Unfortunately, I'm a pretty busy guy these days and have meetings I must attend (and be sharp for) tomorrow, so I was only able to give his Feynman paper a glance. My reaction to the parts I read is that I doubt very strongly that it has any validity. Essentially, his claim seems to be that quantum mechanics (QM) has internal contradictions and gives nonsensical predictions (or no predictions). You have to ask yourself when anyone makes claims like those, "If that's true, how is it that physicists have used these theories to make specific, highly accurate predictions?" If the guys using the theory can make specific (and correct) predictions and agree on what the predictions are, then it doesn't seem his claims could be true from the outset. Note, this is different from if he were to claim they are logically consistent but make incorrect predictions.
My general reaction to the little bit I did read is that he is attacking straw men. Feynman's explanation of the Bohr radius in terms of the uncertainty principle is a way of attempting to get a feel for why the Bohr radius has that value, but it is not the way in which one would actually "prove" the stability of the Hydrogen atom. To find the ground state of hydrogen, you just use the Schroedinger equation, which reduces it to a problem in partial differential equations. I've not read Feynman's explanation personally, so I can't speak about its validity. In essence, he's attacking a particular explanation, not the actual derivation the people rely on. To show this is stable to radiative damping, one would add the quantized electromagnetic field to the calculation. He doesn't actually address this sort of calculation anywhere in the paper. He does talk about Dirac's equation, but one need not go to the relativistic formulation in order to treat the quantized EM field in this situation. Mostly he seems upset with some of the mathematical details of quantum field theory, though he makes no correct, persuasive points about it's problems (it seems he doesn't like renormalization). He also seems to spend time attacking the Bohr model of the atom, which doesn't make any sense, since no one claims this to be the correct model (it was a very early idea that later lead to the modern, QM, model).
Some other apparent errors I noted: Mills claims that the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle (HUP) is derived from the Schroedinger equation. That is incorrect. The HUP simply arises from the fact that you describe particles as waves according to de Broglie's relation. The Schroedinger equation is an extra assumption that then tells you how those waves behave in time. Mills claims as one of the problems with Dirac's equation that it admits negative energy states, but Dirac soon realized these were not negative energy states but antimatter, which was later observed vindicating his theory. All in all, I don't see a lot of specific objections here, just vague claims that problems exist.
In replying to another post, I did come up with a specific critique of Mills' work (see paragraph 3 of this post). I can't see how he can get around this objection, unless he wishes to claim his theory is non-local, in which case it isn't really classical, macroscopic physics as he said.
Look, I'd certainly like to see a good debunking of various crackpot theories, but the bottom line is that Slashdot is not really the right forum. Articles are only on the front page for a day and usually only receive significant attention for a few hours. That's not a good format for a detailed intelligent exchange, not to mention the lack of good resources for formatting equations and diagrams. We may lack people with enough time and the appropriate expertise in our audience, and even if we have them we'll also have a lot of "armchair physicists" in the mix creating a lot of noise in the discussion. Finally, if you want to read actual exchanges on the technical details of scientific theories and really understand them you need the appropriate background (like, say, a B.S. in Physics), which undoubtedly the/. audience overwhelmingly lacks. The point is that there's a place for debates about the scientific validity of a new theory: scientific journals. There the reviewers and the readership have the background to address the details properly and completely.
Could there be someone out there on the net with a revolutionary theory just waiting to be discovered? Perhaps, but for each one of those there are hundreds or thousands of crackpots. Slashdot is not equipped to properly decide which is which. If Slashdot continues posting stories about supposed breakthroughs without the requisite evidence of plausibility (which I discuss a bit here), then at best it is wasting the time of the readers, and at worst it is helping to perpetuate scientific hoaxes that are used to swindle the gullible out of their money.
As to scientific reasons why this fellow's theory may be incorrect, I have not looked into it in detail. I gave some reasons that it seems implausible at first glance here. It strikes me, however, that there is almost certainly another problem with this theory, which is that it violates Bell's Theorem. I glanced at Mills' book, in which he claims that his theory is based upon the classical, macroscopic laws of physics, which would make it what is called a "local realistic hidden variables theory". John Bell (and others) proved a theorem that states any local realistic hidden variables theory must obey certain relationships, known as "Bell's inequalities", (e.g. the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality), while quantum mechanics violates them in some cases. This means that if any Bell's inequality is violated, no local hidden variables theory can explain that phenomenon. Over the years, many tests of Bell's inequalities have been done (e.g. A. Aspect et al., "Experimental Tests of Realistic Local Theories via Bell's Theorem", Phys. Rev. Lett. 47, 460 (1981)) and shown them to be violated, meaning no local realistic hidden variables theory could be true. Thus, it seems, Mills' theory should be already experimentally ruled out. Appreciating why Bell's inequalities must be true requires some knowledge of quantum mechanics, but I hope you can get the gist from what I've said here and the Wikipedia article.
Now, I have no idea if the effect Mills' claims to see is real. It's possible the effect is real, but he just has a completely incorrect explanation. It could also be some sort of systematic error. Personally, I wouldn't give it much credence until an independent group with a good background in spectroscopy can repeat the experiment and consistently get the same result.
You think this is ridiculous? Imagine being a hard-core scientist when the crazy equivocations of quantum mechanics were first unleashed upon the public in the 1900s.
Science? Bullshit! Just a bunch of fuzzy, mystical mathematics. Nothing to do with physical reality.
Yes, that's fairly close to what many of them thought. It was only after the ideas of quantum physics explained many long standing puzzles of physics (e.g. the stability of the atom) and many new phenomena in the laboratories of many researchers that the ideas began to gain credibility. This work is, so far, lacking all those things, so as of yet there's no reason to take the theory seriously. Moreover, this theory seems to contradict most of known quantum theory without satisfactorily explaining how quantum mechanics has been so successful for all this time. There may be reason to look for the effect, but so far there's no reason to give the theory too much credence.
If you take the time (and have sufficient background) to read some of Dr. Mills papers, you'll find he (and others) have exposed some inconsistencies in quantum mechanics - such as the n=1 state of hydrogen being non-radiative, contrary to the predictions of Schrodingers Equation (which also violates Maxwells equations in this case).
You do realize that the stability of the atom (the fact that it does not collapse due to radiative damping) was one of the great successes of quantum mechanics, don't you? Your statement about the hydrogen atom is completely incorrect, as far as I can make sense of it. Schroedinger's equation itself does not predict radiative damping directly. Did you perhaps mean Dirac's equation? You have to either use a semiclassical or quantized field approach. The quantized field picture (the more exact treatment) is based directly on Maxwell's equations and so agrees with them by design. One can also verify that the ground state will not radiate in that treatment.
Without having read the details of Mills' claims, I can tell you why is sounds like nonsense. An atom is dissipative system, because it interacts with the electromagnetic field. By that, I mean that if it is given energy, it will eventually lose that energy because it emits light (the rate may be very small in some states, of course). One would expect to find hydrogen in whatever the lowest energy state is, then, because if it's in a higher state it will eventually emit light and drop to the lowest state. Thus, the idea of a state lower than the ground state then seems pretty doubtful, even if you were to forget for a moment that the modern theory of the atom (quantum electrodynamics) is probably one of the most exactly tested theories in history. To put it another way, you'd have to overturn not only quantum physics but also thermodynamics. Futhermore, one must ask why, when the vast majority of the baryonic mass of the universe is Hydrogen, this effect has never before been noticed in the emission and absorption lines of materials either in the lab by physics or anywhere else in the Universe by astronomers.
Galileo wouldn't have to compare himself to anyone. He could merely point out the actual evidence that he was being silenced: He was forced to go before the inquisition and recant under (at least implied) threat of torture. The point is that when someone who is not actually being silenced or threatened compares themselves to Galileo it is entirely bogus, and it is indeed a sign that the person does not want to talk about the actual reasons people don't accept their theories.
I don't think elehrner was necessarily actually trying to compare himself to Galileo. I was partially joking and partially just trying to point out that's a road not to go down. If someone is actually being silenced then by all means they should tell people about it, but people just ignoring your ideas because they don't believe them is not the same thing and hardly makes you a modern day Galileo.
A lot of these posts appeal to authority to determine if focus fusion is decent science, analyzing who I am, or even who people who talk about focus fusion are or who is on their board of directors.... The right way is to look at the scientific work and ask--does it make sense, and does it follow the scientific method? Sometimes that's difficult if the work is only presented in technical journals. But in this case, our work is both available in technical form...and in layman's terms...
What you're saying would make some sense if you were talking to physicists or engineers who work on fusion (or at least nuclear physics), because those people would have the expertise to judge a proposal on its scientific merits. For the rest of us, though, it's really not possible to look at it with an informed, skeptical eye and determine its validity. I'm close to completing my Ph.D. in Physics, but even I don't know enough about plasma and nuclear physics to really give a good appraisal of a new fusion technique. That is the reason people spend years in school studying night and day in order to get a Ph.D. in a very narrow specialty. I have personally read works in my area of expertise (quantum information) that look fairly reasonable on first glance but are completely wrong when you look at the details. These errors can be so subtle they would go unnoticed by almost anyone but a specialist in that particular area. Putting it in "layman's terms" may give people more of an impression that they understand it, but it doesn't do anything to actually help them understand the technical details. In fact, when you do know the technical details, reading the layman's accounts of things that appear, for example, in the New York Times it is actually harder to determine if the research is valid, because none of the technical details are clearly explained.
So what can a layperson (or even non-specialist, like me) do when confronted with claims they don't understand the technical details of? Well, they look for the opinion of someone who does know about that specific area, which is, indeed, appealing to authority and is entirely appropriate and reasonable in that case. We must ask, have people with a track record of doing good, successful science looked at this and thought it was right? In the linked article, the only person who seems to be quoted giving an "expert" opinion on it is Dr. Thomas Valone, of Integrity Research Institute. And his credentials? Well, Integrity Research Institute seems to have dubious credentials at best and again a quick search on Dr. Valone again turned up no publications in peer-reviewed physics journals (if I missed some, I'd be interested to know). (A search on the web did turn up his support for ideas such as inertial propulsion. I can say with authority that that idea is nonsense; it is completely at odds with the known laws of physics, all experimental data on record, and plain old common sense.)
Another way a non-specialist can gauge whether some research has merit according to experts in the field is to see whether it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, showing that people with technical expertise in this area feel it is at least plausible that it's correct. I didn't find a paper on your idea in any of the APS journals or on Google Scholar, so at least that quick search seems to suggest it's never been published after peer review (the arxiv is not peer-reviewed, of course). Furthermore, I didn't notice any peer-reviewed articles by you on fusion at all, which might lead one to question your own expertise in the matter.
Basically, a non-specialist can try to judge the validity of a piece of work by asking, "Does the author have a record of research in the field that has been widely recognized as successful?" and "Have other specialists in the field (with a record of widely recognized success) looked critically at this research and thought it ha
Actually, assuming the chance of failure on an individual flight is 1/100 and failure on each flight is statistically independent, then the failures are poisson distributed. While the mean number of failures out of 176 flights would be 1.76, the probability of zero failures after 176 flights is 17%; thus, we can't say with any real confidence that Feynman was wrong, according to your numbers. In other words, it's not all that improbable (about 1 chance in 5) that Feynman was right and the failure just hasn't happened yet.
Why don't you idiots understand that those people we are holding in Cuba are POWs?
They are? Great, then let's treat them according to the Geneva conventions. At that point you'll get no argument from a lot of us. If they're criminals, treat them as criminals. If they're POWs, treat them as POWs. But do one or the other.
I've never used Gentoo, but it has a reputation for being rather complex for the uninitiated and having a steep learning curve. Every once in a while apt-get will ask you, when installing a new package, whether you want to keep your old configuration file or install the new default one, usually this is for servers. I don't run many servers on my systems, besides sshd, so I very seldom run in to this. If you run more servers, perhaps you would have to deal with it more. In my experience either config file will result in a functional system, though choosing a default will wipe out any customizations you might have made to the configuration file. In short, this has never been an issue for me, and not because I'm an expert or anything. I just make a choice (generally to keep my config file), don't sweat it, and it seems to work out fine.
As for bad stuff in the EULA, I HAVE found plenty of bad stuff in EULAs for programs, from spyware to provisions for installing DRM or "phoning home". I don't recall ever finding any new objectionable material in EULAs for the Windows updates, but I was always looking for them to, for example, sneak in a new DRM system. Again, I generally wouldn't accept a legal agreement without reading it, unless perhaps I trusted the other party implicitly. I probably wouldn't put that sort of trust in any company.
In my experience many distros are quite easy to update. That's certainly true of Ubuntu. I'm being quite literal when I say it's as simple as a few clicks or typing 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade;'. Now, of course, I'm talking about the default setup. As with anything, you can break it if you try. Upgrading can be difficult once you start changing the upgrading settings (selecting different repositories), but presumably you wouldn't even know this was possible or try it until you know something about the upgrade system. I think you just made an unlucky choice with Gentoo. Gentoo has many good attributes, but being easy to update without a lot of knowledge is not one of them from what I know.
I can speak on every distro or about using it with every computer. I don't do this professionally, I only use Linux on my own machines. For what it's worth, here is my experience:
I use apt to get binary kernel updates. This is, indeed point and click (if you use the GUI). It installs the new kernel image and makes it available for the boot loader. I don't do anything other than tell it to install the update. Next time I start my computer, it defaults to the new image. I'm sure it's true that it's possible that the kernel update will mess up some functions, as it is in any OS. I have no idea if this is statistically more likely to happen in Linux. I'm sure that if you want to custom patch your kernel and compile it, that can be more difficult. I chose to try this once, but I did it again through a setup program that did most of the work for me. I've never actually found such a compilation to be necessary.
"What about modules for the kernel, like support for different parts of my motherboard. You don't need to know what you have in your computer with Windows. It finds it every time."
When I installed Ubuntu, I just plugged in the CD and answered a few simple questions like what language I wanted it to use. I didn't tell it anything about chipsets or anything like that. Then I walked away to get some food, and when I came back I had a functioning system. You can see something similar if you use Knoppix. The point is that, yes, there have been (and still are) some distros that require a lot of arcane information, but many of them do not. Installing Ubuntu was faster and simpler than installing Windows 2000.
I think you've misunderstood me (perhaps intentionally so), so let me restate what I've said a bit. When I said, "If you have a system that uses the apt package manager" I was trying to be very specific, but essentially I think this goes for any modern package manager. This means, basically, if you're running any modern Linux OS designed for the desktop. I'm trying to be clear that I'm not talking about ancient Linux OSs or ones that are designed for more technical tasts, just as updating Windows 3.0 or WinCE might not be easy for an end user. What I'm saying is likely true for almost any Linux OS geared toward desktop use and specifically novices, so your objection about the user having to know what he is running is irrelevent.
If you had read the entirity of what I wrote about updating, you would have noticed that while I mentioned how to do it at the command line, you can also just click on an applet sitting on your desktop, just like in Windows. A few clicks and the update is complete. I think these can also be set to go automatically, though I haven't used that feature (never did in Windows either).
The bottom line: If you have a modern Linux OS tageted toward Desktop users (the sort a newbie would buy in the store or be recommended by friends), then the process of doing an update is almost exactly the same as it is in Windows, and because of other factors I mentioned is actually easier.
One point you make that is dead wrong in my experience is when you say, "And frankly, applying patches in Windows is easier than in Linux." Now this may be true if you're actually manually applying kernel patches and recompiling the kernel or something, but actually if you're just talking about normal (binary) system updates, one of the big reliefs for me about switching to Linux was that updates are so much less painful.
If you have a system that uses the apt package manager, then updating your system is as simple as typing 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade;' at the command line. Or if you don't like that, you can use several of the graphical tools (like synaptic) where it's just a matter of two or three clicks. On the distro I use, Ubuntu, there's actually an applet that periodically checks for updates and allows you to install them with a few clicks. In short, it's quite similar to Windows. Certainly, it's no more difficult.
Where the advantage comes in is that every damn update in Windows comes with its own EULA. Sure, you could randomly accept legal obligations without trying to figure out what you're agreeing to (though you still have to sit around and click "I agree"), but if you're actually trying to be responsible, it's a real pain. In Linux, updates to the OS, and most of the applications, are covered by the same license, the GPL, and you aren't confronted with a new EULA to accept every time you want to do an update. What a relief! In addition, the updates in Windows would often request a reboot, which never happens in Linux. Even if I update the kernel, I know I can keep using the system (with the old kernel) until I feel like rebooting.
If you're using a modern package management system, then updating in Linux is no more difficult than in Windows. In addition, there are a lot of things about the updates in Windows that may actually make the Linux process a lot easier.
While AOL does have a documented protocol for interacting with AIM servers, they have also gone to considerable lengths trying to block 3rd party clients from using the network in the past, specifically Trillian. I believe that having the published protocol was part of requirements for the merger with Time-Warner, but it seems it was only window dressing, and they didn't actually intend to interoperate with competitors.
I think the issues you're discussing (regarding signal speeds in the free vacuum vs. those in the Casamir vacuum) are actually irrelevant to this experiment, unless this is radically different from other fast light experiments done in optical fibers. In fast light experiments it is generally just a case of having a group velocity which is faster than c but no longer corresponds to the velocity of energy or information. Meaning that you have a pulse that appears to go faster than c, but it does not do so in a meaningful way.
There's a very good discussion of this in a paper by Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva on a (presumably similar) fiber based fast light experiment PRL 92, 203902 (2004). To quote from that paper:
"Both [phase and group] velocities can exceed the speed of light in vacuum c in suitable cases; hence, neither can describe the speed at which information is carried by a pulse that propagates in the medium....it is known that information travels at the signal velocity, defined as the speed of the front of a square pulse. This velocity cannot exceed c."
The rest of the paper goes on to detail their experiment and show quite clearly from the data that while the peak of the pulse is tipped forward, the arrival time of the leading edge of the pulse (the signal velocity) remains constant. The QED issues you're talking about are interesting, but as far as I can tell they are not what is at issue here.
Mainly, Speakeasy seem to be the only ones with reasonable policies. I was discussing this recently with a group of people in my area. One guy had his ISP (Verizon) disable his connection. It turn out this was because he'd setup a web server on his computer. They apparently don't block port 80, but they do monitor it and disable your connection if there's too much traffic on that port. A long discussion ensued about which provider he might switch to, but every one that was suggested also doesn't allow you to run a server on a standard home connection you have to . They all want you to buy some more expensive business package just to use your interenet connection as a, you know, fully functional internet connection. Someone even suggested Verizon's new fiber (FIOS) connection, but, guess what, running a server on that is also a violation of the TOS. Apparently you can have plenty of bandwidth, you just can't really use it.
Then of course there are the ISPs with caps on the amount of data you transfer, or the ones who want to charge you for each computer connected. I guess it has really looked to me that Speakeasy is the only ISP that treats its customers reasonably. Compitition between cable and phone companies won't help, since each has similarly customer unfriendly policies. Competition between 2 or 3 perimenant entities is really not sufficient.
I said it's would be unnecessarily political to use it as an example of an invalid scientific theory. As was discussed already, ID shouldn't be taught in science class because it's not science by definition and it is not accepted by the scientific community. Politics is irrelevent to that decision. It's just the good sense.
A school certainly can have a philosophy or comparative religion class. As long as these focus on several, opposing points of view there is no reason to mistake that for teaching a specific theology.
Creationism and its relative Intelligent Design are not valid scientific theories. They are not predictive in any meaningful sense, nor are they falsifiable. This doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or useless in a broader sense, simply that they are not science and, thus, have no place in a class on science.
What gets taught in classes on a particular subject (at least at the high school level) should be determined by what is the consensus view among experts in that particular field. Evolutionary theories are the accepted consensus among the scientific community, meaning this is what should be taught in science class. Thus, even if creationism and ID were valid scientific theories, they still would have no place in a K-12 science course, any more than the theories of those who object to special relativity or the heliocentric model of the solar system. The curriculum of science class should not be determined by popular oppinion among the uninformed. If we did things that way, we'd probably be teaching children that summer happens because that's when the Earth is closest to the Sun, since in surveys I've seen this is a more popular explanation than the correct one.
Creationism and ID might have a proper place in school, however. If the school offers a course on philosophy or on comparative religion, then these would be perfectly suitable topics for discussion. Ironically, they might be used in a discussion of the scientific method as instructive examples of ideas that are invalid as scientific theories, but that would obviously be a foolish example to use, because it's too politically charged.
Anything conductive with holes small compared to the wavelength ought to work, including a mirror. As for the power reflected back, it might not be much (depending on how well the initial beam is columnated, but you could always make your reflector a curved surface and focus the return beam a bit. On the other hand, whatever you're using may get hot, throw sparks, etc., so it might not turn out so well for someone holding the reflector.
Did you read the facts from the case? Does that really seem reasonable, to get 3rd degree burns over 6% of your body? Having to get surgery? Coffee can't be reasonably consumed at that temperature and poses a signficant danger. The company already knew this and kept it at that temperature anyway because they throught it would maintain its taste longer (i.e. to make more money). That's not reasonable or responsible.
If look at the facts you will see that this was a completely unreasonable temperature at which to serve coffee, at least in a styrofoam cup through a car window. The reason being that at that temperature it causes a signficant danger, not of a little painful burn but of full thickness, third degree burns.
People like to pretend that this is a case of someone ignoring the fact that coffee is hot, when in fact it's more akin to handing someone a plate of food and saying "careful, it's hot" when in fact you've just left it sitting in a 500 degree (F) oven for the last hour. The point is that the hypothetical person in question has been warned, but the danger is unusual, far in excess of what they should rationally expect, and shows blatent disregard for safety. That person would have every reason to get pissed when they're fingers get seared because they were expecting a normal, 130 degree plate. In the McDonald's case this was apparently because they felt that reasonable safety was less of a concern than maximizing how long they could let the coffee sit.
Actually, the McDonald's coffee lawsuit was not frivolous. It sounds like it on the surface, but if you read the details you'll see that McDonalds was doing something foolish and negligent, namely serving coffee that was far hotter than the coffee machine manufacturer suggested, far far too hot for human consumption, and would not just give you a little burn but cause 3rd degree burns requiring surgery to repair the damage. The fact that it sounded ridiculous was the result of a lazy media and McDonalds' gigantic PR machine.
Then killing them is the only solution, since 'curing' them is basically impossible and locking them up only gives them a chance to escape.
First of all, curing them may or may not be possible, but your assertion that it isn't is hardly convincing. What do the actual professionals think? Second, what is the escape rate for people jailed without chance of parole? At least where I live, I'm not aware of many maximum security jail breaks. Is this really a statistically significant problem?
Theodore Dalrymple had an interesting article printed a few years ago when he was talking to prisoners about their thoughts on the death penalty: the conclusion was that prisoners were vastly _MORE_ supportive of the death penalty than the law-abiding. After all, they live in a world full of crime, and see the consequences on a regular basis.
...Or it could be that that they're criminals and don't give a damn about killing people. Are we really going to use convicts as our moral guides or suppose they make more rational choices? It's not suprising that people who, for example, gun down their enemies in the street have no problem with the death penalty.
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Unfortunately, I'm a pretty busy guy these days and have meetings I must attend (and be sharp for) tomorrow, so I was only able to give his Feynman paper a glance. My reaction to the parts I read is that I doubt very strongly that it has any validity. Essentially, his claim seems to be that quantum mechanics (QM) has internal contradictions and gives nonsensical predictions (or no predictions). You have to ask yourself when anyone makes claims like those, "If that's true, how is it that physicists have used these theories to make specific, highly accurate predictions?" If the guys using the theory can make specific (and correct) predictions and agree on what the predictions are, then it doesn't seem his claims could be true from the outset. Note, this is different from if he were to claim they are logically consistent but make incorrect predictions.
My general reaction to the little bit I did read is that he is attacking straw men. Feynman's explanation of the Bohr radius in terms of the uncertainty principle is a way of attempting to get a feel for why the Bohr radius has that value, but it is not the way in which one would actually "prove" the stability of the Hydrogen atom. To find the ground state of hydrogen, you just use the Schroedinger equation, which reduces it to a problem in partial differential equations. I've not read Feynman's explanation personally, so I can't speak about its validity. In essence, he's attacking a particular explanation, not the actual derivation the people rely on. To show this is stable to radiative damping, one would add the quantized electromagnetic field to the calculation. He doesn't actually address this sort of calculation anywhere in the paper. He does talk about Dirac's equation, but one need not go to the relativistic formulation in order to treat the quantized EM field in this situation. Mostly he seems upset with some of the mathematical details of quantum field theory, though he makes no correct, persuasive points about it's problems (it seems he doesn't like renormalization). He also seems to spend time attacking the Bohr model of the atom, which doesn't make any sense, since no one claims this to be the correct model (it was a very early idea that later lead to the modern, QM, model).
Some other apparent errors I noted: Mills claims that the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle (HUP) is derived from the Schroedinger equation. That is incorrect. The HUP simply arises from the fact that you describe particles as waves according to de Broglie's relation. The Schroedinger equation is an extra assumption that then tells you how those waves behave in time. Mills claims as one of the problems with Dirac's equation that it admits negative energy states, but Dirac soon realized these were not negative energy states but antimatter, which was later observed vindicating his theory. All in all, I don't see a lot of specific objections here, just vague claims that problems exist.
In replying to another post, I did come up with a specific critique of Mills' work (see paragraph 3 of this post). I can't see how he can get around this objection, unless he wishes to claim his theory is non-local, in which case it isn't really classical, macroscopic physics as he said.
Look, I'd certainly like to see a good debunking of various crackpot theories, but the bottom line is that Slashdot is not really the right forum. Articles are only on the front page for a day and usually only receive significant attention for a few hours. That's not a good format for a detailed intelligent exchange, not to mention the lack of good resources for formatting equations and diagrams. We may lack people with enough time and the appropriate expertise in our audience, and even if we have them we'll also have a lot of "armchair physicists" in the mix creating a lot of noise in the discussion. Finally, if you want to read actual exchanges on the technical details of scientific theories and really understand them you need the appropriate background (like, say, a B.S. in Physics), which undoubtedly the /. audience overwhelmingly lacks. The point is that there's a place for debates about the scientific validity of a new theory: scientific journals. There the reviewers and the readership have the background to address the details properly and completely.
Could there be someone out there on the net with a revolutionary theory just waiting to be discovered? Perhaps, but for each one of those there are hundreds or thousands of crackpots. Slashdot is not equipped to properly decide which is which. If Slashdot continues posting stories about supposed breakthroughs without the requisite evidence of plausibility (which I discuss a bit here), then at best it is wasting the time of the readers, and at worst it is helping to perpetuate scientific hoaxes that are used to swindle the gullible out of their money.
As to scientific reasons why this fellow's theory may be incorrect, I have not looked into it in detail. I gave some reasons that it seems implausible at first glance here. It strikes me, however, that there is almost certainly another problem with this theory, which is that it violates Bell's Theorem. I glanced at Mills' book, in which he claims that his theory is based upon the classical, macroscopic laws of physics, which would make it what is called a "local realistic hidden variables theory". John Bell (and others) proved a theorem that states any local realistic hidden variables theory must obey certain relationships, known as "Bell's inequalities", (e.g. the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality), while quantum mechanics violates them in some cases. This means that if any Bell's inequality is violated, no local hidden variables theory can explain that phenomenon. Over the years, many tests of Bell's inequalities have been done (e.g. A. Aspect et al., "Experimental Tests of Realistic Local Theories via Bell's Theorem", Phys. Rev. Lett. 47, 460 (1981)) and shown them to be violated, meaning no local realistic hidden variables theory could be true. Thus, it seems, Mills' theory should be already experimentally ruled out. Appreciating why Bell's inequalities must be true requires some knowledge of quantum mechanics, but I hope you can get the gist from what I've said here and the Wikipedia article.
Now, I have no idea if the effect Mills' claims to see is real. It's possible the effect is real, but he just has a completely incorrect explanation. It could also be some sort of systematic error. Personally, I wouldn't give it much credence until an independent group with a good background in spectroscopy can repeat the experiment and consistently get the same result.
Yes, that's fairly close to what many of them thought. It was only after the ideas of quantum physics explained many long standing puzzles of physics (e.g. the stability of the atom) and many new phenomena in the laboratories of many researchers that the ideas began to gain credibility. This work is, so far, lacking all those things, so as of yet there's no reason to take the theory seriously. Moreover, this theory seems to contradict most of known quantum theory without satisfactorily explaining how quantum mechanics has been so successful for all this time. There may be reason to look for the effect, but so far there's no reason to give the theory too much credence.
You do realize that the stability of the atom (the fact that it does not collapse due to radiative damping) was one of the great successes of quantum mechanics, don't you? Your statement about the hydrogen atom is completely incorrect, as far as I can make sense of it. Schroedinger's equation itself does not predict radiative damping directly. Did you perhaps mean Dirac's equation? You have to either use a semiclassical or quantized field approach. The quantized field picture (the more exact treatment) is based directly on Maxwell's equations and so agrees with them by design. One can also verify that the ground state will not radiate in that treatment.
Without having read the details of Mills' claims, I can tell you why is sounds like nonsense. An atom is dissipative system, because it interacts with the electromagnetic field. By that, I mean that if it is given energy, it will eventually lose that energy because it emits light (the rate may be very small in some states, of course). One would expect to find hydrogen in whatever the lowest energy state is, then, because if it's in a higher state it will eventually emit light and drop to the lowest state. Thus, the idea of a state lower than the ground state then seems pretty doubtful, even if you were to forget for a moment that the modern theory of the atom (quantum electrodynamics) is probably one of the most exactly tested theories in history. To put it another way, you'd have to overturn not only quantum physics but also thermodynamics. Futhermore, one must ask why, when the vast majority of the baryonic mass of the universe is Hydrogen, this effect has never before been noticed in the emission and absorption lines of materials either in the lab by physics or anywhere else in the Universe by astronomers.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Galileo wouldn't have to compare himself to anyone. He could merely point out the actual evidence that he was being silenced: He was forced to go before the inquisition and recant under (at least implied) threat of torture. The point is that when someone who is not actually being silenced or threatened compares themselves to Galileo it is entirely bogus, and it is indeed a sign that the person does not want to talk about the actual reasons people don't accept their theories.
I don't think elehrner was necessarily actually trying to compare himself to Galileo. I was partially joking and partially just trying to point out that's a road not to go down. If someone is actually being silenced then by all means they should tell people about it, but people just ignoring your ideas because they don't believe them is not the same thing and hardly makes you a modern day Galileo.
What you're saying would make some sense if you were talking to physicists or engineers who work on fusion (or at least nuclear physics), because those people would have the expertise to judge a proposal on its scientific merits. For the rest of us, though, it's really not possible to look at it with an informed, skeptical eye and determine its validity. I'm close to completing my Ph.D. in Physics, but even I don't know enough about plasma and nuclear physics to really give a good appraisal of a new fusion technique. That is the reason people spend years in school studying night and day in order to get a Ph.D. in a very narrow specialty. I have personally read works in my area of expertise (quantum information) that look fairly reasonable on first glance but are completely wrong when you look at the details. These errors can be so subtle they would go unnoticed by almost anyone but a specialist in that particular area. Putting it in "layman's terms" may give people more of an impression that they understand it, but it doesn't do anything to actually help them understand the technical details. In fact, when you do know the technical details, reading the layman's accounts of things that appear, for example, in the New York Times it is actually harder to determine if the research is valid, because none of the technical details are clearly explained.
So what can a layperson (or even non-specialist, like me) do when confronted with claims they don't understand the technical details of? Well, they look for the opinion of someone who does know about that specific area, which is, indeed, appealing to authority and is entirely appropriate and reasonable in that case. We must ask, have people with a track record of doing good, successful science looked at this and thought it was right? In the linked article, the only person who seems to be quoted giving an "expert" opinion on it is Dr. Thomas Valone, of Integrity Research Institute. And his credentials? Well, Integrity Research Institute seems to have dubious credentials at best and again a quick search on Dr. Valone again turned up no publications in peer-reviewed physics journals (if I missed some, I'd be interested to know). (A search on the web did turn up his support for ideas such as inertial propulsion. I can say with authority that that idea is nonsense; it is completely at odds with the known laws of physics, all experimental data on record, and plain old common sense.)
Another way a non-specialist can gauge whether some research has merit according to experts in the field is to see whether it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, showing that people with technical expertise in this area feel it is at least plausible that it's correct. I didn't find a paper on your idea in any of the APS journals or on Google Scholar, so at least that quick search seems to suggest it's never been published after peer review (the arxiv is not peer-reviewed, of course). Furthermore, I didn't notice any peer-reviewed articles by you on fusion at all, which might lead one to question your own expertise in the matter.
Basically, a non-specialist can try to judge the validity of a piece of work by asking, "Does the author have a record of research in the field that has been widely recognized as successful?" and "Have other specialists in the field (with a record of widely recognized success) looked critically at this research and thought it ha
Actually, assuming the chance of failure on an individual flight is 1/100 and failure on each flight is statistically independent, then the failures are poisson distributed. While the mean number of failures out of 176 flights would be 1.76, the probability of zero failures after 176 flights is 17%; thus, we can't say with any real confidence that Feynman was wrong, according to your numbers. In other words, it's not all that improbable (about 1 chance in 5) that Feynman was right and the failure just hasn't happened yet.
They are? Great, then let's treat them according to the Geneva conventions. At that point you'll get no argument from a lot of us. If they're criminals, treat them as criminals. If they're POWs, treat them as POWs. But do one or the other.
I've never used Gentoo, but it has a reputation for being rather complex for the uninitiated and having a steep learning curve. Every once in a while apt-get will ask you, when installing a new package, whether you want to keep your old configuration file or install the new default one, usually this is for servers. I don't run many servers on my systems, besides sshd, so I very seldom run in to this. If you run more servers, perhaps you would have to deal with it more. In my experience either config file will result in a functional system, though choosing a default will wipe out any customizations you might have made to the configuration file. In short, this has never been an issue for me, and not because I'm an expert or anything. I just make a choice (generally to keep my config file), don't sweat it, and it seems to work out fine.
As for bad stuff in the EULA, I HAVE found plenty of bad stuff in EULAs for programs, from spyware to provisions for installing DRM or "phoning home". I don't recall ever finding any new objectionable material in EULAs for the Windows updates, but I was always looking for them to, for example, sneak in a new DRM system. Again, I generally wouldn't accept a legal agreement without reading it, unless perhaps I trusted the other party implicitly. I probably wouldn't put that sort of trust in any company.
In my experience many distros are quite easy to update. That's certainly true of Ubuntu. I'm being quite literal when I say it's as simple as a few clicks or typing 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade;'. Now, of course, I'm talking about the default setup. As with anything, you can break it if you try. Upgrading can be difficult once you start changing the upgrading settings (selecting different repositories), but presumably you wouldn't even know this was possible or try it until you know something about the upgrade system. I think you just made an unlucky choice with Gentoo. Gentoo has many good attributes, but being easy to update without a lot of knowledge is not one of them from what I know.
I can speak on every distro or about using it with every computer. I don't do this professionally, I only use Linux on my own machines. For what it's worth, here is my experience:
I use apt to get binary kernel updates. This is, indeed point and click (if you use the GUI). It installs the new kernel image and makes it available for the boot loader. I don't do anything other than tell it to install the update. Next time I start my computer, it defaults to the new image. I'm sure it's true that it's possible that the kernel update will mess up some functions, as it is in any OS. I have no idea if this is statistically more likely to happen in Linux. I'm sure that if you want to custom patch your kernel and compile it, that can be more difficult. I chose to try this once, but I did it again through a setup program that did most of the work for me. I've never actually found such a compilation to be necessary.
When I installed Ubuntu, I just plugged in the CD and answered a few simple questions like what language I wanted it to use. I didn't tell it anything about chipsets or anything like that. Then I walked away to get some food, and when I came back I had a functioning system. You can see something similar if you use Knoppix. The point is that, yes, there have been (and still are) some distros that require a lot of arcane information, but many of them do not. Installing Ubuntu was faster and simpler than installing Windows 2000.
I think you've misunderstood me (perhaps intentionally so), so let me restate what I've said a bit. When I said, "If you have a system that uses the apt package manager" I was trying to be very specific, but essentially I think this goes for any modern package manager. This means, basically, if you're running any modern Linux OS designed for the desktop. I'm trying to be clear that I'm not talking about ancient Linux OSs or ones that are designed for more technical tasts, just as updating Windows 3.0 or WinCE might not be easy for an end user. What I'm saying is likely true for almost any Linux OS geared toward desktop use and specifically novices, so your objection about the user having to know what he is running is irrelevent.
If you had read the entirity of what I wrote about updating, you would have noticed that while I mentioned how to do it at the command line, you can also just click on an applet sitting on your desktop, just like in Windows. A few clicks and the update is complete. I think these can also be set to go automatically, though I haven't used that feature (never did in Windows either).
The bottom line: If you have a modern Linux OS tageted toward Desktop users (the sort a newbie would buy in the store or be recommended by friends), then the process of doing an update is almost exactly the same as it is in Windows, and because of other factors I mentioned is actually easier.
Indeed. So the point being, that's even better!
One point you make that is dead wrong in my experience is when you say, "And frankly, applying patches in Windows is easier than in Linux." Now this may be true if you're actually manually applying kernel patches and recompiling the kernel or something, but actually if you're just talking about normal (binary) system updates, one of the big reliefs for me about switching to Linux was that updates are so much less painful.
If you have a system that uses the apt package manager, then updating your system is as simple as typing 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade;' at the command line. Or if you don't like that, you can use several of the graphical tools (like synaptic) where it's just a matter of two or three clicks. On the distro I use, Ubuntu, there's actually an applet that periodically checks for updates and allows you to install them with a few clicks. In short, it's quite similar to Windows. Certainly, it's no more difficult.
Where the advantage comes in is that every damn update in Windows comes with its own EULA. Sure, you could randomly accept legal obligations without trying to figure out what you're agreeing to (though you still have to sit around and click "I agree"), but if you're actually trying to be responsible, it's a real pain. In Linux, updates to the OS, and most of the applications, are covered by the same license, the GPL, and you aren't confronted with a new EULA to accept every time you want to do an update. What a relief! In addition, the updates in Windows would often request a reboot, which never happens in Linux. Even if I update the kernel, I know I can keep using the system (with the old kernel) until I feel like rebooting.
If you're using a modern package management system, then updating in Linux is no more difficult than in Windows. In addition, there are a lot of things about the updates in Windows that may actually make the Linux process a lot easier.
While AOL does have a documented protocol for interacting with AIM servers, they have also gone to considerable lengths trying to block 3rd party clients from using the network in the past, specifically Trillian. I believe that having the published protocol was part of requirements for the merger with Time-Warner, but it seems it was only window dressing, and they didn't actually intend to interoperate with competitors.
I think the issues you're discussing (regarding signal speeds in the free vacuum vs. those in the Casamir vacuum) are actually irrelevant to this experiment, unless this is radically different from other fast light experiments done in optical fibers. In fast light experiments it is generally just a case of having a group velocity which is faster than c but no longer corresponds to the velocity of energy or information. Meaning that you have a pulse that appears to go faster than c, but it does not do so in a meaningful way.
There's a very good discussion of this in a paper by Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva on a (presumably similar) fiber based fast light experiment PRL 92, 203902 (2004). To quote from that paper:
The rest of the paper goes on to detail their experiment and show quite clearly from the data that while the peak of the pulse is tipped forward, the arrival time of the leading edge of the pulse (the signal velocity) remains constant. The QED issues you're talking about are interesting, but as far as I can tell they are not what is at issue here.
Well, they host an RPMfind mirror for one. That seems pretty friendly.
Mainly, Speakeasy seem to be the only ones with reasonable policies. I was discussing this recently with a group of people in my area. One guy had his ISP (Verizon) disable his connection. It turn out this was because he'd setup a web server on his computer. They apparently don't block port 80, but they do monitor it and disable your connection if there's too much traffic on that port. A long discussion ensued about which provider he might switch to, but every one that was suggested also doesn't allow you to run a server on a standard home connection you have to . They all want you to buy some more expensive business package just to use your interenet connection as a, you know, fully functional internet connection. Someone even suggested Verizon's new fiber (FIOS) connection, but, guess what, running a server on that is also a violation of the TOS. Apparently you can have plenty of bandwidth, you just can't really use it.
Then of course there are the ISPs with caps on the amount of data you transfer, or the ones who want to charge you for each computer connected. I guess it has really looked to me that Speakeasy is the only ISP that treats its customers reasonably. Compitition between cable and phone companies won't help, since each has similarly customer unfriendly policies. Competition between 2 or 3 perimenant entities is really not sufficient.
I said it's would be unnecessarily political to use it as an example of an invalid scientific theory. As was discussed already, ID shouldn't be taught in science class because it's not science by definition and it is not accepted by the scientific community. Politics is irrelevent to that decision. It's just the good sense.
A school certainly can have a philosophy or comparative religion class. As long as these focus on several, opposing points of view there is no reason to mistake that for teaching a specific theology.
Creationism and its relative Intelligent Design are not valid scientific theories. They are not predictive in any meaningful sense, nor are they falsifiable. This doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or useless in a broader sense, simply that they are not science and, thus, have no place in a class on science.
What gets taught in classes on a particular subject (at least at the high school level) should be determined by what is the consensus view among experts in that particular field. Evolutionary theories are the accepted consensus among the scientific community, meaning this is what should be taught in science class. Thus, even if creationism and ID were valid scientific theories, they still would have no place in a K-12 science course, any more than the theories of those who object to special relativity or the heliocentric model of the solar system. The curriculum of science class should not be determined by popular oppinion among the uninformed. If we did things that way, we'd probably be teaching children that summer happens because that's when the Earth is closest to the Sun, since in surveys I've seen this is a more popular explanation than the correct one.
Creationism and ID might have a proper place in school, however. If the school offers a course on philosophy or on comparative religion, then these would be perfectly suitable topics for discussion. Ironically, they might be used in a discussion of the scientific method as instructive examples of ideas that are invalid as scientific theories, but that would obviously be a foolish example to use, because it's too politically charged.
I don't know, at a cost of only 30 pieces of silver I'd call that wholesale.
Anything conductive with holes small compared to the wavelength ought to work, including a mirror. As for the power reflected back, it might not be much (depending on how well the initial beam is columnated, but you could always make your reflector a curved surface and focus the return beam a bit. On the other hand, whatever you're using may get hot, throw sparks, etc., so it might not turn out so well for someone holding the reflector.
I think you botched the link in your sig. I believe it was supposed to be
Did you read the facts from the case? Does that really seem reasonable, to get 3rd degree burns over 6% of your body? Having to get surgery? Coffee can't be reasonably consumed at that temperature and poses a signficant danger. The company already knew this and kept it at that temperature anyway because they throught it would maintain its taste longer (i.e. to make more money). That's not reasonable or responsible.
If look at the facts you will see that this was a completely unreasonable temperature at which to serve coffee, at least in a styrofoam cup through a car window. The reason being that at that temperature it causes a signficant danger, not of a little painful burn but of full thickness, third degree burns.
People like to pretend that this is a case of someone ignoring the fact that coffee is hot, when in fact it's more akin to handing someone a plate of food and saying "careful, it's hot" when in fact you've just left it sitting in a 500 degree (F) oven for the last hour. The point is that the hypothetical person in question has been warned, but the danger is unusual, far in excess of what they should rationally expect, and shows blatent disregard for safety. That person would have every reason to get pissed when they're fingers get seared because they were expecting a normal, 130 degree plate. In the McDonald's case this was apparently because they felt that reasonable safety was less of a concern than maximizing how long they could let the coffee sit.
Actually, the McDonald's coffee lawsuit was not frivolous. It sounds like it on the surface, but if you read the details you'll see that McDonalds was doing something foolish and negligent, namely serving coffee that was far hotter than the coffee machine manufacturer suggested, far far too hot for human consumption, and would not just give you a little burn but cause 3rd degree burns requiring surgery to repair the damage. The fact that it sounded ridiculous was the result of a lazy media and McDonalds' gigantic PR machine.
First of all, curing them may or may not be possible, but your assertion that it isn't is hardly convincing. What do the actual professionals think? Second, what is the escape rate for people jailed without chance of parole? At least where I live, I'm not aware of many maximum security jail breaks. Is this really a statistically significant problem?
...Or it could be that that they're criminals and don't give a damn about killing people. Are we really going to use convicts as our moral guides or suppose they make more rational choices? It's not suprising that people who, for example, gun down their enemies in the street have no problem with the death penalty.