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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.
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
and you'll find the universal pattern is a big moving paisley pattern.
Be seeing you...
It's everywhere! In our names, our brains, the internet and even the stucture of our galaxies! Run, Run and tell the world!
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..."
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
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.
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.
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.
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There, now you don't have to read it.
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.
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?
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?
Exactly. I suspect that when people see the word "network" used, they misunderstand its meaning. The brain and the universe are not like networks and we do not merely see network patterns in them. They are in fact networks because by the word network we mean a set of interlinking or interacting nodes. Under this definition, it does not matter what sort interactions may occur. The interactions can carry data (computer network), electricity (the grid), nutrition (the food cycle in biology), or mass (as we find in the interaction, gravity, between stellar bodies, the nodes).
The interesting thing about these sets of interactions, is that similar topologies in the different nodes produce similar characteristics in the networks. OP is, therefore, quite mistaken to dismiss this as faux science. One cannot explain why computer networks, social systems, ecosystems, power-grids, and transportation networks can all have cascading failures without understanding that this property derives from network topology. It is sad to see anyone on Slashdot to be so dismissive of a relatively new and very useful science.
If I was going to post such blather, I'd do it as an AC too. Math is a way of expressing how we perceive things. It has absolutely nothing to do with how things actually are. It is the ultimate anthropomorphization of reality.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
"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..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkGeOWYOFoA :)
Duh. The "laws" we formulate are simply our attempts to describe and predict what we can observe. When you throw a ball, the simplified model of gravity and the ball you have in your head doesn't affect reality in any way other than helping you predict where the ball goes.
So?
We are all connected. Our posts, Karma Whores and Trolls alike, give birth to Slashdot. Our insights and banal pontification ripple through time. From womb to tomb, some folks are addicted to spending all their waking hours brain farting here and the best you can hope for is to be up wind.
Is here.
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.
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.