I’ve been steeling myself to discard books (hundreds), papers (boxfuls), mementoes. These two wooden boards –
– each fourteen inches on a side. I painted them, rather carefully, to hang outside our house on the main street in Lyme Regis, when we were using the front room as a gallery to sell prints of my paintings.
The lion is Alfredo,
six feet long if his tail is included. He was made from a cottonwood log by a folk artist in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has followed Tilly around the world, we won’t be downsizing him.
Nor Leo, the gigantic lion of the sky. On August evenings, he is diving down through the horizon after the Sun. And on this evening, if you could see through the ground, and could see the stars past the Sun, you would see Regulus, Leo’s chief star (said to be his heart, though positioned more like his forepaw), almost exactly on the ecliptic and behind the Sun.
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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image” or “Open image in new tab”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
There’s the much ignored Leo Minor too just had to look up it’s location,far northern skies and next to another cat Lynx(and Leo).These three seem to be the only cats in the sky.
In his recent book _Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution_ Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli revises Schrödinger’s thought experiment so that if the quantum phenomenon happens, the cat, rather than being killed, is only given a sleeping draught. Here’s Rovelli’s footnote: “In the original version, the bottle contains not a sleeping gas but poison, and the cat did not fall asleep: it died. I prefer not to play around with the death of a cat.” I admire Rovelli’s humanity, even in his thought experiments.
The book is a gem, a rollicking history of the development of quantum mechanics and a deep reflection on what it means to take quantum reality seriously. Short, beautifully written in Italian and beautifully translated into English, vividly clear to a layperson without oversimplification (there are equations), filled with historical, philosophical, and literary references, and cogently argued. Rovelli dedicates the book “To Ted Newman, who made me understand that I did not understand quantum theory,” and he steadfastly rejects all the untestable (and therefore metaphysical) ways that other theorists have tried to comprehend the incomprehensible reality of quanta: collapsing wave functions, hidden variables that presuppose a nonrelativistic objective frame of reference, proliferating multiverses. The simple, profound, and deeply unsettling truth is that every thing exists only in relation to other things, and we can only know any thing as we are in relation to it.
That would be Erwin Schrödinger’ infamous cat in a box
Schroedinger’s cat was in a quantum superposition of states until the wave function describing his state (living or not living) was collapsed by attempting to determine the quantum state of the particle responsible for his state LOL
The cat that was capable of being both alive and/or dead at the same time was Schrödinger’s cat.
So that’s how cats can be in more than one place at once! Simultaneous reincarnation! :-)
I should add ?Salinger’s Cat to the picture – dang, I can’t remember whose cat it is that’s both alive and dead.
The signs would definitely catch my eye and my interest. Who are the smaller felines in the other charming painting of Alfredo?
In an interesting precessional coincidence, when the Sun conjuncts Regulus, the Sun enters the tropical zodiac sign of Virgo.
You’re right; according to Ast. Cal. 2022
Aug 23 Tue 3 Sun enters the astrological sign Virgo, i.e. its longitude is 150°
The smaller felines were Daisy (in two of her nine lives) and Nikkki (reincarnated to provide a black tail winding around the lion’s leg).