A man was speaking: "The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image is incredibly important. When NASA aimed the world's most powerful telescope at an empty patch of sky the size of a grain of sand at arm's length, a patch that seemed utterly empty and devoid of any stars or galaxies or anything else, it captured an image of over 10,000 galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. That image should be physically impossible."
A woman, possibly the interviewer, asked, "How do you mean 'impossible'?"
Suguha poked her head deep inside the refrigerator.
Where is that leftover KFC?
"Well, you have to understand the mathematics of it. It has to do with something called the alpha opacity function, a concept familiar to video game designers. In a 3-D video game, every object or texel is assigned an RGBA value: red, green, blue, alpha. The alpha value determines the the opacity of that the object or texel at that point. This determines its transparency: 0.0 is fully transparent, and 1.0 is fully opaque, typically scaled on integral values from 0 to 255. Video games are of course discrete, not continuous, simulations and therefore the RGBA values either quickly saturate - go to 1.0 - or remain at 0.0, nothing in-between.
"You see, achieving partial transparency that doesn't enfog the player is incredibly hard, and many video game designers simply cheat and create a fake fog that kicks in at a fixed distance. Creating a 3-D simulation over unimaginable distances while still revealing interesting objects at those distances is practically impossible."
"So you're saying it is probably not random."
Ah, there is the chicken bucket.
"The opacity gradient has to be inconceivably precise to be able to see such interesting details on literally the far side of the universe. For it to be merely random would be like hitting the Power Ball Jackpot. And you can't hand-wave it away with the Anthropic Principle either."
"So, in your opinion, the fact that we can see all those lovely swirling galaxies is not a coincidence?"
"No, it is not. And they shouldn't be 'swirling' either."
Hey, who ate all the drumsticks?
"How do you mean?"
"The pinwheel structure of a galaxy is mathematically impossible. Spiral galaxies simply shouldn't exist. Computational physicists have tried for decades to create computer simulations that would create a long-term pinwheel structure of a typical spiral galaxy and it just doesn't work, at least not without cheating. It always smears into a blob."
Suguha rolled her eyes while trying to ignore the audio.
Everyone in this house is a geek. Mom, Kazuto, Sachi. Why am I the only normal one?
"Then dark matter (DM) was discovered. Why does dark matter exist? There's no reason for it. It definitely exists - gravitational lensing reveals it everywhere in the cosmos - but there's nothing in the Standard Model that explains it. It's just there. But why? It's only use seems to be for creating interesting and beautiful galactic structures that we can actually see at cosmological distances."
"But why is it like that?"
Suguha sat on a chair at the breakfast nook and ate a cold chicken breast with her fingers.
The man's voice was getting excited. "Exactly! Don't you see what this means? The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is the 'smoking gun', so to speak. The fact that miraculous photo exists, that the Universe seems to be carefully crafted so that we as humans can actually see all these amazing, beautiful, and glorious galaxies by the billions, strongly implies that someone or something..."
Suguha rolled her eyes.
You want to see a miracle?
Suguha picked up another piece of cold chicken as she tried to tune out the annoying video, which Midori continued to watch with keen interest.
The miracle is how my geek mother ever managed to marry a normal guy and make babies.
Suguha dug into the chicken wing.
A post worthy of Darks!