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| Your personal background. | |
| I live in Calgary, Canada, and work in the oil-and-gas exploration field, processing seismic data. Among other things at the office, I'm the guy that keeps the network and the machines running, so I've "given myself permission" to use the work computers for BOINC. At home, my wife has no objection to using the computers there. The photo is a composite, courtesy of Mike Mah who was with me on an expedition I co-led to observe the June 8th 2004 Transit of Venus from Luxor, Egypt. It shows the Sun in hydrogen-alpha emission (about 656 nm wavelength) with Venus visible as a dark spot in the lower half. Superimposed on that image is one of a statue of one of the very rare female pharaohs, Hatshepsut, from her temple near Luxor. I've been around since 1951, in the seismic industry since 1979, and a member of the RASC since 1983. I started running the first successful distributed computing program, SETI, a few months after it went fully public in 1999. Now that BOINC is available I've "distributed" my computing efforts to include Einstein. | |
| Your opinions about Einstein@Home | |
| I think the chances of finding what Einstein@Home is looking for are greater than for SETI. The most important advances in pure science in the next few decades will be in cosmology, and this project might have implications for the theoretical study of how the universe functions. In particular, uniting Gravity with the other forces in a GUT that actually works. I've looked at some of the other BOINC projects, but other than SETI (whose efforts do have some spill-over into real research-type science) Einstein is the only one with astronomical signifigance. CPDN, the climate modelling program, even excludes solar variability as an external forcing factor, despite the known strong correlation between solar sunspot cycle length and temperature change. | |
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| Team | Royal Astronomical Society of Canada |
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