Word: stannard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...father was the great love object" of his life. A spellbinding Presbyterian minister who led family-prayer sessions five times a day, the Rev. Joseph Ruggles Wilson came to assume the dimensions of deity in the eyes of his worshipful first son. "Until after he was 40," writes Ray Stannard Baker, the official Wilson biographer quoted in this volume, "Woodrow Wilson never made an important decision of any kind without first seeking his father's advice...
...Stannard is aware of the misnomer; Faust was simply rejuvenated, his death merely postponed...
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...
Though his hypothesis strikes him as "esthetically pleasing" and has not yet been seriously challenged, Stannard is quick to admit that there is no proven evidence to support it. Asked by a U.S. student for a simple explanation of his theory, Stannard sent a copy of his Nature article and included some dis arming advice: "If you don't understand the theory, it doesn't matter, because it probably isn't true...