Big Blue Designing Chip to Decode the Big Bang

Jerry Beth writes "IBM is working with European astronomy organization Astron to design a chip that will be used to help gather billions-of-years-old radio signals from deep space in the hopes of learning more about the origins of the universe. From the article: 'It's part of Astron's Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project. The SKA will be linked to millions of antennas collecting radio signals from space. The antennas will be spread over a large surface area of the globe but, in the aggregate, they will form a square kilometer's worth of collection area. [...] The microprocessors will essentially help the antennas capture the signals, filter out extraneous data and then convert the signals into data. Astrophysicists will then analyze the data to look for patterns. The weakest signals are the prize in this project, because they will be the oldest.'"

Re:How else can it be applied?

[stevesliva]

Then it brings up the other question: What else can this processor be used for? If it needs to be produced in the millions to make it financially viable, where else will it be sold?

Nope, IBM offers a SiGe foundry process. If you pay for the wafers, IBM will make them, whether you want 10 or 10,000. Yes, you may be designing a chip for a limited design run, but you're also designing a telescope that you'll only build once...

It's just you.

[Vellmont]

At some point, doesn't it make sense to stop spending Billions of dollars of taxpayer money on Big Bang research?

It sounds like it's more European countries funding this. I don't see the US mentioned anywhere, so at best the US is but one funding contributor.

How much does it benefit us to know what happened .3 seconds after the big bang vs. 3 seconds vs. 10 million years?

I dunno.. how much did it benefit us more than 180 years ago when Michael Faraday was screwing around with magnets? How much did it benefit us when Gallileo was looking at the moons of Jupiter and realized that they revolved around Jupiter, and not the earth? Are you really trying to argue that understanding the basic forces of our universe might not possibly be of some use to us?

Scientific advancement and benefits to mankind aren't always a nice straight line where the benefit to an everyday person is immediately obvious.

Re:Is it just me, or is this a waste?

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily, there are plenty of people - with the resources - who don't agree with you.

Remember kids: You not "getting it", that doesn't imply "it"'s bad. It just means that you don't "get it".

There are lots of things which I consider a waste.. But I'm also aware of that since my interest lay elsewhere, I'm probably not qualified to have an informed opinion.

Expensive wines, for instance.