Slashdot Mirror

The third images from the preview indicates that there is only dampening by 14 dB. This doesn't seem like much.

If this works by reflection, is it even possible to stack more of these in several layers to achieve higher dampening (because the layers would themselves reflect the sound)?

Here's the paper published in Phys. Rev. B 99 in case anyone is interested: https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.99.024302

*sigh*

Since the editor and submitter didn't do it,

here is the BU research alert, which includes an image of the new material, and

here is a link to the published paper, from which you can get a DOI number if you want to read about their work.

The acoustic suppressor looks like thick a 3-d printed bushing.

I predict that an article like this is going to bring the cranks out of the woodwork. Two obvious flaws in this "journalistic impression" of the actual research: 1) The original article has nothing to do with antigravity, it discusses an effect more like buoyancy. 2) A change of one degree is not hard to measure, regardless of the distance it is measured over, because angles do not change with distance. These obviously nonsensical inventions are the result of some journalist's wild imagining about a topic they have no competence to discuss. The whoppers get bigger with the retelling.

A saner report. The original paper is paywalled.

With a laser functioning as "optical tweezers" one can isolate single subatomic particles (electron, proton, well-characterized ions ref: https://journals.aps.org/rmp/a... ) set the standard kilogram to the appropriate number of one of those and bid all your metal alloys under bell-jars bye-bye. That is, define the kilogram to be something like 1e30 electron masses or 6e26 proton masses. whichever is more convenient.

This approach was considered -- there were a lot of attempts to make a reasonably large lump of silicon pure enough and with a perfect enough crystal lattice that the number of atoms in it could be counted to sufficient accuracy, whereupon the mass of one atom of (a specific isotope of) silicon would become the reference. The Kibble balance (which ties the kilogram to Planck's constant and so to the energy of photons of specific wavelengths) got to the required accuracy (required so that the mass of the kilogram didn't change too much when the standard changed) first.

With a laser functioning as "optical tweezers" one can isolate single subatomic particles (electron, proton, well-characterized ions ref: https://journals.aps.org/rmp/a... ) set the standard kilogram to the appropriate number of one of those and bid all your metal alloys under bell-jars bye-bye. That is, define the kilogram to be something like 1e30 electron masses or 6e26 proton masses. whichever is more convenient.

ITER’s achievements over 50 years have zero direct value if physics prevents the reactor from being scaled down to a usable size. For the billions poured into it, the results are rather disappointing. Any other low-cost projects you would like to mock, since this fundamental flaw of tokamaks is indefensible?

It is disingenuous to directly compare ITER results to a lab-scale machine with uncooled conventional magnets operating in a pulsed mode. Of course the confinement time is limited; so is fusion yield and other metrics. It isn’t the absolute numbers that matter, and the Polywell has produced solid results with extremely limited funds. Commercial fusion might be available today if alternatives were funded at a hundredth of the level of ITER, and it is sad that the trickle of intermittent funding stretched the project timeline such that Bussard is no longer alive to see the results.

The scarcity of published material on Polywell is unfortunate, yet the linked presentation provides insight into the current state of affairs and expectations. Simulation of a Polywell is a non-trivial achievement, as was the demonstration of a high pressure plasma confined at beta near 1, as documented in Park’s 2015 paper. This work finally proves Grad’s conjecture made over 70 years ago, and reveals that magnetic cusp confinement works well and was prematurely abandoned.

Well, technically energy cannons would have recoil, just not nearly as much as the movies show. If the energy was delivered in laser form for example, the light pressure would cause a small but measurable recoil in the opposite direction.

If referring to the (somewhat inappropriately named) turbo lasers in Star Wars, they appear to be some sort of plasma projecting weapons. Definitely are not lasers.

Well, technically energy cannons would have recoil, just not nearly as much as the movies show. If the energy was delivered in laser form for example, the light pressure would cause a small but measurable recoil in the opposite direction.

Re: "You need to make testable predictions that differ from the current model."

There are many examples of observations at the level of planetary --> intergalactic scales which are expected in an electrical cosmology, but not in a gravitational one (and realize that it is acknowledged that gravity dominates at the smaller scales). To give a few examples ...

1. The failure of the solar wind to appreciably decelerate even as it passes the Earth's orbit. In the laboratory, we accelerate charged particles with an electric field. Basic physics is suggestive of the idea that the Sun is the center of an electric field, and it extends outwards to the heliopause.

2. The fact that galactic rotation curves are easily produced by modeling the cosmic plasma as laboratory plasma. The reason it is so is because the spiral arms trace out electric currents. Very simple physics compared to the dark matter conjecture. In fact, Winston Bostick produced spiral galaxy forms in the plasma laboratory many, many years ago, and Anthony Peratt created his supercomputer simulations as a reaction to that former experimental work.

3. The CMB itself can be argued to be evidence for electric currents in space, because

"High-power microwave generation on earth belongs exclusively to devices using relativistic electron beams ... A relativistic electron beam that does not produce microwave radiation is unknown. These same basic mechanisms are likely to have their natural analogs in cosmic plasmas."

As for the unexpected bell-curve shape of this signal, it could very well result from the signal passing through the heliopause, but even if that proves to be problematic, it's not at all scientific to rush to judge that this is evidence for a creation event.

4. The layering of the ionosphere is evidence that the Earth has a net charge to it. Why? Because we can do the experiment in the laboratory: Set up a metal sphere in a vacuum, and pump it full of charge until the charge density becomes very high. What happens? Layering of charge. These are actually called double layers in the plasma laboratory, and they are recognized as electrodynamic phenomena (which is likely why astrophysicists have so far refused to catalog double layers as astrophysical entities, even though they've been observed in the Van Allen radiation belts).

5. The Earth is observed to electrically interact with the Sun every 8 minutes. You didn't recognize this as an electric current because the scientists called it either a "magnetic portal" or a "flux transfer event", but it is obvious that the magnetic field is caused by an electric current. What we've yet to see any acknowledgement of from mainstream scientists is that these discharges every 8 minutes might be acting as a feedback which stabilizes our solar system.

6. The Cassini spacecraft was struck in 2005 by an electric current from Hyperion, even though it was a full 1,200 miles away from the small object.

during a 2005 flyby of Saturn's moon Hyperion, the spacecraft was briefly bathed in a beam of electrons coming from the moon's electrostatically charged surface

The scientists referred to it as an "electrostatic shock", but this was an obvious violation of Debye screening, which should have limited the electrostatic discharges in this region to 10 meters. Incidentally, the researchers sat on the news of this event for a full 9 years before reporting it to the public.

In each case, we see something happening which is expected for electricity in space, but u

I do find it ironic that out of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in advertising in this election, so many people are willing to believe that just $3000 in well placed Facebook ads is all it took to 'steal' an election. Does anyone besides Facebook have anything to gain by perpetuation this rumor? I mean that's totally amazing Advertisement for Facebook.

Indeed. And it's a damn shame that anyone might believe that was the extent of Russia's participation.

Instead, Russia employed an army of "personas" who were given marching orders to embed themselves in most of the popular social networking sites and argue as if they were Americans who had a stake in this race. In addition, numerous fake news sites were setup which these people would use to back up their claims.

Now, you might ask, why is this important? What kind of real impact could several thousand people arguing for one side over another make? Well, it turns out that you can sway the overwhelming majority of people if only a small percentage of the total discussion takes a strong stance on an issue.

"Ads placed on Facebook are 10,000 times more likely to be viewed than traditional media. A 2016 study showed that every dollar spent in ads on Facebook had more impact than $10,000 spent with our competitors" ... then they go about feeding those who are so anti-trump they will latch onto anything, and suddenly half the country believes that Facebook is the ultimate advertisement platform.

The inherent problem with your assertion is that it leaves out most of what Russia actually did and your argument would be relevant were it not for that reality.

Phys Rev Lett doesn’t use your latex dumbass. Your latex is just a manuscript. You can also submit manuscripts in Word. All the type setting is done by the journal.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/a...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.027...
http://sci2.esa.int/Microscope...

The key will be to establish "open source" peer-reviewed journals that are backed by the biggest names in science and the major universities. That at this point it hasn't happened makes me think that the biggest names in science and the major universities like the way things are now...

You mean such as Nature Scientific Reports? It's a relatively good journal (impact factor 4.3), open access, and does not discriminate against negative results. Even older mainstream journals like Physical Review Letters (impact factor 8.5) are starting to offer open access publication. Nature Communications (high impact factor 12.1) also just switched to an open access model last year, and even removed the paywall from all their older content. So I'd say that things are at least moving in the right direction, especially after funding bodies in many countries started pushing it.

Here is a quote from Elon Musk on MBA's:

"I wouldn't recommend an MBA. I'd say no MBA needed. An MBA is a bad idea. [...] It teaches people all sorts of wrong things. [...] They don't teach people to think in MBA schools. And the top MBA schools are the worst. Because they actually teach people that you must be special, and it causes people to close down their feedback loop and not rigorously examine when they are wrong. [...] I hire people in spite of an MBA, not because of one. If you look at the senior managers of my companies, you'll see very few MBAs there."

Source.

"As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don't teach people how to create companies."

And Steve Jobs regularly violated MBA ideology. He was a notorious micromanager, which is exactly what MBA's aren't supposed to do. He personally led a small team of engineers in designing the original iPhone. And we all know how much of a flop the iPhone was.

As for my degree, my field is physics and mathematics. I wouldn't join the MBA cult for anything. LOL GMAT.

I understand that there's a good chance that I'm able to access this source for free though one of my state's local libraries, and that's wonderful. I tried and failed to access it through one library card. I still feel as though more this entity would generate more net revenue and have the side effect of more people able to speak intelligently on the subject if the cost of a single paper was $2-$5 each.

In writing out this frustration, I think I'm beginning to understand, and I'm wondering if I might have a possible solution. I believe the average paper out of a scolarly journal produces effectively zero interest from the general public. They are too niche or too complicated or the findings are too unsurprising. For these papers, it doesn't matter if it costs $25 dollars or if it costs $1, you're still selling about the same number of copies. So it makes sense to charge the higher price. Every month or so, a decent journal such as this manages to publish an article that some science-news entity thinks is interesting enough to post a writeup. Every few months, they publish something that interests a number of science-writers, and manages to hit the slashdot level of interest. Once or twice a year, they publish something that gets mainstream attention and shows up on the level of something like SciShow (one of the few entities that makes science friendly and digestible, but also fact-checks and doesn't constantly get details plain wrong like so many other pop-sci media sources). The lower pricing would only make sense on those higher tiers, where greater demand for the original paper is generated. So now I'm wondering, why don't journals re-actively price accordingly? When a paper gets wider attention, slash the price. I suppose the response to this is that this isn't done for fear of it generating bias in publication selection. And I get that; greed is the enemy of integrity; it's why MTV stopped playing music videos long before the days where we could just stream them, it's why History channel and Discovery Networks bailed on quality educational programming. You don't want your academic journals vying to go viral; so you isolate yourself from that business. But in rea

That https://journals.aps.org/prl/a... was one hard read, here's one from LIGO explaining gravity waves and their detection http://ligo.org/science/Public...

The second LIGO detector is like 20 miles away, so when a gravity wave comes by I know I felt it :)

No we have not yet seen this form of matter. It was claimed to have been observed a while ago but this was disproved. Let's hope the same thing does not happen again.

Smarter people than you say otherwise:

Time crystals may sound dangerously close to a perpetual motion machine, but it is worth emphasizing one key difference: while time crystals would indeed move periodically in an eternal loop, rotation occurs in the ground state, with no work being carried out nor any usable energy being extracted from the system. Finding time crystals would not amount to a violation of well-established principles of thermodynamics.

This. Mod parent up.

Quantum-mechanical systems in their ground state cannot radiate energy, because they are already in their lowest possible energy-state.

Smarter people than you say otherwise:

Time crystals may sound dangerously close to a perpetual motion machine, but it is worth emphasizing one key difference: while time crystals would indeed move periodically in an eternal loop, rotation occurs in the ground state, with no work being carried out nor any usable energy being extracted from the system. Finding time crystals would not amount to a violation of well-established principles of thermodynamics.

I think someone didn't understand his physics course very well. Being in a different frame of reference does not affect a clock's accuracy.

Actually since I'm now the one at the front giving the lectures I'm petty confident I do understand my own physics courses! ;-) Being in a different frame does affect a clock's accuracy when I am making a measurement because time is local. The moment you are in a different frame the accuracy of the clock is limited at best by the accuracy with which you can determine the frame of the clock relative to your own.

In fact this is now the limiting factor in the accuracy of clocks since they can now make clocks which are accurate to 1s in 15 billion years at which point things the the floor of the building you are on start to matter. If they ever make these portable and cheap there are going to be some really interesting applications as well as some fun lecture demos.

I'm not certain how they manage to set the azimuthal angle

See: Rapid Bayesian position reconstruction for gravitational-wave transients

"We introduce BAYESTAR, a rapid, Bayesian, non-Markov chain Monte Carlo sky localization algorithm that takes just seconds to produce probability sky maps that are comparable in accuracy to the full analysis. Prompt localizations from BAYESTAR will make it possible to search electromagnetic counterparts of compact binary mergers."

(I assume that you're in the US since you consider the case where the government might only contribute 5% of a university's budget.)

Second order effects like the school's general fund getting a pinch government money are irrelevant. The question is whether the research is being directly payed for, in full or in part, by a government grant (e.g. NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA). US researchers already have to state government funding sources in publications, so there's not much ambiguity about whether research is being funded by a government grant. Look at the acknowledgement section of a research article and you'll see something like

Work at UCSB was supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (BES) under Award No. DE-SC0010689. Computational resources were provided by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the DOE Office of Science under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

(Taken from a random physics article.)

It's not that complicated.

It is well known that a human brain can operate a (finite) Turing machine, albeit very slowly. There are Turing machine in cardboard form for teaching the way computers work, here for instance.

So the brain can definitely emulate a Turing machine. The reverse is very likely to be true, because it is possible to simulate finite collections of atoms to a very high degree of accuracy with a Turing machine, including quantum effects. So in theory we *could*, with enough resources, simulate a whole brain down to the atomic level and run it.

Neither proposition is practical though. AI research is precisely about emulating intelligence practically.

For those who are interested, the scientific journal has a companion article here. It describes the design and sensitivity of the experiment, as well as some of the context. There is also a link to the actual journal article to the right, but you may need institutional access to download it.

Abbot et al. is here: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab...

It just came out in Physical Review Letters today: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab...

The problem with neutrino telescopy is that we don't have a neutrino-opaque material. So all our neutrino telescopes are whole-sky telescopes. The first generations of neutrino telescopes (e.g., the Homestake experiment that you refer to) had no direction sensitivity at all, but purely returned counts of neutrinos over the interval since the last purging.

When Cherenkov detectors came in, the cone of Cherenkov radiation would give you the orientation of travel, but not the direction of travel. For example, the Super-Kamiokande detector counted a pulse of 11 neutrinos from SN1987A with an accuracy of about +/-28deg, of which the first two pointed to the LCM (or it's antipode) with an accuracy of 18deg +/-18deg and 15deg +/- 27deg (the rest of the burst was "consistent with isotropy" ; the trigger time of the photomultipliers is about 50ns, which restricts the directional accuracy).

I can't be bothered to track down the accuracy of, say, ANTARES or ICE-CUBE ; but they'll be in the literature. On the basis that you try to half the imprecision with each new generation of equipment (otherwise it's not worthwhile building ore re-building), you'd expect precisions of around 7-10deg (one and ah half to two fist-widths at arms length), which is getting to the point of potentially being useful for pointing survey telescopes.

So, while we knew there were neutrinos coming into the detectors before SN1987A, observers had no way of knowing whether they were from the Sun, a supernova, or backwash form an alien's anti-gravity drive. The "SK eleven" (sounds like a bank robbery gang) were the first detections that astronomers could point at and say "we think these neutrinos came from there, for these reasons".

That's the science bit (and a little defence of StartWithAnAdvert's science, if not of his writing skills) ; for my own interest ... WTF is the current SN monitor system?

Well, unsurprinsingly, there is a paper on Arxiv. Oh, it's just from last week!

It is also important to determine the SN direction using the neutrino signal: the direction information can guide optical instruments toward the SN explosion and enable observation of the onset of radiation. Among the neutrino detectors operating at present, Super-Kamiokande (SK) is the only detector able to determine the SN direction using neutrino events.

Well, I'll take their word for it.

When the SN burst has less than 60 events, the golden warning will not be generated.

Oh, Japanese English! sorry, "Engrish!" It must be authentic!

The pointing accuracy estimated by the e nsemble study is found to be 3.1 â¼ 3.8â--¦ (4.3 â¼5.9â--¦) at 68.2% coverage for the Wilson (NK1) model at 10 kpc, where the range covers various neutrino oscillation scenarios.

Well bugger me! My wild-arsed guess above wasn't too bad!

And the final question ... how do I receive neutrino burst alerts? That is something I'm working on finding the answer to. but I deserve a pint!

"Expanded solar-system limits on violations of the equivalence principle" James Overduin, Jack Mitcham and Zoey Warecki, Classical and Quantum Gravity, Volume 31, Number 1. IOP: http://m.iopscience.iop.org/ar... arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.1202

"Four-Qubit Entanglement Classification from String Theory", L. Borsten, D. Dahanayake, M. J. Duff, A. Marrani, and W. Rubens
Physical Review Letters 105, 100507. APS: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab... arxiv http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4915

"Permutation orbifolds and holography", Felix M. Haehl, Mukund Rangamani Journal of High Energy Physics 2015:163 Springer: http://link.springer.com/artic... arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.2759

"Quest for the Perfect Liquid: Connecting Heavy Ions, String Theory, and Cold Atoms" Barbara Jacak, John E. Thomas, Clifford Johnson, Symposium at tahe AAAS Amual Meeting 2009 https://www.bnl.gov/aaas09/per...

You'd be surprised, entanglement was in fact proven correct just the other day: http://physics.aps.org/article... Full paper here: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab...

You'd be surprised, entanglement was in fact proven correct just the other day: http://physics.aps.org/article... Full paper here: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab...

You can surely detect my attack by using an optical power meter, but eventually I'll figure out a way around this as well. What our paper really shows is that there is a missing link in the security proof. Fix the proof and you'll be safe forever.

Could you explain your attack in laymans terms? From what you said here, you've not really "broken" quantum encryption and worked around the wave function collapse, rather you've discovered that quantum encryption as currently defined is flawed and immune to the observer effect?

Any QKD protocol relies on a security proof, and the observer effect is only a small part of the puzzle. In this case, we attack the Franson interferometer which uses a security test in the form of a Bell inequality violation to make sure no attack is occurring. We have discovered a way to fake this Bell inequality violation.

Bell's theorem is a very interesting part of physics on it's own, I really recommend looking into the recent Vienna and NIST experiments (good writeup here). The short version is that it allows us to distinguish between "quantum" things and "classical" things with a surprisingly powerful tool, Bell's inequality.

In essence, when measuring Bell's inequality you need data on the form of Probability(A,B), where A is the setting Alice uses for her box and B the setting Bob uses for his box. However, the Franson interferometer is very deceptive here and gives you data on the form Probability(A,B | coincidence), which means you condition on coincidence, i.e. you remove half of the events from the statistical ensemble.

The net result is that you don't really measure Bell's inequality, but a similar but (unfortunately) useless cousin. This paper shows why this happens. Therefore, we can start attacking the system and at the same time, fool the security test. Again, the Franson interferometer removes half of the events, which means the apparent detector efficiency is 50% even in the ideal case.

For even more info, see our previous paper: http://iopscience.iop.org/1751...

You can surely detect my attack by using an optical power meter, but eventually I'll figure out a way around this as well. What our paper really shows is that there is a missing link in the security proof. Fix the proof and you'll be safe forever.

Could you explain your attack in laymans terms? From what you said here, you've not really "broken" quantum encryption and worked around the wave function collapse, rather you've discovered that quantum encryption as currently defined is flawed and immune to the observer effect?

Any QKD protocol relies on a security proof, and the observer effect is only a small part of the puzzle. In this case, we attack the Franson interferometer which uses a security test in the form of a Bell inequality violation to make sure no attack is occurring. We have discovered a way to fake this Bell inequality violation.

Bell's theorem is a very interesting part of physics on it's own, I really recommend looking into the recent Vienna and NIST experiments (good writeup here). The short version is that it allows us to distinguish between "quantum" things and "classical" things with a surprisingly powerful tool, Bell's inequality.

In essence, when measuring Bell's inequality you need data on the form of Probability(A,B), where A is the setting Alice uses for her box and B the setting Bob uses for his box. However, the Franson interferometer is very deceptive here and gives you data on the form Probability(A,B | coincidence), which means you condition on coincidence, i.e. you remove half of the events from the statistical ensemble.

The net result is that you don't really measure Bell's inequality, but a similar but (unfortunately) useless cousin. This paper shows why this happens. Therefore, we can start attacking the system and at the same time, fool the security test. Again, the Franson interferometer removes half of the events, which means the apparent detector efficiency is 50% even in the ideal case.

For even more info, see our previous paper: http://iopscience.iop.org/1751...

Please have a look at this paper: http://journals.aps.org/pra/ab... where the authors successfully perform a blinding attack with only 120 photons per pulse. If Eve uses this attack Bob cannot catch it with a simple optical power monitoring system. So he needs something different to catch the attack (assuming he can discover this new attack in the first place). Then Eve will improve her attack and crack the system again. Patching individual attacks is NOT a permanent solution. Like the OP is saying, you need to fundamentally fix the flaw, and this is what has to be done.

There's a world of difference between a classical system like you describe and quantum annealing.

At any rate, entanglement on the chip has been demonstrated, and outside experts comparing different models to characterize the chip, also came to the conclusion that it indeed performs quantum annealing.

At this point this question can be regarded as settled.

The only open, remaining question is how useful quantum annealing will be in practice.

As to Feynman, his original proposal of a quantum simulator is much closer to adiabatic quantum computing, i.e. D-Wave, then the gate model that took hold after Deutsch's seminal paper.

Pretty sure that fermions , bosons and helium-4 aren't conductors.

All conductors are fermions or bosons, and not all conductors form superconductors as seen in some of the coldest states achieved with sodium and rhubidium, or even simple alloys in the case of the Kondo effect... and you said

Any experiment running close to absolute zero is using superconductivity.

Which contains so much wrong, because as pointed out other states near absolute zero, and this is irrelevant for a large number (and probably actual majority) of experiments involving entanglement.

As I understand the Stern-Gerlach it shows you entanglement exists,

You can find intro level text freely available that describe how it generates entanglement.

Even your link to the "original test" says nothing about the photon source.

They used an atomic cascade in the original experiment. But there are lots of off the shelf entangled photon sources... as already stated and the point was that it is done with photons which involves simple optics and no supercooled components. SPDC components are off the shelf now and used in undergrad labs.

At this point, either your trolling, or you have so much confidence in your vague superficial impressions of things that you don't seem to be actually reading or looking up anything. I don't think there is any point in continuing this, but for anyone else who stumbles upon this, they can see the links to things that were easy to find and hopefully realize that answers/corrections are easy enough to find for anyone with reading comprehension.

Basic science doesn't "drive" innovation, but basic science sure as hell enables innovation.

Einstein published his work on general relativity in 1915. The GPS system (which requires a knowledge of general relativity to design) began development in 1973.

Einstein published his work on stimulated emission in 1916. The first laser (which requires a knowledge of stimulated emission to design) was built in 1960.

For those keeping score, those are gaps of 58 and 44 years, respectively, to go from basic science to innovation. Neither of those innovations were simply bumbled into by tinkerers. The designers knew the science from the get-go, and the inventions would not have happened without knowing the science from the get-go. The days of Edison and similar tinkerers has long passed. Good luck inventing any modern technology by chance. The low hanging fruit have already been picked.

From TFA:

It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them.

Industry does not function on the timespan of 4, 5, or 6 DECADES. There is zero chance that modern industry could do that.* The argument in TFA is total bullshit.

*That said, once upon a time industry did kind of do this _a little_. I did research with Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs), and I decided to look into the history of the devices. Where was the first SQUID made? Ford (the car company) research labs back in 1963 ( http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab... ). Once upon a time, large corporations were flush with cash and without shareholders who wanted to wring every ounce of profit from them, so corporations _sometimes_ funded basic research just because they could -- _sometimes_ without applications in mind. However, that has long gone the way of the dodo. And no, they didn't abandon the business because the government was funding it instead. Modern corporations will never spend the money to do real basic research because it is not economically useful (either in 1963 or now) to invent something and have someone else use it 5 decades later. They learned that lesson decades ago. Ford has never made use of a SQUID, and real applications are still on the horizon (tho they may not be far away today).

Wireless communications may become more interesting in the future thanks to this pioneering research: http://www.nature.com/articles...

See also the theoretical paper: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab... (http://arxiv.org/pdf/math-ph/0703059.pdf)

It's not clear what the implications are for signal loss or if this is more of an illusion akin to beam steering.

Plus, did you look at their paper....? Link: http://journals.aps.org/prl/pd... I've never seen a more phallic figure (Figure 1c.) in an E&M paper in my life. Some serious editor trolling going on with this paper.

Intellectually dishonest??

A post that quotes a real life physicists analysis of the problem?

Hive mind indeed.

That is the opinion of one physicist.

Now lets heard the opinion of other 48,000 APS members myself included.

The guy is full of shit.

It's intellectually dishonest to post that letter without giving the APS a chance to respond, so I'll briefly quote them:

Dr. Lewis’ specific charge that APS as an organization is benefitting financially from climate change funding is equally false. Neither the operating officers nor the elected leaders of the Society have a monetary stake in such funding. Moreover, relatively few APS members conduct climate change research, and therefore the vast majority of the Society’s members derive no personal benefit from such research support.

A cosmologist's 'dark matter' (non-baryonic) is different than an astrophysicist's 'dark matter' (baryonic). To an astrophysicist, the term 'dark matter' has historically meant matter that is not lit up. It is not reflecting ar emitting light. Also it is not blocking light from some other source. There is nothing exotic or strange about it. It is just in the dark and so it cannot be seen.

There were many observations of matter within the milky way, and within other large spiral galaxies that showed the velocity and orbits of matter were not explained by the mass that could be seen. We only saw mass in the visible light for a long time. The matter had to be emitting light, reflecting light, or blocking another source of light for us to see it in telescopes.

It was simply assumed that Einstein's theories of gravity were still correct and there just had to be more matter than we were seeing. It wasn't seen becuase it was dark, hence the name 'dark matter'. Nothing wierd or strange, just stuff we didn't see.

As time went on our observations expanded into more regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. We saw that there, indeed, was a great deal more matter emitting in the infra-red, radio, x-ray, and gamma ray spectrums. This has added greatly to the amount of matter that is known. There is much less missing mass on the intragalactic scale than there once was because we see more of it.

However, it is not enough. Here is a really good explanation.

And there is a new problem. We are now mapping the interaction of galaxies, and of huge groups of galaxies. And there does not seem to be enough matter in sight to fully account for there movements. Enter the cosmologists.

The first 'exotic' form of 'dark matter' was probably the neutrino. While once considered a very exotic beast, it is now considered rather mundane (at least the three known flavors are considered mundane). The neutrino is an almost massless particle that is electrically neutral and has such a small cross section that it hardly ever interacts with other matter. Neutrinos have mass, so they do feel the effects of gravity and due the the equal and opposite reaction thing, they contribute to the gravity that we, our sun, and all the starts in the galaxy feel. While a single neutrino is almost non-existent, the huge numbers of neutrinos within the boundaries of the galaxy actually do add up to an appreciable mass.

Now cosmologists are suggesting even more exoctic unknown particles, like WIMPS, to explain the missing mass. Some people feel that we should be examining new theories of gravity. Maybe on a very large scale gravity behaves differently. We do know that our theories of gravity are not complete. We do not have a good field theory of gravity that works with quantum mechanics. Continued experimentation involving things like the Higg's Boson will help to confirm some of these leading edge theories, and get rid of others. By determining the mass and energy of the particles that communicate the 'mass' field we will be putting constraints from the real physical universe around these theories.

The cosmology stuff is the wierd exotic 'dark matter' that inspires wierd science fiction ideas, but it will probably be needed to explain all of the missing mass. When some of these, currently, exotic particles are observed measured and fit in an overarching theory, they will seem much more ordinary, as the three known neutrinos are today.

This is actually pretty cool, mostly because it's an efficient source of photon pairs. The time-energy entanglement means that photons with particular energies always come out at particular relative times (that is, pairs of photons are produced by splitting one higher energy photon into two lower energy photons, which are emitted at the same time). Photon pairs like this can be used to do quantum key distribution, a secure method of distributing encryption keys, or, with a memory and some clever entanglement swapping protocols, the entanglement resource could be transported over long distances to do true quantum communication, where measurement in one place guarantees a result at the other place, and anyone listening in will destroy the communication channel.

.. The experiment we were discussing was Spencer's radiation experiment. Not "global warming". You keep trying to apply my arguments about Spencer's challenge to the broader issue of global warming, aka "climate change", and it's not valid to do so. .. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-25]

CEASE misreprenting my position and my words. We had an agreement: when we discussed Spencer's "back radiation" experiment, I made it abundantly clear that we were discussion ONLY Spencer's experiment, not "greenhouse warming". .. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-12-07]

How adorable. Once again, the whole reason Slayers dispute Spencer's experiment is because that implies greenhouse gases can't warm the surface:

.. the CO2-warming model rely on the concept of "back radiation", which physicists (not climate scientists) have proved to be impossible. I'm happy to leave actual climate science to climate scientists. But when THEIR models rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of physics, I'll take the physicists' word for it, thank you very much. .. [Jane Q. Public, 2012-07-05]

Actually, the rules aren't even well-known. The majority of CO2 warming models rely on a concept of "back radiation" that (according to physicists) does not even exist.. [Jane Q. Public, 2012-07-15]

.. I can show clearly, to someone with high school level math skills, that he was utterly, abjectly, and rather pathetically wrong, and the "Slayers", as he calls them, were right all along. Because, you see, as I know from experience, it isn't enough to show people the right way. At the same time it is necessary and desirable to show beyond doubt that "global warming alarmist" bullshit is just that: bullshit. .. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-09-10]

.. I stipulated before we got into that discussion that we were discussing ONLY Spencer's experiment, nothing else. You agreed to that condition. And now, you're violating it by extrapolating my comments to a completely different context. .. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-26]

I never agreed to pretend that Jane's Sky Dragon Slayer nonsense doesn't conflict with mainstream physicists' understanding of the greenhouse effect. Mainly because I couldn't imagine a Slayer resorting to such an absurd evasion, but also because I can't imagine agreeing to look the other way while he paralyzed his brain by simultaneously insisting that mainstream physicists agree with the Sky Dragon Slayers, while also somehow completely ignoring the National Academies of Science, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the Australian Institute of Physics, the European Physi

And so it is with a lot of these Silicon Valley garage stories.

Garage Myth

No, we have several excellent hypotheses that are untested so far. For example, travel along any spacelike axis can be constrained by strong gravity, so why not travel along the timelike one? For certain observers a clock in a strong gravitational field will slow to an apparent stop. However the clock itself will keep ticking at its own proper time in its own frame of reference, if that frame of reference is inertial. However, there is a chance that the model that the metric expansion of space is inertial is wrong (the accelerating expansion offers neat hints of this), in which case a clock in the early universe might notice that its proper-time ticking rate has a degree of freedom that freezes out as the universe expands. That freezing out could be the result of a fictitious force that is really just spontaneous symmetry breaking in an accelerated frame of reference.

Another model where gravitation drives the direction of time: http://physics.aps.org/article...

There are several other plausible hypotheses for the setting of the thermodynamic arrow of time, and there are several space probes which will put stronger constraints on them (likely killing several off entirely) due for launch in the next several years.

... Would you all like to see his dumbass failure at trying to school me in thermodynamics? All you have to do is follow his comments back a ways. A long ways... because he kept making the same nonsense arguments, over, and over, and over again, even after he had been shown how wrong they were. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-22]

Jane keeps insisting that this Sky Dragon Slayer equation describes electrical heating power:

My energy conservation equation is this: electrical power in = (epsilon * sigma) * T^4 * area = radiant power out [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-08]

Once again, that violates conservation of energy. Draw a boundary around the heat source:
power in = electrical heating power + radiative power in from the chamber walls
power out = radiative power out from the heat source

Jane's equation wrongly cancels "radiative power in" with a nonexistent term.

The BASIS of “greenhouse warming” -- back radiation -- has been SCIENTIFICALLY shown to be a load of hogwash. [Lonny Eachus, 2014-10-14]

No, Jane/Lonny Eachus's Slayer nonsense has been scientifically shown to violate conservation of energy. Unless, of course, Jane/Lonny can finally write down an energy conservation equation before wrongly "cancelling" terms?

It's fascinating that Jane/Lonny Eachus keeps insisting that mainstream physics is a hogwash dumbass failure. Jane/Lonny just needs to inform "dumbasses" like Prof. Brown, Dr. Joel Shore, physicists in the National Academies of Science, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the Australian Institute of Physics, the European Physical Society, etc.

Jane/Lonny's Sky Dragon Slayer nonsense is so ridiculous that even prominent climate contrarians are rational enough to back away from the Slayers:

• Dr. Fred Singer finds it "surprising that this simplistic argument is used by physicists, and even by professors who teach thermodynamics. One can show them data of downwelling infrared radiation from CO2, water vapor, and clouds, which clearly impinge on the surface. But their minds are closed to any such evidence." The comments prove his point.
• Dr. Roy Spencer "clearly demonstrates that IR absorbing gases (greenhouse gases) reduce the Earth's ability to cool to outer space. No amount of obfuscation or strawman arguments in the comments section, below, will be able to get around this fact."
• Anthony Watts banned one of the original authors because of his nutty comments and later called the argument

It's that "fewer women than used to, where every other intensely technical field has had the opposite trend"

By lumping all physical sciences together the graph hides a lot of information. Here is a much more detailed graph. Notice that bachelors for females has declined in almost all fields.

It's that People are more likely to pick men for mathematical tests that both genders are proven to do equally well on, even when in the test cases where the specific women are known to outperform the specific men

The bias is attributed to the fact that men brag more. Maybe bragging is seen as a measure of confidence.

It's that sexism is actually cited by women leaving the field

You didn't read the study you quoted. Here is a quote from the abstract;

The evidence points to the existence of a “scar effect” of previous work in the female field, which hinders women's opportunities in the male sector and ends up increasing the likelihood of exit.

The study is about "scars" from work in a female dominated job effecting the next, male dominated, job. It has nothing to do with sexism in the male dominated job.

It's that gender based social norms enforced on children clearly influence their likliehood to enter a sex-typical field

Yet another misinterpretation.

Motivation and self-esteem help girls aim higher in the occupational ladder, which automatically reduces their levels of sex-typicality. For boys, however, self-esteem reduces sex-typicality at all levels of the aspired occupational distribution.

Why do girls need to be motivated but not boys.

It's a scam. The fact he did his PhD on fusors leads even more evidence that this is a scam. No where does his name or Lockheed apple on the APS DPP bulletin because he presents his findings there, he'll get laughed out of New Orleans.

This device they came up with a Mirror Machine. These devices are were well studied and proven not to work back in the 70's.

I haven't expended ANY energy to avoid writing anything down. I've written down the proper and necessary equations not just once but many times now. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-13]

Ironically, Jane's still trying hard to avoid writing down his energy conservation equation before wrongly "cancelling" terms. If he'd try to write down that equation just once, he might realize that the nonsensical equation he's written down many times isn't proper or necessary.

I don't need to write down a "conservation of energy equation" in regard to Spencer's experiment. I don't refuse to do it because I can't, as you have clearly implied. I refuse to do it because this is a dead issue. You were proved wrong weeks ago, and your demands for additional proof from me are just laughable. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-13]

If Jane actually could write down an energy conservation equation before wrongly "cancelling" terms, Jane would see that "radiative power from the walls" can't cancel out.

Once again, the only way Jane's final term could cancel with the radiative power in term "(e*s)*T4^4" to obtain Jane's final equation would be if "radiative power from chamber walls, re-emitted back out" equals "(e*s)*T4^4". But it's being emitted by the source, which is at temperature T1. If reflections confuse you, just remember that the gray body equation has to reduce to the black body equation where there aren't any reflections at all. In that case, all that power is being absorbed and re-emitted, not reflected.

If Jane would write down an energy conservation equation and think about it, he might realize that he's been endlessly crowing about "proving me wrong" using Sky Dragon Slayer nonsense that violates conservation of energy and/or the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

But since Jane's Slayer brainwashing is so thorough that he can't bring himself to write down that equation, Jane will probably keep endlessly crowing about "proving me wrong".

Ironically, if Jane's Slayer nonsense was right, Jane would also have "proven wrong" Prof. Brown, Dr. Joel Shore, the National Academies of Science, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the Australian Institute of Physics, the European Physical Society, etc.

... YOU are the one going against "established" physics here. ... If you could actually show how the physics textbook idea of heat transfer was wrong, you would be world famous by now. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-06]

No, I'd have to get in line behind all those other physicists who agree that adding CO2 warms Earth's surface, which is equivalent to saying that enclosing a heat source warms it. This is probably the most fascinating part of Jane's delusion. Not only does Jane completely misunderstand fundamental physics, Jane seems to earnestly believe that his crackpot Slayer conspiracy theory represents "established" physics. Fascina