scientific models – Harmonia Philosophica

Cubes!

The ancient philosopher Plato posited the shapes of the building blocks of the universe. According to him, the earth was formed of cubes. Researchers now find a fundamental truth in that premise. Studying the shapes and fragmentation patterns of a variety of rocks, they found that the average of all their forms is a cube. (1)

Approximations.

Imitating the cosmos.

Until we can make sense of it.

Until it makes no sense.

Look at the shore.

Full of rocks.

Look at them carefully.

Can you listen…

At the ocean behind?

New force…

Photo by **Spiros Kakos** from **Pexels**

Everything in our Universe is held together or pushed apart by four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear interactions. Physicists now think they’ve spotted the actions of a fifth physical force emerging from a helium atom.

It’s not the first time researchers claim to have caught a glimpse of it, either. A few years ago, they saw it in the decay of an isotope of beryllium. Now the same team has seen a second example of the mysterious force at play – and the particle they think is carrying it, which they’re calling X17.

The team seems to discover a new particle the characteristics of which suggested it had to be a completely new kind of fundamental boson. We currently know of four fundamental forces, and we know that three of them have bosons carrying their messages of attraction and repulsion.

This new boson couldn’t possibly be one of the particles carrying the four known forces, thanks to its distinctive mass of (17 megaelectronvolts, or about 33 times that of an electron), and tiny life span (of about 10 to the minus 14 seconds).

But physics isn’t keen on celebrating prematurely. Finding a new particle is always big news in physics, and warrants a lot of scrutiny. Not to mention repeated experiment. (1)

Humans lost in their quest for more knowledge.

New particles.

New forces.

New… whatever we know already.

Modern physics looks the cosmos through its own lenses. And interprets everything accordingly. When something is not in place, it seeks to fill in the puzzle with a new piece. And it searches for that new piece in – where else? – this things it already knows. So like a stupid uroborus ofis (Gr. Ουροβόρος όφις) it keeps on verifying itself by looking for answers back to… itself.

Don’t you see?

There is nothing which you see that you have not seen already…

And in the beginning you were blind.

It is just that we need a new Einstein to tell us so.

Cosmic-scale magnetic fields. Scientific models’ dirty little secrets…

While researchers have believed for some time that magnetic fields of femto-Gauss strength extend to the largest scales in the universe — to scales larger than the largest clusters of galaxies — it is an unresolved mystery how such magnetic fields can have been created in the early universe.

One logical possibility is that the magnetic fields were enhanced by the primordial period of inflation, which is needed also to solve the flatness and horizon problem in the standard Big-Bang model. But the problem is that magnetic fields generated during inflation have been believed to quickly be washed away by the subsequent ordinary expansion of the universe making successful inflationary magnetogenesis a challenge.

Recently the researchers Takeshi Kobayashi from International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy and Martin S. Sloth from University of Southern Denmark have shown that due to Faraday’s law of induction, the assumed evolution of electromagnetic fields after inflation is different than previously assumed if there are also strong primordial electric fields.

“This opens a new door to our understanding of the origin of cosmic magnetic fields,” says Martin S. Sloth, professor, CP3-Origins, Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology, University of Southern Denmark. (1)

Magnetic fields everywhere. And yet we cannot understand why magnetic fields are everywhere. One day we will know. But how can we know anything else without knowing the obvious? How can we know magnetism if we cannot explain how the massive prevailing fields in the universe are formed? How can we know the secrets of life if we cannot understand life and how it emerged? How can we know about gravity without knowing how it can be paired with the other major theory of the cosmos (QM)?

How arrogant must we be to know anything without knowing everything?

Behold one of the dirty secrets of the science process of creating models.

That they work based on what they explain and not based on what they don’t!

Behold one of the greatest secrets of men.

That they know based on only what they know…

But one day we will know everything.

And then, only then, will we know anything…

Related article: Check the harmonia-philosophica.blogspot.com portal!

Chaos. Numbers. Simulations.

Digital computers use numbers based on flawed representations of real numbers, which may lead to inaccuracies when simulating the motion of molecules, weather systems and fluids, find scientists.

The study, published today in Advanced Theory and Simulations, shows that digital computers cannot reliably reproduce the behaviour of ‘chaotic systems’ which are widespread. This fundamental limitation could have implications for high performance computation (HPC) and for applications of machine learning to HPC.

Professor Peter Coveney, Director of the UCL Centre for Computational Science and study co-author, said: “Our work shows that the behaviour of the chaotic dynamical systems is richer than any digital computer can capture. Chaos is more commonplace than many people may realise and even for very simple chaotic systems, numbers used by digital computers can lead to errors that are not obvious but can have a big impact. Ultimately, computers can’t simulate everything.”

The team investigated the impact of using floating-point arithmetic — a method standardised by the IEEE and used since the 1950s to approximate real numbers on digital computers.

Digital computers use only rational numbers, ones that can be expressed as fractions. Moreover the denominator of these fractions must be a power of two, such as 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. There are infinitely more real numbers that cannot be expressed this way. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190923213314.htm)

An irrational universe.

Full of irrational people.

Trying to analyze it rationally.

Under the illusion that number we have invented can draw a sketch of the cosmos. And yet, nothing we have invented is anywhere to be seen but on a piece of paper. Can you limit the birth of a star on a piece of paper? Can you contain the death of the universe on an equation?

We believe we can.

And sadly, we do.

And at the moment we do, the universe indeed dies…

And a small voice will whisper in our ear…

Congratulations. You have now understood it all.

How irrationally rational everything is!

And inside the darkest night you will dance.

Laughter.

And for a brief moment the forest will look at you.

Crying.

And for a brief moment the forest will see nothing…

But an empty broken CD. Full of data. Full of life…

AI. Universe. Logos.

Researchers have successfully created a model of the Universe using artificial intelligence, reports a new study.

Researchers seek to understand our Universe by making model predictions to match observations. Historically, they have been able to model simple or highly simplified physical systems, jokingly dubbed the “spherical cows,” with pencils and paper. Later, the arrival of computers enabled them to model complex phenomena with numerical simulations. For example, researchers have programmed supercomputers to simulate the motion of billions of particles through billions of years of cosmic time, a procedure known as the N-body simulations, in order to study how the Universe evolved to what we observe today.

“Now with machine learning, we have developed the first neural network model of the Universe, and demonstrated there’s a third route to making predictions, one that combines the merits of both analytic calculation and numerical simulation,” said Yin Li, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo, and jointly the University of California, Berkeley. (1)

A perfect model of the universe by using artificial intelligence.

But why use intelligence at all to analyze a random universe?

We feel the cosmos is made out of order.

And yet our mind is full of chaos.

Believing in chaos and yet striving for order.

Unable to grasp the simple truth: that there is no truth!

And this is the most stable law of them all.

Transcending through the cosmos.

Making it dance in the void of space.

Making it stand still inside your mind.

Create the AI. Look at it modeling the universe.

Do you see yourself in it?

You will understand everything at the end.

But only at the moment you pull the plug.

And stop looking at this perfectly functional model of the cosmos…