Word: faustian
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...official engines of conscience and convenience have rehabilitated Bulgakov. Last year the Soviets printed his Faustian novel The Master and Margarita, a rowdy satire written three decades ago that treats the Devil and the literary world of Moscow in the 1930s with equal seriousness (TIME, Oct. 27). The book was a great success in Russia and in the U.S. In 1965, Soviet literary authorities printed Black Snow, another satirical novel from Bulgakov's trunk. This is the book that leaves the great Stanislavsky with sour cream on his face...
...stacked to form one tier and then two. As the stage gets higher it gets smaller, and the play ends with the last man on earth pacing on a tiny square, rubbing his head against the ceiling of the Adams House Dining room. This is the most comically un-Faustian act since the nose tweek...
Only if there were some interaction between the two universes might it be possible to detect a Faustian galaxy, which would absorb energy instead of radiating it in familiar galactic fashion. The search for such a galaxy, Stannard suggests, could be made by a telescope equipped with a sensitive thermal device. If the device suddenly began radiating heat, the telescope almost certainly would be pinpointing a heat-absorbing Faustian galaxy, otherwise invisible because it would also be absorbing rather than emitting light...
Scientists may have already seen evidence of Faustian matter in the be havior of subatomic particles called K-mesons. These particles normally decay rapidly into other smaller bits of matter, but some of them seem to live longer than they theoretically should. Stannard speculates that the K-mesons may actually do a "time-flip" into the Faustian universe, reverse their process of decay and grow younger. Then they flip back and resume their disintegration-while appearing only to have decayed more slowly...
Negative Answer. A Faustian universe can even be justified mathematically, says Stannard, because the Einsteinian equation that expresses the time of one observer relative to the time of another observer moving at a different speed involves a square root. The square root of any number, he points out, can be a positive or a negative number. "What I suggest," says Stannard, "is that we accept the minus answer as a possibility. Thus we get negative, or Faustian, time...