Love and Cosmology, Work Failures, Book Reviews

[tcpip]

Last Sunday Rev. Dr. David Sammons, Visiting Professor of Unitarian Universalist Heritage & Ministry, Star King Ministry, gave his a presentation on "That Confusing Word Called 'Love'". He made an extension to what is commonly called "the Unitarian-Universalist trinity" of freedom, reason and tolerance - by extending it to 'honesty' and 'compassion' which he considered to the key features of the notion of love. After the service, I led the discussion for the Unitarian Philosophy Forum which had an excellent turnout for a discussion on Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and particularly its relationship to the scientific method. We made good use of the BBC programme Most of our Universe is Missing. I have since started writing a paper on the issue and discussion, but find myself sidetracked by holographic principle.

Life at VPAC hasn't been fun for our users of late with three hardware failures on one of our storage nodes in a two-week period. Having 14 drives fail due to a faulty LSI card in the space of six minutes can be sort of scary, especially when we have to restore over twenty million files and almost 8 terabytes of data. It has meant an extended outage on our supercomputers, however users have been most understanding. On a work related topic from some years ago, the proposal that Martin McGuire of ConnectIE and I put together to convert East Timor's ccTLD into a revenue-raising international telephone directory has been taken up; but for a commercial interest and not for East Timor.

When Ticonderoga Online restarted at the very end of last year a number of my book reviews were included; The Last Witchfinder (historical fiction, entertaining, well-written, informative), Hidden Empire and A Forest of Stars (plain-vanilla space opera, somewhat unimaginative) and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (typical Phillip K. Dick - which is good). Still have a small mountain of other books I've promised to review.

Comments

[ivansun.livejournal.com]

*giggles* that sounds like X- marks the spot. Or another algebraic variable.

Dark Matter then is just something we are yet to know, hence the mystery?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, we're pretty sure it is there. The alternative, that gravity is actually variable, is extremely remote, especially after modelling based on data from the WMAP satellite give an accurate simulation of the universes' life.

But yes, Dark Matter/Dark Energy is a big 'X'. It could very well be a blanket term for a whole new range of matter and energy that will be incredibly varied. It's a little like knowing that matter and energy exists without knowing about knowing about atoms and forms.

A future periodic table of Dark Matter? Sure it's quite possible. Heck, I'd even be prepared to posit likely.

[ivansun.livejournal.com]

Two years ago, I attended a physics lecture at the Uni of Melbourne where the head of school noted that there are at least nine dimensions of reality including the four that we know of. (That is astonishing to me in itself, at his mentioning it so casually) If this is the case, it is quite possible that a particular unknown dimension might impact gravitationally in the manner of dark matter...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

*nods* String theory; currently debating somewhere between 10 and 26 :)

Extra dimensions seem pretty strange because we're used to a 3 spatial, 1 temporal universe.

Explaining an additional dimension is relatively simple. Think of a cube, with North, South, East and West 'walls' (N, S, E, W) and a floor and ceiling (F, C). Now imagine if you would a fourth spatial dimension which allows movement; like an edge between the F and C.

Check out the 3-d shadow of a similar object...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension

... and elaborate from there!