Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Landmark Calculation Clears the Way To Answering How Matter Is Formed

Posted by Unknown on from the universal-decay dept.

First time accepted submitter smazsyr writes "An international collaboration of scientists is reporting in landmark detail the decay process of a subatomic particle called a kaon – information that may help answer fundamental questions about how the universe began. The calculation in the study required 54 million processor hours on the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, the equivalent of 281 days of computing with 8,000 processors. 'This calculation brings us closer to answering fundamental questions about how matter formed in the early universe and why we, and everything else we observe today, are made of matter and not anti-matter,' says a co-author of the paper."

5 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. This is the kind of story that belongs on /. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Help restore /. to it's former nerd news glory, tag stories like this with realslash to tell the editors that we want our favorite site back.

    1. Re:This is the kind of story that belongs on /. by Belial6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't know. One of the big things that originally hooked me was the tendency for people to 'run the numbers' when they had a disagreement with someone else. Now it seems that instead of putting numbers on the page it just degrades into accusations of people watching FOX news.

  2. Re:Can someone please explain to me by bmo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As someone who has just re-watched James Burke's "Connections" I have an answer for you:

    Basic science *never* appears to have any immediate applications in the here-and-now. But someone, somewhere, is going to look at bits of it and say "ah, wait, I can use this over here" and either advance more basic science, or start applying it to technology, aka, applied science. But we don't know who, which, how, when, or why. In general, that is how all change happens. It is why we can't look into the future and see all the implications of what we create today. You don't know how someone is going to look at what you did and have an insight into something else because of it.

    If you think something is useless because you, personally, can't see the implications of what something is, the problem is not with the science or technology, or social concept (like the creation of the first stock market in the Netherlands, for example) and you judge it such, the problem is with you and your myopia. Putting limits on what science gets done because immediate results are not readily apparent does nothing but hinder progress, and society (you and me and everyone else) loses out in the long run.

    James Clerk Maxwell's equations had *zero* immediate implications for society at the time, but here we are 150 years later with a society that would absolutely fall apart without them - no radio, no computers, no high tech at all.

    Anyone who says that basic science is too unfocused needs sit down and be quiet and let the adults talk.

    --
    BMO

  3. Re:Can someone please explain to me by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In other words; basic research is absolutely critical to scientific advancement, and those that have to ask why are ignorant of how we got to where we are now.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  4. Re:281 days? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

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