Why are you risking your job for a scientific statement? What country are you living in? In my country a scientist can not lose his job for a scientific statement. Of course he might have problems to get funding beyond what he gets from university.
the biggest obstacle in testing this "equation" is probably the fact the it does not contain an "equals" sign. It's only an expression, but we are not told what for...
You'd have to teach the robot that the carpet has to be hoovered, and the windows need to be cleaned with a sponge, water and a few drops of dish washing liquid in it and not the other way round. You need to tell it not to pour any water over your brand new 21" TFT, and you'd have to hardwire the use of stonger detergents for cleaning the toilet.
I don't think this is very hard. You just have to give the robot a list of things together with the apropriate detergent. The more difficult part about cleaning is to detect the level of cleanliness (one wipe usually is not enough). From a user perspective, nothing would be more disappointing than a cleaning robot that worse at cleaning than an unmotivated teenager.
I am also impressed by the roller bot (and even more by the sumo bot). It should be only a matter of time to teach the roller bot how to move effectively. He is rolling on quads, which is easier to balance on one foot than inline skates. For inline skating one definetely needs to keep dynamic balance for extended periods (as opposed to static balance), i.e. you have to give up balance in order no move forward more effectively. Therefore, inline skating somewhat harder to learn. OTOH, walking also requires dynamic balance and we already have seen walking robots, so I think that we will soon see skating robots as well.
The sumo bot is particularly impressive; I like how he is using his arms to balance. This bot is also leaving static balance only to a small degree. I also like the way he is employing friction to move his feet together. This is also not tivial, because to slide the feet the way he does you need to move at a certain minimum speed to overcome static friction and you have to accurately control the distribution of weight between both feet (to slowly slide with both feet at the same time is very difficult, try it at home!). Accurate distribution of balance in lateral as well as in forward direction is also a key to skating; in skating especially the forward-backward balance is very important if you want to go around corners or skate on one foot.
Hence, we can't observe them because so much energy is required to seperate them (and they immediately pair up again so you can't spot the seperation when it occurs).
But we can observe the hadron jets that stem from the original seperating quarks.
Wass, no offense but I really don't think there is any practical validity in the scenario you are worrying about. Although it'll be a neat little play for a climate simulation if you have a couple of excess TFlops - along the lines of a Gedankenexperiment just for the heck of it.
Being a scientist as well, I am a little bit worried about your attitude. You claim that the issue Wass brought up is not worth to be studied based only on a very crude total energy argument and thickness of athmosphere argument. In science what can "kill" you (your line of arguments) most easily are wrong assumptions - that's why we usually do not assume things but rather measure them. Many times we get what we expected but often enough there are surprises, there are enough examples of it: Michelson, Mössbauer come to mind as well es Stark, Stern & Gerlach. Just to give one argument why it is absolutely required that we conduct a detailed simulation: We know that the athmosphere is a non-linear system, i.e. small influences do not necessarily imply small consequences. I also consider your number of 12 years for one degree of change in athmosphere temperature as a rather small number! In terms of how fast political decisions are made and then show effects 12 years basically means "tomorrow"! I think any number that is smaller than 1000 years is not acceptable for a final solution.
If you follow the debate about nuclear energy, you will often find the complaint that we started to use that technology before we were totally aware of its consequences (because we ASSUMED that nuclear waste would be only a small quantity that can be stored safely). We are now about to make the same error with the next technology.
Are you sure that the energy transport by winds is a significant factor in heating Europe compared to North America? Give the fact that the heat capacity of water is a lot higher than that of air, I would suspect that the gulf stream is mainly responsible for the heating of Europe. It would be interesting if somebody in the business of modelling global climate could give some numbers of relative importance here.
OK, let me cite from the conclusion of the original paper:
Thus we see complex structures in the electronic angular distribution that depend strongly on the molecular orientation and the inter-nuclear separation. The angular distributions, apparently highly influenced by an appropriate initial-state wavefunction, diffraction and electronelectron correlation, show behaviour that is both unexpected and not yet understood. Our results are highly sensitive and direct tests of the initial-state wavefunction and its correlation effects. An intricate calculation to address our observations is highly desirable. A complete treatment of the break-up of this fundamental molecule would mark a significant step towards understanding the quantum dynamics of many-particle systems, a subject central to most physical and chemical processes.
So, apparently, this stuff is not fully understood yet and the experiment provides new data that can be used to improve modelling. Maybe you are confusing the hydogen atom with the hydrogen molecule ?
This sounds not much more sophisticated (or important) than the experiments done in advanced physics lab
First, I doubt that you have a 75 eV photon beam in your advanced physics lab. You really need a synchrotron for this. Second, keep in mind that they are measuring the momentum vectors of all four fragments (2 electrons & 2 nuclei) For this you need a detector that provides position and time resolution and has a large enough acceptance angle.
That's a small steel bar, for the purposes of gravity. You'd have to compare that to the kinetic energy of the steel bar (you'd get a really small number, which means that energy loss due to emission of gravity waves is very small). Or better compare it to the gravitational self energy.
But even if you weren't sure, the "wavelength/frequency" of the light is INCREDIBLY different. A good eye can tell the difference between all the different sorts of supernova spectra in seconds.
Would you explain to us what exactly is the difference in the spectra of stars and SN? How does a typical SN spectrum look like? Do you have a graph?
In special relativity, concurrency is a local concept. You cannot define concurrency between far spaced objects (like earth and alpha centauri). In some cases, even the sequence of events at two far spaced locations depends on the frame of reference of the observer (this is the case if the distance between the events is space-like).
You're forgetting the Big Bang, which is the most interesting part of the history of the universe.
That's a matter of taste. These scientists find the later periods more interesting.
...lots of light was emitted, etc).
They plan to include this effect in subsequent simulations.
Using a full 10 billion particles for just gravity also makes very little sense because the distribution of matter in the universe is quite homogeneous.
This is just plain wrong. Read the article.
The only groups of particles that really matter are those that are very close to you (the Earth, Sun and Moon in our case).
How do you explain the formation of galaxies and clusters of galaxies then?
...or use more particles and a more detailed model to get more detailed results.
The important issue is to run sufficiently fine grained simulations to capture the effect that one is interested in (here: large scale distributions of matter). Typically, to verify whether effects are affected by simulation granularity, scientists run several simulations at different levels of granularity and compare whether the results are qualitatively the same or not. Note, that 10 billion simulated mass points is the currently largest simulation anyway. This is the frontier of research. If they could simulate significantly larger systems, they probably would. Even in research, you have to limit yourself to challenges that are feasible. Also, sometimes it is more interesting to run several smaller simulations with different initial conditions and study the effect of those on the result, rather than running just one large simulation. A simulation that is finished in only 26 days certainly opens this opportunity.
You can do this, or you can just look at the interesting parts like the air/water interface and the meniscus around the sides of the glass, and either get the same results faster...
I don't understand how you can easily deduce the dynamics in the volume of a glass of water by just looking at the surface. Even if you could, there are many assumptions involved in such a reasoning. You would have to perform a full simulation at least once to verfiy that your assumptions are correct.
My opinion is that current technology advance is not limited by (lack of) intelligence. It's rather limited by resources (fabrication tools and capital). Take, for example, Intel: Are they limited by the intelligence of their employees? No, they are limited by lack of fabrication technology, they simply don't have the machines to produce CPUs with structure size of atomic dimensions. They certainly could design a CPU with a couple of square centimeters die size, but yield would be too low to be economically viable (again limited by tools and capital or better: demand). You could now argue: let's use the intelligence at the tool manufacturers. But the problems they have cannot be solved by mere thinking; yes you need to come up with ideas, but you also need to test the ideas and make experiments which are expensive and time-consuming. Think about space travel: limited by lack of capital and lack of demand.
To make my point clear in an extreme example: If we gave all the plans and every piece of information that is required to build a PC of the year 2004 to Leonardo da Vinci, do you think he could build it during his life? I think not. He would first have to build all the tools that build the tools that build the tools...etcetc. He would need a lot of people to do it. He would need a lot of money to do it. It would still take a lot of time. Even if you have all the information to build something, you are still limited by the fact that you actually have to DO it. There is a fundamental difference between coming up with an idea and actually executing it.
The big advantage of nuclear power (fission) is the extremely high energy DENSITY (J/m^3 or J/kg). This is the reason why it's used as fuel for deep space probes (where photovoltaics don't work due to the large distance to the sun). Btw. the high energy density is also exactly the reason why radioactives are so dangerous.
Re:Feasibiliy of High Speed Travel
on
X-43A Hits Mach 7
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· Score: 1
9G vertical (for a short period) in a flight suit without passing out.
have you seen videos from people at 9g? even for trained combat pilots it's hard to not pass out during a few seconds at 9g.
I think this is due to the fact the the blue content of the image is rather low in detail. Really depends on the choice of picture..Anyway, the fact the we are so bad at seeing blue is because nature does not have a lot of stuff that would require good blue vision. We are really good at green, which happens to be the color of plant..not surprising.
Nor, does he explain why a TV, when viewed from far away (like across the street in someone else's house), the picture and glow is so...blue
I think this is a psychovisual effect: If you sit close to the TV most of your field of view is filled by the screen. Your brain will then adapt to the slightly blueish picture and give you the impression of a color balanced picture. When further away from the TV your brain also gets color information from the surrounding and the blueish tint of the TV will be more apparent.
The amount of correction that your brain is making is rather surprising: I remember when my computer screen once had one of the RGB connections broken, leading to complete lack of red (picture looked blue-greenish). After a few minutes working with the computer I almost didn't see the green tint any more: I really had the impression to look at a white area. Then, when I turned around and looked into the room the white walls looked red! Of course this effect quickly diminshed...
Also keep in mind that the color receptors in your retina are concentrated around the center, so the TV does not have to fill all of your field of view.
The different focus for red vs. green vs. blue is because your eyes' lens has different index of refraction for the different wavelengths. It's even more pronounced for UV light (a.k.a. "black light") which cannot be focused by the human eye: you probably remember that those black light tubes always look blurry and have a halo around them.
believe it or not, when they introduced the EURO notes a few years ago, there was actually an incident where a store clerk accepted a one sided copied note (How many clerks check both sides?).
At www.theimagingsource.com they sell quite small Firewire video cameras. I have the DMK 21F04 and I'm pretty satisfied. Forget about web-cams, they have really shitty image quality.
Although designed for optics and not STM, NewFocus sells slip-stick actuators that have a quite large range (several millimeters) while having a resolution of 30nm (i.e. suitable for coarse positioning). They are pretty expensive, though.
I think you missed the part about "conductive nanoparticles that are implanted in the non-conducting matrix". As you might know from transformator theory, you can reduce eddy current loss in the yoke by making the yoke from a stack of thin metal sheets rather than a solid yoke, i.e. reducing the size of continuous metal parts.
Slashdot Mirror
You can download the Nature preprint in full text on the HESS project site. Scroll down to the "News" section and click on "preprint".
Why are you risking your job for a scientific statement? What country are you living in? In my country a scientist can not lose his job for a scientific statement. Of course he might have problems to get funding beyond what he gets from university.
the biggest obstacle in testing this "equation" is probably the fact the it does not contain an "equals" sign. It's only an expression, but we are not told what for...
You'd have to teach the robot that the carpet has to be hoovered, and the windows need to be cleaned with a sponge, water and a few drops of dish washing liquid in it and not the other way round. You need to tell it not to pour any water over your brand new 21" TFT, and you'd have to hardwire the use of stonger detergents for cleaning the toilet.
I don't think this is very hard. You just have to give the robot a list of things together with the apropriate detergent. The more difficult part about cleaning is to detect the level of cleanliness (one wipe usually is not enough). From a user perspective, nothing would be more disappointing than a cleaning robot that worse at cleaning than an unmotivated teenager.
I am also impressed by the roller bot (and even more by the sumo bot). It should be only a matter of time to teach the roller bot how to move effectively. He is rolling on quads, which is easier to balance on one foot than inline skates. For inline skating one definetely needs to keep dynamic balance for extended periods (as opposed to static balance), i.e. you have to give up balance in order no move forward more effectively. Therefore, inline skating somewhat harder to learn. OTOH, walking also requires dynamic balance and we already have seen walking robots, so I think that we will soon see skating robots as well.
The sumo bot is particularly impressive; I like how he is using his arms to balance. This bot is also leaving static balance only to a small degree. I also like the way he is employing friction to move his feet together. This is also not tivial, because to slide the feet the way he does you need to move at a certain minimum speed to overcome static friction and you have to accurately control the distribution of weight between both feet (to slowly slide with both feet at the same time is very difficult, try it at home!). Accurate distribution of balance in lateral as well as in forward direction is also a key to skating; in skating especially the forward-backward balance is very important if you want to go around corners or skate on one foot.
I didn't mean to suggest that isolated quarks exist, but rather that they are needed to explain experimental facts.
Hence, we can't observe them because so much energy is required to seperate them (and they immediately pair up again so you can't spot the seperation when it occurs).
But we can observe the hadron jets that stem from the original seperating quarks.
Wass, no offense but I really don't think there is any practical validity in the scenario you are worrying about. Although it'll be a neat little play for a climate simulation if you have a couple of excess TFlops - along the lines of a Gedankenexperiment just for the heck of it.
Being a scientist as well, I am a little bit worried about your attitude. You claim that the issue Wass brought up is not worth to be studied based only on a very crude total energy argument and thickness of athmosphere argument. In science what can "kill" you (your line of arguments) most easily are wrong assumptions - that's why we usually do not assume things but rather measure them. Many times we get what we expected but often enough there are surprises, there are enough examples of it: Michelson, Mössbauer come to mind as well es Stark, Stern & Gerlach.
Just to give one argument why it is absolutely required that we conduct a detailed simulation: We know that the athmosphere is a non-linear system, i.e. small influences do not necessarily imply small consequences.
I also consider your number of 12 years for one degree of change in athmosphere temperature as a rather small number! In terms of how fast political decisions are made and then show effects 12 years basically means "tomorrow"! I think any number that is smaller than 1000 years is not acceptable for a final solution.
If you follow the debate about nuclear energy, you will often find the complaint that we started to use that technology before we were totally aware of its consequences (because we ASSUMED that nuclear waste would be only a small quantity that can be stored safely). We are now about to make the same error with the next technology.
Are you sure that the energy transport by winds is a significant factor in heating Europe compared to North America? Give the fact that the heat capacity of water is a lot higher than that of air, I would suspect that the gulf stream is mainly responsible for the heating of Europe.
It would be interesting if somebody in the business of modelling global climate could give some numbers of relative importance here.
So, apparently, this stuff is not fully understood yet and the experiment provides new data that can be used to improve modelling.
Maybe you are confusing the hydogen atom with the hydrogen molecule ?
This sounds not much more sophisticated (or important) than the experiments done in advanced physics lab
First, I doubt that you have a 75 eV photon beam in your advanced physics lab. You really need a synchrotron for this.
Second, keep in mind that they are measuring the momentum vectors of all four fragments (2 electrons & 2 nuclei) For this you need a detector that provides position and time resolution and has a large enough acceptance angle.
That's a small steel bar, for the purposes of gravity. You'd have to compare that to the kinetic energy of the steel bar (you'd get a really small number, which means that energy loss due to emission of gravity waves is very small). Or better compare it to the gravitational self energy.
But even if you weren't sure, the "wavelength/frequency" of the light is INCREDIBLY different. A good eye can tell the difference between all the different sorts of supernova spectra in seconds.
Would you explain to us what exactly is the difference in the spectra of stars and SN? How does a typical SN spectrum look like? Do you have a graph?
In special relativity, concurrency is a local concept. You cannot define concurrency between far spaced objects (like earth and alpha centauri). In some cases, even the sequence of events at two far spaced locations depends on the frame of reference of the observer (this is the case if the distance between the events is space-like).
You're forgetting the Big Bang, which is the most interesting part of the history of the universe.
...lots of light was emitted, etc).
...or use more particles and a more detailed model to get more detailed results.
That's a matter of taste. These scientists find the later periods more interesting.
They plan to include this effect in subsequent simulations.
Using a full 10 billion particles for just gravity also makes very little sense because the distribution of matter in the universe is quite homogeneous.
This is just plain wrong. Read the article.
The only groups of particles that really matter are those that are very close to you (the Earth, Sun and Moon in our case).
How do you explain the formation of galaxies and clusters of galaxies then?
The important issue is to run sufficiently fine grained simulations to capture the effect that one is interested in (here: large scale distributions of matter). Typically, to verify whether effects are affected by simulation granularity, scientists run several simulations at different levels of granularity and compare whether the results are qualitatively the same or not.
Note, that 10 billion simulated mass points is the currently largest simulation anyway. This is the frontier of research. If they could simulate significantly larger systems, they probably would. Even in research, you have to limit yourself to challenges that are feasible.
Also, sometimes it is more interesting to run several smaller simulations with different initial conditions and study the effect of those on the result, rather than running just one large simulation. A simulation that is finished in only 26 days certainly opens this opportunity.
You can do this, or you can just look at the interesting parts like the air/water interface and the meniscus around the sides of the glass, and either get the same results faster...
I don't understand how you can easily deduce the dynamics in the volume of a glass of water by just looking at the surface. Even if you could, there are many assumptions involved in such a reasoning. You would have to perform a full simulation at least once to verfiy that your assumptions are correct.
My opinion is that current technology advance is not limited by (lack of) intelligence. It's rather limited by resources (fabrication tools and capital). Take, for example, Intel: Are they limited by the intelligence of their employees? No, they are limited by lack of fabrication technology, they simply don't have the machines to produce CPUs with structure size of atomic dimensions. They certainly could design a CPU with a couple of square centimeters die size, but yield would be too low to be economically viable (again limited by tools and capital or better: demand).
You could now argue: let's use the intelligence at the tool manufacturers. But the problems they have cannot be solved by mere thinking; yes you need to come up with ideas, but you also need to test the ideas and make experiments which are expensive and time-consuming.
Think about space travel: limited by lack of capital and lack of demand.
To make my point clear in an extreme example: If we gave all the plans and every piece of information that is required to build a PC of the year 2004 to Leonardo da Vinci, do you think he could build it during his life? I think not. He would first have to build all the tools that build the tools that build the tools...etcetc. He would need a lot of people to do it. He would need a lot of money to do it. It would still take a lot of time. Even if you have all the information to build something, you are still limited by the fact that you actually have to DO it. There is a fundamental difference between coming up with an idea and actually executing it.
The big advantage of nuclear power (fission) is the extremely high energy DENSITY (J/m^3 or J/kg). This is the reason why it's used as fuel for deep space probes (where photovoltaics don't work due to the large distance to the sun).
Btw. the high energy density is also exactly the reason why radioactives are so dangerous.
9G vertical (for a short period) in a flight suit without passing out.
have you seen videos from people at 9g? even for trained combat pilots it's hard to not pass out during a few seconds at 9g.
I think this is due to the fact the the blue content of the image is rather low in detail. Really depends on the choice of picture..Anyway, the fact the we are so bad at seeing blue is because nature does not have a lot of stuff that would require good blue vision. We are really good at green, which happens to be the color of plant..not surprising.
Nor, does he explain why a TV, when viewed from far away (like across the street in someone else's house), the picture and glow is so...blue
I think this is a psychovisual effect: If you sit close to the TV most of your field of view is filled by the screen. Your brain will then adapt to the slightly blueish picture and give you the impression of a color balanced picture. When further away from the TV your brain also gets color information from the surrounding and the blueish tint of the TV will be more apparent.
The amount of correction that your brain is making is rather surprising: I remember when my computer screen once had one of the RGB connections broken, leading to complete lack of red (picture looked blue-greenish). After a few minutes working with the computer I almost didn't see the green tint any more: I really had the impression to look at a white area. Then, when I turned around and looked into the room the white walls looked red! Of course this effect quickly diminshed...
Also keep in mind that the color receptors in your retina are concentrated around the center, so the TV does not have to fill all of your field of view.
The different focus for red vs. green vs. blue is because your eyes' lens has different index of refraction for the different wavelengths. It's even more pronounced for UV light (a.k.a. "black light") which cannot be focused by the human eye: you probably remember that those black light tubes always look blurry and have a halo around them.
believe it or not, when they introduced the EURO notes a few years ago, there was actually an incident where a store clerk accepted a one sided copied note (How many clerks check both sides?).
At www.theimagingsource.com they sell quite small Firewire video cameras. I have the DMK 21F04 and I'm pretty satisfied. Forget about web-cams, they have really shitty image quality.
Although designed for optics and not STM, NewFocus sells slip-stick actuators that have a quite large range (several millimeters) while having a resolution of 30nm (i.e. suitable for coarse positioning). They are pretty expensive, though.
I think you missed the part about "conductive nanoparticles that are implanted in the non-conducting matrix". As you might know from transformator theory, you can reduce eddy current loss in the yoke by making the yoke from a stack of thin metal sheets rather than a solid yoke, i.e. reducing the size of continuous metal parts.
Aren't most metal implants made of Titanium (non-ferrous) anyway (for bio-compatibility) ?