Slashdot Mirror
The Pioneer Anomaly & Other Breaking Physics News
David Harris, editor-in-chief at Symmetrymagazine.org (a joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC), sends us to his blog covering the American Physical Society meeting now going on in St. Louis. Among the breaking physics news relating to topics we have discussed in the past: results that explain about 1/3 of the Pioneer anomaly by differential heat flow in the spacecraft; an analysis of the Fermilab Tevatron's chances of spotting the Higgs "God particle"; and a hint that an Italian team has replicated their results from the year 2000 pointing to a detection of dark matter.
We have three separate subjects crammed together in one article. So some of the briliant, insightful comments by my fellow shashdotters may get buried. How about three separate articles?
Or is this a new trend? Are we going to see twenty subjects crammed into the one daily article tommorow?
I read the article on Higgs, and it is entirely conjecture based on specified rumor after rumor. Is this TMZ.com?
Insightful comments are *always* buried under senseless meme-tossing and political (or other off-topic) ranting.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The article states that Fermilab can begin exploring to 160GeV in the summer. LHC is due to be switched on before that. From all I've read, LHC has a MUCH better chance of being sure of what it finds at around those energies. I think any article on this subject can't even pretend to be balanced without discussing LHC.
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
I read a discussion somewhere that many spacecraft pick up a sizable electric charge and keep it (they are after all in a vacuum), and that electrostatic forces from the Sun and the solar wind are enough to account for course deviations. It's certainly true that gravity is not the only force operating out there.
The Higgs field is supposedly responsible for mass generation -- and that's it. Nothing else. Maybe something about "spontaneous symmetry breaking...mumble... big bang.. mumble... inflationary expansion... mumble", but hardly anything "God-like".
This nickname comes across as something dumb invented by the popular press in a half-assed attempt to communicate to regular folk how exciting the LHC is to us physicists.
Maybe /. could lead the charge to kill this nickname?
hey baby, wanna see my large hardon collider? I'll make you see the God particle.
Sweet! These breakthroughs bring us ever closer to a portal gun.
Is it so hard to see that they're just dealing with the (luminiferous) (a)ether?!?
See Tesla [1][2], Lyne[1], Silvertooth[3] and many others.
Oh, but aether has become a term that is a no-no.. so let's call it dark energy, dark matter, the zero point field, etc.
Currently no university is teaching the real work of Maxwell, but rather the simplified (and lacking!) version by Heaviside.
[1] http://netowne.com/technology/important/
[2] http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tesla/occultether/occultether.htm
[3] http://www.unusualresearch.com/silvertooth/silvertooth.htm
Ahem, has it been peer reviewed?
Sadly, 10% of Fermi's staff is being laid off, and the rest must take a mandatory week off of unpaid leave every two months due to the funding SNAFU at the DOE.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The same technologies that will let us cure diseases, expand the economy, and overcome everyday inconveniences can theoretically bring about catastrophes. The risk of apocalypse is serious enough for us to relinquish the current pace of technological innovation in three overarching types of technology: Genetic Engineering, Nanotechnology, and Robotics. If we don't put limits on how far we explore into these areas, we could, and most likely will, bring on some form of accidental extinction of the entire human race.
The field of Geneitc Engineering has become a very popularly debated subject over the past few decades. Given its incredible power, it's no surprise that there are significant safety issues in its use; some groups have argued that it is wrong and is "doing the work of God". Today, most of the genetical alterations occer on certain types of plants and crops, in hopes of breeding new strains of food with specificly chosen functions or properties. For example, The first commercially grown genetically modified food crop was the "Flavr Savr" tomato, which was made more resistant to rotting. This was in 1994, and since then other crops such as insect-protected cotton and herbicide tolerant soybeans have been sold to consumers.
However, even with regard to this technology's great potential, concerns have been raised about the introduction of genetically engineered plants and animals into the environment, and the potential dangers of human consumption of these genetically modified foods. It is said that these organisms have the potential to spread their modified genes into native populations, thereby disrupting natural ecosystems. In fact, There has been a farm-scale trial in the United Kingdom comparing the impact of GM crops and conventional crops, some of which claimed that the results showed that these altered crops had a significant negative impact on wildlife.(http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1443004,00.html).
A gene for an allergenic trait was unintentionally transferred from the Brazil nut into genetically engineered soybeans, while intending to improve the nutritional quality for animal feed use. Brazil nuts were already known to produce food allergies in certain people prior to this study, and further investigation of the new soybeans revealed that they produced immunological reactions with people suffering from this Brazil nut allergy. The company who produced these beans discontinued further development and disposed of all material related to them, but if this is happened accidentally, what is stopping a genetic engineer from hypothetically mixing an even more dangerous, and potentially deadly trait into a large number of crops bound for say, human consumption? Nothing, and that is the truth we have to face. There is no law or regulation in either the United States or Canada that requires any company to test for allergenicity or toxicity of genetically altered foods prior to them being licensed to be grown and consumed in their respected countries.
I was a bit put off by the tone of TFA with respect to the Pioneer anomaly. While it is unlikely that the anomaly will disprove our models of gravity, it is an excellent example of a gap in our understanding of physics.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
....the god particle????
Is god that small?
Your indignant geek rage does nothing to help either.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I won't 3oTre you
and
"Hodapp presented a string of evidence that shows just how serious the dearth of physics undergraduates is"
As this old article shows, thermal radiation can easily explain all of the Pioneer anomaly. Trying to show this by making a thermal model of the spacecraft is an interesting approach, but how well will they be able to model how the harsh environment of space, with all kinds of rays and particles from the sun and elsewhere are continuously bombarding the spacecraft form all directions? Just a small discoloring or formation of chemical substances on the surface will greatly influence how the heat is dissipated, and anyone who have seen a spacecraft which has been out there for a few weeks know that will happen.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Is he a dot, or is he a speck? Nobody knows...