Alex Cunningham
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“Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.”
Niels Bohr (7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962)
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The Great Wall of China, 1907 by Herbert G. Ponting
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IC405 in Ha (Flaming Star Nebula) by swag72 on Flickr.
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MergeMosaic_clone by pfile on Flickr.
How to Simulate the Universe on your Laptop (by minutephysics)
(via Accelerating Expansion of Universe Discovery Wins 2011 Noble Prize in Physics)
“…Three scientists shared the 2011 Nobel Prize for physics for the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, the Nobel prize committee announced today. Half of the $1.5 million prize went to American Saul Perlmutter and the rest to two members of a second team which conducted similar work: American Adam Riess and U.S.-born Brian Schmidt, who is based in Australia. All three made the discovery through observations of distant supernovae…”
How Many Bits Are in the Universe?
Seth Lloyd, an MIT mechanical engineer, doesn’t think digital physics requires an “unseen programmer.” He posits that the universe could be a computer in and of itself, rather than existing in a computer on a desk somewhere, and that phenomena can be decided using relativity. He and theoretical physicist Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara elaborate on the implications and curiosities of such a bit-flipping universe.
Image courtesy of Bruce Irving
More from this series: Rebooting the Cosmos.
(via skeptv)
cwnl:
Most Complete Universe Simulations Visualized in 3D
Run on NASA AMES’ supercomputer constellation, the evolution of the largest structures in the Universe are here simulated. This Bolshoi simulation (based on the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model) is designed to study how dark matter halos evolved.
(via ikenbot)
Creating Universes with Digital Bits
In 1970, a mathematician named John Horton Conway devised a self-sustaining simulation based on several simple rules. What he didn’t know is that his “Game of Life” would create a whole new field of mathematics and cause theorists to wonder if our own universe could be the emergent result of a simple set of instructions. Could everything in our universe stem from a relatively simple set of rules? Computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber thinks so, and he believes Conway’s game is an excellent example of seemingly random complexity arising from predetermined rules. But how useful is it to scientists?
Want to try your hand at Conway’s Game of Life?
Pictured: John Horton Conway, inventor of cellular automata and the Game of Life; Image courtesy of Thane Plambeck; Recorded June 2011; Posted September 2011
More from this series: Rebooting the Cosmos.
(via skeptv)
(via ikenbot)
cwnl:
Astronomers Create 3-D Map of 3-Billion-Year-Old Universe
Using light from 14,000 distant yet powerful cosmic beacons, astronomers have pieced together the largest and most detailed 3-D map of the ancient universe.
Previous versions plotted the locations of galaxies within 7 billion light-years of Earth. The new version, however, charts clouds of hydrogen in a swath between 10 billion and 12 billion light-years away — farther in distance and deeper in time than any 3-D map before it.
The hydrogen clouds could help answer some of astronomers’ more profound questions about the universe, including the nature of dark energy.
“We’re looking for a bump in the data that may tell us how fast universe is expanding,” said cosmologist Anže Slosar of Brookhaven National Laboratory, one of the researchers who presented the map May 1 at the American Physical Society meeting in Anaheim, California. “We don’t have enough data to see the bump yet, but we expect to get there in a few years.”
To create the map, Slosar joined dozens of other astronomers in the third iteration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The multipurpose telescope hosts an instrument called the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, or BOSS, which can analyze light from individual quasars.
“Quasars are extremely bright galaxies that are very far away. At the center of each, a black hole is eating matter. The matter heats up to such superhigh temperatures that it shines like crazy,” Slosar said. “This allows us to see them from very, very far away.”
Light from quasars focuses into a beam which, on the way to Earth,gets partially absorbed by hydrogen gas. The light is then re-emitted in a different wavelength, creating a unique spectrum for each quasar. Because the beam traverses space as well as time, astronomers can use its spectrum to estimate hydrogen cloud expansions and contractions through time.
Slosar said the process is similar to an ice core sample removed from Antarctica. Looking straight on, the core looks like a circle or a point. But slice by slice, one can reconstruct events of the past. In the case of the 3-D map, astronomers can chart the development of galaxy clusters between 10 billion and 12 billion years ago.
The SDSS collaboration has laboriously analyzed 14,000 of about 160,000 known quasars. By 2014, the astronomers hope to have 50,000 or 60,000 quasar slices in their grips — perhaps enough data to say something meaningful about the fate of the universe.
Images: 1) Illustration of where the new SDSS map data exists in space and time. The new data are of hydrogen gas emissions between 10 billion and 12 billion light-years away. Older galaxy-based data is shown closer to Earth. (A. Slosar and SDSS-III collaboration) 2) Slice of the full map showing the density of hydrogen gas in the ancient universe. Blue represents little gas, while red represents dense clouds. (A. Slosar and SDSS-III collaboration)
(via ikenbot)
