BrightQuark

Reading the blurb around a couple of books recently and it was said, by one neuroscientist, that it only shows the pattern of blood flow around the brain, and these are its limitations.

Are you aware of any general trends in sea levels around the world, Ed, seeing your post made me ponder the question of what is happening - only generallly speaking - out there?

I was watching a programme recently, generally centered around cyberwarfare, and the reliance of the web upon prime numbers and quantuam computing was a component. Anybody care to discuss some of the features of quantum computing, what we might expect from it, where it's up to in terms of progress, how it differs from everything we've been doing up until now in computing?

Whilst watching a programme this week on measurement and the history of science I picked up on the designation "Quantum Age". Although dealing with the history of measurement, and suggesting that improved temperature accuracy is becoming very important to science, esp. in areas such as engineering ( one area where batter understanding of heat measurement is sorely required) and by way of one example -- this should eventually allow companies like Rolls Royce to improve aircraft engines enabling greater fuel efficiency and .... wait... back on topic warning ... so anyway, naturally quantum computers cropped up and the naming of our new century too ... as THE QUANTUM AGE ... now, that sounds fine, but if you were a betting man, and were to transport yourself forward by 50 or even 100 years, what do you think the history of science books would refer to this period of time as, or even more speculatively, what designations could follow that age, I somehow feel that the latter is impossible to answer at this time. addendum:- Science seems to be at critical juncture, either q.m will continue to provide answers, or perhaps the "theory of everything" will stall, and if so, physics will have to rethink almost everything achieved to date (loosely defined and provocative statement, but, you kjnow...) and so how do we see things as shaping up, are we seeing for example "reliable patterns" on continuation already forming, or are we indeed, heading into entirely unknown territory?

Interesting and thanks for the links, I'll watch those documentaries, and if there's interest, we could always set up a new thread. (I keep atttempting to watch the L Susskind documentary on holograms, but keep getting distracted. I did manage however to watch two science prograames this week, one on gas being drawn into the central bulge/Black hole, and another on the foundations of measurement, by Marcus De Sautoy, if I've spelt that correctly, the mathematician, that was an exceptionally good quality programme, I'll probably rewatch it actually. 3 episodes, on foundations.

Ed, why do you think we seem to be transitioning so slowly towards these new sources, is the technology still in its infancy, is it cost, or are we still too heavily invested in oil? The UKs energy problem has been left far too long and now we seem to be rushing towards nuclear power stations, built by the French, wind turbines have attracted a great deal of criticism, to date, ruining views or clogging up the near shore seascapes.

Gees, I don't think we've advanced very far in terms of understanding consciousness. Our most powerful computers aren't really "intelligent" in the way that many of us tend to understand human insight and intelligence. It seems that SF has somehow popularised this idea of a computer that will - one day in the distant future perhaps - miraculously go "self-aware" at a previously derived or random point of complexity. The problem for me, personally, with all this... is that it assumes that "consciousness" can be designed from the ground up, and perhaps it can, but everythng I've read and listened to, to date, suggests that this may not be the case. We can't even define consciousness. . Re the Science Forum... I think you're probably being too ambitious, attempting to muddle together disparate and often contradictory subjects, and then proceeding to ask a randomly selected bunch of people, the posters in here, to somehow tie it all up together! That's unlikely to unlock the riddles of consciousness. We need to learn more about what "consciousness" actually is. It doesn't really matter whether people believe in the paranormal or not, because clearly they're not very interested in it around here, or even qualified to answer your questions... if that's a better way of putting it?

If we ever captured a Unicorn, I guess we'd have to rethink sicence, or at least a part of the fossil record!. What sometimes interests me, is why do unicorms exist at all, even in the imagination, it's not the unicorn, specifically, but anything like it, and if it exists in the imagination, does it in some sense exist. I think that this division between the abstract and the real is very complicated, and in some sense, that everything that has been thought of, does in fact exist, but obviously we distinguish. If we were to go back several hundred years, and enter the mind of somebody from the 15th century, to them, a great deal out there that we disccount as superstition would be very real to them, we'd discount it as backward and even comical, but I wonder how much of every day reality, or what we call reality as we see it today, will be subject to a similar viewpoint, hundreds of years from now. In many ways, we're always trapped inside our own age. I suppose we'd say, none of it, since the scientific revolution, circa 1543 or so, we'd probalby argue that everything will be traceable back to our shift in thinking, and that will remain unbroken. Of course, they'll always be cranks!

Would the centre of the galaxy be anywhere near as bright as in that artist's impression, if the gas clouds moved aside and we could see it. I've heard somewhere that it would show up in the sky like another moon?

I'll have a go just for some fun: Energy is real to us, because as an objective observer, we can see the effects of energy, a cooker hob turns read, ice melts on a warm surface. A philosopher might say, 'energy is real because we notice it, it affects *us* in any number of ways, the sun heats out face, the glass of whiskey becomes more full as the ice cubes melt. However, without an impartial observer, it exists anyway, the ice still melts, the sun is warm, even without an observer to comment on the action. Energy is also potential energy (yes- physicists?), the ice cube has the potential to melt, the glacier recede, icicles to form? What I'd be interested in, is what is classed as energy, is it almost any change of state from matter into light, or movement within the substance. Ovid in his Metamorphosis changed humans into trees and gods into mortals, but they probably weren't subject to the laws of energy or physics, they were myths, and so wouldn't be classed as energy!

Travelling over the flat-plane of the universe is one of most difficult concepts to conceive, well for me at least, because you naturally begin to add in dimensions, if you pass over a surface, and ask - but what is above, why can't you penetrate it, and go straight down and through it, we seem to be limited by our ability to visualise in only 1, 2 or 3D perhaps? Enjoyed watching the TED lectures in here.

- as one headline catchily puts it! Any videos or interesting articles on this spectacular event folks? I have a BBC Horizon programme to watch on this, aired last night -- so that prompted me to open this thread. I haven't been able to skim every/all prior posts within Science. net, so apologies ahead if I double-up at any time... nb- I still haven't quite got the hang of the site's cut and paste facility. I gather we have to save our files initially, and then upload using the tools below, as cut/paste directly into here is not possible?

Yes, that's how I've always understood it. And on that note, I'll back away and return to reading, as I don't wish to emulate the proverbial dog chasing its proverbial tail.

Swansont, if we ignore the age of the light for a moment, and enter a Carl Sagan type of Spacecraft that can zip us around to each and every point of the universe, wherever we choose, so we'll meet up with star nurseries, and nebulas, and young galaxies, and older galaxies, and some of those will be closer to the date of the BB, say, 12 billion years old, others yet, only 8 or 3 billion years old... what do we know, or what theories have there been to date - if any - about the distribution patterns of the same? I'm aware of the example of the balloon where we use a marker pen and scribble small dots of black and then we inflate it, and the spots expand and move away from one another, but that doesn't really assist with "distribution" of old and young galaxies.... Or is it much simpler than that, if we look around the Milky Way, only, we see new stars forming, older suns and planets etc, so we have "young material" appearing amongst and around what exists. To clarifiy, the point about the time the light has taken to get here is not one of "how old the galaxy or objext is" ... it's only a record of older information effectively, so we have to be able to date that galaxy or object from analysis of the light. However, having done that and let's say, we find a galaxy that is only 5 billion years, we then have to remember that if the light for that galaxy took around 10 billion years to get here, we don't really know what the galaxy would look like now, At its point of origin. Or I presume we could model it if we had a computer powerful enough and the data, and then watch it age, taking into account the small inconvenience that we'd have to know everything about it, impossible of course. Edit to add: Actuallly, this just raises more questions, we have the date of a galaxy, but that won't assist with how we date the earliest material in that galaxy, there will be older suns, and newer stars forming as it evolves, yes? And if CMBR is distributed throughout the universe, evenly, I presume that the radiation that James Webb is seeking to see in the IR spectrum, is the early or "earliest" radiation, as the radiation we see that is closer, has had more time to dim in intensity? I'm entirely speculating here? Krauss... in a lecture I was watching earlier explained how we exist at a fortunate time in the evolution of the universe, if we'd turned up a few billion years earlier, we would interpret the state of the atoms and form our views based upon that evidence, and if later, we'd not see any trace of the CMBR, so, it would be a case of bye-bye BB theory, we also wouldn't know that our part of the universe wasn't particularly special and see a far more benign universe, as it would be a universe without any CMBR, that would lead to different theories about the formation or nature of the universe/early universe.... ... anyway, enough, I'm babbling away here....

Oh, my slip, I meant 380,000 years "after" the BB.

This rings a bell, I'm sure that I was listening to an explanation quite a while back that said that the light we get from such distances, is as small as that, I'd tended to assume that the light would always produce a picture (through the most powerful telescopes) taht showed at least a sort of nebulous scattering of light which could be worked on or manipulated by various types of interpreation - artists' sketches, or by way fo chemical composition, to give us a picture of a galaaxy, or nebula or some other type of object. Okay, I'll reread that post, thanks. CMBR: Light that is 380,000 years older than the BB itself. Yes. Just looked at Wiki's CMBR article and NASA's page on James Webb, which explains what the new satellite will be able to see. And read up on WMAP, too. I was also looking at a few articles on magnification.

Guys, this makes sense and fits with what I'd understood prior to our discussions, there are a few aspects, such as the fact that there are older galaxies or galaxies of different ages fairly close to us! The light that we receive from extreme distances, which could be 10 billion years old (and yet shows the star as it was, not as it is now makes complete sense) and so interestingly, we are always out of date, the sky we see is a universe that existed out there at various stages, a little like watching TV on our sets from the 1960s, instead of today, and we'll have to wait a long time to receive The Sopranos, or The Wire. What's the oldest light we can detect and how close to the BB is that light? (perhaps Ed had answered that with his pixels example) I know that they are trying to replicate the conditions that followed the very early stages of the BB at CERN, but what is interesting is that I'm wondering what exactly I've heard now about Hubble II, I understood that it was going to be able to detect light that was very close to the very first state of the universe, whilst the BB was still hot and atoms weren't behaving as they do now, perhaps, what was being said was still a great deal of time after BB, but still very useful and would open up new understanding, it just sounded as though they were going to be able to see lgiht that was litearlly from seconds after the BB, rather than light years, later? I'm have a scout around and see if I can find an example of what I've been listening too, and post it up if it's any good! Thanks again guys, I think we're on the same page at last.

How about as a consequence of a large asteroid collision, which if large enough might scatter debris beyond the atmosphere, thinking here of an extinction event size of asteroid, has to be some irony in there.somewhere. And is it conceivable that the moon's gravitational pull might have some tiny influence once the debris has been blown clear of the atmosphere, given it's effect on the tides, some kind of distrubution effect? - just a few thoughts.

Yes, I've always found the web to be a a sort of good/bad entity on that front, it's dark and light, good and evil, all wrapped up Ed! And it's a fine art to separate out the rubbish, dross, from the gold. Thanks for those tips, that will help to narrow down the search choices. I've found the web of middling quality for other subjects I like to read up on, such as literature, history, philosophy and even theology recently. I've always had a bit of a knack for finding good books, that's from spending too much time in bookshops, or on Amazon, and other websites, and try to apply those instincts to the web, but there's a lot to get through, found one by Lawrence Krauss last night, lecturing at CALTECH with Dawkins on a universe out of nothing, and that was interesting and fun too.

nb- - would a MODERATOR be kind enough to change the title above to "world", as I've typed "universe". Thanks. I'm having problems with cut and paste on this site, so will try and put this YT video up on the screen. This is a topic I caught a while back within a BBC Horizon episode -- where one physicist said something like "if you think that you understand this subject, you don't, nobody does!" Thanks to Ed once again for referring me to these Stanford University YT Lectures. I came across this one so decided to place it in here rather than just watch it myself. I haven't had a chance to listen the video all the way through, it's around 50 minutes or so long, and so will probably watch it when I return home from work. Edit: It seems I've FINALLY twigged on how to paste in on here, slightly different to some sites out there.

I'm aware that this is an old thread, but in terms of understanding religion, I've enjoyed reading "The Case For God" by Karen Armstrong, In fact, based upon how clear and enjoyable this book was to read, I'd probably read anything by Karen Armstrong. it's very refreshing to dip into something so cogently expressed. .

I saw this thread yesterday and did a quick search out of interest and found a discussion elsewhere, on the same topic, with respect to the "thickness" issue, one poster gave a measurement of between 900 lt yrs, and 10,000 light yrs, working through the spiral arm, I assume, very uneven in short, however, unfortunately he posted nothing to back up where this information was taken from..... and then I happened on the Wiki article that you've already copied in above on the MW, with some of the comments half-way down concerning the difficulty of calculations from within the galaxy made across the galactic plane.

based upon what Zapatos has set out above, I assume therefore, that even though that light is 10 billion years old, we can interpret that light and confirm that we are dealing with a galaxy that is either older or much younger than our own based upon say, the spectrographic content of the light, so even though the light has taken 10 billion years to get here, as Zapatos has pointed out, you have to be careful not to confuse the light and the age of the galaxy? My, albeit incomplete understanding, had always been that the further away you look, the older the universe is, if I've understood Zapatos' explanation, we have to factor in the time the light has taken to get here before we ascertain the age of the galaxy, and that -- and this is the aspect that is confusing, but my original statement that Zapatos copied in suggested that further = older, and that closer = newer with respect to the age of galaxy -- and that's, it seems... incorrect? Are we effectively saying we that we have much older galaxies on our doorstep, with light that only took 4 billion years to arrive here that we are able to study as examples of the early universe? *Again, whilst not confusing time for light to travel to us with the actual age of the galaxy. I always assumed that further meant older and that was because the light had taken so long to get here, and that's how we are able to see the older universe, and that we are hoping to look further back with Hubble II, Edit to add: I've just dipped in and missed the earlier posts by Ed and others, so will have to come back and read over these more carefully.

I've been reading Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis, at 700 pages or so, it's not an easy read, but anyway, it's an historical account of the so-called "little ice age" which occurred around the 17th century. It's impossible for the public to grasp what is happening with respect to global warming, the scientists appear to have lost the confidence of many people, whereas many are deeply unsettled. I'm aware that there's an argument out there for periods of cooling, something the earth goes through, but given the quantities of greenhouse gases that we're continually pumping out, it's difficult to believe that that's all that we're seeing.

I've just read up again on the Big Bang and the Cosmological Principle, and your latest posts have just summed up more briefly what I have been reading, and I think I can see where I'm struggling to understand, it has something to do with the "all directions" aspect, furthest galaxies are the oldest, near galaxies new and much younger, and the formation of the atoms aspect, thinking here of the theoretical "primordial atom" vs what we see forming in the universe created much later,.... but it's hard to actually picture why the older universe is seen at a distance, rather than much closer, or close to us in the MW, this "distribution" is tricky to put into perspective. Does this have something to do with the often cited explanation of walking on the surface, and all matter, old and new is in our path.... No, that doesn't work either, we have to look deeper or frame this at a distance, and yet those older parts of the uninverse could in theory be on our doorstep, and yet, they are much further away in all directions? If this makes any sense so far, or rather, can you see my confusion regarding this aspect, it's a perspective issue, or observer's point of view, that's difficult to "frame".