The cult movie and book "It" may seem like nothing more than terrifying fiction, but there is apparently a game in which you can evoke a being similar to the main character of this horror movie.
Could the famous "grandfather paradox" described by Rene Barzhavel in 1943 become a reality? Theoretically, there are no direct prohibitions against traveling to the past. Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the curvature of space and time in energy and matter, allows such journeys.
In 1999, more than 900 people in the USA were insured against their transformation into a werewolf. The leader of the Third Reich himself, Adolf Hitler, named one of his quarters during World War II in honor of these mythical creatures. What is it about these mysterious creatures that even today, almost several hundred years after their last observation, they are still the object of so much human interest?
Fear is a feeling that we all feel. Could there be anything scarier than a being that not only attacks you but does it in the guise of your greatest fear? "It" from the novel and film first takes the form of a dancing clown - Pennywise. Then it can turn into something that its victim fears the most. In the film, it was a mummy, a dead brother of one of the heroes, a drowned man, a werewolf, a character coming to life from a painting, etc. A similar theme appeared in one of the episodes of the famous series "From the X-Files", where agents Scully and Mulder were to unravel the mystery of an unidentified creature, always prowling during a full moon, which could also assume any form that was most terrifying for the victim at a given moment. Fear was so real that it could kill anyone who encountered this creature. However, there are also rumors of a game called "Midnight Man" in which if one of the participants fails to meet the rules by 3:33 a.m., a character will also appear in front of him who will take the form of his worst fear, and then this terrifying creature will gut your victim. Perhaps the realization that such entities can really exist will make everyone approach the issue of summoning ghosts and other dangerous monsters with much greater humility.
However, they require an extremely strong gravitational field, such as generated by a rotating black hole. Only an object of such strength can deform matter in such a way that space curves to the other side. Stephen Hawking and many other physicists believed that a closed time-like curve was absurd because the time-travel of any macroscopic object inevitably creates paradoxes that break causality. A few years ago, University of Queensland physicist Tim Ralph and his Ph.D. student Martin Ringbauer explored the "grandfather paradox" from the point of view of quantum mechanics. The essence of the paradox is to go back in time and kill your grandfather, thus preventing your own birth. According to the hypothesis, the grandfather must have survived the murder because otherwise, the time traveler creates an alternate line where he will never be born. Instead of a man walking through time to kill his ancestor, imagine an elementary particle traveling back in time to activate a switch on the particle generating machine that created it. If a particle flips the switch, the machine will emit a particle that has started a time-travel loop. Thus, if the switch is not moved, the machine emits nothing. In this scenario, there is no deterministic certainty, only the probability distribution. If the particle were a person, it would have a 50% chance of killing its grandfather, which is good enough in probabilistic terms to close the causal loop and escape the paradox. As strange as it may be, this solution follows the known laws of quantum mechanics.
The first stories related to werewolves can be dated to the 5th century BC when the Greek historian Herodotus described the tribe of Neur, which, according to his accounts, could turn into wolves for a few days a year and then return to the human form. Herodotus described this ability as Lycanthropy (Greek: Lycanthropes Lucus (wolf) + Anthropos (human)). The concept of werewolves as creatures hunting people appeared and spread in Europe at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Their appearance varied from region to region but usually had several basic characteristics. Most legends say that they were much larger than ordinary wolves, retained human voice and eyes, and could walk on two legs and ate the remains of newly buried people. More interestingly, people suspected of werewolf were subject to the same persecution as witches. Although werewolf trials were not that common, they did so even in the early 18th century. There were many guaranteed ways to become a werewolf. The most common of them were: inheriting the werewolf gene from his parents, being bitten by a werewolf, being cursed by gypsies, wearing a wolf's skin belt, drinking water from a werewolf's imprint in the ground, and perhaps most interestingly, sleeping in the forest with a full moon shining on our face. Luckily, folk myths also discussed several ways to solve the problem of werewolves. Some proposed exorcisms, others pierced our hands with nails, but perhaps the most common method was to kill the werewolf that brought about our transformation. The frequency of these creatures appearing in the mythologies of individual peoples was largely related to the number of forests and wild animals in a given area. As a result, in more forested regions, these stories appeared more often than in the south. Naturally, Italians and Portuguese were not "inferior" to us in this matter and they had their own counterparts of these creatures, ie the Italian "Lupo Manaro" or the Portuguese "Lobisomem". Interestingly, not all myths define werewolves as evil bloodthirsty creatures. According to legends told in Lithuania and Latvia, for example, a werewolf (they called "vilkacis") sometimes brought people treasures. When dealing with werewolves, it's hard not to refer to the myth created by Hollywood movies about their eternal fight against vampires. Of course, this is a fiction that could hardly be anything more distant from the folk truth. According to the myths told in various European countries, dead werewolves were supposed to be reborn into vampires. Moving on, the Silesian word "volkodlak" meaning werewolf, in Serbian it even translates to "vampire". Similar to the legends and stories described by Herodotus, Scandinavia also tells about the so-called Ulfhednar warriors. According to the stories, they dressed up in wolf skins and allegedly were able to take control of animal spirits and use them in battle. More or less the same practices also appeared in northern Europe, where they were to deal with it. cruelty. It is also worth mentioning here the famous berserkers, Norse warriors engulfed in a battle frenzy, who owed their name to the bearskins they wore. Naturally, the regions of the world where wolves did not exist also had their version of the legend. Thus, South America was terrified of the pumas, Asia of the tigers, and Africa of the people of hyenas. Of course, these days werewolf stories are mostly the domain of myths and legends. Reports of the bloodthirsty half of the people are now considered only the primary cases of conditions such as hypertrichosis (also known as the werewolf syndrome). Naturally, science rejects reports about these creatures as they contradict common sense, and it cannot be denied that the explanation of the lycanthropy phenomenon is far beyond today's researchers.
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