Well, yes, but did all the 100 different library vendors you rely on do that? One hopes that libraries are free of leaks but reality is they aren't, and they often use DIFFERENT frameworks for smart pointers etc than the one you happen to be using, which can create its own headaches. At best its an entire extra category of stuff that has to be mastered.
I know a lot of people talk about all the 'random execution pauses' and such that a GC brings, but in my lengthy Java experience (10 years now) with high performing applications I've not found it to be a huge impediment. I think if you are really down to caring about sub-microsecond latancies and such then perhaps Java isn't the solution for that particular problem, or you need a hybrid solution or something (at which point you've probably lost a lot of the advantages of going with Java to start with, admittedly). There just really aren't that many such applications in the world. I run some pretty big market data processing applications and I don't see millisecond variances. Since most of the data being published is coming across at least leased lines from halfway around the world and often over the 'net sub-millisecond or even a couple milliseconds is not actually something anyone will care about. So the utter reliability and stability of the application (processing up into the 100's of thousands of packets per second with 100% reliability for weeks on end without human attention) is the paramount consideration. I have competitors that try to sell to my client base SPEED! They succeed for a while sometimes, but they always come back after the big ugly crash:)
Yeah, I'm a fan of QT, always have been. I haven't done a lot of C++ stuff in many years (it predates even QT1 if you can believe that). Our Java stuff in general doesn't have a desktop UI with a couple minor exceptions, so for my particular use case Java makes sense. I think in general C++ can often replace Java, but it CAN be a lot of work. Our apps are very long running stuff that churns through vast amounts of data constantly and requires high reliability. So if we do something in C++ then there's an added 50% "C++ Tax" just to find the 500,000 memory leaks and such. In GUI apps they don't matter much unless their really serious, but in my line of work if you loose 4 bytes per UDP datagram you'll be out of 32 gigs of RAM in a pretty short time! And each one of those suckers runs through probably 20-30k LOC worth of logic, so there's a lot of chances for fuck ups.
LOL, I don't know what sort of disasterously bad Java shop you work for... I've got a VERY large Java code base. We use a number of the tools you mention and they are quite powerful and useful. There's nothing in the 'steaming mass' category about it. Perhaps you need some new developers! OTOH The last big project I did with a dynamic language became hideously complicated with constant undocumented dependency issues and bizarre almost untraceable bugs that it was finally just literally delivered by the prime contractor as it was. Luckily the whole issue became largely moot as external forces cut the project back. It IS still in use, 7 years later, but if I were to do that sort of project today I wouldn't even consider a dynamic language. Not with the schema complexity and other aspects of it as it was. Java has a vastly more powerful infrastructure for dealing with complex data for one thing.
I've written a lot of code in the 'P languages' and I don't really believe that anymore. A 15k python app might be perfectly fine, but loose typing and the lack of a standard error handling strategy bite you in the end. I don't actually think that Perl is any weaker here than Python. You may be more familiar with one and comfortable with it, but I've written some pretty large programs in Perl. It HAS the tools, and I'm not the only one. Ruby is probably the cleanest of this sort of languages, but its still things like loose typing and the attendant inability to enforce calling semantics that hurts in all cases the most. When I write Java I know that if I call a method I have the right type of arguments at least, and that if somehow I manage to partially subvert that with reflection or whatnot that my error will be quickly outed by the run time. In dynamic languages you really don't know what the data is supposed to be until something goes wrong. Mostly though you lack the ability to have your IDE vet everything, you can't do static validation, etc. On big projects things like code validation, test coverage, etc are big deals, as is code GENERATION for that matter. All of these things are vastly better supported and easier to do in a statically typed language like Java.
Yeah, sorry, I maintain LARGE complex code bases. There's zero chance that's going to be easier using a loosely typed language with porous ideas of module boundaries, etc. I've been there, and a well-architected system built with a classic OO language like Java is just a lot more manageable. Also a lot of the advantages in brevity of things like Python or Perl evaporate when you try to apply some sanity to their use, but the disadvantages are still there to bite you. A 500 line Perl script is undoubtedly a LOT more compact and succinct than some java app built to do the same thing, which will be 2-3 thousand lines long probably. But when you start building well-designed class hierarchies in Perl? You're code will rapidly become just as large and verbose as its Java counterpart. Python and Ruby aren't better, in fact no scripting language will improve on this because all that stuff is NEEDED at scale. I'm an exceedingly accomplished Perl programmer and I can certainly code in other 'P languages' perfectly well, but they aren't the same thing. Each tool to its place.
The alternative view is that it is fast enough to do the things that need to be fast and cleaner than all those scripting languages.
Here's the thing. Java applications are VERY EFFICIENT. It may be difficult (not impossible but a pain in the ass) to write Java code which performs a specific task in a deterministic period of time. In other words it is not really a real-time sort of thing. OTOH if you want a perform a large number of operations with maximum overall throughput and a fairly stable task completion time then you cannot beat Java. You could do it in C/C++, but you'll spend a lot more time and effort to get the same results. 10 years I coded large high capacity high speed feed handlers in Java and people said I was crazy, but that application continues to exist and outperform anything that tries to rival it while being highly portable, scalable, and superbly reliable.
The thing with scripting languages is they are for small projects. Sure, its MUCH easier to whip out a perl script or something to do a small job. Its faster at run-time as well, but as soon as that task grows to somewhere in the 5-20k lines of code range you simply cannot do it using a scripting language anymore and stay sane. Inconsistencies creep in, problems pile up, the code starts to have to be used and understood by many people, and its just not possible to maintain the level of determinism required of a large code base. At this point you NEED something like Java.
And yes, C# is a perfectly nice language, but it is only really usable on Windows in any consistent fashion. I see no reason to be limited to that platform. Most of my customers are perfectly comfortable with *nix systems and for high reliability high capacity line-of-business applications no version of windows holds a candle to RHEL and isn't even on the same planet with Solaris.
Nor that they will turn out to be the same. To be perfectly frank we had better cover our bases. People are going to make millions of small decisions around the world, and a few big ones, that are going to result in the shape of tomorrow's power grid. The people implementing that grid are going to basically have a choice of making it work as people are using it, not as they dream it should be. Making it as 'smart' as possible seems like win/win kind of situation. Whether that will end up with a no-storage all-renewable grid or not is hard to say. Probably not, but it might be a lot closer than one imagines. It might turn out to be something else entirely too!
I think the problem is nobody can really say exactly what the energy situation in 2055 is going to be. We have some idea, but there will be substantial differences. I'm not ignorant of the physics or the technology, etc. Its just that different economics will be at play then as opposed to now. Building efficiency for instance is rising rapidly, which has a big impact on the timing and nature of peak demand. Its quite likely people will use energy quite a bit more efficiently and how about they're more concerned about reliable supply and thus at-the-source generation and storage? Imagine my computing needs of 2040. What I can do with a couple watt-hours is going to be monstrous, but I want to never be in the dark, so I want local storage, and then why not have local distributed generation as well? I'm not saying how it WILL play out, but you have to watch basing your projections on assumptions that themselves will be the first victims of change.
No, you're wrong, it will be a once in some significant number of years event, no more common than major power outages are now. This would be true if the entire East Coast was powered virtually entirely by wind. You need to do some actual reading of plans and studies on the subject and look at what is happening in other areas. Note too that what I'm mentioning is ONLY OFFSHORE WIND, nothing else (with about 10% capacity gas backup, no more than is already provided for what you call 'baseload'). Surely this is not the ACTUAL configuration which would exist. There will be for a long time now other forms of power generation, and things like hydro (very good at storage and quick dispatch, and can run at 100% capacity when required for a time). The REAL GRID of the mid-21st Century is very different from the grid of the mid-20th Century upon which you build your prognostications.
Hey, you can have 3 different natural disasters and a transmission line failure too. There's only a finite reliability to the whole grid. Nothing has to be 100%. You need to cover the "once every 20 years there's a modest shortfall and we can predict it 2-3 days out" which we are at now.
Its not that we WANT TO or SHOULD create this sort of energy distribution system, but just that we COULD in theory do so. It seems to me that such a system would be very much always on the hairy edge of crashing just by its very nature, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility in the future at some point, and it might make economic sense too, who knows? I really doubt we'll ever even approach this in any of our lifetimes though.
That may be true of the UK, but it is most certainly NOT true of North America. Even just the East Coast, with reasonably affordable interconnects, would have 24/7/365 offshore wind if we built in the right places. Most indications are that it would be pretty economical in the longrun. Many other areas of world are perhaps not quite so well-endowed with reliable winds, but areas that span more than say 1500km along a north-south coastline generally COULD be self-sufficient.
when you are dealing with 'odds' on the order of 10^100th power against something there's no real point in calling it odds anymore. Nothing is 'certain' if you can't call that sort of thing certain. I'm simply trying to demonstrate that yes indeed I can argue the argument from your perspective as well. It really doesn't matter. I can say "we know for certain that Conservation of Momentum is never violated, period" or I can say "the vast number of observations which ONLY fit a mathematical model that included inviolable Conservation of Momentum makes the probability of its violation too low to worry about", its the same thing when the odds are as remote as I've already stated. So I don't find there to be any contradictions in my position, but I probably didn't make that clear.
Is there really scientific value in finding the flaw in the experiment? Lots of people have already suggested very mundane ways the experiment appears ON THE FACE OF IT to be flawed. Ways that would involve nothing new at all, just garden variety scientific crappy experiment design coupled with a fondness for ridiculous projects just because they offer some tantalizing revolution. Its POSSIBLE when observing anything to stumble upon some sort of useful knowledge. This is however just as likely if you were say working on Solar Sails, which are a technology that needs a LOT of basic work still but which we know operate according to established principles. I don't see anything to indicate to me that SS experiments wouldn't be a better use of NASA's limited funds. The WORST CASE is they add to our ability to build a solar sail, best case they might lead to some sort of interesting new science.
Again, I appreciate the scientific endeavor and the value of turning over many different stones, but its best to turn over stones in the most fertile areas. Since we can't do every possible experiment we can think of we should do GOOD experiments, not bad ones.
The Casimir Effect doesn't conflict with any of existing physics. Its a consequence of renormalization, a process that was developed in the 1960's by Feynman et al. Its quite interesting that the 'book keeping' has a real physical effect. It tells us that the theory really is not just an arbitrary description, but that there's some deeper correspondence between theory and reality. The point is The Casimir Effect doesn't 'point to something new', it is just telling us that yes indeed the vacuum exists. That in no way implies that it can be used to subvert basic laws of physics. Casimir doesn't imply anything about momentum at all.
There's nothing 'improbable to ridiculous' about dark energy and dark matter. They are perfectly reasonable and don't actually change our overall view of the basic story of the Universe at all. They don't undermine the big bang, they explain some observations about what happens later and some of the characteristics of the CMB, that's all. Now, there's clearly going to be new/extended theories required to explain dark matter. Dark Energy, it looks like its just a 'cosmological constant', which begs some questions about what exactly is the cosmos and how does it exist, but its not clear that we need to explain the value of this number to understand the physics of THIS universe. Nor is there any implication that this means there's some physics that would allow an ordinary asymmetrical oscillator to generate reactionless thrust. I don't believe that DM/DE mean there are 'gaping holes', just that there is physics that we haven't codified yet and it will be compatible with the existing physics just like GR is compatible with classical mechanics. Anything that was impossible in CM is also impossible in GR.
I'm sure there ARE unexpected phenomena, but they won't cause massive flaming violations of basic conservation laws with trivial ease. If they DO allow for such violations they will be at event horizons or the beginning of time, etc. They won't be significant effects that show up in a simple tuned driver that doesn't happen to be symmetrical. I just don't find that to be plausible at all. Unexpected phenomena and new theories WILL LEAVE CONSERVATION OF MOMENTUM INTACT. I'm sure of that to a very high degree of certainty. Just like an 18th Century cartographer was sure there was no land bridge from Africa to South America even those his map of the interior of Africa was a big blank with a few hazy rumors drawn on it. Its just that kind of a thing.
One: I would be *very* surprised if this thruster truly violated conservation of momentum, as you say that's a fairly foundational thing. I would be much less surprised however if it only *appeared* to violate conservation of momentum by pushing against quantum vacuum, dark matter, the fabric of space-time, or something else entirely whose nature and interaction with "normal" matter is poorly understood or completely unexpected. And I would fully expect such a (working) device to be derided by the establishment as impossible until it was thoroughly proven to actually generate anomalous thrust, at which point many, many smart people would start trying to figure out WTF was really going on.
Yeah, I'm exceedingly dubious. If any of these kinds of mechanisms was so easily accessed then its very VERY unlikely we haven't seen it before. Not only that but this sort of interaction would almost surely be only one of a CLASS of interactions of various sorts. Also I don't think you can cheat by pushing against 'vacuum energy' (who's existence and nature are highly dubious) or other non-material things. I'm not really facile enough with GR, and I'm not sure ANYONE is to be frank, to say exactly what might or might not be allowed absolutely in theory, but it seems like a cheat to me, and nature isn't very fond of cheats. I think momentum will be conserved in its classical sense and I don't think any other sort of conservation suffices.
Two: I think you're not giving enough credit to past researchers. Until somebody noticed the anomalous exposure of some film that had been left in the same drawer as a mineral sample, nobody had any reason to expect the existence of radioactive decay - it was in fact impossible according to the then-current theories. That discovery shattered atomic theory (atom literally means indivisible) and opened whole new fields of science. Imagine the derision they would have faced if instead of only requiring some film and a mineral sample, duplicating the key phenomena required tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and testing apparatus. Nobody would have wasted their resources trying to duplicate such an obviously impossible phenomena, and nuclear physics might never have been born.
But you have to understand how far less developed high energy physics was at that time. VERY many experiments had never been done, so entire fields of possible phenomena were unknown. They couldn't 'balance the books' in even the simplest way, so they really didn't understand what they were looking at. Today we DO balance the books. We can analyze atomic and subatomic interactions and tell exactly what energy is going in and out, and in what forms. Its not an analogous situation.
>Its not circular reasoning to expect some phenomena to not exist. Certainly not. It is however circular reasoning to extend that reasoning to conclude that NO unknown phenomena exist. And unknown phenomena will, by definition, appear to break the well-understood laws of physics, at least until the principles behind them are understood. And that does occasionally involve completely uprooting the existing laws, such as relativity did to Newtonian mechanics, which are now only kept around as an approximation that is accurate enough for most purposes - incidentally also a great example of simple, elegant physics being replaced by something far more complex and counter-intuitive. The universe is after all under absolutely no obligation to make sense to us, making sense of things is what *we* strive to do, the universe only offers an occasional hint of untapped mysteries if we poke it just right.
Well, when I claim that no unknown phenomena exist, then your argument is relevant, but since I haven't its really not...
I disagree that unknown phenomena will appear to break anything. Does the Higg's appear to break anything? No, it doesn't. Neither does Dark Matter, etc etc etc. They aren't entirely un
I don't really disagree with you. I think QM isn't PARTICULARLY fraught with constants which it doesn't explain though. Classical Newtonian mechanics has plenty of them as well. There are constants galore in classical electrodynamics, etc. I share everyone's belief that there are some sort of 'more fundamental' physics which 'clean up' these things, but we cannot be sure. No absolute rule says that there are no arbitrary constants, and if we reduce the number to only 1 then in effect we still haven't explained ANYTHING because our theory will base EVERYTHING else on that one. So you have to ask what really is the value of a theory? Its only use is practical, as a predictor of things. In that sense what we have is quite good, though not perfect. The diameters of protons are still being argued about, as are a number of other fairly basic things. Our value for G is still not as good as we'd like, etc.
The thing about all these 'theories of everything' is they EXTEND what we already know. None of them proposes things like violations of Conservation of Momentum. If they do allow for us to observe that happening then they've also got some other way to extend these conservation laws that we should be able to test. Honestly, while I can't possibly know the potential ramifications of all the various permutations of TOEs that are out there, I don't believe any of the ones that are considered likely or 'on the right path' would allow for the type of violation that a reactionless drive would require. In any case I'd just want to see a much more convincing mathematical basis that touched on how one of these theories would allow for reactionless thrust before I thought it was at all worth looking into.
Its not circular reasoning to expect some phenomena to not exist. MANY, in fact the vast majority, of possible phenomena do not exist. The ones that DO exist have UNIVERSALLY proven to exhibit certain characteristics. Universally, that's IN ALL CASES. Its not 'circular reasoning' to say that because some hypothesized phenomenon doesn't exhibit those characteristics it doesn't exist. That's just using your plain old common sense and basic deductive reasoning. Science has to operate on a basis of deduction and inference because otherwise you can't tell what to believe or not believe and you would literally have to go around testing every ridiculous idea. What if I send NASA a paper that shows how pink unicorns can carry your spaceship to Atlantis without using any power at all? Do they have to build a unicorn harness to decide this is ridiculous? Of course not. This is in the same category, its ridiculous and there's no reason to expect it would work thus no reason to test it. Its really that simple. You can wave your hands all you want about TOEs and maybe we don't know everything but we don't have to know everything to use fekking common sense.
Well, I have nothing to say about it if you want to do some research its your money, do what you want. Its a free country. For myself I'd vote not to have NASA funds spent on such things when there are good solid scientifically defensible lines of research just begging to have some funds all over the place. Plasma sailing, solar sails, better ion drives, magnetohydrodynamic (VASIMIR, etc) drivers, and 100 other things. Heck, work on a warp drive if you must do something pie-in-the-sky, at least its not outright impossible on the face of it. There's just a lot of stuff to work on and little money, so I don't want to spend PUBLIC money on ridiculously unlikely things.
Yes, but I think a lot of you fail to comprehend the degree of that 'more likely'. Its something like 10^100th power to one odds against all of physics being wrong. I don't have to check that out, I can dismiss it. Reality agrees with me, not with the reactionless thruster people. They need to go back to school and learn to use Maxwell's equations right.
Yeah, I know, I get your drift. We just have to agree to disagree. I think if you got a bit more into the guts of both classical and modern physics you'd start to agree with me. QM for instance is NOT a 'monstrosity', its a beautifully elegant mathematical construct. And it fits TOO WELL, nothing is going to displace it. What we need is research on how to sort through the various proposals to extend QM and GR, not ignorant snipe hunts for non-existent phenomena. Learn some of the math, learn more about how these theories work, you'll come to understand how powerful and generalized they really are, and how simple they are in essence.
There's no 'probably' about it though in this specific case. You have to learn enough about physics in particular to understand what is and isn't possible. Now, some of these miraculous energy machines and whatnot, some of them actually had to be checked out. Some of them maybe even still could use a bit more checking out. There are a LOT of possible outcomes lurking out there at the margins of different complex physical regimes. Its probably true that we will find some things, but reactionless drives aren't one of them. Again, you have to be able to pick the possible from the impossible.
Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree, but of course everyone who called it narrow minded to say it was a waste of time will quickly forget they said that and never understand how silly it was. Meanwhile reality will pull a wet blanket over the whole sordid affair, hopefully before another dime is wasted on the whole thing. So it always goes, and such is the life of the true skeptic, you're rarely appreciated for being right. In fact nobody has ever come to me and said "yup you were right about that" even though I have yet to ever be wrong about one of these things.
More testing is a waste of good money after bad. There's no effect. If it was this easy to grab hold of the 'vacuum energy' it would be routine. And needing a tuned resonance is no big deal, that happens naturally all the time. Just blow on a guitar string and here it sound.
Yeah, I'm not worried in this case. The truth is that history doesn't even remember all the quacks that were just so far wrong they shouldn't even have gotten an ear, they are legion. The cases where people were outsiders but were RIGHT? They're a very select and exceedingly rare breed, its happened maybe half a dozen times in the whole history of modern science. Its not THAT uncommon in engineering, where people say "oh its impossible to build a flujiwigger" and some guy does exactly that. But he's not working against the known laws of physics, just against someone's overly unimaginative or wrong-headed impression of how they should work. My father held patents for a number of proportional flow valve designs that people said were 'impossible' to build. They were HARD and required inventing some machining techniques that never existed before, but they were quite possible. Reactionless drives just aren't in that category of the complexities of application of known principles aren't clear. Its not hard to see why a lot of people that don't know basic physics of EM can't tell the difference, but NASA scientists should know better.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it takes a lot of work to maintain those, though I admit it was kind of fun writing them... lol.
Well, yes, but did all the 100 different library vendors you rely on do that? One hopes that libraries are free of leaks but reality is they aren't, and they often use DIFFERENT frameworks for smart pointers etc than the one you happen to be using, which can create its own headaches. At best its an entire extra category of stuff that has to be mastered.
I know a lot of people talk about all the 'random execution pauses' and such that a GC brings, but in my lengthy Java experience (10 years now) with high performing applications I've not found it to be a huge impediment. I think if you are really down to caring about sub-microsecond latancies and such then perhaps Java isn't the solution for that particular problem, or you need a hybrid solution or something (at which point you've probably lost a lot of the advantages of going with Java to start with, admittedly). There just really aren't that many such applications in the world. I run some pretty big market data processing applications and I don't see millisecond variances. Since most of the data being published is coming across at least leased lines from halfway around the world and often over the 'net sub-millisecond or even a couple milliseconds is not actually something anyone will care about. So the utter reliability and stability of the application (processing up into the 100's of thousands of packets per second with 100% reliability for weeks on end without human attention) is the paramount consideration. I have competitors that try to sell to my client base SPEED! They succeed for a while sometimes, but they always come back after the big ugly crash :)
Yeah, I'm a fan of QT, always have been. I haven't done a lot of C++ stuff in many years (it predates even QT1 if you can believe that). Our Java stuff in general doesn't have a desktop UI with a couple minor exceptions, so for my particular use case Java makes sense. I think in general C++ can often replace Java, but it CAN be a lot of work. Our apps are very long running stuff that churns through vast amounts of data constantly and requires high reliability. So if we do something in C++ then there's an added 50% "C++ Tax" just to find the 500,000 memory leaks and such. In GUI apps they don't matter much unless their really serious, but in my line of work if you loose 4 bytes per UDP datagram you'll be out of 32 gigs of RAM in a pretty short time! And each one of those suckers runs through probably 20-30k LOC worth of logic, so there's a lot of chances for fuck ups.
LOL, I don't know what sort of disasterously bad Java shop you work for... I've got a VERY large Java code base. We use a number of the tools you mention and they are quite powerful and useful. There's nothing in the 'steaming mass' category about it. Perhaps you need some new developers! OTOH The last big project I did with a dynamic language became hideously complicated with constant undocumented dependency issues and bizarre almost untraceable bugs that it was finally just literally delivered by the prime contractor as it was. Luckily the whole issue became largely moot as external forces cut the project back. It IS still in use, 7 years later, but if I were to do that sort of project today I wouldn't even consider a dynamic language. Not with the schema complexity and other aspects of it as it was. Java has a vastly more powerful infrastructure for dealing with complex data for one thing.
I've written a lot of code in the 'P languages' and I don't really believe that anymore. A 15k python app might be perfectly fine, but loose typing and the lack of a standard error handling strategy bite you in the end. I don't actually think that Perl is any weaker here than Python. You may be more familiar with one and comfortable with it, but I've written some pretty large programs in Perl. It HAS the tools, and I'm not the only one. Ruby is probably the cleanest of this sort of languages, but its still things like loose typing and the attendant inability to enforce calling semantics that hurts in all cases the most. When I write Java I know that if I call a method I have the right type of arguments at least, and that if somehow I manage to partially subvert that with reflection or whatnot that my error will be quickly outed by the run time. In dynamic languages you really don't know what the data is supposed to be until something goes wrong. Mostly though you lack the ability to have your IDE vet everything, you can't do static validation, etc. On big projects things like code validation, test coverage, etc are big deals, as is code GENERATION for that matter. All of these things are vastly better supported and easier to do in a statically typed language like Java.
Yeah, sorry, I maintain LARGE complex code bases. There's zero chance that's going to be easier using a loosely typed language with porous ideas of module boundaries, etc. I've been there, and a well-architected system built with a classic OO language like Java is just a lot more manageable. Also a lot of the advantages in brevity of things like Python or Perl evaporate when you try to apply some sanity to their use, but the disadvantages are still there to bite you. A 500 line Perl script is undoubtedly a LOT more compact and succinct than some java app built to do the same thing, which will be 2-3 thousand lines long probably. But when you start building well-designed class hierarchies in Perl? You're code will rapidly become just as large and verbose as its Java counterpart. Python and Ruby aren't better, in fact no scripting language will improve on this because all that stuff is NEEDED at scale. I'm an exceedingly accomplished Perl programmer and I can certainly code in other 'P languages' perfectly well, but they aren't the same thing. Each tool to its place.
The alternative view is that it is fast enough to do the things that need to be fast and cleaner than all those scripting languages.
Here's the thing. Java applications are VERY EFFICIENT. It may be difficult (not impossible but a pain in the ass) to write Java code which performs a specific task in a deterministic period of time. In other words it is not really a real-time sort of thing. OTOH if you want a perform a large number of operations with maximum overall throughput and a fairly stable task completion time then you cannot beat Java. You could do it in C/C++, but you'll spend a lot more time and effort to get the same results. 10 years I coded large high capacity high speed feed handlers in Java and people said I was crazy, but that application continues to exist and outperform anything that tries to rival it while being highly portable, scalable, and superbly reliable.
The thing with scripting languages is they are for small projects. Sure, its MUCH easier to whip out a perl script or something to do a small job. Its faster at run-time as well, but as soon as that task grows to somewhere in the 5-20k lines of code range you simply cannot do it using a scripting language anymore and stay sane. Inconsistencies creep in, problems pile up, the code starts to have to be used and understood by many people, and its just not possible to maintain the level of determinism required of a large code base. At this point you NEED something like Java.
And yes, C# is a perfectly nice language, but it is only really usable on Windows in any consistent fashion. I see no reason to be limited to that platform. Most of my customers are perfectly comfortable with *nix systems and for high reliability high capacity line-of-business applications no version of windows holds a candle to RHEL and isn't even on the same planet with Solaris.
Nor that they will turn out to be the same. To be perfectly frank we had better cover our bases. People are going to make millions of small decisions around the world, and a few big ones, that are going to result in the shape of tomorrow's power grid. The people implementing that grid are going to basically have a choice of making it work as people are using it, not as they dream it should be. Making it as 'smart' as possible seems like win/win kind of situation. Whether that will end up with a no-storage all-renewable grid or not is hard to say. Probably not, but it might be a lot closer than one imagines. It might turn out to be something else entirely too!
I think the problem is nobody can really say exactly what the energy situation in 2055 is going to be. We have some idea, but there will be substantial differences. I'm not ignorant of the physics or the technology, etc. Its just that different economics will be at play then as opposed to now. Building efficiency for instance is rising rapidly, which has a big impact on the timing and nature of peak demand. Its quite likely people will use energy quite a bit more efficiently and how about they're more concerned about reliable supply and thus at-the-source generation and storage? Imagine my computing needs of 2040. What I can do with a couple watt-hours is going to be monstrous, but I want to never be in the dark, so I want local storage, and then why not have local distributed generation as well? I'm not saying how it WILL play out, but you have to watch basing your projections on assumptions that themselves will be the first victims of change.
No, you're wrong, it will be a once in some significant number of years event, no more common than major power outages are now. This would be true if the entire East Coast was powered virtually entirely by wind. You need to do some actual reading of plans and studies on the subject and look at what is happening in other areas. Note too that what I'm mentioning is ONLY OFFSHORE WIND, nothing else (with about 10% capacity gas backup, no more than is already provided for what you call 'baseload'). Surely this is not the ACTUAL configuration which would exist. There will be for a long time now other forms of power generation, and things like hydro (very good at storage and quick dispatch, and can run at 100% capacity when required for a time). The REAL GRID of the mid-21st Century is very different from the grid of the mid-20th Century upon which you build your prognostications.
Hey, you can have 3 different natural disasters and a transmission line failure too. There's only a finite reliability to the whole grid. Nothing has to be 100%. You need to cover the "once every 20 years there's a modest shortfall and we can predict it 2-3 days out" which we are at now.
Look at the studies, its just not true. You won't have hurricane force winds both off the coast of MASS and SC at the same time, ever.
Its not that we WANT TO or SHOULD create this sort of energy distribution system, but just that we COULD in theory do so. It seems to me that such a system would be very much always on the hairy edge of crashing just by its very nature, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility in the future at some point, and it might make economic sense too, who knows? I really doubt we'll ever even approach this in any of our lifetimes though.
That may be true of the UK, but it is most certainly NOT true of North America. Even just the East Coast, with reasonably affordable interconnects, would have 24/7/365 offshore wind if we built in the right places. Most indications are that it would be pretty economical in the longrun. Many other areas of world are perhaps not quite so well-endowed with reliable winds, but areas that span more than say 1500km along a north-south coastline generally COULD be self-sufficient.
when you are dealing with 'odds' on the order of 10^100th power against something there's no real point in calling it odds anymore. Nothing is 'certain' if you can't call that sort of thing certain. I'm simply trying to demonstrate that yes indeed I can argue the argument from your perspective as well. It really doesn't matter. I can say "we know for certain that Conservation of Momentum is never violated, period" or I can say "the vast number of observations which ONLY fit a mathematical model that included inviolable Conservation of Momentum makes the probability of its violation too low to worry about", its the same thing when the odds are as remote as I've already stated. So I don't find there to be any contradictions in my position, but I probably didn't make that clear.
Is there really scientific value in finding the flaw in the experiment? Lots of people have already suggested very mundane ways the experiment appears ON THE FACE OF IT to be flawed. Ways that would involve nothing new at all, just garden variety scientific crappy experiment design coupled with a fondness for ridiculous projects just because they offer some tantalizing revolution. Its POSSIBLE when observing anything to stumble upon some sort of useful knowledge. This is however just as likely if you were say working on Solar Sails, which are a technology that needs a LOT of basic work still but which we know operate according to established principles. I don't see anything to indicate to me that SS experiments wouldn't be a better use of NASA's limited funds. The WORST CASE is they add to our ability to build a solar sail, best case they might lead to some sort of interesting new science.
Again, I appreciate the scientific endeavor and the value of turning over many different stones, but its best to turn over stones in the most fertile areas. Since we can't do every possible experiment we can think of we should do GOOD experiments, not bad ones.
Like I said, exceedingly unlikely, very very exceedingly unlikely. Spend the money on better bets.
The Casimir Effect doesn't conflict with any of existing physics. Its a consequence of renormalization, a process that was developed in the 1960's by Feynman et al. Its quite interesting that the 'book keeping' has a real physical effect. It tells us that the theory really is not just an arbitrary description, but that there's some deeper correspondence between theory and reality. The point is The Casimir Effect doesn't 'point to something new', it is just telling us that yes indeed the vacuum exists. That in no way implies that it can be used to subvert basic laws of physics. Casimir doesn't imply anything about momentum at all.
There's nothing 'improbable to ridiculous' about dark energy and dark matter. They are perfectly reasonable and don't actually change our overall view of the basic story of the Universe at all. They don't undermine the big bang, they explain some observations about what happens later and some of the characteristics of the CMB, that's all. Now, there's clearly going to be new/extended theories required to explain dark matter. Dark Energy, it looks like its just a 'cosmological constant', which begs some questions about what exactly is the cosmos and how does it exist, but its not clear that we need to explain the value of this number to understand the physics of THIS universe. Nor is there any implication that this means there's some physics that would allow an ordinary asymmetrical oscillator to generate reactionless thrust. I don't believe that DM/DE mean there are 'gaping holes', just that there is physics that we haven't codified yet and it will be compatible with the existing physics just like GR is compatible with classical mechanics. Anything that was impossible in CM is also impossible in GR.
I'm sure there ARE unexpected phenomena, but they won't cause massive flaming violations of basic conservation laws with trivial ease. If they DO allow for such violations they will be at event horizons or the beginning of time, etc. They won't be significant effects that show up in a simple tuned driver that doesn't happen to be symmetrical. I just don't find that to be plausible at all. Unexpected phenomena and new theories WILL LEAVE CONSERVATION OF MOMENTUM INTACT. I'm sure of that to a very high degree of certainty. Just like an 18th Century cartographer was sure there was no land bridge from Africa to South America even those his map of the interior of Africa was a big blank with a few hazy rumors drawn on it. Its just that kind of a thing.
Okay, two things:
One: I would be *very* surprised if this thruster truly violated conservation of momentum, as you say that's a fairly foundational thing. I would be much less surprised however if it only *appeared* to violate conservation of momentum by pushing against quantum vacuum, dark matter, the fabric of space-time, or something else entirely whose nature and interaction with "normal" matter is poorly understood or completely unexpected. And I would fully expect such a (working) device to be derided by the establishment as impossible until it was thoroughly proven to actually generate anomalous thrust, at which point many, many smart people would start trying to figure out WTF was really going on.
Yeah, I'm exceedingly dubious. If any of these kinds of mechanisms was so easily accessed then its very VERY unlikely we haven't seen it before. Not only that but this sort of interaction would almost surely be only one of a CLASS of interactions of various sorts. Also I don't think you can cheat by pushing against 'vacuum energy' (who's existence and nature are highly dubious) or other non-material things. I'm not really facile enough with GR, and I'm not sure ANYONE is to be frank, to say exactly what might or might not be allowed absolutely in theory, but it seems like a cheat to me, and nature isn't very fond of cheats. I think momentum will be conserved in its classical sense and I don't think any other sort of conservation suffices.
Two: I think you're not giving enough credit to past researchers. Until somebody noticed the anomalous exposure of some film that had been left in the same drawer as a mineral sample, nobody had any reason to expect the existence of radioactive decay - it was in fact impossible according to the then-current theories. That discovery shattered atomic theory (atom literally means indivisible) and opened whole new fields of science. Imagine the derision they would have faced if instead of only requiring some film and a mineral sample, duplicating the key phenomena required tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and testing apparatus. Nobody would have wasted their resources trying to duplicate such an obviously impossible phenomena, and nuclear physics might never have been born.
But you have to understand how far less developed high energy physics was at that time. VERY many experiments had never been done, so entire fields of possible phenomena were unknown. They couldn't 'balance the books' in even the simplest way, so they really didn't understand what they were looking at. Today we DO balance the books. We can analyze atomic and subatomic interactions and tell exactly what energy is going in and out, and in what forms. Its not an analogous situation.
>Its not circular reasoning to expect some phenomena to not exist.
Certainly not. It is however circular reasoning to extend that reasoning to conclude that NO unknown phenomena exist. And unknown phenomena will, by definition, appear to break the well-understood laws of physics, at least until the principles behind them are understood. And that does occasionally involve completely uprooting the existing laws, such as relativity did to Newtonian mechanics, which are now only kept around as an approximation that is accurate enough for most purposes - incidentally also a great example of simple, elegant physics being replaced by something far more complex and counter-intuitive. The universe is after all under absolutely no obligation to make sense to us, making sense of things is what *we* strive to do, the universe only offers an occasional hint of untapped mysteries if we poke it just right.
Well, when I claim that no unknown phenomena exist, then your argument is relevant, but since I haven't its really not...
I disagree that unknown phenomena will appear to break anything. Does the Higg's appear to break anything? No, it doesn't. Neither does Dark Matter, etc etc etc. They aren't entirely un
I don't really disagree with you. I think QM isn't PARTICULARLY fraught with constants which it doesn't explain though. Classical Newtonian mechanics has plenty of them as well. There are constants galore in classical electrodynamics, etc. I share everyone's belief that there are some sort of 'more fundamental' physics which 'clean up' these things, but we cannot be sure. No absolute rule says that there are no arbitrary constants, and if we reduce the number to only 1 then in effect we still haven't explained ANYTHING because our theory will base EVERYTHING else on that one. So you have to ask what really is the value of a theory? Its only use is practical, as a predictor of things. In that sense what we have is quite good, though not perfect. The diameters of protons are still being argued about, as are a number of other fairly basic things. Our value for G is still not as good as we'd like, etc.
The thing about all these 'theories of everything' is they EXTEND what we already know. None of them proposes things like violations of Conservation of Momentum. If they do allow for us to observe that happening then they've also got some other way to extend these conservation laws that we should be able to test. Honestly, while I can't possibly know the potential ramifications of all the various permutations of TOEs that are out there, I don't believe any of the ones that are considered likely or 'on the right path' would allow for the type of violation that a reactionless drive would require. In any case I'd just want to see a much more convincing mathematical basis that touched on how one of these theories would allow for reactionless thrust before I thought it was at all worth looking into.
Its not circular reasoning to expect some phenomena to not exist. MANY, in fact the vast majority, of possible phenomena do not exist. The ones that DO exist have UNIVERSALLY proven to exhibit certain characteristics. Universally, that's IN ALL CASES. Its not 'circular reasoning' to say that because some hypothesized phenomenon doesn't exhibit those characteristics it doesn't exist. That's just using your plain old common sense and basic deductive reasoning. Science has to operate on a basis of deduction and inference because otherwise you can't tell what to believe or not believe and you would literally have to go around testing every ridiculous idea. What if I send NASA a paper that shows how pink unicorns can carry your spaceship to Atlantis without using any power at all? Do they have to build a unicorn harness to decide this is ridiculous? Of course not. This is in the same category, its ridiculous and there's no reason to expect it would work thus no reason to test it. Its really that simple. You can wave your hands all you want about TOEs and maybe we don't know everything but we don't have to know everything to use fekking common sense.
Well, I have nothing to say about it if you want to do some research its your money, do what you want. Its a free country. For myself I'd vote not to have NASA funds spent on such things when there are good solid scientifically defensible lines of research just begging to have some funds all over the place. Plasma sailing, solar sails, better ion drives, magnetohydrodynamic (VASIMIR, etc) drivers, and 100 other things. Heck, work on a warp drive if you must do something pie-in-the-sky, at least its not outright impossible on the face of it. There's just a lot of stuff to work on and little money, so I don't want to spend PUBLIC money on ridiculously unlikely things.
Yes, but I think a lot of you fail to comprehend the degree of that 'more likely'. Its something like 10^100th power to one odds against all of physics being wrong. I don't have to check that out, I can dismiss it. Reality agrees with me, not with the reactionless thruster people. They need to go back to school and learn to use Maxwell's equations right.
Yeah, I know, I get your drift. We just have to agree to disagree. I think if you got a bit more into the guts of both classical and modern physics you'd start to agree with me. QM for instance is NOT a 'monstrosity', its a beautifully elegant mathematical construct. And it fits TOO WELL, nothing is going to displace it. What we need is research on how to sort through the various proposals to extend QM and GR, not ignorant snipe hunts for non-existent phenomena. Learn some of the math, learn more about how these theories work, you'll come to understand how powerful and generalized they really are, and how simple they are in essence.
There's no 'probably' about it though in this specific case. You have to learn enough about physics in particular to understand what is and isn't possible. Now, some of these miraculous energy machines and whatnot, some of them actually had to be checked out. Some of them maybe even still could use a bit more checking out. There are a LOT of possible outcomes lurking out there at the margins of different complex physical regimes. Its probably true that we will find some things, but reactionless drives aren't one of them. Again, you have to be able to pick the possible from the impossible.
Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree, but of course everyone who called it narrow minded to say it was a waste of time will quickly forget they said that and never understand how silly it was. Meanwhile reality will pull a wet blanket over the whole sordid affair, hopefully before another dime is wasted on the whole thing. So it always goes, and such is the life of the true skeptic, you're rarely appreciated for being right. In fact nobody has ever come to me and said "yup you were right about that" even though I have yet to ever be wrong about one of these things.
More testing is a waste of good money after bad. There's no effect. If it was this easy to grab hold of the 'vacuum energy' it would be routine. And needing a tuned resonance is no big deal, that happens naturally all the time. Just blow on a guitar string and here it sound.
Yeah, I'm not worried in this case. The truth is that history doesn't even remember all the quacks that were just so far wrong they shouldn't even have gotten an ear, they are legion. The cases where people were outsiders but were RIGHT? They're a very select and exceedingly rare breed, its happened maybe half a dozen times in the whole history of modern science. Its not THAT uncommon in engineering, where people say "oh its impossible to build a flujiwigger" and some guy does exactly that. But he's not working against the known laws of physics, just against someone's overly unimaginative or wrong-headed impression of how they should work. My father held patents for a number of proportional flow valve designs that people said were 'impossible' to build. They were HARD and required inventing some machining techniques that never existed before, but they were quite possible. Reactionless drives just aren't in that category of the complexities of application of known principles aren't clear. Its not hard to see why a lot of people that don't know basic physics of EM can't tell the difference, but NASA scientists should know better.