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A comment on The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies. Parent comment

Re:The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early ... by User23 on Thursday January 12, 2023 @05:55PM (#34361425)
There's a joke that calling Computer Science Computer Science is like calling Astronomy Telescope Science, but part of what makes it funny is the ring of truth to it. Our instruments really do limit our observations. The advantage Computer Scientists have is that we can glimpse a world of Platonic Forms[1], where Functions, and Sets, and Information exist, or something close enough for government work, merely through the intellect. Astronomers have no such luxury.

[1] Or whatever circumlocution you prefer to express the same general concept.

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Re:The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early ... by AstixAndBelix on Thursday January 12, 2023 @07:49PM (#34362511)
Computer Science doesn’t get the pass, unfortunately. First of all because it’s a branch of maths, so in reality it doesn’t have any instruments to worry about. Secondly, applied CS relies on an incredibly simple instrument: binary logic gates. The computers we have today are just a mesh of stuff that flips on and off with no intermediate states. That’s pretty primitive as a means of expression and computation compared with the rest of the universe
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Re:The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early ... by Taniwha on Thursday January 12, 2023 @08:42PM (#34362917)
Oh, let me introduce you to metastability ....
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Re:The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early ... by bpye on Friday January 13, 2023 @02:21AM (#34364865)
Is that computer science or is that physics though?
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Re:The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early ... by Taniwha on Friday January 13, 2023 @02:45AM (#34364999)
well a bit of both - if someone hasn't given you the scary meta stability lecture you haven't really done computer science :-)
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Re:The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early ... by bombolo on Friday January 13, 2023 @03:22AM (#34365234)
> The computers we have today are just a mesh of stuff that flips on and off with no intermediate states.

Only when things are working properly and there isn't too much cosmic radiation, interference, strange patterns accessing memory, someone turning on a light…

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Re:The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early ... by mnw21cam on Friday January 13, 2023 @06:55AM (#34366597)
A lot of people think that computer science is just a branch of maths. But when I was doing my doctorate, I was a computer scientist, and my three supervisors were a mathematician, an engineer, and a meteorologist. The difference between us was much more than the stuff we knew - it was the way that we thought, and therefore approached a problem. Supervision meetings were interesting - it very much felt like four people speaking four different languages.

On a very broad level (and I'll get loads of people disagreeing with this, because both mathematics and computer science divide further into different specialities), mathematics is primarily about proving logical truths, whereas computer science is about managing complexity. That's a massive cognitive difference, even if many of the problems the two fields tackle are the same.

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Re:The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early ... by raxxorraxor on Friday January 13, 2023 @07:47AM (#34366971)
Astronomers probably should go on the quest for immortality since otherwise you are basically condemned to look at a still image. Even if that image contains a story from the earliest universe until now. It is a million states, but no real process.

What I find so fascinating is that the observations are still quite precise. How do you know the outer rims are rotating too fast? Couldn't this be some gravitational lensing and stars are actually much closer to the core than they appear?

How do you even begin to estimate the mass of a galaxy? How do you weight the behavior of a disc and combine it with keplers law to even see that something is wrong here? As a layman I would be perfectly happy with how galaxy are rotating... I find it fascinating that much is so precisely determined that we have to miss something.

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