Scientists Complete Universe Millennium Simulation

james tech writes "The Virgo Consortium recently completed its massive "Millennium Simulation", tracing the universe's evolution from its early origins to present day. To simplify the computations, they considered only dark matter which composes most of the universe. Using a 512-node cluster with IBM processors, the group produced over 20 terabytes of data with some of the most breathtaking images of the universe never seen. A visible matter simulation is underway, at a lower resolution."

Comments

Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

But despite all of our fancy computers and new-fangled technology, it is still only speculation at best.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely. They just assume a dark matter model. How do we know dark matter is there? Why, because without it, visible matter would be moving differently, of course. And the strange paths of the planets are simply because we haven't included enough epicycles in their attachments to God's crystal spheres of heaven, right?

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why, because without it, visible matter would be moving differently, of course."

You're assuming that they know why visible matter moves the way it does. Again, it's all just a theory in the end.

You can pretty much come up with a mathematical equation to explain anything. That's the beauty of math. It is the essence of perfection as we know it. But in the end, math is still a man-made concept applied to real world physics. That doesn't mean that the universe exists in such terms or recognizes our simplistic definitions of it.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Xaositecte]

"Just a theory" is a phrase that should never be used in the context of Scientific discussions. It shows a misunderstanding of what the word theory means in Science. A Theory, put simply, is an explaination for observed phenominon which can be experimentally disproven, and is capable of being used to make predictions. Mathmatical theory applies to the real world only insofar as it correctly explains real-world phenomina, and predicts the actions of the real universe. Current theories on the creation of the Universe are anything but simplistic, and are accurate according to the data we've collected so far. When more data comes along that proves the theory false or inadequate, the theory will have to change, creating a stronger theory. The idea that it's somehow worthless because it's incomplete is ridiculous.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[helioquake]

Someone ought to mod you up.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[syntaxglitch]

Whether we know WHY visible matter moves the way it does is not at issue; the issue is that we do know HOW visible matter moves, and in fact we understand it very well and can predict it with great accuracy and consistency. Of course the universe doesn't recognize our "simplistic definitions"--our definitions recognize the universe. There's quite a difference.

There's nothing arbitrary about it. Science is a description of how the world around us behaves; inventing fanciful and largely frivolous reasons to explain WHY is best left to philosophers and theologians.

I suspect your science education has been thoroughly inadequate. Please rectify this tragic oversight before having further opinions on scientific matters.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am far from a Holy Roller but there is one thing that the current theories about the creation of the universe fail at miserably.

The theories can tell you what happened a split nanosecond after the big bang and can track the expansion of the universe.

One of the basic principals all these theories hold common is that energy can never be created nor destroyed, only change form.

What I really want to know is what was the universe like a split nanosecond before the big bang.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[syntaxglitch]

Your question is meaningless. There is no "before" the big bang, because time AND space began at that point. "Prior" to the big bang is about as meaningful as asking what point on the Earth's surface is the center of the world.

There is no known way--and likely never will be--to know anything about existance outside of the post-big bang observable universe, other than indulging in wild and baseless speculation.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[aussie_a]

I've heard the theory that time didn't exist until the Big Bang, so therefore there was no split nanosecond before the Big Bang ;) It sounds a lot like Creationist theories on the whole seven day deal.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your question is meaningless. There is no "before" the big bang, because time AND space began at that point

If they both began at that point then where did the vast amount of energy which was present at the big bang come from? Remember that energy can never be created or destroyed so.... Where man, where?

Really, like others have said, the scientific theory of the big bang is based as much in faith as the religious insanity that claims god created everything.

"Prior" to the big bang is about as meaningful as asking what point on the Earth's surface is the center of the world.

How is your analogy even remotely correct? I am not asking a question which has already been proven to be false, I am simply asking science to explain, even a tiny amount, the origin of the whole basis of their theory.

It is far from asking if the sun revolves around me, or you, or your neighbors dog.

I personally believe in the scientific explanation of the creation of the universe, I also admit it is based on faith. (I have heard it called the 'cult of scientism')

There is no known way--and likely never will be--to know anything about existence outside of the post-big bang observable universe, other than indulging in wild and baseless speculation.

EXACTLY! But ever notice how most of the science community refuses to even address this issue (kinda like you are now by hurling random insults). While the big bang is not based on speculation, EVERYTHING that happened before it is. If you are comfortable with an explanation that refuses to address anything prior to its own existence and attempts to dissuade people from even asking questions about it, more power to you brother. (most people call it religion but I guess you can call it science)

Personally, I believe in god (not the Christian idea of it), I also believe in the big bang, evolution, aliens, and lots of other things that could be considered crackpot. After all, everything that ends must start somewhere. The quest for god is nothing more then trying to find what is on the other side of the starting line.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[timster]

That's as meaningless as asking where God came from. Without data we cannot speculate scientifically, and so far we have not been made aware of any relevant data.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Brahmastra]

String theory does handle what happened before the big bang. Two branes collided in the 11th dimension causing a big bang.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[syntaxglitch]

If they both began at that point then where did the vast amount of energy which was present at the big bang come from? Remember that energy can never be created or destroyed so.... Where man, where?

Who knows? We don't. All we know is that that energy was there. Science is not in the business of speculating on things that cannot be determined or falsified.

Really, like others have said, the scientific theory of the big bang is based as much in faith as the religious insanity that claims god created everything.

No. No, it isn't. The theory of the big bang is based on logical extrapolation from what we can observe about the universe. Just because the current understanding does not satisfy your curiousity does not make it arbitrary.

How is your analogy even remotely correct? I am not asking a question which has already been proven to be false, I am simply asking science to explain, even a tiny amount, the origin of the whole basis of their theory.

No, you are asking science to answer a question that is MEANINGLESS. The "origin of the whole basis of the theory" lies in the data we have collected about the universe today. The big bang theory wasn't just made up because it sounded nice, it was reasoned out as an explaination for observations, and not knowing what happened "before" the big bang does not in any way detract from the descriptive and predictive value of the theory.

I personally believe in the scientific explanation of the creation of the universe, I also admit it is based on faith. (I have heard it called the 'cult of scientism')

For you, it may be based on faith. You say you believe in science, but clearly you do not understand it.

EXACTLY! But ever notice how most of the science community refuses to even address this issue (kinda like you are now by hurling random insults). While the big bang is not based on speculation, EVERYTHING that happened before it is. If you are comfortable with an explanation that refuses to address anything prior to its own existence and attempts to dissuade people from even asking questions about it, more power to you brother. (most people call it religion but I guess you can call it science)

Science refuses to address the issue for the same reason that they refuse to address the issue of whether I should wear a black or a blue shirt today--because the "issue" has no bearing on science whatsoever. Furthermore, I HAVE addressed the issue, by explaining why you are misunderstanding the concepts involved. It is not my responsibility to give you a science education; I encourage you to seek a better understanding of science if you still do not understand.

You are indeed correct that the idea of anything happening before the big bang is speculation. That is precisely why science does not say anything about it. Please do not ask for scientific answers to non-scientific questions and then blame science for refusing to answer!

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Kiryat Malachi]

The universe is one big lie.

Seriously. Look up virtual particles and perturbation theory; vacuum fluctuation and the Casimir effect. The implication is that there is an extremely low, but finite and non-zero, probability that at any given moment a Universe-sized blob of mass shaped appropriately to generate the Big Bang can appear. Since it is non-zero, given enough "time" (as the GP said, time is a meaningless concept before the Big Bang, but assume an infinite framework on which things exist/can happen and its more or less the same thing) it is guaranteed to happen (for P_trial > 0, as #trials goes to infinity, P_event becomes 1).

It also implies that at any minute, the Universe's internal auditors could say "Whoops, that mass needs to go away now" and the entire thing will disappear.

There *are* scientific explanations for the questions you're asking. They have their own problems, and most cosmologists will be happy to admit that; rarely will one "hurl random insults". You're a bit touchy on this point, it would seem.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do not ask for scientific answers to non-scientific questions and then blame science for refusing to answer!

Substitute 'science' for 'religion' and I am sure I have heard a number of preaches say the exact same thing.

Any organization that refuses to attempt to answer questions it can not, and tells its followers not to ask them is based on faith, plain and simple.

I admit it, you obviously do not.

On another note, what are your thoughts on abiogenisis, science has never proven that but many people accept is as fact.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[mabraham]

While you clearly understand the scientific method, I think your assertion that ""Just a theory" is a phrase that should never be used in the context of a scientific discussion" is excessively strong. "Just a theory" is commonly used by scientists to describe an idea that is known to explain some of the data known about a phenomenon, but which is either inconsistent with other data or not sufficiently tested to warrant confidence in its predictive power.

As used by the original poster, "Just a theory" is an unjustified derogative. The theories on how matter behaves do have predictive power in many cases that we've tested after formulating the theories. They might have meant "It's just an abstraction" and they have a point there, but one for philosophers to debate, not scientists.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Floody]

"Prior" to the big bang is about as meaningful as asking what point on the Earth's surface is the center of the world.

How is your analogy even remotely correct? I am not asking a question which has already been proven to be false, I am simply asking science to explain, even a tiny amount, the origin of the whole basis of their theory.

The analogy is correct because your question is an attempt to extrapolate an additional orthagonal relationship from any given n-dimension while somehow still remaining in the confines of said dimension.

It is identical to asking where a point with three cartesian ccordinates exists in a two-dimensional space. It's nonsense.

In more real-world terms: How can you possibly have a "before", which is a temporal construct, without having the temporal bit?

Consider the fact that it is entirely possible that the following two statements are both true:

a. The universe began at the big bang.

b. The universe has always existed.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even before the Big Bang, people knew the difference between "principal" (main) and "principle" (idea)... Have a nice Big Crunch!

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Foobar of Borg]

If they both began at that point then where did the vast amount of energy which was present at the big bang come from? Remember that energy can never be created or destroyed so.... Where man, where?

Actually, this is not completely true. There are certain special conditions under which energy can be created, similar to the vacuum energy phenomenon. Furthermore, the big bang, specifically the first 10^(-43) seconds of the universe, is certainly another kind of special condition, the physics of which are not fully understood. The reason the conditions are not fully understood is that there is currently no comprehensive theory of quantum gravity. There are a lot of things that have not been resolved in that regard. Even string theory, despite its current age, is still basically in its infancy.

My point is that the situation at the moment of the big bang is a very complicated issue from a physics perspective and cannot thus be couched in such simplistic terms.

"Prior" to the big bang is about as meaningful as asking what point on the Earth's surface is the center of the world.

How is your analogy even remotely correct? I am not asking a question which has already been proven to be false, I am simply asking science to explain, even a tiny amount, the origin of the whole basis of their theory.

The analogy the GP poster made is quite valid. Asking what happens before time begins is a meaningless question, like asking "how high is up?" There is no meaningful basis by which an answer can be made. Furthermore, the physics as currently understood predicts back to the first 10^(-43) seconds of the universe. As I stated above, the problem with the first 10^(-43) seconds is that there is currently no complete theory of quantum gravity. Additionally, and I know I am probably nit-picking at this point, there is no "science" to ask questions. There are individual physicists (the most appropriate type of scientist to consult for this kind of question) and there is the accumulated science physics.

I personally believe in the scientific explanation of the creation of the universe, I also admit it is based on faith. (I have heard it called the 'cult of scientism')

There is no known way--and likely never will be--to know anything about existence outside of the post-big bang observable universe, other than indulging in wild and baseless speculation.

EXACTLY! But ever notice how most of the science community refuses to even address this issue (kinda like you are now by hurling random insults). While the big bang is not based on speculation, EVERYTHING that happened before it is. If you are comfortable with an explanation that refuses to address anything prior to its own existence and attempts to dissuade people from even asking questions about it, more power to you brother. (most people call it religion but I guess you can call it science)

No offense intended, but I have only heard the word "scientism" from fundamentalists. I guess the reason they use the word is so that they can make the scientific method sound as though it is simply another tiny philosophy or ideology, like being a Democrat or a Republican or a Rotarian. As to your other point, it is generally understood by physicists that the first 10^(-43) seconds of the universe, including the precise way in which the universe came into being, is not currently known or understand. There are a lot of hypotheses (to use the proper terminology), but there is nothing definitive. There is certainly nothing to defeat any kind of religious view (such as my own) with regard to the beginning of the universe and time, but again, to ask the question "what happened before the beginning of time" is not really meaningful.

I personally think, and this is just my opinion naturally, that even if the physical theory necessary to fully understand the pattern of the physical universe back to the very instant of the big bang (or whatever it was that began all this silliness we call a universe) is fully developed, we will still be left with many more questions. This has simply been the pattern of human knowledge. But then the more questions we have, the more there is to learn.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[syntaxglitch]

Substitute 'science' for 'religion' and I am sure I have heard a number of preaches say the exact same thing.

And it would be perfectly appropriate in that case as well. If you ask an honest theologian for a religious answer to an irrelevant question, they'll tell you exactly the same thing.

Any organization that refuses to attempt to answer questions it can not, and tells its followers not to ask them is based on faith, plain and simple.

Total non sequitur. Please do not state nonsense.

Rather to the contrary, an organization that attempts to answer questions that are impossible for it to answer is dishonest and probably malicious. It is the people who prefer meaningless answers to honest uncertainty that take things on faith, because they insist on absolute certainty where it is not possible.

Do you also blame science for not answering questions such as "Should I put mustard on this hamburger?" or perhaps "where did I put my car keys?" Forget all the successes of modern science that make things like posting on slashdot possible, clearly science is based on faith, because it is unable to answer such simple, everyday questions! Oh, the humanity!

On another note, what are your thoughts on abiogenisis, science has never proven that but many people accept is as fact.

It is accepted as highly likely because there are plausible mechanisms for its occurance and no superior explanation for the origin of life has been proposed. I'm uncertain of the relevance here.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[syntaxglitch]

The analogy is correct because your question is an attempt to extrapolate an additional orthagonal relationship from any given n-dimension while somehow still remaining in the confines of said dimension.

Wow.
I'm pretty sure you understood my analogy better than I did when I wrote it. :)

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Thunderstruck]

You make an interesting point. Perhaps the term "theory" is not a good one to apply to models we use in considering past events. As creationists are propmpt to point out, no amount of reproduceable experiments, in the future, can tell us for certain what events took place in the past. I suppose then, a "theory" about what happened in the past is not something we can test by experiment. Used in this way, a "theory" includes an element of speculation that cannot be tested.

In order to remedy this linguistic problem, I propose that henceforth all models about how events in the past took place be called "Bob." Evolution of present species is a Bob, but forward looking natural selection is a theory.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds a lot like Creationist theories on the whole seven day deal.

Yup, it does. I think it is funny personally. This is the whole point I was trying to make. Thank you for putting it so simply.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[tabrnaker]

Haven't you heard? It's big bangs all the way down!

On the real side of things. Let see, all the energy in the universe existing as one in a timeless state, the be all and end all of everything, all of consciousness in one point. Certainly sounds like the Creator. He who set time in motion to divide himself for self discovery.

The problem with organized religions is that they teach that we are seperate from god. Yet, if the creator is everything, what else could we be made of?

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Pooua]

How do we know dark matter is there? Why, because without it, visible matter would be moving differently, of course. And the strange paths of the planets are simply because we haven't included enough epicycles in their attachments to God's crystal spheres of heaven, right?

Ironically, you demonstrate the point you attempted to mock.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[kurzweilfreak]

I guess it depends on how you define "time". If you mean time as in the cause-effect relationship of the reality of our universe that we live in, then no, time did not exist before the "big bang" because our universe didn't exist, hence, there was no frame of reference for time to be measured by.

If you subscribe to M-theory or Brane theory, time can exist in the 11-dimensional hyperspace defined by the movement of branes relative to one another. The idea is that our universe came into being when two branes nudged into each other, creating our universe out of the resulting kenetic energy release, starting our "local" time (local being within our universe). Even without the existance of our local universe, time would exist in the 11-dimensional hyperspace, in which we exist as a subset. If string/m/brane theory is right, the need for a creator of our universe is null. Next, onto explaining the origin of the hyperspace! :D

Einstein is still right: it's all relative and depends on your frame of reference. ;)

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[antispam_ben]

One of the basic principals ...

I remember Ms. McKown (McKowan?), she was the principal at Capital View Elementary when I was a student, she was one mean principal.

What I really want to know is what was the universe like a split nanosecond before the big bang.

It was creating nuclear fusion for people who ask questions like that!

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[e_xworm]

Once again.

What the grantparent says is that since we define Bing Bang as the point where time starts, there's no meaning in questioning what happens before that. There's no "before".

Actualy his analogy is quite good considering the paradoxical nature of both questions ;)

Now we can never be 100% certain that the Bing Bang hypothesis is true. It's just a hypothesis that fits nicely (??) with the current cosmological theory.

Otherwise you could argue that there's no point in time where time begins (which is somewhat stupid since even if there was you wouldnt know it). Modern string theory tells us that the universe might be having an infinate series of Big Bangs and Big Cranches (see Brian Greens incredible book: The Elegant Universe).

Now about your argument on where all this energy came from, since energy cant be created or destroyed... well what do you know, that may not be quite true...

Modern quantum physics tell us that you can "borrow" an arbitary large amount of energy if you "promise" to "return" it quickly enough. Ok ok i'm quoting someone else on that, but that's exactly what Heisenburgs formula tells us. That and the fact that matters positive energy and gravitys negative energy negate each other may lead us to the conclusion that the whole universe runs on borrowed energy!!

I hope i was clear on what I said.. My english is not that good anyhow... :)

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Just a theory" is commonly used by scientists to describe an idea that is known to explain some of the data known about a phenomenon, but which is either inconsistent with other data or not sufficiently tested to warrant confidence in its predictive power.

The correct term for that is hypothesis. That's 8th grade science, bud.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[hazah]

The problem you are facing has to do with how you percieve time. Current theory suggests that your perception of time has something to do with the speed you're traveling at. So far, it is speculated that to a photon, which travels at the speed of light, time "stands still". So... in this context, what does your personal perception of time have to do with what happens when everything is said to be moving at that speed?

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Current theories on the creation of the Universe are anything but simplistic, and are accurate according to the data we've collected so far. When more data comes along that proves the theory false or inadequate, the theory will have to change, creating a stronger theory. The idea that it's somehow worthless because it's incomplete is ridiculous."

Another criteria that is often overlooked, is "the theory that makes the least number of assumptions is more likely to be true". At this point, anyone making claims about the Universe's origins is making far too many assumptions to be believable to the average human.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[mwood]

Indeed. It takes a lot of hard work to turn a raw idea into a "mere theory", and a well-crafted theory is (on average) about the most reliable thing you can find. A theory is an idea that has survived multiple, merciless attacks by logic and observation of how things actually behave, and while it may not be the whole truth or nothing but the truth, a good theory is a darned close approximation of truth.

Far too many people misuse "theory" when they mean "guess", just as some confuse "believing what someone else told me to believe" with "thinking".

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[mwood]

The Law of Conservation of Matter/Energy has only been observed to hold within the Universe. "Before the Big Bang" is not within the Universe so we haven't much reason to insist that such laws operate there.

We'll have a lot more to go on once we figure out how to point telescopes at right angles to reality.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[mwood]

Any organization that refuses to attempt to answer questions it cannot is thinking clearly. We get no end of trouble when science and religion try to address each other's questions. They can't do it, and the smart practitioners in both camps won't try to make them.

Please note that I distinguish here between "cannot answer" as in cannot *ever* answer for structural reasons, vs. "will not answer" as in don't know the answer *yet*.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[mwood]

Actually I think the problem with the seven-day Creation thing is that it takes too *long*. You can recite the whole story in under a minute, monologues included, and God didn't have the narrative to deal with.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

EXACTLY! But ever notice how most of the science community refuses to even address this issue (kinda like you are now by hurling random insults). While the big bang is not based on speculation, EVERYTHING that happened before it is. If you are comfortable with an explanation that refuses to address anything prior to its own existence and attempts to dissuade people from even asking questions about it, more power to you brother. (most people call it religion but I guess you can call it science)

Personally, I believe in god (not the Christian idea of it), I also believe in the big bang, evolution, aliens, and lots of other things that could be considered crackpot. After all, everything that ends must start somewhere. The quest for god is nothing more then trying to find what is on the other side of the starting line.

Your capability to think critically is severely limited. The scientific community isn't refusing to address the issue, because the issue is addressed implicitly in the theory. Time and Space began at the instant of the Big Bang, so there is no "before" because Time didn't exist. You even answer your own question in the second paragraph quoted above. Everything includes Time, right?

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Kazoo the Clown]

What the grantparent says is that since we define Bing Bang as the point where time starts, there's no meaning in questioning what happens before that. There's no "before".

Actualy his analogy is quite good considering the paradoxical nature of both questions ;)

I'd say it isn't very good, as obviously it didn't get the message across.

I prefer Steven Hawking's example-- "asking what came 'before' the Big Bang is like asking what's north of the North Pole."...

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[Xaositecte]

I am indeed comfortable with a Scientific community that can admit "We don't know" - which is why they don't address the issue of what happened before the Big Bang. There is no evidence (experimental or otherwise) which even comes close to explaining what the universe was like before existence as we know it.

Creationism is an ideal that just.. Makes something up, the wise man of the tribe says "this is how it all began" and that's the truth. I can't accept that. I can accept "We've tried to figure it out, and we're STILL trying to figure it out, but we don't have any conclusive answers right now" - because it's true.

I know we may never know the answers, we probably won't in my lifetime.

Everything in the theory begins from something, and even if you had an explaination for what went on before the big bang, there'd be a question of "well, what went on before that." Analogous to the "who created god" question that no creationist has ever been able to answer to my satisfaction.

You may as well ask them to explain why is the gravitational constant what it is, or how mathmeticians really know 1+1=2.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[tabrnaker]

We don't understand it, that's why we have science. We have workable constructs, but we do not 'understand' how any matter moves. haha, we don't even have a clue what matter is.

Science is all about control, not knowledge. It doesn't care why, it just expects results.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[IRIGHTI]

The scientific community refuses to address the issue because it is not science. As soon as you can disprove any theory about what was going on before the Big Bang then it will be. Somehow I don't see that happening. Ask any questions about what happened before, you won't get any answers because there aren't any.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[dword]

Just buggin' in with another point: There is no space outside the Universe. It's still expanding and cooling (much, much slower than at the begining) and by expanding it creates it's own space and time. There *isn't*anything* outside the Universe! Scientists have assumed there is Ether but they were proven wrong. There is no support for electromagenitic fields and apparently even space, time and matter are a cooler variation of it.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[WryCoder]

Current theory suggests that your perception of time has something to do with the speed you're traveling at. So far, it is speculated that to a photon, which travels at the speed of light, time "stands still".

Actually, your perception of time is unchanged, otherwise physics would seem different to you, which violates SR. What happens is distances in the direction of your velocity are compressed. At the speed of light, the distance to wherever you are going is zero, so it takes zero time to get there. To an observer moving relative to you and watching your situation, the distance is not zero, but your clock appears to be running very slow: at the limit of the speed of light, it stops.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[mabraham]

I said "commonly used", not "correctly used according to delineations in elementary discussions of the scientific method".

The whole hypothesis/theory/law gradation is nothing like as clear-cut as they teach you in 8th grade. You have a continuous gradation of theories according to their explanatory and predictive power. A "law" is really an honorary title to theories that work very well. However the "laws" of gravitation and motion (for example) are known to only apply for middle-range masses moving much slower than the speed of light... but we still call them laws.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[hazah]

Apologies for not being clear. Yes, the photon will "experience" normal time, and a distance of zero. The time that "stands still" would be that time the photon will be the time the photon spends observing you :).

Not sure if this is any better, it seems that we are in agreement anyway.

Re:Breathtaking indeed.

[lazy genes]

What point is the center? There is no perfect center .All things are made of three's.The system that explains our planet the best is that it has two poles and an equador.The three variables are equally distant from each other in many ways .This is the same as saying it is a wave form.Wave forms are always moving because space-time is also a product consisting of three parts equally distant from each other in many ways .Just like an atom is made of three parts and those three parts are made of three parts untill you reach beyond planck lengths.You can only go so small in this universe before you start bending space-time.In other universes things are very relitive.

impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, this is some impressive stuff indeed.... Of course I'm talking about their "not yet slashdotted" webserver that's probably handling a lot of big 50MB downloads right now.

Re:impressive

[LucidBeast]

Well, what did you think they did with that super computer after they were done simulating the whole universe.

Re:impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently they didnt use it as a webserver...

Re:impressive

[autophile]

Well, that's why the blurb says "the most breathtaking images of the universe never seen".

--Rob

Re:impressive

[ikkonoishi]

Photo-realistic 3D porn.

Total Millenium Vortex

[Anonymous Coward]

The scientists are working on future versions of the software that will exptrapolate the whole Millenium simulation from a piece of pie.

Re:Total Millenium Vortex

[Bob McCown]

s/pie/fairy\ cake/;g

You're welcome.

Re:Total Millenium Vortex

[Breakfast Pants]

Well since the complete resultant dataset is already available from an extrapolation of pi that would almost be redundant (though tasty).

Talk about bloat

[sygin]

"20 terabytes of data" This has to be the most bloated screensaver ever!

Re:Talk about bloat

[active8or]

20Tb is of course refers to the current bandwithd requested of the server a seconds from slashdot users ;)

Re:Talk about bloat

[AndroidCat]

There's talk of Google buying them out and offering it as Google Everything.

Re:Talk about bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely EA will sue them for that because "Challenge Everything" looks too much like it.

Re:Talk about bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

That isn't funny, try again!

Re:Talk about bloat

[glsunder]

"20 terabytes of data" This has to be the most bloated screensaver ever!

I have users that would love to get their hands on that one.

Re:Talk about bloat

[Donny Smith]

Judging by its performance, I thought that is the default KDE screensaver.

Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[helioquake]

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are -- if it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." -- R.P. Feynman

I feel that this quote is appropriate, as I believe this type of simulation possibly cannot contain every essential physics that governs the evolution of the Universe. Some oversimplification must be present and some tweaks (e.g. dark matter) may go into the modeling to match whatever we see it today.

This isn't the end of the study of cosmology. That's all I'm trying to say.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[helioquake]

Of course, in the title, I meant to say "cosmology far from understood"...geez, I need to get some sleep.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[MoonFog]

I don't think their point was to try and end the study, fta:

This combines the largest simulation of the growth of dark matter structure ever carried out with new techniques for following the formation and evolution of the visible components. We show that baryon-induced features in the initial conditions of the Universe are reflected in distorted form in the low-redshift galaxy distribution, an effect that can be used to constrain the nature of dark energy with next generation surveys.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[MichaelSmith]

I feel that this quote is appropriate, as I believe this type of simulation possibly cannot contain every essential physics that governs the evolution of the Universe. Some oversimplification must be present and some tweaks (e.g. dark matter) may go into the modeling to match whatever we see it today.

Yes, but as a source of desktop backgrounds (ignoring the impending /. effect) it can't be beaten

Re: Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Black Parrot]

> > "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are -- if it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." -- R.P. Feynman

> I feel that this quote is appropriate, as I believe this type of simulation possibly cannot contain every essential physics that governs the evolution of the Universe. Some oversimplification must be present and some tweaks (e.g. dark matter) may go into the modeling to match whatever we see it today.

Yes, and figuring out why your model doesn't reproduce what you see is where the potential for real discoveries lies.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[helioquake]

Not many slashdot readers are (unfortunately) as an observant and careful reader as you are. People tend to swallow what is dangled in front of them and to take it as a "hard" fact. I'm just adding my 2 cents to make them think a bit deeper (if at all).

Yeah, this could be proven to be utterly wrong in 5 years; or it could be used as a benchmark study for the cosmological study of large scale structure. The community will decide that sooner or later.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Jump]

The problem with this kind of science is, that people are so happy with the 'media' that they forget the 'message'. Cold dark matter forming dark halos in an expanding universe have been very successful in explaining the large scale structure, but fail miserably at the not so small scale of individual galaxies. These models are just tests of the theory, not a replacement of reality. It doesn't make sense to have a perfect simulation of the universe - why duplicate it? It only makes sense to try to understand and improve the theory. Tell me what is new about taking more particles to simulate the same physics? It will still not hold on small scales. Of course simulating magnetic fields, radiation, details of the interstellar medium and the actual star formation process is difficult. But instead of using shear computer power to do the simple model more accurate doesn't quite cut it.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[CmdrGravy]

Oh what, really ?

Re: Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Anonymous Coward]

...and all of the "startling" findings that we expect to see in the next 20 years.

That's the problem with simulations: software is exceedingly precise. You can tweak it until it matches our current perceptions, but it will never really simulate what is actually out there.

Re: Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[SimilarityEngine]

Okay, for example: the weather is predicted by running simulations on a computer, and although the detailed predictions are notorious for their unreliability (especially where I live in Britain), the fact that they do at least predict something "plausible looking" indicates that the underlying model is along the right lines. If the model was way off, the prediction would be crazy nonsense.

I think this the point that Black Parrot was making in the GP post - simulations like this provide you with a "sanity check" for your theory... please correct me if I misunderstood.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Tomfrh]

"This isn't the end of the study of cosmology. That's all I'm trying to say."

Whoever said it was?

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[joshv]

That's a great quote, and yes, Astronomy/Cosmology aren't really 'experimental' sciences in the true sense of the word. But there are observations that can be made to attempt to validate/invalidate the model. It's difficult, because we are stuck with the few photons that happen to make it to vicinity of our planet. Regardless, such observations can still be powerful enough to dethrone one model of the universe and suggest another

The best we can eventually hope for is a comsological model that agrees with all known astronomical observations. Which of course buys no guarantee than the next, bigger, supper telescope won't see something that proves the entire theory is crap.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's amplify that caveat.

No-one understands the physical properties of dark matter.

So ... running a simulation of it is a complete waste of time.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[syntaxglitch]

Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that even if an entire theory is proven to be crap, that doesn't change the fact that the now-crappy theory still makes correct predictions within a certain subset of data.

Even if everything we think we know today about science is later proven false, the new theories will not contradict our current theories when applied to measurements we currently have, anymore than discovering an improved theory of gravity will make apples suddenly fall upward.
(deciding whether or not thousands of Macs suddenly flying off into space would be a good thing is another matter.)

There is a tendency among people who enjoy highly speculative ideas that contradict known physics to say "well, we don't know, so faster-than-light travel/instantaneous communication/psychic powers/creationism/whatever COULD be possible." Really, it's not probably going to happen.

Re: Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[aussie_a]

If the model was way off, the prediction would be crazy nonsense.

I'd say many predictions are crazy nonsense. Here's a prediction on tomorrow's weather: It's going to rain.

I'm correct aren't I? I just didn't say where. Okay, a less smart ass reply: It's going to rain in Sydney. Am I right? Am I wrong? Who knows. If I'm right, I can say I've got a predictable model, if I'm wrong, I can say "hey, I'm not always wrong." I'm sure the model they use is better then mine, but it's easy to create a model that doesn't provide "crazy nonsense" but still not correspond to real life in any meaningful manner.

Re: Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[SimilarityEngine]

Okay, fair enough, but weather prediction models don't keep coming out with things like "the whole world will be consumed by hurricanes and lightning" - that's the kind of crazy nonsense I'm talking about.

If a simulation of the universe's evolution predicted that it would collapse after (say) 10 years, you'd have to say the underlying model was wrong. If it predicted a universe which after about 13*10^9 years had the broad characteristics of the current observed universe (avg. density, size of density fluctuations etc.), you'd say you were along the right lines.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for helping me think deeper or at all. You are a knight of men and an inspiration to all who read your posts.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[part_of_you]

I agree. One cannot predict where something is going, without knowing from where it came. As far as I know, man-kind has not yet understood the full reverse of the universe yet. I mean our scientist still cannot come up with a model of the universe, and cannot link the quantum world with the every-day world we live in. There is a point where (when reversing the time of the universe) our current understanding of reality fails, and we cannot understand the transition of matter from it's current state, to that of what it was just after the "Big Bang".

I couldn't RTFA, but I wonder how far back they went.

Re: Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you would, wouldn't you. Of course the correct conclusion might well be something like "boy oh boy, haven't we been the bloody lucky bastards!"

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[pboulang]

I couldn't RTFA, but I wonder how far back they went.

Well, since any good fundmentalist knows that the heavens and Earth are only like 6000 years old, they couldn't go back further than that.

Seriously, though, you can certainly predict the path of a baseball thrown into the air without knowing which factory made it and what kind of cow was used for the leather. To accurately predict, you need to know where something is NOW, and where it is some delta time from now, and understand all forces to some degree (obviously things like Hiesenberg's Uncertainty Principal come into play when you try and get too much detail, but that doesn't invalidate the whole thing)

Interestingly, you say we have not understood the full reverse of the Universe, yet later implicitly accept the Big Bang theory. Scientific theory throughout history has been mostly looking at a tiny little series of events (position of stars each year, path of a proton through a vapor cloud, measuring the voltage on a lightning strike), so when you say I mean our scientist still cannot come up with a model of the universe, and cannot link the quantum world with the every-day world we live in. it comes across as really very very whiney. This model is just another of the tools scientists have created in our short time humans have been concious on this planet.. don't disparage their achievements.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Anonymous Coward]

thank you prof. obvious.

Re: Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Haydn Fenton]

IANAW(eatherman), but clearly I know a lot more about weather prediction than you, given your posts consists of 99% ignorance.

People get information about the current weather using weather balloons, satellites, everyday weather instruments and whatever else. Then they can use that data to pretty accurately predict what's going to happen next. If you see a bunch of hot air, clouds, cold air, you know where winds are coming from, the temperature of them, the speed, etc. and you know from past experience what happens when such and such occurs, it's not surprising that you should be able to build up a picture of what's going to happen within the next hour. Now keep the prediction going, but instead of using the facts about current weather, they will have to use their future prediction as fact and do the same as before with the new data. Carry this on for a few days and the chances are your data is going to lose some accuracy, but it's still going to be a rough guide to what will happen. The longer you try to predict, the less accuracte the prediction will be. That's not to say the model is wrong.

It's like calculating the distance the Earth takes as it moves around the sun - to calculate the exact distance you would need to know the exact gravitational pull from *everything* in the universe, shove it into a huge calculation and you have your answer. This is obviously a hell of a lot of work and probably couldn't be done for a lot of reasons. So instead, we ignore pretty much everything in the universe and imagine only the Sun and the Earth exist. The formula would still be pretty complex, but it gives an answer that's very accurate.

It's not wrong, it's just not 100% right because to do that would require an immensely huge (and therefore unreasonable) amount of data and computer power.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[part_of_you]

Seriously, though, you can certainly predict the path of a baseball thrown into the air without knowing which factory made it and what kind of cow was used for the leather.

Yes, of coarse you can, but you must know for sure sertain things. Like: It came from the pitcher's mount, from a release height of 4 feet. Speed is important along with spin, and angle. It then got hit with a wooden bat. Swing is important, along with, again, weight of the bat. Did the ball hit the outer-most part of the bat? or the inner, or middle? Then another important thing would be the way the bat struck the ball, did it hit the top of the ball making it spin downward?

All of this can be viewed backwards to reveal everything. But what if you didn't have a tape of it? What if it was millions of years later? If the ball is still spinning around somewhere in space, then you can project where you think it would have come from, but you wouldn't know the thing that propelled it, because the man that hit it is dead, and in fact the whole game that was once called "baseball" is no longer understood.

The whole pont I was trying to make is that the quantem world has not yet been related to the larger-scale world that we live in, and the laws are different as well. I still can't RTFA, so I still don't know how long they were able to go back. Have you RTFA? If so, maybe you can help me out with this instead of calling me whiney.

We all smile, we all sing

Re: Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[lgw]

Okay, fair enough, but weather prediction models don't keep coming out with things like "the whole world will be consumed by hurricanes and lightning" - that's the kind of crazy nonsense I'm talking about.

That seems to be exactly the sort of crazy nonsense that some global warming simulations predict. Slashdot readers seem to be fond of such simulations - it's fun, after all, to imagine life becoming more interesting.

Re: Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Anonymous Coward]

yep.

That's how I usually discover that it's time to recalibrate the equipment.

[regular preventative maintinance? that requires a regular budget.]

-anon_lab_rat

Re: Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[xoboots]

There exist important classes of systems where close enough is *not* good enough to make reasonable predictions. At best, you can predict various possible families of outcomes and then wait to see which one pertains. For example, chaotic systems are not deterministic in the way that classical systems are considered to be. The weather is essentially unpredictable except for gross patterns because even a minute variation of starting conditions will lead to completely different model outcomes. Considering that complete certainty over every possible starting point measurement (there an infinite number of them, but even just considering a few "important" ones) is quite impossible, even if there was a complete model we would still not be able to use it to make completely accurate predictions. There is a good reason that statistics underpins modern science. The only accurate simulator for the universe is the universe itself.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course its simplified, ctp. obvious... The fact that you find that significant enough to comment makes me wonder if you really comprehend the scale of this model. This is the single largest n-body simulation ever, no claim (AFAIK) has been made that it is "the end of the study of cosmology" or indeed that it models all types of elementary physical interactions.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but the world is completely me-centric.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[pboulang]

If what you are measuring is how far the ball will go, will it go over the wall, does NOT need to know anything about the pitcher's mound or release hight, how fast it was pitched.. all that is made moot by the bat.. you track the trajectory after that point. Similarly, the tool they are creating is a model that takes current conditions and can be run forward or backwards, but I think that as you move further along the timeline, you will by nature of the tool have a more and more vague corellation with reality. Kinda like you say, that baseball millions of years future isn't really enough to tell you about the type of bat used.

Though I hadn't RTFA prior, just looked at pretty pictures, we can look at this exerpt:

The Millennium Run followed the evolution of the virtual universe from a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, when it was still a nearly-uniform soup of hot matter, up to the present day, billions of years later. This fast-forwarding of the universe was achieved using "the N-body simulation technique," Evrard explained.

That the early universe was only nearly uniform is of principal interest. Scientists believe that it was the few tiny imperfections, perhaps from the quirks of quantum physics, way back then that served as the seeds from which all later structure arose. Otherwise, our universe would still be a completely uniform one where matter couldn't accrete -- a boring cosmic soup.

This tool isn't the endall be-all of the universe, it is a rough guess, and I had said you came across whiney only because I felt you had too much expectation that it would answer all the questions of origin that are as of yet unresolved, and deals specifically with macro objects and how matter is distributed.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[Mr Europe]

Sure they're cheating - Simulation of everything?! Hmph! I couldn't even find my my dog in there! First I thought it was because they simulated only the dark matter, but hey, my dog is black ! I should show up!

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[xnot]

Where the problem lies is what is possible to experiment vs what must be theorized and somehow extrapolated to the present day.

Re:Caveat -- cosmology not far from understood

[part_of_you]

This tool isn't the endall be-all of the universe, it is a rough guess, and I had said you came across whiney only because I felt you had too much expectation that it would answer all the questions of origin that are as of yet unresolved, and deals specifically with macro objects and how matter is distributed.

See, this is the thing. Scientists get their computers, and run with it. I don't think they were trying to explain the begining of time, but watch and see, I'll bet this is only the begining of our current "scientists" branching out into another rhelm of lazyness.

Really, if you look at it, the whole of the cosmic worls was realised by the real scientists/mystics of the past. Sadly, the Chatholic church had a problem with people developing these skills, once better technology came into play, like bending glass to make telescopes and such. Many inventions that changed the world we live in were made without any help from computers.

It all boils down to the individual "inventor" and how much he is pulling from inside himself/herself, and not from what they expect from outside.

I live in Alabama, and am about to experience another fregin hurricane. With all the technology we have, we cannot predict when hurricanes will strike. But there is an age-old way to pretty much predict it by the way pine cones develope. I remember someone told me back in 2000, that in 2004 and 2005 we would start seeing a lot more heavy-wind hurricanes. Last year, we had 2 catigory 4 hurricanes, and this year, ALREADY we have a catigory 4 (but it will probably get to a 5). This was done with pine cones.

I use computers every day. They are useful tools for all kinds of things. The problem is dependance on them.

If what you are measuring is how far the ball will go, will it go over the wall, does NOT need to know anything about the pitcher's mound or release hight, how fast it was pitched.. all that is made moot by the bat

Try hitting a ball over the wall by just throwing it up in the air, and then swinging. You need that oposition to really smash it out of the park, as even baseballs do bounce under extreme pressure. If you unravel a baseball, there is a little cork in the middle.

evidence

[resistfascism]

Besides the argument that stars orbiting around the fringes of galaxies appear to be moving too fast to stay in orbit without extra mass, what other observable evidence of dark matter is there?

Re:evidence

[Use Psychology]

a good one is gravitational lensing by massive clusters -- a lens analysis of all the arcs seen in, for example, a cluster, can be used to infer the mass of the cluster, and hence see that it is inconsistent with the mass of all the luminous matter. i.e. dark matter

Re:evidence

[Jump]

There is no clear evidence. But there is plenty
of evidence for a big bang and the large scale
structure formation visible in the galaxy distribution with redshift. The large scale structure is very well explained by this kind of model. The big questions now are, can we find
dark matter nearby and can we explain how galaxies
form within such dark matter halos.

Re:evidence

[imsabbel]

There is for example the anisotropy of the background radiation. Without those wimps self-gravitating while the interacting matter was still in equlibrium, there would have been no chance of the universe "clumping together" that quick.

Also, recently some structures of the higher energy band of the background radiation are suspected to be the result of the decay-series of those weakly interacting particles, as predicted by the theory of supersymetry.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0405235 (sorry for the plug, but i know the guy from freshman days :) )

Re:evidence

[anandsr]

Are big bang and Redshift related to Dark Matter.

I believe Big Bang is the outcome of the observed
RedShift. Dark Matter is the outcome of trying
to fit the rotation curves, and Gravitational
Lensing. It is also used to fit the data for
structural formation of the observed universe.
But these all could be due to the same lack of
understanding of the basic laws as applied to
large distances.

Re:evidence

[gilzreid]

Also, by measuring the expansion rate of the universe over a very long time (ie. billions of years), and making observations of the Cosmic Microwave Backgound (CMB, the left over radiation from around 300000 years after the Big Bang) we can calculate the amount of matter it must contain. Then from models of the Big Bang and the CMB observations we can also find the amount of 'normal' matter (ie atoms), which comes to about 4% of the so called 'critical density', which is the amount of matter/energy required to have the universe be spatially flat (expands forever but tends toward zero expansion rate as time goes to infinity)

Since the amount of matter is measured to be around 25% this means dark matter must be around 20% of the critical density.

Incidentally, this also means that 75% of the energy/matter in the universe is 'dark energy', since the cosmic microwave background indicates the universe is almost exactly flat.

However, the importance of each constituent changes over time because essentially the dark energy is proportional to the size of the universe and when it was much smaller the matter was more concentrated so it had a far greater influence. Therefore for studies of the early evolution of the universe the dark energy is unimportant, and since dark matter is most of the total matter the models can just use dark matter alone. At present, however, the dark energy appears to be causing an acceleration of the expansion rate, which is seen using distant supernovae. This is how the 75% figure is worked out.

NB: Nobody can explain what the dark matter or dark energy is right now! This is by far the most important problem in Cosmology, and there are many , many competing theories.

Re:evidence

[Jump]

There is an alternate theory for gravity called 'MOND', but it has not been shown yet if it works for structure formation. It is based on the assumption, that beyond some length scale, gravity becomes weaker - possibly because of gravity leaking out to higher dimensions. This can be done with M-branes in string theory. Hey, but string theory is also not proofen and is basically a theoretical toy theory so far. Basically, MOND just replaces one problem with another - instead of having to explain dark matter (there many candidates for what it might be including ongoing experiments on earth to find in a lab), you replace well known general relativity with something yet to be worked out in detail and not proofen. Of course, all these possibilities have to be checked out, if we want to get a better understanding of nature.

BTW, redshift is not a byproduct of big bang, even in an infinite steady-state universe, there would be the same red shift. The difference is, that in a closed universe with big bang you can only look back in time until you see the big bang itself (before that the universe was not transparent for light waves). And this is observed in the so-called microwave background. So we actually can SEE the big bang going off, by just looking at high redshift. And fluctuations in this light coming from all directions tell us that it was very smooth and constant all over the place. Only small fluctuations exists and those are to little to let galaxies pull together the mass they have today if you do not invoke some additional force (gravity of dark matter!). The standard theory explains all these details at high redshift and the subsequent formation of large scale structure very well. The problem on galactic scales are details which have to do with feedback from the evolving galaxies. This is not understood in detail, yet.

Re:evidence

[gr8_phk]

"Besides the argument that stars orbiting around the fringes of galaxies appear to be moving too fast to stay in orbit without extra mass, what other observable evidence of dark matter is there?"

I looked into that whole thing. Most of the people who make that claim refer to Keplers laws of motion for orbiting bodies. If you assume the stars orbit a heavy core and don't interact with each other you get a galactic rotation curve that tapers off with radius. Real measured curves are nearly flat, so they conclude some "dark matter" that has some really unintuitive properties (see below). My own calculations of a rotation curve for a uniform flat disk of stars using interactions between all stars shows velocity increasing roughly linearly all the way out, and increasing even faster toward the edge. I don't think we should be suprised that observation lies somewhere between these two models. My distribution of stars is not accurate.

Stupid properties of dark matter: The interaction with regular matter must be asymetric. Why? Because they model it as a sphere of dark matter enclosing a disk shaped galaxy to get the expected rotation curve. If dark matter interacted with itself and visible matter in the same way visible matter interacts with itself, they should have the same distribution. I think they just observed that a big sphere of stuff would make their flawed model match reality and said "oh there must be this goofy thing here". Remember, there are NO direct observations of dark matter (or energy).

The tragedy of Einstein is that he convinced physicists that strange nonintuitive things are a part of the universe. This encourages the promotion of nifty off-the-wall sounding theories that make headlines to get funding.

I've said it here before: The only dark matter is between the astrophisicists ears.

Re:evidence

[revscat]

It's people like you that make me keep reading messages on Slashdot. 99% of all messages are one of hyperbole, uninformed opinion, or GNAA trolls, but the occasional gem like this makes it all worth it.

Thanks.

Re:evidence

[radtea]

It is important to realize that there may be quite different kinds of dark matter involved on different distance scales. For example, rotation curves of spiral galaxies can be explained by baryonic dark matter--that is, stuff that's pretty much what we are made out of. Baryons are protons and nuetrons, the building blocks of ordinary atoms.

But on larger scales, when one looks at the motions of clusters of galaxies, when one looks at galaxy formation in the early universe, when one looks at the flatness of space-time, it is apparent that there is more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by baryons.

We have a pretty good bound on the baryonic density of the universe because we know the primordial ratio of H to He pretty well. In the early universe there was an era in which the average baryon energy was greater than the average binding energy, so nuetrons were basically free. But free neutrons are unstable, with a lifetime of only about 15 minutes. So when the universe cooled to the point where neutrons could be captured onto protons to form D, He, etc, the actual amount of heavy (non-H) nuclei formed depends sensitively on the baryonic density. After an hour or so, any neutrons that didn't capture were gone.

It turns out that the baryonic density is sufficiently high to account for "galactic" dark matter, but not nearly enough to account for the dark matter seen on larger scales. Discovery of the nature of this non-baryonic dark matter is THE outstanding problem in cosmology.

Re:evidence

[lgw]

Dark matter is moving along as a theory. With the quite independent data from observed galactic rotation rates and the CMB data matching up, the theory became quite credible. While there are many possible ways to explain the galactic rotation rates, the later CMB data, as well as some gravitational lensing seen, served to select the dark matter theory out of the possibilities. It's nice to see how science works firsthand.

The dark energy model, however, is currently just the latest attempt at a cosmological constant. Historically such theories have proven quite wrong, one after another, so this is less credible - but we don't have to guess! Time and additional data will show whether dark energy is "yet another cosmological constant" or whether instead we have some real predictive power.

Re:evidence

[lgw]

Stupid properties of dark matter: The interaction with regular matter must be asymetric. Why? Because they model it as a sphere of dark matter enclosing a disk shaped galaxy to get the expected rotation curve. If dark matter interacted with itself and visible matter in the same way visible matter interacts with itself, they should have the same distribution. I think they just observed that a big sphere of stuff would make their flawed model match reality and said "oh there must be this goofy thing here". Remember, there are NO direct observations of dark matter (or energy).

This argument has several flaws. There is direct evidence for dark matter in the cosmic microwave background data, which is why dark matter is now the preferred theory for explaining galactic rotation rates.

It's not actually the theory that all of the "normal matter" in our galaxy is visible in a disk, and all of the "dark matter" is distributed in a sphere - a significant percentage of the dark matter in our galaxy is thought to be normal matter that just didn't clump enough to form (many) stars - that is, disperse hydrogen gas.

For the remaining "exotic dark matter", the one thing we know about it (from the CMB data) is that it interacts weakly with normal matter. There's no reason to assume that whatever caused most "normal" matter to clump and eventually become stars would cause "exotic" matter to have a similar distribution. A disk makes sense for matter that tends to form clumps as a result of collisions, and a sphere makes perfect sense for matter that doesn't. It's not all that unintuitive or surprising, given the data now in hand.

Re:evidence

[gr8_phk]

"A disk makes sense for matter that tends to form clumps as a result of collisions, and a sphere makes perfect sense for matter that doesn't. It's not all that unintuitive or surprising, given the data now in hand."

Based on what model does a sphere make perfect sense? Assuming dark matter exists, my intuition tells me it is either a) attracted to regular matter or b) attracted to itself. Otherwise it would not clump. If either of these is correct, a sphere is not the correct shape. If the DM is not rotating, the cloud would collapse and not have a large radius. If it is rotating, it will bulge in the middle and not remain a spherical distribution. I will maintain that there is nothing natural or intuitive about a spherical blob of dark matter with an embedded galaxy. I'd agree that there may be undetected "normal" matter in galaxies, but I'm not so sure that's needed either. I just wish people would stop claiming the expected rotation curve is based on Keplers laws and not Newtons with many bodies. Anyone who thinks 2 body Kepler equations are valid for entire galaxies needs is not qualified to be working in that area. As far as I can tell, this flawed assumption was (and still is) the basis for "dark matter".

Re:evidence

[lgw]

We know dark matter is affected normally by gravity, so it clunps on the scale needed to for galaxies, but gravity is very weak.

The key to forming a disk (and not just an oblate sphere - which of course is the shape of many galaxies) is that matter has the property that collisions of bits of matter are sometimes inelastic, and the bits stick together. This clumping of molecules leads to large areas of space with everything moving in about the same direstion, which is necessary for disk formation. Gravity along won't make molecules clump like that (at least, not fast enough), you need electromagnetic interaction to produce inelastic collisions.

We know very little about dark matter except that it doesn't have (strong) electromagnetic interaction. Dark matter has no protons or electrons, so it's not a big reach to assume it doesn't clump well.

Also, remember matter in roughly uniform distribution in a a sphere (that you're outside of) acts exactly like all the mass was in the center of the sphere, and that a shell of matter of roughly even distribution that you're inside of has no net gravitational attraction, so the math isn't that complicated here. It's obvious that the galactic rotation rates are wrong given only visible matter.

Re:evidence

[gr8_phk]

"Also, remember matter in roughly uniform distribution in a a sphere (that you're outside of) acts exactly like all the mass was in the center of the sphere, and that a shell of matter of roughly even distribution that you're inside of has no net gravitational attraction, so the math isn't that complicated here."

A roughly disk shaped galaxy is very different from a uniform spherical distribution of mater. If we try to slice a galaxy like an onion, we get rings of matter - not shells. The gravitational force acting on a body inside a ring of uniform construction is NOT zero as it is inside a spherical shell of uniform density. Nor does a disk act like all its mass is concentrated in the center. This is another one of the mistaken assumptions of some of the dark matter proponents.

If you were refering to the dark matter sphere, then yes, you can adjust the density of the dark sphere as a function of radius to create any galactic rotation curve you like (with some limitations).

"It's obvious that the galactic rotation rates are wrong given only visible matter."

As I said before, the shape of the rotation curve should not taper off if there was only regular matter in a galaxy. That assumption has no basis in mathematics, yet it's the basis for the DM argument. You're right, the math isn't that hard, but Kepler doesn't apply and niether do uniform shells of matter.

My whole point is that the evidence for dark matter is based on some mathematical generalizations that don't carry over to multi-body disk shaped galaxies.

Re:evidence

[lgw]

As I said before, the shape of the rotation curve should not taper off if there was only regular matter in a galaxy. That assumption has no basis in mathematics, yet it's the basis for the DM argument.

Well, I'm going to give the beenfit of the doubt to the math used in many peer-reviewed papers, but feel free to show your work. Much of the visible mass of the galaxy is in the central buldge, and the density of the disk falls off with distance from the center, so I don't see how you derive "rotation curve should not taper off".

How do you explain that the rotation curve actually *rises* from about 3kpc to about 11kpc? At 30kpc out, beyond most visible matter, why do you expect the rotation curve to be the actual ~210km/s instead of the accepted 100km/s for visible matter?

Re:evidence

[LMCBoy]

I should really know better than to reply to crackpots, but what the heck...

I looked into that whole thing. Most of the people who make that claim refer to Keplers laws of motion for orbiting bodies. If you assume the stars orbit a heavy core and don't interact with each other you get a galactic rotation curve that tapers off with radius. Real measured curves are nearly flat, so they conclude some "dark matter" that has some really unintuitive properties (see below).

Newton showed that given an spherical mass distribution, the gravitational force felt at a particular point at radius R is mathematically identical to having the enclosed mass M(R) in a point at the center. For points in the plane of a disk distribution of mass, the same arguments hold. In other words, if there is no dark matter, you should still see a "Keplerian falloff" in the velocities of stars in the outskirts of a galactic disk (where M(R) is becoming constant with R because the density is falling off exponentially). No such falloff is seen in real galaxy disks. Therefore, either gravity is not an inverse-square law, or there is more mass in the outskirts of galaxies that we can't see.

My own calculations of a rotation curve for a uniform flat disk of stars using interactions between all stars shows velocity increasing roughly linearly all the way out, and increasing even faster toward the edge.

Your calculations are either totally wrong, or you are using a bizarre M(R) mass distribution.

Perhaps reading a modern textbook on galactic dynamics, such as Binney & Tremaine will help you to better understand the fundamentals of modern dynamics theory.

The interaction with regular matter must be asymetric. Why? Because they model it as a sphere of dark matter enclosing a disk shaped galaxy to get the expected rotation curve. If dark matter interacted with itself and visible matter in the same way visible matter interacts with itself, they should have the same distribution.

The reason the dark matter distribution is spherical and the baryonic matter distribution is a flattened disk is quite simple: hydrodynamics. Gas feels hydrodynamic forces, DM feels only gravity. IOW, gas particles can dissipate energy through collisional interactions, which will cause an initially spherical distribution to flatten into a rotating disk as it collapses under gravity. DM particles, apparently, cannot dissipate energy in this fashion (which is entirely consistent with the fact that DM doesn't emit light...both properties result if DM simply does not participate in the electromagnetic force). That's your asymmetry.

I think they just observed that a big sphere of stuff would make their flawed model match reality and said "oh there must be this goofy thing here".

What can I say? I'm insulted. You're utterly wrong if you think that real cosmological theory is only flimsily supported by evidence and weakly motivated by theory. Just because you are ignorant of the evidence and theory behind cosmology does not mean they don't exist.

Remember, there are NO direct observations of dark matter (or energy).

Given the nature of DM, our observations of it are as direct as they can possibly be. I mean,
consider for the moment that a particle exists which only interacts through the gravitational force. What, pray tell, would satisfy you as direct evidence of its existence, if not the telltale signs of a gravitational field unaccompanied by baryonic matter?

Re:evidence

[slavemowgli]

The tragedy of Einstein is that he convinced physicists that strange nonintuitive things are a part of the universe.

You mean like special/general relativity? Quantum mechanics? Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Seriously, many things in physics *are* non-intuitive (or even counter-intuitive). That doesn't mean that every "off-the-wall sounding" theory is necessarily right, of course, but where does the idea come from that it should necessarily be wrong? The only thing a theory should be judged on is how well it explains the observed facts and how good it is for the purpose of making predictions (which can then be verified or falsified in turn).

Any sort of personal attachment to or opposition to a theory, based on *anything* except whether it's scientifically sound, is stupid, and that (stupidity) is just what you seem to be exhibiting here - you're not really any better than the cargo-culters who like cool-sounding terms like "dark matter" (or black holes, or quarks, or nifty pictures of fractals - the list is endless) without really understanding what these things are about.

Big bang

[Xoknit]

After the images of the simulation were released, a second big bang was reported by the scientists of the project, originating from the server room.

Apparently all the packets on the internet condensed in one of their servers and created a second universe, from now on to be referred to as "cyberspace".

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Shame

[nagora]

Since it's pretty obvious that "dark matter" is just a hack to make the maths work; there's almost certainly no such thing. Oh, well.

TWW

Re: Shame

[Black Parrot]

> Since it's pretty obvious that "dark matter" is just a hack to make the maths work; there's almost certainly no such thing.

Like the cosmological constant?

> Oh, well.

Let us know when your Nature article comes out.

Re:Shame

[Ingolfke]

Since it's pretty obvious that "dark matter" is just a hack to make the maths work; there's almost certainly no such thing. Oh, well.

I'd have to disagree, because we've found several draft scientific documents in the Kiev that indicate that In Soviet Russia dark matter made the maths work.

Re:Shame

[ozmanjusri]

Since it's pretty obvious that "dark matter" is just a hack to make the maths work; there's almost certainly no such thing.

What are you sitting on then?

Re:Shame

[friendswelcome]

Kiev is Kiev, not "The Kiev"
Ukraine is Ukraine, not "The Ukraine"

I will let you off easy this time since you referred to soviet Russia. In soviet Russian Ukraine was called "The Ukraine", so I can understand why you might think Kiev is called "The Kiev" :)

The US is The US, perhaps because we're not as united by law as many other counties. Which could be why people in Ukraine flooded the streets when they felt there was injustice in their election. They could not go some other state, they had to deal with the problem they felt was urgent at the time, because they had no other state to run too.

There is merit in having to face ones problem as there is merit in having a place to run away. But I think as places to run away erode and people adjust to tyranny. Outcry can be crushed much easier in a system of states then in a system truly united by law.

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you sitting on then?

I don't understand. Are you talking about poop?

Re:Shame

[hesiod]

> What are you sitting on then?

A chair. The (supposed) existence of my chair does not imply the existence or nonexistence of dark matter. Unless, of course, it is extremely heavy and invisible. Still then, it's only conjecture that it isn't just very dense... and somehow invisible.

So that is where all the money goes...

[jpowell47]

It's nice to see where the £millions that get pumped into my uni's physics department actually goes. Now we have a pretty screensaver for all their effort.

Mirror to full text

[AngryScot]

Full Text Just incase

Yeah....

[Anonymous Coward]

Their webserver is simulating the big bang right now.

MirrorDot

[HateBreeder]

http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/bdfc0ad7cef604a1a f6b98722b0f530f/index.html

Re:MirrorDot

[niktemadur]

Yes, mod parent up to 5, great work.

Re:MirrorDot

[Anonymous Coward]

That mirrordot link would be much more useful if it ACTUALLY MIRRORED THE FILES.

About those authors...

[Black Parrot]

> Authors: Volker Springel (1), Simon D. M. White (1), Adrian Jenkins (2), Carlos S. Frenk (2), Naoki Yoshida (3), Liang Gao (1), Julio Navarro (4), Robert Thacker (5), Darren Croton (1), John Helly (2), John A. Peacock (6), Shaun Cole (2), Peter Thomas (7), Hugh Couchman (5), August Evrard (8), Joerg Colberg (9), Frazer Pearce (10) ((1) MPA, (2) Durham, (3) Nagoya, (4) UVic, (5) McMaster, (6) Edinburgh, (7) Sussex, (8) Michigan, (9) Pittsburgh, (10) Nottingham)

Now you know why "et al." is one of the most important concepts in the natural sciences.

Re:About those authors...

[MidnightBrewer]

If you were in on creating a universe, you'd want to make sure you got your name listed in the credits, too.

Seems like a waste of time

[SimianOverlord]

I support basic research and modelling, but this seems all too artificial to have any useful predictive benefits. It's like trying to draw Michaelangelo's "The Adoration of the Magi" with only a green crayon, it might look something like what you're trying to simulate, but in all essential aspects it's completely and obviously fake. If they lack the computing power, why aren't they waiting a few years when they can afford to improve upon their resolution, produce something useful?

Sorry, but this reminds me all too much of other unhelpful models that are done "just because we can" rather than because it has some sort of utility, for example early climate change models which were incredibly unhelpful in the long term by making people rightly sceptical, when doomsday predictions didn't materialise. The fact is, this generates pretty pictures, maybe a nice paper in some backwater of journal land, and not much else beyond froth. It shouldn't really be called science, like someone making a work of art out of say, pictures of cells, isn't considered science.

Inevitably, I will be modded down for having a negative view.

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[Mister Impressive]

You said that early climate change models were incredibly unhelpful. This was ultimately the first step in creating a helpful one. Why can't the same apply to this universe simulation?

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[SimianOverlord]

In short - emergent behaviour.

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[Flyboy Connor]

Inevitably, I will be modded down for having a negative view.

What, with the cynical slashdot crowd?

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

Where you might be missing something is in the improvements of modelling itself. I know the arguments a bit circular, but every time we build
a new model, with better clustering, better arithmetic, better data mapping, we get an improvement in modelling technology and its applications. Very little separates 90% of the software in this example from the modelling used for DNA modelling in medical sciences or the massive tensor arrays used for climate modelling.

I agree many theoretical physics stuff seems pie in the sky. The big benefits are almost always the little side effects no one was looking for until they go through the data with a flea comb and find
nuggest of gold.

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[Zapman]

(paraphrase) "Celestial Navigation works on the principle that the Earth is the center of the universe. The assumption is wrong, but the navigation works. A flawed model can still produce useful results."

All models are oversimplifications. Even our models of molecules pretend that atoms are solid spheres... This doesn't mean that the models are useless.

That said, only time will tell how useful this model is.

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[indifferent children]

It's like trying to draw Michaelangelo's "The Adoration of the Magi" with only a green crayon, it might look something like what you're trying to simulate, but in all essential aspects it's completely and obviously fake.

Rather than disagree with your analogy, let's add a time-condition. It's like finding a drawing of Michaelangelo's "The Adoration of the Magi", done in green crayon that was executed on a cave wall sometime in the paleolithic. Now that's impressive. Our scientific cosmology is still in its infancy. I'm sure that in 100 years we will have more knowledge/understanding and better models. Until then this is a step in the right direction.

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[indifferent children]

Einstein was a lousy patent clerk.

Amazon didn't get a single patent on Einstein's watch. That alone should get him a B+.

Yes, I'm replying to a .sig; mod me like I endorsed a M$ product.

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[Mt._Honkey]

The fact is, this generates pretty pictures, maybe a nice paper in some backwater of journal land, and not much else beyond froth.

Some backwater journal like Nature?

I've done some work in the past couple of years on simulations of galaxy collisions, and can speak a little on the value of this type of research.

Large-scale structure simulations such as this one do have specific uses. They do not claim to reproduce the current universe in all its complexity, but can be used to test theories on its composition. When doing simulations like these, one makes certain assumptions in order to test them. They seem to have assumed that dark matter is made of non-relativistic (cold) particles that only interact gravitationally. They also would have had to assume an initial distribution of dark matter that has small density fluctuations. So by comparing the results of this simulation with observations of the real universe, one can get an idea of how accurate our theories of dark matter behavior and initial conditions are.

A common theory that is often assumed to be true is the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) cosmology, where all dark matter is assumed to be relatively heavy particles that are moving much more slowly than the speed of light. When you do this kind of simulation, a large number of dwarf galaxies are created, several times more than are observed in the real universe. This is a strong indication that the CDM assumption is flawed, that there is at least small portion of the dark matter that is "hot", or relativistic, as if there were a large number of high energy neutrinos, or some similar particle.

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[BewireNomali]

The sciences are evolutionary. We need the early, shitty models to direct and focus ensuing research and modeling. In the beginning of the research cycle for every branch, all of it amounts to guesstimated shots in the dark. Fine tuning then comes from that, then more spohisticated models, etc.

Re: just because we can. That's the greatest and best reason to do anything.

I think you make a salient point though, in that the publication of such preliminary research tends to be injurious to the general public... especially medical research.

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[kurzweilfreak]

Amazingly enough, the sig is semi-ontopic for this particular subject matter, and your reply is funny to boot. Do not mod down!

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[gardyloo]

It's like finding a drawing of Michaelangelo's "The Adoration of the Magi", done in green crayon that was executed on a cave wall sometime in the paleolithic. Now that's impressive.

You know you're a geek when you think that the most impressive thing about that analogy is that cavement might have had green crayons.

Re:Seems like a waste of time

[lazy genes]

Keep thinking cold and slow until it gets so slow that it warps the fabric of space-time.Everything comes in three's .The fabric of space-time is also made of three parts. Unless they find that the universe started with three big bangs.They might as well add a laugh track to their simulations.

Most breathtaking images...

[Anonymous Coward]

of the black hole that appears when the servers go nova thanks to /.

Re:Yes, but...

[madaxe42]

Does a bear relieve himself in a tree rich environment?

Typical

[CleverNickedName]

The Virgo Consortium recently completed its massive "Millennium Simulation", tracing the universe's evolution from its early origins to present day. To simplify the computations, they considered only dark matter...

Reminds me of a joke:
A rich oil-baron hires a veterinarian, a statistician and a physicist to develop a method for predicting the outcome of a horse race. The three scientists disappear for a week and each returns with a different method; The vet states "I have studied the form, health and blood-lines of all the horses for the next race and can confidently say that number 7 is the best of the lot. Whether he wins on the day, is another question". The Statistician boasts "I have studied the race histories of all the horses in the next race and all the races ran on this track and can definitely say that horse number 3 has a 85% chance of coming in the top 3". The physicist then strides up to the baron and boldly proclaims "I have developed a way to predict the outcome of any race with 100% accuracy! First, one assumes that the horses are perfectly spherical and moving through a vacuum...".

Re:Typical

[syntaxglitch]

Bah.

I generally find that joke is found to be funny in direct proportion to the audience's scientific illiteracy. "Har har, look at those silly scientists, spouting their nonsense. I'll just sit here and laugh at them while I enjoy all the lovely modern technology their work has made possible."

While mildly amusing, it betrays a deep failure of understanding the value of analytical simplification. Just because something sounds silly to the uninformed does not mean it has no value.

As pitiful as the current public understanding of science is (as evidenced by such things as the rampant belief in nonsense like 'creationism'), it'd be nice if the problem not further exacerbated.

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

I generally find that joke is found to be funny in direct proportion to the audience's scientific illiteracy.

so a room full of professors wouldn't laugh at that? lighten up. yikes.

Re:Typical

[syntaxglitch]

Not most of the science professors I've taken classes from. Then again, some of them were pretty humor impaired. :D

Suffice it to say it sounds funnier the less you actually understand the subject matter. It has a very shallow perception of the subject; someone who actually knows the material is more likely to think "wait, that's not how it works..."

Have you ever seen technology-oriented jokes of the variety that poke fun at how difficult simple electronic devices are to use? The whole "haha, the power went out a month ago and the VCR still flashes 12:00, isn't that funny" variety of stuff. People who are clueless about technology usually find such humor funny; people who actually know their stuff are more likely to scratch their heads and say "but that's stupid." The same thing is going on with that joke.

Re:Typical

[Keck]

First, one assumes that the horses are perfectly spherical and moving through a vacuum...".

The only problem I have with that joke comes from the fact that the horses have little need to be spherical if they are in a vacuum. Unless the physicist is considering radiation, or mass distribution somehow matters, they could just as well say the horse is a point mass.

Re:Typical

[CleverNickedName]

That was bugging me too. I guess it could be a collision thing.

As a physics graduate, I have seen many "perfectly spherical" and "in a vacuum" assumptions. Generally they're not too far off the mark though. :)

Re:Typical

[CleverNickedName]

Disclaimer: I have an honours degree in physics.

Actually, it was my classical professor who told me that joke. The humour lies in the fact that it is very common to assume objects are spheres, or in a vacuum for the sake of simple examples.

Re:Typical

[Keck]

In a fluids class we often approximated humans as cylinders. Not too bad of an approximation either, but horses :: spheres is a bit more of a stretch IMHO :)

Re:Typical

[jfengel]

Actually, I think only a scientist would find that joke funny. A nonscientist is just going to give you dumb stares.

It's an exaggeration for comic effect. Every good scientist recognizes in it some silly oversimplification he or she has made at some point in the past, because that's the way science gets done. The nonscientist doesn't get it precisely because he doesn't know how science gets done.

Public misunderstanding of science has little to do with the jokes of scientists poking fun at themselves. In fact, one of the best ways to convince the general public that science is simply wrong is to be humorless about it. Lighten up.

Re:Typical

[CmdrGravy]

"haha, the power went out a month ago and the VCR still flashes 12:00, isn't that funny"

I think you've lost your sense of humour.

Re:Typical

[thelordx]

I believe the only proper response to you is: shut up. Don't be such a putz, that was a funny joke (and my level of scientific literacy destroys your theorem anyway).

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

You just earned yourself a new Foe, you tool.

Re:Typical

[MrPlastic]

As pitiful as the current public understanding of science is (as evidenced by such things as the rampant belief in nonsense like 'creationism'), it'd be nice if the problem not further exacerbated.

C.P. Snow (Baron Snow of Leicester) pointed this out in 1959 in his book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Snow was a rarity, being both a respected scientist and a respected novelist. In Snow's words:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?-not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

Re:Typical

[syntaxglitch]

Okay, fine. It also appeals to some physics undergrads and the easily amused. ;P

I never said the joke wasn't funny. I said it was humor derived from misrepresenting a concept, which is a type of humor typicaly received more favorably by the less educated.

Re:Typical

[syntaxglitch]

How delightfully amusing. Shall I mark the date in my calendar, perhaps?

Re:Typical

[linzeal]

"Assuming the listener is capable of humour and has had his morning cofee..."

Re:Typical

[syntaxglitch]

Yeah, I'm aware of that, but that's generally done in cases where a spherical object in a frictionless environment offers at least a rough approximation of real-world behavior.

Re:Typical

[linzeal]

Maybe they were talking about fat dragons. Lol, this is what I got when I googled fat horse.

Re:Typical

[syntaxglitch]

I think you've lost your sense of humour.

It's not lost at all! It's filed away neatly in my closet with other assorted knick-knacks of no real importance.


;)

Re:Typical

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

I generally find that joke is found to be funny in direct proportion to the audience's scientific illiteracy.

Wow. I don't think you could be more wrong. At Stanford I worked among some of the top minds in physics in the world, and every one of them found it a funny joke. I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if a physicist wrote the original joke in the first place. It's just self-deprecating humor.

And if you can't laught at yourself, you shouldn't be taken seriously.

Re:Typical

[syntaxglitch]

Wow. I don't think you could be more wrong. At Stanford I worked among some of the top minds in physics in the world, and every one of them found it a funny joke. I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if a physicist wrote the original joke in the first place. It's just self-deprecating humor.

Sigh. I admit to being somewhat oversensitive toward negative perceptions of science, and I've seen that joke before in collections with other jokes that had a much stronger anti-science bias. It appears I have been outvoted regarding the humor value of the joke in question. :(

And if you can't laught at yourself, you shouldn't be taken seriously.

Certainly true. Of course, in my defense, I'm not actually a physicist, so that doesn't apply to me here. ;)

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

get a life

Re:Typical

[slashdotnickname]

things as the rampant belief in nonsense like 'creationism'

fyi, creationists would believe the converse is true about science... but I'm just playing devil's advocate here.

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it's the only 'date' you'll have in your calendar.

Re:Typical

[MegaFur]

Yeah, I agree.

The joke works first because it pokes fun at vast oversimplification, second because it pokes fun at physicists in particular (statisticians will get a good laugh--every branch of science and math has this sort of friendly rivalry thing), and third (most important for me) because the mental image of spherical horses hurtling through a vacuum is just damn humorous. :-)

Next time I see horse racing, I'm gonna be picturing spherical horses hurtling (they don't actually have to be hurtling--but they're round, and they're in a vacuum, and it's funnier this way) through a vacuum and everyone else is gonna wonder why I can't stop chuckling and grinning. :-D

Re:Typical

[d474]

True. His humour is now a sphere moving through a vacuum.

Re:Typical

[ta ma de]

LOL. Modeling 101: A) Work out the knowns and model the easy parts first. B) Add difficult knowns that complicate model. C) Test and try and find unkowns.

Re:Typical

[lgw]

Bah yourself. Science may make technology possible, but it's too full of assumed-spherical chickens at absolute zero in a vacuum to make technology *happen*. Engineering is what makes technology *happen*, once science has made it possible, and engineers have to deal with all of the messy reality. We have every right to scoff at the scientists' simplifying assumptions. The scientists can in turn scoff at the mathematicians. ;)

Here's another one:

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are each awakened by a fire in their kitchen. The physicist calculates the precise amout of water needed to extinguish the fire, adjusts for the time it took to make the calulation, pours precisely that amout of water on the fire, and goes back to bed. The engineer immediately starts pouring water on the fire, continues until it looks like the fire's out, adds a safety factor of 50% more water, then goes back to bed. The mathematician proves in great detail that it's *possible* to extinguish a fire using water, then goes back to bed.

Re:Typical

[Lord Ender]

I only hear jokes like that from other scientists, engineers, and college students in that field. Your gripe about the misunderstandings subscientists make is a good one, but doesn't apply to this joke.

Re:Typical

[tooley]

I was going to comment something witty and stern in rebuke of your original post, but it was quite refreshing to see your reply later in the thread.

Rock on. I just wanted to complement your humility.

Remember to always examine your own most hidden and implicit assumptions, too.

Re:Typical

[tabrnaker]

I think that's the point of the joke. It's laughable some times how much 'science' runs around building a whole reality when there's already one in front of us.

It doesn't matter if the theory gets consistent results, it isn't reality. Seems some people get so caught up in wanting to control everything around them that they forget they're supposed to be living life!

Re:Typical

[clayanderson]

That's some real nice flamebait!

It's actually *God* we believe in, not creationism. But since God created the universe, we therefore believe in a creator, which I guess, makes us creationists.

But that doesn't mean we discard science (at least, the level-headed among us don't). The method God used to create the universe is a good question for science to answer, but curiously, also one that the Bible seems intentionally vague about.

The scriptures prophesied all sorts of future events before they happened; could not God have also provided details on the laws of the physical world? Sure! But frankly, it appears he doesn't care so much about that.

And it seems he knew what he was doing in that respect. Exactly how long did it take for us to progress from Einstein's theories to crafting tools to destroy the entire human race? Good thing God didn't write E=mc2 in the footnotes of the Ten Commandments.

Oh, and for the record, God liked the joke. ;-)

Re:Typical

[syntaxglitch]

But that doesn't mean we discard science (at least, the level-headed among us don't).

Then it's rather a pity there are so few of such level-headed folks.

In most cases when someone refers to "creationism" without further qualifications they're referring to the young-earth creationist types--Kent Hovind, Answers in Genesis, and their ilk. The "intelligent design" crowd usually tends to get lumped in, because their ideas of science are equally stupid, albeit more subtle.

There's a great deal that can be said about finding God's hand in evolution; the mere fact that the evolutionary process has so far been a more successful design mechanism than anything humans can do by themselves speaks volumes. Unfortunately, the religious folks who don't casually discard science tend to be a rather smallish and largely silent minority among those who are eager to do just that.

Need Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone Needs to make a torrent of the videos, there server is going to turn into dark matter otherwise.

MOD PARENT UP, mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the MD link.

Who is to say...

[seti]

That this whole universe as we see it is not an experiment in somebody's supercomputer?

Re:Who is to say...

[Hinhule]

Oh come on! Which supercomputer with an grain of sanity would include Windows?

Re:Who is to say...

[edsonmedina]

Wow!

People running computers running universes with people running computers running universes...

This looks like those nested vmware sessions

Re:Who is to say...

[burnetd]

A very cleverly designed one. So well designed it included a fail safe to make sure the simulated computers would never become powerful enough to simulate the universe to the same degree allowing the simulated inhabitants to discovered they are merely simulations.

It does this by ball and chaining the computers with Microsoft software, which promptly uses all available resources.

Re:Who is to say...

[seti]

A supercomputer with a serious sense of humour :)

It would be cool to imagine that during the above experiment, in what for us seemed a few days, an entire universe came to be, evolved and faded away.

Re:Who is to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

That this whole universe as we see it is not an experiment in somebody's supercomputer?

That's pretty close to what a lot of people have thought for some thousands of years. That this is a game, and the the rules are delivered on clay slates to mountaintops, and in the end somebody judges your performance and you get a reward or punishment...

Re:Who is to say...

[GigsVT]

That this whole universe as we see it is not an experiment in somebody's supercomputer?

That's pretty close to what a lot of people have thought for some thousands of years. That this is a game, and the the rules are delivered on clay slates to mountaintops, and in the end somebody judges your performance and you get a reward or punishment..

This is an interesting line of reasoning, one that has struck me lately as plausible. With all the argument these days, "Evolution vs Intelligent Design", it seems to me that the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Evolution doesn't really address origins of the universe, and Intelligent Design doesn't preclude evolution.

It seem equally plausible to me that life has continually created new universes every "foo" years, each universe a little different from the last, created with the intent to turn out a little better than the last.

It does strike a deep seated fear, it's difficult for me, and I assume for most people to assume humans and all life are mere automatons. The illusion of free will (or at least some level of self-determination) seems to be something required for sanity.

Re:Who is to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution doesn't really address origins of the universe

Of course not. It's got to do with biology, living creatures, populations & all that. Astronomy deals with the universe.

Re:Who is to say...

[indifferent children]

"Evolution vs Intelligent Design", it seems to me that the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Actually, I-D does preclude evolution (at least macro evolution). I-D proponents claim that complex structures (they love to pick on the eye and protozoan flagella) must have been designed, and could not have evolved. Many try to bastardize the concept of entropy, and claim that complexity arising out of less complex structure violates the laws of Physics. If you try to posit complex structures coming into existence through evolution, then you remove their entire argument for I-D (watch needs a watchmaker).

There are many people who believe that a god created the Universe, and created life, but then that life evolved into the diversity that exists today. This is not I-D.

Re:Who is to say...

[doug141]

Perhaps the failsafe could be the uncertainty principle, coupled with the finite mass of the universe?

Re:Who is to say...

[bitflip]

If we were, it'd be the worst case of developer God Complex we've ever seen.

Re:Who is to say...

[GigsVT]

Well I think that's more of a symptom of the religious engineering what they call "intelligent design" in a way that suits their needs.

Re:Who is to say...

[master_p]

There exists the simulation argument theory, which is a pretty solid theory concerning our universe being a computer experiment of some sort. It may be possible even for us, some day, to simulate an entire universe using quantum computers.

Re:Who is to say...

[wackywendell]

Darnit, you found me out...

Re:Who is to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been wondering if we're just some kind of AI experiment, where the one of the conditions of demonstrating 'true intelligence' is to break out of the simulation.

That said, even if we are an experiment in someone's supercomputer, I still gotta pay the bills...

Re:Who is to say...

[A_Known_Coward]

It will NEVER be possible to simulate the entire universe in a computer simulation regardless of the computing power. The limit will always be simulating the simulator.

It kind of reminds me of the Steven Wright joke, "I have a map of the united states .... it's original size ... it says one mile equals one mile."

Re:Who is to say...

[quantaman]

That this whole universe as we see it is not an experiment in somebody's supercomputer?

Take a look around you.

Now I've met some messed up developers but I've yet to see anyone who's nearly screwed up enough to come up with this universe!!

Re:Who is to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am, and it isn't.

Signed,
God

Re:Who is to say...

[Seanasy]

That this whole universe as we see it is not an experiment in somebody's supercomputer.

If I had a dollar for every stoned college kid that thought of that and exclaimed, "Whoa, dude," I'd have enough money to buy a supercomputer capable of simulating an entire universe of stoned college kids wondering whether they were in a computer simulation and exclaiming, "Whoa, dude."

Re:Who is to say...

[master_p]

But maybe the computer that is used to run our simulation is more powerful then our universe.

Re:Who is to say...

[MidnightWatcher]

I agree, it is not I-D, but about 40% of biologists, mathematicians, physicians, and astronomers include God in the process of macro evolution. That's pretty damn high. I think they realize that macro evolution is statistically impossible to happen all on its own "by chance." It's like taking the millions of characters in the more than 40 million lines of source code for Microsoft Windows XP, putting each character in a gigantic box and throwing it over a cliff. How many times will you need to throw it over before you have each character, and each line of code, line up perfectly AND in the correct order to get the code correct? Obviously, it's never going to happen. Macro evolution teaches that, given enough time, the source code for "Windows XP", if you will, will be laid out in perfect order. Uh, don't think so. This same evolutionary model even contends that the extremely complex living cell, more complex than the space shuttle, evolved from a non-living thing, a rock. (Give me one example where science has ever observed life coming from non-living material.) Again, I think it's because they understand that it's like taking all of the nuts, bolts, tiles, wires, switches, electronic chips, transistors, capacitors, etc. etc. etc. from the space shuttle, putting them all in a box and letting them roll down and endless slope. How far will they have to travel before they all eventually end up completely assembled and you have a fully functioning space shuttle? Again, it just ain't gonna happen. Not by chance, not ever, impossible, no matter how much time you let it roll. Common sense. Universe. Uni = one. Verse = a spoken sentence. God said, "Let there be..." and there was. Now that's a Universe, and it's good enough for me.

Re:Who is to say...

[Kazoo the Clown]

The language of I-D is rather problematic-- in effect, evolution is a design mechanism. And based on one common definition of intelligence-- "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge," it can be said that evolution has this characteristic through DNA-- as it does in fact acquire the information "learned," and apply it in new organisms.

What evolution as an "intelligent designer" is not however, is self-aware. The I-D proponents never address what it means to demonstrate the self-awareness of the "intelligent designer," as if it is implicit. The fact is, it is the self-awareness of the "designer" that is at issue, not the "intelligence." They can demonstrate "intelligent design" all day and they still haven't contradicted evolution-- a pity they don't even realize it, but I suppose if they did they'd lose interest in it.

Re:Who is to say...

[MidnightWatcher]

I understand your point, but your argument is an argument of semantics. The bottom line is that an intricate, complex design cannot happen without an outside influence. Anything which contains parts that operate, depend upon and interact with one another needs to be designed to do so. If I belonged to a secluded African tribe that had never had any contact with the rest of the world and one day found a watch on a riverbank, for example, would it be logical to assume that metal pieces (which is found naturally) had been formed and somehow put together further up river by the movement of water until it evenually assembled itself into a design of intricate parts? Each part itself needs to be designed. These designed parts must then be assembled in a specific order so as to function correctly. It cannot happen by chance, and even taking each individual part, and shaking them in your hand for a billion years will never cause you to end up with a fully assembled watch. It will not happen, ever. And, considering that a single cell is more complex than the space shuttle, it is silly to assume that, given enough time, a single cell will put itself together all on its own. Mathematically, it is an impossibility. I can now understand why more and more scientists and teachers are also coming to this conclusion as well.

Re:Who is to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your watch analogy does not compute. Replication is an essential part of evolution. How can a watch replicate? It can't. Nobody would suspect a bunch of metal pieces evolved into a watch because nobody has ever seen a watch reproduce.

Re:Who is to say...

[MidnightWatcher]

Nobody has ever seen macro evolution take place either (e.g.. genetic information being added). Where is the fossil record proving evolution? Even Darwin assumed that the fossil record would prove his idea but it hasn't. (Surely, there must be numerous examples of partially evolved animals over millions of years if macroevolution is true). Can you point to one single positive mutation that has ever been observed? At what point did sexual reproduction begin to take place, and how did animals reproduce when sexual organs were only partially evolved? How did anything see, and move around, and find food to eat when eyes were only partially evolved, or mouths, or digestive systems, etc? If a watch could never be assembled by chance by taking all of it's pieces in your hand and tossing it around for a billion years, how can even a single-cell, which is exponentially more complex, have ever happened by chance? If there was oxygen in the atmosphere, it would have oxidized any 'life' and killed it off. If there was no oxygen, then there would be no ozone and therefore no protection from UV rays, which would also have killed any life. Darwinian evolution has some serious questions that is has failed to answer, let alone prove, and I've only come to this realization fairly recently. This is one reason why I think an alternative should be taught along side evolution, and the only real alternative is Intelligent Design.

Re:Who is to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Either you don't have the feeblest understanding of evolution, or you are deliberately knocking down straw men. None of your arguments hold water with respect to how evolution happens. You are apparently satisfied with the God explanation, but it would certainly do you no harm to read about actual evolution from a college textbook rather than I-D websites.

Re:Who is to say...

[MidnightWatcher]

I've studied evolution for years, and there are way too many problems with it due to irreducible complexity, for example. No straw man arguments are even required. Since I began to also study in depth the arguments for Intelligent Design, I have begun to take this viewpoint very seriously. While studying Intelligent Design, some of the arguments were so convincing (and even scientifically verifiable and sound in many cases, you can't always say that for evolution) that I've asked myself on several occasions, "Why wasn't I also taught this stuff in school?" I mean, if there are sound alternatives out there, shouldn't we also know about them as well? I'd recommend you read Michael Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" and then refer to Dr. Robert DiSilvestro's (Ph.D. Biochemistry, Associate Professor, Human Nutrition, Ohio State University) rebuttal to the book's critics. Another great read would be a book by Dr. Robert Gentry (Nuclear Physicist) on Polonium halos found in granite. Read the criticisms, and his rebuttals. This is all extremely interesting and eye opening material.

Re:Who is to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

You've studied it for years, yet you used tornado-in-a-junkyard arguments. Something doesn't add up here.

In any case, welcome to Slashdot!

Re:Who is to say...

[scot4875]

and there are way too many problems with it due to irreducible complexity

Ok. You don't believe that complex things can just 'create themselves.' Where did God come from? Who made god?

Consider yourself pwned until you can answer that question -- if you say that I can't consider that things arranged themselves over countless iterations through billions of years, then I say you can't consider that a god just magically appeared and then equally magically created everything else.

If we're going to rule out the possibility that complex things can create themselves, then that rules out god. Okay? And if you're going to allow that "well, god just is," then you have to also allow that "well, the universe just is." You can't have your cake and eat it too.

All ID theory does is deflect the whole purpose of the study of evolution. You know why evolution is bad, right? No evolution == no Adam & Eve == no original sin == why the fuck are we going to church every Sunday?

--Jeremy

Re:Who is to say...

[indifferent children]

The bottom line is that an intricate, complex design cannot happen without an outside influence.

If by outside influence you mean an input of energy (e.g. Solar radiation), then you are correct. If you think that an intelligence is required, then you are not correct. For an interesting example of complex behavior arising from very simple rules (much simpler than the rules of physics/chemistry) and very simple initial conditions, check out the ancient UNIX game called 'Life'. Try a thousand different combinations at random. Try it on graph paper (yes, the rules are that simple) to make sure that the computer isn't injecting complexity behind the scenes. You ought to be surprised.

Mathematically, it is an impossibility.

Not even close. That evolution happens on a small scale is an almost unavoidable conclusion if you accept the following:

• Mutations happen (DNA-level)
• Those mutations will be inherited, if offspring happen (using single-celled organisms as a testbed gives us direct inheritance, sexual reproduction gives us usually percentage-chance of inheritance depending on which chromosome holds the mutation)
• Some (tiny percentage) mutations will make an organism slightly more likely to survive long enough to produce offspring (BTW, the fact that most mutations are immediately fatal or vastly reduce the likelihood of offspring is not a problem)

If you accept those statements, then you have accepted the mechanism by which natural selection increases the complexity and improved adaptation of an organism to its environment. You have not necessarily accepted that this is how humans came to be, or even macro-evolution (speciation), but your earlier statements about 'Mathematical...impossibility' should look silly.

Re:Who is to say...

[MidnightWatcher]

God is infinite, we are finite, and for the finite to explain or even understand the infinite is impossible. And no, I do not consider myself "owned". I believe, by faith, in God. I don't, however, have enough faith to believe in evolution. There is no real concrete evidence for evolution (all I see is conjecture, theory, and contrived 'evidence' that has later been shown to be false), but the immense complexities and inter-relational operations within nature is evidence, to me, of a Creator. You'd look at something as simple as a watch and know that it had a designer, but you see something that is exponentially, millions of times, more complex and believe that it all happen by chance, a fluke. Wow, I wish I had half the faith that you have. Look at it this way. Let's assume that you know and understand half of all the knowledge in the universe. Is it possible for God to exist in the half that you don't know?

Re:Who is to say...

[MidnightWatcher]

The UNIX game "Life" had a designer. Show me a program that created itself. The second part of your response seems to refer to microevolution, or adaptation to an environment. With this I agree (although I object to the term "evolution). However, the mutations that you refer to are not adding information at the DNA level. The DNA information is already present. Otherwise, information is being lost/scrambled. New DNA information has never been added on it's own by chance. If certain genes become dominant, then those genes will also be dominant in the offspring, but as noted no new information is added. Micro evolution occurs, but macro evolution does not.

Re:Who is to say...

[indifferent children]

The UNIX game "Life" had a designer.

Forget where "Life" came from (both kinds), the game is a system of elements and rules, just as physics and chemistry contain elements and rules. And ignoring where the game came from is kosher, because evolution does not purport to explain the origin of life, only the changes from simple to complex organisms.

However, the mutations that you refer to are not adding information at the DNA level.

This is not correct. Many mutations result in the duplication and translocation of pieces of DNA (think XYY and XXY individuals having an extra chromosome, look-up trisomy-21 or the term Aneuploidy). By this mechanism, the absolute volume of the DNA in an individual does increase. Especially beneficial if you want an increased rate of change: the copies may have errors themselves, in addition to being targets for further mutation.

Micro evolution occurs, but macro evolution does not.

The fact that micro evolution occurs pretty much prevents us from ruling-out macro evolution. A thousand baby steps has the same effect as a huge leap. Ask a biologist, they will tell you that we are discussing billions of individual mutations that make up macro-evolutionary changes. When I say that we can't rule-out macro evolution, this does not prove that macro evolution led to the creation of humans; but to say that it is a mathematical impossibility is just not true.

Re:Who is to say...

[Kazoo the Clown]

No, mathematically, it is an inevitability. Randomness filtered by virtually any selection processes will in fact, produce a reduction in randomness and therefore an increase in structure (and easily demonstrated by mathematical simulation). A mathematician may be a "designer" of a simulation, but that does not make him the designer of the system he is simulating, any more than the designer of a wind tunnel is the "designer" of the physics that produce lift.

Is your mind really so clouded by superstition that you are unable to see that the output of the Life algorithm is not predetermined by the programmer, and that the Life program is merely a very simple simulation of a minimal set of physical characteristics?.

-- Why do you think they call it apologetics?

Re:Who is to say...

[MidnightWatcher]

The mathematician is a designer of the simulation, and he tells the simulation what to do. It is a silly argument to use, really. I'm not even sure why you're using it. Like I said, evolution et al fails to answer numerous questions, and in fact only complicates matters. When, where, why, and how did life come from non-living matter? When, where, why, and how did life learn to reproduce itself? How can mutations (recombining of the genetic code) create any new, improved varieties? (Recombining English letters will never produce Chinese books.) Natural selection only works with the genetic information available and tends only to keep a species stable. How would you explain the increasing complexity in the genetic code that must have occurred if evolution were true? How did intermediate forms live (and where is the fossil record)? There are many thousands of examples of symbiosis that defy an evolutionary explanation. Why? How would evolution explain mimicry? Did the plants and animals develop mimicry by chance, by their intelligent choice, or by design? Are you sure your answers are reasonable, right, and scientifically provable, or do you just believe that it may have happened the way you have answered, and do these answers reflect your "belief system" or your science? Many people accept evolution simply because it's what they've always been taught, ie, programmed to believe (the "designers" in this case are well-meaning, but misguided teachers). But should we continue to use outdated, disproved, questionable, or inconclusive evidences to support the theory of evolution because you don't have a suitable substitute (Piltdown man, recapitulation, archaeopteryx, Lucy, Java man, Neanderthal man, horse evolution, vestigial organs, etc.)? Why are many evolutionists afraid of the idea of Intelligent Design or Creationism being presented in public schools? If we are not supposed to teach religion in schools, then why not get evolution out of the textbooks? After all, it is just a religious worldview that isn't even based on scientific fact, and takes more faith to believe in than God. I believe "In the beginning, God ..." but you believe "In the beginning, dirt ...". Yep, you've got more faith than I do.

Re:Who is to say...

[MidnightWatcher]

Show me one example of a beneficial mutation that has ever been observed (or even the fossil record of a partially mutated species). In fact, let's go way, way back and try to figure out how life would have "mutated" from a few amino acids to a single celled organism. Explain how our early atmosphere, which is assumed to have no oxygen, would allow the formation of amino acids. With oxygen, amino acid formation could not take place. However, with no oxygen, there would be no ozone shield. With no ozone shield, there would be no UV protection. UV will kill any life from "forming". Even Stanley Miller's experiment in 1953 failed miserably. In this experiment sparks were discharged into an apparatus which was circulating common gases. These gases reacted to form various organic products which were collected and analyzed. The experiment succeeded in producing only a few of the 20 amino acids required by itself. In addition to the problems I've noted above, the same gases which can react to form amino acids undergo known reactions in the presence of sunlight which remove them from the atmosphere. The required gases would not have been around long enough for life to have developed! In addition, a cold trap was used to keep the reaction products from being destroyed as fast as they formed. The biggest problem is that the amino acids formed in this experiment are always a 50/50 mixture of stereotypes (L and D forms). Stereotypes are like a drawer full of right-hand and left-hand gloves, identical in every way except a mirror image of each other. Life contains only L stereotypes of these randomly produced amino acids. Yet equal proportions of both types are always produced. How could the first cell have selected only L stereotypes from a random, equally reactive mixture? No answer to this has ever been found. These are just a few of the problems with the fanciful idea that life generated itself. The linking of these randomly produced amino acids into the required proteins is an even more overwhelming impossibility.

Re:Who is to say...

[indifferent children]

Show me one example of a beneficial mutation that has ever been observed (or even the fossil record of a partially mutated species).

Researchers have directly observed beneficial mutations. There are many strains of bacteria that have mutated to become resistant to antibiotics. There are coca plants in South America that have become resistant to 'Roundup' pesticides that our government is using to try to eradicate cocaine. These are examples of mutations that are beneficial to the organism, by increasing its liklihood of survival.

Once you recognize that beneficial mutations happen, unless you provide a mechanism that prevents more than one beneficial mutation from happening to a species over time, then you must admit that multiple beneficial mutations can happen over generations. From there, it would be ludicrous to argue that a million beneficial mutations in a single species could not have a significant impact on morphology, and could not result in a creature that can no longer produce offspring by mating with its pre-mutation cousins. Therefor, speciation (macro-evolution) is a definite possibility. In fact, it is virtually certain that at least one instance of speciation will occur, given enough generations of enough different species.

In fact, let's go way, way back and try to figure out how life would have "mutated" from a few amino acids to a single celled organism. Explain how our early atmosphere, which is assumed to have no oxygen, would allow the formation of amino acids.

That is a totally different argument from evolution. Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life. In fact, I don't know of any scientific theory that does explain the origin of life, only conjecture (ok, maybe as high as hypothesis, but no theory). Until we can re-create life from inanimate elements, any honest scientist will have to tell you "we don't know".

Many christians believe that God created life, but evolution is the mechanism by which simple life turned into what we see today. This is standard practice in Catholic schools (I don't know if this is official church doctrine).

Unless you are the stripe of Fundamentalist who believes that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, why even attack evolution? A very young Earth is about the only thing that could prevent macro-evolution. If life is more than a few million years old, then macro-evolution is practically certain, even if a supernatural being did create 95% of the species that existed at that time. Aside from (possibly) a few living fossils, all of the species that exist today are genetically quite different from the versions of those species that existed five million years ago. How could there not have been natural selection for physical traits, as environments changed and the mixes of predator, prey, and parasite changed from season to season?

Re:Who is to say...

[MidnightWatcher]

That was not an example of a "beneficial mutation." The only thing that was observed was that some of the bacteria already had a resistance to the antibiotics. The antibiotics killed off all other bacteria, except for that which already had an immunity to it. The bacteria that had this immunity multiplied. The same thing goes for the coca plants. The pesticides killed off all the plants except those which already had resistance to it. Notice how evolutionists try to interpret observations in light of a preconceived idea. You call that science? As for evolution attempting to explain the origin of life, of course it does. Remember there's multiple definitions of evolution. You have: 1. Cosmic evolution (the origin of time, space matter, aka the "Big Bang"; 2. Chemical evolution - the origin of higher elements from hydrogen; 3. Stellar and planetary evolution - origin of stars and planets; 4. Organic evolution - origin of life; 5. Macro evolution - Changing from one kind of animal into another; 6. Micro evolution -- variations within kinds. The first five have never been observed, and require a heck of lot of faith to believe in. In other words, the first five are religious. You've never seen it happen, but you believe it anyway based on all the conjecture and guesswork, must of which is nonsensical when you really think about it.

Re:Who is to say...

[MidnightWatcher]

I haven't read "Tornado in a Junkyard" yet, but may look into it sometime.

TORRENTS needed!

[Alsee]

I managed to download one of the videos the instant the story appeared but we desperately need someone to put torrents for them. The site was pretty well dead by the time there were even TWO Slashdot posts.

The video I got was pretty impressive at 1024 full screen mode. I haven't been able to get the other one.

-

Re:TORRENTS needed!

[Alsee]

I've never put up a torrent before, so feel free to mod me down if this doesn't work.

Millennium Simulation Slow Flight Galaxy Flythru [divx5, 120 MB, 1024x768]
Go here then click the Download Torrent button to get the .torrent file.

-

Re:TORRENTS needed!

[Alsee]

Second attempt at .torrent posting.

-

See Also...

[stuffman64]

...An older Slashdot Post.

title?

[kv9]

SCUMS? yeah, like im gonna trust them. *rolls eyes*

100Gyr

[Frans Faase]

Why did they stop at 13.6Gyr? Why not run this simulation into the future? Looking at the pictures, it doens't look like a stable situation has been reached yet.

Re:100Gyr

[imsabbel]

Well.
Its because they absolutle exacly know what is going to happen, simply because of the choice of starting parameters of their simulation.

But as their is no reality to compare with (for those future), there is no scientific value to it.

Re:100Gyr

[Xaositecte]

A Mainframe with that much processing power has more groups wanting to use it, time is valuable. So they leave it running just long enough to get the data they need, or, alternatively, the entire time they're alloted the mainframe's processing power.

Re:100Gyr

[metalcup]

I suppose 'cause there never will be a 'stable' situation.. either we keep expanding, or expand and contract..or just 'dissipate' away ? Nothing in nature is stable.., which ofcourse means us scientists will never be out of a job :D

Suspicious

[Arthur B.]

I cannot access the article at this moment but I am very suspicious of how accurate / scientific this simulation is. It surely is an amazing artistic work but heck, we don't even know the mass density of the universe (related to its curvature). Yet that sounds like a required data to make a simulation. This simulation should be ruled by the equations of general relativity which is still drafty. Most equations lead to cahotic behavior... we have trouble simulating three bodies because of the unstability of the system...

Re:Suspicious

[GigsVT]

Well, just as early cartographic maps of the earth were pretty shitty by today's standards, we have to start somewhere.

If this simulation is useful in any way for building new theories that are in turn useful for predicting other things, then it isn't a loss.

Even if the simulation is complete bunk, as long as it is studied and reasons are articulated why it is complete bunk, then it wasn't a loss then either, we then know how not to do such a simulation in the future.

Re:Suspicious

[syntaxglitch]

I, on the other hand, am very suspicious of how knowledgeable you are about physics.

While the simulation in question makes huge sweeping simplifications (including the amusing--if reasonable--omission of the relatively insignificant contribution of visible matter), it seems to be based on cosmological physics that have been thoroughly tested and produce reliable predictions. The more speculative stuff doesn't really even enter into it.

Besides, the purpose of a simulation like this isn't to be accurate itself. The purpose is to draw out the logical conclusions of our current understandings of the universe so that any INaccuracies can be noted and used as guides on how to further refine the existing theories.

There is no bigbang or darkmatter

[ebief]

New scientific evidence show that redshift do not relate to speed of galaxies, which implies they are not moving.

Also, darkmatter are only "epicycles" of the current wrong gravity driven view of the universe.

The universe is electric, and follows the laws of plasma on bigger scales. read more here:

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/universe/pl asma_univ.html

http://www.thunderbolts.info/

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0506 10arptest.htm

Re:There is no bigbang or darkmatter

[CmdrGravy]

From that Thunderbolts website:

"So the Deep Impact mission could prove to be an acid test. The electric theorists have made their position clear, and there won't be much wiggle room for the conventional "dirty snowball" hypothesis. If water is not observed to explode from the surface at the projectile's impact, a domino effect will be set loose. An absence of water would mean there is no mainstream model left, only the electric model would remain. A single event could thus alter the mindset of all who work in the theoretical sciences: it would mark the end of the imagined "electrically neutral" universe lurking behind every statement we heard from David Morrison"

Oh dear. Looks like convential science wins again eh !

The simulation...

[ms1234]

...of the server serving the pictures seems to have gone up in blazing fire. Anyone has a mirror?

Currently slashdotted

[fullofangst]

Server timing out.

Suggest people who want to see the pretty pictures use the Mirrordot mirror link at

http://mirrordot.org/stories/bdfc0ad7cef604a1af6b9 8722b0f530f/index.html

So, to quickly simulate everything that exists...

[kahei]

...they left out everything that is actually known to exist.

Yay!

At least TRY...

[imsabbel]

So its "pretty obvious"?
I guess thats in the same class as "its KNOWN the earth is flat"...
So please give me a proof, or at least a good theory, why there cant be particles that dont interact with the strong or electromagnetic forces and have large mass?
We SEE the results of their gravitation (and not just with the galactic rotation, but you cannot really do cosmology ignoring them), so who are you to claim them a "hack to make maths work"?
(btw: maths work really most of the time. The trick is that the result should represent reality)

Re:At least TRY...

[nagora]

We SEE the results of their gravitation (and not just with the galactic rotation, but you cannot really do cosmology ignoring them),

The gavitational effects are more likely to have something to do with a hole in the gravitational theory; perhaps a sign of quantum effects in gravity/acceleration? Dark matter is just plain silly.

The other implication of dark matter theory that really points to it being wrong is that the age of distant galaxys is too great (in terms of stellar evolution and population mix) to fit with the very low age of the universe that comes out of simulations, such as this one, that assume the reality of dark matter/energy. The observed universe simply does not support that interpretation of the gravitational anomalies you refer to. The anomalies are real, the explanation simply does not work. Even on the small scale of globular clusters dark matter fails to explain what we see through our telescopes.

TWW

Re:At least TRY...

[aug24]

Oh come on, it is a pretty good point. Gravity isn't behaving as we'd expect, so let's postulate lots and lots and lots and lots of heavy shit that does nothing else at all sitting in just the right place - and nowhere else. That's a hack. It may still be right.

I've always preferred to think that the equations of general relativity might be imperfect. After all, Newton's equations are simplifications of Einstein's, there's no reason why his might not be simplifications of <insert future clever bastard's name here>

Justin.

Re:At least TRY...

[imsabbel]

no, its not.
And if you first sentence represents what you think dark matter is and why you think it is postulated, you should take a MUCH closer look at cosmology.

Re:At least TRY...

[mr i want to go home]

I couldn't agree more. Believing in dark matter is in the same league as believing in ghosts. Can't see it, can't touch it, but we use it to explain all sorts of odd experiences.

I'm truly not trying to flame(bait) but there are so many people ready to take dark matter as a literal truth, but scoff at any notion of the supernatural.

And as for all those people only to willing to apply Occam's Razor to anything vaguely mystical - where are they now? What's more likely - incomplete knowledge of the long distance properties/influence of gravity, or 'dark matter'?

Re:At least TRY...

[aug24]

Dear god, what brilliant arguing tactics you have: "no, its not". Thanks for your input...

If it helps you to understand, I was referring to the imbalance between the centripetal force required for the observed rotation of galaxies and predicted gravitic strength based on the amount of observable material.

Simply put: they don't match.

We can postulate one of:
* we observe the rate of rotation wrongly
* we observe the amount of mass wrongly
* we have bad rules for rotation
* we have bad rules for gravity
* something else

Some people have postulated a spherical shell of 'dark matter' around each galaxy, in line with option 2. The only force it interacts with is gravity, yet for no readily apparent reason it doesn't fall in to the centre of the galaxy. One presumes its own rotation is perfectly balanced with its gravitational attraction, but normally that only happens for a rotating *disk*, not a sphere. Strange, no?

Can you see yet why I agree that it's a hack, yet also observed that it might still be right, given that the universe *is* weird, as anyone who's understood GR and QM will agree?

Justin.

Re:At least TRY...

[hesiod]

> What's more likely - incomplete knowledge of the long distance properties/influence of gravity, or 'dark matter'?

I do not claim to have any definitive knowledge on anything, me being just a balding monkey on this really big rock and all, but, is it necessarily "either/or?" Maybe there is some strange type of matter we don't understand AND we have incomplete knowledge. Or maybe it really is regular matter but we just can't see it for some reason (multiple dimensions drawing closer together)... I don't know.

Anyway, my point is that this is sort of like another discussion, on programming: is it "art" or is it "science?" Why can't it just be both?

Re:At least TRY...

[lgw]

What you're both missing is that what you're both saying with respect to dark matter changed with the recent high-resolution cosmic microwave background radiation studies. Dark matter explains two completely unrelated sets of observations, and makes the numbers agree (apparantly to 2 significant digits! even 1 significant digit is hyper-accurate for cosmology).

This is how science works, folks. It's just one more speculative hypothesis until it accurately predicts something that none of the other speculative hypotheses did. At that point you have to start taking it seriously as a theory, as it has predictive power, not just explanatory power.

Re:At least TRY...

[lgw]

Actually, no disk is required if the for rotation to be balanced by gravitation. In fact, a sphere is the simplest model! Each bit of matter in it's own random orbit around the colective center of mass produces a roughly spherical galaxy. You only get a disk when the bits of matter collide with one another and stick. When clumping happens, and a dominant axis of rotation exists, the clumps tend to wind up in a disk as they grow larger. Matter that doesn't tend to clump when colliding has no reason to form a disk.

Heck, eyen orinary visible matter doesn't always manage to form a disk. Somewhat oblate spheres are a common shape for smaller galaxies.

They use the 512 node cluster to do *that*...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but not run the webserver? Come on!

also, see the nice poste

[da5idnetlimit.com]

poster.ps.gz, A0, 280 MB

sad mirrordot doesn't also take the links ...

Re:Yes, but...

[deetsay]

...is it art?

But they can't run it into the future...

[haakondahl]

Because then the machine would have to simulate itself on earth, and could cause the program to crash. Think of the simulated /.ers!

Re:But they can't run it into the future...

[Anonymous Coward]

not to forget the infinite loop it will enter trying to simulate itself simulating itself and.....

my head asplode !

Re:But they can't run it into the future...

[MikeBabcock]

Ah yes, the paradox of trying to know enough about everything going on at a spontaneous moment in time so as to predict its history.

Or better, the paradox of trying to simulate something as complex as yourself simulating yourself (recursive).

Its fun to take a random amount of dark matter and pretend we know what happened during the first 1/10^12 seconds of the universe of course, assuming our modern understandings of physics apply at those densities, temperatures and speeds.

the science of creatonism...

[jnf]

wait.. i dont get it, where is god?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Here they come

[waterlogged]

Let the Douglas Adams, and ruling order of mice, posts begin.

google maps link to server beeing /.ed

[SamLowry42]

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=48%C2%B015.662'N+11% C2%B040.282'E&spn=0.006686,0.004974&t=k&hl=en If we can't get them pretty pictures of the universe we can at least have a look at where they are.

And the Answer is

[dankasfuk]

Forty-two.

Counter-evidence

[FhnuZoag]

A different question would be - why do we need evidence for dark matter?

It is surely more absurd to insist that all the matter in the universe interacts by the electromagnetic force, than to suggest that a sizable proportion does not.

Ok, Let me get this straight...

[mritunjai]

I'm sleep deprieved, but have a fundamental question... the article said they only simulated 'dark matter' and produced 'breath-taking images'!!

Breath-taking images of *DARK MATTER* ??? WTF

Re:Ok, Let me get this straight...

[cy_a253]

These images simply show what we would see if we could "see" dark matter. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

Re:Ok, Let me get this straight...

[dword]

"Dark Matter" isn't really as dark as you think. It's even darker, but I don't want to get into that now! They simply used a way of representing something, the same way as nigh-vision goggles let you see in the dark and the same way you could see someone's body temperature map by using colors. If hot, use red; if cold, use blue.
The colors are just a representation of particles.

Re:Ok, Let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear-
One might well ask why NASA makes false color images from infra-red cameras - or better yet, why the results from the Chombo x-ray observatory aren't visualized in their natural wavelength. Even optical telescope images would be nearly black if they were presented as a precise representation of the photons received - instead, they are brightened by several orders of magnitude.

The whole precept of scientific visualization is to use the human visual system to detect patterns in complex data. Whether or not those data represent naturally visible phenomena is immaterial. Consider the case of atmospheric simulations. I recently worked with a group visualizing the results of a severe storm which spawned a tornado. Leaving aside the question of the validity of such a simulation, our job was to help the scientists figure out, from their simulation, how a tornado forms (the exact details of which are unknown even today). To do that, they wanted to see the movement of air well before the tornado forms. Of course, once an actual tornado forms, it picks up all sorts of dust, and thus air movement is visible. However, the rotational movement that spawns a tornado is relatively mild, and in the natural world would be unobservable. By releasing virtual (i.e. fake and massless) particles into the simulation, the scientists were able to see horizontal vorticity up to 30km away from the storm center. In essence, we made invisible (to the naked eye) air molecules visible.

Now vorticity is a difficult thing to quantify - like pornography, you 'know it when you see it', but traditional analytic techniques (measuring curl of a vector field) yield an awful lot of noise. Using the human visual system, it is rather easy to detect. Whether anything will come from this particular visualization remains to be seen (it's early days yet). However, the scientists we worked with were excited by the discovery, and hopefully it will yield at least some small new insights, which could help improve weather models and tornado prediction.

Just like making invisible air movements visible may yield new insights into tornado formation, viewing dark matter distribution may yield new insights into galaxy/universe formation. Rendering the invisible is not just a neat trick, it is intended to engage the highly evolved pattern recognition system of our eyes and brain to provide insight into an unsolved problem.

As an aside, in some cases, we are very lucky, and complex problems present themselves naturally to our visual system, such as vorticity in a tonado funnel. Or, sometimes scientists are able to manipulate nature to provide what Pat Hanrahan calls "self-illustrating phenomena". One example of that would be a cloud-chamber for particle physics experiments. To see more examples of self illustrating phenomena, go to:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-04-win ter/lectures/selfillustrating/

--matt

Re:Ok, Let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear-
One might well ask why NASA makes false color images from infra-red cameras - or better yet, why the results from the Chombo x-ray observatory aren't visualized in their natural wavelength. Even optical telescope images would be nearly black if they were presented as a precise representation of the photons received - instead, they are brightened by several orders of magnitude.

The whole precept of scientific visualization is to use the human visual system to detect patterns in complex data. Whether or not those data represent naturally visible phenomena is immaterial. Consider the case of atmospheric simulations. I recently worked with a group visualizing the results of a severe storm which spawned a tornado. Leaving aside the question of the validity of such a simulation, our job was to help the scientists figure out, from their simulation, how a tornado forms (the exact details of which are unknown even today). To do that, they wanted to see the movement of air well before the tornado forms. Of course, once an actual tornado forms, it picks up all sorts of dust, and thus air movement is visible. However, the rotational movement that spawns a tornado is relatively mild, and in the natural world would be unobservable. By releasing virtual (i.e. fake and massless) particles into the simulation, the scientists were able to see horizontal vorticity up to 30km away from the storm center. In essence, we made invisible (to the naked eye) air molecules visible.

Now vorticity is a difficult thing to quantify - like pornography, you 'know it when you see it', but traditional analytic techniques (measuring curl of a vector field) yield an awful lot of noise. Using the human visual system, it is rather easy to detect. Whether anything will come from this particular visualization remains to be seen (it's early days yet). However, the scientists we worked with were excited by the discovery, and hopefully it will yield at least some small new insights, which could help improve weather models and tornado prediction.

Just like making invisible air movements visible may yield new insights into tornado formation, viewing dark matter distribution may yield new insights into galaxy/universe formation. Rendering the invisible is not just a neat trick, it is intended to engage the highly evolved pattern recognition system of our eyes and brain to provide insight into an unsolved problem.

As an aside, in some cases, we are very lucky, and complex problems present themselves naturally to our visual system, such as vorticity in a tonado funnel. Or, sometimes scientists are able to manipulate nature to provide what Pat Hanrahan calls "self-illustrating phenomena". One example of that would be a cloud-chamber for particle physics experiments. To see more examples of self illustrating phenomena, go to:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-04-win ter/lectures/selfillustrating/

--matt

Dark Server

[Doc Ruby]

We have Slashdotted the Universe.

Wow

[DinX]

Using a 512-node cluster with IBM processors, the group produced over 20 terabytes of data with some of the most breathtaking images of the universe never seen

Imagine a Beowolf clu.... oh ... nevermind ...

Torrents

[LordAlbert]

made a torrent of the first 1024 version http://homepage.hispeed.ch/stanislaw/millennium_si m_1024x768.torrent

happy downloading

Re:Torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad torrent?

MIRROR

[agoodm]

Sorry to anyone hoping to see a mirror of videos here but its coming so be patient and check back... I am downloading a video right now ETA 10 minutes. Ill try and create a torrent when thats done - Then reply back here.

Re:MIRROR

[agoodm]

Joy I couldnt be bothered to make a torrent but ill post a link to one of the files for your pleasure... http://files.photojerk.com/alan/millennium_sim_slo wzoom_1024x768.avi Speed may be slow but our server wont get overloaded - Blame the cheap DC if speeds are poor :-)

Re:MIRROR

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the link!

Re:MIRROR

[Anonymous Coward]

You suck! Fag!

Re:MIRROR

[agoodm]

Please do not feed the trolls, thank you.

The answer everyone's waiting for?

[Asprin]

Well, do I win?

Mpc/h?

[nherm]

In almost all the images there is a reference scale in Mpc/h.

Why? Parsec is a measure for distance already, isn't it?

Re:Mpc/h?

[Anonymous Coward]

The unit Mpc/h indicates a distances a distance in Mega-Parsec divided by a scale variable h which indicates the size of the Hubble Variant H. It is set so that

H = 100 h km/(s*Mpc)

Gravitational processes are invariant to h, so choosing this normalization makes results independent on the actual value of the Hubble constant.

Re:Mpc/h?

[AstroDan]

Good question! In this case, the h in Mpc/h does not mean "hour". It is a fudge factor for dealing with the uncertainty in our determination of the Hubble constant. In the astrophysics and cosmology literature you will often see the Hubble constant expressed as

H0 = 100h km/s/Mpc

where h is a dimensionless parameter between 0.5 and 1 (thus the Hubble constant is between 50 and 100 km/s/Mpc). The current estimated value of the Hubble constant is about 70 km/s/Mpc (h = .70), with an error of about 10%. One of the Hubble Space telescopes key missions was/is to determine the Hubble constant to high precision (10% doesn't seem that high precision but it is pretty darn good for cosmology).

Re:Tagline Rants from "Ring 0"

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that picking on people's .sigs is completely offtopic, but come on -- yours is 100 years late.

Simulate dark matter?

[AceJohnny]

Wait, I thought physicists don't know what dark matter *is*! We went from MACHOs and WIMPs to "It's all just neutrinos. Lots.".

Did I miss something here?

How can they simulate something when they don't know what this thing is, let alone behaves? Shouldn't the density of dark matter strongly influence the simulation?

Or maybe they just simplified the equations to eliminate thos vital parameters?

Re:Yes, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is art.

Low resolution...

[troon]

From TFA: By zooming in on a massive cluster of galaxies, the movie highlights the morphology of the structure on different scales, and the large dynamic range of the simulation (10^5 per dimension in 3D).

Now I understand that this resolution means 10^15 voxels ((10^5)^3) but that only equates to a linear resolution of 1mm in a 10m wide universe. Impressive it may be, but it's a long way short of the real thing.

Re:Low resolution...

[nhnfreespirit]

Hmm... that's still a 100.000 x 100.000 x 100.000 data set. Which, if my math is not completely off, would corrospond to a 1mm^3 resolution in a 100m * 100m * 100m cube. Not too bad really!

Re:Low resolution...

[imsabbel]

really interesting is how much they used the hardware possiblities:
There Power-nodes where equipped with 2GB RAM per Processor, and the peak memory usage during the simulation was 1970MB (per node)

Dark Matter

[tverbeek]

To simplify the computations, they considered only dark matter which composes most of the universe.

In other words, they left out the entire observable universe. Not only does that simplify the calculations, it makes it a little difficult to truly authenticate the results. :)

Re:Dark Matter

[syntaxglitch]

Where did you get the idea that dark matter is not oberservable?

Just because a magnetic field is invisible doesn't mean you can't put it on your fridge and see if it sticks.

Re:Dark Matter

[tverbeek]

Where did you get the idea that dark matter is not oberservable?

Various places, but mostly from the fact that it has yet to be directly observed. Its existence has been inferred indirectly, but to my knowledge no one has ever detected it experimentally.

Re:Dark Matter

[syntaxglitch]

Yes, and by that standard, the existance of atoms, gravity, and a host of other well-understood phenomena have only been inferred indirectly.

Just because you can't SEE something doesn't mean its existance can't be reliably measured.

Re:Dark matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I meant "phlogiston". An unseen substance theorized in pre-quantitative chemistry that was assigned a different weight in every combustion experiment to make the math work out.

Re:Dark Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

"Detect" != "see", moron.

Re:Dark Matter

[syntaxglitch]

Then perhaps you would care to clarify how our ability to detect dark matter due to the influence it exerts on other things is different from our ability to detect something more "mundane" like magnetism also through the influence it exerts on other things?

dark matter is invisible

[daniel23]

To simplify the computations, they considered only dark matter which composes most of the universe

no wonder those breathtaking images remain invisible...

Wallpaper

[seanyboy]

It'd be nice to have a few of these as 1028x768 jpegs to be used as wallpaper. If *you* beginning-of the-universe-scientists are listening!

Re:Wallpaper

[seanyboy]

OK - my bad. Follow the links...

Re:Who is to say... Tipler/Physics of Immortality

[neurocutie]

I presume you know that this idea of a super-supercomputer simulating the entire universe including all the sentient beings who ever lived and will live is one of the central theme's of the book The Physics of Immortality : Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead by Frank Tipler...

Re:So, to quickly simulate everything that exists.

[jd]

Not entirely. They did factor in the existance of income tax and rice pudding.

Put the cluster to use

[STFS]

They should have considered using their 512 node cluster to run the damn website after it finished calculating how the universe came to be!

The site is dead slow!

Re:Put the cluster to use

[metalcup]

hmm,and how would that help the transfer bandwidth/speed ?

So wait a minute

[squoozer]

these people produced 20TB of something we can even see? If I download the video what an I going to get? 10 hours of watching a black screen?

My God, it's full of stars!

[syntap]

some of the most breathtaking images of the universe never seen

Thought I'd beat someone to it.

Re:My God, it's full of stars!

[thaneross]

Damn it! That was going to be MY 2001 reference!

Crazy talk

[Orne]

Everyone knows that the Big Bang happened. I mean if it didn't, then modern scientific teachings are just as wrong as the Creationists they disparage; it would cancel the logic behind the assumption that the universe has a finite and deterministic beginning; Astronomers everywhere would lose their fund...

Oh.

Re:Crazy talk

[syntaxglitch]

Noone knows for SURE the big bang happened. What we DO know is mountains of data for which the big bang is the best current explanation.

In contrast, creationists have evidence roughly amounting to "because that's how I want it to be", with a pile of fudged data and outright lies to prop it up with.

I trust the difference between the two is easily understood.

This is a dupe story...

[Black.Shuck]

Not that I'm complaining about it, but last time this ran the pictures and video page withstood the Slashdotting. Probably because of the lack of a direct-link to it.

Anyway, the Coral-cached version of the page is currently working fine.

Computational difficulty.

[rob101]

How can we ever reliably compute a model of the universe? - This system used a reduced resolutiuon to do so.

My year 8 science teacher told me that we cannot see an atom with a machine that is made of atoms, so we analyse the effect that atoms have on their surrounding environment and create a hypothesis that supports the effect.
(Will we ever have a 10" x 8" of an atom?)

Similarly, how can we model every particle in the universe, when ovbiously every particle in the universe (and then some) would be required to process the model.......

(Yeah... well my 10c :) )

Re:Computational difficulty.

[Hawkxor]

"Similarly, how can we model every particle in the universe, when ovbiously every particle in the universe (and then some) would be required to process the model......."

WinZip?

Or just focus on a little bit at a time; obviously we can't hold every particle in the universe in memory at a time; we couldn't even do that for a single Hubble Space

Mod parent up Insightful

[aussie_a]

The simulation is an amazing tool to teach current scientific theories. It's a testament to the programming abilities of the creators. What it isn't, is evidence that Dark Matter exists. I've heard of simulations on how the eye has evolved over time and into existance. It's a great teaching tool, but it isn't evidence that evolution is correct (as many people claim it is. Were these people scientists, no. They were slashdotters. But this post is directed at slashdotters and not scientists). Before I get modded down as a bible thumper, I believe in evolution, but only because I haven't heard of a better explanation. I don't know enough about dark matter to say whether I believe it is a correct theory.

Re:Mod parent up Insightful

[saider]

Dark matter is "observed" indirectly through gravitational effects. It is not that the scientists doubt its existence, it is just that they cannot observe it directly, hence the name "dark".

A crude example would be if you were looking out your window at a lake. You might see waves caused by fish swimming below, but you would not be able to describe the fish, because you only saw the wave.

Re:Mod parent up Insightful

[jafiwam]

AFIK the only evidence is the fact that regular "light" matter seems to circulate around in galaxies faster than it should. (Implying there is more matter or gravitational pull there than can be accounted for by looking at the light emitted from stars.)

The rest of it is poking around trying to find someplace to start a coherent theory about the stuff.

A LOT of work has been done on it, but so far there isn't a "we think this is it" theory.

Your ideas about eyes are old though, there's been some new stuff (either fossil evidence or genetic, I forgot which) that has filled in some of the gaps on eyes. You should look it up...

BTW, you DO sound like a bible thumper or a 'intelligent design' person. I'll take your word for it that you are not...

Re:Mod parent up Insightful

[Macrolord]

crude example certainly. you believe the cause of the waves is a thing you have named a "fish" based on the type of motion which caused the waves as you have observed before.

Even though you have never seen this thing named "fish", and you have no other logical explanation, so until further notice, if anyone asks what causes the waves, they would be told is is "the fish".

The scientific approach to this is just plain cool?

Re:Mod parent up Insightful

[saider]

you believe the cause of the waves is a thing you have named a "fish" based on the type of motion which caused the waves as you have observed before.

Even though you have never seen this thing named "fish", and you have no other logical explanation, so until further notice, if anyone asks what causes the waves, they would be told is is "the fish".

So what would you do? Keep in mind that you cannot walk out to the lake.

I would be basing my explanation that fish in my aquarium, which I can observe, make similiar patterns in their environment. I have a theory and I can test it in a local environment with experimentation and observation. I would then postulate that the waves in the lake are made by a similiar mechanism. I may even be able to deduce the size and velocity of that organism based on the data collected from my experiments. But until I can walk out to the lake or find some other method to directly observe it, it is still a theory.

Scientists can observe matter and its interactions in the nearby environment and postulate that similiar interactions occur in faraway places. Testing a theory requires good repeatable data and as few assumptions as possible. More data and fewer assumptions lead to better theories. Less data and more assumptions lead to weaker theories.

Backwater journal you say?

[Mortiss]

The fact is, this generates pretty pictures, maybe a nice paper in some backwater of journal land.

Well, if you considert "Nature" a backwater journal, then i dont know.... where should i publish? This paper went through a peer-review process, so its not just pretty pictures.
Although, I am partial to agree that simualtions are approximations, how long should we wait then before we attain "suitable" computing power? Everything starts somewhere.

They're a bit late...

[tod_miller]

Should I tell them or shall I wait until they realise how stupid they Look in those:
2O-OO nerd glasses.

ha.

OS?

[keepright]

I just want to know what OS the universe is running!

Re:OS?

[pcnetworx1]

Its SkyOS you insensitive clod! Jeez, are you from Soviet Russia with Linux or something?

DON'T BOTHER. TRACKER DIDN'T WORK.

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried, I failed. I'm not sure where I went wrong. Mod parent post down so no one wastes time on it.

Isn't this a dupe?

[rpresser]

Over a month old, too?

Simulated Universe
Posted by Zonk on 2005-06-03 20:25
from the not-the-matrix dept.

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."

Dark matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Dark matter may be a reasonable theory, but I can't help but compare it to the "phlostigon" of early chemistry.

Perception vs Reality

[Orne]

Yes, I understand that, you understand that, but what it is going to do is add fuel to the fire that "These 'big shot' scientists are resisting review of their own views when they shout we should review ours; when they do review their data, they find their base assumptions are wrong; assumptions that are used in the secular view of a godless universe. If their model is wrong when assumed right, and they assume our model is wrong, then are their godless universe assumptions also implicitly wrong?"

The Plasma Cosmology guy's view is that things like Singularities, Red Shift, the early Accelleration periods of the universe... all those are just fudged data with outright lies propping them up too. the argument is that for the last 30 years, astronomers have been ignoring 1/4th of the known fundamental forces in all of their data captures, and have written all of their formulas based on an incomplete data set. This is a view just as contrarian to modern physics as the guy who doesn't believe in the arrow of time...

Re:Perception vs Reality

[syntaxglitch]

Yes, I understand that, you understand that, but what it is going to do is add fuel to the fire that "These 'big shot' scientists are resisting review of their own views when they shout we should review ours; when they do review their data, they find their base assumptions are wrong; assumptions that are used in the secular view of a godless universe. If their model is wrong when assumed right, and they assume our model is wrong, then are their godless universe assumptions also implicitly wrong?"

Well, I admit that I am ill-equipped to deal with the refutation of patent nonsense. If you have any suggestions on the matter, I'd love to hear them.

Moores Law: every atom simulated by 2082

[peter303]

If Moores Law were to continue at its same rate for another 77 years, every atom in the universe for 15 billion years could be simulated in a computer. Unikely.

Reminds of an Isaac Asimov short story from Nine Tommorrows called The Last Question. A computer grows to become the entire universe and finds out it is God.

IPv6 addresses for the galaxies?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, did they assign some IPv6 addresses to all of those particles?

The Big Bang Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

I theorize that that their server just made a Big Bang.

Well, rumor has it that...

[alien-alien]

After 6 days of calculation, they took the next day off.

they can simulate the universe...

[SolusSD]

but they can't keep their servers from being / . 'ed. ;)

Copyright?

[Grendel Drago]

Does anyone have an idea what the copyright on these images is? That is, how difficult will it be for me to go to my local Kinko's or Staples and have them make me a nice A0 poster out of one of these pictures?

--grendel drago

Re: Rate of progress.

[vertinox]

At the current rate of human population growth there will be more humans than atoms in 17,000 years.

Trust me, I'm scratching my head too.

Total Perspective Vortex

[SIGBUS]

I suppose it also shows a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, with the notation "You are here."

Hey, I'm a virgo...

[stalky14]

How come I wasn't invited to be in their consortium?!

Screw 'em! I'm starting my own consortium. Who's with me? I've got a spare K6-2-500 and a refrigerator box we can make a fort out of.

FAILED

[Alsee]

Mod parent down. Seeding failed, link doesn't work. Sorry.

Visible/Whole

[MagPulse]

Since this simulation is of the entire universe, can we look at the density it predicts for the present day, and figure out what fraction of the entire universe our visible universe is?

Or has that already been done?

Wrong Direction

[COMON$]

Why start from the origins and go forward. Scientists have the oddest way of thinking. It used to be the scientific method.

http://phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/no de6.html#SECTION02121000000000000000

Now we reverse the method, getting a theory and look for things in nature to prove it.

What should be done is to take facts we know about now and work backwards to find out what happened in the beginning. There are serious holes in our understaning of the origin of the universe mainly because we cannot see it right now.

I weep for current scientific processes and the future until we can get scientists who are more interested in explaining nature from a neutral standpoint rather than a try to get famous by shocking everyone standpoint.

Re:Wrong Direction

[WhiteWolf666]

I believe you are thinking of this experiment incorrectly.

1. Scientists have observed certain aspects of the universe. Namely, physical properties of 'light' matter/energy, and gravitational properties of 'dark' matter.
2. These scientists then develop a hypothesis, in the form of: "Given the previously described aspects of light and dark matter, we believe that X, Y, and Z are the equations describing their behavior under various conditions. Some of the constants we observed in #1 actually only seem constant; given a long enough view of time, they are variable depending on the following factors A, B, and C, which change very, very slowly by human standards (on the order of hundreds of millions of years).
3. As such, they form the following hypothesis: "Initial conditions in the universe were such and such in order to produce the current conditions outlined in #1. The algorhthims proposed in #2 produce a configuration similar to the current state of the universe when extrapolated from time zero to the current time".
3. Given that hypothesis, they seek to run a simulation of these algorhithms from time zero to the current time. Keep in mind that a) it's very difficult to observe the passage of time in the universe (not impossible, very difficult), and b) you can see select static examples of various 'historical' points in the universe by observing astronomical phenomenom at various distances (we can guess at the original state of the universe by observing cosmic background radiation and objects exceedingly distant from us).
4. Test the hypothesis (and the equations in #2) through simulation, since, given our current level of technology, it would be difficult to test them by creating a new universe. Account for discrepancies in the simulation by modifying the assumptions of 2, and correcting the hypothesis of 3.
5. Rinse, lather, rinse, repeat.

It is very, very difficult to produce a neutral simulation; I'll give you that. Whenever you create a simulation you end up 'assuming' hundreds/thousands of things you really shouldn't be assuming; however, in some circumstances, you really do not have any choice. There are no other current avenues of exploration regarding the origin of the universe that really make any sense; we can make countless distant observations, and we have (and continue to) experiment with high-energy particle colliders. But we cannot form a universe in a test-tube (well, at least not yet *wink*), so a computer simulation is the next best thing.

They will not present this simulation as 'Map of the History of the Universe', at least not in academic circles. At the same time, however, it is fairly interesting data, and a potentially useful calcuation. It can be good to see extrapolations of equations for billions upon billons of iterations, as these levels of iterations are generally beyond the mind's eye. Sometimes, interesting trends will result.

Yes, there are plenty of 'shortcomings' to this style of research. But I do not think it is fair to dismiss it out of hand. Take it with a grain of salt, and look over the data for useful nuggets of information. As it is, merely building a simulation of this magnitude is an interesting exercise; the CS aspect of this research is fascinating in and of itself. The results regarding the dataset may or may not be useful; but not every experiment is perfect or even ideal, sometimes, its worthwhile to give even lackluster options a try.

Re:Wrong Direction

[COMON$]

Thanks for the great reply. I have a BS in computer science myself. I do respect the CS aspect of this, very impressive since I have background in Physics and can appreciate the number of computations that this algorithm would have to take into consideration. I am just wondering why choose time 0 when you dont have realistic measurements. To me it would make more sense to take the measurements we know know and move backwards and find out what the data would look like at 0. We might be suprized at what we find.

In other words use the equations of known observable data and extrapolate the data from the simulation to find the origin, then use that data in other simulations to find other answers. Using the wrong original equations would just result in a made up man made universe.

Re:Wrong Direction

[WhiteWolf666]

Yeah, you're probably right ;)

I believe they use a combination of data from 'Really High Energy' (TM) Particle collisions and 'Really Far Away' (TM) objects to guess at conditions at time zero.

Most astronomers/cosmologists feverently hope and pray that conditions were actually fairly simple. While the argument holds a great deal of elegance, I'm not sure that it is accurate; you have to make a lot of assumptions to get to that position.

Really, I think its an unanswerable question. The evidence is just too faint; we can only guess at it and hope we get something approximating the truth.

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if they plan on the running the simulation backwards, at the same time, I'm not sure I'd trust the results then, either, you'd probably have to make a great deal of poorly founded assumptions as well. A lot of the problems come up when you're guessing at which cosmological constants are actually constants, and which ones are variables which appear to be constants over short (read millions of years) periods.

On the other hand, if we can get some good data (read hyperaccurate, allowing us to figure out some coefficents to countless significant digits), we might be able to go backwards far more effectively. That's what an experimental physists might say; I can't really be sure, I didn't spend much time as one before moving on to the world of dollars and sense. ;-) I'm not really sure how far we are from getting this kind of data, either; but I do know NASA's been trying hard lately, building all kinds of satellites to attempt to experimentally measure such concepts as relativity.

Forgive me if I'm talking nonsense, I'm tired at the moment, and not really making a great deal of sense. That being said, this subject interests me greatly: Who doesn't like to ramble on about Life, the Universe, and Everything ;-)

Dupe?

[mattr]

This is wonderful, great, stupendous stuff! But I could have sworn I saw this site a few weeks ago. Is this news Slashdot?

Re:Dupe?

[azav]

Weeeell glory be. It is a dup. It's from April.

Re:Low resolution...oops

[troon]

1mm in 100m, of course. Not so shabby...

Irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

"Current theories on the creation of the Universe are anything but simplisctic, and are accurate according to the data we've collected so far."

Correction. Current theories on the creation of the Universe are BASED ON the data we've collected so far, therefore the argument of using the data to prove or disprove the accuracy of the theory / model, is irrelevant.

I can't be bothered to check

[mr.mighty]

Just tell me how it all ends.

media player errors?

[carn1fex]

Anyone else having trouble viewing these avi's in windows media player? I think its a codec problem.. know where to get the right one? Yes yes give me the link to linux.org har har ;p.

Re:Who is to say... Tipler/Physics of Immortality

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but Tipler's model requires a Closed universe, engineered by it's inhabitants to collapse asymmetrically... then they use the gravitational shear to power the simulator, achieving effectively limitless computational power in finite time, in the final moments before their universe completes it's firely death.

not only are they able to then upload themselves and escape the Big Crunch, but they have enough extra cycles to simulate everybody who has ever lived.

now, since our universe appears to be Flat rather than Closed, we're not going to be able to do that... but i can imagine a series of Closed universes each modeling one slightly less Closed, leading to our own Flat universe as a limiting case.

Mill Fly Thru is Awesome

[ta ma de]

Just watched the fly-thru...too bad star trek has been cancelled. The oppurtunity to reverse polarity and modulate some EPS manifolds seems endless. My subspace warp field harmonics have been totally juiced.

NO! You mean "just a HYPOTHESIS"

[antispam_ben]

Again, it's all just a theory in the end. ... cringe ...

There is a serious confusion between the word theory as used in common English and as how it is used in science. This is intentionally abused by creationists when they say "evolution is just a theory."
The common use of theory is closer to the scientific use of hypothesis, meaning an untested idea. The scientific use of theory is much stronger, meaning an idea that has been tested, and that some scientists may have reason to believe is true.
A scientific theory can still be shown to be wrong, but it carries credibility in science.

Of course, whether this simulation is based on a good theory or a weak hypothesis is up for debate.

"Define the universe. Give three examples."

[alumshubby]

Thanks to the Millenium Simulation, the latter half of the old university-final-exam problem is now achievable.

Re:Who is to say... Tipler/Physics of Immortality

[lgw]

But then Tipler, like many brilliant men, was a total nutball outside of his field. He certainly published some ... interesting ... books alongside some great works in physics.

Omega Point

[Corpus_Callosum]

That this whole universe as we see it is not an experiment in somebody's supercomputer?

Research Omega Point theory. After you take a good look at the Omega Point, this question becomes more meaningful than you may expect...

I can see my simulated house from here!

[payndz]

Though of course with no visible matter in the simulation, it's too dark to make out any details.

Re:Who is to say... Tipler/Physics of Immortality

[Corpus_Callosum]

now, since our universe appears to be Flat rather than Closed, we're not going to be able to do that... but i can imagine a series of Closed universes each modeling one slightly less Closed, leading to our own Flat universe as a limiting case.

Well, that wouldn't be neccessary. The original Omega Point would be more able to model the flat case than any of it's simulations - cycles are additive at that level, after all.

Even if There is no big crunch, who is to say that event-horizon effects around a black hole could not be harvested in some simliar manner, or some other as-yet-unknown physical effect might do the trick? If it can be proven in one hypothetical physical case, it should be possible to prove it in others.

I really like the Omega-point theory, it provides a very interesting overarching theological breathing space (let's call that room for faith). I especially like the colorful comparisons to heaven and hell such as; If you are tossed out of heaven, you are tossed into the inferno of the big-crunch where you will (from the point of view of those in heaven) burn for all time (but of course, from the point of view of those in hell, they are incinerated instantly and cease to exist).

By the way, you know the universe is flat because?

You're WRONG

[katharsis83]

"Many races believe that it was created by some sort of God, though
the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire
Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great
Green Arkleseizure.
The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call
The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures
with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the
only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the
wheel.
However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory is not widely
accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being the puzzling
place it is, other explanations are constantly being sought."*

Obviously the Viltvodle VI people are correct.

*Douglas Adams: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

I can't see it

[Shiz-master]

Then again, I've never been good with these magic eye things!

Re:impressive - D-Land

[Nom du Keyboard]

Well, what did you think they did with that super computer after they were done simulating the whole universe.

You mean they didn't take it to Disneyland?

Interesting similarity.

[Captain Scurvy]

Is it just me, or does this picture from the simulation look a hell of a lot like this picture of a bunch of neurons? Hm... ;)

The simulation blue screened in 2006

[Mingco]

...when it got caught in an infinite loop trying to simulate itself simulating the universe. When I think of you, I simulate myself.

Re:Darn It

[WolfDeusEx]

No, not really. :(

Mirrordot / Videos Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Mirrordot mirror is at :
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/bdfc0ad7cef604a1a f6b98722b0f530f/index.html

And I am creating a mirror of the videos at :
http://www.chatvenue.com/temp

It's just a simple dir listing with the videos there - I am still grabbing the videos as I type this. Whatever I can get will be there for a day or two at least.

It will be better if someone can make torrents out of them.

Posted AC to prevent karma whoring.

Goodbye server ......... :(

why you dirty troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Tabris, SyntaxGlitch, Starfire, what do you like to be called.

You know, at first I found you scientific zealotry and blind faith amusing, then I decide to find out who you really are because, well, I get bored easy. I come to find out you are nothing but a 19 year old punk who lives in Illinois, plays role playing games, has some homosexual crush on some guy named Citan, and thinks he can code up to snuff at top coders.

Man, I lost all respect for you.

Don't worry though, I don't judge you, I'll leave that job to God.

Re:why you dirty troll

[Barlo_Mung_42]

This is typical religious nut behavior.
Reading through the posts I didn't see him insult you at all. He merely tried to explain what you were not understanding. There is no shame in honest ignorance, only willful ignorance. When you found your position was based on a faulty foundation you retaliate with name calling. Regardless of his age he is clearly more capable of reasonable thought and honest discourse than you are.
And it does not matter how many names he has. You hide behind the least respectful of them all AC.

Re:why you dirty troll

[azav]

I'll judge you. Because there is no god.

Re:why you dirty troll

[syntaxglitch]

...what the HELL?

Re:why you dirty troll

[syntaxglitch]

Given that his online stalking attempt didn't even get my age right I'm not inclined to worry. I don't think I'll lose any sleep over it. :)

Re:So, to quickly simulate everything that exists.

[VeganBob]

1. Take everything
2. Take everything' (the compliment of everything)
3. Simulate everything'
4. ...
5. Profit'

In what base ?

[Anonymous Coward]

In what base ?

*Dark* matter simulation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they only simulated the *dark* matter.

So if you want a good idea what all that stuff looks like, turn off your monitor.

Can I have a few million dollars now for this simulation? :)

Its...not easy being green ,,,

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd'ave settled for beef stogonov. screw the meaning and puropose of life..

Re:omgzors!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get back to the Wow Forums

But leads to the obvious question:

[Anonymous Coward]

How much more black could it be?

None, none more black.

A Brain...

[firew0lfz]

Did anyone else watch the movie and think to themselves:

man, that sorta looks like the inside of someone's head? I mean, like, the whole neural network, or such?

now they need to calculate...

[RazorRaiser]

life and everything

The inverse of entropy is information density

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAP, but i believe it..

42 aka how many roads must a man walk down

[COMON$]

well with the leaps and bounds we are making regarding quantum physics maybe in the next 150 years or so we will have a computer that will be capable of observing data at the level we need for the right period of time. Maybe that is why it took deep thought so long ;)

whatever happens, by the time we figure anything out I will be long gone from this earth, hopefully sitting with Yahweh while he tries to explain it all to me :)

Re:Tagline Rants from "Ring 0"

[Some_Llama]

"George W. Bush had MORE people COME TOGETHER on election night than anyone you apparently consider a uniter."

Is that so?

It seems history tells a different story, if you look at the facts, Bill Clinton won by a bigger lead than George Bush, which would mean a bigger percentage of people united behind him...

"In 1996, Clinton won by 8.2 million votes over Republican Bob Dole, while Perot received 8.1 million votes. In 2004, George W. Bush won by 3.5 million votes."

"Bill Clinton never once broke the 50 percent barrier in his two elections, garnering only 43 percent in 1992 and 49 percent in '96"

So if Ross perot hadn't taken any votes then you would have definitely seen a greater than 51% vote for Clinton...

Just because George Bush won through fear mongering and a lack of a better option, doesn't mean people were united For Bush, they were either scared about the future of the US or didn't have a better option... that is seen by his current approval rating.