Category: T

A model of the planetary system named after Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). Brahe was a Danish nobleman and an energetic and meticulous astronomer, who gathered much accurate data on the planets which, on his death, passed to Kepler. Brahe lived at a time when the Catholic Church was debating the admissibility of Copernicus’s theory, which put…

The most conservative wing of modern creationism. The Tychonian Society supports Geocentrism, the belief that Earth is stationary and that the sun revolves around it. Such a position is a logical extension of a very literal reading of such biblical stories as that of Joshua making the sun stand still. Members of the society argue…

The 1908 devastation of hundreds of square miles of dense forest near the remote Tunguska River valley in Siberia. Faint aftershocks were felt around the world, and people 80 kilometers (50 miles) and more away saw a gigantic “pillar of fire” from the explosion that caused the devastation. Its cause remains a mystery. It occurred…

Changing one element into another. Plato defined four elements the earth, air, fire, and water basic constituents of the universe. He identified each with a regular solid figure the earth with the cube, air with the octahedron, fire with the tetrahedron, and water with the icosahedron. Any of the last three could be broken into…

British steamship that sank on the night of April 14-15, 1912, while on its maiden voyage. Launched on May 31, 1911, Titanic was the largest ship of its time, 882.5 feet long, 104 feet high, with a displacement of 66,000 tons, and a top speed of 25 knots; it could carry up to 3,000 passengers…

The idea that humans might be able to travel backward or forward in time, an idea that has been of occasional interest, particularly during this last hundred years. H. G. Wells (1866-1946) in The Time Machine (1892) imagined a machine that could transport its occupant forward or backward through time and deposit him or her…

Sometimes called skotography, a form of psychic photography where the practitioners claim the ability to project, by paranormal means, the image of their thoughts onto a film inside a camera. The first recorded thoughtographs, then called psychographs, were made by the psychic and spiritualist Duguid in 1878. Between 1920 and 1940, Madge Donohue produced thousands…

A school of natural medicine popular in 19th-century United States. Samuel Thompson was born in rural New Hampshire. As a youth, he was intrigued by the herbs and medicines used by an elderly woman, the village herbalist. He eventually married, settled down as a farmer, and raised a family. When one of his sons developed…

The doctrine and teachings of the Theosophical Society. The literal meaning of the word is “sacred science” or “divine wisdom.” The society was founded in 1875 by a small group with a shared interest in Spiritualism and Occultism, centered around Madame Blavatsky and Col. Henry Steel Olcott. Olcott proposed to the group that they should…

The movement of something, often a human, through solid objects or from one place to another through paranormal means. Teleportation was a popular feature of many 19th-century seances. The medium conducting the seance might disappear from the premises only to reappear later, or someone not initially involved in the seance would suddenly be present, his…