Replying to
@joachim@boitam.eu omg yes I could happily to through an entire workday, and entire work year without it, I do scientific simulations and I am not using it anyway. So please, no AI slop please
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franco_vazza
@franco_vazza@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06#SimulatedUniverses #AstroPhysicsFactlet
Professor in #Astrophysics at the University of #Bologna and #ERC grantee.
I study the cosmic web, extragalactic magnetism and clusters of galaxies with colorful simulations.
Less #AI and more tiramisu in our lives!
https://cosmosimfrazza.eu
#science #physics #astronomy #COSMOMAG
1805 Followers
740 Following
50 Posts
Joined October 28, 2022
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Italy
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Replying to
@joachim@boitam.eu I tested and used for a few code translating tasks for which AI was useful, ye, but this amounts to less than 1% of my work. The quintessential dependence on AI in several fields and in science is a big hoax, but of course we can also make it a self fulfilling profecy if we just relax
Nice between the 72 written exams of #Electromagnetism I am correcting, there's the one of one student who gave it to me and added "but please prof leave it on sunlight for a couple of hours because i have mononucleosis and I just sneezed over it"
🙄
In the (desperate) attempt of engaging a bit more with astronomy master students, I am going to start tomorrow lecture on the acceleration of cosmic rays and neutrinos by supernova remnants by using this nice one by the creator of the xkcd comic, Randall Munroe!
A woman merging with a beautiful full screen rendering of the simulated cosmic web in a simulation of mine...
This is was a segment from "Destinazione Terra" (Destination Earth) a video using scientific simulations by Daniela Paoletti and Diego Molinari, together the VisitLab at #CINECA, the biggest supercomputing centre in #Italy
It was presented at the Genova Science festival, and you can see the
full video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SAybgEBiXE
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By 1888, Heinrich Hertz managed to scale up the scientific apparatus and transmit some power across a lecture room, showing the actual existence of electromagnetic waves.
to do that, he also to improve the quality of the receiving strategy, the reflection of EM waves etc...
It all started with Faraday, and it brought humankind where we are now!
RE: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/116991293373233772
🇪🇺 champions!!
https://mastodon.social/@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu/116991293381477621
but I can assure, 14 weeks of vacations are never ending, for the children too, and for the parents
Quoting
The art of the European summer break 🥷⛱️☀️
How we structure school calendars varies across our union, reflecting different local traditions and lifestyle models.
Italian students enjoy nearly 14 full weeks of summer bliss. Over in Denmark, summer is a breezy 6 weeks, balanced with clever mini holidays throughout the school year.
If you were back in school, which one would you prefer? 👇
https://link.europa.eu/F3kQPM
A glimpse into the invisibile magnetic threads of the cosmic web:
green=magnetic field strength
red=pressure of thermal gas
zoom into a massive galaxy cluster region at z=0 in an ENZO-MHD simulation
#SimulatedUniverses a movie showing the development over time of injected cosmic ray electrons by three different mechanisms, color-coded in different ways:
a) blue=cosmic rays from star formation b) red=from shocks c) green=from active galactic nuclei.
In reality these relativistic particles are very hard to observe, and it's impossible to know their origin, but with simulations we can refine theoretical ideas.
ENZO simulation run at CINECA.
Things I did not know we will be able to study with the low frequency part of the Square Kilometer Array: lightnings ⚡
"Unveiling the Mysteries of Lightning: Exploring its
fundamental Physical Processes with SKA-LOW" by Hare et al. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.00659
#paperday on #astroph:
another chapter contribution to the Advancing Astrophysics with the SKAII big collection of papers trying to outline what the SKA may and should be doing in a few years 🤞🏼
In this one I helped giving a sense of what might be detectable with a few different survey configurations for SKA-LOW and MID, on the scale of filaments of the cosmic web:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.31503
"The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe through the
SKA lenses" by Cuciti et al.
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- We can still increase the magnetic flux by inserting a ferromagnetic cylinder into the primary coil. For the same current, this boosts the magnetic field by Km~100-1000, i.e. by the relative magnetic permittivity of Iron. That's a big boost! If I now do the same and flicker the contacts with the 1V battery, a tiny <0.1mV tension appears on the secondary coil.
Something has travelled between a couple of cm of empty space!
And what has travelled, is "the future", as seen in 1831.
Buon #25Aprile everyone (#Italy #Liberation day from fascism)
(In retrospective, it only partially worked and show be reminded every year..)
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(arrived at this point, which also was Faraday's for many years, it is beyond my imagination how one can persist and continue to improve experiments without the slightest sign of a positive effect.
I know that Faraday law predicts and effect, so I am motivated to insist, but Faraday did not know about this law., yet, so why he insisted? Anyway...)
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- I now replace the magnet with a coil, connected to a 1V battery. Theoretically, if i open an close the primary circuit, the magnetic field produced on the axis of the primary coil induces a changing magnetic flux in the secondary coil, and this should produce a tiny tension as in the first example.
However "no effect" (as Faraday wrote many times in his notes!) was detected. Why? Simply because the change in magnetic flux is not enough to induce a current my digital voltmeter can read.
Wish I would be religious, so that I could at least pray that trump won't commit anymore war crimes against civilian in #Iran in the upcoming hours, instead of just feeling so hopeless and impotent towards this nonsense, which ourselves and mostly our children will keep paying in the upcoming future.
And who will suffer first are the innocents in #Iran who did nothing wrong against the US, and have already suffered more than enough the Islam theocracy and its many repressions.
@giovanni_covone@mastodon.uno per l'autografo come si fa?
(Non l'ho ancora iniziato eh, ma sono fiducioso)
Replying to
This is the classical way in which I've always showed the experiment, even if with a self-made coil with less windings.
This perfectly shows the Faraday induction law, however not in the way Faraday discovered it as he was using not such a strong magnet, but a primary coil with currents, instead.
(it is good however to see such a clear induction here, because this primary coil has approximately N=10,000 windings, and the effect scales with N).
Replying to
On the other hand, I consider it a very useful philosophical problem, if you want to show the limits of objective science:
- how can you prove someone else is conscious?
- how can you prove anything is real, beside your subjective experience?
- how can you prove there is not a bigger reality?
Etc. But already Renè Descartes said most of the useful things there, the modern SM just gives a technological spin to it.
Replying to on universeodon.com
@flyhigh@universeodon.com It Is not alive, but it shares several morphological properties with complex living systems ➡️ https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physics/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.525731/full
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@gleick@mas.to absolutely looking forward to it! I became a professional astrophysicist in the same time I got to devour both "Caos" and "The Information" and they surely shaped my vision of science. Now I am attempting to write a book about a particular history in science myself, and I started reading them both again, like I am attending a masterclass. You're a hero in the storytelling of #science, and i hope you will have many more to come! 👏👏👏
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@himmelssohn@social.adlerhorst.net of course it is, but the Uni is the employer here. I get the same problem when I have to recruit new post docs. When I moved back from Germany as a post.doc to become tenured here, my salary dropped by 25% Let's say we complement the whole thing with food and weather?
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The procedure is (relatively light), it requires a CV a bunch of self-declarations.
For clarity, the application is meant for students and not people who already got a permanent position.
Please see the online description for the various details!
-> https://bandi.unibo.it/ricerca/incarichi-di-ricerca?id_bando=162
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I can barely understand this if you need to apply to everywhere and everything because you need a job, and this is very human and understandable; however I cannot imagine this to work as in the classical "nigerian princess" scam: real experts are going to look into the application, and if something it's just entirely, or very largely, generated with AI it just shows up in a second. And not matter what is in the rest of the application, or maybe even how good you may be.
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To be flexible in our analysis, we designed and deployed a new code, fully written in #Julia , which injects and transports UHECRs across redshift and starting from galaxies in the simulation, and also apply energy losses to them.
It can run in parallel and is publicly available here:
https://github.com/FrancoVazza/UMAREL_PUBLIC/
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@astro_jcm@mastodon.online @gleick@mas.to I also coded it (in IDL!) after discovering Feigenbaum through that book. And soon after that I asked a master thesis project about turbulence in space...after 20+ years I am still investigating it!
Replying to
For example, if consciousness is the product of electro-magnetic fields overlapping in a complex way only because the brain topology is such (there are honest models about this), no computer whatsoever can produce conscious entities, and the entire classical SH's argument won't apply.
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It seems that since I cited one of the most influential paper on the subject, by N. Bostrom ("are you living in a computer simulation?", 2003) I wanted to debunk only that possible version - which for reasons given above, it cannot be entirely done, and I think this is well acknowledged.
However, Bostrom's paper, despite its general philosophical deep implications, explicitly focuses on the "Matrix" scenario I tried to debunk:
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There is a clash of scholar cultures here, which is fair. I tested the versions of the #SimulationHypothesis (SH) that can be tested using physics, as clearly explained in the article (and my last commenters get it), as in the "Matrix" scenario. Solipsistic version of the SH cannot be tested, at least I could not figure out how, nor versions in which the simulation happens in entirely different universes, and this is discussed too (and my commenters get it too).
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To study this process in detail, we used a set of realistic cosmological MHD simulations produced with the ENZO code, selected based on previous works comparing with radio observations, and featuring both a primordial field (0.3nG) and the seeding by feedback processes.
We analysed in sequence several snapshots from the same run, since UHECRs could have been injected in the ancient past.
Replying to
So tbh I don't understand how is missing the point here...
Moreover, the whole SH is based on the implicit and never proven by anyone idea that computation by itself can create consciousness, so complex digital realities can reach a complexity level to produce conscious beings to fool).
It's maybe just an impossible-to-prove fact (how can you prove anyone else but you is conscious?) but hey you wanted to make big claims about the commonly accepted reality, not me.
New nice rendering of the day, after some stress making #Julia correctly call python stuff.
(projected magnetic field vectors and magnetic field amplitude for the last simulated cluster of galaxies with ENZO)
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@qrios@mathstodon.xyz
I am really not an expert of consciousness (TBH: who is??), but I read a lot of what is there.
If by chance an Electromagnetic model of consciousness is right (clearly not the mainstream scenario, but a legitimate one as well) consciousness would emerge from the physical overlap of EM fields - not their simulated version, really the fields. Meaning you can produce it only having wires arranged with the same topology of real brains.
So..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_consciousness#cite_note-10
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The existence of a "Magnetic Horizon" has been surmised to make a sense of the strange sorting in composition of the highest energy UHECRs measured by the Pierre Auger Observatory, which is not predicted by standard acceleration models. But it could be explained if significant magnetic fields are affecting the propagation of 1e18eV particles more than of 1e20eV particles - which can happen because the deflection by magnetic fields scales as \propto E/B , where E=particle energy
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@SoftwareTheron@mas.to (also: it already got its quota of drama in the past, since it is the town of the concluding battle of WWI!)
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@gleick@mas.to Wow, even from the other side of the Ocean, this makes a big noise. Just incredible. Not even an attempt to publicly explain the reason behind this?
#science #physics
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@qrios@mathstodon.xyz
So, I give value to the SH in the philosophical sense: a) suppose consciousness is a computational phenomenon only, then b) you can discuss how difficult it would be for a conscious entity to decide what is real and what is not, based on physics or logic.
But starting point is a HUGE unproven assumption. You cannot solve b), but since a) is far from proven at all, we should not conclude the SH is particularly realistic or plausible.
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@schtobia@sueden.social You put children for one additional month (or more) in summer camps, if you are lucky to have active grandparents they can spend some time with them, or you tend to be creative..
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@himmelssohn@social.adlerhorst.net idk what to say, the net is larger than 50% here, probably about 70%, and it is definitely on the highest end of what we are allowed to pay research contracts for student fellows *without a PhD* (Italians or not)
This is even higher than what PhD students are getting here, these are salary levels decided at the national level and for which universites have to follow rules.
So welcome to the italian system I guess
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@qrios@mathstodon.xyz
...so you really have to build the hardware of a single brain, with its real 3D structure down to the atomic level, to get one consciousness. This does not seem scalable at all to me, so the entire argument of "we might one of the infinite number of digital conscious being in the future" does not follow.
Again, this only one example of what I meant. The whole simulation hypothesis starts from a GIANT step: consciousness is just a computational process.
What is the proof?