That should work for modest energy charged particles and is probably a good idea. I don't know how much of the radiation is neutral or too high energy to reasonably deflect with a magnetic field. Depending on the mix of energies and particle types using magnetic shielding might or might not be a significant help.
On earth we are shielded by both a magnetic field (weak but very large volume), and by the equivalent of about 10 meters of shielding from the atmosphere.
The don't turn of the engines for landing. If the pilot and air traffic control are able to plan correctly, a lot of the descent can be done at idle power, but as you say the engines need to be ready for a go-around / wave-off if needed.
You are right that space is hard. Flight was hard, many of the early pioneers of flight died in the attempt. Crossing oceans was hard, climbing mountains was hard, exploring the poles was hard. It is in the nature of exploration that it is difficult, otherwise it would have already been done.
In the end though you are right - going into space doesn't get us anything. Unless you see it as a goal, rather than a means, there is no point. There are plenty of resources here on earth for hundreds of millions of humans to live until some global scale natural disaster kills us, which might be very long time.
I don't think this is new - surely we have enough data to know the interplanetary radiation levels. In some of the old Mars mission designs there was a shielded "shelter" on the spacecraft that could be used during times of high radiation from solar activity. This of course adds weight - but if its located in the center of the spacecraft, or maybe shielded by fuel it might not be too bad.
On the martian surface it would seem fairly straightforward to make a covered trench. Most of the work could be done by robotic equipment before the manned mission arrived.
Putting people on mars isn't easy - if it were, much of the point would be lost.
A lot of material is available for free. A lot of what we publish at SLAC (and probably other DOE lab) is available for free from our publications sites, (eg SLAC Pubs) Unfortunately those sites rank much lower than the refereed journals in google searches so many people probably can't find them. Most researchers would be very happy to publish in free sites if we could somehow fix the problem of funding and promotions being based on the number of publications in "high impact" journals.
Um no. I'm a pilot. Its true that planes generally do not carry more fuel that they need for the flight (including reserves for delays, diversions, etc) in order to save fuel - carrying more fuel uses more energy, but they only dump fuel in very rare emergencies. I was on a 777 out of Narita to SFO (as a passenger) when they had to return due to a failed ventilating fan. They DID NOT dump fuel, even though they were fully loaded for a 12 hour flight.
When you burn jet fuel you get CO2 and water. If conditions are right, the water condenses and leaves a trail, sometimes that trail seeds additional clouds .
Forget about environmental concerns - fuel is expensive. It would be crazy for airliners to throw it away .
For small businesses you are right, but not large businesses. I had an issue with a large business where I had been a customer for almost 20 years. I was unable to find any way to contact anyone who had the slightest interest in my issue, so I canceled my long term contract, reported their behavior to BBB. Maybe there is a way to contact Sony to get someone who would care, but I don't know how.
We can stop essentially all crime, or at least prosecute it after it happens by installing surveillance everywhere. We need to decide where we are willing to use this technology. This particular application seems pretty harmless - as long as the railway companies don't decide that now that they have the drones they might as well monitor employee efficiency.....
Sony has lost a lot of business from me - I had sony computers, TVs, DVDs, etc before the rootkit fiasco. Now I will not purchase from them - probably cost them >$10K in sales to me personally. The problem is that they have no way to know that they are losing customers, so they have no motivation to change their behavior.
I should have been more clear on "terrible". It is possible to show that 2 effects are statistically correlated with a low probability of an accidental correlation, but still have the error bars on the measurements so large that one measurement cannot be used to predict the other. For example it is possible (I think) to correlate ocean current patterns in the pacific with the average amount of rain on any day in California. This correlation is important in that it shows that ocean currents are correlated with (and based on physical arguments likely effect) weather in California. You cannot however make an accurate prediction of whether it will rain TODAY based solely on ocean currents.
In this case it may be that IQ scores are statistically correlated with the vision tests. The difficulty of doing human experiments makes the analysis much more difficult. Even if it is true, it looked to me from the graph that the vision tests can only predict the IQ of an individual to 10s of points. That is such a wide range that I cannot think of a useful application. Maybe if you could show that there are very few outliers this could be used to find under-achieving children, but based on nature of the test I would expect a lot of outliers.
Yes, as would any sort of issue with ability to focus, or eye irritation that makes you blink more often than average.
Then look at the graph (the one in the article with blue and red dots). That is a TERRIBLE correlation. It might be significant from a purely statistical argument, but the correlation is so weak that it would be difficult to eliminate other factors.
The lower graph in the article shows a stronger correlation of IQ vs suppression of moving objects. On more thinking though, that is a HUGE range of IQs and still only a modest correlation. . Isn't it likely that people with an IQ of 140 will understand the instructions better than those with an IQ of 80. Even if there is a real correlation, it looks like the error bars on predicting IQ will have a 40 point spread! Useless.
All this assumes IQ is a good measure, something I question since intelligence appears to be a combination of factors (memory, 3D visualization, quick thinking, abstract math etc) and probably needs to be represented by a vector, not a scalar measurement.
The basic problem is that a "reasonable" pricing scheme would have a monthly rate, and then a (very small, say $0.01/GB) charge for data. For the typical ~10GB/month user the data charge would be tiny, but for a >10TB / month user it would be significant. This would even eliminate the ISPs desire to shut down file sharing on the network.
There seem to be a couple of reasons we don't have this pricing:
1. People can wind up using bandwidth unknowingly. This is potentially a big problem for phones with 1GB contracts, but on a home line its pretty unlikely that you will accidentally use 100GB.
2. Customers are strangely resistant to this model. They somehow like the idea of "unlimited", even though it means that most customers are supporting the extravagant data use of a tiny minority.
I couldn't find much information on the camera. Does it just measure power in a band, or is it a ratio of 2 (or more) wavelengths? If the first, then (for a grey-body) the emissivity would cancel out. If the second, it would give an accurate temperature, but low emissivity would result in lower power output than estimated. I know that some IR cameras use the 2-color trick, but the documentation I could find on this one isn't very good. Since most people are interested in temperature, not thermal power, the 2-color method is likely much more common.
They really should have put a few thermocouples on their system - cheap and a good way to back up the other measurements.
The power measurements should have been directly on the wires to the device, not the AC power going into their drive circuitry.
Another cross check on calorimetry (that we do here) is to turn off the power and measure the rate of temperature change and compare with the predicted specific heat. Then of course you can put an inert filler in the chamber and calibrate your calorimetry against the resistor heaters (both temperature and rate of rise / fall of temperature).
Calorimetry is hard - so anyone who does it seriously does these sort of cross-checks. There is someone here who is still trying to decipher a mystery factor of 2 in a calorimetry system for measuring X-ray power. We know (from other measurements) that his results are wrong, but he hasn't been able to find the problem.
I don't know anything about the scientists who "observed" this and whether there were experts in this sort of measurement - as opposed to experts in chemistry or nuclear physics.
Again all this is assuming unintentional errors. If you allow for fraud there are a lot of ways they could have done this.
The temperature could be close to correct, but if the emissivity is wrong then the power output is lower. The cylinder in the photos is clearly grey, not black (there are darker object visible), but that can't be quantified from the picture. In addition, it is not the visible light emissivity that matters, but the mid to near infrared, and that can be very different.
I agree that a factor of ~5. is a big error, but not impossible. It could also be one of many smaller errors that add up.
Of course if it is fraud, then the experiment could have been faked in all sorts of ways.
My skepticism remains - there is just no clear explanation of how chemistry can effect nuclear reactions (with the exception of some special case very-narrow line width reactions unrelated to this).
Was it really 480C? Thermal imaging temperature sensors typically look at the ratio of light at different wavelengths (or cheap ones may just look at one wavelength). Depending on the surface coating the emissivity can have a strong variation with wavelength or temperature. I don't know why they didn't have some thermocouples on the system, but even if they did, they need to know the emissivity to know the power output. The object is visibly non-black so this could be a very large factor. (5X is needed to invalidate the experiment). When the camera was calibrated with boiling water, what was the target? Even if the same material, the emission curve is different at higher temperatures .
Sounds like they were using 3-phase power - confusion about Y vs Delta connections? Its a bit confusing though since the test device only seems to have 2 leads.
It isn't clear where the power leads go. One problem with the paper is that there is no diagram, no indication of where and how the electrical power was measured, except to give the model number of the meter (not how it was hooked up). There is plenty of room in that lab for energy storage if the project were a fraud.
"demonstrations" are not how science is done. Scientific publications give enough details for other people to duplicate the experiments. If they want to keep it secret, that is fine, but they can't expect scientists to take their word for what is going on.
They are getting a lot of objections because their claim is so extraordinary. They basically have a device that does something incredibly valuable but they won't say exactly how, and based on physics that is not understood. What is the last time a claim like this was true?
If you read carefully, the glow was from an earlier test. The main tests was a lower temperature. The main test was at a claimed ~480C which is not hot enough to glow visibly in room lights. You have to rely on the calibration of his thermal camera - a notoriously finicky device when looking at non-standard surfaces .
If not a fraud: The surface emissivity may be far from 1, giving an incorrect power output and temperature The camera may be mis-calibrated for that surface The 360W heater power may be wrong.
If a fraud: His power meter may mis-adjusted, or only measuring one phase out of 2. The camera may have an incorrect calibration intentionally loaded. high frequency AC power may be heating the unit The whole test could be a lie - you can publish anything you want in a non-refereed journal.
You are missing the 3rd possibility of a measurement error. This is what happened with the FTL neutrinos and may well be what is going on here. Measuring power from thermal emission is very difficult to do correctly and is not the standard way to do calorimitry. The difficult is because real materials are not black bodies and their emission can vary substantially with wavelength AND temperature. Some systems (like stars) you don't have much choice, but for laboratory sized objects there are better ways to measure power output.
Any time you see a physical effect that was not predicted by theory it indicates the need for very careful scrutiny. Every once in a while it is a breakthrough, but the great majority of the time it is a mistake. This is especially true for laboratory scale experiments. Even the astronomical measurements that found "dark energy" were not a complete surprise, there were theories that predicted this.
Muon and antimatter catalyzed fusion are based on well understood physics (the rate at which muons catalyze fusion can be calculated by any graduate physics student). So far though these schemes have insurmountable "technical" issues: The muons stick to the helium and can't be re-used, and the anti-protons require too much energy to produce (and probably anhillate too often).
The research is legitimate because it is possible that there is a way around these problems. I think its unlikely, but the value if you succeed is so high that it is worth some effort.
The other style of cold-fusion is really a form of : we have this gadget that gets hot due to some "new" physics. That would be OK, except it us usually coupled with "it is a secret process, so we won't give you full access to the machine"
If it is just a case of verifying the experiment, then it is easy. If the inventors are deliberately pulling a scam, then you would need complete access to the device, including dis-assembly. The device only produces a about a kilowatt - you can supply that on very fine wire hidden in the support structure if you want.
Your scheme has merit. Its complicated though, in a lot of fields there are only a very small number of experts who are qualified to review a paper, and you would need some way to get the "right" people doing the reviews. A paper with a provocative title like Kip Thorne's "Wormholes, Time Machines and the Weak Energy Condition" is likely to attract a hoard of people who are in no way qualified to evaluate the work. We see the same effect on Slashdot where a very technical article will be referenced and there will be a few comments from knowledgeable people, a lot will be from people who don't have the background to understand the original article.
Still - I absolutely agree that we need a fix, but it is a tricky problem.
Its not just the scientists. Laboratories are judged (and to some extent funded) based on the total impact of their publications. You get there with a few easy steps:
1) public decides that funding science is good 2). lots of organizations compete for limited funding 3). Public needs to decide how to allocate funding and needs a metric for measuring the performance of these organizations 4) Public decides that peer review is a good metric 5) Important publications are sent to the journals that have other important publications, those that are rejected go to lower level journals. This establishes a hierarchy of journals. 6). The public considers publishing in higher "impact" journals as representing more value.
It is all logical, and a difficult system to fix. If I have a really good publication, I am hurting my career and my laboratory and coworkers by not publishing it in one of the premier journals. I'm even hurting science because by publishing in a lower impact journal, my (presumed brilliant and important) publication will be read by fewer scientists.
As an aside, a lot of the published material is also available to the public for free (all my stuff is also in SLAC pubs as is required by DOE), but these do not rate as high on a google search so you will have a more difficult time finding them. Google, like everyone else, gives higher ratings to the prestigious journals.
I wish I knew how to fix this. It is quite frustrating that 3rd party companies are paid for my work. To add insult to injury, I often review papers for these journals - and am not paid for the reviews. I could turn down the review requests, but peer review IS a vital part of science.
To the previous poster - the problem with non-anonymous reviews is the risk of "trading" good reviews, retaliation etc if the reviewers are known. Scientists are people, as easily tempted to misbehavior as any other group.
In general relativity, gravity is a warping of space and EVERYTHING falls at exactly the same speed. This has been tested to very high accuracy in a variety of experiments. (see eotvos experiment)
There are other theories of gravity where this doesn't necessarily need to be true and antimatter and matter might fall at different rates. The eotvos type experiments have indirectly tested this since there is some amount of virtual antimatter in normal objects (from quantum fluctuations), but a direct measurement would be a nice demonstration.
This is one of those experiments were people are pretty sure of the answer, but getting a different result would be very important to physics.
Slashdot Mirror
That should work for modest energy charged particles and is probably a good idea. I don't know how much of the radiation is neutral or too high energy to reasonably deflect with a magnetic field. Depending on the mix of energies and particle types using magnetic shielding might or might not be a significant help.
On earth we are shielded by both a magnetic field (weak but very large volume), and by the equivalent of about 10 meters of shielding from the atmosphere.
The don't turn of the engines for landing. If the pilot and air traffic control are able to plan correctly, a lot of the descent can be done at idle power, but as you say the engines need to be ready for a go-around / wave-off if needed.
You are right that space is hard. Flight was hard, many of the early pioneers of flight died in the attempt. Crossing oceans was hard, climbing mountains was hard, exploring the poles was hard. It is in the nature of exploration that it is difficult, otherwise it would have already been done.
In the end though you are right - going into space doesn't get us anything. Unless you see it as a goal, rather than a means, there is no point. There are plenty of resources here on earth for hundreds of millions of humans to live until some global scale natural disaster kills us, which might be very long time.
I don't think this is new - surely we have enough data to know the interplanetary radiation levels. In some of the old Mars mission designs there was a shielded "shelter" on the spacecraft that could be used during times of high radiation from solar activity. This of course adds weight - but if its located in the center of the spacecraft, or maybe shielded by fuel it might not be too bad.
On the martian surface it would seem fairly straightforward to make a covered trench. Most of the work could be done by robotic equipment before the manned mission arrived.
Putting people on mars isn't easy - if it were, much of the point would be lost.
A lot of material is available for free. A lot of what we publish at SLAC (and probably other DOE lab) is available for free from our publications sites, (eg SLAC Pubs) Unfortunately those sites rank much lower than the refereed journals in google searches so many people probably can't find them. Most researchers would be very happy to publish in free sites if we could somehow fix the problem of funding and promotions being based on the number of publications in "high impact" journals.
Um no. I'm a pilot. Its true that planes generally do not carry more fuel that they need for the flight (including reserves for delays, diversions, etc) in order to save fuel - carrying more fuel uses more energy, but they only dump fuel in very rare emergencies. I was on a 777 out of Narita to SFO (as a passenger) when they had to return due to a failed ventilating fan. They DID NOT dump fuel, even though they were fully loaded for a 12 hour flight.
When you burn jet fuel you get CO2 and water. If conditions are right, the water condenses and leaves a trail, sometimes that trail seeds additional clouds .
Forget about environmental concerns - fuel is expensive. It would be crazy for airliners to throw it away .
You are right that there are ways to defeat partial surveillance.
I was suggesting *TOTAL* surveillance. Enough to follow the criminals home. This is close to being practical today.
For small businesses you are right, but not large businesses. I had an issue with a large business where I had been a customer for almost 20 years. I was unable to find any way to contact anyone who had the slightest interest in my issue, so I canceled my long term contract, reported their behavior to BBB. Maybe there is a way to contact Sony to get someone who would care, but I don't know how.
We can stop essentially all crime, or at least prosecute it after it happens by installing surveillance everywhere. We need to decide where we are willing to use this technology. This particular application seems pretty harmless - as long as the railway companies don't decide that now that they have the drones they might as well monitor employee efficiency.....
Sony has lost a lot of business from me - I had sony computers, TVs, DVDs, etc before the rootkit fiasco. Now I will not purchase from them - probably cost them >$10K in sales to me personally. The problem is that they have no way to know that they are losing customers, so they have no motivation to change their behavior.
I should have been more clear on "terrible". It is possible to show that 2 effects are statistically correlated with a low probability of an accidental correlation, but still have the error bars on the measurements so large that one measurement cannot be used to predict the other. For example it is possible (I think) to correlate ocean current patterns in the pacific with the average amount of rain on any day in California. This correlation is important in that it shows that ocean currents are correlated with (and based on physical arguments likely effect) weather in California. You cannot however make an accurate prediction of whether it will rain TODAY based solely on ocean currents.
In this case it may be that IQ scores are statistically correlated with the vision tests. The difficulty of doing human experiments makes the analysis much more difficult. Even if it is true, it looked to me from the graph that the vision tests can only predict the IQ of an individual to 10s of points. That is such a wide range that I cannot think of a useful application. Maybe if you could show that there are very few outliers this could be used to find under-achieving children, but based on nature of the test I would expect a lot of outliers.
Yes, as would any sort of issue with ability to focus, or eye irritation that makes you blink more often than average.
Then look at the graph (the one in the article with blue and red dots). That is a TERRIBLE correlation. It might be significant from a purely statistical argument, but the correlation is so weak that it would be difficult to eliminate other factors.
The lower graph in the article shows a stronger correlation of IQ vs suppression of moving objects. On more thinking though, that is a HUGE range of IQs and still only a modest correlation. . Isn't it likely that people with an IQ of 140 will understand the instructions better than those with an IQ of 80. Even if there is a real correlation, it looks like the error bars on predicting IQ will have a 40 point spread! Useless.
All this assumes IQ is a good measure, something I question since intelligence appears to be a combination of factors (memory, 3D visualization, quick thinking, abstract math etc) and probably needs to be represented by a vector, not a scalar measurement.
The basic problem is that a "reasonable" pricing scheme would have a monthly rate, and then a (very small, say $0.01/GB) charge for data. For the typical ~10GB/month user the data charge would be tiny, but for a >10TB / month user it would be significant. This would even eliminate the ISPs desire to shut down file sharing on the network.
There seem to be a couple of reasons we don't have this pricing:
1. People can wind up using bandwidth unknowingly. This is potentially a big problem for phones with 1GB contracts, but on a home line its pretty unlikely that you will accidentally use 100GB.
2. Customers are strangely resistant to this model. They somehow like the idea of "unlimited", even though it means that most customers are supporting the extravagant data use of a tiny minority.
I couldn't find much information on the camera. Does it just measure power in a band, or is it a ratio of 2 (or more) wavelengths? If the first, then (for a grey-body) the emissivity would cancel out. If the second, it would give an accurate temperature, but low emissivity would result in lower power output than estimated. I know that some IR cameras use the 2-color trick, but the documentation I could find on this one isn't very good. Since most people are interested in temperature, not thermal power, the 2-color method is likely much more common.
They really should have put a few thermocouples on their system - cheap and a good way to back up the other measurements.
The power measurements should have been directly on the wires to the device, not the AC power going into their drive circuitry.
Another cross check on calorimetry (that we do here) is to turn off the power and measure the rate of temperature change and compare with the predicted specific heat. Then of course you can put an inert filler in the chamber and calibrate your calorimetry against the resistor heaters (both temperature and rate of rise / fall of temperature).
Calorimetry is hard - so anyone who does it seriously does these sort of cross-checks. There is someone here who is still trying to decipher a mystery factor of 2 in a calorimetry system for measuring X-ray power. We know (from other measurements) that his results are wrong, but he hasn't been able to find the problem.
I don't know anything about the scientists who "observed" this and whether there were experts in this sort of measurement - as opposed to experts in chemistry or nuclear physics.
Again all this is assuming unintentional errors. If you allow for fraud there are a lot of ways they could have done this.
The temperature could be close to correct, but if the emissivity is wrong then the power output is lower. The cylinder in the photos is clearly grey, not black (there are darker object visible), but that can't be quantified from the picture. In addition, it is not the visible light emissivity that matters, but the mid to near infrared, and that can be very different.
I agree that a factor of ~5. is a big error, but not impossible. It could also be one of many smaller errors that add up.
Of course if it is fraud, then the experiment could have been faked in all sorts of ways.
My skepticism remains - there is just no clear explanation of how chemistry can effect nuclear reactions (with the exception of some special case very-narrow line width reactions unrelated to this).
Was it really 480C? Thermal imaging temperature sensors typically look at the ratio of light at different wavelengths (or cheap ones may just look at one wavelength). Depending on the surface coating the emissivity can have a strong variation with wavelength or temperature. I don't know why they didn't have some thermocouples on the system, but even if they did, they need to know the emissivity to know the power output. The object is visibly non-black so this could be a very large factor. (5X is needed to invalidate the experiment). When the camera was calibrated with boiling water, what was the target? Even if the same material, the emission curve is different at higher temperatures .
Sounds like they were using 3-phase power - confusion about Y vs Delta connections? Its a bit confusing though since the test device only seems to have 2 leads.
It isn't clear where the power leads go. One problem with the paper is that there is no diagram, no indication of where and how the electrical power was measured, except to give the model number of the meter (not how it was hooked up). There is plenty of room in that lab for energy storage if the project were a fraud.
"demonstrations" are not how science is done. Scientific publications give enough details for other people to duplicate the experiments. If they want to keep it secret, that is fine, but they can't expect scientists to take their word for what is going on.
They are getting a lot of objections because their claim is so extraordinary. They basically have a device that does something incredibly valuable but they won't say exactly how, and based on physics that is not understood. What is the last time a claim like this was true?
If you read carefully, the glow was from an earlier test. The main tests was a lower temperature. The main test was at a claimed ~480C which is not hot enough to glow visibly in room lights. You have to rely on the calibration of his thermal camera - a notoriously finicky device when looking at non-standard surfaces .
If not a fraud:
The surface emissivity may be far from 1, giving an incorrect power output and temperature
The camera may be mis-calibrated for that surface
The 360W heater power may be wrong.
If a fraud:
His power meter may mis-adjusted, or only measuring one phase out of 2.
The camera may have an incorrect calibration intentionally loaded.
high frequency AC power may be heating the unit
The whole test could be a lie - you can publish anything you want in a non-refereed journal.
I'd like to believe that it is just a mistake
Experiments take time and money. The initial paper needs to be sufficiently detailed and convincing or other scientists will not waste their time.
You are missing the 3rd possibility of a measurement error. This is what happened with the FTL neutrinos and may well be what is going on here. Measuring power from thermal emission is very difficult to do correctly and is not the standard way to do calorimitry. The difficult is because real materials are not black bodies and their emission can vary substantially with wavelength AND temperature. Some systems (like stars) you don't have much choice, but for laboratory sized objects there are better ways to measure power output.
Any time you see a physical effect that was not predicted by theory it indicates the need for very careful scrutiny. Every once in a while it is a breakthrough, but the great majority of the time it is a mistake. This is especially true for laboratory scale experiments. Even the astronomical measurements that found "dark energy" were not a complete surprise, there were theories that predicted this.
Muon and antimatter catalyzed fusion are based on well understood physics (the rate at which muons catalyze fusion can be calculated by any graduate physics student). So far though these schemes have insurmountable "technical" issues: The muons stick to the helium and can't be re-used, and the anti-protons require too much energy to produce (and probably anhillate too often).
The research is legitimate because it is possible that there is a way around these problems. I think its unlikely, but the value if you succeed is so high that it is worth some effort.
The other style of cold-fusion is really a form of : we have this gadget that gets hot due to some "new" physics. That would be OK, except it us usually coupled with "it is a secret process, so we won't give you full access to the machine"
If it is just a case of verifying the experiment, then it is easy. If the inventors are deliberately pulling a scam, then you would need complete access to the device, including dis-assembly. The device only produces a about a kilowatt - you can supply that on very fine wire hidden in the support structure if you want.
Your scheme has merit. Its complicated though, in a lot of fields there are only a very small number of experts who are qualified to review a paper, and you would need some way to get the "right" people doing the reviews. A paper with a provocative title like Kip Thorne's "Wormholes, Time Machines and the Weak Energy Condition" is likely to attract a hoard of people who are in no way qualified to evaluate the work. We see the same effect on Slashdot where a very technical article will be referenced and there will be a few comments from knowledgeable people, a lot will be from people who don't have the background to understand the original article.
Still - I absolutely agree that we need a fix, but it is a tricky problem.
Its not just the scientists. Laboratories are judged (and to some extent funded) based on the total impact of their publications. You get there with a few easy steps:
1) public decides that funding science is good
2). lots of organizations compete for limited funding
3). Public needs to decide how to allocate funding and needs a metric for measuring the performance of these organizations
4) Public decides that peer review is a good metric
5) Important publications are sent to the journals that have other important publications, those that are rejected go to lower level journals. This establishes a hierarchy of journals.
6). The public considers publishing in higher "impact" journals as representing more value.
It is all logical, and a difficult system to fix. If I have a really good publication, I am hurting my career and my laboratory and coworkers by not publishing it in one of the premier journals. I'm even hurting science because by publishing in a lower impact journal, my (presumed brilliant and important) publication will be read by fewer scientists.
As an aside, a lot of the published material is also available to the public for free (all my stuff is also in SLAC pubs as is required by DOE), but these do not rate as high on a google search so you will have a more difficult time finding them. Google, like everyone else, gives higher ratings to the prestigious journals.
I wish I knew how to fix this. It is quite frustrating that 3rd party companies are paid for my work. To add insult to injury, I often review papers for these journals - and am not paid for the reviews. I could turn down the review requests, but peer review IS a vital part of science.
To the previous poster - the problem with non-anonymous reviews is the risk of "trading" good reviews, retaliation etc if the reviewers are known. Scientists are people, as easily tempted to misbehavior as any other group.
Don't equivelence principal experiments test this due to virtual anti-matter in normal matter? Maybe there isn't enough sensitivity?
A direct test is certainly nicer.
In general relativity, gravity is a warping of space and EVERYTHING falls at exactly the same speed. This has been tested to very high accuracy in a variety of experiments. (see eotvos experiment)
There are other theories of gravity where this doesn't necessarily need to be true and antimatter and matter might fall at different rates. The eotvos type experiments have indirectly tested this since there is some amount of virtual antimatter in normal objects (from quantum fluctuations), but a direct measurement would be a nice demonstration.
This is one of those experiments were people are pretty sure of the answer, but getting a different result would be very important to physics.