Crystal ball

A crystal ball, also known as an orbuculum, is a crystal or glass ball and common fortune telling object. It is generally associated with the performance of clairvoyance and scrying in particular.

History

The earliest use of crystal balls can be first attributed to the Celtic Druids who divined the future and omens with beryl balls.

In the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder describes use of crystal balls by soothsayers ("crystallum orbis", later written in Medieval Latin by scribes as orbuculum). By the 5th century AD, scrying was widespread within the Roman Empire and was condemned by the early medieval Christian Church as heretical.

Dr. John Dee was a noted British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy, of which the use of crystal balls was often included.

Crystal gazing was a popular pastime in the Victorian era, and was claimed to work best when the Sun is at its northernmost declination. Immediately before the appearance of a vision, the ball was said to mist up from within.

Crystal Ball function

The Crystal Ball function, named after the Crystal Ball Collaboration (hence the capitalized initial letters), is a probability density function commonly used to model various lossy processes in high-energy physics. It consists of a Gaussian core portion and a power-law low-end tail, below a certain threshold. The function itself and its first derivative are both continuous.

The Crystal Ball function is given by:

where

(Skwarnicki 1986) is a normalization factor and , , and are parameters which are fitted with the data. erf is the error function.

External links

Crystal ball (disambiguation)

A crystal ball is a scrying or fortune telling instrument.

Crystal ball may also refer to:

Music

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See also