It's because the surface area of a sphere increases as r^2 so anything that expands into a volume will fall off in intensity at this rate without outside influence. The only reason this would change is if space-time is curved which we have run experiments to test and if there is a curvature it is so slight as to be negligible for experiments like TFA talks about.
As for the person above who mentioned that light might not expand as 1/r^2 outside of a gravity well, the fact is that it doesn't expand at exactly 1/r^2 inside a gravity well. But we 1/r^2 is a good approximation for any gravitational fields near us.
Spacegun? Having been a 14 year old boy at one point I can tell you it the password would be a picture of an attractive, scantily clad woman. Actually that would probably still apply today...
It's not really superior, it's just cheaper. If you're only looking at bright objects (planets, Messier objects, nearby galaxies, and some stellar remnants) this method would work very well. The problem comes when you try to take a picture of dim objects because you have to have enough light be caught by the optics in the exposure time (1/20th of a second in their example) to get an image good enough to tell if it's a "lucky" image or not. If you're looking at something really dim then those few photons you'll get in that amount of time just won't cut it. One black picture is just as sharp as another as far as the computer algorithm is concerned.
The distortion they are trying to get rid of is caused by motion of the air in the atmosphere. It's similar to the waves and blurring you see looking across a parking lot on a hot day. They put space telescopes out of the atmosphere to get above these effects. The objects they're looking at don't have this problem because the thing being imaged is what is giving off the light, it's not something between the source and the viewer like the atmosphere is and so does not cause diffraction to the same extent.
I would expect that this technique works rather well for bright objects, however I wouldn't expect it to work well for the very dim objects that the Hubble is normally tasked to look at. It order for them to use this technique they have to take many images per second. For very dim objects this would only mean a few photons per picture, not nearly enough to figure out if this image is any sharper than any other. So we won't be able to get rid of space telescopes or adaptive optics just yet.
the people at teh edge of the high IQ spectrum should not expect their 'needs' to be served so much as as creating what they need since they at the top of the pile, why should anyone gifted expect interesting work when they in the top %1 of the population? I mean come on the dice is so loaded with gifted kids, most of them simply have character flaws, are lazy or oblivious to their own egotistical flaws. Clearly you have no idea what it is like to be in the top 1%, so let me explain a little. I was identified 99th percentile, Talented and Gifted (TaG was 95th percentile and above if I remember correctly) in first grade. I was in a small school district which didn't have enough TAG students to make up a class so they offered to skip me a year. Unfortunately I have a summer birthday so I was already quite a bit younger than most of the other students in my grade and my mom wouldn't me skip. They tried to give me extra work for a short time but that lasted less than a year because it became too much work for my teacher to keep up with. By the fifth grade they wanted to skip me two years. I did the best I could by reading and learning on my own, but when you have to sit through 7-8 hours a day that are completely worthless to you and then try to be as socially normal as possible afterward there's only so much extra time you have to learn. Remember these are kids! They shouldn't be forced to have no social life just because they are smarter than average.
High school was almost as bad, I had passed out of all of the science classes by the end of my sophomore year. Luckily my school had the one math teacher that could teach through AP calculus in the district and he was willing to let me be an independent study in his computer programming class or it would have been a similar story for math. My school had other AP classes, but they all got canceled one-by-one because there weren't enough kids and the school didn't have enough money to be able to spare a teacher. We also had a college in the schools program but my family had to pay for it ourselves and we didn't have enough money for me to take more than the one writing class I did. The one thing high school really taught me was that I shouldn't work too hard academically because 1) it becomes very difficult to make friends if they know you are smarter than they are, and 2) why bother? There is no difference between 95% and 105% after the report cards come out.
You are correct in one respect though, high IQ students usually can teach most things to themselves. We just have to have a teaching system that allows them to. Give them packets and different work accelerated to their level. When the other students are working on math let them be learning their own math, the same for science, grammar, spelling, etc. But when you hold them back and force them to learn with the rest of the class you aren't doing anyone any good.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask them if their slashdot UID is prime. If they know without having to look then move on to the next programmer and repeat.
Not to mention lack of sleep which has been shown to have a large effect on memory.
It's because the surface area of a sphere increases as r^2 so anything that expands into a volume will fall off in intensity at this rate without outside influence. The only reason this would change is if space-time is curved which we have run experiments to test and if there is a curvature it is so slight as to be negligible for experiments like TFA talks about.
As for the person above who mentioned that light might not expand as 1/r^2 outside of a gravity well, the fact is that it doesn't expand at exactly 1/r^2 inside a gravity well. But we 1/r^2 is a good approximation for any gravitational fields near us.
Spacegun? Having been a 14 year old boy at one point I can tell you it the password would be a picture of an attractive, scantily clad woman. Actually that would probably still apply today...
It's not really superior, it's just cheaper. If you're only looking at bright objects (planets, Messier objects, nearby galaxies, and some stellar remnants) this method would work very well. The problem comes when you try to take a picture of dim objects because you have to have enough light be caught by the optics in the exposure time (1/20th of a second in their example) to get an image good enough to tell if it's a "lucky" image or not. If you're looking at something really dim then those few photons you'll get in that amount of time just won't cut it. One black picture is just as sharp as another as far as the computer algorithm is concerned.
The distortion they are trying to get rid of is caused by motion of the air in the atmosphere. It's similar to the waves and blurring you see looking across a parking lot on a hot day. They put space telescopes out of the atmosphere to get above these effects. The objects they're looking at don't have this problem because the thing being imaged is what is giving off the light, it's not something between the source and the viewer like the atmosphere is and so does not cause diffraction to the same extent. I would expect that this technique works rather well for bright objects, however I wouldn't expect it to work well for the very dim objects that the Hubble is normally tasked to look at. It order for them to use this technique they have to take many images per second. For very dim objects this would only mean a few photons per picture, not nearly enough to figure out if this image is any sharper than any other. So we won't be able to get rid of space telescopes or adaptive optics just yet.
High school was almost as bad, I had passed out of all of the science classes by the end of my sophomore year. Luckily my school had the one math teacher that could teach through AP calculus in the district and he was willing to let me be an independent study in his computer programming class or it would have been a similar story for math. My school had other AP classes, but they all got canceled one-by-one because there weren't enough kids and the school didn't have enough money to be able to spare a teacher. We also had a college in the schools program but my family had to pay for it ourselves and we didn't have enough money for me to take more than the one writing class I did. The one thing high school really taught me was that I shouldn't work too hard academically because 1) it becomes very difficult to make friends if they know you are smarter than they are, and 2) why bother? There is no difference between 95% and 105% after the report cards come out.
You are correct in one respect though, high IQ students usually can teach most things to themselves. We just have to have a teaching system that allows them to. Give them packets and different work accelerated to their level. When the other students are working on math let them be learning their own math, the same for science, grammar, spelling, etc. But when you hold them back and force them to learn with the rest of the class you aren't doing anyone any good.