Holy Shit!

[plutherus]

Scientists may have actually found a cosmic string!

Two galaxies, which look identical, and are right next to each other, may actually be only one galaxy, the image duplicated by a cosmic string somewhere between us and it...

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=615886

The more we learn about the universe, the weirder it gets.

Comments

[thevirtualjim.livejournal.com]

Sadly, the only part of that news story I don't understand is the paper analogy they use...I juat can't picture how a triangle-cut hole becomes a cone. (I'm serious)

Give me theoretical astrophysics any day, but keep me away from that construction paper!

[reynard52.livejournal.com]

Spin the triangle ^_^

[thevirtualjim.livejournal.com]

but it never said to spin it, it said to fold the hole left...

[reynard52.livejournal.com]

Hokay, so you fold the edge over so the edges touch but don't crease it.

[thevirtualjim.livejournal.com]

OH!!! After reading this, I re-read the part of the article, and this is what threw me off: "Imagine cutting from the paper a narrow triangle whose tip is at the string, then gluing the paper back together again. "

See, when i read it, it said 'gluing the paper back...' I thought this was referring to the sheet of paper from 'cutting from the paper' from the 1st part of the statement, not the piece of paper that was cut out.

Seems that it was an easy mistake to make, seeing the only reference to 'paper' was the whole sheet in the begining...right?

pff..DOCtors

[reynard52.livejournal.com]

Uhyeahsureright...^_^. Hehehe...it was a long article so that was an easy thing to miss.

[plutherus.livejournal.com]

Feynman once described it thusly:
To picture 10 dimensions, first imagine a two-dimensional figure, draw on a piece of paper. Then stretch it up off the paper to get three dimensions. Then project it forward and backward in time a while to get four dimensions. Then just add six more dimensions.

[casfic.livejournal.com]

Then just add six more dimensions.

Oh yeah, that's really easy!

But the article was ever so cool.

[thevirtualjim.livejournal.com]

that dont help with me not getting how you can cut a triangle out of a piece of paper and end up with a cone from the hole left, liek they describe int he article.

btw, Feynman is one of my fav physicists...