Paul Summers Young

  Between 1908 and 1912, Henrietta Swan Leavitt published a simple idea which settled the debate about the scale of the visible universe. The intrinsic luminosity of a variable star - a star which waxes and wanes - is related to the period of its fluctuation; which is to say, the interval between its maximum and minimum apparent luminosity tells you its actual temperature. Knowing that then allows you to calculate its distance. This clever, elegant observation allowed astronomers at Harvard to establish that some of the nebulae observable in the night sky were beyond the bounds of our own galaxy, galaxies in their own right. It established beyond doubt that our galaxy is not alone, one among many. Ptolemy finally died.  These variable stars are known as Cepheid Standard Candles. *  My father bought a copy of Gould and Cornell's 'Poltergeists' within a year or so of its publication in 1979, and I am grateful that he did. Admittedly, I read it far too young, and it terrifie...

This is the introduction I wrote to my transcription and edit of Joseph Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus; it will not be appearing in the printed edition, so I reproduce it here.  The book itself will be published by Holythorn Press at the end of March.  Introduction  This actually happened: a friend from the southern reaches of the Appalachia was telling me about her experiences with Hoodoo and the tent revival scene, and how she's seen people with her own eyes regurgitate nails and pins during an exorcism. This captured what I want to say about Joseph Glanvill's work and the persistence of the seventeenth-century so well; if you at all doubt what Glanvill and , and their various gentleman correspondents recount in Saducismus Triumphatus , you have only to join the Pentecostalist circuit in North Carolina. What happened then, happens now; context and interpretation vary, of course, but the heart of the thing, the phenomenon, is what it is. Glanvill never saw Saducismus ...