Cosmology Thread

The Cosmology Thread at XpImmersionTwo

RobertCecilMartin gave short talks throughtout all the sessions at XpImmersionTwo that (at the least) served the purpose of getting the group back from breaks with the minimum of straggling. These talks grabbed me by my interest in theoretical physics and astronomy. I would like to have a fun discussion on what your thoughts were on how this related to XP. (Tom Guyette)

OK. Here we go. The obvious use of the Cosmology thread was to get us back to the meetings and it was fun to listen to.

I talk about cosmology, biochemistry, archaeology, physics, and Sci-Fi, because I have a captive audience and I like to hear myself talk. -- rcm

My favorite part was that the creation of the heavy metals of the universe can only (so far) be explained by them coming supernovas. Well it seems that since carbon comes from the fusion of 2 helium atoms, we carbon-based life forms are also made up of supernova dust. Cool!

The universe is an example of a self-organizing system - emergent behavior and XP proports to work under the same principle. Self-organizing software creation. That would make a cool patch or subtitle for XP. XP - "Developing Self-Organizing Objects at the Speed of Change".

TomGuyette

My favourite example of this is the iron in our blood. The iron nucleus lies at the extremum of binding energy-per-nucleon, so is created in nature just as a star reaches the end of its life and goes nova. The carbon example is less strong, since light elements are created during the star's "normal" life. We are stardust.

I like to goad NewAgers? with this (and in other ways): We are stardust, and that isn't a metaphor, or an analogy, or wishful thinking or (just) poetic language, it is the case. This being so, I say after trotting this example out, why bother making up <your favourite NewAge cosmobabble here>? Because, when it comes to amazing, soul-expanding stuff, DameKind? beats you every time. --KeithBraithwaite

I thought the subtext of his talks was interesting. At each point in time, mankind thought it had the universe pretty well figured out, except for a few nagging little problems around the edges, like the irregularities of planetary motion, or why the Sun hadn't burned itself out yet. Each time, it took a radical ParadigmShift to solve those problems, and each time our understanding of the universe dramatically widened.

I saw this as a metaphor for pre-XP software development. We've got it all figured out, except for these nagging little issues of quality and shipping something the customer wants.... --JohnBrewer

Why pre-XP software development? Do you think XP has it all figured out?

Absolutely not. Once XP gets well established, I'm sure there'll once again be a few nagging little problems for the next paradigm shift to explain. I'm just revelling in the fact that XP explains a lot of things that just didn't make sense under the old paradigms. --jb

A ".wav" file of "The Universe Song" along with lyrics can be found at: http://montypython.virtualave.net/meaningmm.htm