Doughnut Shaped Universe <- Homer was right (really)

Remember the ep with Steve Hawkins (maybe spelled Hawkings?). Homer had a theory about a doughnut shaped universe.

Check it out. And I thought those Simpsons eps. were a waste of time. This is actually from the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/science/space/11COSM.html?8isc

You have to register with the times to read this. In case you don't want to do that here's the first few paragraphs.

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Universe as Doughnut: New Data, New Debate By DENNIS OVERBYE

Long ago in the dawn of the computer age, college students often whiled away the nights playing a computer game called Spacewar. It consisted of two rocket ships attempting to blast each other out of the sky with torpedoes while trying to avoid falling into a star at the center of the screen.

Although cartoonish in appearance, the game was amazingly faithful to the laws of physics, complete with a gravitational field that affected both the torpedoes and the rockets. Only one feature seemed outlandish: a ship that drifted off the edge of the screen would reappear on the opposite side.

Real space couldn't work that way.

Or could it?

Imagine that the Spacewar screen is wrapped around to form a cylinder or a section of a doughnut so that the two edges meet.

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Here's a trick to get around that: go to news.google.com and type in the headline of the article you are looking for. The link that google provides to this article doesn't require registration. This works in general, not just for this article.

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This is a reply to , in which AC speculated:

Hawking, actually

AC wrote in message news:...

Of all the possible ways for life to imitate the Simpsons.

When I was a grad student at MIT, getting my Masters in Mechanical Engineering, we had Thursday night donuts in my dorm (Ashdown House). We would sit in the dining hall, eating donuts and drinking cider, and commenting on how the various donuts looked like the electron orbits around nuclei known as the S-orbitals and P-orbitals. Now do you have a better grasp of the type of people who like the Simpsons?

"Lisa, in this house we OBEY the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!"

Space