or Dedicate Their Computers to It

In the burgeoning world of “doing science at home on your computer” made popular by such projects as Seti@Home, there’s a new entry: Cosmology@Home. It works the same as Seti and the other distributed computing projects: you download a program that goes to work on your computer chewing up chunks of data that will help astronomers come up with a model that best describes our universe. The ultimate goal is to find the range of models that best agree with the observational data from astronomy and particle physics experiments.

As described in the Welcome Letter on the project’s web page, each work package your computer processes helps simulate a universe with a particular geometry, particle content, and “physics of the beginning.” The cosmologists then take the chewed-on data and compare it to the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (observed from space by the WMAP and soon the Planck spacecraft, as well as from ground based and balloon based experiments), the large-scale distribution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, measurements of the current expansion speed of the Universe by the Hubble space telescope, the acceleration of the Universe as measured by observations of supernova explosions, observations of primordial element abundances in distant gas clumps, and gravitational lensing data, when it becomes available.

If you’d like to take part in this large-scale computing project, check out the web link above for details on how to download the client and get started helping cosmologists explain the physical evolution of the universe we live in.

After my trip to Athens, I turned around and came back to the U.S., not just back to New England, but all the way out to Los Angeles for the Association of Science-Technology Centers meeting. I’d never been to an ASTC meeting before, and was going because we (Mark and I) had a clip running in the fulldome showcase that was held at Griffith Observatory. It was also a good chance to visit “my” exhibits again at Griffith, and also to catch up with my old friends and colleagues there. We don’t all see each other often enough!

So, I hopped a plane in Athens and 22 hours later found myself in Los Angeles, jetlagged but glad to be back “home” in the U.S. No slam on Athens; I loved running around and meeting with folks at the CAP meeting. But, as any traveler knows, it’s always good to get home again.

The ASTC meeting featured a number of interesting talks that, as I get more interested in doing exhibit work and also as I do more “production” work along the lines of the vodcasts Mark and I are doing, give me an opportunity to learn from other people who do the same kinds of work for science centers. In that regard then, going to ASTC was a “must-do” event. And, I did meet a LOT of new faces mixed in among the science center folks I already knew.

Science outreach is going to become (if it isn’t already) one of the more crucial means for scientists to impact people who may not ever consider becoming scientists but who are interested in what science is and does. In the U.S. (and in some other countries) science is facing increasing onslaughts from pockets of ignorant thought, borne by people who can’t bear the rational thought that science requires, and are blind to the beauties of the scientific universe. It’s tough for me to understand such ignorance, mostly because I don’t see any need for it to exist. Nonetheless, it’s there. And so, I do what many others do, try to teach about science as best I can through my books, exhibits, scripts and other works. We’re all scientists at heart; we’re born that way, to question the universe and seek to understand how it works.