A really good point. There is a strong argument that the first thing you should do on detecting an alien civilization is to attack with stealth R-bombs (or substitute your favorite interstellar weapon). Of the possible outcomes:
1. they were hostile: you got them first, you win!
2. They were incredibly more advanced than you: The attack will seem cute to them, sort of like a kitten pouncing you your toes. Maybe they will post pictures of you on their tentacle-book site.
3. They were friendly: Sad, but some other civilization would have gotten them if you hadn't.
If you don't attack:
1: they r-bomb you 2: no change 3: someone else destroys them, and if they don't you will just wind up competing for resources anyway.
More seriously, I think its a great idea to look for signs of alien intelligence as long as we under no circumstances try to contact them.
Remember, when the guys on the ships meet the guys on the shore, you want to be the guys on the ships......
A lot of earlier work was also done by more people that is suggested by the popular literature. The time and space transforms in Einstein's relativity are called the "Lorentz transforms". I'm not in any way trying to reduce the importance of what Einstein did, but he wasn't working in a vacuum.
Still, you are right that science today seems to require more people and resources. I don't know if this is fundamental - its possible that we really have found all the "easy" experiments to do, but someone may well come along with a breakthrough that proves that wrong.
The post title seemed to be emphasizing the decline of science, not the in increasing number of resources required to do it.
There IS ground breaking science. Dark matter, dark energy, experimental measurements of cosmological inflation: our picture of the large scale structure of the universe has changed dramatically. Higgs bosons, neutrino mass: our picture of the microscopic structure of the universe has changed. We've found hundreds of extra-solar planets. We've built giant particle accelerators and telescopes, huge computers and data networks, peta-watt and X-ray lasers. We've sequenced the DNA of many creatures, including some that are extinct - and which we may bring back.We have pictures from the surface of a moon of Saturn, and an car driving around Mars.
One could imagine a small state with the resources to launch a few ICBMs - North Korea may be almost there. A defense against a small launch might well make military sense even if the cost of the interceptors far exceeded the cost of the ICBMs.
As almost everyone has pointed out, the original article's use of "math" is completely incorrect. Most things called "science" aren't most things claimed to be "mathematically impossible' are no such thing.
The problem is that it isn't a very secure limit unless you are in a light-tight room. If the system is modulating lighting LEDs, then it may possible to snoop on the AC power lines. I could imagine making the lighting system secure, but its not trivial. If you want security there are lots of encryption methods that are much more secure. If you are really worried about snooping (defense work), then you need a certified RF shielded room in any case.
It might be useful for separating bandwidth from different areas, but only if its total bandwidth is comparable to that of a modern wireless system.
I'd be surprised if it were lower power. RF is very efficient, and detectors very low noise. Basically RF detectors are limited by thermal noise ~1/40 ev, while photo detectors can't measure less than 1 photon (~1ev) and most are ~100X worse than that.
Avoiding frequency congestion would be useful if the bandwidth is competitive with wireless.
Even if they clear you of the child porn charges and expunge the records, they will probably hang onto your computer, and ALL your backup devices (thats standard practice), until they are done investigating - could be a couple of years.
In scanning all your your hardware, they may find that you've illegally downloaded Beatles tunes. Maybe somewhere in your vast legal porn collection they find a picture that is actually child porn (its not like you can distinguish an 17 year old form an 18 year old with perfect accuracy). Law enforcement will try to prosecute so that they don't look like they've wasted all their money investigating for nothing.
I just don't see any motivation to take such a chance .
If everything goes perfectly, then you wind up paying for bandwidth for other people to use.
The government funds labs partially based on the number of publications they publish in "high impact" (almost always non-public) journals. Write your congressman (really!) that publicly funded research needs to be freely available, and that government needs to stop funding science based on publications in non-free sources.
Of course in that case you need to suggest a different metric for scientific success to allow the government to allocate limited funds between labs. This I think is the big sticking point.
I'm a scientist at a big national lab (SLAC). We do open source / collaboratively write some code. There is a real-time distributed control system "EPICS" that is developed and maintained by multiple labs. There are programs like LIAR, ELEGANT, GENESIS, etc that are widely used for accelerator design optimization. For widely used programs like these, it is wort the (very large) effort to support them and make them usable. Even with this effort through, I dare anyone to get EPICS running without help from someone who has already done it. (all the components are free to download from Argonne national lab, and source is available).
I've written a tone of "code", mostly Matlab scripts that are used for everything from optimizing the operation of the accelerator to electronics design. Anyone who wants a copy can have one - but it won't do them any good. This sort of technical code simply can't be used by anyone except the original writer, or someone that writer has trained. The effort required to make this code general purpose and well documented enough for others to use is larger than the original writing of the code.
So, I think the solution we have (at least at the big labs) works. Most code written by researchers is not worth the effort to make it general use, though it is often available to anyone who really wants it. The general purpose code IS open source, collaboratively written.
A lot of people work in situations where they cannot have internet access. I spend a lot of time on overwater airliners - typically no internet. I'm often in countries where internet access is unreliable, or untrustworthy. The facility where I work has areas where cell and wireless are not available.
I cannot use cloud-only applications even if I wanted to, which I don't. I'm actually quite happy with the functionality of microsoft apps, but if they move to a cloud-only model, I will need to switch to some alternative.
I think that people focus too much on "critical" systems and cyber->physical attacks, and not enough on the value of privately held information. My personal information (photographs, writings, etc) are quite valuable to me. The loss of my personal copies of my financial and legal information would cost me a large amount of time to recover. The loss of my purchased media and software would represent a significant financial loss. I take normal steps to protect my information, but I'm sure it is not safe against a carefully planned attack by experts. Very conservatively this is thousands of dollars in value to me, possibly much higher. (here I am assuming that my backups are destroyed as well in this hypothetical attaci).
Multiply my loss by say 100 MILLION and the damage done is quite large - without a single photogenic explosion or train wreck. Think of how many people have their valuable information on insecure home computers.
An attack on insecure data can also cause a lot of disruption and financial chaos. Huge numbers of credit card and bank account numbers and passwords released, fake purchases made, etc.
Free and wealthy countries like the US are especially vulnerable as they have significant information assets, and a large and vulnerable computer infrastructure.
I think it was a serious strategic error when the US (through stuxnet) launched a cyber attack on a national nuclear facility. It demonstrated that we consider cyber attacks a very different issues from physical attacks, and made it very difficult for us to respond physically to such attacks. We have changed our battle ground from one where we have absolute superiority (conventional warfare) to one where we are quite weak (cyber warfare). Sun Tzu would not approve.
In principal you can compress and expand at constant temperature by exchanging heat with the outside air and get high (ideal) efficiency. Imagine many stages of compressors (or expanders) spaced by heat exchangers to ambient. In the limit of LOTS of compressors and expanders, the air never gets hot, and there is no efficiency loss. Real high presure compressors usually have a few stages with coolers inbetween.
I don't know if there is a mechanical trick to make this practical, and I'm too lazy to calculate how many stages you would need to have reasonable (say 80%) efficiency. Maybe some trick to do this is part of their technology. (for example you could imagine all sorts of clever water-spray heat exchangers).
I'm still not convinced that air is a good way to store energy, but there is no fundamental reason it is inefficient.
Are you sure? We don't know much about their mental abilities or emotions. They might be too passive or too aggressive, or simply have incompatible responses to situations to live with modern humans.
Does this lead to suggesting that the government downplay risks since the fear causes more injuries that the actual risk? Should we avoid technologies that scare people even if there is not data to support that fear?
I think the study is probably valid, but I think people need to be very careful on how this information is incorporated into policy.
We do have data. Natural radiation levels vary considerably with location. It is of course difficult to separate effects since lots of other things also vary with location, but there is so much data available that studies should be pretty good
Yes, flexibility, moment of inertia etc. differences might make bicycling more efficient, but that is not how the device is claimed to work, and any improvement it provides would be accidental. It would be fairly straightforward to design a crank with an adjustable moment of inertia and spring constant, so the fact that they aren't used suggests that any gains are very small.
The Z-crank doesn't work due to basic mechanics. The various warp-drive and wormhole designs are usually not provably impossible, though it is very unlikely that they work (due to quantum effects), and require material (negative energy density matter) that probably can't exist in the required densities, and typically need engineering on a difficult to imagine scale.
The analysis in the article is OK, but this is a tricky enough statistics question that only real experts in statistics can evaluate how likely it is that lead is the cause of the increase in crime rate, as opposed to just a correlation. This goes well beyond any generalized sqrt(N) type statistics, or simple correlations.
I am not disagreeing (or agreeing) with the results of the study, my statistics background (and I'm a working physicist) is simply not good enough to evaluate this work.
Unfortunately the way projects are funded, there is strong pressure to minimize the initial cost, even if the total cost in the long run will be higher. "operating" costs can usually be taken into account, but most funding agencies are very reluctant to spend more money not for future non-approved upgrades.
There is a lot of work on alternate ways to build accelerators, some of it well funded like BELLA at LBNL, FACET at SLAC, and the muon-collider from Fermilab . While some of these ideas are very promising in the long run, they are decades away from being usable for a high energy high luminosity machine like ILC. Right now the only practical alternatives are room temperature accelerators (like SLAC), and superconducting machines like DESY/FLASH or CEBAF. Several years ago a comparison was done, an it was decided that superconducting was better for this application.
They care, you are just confusing customers with products. As has been said many times, the users of facebook are the product, the advertisers are the customers. There is no reason for a company to care about what its product thinks as long as it is confident that they won't run off or cause trouble.
Its dramatically saved development time - the physicists can write code that does what they need, rather than specifying in enough detail for the software department. This reduced our development times for new control functions from months to days. We originally planned to gradually replace the Matlab with lower level code, but Matlab (operated in text mode without GUIs) has been very reliable, and the machine operates with very high uptime. The code is also readable by the operations staff who can modify / improve it if needed. The Matlab code interacts with an EPICS distributed control system.
Code that needs to have fast response, or to be realtime is not written in matlab. Hardware protection code is generally in PLC type logic and safety systems use certified safety PLC like controllers ( don't know much about this).
The LCLS (our X-ray laser) operates with something like 95% of scheduled uptime (~9 months a year, 24-hours a day, for the last few years), and that includes probably dozen constantly running Matlab scripts and feedbacks,and hundreds of real time processor crates, not to mention a kilometer of high power RF systems (many of them 50 yeras old), 2 kilometers of vacuum system, undulators, x-ray controls and diagnostics, and the experimental end stations. Its by a significant margin the brightest (photons/%bw/mm^2/mr^2) X-ray source every built, and substantially exceeds all of its design parameters.
I have personally observed a digital camera (Nikon D200 I think), interfering with the navigation receiver on a small plane. Every time we took a picture the VOR needles would jump slightly. We were at cruise altitude and VFR so it wasn't a problem, but it would have been disturbing if it happened low on an ILS approach.
I think the issue is that most electronics will not interfere with aircraft electronics, but a couple of things to consider:
The transmitter powers add - so a plane with 400 activated cell phones will have a lot more interference than a plane with a few.
Normally communication frequencies are well separated from navigation frequencies, but a broken electronics transmitter could possibly transmit off frequency.
All that said, I think the risk to the airplane is very small. OTOH, we are very intolerant of risks in commercial aviation, it isn't clear how this compares to other risks that we work to avoid.
Software that interacts with the real world needs some way to handle errors. We have a distributed control system (MATLAB / EPICS based) that runs our accelerator (SLAC). The code needs to deal with a hardware device that is broken and has returned a nonsensical value, or does not return anything. This needs to be dealt with in some way - whether it is by throwing an exception or by checking the return from the routine that made the call. The error handling can be fairly complex, some devices are vital to operation and an error requires that the machine be stopped, others are at least partially redundant and you can continue to operate, though possibly with reduced capacity.
BTW: personnel safety and hardware protection are handled separately.
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A really good point. There is a strong argument that the first thing you should do on detecting an alien civilization is to attack with stealth R-bombs (or substitute your favorite interstellar weapon). Of the possible outcomes:
1. they were hostile: you got them first, you win!
2. They were incredibly more advanced than you: The attack will seem cute to them, sort of like a kitten pouncing you your toes. Maybe they will post pictures of you on their tentacle-book site.
3. They were friendly: Sad, but some other civilization would have gotten them if you hadn't.
If you don't attack:
1: they r-bomb you
2: no change
3: someone else destroys them, and if they don't you will just wind up competing for resources anyway.
More seriously, I think its a great idea to look for signs of alien intelligence as long as we under no circumstances try to contact them.
Remember, when the guys on the ships meet the guys on the shore, you want to be the guys on the ships......
A lot of earlier work was also done by more people that is suggested by the popular literature. The time and space transforms in Einstein's relativity are called the "Lorentz transforms". I'm not in any way trying to reduce the importance of what Einstein did, but he wasn't working in a vacuum.
Still, you are right that science today seems to require more people and resources. I don't know if this is fundamental - its possible that we really have found all the "easy" experiments to do, but someone may well come along with a breakthrough that proves that wrong.
The post title seemed to be emphasizing the decline of science, not the in increasing number of resources required to do it.
There IS ground breaking science. Dark matter, dark energy, experimental measurements of cosmological inflation: our picture of the large scale structure of the universe has changed dramatically. Higgs bosons, neutrino mass: our picture of the microscopic structure of the universe has changed. We've found hundreds of extra-solar planets. We've built giant particle accelerators and telescopes, huge computers and data networks, peta-watt and X-ray lasers. We've sequenced the DNA of many creatures, including some that are extinct - and which we may bring back.We have pictures from the surface of a moon of Saturn, and an car driving around Mars.
One could imagine a small state with the resources to launch a few ICBMs - North Korea may be almost there. A defense against a small launch might well make military sense even if the cost of the interceptors far exceeded the cost of the ICBMs.
As almost everyone has pointed out, the original article's use of "math" is completely incorrect. Most things called "science" aren't most things claimed to be "mathematically impossible' are no such thing.
The problem is that it isn't a very secure limit unless you are in a light-tight room. If the system is modulating lighting LEDs, then it may possible to snoop on the AC power lines. I could imagine making the lighting system secure, but its not trivial. If you want security there are lots of encryption methods that are much more secure. If you are really worried about snooping (defense work), then you need a certified RF shielded room in any case.
It might be useful for separating bandwidth from different areas, but only if its total bandwidth is comparable to that of a modern wireless system.
I'd be surprised if it were lower power. RF is very efficient, and detectors very low noise. Basically RF detectors are limited by thermal noise ~1/40 ev, while photo detectors can't measure less than 1 photon (~1ev) and most are ~100X worse than that.
Avoiding frequency congestion would be useful if the bandwidth is competitive with wireless.
It requires line of sight or a limited number of bounces. Is it faster, cheaper, or lower power than conventional wireless?
Even if they clear you of the child porn charges and expunge the records, they will probably hang onto your computer, and ALL your backup devices (thats standard practice), until they are done investigating - could be a couple of years.
In scanning all your your hardware, they may find that you've illegally downloaded Beatles tunes. Maybe somewhere in your vast legal porn collection they find a picture that is actually child porn (its not like you can distinguish an 17 year old form an 18 year old with perfect accuracy). Law enforcement will try to prosecute so that they don't look like they've wasted all their money investigating for nothing.
I just don't see any motivation to take such a chance .
If everything goes perfectly, then you wind up paying for bandwidth for other people to use.
The government funds labs partially based on the number of publications they publish in "high impact" (almost always non-public) journals. Write your congressman (really!) that publicly funded research needs to be freely available, and that government needs to stop funding science based on publications in non-free sources.
Of course in that case you need to suggest a different metric for scientific success to allow the government to allocate limited funds between labs. This I think is the big sticking point.
I'm a scientist at a big national lab (SLAC). We do open source / collaboratively write some code. There is a real-time distributed control system "EPICS" that is developed and maintained by multiple labs. There are programs like LIAR, ELEGANT, GENESIS, etc that are widely used for accelerator design optimization. For widely used programs like these, it is wort the (very large) effort to support them and make them usable. Even with this effort through, I dare anyone to get EPICS running without help from someone who has already done it. (all the components are free to download from Argonne national lab, and source is available).
I've written a tone of "code", mostly Matlab scripts that are used for everything from optimizing the operation of the accelerator to electronics design. Anyone who wants a copy can have one - but it won't do them any good. This sort of technical code simply can't be used by anyone except the original writer, or someone that writer has trained. The effort required to make this code general purpose and well documented enough for others to use is larger than the original writing of the code.
So, I think the solution we have (at least at the big labs) works. Most code written by researchers is not worth the effort to make it general use, though it is often available to anyone who really wants it. The general purpose code IS open source, collaboratively written.
A lot of people work in situations where they cannot have internet access. I spend a lot of time on overwater airliners - typically no internet. I'm often in countries where internet access is unreliable, or untrustworthy. The facility where I work has areas where cell and wireless are not available.
I cannot use cloud-only applications even if I wanted to, which I don't. I'm actually quite happy with the functionality of microsoft apps, but if they move to a cloud-only model, I will need to switch to some alternative.
I think that people focus too much on "critical" systems and cyber->physical attacks, and not enough on the value of privately held information. My personal information (photographs, writings, etc) are quite valuable to me. The loss of my personal copies of my financial and legal information would cost me a large amount of time to recover. The loss of my purchased media and software would represent a significant financial loss. I take normal steps to protect my information, but I'm sure it is not safe against a carefully planned attack by experts. Very conservatively this is thousands of dollars in value to me, possibly much higher. (here I am assuming that my backups are destroyed as well in this hypothetical attaci).
Multiply my loss by say 100 MILLION and the damage done is quite large - without a single photogenic explosion or train wreck. Think of how many people have their valuable information on insecure home computers.
An attack on insecure data can also cause a lot of disruption and financial chaos. Huge numbers of credit card and bank account numbers and passwords released, fake purchases made, etc.
Free and wealthy countries like the US are especially vulnerable as they have significant information assets, and a large and vulnerable computer infrastructure.
I think it was a serious strategic error when the US (through stuxnet) launched a cyber attack on a national nuclear facility. It demonstrated that we consider cyber attacks a very different issues from physical attacks, and made it very difficult for us to respond physically to such attacks. We have changed our battle ground from one where we have absolute superiority (conventional warfare) to one where we are quite weak (cyber warfare). Sun Tzu would not approve.
In principal you can compress and expand at constant temperature by exchanging heat with the outside air and get high (ideal) efficiency. Imagine many stages of compressors (or expanders) spaced by heat exchangers to ambient. In the limit of LOTS of compressors and expanders, the air never gets hot, and there is no efficiency loss. Real high presure compressors usually have a few stages with coolers inbetween.
I don't know if there is a mechanical trick to make this practical, and I'm too lazy to calculate how many stages you would need to have reasonable (say 80%) efficiency. Maybe some trick to do this is part of their technology. (for example you could imagine all sorts of clever water-spray heat exchangers).
I'm still not convinced that air is a good way to store energy, but there is no fundamental reason it is inefficient.
Are you sure? We don't know much about their mental abilities or emotions. They might be too passive or too aggressive, or simply have incompatible responses to situations to live with modern humans.
Does this lead to suggesting that the government downplay risks since the fear causes more injuries that the actual risk? Should we avoid technologies that scare people even if there is not data to support that fear?
I think the study is probably valid, but I think people need to be very careful on how this information is incorporated into policy.
We do have data. Natural radiation levels vary considerably with location. It is of course difficult to separate effects since lots of other things also vary with location, but there is so much data available that studies should be pretty good
Yes, flexibility, moment of inertia etc. differences might make bicycling more efficient, but that is not how the device is claimed to work, and any improvement it provides would be accidental. It would be fairly straightforward to design a crank with an adjustable moment of inertia and spring constant, so the fact that they aren't used suggests that any gains are very small.
The Z-crank doesn't work due to basic mechanics. The various warp-drive and wormhole designs are usually not provably impossible, though it is very unlikely that they work (due to quantum effects), and require material (negative energy density matter) that probably can't exist in the required densities, and typically need engineering on a difficult to imagine scale.
The analysis in the article is OK, but this is a tricky enough statistics question that only real experts in statistics can evaluate how likely it is that lead is the cause of the increase in crime rate, as opposed to just a correlation. This goes well beyond any generalized sqrt(N) type statistics, or simple correlations.
I am not disagreeing (or agreeing) with the results of the study, my statistics background (and I'm a working physicist) is simply not good enough to evaluate this work.
Unfortunately the way projects are funded, there is strong pressure to minimize the initial cost, even if the total cost in the long run will be higher. "operating" costs can usually be taken into account, but most funding agencies are very reluctant to spend more money not for future non-approved upgrades.
There is a lot of work on alternate ways to build accelerators, some of it well funded like BELLA at LBNL, FACET at SLAC, and the muon-collider from Fermilab . While some of these ideas are very promising in the long run, they are decades away from being usable for a high energy high luminosity machine like ILC. Right now the only practical alternatives are room temperature accelerators (like SLAC), and superconducting machines like DESY/FLASH or CEBAF. Several years ago a comparison was done, an it was decided that superconducting was better for this application.
They care, you are just confusing customers with products. As has been said many times, the users of facebook are the product, the advertisers are the customers. There is no reason for a company to care about what its product thinks as long as it is confident that they won't run off or cause trouble.
Its dramatically saved development time - the physicists can write code that does what they need, rather than specifying in enough detail for the software department. This reduced our development times for new control functions from months to days. We originally planned to gradually replace the Matlab with lower level code, but Matlab (operated in text mode without GUIs) has been very reliable, and the machine operates with very high uptime. The code is also readable by the operations staff who can modify / improve it if needed. The Matlab code interacts with an EPICS distributed control system.
Code that needs to have fast response, or to be realtime is not written in matlab. Hardware protection code is generally in PLC type logic and safety systems use certified safety PLC like controllers ( don't know much about this).
The LCLS (our X-ray laser) operates with something like 95% of scheduled uptime (~9 months a year, 24-hours a day, for the last few years), and that includes probably dozen constantly running Matlab scripts and feedbacks,and hundreds of real time processor crates, not to mention a kilometer of high power RF systems (many of them 50 yeras old), 2 kilometers of vacuum system, undulators, x-ray controls and diagnostics, and the experimental end stations. Its by a significant margin the brightest (photons/%bw/mm^2/mr^2) X-ray source every built, and substantially exceeds all of its design parameters.
So no, we're not crazy - (just damn good. ).
I have personally observed a digital camera (Nikon D200 I think), interfering with the navigation receiver on a small plane. Every time we took a picture the VOR needles would jump slightly. We were at cruise altitude and VFR so it wasn't a problem, but it would have been disturbing if it happened low on an ILS approach.
I think the issue is that most electronics will not interfere with aircraft electronics, but a couple of things to consider:
The transmitter powers add - so a plane with 400 activated cell phones will have a lot more interference than a plane with a few.
Normally communication frequencies are well separated from navigation frequencies, but a broken electronics transmitter could possibly transmit off frequency.
All that said, I think the risk to the airplane is very small. OTOH, we are very intolerant of risks in commercial aviation, it isn't clear how this compares to other risks that we work to avoid.
Software that interacts with the real world needs some way to handle errors. We have a distributed control system (MATLAB / EPICS based) that runs our accelerator (SLAC). The code needs to deal with a hardware device that is broken and has returned a nonsensical value, or does not return anything. This needs to be dealt with in some way - whether it is by throwing an exception or by checking the return from the routine that made the call. The error handling can be fairly complex, some devices are vital to operation and an error requires that the machine be stopped, others are at least partially redundant and you can continue to operate, though possibly with reduced capacity.
BTW: personnel safety and hardware protection are handled separately.