I'm a condensed matter physicist. This claim is weak beyond belief, and it pains me to no end to see it get picked up by slashdot and other sites (nextbigfuture.com). To demonstrate superconductivity, you need to show (a) zero resistance over some range of current; (b) the Meissner effect (expulsion of magnetic flux, seen via magnetometry); (c) a characteristic feature of a phase transition in the heat capacity. This paper shows exactly none of these things. The noise level in the resistance measurements is so poor, you could not tell the difference between zero and 0.01 Ohms (which would be totally believable considering there is already a metal film in the system). This paper in its present form is not fit for publication. Seriously, you don't have to be an expert at this stuff to see that this is weak - just look at the noise level in the current-voltage curves and use some common sense!
The author of the actual paper is Hideo Hosono, not "Hideo Hono". The paper, available here, was not published in the April 11 issue of Nano Letters. Rather, it was published on-line on March 22.
Because the nanoparticles are, in fact, nanoparticles. 12 nm in diameter, and 4 nm in diameter later in the paper. Indeed, that's critical for why this works.
But I do find it rather amusing that you'd have to give up something like Lorentz invariance or unitarity to disprove string theory.
That's why I qualified my statment with the word "credibly":-) I agree that if the LHC demonstrated big violations of Lorentz invariance, or conservation of energy, or causality, then that'd kill string theory. Of course, it'd also stand modern physics on its head, which would be pretty cool.
A real concern is that the "landscape" (the fact the string theory is really a collection of theories that could have something like 10^500 (yes, that's a googol to the fifth power) possible vacua as solutions) renders string theory nearly unfalsifiable. It's not that they can't predict anything. Indeed, they've predicted everything. If the LHC at CERN started up tomorrow and found a Higgs boson with a mass of 220 GeV, and some kind of light supersymmetric partner at 260 GeV, they could claim that's consistent with string theory. Heck, if the Tevatron folks at Fermilab found a fourth family of leptons next week, the string community could claim to understand that, too. I would love to see just one example of something that could credibly be found at the LHC that string theory can't explain. Just one.
IAAP (I am a physicist). Out of all the bloviating, often obnoxious high energy physicists who feel compelled to write popular books with pretentious titles (Dreams of a Final Theory (Weinberg); The Quark and the Jaguar (Gell-Man); The God Particle (Lederman); The Cosmic Landscape (Suskind); A Brief History of Time (Hawking)), Kaku has absolutely contributed the least to the actual science. Lisa Randall is 10x the physicist of Kaku, if not moreso.
Any word on when they're going to try again at launching the Falcon 1? At the company website, Musk writes on Feb. 10 that he'll post a long update "next week" regarding the static fire test and a new launch date. It's been two weeks now, and still no post....
This article highlights one of my pet peeves: people with no technical background in physics, chemistry, or biology who somehow become talking heads on the subject of nanoscale science that garner world-wide attention. Seriously, look at their website. Explain to me what gives them professional credibility on this issue. This is as bad as Michael Crichton testifying before Congress about climate change last fall. Besides being loud and writing a novel, what actual qualifications does he have to be taken seriously?
There are plenty of actually qualified people worrying about things like the toxicology of nanomaterials, and environmental impacts of nanomaterials. Indeed, Rice University has an NSF-funded center on exactly this topic. Responsible scientific research is a good thing - assuming that unqualified people can appreciate the technical issues is not.
It's too bad that the NIH budget was cut this year (effectively below the rate of inflation) by the Whitehouse and further cut by Congress who, while managing to take care of their own salaries before going on vacation, could not work in the NIH budget to their schedule. As a result, many labs here in the US this year have had to slash this years budget by 12-20% which has a dramatic effect on the success of bioscience research such as this suspended animation work.
While I have sympathy for the NIH, their overall budget was only cut by about 1%. Adding in inflation, that's about 4% or so in real dollars. Now, that's sucky, but NIH's budget has doubled over the last 10 years or so, in real dollars, and is around $25B/yr. If a 1% cut makes labs cut their budgets by 12-20%, those labs are either unlucky or poorly run.
By contrast, the NSF, which supports much of the rest of basic science research in the US, has had real $ cuts for the last several years, and has remained largely flat in real $ during the NIH doubling. NSF's total annual budget is about $5B/yr, or, in more interesting units, about three weeks of the Iraq conflict. So, as a physical scientist, forgive me if I don't get tooooo upset about NIH's situation.
What makes you think the NSA does not already have access to Google records, with or without Google's knowledge and consent?
Good point. Frankly, I've always assumed that the NSA eavesdrops on the entire fiber-optic backbone, or minimally the overseas cables. What google brings to the table is context-indexing. It's not at all unrealistic to think that the NSA, which is full of clever, mathematically adept types, could plant a mole inside google, which is also full of clever, mathematically adept types.
Why would you think they're requesting searches "indexed to specific IP addresses?"
Oh yeah, almost forgot I was at Slashdot, where 99.9% of the users are fucking morons. Congrats on fitting the demographic perfectly.
Assuming one buys the "child porn" intention:
You're right - I'm a complete idiot. The feds want to know if people have been searching for and trading child porn, but have no intention at all of tracking those people down and punishing them. Clearly they would never want to be able to match up searches and the individuals who performed them- how could I have been so blind? Thank you for helping me to see the error of my ways.
So, we should believe that when the federal authorities are given access to something like 600 million Google searches per week indexed to specific IP addresses, they're only going to use that data for the specific purpose of fighting child pornography? That the NSA, for example, would decline to data mine that information?
Given that the current administration has shown that they're willing to spy on US citizens domestically without warrants, even though warrants are easy to get retroactively, why should we trust anything they say regarding 4th amendment rights?
Wow. I've read this story before - back when it was J. Hendrik Schon faking experiments at Bell Labs, with his collaborators eventually stuck with retracting 17 Science and Nature papers.
The similarities are incredibly striking, including (according to the New Scientist) duplicated figures within papers and between papers claiming to be different samples.
What motivates someone to (apparently) fake results like this, when they're almost sure to be caught?
You're absolutely right. I was a postdoc at Bell from '98 to '00, and got out just before everything completely imploded.
There has definitely been an evolution from long-term basic research to short term applied research in industry, particularly as the '90s attitude of "what can we do to juice our stock price this quarter" trumped "how can we lay the foundation for the next NN years of our industry". Of course, places like IBM Research (which is also something of a shadow of its former self in the physical sciences) and Bell Labs were able to subsist because they were the result of "accidental" monopolies with nearly guaranteed revenue streams.
Bear in mind that US research (not development!) $ per GDP is plummeting compared to Europe, China, and India. The NSF's entire annual budget is only one sixths of NIH, only three weeks worth of the Iraq war, and only around 1% of the annual service on the federal debt!
IAAP (I am a physicist), and your comment is so off-base I don't know really where to begin. You say:
Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.
Have you ever actually read an abstract for a scientific meeting? People say things all the time at meetings before every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed. Obviously it would be misconduct to state a conclusion (e.g. discovery of a new object) that you couldn't back up. However, it's perfectly valid (and TFA makes it quite clear that this is what happened) to say that you will present preliminary data on the discovery of XYZ. Good grief - if Brown had put all the data into the abstract, that's be equivalent to publishing w/o any peer review at all, which we all agree is bad, right?
Brown and his student(s) were naive, not "wrong". It looks like Ortiz (or at least his student(s)) broke an unwritten rule about not (effectively) spying on competitors by looking to see what they're observing. Ortiz is free to do that, but if he really learned something of value (e.g. that his two-year-old observations probably captured the same object, and he should go look at his old data) from those records, he is required ethically to cite those records. This is pretty clear cut.
Umm, surely this must be totally over-simplifying what they -really- do..
Nope. I saw this presented last month at an Air Force program review, and it is exactly what they say. For example, they showed pictures of 1 m long ribbons, where the length was limited by the length of the postdoc's arm who manually pulled the sheets from the nanotube "forest".
GHz has no meaning with Quantum computers. Sorry. Clock speeds still do mean something in quantum computers. Arguably they're even more important than in classical computers, since in quantum computers you need to get operations done at least 10^4 times faster than the system's decoherence time for quantum error correction to be robust. Decoherence times can be as short as microseconds, meaning that multiGHz operations could be important. Of course, if you're building a quantum computer, you want to work with a system with as long a decoherence time as possible....
The clever bit is that they've come up with an experimental technique that let's them avoid having Casimir forces contribute a background to their measurements of G.
You're right about TeX. I suppose we can wait for/. to start supporting MathML....
Try this, particularly the external link to the 1999 hep-th paper.
In short, when you assume "action at a distance" and calculate the instantaneous forces between fluctuating dipoles, you get the van der Waals interaction. When you do full local treatment of the quantum EM fields, including retardation effects, you get the Casimir force.
I succeeded in tracking down the actual paper from the Purdue folks. What they've really done is come up with a clever experimental scheme that measures the gravitational interaction independent of the Casimir force - basically it's a background-free measurement. Very slick.
There are suggestions out there that one way to test for the existence of extra "compactified" spatial dimensions (the kind of stuff needed in string theories) is to look for deviations from Newton's 1/r^2 gravity at small distance scales. See, for example, here.
The problem is, it's very hard to measure just the gravitational interaction between two objects separated at micron scales. Gravity is incredibly weak compared to common forces like electrostatics and magnetic interactions, and even more exotic things like Casimir forces (related to the van der Waals interaction).
The Purdue team has shown that the measured Casimir force in their experiment acts just as expected, setting a new limit on how screwy gravity can be at these distance scales.
For what it's worth, there are two other big efforts in this area. The one at Stanford is led by Aharon Kapitulnik, and is so sensitive that their apparatus can detect the different forces on Au and Si in the earth's magnetic field due to diamagnetism (!). The one at Washington is reportedly even more sensitive, and there are rumors circulating that they may have seen something exciting.
The really cool thing here is how table-top solid state experiments may have something profound to say about high energy physics, without any big accelerators.
The paper by the Canadians is nice, but (a) it's not really a transistor, since there is no gate electrode, and (b) single-molecule transistors have been done by several groups.
Slashdot Mirror
Look up the rocket equation. You simply cannot generate anything remotely close to 1g of acceleration with an accelerator-based ion engine like this.
I'm a condensed matter physicist. This claim is weak beyond belief, and it pains me to no end to see it get picked up by slashdot and other sites (nextbigfuture.com). To demonstrate superconductivity, you need to show (a) zero resistance over some range of current; (b) the Meissner effect (expulsion of magnetic flux, seen via magnetometry); (c) a characteristic feature of a phase transition in the heat capacity. This paper shows exactly none of these things. The noise level in the resistance measurements is so poor, you could not tell the difference between zero and 0.01 Ohms (which would be totally believable considering there is already a metal film in the system). This paper in its present form is not fit for publication. Seriously, you don't have to be an expert at this stuff to see that this is weak - just look at the noise level in the current-voltage curves and use some common sense!
The author of the actual paper is Hideo Hosono, not "Hideo Hono". The paper, available here, was not published in the April 11 issue of Nano Letters. Rather, it was published on-line on March 22.
Because the nanoparticles are, in fact, nanoparticles. 12 nm in diameter, and 4 nm in diameter later in the paper. Indeed, that's critical for why this works.
But I do find it rather amusing that you'd have to give up something like Lorentz invariance or unitarity to disprove string theory.
:-) I agree that if the LHC demonstrated big violations of Lorentz invariance, or conservation of energy, or causality, then that'd kill string theory. Of course, it'd also stand modern physics on its head, which would be pretty cool.
That's why I qualified my statment with the word "credibly"
A real concern is that the "landscape" (the fact the string theory is really a collection of theories that could have something like 10^500 (yes, that's a googol to the fifth power) possible vacua as solutions) renders string theory nearly unfalsifiable. It's not that they can't predict anything. Indeed, they've predicted everything. If the LHC at CERN started up tomorrow and found a Higgs boson with a mass of 220 GeV, and some kind of light supersymmetric partner at 260 GeV, they could claim that's consistent with string theory. Heck, if the Tevatron folks at Fermilab found a fourth family of leptons next week, the string community could claim to understand that, too. I would love to see just one example of something that could credibly be found at the LHC that string theory can't explain. Just one.
IAAP (I am a physicist). Out of all the bloviating, often obnoxious high energy physicists who feel compelled to write popular books with pretentious titles (Dreams of a Final Theory (Weinberg); The Quark and the Jaguar (Gell-Man); The God Particle (Lederman); The Cosmic Landscape (Suskind); A Brief History of Time (Hawking)), Kaku has absolutely contributed the least to the actual science. Lisa Randall is 10x the physicist of Kaku, if not moreso.
Any word on when they're going to try again at launching the Falcon 1? At the company website, Musk writes on Feb. 10 that he'll post a long update "next week" regarding the static fire test and a new launch date. It's been two weeks now, and still no post....
This article highlights one of my pet peeves: people with no technical background in physics, chemistry, or biology who somehow become talking heads on the subject of nanoscale science that garner world-wide attention. Seriously, look at their website. Explain to me what gives them professional credibility on this issue. This is as bad as Michael Crichton testifying before Congress about climate change last fall. Besides being loud and writing a novel, what actual qualifications does he have to be taken seriously?
There are plenty of actually qualified people worrying about things like the toxicology of nanomaterials, and environmental impacts of nanomaterials. Indeed, Rice University has an NSF-funded center on exactly this topic. Responsible scientific research is a good thing - assuming that unqualified people can appreciate the technical issues is not.
It's too bad that the NIH budget was cut this year (effectively below the rate of inflation) by the Whitehouse and further cut by Congress who, while managing to take care of their own salaries before going on vacation, could not work in the NIH budget to their schedule. As a result, many labs here in the US this year have had to slash this years budget by 12-20% which has a dramatic effect on the success of bioscience research such as this suspended animation work.
Look at these budget numbers here.
While I have sympathy for the NIH, their overall budget was only cut by about 1%. Adding in inflation, that's about 4% or so in real dollars. Now, that's sucky, but NIH's budget has doubled over the last 10 years or so, in real dollars, and is around $25B/yr. If a 1% cut makes labs cut their budgets by 12-20%, those labs are either unlucky or poorly run.
By contrast, the NSF, which supports much of the rest of basic science research in the US, has had real $ cuts for the last several years, and has remained largely flat in real $ during the NIH doubling. NSF's total annual budget is about $5B/yr, or, in more interesting units, about three weeks of the Iraq conflict. So, as a physical scientist, forgive me if I don't get tooooo upset about NIH's situation.
What makes you think the NSA does not already have access to Google records, with or without Google's knowledge and consent?
Good point. Frankly, I've always assumed that the NSA eavesdrops on the entire fiber-optic backbone, or minimally the overseas cables. What google brings to the table is context-indexing. It's not at all unrealistic to think that the NSA, which is full of clever, mathematically adept types, could plant a mole inside google, which is also full of clever, mathematically adept types.
Why would you think they're requesting searches "indexed to specific IP addresses?"
Oh yeah, almost forgot I was at Slashdot, where 99.9% of the users are fucking morons. Congrats on fitting the demographic perfectly.
Assuming one buys the "child porn" intention:
You're right - I'm a complete idiot. The feds want to know if people have been searching for and trading child porn, but have no intention at all of tracking those people down and punishing them. Clearly they would never want to be able to match up searches and the individuals who performed them- how could I have been so blind? Thank you for helping me to see the error of my ways.
So, we should believe that when the federal authorities are given access to something like 600 million Google searches per week indexed to specific IP addresses, they're only going to use that data for the specific purpose of fighting child pornography? That the NSA, for example, would decline to data mine that information?
Given that the current administration has shown that they're willing to spy on US citizens domestically without warrants, even though warrants are easy to get retroactively, why should we trust anything they say regarding 4th amendment rights?
Wow. I've read this story before - back when it was J. Hendrik Schon faking experiments at Bell Labs, with his collaborators eventually stuck with retracting 17 Science and Nature papers.
The similarities are incredibly striking, including (according to the New Scientist) duplicated figures within papers and between papers claiming to be different samples.
What motivates someone to (apparently) fake results like this, when they're almost sure to be caught?
You're absolutely right. I was a postdoc at Bell from '98 to '00, and got out just before everything completely imploded.
There has definitely been an evolution from long-term basic research to short term applied research in industry, particularly as the '90s attitude of "what can we do to juice our stock price this quarter" trumped "how can we lay the foundation for the next NN years of our industry". Of course, places like IBM Research (which is also something of a shadow of its former self in the physical sciences) and Bell Labs were able to subsist because they were the result of "accidental" monopolies with nearly guaranteed revenue streams.
Bear in mind that US research (not development!) $ per GDP is plummeting compared to Europe, China, and India. The NSF's entire annual budget is only one sixths of NIH, only three weeks worth of the Iraq war, and only around 1% of the annual service on the federal debt!
It was meant as a joke - guess I should've been a bit more explicit.
This is a wonderful start to providing mass access to rare manuscripts.
Now if only they would post the complete papers of Milo Rambaldi....
IAAP (I am a physicist), and your comment is so off-base I don't know really where to begin. You say:
Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.
Have you ever actually read an abstract for a scientific meeting? People say things all the time at meetings before every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed. Obviously it would be misconduct to state a conclusion (e.g. discovery of a new object) that you couldn't back up. However, it's perfectly valid (and TFA makes it quite clear that this is what happened) to say that you will present preliminary data on the discovery of XYZ. Good grief - if Brown had put all the data into the abstract, that's be equivalent to publishing w/o any peer review at all, which we all agree is bad, right?
Brown and his student(s) were naive, not "wrong". It looks like Ortiz (or at least his student(s)) broke an unwritten rule about not (effectively) spying on competitors by looking to see what they're observing. Ortiz is free to do that, but if he really learned something of value (e.g. that his two-year-old observations probably captured the same object, and he should go look at his old data) from those records, he is required ethically to cite those records. This is pretty clear cut.
Umm, surely this must be totally over-simplifying what they -really- do..
Nope. I saw this presented last month at an Air Force program review, and it is exactly what they say. For example, they showed pictures of 1 m long ribbons, where the length was limited by the length of the postdoc's arm who manually pulled the sheets from the nanotube "forest".
GHz has no meaning with Quantum computers. Sorry.
Clock speeds still do mean something in quantum computers. Arguably they're even more important than in classical computers, since in quantum computers you need to get operations done at least 10^4 times faster than the system's decoherence time for quantum error correction to be robust. Decoherence times can be as short as microseconds, meaning that multiGHz operations could be important. Of course, if you're building a quantum computer, you want to work with a system with as long a decoherence time as possible....
The clever bit is that they've come up with an experimental technique that let's them avoid having Casimir forces contribute a background to their measurements of G.
/. to start supporting MathML....
You're right about TeX. I suppose we can wait for
Try this, particularly the external link to the 1999 hep-th paper.
In short, when you assume "action at a distance" and calculate the instantaneous forces between fluctuating dipoles, you get the van der Waals interaction. When you do full local treatment of the quantum EM fields, including retardation effects, you get the Casimir force.
I succeeded in tracking down the actual paper from the Purdue folks. What they've really done is come up with a clever experimental scheme that measures the gravitational interaction independent of the Casimir force - basically it's a background-free measurement. Very slick.
IAAP (I am a physicist), and here's the deal:
There are suggestions out there that one way to test for the existence of extra "compactified" spatial dimensions (the kind of stuff needed in string theories) is to look for deviations from Newton's 1/r^2 gravity at small distance scales. See, for example, here.
The problem is, it's very hard to measure just the gravitational interaction between two objects separated at micron scales. Gravity is incredibly weak compared to common forces like electrostatics and magnetic interactions, and even more exotic things like Casimir forces (related to the van der Waals interaction).
The Purdue team has shown that the measured Casimir force in their experiment acts just as expected, setting a new limit on how screwy gravity can be at these distance scales.
For what it's worth, there are two other big efforts in this area. The one at Stanford is led by Aharon Kapitulnik, and is so sensitive that their apparatus can detect the different forces on Au and Si in the earth's magnetic field due to diamagnetism (!). The one at Washington is reportedly even more sensitive, and there are rumors circulating that they may have seen something exciting.
The really cool thing here is how table-top solid state experiments may have something profound to say about high energy physics, without any big accelerators.
The paper by the Canadians is nice, but (a) it's not really a transistor, since there is no gate electrode, and (b) single-molecule transistors have been done by several groups.
See:
Park et al., Nature 407, 57 (2000)
Park et al., Nature 417, 722 (2002)
Yu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 266802 (2004)
and others.
Nanotube-based transistors came before these, too, though that's a bit of a cheat since nanotubes can be microns long.