There is something that confuses me that this article doesn't address: the jet stream's location is not stable. Over the US, for instance, it can move between the Great Lakes in the North to the Florida Keys in the south, something like 1500 miles, in the course of a day or two. Is that not the case over Australia?
Part of this may be due to inefficiency in our detectors, errors in our theories of stellar behaviour or errors in our theories of fundamental particles.
The problem is almost certainly (i.e. hundreds of physicists have bet their careers on it) in our theory of fundamental particles. The discrepancy is absolutely not due to detector inefficiency (the same types of experiments obtain the expected neutrino flux from nearby experiments); the detection efficiency for neutrinos is very low, but if you build a big enough detector, it doesn't kill you. Furthermore, many different experiments using very different techniques obtain results that (roughly) agree on the disagreement. And while there are problems with the stellar models, the same calculation that tells you how many neutrinos come out also tell you how many photons come out and what the surface temperature of the sun should be, and the photon flux and temperature measurements are dead on. Further, the stellar models make predictions about things like "sun-quakes" (the spectrum of solar acoustic surface waves) that are, I believe, also dead on. So, while there is room for improvement in both the experiments and the stellar models, they are not reallly suspect in the solar neutrino problem.
Further evidence that it is the fundamental particle physics that is wrong is that there is a measurable azimuthally dependent flux (angle above versus below the horizon) of atmospherically produced muon neutrinos; the Standard Model predicts no such behavior.
In fact, the best (educated) guess at this point is that neutrinos are able to "oscillate" between the different types, and that the neutrinos from the sun change from electron type to some other type during the time it takes to get from the sun to the earth. Thus, when they get here, some of them are no longer in a form that can be detected by the experiments to date.
Now, I don't think that AMANDA can tell us anything about the solar neutrinos (it looks at very high energy muon type neutrinos, not the low energy electron type), but there are experiments such as SNO in Canada that should be able to access the low energy neutrinos and give us some more information about the solar neutrino problem.
Bravo! Most of my particle physics colleagues couldn't give a better brief explanation. In less than a page, you've succeeded in summarizing the last fifty years or so of high energy physics brilliantly!
I did want to mention one thing. You said:Last I checked physicists were unsure if there was a link between quarks and leptons.
In fact, we are pretty darn sure that there IS a link. We don't know exactly why there are three families (or generations) of fermions (although there are many ideas out there), but we DO have a good understanding of why there are as many leptons as there are quarks. In fact, the reason we believed for many years that there was a top quark and a tau neutrino is that they HAD to be there.
The reason is a tad technical, and has to do with something called gauge anomaly cancellation. If the number of leptons and quarks was NOT the same, then some of the symmetries of the theory that we actually see in nature would be destroyed by certain "one loop Feynman graphs" that connect three gauge bosons (the triangle graphs). But, with the same number of quarks and leptons, the gauge anomalies of the standard model cancel, and all is right with the current theory of the universe. In fact, gauge anomaly cancellation is nearly a requirement for any model to be taken seriously, and is one of the first things people ask about when someone presents a new model.
And as a bonus, we wouldn't be dependent on nutty middle eastern dictatorships with delusions of mediocrity to run our cars. Air, last I checked, was fairly commonplace.
Air may be commonplace, but hydrogen is not so commonplace. There is not much hydrogen in the atmosphere. Free hydrogen rapidly escapes the atmosphere, as its mean velocity at all temperatures in the atmosphere exceeds orbital escape velocity (cf. Jeans Escape) If you want to utilize hydrogen as a fuel, you have to make it and pick it up somewhere, since you won't be finding it in sufficient quantities in your intake manifold to be useful.
People are attacking the emissions problem, because that is the feasible solution. The parts that are disposed of regularly (like tires, the cars themselves, used oil, etc) can be efficiently and cheaply (relatively) recycled, cleaned, or converted at centralized, enviromentally sane facilities. Millions of vehicles dumping emissions into the atmosphere can not. It is also the largest pollution component in transportation: the sum total of all pollution from other sources is positively dwarfed by emissions.
If you want to reduce vehicular polluiton, the only real alternative to attacking emissions at the tailpipe is to outlaw driving...which will result in an economic and social and moral disaster the magnitude of which is unimaginable. It isn't going to happen, so you ought to do what you can, where you reasonably can.
Not to mention the fact that, if we convert to hydrogen fuel, SOMEONE has to produce it, move, and sell it....someone who has, say, gobs of money, huge tracts of industrialized land near the sea coasts for fuel, massive pipeline, trucking, and seaborne distribution networks for pressurized gasses, hundreds of thousands of distribution points world wide, and 100 and more years of know how in the production and distribution of volatile and dangerous fluids. Someone, like say, the OIL COMPANIES!
I'm always amazed that so many people seem quick to condemn the oil companies as "huge, evil, earth destroying" corporations, and that they somehow think that changing to a new form of fuel will suddenly destroy the oil companies and bring in new immaculately clean and excessively environmentally conscious organizations. These people live in dreamland! It will take many years, and trillions (at least) of dollars to make any such change in our energy usage patterns, EVEN IF EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE INDUSTRIALIZED WORLD AGREED TO DO IT. And you still need people with the know how to design, build, maintain, fund, and expand these new systems. The oil companies of today will be around for a very long time to come, even if they change their primary product lines.....
The crazy thing about many greenhouse skeptics is not their skepticism...but their assumption that the error bars only extend in one direction
While I agree with you about this problem (and it is quite prevalent among most opponents in most areas, not just in the climate debate), in fairness it should be noted that most popular reporting that activists/citizens/politicians/businesses respond to make the opposite error and only quote the worst case scenario, which is ALSO a one sided error bar. So, responding that "things are not going to be that bad" are not too far out of line...even if it is an indefensible stance.
Actually, the administration recently announced that its budget proposal for this fiscal year would include no additional spending over what was agreed to by the Congress and the Clinton administration last year.
Strictly speaking, what this U. Wash. group has done is to confirm that the Newtonian formula for gravity (or the Einsteinian weak field limit, if you prefer), is correct for objects separated by more than a certain distance. In other words, in the weak field limit, gravitational force falls off exactly as 1/r^2. Although this may not be the way the experiment is done and analyzed, you can think of it this way: suppose gravity "really' acted like (1-exp(-r/a))/r^2. Then, if r >> a, you would find that gravity at larger distances fits the 1/r^2 model. In essence then, this experiment has put a limit on how big "a" can be, since if it was any larger, they would have seen the deviation.
Now, why is this interesting? One reason is that it is yet another confirmation of the weak field limit of General Relativity (this is not that interesting a confirmation, really). Another is that it tells us that there aren't additional dimensions that are "curled up" which are bigger around than a few millimeters. If there were, they would lead to specific types of deviations in gravity at small distances (curled up, or compactified dimensions are kind of difficult to get your head around, but here is a model to think about: get out a garden hose, and stretch it out straight. Then, go a few hundred feet away. That there garden hose would appear to be a one-dimensional object (a line segment). But if you go closer, you would see that it had extent in a second "curled up" direction. Just like this experiment does with the more topologically complicated world we live in).
Frankly, if this experiment had been done a few years ago (say five or six), it would not have been very interesting. "Hold on!", you might say, "Doesn't string theory expect extra dimensions?" And the answer would be "Yes, But", since the dimensions in string theory are expected to be so small that they would never be seen in this type of experiment. What is interesting about this result is that there are new (last five years or so) types of models which remove (in a sense) a certain "aesthetically unpleasant" aspect of the Standard Model of Particle Physics by adding relatively large extra dimensions (meaning fractions of millimeters, not fractions of fractions of Angstroms). So, what is interesting in this new result is that it directly accesses the most relevant size scales for these new models, placing (potentially) strong constraints on some of the most interesting (and easy to understand) versions.
[This unpleasant aspect is that the current version of the Standard Model receives corrections that are proportional to the next highest energy scale above the Standard Model's highest scale, and those corrections are quadratic in the higher energy scale...and the next energy scale is the scale of gravity, some 20ish orders of magnitude above the Standard Model scale. Corrections of this size would be in conflict with the predictions of the Standard Model. In order to eliminate them, you have to assume that certain parameters have ratios which are finely tuned to within 1 part in 10^30 (for example). This is the classic "hierarchy" problem. But, if you put in extra dimensions in a certian way, you lower the fundamental scale of gravity to the point where the corrections to the Standard Model are not large, and hence there is no "hierarchy" to become problematic. Personally, I don't think these models will survive the next few years, but I've been wrong before!]
I don't know what your scientific training is, but you seem to be confused about a great many things:
The Big Bang: The BB model makes definite, testable, falsifiable predictions about a great many things, including the existence of a nearly uniform background radiation, the ratios of various light elements in the cosmos, and a host of other things. Every measurement so far has been consistent with this model. So in a sense it HAS been observed, because we can directly measure its after effects. Furthermore, just because we can't recreate it doesn't mean it isn't correctly in the realm of science... we can't make a solar system from scratch either, but we're pretty darn sure they exist. And what is this "cosmic egg" stuff you were talking about? It is unconnected with the big bang model.
Your grasp of the ideas of thermodynamics is as poor as your understanding of the big bang model. Self organization is NOT forbidden by thermodynamics; if that were so, you could not have been born. I will not address your big bang argument, because I can't do so in a non-technical language (my short coming, not one of the theory) that people will likely understand. Maybe someone else will chime in.
See above...your understanding of the big bang model, cosmological theory, and particle theory is woefully incorrect. Think for a moment about how ridiculous and clearly incorrect your last sentence was.
Again, you clearly don't understand the scientific theory you are trying to use to support your point; amino acids CAN be formed out of simpler chemicals. It has been done in the lab, and some of the simpler amino acids have been observed in the spectra of extra-solar clouds. Your chirality argument also misses the point. The chiral molecules in biological systems are built by other molecules of the same chirality, from molecules of the same chirality. We could just as easily be built of molecules of the "wrong" chirality. The selection of one chirality over the other was likely random chance; there is not scientific "expectation" that life should be 50 50.
Abiogenesis - not disproven either. We CAN create the essential molecules of life from simpler compounds, under conditions we think occurred on the early earth, and in the early solar system. That we don't necessarily (yet) know how the next steps might have occurred does not in any way affect our belief in the evolution that occurred AFTER those steps.
Macroevolution - Your argument here is also specious. There are many things of which we don't have direct, first hand knowledge. I have never seen the "intermediate" stages of fueling my car, for example: I go to the gas station, I stick the fueling spout into a hole in the side of my car, I pull on the handle, and some time later, the machine tells me my car is full. I've never seen the fluid flow into the vehicle. That doesn't mean I don't know that gasoline has passed into the tank of the car. I believe it because there are other lines of evidence that convince me that the car has been fueled: the gauge moves up to F, the car drives down the road, etc. Same with macroevolution. (Furthermore, although I hesistate to mention this since I don't have a citation, we HAVE IN FACT observed macroevolution occurring in the wild, and in the lab, in viral, cellular, and multi-cellular domains). Along the same lines, we don't need to have ALL of the intermediate evolutionary forms. I observe that digestion occurs, even though there are many "intermediate forms" that the nutrients take on their way through my body. A further analogy: we no longer have evidence of all the "intermediate forms" of automobiles that existed between the Ford Model A and the 2001 Ford Mustang, but we know that they existed... this doesn't suggest to me that we have to assume that the seat belt "materialized" or was "divinely created" out of nothing. Furthermore, have you considered the fact that we just might find some of those "intermediate forms" you desire tomorrow? or next week? or a year from now?
The fact that our evolutionary ancestors are not all preserved is identcal to the reasons that not all species are preserved. It is just as specious an argument.
Your "micro" versus "macro" evolution arguments are just as specious as the rest of your arguments. We know that microcellular processes drive macrocellular phenomena (think of muscular contractions), and we know that structural form is encoded in DNA. And we have observed both this "micro" evolution and "macro" evolution as you refer to these phenomena. When it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck, and tastes like a duck, why would you insist on calling it a cow?
I am NOT arguing that our current models of biology, chemistry, physics, cosmology, etc. are correct in every detail, nor do I expect them to remain static. However, I do believe from my own training (as a theoretical particle physicist), discussion with colleagues, reading of the peer reviewed literature, etc, that the essential fact that evolution currently occurs has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt, and I have further been convinced that it DID occur in the past, and that all species around today are descendants of earlier species. I believe this because the predictions made by our current theories and models fit the physical evidence much better than any of the alternatives. And living in a world with incomplete, and potentially flawed models is to me a much more reasonable and palatable options to throwing up our hands and saying "we don't have all the proof that we would like, so we aren't going to accept anything as more likely than anything else." We certainly wouldn't progress very far as a society if that were true.
Here are a few falsifiable predictions, off the top of my head... forgive me for not giving more, but IANAB:
All geographically isolated populations of a given species should show genotypic variation in proportion to the time since they were separated (this is one method to determine how ancient human populations migrated, and the data from genetic typing match surprisingly well with the physical anthopological evidence)
Different species should have similar genes doing similar tasks; if this were not the case, evolution would be dead out of the starting gate.
Furthermore, one can perform experiments testing natural selection: take a population, subject it to environmental pressures, and then observe whether succeeding generations are modified (antibiotic resistant bacteria, pollution resistant plants, dogs, domesticated cattle, etc.)
The above are just three examples of predictions from modern biology; if any one of them were not observed, the evolutionary basis of modern biology would be disproven.....all of them have been observed in both the lab and in the wild. I am unaware of any physical evidence that contradicts the current basic theory.
Just because something doesn't have a physical manifestation doesn't mean that it isn't worth anything. If I hack into my bank acount and "update" the balance, I haven't "taken anything" from anyone, it doesn't "cost anything" according to you....but the fact is that it does. It costs everyone else in the diminished value of their holdings. This is exactly analogous to you pirating an Adobe product because you don't want to pay for it; there IS a cost associated with stealing that software, in that it diminishes the value of others' work as well as the capital and educational investments made by the investors (and the programmers, marketers, educators, suppliers, etc...). The world would be a much less interesting and lively place to live if no one had any incentive to produce intellectually grounded works and expect compensation. Make no mistake, there would be much MUCH less intellectual output today if no one was compensated and their output wasn't protected. You may not like the fact that others are making money that you aren't, but that doesn't automatically make it acceptable for you to take it by force or other means.
Note that I am not defending the excesses that can occur under the current system....but just as I wouldn't advocate eliminating alcohol from society just because a small percentage of people abuse it, I can't condone violations of IP law just because a few IP owners abuse their position. To do so would in fact undermine the rights and protections we have in our modern world, not enhance them.
In an ideal world, maybe we wouldn't need IP law and IP protections...everything could be free because there would be no scarcity, and hence no need to enhance that scarcity to encourage production. But as long as there is scarcity in ANY part of our economy, losses in any OTHER part of the economy diminish the value of the whole. But then again, in an ideal world no one would be stealing tangible objects either...or killing, maiming, insulting, assaulting, etc. etc. etc.
Assume that Eros is a cylinder about a mile in diameter and 20 miles long. And made of rock (6g/cc). Multiply all that together, and I find that Eros weighs (roughly) 10^11 or so metric tons. Even if Eros weighed 1 metric ton, there is no chance that Eros would even notice....compared to a million years of solar wind and Jupiter perturbations, it is meaningless.
This doesn't so much blow apart quantum physics as it does (hopefully) validate the supersymetry model of physics
This result doesn't actually favor any particular post-Standard Model physics scenario... what it does say (if it holds ups) is that the successor model must provide a certain, definite correction to the muon anomalous g value. The paper mentions that this could be acounted for by a particular supersymmetric scenario with particular values of certain parameters; but, it could just as easily be accounted for by muon substructure at the 2TeV scale or other types of SM extensions. So, it really doesn't say anything other than "something else is (almost) definitely out there".
BTW, if you don't like the SM because it has 20 or so free parameters, you're going to absolutely hate supersymmetry: the absolutely minimal supersymmetric extension requires the specification of roughly 150 free parameters. Despite this, many people see it as the preferred extension of the SM for a number of extremely technical reasons that greatly outweigh the seven-fold ballooning of the parameter space.
But the calculations of the cloud of virtual particles that surround the muon are insanely difficult. I'm curious if perhaps an error may lie in wait.
It is possible that an error lies in wait; I know that I make them all the time in these types of calculations:-)
That said, the calculations themselves are not really that difficult in principle; the procedure is quite rigorous and very well understood. Doing the calculations by hand is tedious and error prone, but most of these calculations today are automated. And they are usually done independently by multiple small groups of theorists, so that the results can be cross checked, and critiqued by interested observers. The odds of a major error hiding in the theoretical papers is very small. (There are of course some caveats, but they are technical and uninteresting, and they are, I believe, included in the theoretical error bars.
I think it might be a little early to begin the last rights for the standard model.
This is probably a good statement: the important thing to note about this new result is that it doesn't quite reach the level of scientific "certainty" (much like the noise from a few months ago out of LEP concerning the Higgs boson). This result differs from the Standard Model result by "2.6 sigma", whereas "scientific confidence" requires 3 sigma, and "scientific certainty" requires 5 sigma (which is MUCH MUCH stronger than 3 sigma, not the piddling difference it sounds like it is). What is truly interesting about this result is that, for the first time, we have a reliable result which differs from the SM result by so much. Get the paper and look at the last figure. If the experiment reaches its ultimate goal, and the central value doesn't move towards the SM value by too much, their ultimate result will definitely be greater than 3 sigma, and will probably exceed 5 sigma.
THAT's when we really rejoice:-)
they chose the muon for a reason
Actually, they chose it for a couple of reasons:
the muon is a "lepton", so it doesn't feel the strong force. The strong force at low energies (like this experiment) is "non-perturbative" which makes the calculations much much tougher (for example, we still can't calculate the equivalent number for the proton with any certainty). Thus, if you work with leptons, you minimize the contributions from the strong force to the number you are measuring.
it is easy to make polarized muons, which is a technical, but important property for this experiment.
muons are almost stable: they live for about 64 microseconds in this experiment. Now, that may not sound like much, but given that most of the particles we study survive for 10^{-20} seconds or less -- that is the difference between a day and 10 times the age of the universe -- so, effectively, they live forever.
they can only decay into electrons. This makes parts of the experiment really really easy, since they don't have any uncertainty from identification of the decay products.
And finally, the most important reason: no one can figure out how to use anything else to do this measurement:-)
Could we get the title of this story changed? This experimental result does not, in any way "poke holes in quantum physics". It (potentially) pokes holes in a very particular model that is based on quantum theory, but there is no suggestion that the quantum theory itself is being challenged.
You may think its fun (and sometimes it really is), but no such thing happened here: we've been expecting the experiments to diverge from the Standard Model since the day it was written down in the 70s. More than that, we've been hoping to see that failure for 30 years.
The really embarrasing thing is that we've built a model that has been so incredibly successful (no experiment has yet been confirmed to be in conflict with the Standard Model, including this one) that we haven't seen it break down yet! Hopefully, once they've finished analyzing the data from their 2000 run, the g-2 group will be able to push the error bars down far enough that we can finally say we've seen the Standard Model fail. But we won't know for a year or so, unfortunately.
Your definition probably won't fly, as there are a number of asteroids (Ceres comes to mind) that are large enough to be drawn into a spheroid by their own self-gravity.
More correctly, the presence of a changing magnetic field requires the presence of an electric field, and vice-versa.
Aside for people who've taken calculus based physics: If you remember the Maxwell equations, you should remember that there are four of them: two of them tell you how static charges give rise to E and B fields, and two that tell you how moving charges give rise to E and B fields, and additionally, how a time-varying E field gives rise to a B field and vice-versa. See, for example, Eric's Treasure Trove
Furthermore, there are some points about Faraday cages that you are missing: firstly, as another poster mentioned, any holes will reduce the effectiveness of the cage. Secondly, even a very good cage only keeps out static fields; time-varying fields penetrate into cages to a degree that depends on their frequency. For this, you'll need to check out an advanced undergraduate or graduate E&M text (such as Jackson). This is why, for instance, you can listen to the AM radio while riding in your car, and why you can talk on your cellphone inside an elevator (which are generally excellently well closed Faraday cages).
I disagree...with a sufficiently long message, and all other things being equal, it is no more or less difficult to determine how to reconstruct a message from a technical standpoint, whether that message is encoded digitally or in analog. ALL formats are completely arbitrary to someone who has no idea what you are trying to communicate. Consider, for example, analog NTSC television signals....there are many channels of data encoded in a "single channel": horizontal, vertical, color, sound, SAP, frame timing data, and captioning. And there are dozens of neighboring stations in the spectrum. And right next door is FM. And right next to that is cellular, CB, etc. Since a given TV signal is spread all over the place, how do you, a priori, determine where to start hacking the signal up? Which subsignals do you associate with each other?
It is a much more difficult problem when you have NO IDEA where to begin.
Maybe you should reread what he said, and reconsider why the journal might have rejected the article -- in particular, Newland argues that the experiment as performed does not distinguish between a revolutionary possibility, and a list of more mundane possibilities. In other words, the information derived from the experiment (and quite possibly, contained in the rejected article) does not support the purported result. He's clearly NOT saying that he is rejected the result. What he IS saying is that, if the result is interpreted as being due to the revolutionary possibility, then it contradicts previous experiments, so we have to reevaluate all of the collected data to see where the discrepancy comes from -- more work is needed to separate out the mechanism responsible for the results of the experiment. That doesn't sound to me like a scientist rejected ideas that contradict his own...it sounds like good science.
If you can show me how in all concievability that cat can be both dead and alive, then quantum theory is possible - otherwise it just won't work.
This is the "Schroedinger's Cat" example of quantum mechanics, filtered through a particular "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics...but a cat is not a quantum system, and the interpretation you choose to apply to describe your philosophical position does not affect the physical system one bit. The cat is an analogy, if you will, not to be taken literally (although that is one other philosophical interpretation of the theory). It is an analogy for the way that quantum states "superimpose" on other quantum states: an electron when observed has either spin up or down, but while it is evolving unobserved, it really CAN BE in a state which is both up and down at the same time....and it "picks" which state to be in when observed in certain percentages based on the evolution of the state (again, this description is colored by a particular interpretation...if you want, rather than "picking a state" think "choosing a universe where the observation is made"). The technical details can be found in any undergraduate quantum mechanics textbook.
Quantum mechanics is the realization, at small distance scales (atomic and smaller), systems have to be described in terms of different dynamics than they do at the macroscopic level. There is nothing strange about this...physics at larger scales is always a limiting case of the physics at smaller scales. And quantum mechanics itself is extremely well tested and understood (all of modern chemistry, semiconductor development, biochemistry, superconductors, particle physics, etc. are based on quantum theory). Quantum behavior is not only conceivable and possible, but it appears from experiments that it IS the way reality is constructed; it is far from busted, and we are a much happier world for discovering it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is something that confuses me that this article doesn't address: the jet stream's location is not stable. Over the US, for instance, it can move between the Great Lakes in the North to the Florida Keys in the south, something like 1500 miles, in the course of a day or two. Is that not the case over Australia?
Part of this may be due to inefficiency in our detectors, errors in our theories of stellar behaviour or errors in our theories of fundamental particles.
The problem is almost certainly (i.e. hundreds of physicists have bet their careers on it) in our theory of fundamental particles. The discrepancy is absolutely not due to detector inefficiency (the same types of experiments obtain the expected neutrino flux from nearby experiments); the detection efficiency for neutrinos is very low, but if you build a big enough detector, it doesn't kill you. Furthermore, many different experiments using very different techniques obtain results that (roughly) agree on the disagreement. And while there are problems with the stellar models, the same calculation that tells you how many neutrinos come out also tell you how many photons come out and what the surface temperature of the sun should be, and the photon flux and temperature measurements are dead on. Further, the stellar models make predictions about things like "sun-quakes" (the spectrum of solar acoustic surface waves) that are, I believe, also dead on. So, while there is room for improvement in both the experiments and the stellar models, they are not reallly suspect in the solar neutrino problem.
Further evidence that it is the fundamental particle physics that is wrong is that there is a measurable azimuthally dependent flux (angle above versus below the horizon) of atmospherically produced muon neutrinos; the Standard Model predicts no such behavior.
In fact, the best (educated) guess at this point is that neutrinos are able to "oscillate" between the different types, and that the neutrinos from the sun change from electron type to some other type during the time it takes to get from the sun to the earth. Thus, when they get here, some of them are no longer in a form that can be detected by the experiments to date.
Now, I don't think that AMANDA can tell us anything about the solar neutrinos (it looks at very high energy muon type neutrinos, not the low energy electron type), but there are experiments such as SNO in Canada that should be able to access the low energy neutrinos and give us some more information about the solar neutrino problem.
Bravo! Most of my particle physics colleagues couldn't give a better brief explanation. In less than a page, you've succeeded in summarizing the last fifty years or so of high energy physics brilliantly!
I did want to mention one thing. You said:Last I checked physicists were unsure if there was a link between quarks and leptons.
In fact, we are pretty darn sure that there IS a link. We don't know exactly why there are three families (or generations) of fermions (although there are many ideas out there), but we DO have a good understanding of why there are as many leptons as there are quarks. In fact, the reason we believed for many years that there was a top quark and a tau neutrino is that they HAD to be there.
The reason is a tad technical, and has to do with something called gauge anomaly cancellation. If the number of leptons and quarks was NOT the same, then some of the symmetries of the theory that we actually see in nature would be destroyed by certain "one loop Feynman graphs" that connect three gauge bosons (the triangle graphs). But, with the same number of quarks and leptons, the gauge anomalies of the standard model cancel, and all is right with the current theory of the universe. In fact, gauge anomaly cancellation is nearly a requirement for any model to be taken seriously, and is one of the first things people ask about when someone presents a new model.
And as a bonus, we wouldn't be dependent on nutty middle eastern dictatorships with delusions of mediocrity to run our cars. Air, last I checked, was fairly commonplace.
Air may be commonplace, but hydrogen is not so commonplace. There is not much hydrogen in the atmosphere. Free hydrogen rapidly escapes the atmosphere, as its mean velocity at all temperatures in the atmosphere exceeds orbital escape velocity (cf. Jeans Escape) If you want to utilize hydrogen as a fuel, you have to make it and pick it up somewhere, since you won't be finding it in sufficient quantities in your intake manifold to be useful.
People are attacking the emissions problem, because that is the feasible solution. The parts that are disposed of regularly (like tires, the cars themselves, used oil, etc) can be efficiently and cheaply (relatively) recycled, cleaned, or converted at centralized, enviromentally sane facilities. Millions of vehicles dumping emissions into the atmosphere can not. It is also the largest pollution component in transportation: the sum total of all pollution from other sources is positively dwarfed by emissions.
If you want to reduce vehicular polluiton, the only real alternative to attacking emissions at the tailpipe is to outlaw driving...which will result in an economic and social and moral disaster the magnitude of which is unimaginable. It isn't going to happen, so you ought to do what you can, where you reasonably can.
Not to mention the fact that, if we convert to hydrogen fuel, SOMEONE has to produce it, move, and sell it....someone who has, say, gobs of money, huge tracts of industrialized land near the sea coasts for fuel, massive pipeline, trucking, and seaborne distribution networks for pressurized gasses, hundreds of thousands of distribution points world wide, and 100 and more years of know how in the production and distribution of volatile and dangerous fluids. Someone, like say, the OIL COMPANIES!
I'm always amazed that so many people seem quick to condemn the oil companies as "huge, evil, earth destroying" corporations, and that they somehow think that changing to a new form of fuel will suddenly destroy the oil companies and bring in new immaculately clean and excessively environmentally conscious organizations. These people live in dreamland! It will take many years, and trillions (at least) of dollars to make any such change in our energy usage patterns, EVEN IF EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE INDUSTRIALIZED WORLD AGREED TO DO IT. And you still need people with the know how to design, build, maintain, fund, and expand these new systems. The oil companies of today will be around for a very long time to come, even if they change their primary product lines.....
The crazy thing about many greenhouse skeptics is not their skepticism...but their assumption that the error bars only extend in one direction
While I agree with you about this problem (and it is quite prevalent among most opponents in most areas, not just in the climate debate), in fairness it should be noted that most popular reporting that activists/citizens/politicians/businesses respond to make the opposite error and only quote the worst case scenario, which is ALSO a one sided error bar. So, responding that "things are not going to be that bad" are not too far out of line...even if it is an indefensible stance.
Actually, the administration recently announced that its budget proposal for this fiscal year would include no additional spending over what was agreed to by the Congress and the Clinton administration last year.
I'll try...
Strictly speaking, what this U. Wash. group has done is to confirm that the Newtonian formula for gravity (or the Einsteinian weak field limit, if you prefer), is correct for objects separated by more than a certain distance. In other words, in the weak field limit, gravitational force falls off exactly as 1/r^2. Although this may not be the way the experiment is done and analyzed, you can think of it this way: suppose gravity "really' acted like (1-exp(-r/a))/r^2. Then, if r >> a, you would find that gravity at larger distances fits the 1/r^2 model. In essence then, this experiment has put a limit on how big "a" can be, since if it was any larger, they would have seen the deviation.
Now, why is this interesting? One reason is that it is yet another confirmation of the weak field limit of General Relativity (this is not that interesting a confirmation, really). Another is that it tells us that there aren't additional dimensions that are "curled up" which are bigger around than a few millimeters. If there were, they would lead to specific types of deviations in gravity at small distances (curled up, or compactified dimensions are kind of difficult to get your head around, but here is a model to think about: get out a garden hose, and stretch it out straight. Then, go a few hundred feet away. That there garden hose would appear to be a one-dimensional object (a line segment). But if you go closer, you would see that it had extent in a second "curled up" direction. Just like this experiment does with the more topologically complicated world we live in).
Frankly, if this experiment had been done a few years ago (say five or six), it would not have been very interesting. "Hold on!", you might say, "Doesn't string theory expect extra dimensions?" And the answer would be "Yes, But", since the dimensions in string theory are expected to be so small that they would never be seen in this type of experiment. What is interesting about this result is that there are new (last five years or so) types of models which remove (in a sense) a certain "aesthetically unpleasant" aspect of the Standard Model of Particle Physics by adding relatively large extra dimensions (meaning fractions of millimeters, not fractions of fractions of Angstroms). So, what is interesting in this new result is that it directly accesses the most relevant size scales for these new models, placing (potentially) strong constraints on some of the most interesting (and easy to understand) versions.
[This unpleasant aspect is that the current version of the Standard Model receives corrections that are proportional to the next highest energy scale above the Standard Model's highest scale, and those corrections are quadratic in the higher energy scale...and the next energy scale is the scale of gravity, some 20ish orders of magnitude above the Standard Model scale. Corrections of this size would be in conflict with the predictions of the Standard Model. In order to eliminate them, you have to assume that certain parameters have ratios which are finely tuned to within 1 part in 10^30 (for example). This is the classic "hierarchy" problem. But, if you put in extra dimensions in a certian way, you lower the fundamental scale of gravity to the point where the corrections to the Standard Model are not large, and hence there is no "hierarchy" to become problematic. Personally, I don't think these models will survive the next few years, but I've been wrong before!]
I don't know what your scientific training is, but you seem to be confused about a great many things:
I am NOT arguing that our current models of biology, chemistry, physics, cosmology, etc. are correct in every detail, nor do I expect them to remain static. However, I do believe from my own training (as a theoretical particle physicist), discussion with colleagues, reading of the peer reviewed literature, etc, that the essential fact that evolution currently occurs has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt, and I have further been convinced that it DID occur in the past, and that all species around today are descendants of earlier species. I believe this because the predictions made by our current theories and models fit the physical evidence much better than any of the alternatives. And living in a world with incomplete, and potentially flawed models is to me a much more reasonable and palatable options to throwing up our hands and saying "we don't have all the proof that we would like, so we aren't going to accept anything as more likely than anything else." We certainly wouldn't progress very far as a society if that were true.
Here are a few falsifiable predictions, off the top of my head ... forgive me for not giving more, but IANAB:
The above are just three examples of predictions from modern biology; if any one of them were not observed, the evolutionary basis of modern biology would be disproven.....all of them have been observed in both the lab and in the wild. I am unaware of any physical evidence that contradicts the current basic theory.
Just because something doesn't have a physical manifestation doesn't mean that it isn't worth anything. If I hack into my bank acount and "update" the balance, I haven't "taken anything" from anyone, it doesn't "cost anything" according to you....but the fact is that it does. It costs everyone else in the diminished value of their holdings. This is exactly analogous to you pirating an Adobe product because you don't want to pay for it; there IS a cost associated with stealing that software, in that it diminishes the value of others' work as well as the capital and educational investments made by the investors (and the programmers, marketers, educators, suppliers, etc...). The world would be a much less interesting and lively place to live if no one had any incentive to produce intellectually grounded works and expect compensation. Make no mistake, there would be much MUCH less intellectual output today if no one was compensated and their output wasn't protected. You may not like the fact that others are making money that you aren't, but that doesn't automatically make it acceptable for you to take it by force or other means.
Note that I am not defending the excesses that can occur under the current system....but just as I wouldn't advocate eliminating alcohol from society just because a small percentage of people abuse it, I can't condone violations of IP law just because a few IP owners abuse their position. To do so would in fact undermine the rights and protections we have in our modern world, not enhance them.
In an ideal world, maybe we wouldn't need IP law and IP protections...everything could be free because there would be no scarcity, and hence no need to enhance that scarcity to encourage production. But as long as there is scarcity in ANY part of our economy, losses in any OTHER part of the economy diminish the value of the whole. But then again, in an ideal world no one would be stealing tangible objects either...or killing, maiming, insulting, assaulting, etc. etc. etc.
In a word, no:
Assume that Eros is a cylinder about a mile in diameter and 20 miles long. And made of rock (6g/cc). Multiply all that together, and I find that Eros weighs (roughly) 10^11 or so metric tons. Even if Eros weighed 1 metric ton, there is no chance that Eros would even notice....compared to a million years of solar wind and Jupiter perturbations, it is meaningless.
This doesn't so much blow apart quantum physics as it does (hopefully) validate the supersymetry model of physics
This result doesn't actually favor any particular post-Standard Model physics scenario ... what it does say (if it holds ups) is that the successor model must provide a certain, definite correction to the muon anomalous g value. The paper mentions that this could be acounted for by a particular supersymmetric scenario with particular values of certain parameters; but, it could just as easily be accounted for by muon substructure at the 2TeV scale or other types of SM extensions. So, it really doesn't say anything other than "something else is (almost) definitely out there".
BTW, if you don't like the SM because it has 20 or so free parameters, you're going to absolutely hate supersymmetry: the absolutely minimal supersymmetric extension requires the specification of roughly 150 free parameters. Despite this, many people see it as the preferred extension of the SM for a number of extremely technical reasons that greatly outweigh the seven-fold ballooning of the parameter space.
But the calculations of the cloud of virtual particles that surround the muon are insanely difficult. I'm curious if perhaps an error may lie in wait.
It is possible that an error lies in wait; I know that I make them all the time in these types of calculations :-)
That said, the calculations themselves are not really that difficult in principle; the procedure is quite rigorous and very well understood. Doing the calculations by hand is tedious and error prone, but most of these calculations today are automated. And they are usually done independently by multiple small groups of theorists, so that the results can be cross checked, and critiqued by interested observers. The odds of a major error hiding in the theoretical papers is very small. (There are of course some caveats, but they are technical and uninteresting, and they are, I believe, included in the theoretical error bars.
I think it might be a little early to begin the last rights for the standard model.
This is probably a good statement: the important thing to note about this new result is that it doesn't quite reach the level of scientific "certainty" (much like the noise from a few months ago out of LEP concerning the Higgs boson). This result differs from the Standard Model result by "2.6 sigma", whereas "scientific confidence" requires 3 sigma, and "scientific certainty" requires 5 sigma (which is MUCH MUCH stronger than 3 sigma, not the piddling difference it sounds like it is). What is truly interesting about this result is that, for the first time, we have a reliable result which differs from the SM result by so much. Get the paper and look at the last figure. If the experiment reaches its ultimate goal, and the central value doesn't move towards the SM value by too much, their ultimate result will definitely be greater than 3 sigma, and will probably exceed 5 sigma.
THAT's when we really rejoice :-)
they chose the muon for a reason
Actually, they chose it for a couple of reasons:
Could we get the title of this story changed? This experimental result does not, in any way "poke holes in quantum physics". It (potentially) pokes holes in a very particular model that is based on quantum theory, but there is no suggestion that the quantum theory itself is being challenged.
You may think its fun (and sometimes it really is), but no such thing happened here: we've been expecting the experiments to diverge from the Standard Model since the day it was written down in the 70s. More than that, we've been hoping to see that failure for 30 years.
The really embarrasing thing is that we've built a model that has been so incredibly successful (no experiment has yet been confirmed to be in conflict with the Standard Model, including this one) that we haven't seen it break down yet! Hopefully, once they've finished analyzing the data from their 2000 run, the g-2 group will be able to push the error bars down far enough that we can finally say we've seen the Standard Model fail. But we won't know for a year or so, unfortunately.
They didn't use taus because:
I'm sure there are a number of other problems, but these are the real killers.
Your definition probably won't fly, as there are a number of asteroids (Ceres comes to mind) that are large enough to be drawn into a spheroid by their own self-gravity.
More correctly, the presence of a changing magnetic field requires the presence of an electric field, and vice-versa.
Aside for people who've taken calculus based physics: If you remember the Maxwell equations, you should remember that there are four of them: two of them tell you how static charges give rise to E and B fields, and two that tell you how moving charges give rise to E and B fields, and additionally, how a time-varying E field gives rise to a B field and vice-versa. See, for example, Eric's Treasure Trove
Furthermore, there are some points about Faraday cages that you are missing: firstly, as another poster mentioned, any holes will reduce the effectiveness of the cage. Secondly, even a very good cage only keeps out static fields; time-varying fields penetrate into cages to a degree that depends on their frequency. For this, you'll need to check out an advanced undergraduate or graduate E&M text (such as Jackson). This is why, for instance, you can listen to the AM radio while riding in your car, and why you can talk on your cellphone inside an elevator (which are generally excellently well closed Faraday cages).
I disagree...with a sufficiently long message, and all other things being equal, it is no more or less difficult to determine how to reconstruct a message from a technical standpoint, whether that message is encoded digitally or in analog. ALL formats are completely arbitrary to someone who has no idea what you are trying to communicate. Consider, for example, analog NTSC television signals....there are many channels of data encoded in a "single channel": horizontal, vertical, color, sound, SAP, frame timing data, and captioning. And there are dozens of neighboring stations in the spectrum. And right next door is FM. And right next to that is cellular, CB, etc. Since a given TV signal is spread all over the place, how do you, a priori, determine where to start hacking the signal up? Which subsignals do you associate with each other?
It is a much more difficult problem when you have NO IDEA where to begin.
Maybe you should reread what he said, and reconsider why the journal might have rejected the article -- in particular, Newland argues that the experiment as performed does not distinguish between a revolutionary possibility, and a list of more mundane possibilities. In other words, the information derived from the experiment (and quite possibly, contained in the rejected article) does not support the purported result. He's clearly NOT saying that he is rejected the result. What he IS saying is that, if the result is interpreted as being due to the revolutionary possibility, then it contradicts previous experiments, so we have to reevaluate all of the collected data to see where the discrepancy comes from -- more work is needed to separate out the mechanism responsible for the results of the experiment. That doesn't sound to me like a scientist rejected ideas that contradict his own...it sounds like good science.
Many cases of virtual function calls can be completely optimized away at compile/link time. Read, for example, here.
If you can show me how in all concievability that cat can be both dead and alive, then quantum theory is possible - otherwise it just won't work.
This is the "Schroedinger's Cat" example of quantum mechanics, filtered through a particular "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics...but a cat is not a quantum system, and the interpretation you choose to apply to describe your philosophical position does not affect the physical system one bit. The cat is an analogy, if you will, not to be taken literally (although that is one other philosophical interpretation of the theory). It is an analogy for the way that quantum states "superimpose" on other quantum states: an electron when observed has either spin up or down, but while it is evolving unobserved, it really CAN BE in a state which is both up and down at the same time....and it "picks" which state to be in when observed in certain percentages based on the evolution of the state (again, this description is colored by a particular interpretation...if you want, rather than "picking a state" think "choosing a universe where the observation is made"). The technical details can be found in any undergraduate quantum mechanics textbook.
Quantum mechanics is the realization, at small distance scales (atomic and smaller), systems have to be described in terms of different dynamics than they do at the macroscopic level. There is nothing strange about this...physics at larger scales is always a limiting case of the physics at smaller scales. And quantum mechanics itself is extremely well tested and understood (all of modern chemistry, semiconductor development, biochemistry, superconductors, particle physics, etc. are based on quantum theory). Quantum behavior is not only conceivable and possible, but it appears from experiments that it IS the way reality is constructed; it is far from busted, and we are a much happier world for discovering it.
Indeed! In the real world, you can't win, can't break even, and can't quit the game....More technically (from Eric's Treasure Trove of Physics):