For Stephen Hawking's Birthday

Epigraphs to the classic novel Cosmic Banditos:

God does not play dice with the universe. --Albert Einstein

Not only does God play dice with the universe, but sometimes he throws them where they cannot be seen. --Stephen Hawking

Today's Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:

Strange Attractor

Epiphany Star

(See also the star as a
"spider" symbol in the
stories of Fritz Leiber.)

For Heinrich Harrer,
who died today...

Wikipedia on the north face of the Eiger:

"A portion of the upper face is called 'The White Spider,' as
snow-filled cracks radiating from an ice-field resemble the legs of a
spider. Harrer used the name for the title of his book about his
successful climb, Die Weisse Spinne (translated... as The White Spider)."

"Connoisseur of Chaos,"
by Wallace Stevens,
from Parts of a World (1942):

III

After all the pretty contrast of life and death

Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.

V

The pensive man . . . He sees that eagle float

For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

Related material:

• Trevanian on "the meadow" in Shibumi,
• Trevanian on "the meadow that tilts up toward the north face" in The Eiger Sanction,
• Johnny Mercer on the meadow (Dec. 18 and 20, 2005), and
• Nine is a Vine, Christmas Eve, 2005.

In memory of Humphrey Carpenter, author of The Inklings, who attended The Dragon School.  Carpenter died a year ago today.

"Lewis began with a number of haunted images...."

"The best of the books are the ones... where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow."

"'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote...."

"The Transfiguration of Christ is the culminating point of His public
life.... Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them to a
high mountain apart, where He was transfigured before their ravished
eyes.  St. Matthew and St. Mark express this phenomenon by the
word metemorphothe, which the Vulgate renders transfiguratus est.   The Synoptics
explain the true meaning of the word by adding 'his face did shine as
the sun: and his garments became white as snow,' according to the
Vulgate, or 'as light,'  according to the Greek text. 
This dazzling brightness which emanated from His whole Body was produced by an interior shining of His Divinity."

-- The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912

From Broken Symmetries, 1983, Chapter 16:

"He'd toyed with 'psi'
himself.... The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were
suckers for the stuff was easy to understand-- for two-thirds of a
century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a
contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox....   

Peter [Slater] had
never thirsted after 'hidden variables' to explain what could not be
pictured.  Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere
formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once. 
It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the
gods....

Those so-called crazy psychics
were too sane, that was their problem-- they were too stubborn to
admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they
could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry."