USA Africa Dialogue Series - TIME TRAVEL FROM THE PRESENT TO THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE AT THE BIG BANG AND FROM THERE TO THE PRESENT:WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO DO SUCH RESEARCH?

                                                                TIME TRAVEL

The report below is an exciting summary of research using computer simulation to explore the development of the universe.This does not require telescopes which are a much larger and more expensive  level of scientific  hardware.

Is research of this kind done by researchers in Africa? 

One notes that some of the most important work in scientific cosmology did not even use computers,examples being the work of Einstein ,who was not an academic when he published his most famous work in 1915 and Isaac Newton who used paper,mathematical instruments and perhaps the rudimentary telescopes of his day.

I object with all my being to those who claim that Africans should focus on research relevant to their immediate needs.

A person or group that does not look beyond the present is not likely to achieve great things.

How was Isaac Newton to know that his development of the laws of motion would become central to rocketry and space travel  centuries later?

A man working quietly in a quiet city in a corner of England, a city that still does not have an airfield,mapped the laws of the cosmos using only his mind and insights from rudimentary hand held telescopes.

A man who could not get an academic job busied himself by working in a patent office,working for years till he brought out his four  epochal parers in 1905-on Special Relativity,Brownian motion,the photoelectric effect  and the equivalence of matter and energy. His only tools were paper and pen-Albert Einstein. Years later he brought out his last major a paper-on General Relativity,again using only the instruments of writing.No computers ,no high tech.

News Home Calendar Images Video on Demand Subscribe to Our Newsletter Frequently Asked Questions

released 08.11.08 Download a PDF of this story Email this story Subscribe to our newsletter Volume rendering of log baryon density of the entire 1.5 billion light year cube, viewed from an angle. Created by Matthew Hall of NCSA's Advanced Visualization Laboratory Want to know what the universe looked like after the Big Bang? The largest adaptive mesh cosmological simulation ever done allowed cosmologists to travel backwards in time and view some early history of the universe. Michael Norman of the University of California, San Diego, working with Robert Harkness of the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC), and Brian O'Shea of theLos Alamos National Laboratory, used the ENZO cosmology code to simulate the universe, starting shortly after the Big Bang. The purpose of this calculation was to study the formation, growth, and evolution of clusters of galaxies and to understand relationships between cluster size and observational properties. Their results are of importance to other researchers involved in spatial mapping and simulated sky surveys as it helps understand the underlying physical processes at work in galaxies, which are the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe. The Enzo simulation software is incredibly flexible, and can be used to simulate a wide range of cosmological situations. The team simulated a volume of the universe 1.5 billion light years on a side. Adaptive mesh refinement codes begin with a grid, and then allow researchers to produce subgrids as needed to track key processes. The team produced more than 400,000 subgrids on seven subgrid levels, allowing them to follow the evolution of dark matter and baryonic gas over five orders of magnitude in spatial resolution, from slightly after the Big Bang to the present day, a total simulation time of 13.7 billion years. Harkness and O'Shea utilized TeraGrid resources to run the calculation, using 1.5 terabytes of shared memory on Cobalt, NCSA's SGI Altix system, as well as 2 terabytes of memory on SDSC's IBM Datastar. The simulation generated over 10 terabytes of data from start to finish. This image is a volume rendering of log baryon density of the entire 1.5 billion light year cube, viewed from an angle. Created by Matthew Hall of NCSA's Advanced Visualization Laboratory, it is similar to the filamentary structures that can be seen in real life, such as in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, where one can see that galaxies typically associate with each other in filamentary and planar structures. A particularly massive galaxy cluster, with a mass of 2x1015 times that of our sun (that's two quadrillion solar masses) can be seen near the center of the image. Galaxy clusters have big central galaxies that tend to have super massive black holes. These black holes weigh millions to billions of times the mass of our sun, and produce incredibly energetic jets of gas which stir up the gas in the galaxy cluster. "In general," explains O'Shea, "galaxy clusters are interesting astrophysical objects because they can be used to probe cosmological parameters, by which I mean they can be used to determine the amount of baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy in the universe."

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com