Slashdot Mirror

With that out of the way, American Scientist does a good job of covering science news. It's parent organization, Sigma Xi, has a filtered publication, Science in the News, that is edited by a real person, who screens for quality in the articles.

One of the big problems in journalism at large, and especially coverage of news in science, is that the journalists are not familiar with the material. So, the professional dumbs it down enough for the reporter to 'get it', and then he rewrites his notes into an 'interesting' story.

So, by the time it gets published, a bunch of the original material is missing or misreported, since the reporter is trying to get his story published.

here (pdf)

Actually Werner Heisenberg got the calculation of the critical mass of Uranium 235 needed for a bomb wrong, which was the main reason that the Germans never commited any serious resources to a nuclear weapons project. Heisenberg calculated the critical mass to be of the order of several tons and it was therefore concluded that a bomb was not feasible. See this description of Heisenberg's reaction to news of the dropping Hiroshima bomb to see that he really believe that many tons of Uranium 235 was needed.

The first reasonably accurate calculation of the critical mass of Uranium 235 was made by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham, England in 1940. They found that only about a kilogram or so would be needed for a bomb and a memorandum submitted by them to British science advisor Henry Tizard on March 19th can be seen as the main trigger for the Manhatten project. Frisch and Peierls calculation turned out to be slightly low and in fact a few kilograms rather than one was needed but it was still three orders of magnitude less that the few tons the Germans thought was necessary.

I wonder what constitutes a computer?

Almost anything. Have you paid your tinker-tax?

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If the universe is known to be expanding farther and farther away from each individual star from the Big Bang, would the universe one day begin to 'collapse' on itself when stars begin to attract each other towards the center of the universe caused by their own gravities?

In short, the fate of the universe depends on the true nature of Einstein's cosmological constant, also known as "that damn nuisance of a lambda" in more jocular astrophysics circles. I quote:

"In this model, called the inflationary Big Bang, the universe should contain a critical density of matter, just enough to slow expansion to a halt, given infinite time. Scientists express this condition of critical density as omega equals one. Too little mass -- if omega equals less than one -- and the universe would expand forever, growing ever more tenuous. If omega equals more than one, then the universe would collapse of its own weight, contracting in what is called the Big Crunch."

Read the link for more. There was also an excellent article on this in last month's (?) American Scientist, IIRC.

Watson and Crick discovered the double helical structure of DNA; this reveals the method of genetic replication.

The genetic code, which is used to convert genetic information into actual proteins which do the physical work of life, was not discovered until quite a few years later. Crick made a number of important contributions to the discovery of the genetic code, but he isn't credited with it.

Here's a writeup on the history of efforts to decipher the genetic code.

Not strictly true. The Nazis had a significant nuclear-weapons research program, using the intellectual powers of such notable physicists as Werner Heisenberg (of "Uncertainty Principle" fame). However, they were convinced that an exploding nuclear bomb was impractical, because Dr. Heisenberg had grossly mis-estimated the critical mass of uranium. Because of this, the most likely form of Nazi nuclear weapon was a subcritcal reactor-bomb which would "detonate" through a mechanism more like the Chornobyl meltdown than a runaway complete fission reaction.

That said, the commando raids on the various plants supporting this reasearch definitely helped guarantee that Nazi Germany never attained nuclear weapons. We can be fairly grateful for that, I think.

I won't research for you, but if you're interested, the preprints archive at LANL has a lot of relevant theory. Basically, the current research is trying to come with a unified framework for so-called "phase transitions" in stochastic discrete processes. One of the most studied problems is the transition between "easy" and "hard" problems in 3-SAT (three-satisfiability). Brian Hayes has a very readable article about this phenomenon, with references. The authority in this field seems to be Gabriel Istrate.

The emergence of the giant component in random networks is a mature field of research, of course pioneered by Erdös, and with players of the likes of Don Knuth and Doron Zeilberger.

From a mathematical standpoint, Graph Theory per se is not really complicated, what actually is is the asymptotic analysis of stochastic processes.

HTH,
Matas

By "it's digital" I assume you mean "it's binary". Which is the whole point. Binary hardware is cheaper/easier to build than other options ("dimmer switches" as it were).

What it all comes down to is doing something you love.

What it all comes down to is the the reward cascade in your limbic system.

Thought this article might provide some interesting background on thermoacoustics.

The Article also gives the following quote;

"Perhaps the prettiest number system of all," writes Donald E. Knuth in The Art of Computer Programming, "is the balanced ternary notation."

In the paragraph just above figure 2:

Everything hinges on the assumption that rw is a proper measure of hardware complexity, or in other words that the incremental cost of increasing the radix is the same as the incremental cost of increasing the number of digits.

Scroll back up to figure 1, and the third paragraph up is where the assumption is first made:

By one plausible measure, it is the most efficient of all integer bases; it offers the most economical way of representing numbers.

How do you measure the cost of a numeric representation?

[snip, absurd cases of base 1 and base 1e6]

Evidently we need to optimize some joint measure of a number's width (how many digits it has) and its depth (how many different symbols can occupy each digit position). An obvious strategy is to minimize the product of these two quantities. In other words, if r is the radix and w is the width in digits, we want to minimize rw while holding rw constant.

So what he's saying is that the "cost" of a representing a number is the cost per digit multiplied by the number of digits required. But he makes the assumption that the cost of each digit is a linear relationship with the radix, which is simply not true in almost any system (certainly not in electonic circuitry nor in telephone menu systems).

Speaking mathematically, r is the radix, and w is the number of digits (or symbols, words, or whatever you call them) required using that radix. The cost is F(r) * w, where F(r) is some model for the cost to implement that radix.

The words "An obvious strategy" are plain wrong. It's not obvious at all. It's simple-minded and ignorant. It's devoid of any anaylsis or thought about any real system. Even from a purely theoretical standpoint, it's academically dishonest to gloss over this critically important point rather than write "r * w" instead of "w * F(r)" and state the assumption of a linearly increasing cost per digit as the radix changes.

Well, maybe that's a bit strong. Who am I to judge what's academically proper. But the paper clearly begins by saying:

People count by tens and machines count by twos ... I want to offer three cheers for base 3, the ternary system ... They are the Goldilocks choice among numbering systems: When base 2 is too small and base 10 is too big, base 3 is just right.

The general arguement that base-3 is actually superior for computer arithematic is also quite evident in the "Trit by Trit by Trit" section (just below figure 1). I'll avoid quoting much of it, but at the conclusion he writes:

Why did base 3 fail to catch on? One easy guess is that reliable three-state devices just didn't exist or were too hard to develop. And once binary technology became established, the tremendous investment in methods for fabricating binary chips would have overwhelmed any small theoretical advantage of other bases.

Now the rhetorical question "Why did base 3 fail to catch on?" is answered by postulating (not even any real knowledge) that way-back-then it was too tricky to design and base-2 gained so much momentum and became so well established that base-3 never caught on. Notice how he concludes with the words "overwhelmed any small theoretical advantage of other bases", reaffirming once again the standpoint the base-3 has some advantage, if small, over base-2, theoretically speaking. He's clearly talking about implementation of circuitry.

The ugly truth is that rolled up in the theoretical advantage of base-3 for circuitry is that assumption that the "cost" is "r times w" (r for radix, w for number of digits). Any engineer can tell you that cost has units of dollars, and r and w are both unitless quantities. To compute the cost of using a particular number system, you need to use a function (above I called it "F(r)") that transforms the abstract number "r" into the cost of implementing that radix. The unitless number of possible digits needs to be turned unto a quantity in units of dollars (or some other currency) before it can be multiplied by "w" to obtain the cost of implementing that radix.

Nowhere in the paper could I find that Brian Hayes claimd "that circuit complexity increases linearily with the number of logic levels." He was being theoretical about the whole issue. In other words, if hardware was not an issue, then the trinary number system is the most effecient numbering system. He was not stating that a trinary number system is beter because the circuit complexity is less. In fact, Brian Hayes goes on to state that:

Base 2 dominates computing technology because binary devices are simple and reliable, with just two stable states--on or off, full or empty. Computer circuitry also exploits a coincidence between binary arithmetic and binary logic: The same signal can represent either a numeric value (1 or 0) or a logical value (true or false).

I would find it interesting to see how well a trinary computer performs compaired to a binary computer. It would also be interesting to compair the complexity involved in bulding each machine and decide which numbering system is practally best.

It could be accomplished (fully static CMOS, no steady state current to maintain a 3rd logic level) with a second power supply, and circuitry designed to connect the output to either Vss, Vdd or Vmm (m for middle, for lack of any other name.. hmm) Brian Hayes's flawed assumption is that circuit complexity increases linearily with the number of logic levels. He writes "An obvious strategy is to minimize the product of these two quantities", refering to the radix and number of symbols to represent a number... but he just pulled that out of a hat. The required circuit complexity is not linear function of the radix, and a realistic model would quickly prove that binary is the most efficient. A fully static ternary output requires a minimum of four transistors, whereas binary requires only two.

That chip's going to get a little hot!

With a static CMOS circuit designed this way, power consumption would be approx 0.5 * C * f * V^2 (as it is in normal binary circuit). C will probably increase somewhat, as nearly twice as many transitors would be needed per circuit, yet fewer trits are needed that bits for the representing the same numerical range, so the increase in C probably wouldn't be by a factor of two. Presumably f (the clock frequency) would stay the same (well... I'll get to that...), and V stays the same (50% of transitions in binary are full supply voltage, in ternary 33% are full voltage and 33% are half voltage). Power comsumption would probably be similar.

Saddly, f probably won't stay the same. C gets larger on each signal, and when driving to half voltages, the transistors that would connect to the Vmm supply get only half the effective gate voltage applied. So doubling the load and cutting the drive significantly is really going to hurt the circuit's speed.

Dynamic logic tricks (pre-charged busses) and bicmos circuits add another interesting dimension that's too complex to worry about, though it'd be important for any microprocessor.

But power consumption isn't likely to be a problem.

Getting back to the old PDP-8, as I recall it was a binary machine. The motivation behind 12 bits was that 6 bits was ideal to represent both upper and lower case characters and plenty of symbols, and 12 bits (two chars) was plenty for useful math. I don't recall the popularity of 6/12 bit systems having anything to do with base-3 signaling.

Maybe someone would enlighten the rest of us on why a certain bit size is better than another, and why we currently use 8/16/32/64, instead of 12/24/48/96 ?

This article explains why base-3 systems are actually a lot better than base-2 from a theoretical perspective, but that it was much easier to design hardware in base-2, so base-2 became the de-facto standard. Nowadays we could probably fab base-3 hardware fairly easily, but it's not worth doing so with all the base-2 hardware already in existance.

As for 16/32/64 instead of 12/24/48, it's just one of those things. IBM's earlier AS/400s ran on 48-bit processors (now they are 64-bit). 96-bit floating point is an IEEE standard. And do you know why file permissions in Unix are rwxrwxrwx? It's because they borrowed that idea from another operating system designed for 9-bit bytes and a 36-bit processor.

As the article states this is currently on display in the main entrance to the Boston science museum. it looks really darn cool but it just sits there, no demonstrations or anything. I think they are afraid any actual usage will break the thing. :/

Here's a better image of the contraption

This is just impossible! :)

But seriously, I did read it. Well, really just the section about nanotubes, and if the rest of the paper is equally fallacious, I think that would serve as pretty conclusive evidence of the imposibility of the space elevator. Using a combination of an overestimate of the strength of nanotubes with an underestimate of their density, the author uses a strength/mass ratio that is twice as large as the UPPER bound on the strength of nanotubes (which is the ideal strength). In practice the ideal tensile strength is typically many times higher than the yield strength. In case you're wondering, this is based on density functional calculations I performed myself--far better than the crude estimates refered to in the paper. And yes, I did just check his source. It's a review paper that refers to an extrapolation of a strength based on a strain from a tight-binding molecular dynamics calculation which the authors recommend taking with a grain of salt.

On the experimental side, noone has yet (to my knowledge) produced a composite based on nanotubes which is actually particularly strong. Even if these composites are developed (and probably eventually nanotube composites will surpas carbon fiber composites), they are guaranteed to pay a major hit in strength/mass due to the mass of the epoxy. Look for more like a factor of two over carbon fiber composites, rather than the factor of 50 or so advertised.

As mentioned in the paper, the mass of cabling needed is extremely sensitive to the strength/mass ratio. I don't know the relation (since I haven't looked up the Pearson paper), but he mentions that if you diminish the strength/mass ratio by a factor of 50 (using kevlar) from his fictitious nanotube ratio, the mass goes up by about a factor of 100,000. With an overestimate of the strength of nanotubes of at least a factor of two, probably much more, it seems highly unlikely that the cost of the elevator (already estimated to be rather high) will be within reason, and for all I know there may similar "rounding up" going on in the rest of the paper.

I think this hit list is totally stupid. Half the things on that list wouldn't fall under the law.

Too bad your -1 wrong post also gets +1 funny.

Everything on that list IS covered.

Perhaps they changed the language, but last time I checked they specified "interactive digital device" and defined it. As far as I could tell the definition would also have covered a tinker toy.

So yes, it is totally stupid. Not the list, but the law that prompted the list. 100% brain-dead stupid. From a US Senator. Oh joy.

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This is a good point. Millikan may have had some undesirable qualities, but I don't think an inclination to fraud was one of them. The whole thing stems from one sentence in his paper, "It is to be remarked, too, that this is not a selected group of drops but represents all of the drops experimented on during 60 consecutive days...", that is arguably taken out of context by those claiming fraud. See this for an additional recounting in favor of Millikan.

Or everything could look just like Earth, only they use right-handed amino acids instead of left-handed ones. We wouldn't kill each other, but neither could we share a meal (and we wouldn't have to worry about them developing a taste for human flesh).

Software isn't patentable. What is patentable are inventions that can be implemented using a general purpose computing machine, configured to perform as described by software.

Software is merely part of the description of a machine in the same way drawings and diagrams are part of the descriptions of other machines. A software engineer uses programming languages to describe his machines while other types of engineers use lines, points, and measurements.

What makes it difficult to see that programming is machine building is the scale at which the parts are manipulated. People don't see bits of charge getting put into memories. A computer before and after it's been programmed look the same.

On the other hand, if I hand you a diagram of a tinker-toy computer showing you how the parts go together, etc, its pretty obvious that this describes a real machine. When such machines are patented, we don't call them drawing patents just because they are described using abstract things such as lines, circles, and polygons. There are no shouts of "lines can't be patented!" because its obvious that the drawings are describing a machine, and its the machine that patented.

If its still hard to see this, you're not alone. It isn't obvious to most people (even programmers) that software fullfills the same role for electronic computing machines as drawings do for other machines. Patent-wise, the situation has been quite unfair to programmers until recently and it took a long time for the USPTO to come around.

If you still need convincing, ask yourself this: can a machine the consists of a circuit be patented? Can it include transistors? If yes, then software must be allowed in patents for practical reasons, otherwise patents would become enormous collections of huge diagrams showing the placement of charges in capacitors, or magnetic domains on a disk, or pits burned in a CD read by laser. A software description of these patterns is much more economical.

The recent American Scientist article on this described how the constant flexing of the moon in its orbit around Jupiter may produce tides that rise through the myriad cracks on the surface, bringing water close to the surface.. The cracks are plentiful and it shouldn't be too hard to find the more recent ones. Actually, the article describes in some detail crack formation and propogation. The overall impression is that this is a constant process and that it may be an easy way of getting to the sub-europan ocean.

Quoth phunhippy:

So you think withour[sic] Religion we would have Anarchy? I think without religion we would have had a lot less wars in the past 5000 years.

You must have missed the recent article in American Scientist on conflict. Statisticians seem to think that conflicts occur randomly, that "the data offer no reason to believe that wars are anything other than randomly distributed accidents." Here, "wars" include any deadly conflict down to the individual level (e.g. murder). With or without religion, we are a murderous race. If it isn't religion we're fighting about, it's about trade, or it's about skin color, or it's about the country from which your great-grandparents emigrated, or it's about how much of a certain resource you have, et cetera ad nauseum. Heck, some days, it's just becuase somebody is being an asshole and is getting in someone else's way.

I think, regardless what the philosophers or scientists say, that we are a bunch of primitive animals that are barely civilized enough to bathe on a semi-frequent basis (and that only recently). In that context, killing each other or our own spawn is merely "human nature," regardless of our justifications (like "oh, but he was going to kill me" or "fight to preserve our freedom" or "it's my body").

For a fairly detailed overview of quantum computers, see Brian Hayes' article "The Square Root of NOT".

The mind boggles at the power of a quantum parallel CPU and that's before some smart arse overclocks it.

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Recently American Scientist" had an article on possible niches for organisms on Europa. The magazine article is worth reading. Very interesting. It is pretty easy to do the calculation that shows how deep the oceans are on Europa. You can even get an idea of the ice thickness from the heat diffusion for snow, though maybe I fluked that one. Anyway, Europa is the next moon out from Io which is pretty tormented by tidal stress. The surface of Europa is amazingly flat ... like the ice isn't very thick blah blah .. you get the picture.

People have been theorising about this for about 20 years, Clarke didn't invent the "life on Europa" thing he was just astute enough to see a winning theory. I remember at the time I was surprised so few supported it ... it seemed a very likely possibility. Then when hydrothermal vents were discovered it didn't take long for people to put the two ideas together.

Actually, the likely pressure at the bottom of the ocean on Europa is likely to be similar to that at the deepest parts of the Earth's oceans. But no-one knows. Can't wait for a probe to do some searching ... even just the ice on the surface near the cracks should have heaps of biological stuff if there is life there. Also, its probably the easiest place we could colonise. I mean the temp is over 0 C and the upper layers should be ok for scuba ... and a few subs ... hmmmmmmmmm

Pete

• photo at the European Museum on CS and Technology
• article (including bibliography) at the Virtual Computer Museum
• discussion of ternary computing at American Scientist

I swear I am not making this up. Look it up at your university library if you don't believe me:

According to a review of the book "Shark Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance" (Lyons Press) in reputable science journal "American Scientist", Volume 89, September-October 2001, p. 458, "The book is loaded with other shark-related facts, including the surprising information that these animals are less dangerous than toilets: In 1996, only 18 people in the United States were killed or injured by a shark, whereas 43,687 were injured by a toilet. ("Could the toilets be mistaking people for seals?)

And you worry about shark attacks? Me, I play Barry White songs to my toilet. I'd rather have it put the moves on me than mistake me for a seal.

Google works on the idea that information that is the most useful will be linked to more, essentially, it identifies clusters of information dense websites and ranks them. There was some other research, involving graph theory (actually, Google tech does too... Google really is a feat of theoretical and practical value), that talk about power law relationships. Here's an article (1 in a series of 2) in American Scientist. The bibliography has some references that might be useful to anyone truly interested in the topological nature of the internet.

As you can read, as far as 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged a brown dwarf orbiting a brown dwarf on Gliese 229B. Indeed, some of the US media call it "the first discovered brown-dwarf" although the discoverer was Rafael Rebolo et al at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (he and his colleagues proposed the "Lithium test" method to actually detect this substellar objetcts). You can read a short report about brown dwarf findings at American Scientist.

Oh really? Would you kindly care to point out where logic gates and trinary algebra is used in Third Base? If you read the article, maybe you wouldn't post such blatantly false comments. trinary.cc has infinitely more depth.

Trinary computing sounds a little like taking something that was settled on in the first place and resettling again

1. The cost of representing a particular number in a given base depends on a) how many digits there are in the number in that base, and b) how many digits there are in the base
2. Analysis of said formula gives a minimal value at e=2.718281828...
3. Dealing with numbers in irrational bases is problematic, but the same formula also suggests that using base 3 is more optimal than using base 2.
4. In the end, none of this matters, since AYBABTU.

After you read one, or both, of them, reflect on the "obviousness" of pencils and paperclips.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sad to say, but the existence of Lake Vostok has been known for at least 18 months, and has been assumed to exist for much longer.

Though I have to admit the prospect of a virgin body of untouched water the size of Ontario is a very cool thing to contemplate.

American Scientist noted the lake in 1999, as did SCAR and Earth Sciences News -- ESN also talks about some 'microbes' found near/in it, and they have a telling graphic of the lakes' actual size. Cool stuff.

Here is an article from American Scientist. I suspect the information it has might help you.

If NEST doesn't have *immediate* access to the information they need, bad things will happen, like cities being atomized or poisoned by plutonium.

Cities atomized? How?

The toxicity of plutonium is a myth. What's worse, it's also pseudoscientific nonsense perpetuated by muddy thinking. I hesitate to post a link for fear of tanking an innocent web server, but here it is. Here's another link with more numbers, and another.

It's not poisonous in the chemical sense. There are any number of common materials that are more toxic chemically than plutonium. The chemical tocxity, if there is any (it has not been observered) is completely insignificant compared to its radiation effects. It is most dangerous when inhaled, since it is an alpha emitter and can then raise the risk of lung cancer. Even so, there are no peer-reviewed studies showing that plutonium is extremely dangerous when inhaled. This is just one of those old canards that will probably never die.

Someone already brought this up earlier, but even more promising than the Magsail is the M2P2. There are are problems with the Magsail, especially with the size of the superconducting loop--the needed diameter of which has been estimated from kilometers to hundreds of kilometers.

The material requirements for the M2P2 are more modest. The M2P2 uses a magnetic field generated by a solenoid. This field is then "inflated" with plasma. According to Dr. Winglee:

"...a 200-kilogram probe could deploy a magnetic sail of perhaps 20 kilometers' breadth and attain a velocity of nearly 100 kilometers per second using 50 kilograms of gas and about 1,000 watts of power to keep the plasma envelope filled. Making way at that clip, a craft could reach from Earth to Saturn in less than six months. The Cassini probe now on route to the ringed planet, by comparison, will take seven years..."

For more information, take a look at this article from American Scientist, or try this page at the University of Washington.

See this American Scientist article: Rising Scores on Intelligence Tests

Actually, it's not a theory, it's Einstein -Podolsky-Rosen, which was recently proved as a law of quantum mechanics with a neat little experiment...
In a nutshell, EPR implies that in an entangled state, certain particles would seem to violate local reality by "agreeing" on their quantum state, with no perceptible particle exchange (which means it's not limited by the speed of light), even when separated by great distances.

The problem is, for now, that we have no way of predetermining quantum states in entangled pairs, meaning we can't yet use it for FTL data transmission. But it is the principle behind quantum teleportation, which is unspeakably cool.

ObKomputerGeek->Relevance: Information stored in quanta has some freaky properties.