“Data from the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, told us that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate,” a phenomenon attributed to dark energy, Pontzen says. “And in some sense, everything we've done since then is putting flesh on the bones of that idea that galaxies change a lot over time.” Chipping away at a cosmic problemĪlthough scientists cannot yet simulate the entire evolution of the universe, they have managed to use simulations to learn about phenomena they are unable to detect directly, like dark matter and dark energy. “She constructed these simulations-which would be considered very rudimentary by today's standards, but still recognizably simulations-where she showed that, given what we know about the universe, distant and close galaxies are very different,” Pontzen says. This aging effect changed the interpretation of cosmologists’ early maps of the universe. Tinsley, an astronomer and cosmologist (and the first female astronomy professor at Yale University), used simulations to demonstrate that not only are scientists looking back in time when viewing distant galaxies, but the light from those distant galaxies must change as those galaxies mature. One of the earliest examples of computer simulations advancing the field of cosmology comes from the work of Beatrice Tinsley in the late 1960s. ![]() “That’s essentially what modern simulations of the weather do today.” “He believed the equations of physics that describe how materials behave could be applied to the material in Earth’s atmosphere,” Pontzen says. In the early twentieth century, mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson proposed building a giant amphitheater filled with mathematicians, calculating together to produce simulations that forecast the weather. “She wrote about the fact that this machine could take science from being a pursuit of abstract equations and turn that into something much more practical.” ![]() Lovelace recognized the potential of the Analytical Engine, Pontzen says. He didn’t quite manage to build it, but his goal was to create a machine capable of performing an endless variety of calculations just by changing coded instructions fed to it on strips of card. In the mid 19th century, Lovelace worked alongside Charles Babbage, an English polymath and inventor who envisioned a precursor to the modern computer called the Analytical Engine. More than 2,000 years ago, ancient Greeks used a rudimentary computer of sorts, called the Antikythera Mechanism, to calculate the occurrence of astronomical events, such as eclipses.īut perhaps the first mention of a more modern concept of simulation appears in the writings of Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and pioneer of computing. What should happen next?”Ĭurious minds have been practicing simulations in this way since antiquity, he says. “We set up hypothetical situations inside computers that we’ve programmed-in our case, with certain laws of physics-and then we ask the computer to figure out the consequence of that situation. Simulations are kind of like hypothetical experiments, Pontzen says. ![]() In The Universe in a Box, published this year, University College London professor of cosmology Andrew Pontzen bolsters those efforts by charting humanity’s progress over time toward a simulation of the universe. That’s why scientists like Wagman remain undeterred in their quest to figure out the universe’s underlying code. ![]() There are too many variables there is too much we don’t understand.īut the fact that we can use computers to simulate anything with any semblance of accuracy is a gigantic leap for the state of the art from just a century ago. In response to the question, Wagman says, his advisor chuckled. “We have all of these beautiful theoretical descriptions of how we think the world works, so I wanted to try and connect those formal laws of physics to my everyday experience of reality,” he says. Wagman, a theoretical physicist and associate scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, thought it seemed like a reasonable question to ask. In his first year of graduate school, in 2013, Michael Wagman walked into his advisor’s office and asked, “Can you help me simulate the universe?”
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