Prior to the possible discovery announcement, the LHC was often called one of the last big science experiments of our generation--- big science being a casualty of recession budgets. Do you think this discovery might persuade governments to invest more in big/expensive/multinational investigations?
Six years ago, from a professor at my alma mater: http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/node45.html This being slashdot, I didn't RTFA but the author seems to come to the same conclusion that Fitzpatrick did. Incidentally, if you ever need to know something about physics, chances are this fellow has excellent lecture notes posted on his website covering the topic (in hyperlinked html, pdf, and even a git repository for the latex code!).
I don't get why people get so hung up on these aspects of QM... QM is NOT a complete theory anyway, and treating a particle as a localized field configuration (quantum field theory) neatly fixes many of the seemingly inconsistent aspects of non-relativistic QM (albeit while creating a thousand other problems/questions). It's ultimately irrelevant in some sense...
Some examples from my intellectual neck of the woods-- the comments sections were particularly interesting during the whole OPERA snafu, though with Lubos' blog in particular you have to deal with some pretty half-baked political ideologies.
Researchers don't like this any better than you do-- it's indescribably frustrating to have to email colleagues at another university with a better, more comprehensive literature subscription. And that's before you acknowledge the fact that the researchers do everything up to printing the journal (generating the work, reviewing the work, revising the work), and yet the journal receives the profits. Trust us, we'd all like open access journals.
Majored in physics, not spin doctoring-- my apologies. Shale reserves are far from ready to produce, what makes you think holding fossil fuels up on life support via enormous subsidies and incentives for our best and brightest engineers/scientists to enter the oil/gas industry is a more logical plan than solar (or nuclear, gasp!) powered batteries or fuel cells? Your error re: Chu exposes your comment for what it is-- just so much spin and rhetoric.
Your rant would sound considerably less crazy if you correctly identified Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy, rather than Secretary of the Treasury, who is Timothy Geithner. Oh who am I kidding, you sound insane regardless! P.S.: I've interned with and a large portion of my undergraduate education was paid for by Schlumberger-- you might feel differently about fracking/fossil fuels in general if you've seen the beast from the inside.
Not only the fact that you do induce a voltage along the length of the tether-- think about the dynamics induced by the air currents. Anyone who has taken an introductory physics course knows that driven strings exhibit some pretty complex dynamics. It's entirely likely that you couldn't stabilize the tether, that some sort of instability would take hold and snap the damn thing. Incidentally, this is similar to the problems prohibiting viable tokamaks. You start out with what seems like a reasonable stable electron distribution (that is, reasonably close to an equilibrium solution), but small perturbations tend to grow pretty quickly and before you know it you've collided with the chamber wall.
This is a pretty commonly held misconception, exacerbated by the media. Einstein never objected to much of non-relativistic QM, but he did take issue with the attitudes adopted by many Copenhagen proponents-- that once you had the Heisenberg picture, the theory was put to bed. Einstein knew better than this, and was vindicated by Dirac et al during the development of quantum field theory. He never rejected QM in its entirety. It's unfair to diminish his role in developing modern physics, even with such benign criticism-- the man was probably the greatest scientist to ever live.
P.S. I study QFT. I'd be pretty interested in hearing Einstein's take on things like renormalization.
FTA "[...] people like Einstein and Paul Dirac (who predicted the existence of antimatter )"
It's so strange that they have to explain who Dirac is. I'm a student in a top high energy physics department, and the man's name is literally everywhere. He build quantum field theory from the ground up, damn near by himself. He's definitely a demigod within the community.
When I was in highschool I read (in Scientific American?) an article about Dirac, and it portrayed him as something of an under appreciated genius, that somehow he managed to escape the public eye. I guess this really is true.
There's this huge disconnect between who the layman idolizes (Einstein, Bohr, Hawking etc.) and who the theorists idolize (t'Hooft, Yang, Wilson, etc. though of course we do idolize the other guys as well).
It was kind of funny, I got to tour the TACC through a lab contact, and the most interesting thing wasn't Ranger (the fastest publicly owned supercomputer in the world), but this odd looking unit they have in the back room pushed up against a wall. Walking up to it, we thought it was filled with flourinert-- but then the systems manager stuck his finger in and licked the liquid off, explaining it was mineral oil! It's pretty amazing, they cool this thing using a swamp cooler. Just a pump with a heat exchanger that feeds a water loop through an exterior wall, to an evaporator. And apparently this thing works well during the Austin summers-- not as bad as Houston, but those of us who've had to endure it know that it can get pretty humid.
I can have complete control over a video game in 2011. I simply have to torrent it illegally from a plethora of sources and install a crack. I thought maybe the uproar (and subsequent spike in pirating) over the Assassin's Creed DRM would have shown developers that sometimes excessive control can backfire. Quoth the Princess Leia: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Mathematica syntax is actually quite easy once you get used to it. This is enhanced enormously by the excellent help/reference/tutorial database. Can't remember the syntax for a certain command? Curious about options? Need a similar command but can't remember/don't know it? Highlight your command and hit F1. Takes all of about 2 seconds, and you have all the requisite knowledge to construct some pretty sophisticated functions. I'm a physics student, and I've used Mathematica extensively for both quick and dirty and more involved numerical work, and in this respect its proved invaluable. My one reservation is that it's handling of procedural programming blows-- sometimes I wish I knew C better than I do...
DARPA is the canonical "high risk, high reward" agency. Sure some of their funded proposals/contracts sound bat shit insane, but what if this actually succeeds? This is, after all, the organization that brought us the precursor to the internet and the predator drone. A pilot-less combat plane you say? Blasphemy. Lay people exchanging information and culture near instantaneously across the world using light traveling through a cable? Apostasy. IMHO, quit whining about what in all reality is a small, small fraction of the federal budget, and focus on what really matters. And by that I mean ensuring net neutrality. =)
You know what the great thing about making absolute statements (or in your case, the insinuation) is? It only takes one counter example to prove the statement false.
I played WoW for about 5 years, consistently performing at the highest levels of both PVE and PVP (top 100 world wide PVE, multiple gladiator titles). I'm also a physics major at a world class research university who has publications in a major journal.
While your statement may be true of many WoW players, it's downright asinine to assume no benefits come from the game at all or that it inevitably wrecks your life. In short, I defy you, sir.
I can probably read the BBC article using the BBC news app on my android phone. For those of you unfamiliar with the BBC, it's a corporation operating under royal charter that's funded primarily by taxes (the television licensing fee). Oh irony, how you brighten my day...
In the gaming community, I've noticed a trend where people will drop offline, then reappear, explaining that they'd been "Comcast'd". Take that as you will.
Yeah, I figured the literature was probably fluff so I didn't even bother to track it down. It's interesting that they can't even show an expulsion of flux--my experience has been that you can take quite a few ceramics and throw them into a SQUID and see the "Meissner" effect... but when you try and measure resistivity it's always finite but measurable. Seems they didn't even get that far...
Doing research in a solid state physics lab, I can tell you that this article is worth nothing without the inclusion of the critical temperature Tc at which the "superconductor" starts working. Given that its some sort of ceramic, its a class II superconductor which means that it could possibly be one of the "high Tc" superconductors, a misleading title because they do still need to be cooled with LN2 (just not liquid helium, a much more expensive/difficult prospect). If their "superconductor" only works at.7 kelvin, it's not very impressive--there are lots of materials that do that. To quote (more or less) one of my lab mates "if I dunked my cat in liquid helium, it would probably begin to superconduct." In summary, the devil is in the details.
Follow me here:
The average household is somewhere around 2400 square feet. Let's assume for simplicity sake that it's a box measuring 49'x49'x10'. That makes for about 6800 square feet of interior surface area. The skin depth for gold at 2.4 GHz is pretty close to 200nm, but to be sure that the vast majority of the signal is stopped lets assume a coating of 1um thickness. 6800 square feet multiplied by 1um yields a volume of about 6e-4 m^3 of gold. Multiplying this by the density of gold (~20gm/cm^3) yields about 12 kilograms of gold. The last time I checked, gold was something close to $1200 dollars an ounce, which works out to be about $508k.
So all the guy really wants to do is use the settlement money to WiFi proof his house. And have a gold plated interior. And a little bit left over for hookers and blow.
Slashdot Mirror
Prior to the possible discovery announcement, the LHC was often called one of the last big science experiments of our generation--- big science being a casualty of recession budgets. Do you think this discovery might persuade governments to invest more in big/expensive/multinational investigations?
Six years ago, from a professor at my alma mater: http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/node45.html This being slashdot, I didn't RTFA but the author seems to come to the same conclusion that Fitzpatrick did. Incidentally, if you ever need to know something about physics, chances are this fellow has excellent lecture notes posted on his website covering the topic (in hyperlinked html, pdf, and even a git repository for the latex code!).
I don't get why people get so hung up on these aspects of QM... QM is NOT a complete theory anyway, and treating a particle as a localized field configuration (quantum field theory) neatly fixes many of the seemingly inconsistent aspects of non-relativistic QM (albeit while creating a thousand other problems/questions). It's ultimately irrelevant in some sense...
Some examples from my intellectual neck of the woods-- the comments sections were particularly interesting during the whole OPERA snafu, though with Lubos' blog in particular you have to deal with some pretty half-baked political ideologies.
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/
http://motls.blogspot.com/
Researchers don't like this any better than you do-- it's indescribably frustrating to have to email colleagues at another university with a better, more comprehensive literature subscription. And that's before you acknowledge the fact that the researchers do everything up to printing the journal (generating the work, reviewing the work, revising the work), and yet the journal receives the profits. Trust us, we'd all like open access journals.
Majored in physics, not spin doctoring-- my apologies. Shale reserves are far from ready to produce, what makes you think holding fossil fuels up on life support via enormous subsidies and incentives for our best and brightest engineers/scientists to enter the oil/gas industry is a more logical plan than solar (or nuclear, gasp!) powered batteries or fuel cells? Your error re: Chu exposes your comment for what it is-- just so much spin and rhetoric.
Your rant would sound considerably less crazy if you correctly identified Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy, rather than Secretary of the Treasury, who is Timothy Geithner. Oh who am I kidding, you sound insane regardless! P.S.: I've interned with and a large portion of my undergraduate education was paid for by Schlumberger-- you might feel differently about fracking/fossil fuels in general if you've seen the beast from the inside.
Not only the fact that you do induce a voltage along the length of the tether-- think about the dynamics induced by the air currents. Anyone who has taken an introductory physics course knows that driven strings exhibit some pretty complex dynamics. It's entirely likely that you couldn't stabilize the tether, that some sort of instability would take hold and snap the damn thing. Incidentally, this is similar to the problems prohibiting viable tokamaks. You start out with what seems like a reasonable stable electron distribution (that is, reasonably close to an equilibrium solution), but small perturbations tend to grow pretty quickly and before you know it you've collided with the chamber wall.
Real men and women write their resumes in LaTeX.
This is a pretty commonly held misconception, exacerbated by the media. Einstein never objected to much of non-relativistic QM, but he did take issue with the attitudes adopted by many Copenhagen proponents-- that once you had the Heisenberg picture, the theory was put to bed. Einstein knew better than this, and was vindicated by Dirac et al during the development of quantum field theory. He never rejected QM in its entirety. It's unfair to diminish his role in developing modern physics, even with such benign criticism-- the man was probably the greatest scientist to ever live.
P.S. I study QFT. I'd be pretty interested in hearing Einstein's take on things like renormalization.
Doesn't change the fact that they won't award the Fields medal to anyone over 40 years old. Sadface...
FTA "[...] people like Einstein and Paul Dirac (who predicted the existence of antimatter )"
It's so strange that they have to explain who Dirac is. I'm a student in a top high energy physics department, and the man's name is literally everywhere. He build quantum field theory from the ground up, damn near by himself. He's definitely a demigod within the community.
When I was in highschool I read (in Scientific American?) an article about Dirac, and it portrayed him as something of an under appreciated genius, that somehow he managed to escape the public eye. I guess this really is true.
There's this huge disconnect between who the layman idolizes (Einstein, Bohr, Hawking etc.) and who the theorists idolize (t'Hooft, Yang, Wilson, etc. though of course we do idolize the other guys as well).
It was kind of funny, I got to tour the TACC through a lab contact, and the most interesting thing wasn't Ranger (the fastest publicly owned supercomputer in the world), but this odd looking unit they have in the back room pushed up against a wall. Walking up to it, we thought it was filled with flourinert-- but then the systems manager stuck his finger in and licked the liquid off, explaining it was mineral oil! It's pretty amazing, they cool this thing using a swamp cooler. Just a pump with a heat exchanger that feeds a water loop through an exterior wall, to an evaporator. And apparently this thing works well during the Austin summers-- not as bad as Houston, but those of us who've had to endure it know that it can get pretty humid.
Real gamers map all their keys to a nostromo anyways... or whatever they're calling it these days. Who needs more than a few buttons on the mouse?
http://www.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=390404
I can have complete control over a video game in 2011. I simply have to torrent it illegally from a plethora of sources and install a crack. I thought maybe the uproar (and subsequent spike in pirating) over the Assassin's Creed DRM would have shown developers that sometimes excessive control can backfire. Quoth the Princess Leia: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Mathematica syntax is actually quite easy once you get used to it. This is enhanced enormously by the excellent help/reference/tutorial database. Can't remember the syntax for a certain command? Curious about options? Need a similar command but can't remember/don't know it? Highlight your command and hit F1. Takes all of about 2 seconds, and you have all the requisite knowledge to construct some pretty sophisticated functions. I'm a physics student, and I've used Mathematica extensively for both quick and dirty and more involved numerical work, and in this respect its proved invaluable. My one reservation is that it's handling of procedural programming blows-- sometimes I wish I knew C better than I do...
DARPA is the canonical "high risk, high reward" agency. Sure some of their funded proposals/contracts sound bat shit insane, but what if this actually succeeds? This is, after all, the organization that brought us the precursor to the internet and the predator drone. A pilot-less combat plane you say? Blasphemy. Lay people exchanging information and culture near instantaneously across the world using light traveling through a cable? Apostasy. IMHO, quit whining about what in all reality is a small, small fraction of the federal budget, and focus on what really matters. And by that I mean ensuring net neutrality. =)
You know what the great thing about making absolute statements (or in your case, the insinuation) is? It only takes one counter example to prove the statement false. I played WoW for about 5 years, consistently performing at the highest levels of both PVE and PVP (top 100 world wide PVE, multiple gladiator titles). I'm also a physics major at a world class research university who has publications in a major journal. While your statement may be true of many WoW players, it's downright asinine to assume no benefits come from the game at all or that it inevitably wrecks your life. In short, I defy you, sir.
I can probably read the BBC article using the BBC news app on my android phone. For those of you unfamiliar with the BBC, it's a corporation operating under royal charter that's funded primarily by taxes (the television licensing fee). Oh irony, how you brighten my day...
In the gaming community, I've noticed a trend where people will drop offline, then reappear, explaining that they'd been "Comcast'd". Take that as you will.
Yeah, I figured the literature was probably fluff so I didn't even bother to track it down. It's interesting that they can't even show an expulsion of flux--my experience has been that you can take quite a few ceramics and throw them into a SQUID and see the "Meissner" effect... but when you try and measure resistivity it's always finite but measurable. Seems they didn't even get that far...
Doing research in a solid state physics lab, I can tell you that this article is worth nothing without the inclusion of the critical temperature Tc at which the "superconductor" starts working. Given that its some sort of ceramic, its a class II superconductor which means that it could possibly be one of the "high Tc" superconductors, a misleading title because they do still need to be cooled with LN2 (just not liquid helium, a much more expensive/difficult prospect). If their "superconductor" only works at .7 kelvin, it's not very impressive--there are lots of materials that do that. To quote (more or less) one of my lab mates "if I dunked my cat in liquid helium, it would probably begin to superconduct." In summary, the devil is in the details.
Heh, I watched the episode last night as well. But seriously, this guy is crazier than a green snake in a sugar cane field.
Follow me here: The average household is somewhere around 2400 square feet. Let's assume for simplicity sake that it's a box measuring 49'x49'x10'. That makes for about 6800 square feet of interior surface area. The skin depth for gold at 2.4 GHz is pretty close to 200nm, but to be sure that the vast majority of the signal is stopped lets assume a coating of 1um thickness. 6800 square feet multiplied by 1um yields a volume of about 6e-4 m^3 of gold. Multiplying this by the density of gold (~20gm/cm^3) yields about 12 kilograms of gold. The last time I checked, gold was something close to $1200 dollars an ounce, which works out to be about $508k. So all the guy really wants to do is use the settlement money to WiFi proof his house. And have a gold plated interior. And a little bit left over for hookers and blow.