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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 12 2015, @06:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-the-end-of-the-world-and-we-know-it dept.

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...


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @06:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @06:36AM (#222143)

    So if there is a bag of unknown size with unknown amount of grain and I then pull out grains from different parts of the bag (but never feeling a bottom or side) without being able to shake it up, 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 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?

    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.

    Uncertainty has a way of “creeping in” when we least expect it. We are all familiar with the Red Bead experiment. The “willing workers” take samples of beads from a box in which there are 4000 beads, of which exactly 800 are red, and the rest white. The samples are scooped out with a “paddle”, which has 50 holes in it. If the paddle is used carefully, each hole selects one bead.

    Nothing could be simpler. The beads are well stirred each time, so any statistics student would immediately calculate the probabilities of any number of red beads in the sample, using standard mathematical theory, based on a random sample from the “population” of beads. Most would use the binomial distribution. We could use the slightly more “accurate” hypergeometric distribution, but the difference is trivial. The average number of red beads comes to 10, and the standard deviation the square root of 8 = 2.83. Dr. Deming was fond of teasing the audience with this. He would ask them how many red beads there would be on average, in the sample of 50. When they said 10, would trumpet “Wrong!”

    The theory is wrong, and noticeably so. In “The New Economics” (page 164) he records the results of the red bead experiment over the years. The average number of red beads changes with the paddle he used, and ranges from 9.2 to 9.6 with one set of beads, and 11.3 with a different set of beads and paddle. This difference is far too big to be due to chance. As WED says, differences like that would cost you a lot of money if you relied on the theoretical calculation.

    The reason for the failure of theory here is that no mechanical process (except perhaps on the atomic scale, as Shewhart points out) is really random, or even completely stable. In this case there must be slight differences between the red an white beads. This might be a difference in size, or smoothness, or even of the tendency to pick up static electricity.

    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

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:04AM (#222154)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @08:35AM (#222185)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @05:20PM (#222405)

        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

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @01:01AM (#222610)

    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.