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Universe at large scale and brain at very small scale remarkably similar
- Thread starter nowonmai
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SmC
Ex-Bluelighter
Interesting. What does this tell us then?
DarthMom
Bluelighter
great pics, although one is computer simulated, so not exactly a real pic, but i still see the similarities. this is a topic i have thought about often, looking at a grain of sand and wondering what kind of world lives in that grain. infinitely big and infinitely small.....i don't have words to put my thoughts into place. too much for my little head to wrap around :D
smc, tells us everything is connected/related??
smc, tells us everything is connected/related??
SmC
Ex-Bluelighter
Connected in what way? Other than the patterns being similar it doesn't really tell us much. I haven't had much sleep so forgive me if i'm missing the obvious here! 
DarthMom
Bluelighter
"We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the Cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff."
- Carl Sagan
no you aren't missing anything! i am just talking out of my ass with this :D
- Carl Sagan
no you aren't missing anything! i am just talking out of my ass with this :D
ebola?
Bluelight Crew
what is a fractal information network?
How does it function?
How does it function?
Tokey-tokerson
Bluelighter
What is that huge star in the middle of the universe?
ninjadanslarbretabar
Bluelighter
no its god 
Medatripper Tates
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2005
- Messages
- 1,014
hmm .. how is it even possible to simulate a universe and be able to zoom out to that extent, or is it just simulated at that scale.. ? This is wierd though, we do not even know everything about how the universe behaves and there are plenty mysteries out there. Can we even be sure that this is what the universe actually looks like? Forgive me for being skeptical, but there are a lot of people out there who would absolutely love to have something like this to support their theory of the universe being a brain cell in some giant god being or something. I'm not saying this is impossible, just that it seems like this is conveniently put together to support that theory.
zorn
Bluelighter
It's a cluster or a supercluster -- a whole bunch of galaxies jammed so close together that they look like one big blob in the picture.Tokey-tokerson said:
And actually, that's just a small section of what the universe looks like. So the cluster they're showing is not really 'in the middle.' There are lots of clumps of galaxies like that, connected by 'walls' and 'filaments' of galaxies. They surround huge, empty voids where there's very little matter. It's sort of like foam, or soap bubbles. Here's a bigger picture from a similar simulation:
Here's a VERY big version of the same image.
Both are from this page, which has lots of cool pictures and snazzy 3-d videos of the large-scale structure of the universe.
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/millennium/
They have pictures from earlier times in the simulations too, so you can see this foam-like structure forming out of the early universe, which we know was almost perfectly uniform after the Big Bang.
The universe at 0.2 billion years old, 1 billion, 5 billion, and 14 billion (which is now: )
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Finally, here are some real pictures of the large-scale structure of the universe. These are actual datasets, not simulations! They're from Sloan DSS and 2dF, the two giant galaxy surveys underway. They're only 2-d slices, but you can clearly see the same structure as in the simulations. (They 'fade' near the edges just because we can only see the brightest galaxies so far away.)
DarthMom
Bluelighter
i just can't wrap my brain around the fact that we are seeing stars and galaxies the way they were millions (billion?) of years ago, and in theory, with a strong enough telescope, you could see the big bang.
i can't comprehend how there is a camera we can make that can do what it does already.
i can't comprehend how there is a camera we can make that can do what it does already.
zorn
Bluelighter
^^^ It is amazing isn't it? Blows your mind.
By the way, we couldn't actually see the big bang with a powerful enough camera. (We DO in fact have a powerful enough camera.**) This is because early on, right after the Big Bang, the universe was a glowing-hot plasma. Sort of like a lightning bolt, or the sun. We can't see through that. So the oldest (and furthest away) thing we can see is the universe right before it cooled enough to stop glowing and become transparent. (It's called the 'surface of last scattering.') That happened about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
In fact we did see that, in 1965. Since the light from then has been redshifted so much, it's now microwave light and so is called the cosmic microwave background or CMB. Recently the WMAP satellite took a great picture if it:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html
The colors are fake colors, of course. Actually it took a super-high resolution camera to see any differences at all. The CMB looks like almost exactly the same everywhere. The colors show the tiny differences in temperature & color of the CMB -- the red spots are a tiny bit brighter, the blue ones a tiny bit dimmer than the average.
Yeah, in fact we're reasonably sure the universe looks roughly like this. The exact details of the structure aren't completely sure yet, because they're based on just simulations. But we do have actual galaxy surveys which show us the large-scale structure of the universe, and they show this same filament-void structure. (I posted some pics of this above.)
I wouldn't make too much about the similarity between the brain cell pic and the universe's structure. It's just superficial. First, the universe has a three-dimensional large scale structure... clusters are connected by filaments but also by walls, and there are great voids between. Brain cells only have filaments, which then tree out & attach to other brain cells. And of course if you zoom out a little bit on the brain cells they look completely different (they are surrounded by "helper" cells, blood vessels, etc. The similarity at this scale is neat but coincidental. (The universe's structure is also commonly compared to a spiderweb or to soap bubbles or foam.)
By the way, we couldn't actually see the big bang with a powerful enough camera. (We DO in fact have a powerful enough camera.**) This is because early on, right after the Big Bang, the universe was a glowing-hot plasma. Sort of like a lightning bolt, or the sun. We can't see through that. So the oldest (and furthest away) thing we can see is the universe right before it cooled enough to stop glowing and become transparent. (It's called the 'surface of last scattering.') That happened about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
In fact we did see that, in 1965. Since the light from then has been redshifted so much, it's now microwave light and so is called the cosmic microwave background or CMB. Recently the WMAP satellite took a great picture if it:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html
The colors are fake colors, of course. Actually it took a super-high resolution camera to see any differences at all. The CMB looks like almost exactly the same everywhere. The colors show the tiny differences in temperature & color of the CMB -- the red spots are a tiny bit brighter, the blue ones a tiny bit dimmer than the average.
Hi trails,Tr6ai0ls4 said:
Yeah, in fact we're reasonably sure the universe looks roughly like this. The exact details of the structure aren't completely sure yet, because they're based on just simulations. But we do have actual galaxy surveys which show us the large-scale structure of the universe, and they show this same filament-void structure. (I posted some pics of this above.)
I wouldn't make too much about the similarity between the brain cell pic and the universe's structure. It's just superficial. First, the universe has a three-dimensional large scale structure... clusters are connected by filaments but also by walls, and there are great voids between. Brain cells only have filaments, which then tree out & attach to other brain cells. And of course if you zoom out a little bit on the brain cells they look completely different (they are surrounded by "helper" cells, blood vessels, etc. The similarity at this scale is neat but coincidental. (The universe's structure is also commonly compared to a spiderweb or to soap bubbles or foam.)
I see. I'm confused at what I'm looking at though. Its just a flat picture. Does the simulation show what the universe would look like if you took a snapshot from any given angle or point inside of itself? I'm also confused by that pic you posted with a snapshot of some cluster of galaxies (http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~mab/education/astro103/lectures/l24/ap031028_files/galaxies_sdss.jpg) how is that photograph related to the hourglass shape on the left of it. I guess this is actually a topic for another thread. PM me if you have the time to explain it, or to point me to something else that explains it. Thanks...
This reiterates the idea that the macro universe is simply a projection of the brain, which tells me, that the ridiculous expanse of the macro universe can be significantly reduced with greater understanding (and use) of the brain.
awesome pics :D
awesome pics :D
zorn
Bluelighter
I think the simulation pictures are of a thick "slice" through the universe. That lets you see the 3-d structure without cluttering up the image. What you'd see from any given point inside the universe would be a little different.Tr6ai0ls4 said:
The real data (the hourglass-shaped images) are also thin slices of the universe. We're located at the center point of the hourglass. For these surveys, they don't look at the whole sky, just two regions of it -- on in the north and one in the south, directly opposite one another. So the region of the universe they can see looks like two cones, attached tip-to-tip at the points (where we are). Then these images are a 2d slice out of those cones -- hence the hourglass shape.
The photograph of galaxies doesn't really have anything to do with it... it's just showing where on the map those galaxies in the foreground are, I guess.