The multi-aperture telescope

Spyware is constantly trying to improve upon resolution constraints; Raytheon have been funding quite a bit of it. But as our Nancy Grace Roman telescope shows, what is designed for spying on people can be repurposed to spy upon other stars and dwarf-planets. Today we're discussing the Rayleigh criterion. The minimum resolvable angle is proportional [1.22] to the wavelength (λ) over the diameter (D) of the aperture of a monolithic telescope. Or: tyranny of the aperture limit.

They want their multitude of 'scopes to be pushed into orbit or the Lunar farside or, most-likely, some SpL2. In space it's presently constrained by the Starship (D = 9 m), which compares with the Chilean 8.5 m mirror-'scopes.

In 2023, Stephen Fleming with Amit Kumar Jha and some others presented a telescope which might obviate the "monolithic" side of that, kind of like putting rockets in series to boost thrust. Last year they got their idea published.

They want to image other worlds without having to go there. We want to go to the Uranian moons and Triton again, so the project isn't for them. It might however be of use to get some better imaging of the KBOs, and Sedna.

They are teasing this for other systems. In that case they think they can remove the starlight from the array of images, without blocking the star in the 'scope itself (like with the Coronagraph). I expect the prime targets will be the Proxima and Trappist worlds.

The (smaller, cheaper) mirrors in space will have to stay at 20 meters, or whatever, from each other. So - pack poles? A better idea is to give Beyond Reach something to do.

Precedence

Over my time studying early Islam through Islamic sources, I stumbled upon Gerald Hawting's The first dynasty of Islam. This was published 1986; I had some 2000 paperback, but it really hadn't absorbed much 1990s scholarship. It was anyway hard to read - for me - because it concentrated on internal debates about who got dibs on all that pelf. In particular I had trouble with "Muhajirun" versus "Anṣar".

Adrien de Jarmy (with whom readers will be familiar) offers some help, which we may read in preprint.

For sura 9, Mahajirun and Anṣar are peers. What matters is precedence - tasbîq - within each group. This may even react to chauvinists in one camp or the other. These sentiments become rife among the poets, but such may be earlier: I suspect Ḥassan bin Thabit as an Anṣarist representative. I find in Ḥassan little contact with suras 9 (or 48).

De Jarmy finds the crux at the turn of the 2nd/8th century. That implies AH 80-100 / AD 700-720: the reign of al-Hajjaj in the east, after the fitna of Ibn al-Ashʿath. In the Madina, the family of ʿUmar was paramount: these included ʿAbd Allah bin ʿUmar's (d. 73/693) mawla Nafiʿ, and the governor ʿUmar future caliph. Anyway before the Ashaʿitha, the muhajir was the man who went out for the sake of God in the conquests. This agrees well with suwar such as 3-6 and 8 (not 9 - nor 48), and with the consistent Syriac term mhaggrayë (which will naturally lag Arabic semantics). De Jarmy sees an attempt to define the sabiq first in al-Kufa: he is one who pledged the oath to the Prophet himself AH 6 in al-Ḥudaybiyya under a, uh, tree. These are the ahl al-shajara. The anṣar don't figure in this side of the paper's conclusion and seem an afterthought in the tradition; some anṣar may well themselves have been muhajirs.

This paper sees the Madinese offering their alternate definitions. Such may have been floated in the Madina first, only getting out to the rest of Islam after ʿUmar the governor became ʿUmar II the caliph. This city restricted the muhajir such that one only existed in the time of the Prophet; if you emigrated to Iraq after that, that wasn't a real hijra/hegira. All those muhajirs are sabiq by definition; the Anṣar may or may not also count, depending on when their ancestors joined the crew. De Jarmy promises a new paper to explore another clear implication, that the Madinese had also raised the Madinese Hegira to preëminence.

Amateur thermodynamics

American Thinker is posting Douglas J Cotton's theory on Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures. This addresses the "carbon" theory of global warming on Venus and, on Earth, "climate change".

Until the late 1970s, we had no real consensus on whether Earth was heating or cooling. We had Venus' surface temperature from flybys, a knowledge of main-sequence evolution (effective over hundreds of millions of years), and the historical record. This wasn't enough.

Soviet landers, including near-landers, got us the temperature gradient of Venus' (long) atmosphere. In the 1980s, the Scientific Community settled upon the bathtub-drain theory of global warming for Earth. 1361 W/m² are coming dayside; less than that are radiating nightside. So the joules are accumulating. To blame: the manmade (anthropogenic) change in atmospheric chemistry. We got more CO₂ now, also CH₄ and H₂O.

Cotton is a degreed physicist, but not of a high degree. His findings here could work toward a Masters if any university saw fit to reach out to him.

He argues that gas doesn't work like a greenhouse. A greenhouse glass is transparent for entry, but translucent for exit. This allows internal higher equilibrium temperature before its sheer heat must radiate into the chill of the Boston Zoo. A non-ionic gas lacks a specific direction. All it can do is slow heat transfer, going in as well as going out. So there is no "greenhouse gas".

To explain Venus and Earth, Cotton proposes instead "heat creep". This is the effect of gravity on a temperature-gradient, which Cotton takes from Josef Loschmidt (1876). Maxwell had rejected Loschmidt as a vio of Clausius (1850) no process is possible whose sole result is the transfer of heat from a body of lower temperature to a body of higher temperature. Cotton points out that Clausius was ignoring the relation between temperature and pressure: Gay-Lussac, or Amontons. So where Maxwell rejected, Maxwell should have sidestepped: "assume uniform pressure, such that we neglect gravity". If we are talking planetary scale, Cotton refuses to neglect gravity.

That's about where I'll leave the dispute, which is presently one-sided, Cotton having failed to attract serious attention, only the attention of unserious bloggers. I will however suggest that it seems falsifiable. It might be testable at - say - Uranus, whose own composition is presently unconstrained.

Berber revolt!

Among the early converts to Islam were Imazighen from Morocco. The way conversion worked in those days was to get adopted as mawla by a Muslim. The Africans' sponsor was one Musa bin Numayr, and one of his proteges - Tariq - proceeded into Spain.

The jealous caliphate then recalled Musa and executed him. In AH 122, his mawali back home - still being called "Berbers" - revolted. 740 for Christians today; 778 for the Mozarabic Chronicler.

Antonia Bosanquet in 2023 published a survey of Islamic historians' view.

Robert Hoyland had flagged the Mozarabic Chronicler for using a rah-rah Umayyad source (in Latin) probably extending past the revolt to Walid II, since it is synoptic with another chronicle that stops at 724 but assuredly written after that. The pro-Muslim stuff ends after this caliphate, at which point the Mozarabs - living in an Islamic state (and probably an Awza'ite jihad state, at that) quit offering religious opinions on the Islamic side. It doesn't much touch even Christianity besides supporting Catholic bishops against Sabellians and other in-house heretics. So the reports on Arab and Berber affairs in Spain (and eighth-century Africa) are purely secular, to be judged on how well the people are being ruled. Unfortunately - for our purpose - that's where Hoyland loses interest, because now we are outside of the "origins" period he'd inherited from Crone.

MC 84 is what handles the revolt against Kulthûm of Damascus. This became a real black eye for the waning years of Hishâm (and Walid II) back in Rusafa. I don't think the Umayyads ever really did retrieve that part of Andalus.

It turns out that the Muslims also viewed this 122 revolt in secular terms. The Mozarab blames "Arures"; the Muslims historically blamed the Sufriya. (Later ones added the Ibadis, but that sect likely came to the west later, apparently subsuming the Sufris.) I sense parallels with the Khurasani movement of Abu Muslim. The former were, they say, at first led by a self-styled prophet, but this prophet was soon overthrown for blasphemy, justly in my opinion. As a more-orthodox movement the Berbers could appeal to the caliph as loyal Muslims, or at least could make a show of it, and rally a pan-Muslim coalition against the Umayyads. We'll note that Abu Muslim's entourage of absolute weirdos will switch to support the 'Abbasid family.

Tabari even offers some of the rebels' propaganda, although here we must be cautious, because we could be reading Tabari's brief against caliphal ('Abbasid) tyranny put in the mouths of faraway people in little position to rebut him. Ancient historians were prone to making up speeches. I do think Muslims were more scrupulous, given that Tabari's peers expected valid chains of transmission and didn't tolerate forgers. So: let's be cautious.

For Tabari, the rebels actually were Muslims, in comparison with the Umayyad court anyway, and deserved a hearing. Khalifa bin Khayyat agreed that as "Haruris" went, the Sufris were more like Ibadis in today's Oman: moderates. (Contrast, the Jarudiya among the Zaidi-Hanafis.) Khalifa by the way disagreed with the revolt in a way Tabari didn't. Khalifa just figured the rebels were angry at the disrespect shown their patron Musa.

Rapa Nui and Hawaii

Undeterred by anklebiters, Alexander Ioannides and others are rolling on with Hawaiki Ultima. This posts the origin of Rapa Nui (which Christians found on Easter Sunday AD 1722 Gregorian) and of our "Hawaiï" chain - here-on, Sandwich - as from Mangareva.

I had to look up Mangareva. I only just heard about this one, like in 2020ish I'd first heard of Marquesas.

Okay: mostly undeterred. There's a DEI statement at the end. They stick "ethics" in there to make it DEEI. #woke isn't dead; it's prepping the battlespace for after-November. At least the buncombe is sequestered.

I had thought that Rapa Nui, at least, was peopled by the Marquesas. I take it that the evidence was too broad at the time to say more than "eastern Polynesia". Mangareva is further south than the Marquesas, so in better-position for South American exploration (Rapa Nui is so near that continent, that Chile now governs it). It is, however, very far from our Sandwich Isles.

Present Sandwich genes come with some admixture, not to say pollution, from the waves of immigration from elsewhere in the Pacific, Europe, and Africa in modern times. That makes difficult to tease possible South American admixture of old, from what happened over the Age of Exploration. Some Sandwich genes in the recent study have "AMR" influx; but some have zero. This is telling me that Easter Island got to South America separately, carrying on their new crops around Polynesia secondarily.

Also possible: in between the dual radiations to Rapa Nui and to Sandwich, Marquesas took on a new wave of visitors from their western Hawaikan cousins. This may have blended their genomes more with Tahiti, leaving Sandwich and Rapa Nui as outliers.

R-M12205

The Balt / Iran split in language also has a genetic component, which is being hashed out among the mostly-Semitic Tribe. Specifically there is an old R1a signature in Levites, who then assuredly are not Levides save by adoption.

Jewish Genomics has the scoop. Which it is, because @FamilyTreeDNA is supposed to get more-formal publication later.

A "Tajik" from Pamir shares R-Y2619 ancestry but was clearly no Jew. The relevant Levites are now reclassified: R-M12205, counting down from AD 750.

So far the Levites in question are Ashkenaz, which is why - beforehand - it was a tossup if R-Y2619 were just East European. Pamir is now Badakhshan so decidedly Iranic. Something like Avestan, Parthian, Bactrian et al.. 'Twould be later that the region became Persianate (or, before that... Buddhist).

"Dienekes" Lazaridis thinks some north-Iran tribe off to itself from 700 BC to injection into Judaea, whenever that was. They'd have drifted west. Lazaridis could call them Medes.

If Lazaridis be right that the injection was so early: I find personally difficult to understand how this bloodline got restricted to the Ashkenaz, "the Scythia" to Greeks and "Saka" to Seistanis (and it's probably not them anyway).

Other commenters are reviving the Khazar hypothesis - was Elhaik right for the wrong reasons? Or maybe this is old Radhan, spreading out to the Caspian shores to the Tatarstan around Kazan. I mean, I know only my femme ancestry and that is decidedly Oriental.

I suspect that we have an incomplete record of male Y-DNA from Sephardic and Mizrahi populations. To be kept in mind: occasional "Ashkenaz" signatures can be imported, like in AD ~1666.

How the Persians failed to make their case

I skipped chapter 2 because it's covering similar ground as Mark Durie. Between chapters 1 and 3, one might explain why it was that Europeans thought that the Persians had degenerated under their Achaemenid shahs. To use the Middle Persian for xšāyaθiya.

Germans and, maybe, Russians and certainly Greeks and Latins could see that the Persian language changed 500-350 BC. I pick on those four because they retained, stubbornly, the inflexions of their own languages; against such pressures as applied to English and French. But the English and French orientalists were saying the same. Since Beowulf and Tolkien I suppose some of the English have inflexion-envy. Frenchmen might, also.

Value-judgements might also be brought at the empire filling its palaces with eunuchs and harems. Van Bladel, head-scratchingly, makes a point of refusing to judge. Okay. The Greeks sure diagnosed the Persians as an unsteady empire, and literally wrote the book on politics. Eventually the Greeks proved that thesis by destroying their empire. Difficult to dispute results.

Even before the disaster of Alexander III's takeover, Persians already could see that the spoken common language was not that of Behistun anymore. This embarrassed some, who then tried to spell their monuments in the good old way. It appears they had no textbook for that; so such inscriptions ended up being... wrong. Like the Book of Mormon (in its first editions) did Tudor/KJV English wrong. If what you put out there isn't evolved but is just wrong, someone is going to point and laugh at you.

A linguistic history of Persian

Old Persian was an inflected language like Avestan and Sanskrit. Farsi is so, no longer. Apart from the vocabulary and the Semitisms (Aramaic then Arabic), it is pretty-much a pidgin of the ancestral tongue. As of last month Kevin van Bladel is explaining it all - for free.

The pidginism thesis, for van Bladel [POST-READ 10/10 -semicreole], came from a chapter in John McWhorter, Language Interrupted (2007). That was before McWhorter's late disgrace. The chapter in 2007 was impressionistic, but still insightful, so van Bladel is now doing justice to a topic which McWhorter - I fear - cannot anymore do himself.

Van Bladel sees the most drastic pidginification in the Achaemenid era. Old Persian was still inflected for Darius I, at least for Darius' monuments. Darius III presided over a language well on its way to the Middle Persian of the Sasanians which, in turn, isn't too far from late-mediaeval Farsi.

This process is what the book essays to sketch. For van Bladel, pots come with people: one people brings language - the pots - and other peoples must react based on how the pots are presented. Greeks, Indians, and Armenians all had to learn Persian; perhaps less hard for them. But so did Aramaeans and Elamites. First, these two languages simply weren't/aren't IndoEuropean, nor are they relatives to each other. More importantly these two were the preponderant populations at the imperial core, where "Javonia" was, like Egypt and Caria, peripheral.

Looks fun. Will read.

Fake myths

The Homeric Iliad contains summaries of maybe hundreds of old legends and myths, mostly Greek and found in other summaries of that legendarium. Eight years ago André Lardinois pinpointed two - which are disputed elsewhere in the epic.

Lardinois believes that the poet intended them to be taken as lies. He brings seven criteria for their ... I suppose, barbarity. Specifically his choices are what Homer calls "Phoenician": that great Other for the Archaic Greeks, what with their Canaanite book-larnin' and mathematical sorcery.

One concerns Tethys and Oceanus, parents of the gods. Here Hera is begging of Aphrodite her magic Venereal bracelet; and of Sleep, because Hera is trying to knock Zeus out for awhile. Sleep, at least, is aware that Oceanus is parent only to rivers... if you're Greek. The Babylonian Enuma Elish, contemporary with Homer, assumes less-ironically that the world came from the salt and clear waters, an ancient Iraqi trope that might even be Sumerian. For Eudemos of Rhodes, likely looking to Aramaic, the two waters were Tauthe and Apason. It's not that Tauthe<*Tjavat/Tiamat had any real etymology with Tethys; for Lardinois, suffice that the names were close-enough for the goddess to lie about it.

The other concerns the division of the cosmos by lot. That sounds positively Deuteronomic. And indeed we don't see this in mainline Greek or otherwise IndoEuropean storytelling. Zeus is simply the god in heaven; Poseidon gets the sea, and Hades gets the underworld. Where we find three gods of heaven, sea, and earth casting lots is in Ugarit. I take it that Greeks didn't really own an earth god, instead having various earth mothers: Demeter, Gaia, Rhea and I'm sure I'm missing some. Seems reasonable that this be Phoenician as well.

Your gold is safe a month after H-Day

In the 1950s came a rash of nuclear-war books. The worst is, I think, Nevil Shute's On The Beach, worse even than Ryder Stacy's porn and the Gamma World oeuvre. I just got through Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. That one was mostly okay, for a Kennedy voter. You know... a voter for the guy who put Confeds in Portraits in Courage.

My recent interest has been in neutron activation. Which is a sideplot in this story, as the gathering of gold becomes the undoing of several characters as beta-decay hits the higher isotopes of precious metal.

Except that gold-198's halflife is 2.6946 days. Push that up to mercury-198, and after that... nothing happens. (Hg-199 would be trace but that's stable too.) Maybe the bulk of the gold, annealed as it will be with mercury, will chip away a little more on the outside. Would mercury poisoning be a problem for rings and watches? Either way, after a few weeks it shouldn't be radioactive no mo'.

Silver-108 and -110, they say, stay hot for longer.

T-FINER, the alpha dog

The starfire / sunbird engines fuse elements to make helium propellant. You know what also emits helium plasma: α-decay. In 2024, quite the year for deep-space rocket ideas, Loura Hall posted how to do it. A yuuge wall poster of its powerpoint can be downloaded (pdf); the project released an update last year.

Thin Film Isotope Nuclear Engine Rocket. But not TFI-Ner[va], oddly, they prefer T-FINER.

This is a sail of (foully) radioactive metal, maybe 36 m². This sail provides its own propulsion, backward. Alpha particles, which are helium-4 ions, blast away up to 0.05c. That calculates to specific-impulse you... you might not even believe if I told you; in the millions (refer to PDF). Mass-ratio would be the mass of the radioactive metal (+ cargo) over the mass of the waste (+ cargo). This ratio would decline by half-life of the element, rather than the rate of burn.

The structure would be to drag the cargo behind. The sail is thin, like 20-50 μm for Thorium-228.

I didn't do the delta-V maths, but NIAC has, and they say they can get 100 km/s. That's a ticket to anywhere in the Solar System. ²²⁸Th (1.9 years) might get us to the 550 AU solar-lens in 25 years. Cf-254 is advertised as 300 AU in one year! (After which, they can maybe flip-and-drag, to 550 AU.) Outside that, this system will stall out so it's not a serious Centauri candidate.

Launching rolls of thin sheets of radioactive sail from Earth is less a problem, I suspect, than making it all in the first place. Alpha-emitters are neutron-deficient and trend heavy. Those meatballs we can spice in space are the opposite. The consortium is talking about skimming reactors or making in cyclotrons (e.g. Ac-227... and Ra-228). That's done on Earth.

Initial thrust remains a problem, unless we just use this to putt around various Earth orbits. One option is to bring layers of this stuff.

Cargo will have to be low-mass; they aim for 8.2 kg. I don't see a comm relay onboard. So I don't know how well it can beam data from Sedna or wherever. This would compete with the sunsail. Because there isn't 'nuff sun out there and, better, the vessel can be steered.

Meanwhile they hope for demo missions. Uranus, with Ra-228, to launch 2034. If someone else sends a full relay to orbit that planet, T-FINER will demand less comms.

Going bananas

Kalium-40 famously has one too many neutrons, β-decaying to argon-40. Not quite radioactive enough to give you argon burps; so it comes up from the mantle with normal potassium in eruptions. How radioactive, is the trick; if it's too long, as with bismuth-209 (2.01×10¹⁹ years) the halflife gets imprecise.

Pumice is telling us more-exactly how radioactive is ⁴⁰K: from Vesuvius. This is done in tandem with recent work verifying the Plinian Eruption against the first months of Titus' imperium.

The latest coins in situ predate 24 June AD 79. I guess the Romans wanted to wait a bit in case someone assassinated the likely heir. It turned out his bro Domitianus liked the guy, better than he liked anyone else in Latium anyway. I don't know any coins got minted in Campania for a year or so after the eruption; Roman coins after 8 September get the "IMP XV" sigil, the fifteenth acclamation of their new imprah. Also "P P", pater-patriae.

The town with the pumice in question was Oplontis. With the assumption of a July-August eruption - Pliny says 24 August - the halflife is narrowed. 1.2044×10¹⁰ years, twelve billion. Give/take 88 million.

Which they then overlay back on the eruption for 1,938 ±13 years before 2025. Which is AD 87. So uh. I guess they added these calcs to some others to get the halflife. The precision is still not what we'd prefer, but ¹⁴C is also a pest.

A spirit-haunted church

It's October! And a new year on Mars...

The position of Orthodox Christianity, in history, has held that natural processes and the movements of the planets are driven by angels. In the past few hundred years, scientists - with mathematicians' help - have dispossessed most of our universe. Some questions remain, yes. But increasingly beyond the purview of, say, the accretion of our Milky Way galaxy.

Modern Orthodoxy seems to be arguing that, yeah, we were a bunch of superstitious ignorants up to Epiphanius and John Damascene. But you can totally follow us when we do necromancies!!

Unlike the veneration for the angel of planet Malacandra, or maybe for the angel who is that planet; necromancy is contradictory in the Bible. On the one hand it's forbidden. On the other hand, as Alex Sorin points out, you can call upon the Sancti for intercession; and the saints are not restricted to the angelic movers of wind and planet, but include also (certain of) the dead. Somewhere in between: king Saul, then barred from asking intercession himself, once called upon a woman in Endor who might bring up a saint on his behalf. That differs from a sinner begging a nun at Agnes' convent to pray for him because... because.

Catacombs and tombs tend to survive the ages and, indeed, Christians could be found down there doing veneration - and begging intercession - from very early years. So Sorin wins on points. The intercession of saints has existed from the earliest days, and extended to dead humans from scarcely-later days. For "great apostasy" restorationists, this happened (I think) too early to extricate from Christianity as the first authors intended. Note that the most notorious restorationist sect, the LDS, goes as far as to post their dead righteous to rule over exoplanets.

Some Christians did attempt to eject necromancy from the faith. Ephrem refused it for the Syrians; over here out West, Vigilantius had taken up that cause. Jerome - a Latin - took this one to school, as mah boi does.

To invoke practical necessity, as Gavin Ortlund might, I sometimes dispute Jerome. Jerome was one who preferred the dead to the living. That can be a problem.

I propose here that it is not a problem at base; there is indeed wisdom to be had from the departed, if not from the process of departing. Here I think practical necessity supports Jerome. So - perhaps Sorin could have stopped there.

Aphrodite's girdle

Stephen Kane gets cited a few times around here, mostly for exoplanets. But he also sometimes ponders planets close to Earth. So here is something making waves in the Youtube sphere, alongside Sean N Raymond. It's about whether Venus had a moon.

I don't pretend competence in these fields. At any rate Kane's paper is talking about a hypothesis: if Venus had a moon early-enough in her history, then that moon would have been crushed and would have fallen by now.

I will, however, note that Venus is presently rather flat. We do except those volcanoes, mighty Maxwell Montes (the rare male exception to the naming rules there), and the Alpha/Beta Regiones. But widest of all, lies Aphrodite Terra. The "continent".

Aphrodite Terra tracks the Venereal equator. This always has stricken me as strange. Venus orbits extremely slowly, and that retrograde; such that the planet is more spherical than Earth's geode. Earth can run solar-synchronous satellites in orbit; for Venus, I guess they can stationkeep something with a sail at SVL1.

If a moon disintegrated in low Venus orbit more-or-less coplanar with Venus' ecliptic, that might account for colossal masses atop Venus' equator. Venus has resurfaced much of its plaons, yes. But maybe Aphrodite Terra was simply too massive for this effect to cover it all up. (Alternatively the moonfall happened recently.)

Nestorius and Cyril in context

As an occasional "Nestorian" blog, and certainly a pro-east-Syriac blog, I have some interest in that history. Matt Crawford traces the history to Nestorius' roots in Antioch. Good luck to Crawford; I hope he fares better than some others.

Cyril is meanwhile (somewhat) rehabilitated as not just making up theotokos (Latin, deipara) himself. Most people (like me, and Candida Moss) have seen Cyril as a base opportunist. We here have inherited Schwartz in 1928. Even if, of late, we have had to back off some of the Agora slanders against this Miaphysite saint. [EXCUSES 10/13: Ancestral wisdom, if you buy it.]

Emperor Julian, born to Christian (Eunomian!) emperors, among his Christian foils had to address such as were saying theotokos or something like that. As a pagan, he recognised this term as pagan, like a mortal-ess birthing Heracles or Dionysus. The Eunomians weren't saying this; only a Miaphysite could say this. So Cyril was heir to a Miaphysite tradition. Gregory of Nazianzus knew this as of Apollinaris; later authors would see Eutychianism or "Julianism". Nevertheless Gregory (somehow) affirms theotokos.

Nestorius (and, I could add, John Chrysostom before him; and Diodore of Tarsus) grew up where Apollinarianism was staking its last redoubt. Theotokos could be tolerated anywhere else. Not in Antioch, says Crawford.

My reading of Crawford suggests he personally supports theotokos, or at least some form of Christian unity without taking that seriously. He wants to humanise Nestorius without accepting him. Maybe he can. I'll leave that aside for now.

The story may start with Paul of Samosata, all the way back in the middle 200s AD. He had posed, perhaps clumsily: for the Word is from above; Jesus Christ, a human being, is from here. The Council of Antioch shut him off AD 268. Eunomian subordinatism owes to this thought - if taking Paul's words literally. Athanasius devoted at least half his career against Eunomianism, maybe more than half. Nestorius' dyophysic might descend from Paul, also; but I think it turned out better, and I don't know how far Athanasius would have disliked Nestorius.

Gregory and (maybe) Athanasius could have threaded this needle. Real problems started emerging out West. Not the problems I'd expect.

One Leporius of Marseilles had propounded a notion of Christ as the merger of God and man. We don't really have the exact words he said, but the Masillians booted him out. Leporius then met Augustine in Africa and, basically, did the apology tour. The ensuing libellius survives through extensive quoting by John Cassian who brought it back to Gaul, with Augustine's personal imprimatur (if mostly an antiPelagian text, here). Cassian's aim was to rebut "Nestorians" who may well have preserved Leporius' earlier work.

Crawford carries over recent scholarship on Cyril's oeuvre, also: On the Incarnation of the Only-Begotten and that There is One Christ and Lord according to the Scriptures. This - for De Durand - preceded the whole feud with Nestorius. Nestorius' accession as the Patriarch of Constantinople, for Crawford, was unlucky for Nestorius, because Cyril was already an enemy of the dyophysitism who also shared his antiApollinarian credentials (or so he claimed).

I admit, I think Leporius got it right first-time. Augustine was always a momma's-boy who could easily have fallen in with the Ephesus councils, had he been born that late. I like to think - say - Jerome would have known better, hence why his work got translated to Syriac and passed East.

Some high-Isp experiments

ToughSF posted a few avenues of research, early last weekend. Both definitively drawing-board. I'd have said something but I couldn't click the link to one of the actual papers then, so - you get my take on them, today.

One is laser-hits on a liquid propellant. It splashes. As far as ToughSF knows, nobody's solved this one. Then he went on to note how lasers sploot droplets. Next!

The University of Surrey is asking about magnesium rockets. I'd heard of burning aluminium (as Surrey spell it) in oxygen, or maybe some even stronger oxidant like ozone. Burning metals isn't for Earth or LEO, but it intrigues me for low-grav takeoffs like our Moon - once bermed. Magnesium is just as common over there. But again, this looks rife with Unsolved Problems. The link will be here (pdf).

Absent a pdf, we do get an illustration. It looks like AI and makes little sense to my mortal eyesight. I just see magnesium is not planned for surface-to-orbit roggets the way some were talking aluminum. They want mass drivers, to take this fuel into orbit which rockets burn it up there. Into that topic, PlanetaryEngSys has butted: that mass drivers should start small, such that the capsule then fire the engines on that (parabolic) trajectory, to bring it to orbit. Seems more reasonable than Surrey's proposal frankly. ESA should pay that grant to them.

VIDEO 10/10/26: Space Startup News.

Quirinius

This blog has had some occasion to look into The Third Gospel's use of material and into its general tendency. Some of Luke's changes can be illustrated with textual-strain. Among the more-diverting results is Jesus' long gestation: he was conceived in Herod's reign (d. 4 BC) as in Matthew, but he came out among us during Quirinius' census (r. AD 6). Mary bore a burden quite unlike those of most women.

Miracles, or snark, aside: at least Joslin McDowell never entertained that notion, Protestant as he is (yeah, he's still alive). He prefers that Quirinius was there several years before. And maybe this Roman was; but he wasn't doing census in someone else's kingdom. Especially not Herod's.

Michael Kochenash explains Luke's plan. Luke knew of Roman-Jewish talk that the census was a flashpoint of rebellion, and this rebellion in particular. Kochenash goes further: he notes Josephus (a Galilean friend of Herod Agrippa II) in The Jewish War and Antiquities. The former, Josephus completed before the Campanian volcano buried Agrippa's sister; this eruption received note only in the latter.

TJW is well aware of Quirinius' census and of the revolts around it. But this book does not connect those events with the Revolt. The connexion becomes explicit only in JA. Kochenash does not see Josephus, here, arguing that point for or against other historians like Justus. It seems an idea that Josephus had just... come up with. A reasonable idea, to my mind anyway; but never mind that.

Kochenash does not think that Saint Luke had come up with that idea, either, by himself. Instead - Kochenash argues - Luke made of it a trope. Roma and Judaea came into serious Imperial contact through that census. Luke associates this contact with Jesus' infancy. What the Jews do to Jesus, is going to post a milestone to the Ninth Of Av; which the Jews perhaps could have averted, by embracing him as Christ.

Crossan would supplement, here, the Holy Spirit as Divine gloría. This has abandoned the Jews to settle upon the Apostles, and - finally - upon Peter and Paul who are headed westward.

Capstone of prophecy

Adrien de Jarmy seeks to make a wave in sira studies. Namely to separate "Constitution of the Madina" therefrom.

He points out that the Constitution hails Muhammad by titles taken from sura 7 and derived from sura 25. The document also delivers taṣliya, as the Dome of the Rock upon Muhammad - and upon [sura 3-4's] Jesus. One title, "sayyid of the mursalîn", is not on the Dome at all. That title, to boost the Arab Prophet over that other Semitic prophet, would be a development from 70s/690s Umayyad thought.

That tracks closer with the sura 33+48 complex, that Muhammad is the "seal". De Jarmy posits that it is overall 'Abbâsid. Huh.

According to Crone-Hinds' God's Caliph, the Umayyads were shifting to the ideology that the Caliphate was the postProphetic dispensation. For this, they could use sura 48. Just about any 'Abbâsite propagandum about how Muslims need to come together and avoid fitna can also be found in Umayyad sermons and poems; which Crone and Hinds did so find. The only real distinction is that 'Abbâsids (later!) came to interpret their caliphate as the stand-ins for the Prophet rather than, as earlier, shadows of God.

Overall I'd like to see comparisons of the Constitution with the treaty-literature. De Jarmy can make of that, his next project.

CI origins

B type Bennu, like Cb Ryugu, corresponds to CI meteors sent down here from Above - like local CM, CO and maybe CT.

Now Maria Schönbächler et al. have formally published this, as reported in Switzerland Wednesday.

When the CIs accreted, they accreted with water ice. That "when", for Ryugu and arguably for Bennu, could have been as early as 2My after CAI formation. They take those "calcium-aluminum-rich inclusion" chondrites to be the eldest of them all, I assume marking that 4.567Gy age we keep seeing. Our CI, and I assume CY also, would precede CM and CO (and CV). By this time, Jupiter had grown to 20 Earth masses.

The paper accepts that Bennu is rubble from a parent. But, without naming 142 Polana. Polana presently rolls around 2.4 AU. This is well within the 4-5 AU ice line today, and assuredly in CM times then, therefore has migrated. The paper's "figure 5" speaks of something called "ureilites" to be native down at ~2.5 AU, sooty achondrite rocks from some differentiated parent destroyed 5 My after CAI beyond Vesta.

Such chaos may account for why the authors seem cautious about assigning general CI/CY (for asteroids, B/Cb) distance from our (very) young sun at this time. And they don't speculate on the Grand Tack; this may be because they must admit hazy understanding of asteroids beyond Jupiter. CI was once mooted as far as 7 AU, assumed for instance here (slushball Ceres remains, I think, a migrate from up there). Other papers have put CO out 3.7 AU so, hey, why not for CI.

Redshifts

This blog has typically left the vagaries of the Big Bang and its cosmologic models to better bloggers. Lately we have a few hits on this topic, so I've decided to annotate them.

Key to deep cosmology is deep time. The universe expands, which by Doppler is colouring the further galaxies to the red. So the unit of time is like the unit of Marine Isotope Stages: the higher the number, here z_sys, the deeper. By the way using z means we can leave aside the vexatious Hubble Tension, as to compare stratum to stratum.

The Turtle is pointing to cosmic daybreak, a term connoting more abruptness than "dawn". At z≤15.1, we have stars and galaxies; hydrogen and helium stars, anyway. Never before/greater-than. Pace Zim.

Three galaxies, where we can better see them, are already forming "metals" at z=7.2883, 7.8 and even 9.31. There is a reïonism event between 8 and 7, ending 5.3, which, I take it, had been obscuring our sight of higher z's. (Damned if I'm going to use the -isation suffix like some Star Control 3 alien.) 7.65 is where this SMBH lives.

At z=7.76, estimated 660My from the start, comes a Black Hole Sun. So that isn't at the cosmic daybreak, pace the title; it's older than the 7.29 galaxy but younger than the other two.

I think these ancient red dots could provide furnaces fit to meld all manner of heavier elements. They point to the creation of early black holes generally. Neutron stars, I'll grant, might take a mite longer to form.