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What follows is a summary of what impact a $34 million reduction has on nuclear physics in the US. Anybody who doubts that there is a program behind this reduction may answer the question how much money is being spent per day in Iraq. Science is an all-time low in the US. Here we go...

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FYI
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News
Number 168: November 22, 2005

Senators Express Concern Over Layoffs and Run Times at RHIC and
Jefferson Lab

Before the Senate passed the FY 2006 Energy and Water Development
Appropriations Bill last week, senators discussed the negative
impacts that a reduction in funding for the DOE Nuclear Physics
program will have on two key facilities. As it now stands, the
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National
Laboratory and the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
will have to reduce operating times, and, at least at RHIC, reduce
staffing.

When the Bush Administration sent its FY 2006 budget request to
Congress, it sought an 8.4% or $34.0 million reduction in the
Nuclear Physics program budget, from $404.8 million to $370.7
million. The Administration acknowledged this cut would result in a
29% reduction in run time at the Jefferson Accelerator Facility and
a 61% reduction in run time at RHIC.

Going into the conference to settle on the final version of the FY
2006 bill, it appeared that the Administration's suggested cut in
the Nuclear Physics program budget would be rejected. The House's
initial version of the bill had recommended FY 2006 funding a bit
higher than what was then the current level. The Senate bill came
in even higher, at almost $420 million. A DOE senior official
called the outlook "very encouraging" at a meeting of the DOE/NSF
Nuclear Science Advisory Committee in early September (see
http://www.aip.org/fyi/2005/128.html.)

Despite this promising outlook, the final appropriations bill funded
the Nuclear Physics program at the level requested by the
Administration, cutting the budget by 8.4% to $370.7 million (see
http://www.aip.org/fyi/2005/160.html.)

Laboratory officials are grappling with the projected impacts of the
reduced budget. RHIC's scheduled December 2006 run will be delayed
until late in FY 2006. It will be combined with the run for 2007 to
afford the longest possible time for experimentation. Brookhaven's
current hiring freeze will be extended, and officials estimate there
could be as many as 100 scientific and support position layoffs
between now and next October 1.

There is language in the FY 2006 Energy and Water Development
Appropriations bill allowing DOE to reprogram, or shift, money from
one program to another, as confirmed in the discussion that took
place on the Senate floor that appears below. Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton (D-NY) lead this November 14 discussion,
highlighting the severe impacts of the reduced funding levels. She
was joined by Senator John Warner (R-VA), who expressed concern
about the reduced funding level, stating, "At the Jefferson Lab we
need to invest in the 12GeV upgrade necessary to sustain the pace of
scientific discovery, not cut programs." Senator Charles Schumer
(D-NY) and Senator George Allen (R-VA), expressed similar concerns.
Their statements, and responses by Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), the
chairman of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations
Subcommittee and Senate Minority Leader (and appropriations
subcommittee ranking member) Harry Reid (D-NV), follow:

"MS. CLINTON: First, I want to compliment the chairman and ranking
member of the Energy and Water Subcommittee for their hard and
successful work in leading the development of the Energy and Water
bill that is before the body today. I know it is especially
difficult to fund all of th

There is a fair bit of info at http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-10/iss-4/p8.html that is useful here.

To elaborate on this, it's not that you can take one electron, start flipping it up and down, and communicate istantaneously with your buddy who is looking at other electron, say, 50000 miles away. Once you measure one electron, it is defined by itself andnot mutually with the other.

This is correct. The basic issue is that you have to re-entangle the electron to measure it. For FTL communication that leaves photons which creates a number of infrastructure problems. So FTL communications do not appear practical at this time.

http://users.rowan.edu/~marchese/blr.html

> If they had something strange happen during an experiment they should have left it at that and write
> a paper called something like "Something strange happened during blah blah blah...", then describe in
> detail the setup of the experiment and the results, then wait for peer review

Have done:

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0963-0252/12/3/312

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?isn umber=27155&arnumber=1206739&count=18&index=5

http://www.edpsciences.org/10.1051/epjap:2004168

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ let?prog=normal&id=JAPIAU000096000006003095000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleUR L&_udi=B6TGS-47C8N0P-B&_coverDate=12%2F19%2F2002&_ alid=308918281&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_c di=5262&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1 &_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=82d2cdf37641d3ec848f 070de1f6a1d2

http://scitation.aip.org/vsearch/servlet/VeritySer vlet?KEY=JAPIAU&ONLINE=YES&smode=strresults&sort=c hron&maxdisp=25&threshold=0&possible1=mills&possib le1zone=author&OUTLOG=NO&viewabs=JAPIAU&key=DISPLA Y&docID=1&page=1&chapter=0 It's called google

For a start, this is on opensourceenergy.org, which also hosts a number of articles on electromagnetic over-unity devices, i.e. the 'free energy' crowd. Not good company to keep if you want to be taken seriously.

In addition, Eric Lerner is a believer in the plasma universe theory; he wrote a book on the matter called 'the Big Bang Never Happened', which apparently makes him popular with the evolution-denier crowd. Again, questionable associations.

He's also criticised the peer-review scientific process, calling it open to fraud. Just unfortunate that peer-review has not been kind to his own research, I imagine.

I'm no physicist, but it seems his process passes a short, extremely high current from a coffee-can sized copper electrode through a low-pressure hydrogen-boron mix.

The current's magnetic field forms a small hot ball of plasma, a plasmoid, (without external magnets) and when the current's magnetic field collapses it induces an electric field that heats the plasmoid so much, it ignites fusion reactions that create more electrons & ions, which can be converted back into electricity via an advanced transformer that converts an ion stream to electricity.

So basically, pass an electric current though low-density hydrogen-boron in a coffee can, and you get spontaneous fusion - so much so, you get over-unity? Somehow, it strikes me as a little too easy to be true.

Shockingly enough, Lerner has yet to demonstrate over-unity, but that's because the government is so in bed with the oil-companies, they won't give him any money. NASA gave him some money, looked at his results, and dropped him.

I won't call him a junk-scientist, but I think I'd like to see some peer-reviewed and repeated evidence of his results before I lend his theories much credence.

The correct response to this article is,

(a) yes, H-B fusion (aneutronic) is possible, but...

(b) it requires very high temperatures, and suffers from a variety of energy loss mechanisms which make getting usable energy from it difficult. This is similar to when I was in grad-school, and everyone was whispering about Muon-catalyzed fusion, which turned out to be impractical for energy extraction as well.

IANA(N/P)P (i am not a nuclear/plasma physicist), but the papers I skimmed suggest that you could use this method, mixed with a conventional Deuterium/tritium mixture, to get cleaner fusion and better burn rates. Of course, not being a physicist, it's possible that the journals I found the citations in are the physics equivalent of Journal of Pointless Chemistry.

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ let?prog=normal&id=APCPCS000406000001000216000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=yes/

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleUR L&_udi=B6TVM-3WN77X7-19&_coverDate=06%2F17%2F1996& _alid=331683658&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_ cdi=5538&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version= 1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=fad383390465b806fd1 b90abff541fee/

Probable Translation: Another backyard inventor who can read enough of the literature to be encouraged, but not enough to admit the drawbacks.

Secondary Translation: I canna' change the laws of physics, Captain.

This should confuse a few people. Group velocity (the apparent speed of a collection of waves - aka wave packet) can go faster than the phase velocity (the speed of a given wave making up a wave-packet).

Physicsweb
American Institute of Physics

Sure as hell confuses me.

\begin{rant}
Then they start talking about amplification in optic fibres, but the zero of intensity at the start of a pulse can't go faster than 299792458m/s so it can't carry information (and other such misleading things)...
\end{rant}

Physics produces in the neighborhood of 1200-1500/year. It's on the decline lately.

you can see some statistics (including production vs time) here: http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/emptrends.htm l

Chemistry probably produces more, and Biology/Biochem even more than that.

About the hydrogen fuel storage problems for cars

http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-10/iss-1/p20.htm l

Everything is predictable scientifically. It's just that there's too many variables to do it practically.

What is this, 1792?

I think this isn't true anymore

In some googling on this, I've become confused. "ultrahard fullerene" is C-60 buckyballs compressed at high temperature also. I see many different values quoted for UHF hardness and diamond. This Russian paper gives a value of 1 TPa in 1988!

I think the issues you're discussing (regarding signal speeds in the free vacuum vs. those in the Casamir vacuum) are actually irrelevant to this experiment, unless this is radically different from other fast light experiments done in optical fibers. In fast light experiments it is generally just a case of having a group velocity which is faster than c but no longer corresponds to the velocity of energy or information. Meaning that you have a pulse that appears to go faster than c, but it does not do so in a meaningful way.

There's a very good discussion of this in a paper by Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva on a (presumably similar) fiber based fast light experiment PRL 92, 203902 (2004). To quote from that paper:

"Both [phase and group] velocities can exceed the speed of light in vacuum c in suitable cases; hence, neither can describe the speed at which information is carried by a pulse that propagates in the medium. ...it is known that information travels at the signal velocity, defined as the speed of the front of a square pulse. This velocity cannot exceed c."

The rest of the paper goes on to detail their experiment and show quite clearly from the data that while the peak of the pulse is tipped forward, the arrival time of the leading edge of the pulse (the signal velocity) remains constant. The QED issues you're talking about are interesting, but as far as I can tell they are not what is at issue here.

It scarcely mattered what the Milankovitch orbital changes might do, wrote Murray Mitchell in 1972, since "man's intervention... would if anything tend to prolong the present interglacial." Human industry would prevent an advance of the ice by blanketing the Earth with CO2. A panel of top experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences in 1975 tentatively agreed with Mitchell. True, in recent years the temperature had been dropping (perhaps as part of some unknown "longer-period climatic oscillation"). Nevertheless, they thought CO2 "could conceivably" bring half a degree of warming by the end of the century.(27) The outspoken geochemist and oceanographer Wallace Broecker went farther. He suspected that there was indeed a natural cycle responsible for the cooling in recent decades, perhaps originating in cyclical changes on the Sun. If so, it was only temporarily canceling the greenhouse warming. Within a few decades that would climb past any natural cycle. "Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?" he asked.(28*)

Meanwhile in 1975, two New Zealand scientists reported that while the Northern Hemisphere had been cooling over the past thirty years, their own region, and probably other parts of the Southern Hemisphere, had been warming.(29) There were too few weather stations in the vast unvisited southern oceans to be certain, but other studies tended to confirm it. The cooling since around 1940 had been observed mainly in northern latitudes. Perhaps cooling from industrial haze counteracted the greenhouse warming there? After all, the Northern Hemisphere was home to most of the world's industry. It was also home to most of the world's population, and as usual, people had been most impressed by the weather where they lived.(30*)

If there had almost been a consensus in the early 1970s that the entire world was cooling, the consensus now broke down. Science journalists reported that climate scientists were openly divided, and those who expected warming were increasingly numerous. In an attempt to force scientists to agree on a useful answer, in 1977 the U.S. Department of Defense persuaded two dozen of the world's top climate experts to respond to a complicated survey. Their main conclusion was that scientific knowledge was meager and all predictions were unreliable. The panel was nearly equally divided among three opinions: some thought further cooling was likely, others suspected that moderate greenhouse warming would begin fairly soon, and most of the rest expected the climate would stay about the same at least for the next couple of decades. Only a few thought it probable that there would be considerable global warming by the year 2000 (which was what would in fact happen).

That's quite right. Phase velocities faster than the speed of light are not new. The "speed limit" concept does apply to the propagation of information, which occurs at the group velocity. However, if you read the abstract of the paper, Applied Physics Letters, you see that it is, in fact, the group velocity that has been adjusted in these experiments.

I am deeply dubious that this is truly a relativity violation, but everything I have read online seems to point in that direction. I plan to head to the local university library as soon as I get a chance, so I can read the full article.

I don't want to get all Voltaire on this, but all things considered it worked out better than it might have. If Heisenberg hadn't botched slow-neutron diffusion path (and hence, critical mass), the Nazis might have had a practical U235 or PU239 warhead before anyone else. As you say, no one was going to un-invent nuclear fission as a weapons explosive; Einstein's own words indicate that the only reasonable way to excuse the US's creation of nuclear weapons was to prevent the Germans from doing so first, creating "...inconceivable destruction, and the enslavement of the rest of the world..."

According to the report it was not feasible to make intercepts for IBCM weapons based on limited time and accuracy required. I wonder if space weapons will have any less technological challenges ?

I was taught high school Physics by a Biologist

No, I really meant Heisenberg.

That was one hell of a year. Any one of those would have established his reputation, but all three, and in the same year!!

Perhaps because some nut in his garage futzing around with what he thinks might be ball lightning likely has little to nothing to do with controlled fusion? When I do a search like this and get 2 hits, that's not really a good encouraging sign. Has he seen neutrons? What is his confinement time etc.? So far as can see it did not exceed 5usec! not exactly what I would describe as "stable plasma structure", even small tokamaks have confinement times exceeding this by a million. The reason the tokamak is consistently the preferred method of these MFE devices is not because of an evil conspiracy to suck funding from stellarators and spheromaks. It is simply because the tokamak has time and time again through the past 40 years shown its ability to produce the hottest and densest plasmas (with the highest reaction rates achieved) of any MFE confinement method known. It's as simple as that and I'd expect someone who claims to be a former fusion researcher to know it.

Indeed. And if you actually google "vdw bonds," as I did, then this page comes up as a first choice (i.e. I'm Feeling Lucky).

Think of it as a test. If someone's too clueless to figure out what vdw means, do we really even want them to be reading /.?

I succeeded in tracking down the actual paper from the Purdue folks. What they've really done is come up with a clever experimental scheme that measures the gravitational interaction independent of the Casimir force - basically it's a background-free measurement. Very slick.

In all other aspects - lying to their employees, misdirecting funding, fudging non-scientific reports- they are devious lying weasels.

That sounds about right. The physics professors I remember were mostly egomaniacal psychopaths. The ones most vocal in their profession of religious devotion were usually the worst offenders.

This report (from a poster above) fascinates me, though:

When APS junior members were asked if they had ever observed or had personal knowledge of ethical violations while they were graduate students or postdocs, fully 39% of those responding to the survey said yes.

One of the reported offenses:

slavery of graduate students. Professors threaten to not write letters of recommendation unless graduate students stay in their group to produce more data.

Also, not suprising:

only a quarter of physics department chairs responded to the survey they were sent.

What is suprising, though, is that the APS is treating this as a "lack of education" issue. As though well-educated professionals with high IQs need to be told that deception, manipulation, and abuse of those in their charge are unethical practices.

This situation is quite fucked up.

I'd like to point out that this is a survey only of scientists funded by the NIH (National Institutes of Health). It has no bearing on conduct of scientists in other life sciences or in the physical sciences. I would imagine that given the closer industry ties of human health-related research, there would be different, and perhaps greater, pressure to falsify data. There is also clearly no opportunity to violate human subject research standards when you're studying subatomic particles.

Physics Today has a good story on ethics issues in physics. It seems that data falsification is relatively rare (the few high-profile cases demonstrate that it is generally a career-ending move), but other ethical problems certainly do occur. In particular, Physics Today talks about the abuse of graduate students (a problem that's probably not limited to physics).

As a graduate student myself, I've got things pretty good, but some of my friends are definitely being mistreated. One guy is working 70-hour weeks and is still getting told by his supervisor that he's not working hard enough. I'm sure that if he protested he'd quickly find himself tossed out of the group and having to start his thesis research again from scratch.

A list of common thermonuclear fusion reactions with various elements can be found here

The links on the page lead to the rest of the NRL Plasma Physics formulary, which has lots of useful info on fusion-related stuff.

As far as how far this one method can be pushed, this design is basically a very compact neutron generator. This type of design suffers from the problem that the electrons in the target on average absorb the majority of the incoming particle's energy before it hits an ion and fuses. This is because the electrons in the target are very cold (from a plasma physics point of view) and cold electrons are light mass and absorb energy easily. Consider it similar to trying bowling in gravel - the little gravel pieces absorb so much energy from the bowling ball that it is really hard to knock over a pin. Even if you got 10 new bowling balls every time you knocked over a pin, you would still run out of balls pretty fast if you only hit a pin one out of every 1000 balls.

About ten years ago I accidentally made a neutron generator, similar to the one in the article, although without the cool little pyrocrysal accelerator. I was working on a beam collision fusion project (where the idea is to have two recirculating ion beams which cross and collide, avoiding the electron energy absorption), and instead of the beam recirculating, it was hitting a titanium wall. We started getting neutron counts, and when we measured the energy, they were 2.45 MeV, which meant they were fusion reactions. We thought everything was going well, until I tried a control experiment where we blocked the beam recirculation path. We still were getting neutrons. We found out that the deuteron beam was depositing deuterium on the titanium wall, and the incoming deuterons were fusing with the deuterium on the wall. Another back to the drawing board moment...

At the risk of trolling beyond my bounds...
It irks me to hear a good joke all the way to the end, only to find someone botched the punchline. Thank you fellow mathematician for enlightening us to the real deal.

Just so this isn't a pure fluff-post, here's a link to the abstract of the original paper from clinical studies in mice, published in Physical Review Letters, June 7, 2004. Mind you this has only been tested in one human case study and they make no claims to generalize this to other forms of cancer.

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ let?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000092000023238101000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=Yes
I will most likely download the full report tomorrow from the university.

"At the age of 12, I experienced a wonder in a booklet dealing with Euclidean plane geometry, which came into my hands at the beginning of a school year. Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which -- though by no means evident -- could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression on me."

Here's the link to picture showing Einstein at that time:
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/images/ae14.jp g

Oh, and I think today his job application would be rejected because he lack necessary skills...

Fair point on "Einstein believing in God", but that's a very different claim from "him not believing in Newtonian Mechanics". My point was that if you disparage scientific theory in favour of non-scientific ideas, you only do harm. Skepticism in science is good, but that's very different from rejecting well-supported scientific theories in favour of unproveable philosophical or religious arguments.

"Fact is that people can work on Evolution, and Physics and explainations to the creation of the universe, while still believing that God did it."

And I have no problem with that. I don't (well, only occasionally, in the heat of debate) dislike or even disapprove of the idea of Intelligent Design - as we both agree, it's Philosophy, not Science. My problem is when (as with the Creationists in this case) people knock Science in favour of Philosophy - this seems deeply wrong to me, since often the only difference between Science and Philosophy/Religion is that Science has the requirement that it be sanity-checked against observations, whereas Philosophy can (often) romp free of accountability.

If people want to teach ID in Religious Education, it's fine. But they shouldn't be allowed to push a pro-religious agenda in Science, at least not unless we apply the same caveats to the Bible - maybe stickers on the front of all Bibles, stating "This is merely the unsupported opinion of unknown authors, not educated in logic or the scientific method".

This is clearly an anti-religious step, and most people would view it as over-the-top. Why, then, is it ok for religious groups to require the same of science books?

"So, don't think that quantum mechanics has quasi-particles that are actually undefined in size and position until observed, we just can't actually know the size or position until observed, which damages the other."

Actually, that's not true. If you read the literature, the current theory is that the particle literally doesn't have a defined position or velocity until one is measured - see Young's Double-Slits Experiement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experime nt#The_thought_experiment) for more info. The write-up above talks about photons, but YDSE also works for quantum particles of "matter" (eg, it's been done with electrons), and the same results are observed - the particle travels through both slits simultaneously and interferes with itself. Obviously, it can only do this in a quantum superposition of states, not as a classical particle.

A slightly more succinct (but spacey) version was given by Heisenberg himself: http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm

There's also the Copenhagen Interpretation, which (IIRC) says that for any non-trivial quantum system interference with external stimuli very quickly collapses the waveform, but the principle still stands that if you can perfectly insulate a system from all external stimuli, it will persist in a state of indeterminacy forever.

This is also why we talk about "a state of indeterminacy", rather than "unknown state". The state is unknown, but only because the particle has no discrete, determinable state at that point, not even "one we just don't know".

"I'd rather be told, "this is the model we present, it explains a lot, but it doesn't explain a lot also. But for now, we're working within this model.""

That's a fair point, and as an adult I'd agree with you, but I still think you'll confuse kids. How old are you when you first hear about evolution? 6? 7? I don't think kids that age are capable of making that fine a distinction - young kids tend to view things in terms of black and white, and this kind of "good but not right" would just get interpreted as "wrong". Mix in Mum & Dad's "certainty" about the Creationist/Fundamentalist alternative, and you raise another generation of people who neither agree with nor understand evolution.

Scientific American (warning: loaded with ads etc)

Not for the light-hearted, a thorough review in Reviews of Modern Physics (subscription required, if you cannot access the article, drop me an email at karvind@NOSPAM.gmail.com)

On Ferroelectric spintronics from Colossal Storage.

Spintronics and Quantum Dots. Discussion about one possible implementation.

Another good introduction.

Hope it helps.

Only if you only look at data from the Northern Hemisphere. And if you ignore cooling from industrial haze. We already have some clear explanation for this aberation. We had it before global warming even became an issue for the general public.

> What these guys have done is found a novel
>application of a relatively well-known means of
>generating extremely high electric fields.

This article describes modern compact neutron
generators:

http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-9/iss-6/p22.html

and this article describes several patent pending
compact neutron generators:

http://www.lbl.gov/Tech-Transfer/techs/lbnl1764.ht ml

You can see similarities in the way they all work,
basically accelerating ions to slam them into
a target; they all use the accelerator
method to produce neutrons. So radtea is correct,
all that seems really new here is using a
temperature change driven crystal to generate
the potential difference to produce/accelerate
the ions which in other designs is supplied by a
power supply or RF generator.
I think that the reason none of these devices
(all of which use fusion reactions to produce
neutrons) are useful for producing power is
that none of the energy is directable
back to where the reactions are occuring. The
Farnsworth Fusor differs in that respect, but it
has the problem that introducing new fuel is
possible only by stopping the reaction.

Well, this observation is dead. The computing power and processor's bandwidth can continue to increase for a while, especially when the quantum computer does more than 3*5, but the chip cannot get a lot smaller. There is such a thing as Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and unlike Star Trek, there is no Heisenberg Compensators for it!

Unfortunately, when you do the numbers, we do not have enough land to replace more that a few percent of our fossil fuel consuption with biomass.

An article in Physics Today discusses this. They only talk about fertile agricultural land, but even if you were to use marginal land, the argument stays the same.

About the light go faster than c, well, it appears to be here already http://www.aip.org/pnu/2000/split/pnu495-2.htm, although not exactly faster than c :). There is also this blurb about a negative index of refraction, which might also be interresting. http://www.aip.org/pnu/2001/split/534-2.html

About the light go faster than c, well, it appears to be here already http://www.aip.org/pnu/2000/split/pnu495-2.htm, although not exactly faster than c :). There is also this blurb about a negative index of refraction, which might also be interresting. http://www.aip.org/pnu/2001/split/534-2.html

Check out

Brunner, Scarani, Wegmueller, Legre, and Gisin, Phys. Rev. Lett., 93, 203902 (2004).

It contains a reasonable discussion of signal speed and an experimental test that demonstrates things very well. You should find more detailed theoretical discussions in the references.

Well there's John Cramer who has just published an alternate theory explaining the RHIC resluts and has also published a couple of novels based on experimental high energy physics.

A puzzling signal in RHIC experiments has now been explained by two researchers as evidence for a primordial state of nuclear matteA puzzling signal in RHIC experiments has now been explained by two researchers as evidence for a primordial state of nuclear matter believed to have accompanied a quark-gluon plasma or similarly exotic matter in the early universe. Colliding two beams of gold nuclei at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, physicists have been striving to make the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup of matter in which quarks and gluons circulate freely.

However, the collision fireball has been smaller and shorter-lived than expected, according to two RHIC collaborations (STAR and PHENIX) of pions (the lightest form of quark-antiquark pairs) coming out of the fireball. The collaborations employ the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method, originally used in astronomy to measure the size of stars. In the subatomic equivalent, spatially separated detectors record pairs of pions emerging from the collision to estimate the size of the fireball.

Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu) and Gerald A. Miller (206-543-2995, miller@phys.washington.edu), have teamed up for the first time to propose a solution to this puzzle. Reporting independently of the RHIC collaborations, they take into account the fact that the low-energy pions produced inside the fireball act more like waves than classical, billiard-ball-like particles; the pions' relatively long wavelengths tend to overlap with other particles in the crowded fireball environment.

This new quantum-mechanical analysis leads the researchers to conclude that a primordial phenomenon has taken place inside the hot, dense RHIC fireballs. According to Miller and Cramer, the strong force is so powerful that the pions are overcome by the attractive forces exerted by neighboring quarks and anti-quarks. As a result, the pions act as nearly massless particles inside the medium.

Such a situation is believed to have existed shortly after the big bang, when the universe was extremely hot and dense. As the pions work against the attraction to escape RHIC's primordial fireball, they must convert some of their kinetic energy into mass, restoring their lost weight. But the pions' experience in the hot, dense environment leaves its mark: the strong attractive force (and the absorption of some of the pions in the collision) would make the fireball appear reduced in size to the detectors that record the pions. According to Miller, looking at the fireball using pions is like looking through a distorted lens: the pions see the radius as about 7 fermi (fm), about the radius of an ordinary gold nucleus, while the researchers deduce the true radius of the fireball to be about 11.5 fm (Cramer, Miller, Wu and Yoon, Phys Rev Lett, tent. 18 March 2005).r believed to have accompanied a quark-gluon plasma or similarly exotic matter in the early universe. Colliding two beams of gold nuclei at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, physicists have been striving to make the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup of matter in which quarks and gluons circulate freely.

However, the collision fireball has been smaller and shorter-lived than expected, according to two RHIC collaborations (STAR and PHENIX) of pions (the lightest form of quark-antiquark pairs) coming out of the fireball. The collaborations employ the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method, originally used in astronomy to measure the size of stars. In the subatomic equivalent, spatially separated detectors record pairs of pions emerging from the collision to estimate the size of the fireball.

Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu) and Gera

If precise formation as well as placement can be achieved, it will get over the biggest hurdle in getting into the electronics. There are still other issues (eg. contacts, surface adsorbtion etc) to be addressed though.

I looked up some links after this.

There's a general article at
How Stuff Works.

A study of several cases at
Federation of American Scientists. Death rates will depend a lot on the thresholds for closing an area and moving people out. Meaning that cancer rates climb but not enough to evacuate the area. I think the numbers in the FAS article assume people stick around. Say rich people move out, poor people move in. FAS death rate numbers assume more things. Like no advance in cancer treatment in the next 40 years. And little protective measures.

And an article at
American Institute of Physics that says don't make such a fuss.

BTW, the fact of global warming and the theory that man made gasses are responsible was once the outsider view. So Crichton's way of reasoning actually goes in favor of it.

And the research is a tad older than 10 years. The Discovery of Global Warming

Tracking the world's average temperature from the late 19th century, people in the 1930s realized there had been a pronounced warming trend. During the 1960s, scientists found that over the past couple of decades the trend had shifted to cooling. Many scientists predicted a continued and prolonged cooling, perhaps a phase of a long natural cycle or perhaps caused by human activities. Others insisted that humanity's emission of gases would bring warming over the long run. In the late 1970s, this group's views became predominant. By the late 1980s, it was plain that the cooling spell, whose cause remained mysterious, had been a temporary distraction. For whatever reason, unprecedented global warming was underway.

The Star Ledger reporter certainly hooked the potential 'scandal' of SBC moving thousands of jobs out of NJ.

As a former Bell Company, SBC shares a history with AT&T, but that's no guarantee that SBC will absorb the cost of moving hundreds of thousands of square feet of archival material to a new location, or that they'll continue putting money into NJ's economy by paying property taxes and employing locals to maintain the collection where it is.

I used to work with Sheldon http://www.aip.org/history/newsletter/spr98/att-ar c.htm (the former AT&T historian) and I certainly hope he's right that SBC will maintian the collection. But SBC will have to balance any desire to maintain this asset with shareholder demands that they leverage this aquisition to maintian increasing profitability.

There's no telling what choices SBC will make in order to meet Wall Street's expectations. That said, SBS is a stronger company today than AT&T, so maybe they are the better costodian.

Philip Reis invented the telephone.

There have been claims that the Reis telephone didn't work for spoken communication, just for sounds, but these have been rebutted a long time ago.

Hurga

BTW, does anyone know if there any planets that actually have been confirmed to have a reducing atmosphere? Does Venus?

Yes, Venus has an ion tail that extends 45 million kilometres - almost as far as Earth's orbit - caused by the solar wind stripping them from the upper atmosphere. Link.

IIRC, it was the NIH budget that was doubled. In 2002 the NSF was promised the same over five years, but the White House has apparently changed its mind. NSF even ended up with a budget cut this year.

IIRC, it was the NIH budget that was doubled. In 2002 the NSF was promised the same over five years, but the White House has apparently changed its mind. NSF even ended up with a budget cut this year.

See full text of article here

..the Original statement by HP and even more important HP's paper in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Actually, 25 years ago "these same folks" realized what was wrong with the global cooling idea. Namely that it a) only looked at the northern hemisphere, and b) that it likely was caused by all kinds of dirt that was released into the air by industry, and has since been reduced because it killed people even faster than global warming. The Discovery of Global Warming

Tracking the world's average temperature from the late 19th century, people in the 1930s realized there had been a pronounced warming trend. During the 1960s, scientists found that over the past couple of decades the trend had shifted to cooling. Many scientists predicted a continued and prolonged cooling, perhaps a phase of a long natural cycle or perhaps caused by human activities. Others insisted that humanity's emission of gases would bring warming over the long run. In the late 1970s, this group's views became predominant. By the late 1980s, it was plain that the cooling spell, whose cause remained mysterious, had been a temporary distraction. For whatever reason, unprecedented global warming was underway.