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 One
enduring benefit of living in the intellectual Hub of the Universe
is the availability of free lectures
by some of the
smartest experts in some of the most obscure and useless areas of
knowledge known to man. This week, for example, there is a doubleheader
which we hope will go a long way towards helping us understand who we
are and how we got here, or at least distract us from the ongoing tragedy
which is the Red Sox 86 year unrequited quest for baseball redemption.
Tomorrow, there is what looks to be a gripping presentation
on one of the most dramatic discoveries of the previous century –
the army of life-sized Terra-cotta warriors unearthed 30 years ago
in China:
Wednesday, Oct. 13
UNDERGROUND ARMY
In 1974, a group of farmers in the Chinese countryside began digging
a well and instead unearthed a clay torso, and another, and another.
Soon it became clear that they had discovered something breathtaking:
A vast terra-cotta army of life-size soldiers. Buried more than 2,000
years ago to escort the ruthless Emperor Qin Shihuang to the afterlife,
the subterranean legions have become a linchpin of Chinese tourism,
spawning chess sets and trinkets and even ”Qin Army Powdered Milk." In a
talk on Wednesday, archeologist Robert Murowchick will describe this
extraordinary burial and what might lie behind it. ”Making Silent Sentinels
Speak: The Archeology of China’s Buried Armies of Clay," Boston
University, 725 Commonwealth Ave., Room 224. At 7 p.m. Free.
Then, on Thursday, we have a lecture at Harvard’s Peabody
Museum on the central mystery of life on earth – how did it get here?
A lightning strike on a primordial chemical soup? A comet carrying
a frozen seed of biological life? A visit from creatures from the stars?
Thursday,
Oct. 14
WE CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
At some point on this planet, a bunch of chemicals got together and
formed long, complicated compounds that could reproduce themselves,
a process
echoed deep inside our own bodies every time a strand of DNA replicates.
Or did life really start that way? Even experts disagree, and the
primordial evidence has long since been melted, crushed, or ground
to dust. So
scientists are looking for answers elsewhere, both within our cells
and in the far
reaches of outer space. Astrobiologist Antonio Lazcano will appear
at Harvard Thursday to lay out several theories on how the earliest
structures
of life may have arisen on Earth. ”The Origins of Life on
Earth: Did It All Begin in a Warm Little Pond?", Harvard
Museum of Natural History, Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford
St., Cambridge. Call 617-495-3045
for information. At 6 p.m. Free.
We fully expect that by Friday morning be will be completely
convinced that the Terra Cotta warriors were deposited fully formed
by visitors from beyond the stars…..
from the Boston Globe
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