Simulated Universe 332
anonymous lion writes "A story in the Guardian Unlimited reports on The Millennium Simulation saying that it is 'the biggest exercise of its kind'. It required 25 million megabytes of memory to take our universe's initial conditions along with the known laws of physics to create this simulated universe." From the article: "The simulated universe represents a cube of creation with sides that measure 2bn light years. It is home to 20m galaxies, large and small. It has been designed to answer questions about the past, but it offers the tantalising opportunity to fast-forward in time to the slow death of the galaxies, billions of years from now."
Re:I thought (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to science, where no matter how far you come along, there's always a ways more to go. Today's models are flawed, but not nearly as much as yesterday's. And even if the Dark Matter mysteries or older-than-time star mysteries are resolved, I'm sure there will be other mysteries we have yet to discover. These simulations are a part of that process.
Voodoo science here, I think. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is stated as fact, not theory, but how can it be a scietific fact if it can not be detected, measured, and independetely verified?
Re:Voodoo science here, I think. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Predicting the future (Score:3, Insightful)
Bah... the universe is mostly empty space. It would compress nicely.
One small detail (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming your assumptions and input are correct, of course.
Re:Predicting the future (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So where can I download it? (Score:1, Insightful)
I personally think that insightful has a slightly more poetic justification than informative. Basically, a joke often is looking at a situation and seeing things slightly different than everyone else. Insight is the ability to look at a situation and see things slighty different than everyone else. So, it takes some level of insight to make a really good joke.
Although the joke in question didn't really particularilly insightful to me, there are some that actually take a deeper understanding of the situation to make. This joke was just funny because of the level of... I suppose the emotion would be close to sarcasm. Humerous exaggeration, maybe. And comic timing did help. In this case the timing happened to come from not actually reading the article, but instead skimming the slashdot blurb, and then getting a first post. Not necesarilly the work of a troll, but a tactic often used by them.
Re:Predicting the future (Score:3, Insightful)
In truth, no space is empty; and you can compress the data, but then you will not have a perfect simulation; your computer will take longer to process the data than the span of the events which are occuring. As far as predicting the future goes, it would be useless, because the real universe would complete its 'calculations' long before your more space-efficient machine did--you would in effect only be able to 'predict' the past.
Re:Predicting the future (Score:1, Insightful)
That doesn't mean that the uncertainty principle isn't relevant. Even if you knew the initial configuration exactly, you still can't predict the future with certainty in a quantum theory.
How about giving me an accurate weather report? (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead, put all those computers together to model the earth's weather and use the laws of physics to tell me if I should take off next Friday to play golf or schedule a trip to Disney in late August. Geez........