hi everyone,
We have a media question :).
i don't want to spam people, so anyone interested, please respond on cosmo-media@ ... rather than cosmo-torun.
Below are my proposed "compact" answers. Any corrections before i respond "officially"? Remember the number one rule of the dependent media: "anything you say may and will be misquoted against you". Which is why having this on the cosmo-media archive will at least, in principle, provide some defence...
i don't know what time frame the journalist has in mind - but presumably the sooner the better for any answers. IMHO probably a day or two should be OK.
pozdr boud
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 23:38:49 +0100 From: t.rozek at fz-juelich.de To: boud at astro.uni.torun.pl Subject: the shape of the universe
Dear Sir,
I'm a physicist and scientific writer. Within the new project of Axel Springer publishing house (editor of Newsweek in Poland and Die Welt in Germany) in Poland I would like to invite you to the discussion about the shape of the universe.
As I know scientific group you are the leader, in 2004 went public with the information that in the microwave background radiation picture there are some indications, that our universe has a shape of dodecahedron.
Questions I'm asking you are the same like these I have sent to other expert in this field. I will not hide, that his opinion about the shape of the universe is different than your.
I will be pleased to get from you compact answers to questions which are listed below. Please keep in mind that new Axel Springer daily will be addressed to nonspecialists in physics or astronomy.
Let me thank you in advance for time you will spend to answer my questions. I'm looking forward to your respond.
With the best regards Tomasz Rozek
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Questions:
- Analysis of the microwave background radiation are the only way
- I guess - to collect information about the shape of the
universe. Isn't it risky to draw conclusions resulting from only one experiment ?
Yes, it is risky to draw conclusions from only one experiment. We expect other scientists to read our paper carefully and make their own analyses of microwave background and other data.
The most independent test of our work will be testing the prediction that the average, total density parameter of the Universe, including ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy together, should be about 0.9% to 1.1% higher than the density which would make the Universe perfectly flat ("flat" means that Pythagoras' Theorem is true). This type of test is highly independent of our analysis method.
- Why this is commonly believed, that data from WMAP probe, brought
down the concept of flat and infinite universe ?
The flat and infinite universe model is still consistent with the WMAP data. It is not the best model, but it is still consistent with the data and most observational cosmologists still take it as the best approximation we have.
Please remember, however, that no theoretical cosmologists take the flat and infinite model as a serious model of the entire Universe - it is only treated as a limiting case inside the observable sphere.
- There are many ideas concerning the shape of the universe. Maybe
it is like a sphere, cylinder, funnel, but it can also be like bell, horn or dodecahedron. Why do you claim that space is dodecahedron-like ?
We don't.
The first misunderstanding is that "shape" means the shape of *space itself*, not the shape of *space inside of space*. Our intuition is developed to think of objects inside of three-dimensional, Euclidean, infinite space. In order to understand what is meant by the shape of the Universe, you first need to develop a method of thinking about the shape of space itself. A good place to start would be http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksztalt_Wszechswiata .
One example of a shape of space itself is a space with the name "Poincare dodecahedral space" (PDS). One "ordinary" shape, inside of space, which helps to think about the PDS, is the dodecahedron.
The second misunderstanding is that so far our group only claims to have a "hint" of that the shape of space is the PDS. Our analysis follows that by Jean-Pierre Luminet's group. Ralf Aurich's group and Jesper Gundermann have also found similar (though not exactly identical) results.
- What are the errors or defects of the idea of horn-like space ?
None as far as I am aware of.
- Could you in the very easy way explain the expression, that space
has a shape ?
Imagine that space only has two dimensions, instead of three.
Now we can use our existing intuition about three-dimensional space to imagine many different possible two-dimensional spaces inside of three-dimensional space. In this way, we use one dimension as a purely psychological dimension. It's used by our brain, but has no physical meaning for the two-dimensional space we're thinking about.
Of course, real space has three dimensions (we can ignore the time dimension for discussion of "the shape of space"), so if you can now start thinking in four dimensions, then you can use the fourth dimension as a psychological dimension and think of differently shaped spaces, each having three dimensions.
- Do efforts to establish a shape of the universe have any
practical meaning or you are doing that just to know ?
Both.
It is practical to know the shape of a footpath or a tree or a mountain or an atom or a molecule, so it is practical to know the shape of the Universe.
But it is also good to knowing the shape of a work of Picasso or a beautiful woman or man, even if this has no practical use.
- Did universe have a beginning, and ones will have the end ?
The standard hot big bang model is very well established, and this model has a limiting time we can call "time equals zero". If we start today and think backwards towards "time equals zero", then our model of the Universe becomes more and more speculative as we get towards "time equals zero".
So it is more realistic to say that we have a standard model which goes *towards* having a beginning rather than saying the Universe actually "had" a beginning.
However, theoretical cosmologists have some ideas of universe models extending earlier than "time equals zero".
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Boud Roukema wrote:
We have a media question :).
But what kind of media? DEPENDENT, commercial, global media!
Remember the number one rule of the dependent media: "anything you say may and will be misquoted against you".
Right! So think *twice* before you start to talk to them.
[...]
I'm a physicist and scientific writer. Within the new project of Axel Springer publishing house (editor of Newsweek in Poland and Die Welt in Germany)
Not only, not only. "Die Welt" and "Newsweek" - hmm, these sound good and this is true but this is only a smaller part of the truth. Go to: http://www.axelspringer.pl/ to see how they REALLY make (LOTS of) money. In particularly pay attention to http://efakt.pl/ the most disgusting tabloid in the market in this country. Also, you might be interested in http://dziewczyna.redakcja.pl/ and http://popcorn.redakcja.pl/ the latter being just a complete bull... and rubbish.
So as you can see they are liars! They say Axel Springer publishes "Die Welt" and "Newsweek" but they keep quiet they are No.1 brain washers in this country.
My advice: to keep your alter/anti-globalist's conscience clear you'd better... BOYCOTT Axel Springer and don't talk to them by the same token you don't dine at McDonald'$. ;-)
-- Andrzej
hi all,
On Thu, 16 Feb 2006, Boud Roukema wrote:
hi everyone,
We have a media question :).
i don't want to spam people, so anyone interested, please respond on cosmo-media@ ... rather than cosmo-torun.
Below are my proposed "compact" answers. Any corrections before i respond "officially"? Remember the number one rule of the dependent media: "anything you say may and will be misquoted against you". Which is why having this on the cosmo-media archive will at least, in principle, provide some defence...
i don't know what time frame the journalist has in mind - but presumably the sooner the better for any answers. IMHO probably a day or two should be OK.
well, it's your time and you should decide what priority assign to replies to this request in your schedule. :)
But just as a formal comment I'd like to mention that more natural way of asking for your (Boud's) oppinion on some scientific fenomena would be by a phone call and then possibly for the sake of ease of communication, explanations or whatever by email exchange. But in any case I direct "ear-to-ear" (or face to face) communication would make this request more serious (and polite) as would be expected from serious news media IMHO.
but anyway gatting back to the science...
pozdr boud
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 23:38:49 +0100 From: t.rozek at fz-juelich.de To: boud at astro.uni.torun.pl Subject: the shape of the universe
Dear Sir,
I'm a physicist and scientific writer. Within the new project of Axel Springer publishing house (editor of Newsweek in Poland and Die Welt in Germany) in Poland I would like to invite you to the discussion about the shape of the universe.
As I know scientific group you are the leader, in 2004 went public with the information that in the microwave background radiation picture there are some indications, that our universe has a shape of dodecahedron.
Questions I'm asking you are the same like these I have sent to other expert in this field. I will not hide, that his opinion about the shape of the universe is different than your.
I will be pleased to get from you compact answers to questions which are listed below. Please keep in mind that new Axel Springer daily will be addressed to nonspecialists in physics or astronomy.
Let me thank you in advance for time you will spend to answer my questions. I'm looking forward to your respond.
With the best regards Tomasz Rozek
Questions:
- Analysis of the microwave background radiation are the only way
- I guess - to collect information about the shape of the
universe. Isn't it risky to draw conclusions resulting from only one experiment ?
Yes, it is risky to draw conclusions from only one experiment. We expect other scientists to read our paper carefully and make their own analyses of microwave background and other data.
The most independent test of our work will be testing the prediction that the average, total density parameter of the Universe, including ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy together, should be about 0.9% to 1.1% higher than the density which would make the Universe perfectly flat ("flat" means that Pythagoras' Theorem is true). This type of test is highly independent of our analysis method.
but CMB is not the only way to procede with topology tests, right?, though, at the moment probably the most straighforward and most reliable.
- Why this is commonly believed, that data from WMAP probe, brought
down the concept of flat and infinite universe ?
The flat and infinite universe model is still consistent with the WMAP data. It is not the best model, but it is still consistent with the data and most observational cosmologists still take it as the best approximation we have.
Please remember, however, that no theoretical cosmologists take the flat and infinite model as a serious model of the entire Universe - it is only treated as a limiting case inside the observable sphere.
I'm not sure if I understant the expression "bring down" in the context, but from what it means one could think that a flat universe is no longer a "cosmic concordance" model which AFAIR is not the case :p
- There are many ideas concerning the shape of the universe. Maybe
it is like a sphere, cylinder, funnel, but it can also be like bell, horn or dodecahedron. Why do you claim that space is dodecahedron-like ?
We don't.
The first misunderstanding is that "shape" means the shape of *space itself*, not the shape of *space inside of space*. Our intuition is developed to think of objects inside of three-dimensional, Euclidean, infinite space. In order to understand what is meant by the shape of the Universe, you first need to develop a method of thinking about the shape of space itself. A good place to start would be http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksztalt_Wszechswiata .
One example of a shape of space itself is a space with the name "Poincare dodecahedral space" (PDS). One "ordinary" shape, inside of space, which helps to think about the PDS, is the dodecahedron.
The second misunderstanding is that so far our group only claims to have a "hint" of that the shape of space is the PDS. Our analysis follows that by Jean-Pierre Luminet's group. Ralf Aurich's group and Jesper Gundermann have also found similar (though not exactly identical) results.
- What are the errors or defects of the idea of horn-like space ?
None as far as I am aware of.
AFAIR these models (as many other compact topological models) brake down the global isotropy and uniformity making CMB look bizzare (eg. producing some "outstanding " spots in the sky
- Could you in the very easy way explain the expression, that space
has a shape ?
Imagine that space only has two dimensions, instead of three.
Now we can use our existing intuition about three-dimensional space to imagine many different possible two-dimensional spaces inside of three-dimensional space. In this way, we use one dimension as a purely psychological dimension. It's used by our brain, but has no physical meaning for the two-dimensional space we're thinking about.
Of course, real space has three dimensions (we can ignore the time dimension for discussion of "the shape of space"), so if you can now start thinking in four dimensions, then you can use the fourth dimension as a psychological dimension and think of differently shaped spaces, each having three dimensions.
- Do efforts to establish a shape of the universe have any
practical meaning or you are doing that just to know ?
Both.
It is practical to know the shape of a footpath or a tree or a mountain or an atom or a molecule, so it is practical to know the shape of the Universe.
But it is also good to knowing the shape of a work of Picasso or a beautiful woman or man, even if this has no practical use.
not mantioning that it may give a* hint* on the quantum structure of space itself
- Did universe have a beginning, and ones will have the end ?
The standard hot big bang model is very well established, and this model has a limiting time we can call "time equals zero". If we start today and think backwards towards "time equals zero", then our model of the Universe becomes more and more speculative as we get towards "time equals zero".
So it is more realistic to say that we have a standard model which goes *towards* having a beginning rather than saying the Universe actually "had" a beginning.
However, theoretical cosmologists have some ideas of universe models extending earlier than "time equals zero".
pozdr. bartek
hi cosmo-media
On the thread of what we *would* answer, if we do answer...
On Thu, 16 Feb 2006, Bartosz Lew wrote:
hi all,
On Thu, 16 Feb 2006, Boud Roukema wrote:
hi everyone,
We have a media question :).
i don't want to spam people, so anyone interested, please respond on cosmo-media@ ... rather than cosmo-torun.
Below are my proposed "compact" answers. Any corrections before i respond "officially"? Remember the number one rule of the dependent media: "anything you say may and will be misquoted against you". Which is why having this on the cosmo-media archive will at least, in principle, provide some defence...
i don't know what time frame the journalist has in mind - but presumably the sooner the better for any answers. IMHO probably a day or two should be OK.
well, it's your time and you should decide what priority assign to replies to this request in your schedule. :)
But just as a formal comment I'd like to mention that more natural way of asking for your (Boud's) oppinion on some scientific fenomena would be by a phone call and then possibly for the sake of ease of communication, explanations or whatever by email exchange. But in any case I direct
i'd prefer email to a telephone call - less chance of being misquoted.
"ear-to-ear" (or face to face) communication would make this request more serious (and polite) as would be expected from serious news media IMHO.
but anyway gatting back to the science...
pozdr boud
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 23:38:49 +0100 From: t.rozek at fz-juelich.de To: boud at astro.uni.torun.pl Subject: the shape of the universe
Dear Sir,
I'm a physicist and scientific writer. Within the new project of Axel Springer publishing house (editor of Newsweek in Poland and Die Welt in Germany) in Poland I would like to invite you to the discussion about the shape of the universe.
As I know scientific group you are the leader, in 2004 went public with the information that in the microwave background radiation picture there are some indications, that our universe has a shape of dodecahedron.
Questions I'm asking you are the same like these I have sent to other expert in this field. I will not hide, that his opinion about the shape of the universe is different than your.
I will be pleased to get from you compact answers to questions which are listed below. Please keep in mind that new Axel Springer daily will be addressed to nonspecialists in physics or astronomy.
Let me thank you in advance for time you will spend to answer my questions. I'm looking forward to your respond.
With the best regards Tomasz Rozek
Questions:
- Analysis of the microwave background radiation are the only way
- I guess - to collect information about the shape of the
universe. Isn't it risky to draw conclusions resulting from only one experiment ?
Yes, it is risky to draw conclusions from only one experiment. We expect other scientists to read our paper carefully and make their own analyses of microwave background and other data.
The most independent test of our work will be testing the prediction that the average, total density parameter of the Universe, including ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy together, should be about 0.9% to 1.1% higher than the density which would make the Universe perfectly flat ("flat" means that Pythagoras' Theorem is true). This type of test is highly independent of our analysis method.
but CMB is not the only way to procede with topology tests, right?, though, at the moment probably the most straighforward and most reliable.
Sure i agree - i just didn't want to make the answer too long.
- Why this is commonly believed, that data from WMAP probe, brought
down the concept of flat and infinite universe ?
The flat and infinite universe model is still consistent with the WMAP data. It is not the best model, but it is still consistent with the data and most observational cosmologists still take it as the best approximation we have.
Please remember, however, that no theoretical cosmologists take the flat and infinite model as a serious model of the entire Universe - it is only treated as a limiting case inside the observable sphere.
I'm not sure if I understant the expression "bring down" in the context, but from what it means one could think that a flat universe is no longer a "cosmic concordance" model which AFAIR is not the case :p
Both the flat infinite model and the PDS model are IMHO consistent with the concordance model - which essentially just says (0.05,0.3,0.7,71).
Anyway, that's why i put the sociology comment "most cosmologists still..."
- There are many ideas concerning the shape of the universe. Maybe
it is like a sphere, cylinder, funnel, but it can also be like bell, horn or dodecahedron. Why do you claim that space is dodecahedron-like ?
We don't.
The first misunderstanding is that "shape" means the shape of *space itself*, not the shape of *space inside of space*. Our intuition is developed to think of objects inside of three-dimensional, Euclidean, infinite space. In order to understand what is meant by the shape of the Universe, you first need to develop a method of thinking about the shape of space itself. A good place to start would be http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksztalt_Wszechswiata .
One example of a shape of space itself is a space with the name "Poincare dodecahedral space" (PDS). One "ordinary" shape, inside of space, which helps to think about the PDS, is the dodecahedron.
The second misunderstanding is that so far our group only claims to have a "hint" of that the shape of space is the PDS. Our analysis follows that by Jean-Pierre Luminet's group. Ralf Aurich's group and Jesper Gundermann have also found similar (though not exactly identical) results.
- What are the errors or defects of the idea of horn-like space ?
None as far as I am aware of.
AFAIR these models (as many other compact topological models) brake down the global isotropy and uniformity making CMB look bizzare (eg. producing some "outstanding " spots in the sky
AFAIR that was a Levin paper that claimed that a horn topology would make the CMB look bizarre. Aurich et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0403597 (maybe Uzan et al. before as well? i'm not sure) showed that this is in fact *not* the case, that this only happens if you fail to go to take enough terms in the series of eigenfunctions going to small length scale structures!
So no, the spots were a result of calculational error, not a true feature of "horned" i.e. negatively curved multiply connected space.
- Could you in the very easy way explain the expression, that space
has a shape ?
Imagine that space only has two dimensions, instead of three.
Now we can use our existing intuition about three-dimensional space to imagine many different possible two-dimensional spaces inside of three-dimensional space. In this way, we use one dimension as a purely psychological dimension. It's used by our brain, but has no physical meaning for the two-dimensional space we're thinking about.
Of course, real space has three dimensions (we can ignore the time dimension for discussion of "the shape of space"), so if you can now start thinking in four dimensions, then you can use the fourth dimension as a psychological dimension and think of differently shaped spaces, each having three dimensions.
- Do efforts to establish a shape of the universe have any
practical meaning or you are doing that just to know ?
Both.
It is practical to know the shape of a footpath or a tree or a mountain or an atom or a molecule, so it is practical to know the shape of the Universe.
But it is also good to knowing the shape of a work of Picasso or a beautiful woman or man, even if this has no practical use.
not mantioning that it may give a* hint* on the quantum structure of space itself
Sure.
- Did universe have a beginning, and ones will have the end ?
The standard hot big bang model is very well established, and this model has a limiting time we can call "time equals zero". If we start today and think backwards towards "time equals zero", then our model of the Universe becomes more and more speculative as we get towards "time equals zero".
So it is more realistic to say that we have a standard model which goes *towards* having a beginning rather than saying the Universe actually "had" a beginning.
However, theoretical cosmologists have some ideas of universe models extending earlier than "time equals zero".
OK, back to the other thread...
pozdr boud
-
Andrzej Marecki -
Bartosz Lew -
Boud Roukema