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He studied,completed a degree, and wrote a dissertation presumably in the field of astrophysics, which should be enough. But he has apparently published too. http://www.haydenplanetarium.o...

You didn't look very hard, did you?

http://www.haydenplanetarium.o...

I count 13 papers.

Would you care to share your publication record for comparison? It might help your credibility since your level of troll is at grade schooler levels at the moment.

Belief systems and the practice of science are as unrelated as music and athletics. There are plenty of excellent scientists that are devout believers in various religions.

While your second statement is obviously true, that does not help validate your first statement. Every limitation can be overcome, even being a religious scientist. I equate it as being similar to a professional basketball player who is under 6' tall. It is absolutely possible but it does impact your play.

Neil Degrasse Tyson has a great lecture which goes over how religious thought has impacted some of the greatest minds in history. He also writes about the concept in an article titled "The Perimeter Of Ignorance." As I understood his point, there have been times when great scientific scholars have stopped their pursuit of knowledge because they were content with the "God did it" explanation.

Newton stopped investigating the movement of planets once his current mathematical knowledge was put to the task of understanding how planets affect each others' orbits. This was the man who invented Calculus and wrote the Principia, but even he was guilty of not pushing forward the boundaries of science because he was content with the "God did it" answer. If not for his religious beliefs, perhaps he would have added inventing perturbation theory to his list of accolades and could have introduced it a century before Laplace did.

I am not arrogant enough to think I could keep religious beliefs from impacting my ability to investigate the world rationally if even geniuses like Newton couldn't.

The most troubling causational link he highlights is how the Islamic world lost its place as a center of scientific progress when a radical version of Islam took hold in the 12th century. Over the centuries that followed, the Islamic world went from being the place Algebra was invented to having 0.6% of Nobel laureates in Physics/Chemistry/Medicine with 23% of the world's population.

My favorite concept from his lecture is the danger of Revelation Replacing Investigation. It is at the core of why scientific thought and religious thought are at opposing sides, even though they can both exist within the same human being.

"After the 9/11 attacks, when President George W. Bush, in a speech aimed at distinguishing the U.S. from the Muslim fundamentalists, said, 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' The problem is two-thirds of all the stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. This would confound the point that he was making." From The Amazing Meeting Keynote Speech, 2008. http://www.haydenplanetarium.o...

And I at one point considered doing something like this with a modern browser - but nothing ever came of it (should'a would'a could'a - gotten off my lazy ass and tried).

Instead I found this:
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe

If you want a standalone app for a star map, this seems like a good (and free!) place to start, and the db looks like something vaguely resembling an open licence (I admit I didn't read into it).

The perimeter of ignorance. A boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2005/11/01/the-perimeter-of-ignorance

God is where we don't know.

How true that is...

Writing in centuries past, many scientists felt compelled to wax poetic about cosmic mysteries and God's handiwork. Perhaps one should not be surprised at this: most scientists back then, as well as many scientists today, identify themselves as spiritually devout.

But a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. They call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

My own personal favorite example here.

The 'supernatural' in practice means 'incomprehensible' - unknowable by humans - something forever beyond human ken, something we will never be capable of understanding. Different terms are used - the 'ineffable', the 'mystery', and so forth - but the basic idea is the same.

Think about the difference between the notion of the 'powerful alien' (a staple of science fiction) and the notion of a 'god' in a religion. What's the essential difference between them? In the stories, they both do amazing, astonishing things. But a powerful alien is (ultimately, eventually) comprehensible - often in the story humans are able to figure out some way of duplicating its powers, or interfering with them, etc. Gods, though, are beyond what humans can do, and there's no point in trying to figure out why or how they do what they do.

And if you decide that something is fundamentally incomprehensible, you will stop trying to understand it. E.g. here or here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson I wish I read his book "The Universe Down to Earth" when I was in grade 9. I think it would have greatly shaped my school pathway for a 'real' science career. http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/

Absolute rational materialism* is based on the assertion that there is a rational scientific explanation for everything.

Not necessarily. One can note that the list of things that have a "rational scientific explanation" has been growing monotonically since we've been keeping track - the total has never gone down. Nothing's ever moved from the "has a rational scientific explanation" column to the "explained only supernaturally" column.

One can be a rational materialist and simply go with induction there.

Then there's the philosophical problem with the 'unknowable'. How can we, in practice, distinguish between something that doesn't have a "rational scientific explanation" and something that can't have one? From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can't conclude that it's unknowable. It might be... but it also might be the case that you just didn't happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt. Especially when one notes the documented risks of allowing supernatural explanations.

In practice, there ends up being no real difference between "absolute rational materialism" and just plain "rational materialism"... Either way, there's no point in accepting supernatural explanations. All you can say is, "we don't have a good account of that yet."

The planetarium that I work at is also considering using the Uniview system. We currently use the Konica Minolta's single-projector MediaGlobe I/II system. It provides wonderful visuals and interactivity in our galaxy, but sadly, its intergalactic abilities aren't nearly up to what the Uniview can do. For those wishing to dabble a bit in the technology behind Uniview, though, check out the free Digital Universe.

Now this is a real planetarium!
I know, because I have worked in many of the world's best known planetariums.

I'm no great coder, nor matemathician, but wouldn't a GPU be perfect for simulations such as this one?

I imagine there is a lot of vector calculations going on, which GPUs are very good at. Maybe the communication between memory and GPU would be too slow.

Someone with more knowledge, please share your insights!

Another application you might try is Digital Universe by the Hayden Planetarium...
http://haydenplanetarium.org/
Available for Windows and Linux...

Whoops. I forgot [1] http://haydenplanetarium.org/universe/duguide/mwt_ coordinates_sky.php Second paragraph of section titled "Galactic Coordinates Trace the Galactic Plane" is where I got 62 degrees between the solar ecliptic and the galactic equator.

Here's a link to the cannonical paper on the issue: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0104064

Also, if you're interested, and in the New York area, some of the scientists who've been working on this are speaking at the Hayden planetarium in a few weeks: http://haydenplanetarium.org/programs/asimov/

Just to give a feel for what obsessive level of detail we're dealing with, here's a list of the possible causes considered in the paper above. The numbers after each listing are the bias and uncertainty in units of 10^-8 cm/sec^2. Listings with only one number only have an uncertainity, not a bias.

1 Systematics generated external to the spacecraft:
  a) Solar radiation pressure and mass +0.03 ±0.01
  b) Solar wind ± 10^-5
  c) Solar corona ±0.02
  d) Electro-magnetic Lorentz forces ± 10^-4
  e) Influence of the Kuiper belt's gravity ±0.03
  f) Influence of the Earth orientation ±0.001
  g) Mechanical and phase stability of DSN antennae ± 0.001
  h) Phase stability and clocks ± 0.001
  i) DSN station location ± 10^-5
  j) Troposphere and ionosphere ± 0.001
2 On-board generated systematics:
  a) Radio beam reaction force +1.10 ±0.11
  b) RTG heat reflected off the craft -0.55 ±0.55
  c) Differential emissivity of the RTGs ±0.85
  d) Non-isotropic radiative cooling of the spacecraft ±0.48
  e) Expelled Helium produced within the RTGs +0.15 ±0.16
  f) Gas leakage ±0.56
  g) Variation between spacecraft determinations +0.17 ±0.17
3 Computational systematics:
  a) Numerical stability of least-squares estimation ±0.02
  b) Accuracy of consistency/model tests ±0.13
  c) Mismodeling of maneuvers ±0.01
  d) Mismodeling of the solar corona ±0.02
  e) Annual/diurnal terms ±0.32

Just... wow. Great to see that there is life in the old girl yet. Our galaxy is to suffer a similar fate, some 3 billion years hence.

It's hard to tell at first, because Partiview is so much slower on a PIII/800/i810 cheapo to which I downloaded it, compared to the Hayden, or even Celestia on that cheapo. But the fonts look different (though maybe I can change the fonts). When I can figure out how to zap over to the Solar system, the planets might look the same, which could mean the same program is working. In any case, Partiview looks really cool - thanks for pointing it out.

I am wondering about the source code, inevitably. I don't see it available, or mentioned - its license isn't mentioned beyond the clickthru. Which is purportedly an "open source" license, but I don't see the source. Maybe it's stored somewhere in Partiview, maybe in a locker, in a disused lavatory, down a dark flight of stairs, behind a door with a sign saying "beware the leopard", on Magrathea.

The software you saw at the Hayden might have been something to do with Partiview:

Funny you should bring that up. My advisor, a well-respected astrophysicist, was making a lengthy joke about extending google maps / keyhole all the way out to the local group. I'm not sure that it would work so well, because it's necessarily a two-dimensional interface, and the data is 3-d. If you mean as a planetarium interface, I think I could agree with you there.

Right now, the best 3-d data viewer that I've seen is Partiview which was designed by Stuart Levy at NCSA and is hosted by AMNH with a couple data catalogs. I'd recommend checking out the Extragalactic catalog and the Milky way catalog. The button bar isn't as nice as in celestia, but the data is extremely extensive and I find the 3-d manipulation to be much more intuitive.

And, of course, the Milky Way is on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy. And both galaxies are hurtling towards the Great Attractor in the Virgo cluster.

So, no matter how you look at it, progress has been made towards some sort of calamity.

Oops, missed a couple of good ones: Polygon Worlds lets you drive around on Mars. Planet's Orbits and Partiview are great for general Astronomy education.

...and some more general linkage, because I'm bored:
Educational -
Tuxtype and Droid Battles.
Board/puzzle games -
MahJong (the real four player thing, not the solitaire version), Settlers of Catan - versions here or here, JTEG, a Risk-alike, and Tetrinet (networked T*tris).
General Fun -
Armagetron (definitely have a look at this - I can imagine it being popular with kids), Search and Rescue, Astrobattle, Tower Toppler, MyLink (UpLink clone), Airstrike, XRick, Vegastrike, Stoned (curling simulation), CarWorld, Cannon Smash (virtual Table tennis), Sentry, Noiz2sa, rRootage, PowerManga, Spheres of Chaos, Warblade, Epiar...

More possibilities.

You might also give Nethack or one of its many derivatives a shot.

That enough to keep you busy? (=

From the "What is Partiview?" page:

Partiview (Particle View) is a software package that allows one to navigate through three dimensional data sets. These data sets are not limited to astronomical data, but can be particle data of any type. Partiview is also able to display 2-D images as well as play prerecorded flight paths.

So, I'm not sure how you can call it "universe-simulation software" - it's visualisation software for 3-d data sets, which don't even have to be astronomical in nature. It doesn't actually do any simulation of the physical processes in the universe, as far as I can see.

That's not to belittle it - I find being able to visualise data is one of the most important aspects of research.