next lecture Fri 8 Mar

[Boud Roukema]

Cze¶æ wszysce,
   On Friday 1 March we started from the beginning again, going
through comoving coordinates and curvature, with an added touch of
history.

Where did Euclid spend 30 years studying geometry and writing an
extremely good review paper? Cairo, Africa. That's where zero
curvature geometry models come from. Western scientific culture is
fundamentally African. [Anyone want to search for http refs?]

Who developed and introduced algebra and the Hindi decimal system to
the West? An Arabic-speaking Iranian scientist born in... Khiva,
Uzbekistan, hence known as al-Khwarizmi, who spent a lot of his life
in Baghdad:

http://www.mscf.uky.edu/~carl/ma330/project2/al-khwa21.html

So, the "gor" in algorithm comes from "Khiva" in Uzbekistan.
http://www.ati-uzbekistan.com/english/uzbekistan/touristcentres/khiva.htm

So Western scientific culture is equally Asian. (Do you really want to
do physics using roman numerals? VIII + I = IX ?)

Modern "Western" science involves a mix between thinking in terms of
geometry (African), decimal numbers (Indian), algebra (Arabic culture) and
algorithms/software (Arabic/Iranian/Uzbek), though of course there
are some European and North/South American contributions too...

IMHO, observational cosmologists tend to think in terms of numbers
and software, theoretical cosmologists tend more to think in terms of
algebra (in the more modern concepts of algebra, calculus etc.).

We discussed whether people would prefer

(1) continuing lectures in a similar more or less traditional style,
or rather

(2) move on to a research project involving some hands-on code-writing
and observational data.


** standard ruler project **

The particular project ("standard ruler project") I propose is a
rewrite of the code of

http://de.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0106135

and application of the same analysis to a larger superset and to
different observational data sets, and using more refined observational
corrections in order to get more signal out of the data. Anyone
contributing will have their name on any publications resulting
from the work (unless they choose not to!). This relates to the
shape of the Universe in the sense that
- Omega_m,
- Omega_Lambda and
- w_Quintessence
can be thought of just as parameters of the metric which convert [right
ascension, declination, redshift] into 3-dimensional comoving
positions.

If I understood people's comments right (please feel free to
correct me), the initial preferences were:

(1) Bart

(2) Marcin, Rafa³, Micha³, Sebastian

Since we didn't cover topology during Friday's session, what would
seem to match both preferences is:

- 1 more or less conventional lecture (next week) on topology

- following lecture as introduction to the material sufficient for
understanding the standard ruler project and together discussing how
we could divide the work (code writing, debugging, paper writing)


** "Archeops - topology project?" **

Micha³ asked about the possibility of writing software for topology
work. This is certainly possible, but it's less clear that it would
result in publications or observational detections.  I think that the
Grenoble people would be happy to have someone contribute to programming
work for Archeops analysis, and that in return, we could do topology
analysis, but this would be a *much* bigger scale project (in terms
of programming effort, coordination, and... politics) than the standard
ruler project.

Comparison local parameter vs topology projects:

                    definite exciting result     if result, then how important
standard ruler            YES                         moderate to big
Archeops topology         NO                          big to huge

                    effort (programming, coordination, politics)
standard ruler          easy in a few months, IMHO
Archeops topology       heavy, over 12 months


Hmmm.... There is also a very easy, quick topology project which
should lead to a publication relating to a principle for detecting
topology. :-) Let's call this:

** "roots of the identity project" **


The ultimate decision should be from the students - I personally will
do the standard ruler project sooner or later. Sooner would be better,
but later is also OK.   I will also do the roots of the identity
project, when I have a spare moment...


Think about it, discuss it on this list, and at next Friday's meeting
after going through a topology introduction we can see what people
think.


Pozdrawiam
Boud