Website review: [Projet Horizon - Horizon Project ...
laodan discovered this in Science/Tech
•1 reviews since Sep 19, 2007
science
•projet-horizon.fr/article323.html
People who like this website
StumbleUpon is the best way to discover great web sites, videos, photos, blogs and more - based on your interests.
Everything is submitted and rated by the community. Discover, share and review the best of the web!
Reviews of this website
laodan discovered 10 months ago- The Horizon project via Metafilter by bru
The HORIZON Project is organised in 4 large thematic actions. Inside each theme, well identified task packages can be found, and for each task a task manager, a calendar and deliverable products. The 4 thematic actions are: * Mathematics applied to galaxy formation * Parallel programmation and distributed computation * Virtual observations and data bases * Physical processes and initial conditions Three scales of simulations will be produced by the HORIZON Project: * Large-scale simulations o One Cosmological Horizon (Hubble volume) simulation o Several simulations of Large-Scale Structures o Several zoom-simulations of galaxy clusters * Galaxy-scale simulations o Several simulations of "Lyman-alpha" filament forest o Several zoom-simulations of galaxies * Small-scale simulations o Some simulations of the re-ionization epoch o Several zoom-simulations of first stars formation The Horizon project Unlocking the mysteries of the Universe the animation For the first time, a simulation of half the observable universe, with enough resolution to describe a Milky Way-like galaxy with more than 100 dark matter particles. Stunning images about the visualization of the macrocosm at different rates of zooming. The animation I link to here above, in particular, lets us see the relativity of any "point of view", of any image on its own, within the whole. What emerges out of those visualizations is the understanding of our unattainability of the whole. Our unattainability of the whole has immense implications. It obliges us to admit that intellectual constructs are necessarily limitative for they rely on what we observe. As such we also understand that intellectual constructs are doomed to change to evolve with all our newly gained knowings that add up on the mass of already acquired and memorized knowings. This process it appears is bound to be eternally reproducible for the end of the observable is simply unattainable. What we do is eternally pushing back the limits without giving us the means to grasp the meaning laying behind our observations and the knowings we deduce out of them. What I mean to say here is that science is kind of stuck in a game of mirrors projecting the image of what we observe in one mirror to the other and then to their mirrorings ad infinite. Faced with this unpleasant truth about rationality and science, it seems to me that, we should come to accept our limitation in all humility. In "The Myth of Sisyphus" Albert Camus sketches Sisyphus as the undertaker of never ending laboring and he concludes "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" as "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart." Camus' precept was that humility leads to contentment. Is this not what all philosophies and religions have taught their followers for ages? I do not propose a return to an explanation from the past but I suggest that rationality and science would gain immensely from being framed within the philosophical context of "the whole" and its "unattainability"...
- The Horizon project via Metafilter by bru
