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

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

[autophile]

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

--Rob

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.

Talk about bloat

[sygin]

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

Re:Talk about bloat

[AndroidCat]

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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

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

MirrorDot

[HateBreeder]

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

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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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...

[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...

[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...

[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."

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.

-

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.

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.

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: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: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: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.

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.

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

Torrents

[LordAlbert]

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

happy downloading

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: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 !

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.

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: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.

Well, rumor has it that...

[alien-alien]

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

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: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.