Tell me that ain’t the coolest thing you’ve seen today.
Archive for the ‘science’ Category
The 6 Million Dollar Cat
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
On dots containing a universe within
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
Every point of light is a Galaxy
Each point of light in that image is a galaxy. Not a solar system, a galaxy.
Each galaxy contains hundreds of billions if not trillions of stars. Want to try to count the points in that image and do the math?
I’ll do a quick approximation, since pretty much every pixel in that image is lit up (not to mention the fact that there are other galaxies behind the ones visible here because this is just a two dimensional projection of a 3 dimensional space). There are 391,040 pixel in that image (for reference, there are approximately 170 billion galaxies in the current known, visible universe). Galaxies range anywhere from 10 million to 100 trillion (yes, trillion) stars, so lets go with a trillion stars as an average (because I’m guessing they obey a bell curve distribution and not the 50.000006 trillion median between the observed star amounts).
That means in this image, you are staring at almost 400 thousand trillion stars. And, percentage-wise, you’re looking at 0.000002% of the currently human-observable universe.
400 thousand trillion stars, 0.000002%. How many of those have planets? Pretty much all of them, I’d guess.
If you take 1 trillion stars as the galactic average (I couldn’t find a good approximation but if anyone’s got an idea please comment), that’s 170 billion trillion stars in the observable universe.
170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. We currently have no idea what the average amount of planets around them is but I’m guessing we can add some multiple of the aforementioned number.
And this is just what we can currently see. Do you begin to get an inkling of the possibility present in our universe?
We used to think regular matter was indivisible. Then we found atoms. We though they were indivisible, then we found quanta. We currently think they are indivisible.
Every time we claim to have found the bedrock, the end-all, be-all… we find something else to continue our scientific search. There may indeed be a limit to these things, but I’ll believe that when I see the end of science.
Mind/Universe/Matter/Energy/Mind
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
the human mind gathers information from its surroundings.
The human society gathers information from it’s universe, from the very fabric at the smallest to the pattern that *everything* in the universe has expressed.
At different scales, shapes repeat themselves. above a certain mass in space and/or seen from the appropriate distance, objects from planets to galaxies look rather similar. When you get closer, they differentiate, i.e. planets, solar systems, spiral galaxies, nebulae, gas clouds. From the scale of the smallest planets to the size of sand or so, objects begin to take on features rather differentiated, mostly in subtle ways but a plethora of complexity at our level. Look below and things begin to resemble dots, look at those dots and there’s a level of complexity, but when you examine that complexity close enough again, it’s dots. Examine them and there’s more dots, just doing a lot of hard-to-explain stuff. Go back up and look at the universe and see there are filaments and columns and lots of really complex shapes depending on how you zoom, but at some point they all look like dots.
The universe is made out of dots that each contain unimaginable complexity when you look close enough. The unimaginable complexity is made out of dots when you look close enough.
Is it any wonder that we talk of matroishka universes? The “universe” is just the perception-bubble of the consciousness probing it.
All life probes its universe to map it.
Life arises spontaneously out of the complexity of the simplicity below it.
The mind is a map of the universe you build for yourself. A map of the universe the universe builds for itself. Another point that, when examined closely enough, reveals endless complexity that reveals dots that contain endless complexity.
As long as we seek, so shall we find. And let it ever be so.
Can make meat taste like damp dog hair
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
That’s probably a sign, when near-dangerous amounts of salt are needed to make beef not taste like damp dog hair, that you shouldn’t be eating the food to begin with. I’m just sayin…
How do we even GET oil in the first place?
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
