Just up at Colliding Universes

All things are possible through the scientist who postulates very large numbers? Especially unimaginable things, I am sure.

Settled science chronicles: Reader disses "best science" boilerplate

Life could be just plain rare but not unique in the universe

Catholic Cardinal: Multiverse theory an "abdication of human intelligence"?

Comments

[JM Inc.]

I don't know where else to put this, but I quite enjoyed it. I'm sure many of you will get a kick out of Brian Cox calling modern cosmology a "scientific creation story"; even if you're not a naturalist, however, and I suspect most of the people who regularly look at this blog are not, I'm confident you'll still find it interesting:

Brian Cox: An inside tour of the world's biggest supercollider

[Jerry]

Thanks for the link. This was a very interesting video, as were the others on there that I watched. As much as I don't like how people say that "non-naturalists" are only so because of the "wow" factor of nature, I still have to say it. . . Wow.

[JM Inc.]

Well, we're all in this for the "wow factor", even us naturalists. If there weren't that wow factor, nobody would ever have taken an interest in any of this stuff and we'd know none of it.

It's really quite exciting for somebody like myself, and it's strange to me to think that I've been waiting for this supercollider to come online for much of my life - I'm not all that old and I've been excited about this for many, many years, about this big machine coming on-line, ever since I first heard of it. I really wish I'd been good at mathematics so that I could have studied physics (or mathematics, for that matter) professionally. Oh well.

One of the excellent things he doesn't talk about in that video is the data-system they've built for this thing - they call it "the Grid"; it's a high performance, high bandwidth, ultra-high speed, multitier fibre optic network designed to sort out the interesting data and process it at incredible speeds, and then distribute it to institutions around the world, so that the 10,000 or so physicists collaborating on this project globally don't all have to pack into one room or something. They have to sort out the interesting data, because the detectors will be producing so much information that if they were just to store it all, they'd end up with a growing mountain of data that could, in the course of about a month, produce a stack of High Definition DVDs 384,400 kilometres long.

Some people are heralding the Grid as the successor to the modern Internet, because it's so much faster and more reliable, and they're already talking about expanding it to include computer systems outside the original planned superstructure. One of the reasons why it's so powerful is that it isn't weighted down by legacy systems - no networks attached to it are using old hardware or software that could form a bottleneck.

As to that misconception you don't like about non-naturalists, well I've got a pet peeve of a misconception myself (though I'm not directing this at anybody in particular): it's that naturalists, or, to use that most abhorred of terms, "materialists", live in a world without the wow factor, that somehow we're left floating somewhere in a dark ocean of cold apathy. While that maybe true in a technical sense; the universe, as far as we can tell, does not seem to care all that much about our being here (we’ve yet to see anybody roll out a welcome mat to our species), we humans, to draw a metaphor from Brian’s talk, are an excellent source of light, and warmth.

It was, after all, Richard Dawkins who, while standing under the dome of the Mount Wilson Observatory, in which Hubble first determined that some distant nebulae were, in fact, each their own separate galaxy and not part of our own, and furthermore, that these and all galaxies are expanding away from one another at enormous speed, is remembered to have said:
"All of this makes me so proud of our species that it almost brings me to tears."

And, with the LHC among other things, here are we continuing the same journey today that Hubble was on then. I can't help but echo the sentiments. If I had to have picked anywhere to spend a paltry eighty or so years, I’d have picked here and now, and I wouldn’t have changed all that much.