Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Solve Century-Old Optics Mystery
evan_arrrr! writes "From the article:
Since the early 20th century physicists have known that light carries momentum, but the way this momentum changes as light passes through different media is much less clear. Two rival theories of the time predicted precisely the opposite effect for light incident on a dielectric: one suggesting it pushes the surface in the direction light is traveling; the other suggesting it drags the surface backwards towards the source of light. After 100 years of conflicting experimental results, a team of experimentalists from China believe they have finally found a resolution."
Since it's already slahshdotted, here's the cached version.
Google Cache for anyone interested in reading it
Does this article help explain how those little lightbulb things with the rotating black/white cards work? I always loved those as a kid... in fact I was shocked to find them at Home Depot the other day in a demonstration of why LowE glass can be a good thing. They had two of them, but the one behind the low E glass was barely rotating when exposed to a lightbulb while the other behind regular glass was whizzing around.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
What happened to good old "Scientist"? It's a nice, nine letters long, and respected. "Experimentalist"... It sounds like what a social deviant might call themselves. Like some weird cult that was rejected by the mainstream sect of Scientist, so they had to add an extra six letters to their name to make up for their lack of membership. Maybe more letters makes it sounds more smart? -_-
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
And the winner is... "pressure!"
Dang it!!! There goes my bet with Hawking about making a tractor beam. But wait... if we could use a photon emitted from NEGATIVE MASS it would have NEGATIVE MOMENTUM!!! Ok, Stephen... it's ON!
Text Only Mirror
"We report direct observation of a push force on the end face of the silica filament exerted by the outgoing light" said [Weilong] She."
TFS left it out; this was the result.
The mystery is whether or not giving your child the same name as a feminine pronoun is confusing.
The answer is, yes, it's very confusing.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
well doesn't everyone have to read the article first in order to comment on it?
Wait.. what the hell am I thinking?
Experimentalists, as opposed to theorists.
That's what *SHE* said!
The article is unclear to me, maybe I missed something
...Weilong She and his colleagues...
...Hermann Minkowski had proposed in 1908 that light momenta is proportional to a material's refractive index then the following year, another German theorist, Max Abraham proposed the opposite...
Ok so we are talking about a guy right?
This paper is a beautiful piece of work and may become one of the classic papers on the momentum of light" said Ulf Leonhardt a researcher...
hmm not sure article doesn't indicate one way or another
Still guys right?
21st Century makeover
She and colleagues have now finally overcome these difficulties by replacing the water surface with a nanometre silica filament.
Wait who is a she???
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0502014
This paper from MIT showed conclusively through experiment (almost 4 years ago) that in a refractive material the medium temporarily gives up its momentum to the photon, so that the momentum of the photon in the medium is nhk.
It's too bad that this new experiment didn't cite the prior art.
1. Posing as someone else, post false news that own lab has made a breakthrough discovery
2. Take down the faked article before any scrutiny can be applied and it is determined to be a fake
3. ???
4. Profit!
Since it's already slahshdotted, here's the cached version.
Page wont load in google cache either. Google cache has been slashdotted.
That's because your web browser is trying to pull the CSS and images from the (now slashdotted) original server before it lays out the page. Click "Text-only version" to view the page without CSS and images.
Don't underestimate the power of Slashdot. It's as if millions of mouse clicks suddenly jumped out into the internets and the servers where suddenly silenced.
Within physics, there is a difference between theorists (people who do try to prove things using math) and experimentalists (people who do experiments to test the theorists' theories).
Most physicists see themselves as either one or the other, and often the two do not get along. Theorists see experimentalists as being corrupted by real world problems when really all the problems can be solved by a little hard thought (and maybe some math). They think experiments shouldn't be called "science" but "engineering". Experimentalists see theorists as having pointless jobs because nothing they ever do will ever produce something useful to the human race, by their very nature.
In reality, of course, they are dependent on each other, because without the theorists' theories the experimentalists have nothing to test, and without the hope of some kind of payoff from experimentalists, theorists will never get funding.
Also, as a non-physicist, it can be fun to pit theorists and experimentalists against each other in battles to the death and watch what happens.
Being a computer scientist means you tell people how computers should work, not that you know how they actually work.
Does the slashdot effect push the server over or pull it down?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Also, as a non-physicist, it can be fun to pit theorists and experimentalists against each other in battles to the death and watch what happens.
Wow, you just don't get it. There's no need to actually pit them against each other, I can provide mathematical proof that the experimentalists will win 84.3% of the time.
Touche. But will the experimentalists be satisfied with your result, or will they want to have the fight anyway, just to be sure?
Being a computer scientist means you tell people how computers should work, not that you know how they actually work.
For those with a large monitor, the GP was doing us all a favor. It gets difficult for the human brain to read text with overly long lines: the optimal width is about 65 characters. Longer than that and the eye gets lost when traveling back to the left for the next line. Basic usability/readability knowledge.
when it comes to scientific discoveries its more likely the US government would find it inappropriate.