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I spent my summer working on Swift http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/ at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They pay very nicely for undergraduates, and a lot of the work to be done here is not classified that vastly improves your employability and resume. http://lanl.gov/education/ is how to apply to Los Alamos for next summer.

The best way in, however, is to poke around http://lanl.gov/ and find a project that interests you, contact the person in charge, and see if they're willing/have the money to take on a student. The student programs here are absolutely fantastic and it's a long standing tradition of training the next generation of scientists/engineers during the summer.

My entire life has changed because of my experiences at LANL. I've met the leaders in the gamma ray burst field, started feeling out graduate schools, published about 10 papers, and I still have 2 years until I graduate!

Seriously, I love my work, I love my job, and my summer was amazing. I just want more people to know about this opportunity.

I spent my summer working on Swift http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/ at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They pay very nicely for undergraduates, and a lot of the work to be done here is not classified that vastly improves your employability and resume. http://lanl.gov/education/ is how to apply to Los Alamos for next summer.

The best way in, however, is to poke around http://lanl.gov/ and find a project that interests you, contact the person in charge, and see if they're willing/have the money to take on a student. The student programs here are absolutely fantastic and it's a long standing tradition of training the next generation of scientists/engineers during the summer.

My entire life has changed because of my experiences at LANL. I've met the leaders in the gamma ray burst field, started feeling out graduate schools, published about 10 papers, and I still have 2 years until I graduate!

Seriously, I love my work, I love my job, and my summer was amazing. I just want more people to know about this opportunity.

Elsewhere in the news...

THIS HAPPENED 4 YEARS AGO!!!

linky: http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php?fuseaction=home .story&story_id=1212

funny parent post though ;)

Per this news release here this has already been done by the mentioned generator. They even use the tuna can size reference;

"In the shot, the 650-ton Atlas pulsed-power generator successfully discharged approximately 20 million amperes of current through an aluminum cylindrical shell or liner about the size and shape of a tuna can, causing the liner to implode at very high speeds. "

Scientists today successfully generated a powerful current - roughly four times the electrical power on Earth - to create....

But, as you can see here, they were generating the same current level over 4 years ago, so this is hardly a new result.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/

http://periodic.lanl.gov/

Los Alamos has downloadable versions, but at 8.5 inches by 11 inches, I'm not sure poster applies.

It's actually a very intersting theory, first proposed by the Nobel-prize winning father of plasma physics Alfven. Their simulations of galactic formation look a lot like the real thing.

http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/TheUniverse.html

For more details, the preprint of the Nature paper can be found here.

• High Performance Linpack (Requires MPI and either BLAS or VSIPL)
  
• High Performance Computing Challenge - the ultimate in stress-testing software
  

Dependencies:

• LAMPI - MPI from the Government's laboratories at Los Alamos
  
• MPICH - another version of MPI
  
• ATLAS - a portable version of BLAS
  
• VSIPL - a heavy number-crunching image processing package
  

I doubt many Slashdotter machines will do well against the top 500, but it might be fun to do our own "top 500" (for sheer geek value and bragging rights).

IAAP (I am a physicist), and here's the deal:

There are suggestions out there that one way to test for the existence of extra "compactified" spatial dimensions (the kind of stuff needed in string theories) is to look for deviations from Newton's 1/r^2 gravity at small distance scales. See, for example, here.

The problem is, it's very hard to measure just the gravitational interaction between two objects separated at micron scales. Gravity is incredibly weak compared to common forces like electrostatics and magnetic interactions, and even more exotic things like Casimir forces (related to the van der Waals interaction).

The Purdue team has shown that the measured Casimir force in their experiment acts just as expected, setting a new limit on how screwy gravity can be at these distance scales.

For what it's worth, there are two other big efforts in this area. The one at Stanford is led by Aharon Kapitulnik, and is so sensitive that their apparatus can detect the different forces on Au and Si in the earth's magnetic field due to diamagnetism (!). The one at Washington is reportedly even more sensitive, and there are rumors circulating that they may have seen something exciting.

The really cool thing here is how table-top solid state experiments may have something profound to say about high energy physics, without any big accelerators.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0506027

Abstract:

We introduce a quantum mechanical model of time travel which includes two figurative beam splitters in order to induce feedback to earlier times. This leads to a unique solution to the paradox where one could kill one's grandfather in that once the future has unfolded, it cannot change the past, and so the past becomes deterministic. On the other hand, looking forwards towards the future is completely probabilistic. This resolves the classical paradox in a philosophically satisfying manner.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0506/050 6027.pdf

jdb2

Who says you need VHDL expertise to be able to program an FPGA? There are lots of C to VHDL converters and here's an open source one. In any case VHDL was created a very long time ago and is even more simple than C or Basic in many aspects.

Besides, FPGAs have two issues that make them good only for a very specific set of apps. Number 1, they don't currently have great floating point performance - this is a killer for most scientific apps. Number 2, they are hard to feed because the rate they can compute at versus the rate memory can feed them is quite skewed. Regardless, they're still very promising. The reconfigurable computing team at LANL (http://rcc.lanl.gov/) has done some very cool things with FPGA based systems.

http://www.fedora.info/

"
Fedora is a general purpose repository service developed jointly by The University of Virginia Library and Cornell University. The Fedora project is devoted to the goal of providing open-source repository software that can serve as the foundation for many types of information management systems.

The software demonstrates how distributed digital information management can be deployed using web-based technologies, including XML and web services."

http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/papers/aDORe_20050 128_submission.pdf

"aDORe: a modular, standards-based Digital Object Repository ..."

... and more credit ... (and to enhance discussion :) ...

Full article

The Distribution of Satellite Galaxies: The Great Pancake

Noam I Libeskind, Carlos S Frenk, Shaun Cole, John C Helly, Adrian Jenkins, Julio F Navarro and Chris Power

ABSTRACT
The 11 known satellite galaxies within 250 kpc of the Milky Way lie close to a great circle on the sky. We use high resolution N-body simulations of galactic dark matter halos to test if this remarkable property can be understood within the context of the cold dark matter cosmology. We construct halo merger trees from the simulations and use a semianalytic model to follow the formation of satellite galaxies. We find that in all 6 of our simulations, the 11 brightest satellites are indeed distributed along thin, disk-like structures analogous to that traced by the Milky Way's satellites. This is in sharp contrast to the overall distributions of dark matter in the halo and of subhalos within it which, although triaxial, are not highly aspherical. We find that the spatial distribution of satellites is significantly different from that of the most massive subhalos but is similar to that of the subset of subhalos that had the most massive progenitors at earlier times. The elongated disk-like structure delineated by the satellites has its long axis aligned with the major axis of the dark matter halo. We interpret our results as reflecting the preferential infall of satellites along the spines of a few filaments of the cosmic web.

CC.

• The first edition of the classic Cheswick and Bellovin book Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker is available in its entirety for free online.
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• High Energy Physics - Fields
• Also, the National Academies Press says it has over 2,500 books on many different academic topics online for free.
• Open Source Development with CVS

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0405325

And of course, 1 amu = 1.66e-27 g, so 1 zeptogram (10e-21 g) is about 1.66e6 amu per weighted Xe Cluster. At a mass of 131.3 amu per Xe atom we get a cluster size of roughly 12000 Xe atoms per cluster.

Perhaps amazingly, the first three results in Google are the e-Print archive mirror, the coming Diesel movie sequel, and the original Diesel movie. Only after that is Jay's XXX links, a mathematical site, and "The #1 christian porn site".

I haven't had so much fun with Google for a while

Nagel and his associates are quite famous for finding interesting physics in things like coffee stains and sand piles and crumpling paper. He taught me quantum while I was an undergrad at U of C, and he was a great teacher, even if I didn't appreciate it at the time.

It is quite true that there exist interesting physical phenomena right under our noses.

There's a decent amount of evidence that has been mounting over the past few years that a large component of redshift is in fact intrinsic, i.e. not attributed to the Doppler effect.

In some ways, it seems related to the much-glossed-over "K Effect" of a few decades ago, where it was found that bright, bright blue stars seemed to be systematically redshifted.

Researchers like M. B. Bell are of the opinion that the intrinsic redshifts are superimposed on a Big Bang flow (reducing the actual velocity we should be measuring). Others, like Arp, believe that the Hubble Flow is an illusion, and that the universe is actually relatively static once you take away the intrinsic redshifts.

David Russell's paper that just came out supports either view, and shows that other explanations (like Tully-Fisher Relationship errors or rotational velocities) are far too small to account for the large discrepancies.

(Some more hubbub on the topic.)

In either case, intrinsic redshifts will take a lot of pressure off researchers to find 'dark energy', because the discrepancies of speed/distance are much reduced.

Then, perhaps, we can stop looking for something that isn't there? :)

Lax's work may seem obscure, but it has practical applications that are very relevant for many people. Example: simulations in 3d computer games. Look here for more details.

I'm sure they're subject-shopping, but it's interesting that there are so many weird things going on out there.

It does feel like there are a few things about to tease themselves apart in cosmology...

Gravity seems to be behaving oddly, with things like the Pioneer acceleration and the anomalous in-track acceleration of the LAGEOS satellites.

The limited age of the universe is being stretched to strange proportions of late with observations of the early universe looking more developed than expected. Observations by the Spitzer may throw even more confusion on the fire.

Add to the pile interesting oddities like Quantized Redshift, originally proposed by Tifft and still observed, that would see to put us at the center of the universe (we shouldn't see the equivalent of even "shells" from our point of view). The Fingers of God is an interesting graphic interpretation.

Association of high-redshift quasars with low-redshift galaxies rounds off the plate.

Actually, a number of these controversies have been around since the mid-80's, but the power and spectrum spread of our telescopes has been getting better. It's been hard to get time to observe the controversial objects - the allocation committees tend to turn such proposals down - but there are plenty of controversies left in the skies, even when we don't go looking for them :)

Personally, I'm excited by the possibilities. It feels like there's something just around the corner, if only we can get some research time in on it.

"There is a reason for that. The sky can't suddenly develop a crack or leak and expose him to deadly doses of radiation in minutes."

Can't it? During a coronal mass ejection directed at earth, proton radiation (and the associated induced muon radiation from subsequent "air showers")spiraling in along the magnetic field lines of the planet often cause polar flights to be rerouted (flights over the south Atlantic anomaly are also rerouted) in order to avoid relatively large doses to flight crews and passengers.

First off, here's a link to the EpiSims site at Los Alamos National Labs. They have a neat (250 meg) video showing smallprox propagation, as well as several graphs.

Here's a link to the general web page at LANL for Dynamic Simulation Science, which also includes information on things like simulation of transportation networks.

A google scholar search turns up a few interesting-looking research papers:

Structural and Algorithmic Aspects of Massive Social Networks (Eubank et al, 2004)

Understanding Large-Scale Social and Infrastructure Networks: ASimulation-Based Approach (Barrett et al)

BioWar: A City-Scale Multi-Agent Network Model of Weaponized Biological Attacks

First off, here's a link to the EpiSims site at Los Alamos National Labs. They have a neat (250 meg) video showing smallprox propagation, as well as several graphs.

Here's a link to the general web page at LANL for Dynamic Simulation Science, which also includes information on things like simulation of transportation networks.

A google scholar search turns up a few interesting-looking research papers:

Structural and Algorithmic Aspects of Massive Social Networks (Eubank et al, 2004)

Understanding Large-Scale Social and Infrastructure Networks: ASimulation-Based Approach (Barrett et al)

BioWar: A City-Scale Multi-Agent Network Model of Weaponized Biological Attacks

Here is the accepted Astrophysical Journal Letter regarding this discovery.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0502312

(Note: Be on guard for confusing astronomical conventions, like measuring almost everything logrithmically with decreasing numbers representing increasing brightnesses.)

To sum up: Astronomers discovered a large mass of rotating Hydrogen gas towards the Virgo Cluster. From the gas dynamics they were able to estimate the mass of the system, and found it to be comparible to the mass of a galaxy. When they went to look at the optical light given off by stars, they found they couldn't find nearly the amount they should for a normal galaxy, hence the 'star-less galaxy' title.

Current Cold Dark Matter (CMD) models of galaxy formation predict that these 'star-less' masses of dark matter should exist in the universe. While other candidates have been discovered in the past, this is the only (currently) viable candidate now known. If it holds up to subsequent analysis, it will provide observational support for the CDM formation models.

A few quick points --
- Dark matter is simply non-luminous matter (matter that does not emit light at any wavelength).
- Yes, black holes are a form of dark matter (baryonic).
- No, this is not an 'anti-matter' galaxy.
- Current Dark Matter theories lean towards it having a non-baryonic source (i.e. not being made up of 'normal' matter).

There's a theory about influence of electricity in universe. Here are few links that might help you. http://www.electric-cosmos.org/links.htm/
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=9eq6g3 aj/
http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/elec_fields.html /

• The Complexity of Sliding Block Puzzles and Plank Puzzles
• The Nondeterministic Constraint Logic Model of Computation
• Generalized Rush Hour is PSPACE-complete
• Computational Complexity of Games and Puzzles

hmmm let me guess which DM search you're with.....CDMS 2? BTW what do you think of the latest DAMA/NaI(Tl) "result"?

They are extremely interesting for anyone fascinated with physics.

More or less. See the paper "The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations".

It's quite entertaining....

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/?9912202

Oh yes.

Talk about faster than light travel attached to some pop-sci articles. Atleast if you'd linked to a few respectable journals or archives, it would make sense.

Wavelet compression however is used in jpeg2000 which is a bit better than jpeg but even that isn't supported by any digital cameras.

I've been working with wavelets (eg.) in several contexts for many years now. Saying wavelet compression does 'a bit' better than jpeg is an enormous understatement. Especially in applications where you need serious compression ratios, wavelets are vastly better than the traditional jpeg compression algorithm.

Want proof? See for yourself.

But it sounds like this has more to do with improving transfer times for images that already exist in jpeg than developing a new standard for compression. But if some digital cameras started supporting jpeg2000, it'd be a boon: you could fit many more images in memory without a perceptiable decrease in quality OR could fit the same number at much higher quality.

While I agree with most of the parent's post, I think BEAM has a lot of promise when it comes to practical robot design. I would compare it to a Roomba before an AIBO (there's a reason the AIBO costs almost $2k). The BEAM concept focuses on developing specific behaviours/mechanisms to achieve specific goals, and evolving them into more complex systems.

The robosapien is less a humaniod "robot" and more of a bug-bot with two legs and and arms. For a street price of $70, that's not too bad. My only grip with the robosapien is that there are only 3 programmable responses (left bumper, right bumper, and sound), even though it has 7 sensors (6 bumpers + the sound sensor). If one could get a different response to backing into things, then one could program more interesting behaviors. Right now I can get him to walk (slooowwwwllly) around a room, backing up and turning when bumping into objects. It's still a toy, and my 2- and 4-year-olds like to dance with it and make it move around.

The idea of BEAM robots (BEAM is an acroonym for Biology Electronics Aesthetics Mechanics) is that they use analog circuts and many of them are very simple and cheap to build but do kind of interesting things and have solar cells and look really cool. There are also more complicated ones... and ones that you can buy in kits and such. Anyway, the nice thing about the above sites (particularly BEAM-online) is that they explain lots of basic robotics stuff and include links to other places with more info - and you don't need to buy a book.

Pathfinder (1997): Designed more as a engineering test bed mission, than a primarily scientific one. Successfully demonstraited the air bag landing technique and sent back some amazing images. Rover Sojourner could only move with direct sunlight shining on it's solar panels. Did not have rechargable battery packs. Once the power was all used up, the mission was over.

Spirit/Opertunity: Two rover's sent for redunantcy, and to provide coverage for two different land sites. Rovers have rechargable batteries, and radio isotope heaters to keep the electronics from freezing during the cold mars nights/winter. These heaters also mean the rover doesn't have to use battery power to provide this heat, so it greatly reduces battery load, and extends the mission. The heaters use plutonium-238 with a half life of 27.1 years. http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/newsbulletin/2004/02/0 9/text02.shtml The mars envirornment is dumping a lot less dust onto the solar cells than was esitmated. This means more power for the rovers, and a longer mission life.

A lot of the other parts are standard things. A bearing is a bearing. It would have cost a lot of money to design a bearing that would wear out after two miles of use. P-238 is the isotope of choice for RHU's. A digital camera generally works forever, until you spill pepsi on it. Same with the rover, you take care of it, it'll last.

Think of it as an airplane. I wouldn't get in an airplane that didn't have a sound engine, solidly mounted wings, tires with good tread left one them, ect. Such an plane is safe enough for a flight accross the country, or a hundred. Without it, it's not safe for one trip.

The real test will be to see if these babbies can make it through the mars winter and come back up and run in the spring.

http://qso.lanl.gov/qc/graphics/whz.GIF.

I'm a little lost...

"First of all, I don't know a whole lot about satellite transmission, but I know it's a lot slower than standard internet technology."

Yup. Part of the reason, as I understand it, is purely distance. The signal has to travel 22,000 miles up 22,000 miles back. So figure it takes a quarter of a second just to send a request. Since the reply takes the same route, it's another quarter of a second. So even an "instant" reply would take take half-a-second.

Conversely, the airships are at about 12 miles up, making the signal travel time much smaller.

"Even if this is no less safe than a server sitting in a room someone will still have to have a physical presense sooner or later to fix something or install new hardware."

Right. So you build two blimps. When one gets persnickity, you launch the other one and land the first one. Fix it and keep it ready for when the second one goes persnickity.

If you have a satellite, it's very expensive to bring it back down to repair it or to send someone up later to fix something or install new hardware.

"Also, how much is this going to cost? Tons and tons of anything, including helium, isn't cheap."

Well, let's see. The article says it takes 37,000 cubic meters of helium. I'll show my math, 'cause I may be wrong. That's 121,391 cubic feet of helium. In 1986, the cost of helium was $37.50 for 1000 cubic feet. So that's about $4550 to fill 'er up every 18 months.

"I like the idea, but I think it will be more productive, cheap, and reliable to use lots of inexpensive 802.11 equipment."

Again, according to the article, something like this could provide coverage for an area of 800,000 square kilometers, an area the size of Texas. You'd have to use lots and lots and lots and lots of inexpensive 802.11 equipment to get the same coverage. And one of these blimps costs $20 million. So for reliability, you have two of them at $40 million.

I'm not sure how cheap 802.11 equipment is, but to cover every inch of Texas, they'd need to cost less than $50 per, assuming you could get one that would cover 1 square kilometer.

Yes, I know. A calculator is a dangerous thing for those of us who don't know how to use it...

The New Mexico National Labs (Los Alamos, Sandia, the universities (NMSU, UNM, etc) and others came together in a rather awesome program about 13 years ago. The Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge Program gives high school students access to modern supercomputers to do scientific programming projects. They are given mentoring and instruction by volunteers as well as volunteered CPU time and access. Schools lacking net access are provided it by the participants, etc. After all their work, there is a competition based on how much was learned, presentations, science done, and final reports. It is a lot of fun. It's really hard.

I was originally a student in it waaaay back when it was getting underway (1990 & 1991) and then acted as a mentor for the next 5 years. I had a first place team and a third place team in those five years. I worked with kids that were often C students because they were bored as h*ll in class and often after seeing what they could do would go on to work harder to improve their grades to get into some very good universities.

Kids often rose to the challenge far and above what I would have thought they'd do. If the kids needed to learn the necessary math for the scienc they wanted to do we'd crash course it. I had kids that had been doing second year algebra doing partial differential equations by the end of the six months of work and able to understand it, frex. They always learned the science and programming that was required as well. This was their work, not mine. I could give guidance and knowledge, but couldn't do the work for them. Some of the science done was thermodynamics, astrophysics, environmental science, and fluid dyanmics, frex.

Now you may not be able to donate supercomputing time, but you might want keep this in mind when you go to think about what HS kids are interested in. Kids are often interested in a lot. You just have to be willing to teach them in a way that they'll remember, show them its useful, and make it interesting.

wouldn't it be nicer to name your inc variables xxx ? ... it's fun!

Which reminds me of my favourite sites to visit when my internet access is through monitored firewalls (corporate or university systems)

http://xxx.lanl.gov/
http://xxx.arxiv.cornell.edu/
http://xxx.adelaide.edu.au/
http://xxx.uni-augsburg.de/

Yep, folks - Governments and Universities worldwide, hosting xxx sites. And for what it's worth, xxx.lanl.gov was the original!

I think that it was mentioned in the article that thorium is a better fuel. Or at least more common.

of the 12.8 tons of Thorium only a tiny amount is the radioactive isotope

Actually, all of it's radioactive
"Twenty five isotopes of thorium are known with atomic masses ranging from 212 to 236. All are unstable."

I think most folks in the /. world consider IT to be the 'tech' industry. Not surprising due to the backgrounds of the people who read/post here. As for 'tech' jobs, there are quite a few in my region of the technology world:

LLNL has 20 open S&E positions.

INEEL in the middle of transitioning contractors, but will undoubtedly need S&Es to complete missions for DOE and the Navy.

LBL has 95 open S&E positions.

BNL has 7 open S&E positions.

SNL has 20 open S&E positions.

LANL has 107 open S&E positions.

ORNL has 28 open S&E positions.

PNNL has 36 open S&E positions.

ANL has 32 open S&E positions.

There complete list of laboratories is here. All of them have job postings in the S&E categories. These just happen to be the largest insitutions.

I haven't even started searching Monster.com

Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineering graduate student.

The main reason we're having such problems with nuclear waste repositories such as Yucca mountain is because of the rather long timescales of decay of a small class of fission byproducts. This class of elements (the 'transuranics' ; Z > 92) comprises a very small fraction of the total waste volume and has (in general) the majority of ill-effects, such as long half-lives, toxicity, excessive heat generation, etc. (Different isotopes contribute to each of these effects in some small fashion.)

A key insight to the problem is that we do not have to store the waste as it comes out of the reactor (or otherwise packaged for long-term storage). It is possible to process the spent fuel in a way to transmute the problem isotopes into others that decay away quickly (days to tens/hundreds of years vs 1x10^6 + years). Neutron bombardment is one method of 'bumping' these decay chains onto different tracks. Doing this effectively, efficiently, and economically is the challenge; many people (including some of my professors) have been working on it at Los Alamos. A good introduction to the process and its rationale are located here.

Of couse, these transmutation schemes require their own energy to run them, and we can't beat the second law of thermodynamics -- it has to come from somewhere. These days it's mostly coal, the same source we're trying to replace with nuclear power! (Don't get me wrong -- nuclear power plants are by far the best we've currently got in terms of environmental impact, reliability, and production capacity. It's not the best, but it's the least of the other evils at the moment.) A better solution would be to provide this energy from an environmentally clean source, such as fusion energy. (It's nice to see two nuclear physics articles in a day!)

Of course, providing funding for disposal solutions such as Yucca and transmutation technologies is expensive and a political hot potato. (It also requires members of Congress to be a bit more forward-sighted, instead of just looking ahead to the next election cycle. Just think: ITER is on the order of $10B [a drop in the bucket to Congress], and has been scrounging for funds from all across the world for more than 20 years -- when it has the potential to unlock safe, envirionmentally clean energy that's powered from constituents of seawater.)

The Acoustic Stirling, a new engine that has been recently been developed, Acoustic Stirling Press Brief, could take the heat energy that is generated by nuclear waste and convert it into electrical energy. When the waste is doing work for you, it's no longer waste.

BTM

That this is a surprise depends on whom you ask. The real issue here is to understand how those huge f**off multi-billion solar mass black holes form. And so far there had not been such high-quality evidence for anything in between a stellar-mass black hole formed by a single massive star collapse, and those monsters in the middle of galaxies.

The other original thing here is that evidence for intermediate BHs in other galaxies comes from 1) luminosity measurements, which is a much more biased method than speed measurements of stars gravitating around it (to measure star velocities you have to be able to resolve them, which is only possible in relatively nearby objects) and 2) objects that were not in small clusters like here.

The first part of the article deals with all the legitimate ways to move particles from point A to point B without going through the intervening space. These methods (while very, VERY far off in the future) are scientifically plausible even if they sound like they were lifted from a bad Star Trek script. The second part, of course, is full of the worst kind of pseudo-science, like telekenisis and psychic abilities. But, really, the first half of the proposal is only a waste of money because the technology involved is too far off to be useful in any reasonably timeframe.

For example, negative energy is a real phenomenon in quantum physics. It is most commonly discussed in the context of the Casimir effect. Here's an article that discusses the Casimir effect. Basically, the negative energy arises because empty space itself has a certain amount of vacuum energy, and the Casimir effect reduces these fluctuations inside two metal plates (which have to be spaced absurdly closely together and manufactured to extremely exact precision for the effect to be measureable). Because we generally say that empty space has zero energy and the space between the plates has less energy than that, the Casimir effect is regarded as a source of "negative energy". This could actually be useful (one day in the far FAR future) for opening up space-time wormholes. And, no, I'm not joking either.

Also, while "warp drive" may be an overused Trek term, it's also a (semi) legitimate topic of discussion in physics. In 1994, Dr. Miguel Alcubierre found a solution to General Relativity that seemed to allow for faster than light travel while obeying special and general relativity. What followed was a lively debate on the plausibility of the "Alcubierre Warp Drive". One of the most recent objections argued that Alcubierre's warp drive would never be able to cross lightspeed but might allow for non-Newtonion sublight travel.

>Tell someone 'Einstein was wrong' and you would >probably get beaten badly even before you say a >word about evidence.

Sorry, but that just isn't true. Look at recent physics papers http://xxx.lanl.gov or go to a physics talk, and lots of physicists are willing to give serious consideration to things that go pretty far against Einstein's theories. And, once one of those actually does better with the data, it will supercede relativity. Not to mention that lots of gravitational wave stuff is stated a test of relativity. You don't test things that you would never be willing to accept could be false.

That is where science is different that intelligent design or creationism.