan administration, then-Rep. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who was chief executive of the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Co., were key players in a secret program to set aside the legal lines of succession and install a new president in a catastrophe, The Atlantic Monthly reported this month.

Source: Space.com
http://space.com/news/secret_gov_040321.html