Physics
Scientific paper
Dec 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008njph...10l5001s&link_type=abstract
New Journal of Physics, Volume 10, Issue 12, pp. 125001 (2008).
Physics
Scientific paper
Advances in physics are intimately connected with developments in a new technology, the telescope, precision clocks, even the computer all have heralded a shift in thinking. These landmark developments open new opportunities accelerating research and in turn new scientific directions. These technological drivers often correspond to new instruments, but equally might just as well flag a new mathematical tool, an algorithm or even means to visualize physics in a new way.
Early on in this twenty-first century, scientific communities are just starting to explore the potential of digital visualization. Whether visualization is used to represent and communicate complex concepts, or to understand and interpret experimental data, or to visualize solutions to complex dynamical equations, the basic tools of visualization are shared in each of these applications and implementations.
High-performance computing exemplifies the integration of visualization with leading research. Visualization is an indispensable tool for analyzing and interpreting complex three-dimensional dynamics as well as to diagnose numerical problems in intricate parallel calculation algorithms. The effectiveness of visualization arises by exploiting the unmatched capability of the human eye and visual cortex to process the large information content of images. In a brief glance, we recognize patterns or identify subtle features even in noisy data, something that is difficult or impossible to achieve with more traditional forms of data analysis.
Importantly, visualizations guide the intuition of researchers and help to comprehend physical phenomena that lie far outside of direct experience. In fact, visualizations literally allow us to see what would otherwise remain completely invisible. For example, artificial imagery created to visualize the distribution of dark matter in the Universe has been instrumental to develop the notion of a cosmic web, and for helping to establish the current standard model of cosmology wherein this (in principle invisible) dark matter dominates the cosmic matter content.
The advantages of visualization found for simulated data also hold for real world data as well. With the application of computerized acquisition many scientific disciplines are witnessing exponential growth rates of the volume of accumulated raw data, which often makes it daunting to condense the information into a manageable form, a challenge that can be addressed by modern visualization techniques. Such visualizations are also often an enticing way to communicate scientific results to the general public. This need for visualization is especially true in basic science, with its reliance on a benevolent and interested general public that drives the need for high-quality visualizations.
Despite the widespread use of visualization, this technology has suffered from a lack of the unifying influence of shared common experiences. As with any emerging technology practitioners have often independently found solutions to similar problems. It is the aim of this focus issue to celebrate the importance of visualization, report on its growing use by the broad community of physicists, including biophysics, chemical physics, geophysics, astrophysics, and medical physics, and provide an opportunity for the diverse community of scientists using visualization to share work in one issue of a journal that itself is in the vanguard of supporting visualization and multimedia.
A remarkable breadth and diversity of visualization in physics is to be found in this issue spanning fundamental aspects of relativity theory to computational fluid dynamics. The topics span length scales that are as small as quantum phenomena to the entire observable Universe. We have been impressed by the quality of the submissions and hope that this snap-shot will introduce, inform, motivate and maybe even help to unify visualization in physics.
Readers are also directed to the December issue of Physics World which includes the following features highlighting work in this collection and other novel uses of visualization techniques: 'A feast of visualization' Physics World December 2008 pp 20 23 'Seeing the quantum world' by Barry Sanders Physics World December 2008 pp 24 27 'A picture of the cosmos' by Mark SubbaRao and Miguel Aragon-Calvo Physics World December 2008 pp 29 32 'Thinking outside the cube' by César A Hidalgo Physics World December 2008 pp 34 37
Focus on Visualization in Physics Contents
Visualization of spiral and scroll waves in simulated and experimental cardiac tissue E M Cherry and F H Fenton
Visualization of large scale structure from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey M U SubbaRao, M A Aragón-Calvo, H W Chen, J M Quashnock, A S Szalay and D G York
How computers can help us in creating an intuitive access to relativity Hanns Ruder, Daniel Weiskopf, Hans-Peter Nollert and Thomas Müller
Lagrangian particle tracking in three dimensions via single-camera in-line digital holography Jiang Lu, Jacob P Fugal, Hansen Nordsiek, Ewe Wei Saw, Raymond A Shaw and Weidong Yang
Quantifying spatial heterogeneity from images Andrew E Pomerantz and Yi-Qiao Song
Disaggregation and scientific visualization of earthscapes considering trends and spatial dependence structures S Grunwald
Strength through structure: visualization and local assessment of the trabecular bone structure C Räth, R Monetti, J Bauer, I Sidorenko, D Müller, M Matsuura, E-M Lochmüller, P Zysset and F Eckstein
Thermonuclear supernovae: a multi-scale astrophysical problem challenging numerical simulations and visualization F K Röpke and R Bruckschen
Visualization needs and techniques for astrophysical simulations W Kapferer and T Riser
Flow visualization and field line advection in computational fluid dynamics: application to magnetic fields and turbulent flows Pablo Mininni, Ed Lee, Alan Norton and John Clyne
Splotch: visualizing cosmological simulations K Dolag, M Reinecke, C Gheller and S Imboden
Visualizing a silicon quantum computer Barry C Sanders, Lloyd C L Hollenberg, Darran Edmundson and Andrew Edmundson
Colliding galaxies, rotating neutron stars and merging black holes—visualizing high dimensional datasets on arbitrary meshes Werner Benger
A low complexity visualization tool that helps to perform complex systems analysis M G Beiró, J I Alvarez-Hamelin and J R Busch
Visualizing astrophysical N-body systems John Dubinski
Sanders Barry C.
Senden Tim
Springel Volker
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