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Big Blue Designing Chip to Decode the Big Bang
Jerry Beth writes "IBM is working with European astronomy organization Astron to design a chip that will be used to help gather billions-of-years-old radio signals from deep space in the hopes of learning more about the origins of the universe. From the article: 'It's part of Astron's Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project. The SKA will be linked to millions of antennas collecting radio signals from space. The antennas will be spread over a large surface area of the globe but, in the aggregate, they will form a square kilometer's worth of collection area. [...] The microprocessors will essentially help the antennas capture the signals, filter out extraneous data and then convert the signals into data. Astrophysicists will then analyze the data to look for patterns. The weakest signals are the prize in this project, because they will be the oldest.'"
Black and Blue
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Could this be used to decode and filter out the content on myspace and find intelligent life?
liqbase
Which one? The Anonymous Coward family is HUGE!
Millions of transistors for a chip that contains a single read-only register that contains the number 42.
They should just call it Deep Thought and get back to us in 7.5 million years.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
This is very interesting, but it doesn't explain what is being filtered, and how it is being filtered. Assuming the signals that are being filtered are radio waves, that would indicate that the processor would need to be powerful enough to catch the weak waves (as indicated in the article), while still providing enough power to filter out the noise.
I trust the astronomists already know how to do this, but it would be interesting to see what the process would be.
Then it brings up the other question: What else can this processor be used for? If it needs to be produced in the millions to make it financially viable, where else will it be sold?
Perhaps it could be used to filter out wireless microwave radio signals, allowing for better reception in a cell phone, security within a wireless network through filtering, and elsewhere. Imagine having a hard-coded chip that will filter out background wireless "noise" and look for a specific signal from a wireless signal. Assuming it couldn't be easily hacked, it could potentially provide some excellent security to wireless networks.
For the same reason humans concocted religion in the first place: it comforts them. Just as we're always looking and hoping for a parent-analog to take care of us.
We can't know, or even imagine, non-existance, because we've never experienced it. For many, it's too scary and awful to even contemplate. It's why when you ask them to try to imagine and describe death, they always say things like "black" and "cold". They have no other frame of refence to describe 'non-existance'.
We invent supernatural bogeymen as a way of dealing with the unknowable, and we conjure up 'Big Bangs' as a way of getting our minds around the Universe. It's a lot easier than trying to understand infinity and nothingness.
The reason science exists is that some people cannot just "accept" things. They must ask why. They must have proof to back up their assumptions. From what I understand about the Big Bang, these scientists have reason to believe that time DOES have a beginning.
If there are scientists with evidence that time is not finite, then it would be helpful if someone provided a link.
- It's funny to think that the Big Bang happened what 5 billion years ago or something like that and before that what?
- Likewise God Created the heavens and the earth 6,000 years ago. . .
- Likewise I was created 24 years ago and I've never experienced anything before that!
There's a saying in Algebra, as x approaches infinity y approaches 0 or maybe that's tangents in Geometry or maybe I'm off my rocker!I think Einstein was on to something with that relativity thing.
-You have been modded appropriately-
Big Blue Building a Baffling, Buggy, and Bloated Behemoth Befitting Betterment of the Big Bang theories.
How can you know where you are going, unless you understand where you come from?
it is easy to get lost in the ambiguous nature of the project's goal. put that aside for a minute. think about all of the advanced in communication and antenna theory, receiver design, and other technologies that will need to be developed in order to reach the ends of the project. while unearthing the big bang may not provide you with a tremendous amount of excitement; maybe you will sleep a little easier knowing that all of the technology advancements that go into research like this can/will be applied to other more practical areas of our lives.
many of the advances in technology that influence our lives today were unintended consequences of other research.
dude.
Aren't the two mutually exclusive?
It would be interesting to actually know the performance of the chips. From the article, The chips will be made on IBM's silicon germanium process and have a typical peak frequency, or speed, of around 200GHz. They will be made on the 130-nanometre process. Bearing in mind that these are ASICs and they run at 200GHz each this should allow for an incredibly detailed model to be formed. Can anyone hazard a guess to how the performance would compare to "standard" efficient code running on a microprocessor?
I hope that this leads to some great science.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
There are three ideas here and each is worth addressing individually:
.3 seconds after the big bang vs. 3 seconds vs. 10 million years?
At some point, doesn't it make sense to stop spending Billions of dollars of taxpayer money on Big Bang research?
At some point, yes. Diminishing marginal returns eventually bring down everything. But I wouldn't say we've gone too far; this program doesn't sound like it would cost anywhere near a billion dollars and the chips will probably be useful in other weak-signal applications.
How much does it benefit us to know what happened
Newton couldn't have developed his universal law of gravitation without the observations of Galileo and Kepler that planets are attracted to each other. But now we use his law of gravity all the time. Relativity drew on the results of experiments that involved light reflecting back from the moons of Jupiter; now we need relativity to calibrate the electron guns in our televsion sets. Our understanding of nuclear physics got a huge boost from studies of the stars and the fusion processes going on out there. And nuclear power (and weapons) have impacted society in a grand way. How much does it benefit us to know what happened 0.3 seconds after the Big Bang? It helps us because the closer we get to the Big Bang, the closer we get to observing quantum gravity (in whatever form it takes). And while quantum gravity might not seem terribly useful right now, I have little doubt that it will have useful applications eventually. Basic research is important.
I'd rather see all this money fund research into advanced propulsion systems, robotics, and solar power technologies that will help us explore the Universe, rather than just gaze at it with ever more powerful equipment.
I can't help thinking "why?". At some point, doesn't it make sense to stop spending Billions of dollars of taxpayer money on Space exploration? After all, if looking at the universe with a cheap telescope is a waste of time, wouldn't going out and touching it in an expensive spaceship be an even bigger waste?
At some point, doesn't it make sense to stop spending Billions of dollars of taxpayer money on Big Bang research?
It sounds like it's more European countries funding this. I don't see the US mentioned anywhere, so at best the US is but one funding contributor.
How much does it benefit us to know what happened
I dunno.. how much did it benefit us more than 180 years ago when Michael Faraday was screwing around with magnets? How much did it benefit us when Gallileo was looking at the moons of Jupiter and realized that they revolved around Jupiter, and not the earth? Are you really trying to argue that understanding the basic forces of our universe might not possibly be of some use to us?
Scientific advancement and benefits to mankind aren't always a nice straight line where the benefit to an everyday person is immediately obvious.
AccountKiller
Luckily, there are plenty of people - with the resources - who don't agree with you.
Remember kids: You not "getting it", that doesn't imply "it"'s bad. It just means that you don't "get it".
There are lots of things which I consider a waste.. But I'm also aware of that since my interest lay elsewhere, I'm probably not qualified to have an informed opinion.
Expensive wines, for instance.
Umm, I consider myself to be a creationist, and I'm not pissed off. It seems obvious (to me, anyway) that the Big Bang theory and the creation story are just 2 different views of the same event. The universe was created from a singularity -- where once there was nothing now there is something. Sounds like creation to me. The more we learn about the universe we live in, the more in awe I become of God, the Creator of it all. Anyway, please hold your flames to a minimum. You won't change my fundamental beliefs about God and creation anymore than my spouting off about the Bible will change your cherished beliefs. If you choose to believe we evolved from whatever, so be it.
Seriously, someone explain to me why time MUST have a beginning? Can't we just accept some things as being infinite?
First, the human mind and computers cannot actually calculate infinity.
There is not enough brainpower nor matter in the observable universe to calculate such an amount.
Rather than to go insane at the thought of infinity or to try to create a machine that consumes all matter outside the observable universe, we simply create a placeholder.
Secondly, infinity does not actually exist in the physical universe.
As time does not exist other than as a unit of measurement and mostly as a matter of opinion and comparison of atomic decay. Time itself cannot be measured by polling a static unit of measurement like you can with matter or energy... As in... There are so much quantity and quality of matter or energy at any given point. Whereas time is merely a measurement of the comparison of what matter and energy are doing and for how long.
Considering it is also relative depending on how fast the energy or matter is traveling doesn't help the situation.
Even if there is infinite matter and energy in the universe, it would be impossible for anything to observe it all at once because of the space time problem.
Infinity might as well not exist if you can't observe it and even if you could would it really matter? Since, nothing else could exist as a single point of time, matter, and space no information could be transfered before the big bang.
However, this does not take an account of what is happening outside our observable universe or if there other universes. As in... There was a big bang, but there happens to be other big bangs or various other similar events happening elsewhere but so far away that light or xrays from those parts of the universe will never reach us... EVER!
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It seems to me that there is no way to get data coming right after the big bang unless you assume that matter was thrown out faster than the speed of light. I'm just a layman but wouldn't that data have passed us by a loooong time ago?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Well, I *hope* it's just you. Just like I don't get what makes a cat do particular things from time to time, I don't get people who aren't fundamentally *curious*. Even stipulating that there may *never* be a single practical application or utility derived from cosmology, it speaks poorly for our species if we have the capability to probe our fundamental origins from our little speck in the cosmos but lack the effort. In all cases, when we probe the Universe with more precise instruments, we find mysteries that we not only cannot explain, but that we never before *imagined*. The subtlety and beauty of the Universe demands enough respect for it that we at least peer through the crack in the door.