Slashdot Mirror

I also wonder if our protoplanetary disc acted like a gold pan during the formation of the solar system, so Mercury might have lots of heavy elements as well as Venus (talk about hard to mine!)

There actually is quite a bit of stratification of elements in the solar system, and various relations have been worked out for the relative proportions of such elements based on distance from the sun during planet formation. A lot of this comes down to chemistry, and how elements will have different volatility, solidifying or getting blown away by solar wind depending on the local temperature and other materials around. This was touched upon briefly in a recent Physics Today article, although most of it is on separation of elements within the Earth.

is calculated from a linear combination of five metrics: an individual's current h-index h(t), the square root of his or her total number of publications N, the number of years t since first publication (the career age), the number of publications q in high-impact journals, and the number of distinct journals j in which the individual has published.

While the 'fake' journals may not be high-impact they would enhance the total number and diversity values. This type of formula might be used when hiring for academic positions.

That a single study showing positive results for ESP was flawed in some way, is a natural starting position.

Ah, but Bem's 2011 paper was not flawed at all. He successfully and convincingly demonstrated his lack of understanding of statistical techniques and his ineptitude in application of said techniques. He also illustrated the failings of the peer review process in minor fields. His incompetent attempt at "validation" of ESP was the most persuasive evidence of all, in fact.

This overwhelming ignorance of statistics is prevalent throughout the social "sciences" and is almost as widespread in medical fields. Bem is not the first to misunderstand and misuse t-tests or to fail to distinguish exploratory and confirmatory analysis. Those in fundamentally innumerate fields should not play with numbers (especially using packaged statistical software) except under supervision of a qualified adult. They are emphatically not qualified to certify themselves as competent in statistics or any other area outside their specialization.

Here is another article, which is both more informative, and doesn't have an annoying constantly scrolling twitter feed to distract you while you try to read.

I like:

http://physicsworld.com/
http://www.physicstoday.org/

They are good a summary of current work but still easy to understand.

Since you're especially interested in physics, I'd recommend magazines like Physics Today, which I guess is accessible from decent libraries in both online and dead-tree formats. It's not a research journal and is intended for the general audience, but is somewhat more advanced than the material you usually find online. The American Physical Society also carries an on-line journal "Physics" which is free to read and provides a view into what physicists from around the globe are doing. It provides commentary and explanations to notable articles published in the Physical Review journals that are only open to subscribers.

You may also want to check some open-access journals such as the New Journal of Physics, and the upcoming Physical Review X (no content yet). But reading "real" research papers doesn't usually makes you feel it's "engaging"..

Besides, I think everyone reading /. on any semi-regular basis already knows about the whole "capturing anti-matter" thing, so no need to repeat stuff like you're the only one who keeps up on the news.

You're assuming everyone has kept up on this news. It might be new to somebody, in which case this is incredibly helpful.

As much as I enjoy hangin' out with y'all here on /., I very much doubt that anti-matter specialists come here for the latest news on their specialty. Cern Courier, Physics Today, and Symmetry Magazine are fun reading, though perhaps some real physicists (I'm not one) can suggest better.

My grandfather used to have a farm on the south shore of Long Island, almost due south from Wardenclyffe. He took us there a couple of times when I was a kid. The site was a photo processing plant at the time, but we could peer through the south gate and see the pad where the tower was. The concrete octagon was the site of the tower that was demolished in 1917.

Changing the length of the second would certainly help. In principle a leap second can be a leap forwards or backwards. So far all leap seconds have been positive. If the second had been defined to be a little longer the number of leap seconds would be a lot less (significantly alleviating the problem for people who have to deal with them) and we would have occasional negative leapseconds.

This is described in a physics today article from a year or so ago.

Neither Einstein's relativity nor quantum mechanics are physics so we cannot use them as a foundation for our new model (although we should find that the mathematics that works in the real world still applies).We have to discard "modern" physics and return to the classical physics of a century ago. This, perhaps, is the greatest hurdle - to discard our training and prejudices and to approach the problem with a beginner's mind.

whew! I'm so glad we can at least keep mathematics - or some part of it - because reinventing physics without it would be problematic

We must "go down" one more level and propose that all subatomic particles, including the electron, are resonant structures of electric charges of opposite sign that sum to the charge on that particle....The electron is not a fundamental, point-like particle.It must have structure to provide its dipole magnetic field.... The same model applies to the proton and the neutron.

So all the particle physics results indicating the existence of quarks are fictional? Well if we had known they didn't exist we wouldn't have spent so much time and money pinning down their properties.

When we accelerate electrons or protons in an electromagnetic field they become less responsive to the fields the more they are accelerated. This has been interpreted as an increase in mass. However, charges have no mass.

I (and particle physicists) much prefer E^2 = (pc)^2 +m^2*c^4 where m is the rest-mass; an unchanging invariant property. only the momentum p has relativistic terms in it.

The notion that matter can be annihilated when normal matter meets antimatter is a confusion of language. Matter can neither be destroyed nor created nor can matter be exchanged for energy. Einstein's E = mc2 refers to mass, a property of matter, not matter itself.

The most collapsed form of matter is the neutrino, which has a vanishingly small mass. However, the neutrino must contain all of the charges required to form two particles - a particle and its antiparticle. This symmetry explains why a neutrino is considered to be its own anti-particle. A neutrino may accept energy from a gamma ray to reconstitute a particle and its anti-particle. "Empty space" is full of neutrinos. They are the repositories of matter in the universe, awaiting the burst of gamma-radiation to expand them to form the stuff of atoms. The weird "zoo" of short-lived particles created in particle accelerators and seen in cosmic rays are simply unstable resonant systems of charge.

We must abandon our peculiar phobia against a force acting at a distance. And we must give up the notion that the speed of light is a real speed barrier. It may seem fast to us, but on a cosmic scale it is glacial. Imposing such a speed limit and requiring force to be transmitted by particles would render the universe completely incoherent.

Holy friggin' hell. check out http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-56/iss-10/images/p48fig1.jpg or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:First_Gold_Beam-Beam_Collision_Events_at_RHIC_at_100_100_GeV_c_per_beam_recorded_by_STAR.jpg image created at RHIC. Think about what standard physics implies about the result versus "Electric physics"
Electric Physics
1. individual gold atoms are accelerated perhaps to >c
2. energy is added into some electric fields within the atom
3. the electric fields do not interact with any neutrinos until the atoms near each other
4. the electric fields interact with thousands of undetected neutrinos at the exact point where the atoms collide (kind of

Show me the money trail. How do you know this?

All I can find because everything else wants you to buy a subscription to view their articles says the budget for science is set to triple over the next ten years

They also go on to say the funds are handed over to the national science foundation who then doles it out to whatever it determines necessary. As far as I know, there hasn't been any budget that goes specifically to physics or particle physics. It has been done this way for the last 25 years that I have payed attention with the exception of earmarking for things like Aids, cancer and global warming research.

Now, the current funding is being spent on global warming and not physics because the doom and gloom is proving more interesting to the NSF then physics is at the moment. This is why whenever someone says Exxon has everything to lose and the global warming scientist have nothing to lose, the counter answer is alway they could lose their funding. If you think the president or congress should provide money singled out for physics research, then suggest that. But don't blame the president for doing something that is a direct result of the researchers now being as creative in making their projects as interesting as the doom and gloom the global warming crowd has. I suggest that instead of requesting funding to monitor the interactions of elements of atoms, you ask for funding to monitor the interactions of elements of atoms in hopes to find a way to fix global warming.

It is like that game "in the bed" were you end every sentence with in the bed. Look at tom run a race "in the bed". Tom was the first to finish "in the bed". Except change the "in the bed" to "for global warming" and you will get all the funding you need. And this isn't the evil politicking of one man causing this. It is the pressures from everyone preaching the end of the world with global warming that is causing the interest to be focused in those areas "in the bed". Man that is a fun game.

Now, keep this in mind, This article describes a situation were some in congress had their priorities in the wrong places on both sides of the isle. But it also describes members of both sides coming around to more sound thinking at the last minute. It also provided an 8% increase in funding which is in line with the presidents stated initiatives he made us aware of in 2006. And again, no one has cut funding to physic research. It is only that the funding is being used differently. You cannot claim a funding was cut when there wasn't a specific allotment by law (entitlement) to them.

Now, if you are confused about NASA funding and the physics research they do, it is two different things. Here is an article describing the problems with funding NASA and come to the exact opposite conclusion you have about Bush not funding anything. It was a republican senator who stood his ground and made sure NASA got all it's funding.

Again, show me the money trail, What beside a few ranting from people who won't verify the misconstrued facts presented to them makes you believe that Bush has it in for physic? I have went above what I would consider necessary to show this isn't the picture. Now show me that I am wrong. Show me that this is more then some political posturing because someone has a stiffy for Bush and thinks everyone will jump on the bashing bandwagon too. I want to see your proof.

A physicist explains science to third graders:

We take a vote. I ask how we decide who is right, and then I do the experiment... I emphasize that science is not a democracy, it is not the majority but the experiment that decides what is correct.

Sums it up pretty nicely.

Currently, a measurement accuracy of one part in 10^7 is possible

But making up particles no one has ever seen just because you don't understand what you are seing is fitting facts to the data.

You do realize that science is 'just' fitting theoretical models to data, do you? And that, while a model survives by being able to fit more types of data, it usually starts by fitting one or a handful?

Scientists often discuss new theories, etc, and in that context dark matter has it's place, but to claim it exists - as this story does - without being able to actually measure anything is quite silly and premature.

You are in error here. There are observations seeing dark matter (see here for example) - it's just that they don't provide information on what it is. And ultra-low cross-section particles are not as fantastic as you seem to make them - just because we don't know they exist we shouldn't rule them out. Or in. File it as usually under 'maybe' until further testing.

ExonnMobil and some in the coal industry have been clear about the rewards for scientists to distort science in their favour. What is the motivation for all other scientists to distort science in the other direction? As someone who gives grants has pointed out, grants are given to answer the plethora of genuine scientific questions that still remain. Lindzen conspiracy of oppression rings hollow since he himself has been invited to give evidence to political commitees on both sides of the Atlantic, unfortunately he did not come up with anything new and spent most of his time labeling anyone who does not agree with him "alarmists".

I put it to you that Lindzen has his conspiracy theory back to front. As for the congressional debate you mention, it wouldn't happen to be linked to Lindzen or a certain science fiction writer giving "scientific evidence" to the senate would it?

Dragging up old arguments is a waste of time and resources and is also the main reason why scientists try to ignore to the likes of Lindzen. Naturally Lindzen is entitled to his opinion and the WSJ is entitled to print it, but please remeber others are entitled to be skeptical of that opinion, particularly when it tells only half the story and totally ignores the science that does not serve Lindzen's or the WSJ's agenda. However I do agree "the politics of science is out of hand" when the WSJ repeatedly gives that much column space to what is basically an individuals fringe opinion.

As for people "getting on with the science", here is a short article about the usefullnes of climate models and what goes into them. Here is another one expalining why scientists back the IPCC even though it may not precisely line up with their own views.

You are correct in saying that science dependes on skepticism to progress, you are wrong to assume the IPCC is political dogma that does not represent the culmination of scientific skepticism that you claim is absent from climate research. I humbly suggest you actually read the 2001 version as background for the next installment due early 2007.

In 1947, four high school students in El Cerrito, California built a cyclotron. Here's a PDF of an article from Physics Today.

Here's the link http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-59/iss-8/p30.sh tml

See http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-9/pdf/vol59 no9p24_25.pdf

There's a difference beetween "unknowable" and "incomprehensible". Given what we understand of chaos theory, long-range weather forecasting is impossible. In many areas of the world we can't know whether it will be raining or sunny a week from today, there's no way to gather sufficient data with sufficient precision to make a prediction that far in advance.

That doesn't mean that weather isn't comprehensible. We understand the processes involved in weather well enough to even specify what conditions make such predictions impossible, and when. (For example, we can predict that it'll be sunny next week in the Sahara desert with a very high degree of reliability.)

we might never have enough available energy to do the experiements required to prove exactly what happened [at the Big Bang]

Yup, we might not. Then again, we might figure out ways to do the experiments with less energy, or come up with alternative cosmologies with more testable features. That's a different proposition altogether from saying that the Big Bang is forever beyond human ken.

In the late 1700's, as scientists started getting a handle on electricity, they realized that lightning was electrical, and should respond in the same ways as the electricity they generated in their labs. Lightning rods were proposed, and the officials of various churches vociferously denounced them. After all, they knew that lightning was a direct expression of Divine fury, and it was hubristic to attempt to interfere with that.

Of course, since God wouldn't strike a church with lightning, very often people would store explosives in the local church (the tallest building in town, with ungrounded metal on top). After a church in Europe was struck by lightning in 1769, and 3,000 people were killed when the tons of gunpowder stored there exploded, those objections began to die out.

Now, even before the 1700's, was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Ulohora, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response to "What causes lighting?" was "Darn if I, or anyone else, knows."

And, obviously, it was similarly incorrect to say, "No one ever will know, either."

Daniel Kleppner of MIT contributed an article to Physics Today which ruminated on the problems that clocks like this will have for international timekeeping. The trick is that the clocks will be able to see the diurnal variations in general relativistic gravitational potential. No two clocks like this on the surface of the earth will ever be able to agree with each other. A whole new set of computational protocols for combining their results into International Atomic Time (TAI) will be necessary.

Compared with those of previous millennia, the changes in GSL occurring today are tiny.

It'll become your problem when half of the state of New Jersey moves to Minnesota because NJ is underwater. And we are bringing Tony Soprano with us. I hope you like calzones and AK47s.

You goombas won't cause culture shock up here. There is a fair bit of diversity here. You won't scare us with gunplay either. The woods are mayhem during hunting season. People drive around wasted drunk on the logging roads in their pickups shooting anything that moves.

In assessing the usefulness of the ABL, the study group adopted its publicly reported design goals: 3 MW of power focused into a 1.2-m-diameter beam (close to the diffraction limit) that could illuminate the target missile for up to 20 s. We also considered the utility of systems with greater and lesser capabilities. We found that if the ABL achieves its design goals, it would have a range of about 600 km against liquid-propellant ICBMs. That would be useful against liquid-propellant ICBMs launched from North Korea, but not from Iran. Against solid-propellant ICBMs, its range would be only about 300 km, too short to be useful in any of the scenarios we examined. The ABL's range is relatively insensitive to its power.

Weight IN THE SAME CONFIGURATION equals safety. And only in a two-vehicle accident.

Low center of gravity also equals safety. Having a vehicle actually engineered from the ground up to carry passengers exclusively equals safety. You don't get that with most SUVs.

Oh, and you're more dangerous to pedestrians and the occupants of other vehicles REGARDLESS OF WHAT THEY ARE DRIVING.

A large sedan of similar (or even slightly less) mass will stomp your SUV in almost every safety category. The only type of accident where SUVs offer ANY advantage to anyone is multiple-vehicle, and even then not across the board, and not every SUV.

Risk to other drivers:
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-1/pdf/vol59 no1p49_54.pdf

I suspect the only reason SUVs don't do worse as a category is they mix the car and truck based ones together.

Fuel economy in truck-based, and large unibody SUVs is still abysmal. And in fact, that's one of US automakers' biggest problems right now.

My biggest issue with SUVs though, is that most of them are utter poseurmobiles. They aren't especially good road cars, they aren't very good off-roaders, they're too compromising on all fronts. And the ones that CAN go off-road but DON'T are even more offensive. 4x4s more than a year old should not be shiny. they should be caked with mud or dust or show evidence of abrasion from the previous times they were.

So you're saying that the US Military has not been thinking of developing nuclear bunker busters? Here's an article in Physics Today (hardly a political publication) that disagrees with you. I can find lots of other sources just by googling "nuclear bunker busters".

So I guess, according to you, people are somehow "blaming Bush or Americans for any evil that occurs in the world" if they do nothing more than read the news.

The peer review process is a work of man, not God, so it is not perfect and the particpants are only human. However it can have great benefits. Here is a wonderful article about Einstein's expereince with Phy Rev.

http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-9/p43.html

It is appropriate that this story is listed first under "politics", because that is what LANL has mostly been a victim of. Its safety and security record has actually been no worse than other DOE labs and industry, but no one seems to notice when classified information goes missing at other labs (it happened recently at Sandia, but as no senators are interested in having a company in their home state win a very lucrative contract to manage that one, no one seemed to notice). Of course, having an antagonistic ass like Pete Nanos at the helm shutting down the lab for months certainly didn't help things.

A very informative opinion piece on this can be found at:
    http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-12/p60.html

Lastly, the NNSA is so hyperactive about classifying everything (they decide to classify some of most stupid crap), and there are so many classified items in the inventory (millions of them), it is remarkable, actually, how few incidents there have been with those.

Ecological change is usually on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.

Bull puckey. I suggest you read Spencer Weart's excellent article in Physics Today. Seems there is a whole heap of data to support the notion that a lot of ecological change occurs on very short time scales (oceanic currents, de/re-forestation due to climate alterations, etc).

In this article, pay particular attention to the part where he outlines the history of climatologists around 1900 or so. Specifically, they bought the belief that all geological/climatological change was slow, and ignored much compelling evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately, that band of scientists has shaped the training of many in our age.

In 1948, four high schools students in California built a cyclotron. Here (scroll down a ways) is the article from Physics Today about it. There was a really nice writeup about it in Scientific American's Amateur Scientist column. There was also a Nov 2004 slashdot thread on homebrew cyclotroning.

There is an interesting read on Einstein's "mistakes", including the cosmological constant, at Physics Today.

This month's issue of Physics Today has an article by Steven Weinberg, no slouch himself in physics, on
"Einstein's mistakes".

His take is that given what Einstein and others knew about the cosmos at the time it was perfectly reasonable for him to introduce the cosmological constant to try to obtain a 'static' description of the universe.

As was covered in a recent excellent Physics Today article (http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-58/iss-5/conte nts.html -- unfortunately contents are subscriber-only, but you can read the summary on the contents page; I read the whole article), high energy cosmic rays can play a role in the initiation of lightning strikes. Thus it seems very reasonable to expect the presence of neutrons in the consequent cosmic ray shower, and their presence does not imply anything at all about fusion!

Physicists have a really, really hard time explaining *why* gravity is 10^42 times weaker than all other forces. (If you really want to split hairs, it's about 10^38 times weaker than the Weak Force, but what's an order of magnitude among friends?) Gravity appears to be a completely different manifestation than the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces of nature. This irks many, and they try to rectify that by a Grand Unifying Theory (GUT).

One recent shot at explaining all this was well laid out in this article in Physics Today (subscription required, sorry) from 2002. In short, it theorized that gravity exists in 11 dimensions, not just 3, over short distances. Over some distance, the force known as gravity would "collapse" back down to our traditional 3. The fact that it acted over 11 dimensions, not 3, made gravity drop off as something like 1/r^10. This could help explain the apparent weakness of gravity.

IIRC, the authors predicted that gravity would get measurably stronger at small distances, as it was acting in many dimensions at once. Towards the upper end of their estimates, they predicted that gravity could be measurably stronger at distances around 3-5 millimeters.

As I read this latest discovery, it appears to throw water on that attempt to unify gravity with everything else. Back to the drawing board.

• physicstoday.org
• sciencenews.org
• http://www.eurekalert.org/

The coal argument is often used...however it is always used wrongly....the 300 year projection is based on current usage...not usage in trying to replace oil and further population growth. In which case coal is only projected to last 90 years at most. Still a fair while, but not as rosy as 300 years. http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-7/p47.html# cap4

In physics, do we say that force is about equal to mass times acceleration?

Perhaps you should.

Quite ironic that your link to kindergarten art states: In Kindergarten art class, we explore various two and three diminsional media .

Picasso worked with the 4th dimension, like Einstein did. Tell that to your average 5 year old kindergarden children.

...well im sure you understand the potential. instead, ive just been reading an article about the huge difficulties facing the viablity of fuel-cell vehicles. my green heart has been prepared to wait 10~15 to drive my first, but by what the article says, it will probably take longer (goverments and organisations can never be trusted to deliver on time), and even then, they'll be very expensive to buy AND refuel, not to mention lousy performers. So do you know what im getting at? ...many climate experts agree that we are only a matter of months (10~40) away from the point of no return for dramatic, long term climatic disaster and its consequences (numerous experts say we have even passed it). given the 10~20 years until fuel cell transport is available, people must not be allowed to fall into the false sense of security that "fuel cells will save us". the most viable technology for now is the battery to power cars. most of us have read about or seen them, and they do the job exceptionally for 99% of vehicles; the electricity must be generated by renewable energy sources. if you know someone who is influential or have access to a motor corp. executive, please reason to them that 20 years will mean the life or death of much of what we enjoy today. we need solutions NOW, not in 2 decades. i hope Altairs claims are true as it would be another addition to the already compeling argument for battery driven vehicles. P.S. i can't avoid being dramatic, i do not apologies because this is what i beleive to be the truth

You're not serious that you don't "GET IT" are you? The evidence is overwhelming. And those who trot out some trumped up fiction that refutes the majority are mostly politcally motivated, or funded by oil companies. There is really buig bucks at stake to these people, at least for them. But if the planet compromises it's long term future, what have we done? Look at this month's "Discover" magazine; or any simple searching dregs up tons.: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2001/04/13/MN211246.DTL http://home.earthlink.net/~cevent/11-10-04_solid_e vidence_gw.html http://www.carleton.ca/~tpatters/teaching/climatec hange/globemail4.11.97.html http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/02/19/en vironment.report/ http://www.ehleringer.net/Biology_5460/Projects/cl imatedata/globalwarming3.pdf http://www.climatesolutions.org/pubs/pdfs/gwih.pdf http://www.climateark.org/articles/2001/2nd/statto ce.htm http://www.mmmfiles.com/archive/gw2001.htm http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/3970 _ConferenceBoard.pdf http://www.colorado.edu/pwr/occasions/salliebaliun as.htm http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-1/p13.html

According to the CNET article, CERN stands for China Education and Research Network... What about History of CERN? Oh well, I guess that there are advantages to living in a world without legacy systems or intellectual property...

bush's bunker busters

missle defense shield

Physics Today has several articles dealing with the subject, and the actual report can be obtained here.

The verdict: living under the physical laws we all have to obey, boost phase missile defense really doesn't work -- even if the interceptors can get off the ground. Continuing on in with the fiendishly expensive and marginally beneficial program (beneficial in terms of the defense contractors' job security) in the light that it is not physically possible to expect a reasonable chance (or sometimes even a chance) of success is a demonstration of the Administration's ignorance of science and fact, as well as pork-barrel spending at its worst.

So, I'm not surprised at all about the failure -- and wouldn't be even if they launched the interceptor successfully. It's too bad that we won't see any sort of rational discussion of the topic of missile defense in Congress now that the topic is so politically charged.

Physics Today has several articles dealing with the subject, and the actual report can be obtained here.

The verdict: living under the physical laws we all have to obey, boost phase missile defense really doesn't work -- even if the interceptors can get off the ground. Continuing on in with the fiendishly expensive and marginally beneficial program (beneficial in terms of the defense contractors' job security) in the light that it is not physically possible to expect a reasonable chance (or sometimes even a chance) of success is a demonstration of the Administration's ignorance of science and fact, as well as pork-barrel spending at its worst.

So, I'm not surprised at all about the failure -- and wouldn't be even if they launched the interceptor successfully. It's too bad that we won't see any sort of rational discussion of the topic of missile defense in Congress now that the topic is so politically charged.

Physics Today has several articles dealing with the subject, and the actual report can be obtained here.

The verdict: living under the physical laws we all have to obey, boost phase missile defense really doesn't work -- even if the interceptors can get off the ground. Continuing on in with the fiendishly expensive and marginally beneficial program (beneficial in terms of the defense contractors' job security) in the light that it is not physically possible to expect a reasonable chance (or sometimes even a chance) of success is a demonstration of the Administration's ignorance of science and fact, as well as pork-barrel spending at its worst.

So, I'm not surprised at all about the failure -- and wouldn't be even if they launched the interceptor successfully. It's too bad that we won't see any sort of rational discussion of the topic of missile defense in Congress now that the topic is so politically charged.

Physics Today has several articles dealing with the subject, and the actual report can be obtained here.

The verdict: living under the physical laws we all have to obey, boost phase missile defense really doesn't work -- even if the interceptors can get off the ground. Continuing on in with the fiendishly expensive and marginally beneficial program (beneficial in terms of the defense contractors' job security) in the light that it is not physically possible to expect a reasonable chance (or sometimes even a chance) of success is a demonstration of the Administration's ignorance of science and fact, as well as pork-barrel spending at its worst.

So, I'm not surprised at all about the failure -- and wouldn't be even if they launched the interceptor successfully. It's too bad that we won't see any sort of rational discussion of the topic of missile defense in Congress now that the topic is so politically charged.

Enrico Fermi supposedly failed every single person who ever took his Quantum Mechanics course at the University of Chicago.

This story is not likely.

Fermi only gave the quantium mechanics course once in 1954 in the last year of his life. He was known as an outstanding teacher, always willing to help students. His notes for the course were published in a book titled Notes on Quantum Mechanics with additional material supplied by one of the students. None of the reviews I've found mention the story about all the students failing.

One of his colleagues writes:

Fermi's legendary classroom teaching was the fruit of careful preparation. He seemed to derive pleasure from the act of teaching, without regard for the result. He never showed annoyance at a student's failure to grasp on the first try (or even the second) what he was trying to explain. On the contrary, if Fermi had to repeat an explanation, his pleasure appeared to be doubled.

Enrico Fermi supposedly failed every single person who ever took his Quantum Mechanics course at the University of Chicago.

This story is not likely.

Fermi only gave the quantium mechanics course once in 1954 in the last year of his life. He was known as an outstanding teacher, always willing to help students. His notes for the course were published in a book titled Notes on Quantum Mechanics with additional material supplied by one of the students. None of the reviews I've found mention the story about all the students failing.

One of his colleagues writes:

Fermi's legendary classroom teaching was the fruit of careful preparation. He seemed to derive pleasure from the act of teaching, without regard for the result. He never showed annoyance at a student's failure to grasp on the first try (or even the second) what he was trying to explain. On the contrary, if Fermi had to repeat an explanation, his pleasure appeared to be doubled.

"The critical question is, How good and different are [the cold fusion researchers'] new results?" says Allen Bard, a chemist at the University of Texas at Austin. "If they are saying, 'We are now able to reproduce our results,' that's not good enough. But if they are saying, 'We are getting 10 times as much heat out now, and we understand things,' that would be interesting. I don't see anything wrong with giving these people a new hearing." In ERAB's cold fusion review in 1989, he adds, "there were phenomena described to us where you could not offer alternative, more reasonable explanations. You could not explain it away like UFOs."

Isn't this basically a smoking gun? New fundamentl physics is often revealed by results that differ by as little as one part in a million from preditictions of current theory, or one part in whatever. If there is any discrepancy, whatsoever, within the statistical and systematic errors, that is enough. Your old theory is incorrect. This is completely bonkers. He is saying that consistent excess heat production is not enough, unless it is bigger than before.

Personally I suspsect the writer of this article, Toni Feder, intentionally tricked Dr. Bard into revealing this on the record. That last bit -- about phenomena that you can't just "explain away" -- seems as though Dr. Bard thinks he is speaking to a member of the group that is sympatico to repressing cold fusion research, doesn't it?

There is known to have been disputes between editorial staff and management at Physics Today over the coverage given to less mainstream areas of research. The following exerpt from a letter to the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today, protests the treatment suffered by a past editor, Jeff Scmidt:

Indeed, we understand that you were displeased with Jeff's workplace activism and had tried to silence him through a number of very repressive measures short of dismissal.

As you know, Jeff worked with other Physics Today staff members to ... increase staff participation in decision-making, broaden the narrow range of viewpoints allowed in the magazine ...

By the way, Jeff Schmidt is the author of Disciplined Minds [disciplined-minds.com], and I think this book includes more coverage of this editorial dispute at Physics Today.

Back to the question of how anomalous the results have to be, we move from the comments of scientists to the behavior of the reporters, in this case Gary Taubes, with What If Cold Fusion Is Real?, Wired, November 1998:

Meanwhile, electrochemist John Bockris announced that one of his graduate students at Texas A&M, Nigel Packham, had collaborated on a successful cold fusion experiment. Packham had even detected small amounts of tritium, a radioactive by-product virtually guaranteeing that fusion had taken place.

A science writer named Gary Taubes, who has written two books and several articles investigating allegations of fraudulent activity in science, went to Texas A&M on a fact-finding mission.

"We thought Taubes was genuine at first," Bockris told me recently, speaking in a clipped, precise British accent that he acquired before he moved to the U

"The critical question is, How good and different are [the cold fusion researchers'] new results?" says Allen Bard, a chemist at the University of Texas at Austin. "If they are saying, 'We are now able to reproduce our results,' that's not good enough. But if they are saying, 'We are getting 10 times as much heat out now, and we understand things,' that would be interesting. I don't see anything wrong with giving these people a new hearing." In ERAB's cold fusion review in 1989, he adds, "there were phenomena described to us where you could not offer alternative, more reasonable explanations. You could not explain it away like UFOs."

Isn't this basically a smoking gun? New fundamentl physics is often revealed by results that differ by as little as one part in a million from preditictions of current theory, or one part in whatever. If there is any discrepancy, WHATSOEVER, within the statistical and systematic errors, that is enough. Your old theory is TOAST. This is completely bonkers. He is saying that consistent excess heat production is not enough, unless it is bigger than before.

Personally I suspsect the writer of this article, Toni Feder, intentionally tricked Dr. Bard into revealing this on the record. That last bit -- about phenomena that you can't just "explain away" -- seems as though Dr. Bard thinks he is speaking to a member of the group that is sympatico repressing cold fusion research, doesn't it?

There is known to have been disputes between editorial staff and management at Physics Today over the coverage given to less mainstream areas of research. The following exerpt from a letter to the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today, protests the treatment suffered by a past editor, Jeff Scmidt:

Indeed, we understand that you were displeased with Jeff's workplace activism and had tried to silence him through a number of very repressive measures short of dismissal.

As you know, Jeff worked with other Physics Today staff members to ... increase staff participation in decision-making, broaden the narrow range of viewpoints allowed in the magazine ... .

By the way, Jeff Schmidt is the author of "Disciplined Minds", and I think this book includes more coverage of this editorial dispute at Physics Today.

Back to the question of how anomalous the results have to be, we move from the comments of scientists to the behavior of the reporters, in this case Gary Taubes, with "What If Cold Fusion Is Real?", Wired, November 1998:

Meanwhile, electrochemist John Bockris announced that one of his graduate students at Texas A&M, Nigel Packham, had collaborated on a successful cold fusion experiment. Packham had even detected small amounts of tritium, a radioactive by-product virtually guaranteeing that fusion had taken place.

A science writer named Gary Taubes, who has written two books and several articles investigating allegations of fraudulent activity in science, went to Texas A&M on a fact-finding mission.

"We thought Taubes was genuine at first," Bockris told me recently, speaking in a clipped, precise British accent that he acquired before he moved to the U

1. Should we be wasting money on missile defense when scientists have shown it is ineffective?

Bush: we're doing it no matter what anyone says.

Kerry: it would be nice, but it's lower priority than stopping the spread of WMDs.

Physicist: a previous article in Physics Today discussed the issues and showed that it's silly to think that a missile defense system would provide any safety. The only studies that show it's even close neglect to take into account certain laws of physics, like allowing for infinite acceleration, etc.

http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-10/p28.html / Kerry answers by noting that most of the R&D money is going for weapons systems and defense spending related to the war in Iraq, not basic science programs. Marburger and other administration officials point to several R&D initiatives, including new nanotechnology centers, the Moon/Mars space initiative, and the program to develop hydrogen fuel technology. ---------- Money for weapons is most certainly not money for science.