John Hancock was the president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, and president of the first and second Continental Congresses, but you are correct that he was not president of the United States under either the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land;
and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
So, treaties are such as to law, only when made under the authority of the United States...which derives from the powers granted it by the people in the Constitution. So, any treaty in violation of the Constitution has not been made under the authority of the United States, and hence is invalid.
I found the statement in the article that the US Congress would be obliged to pass laws in support of this treaty a little disingenuous. This statement would be true if the US Senate approves the treaty. Under the US constitution, no treaty to which we are a signatory becomes legally binding until ratified by the Senate...no Administration can run off to foreign powers and conclude a treaty that gives them legislative powers. So, if they've been unwilling to pass the laws unilaterally, no signed treaty is going to make them do so any faster.
Now could the Senate ratify a treaty requiring these laws be passed? Sure, and they very well might, but they are not under any obligation to do so (look at the Chemical Weapons Convention, the League of Nations, etc...). And that is a different issue than this article implies.
This really had me worried, so I went to the FCC site to read what they actually ruled, and I am now convinced that the linked article above is REALLY screwed up, freely mixing comments and opinions about two rulings that have ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with each other
Here is the summary of what the FCC actually said concerning copy protection:
Summary of the Declaratory Ruling:
In today's Order, the Commission addressed the narrow issue of whether technology licenses requiring copy protection measures to be located within commercially available equipment are consistent with the Commission's navigation devices rules. The Order noted that the Commission's initial navigation devices Order expressly contemplated the inclusion of copy protection measures in navigation host devices and that such measures would not violate the security separation requirement. Today's Order reiterated that some measure of anti-copying encryption technology is consistent with the intent of the rules because such measures protect a gap where digital data would otherwise be available "in the clear" and subject to unrestricted digital copying.
With this controversy resolved, the Commission directed industry participants to finalize negotiations necessary to bring to fruition the goals of Section 629 and requested that industry participants submit, within 30 days of the release of the Order, a report on the status of the DFAST license, including a final version of a completed DFAST license agreement.
Although today's ruling clarified that the inclusion of some amount of copy protection within a host device does not violate the navigation devices rules, the Commission did not determine whether specific copy protection terms or technology were consistent with the rules. The Commission also concluded that no evidence was presented that reasonable home copying would be impeded by the inclusion of copy protection within host devices.
Action by the Commission September 14, 2000, by Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and Declaratory Ruling (CS Docket # 97-80, FCC 00-341).
So the FCC clearly IS concerned with ensuring that "reasonable" home copying is possible, although it isn't clear from this summary what EXACTLY that means. It is also not clear to me after reading this whether the quote from Jeff Joseph is complaining about the inclusion of copy protection itself, or whether it is complaining about the loss of backward compatibility. The latter is a problem, but allowing copy protection into some devices was already decided. I'm not sure exactly what the copy protection is allowed to copy, but this ruling was covering the narrow question of exactly where in the digital decoding process that copy protection has to go.
It seems that the original linked article was mixing comments concerning TWO FCC releases; this copy protection rule clarification, and another one regarding uniform labelling rules that make it clear what "Digital Cable Ready" means: FCC ADOPTS RULES FOR LABELING OF DTV RECEIVERS. THIS is what Commissioner Ness was complaining about, not about the copy protection ruling.
In summary, this article is highly confused about the events it is reporting.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with the potential for abuse with embedded copy protection, just that I'm not sure this article had a clue. I'm also pretty certain that the FCC is not "trying to get around AHRA" as some others have said. I'd just like to understand what is really going on here, and not jump to outrageous conclusions.
Indeed, but currently most judges have no knowledge of the various fields of computing whatsoever. How can you expect somebody who doesn't know anything about technology to effect an honest trial in a technology-based case?
Playing devil's advocate here for a second, I would expect judge's to seek out help, just as Judge Jackson did by appointing a Special Master (did I get that title right?), or listen to the experts (in the legal sense) that both sides bring to a trial (that is, after all, why the "expert" is enshrined in law and given special leeway in the court to inject their opinion into a legal proceeding). If you read legal opinions from judges presiding over trials with experts, you generally see them address the comments and opinions of the experts, and why they accept or reject those opinions.
Secondly, even a technology aware judge is not going to have the requisite knowledge in all areas of "technology". I would not want to see an expert in database technology designing tires (to pick a random, in the news kind of point), for example, because they require totally separate sets of understanding. Should the same extend to these technology judges, or would you consider all technology cases equally under the jurisdiction of the technology courts?
Besides, practice of the law is not so much different in the skills needed than is practice of most technical professions: the ability to absorb large quantities of data, analyse those data logically within a certain prescribed framework, and render decisions on that data in view of past experience and current data. Just because the prescribed framework is a set of laws and precedents and not an instruction set and memory architecture doesn't, to me anyway, seem to make much difference in the end.
With your car you know it needs gas and the oil changed and you learn that as part of owning a car... Joe User shoudl learn enough to either learn about a firewall or pay someone to do it.
I think there is a slight difference here, though, that bears mentioning, that makes all the difference in the world: you know your car needs its oil changed because the manufacturer tells you so in the owners manual. I would dare say that most people would not know to change their oil if they weren't told; I would go even further, and say that most people don't know what the oil in their car is there for! Furthermore, few of those who know to change their oil do it themselves; even those who know HOW to change their oil pay someone unquestioningly to do the work for them (I know I do).
The difference is that the manufacturers and service providers for software do not give such instructions; I've never seen a piece of modern computer hardware or software come with a "3000 hour service schedule". I don't think this is a result of any sloth or malice on their part, just that the industry is so young it really isn't possible to do so yet. If even the most die hard, hands on hackers can make massive security mistakes that lie unfound for a long time (recent glibc bugs anyone?), how can we possibly expect to be able to educate Joe User to the pitfalls and details of securing his home computer?
In time, maybe, but it will only happen with widespread industry and user experience, and the maturing of computer science in general.
I'm with you...it seems more likely to me to be a last gamble that they can get a few more weeks of running before decommissioning. The article sounds much like the CERN announcement of the "discovery" of Quark-Gluon Plasma a week of so before the start of RHIC's first run.
Warning! Handwaving to occur! Intended for non-theorists! Complaints on details not expected!
First, is the Higgs field the same everywhere in the Universe?
No, just like E&M
And second, perhaps we can learn to manipulate it?
Probably not. We can manipulate EM fields because the sources of such fields are electrically charged particles, and they are easy to grab and move around, since EM forces are relatively large. You can think of masses as being the sources of the Higgs field. But, the coupling of the Higgs field is extremely weak, making it hard to have an impact on the field by wiggling masses around.
If the Higgs field "causes mass", maybe its different in other areas of the universe. Maybe this could explain the "dark matter" problem - perhaps there is no missing matter, but the Higgs field is stronger in other places so everything just has more mass "out there".
This is a reasonable extrapolation of what's been written here, but as usual, popularizations leave out some important technical details. The particle masses are generated by their coupling to the Higgs field, and the magnitude of those masses is set by the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field, which is how strong the field is when there are no excitations (no real Higgs particles) lying around. We know the value of this VEV fairly well (246 GeV in the most popular normalization). Assuming the vacuum has the same structure everywhere in the universe (and there are observational limits on this that are very strict), then particle masses would be the same everywhere as well, even if the instantaneous value of the Higgs field is different
If we could make a device that modifies the Higgs field, would that have the effect of changing the apparent mass of objects within the field?
No, but we could do so if we could build a device to modify the structure of the vacuum...which we don't know how to do! But, if the rumblings out of CERN are right (and I doubt they are more than a desperate grab on a primacy claim for the Nobel that the discovery will garner), we have ALREADY BUILT a machine to change the Higgs field (athough not in the same sense that we've built machines (radio transmitters) to change the E&M field), namely LEP, since "changing the Higgs field" is the same thing as generating real Higgs particles.
There is a difference here from the luminous ether theory: Maxwell's equations (which describe classical electromagnetism, and contain wave equations as their solution) does not predict or require the existence of the ether. Presuming the existence of the ether was an additional assumption that was added based on personal preferences of the scientists involved, but NOT in any way required by the fundamental statement of the theory of electromagnetism.
However, the Higgs boson is required IF our current theory is correct. And, the current theory is believed to be correct BECAUSE every measurement that is made conforms to this theory; there are literally millions of experimental observations that have been made, and we need only 20 or so parameters to describe all of them... hence, we can make millions of predictions. Thus, if the Higgs does NOT exist, we will have the exceedingly hard job of explaining how the current theory can be so wrong and yet so accurate.
So, the Higgs boson is FUNDAMENTALLY PREDICTED AND REQUIRED to exist by the theory, whereas the ether was neither predicted nor required.
That does not mean it DOES exist, just that we really do expect it to (much like we expected to see the top quark and the Z/W bosons long before they were actually observed).
Generally, they are either named in honor of someone who did fundamental work on the theory behind the particle (like fermions (Fermi), and the Higgs (Peter Higgs)) by general, informal consensus (people just started calling the Higgs the Higgs) or they are named by their discoverers (like the J/psi), or by committee (most of the heavier elements are named by IUPAC).
Minor correction: the graviton is a spin 2 excitation. Incidentally, this is why it is so hard to come up with a consistent quantum theory of gravity. You might know that all of our particle physics is based on renormalizable quantum gauge field theories, and, as you said, they contain spin 0, 1/2, and 1 fundamental fields. These, it turns out, are the only types of fields that can be consistently renormalized in four space-time dimensions. Thus, when you try to turn a classical theory (like E&M, with its spin 1 photon), into a quantum field theory, you can do it consistently, and make all the icky infinities disappear. Since you can't do that to spin 2 fields, you can't make the infinities go away, and naive quantization of Einstein's gravity doesn't give a consistent quantum theory....but I've digressed:-)
For instance it's easy to imagine repulsion forces as a result of exchanging some particles, but it's impossible to explain attraction that way.
FWIW, there is an analogy (a pretty hokey analogy) for explaining attraction as an exchange. You think of repulsion as the exchange of "balls" while you can think of attraction as the exchange of "boomerangs" - you throw the boomerang AWAY from the one you want to be attracted to, it loops around, and they catch it. YOU are "pushed" toward the one you are attracted to when you throw the boomerang, and the CATCHER is pushed toward YOU.
Like I said, its a hokey analogy, but it helped some of my students at one point.
I believe that it is not actually going into the trashcan, but large parts of it will be mothballed for possible future use at the current facility as part of an electron-proton "upgrade" when the LHC program is done....at least, that's what Chris Llewellyn-Smith (sp? former director general of CERN) told us when he was here a few years ago.
Won't the RT's proximity to the east coast megalopolis suffer it interference problems.
Probably not a big issue, for three reasons:
(1) Many of the frequencies of interest are not used by commercial broadcasting equipment (if I remember correctly, things like the spin flip transition of ground state atomic hydrogen, and the prominent HNO lines...but I could be remembering incorrectly here)
(2) The mobile noise generators (like jets and cellphones) are on frequencies that can be ignored.
(3) The fixed noise generators have a measurable, known location and transmission power, and so can be trivially monitored and removed....and they are generally behind mountains and below the interesting horizon anyway.
Although you should take this with a grain of salt, since I haven't done any work with this stuff in a few years.
A telescope is just a device for collecting and focusing electromagnetic energy onto a detector (be it a solid state device, a camera, your eyeball, etc). Most telescopes that you think of are optical telescopes, and look at visible light. A radio telescope is a big antenna that looks at the radio section of the spectrum. There are also infrared telescopes, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray telescopes.
Likely, there would be no gain....distributed processing of the SETI@home type is kind of unique in data analysis, being processor limited on relatively small amounts of data. Most large experiments (radio telescopes, particle accelerator detectors, etc.) have data analysis requirements that turn out to be bandwidth limited, and not processor limited; you end up having to move a few megabytes of data for each event of interest, but then you only need to spend relatively small amounts of time comparing a few of the pieces of data to a given criteria. Big collider experiments use large farms of cheap machines connected to very high speed networks to do their work, not something that scales well to low bandwidth networks like the Internet.
Can somebody please explain how a "dimension" can be "curled up tiny"?
I'll try...
First, think of an infinite 1 dimensional surface... a line. Now, as you know from geometry, the line has infinite extent. This is what we normally think of when we think of a "dimension". It is "1-dimension" since we need 1 parameter to describe a position along its length. It is an infinite dimension since the value of that position parameter can vary from -\infty to +\infty
Now, we'll think of a finite 1 dimensional surface. Take a line segment and connect the ends, and we get... a circle! It is also "1 dimensional" since we need 1 parameter, and it is finite, since that parameter can vary from (say) 0 to 2\pi
When formulated in the right way, there is nothing that prevents you from doing physics where the dimensions are finite instead of infinite (I admit that it would be quite difficult using the techniques normally taught in an undergraduate setting). And, generally speaking, there is nothing that prevents you from doing physics with more than three space and one time dimension (although again, it is generally quite difficult using undergraduate techniques).
Now, we bring it all together; while a particular string theory requires that our universe be ten dimensional (for the mathematical consistency of the "supersymmetry algebra" of the theory), the theory itself doesn't specify which of those dimensions are finite, and which of them are infinite (eventually, we would hope to come up with a theory which DID make that specification, starting from basic assumptions, but we aren't there right now). What makes that specification right now is our experiments, which say that there are at least 3+1 "large" dimensions (nearly infinite). Thus, those extra 6 dimensions must be finite, or "curled up".
Incidentally, the fact that we can't see those extra dimensions (if they exist) tells us something (that "something" depends on exactly how you assume that they have compactified). Generally, it tells us that they must be smaller than a certain size, otherwise they would have manifested themselves in experiments, usually as deviations from the Newtonian gravitational force. The fact that we haven't seen any such deviations tells us that the "size" of the "dimension" must be very small.
Rereading what I just wrote, I'm not sure it helps, but I hope it does!
Or is it true, as another response to my post said, that "string theory IS the simpler theory.". If so, why
are there so many different string theories, and what's with the M-theory "unifying" them but "adding complications"?
String theory is "simpler" in the sense that it starts from mathematically simpler (and more well technically well justified) assumptions (not being a string theorist, I really can't tell you what those are, sorry) than does quantum field theory, the mathematical framework upon which the Standard Model is hung.
The reason there are "different" string theories is that there is some freedom in which subset of those mathematical assumptions you are allowed to choose from: you need to choose some minimal set from those assumptions that will give you enough "interesting" structure that you can obtain results that can be identified with physical processes that we see in nature. It turns out that there are only five mathematically consistent ways to combine the assumptions, hence there are only five different string theories.
Now, it turns out that combining those mathematical assumptions in a certain way (again, not an M-theorist, so I don't know the details), you get a theory called M-theory. When you take certain limits (in the same sense that you learned in freshman calculus) of the theory, you obtain each of the 5 string theories. It is in this sense that M-theory "unifies" all the string theories (since they are all subsets of the same theory), while adding "complications" (any of the calculations that you can't do in string theory, you can't do even more in M-theory:-)
Why didn't they try harder to find a simpler explanation?
I'm a grad student in particle theory, so take what I say with a grain of salt. In a sense that isn't easy to relate to a lay person (because they are technical and require acquisition of a vocabulary and rigorous definitions that I'm not well equipped to explain), the current model of particle physics IS the simplest theory that is possible (meaning anything simpler gets the wrong answer). Whether it be within the Standard Model or with M-theory, you start by writing down the simplest mathematical description you can, and then check the consequences.
The complications all arise in the last step, checking the consequences. Those calculations are often horrifically difficult. This is not unlike the example you cite of Newtonian gravity: you COULD write down a more complicated model that agrees with experiments, but the inverse square law works very well, and is incredibly simple. Unfortunately, even this simplest possible model becomes calculationally intractable when you try to do something as seemingly simple as the three body problem, which is unsolvable (in a technical sense) except in a few highly contrived circumstances.
String theory is the same thing. Write down the absolutely most trivial and general equations you can that are consistent with the known "properties" of the universe, turn the crank, and see what comes out....but you get stuck in the process of turning the crank.
As to whether there are physicists trying to come up with a simpler set of explanations; yes, there are, but anything that has been tried that IS simpler is KNOWN to be wrong. Since these theories are mathematical, you can convince yourself that there AREN'T simpler theories that you have missed (in a certain highly technical sense....), because those classes of theories makes predictions which are wrong.
Of course, it may turn out that a more complicated fundamental theory may turn out to be simpler to calculate with, and hence be simpler in a different sense.
There's a lot of stuff we don't know, and a lot of people trying to discover that.
True statement...and that's why scientists will have jobs for many many generations.
However, this "field" of "cold fusion" research is not one of them....many many studies have been done in the years after the Pons/Fleischman debacle, and have shown conclusively, beyond any shadow of scientific doubt, that this "cold fusion" of hydrogen is NOT in fact happening. Every single "experiment" that has "shown" that cold fusion is occurring has been:
seriously flawed
unreproducible
and statistically irrelevant
The claims of the "cold fusion" advocates are mostly wishful thinking and bunk. I don't go so far as to claim they are crack pots, just that they don't have the training and experience to realize and understand where their experiments are flawed and why they are getting junk results. Doing experiments correctly is HARD and most experiments take years to work out all the known bugs and to understand in detail the nuances and effects present in the system.
Always remember: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof....and cold fusion advocates have not even been able to show repeatable experiments, much less mundane proof!
Slashdot Mirror
John Hancock was the president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, and president of the first and second Continental Congresses, but you are correct that he was not president of the United States under either the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution.
Biography of John Hancock
Nope...
Article VI, paragraph 2
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
So, treaties are such as to law, only when made under the authority of the United States...which derives from the powers granted it by the people in the Constitution. So, any treaty in violation of the Constitution has not been made under the authority of the United States, and hence is invalid.
I found the statement in the article that the US Congress would be obliged to pass laws in support of this treaty a little disingenuous. This statement would be true if the US Senate approves the treaty. Under the US constitution, no treaty to which we are a signatory becomes legally binding until ratified by the Senate...no Administration can run off to foreign powers and conclude a treaty that gives them legislative powers. So, if they've been unwilling to pass the laws unilaterally, no signed treaty is going to make them do so any faster.
Now could the Senate ratify a treaty requiring these laws be passed? Sure, and they very well might, but they are not under any obligation to do so (look at the Chemical Weapons Convention, the League of Nations, etc...). And that is a different issue than this article implies.
This really had me worried, so I went to the FCC site to read what they actually ruled, and I am now convinced that the linked article above is REALLY screwed up, freely mixing comments and opinions about two rulings that have ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with each other
Here is the summary of what the FCC actually said concerning copy protection:
Summary of the Declaratory Ruling:
In today's Order, the Commission addressed the narrow issue of whether technology licenses requiring copy protection measures to be located within commercially available equipment are consistent with the Commission's navigation devices rules. The Order noted that the Commission's initial navigation devices Order expressly contemplated the inclusion of copy protection measures in navigation host devices and that such measures would not violate the security separation requirement. Today's Order reiterated that some measure of anti-copying encryption technology is consistent with the intent of the rules because such measures protect a gap where digital data would otherwise be available "in the clear" and subject to unrestricted digital copying.
With this controversy resolved, the Commission directed industry participants to finalize negotiations necessary to bring to fruition the goals of Section 629 and requested that industry participants submit, within 30 days of the release of the Order, a report on the status of the DFAST license, including a final version of a completed DFAST license agreement.
Although today's ruling clarified that the inclusion of some amount of copy protection within a host device does not violate the navigation devices rules, the Commission did not determine whether specific copy protection terms or technology were consistent with the rules. The Commission also concluded that no evidence was presented that reasonable home copying would be impeded by the inclusion of copy protection within host devices.
Action by the Commission September 14, 2000, by Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and Declaratory Ruling (CS Docket # 97-80, FCC 00-341).
FCC Press Release
So the FCC clearly IS concerned with ensuring that "reasonable" home copying is possible, although it isn't clear from this summary what EXACTLY that means. It is also not clear to me after reading this whether the quote from Jeff Joseph is complaining about the inclusion of copy protection itself, or whether it is complaining about the loss of backward compatibility. The latter is a problem, but allowing copy protection into some devices was already decided. I'm not sure exactly what the copy protection is allowed to copy, but this ruling was covering the narrow question of exactly where in the digital decoding process that copy protection has to go.
It seems that the original linked article was mixing comments concerning TWO FCC releases; this copy protection rule clarification, and another one regarding uniform labelling rules that make it clear what "Digital Cable Ready" means: FCC ADOPTS RULES FOR LABELING OF DTV RECEIVERS. THIS is what Commissioner Ness was complaining about, not about the copy protection ruling.
In summary, this article is highly confused about the events it is reporting.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with the potential for abuse with embedded copy protection, just that I'm not sure this article had a clue. I'm also pretty certain that the FCC is not "trying to get around AHRA" as some others have said. I'd just like to understand what is really going on here, and not jump to outrageous conclusions.
Indeed, but currently most judges have no knowledge of the various fields of computing whatsoever. How can you expect somebody who doesn't know anything about technology to effect an honest trial in a technology-based case?
Playing devil's advocate here for a second, I would expect judge's to seek out help, just as Judge Jackson did by appointing a Special Master (did I get that title right?), or listen to the experts (in the legal sense) that both sides bring to a trial (that is, after all, why the "expert" is enshrined in law and given special leeway in the court to inject their opinion into a legal proceeding). If you read legal opinions from judges presiding over trials with experts, you generally see them address the comments and opinions of the experts, and why they accept or reject those opinions.
Secondly, even a technology aware judge is not going to have the requisite knowledge in all areas of "technology". I would not want to see an expert in database technology designing tires (to pick a random, in the news kind of point), for example, because they require totally separate sets of understanding. Should the same extend to these technology judges, or would you consider all technology cases equally under the jurisdiction of the technology courts?
Besides, practice of the law is not so much different in the skills needed than is practice of most technical professions: the ability to absorb large quantities of data, analyse those data logically within a certain prescribed framework, and render decisions on that data in view of past experience and current data. Just because the prescribed framework is a set of laws and precedents and not an instruction set and memory architecture doesn't, to me anyway, seem to make much difference in the end.
With your car you know it needs gas and the oil changed and you learn that as part of owning a car...
Joe User shoudl learn enough to either learn about a firewall or pay someone to do it.
I think there is a slight difference here, though, that bears mentioning, that makes all the difference in the world: you know your car needs its oil changed because the manufacturer tells you so in the owners manual. I would dare say that most people would not know to change their oil if they weren't told; I would go even further, and say that most people don't know what the oil in their car is there for! Furthermore, few of those who know to change their oil do it themselves; even those who know HOW to change their oil pay someone unquestioningly to do the work for them (I know I do).
The difference is that the manufacturers and service providers for software do not give such instructions; I've never seen a piece of modern computer hardware or software come with a "3000 hour service schedule". I don't think this is a result of any sloth or malice on their part, just that the industry is so young it really isn't possible to do so yet. If even the most die hard, hands on hackers can make massive security mistakes that lie unfound for a long time (recent glibc bugs anyone?), how can we possibly expect to be able to educate Joe User to the pitfalls and details of securing his home computer?
In time, maybe, but it will only happen with widespread industry and user experience, and the maturing of computer science in general.
I'm with you...it seems more likely to me to be a last gamble that they can get a few more weeks of running before decommissioning. The article sounds much like the CERN announcement of the "discovery" of Quark-Gluon Plasma a week of so before the start of RHIC's first run.
Then again, maybe they really do have something.
Warning! Handwaving to occur! Intended for non-theorists! Complaints on details not expected!
First, is the Higgs field the same everywhere in the Universe?
No, just like E&M
And second, perhaps we can learn to manipulate it?
Probably not. We can manipulate EM fields because the sources of such fields are electrically charged particles, and they are easy to grab and move around, since EM forces are relatively large. You can think of masses as being the sources of the Higgs field. But, the coupling of the Higgs field is extremely weak, making it hard to have an impact on the field by wiggling masses around.
If the Higgs field "causes mass", maybe its different in other areas of the universe. Maybe this could explain the "dark matter" problem - perhaps there is no missing matter, but the Higgs field is stronger in other places so everything just has more mass "out there".
This is a reasonable extrapolation of what's been written here, but as usual, popularizations leave out some important technical details. The particle masses are generated by their coupling to the Higgs field, and the magnitude of those masses is set by the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field, which is how strong the field is when there are no excitations (no real Higgs particles) lying around. We know the value of this VEV fairly well (246 GeV in the most popular normalization). Assuming the vacuum has the same structure everywhere in the universe (and there are observational limits on this that are very strict), then particle masses would be the same everywhere as well, even if the instantaneous value of the Higgs field is different
If we could make a device that modifies the Higgs field, would that have the effect of changing the apparent mass of objects within the field?
No, but we could do so if we could build a device to modify the structure of the vacuum...which we don't know how to do! But, if the rumblings out of CERN are right (and I doubt they are more than a desperate grab on a primacy claim for the Nobel that the discovery will garner), we have ALREADY BUILT a machine to change the Higgs field (athough not in the same sense that we've built machines (radio transmitters) to change the E&M field), namely LEP, since "changing the Higgs field" is the same thing as generating real Higgs particles.
There is a difference here from the luminous ether theory: Maxwell's equations (which describe classical electromagnetism, and contain wave equations as their solution) does not predict or require the existence of the ether. Presuming the existence of the ether was an additional assumption that was added based on personal preferences of the scientists involved, but NOT in any way required by the fundamental statement of the theory of electromagnetism.
However, the Higgs boson is required IF our current theory is correct. And, the current theory is believed to be correct BECAUSE every measurement that is made conforms to this theory; there are literally millions of experimental observations that have been made, and we need only 20 or so parameters to describe all of them ... hence, we can make millions of predictions. Thus, if the Higgs does NOT exist, we will have the exceedingly hard job of explaining how the current theory can be so wrong and yet so accurate.
So, the Higgs boson is FUNDAMENTALLY PREDICTED AND REQUIRED to exist by the theory, whereas the ether was neither predicted nor required.
That does not mean it DOES exist, just that we really do expect it to (much like we expected to see the top quark and the Z/W bosons long before they were actually observed).
Generally, they are either named in honor of someone who did fundamental work on the theory behind the particle (like fermions (Fermi), and the Higgs (Peter Higgs)) by general, informal consensus (people just started calling the Higgs the Higgs) or they are named by their discoverers (like the J/psi), or by committee (most of the heavier elements are named by IUPAC).
Minor correction: the graviton is a spin 2 excitation. Incidentally, this is why it is so hard to come up with a consistent quantum theory of gravity. You might know that all of our particle physics is based on renormalizable quantum gauge field theories, and, as you said, they contain spin 0, 1/2, and 1 fundamental fields. These, it turns out, are the only types of fields that can be consistently renormalized in four space-time dimensions. Thus, when you try to turn a classical theory (like E&M, with its spin 1 photon), into a quantum field theory, you can do it consistently, and make all the icky infinities disappear. Since you can't do that to spin 2 fields, you can't make the infinities go away, and naive quantization of Einstein's gravity doesn't give a consistent quantum theory....but I've digressed :-)
FWIW, there is an analogy (a pretty hokey analogy) for explaining attraction as an exchange. You think of repulsion as the exchange of "balls" while you can think of attraction as the exchange of "boomerangs" - you throw the boomerang AWAY from the one you want to be attracted to, it loops around, and they catch it. YOU are "pushed" toward the one you are attracted to when you throw the boomerang, and the CATCHER is pushed toward YOU.
Like I said, its a hokey analogy, but it helped some of my students at one point.
I believe that it is not actually going into the trashcan, but large parts of it will be mothballed for possible future use at the current facility as part of an electron-proton "upgrade" when the LHC program is done....at least, that's what Chris Llewellyn-Smith (sp? former director general of CERN) told us when he was here a few years ago.
Won't the RT's proximity to the east coast megalopolis suffer it interference problems.
Probably not a big issue, for three reasons:
(1) Many of the frequencies of interest are not used by commercial broadcasting equipment (if I remember correctly, things like the spin flip transition of ground state atomic hydrogen, and the prominent HNO lines...but I could be remembering incorrectly here)
(2) The mobile noise generators (like jets and cellphones) are on frequencies that can be ignored.
(3) The fixed noise generators have a measurable, known location and transmission power, and so can be trivially monitored and removed....and they are generally behind mountains and below the interesting horizon anyway.
Although you should take this with a grain of salt, since I haven't done any work with this stuff in a few years.
A telescope is just a device for collecting and focusing electromagnetic energy onto a detector (be it a solid state device, a camera, your eyeball, etc). Most telescopes that you think of are optical telescopes, and look at visible light. A radio telescope is a big antenna that looks at the radio section of the spectrum. There are also infrared telescopes, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray telescopes.
Likely, there would be no gain....distributed processing of the SETI@home type is kind of unique in data analysis, being processor limited on relatively small amounts of data. Most large experiments (radio telescopes, particle accelerator detectors, etc.) have data analysis requirements that turn out to be bandwidth limited, and not processor limited; you end up having to move a few megabytes of data for each event of interest, but then you only need to spend relatively small amounts of time comparing a few of the pieces of data to a given criteria. Big collider experiments use large farms of cheap machines connected to very high speed networks to do their work, not something that scales well to low bandwidth networks like the Internet.
Can somebody please explain how a "dimension" can be "curled up tiny"?
I'll try...
First, think of an infinite 1 dimensional surface ... a line. Now, as you know from geometry, the line has infinite extent. This is what we normally think of when we think of a "dimension". It is "1-dimension" since we need 1 parameter to describe a position along its length. It is an infinite dimension since the value of that position parameter can vary from -\infty to +\infty
Now, we'll think of a finite 1 dimensional surface. Take a line segment and connect the ends, and we get ... a circle! It is also "1 dimensional" since we need 1 parameter, and it is finite, since that parameter can vary from (say) 0 to 2\pi
When formulated in the right way, there is nothing that prevents you from doing physics where the dimensions are finite instead of infinite (I admit that it would be quite difficult using the techniques normally taught in an undergraduate setting). And, generally speaking, there is nothing that prevents you from doing physics with more than three space and one time dimension (although again, it is generally quite difficult using undergraduate techniques).
Now, we bring it all together; while a particular string theory requires that our universe be ten dimensional (for the mathematical consistency of the "supersymmetry algebra" of the theory), the theory itself doesn't specify which of those dimensions are finite, and which of them are infinite (eventually, we would hope to come up with a theory which DID make that specification, starting from basic assumptions, but we aren't there right now). What makes that specification right now is our experiments, which say that there are at least 3+1 "large" dimensions (nearly infinite). Thus, those extra 6 dimensions must be finite, or "curled up".
Incidentally, the fact that we can't see those extra dimensions (if they exist) tells us something (that "something" depends on exactly how you assume that they have compactified). Generally, it tells us that they must be smaller than a certain size, otherwise they would have manifested themselves in experiments, usually as deviations from the Newtonian gravitational force. The fact that we haven't seen any such deviations tells us that the "size" of the "dimension" must be very small.
Rereading what I just wrote, I'm not sure it helps, but I hope it does!
Or is it true, as another response to my post said, that "string theory IS the simpler theory.". If so, why are there so many different string theories, and what's with the M-theory "unifying" them but "adding complications"?
String theory is "simpler" in the sense that it starts from mathematically simpler (and more well technically well justified) assumptions (not being a string theorist, I really can't tell you what those are, sorry) than does quantum field theory, the mathematical framework upon which the Standard Model is hung.
The reason there are "different" string theories is that there is some freedom in which subset of those mathematical assumptions you are allowed to choose from: you need to choose some minimal set from those assumptions that will give you enough "interesting" structure that you can obtain results that can be identified with physical processes that we see in nature. It turns out that there are only five mathematically consistent ways to combine the assumptions, hence there are only five different string theories.
Now, it turns out that combining those mathematical assumptions in a certain way (again, not an M-theorist, so I don't know the details), you get a theory called M-theory. When you take certain limits (in the same sense that you learned in freshman calculus) of the theory, you obtain each of the 5 string theories. It is in this sense that M-theory "unifies" all the string theories (since they are all subsets of the same theory), while adding "complications" (any of the calculations that you can't do in string theory, you can't do even more in M-theory :-)
Why didn't they try harder to find a simpler explanation?
I'm a grad student in particle theory, so take what I say with a grain of salt. In a sense that isn't easy to relate to a lay person (because they are technical and require acquisition of a vocabulary and rigorous definitions that I'm not well equipped to explain), the current model of particle physics IS the simplest theory that is possible (meaning anything simpler gets the wrong answer). Whether it be within the Standard Model or with M-theory, you start by writing down the simplest mathematical description you can, and then check the consequences.
The complications all arise in the last step, checking the consequences. Those calculations are often horrifically difficult. This is not unlike the example you cite of Newtonian gravity: you COULD write down a more complicated model that agrees with experiments, but the inverse square law works very well, and is incredibly simple. Unfortunately, even this simplest possible model becomes calculationally intractable when you try to do something as seemingly simple as the three body problem, which is unsolvable (in a technical sense) except in a few highly contrived circumstances.
String theory is the same thing. Write down the absolutely most trivial and general equations you can that are consistent with the known "properties" of the universe, turn the crank, and see what comes out....but you get stuck in the process of turning the crank.
As to whether there are physicists trying to come up with a simpler set of explanations; yes, there are, but anything that has been tried that IS simpler is KNOWN to be wrong. Since these theories are mathematical, you can convince yourself that there AREN'T simpler theories that you have missed (in a certain highly technical sense....), because those classes of theories makes predictions which are wrong.
Of course, it may turn out that a more complicated fundamental theory may turn out to be simpler to calculate with, and hence be simpler in a different sense.
There's a lot of stuff we don't know, and a lot of people trying to discover that.
True statement...and that's why scientists will have jobs for many many generations.
However, this "field" of "cold fusion" research is not one of them....many many studies have been done in the years after the Pons/Fleischman debacle, and have shown conclusively, beyond any shadow of scientific doubt, that this "cold fusion" of hydrogen is NOT in fact happening. Every single "experiment" that has "shown" that cold fusion is occurring has been:
- seriously flawed
- unreproducible
- and statistically irrelevant
The claims of the "cold fusion" advocates are mostly wishful thinking and bunk. I don't go so far as to claim they are crack pots, just that they don't have the training and experience to realize and understand where their experiments are flawed and why they are getting junk results. Doing experiments correctly is HARD and most experiments take years to work out all the known bugs and to understand in detail the nuances and effects present in the system.Always remember: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof....and cold fusion advocates have not even been able to show repeatable experiments, much less mundane proof!