November 3, 2003
Little Universes
Walked around Oxford with Janna and talked about how we could make little universes out of mirrors. We wandered round the Ruskin School of Art (where she's scientist in residence) and back to Astrophysics.
She also filled me in on more details about pulsars. Not so sure it will be possible to make one. Now I know that they're neutron stars with an iron core and a density so great that one teaspoon of pulsar matter weighs a billion tons, beaming out a cone of radiation from their poles. It's that beam that creates the pulse, flashing like a lighthouse each time a pole spins past our field of vision.
Talked to Jo Dunkley about Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and what form the data took, with a view to an experiment in mapping it to sound. Basic data is made up simple of points on the inside of a sphere and temperature. JD reckoned that for my purposes it was better to use angular power spectrum data. Trying to get my head round what that quite means ! Anyway, she emailed me this graph and it's data which I'll experiment with in SuperCollider.
