{"id":1729,"date":"2009-10-26T11:42:52","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T19:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=1729"},"modified":"2009-10-26T16:05:05","modified_gmt":"2009-10-27T00:05:05","slug":"popping-an-electron-for-king-tut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/26\/popping-an-electron-for-king-tut\/","title":{"rendered":"Popping an Electron for King Tut"},"content":{"rendered":"

In order to hook up Earth with my fictional land of Flimsy in my novel-in-progress Jim and the Flims<\/em>, I\u2019ve been thinking about using an STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope<\/a>) to poke a hole in an atom or, even better, into an electron. And this produces a tunnel to an alternate world. Simple!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Really you\u2019d need some SFictional way to amp up the power of the thing\u2014maybe I fall back on that hoary SF-movie expedient of a well-timed stroke of lightning on a nearby power pole. I see this happening on some slacker\u2019s hobby porch, not in an intergovernmental lab. I gather that it’s possible to build your own STM at home<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Somehow he\u2019s virtually riding on his picometer needle and … Zzzzzt!<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There\u2019s some nice STM pictures <\/a>on the IBM Almaden Labs site. (The photo above shows the results, however, of San Francisco graffitti removal, not the machines at IBM.)<\/p>\n


\nPhoto by Kenneth Garrett, Copyright (C) 2008, National Geographic<\/em><\/p>\n

We went to see the King Tut show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco this weekend. It was a good show, with some gorgeous things. I loved this \u201cpectoral\u201d\u009d or necklace.<\/p>\n


\n[Photo from www.suite101.com, Credit: Credit: Egyptian Museum\/Andreas F. Voegelin]<\/em><\/p>\n

Even better was the gilded coffin of Tjuya, who may have been Tut\u2019s mother-in-law. Ride the boat to heaven.<\/p>\n

I pick up cultural associations of the 1920s and 1960s when I look at Egyptian art. Howard Carter discovered Tut\u2019s tomb in the 1920s\u2014I just read Carter\u2019s fascinating account of it in a Dover reprint called The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen<\/em>\u2014this is a great little book. And in the 1920s there was a fad for Deco and Egyptian stuff.<\/p>\n


\n[Art by Rick Griffin for Zap #3, (C) Rick Griffin]<\/em><\/p>\n

The psychedelic rock posters and cartoons of the 1960s often used to feature flying scarabs\u2014I think particularly of the work by Rick Griffin<\/a>.<\/p>\n


\n[Found on Wikimedia Commons.]<\/em><\/p>\n

This pair of cartouches contains the hieroglyphic signs that render Tutankhamen\u2019s name. I\u2019ll give an explanation that\u2019s partly or even largely wrong. (A cartoonist named Chris Cooper has posted a more accurate illustrated essay <\/a>about Tut\u2019s name.)<\/p>\n

The cartouche on the left is his more informal name, Tut (chicken) + Ankh (hippie cross) + Amun (earth, air, and sea) and under that a Crook for Ruler, an On (butter churn?) for the city Heliopolis, and a Papyrus plant for Upper Egypt, or Thebes. The cartouche on the right represents his throne name, \u201cNebkheperura.\u201d\u009d Here we have Ra=God (sun disk) + Khephri (Scarab) + Neb (Basket, stands for All). <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sylvia pointed out that one of the ankhs on display had a woman’s lower body sketched on it, right below a Nebkheperura cartouche. I’d never thought of the Ankh that way.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It felt so weird to come out of the tomb-like show into the museum shop, three thousand years later, and a half a world away from Tut\u2019s tomb and everyone is imitating Tut and taking pictures.<\/p>\n

[Sarcophagus-like Scanadavian pancake house on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley, converted to a sushi resaurant.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Certainly there should be some Egyptian stuff in my fictional land of Flimsy. A flying snake. A great scarab. But maybe in a diner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In order to hook up Earth with my fictional land of Flimsy in my novel-in-progress Jim and the Flims, I\u2019ve been thinking about using an STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope) to poke a hole in an atom or, even better, into an electron. And this produces a tunnel to an alternate world. Simple! Really you\u2019d need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1729"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1738,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729\/revisions\/1738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}