Obviously someone else has already noticed the remarkable similarity between the structure of the human brain and that revealed by computer simulations of the large-scale structure of the Universe.
Does this mean that dark matter is really just all in the mind?
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This entry was posted on September 10, 2010 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Astronomy Lookalikes, The Universe and Stuff with tags Cosmology, dark matter, large-scale structure of the Universe, look-alikes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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In the Dark 
September 10, 2010 at 1:09 pm
maybe now we really do know the mind of God…
September 10, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Many years ago when I worked for the Science Photo Library I sent a transmission electron micrograph of a flu virus to Oxford University Press. A few weeks later I saw it on the cover of a book about cosmology. I phoned the picture editor to point out the error. Her response was, ‘oh it doesn’t matter, it still looks sciencey’. She was right – it didn’t make a huge difference to the book.
My PhD research was on visual communication in science. I was particularly interested on how we make invisible things visible. The way it works is this: invisible things (including brain cells and clusters of galaxies) have a deficit of visual qualities. For instance they don’t have a colour, let alone a shinyness or transparency. So we have to ‘lend’ them visual qualities – arbitrarily assign colours, etc. But the choice is not so arbitrary – we tend to lend invisible things the visual qualities of things we are good at looking at, so it’s not surprising that very small things end up looking like very big things.
True – there appears to be some fractal structure that clusters of galaxies share with brain cells, but our visualisation idioms are the main reason we think brains look like the universe.
September 10, 2010 at 3:37 pm
As a scientist and theoretician, I would answer the question, “Does this mean that dark matter is really just all in the mind?”
as follows:
Dark matter *is* the Mind.
Peace,
Ik
September 10, 2010 at 6:25 pm
Funnily enough – we had a conference on astro-med – the link between astronomical and medical imaging, and what we do with the images is all very similar.
>> theoretician – ????? Surely a theorist?
September 10, 2010 at 9:02 pm
I thought the brain was grey matter..?
September 12, 2010 at 8:35 pm
It really doesn’t matter any more – Buddy Holly
September 12, 2010 at 11:53 pm
There’s only one word for that: ganglions!