BenTheMan
12-27-07, 12:26 PM
The Telegraph reports (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2007/12/23/scicosmos123.xml) about experiments using Helium 3 to model the early universe.
The equations used to describe this superfluid turn up in many other branches of physics. "For instance, the internal structure of the superfluid mirrors very closely the structure of space-time itself, the 'background' of the universe in which we live," says Haley.
There's not a lot of content in the article, which is true of most scientific writing. You also have to be careful, because these articles are always full of grandiose claims. But this stuff is incredibly interesting, nonetheless. The Nature article costs something like $20, so when I get back to Columbus I'll try to access it from my office and sumarize it. Also, if you find any other references, post them here.
Basically, the early universe is modeled as a perfect fluid, which gives some restrictions on the form of the stress energy tensor (i.e. the right hand side of Einstein's equations). The same set of assumptions apply to Helium 3 when it is very close to absolute 0. The wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_state_(cosmology)) looks to be pretty good.
Peter Woit (http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=634) has a typically acerbic response to claims of string theory's testability.
The equations used to describe this superfluid turn up in many other branches of physics. "For instance, the internal structure of the superfluid mirrors very closely the structure of space-time itself, the 'background' of the universe in which we live," says Haley.
There's not a lot of content in the article, which is true of most scientific writing. You also have to be careful, because these articles are always full of grandiose claims. But this stuff is incredibly interesting, nonetheless. The Nature article costs something like $20, so when I get back to Columbus I'll try to access it from my office and sumarize it. Also, if you find any other references, post them here.
Basically, the early universe is modeled as a perfect fluid, which gives some restrictions on the form of the stress energy tensor (i.e. the right hand side of Einstein's equations). The same set of assumptions apply to Helium 3 when it is very close to absolute 0. The wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_state_(cosmology)) looks to be pretty good.
Peter Woit (http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=634) has a typically acerbic response to claims of string theory's testability.