I found your post interesting in that I too have an occipital bun. More interesting is that I come from the North of England which Wikipedia mentioned was one of the rare places where such features are found.
However what is more surprising is that the article says that this is a trait common in Lancashire! As a Yorkshireman I'll never live this one down. Mind you it does make the old rhyme, which was probably written by Lancastrian, somewhat ironic: "Yorkshire born and Yorkshire bred, strong in the arm and thick in the head"!
This is something we'd be markedly less willing to do if we didn't use Windows ourselves.
Actually I think what they are worried about is that we would NOT be less willing to keep giving advice but that the advice would end up being "why don't you try out the Linux/BSD/... OS? I can fix it and make it do what you want and it is completely free."
I don't sign a EULA when I use my own machine. In fact I've never signed a EULA and, fortunately, in some (many?) coutries this means it is meaningless. So until MS requires people to physically sign the document I really don't care what they put in it.
Wrong - it detects photons of light and records their momenta (effectively). So a single photon detector (which I'm guessing they have on the hubble) - records the image of a photon as a single dot. Not a very informative picture of a photon but not the less is is AN image of a photon. This builds up into an image of a galaxy or whatnot but that image consists of single photon "pictures" added together.
Just because you don't think that a single 'dot' is much of an image is neither here not there.
If you want to get more pedantic (and don;t like the idea of a dot as a picture) then photon-photon scattering events from LEP (or elsewhere) could be considered "photograph" of photons since you detect "light" which has scattered off a single photon. Not quite your conventional photo but nevertheless consistent with your definition. So I would still argue that hyping this is "the fastest wave ever photographed" is wrong.
Hubble telescope pictures consist of photographing waves travelling at 100% of the speed of light in vacuum by definition!
For the pedants technically your own photographs generally don't count because the refractive index of air (1.0008) actually means that light waves in air will only travel at 99.92% of the speed of light in vacuum.
The sooner the myth that is diamonds is de-mythed, the better. Read more about diamond myths here.
Actually they got the first point of the FAQ wrong - a diamond is not forever even if you do take care of it. It is a metastable allotrope of carbon and will slowly convert to the thermodynamically favoured allotrope, graphite. It might take several billion years for a diamond to decay into graphite but that is still a lot less than forever.
The river swale, also in the Yorkshire dales, used to have a water level up the dale at Muker which rang a bell in Richmond police station about 40 miles downstream so that the police could come out and clear the tourists picnicing on the river banks when there was a cloud burst up on the tops and the sun was still shining in Richmond and the river was about to rapidly rise.
Reading the article I wonder whether this vastly more complex system is really going to work when the river is in full flood and metre sized boulders are scouring out the river bed and banks. I've seen Bluetooth mice having trouble communicating in indoor conditions at a distance of 2 metres.
Still it is not all bad - at least the sheep will get to enjoy their own WiFi connection.
...put a true "off switch" on the device. All TVs in Europe have (or at least used to have) a real off-switch that cut power consumption to zero. It was simplicity itself to turn on the TV when you wanted to start watching it pick up the remote control which was kept next to the TV and when you were done put the remote back and turn of the TV.
This not only cut standby power to zero for most of the day but also meant I never lost the remote down the back of the sofa! In addition it pretty much emliminated any fire risk from faulty electronics. When I moved to the US I was amazed that there was no such button on TVs there (and I've found it is the same in Canada as well).
Since I was unwilling to spend a minute squeezing my hand round the back of the entertainment centre to plug/unplug the TV and there were no switched on the plug sockets I ended up leaving the TV in standby. The only plus being that the incessant adverts on every channel meant I ended up almost cutting out TV watching when I was living in the US which, as was recently pointed out to me, somewhat ironic given the "TV culture" of the US!
You can aclimatise to heat easily as long as you never go near air conditioned space.
Unfortunately I grew up in an air conditioned space called Yorkshire (northern England) where the temparature rarely got too far away from comfortable in either direction. When I lived for several years in the US near Chicago the summer heat was not something I could acclimatize to and in fact it killed several hundred people in the city centre. When temperatures exceed 38C and the humidity is high there is no physical means for your body to loose heat and so you cannot simply shrug it off and say "I'll acclimatize" any more that I could stand outside in -35C weather wearing a T-shirt and shorts and claim I'll acclimatize to that too (although being a northerner I'll claim I can do the latter!:-)
The difference, which you're ignoring, is that the picture was not taken 10+ billion years ago.
I'm ignoring it for a good reason - it doesn't make any difference to the photo. Effectively it was taken 10+ billion years ago. There would be no difference between a photo of the galaxy taken 9 billion years ago at a distance 9 billion light years nearer to the galaxy and the one taken today from earth assuming red shift is corrected for. Essentially the photo is a 10+ billion year old pictures of galaxies which were a heck of a lot closer than 78 billion light years when the photo was effectively taken.
Our combined observations tell us a lot about cosmological evolution that is fairly model-independent; you can come up with different models to explain the same data, but the ultimate conclusions about the universe and how it is expanding are constrained to be mostly the same.
Yes but you are missing the point that I am trying to make. You are fitting models to the data to draw your conclusions which you state as observations. This is a lot different than a simple direct observation. Perhaps a better example, but far less well known, would be the theoretical calculation of the direct CP violation parameter e'/e which the leading theorists swore blind could not be above 1E-3 no matter how far they pushed their models. The experiment I worked on (and a similar one at Fermilab) both published measurements a few years later putting e'/e above 1E-3 in a statistically significant fashion and low and behold the theory groups re-evaluated some of their assumptions and suddenly could account for it.
Now in some ways this is an unfair comparison since non-perturbative QCD is fiendishly hard to get right since you have to make simplifying assumptions to be able to solve problems at all. On the other hand it only involves known physics. Plus, to be honest, I do believe that the WMAP/SN survey/etc. data really does point to dark matter and energy....just like I believe that at the LHC we will find a Higgs boson. In fact the Standard Model (with Higgs) is probably an excellent comparison. It is an excellent fit to the data - there is no better model out there. In fact you can even use the data to predict the mass of the Higgs boson. However you will not find any particle physicist who will tell you that the Higgs definitely exists (although I bet almost all of us believe that it does). The reason being that we have not yet directly observed the Higgs and so the possibility remains that there could be another explanation which nobody has thought of.
So how big is that possibility? I haven't a clue - I'd guess rather low but that is a guess. Being a particle physicist I (rightly or wrongly!) apply the same logic to the WMAP/Boomerang etc models. These are the best models out there, they agree with all the data but they predict something that we have not seen so I cannot help but think are there different models that we have not thought of with different new physics?
I suppose the point which I am trying to make is that once you have a model which requires new physics you are far less constrained than models which are consistent with known physics and you have to ask yourself is it possible you come up with some different new physics to explain the data? Historically we seem to have been pretty good at getting it right...but as I've heard them say in US financial commercials: past success is no guarentee of future performance!
Thanks for the book recommendation as well as the educational discussion! I know an overthrowing of GR would be a very unlikely prospect but my understanding was that some refinements could explain the galactic rotation curves (instead of dark matter haloes) but I did not know what the implications of that would be for the WMAP predictions. Although I understand that these models keep getting squeezed harder and harder and are becomming increasingly less believable.
Frankly, most people are not interested in how far away the galaxy used to be, and if you say "the distance to the galaxy is X lightyears" they will assume that means the distance now.
If I take a photo from the platform of a train pulling out of York station for Kings Cross and show it to someone saying "this is a picture of a train which is 200 miles away" I'd bet the first reaction would be "no it isn't" which would then be followed by "oh you mean now" but only because they know how big a train is. Repeat with a picture of a galaxy which you say is 78 billion light years away and I bet the understanding someone will take away from that will be this is a picture showing a galaxy that is 78 billion light years away. The reason being is that you usually describe what a picture shows in the picture not how things have changed since the picture was taken.
(Or are you talking about the MOND alternative to dark matter? It doesn't do well on the cosmological front, or even so much on the dark matter front nowadays.)
Sorry I should have been clearer - I meant MOND and variants. My understanding was that the cosmologocal constant was part of GR and not a modification to it (other than dropping Einstein's original conclusion that it had to be zero because there was no evidence for it!).
And, as I said, you can combine it with supernova surveys. Those have the advantage that you don't even need to assume GR dynamics, since with both luminosities and redshifts you can measure distances and times more or less directly.
This precisely demonstrates my point about observation being a lot riskier than experiment since it was only last week that I read of the observation of a supernova that was substantially brighter than it was supposed to be which now puts in doubt how accurate these supernova surveys are since the "standard candle" model is perhaps not correct. So how robust are predictions based on WMAP?
What I find fascinating about the WMAP data is that we either have to find some new particles to explain the dark matter and who knows what to explain the dark energy or some of the assumptions used to predict the dark matter/energy are wrong. Not being a cosmologist, and given that most cosmologists point at dark matter/energy I'm happy to take that as the most likely explanation....but until we can find the missing particles and understand what the dark energy is are you really extremely confident that all the assumptions used to mke that prediction are correct?
Look at the solar neutrino problem: people were convinced for years that the solar model was wrong (or the experiments were wrong) and in the end it simply turned out to be a wrong assumption that an electron neutrino remained an electron neutrino. Given that experience I can't help but wonder if there is not at least a small possibility of such another "obvious" (but wrong) assumption being made with the conclusions drawn from the WMAP data.
What if the small group of cosmologists pushing the "gravity is different at large distances" is correct? Doesn't that change the WMAP predictions to the size of the Universe? (and if so how?) I personally think this unlikely but my understanding is that we can't rule out this possibility yet. So doesn't this put any extrapolations on somewhat questionable ground?
Secondly (just for my interest!) I can understand how the expansion of space will give apparent superluminal velocities over large distances what is less clear to me is how we stay causally connected. This is particularly puzzling given that my understanding of inflation is that the expansion of space was superluminal and resulted in causally disconnected regions of space. So what's the difference between the two? I know we don't really know a lot about inflation but clearly we know enough to be sure that there is a difference between this and normal expansion.
(Heh, sorry that you're being tag-teammed by Anonymous Cowards).
No problem - nothing like a vigourous discussion with fellow physicists (I'm guessing!) for understanding things outside my area better! That being said if you could recommend a good graduate level cosmology text I'd be grateful. I'm a particle physicist without much GR background but with the recent developments in cosmology our fields are becoming ever closer together.
I think you and I are addressing different questions. I completely agree that the existance of a distant galaxy is irrelevant to the size of the Universe but when the narrator in the video says "these galaxies are 78 billion light years away" they are NOT 78 billion light years away in the photograph shown and likely do not existing in anything like the same form now. Thus my objection is to extrapolating the distance observed to the distance now without saying so.
If I understand correctly you can get from the WMAP data by itself the age and expansion of the universe which is all you need to calculate the current size so how does this image improve on that? You can't measure the Hubble constant from this image can you?
Regarding the inference of measurements there is a HUGE difference between inferring the proton size from scattering amplitudes and estimating the size of the Universe from WMAP data. Particle physics is an experimental science which means that we can (and have) repeated the experiment many times in a fully controlled laboratory setting where we can control (to some extent) what is going on. The WMAP data are based on observation: you have no control over the conditions. Additionally the WMAP data predict the existance of things we have no current explanation for like dark matter and dark energy which have lead some cosmologists to suggest that perhaps gravity doesn't work like we think it does at large distances. While I persomally think the dark metter/energy scenario is far more likely there are sufficient unknowns in there to make the WMAP extrapolations no where near as robust as proton scattering experiments.
As I pointed out to the previous poster it seems crazy to quote the distance now to an object which we are no longer sure even exists and for which, as you mention, we really can't do the extrapolation....but then again I'm an experimentalist and like to stick with real numbers rather than wild extrapolations.
Sorry but that is an absolutely crazy thing to quote the "distance to the object now". First we cannot measure it - we are extrapolating based on WMAP data as to the expansion of the universe - linear or otherwise it doesn't matter - and as this data suggests that we don't know what 96% of the universe is I have some doubts as to how reliable this is. Secondly there is no guarentee that the object even exists any more!
In summary it seems like saying "This computer I just bought will be over 1,000 years old in the year 3006 so it's a valuable antique!".
...but international. It is not sufficient to simply make ICANN an independent company based in the US since then it will still be subject to US courts which those of us in the rest of the world do not have to pay any attention to.
In fact putting it under UN control would probably be the best way to proceed since the UN can never decide anything and so it would be able to operate independently but being part of an international inter-governmental organization would make it above the courts of any one nation.
The narrator on the video keeps going on about look 78 billion light years into the universe but that is wrong. The universe only formed 13.7 billion years ago so the furthest we can see is 13.7 billion light years due to relativity. Inflation may mean the Universe is bigger bit we will not be able to see it if it is.
In actual fact the WMAP probe is the furthest we have seen, NOT the Hubble deep field since that looks at the Universe ~300k years after the Big Bang before there were any stars, let alone galaxies.
That said it was a nice video but it would have been nicer if they got their facts correct when trying to sound impressive!
Just looking at the number of comments here it is clear that the corporation brainwashing is really working. The number of comments saying "of course it is copyright violation" is amazing. Does nobody remember fair use rights? It is perfectly legal to quote sections of a text (or play small sections of a song or film). If it weren't it would be impossible to review music, songs or books or at least those reviews would be worthless since the copyright holder would withhold permission if the review was bad.
The fact that there are so many slashdotters who seem to have blindly accepted the "if I reproduce anything of the text it is copyright violation" is amazing. If here on Slashdot there are that many people who have accepted the death of fair use rights I worry that effectively we really have already lost them.
Slashdot Mirror
I found your post interesting in that I too have an occipital bun. More interesting is that I come from the North of England which Wikipedia mentioned was one of the rare places where such features are found.
However what is more surprising is that the article says that this is a trait common in Lancashire! As a Yorkshireman I'll never live this one down. Mind you it does make the old rhyme, which was probably written by Lancastrian, somewhat ironic: "Yorkshire born and Yorkshire bred, strong in the arm and thick in the head"!
...they are certainly bold. I wonder if they will live up to the rest of their name?
This is something we'd be markedly less willing to do if we didn't use Windows ourselves.
Actually I think what they are worried about is that we would NOT be less willing to keep giving advice but that the advice would end up being "why don't you try out the Linux/BSD/... OS? I can fix it and make it do what you want and it is completely free."
...a reporter from The Onion takes a job at the Wall Street Journal.
I don't sign a EULA when I use my own machine. In fact I've never signed a EULA and, fortunately, in some (many?) coutries this means it is meaningless. So until MS requires people to physically sign the document I really don't care what they put in it.
Wrong - it detects photons of light and records their momenta (effectively). So a single photon detector (which I'm guessing they have on the hubble) - records the image of a photon as a single dot. Not a very informative picture of a photon but not the less is is AN image of a photon. This builds up into an image of a galaxy or whatnot but that image consists of single photon "pictures" added together. Just because you don't think that a single 'dot' is much of an image is neither here not there. If you want to get more pedantic (and don;t like the idea of a dot as a picture) then photon-photon scattering events from LEP (or elsewhere) could be considered "photograph" of photons since you detect "light" which has scattered off a single photon. Not quite your conventional photo but nevertheless consistent with your definition. So I would still argue that hyping this is "the fastest wave ever photographed" is wrong.
Hubble telescope pictures consist of photographing waves travelling at 100% of the speed of light in vacuum by definition!
For the pedants technically your own photographs generally don't count because the refractive index of air (1.0008) actually means that light waves in air will only travel at 99.92% of the speed of light in vacuum.
The sooner the myth that is diamonds is de-mythed, the better. Read more about diamond myths here.
Actually they got the first point of the FAQ wrong - a diamond is not forever even if you do take care of it. It is a metastable allotrope of carbon and will slowly convert to the thermodynamically favoured allotrope, graphite. It might take several billion years for a diamond to decay into graphite but that is still a lot less than forever.
...but not as cool as Edmonton! :-)
The river swale, also in the Yorkshire dales, used to have a water level up the dale at Muker which rang a bell in Richmond police station about 40 miles downstream so that the police could come out and clear the tourists picnicing on the river banks when there was a cloud burst up on the tops and the sun was still shining in Richmond and the river was about to rapidly rise.
Reading the article I wonder whether this vastly more complex system is really going to work when the river is in full flood and metre sized boulders are scouring out the river bed and banks. I've seen Bluetooth mice having trouble communicating in indoor conditions at a distance of 2 metres.
Still it is not all bad - at least the sheep will get to enjoy their own WiFi connection.
...but a bookcase full of these volumes in every bomb shelter would make me feel a bit better about war.
This is a good reason never to do it.
...but that does mean that you Americans will be extinct!
...put a true "off switch" on the device. All TVs in Europe have (or at least used to have) a real off-switch that cut power consumption to zero. It was simplicity itself to turn on the TV when you wanted to start watching it pick up the remote control which was kept next to the TV and when you were done put the remote back and turn of the TV.
This not only cut standby power to zero for most of the day but also meant I never lost the remote down the back of the sofa! In addition it pretty much emliminated any fire risk from faulty electronics. When I moved to the US I was amazed that there was no such button on TVs there (and I've found it is the same in Canada as well).
Since I was unwilling to spend a minute squeezing my hand round the back of the entertainment centre to plug/unplug the TV and there were no switched on the plug sockets I ended up leaving the TV in standby. The only plus being that the incessant adverts on every channel meant I ended up almost cutting out TV watching when I was living in the US which, as was recently pointed out to me, somewhat ironic given the "TV culture" of the US!
You can aclimatise to heat easily as long as you never go near air conditioned space.
:-)
Unfortunately I grew up in an air conditioned space called Yorkshire (northern England) where the temparature rarely got too far away from comfortable in either direction. When I lived for several years in the US near Chicago the summer heat was not something I could acclimatize to and in fact it killed several hundred people in the city centre. When temperatures exceed 38C and the humidity is high there is no physical means for your body to loose heat and so you cannot simply shrug it off and say "I'll acclimatize" any more that I could stand outside in -35C weather wearing a T-shirt and shorts and claim I'll acclimatize to that too (although being a northerner I'll claim I can do the latter!
The difference, which you're ignoring, is that the picture was not taken 10+ billion years ago.
I'm ignoring it for a good reason - it doesn't make any difference to the photo. Effectively it was taken 10+ billion years ago. There would be no difference between a photo of the galaxy taken 9 billion years ago at a distance 9 billion light years nearer to the galaxy and the one taken today from earth assuming red shift is corrected for. Essentially the photo is a 10+ billion year old pictures of galaxies which were a heck of a lot closer than 78 billion light years when the photo was effectively taken.
Our combined observations tell us a lot about cosmological evolution that is fairly model-independent; you can come up with different models to explain the same data, but the ultimate conclusions about the universe and how it is expanding are constrained to be mostly the same.
Yes but you are missing the point that I am trying to make. You are fitting models to the data to draw your conclusions which you state as observations. This is a lot different than a simple direct observation. Perhaps a better example, but far less well known, would be the theoretical calculation of the direct CP violation parameter e'/e which the leading theorists swore blind could not be above 1E-3 no matter how far they pushed their models. The experiment I worked on (and a similar one at Fermilab) both published measurements a few years later putting e'/e above 1E-3 in a statistically significant fashion and low and behold the theory groups re-evaluated some of their assumptions and suddenly could account for it.
Now in some ways this is an unfair comparison since non-perturbative QCD is fiendishly hard to get right since you have to make simplifying assumptions to be able to solve problems at all. On the other hand it only involves known physics. Plus, to be honest, I do believe that the WMAP/SN survey/etc. data really does point to dark matter and energy....just like I believe that at the LHC we will find a Higgs boson. In fact the Standard Model (with Higgs) is probably an excellent comparison. It is an excellent fit to the data - there is no better model out there. In fact you can even use the data to predict the mass of the Higgs boson. However you will not find any particle physicist who will tell you that the Higgs definitely exists (although I bet almost all of us believe that it does). The reason being that we have not yet directly observed the Higgs and so the possibility remains that there could be another explanation which nobody has thought of.
So how big is that possibility? I haven't a clue - I'd guess rather low but that is a guess. Being a particle physicist I (rightly or wrongly!) apply the same logic to the WMAP/Boomerang etc models. These are the best models out there, they agree with all the data but they predict something that we have not seen so I cannot help but think are there different models that we have not thought of with different new physics?
I suppose the point which I am trying to make is that once you have a model which requires new physics you are far less constrained than models which are consistent with known physics and you have to ask yourself is it possible you come up with some different new physics to explain the data? Historically we seem to have been pretty good at getting it right...but as I've heard them say in US financial commercials: past success is no guarentee of future performance!
Thanks for the book recommendation as well as the educational discussion! I know an overthrowing of GR would be a very unlikely prospect but my understanding was that some refinements could explain the galactic rotation curves (instead of dark matter haloes) but I did not know what the implications of that would be for the WMAP predictions. Although I understand that these models keep getting squeezed harder and harder and are becomming increasingly less believable.
Frankly, most people are not interested in how far away the galaxy used to be, and if you say "the distance to the galaxy is X lightyears" they will assume that means the distance now.
If I take a photo from the platform of a train pulling out of York station for Kings Cross and show it to someone saying "this is a picture of a train which is 200 miles away" I'd bet the first reaction would be "no it isn't" which would then be followed by "oh you mean now" but only because they know how big a train is. Repeat with a picture of a galaxy which you say is 78 billion light years away and I bet the understanding someone will take away from that will be this is a picture showing a galaxy that is 78 billion light years away. The reason being is that you usually describe what a picture shows in the picture not how things have changed since the picture was taken.
(Or are you talking about the MOND alternative to dark matter? It doesn't do well on the cosmological front, or even so much on the dark matter front nowadays.)
Sorry I should have been clearer - I meant MOND and variants. My understanding was that the cosmologocal constant was part of GR and not a modification to it (other than dropping Einstein's original conclusion that it had to be zero because there was no evidence for it!).
And, as I said, you can combine it with supernova surveys. Those have the advantage that you don't even need to assume GR dynamics, since with both luminosities and redshifts you can measure distances and times more or less directly.
This precisely demonstrates my point about observation being a lot riskier than experiment since it was only last week that I read of the observation of a supernova that was substantially brighter than it was supposed to be which now puts in doubt how accurate these supernova surveys are since the "standard candle" model is perhaps not correct. So how robust are predictions based on WMAP?
What I find fascinating about the WMAP data is that we either have to find some new particles to explain the dark matter and who knows what to explain the dark energy or some of the assumptions used to predict the dark matter/energy are wrong. Not being a cosmologist, and given that most cosmologists point at dark matter/energy I'm happy to take that as the most likely explanation....but until we can find the missing particles and understand what the dark energy is are you really extremely confident that all the assumptions used to mke that prediction are correct?
Look at the solar neutrino problem: people were convinced for years that the solar model was wrong (or the experiments were wrong) and in the end it simply turned out to be a wrong assumption that an electron neutrino remained an electron neutrino. Given that experience I can't help but wonder if there is not at least a small possibility of such another "obvious" (but wrong) assumption being made with the conclusions drawn from the WMAP data.
If the Canadian company wants to do business in the US, yes, yes they can.
Not unless doing business requires a physical presence in the US which almost certainly not the case for a domain registry.
Ok I have a couple of questions:
What if the small group of cosmologists pushing the "gravity is different at large distances" is correct? Doesn't that change the WMAP predictions to the size of the Universe? (and if so how?) I personally think this unlikely but my understanding is that we can't rule out this possibility yet. So doesn't this put any extrapolations on somewhat questionable ground?
Secondly (just for my interest!) I can understand how the expansion of space will give apparent superluminal velocities over large distances what is less clear to me is how we stay causally connected. This is particularly puzzling given that my understanding of inflation is that the expansion of space was superluminal and resulted in causally disconnected regions of space. So what's the difference between the two? I know we don't really know a lot about inflation but clearly we know enough to be sure that there is a difference between this and normal expansion.
(Heh, sorry that you're being tag-teammed by Anonymous Cowards).
No problem - nothing like a vigourous discussion with fellow physicists (I'm guessing!) for understanding things outside my area better! That being said if you could recommend a good graduate level cosmology text I'd be grateful. I'm a particle physicist without much GR background but with the recent developments in cosmology our fields are becoming ever closer together.
I think you and I are addressing different questions. I completely agree that the existance of a distant galaxy is irrelevant to the size of the Universe but when the narrator in the video says "these galaxies are 78 billion light years away" they are NOT 78 billion light years away in the photograph shown and likely do not existing in anything like the same form now. Thus my objection is to extrapolating the distance observed to the distance now without saying so.
If I understand correctly you can get from the WMAP data by itself the age and expansion of the universe which is all you need to calculate the current size so how does this image improve on that? You can't measure the Hubble constant from this image can you?
Regarding the inference of measurements there is a HUGE difference between inferring the proton size from scattering amplitudes and estimating the size of the Universe from WMAP data. Particle physics is an experimental science which means that we can (and have) repeated the experiment many times in a fully controlled laboratory setting where we can control (to some extent) what is going on. The WMAP data are based on observation: you have no control over the conditions. Additionally the WMAP data predict the existance of things we have no current explanation for like dark matter and dark energy which have lead some cosmologists to suggest that perhaps gravity doesn't work like we think it does at large distances. While I persomally think the dark metter/energy scenario is far more likely there are sufficient unknowns in there to make the WMAP extrapolations no where near as robust as proton scattering experiments.
As I pointed out to the previous poster it seems crazy to quote the distance now to an object which we are no longer sure even exists and for which, as you mention, we really can't do the extrapolation....but then again I'm an experimentalist and like to stick with real numbers rather than wild extrapolations.
Sorry but that is an absolutely crazy thing to quote the "distance to the object now". First we cannot measure it - we are extrapolating based on WMAP data as to the expansion of the universe - linear or otherwise it doesn't matter - and as this data suggests that we don't know what 96% of the universe is I have some doubts as to how reliable this is. Secondly there is no guarentee that the object even exists any more!
In summary it seems like saying "This computer I just bought will be over 1,000 years old in the year 3006 so it's a valuable antique!".
...but international. It is not sufficient to simply make ICANN an independent company based in the US since then it will still be subject to US courts which those of us in the rest of the world do not have to pay any attention to.
In fact putting it under UN control would probably be the best way to proceed since the UN can never decide anything and so it would be able to operate independently but being part of an international inter-governmental organization would make it above the courts of any one nation.
The narrator on the video keeps going on about look 78 billion light years into the universe but that is wrong. The universe only formed 13.7 billion years ago so the furthest we can see is 13.7 billion light years due to relativity. Inflation may mean the Universe is bigger bit we will not be able to see it if it is.
In actual fact the WMAP probe is the furthest we have seen, NOT the Hubble deep field since that looks at the Universe ~300k years after the Big Bang before there were any stars, let alone galaxies.
That said it was a nice video but it would have been nicer if they got their facts correct when trying to sound impressive!
The fact that there are so many slashdotters who seem to have blindly accepted the "if I reproduce anything of the text it is copyright violation" is amazing. If here on Slashdot there are that many people who have accepted the death of fair use rights I worry that effectively we really have already lost them.