Muons Meet the Maya

Science News ^ | Week of Dec. 8, 2007 | Betsy Mason

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

The “Crystal Skull” episode.

[P8riot]

The Olmecs pre-dated Teotihuacán

[aruanan]

I climbed that pyramid in January, 1977. If you go all the way up quickly without stopping, you get real dizzy!

[P8riot]

The last scenes of “Star Wars: Episode IV” were filmed in the Mayan city of Tikal. In fact Mayan literature contains a reference to “star wars”, battles tied to astronomical events.

[P8riot]

I suppose you are talking about the Pyramid of the Sun”. I last climbed it in June of 1999. Going up is easy. It rained when I was at the top.

[aruanan]

I suppose you are talking about the Pyramid of the Sun”. I last climbed it in June of 1999. Going up is easy. It rained when I was at the top.

Some of those steps are almost straight up. Other neat places were Mitla and Monte Alban down in the state of Oaxaca. Mitla was cool because it had paintings that still had some of the original paint. And the view of the mountains from Monte Alban was beautiful. I crawled into the bottom of one of the small pyramids and up through the top.

I didn't like the restoration efforts at the Pyramid of the Sun because, like Constitution Hall in Philadelphia, you couldn't tell what was original and what was restored.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Interesting.

Appreciated.

[P8riot]

My in-laws are missionaries to the Zapotec people and have lived in Mexico on and off since 1959. Their base of operations has been in Mitla, Oaxaca since 1968. The last time we went to visit them in he field was for 3 weeks in the summer of 1999. I was very impressed with the ruins at Mitla, the reliefs and the murals were fantastic. Monte Alban was fantastic as well.

The steps on the Pyramid of the Sun are almost straight up, but try coming down when they are wet. We were at Teotihuacán on June 21st (the summer solstice) and there were a bunch of pagans there doing their thing as well.

[Physicist]

Schwitters won't be the first to marry physics and archaeology in this way. In 1967, Nobel prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley placed a muon detector in a chamber beneath the pyramid of Khafra in Egypt to see if it was hiding any burial chambers like those discovered in the larger pyramid of Khufu. He found none, but the experiment showed that the method worked.

Alvarez used to bristle when people said he found no hidden chambers in the pyramid. It's not that he found no hidden chambers, it's that he found there were no hidden chambers.

[P8riot]

You’re welcome.

[aruanan]

Did you see that giant willow tree in some little town nearby? I also liked the marketplace in Oaxaca.

[P8riot]

You probably mean El Tulé. Yes, It's amazing. It's actually a Ahuehuete Cypress. It's the biggest (not the tallest) tree in the world.

The Oaxaca market is nice, but the Sunday market in Tlacolula (on the highway between Oaxaca City and Mitla) is better.

[headsonpikes]

So these muons are yielding a new cowsmology, I gather.

[aruanan]

Did you buy any of those black clay whistles and flutes in Mitla? Some girl was selling them. I just plain didn’t want any and told her no. She thought I was regateando and kept lowering her price. I kept saying no until out of frustration she went down to something really ridiculous. Then I said yes. She got really mad. I then told her to forget it because I didn’t want anything like that anyway. She made some insulting remark about gringos. I told her I didn’t buy anything because of her attitude.

[Old Professer]

I read it as more like reading wind speed by using a rain gauge.

[P8riot]

No. My wife has a couple from when she was growing up there. We were too busy anyway, between visiting the ruins at Dainzu, Lambityeco, and Yagul, the formations at Hierve el Agua, and many local villages, plus helping with the mission and translation work.

Did you say you were there in 1977? My wife lived there until moving to the states in 1982. I don't know if you remember it or not, but there is a compound and airstrip on the left hand side of the main road into Mitla (between the village and the higher mountains). That is the translation center for the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano (Summer Institute of Linguistics). My father-in-law oversaw it's construction, and today heads up maintenance and new construction. He is 77 years old, and acts like he's 50. My mother-in-law (a year younger) does all of the book-keeping and administrative stuff.

[zeugma]

so detecting submarines and tunnels might be difficult...

Not if you knew where they were!

(Z ducks) 

[aruanan]

When I was first in college I thought of doing something like translating for Wycliffe. Our college group visited them in Mexico City January of 77 but I was sick and couldn’t make it. I recovered by the time we went to Oaxaca (and that Baroque church is quite beautiful). I ended up teaching school in the Dominican Republic and then coming back for graduate school.

[xJones]

I don’t mind the muouns.

And that is why they will punish you.