No, he essentially had Pilot Error (he ran out of fuel).
And out of common courtesy, they didn't leave him to freeze on the ice, they took him in, gave him clothing and shelter, and offered to fly him home and ship his plane after.
That seems pretty courteous. He, of course, would like another level of courtesy, but just because they aren't accomodating him to every level of his wishes, doesn't mean that his hosts are being incourteous.
I'd think that many military forces would be happy to have their personnel treated exactly like this.
I wasn't disputing your 6%, just saying that we never get anything that precise here.
11%:
http://wwwa.accuweather.com/adcbin/public/local_ in dex_day.asp?zipcode=10001&metric=0&partner=accuwea ther&day=16
Which is what leads me to believe that different methods may be used for different areas.
Look, I don't want to be rude, but show me something besides your (so far) wrong opinions (in every case). Just restating something over and over again doesn't make it so. If your fellow at the Museum was correct for NYC, it shouldn't be that hard to find a link on the NWS website to prove it.
Or in NYese (I lived on LI for two years), put up or shut up.
He wasn't my friend, he was some guy we met on a science class field trip.
So I point you to two sites that say clearly that "some guy" of unknown credentials is just wrong, you can't point me to anything that says he's right, and you fall back on "it's possible that it's figured differently for different regions"? Point me to some evidence of that. Sheesh!
As far as the 6% chance of thunderstorms goes, don't take my word for it, look it up:
http://wwwa.accuweather.com/adcbin/public/local_ in dex_day.asp?zipcode=91104&metric=0&partner=accuwea ther&day=1
Sheesh again. I'm not making this stuff up as I go along.
Given a choice between your friend, and everything that the NWS says, you pick your friend? I can find 10 examples on the web in one search that say differently.
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Billings/talk/talk16.sht ml
Counterexamples - I grew up on the Great Plains. Every day, the chance of rain would be 10-20%. Almost every day, the sun would rise and set on clear blue skies as far as the eye could see (or equivalently, over the 200 mile radius the Doppler radars in Amarillo could see). It most certainly did NOT rain every day over 10 or 20% of the forecast area. If it did, it wouldn't be known as the Great American Desert, and the average rainfall would be more than 8 inches per year. 10-20% of the time, thunderstorms would pop up and it might rain. It isn't an ergodic process.
Today, the forecast for LA is 6% probability of thunderstorms. Is it going to thunderstorm over 6% of the LA basin? Not a chance. There is a 94% chance that it won't rain anywhere in the LA basin. Check the news tomorrow and see if it rained here. It won't have, I'll bet money on it. My counterexample disproves your hypothesis.
I think the thing about the PNW was a joke - Cecil is in the humor business.
yet American scientists who refuse military work are exceedingly rare today.
This is just plain wrong on the face of it. Does Mr. Anonymous Submitter truly believe that most American scientists today work for the military? Most work for universities, the DOE, NIH, NASA, or industry. Do they stand on a soap box and yell (as the quoted scientists in the Village Voice article) "I refuse to accept military money! My principles are better than yours!"? No, they simply choose to work in fields where the military doesn't. Say, on cancer or HIV, or in astrobiology, or one of the fifty-seven branches of physics that have no military applications.
What a load of bullshit. False premises, holier than thou egos, and let's not even get into the argument that those scientists who self-righteously refuse military money are all too happy to accept the benefits of living in a country where their freedom to be self-righteous assholes is guaranteed by a large military budget.
I say this as a fairly liberal scientist who would rather not work on weapons of mass destruction, but isn't so naive to think that they aren't a necessary evil.
Hubble has to be able to point with great accuracy and precision to a few milli-arcseconds for long periods of time. The vibrations of all the plumbing and fans necessary to sustain life on the ISS would kill its ability to look at it, even if you could get it there, and even if it could operate at 240 miles altitude and not 370 miles as it was designed (lots more atmosphere down there - contaminants).
ISS is at 240 miles, and it's damn hard to get the equipment and supplies necessary to support life there as is. Geosync is 22,000 miles, two orders of magnitude farther away, and this guy wants to put multiple space stations there with people hanging around to do occasional maintenance? Who is going to pay for that when it will be orders of magnitude cheaper just to send up another unmanned geosync satellite just like they do now?
Then, some day in the long run, you use these stations to assemble and launch real space-ships, ones that don't have to deal with the problems of getting to and from the bottom of a gravity well.
How does the material to make "real space-ships" get to the stations? From the bottom of a gravity well, I'd imagine. And why do you think that geosync isn't still at the bottom of a gravity well? You're in orbit! By definition you're still in the earth's gravity well!
Ahh, dreams...
Yeah, dreams don't usually have to obey the laws of orbital mechanics.
Why does this get moderated as "interesting"? There's literally not a single sentence in it that makes sense.
Why do you think that NASA and SETI haven't looked at the nearest star systems? Holy cow. Assuming that other people don't do the obvious thing is a "reference for stupidity." Just because you're ignorant of it doesn't mean that they haven't.
For what it's worth, Alpha Centauri is a binary system - the habitable zone (the region of space where liquid water exists) is probably small or non-existent. It's not a great target for searches for life as we know it, or even just green life. Maybe there's something there, but if it doesn't look like something we understand, then how could we say there is life there? "Gee, I think that spectral line in the atmosphere means that there is silicon-based life on that planet." How the heck could you prove that? I think that line means that leprechauns inhabit that planet - my assertion is equally valid, and equally ridiculous.
Even so, I'm certain that SETI has looked at it for radio emissions. The fact that it wasn't on the front page of the NYT and that you didn't read about it means that they didn't find anything.
Hubble couldn't resolve a planet around Alpha Cen anyway - the star is roughly a billion times brighter than any planet would be. It would be drowned out. That's a mission for SIM and TPF.
$200M/year is not that much, except that it takes $600-700M every five years to run a Hubble reservicing mission, and that takes a shuttle. Shuttles tend to fail at a rate of about 4%.
One way or the other, the Hubble is coming down. NASA has a fixed budget (SIRTF launch is delayed, costing money to keep it functioning on the pad, and other project's budgets' get axed - going on right now), so you can either keep an old project up at a rough cost of 2 billion dollars (one servicing mission, one return mission, several years of $200M/yr operations), or you can have a shiny new Next Generation Space Telescope (the JWST) which is bigger and better. Congress probably won't increase NASA's budget by the amount necessary to have both.
I don't disagree with you, but recognize that any book that isn't to be lifted with a forklift has to make choices. Your book would have had different subject matter than the one we chose to write.
We discussed addressing at least some of these, but the book is already 460 pages, and we felt that these were out of the scope for the audience we chose.
We talk about web security where ever possible, but again, it's a big subject and one that deserves its own study once the student is ready. We try to point out where one should worry about it (hint - most of the time).
Budding web developers should also learn about good web design practices, and I had some good rants about that, which were lost on the cutting room floor.
>Wouldn't most of the book apply to Apache on any platform?
I believe this to be largely true, but haven't really kept up with what's available on other non-*nix platforms (cough - Windows), so didn't want to talk out of school.
We didn't mean to imply that only Linux could do this stuff, but you have to admit that LAMP is a better acronym than UAMP (Unix), BAMP (BSD), BLAMP (BSD/Linux), G/LAMP (GNU/Linux), MAMP (Mac OS X) or some combinatorial subset thereof. We say in the intro that most of the book is suitable not only for Linux, but most *nix-based machines.
But hey, LAMP is good marketing, and I didn't want to spend a year working on a book called BLAMP.
We wouldn't disagree with you on most of this. In fact, we spend a fair portion of the intro discussing online resources, and many if not most of our references are to online resources. I'm pretty sure that the two websites you mention are referenced in the book in appropriate places. We even say that Google and Google News are your best friends.
That said, lots of those online resources are out of date, poorly maintained, contradictory, and even if they weren't, how is a person new to the game supposed to figure out which ones to use and which ones to ignore, and even whether they should be using Perl or mod_perl or Embperl or CGI?
(I realize that any printed book will be out of date soon also, but at least it will be out of date in consistent ways.)
The purpose of the book was to put all those things together in one place, be consistent, show the differences and similarities, so that someone new to doing this could make intelligent choices.
We'd have been just as happy to not have to write Linux and Apache sections either, but those seemed necessary both from completeness, consistency, and security aspects.
This is probably not a necessary book for you as a professional web designer, but imagine someone just starting. We hope at least that it is useful to that person. And maybe even to you, if you had to take one book to a desert island to set up www.desertisland.com.
LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
And who does LeDuc think pays for those articles when the researchers buy them from him? The scientists don't pay for them out of their pockets. They use money from grants. Primarily federally funded grants. So it costs the taxpayers twice, once when the research is first done, and again when other researchers pay publishers outrageous fees to get those same taxpayer funded articles.
I've had three iPods, and they all skip when I take them for runs (not jogs). I don't try to use my iPod when I run anymore, which is too bad, it was nice.
As someone who regularly drives to Vegas from LA (for climbing, not gambling), I would much rather see a bullet train running from LA to Vegas. There's nothing like 200 miles of stop and go traffic in the middle of the Mojave desert (i.e., the middle of nowhere) on a Sunday evening to finish off a great weekend.
Re:more important things to do in space ...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 1
Plus strange quark matter is one of the few things you can point to and say what exactly it would be useful for. Aside from all its interesting properties, it might be a source of exothermic reactions. Shoot neutrons at it, get heat out.
Also, if strange quark matter exists, we now know that the ground state of the universe is not the one we live in, but rather the strange quark matter state.
Re:"Up" quarks and "down" quarks.
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 1
Because if one up quark were different than another up quark, the one that is different would not be a quark, it would be something else.
That sounds like semantics, but it isn't. It's physics. Quarks only have a few properties: mass, spin, color, charge, isospin. Change any of those and you don't have an up quark anymore, you have a different kind of quark.
Re:Quark Matter is Not New
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Quark stars are not a new idea either. The idea has been floating around for 20 years or more, and has been invoked to try to explain all sorts of cosmic events, gamma ray bursters, the Tunguska event, you name it. I've got a paper by Witten on this subject from the mid-80s.
The basic idea behind strange quark matter is really easy to understand, and has very little to do with quantum chromodynamics, and everything to do with thermodynamics. If you have two kinds of fermion (up, down) and squeeze them together (gravity), they'll reach a certain energy state determined by Fermi-Dirac statistics - the Pauli exclusion principle. If you thrown in another type of fermion (strange), and apply the same pressure, you'll get more particles in the same space because there are now more states for the fermions to occupy without running into the Pauli exclusion principle. A strange quark can have exactly the same energy as an up as a down, because they are still different. There are now three quarks occupying a certain energy level instead of two.
There are many very interesting implications of this which aren't mentioned in any article I've seen, including the possibility of exothermic reactions from such a ball of strange quark matter. That's sekrit code talk for something very exciting and far out which I won't mention explicitly because I'm not a crackpot. No, really! Witten and Fitch said it first anyway.
The theory is there. Now it'll be interesting to see if we can make any of this stuff in an accelerator.
Now let's see how this gets modded, since I'm the only person on/. who has ever published a paper in PRL on the subject of strange quark matter. I'm betting 2 at most.
A lot of people get paid extremely minimal amounts of money and work long, long, long, hard hours in a superclean environment to put together an amazing experiment and get a result that is staggering in its sensitivity and its implications for physics, and you want to point the fingers and talk about gross negligence.
Here's a clue. Having worked on a HEP experiment that got trashed through greed (someone wanted to steal a bunch of the expensive heavy metals for scrap), there are a many broken hearts in the SuperK researchers. HEP researchers are well known for putting in > 100 hour weeks on a regular basis, and not for the promise of stock options and early retirement at the end. Just physics data that they will spend years going through. The payoff is four pages in PRL.
Super-K's predecessor was almost denied funding because it had the nerve to obtain physics results from the neutrinos observed from SN1981A. It was designed and funded to look for proton decay, you see, and if those darn scientists can't stick to the mission, then it's gross negligence and cut their funding. Luckily wiser heads prevailed.
For what it's worth, it's a superclean environment and they probably want to continue to take steps to keep it that way. I will not speculate on why it happened, except to say that yes, it could be simple stupidity. These things happen when you are working out on the edge. No one has ever done this kind of stuff before, so there aren't rules. But not rebuilding the detector and not getting the funds to do so would be cutting off someone else's nose to spite your face - who else is going to know how to build this kind of thing better than the folks who did it, and learned from previous mistakes?
I find the chain reaction stuff unlikely though. If it's like the experiments I worked on, each PMT has it's own power supply, and any individual PMT is separate from those around it in most every way. It could be a bad HV power supply, but in general when those things go, they just stop working. Plus any individual HV card probably only supplies 12 or 25 tubes. PMTs are actually fairly robust devices. They're delicate, but we were using hand-me-downs from an experiment back in the 60s, still going strong. The original KamioKande started with hand-me-downs too.
More likely is that something went wrong with the fill in order to kill 4000 tubes all at once. But then again, it's something they've done multiple times, so what was different this time?
Who knows? All speculation. My heart goes out to the Ph.D thesis students who just had their graduation dates moved back arbitrarily, another year or more in grad school, poor bastards.
Slashdot Mirror
He had essentially a plane accident.
No, he essentially had Pilot Error (he ran out of fuel).
And out of common courtesy, they didn't leave him to freeze on the ice, they took him in, gave him clothing and shelter, and offered to fly him home and ship his plane after.
That seems pretty courteous. He, of course, would like another level of courtesy, but just because they aren't accomodating him to every level of his wishes, doesn't mean that his hosts are being incourteous.
I'd think that many military forces would be happy to have their personnel treated exactly like this.
I wasn't disputing your 6%, just saying that we never get anything that precise here.
_ in dex_day.asp?zipcode=10001&metric=0&partner=accuwea ther&day=16
11%:
http://wwwa.accuweather.com/adcbin/public/local
Which is what leads me to believe that different methods may be used for different areas.
Look, I don't want to be rude, but show me something besides your (so far) wrong opinions (in every case). Just restating something over and over again doesn't make it so. If your fellow at the Museum was correct for NYC, it shouldn't be that hard to find a link on the NWS website to prove it.
Or in NYese (I lived on LI for two years), put up or shut up.
Holy cow.
_ in dex_day.asp?zipcode=91104&metric=0&partner=accuwea ther&day=1
He wasn't my friend, he was some guy we met on a science class field trip.
So I point you to two sites that say clearly that "some guy" of unknown credentials is just wrong, you can't point me to anything that says he's right, and you fall back on "it's possible that it's figured differently for different regions"? Point me to some evidence of that. Sheesh!
As far as the 6% chance of thunderstorms goes, don't take my word for it, look it up:
http://wwwa.accuweather.com/adcbin/public/local
Sheesh again. I'm not making this stuff up as I go along.
Given a choice between your friend, and everything that the NWS says, you pick your friend? I can find 10 examples on the web in one search that say differently.
t ml
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Billings/talk/talk16.sh
Counterexamples - I grew up on the Great Plains. Every day, the chance of rain would be 10-20%. Almost every day, the sun would rise and set on clear blue skies as far as the eye could see (or equivalently, over the 200 mile radius the Doppler radars in Amarillo could see). It most certainly did NOT rain every day over 10 or 20% of the forecast area. If it did, it wouldn't be known as the Great American Desert, and the average rainfall would be more than 8 inches per year. 10-20% of the time, thunderstorms would pop up and it might rain. It isn't an ergodic process.
Today, the forecast for LA is 6% probability of thunderstorms. Is it going to thunderstorm over 6% of the LA basin? Not a chance. There is a 94% chance that it won't rain anywhere in the LA basin. Check the news tomorrow and see if it rained here. It won't have, I'll bet money on it. My counterexample disproves your hypothesis.
I think the thing about the PNW was a joke - Cecil is in the humor business.
You are incorrect:
m l
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_115b.ht
yet American scientists who refuse military work are exceedingly rare today.
This is just plain wrong on the face of it. Does Mr. Anonymous Submitter truly believe that most American scientists today work for the military? Most work for universities, the DOE, NIH, NASA, or industry. Do they stand on a soap box and yell (as the quoted scientists in the Village Voice article) "I refuse to accept military money! My principles are better than yours!"? No, they simply choose to work in fields where the military doesn't. Say, on cancer or HIV, or in astrobiology, or one of the fifty-seven branches of physics that have no military applications.
What a load of bullshit. False premises, holier than thou egos, and let's not even get into the argument that those scientists who self-righteously refuse military money are all too happy to accept the benefits of living in a country where their freedom to be self-righteous assholes is guaranteed by a large military budget.
I say this as a fairly liberal scientist who would rather not work on weapons of mass destruction, but isn't so naive to think that they aren't a necessary evil.
It's a lousy idea.
Hubble has to be able to point with great accuracy and precision to a few milli-arcseconds for long periods of time. The vibrations of all the plumbing and fans necessary to sustain life on the ISS would kill its ability to look at it, even if you could get it there, and even if it could operate at 240 miles altitude and not 370 miles as it was designed (lots more atmosphere down there - contaminants).
ISS is at 240 miles, and it's damn hard to get the equipment and supplies necessary to support life there as is. Geosync is 22,000 miles, two orders of magnitude farther away, and this guy wants to put multiple space stations there with people hanging around to do occasional maintenance? Who is going to pay for that when it will be orders of magnitude cheaper just to send up another unmanned geosync satellite just like they do now?
Then, some day in the long run, you use these stations to assemble and launch real space-ships, ones that don't have to deal with the problems of getting to and from the bottom of a gravity well.
How does the material to make "real space-ships" get to the stations? From the bottom of a gravity well, I'd imagine. And why do you think that geosync isn't still at the bottom of a gravity well? You're in orbit! By definition you're still in the earth's gravity well!
Ahh, dreams...
Yeah, dreams don't usually have to obey the laws of orbital mechanics.
Why does this get moderated as "interesting"? There's literally not a single sentence in it that makes sense.
Why do you think that NASA and SETI haven't looked at the nearest star systems? Holy cow. Assuming that other people don't do the obvious thing is a "reference for stupidity." Just because you're ignorant of it doesn't mean that they haven't.
For what it's worth, Alpha Centauri is a binary system - the habitable zone (the region of space where liquid water exists) is probably small or non-existent. It's not a great target for searches for life as we know it, or even just green life. Maybe there's something there, but if it doesn't look like something we understand, then how could we say there is life there? "Gee, I think that spectral line in the atmosphere means that there is silicon-based life on that planet." How the heck could you prove that? I think that line means that leprechauns inhabit that planet - my assertion is equally valid, and equally ridiculous.
Even so, I'm certain that SETI has looked at it for radio emissions. The fact that it wasn't on the front page of the NYT and that you didn't read about it means that they didn't find anything.
Hubble couldn't resolve a planet around Alpha Cen anyway - the star is roughly a billion times brighter than any planet would be. It would be drowned out. That's a mission for SIM and TPF.
It would be an amazing feat of technology to remotely service a device as complex as the Hubble without actual human presence.
Coming up with a reasonably inexpensive way to keep the Hubble working for another 30 years would be a huge gift to Science, mankind and our children.
In what universe do you live in which "amazing feat of technology" and "inexpensive" coincide?
Either spend a lot of money to keep Hubble up, or have a bigger, better JWST.
TPF http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF/tpf_index.html l
SIM http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/SIM/sim_index.htm
LISA http://lisa.jpl.nasa.gov/
Can you say what you will be doing in 7 years?
Let's see a schedule, then see if you can stick to it.
Didn't think so.
$200M/year is not that much, except that it takes $600-700M every five years to run a Hubble reservicing mission, and that takes a shuttle. Shuttles tend to fail at a rate of about 4%.
One way or the other, the Hubble is coming down. NASA has a fixed budget (SIRTF launch is delayed, costing money to keep it functioning on the pad, and other project's budgets' get axed - going on right now), so you can either keep an old project up at a rough cost of 2 billion dollars (one servicing mission, one return mission, several years of $200M/yr operations), or you can have a shiny new Next Generation Space Telescope (the JWST) which is bigger and better. Congress probably won't increase NASA's budget by the amount necessary to have both.
Future or past, you choose.
So why does my copy of 1.4rc3 (OS X) say that it's 1.5a under "About Mozilla"?
I don't disagree with you, but recognize that any book that isn't to be lifted with a forklift has to make choices. Your book would have had different subject matter than the one we chose to write.
We discussed addressing at least some of these, but the book is already 460 pages, and we felt that these were out of the scope for the audience we chose.
We talk about web security where ever possible, but again, it's a big subject and one that deserves its own study once the student is ready. We try to point out where one should worry about it (hint - most of the time).
Budding web developers should also learn about good web design practices, and I had some good rants about that, which were lost on the cutting room floor.
>Wouldn't most of the book apply to Apache on any platform?
I believe this to be largely true, but haven't really kept up with what's available on other non-*nix platforms (cough - Windows), so didn't want to talk out of school.
Thanks for buying the book!
We didn't mean to imply that only Linux could do this stuff, but you have to admit that LAMP is a better acronym than UAMP (Unix), BAMP (BSD), BLAMP (BSD/Linux), G/LAMP (GNU/Linux), MAMP (Mac OS X) or some combinatorial subset thereof. We say in the intro that most of the book is suitable not only for Linux, but most *nix-based machines.
But hey, LAMP is good marketing, and I didn't want to spend a year working on a book called BLAMP.
We wouldn't disagree with you on most of this. In fact, we spend a fair portion of the intro discussing online resources, and many if not most of our references are to online resources. I'm pretty sure that the two websites you mention are referenced in the book in appropriate places. We even say that Google and Google News are your best friends.
That said, lots of those online resources are out of date, poorly maintained, contradictory, and even if they weren't, how is a person new to the game supposed to figure out which ones to use and which ones to ignore, and even whether they should be using Perl or mod_perl or Embperl or CGI?
(I realize that any printed book will be out of date soon also, but at least it will be out of date in consistent ways.)
The purpose of the book was to put all those things together in one place, be consistent, show the differences and similarities, so that someone new to doing this could make intelligent choices.
We'd have been just as happy to not have to write Linux and Apache sections either, but those seemed necessary both from completeness, consistency, and security aspects.
This is probably not a necessary book for you as a professional web designer, but imagine someone just starting. We hope at least that it is useful to that person. And maybe even to you, if you had to take one book to a desert island to set up www.desertisland.com.
Open Source Web Book - the web site is www.opensourcewebbook.com, as www.lamp.com and www.oswb.com were taken.
LeDuc said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
And who does LeDuc think pays for those articles when the researchers buy them from him? The scientists don't pay for them out of their pockets. They use money from grants. Primarily federally funded grants. So it costs the taxpayers twice, once when the research is first done, and again when other researchers pay publishers outrageous fees to get those same taxpayer funded articles.
I've had three iPods, and they all skip when I take them for runs (not jogs). I don't try to use my iPod when I run anymore, which is too bad, it was nice.
As someone who regularly drives to Vegas from LA (for climbing, not gambling), I would much rather see a bullet train running from LA to Vegas. There's nothing like 200 miles of stop and go traffic in the middle of the Mojave desert (i.e., the middle of nowhere) on a Sunday evening to finish off a great weekend.
Plus strange quark matter is one of the few things you can point to and say what exactly it would be useful for. Aside from all its interesting properties, it might be a source of exothermic reactions. Shoot neutrons at it, get heat out.
Also, if strange quark matter exists, we now know that the ground state of the universe is not the one we live in, but rather the strange quark matter state.
Because if one up quark were different than another up quark, the one that is different would not be a quark, it would be something else.
That sounds like semantics, but it isn't. It's physics. Quarks only have a few properties: mass, spin, color, charge, isospin. Change any of those and you don't have an up quark anymore, you have a different kind of quark.
Quark stars are not a new idea either. The idea has been floating around for 20 years or more, and has been invoked to try to explain all sorts of cosmic events, gamma ray bursters, the Tunguska event, you name it. I've got a paper by Witten on this subject from the mid-80s.
/. who has ever published a paper in PRL on the subject of strange quark matter. I'm betting 2 at most.
The basic idea behind strange quark matter is really easy to understand, and has very little to do with quantum chromodynamics, and everything to do with thermodynamics. If you have two kinds of fermion (up, down) and squeeze them together (gravity), they'll reach a certain energy state determined by Fermi-Dirac statistics - the Pauli exclusion principle. If you thrown in another type of fermion (strange), and apply the same pressure, you'll get more particles in the same space because there are now more states for the fermions to occupy without running into the Pauli exclusion principle. A strange quark can have exactly the same energy as an up as a down, because they are still different. There are now three quarks occupying a certain energy level instead of two.
There are many very interesting implications of this which aren't mentioned in any article I've seen, including the possibility of exothermic reactions from such a ball of strange quark matter. That's sekrit code talk for something very exciting and far out which I won't mention explicitly because I'm not a crackpot. No, really! Witten and Fitch said it first anyway.
The theory is there. Now it'll be interesting to see if we can make any of this stuff in an accelerator.
Now let's see how this gets modded, since I'm the only person on
Nice.
A lot of people get paid extremely minimal amounts of money and work long, long, long, hard hours in a superclean environment to put together an amazing experiment and get a result that is staggering in its sensitivity and its implications for physics, and you want to point the fingers and talk about gross negligence.
Here's a clue. Having worked on a HEP experiment that got trashed through greed (someone wanted to steal a bunch of the expensive heavy metals for scrap), there are a many broken hearts in the SuperK researchers. HEP researchers are well known for putting in > 100 hour weeks on a regular basis, and not for the promise of stock options and early retirement at the end. Just physics data that they will spend years going through. The payoff is four pages in PRL.
Super-K's predecessor was almost denied funding because it had the nerve to obtain physics results from the neutrinos observed from SN1981A. It was designed and funded to look for proton decay, you see, and if those darn scientists can't stick to the mission, then it's gross negligence and cut their funding. Luckily wiser heads prevailed.
For what it's worth, it's a superclean environment and they probably want to continue to take steps to keep it that way. I will not speculate on why it happened, except to say that yes, it could be simple stupidity. These things happen when you are working out on the edge. No one has ever done this kind of stuff before, so there aren't rules. But not rebuilding the detector and not getting the funds to do so would be cutting off someone else's nose to spite your face - who else is going to know how to build this kind of thing better than the folks who did it, and learned from previous mistakes?
I find the chain reaction stuff unlikely though. If it's like the experiments I worked on, each PMT has it's own power supply, and any individual PMT is separate from those around it in most every way. It could be a bad HV power supply, but in general when those things go, they just stop working. Plus any individual HV card probably only supplies 12 or 25 tubes. PMTs are actually fairly robust devices. They're delicate, but we were using hand-me-downs from an experiment back in the 60s, still going strong. The original KamioKande started with hand-me-downs too.
More likely is that something went wrong with the fill in order to kill 4000 tubes all at once. But then again, it's something they've done multiple times, so what was different this time?
Who knows? All speculation. My heart goes out to the Ph.D thesis students who just had their graduation dates moved back arbitrarily, another year or more in grad school, poor bastards.