The most comprehensive assessment of the energy output in the nearby universe reveals that today's produced energy is only about half of what it was 2 billion years ago. A team of international scientists used several of the world's most powerful telescopes to study the energy of the universe and concluded that the universe is slowly dying.
"We used as many space- and ground-based telescopes as we could get our hands on to measure the energy output of over 200,000 galaxies across as broad a wavelength range as possible," Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) team leader Simon Driver, of the University of Western Australia, said in a statement. The astronomers created a video explaining the slow death of the universe to illustrate the discovery.
A chance to roll out your cosmology humor...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @02:43AM
So if I put about a million grains of two-colored rice in a bin and shake it up real good. I then pull out grains from different parts of the bag, say about 100, and I see that they are about 50/50 in proportion, are you telling me that I'm likely to find that they are in much different proportions if I counted all million of them? I'm not a betting man, but I would feel pretty comfortable stating that they colors are roughly equally proportionate.
How many grains of rice are you suggesting I need to pull to feel confident? What if I am only allowed to pull a handful? I'm only allowed to say that I haven't a clue what the proportions are because I can only pull such a small sample?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @06:36AM
FTFY. I wouldn't be surprised if it was different proportions, if the bag was sitting there long enough the heavier type of grain would have sunk towards the bottom where you couldn't reach. Unless you are proposing two different colored grains with exactly the same weight, which will need justification.
Statistics and Reality. David and Sarah Kerridge. Nov 21, 1998. Based on a series of postings to the Deming Electronic Network. The sections correspond to the ten original messages.
http://pkpinc.com/files/Statistics_and_Reality.pdf [pkpinc.com]
No idea if Deming really claimed all that, but in principle it is correct.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:04AM
Note that homegeneity and isotropy of the universe are treated by physicists as an axiom. Physicists *assume* there is nothing special about the local universe when doing cosmology. Fundamental stuff like conservation of momentum and conservation of angular momentum come from this axiom. It may be that this is not true on the large scale, but presumably the paper authors treat this as an axiom implicitly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @08:35AM
I see. So on very small and very large scales that humans cannot directly sense there is homogeneity, but at the intermediate level all we experience is heterogeneity. It also happens to simplify the math, just as humans would like because we evolved to be as lazy as possible. It sounds anthropocentric, like humans are building tools and designing experiments based on that simplifying assumption that may be incapable of detecting deviations. I'm not criticizing, but how could that possibility be ruled out?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @05:20PM
At the largest scales we can observe, the universe is very homogeneous. For example, the inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background are so small that it took a rather big effort to measure them.
Note that when considering cosmic scales, galaxies, and even galaxy clusters, are microscopically small.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @01:01AM
When you're talking particles, they don't sink down. There is a whole research area having to do with this. Not surprisingly, the cereal manufacturers research this because they want their raisins or marshmallow bits to be uniformly distributed. Turns out if you put big heavy objects in with a bunch of little light objects and shake it up, the big heavy objects rise to the top.
Let it be two different kinds of rice anyways. They aren't going to separate themselves. As for the red bead comments, 10 +/- 1 is well within the error to support my argument. OP was claiming that you pulled from such a small sample that you can't make any valid claims.