Cze�� wszysce, On Friday 1 March we started from the beginning again, going through comoving coordinates and curvature, with an added touch of history.

Where did Euclid spend 30 years studying geometry and writing an extremely good review paper? Cairo, Africa. That's where zero curvature geometry models come from. Western scientific culture is fundamentally African. [Anyone want to search for http refs?]

Who developed and introduced algebra and the Hindi decimal system to the West? An Arabic-speaking Iranian scientist born in... Khiva, Uzbekistan, hence known as al-Khwarizmi, who spent a lot of his life in Baghdad:

http://www.mscf.uky.edu/~carl/ma330/project2/al-khwa21.html

So, the "gor" in algorithm comes from "Khiva" in Uzbekistan. http://www.ati-uzbekistan.com/english/uzbekistan/touristcentres/khiva.htm

So Western scientific culture is equally Asian. (Do you really want to do physics using roman numerals? VIII + I = IX ?)

Modern "Western" science involves a mix between thinking in terms of geometry (African), decimal numbers (Indian), algebra (Arabic culture) and algorithms/software (Arabic/Iranian/Uzbek), though of course there are some European and North/South American contributions too...

IMHO, observational cosmologists tend to think in terms of numbers and software, theoretical cosmologists tend more to think in terms of algebra (in the more modern concepts of algebra, calculus etc.).

We discussed whether people would prefer

(1) continuing lectures in a similar more or less traditional style, or rather

(2) move on to a research project involving some hands-on code-writing and observational data.

** standard ruler project **

The particular project ("standard ruler project") I propose is a rewrite of the code of

http://de.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0106135

and application of the same analysis to a larger superset and to different observational data sets, and using more refined observational corrections in order to get more signal out of the data. Anyone contributing will have their name on any publications resulting from the work (unless they choose not to!). This relates to the shape of the Universe in the sense that - Omega_m, - Omega_Lambda and - w_Quintessence can be thought of just as parameters of the metric which convert [right ascension, declination, redshift] into 3-dimensional comoving positions.

If I understood people's comments right (please feel free to correct me), the initial preferences were:

(1) Bart

(2) Marcin, Rafa�, Micha�, Sebastian

Since we didn't cover topology during Friday's session, what would seem to match both preferences is:

- 1 more or less conventional lecture (next week) on topology

- following lecture as introduction to the material sufficient for understanding the standard ruler project and together discussing how we could divide the work (code writing, debugging, paper writing)

** "Archeops - topology project?" **

Micha� asked about the possibility of writing software for topology work. This is certainly possible, but it's less clear that it would result in publications or observational detections. I think that the Grenoble people would be happy to have someone contribute to programming work for Archeops analysis, and that in return, we could do topology analysis, but this would be a *much* bigger scale project (in terms of programming effort, coordination, and... politics) than the standard ruler project.

Comparison local parameter vs topology projects:

definite exciting result if result, then how important standard ruler YES moderate to big Archeops topology NO big to huge

effort (programming, coordination, politics) standard ruler easy in a few months, IMHO Archeops topology heavy, over 12 months

Hmmm.... There is also a very easy, quick topology project which should lead to a publication relating to a principle for detecting topology. :-) Let's call this:

** "roots of the identity project" **

The ultimate decision should be from the students - I personally will do the standard ruler project sooner or later. Sooner would be better, but later is also OK. I will also do the roots of the identity project, when I have a spare moment...

Think about it, discuss it on this list, and at next Friday's meeting after going through a topology introduction we can see what people think.

Pozdrawiam Boud