Archive for September 8th, 2009


Where Did All the Flowers Come From?

Posted by Miss Cellania in Science & Tech on September 8, 2009 at 10:58 pm

Charles Darwin was a lifelong fan of flowers, but was unable to figure out how they evolved. There were fossils of flowering plants going back 66-100 million years, which didn’t help much because flowers evolved much earlier. Recently, however, scientists are turning to DNA analysis of contemporary plants to decode where they came from. They are also finding older fossils than ever before, as far back as 136 million years ago. Paleobotanist James A. Doyle says the fossil record is the only thing that will bring together the many theories of flower evolution.

If you could travel back to 130 million years ago, you might not be impressed with the earliest flowers. “They didn’t look like they were going anywhere,” Dr. Doyle said.

Those early flowers were small and rare, living in the shadows of far more successful nonflowering plants. It took many millions of years for flowers to hit their stride. Around 120 million years ago, a new branch of flowers evolved that came to dominate many forests and explode in diversity. That lineage includes 99 percent of all species of flowering plants on Earth today, ranging from magnolias to dandelions to pumpkins. That explosion in diversity also produced the burst of flower fossils that so puzzled Darwin.

Genetic research is providing answers to how plants can switch on genes that control how different plants parts grow, and to use sexual reproduction to increase genetic diversity. Link

 
Email This Post 



Inhaling Chocolate

Posted by Marilyn Terrell in Food & Drink on September 8, 2009 at 10:23 pm

packofsixFrench chef Thierry Marx and Harvard professor of biomedical engineering David Edwards have invented a way to consume chocolate without calories. Le Whif is an aerosol inhaler that provides a puff of fine chocolate powder every time you get the cocoa urge. Each inhaler contains about 200 milligrams of chocolate powder, less than 1 calorie of chocolate, with four puffs per container.

To use, you place the device between your lips and inhale and the particles land on your tongue and the sides of your mouth, where you can taste them best. When you eat a chocolate bar, in contrast, much of the chocolate passes quickly through your mouth without spending much time on your taste buds. Le Whif allows you to inhale and savor. It comes in chocolate, chocolate mint and chocolate raspberry.

Link – via Nag on the Lake

 
Email This Post 



40 New Species Found in Papua New Guinea

Posted by Miss Cellania in Animals & Pets, Travel on September 8, 2009 at 9:46 pm

The BBC’s natural history unit sent an expedition to Mount Bosavi, a volcano in Papua New Guinea. Scientists on the team identified 40 new species of wildlife which have called the crater home since its last eruption 200,000 years ago. These include the 3-pound Bosavi Woolly Rat which can grow up to 32 inches long! They also found colorful new birds, beetles, spiders, marsupials, and frogs, such as the Litoria sauroni pictured.

The habitat in the area is currently regarded as pristine, but less than 20 miles to the south of Mount Bosavi extensive logging operations are happening.

The mountain acts like an island in the vast sea of jungle, trapping different species on it.

Link

(image credit: BBC)

 
Email This Post 



Eye Stick For the Blind

Posted by Queuebot in Gadgets, Hacks & Mods on September 8, 2009 at 9:25 pm

This cane designed by Wonjune Song is meant for the blind, but there are two big innovations that set it apart from the classic cane:

1) Its got a sensor lens fitted at the bottom of the cane. So when a blind person approaches a traffic light or stairs, the cane senses it.

2) It warns the user of the obstacles via a vibrating handle.





The Eye Stick is fitted with a sensor lens towards the bottom part, from where it picks up location bearings, like is the person nearing a staircase, or is he near the traffic lights. It then sends feedback to the blind commuter via vibrations, communicating the scenario, so that the person can be aware of his surroundings and take his next step with confidence.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Design Freak.

 
Email This Post 



Fun with Logs

Posted by Alex in Everything Else on September 8, 2009 at 8:02 pm

fun-with-logsAll you need to have for a fun evening with a too-trusting friend are a couple of logs, a long piece of 2 by 4s, a bin, and a blindfold.

Here’s a simple yet diabolically genious prank that you shouldn’t pull on anybody, you hear? Link

 
Email This Post 



The Ultimate Star Wars Collection

Posted by Alex in Film, Pictures on September 8, 2009 at 7:40 pm


Photo: Cho Woong

I’ve always been impressed with some people’s ability to collect things – stamps, soda cans, comic books, what have you. My amazement over Cho Woong’s extensive collection of Star Wars figures is compounded by his ability to keep everything … so organized and neat! I betcha there’s a good amount of OCD (I’m kidding!) involved in this: Link [in Korean] – via Cribcandy

 
Email This Post 



13 Awesome Stone Circles

Posted by Miss Cellania in Travel on September 8, 2009 at 7:22 pm

A few days ago, you read about Clonehenges, art installations that are made to resemble the original Stonehenge. You might not realize that Stonehenge is far from the only ancient stone circle in the UK, and there are some in Europe and North America as well. WebEcoist looks at 13 of these circles, including the pictured Avebury Stone Circle in England, which is bigger and older than Stonehenge! Link

 
Email This Post 



The Best Station Fire Photos

Posted by Johnny Cat in Pictures on September 8, 2009 at 6:58 pm

The Big Picture Blog has a roundup of some of the best photos to come out of the Station Fire in Angeles National Forest recently.

Over 140,000 acres have been consumed by the fire.  But the efforts of the firefighters, beautifully documented by these brave photogs, have contributed to full containment, which is expected by September 15.

Check out all 41 photos at the site: Link (Photograph by Jon Vidar/AP)

 
Email This Post 



That Will Buff Out

Posted by Johnny Cat in Auto & Transportation, Pictures on September 8, 2009 at 6:58 pm

That Will Buff Out is a newish photoblog along the lines of Fail Blog and I Can Has Cheezburger, that’s chock full of fun!  Users submit photos of vehicles in compromising positions, and each entry is easily shareable.  Above entry, “Always Helps To Apologize” made me laugh.  Plenty more at the blog…

Link

 
Email This Post 



Why Don’t We All Drive on the Same Side of the Road?

Posted by John Farrier in Auto & Transportation on September 8, 2009 at 6:52 pm

Yesterday, the residents of Samoa began driving on the left side of the road instead of the right. This is the first major switch since the 1970s, when Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone made the change. Randy James of Time magazine has an article exploring how different nations came to use different sides of the road:

Theories differ, but there’s no doubt Napoleon was a major influence. The French have used the right since at least the late 18th century (there’s evidence of a Parisian “keep-right” law dating to 1794). Some say that before the French Revolution, aristocrats drove their carriages on the left, forcing the peasantry to the right. Amid the upheaval, fearful aristocrats sought to blend in with the proletariat by traveling on the right as well. Regardless of the origin, Napoleon brought right-hand traffic to the nations he conquered, including Russia, Switzerland and Germany. Hitler, in turn, ordered right-hand traffic in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the 1930s. Nations that escaped right-handed conquest, like Great Britain, preserved their left-handed tradition.

Link via Outside the Beltway

Image by flickr user multitrack used under creative commons license.

 
Email This Post 



The Fire-Breathing Dragon Boat

Posted by John Farrier in Art, Video Clips on September 8, 2009 at 6:33 pm


(YouTube Link)

The Lucky Dragon is a work by Japanese artist Yanobe Kenji. It is a water and fire-shooting articulated steel dragon head with glowing eyes mounted on a 15-meter long cruise boat. The video above is of the boat in action at Aqua Metropolis festival in Osaka. It’s scheduled to make similar demonstrations in Osaka’s waterways until October 12.

Artist’s Website

Link via DVICE

 
Email This Post 



Glass Microbiology by Luke Jerram

Posted by Queuebot in Art, Health, Pictures, Science & Tech on September 8, 2009 at 6:29 pm


SARS Corona Virus by Luke Jerram

Artist Luke Jarram has created glass sculptures of some of the deadliest diseases known to man including HIV, E. Coli and Small Pox.  The incredibly intrincate sculptures challenge both the state of the art in glass sculpting and the ability of scientists to visualize these diseases.  For instance scientists are unable to describe to Jarram how RNA is situated in the Capsid.

Jarram’s website includes a video showing how he uses glass blowing techniques to create the sculptures.  The video shows him working on the HIV sculpture.

Link – via digg

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by OddNumber.

 
Email This Post 



Man Has Donated 40 Gallons of Blood

Posted by Alex in Health on September 8, 2009 at 6:25 pm

Al Fischer, an 75-year-old New York man has reached a very commendable milestone: he has donated 40 gallons of blood over 58 years!

The print shop operator from Massapequa, affectionately known as Albee, has been donating blood every year since 1951, when Harry S. Truman was in the White House – 11 presidents ago.

So far, Fischer has given 319 pints of blood and he will do it again Tuesday in Woodbury, bringing his lifetime donation to a total of 40 gallons.

"I’m too cheap to give money, so I give blood," Fischer, 75, said jokingly.

Fischer is estimated to have helped almost 1,000 people who needed blood transfusion. Newsday has the story: Link (Photo: Howard Schnapp)

 
Email This Post 



Portraits From Your DNA

Posted by John Farrier in Art, Science & Tech on September 8, 2009 at 6:18 pm


Image: DNA Art Forms

Lauren Davis of io9 describes four companies that make a portrait of you, right down to the profile of your DNA. Above is a portrait of a woman named Catherine from DNA Art Forms. It all started with a cheek swab:

After identifying 15 unique regions of your genetic code, clients consult with an artist as to how they want their DNA represented, be it as an abstract form, a landscape, or as an actual portrait including your image. Portraits start at $1500, and clients are consulted each step of the way, approving concept sketches before paint ever touches canvas.

Link

 
Comments Off
Email This Post 



A Funeral and A Wedding

Posted by Alex in Baby & Kids on September 8, 2009 at 4:09 pm

This has got to be one of the most poignant things I’ve ever read. When 7-year-old Asa Hill died after a car accident, his parents honored the young boy’s lifelong wish that they get married. And married they did, right after their child’s funeral:

The Rev. Joel Miller of The Unitarian Universalist Church of Elmwood, where the service was held, was unsure at first when the idea of a wedding was proposed by the couple and their family.

"I asked twice, ‘We’re doing a wedding?’ This was new for me. I never did a funeral service and a wedding ceremony at the same time, and normally wouldn’t, but they have known each other since they were teens," Miller said. "And they had been providing for Asa, and they made a home together for all of Asa’s life. … It was clear they were following through on something they had been talking about for some time."

Hill and Ghirmatzion have been best friends since they were 15 and have been together for almost half of their lives. After Asa was born, marriage had always been something that they considered but, according to Hill, both felt that a wedding was "superficial and not necessary."

Asa, however, was insistent that they make their union official. "Asa really wanted us to do it, and every time he would ask us
we would say, ‘Yes, we’ll get married,’ " said Hill. But the couple never did get around to figuring out the logistics for a ceremony.

While holding his lifeless son in his arms at the hospital, Hill was moved to finally officially propose to his lifelong partner. "Rahwa was overwhelmed at that moment and just looked at me. When the family sat down to plan the funeral service, she said ‘Let’s get married.’ And everyone broke down at the table," he said.

Jean Shin of CNN has the moving story: Link

 
Email This Post 



10 Incredible Backyard DIY Projects

Posted by John Farrier in Pictures, Science & Tech on September 8, 2009 at 1:50 pm


Photo: Popular Mechanics

The magazine Popular Mechanics has issued its Backyard Geniuses Award. It’s like a Nobel Prize, but for people who complete amazing technical projects of questionable utility. Pictured above is a giant car-crushing mechanical hand by Christian Ristow, a former employee of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop:

In 2007 Christian Ristow, an artist and former animatronics designer for the movie industry, demonstrated his first working incarnation of the Hand of Man at a robotics festival in Amsterdam. Much of his time since then has been spent re-engineering and refining the design of the 27-foot-long hydraulically actuated appendage, exhibiting more and more capable crushers at a series of public venues­. Ristow’s latest mechanical steel limb has 90-degree wrist rotation and improved mobility in the finger joints. It is powered by a 90-hp Perkins 1104C-44T four-cylinder diesel engine and is controlled through a glove worn by the operator. At demonstrations, that operator is usually a random member of the audience. “I’ve built other large-scale radio-control robots for shows over the years, but I always felt like I was the one having the most fun,” Ristow says. “This democratizes the crushing power.”

Link

 
Email This Post 



Muzorama

Posted by John Farrier in Art, Video Clips on September 8, 2009 at 1:18 pm


(Video Link)

Muzorama is a surrealist short film created by students at the animation studio Superinfocom and presented last month at the Siggraph 2009 computer animation festival. The six students involved, Laurent Monneron, Elsa Brehin, Raphaël Calamote, Mauro Carraro, Maxime Cazaux, Emilien Davaux and Axel Tillement were assigned to create an animated short based upon the universe of an artist within six weeks. They selected the French illustrator Muzo.

Via The Presurfer

 
Email This Post 



Llama Caddies

Posted by Miss Cellania in Animals & Pets, Sports on September 8, 2009 at 11:27 am

Sherwood Forest Golf Course in Transylvania County, North Carolina offers a memorable golf experience every Tuesday. You can rent a llama to be your caddy! A llama from Fairway Friends Llama Farm will carry two sets of clubs for $40. This is a sure way to get kids interested in playing golf. Link -via the Presurfer

 
Email This Post 



Snow Leopard Cub

Posted by Miss Cellania in Animals & Pets, Video Clips on September 8, 2009 at 11:25 am


(YouTube link)

The Tama Zoo in Tokyo has unveiled their new snow leopard cub named Yukichi. The male cub was born on July 2nd. He is the fourth cub born to his mother Yuki and the first for his father Valdemar. And he’s adorable! Link

 
Email This Post 



Kate has Five Babies

Posted by Miss Cellania in Animals & Pets on September 8, 2009 at 11:22 am

The announcement in the Times of London told the world that Kate Pong had given birth to quintuplets named Beyonce, Tyra, Bobbi, Barrack and Earl. The small item prompted Robert Littlejohn of The Daily Mail to speculate on the mother’s marital status. But it turns out that Kate Pong is a chocolate Labrador! Kate’s owner, Fiona Wallace of Newport, Shropshire said a friend had placed the birth announcement but didn’t bother to mention that Kate is a dog.

“We have a lot of friends in the business all over the country and lots of people read about her on the website.

They keep logging on and it’s just snowballed from there.

“So many people were asking about her and the pups that we decided to put it in the Times so everyone around the country would know.”

Link to story. Link to website.

 
Email This Post 



The Math Book: Milestones in the History of Math

Posted by Alex in Neatorama Exclusives, Science & Tech on September 8, 2009 at 1:32 am

I love math (though it's debatable whether math loves me back, I suspect not) so it's a pleasure to read Cliff Pickover's newest creation, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics.

Don't let the title fool you - The Math Book is a thoroughly enjoyable "walk" through the history of mathematics with each milestone narrated by Pickover in a short and sweet fashion (and surprisingly, with very little equations) that even non-mathemagicians like myself can enjoy. If you've ever heard the terms Bessel functions, Transcendental numbers, and Riemann hypothesis, and want to know more, then this is the book for you.

Below is an excerpt from the book (selecting which ones to show was a hard thing to do - there were just so many interesting articles!):

Cicada-Generated Prime Numbers

Cicadas are winged insects that evolved around 1.8 million years ago during the Pleistocene epoch, when glaciers advanced and retreated across North America. Cicadas of the genus Magicicada spend most of their lives below the ground, feeding on the juices of plant roots, and then emerge, mate, and die quickly. These creatures display a startling behavior: Their emergence is synchronized with periods of years that are usually the prime numbers 13 and 17. (A prime number is an integer such as 11, 13, and 17 that has only two integer divisors: 1 and itself.) During the spring of their 13th or 17th year, these periodical cicadas construct an exit tunnel. Sometimes more than 1.5 million individuals emerge in a single acre; this abundance of bodies may have survival value as they overwhelm predators such as birds that cannot possibly eat them all at once. (Photo: Joelmills [Wikipedia])

Some researchers have speculated that the evolution of prime-number life cycles occurred so that the creatures increased their chances of evading shorter-lived predators and parasites. For example, if these cicadas had 12-year life cycles, all predators with life cycles of 2, 3, 4, or 6 years might more easily find the insects. Mario Markus of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, Germany, and his coworkers discovered that these kinds of prime-number cycles arise naturally from evolutionary mathematical models of interactions between predator and prey. In order to experiment, they first assigned random life-cycle durations to their computer-simulated populations. After some time, a sequence of mutations always locked the synthetic cicadas into a stable prime-number cycle.

Of course, this research is still in its infancy and many questions remain. What is special about 13 and 17? What predators or parasites have actually existed to drive the cicadas to these periods? Also, a mystery remain as to why, of the 1,500 cicada species worldwide, only a small number of the genus Magicicada are known to be periodical.

Borromean Rings


(L) Borromean Rings; (M) Valknut, or three interlocked triangles, on the Stora Hammar Stone; (R) Molecular Borromean Rings by J. Fraser SToddart

Peter Guthrie Tait (1831 - 1901) - A simple yet intriguing set of interlocking objects of interest to mathematicians and chemists is formed by Borromean rings - three mutually interlocked rings named after the Italian Renaissance family who used them on its coat of arms in the fifteenth century. (Image: Theon [Wikipedia])

Notice that Borromean rings have no two rings that are linked, so if we cut any one of the rings, all three rings come apart. Some historians speculate that the ancient ring configurations once represented the three families of Visconti, Sforza, and Borromeo, who formed a tenuous union through intermarriages. The rings also appear in 1467 in the Church of San Pancrazio in Florence. Even older, triangular versions were used by the Vikings, one famous example of which was found on a bedpost of a prominent woman who died in 834.

The rings appear in mathematical context in the 1876 paper on knots by Scottish mathematical physicist Peter Tait. Because two choices (over or under) are possible for each ring crossing, 26 = 64 possible interlaced patterns exist. If we take symmetry into account, only 10 of these patterns are geometrically distinct.

Mathematicians now know that we cannot actually construct a true set of Borromean rings with flat circles, and in fact, you can see this for yourself if you try to create the interlocked rings out of wire, which requires some deformation or kinks in the wires. In 1987, Michael Freedman and Richard Skora proved the theorem stating that Borromean rings are impossible to construct with flat circles.

In 2004, UCLA chemists created a molecular Borromean ring compound that was 2.5 nanometers across and that included six metal ions. Researchers are currently contemplating ways in which they may use molecular Borromean rings in such diverse fields as spintronics (a technology that exploits electron spin and charge) and medical imaging.

Golden Ratio

Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli (1445 - 1517) - In 1509, Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli, a close friend of Leonardo da Vinci, published Divina Proportione, a treatise on a number that is now widely known as the "Golden Ratio." This ratio, symbolized by , appears with amazing frequency in mathematics and nature. We can understand the proportion most easily by dividing a line into two segments so that the ratio of the whole segment to the longest part is the same as the ratio of the longer part to the shorter part, or (a+b)/b = b/a = 1.61803 ...

If the lengths of the sides of a rectangle are in the golden ratio, then the rectangle is a "golden rectangle." It's possible to divide a golden rectangle into a square and a golden rectangle. Next, we can cut the smaller golden rectangle into a smaller square and golden rectangle. We may continue this process indefinitely, producing smaller and smaller golden rectangles.

If we draw a diagonal from the top right of the original rectangle to the bottom left, then from the bottom right of the baby (that is, the next smaller) golden rectangle to the top left, the intersection point shows the point to which all the baby golden rectangles converge. Moreover, the lengths of the diagonals are in golden ratio to each other. The point to which all the golden rectangles converge is sometimes called the "Eye of God."

The golden rectangle is the only rectangle from which a square can be cut so that the remaining rectangle will always be similar to the original rectangle. If we connect the vertices in the diagram, we approximate a logarithmic spiral that "envelops" the Eye of God. Logarithmic spirals are everywhere - seashells, animal horns, the cochlea of the ear - anywhere that nature needs to fill space economically and regularly. A spiral is strong and uses a minimum of materials. While expanding, it alters its size but never its shape.

Benford's Law

Simon Newcomb (1835 - 1909), Frank Benford (1883 - 1948) - Benford's Law, also called the first-digit law or leading-digit phenomenon, asserts that in various number lists, the digit 1 tends to occur in the leftmost position with probability of roughly 30 percent, much greater than the expected 11.1 percent that would result if each digit occurred with a 1 to 9 probability. Benford's law can be observed, for instance, in tables that list populations, death rates, stock prices, baseball statistics, and the area of rivers and lakes. Explanations for this phenomenon are very recent. (Photo from Mark J. Nigrini)

Benford's law is named after Dr. Frank Benford, a physicist at the General Electric Company who publicized his work in 1938, although it had been previously discovered by mathematician and astronomer Simon Newcomb in 1881. Pages of logarithms, with numbers starting with the numerals 1 are said to be dirtier and more worn by other pages, because the number 1 occurs as the first digit about 30 percent more often than any other. In numerous kinds of data, Benford determined that the probability of any number n from 1 through 0 being the first digit is log10 (1 + 1/n). Even the Fibonacci sequence - 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 - follows Benford's law. Fibonacci numbers are far more likely to start with "1" than any other digit. It appears that Benford's law applies to any data that follows a "power law." For example, large lakes are rare, medium-size lakes are more common, and small lakes are even more common. Similarly, 11 Fibonacci numbers exist in the range 1 - 100, but only one in the next three ranges of 100 (101 - 200, 201- 300, 301- 400)

Benford's law has often been used to detect fraud. For example, accounting consultants can sometimes use the law to detect fraudulent tax returns in which the occurrence of digits does not follow what would be expected according to Benford's law.

Menger Sponge


Menger Sponge by Jeannine Mosely, at the Institute for Figuring. Photo: Ravi Apte

Karl Menger (1902 - 1985) - The Menger sponge is a fractal object with an infinite number of cavities - a nightmarish object for any dentist to contemplate. The object was first described by Austrian mathematician Karl Menger in 1926. To construct the sponge, we begin with a "mother cube" and subdivide it into 27 identical smaller cubes. Next, we remove the cube in the center and the six cubes that share faces with it. This leaves behind 20 cubes. We continue to repeat the process forever. The number of cubes increases by 20n, where n is the number of iterations performed on the mother cube. The second iteration gives us 400 cubes, and by the time we get to the sixth iteration, we have 64,000,000 cubes.

Each face of the Menger sponge is called a Sierpinski carpet. Fractal antennae based on the Sierpinski carpet are sometimes used as efficient receivers of electromagnetic signals. Both the carpets and the entire cube have fascinating geometrical properties. For example, the sponge has an infinite surface area while enclosing zero volume.

According to the Institute for Figuring, with each iteration, the Sierpinski carpet face "dissolves into a foam whose final structure has no area whatever yet possesses a perimeter that is infinitely long. Like the skeleton of a beast whose flesh has vanished, the concluding form is without substance - it occupies a planar surface, but no longer fills it." This porous remnant hovers between a line and a plane. Whereas a line is one-dimensional and a plane two-dimensional, the Sierpinski carpet has a "fractional" dimension of 1.89. The Menger sponge has a fractional dimension (technically referred to as the Hausdorff Dimension) between a plane and a solid, approximately 2.73, and it has been used to visualize certain models of a foam-like space-time. Dr. Jeannine Mosely has constructed a Menger sponge model from more than 65,000 business cards that weights about 150 pounds (70 kilograms).

The Quest for Lie Group E8


E8 graph as a 2-dimensional projection, by Peter McMullen
(image by Claudio Rocchini [wikipedia])

Marius Sophus Lie (1842 - 1899), Wilhelm Karl Joseph Killing (1847 - 1923) - For more than a century, mathematicians have sought to understand a vast, 248-dimensional entity, known to them only as E8. Finally, in 2007, an international team of mathematicians and computer scientists made use of a supercomputer to tame the intricate beast.

As background, consider the Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Sacred Mystery of the Cosmos) of Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630), who was so enthralled with symmetry that he suggested the entire solar system and planetary orbits could be modeled by Platonic Solids, such as the cube and dodecahedron, nestled in each other forming layers as if in a gigantic crystalline onion. These kinds of Keplerian symmetries were limited in scope and number; however, symmetries that Kepler could have hardly imagined may indeed rule the universe.

In the late nineteenth century, the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie (pronounced "Lee") studied objects with smooth rotational symmetries, like the sphere or doughnut in our ordinary three-dimensional space. In three and higher dimensions, these kinds of symmetries are expressed by Lie groups. The German mathematician Wilhelm Killing suggested the existence of the E8 group in 1887. Simpler Lie groups control the shape of electron orbital and symmetries of subatomic quarks. Larger groups, like E8, may someday hold the key to a unified theory of physics and help scientist understand string theory and gravity.

Fokko du Cloux, a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist who was one of the E8 team members, wrote the software for the supercomputer and pondered the ramifications of E8 while he was dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and breathing with a respirator. He died in November 2006, never living to see the end of the quest for E8.

On January 8, 2007, a supercomputer computed the last entry in the table for E8, which describes the symmetries of a 57-dimensional object that can be imagined as rotating in 248 ways without changing its appearance. The work is significant as an advance in mathematical knowledge and in the use of large-scale computing to solve profound mathematical problems.

Mathematical Universe Hypothesis

Max Tegmark (b. 1967) - In this book, we have encountered various geometries that have been thought to hold the keys to the universe. Johannes Kepler modeled the solar system with Platonic Solids such as the dodecahedron. Large Lie groups, like E8, may someday help us create a unified theory of physics. Even Galileo in the seventeenth century suggested that "nature's great book is written in mathematical symbols." In the 1960s, physicist Eugene Wigner was impressed with the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." (Photo: MIT Physics Faculty website)

In 2007, Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark published scientific and popular articles on the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) that states that our physical reality is a mathematical structure and that our universe is not just described by mathematics - it is mathematics. Tegmark is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute. He notes that when we consider equations like 1 + 1 = 2, the notations for the numbers are relatively unimportant when compared to the relationship that are being described. He believes that "we don't invent mathematical structures - we discover them, and invent only the notation for describing them."

Tegmark's hypothesis implies that "we all live in a gigantic mathematical object - one that is more elaborate than a dodecahedron, and probably also more complex than objects with intimidating names like Calabi-Yau manifolds, tensor bundles, and Hilbert spaces, which appear in today's most advanced theories. Everything in our world is purely mathematical - including you." If this idea seems counterintuitive, this shouldn't be surprising, because many modern theories, like quantum theory and relativity, can defy intuition. As mathematician Ronald Graham once said, "Our brain have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions."

__________

Cliff Pickover is a prolific author, having published more than 40 books, translated into over a dozen languages, on topics ranging from science and mathematics to religion, art, history, computers and creativity, human intelligence, higher dimensions, time travel, and science fiction. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University's Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, holds over 50 U.S. patents, and is an associate editor for several scientific journals. His computer graphics have appeared on the cover of numerous magazines, and his research has received considerable attention from media outlets ranging from CNN and WIRED to The New York Times. His website, pickover.com, receives millions of visits.

Links: The Math Book website | The Math Book on Amazon | Cliff Pickover's Reality Carnival

__________

Previously on Neatorama: 5 Scientific Laws and the Scientists Behind Them

Math T-shirts from the Neatorama Store:

 
Email This Post 




Don't Miss: New Stuff | Bestsellers | The Cute Store
                   Funny T-Shirts

Need a gift? Get unforgettable gifts for:
Geeks | Pranksters | Kids | Hipsters | Shutterbugs

Lijit Search

Old school? Bookmark us! RSS Feed Twitter Facebook Page