Paras Chopra Profile picture
Oct 17, 2021 13 tweets 4 min read Read on X
A story of our home in the universe.

a visual🧵
1/ We belong to a system of planets revolving around a beautiful star.
2/ Just at the edges of the solar system lies remnants from the early days that couldn’t assemble into a planet.

This disc is called the Kuiper belt.
3/ But the influence of our sun goes much beyond the planets and the Kuiper belt.

We’re surrounded by a spherical shell of billions of icy comets that extend 100,000 times as far as Earth is from sun.

It’s called the Oort cloud.
4/ The nearest star - Proxima Centauri - is about six times even further away.
5/ Of course, we all are embedded within the Milky Way, home to 100 billion stars like our sun.

Each pair is as far away from one another as Sun is from our nearest neighbour.

Our galaxy is truly staggering.
6/ Our nearest neighbour galaxy, Andromeda, is so far away that when we look at it, it appears to us as it was 2.5 million years ago.

It’s on a collision path to us, which will eventually create a new home for us - the Milkdromeda.
7/ Gravity binds stars within a galaxy.

Just the same way, neighbourhood galaxies are bound in a structure called the Local Group.

It contains Milky Way, Andromeda and ~50 other galaxies.
8/ Our local group is gravitationally bound in a supercluster of galaxies called the Virgo supercluster which contains the Local Group and many other such galactic clusters.
9/ Can structures in the universe get even bigger than the super clusters?

Yes!

The biggest known structure we belong to is called Lanieka supercluster. It contains Virgo superclusters and many other ones.

Our Lanieka is moving towards a point known as the great attractor.
10/ Finally, even the Lanieka supercluster is a tiny portion (~0.00001% by volume) of our entire observable universe.

Our observable universe is *huge*.
11/ Does anything lie beyond what we can observe in the universe?

Yes, it’s highly unlikely that the universe suddenly ends beyond our horizon.

Many scientists believe that it is infinitely huge, although nobody knows what that *really* means.

Can infinities exist physically?
12/ That’s it!

Hope you enjoyed the thread.

It blows my mind that universe may be finite or infinite. Both possibilities fill me with strange awe.

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More from @paraschopra

Nov 10
Kicked off the 2nd batch of Turing’s Dream, the AI residency that I run in Bangalore!

Here’s what they’re upto… Image
1/ Adithya S Kolavi @adithya_s_k is a 4th year engineering student at PES.

In 2024, he set a target to achieve 10k stars across his github repositories

His most famous one is Omniparse and has 5.5k stars, it's a library that converts unstructured data into structured data for LLMs github.com/adithya-s-k/om…
@adithya_s_k 2/ Arjun Balaji @kaizen797 - 4th year engineering.

He's working with UPI team to detect money laundering using graph NNs. (it has trillion edges, so fun problem!)

He's also working with a Harvard team to map MRI images over time to 3D space to see how brain structures change!
Read 13 tweets
Oct 26
How to achieve success without trying to shoot for it!

My notes from the #book "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned" by @kenneth0stanley and @joelbot3000

🧵 Image
1/ It’s an unconventional self-help book disguised as a computer science research exposition (that’s why the publisher is Springer).

I strongly recommend reading it.

Here is a taste of the book’s main ideas. 👇
2/ Key insight:

Objectives only work when your goal is one hop away from where you are
Read 42 tweets
Sep 14
Turing’s Dream first batch - who is in it and what they’re upto.

🧵
1/ Praveen Chavali - @praveen_chavali is exploring the math of neural networks, and is trying to build a black box optimization method for compressing large models into smaller models.

At yesterday’s tech deep dive, he showed why GANs never converge.
@praveen_chavali 2/ Mehul Goyal - @observerforever is a former hedge fund guy who is now exploring how to model time series data using deep networks.

Yesterday, he explained the problem formulation of predicting sharpe ratio via a reinforcement learning kind of a setup. Image
Read 12 tweets
May 15
How to be a messy thinker

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1/ I love thinking about thinking. Give me a research paper on rationality, cognitive biases or mental models, and I’ll gobble it up.

Given the amount of knowledge I’ve ingested on these topics, I had always assumed that I’m a clear thinker.
2/ Recently, though, it hit me like a lightning strike that this belief is counter-productive.

That’s because is you “know” that you’re a clear thinker, you’re less likely to suspect that you might be missing something big in your thought process.
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Feb 26
Why time seems to pass faster as we age.

🧵
1/ I’ve been mega-obsessed with this feeling.

A year as a 36 year old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen.

It seems cosmically unfair - have less years to live, and each year is flying by faster.
2/ But, why is that happening?

My tentative conclusion is that it’s an unfortunate outcome of how evolution shaped our brain to be an efficient storage device.
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Feb 19
A (massive) thread on dopamine

🧵
1/ If you prefer the blog format, this thread is available on my website too:

invertedpassion.com/a-primer-on-do…
2/ I recently made notes on the book “Hooked” but wasn’t satisfied by the depth of explanation in it.

So, I went about doing my own research on how to make habit-forming products.

invertedpassion.com/notes-from-the…
Read 74 tweets

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