If your worst enemy accidentally tripped and bonked his head you'd celebrate, too. It doesn't mean that you tripped him. Especially when he's 200,000 feet straight up and you can't reach that high.
NASA engineers don't make mistakes? Was a different set of engineers in charge of the last shuttle explosion? Did their institutional refusal to deal with well-known O-ring problems not constitute a grand mistake?
If you want to know about all that cool chaos theory, quantum mechanics, black hole stuff then pick up any of a number of excellent books aimed at laymen; Chaos by James Gleick is pretty good, and In Search of Schroedinger's Cat by James Gribbin is a really good hand-waving (no math) book about quantum. If you actually want to be able to do physics (or write games with realistic physics, etc.) then you'd do well to find a decent introductory textbook (Halliday and Resnick, Fowler, etc.) Note that to do physics at all two things are required: 1) you must think well, and 2) you must do algebra at a bare minimum, and calculus if you want to learn anything really interesting.
Physicists do so much deep calculus that they forget that it's calculus much of the time and call it "algebra." Unfortunately, most physics also requires a deep understanding of what the math is actually doing. Most physics majors could leave their programs for the math department halfway through their junior year and still graduate on time.
Do not worry about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Self-assembling layers that are one-molecule thick are really common and very stable. Examples include cell walls (I know where several trillion are), soap bubbles, etc.
Thermal fluctuations have many orders of magnitude more energy (1/40 kT, where k is Boltzmann's constant) than the quantum mechanical fluctuations associated with the uncertainty principle. Since room temperature doesn't make these things fall apart we can immediately stop worrying about quantum fluctuations. Also, 1 nm is big enough that quantum tunneling of electrons isn't a problem, especially at 5 V (or whatever they use in chips). The scanning tunneling microscope uses gaps that are ten times smaller and voltage differences that are thousands of times larger.
Actually, you could probably make a transistor out of a single molecule but it's not clear how you would connect it to anything. The nice thing about this technique is not so much that single molecules are involved, but rather that this is a cheap way to get a very uniform, very thin layer of insulator.
Smaller, thinner layers of insulator are possible maybe, but 1/1000000000 meter is about as small as layers made out of atoms and molecules are going to get. In other words, one molecule thick is as good as chemistry can do even in principle. Hence the "bookend" comment, probably.
1. Interactive (but not-computer) devices being banned from preschool/Kindergarden/grade school children.
These get banned when kids make irritating Tamagochi-type beeping noises instead of learning to spell. Yes, young kids should be continually be taught by extremely talented teachers who know all about the latest technology and who have MS degrees in human factors (in addition to their MS in education), but that's a tough one to make happen.
2. Middleschool/Highschools banning HP-type calculators and handheld-type devices.
People (kids) need to know how to do math (etc.) without electronic assistance. Having spent several years teaching freshmen how to do calculus and extract analytical information from graphs (plots of experimental data, etc.; I taught physics), I can assure you that forcing people to do these things by hand teaches allows them to learn much more quickly than they would with the assistance of snazzy calculators and Mathematica. In fact, my worst students were often the ones with the nicest calculators.
Refusing to integrate these potentially educationally-rich technologies is a huge failure.
It seems that it's these supposed "educators" who need to learn a thing or two.
If your current teachers are so lousy, vote for more money for education and property tax increases and the like. How many of you (us?)/. libertarians would really get behind such an idea? (end of rant)
If everyone who wasn't sure that they knew what they were talking about would ask questions instead of spewing rambling, pseudo-scientific speculation, then this (/.) would be a useful and interesting forum for discussion of things like scanning tunnelling microscopy and its applications to designing small things.
But the signal to noise ratio is depressingly high here.
I know little about how best to implement a kernel (or whatever); accordingly, I try to say little about it other than asking non-leading questions of those who know.
Just my $0.02. By the way, I know just enough about STM to know that the best answers (on the web) can be found by visiting physics department sites at universities.
The reason this is done is that the person at fault (pirate, drive-thru clerk, junkie mugger) doesn't have any money. If, for example, Acme went and sued me for making illegal knock-off widgets, they'd find that I won't pay (I'm in the Bahamas or something) but the publisher of the advertising flier I used to solicit business is rich and local.
If you are getting a little utility (or a huge program) running because you want to use it on an OS X box, then you should port exactly as much UI as you feel is good for you.
If, on the other hand, you want people to actually use your product, then you should stick to the user interface guidelines that Apple publishes. If you don't, nobody will be angry, but they will simply avoid your software. It's how things work in the Mac world; programs with interfaces that are even slightly weird get shunned.
...without particle physics you sure wouldn't be using a computer...
This is incorrect. Particle physics is totally unrelated to anything that goes into computers. People who design computer components are usually trained in "solid state physics" and "materials science". Solid state physicists know all about the properties of semiconductors (especially crystalline silicon, but also including most other materials that are solids), how to dope them to achieve exactly the right electronic characteristics, and so forth. Material scientists (who are sort of halfway between physicists and engineers) know all about how to put thin layers of magnetic particles on layers of mylar, how to invent new materials with the right thermal/magnetic/electronic properties, etc.
Particle physicists are an entirely different breed. They are uniformly incredibly smart (occasionally you will meet a solid state or materials person who is merely quite smart), and play mostly with mathematics that is of an order difficult to describe even to other trained mathematicians and physicists. They are not concerned, by and large, with any applications of their research except in the uncertain future. They tend to find semiconductors and supermagnetoresistive materials boring, which is why they're doing particle physics and not solid state physics.
At any rate, the physics that is used in designing computers and computer components was understood well before particle physics was terribly well-developed.
My post is overlong (sorry), and has two parts: 1) Some people seem confused, so let me elaborate on netcurl's post. 2) Monochromatic sources are key.
Low-grade primer on EM radiation frequency and wavelength: Speed == Wavelength * Frequency. Travelling electromagnetic waves all have the same speed (3x10^8 meters/second), but different frequencies. Different colors of visible light (that you can see with your eye) have frequencies on the order of 10^-15 seconds, hence wavelengths on the order of 500x10^-9 meters == 500 nm. UV light is around 300 nm, blue is around 450 nm, green is about 530 nm, red is 700 nm or so, infrared starts around 800 nm, etc. So visible light frequencies are around a petahertz (a million gigahertz). As another poster mentioned, this means that really high-frequency EM waves, like visible light, don't transmit through walls and trees (nor even curtains) very well, but you already knew that was true.:) ) This problem is overcome by sending the light down fibers that can make it bend around walls.
So here's my main point: We should worry about how many different wavelengths (or frequencies, or colors) we can discriminate among within a certain frequency band. The reason people like the guy down the hall from netcurl use visible light (and near-visible light like ultraviolet and infrared) to send and receive signals is that one can get amazingly monochromatic light out of a laser. For example, I used to use a (yttrium vanadate) laser that emitted light at 532.40 nm plus or minus 0.03 nm (I forget the exact figures). That means, in principle, that we could send signals at 532.4 nm, 532.6 nm, 532. 8 nm, etc. simultaneously down the same fiber.
However, discriminating among these different colors is kind of hard because of color filters not having sharp cutoffs and because of frequency-spreading that can occur in fibers. The cutting edge of research in fibers, then, is largely in a) making fibers that prevent or correct for spreading, and b) finding clever ways of distinguishing between two nearly identical colors.
I've probably forgotten something, but hope this helps.
The primary reason I no longer read my local paper more than once a week or so is that the writing is terrible, subliterate even. It's like reading poorly edited essays written by eighth-graders in remedial English. Worse, only rarely does one find useful, independent analysis of the news; just a regurgitation of unhelpful, timid facts. It's not the only reason, tho:
The vast majority of the stories come straight off either the AP or NYT syndicated feed;
The ratio of annoying human interest stories to insightful news analysis is depressingly high;
Almost everything in the paper sounds exactly like what one hears on the TV (and that with me trying not to watch TV!);
The New York Times is available on the web.
In fact, the only paper I ever read much anymore is the Times. Most Sundays I manage to dig up a copy (if I wake up early enough), and it provides reading material for the week. The Week In Review section and the Magazine are each worth the $3 that the whole paper costs, and I end up with reading material for the week.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to visit Project Gutenberg, which was obviously dreamed up by someone with a serious proofreading jones.
This story has already been posted. This story has already been posted. This story has already been posted.
If you want to know about all that cool chaos theory, quantum mechanics, black hole stuff then pick up any of a number of excellent books aimed at laymen; Chaos by James Gleick is pretty good, and In Search of Schroedinger's Cat by James Gribbin is a really good hand-waving (no math) book about quantum. If you actually want to be able to do physics (or write games with realistic physics, etc.) then you'd do well to find a decent introductory textbook (Halliday and Resnick, Fowler, etc.) Note that to do physics at all two things are required: 1) you must think well, and 2) you must do algebra at a bare minimum, and calculus if you want to learn anything really interesting.
Physicists do so much deep calculus that they forget that it's calculus much of the time and call it "algebra." Unfortunately, most physics also requires a deep understanding of what the math is actually doing. Most physics majors could leave their programs for the math department halfway through their junior year and still graduate on time.
I'd actually like to see someone take the Onion's kids explanation of why the Sept. terrorist attacks happened seriously.
Wow!! 22 millibits per second. That means it only takes 45 seconds to transfer a whole bit!
I can't wait until 22Mbps devices come out.
Do not worry about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Self-assembling layers that are one-molecule thick are really common and very stable. Examples include cell walls (I know where several trillion are), soap bubbles, etc.
Thermal fluctuations have many orders of magnitude more energy (1/40 kT, where k is Boltzmann's constant) than the quantum mechanical fluctuations associated with the uncertainty principle. Since room temperature doesn't make these things fall apart we can immediately stop worrying about quantum fluctuations. Also, 1 nm is big enough that quantum tunneling of electrons isn't a problem, especially at 5 V (or whatever they use in chips). The scanning tunneling microscope uses gaps that are ten times smaller and voltage differences that are thousands of times larger.
Actually, you could probably make a transistor out of a single molecule but it's not clear how you would connect it to anything. The nice thing about this technique is not so much that single molecules are involved, but rather that this is a cheap way to get a very uniform, very thin layer of insulator.
Smaller, thinner layers of insulator are possible maybe, but 1/1000000000 meter is about as small as layers made out of atoms and molecules are going to get. In other words, one molecule thick is as good as chemistry can do even in principle. Hence the "bookend" comment, probably.
These get banned when kids make irritating Tamagochi-type beeping noises instead of learning to spell. Yes, young kids should be continually be taught by extremely talented teachers who know all about the latest technology and who have MS degrees in human factors (in addition to their MS in education), but that's a tough one to make happen.
2. Middleschool/Highschools banning HP-type calculators and handheld-type devices.
People (kids) need to know how to do math (etc.) without electronic assistance. Having spent several years teaching freshmen how to do calculus and extract analytical information from graphs (plots of experimental data, etc.; I taught physics), I can assure you that forcing people to do these things by hand teaches allows them to learn much more quickly than they would with the assistance of snazzy calculators and Mathematica. In fact, my worst students were often the ones with the nicest calculators.
Refusing to integrate these potentially educationally-rich technologies is a huge failure. It seems that it's these supposed "educators" who need to learn a thing or two.
If your current teachers are so lousy, vote for more money for education and property tax increases and the like. How many of you (us?) /. libertarians would really get behind such an idea? (end of rant)
An entire super-corporate web site, and not a single obvious place to see some source...
They've finally made Imipolex-G. Can we look forward to human-guided missiles now?
But the signal to noise ratio is depressingly high here.
I know little about how best to implement a kernel (or whatever); accordingly, I try to say little about it other than asking non-leading questions of those who know.
Just my $0.02. By the way, I know just enough about STM to know that the best answers (on the web) can be found by visiting physics department sites at universities.
Stones yield no blood when squeezed.
If, on the other hand, you want people to actually use your product, then you should stick to the user interface guidelines that Apple publishes. If you don't, nobody will be angry, but they will simply avoid your software. It's how things work in the Mac world; programs with interfaces that are even slightly weird get shunned.
I miss being a Mac user. :(
--josh
This is incorrect. Particle physics is totally unrelated to anything that goes into computers. People who design computer components are usually trained in "solid state physics" and "materials science". Solid state physicists know all about the properties of semiconductors (especially crystalline silicon, but also including most other materials that are solids), how to dope them to achieve exactly the right electronic characteristics, and so forth. Material scientists (who are sort of halfway between physicists and engineers) know all about how to put thin layers of magnetic particles on layers of mylar, how to invent new materials with the right thermal/magnetic/electronic properties, etc.
Particle physicists are an entirely different breed. They are uniformly incredibly smart (occasionally you will meet a solid state or materials person who is merely quite smart), and play mostly with mathematics that is of an order difficult to describe even to other trained mathematicians and physicists. They are not concerned, by and large, with any applications of their research except in the uncertain future. They tend to find semiconductors and supermagnetoresistive materials boring, which is why they're doing particle physics and not solid state physics.
At any rate, the physics that is used in designing computers and computer components was understood well before particle physics was terribly well-developed.
Not to be picky or anything... --jd
Low-grade primer on EM radiation frequency and wavelength: Speed == Wavelength * Frequency. Travelling electromagnetic waves all have the same speed (3x10^8 meters/second), but different frequencies. Different colors of visible light (that you can see with your eye) have frequencies on the order of 10^-15 seconds, hence wavelengths on the order of 500x10^-9 meters == 500 nm. UV light is around 300 nm, blue is around 450 nm, green is about 530 nm, red is 700 nm or so, infrared starts around 800 nm, etc. So visible light frequencies are around a petahertz (a million gigahertz). As another poster mentioned, this means that really high-frequency EM waves, like visible light, don't transmit through walls and trees (nor even curtains) very well, but you already knew that was true. :) ) This problem is overcome by sending the light down fibers that can make it bend around walls.
So here's my main point: We should worry about how many different wavelengths (or frequencies, or colors) we can discriminate among within a certain frequency band. The reason people like the guy down the hall from netcurl use visible light (and near-visible light like ultraviolet and infrared) to send and receive signals is that one can get amazingly monochromatic light out of a laser. For example, I used to use a (yttrium vanadate) laser that emitted light at 532.40 nm plus or minus 0.03 nm (I forget the exact figures). That means, in principle, that we could send signals at 532.4 nm, 532.6 nm, 532. 8 nm, etc. simultaneously down the same fiber.
However, discriminating among these different colors is kind of hard because of color filters not having sharp cutoffs and because of frequency-spreading that can occur in fibers. The cutting edge of research in fibers, then, is largely in a) making fibers that prevent or correct for spreading, and b) finding clever ways of distinguishing between two nearly identical colors.
I've probably forgotten something, but hope this helps.
--jd
The vast majority of the stories come straight off either the AP or NYT syndicated feed;
The ratio of annoying human interest stories to insightful news analysis is depressingly high;
Almost everything in the paper sounds exactly like what one hears on the TV (and that with me trying not to watch TV!);
The New York Times is available on the web.
In fact, the only paper I ever read much anymore is the Times. Most Sundays I manage to dig up a copy (if I wake up early enough), and it provides reading material for the week. The Week In Review section and the Magazine are each worth the $3 that the whole paper costs, and I end up with reading material for the week.
And all that icky paper to recycle!