Oh but if he did that he'd lose his chance to talk uninformed shit on Slashdot about how they should screw testing and calibration and ramp the LHC up to full immediately!
haha, are you suggesting that europe pumps over 14bn euro into a machine and then because some people are slightly impatient, they should whack it up to 11 to see what happens?
"hey, we've not done any tests yet, why are you ramping it up to 7Tev?"
"some guy on slashdot's getting impatient."
"some guy on slashdot's getting impatient!? what are we waiting for??"
*disturbing explosion from underground*
"oh. shit."
science will start in january/february. to be honest, what they're finishing up now is calibrating the detectors which is pretty vital -- and even so they've run beams with more energy than any accelerator ever has before. or do you plan to somehow puzzle out the observations by the power of voodoo?
If you're still reading this then it's a matter of scale.
Let's for the sake of conceptual clarity phrase things as "forces". The "force" pushing galaxies apart is extremely, extremely weak, but it acts on cosmological scales because the distances are so large that it outweighs the usual gravitational attraction between them. As soon as objects get closer together their mutual attraction quickly outweighs the expansion. By the time you get to the solar system, you're in a series of nested gravitational wells -- that of the local group, that of the milky way, that of our local group of stars, that of the sun and, finally, that of the earth.
Speaking more rigorously, we'd have to talk about the metrics we experience. Relativity is a non-linear theory, so you can't simply add a Schwarzschild (or Kerr, or whatever) metric representing the sun's gravitational field onto the Robertson-Walker metric representing the universe as a whole, but let's pretend that we can. Then on very large scales -- and we're meaning *very* large scales, ~100Mpc and above, matter is so homogeneous that the Robertson-Walker metric holds. *On and above these scales* the universe is then expanding. When yu go below these scales you get clumpy structures in the matter, which we can think of as little droplets of Schwarzschild metrics poked into the Robertson-Walker. On these scales, you don't feel an expansion because you're not living in a Robertson-Walker, you're living in a Scwarzschild.
No idea if that helps at all. Also you may be interested to know that your line of thinking is neither new nro actually totally wrong -- people have constructed ways of embedding a Scwarzschild properly into a Robertson-Walker (it's called a McVittie metric) that represents a point particle in an expanding universe. With this they can then test the effects of an expanding universe on local measurements in the solar system.
(I'd not trust any results from that absolutely, merely qualitatively, since in reality we'd be wanting to patch a Schwarzschild to a few billion other local Schwarzschilds before we get anywhere near the universe scale.)
yeah, there is. we can't measure gravity very well because it's so weak, so we can only test it to about 0.1mm or whatever the current limit is. then when you go to larger scales odd things like dark matter and, worse, dark energy crop up which may well suggest that relativity is wrong.
on the other hand, quantum electrodynamics can be verified in the lab to about 9 decimal places or so, an accuracy that relativity can't even dream of. it may even be 13 decimal places these days. if one of them's wrong, it's definitely general relativity.
of course, this being reality, *both* of them are wrong in the right circumstances, and both of them are right under different circumstances. raising them to a tenet of faith is silly -- they're algorithms that describe what we expect to happen in a given situation. as an example, you throw a ball across a field. do we want to analyse it using a full relativistic solution which, given the nature of the earth, would have to be akin to a kerr-newman solution, incorporating the entire flow of the atmosphere around us? yes, we could, but it would take the world's fastest supercomputers quite a long time to do it. so we just use newtonian mechanics because they're perfectly valid in that regime...
Plenty of things. Swap to Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates and you very easily see that there's nothing odd at the event horizon whatsoever, whether a shield or anything else...
You could argue he made the assumption partly because no-one had ever observed the earth's velocity relative to the aether, which either implies that the Earth is in the absolute rest frame of the universe and everything orbits around us, or that electromagnetic waves do not propagate through an aether and so Maxwell's equations do not pick out any preferred references frame; and partly for the simple reason that they derive the Lorentz transformations which were already known to solve the problem.
I don't think Einstein ever actually claimed that the latter was an inspiration in formulating SR, but I strongly suspect that if he *hadn't* found the Lorentz transformations he would have found different arguments until he did finally find them...
1) Schwarzchild was not the first to describe a black hole; that would be some cleric in the late 18th century in Britain whose name I have forgotten.
2) Schwarzchild found black hole solutions in relativity by solving the vacuum Einstein equations for a spherically-symmetric spacetime. Doing so leads, absolutely inevitably, to the existence of an event horizon (which is riddled with singularities, all of them unphysical and removeable) behind which hides a bewildering patch of spacetime where time becomes space and one space dimension becomes time and everything is inevitably swept to a singularity. He didn't divide by zero, the singularity comes up all by itself.
No, that's not actually the starting point of special relativity and it's got really nothing to do with general relativity.
Special relativity, if you wish to formulate it like that, comes from postulating that the velocity of light as seen from unaccelerated frames of reference is always the same -- this is *not* the same as saying that nothing travels faster than light; that is, instead, a result of this hypothesis.
General relativity, ultimately, comes from stating that the fact that all objects regardless of mass fall under gravity with the same acceleration isn't an accident. If you think about it, this is an absolutely unnatural situation. Imagine any force -- any actual force. Then the heavier an object is, the less it accelerates for a given force. Simple physics. Gravity doesn't do that. What other force doesn't? Well, centrifugal force. And as people who've never studied anything in rotating reference frames are fond of pointing out, centrifugal force does not exist -- centrifugal force is a fictional force. The hallmark of a fictional force is that it imparts an equal acceleration on all objects. If one assumes that this is due to the fundamental nature of gravity, then by some relatively straightforward reasoning (tied to some not-so-straightforward differential geometry) one is lead to something that resembles general relativity, a "metric" theory of gravity that explains gravity as the manifestation of geometry in some manner.
(General relativity itself is then found by postulating, based chiefly on the sheer simplicity of it, some equations tying the metric to the distribution of matter, known as the Einstein equations.)
In general relativity, the fact that nothign can travel faster than light is, firstly, not actually absolutely true due not least to ambiguities in how to define distance and time in arbitrary curved reference frames and, secondly, linked chiefly to the geodesics that particles travel on. A "spacelike" (FTL) geodesic cannot become a timelike (slower than light) geodesic, at least not in a non-pathological spacetime. (I've never seen a spacetime where this could happen, but I'll never say never just in case I'm wrong...)
DO NOT EAT AT AN ANGUS STEAKHOUSE or similar. They are expensive tourist traps that serve revolting food. Nobody goes twice. If you're wise you don't go once.
But if you do go to Edinburgh for the love of God don't make the mistake of saying anything that implies you think you're still in England.
Actually, that's good advice in general -- the English generally don't give a shit but everyone else tends to get very twitchy about what you call things. England, the UK and Britain are not synonyms. It's best to say "Britain" or "the UK" pretty much universally and try and forget you ever heard the word "England". (Hypocritically, this is reasonable in Scotland or Wales but there you're better using the words "Scotland" or "Wales" in preference.) Even if you're staying in London it's got enough people from all over the UK that you could absolutely inadvertently cause offense and then have some Scottish guy lecture you aggressively for three hours about English arrogance etc etc etc they take our oil etc etc etc Culloden etc etc etc.
Well, I've got a couple of comments on that. Firstly, the article isn't talking about dark matter which is an entirely separate issue to dark energy -- effectively, dark matter is gravitationally attractive and appears on scales ranging from galactic to cosmological, while dark energy is gravitationally repulsive and appears on cosmological scales. Secondly, the search for dark matter cannot (yet) be compared to the search for the aether and any such comment, without being qualified and backed-up with reasonable arguments, is uneducated. The evidence for "dark matter" (meaning an apparent weakness of gravity on galactic and supergalactic scales) is extremely strong -- the problem is there. The next question is simply whether something is wrong with the theory of gravity, which is certainly possible, or whether there is actually missing matter of some form out there.
Taking the second view first, which is more or less the current view, there are plenty of ways that we can get "dark matter". The simplest is simply matter that is difficult to see -- but there are problems with this and it is unlikely that it makes up a significant amount of the problem. Then you get more interesting models. The immediate particle candidate is a neutrino. Neutrinos exist, of this we can be sure, and they appear to have a small but non-vanishing mass -- of this we can be very confident. (This immediately tells us, by the way, that the standard model of particle physics in its simplest form is flawed since it predicts neutrinos of vanishing mass.) Since neutrinos interact only very weakly with matter, they are an immediate dark matter candidate. The problem is that if you make all teh dark matter in the universe the result of massive neutrinos you wash out cosmic structure -- it just doesn't fit observations. So it can't be (entirely) neutrinos. The most common candidate at hte minute would be neutralino, which is the supersymmetric partner of a neutrino. If you believe supersymmetry (which personally I don't, quite, but plenty of people do and there are very good reasons to believe that there's something in it) then you believe in supersymmetric partners; and you also must believe in a *lightest* supersymmetric partner. This particle will be stable, since it can't easily decay into non-supersymmetric particles. In most models, this particle is the neutralino. The hope is that its mass may be such that we can detect it at the LHC. If we do, much of the dark matter problem will be immediately solved -- there would be neutralinos in enough numbers to fit the observations.
The first view, that of modifying gravity itself, is an old one -- and a current one too. It is entirely wrong of you to suggest that people aren't "developing" the theory, since they are and have been ever since Einstein proposed general relativity in the first place. The main ways of modifying relativity come from adding an extra (scalar) degree of freedom into the theory; this can either be done by literally adding in a scalar degree of freedom (which ultimately makes Newton's "constant" time-dependent) or by modifying the "action", the function that generates the equations of motion, such that the Einstein action linearly dependent on the Ricci scalar becomes instead an arbitrary function of the Ricci scalar.
You can struggle to get dark *matter* out of such theories, but if you go one step further and also add in additional vector degrees of freedom, then you have dark matter along with dark energy. (And a really ugly theory.) The other advantage is that you can tune the theory such that in the non-relativistic limit it matches the predictions of "MOND" (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics), which is a purely phenomenological "theory" that aims to predict galactic rotation curves without recourse to dark matter. Effectively, in MOND there is a minimum acceleration below which the nature of gravity changes. With this simple idea, you get startlingly good agreements with many observations (and truly rubbish ones with others, it must be said). The benefit of the
Fucking hell, are you that daft? No-one can pick anything dubious out of MIE without really, really trying hard, whereas everyone knows what a gimp is. The name is fucking horrible and I'd be very surprised if the full name came first and the abbreviation second rather than the other way around.
"LOL you know what would be really funny? Calling the program GIMP because then we can claim it's from Gnu Image ManiPulator! HehhehicSNORT."
It's a horrible name and should be changed if they want it to actually grow any further -- and I say this using it daily.
Yeah but to repeat the title of the thread, Who cares? It's lossless -- buy it in FLAC, by it in TAK (yeah, right) buy it in ALAC, buy it in WAV, who cares? Transcode it to ALAC to put on your iPod and transcode it to FLAC to leave yourself with the warm fuzzy feeling that you've done right by the Free and Open-Source Software community. You don't lose anything but a small amount of time.
Flame wars over lossless codecs might be the future, but it's a bloody silly future.
So...would you suggest a musician use his laptop speakers during mix down?
Yes. And big, bassy speakers, and tinny little headphones, and reasonable headphones, and normal computer speakers, and a decent system. He should use *every setup he can recreate* that his listeners could possibly be using, to make sure the mix sounds fine on all of them. This involves compromises, prioritising - but it has to be done. Any sound engineer or musician who doesn't do it is skimping on the job.
this "news" article has managed to find these shocking truths:
a) MP3 encoded with LAME goes transparent to most ears at or below 192kbs, which has been known for a good few years now and with current versions of Lame can be pushed lower still
b) MP3 encoded with LAME at 320kbs is transparent to everyone who isn't deluding themselves, which is hardly a surprise given that MP3 encoded with LAME goes transparent to most ears at or below 192kbs, as been known for a good few years now
Seriously, what is this non-news doing here? There have been plenty of actually controlled tests studying when lossy formats become transparent; and comparing them with FLAC rather than comparing them with the original CD is a meaningless addition since, by definition, unless someone did something seriously stupid during the encoding the FLAC is identical to the CD.
and doubtless the people who did this work have a very good reason not to do this, but why waste your time on a problem they've already accepted is ill-defined? Why not just make a 4D Mandelhyperbulb and then take slices through it? That way you could actually say that you *do* have a higher-dimensional Mandelbrot set, and still have 3D figures that you can render on a computer screen. This arbitrary "Let's make a 3D Mandelbulb by, err, fucking about a bit and not actually doing anything properly" is remarkably unsatisfactory -- and they seem to acknowledge that themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh but if he did that he'd lose his chance to talk uninformed shit on Slashdot about how they should screw testing and calibration and ramp the LHC up to full immediately!
haha, are you suggesting that europe pumps over 14bn euro into a machine and then because some people are slightly impatient, they should whack it up to 11 to see what happens?
"hey, we've not done any tests yet, why are you ramping it up to 7Tev?"
"some guy on slashdot's getting impatient."
"some guy on slashdot's getting impatient!? what are we waiting for??"
*disturbing explosion from underground*
"oh. shit."
science will start in january/february. to be honest, what they're finishing up now is calibrating the detectors which is pretty vital -- and even so they've run beams with more energy than any accelerator ever has before. or do you plan to somehow puzzle out the observations by the power of voodoo?
If you're still reading this then it's a matter of scale.
Let's for the sake of conceptual clarity phrase things as "forces". The "force" pushing galaxies apart is extremely, extremely weak, but it acts on cosmological scales because the distances are so large that it outweighs the usual gravitational attraction between them. As soon as objects get closer together their mutual attraction quickly outweighs the expansion. By the time you get to the solar system, you're in a series of nested gravitational wells -- that of the local group, that of the milky way, that of our local group of stars, that of the sun and, finally, that of the earth.
Speaking more rigorously, we'd have to talk about the metrics we experience. Relativity is a non-linear theory, so you can't simply add a Schwarzschild (or Kerr, or whatever) metric representing the sun's gravitational field onto the Robertson-Walker metric representing the universe as a whole, but let's pretend that we can. Then on very large scales -- and we're meaning *very* large scales, ~100Mpc and above, matter is so homogeneous that the Robertson-Walker metric holds. *On and above these scales* the universe is then expanding. When yu go below these scales you get clumpy structures in the matter, which we can think of as little droplets of Schwarzschild metrics poked into the Robertson-Walker. On these scales, you don't feel an expansion because you're not living in a Robertson-Walker, you're living in a Scwarzschild.
No idea if that helps at all. Also you may be interested to know that your line of thinking is neither new nro actually totally wrong -- people have constructed ways of embedding a Scwarzschild properly into a Robertson-Walker (it's called a McVittie metric) that represents a point particle in an expanding universe. With this they can then test the effects of an expanding universe on local measurements in the solar system.
(I'd not trust any results from that absolutely, merely qualitatively, since in reality we'd be wanting to patch a Schwarzschild to a few billion other local Schwarzschilds before we get anywhere near the universe scale.)
yeah, there is. we can't measure gravity very well because it's so weak, so we can only test it to about 0.1mm or whatever the current limit is. then when you go to larger scales odd things like dark matter and, worse, dark energy crop up which may well suggest that relativity is wrong.
on the other hand, quantum electrodynamics can be verified in the lab to about 9 decimal places or so, an accuracy that relativity can't even dream of. it may even be 13 decimal places these days. if one of them's wrong, it's definitely general relativity.
of course, this being reality, *both* of them are wrong in the right circumstances, and both of them are right under different circumstances. raising them to a tenet of faith is silly -- they're algorithms that describe what we expect to happen in a given situation. as an example, you throw a ball across a field. do we want to analyse it using a full relativistic solution which, given the nature of the earth, would have to be akin to a kerr-newman solution, incorporating the entire flow of the atmosphere around us? yes, we could, but it would take the world's fastest supercomputers quite a long time to do it. so we just use newtonian mechanics because they're perfectly valid in that regime...
Plenty of things. Swap to Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates and you very easily see that there's nothing odd at the event horizon whatsoever, whether a shield or anything else...
(Point taken though. :) )
You could argue he made the assumption partly because no-one had ever observed the earth's velocity relative to the aether, which either implies that the Earth is in the absolute rest frame of the universe and everything orbits around us, or that electromagnetic waves do not propagate through an aether and so Maxwell's equations do not pick out any preferred references frame; and partly for the simple reason that they derive the Lorentz transformations which were already known to solve the problem.
I don't think Einstein ever actually claimed that the latter was an inspiration in formulating SR, but I strongly suspect that if he *hadn't* found the Lorentz transformations he would have found different arguments until he did finally find them...
Whut?
1) Schwarzchild was not the first to describe a black hole; that would be some cleric in the late 18th century in Britain whose name I have forgotten.
2) Schwarzchild found black hole solutions in relativity by solving the vacuum Einstein equations for a spherically-symmetric spacetime. Doing so leads, absolutely inevitably, to the existence of an event horizon (which is riddled with singularities, all of them unphysical and removeable) behind which hides a bewildering patch of spacetime where time becomes space and one space dimension becomes time and everything is inevitably swept to a singularity. He didn't divide by zero, the singularity comes up all by itself.
No, that's not actually the starting point of special relativity and it's got really nothing to do with general relativity.
Special relativity, if you wish to formulate it like that, comes from postulating that the velocity of light as seen from unaccelerated frames of reference is always the same -- this is *not* the same as saying that nothing travels faster than light; that is, instead, a result of this hypothesis.
General relativity, ultimately, comes from stating that the fact that all objects regardless of mass fall under gravity with the same acceleration isn't an accident. If you think about it, this is an absolutely unnatural situation. Imagine any force -- any actual force. Then the heavier an object is, the less it accelerates for a given force. Simple physics. Gravity doesn't do that. What other force doesn't? Well, centrifugal force. And as people who've never studied anything in rotating reference frames are fond of pointing out, centrifugal force does not exist -- centrifugal force is a fictional force. The hallmark of a fictional force is that it imparts an equal acceleration on all objects. If one assumes that this is due to the fundamental nature of gravity, then by some relatively straightforward reasoning (tied to some not-so-straightforward differential geometry) one is lead to something that resembles general relativity, a "metric" theory of gravity that explains gravity as the manifestation of geometry in some manner.
(General relativity itself is then found by postulating, based chiefly on the sheer simplicity of it, some equations tying the metric to the distribution of matter, known as the Einstein equations.)
In general relativity, the fact that nothign can travel faster than light is, firstly, not actually absolutely true due not least to ambiguities in how to define distance and time in arbitrary curved reference frames and, secondly, linked chiefly to the geodesics that particles travel on. A "spacelike" (FTL) geodesic cannot become a timelike (slower than light) geodesic, at least not in a non-pathological spacetime. (I've never seen a spacetime where this could happen, but I'll never say never just in case I'm wrong...)
DO NOT EAT AT AN ANGUS STEAKHOUSE or similar. They are expensive tourist traps that serve revolting food. Nobody goes twice. If you're wise you don't go once.
Hahahahahaha! The best advice on this page yet.
Actually I was about to advise Cambridge instead of Oxford until you mentioned the Pitt Rivers museum.
Now I want to get back to Oxford. I've not been in the Pitt Rivers since I was 10 or 11.
But if you do go to Edinburgh for the love of God don't make the mistake of saying anything that implies you think you're still in England.
Actually, that's good advice in general -- the English generally don't give a shit but everyone else tends to get very twitchy about what you call things. England, the UK and Britain are not synonyms. It's best to say "Britain" or "the UK" pretty much universally and try and forget you ever heard the word "England". (Hypocritically, this is reasonable in Scotland or Wales but there you're better using the words "Scotland" or "Wales" in preference.) Even if you're staying in London it's got enough people from all over the UK that you could absolutely inadvertently cause offense and then have some Scottish guy lecture you aggressively for three hours about English arrogance etc etc etc they take our oil etc etc etc Culloden etc etc etc.
Well, I've got a couple of comments on that. Firstly, the article isn't talking about dark matter which is an entirely separate issue to dark energy -- effectively, dark matter is gravitationally attractive and appears on scales ranging from galactic to cosmological, while dark energy is gravitationally repulsive and appears on cosmological scales. Secondly, the search for dark matter cannot (yet) be compared to the search for the aether and any such comment, without being qualified and backed-up with reasonable arguments, is uneducated. The evidence for "dark matter" (meaning an apparent weakness of gravity on galactic and supergalactic scales) is extremely strong -- the problem is there. The next question is simply whether something is wrong with the theory of gravity, which is certainly possible, or whether there is actually missing matter of some form out there.
Taking the second view first, which is more or less the current view, there are plenty of ways that we can get "dark matter". The simplest is simply matter that is difficult to see -- but there are problems with this and it is unlikely that it makes up a significant amount of the problem. Then you get more interesting models. The immediate particle candidate is a neutrino. Neutrinos exist, of this we can be sure, and they appear to have a small but non-vanishing mass -- of this we can be very confident. (This immediately tells us, by the way, that the standard model of particle physics in its simplest form is flawed since it predicts neutrinos of vanishing mass.) Since neutrinos interact only very weakly with matter, they are an immediate dark matter candidate. The problem is that if you make all teh dark matter in the universe the result of massive neutrinos you wash out cosmic structure -- it just doesn't fit observations. So it can't be (entirely) neutrinos. The most common candidate at hte minute would be neutralino, which is the supersymmetric partner of a neutrino. If you believe supersymmetry (which personally I don't, quite, but plenty of people do and there are very good reasons to believe that there's something in it) then you believe in supersymmetric partners; and you also must believe in a *lightest* supersymmetric partner. This particle will be stable, since it can't easily decay into non-supersymmetric particles. In most models, this particle is the neutralino. The hope is that its mass may be such that we can detect it at the LHC. If we do, much of the dark matter problem will be immediately solved -- there would be neutralinos in enough numbers to fit the observations.
The first view, that of modifying gravity itself, is an old one -- and a current one too. It is entirely wrong of you to suggest that people aren't "developing" the theory, since they are and have been ever since Einstein proposed general relativity in the first place. The main ways of modifying relativity come from adding an extra (scalar) degree of freedom into the theory; this can either be done by literally adding in a scalar degree of freedom (which ultimately makes Newton's "constant" time-dependent) or by modifying the "action", the function that generates the equations of motion, such that the Einstein action linearly dependent on the Ricci scalar becomes instead an arbitrary function of the Ricci scalar.
You can struggle to get dark *matter* out of such theories, but if you go one step further and also add in additional vector degrees of freedom, then you have dark matter along with dark energy. (And a really ugly theory.) The other advantage is that you can tune the theory such that in the non-relativistic limit it matches the predictions of "MOND" (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics), which is a purely phenomenological "theory" that aims to predict galactic rotation curves without recourse to dark matter. Effectively, in MOND there is a minimum acceleration below which the nature of gravity changes. With this simple idea, you get startlingly good agreements with many observations (and truly rubbish ones with others, it must be said). The benefit of the
Fucking hell, are you that daft? No-one can pick anything dubious out of MIE without really, really trying hard, whereas everyone knows what a gimp is. The name is fucking horrible and I'd be very surprised if the full name came first and the abbreviation second rather than the other way around.
"LOL you know what would be really funny? Calling the program GIMP because then we can claim it's from Gnu Image ManiPulator! HehhehicSNORT."
It's a horrible name and should be changed if they want it to actually grow any further -- and I say this using it daily.
Yeah but to repeat the title of the thread, Who cares? It's lossless -- buy it in FLAC, by it in TAK (yeah, right) buy it in ALAC, buy it in WAV, who cares? Transcode it to ALAC to put on your iPod and transcode it to FLAC to leave yourself with the warm fuzzy feeling that you've done right by the Free and Open-Source Software community. You don't lose anything but a small amount of time. Flame wars over lossless codecs might be the future, but it's a bloody silly future.
hahahahahahaha jog on
So...would you suggest a musician use his laptop speakers during mix down?
Yes. And big, bassy speakers, and tinny little headphones, and reasonable headphones, and normal computer speakers, and a decent system. He should use *every setup he can recreate* that his listeners could possibly be using, to make sure the mix sounds fine on all of them. This involves compromises, prioritising - but it has to be done. Any sound engineer or musician who doesn't do it is skimping on the job.
this "news" article has managed to find these shocking truths: a) MP3 encoded with LAME goes transparent to most ears at or below 192kbs, which has been known for a good few years now and with current versions of Lame can be pushed lower still b) MP3 encoded with LAME at 320kbs is transparent to everyone who isn't deluding themselves, which is hardly a surprise given that MP3 encoded with LAME goes transparent to most ears at or below 192kbs, as been known for a good few years now Seriously, what is this non-news doing here? There have been plenty of actually controlled tests studying when lossy formats become transparent; and comparing them with FLAC rather than comparing them with the original CD is a meaningless addition since, by definition, unless someone did something seriously stupid during the encoding the FLAC is identical to the CD.
and doubtless the people who did this work have a very good reason not to do this, but why waste your time on a problem they've already accepted is ill-defined? Why not just make a 4D Mandelhyperbulb and then take slices through it? That way you could actually say that you *do* have a higher-dimensional Mandelbrot set, and still have 3D figures that you can render on a computer screen. This arbitrary "Let's make a 3D Mandelbulb by, err, fucking about a bit and not actually doing anything properly" is remarkably unsatisfactory -- and they seem to acknowledge that themselves.