Engineering student cracks major riddle of the universe An engineering undergraduate in Australia has made a major step forward in solving one of the greatest riddles of the universe: that is, where most of it is. Boffins know from observing the universe that it must have a certain amount of mass, otherwise it would have failed to hold itself together as well as it has. Argument …
Hmm, we appear to be getting into Buttered Cat Array theory here.
Also hmm. It would seem that search engine results for such are no longer returning the original from the usenet oracle, but someone's later recycling of the concept as a competition entry to Omni magazine.
Precis (all AFAIR): The toast is immaterial to the effect. The staining properties of the "butter" are important, as are the properties of the surface over which the cat is dropped. Optimum results are achieved by buttering cats directly with Tikka Masala sauce and releasing them over white Axminster shagpile carpet, as this combination causes the cat to remain suspended and rotating in mid-air even while carrying a significant additional load.
Large Buttered Cat Arrays are used by aliens to provide anti-gravity effect for their flying saucers. Alien spacecraft are often reported as generating a humming noise, which is actually the sound of many thousands of moggies purring in unison.
If you read this in the right way it gets remarkably close to the discovery of the infinity improbability drive.
Scientists had made theories about the universe mut however much they tried to add up the mass of all the stars and galaxies it never added up to a big enough number, so they sighed and decided that the rest was made up of "missing mass". Then one day a Phd student reasoned that if this mass was "missing" then it must be possible to find it so she got the biggest telescope she could find and point out where this mass was ....
Actually no, if the mass was inside the the currect accepted edges of the galaxy the galaxy would rotate faster, for the edges of the galaxy to rotate at the current speed the mass needs to be outside, slowing the rotation, so that what we think is the edge of the galaxy isn't actually the edge, just the visible edge. Much like a wet cat, it would appear to rotate slower when its wet, but fluffed out you can see the rotation is correct acording to the actual edge of the cat, the fur on the periphery of a fluffed cat would move faster that that of a wet cat, but in actual fact its all the same.
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It's eye-watering, heart-warming stuff like this that makes me hope like hell that there is no "rapture" for at least 6 million years. Rapture should be a day of reckoning on the individual basis, not planetary or universal scale.
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Is that you don't know what Engineering will come of it.
And that Engineering might be really, really useful and solve all kinds of serious problems.
The LASER is the example of this that gets trotted out all the time - Science came up with this weird monochromatic in-phase light source, and then all kinds of surprising uses for it turned up, like improving your access to pornography.
Off-hand I can't think of any direct uses for recent cosmology results, but that's probably because I'm not at the bleeding edge of high-energy physics or cosmology.
I think the Reg forums need a FAQ that people read before posting so they know which responses get massively downvoted, to at best save embarrassment, at worst to avoid the feelings of paranoia and despair that no-one likes them. If they still want to post then a FAQ reference number without a voting button and automatic troll icon would suffice.
The previous hunters must have been male and using the principle of a 'Man look'.
Man - Were are my slippers, please, dear?
Partner - In the bedroom, were bedroom slipper should be.
Man - I've looked for my slippers in the bedroom - they aren't there.
Partner - I didn't hear the door open, open the door this time.
Man - They're not there, I've looked.
Partner - Go in the bedroom this time and look.
Man - I went in and looked around and they aren't there.... were have you put them this time...
Partner - Did you go to the bottom of the bed and look in the Wardrobe...?
Man - errr no, but I have now and they're not there. What have you done with them... I liked those slippers...
Partner - Have you looked under your side of the bed?
Man - Ooooo, Ahhhh, Why are they there.....? and do you know were you've put my dressing gown...
Partner - sighs - .......
Is your god a Partner???
As seems inevitable in articles penned by Mr. Page about subjects of which he is ill-informed, it is not true that "[b]offins know from observing the universe that it must have a certain amount of mass...." Some boffins conjecture (quite different from "know") that a hitherto unknown kind of mass exists and is distributed such that seeming anomalies in galactic rotatations can be explained. Because this conjectured mass is undetectable, it is described as "dark." Some of these same boffins conjecture that "dark matter" is made up of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), particles which have never been detected, let alone described, in any experiment to date. (To physicists, "massive" means a particle has some mass, unlike photons, which are thought to have no mass.)
Mr. Page fails to note that other, well-respected boffins have conjectured that the seemingly anomalous observations can be explained theoretically, without having to concoct new forms of undetectable matter. The two most popular theoretical conjectures at the moment are MOND (modified newtonian dynamics) and (TeVeS) tensor-vector-scalar gravity.A number of other theoretical conjectures have also been advanced, most of which don't require an assumption that the universe must contain more mass than is observable.
Mr. Page further fails to note that the vast majority of the allegedly missing mass is called "dark energy," currently conjectured to represent approximately 75% of the total mass of the Universe. (Physicists regard mass and energy as interchangeable, so much so that the mass of particles in accelerators is measured in "electron-volts.") The most popular current speculation is that 5% of the Universe's mass is observable matter, 20% is "dark matter," and 75% is "dark energy."
Finally, Mr. Page seems unaware of the WiggleZ project, which just last week announced results whose implications are strikingly different than those reported in this article. The project is a group of researchers at NASA and the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, which spent five years using a U.S. satellite and a large Australian telescope to track the movements of 200,000 galaxies. The group's study asserts (conclusively, in their minds) that "dark energy" controls the movement of celestial bodies.
My reading of the article is: boffins gather data, analyse it and fail to find what they were looking for. They then invite in Dr Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway for a second opinion and she proceeds to embarrass them by showing that their data does in fact show what they were looking for. The junior is then credited as lead author on the paper because the rest should have done better first time around.
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They have not given any sort of analyses about how much mass the filaments constitute as a total of how much mass we expect there to be in the universe.
It also appears that these filaments were already "known" to exist. So its not even like they discovered them.
So please can you show me the calculations that indicate that all the "missing mass" is accounted for by these findings?
Don't get me wrong, the paper is well written and obviously significant to be published in this prestigious journal, but this story is WAY to sensational for what the paper actually states. Is she a friend of yours perhaps?
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