How the universe looks like a brain

... or a social network, or the internet....



The Millenium Simulation is touted as the largest n-body simulation ever conducted... over 10 billion particles. It was created by the Virgo Consortium, a group of physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and nerds.

The image and movie above are of enormous scale, our planet, no, our star, no, actually our galaxy doesn't even equate to a single dot in this model. This is supposed to represent the entire universe. Each dot is a group of galaxies. The colors indicate the density. Mpc is a Mega Parsec, about 3.2 million light years.

I think they have a really good small scale example here of how these structures are formed in their model.

I think one of the most fascinating sciences emerging today is the study of complexity. And the gravitational system of bodies in the universe is certainly a very interesting complex system.

Internet:



Social:



Neuronal:



Protein homology:



It almost seems like networks are universal. Wherever there is a complex system with multiple simulataneous interactions occurring at once, we see these sorts of patterns. I makes me think...