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New Theories / Re: How do we measure the energy of a photon?
« on: 27/05/2019 22:30:57 »Quote from: mxplxxx
this fact (the complexity of the universe) implies that the universe IS a simulation of something much bigger and much more complicated!No, they were just trying to simulate our universe, and it still takes a lot of time on the largest supercomputers.
They were not trying to simulate anything bigger.
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The only way to simulate the universe is via abstractions.I agree. Usual ways of abstracting in astronomy are:
- Model a small part of the universe (but still big enough to be "typical")
- Don't model individual atoms, but model galaxy-mass "blobs"
- Model the Dark Matter separately from the visible matter (with both interacting via gravity)
- Don't model individual stars, but use an "average" behavior of a galaxy
And the conclusion was that statistically, it is similar to the universe we see.
An abstraction where you don't model the individual cards in a deck, but just whole decks would fail in a game of chance!
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I would be very surprised if it gave you more than an inkling of the power of abstractions.I am aware of the usefulness of abstraction for software developers.
But when it comes to turbulent events (like a supernova), where tiny details are tightly coupled to the high-level outcome, abstraction fails. For these tightly-coupled problems, you need a numerical solution - with today's technology, the optimum answer seems to be a continuous-time simulation in FORTRAN, running on a large supercomputer.
Once the astronomical community understands what fraction of stars go supernova at certain stages vs those that turn into black holes (and publish it in a peer-reviewed journal), then other astronomers and cosmologists can use that encapsulated knowledge in predicting the life course of a whole galaxy. This is a level where there is loose coupling between stars and their galaxy and abstraction works.
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The central sun object has state variables relating to the overall state of the objectAnd if you want to simulate the state of this sun object, I suggest that you read up on continuous-time numerical methods.
See, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods
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