Re: OT SF Mythology

Titus G wrote:

Durandal a sword said to be indestructible, the sharpest of all blades,
once wielded by the knight Roland under Charlemagne, and thenceforth
stuck in stone for 1,300 years, has disappeared from a French village.
>
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/france-excalibur-like-sword-durandal-disappears-after-1300-years/

The mythological Roland blew his horn, the Olifant, to signal
Charlemagne. The sound carried for thirty leagues (90 miles). Such
effort begot bright blood from Roland's' mouth as the veins in his
temples and neck burst.

Perry Rhodan faces a similar situation on the planet Roland, where
Perry's small squad must endure physical pain to send a gravitational
wave SOS:

    Perry Rhodan placed his finger on the small piece of
    metal. "Here goes," he said. "Hold your breath. We don’t
    know what will happen!"

    Rhodan increased the pressure of his finger. He felt the
    little lever begin to yield. For one second Perry Rhodan
    wondered why absolutely nothing happened. Then suddenly
    it felt as if someone had landed a powerful blow on his
    shoulders. His arm sank, his hand with it, and in the
    process his finger pulled the little lever all the way
    down.

    Somebody screamed. Perry Rhodan felt like screaming
    himself. Something was pushing him down with overpowering
    might. He lunged forward and tried to brace himself with
    his hands but a few moments later his arms buckled under.
    He fell headlong to the floor. The fall took away his
    breath and conjured a colourful world of fiery circles
    before his eyes.

    The pressure did not lessen. It squeezed the air out of
    Rhodan's lungs, making it almost impossible to breathe.
    Rhodan realized with painful clarity that he would have
    to undertake something if he were to avoid becoming
    unconscious.

    When he had depressed the lever he had anticipated so
    many things that he needed a few seconds to properly
    evaluate the effect it had actually produced.

    The organ was an antigrav generator. Pressing the lever
    resulted in a five or six-fold intensification of the
    artificial gravity field within the subterranean room.

    PR80 "Caves of the Druufs"

"Do Gravitational Waves Exist?" (Einstein and Rosen)

    Einstein Versus the Physical Review

    Einstein stopped submitting work to the Physical Review after
    receiving a negative critique from the journal in response to
    a paper he had written with Rosen on gravitational waves later
    in 1936. That much has long been known, at least to the editors
    of Einstein's collected papers. But the story of Einstein's
    subsequent interaction with the referee in that case is not well
    known to physicists outside of the gravitational-wave community.
    Last March, the journal's current editor-in-chief, Martin Blume,
    and his colleagues uncovered the journal's logbook records from
    the era, a find that has confirmed the suspicions about that
    referee's identity. Moreover, the story raises the possibility
    that Einstein's gravitational-wave paper with Rosen may have
    been his only genuine encounter with anonymous peer review.
    Einstein, who reacted angrily to the referee report, would have
    been well advised to pay more attention to its criticisms, which
    proved to be valid. ...

    Einstein submitted this research to the Physical Review under
    the title "Do Gravitational Waves Exist?" with Rosen as coauthor.
    Although the original version of the paper no longer exists,
    Einstein's answer to the title question, to judge from his letter
    to Born, was "No." It is remarkable that at this stage in his
    career Einstein was prepared to believe that gravitational waves
    did not exist, but he also managed to convince his new assistant,
    Leopold Infeld, who replaced Rosen in 1936, that his argument was
    valid.

    (excerpt)

<https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/58/9/43/399405/Einstein-Versus-the-Physical-Review-A-great>

Danke,

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