Slashdot Mirror
Simulated Universe
anonymous lion writes "A story in the Guardian Unlimited reports on The Millennium Simulation saying that it is 'the biggest exercise of its kind'. It required 25 million megabytes of memory to take our universe's initial conditions along with the known laws of physics to create this simulated universe." From the article: "The simulated universe represents a cube of creation with sides that measure 2bn light years. It is home to 20m galaxies, large and small. It has been designed to answer questions about the past, but it offers the tantalising opportunity to fast-forward in time to the slow death of the galaxies, billions of years from now."
Welcome to science, where no matter how far you come along, there's always a ways more to go. Today's models are flawed, but not nearly as much as yesterday's. And even if the Dark Matter mysteries or older-than-time star mysteries are resolved, I'm sure there will be other mysteries we have yet to discover. These simulations are a part of that process.
Libertarian: label used by embarrassed Republicans, longing to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.
Recent advances in cosmology demonstrate that about 70 percent of our Universe currently consists of Dark Energy, a mysterious force field which is causing it to expand ever more rapidly. About one quarter apparently consists of Cold Dark Matter, a new kind of elementary particle not yet directly detected on Earth.
This is stated as fact, not theory, but how can it be a scietific fact if it can not be detected, measured, and independetely verified?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Bah... the universe is mostly empty space. It would compress nicely.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Assuming your assumptions and input are correct, of course.
I think it actually (or perhaps also?) falls under the pigeonhole principal. In order to fit x seperate pidgeons, you need at least x holes. Or, in data storage terms, to be able to always represent x bytes worth of data, you need at least x bytes worth of data. (Compression sometimes seems to get around this, but with compression, it's almost always a tradeoff: It can store certain configurations of data (usually the most common) in less than x bytes, but other configurations (random noise, for example) almost always takes more. In order to ALWAYS be sure of being able to store x bytes, you need at least x bytes to store it in.)
Yeah... modded +1: funny means that the poster doesn't get a karma boost. Modded +1: informative means that the poster does get a karma boost. Some people have decided a while back to circumvent this by modding anything they find particularilly funny as informative, insightful, etc.
I personally think that insightful has a slightly more poetic justification than informative. Basically, a joke often is looking at a situation and seeing things slightly different than everyone else. Insight is the ability to look at a situation and see things slighty different than everyone else. So, it takes some level of insight to make a really good joke.
Although the joke in question didn't really particularilly insightful to me, there are some that actually take a deeper understanding of the situation to make. This joke was just funny because of the level of... I suppose the emotion would be close to sarcasm. Humerous exaggeration, maybe. And comic timing did help. In this case the timing happened to come from not actually reading the article, but instead skimming the slashdot blurb, and then getting a first post. Not necesarilly the work of a troll, but a tactic often used by them.
"Bah... the universe is mostly empty space. It would compress nicely."
In truth, no space is empty; and you can compress the data, but then you will not have a perfect simulation; your computer will take longer to process the data than the span of the events which are occuring. As far as predicting the future goes, it would be useless, because the real universe would complete its 'calculations' long before your more space-efficient machine did--you would in effect only be able to 'predict' the past.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
That doesn't mean that the uncertainty principle isn't relevant. Even if you knew the initial configuration exactly, you still can't predict the future with certainty in a quantum theory.
So let me get this straight. We can put together enough hardware to simulate the universe, YET WE ARE UNABLE TO PREDICT THE FREAKING WEATHER.
Instead, put all those computers together to model the earth's weather and use the laws of physics to tell me if I should take off next Friday to play golf or schedule a trip to Disney in late August. Geez........