Within quark theory, quark/antiquark annihilation is not defined, as that has not been necessary to explain the phenomena we have observed nor does it lead to any verifiable predictions.
This is total nonsense. Quark/antiquark annihilation is perfectly well-described in standard theory.
The answer to the OP's question is that the quark and antiquark do annihilate, which is why all mesons are unstable. But it takes a little bit of time for the annihilation to happen, which gives you the lifetime of the meson.
The second link is hosed, but the abstract says they discovered "a new chi_b state" of quarkonium. This is well beyond my physics comfort zone, and maybe there is no real difference between states and particles in this realm, but intuitively it seems like there should be one.
Combinations of fundamental particles like quarks themselves behave as particles. The most familiar examples of such composite particles are the proton and neutron, but there are many others consisting of various excited quantum states of various combinations of quarks. Quark/antiquark pairs are called "mesons", and combinations of three quarks are called "baryons". Since energy and mass are pretty much interchangeable in these systems, excited (higher energy) states, act like particles with a larger mass.
An intelligent person, so not you, would have compared an IT department not with a plumber, but with a fire department.
Uh, no. Unless thee circumstances are very special, a computer crash or a network intrusion is not going to result in the loss of life as in the case of a fire. It's exactly this sort of inflated self-importance that breeds contempt for IT.
Not every IT situation is the same. Providing infrastructure for a hospital naturally requires strict control over everything. IT infrastructure for an open institution like a university benefits from a more flexible approach. And when IT places the needs of "their" network over the needs of the institution the network serves, people are going to undermine their efforts. One small example at my place of employment (a university) is that, because network access is so strictly controlled by central IT, campus visitors are entirely unable to get internet access without a complicated and bureaucratic application procedure. The result? A proliferation of rogue access points in visitor offices.This is actually detrimental to security.
The harder you clench your fist, the more lusers slip through your fingers.
IT departments are plumbers: they provide the infrastructure for a utility. There is nothing wrong with being a plumber. It takes a lot of skill, experience, and smarts to be a good one.
The only difference between IT and actual plumbers is that actual plumbers don't think they have a right to godlike control over everybody's bathtub.
A good point of caution, but doesn't prove anything in of itself. When you discover the atom, everything looks like its made of atoms
Oh wait, most things actually are! Sometimes that happens.
Unfortunately for us, replicating the experiment with a second team in a second location entirely from scratch will be extremely expensive, given that this CERN location used for the experiment is unique.
There are other long-baseline neutrino experiments out there, such as MINOS.
The new measurement is much more convincing than the previous one. The difference is the size of the proton bunches used to produce the neutrinos at CERN: in original measurement, the proton bunches where huge (milliseconds) compared to the claimed offset in the neutrino pulse (60 nanoseconds). This required a lot of knowledge about the shape of the proton bunches, and a lot of statistical fitting. The new analysis includes a special run with nanosecond-width proton bunches, widely separated from one another, so that each neutrino can be definitely associated with a particular proton bunch at CERN, with knowledge of the production time at the nanosecond level.
Personally, I'll still be skeptical until it's confirmed by an independent group, but the result is a lot more believable now.
If the big bang was more energetic than as supernova why did it only create Hydrogen and Helium? Why not at least some Lithium?
Lithium was produced in the Big Bang, but in very tiny amounts, less than a part per billion. No heavier elements were produced because of a "bottleneck" caused by the fact that there are no stable nuclei with atomic mass 5 or 8. Massive stars get around this bottleneck by the triple-alpha process, i.e. by three-body collisions of helium, which requires higher temperatures and longer time scales than were available in Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which lasted only a few minutes.
To be fair, if you RTFA, you'll see a diagram showing the various measurements they had made. I've not counted them, but it appears to be several dozen different "spots" rather than the two that you suggested.
Yes, very true. And they do discuss possible systematics in some detail. But most of the significance of their "dipole" looks like it comes from a very small fraction of the data. Sure, you can fit the data to a dipole and calculate a statistical significance, but does that fit really mean anything? The reasonable conclusion from comparing the Keck and VLT data is that the method, for whatever reason, is a lot less reliable than they are assuming it is. The four-sigma significance quoted is really hard to take seriously.
The guys writing the paper are definitely not idiots, and they have tried hard to identify what could possibly go wrong with the measurement. They are reporting what they measure. All good. But if you write a paper saying "We tried this measurement and got screwy results that we don't completely understand" you don't make it into PRL, or get any press. If you write a paper saying "dipole in the fine structure constant!" you do, even if the conclusion is highly dubious.
So... they look at one spot on the sky with Keck and discover that the fine structure constant used to be smaller than it is today. Then they look at a different spot on the sky with VLT, and find that the fine structure constant used to be bigger than it is today. So, instead of thinking "Hmm... the results from these two different observations are contradictory. Perhaps the entire effect is a systematic," they publish a paper in PRL claiming a dipole! Fucking brilliant!
PRL is really getting to be a total joke. Please call me when they look at the same spot with two different telescopes, and different spots with the same telescope. Using the same spectral lines.
Have you ever actually eaten an MRE? The things are 1200 calories or so, about 900 of those from raw sugar. What better way to get a bunch of teenagers to go out and kill people, than to get them all hopped up on a sugar high like a squad of heavily armed Cornholios?.
Caffeinated jerky fits right in.
I wonder how physicists would react to a climatologist who proclaimed that the standard model was just trickery of numbers, using statistical tricks to keep the grant money rolling in.
I bet they would suggest that the climatologist is free to resign from the APS if he wants.
(For example, Roger Penrose has caused biologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers to boggle, with his consciousness-by-quantum-nanotube-therefore-free-will spiel he's been pushing. He's great at astrophysics, but this stuff he's been writing lately is weird and wrong on many levels.)
Actually, his astrophysics has been getting pretty damned insane lately too.
As Alan Stern pointed out on NASA Watch earlier today, this is a very dangerous move for the space science community.
The science program has worked hard to put up firewalls to prevent the manned program from raiding them for funding when the going gets tough. By breaking that firewall in the opposite direction it opens the science directorate to future funding losses when things get bad on the manned side.
The non-profits are much more complicated. These organizations aren't spending lots of money on yachts for CEOs, they're using their funds for (in many cases) education, running conferences, scholarships, and the costs of running and organizing the journals. If you reduce the costs of the journals, a laudable goal of course, you reduce the funds available for their other goals.
Parent is right on. I pretty much only referee for non-profits these days. Fuck Elsevier.
What I think has in practice be the primary problem with open access, at least in the physical sciences, is that a lot of bottom feeders have exploited the idea to form an archipelago of vanity presses around the outskirts of the more mainstream journals.
Step 1: Charge authors for "open access"
Step 2: Have minimal publication standards
Step 3: Profit!
There need to be a few credible organizing bodies to lend an imprimatur to a few good journals. PLoS has done this to an extent for biological sciences, but I think the physical sciences are way behind. I think this is in part because physical science have arXiv, which more-or-less makes journal access moot anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I really want a drink and a smoke.
we need to be proactive about communicating with the retards who break our system.
Nope. Nobody would ever think somebody who says shit like this is aloof, insular, or difficult to get along with.
Incidentally, there is a differnce between "nonsense" and "mistaken", you insensitive clod.
I'm aware of that. You're speaking nonsense, or, in technical terms, gibberish.
Within quark theory, quark/antiquark annihilation is not defined, as that has not been necessary to explain the phenomena we have observed nor does it lead to any verifiable predictions.
This is total nonsense. Quark/antiquark annihilation is perfectly well-described in standard theory. The answer to the OP's question is that the quark and antiquark do annihilate, which is why all mesons are unstable. But it takes a little bit of time for the annihilation to happen, which gives you the lifetime of the meson.
The second link is hosed, but the abstract says they discovered "a new chi_b state" of quarkonium. This is well beyond my physics comfort zone, and maybe there is no real difference between states and particles in this realm, but intuitively it seems like there should be one.
Combinations of fundamental particles like quarks themselves behave as particles. The most familiar examples of such composite particles are the proton and neutron, but there are many others consisting of various excited quantum states of various combinations of quarks. Quark/antiquark pairs are called "mesons", and combinations of three quarks are called "baryons". Since energy and mass are pretty much interchangeable in these systems, excited (higher energy) states, act like particles with a larger mass.
Major-league sports are famously technophobic — the NFL outlaws computers and PDAs on the sidelines,
It's not because they're technophobic. Their IT guys won't let them connect their "toys" to the network.
An intelligent person, so not you, would have compared an IT department not with a plumber, but with a fire department.
Uh, no. Unless thee circumstances are very special, a computer crash or a network intrusion is not going to result in the loss of life as in the case of a fire. It's exactly this sort of inflated self-importance that breeds contempt for IT.
Not every IT situation is the same. Providing infrastructure for a hospital naturally requires strict control over everything. IT infrastructure for an open institution like a university benefits from a more flexible approach. And when IT places the needs of "their" network over the needs of the institution the network serves, people are going to undermine their efforts. One small example at my place of employment (a university) is that, because network access is so strictly controlled by central IT, campus visitors are entirely unable to get internet access without a complicated and bureaucratic application procedure. The result? A proliferation of rogue access points in visitor offices.This is actually detrimental to security.
The harder you clench your fist, the more lusers slip through your fingers.
IT departments are plumbers: they provide the infrastructure for a utility. There is nothing wrong with being a plumber. It takes a lot of skill, experience, and smarts to be a good one. The only difference between IT and actual plumbers is that actual plumbers don't think they have a right to godlike control over everybody's bathtub.
Start with Slashdot dupes.
A good point of caution, but doesn't prove anything in of itself. When you discover the atom, everything looks like its made of atoms Oh wait, most things actually are! Sometimes that happens.
Actually, virtually nothing is made of atoms. Sorry about that.
Unfortunately for us, replicating the experiment with a second team in a second location entirely from scratch will be extremely expensive, given that this CERN location used for the experiment is unique.
There are other long-baseline neutrino experiments out there, such as MINOS.
The new measurement is much more convincing than the previous one. The difference is the size of the proton bunches used to produce the neutrinos at CERN: in original measurement, the proton bunches where huge (milliseconds) compared to the claimed offset in the neutrino pulse (60 nanoseconds). This required a lot of knowledge about the shape of the proton bunches, and a lot of statistical fitting. The new analysis includes a special run with nanosecond-width proton bunches, widely separated from one another, so that each neutrino can be definitely associated with a particular proton bunch at CERN, with knowledge of the production time at the nanosecond level.
Personally, I'll still be skeptical until it's confirmed by an independent group, but the result is a lot more believable now.
If the big bang was more energetic than as supernova why did it only create Hydrogen and Helium? Why not at least some Lithium?
Lithium was produced in the Big Bang, but in very tiny amounts, less than a part per billion. No heavier elements were produced because of a "bottleneck" caused by the fact that there are no stable nuclei with atomic mass 5 or 8. Massive stars get around this bottleneck by the triple-alpha process, i.e. by three-body collisions of helium, which requires higher temperatures and longer time scales than were available in Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which lasted only a few minutes.
To be fair, if you RTFA, you'll see a diagram showing the various measurements they had made. I've not counted them, but it appears to be several dozen different "spots" rather than the two that you suggested.
Yes, very true. And they do discuss possible systematics in some detail. But most of the significance of their "dipole" looks like it comes from a very small fraction of the data. Sure, you can fit the data to a dipole and calculate a statistical significance, but does that fit really mean anything? The reasonable conclusion from comparing the Keck and VLT data is that the method, for whatever reason, is a lot less reliable than they are assuming it is. The four-sigma significance quoted is really hard to take seriously.
The guys writing the paper are definitely not idiots, and they have tried hard to identify what could possibly go wrong with the measurement. They are reporting what they measure. All good. But if you write a paper saying "We tried this measurement and got screwy results that we don't completely understand" you don't make it into PRL, or get any press. If you write a paper saying "dipole in the fine structure constant!" you do, even if the conclusion is highly dubious.
So ... they look at one spot on the sky with Keck and discover that the fine structure constant used to be smaller than it is today. Then they look at a different spot on the sky with VLT, and find that the fine structure constant used to be bigger than it is today. So, instead of thinking "Hmm ... the results from these two different observations are contradictory. Perhaps the entire effect is a systematic," they publish a paper in PRL claiming a dipole! Fucking brilliant!
PRL is really getting to be a total joke. Please call me when they look at the same spot with two different telescopes, and different spots with the same telescope. Using the same spectral lines.
Have you ever actually eaten an MRE? The things are 1200 calories or so, about 900 of those from raw sugar. What better way to get a bunch of teenagers to go out and kill people, than to get them all hopped up on a sugar high like a squad of heavily armed Cornholios?. Caffeinated jerky fits right in.
Apparently to even publish in the first place he has to go through what amounts to an official censorship system.
And how does that differ from peer review?
Because it's not being reviewed by peers, but by political hacks?
I wonder how physicists would react to a climatologist who proclaimed that the standard model was just trickery of numbers, using statistical tricks to keep the grant money rolling in.
I bet they would suggest that the climatologist is free to resign from the APS if he wants.
(For example, Roger Penrose has caused biologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers to boggle, with his consciousness-by-quantum-nanotube-therefore-free-will spiel he's been pushing. He's great at astrophysics, but this stuff he's been writing lately is weird and wrong on many levels.)
Actually, his astrophysics has been getting pretty damned insane lately too.
We must ensure better education for the bears
We should also arm them.
Nobody's outlawing 100W incandescent light bulbs because of the diamond star.
What is it with the goddamn light bulbs? You really think incandescent light bulbs are a civil rights issue?
Mod parent way the fuck up.
As Alan Stern pointed out on NASA Watch earlier today, this is a very dangerous move for the space science community.
The science program has worked hard to put up firewalls to prevent the manned program from raiding them for funding when the going gets tough. By breaking that firewall in the opposite direction it opens the science directorate to future funding losses when things get bad on the manned side.
What manned program? The Russian one?
Three or four exploits is one exploit. Unless your solution scales exponentially, it's bullshit.
The non-profits are much more complicated. These organizations aren't spending lots of money on yachts for CEOs, they're using their funds for (in many cases) education, running conferences, scholarships, and the costs of running and organizing the journals. If you reduce the costs of the journals, a laudable goal of course, you reduce the funds available for their other goals.
Parent is right on. I pretty much only referee for non-profits these days. Fuck Elsevier.
What I think has in practice be the primary problem with open access, at least in the physical sciences, is that a lot of bottom feeders have exploited the idea to form an archipelago of vanity presses around the outskirts of the more mainstream journals.
Step 1: Charge authors for "open access"
Step 2: Have minimal publication standards
Step 3: Profit!
There need to be a few credible organizing bodies to lend an imprimatur to a few good journals. PLoS has done this to an extent for biological sciences, but I think the physical sciences are way behind. I think this is in part because physical science have arXiv, which more-or-less makes journal access moot anyway.