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But *if* they break... what then?

Let's put this to rest. Graphene is one of the strongest materials ever:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/jul/17/graphene-has-record-breaking-strength

Being the strongest material does not mean it is unbreakable.

But *if* they break... what then?

Let's put this to rest. Graphene is one of the strongest materials ever: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/jul/17/graphene-has-record-breaking-strength

Wave particle duality had already been demonstrated on Buckyballs which have a collective molar mass of 720. Here's an article is from 1999 : http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2952 OK, these are larger molecules rather than the larger particles in the new research, but what's being presented here isn't so much of a leap... is it?

It's already been done.

The first ever transmission of information using a beam of neutrinos has be achieved by physicists in the US. The demonstration is highly preliminary – it operates at less than 1 bit/s – and will require a lot of development before it can have any useful application. Nevertheless, the work proves a concept that physicists have been contemplating for years and that could ultimately be used in situations where other means of communications are not feasible.

.

You are right. No person with an adequate basic worldview of physics would write a sentence like "... is made up of just a few subatomic particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on." because he/she knew that protons and neutrons consist of quarks. The "and so on", seems inapropriate as well.

Also the Mike Ross's article raises some questions (although it is far from being a bad journalism when compared to many others):
- The statement that these "special electrons" had no mass was passed so lightly as it was nothing. Although, now I know that it is some special case which was found a while ago.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/23538
- "..the researchers repositioned the carbon monoxide molecules on the surface" - So, how did they do it? With a scanning tunneling microscope? I am not arguing on this one, I just didn't find it out from the article.
- The force that forced the electrons in a graphene pattern was still electromagnetic, wasn't it? So how were these particles 'fooled' ? The statement about fooling the electrons came from one of the researchers, but I would still like to know. The journalist should have asked.

I wouldn't mind if the journalist reread some of the materials about basic nuclear physics before writing an article, no problem, that's what I did just a moment ago. It is the journalists job to gather background information and it is just a fraction of the information gathered that reaches the article. I mean the journalist should have just a notch of a deeper understanding than the level he/she is writing in. Although I have to admit, It probably is a bit harder in case of the breakthrough science journalism though.

Moly disulfide is mostly known as a lubricant.

Interesting, but I wouldn't sell my stocks in silicon electronics yet. Silicon is way down the learning curve. I wouldn't bet a new semiconductor against it.

Some of what the article says is a little dubious, like the fact that silicon "The surface likes to oxidise - it likes to bind with oxygen... and that makes its electrical properties degrade when you want to make a very thin film." Yes, it forms oxide easily. No, that doesn't "degrade" the electrical properties-- in fact, this is exactly why silicon is so incredibly useful in electronics. Oxide, and the fact that silicon oxide passivates the surface to prevent electron-hole recombination at the dangling bonds, is what makes silicon electronics possible. I note that the moly disulfide transistors use hafnium oxide for a gate. That's a high dielectric constant material that is indeed also used in silicon, but the silicon oxide is still the critical interface.

By the way, I think there's slightly better info from eetimes http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4212757/New-material-for-semis-said-to-beat-silicon or physicsworld http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/45056

It seems far too much like aether, i.e. something made up to fill a gap in knowledge without much evidence backing it up.

This is true of both aether and dark energy... but at one point it was also true of Neptune and neutrinos.

It's also not quite as true as it used to be of dark matter.

I've thrown all the feeds from each of these sites into Google Reader. In no particular order:

wired.com
slashdot.org
spectrum.ieee.org
scientistscanvas.com
arxiv.org
techcrunch.com
techdirt.com
news.discovery.com
physicsworld.com
newscientist.com
physorg.com
nationalgeographic.com
scienceblog.com

I have plenty more. Any RSS feeder app works. You get some repeats but there's a constant stream of science news.

I like:

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

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

Small neutral particles of about the same size as the electrons (neutrons, neutrinos, etc.)

Let us do a quick Google search on that.

Neutrinos and electrons are regarded as fundamental particles with zero volume -- which may not be correct -- (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle), so they would have the same size. Neutrons have measurable volume (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron), so "about the same" is entirely wrong.

If we suppose you mean mass, then we get a rest mass of about 10^-30 kg for the electron and at most 10^-36 kg for the neutrino (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/32861) and around 10^-27 kg for the neutron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron), making you off by many orders of magnitude.

I'm sorry. I just couldn't resist your sig.

I'm sorry, but "recently"? I read Penrose first book on this subject in 1990. Actually it was reading this book that inspired me to go to University to study Intelligent Systems (an oxymoron, so I discovered). I also have his second book on this subject, Shadows of the Mind, on my bookshelf.

I find that his basic argument that there is something missing in our conception of reality that makes understanding of conscious experience impossible, to be fundamentally correct. Philosophers differ on whether or not consciousness and the mysteriousness of QM are related. Intuitively I would suggest that they are, but science by intuition isn't very robust so I won't explain why.

It's important not to forget that Physics and Mathematics are good tools for describing the regularities of experience, but they have absolutely nothing to say about the nature of that experience. Philosophers like Dennett would do away with the entire problem by simply denying it. David Chalmers would take the opposing view, that conscious experience can never be explained with a purely functionalist or materialist world view.

Perhaps the most interesting recent advance in this area was the discovery that plants take advantage of quantum effects in optimising photosynthesis. Evin Harris Walker makes a convincing argument for quantum effects in the brain (although he tends to focus on tunnelling, rather than the microtubule coherence that Penrose points us to). I would find it extraordinary if the brain did not take advantage of such effects in order to increase its efficiency.

I think the most important point in all of this however, is that we know very little about consciousness and we know very little about how the brain works. But more than that, it is my belief that even after science has enumerated all of the particles, fields and laws of physics, there will still be something left to explain. This is the central mystery of conscious experience that Penrose talks about and it is why Chalmers says that conscious experience does not logically supervene on the physical.

Since the provided Fox News link is useless, here is the link to the original Science paper published today by the researchers. Requires paid access, if you don't have that, try PhysicsWorld.

Basically, it is a time-reversed laser, so it absorbs coherent light.

Terra has a magntic field which protects it from radiation.

One could be generated for a spacecraft. Not easy but likely not impossible.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/36558

(Since all the long lasting radioactive isotopes are dense metals).

The decay of potassium-40 is the major contributor of heat within the Earth. Potassium isn't a dense metal. Also, there is a theory that a significant amount potassium could exist in the Earth's core.

Maybe potassium-40 is the reason why the moon does have a liquid outer core?

... I remembered reading about a study like this years ago. Turns out, I did. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/21465

I found another article about the article which makes more sense: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/44320

There is a chicken and car analogy that should appeal to the crowd here:

An analogy, says McCall, is a chicken crossing a busy road. Once the chicken steps onto the road cars must stop to let it pass, but as soon as it leaves the other side the cars would accelerate to catch up with the traffic ahead. To an observer farther down the road, the stream of passing cars would display no evidence of having slowed down.

So, there is no magical disappearing of time or events or 4D cloaking of spacetime. That's just bullshit from some journalist who doesn't understand what spacetime or 4D means... Not more than a recorded tv program is cloaking space time.

Nobody invented graphene. It was discovered, rendering it basically unpatentable, so I'm not sure why not sure what that has to do with small patent holders. However with regards to your second point, inventing a clever way of creating it was worth the Nobel Prize.

I would not say that Grephene was not patentable. The Nobel prize winners were on the verge of doing it, but they did not as they said in their interview.

And it seems they did so with good reason.

Nobody invented graphene. It was discovered, rendering it basically unpatentable, so I'm not sure why not sure what that has to do with small patent holders. However with regards to your second point, inventing a clever way of creating it was worth the Nobel Prize.

1. project orion-style propulsion.
2. artificial gravity by rotation
3. an electromagnetic shield

According to studies, it would have been feasible in 1958, so I don't see why it would not be feasible by now, considering the huge technological progress from that time.

The ship could be big enough to host a small city (the Super-Orion project speaks of an 8 million ton ship, which is extremely massive and not necessary; a 500,000 tone ship would do). It would have manned shuttle craft, that would allow personnel to land on and take off low-gravity planetary bodies. It would have all the required equipment for scientific studies.

Such a ship would make space travel between Earth, the Moon and Mars a commodity. The initial cost may be big, but it will pay off later, and most importantly, there would be no need to senseless deaths of people as in the one-way trip.

I assume it's a reference to geoneutrinos, produced by nuclear decays/reactions in the Earth's core:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/22737

I actually read the comments on TFA, and down at , there's a particularly interesting one:

This study overlooks not only the role of the editor, but also the process in which the authors are able to answer the referees' objections. When the referees are competent, this leads to better papers through useful suggestions. On the other hand, when they aren't, overcoming the exasperation of the authors, their objections are easily brushed away, and the paper eventually gets through. Also, when the case is particularly contentious, there's still the option of calling for an adjudicator. In summary, the peer-review process is far more complex than this simulation might suggest. On the dark side, I’ve also noticed that referees are sometimes reluctant to object papers from certain renowned authors. The human factor is hard to remove. I guess many people will agree that there’s a need to look for better approval systems, specially today, when there’s an explosion of submissions. However we must also acknowledge that the present system has served its purpose of maintaining a certain quality.

There's actually a reasonably intelligent discussion going on in there...

So far as we can tell, no. The Copernican principle, on which modern cosmology is largely based, states that the universe is (on large scales) homogeneous and isotropic. That means it's the same everywhere and looks the same in all directions (loosely speaking, and again, on LARGE scales). This is borne out by observations of the cosmic microwave background, for example which seems to indicate that there are no preferred directions, with variations of the observable data (such as temperature) being on the order of one part in ten thousand.

There's a pretty decent write-up of what we know at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/34361

Danny Rathjens writes "The Economist cutely writes, "Ye cannae change the laws of physics Or can you?" There was already evidence that the fine structure constant -- a measure of the strength of electromagnetic interaction -- became slightly smaller going back billions of years based on observations of light from quasars. Staggering newer observations provided evidence that the value going back in time actually became larger! The crucial difference being that the new observations were take from a telescope in the other hemisphere and so pointing to a different part of the universe. That indicates that the fine structure constant not only changed over time but it also varies based on position in space! physicsworld.com points out some fascinating implications of this observation. The pre-print of the article submitted to PRL is available at arxiv.org."

I have always wondered this myself, but I guesstimate that it would require a lens the size of the Earth. Or the Sun. Or something impossible like that.

The problem is that you can't get details from long exposures. These far-off objects require exposures that are hours long. Imagine taking a 5-hour long exposure of a soccer game: all the players would be blurred. Now imagine that the players are running at the speed of a planet: upwards of 65,000 miles per hour. That is going to be one heck of a blurry picture.

So here is my back-of-the-napkin calculation:
This article says they photographed an exoplanet using an 8 meter telescope, with a 4 hour exposure. To get a good picture of a moving object, you need about 1/30th of a second. So we need a lot more light, which means we need a larger telescope. That 8 meter telescope (pretending it is just a circle) is 8*8*3.14 ~= 200 square meters. To get the same amount of light in a 1 second exposure would require 14,400 times more area. (14,400 seconds in 4 hours). Add another factor of 30 to get 1/30th of a second exposure, so the telescope is now 3,456,000 times bigger than the original 200 meter telescope. The exoplanet pictures we have are only a few pixels. So let's say we wanted a 1 megapixel image of the planet, so we need about 1 million times more light, so lets increase the surface area of the telescope another million times. So now the lens is 3,450,000,000,000 * 200 meters = 690,000,000,000,000 meters, which is slightly more surface area than the entire surface of the earth.

And that just gets you a 1 megapixel image of the planet. That won't show you a city. And I bet a 1/30th exposure would be too slow at the speed a planet moves - it would still be too blurry. So I think my estimate of something the size of the Sun was pretty close!

Of course it's a hack!

Of course, and you're a hack to make the "there aren't AIs randomly posting to slashdot" theory work. It's not like I can actually infer your existence or anything without the direct use of my senses.

The problem is when there's no observation to either agree or disagree with, or when the observations they're developing models for are actually wrong. That is why many of these people do what is called "theoretical physics". Of course sometimes observations are made that contradict current theoretical physical theories.

There are actually many observations that support the existence of dark matter. Which is why the statement "there is more error in WMAP than thought" is a far jump from "dark matter doesn't exist". The first evidence for dark matter was not in the CMB at all, but in the behavior of galaxies. First that the observed matter was not enough to give them the behavior observed, then in galaxy collisions where large amounts of apparent matter appeared outside the galaxies, having passed right through unslowed by the collision, and then ultimately by creating maps (and more maps) of dark matter via gravitational lensing.

Like I said, many very talented physicists have tried to make sense of the observations without resorting to dark matter, and it worked when the evidence was only in the spinning of galaxies, but at this point they have mostly admitted defeat. The idea that dark matter is only accepted because nobody wants to rethink the prevailing theory is utter nonsense.

What has happened is a theory that cannot explain observation has been given a crutch to aid it limping along for a while longer until a new hypothesis is introduced to explain the discrepancy.

But the theory works perfectly if you simply infer the existence of mass as all evidence suggests. Then there is no discrepancy. Why this is such a sin, such a hack, is beyond me. Do you think that this is just a little fudge, like the numbers are off so we push 'em this way or change this constant or the mass value of this galaxy and it works? And we're happy because that's better than admitting the theory is wrong?

That's not even close. There is no way to modify gravitational theory in any sane (as in consistent with other experiments) way and get the observed results, without there being matter out there. You'd have to explain how gravitational lensing occurs in the absence of any mass/energy and how visible masses experience accelerations towards apparently empty space. To actually get that to happen, you would basically have to have gravity working completely differently than it appears to in every other observation and experiment.

So as regards evidence, I think you need some evidence for your "gravity pulls things in random directions and causes lensing around empty space without an mass/energy there" theory. But first I think you should figure out whether this theory is even consistent with the all the non-dark-matter evidence.

I think the difference is that we know from the experience of our own senses that 9 (or 8, depending on whether or not you agree) planets do actually exist, are visible and have some demonstrable gravitational effect on our own Sun. It's not such a great leap to infer that perhaps other such bodies exist around other stars and perhaps by measuring the wobble of those stars we may be able to learn something new.

Exactly. The difference is that planets are "normal", and dark matter sounds strange and weird and therefore your gut reaction is to think they are just making things up to keep their theory working. The idea of a kind of matter that has mass, but doesn't interact with photons and is thus invisible to any sort of direct electromagnetic detection, just can't be true. Even though this very article is a

There are actual radioactive lead isotopes, and they can interfere with sensitive particle experiments, so neutrino hunters are apparently very happy with roman lead.

I've never heard of it being a problem in supercomputers though, and if your computer flips bits from the tiny bit of radiation lead produces I'd imagine you might be doing something wrong.

If you read the PhysicsWorld article, you'll see it actually says:

But he believed that it would be impossible in practice to track this motion, given the incredibly short timescales over which the Brownian fluctuations take place

Ahhh... still don't have the original source quotation from Einstein here, but it sounds like Einstein believed it was "impossible in practice" - in other words, that the technology didn't exist at that time to measure rapid fluctuations over microsecond or even nanosecond time scales, and maybe he couldn't even imagine such technology existing.

So he never actually said he thought it was beyond the physical limits of the universe. There was no proof or physical law involved.

Now call me up when somebody figures out how to move matter or information faster than the speed of light (i.e. group velocity greater than c). Einstein really did believe that was *impossible*.

Maybe they are doing Dr. B. Stanley Pons Dr. Martin Fleischmann experiment in jar all over again

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/050399sci-cold-fusion.html
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/1258

Last year it was $9 billion.
Though, the year before that it was £1-2 million per ship, with about 1500 ships needed.

With that $300k they might actually make a working scaled model.
Or a better rendering of that one .jpg that has been going around all this time.

Not solar power at all. Flettner rotors.

The only NEW thing about this plan is that they claim that they've actually received $300.000 from Bill Gates.
They have been going around with this idea for years now.
And from what I can tell - all they have to show for so far is the study linked above and this concept rendering.

Looking at "estimated costs", $300.000 seems like about the amount someone with Bill Gates' money might donate to get rid of them politely.

Very few uncertainties will remain after the expenditure of the first £2 million over 2 years.
It will need perhaps £25 million and a further 3 years to complete research and development of the reliable hardware for spray vessels including the first fully instrumented, full-scale, crewed and sea-going prototype.
Once there is experience of its operation, it will cost approximately £30 million for tooling, which will allow a large number of spray vessels to be built rapidly in the event of a global emergency.

About a year later...

The Copenhagen Consensus Centre, which advises governments on how to spend aid money, examined the various plans and found the cloud ships to be the most cost-effective.

They would cost $9 billion (£5.3 billion) to test and launch within 25 years, compared to the $250 billion that the world's leading nations are considering spending each year to cut CO2 emissions, and the $395 trillion it would cost to launch mirrors into space.

Is it vaporware? Not really sure.
The idea is to just spray the seawater into the air, not actually turn it into water vapor.

Here you go.

Welcome to 2004.

There was even a slashdot discussion of the article.

Ahh but the world is more complicated than that. If there is a large amount of aerosols so that the dimming effect is large than it is true that it will reduce photosynthesis. However diffuse aerosols, especially if they are high in the atmosphere, scatter sunlight providing shaded areas with more light so plants can photosynthesize better in shaded areas.

Anyone that's done a little research knows the scientists there really did some questionable stuff. They would also know that they've (CRU/IPCC) been taken to task by others in the scientific community for doing so.

There was a small amount of criticism from the scientific community regarding small details, but the consensus was that the leaked emails did reveal a conspiracy, and did not alter any of the science. See: Nature, Scientific American New Scientist, the Royal Society.

Want to try again?

When it comes to use electrons to see cloaked items, there is science fiction and computer game presidence. In Alien vs Predator, the switching to Electric vision, the Alien can easily see a cloaked Predator.

---

Optics Feed @ Feed Distiller

Try telling that to the army of so-called String Theorists. Their models make no predictions, there are no testing, it's just another religion.

You are incorrect that string theory does not make predictions that can be proved via experimentation. For example, string theory posits that there are 10 or 11 dimensions. To demonstrate this, a high-energy particle accelerator may be able to cause an energetic enough collision of particles where some of the energy escapes into one of the higher dimensions. I recall reading a while ago that CERN was going to test for this.

There are other predictions floating around the web as well.

"The only place to find quantum mechanics, for any human being, is in said human's imagination."

The macro effects of quantum mechanics can be observed in the viscosity of mayonnasie and similar liquids.

"The only place to find relativity theory in action is off the planet."

Time dialation has been repeatedly observed on the surface of Earth and is important for navigation.

The resulting nanostructures might be used as scaffolds or as miniature circuit boards for precisely assembling components like carbon nanotubes and nanowires. Such circuits would be much smaller than those possible using conventional techniques to fabricate semiconductors. Indeed, the resolution of the process is roughly 10x higher than those currently used to make computer chips because the spacing between the components can be as small as just 6 nm, explains Rothemund.

Source: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/40171

"I have yet to see *one* criticism of something in the Carlin paper [snip] if you actually looked at the linked comments paper, it attempts to raise questions. Points to new studies, revised data, etc."

Can you point to *one* paragraph, "new study" or "data revision" in the report that you think is worthwhile debating? - All I can see are the same old arguments and misinformation put out out by the anti-science lobbyists at CEI and other FF think tanks that have been debunked a million times over. Here are a few specific critisisims...

1. He claims that tempratures have been trending downwards for the past 11yrs - this can be debunked by a simple google search and is laughable to anyone who has looked at the temprate records.
2. He blathers on about sunspots and cosmic rays - a theory born from a book by a self-agrandising author and completely unsupported in the litrature, debunked in detail by yours trully here.
3. He complains the last IPCC report is 3 years old and thus out of date. - Fucking nonsense.
4. He claims that the 1998 temprature spike cannot be explained - maybe it's a mystery to him but yet another simple google search shows it's well known that the 1998 spike was due to El Nino.

I stopped there because my head was about to explode. Suffice to say that after skimming what I was sure would be 98 pages of anti-science drivel I no longer think he should be sacked, I think he should be prosecuted for collusion and conspiricy.

"all the more reason to not rush through it to satisfy political whims of the day!"

I'm sorry to say, and mean no disrespect, this is exacly what the psuedo-skeptical slimeballs at CEI want you to think. They lost the technical debate over a decade ago and have been promoting "debate" as a delay tactic ever since. These are the same people who promoted "tabacco scientists" in the eighties and are still recieving funding from Phillip Morris. They are the scum of the earth and I don't find it the least bit "bizzare" that the "slashdot crowd" are calling bullshit on this particular example of Machevelian politics.

Not really as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima, but Germany tested TWO nuclear devices well before the US tested theirs. The German tests came in 1944 and early 1945 (compare to US first test in July 1945). The German nuclear initiative was headed by this man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Diebner

There are number of recently publicized documents and eyewitness accounts of the actual nuclear tests. Even Mussolini gave a speech praising the new German weapon. And Germany was not far away from putting nuclear warheads on the V2. Do some more research before you dismiss German technology as futile. Western historians wouldn't be happy to admit that the Nazis were the first to the bomb. Strictly speaking though, the German bomb was little more than a dirty bomb. But they came within a hair of developing a full-scale nuclear weapon and nuclear missiles. Some more information is available here http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/22270

Those natuaral variations include solar flux but not susnspots, the reason being is that there is not a scrap of hard evidence that sunspots affect Earth's climate but there is plenty of evidence they affect book sales.

FWIW I spent a few months reproducing research for a suspect article that was published in Nature. Finally my findings were confirmed: the original author was full of shit. Beware of appeal to authority. Don't believe everything you read, even in Nature.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/9951

Yes, possibly: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/19636

when that early star exploded it would have had heavier elements, iron has been detected from 900 million years after big bang.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/17403

"Ultracold" here refers to degenerate Fermi gases, not Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC).

Here's a layman article:
A Fermi gas of atoms
Deborah Jin
Physics World, 2002

And the original publication by the Duke group:
Observation of a Strongly Interacting Degenerate Fermi Gas of Atoms
K. M. O'Hara, S. L. Hemmer, M. E. Gehm, S. R. Granade, J. E. Thomas
Science Vol 298, p 2179 - 2182 (2002)

Sounds mysteriously like a proposal by someone else see here:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/35693

http://www.aip.org/pnu/2002/split/599-2.html

http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/19866

Nice summary, unfortunately you come of as a raving lunatic claiming that epicycles IS the only explanation mankind need and that it's BLASPHEMOUS to claim that there is some other kind of explanation!

I still like facts, and thus I'll happily wait for the CLOUD experiment at CERN with regards to Svensmark's hypothesis.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/3124

http://cloud.web.cern.ch/cloud/

Contrary to common belief, the greenhouse effect may have more to do with water in our atmosphere than gases such as carbon dioxide http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/17402

My big concern is over the principle that once these are made publicly digitally available, they will be easily tampered with.

Carbon dating and radioactive isotopes.