I'm beginning to wonder about the argument "people download MP3s to sample the music". At Barnes and Noble, you can sample any CD in the store (except the bargin CDs, it seems) by using the scanners/headphones that are positioned throughout the music section. I bought five CDs yesterday because of that (and my lack of willpower) when I hadn't bought any CDs in the past year. When all music stores have these machines, will this argument still be valid?
I disagree. I think the most important innovations are the ones that change the way people do things, and the addition of lead to gasoline was a tremendous boon to the automobile industry (as mentioned above), greatly expanding one's freedom to travel. In a similar way, I believe the splitting of the atom was a great accomplishment, despite the resulting Cold War. Why? It started a quest to break down the "indestructable" atom into smaller and smaller pieces, giving rise to sub-atomic particle physics, which may help us better understand the fundamental laws of nature.
And how is this like NMR (which it is still called in the scientific world, but not the medicinal world)? NMR works by placing the sample in an external magnetic field and seeing how strong of a field it takes to get the atoms to flip spin. It's not used for imagery at all in the molecular world; just for identification of the chemical make-up and conformation of molecules. It's only used for imagery in the macroscopic world, and the principle is still the same. It just so happens that soft tissue shows up very well because of it's chemical composition. The interaction of the magnetic field with the nuclei is measured; photons have nothing to do with it. Maybe I read your response wrong, but I don't understand where NMR comes into play.
Yeah, they have been able to use electron microscopes to view atoms for quite a while. The difference that I can see is that electron microcopes take pictures of the atoms; you don't really see an atom, you see a photograph of it. From what I understand from the article, they are using light to view the atom, so this is much more like a normal microscope that you could use in biology class (it'd be really expensive, though). Another plus is, in an electron microcope, you have to view your sample in a vacuum with a plating of gold on it. Hopefully this microcope could be used to view living organisms, and focus on the chemical processes going on inside unimolecular organisms. I'm guessing this is why this a such a big deal, provided the atom doesn't have to be isolated in order to view it.
Sure, they should be dissappearing all the time. However, they produce two gamma rays when they annialate, going in opposite directions, and therefore, when two gamma rays have a head on collision, some of the time a neutralino should be produced. Granted, all particles and their anti-particles are destroyed in similar ways, so the head on collision of two gamma rays could produce any number of differnt particle combinations. Maybe the neutralino is slightly more stable so it's produced more often, or maybe not. Maybe that's where all the dark matter is: sub atomic particles formed in the 99.99999 percent of the universe that is supposedly empty, and we just can't detect them because our experiments pick them up as background radiation.
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I'm beginning to wonder about the argument "people download MP3s to sample the music". At Barnes and Noble, you can sample any CD in the store (except the bargin CDs, it seems) by using the scanners/headphones that are positioned throughout the music section. I bought five CDs yesterday because of that (and my lack of willpower) when I hadn't bought any CDs in the past year. When all music stores have these machines, will this argument still be valid?
Thirty to fourty kilometers? How small does an orbiting object have to be to not be considered a moon anymore?
I disagree. I think the most important innovations are the ones that change the way people do things, and the addition of lead to gasoline was a tremendous boon to the automobile industry (as mentioned above), greatly expanding one's freedom to travel. In a similar way, I believe the splitting of the atom was a great accomplishment, despite the resulting Cold War. Why? It started a quest to break down the "indestructable" atom into smaller and smaller pieces, giving rise to sub-atomic particle physics, which may help us better understand the fundamental laws of nature.
And how is this like NMR (which it is still called in the scientific world, but not the medicinal world)? NMR works by placing the sample in an external magnetic field and seeing how strong of a field it takes to get the atoms to flip spin. It's not used for imagery at all in the molecular world; just for identification of the chemical make-up and conformation of molecules. It's only used for imagery in the macroscopic world, and the principle is still the same. It just so happens that soft tissue shows up very well because of it's chemical composition. The interaction of the magnetic field with the nuclei is measured; photons have nothing to do with it. Maybe I read your response wrong, but I don't understand where NMR comes into play.
Yeah, they have been able to use electron microscopes to view atoms for quite a while. The difference that I can see is that electron microcopes take pictures of the atoms; you don't really see an atom, you see a photograph of it. From what I understand from the article, they are using light to view the atom, so this is much more like a normal microscope that you could use in biology class (it'd be really expensive, though). Another plus is, in an electron microcope, you have to view your sample in a vacuum with a plating of gold on it. Hopefully this microcope could be used to view living organisms, and focus on the chemical processes going on inside unimolecular organisms. I'm guessing this is why this a such a big deal, provided the atom doesn't have to be isolated in order to view it.
Sure, they should be dissappearing all the time. However, they produce two gamma rays when they annialate, going in opposite directions, and therefore, when two gamma rays have a head on collision, some of the time a neutralino should be produced. Granted, all particles and their anti-particles are destroyed in similar ways, so the head on collision of two gamma rays could produce any number of differnt particle combinations. Maybe the neutralino is slightly more stable so it's produced more often, or maybe not. Maybe that's where all the dark matter is: sub atomic particles formed in the 99.99999 percent of the universe that is supposedly empty, and we just can't detect them because our experiments pick them up as background radiation.