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Fermilab Experiment Hints At Multiple Higgs Particles
krou writes "Recent results from the Dzero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator suggest that those looking for a single Higgs boson particle should be looking for five particles, and the data gathered may point to new laws beyond the Standard Model. 'The DZero results showed much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter — beyond what could be explained by the Standard Model. Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons. They say the data point to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges. Three would have a neutral charge and one each would have a negative and positive electric charge. This is known as the two-Higgs doublet model.'" There's more detail in this writeup from Symmetry Magazine, a joint publication of SLAC and Fermilab. Here's the paper on the arXiv.
But can we really trust these people? They seem like a bunch of bosons.
But can we really trust these people? They seem like a bunch of bosons.
Ahh, don't get your Higgs in a bunch; these people are SCIENTISTS! Scientists can do no wrong!
That at least 2 of the 5 mass inducing bosons have electrical charge makes the possibility of elecronically controlling the phenomenon more practical/plausible.
This is because they HAVE a charge, and thus, can be manipulated using the EM force.
Simply because you or I cannot find an immediate use for something does not mean that it is not useful. Who knows, in 15 years, knowledge gained through these experiments could lead to a better method of harvesting energy from some unknown source, or coming up with a better means of propulsion or medicine for a problem that we thought was mundane (subatomic cure for the common cold? who knows).
It is for this reason that science should be pursued so that when someone infinitely smarter than you combines this bit of knowledge with another bit, mankind sees a tangible benefit.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
patience dude... patience... once we get time travel out of it, it doesn't matter how long it took right?
I'm guessing that this won't reassure them. "So, our big machine discovered some weird stuff, that we'll need to build two bigger machines to investigate in proper detail. I'm sure that neither of those will repeat this process..."
Outside of people informed enough to oppose particular scientific projects as being ill-conceived compared to other ones, support for, or opposition to, research projects is pretty much an ideological matter. People who support science as an end will be dissuaded only by the most grindingly uninteresting streaks of purely negative results. People who oppose it(or who rank it very low compared to other ends) will be appeased by only results that are trivially applicable to whatever they do care about. If, for example, one of these Higgs particles could be commercialized as a cure for male-pattern baldness or a source of HDTVs within the next two years...
This is great and all, but does this mean we'll finally get some great new technologies like artificial gravity, FTL propulsion or communication, quantum-fluctuation energy, or interdimensional travel?
We're still getting new technologies out of the strange sub-atomic stuff others started discovering c. 120 years ago.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So if the Higgs particle is the 'God particle', does this mean that polytheism is the way to go? Yay Hinduism?
My other comment is funny
you gotta love nature. just when you think you figured out what is behind the curtain, nature reveals yet another curtain.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They built the LHC at Cern for something that was found out at the place they were trying to make obsolete.
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
If we are going to get time travel out of it we would already be neck deep in time travelers and it would be impossible to get tickets to the world cup. Neither of those things is happening so this result will not give us time travel.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
When Einstein wrote about the stimulated emission of light in 1917 (The paper is called "Zur Quantentheorie der Strahlung"), there was (a) no example of it known in nature (still isn't, I think) (b) no known way to produce it and (c) no known application. Welcome to LaserFest
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
What is it about a particle that makes it have a particular charge? What is charge fundamentally? Are these known things or just stupid questions on my part? It seems to me if two particles can be different (positive or negative) then they must consist of something smaller that makes them that way.
Anybody else think this is modern-day snake oil?
No.
Have you ever considered what technologies we wouldn't have today if people hadn't concerned themselves with the surprising spectrum of black body radiation over a century ago?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I apologize in advance for my ignorant questions, but you seem like you might know the answers and be able to break it down for a layman like myself.
First, how did Einstein postulate the existence of stimulated emission of light? Did he have some type of lab where he did experiments leading him to this conclusion, or is it all purely mathematical?
Second, who figured out how to produce it, and how?
As an engineer, this is the part I'm most interested in in this subject area: getting from some theorized effect in physics to being able to create and control this effect at will, and then coming up with useful applications for it. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like schools gloss over all this stuff; they talk about Einstein coming up with E=mc^2, briefly mention some guys working on the Manhattan Project, and boom, next thing you know there's atomic bombs exploding.
I wonder what other interesting properties in physics have been written about, perhaps even verified experimentally, but no one's yet devised a way to harness them.
I think that one over there is a boson's mate.
Not stupid at all. The whole idea of a "particle" is kind of misleading. What is really going on at this scale (quantum field theory) is far more terrifying and mind bending that basic quantum mechanics (which is by itself very disturbing).
To simplify it slightly (or a whole lot actually), there are fundamental fields (like the electric and magnetic fields, for instance) which which have some associated energy density. Fields can also interact, (that is, if the fields are both nonzero at some point, there is additional energy due to them both being nonzero).
This is all fine and dandy (no particles yet). What we have described is classical field theory. Once we quantize these fields (i.e.,
bring in the quantum in QFT) the discrete steps these fields can take on become the "particles." The interactions between the fields become the force carriers, etc. These notions of "charge" correspond to how the fields couple.
Physics is hard. :(
like being able to build ZPM's?
What would be the point of that? People in the future would already know the outcome.
I'm not sure that the people with cash would really want an even more nuclear than nuclear option floating around...
Being the only kid on the block with nukes has its perks; but that state lasted for about 20 minutes, back in the late 40's. Since then, anybody who has them has to contend with the fact that, if they actually do anything, pretty much everybody else will freak out and glass them. This has virtually obviated the theoretical killing potential. From their invention to the present, nukes probably trail machetes(never mind Kalashnikovs and assorted knockoffs) in terms of body count. You still have to have a collection of them on the mantle, kept polished and dusted, if you want to be part of the great powers club; but you don't actually get to use them, and you can't really stop uncouth little upstarts from collecting their own. Worse, you have to deal with the fact that, although you cannot use them, non-state, covert, or just plain nihilistic actors can. Back when you could be pretty certain that only real countries had nukes, you could rely on MAD. If some nutjob, or untraceable tool of somebody's intelligence apparatus goes and blows up something expensive, the incumbents lose, and don't have any good way of retaliating.
Some sort of uber-nuke super-superweapon would, at best, bring you back to the late 40's situation(minus the enviable economic position of being the only major industrialized nation not squatting in a pile of its own rubble). At worst, it would just antagonize the other nuclear powers.
There will certainly always be money to keep the existing stock dusted and polished, and react to any threats to its efficacy; but I suspect that, if you want military money, you'd do much better by developing weapons that they will be able to use without excessive diplomatic trouble. Drones, precision munitions, vehicles that can't be destroyed by explosively formed penetrators that can be fabricated by anybody with a supply of ammonium nitrate and metal forming skills somewhere between "early modern blacksmith" and "1850's machine shop", etc.
Einstein was purely a theoretical physicist. He knew the state of the current experiments (Young's, various astronomical observations), and the state of the current math (specifically Maxwell and Boltzman). Beyond that, he managed to figure out brilliant thought experiments that pointed his math in the right direction, and was able to work with new interpretations of existing phenomena (such as his statistical interpretation of light phenomena). Actual lasers were first demonstrated in 1960.
The reasons schools gloss over the engineering aspect are that it takes a very long time, a lot of people and a lot of tedious, small increments to go from a new physical effect to a working application. There's very little to be consistently learned about the engineering process that isn't already known.
As for an interesting property that hasn't found an application: quantum entanglement. Yeah, we're kinda seeing baby steps, but consider how long people have been working on it, and how many supposed breakthroughs we've had. There isn't a gadget you can buy at radioshack that uses this.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
"Back off, man -- I'm a scientist."
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
not the portentious/pretentious "God Particle".
Leon Lederman called it The Goddamn Particle because finding it---or them---is so vexatious.
His editor changed the title of the book, removing the -damn, to make it more commercially successful.
quoth Peter Higgs: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/30/higgs.boson.cern
Shall y'all moderate this "Informative" or "Funny"?
You oughta be lepton for saying such a thing.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
I'm afraid your reading comprehension leaves something to be desired.
"Outside of people informed enough to oppose particular scientific projects as being ill-conceived compared to other ones, support for, or opposition to, research projects is pretty much an ideological matter. People who support science as an end will be dissuaded only by the most grindingly uninteresting streaks of purely negative results. People who oppose it(or who rank it very low compared to other ends) will be appeased by only results that are trivially applicable to whatever they do care about. If, for example, one of these Higgs particles could be commercialized as a cure for male-pattern baldness or a source of HDTVs within the next two years..."
The first phrase intentionally excludes scientists in the discipline and very atypically well informed laymen from the rest of the discussion. For them, negative results are certainly of use(though, if you look at scientific publication patterns, even among the professionals, positive results publish better) and of interest.
Then there is the category of interested laymen. The sort of people who like science, think space travel and big science machines are pretty cool, paid attention in high school/undergrad science classes, read science popularizations and maybe the occasional lighter paper, attend lectures when available, etc. Here, I stand by my assertion that an excessively dull string of negative results will blunt their enthusiasm. Not enough to turn them into the third category; but enough that they will probably lose interest in project X and go watch project Y instead.
(I'm pretty sure he hasn't ever considered that)
there is this interesting feature of human nature where if you don't have tangible experience with something yourself the concept must either be wrong or not exist in the first place. "I don't understand the science behind quantum physics / global warmning / whatever and haven't heard a plausible car analogy to explain it, therefore all the scientists have made a big mistake and doesn't exist." the arrogance of introspective existence or something. or maybe just a lack of empathy.
If we are going to get time travel out of it we would already be neck deep in time travelers and it would be impossible to get tickets to the world cup. Neither of those things is happening so this result will not give us time travel.
Perhaps we're already knee deep in them and don't even know it. They're probably really good at creating identities for themselves, and if they ever fuck up, they could go back and fix it. Or perhaps this period in time is considered to be a pretty shitty time to come back to, so they don't bother?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Make it 20 years then.
Support SETI@home
First, how did Einstein postulate the existence of stimulated emission of light? Did he have some type of lab where he did experiments leading him to this conclusion, or is it all purely mathematical?
Perhaps it was just a "hunch".
Do you know why Kepler thought the Sun had to be at the centre of the solar system, and what he kept working at his planetary model until he got the math to work? He believe that the physical order followed the divine order: that God, as the source of all Truth and Light, was orbited by all other entities. The Sun, as the source of light in our realm of reality, therefore had to be orbited by all the entities in the sky:
As he indicated in the title, Kepler thought he had revealed God’s geometrical plan for the universe. Much of Kepler’s enthusiasm for the Copernican system stemmed from his theological convictions about the connection between the physical and the spiritual; the universe itself was an image of God, with the Sun corresponding to the Father, the stellar sphere to the Son, and the intervening space between to the Holy Spirit. His first manuscript of Mysterium contained an extensive chapter reconciling heliocentrism with biblical passages that seemed to support geocentrism.[15]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler
Is your position fermion that?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I'm not a historian of science, but my understanding is that it was purely mathematical -- invented before the relevant quantum mechanics was known. As my undergrad QM text (Griffiths, p 356) says, "Einstein was forced to 'invent' stimulated emission in order to reproduce Plank's formula." I believe he justified it with a fairly abstract thermodynamics argument (he didn't identify a mechanism, he just showed it had to be true or else thermodynamics would be violated). Sorry that I can't cite sources -- I don't have them handy.
Mods: granted this is off-topic, but I'd like to indulge the parent post's questions. I am a biophysicist.
Let me have a stab at explaining the history of stimulated emission and lasers.
Einstein predicted stimulated emission based just on two things: the fact that atoms can absorb light and the fact that thermodynamically, as you approach infinite temperature all possible arrangements of particles become equally likely. Consider a collection of atoms that have a ground and an excited state. As temperature (and black-body radiation) increases, more and more photons will pump atoms into the excited state. Excited states naturally decay after a certain lifetime, but without stimulated emission, at higher temperatures more and more atoms would get pumped into the excited state, until an arbitrarily large fraction of atoms would be in the excited state at arbitrarily high temperature. However, from thermodynamics we know that as you approach arbitrarily high temperature there will be a 50/50 mix of ground state and excited atoms, since high temperature favors disorder (entropy) and 50/50 mixes are maximally disordered. Therefore, there must be a process whose rate is proportional to the intensity of the thermal radiation in the system that takes an atom from the excited to the ground state; this is stimulated emission.
Different people give credit to different inventors of the laser, but you can make a good case for Charles Townes' input being timely and critical. He figured out that putting a gain medium (a material with population inversion - more atoms in the excited than the ground state) in an optical resonator would produce coherent light through stimulated emission. He turns 95 next month, and is still going strong last I heard.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
What would be the point of that? People in the future would already know the outcome.
I am an Australian so I already know the outcome of games involving my team but that wouldn't stop me from watching the game.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
the arrogance of introspective existence or something. or maybe just a lack of empathy.
Or maybe just the lack of science education. I took a college-level chemistry class recently. It kicked my ass, but it was worth it. When you can sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and predict the results of some experiment mathematically, then go into a lab, perform the experiment, and see your results proven correct, you really get a feeling for, "Hey, maybe they really aren't just making all this shit up."
Unfortunately, not many people today are given this experience/forced to have this experience.
Breakfast served all day!
I guess to me it's strongly correlated with how universal in space and time the results are. It's fairly easy to do science which is good science as such, but just either very constricted, navel gazing or void of any fundamental insights. Of course case studies are to the soft sciences what experiments are to the hard sciences, but I don't see how studying ancient Egyptians will ever yield anything significant outside the field of ancient Egyptians. Understanding the fundamental particles and forces of the universe is extremely lasting knowledge and any insights or applications you can find can be used by all of humanity forever. To take one example, Magnetic resonance imaging is very useful in medicine, less than 40 years old and depends on a deep understanding of nuclear magnetic resonance.
True, some thing won't be practically useful now or in the future but how would you know that if you haven't discovered what it can and can't do? To me it's a little bit like handing an illiterate forest tribe a laptop without telling him anything about it, I doubt they'd find it useful because they'd have no idea what to use it for or even the knowledge or concepts to begin using it. The same goes for things that appear to be extremely costly, if you went back 50 years and tried to explain modern computers to an economist he'd short circuit because the cost would be beyond the GDP of the world many times over at the price/performance ratio he is used to. I have no idea what the first laser cost but I'm sure it was massive, today you can get them for next to nothing to use as a laser pointer or in every DVD player or PC with optical drive. But I guess many people are like the stock market, "long term" is what happens next year and equally short-sighted too.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Whenever you look more closely, the universe is immediately replaces by something more complex and even more bizzare...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
(but I don't know if the phenomenon is actually FTL or not).
It is, that's what makes it cool. When particles are entangled, if you move one the other moves with no outside influence - the action is instantaneous and distance doesn't matter. The hard part right now is keeping them entangled at a distance - the further apart you move the particles the harder it is to keep them from losing their entanglement. So long as they are actually entangled, though, distance doesn't introduce any kind of delay in the reaction of one particle to another. If they could get it to work across the world it would be phenomenal, but so far they've only managed a few feet.
In any case, the parent poster was talking about actual applications of quantum entanglement today. As you said, we've got ideas, but no applications yet.
I personally think understanding how/why mass exists is going to do a lot in the area of energy at first, and if it opens up a more correct theory of physics the sky is the limit really. There is no telling what it might do for us.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Where I live machetes still kill people everyday.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I guess that Gauss et al. should not have wasted their time on pure mathematics fields (such as number theory) that had absolutely no practical applications at the time.
I'm sure someone wasted their time on pure mathematics fields that had absolutely no practical applications at the time. Gauss wasn't one of those people. He wasted his time on fields, including pure mathematical fields, that had considerable application then and now. For example, his experience with number theory carried over to make a computation for the position of Ceres that was vastly simpler than existing methods and which since has become the "least squares method", one of the fundamental computing tools for many fields of science.
This myth that one need not consider the value of the science that is researched is pervasive yet it fails to describe how science has actually been done. Yes, Gauss worked on a number of problems (such as the planar geometry problem of constructing a 17-sided polygon with straight edge and compass) that didn't have application (some still don't). But it's worth noting that as a result of his effort, he became knowledgeable about a great deal of mathematics, very proficient with computations, and discovered many other things during his lifetime that he wouldn't have, if he hadn't had been so aggressive in exploring mathematics. Nor would he have been a decent teacher of research mathematics with a number of important students.
To be very blunt, any person who works on a field where there is no value returned in their lifetimes has never made it into the history books as a serious scientist. Every so often, you might find someone who anticipated a future development, but because it didn't catch on in their lifetimes, it's just of historical interest with no relevance to the development of the field (for example, the steam engine was invented in ancient Greece yet it has no relevance until the 17th or 18th century).
In practice, now as then, scientists generally had important problems that they were trying to solve. And many, if not most of those scientists also worked on less importance, sometimes nearly irrelevant problems. But that latter work was low cost. You didn't have to sink ten billion dollars to play with quaternions or zap someone with a Leyden jar.
Even if we grant your point quoted above, do you really think you can justify multi-billion dollar projects on the grounds that extremely cheap mathematicians puttered around centuries ago? A billion dollars is probably more than adequate to fund several thousand potential Gausses over their lifetimes. Maybe something like 20,000 mathematician years, if you spent it all now rather than through careful financing. Using your logic, that seems a lot bigger investment to me than pushing the envelop slightly on certain energetic particle collisions. I bet you'd be hard pressed to find any science that has a cost to scientific quantity comparable to mathematicians. So why not spend it all on mathematicians? My take is that any rebuttal of that argument has to take into account the value of the science involved.
Fair enough, let's address those claims.
The construction of LHC was approved in 1995, way before there was a crisis in Europe. The total project cost (about half of the $10B figure according to this) is therefore spread across more than 15 years (assuming not all experiments have been run) and 20 countries. CERN's budget for last year was about $1B (see previous link) and a similar figure in 2008 and I fully expect them to spend that money on nuclear research, as per their charter; there are other organizations that concern themselves with world hunger, bank bailouts, etc.
Now, let's put the numbers into perspective.
There are *individuals* that can finance the LHC 5 times over. Speaking about countries, in 2009 Germany was the largest contributor to CERN with ~$200M, which was roughly 0.006% of their GDP.
Oh, and by the way, the discovery was made at Fermilab's Tevatron, which is both older and significantly cheaper than the LHC.
No. It appears that Lisi's theory (as well as the Pati-Salam GUT upon which it is partially based) contains a single Higgs doublet, rather than the 2 Higgs doublets suggested by this D0 result.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
If you're interested in a very well written history of early nuclear physics and the atomic bomb, I'd highly recommend Richard Rhodes book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It does a phenomenal job of covering the theory, experiments and engineering involved in big chunk of nuclear research. It is very well written and has compelling mini-biographies of several of the scientists. No Einstein lasers though.
These particular scientists (or rather all the employees there) let us motorcycle riders cruise around the facility surrounding the Tevatron whenever we want, and never greet us with anything but smiles and friendly conversation. Even when a bunch of biker looking guys decide to stop in and press our faces to the glass at the Fermi+CERN room or pull off on one of the access roads to take photographs of their small herd of bison, the many tanker trucks marked "Liquid Nitrogen" in big letters, or one of their many bizarre looking buildings (even the ones with the little radioactive signs on them). It's particularly amazing how open they are with unsupervised visitors given the ridiculous "fear of teh turrorists" mentality that's so prevalent now. In my mind, they really can do no wrong. I hope the ridiculously smart people there find whatever it is they're looking for... it's just a shame I'm too dumb to understand their work.
To give you an idea...
http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Fermi+National+Lab+Library,+Batavia,+IL&sll=41.846547,-88.248367&sspn=0.07225,0.154324&ie=UTF8&hq=Fermi+National+Lab+Library,&hnear=Batavia,+Kane,+Illinois&ll=41.840856,-88.253002&spn=0.036128,0.077162&t=h&z=14&iwloc=A
MAD is possibly the most naive policy imaginable, as it's based on the core assumption that no one would be stupid enough to launch first because they know they'd also be destroyed.
Unfortunately, as Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea have demonstrated, they ARE stupid enough, and really don't care if they die for Allah or Kim or whoever.
Very scary times indeed.
Unfortunately, as Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea have demonstrated, they ARE stupid enough, and really don't care if they die for Allah or Kim or whoever.
Clearly I missed the news report of Iran, Afghanistan or Democratic People's Republic of Korea launching nukes at anyone?
When particles are entangled, if you move one the other moves with no outside influence - the action is instantaneous and distance doesn't matter.
No -- if you move one particle, the other doesn't move instantly. Entanglement is much more subtle than that; in fact, it's hard to explain what exactly is shared between the particles without using math. One point is important, though: it's not possible to send information faster than light using quantum entanglement. So, all that talk about "instantaneous" reaction is a little misleading.
The hard part right now is keeping them entangled at a distance - the further apart you move the particles the harder it is to keep them from losing their entanglement.
The difficulty in maintaining (quantum) coherence has nothing to do with the distance between the particles. It's just that the particles must be kept completely isolated from everything else -- any interaction with anything else breaks the entanglement.
So long as they are actually entangled, though, distance doesn't introduce any kind of delay in the reaction of one particle to another.
Well, sure, for a suitable definition of "reaction". And remember it's a one time deal: once you interact with one of the particles, the other one suffers the "reaction" and then the entanglement is broken.
If they could get it to work across the world it would be phenomenal, but so far they've only managed a few feet.
Actually, it has been done over a few kilometers, see for example this paper.
pull off on one of the access roads to take photographs of their small herd of bison
Did you see the Higgs bison?
I had a similar experience when I visited CERN. Granted it wasn't a spontaneous trip (was arranged as part of a particle physics course), but when being shown around it was repeated over and over that we can go anywhere we want (but that it's not a good idea to enter radioactive or cryogenically frozen areas, of course), we can take photos of anything, etc. This is because 1) it's a place of research, so nobody should be discouraged from researching CERN itself 2) due to the politics involved, no participating country has authority to stop people from any other participating country from doing anything they want 3) it's publicly funded, so should be available to the public and 4) it lowers worries about clandestine weaponisation of the technology they have (especially since the word Nuclear crops up a lot).
It was a fascinating trip and I would recommend it to anyone :)
"Dr. Jackson the subjects for irradiation experiment 46, codename Hulk, are in position"
"Perfect! Let's hope these bikers don't melt too soon"
First thing I thought of when I read this is that there are five fundamental forces in the universe:
1. Electricity
2. Magnetism
3. Gravity
4. Weak Nuclear
5. Strong Nuclear
Considering that the Higgs boson was, in part, supposed to help explain how mass worked, it makes me wonder if this is the reason for the number they're arriving at.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
This thread became strange very quickly. Still, so many charming jokes.
By the way, how do you fix the casing on an LCD monitor at CERN? Put some gluon!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Unfortunately, as Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea have demonstrated, they ARE stupid enough, and really don't care if they die for Allah or Kim or whoever.
Actually, I am wondering... A corollary of MAD is that your nukes are useless unless you manage to make your enemies think that you are crazy enough to use them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Giant_Lance
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Sorry guy. The only country ever to actually drop the bomb on someone else has been the United States. And as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the US is just as if not more likely than any of the aforementioned basket cases to drop one again. All it would probably take is another relatively minor terrorist outrage.
May the Maths Be with you!
Sorry guy. The only country ever to actually drop the bomb on someone else has been the United States. And as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the US is just as if not more likely than any of the aforementioned basket cases to drop one again. All it would probably take is another relatively minor terrorist outrage.
I know it's really fun to wave your hands in the air and yell about how the US is the only country that has ever used a nuclear bomb offensively, but it just makes you look like a goober.
The truth is that the nuclear bombs used on Japan were nothing like later bombs. The highest estimated yield for the Fat Man is 22kt, while Tsar Bomba is 50,000kt, or about 23,000 times the power. Please go educate yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield
The US did far more damage in a single raid against Tokyo using conventional weapons than both the nuclear weapons combined. Dropping nuclear weapons was less effective from a destruction standpoint, but that wasn't their point. The whole point of dropping them was "shock and awe", and bluffing they could drop them all month long.
Dropping a modern nuclear weapon is in no way comparable to what was done 65 years ago.
1) Just because MAD is not applicable to today's circumstances, does not make it a naive theory. It did exactly its job in the circumstances for which it was created.
2) If you write off Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea as "stupid", then you are a fool. Yes, their motivations differ from yours - enough so that you clearly do not understand them. However, you're claim that they're suicidal needs some support.
I'd also imagine that anti-matter weapons would leave some nasty side effects hanging around after detonation.
That's one of the more interesting aspects of anti-matter weaponry. The entire concept is that there isn't anything of the bomb hanging around after detonation. This is of course, assuming the basic concept of an anti-matter 'bomb' in which matter and an equal portion of anti-matter are combined and in the process annihilated.
Fission weapons (and fusion weapons are essentially fission initiated) don't really annihilate anything. The bonds are broken, or isotopes fused, but the matter is still there. That is the fallout.
Antimatter+Matter... once it is 'done' it is basically done and speeding away from the location at the speed of light. Any lingering effects are likely due to whatever was at the site of the explosion that didn't react well to being exploded.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj