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This has been going on for a while. See the most recent note on this subject from Bob Park's "What's New." He refers to an earlier $2M that got dropped on this crackpottery.

Yes the cold fusion reported back in the day was probably BS, but other types of cold fusion have been proven to exist. Muon Catalyzed fusion comes to mind. You take some muons, which are basically really really really really have electrons, and replace the electrons in deuterium and/or tritium and/or Helium-3, and you can get the atoms to spontaneously fuse at 3 Kelvin. The problem with it is that Muons only exist long enough for about 100 events, so you have to keep making more and more Muons. That takes energy, more energy than you get out of the fusion. At least for now. This is a very well documented and accepted process.

By the way, that link was just one of the first links I found on a Google search.

BUBBLE FUSION: A COLLECTIVE GROAN CAN BE HEARD. A report out of Oak Ridge of d-d fusion events in collapsing bubbles formed by cavitation in deuterated acetone, is scheduled for publication in the March 8 issue of Science magazine. Taleyarkan et al. observe 2.5 MeV neutron peaks, evidence of d-d fusion, correlated with sonoluminescence from collapsing bubbles. Pretty exciting stuff huh? It might be, if the experiment had not been repeated by two experienced nuclear physicists, D. Shapira and M.J. Saltmarsh, using the same apparatus, except for superior neutron detection equipment. They found no evidence for 2.5 MeV neutron emission correlated with sonoluminescence. Any neutron emission was many orders of magnitude too small to account for the tritium production reported by the first group. Although distinguished physicists, fearing a repeat of the cold fusion fiasco 13 years ago, advised against publication, the editor has apparently chosen not only to publish the work, but to do so with unusual fanfare, involving even the cover of Science. Perhaps Science magazine covets the vast readership of Infinite Energy magazine.

Thanks ... but I'm pretty familiar with skin effect. And I don't need to look it up on Google
I may not know much but I do know my electromagnetics.

Actually, skin effect is a lot more complicated that you seem to think it is. The depth of penetration of the current is a function of frequency, of material conductivity and of material thickness. Conductor geometry is also important. For cylindrical geometries (i.e. wires) you'll need to lookup things about "ber" and "bei" functions (see Abramowitz and Stegun to learn about "ber" and "bei"); for planar geometries an exponetial decay is sufficient.

Also, without getting into too much detail, skin effect doesn't really apply to the scenerio I gave in my post. Here is a simple question for you to think about ... how does the current know which side of the conductor is the outside? In the Statue of Liberty example, it is not clear that the Statue forms a closed conducting cavity (as posited in my example with the electrical disconnected plates through rust).

Also other posters have pointed out other issues involving sharp metal points and the fact various parts might not be a well grounded whole. Thus, I standby my statement that the Statue of Liberty is not great lightning protection (but probably better than flying a kite into a thunderhead).

But I digress,
Kevin

Check our statistics - Linux has been holding steady at about 16-17% of our user base since the end of 1999.

Yup, lasers. Though i have no idea how harsh atlantic weather would effect transmission.

here is some more on laser broadband, and here and here.

This reference from earlier in the thread looks simple enough for any college chemistry faculty to do on the tabletop.

...and for a few more in-depth journal articles on CBF from Physical Review Letters:

• "Experiment with stored 0.7-MeV ions: Observation of stability properties of a nonthermal plasma"
• "Stabilization by electron oscillations of stored ions at densities in excess of space-charge limit"

...and for a few more in-depth journal articles on CBF from Physical Review Letters:

• "Experiment with stored 0.7-MeV ions: Observation of stability properties of a nonthermal plasma"
• "Stabilization by electron oscillations of stored ions at densities in excess of space-charge limit"

Codeposition fusion might not only relieve a significant portion of our dependence on foreign oil (and we all know how important that is), but it might also be a natural way to retrofit our dangerous, dirty fission nuclear plants. Codeposition fusion produces nearly zero ionizing radiation of any kind, and no nuclear waste products.

Here are three good references:

"Calorimetry of the Pd + D Codeposition," by S. Szpak, P. Boss, and M.H. Miles, in Fusion Technology, volume 36 (Sept. 1999), pp. 234-241. search near the end of this page for the abstract ("...excellent reproducibility, high power outputs....")

"On the behavior of the cathodically polarized Pd/D system: Search for emanating radiation," by S. Szpak, P.A. Mosier-Boss, and J.J. Smith, in Physics Letters A, volume 210 (1996) pp. 382-390. (Phys Lett A is much easier to find than Fusion [Science and] Technol.)

"Calorimetry of Pd+D Codeposition in a Fleischmann-Pons Dewar Cell," by M.H. Miles, S. Szpak, P. Boss, and Martin Fleischmann (March 2001) abstract on web only

In short, codeposition fusion reliably produces a 500% power gain without fast neutrons, high-energy radiation, or radioactive waste. The peak of the energy produced is in the infrared, with x-ray production just 9% above the baseline in a lead cave, and gamma-ray production only 2% above a lead cave's background levels. There is a very high likelihood that codeposition fusion will soon be commercialized to drive electrical generation turbines, helping to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and, given sufficient electric vehicles, foreign oil. The cost of codeposition fusion electricity is likely to be less than one cent per kilowatt hour.

You may have heard that cold fusion was discredited. Early experiments used smooth, solid palladium cathodes, which did not produce reliable results. Some such smooth, solid cathodes would run for weeks without producing excess heat, and then would do so for perhaps a few days, and often would never do so again. Over 400 studies in the peer-reviewed scientific literature -- see: the Dieter Britz bibliography [about a megabyte] -- have confirmed that the effect is certainly real, but is only reproduceable in less than one out of ten attempts. Those who have studied codeposition fusion get 99+% reproducibility, and precise control of the effect. The crucial difference is that codeposition cathodes are mossy and dendritic, instead of smooth and solid. Any kind of mossy, high surface area cathodes produce much better results than any smooth cathodes, but they were not in common use until a couple years after the poor early results had discredited the entire field.

Of the six laboratories in the U.S. publishing cold fusion research, three are in California, one is in Mountain View (First Gate Energies), and one is in Menlo Park (SRI International.) Szpak et al's lab is in San Diego. The governments of Italy, France, Russia, Japan, and China all sponsor cold fusion research in their own national laboratories. However, the budget for cold fusion here in the U.S. is very small, because the entrenched plasma fusion "big science" community (whose most optimistic estimates indicate that plasma fusion will not be viable for another thirty years -- and even then it will produce nuclear waste; perhaps more than fission does) keeps funding away from cold fusion (which does not produce nuclear waste or dangerous radiation) through continued, unfair ridicule.

Cheers,
James

Oh well, welcome to the "Age of Access"...

While saftey questions, many of which are unfounded, still abound, its apparent that fission energy will be the cheapest, safest, and and cleanest energy that mankind can harness until solar collectors are dramatically improved, or fusion energy passes 'breakeven' levels on a sustained basis.

Codeposition fusion already produces sustained power gains of 300-500% without any nuclear waste or radiation (only 2% gamma- and 9% x-ray over baseline lead cave levels; no fast nutrons.) Try searching for Szpak (principal investigator) and codeposition on Google or Google Groups.

Cheers,
James

The paper was published online last week at the official Physical Review Letters web site, though you need a real subscription (most universities have one) to get in.

The actual paper. Also, here is an article from sci.physics.research. It urges taking this with a grain of salt, because although the experimenters are careful, there are other more sensitive experiments that haven't detected this effect.

Also available is a New York Times article. The abstract of the paper is available for free; for the full article, pay or wait for the Aug 27th issue of Physical Review Letters.

(If this sounds like an article submittion, it's because it was -- apparently, I got beaten to the punch by a minute or two.)

The NYT article makes this sound like a much bigger deal. This isn't a change during the first few seconds of the universe, this is over a sagan ("billions and billions of years") or ten.

Also available is a New York Times article. The abstract of the paper is available for free; for the full article, pay or wait for the Aug 27th issue of Physical Review Letters.

(If this sounds like an article submittion, it's because it was -- apparently, I got beaten to the punch by a minute or two.)

The NYT article makes this sound like a much bigger deal. This isn't a change during the first few seconds of the universe, this is over a sagan ("billions and billions of years") or ten.

I post this as a former fusion researcher and a former project manager for the Office of Fusion Energy (OFE) of the Department of Energy (DOE)

Many decades ago the international fusion community put all of its chips on the Tokamak. It has been a disaster.

Even if a Tokamak could produce break-even fusion ( getting more energy out than you put in) the engineering obstacles to creating an economically successful reactor are daunting.

Many years ago, the OFE sponsored a study, Project Aries, of the costs of a Tokamak reactor. Even using the usual optimistic assumptions, the cost came in way above solar and wind power, let alone fossil fuels.

Another symptom of the problem is that three times in a row, projects to build larger Tokamak have collapsed in the design stage. That is, even before anything was build, none could come up with a working design. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the latest attempt, collapsed as the price tag spiraled above $20 billion (US)

The whole OFE degenerated into a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" process where the lab directories divvied up the pie. All non-Tokamak ideas were cut off, including the one I worked on.( more below).Congress cut the OFE budget almost in half a few years ago in response to this.

That being said, I respect the findings of the DIII-D team. The DIII-D is very well run research project, the their accomplishment is to be applauded. Now for a blatant plug. In the 70s I worked on a small project at the University of Miami, the Trisops project, which was defunded. The amount of money was not an issues ( our request was quite small), but the non-Tokamak nature, and the nerve of the principal investigator, Dan Wells, to point out that the Tokamac was unworkable.

The Trisops machine was recently moved from the University of Miami, to Lanham Md, with a small NASA grant, but there is not money to run it. You can see a report on it.

Another interesting project, the Plasmak(TM) project that is being run by Paul Koloc ( out of his garage!!).

The holy grail on fusion research is a stable plasma structure. The Trisops project achieved it one way. Paul has noted that ball lightning, which has been known for millennia, is a stable plasma structure. He has machine that produces ball lightning, and is measuring it. He gets no DOE funding of course.

...lots of research just as interesting as this gets published all the time. ZnO is a wide-bandgap material enjoying a renaissance of interest, and might compete with SiC, DLC, and GaN, but I'm not sure this is worthy of a full-blown /. article. Now combinatorial MBE to explore the TiO2:Co system, that was /. worthy ;-)

http://www.aps.org/apsnews/1200/120007.html

So the question then becomes, what is standing in the way of using these tabletop accelerators to accelerate protons to the speeds necessary to create anti-protons?

The Required posting of theory behind antiferromagnetically-coupled media http://www.aps.org/meet/MAR01/baps/abs/S6820002.ht ml. Interesting Stuff...


--

A recent contribution on this very topic appeared in Physical Review Letters on April 16 2001.

Breakdown of the Internet under Intentional Attack

Keren Erez,1 Daniel ben-Avraham,2 and Shlomo Havlin1

Volume 86, Issue 16 pp. 3682-3685

Worth checking out. Pretty readable.

I read the Nature debate on this before it appeared here on /., and we've been debating something like this pretty strenuously online for the past 3 years over at Sigma Xi. The issue that has caused the Nature debate is a proposed boycott of journals that refuse to make papers older than 6 months available free online (specifically to the "Public Library of Science", but free redistribution beyond that seems to be assumed). As several people in the Nature debate have pointed out, this puts all the burden for paying for what journals do on the market for immediate "news" - quality articles, and is likely to have several quite serious detrimental effects.

Where I work (The Physical Review, published by the non-profit American Physical Society) we've spent the last few years scanning in all our old papers (going back over 100 years) to make them available online for a fee. Last month people downloaded over 150 Gigabytes of these old papers from our site (something like 200,000 individual papers downloaded) -- but these would never have been put online without a publisher with a steady revenue stream to sink a few million dollars into them. And in the long run we expect them to more than pay for themselves, so as we're non-profit that lowers the cost to libraries and other subscribers of the new material we publish.

What about those ridiculous journal prices? Some of the publishers are indeed for-profit companies (Elsevier Science being the biggest now) and many of them have Microsoft-sized monopoly profit margins of 30 or 40% on their scientific journal business. Which is why boycott or other proposals that strike all journals equally are going to weaken us with our 0% profit margin a lot faster than a commercial publisher...

But journal pricing is a tricky business. Unlike what has been suggested by others in this forum, except for very high-volume items (probably no journal in the sciences qualifies), printing and distribution are very far from dominating the costs these days. For us they amount to 20-25% of total costs, and are dropping quickly as our subscribers move to online subscriptions. Another big area of costs for us is the copy-editing process that turns whatever files or pieces of paper we get from the authors into a coherent component of a larger body of work. Costs in this area have actually increased in recent years because we are doing a lot more "tagging" of the content; everything we publish now has an SGML file behind it ready for re-use (for example in constructing reliable online links to other articles cited by the authors). This amounts to roughly 30-35% of total expenses for our journals.

The final piece of the cost for us, around 40-45% of the total, is in the management of peer review. We pay the salaries of a large number of editors (PhD physicists, some full-time, some part-time) who make the decisions about what hoops they need authors to jump through to actually get their article published. Often, particularly for the papers we end up rejecting, this involves mediating a strenuous scientific debate between referees and authors. This is hard intellectual work, and involves 1 to 3 or more hours of effort for each of the 24,000 papers we receive every year. And you need a support staff, building, equipment, etc. adding overhead to it all.

And then you have to divide these costs by the number of subscribers to get a per-subscriber journal price. Some of the very high-priced journals are that way mostly because they don't have many subscribers; it's a vicious circle. Which makes it hard to compare the real costs of one journal with another, unless you factor in total circulation figures.

Could this all really be done free? Certainly not with the same level of quality. Is this level of quality actually necessary? Well, we hope so: people seem to be still paying for it. Our goal is as far as possible to lower our costs, to lower the prices we charge, and to broaden the distribution of the information. We're definitely looking at new markets (the 100+ year archive is one of them) to help broaden our cost base and keep those prices down. Electronic publishing allows you to do a lot more - lower prices to developing countries for example is easy to do. The purpose of our parent organization is "to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics", and any way we can do that better, we'll try doing it. But giving all our stuff away for free just doesn't make any sense, at least not yet.

Check out the following link to a PDF file:

Physical Review Letters

Warning: probably don't bother if you haven't studied Maxwells equations... definitely don't bother if you haven't heard of Maxwell's equations!

Here's the actual paper in Physical Review Letters:

http://link.aps.org/abstract/prl/v86/p2946

The title is "From Computation to Black Holes and Space-Time Foam".

The original PRL article is Hiura et. al. Volume 86, No. 9 pp. 1733-1736. Some may have access to PRL online at: http://prl.aps.org/ This is a little more technical, but still worth a look.

but "flux penetration" is very much a real term.

This is a very important concept in superconducters. As the flux (magnetic field) penetration increases, the resistance of the superconducter increases in a roughly ohmic nature. Superconductors "pin" flux in vortices in order to prevent this resistance, which leads to dissapitave loss. For movies of this go here, and for images of the Z component of flux in High Tc superconductors, go where I worked before I entered the private sector.

Please, do your research, I've actually done mine.

I work for Physical Review Letters (and related journals at the American Physical Society) which is publishing the papers from the Ames, Iowa group. Interestingly enough, the first published paper (in the print journal today, available online since last week at http://link.aps.org/abstract/prl/v86/p1877) has set some new records in our office, in part thanks to increasingly all-electronic processing:

Manuscript received: 30 January 2001
sent to 2 referees: 31 January
Both referees report: 1 February
approved: 2 February
scheduled for an issue: 2 Feb
Updated manuscript received: 2 Feb
proofs available to author: 6 Feb
Author returned proofs (on the web): 8 Feb 2001

A final proof of the article available just over one week after being submitted, and going through a complete peer-review cycle!

More typically each step takes a week or two, though times have been generally improving lately.

But these new superconductors are pretty important!

Also interesting is that Nature has a nice "prepublication" look at the article on the original research, which they are publishing March 1 - Nature in the past has had an "embargo" policy preventing scientists from even talking to journalists about their work before the official publication date, but they've had this page up roughly since we published our related article online. The nature of scientific publishing is changing too here...

We've tracked statistics of browser adoption by our users for the past 4 years:


http://ridge.aps.org/APSMITH/osstats/

-- people, or at least this group of people, do gradually upgrade; it just takes a while. If Mozilla/Netscape 6 had been available sooner, we'd certainly have wider adoption by now. But just wait a year or two, and nearly everybody will be using it (or IE 5+ where that's available). Does it really matter that much to try to force it to happen sooner?

I work for a nonprofit publisher, and we're faced every year with the opposite end of the "increasing returns to scale" equation - if libraries cancel subscriptions, the high value of our information content (relative to the cost of printing the books, and even more so for purely electronic distribution) means we have to charge our remaining customers even more money. Which means more people feel they need to cancel the following year - it's a vicious cycle. What we all need is new markets that we can sell our content to, or new non-content services, but it's hard to see exactly what services we can provide as a publisher, beyond selecting and publishing particular bits of content!

But we have taken one big step with a new product, scanning in 100 years of our old content and selling it relatively cheaply - it's already gaining a sales base close to the size of the current content, and growing very quickly. If we can transition to that as a new revenue source with a much larger subscription base, we might be able to get out of the vicious cycle. But it really is tough to be a publisher in this climate!

I'm almost done reading Park's excellent new book Voodoo Science. I've learned a lot from it about the psychology of pseudoscience, and I've also learned that no branch of the U.S. federal government is really free of it. I'd assumed NASA was run by people with good scientific training, so if they were studying a certain topic, it must not be 100% nonsense. Not true, as it turns out. In the book, Park documents how NASA panders to the politicians by betraying science. (It's also nice to see a cogent and knowledgeable presentation of the case against human space flight and the ISS.)

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

My pet peeves match everyone else's: pages that don't print well; dead-end pages with no links back to command central; long drop-down fold-out menus that fill your screen because the common selection (like, "United States") at the end of the alphabetized list; and unnecessary message boxes that appear when you hold the mouse over a link and obscure the text underneath. An example of a site making this last mistake is the American Physical Society.

Actually though, scientific facilities and publishers aren't bad sites to visit. They look nice but aren't too commercial, and they do want to get real content across.

At present there is just the theory to make such "superlenses". No such lenses have actually been built.

In principle, superlenses can be made for most any electromagnetic radiation. In practice, finding materials with the right refractive index is going to be difficult. So far, there seem to be materials that will properly handle microwaves, radiowaves, and maybe visible light. The authors have this to say:

Such "superlenses" can be realized in the microwave band with current technology. Our simulations show that a version of the lens operating at the frequency of visible light can be realized in the form of a thin slab of silver. This optical version resolves objects only a few nanometers across.

At present there is just the theory to make such "superlenses". No such lenses have actually been built.

In principle, superlenses can be made for most any electromagnetic radiation. In practice, finding materials with the right refractive index is going to be difficult. So far, there seem to be materials that will properly handle microwaves, radiowaves, and maybe visible light. The authors have this to say:

Such "superlenses" can be realized in the microwave band with current technology. Our simulations show that a version of the lens operating at the frequency of visible light can be realized in the form of a thin slab of silver. This optical version resolves objects only a few nanometers across.

Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work..."

...which makes for nice sounding rhetoric despite its being false. (Normally I hate being baited by trolls, but it's morning and I haven't finished my coffee...).

A quick search of the Physical Review Letters web site shows 20+ letters in the last five years alone deomonstrating the preparation of entangled quantum states in the laboratory. Furthermore, quantum computation (an application of Grover's algoritm--see, e.g., "Experimental Implementation of Fast Quantum Searching" by Chuang et al., Physical Review Letters Volume 80, Issue 15, pp. 3408-3411) has been demonstrated in the laboratory, so your claims of quantum computation being a mere "mathematical abstraction" do not appear to be valid.

I'm curious what motivates your objection to quantum mechanics. Do you reject the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics (in all of its various guises) which has held up rather well to experimental validation, or is it instead that the heuristic, post-Copenhagen interpretation of the theory (i.e. "spooky action at a distance") rubs you the wrong way? If the latter, then I think your objections are more semantic than substance.

I remember reading a article on string theory that stated that there are actually 12 dimensions to space and that the we exist in 3 of them. The other dimensions are 'folded back' upon themselvs and are not directly accessable.

Which would explain why time on Mondays seem to drag on forever.

You may be thinking of this article.

Here's an interesting article on Viewing Four-dimensional Objects In Three Dimensions.

--

Your name and address has been forwarded to the American Physical Society :-).

You need both. Telescopes tell you about the behavior of large collections of atoms. Accelerators tell you about the behavior of individual atoms and particles. If you are interested in how stars evolve, you need to know the behavior of atoms on both the large and small scale.

I was just reading a book that pointed out the fact that Earth based neutrino detectors only detect about 1/3 as many neutrinos as predicted by our models of the Sun. Is the Sun running cooler than predicted by the models, or is our understanding of the neutrino incorrect?

Jeff, the coolest thing about nanotubes is their potential as a lightweight alternative to solid metal storage of hydrogen.
As you know, vehicles with hydrogen propulsion systems need to carry fuel, and simple pressure bottles are essentially unsafe at any speed - even if the walls are thick enough to withstand collisions, failures of the valve assembly could be catastrophic.
Safer methods have until recently centered around metallic storage, jamming the hydrogen atoms into palladium and/or various metal hydrides. Most of the research on this, incidentally, is being done by Germans.
Unfortunately, Nelly Rodriguez of Northeastern University is said to have patented the concept of nanotube hydrogen storage, so don't hold your breath waiting for it to reach your driveway any time soon.
These guys are trying to figure out exactly how/where the hydrogen is absorbed.
--Charlie

Argh. The link is here

Other articles on the discovery.

Focus APS
Abstract of the article in Physical Review Letters. To get the actual text, I think you have to subscribe to PRL. Any university with a physics department ought to have it in their library if you're not a subscriber.

imabug

Other articles on the discovery.

Focus APS
Abstract of the article in Physical Review Letters. To get the actual text, I think you have to subscribe to PRL. Any university with a physics department ought to have it in their library if you're not a subscriber.

imabug

A new study has found that there were no increases in the occurence of cancer to residents of three mile island. Check out this link and scroll down a bit to item 3.

I wish I could find where they mention the real number itself, or at least offer a link to where one may find it.

The lay person's version of the paper in question says "we are still running a number of tests in order to confirm our final number". So I guess you can't get the number just yet, but hopefully soon enough will be able to..

I'm heading up a technical group evaluating proposals for a new, hopefully complete, set of scientific/mathematical fonts that we plan to make freely available - obviously Knuth's well-reasoned opinions are highly relevant. What he suggests, that somebody should be out there sponsoring font designers, is exactly what we're trying to do! But it sometimes seems hard to persuade publishers to part with their money for something they won't fully control. Even those who make tens of millions in profits seem reluctant to spend more than a few tens of thousands on something that will be freely distributed - despite the fact that it will likely save a lot in licensing and other proprietary-based costs. Is this a strange psychological problem here?

Anyway, we're trying to work with both the Microsoft side of things and the Mozilla/MathML people, plus support TeX of course. As an advertising plug - if you would like to contribute your thoughts or experience (or cash) towards the effort, send me a note at apsmith@aps.org.

And many thanks to /. for highlighting this wonderful interview with Knuth.

The code is already there. Some on-line science publisher could easily set this up. Question is, would the science community really like being "moderated" in this way, even if it is by their own selves?

I work for the Physical Review journals of the American Physical Society - we've been strong supporters of some of these new ideas, including creating a new mirror of the Los Alamos XXX/arXiv site. Since it's part of my job to bring up new ideas, I've been thinking of setting up a /. site for physics here - having the latest slashdot code available would probably help us get going...

I think scientists really would support something that worked as well as /. seems to. The critical thing is getting enough comments and contributors - if you only get 1 comment or rating for every 100 featured articles (as some trial comment systems out there seem to), you just won't have a statistically valid sampling, no matter how unbiased your pool of moderators attempts to be. Part of the difficulty of doing this (and why Lederman's probably wrong that this will make anybody a pot of money) is that most scientific articles are pretty boring, and you have to motivate reviewers with some sense of duty or something to get even one or two of them to read an article with any degree of care. But it's definitely worth experimenting with - something along these lines has GOT to be the way to go in the long run, we just haven't quite figured out the systemic structures needed yet...

The code is already there. Some on-line science publisher could easily set this up. Question is, would the science community really like being "moderated" in this way, even if it is by their own selves?

I work for the Physical Review journals of the American Physical Society - we've been strong supporters of some of these new ideas, including creating a new mirror of the Los Alamos XXX/arXiv site. Since it's part of my job to bring up new ideas, I've been thinking of setting up a /. site for physics here - having the latest slashdot code available would probably help us get going...

I think scientists really would support something that worked as well as /. seems to. The critical thing is getting enough comments and contributors - if you only get 1 comment or rating for every 100 featured articles (as some trial comment systems out there seem to), you just won't have a statistically valid sampling, no matter how unbiased your pool of moderators attempts to be. Part of the difficulty of doing this (and why Lederman's probably wrong that this will make anybody a pot of money) is that most scientific articles are pretty boring, and you have to motivate reviewers with some sense of duty or something to get even one or two of them to read an article with any degree of care. But it's definitely worth experimenting with - something along these lines has GOT to be the way to go in the long run, we just haven't quite figured out the systemic structures needed yet...

The code is already there. Some on-line science publisher could easily set this up. Question is, would the science community really like being "moderated" in this way, even if it is by their own selves?

I work for the Physical Review journals of the American Physical Society - we've been strong supporters of some of these new ideas, including creating a new mirror of the Los Alamos XXX/arXiv site. Since it's part of my job to bring up new ideas, I've been thinking of setting up a /. site for physics here - having the latest slashdot code available would probably help us get going...

I think scientists really would support something that worked as well as /. seems to. The critical thing is getting enough comments and contributors - if you only get 1 comment or rating for every 100 featured articles (as some trial comment systems out there seem to), you just won't have a statistically valid sampling, no matter how unbiased your pool of moderators attempts to be. Part of the difficulty of doing this (and why Lederman's probably wrong that this will make anybody a pot of money) is that most scientific articles are pretty boring, and you have to motivate reviewers with some sense of duty or something to get even one or two of them to read an article with any degree of care. But it's definitely worth experimenting with - something along these lines has GOT to be the way to go in the long run, we just haven't quite figured out the systemic structures needed yet...

Well, it's pretty much impossible to talk about the exact moment of infinite energy density, so you have to look at the states of the universe shortly before the final crunch, and the corresponding states just after the original bang. Hawking's argument is that in some way (perhaps the smoothness of the energy distribution?) the states shortly after the big bang were very orderly and structured and therefore of low entropy, whereas the corresponding states just before the final crunch would be highly disordered and of high entropy. At least that's how I remember it. I'm not sure this argument entirely makes sense - entropy by definition is either a property of ensembles - many copies of the same system, or else is a measure of the observer's lack of knowledge about a particular system, the two definitions being interrelated - I don't see how either definition strictly applies to our unique universe unless we have a particular observer in mind, and then isn't it a subjective argument?

In fact there was a recent physics paper (check out http://focus.aps.org/ for a link to it) that suggested our universe could have two opposite arrows of entropic time in different regions of space. So I don't think this is exactly a settled issue.

Bob Park's WN page at the American Physical Society (suggested keywords: eos earth observing space station) to see how often the budget of the EOS has been threatened, and occasionally gutted to make up for overruns in the International Space Station account. The launching of Terra (assuming it has lifted off) is bittersweet, though definitely a step in the right direction. I only wish solid science was regarded with even half the importance as good PR in congress. Maybe we would be farther along in understanding global warming and other serious concerns.

Adding a sense of urgency to these missions, the NY Times has an

article today claiming 1999 will join 1998 as the one of the two hottest years on record.

See:

Opposite thermodynamic arrows of time
for the abstract of this paper about to be published. More articles scheduled for the same issue are available here.

See:

Opposite thermodynamic arrows of time
for the abstract of this paper about to be published. More articles scheduled for the same issue are available here.