Slashdot Mirror
Study Finds Similar Structures In the Universe, Internet, and Brain
SternisheFan writes "The structure of the universe and the laws that govern its growth may be more similar than previously thought to the structure and growth of the human brain and other complex networks, such as the Internet or a social network of trust relationships between people, according to a new study. 'By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain or a computer,' said Dmitri Krioukov, co-author of the paper, published by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego.'But the discovered equivalence between the growth of the universe and complex networks strongly suggests that unexpectedly similar laws govern the dynamics of these very different complex systems,' Krioukov noted."
I have learned after studying many differing fields of science and engineering, that as you master one field you gain insight into many others. There are certain patterns of organization that repeat throughout nature, and mimicked by man, and if you study anything long enough you are certain to see these patterns. The more you learn, the easier it becomes to learn more because natural things are mostly variations on a finite set of themes that, whether you are aware of them or not, you will discover them and from that point forward, notice them much more quickly.
This is one example. There are many more.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Maybe this is just because we use the same neural mechanisms we think with to phrase scientific theories and build models of networks? Just a thought.
Myu:
'By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain or a computer,' said Dmitri Krioukov, co-author of the paper
Don't worry, 100,000 conservatives will draw an even better conclusion that you have proved that the Universe was intelligently designed, just like the brain.
Other scientists will of course point out that these structures are due to nothing more special than 'math'. Bill O'Reilly will feature one of the crazier ones on his program to show how stupid they are.
Why suprised that the model we imagine is similar to the brain it imagines?
The same with food we eat, we have the same components as the food we take.
Those repeating patterns are signs of the same math in the background. Sadly, with most mathemathicians doing more abstract work the aren't many who study them. Theoreticists try to fill the void left by the mathematicians and they do a goo job but most of them can't really think outside of their own field.
Come on...we have all read the book. This is not news! :-)
#find
Like Kevin Flynn said: Our world's are more connected than anyone knows.
it's in my head!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
and you'll find the universal pattern is a big moving paisley pattern.
Be seeing you...
So they are finding consistent behavior behind different kinds of emergent networks? I can see how that could turn out to be an important find
It's everywhere! In our names, our brains, the internet and even the stucture of our galaxies! Run, Run and tell the world!
I... I don't know how to explain this... but I... I feel like... like I've met you before... and modded you down...
You don't have a sister that looks like Hugo Weaving in drag, do you?
'By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain'
I know, I read the summary.
The universe is a UNIVERSAL brain.
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
"In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Some proponents of the anthropic principle reason that it explains why the Universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life. As a result, they believe it is unremarkable that the universe's fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is a wonderful example of what true mathematics is about.
And mathematics is indeed very useful and practical, fascinating and fun, as opposed to what many people (usually uninformed ones) want to tell you.
If you get the fascination of finding such patterns, you get math. And what you thought you hated all your life, is actually not very related to real math at all.
Still not convinced? Watch this.
Yes, math can indeed be something the kids love!
Maybe you just discovered that the "human way" of structuring science into theories is the same on an abstract level, if you look at all sections of natural science. Even the math related to a particular hard science is a Human Creation, after all. How do you know the people on, say, Alpha Centauri haven't developed a calculus which is radically different to ours and explains some physical effects much better than ours ?
On a very basic philosophical level we have to understand that all math is just modelling, although with some very exact tools. History has proven that even supposedly exact models aren't that exact if you just look at "corner" cases such as "cannon ball flying at 30000km/second". But for a long time people really thought that Newton's laws were more or less the exact truth.
Maybe we are going to discover at some point that there is an infinite number of "corner cases" and we can just increase our finite amount of knowledge (by doing more complicated, more expensive, more elaborate experiments).
Topology is math
..you beat me both in time and in eloquence. See "STOP" above.
..to discover that causality is gravity e.g. a pervasive quantistic effect on macro scale, affecting any complex network. See also J. Barbour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Time_%28book%29)
as if a million voices cried out...
Just yesterday I read this 2007 review of Hofstadter's Strange Loop by Gardner, and it starts
When I read this I thought, as much as I admire Martin Gardner, what a stupid thing to say. How can a galaxy, i.e. something that contains solar systems that contain at least one biosphere that contains billions of human brains, be less complex than a human brain. This assertion could only be true if you use some measure of complexity that discounts smaller dimensions, that regards complexity only on the outer layers of something. Now I see he might be wrong even on the galactic level.
There are certain constraints for the most efficient transfer of energy. Systems designed or evolved to take advantage of more efficient designs should exhibit similarities.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Maybe this is just because we use the same neural mechanisms we think with to phrase scientific theories and build models of networks? Just a thought.
If you look at enough phenomena, and generalize the description adequately, you'll find equivalences in a variety of strange places. The XKCD strip from friday is a good example. Also, If I see a picture of Jesus in my toast, can I get funding for a study? Seems to be the same "phenomena" at work.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Pop-science interest in the brain should be applauded. But we need to be careful. This headline makes it sound like our brain is similar to the Universe. It isn't, or at least it remains to be seen.
The authors original work (not the linked article) shows that the clustering of the brain is actually not the same... (See Figure 4b) and the authors never make the claim in their original paper that it these two are similar. (See: http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121113/srep00793/full/srep00793.html )
One also needs to take the inclusion of the brain in this study with a 10^8 grains of salt. It is not even the structure of the brain that was even used for the comparison. What is actually used is what was seen during a study of fMRI data on perceived connectivity. Take a look at the methods in the study that the data in the paper came from: http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0309092.pdf fMRI is an extremely questionable way of understanding connectivity. I think the authors would have been better served to leave the brain out... or invite a neuroscientist as a co-author.
Krioukov should stick to relevant science. This other paper he wrote was much more useful. Apparently it got him out of a speeding ticket.
I'm going to have to look up the original paper published by Krioukov, but what was mentioned in the article itself is not news. I imagine this is a consequence of Krioukov trying to explain his findings in laymen's terms.
What the article actually says is a pretty basic exposition of the findings of network science and complex systems theory over the past few years. For those interested in but unfamiliar with these matters, I recommend a volume written a couple of years ago by the physicist Albert-László Barabási called Linked: The New Science of Networks . It is written for a wide audience and is a very readable introduction to the subject. Barabási's based argument is that these common network patterns we see in so many environments is a consequence both growth and preferential attachment in systems. Of course, growth and preferential attachment are going to be present in biological and social systems, as well as things like computer networks, and this is at the heart of why we see similar patterns forming (esp. scale-free topologies).
As a historian, I find the findings of network science as its been applied to social systems particularly useful. It helps to explain societal changes in ways that older theories of history, whether deriving from Marxian, Annaliste, Weberian, or other schools of thought, would have difficulty. Further, the study of networks and complex systems is inherently interdisciplinary--and this in a refreshingly honest way rather than the mere "interdisciplinarity" rhetoric that's been present in the academy over the years. For those interested in the application of network science to the social sciences, there is a very nice collection of seminal articles for the field edited by Gernot Grabher and Walter Powell.
It just sounds like fractal self-similarity to me. An ocean full of waves made up of water, which is made of atoms, where the electron states are governed by wave equations.
This is just more Chopra-esque woo. The entire idea amounts to seeing images in clouds: our minds see patterns and similarities all over the place, even when there are none in reality.
No, the laws that govern the formation of structure in the universe really have nothing whatsoever to do with the laws that govern the formation of brains, let alone the Internet. These are three very different kinds of things with three very different mechanisms for building them, and which do very different things. The fact that they are networks or network-like (in the case of the large scale stucture of the universe, which isn't actually a network) is pretty much the only thing that connects them.
Finally, let me just point out that the claim that these networks are "asymptotically similar" is just flagrantly incorrect. The asymptotic state of our universe is completely empty space. It's not a network, or even a semblance of a network: it's vacuum. The appearance of a network that we see today is merely a temporary, transient phenomenon that will go away in time (I'm not sure the exact time scale, but I expect probably tens of billions to trillions of years should do it). There will still be stars and galaxies long after the appearance of the network has been completely wiped away: the universe will become a series of islands separated by vast distances as the filaments collapse into the more massive clusters of galaxies or are stretched to nothingness with the expansion.
So no, this crud should be chucked in the woo bin where it belongs.
The article is disappointingly vague and hand-wavy. Either the science is bullshit, or this summary is. Given that it's from India, I am leaning towards guessing the former; there's a lot of great research that happens in the country, but there's also a lot of pseudoscience that happens that's designed to give warm fuzzies to Indian nationalists who think they can undo the horrors of colonialisation and recapture national pride by beating the drum of "Vedic Math". Some of their flashier salesmen make it to the US and sell it to deluded new-agers and the other uneducated, portraying it as exotic deep knowledge "from the East".
I find it hard to believe that claims like this are supportable as good science at this point.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
</article>
There, now you don't have to read it.
fractal patterns? -___-
Where exactly may i find the article? All I can extract from the linked news feed is a lot of "we finally caught up with ancient Greeks"...
Thanks to those scientists we now know that the Higher Power that created the universes is either using a templating system or has very strict design patterns, which means that if someone finds a flaw in internet the exploit could possibly be reused to hack the human brain or even destroy the universe. Let's hope the terrorists don't find out!
lucm, indeed.
'By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain or a computer,'
Of course not "global". I claim the universe is universal computer.
I've always thought there was something strangely similar about the structure of an orange and the Earths magnetosphere.
Fuck everyone bringing religion into this too btw....
...it's full of stars...
ok, i don't know if anyone else has spotted this, but there's a link between avogadro's constant, background radiation, and golden mean ratio.
take the background radiation (number of hydrogen atoms per square metre). divide by golden mean ratio cubed. invert. the number, completely coincidentally, comes out to around 6.023e23.
amazing, huh?
Bathtub - Solar system - Galaxy. Kaching!
John Archibald Wheeler was also a supporter of a participatory universe - as noted in the wiki page. Quantum physics needs an observer so the universe evolves to have an observer present to make it happen. So next time you look through a powerful telescope at something no one has seen before, remember, Thou art God
Finding similarities in abstractions is what humans do. If humans can describe something based on patterns that humans are capable of processing, then we will probably find them elsewhere! Abstraction doesn't give us mystical powers that allow us to divine the "true nature" of the universe (let alone understand what that questions means).
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Why not state it here?
You find what you look for.
Computers use local (as they perceive it) communication to simulate anything.
What do they find? Mirabile dictu, everything behaves in exactly the same way, at least in some appropriately-defined asymptotic limit.
D'oh.
Somewhere in this thread there is the claim that a description of reality must not be infinitely long. Who said? Because Newton successfully analysed an anomalously simple system, all of nature is going to work that way?
When I was applying to a prestigious school to major in physics, the interviewer asked me if I didn't think physics was already sort of worn out, spending ever more money to discover one more particle whose explanation required even more exotic explanations that would have made alchemists blush. Physics is worn out. Computational science is worn out. You have already all that you can accomplish with your machines with (potentially) countably-infinite state and local communication.
Maybe nature really does work the way you think it does, except that you can't really explain (or, even more important, predict) anything that matters.
From the article:
Of course the network representing the structure of the universe is astronomically huge – in fact it can be infinite. But even if it is finite, researchers’ best guess is that it is no smaller than 10250 atoms of space and time.
The internet has not only made the world a smaller place, but the entire universe.
Chaos Theory - try reading up on it
The notion that laws of physics govern the universe is a bit simplistic. Consider laws as a scribbling on a piece of paper that is stuffed in a paper bag. Laws do nothing. Laws do not interact with each other nor do they create. A Prime Mover is required to create those laws in such a way that they co-exist or work in concert and a Prime Mover must give force to those laws as well. In other words a law of physics is only a creation of a superior being that serves his purposes. Evolution is simply another crayon in God's coloring book.
"The human brain is like an enormous fish -- it is flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see."
-- Monty Python
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
pass that shit over here.
Benoit Mandelbrot was onto something. Fractals are everywhere now that we know what to look for.
What is this wonder-filled universe?
What constitutes seed?
What centers the universal wheel?
Same equations have same solutions
Richard Feynman
... another structure found in the universe, the internet and human brains!
"andaththil ullathu pindaththil" - a Tamil quote, rough translations goes like, "like universe like body"
Do they claim that the universe is a global brain or a computer?
Is here.
And posted on /. 2 or 3 times (reposts). Not new to this, just pointing it out like a douche.
"Universe found out to be a global brain or a computer! Scientists deny it all!"
Al Gore created the Universe!
Jurgen (14843) below was kind enough to provide a link to the original paper below. There is actually some news here, but it's obscured by the news article linked. The news article discusses the common structure between brains, the internet, and the cosmos. This is not news for anyone familiar with complex systems. (And those who're unfamiliar with complex systems are easy to find here, because they're posting about this being bad science.)
The news from the academic article, as I understand it, lies in their study of the causal sets, the "quantum network which underlies the fabric of spacetime." The node degree distribution of this network approaches a power law (has scale invariance, etc.), but isn't there yet.
This is fairly straightforward stuff and I hope some of the naysayers on this article will reconsider.
Fucking fractals! How do they work?
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
I'm not sure why this is "news". This has been known for quite some time. The book Linked is a pretty good, basic overview.
I prefer to think that the way the universe is is the way the universe is and that we just tend to see patterns in it because we are broken and need to change our perspective to that where the pattern is the default.
Changing maths to a base system on prime numbers doesn't work apparently. I don't know why.
A blog I run for the wealth
... have known for decades. .. unless one's face is so buried in the obvious that one can't see the whole picture.
obvious is obvious
Maybe the common thread behind the similarity is the method of reducing the problem so as to run efficiently on your favorite big iron.
I don't trust their portrayal of what they've discovered as far as I can spit. The details given are far below the threshold of critical thinking. Properly, a claim like this needs a triple helping of sharp knives.
The universe may grow like a giant brain, according to a new computer simulation. The results, published Nov. 16 in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports, suggest that some undiscovered, fundamental laws may govern the growth of systems large and small, from the electrical firing between brain cells and growth of social networks to the expansion of galaxies. "Natural growth dynamics are the same for different real networks, like the Internet or the brain or social networks," said study co-author Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at the University of California San Diego. The new study suggests a single fundamental law of nature may govern these networks, said physicist Kevin Bassler of the University of Houston, who was not involved in the study. [What's That? Your Physics Questions Answered] "At first blush they seem to be quite different systems, the question is, is there some kind of controlling laws can describe them?" he told LiveScience. By raising this question, "their work really makes a pretty important contribution," he said. Similar Networks Past studies showed brain circuits and the Internet look a lot alike. But despite finding this functional similarity, nobody had developed equations to perfectly predict how computer networks, brain circuits or social networks grow over time, Krioukov said. Using Einstein's equations of relativity, which explain how matter warps the fabric of space-time, physicists can retrace the universe's explosive birth in the Big Bang roughly 14 billion years ago and how it has expanded outward in the eons since. So Krioukov's team wondered whether the universe's accelerating growth could provide insight into the ways social networks or brain circuits expand. Brain cells and galaxies The team created a computer simulation that broke the early universe into the tiniest possible units -- quanta of space-time more miniscule than subatomic particles. The simulation linked any quanta, or nodes in a massive celestial network, that were causally related. (Nothing travels faster than light, so if a person hits a baseball on Earth, the ripple effects of that event could never reach an alien in a distant galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, meaning those two regions of space-time aren't causally related.) As the simulation progressed, it added more and more space-time to the history of the universe, and so its "network" connections between matter in galaxies, grew as well, Krioukov said. When the team compared the universe's history with growth of social networks and brain circuits, they found all the networks expanded in similar ways: They balanced links between similar nodes with ones that already had many connections. For instance, a cat lover surfing the Internet may visit mega-sites such as Google or Yahoo, but will also browse cat fancier websites or YouTube kitten videos. In the same way, neighboring brain cells like to connect, but neurons also link to such "Google brain cells" that are hooked up to loads of other brain cells. The eerie similarity between networks large and small is unlikely to be a coincidence, Krioukov said. "For a physicist it's an immediate signal that there is some missing understanding of how nature works," Krioukov said. It's more likely that some unknown law governs the way networks grow and change, from the smallest brain cells to the growth of mega-galaxies, Krioukov said. "This result suggests that maybe we should start looking for it," Krioukov told LiveScience.
. http://m.cbsnews.com/fullstory.rbml?catid=57554473&feed_id=null&videofeed=null
We already know that the planet Earth was created by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings as part of a ten-million-year program running a computational matrix to compute the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Is it so far-fetched to believe the Universe itself is not the Internet of Life?
On the other hand, there is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. ...perhaps we should cease this investigation to save all of existence from being wiped out.
By performing complex supercomputer simulations of the universe and using a variety of other calculations, researchers have now proven that the causal network representing the large-scale structure of space and time in our accelerating universe is a graph that shows remarkable similarity to many complex networks such as the Internet, social, or even biological networks.
Also, the dark matter filaments. Anyone else agree? Holographic mind, holographic DNA, holographic universe, all information everywhere all at once. Domain Name Servers, DeoxyriboNucleic Acid? Maybe when we get this entanglement stuff mastered. I can't wait for zero latency online gaming. Telepathic holodecks. Speaking of acid, this shit is stroooooooong. Must be the DMT in it. Same DMT made by our holographic minds when we dream, aka, subconscious exploring potentialities of meaning, same DMT made by fungus (Wood Wide Web?), same DMT made by plants.
... haha just kidding. There is no door.
It's like we, I mean God, I mean, I and I programmed a Sims video game, but the point of the game is to get your avatar to independently realize s/he's just an extension of you. In fact every avatar in the game is. What would you tell that avatar? Be nice to the other ones you see, because they are also me, and therefore also you? Do you believe in the User? Whoops, I hear Agent Smith at the do
Captcha: locality. Now that's ironic.