Except that from the quote form Nobel, the benefit to pockets of the inventors does not factor into it.
The piece of the sentence
"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes
states that
i) that the prize should be distributed annually
ii) some logistics dealing with the estate.
So Nobel's statement is, in essence, that we should give the Nobel prize to those who, in the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.
In comparing two discoveries we need to compare their relative benefit to mankind; the benefit of the individual is completely and utterly irrelevant. That is, it is irrelevant if the individual (or individuals) benefited more than mankind as a whole; nor does it matter when comparing the two discoveries which group made "more" out of their discovery pre-Nobel prize. Nobel's sentiment is solely concerned with the benefit to mankind.
To be blantent and explicit about it, pretend for a moment that "benefit" was an actual quantifiable measure. It is not, but we can still look at the logical structure of the statement. If we have two discoveries A and B with A: mankind benefit: 500 personal gain: 800 B: mankind benefit: 505 personal gain: 2000 then "B" has greater benefit to mankind of these two discoveries. The last column is completely irrelevant. (BTW, personal gain will probably always exceed mankind benefit as the scientists gain the same benefit you or I would, plus whatever recognition etc. in their field, other prizes, awards, grants, etc. The only way I could see personal gain being less is if the personal sacrafices involved were worse than all the other benefits to the individual).
If you wish to argue that a patented discovery lessens the value to mankind as a whole, by all means go ahead. But the argument that you have presented simply does not hang together -- Nobel makes no comment (at least with the quote you have provided) about the discoverer's personal gain.
PS. If you did want to argue about something mentioned in Nobel's statement, it is that Nobel prizes typically don't go within a year of a device conferring the greatest benefit to mankind.
You missed that these three pieces of information only identify 87% of Americans:
"...in 2000, [researcher Latanya Sweeney] showed that 87 percent of all Americans could be uniquely identified using only three bits of information: ZIP code, birthdate, and sex."
For the other 13% there are the sorts of collisions you mentioned
Obama: 52.9% of the popular vote. If you are going to 2 sig fig then you should be reporting 53%. McCain: 45.7% of the popular vote.
Obama got 7.2% more of the popular vote then McCain, which is actually a significant margin. The "missing" 1.4% went to third parties. The only way the election is as close as you paint it is if you honestly and sincerely believe that 100% of the third party voters would have voted for McCain had there been no other option.
The margin of support that is relevant for elections (namely the electoral college) is significantly higher, which is presumably the one that the supporters would be concerned about if the motive is re-election.
Except that there are some solutions that have real testable conclusions. And remember in science you don't get to test a theory directly, you test a set of experiments to the *solution* of a theory. e.g. we don't test Newtonian gravity directly, we test (for example) the solution it gives us for the gravitational force for a particular matter configuration (like the Earth). The reason this is important is because it is possible to find other theories that have the exact same solutions as the thing we have tested, or (like Einstein gravity) have solutions that are close enough that we need high-precision experiments to distingush between them.
So putting aside the whole "we can never verify a theory" [or adding "we can make it a working model if a sufficient number of solutions have been checked to describe reality without the existence of a counter-example"] then in principle we do have predictions from string theory. Now there are many solutions, many predicitions, etc. but this fact by itself is already enough to distinguish string theory from philosophy.
I know you were just joking, but the original terminator was probably reasonably primative (much more so than the T-1000) and if Skynet had primary focussed in the first branch on killing people getting natural communication right. Also they were sending the robot back in time before Skynet was fully developed, and may not know all the cultural references.
In this case, making the original terminator a non-native speaker is a very easy way of deflecting suspicion. After all, a data-esque terminator would attract a lot of attention =).
Arrow's impossibility theorem proves that no voting system can simultaneously satisfy all five of his requirements in a system with more than two choices *for arbitrary input*.
That does not mean that one cannot be better than the others, or even the best. For example, a simple system may satisfy all 5 criteria for 65% of possible inputs. Another system may satisfy it for 75% of all possible inputs. Note that all the votes of a single election are one single "input", not each vote. What we are looking at what fraction of possible ways of voting are "fair".
If we weigh all inputs equally (and this is an assumption, because one may choose to argue that certain combinations are more likely than others) then the second system is better. Arrow's impossiblility theorem only tells you that the goal of getting a fair election for an arbitrary election, or 100% of possible inputs, is impossible.
But Newtonian physics is not wrong. It's limited in its useful scope. However, that useful scope happens to be vast. Indeed usefulness within a limited, well-defined scope might well serve as a definition of a scientific theory. Here "scope" means a set of phenomena, and "usefulness" means the ability to draw inferences from a set of facts in the scope that will correctly predict other facts within that scope.
The trouble is that Newtonian mechanics does not get the "right" answer for any problem. It is not as if it is making certain assumptions that are true in some cases [i.e. the problems that are within its scope] and false in others. Instead it is the case that deviations from Newton's mechanics or gravitation are acceptably small (at least for most people) in a large part of parameter space, and this is the part that we would consider Newtonian theory "useful".
I don't think we really disagree, but I wanted to clarify your point a little. If you insist the scope, as you have defined it above, includes a tolerance or acceptable error then I think our two statements coincide. The downside to explicitly stating that you need to specify a precision (or worse calling it an acceptable error!) to determine the range of validity of a scientific theory is there are always those that don't do science that will insist on knowing "the truth" and want an error of zero. These people do not understand that science can never give that, because any experiment only checks a theory to a specific precision.
(Even that is sloppy. An experiment checks the prediction of a theory to a solution of a scientific theory. Thus we don't test a theory, but are testing any theory that generates that solution for the given physical conditions, or a theory that has a solution that is close enough to lie within experimental error).
While stating that a range of validity needs a notion of desired precision (or acceptable error) may weaken science in the public perception, we do need to say it. People need a better understanding of how science works, rather than thinking that science is a collection of facts which cannot be disputed. To abuse Heinlein, scientists the only commitment scientists make to a theory is to use it "until they die, or something better comes along."
Canada will deny you entry if you've been convicted of drug possession or DWI -- even if said conviction was a misdemeanor/civil affair if your home country. Why don't I see anybody complaining about that? [emphasis added]
Pretty sure that bit about Canada is not true, as that would mean that G. W. Bush would not be able to enter the country. Did you mean that Canada may deny you entry based on a drug possession or DWI?
But if we are talking about the legal determination of guilt and innocence then yes, she is technically innocent. But it is also true that not one person has ever been served for a crime he or she was guilty of because they are being served to determine "guilt" or "innocence" in a court of law. I think the parent poster is referring to the logical independence of the statements "actually committed act X in the past" and "is currently in hospital".
(I prefer to think of the terms "guilt" and "innocence" in terms of whether you committed the act or not, and that a courts determination of guilt or innocence as akin to legal fiction. This explains why we say we extend the accussed the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise, rather than claiming that they are actually innocent until proven otherwise.)
Then I tried to think of cases in recent decades where world opinion differed significantly from the US media's dominant spin. I can't think of a single one.
Check the foreign press on the case for the Iraq war while Bush and Co were making the case to the United Nations. Or the papers reporting Bush's reelection in 2004. These are probably the most significant counterexamples from recent years.
There are many others where large parts of the world have a different view than the US media, but the stories are not quite as big. e.g. The opinions reflected in US papers on Hugo Chavez differ quite a bit from most of the world, but in many places Chavez is not really discussed so I am not sure you would accept it as a counter-point.
The important part about this idea is that the universe is more mediocre than we expected. Specifically cosmologists are interested in asking the question
Pretend that the laws of physics are given and don't change. But we will allow the parameters (e.g. the amount of matter, or the value of the cosmological constant) to change. How much can the parameters change before the universe looks significantly different?
What does "significantly different" mean? Originally our ego-centric view promoted the idea of "can the universe support life?" but as you correctly point out the definition of sufficiently different life even in our own universe is quite difficult. How should life be defined?
While "life" may be the question that we are interested in, we can instead ask questions that are well-defined that we may be able to answer. For example:
Can galaxies form?
Can stars form?
That is the idea of the this paper, to get away from purely anthropic ideas of what life is.
Your last paragraph
Even if we are rare, why does that make is so special? It's rare to win the lottery, but it's got to happen to someone doesn't it? If we hadn't won the lottery, we wouldn't be here to talk about it, would we?
This sort of reasoning works if there are multiple universes (such as the idea promoted by Susskind of The cosmic landscape) and is what string theory advocates. However we have no evidence for the existence of multiple universes. If there is only one universe we can still describe possible universes and wonder why ours is so special. We have three possibilities:
There are (many) multiple universes, and we did "just win the lottery" because someone had to.
There are not multiple universes (or not many) and our existence is highly unlikely. This suggests that we are either phenomenally lucky or we are not understanding something.
There are not multiple universes (or not many) but we are actually not that unlikely.
Finally there is the issue of what counts as "changing parameters" and what counts as "laws of physics"? A standard cosmologist would consider the parameters to be the amount of matter, amount of radiation, value of cosmological constant, amount of curvature. A string cosmologist would consider the type of particles and things we would traditionally consider the "laws of physics" to be part of choosing the appropriate background.
As far as I understand in USA, a mall is private property, so the owners can informally prohibit picture taking inside the mall but cannot if you're taking pictures from a public place adjacent to the mall. Had you refused the guard and ignored his request for you to leave, you'd be trespassing and he could detain you for trespass,...
I am pretty sure you cannot detain someone for trespassing. It seems counter-productive to ask them to leave and then force them to stay until the police arrive.
Predestination is not necessarily incompatible with free will. There some philosophers (collectively the compatalists) that maintain you can have determinism and free will.
To see how, consider reason that we consider them incompatible. If I have free will, I should be able to choose what I have for breakfast tomorrow. (By choose, I mean within some reasonable constraints -- I am not going to have scambled Dodo eggs, for example.) If the future is pre-determined, then I have no choice at all in what I have for breakfast; I simply have what I must have. The argument is made that I don't have free will because I have no choices available to me.
This all seems reasonable. But a compatalist would point out that we have not exhausted all the opinions. For example, most people would believe that just because you cannot change what you had for breakfast yesterday does not imply you do not have free will. So why does the fact that you must have some particular item for breakfast tomorrow necessarily deny free will? Whatever you did have for breakfast yesterday (which was presumably the outcome of free decisions you already made, and you could have made others but chose not to) is not problematic. Why is it problematic that the (logically possibly) free decisions you will make will lead to a particular breakfast tomorrow, and it is preordained because you will not make other choices?
The argument essentially boils down to pointing out that free will comes about from figuring out what or how the decisions are made. Determinism is an argument about when the decisions are made. These philosophers are simply making the point that having the decisions all made freely (if not knowingly) but not "in real time" is a logically consistent position.
But lying by omission is a lot harder to pin down than what I would call lying i.e. knowingly giving a false statement as a true one.
Using your definition, all sorts of cultural and personal norms come into the game -- who considers something important? If someone jumps to the wrong conclusion based off my actions and does not tell me, have I lied by omission? This seems like it would include many things that I would classify as "misunderstandings". Or is it defined by whether or not the person making the statement had an intent to deceive?
The infamous "hanging chads" were a good example of this, the voter had no way to see if their vote was recorded correctly. This can only really be done with a piece of paper, written in English, that is inspected by the voter. Because English is the only human-readable language? No wonder the Chinese don't have fair elections....
Actually, the Schwarzchild solution does have a well-defined radius. In fact, the problem is that it has many well-defined radii, depending on what you mean by the term (as you point out, this comes about because of the non-Euclidean nature of the geometry). The commonly quoted "Schwarzschild radius" r = 2GM/c^2 is obtained by taking the area of the horizon and figuring out which "r" you would have to plug into A = 4 pi r^2 [true for a flat space sphere] to get the right result. Taking the circumference and dividing by 2 pi would achieve the same result. However, it is quite possible to figure out the proper distance between the horizon and the singularity by measuring the distance an infalling observer would travel. This distance is finite.
A problem can occur if you try and use constant time slices, using the "natural" time coordinate as defined by an observer far from the black hole. This gives silly results, but that is only because of badly behaved coordinates.
You actually read (and understood?) that paper? Jamison probably told you that we had a couple of talks on it, including a visit by Dr. Lisi himself. The whole thing seems completely numerological.....
But in today's political climate, it should be easy for the democrats to get this fixed.
Call up your favourite news network, armed with a quote of how much the government is spending on wiretaps and increased surveillance: $XX. Remind the viewers that this is coming out of taxes, so really they that are paying $XX on themselves. Put this up against the cost of recovering the data on the whitehouse, the people who are wiretapping you. Then drop the "if they have nothing to hide...."
I can give you a somewhat oversimplified picture of the "why the universe is flat" claim, and how the size of the dots come into it.
Current thinking is that the universe had structure on all different scales. That is, we had some blobs where there was a little bit more matter than average (overdense regions) and some blobs where there was a little bit less matter than average (underdense regions). The "all different scales" means that these blobs (statistically) were just as likely to be 1 mm across as 1 m across. Note that this "no scale" does not apply to the amount of overdensity or underdensity -- that was pretty much fixed. The prejudice is that these over- and under-dense regions were created by fluctuations in the inflaton field, which made the universe expand really quickly early on. Why? Well, there are some issues that need to be addressed in cosomology (see the motivation section in the wikipedia article on cosmic inflation).
(For the experts, I realise that the Harrison-Zeldovich purely scale invariant spectrum is on the edge of being ruled out by WMAP. If that is the greatest inaccuracy I make in this description then I will be happy!)
So how do these random-sized blobs (due to inflation, or even some other mechanism if you are a skeptic) tell us about gravity? Well, the answer to this is that the CMB is a snapshot of the universe when it finally cooled to the ionization temperature of hydrogen. Before that, the electrons were free because they had too much energy to be bound to hydrogen atoms, and the light scattered off all the charged particles. Only once the plasma had cooled to form neutral ions could the light travel an appreciable distance without scattering. So what we are seeing is the light after it has bounced around in the plasma for some time.
So what? Well, we don't actually *see* a scale invariant spectrum. Like the article says, we see roughly 1 degree patches on the sky. What is happening is that overdense regions collapse, and just like a collapsing gas, as it gets smaller the overdense region heats up and increases in pressure. Eventually the pressure is great enough to stop the collapse and the spot starts expanding again. Starting with a scale invariant spectrum, we actually get a characteristic "size" for spots from the interplay between number of baryons (i.e. protons and neutrons) and gravity. The strength of gravity relates to the curvature.
So it is not that the "initial random splashes of paint" tell us anything about gravity, but rather than gravity (and some ideal gas like thermodynamics) process these over and underdense regions until we get a statistical distribution of sizes. The involvement of gravity in this "processing" is where numbers like flatness come from.
In special relativity, you are correct. You can only pick an inertial reference frame.
In general relativity gravitation is locally indistinguishable from acceleration, a principle called the "principle of equivalence". This does, in fact, allow you to place the Earth as stationary and have the sun go around it, as claimed above.
If you can't observe the phenomena in the real world, then how do you know the model has any correspondence? Or are you going to say that my computer model of classical mechanics is proof that general relativity is incorrect? No, but you could do some very accurate classical mechanics calculations in order to compare them to experiment. While computers were not used, this method was used to calculate the orbit of Mercury, and it was found that using classical mechanics and the known planets that something was wrong. This gave us the hint that either something was wrong with gravity or that there were unknown planets. So by doing calculations of what you think is true and comparing to reality you can find where the holes in your knowledge are. As is well established by now, the perihilion precession of Mercury was due to a modification of gravity (see GR tests) rather than an extra planet.
I would suggest you re-read my post and consider this phrase:
...cannot expand (or confirm) the frontiers of [scientific] research... I would agree that we cannot confirm scientific research using computers. But we don't really confirm scientific theories ever. Instead, we accumulate a body of evidence that is consistent with experiments.
The people in this article are not trying to calculate things looking for (mathematical) inconsistencies in the standard model. Instead, they are calculating hard processes in the standard model (usually to do with the nuclear force, for which our traditional methods do not work so well) and comparing them to experiment. Physicists have an atheistic prejudice against the standard model being the end of the story until we have to fit in quantum gravity (ignoring minor details like neutrino masses). Because of this we are looking hard to find where the standard model breaks down by comparing it to data. To compare the theory to data, we need to know what the theory predicts - hence the need for the supercomputers.
Bottom line -- the theoretical calculations (and uncertainties, both in the input and in various approximations made in making the model) are consistent with the experimental data. So which part of the standard model breaks first to let us know "what is beyond" is still a mystery.
I would agree that the article was somewhat lacking in details about which processes they analysed. I am not connected with the research group, but I was hoping someone here could fill us in on which processes the group was concentrating on.
That depends on how you look at the fees. WOW is a service. We pay for access to the game. There are costs associated with running the game day to day. They could just release expansion packs at retail if they cared to. THAT would be paying for new content. Obviously there are a myriad of reasons why that policy would be a bad idea, but you get the drift and I think that a fair number of people look at it like that too. I get it. The game development is free + monthly costs for server development. The real world analogue of magazine "deals": free + 10.95 S&H! =)
Take, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction. This is a law of logic, you might even say THE law of logic: it says simply that for any proposition P (a proposition being what is expressed by a sentence in a given sense and context), either P or not-P. Actually, I believe this is commonly referred to as the law of the excluded middle. It states that any proposition must be either true or false. Some people actually disagree with this statement. If you take the proposition P = "I eat cornflakes for breakfast everyday for a week in 2010" then can you necessarily say it must be true or false? Sure, after 2010 it will be easy, but right now is it necessarily true that P must either be true or false, or is it possible for a third truth value "to be determined" exists? Many philosophers have argued this question, and it is not completely uncontroversial.
The law of non-contradiction is the statement that (P and not-P) must be false.
Classical logic does make this equivalent to P being either true or false but not both, but you have to assume the law of the excluded middle to get the equivalence. (Using the cornflakes example again, it is easy to see (P and not-P is definitely false, but not completely clear as to if P has to be either true or false right now.)
Slashdot Mirror
Except that from the quote form Nobel, the benefit to pockets of the inventors does not factor into it.
The piece of the sentence
states that
i) that the prize should be distributed annually
ii) some logistics dealing with the estate.
So Nobel's statement is, in essence, that we should give the Nobel prize to those who, in the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.
In comparing two discoveries we need to compare their relative benefit to mankind; the benefit of the individual is completely and utterly irrelevant. That is, it is irrelevant if the individual (or individuals) benefited more than mankind as a whole; nor does it matter when comparing the two discoveries which group made "more" out of their discovery pre-Nobel prize. Nobel's sentiment is solely concerned with the benefit to mankind.
To be blantent and explicit about it, pretend for a moment that "benefit" was an actual quantifiable measure. It is not, but we can still look at the logical structure of the statement. If we have two discoveries A and B with
A: mankind benefit: 500 personal gain: 800
B: mankind benefit: 505 personal gain: 2000
then "B" has greater benefit to mankind of these two discoveries. The last column is completely irrelevant. (BTW, personal gain will probably always exceed mankind benefit as the scientists gain the same benefit you or I would, plus whatever recognition etc. in their field, other prizes, awards, grants, etc. The only way I could see personal gain being less is if the personal sacrafices involved were worse than all the other benefits to the individual).
If you wish to argue that a patented discovery lessens the value to mankind as a whole, by all means go ahead. But the argument that you have presented simply does not hang together -- Nobel makes no comment (at least with the quote you have provided) about the discoverer's personal gain.
PS. If you did want to argue about something mentioned in Nobel's statement, it is that Nobel prizes typically don't go within a year of a device conferring the greatest benefit to mankind.
You missed that these three pieces of information only identify 87% of Americans:
For the other 13% there are the sorts of collisions you mentioned
Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2008
Obama: 52.9% of the popular vote. If you are going to 2 sig fig then you should be reporting 53%.
McCain: 45.7% of the popular vote.
Obama got 7.2% more of the popular vote then McCain, which is actually a significant margin. The "missing" 1.4% went to third parties. The only way the election is as close as you paint it is if you honestly and sincerely believe that 100% of the third party voters would have voted for McCain had there been no other option.
The margin of support that is relevant for elections (namely the electoral college) is significantly higher, which is presumably the one that the supporters would be concerned about if the motive is re-election.
The size of the Universe is entirely an unknown. As such, scientists don't talk about it much.
Not entirely unknown. We have some pretty good lower bounds on what it can be =).
Except that there are some solutions that have real testable conclusions. And remember in science you don't get to test a theory directly, you test a set of experiments to the *solution* of a theory. e.g. we don't test Newtonian gravity directly, we test (for example) the solution it gives us for the gravitational force for a particular matter configuration (like the Earth). The reason this is important is because it is possible to find other theories that have the exact same solutions as the thing we have tested, or (like Einstein gravity) have solutions that are close enough that we need high-precision experiments to distingush between them.
So putting aside the whole "we can never verify a theory" [or adding "we can make it a working model if a sufficient number of solutions have been checked to describe reality without the existence of a counter-example"] then in principle we do have predictions from string theory. Now there are many solutions, many predicitions, etc. but this fact by itself is already enough to distinguish string theory from philosophy.
I know you were just joking, but the original terminator was probably reasonably primative (much more so than the T-1000) and if Skynet had primary focussed in the first branch on killing people getting natural communication right. Also they were sending the robot back in time before Skynet was fully developed, and may not know all the cultural references.
In this case, making the original terminator a non-native speaker is a very easy way of deflecting suspicion. After all, a data-esque terminator would attract a lot of attention =).
Arrow's impossibility theorem proves that no voting system can simultaneously satisfy all five of his requirements in a system with more than two choices *for arbitrary input*.
That does not mean that one cannot be better than the others, or even the best. For example, a simple system may satisfy all 5 criteria for 65% of possible inputs. Another system may satisfy it for 75% of all possible inputs. Note that all the votes of a single election are one single "input", not each vote. What we are looking at what fraction of possible ways of voting are "fair".
If we weigh all inputs equally (and this is an assumption, because one may choose to argue that certain combinations are more likely than others) then the second system is better. Arrow's impossiblility theorem only tells you that the goal of getting a fair election for an arbitrary election, or 100% of possible inputs, is impossible.
But Newtonian physics is not wrong. It's limited in its useful scope. However, that useful scope happens to be vast. Indeed usefulness within a limited, well-defined scope might well serve as a definition of a scientific theory. Here "scope" means a set of phenomena, and "usefulness" means the ability to draw inferences from a set of facts in the scope that will correctly predict other facts within that scope.
The trouble is that Newtonian mechanics does not get the "right" answer for any problem. It is not as if it is making certain assumptions that are true in some cases [i.e. the problems that are within its scope] and false in others. Instead it is the case that deviations from Newton's mechanics or gravitation are acceptably small (at least for most people) in a large part of parameter space, and this is the part that we would consider Newtonian theory "useful".
I don't think we really disagree, but I wanted to clarify your point a little. If you insist the scope, as you have defined it above, includes a tolerance or acceptable error then I think our two statements coincide. The downside to explicitly stating that you need to specify a precision (or worse calling it an acceptable error!) to determine the range of validity of a scientific theory is there are always those that don't do science that will insist on knowing "the truth" and want an error of zero. These people do not understand that science can never give that, because any experiment only checks a theory to a specific precision.
(Even that is sloppy. An experiment checks the prediction of a theory to a solution of a scientific theory. Thus we don't test a theory, but are testing any theory that generates that solution for the given physical conditions, or a theory that has a solution that is close enough to lie within experimental error).
While stating that a range of validity needs a notion of desired precision (or acceptable error) may weaken science in the public perception, we do need to say it. People need a better understanding of how science works, rather than thinking that science is a collection of facts which cannot be disputed. To abuse Heinlein, scientists the only commitment scientists make to a theory is to use it "until they die, or something better comes along."
Canada will deny you entry if you've been convicted of drug possession or DWI -- even if said conviction was a misdemeanor/civil affair if your home country. Why don't I see anybody complaining about that? [emphasis added]
Pretty sure that bit about Canada is not true, as that would mean that G. W. Bush would not be able to enter the country. Did you mean that Canada may deny you entry based on a drug possession or DWI?
But if we are talking about the legal determination of guilt and innocence then yes, she is technically innocent. But it is also true that not one person has ever been served for a crime he or she was guilty of because they are being served to determine "guilt" or "innocence" in a court of law. I think the parent poster is referring to the logical independence of the statements "actually committed act X in the past" and "is currently in hospital".
(I prefer to think of the terms "guilt" and "innocence" in terms of whether you committed the act or not, and that a courts determination of guilt or innocence as akin to legal fiction. This explains why we say we extend the accussed the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise, rather than claiming that they are actually innocent until proven otherwise.)
Then I tried to think of cases in recent decades where world opinion differed significantly from the US media's dominant spin. I can't think of a single one.
Check the foreign press on the case for the Iraq war while Bush and Co were making the case to the United Nations. Or the papers reporting Bush's reelection in 2004. These are probably the most significant counterexamples from recent years.
There are many others where large parts of the world have a different view than the US media, but the stories are not quite as big. e.g. The opinions reflected in US papers on Hugo Chavez differ quite a bit from most of the world, but in many places Chavez is not really discussed so I am not sure you would accept it as a counter-point.
The important part about this idea is that the universe is more mediocre than we expected. Specifically cosmologists are interested in asking the question
What does "significantly different" mean? Originally our ego-centric view promoted the idea of "can the universe support life?" but as you correctly point out the definition of sufficiently different life even in our own universe is quite difficult. How should life be defined?
While "life" may be the question that we are interested in, we can instead ask questions that are well-defined that we may be able to answer. For example:
That is the idea of the this paper, to get away from purely anthropic ideas of what life is.
Your last paragraph
This sort of reasoning works if there are multiple universes (such as the idea promoted by Susskind of The cosmic landscape) and is what string theory advocates. However we have no evidence for the existence of multiple universes. If there is only one universe we can still describe possible universes and wonder why ours is so special. We have three possibilities:
Finally there is the issue of what counts as "changing parameters" and what counts as "laws of physics"? A standard cosmologist would consider the parameters to be the amount of matter, amount of radiation, value of cosmological constant, amount of curvature. A string cosmologist would consider the type of particles and things we would traditionally consider the "laws of physics" to be part of choosing the appropriate background.
As far as I understand in USA, a mall is private property, so the owners can informally prohibit picture taking inside the mall but cannot if you're taking pictures from a public place adjacent to the mall. Had you refused the guard and ignored his request for you to leave, you'd be trespassing and he could detain you for trespass, ...
I am pretty sure you cannot detain someone for trespassing. It seems counter-productive to ask them to leave and then force them to stay until the police arrive.
Predestination is not necessarily incompatible with free will. There some philosophers (collectively the compatalists) that maintain you can have determinism and free will.
To see how, consider reason that we consider them incompatible. If I have free will, I should be able to choose what I have for breakfast tomorrow. (By choose, I mean within some reasonable constraints -- I am not going to have scambled Dodo eggs, for example.) If the future is pre-determined, then I have no choice at all in what I have for breakfast; I simply have what I must have. The argument is made that I don't have free will because I have no choices available to me.
This all seems reasonable. But a compatalist would point out that we have not exhausted all the opinions. For example, most people would believe that just because you cannot change what you had for breakfast yesterday does not imply you do not have free will. So why does the fact that you must have some particular item for breakfast tomorrow necessarily deny free will? Whatever you did have for breakfast yesterday (which was presumably the outcome of free decisions you already made, and you could have made others but chose not to) is not problematic. Why is it problematic that the (logically possibly) free decisions you will make will lead to a particular breakfast tomorrow, and it is preordained because you will not make other choices?
The argument essentially boils down to pointing out that free will comes about from figuring out what or how the decisions are made. Determinism is an argument about when the decisions are made. These philosophers are simply making the point that having the decisions all made freely (if not knowingly) but not "in real time" is a logically consistent position.
But lying by omission is a lot harder to pin down than what I would call lying i.e. knowingly giving a false statement as a true one.
Using your definition, all sorts of cultural and personal norms come into the game -- who considers something important? If someone jumps to the wrong conclusion based off my actions and does not tell me, have I lied by omission? This seems like it would include many things that I would classify as "misunderstandings". Or is it defined by whether or not the person making the statement had an intent to deceive?
Maybe your 4 year old can help me out here =).
Actually, the Schwarzchild solution does have a well-defined radius. In fact, the problem is that it has many well-defined radii, depending on what you mean by the term (as you point out, this comes about because of the non-Euclidean nature of the geometry). The commonly quoted "Schwarzschild radius" r = 2GM/c^2 is obtained by taking the area of the horizon and figuring out which "r" you would have to plug into A = 4 pi r^2 [true for a flat space sphere] to get the right result. Taking the circumference and dividing by 2 pi would achieve the same result. However, it is quite possible to figure out the proper distance between the horizon and the singularity by measuring the distance an infalling observer would travel. This distance is finite.
A problem can occur if you try and use constant time slices, using the "natural" time coordinate as defined by an observer far from the black hole. This gives silly results, but that is only because of badly behaved coordinates.
Hey Bob,
You actually read (and understood?) that paper? Jamison probably told you that we had a couple of talks on it, including a visit by Dr. Lisi himself. The whole thing seems completely numerological.....
Hope you are enjoying CERN and Randall's talks!
Not everybody.... Wasn't there a fuss a couple of days ago about how the white house doesn't back up its e-mails?
Or did you mean everyone competent? =)
But in today's political climate, it should be easy for the democrats to get this fixed.
Call up your favourite news network, armed with a quote of how much the government is spending on wiretaps and increased surveillance: $XX. Remind the viewers that this is coming out of taxes, so really they that are paying $XX on themselves. Put this up against the cost of recovering the data on the whitehouse, the people who are wiretapping you. Then drop the "if they have nothing to hide...."
Sure, it's dirty and mean. But it is not hard.
I can give you a somewhat oversimplified picture of the "why the universe is flat" claim, and how the size of the dots come into it.
Current thinking is that the universe had structure on all different scales. That is, we had some blobs where there was a little bit more matter than average (overdense regions) and some blobs where there was a little bit less matter than average (underdense regions). The "all different scales" means that these blobs (statistically) were just as likely to be 1 mm across as 1 m across. Note that this "no scale" does not apply to the amount of overdensity or underdensity -- that was pretty much fixed. The prejudice is that these over- and under-dense regions were created by fluctuations in the inflaton field, which made the universe expand really quickly early on. Why? Well, there are some issues that need to be addressed in cosomology (see the motivation section in the wikipedia article on cosmic inflation).
(For the experts, I realise that the Harrison-Zeldovich purely scale invariant spectrum is on the edge of being ruled out by WMAP. If that is the greatest inaccuracy I make in this description then I will be happy!)
So how do these random-sized blobs (due to inflation, or even some other mechanism if you are a skeptic) tell us about gravity? Well, the answer to this is that the CMB is a snapshot of the universe when it finally cooled to the ionization temperature of hydrogen. Before that, the electrons were free because they had too much energy to be bound to hydrogen atoms, and the light scattered off all the charged particles. Only once the plasma had cooled to form neutral ions could the light travel an appreciable distance without scattering. So what we are seeing is the light after it has bounced around in the plasma for some time.
So what? Well, we don't actually *see* a scale invariant spectrum. Like the article says, we see roughly 1 degree patches on the sky. What is happening is that overdense regions collapse, and just like a collapsing gas, as it gets smaller the overdense region heats up and increases in pressure. Eventually the pressure is great enough to stop the collapse and the spot starts expanding again. Starting with a scale invariant spectrum, we actually get a characteristic "size" for spots from the interplay between number of baryons (i.e. protons and neutrons) and gravity. The strength of gravity relates to the curvature.
So it is not that the "initial random splashes of paint" tell us anything about gravity, but rather than gravity (and some ideal gas like thermodynamics) process these over and underdense regions until we get a statistical distribution of sizes. The involvement of gravity in this "processing" is where numbers like flatness come from.
In special relativity, you are correct. You can only pick an inertial reference frame.
In general relativity gravitation is locally indistinguishable from acceleration, a principle called the "principle of equivalence". This does, in fact, allow you to place the Earth as stationary and have the sun go around it, as claimed above.
...cannot expand (or confirm) the frontiers of [scientific] research... I would agree that we cannot confirm scientific research using computers. But we don't really confirm scientific theories ever. Instead, we accumulate a body of evidence that is consistent with experiments.The people in this article are not trying to calculate things looking for (mathematical) inconsistencies in the standard model. Instead, they are calculating hard processes in the standard model (usually to do with the nuclear force, for which our traditional methods do not work so well) and comparing them to experiment. Physicists have an atheistic prejudice against the standard model being the end of the story until we have to fit in quantum gravity (ignoring minor details like neutrino masses). Because of this we are looking hard to find where the standard model breaks down by comparing it to data. To compare the theory to data, we need to know what the theory predicts - hence the need for the supercomputers.
Bottom line -- the theoretical calculations (and uncertainties, both in the input and in various approximations made in making the model) are consistent with the experimental data. So which part of the standard model breaks first to let us know "what is beyond" is still a mystery.
I would agree that the article was somewhat lacking in details about which processes they analysed. I am not connected with the research group, but I was hoping someone here could fill us in on which processes the group was concentrating on.
The law of non-contradiction is the statement that (P and not-P) must be false.
Classical logic does make this equivalent to P being either true or false but not both, but you have to assume the law of the excluded middle to get the equivalence. (Using the cornflakes example again, it is easy to see (P and not-P is definitely false, but not completely clear as to if P has to be either true or false right now.)