title: Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time
author:  Martin Gorst 
description: tory of the religious figures, philosophers, astronomers, geologists, physicists, and mathematicians who, for more than four hundred years, have pursued the answer to a fundamental question at the intersection of science and religion: When did the universe begin? <br /><br />The moment of the universe's conception is one of science's Holy Grails, investigated by some of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds across the ages. Few were more committed than Bishop James Ussher, who lost his sight during the fifty years it took him to compose his <i>Annals</i> of all known history, now famous only for one date: 4004 b.c. Ussher's date for the creation of the world was spectacularly inaccurate, but that didn't stop it from being so widely accepted that it was printed in early twentieth-century Bibles. As writer and documentary filmmaker Martin Gorst vividly illustrates in this captivating, character-driven narrative, theology let Ussher down just as it had thwarted Theophilus of Antioch and many b
zlib_text: # EVIL EYE
  
  by David Annandale
  
  There was a jitter in Bekket’s eye that I didn’t like. We were trained at the
  Schola Progenium to watch for the early signs of political deviance or
  dereliction of duty. That meant being able to read all the nuances of body
  language. Hans Bekket was no traitor, and he was no coward. But the time of
  our imprisonment was eroding him, physically and spiritually, as surely as the
  sands of Golgotha had eaten away at the metal and flesh of our forces.
  
  I had been watching him for several shifts now. How many days those were, I
  had no way of telling. The concept of time as a series of moments arriving
  from the endless potential of the future to become a distinct and defining
  past was a luxury denied to the slaves on Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka’s space
  hulk. We had only the grinding scream of an eternal present. Existence was
  labour, whips, agony, death. I had tried, early on, to gauge the length of the
  shifts, but the orks made even that effort futile. They simp