Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
-
Tychonian society
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…
-
Tunguska event
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…
-
Ancient Troy
Site of the most renowned battle in ancient literature. To classical readers of Homer, llios, Ilium, or Troy the focus of the poet’s Iliad was a real place, still part of the ancient world 7,000 years after its fall. Herodotus the historian asked Egyptian priests for sources that might supplement Homers account. Thucydides, historian of…
-
Brinsley Le Poer Trench
A British author of several books, beginning in the early 1960s, centered around a theme of visiting aliens (both ancient and modern), spaceships, interplanetary travel, and so on, using biblical references to back up these speculations. So, for example, in The Sky People (1960), he placed the Garden of Eden on another planet and identified…
-
Transmutation of elements
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…
-
Mary Toft (1701-1763)
A woman who claimed to have given birth to rabbits. Housewife Mary Toft emerged out of obscurity in April 1726 in Godalming, Surrey, England. She told a curious story of having been working in the held on St. George’s Day when a very large rabbit suddenly appeared and sexually assaulted her. The bizarre nature of…
-
Titanic
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…
-
Time travel
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…
-
Thoughtography
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…
-
Thompsonism
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…
Got any book recommendations?