einstein@home
So, not really a photo, but a screen capture is the next best thing when no photos come my way, I suppose.
For the past month or so I've been ploughing my way though Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos," a book relating the recent history and newest discoveries of astrophysics. It came out late last year and is getting a lot of press, primarily because of Greene himself, who is an unusually talented and down-to-earth writer for an astrophysicist. His tone is similar to Stephen Hawking's in the latter's "A Brief History of Time", which I read last year, but he's a little more accessible, which is good for the easily-confused reader like myself.
Anyway, I've really been enjoying the book, when I get time away from the Program to get into it. So when I heard about this new distributed computing project (think SETI@Home) called 'Einstein@Home', I got very excited in a wanna-be science nerd sort of way (which I guess is even nerdier than regular science nerds). Basically, Einstein's relativity theories depend upon the existence of gravity, which up until this year has been unprovable; even though we can see its effects, we can't see IT (hence 'theory of gravity' rather than 'fact of gravity'). Finally, however, the technology exists to take stock of 'gravity waves', and see if Einstein really was right, or if we've all been quite misled.
'Einstein@Home' uses home computers to analyze the data being pulled in by three main gravity wave observatories: LIGO Hanford (blue line in the picture), LIGO Livingston (green line), and GEO600 (red line). Also represented on the screen saver are the principal stars in the constellations we see in the night sky (gray dots and yellow lines), supernova remnants (purple dots clustered around the milky way), and an orange marker indicating where the current analyzed data has originated from. It makes for a badass picture, that rotates.
Well, I've gone on long enough. More information on the screensaver: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/starsphere.php.
To download it and start computing yourself, which I hope you will: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/.
For the past month or so I've been ploughing my way though Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos," a book relating the recent history and newest discoveries of astrophysics. It came out late last year and is getting a lot of press, primarily because of Greene himself, who is an unusually talented and down-to-earth writer for an astrophysicist. His tone is similar to Stephen Hawking's in the latter's "A Brief History of Time", which I read last year, but he's a little more accessible, which is good for the easily-confused reader like myself.
Anyway, I've really been enjoying the book, when I get time away from the Program to get into it. So when I heard about this new distributed computing project (think SETI@Home) called 'Einstein@Home', I got very excited in a wanna-be science nerd sort of way (which I guess is even nerdier than regular science nerds). Basically, Einstein's relativity theories depend upon the existence of gravity, which up until this year has been unprovable; even though we can see its effects, we can't see IT (hence 'theory of gravity' rather than 'fact of gravity'). Finally, however, the technology exists to take stock of 'gravity waves', and see if Einstein really was right, or if we've all been quite misled.
'Einstein@Home' uses home computers to analyze the data being pulled in by three main gravity wave observatories: LIGO Hanford (blue line in the picture), LIGO Livingston (green line), and GEO600 (red line). Also represented on the screen saver are the principal stars in the constellations we see in the night sky (gray dots and yellow lines), supernova remnants (purple dots clustered around the milky way), and an orange marker indicating where the current analyzed data has originated from. It makes for a badass picture, that rotates.
Well, I've gone on long enough. More information on the screensaver: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/starsphere.php.
To download it and start computing yourself, which I hope you will: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/.
posted by Max at 4:38 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home