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The Top Ten Physics Highlights of 2002
Ocelot Wreak writes "Physics Web has a cool summary of The Top Ten Physics Highlights of 2002. These include anti-atoms, neutrino oscillation - a finding that requires new physics beyond the Standard Model, defying the second law of thermodynamics, and using neutrons to measure quantum gravitational effects, amongst others. For some reason, the Slashdot Effect and the latest research on iPod-based Beowulf clusters were not included..."
Just marry the poor fool. ;-)
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Congrats to you both!
PS: This lameness filtering obviously is optional, as you get away with a 4 chr post, while I had to type this whole postscript to get past some silly minimum # of characters per line.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
so when do we get the Top Ten Top Ten Stories of 2002?
"12. Hope for the future More than 300 physicists from around the world -- most of them women -- met in Paris in March for the first International Conference on Women in Physics."
In a related story: Sex makes your brain grow
Homer: "Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
"For some reason, the Slashdot Effect and the latest research on iPod-based Beowulf clusters were not included..."
Amazing, now the editors are trolling US! You know where.
But the last two points are just "Low points of the year" and "Hope for the future".
The lowpoints... you guess it, the great sham by Victor Ninov on Ununoctium.
The hope is... more women in physics! Oh the joy! You guys in Physics should be happier now... :-) If only this happens as well in Computer Science...
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
In April, physicists at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Canada presented conclusive new evidence that electron neutrinos oscillate -- or change 'flavour' -- on their way from the Sun to the Earth.
So they don't taste like chicken anymore?
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
There's nothing wrong with that, but I have q question: why is it particularly important for more women to get into physics? Why can't we just leave women alone and let them do what they want? Why do we need to perform "social architecture"?
My vote would be just to stop worrying about what group does what (and that includes race), and focus on what individuals do or don't do.
But then, maybe I'm just crazy and believe that society really should be color and sex blind. You may now begin flogging the heretic.
This list is great if for no other reason than it gives me a chance to say "Superkamiokande!" in a superhero-like voice.
Say it with me. It'll make you feel better. "Superkamiokande!"
Of course, having research I worked on mentioned in passing ("Researchers also reported on the unusual expansion characteristics in an ultra-cold Fermi gas this month") was cool too.
I know what #1 will be...
I write in my journal
By analyzing social trends, it may become apparent *why* those trends exist. It has been the case in the past that groups of people were not able to do what they wanted as easily as others, and we could then modify or create laws to make the system in question more equitable.
The Slashdot effect wasn't eligible because it came in #1 last year. Look it up.
Heh, being a woman, and being a Physics major, I can honestly agree that the dating situation was indeed grim.
New here, aren't you?
sulli
RTFJ.
This is a common misconception. Trying to get more groups invloved in science (art, etc) is not just social engineering. It is also an attempt to make science better. The more people lend their talents, the better it will be. This is obviously true in sports, as African-Americans became able to join professional teams. As Jesse Jackson once said, "we never knew how good football could be until everyone could play". The same is true for science: we will never know how good it can be until everyone can participate.
What "women want" is highly influenced by what paths in life seem available or attractive to them. This is hardly something one is born with, but much more likely the product of cultural atmosphere. The fact that there are more American women scientists than Afnagni ones makes this obvious. A restrictive environment of possibilities acts as a real barrier to entry for women, many of whom don't even think of themselves a spossible scientists. And all of that is prior to active prejudice on the part of others.
My mom is a chemist and she had to fight like hell her whole life just to work, much less to do that work and still be considered a woman. Anything that makes science more viable for all individuals sense of identity is positive, and clearly benefits science.
When the electric motor was invented, I doubt everyone in the world had it within a year. I doubt trains were made everywhere within a year of making the steam engine.
Just because the reasearch doesn't provide immediate benefits doesn't mean its useless.
Also, science isn't just about making life better. Part of it is also about satisfying curiosity and knowing more. If someone found the edge of the universe tomorrow, it would not help life in any way, but I would still regard it as the one of the most compelling achievements in science.
And just one more thing; how does anti-matter compare? anti-matter, if successfully harnessed would be a clean pure source of energy. Go talk to the people of Chernobyl and they will tell you how important it is.
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and do not, in any way, reflect the opinions of my employer or university.
More updates at 3 minutes and 14 seconds past the hour.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Sci-Fi Todayran something I wrote on this story a week ago. FYI, you can get daily Sci-Fi Today news headlines on your Slashdot Home Page...
It's called a logic gate. Look it up in a book on basic logic theory. Duh.
Physics Web has announced the Top 12 physics stories of 2002, a number stretched beyond the usual Top 10 to include human-interest stories like the shortage of women in physics and fabrication-of-data misconduct. Advances in optics were lumped together as one achievement for work as diverse as sub-diffraction limit microscopy and quantum photon cloning. Neutrons were big news, providing insight on quantum gravity and atomic nuclei with neutrons but no protons. Some research was COOL, like Bose-Einstein condensates made from cesium and superconductors made from plutonium. One discovery was HOT, namely nanoscale magnetic logic gates that operate at room temperature. The top discoveries were totally sublime: solar neutrinos change identities on their trip from Sun to Earth, the Second Law of Thermodynamics may be broken (can perpetual motion be far behind?) and microwave radiation from the Big Bang is polarized just like a pair of Neo's sunglasses. The number one physics story, however, was straight out of Star Trek: creation of "cold" anti-hydrogen gas that could be stored indefinitely as long as it didn't touch anything while being held in a magnetic field. Maybe the top physics story for 2003 will be the development of a dilithium chamber to put the anti-hydrogen gas into...
It's in there. Just try to load the page. Pseudo-honerable mention I guess.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
Main Entry: prejudice
... (2) : an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.
Pronunciation: 'pre-j&-d&s
Function: noun
2 a
(Merriam-Webster)
Milo
As a horny unattached male physicist, let me tell you this :
EUREKA!!!!!!
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Basically, entropy boils down to probabilities - if you flip a fair coin a gazillion times, you'd expect 50% heads and 50% tails. These folks, in effect, were working at a level where they could detect some of the runs of 100 heads in a row. It's an impressive series of measurements, but won't require a rethink of thermodynamics at all.
Magnetical RAM (MRAM). Storage with access times and density like SRAM, but non-volatile.
In essence, this would allow a computer to resume its work after powered on in an instant from where it left before.
So, yes it essentially the same thing in a smaller scale. Like transitors are tubes in a smaller scale and the HDs are just smaller versions of floppy discs.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Top ten list- Check.
12 Items- Check.
20% margin of error- Check.
The editor must be a experimental physicist.
1 tequila 2 tequila 3 tequila floor
So, for a limited time, yes. Not forever. And the news is, in isolated systems. In unisolated systems, this already known.
I think there are no consequences, since nano-machines are seldom isolated systems.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
In fact if entropy did always increase you could use that to build a perpetual motion machine. If it did always increase you could make predictions about particles that could be exploited by a Maxwell type demon. But the fact that it usually increases, but might sometimes decrease, means that information isn't available to you. (Similarly if there really were such a things as a "law of averages" people could use it to win at roulette. That hasn't stopped people trying though.)
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
If we only see ~5% of the Universe (and probably only understand about 0.00000001% of that), could it be that we really cannot see most of what is right in front of us? Has anyone postulated that the rest of it is all around us, not just "out there somewhere"? Well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking with it.
Well, I just included the last sentence as a "pre-emptive" one-liner for all the folks who were about to hit the reply button and type "gee, just think if they had made a Beowulf cluster of...". Please don't blame the Editors. My fault.
And yes, we DID manage to Slashdot their news page already...
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
None. I think the total mass energy is less than a thousandth of a Joule.
1.00794 is atomic mass of hydrogen in AMU, 6.022e23 is Avogadro's number, 9e18 is the speed of light squared. The constants are off the top of my head so I may be slightly off on the hydrogen atomic mass.
6.6 joules is a quite noticeable amount of energy, equivalent to a 5 gram bullet travelling around 50 meters per second.
Whoops. Forgot that AMU is given in grams per mole, not kilograms. The true energy is one thousand times smaller: 6.6 millijoules.
Good thing for you there's no law forcing female physics majors to date male physics majors.
It's not particularly important per se, but the increasing numbers are an indicator that the sciences may be becoming more gender-blind. Unless you believe that there's a gender-inherent reason women don't become physicists, in a truly just world we should see an equal number of male and female physicists; maybe we're (slowly) getting there.
One big problem is that a random coincidence between four neutrons from unrelated events could masquerade as a tetraneutron. The paper says they have the random-coincidence rate all figured out, but it's the kind of thing that is notoriously hard to be sure about.
With any other exotic nuclear species, you can catch it in a metal foil, and then find out stuff about it, e.g., what particles it emits when it decays. The tetraneutron, if it exists, can only be detected by destroying it, which makes it hard to measure any of its properties. If you can't measure any of its properties, it's pretty hard to be sure it's real.
Find free books.
My vote would be just to stop worrying about what group does what (and that includes race), and focus on what individuals do or don't do.
But then, maybe I'm just crazy and believe that society really should be color and sex blind.
The problem with that theory is this. Sure, you and I might agree to make society color and sex blind. But will the neo-nazis? The gay bashers? The white-supremacists? If some parts of society refuse to be color- or gender-blind, then "society" as a whole is not. Even worse, all the people who are going around being color- or gender-blind might not notice the discrimination being inflicted by these extremists.
Thus, even if most people were perfect (definitely a stretch!) and could agree to be color/gender-blind all the time, there would still be reason to focus on race and gender: to present positive examples to all of those who still feel negatively towards people of certain races or genders or whatever. I suspect that people aren't perfect and thus that everyone falls into that category on occasion, but if nothing else, remember that we need to keep trying to educate the extremists by presenting positive examples. (Not to mention preventing people from becoming extremists. The KKK isn't going to stop recruiting just because you decided to be color-blind!)
Besides, who really wants a completely color/sex/religion/sexual orientation/whatever-blind society? I want people to be proud of their heritage! I want people to be proud of who they are and where they came from and what they believe in! I just wish that people didn't attach all these negative associations to people of other races/genders/etc. That is not the same as wanting society to be whatever-blind. Being whatever-blind really means being blind -- you don't see the bad or the good. I'd rather have a society which was actually good (none of those negative associations) than one which is simply blind.
In July, however, Australian researchers showed that entropy can decrease over short time periods for small systems.
Actually, this has been known for a very long time. Entropy constancy or increase is only probabilistic, in that it happens for large systems with overwhelming likelihood, and thus is never observed to decrease for large systems since observing such is so overwhelmingly unlikely. But for sufficiently small systems, there is reasonable chance of observing fluctuations away from equilibrium.
This does not permit any violations of the second law, however, because as soon as you string several small systems together, you have a large system.
For more information, look up entropy and microstates.
There is nothing wrong with suggesting that there is differences between genders.
Likewise I would suggest that the difference between people honesty interested in the truth, and bigots, would be that the first group would find some sort of evidence to back up the women inferior at physics claim before making it.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
The reason why this got into the list, is that Dennis Evens and co-workers at the Australian National University have hypothesised for quite a while that you can break the 2nd law when dimensions or time scales are very small, but last year they managed to get experimental evidence for it.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
From my very limited understanding of the work (I've studied in the Research School where the work was done, and have been to a couple of talks on it) it should reduce the effectiveness of nanotechnology. If a machine does process, then as it gets smaller the probability of it doing the reverse process increases. If one could make it infinitly small, it would do the reverse process at excaltly the same rate as it did the forward process.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
Why do writers insist on making Top Ten list that start at #1. It ruins the suspense in an otherwise great article. And that's what Physics is all about ... suspense.
Do what I do- as I read down the list, I dynamically reassign the numbers to suspenseful ones by use of a special algorithm:
suspenseful(X) = 11 - X
Hellooo, suspense! It's back!
A neutrino changing its flavor means that the neutrino experiences time. Of course I don't mean "experiences" subjectively, with a consciousness- I mean in the sense that a neutrino can in theory be used as a sort of clock. This effectively rules out the possibility that neutrinos are massless particles.
In relativity, "proper time" in a moving or stationary frame of reference refers to the time as measured by a clock that is stationary relative to that frame. Your watch always gives you the proper time for your frame of reference- and one of the implicit rules is that proper time always proceeds normally. You will never look down at your watch and see the hands spinning around or standing completely still because that would be silly.
Massless particles like the photon travel at the speed of light- and in fact a massless particle can ONLY travel at the speed of light. (With exceptions for travel through water, glass, etc.) It makes no sense to talk about the proper time experienced by a photon, because when v=c the denominator in the time dilation equation vanishes. A photon can spend a billion years traveling from a remote galaxy to a telescope here, but from the photon's own "point of view" the travel time was zero. A photon does not experience proper time.
Now that we've caught neutrinos changing their flavor during their travel, we know that they do experience the passage of proper time, which means they have mass, albeit a very small one. This has some implications for the Standard Model (although I don't know what they are).
Neutrinos have also been shown to be impervious to humor of all kinds, as has been proven here time and again.
Please, please tell me you're joking. I can't bring myself to believe that anyone, not even the most socially inept physics/CS/math student of all time, would think to use that as a line.
Dyolf Knip
One female physics student somewhere once commented to a new potential student:
"The odds are good but the goods are odd."
I love that line.
---Nathaniel
We need women involved in physics because we want to be able to let women into physics.
(Huh?)
There is a huge barrier to women who are interested in physics; there aren't any other women. This may sound stupid to some of you, but think about it: how many women do you know that feel perfectly at home sitting completely outnumbered in a group of geeky males. Sure, a few do, but they are in the minority. Having a stronger female presence (at every level: prof, TA, postdoc, grad student, undergrad, high school teacher, etc) will help to alliveiate this.
Physics is a rather embarassing case. Other hard sciences have recently allowed their influxes of women: chemistry now has reasonable percentages (if not ideal) and maths are gaining too. Physics remains a holdout.. only a certain type of personality is attracted to physics, and only a fraction of those have the intuition and skills neccessary to make it easy. Take off a fraction for social reasons, and you can get it down to zero.
---N
First, if nobody cared about race, the neo-nazis would stand out like a sore thumb. With all the the racial policies, some "good", that we have today it's hard to notice subtely exploitive ones. If nobody noticed race except the racists, there'd be a public outcry against any race-based policies, ensuring we caught the bad ones.
And then, "proud of their heritage"... What's that supposed to mean? The color of your skin is something to be proud of? It sounds suspiciously like the basis of a discriminatory policy. Should I be proud of my blue eyes?
I'd prefer that nobody treated skin color as anything more different than hair color, people recognize it, dress to suit it, and change it, but you never hear of someone not getting a job because of an old-boys network that refuses to hire brown-haired people.
I don't support black scholarships either. Sure, as a class, they're poorer, but on an individual basis, any given poor person in the slums needs as much help as anyone else. If you want to help blacks out of the lower classes, help everyone in the lower classes better themselves and their position.
4 neutrons in a clump - HAH! I've had that beat for ages:
Behold the wonder that is Administratium
And the wonderful (uhhh, awful???) thing is that most of you can see this element in operation yourselves.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Looks like a good paper though, thanks.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.