This has the same central problem as before. D-Wave's computers haven't demonstrated that their commercial bits are entangled. There's no way to really distinguish what they are doing from essentially classical simulated annealing. And the set of problems which their machines can supposedly works on is an NP-hard problem minimization problem involving Ising spin where it isn't even clear that from a complexity standpoint that the the problem can be more quickly solved in general by a quantum system. (Essentially we don't know the relationship between BQP, the set of problems reliably solvable on a quantum computer in polynomial time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP and NP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP_(complexity). Recommended reading that is skeptical of D-Wave's claims is much of what Scott Aaronson has wrote about them. See for example http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=639, http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=198 although interestingly after he visited D-Wave's labs in person his views changed slightly and became slightly more sympathetic to them http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=954.
Neither the summary nor TFA said what this term meant. For those who don't know, essentially an angel investor is someone who invests their own money in a start-up or very young company in return for weak control of a part of the company.
Er, there's a bit wrong with your statement here. Most obviously, the axis of evil speech occurred in January of 2002, not 2003. That helps your case a bit, because a lot of the more serious failures of cooperation by Iran and North Korea occurred towards the end of 2002.. However, in both cases, there were serious failures to cooperate with international inspections before the speech. The entire James Kelly visit to North Korea was over evidence of non-cooperation that had been building up since the late Clinton years. Similarly, in the case of Iran, Iran had likely begun building new nuclear sites since before the speech http://guests.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/517/exiles-and-iran-intel. You can make an argument that Iran and North Korea may have accelerated their programs due to the Axis of Evil speech, and that's a more nuanced and viable argument, but that's a much weaker statement.
Moving on from there, there are other factual problems with your remarks. You claimed that
Iran has never shown itself to be a particularly hostile or irrational nation in any military sense
Right, so funding Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad isn't at all evidence of a "particularly hostile" or "irrational" attitude. http://www.cfr.org/iran/state-sponsors-iran/p9362. Iran doesn't even share a direct border with Israel but they are one of the largest supporters of attacks on Israel. That doesn't exactly scream peaceful to me.
There are enough factual problems as pointed out above, that your four point proposal simply doesn't make sense.
Wikipedia doesn't want original research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OR and with good reason: the project doesn't want to be in the very difficult position of deciding which experts are actual experts and when experts disagree which one is worth listening to. We're willing to pay the (small) price of having some things need to wait until the experts have put their new research through peer reviewed journals or the like. And that's ok. I'm a math grad student who has done original research. In the process of that I've wrote some Wikipedia articles. At least one of those articles is one where my research improves on known bounds. I haven't added that in because Wikipedia isn't the place for that. When the research gets vetted and published in a peer reviewed journal, I will then go back and add it in.
A well-written Wikipedia article should include citations to the relevant statements. So, instead of citing Wikipedia, you can look up where the Wikipedia contributors got the information from and cite that. In some areas one doesn't even need to do that- the well written math articles generally contain proofs of the major claims in question, so you can verify the proofs yourself.
You can get snapshots still- Wikipedia articles have history and it wouldn't take that much effort to go make a bot that ran through a few articles and collected their versions at some time and date. Moreover, Britannica itself while continually updating will also be keeping their old versions (although I don't know if there's going to be any easy access to them). Some other similar projects are still in print, such as the World Book mentioned in the article (although that's really more for a young children). Still, this is the clear end of an era and makes one sad. It also makes me further worried about how much knowledge will get lost if there's some sort of large scale disaster. Paper can survive a lot more infrastructural damage than most forms of electronic storage can.
A few people have giving other Einstein quotes that don't go in the same direction. And they exist for a really simple reason: Einstein was a person, and like most people, his views changed over time. His early beliefs were close to deism, and over time he became more agnostic and in some of the comments made in his last few years (such as the quote given by langeljm below) closer to outright atheism (although his views were always complicated and changing enough that even this narrative is a simplification).
But none of this is really that relevant. There are clearly some very bright people who do very good science who are religious. Ken Miller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_R._Miller is a prominent biologist and religious Catholic. Similarly, Robert Aumann is an Orthodox Jew who won a Nobel Prize for his work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Aumann. While it is true that successful scientists are in general much less likely to be religious than the general population (see discussion here http://news.discovery.com/tech/are-scientists-atheists.html), some people are able to do very good work while still believing. The problem with ID proponents in a nutshell is that they can't keep straight which of of their beliefs fall into science and which fall into religion, and indeed by and large, they don't wan to.
But even this isn't that relevant to the matter at hand. In this particular case, the individual wasn't a scientist but a computer technician. And according to NASA he was fired for being disruptive, not for his actual beliefs. If it turns out that he was fired solely for his beliefs that will be a problem, but it is not likely. The ID people have a long history of claiming persecution where none exists. A very good example of this is how Expelled, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed Ben Stein's movie about ID being mistreated by the "scientific establishment", claimed that many people interviewed were fired or blacklisted for their pro-ID views, yet every case when actually examined turned out to be baseless. http://www.expelledexposed.com/ The same thing will probably happen here.
It is unlikely that the military will use non-lethal weapons on a large scale anytime soon. The reason is pretty simple: such weapons kill fewer people but often make for worse PR. A few years ago they were looking at lasers that could temporarily blind people although there would be permanent damage in many cases. That didn't get adopted because having dead people in the long-run is less PR damage than having horrifically crippled people.
They detected it by gravitational lensing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens. The dark matter is massive enough that it bends the light passing through it. So you can for example see that a star looks bent and not as spherical if it is behind a lot of dark matter. In the really blatant examples of gravitational lensing you get things like the Einstein Cross http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross where you can see multiple copies of the same object.
We can't. What we can observe is the gravitational pull of dark matter (which is the entire reason we know it is there). In this case, they can see where the dark matter is because of its gravitational effects.
No. Quantum computing works whether or not MWI is correct. And it doesn't have to do with quantum suicide. In an MWI situation, the vast majority of universes will get the same (correct) result. Essentially, the different universes cooperate with each other before the split off. This isn't quite correct (in MWI there are really discrete universes but rather part of a continuum, and there are a lot of other subtleties involved).
Entagnlement doesn't allow you to communicate information. The following analogy may help. Imagine two coins that whenever they are both flipped they end up either both heads or both tails, but you can't control which one comes up. So if you separate the two coins, you can use them to get a shared source of randomness which you can use for some useful things (like cryptography) but you can't use it to communicate.
Actually, this is a correct use. Some algorithms on quantum computers are exponentially faster than the best known classical algorithms. For example, estimating a Gauss sum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss_sum scales exponentially in time, but the most efficient quantum algorithms are bounded by a polynomial. So exponential speed up is a valid use of the term here.
It isn't clear at this point if the telomere hypothesis works at a cross-species level. In some species, telomere length is apparently not correlated with aging. In particular, there are some birds which have short telomeres but long lifespans. There's a very good book aimed at laypeople on the science of understanding of aging and the history of attempts- "The Youth Pill" by David Stipp. The only minor disclaimer is that the field is changing so fast that the book is already slightly out of date. But it contains a lot of interesting tidbits and a fair bit of neat history as well. I strongly recommend it.
Not all species which use sexual reproduction use an XX/XY system. For example, some species use an XX/XO system where the males have only one copy of the relevant sex chromosome. Other species are completely hermaphroditic. In general, there are a lot of different ways to do sexual reproduction without using an XX/XY system for gender.
Yeah, so that looks like I actually massively overestimated how much we're talking about then. The Tevatron cost around 50 million a year to run. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/tevatron-higgs-extension/. So in fact the cost is closer to that of half a fighter jet.
There's no definite statement from OPERA or CERN yet. Right now this is just a rumor. This also is definitely not the first suggested explanation. Let's wait and see.
Galactic collisions aren't that uncommon, and if there were any examples of anti-matter galaxies running into matter galaxies we'd be able to detect it. Moreover, if the exact same amount of anti-matter and matter was produced in the early universe, the most plausible models don't suggest big clumping of matter and anti-matter, they suggest that almost everything would just cancel out and return to energy. We don't see that.
Buckyballs have been discovered in nature before. When this first happened it was somewhat surprising because they seemed difficult to synthesize. But they've since been discovered in a variety of natural contexts. One really neat example is how they've been found in craters from meteorites, apparently produced during the formation of the craters as well as by forest fires in some limited circumstances- http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Feb01/permianImpact.html. One neat thing about this is that since buckyballs are large and hollow, they can when they form actually trap small atoms, generally atoms that are noble gasses (especially helium and argon). So, looking at what these buckyballs have can give us information about the atmospheres and conditions where the buckyballs formed. This is overall part of a large trend in the last twenty years where we've learned how many alternate carbon structures there are. Chemists used to think that while carbon had great versatility when combined with other elements (hence the large variety of chemicals used in life) that the chemistry of pure carbon was fairly prosaic. Since then, the discovery of buckyballs, nanotubes, and other structures have shown that carbon has complicated and interesting chemistry even in its pure form.
The work being done here is part of the general work done by the infrared Spitzer telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescopewhich has been as a whole really amazing for all sorts of astronomy. There are some really neat and entertaining videos explaining the work they've done, like this one with Felicia Day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjRJeaNtxN4. Unfortunately, Spitzer ran out of coolant in 2009, which substantially reduces which instruments can be used and how precise observations it can make. One major good thing about Spitzer is that it isn't in Eart orbit but is rather in orbit around the sun, so we don't need to worry about it becoming a space debris problem, or need to worry about bringing it down early before it dies (to prevent orbital bombardment), so we can keep getting good data from it until the very last instrument croaks.
The lack of funding for the Tevatron is deeply unfortunate. It almost certainly could still have been used for good research. Between this and the earlier cancellation of the SSC, the US seems to be doing its hardest to make sure that it isn't first in particle physics research. We're still doing a lot of good research at Fermilab. For example, MINOS is working on testing the recent FTL neutrino claim (and in fact, the OPERA group was paying careful attention to arrival times primarily because MINOS had previously discovered an anomaly which tentatively suggested that some neutrinos might be traveling faster than light). And the US is still doing very good physics in other areas, especially in solid state physics and plasma physics. But this a really bad trend. It fits into the same pattern as the recent budget cuts to Mars exploration, while we still have billions of dollars pumping into military boondoggles.
I'm happy that they can at least reuse the Tevatron, and kaon decay which is important for understanding CP violation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation which may have implications for why there's apparently so much more matter than antimatter in the universe. But it really shouldn't be coming to this. Physicists shouldn't be desperately scrambling for parts while the cost of what they need is less than a new fighter squadron.
I'm really saddened by this. I myself had a few tussles with Daniel before (I was very involved when he tried (unfortunately successfully)to get his Wikipedia entry deleted, and I'm a pretty biased source. During that process, he engaged in some pretty nasty behavior, including posting online the personal details of a various Wikipedians, including some who were minors. In the worst act, he gave the personal details of a female admin to Andrew Morrow, an individual who had made hobby of sexually harassing high level female Wikipedians. In that case, Morrow then, using the data from Brandt actually showed up to her place of work. Daniel expressed zero remorse over this and related issues. However, Scroogle was unambiguously a good thing that Daniel was doing. Daniel doesn't play well with others, and in the last year or so, his main feud has been with various elements of Encyclopedia Dramatica along with some of the nastier bits of Anonymous. It shouldn't be too surprising that they really are willing to respond in pretty nasty and destructive ways. The loss of Scroogle represents a real loss of a helpful service. But given that Daniel has now taken down all his domains including Wikipedia Watch which was primarily a list of personal details of various Wikipedians, I do have to see some minimal silver lining. But it isn't sufficient. The internet shouldn't be censored, whether by the government, or by people who have the capability to launch sustained Denial of Service Attacks. There's a real problem here wen someone as stubborn and experienced as Brandt can be brought down by this sort of thing. We worry a lot about censorship from governments through things like ACTA and SOPA, but this sort of thing is functionally as bad. Daniel Brandt's free speech has been essentially curtailed here. Much of that is speech I disagree with, but there's a relevant line attributed to Voltaire about that.
Sorry, there's an important terminological issue here. "Evolution" is a distinct biological theory. Stellar evolution isn't a theory- that's a process. Cosmic evolution isn't really a term used frequently by actual scientists- but more frequently a term used by laypeople. No one is probably too strong a language, because there are ignorant people who are probably confused and think that these all form one coherent theory. But they really are distinct issues, and even trying to connect them reveals deep confusion. The evidence set, and what is being explained by any of these things is completely distinct. To use what is grossly called "cosmic evolution" is our understanding of how largescale cosmology has changed over time. But even if all life on Earth had been made by aliens a few thousand years ago, it wouldn't alter any of the evidence for our understanding of the early universe, how galaxies formed, or any of that. Thinking- even talking about these, as a single set of related ideas, is grossly miseadling and almost universally done by creationists, not scientists, and certainly not subject matter experts. And in any event, none of the things you mentioned are even remotely close to what the OP was saying when they discussed "what happened before the beginning of time."
No one on your side of the point gets the argument wrong!
So, this is already unhelpful. It is tempting when one is thinking of things where one disagrees to think of sides, like a battle. This is really unhelpful for having serious discussion. It triggers all sorts of normal human cognitive biases and makes them all the worse. You can see it a bit above in your comment where you bring up social Darwinism which has nothing to do with the matter at hand, but is convenient for scoring marginally related rhetorical points. It isn't a good idea to treat discussions as games where you compete to score points.
Slashdot Mirror
This has the same central problem as before. D-Wave's computers haven't demonstrated that their commercial bits are entangled. There's no way to really distinguish what they are doing from essentially classical simulated annealing. And the set of problems which their machines can supposedly works on is an NP-hard problem minimization problem involving Ising spin where it isn't even clear that from a complexity standpoint that the the problem can be more quickly solved in general by a quantum system. (Essentially we don't know the relationship between BQP, the set of problems reliably solvable on a quantum computer in polynomial time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP and NP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP_(complexity). Recommended reading that is skeptical of D-Wave's claims is much of what Scott Aaronson has wrote about them. See for example http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=639, http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=198 although interestingly after he visited D-Wave's labs in person his views changed slightly and became slightly more sympathetic to them http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=954.
Neither the summary nor TFA said what this term meant. For those who don't know, essentially an angel investor is someone who invests their own money in a start-up or very young company in return for weak control of a part of the company.
What's wrong with top posting???
.
Er, there's a bit wrong with your statement here. Most obviously, the axis of evil speech occurred in January of 2002, not 2003. That helps your case a bit, because a lot of the more serious failures of cooperation by Iran and North Korea occurred towards the end of 2002.. However, in both cases, there were serious failures to cooperate with international inspections before the speech. The entire James Kelly visit to North Korea was over evidence of non-cooperation that had been building up since the late Clinton years. Similarly, in the case of Iran, Iran had likely begun building new nuclear sites since before the speech http://guests.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/517/exiles-and-iran-intel. You can make an argument that Iran and North Korea may have accelerated their programs due to the Axis of Evil speech, and that's a more nuanced and viable argument, but that's a much weaker statement.
Moving on from there, there are other factual problems with your remarks. You claimed that
Iran has never shown itself to be a particularly hostile or irrational nation in any military sense
Right, so funding Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad isn't at all evidence of a "particularly hostile" or "irrational" attitude. http://www.cfr.org/iran/state-sponsors-iran/p9362. Iran doesn't even share a direct border with Israel but they are one of the largest supporters of attacks on Israel. That doesn't exactly scream peaceful to me.
There are enough factual problems as pointed out above, that your four point proposal simply doesn't make sense.
Wikipedia doesn't want original research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OR and with good reason: the project doesn't want to be in the very difficult position of deciding which experts are actual experts and when experts disagree which one is worth listening to. We're willing to pay the (small) price of having some things need to wait until the experts have put their new research through peer reviewed journals or the like. And that's ok. I'm a math grad student who has done original research. In the process of that I've wrote some Wikipedia articles. At least one of those articles is one where my research improves on known bounds. I haven't added that in because Wikipedia isn't the place for that. When the research gets vetted and published in a peer reviewed journal, I will then go back and add it in.
A well-written Wikipedia article should include citations to the relevant statements. So, instead of citing Wikipedia, you can look up where the Wikipedia contributors got the information from and cite that. In some areas one doesn't even need to do that- the well written math articles generally contain proofs of the major claims in question, so you can verify the proofs yourself.
You can get snapshots still- Wikipedia articles have history and it wouldn't take that much effort to go make a bot that ran through a few articles and collected their versions at some time and date. Moreover, Britannica itself while continually updating will also be keeping their old versions (although I don't know if there's going to be any easy access to them). Some other similar projects are still in print, such as the World Book mentioned in the article (although that's really more for a young children). Still, this is the clear end of an era and makes one sad. It also makes me further worried about how much knowledge will get lost if there's some sort of large scale disaster. Paper can survive a lot more infrastructural damage than most forms of electronic storage can.
A few people have giving other Einstein quotes that don't go in the same direction. And they exist for a really simple reason: Einstein was a person, and like most people, his views changed over time. His early beliefs were close to deism, and over time he became more agnostic and in some of the comments made in his last few years (such as the quote given by langeljm below) closer to outright atheism (although his views were always complicated and changing enough that even this narrative is a simplification).
But none of this is really that relevant. There are clearly some very bright people who do very good science who are religious. Ken Miller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_R._Miller is a prominent biologist and religious Catholic. Similarly, Robert Aumann is an Orthodox Jew who won a Nobel Prize for his work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Aumann. While it is true that successful scientists are in general much less likely to be religious than the general population (see discussion here http://news.discovery.com/tech/are-scientists-atheists.html), some people are able to do very good work while still believing. The problem with ID proponents in a nutshell is that they can't keep straight which of of their beliefs fall into science and which fall into religion, and indeed by and large, they don't wan to.
But even this isn't that relevant to the matter at hand. In this particular case, the individual wasn't a scientist but a computer technician. And according to NASA he was fired for being disruptive, not for his actual beliefs. If it turns out that he was fired solely for his beliefs that will be a problem, but it is not likely. The ID people have a long history of claiming persecution where none exists. A very good example of this is how Expelled, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed Ben Stein's movie about ID being mistreated by the "scientific establishment", claimed that many people interviewed were fired or blacklisted for their pro-ID views, yet every case when actually examined turned out to be baseless. http://www.expelledexposed.com/ The same thing will probably happen here.
It is unlikely that the military will use non-lethal weapons on a large scale anytime soon. The reason is pretty simple: such weapons kill fewer people but often make for worse PR. A few years ago they were looking at lasers that could temporarily blind people although there would be permanent damage in many cases. That didn't get adopted because having dead people in the long-run is less PR damage than having horrifically crippled people.
You raise, a good point. The evidence suggests that to some extent criminals lack of education is caused by other variables that lead to both to criminality and make completing school more difficult. In particular, criminals have on average lower intelligence, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201006/why-criminals-are-less-intelligent-non-criminals poor impulse control,http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleID=101809 and extremely high self-esteem ,http://www.emotionalcompetency.com/papers/baumeistersmartboden1996%5B1%5D.pdf, all of which are associated with doing poorly in school.
However, there's also evidence that some amount of criminal behavior is due to lower education reducing work opportunities. The most successful programs at reducing recidivism are those which educate the convicts. https://www.stcloudstate.edu/continuingstudies/distance/documents/CollegeEducationandRecidivismEducatingCriminalsisMeritorious1997.pdf although the exact causes of this are unclear http://www.bop.gov/news/research_projects/published_reports/recidivism/orepredprg.pdf. So, while there is a correlation v. causation issue, it does look like education genuinely helps.
They detected it by gravitational lensing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens. The dark matter is massive enough that it bends the light passing through it. So you can for example see that a star looks bent and not as spherical if it is behind a lot of dark matter. In the really blatant examples of gravitational lensing you get things like the Einstein Cross http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross where you can see multiple copies of the same object.
We can't. What we can observe is the gravitational pull of dark matter (which is the entire reason we know it is there). In this case, they can see where the dark matter is because of its gravitational effects.
No. Quantum computing works whether or not MWI is correct. And it doesn't have to do with quantum suicide. In an MWI situation, the vast majority of universes will get the same (correct) result. Essentially, the different universes cooperate with each other before the split off. This isn't quite correct (in MWI there are really discrete universes but rather part of a continuum, and there are a lot of other subtleties involved).
Entagnlement doesn't allow you to communicate information. The following analogy may help. Imagine two coins that whenever they are both flipped they end up either both heads or both tails, but you can't control which one comes up. So if you separate the two coins, you can use them to get a shared source of randomness which you can use for some useful things (like cryptography) but you can't use it to communicate.
Actually, this is a correct use. Some algorithms on quantum computers are exponentially faster than the best known classical algorithms. For example, estimating a Gauss sum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss_sum scales exponentially in time, but the most efficient quantum algorithms are bounded by a polynomial. So exponential speed up is a valid use of the term here.
It isn't clear at this point if the telomere hypothesis works at a cross-species level. In some species, telomere length is apparently not correlated with aging. In particular, there are some birds which have short telomeres but long lifespans. There's a very good book aimed at laypeople on the science of understanding of aging and the history of attempts- "The Youth Pill" by David Stipp. The only minor disclaimer is that the field is changing so fast that the book is already slightly out of date. But it contains a lot of interesting tidbits and a fair bit of neat history as well. I strongly recommend it.
If I can recall correctly, brain scan does introduces radiation into the brain
Depends on the type. PET scans do have some radiation. The study in question - http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=668180&RelatedWidgetArticles=true used diffusion tensor imaging which is a variant of MRI, which uses strong magnetic fields and does't produce any radiation. The technique is essentially harmless.
Not all species which use sexual reproduction use an XX/XY system. For example, some species use an XX/XO system where the males have only one copy of the relevant sex chromosome. Other species are completely hermaphroditic. In general, there are a lot of different ways to do sexual reproduction without using an XX/XY system for gender.
Yeah, so that looks like I actually massively overestimated how much we're talking about then. The Tevatron cost around 50 million a year to run. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/tevatron-higgs-extension/. So in fact the cost is closer to that of half a fighter jet.
There's no definite statement from OPERA or CERN yet. Right now this is just a rumor. This also is definitely not the first suggested explanation. Let's wait and see.
Galactic collisions aren't that uncommon, and if there were any examples of anti-matter galaxies running into matter galaxies we'd be able to detect it. Moreover, if the exact same amount of anti-matter and matter was produced in the early universe, the most plausible models don't suggest big clumping of matter and anti-matter, they suggest that almost everything would just cancel out and return to energy. We don't see that.
Buckyballs have been discovered in nature before. When this first happened it was somewhat surprising because they seemed difficult to synthesize. But they've since been discovered in a variety of natural contexts. One really neat example is how they've been found in craters from meteorites, apparently produced during the formation of the craters as well as by forest fires in some limited circumstances- http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Feb01/permianImpact.html. One neat thing about this is that since buckyballs are large and hollow, they can when they form actually trap small atoms, generally atoms that are noble gasses (especially helium and argon). So, looking at what these buckyballs have can give us information about the atmospheres and conditions where the buckyballs formed. This is overall part of a large trend in the last twenty years where we've learned how many alternate carbon structures there are. Chemists used to think that while carbon had great versatility when combined with other elements (hence the large variety of chemicals used in life) that the chemistry of pure carbon was fairly prosaic. Since then, the discovery of buckyballs, nanotubes, and other structures have shown that carbon has complicated and interesting chemistry even in its pure form.
The work being done here is part of the general work done by the infrared Spitzer telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescopewhich has been as a whole really amazing for all sorts of astronomy. There are some really neat and entertaining videos explaining the work they've done, like this one with Felicia Day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjRJeaNtxN4. Unfortunately, Spitzer ran out of coolant in 2009, which substantially reduces which instruments can be used and how precise observations it can make. One major good thing about Spitzer is that it isn't in Eart orbit but is rather in orbit around the sun, so we don't need to worry about it becoming a space debris problem, or need to worry about bringing it down early before it dies (to prevent orbital bombardment), so we can keep getting good data from it until the very last instrument croaks.
The lack of funding for the Tevatron is deeply unfortunate. It almost certainly could still have been used for good research. Between this and the earlier cancellation of the SSC, the US seems to be doing its hardest to make sure that it isn't first in particle physics research. We're still doing a lot of good research at Fermilab. For example, MINOS is working on testing the recent FTL neutrino claim (and in fact, the OPERA group was paying careful attention to arrival times primarily because MINOS had previously discovered an anomaly which tentatively suggested that some neutrinos might be traveling faster than light). And the US is still doing very good physics in other areas, especially in solid state physics and plasma physics. But this a really bad trend. It fits into the same pattern as the recent budget cuts to Mars exploration, while we still have billions of dollars pumping into military boondoggles.
I'm happy that they can at least reuse the Tevatron, and kaon decay which is important for understanding CP violation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation which may have implications for why there's apparently so much more matter than antimatter in the universe. But it really shouldn't be coming to this. Physicists shouldn't be desperately scrambling for parts while the cost of what they need is less than a new fighter squadron.
I'm really saddened by this. I myself had a few tussles with Daniel before (I was very involved when he tried (unfortunately successfully)to get his Wikipedia entry deleted, and I'm a pretty biased source. During that process, he engaged in some pretty nasty behavior, including posting online the personal details of a various Wikipedians, including some who were minors. In the worst act, he gave the personal details of a female admin to Andrew Morrow, an individual who had made hobby of sexually harassing high level female Wikipedians. In that case, Morrow then, using the data from Brandt actually showed up to her place of work. Daniel expressed zero remorse over this and related issues. However, Scroogle was unambiguously a good thing that Daniel was doing. Daniel doesn't play well with others, and in the last year or so, his main feud has been with various elements of Encyclopedia Dramatica along with some of the nastier bits of Anonymous. It shouldn't be too surprising that they really are willing to respond in pretty nasty and destructive ways. The loss of Scroogle represents a real loss of a helpful service. But given that Daniel has now taken down all his domains including Wikipedia Watch which was primarily a list of personal details of various Wikipedians, I do have to see some minimal silver lining. But it isn't sufficient. The internet shouldn't be censored, whether by the government, or by people who have the capability to launch sustained Denial of Service Attacks. There's a real problem here wen someone as stubborn and experienced as Brandt can be brought down by this sort of thing. We worry a lot about censorship from governments through things like ACTA and SOPA, but this sort of thing is functionally as bad. Daniel Brandt's free speech has been essentially curtailed here. Much of that is speech I disagree with, but there's a relevant line attributed to Voltaire about that.
No one on your side of the point gets the argument wrong!
So, this is already unhelpful. It is tempting when one is thinking of things where one disagrees to think of sides, like a battle. This is really unhelpful for having serious discussion. It triggers all sorts of normal human cognitive biases and makes them all the worse. You can see it a bit above in your comment where you bring up social Darwinism which has nothing to do with the matter at hand, but is convenient for scoring marginally related rhetorical points. It isn't a good idea to treat discussions as games where you compete to score points.