Home PCS may prove point for Einstein

Columbus Dispatch ^ | Feb 22, 2005 | Mike Laffcerty

[tang-soo]

HOME PCS MAY PROVE POINT FOR EINSTEIN
Published: Tuesday, February 22, 2005
NEWS 01A
By Mike Lafferty
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH



WASHINGTON -- Want to help Albert Einstein? Turn on your computer.

Physicists have announced a plan to marshal hundreds of thousands of computers to confirm one of the great physicist's predictions: Gravity waves exist in the universe.

Einstein, who predicted in 1916 that these ripples exist in the fabric of space and time, never thought his theory could be proved.

Now, in the centennial year of one of his two theories of relativity, scientists think they have the equipment to detect these waves created by fallout from supernovae explosions and the collisions of black holes.

What they need is old-fashioned, brute-force, number-crunching power.

By donating our unused computer time, scientists would have a huge network of computers sifting for Einstein's gravity waves in the flood of data culled from the heavens.

Called Einstein@Home, the plan was kicked off at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The idea is similar to SETI@home, the network of 500,000 home and office computers pooled together by scientists searching for intelligent life in the universe.

Einstein@Home was developed at the University of Wisconsin and already has 7,000 computers in its network. These volunteer machines boosted number-crunching power by four times, according to Barry Barish, of the California Institute of Technology.

"A $595 RadioShack computer is more power than anything we had seven years ago,'' said Barish, who directs the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, a wave-detecting instrument built at Hanford, Wash.

Once you log onto Einstein@Home, your computer will download data from the interferometer and a British-German instrument, called GEO600.

When it's connected, your computer will display a star-map screensaver that shows the part of the sky where your data came from.

"We will take every piece of the sky and (compute the same data) on at least three PCs,'' Barish said.

The waves are thought to be incredibly small -- a decimal point followed by 18 zeros. By comparison, the diameter of an atom is a decimal point followed by a mere 10 zeros.

"Einstein knew how small the numbers were and couldn't imagine the technology would develop to a point where it would be technically feasible,'' said Gary Steigman, a theoretical physicist at Ohio State University.

The farther the waves travel, the weaker they are. That's why the instruments will be trained on huge explosions and other cosmic violence.

The waves have been inferred indirectly from data from pulsars, celestial objects that are incrementally losing mass at a rate consistent with the loss of mass through gravity waves.

However, Steigman doesn't think gravity waves will be confirmed until the next generation of wave detectors comes along, in about a decade.

"The point is to demonstrate the feasibility,'' he said.

Confirming gravity waves could allow scientists to demonstrate the existence of black holes, reveal data on supernovae and neutron stars, and provide information about the origin and fate of the universe.

And it would help prove Einstein's theory.

"We all believe he's right,'' Steigman said.

Aiding Albert

Einstein@Home lets you donate your computer to researchers when you're not using it.

How it works:

Your PC gets a list of instructions from the project's scheduling server.

Files are downloaded from the project's data server. New versions of applications are downloaded automatically.

Your computer runs the application programs, producing output files, and transmits these files to the data server.

The results are reported to the scheduling server, and your computer gets instructions for more work. The cycle is repeated indefinitely.

This is all done automatically as you eat, sleep or are at work.

Source: Einstein@Home

mlafferty@dispatch.com

[Slainte]

Really cool. If I weren't already emotionally invested in Stanford's Folding@Home project, I'd be all over this.

If anyone's thinking about getting into distributed computing, but hasn't quite found a project that floats their boat, there's a nice site that has overviews and lnks to dozens of current projects at http://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html

[PhilipFreneau]

Einstein is the Man, for science. Or couse, Walter Williams is the Man for Libertarianism, Mark Levin is the Man for Conservatism, and Michael Savage is the Man for Getting-It-Right (for a change). Kiss off, P.C. punks.

[RadioAstronomer]

Thanks for the ping. :-)

[Moonman62]

It’s over five years later, and in spite of advances in instrument sensitivity and computing power, no gravity waves have been detected.