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dread minerva writes "This week, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories publicly reported that sensitive material stored on removable data storage devices was missing." In Sandia's case, "According to the Las Vegas Sun, this 'prompted the lab to halt all classified work Thursday while officials conduct a wall-to-wall inventory of sensitive data.' Sandia also reported that a 'computer floppy disk was missing.' However, according to the Albuquerque Journal, 'lab officials said they don't believe it contains any weapons information or any other information that could harm national security,' only admitting that the material on the disk was classified. Due to these latest events, LANL has shut down all work on classified projects as of Friday." (Read more below.) Update: 07/17 21:21 GMT by T : A correction -- research was shut down only at LANL (not, as I mistakenly claimed, at Sandia) -- and an update: Sandia's missing disk was recovered.

"These snafus have led the government to open up the labs to defense-contracting bids for the first time in their 60+ year history (until now the labs have been run by UC-Berkeley). As NPR reported on Friday, the researchers at the labs were upset by this move, as they are afraid of the labs losing their academic nature. Perhaps the best question to ask in this situation is why these labs are still using removable data storage devices to store sensitive information."

(Other institutions, including The University of Texas system, are also angling for a share of the lab's management.)

uncadonna writes "ZDNet is reporting that corporate web servers are infecting visitors' PCs. The combination of two unpatched IE security holes and hacked corporate websites is apparently distributing malware via several high-credibility sites. ZDNet says users have 'few options' other than alternative browsers or platforms." Update: 06/25 14:50 GMT by J : A reader points out Microsoft's What You Should Know page. Here's the short version for avoiding this Critical severity attack: you must install add-on software, and change multiple settings in multiple programs, thus causing "some Web sites to work improperly." By changing more settings, you can regain functionality for a particular site if "you trust that it is safe to use," which you have no way of knowing. Or try Firefox. Update: 06/25 19:30 GMT by J : Reuters reports the attack installs a keysniffer which can steal credit card numbers, passwords, and so on. The story offers safety tips, but fails to mention that, after patching the hole, many users will be infected without their knowledge. Shouldn't the "fix" include ceasing to type anything important into your computer until you purchase software which can detect and remove the Trojan? And will you be downloading that software with Mastercard or Visa?

nightsweat writes "The list of items and tasks for the 2004 version of the infamous University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt (or scavhunt for short) is up as a PDF. As a veteran of the first hunt in 1985, I'm glad to see the youngsters carrying on the madness. Some of the highlight items - the URLs of the blogs of the judges, five pages of Queer Eye for Doctor Doom, A McDonald's Sad Meal, Mrs Potatohead giving Mr. Potato head, Eudaemonia (300 points!), and a permanent tattoo that says 'Sorry about the syphilis, can we still be cousins?'"

nightsweat writes "The list of items and tasks for the 2004 version of the infamous University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt (or scavhunt for short) is up as a PDF. As a veteran of the first hunt in 1985, I'm glad to see the youngsters carrying on the madness. Some of the highlight items - the URLs of the blogs of the judges, five pages of Queer Eye for Doctor Doom, A McDonald's Sad Meal, Mrs Potatohead giving Mr. Potato head, Eudaemonia (300 points!), and a permanent tattoo that says 'Sorry about the syphilis, can we still be cousins?'"

naoursla writes "Researchers at the University of Chicago think they have identified 15 mutations in a gene responsible for brain development that gave humans abilities of abstract thought and planning. The article is at Discover. They plan to insert the gene into mice to 'to see what affect it has on brain development.'"

gxc writes "The world's first free national wireless grid is no longer with us, after waves from Cyclone Heta swept over Niue's thirty metre cliffs, destroying everything. Although only one person died, the damage is so bad that there is talk of winding up the country , meaning their fortuitous ccTLD could go the way of .su. Perhaps the easiest way for Slashdotters to help Niue would be to choose a .nu domain over the dull alternatives."

lgreco writes "The new scientist has this article about NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory that is losing part of its sight due to grease built up on one of its optical filters. I guess it will take a space shuttle mission to clean the filter or install one of these mini windshield wipers ..."

An anonymous reader writes "SETI's famous 1977 'Wow' signal has been discredited in the Astrophysical Journal, using the University of Tasmania Hobart 26 m radio telescope to search for intermittent and possibly periodic emissions at the 'Wow' locale. Of the many 'maybes' that SETI has turned up in its four-decade history, none is better known than the brief, powerful one that was discovered in August, 1977, in Columbus, Ohio. Marked by the signal's rise from zero, to '30-sigma' over background noise, and back to zero in 37 seconds, the famous Wow signal was found as part of a long-running sky survey conducted with Ohio State University's 'Big Ear' radio telescope. To quote from their article in The Astrophysical Journal, Robert Gray and Simon Ellingsen, of Australia's University of Tasmania, 'no signals resembling the Ohio State Wow were detected...' So until and unless the cosmic beep measured in Ohio is found again, the 'Wow' signal will remain a 'What' signal."

An anonymous reader writes "SETI's famous 1977 'Wow' signal has been discredited in the Astrophysical Journal, using the University of Tasmania Hobart 26 m radio telescope to search for intermittent and possibly periodic emissions at the 'Wow' locale. Of the many 'maybes' that SETI has turned up in its four-decade history, none is better known than the brief, powerful one that was discovered in August, 1977, in Columbus, Ohio. Marked by the signal's rise from zero, to '30-sigma' over background noise, and back to zero in 37 seconds, the famous Wow signal was found as part of a long-running sky survey conducted with Ohio State University's 'Big Ear' radio telescope. To quote from their article in The Astrophysical Journal, Robert Gray and Simon Ellingsen, of Australia's University of Tasmania, 'no signals resembling the Ohio State Wow were detected...' So until and unless the cosmic beep measured in Ohio is found again, the 'Wow' signal will remain a 'What' signal."

Well, one science journalist's opinion, anyway. Charles Seife writes for Science magazine and is the author of Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe. These are his answers to your questions, and they're very detailed, to the point where you may want to set aside more than a few minutes of quiet time to read and digest them. Q1) "Publishing hype" by BobTheLawyer (#6606631)

A1)I'm not embarrassed at all because it's not hype. Scientists now know how the universe will end. Of course, as with all things scientific, there's a big honking asterisk on the word "know," but before I get to that, let me explain why I feel justified in making such an arrogant statement.

We're in the middle of a scientific revolution, in the honest-to-god paradigm-shift sense. This revolution started in 1997 when two groups of astronomers, the High-Z Supernova Search Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project used the bright flashes of a particular type of dying star (a type-Ia supernova) to measure the expansion of the universe at different times in the past. Since then, a whole raft of astronomical observations -- of faint patterns in the afterglow of the big bang, of distributions of galaxies, of the composition of intergalactic clouds of gas, of distortions of light going around massive bodies -- have all forced cosmologists into a remarkable consensus about the composition of the universe and, yes, its fate.

Just to give you a little taste of what the difference in the state of knowledge was like: in 1997, if you asked an astronomer how old the universe is, you'd get an answer somewhere between 12 and 15 billion years. Now, you'll get an answer of 13.7 billion years, plus or minus about 100 million. That's a big jump in precision. Similarly, before 1997, nobody had a clue how the universe would end; now, cosmologists agree on its fate. Some of the details haven't been worked out (what an understatement!), but the gross picture of the ultimate fate of the cosmos seems to be pretty well established for the first time in history. And by the end of the decade, a lot of the details will be fleshed out.

The ongoing revolution isn't just astronomical; it's physical. A decade ago, nobody knew whether neutrinos have mass. (For those who aren't particle physicists, neutrinos are particles that so rarely interact with matter that they can easily pass through the Earth without noticing the big chunk of mass they've passed through. This property makes them exceedingly hard to study.) Now, neutrino physicists are in accord -- and they've concluded that neutrinos, collectively, weigh about as much as all the visible stars and galaxies in the universe combined. High-energy physicists are using an accelerator in Long Island to recreate the condition of the universe a few microseconds after the big bang. By next year, they will formally announce the creation of a new state of matter that existed only in the very, very early universe. (There are alreadystrong hints that they've succeeded.) And another particle accelerator under construction in Geneva is very likely going to discover the particle responsible for exotic dark matter. (More on this shortly.)

All these experiments, all these observations, are pointing in exactly the same direction; they reveal the composition of the universe and its fate. But as with any good scientific revolution, such as relativity or quantum mechanics, it generates more questions than it answers. Scientists now know how the universe will end, but that understanding comes at the cost of a new mystery in physics.

As to the asterisk on the word "know," scientists are acutely aware that their theories are subject to revision. But at the same time, they have good reasons for being confident about their theories -- and they are more confident about some theories than about others. The new cosmological picture that's emerged has a darn high confidence rating; extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and the scientific world wouldn't accept the ideas of dark matter, much less dark energy, if there weren't a number of independent lines of evidence that forced scientists to make that conclusion. And while they're not confident about many of the details of the cosmos and the mechanisms that shape it, they are pretty sure that the overall picture is correct. (More on this coming, too.)

Q2) [Almost] Serious question! by Noryungi (#6606694)

and

Q3) Why does the rate of expansion change? by Anonymous Coward (#6606745)

A2,3) The universe will end in... umm... you really want me to give away the ending to my book?

Actually, I reveal the answer in chapter four, because the understanding of the fate of the universe is just the beginning of the current cosmological revolution. So it's not a spoiler to say...

-- drum roll -- the universe will die a heat death, or "Dark & Cold" by your terminology.

In a big bang universe governed by the laws of general relativity, there are two possibilities. (Actually, there are more than two, but all the cases boil down to two real outcomes.) Big crunch or heat death, fire or ice.

The fate of the universe depends on how the universe expands. In general, things that expand cool down and things that are compressed heat up. (This is what causes a propane container to feel so cold after a barbecue -- all the gas that expanded.) After the big bang the universe was extremely hot and was seething with energy. As it expanded, it cooled; free-roaming quarks condensed into protons and neutrons, and wound up as hydrogen, helium, and a handful of other light elements and isotopes. About 400,000 years after the big bang, the universe cooled enough so that the electrons could combine with the nuclei and form neutral atoms. Now, about 14 billion years later, the universe is a pretty cool place.

The expansion of the universe is like a cannonball shot into the air. As the cannonball flies ever higher, the force of gravity tries to drag it back to earth, reducing its upward velocity and slowing it down as it zooms upward. If gravity is very strong, then the cannonball rapidly loses its speed and quickly comes crashing back to the ground. On the other hand, if gravity is very weak, then the cannonball might escape the pull of the earth entirely and zoom away into outer space.

Similarly, the big bang gave the universe an initial cannonshot of expansion. If the mutual gravitational attraction of the objects in the universe is very strong (if there's a lot of matter in the universe) the expansion will slow down, halt, and eventually reverse itself. After the cooling phase of expansion, the universe will begin to swallow itself, getting smaller and smaller each day. This will make it heat up. The skies will get brighter and brighter as galaxies and stars get closer and closer together, and eventually, the universe will become a bath of radiation once more. Electrons will separate from atoms, atoms and then protons and neutrons will shiver into their components, and the universe will collapse in a "big crunch," a reverse big bang. The cosmos will die a death by fire.

On the other hand, if there's not much matter in the universe, then the expansion of the universe will continue forever. The expansion will slow down, but it will never halt and never reverse itself. The universe continues to cool down, and for a long time, space will look pretty much as it does now. Stars will be born and die, and galaxies will age. The night sky would get darker and darker as distant objects get too dim to view, and eventually, as the hydrogen in the universe is consumed, stars and galaxies will begin to wink out. Many billions of years hence, the universe will be a lifeless soup of dim light and dead matter. It will be a death by ice.

In 1997 and 1998, the two supernova teams used the brightness of distant supernovae to measure the rate of expansion at different times in the past. (Because the speed of light is finite, looking into the distance is the same as looking into the past. This causes no end of tense problems when writing a book about cosmology.) What they found was absolutely gobsmacking. Not only was the universe's expansion not slowing down very much -- it was speeding up! The cannonball was zooming into the air faster and faster as if it were propelled by some sort of weird antigravity force. Not only was the cannonball going to escape, it is so OUTTA HERE! This means a death by ice.

Yegads -- an antigravity force. This was a really hard thing for scientists (and probably you) to accept. But there's a number of different lines of evidence that support the idea, and in the book I go through those lines of evidence in great detail. I'll have to settle for a brief summary here. In 2000, a balloon experiment known as Boomerang took very detailed pictures of the ubiquitous afterglow of the big bang, the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This afterglow has hot and cold spots in it, and for years, scientists have been making very, very detailed predictions about the size and distribution of those spots. The results of the Boomerang experiment and the DASI and WMAP experiments matched those predictions incredibly well, giving scientists great confidence in the underlying theory. It also allowed them to figure out the amount of matter and energy in the universe, and 73% of the "stuff" in the cosmos was dark energy, this antigravity force.

There are a number of other lines of evidence, too; the current distribution of galaxies, for example, implies the presence of an antigravity force, and just last month, scientists made a very nice measurement of something known as the late integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. This effect can't occur unless you have something like dark energy counteracting gravity's pull.

Unfortunately, a fuller exposition requires a lot more writing -- it takes up several chapters in my book. (Shameless plug). But in summary, there's a number of independent observations that all point to the existence of a dark energy. Furthermore, the theories underlying the idea have made very specific predictions that have been verified with incredible precision. It's extraordinary stuff, but no matter how scientists look at it, they're forced by extraordinary evidence to make the same conclusion.

Yes, it's true that scientists don't know the mechanism of dark energy (though they're not entirely at sea) but there's little doubt that the cannonball is zooming into space faster and faster. They don't know precisely why, but the universe is being pushed toward its icy death by an antigravity force. Scientists are watching it happen.

And you don't need to wait billions of years to know the outcome -- you don't need to observe something directly to conclude that it's going to happen. The planet Pluto was discovered in 1930. So why don't people object to the statement that it takes about 250 years to complete an orbit? Just as you don't have to wait until 2180 to confirm the conclusions of Newtonian dynamics, you don't need to witness the end of the universe to be able to figure out its fate or validate the theory that leads you to that prediction.

Q4) Dark Matter by notcreative (#6606772)

A4) You are correct; the nature and location of dark matter are crucial puzzles in modern cosmology, but I think that the answers will be pretty much in hand by the end of the decade.

I've already mentioned results (most notably WMAP) that reveal the amount of "stuff" in the universe, and 73% of it is dark energy. The rest is matter. But the grand total of the matter locked up in visible stars is a mere 0.5% of the stuff in the universe. What is the other 26.5%? That's dark matter, and, in fact, there are two different types.

Scientists have known for decades that most of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes. In the 1960s, Vera Rubin measured the motion of stars wheeling around the center of the Andromeda galaxy and concluded that there had to be a lot more matter pulling on those stars than could be seen.

Despite what some contrarians say, dark matter isn't dogma; viable alternatives, like Moti Milgrom's MOND are taken seriously, if not accepted. Unfortunately, all of the alternatives, including MOND, fail in crucial ways. Besides, you can see dark matter, both directly and indirectly. The MACHO and OGLE projects see the twinkle of stars caused by a passing chunk of dark matter, and they can see the distortion of light caused by a huge amount of unseen mass sitting on the fabric of spacetime. (Distant galaxies are stretched into arcs around this gravitational lens.) This is allowing scientists to figure out just where dark matter resides. But at the same time, a number of observations lead scientists to conclude that the minority of the matter (dark or light) in the universe is ordinary, atomic matter -- the stuff of stars, planets, and people. Again, it will take too long to describe all the lines of evidence, but one powerful way of measuring the number of atoms in the universe is to look at the proportion of hydrogen to deuterium, helium, and lithium in primordial gas clouds. In the first three minutes of the universe, atoms were fusing, just as they do in a hydrogen bomb. The universe was a giant pressure cooker, turning protons and neutrons into heavier elements. If there are a lot of atoms, then there is a lot of fusion and a lot of heavy elements made; if there are not very many atoms, then the universe winds up being almost entirely hydrogen. By looking at the ratios of heavy elements to light elements, scientists concluded that atomic matter makes up about 4% of the "stuff" in the universe -- which is precisely what other measurements, like the CMB ones -- imply, too.

So, 27% of the stuff in the universe is matter: 4% "atomic" matter, leaving 23% to be made of "exotic" matter, stuff that's not made of atoms. I've already described some of that exotic matter; neutrinos make up about 0.5% of the stuff in the universe, about the same as the visible matter in the universe. What's the remainder?

That's the big open question, but one that I'd wager will be solved by the end of the decade. There are very good reasons -- particle physics ones, rather than cosmological ones -- for believing that the main constituent of dark matter is a proposed particle known as the LSP. If it is, then the LHC accelerator in Geneva will find it. If not, then the LSP almost certainly doesn't exist and the puzzle will be compounded -- but I think that scientists are extremely optimistic. Again, there's lots more detail in the book about the justification for this.

Q5) variable constants by Cally (#6607000)

A5) The point's well taken, and I'll get to it after a few remarks.

First, you're right in that the supernovae serve much the same purpose as Cepheid variable stars do -- they're both objects of known brightness, or "standard candles," that allow astronomers to make a precise measurement of the distance to a faraway galaxy. However, they are not the same thing. Cepheids are stars that pulsate and the rate of that pulsation reveals its intrinsic brightness. They're what Hubble used to spot the expansion of the universe in the 1920s, but they're relatively dim and impossible to find in very distant galaxies. Type-Ia supernovae are standard candles that are much, much brighter than Cepheids, and so can be seen halfway across the universe. (And as you note, since distant supernovae mean ancient supernovae, they reveal the expansion rate of the universe billions of years ago.)

Second, the time-varying speed of light (or more precisely, the time-varying fine structure constant) is a controversial idea. The scientists that made the observation in question are pretty solid and they're taken seriously. However, my impression is that mainstream thinking is that the results are due to a systematic error. That aside, the effect, even if real, is very small, and it has nothing to do with interpreting the data from standard candles. The interpretation there is quite well established; there's little question that scientists are seeing an expansion of the universe;. Alternative theories, like tired light, fail in countless ways and scientists have even seen the relativistic time dilation caused by the motion of the distant object.

But, yes, it's natural for a layperson to conclude that the concordance cosmological model is looking increasingly kludge-y, and you're naturally led to wonder whether scientists are trying to prop up a failing model with the equivalent of epicycles or aether. I don't think this is the case for a few reasons.

For one thing, the theory isn't really getting added to and made more complex; it's getting subtracted from and being made more simple. This seems counterintuitive, but it comes from the fact that modern big bang theory is really a class of theories, rather than one set-in-stone dictum about the way the universe is. All these theories agree on the basic physics about the manner of the universe's birth, the forces that drive the universe, and the physics behind them; the difference between the theories are the values of a handful of parameters that are not predicted by the theory. These parameters are inputs rather than outputs, and by pinning down the values of these inputs, the acceptable class of theories gets narrower and narrower.

Dark energy is one of these inputs. Although nobody took it seriously before 1998 -- everyone thought that the value of the parameter in question was zero -- it was lurking there nonetheless. It turns out that this parameter is not only non-zero, it's really big, much to everyone's surprise. But this doesn't add complexity to the model, especially since other parameters, such as the "curvature" of the universe as a whole, which many physicists thought would be non-trivial, turn out not to be important after all. (In other words, the universe seems to be slate flat, rather than saddle-shaped or sphere-like.)

So, from a mathematical viewpoint, the model is no more complex than it was in 1997, and is, in fact, significantly leaner. But what about from a physical viewpoint? Dark matter and dark energy seem to fly in the face of Occam. But here, too, the increase in complexity is much less than it appears. Long before this cosmological revolution, astronomers knew that dark matter had to exist; more recently, they've begun to see it. Even without worrying about cosmological questions, astrophysicists had accepted the existence of dark matter. Cosmological measurements like WMAP showed that these astrophysicists were right -- it was an independent confirmation that dark energy exists and that it comes in two forms, something that other astronomers had concluded a while ago.

Dark energy, on the other hand, has more claim to being a "hack" to the theory. It really is something new and unexpected (even though it was always a mathematical possibility, nobody in the physics world suspected it actually existed.) Nevertheless, the groundwork was already there, and modern big bang theory implicitly requires the existence of a form of dark energy in the very early universe. And since the 1930s, scientists knew that even the deepest vacuum is full of energy and can exert pressure (something known as the Casimir effect, which I describe in this book and in my previous book, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea). Thus, the idea of dark energy wasn't completely alien to physics before 1997, and in some sense, it was a necessary component.

Yes, it's possible that scientists are looking at the cosmos in the wrong way, and somebody will establish a simpler, more elegant theory that takes all these threads and weaves them together. (More on this shortly.) But at the moment, far from having a kludged-up theory, cosmologists have a leaner (if weirder) theory than ever before -- one that makes very precise predictions that are getting verified with stunning accuracy. I think this argues for increased confidence in the theory rather than for increased fear that it's falling apart.

Q6) Universe's container by bios10h (#6606748)

A6) It freaks a lot of people out. There's a lot of philosophical problems with having an infinite universe -- for example, if the universe is truly infinite, and if, as scientists believe, the number of quantum states of a finite volume is finite, then it's hard to escape the conclusion that, some great distance away, there's a bizarro-you on bizarro-earth reading bizarro-Slashdot. On the other hand, there's no positive evidence that I can think of that the universe is truly infinite; it's just the sparest conclusion in a mathematical sense, if not a philosophical sense.

But an infinite universe is not a foregone conclusion. Earlier this year, Max Tegmark at the University of Pennsylvania published an intriguing paper that looked at slight anomalies in the WMAP data that seem to imply that the universe is not only finite, but shaped like a donut. Nobody takes the idea terribly seriously, not even the author, because there are other statistical tests that seem to rule the donut-shaped universe out. But it's the sort of thing that people are looking at very closely.

Whether it's finite or infinite, in a mathematical sense, there's really no need for the universe to be "in" anything -- there are models where our universe is embedded in a higher-dimensional space, but there are models where it isn't. Philosophically, though, I don't see any advantage to embedding the universe in something bigger -- as you say, it just punts the problem forward. (Who, then, will contain the containers?)

It's one of those things that is hard to get comfortable with -- and even when you accept it, it sometimes can cause pangs of uncertainty. Quantum mechanics does this, too... it's just something that's hard to wrap your head around. Take solace in the fact that it's hard for everyone else, too.

Q7) How ultimate is the end of the universe? by Lane.exe (#6606766)

A7) If there were a collapse-type universe, yes, there could be a reboot and a new big bang. (And if Microsoft built the universe, a reboot would be coming sooner rather than later. *duck*)

In fact, the theory behind the cosmic microwave background stemmed from calculations to see whether this was possible. Remember the expansion-cooling/contraction-heating bit I mentioned a while ago? A physicist at Princeton was trying to figure out whether matter would break apart into its constituents in a collapsing universe, so he looked at how the universe heated up as it compressed. He then realized that his calculations worked equally well in reverse -- the young expanding universe was very hot but cooling -- and it had to have an afterglow: the CMB.

There are restrictions on this rebirth argument, though. For one thing, the fact that the universe will expand forever prevents a big crunch in our future, so we're at the end of the line if such a line existed. And in 2001, Alan Guth proved a mathematical theorem that shows that bang/crunch/bang universes can't have an infinite history; they must have started some finite time in the past. (Though there are a few ways around the theorem if you reject a few assumptions.) So yes, it's possible, but there is no reason to believe it actually happened, and there are very good reasons for thinking it won't happen in the future.

Q8) comparable ramifications? by sstory (#6606658)

A8) I'm not going to give the usual B.S. answers about spinoffs (though there are some). And I'm not going to evade the question by saying that genomics hasn't yielded any transformation, because the potential is certainly there. But I will answer this question obliquely.

If I asked you, "Quick! What's the most important scientific achievement of the 20th century?" how would you respond?

You would probably answer relativity or quantum mechanics, or perhaps the Apollo landings. Probably some would say the atom bomb. I suspect that only a handful of people would mention the computer, and even fewer people would say penicillin. (Am I right?)

Science has two faces -- it can transform society (for better or worse), and it can advance human knowledge. The two are not inextricably bound, though they often come together.

Relativity was a profound shift in our understanding of the way the universe works, but you have to look pretty hard to see a direct effect on our lives. Conversely, penicillin wasn't a central advance in understanding biological systems, but it affected all of us -- I suspect many people here on Slashdot wouldn't be alive today without penicillin and its descendants.

For me, though, relativity is a greater scientific triumph than penicillin -- even though penicillin is probably much more important to us. It altered our view of the universe and gave us a greater understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe -- it was a philosophical advance as much as it was a technical one. That's why we seem to admire Einstein more than Fleming and Newton more than Jenner.

The present cosmological revolution won't change our lives dramatically; heck, a good spam filter would probably have more direct effect on our quality of life. But at the same time, it will finally answer some of the most ancient questions of humanity -- where did the universe come from and how will it end -- and when it ends, we will have a firm grasp of the answer of the latter if not the former. It will be a towering intellectual achievement, and I think that is what will set it apart from even the human genome project.

Q9) What is the next paradigm shift? by geeber (#6606890)

A9) I disagree with the idea that there's no paradigm shifts left -- indeed, I think we're in the middle of one now. I think that it will be associated with one in the Standard Model of particle physics that will begin before the end of the decade.

It's hard to say where future paradigm shifts lie, but there are lots and lots of outstanding questions in science, some of which are incredibly basic, yet totally out of scientists' reach. For example, neurologists have a very good idea about how individual neurons work -- how they connect and communicate. But when it comes to explaining how a large sloppy hunk of neurons becomes a conscious entity, they're completely at sea. I don't think there's even a good definition of consciousness, which is crucial if you're going to study it seriously. Even more basic -- scientists are struggling to define what life is. There's a heck of a lot more work to do, and plenty of room for paradigm shifts.

Speaking of paradigm shifts, I'd like to take a bit of issue with the term (which I've used myself a number of times in the responses to these questions.)

For those who don't know, the idea of a "paradigm shift" comes from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a seminal work in history of science. While I think that Kuhn's idea of a paradigm shift has a lot of merit -- models and philosophies do change suddenly and dramatically in the face of mounting conflicting evidence and despite resistance -- I think the term itself is misleading. It implies the complete abandonment of one idea and acceptance of a replacement.

In my view, this is not the way modern science works -- I think that science is cumulative. Each model extends and corrects the previous one, and while there might be a dramatic shift philosophically, there is almost never a dramatic shift physically. Relativity, for example, made a profound change in the way we think about time and space and gravity, yet the functional difference between Newton and Einstein is pretty small. All these complicated tensor equations are approximately equal to Newton's laws in the vast, vast majority of cases -- it's only under conditions of extreme gravity, extreme speed, extreme energy, or extreme time that relativistic predictions diverge from Newton's. Similarly with quantum mechanics.

While I think that relativity and quantum mechanics are paradigm shifts, they're not rejections of the Newtonian picture as much as they are extensions. The paradigm shift can be huge philosophically, but its effects tend to be small in magnitude. And with these small corrections, scientists extend the applicability of their model of the universe -- they can explain the orbit of Mercury or the photoelectric effect -- and in the cases where Newton's laws were strong, these models boil down to Newton's laws.

If I remember my Kuhn correctly, he explicitly rejected the idea of cumulative science; he really saw each model getting completely replaced by its successor, rather than as an extension -- and this leads, at least in my view, to the excesses of postmodernism.

I think that this issue goes to the heart of the questions about how scientists can be sure about the end of the universe if their models can be replaced at any time. To that I'd argue that, yes, all models are provisional, but even with "paradigm shifts" models are usually extended rather than replaced. The central findings of the previous model still hold with good accuracy in most cases, even if the philosophical underpinnings are badly shaken. Maybe scientists are missing some crucial understanding that will simplify the way we look at the universe -- and scientists are seriously pondering alternate models to things as widely accepted as the inflationary big bang -- but even if such a shift occurs, it probably won't invalidate today's discoveries.

Q10) What will it mean? by boatboy (#6607285)

A10) One thing's certain. If I knew the answers, I'd be even more insufferable than I am now.

Seriously, I'm not sure that knowing the answers would have a profound moral and sociological effect. While I think that asking and answering big questions is a hallmark of a prospering society, a society doesn't necessarily draw strength or stability from its intellectual curiosity. (For example, Athenian democracy lasted only about 80 years if I remember right.) Even the most profound philosophical ideas can wind up having little real effect on the everyday functioning of a civilization -- for example, I think that Godel's incompleteness theorem hasn't changed society in the slightest.

As for the next big question, I think there are some in biology: what is life? What is consciousness? How did life arise? Are we alone in the universe? In physics, I think there are profound questions yet to be answered in a realm that I'd describe as "information theory" in the broadest sense -- what's really going on in a black hole? What makes quantum mechanics so weird? And I think that answering the question about the true nature of dark energy will probably have to await a future cosmological revolution. But one of the wonderful things about science is that you don't really know what big questions are within your grasp until you begin to grasp them. We'll know the next revolution when it appears.

Editor's note: Due to long answer lengths, we linked to the questions instead of running them directly here in order to keep this page from getting too large. This was an experiment. If you have comments or questions about Slashdot interview formatting, please email Roblimo.

Well, one science journalist's opinion, anyway. Charles Seife writes for Science magazine and is the author of Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe. These are his answers to your questions, and they're very detailed, to the point where you may want to set aside more than a few minutes of quiet time to read and digest them. Q1) "Publishing hype" by BobTheLawyer (#6606631)

A1)I'm not embarrassed at all because it's not hype. Scientists now know how the universe will end. Of course, as with all things scientific, there's a big honking asterisk on the word "know," but before I get to that, let me explain why I feel justified in making such an arrogant statement.

We're in the middle of a scientific revolution, in the honest-to-god paradigm-shift sense. This revolution started in 1997 when two groups of astronomers, the High-Z Supernova Search Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project used the bright flashes of a particular type of dying star (a type-Ia supernova) to measure the expansion of the universe at different times in the past. Since then, a whole raft of astronomical observations -- of faint patterns in the afterglow of the big bang, of distributions of galaxies, of the composition of intergalactic clouds of gas, of distortions of light going around massive bodies -- have all forced cosmologists into a remarkable consensus about the composition of the universe and, yes, its fate.

Just to give you a little taste of what the difference in the state of knowledge was like: in 1997, if you asked an astronomer how old the universe is, you'd get an answer somewhere between 12 and 15 billion years. Now, you'll get an answer of 13.7 billion years, plus or minus about 100 million. That's a big jump in precision. Similarly, before 1997, nobody had a clue how the universe would end; now, cosmologists agree on its fate. Some of the details haven't been worked out (what an understatement!), but the gross picture of the ultimate fate of the cosmos seems to be pretty well established for the first time in history. And by the end of the decade, a lot of the details will be fleshed out.

The ongoing revolution isn't just astronomical; it's physical. A decade ago, nobody knew whether neutrinos have mass. (For those who aren't particle physicists, neutrinos are particles that so rarely interact with matter that they can easily pass through the Earth without noticing the big chunk of mass they've passed through. This property makes them exceedingly hard to study.) Now, neutrino physicists are in accord -- and they've concluded that neutrinos, collectively, weigh about as much as all the visible stars and galaxies in the universe combined. High-energy physicists are using an accelerator in Long Island to recreate the condition of the universe a few microseconds after the big bang. By next year, they will formally announce the creation of a new state of matter that existed only in the very, very early universe. (There are alreadystrong hints that they've succeeded.) And another particle accelerator under construction in Geneva is very likely going to discover the particle responsible for exotic dark matter. (More on this shortly.)

All these experiments, all these observations, are pointing in exactly the same direction; they reveal the composition of the universe and its fate. But as with any good scientific revolution, such as relativity or quantum mechanics, it generates more questions than it answers. Scientists now know how the universe will end, but that understanding comes at the cost of a new mystery in physics.

As to the asterisk on the word "know," scientists are acutely aware that their theories are subject to revision. But at the same time, they have good reasons for being confident about their theories -- and they are more confident about some theories than about others. The new cosmological picture that's emerged has a darn high confidence rating; extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and the scientific world wouldn't accept the ideas of dark matter, much less dark energy, if there weren't a number of independent lines of evidence that forced scientists to make that conclusion. And while they're not confident about many of the details of the cosmos and the mechanisms that shape it, they are pretty sure that the overall picture is correct. (More on this coming, too.)

Q2) [Almost] Serious question! by Noryungi (#6606694)

and

Q3) Why does the rate of expansion change? by Anonymous Coward (#6606745)

A2,3) The universe will end in... umm... you really want me to give away the ending to my book?

Actually, I reveal the answer in chapter four, because the understanding of the fate of the universe is just the beginning of the current cosmological revolution. So it's not a spoiler to say...

-- drum roll -- the universe will die a heat death, or "Dark & Cold" by your terminology.

In a big bang universe governed by the laws of general relativity, there are two possibilities. (Actually, there are more than two, but all the cases boil down to two real outcomes.) Big crunch or heat death, fire or ice.

The fate of the universe depends on how the universe expands. In general, things that expand cool down and things that are compressed heat up. (This is what causes a propane container to feel so cold after a barbecue -- all the gas that expanded.) After the big bang the universe was extremely hot and was seething with energy. As it expanded, it cooled; free-roaming quarks condensed into protons and neutrons, and wound up as hydrogen, helium, and a handful of other light elements and isotopes. About 400,000 years after the big bang, the universe cooled enough so that the electrons could combine with the nuclei and form neutral atoms. Now, about 14 billion years later, the universe is a pretty cool place.

The expansion of the universe is like a cannonball shot into the air. As the cannonball flies ever higher, the force of gravity tries to drag it back to earth, reducing its upward velocity and slowing it down as it zooms upward. If gravity is very strong, then the cannonball rapidly loses its speed and quickly comes crashing back to the ground. On the other hand, if gravity is very weak, then the cannonball might escape the pull of the earth entirely and zoom away into outer space.

Similarly, the big bang gave the universe an initial cannonshot of expansion. If the mutual gravitational attraction of the objects in the universe is very strong (if there's a lot of matter in the universe) the expansion will slow down, halt, and eventually reverse itself. After the cooling phase of expansion, the universe will begin to swallow itself, getting smaller and smaller each day. This will make it heat up. The skies will get brighter and brighter as galaxies and stars get closer and closer together, and eventually, the universe will become a bath of radiation once more. Electrons will separate from atoms, atoms and then protons and neutrons will shiver into their components, and the universe will collapse in a "big crunch," a reverse big bang. The cosmos will die a death by fire.

On the other hand, if there's not much matter in the universe, then the expansion of the universe will continue forever. The expansion will slow down, but it will never halt and never reverse itself. The universe continues to cool down, and for a long time, space will look pretty much as it does now. Stars will be born and die, and galaxies will age. The night sky would get darker and darker as distant objects get too dim to view, and eventually, as the hydrogen in the universe is consumed, stars and galaxies will begin to wink out. Many billions of years hence, the universe will be a lifeless soup of dim light and dead matter. It will be a death by ice.

In 1997 and 1998, the two supernova teams used the brightness of distant supernovae to measure the rate of expansion at different times in the past. (Because the speed of light is finite, looking into the distance is the same as looking into the past. This causes no end of tense problems when writing a book about cosmology.) What they found was absolutely gobsmacking. Not only was the universe's expansion not slowing down very much -- it was speeding up! The cannonball was zooming into the air faster and faster as if it were propelled by some sort of weird antigravity force. Not only was the cannonball going to escape, it is so OUTTA HERE! This means a death by ice.

Yegads -- an antigravity force. This was a really hard thing for scientists (and probably you) to accept. But there's a number of different lines of evidence that support the idea, and in the book I go through those lines of evidence in great detail. I'll have to settle for a brief summary here. In 2000, a balloon experiment known as Boomerang took very detailed pictures of the ubiquitous afterglow of the big bang, the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This afterglow has hot and cold spots in it, and for years, scientists have been making very, very detailed predictions about the size and distribution of those spots. The results of the Boomerang experiment and the DASI and WMAP experiments matched those predictions incredibly well, giving scientists great confidence in the underlying theory. It also allowed them to figure out the amount of matter and energy in the universe, and 73% of the "stuff" in the cosmos was dark energy, this antigravity force.

There are a number of other lines of evidence, too; the current distribution of galaxies, for example, implies the presence of an antigravity force, and just last month, scientists made a very nice measurement of something known as the late integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. This effect can't occur unless you have something like dark energy counteracting gravity's pull.

Unfortunately, a fuller exposition requires a lot more writing -- it takes up several chapters in my book. (Shameless plug). But in summary, there's a number of independent observations that all point to the existence of a dark energy. Furthermore, the theories underlying the idea have made very specific predictions that have been verified with incredible precision. It's extraordinary stuff, but no matter how scientists look at it, they're forced by extraordinary evidence to make the same conclusion.

Yes, it's true that scientists don't know the mechanism of dark energy (though they're not entirely at sea) but there's little doubt that the cannonball is zooming into space faster and faster. They don't know precisely why, but the universe is being pushed toward its icy death by an antigravity force. Scientists are watching it happen.

And you don't need to wait billions of years to know the outcome -- you don't need to observe something directly to conclude that it's going to happen. The planet Pluto was discovered in 1930. So why don't people object to the statement that it takes about 250 years to complete an orbit? Just as you don't have to wait until 2180 to confirm the conclusions of Newtonian dynamics, you don't need to witness the end of the universe to be able to figure out its fate or validate the theory that leads you to that prediction.

Q4) Dark Matter by notcreative (#6606772)

A4) You are correct; the nature and location of dark matter are crucial puzzles in modern cosmology, but I think that the answers will be pretty much in hand by the end of the decade.

I've already mentioned results (most notably WMAP) that reveal the amount of "stuff" in the universe, and 73% of it is dark energy. The rest is matter. But the grand total of the matter locked up in visible stars is a mere 0.5% of the stuff in the universe. What is the other 26.5%? That's dark matter, and, in fact, there are two different types.

Scientists have known for decades that most of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes. In the 1960s, Vera Rubin measured the motion of stars wheeling around the center of the Andromeda galaxy and concluded that there had to be a lot more matter pulling on those stars than could be seen.

Despite what some contrarians say, dark matter isn't dogma; viable alternatives, like Moti Milgrom's MOND are taken seriously, if not accepted. Unfortunately, all of the alternatives, including MOND, fail in crucial ways. Besides, you can see dark matter, both directly and indirectly. The MACHO and OGLE projects see the twinkle of stars caused by a passing chunk of dark matter, and they can see the distortion of light caused by a huge amount of unseen mass sitting on the fabric of spacetime. (Distant galaxies are stretched into arcs around this gravitational lens.) This is allowing scientists to figure out just where dark matter resides. But at the same time, a number of observations lead scientists to conclude that the minority of the matter (dark or light) in the universe is ordinary, atomic matter -- the stuff of stars, planets, and people. Again, it will take too long to describe all the lines of evidence, but one powerful way of measuring the number of atoms in the universe is to look at the proportion of hydrogen to deuterium, helium, and lithium in primordial gas clouds. In the first three minutes of the universe, atoms were fusing, just as they do in a hydrogen bomb. The universe was a giant pressure cooker, turning protons and neutrons into heavier elements. If there are a lot of atoms, then there is a lot of fusion and a lot of heavy elements made; if there are not very many atoms, then the universe winds up being almost entirely hydrogen. By looking at the ratios of heavy elements to light elements, scientists concluded that atomic matter makes up about 4% of the "stuff" in the universe -- which is precisely what other measurements, like the CMB ones -- imply, too.

So, 27% of the stuff in the universe is matter: 4% "atomic" matter, leaving 23% to be made of "exotic" matter, stuff that's not made of atoms. I've already described some of that exotic matter; neutrinos make up about 0.5% of the stuff in the universe, about the same as the visible matter in the universe. What's the remainder?

That's the big open question, but one that I'd wager will be solved by the end of the decade. There are very good reasons -- particle physics ones, rather than cosmological ones -- for believing that the main constituent of dark matter is a proposed particle known as the LSP. If it is, then the LHC accelerator in Geneva will find it. If not, then the LSP almost certainly doesn't exist and the puzzle will be compounded -- but I think that scientists are extremely optimistic. Again, there's lots more detail in the book about the justification for this.

Q5) variable constants by Cally (#6607000)

A5) The point's well taken, and I'll get to it after a few remarks.

First, you're right in that the supernovae serve much the same purpose as Cepheid variable stars do -- they're both objects of known brightness, or "standard candles," that allow astronomers to make a precise measurement of the distance to a faraway galaxy. However, they are not the same thing. Cepheids are stars that pulsate and the rate of that pulsation reveals its intrinsic brightness. They're what Hubble used to spot the expansion of the universe in the 1920s, but they're relatively dim and impossible to find in very distant galaxies. Type-Ia supernovae are standard candles that are much, much brighter than Cepheids, and so can be seen halfway across the universe. (And as you note, since distant supernovae mean ancient supernovae, they reveal the expansion rate of the universe billions of years ago.)

Second, the time-varying speed of light (or more precisely, the time-varying fine structure constant) is a controversial idea. The scientists that made the observation in question are pretty solid and they're taken seriously. However, my impression is that mainstream thinking is that the results are due to a systematic error. That aside, the effect, even if real, is very small, and it has nothing to do with interpreting the data from standard candles. The interpretation there is quite well established; there's little question that scientists are seeing an expansion of the universe;. Alternative theories, like tired light, fail in countless ways and scientists have even seen the relativistic time dilation caused by the motion of the distant object.

But, yes, it's natural for a layperson to conclude that the concordance cosmological model is looking increasingly kludge-y, and you're naturally led to wonder whether scientists are trying to prop up a failing model with the equivalent of epicycles or aether. I don't think this is the case for a few reasons.

For one thing, the theory isn't really getting added to and made more complex; it's getting subtracted from and being made more simple. This seems counterintuitive, but it comes from the fact that modern big bang theory is really a class of theories, rather than one set-in-stone dictum about the way the universe is. All these theories agree on the basic physics about the manner of the universe's birth, the forces that drive the universe, and the physics behind them; the difference between the theories are the values of a handful of parameters that are not predicted by the theory. These parameters are inputs rather than outputs, and by pinning down the values of these inputs, the acceptable class of theories gets narrower and narrower.

Dark energy is one of these inputs. Although nobody took it seriously before 1998 -- everyone thought that the value of the parameter in question was zero -- it was lurking there nonetheless. It turns out that this parameter is not only non-zero, it's really big, much to everyone's surprise. But this doesn't add complexity to the model, especially since other parameters, such as the "curvature" of the universe as a whole, which many physicists thought would be non-trivial, turn out not to be important after all. (In other words, the universe seems to be slate flat, rather than saddle-shaped or sphere-like.)

So, from a mathematical viewpoint, the model is no more complex than it was in 1997, and is, in fact, significantly leaner. But what about from a physical viewpoint? Dark matter and dark energy seem to fly in the face of Occam. But here, too, the increase in complexity is much less than it appears. Long before this cosmological revolution, astronomers knew that dark matter had to exist; more recently, they've begun to see it. Even without worrying about cosmological questions, astrophysicists had accepted the existence of dark matter. Cosmological measurements like WMAP showed that these astrophysicists were right -- it was an independent confirmation that dark energy exists and that it comes in two forms, something that other astronomers had concluded a while ago.

Dark energy, on the other hand, has more claim to being a "hack" to the theory. It really is something new and unexpected (even though it was always a mathematical possibility, nobody in the physics world suspected it actually existed.) Nevertheless, the groundwork was already there, and modern big bang theory implicitly requires the existence of a form of dark energy in the very early universe. And since the 1930s, scientists knew that even the deepest vacuum is full of energy and can exert pressure (something known as the Casimir effect, which I describe in this book and in my previous book, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea). Thus, the idea of dark energy wasn't completely alien to physics before 1997, and in some sense, it was a necessary component.

Yes, it's possible that scientists are looking at the cosmos in the wrong way, and somebody will establish a simpler, more elegant theory that takes all these threads and weaves them together. (More on this shortly.) But at the moment, far from having a kludged-up theory, cosmologists have a leaner (if weirder) theory than ever before -- one that makes very precise predictions that are getting verified with stunning accuracy. I think this argues for increased confidence in the theory rather than for increased fear that it's falling apart.

Q6) Universe's container by bios10h (#6606748)

A6) It freaks a lot of people out. There's a lot of philosophical problems with having an infinite universe -- for example, if the universe is truly infinite, and if, as scientists believe, the number of quantum states of a finite volume is finite, then it's hard to escape the conclusion that, some great distance away, there's a bizarro-you on bizarro-earth reading bizarro-Slashdot. On the other hand, there's no positive evidence that I can think of that the universe is truly infinite; it's just the sparest conclusion in a mathematical sense, if not a philosophical sense.

But an infinite universe is not a foregone conclusion. Earlier this year, Max Tegmark at the University of Pennsylvania published an intriguing paper that looked at slight anomalies in the WMAP data that seem to imply that the universe is not only finite, but shaped like a donut. Nobody takes the idea terribly seriously, not even the author, because there are other statistical tests that seem to rule the donut-shaped universe out. But it's the sort of thing that people are looking at very closely.

Whether it's finite or infinite, in a mathematical sense, there's really no need for the universe to be "in" anything -- there are models where our universe is embedded in a higher-dimensional space, but there are models where it isn't. Philosophically, though, I don't see any advantage to embedding the universe in something bigger -- as you say, it just punts the problem forward. (Who, then, will contain the containers?)

It's one of those things that is hard to get comfortable with -- and even when you accept it, it sometimes can cause pangs of uncertainty. Quantum mechanics does this, too... it's just something that's hard to wrap your head around. Take solace in the fact that it's hard for everyone else, too.

Q7) How ultimate is the end of the universe? by Lane.exe (#6606766)

A7) If there were a collapse-type universe, yes, there could be a reboot and a new big bang. (And if Microsoft built the universe, a reboot would be coming sooner rather than later. *duck*)

In fact, the theory behind the cosmic microwave background stemmed from calculations to see whether this was possible. Remember the expansion-cooling/contraction-heating bit I mentioned a while ago? A physicist at Princeton was trying to figure out whether matter would break apart into its constituents in a collapsing universe, so he looked at how the universe heated up as it compressed. He then realized that his calculations worked equally well in reverse -- the young expanding universe was very hot but cooling -- and it had to have an afterglow: the CMB.

There are restrictions on this rebirth argument, though. For one thing, the fact that the universe will expand forever prevents a big crunch in our future, so we're at the end of the line if such a line existed. And in 2001, Alan Guth proved a mathematical theorem that shows that bang/crunch/bang universes can't have an infinite history; they must have started some finite time in the past. (Though there are a few ways around the theorem if you reject a few assumptions.) So yes, it's possible, but there is no reason to believe it actually happened, and there are very good reasons for thinking it won't happen in the future.

Q8) comparable ramifications? by sstory (#6606658)

A8) I'm not going to give the usual B.S. answers about spinoffs (though there are some). And I'm not going to evade the question by saying that genomics hasn't yielded any transformation, because the potential is certainly there. But I will answer this question obliquely.

If I asked you, "Quick! What's the most important scientific achievement of the 20th century?" how would you respond?

You would probably answer relativity or quantum mechanics, or perhaps the Apollo landings. Probably some would say the atom bomb. I suspect that only a handful of people would mention the computer, and even fewer people would say penicillin. (Am I right?)

Science has two faces -- it can transform society (for better or worse), and it can advance human knowledge. The two are not inextricably bound, though they often come together.

Relativity was a profound shift in our understanding of the way the universe works, but you have to look pretty hard to see a direct effect on our lives. Conversely, penicillin wasn't a central advance in understanding biological systems, but it affected all of us -- I suspect many people here on Slashdot wouldn't be alive today without penicillin and its descendants.

For me, though, relativity is a greater scientific triumph than penicillin -- even though penicillin is probably much more important to us. It altered our view of the universe and gave us a greater understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe -- it was a philosophical advance as much as it was a technical one. That's why we seem to admire Einstein more than Fleming and Newton more than Jenner.

The present cosmological revolution won't change our lives dramatically; heck, a good spam filter would probably have more direct effect on our quality of life. But at the same time, it will finally answer some of the most ancient questions of humanity -- where did the universe come from and how will it end -- and when it ends, we will have a firm grasp of the answer of the latter if not the former. It will be a towering intellectual achievement, and I think that is what will set it apart from even the human genome project.

Q9) What is the next paradigm shift? by geeber (#6606890)

A9) I disagree with the idea that there's no paradigm shifts left -- indeed, I think we're in the middle of one now. I think that it will be associated with one in the Standard Model of particle physics that will begin before the end of the decade.

It's hard to say where future paradigm shifts lie, but there are lots and lots of outstanding questions in science, some of which are incredibly basic, yet totally out of scientists' reach. For example, neurologists have a very good idea about how individual neurons work -- how they connect and communicate. But when it comes to explaining how a large sloppy hunk of neurons becomes a conscious entity, they're completely at sea. I don't think there's even a good definition of consciousness, which is crucial if you're going to study it seriously. Even more basic -- scientists are struggling to define what life is. There's a heck of a lot more work to do, and plenty of room for paradigm shifts.

Speaking of paradigm shifts, I'd like to take a bit of issue with the term (which I've used myself a number of times in the responses to these questions.)

For those who don't know, the idea of a "paradigm shift" comes from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a seminal work in history of science. While I think that Kuhn's idea of a paradigm shift has a lot of merit -- models and philosophies do change suddenly and dramatically in the face of mounting conflicting evidence and despite resistance -- I think the term itself is misleading. It implies the complete abandonment of one idea and acceptance of a replacement.

In my view, this is not the way modern science works -- I think that science is cumulative. Each model extends and corrects the previous one, and while there might be a dramatic shift philosophically, there is almost never a dramatic shift physically. Relativity, for example, made a profound change in the way we think about time and space and gravity, yet the functional difference between Newton and Einstein is pretty small. All these complicated tensor equations are approximately equal to Newton's laws in the vast, vast majority of cases -- it's only under conditions of extreme gravity, extreme speed, extreme energy, or extreme time that relativistic predictions diverge from Newton's. Similarly with quantum mechanics.

While I think that relativity and quantum mechanics are paradigm shifts, they're not rejections of the Newtonian picture as much as they are extensions. The paradigm shift can be huge philosophically, but its effects tend to be small in magnitude. And with these small corrections, scientists extend the applicability of their model of the universe -- they can explain the orbit of Mercury or the photoelectric effect -- and in the cases where Newton's laws were strong, these models boil down to Newton's laws.

If I remember my Kuhn correctly, he explicitly rejected the idea of cumulative science; he really saw each model getting completely replaced by its successor, rather than as an extension -- and this leads, at least in my view, to the excesses of postmodernism.

I think that this issue goes to the heart of the questions about how scientists can be sure about the end of the universe if their models can be replaced at any time. To that I'd argue that, yes, all models are provisional, but even with "paradigm shifts" models are usually extended rather than replaced. The central findings of the previous model still hold with good accuracy in most cases, even if the philosophical underpinnings are badly shaken. Maybe scientists are missing some crucial understanding that will simplify the way we look at the universe -- and scientists are seriously pondering alternate models to things as widely accepted as the inflationary big bang -- but even if such a shift occurs, it probably won't invalidate today's discoveries.

Q10) What will it mean? by boatboy (#6607285)

A10) One thing's certain. If I knew the answers, I'd be even more insufferable than I am now.

Seriously, I'm not sure that knowing the answers would have a profound moral and sociological effect. While I think that asking and answering big questions is a hallmark of a prospering society, a society doesn't necessarily draw strength or stability from its intellectual curiosity. (For example, Athenian democracy lasted only about 80 years if I remember right.) Even the most profound philosophical ideas can wind up having little real effect on the everyday functioning of a civilization -- for example, I think that Godel's incompleteness theorem hasn't changed society in the slightest.

As for the next big question, I think there are some in biology: what is life? What is consciousness? How did life arise? Are we alone in the universe? In physics, I think there are profound questions yet to be answered in a realm that I'd describe as "information theory" in the broadest sense -- what's really going on in a black hole? What makes quantum mechanics so weird? And I think that answering the question about the true nature of dark energy will probably have to await a future cosmological revolution. But one of the wonderful things about science is that you don't really know what big questions are within your grasp until you begin to grasp them. We'll know the next revolution when it appears.

Editor's note: Due to long answer lengths, we linked to the questions instead of running them directly here in order to keep this page from getting too large. This was an experiment. If you have comments or questions about Slashdot interview formatting, please email Roblimo.

schmidt349 writes "SCO has issued a preliminary response to Red Hat's lawsuit, in which President and CEO Darl McBride advises that SCO will prepare a "legal response" to Red Hat's requests for injunctive relief. In addition, he promises that the countersuit that SCO will file may include "counterclaims for copyright infringement and conspiracy." His final statement-- that Red Hat's "decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux--" is chilling in light of the business strategy that SCO has adopted in its sales of UnixWare licenses to actual and potential users of the Linux kernel."

aliebrah writes "CNet reports that Microsoft will not release any more major upgrades for Internet Explorer on MacOS. They cite competition from Safari as the reason for this decision, and say that Safari is a better browser for Macintosh systems. Ironically, they also say that they can't compete with Apple, because Apple has better access to the underlying operating system." Yeah, that must be rough. Today's SlashDotFunQuiz is to predict the order in which, impact when, and years until these other Mac products get the axe: Media Player, MSN Messenger, Office, Outlook, and Virtual PC.

VoidEngineer writes "Well, it's that time of the year again... the World's Largest Scavenger Hunt has begun again. (This is the same annual Scavenger Hunt where the students built the breeder reactor, for item #240, back in 1999...) Anyhow, you can find the list here. This year, the competition is between 9 teams and there are 307 items. Nerdy items include, but are not limited to: #2 From the fetid swamps of Lotan to the teeming forests of Jojojop, Endor is an ancient, mysterious, beautiful land, deserving to be rendered as a full-color map fit for National Geographic, circa TA 3019; [51 points] #46 Mobius stripper. Must be non-orientable. Must not emphasize the one-dimensionality of the stripper's personality. [28 points]. #98 A piece of the Space Shuttle Columbia with NASA verification [155 points] #101 A hologram of an entire team member. [50 points] #136 Explain string theory using only sock puppets. The Judge must understand. [19 points]"

Roland Piquepaille writes "The Economist says that "physicists have worked out how to look at the smallest sizes and shortest time that some of them believe can exist." It starts by comparing the quantum theory, which states that space and time are grainy, to the theory of relativity, which assumes that space is continuous. The well-documented article then looks at several current research projects trying "to reconcile quantum theory with relativity, and thus produce a grainy theory of quantum gravity." In particular, it looks at a paper by Richard Lieu and Lloyd Hillman, published by the Astrophysical Journal Letters, "The Phase Coherence of Light from Extragalactic Sources." Check this column to know more about their work and what their contradictors are saying -- plus a quote from Albert Einstein -- or read the original article for even more details."

illuminatedwax writes "Every spring, University of Chicago students attempt to cast off their bookish tendencies and hold the world's largest scavenger hunt. Now, the event has been filmed by the student film group, Fire Escape, as a documentary, and is being sold on DVD and VHS from Periphrastic Films. The film follows the various teams and their effort to procure the off-the-wall 300+ items. For those who haven't heard of the University of Chicago Scav Hunt, its biggest claim to fame is from the 1999 hunt, when students built a working breeder reactor. Items during the 2002 Scav Hunt featured in the film include "Passports stamped by all three axes of evil", building "terrorist base camps" on the University quads, and students competing in a game show-style contest, featuring a DDR contest, and trivia like "Digits of Pi" and "Taylor Series." The Scav Hunt lists can be found here, and the 2002 list here."

illuminatedwax writes "Every spring, University of Chicago students attempt to cast off their bookish tendencies and hold the world's largest scavenger hunt. Now, the event has been filmed by the student film group, Fire Escape, as a documentary, and is being sold on DVD and VHS from Periphrastic Films. The film follows the various teams and their effort to procure the off-the-wall 300+ items. For those who haven't heard of the University of Chicago Scav Hunt, its biggest claim to fame is from the 1999 hunt, when students built a working breeder reactor. Items during the 2002 Scav Hunt featured in the film include "Passports stamped by all three axes of evil", building "terrorist base camps" on the University quads, and students competing in a game show-style contest, featuring a DDR contest, and trivia like "Digits of Pi" and "Taylor Series." The Scav Hunt lists can be found here, and the 2002 list here."

illuminatedwax writes "Every spring, University of Chicago students attempt to cast off their bookish tendencies and hold the world's largest scavenger hunt. Now, the event has been filmed by the student film group, Fire Escape, as a documentary, and is being sold on DVD and VHS from Periphrastic Films. The film follows the various teams and their effort to procure the off-the-wall 300+ items. For those who haven't heard of the University of Chicago Scav Hunt, its biggest claim to fame is from the 1999 hunt, when students built a working breeder reactor. Items during the 2002 Scav Hunt featured in the film include "Passports stamped by all three axes of evil", building "terrorist base camps" on the University quads, and students competing in a game show-style contest, featuring a DDR contest, and trivia like "Digits of Pi" and "Taylor Series." The Scav Hunt lists can be found here, and the 2002 list here."

illuminatedwax writes "Every spring, University of Chicago students attempt to cast off their bookish tendencies and hold the world's largest scavenger hunt. Now, the event has been filmed by the student film group, Fire Escape, as a documentary, and is being sold on DVD and VHS from Periphrastic Films. The film follows the various teams and their effort to procure the off-the-wall 300+ items. For those who haven't heard of the University of Chicago Scav Hunt, its biggest claim to fame is from the 1999 hunt, when students built a working breeder reactor. Items during the 2002 Scav Hunt featured in the film include "Passports stamped by all three axes of evil", building "terrorist base camps" on the University quads, and students competing in a game show-style contest, featuring a DDR contest, and trivia like "Digits of Pi" and "Taylor Series." The Scav Hunt lists can be found here, and the 2002 list here."

ammonoid writes "The BBC news website reported this story about the possibility that the biologically selfish interests of microbes in the atmosphere to reproduce may be partly responsible for the formation of clouds, and observed patterns of rainfall. "

InnerPeace Volunteers writes: "David Beazley's Python slides are excellent, and a very popular way to learn Python. However, if you wanted to look something up days later, they was no index. There is now."

PineGreen writes: "Tomorrow, MAP Satellite is to be launched. MAP is the first space mission to measure Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations after the famous COBE who was first to detect fluctuations in the CMB. It is supposed to do the job with an unprecedented accuracy. There were several successful balloon experiments (Boomerang, Maxima) and interferometer experiments (VSA, DASI, CBI), some of which still haven't published their data. But of course, we are all waiting for the big European Planck mission in 2007. Measuring CMB fluctuations can tell us a lot about the universe in which we live, its constituents and its geometrical properties."

Joshua Strzalko writes: "Aparently, the match, so to speak, that lit the big bang has been discovered by some detectors down in Antarctica. What would be the megatonage of that explosion? Full story can be viewed here." As always, working hypotheses are just that, of course. Update: 04/30 07:12 PM by T : CodeWheeney writes: "The home page for the instrument that was used is located here."

You're probably familiar with the conventional wisdom that online interactions can lead to a polarization of ideas and of people, by encouraging a culture and attitude of constant reinforcement of already-held ideas. Freematt (Matthew Gaylor) presents below a critical reaction to the interventionism Cass Sunstein proposes to counteract this perceived trend in Republic.com.

Republic.Com author Cass Sunstein pages 224 publisher Princeton University Press rating 6 reviewer Freematt (Matthew Gaylor) ISBN 0-691-07025-3 summary Sunstein argues for greater government involvement as a way to encourage societal cohesion in an age of "cybercascades."

Cass Sunstein is the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and Department of Political Science. A former law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, he has worked for the Office of Legal Counsel in the US Department of Justice.

His former works include: "Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech" (1993), which won the Goldsmith Prize from Harvard for the best book on free speech in that year. "After the Rights Revolution" (1990), "The Partial Constitution" (1993), "Free Markets and Social Justice" (1997), and "One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court" (1999). His writings have appeared in the New York Times, and the New Republic. He has also appeared on ABC's Nightline, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NBC and CBS evening news and other programming.

In "Republic.Com" Cass Sunstein makes the point that in cyberspace individuals now have the ability to filter out everything they don't want to read or see and filter in only those whose opinions they agree with. He calls this the "Daily Me", the ability to filter only the issues that concern you, read only the op-eds that only share your point of view. In short he fears that the Internet will bring about a lack of diversity and will amplify extremism and hate groups (Whatever that means). He writes of "cybercascades" that brings groups of people together who share similar viewpoints, a process that in turn causes group polarization and radicalization.

For example, he says, "a group whose members lean against gun control will, in discussion, provide a wide range of arguments against gun control, and the arguments made for gun control will be both fewer and weaker. The group's members, to the extent that they shift, will shift toward a more extreme position against gun control. And the group as a whole, if a group decision is required, will move not to the median position, but to a more extreme point." (Chapter 3, pages 67 68)

He does his argument great damage by using as an example of a hate and extremist group the usual left-wing target, The National Rifle Association (NRA) He trots out the usual suspects such as Skinheads and the KKK and fails to mention any of the other hate groups such as American supporters of Peru's shining path, environmental terrorists who spike logging areas, World Trade Organization protestors/rioters or other left wing extremists. In Chapter three Sunstein speaks of the gun rights movement alongside the KKK, God Hates Fags, and other hate groups in what can only be considered an attempt at guilt by association.

In Chapter seven, Sunstein writes: "FREE SPEECH IS NOT AN ABSOLUTE," -- his caps. In fact, he repeats this line several times throughout the book. He continues: "We can identify some flaws in the emerging view of the First Amendment by investigating the idea that the free speech guarantee is "an absolute", in the specific sense that government may not regulate speech at all. This view plays a large role in public debate, and in some ways it is a salutary myth." He mentions the usual examples of child pornography, copyright and threats to assassinate the President as examples of the government restricting speech. He creates what I consider a straw-man argument by prefacing these remarks for his "Policies and Proposals" in Chapter eight.

He laments the fact that in a four-station universe the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) had a significant voice. But with the advent of programming with hundreds of choices, the justification for PBS is diluted.

As a partial solution he endorses Andrew Shapiro's suggestion from the book The Control Revolution that the government should support a public website, Public.Net. Sunstein writes: "Public.Net would provide an icon, visible on your home computer. You would be under no obligation to click on it; indeed in a free society perhaps you should be permitted to remove the icon if you really do not like it." He envisions Public.Net to include sections on the "environment, civil rights, gun control, foreign affairs, and so forth." (Chapter 8, page 181)

But what I find most troubling is his idea to require websites to maintain hyperlinks to those with differing viewpoints. His example on page 188:

"We might easily imagine a situation in which textual references to organizations or institutions are hyperlinks, so that if, for example, a conservative magazine such as the National Review refers to the World Wildlife Fund or Environmental Defence, it also allows readers instant access to their sites."

Sunstein continues: "To the extent that sites do not do this, voluntary self regulation through cooperative agreements might do the job. If these routes do not work, it would be worthwhile considering content-neutral regulation, designed to ensure more in the way of both links and hyperlinks."

Princeton sent me a free review copy of Republic.Com; I'm glad they did as I would have been highly upset to have paid money for it. I can understand why Professor Sunstein makes the suggestions he does. In my opinion it has less to do with wanting to expand free and open discourse and more to do with control. Who gets to decide which links get to be included as "opposing viewpoints"? I did note that many of Sunstein's examples involved a right wing organization being forced to carry left wing links.

The celebrated civil libertarian, John Stuart Mill, contended that enlightened judgment is possible only if one considers all facts and ideas, from whatever source, and tests one's own conclusions against opposing views. Therefore, all points of view -- even those that are "bad" or socially harmful -- should be represented in the "marketplace of ideas." And the Internet is an incredibly free and eclectic smorgasbord of ideas. And just as we have freedom to choose which sites we visit or what print magazines or books we read, it would be the end of freedom as we know it if the government forced us to read or watch what they want, even if it were only a link. Thanks, but no thanks to Republic.Com.

You can read the first chapter online for free. You can also purchase this book at ThinkGeek. You may also be interested in Cass Sunstein's Homepage.

dread minerva writes "Proof that the kids are alright: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the following article about Josh Klehr, who discovered a math theorem while sitting in study hall one day in eigth grade. The theorem is now known as the Klehr-Bliss Theorem and a paper on it is being published in The American Mathematical Monthly."

xueexueg writes: "Dr. David Touretzky has posted a new piece of DeCSS art here, as well as his response to a threatening letter from the MPAA. Both are triumphantly good, one an epic haiku with the most intelligent and beautiful commentary I've heard in months, the other a response to the MPAA lawyers who evidently told Touretzky that his entire home page is a 'circumvention device.'" Both are good reads. I realize that posting this sort of thing on Slashdot is simply preaching to the choir, but some part of me hopes that in the end we'll still have a freedom of speech, a freedom to reverse engineer, and a freedom to watch the media we purchase. Sure seems less likely these days.

Comment: 02/25 2:35 PM EST by J : My favorite source for CSSdescramble() is the DVDCCA's own DNS server.

Do dig ns dvdcca.org to verify that their DNS servers are (as of right now) mercury.hypersurf.com and west.mainstreet.net.

Then, to pull the gzip'd code straight off their servers, this will work on any vaguely sh-like shell:

for DVDs in Linux screw the MPAA and ; do dig $DVDs.z.zoy.org @mercury.hypersurf.com ; done | perl -ne 's/\.//g; print pack("H224",$1) if(/^x([^z]*)/)' | gunzip > myfile.c

This trick is number nine on zoy.org's 42 ways to get DeCSS. You're actually requesting data which resides on zoy.org's DNS server, but it's being delivered to you by the DVDCCA's DNS server.

mreece writes: "Recently on Slashdot there was a discussion about researchers who claimed to have observed superluminal propagation of a laser pulse. Three researchers from the Naval Research Laboratory, Plasma Physics Division, in Washington D.C., claim that this is not a valid interpretation, and that the propagation was not superluminal. The preprint is available in PDF format from http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0010033. IANAP (yet), but it looks valid."

Gone Jackal asks: "I've run into a ludicrous situation. I'm a classicist at the University of Chicago, finishing off my undergraduate career with a bachelor's thesis. As part of this, I'm working on poetry and meter in Vergil. Imagine my joy when I found in the library catalogue a 20 volume set of books on just this topic, published between 1973 and 1985. Now imagine my horror when I open up the first volume and see that the entire work is on punch cards. What the heck do I do with punch cards? The CS department has laughed at me, and mainframe computing says they're not allowed to help since I'm not an administrator. Any suggestions on where to go, what to do to read these, or even find out what's on them? (The series title, in case you wanted to know, is 'Metrische Analysen zu Vergil', by Wilhelm Ott. It's in German)." Oh man...punch cards. I can understand Gone Jackal's frustration, however I'm more surprised that such works weren't converted to better media a long time ago.

HerbieTMac writes "Congrats to FreeBSD for a new single day download record. Two terabytes (that's 2 trillion bytes!) from a single machine (ftp.freesoftware.com). This was brought about by the simultaneous release of RedHat 7 and FreeBSD 4.1.1."

HerbieTMac writes: "Colossus II has been declassified. After more than 50 years, the details surrounding the first programmable, digital computer have been declassified by the British Public Record Office." Well, will be released

HerbieTMac writes: "Intel and HP are releasing HP's IA-64 emulator for Linux later this week. Particularly interesting is that this emulator will be free (as in beer) for download from Intel's and HP's Web sites."

Bob Kopp writes "The state legislatures of Maryland and Virginia are among the first in the nation to consider passage of the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act (UCITA). The Washington Post has coverage here. " The Federal Trade Commission says that UCITA allows software companies to place "restrictions on a consumer's right to sue for a product defect, to use the product, or even to publicly discuss or criticize the product." If you oppose UCITA and live in Maryland or Virginia, you need to call or fax your legislators immediately.

Bob Kopp writes "The libertarian magazine Reason is running an article about the clash between corporations that own copyrights and 'grassroots, participatory culture.' The article discusses the effects of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which extended the life span of copyrights by 20 years, as well as the dangers of information monopolies in general."

Alexey Goldin writes "An inflatable heatshield --- a new technology with a potential to make space access cheaper will be tested on Feb. 9 by Lavochkin Association (Russia) and DaimlerChrysler Aerospace (Germany). A new word in inflatable toys business :-). " This ranks up there with the Mars Pathfinder, where they just surrounded the lander in airbags and let it drop - elegant engineering at its finest.

Nothing like some quality quickies to survive humpday. Magus311X sent us linkage to an awesome web site that has the plans for nearly every set of legos. If you still have your big bucket, you'll love it. I always got bored half way through the plans tho. Started putting guns on my castles and plants on my spaceships wings. HP LoveJet (I like that one) sent us a webpage that will compute your Wu-Tang name ('Rob Malda' = 'Grand Moff Puppeteer') Blaxthos sent us a photo of the most amazing toilet mankind has developed thus far. Looking for some new comics? Bob Barker pointed us to Tug House and Cecil noticed EtherLife v1.5.. I dig EL15. And now the pointless violence and stupidity portion of the quickies: DragonHawk sent us some nice pictures of people ignoring the warning labels on spray cans, and also building a potato gun capable of firing spuds at 550 MPH. Then we have a guy who builds "sparkler bombs" by setting off 1000 sparklers at a time. Jura sent us pictures of computers that he apparently shot the hell out of. Elwood sent us linkage to another license, this one is the BPL or The "Bastard Public License" Next, random Slashdot references from around the net: Raps sent us writes Alfdot, a Slashdot parody weblog about everyone's favorite lame 80s sitcom (cancelled no doubt do to government conspiracy). Slashdot Man earned a special place on my list of 'people to get a restraining order for' his fan page. Eeeek rebrane sent us a Slashdot drinking game. And the perfect quickie to get some closure on the day: McAdder sent us Final Thoughts which is a website that spams your friends and family upon your death to send them your, well, final thoughts from beyond the grave. Wierd.

Nothing like some quality quickies to survive humpday. Magus311X sent us linkage to an awesome web site that has the plans for nearly every set of legos. If you still have your big bucket, you'll love it. I always got bored half way through the plans tho. Started putting guns on my castles and plants on my spaceships wings. HP LoveJet (I like that one) sent us a webpage that will compute your Wu-Tang name ('Rob Malda' = 'Grand Moff Puppeteer') Blaxthos sent us a photo of the most amazing toilet mankind has developed thus far. Looking for some new comics? Bob Barker pointed us to Tug House and Cecil noticed EtherLife v1.5.. I dig EL15. And now the pointless violence and stupidity portion of the quickies: DragonHawk sent us some nice pictures of people ignoring the warning labels on spray cans, and also building a potato gun capable of firing spuds at 550 MPH. Then we have a guy who builds "sparkler bombs" by setting off 1000 sparklers at a time. Jura sent us pictures of computers that he apparently shot the hell out of. Elwood sent us linkage to another license, this one is the BPL or The "Bastard Public License" Next, random Slashdot references from around the net: Raps sent us writes Alfdot, a Slashdot parody weblog about everyone's favorite lame 80s sitcom (cancelled no doubt do to government conspiracy). Slashdot Man earned a special place on my list of 'people to get a restraining order for' his fan page. Eeeek rebrane sent us a Slashdot drinking game. And the perfect quickie to get some closure on the day: McAdder sent us Final Thoughts which is a website that spams your friends and family upon your death to send them your, well, final thoughts from beyond the grave. Wierd.

Andrew Hunt has come through with his first review for Slashdot, of David Zindell's The Broken God. Set in the distant future, the book chronicles vast, divinely created supercomputers, a humanity spread throughout the stars, and the notion of humanity achieving divine nature. Excellent science fiction. The Broken God author David Zindell pages 695 publisher Bantam Books rating 9.5/10 reviewer Andrew Hunt ISBN 0553564501 summary Story of divinity in the distance future. The Scenario

This masterful work of science fiction by David Zindell takes place several thousand years after the destruction and abandonment of Earth. Humanity now covers thousands of worlds and shares the galaxy with many races of aliens. Gods roam the universe and several inhabit huge nebulae in the Milky Way, endlessly turning dead matter into the vast supercomputers that make up their brains. Among these are Nicolas Daru Ede, who imprinted his consciousness into a computer and became humanity's first god; and Mallory Ringess, who discovered an entirely different path toward godhood embedded in human genetic memory.

Danlo wi Soli Ringess, the son of Mallory Ringess, is born on the planet Icefall, heart of civilization and home of the Order, the group of intellectuals dedicated to discovering all that is knowable about reality. However, he is born deep in the Icefall's frozen wilderness into a group of primitives who know nothing more of civilization than a rumor of an Unreal City far to the east. When he is thirteen years old, an engineered virus kills all the members of his tribe. It is his fate to journey far across Icefall's frozen waste to the Unreal City, that is properly called Neverness, to join the ranks of the most glorified profession of the Order, the Pilots, and to learn of the infinite possibilities for humans.

What's Bad?

[This section left blank intentionally.]

What's Good?

Zindell displays incredible skill and imagination in constructing this universe. Neverness is populated by many species of aliens and groups of humans, each with its own philosophy and view of reality. More importantly, Neverness is the home of the Order of Mystical Mathematicians and Other Keepers of the Ineffable Flame. There are many professions in the Order, from Pilots to Librarians, and each dedicates itself to understanding reality more deeply in a different way.

While Neverness is civilization's most important city and the setting of the novel, Zindell does not neglect to describe the rest of the galaxy. Many philosophies, religions, and wars helped shape civilization, and the author presents this background information without disrupting the flow of the story.

This universe is apprehended through the experiences of Danlo Ringess. Because of his tragic childhood, heroic journey through the wilderness, and enduring love of life, the reader sympathizes with him. Because of his combination of primitive beliefs and desire to experience the world in different ways, he continually interests the reader. Because of his genius and wildness, the reader sees him as a hero.

What does an author need other than a beautifully crafted universe and a compelling character? Zindell has not forgotten to include a plot in his novel. It involves the birth of a religion, romance, assassins, warring philosophies, flight through the stars, virtual realities, and much more.

Conclusion

Many Slashdot readers will like the computer ideas presented in this book, including his idea of "cybernetic philosophies" which view the universe as a computer program run to discover the answer to some question. There's also stuff about telepathic interfaces and virtual realities.

Much of this book can be thought of as the author discussing the difference between perception of reality and reality itself, and many other themes pervade the novel. The possibility of discussing such topics in the flow of an intriguing plot is why I enjoy science fiction so much, and why I view this book as one of the best recent examples of the genre. It's also why I think you should procede directly to mxbf.com (or your local used book store) and buy a copy of this book immediately. It's been out of print for a while now, so the big retail stores probably won't have it.

If you like this book, you should definitely read Neverness, by the same author, which might be considered the prequel to The Broken God. It's at least as good, though harder to get your hands on.

If such things offend you, you might want to know that there are occasional fairly graphic sex scenes.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

Andrew Hunt has come through with his first review for Slashdot, of David Zindell's The Broken God. Set in the distant future, the book chronicles vast, divinely created supercomputers, a humanity spread throughout the stars, and the notion of humanity achieving divine nature. Excellent science fiction. The Broken God author David Zindell pages 695 publisher Bantam Books rating 9.5/10 reviewer Andrew Hunt ISBN 0553564501 summary Story of divinity in the distance future. The Scenario

This masterful work of science fiction by David Zindell takes place several thousand years after the destruction and abandonment of Earth. Humanity now covers thousands of worlds and shares the galaxy with many races of aliens. Gods roam the universe and several inhabit huge nebulae in the Milky Way, endlessly turning dead matter into the vast supercomputers that make up their brains. Among these are Nicolas Daru Ede, who imprinted his consciousness into a computer and became humanity's first god; and Mallory Ringess, who discovered an entirely different path toward godhood embedded in human genetic memory.

Danlo wi Soli Ringess, the son of Mallory Ringess, is born on the planet Icefall, heart of civilization and home of the Order, the group of intellectuals dedicated to discovering all that is knowable about reality. However, he is born deep in the Icefall's frozen wilderness into a group of primitives who know nothing more of civilization than a rumor of an Unreal City far to the east. When he is thirteen years old, an engineered virus kills all the members of his tribe. It is his fate to journey far across Icefall's frozen waste to the Unreal City, that is properly called Neverness, to join the ranks of the most glorified profession of the Order, the Pilots, and to learn of the infinite possibilities for humans.

What's Bad?

[This section left blank intentionally.]

What's Good?

Zindell displays incredible skill and imagination in constructing this universe. Neverness is populated by many species of aliens and groups of humans, each with its own philosophy and view of reality. More importantly, Neverness is the home of the Order of Mystical Mathematicians and Other Keepers of the Ineffable Flame. There are many professions in the Order, from Pilots to Librarians, and each dedicates itself to understanding reality more deeply in a different way.

While Neverness is civilization's most important city and the setting of the novel, Zindell does not neglect to describe the rest of the galaxy. Many philosophies, religions, and wars helped shape civilization, and the author presents this background information without disrupting the flow of the story.

This universe is apprehended through the experiences of Danlo Ringess. Because of his tragic childhood, heroic journey through the wilderness, and enduring love of life, the reader sympathizes with him. Because of his combination of primitive beliefs and desire to experience the world in different ways, he continually interests the reader. Because of his genius and wildness, the reader sees him as a hero.

What does an author need other than a beautifully crafted universe and a compelling character? Zindell has not forgotten to include a plot in his novel. It involves the birth of a religion, romance, assassins, warring philosophies, flight through the stars, virtual realities, and much more.

Conclusion

Many Slashdot readers will like the computer ideas presented in this book, including his idea of "cybernetic philosophies" which view the universe as a computer program run to discover the answer to some question. There's also stuff about telepathic interfaces and virtual realities.

Much of this book can be thought of as the author discussing the difference between perception of reality and reality itself, and many other themes pervade the novel. The possibility of discussing such topics in the flow of an intriguing plot is why I enjoy science fiction so much, and why I view this book as one of the best recent examples of the genre. It's also why I think you should procede directly to mxbf.com (or your local used book store) and buy a copy of this book immediately. It's been out of print for a while now, so the big retail stores probably won't have it.

If you like this book, you should definitely read Neverness, by the same author, which might be considered the prequel to The Broken God. It's at least as good, though harder to get your hands on.

If such things offend you, you might want to know that there are occasional fairly graphic sex scenes.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

rebrane writes "John Carmack has apparently gotten his hands on a K7 and has a few favorable things to say. Notable quotable: "The bottom line is that I feel comfortable standing behind the statement that the K7 is faster than the PIII." "

MattJ writes "At the end of this NYT story about a scavenger hunt at UofChicago, you discover two physics students got points for building a working nuclear reactor, in a day, from scratch. It's a bit scary how easy it was for them to actually produce plutonium. " Reminds me of some of things we did in Biochem. But the lawyer says I'm not supposed to talk about that.

Joy! Cleaning out the submissions box: Praxxus sent us a link to an article you'll swear is a joke... a new use for old computers: filling potholes. HerbieTMac wrote in to say that Ice-T has joined the fray by releasing a new MP3 single. sanpitch sent us an interesting article about facial expression recognition. polar_bear` wrote in to say that Linux Mall has an Associates Program just like CD-Now. Or Amazon, speaking of which Sevn gave me the heads up on their entry for Bill "Family Circus" Keane- check out the reader reviews of Daddy's Hat is on Backwards. Trust me. Read it. Someone had to much spare time, and I'm glad they did. [null] hooked us up with the definitive Mr. T vs. site and east sent us an offensive dilbert parody site. gseidman wrote in to tell us about an important translation project underway to decipher the alien language used on Futurama. Assorted Slashdot notes from the world: An anonymous reader linked us to a cute comment on Neal Stephenson's server about the Slashdot effect. suprax noted that Slashdot and Freshmeat have a cameo in the current dead tree edition of PC Computing. adamv sent us a link to an interview with the creator of IMDB where he says he wishes he designed Slashdot. Funny, I wish I had designed IMDB. And Lastly, Jesse Shrieve, my favorite BSD pusher and dedicated Slashdot Server whipping boy noticed that Slashdot is up to 28 on hot100.com. We're neat.