Again, if you think people in the US are paying more for the same or inferior service, you have zero comprehension of the facts. Americans receive more health care services, goods, and procedures than the rest of the OECD, they wait less, and by most metrics they have higher quality of care.
Come on, you can't be serious. Have you even looked to the table I linked? Or you think having the highest infant mortality rate is a sign of a good health care? Or having the highest mortality rate amenable to health care? Both these indicators can't be reduced to lifestyle choices (as you could rationalize away the fact that the US has the lowest life expectancy of the OECD). Or the fact that it has one of the lowest number of physicians per person.
That said, even without mentioning the hideous fact that a significant part of the population has no health care insurance, and have to go bankrupt when suffer an accident or an illness. Or, you know, don't get treated at all.
The amount of money or even the percentage of GDP being spent on health care is not a measure of how much the health care system is a burden to the economy. It's totally irrelevant. The economy is not burdened by people producing and consuming goods and services- that is the economy. The fact that people choose to spend their money that way does not mean that they'd be better off if a central planner forced them to spend less of their money on that.
It is relevant if people are paying more for the same service; then the country is just giving a relevant part of the economy as profits to the health care industry, which I doubt it's a worthy goal in itself or good for the economy. But wait, people are not paying more for the same service, they are paying more for an inferior service.
Also, I don't think anyone likes shopping for health care; I for one don't feel any pleasure in going to hospitals and seeing doctors. After all, it's not as if you're going to become healthier and healthier the more you spend with health care.
I do understand your point on more general economic terms: if the US expenditure on cars, or computers, as a fraction of the GDP, is higher than that of other nations, it probably just means that the US automobile industry (or computing industry) is more well-developed than those countries' industries. Maybe you just like (or need) cars more than other countries, I don't know. But a more concrete example: the US spends much more with its military than any other nation. But that buys a military which is spread around the globe and is capable of fighting (at least) two wars simultaneously. If with this level of expenditure bought only a weak military that was barely able to defend the country, would you agree that something very wrong was going on?
That's my point with health care: the system is very inefficient. It costs a lot and is a piss-poor health care system, worse than any OECD system.
Most health care spending is a luxury good, in that as people's income rises they will choose to spend a greater proportion of their income on health care (if they are permitted to do so).
You're actually arguing that people like paying absurd premiums for insurance companies?
It's true that health care spending as a percent of GDP is high in the US and low in Somalia.
Mind you, I'm not comparing US and Somalia, I'm comparing the US to other OECD countries, which spend much less on health care as a fraction of GDP and have much better health care systems.
I don't think we have enough common ground to have a productive discussion, so I'll just stop here.
Are you saying that spending a higher proportion of the GDP with health care is good for a nation's economy? That would make sense if it was a temporary measure designed to increase that nation's GDP, and thus end up with a lower proportion of the GDP being spent on health care, but I have no evidence this is the case with the US.
And I do think it's misleading to compare these countries economies and health care systems with the USSR. They all (with the possible exception of Norway and Sweden) are between the most advanced capitalist economies on earth. And to suggest that they are "rationing" health care, or reducing health care costs through queuing is, frankly, insulting. By any measure their health care systems are way better than the US's.
Then he abandoned his PhD for a MBA. So this guy got a degree in 1985, and has not worked with physics for at least 22 years. Maybe it's too harsh to claim that he knows nothing of physics. He knows almost nothing.
I apologize for (indirectly) criticizing inflation. I guess my anger blinded me to the fact that Alan Guth was among the winners, precisely for his work in inflation.
But as for SUSY, I disagree with you. To completely rule out a theory is very very hard (a "definitive" test of Bell's inequalities is still not done even today, and some more exotic models of hidden variables will never be ruled out). I think the experimental community agrees that "reasonable" SUSY has already been ruled out. See what Résonaances has to say about it. Tommaso Dorigo is already collecting bets on the failure of the LHC to deviate from the Standard Model. Peter Woit is, as usual, full of skepticism.
The particular link you sent me was written before the Higgs announcement, and even it admits that a 125 GeV Higgs creates serious problems for SUSY.
So, yes, I am of the strong opinion that SUSY -- as we know it -- is dead. Perhaps some of its offspring can survive and get some experimental evidence, perhaps something completely new will replace it. I don't know. But SUSY is no more.
I'm a physicist. As far as I know, the only one who has done real work in physics is Alexei Kitaev, for his amazing contributions for quantum computing. The rest work on either untestable ideas (string theory), or testable ideas who have been shown to be wrong (supersymmetry). I guess that's what you get from a guy who knows nothing about physics but saw something about string theory on the TV and found it cool. Nature has a more or less balanced report; for a more inflamatory one, I recommend Peter Woit's blog.
Assuming that this new particle is in fact the Standard Model Higgs boson, what more can we expect to discover with CMS? Is there any new physics you expect to be within the reach of CMS? Or this is pretty much the end?
I know this question is unanswerable, but your best guess would make me happy. I'm actually very worried by the prospects of running out of (falsifiable) theories to test...
I'd just like to add that I was unaware of the connotation that the expression "rubber stamp" has in English, certainly getting a paper accepted into PRL is not trivial. What I meant was that we are using the fact that the PRL accepted our paper as a certificate of quality, while the actual.pdf they provide has very low relevance.
But I'm actually curious: if you don't think that traditional journals have a sustainable business model, and that "hitching one's wagon to new, open-access journals is a losing proposition...", which is the way forward in your opinion?
Do you really think that the publishing rates in a open access journal are anything near the subscription rates of a traditional journal? You must be insane. One of the reasons behind this boycott movement is precisely because Elsevier's journals are very expensive, and they can charge these prices because they *own* the research papers.
Well, if you're not refereeing anymore, you're not breaching any etiquette...
At least for me, it's quite easy to find out who the authors are: just look in the arXiv. If your area is not physics/math/cs, well, that's tougher. But still, it should be possible to deduce it based on the references.
Do you have no problem with your library paying outrageous fees too give you access to non-free journals? After all, if everyone just reads the paper off arXiv (which is true for myself, and most people I know, as arXiv is a lot faster than any journal) anyway, why should we pay for the journals nobody reads? And if we don't pay for them, how they will survive and continue to provide the rubber-stamp refereeing process you use them for? It's just not a viable business model. Furthermore it enrages me that we have to *ask for permission* to publish our own papers on arXiv, since every journal (even non-evil ones, like APS' journals) demands the copyright of your paper.
You're correct that academia is conservative, and that it takes time to build up the reputation of a journal. But that does not mean it's impossible like you believe! For instance, look at the wonderful open-access, electronic journal New Journal of Physics. It is quite new (for a journal), being established in 1998, but it already has a reputation of a very high quality journal, with impact factor (if you care about it - I don't) larger than many traditional journals, such as PRA. In fact, they have just rejected a paper of mine =( but I still like them.
Well, as it is information, it certainly has entropy; let's assume that the best possible encoding of an mp3 is the mp3 itself (not a terrible assumption, since a mp3 is a compressed file, and as such highly entropic). By Landauer's principle, to write a bit irreversibly one spends kTlog(2) Joules. This corresponds to an increase of m = E/c^2 = kTlog(2)/c^2 kg per bit. If one assumes a 8 MB mp3 (One more time @ 256 VBR) at room temperature (300 K), that's 2.55E-31 kg for you.
Even premium bus lines can't give you the comfort of a train ride; I for one feel sick when I try to read in a bus.
A very simple reason: Ryanair is cheap. I have traveled by Ryanair many more times than I've traveled by train. Let's say you are at Berlin and wants to go to Paris. About 900 km apart, a meaningful distance in my opinion. Who would want to take a bus, go to Schönefeld, grab a plane, descend at Charles de Gaulle (or a shitty airport 100 km apart from Paris, if you chose Ryanair), take another bus, and get to Paris, instead of taking the subway, going to Hauptbahnhof (central station), getting on a train, and getting down at downtown Paris? Me, who can't afford the train always. But I'm just a poor boy from a poor family, and when I can afford to not suffer the inconvenience, I won't anymore.
It's true that for very large distances the speed of the airplane beats the convenience and comfort of the train. But it's very large distances, not just meaningful distances.
Their favourite means of transportation is train. You can go through high-speed rail to almost anywhere in western Europe. I've been to the central bus station in Berlin. It's so desert it's scary.
The rail system in the US is archaic. It's slow and expensive. Of course no one wants to use it. I grant you that, bus is cheaper than train in Europe as well, but the difference in comfort and speed is worth it.
Yes, this is evidence against SUSY. And I agree that this is much bigger than "electron shape".
But it is not huge, because their measurement was not precise enough to actually rule out SUSY; about alternative models, I prefer to stay silent, because this is not my area of expertise.
So if something has a north/south polarity in magnetism we say it has a strong "Magnetic Dipole Moment"? Or more simply I would using my non-physicist vocabulary say it has a distinct Magnetic Polarity. Magnetic Moment = Amount of polarity?
Yes, you are mostly correct. We use the word dipole because there are monopoles and quadrupoles and octopoles and so on, so we need to differentiate between them to be precise. But the dipole moment is what corresponds to polarity, so you can understand the magnetic dipole moment as amount of polarity.
So even though the electron obviously has an average electric charge some theories think it might actually be the product of a slightly + in addition to being mostly - field?
No, no theory says it so. The origin of the predict electric dipole moment of the electron is very fundamental, and no one thinks that it is due to a slight + charge. The most simple example of a system that has an electric dipole moment is a combination of a + and a - charge, but that is by no means the only example. Things that have an electric dipole moment have an electric field like the one in the picture.
But this study found that there isn't any duality to the charge; it's to the best of our measurements completely singularly charged and therefore has no polarity or shape?
This study found that our best measurements can't see any polarity in the electric field of the electron.
I'm getting thrown by "Bipole Moment" since I don't know what that means but I feel like it's important to your explanation.:D
I'm imagining a magnetic field in my head. If you could create a magnet that was only positive it would be a round field pattern. But if you had a bar magnet it would form the classic figure eight of magnetic fields and therefore not be 'spherical'? http://www.windows2universe.org/spaceweather/images/bar_magnet_correct.gif
Am I understanding you correctly?
Hmm no. The issue of the shape is that if the electron were a uniformly charged sphere (it isn't), and you distorted this sphere a bit, it would display an electric dipole moment. So by measuring the electric dipole moment one can measure how much the sphere deviates from a perfectly round sphere, as a perfectly round sphere has no electric dipole moment.
The issue is that the electron is not a uniformly charged sphere, so it's meaningless to measure its roundness through the electric dipole moment; and I think that it just obscures the issue, because you have to know a bit of electromagnetism to know that a imperfectly round sphere has a nonzero electric dipole moment.
Even laymen like OP see that there's something weird about saying the electron has a shape and is a sphere
Do you HONESTLY think that people like Sebastopol (189276) who have "been trying to un-brainwash [themselves] out of the early models of the electron as a little ball whirring around a nucleus, and convert to the probabilistic electron cloud model, as well as the wave/particle hybrid nature" are in ANY way representative of typical laypeople?
I think Sebastopol is representative of the typical layman that is interested in reading about the latest developments in modern physics. He remembers what he learnt in high school, has probably read a wikipedia article or two, and usually reads these quantum physics articles when they appear. So a electron as a little ball is contrary to everything he has ever learnt about the subject.
Here's what a typical layperson would say: "electrons? Oh, right, I vaguely recall something from physics class in school. Aren't they the negatively-charged ones?"
Sure, there'll be a lot of people who'll know some more than that. There'll also be a lot of people who know a lot less, though, and the amount of people who consciously try to understand things like "probabilistic electron cloud models and the wave/particle hybrid nature" probably amount to no more than a few percent of the general population.
You're forgetting that no more than a few percent of the general population is interested in this subject.
The Beeb, like other news sources, isn't trying to cater to people like Sebastopol, or me (another interested layperson). It's trying to cater to the man on the street, and the only options they have are either a) simplifying things to the point where the man on the street can actually understand a word of what's being said, or b) not reporting on it at all. You appear to be blaming them for taking the former approach (all the while also denigrating the average man on the street by insinuating that he doesn't know the Beeb is not presenting all the details and that if he becomes interested, he's too stupid to possibly look up things himself).
Science Daily is not taking approach 'a'. They are mangling the information until there's almost no relation to the actual results. They are inventing a story about roundness to make the subject appear more simple, but in doing so they are just obscuring the facts and confusing the reader. Allow me to xkcd you. I'm not against the rubber sheet kind of analogy (as long as you say that it is an analogy; actually Feynman has an analogy that is more correct and simpler, but I digress); but what they are doing here is saying that Einstein's theory is like fairies pushing the stars around to make it seem like gravity.
I'm not saying that they should give all the details (because oh the actual details are hideously complicated), I'm saying that they should have given less details. They have measured a fundamental property of the electron, called electric dipole moment, that has profound implications on our understanding of the physical world.
Now it's much easier for the interested reader to search "electric dipole moment" and find out what it is, and ask the interesting questions, like "how can it have an electrical dipole moment if it is a single charge without structure?", instead of the nonsensical ones I'm seeing here on slashdot, like
Is it always round, even when it's tunnelling through a potential wall?
And I assume that by "round" they mean that every level curve of the probability amplitude has constant radius.
And, uh, what did they do about that Heisenberg thing? If you can't tell where the electron is relative to your frame of reference, how is the electron supposed to tell where a certain constant on its level curve is relative to its own frame of reference?
No it's not. Your head exploding is a perfectly normal reaction to trying to comprehend the piece of shit that passes as scientific journalism nowadays. I'm a physicist and after reading the article I still had no idea about what the researches discovered. At least Science Daily had the original reference so I could look up. Even more appalling is BBC's coverage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13545453
They both only said "lasers" about what the group actually measured. As if the measurement technique were as relevant as what they were actually measuring. Even laymen like OP see that there's something weird about saying the electron has a shape and is a sphere. Of course, this makes absolutely no sense. This talk about sphere is a semiclassical analogue that someone in the 20's once thought that could be true and was quickly disproved. What they measured was the electron's electric dipole moment. What is that?
Imagine a small bar magnet, with south and north poles. This is what we call a magnetic dipole. The strength of the magnet (measured in a standard way) is what we call magnetic dipole moment. Now imagine that instead of south and north poles, we have negative and positive electric charges. This is an electrical dipole, and it's strength is likewise the electrical dipole moment.
Now the beauty of the electron is that despite not being a small bar magnet, it still displays a strong magnetic dipole moment, which we call spin. Originally people thought that it could be explained by postulating a structure on the electron (an electric charged spinning sphere gives rise to a magnetic dipole moment, hence the name spin), but quickly we found out that it couldn't be so. We have no explanation for it, it is what it is, just a property of the electron.
But what the electric dipole moment? The electron is a single charge, so it can't be an actual electrical dipole. But despite this, the Standard Model predicts that it has a very small electric dipole moment, too small to be measurable. But Supersymmetry predicts that it is quite larger, and even measurable, and these folks' measurement showed that Supersymmetry's prediction is probably wrong.
Ok, but why did they call it measuring the roundness? Analogously with the spinning sphere model for the magnetic dipole moment, a distorted sphere gives rise to an electric dipole moment. But calling it measuring the roundness makes as much sense as saying that when we measure the magnetic dipole moment (spin) we are measuring the speed with which the electron spins about itself.
It's not really quite clear what the breakthrough is here. But I'm fairly certain it doesn't involve a group velocity (i.e. information transmission) greater than c.
You're right, it isn't. This article makes me sick. If people take shit like this seriously they can't be blamed for not being able to differentiate real science from quantum woo.
It's better to just ignore than try to correct it.
Teleportation is a real phenomenon, albeit a bit old. This is not their breakthrough. The breakthrough is doing it with a cat state (the name is a reference to Schrödinger's cat; this kind of state was inspired in it). These states are usually very fragile, and strongly entangled, hence the interest.
Also other breakthrough is doing it with the measurement of the number of photons and position. This is a promising technique, that I am personally working with at the moment to test Bell inequalities, because of its high resistance to noise. But I don't think it is very exciting to the general public...
Too slow. Also, there are very few people that care about a particular article, so the volunteers would probably ended up voting as blindly as the non-experts.
Oh yeah. I'm having this problem right now, trying to correct the article on quantum entaglement.
The worse bit was my adversary, that by his own admission knew nothing about the subject, getting insulted at my suggestion that he should learn it before editing the article.
Slashdot Mirror
I said that I would stop, but I can't.
Again, if you think people in the US are paying more for the same or inferior service, you have zero comprehension of the facts. Americans receive more health care services, goods, and procedures than the rest of the OECD, they wait less, and by most metrics they have higher quality of care.
Come on, you can't be serious. Have you even looked to the table I linked? Or you think having the highest infant mortality rate is a sign of a good health care? Or having the highest mortality rate amenable to health care? Both these indicators can't be reduced to lifestyle choices (as you could rationalize away the fact that the US has the lowest life expectancy of the OECD). Or the fact that it has one of the lowest number of physicians per person.
That said, even without mentioning the hideous fact that a significant part of the population has no health care insurance, and have to go bankrupt when suffer an accident or an illness. Or, you know, don't get treated at all.
The amount of money or even the percentage of GDP being spent on health care is not a measure of how much the health care system is a burden to the economy. It's totally irrelevant. The economy is not burdened by people producing and consuming goods and services- that is the economy. The fact that people choose to spend their money that way does not mean that they'd be better off if a central planner forced them to spend less of their money on that.
It is relevant if people are paying more for the same service; then the country is just giving a relevant part of the economy as profits to the health care industry, which I doubt it's a worthy goal in itself or good for the economy. But wait, people are not paying more for the same service, they are paying more for an inferior service.
Also, I don't think anyone likes shopping for health care; I for one don't feel any pleasure in going to hospitals and seeing doctors. After all, it's not as if you're going to become healthier and healthier the more you spend with health care.
I do understand your point on more general economic terms: if the US expenditure on cars, or computers, as a fraction of the GDP, is higher than that of other nations, it probably just means that the US automobile industry (or computing industry) is more well-developed than those countries' industries. Maybe you just like (or need) cars more than other countries, I don't know. But a more concrete example: the US spends much more with its military than any other nation. But that buys a military which is spread around the globe and is capable of fighting (at least) two wars simultaneously. If with this level of expenditure bought only a weak military that was barely able to defend the country, would you agree that something very wrong was going on?
That's my point with health care: the system is very inefficient. It costs a lot and is a piss-poor health care system, worse than any OECD system.
Most health care spending is a luxury good, in that as people's income rises they will choose to spend a greater proportion of their income on health care (if they are permitted to do so).
You're actually arguing that people like paying absurd premiums for insurance companies?
It's true that health care spending as a percent of GDP is high in the US and low in Somalia.
Mind you, I'm not comparing US and Somalia, I'm comparing the US to other OECD countries, which spend much less on health care as a fraction of GDP and have much better health care systems.
I don't think we have enough common ground to have a productive discussion, so I'll just stop here.
I'm afraid I can't follow your logic.
Are you saying that spending a higher proportion of the GDP with health care is good for a nation's economy? That would make sense if it was a temporary measure designed to increase that nation's GDP, and thus end up with a lower proportion of the GDP being spent on health care, but I have no evidence this is the case with the US.
And I do think it's misleading to compare these countries economies and health care systems with the USSR. They all (with the possible exception of Norway and Sweden) are between the most advanced capitalist economies on earth. And to suggest that they are "rationing" health care, or reducing health care costs through queuing is, frankly, insulting. By any measure their health care systems are way better than the US's.
Trying to provide free health care (even of dubious quality like that of most socialized health care systems) would impoverish us.
Really? AFAIK the opposite argument was being made in favour of "free" health care: it is much cheaper than private health care. The US's system is by far the most expensive in the world (in terms of dollars per capita or fraction of GDP).
So, actually, I think any other system would make you richer.
Then he abandoned his PhD for a MBA. So this guy got a degree in 1985, and has not worked with physics for at least 22 years. Maybe it's too harsh to claim that he knows nothing of physics. He knows almost nothing.
I apologize for (indirectly) criticizing inflation. I guess my anger blinded me to the fact that Alan Guth was among the winners, precisely for his work in inflation.
But as for SUSY, I disagree with you. To completely rule out a theory is very very hard (a "definitive" test of Bell's inequalities is still not done even today, and some more exotic models of hidden variables will never be ruled out). I think the experimental community agrees that "reasonable" SUSY has already been ruled out. See what Résonaances has to say about it. Tommaso Dorigo is already collecting bets on the failure of the LHC to deviate from the Standard Model. Peter Woit is, as usual, full of skepticism.
The particular link you sent me was written before the Higgs announcement, and even it admits that a 125 GeV Higgs creates serious problems for SUSY.
So, yes, I am of the strong opinion that SUSY -- as we know it -- is dead. Perhaps some of its offspring can survive and get some experimental evidence, perhaps something completely new will replace it. I don't know. But SUSY is no more.
I'm a physicist. As far as I know, the only one who has done real work in physics is Alexei Kitaev, for his amazing contributions for quantum computing. The rest work on either untestable ideas (string theory), or testable ideas who have been shown to be wrong (supersymmetry). I guess that's what you get from a guy who knows nothing about physics but saw something about string theory on the TV and found it cool. Nature has a more or less balanced report; for a more inflamatory one, I recommend Peter Woit's blog.
Assuming that this new particle is in fact the Standard Model Higgs boson, what more can we expect to discover with CMS? Is there any new physics you expect to be within the reach of CMS? Or this is pretty much the end?
I know this question is unanswerable, but your best guess would make me happy. I'm actually very worried by the prospects of running out of (falsifiable) theories to test...
As a matter of fact, I was in Bangkok two weeks ago. Ate their food, drank their water, no problem. The heat, on the other hand, did bother me.
I'm glad we agree then.
I'd just like to add that I was unaware of the connotation that the expression "rubber stamp" has in English, certainly getting a paper accepted into PRL is not trivial. What I meant was that we are using the fact that the PRL accepted our paper as a certificate of quality, while the actual .pdf they provide has very low relevance.
But I'm actually curious: if you don't think that traditional journals have a sustainable business model, and that "hitching one's wagon to new, open-access journals is a losing proposition ...", which is the way forward in your opinion?
Do you really think that the publishing rates in a open access journal are anything near the subscription rates of a traditional journal? You must be insane. One of the reasons behind this boycott movement is precisely because Elsevier's journals are very expensive, and they can charge these prices because they *own* the research papers.
Well, if you're not refereeing anymore, you're not breaching any etiquette...
At least for me, it's quite easy to find out who the authors are: just look in the arXiv. If your area is not physics/math/cs, well, that's tougher. But still, it should be possible to deduce it based on the references.
Are you actually serious?
Do you have no problem with your library paying outrageous fees too give you access to non-free journals? After all, if everyone just reads the paper off arXiv (which is true for myself, and most people I know, as arXiv is a lot faster than any journal) anyway, why should we pay for the journals nobody reads? And if we don't pay for them, how they will survive and continue to provide the rubber-stamp refereeing process you use them for? It's just not a viable business model. Furthermore it enrages me that we have to *ask for permission* to publish our own papers on arXiv, since every journal (even non-evil ones, like APS' journals) demands the copyright of your paper.
You're correct that academia is conservative, and that it takes time to build up the reputation of a journal. But that does not mean it's impossible like you believe! For instance, look at the wonderful open-access, electronic journal New Journal of Physics. It is quite new (for a journal), being established in 1998, but it already has a reputation of a very high quality journal, with impact factor (if you care about it - I don't) larger than many traditional journals, such as PRA. In fact, they have just rejected a paper of mine =( but I still like them.
you mean ubuntu 10.10?
For me, it's the best release of ubuntu of all times. Or should I say the last release of ubuntu?
Still on it, and still haven't plans for switching. I hope it won't take 5 years for an acceptable update to appear, though.
Well, as it is information, it certainly has entropy; let's assume that the best possible encoding of an mp3 is the mp3 itself (not a terrible assumption, since a mp3 is a compressed file, and as such highly entropic). By Landauer's principle, to write a bit irreversibly one spends kTlog(2) Joules. This corresponds to an increase of m = E/c^2 = kTlog(2)/c^2 kg per bit. If one assumes a 8 MB mp3 (One more time @ 256 VBR) at room temperature (300 K), that's 2.55E-31 kg for you.
Even premium bus lines can't give you the comfort of a train ride; I for one feel sick when I try to read in a bus.
A very simple reason: Ryanair is cheap. I have traveled by Ryanair many more times than I've traveled by train. Let's say you are at Berlin and wants to go to Paris. About 900 km apart, a meaningful distance in my opinion. Who would want to take a bus, go to Schönefeld, grab a plane, descend at Charles de Gaulle (or a shitty airport 100 km apart from Paris, if you chose Ryanair), take another bus, and get to Paris, instead of taking the subway, going to Hauptbahnhof (central station), getting on a train, and getting down at downtown Paris? Me, who can't afford the train always. But I'm just a poor boy from a poor family, and when I can afford to not suffer the inconvenience, I won't anymore.
It's true that for very large distances the speed of the airplane beats the convenience and comfort of the train. But it's very large distances, not just meaningful distances.
You have obviously never been to Europe.
Their favourite means of transportation is train. You can go through high-speed rail to almost anywhere in western Europe. I've been to the central bus station in Berlin. It's so desert it's scary.
The rail system in the US is archaic. It's slow and expensive. Of course no one wants to use it. I grant you that, bus is cheaper than train in Europe as well, but the difference in comfort and speed is worth it.
Yes, this is evidence against SUSY. And I agree that this is much bigger than "electron shape".
But it is not huge, because their measurement was not precise enough to actually rule out SUSY; about alternative models, I prefer to stay silent, because this is not my area of expertise.
So, makes more sense now?
Mayyyybe...?
So if something has a north/south polarity in magnetism we say it has a strong "Magnetic Dipole Moment"? Or more simply I would using my non-physicist vocabulary say it has a distinct Magnetic Polarity. Magnetic Moment = Amount of polarity?
Yes, you are mostly correct. We use the word dipole because there are monopoles and quadrupoles and octopoles and so on, so we need to differentiate between them to be precise. But the dipole moment is what corresponds to polarity, so you can understand the magnetic dipole moment as amount of polarity.
So even though the electron obviously has an average electric charge some theories think it might actually be the product of a slightly + in addition to being mostly - field?
No, no theory says it so. The origin of the predict electric dipole moment of the electron is very fundamental, and no one thinks that it is due to a slight + charge. The most simple example of a system that has an electric dipole moment is a combination of a + and a - charge, but that is by no means the only example. Things that have an electric dipole moment have an electric field like the one in the picture.
But this study found that there isn't any duality to the charge; it's to the best of our measurements completely singularly charged and therefore has no polarity or shape?
This study found that our best measurements can't see any polarity in the electric field of the electron.
I'm getting thrown by "Bipole Moment" since I don't know what that means but I feel like it's important to your explanation. :D
I'm imagining a magnetic field in my head. If you could create a magnet that was only positive it would be a round field pattern. But if you had a bar magnet it would form the classic figure eight of magnetic fields and therefore not be 'spherical'?
http://www.windows2universe.org/spaceweather/images/bar_magnet_correct.gif
Am I understanding you correctly?
Hmm no. The issue of the shape is that if the electron were a uniformly charged sphere (it isn't), and you distorted this sphere a bit, it would display an electric dipole moment. So by measuring the electric dipole moment one can measure how much the sphere deviates from a perfectly round sphere, as a perfectly round sphere has no electric dipole moment.
The issue is that the electron is not a uniformly charged sphere, so it's meaningless to measure its roundness through the electric dipole moment; and I think that it just obscures the issue, because you have to know a bit of electromagnetism to know that a imperfectly round sphere has a nonzero electric dipole moment.
Even laymen like OP see that there's something weird about saying the electron has a shape and is a sphere
Do you HONESTLY think that people like Sebastopol (189276) who have "been trying to un-brainwash [themselves] out of the early models of the electron as a little ball whirring around a nucleus, and convert to the probabilistic electron cloud model, as well as the wave/particle hybrid nature" are in ANY way representative of typical laypeople?
I think Sebastopol is representative of the typical layman that is interested in reading about the latest developments in modern physics. He remembers what he learnt in high school, has probably read a wikipedia article or two, and usually reads these quantum physics articles when they appear. So a electron as a little ball is contrary to everything he has ever learnt about the subject.
Here's what a typical layperson would say: "electrons? Oh, right, I vaguely recall something from physics class in school. Aren't they the negatively-charged ones?"
Sure, there'll be a lot of people who'll know some more than that. There'll also be a lot of people who know a lot less, though, and the amount of people who consciously try to understand things like "probabilistic electron cloud models and the wave/particle hybrid nature" probably amount to no more than a few percent of the general population.
You're forgetting that no more than a few percent of the general population is interested in this subject.
The Beeb, like other news sources, isn't trying to cater to people like Sebastopol, or me (another interested layperson). It's trying to cater to the man on the street, and the only options they have are either a) simplifying things to the point where the man on the street can actually understand a word of what's being said, or b) not reporting on it at all. You appear to be blaming them for taking the former approach (all the while also denigrating the average man on the street by insinuating that he doesn't know the Beeb is not presenting all the details and that if he becomes interested, he's too stupid to possibly look up things himself).
Science Daily is not taking approach 'a'. They are mangling the information until there's almost no relation to the actual results. They are inventing a story about roundness to make the subject appear more simple, but in doing so they are just obscuring the facts and confusing the reader. Allow me to xkcd you. I'm not against the rubber sheet kind of analogy (as long as you say that it is an analogy; actually Feynman has an analogy that is more correct and simpler, but I digress); but what they are doing here is saying that Einstein's theory is like fairies pushing the stars around to make it seem like gravity.
I'm not saying that they should give all the details (because oh the actual details are hideously complicated), I'm saying that they should have given less details. They have measured a fundamental property of the electron, called electric dipole moment, that has profound implications on our understanding of the physical world.
Now it's much easier for the interested reader to search "electric dipole moment" and find out what it is, and ask the interesting questions, like "how can it have an electrical dipole moment if it is a single charge without structure?", instead of the nonsensical ones I'm seeing here on slashdot, like
Is it always round, even when it's tunnelling through a potential wall?
And I assume that by "round" they mean that every level curve of the probability amplitude has constant radius.
And, uh, what did they do about that Heisenberg thing? If you can't tell where the electron is relative to your frame of reference, how is the electron supposed to tell where a certain constant on its level curve is relative to its own frame of reference?
No it's not. Your head exploding is a perfectly normal reaction to trying to comprehend the piece of shit that passes as scientific journalism nowadays. I'm a physicist and after reading the article I still had no idea about what the researches discovered. At least Science Daily had the original reference so I could look up. Even more appalling is BBC's coverage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13545453
They both only said "lasers" about what the group actually measured. As if the measurement technique were as relevant as what they were actually measuring. Even laymen like OP see that there's something weird about saying the electron has a shape and is a sphere. Of course, this makes absolutely no sense. This talk about sphere is a semiclassical analogue that someone in the 20's once thought that could be true and was quickly disproved. What they measured was the electron's electric dipole moment. What is that?
Imagine a small bar magnet, with south and north poles. This is what we call a magnetic dipole. The strength of the magnet (measured in a standard way) is what we call magnetic dipole moment. Now imagine that instead of south and north poles, we have negative and positive electric charges. This is an electrical dipole, and it's strength is likewise the electrical dipole moment.
Now the beauty of the electron is that despite not being a small bar magnet, it still displays a strong magnetic dipole moment, which we call spin. Originally people thought that it could be explained by postulating a structure on the electron (an electric charged spinning sphere gives rise to a magnetic dipole moment, hence the name spin), but quickly we found out that it couldn't be so. We have no explanation for it, it is what it is, just a property of the electron.
But what the electric dipole moment? The electron is a single charge, so it can't be an actual electrical dipole. But despite this, the Standard Model predicts that it has a very small electric dipole moment, too small to be measurable. But Supersymmetry predicts that it is quite larger, and even measurable, and these folks' measurement showed that Supersymmetry's prediction is probably wrong.
Ok, but why did they call it measuring the roundness? Analogously with the spinning sphere model for the magnetic dipole moment, a distorted sphere gives rise to an electric dipole moment. But calling it measuring the roundness makes as much sense as saying that when we measure the magnetic dipole moment (spin) we are measuring the speed with which the electron spins about itself.
So, makes more sense now?
It's not really quite clear what the breakthrough is here. But I'm fairly certain it doesn't involve a group velocity (i.e. information transmission) greater than c.
You're right, it isn't. This article makes me sick. If people take shit like this seriously they can't be blamed for not being able to differentiate real science from quantum woo.
It's better to just ignore than try to correct it.
Teleportation is a real phenomenon, albeit a bit old. This is not their breakthrough. The breakthrough is doing it with a cat state (the name is a reference to Schrödinger's cat; this kind of state was inspired in it). These states are usually very fragile, and strongly entangled, hence the interest.
Also other breakthrough is doing it with the measurement of the number of photons and position. This is a promising technique, that I am personally working with at the moment to test Bell inequalities, because of its high resistance to noise. But I don't think it is very exciting to the general public...
actually, this problem is trivial. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Rabin_primality_test
Too slow. Also, there are very few people that care about a particular article, so the volunteers would probably ended up voting as blindly as the non-experts.
Oh yeah. I'm having this problem right now, trying to correct the article on quantum entaglement.
The worse bit was my adversary, that by his own admission knew nothing about the subject, getting insulted at my suggestion that he should learn it before editing the article.