shape-univ monograph course 14:00 Fri 1 Mar 2002

[Boud Roukema]

Dear students,
   Nazywam siê Boud Roukema, jestem kosmologiem, zaczê jak adiunkt
w Centrum Astronomii.

This semester, I'm giving a "monograph course" on "the Shape of the
Universe", or more precisely, on observational ways of trying to
measure the shape of the Universe, aimed at the level of 4th year
students, but 3rd years or other students are also welcome. You'll
find more information on this at:

http://www.astro.uni.torun.pl/sympa/shape-univ/index.html

Sorry for the confusion about the starting date! Because of this, the
next session will have a subject which is essentially the same as the
first, unless you all think it is too easy and you already know it! So
here are the details:

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Time/Date: 14:00-16:00 Friday 1 March 2002
Place: Radio Observatory main lecture room, Piwnice

Goal of first lecture:
* Basic concepts of curvature, topology, extra dimension as a
psychological tool to help imagine curved and/or multiply connected
spaces, comoving coordinates, with the aim of making sure the 4th year
students (or others relatively new to cosmology) understand
these.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Two students who were there, Pawel and Andrzej, said that it was very
easy, so if they can explain everything to you, we could maybe move
immediately on to observational techniques. But this depends on you.

Apparently there was another course on something about business and
computing in the other building this afternoon.

Well, the best way to learn computing if you want to be able to find a
job in it and/or want to create your own software company is in the
free software movement, e.g. GNU/Linux and the GNU Public Licence
(GPL):

http://www.gnu.org/home.pl.html
http://groups.google.com/groups?group=pl.comp.os.linux

If you write software for a company which is *not* protected under the
GPL, and if the company fires you and you want the freedom to use this
software in another company, you will not be allowed to! Not only will
you have lost your job, but all your intellectual effort will be
wasted. :-(

And starting your own company would be much easier with free software,
since you would only have to add one small new idea to the huge amount
of existing free software. You would not have the cost of buying
proprietary software or using an unstable, inefficient operating
system full of bugs.

So free software is better, z moim skromnem zdaniem...

In astronomy, most of the software we use and write is more or less
free software, but its commercial value is about... zero z³oty.
However, if you help work on cosmology GPL software, it would be a good
learning exercise.

And I think that one of the best ways for you to learn about
observational measurements of the shape of the Universe is to work
with software that is related to observational work on the shape of
the Universe. I would be happy to support students interested in
doing this, and hope that both the face-to-face lectures and the
shape-univ mailing list (and archive) can be used to think about this.


Anyway, the content of the course is more or less:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
= Quantitative =

- curvature measurements, e.g.
http://de.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0201092

- topology measurements, e.g.
http://de.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0010185

[This is the ref I promised during today's lecture. For a *lot* more
detail on topology (but slightly out-of-date regarding observational
research and with a few small, minor errors) is LaLu95:

http://de.arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9605010

]

Please look for good introductions to these on the web (w po polsku
lub w po angielsku), i proszê wysylacie any links that you think are good
to the  shape-univ  mailing list. That way, everybody else can just
click and read.

= Qualitative =

- curvature
Here's one which seems nice, but is essentially without algebra:

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~clark/ToC.html

It's said to be at high school level, but it's important to develop
intuition. Understanding is not just abstract symbols on paper, it's
also intuitive understanding.

But please provide a better link if you can!

- topology - intuition

Here's a good exercise for developing topology intuition:

http://humber.northnet.org/weeks/TorusGames/

Don't be embarrassed to play the games - it's part of learning.
----------------------------------------------------------------------


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Hope to see you next Friday,
Pozdrawiam
Boud