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The Accidental Astrophysicists
An anonymous reader recommends a ScienceNews story that begins: "Dmitry Khavinson and Genevra Neumann didn't know anything about astrophysics. They were just doing mathematics, like they always do, following their curiosity. But five days after they posted one of their results on a preprint server, they got an email that said 'Congratulations! You've proven Sun Hong Rhie's astrophysics conjecture on gravitational lensing!'... Turns out that when gravity causes light rays to bend, it can make one star look like many. But until Khavinson and Nuemann's work, astrophysicists weren't sure just how many. Their proof in mathematics settled the question."
Mathematics results are physically relevant. News at 11.
The wikipedia article on gravitational lensing has a neat animation produced with a numerical model. I wouldn't make it your desktop background though because it might warp your file icons.
It happens more often than you think. Parents, tell your daughters to watch out for slippery ground. They may be the next one to slip and fall on a penis.
OMFG! It's full of stars!
Say hello to my little sig.
but I don't see where in the article they describe what "n" is.
I think it relates to the mass creating the lens but since the mass is not an integer I don't see how the math could work.
Does anyone have a link or maybe an explanation?
Mathematically, this is the first post.
And isn't that wonderful, that our sciences are so wide in breadth that one discipline may hold answers to other disciplines' questions?
And much much better is that someone in another discipline is willing to look across those divisions to see an answer that might have gone unremarked.
How many stars will be seen?
TFA says 5n-5, but I don't get it because if n=1, then zero stars would be seen.
Can someone clear this up?
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
... that xkcd is right: http://xkcd.com/435/
Three is my favourite number
But I haven't got four legs nor do I sport a tail.
Some of these theories offer (often long standing as I understand) a financial reward for the person(s) who proved them. I did some looking and I'm not seeing any for this one in particular. My questions (yeah, I ask those a lot here) total just two today. Was there one in this case? If there was then, well, who would get it?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
who thought that this was about Penzias and Wilson?
I mean, C'mon.
I'm thuper thereal, guys!
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
It'd be great if we could call this particular Cosmological spade a merely-Conjectured one, because that's what it is and nothing more.
:(
But many of its professional adherents (ie, actual, paid-to-be-Cosmologists Cosmologists) would feel a tad miffed. They often get quite grumpy when the "conjecture" word is waved in front of them. And yet some of them are perfectly okay with it all, because they know as well as anybody that String Conjecture is just a bunch of really fascinating What Iffing.
The big problem is going to be the immense Holy war triggered when the amateur Cosmologists - the lay-astrophysicists-cum-security guards or bookstore clerks who read Omni and New Scientist - hear that their fad-du-jour has been relegated to the scientific cheap seats where it belongs.
Between them and the offended professional Cosmologists, astronomy forums throughout 73h 1n7a4rw3bz will become unbearable.
Well, more unbearable.
There's no Theory in String Conjecture, just as there's no room in Science for faith.
Damn! That last remark just blew away my hopes for a (Score:+5, Insightful). Me and my big mouth...
The thing is, though: why bother? We already have simpler maths to describe the same phenomena and theories. Remember Occam's Razor, basically. If the same thing can be described simpler, and without multiplying unneeded entities like strings and branes, then why take the scenic route?
;) Well, it's a noble goal, but not at the expense of making everything more complicated than it already is, without explaining anything new.
Having one set of equations to rule them all, one set to find them, one set to bring them all and in the darkness bind them... erm... wrong movie
It also seems to me to defeat the whole idea of physics. The idea is to simplify the model to whatever is strictly necessary. If you just have to calculate in what time a mag-lev train travelling at 200 mph would go from Peking to Shanghai, you don't even need to know what mass or size the train is. If you want to calculate the engine to reach that speed, mass and shape become very important, but the colour of the train is still useless. The idea is to simplify maths, not make it more complicated.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
One of the big question in cosmologi is the topology of the universe.
Matematics allow you to create an infinity of different topology. I'm sure that one of them will be able to represent the universe.
But The Mathematicien will never be able to say which one is the correct one. For them they are all the same, methematical models.
For the physician which have his experiments and data, only one is the correct one. The rest is just models.
Mathematics is not a science.
xkcd has a cartoon for that too: http://xkcd.com/417/
The final quote, "I find the whole experience totally extraterrestrial", wins the Internet.
You've succumb to the shuttered view of Analytic Philosophy which consider the field only about manipulation of languages and symbols.
Get out more. Read some Kierkergaard and Tao Te Ching. Check out existentialism, phenonemology, and sunyata in buddhism....