I love finding new ways to visualize complex systems at different levels of magnification. Victoria Castle alerted me to this video from Bio Visions at Harvard University. It’s an animated fly-through of the inside of a living cell in action.
Imagine having versions of this that show the inner workings of every healthy and diseased bodily function. As a patient, you could see what works well and what doesn’t work so well, and have a stronger capacity to visualize healthy function in your own body.
If you know of other great examples that illustrate complex systems in action, please let me know.
Gabriel, you might enjoy the visual complexity web site at:
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
Lots to look at!
By: tina on 14 March 2007
at 11:30 pm
Thanks Tina, that’s a good resource.
Here’s another one from Joel Levey (http://wisdomatwork.com) that’s astro-physically oriented:
We just returned from an awe inspiring presentation at the Keck Observatory on the Big Island of Hawaii BLACK HOLES FROM THE DARK AGES: THE BIRTH AND EARLY YOUTH OF QUASARS
One of the most stunning images of the evening was a new supercomputer simulation posted at:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/mpg/146898main_viz_shiftingall_21.320×240.mpg
This visualization shows what Einstein envisioned. Researchers crunched Einstein’s theory of general relativity on the Columbia supercomputer at the NASA Ames Research Center to create a three-dimensional simulation of merging black holes. This was the largest astrophysical calculation ever performed on a NASA supercomputer. The simulation provides the foundation to explore the universe in an entirely new way, through the detection of gravitational waves.
Quasars — the ultra-luminous objects found in the cores of galaxies — are believed to be powered by material falling into supermassive black holes. Nearly every large galaxy, including our own, has one such black hole lurking in its center, and probably all of them have been quasar-type objects in the past. Many pieces of evidence point towards a joint formation and evolution of galaxies and their central black holes. Distant quasars can help us illuminate the youth of galaxies themselves, but their origins in the early universe are still somewhat mysterious, and related to the formation of first stars and galaxies.
Podcasts of other Keck programs are available at:
http://keckobservatory.org/podcast.php
By: Gabriel Shirley on 15 March 2007
at 2:32 pm
Oops, the link to the simulation was cut off. This should get you there.
By: Gabriel Shirley on 15 March 2007
at 2:36 pm
Beautiful! Thanks for sharing.
By: tina on 16 March 2007
at 12:01 am