00:00 CU
computer monitors showing Cosmic Cookery
Professor
Carlos Frenk & others putting on 3D viewing glasses
Cosmic
Cookery animation – Opening titles
CU
reflection in 3D glasses
Over
shoulder audience viewing Cosmic Cookery animation
Wide
– exterior Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics, University
of Durham
Professor
Carlos Frenk walking inside Ogden Centre
Cosmic
Cookery animation – computer galaxy forming
Cosmic
Cookery animation – computer galaxy next to real galaxy
Guide Voice: They call it cosmic cookery, but
it’s all about unlocking the secret recipe that created the
universe itself.This 3D movie show of a voyage through the solar
system is the culmination of a lot of cooking by Researchers from
DurhamUniversity’s Institute of Computational Cosmology. They
were the chefs who in the last month cooked up their own virtual
galaxy!
Head Chef was Professor Carlos Frenk and what his team produced
was a computer simulation that built up a galaxy with its own
stars, which is remarkably similar to a real galaxy like
Earth’s own.
00:33 SOT Professor Carlos Frenk,
Institute of Computational Cosmology, Department of
Physics, Durham University
– “Cosmic cookery is a
process of cooking galaxies in a computer, in a big computer. The
ingredients that you need are the contents of the universe, which
we now know are ordinary matter like the matter that you and I and
the planets are made of. The so called dark matter and a mysterious
new component called dark energy. Those are the ingredients. The
recipe is the laws of physics. And the oven is a very large
computer. And what comes out of it is a very tasty galaxy that
looks just like the Milky Way.”
01:03 Wide
– rack of computers
Wide
– Computer/Processor stacks
CU
– Computer/Processor stack
Professor
Carlos Frenk operates Galaxy Merger Simulation computer touch
screen
CU
Galaxy Merger Simulation computer touch screen
CU
Professor Carlos Frenk
ECU
Galaxy Merger Simulation – Galaxies merging
Guide Voice: To create the virtual galaxy took
this entire rack of computers seven months, 128 processors,
number-crunching through 450 billion instructions per second. The
computers were fed with basic facts about the big bang, the laws of
Physics that exist here on earth, and set to work with the goal of
making a galaxy like the milky way.
01:25 SOT Professor Frenk - "This is a
task that had challenged cosmologists for about a decade and we
were the first to be able to successfully reproduce the milky way
galaxy. It turns out that what our colleagues had been missing were
some very intricate detail that we call feedback processes whereby
the galaxy forming interacts with gas cooling down to make the
stars in a fairly complicated way this is the first time however
that anybody has been able to make a galaxy that for all intents
and purposes could just be the Milky Way."
01:59 CU
Galaxy Merger Simulation computer touch screen
MS
over shoulder Prof. Carlos Frenk operating Galaxy Merger Simulation
computer touch screen
ECU
Galaxy Merger Simulation – Galaxies merging
Over
shoulder shot, girl operating computer simulation
Reverse
angle girl operating computer simulation
CU
operating computer simulation touch pad
Side
shot girl at computer simulation
CU
computer simulation
Cosmic
Cookery animation – Millennium Simulation
Over
shoulder audience viewing Millennium Simulation
Cosmic
Cookery animation – Millennium Simulation
Tilt
up – rack of computers
Over
shoulder, audience viewing Cosmic Cookery
animation
Guide Voice: They have developed a number of
simulations through which to study both how galaxies are made and
how they interact. By building up these simulations they are able
to test different hypotheses to compare with the real universe in
order to try to understand what exactly was at play when the
universe began, and how it became the way it is today.
Perhaps the most spectacular of their studies is what they call
the millennium simulation which builds up a model of a large
fraction of the universe. It was the largest calculation in
cosmology ever, in fact one of the largest computational efforts in
the history of science, outputting 22 terabytes of data, equivalent
to a thousand numbers for each of the Earth’s inhabitants
today.
As the power of super computers grows over the next decade they
will be able to build up increasingly detailed versions of the
universe itself, allowing them to unlock more of its secrets, but
they have already learnt a lot.
02:52 SOT Professor Frenk - "Well
perhaps the most important thing we’ve learned is that the
universe, big as it is is intrinsically simple and the apparent
complexity of the universe and it is only apparent can be
understood in very simple terms and that is quite remarkable. Using
simply the laws of physics that control the every day phenomena on
earth the very same laws of physics that control how an apple falls
from a tree onto the floor, this very same concepts that allow us
to understand the entire evolution of the universe, 13.7 billion
years of cosmic history, that to me is the main lesson that we have
learned. The universe is big but it’s simple. And it’s
understandable by humans.’
03:32 Wide
– computers and large screen displaying Cosmic Cookery
animation
Cosmic
Cookery animation – Earth spinning
Guide Voice: With the aid of Super Computers
and cosmic cookery, humans are now deciphering the recipe of not
just their own origins but of the entire universe
03:42 SOT: Professor Frenk -
"Somewhere in the universe a planet has been born where a
species has evolved whose mind is capable of comprehending
basic processes of the structure of the universe."
03:52 Ends
This material is available for use without restriction for up
to 28 days after the feed date, Tuesday 19 July 2005. For use
beyond this period, please contact Research-TV on +44 (0) 20 7004
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