Comments for Cosmic Variance

Comment on Newton, P.I. by Wc

Wc — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:21:29 +0000

I was only trying to say that America likes to play up the word ‘genius’ - but is there such a thing?

Sean rightly points out ‘hard work’ is a major factor in the making of a successful scientist. I say perseverance is a better word to describe what is needed. That and intellectual honesty are really what make a great scientist.

Most scientific problems are just too hard to be solved in a day. The harder the problem gets the less IQ matters. Also I doubt if it makes a difference if you work from 9a.m -8 p.m or 9a.m - 12p.m everyday. What matters is the ability to start with renewed enthusiasm everyday in the face of repeated disappointment.

And a good dose of luck helps very much.

Discovery of calculus and gravity was a hard problem and it took ‘genius’ to solve. ‘Genius’ however is just not the individual alone - the individual is not also the most important component of ‘genius’. It takes a collusion of many factors to produce a ‘genius’ who accomplishes anything extraordinary. I would say these are, in order of importance, being in the right place at the right time, a supporting environment and lastly any individual traits.

Its not a coincidence that two people separately discovered something as profound as calculus at about the same time in about the same place(Europe).

People who say ‘He would have been great in any age, whether as a philosopher or as a scientist or as a mathematician’, are just hero-worshipping. How great and famous would he have been if he had been born in Somalia? If he had been born in Europe during the dark ages? Whether or not one wants to believe it, luck plays a great part in determining whether we end up discovering gravity or being the proprietor of an apple-cart.

Personally I doubt whether Newton would have discovered gravity if his university had not shut down because of the plague and he had not been forced to idle and ruminate at his grandmother’s farm.

We can stretch ourselves within the limitations of the age, place, time and environment that we grow up and live in but no one can ever escape those limitations. And ‘genius’ far from being something that transcends its environment, is actually a product of it.

Comment on Camp Quest UK by Mark

Mark — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:01:16 +0000

It’s a quest Peter - they’re working on it.

Comment on arxiv Find: The Local Density of Dark Matter by Olli

Olli — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:39:43 +0000

Unlike DE, DM clusters due to gravity, i.e. it accumulates in objects like galaxies and clusters of galaxies. In the paper, they estimate the *local* density in the solar neighbourhood, which is significantly enhanced over the *average* density of DM and thus higher than the density of DE.

Comment on Newton, P.I. by RD

RD — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:00:22 +0000

Sean, in your opening paragraph you mentioned the question of what was common to the best scientists and gave the reply ‘hard work’, which I certainly would agree with. Another attribute that has been mentioned is a sense of playfulness, although I am not sure if that would apply to Newton.

Comment on Rules for Time Travelers by Time Travel by Sean Carrol « falafel

Time Travel by Sean Carrol « falafel — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:47:51 +0000

[…] Source. […]

Comment on Holes of Silence by pi

pi — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:47:41 +0000

interesting, fact is they did one in haifa and didn’t have hawking radiation, neither evaporated, and it was done only with 10.000 atoms in
bosonic state. now they are going to mass strong force quarks at cern
hundreds of thousands. If they become a boson, their strong force, 100
times stronger than the electroweak force at haifa, will create a sucking hole 100^3 times faster in its absorbition. Speed of sound x 100^3=speed
of light. Thus a quark hole is actually a black hole and will be created
at cern and will not evaporate.
interesting haifa has proved that a boson quark hole will be a black hole
and it will not evaporate and it will be made at cern
interesting nobody has thought of this at cern?

Comment on arxiv Find: The Local Density of Dark Matter by Jimbo

Jimbo — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:50:13 +0000

That number is enuf to make a cosmologist go wild.
The density of dark energy is 3.9 Gev/m^3; Thus they’re claiming a dark matter density which is exactly 5 orders of magnitude larger than that of dark energy !?
The relative density of DE:DM is supposed to be about 0.72/0.24 ~ 3:1 with regular baryonic matter accounting for the remaining 4%.
What gives ?

Comment on Liquid Sand by Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:35:22 +0000

“Back when I was a kid, my Dad constructed a small factory for producing resin-coated sand. He used compressed air to fluidize the sand, making it easy to move it from place to place using just gravity”

I’ve no idea if it’s still there, but the Science Museum in London used to have a tub of sand fluidised in this way for kids to play with. It was very cool.

Comment on arxiv Find: The Local Density of Dark Matter by Lab Lemming

Lab Lemming — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:10:36 +0000

Is GeV a mass equivalent energy unit? If so, why don’t they just use mAMU or (shock, horror) grams?

Comment on arxiv Find: The Local Density of Dark Matter by macho

macho — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:31:04 +0000

7% uncertainty is a bit too optimistic (loosening the assumption of spherical symmetry will increase this uncertainty by a significant amount). Also, the uncertainties in some of the galactic parameters are larger than they’ve assumed here.

There was another very recent paper that came at this with a different approach

Reconstructing WIMP Properties in Direct Detection Experiments
Including Galactic Dark Matter Distribution Uncertainties

and found a local density of 0.32 Gev/cm with an uncertainty of 22% for
their “baseline” model — with full acknowledgement that this is a model dependent
estimate.