Celestia Forums

...a great idea!

Make a real celestia version fom the world of
quarks, protons and from this litle Universe.
With the Strings and Bran`s of nano Universe.
That must have a look from the movie Matrix.
A book with a lot of Illustrations is from Stephen
Hawking "Das Universum in der Nu?schale"

What do you think and what can i do?

Please a answer!

my mail adress is rwhalle@gmx.de

Hi,

This looks a good idea for me. At least Celestia is capable to show how big the universe is and how far planets, stars and galaxies are from eachother. Maybe it will be also able to show the scales and ratios of nano world.

I think the first try should be changing the files in /data directory especially solarsys.ssc to build some nano objects. You can read a lot about the format of these files in this forum. I am very intrested in some screenshots you could make by this.

As Celestia is mainly an astronomy program the programmed physics are for astronomical objects and not for the objects of the nano world, but as it is an open source project you may edit the code and do everything that is within your programming skills.

Bye,

docens

Celestia Fan wrote:...a great idea!

Make a real celestia version fom the world of
quarks, protons and from this litle Universe.
With the Strings and Bran`s of nano Universe.
That must have a look from the movie Matrix.
A book with a lot of Illustrations is from Stephen
Hawking "Das Universum in der Nu?schale"

What do you think and what can i do?

Please a answer! :lol:

my mail adress is rwhalle@gmx.de

If it was possible to model the "femto-universe" (of size ~ proton diameter ~ 1 fermi = 10^(-15) meter), clearly it would be fascinating to travel in Celestia manner among the quarks of a proton or other 'hadrons', land on a 'beauty' quark and watch a gluon 'raise' at the horizon;-)...

But, unfortunately, this is the domain of highly complex quantum phenomena. We are working fulltime;-) to understand them eventually...

Bye Fridger

If you're really serious about doing this, the first thing you'll want to do is modify UniversalCoord to use 256 bits per component instead of 128 bits. 256 bits gives a range of 10^77, sufficient for Planck length resolution (10^-35 m) over the entire visible universe (10^26 m)

--Chris

t00fri wrote:If it was possible to model the "femto-universe" (of size ~ proton diameter ~ 1 fermi = 10^(-15) meter), clearly it would be fascinating to travel in Celestia manner among the quarks of a proton or other 'hadrons', land on a 'beauty' quark and watch a gluon 'raise' at the horizon;-)...

But, unfortunately, this is the domain of highly complex quantum phenomena. We are working fulltime;-) to understand them eventually...

Bye Fridger

It might be interesting just to give a sense of the scale-- as in the old educational film "Powers of Ten". But it would have to be pretty intensely metaphorical, since things on that scale move around in a strange quantum-mechanical manner that would be hard to model using traditional object rendering.

(And for some of these objects, nobody knows how big they are-- or even if they have an extended size at all! Nobody has ever been able to find any internal structure or spatial extension to quarks and electrons, unless you count the size of their wave functions, which is another thing entirely-- and that comes right back to the central problem...)

Matt McIrvin wrote:

t00fri wrote:If it was possible to model the "femto-universe" (of size ~ proton diameter ~ 1 fermi = 10^(-15) meter), clearly it would be fascinating to travel in Celestia manner among the quarks of a proton or other 'hadrons', land on a 'beauty' quark and watch a gluon 'raise' at the horizon;-)...

But, unfortunately, this is the domain of highly complex quantum phenomena. We are working fulltime;-) to understand them eventually...

Bye Fridger

It might be interesting just to give a sense of the scale-- as in the old educational film "Powers of Ten". But it would have to be pretty intensely metaphorical, since things on that scale move around in a strange quantum-mechanical manner that would be hard to model using traditional object rendering.

(And for some of these objects, nobody knows how big they are-- or even if they have an extended size at all! Nobody has ever been able to find any internal structure or spatial extension to quarks and electrons, unless you count the size of their wave functions, which is another thing entirely-- and that comes right back to the central problem...)

While the fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics are believed to remain valid in the 'femto-universe', there the dynamics is described by (highly non-perturbative) quantum field theory (Quantum Chromo Dynamics, QCD). The most striking feature being 'confinement', i.e. quarks and gluons cannot 'leave' the femto-universe: when their mutual separation /increases/, the strength of the so-called 'color' force between them increases /indefinitely/. In order to kick one of these guys out of the proton you would need /infinite/ energy.

This is most unlike celestial bodies that experience mutual gravitational forces, the strength of which /decreases/ with increasing distance...While gravitational forces are truly /long range/, the strong 'color' forces are only experienced /within/ sizes of the femto-universe. While quarks (and gluons) carry 'color' charge, i.e. they exist in 'red', 'green' and 'blue' varieties, the proton -- consisting of 3 (RGB) quarks -- is 'white'. Clearly, 'color' is just a name and NOT connected to /real/ color;-)...

About the best intuitive picture of what is going on at the scale of about 1 fermi among gluons and quarks is a close analogy to /super conductivity/ as formulated long ago by Nobel price winner Gerard 't Hooft.

Quarks are structure-less point particles only if looked at with very good resolution, i.e. at distances much smaller than 1 fermi. This is experimentally done at my laboratory.

If looked at with a 'microscope' whose resolution is of the order of the 'femto-universe' itself, quarks appear surrounded with a dense 'cloud' of gluons and thus appear like extended objects.

And so on...

Bye Fridger

(And for some of these objects, nobody knows how big they are-- or even if they have an extended size at all! Nobody has ever been able to find any internal structure or spatial extension to quarks and electrons, unless you count the size of their wave functions, which is another thing entirely-- and that comes right back to the central problem...)

This is slightly different to what you're saying, but I'd like to point out that many of the appearances of astronomical objects modelled in Celestia are also speculative... so I don't think that aspect of the subatomic world should be used to dissuade anyone from putting it into Celestia. Obviously I think it would be cool too

Cheers,
Paul

t00fri wrote:

Celestia Fan wrote:...a great idea!

Make a real celestia version fom the world of
quarks, protons and from this litle Universe.
With the Strings and Bran`s of nano Universe.
That must have a look from the movie Matrix.
A book with a lot of Illustrations is from Stephen
Hawking "Das Universum in der Nu?schale"

What do you think and what can i do?

Please a answer!

my mail adress is rwhalle@gmx.de

If it was possible to model the "femto-universe" (of size ~ proton diameter ~ 1 fermi = 10^(-15) meter), clearly it would be fascinating to travel in Celestia manner among the quarks of a proton or other 'hadrons', land on a 'beauty' quark and watch a gluon 'raise' at the horizon;-)...

But, unfortunately, this is the domain of highly complex quantum phenomena. We are working fulltime;-) to understand them eventually...

Bye Fridger

And what then about jumping from nucleus to nucleus, from atom to atom (all the while crossing through electron clouds), and leaving the confines of one H20 molecule (or C6H12O6, or ... ), travelling intermolecular space, riding on the chemical bonds and entering the next molecule...

I've been thinking about things like this too. Maybe it would be better to show somewhat larger things, like "something" living on the surface of the earth ((wo)man? animal? plant?), a cell in it, DNA, and stop at the electron cloud level. I have been searching for 3ds models of cells and DNA; they exist, but I have not found nice ones yet. Or maybe we can shrink Rassilons Eta Carina and use it as an electron cloud?

Quantum mechanics and all those details aren't really that important. Do you realise how many "fuzzy balls" like atoms Celestia will have to draw, in a simple cubic-centimeter of matter ???? AVOGADRO NUMBER IS THE WALL HERE !

And what about all the complexities of molecular structures, atomic network in metals, etc... A whole program must be dedicated to this, not Celestia.

Nanoworld ? Forget that idea !!

Cham wrote:Quantum mechanics and all those details aren't really that important. Do you realise how many "fuzzy balls" like atoms Celestia will have to draw, in a simple cubic-centimeter of matter ???? AVOGADRO NUMBER IS THE WALL HERE !

And what about all the complexities of molecular structures, atomic network in metals, etc... A whole program must be dedicated to this, not Celestia.

Nanoworld ? Forget that idea !!

That does not sound quite right;-)

-- Quantum mechanics is important in the femto-universe. You bet!

Or if you prefer: I know...

-- I cannot see any principal difference among the huge number of stars and other celestial objects Celestia has to draw in principle in the universe and the number of atoms etc Celestia' would have to draw in the "femto-universe"...

Bye Fridger

Of course, QM is important, but that wasn't relevant here.

There's a HUGE difference in the number of stars and the number of atoms. In our galaxy, there's about 100 billions of stars. A powerfull computer with enough memory (lots of memory!) can handle that. In Celestia, we can have about 2 millions of stars, before Celestia begins to have some drawing troubles (it may becomes very slow on many computers). But a modern personnal computer cannot handle 10^23 atoms (that's almost one million of billion of billions of atoms) in a single cubic-centimeter of matter. Too much info on position to stack in memory. You'll have to cheat in the code. Okay, maybe this can be done, but it will be very dull anyway, because most atoms looks the same. Just a fuzzy ball without any colors (obviously).

This is an interesting idea, but IMHO it's unrelated to Celestia.

It would be pretty hard to simulate a cloud, anyways. It wouldn't look interesting, either, as you couldn't see anything.

And think about all those thermal vibrations, and the electrons moving in the atoms at 1/100 the speed of light !! You will have to slow down time a lot, at the same time as you change the scale. And what kind of matter do you want to see ? Metallic (network or cristallographic) ? Organic ? Disorded matter ? At which temperature ?

The universe is VERY different at this scale than at the astronomy scale. Everything is different and MUCH more complex.

Stars are simple. An atom isn't simple at all.

Cham wrote:Of course, QM is important, but that wasn't relevant here.

There's a HUGE difference in the number of stars and the number of atoms. In our galaxy, there's about 100 billions of stars. A powerfull computer with enough memory (lots of memory!) can handle that. In Celestia, we can have about 2 millions of stars, before Celestia begins to have some drawing troubles (it may becomes very slow on many computers). But a modern personnal computer cannot handle 10^23 atoms (that's almost one million of billion of billions of atoms) in a single cubic-centimeter of matter. Too much info on position to stack in memory. You'll have to cheat in the code. Okay, maybe this can be done, but it will be very dull anyway, because most atoms looks the same. Just a fuzzy ball without any colors (obviously).

This is an interesting idea, but IMHO it's unrelated to Celestia.

For that reason I was talking from the onset about the "Femto-universe" the size of which is 1 femtometer = 10^-15 m or 1 fermi or the diameter of the proton!

This is where the real "action is going on;-) and there is slightly less "stuff" to draw

But even in nano-space you do not have to draw every atom, since that would be repetitively boring I guess...

Bye Fridger

Cham wrote:And think about all those thermal vibrations, and the electrons moving in the atoms at 1/100 the speed of light !! You will have to slow down time a lot, at the same time as you change the scale. And what kind of matter do you want to see ? Metallic (network or cristallographic) ? Organic ? Disorded matter ? At which temperature ?

The universe is VERY different at this scale than at the astronomy scale. Everything is different and MUCH more complex.

Stars are simple. An atom isn't simple at all.

Now you seem to be getting really "lost".

It is of course all a matter of "resolution"!
Stars are only simple at large distance from the observer when they appear as point sources of light and nothing else. When you get closer you must start thinking about lots of complicated things as well: nuclear processes, termodynamics, etc...

The same considerations apply to atoms, of course. As long as your "resolution" is sufficiently bad, atoms are just point particles and thus very simple objects.

Bye Fridger

Right, but you can know both the velocity and the position of a star at the same time

In the beginning of this year, the German government has given green light for the building of a > 600 Million Euro "Super X-ray Laser" in my laboratory.

This Laser works with a completely new technique (SASE-principle) effecting a /self-amplified/ spontaneous emission (without any mirrors that would not work anymore at such wavelengths!).

It will bring a completely new dimension of knowledge about the ongoing dynamics in the "nano-world"! One will be able to make real-time "movies" with a resolution of atomic size and e.g. observe the movements of complex biomolecules directly in 3d!
http://www.desy.de/pr-info/desyhome/html/presse/hginfos/xfel/was.en.html#super

So perhaps it is a good time now to start with the preparations for "Nano-Celestia";-), since in some years we shall get real photographic 3d (molecular) data just like we have them now from the universe...

The X-FEL laser flashes will have a duration of only about 100 femtoseconds (!), which is about the time scale on which changes during reactions among molecules are taking place.

Bye Fridger

Wow... That is SO cool...

I wonder what atoms really look like...I'm thinking they'll look kind of fuzzy.