Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving from the Wolfram|Alpha team! We can’t really cook, so we are bringing data to dinner:
Tales will be told of the great turkey population spike of 1998.
A 40-year-old puzzle of superstring theory solved by supercomputer
A group of three researchers from KEK, Shizuoka University and Osaka University has for the first time revealed the way our universe was born with 3 spatial dimensions from 10-dimensional superstring theory in which spacetime has 9 spatial directions and 1 temporal direction. This result was obtained by numerical simulation on a supercomputer.
“According to Big Bang cosmology, the universe originated in an explosion from an invisibly tiny point. This theory is strongly supported by observation of the cosmic microwave background and the relative abundance of elements. However, a situation in which the whole universe is a tiny point exceeds the reach of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and for that reason it has not been possible to clarify how the universe actually originated.
In superstring theory, which is considered to be the “theory of everything”, all the elementary particles are represented as various oscillation modes of very tiny strings. Among those oscillation modes, there is one that corresponds to a particle that mediates gravity, and thus the general theory of relativity can be naturally extended to the scale of elementary particles. Therefore, it is expected that superstring theory allows the investigation of the birth of the universe. However, actual calculation has been intractable because the interaction between strings is strong, so all investigation thus far has been restricted to discussing various models or scenarios.
Superstring theory predicts a space with 9 dimensions, which poses the big puzzle of how this can be consistent with the 3-dimensional space that we live in.
A group of 3 researchers, Jun Nishimura (associate professor at KEK), Asato Tsuchiya (associate professor at Shizuoka University) and Sang-Woo Kim (project researcher at Osaka University) has succeeded in simulating the birth of the universe, using a supercomputer for calculations based on superstring theory. This showed that the universe had 9 spatial dimensions at the beginning, but only 3 of these underwent expansion at some point in time…”
Jumping Rope HOP-HOP by George Strouzas
This is my submission for the SEEAR Playground exhibition.
Inspiration came from the patterns that jumping rope does when it’s played and I
connected it with the theory of Bohr about the hydrogen atom.
www.seear.gr
This image was run on 8192 Cores with 150 M Grid points. We’re featuring this image as part of our “Science as Art” series and we call it “Lava Lamp.” It was generated on a supercomputer, what does this image represent or look like to you?
cwnl:
Isaac Newton’s Personal Notebooks Go Digital
Who says you can’t hoard anything in this now technological world? Here’s something for the science history buffs:
The largest collection of Isaac Newton’s papers has gone digital, committing to open-access posterity the works of one of history’s greatest scientist.
Among the works shared online by the Cambridge Digital Library are Newton’s own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica and the ‘Waste Book,’ the notebook in which a young Newton worked out the principles of calculus.
Other of his myriad accomplishments include the laws of gravity and motion, a theory of light — pictured above are notes on optics — and his construction of the first reflecting telescope.
Newton was also notoriously idiosyncratic and irascible, obsessed with the occult and vicious towards scientific rivals; a full account of his life and science can be found in James Gleick’s Isaac Newton, and a partial but entertaining fictionalization in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. But the papers come straight from the master.
“Anyone, wherever they are, can see at the click of a mouse how Newton worked and how he went about developing his theories and experiments,” said Grant Young, the library’s digitization manager, in a press release. “Before today, anyone who wanted to see these things had to come to Cambridge. Now we’re bringing Cambridge University Library to the world.”
Approximately 4,000 pages of material are available now, and thousands more will be uploaded in coming months.
