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Constants Not Constant?
grytpype writes: "According to this story, a team of astronomers have determined (based on their observations of distant quasars) that [certain physical constants] may have been different in the far past of the universe. The discovery (if validated) is said to be good news for string theorists."
Well I guess it depends on how you say SR is affected. The transformations from one frame of reference to another are unaffected. Now its just that c could possibly be smaller or larger. The fundamentals of the theory remain unchanged, only the numbers you punch in are different. Its on the scale of doing more precise measurements of the speed of light. SR is only affected in that the result you get is slightly changed--the underlying theory is unaffected. Its like calculting gravity force and suddenly we improve the Gravitational constant measurement. Well the numbers we get from the theory are all slightly different, but the underlying theory is unchanged. Special Relativity does not care is the speed of light is 1 m/s or 100 m/s. Its just cares that objects transform according to certain laws.
Cthulhu for president!
There are very standard notions of convergence that lead to the conclusion that 1 + 2 + 3 + ... converges to -1/12.
Let me ask you this. You say that the truth is "we're on our own, and have to make our own futures". How will you beat death? You want to make your future here and now in this universe, that's fine, but what about your (and everyone else's) eventual demise? Are you going to solve that problem?
"This isn't a 'life after death' debate!" Fine. Fine. But we're talking about what we call our universe. I hope you have thoroughly researched what's going to happen when you stop breathing and die.
If all gods are "obsolete", what's the point of living? Betting yourself? Mankind? That's fine while you're here, but when you die, based on the theory that there aren't any gods or God, your brain will die, your body will cease all electrical activities, and all of your memories and being will cease to exist. Why do anything at all in life if dying negates everything you've done? In fact, if there's no God or life after this one, you won't even remember anything that's been discussed here because you're dead. You have ceased to exist like you never existed.
Think about it. Can you make your own future facing absolute death?
The differences between the sexes are mostly registry entries. Certain features of nipples are disabled in men.
I don't understand how saying "Microsoft Sucks" will get me modded down as a troll when saying something like this doesn't. Come on moderators, wake up! This post is awfully offensive to those who are Christians and thinkers. Yeah, it makes me a little mad to see some creationists misuse science, but the outright attack in this post is just begging for a reply.
(quoted from the article) The observations revealed patterns of light absorption that the team could not explain without assuming a change in a basic constant of nature involving the strength of the attraction between electrically charged particles.
In a related story... janitor walk by & corrects faulty assumptions of flawed mathematical equation scrawled by over-eager astrophysicists...
but he's given a dope-slap & sent on his way.
your stupid math teachers?? reading your words, you might have been wise to listen to them more than insulting them.
first off, before dissing them, read all this page on differential geometry: http://147.4.150.5/~matscw/diff_geom/tc.html.
if you do not understand the following phrase: "a geodesic on the 2-sphere, when embedded in 3 dimensional euclidean space, does not have a non-zero first curvature vector", do not bother replying yet. go back and read that again. take care to look carefully at section 8.
also, if a terminology exists for something, don't make up your own. it only makes you sound overly self important.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
the scientifically accepted age is irrelevent, all are based on theories, just because the majority prefer one theory over another does not make it the _right_ theory.
... well ... somehow seemed to exist .. which magically created life, and the universe." They both seem pretty far out to me, but then how the universe was created seems a rather pathetic problem to mull over then say, a cure for aids, population control education, homeless people, etc.
The expansion of the universe and all evidence that supports it proves one thing. That the universe is expanding. It does not prove either way the Big Bang theory. It could equally prove that there was a shockwave generated by creation or alternatively that creation is still happening. (Neither theories I've heard before, they're just illustrations)
Why is "everything just sort of poofed everything into place at some point in the recent past" any different from "all of a sudden there was this huge explosion from elements that
But, on a more positive note, string theory (if correct) looks like it really goes a long way towards explaining a lot of the stranger questions. Like why the physical constants are what they are, why electrons, protons, neutrons have the masses that they do, etc.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
time i was able to sit in with Flatt and Scruggs because they heard the riffs I played on my steel slide rule...
Does this mean my "f" in Physics 101 will come up for review anytime soon?
Ditto that. As long as several such posts don't get moderated up, I have no problem with this. I'm sure the previous poster said something like this because he's struggling to get above 0 karma or something.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
"2 != 2. It really equals 1.999987834637462"
My friend, it is long past overdue for you to upgrade that old Pentium-60.
Comprehending relativity doesn't make sense to me unless the speed of light can vary. On the one hand you have "Nothing is constant, eveything is relative" and on the other "the speed of light is constant". That the speed of light can speed up as the universe expands makes it possible (for me at least) to visualize the universe from bigband to the present. Before this I had a perception of the universe where everything in it (space/time, big rocks, etc.) was connected and influenced by each other - except for light, somehow immune yet influenced by gravity. Too many contradictions.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Here's a quick summary, for those opposed to NYTimes registration (incidentally, feel free to use the login slashdot66, password slashdot):
Astrophysicists have observed spectra from metallic atoms in gas clouds up to 12 billion light years away. Certain patterns in these spectra cannot be explained with current physics, and suggest that the fine structure constant (alpha) had a value slightly different in that place and time. From memory, I believe alpha is a dimensionless number with a value near (but not exactly) 137. The difference between alpha as we know it, and the apparent alpha in these gas clouds is about 0.001%. The observation was made from the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Something like this, if confirmed, would almost certainly win the discoverers a Nobel Prize. Also, such a discovery would apparently also support string theory (although that's outside my area of research).
I'll stop karma whoring now, and return you to your regularly-scheduled uninformed flamefest.
Specifically, re: magnetic field decay, the person who originally came up with the 10k year limit pulled an exponential curve from a point plot that doesn't seem to suggest an exponential curve. He didn't account for the earth's magnetic field fluctuating, instead of just decaying, and (most importantly) he was under the assumption that there is no energy source in the earth to cause the magnetic field to change. However, we know now that heating caused by radioactive decay in the earth produces a lot of heat...
Info, if anyone's interested:
Edited by Laurie R Godfrey
Publushed by WW Norton & Company, Inc
Copyright 1983
ISBN 0-393-30154-0
I suggest anyone who gets into arguments with people who make claims like "the world is only 6000 years old!" and "Geologic dating has been proven wrong" and such shit go get a copy, at the library or try to find it in a bookstore.
Lets see:
... who knows what we'll have learned in another 500 years, or another 5,000. Indeed, already we have answered far more questions through science in the blink of a proverbial eye than religion has in 6000 years and more general folklore has in 3,000,000. I wouldn't dismiss science just yet, merely because its results, while often truly dramatic, aren't instantaneous (and are subject to revision upon the accumulation of new knowledge, which is one of science's greatest strengths).
The universe is something on the order of 15,000,000,000 years old.
The earth has been around about 4,000,000,000 years.
Human beings are believed to have existed for approximately 3,000,000 years.
Human civilization as we know it is estimated to have begun around 10,000 years ago.
Modern monotheistic religions, purporting to have all of life's answers, have only been around for 5,000 years or so.
Modern science, which is actively searching for many of those answers, is only about 500 years old.
500 years. 1/100th as much time as (modern) religion has had to answer those questions. 1/6000th of the age of the human race. 1/8,000,000th of the age of the planet, and 1/3,000,000,000th the age of the universe.
I think claiming that, because science hasn't yet provided all of the answers after which it searches in a mere 500 years is akin to a child claiming that, because they were unable to learn those skills necessary to life as an adult in just two days, they will never learn.
Science may never answer the most fundamental questions of life. Then again, it just might. We are really only in the first moments of trying
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Another article at SiliconValley.com.
Chris Southern
Well, I think my knowledge of string theory prevents me from making any comments that were productive. But I think I have enough of a grasp of things to point out some flaws in the original post. So I added what I could to the discussion, and attempted to do it a polite fashion. I even thought I had succeeded. Apparently not. So, I apologize for any offense taken. That was not my intent, and I most certainly did not intend to belittle or personally attack the author.
Basically, it says that at extremely high temperatures, forces combine together. First, the electromagnetic force with weak nuclear force, becoming electroweak force, then the strong nuclear force, then finally, gravity (it is better explained in Hawking's book). Basically, depending on the temperature of the substance you're working with, constants, laws, and forces that it obey change as well.
Hawking also tells us that there is a constant amount of energy and matter in the universe, and the universe is constantly expanding and cooling. Since no natural law is so abrupt as to spontaneously jump from one value to another (a bullet traveling in one direction cannot change its direction entirely without stopping first, then going the other way, even if it is shot at directly with a cannon ball), then it only makes sense that it would change smoothly on some sort of function. Why shouldn't this idea be applied to constants? In this case, the force combination at high temperatures (such as the infinte temperature at the beginning of time) would follow some sort of inverse function, such as c = k ^ h + 300,000 (where k is some unknown value, h is the temperature of the location in space). So, at incredibly high temperatures, this would severely change the value of "c" (the speed of light), but at lower ones, the change would have less effect.
I don't believe that the value of light or gravity or any other constant will change with time, but instead with temperature, since the temperature of an object directly changes how it acts (H20: ice vs. water vs. vapor, etc), not what particular time it is in. This would still hold up with the quasar observations. With an incredible amount of distance separating us and the phenomena we're observing, the temperature of the universe in between here and there would affect the observations more, not the time in which it was sent.
Well, this is defintely more than just $.02 worth, but interesting to consider, nonetheless.
The speed of time is one second per second.
We didn't evolve from any primate species living today.
But wait, I can hear it now "Apes and Humans are virutually 90% identical, we all came from the same primate ancestor! We have the same DNA! We evolved!"
Heh. Well, I share common genetic ancestors with (almost) every other lifeform on the planet. (Juty is still out with some of the sulpher-eaters.) You, however, evolved directly from clay and sand, I'm sure, with a healthy helping of shale. Corp. Detritus would be ashamed to be labled of the same species as you... as would poor blue Skull...
how could we possibly know that we had, and that there wasn't some even better
description lurking just beyond our reach?
My theory is that we can never know the true nature of the universe
because we are part of it.
We can never be a true neutral observer.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
infinite...it keeps growing, and we can't measure all of it...plus, if there is a finite value, what is on the other side? Black space? Anti-Space??
If I had mod points right now I'd mod you both down as flamebait. Just so ya know.
(ooh, me scary!)
Kitty Porn?!? Damn, you need to get some help.
domc
Read up, buddy.
Female Prison Rape in NY
The article addresses this. It's deeper down but there are quotes that talk about how it was believe that these constants changed very "soon" after "the big bang". This finding suggests that the change occurs longer than that. (Note: I'm not good at physics but I understood what the article was saying about it so I may not have phrased that properly)
Pi is a really nasty law offender actually. Within the digits of Pi are an infinite number of unliscensed copies of windows 98, and a multitude of kitty porn. In fact, pi is so devious, that it has a naked picture of every child in every sexual position compressed not only into JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP, but also compression formats we wont invent for another year or two! Pi is also the worst violater of privacy in known history. It has movies of you in the shower, sleeping, and making out with all your past signifigant others. Pi has your address, phone number, social scurity number, and list of personal turn-on's all nicely formated in every concievable document format. Pi even has a DivX compressed AVI file of Bill Gates having intercouse with satan. The funniest thing about all of this is, its ABSOLUTELY true!!
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps we will never know the answer to every question about the universe, but at least we will have a better understanding of the universe.
Physics today may seem like its so far out there as to have any real-world applications, but the developments of mathematical techniques being developed are pushing the boundaries and exposing new solutions to old problems.
Troll Like a Champion Today
This article reminded me of a stack of papers passed around my dorm about 10 years ago about the slowing of the speed of light by an Australian astronomer named Barry Setterfield.
Someone of a Creationism bent took his original paper and proceeded to extrapolate into the past and determined that at some point the speed of light was so fast, Carbon-14 decayed so fast, it would seem like millions or even billions of years given the current speed of light. And therefore, ipso facto, Evolution is wrong and Creationism is right. I still have it somewhere with my college memorabillia, probably with all the Young Republicans for Freedom propaganda I snagged off their table in the student union.
Here's more about the implication of changing constants (Their words, not mine) and a short version here.
Well, there's one problem. You can't just change the speed of light without mucking up other things. And if you change the speed of light to the degree necessary to make the universe be 6000 years old instead of the ~15 billion that it looks, then probably we wouldn't even be here to argue about it.
You might as well just invoke a miracle and be done with it
Up until now scientist had been swearing up and down that they do not change, whoops guess they were wrong again ;)
At least they can admit they were wrong and correct the mistakes, something which religion has rarely managed to do.
Anyway lots of people have postulate large decays in light speed, not small ones.
And their evidence is.... what?
Any cretinist who trys to use this as some sort of argument for a young-universe is a liar. Mind you, most of them already are anyway, so no change there.
Well explain this and this. 5.8% drop in Apache usage because TWO sites total drop their Solaris installs is hardly news. This result isn't significant statistically simply because the total number of servers sampled was controlled ultimately by sources two to three orders of magnitude less than the servers themselves. BIG WHOOP! Furthermore, they don't use meaningful statistics like total number of web pages served up in a period of time - and as I said before, according to the experiences of a 15 year veteran of server installs MS IIS would be right up there. But is that statistic ever mentioned? In fact, there are other, more dynamic factors affecting the usage going forward. Yet everyone in their messages screams that it's the end.
/. subject, Microsoft is constantly attacked. Yet the proliferation of PCs and standards is largely due to Microsoft's work, and the average person probably would have never touched a computer if it hadn't been for Microsoft. They did a lot of bad things, but they also did a lot of good - and it's that good that is never recognized here.
Back to my original point - there is virtually no counterpoint present in the material here, and every opportunity becomes an attack on something almost completely irrelevant. The mainstream religions represented by a majority in North America (Christianity in this case) are regularly shoehorned into arguments here. But you will never EVER see Hinduism or Buddhism or Shinto or Zoroastrianism attacked here, for any reason, because the religious right makes a convenient fat target. These attacks are unwarranted, unbalanced, and irrelevant to the particular issue. There are Christians and Buddhists who believe in science, and it is not inconsistent with their interpretation of beliefs nor this story. On a less sore and more relevant to
Even more significant (and as I mentioned in my original post), this is supposed to be "Stuff that matters." I can hardly excuse 90% of the crap posted here because it doesn't matter. If religion really REALLY is their sore point, let them post something by Humanist geeks doing something for their fellow man. When is the last story I saw of computer donations being made to third world countries? THAT is what truly matters, not a bunch of guys hunkered over keyboards 24/7 who saw the information economy usurping the industrial economy (but look at the relative stability of the Dow vs. NASDAQ) and exacting revenge on their social torturers in their early age by demonstrating their knowledge skills on relatively miniscule semantic matters in these boards. But like I say - a couple of well-placed atmospheric EMPs will do wonders for the social skills of all of the computer elite.
I suspect that 50 years from now people looking back at this genre of prayer research will kind of shake their heads and call it junk science.
Essentially correct. Dimensionless quantities are all we can really measure invariantly. Speed of light variation is only measurable through its influence on dimensionless quantities like the fine-structure constant being discussed, which really means "the variation in c relative to the variations, if any, in other constants, when combined to produce a dimensionless quantity".
I think you'll find (especially in cases like this!), even the scientists who encounter counterexamples are initially surprised.
Female Prison Rape in NY
The value of pi IS 3, to one significant digit.
FWIW, here's the text of the article, for those not wanting to register.
August 15, 2001
Cosmic Laws Like Speed of Light Might Be Changing, a Study Finds
By JAMES GLANZ and DENNIS OVERBYE
[Multimedia]
[interactive_feature] A Small Change, With Huge Implications
[A] n international team of astrophysicists has discovered that the basic laws of nature as understood today may be changing slightly as the universe ages, a surprising finding that could rewrite physics textbooks and challenge fundamental assumptions about the workings of the cosmos.
The researchers used the world's largest single telescope to study the behavior of metallic atoms in gas clouds as far away from Earth as 12 billion light years. The observations revealed patterns of light absorption that the team could not explain without assuming a change in a basic constant of nature involving the strength of the attraction between electrically charged particles.
If confirmed, the finding could mean that other constants regarded as immutable, like the speed of light, might also have changed over the history of the cosmos.
The work was conducted by scientists in the United States, Australia and Britain and was led by Dr. John K. Webb of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It is to be published on Aug. 27 in the field's most prestigious journal, Physical Review Letters.
Scientists who have examined the paper have not been able to find any obvious flaws. But because the consequences for science would be so far-reaching and because the differences from the expected measurements are so subtle, many scientists are expressing skepticism that the discovery will stand the test of time, and say they will wait for independent evidence before deciding whether the finding is true.
On the other hand, the finding would fit with some theorists' new views of the universe, particularly the prediction that previously unknown dimensions might exist in the fabric of space.
Even scientists on the project have been deliberately cautious in presenting their result. Describing the implications of what his team observed, Dr. Webb said, "It's possible that there is a time evolution of the laws of physics."
Dr. Webb added, "If it's correct, it's the result of a lifetime."
Dr. Rocky Kolb, an astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who was not involved in the work, said the finding could not only force revisions in cosmology, the science of how the universe began and later evolved, but also add credence to an unproven theory of physics called string theory, which predicts that extra dimensions exist.
"The implication, if it is true, would just be so enormous that it's something people should look at and take seriously," Dr. Kolb said. "This would upset the apple cart."
The magnitude of the change apparently observed by the group is minute, amounting to just 1 part in 100,000 in a number called the fine structure constant over 12 billion years. That constant, also referred to as alpha, is defined in terms of more familiar quantities like the speed of light and the strength of electronic attractions within atoms.
But even that small change would rock physics and cosmology, said Dr. Sheldon Glashow of Boston University, who received a Nobel Prize in physics in 1979. The importance of such a discovery, Dr. Glashow said, would rank "10 on a scale of 1 to 10."
Considering the unexpected nature of the finding, both Dr. Glashow and Dr. Kolb said the chances were high that some more mundane explanation for the results would turn up.
Dr. John Bahcall, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said the complicated analysis that was required to infer the tiny changes from the observations could ? in principle, at least ? be obscuring possible errors.
"The effect does not scream out at you from the data," Dr. Bahcall said. "You have to get down on all fours and claw through the details to see such a small effect."
But others said that the team had been very careful and that any unknown source of error would have to be extremely subtle to be missed.
"If they were claiming anything less dramatic, probably most people would find their work very careful and believable," said Dr. Massimo Stiavelli, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
"Exceptional results deserve extraordinary proof," Dr. Stiavelli said, adding that he was reserving judgment until further evidence became available.
The work relied on observations of light from distant beacons called quasars, which shine with a brightness equivalent to billions of suns. The light is probably emitted by matter torn from young galaxies by the powerful gravity of a black hole.
Besides Dr. Webb, the team included three other scientists at the University of New South Wales, Michael T. Murphy, Dr. Victor V. Flambaum, and Dr. Vladimir A. Dzuba; and one physicist at Cambridge University in Britain, Dr. John D. Barrow. Three American astronomers who are experts on quasars were also members of the team: Dr. Christopher W. Churchill of Pennsylvania State University; Dr. Jason X. Prochaska of the Carnegie Observatories; and Dr. Arthur M. Wolfe of the University of California at San Diego.
The observations, made by the 30- foot-wide Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, looked in detail at the absorption of quasar light by gas clouds in deep space between Earth and the quasars. Metal atoms like zinc and aluminum are often present in trace amounts in the clouds.
The absorption of light by such atoms creates dark spikes at various wavelengths in the quasar's spectrum, with a pattern so well defined that it is often likened to a fingerprint. The value of those wavelengths is directly related to the value of the fine structure constant.
But the fingerprint seemed to change in time, Mr. Murphy said, indicating that the constant grows larger as one goes nearer to the present and was not really constant.
"What we have found is that, statistically, there is a difference between the fine structure constant a long time ago and here on earth," he said.
Far from being of interest only in understanding atomic behavior, said Dr. Barrow of Cambridge University, the effect would be important "because it gives you such a feedback into fundamental physics."
String theory, for example, could accommodate changes in quantities that accepted physics theory considers immutable. String theorists postulate that space contains tiny, unseen dimensions. Any change in the size of those dimensions ? much like the expansion of the universe in the space we are familiar with ? could change quantities like the fine structure constant, said Dr. Paul Steinhardt, a physicist at Princeton University.
Dr. Steinhardt said most theorists would have expected those changes to have occurred in the first seconds of the universe's life and be virtually unobservable by astronomers today. Still, he pointed out that several years ago, other astronomers unexpectedly found that the present universe is apparently filled with a mysterious kind of energy that counteracts gravity on large scales. Perhaps the two effects are somehow related, Dr. Steinhardt said.
Other scientists pointed out that geologic processes, like naturally occurring nuclear fission, have been used to determine that the fine structure constant has probably changed little over the past two billion years on Earth. But researchers on the new paper point out that their results reach back much farther in time, and that interpreting the geological results is also a complicated matter.
But a few physicists, like Dr. Jacob D. Bekenstein of Hebrew University in Israel, noted that some theories have long been predicting a change in some of nature's apparent constants. Dr. Bekenstein called the findings "potentially revolutionary" and said he was inclined to believe them.
"After much thinking about this issue," Dr. Bekenstein said, "I think the quasar observations may have found the real variation."
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
Come to think of it, pi probably WAS 3 in biblical times.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
More and more I think that theories in physics are nothing more than successive approximations and we'll never know the true nature of existence.
I agree with this totally. Just read a book on medicine or science from 1890, or just a Popular Science from 1950. And then realize that at the time they though all of that utter garbage was correct, too. Though of course our approxomations are getting better, which is certainly nice. But saying "we know everything there is to know about {phyiscs,biology,chemistry,some sub-branch of any of the previous}, is like saying "this program does not have any bugs at all"
In the 1970's, all sorts of scientists were certain that we were heading into another ice age. Good thing all those SUVs came along and warmed up the planet for us, eh? (Note that I'm also skeptical about claims of global warming, but that is, perhaps, another story).
maybe man was designed to be assexual, but that feature set was expanded into two seperate programs to enhance revenue (souls I guess)
maybe they were a feature to break up an other was featureless abdomen (assuming adam and eve had no belly button), they also happened to be a convient place to hang extra features on the female modle after determining that two legs + upright walk + udders = bad idea.
maybe adam didn't have nipples but instead the nipple gene is 100% dominant. (insert other such theories where adam had no nipples but children did)
who knows who cares. I know you intended this to point out a flaw in the creation theory, but all you've done is point out that any details "known" is sketchy at best, and is the result of generation of being passed down the line by word of mouth (think extended version of chinese whispers).
In answering the question, what does the Red spectrum tell us about Quazars, there are certain things that need to be established.
1) What is a Spectrum?
2) What is a red one?
3) Why are they so frequently linked with Quazars?
Just put a neat line through that we'll come back to it later.
And I think that confidently answers the question What does the Red spectrum tell us about Quazars!
I presume physicists #define their constants the same way I do :-P
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
You are of couse correct in saying that there needs to be experimental evidence. If you can search for the SciAm article by Van Fandern you'll probably find what he based his work on. These sorts of things need observations of large scale events over long periods of time. I seem to recall Mike saying that the decrease in G is on the order of 10^-12 per annum (I'm going by memory here. I know it was 3 or 4 orders of magnitude less than our current precision of the measurement of G) We discussed how he could hope to set up a reproducible experiment, and came to the conclusion that it would probably require use of spacecraft and co-operation of Governments.
There are a lot more results in his work than I've mentioned btw, there are things I don't even pretend to understand, like a derivation of the Plank Units and the Fine Structure Constant. As I said, his maths checks out - I'm not qualified to judge the physics.
And, just for the record, when I first saw his work 7 years ago I tried everything I knew (not much I admit) to show him the error of his ways. Since then I've come to the conclusion that _if_ his physics is right he's onto something.
Thanks for your feedback - I'll be sure to pass this on to him when he gets back.
haha, this is offtopic? Seems I have a moderator censoring me in the name of god. How typical.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Let's see. It's changed by 1 part in 100,000 over the last 12 billion years. So, we're dating fossil remains from about 100 million years ago. Assuming the same error, we'd be off by (hmm... carry the five, move the three, divide by pi, ignore the remainder, add 1 for good measure, and we get) about 1000 years. Gosh, yes, we 'evolutionists' are worried.
Some of us resist that cop-out and continue to look deeper. We never find the answer in our lifetimes, but we do help our successors in that quest, and in the meantime we also help invent nifty stuff like electric motors and computers.
Meanwhile, millions of other humans prefer to continue to live the life of "I do not understand it, therefore God exists".
Which is fine as long as they leave us alone. Some, like the Taliban, don't.
Well this is big, but not in the way most people will think. The constant they speak of, alpha, is the fine structure constant which is very important in fundamental high energy physics and cosomology. Its also important to note that since alpha = electron charge ^2 / (planks constant x speed o light) that any one of the three could be the culprit in changing or it could be some eacky quasar problem since we don't really know what quasars are for sure.
I doubt this affects General Relativity very much because GR is a non-quantum theory, while alpha is a quantum mechancis issue. Of course this may help develop a quantum gravity theory (Special relativity is different and completely unaffected, its main idea is that everything is relative and is unaffected by whatever alpha and c and the electron charge are).
In addition the paper does call for further study, and of course the CURRENT universe in unchanged (sorry still no FTL). However, this is an insight at the very fundamental levels of quantum mechnanics which is very closely tied to cosmology. String theorys and all of that ilk may be able to acount for this but the day to day shmoe will probably not know the difference. Still it is an important result that begs for more study and of course the bloody theory people will be all over this (It doesn't show I'm experiemtal branch does it). What this does boil down to is a insight into the fundamental interactions between the smallest bits of the universe. Of course we probably are going to need quite a few more before we sort out Grand Unified Theory, but this may be one of the big steps along the way.
One last caveat. Alpha also changes with energy, and as one causes more energetic reactions (like those done at fermilab) Alpha will increase. This could be a source for explanation, but I am only speculating. Theres a lot of wild stuff at the top physics levels going on.
Cthulhu for president!
Any time we think we know all there is to know about something, nature proves us wrong. Here we go again. "It's impossible to fly" - wrong. "Humans can't go faster than sound" - wrong. "The speed of light is unreachable" - wrong. This discovery about changing constants is just one more example of how educated people should keep an open mind and not take certain facts as concrete, unchanging law just because a certain person or group presented them.
~ now you know
Actually, yes, I do. Not wanting to get accounts everwhere they can, I'm sure many users (myself included) actually appreciate these links. It's truly a useful post, instead of just "let's try to find a way to blame microsoft" which always gets modded up here. Thanx to TechnoVooDooDaddy for posting it and to the moderators who modded it up. G'day.
'k I went to that site you linked and I've got question for you: is Islam half empty or is it half full? ha ha! (oh no, I just mocked! looks like another fatwah...)
What if interstellar space is actually not flat in four dimensions, but curved slightly (i.e. perhaps the shape of the universe is a 4-dimensional sphere). Could this possibly affect the permittivity of space over long distances? When light is forced to travel through curved space, it loses energy does it not?
"The unicode stuff in the latest version is working fabulously well. My russian mafia friends are ecstatic."
you need to work on your reading comprehension.
Female Prison Rape in NY
The ArchAngels and ArchDemons in charge of implementing the Universe having arguments over the specs, the editors, the compilers.
Even the constants to use, which get updated from time to time.
[There are plenty of articles out there with this paradigm of God as programmer]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
No, I'm referring to U238 and Thorium (isotope number escapes me) decay.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
first post!
Yeah, but in another part of the universe, the number on your post might be something else.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
String theory basically means, that a char sequence must end in null char, otherwise there is a segmentation violation.
completely ruins my jacobs ladder trick!
Wow, you're right... this also means that whenever I go to a warez site, I'm not looking for copyrighted software, but simply doing scientific research on Pi. I just want to view the piece of Pi's decimal expansion that may or may not resemble the latest version of 3D Studio MAX :-)
Dr. Steinhardt said most theorists would have expected those changes to have occurred in the first seconds of the universe's life and be virtually unobservable by astronomers today. Still, he pointed out that several years ago, other astronomers unexpectedly found that the present universe is apparently filled with a mysterious kind of energy that counteracts gravity on large scales. Perhaps the two effects are somehow related, Dr. Steinhardt said.
The postulation of "dark energy" and "dark matter" gives me the heebie jeebies, not b/c they sound spooky, but b/c they are placeholder notions filling collossal gaps in our knowledge. One of my principal criticisms of religion is that the idea of God is often relied on as a magic variable to make sense of our world. Don't understand why your house burned down on Xmas? God's will! never mind that your meth-smoking kid decided to spark the pipe under the tree.
To my mind, the most important thing is for a theory to be internally consistent. If we lose the notion of the truly constant constant, but in exchange are able to generate a theory that explains more and leaves fewer mysterious variables, we have made some important progress.
Yeah, slow light also faked fossil and geological records.
No, wait, I'm thinking of some mysterious all-powerful force that wants us to not have proof of his existance (otherwise where would the "faith" be?), yet leaves descriptions of what will happen to us if we don't tithe^H^H^H^H^Hbelieve in him. What a scam.
Oh wait, the Bible.
So the Bible is the Word of God because.....the Bible says so....
A mostly unknown and pretty incomplete, but in my opinion very interesting alternative fundamental theory of physics exists called Bit String phyics. As far as I know, its the only theory that actually can calculate the fine-structure constant from first principles (string theory allows the possibility, but AFIK hasn't done it). Statistical fluctuations in fundamental constants are built into it. Search http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires with "find a noyes" for papers. A recent one is at http://arXiv.org/ps/astro-ph/0103271
It's the speed of light in a vacuum that's constant. In a material like water or glass, the speed of light is slower by a factor known as the refractive index. And yes, the refractive index of a material can be a function of the light's frequency (color).
Seriously, I'm a little skeptical. This reminds me far too much of maths teachers trying to convince me that the shortest distance is not a straight line, on a sphere. (It =IS=, from the perspective of the line. It's not the line's fault that stupid teachers can't seperate the observer from the observed.)
Now, some "constants" are composite. The Gravitational Constant, for example, is not a simple value, but the product of a number of values. It's entirely possible that such composite values will vary, under different conditions, even if any given constant within them did not. (eg: Different ratios.)
In other words, those "composite" constants might not be "Constants" in the accepted sense. They might merely be static, under "normal" conditions.
Not So Brief Note: For the purpose of this post, I'm defining "Composite" Constants as those constants which exist, in the underlying model, as a product/sum of two or more component Constants, and which have no existance independent of those component Constants. Since they are defined as expressions, I can accept that such Composite Constants could actually vary.
An Atomic Constant is one which exists in and of itself. The simplest possible description of itself -is- itself. Since these aren't defined in relation to anything else, it would not make sense to me for these to vary with time or environment. There's nothing within them to vary.
Pi, I believe, is an Atomic constant. The mere fact that you can compute Pi to any accuracy, and/or computer any given digit within it, indicates that it's not going to change in a hurry.
The Feigenbaum Number (the ratio between period doublings in a chaotic system that is in an oscilating state) is, IMHO, much more interesting, in that it is not at all clear from the system whether it is composite or atomic. Because it exists in an abstract, mathematical sense, I'm going to guess that it's atomic, in which case I believe it won't vary.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Of course, the other thing this reminds me of is a TNG episode where the temporarily mortal Q is in engineering as the crew try to figure out how to deflect an asteroid landing on a planet, and Q blurts out "Why not just change the gravitational constant of the universe?"
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Try reading a book on the arrow of time, such as Zeh or Price. Thermodynamics hasn't resolved the issue.
Try again. Islam's got as many holes as the next religion.
Thank you but I read the book back in the 80s. Long before slashdot.
we spent to much time reading physics and programing books when we were in english class :)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Constants such as the gravitational constant are based on our perceptions and lots of mathematical evidence. Perhaps in distance corners of our universe the fabric of space/time is warped. We know that gravity actually bends the fabric of space, causing light to bend and applying forces to massive objects, etc. If the fabric is thinner or somehow different than our solar system perhaps the constants that define our equations should actually be functions based on higher mathematical models similar to superstrings. But I'm not even an amateur physicist... just a thought.
The 3.5" diskette is dying.
well, with the new portable USB 240Mb drive (compatible with LS-120) that use special floppy of 240Mb, you can format your old 1.44Mb floppy to 32Mb, not too bad to put some MP3 for example, see www.qps-inc.com.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Well, 1 is considered equivlent to 2 for very large values of 1.
I read the internet for the articles.
well lets see, current science dates the universe at about 15billion years old. now, we can see the background radiation from the edges of the universe (that's from teh big bang). so lets see now that would mean that the light from 15 billion light years away is actually only 6000 years old, okay that would mean that at that time the speed of light was roughly 2500000 times faster then as it was now. But the article mentions this:
The magnitude of the change apparently observed by the group is minute, amounting to just 1 part in 100,000 in a number called the fine structure constant over 12 billion years. That constant, also referred to as alpha, is defined in terms of more familiar quantities like the speed of light and the strength of electronic attractions within atoms.
I have trouble believing a minute change in magnitude is 2500000 times what it is now.
Photos.
Constants aren't.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Are you sure of the percentage, and what kind of 'scientists' are counted in? I remember seeing a study on 47 Nobel laureates of chemistry and physics. 45 considered themselves non-religous, either atheist or agnostic. Two were christians. Of these scientists, only less than 5 per cent believed in a supreme being. I think this is an issue where selecting an unbiased sample is very important.
Another thing I would like to comment on is that religious belief does not always contain a belief in a higher being. Buddhist do not believe in any supreme being, (Buddha is a teacher, and a human, not a God) and they are usually considered as a religion. Or are you claiming Dalai Lama is not religious?
what will all the mullets drive?
I guess that there will always be the cars from the good ol' days, but that whole culture will just ferment like the old car culture in cuba...
- passion
I think /.ers should put it back in their pants when it comes to openly criticizing one thing or ignoring another. Half of these arguments were complete non-sequiturs, especially with respect to God, etc., (or at least their notions). I am seriously throttling back my reading of half the crap on this site.
As far as the article I sent, the point was that it will NEVER appear on the front page here or even as a side submission simply due to the closed-mindedness of some of the individuals here. The result is intriguing however - *MAYBE* there's some other force working here that we can investigate. Let's see what that is.
As far as statistical significance, I think what my Microsoft developer friend said about the Apache servers running for so many days - who hosts the most # of web pages the fastest - and you'll see IIS right up there. Yet an article appeared here yesterday without much merit, and with a 5% statistical drop. *THAT* is my point. It's not about arguing whether prayer works or not, but the content and its editorial slant and the slant of the comments on the articles. They run like Chicken Littles when their precious open source/Linux/whatever isn't working, but they turn snobby when it comes to the most minute thing going for what they write for.
:)
:)
:)
:)
:)
How many people do you think really cant drive a stick?
Me and my GF are really into mustangs and I got her hooked on a manual. I even like my manual in traffic
I have a Z-Rated T5 in my stang, I think at 70 im doing about 1.7K RPMs in my daily driver.
I love real muscle cars and keep all but one of my (I only have three) mustangs stock. It is actually great fun to build up a later models mustang due to the large fan base and available parts --ok-- that kind of takes the fun out of it but for the lazy its fun.
I restored a 64 1/2 too and would have nothing to do with automatic tranmission
There are still some folks out there who like manual trannies..
I know a lot of people look down upon mustangs with great disdain, but im really into classic cars and mustangs for the fun of it not because my care is more 1337 than j00rs
Jeremy
There are such effects, and they are responsible for cosmological redshift and time dilation.
Disclaimer: IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist)
I think we need to expand our views a little. It is possible that a "constant" is relative to an individual's perspective. Therefore, what is observed from a location other than this earth may be different, even if ever so slightly. For example, gravity differs from planet to planet, but is relatively "constant" here on earth. The same principle could related to other "constants" as well.
Or rather, spoken like true flamebait.
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
Or how bout the HDTV sitting in my living room -- 1080 lines. Too bad I don't have anything that uses the high res...
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
That's right, the speed of light is only constant in a local inertial frame.
MOD THIS UP!
Hilarious!
Constants aren't, variables won't...
bash$
slaon article I read this morning about the same thing: http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2001/08/15/light/in dex.html
For those who refuse to have anything to do with NYT
Yeah, but the poster quoted 3.0, implying two significant digits...
It's pretty damn hard to think of how you could disprove evolution.
Then you're not thinking hard enough.
Evolutionary theory also doesn't really make testable predictions.
Wrong. It predicts that closely related organisms will share a large amount of the same genetic material. It predicts an ordering of the fossil record. It predicts that isolated regions of the planet will be populated by living organisms that are unique throughout the world. It predicts anatomical simularities between genetically similar organisms. It predicts the existence of atavisms and vestigial structures that were useful to ancestral forms but are much less useful to present forms.
I hold that all of these predictions are quite testable, and furthermore I submit that the absence of any of these would pretty much deal a death blow to biological evolutionary theory. You see, the problem for creationists is not that evolution isn't falsifiable. The problem is that everything that could have falsified it hasn't.
I sympathise with your view.....but
Please Keep those nice furry friendly animals out of your arguments!
Dogs are good things!
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Is exactitude a necessary condition for the knowledge of true nature?
The series
will never quite converge in our lifetimes but I don't think we need to see infinity to get a pretty good idea of where it's heading.Perhaps truth (in the cosmic sense) is overrated ...
Pi has changed throughout the years. First it was about 3. Then it became about 3.14. Then 3.14159. Then C/d.
;~)
The question of whether physical constants have changed since the big bang is old news, sure, but observational evidence that they have is completely new, far newer than the outdated references that page mentions. Idiot.
:wq
You will get c--3*10^10 cm/s, IIRC--in all cases.
"The speed of light is a constant in all reference frames."
I believe this is one of relativity's postulates.
This means, if it's necessary for the reference frame to bend a little bit to keep the speed of light a constant in that frame, it bends.
Practically speaking, what happens is the tools you use warp just enough to give you the answer of c. Stopwatches slow down or speed up as needed, meter sticks (or anything you use to measure distance) either stretch or shrink, as needed.
The effects are real and have been measured. Years ago, I attended a seminar by a physics professor who tested the predictions of relativity by accelerating unstable radioactive particles to close to the speed of light. The decay lifetimes of the acclerated particles were longer than those at rest, by the amount predicted by the theory. (By multiplier tau, IIRC, for any physics people out there.)
Jeff Corkern
The expansion of the universe and all evidence that supports it proves one thing. That the universe is expanding.
... well ... somehow seemed to exist .. which magically created life, and the universe."
.. are you kidding? One is a scientific theory that (as I have demonstrated) makes testable predictions. The other is a story. The claim that the Hebrew wind god Yahweh created the universe 6,000 years ago but made it look like it was billions of years ago is not a scientific theory; it is not falsifiable, nor does it make any predictions that can be used to test it. It's like the rest of religionism: "Here's how it went, take it or leave it .. but if you leave it, you'd better watch yourself."
.. myths.
Um.
You do realize, don't you, that an expanding universe would be the signature byproduct of the Big Bang? That the expanding universe was the driving factor behind the formation of the entire theory? I notice that you didn't have much to add about the CMBR.
It could equally prove that there was a shockwave generated by creation or alternatively that creation is still happening.
Natural science is not in the business of proof. If it's proof you're looking for, try mathematics. The expanding universe does not (and can not) "prove" the Big Bang any more than it can prove a creation shock wave. When a physicist throws a ball up in the air, she does not say "I shall prove this ball will come back down." Instead, she says "Based on our gravitational theories, I predict this ball will come back down." That's what science is about: using the observed evidence to form theories that can be used to make predictions. A theory rises and falls on the basis of how well its predictions hold up. The Big Bang does very well in this area (once again, I note the CMBR, which was predicted by the Big Bang and not measured until decades later.)
Why is "everything just sort of poofed everything into place at some point in the recent past" any different from "all of a sudden there was this huge explosion from elements that
Now I see what your problem with the Big Bang theory is; you're getting all of your science from Jerry Falwell. If that is what you think the theory says, that there was an "explosion" (hint: the word "Bang" is not literal) and a bunch of "pre-existing elements" (hint: chemical elements did not form until after the Big Bang event) and "life was magically created" (hint: cosmology is not biology) then it's no wonder that your perception is so skewed.
As far as how the two are different
They both seem pretty far out to me, but then how the universe was created seems a rather pathetic problem to mull over then say, a cure for aids, population control education, homeless people, etc.
It is your right to place your faith in gods, jesuses, angels, etc. I choose to place my faith in humans. I also believe that humans are capable of multitasking, and that we are able to study cosmology and work towards a cure for AIDS at the same time. Religionists of today are no different than their ancient brethren; they wish to suppress the practice of science (in particular, cosmology and biology) because they fear that it can confirm what they already know at some level to be true: that their myths are exactly that
Well... I have a belief, which may be somewhat unfounded, that you only get complex functions in complex situations, and that once you break it down, they're really composed of a LOT of very simple functions. A reason 'modern' physics tends to seem mathematically complicated may just be that we're observing and describing these emergent properties of very large and complex systems. By studying the system in greater and greater detail, we manage to generalize the math we use to describe it, so that we get to the level where we can give a couple very simple equations that, when iterated or compounded over a complex set of initial conditions, become the nasty thorny things that we had at first observed.
For instance, consider something like fluid dynamics. The patterns created in fluid flow can be mathematically mathematically complex compared to the source equations which produce them (either using Navier-Stokes, or even based on <a href="http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/414684.html"> colliding particles</a>.
So, it may be overly optimistic, but I tend to think that although the observed behaviors may be complex, the sources of those behaviors will tend to be simple, and that as a whole, the progression is from complex to simple, not vice versa.
NichG
http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/08/15/science/15PH YS.html
One theory that 'explains' how the universe can be only 6000 odd years old, yet some starlight can have travelled many billions of (current) light-years to reach earth is that the speeed of light is slowing down...
> And ok, fine. I'm secure in what happens to me > after I die. I've given my life up to Jesus to > be the one in control of it, not myself anymore. > Therefore, I get to spend eternity in a perfect > heaven away from the misery that is Earth. Are > you secure in what happens to you after you die? Control yeah is the master word here. Coz ur unable to think by yourself, u find that is simplier to be governed by some one else will be it god or not. YES YOU ARE A SLAVE ! And you will live and die like a slave, being affraid by what could happen to you if u dare not to blindly submit yourself at the will of your master (be it imaginary or real). I want to say you that we atheists are not afraid by the afterlife. We are proud of our FREEDOM of thought and we nevermind what could happen after the dead. P.S.: Oh, by the way have you ever noticed that your god (i suppose ur christian) is _NOT_ the god of more than three quarters of the humanity (which doesnt share also your insane creationist conceptions).
...then does this new information suggest it may be possible for us to change the speed of light to suit our travel needs?
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
Mathematical constants are "constants" in the sense that it won't change whatever the universe's physics behave. Pi, for example, is always 3.14... in a flat euclidean space (which can be defined and have nothing to do with the real universe which may not be flat, nor is it euclidean).
Physical constants, like Grav Constant (which by the way, is NOT a composite), however, are constants in the sense that they come out of a theory that needs MEASURED parameters to make it work.
The "constant" in the article refers to the fine structure constant, is a quantity that is either a constant or not dependent on which theory you believe. Currently the Standard Model (which is believed to be wrong at some level) thinks it is. If it is varying with time, like the article says it is, then the interesting thing is that it allows to speculate what the real "underlying" theory is actually is (Not the Standard Model).
YOur idea about the "Atomic constant" and "composite constant" are just plain misunderstanding of what a constant really is. There is no such jargon as "atomic constant". We use the word "fundamental constants of a theory", which is theory/physics dependent. The other constants, like Pi, are mathematical and has NOTHING to do with physics, for chrissake!
So the Greeks cannot square the circle, ever.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
August 15, 2001
Cosmic Laws Like Speed of Light Might Be Changing, a Study Finds
By James Glanz and Dennis Overbye
An international team of astrophysicists has discovered that the basic laws of nature as understood today may be changing slightly as the universe ages, a surprising finding that could rewrite physics textbooks and challenge fundamental assumptions about the workings of the cosmos.
The researchers used the world's largest single telescope to study the behavior of metallic atoms in gas clouds as far away from Earth as 12 billion light years. The observations revealed patterns of light absorption that the team could not explain without assuming a change in a basic constant of nature involving the strength of the attraction between electrically charged particles.
If confirmed, the finding could mean that other constants regarded as immutable, like the speed of light, might also have changed over the history of the cosmos.
The work was conducted by scientists in the United States, Australia and Britain and was led by Dr. John K. Webb of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It is to be published on Aug. 27 in the field's most prestigious journal, Physical Review Letters.
Scientists who have examined the paper have not been able to find any obvious flaws. But because the consequences for science would be so far-reaching and because the differences from the expected measurements are so subtle, many scientists are expressing skepticism that the discovery will stand the test of time, and say they will wait for independent evidence before deciding whether the finding is true.
On the other hand, the finding would fit with some theorists' new views of the universe, particularly the prediction that previously unknown dimensions might exist in the fabric of space.
Even scientists on the project have been deliberately cautious in presenting their result. Describing the implications of what his team observed, Dr. Webb said, "It's possible that there is a time evolution of the laws of physics."
Dr. Webb added, "If it's correct, it's the result of a lifetime."
Dr. Rocky Kolb, an astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who was not involved in the work, said the finding could not only force revisions in cosmology, the science of how the universe began and later evolved, but also add credence to an unproven theory of physics called string theory, which predicts that extra dimensions exist.
"The implication, if it is true, would just be so enormous that it's something people should look at and take seriously," Dr. Kolb said. "This would upset the apple cart."
The magnitude of the change apparently observed by the group is minute, amounting to just 1 part in 100,000 in a number called the fine structure constant over 12 billion years. That constant, also referred to as alpha, is defined in terms of more familiar quantities like the speed of light and the strength of electronic attractions within atoms.
But even that small change would rock physics and cosmology, said Dr. Sheldon Glashow of Boston University, who received a Nobel Prize in physics in 1979. The importance of such a discovery, Dr. Glashow said, would rank "10 on a scale of 1 to 10."
Considering the unexpected nature of the finding, both Dr. Glashow and Dr. Kolb said the chances were high that some more mundane explanation for the results would turn up.
Dr. John Bahcall, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said the complicated analysis that was required to infer the tiny changes from the observations could ? in principle, at least ? be obscuring possible errors.
"The effect does not scream out at you from the data," Dr. Bahcall said. "You have to get down on all fours and claw through the details to see such a small effect."
But others said that the team had been very careful and that any unknown source of error would have to be extremely subtle to be missed.
"If they were claiming anything less dramatic, probably most people would find their work very careful and believable," said Dr. Massimo Stiavelli, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
"Exceptional results deserve extraordinary proof," Dr. Stiavelli said, adding that he was reserving judgment until further evidence became available.
The work relied on observations of light from distant beacons called quasars, which shine with a brightness equivalent to billions of suns. The light is probably emitted by matter torn from young galaxies by the powerful gravity of a black hole.
Besides Dr. Webb, the team included three other scientists at the University of New South Wales, Michael T. Murphy, Dr. Victor V. Flambaum, and Dr. Vladimir A. Dzuba; and one physicist at Cambridge University in Britain, Dr. John D. Barrow. Three American astronomers who are experts on quasars were also members of the team: Dr. Christopher W. Churchill of Pennsylvania State University; Dr. Jason X. Prochaska of the Carnegie Observatories; and Dr. Arthur M. Wolfe of the University of California at San Diego.
The observations, made by the 30- foot-wide Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, looked in detail at the absorption of quasar light by gas clouds in deep space between Earth and the quasars. Metal atoms like zinc and aluminum are often present in trace amounts in the clouds.
The absorption of light by such atoms creates dark spikes at various wavelengths in the quasar's spectrum, with a pattern so well defined that it is often likened to a fingerprint. The value of those wavelengths is directly related to the value of the fine structure constant.
But the fingerprint seemed to change in time, Mr. Murphy said, indicating that the constant grows larger as one goes nearer to the present and was not really constant.
"What we have found is that, statistically, there is a difference between the fine structure constant a long time ago and here on earth," he said.
Far from being of interest only in understanding atomic behavior, said Dr. Barrow of Cambridge University, the effect would be important "because it gives you such a feedback into fundamental physics."
String theory, for example, could accommodate changes in quantities that accepted physics theory considers immutable. String theorists postulate that space contains tiny, unseen dimensions. Any change in the size of those dimensions ? much like the expansion of the universe in the space we are familiar with ? could change quantities like the fine structure constant, said Dr. Paul Steinhardt, a physicist at Princeton University.
Dr. Steinhardt said most theorists would have expected those changes to have occurred in the first seconds of the universe's life and be virtually unobservable by astronomers today. Still, he pointed out that several years ago, other astronomers unexpectedly found that the present universe is apparently filled with a mysterious kind of energy that counteracts gravity on large scales. Perhaps the two effects are somehow related, Dr. Steinhardt said.
Other scientists pointed out that geologic processes, like naturally occurring nuclear fission, have been used to determine that the fine structure constant has probably changed little over the past two billion years on Earth. But researchers on the new paper point out that their results reach back much farther in time, and that interpreting the geological results is also a complicated matter.
But a few physicists, like Dr. Jacob D. Bekenstein of Hebrew University in Israel, noted that some theories have long been predicting a change in some of nature's apparent constants. Dr. Bekenstein called the findings "potentially revolutionary" and said he was inclined to believe them.
"After much thinking about this issue," Dr. Bekenstein said, "I think the quasar observations may have found the real variation."
Antibiotic resistance in bacteria seems like a good example of evolution in action to me. That is readily observed in human timescales.
Just look at the creationist sites and you'll find hundreds of attempts to disprove evolution, usually by demonstrating apparent impossibilities. For example, a whale buried vertically through several geological strata would be kind of impossible according to standard theories of stratification. Of course, the only instance the creationists have given, is a false one. However, were the case really what they claim it is, it would give a heavy blow to geology (and therefore to evolutionary theory). Similar claims would include combined dinosaur and human fossils, etc, etc.
It does. Just consider the basic idea that all species have begun from a single cell. Therefore, a raise in complexity over time would be required. We can therefore predict, that the organisms in young strata are, on average, more complex than the ones in much older strata. This is, in fact, what we have observed. There are, for example, no complex animals (such as mammals) in 3 billion years old strata, and the fossils actually have a very rough ascending trend in complexity. (Assuming that fossilised skeletal complexity correlates with genetic complexity.) We can also roughly observe the birth of radically new features, which the older fossils didn't have, such as wings.
Actually, the creationist hypothesis also makes a similar prediction; there would be no observable trend in the fossil record through the "apparent time". However, this hypothesis is in disagreement with the observations. Nevertheless, it's also testable in this way.
I guess it's often though that evolutionary theory can't make predictions because we can't observe large-scale evolution right now. But that's not at all necessary. We don't have to do it right now. To give an analogy, we can't "test" a murder after it has happened. However, we can prove it with evidence. For example, we can have theories about the murder of JFK, but can't "test" it. However, if we found out that there had been a surveillance camera filming the apartment where the killer would have been according to a theory, we could make a prediction that the film shows him, and the film could provide the observation. So the idea is that historical events can be observed through the record of evidence they leave, just as a nuclear physics experiment might be analyzed from film plates later. Similarly, to test the astrophysical prediction that some stars blow up at some time in their life, we don't actually have to test it with our Sun, but we can observe the explosions that happened thousands or millions years ago.
I thought there was something different about the universe when I got up trhis morning.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Variables don't; constants aren't.
I heard somewhere that Metallica and the RIAA are filing a lawsuit against pi, citing that, because of its infinite string of digits, embedded somewhere within is a complete digital copy of "Enter Sandman". 317,865 others have subsequently filed lawsuits for similar reasons.
This is a special excite
This
Female Prison Rape in NY
If I cared about what everyone else thought of me, I wouldn't believe what I believe. I'd be doing and believing whatever everyone else thought was 'cool', which to me, seems pretty spineless.
What this says about C, if C is even a contributor to the effect, is that C was slower in the past. This is precisely the opposite of what the wacko Xtian fundies would need for their claims. In other words, this work tends to falsify Creationist claims.
Anybody that programs for Windows is familiar with the phenomenon of constants simply changing their values whenever the hell the OS feel like it.
I love that site, but whenever I try to go to it it's down, and I have to use google's cache. Do they have some major server problems or something?
If alpha is actually not constant, any one of those items you listed can still be constant, if we change "h". After all, "h" is just an invested scaling factor so that alpha, q, E and c match up.
<grub> Reading
I thought I had heard once that there was a theory that constants changes with the epxansion of the universe. There may have been a catch, though, that since we were of the universe, we couldn't detect it. Or maybe it was that different constants changed at different rates with the expansion. Anyone have more ifoon this?
His work was ridiculed because fossil evidence shows no eveidence for his decrease.
In the 1970s Michael Macarthur published in a New Zealand Amateur Astronomical journal a paper in which he demonstrated that if the decrease in G obeyed a hyberbolic law then at the time the fossils were being laid down the decrese in G would be so slow as to be unobservable by that method.
I've seen some of Macarthur's later work, in which he comes to the same conclusions as Dirac does. In particular, he arrives at conclusions Hawking and Penrose arrive at, and has shown a physical basis for the Principle of Equivalence.
His major problem in getting his latest work published is actually Van Flandern, who seems to have lost the plot after being so soundly trashed - he is now a Flying Saucer Conspiracy Theorist. Any work that uses his (very early) observations gets shouted down so fast.
I'm not a physicist, but I read recently that the mass of the universe was off by a fraction for the big crunch to occur. Does this 0.001% difference have anything to do with that ? Could it be used to re-evaluate the flat universe theory of eternal expansion ?
Could the fact that constants have changed relate to the fact that Electromagnitism has evolved??
Considering they were both posted the same day, I'm surprised I was the first to relate them (I ain't too smart like dem der LEEENucks users).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Are you sure about that? From my understanding, the holy qabbalah's origins come from Ægypt... The Egyptian tarot to be more specific. There are 22 keys in the tarot, 22 letters in the hebrew language, but the Egyptians possessed the tarot first...
In your opinion I may be "having problems" with science because I don't accept the "Ok, that was wrong but it was yesterday. Now THIS is the truth!" mindset.
I've never really believed in creationism because the 6000 years sounded so ridiculous and could only be explained by changing light speed. Now this evidence seems to change it all and I will NOT bet on spending an eternity in hell because of some flakey scientific theory that can be devastated in a minute like this one.
If believing in the infallibility of the science (a HUMAN creation) makes you happy, go ahead. After reading this article I'll be re-thinking my values. Are you a man enough to do that?
Dunno, haven't been following their latest preprints.
More and more I think that theories in physics are nothing more than successive approximations and we'll never know the true nature of existence.
Actually it's like this in science generally.
"Progress in science does not consist of replacing a wrong theory with a correct theory, it is about replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong." (somebody whose name escapes me at the moment, probably Asimov)
Any explanation of the world that purports to give the exact truth immediately is religion, not science.
So it isn't just random noise affecting the measurements. But this says nothing about the chances that any one of a hundred things could have biased their measurements. Assuming they don't want to have all the other scientists laughing at them, they did their utmost to account for all such factors, but they have no way at all to estimate the probability that there's something else out there they didn't take into account...
---Creation is supposed to have happened once.---
Just because something is CLAIMED to have happened once doesn't mean one is off the hook for having to back up the claim.
---You could argue that the various faiths is evidence of this after generations of word of mouth errors, and idealistic differences (just look at the anglican vs catholic churchs). ----
No, you couldn't, because as is a basic starting point in science: beliefs are not facts. If beliefs were true merely by virtue of people believing them, then there would be no need for science or logic: soliphism would reign! Few creation myths are realy as similar as apologists make them out to be. Once you get past the pretty commonplace bare idea of some wilfull being (what else is the human imagination going to dream up?), and down to what's really important: the HOW of a creation event, few creation myths tell even remotely the same story. And even if they did, this would hardly be evidence of creation, just evidence of the very similar way most people imagine things.
To me, it means:
Energy = mass * (speed of light) squared
This equation tells us how much energy we get from reactions that destroy mass, such as the radioactive decay of elements inside the Earth, or the nuclear fusion inside the Sun.
Now, if you want light in the past to travel, say, 6 billion (current) light years in the space of 6000 years, you need to speed it up one million times. In other words, you increase the amount of energy released by nuclear reactions by one trillion.
I'm not an astrophysicist, and the question "what would happen to the Sun if fusion released a trillion times as much energy" is a complicated one, but even if it didn't go nova I'd be surprised if Earth was still at a comfortable temperature.
I'm not a geophysicist either, but the question "what would happen to the Earth if radioactive elements released a trillion times as much energy" is a relatively (excuse the pun) easy one. Estimating the heat production of the Earth's core in this fashion at 4 * 10^13 watts, we can calculate the heat production of the early creationist Earth to be approximately 4 * 10^25 watts.
For comparison's sake, the Earth currently receives (1353 W/m^2) * pi * (6,360,000 m)^2 = approximately 1.7 * 10^17 watts from the Sun. So really, even if there was no Sun shining on Adam and Eve, they would still be getting about 230 times as much energy as we do today, raising the equilibrium temperature of the planet to a nice toasty 750 degrees Celsius. Maybe that explains Noah's flood, huh? All that water to cover the planet must have been in water vapor form before we cooled to under boiling temperatures.
Of course, if you want to explain just how *much* of those radioactive elements have decayed away in the multi-billion year old rocks we find lying around, you have to increase the rate of reaction (m, in the above equation) by another million fold. That brings our equilibrium temperature to about 5600 degrees Celsius... but wait, at that temperature all the rock is molten and radioactive decay products wouldn't get trapped next to their generating elements anyway.
I love creationist theories. My personal favorite are the wacky explanations of where all the water for Noah's flood came from ("vapor canopy"? anyone want to calculate the air pressure under something like that!?) and where it went.
For future reference, if you really think that Genesis is literal truth and God behaves like a parlor magician, then answers like "He created starlight already on it's way to Earth" and "he made ten million cubic miles of water teleport to deep space", however implausible sounding, are irrefutable. Once you try to explain miracles in terms of science, you're going to have to deal with its conclusions.
under Windows ... the constants #defined don't stay the same for too long.
BTW, if the Universe is infinite, how can it expand?
That's it.
I have no education in physics, so don't flame my head off if this is way wrong :P If the rate of change of these constants is dependant on time, could the velocity of the expansion of the universe actually give rise to different constant values at different points in space? And by similar relativistic distortion, could fast-moving objects 'bend' the laws of physics, so to speak, by changing constants as they moved?
Reality is indistinguishable from any sufficiently advanced fantasy.
And with those shiny new gnu tools you could even use "./configure --with-pi=3.0" if you live in Alabama.
You'd be surprized how dependent most of them are on the concept of time in order to even think about physics. Time, however, is just an illusion created by thermodynamics - it really doesn't exist. Causality does, but not time as we normally conceive of it. This latest brouhaha is merely a manifestation of the collective illusion of time shared by most physicists. Not all, fortunately.
I recognise some of the names mentioned as knowing their stuff, and I'd like to see a few more details but I'd go along with this article. This isn't old news.
The speed of light in a medium varies and depends on the frequency of light, but the speed of light in vacuum does not.
Consider the series N = 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + ...
Then,
N - 1 = - 1 + 1 - 1 + ... = -N
A little algebra convinces you that N = 1/2. However, this series clearly diverges! (at least if you're using standard notions of convergence). You have to watch out what you start calling a proof!
A theory - or indeed a "law" - of physics is *never* more than a model. Someone comes up with an idea about how the universe may work and then sees how useful that idea is in explaining some observed phenomenon. To be useful, it should also make predictions.
For instance, Newtons "laws" describe the operation of the universe extrememly well, and are still used all the time. Early this century, Einstein had an alternative idea - General Relativity - that worked better than Newton's ideas as they continue to model the universe accurately in situations involving very high speeds or very large masses.
We know that there is a problem with General Relativity, however, since it conflicts with Quantum theory. That doesn't stop both Relativity and Quantum theory from being able to make very useful predictions. (Indeed, Quantum theory is about the most useful theory ever created).
I think that the confusion if partly due to the way science tends to be taught: students are usually handed these "laws" as though they are immutable, handed down on stone tablets on top of a mountain. They get used to thinking of them that way, and then get suprised when they're told that the laws have been found to break down in certain circumstances.
Perhaps terminology like "laws" doesn't much help either!
Hmmm..., it's nice how you mix all of the people you don't like, and give them a label. Creationism has little to do with whether or not the Bible is true - it has to do with when the earth came about, and how it happened, and how life came about. There are also many groups within creationism which you seem to have glossed over. Yes, most creationists are trying to defend the Bible's accuracy, however, most creationists do not use the Bible as their proof, they use evidence. The fact that some don't doesn't mean that everyone doesn't. Creationists, though, as a rule, operate using the same scientific principles as everyone else.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Copycat. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/08/15/18372 32&threshold=1&commentsort=3&mode=thread&cid=100
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
It's possible to change a constant, at least in C. It's a workaround and a bit of a hack, but you can. (Thanks to Peter van der Linden and _Expert_C_Programming_ for this and other wonderful tips.) All you need to do is get a pointer to the constant and change the value pointed at.
/* x is now 3 */
const int x = 4;
int *y = &x;
*y = 3;
Yes you get warnings from gcc when you try to compile it (because you're discarding the const qualifier), but it does work. I'm boring, I know.
-----
"A man is judged by his every word." -RW Emerson
"They misunderestimated me." -GW Bush
Young Earth creationists have always used this as part of their "theory" of how light from stars that are millions of light years away could have gotten to earth in just under 7,000. They will probably put a creat deal of effort into mischaracterizing as an airtight proof that "God" exists.
Of course there are numerous holes in such an argument, but that never stood in the way of religious righteousness before.
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
The new Saturn SUV (Vue?) coming out in October uses this.
No, he's saying that the rate of change is small, regardless of whether it is constant, and hence measurements over time are not largely affected.
You are confusing the speed of light in a vaccuum (space), which is a constant (C=3x10^8), with the speed of light in some other medium (not a vaccuum), which is variable and can be quite slow.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
Of course it is going to vary depending on the mass light travels between and the medium it travels through. Also, lets not forget, light is composed of particles - wouldn't the speed of light also depend on its source? Perhaps this is just the phenomenon of an unknown element or subatomic particle we haven't yet discovered. And, another thing I didn't see mentioned was signal degradation. They are looking at a quasar that emitted its light 12 billion years ago.
Observe it in a vacuum, however, control the known variables and the properties of light should hold the same. Unfortunately, these physicists have no choice but to use incomplete evidence to draw their conclusions.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
So you know of someone who actually observed the Big Bang, beneficial mutations (not falsified ones like the last 100 yrs of 'prehistoric-man' fossil findings - and yes, their is documented proof of the frauds in each case), and other evolutionary wonders? I like to remember that there have been documented cases of fossils of the same dinosaur (in tact) found in differing geological layers that are 'millions upon millions' of years apart from each other as defined by evolutionary theories.
It's not necesarily true, an infinitely long irrational number does not necessarily include every other possible number sequence. Go here for more info.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Great now StarFleet is gunna have to adjust all of their speedometers...*sigh*
.ph0x
---
ps -aux | grep mind
General Motor's contract with the canadian company that produces the f-body cars (camaro and firebird) expires at the end of the 2002 model year. There is a lot of speculation going on about that contract not being renewed. Then again, it could all be hype to try and get people to buy those cars now, thinking that they won't be able to in the future. Or they may end up the same way that Ford's thunderbird did, where they stop production for a few years and then do a huge hyp campaign while re-releasing them. At the very least I rather suspect that the firebird will get canned before the camaro, which is unfortunate as the 'bird has a much nicer body style, and better options (WS6, etc...) IMHO.
Hockey - Canada's gift to the world
Here in Brazil the default is Manual Transmitons, and it's getting hard to find new cars without it. Probably cultural, but most people here preffer manual transmission, most people preffer to have control over the machine.
Although, some have semi-automatic transmission, we still prefer the other.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
I do argue sample size, the sample was ridiculously small. The 11% experiment had a respectable sample size, but the effect is still highly questionable. And you're right: it does deserve further study, 11% is almost big enough to be interesting. But a huge grain of salt is warranted, and I have a feeling that any time an experiment comes out with some noisy data people are going to jump on it as "proof" and ignore the zillions of other experiments that showed no effect. When only a few experiments show anything at all, it's not evidence.
Evolutionary theory does not rely on time frame! Its a theory of how things evolve, not when they evolved.
Even the Pope has announced that "God" could do his work through evolution.
for sources search: oct 1996 pope evolution
what is stream teory and where can I read more about it? 10x
Yes, but its not the religious text that has the pattern, its the language itself. Basically the second word for line is better translated as circumference. So the hebrew word for circumference has a value of 111. The word for line is 106 (111/106)*3=3.14156. Multiply that by 3 and you get 3.141509 (yes that is different than the number I gave earlier, like I said, I was doing that from memory, quoting this from actually rereading the info.) And I was wrong Egpytian did come before Hebrew :(
Anyways the Hebrew language is full of math, so this isn't something unusual or devine really. Watch the movie PI it gives some great examples, for instance the mathematical values for mother+father=child. And many other example that I can't remember.
What about 42?
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
And, more to the point, can you say it ten times quickly?
What a stupid response.
Creation is supposed to have happened once. You could argue that the various faiths is evidence of this after generations of word of mouth errors, and idealistic differences (just look at the anglican vs catholic churchs).
Whereas evoulution is supposed to be an ongoing phenomon. Where are the species transforming into other species ?
"But you can't go faster than the speed of light."
"Of course not, that's why scientists raised the speed of light back in 2260." --Futurama
Entropy gets everyone.
Well, God could do His work through evolution, certainly, but the Bible states (even if you go back to the literal Hebrew original text) that the time it took to create everything was a literal, 24 hour days, 7 day week. Argument over.
The bad news is, I don't bother following New Scientist links because IMO for accuracy it ranks somewhere below National Enquirer...
I know it's a slow news day, but this story was posted on slashdot 63 minutes ago.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
Drawing conclusions based on the behavior of *atoms* 12 billion light years away seems ridiculous. Jeez, they had to land a probe on Mars to get a really accurate picture of the landscape. Why don't scientists just say, "Based on our current known facts (which change every 5 years), and using our best measuring sticks (mostly a software-based approach) we think this is what is going on."
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?
Find free books.
The discovery (if validated) is said to be good news for string theorists.
I bet all the poor college students with a modern physics course requirement aren't going to see it as good news when their midterm calculations start getting even more complex than they were before...
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section2.h tml
Evolutionary theory also doesn't really make testable predictions.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/predict.h tml
AC, to answer your inquiry: Buddhists accept perception and inference as the most important & reliable means of knowledge. Contrary to this, creationists typically accept verbal testimony and/or scriptual authority as the most important & reliable means of knowledge. Thusly, Buddhists will not inherently have difficulty with scientific theory/inquiry whereas a creationist would. Note that Buddhists typically are not concerned with the focus & direction which science typically pursues as it has little to do with the nature of suffering. =jombee
x + y = y cancel
That cancellation step is just shorthand for dividing both sides of the equation by a shared element to eliminate that element from the equation. This works because any element divided by itself equals one, unless the element in question is zero. Of course, dividing by zero is undefined and would break the equation.
...but the element you're cancelling is x - y. Um...doesn't x = y? Wouldn't a quick substitution of x for y give us y - y? Doesn't that equal 0?
Oops. Did I break it? ;-)
208.48.26.212 www.nytimes.com
Enjoy.
[TMB]
No, you don't have to assume the change is constant. But you can assume a constant average upper bound if you want to find out how big the accumulated effect can be. If it were bigger than that, we'd see it.
So perhaps right after the big bang, when the universe was smaller, Pi might have been tart. After enough time, in an apparently open universe, Pi will evolve into pizza, or perhaps beyond. But to think more 3-dimensionally, perhaps Pi is really cake, or perhaps orange, or beach ball.
On a different digression, last week there was a discussion about Pi violating the DMCA by containing bit combinations somewhere deep in the bits that express circumvented copyrighted art. If Pi is indeed changing, perhaps that's why TV, movies, and music just seem to be getting worse as the years go by. (Can't have anything to do with MY aging and turning into an old phart!) Wonder what the same changing Pi theory says about Microsoft products or other software contained deep in the bits.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Still, I've got the uncanny feeling there's some very simple explanation for the universe and everything (and I doubt it's 42), and we just don't see it.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Huh? What does biology have to do with anything here? You're comparing apples and oranges.
Have you even read anything on string theory yet? String theory is the idea that all laws in the universe are inter-related by certain 'strings' that 'vibrate' to a certain frequency. I'm over-simplifying, but basically, YES, they are absolutely related to each other.
IF the findings are true (remember, these are very preliminary findings), THEN it takes something like 12 billion years for very very very minute changes to occur.
And so you're saying that there is a constant rate of change that never changes, but constants can change according to this rate of change constant? Yeah, that makes sense.
Nothing like having a wide-variety of standards.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
11% is one experiment. What about the other experiment with the AIDS patients where a bigger chunk survive than don't? Maybe one can argue sample size in that case. BUT WHATEVER THE CASE, it does merit further examination and study. Any good scientist wouldn't stick their head in the sand to not want to find out.
On that note, it's too bad my original post didn't get modded up - not that it ever would, it violates the principles of science and atheism, it seems...or does it really? But hey - it's a free website run by geeks, what should I have expected in the first place? They think they're right anyway in a very pseudostoic way.
N = 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +
2N = 2 + 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 +
or
2N = 2 + N => N = 2
Simple proof of convergence.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Ok, scientific evolutionary and cosmological theories are based on emperical evidence (IE, observations). If I'm going to be convinced that creationist theories are equally valid, I need to see some emperical evidence for divine creation. One common argument against evolution is that "no-one has ever witnessed evolution happening." Well, put your money where your mouth is-- are there any first-hand accounts of creation happening?
Causation can cause correlation
Well, relativity tells us that there's no such thing as a 'fixed point'. Objects' position and speed can only be described in terms of other objects. (Check out the Michaelson-Morley experiment for a demonstration of this.)
- fader
If you look hard enough for a pattern in anything you will find it. I'm willing to bet $200 that I could find an aproximation for pi in any text, religious or otherwise.
-matt
An example of the former would be the ekpyrotic universe model, an example of the latter would be eternal inflation.
Ah, how goes the war between P.S. and A.L.?
- Caveman
The really funny part is how badly everyone jumped on the trollin' band wagon. ROFL! Gotcha!
root # mount -t msdos /dev/fd1 /mini-floppy
What would be a good novelty gift is those 8in disks. They looked like 5.25"'s but were bigger.
- 8" = floppy
- 5.25" = mini-floppy
- 3.5" = micro-floppy
- Weird Sony things that nobody ever used
Or how about those really small ones Sony was pushing for a while, they looked like 3.5" but were even smaller (2" I think, but my memory is very foggy about these).Best Slashdot comment ever
Lest you miss the point of the previous poster's remark, however: all science is observational. That doesn't mean that every phenomena has to be directly observed in order to formulate scientific theories about it. We don't have to actually go to the center of the Sun to scientifically study what happens at the center of the Sun -- there are indirect effects that we can observe. Ditto, astronomy, cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology, archaeology, forensic science, etc. etc. etc.
To creationists: Stop trying to claim your dogma is factandStop trying to get it inserted as fact into schools.
Your post made more sense to me when I initially misread your first sentence as "So perhaps right after the big bong
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
Since when was God trademarked?
And ok, fine. I'm secure in what happens to me after I die. I've given my life up to Jesus to be the one in control of it, not myself anymore. Therefore, I get to spend eternity in a perfect heaven away from the misery that is Earth. Are you secure in what happens to you after you die?
If you say you don't care, what matters is the here and now - I say, by all means, go live it up I'm sure there aren't consequences for such actions (AIDS, alcoholism, brain damage from drug use, the list goes on...)
I'm not sure what you mean by "observational science". All science is observational, in the science that observation and experiment is the ultimate test of theory. If it wasn't, it would either be math, philosophy, or just pure bullshit. I agree with you that evolutionary theory isn't a very good theory, but I hold that it's better than creationism.
About your point that radioisotope dating methods may not be accurate due to changes in physical constants, please stop being ridiculous. Scientists have possible evidence for a 0.001% change in a physical constant unrelated to radioactive decay in a place 12 billion light years away and time 12 billion years ago. That's hardly reason to criticize radioisotope dating. You're obviously tremendously biased towards anything that might lend a shred of support to your theory. That's not objective science.
As to why I have issues with evolutionary theory, here are my tests for a good scientific theory:
1. Must be falsifiable. If there is no reasonable way it could be proved wrong, it's not science.
2. Must make verifiable predictions. If a theory doesn't make any predictions that can be checked, it's not terribly useful.
It's pretty damn hard to think of how you could disprove evolution. Just about anything you find, the biologists will make up an explanation for. Evolutionary theory also doesn't really make testable predictions. About all it's good for is explaining things after-the-fact. Of course, creationism fails both tests in an even worse manner. Thus, lacking a better alternative, I believe in evolution, but hold healthy doubts.
> Have you even read anything on string theory
> yet? String theory is the idea that all laws in
> the universe are inter-related by certain
> 'strings' that 'vibrate' to a certain frequency.
> I'm over-simplifying, but basically, YES, they
> are absolutely related to each other.
So if u r so savy in string theory could u explain
how the pretty tiny strings vibrating @ a "certain" frequency could defeat evolution theories.
I know you cannot so dont loose ur time and stick with your creationism. Its your right to believe in what you want but dont use your pseudo-science
to criticize a scientific theory.
While it is colloquial to refer to the speed of light in refractive matter, technically this is _not_ light but a coupled light-phonon (sound) mode.
Yes, I'm karma whoring, and No, I don't care if you mod me down.
Ha! If you think I believe myself to be any better of a person than anyone here, you're wrong. I'm simply stating that in this one case, my attitude towards others (not of my own abilities) will be a much better one than theirs. But overall I would be the first to admit defeat in trying to be a 'decent human being'. I know I'm a big pile of cow-dung, admit it, and can still be kind to others.
[ls -l /etc/]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 766 Jul 31 14:16 /etc/c
GOD: Oops.
[chmod 666 /etc/c]
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Despising poor people. Well thats very christian of you, FUCKER! I'm glad I'm not American every time I see these rabid, christian rightwingers insulting people because of their social situation. Asshole!
Should read:
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
that [certain physical constants] may have been different in the far past
Here's proof that constants aren't really constant:
I'm all for having write access to constants if it means that we can change the speed of light, though.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Does this mean the constant requests for my personal information (a la the NYT article linked to in the story) may have been at a different frequency in the past?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Does that mean that perl script kiddies hold the key to the universe's mysteries ?
We're all doomed !!! Our universed is just one big string manipulation perl hack, making it unmaintainable code soon to collapse and kill us all. AAAAARRGH !!!
- sigs are for wimps.
There is a theory which says that if we ever really figure out once and for all how the universe works, it will immediately be replaced by something even more bafflingly complicated. There is another theory which says that this has already happened.
-THGTTG
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
Ha! I knew it, I knew it. That fucking asshole is going to get a verbal smackdown tomorrow for calling M-theory "some flaky theory that some professor probably came up with".
if you look at an object near a black hole (since it's under a stronger gravitational field), the rate of time is different than right next to you. Now, a long time ago, the universe was more dense, since it is expanding. Therefore when we look at areas that are far away (and much older), shouldn't we be viewing events that were happening in a different frame of reference? Wouldn't this cause all sorts of things to appear to be different than they actually would be if you had been there in the same frame of reference?
You're lying because you think you're better, even as you deny it to yourself. Otherwise you wouldn't bother to make a point of comparing your loving actions to those infidels. Yeah yeah, I know, you'll claim "it's merely the truth, there is no harm in that", the last refuge of the guy who is attempting to rationalize himself into believing he's humble.
The speed of light has changed over time? No kidding? I mean, after a few drinks, it takes several seconds for the light from my monitor to reach my eyes. I think that the constants change more with alcohol and drugs, than with time.
;-)
To give a really obvious example, smoke some pot, and hey, time slows down, sometimes it speeds up. I think the physicists need to stop looking at the stars and more at things like pot, LSD, etc. Things that really affect time, and therefore the speed of light 'constant'
Actually if you understand that the hebrew language is mathematical, you get a much better value of PI from the bible. I used to have the explanation memorized (I love arguing random crap like that), but I don't anymore, but basically each letter/word of the alphabit of the hebrew language has a mathematical meaning and the word "line" is used twice in the setence, but a different word is used the second time. If you take the (second word/first word)*3 you get 3.14156 or something like that, which is even closer than the egyptians reportably knew of pi.
(figured I'd do a google search for this before I submitted this, came up with this)
http://www.yfiles.com/pi.html
Magius_AR
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
This is (quite literally) not the end of the world, and also not relevant to the evolution debate (although it will surely be blown out of proportion a billion-fold by shoddy journalists). Some info for the crowd:
The fine structure constant (alpha) is found by combining several other "universal constants" in such a way that all of the units (such as meters per second) cancel out. You get a dimensionless number, like pi, whose particular value (about 137) is basically built in to the universe. One formula is:
where
So if alpha is actually not constant, any one of those items may have changed while others remained constant. And more importantly, the research points to a change of only 0.001% over the past 12 billion years. In short, warp drive this ain't.
Not true. It did, however, come close to happening..
end communication
Go back to your trailer home and tell your wife to get back on the treadmill generator to power that there internet thing.
> After reading this article I'll be re-thinking my
> values. Are you a man enough to do that?
Man enough to rethink values, but not enough to post under your real nick?
Anyway, first off you're confusing relying on the scientific method versus relying on any particular result of applying the scientific method. It's easy to make mistakes using the scientific method. The point is to reapply it to your conclusions to ferret out the erroneous results.
Secondly, you're also confusing reliance on the scientific method (science) with scientific humanism, or atheism, both of which are philosophical beliefs. Since philosophy and science seek to answer different questions, you're comparing apples and angels. There's no conflict between the scientific method and most religious beliefs; in fact, percentage-wise most scientists believe in a higher being. The only time they come into conflict is when someone tries to apply the scientific method to a philosophical idea, or tries to apply belief to an experiment. As said above, science and philosophy can be mixed, but cannot be substituted.
Perhaps, then, rethinking your values merely means expanding your mind to encompass both sides of the issue, thereby finding that there's not really a contradiction between them.
Virg
P.S.: I must take issue with your calling science a human creation. The scientific method is application of simple logic and experiment, and the results can describe things within or outside of human influence For example, the way electricity behaves has been experimentally defined by scientists, but none would argue that those scientists created the phenomenon just because they came up with rules to describe its behavior.
Way back when I was a kid it seemed like an eternity of time existed between my birthday in June and Christmas in December. Nowadays all I seem to be saying to myself is "Seems like I *just went* to the bathroom"
flaky time constants..
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
News for nerds not news? Oops. I guess I should be more careful what I ask ;)
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Indeed. And even if we did happen to stumble across "the true nature of existence", how could we possibly know that we had, and that there wasn't some even better description lurking just beyond our reach?
extern const Universal_Quantity my_universal_constant;
Universal_Quantity& my_universal_variable = const_cast<Universal_Quantity &>(my_universal_constant);
Devo Andare,
Jeffrey.
Time Lord, Dark Horse: The Techno Mage of Gallifrey
> Of these scientists, only less than 5 per cent believed in a supreme being.
> I think this is an issue where selecting an unbiased sample is very important.
Definitely something to consider, although I don't think that "Nobel Laureates in Physics and Chemistry" necessarily represents an unbiased sample. It would be interesting to run the numbers by field, say, or by "level of achievement", insofar as that term could be defined.
> Another thing I would like to comment on is that religious
> belief does not always contain a belief in a higher being.
Good point. I consider atheism to be a religious belief as well, in that atheists believe in the absence of a higher being (as opposed to agnostics, who do not choose one way or the other). So, I will concede that although I didn't mean to connect religion to supreme beings, putting the sentence together the way I did had that effect. And in answer to your last question, I consider the Dalai Lama to be one of the best examples of how reverence need not be tied to a diety.
Virg
is that /. will repost the same stories, sometimes within hours of each other.
See?
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
The perceived "bias" of scientists against creationsim is strictly based on the profound lack of any supporting evidence for it. If anyone discovers something that can be considered "evidence" for creationism- like an ark on a mountain- then we will have to take creationism seriously! We wouldn't merely tell you that "you cannot use this new evidence". Science is not another religion. In fact this would be very exciting, because if creationsim has any truth in it at all, then an elaborate theoretical tapestry of hundreds of long-accepted scientific ideas would have to be discarded. Constructing a replacement framework to explain your new evidence would involve lots of papers and research funding. So this would be a good thing.
:)
But for science to just throw away centuries of established theories, you're going to have to fork over some real evidence. All we ever get are wishful thinking, appeals to emotion, appeals to ignorance, and Bible passages.
What would stop me from doing the same thing to you with your "evidence" for evolutionism?
A number of things will stop you. For example, the mere fact that the evidence exists is a huge blow to you. The sheer volume of it doesn't help you much either.
...how the anti-creationist posts are modded up and the anti-evolutionist posts are modded down. Ah, to have a slashdot-esque open mind....
see
Je t'aime Stéphanie
local inertial frames are used in special reletivity, not general relitivity. and even thought GR does not explicitly state it, the fact that nothing is constant is implied by the nature GR, on measurment to me is not the same for you, therefore one can not make anything constant (theoreticly).
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Or so said Einstien, I think...
A recommended reading:
Brian R. Greene, The Elegant Universe, Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, 1999, Random House, 448p, illustrated
Gives a summary of special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, an introduction to superstring theory, the current state of the research, and the search for the 'final' theory.
Written for the interested reader with some pre-knowledge in physics. I thought it was a very enjoyable reading.
2 != 2. It really equals 1.999987834637462
Get Up Kids - Valentine anybody? gimme a hell yeah!
|---------------|
practically an AC
See New Scientist.
are still alive. I saw a 10-pack for sale at Radio Shack the other day. Seriously considered buying some as a novelty gift.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Lots of things once believed to be black/white are really just on one extreme end of a continuum.
aXV1cTswMDR5dS9wc2gwYnFxew
This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi ever change.
:o)
Hey, those forward-thinking guys at Xerox must have looked pretty smug when that town in Alabama legislated PI to be equal to 3.
So does this mean I should stop using const in my C and C++ programs?
No sig? Sigh...
Haven't you noticed the way cats like to sprawl out and show it all when it's hot?
But then again, I don't bother photographing it. It's just that cats have a way of finding the warmest spot in the winter, and the coolest in the summer. Think of them as comfort canaries.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
More than 525 lines .. Its called PAL
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
If you look at equations which use the Gravitational Constant, you notice something very important. They typically involve the surface of a sphere, of radius 'r', but there's no Pi. The one constant that NEEDS to be there, for the description of the system to be complete, is noticable by its absence.
In short, G - the Gravitational Constant - is provably composite, as it must contain within it the value of Pi, in order to complete the description of the spherical system.
Now, let us say that G = n . Pi, where n is some arbritary multiplier, which is fixed for any given system. In other words, n is a constant, for that system. Change the system, and n varies, which would mean that G varies.
In truth, I believe G to be an extremely complex composite, containing a wide range of "atomic" constants and multipliers. Since gravity does not travel faster than light, there would seem to be some equivalent to elasticity for space, which suggests some parallel of Hooke's Constant. I'm sure, if anyone had a moment to think about it, there would be many other Constants which end up being "missing/unnecessary" when using G in an equation, but which are there, nonetheless. Now, where could they be....
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I once read in a C programming book something along the lines of, "always use CONST for a value of something you will use throughout the program. That way if you need to change this value, you only have to change it once. An example would be making 3.14 a constant named PI. That way if PI ever changes, you only need to change one line of code."
alpha =(e^2)/((h-bar)*c)
where e is the charge on an electron, h-bar (normally a lover case script h with a horizontal line through the stem just above the round part) is Plank's constant divided by 2*pi, and c is the speed of light. the answer is a dimensionless 1/137.036.
(Your link didn't work.) Nah, that's an old red herring. The adjacent biblical verses say that the vessel was a handsbreath in thickness, so if you measure from the inside you get pretty close to 3.14 depending on your assumptions about cubits, etc. See this mostly secular analysis or this more religiously-oriented site's explanation.
This is why the speed of light is slowing down (E=mC^2 means you can't measure this with an atomic clock), why my house is always a mess and why my whiz-bang 2 year old computer is now a slow old dog. Those old mechanical clocks that don't keep good time any more???? They actually do, it's just that time isn't a constant either! Anyone got a good way to benchmark this?
Yes, many people worship the Bible, rituals, idols, statues, etc, but the Bible is the Word of God, and thirsting for the knowledge of the Word is one of the smartest decisions a person may ever make.
I am a Creationist. I read the Bible. I worship God. How can you say Creationists don't worship God?
seriously it's time for moderators to stop modding these things up, they're just annoying, if you read slashdot and havn't registered at NYT yet then you have read it enough, it takes 2 minutes and the above poster is an ass
Photos.
Easy peasy. The light beam travels at the speed of light. Both an external observer and the .5 c traveler experience this. Its easier to understand when you realize that as speed increases, the rate of time decreases. So the .5 c traveler is moving faster but is watching slower.
Well, physics, like math, attempts to be exact and accurate. But whenever we discover otherwise more complex functions need to be drafted. I doubt the average human brain is fully capable of understanding the intricate details of how the universe really works on a functional / mathematical level. Most people, americans, don't even understand the basics of newtonian physics, let alone superstrings. Perhaps something like a genetic program could solve these problems a bit easier and faster?
I can explain it easily: statistical anomaly. 11% isn't a big effect. For that matter, what about the *several* *different* experiments in the past that have shown no statistically significant effect? These guys aren't the only ones to have tried the experiment, you know. It means that the result is questionable at best.
hm. Interesting.
Let me try to draw some parallels. We won't argue what true Science is defined as. From a creationist point of view it's Evolution vs Creation and true science is caught in the middle. From a creationist point of view, here's a general parallel:
Ev. - foundation= none
Cr. - foundation= bible
Ev. - theory= nothing -> big bang -> chaos -> us -> big crunch
Cr. - theory= God -> 7 days -> perfection -> us -> chaos
Ev. - goal= find evidence to prove a human-born theory
Cr. - goal= find evidence to support a believed factual record of history
Basically, evolutionists are working from the bottom up and creationists are working from the top down - proving a theory vs. supporting a believed truth. So yes, the methodology behind evolution science and creation science will be different. But as a previous post mentioned, there are creation scientist quacks and intelligent creation scientists, just as there are also evolution scientist quacks and intelligent evolution scientists.
Intelligent creationists believe in the scientific process, and the observation, exploration and experimentation of observable, testable phenomenon. But when science deals with anything in relation to time (more generally, origins and destinations), it becomes a theory (to differing degrees). ie we can observe how light acts in the immediate time period, but as we've just observed, the possibility of how light acted long ago may have changed, so any theories/facts that deal with light from a historical record (now, pretty much anything we observe in the sky) will have to be treated much more carefully.
Real science would say: "we see light travelling from this star and have calculated it's distance through reliable processes, estimating the light to have been travelling for 5 million years."
Real science would not add: "therefore, 5 million years ago this star was born." and repeat that as fact. It WOULD say: "therefore, we believe this star may have been born 5 million years ago based on our current understanding of the lightwave spectrum and properties."
Real science must distinguish between observed and tested fact, and interpolated theories based on those fact. Creationists would be so much more easy going if this happened, but it doesn't in most cases. So the evolutionist quacks force their evolution beliefs on the public, and the intelligent creationists try to defend the creation foundation. Then the creationist quacks go out and ridicule the evolutionist quacks, including the evolution foundational theory, and force their creationist beliefs on the public, causing the intelligent evolutionists retaliate against the creationist theory. It's an endless circle, and neither foundational theory will EVER be proven as fact until someone empirically disproves either belief (as it is now, only if we eventually figure out how to time travel).
So, ignoring the evolution/creation scientist quacks, intelligent scientists state clearly what they believe vs what they know. Creationist and evolutionist scientists CAN work together, responsibly, if they treat and acknowledge each other's beliefs and their own as theories that can and may be disproven in time, and can accept that.
Science is the strive to prove what you believe, accepting that what you believe may be disproven.
And just in response to some specific statements...
as science has shown that some claims of the Bible are not completely correct
-- correction - some claims of creationists are not completely correct. Just as science forms theories to prove beliefs, creationists form theories to prove the bible. In both cases, if one theory is disproven, the belief isn't just thrown away - it's fought for, it's researched more, and other theories that can prove the belief are found.
-- the bible has not in any way been proven beyond doubt to be incorrect. Theories, however, have changed. People have said that the changing speed of light is a score for creationists - it's not a win, it's just a factor that evolutionists now need to consider in their theories, whereas it doesn't affect the creationist theory at all. This will continue...
-- again, the difference is that evolution has no foundation except a formed theory, so evolutionary theories will undergo many more changes than creationist theories. The foundation for creation, the believed facts, have not been disproven. The focus for both beliefs are different. Evolutionists therefore needs to uphold their theory and prove it, while trying to disprove the creation foundation. Creationists on the other hand, only focus on disproving evolution, as the foundation is believed to be fact, so people aren't focused on proving creation as much as disproving evolution.
So, creation theories - those attempting to disprove evolution - change, just as much as evolution theories - those attempting to prove evolution - change. This is because science, the strive for truth, continues to uncover more properties of our universe, and these properties are applied to mold and update the theories for evolution and creation.
Nutshell:
Evolution -> prove theories, disprove bible
Creation -> support bible, disprove evolution
That was long, and kind of redundant, but I think I get the point across... am I wrong in anything I said?
Disclaimer: I feel like I may be way off base here, but I'll go out on a limb anyway. If I'm wrong, please correct me, don't flame me. Also, I'm generalizing a bunch of stuff here, if you're a physist (or a cynic), read this with a grain of salt.
Current theoretical physicists (and some hefty dead ones too) believe(d) that at the time of the big bang, and for a relative time afterwards, there was a single super-force.
Constants, as we know them, are directly related to more particular forces (i.e. Nuclear/Weak/Electromagnetic/Gravitational). For instance, take the gravitational constant G. This constant only makes sense when looking at the gravitational force as it stands now. When the forces are unified, there are different physical behaviors, and hence, even though G *should* be a constant, it is outside its frame of reference.
Think of it this way: when you move at a velocity close to the speed of light, your rulers change size and your clocks tick at a different rate. This is general relativity [I'm dyslexic, what's the chance it's special relativity?]. Go back far enough in time, to when there is a single super-force along with massive amount of dense matter and heat: your tools have changed now too. How can you measure a "constant" when your instruments are changing?
That example is a little weak, so I'll try another one as well. When you look into a glass of water, objects inside will seem different than when you remove them. This is due to different densities in the three mediums you view the object through (water -> glass -> air). Say all pennies are constant. Why is the penny in the glass a different size? Quick answer: it isn't.
But, if you don't know the glass is there, or don't know the correct densities, etc., you have no way of answerring this question other than by saying "the constant isn't so constant." The number of layers (and relative densities) of glass and the other mediums is also important. If each "separation" of the fundamental force to sub-forces (and subsequent breakdowns) are thought of as layers of glass, or the dark to light age transition is thought of as a layer of glass, then the analogy becomes clear. How can you compare one set of measurements with one set of related constants to another set with its own properties, but without knowing the relationships between the two? I say you cannot.
So, doesn't current theoretical physics imply that "constants" specifically cannot remain constant as the laws and makeup of physics changes? Seems that way to me.
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Will this myth never end?
A groundbreaking paper to be published next week in the field's most prestigious journal was withdrawn today after the results were found to be spurious results of a computer bug.
The research, which showed that some of the fundamental constants of the universe may be changing as they aged, had been computed on a supercomputer known as a Beowulf Cluster. Some of the components of that cluster used the Intel Pentium processor which was affected by a well known bug which performed certain mathematical calculations incorrectly.
The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia had assembled the supercomputer over several years using cast off computers and special software originally developed at NASA. The calculations were run over several months to process the huge amount of data the scientists accumulated from the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii.
Team leader Dr. Webb said, "This finding is devastating to myself and my team members, as we worked very hard to eliminate every source of error in our observations".
Dr. Rocky Kolb, an astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who was not involved in the work, is worried about other projects using this and similar supercomputer clusters, "This means that a great many other 'findings' are going to have to be reviewed. This sets the physics field back several years but renews hope in areas such as cold fusion".
An Intel spokesman declined to comment.
Bleh!
...the universe is being run on old Pentiums?
[studio audience laughs]
Maybe those Alabama folk weren't so far of with the proposed legislation changing pi to 3.0.
The paper was published online last week at the official Physical Review Letters web site, though you need a real subscription (most universities have one) to get in.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Ceci n'est pas un sig
It's traveling at c relative to the object AND relative to the fixed point.
Yes, I know, it hurts my head too.
Should Read: Stupid Typo in last paragraph
Bah, I'm bad at this.
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
You've just described science and knowledge, my friend.
Everything is a crutch until we get a better description, ad infintum. From Aristotle to Galileo, to Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, to Feynman, Hawking, and Thorne. Each generation of scientists and mathematicians uses the truths of the previous generation, breaks it, and refashions it according to modern experiences.
It's the *strength* of science, not a weakness.
GPL Deconstructed
Really, it's very simple- every point in space time has a zero dimension point in addition to all the other dimensions. Since there is no time or space coordinate to these zero points, everything in the universe exhibits a very weak force on every other object in space. In other words the entire universe is it's own ether. Have a nice think on that.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
More and more I think that theories in physics are nothing more than successive approximations and we'll never know the true nature of existence. With some of these theories it almost feels like someone is playing a trick on us and every time we see through it a new layer of tricks is added.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!"
:-) Nobody else seemed to get it, though...
:-) Or a way to temporarily slow down the rest of the universe... Or some other "loophole" which leaves relativity intact.
I laughed my ass off when I saw that
Wouldn't this change some fundamental laws of nature? Whats with Einstein's relativity theory then? *dreams of FTL travel*
It would be interesting if Einstein was correct, but we found loopholes that made it irrelevant.
For instance, wouldn't it be just as good to travel to a point 1 light year away in under a year, compared to moving faster than light? They might be completely different things. Maybe we can figure out a way to increase the speed of light locally
Don't listen to me, I am insane.
A dingo ate my sig...
Great track off of Tool's Ænima. I'm glad you decided to post this, it gives me an excuse to listen to Tool.
Constants are always constant, it is just the rate at which they are constant changes.
Atleast, so I've heard.
The problem as I see it is that I have no personality of my own.
Speaking of light speed, there is one question that I've been curious about in case anyone out there has an idea.
.5 c.
Suppose we have an object traveling at at
Then the object shoots a beam of light in the direction of its travel. How fast is the beam of light moving relative to the ojbect and a fixxed point?
goddamnit, why cant you nerds spell!
I remember in my last college physics course(a theoretical physics course) something very much like this was discussed. Back in the very first instants of the universe many of the fundamental forces were combined but as the universe cooled the separate forces condensed out. Is this something different or is this just new proof?
"Even the Devil can quote scripture to suit his purposes" - William Shakespeare
...but how do you explain the data from *several* *different* experiments done in a double-blind study that were purposely built to remove the placebo effect that confirmed that the prayer group had improvement? I'm not kidding when I say this - I think this should be investigated further.
Remember, science explains how, not why...
proof the 1 == 2
x = y
xx = yx multipy both sides by x
x^2-y^2 = yx - y^2 subtract y^2
(x+y)(x-y) = y(x-y) factor
x + y = y cancel
y + y = y replace x with y since x = y
2y = 1y
2 = 1 divide by y
I'd like to see your "god" power your internet for one millisecond. go on, show me.
even the "trailer trash" can at least do some work around this shithole planet. name one tangible, unquestionably positive thing religion or a god has produced.
Geeze. Don't let the Creationists see this. They already claim that energy decays over time, there is no accurate form of dating old things, and that, to the point, all the physical constants have changed so it only appears the universe is as old as it is. It is only 4000-10000 years old. Blah. I am a scientist and fairly spiritual, but they are just lunitics.
Second, alpha does indeed change with energy. The ratio of constants you know as "alpha" is actually the zero-energy limit of the energy-dependent alpha, sometimes known as alpha0. In particle accelerators, the energies are large enough that alpha begins to noticeably deviated from alpha0. As the other poster said, this is known as "running of the coupling constants". You can read about the idea here. (That discussion is generic and applies to any kind of coupling constant, including the fine structure constant.)
Thirdly, you're right, the experiment needs to be reproduced and improved.
They worship the Bible.
:(
And it's the gravest mistake that they will ever make.
Unfortunately many won't find out until it's too late
You also have to realize they're only claiming a four-sigma result. Four sigma is very convincing if it's really four sigma, but experimentalists never really truly know their error bars that well --- four sigma could really be two sigma, which could be wrong.
And anyway, say they're right. So what? It would be interesting, but I don't think it revolutionizes physics. The link to string theory suggested in the NY Times article is kinda silly, since string theory would only have produced significant effects at times a zillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Also, it's not news that the fine structure constant isn't constant. In quantum field theory, coupling constants are not absolute constants; they have different values on different distance scales. So yes, it's surprising if atomic spectra have changed, but it doesn't bring all of physics to its knees.
Find free books.
Quote Hubert Farnsworth in Futurama:
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!"
I generally don't think it is a good idea to rely on telescope observation only. But IANAA(strophysicist)...
Wouldn't this change some fundamental laws of nature? Whats with Einstein's relativity theory then? *dreams of FTL travel*
Once again (if correct) it is proven that cosmic laws are never meant to be final...
Thanks for proving my point. Significant by whose measure? Jeez, who's watching the watchers???
Speed of light down. Fine structure constant up. Details on the financial and physics news at 11...
By definition: a scientific theory makes predictions that are based on some assuptions. It can be proven false by measuring the effect it predicts and finding discrepancies between observations and theory. So, a scientific theory can be falsified, for example the Newtonian Gravitation Theory was known to be wrong as it did not predict the orbit of Mercury absolutely correctly. General relativity could explain the difference, and thus was considered to be closer to the truth. However, both do a good job in e.g. predicting the orbit of the Moon.
Religious theories in general do not provide predictions or arguments that could be verified or falsified. (Of course there are 'world-will-end-next-sunday' predictions, but who takes them seriously). How could you verify claims such as: 'If you kill someone, you'll go to hell after you die' or 'Jesus is the Son of God'
Creationists are people who believe strongly that Bible is the absolute truth of God, by God and for His People. Some scientific theories have made predictions that are based on assumptions which contradict the Bible, and are thus being seen as an attack against the God. The creationists are now making what they think is science by producing their own theories that also explain all the observed facts, including the Bible, which they think is the absolute truth. However, they do not make their own predictions on results of measurements, they just explain the existing ones.
One characteristic of scientific measurements is that they always contain statistical uncertainties, often referred to as 'error' or 'accuracy'. However, I have never met a creationist who would give a value on the accuracy of the facts extracted from the Bible.
For a creationist, the Bible is the word of absolute truth, meaning that it should be absolutely correct. If it is not, it contains some inaccuracy, and thus their God, who has dictated it word by word, is imperfect. It seems that creationists do no longer believe that Bible is a sufficient base for their life, as science has shown that some claims of the Bible are not completely correct.
They produce artificial 'scientific' extensions to the biblical base of their life. In my opinion, this means that the creationists are trying to explain and extend the absolute truth (or what they think is the absolute truth) with relative truths, that are changing and falsifiable. I'm not that familiar with christianity, but for a muslim, this would mean 'Shirk', or mixing Allah with something else. Shirk is always punished by eternal damnation, and in an islamic society, it is punished also by death. I think creationists are dangerously close to that.
The Buddhists (including myself) have a nice workaround for the conflict between science and religion, but that is another story. If you are interested in that, use google.
In earlier versions of Borlands Pascal compilers, constants were writable. Now they changed it (Kylix, Delphi 6) so that constants are readonly and variables (which are obviously writable) can be initialized, like in C/C++:
// Old syntax
// New syntax
const a:integer=2;
var a:integer=2;
I wonder if they will change that back now...
It was fine this morning but over the past couple of months it has been near impossible to reach. It is a definite DDoS attack. Funny, if these creation people were sincerely certain about the things that they say, they would not feel threatened by people discussing science in a public forum. Maybe they're not quite as convinced about their faith as they let on ...
Did anyone understand my point??
So the speed of light has changed. It's a little bit faster. How does this affect my stock options?
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
"Make that 'const int'. It's always going to be a four."
"But what if it becomes a three?"
"It's a const, it won't become a three."
"But according to the physical restraints of the universe, it just might..." :)
I always liked bringing up "But what if a few bits change on the computer due to static electricity? It ain't const then." :)
if you think of it in a certain way, light needs to go from one point to another point in a fixed amount of time because it is a constant.
;-)
perhaps light is not so much tied to space (the miles/Kilometers) as it is to time (seconds), if that is true, then light would then need to speed up as the univers expands because the 2 points are farther apart so it can make it to the second point in the same amount of time.
physics gets wierd when you start talking about stuff in the fourth dimention
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Now I know what non-computer people think when they hear us ranting about how MS's oppressive tactics are keeping the world from experiencing the best software available:
"Whatever buddy, in YOUR world maybe.."
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I just built a gadget that bends space time. I can go anywhere, anytime. The problem is, this professor at MIT has come really close to doing the same thing and he patented his work. I'm worried that he'll sue me under the DMCA if I publish my work. What should I do?
Wishful thinking has nothing to do with it.
If the constants are in fact changing, then this means that it is *LESS LIKELY* that we live in a simulation. A simulation would be easier to produce where there are non changing constants. I would be inclined to view the idea of a Matrix type of simulation more critically if the obesrvations prove true. Clearly this would not absolutely rule out a simulation but would provide unnecessary complication.
first, alpha has a dependence on c, which is the most important constant in special relativity. so yes, alpha may be important for relativity- but in this tortured way. in the limit c --> infinity, then we recover galilean invariance. if we change c, then predictions such as SR redshifts or GR redshifts will also change.
second, alpha doesn't change with energy. it's a ratio of constants, and none of those constants change with the energy regime. your very own definition shows that it has nothing to do with the energy regime: not hbar, not c, and not the basic charge.
and thirdly, i have to add my own thoughts... although the random errors are known to be small enough such that the prediction is within four sigma (4 standard deviation, >99.8% that it did *not* occur by chance,) there is a possibility of systematic errors. the difference observed was so small, 10^-5, or 0.001% difference, that any very small, almost undetectable systematic error could cause it. the experiment should be repeated in another lab and set-up, and the same prediction verified before we leap to conclusions.
All they were talking about in this is constants of the universe, and half the /.ers started talking about God and creationists and all sorts of shit. Come on guys, if God is that irrelevant to you, why is it that it takes up half the posts? But hey, to those skeptics out there, remember Dogbert's nugget of wisdom to the skeptic:
"Isn't the way you're trying to find psychic powers kinda like trying to find unicorns in your sock drawer with a metal detector?"
Of course, you won't find links on Slashdot to stories like this where they do fully anonymous independent double-blind studies which prove a positive link between independent prayer for the health of sick people and their improvement. What force could possibly be at work there? Gravity? Charm repulsion (pardon the pun)?
Oh yeah, just in case you were wondering, while you're out staring at the sky, you haven't even figured out a tenth of what you have to do down here on earth, or even help your fellow man who is starving, sick, or disadvantaged in some other way. Put it into perspective folks.
Here is a typical creationist argument:
The earth's magnetic field has decayed 7% since 1829. Assuming that the decay is exponential, we find that the field energy becomes increasingly large the further back you go in time. We can set a rough maximum to the initial energy from basic physical considerations, which limits the age to roughly 10,000 years.
Here is a similar argument:
Today's minimum temperature was 25 degrees C. Yesterday's was 24 degrees C. Assuming the temperature increase is uniform with time, we see that the earth's temperature was absolute zero a mere 298 days ago, which is not as much time as evolution requires. So evolution is false. ANYWAY, SHOULDN'T THEY TEACH THE KIDS BOTH THEORIES AND THEN LET THEM MAKE THEIR OWN MORAL DECISION ABOUT WHICH ONE IS RIGHT?
When people spout nonsense and are actually taken seriously by scientific illiterates, I get really upset.
The actual paper. Also, here is an article from sci.physics.research. It urges taking this with a grain of salt, because although the experimenters are careful, there are other more sensitive experiments that haven't detected this effect.
I once heard about a hypothesis on the evolution of the laws of physics. The interesting story this guy told was that evolution is not only about "survival of the fittest", but also very much about "survival of the accepted".
This guy speculated Black Holes to be the wombs of universes, wich alternative physical laws. He played games with other scientists "suppose the speed of light would be a little faster" it would mean speed of electrical currents be faster and it would mean (I don't know why) more black holes.
What I do find interesting about the constants not constant hypothesis is that it would mean that a lot of our measurements are not so correct. Stars could be closer to us, or even further away, big bang theory may need a revision etc. My guess is that only Moore's laws could gain from this....
Bizar technology?
Physical constants, like Grav Constant (which by the way, is NOT a composite), however, are constants in the sense that they come out of a theory that needs MEASURED parameters to make it work.
How do you know that the gravitation constant is not a composite? It's there because we don't understand gravitation. Gravitation itself is an unexplained force, and the constant results only from observation. Now how do we know it cannot be composited from rules we don't yet know?
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Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Two points here :
:(. G is believed to be pretty fundamental, and describe the energy scale of gravity. (The fine structure constant essentially describes the energy scale of Electromagnetism).
(a) Gravity is well understood at large scales, given the standard caveats (Universe full of dark matter, dark energy blah blah). At solar system scales, it is very well tested. G (the Grav Constant) is a true constant in General Relativity, the theory that describes gravity. What I mean is that Einstein invented a theory, and in his theory is a constant that is not constrained by theory alone. It is constrained, however by our observations (i.e. we go and measure it). Now, there indeed are "extensions" of GR that has G being not a constant. Brans-Dicke Gravity is an extension of GR that has a varying G. I am working on another that has a slightly varying G. But they have to past the crucible of observations. Brans-Dicke is dead (abeit resurrected occasionally). The theory I am working on does not look too good.
(b) Now, on your second point about some constants may be composites, and we are ignorant about it. That is true. Which is why my caveat in my post stating "fundamental constants OF A THEORY", and emphasised "theory/physics dependent". If our current theories are wrong, then constants that are though to be "fundamental" are not. That indeed is the whole program of String Theory, which in its most ambitious form, aim to _derive_ all the 20+ "fundamental" constants of current physics in a standard framework. If we can reduce the number of fundamental constants to, say, 5, then we are really making huge progress. Well, that's the aim anyway. String Theory is no where near that.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.