There are a number of apparent misconceptions in your post. Some parts of physics are axiomatic (well, typically not in the formal logic sense, but in a way that would satisfy most mathematicians)--for instance, consider the Wightman axioms in quantum field theory. The Lorentz transform doesn't have to be "the result of enforcing a finite limit speed". It can be a rather natural consequence of frame-of-reference transformations derived from the two axioms I listed. That particles end up having a finite limit speed (moreover, the speed of light) becomes a requirement to preserve causality. You could "decouple" c from the speed of light, but the effects of special relativity have been verified (with c as it stands) to higher accuracy than this discrepancy. Decoupling isn't enough.
The mass of the particle doesn't have a bearing on the causality paradoxes I alluded to, ala this Wikipedia article. The "c" from special relativity would need to be revised (makes no sense; it's been tested very accurately), causality would need to break, or we would need a theory containing quite a bit of new physics to explain this result.
This idea has been brought up a few times. The precisions don't work out. The effects of special relativity (where c is assumed to be the "speed limit") have been tested to higher precision than this result, so there should be legitimately new physics going on if this is true. Sure, you could just say "in all the equations that work, keep c there", but they were derived with the above equivalence in mind, so something would be very wrong indeed.
A 10^-5 order difference is not that large when dealing with the speed of light. It's been measured to far more precision than that in a variety of experiments, even in the context of special relativity's predictions (eg. see this Wikipedia article).
My estimate was extremely generous. All of those possibilities still couldn't possibly reduce a usual paragraph to under 100 bits of information. The preceding sentence alone had 109 characters, so just under 1000 bits in ASCII. A normal paragraph would be at least 4 times as long. Still, if you really want, you could take a bunch of text and compress it. That would give a vaguely decent idea of how much "information" is really there. If 4000 multiplied by a usual compression ratio is less than 100, my estimate would need to be decreased.
Actually, the two axioms of special relativity you're probably referring to are
1. Light travels (through a vacuum) *from any source* at the same speed as measured by any inertial (non-accelerating) observer.
2. The laws of physics do not change when you switch to another inertial frame (the principle of relativity; there are more rigorous statements).
The speed of light is known accurately enough compared to this neutrino discrepancy that, if the discrepancy is real, there would be new physics going on. Saying that light travels slightly below this "speed limit" wouldn't be enough, since it is assumed throughout special relativity that the speed limit is in fact c, and those implications have been tested to higher precision than this discrepancy.
To latch on to your math examples, I learned calculus, abstract algebra, and continue to learn other math because I find it interesting, mostly because I find it very surprising. I would never have thought of the fundamental theorem of Galois theory, for instance; it's incredibly clever and not at all obvious. The results of this experiment, on the other hand, are not at all surprising. To me it's in the same league as counting to 10,000 manually. I shouldn't criticize, though. The guy is free to do what he likes with his free time, and if he and others can enjoy it, wonderful.
To be clear, I didn't mean to imply that you didn't understand the problem. In fact, clearly you did, since you cut it down to a manageable version. This story was submitted and posted by two different people, so at least 3 people (assuming no overlap) have found it interesting. I was just curious about why it interests those who find it interesting.
Please, enjoy your project. I hope the negativity hasn't disheartened you.
If he had successfully randomly achieved a shakespeare play, [...] It would be like a flying saucer landing and informing someone that they won the galactic lottery.
It's far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, (...), far more improbable than that. The text of Hamlet (see Project Gutenberg) is around 180 KB long, so around 1.44 million bits. Being generous and lopping off half (since most of the characters aren't present), and then rounding down, let's say it's 500,000 bits. There are 2^500,000 possibilities; this is a number with around 150,000 decimal digits. It's comparable to the odds of winning a 1-in-a-million lottery 25 thousand times in a row.
Winning a galactic lottery, in comparison, would be extremely, almost incomparably, frequent. There are something like 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. Suppose each star had 30 planets with 100 billion "people", being very generous. That's only about one million billion billion inhabitants. Winning such a lottery would be the same as winning 4 1-in-a-million lotteries in a row. 4 versus 25,000, and that 25,000 is an exponent--these two can't just be divided to property compare them.
It's closer to winning 6 thousand galactic lotteries in a row.
He got the point. That he limited his monkeys to 9 character blocks instead of trying to generate entire works makes that pretty clear. I still think it's stupid, though.
Certainly this story must interest some people. To you, I ask this question: what makes this story interesting? To me it's a waste of energy that doesn't produce anything unexpected or particularly interesting. Compared to this, the Minecraft Enterprise-D is useful--it's at least interesting.
(Note: I am a mathematician, so maybe I'm missing some of the novelty associated with random number generation and exponential growth.)
Trillions of years is generous. A million monkeys each making a unique 100 bit binary string every second would still take around 40 quadrillion years. This *vastly* underestimates the time of an actual paragraph, let alone multiple paragraphs, and it's still 40,000 times larger than the trillion years estimate.
Things you're missing:
1. No such tunnel exists.
2. It would have to be hundreds of miles long, so tens of millions of Euros wouldn't make a dent in construction costs.
3. Neutrinos interact weakly enough with matter that they can be beamed through solid rock without much trouble, so a tunnel is unnecessary (even undesirable).
4. Faster than light neutrinos have not been "discovered" per se. The guys published their results in hopes that someone will find an error, or (mmmaaaybbbeee) in hopes that their results will be reproducible.
5. Faster than light neutrinos would require huge revisions to modern physics. For instance, under special relativity a faster-than-light particle time travels and destroys causality.
6. In light of (5), extreme caution should be taken in accepting and verifying these results. Congratulating scientists for their amazing discovery now is, to say the least, premature.
There's a good chance some poorly informed fluky wrote the letter and she just signed it. That is, she may have just been inattentive rather than stupid.
Yes! Since quantum entanglement doesn't transfer information, maybe this type of trading would end. Maybe they'd catch on, though, and want a real method with low latency. Oh, I know! You could just distort the geometry of the earth by screwing around with the distribution of mass and energy, thereby modifying the metric tensor! Idiots--why lay cable when you can physics your way out of it?
1) You're the only one mentioning c (it's usually lower case), and I'm not sure why.
2) Having "perfect parelel [sic] processor and OS" are not necessary to gain a boost over a single processor. The overhead just needs to be particularly small in this case.
It's not that comparable with existing copy&paste. It's close to copy&paste extended with the ability to set extra options and to use option templates, but integrated into a single UI. As I understand it, it can also open the target app, which would be especially convenient on mobile devices. That some apps offer certain photo transfers to other apps already is evidence that a more general and standardized system might be appropriate. Having to write a new custom export routine for each major app that comes along is inefficient, to say the least. This new mechanism doesn't have to be strictly more powerful than existing ones to be useful, it just has to be more convenient. If power was the only issue, we'd all use command lines and C. (For the record, I'd say option templates in the form of the QuickLaunch buttons make it more powerful. It can also coexist quite peacefully with regular copy&paste, so at least there shouldn't be any loss of power.)
On another note, has it occurred to you that it's remarkably arrogant to pronounce something like this a waste of time when you (I assume) have almost no experience with it? A very similar system is implemented on Android (Intents), and a fair amount of development time has gone into this system. Stupid, defensive old know-it-all (well, I assume you're older, from your comment about when I was born).
"MPI attack" is also non-standard (20 Google hits, only one source apparently referring to your use of the phrase). Could you simply give an example of what you mean in the context of this particular, new system?
Slashdot Mirror
There are a number of apparent misconceptions in your post. Some parts of physics are axiomatic (well, typically not in the formal logic sense, but in a way that would satisfy most mathematicians)--for instance, consider the Wightman axioms in quantum field theory. The Lorentz transform doesn't have to be "the result of enforcing a finite limit speed". It can be a rather natural consequence of frame-of-reference transformations derived from the two axioms I listed. That particles end up having a finite limit speed (moreover, the speed of light) becomes a requirement to preserve causality. You could "decouple" c from the speed of light, but the effects of special relativity have been verified (with c as it stands) to higher accuracy than this discrepancy. Decoupling isn't enough.
The mass of the particle doesn't have a bearing on the causality paradoxes I alluded to, ala this Wikipedia article. The "c" from special relativity would need to be revised (makes no sense; it's been tested very accurately), causality would need to break, or we would need a theory containing quite a bit of new physics to explain this result.
That's hilarious. Could you provide a link?
This idea has been brought up a few times. The precisions don't work out. The effects of special relativity (where c is assumed to be the "speed limit") have been tested to higher precision than this result, so there should be legitimately new physics going on if this is true. Sure, you could just say "in all the equations that work, keep c there", but they were derived with the above equivalence in mind, so something would be very wrong indeed.
Good point. I agree, they should be lauded for their honesty. If only I wasn't participating, I would mod you up.
A 10^-5 order difference is not that large when dealing with the speed of light. It's been measured to far more precision than that in a variety of experiments, even in the context of special relativity's predictions (eg. see this Wikipedia article).
My estimate was extremely generous. All of those possibilities still couldn't possibly reduce a usual paragraph to under 100 bits of information. The preceding sentence alone had 109 characters, so just under 1000 bits in ASCII. A normal paragraph would be at least 4 times as long. Still, if you really want, you could take a bunch of text and compress it. That would give a vaguely decent idea of how much "information" is really there. If 4000 multiplied by a usual compression ratio is less than 100, my estimate would need to be decreased.
Yeah, I think it's a joke (at least I chuckled). For one thing the magnitude of the effect would be in the percents, not in the millionths.
Actually, the two axioms of special relativity you're probably referring to are
1. Light travels (through a vacuum) *from any source* at the same speed as measured by any inertial (non-accelerating) observer.
2. The laws of physics do not change when you switch to another inertial frame (the principle of relativity; there are more rigorous statements).
The speed of light is known accurately enough compared to this neutrino discrepancy that, if the discrepancy is real, there would be new physics going on. Saying that light travels slightly below this "speed limit" wouldn't be enough, since it is assumed throughout special relativity that the speed limit is in fact c, and those implications have been tested to higher precision than this discrepancy.
To latch on to your math examples, I learned calculus, abstract algebra, and continue to learn other math because I find it interesting, mostly because I find it very surprising. I would never have thought of the fundamental theorem of Galois theory, for instance; it's incredibly clever and not at all obvious. The results of this experiment, on the other hand, are not at all surprising. To me it's in the same league as counting to 10,000 manually. I shouldn't criticize, though. The guy is free to do what he likes with his free time, and if he and others can enjoy it, wonderful.
To be clear, I didn't mean to imply that you didn't understand the problem. In fact, clearly you did, since you cut it down to a manageable version. This story was submitted and posted by two different people, so at least 3 people (assuming no overlap) have found it interesting. I was just curious about why it interests those who find it interesting.
Please, enjoy your project. I hope the negativity hasn't disheartened you.
If he had successfully randomly achieved a shakespeare play, [...] It would be like a flying saucer landing and informing someone that they won the galactic lottery.
It's far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, (...), far more improbable than that. The text of Hamlet (see Project Gutenberg) is around 180 KB long, so around 1.44 million bits. Being generous and lopping off half (since most of the characters aren't present), and then rounding down, let's say it's 500,000 bits. There are 2^500,000 possibilities; this is a number with around 150,000 decimal digits. It's comparable to the odds of winning a 1-in-a-million lottery 25 thousand times in a row.
Winning a galactic lottery, in comparison, would be extremely, almost incomparably, frequent. There are something like 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. Suppose each star had 30 planets with 100 billion "people", being very generous. That's only about one million billion billion inhabitants. Winning such a lottery would be the same as winning 4 1-in-a-million lotteries in a row. 4 versus 25,000, and that 25,000 is an exponent--these two can't just be divided to property compare them.
It's closer to winning 6 thousand galactic lotteries in a row.
He got the point. That he limited his monkeys to 9 character blocks instead of trying to generate entire works makes that pretty clear. I still think it's stupid, though.
No, but I'd rather have someone inattentively checking their press releases than an idiot.
Certainly this story must interest some people. To you, I ask this question: what makes this story interesting? To me it's a waste of energy that doesn't produce anything unexpected or particularly interesting. Compared to this, the Minecraft Enterprise-D is useful--it's at least interesting.
(Note: I am a mathematician, so maybe I'm missing some of the novelty associated with random number generation and exponential growth.)
Trillions of years is generous. A million monkeys each making a unique 100 bit binary string every second would still take around 40 quadrillion years. This *vastly* underestimates the time of an actual paragraph, let alone multiple paragraphs, and it's still 40,000 times larger than the trillion years estimate.
Things you're missing:
1. No such tunnel exists.
2. It would have to be hundreds of miles long, so tens of millions of Euros wouldn't make a dent in construction costs.
3. Neutrinos interact weakly enough with matter that they can be beamed through solid rock without much trouble, so a tunnel is unnecessary (even undesirable).
4. Faster than light neutrinos have not been "discovered" per se. The guys published their results in hopes that someone will find an error, or (mmmaaaybbbeee) in hopes that their results will be reproducible.
5. Faster than light neutrinos would require huge revisions to modern physics. For instance, under special relativity a faster-than-light particle time travels and destroys causality.
6. In light of (5), extreme caution should be taken in accepting and verifying these results. Congratulating scientists for their amazing discovery now is, to say the least, premature.
There's a good chance some poorly informed fluky wrote the letter and she just signed it. That is, she may have just been inattentive rather than stupid.
I'm not sure if you're trying to save face or if you're sincere. Still, in either case you're an ass.
Wow. I just got through a wild ride visiting very strange places. Thanks for that.
Yes! Since quantum entanglement doesn't transfer information, maybe this type of trading would end. Maybe they'd catch on, though, and want a real method with low latency. Oh, I know! You could just distort the geometry of the earth by screwing around with the distribution of mass and energy, thereby modifying the metric tensor! Idiots--why lay cable when you can physics your way out of it?
Thanks for the link and discussion. I agree; I have yet to see a credible, clear exploit.
1) You're the only one mentioning c (it's usually lower case), and I'm not sure why.
2) Having "perfect parelel [sic] processor and OS" are not necessary to gain a boost over a single processor. The overhead just needs to be particularly small in this case.
It's not that comparable with existing copy&paste. It's close to copy&paste extended with the ability to set extra options and to use option templates, but integrated into a single UI. As I understand it, it can also open the target app, which would be especially convenient on mobile devices. That some apps offer certain photo transfers to other apps already is evidence that a more general and standardized system might be appropriate. Having to write a new custom export routine for each major app that comes along is inefficient, to say the least. This new mechanism doesn't have to be strictly more powerful than existing ones to be useful, it just has to be more convenient. If power was the only issue, we'd all use command lines and C. (For the record, I'd say option templates in the form of the QuickLaunch buttons make it more powerful. It can also coexist quite peacefully with regular copy&paste, so at least there shouldn't be any loss of power.)
On another note, has it occurred to you that it's remarkably arrogant to pronounce something like this a waste of time when you (I assume) have almost no experience with it? A very similar system is implemented on Android (Intents), and a fair amount of development time has gone into this system. Stupid, defensive old know-it-all (well, I assume you're older, from your comment about when I was born).
"MPI attack" is also non-standard (20 Google hits, only one source apparently referring to your use of the phrase). Could you simply give an example of what you mean in the context of this particular, new system?