19,284 research outputs found
The Last Scientific Revolution
Critically growing problems of fundamental science organisation and content are analysed with examples from physics and emerging interdisciplinary fields. Their origin is specified and new science structure (organisation and content) is proposed as a unified solution
Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero
probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus,
it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly
like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own
in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this
conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite
universe, we find that the doomsday argument applies only to effects which
change the average lifetime of all civilizations, and not those which affect
our civilization alone.Comment: 25 pages; v2: revised version to appear in British Journal for the
Philosophy of Scienc
Cosmic cookery : making a stereoscopic 3D animated movie.
This paper describes our experience making a short stereoscopic movie visualizing the development of structure in
the universe during the 13.7 billion years from the Big Bang to the present day. Aimed at a general audience for
the Royal Society's 2005 Summer Science Exhibition, the movie illustrates how the latest cosmological theories
based on dark matter and dark energy are capable of producing structures as complex as spiral galaxies and
allows the viewer to directly compare observations from the real universe with theoretical results. 3D is an
inherent feature of the cosmology data sets and stereoscopic visualization provides a natural way to present the
images to the viewer, in addition to allowing researchers to visualize these vast, complex data sets.
The presentation of the movie used passive, linearly polarized projection onto a 2m wide screen but it was
also required to playback on a Sharp RD3D display and in anaglyph projection at venues without dedicated
stereoscopic display equipment. Additionally lenticular prints were made from key images in the movie. We
discuss the following technical challenges during the stereoscopic production process; 1) Controlling the depth
presentation, 2) Editing the stereoscopic sequences, 3) Generating compressed movies in display speciÂŻc formats.
We conclude that the generation of high quality stereoscopic movie content using desktop tools and equipment
is feasible. This does require careful quality control and manual intervention but we believe these overheads
are worthwhile when presenting inherently 3D data as the result is signiÂŻcantly increased impact and better
understanding of complex 3D scenes
Unreduced Dynamic Complexity: Towards the Unified Science of Intelligent Communication Networks and Software
Operation of autonomic communication networks with complicated user-oriented functions should be described as unreduced many-body interaction process. The latter gives rise to complex-dynamic behaviour including fractally structured hierarchy of chaotically changing realisations. We recall the main results of the universal science of complexity (http://cogprints.org/4471/) based on the unreduced interaction problem solution and its application to various real systems, from nanobiosystems (http://cogprints.org/4527/) and quantum devices to intelligent networks (http://cogprints.org/4114/) and emerging consciousness (http://cogprints.org/3857/). We concentrate then on applications to autonomic communication leading to fundamentally substantiated, exact science of intelligent communication and software. It aims at unification of the whole diversity of complex information system behaviour, similar to the conventional, "Newtonian" science order for sequential, regular models of system dynamics. Basic principles and first applications of the unified science of complex-dynamic communication networks and software are outlined to demonstrate its advantages and emerging practical perspectives
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