“Why isn’t Lenna wearing any clothes?” I implored my friend, shocked at seeing the shoulders-up nude photo of a woman on a mundane Monday in the Duke library. I had been going through a MATLAB tutorial on computer vision, and the sample image was, surprisingly, a naked lady. Apparently, when the USC developers behind a computer vision algorithm needed a sample face in 1973, someone just happened to walk into the lab with a Playboy magazine. The face of the woman on the centerfold, Lenna, has since become the default data for computer vision classes around the world. Because, of course, it’s totally normal to walk into an academic setting waving around a copy of Playboy, which would naturally be the first place one would go looking for a face.
Unfortunately, seeing female objectification in professional programming environments isn’t exactly an isolated incident. With the advent of the “brogrammer” culture, women have reported being exposed to workplaces in which male programmers share porn over open communication channels, according to CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap. When they’ve asked their male coworkers to stop, they were told, “Stop being such a girl.”
The percentage of women earning degrees in computer science has been decreasing, rather than increasing, since the 1980s.
Carolina Women’s Center, on February 29 at UNC. RENCI, while addressing issues of staffing diversity within its own organization, was inspired to bring the issue to light in the greater UNC community. By 2020, we expect to see more than one million unfilled software engineering jobs. As of now, only 23% of technical jobs nationwide are filled by women, leaving a huge gap to fill in this important workspace.
The response of the largely female audience to the film was overwhelmingly positive. Lilly, a first-year math student at UNC, noted that the issues the film addressed were “obvious,” both in academic settings and in the online blogosphere. She appreciated the positive messages, such as in this GoldieBloxsuperbowl ad, that counter expectations of young girls to study more “social” subjects and encourage them to pursue science, technology, engineering and math. Addy, a first-year computer science student, noted that a supportive group of women in her CS401 class at UNC makes the dearth of women less noticeable.
Olivia, Tabatha, and Megan with a collage of “Why We Love Tech”
Tabatha, a first-year computer science student at UNC, said that she feels intimidated in introductory computer science classes, where male students often have years of background knowledge that she doesn’t. She hesitates to show men her code until it is perfect, since she feels that as a woman, she has to prove that she is just as good as a man. This additional pressure and worry, CODE observed, often causes women to perform worse in quantitative classes. Tabatha, Megan, and Olivia attended the screening as part of a Women’s Studies class. Megan echoed Tabatha’s sentiment, relating that as a beginning programmer, she felt behind during HackNC, where most men already knew how to build apps.
Clearly, issues of female representation in tech persist into the university and industry level. However, CODE insists that we must remedy the problem during childhood, when girls receive societal messages that deter them from studying science and tech subjects.
If we’re going to be “changing/saving the world,” “making a better version of you,” and deciding how to “do the right thing,” (all rhetoric from the tech industry), we should probably have all genders and races represented in those responsible for effecting the change that will supposedly impact all of humanity.
Scenes like the one above are engineer Christine McKinley’s favorite views of the construction sites where she manages building designs and contracts with other engineers. McKinley, a mechanical engineer, musician, and author, enjoys the complexities, high stakes and surprises of her job. Engineers, she says, “design against [surprises] but live for surprises.”
One of these surprises, McKinley told an audience last Thursday Feb. 25 in the Nelson Music Room at Duke, was a talk she had with the director of a community college district. He told her “women aren’t as good as math and science.” Shocked and disappointed that a man in charge of the education of the young students would believe this, McKinley pointed out that several of her accomplished colleagues were women. McKinley, like many other women, was frustrated that she has to work harder than men to get a promotion.
Is this changing? Are women today more prevalent in engineering fields than they were twenty to thirty years ago?
The chart below depicts the distribution of engineers in 1989: only 15 percent are women.
Of course, 1989 was 27 years ago and a different cultural time, with Nintendo’s Game Boy and Prince William’s seventh birthday. But the chart below shows how little those numbers have changed.
For mechanical engineers, the gap is much larger: only 7 percent are women (yellow faces), while the blue faces represent men, with the some frowning ones unhappy to be working with the women.
Percent of female mechanical engineers
When the workers are broken down into teams, according to McKinley, the image below is what it actually feels like to be working as a female mechanical engineer.
What it actually feels like to be a female mechanical engineer
Let’s start with the most troubling issue regarding the lack of diversity in engineering. If women and people of color are told that we are not good at math and science, and we believe it, then we are choosing a form of helplessness. Specifically, if we don’t pick apart the data and challenge those who made up this story, then it sticks, and the “rumor” becomes a narrative – and that’s dangerous, McKinley said. However, everyone needs to know basic chemistry, math, and physics to participate in conversations about topics such as medicine, NASA, one’s cholesterol level, and energy conservation as a knowledgeable adult. People need to be STEM-literate to be able to analyze this data, and men, especially in the 1950s, didn’t want women to research the facts and prove a competition.
Why should we care about women choosing careers in STEM fields?
Reason 1: Gender financial inequity: STEM grads make more than non-STEM grads
If we care about the gender pay gap, and only 19 percent of engineering graduates are women, then that aggravates the situation. This gender inequity can be addressed – partly – by women choosing to study engineering, McKinley said.
Of course, money is not the only thing in life; we want jobs with meaning, she added. However, even civil engineers understand that they are in a helping profession, always excited to build a new bridge, for example, to help people cross a flooded river. At the same time, money gives one the ability to leave a spouse, to take care of a disabled child, to find a better job, to afford healthier food; making real money gives one a way to become independent and make better choices. Working a job, however, does not imply that we must “sacrifice [our] life and fun.” McKinley enjoys what she does and has a lot of fun on the job; studying math and science, she says, is not that complex with the right motivation and support.
Reason 2: Humanity’s Survival
A coronal mass ejection (CME) is an enormous eruption of gas and magnetic field that launches billions of tons of plasma from the sun’s surface into space. Such an event occurred in 1859. As a result, farmers plowing field with horses noticed a bright flash of light, steam engines continued to run on schedule, and telegraph operators were confused when their telegraph batteries stopped working. Overall, there were few problems due to the limited technology at the time.
Imagine a CME happening today. All our large pieces of equipment – power stations, transformers, and transmission lines – would get fried.
Equipment involved in the transportation of energy from power plants to users
If these power houses blow up, what are we going to do? With three-year lead-time and $2 trillion cost, they will not be repaired in time for us to continue our daily functions. We now have a civilization-changing event on our hands – what Hurricane Katrina gave us, but now, for entire countries. We are in a time where our dependence on technology is constantly rising – until it’s not. In such a disastrous scenario, we will need more engineers. At this time, everyone – men and women – will come together to work on simple, elegant solutions to make the world better.
Currently, we have a mass shortage of engineers, so those today are overbooked with work. If these engineers are unable to find time to think through the entire solution and review all possible sources of error, then it creates a problem not only for engineering but also for the entire world in general. We are in need of good engineers and a diverse workforce to bring together all our ideas for a better world.
McKinley notes that she finds herself more comfortable when there are other women in the room. As a result, the whole team gets more relaxed, “elevating everyone’s game,” and people get more creative and feel more secure in sharing their ideas.
Grace Hopper created the computers advertised in this flyer.
Reason 3: The third reason we care about this view about engineering is the history of STEM achievements by women being ignored or the credit being taken by men.
Women who became mathematicians in the 1900s had to fight hard to have their contributions to the field recognized. The world misses out significantly if the achievements of half of humanity are ignored.
Hertha Aryton was a brilliant mathematician who had been elected the first female member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1899. In 1902, she became the first woman nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. “Because she was married, however,” McKinley quoted, “legal counsel advised that the charter of the Royal Society did not allow the Society to elect her to this distinction.”
Amalie Noether was another incredible mathematician who invented a theorem that united symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, to be as important as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein himself regarded her as most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time. However, McKinley tells the audience, she was denied a working position at universities simply because they did not hire female professors.
In the 1900’s, more than 1000 women joined an organization called Women Airforce Service Pilots. They transported newly-made planes to the fighter pilots; however, many of the planes were untested, causing 38 of them to die in service. While they went through intense military training and had prior experience, the women were considered “civilian volunteers” and had to fight to be recognized. Further, most of the accepted women to the organization were white, and the only African American applicant was asked to withdraw her application.
Nancy Fitzroy was American engineer and heat transfer expert in the 1900s. She received plenty of criticism as well, but she said it didn’t affect her: “The reaction I pretty much have gotten most of my life is ‘little girl, what are you doing here?’ but I was a good engineer. That’s what made all the difference.”
Curiosity, inventiveness, and the urge to improve are not male traits. They are human traits. Women are half of humanity; they are not the spectators. Women must step up and contribute even if it is more difficult. Constantly underestimated as a female mechanical engineer, McKinley says she uses this underestimation as fuel to work harder and become better.
Being an engineer is worth it. Ask great questions, and be really good.
Remember, McKinley told her audience, that engineering is full of surprises. And for people who underestimate you, you’ll be that surprise.
—–
Christine McKinley gave her talk in the Nelson Music Building at Duke last Thursday for Feminist/Women’s month.
Christine McKinley is a mechanical engineer, musician, and author. Her musical Gracie and the Atom, won a Portland Drammy for Original Score. Her book Physics for Rock Stars was published in 2014 by Penguin Random House. Christine hosted Brad Meltzer’s Decoded on History Channel and Under New York on Discovery Channel.
You can view her website, read her book, or contact her via email.
If you’ve ever wanted to watch a killer T cell in action, or see human cancer make new cells up-close, now is your chance.
A collection of 3-D movies captured by Duke biology professor Dan Kiehart and colleagues has won the 2015 Newcomb Cleveland Prize for most outstanding paper in the journal Science.
The paper uses a new imaging technique called lattice light-sheet microscopy to make super high-resolution three-dimensional movies of living things ranging from single cells to developing worm and fly embryos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwzIUnKNw0s
Cutting-edge microscopes available on many campuses today allow researchers to take one or two images a second. But the lattice light-sheet microscope, co-developed by 2014 Nobel Prize winner Eric Betzig, lets researchers take more than 50 images a second, and in the specimen’s natural state, without smooshing it under a cover slip.
You can watch slender antennae called filopodia extend from the surface of a human cancer cell, or tiny rods called microtubules, several thousand times finer than a human hair, growing and shrinking inside a slide mold.
Daniel Kiehart and former Duke postdoctoral fellow Serdar Tulu made a video of the back side of a fruit fly embryo during a crucial step in its development into a larva.
Chosen from among nominations submitted by readers of Science, the paper has been viewed more than 20,000 times since it was first published on October 24, 2014.
The award was announced on February 12, 2016, at an award ceremony held during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C.
Winners received a commemorative plaque and $25,000, to be shared among the paper’s lead authors Eric Betzig, Bi-Chang Chen, Wesley Legant and Kai Wang of Janelia Farm Research Campus.
Duke senior Grace Lim isn’t grossed out by the innards of the tiny worm C. elegans. In fact, she finds them beautiful.
As a researcher in the David Sherwood Lab, she peers inside the transparent 1-millimeter creature under a microscope, watching for “cell invasion” — a process that occurs when one type of cell literally bursts into an area occupied by another type of cell.
Grace Lim presenting the results of her research at the AAAS Annual Meeting on Saturday.
Last weekend, the aspiring developmental biologist had the opportunity to take her work to the national stage when she presented at the Student Poster Competition as part of the annual AAAS meeting in Washington, D.C.
“It’s been really exciting,” said Lim. “The researchers here are experts and it is great to learn about their projects. At the same time, I’ve met scientists from all different fields who have asked questions and provided insights that I didn’t expect.”
Cell invasion plays a key role in organism growth and development, Lim said. For example, a fertilized egg will use cell invasion to implant itself into the uterine wall. However, cell invasion can also occur in less desirable processes, like cancer and other diseases.
In her work, Lim created C. elegans mutants that lacked specific genes related to cell invasion. She then observed whether uterine cells in the growing mutants could still invade tissue in the vulva — a key milestone in the growth of the developing larva.
“C. elegans is a good system to study because it is transparent, so you can watch these biological processes happening under a microscope,” she said.
The tiny transparent C. elegans. Photo courtesy of the National Human Genome Research Institute
Her experiments uncovered four new genes that appear to regulate cell invasion in C. elegans. In addition to presenting at the conference, Lim will also be writing up these results as an honors thesis.
Lim, who wants to pursue a graduate degree in biology after finishing up at Duke, says her favorite part of working in the Sherwood lab has been interacting with the graduate students. “We work together to come up with creative ways to solve problems, which is something you don’t always get to do in class,” she said.
And her favorite part of working with C. elegans?
“They have this amazing ability to control their metabolism,” she said. “We grow these worms in petri dishes, and when the plate fills up and they run of out food, they just stop growing. But if you take a few and put them on a new plate they grow again, as if nothing had happened.”
An international team of gene sequencing scientists, including some at Duke, want to sequence the genomes of all living kakapo — a critically endangered flightless parrot of New Zealand – while there are still 125 of them left in the world.
A one-year-old Kakapo named Pura on Codfish Island in 2005, by Mnolf, via Wikimedia Commons.
This is the first project aiming to sequence every member of a given species. The scientists and their collaborators are hoping the public can help through a crowd-funding effort. They hope to raise $45,000 US and are a little more than halfway there. With just 2 and a half months left, you can help write the end to this story.
Four years ago, Duke research specialist Jason Howard picked up a children’s book from the library to read to his 6-year-old daughter. It was about the kakapo (Strigops habroptilus), a flightless, nocturnal parrot that smells like honey.
Howard works in the Duke lab of neurobiologist Erich Jarvis, a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator who is co-leading a massive, ongoing effort to sequence the genomes of all 10,000 bird species. So, Howard’s library book pick was not exactly random. (In fact, he was sequencing the parakeet genome at the time.)
This sweet face belongs to Felix the Kakapo, photographed in 2006 by Brent Barrett (originally posted to Flikr – via Wikimedia Commons)
But as Howard read about efforts to save this beloved — and rapidly aging — bird population, he asked his daughter whether she thought he should make the kakapo’s genome a priority. (To which she said, “Yes, daddy, do it!”)
Howard was able to obtain a DNA sample from the kakapo, a feat in itself, and get a rough draft of the sequence. “But the sequencing technology [three years ago] wasn’t as good then and it was a lot more expensive,” he said.
He wanted to get a higher quality genome and study genomes of individuals, in part because there are so few kakapo left. Because this bird is among the most ancient species of parrot, it would also give Jarvis’s lab a better understanding of the evolution of vocal learning and speech imitation, where many of their studies focus.
Advances in genome sequencing even in the past year have already answered the group’s wish for a more-detailed kakapo genome. Jarvis’s lab completed the genome of a kakapo named Jane; their so-called ‘reference’ genome will allow them to more simply and inexpensively piece together the sequences of other individual kakapo. They just needed the funds to do more.
As luck would have it, molecular ecologist Bruce Robertson, an associate professor at the University of Otago, Andrew Digby of the New Zealand Department of Conservation and David Iorns of the Genetic Rescue Foundation approached Howard, while he was working on Jane’s genome, about funding and crowdsourcing a project to sequence all of the remaining kakapo. “I had never dreamed of doing all 125,” Howard said.
Jason Howard
Conservation efforts that started in the 1980s have already employed breeding strategies to boost dwindling population, but with individual genomes in hand, the group will be able to understand which kakapo harbor genetic susceptibility to specific diseases and to more effectively breed them to produce offspring with more robust immune systems. (One day, scientists might even be able to modify disease-vulnerable genes using gene-editing technology.) The genomes will also allow them to investigate any genetic causes of low fertility in these birds, which mate only intermittently.
Kakapo currently reside in the wild on just two of New Zealand’s small islands, because human-introduced predators, including cats and dogs, ran them off the mainland.
Kakapo Recovery has access to museum samples of deceased birds from areas where they are now extinct, including some from nearly 200 years ago. If the project is well-funded, they can tap into these museum specimens to get a better understanding of the various island populations and possible clues about their demise.
In this letter written nearly 150 years ago, Charles Darwin asks whether nest-building is something birds instinctively know how to do from birth, or whether it’s a skill they get better at with practice — a question researchers continue to study today.
Hidden among more than four million books and documents stacked three stories high, in a room kept a constant 50 degrees with 30 percent humidity, Duke’s Rubenstein Library houses several letters and early edition publications by one of history’s greatest scientists — the British naturalist Charles Darwin.
Born more than 200 years ago today, Darwin famously wrote thousands of letters in his lifetime. You can find several of the handwritten originals at Duke, on topics ranging from how birds moult to the behavior of blow flies.
“I begin to think that the pairing of birds must be as delicate and tedious an operation as the pairing of young gentlemen and ladies,” a 59-year-old Darwin wrote to his bird-loving friend and frequent correspondent John Jenner Weir on April 18, 1868.
Also available is an 1855 copy of Darwin’s firsthand account of the voyage of the Beagle. These and other Darwin writings are available by request at http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/.
Visitors to Duke’s Rubenstein Library can browse an 1855 copy of Darwin’s firsthand account of the voyage of the Beagle, “Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, Under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N.”
Matthew McCann, Pratt ’16, spent his summer translating thoughts into movements.
A biomedical engineering and mathematics major, the Duke senior contributed to work in the field of prosthetics by creating a brain-machine interface that senses different brain waves of a subject and converts them into movements of a mechanical hand.
McCann combined two prominent biomedical techniques, tri-polar concentric electroencephalograms (tEEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), to pick up the brain activity of his subjects. EEGs are the typical devices one pictures when imagining recording brain activity: electrodes stuck all over a subject’s skull to pick up neuron firing when particular brain regions are active.
NIRS is a novel way of measuring brain activity. A common application of NIRS is in the pulse oximeter, or the plastic clip-like contraption doctors place on your finger to measure pulse and blood oxygenation. McCann used NIRS to measure the blood flow in different regions of the subject’s scalp. Different patterns of blood flow indicated dynamic brain activity.
Based on data obtained from these two techniques, McCann categorized brain activity into three specific intentions: thinking about moving the right hand, thinking about moving the left hand, and thinking about moving the feet. Each different intention to move was then connected with moving one finger of a mechanical hand. An example of the hand moving in response to different intentions is shown below (at 8x speed):
McCann’s major challenges in the project were processing complicated EEG signals and removing noise from these signals in order to correctly classify each of the movement intentions. He worked with vast amounts of training data from subjects who had practiced focusing acutely on each of the movements.
He ultimately isolated the specific frequency bands whose power was modulated most drastically during the three movement intentions he was targeting. These frequency bands served as the basis for his machine-learning algorithm, which matched known data the subjects had been trained to produce with unknown thoughts about movement.
After developing his algorithm, McCann tested it on unknown data, in which subjects thought about moving their right hand, their left hand, and their feet in some arbitrary sequence. McCann’s algorithm ultimately obtained impressive accuracy of up to 80% when categorizing unknown thoughts about movements.
Through his research, McCann demonstrated the feasibility of rapidly creating functional prosthetics from simple materials and only open-source software. His prosthetic hand proves promising to medical innovation, as it represents a non-invasive, functional brain-machine interface. Ultimately, his success sheds optimism on the future of prosthetics.
Learn more about McCann and his projects on his website.
The winning submission, created by Nicholas School PhD candidate Brandon Morrison, illustrates the flow of agricultural and forestry crops from raw materials to consumer products. The colors correspond to the type of crop – brown for wood, green for vegetables, etc. – and the width of the lines correspond to the quantity of the crop. You can check out the full image and caption on the Duke Data Visualization Flickr Gallery.
“Visualizations take advantage of our powerful ability to detect and process shapes to reveal detailed trends that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see,” said Angela Zoss, Data Visualization Coordinator at Duke Data and Visualization Services (DVS), who runs the contest. “This year’s winners were all able to take very complex topics and use visualization to make them more accessible.”
One winner and two finalists were selected from the 14 submissions on the basis of five criteria: insightfulness, broad appeal, aesthetics, technical merit, and novelty. The submissions represent data from all areas of research at Duke – from politics and health to fundamental physics and biology.
“This year’s entrants showed a lot of sophistication and advanced scholarship,” Zoss said. “We’re seeing more advanced graduate work and multi-year research projects that are really benefiting from visualization.”
Eric Monson, a Data Visualization Analyst with DVS, hopes the contest will inspire more students to consider data visualization when grappling with intricate data sets.
“A lot of this work only gets shared within courses or small academic communities, so it’s exciting to give people this opportunity to have their work reach a broader audience,” Monson said.
Posters of the winning submissions will soon be on display in the Brandaleone Lab for Data and Visualization Services in The Edge on the first floor of Bostock Library.
The second-place entry, by Art History PhD student Katherine McCusker, depicts an archaeological site in Viterbo, Italy. The colored lines indicate the likely locations of buried structures like walls, platforms, and pavement, based on an interpretation of data from ground-penetrating radar (represented by a dark red, yellow, white colormap). You can check out the full image and caption on the Duke Data Visualization Flickr Gallery.
The larger the church, the less likely its members will attend weekly services, a new Duke University study finds.
Joel Osteen’s stadium-sized Lakewood Church. If you skipped a service like this, would anybody notice?
“People have an increasing detachment from religious organizations, and, somewhat counter intuitively, mega-churches are a reflection of that,” said David Eagle, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke’s Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research.
“These churches are really large – with more than 2,000 people in attendance. By nature they are more anonymous places – your comings and goings aren’t noticed from week to week and you may not face the same encouragement — or pressure — to attend as in a smaller church,” Eagle said.
Across the religious spectrum, Eagle’s study found a reverse correlation between church size and attendance of its members. For example: about 40 percent of members of white, mainline Protestant churches with a membership of 50 people attended services each week. But at a far larger white, mainline Protestant church of 10,000 members, just about 25 percent attend weekly services.
From the study: probability that a person will attend church and church size, controlling for age, gender, and class (shaded regions indicate the range of statistically possible values)
Small, black Protestant churches of 50 members reported a 50 percent rate of weekly attendance, the study found. But at a far larger church of 10,000 members, just 40 percent of members attended weekly.
There are other factors at work as well, Eagle said. Families with little free time are more apt to attend large churches where they can pick and choose their involvements without feeling obligated to take a leadership role, he said.
Eagle’s study, which examines mainline Protestant, black Protestant, evangelical and Roman Catholic churches with as few as 20 members and as many as 25,000, analyzes data from the U.S. General Social Survey and the National Congregations Study, the latter led by Mark Chaves, a Duke professor of sociology, religion and divinity.
During political election cycles, many wonder about the political influence that megachurch pastors might exercise from the pulpit. But those pastors may struggle to reach their members, given the tendency for attendees of those larger churches to attend only sporadically. And in larger churches clergy often shy away from expressing extreme political stands from the pulpit, Eagle said.
“If you have 10,000 people in your pews, it’s less likely that everyone is of one political persuasion.”
Guest post by Eric Ferreri, News and Communications
Students and faculty gathered in the Physics building over coffee last Friday to understand the theory and mathematics behind a fundamental question: how did our universe start and what came before it?
Cosmologist and theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton, associate professor at UNC, is a proponent of the idea that our universe is one of many.
Laura Mersini-Houghton, associate professor of theoretical physics and cosmology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has appeared on various TV and radio stations to discuss her theories on black holes and the origins of the universe.
With the rise of technology in the twentieth century, we now know more about the Big Bang and the dark energy that makes up approximately 70 percent of the universe. With the expansion of universe, all other matter — everything we have observed on Earth and through instruments — will dilute, while dark energy, which has constant density, will expand, thereby “pushing the universe apart.”
Expansion of the universe due to dark energy.
What has bothered scientists since the early 1970’s are the questions: what exactly selected the initial conditions of the universe? What determined the arrow of time? Why did we have to start with these very special conditions?
What brings these issues to the forefront of research today is that fact that dark energy will be the only thing remaining in the present timeline of our universe. In other words, we are going towards another big bang explosion. In order to predict how the future of the universe will evolve, we must first understand the mystery behind dark energy.
Dr. Mersini-Houghton says that the chances of a Big Bang happening by chance are 1 / 10^{10^123}, which is infinitely impossible. What selected this initial condition?
Illustration of the string theory landscape of multiple universes.
She proposes wave functions. When the energy of each wave function is at a tipping point, a new big bang occurs and with it another universe is created. With the support of the string theory, using one-dimensional strings in place of the particles of quantum physics, we calculate a landscape of 10^500 possible universes. The hypothesis that there exist other universes then raises the question: why did we start with this universe? Our universe is no longer at the center of the Cosmos as we previously believed; rather it is a humble member in a vastness.
Even if there are multiple universes, their entanglement with us is so tiny that they are nearly impossible to detect. However, the Planck satellite has found concrete scientific evidence of changes in energy due to other universes. According to Dr. Mersini-Houghton, atypical observations made about galaxies moving in the wrong direction and the unexplained “Cold Spot” in the cosmic microwave background are effects are due to the presence of neighboring universes.
In short, nature is a lot more complicated than we think it is, and simply looking at it and simplifying the problem to solely our world will not help us understand what is truly happening. To address the problem of our origins, perhaps we need to extend our paradigm of space-time and look for observational tests of a multiverse framework.
Stephen Hawking’s take on parallel universes in an interview.
“Why isn’t Lenna wearing any clothes?” I implored my friend, shocked at seeing the shoulders-up nude photo of a woman on a mundane Monday in the Duke library. I had been going through a MATLAB tutorial on computer vision, and the sample image was, surprisingly, a naked lady. Apparently, when the USC developers behind a computer vision algorithm needed a sample face in 1973, someone just happened to walk into the lab with a Playboy magazine. The face of the woman on the centerfold, Lenna, has since become the default data for computer vision classes around the world. Because, of course, it’s totally normal to walk into an academic setting waving around a copy of Playboy, which would naturally be the first place one would go looking for a face.
By Anika Radiya-Dixit
Post by Kelly Rae Chi
Matthew McCann, Pratt ’16, spent his summer translating thoughts into movements.
Guest post by Eric Ferreri, News and Communications
