That article was a bit sensationalist. To read it, it sounds like the peer review system completely failed and the whole foundation of physics is crashing down. There certainly appear to be problems within that research group in that so many coauthors seemed to have been happy to attach their names to the papers without scrutinizing the results, but once the papers were published the scientific system worked.
It is a reasonable criticism directed at Science and Nature that they seem to compete with each other to publish attention-getting results (the recent bubble fusion experiment comes to mind), but what it comes down to is that a reviewer of a paper has no way to validate experimental data given to him. You have to take the research group at its word that the data are not fabricated. You can question their data reduction and analysis methods, but if they said they did this measurement and these are the resulting data then you have to take them at their word.
One of the ways science operates is that results like these are presented, and if the results are interesting enough (i.e., unexpected or never seen before) then other labs repeat and verify the experiment. When the results are confirmed, then great. If not, then the results (or at least the conclusions drawn from them) become suspect. This happened with cold fusion and it looks like bubble fusion is heading down the same road. This has happened in the past (N-rays are another example), and it will happen in many other instances that don't draw the big press stories. That is how it should work. The Salon article seems to suggest (among some valid points) that the paper reviewers should have had some all-knowing wisdom and immediately questioned the data.
I also doubt, as the article suggests, that the reputation of physicists has been harmed and that all over the world school children are crying "Say it ain't so Jan Hendrik." The biosciences have many many scandals related to data forging, or at least questionable massaging or analysis of data, because the stakes ($$) are much higher for a new drug to come to market as well as the difficulty in collecting consistent data. The biosciences continue to draw huge numbers of people into the field and it enjoys (deservedly) a positive reputation.
I also thought the article was way over the top with regard about the government funding aspect of this. It made it sound like that all the government money spent on R&D is a waste as it obviouly is going to charlatans and rouges. The author should have looked up the research dollar amounts in relation to the total government budget (such as its percentage of the GNP) as well as in relation to the total non-DoD R&D budget and see how well the NSF or the DOE compare to, say, NIH (I'll give you a hint, they are quite neglected). This isn't "Big Science" by any stretch of the imagination.
Part of the problem is this fella's lawyer background. He probably is thinking of "open relay" in the literal sense (i.e., accepts any message and passes it along), so by his semantic reasoning he is correct that he isn't running an open relay. Although, most people on Slashdot would accept a narrower definition and say that his mail server is essentially acting as an open relay.
Remember: It all depends on what you mean by the word "is."
You can indeed say that conducting an experiment that can invalidate a theory tests that theory. If the theory cannot explain the experimental results, then if the experiment was done carefully the theory failed the test and needs to either be modified or thrown out. That is a pretty good test. If the theory is in agreement with the experiment, then it passed the test, but that is about all you can say about it. That is pretty much the basis of science (physical, at least), not just physics.
Maybe it is a semantic problem, but I guess I don't understand your point. If the experiment says that GR needs to be changed, what does that have to do with the other theories of gravity you mentioned? If the experiment showed infinite propagation velocity (though I don't know how you show that given experimental uncertainties), then I think the finite-velocity theories you allude to also take a hit, and I would say those theories didn't "pass the test." If the experiment shows a finite velocity, then those other theories pass the test and they get to stay on the island for another week.
Yes, but to an observer outside the event horizon it would appear the internet has come to a stop, which is how it appears to me most of the time from my dialup.:P
Why does the percentage go down in your simple model? That would assume that if there are 1000 users and 1% look at the code, then you have 10 people. Now if the number of users go up to 10000 you are saying that you still only have those same 10 people (now 0.1%) looking at the code and none of the new 9900 people are code checkers. Why is it that when you are at 10000 users that you now don't have 100 people looking at the code? The same question applies to the changing percentage of people that don't apply patches.
I believe that even though there are supposed to be very many objects in the Oort cloud, as with the asteroid belt the objects are so spread out that the odds of hitting anything are very small. This is also assuming that the Oort cloud exists, and if so, whether it is as populated as expected.
They can only infer where the heliopause is. One way is by looking at things like MHD distrubances (i.e., magnetic shockwaves created by events on the Sun) that travel out and are reflected at the heliospere boundary (as the other poster mentioned); however, all they have at this point are computer models that suggest where it might be. The computer models over the last several decades have shown where the boundary will be, but the researchers have to keep revising the models every time the spacecraft passes the predicted boundary. If I recall correctly, the first prediction in the 60's (by Eugene Parker) expected the boundary somewhere about 5 AU or so, and the expected distance has been increasing ever since (I think it is up in the 100-150 AU range).
Some researchers have suggested that the heliopause might not be a well defined boundary and we might not notice passing through it for a while.
By the way, it is a very tough problem developing a detailed 3D model of the heliosphere when pretty much all your measurements are either inferred or taken mostly at 1 AU in the ecliptic plane (where Ulysses, the Pioneers, and the Voyagers are the exceptions). Even with the measurements the models are still very complicated and take quite a long time to run.
that would actually be much faster and take less computation than having the OS generate a list and then convert them all to a common case.
Actually, there isn't a need to read in and build a list of file names, convert them all into another list, then search through that. You just do the conversions on the fly. It doesn't take any longer because you are going to look at all the filenames anyway.
Anyway, I think I understand your point, but I guess I just fundamentally disagree. I hate it when programs like Windows keep making assumptions about what I want to do. The only useful thing I have found is when I mistype "the" as "teh" in Word and it corrects it for me. However, when I want to create a folder called "QNX" so that I can put in QNX-related software, I don't want it insisting that it should be named "Qnx." Do as I say, not as what you think I want!!! As someone who programs, I also find it useful to tell the difference between the files foo.c and foo.C (and my compiler finds it useful too).
In the case that you mention, I just don't see the problem. If I'm looking for a file letter.txt and my search routine comes back with Letter.txt, letter.txt, and Letter.Txt, then I (and Aunt Ginny) should know what file we want opened. If not, then we should open all three to see which one we want. If Aunt Ginny started a file letter.txt and later "Save As" it to Letter.txt, then that is a problem she has to work out. It is the same as if she later saved her file as lettre.txt. At some point she'll have to reconcile her errors.
I never had a PC until about 8 years ago. I cut my computer teeth on a VAX system and got used to case-insensitive filenames. When I moved to Unix/Linux systems, it was just a minor difference to get used to. A lot of people make the argument that Linux will only be popular if the UI is exactly like Windows, but I disagree. Anyone should expect a learning curve when moving from one OS to another (even Aunt Ginny). Move Ginny from Windows to a Mac and you'll have to explain to her how some of the things she wants to do are different. Look at the differences between the various Windowses, but people have had little problem moving from 3.11 to Win95 to WinXP, etc. Microsoft just has the genius (and $$) to market the idea that it is a revolutionary and great step and people accept it and learn it. Remember when Win95 came out? The Mac users were annoyed to no end because Microsoft was touting their new point-and-click-and-drag GUI as incredibly revolutionary and the greatest breakthrough in computer history.
I think that it is the idea of moving to a different OS and not some silly minor UI differences that keep people from actually doing it.
The kind of search you are talking is way overkill. Your search program simply reads each filename and converts the name to all upper or all lower case before it compares to the simarly-converted requested file. See for instance these C library functions. Your program is only a few lines, and it only need pass through the directory once.
Simply put, accelerometers tell you if you are accelerating and it says nothing about applying different forces to particular sensor elements and not others. Consider the simplest of accelerometers: a flashlight. Shine a flashlight across a room and the beam travels a straight line. Now constantly accelerate the room and the beam "falls." No moving parts. This is a very nice Newtonian argument that you can find all over the place (such as here). If you invoke the Equivalence Principle, then this says that your flashlight beam will bend when you are in the constant accelerating field of the Earth. This is a nice General Relativity argument which you will find in pretty much all GR books (it will be referred to as the Einstein Elevator).
Rotation is something else that is very easy to detect, even if you are out in free space with no points of reference (such as a star field). Simply hold a ring laser gyro. This whole device relys on the Sagnac Effect which will tell you whether you are rotating (i.e., accelerating) or not. Rotation is just as easy to detect because it is involves acceleration.
As an aside, inertial reference frames do not depend on special relativity (SR), it is SR that depends on interial reference frames (this is the first of Einstein's three postulates). In the context of this discussion intertial reference frames have everything to do with it, and it doesn't mean we have to be talking about SR when we talk about inertial reference frames. The whole point of my previous post is that you can always tell that you are accelerating even if you are falling in the potential well of a planet or any other scenario you can dream up. Just use your flashlight (a finite speed of light is a wonderful thing, even in the Newtonian world). If you want to live only in a Newtonian world and you don't have a flashlight, then perform some intro physics conservation of momentum experiments on those noisy airtracks to see that you are not conserving momentum in your uniformly accelerating reference frame you say you cannot detect.
You also need to be careful about associating acceleration with motion. The can in the previous example does not crush because the bottom of the can is not accelerating while the top does, the whole can is accelerating (and uniformly (20g), I might add). Right now you are accelerating in your chair, but you don't move because the Earth is pushing back on you, but that doesn't mean you aren't accelerating. Remember, your weight is a force, and the force is proportional to your acceleration; no acceleration, no force holding you to your chair, and you would fly away.
In fact, uniform accellerations cannot possibly inflict damage on an object.
Certainly they can. Take a familiar object (say, an empty soda can) and put it in a uniform 20g field and it would crush.
(in fact, you could not possibly detect it, unless you noticed you were suddenly moving relative to everything nearby, that is, assuming things are in fact nearby)
Be careful that you are not confusing uniform acceleration with uniform velocity. The first is not an inertial reference frame while the second is. Any simple accelerometer will tell you that you are accelerating; it is the special relativity constancy of physics that holds in the intertial reference frame. You might be thinking of Einstein's Equivalence Principle that says (colloquially) that you can't tell if you are standing on the surface of the Earth or in an elevator that accelerates in free space at 9.8 m/s2.
Just curious, but what do you consider a "hard" programming language, or at least one that would be considered "harder" than FORTRAN (from my point I certainly wouldn't say "C" because it is pretty much the same as FORTRAN---they just have different ways of looking at things)?
However, to phase the signals from all the telescopes the radio astronomers have to time-tag the signals coming in and combine the data via post-processing. They use atomic clocks at each telescope to do the time-tagging. Combining the signals electronically only works in practice when you have telescopes (usually two) watching a source pass overhead (so that you are not trying to actively phase the telescopes).
One point the person in the article seems to miss is that he clearly was into chasing the latest distributions whenever they came out, as he seemed to have jumped up the Mandrake/Redhat/Debian releases when they came out, and he even seemed to run the unstable releases too. In the Windows world you don't get to do this much at all (except for installing the security fixes and extra clipart upgrades). It sounds like that a good deal of his problems would go away if he stayed with a distribution when it stopped giving him problems just like if he sticks to WinXP for the next few years.
The problem is far from solved. You still have the problem of holding that shape (be it 2 or 3-D) to telesope-level quality. Whether that is easier for the 2-D shape or not depends on the support system and active optics (if any). Obviously they see advantages in going with the 2-D surfaces, but the problem is basically almost as hard.
You are confusing two different operating modes in astronomy. What you are describing is globally coordinating telescopes to provide continuous coverage of an object (when the object sets for one telescope, it is in view for another). This is particularly useful for object that change appearance on reasonable timescales (such as Cephid variables) and you want to accumulate a nice, continuous data set. The fact that you are using telescopes spread out over the globe does not mean that you now have an effective aperture as big as the globe. Your light gathering ability and angular resolution are still only as good as each individual telescope.
The purpose of the 100m telescope is just that, to build a very large aperture telescope. This will increase your light gathering ability and angular resolution. This you cannot accomplish (as another poster suggested) in the same manner that they do with radio astronomy (i.e., time-tag the data and put the picture together later during post-processing) because you'll never get accurate enough clocks to make those measurements.
Consider that to make a decent image you need an optic that is accurate to a fraction of a wavelength (lets use 1/10 to make the math easier). To make a radiotelescope image you are dealing with wavelengths of about a meter, so you need to tag the wavefront to about 10 centimeters, which given the speed of light is 3x10^10 cm/s, means you need clocks that are synchronized to a few hundred picoseconds. You can do this with atomic clocks. However, in the light band, if you have a wavelength of 500 nm, you need to tag your wavefront to about 50 nm, which means you need to synchronize your clocks to about 10^-16 seconds. I don't know what kind of improvement you are expecting out of the next generation of atomic clocks, but it isn't going to be six orders of magnitude. And I'll even go out on a limb and suggest that you aren't going to have clocks that accurate in our lifetimes.
A 100m telescope is good science any way you look at it.
You are not required to cite work that the original author retracted. In most (but not all) cases it would be silly to.
In fact, in Podkletnov's case he withdrew his paper before it went up for peer review, so it was never published and hence there is nothing to cite. If he later did resubmit to a peer reviewed journal than please provide the reference as I would be interested to see it.
Actually the General Theory was published in 1915. The results immediately agreed with the observations of the perturbations in the orbit of Mercury. It was subsequently verified against a solar eclipse in 1919 (there was an earlier eclipse, but WWI prevented a scientific expedition to view it).
Of course there are varying degrees of "proof." For instance, if you are looking for a blip in your data there is a big difference between something like a 1.5-sigma feature verses a 5-sigma feature.
On the other hand, I am not partial to the phrase "extraordinary proof" either.
Quantum physics describes the hydrogen ground state as the electron wavefunction fitting in one orbit, and even that is a simplistic picture (you really need to talk about probability densities). There is no little point particle going around the nucleus in a wavy pattern, do not think this way because it is wrong. You get into all sorts of trouble once you start picturing the quantum world in terms of classical pictures (e.g., the Bohr model of an atom being a little solar system).
Besides, if you want to run with the classical picture you described it still would not work because cannot have "two orbits per oscillation" because you run into a boundary problem. Any spot in this orbit would have two values of it's "height" unless the two "waves" were exactly on top of each other (which would get you back your original wave).
The biggest difference between muon catalyzed fusion and hydrinos is that there is a strong, logically consistent, and testable basis on which muon catalyzed fusion rests. Not just a bunch of buzzwords and VC funding.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a reasonable criticism directed at Science and Nature that they seem to compete with each other to publish attention-getting results (the recent bubble fusion experiment comes to mind), but what it comes down to is that a reviewer of a paper has no way to validate experimental data given to him. You have to take the research group at its word that the data are not fabricated. You can question their data reduction and analysis methods, but if they said they did this measurement and these are the resulting data then you have to take them at their word.
One of the ways science operates is that results like these are presented, and if the results are interesting enough (i.e., unexpected or never seen before) then other labs repeat and verify the experiment. When the results are confirmed, then great. If not, then the results (or at least the conclusions drawn from them) become suspect. This happened with cold fusion and it looks like bubble fusion is heading down the same road. This has happened in the past (N-rays are another example), and it will happen in many other instances that don't draw the big press stories. That is how it should work. The Salon article seems to suggest (among some valid points) that the paper reviewers should have had some all-knowing wisdom and immediately questioned the data.
I also doubt, as the article suggests, that the reputation of physicists has been harmed and that all over the world school children are crying "Say it ain't so Jan Hendrik." The biosciences have many many scandals related to data forging, or at least questionable massaging or analysis of data, because the stakes ($$) are much higher for a new drug to come to market as well as the difficulty in collecting consistent data. The biosciences continue to draw huge numbers of people into the field and it enjoys (deservedly) a positive reputation.
I also thought the article was way over the top with regard about the government funding aspect of this. It made it sound like that all the government money spent on R&D is a waste as it obviouly is going to charlatans and rouges. The author should have looked up the research dollar amounts in relation to the total government budget (such as its percentage of the GNP) as well as in relation to the total non-DoD R&D budget and see how well the NSF or the DOE compare to, say, NIH (I'll give you a hint, they are quite neglected). This isn't "Big Science" by any stretch of the imagination.
www.theassayer.org
Remember: It all depends on what you mean by the word "is."
Maybe it is a semantic problem, but I guess I don't understand your point. If the experiment says that GR needs to be changed, what does that have to do with the other theories of gravity you mentioned? If the experiment showed infinite propagation velocity (though I don't know how you show that given experimental uncertainties), then I think the finite-velocity theories you allude to also take a hit, and I would say those theories didn't "pass the test." If the experiment shows a finite velocity, then those other theories pass the test and they get to stay on the island for another week.
Yes, but to an observer outside the event horizon it would appear the internet has come to a stop, which is how it appears to me most of the time from my dialup. :P
It is maintenance related. A nice explanation can be found here.
Why does the percentage go down in your simple model? That would assume that if there are 1000 users and 1% look at the code, then you have 10 people. Now if the number of users go up to 10000 you are saying that you still only have those same 10 people (now 0.1%) looking at the code and none of the new 9900 people are code checkers. Why is it that when you are at 10000 users that you now don't have 100 people looking at the code? The same question applies to the changing percentage of people that don't apply patches.
I believe that even though there are supposed to be very many objects in the Oort cloud, as with the asteroid belt the objects are so spread out that the odds of hitting anything are very small. This is also assuming that the Oort cloud exists, and if so, whether it is as populated as expected.
Some researchers have suggested that the heliopause might not be a well defined boundary and we might not notice passing through it for a while.
By the way, it is a very tough problem developing a detailed 3D model of the heliosphere when pretty much all your measurements are either inferred or taken mostly at 1 AU in the ecliptic plane (where Ulysses, the Pioneers, and the Voyagers are the exceptions). Even with the measurements the models are still very complicated and take quite a long time to run.
Anyway, I think I understand your point, but I guess I just fundamentally disagree. I hate it when programs like Windows keep making assumptions about what I want to do. The only useful thing I have found is when I mistype "the" as "teh" in Word and it corrects it for me. However, when I want to create a folder called "QNX" so that I can put in QNX-related software, I don't want it insisting that it should be named "Qnx." Do as I say, not as what you think I want!!! As someone who programs, I also find it useful to tell the difference between the files foo.c and foo.C (and my compiler finds it useful too).
In the case that you mention, I just don't see the problem. If I'm looking for a file letter.txt and my search routine comes back with Letter.txt, letter.txt, and Letter.Txt, then I (and Aunt Ginny) should know what file we want opened. If not, then we should open all three to see which one we want. If Aunt Ginny started a file letter.txt and later "Save As" it to Letter.txt, then that is a problem she has to work out. It is the same as if she later saved her file as lettre.txt. At some point she'll have to reconcile her errors.
I never had a PC until about 8 years ago. I cut my computer teeth on a VAX system and got used to case-insensitive filenames. When I moved to Unix/Linux systems, it was just a minor difference to get used to. A lot of people make the argument that Linux will only be popular if the UI is exactly like Windows, but I disagree. Anyone should expect a learning curve when moving from one OS to another (even Aunt Ginny). Move Ginny from Windows to a Mac and you'll have to explain to her how some of the things she wants to do are different. Look at the differences between the various Windowses, but people have had little problem moving from 3.11 to Win95 to WinXP, etc. Microsoft just has the genius (and $$) to market the idea that it is a revolutionary and great step and people accept it and learn it. Remember when Win95 came out? The Mac users were annoyed to no end because Microsoft was touting their new point-and-click-and-drag GUI as incredibly revolutionary and the greatest breakthrough in computer history.
I think that it is the idea of moving to a different OS and not some silly minor UI differences that keep people from actually doing it.
The kind of search you are talking is way overkill. Your search program simply reads each filename and converts the name to all upper or all lower case before it compares to the simarly-converted requested file. See for instance these C library functions. Your program is only a few lines, and it only need pass through the directory once.
Simply put, accelerometers tell you if you are accelerating and it says nothing about applying different forces to particular sensor elements and not others. Consider the simplest of accelerometers: a flashlight. Shine a flashlight across a room and the beam travels a straight line. Now constantly accelerate the room and the beam "falls." No moving parts. This is a very nice Newtonian argument that you can find all over the place (such as here). If you invoke the Equivalence Principle, then this says that your flashlight beam will bend when you are in the constant accelerating field of the Earth. This is a nice General Relativity argument which you will find in pretty much all GR books (it will be referred to as the Einstein Elevator).
Rotation is something else that is very easy to detect, even if you are out in free space with no points of reference (such as a star field). Simply hold a ring laser gyro. This whole device relys on the Sagnac Effect which will tell you whether you are rotating (i.e., accelerating) or not. Rotation is just as easy to detect because it is involves acceleration.
As an aside, inertial reference frames do not depend on special relativity (SR), it is SR that depends on interial reference frames (this is the first of Einstein's three postulates). In the context of this discussion intertial reference frames have everything to do with it, and it doesn't mean we have to be talking about SR when we talk about inertial reference frames. The whole point of my previous post is that you can always tell that you are accelerating even if you are falling in the potential well of a planet or any other scenario you can dream up. Just use your flashlight (a finite speed of light is a wonderful thing, even in the Newtonian world). If you want to live only in a Newtonian world and you don't have a flashlight, then perform some intro physics conservation of momentum experiments on those noisy airtracks to see that you are not conserving momentum in your uniformly accelerating reference frame you say you cannot detect.
You also need to be careful about associating acceleration with motion. The can in the previous example does not crush because the bottom of the can is not accelerating while the top does, the whole can is accelerating (and uniformly (20g), I might add). Right now you are accelerating in your chair, but you don't move because the Earth is pushing back on you, but that doesn't mean you aren't accelerating. Remember, your weight is a force, and the force is proportional to your acceleration; no acceleration, no force holding you to your chair, and you would fly away.
Yup.
Just curious, but what do you consider a "hard" programming language, or at least one that would be considered "harder" than FORTRAN (from my point I certainly wouldn't say "C" because it is pretty much the same as FORTRAN---they just have different ways of looking at things)?
However, to phase the signals from all the telescopes the radio astronomers have to time-tag the signals coming in and combine the data via post-processing. They use atomic clocks at each telescope to do the time-tagging. Combining the signals electronically only works in practice when you have telescopes (usually two) watching a source pass overhead (so that you are not trying to actively phase the telescopes).
One point the person in the article seems to miss is that he clearly was into chasing the latest distributions whenever they came out, as he seemed to have jumped up the Mandrake/Redhat/Debian releases when they came out, and he even seemed to run the unstable releases too. In the Windows world you don't get to do this much at all (except for installing the security fixes and extra clipart upgrades). It sounds like that a good deal of his problems would go away if he stayed with a distribution when it stopped giving him problems just like if he sticks to WinXP for the next few years.
The problem is far from solved. You still have the problem of holding that shape (be it 2 or 3-D) to telesope-level quality. Whether that is easier for the 2-D shape or not depends on the support system and active optics (if any). Obviously they see advantages in going with the 2-D surfaces, but the problem is basically almost as hard.
The purpose of the 100m telescope is just that, to build a very large aperture telescope. This will increase your light gathering ability and angular resolution. This you cannot accomplish (as another poster suggested) in the same manner that they do with radio astronomy (i.e., time-tag the data and put the picture together later during post-processing) because you'll never get accurate enough clocks to make those measurements.
Consider that to make a decent image you need an optic that is accurate to a fraction of a wavelength (lets use 1/10 to make the math easier). To make a radiotelescope image you are dealing with wavelengths of about a meter, so you need to tag the wavefront to about 10 centimeters, which given the speed of light is 3x10^10 cm/s, means you need clocks that are synchronized to a few hundred picoseconds. You can do this with atomic clocks. However, in the light band, if you have a wavelength of 500 nm, you need to tag your wavefront to about 50 nm, which means you need to synchronize your clocks to about 10^-16 seconds. I don't know what kind of improvement you are expecting out of the next generation of atomic clocks, but it isn't going to be six orders of magnitude. And I'll even go out on a limb and suggest that you aren't going to have clocks that accurate in our lifetimes.
A 100m telescope is good science any way you look at it.
In fact, in Podkletnov's case he withdrew his paper before it went up for peer review, so it was never published and hence there is nothing to cite. If he later did resubmit to a peer reviewed journal than please provide the reference as I would be interested to see it.
Actually the General Theory was published in 1915. The results immediately agreed with the observations of the perturbations in the orbit of Mercury. It was subsequently verified against a solar eclipse in 1919 (there was an earlier eclipse, but WWI prevented a scientific expedition to view it).
On the other hand, I am not partial to the phrase "extraordinary proof" either.
Besides, if you want to run with the classical picture you described it still would not work because cannot have "two orbits per oscillation" because you run into a boundary problem. Any spot in this orbit would have two values of it's "height" unless the two "waves" were exactly on top of each other (which would get you back your original wave).
The biggest difference between muon catalyzed fusion and hydrinos is that there is a strong, logically consistent, and testable basis on which muon catalyzed fusion rests. Not just a bunch of buzzwords and VC funding.