Slashdot Mirror

Recent events have highlighted the safety disadvantages of pressure-suppression containments. ... If some unexpected event should result in steam generation or flow greater than the suppression capability, then the steam that is not condensed would add an increment to containment pressure. Since the objective of the of pressure suppression is to permit the use of smaller containment, rated at lower pressure than would be required without suppression, then incomplete suppression would lead to overpressurizing a pressure-suppression containment so designed.

Basically, the only advantage reactors like this have over dry-containment, is that they are cheaper to build at the outset, but probably end up costing as much as dry containment systems.

... I've thought a bit more about that question of if photons of light have inertia. While they do have momentum, I am more convinced now that they don't have inertia. One can define inertia as the resistance of mass to changes in velocity, right? The root cause of this classic Newtonian mechanic is the interaction of objects with the Higgs field, right? That's what grants particles inertia. But photons do not interact with the Higgs field, so they don't have inertia. [ShakaUVM]

I've never taken graduate-level elementary particle physics, so I don't know much about the Higgs field. My classmates who have taken those classes and moved on to work at the LHC tell me that most theorists consider the discovery of the Higgs boson to be very likely.

Personally, I'm not sure how to rule out the notion that inertia is caused by viewing zero point energy in an accelerating reference frame. I'm sure the Higgs field really is more likely to be the cause of inertia, but right now I don't have enough time to wade through the relevant literature to learn why.

Anyway, you're right to say that the "inertial mass" of an object can be measured by placing it in a container and determining how much force is necessary to accelerate the container. Or, rather, how much extra force is necessary compared to experiments performed when the container is empty.

Now imagine a one dimensional container with perfectly reflective inner walls. I claim that if this container is filled with photons having total energy E, then more force would be needed to accelerate the container after filling it. More precisely, the experiment would show that the container has an extra "inertial mass" E/c^2 compared to its empty state.

Here's why.

If the container isn't accelerating, the trapped photons will exert equal pressure on both walls of the container as they're reflected back and forth, just as with solar sails. Accelerating the container, though, will cause the mirror on the bottom to reflect those photons more often than the mirror on the top. Thus on average the bottom mirror will experience more pressure than the top mirror, and this pressure asymmetry will mimic an "inertial mass" of E/c^2.

In fact, I think any method of measuring inertial mass would conclude that photons have inertia. That's because active gravitational mass in general relativity is defined by the stress-energy tensor, which includes the energy (and momentum) in electromagnetic fields. Active and passive gravitational masses need to be equal to conserve momentum, and the equivalence principle says that passive gravitational mass equals inertial mass.

In other words, the container curves spacetime more when it's filled with photons. Therefore its gravitational mass has increased, and via the equivalence principle so has its inertial mass.

This depends on my interpretation of the equivalence principle (and the principle itself) being correct. It also implies that pressure has inertia, because pressure contributes to the stress energy tensor. Interestingly, that implies tension has negative inertia because tension is just negative pressure. Greg Egan uses this concept masterfully in a short

There's yet to be any evidence the universe doesn't run on very specific mathematical rules. For example, there's a very good reason for inflation having to do with the 'pressure' at high energy states. [ShakaUVM]

Huh? Your customarily vague but authoritative comment which doesn't include an "IANAP" disclaimer will just reinforce the disturbingly common impression that physicists are bullshitting about concepts like inflation and dark matter.

The cosmology course I've mentioned was taught by Dr. Nanopoulos using Kolb's The Early Universe. He pointed out that physicists have known for decades that something like inflation is required to explain the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Kolb disusses these topics in chapter 8, though his overview is somewhat dated now. WMAP has since observed temperature fluctuations on the 10^(-5) level, which matches predictions based on modelling quantum fluctuations in the early universe. More precisely, inflation predicts that these fluctuations would deviate slightly from the perfect scale invariance expected in a universe without inflation. After 7 years, WMAP can exclude the possibility of a scale invariant spectrum by more than 3 sigma. The WMAP results also show that the universe is perfectly flat, at least to within the limits of measurement. Inflation isn't necessary for the universe to be perfectly flat, but it's sufficient to explain what may seem like "fine-tuning" at first glance.

That's why physicists think inflation happened, but it's an argument based on how relativistic causality affects the large-scale thermodynamics of the universe, not pressure. Pressure is at least tangentially relevant to almost every physics problem imaginable, though, and inflation is no exception. I've explained that dark energy's negative pressure acts as a kind of anti-gravity. Later, Dr. Stoeger (Jesuit priest, astrophysicist working for the Vatican Observatory) observed that "There is, of course, a much deeper connection between inflation and dark energy. The only way we can really conceive of inflation occurring in the early universe is under the influence of a large amount of vacuum energy, which is a type of dark energy. This dark energy must be quickly transformed into the particles and radiation at the end of inflation. So, it's not at all clear if there is a relationship between the dark energy which drove inflation and the dark energy which we have evidence is driving the gentle acceleration of cosmic expansion now. It may be that the dark energy now may be a remnant of the dark energy left over from the very early universe."

Then there's the problem of heavy exotic particles predicted by most GUT's; the only one I'm familiar with is the magnetic monopole. In my senior year, I took electrodynamics using the standard Griffiths 3rd ed. Page 327 shows how symmetric Maxwell's equations appear in the presence of magnetic monopoles, and Griffiths opines that they "beg for magnetic charge to exist." My fondest memory of that class is problem 8.12 on page 362, along with footnotes 11

And no, the Universe enforces one direction and one direction only to displacement on that dimension.

The universe does no such thing.

First, the universe is not a sentient being - it cannot "forbid" anything. It is what it is, nothing more, nothing less. I know this might seem nit-picky, but we often make anthropomorphism that tend to get ingrained, and then we overlook the consequences.

Which brings us to one of those "consequences" -

Second, there is no evidence that time only goes in one direction. Here's one paper that proposes differently.

But let's take a simple thought experiment. We all "know" that entropy increases in any system over time, and that eventually there will be no energy differential - all matter will be at the same temperature, so no "work" can be done. This is the "heat death" - though what that uniform temperature could be is irrelevant for the current discussion.

So at that point, all we have is particles moving in random directions with exactly the same amount of energy.

So we wait .. and wait ... and wait.

Eventually, any random distribution will give rise to patterns. For example, instead of the air molecules in a room being distributed completely evenly, if we wait billions of years, there will, just by random chance, arise a distribution where many more are on one side than the other. We now have a pressure differential - and a temperature differential. Some small amount of work could be done.

Sure, it would tend to degrade immediately, but the point is that past a certain level of randomness, with enough time, you can generate a pattern that is not random. Like a million million monkeys typing out the complete works of Shakespeare.

Normally, creating a reduction of entropy locally requires that the entropy of the entire system increase, since no process is 100% efficient. In this case, however, the overall entropy of the universe has decreased - and all physicists agree that in a universe with decreasing over-all entropy, time runs backwards, or at least seems to.

Given enough time (and in a universe at heat death, time becomes meaningless, so that "heat death" will never be more than an ill-defined instant that we can approach but never actually reach), time will flow backwards by the simple reduction of entropy in the overall universe. Most of the time, no really significant reduction will occur, but just like those million million monkeys can eventually get Shakespeare right, given enough time, even the universe can reach a state that is not distinguishable from today, or even a parallel one where almost everything is the same. Also note that there is now no need for a mysterious "superposition of states" - they're just a natural part of the universe doing the random walk.

Think of it as the "conservation of entropy and time" law.

The answer is maybe. My thought experiment would suggest it may be possible for one possible outcome to alter the state of the universe in which a different outcome happened, which is similar to your own idea. If that is true, then the answer is necessarily yes. There may be other circumstances in which it could happen, but once you allow - even under the most restrictive of circumstances - a Y-piece to be added to the possible outcomes, then it becomes possible for a particle to go through one slit but register as though it went through the other.

To complicate things further, you can do diffraction over time as well as space. I found the original paper and two followups but Physical Review is subscription only. If it is possible to diffract in time as well as space, then it automatically follows that events don't just happen and then go away. The different points in time have to be interacting in some way. I do not fully understand the implications of that, but I would interpret it as meaning that it does indeed mean that it is possible to snake between the different possible worlds, or at least some subset of them.

The answer is maybe. My thought experiment would suggest it may be possible for one possible outcome to alter the state of the universe in which a different outcome happened, which is similar to your own idea. If that is true, then the answer is necessarily yes. There may be other circumstances in which it could happen, but once you allow - even under the most restrictive of circumstances - a Y-piece to be added to the possible outcomes, then it becomes possible for a particle to go through one slit but register as though it went through the other.

To complicate things further, you can do diffraction over time as well as space. I found the original paper and two followups but Physical Review is subscription only. If it is possible to diffract in time as well as space, then it automatically follows that events don't just happen and then go away. The different points in time have to be interacting in some way. I do not fully understand the implications of that, but I would interpret it as meaning that it does indeed mean that it is possible to snake between the different possible worlds, or at least some subset of them.

The answer is maybe. My thought experiment would suggest it may be possible for one possible outcome to alter the state of the universe in which a different outcome happened, which is similar to your own idea. If that is true, then the answer is necessarily yes. There may be other circumstances in which it could happen, but once you allow - even under the most restrictive of circumstances - a Y-piece to be added to the possible outcomes, then it becomes possible for a particle to go through one slit but register as though it went through the other.

To complicate things further, you can do diffraction over time as well as space. I found the original paper and two followups but Physical Review is subscription only. If it is possible to diffract in time as well as space, then it automatically follows that events don't just happen and then go away. The different points in time have to be interacting in some way. I do not fully understand the implications of that, but I would interpret it as meaning that it does indeed mean that it is possible to snake between the different possible worlds, or at least some subset of them.

Personally, if I was in the same spot, I'd go and look over all the XKCD comics and pick my favorite. It's nice black line art that would go well with a tattoo, particularly if surrounded by equations.

On the more personal side, I would probably get the equations from Tippler's "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" which is essentially showing that physics does not care about causality and time travel is possible.

I don't know why you're taking medical advice from a physicist though.

Because I'm not arguing that children that live closer to power lines don't have higher likelyhoods of developing leukemia. I'm arguing that EMF is not the cause, and physicists are infinitely more qualified to speak on that matter.

As stated here, "there is no biological mechanism to explain the higher risk". Correlation does not imply causation, and in this case there is a very very notible absense of scientifically sound proposed mechanisms for causation.

If you want to play this just by references, then here you go. Courtesy of the paper I previously linked to you, I'd suggest actually reading it instead of dismissing it for being writting by a physicist (what could a physicist possibly know about EMF after all?). I think this trumps some article in Times..., have fun:

1. Wertheimer N, Leeper E. Electrical wiring configurations and childhood cancer. American Journal of Epidemiology 109:273-284, 1979.
2. Brodeur P. Currents of Death: Power Lines, Computer Terminals, and the Attempt to Cover Up the Threat to Your Health. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
3. Brodeur P. The Great Power Line Cover-Up: How the Utilities and Government Are Trying to Hide the Cancer Hazard Posed by Electromagnetic Fields. (Little-Brown, 1993, hardback). There is also a 1995 paperback edition.
4. PBS Frontline. Currents of Fear. Program #1319, originally aired June 13, 1995.
5. Davis JG and others. Health Effects of Low-Frequency Electric and Magnetic Fields. Oak Ridge Associated Universities, 1992.
6. Park RL. Review panel exonerates low frequency electromagnetic fields. What's New, Nov. 20, 1992.
7. American Physical Society, Executive Council Statement, April 23, 1995.
8. National Research Council Committee on the Possible Effects of Electromagnetic Fields on Biologic Systems. Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997. [Press release] [Complete book]
9. Linet MS and others. Residential exposure to magnetic fields and acute lymphoblastic leukemia in children. New England Journal of Medicine 337:1-7, 1997.
10. Campion EW. Power lines, cancer, and fear. New England Journal of Medicine 337:44-46, 1997.
11. Day N. Exposure to power-frequency magnetic fields and the risk of childhood cancer. Lancet 354:1925-1931, 1999.
12. Adair RK. Constraints on biological effects of weak extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic fields. Physics Review A43:1039-1048, 1991.
13. Savitz DA and others. Case-control study of childhood cancer and exposure to 60-Hz magnetic fields. American Journal of Epidemiology 128, 21-38, 1988.
14. Gurney JG and others. Childhood cancer occurrence in relation to power line configurations: A study of potential selection bias in cas

I don't know why you're taking medical advice from a physicist though.

Because I'm not arguing that children that live closer to power lines don't have higher likelyhoods of developing leukemia. I'm arguing that EMF is not the cause, and physicists are infinitely more qualified to speak on that matter.

As stated here, "there is no biological mechanism to explain the higher risk". Correlation does not imply causation, and in this case there is a very very notible absense of scientifically sound proposed mechanisms for causation.

If you want to play this just by references, then here you go. Courtesy of the paper I previously linked to you, I'd suggest actually reading it instead of dismissing it for being writting by a physicist (what could a physicist possibly know about EMF after all?). I think this trumps some article in Times..., have fun:

1. Wertheimer N, Leeper E. Electrical wiring configurations and childhood cancer. American Journal of Epidemiology 109:273-284, 1979.
2. Brodeur P. Currents of Death: Power Lines, Computer Terminals, and the Attempt to Cover Up the Threat to Your Health. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
3. Brodeur P. The Great Power Line Cover-Up: How the Utilities and Government Are Trying to Hide the Cancer Hazard Posed by Electromagnetic Fields. (Little-Brown, 1993, hardback). There is also a 1995 paperback edition.
4. PBS Frontline. Currents of Fear. Program #1319, originally aired June 13, 1995.
5. Davis JG and others. Health Effects of Low-Frequency Electric and Magnetic Fields. Oak Ridge Associated Universities, 1992.
6. Park RL. Review panel exonerates low frequency electromagnetic fields. What's New, Nov. 20, 1992.
7. American Physical Society, Executive Council Statement, April 23, 1995.
8. National Research Council Committee on the Possible Effects of Electromagnetic Fields on Biologic Systems. Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997. [Press release] [Complete book]
9. Linet MS and others. Residential exposure to magnetic fields and acute lymphoblastic leukemia in children. New England Journal of Medicine 337:1-7, 1997.
10. Campion EW. Power lines, cancer, and fear. New England Journal of Medicine 337:44-46, 1997.
11. Day N. Exposure to power-frequency magnetic fields and the risk of childhood cancer. Lancet 354:1925-1931, 1999.
12. Adair RK. Constraints on biological effects of weak extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic fields. Physics Review A43:1039-1048, 1991.
13. Savitz DA and others. Case-control study of childhood cancer and exposure to 60-Hz magnetic fields. American Journal of Epidemiology 128, 21-38, 1988.
14. Gurney JG and others. Childhood cancer occurrence in relation to power line configurations: A study of potential selection bias in cas

I don't know why you're taking medical advice from a physicist though.

Because I'm not arguing that children that live closer to power lines don't have higher likelyhoods of developing leukemia. I'm arguing that EMF is not the cause, and physicists are infinitely more qualified to speak on that matter.

As stated here, "there is no biological mechanism to explain the higher risk". Correlation does not imply causation, and in this case there is a very very notible absense of scientifically sound proposed mechanisms for causation.

If you want to play this just by references, then here you go. Courtesy of the paper I previously linked to you, I'd suggest actually reading it instead of dismissing it for being writting by a physicist (what could a physicist possibly know about EMF after all?). I think this trumps some article in Times..., have fun:

1. Wertheimer N, Leeper E. Electrical wiring configurations and childhood cancer. American Journal of Epidemiology 109:273-284, 1979.
2. Brodeur P. Currents of Death: Power Lines, Computer Terminals, and the Attempt to Cover Up the Threat to Your Health. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
3. Brodeur P. The Great Power Line Cover-Up: How the Utilities and Government Are Trying to Hide the Cancer Hazard Posed by Electromagnetic Fields. (Little-Brown, 1993, hardback). There is also a 1995 paperback edition.
4. PBS Frontline. Currents of Fear. Program #1319, originally aired June 13, 1995.
5. Davis JG and others. Health Effects of Low-Frequency Electric and Magnetic Fields. Oak Ridge Associated Universities, 1992.
6. Park RL. Review panel exonerates low frequency electromagnetic fields. What's New, Nov. 20, 1992.
7. American Physical Society, Executive Council Statement, April 23, 1995.
8. National Research Council Committee on the Possible Effects of Electromagnetic Fields on Biologic Systems. Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997. [Press release] [Complete book]
9. Linet MS and others. Residential exposure to magnetic fields and acute lymphoblastic leukemia in children. New England Journal of Medicine 337:1-7, 1997.
10. Campion EW. Power lines, cancer, and fear. New England Journal of Medicine 337:44-46, 1997.
11. Day N. Exposure to power-frequency magnetic fields and the risk of childhood cancer. Lancet 354:1925-1931, 1999.
12. Adair RK. Constraints on biological effects of weak extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic fields. Physics Review A43:1039-1048, 1991.
13. Savitz DA and others. Case-control study of childhood cancer and exposure to 60-Hz magnetic fields. American Journal of Epidemiology 128, 21-38, 1988.
14. Gurney JG and others. Childhood cancer occurrence in relation to power line configurations: A study of potential selection bias in cas

Interestingly enough, Richard Feynman was also the topic of an article in the latest edition of APS News. The article discusses Richard Feynman's artistic life in addition to his Physics life.

http://physics.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.180501.pdf

I thought that inertia was the defining property of mass.

Yes, as in: The mass determines the inertia.
No, as in: The mass equals the inertia. That's only true in the non-relativistic limit. For relativistic speeds, inertia depends not only on the mass, but also on the velocity and on the direction of the force. This also means that in general, the acceleration isn't any more in the direction of the force (this is only true if the force either goes in the direction of movement, in the opposite direction, or exactly perpendicular).

Also, what about electrons?
They can travel at the speed of light right?

No. The quoted text actually refers to the so-called "Zitterbewegung" which only occurs if you have both positive and negative energy solutions (i.e. both electrons and positrons) in your wave packet. It seems that the actual meaning of it is still discussed, but it's definitively not just that electrons move that way (you need both electrons and positrons to reproduce it). So it's some more complex effect, and even an apparent motion at the speed of light doesn't mean there's really something moving at the speed of light. One article I've seen claims that it's an effect of vacuum polarization, where a virtual electron-positron pair is created near the electron and the electron annihilates with the virtual positron, and the electron of the pair replaces the original one. That of course implies that speed of light is no problem, because the electron at the later position didn't actually move there.

But electrons definitely have a measurable "mass"..

Well, if the Higgs theory is right, they don't really have mass, but obtain that mass by interacting with the Higgs field.

http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v93/i20/e208002

If you dug a little deeper you'd find that W. Edelstein is one of the pioneers of magnetic resonance imaging (my own field). "Physics" is an awfully big field. I couldn't find out what his original specialization was, but it's been a LONG time since he did any space-related work. He is certainly an outsider to the field of manned space travel.

I've never heard of his co-author, Arthur Edelstein. It looks like he's a programmer at UCSF, formerly UC Berkeley. William's son? Grandson? Google scholar only shows up a couple of hits. W and A Edelstein have a paper on MR in JMRI (looks like from W's lab, he's senior author, A buried in the middle). The two of them have been covering a lot of ground - they've also got an arxiv preprint on electronic voting machines. That's kind of weird too - it doesn't have much to do with physics and every one of the references are web pages, including Wikipedia.

  His abstract seems a bit strange - I'd have thought you'd have to do something a little more in depth to get accepted to an APS meeting. I've seen much the same calculation in Slashdot posts over the years. Maybe those posters should have submitted something. It's also possible there's a lot more content in the actual presentation.

Now, what was it you were saying about presumptions?

The new data mandates that the Higgs boson mass within the standard model lies between 115 and 150 GeV."

No, it doesn't. Look at this graph. At a "3 sigma" level (and don't believe any new science that is not at the 3 sigma level or better), the mass of the Higgs (assuming it exists) is roughly between 115 and 225 GeV. To put it another way, a mass greater than the Tevatron exclusion zone at ~160 GeV is by no means ruled out.

You are completely, 100 percent full of shit:

NIH budget in 2002: $19,319,125,000
NIH budget in 2008: $23,841,208,000

% increase: 23.4%

source: http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/appropriations/index.htm

Not exactly double, eh?

*****************

Do you also remember how Bush was going to double NSF's budget? We all know how THAT went:

News about bill from 2002: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200210/senate.cfm

According to the bill, NSF's budget was supposed to be $9.8B by 2007.

Actual 2007 budget: $6.43B.
Actual 2009 budget (even later): $6.85B.

So yeah, don't trust Bush or anyone who supports him. Nuff said.

reference: http://web.hwr.arizona.edu/~gleonard/2009Dec-FallAGU-Soot-PressConference-Backgrounder-Kargel.pdf

number of papers used in this one flawed report: none

hockey stick graphs created from this: none

papers from "hide the decline" subroutines: none

errors in raw data: none (this was a error in a projection, not an observation)

accurate papers based on flawed data: some, but not in this case.

Sorry, I gotta call BS. First of all, the hockey stick graph was on the front page of a major IPCC report and other papers as well. The author of the Hockey stick graph is all over the place. From Michael E Mann's Wiki page:

He was a Lead Author on the “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report (2001). He has been organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences ‘Frontiers of Science’ and has served as a committee member or advisor for other National Academy of Sciences panels. He served as editor for the Journal of Climate and has been a member of numerous international and U.S. scientific advisory panels and steering groups.

CRU, the place where all those emails came from PROVIDED TEMPERATURE DATA TO THE IPCC! From HERE

The CRU maintains the repository for temperature measurements used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

I'm sure I could find more, but I didn't have more than 2 minutes to spend on this.

There's a quicktime movie showing the reversal of the air stream in the Supplemental Material of the PRL site.

It's pretty cool, and I couldn't find it on arxiv. Boy, I love being a student again and having free access to journal subscriptions!

Designed for mere mortals to read, should really have been included by the OP. http://physics.aps.org/viewpoint-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.024501

Your beer may be able to detect ionizing radiation: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201001/physicshistory.cfm This explains the fascination that physicists have with the liquid.

Here is the original article by Gödel this is about.

This is it http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.160502

Here's the correct link http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.160502

Here's the correct link http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.160502

That's 'cause i posted the wrong link. This is the right one http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.160502

My bad, the link to the correct paper is this http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.160502 Sorry kids. Buzz

Doesn't anyone read the articles? It says that the article in Phys. Rev. Lett. was published _today_, October 13, 2009. The article that was linked to is two years old and not really relevant. This is the one they're talking about: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.160502 There's a preprint at: http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.3417 The gist of it is that one can consider a fundamental step of a computation to be the evolution of a quantum system from a state to an orthogonal state (cause if they aren't orthogonal, you're going to get the answer wrong). They figure out the maximum rate at which the system can evolve between orthogonal states, which sets a maximum to the speed of the computation. Turns out that the rate is proportional to the difference in energy of the two states -- which means that you can drive the computation faster by choosing two states that have very different energies. But if you do that, since you need to have a power source driving the system between the two energy levels, you have to spend a lot of energy to keep the rate up. Sort of obvious, but they work out the details with explicit lower bounds for the first time

Actually, for the last 3-5 or so years, the seas have been cooling and capturing carbon. In 2005-6 there was a study by someone at the university of Colorado (who monitors a network of Ocean bathythermographs deployed by the Argo program and jason-1 satellite which monitor sea surface temps and ocean level rises). I can't find the study in a non-pay site and I'm not going to link to but anyways, the study showed that all of the claimed warming to date thought to of been caused by the Anthropogenic global warming can be explained by differences in ocean surface temperatures. It said that it didn't rule out Anthropogenic causes but questions the statement of importance.

Your getting the cart before the horse with your assumption that the ocean is warmed by the air. In fact, the ocean has more of an impact on the temps of the air then the air does on the ocean. Just ask the coastal dwellers who get cool breezes coming off the ocean that keep the temps a comfortable level in an otherwise hostile environment. California comes to mind where LA can be 90 degree F and just a few miles away (less then 100) it can be a cool and mild 75 degrees F because of the winds coming off the ocean. Another source for this is the El Nino and la nina effect in the southern pacific oscillations. Of course there are decadal oscillation anomalies in every large body of water. And these vary to such a degree that the IPCC has admitted that their models have problems processing them.

Furthermore, Christopher Monckton has released a study surrounding issues with the IPCC claims which you should read. Some of the key points as outlined elsewhere,

• The IPCC's 2007 climate summary overstated CO2's impact on temperature by 500-2000%;
• CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 F (0.6 C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;
• Not one of the three key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured directly;
• The IPCC's values for these key variables are taken from only four published papers, not 2,500;
• The IPCC's values for each of the three variables, and hence for climate sensitivity, are overstated;
• "Global warming" halted ten years ago, and surface temperature has been falling for seven years;
• Not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted so long and rapid a cooling;
• The IPCC inserted a table into the scientists' draft, overstating the effect of ice-melt by 1000%;
• It was proved 50 years ago that predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible;
• Mars, Jupiter, Neptune's largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed;
• In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.

Now keep in mind, this report does not dispute Anthropogenic climate change, it's pointing to verifiable mathematical flaws causing it's over statement by the IPCC. This is also something of a concern when one of the IPCC lead author has recently went on record claiming the science of global warming is too uncertain at this point in time. There is also a Dr. Essenhigh that claims the IPCC models are incorrect too. His Paper is unavailable for non-paying people (or I couldn't find it) but here is an abstract of it and some comment from a notorious denier.

In short, the issue is a lot more complex then you were led to believe and your comment reflects that profusely.

I think this document refers to that petition:

http://www.aps.org/about/pressreleases/climatechange08.cfm

The GP should know better than thinking a petition is the same as an official position or consensus...

This is just ONE guy who claims (rightly or not) to be a member of APS to change its official policy. And what is its official policy?

Why don't you go to the APS itself?

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earthâ(TM)s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earthâ(TM)s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms.The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

Oh yeah that was so informative, pastafazou!

Fucking denialist liars.

Pluto has a retarded orbit (no, that's not a scientific term)

Actually it is. Well, kind of:

Orbits Using Retarded Fields
http://authors.aps.org/eprint/files/1997/Jul/aps1997jul09_006/main.html

An economical semi-analytical orbit theory for retarded satellite motion about an oblate planet

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980fmet.sympQ....G

and I would not be too far from correct terminology in saying that Earth's orbit is degenerate in the plane of Mars' orbit, no?

Well, I don't think it is relevant on the galactic scale, but the GP might be mangling "Quantized Fields and Particle Creation in Expanding Universes" http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v183/i5/p1057_1

short pulse from the FLASH laser 'knocked out' a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metal's crystalline structure. This turned the aluminum nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.
..."Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period - an estimated 40 femtoseconds..."

OK. so they took a really powerful soft X-ray pulse source and hammered an electron out of most of the atoms in a sample of aluminum. In 40 femtoseconds (!) the electrons were replaced, but for a brief period, the material would pass "extreme ultraviolet radiation". This isn't a "new material"; it's an old material in a very transient state. They were able to do this without blasting the aluminum apart, which is the new result. On the other hand, metals can be forced into electron-deprived states without too much trouble. Ordinary vacuum tubes do this.

The terminology here is puzzling. "Extreme ultraviolet radiation" and "soft X-rays" are in the same part of the spectrum. Does this mean that after being zapped with the giant X-ray pulse, some of the soft X-rays made it through? Or did they have two different illumination sources?

Also see "Extreme Ultraviolet Radiation Transport in Laser-Irradiated High-Z Metal Foils", from 1981, where someone seems to have come close to the same phenomenon.

We researchers submit and review for free because otherwise the journals would stop publishing. Physical Review, for example, publishes something like 150000 pages of articles a year -- and that costs money. Yes, they charge libraries a lot, but financially, they're luck to break even each year.

From their copyright FAQ:

Why should I transfer copyright to APS?

<snip> This permits APS to publish the article and to defend against improper use (or even theft) of the article. It also permits APS to mount the article online and to use the article in other forms or media, such as PROLA. <snip>

while i imagine the same "logic" is applied nearly universally among all publishers, all i can say to this is what a bunch of crap. aps doesn't need copyright to publish the article. a non-exclusive license suffices for such purposes. as to defending against improper use, aps will have a copyright on the collective work in which the paper is published and can pursue copyright violations in that regard, and the author of a published paper can pursue his or he own defense against improper use. again, aps merely needs a license to "mount" the article online or use it in other forms or media. such a license can even be fashioned to be broad enough to encompass technologies not yet conceived of.

this leads me to believe that aps has some other motive for requiring copyright assignment before publication.

Basically journals get academics to edit and review for free, to write for free, they force you to sign over copyright, and they charge you to access your own paper. [...] Most of the research is probably government and publicly funded anyways. Anyone see anything wrong with this??

No, I don't (and I say this having both published and reviewed academic articles myself).

The point most people here seem to not understand (or find inconvenient) is that most of these journals are published by non-profit organizations. The only significant exception is Elsevier, and I don't publish in their journals.

We researchers submit and review for free because otherwise the journals would stop publishing. Physical Review, for example, publishes something like 150000 pages of articles a year — and that costs money. Yes, they charge libraries a lot, but financially, they're luck to break even each year.

As for charging you for access to your own papers, the policy varies from journal to journal, but here's the APS policy from their author copyright FAQ:

As the author of an APS-published article, may I provide a PDF of my paper to a colleague or third party?
The author is permitted to provide, for research purposes and as long as a fee is not charged, a PDF copy of his/her article using either the APS-prepared version or the author prepared version.

Similary policies are spelled out for Wikipedia articles, re-use of figures in other articles, on-line reprints, and the like. Frankly, I've never heard of a copyright transfer getting in the way of getting work done...

-JS

Basically journals get academics to edit and review for free, to write for free, they force you to sign over copyright, and they charge you to access your own paper. [...] Most of the research is probably government and publicly funded anyways. Anyone see anything wrong with this??

No, I don't (and I say this having both published and reviewed academic articles myself).

The point most people here seem to not understand (or find inconvenient) is that most of these journals are published by non-profit organizations. The only significant exception is Elsevier, and I don't publish in their journals.

We researchers submit and review for free because otherwise the journals would stop publishing. Physical Review, for example, publishes something like 150000 pages of articles a year — and that costs money. Yes, they charge libraries a lot, but financially, they're luck to break even each year.

As for charging you for access to your own papers, the policy varies from journal to journal, but here's the APS policy from their author copyright FAQ:

As the author of an APS-published article, may I provide a PDF of my paper to a colleague or third party?
The author is permitted to provide, for research purposes and as long as a fee is not charged, a PDF copy of his/her article using either the APS-prepared version or the author prepared version.

Similary policies are spelled out for Wikipedia articles, re-use of figures in other articles, on-line reprints, and the like. Frankly, I've never heard of a copyright transfer getting in the way of getting work done...

-JS

1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive

Hmm... what I was always told was that rod cells in the retina are sensitive to single photons. IIRC, that's also why spinthariscopes work. Now, sure, I understand that the probability of a random photon entering the eye hitting a rhodopsin pigment is fairly low, and the response could be inhibited by nearby neural cells, but it's still my understanding that you can see individual photons in very dark surroundings. So, is this threshold more of a "what people notice under normal lighting", or are these researching splitting photons somehow?

Not that I recall. It used an ultra-cold medium, IIRC. I think this article may be discussing the same thing. However, there seems to be other ways to reduce the speed of light to manageable levels, which is interesting.

• M&M used the wrong version of Mann et al. (1998). (that should be enough right there.)
• M&M eliminated 70% of Mann's data due to some methodological misunderstanding. (I will not summerize, you must read. It's on page 13-14.)
• Mann et al.s reconstruction is reproducible, and within close approximation (2 standard deviations) of other methods. M&M's is not.
• Interestingly, the hockey stick does appear in a reconstruction using M&M's method and subset of data. This fact is left out of their report.

Good enough? If not, I don't care - honestly. There's a whole page on McIntyre and McKitrick myths. I think James Annan said it best on google-groups: Steve McIntyre has found a molehill and is doing his best to make a mountain out of it.


"I want to know what the observed experimental data is, from a ~10 meter tube, or the observed atmosphere, or such, not computer models" - the absorption spectrum of CO2 is measured by a spectrometer over ~1cm, I think it's important to have done the (simple) experiment that would verify we know how CO2 behaves over longer distances, if it's a fundamental part of our models.

Here is a derivation. Here is an article on observations of CO2 absorption. Also, the linked diagram was observational data.

I did some googling, and I think I found the argument your putting forward - that CO2 absorption saturates after 10m. See here

My specific claim about standard deviation is that no one has taken the observed temperature readings, and calculated the standard deviation from that, for 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, and 1 year. If you've read a paper which has this value, please provide a quote, and link.

Is this some oblique way to assert that prediction models don't have standard deviations built into them? Here is a model from 2002, that includes variance of estimates

Anyway, you wanted to know what's wrong with the equation you specified, *I don't care about the rest*. Please upload a well-formated copy somewhere, with the numbers and working for Earth and Venus. I'll figure it out and get back to you.

It's rather disingenuous to expect me to provide a simpler derivation

If you say so, however, I'm not after a simpler derivation. I'd like to see your working with your numbers, and formatted so I can read it without having to write is out from scratch. I don't want to do the leg work only to have you tell me I didn't do it right. I want to see you do it, and be happy with the equation, and then I'll do the leg work.

How the hell did you come to that conclusion? We know exactly what the value of "Pi" is, yet we can't manipulate or adjust it in any way. We know what the speed of light in a vacuum is, bet we can't change it in any way. Why in the world would you expect us to be able to modify gravity when we cannot modify any other universal laws or constants?

You have too much faith in what you don't know. We don't know the value of Pi. It isn't an irrational number we shorten it to be useful to us. Thus we manipulate it. And yes, we have changed the speed of light We are even attempting to use it to our advantage.

If you mean the experiment at Dan Lathrop's Nonlinear Dynamics Lab, they are doing succesive experiments with bigger and bigger spheres. Last was with a 60cm one, and now they are working on the 3m version which is the one with 13.5 tons of sodium as you mention. According to their webpage:

The three meter experiment now spins under motor control--watch our YouTube movie! We are debugging the system with water as a test fluid, and will soon make Lagrangian flow measurements in collaboration with colleagues from the group of J. F. Pinton. Sodium experiments will follow. More...

There is an article about them from 2008 at Universe Today, and also other people in France were doing spinning sodium experiments in 2007.

String theory was originally conceived as a theory for QCD, and only later was it applied to quantum gravity. Here (http://physics.aps.org/articles/v1/10) is an article which explains the new results with a little historical context.

There has been a long search for metallic hydrogen, which is supposed to be (once made under high pressure) possibly both stable and superconducting at room temperature.

Given that metallic hydrogen is also supposed to be quite dense, I have to wonder if they haven't made metallic deuterium.

So top secret that some scientists at MIT published it PhysRev in 1948... i.e. shortly after they had the apparatus to do the experiment!

Still, that is truly a stonking absorption band in the 54-66GHz range.

http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRev.75.1524

If anybody knew of (or planned for) an adaptation to physics (with interfaces to arXiv.org, the APS journals and ideally other journals), I would be very interested (even as a paying customer).

If you look at the publications from 1995 about the Top Quark, for example, you'll find that they do their best to present the odds that it doesn't exist and they only thought they found it (i.e. that it was "background"), and other such permutations, in a detailed error analysis. In particular they point out in the abstract that "we observe a signal ... inconsistent with the background prediction by 4.8(sigma)"

If you look at the publications from 1995 about the Top Quark, for example, you'll find that they do their best to present the odds that it doesn't exist and they only thought they found it (i.e. that it was "background"), and other such permutations, in a detailed error analysis. In particular they point out in the abstract that "we observe a signal ... inconsistent with the background prediction by 4.8(sigma)"

Here's the actual article: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.046805 . The summary linked is crap : "The quantum dot developed by Wolkow's team is much smaller; less than a nanometre in diameter and containing only one or two particles" It's a silicon atom. How many particles in that? I guess the author was talking about subatomic particles, right?? They also claim that Physical Review Letters, is considered the world's premier physics journal. By whom? It was 12th in the ranking in 2007. Finally, they say "The discovery is a highly anticipated milestone in nanotechnology circles." Uhhh?? I don't think so. As usual, this is self-publicity disguised as news.