February 28, 2006

Scientist at Work | Andrew Hamilton

A Thrill Ride to 'the Other Side of Infinity'

By KIRK JOHNSON

DENVER, Feb. 27 — Video game technology and Einstein's work on relativity may at first seem as unlikely a couple as Oscar and Felix.

One bobs in the froth of commercial culture, dodging the scornful radar of educators and parents who wish students were off doing something else like, say, studying Einstein. The other is as highbrow as science gets in its lofty waltz of theoretical physics, where time and space warp in otherworldly ways that have given brain aches to generations of physics students.

But to Andrew J. S. Hamilton, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado, they are perfect together.

What gamer programs do with increasing speed, sophistication and computational muscle, Dr. Hamilton said, is visualize things that have never been seen in the real world. And what Einstein described, especially in his theory of general relativity, are forces of time and space literally outside the real world we know, or can know.

"What if you could take people through a wormhole the way Einstein's equations said it would be?" he said in interview in his office on the Boulder campus. "And what if you could bring art and science together in a way that compromised neither?"

That is where black holes come in. Dr. Hamilton's marriage of video game software and relativity, which he has fashioned into a "Black Hole Flight Simulator," is at the heart of a new show at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science that takes viewers on a 23-minute thrill ride to what the program notes call "the other side of infinity."

The show is built on the crunching of numbers that even a black hole might envy: some segments produced by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois required 90 hours of supercomputer calculation for each second on screen.

The rest of the article is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/science/28prof.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin