Companies exist to make money, and they make money by being very highly specialized. Oil companies are only just beginning to make the transition to becoming "energy companies", and it is a sure thing that some of them will not survive the transition.
So energy companies certainly do care about where the energy is coming from, because they are currently highly optimized to generate power from oil and coal. It is harder for an oil company to switch to a new power source based on a completely different technology than it is for a small, high-margin, niche alternative energy company to grow. Ergo, it is in the interests of oil companies to put the brakes on alternative energy development as much as possible.
That said, some oil companies (notably Shell) are being fairly forward-looking about the changes they are facing over the next few decades. But even in that case they must recognize that rapid change is not at all good for them.
Finally, this is what makes some alternatives more attractive than others, and algae-derived biodeisel is particularly promising because it will utilize much of the existing supply-chain technology that the large, highly-optimized players have invested so heavily in.
Actually, the biggest influence on her character and personality in her adult life was...herself. I can say this confidently without knowing anything more about her. As Abe Lincoln said, by the time you're 40 you're responsible for your own face. He said it about men, but let's recognize that women are mature, capable, adult humans, as fully responsible for their own character and actions as men.
Women have made huge strides in formerly all-male fields like medicine and law. But they've spectacularly failed to make comparable inroads in engineering, science and math.
Some posters here have noted that women with Ph.D.'s graduate around the time that they'd really like to be having children (late 20's, early 30's) and that the demands of the job are hard to reconcile with having a family. But this is also true of doctors and lawyers, where women are not nearly so disadvantaged.
One possible reason for this large difference is that academic jobs basically suck--they're extremely hard, involve all kinds of non-essential extra work, poor chance of promotion and lousy pay. I'm a (male) refugee from academia myself and have dated female academics who are being ground down by committee work, curiculum changes and teaching load to the point where their research isn't so much suffering as non-existent.
I'm writing this from home, where I'm working today because my kids are home from school with colds. If I'd stayed in academia, I'd probably be giving a lecture or in a committee meeting right now. Instead, I'm self-employed and having more fun than should really be legal.
So it's possible that women simply are making more rational choices than men in this regard, and that men are stupidly sacrificing themselves to their academic careers. If we want to put this in terms of discrimination, academics--particularly junior academics--are being discriminated against relative to everyone else, and women are less tolerant of those working conditions than men are.
From the linked site: "Today's physicist may start his lecture by convincing the audience that there is no understandable logics behind natural phenomena; it is out of date to look for a common sense picture of the physical reality."
The latter claim (it is out of date to look for a common sense picture of physical reality) is certainly true, and has been true since Newton's time. Newton's theory of gravitation was criticized for being in violation of common sense and being based on "occult qualities".
The former claim is nonsense. No one who is not looking for understandable logic behind natural phenomena is a scientists of any kind, and in hundreds (or possibly thousands) of talks from physicists all over the world I have never heard one so much as hint that they aren't looking for an understandable logic behind natural phenomena.
GR is not "taken as an absolute gospel". It is just a damned good theory, predicting with tremendous precision phenomena on scales of metres (the red shift of Mossbaur gamma rays), hundreds of kilometres (GPS algorithms have GR correction terms), millions of kilometres (precession of Mercury), tens of millions of kilometers (binary pulsars) and millions of light years (large scale structure of the universe.) You don't throw away a theory like that lightly, and any challenging theory has to do at least as well on all the things GR is so very good at.
So far, there is nothing else that even comes close.
No one has suggested that creative works have no value, or that there ought not be some rights attached to creations.
The words you're looking for are "copyright", "trademark" and "patent". None of them are property rights. Property rights were invented to internalize negative externalities. Copyright, trademark and patent rights were invented to internalize positive externalities.
It's easier than that--if a company is selling "solutions", I don't want their stuff. I buy products and services, not solutions. I want a hat, not a "rain protection solution" and an accountant, not a "tax preparation solution."
One important characteristic of "solution" is that it makes it impossible to tell if the vendor is selling a product or a service. Yet as a purchaser that is one of the most critical peices of information that I want, and I want it up-front.
For example, is a "tax prepartion solution" a tax software package for my PC, or is it a person who will do my taxes? It really matters to me which it is. Yet looking at the words "tax prepartion solution" I have no way at all to tell. Ergo, I move on to a vendor who identifies their product or service in the terms I care about, not in terms of some abstract irrelevancy.
The headline says "Efficient paintable solar cells", but the story is about a new material. This is like announcing a new programming language that is designed to improve database design with the headline, "New improved database design."
Things like incarceration are driven by ideology, not rationality. The U.S. has a high incarcertation rate because a majority or sizable minority of Americans really believe against all evidence that putting people in jail is an effective means to combat crime. It just "feels right" or "makes sense" that the threat of jail will reduce crime.
Once you realize that this is an ideological or religious argument (epistemologically ideology and religion are indistinguishable) you'll realize that no practical consequences will ever have an effect on people's beliefs in this regard. The fact that Christ never comes back doesn't deter Christians from believing he's going to Real Soon Now. The fact that non-democratic socialist countries were abject economic failures didn't stop ideologues from claiming that non-democratic socialism was more efficient.
So until there is a major ideological shift in the U.S., and parents start teaching their children that the threat of jail doesn't have a big effect on crime, but reduction in poverty does, we'll continue to see the "paradox" of high crime and high incarceration rates in the U.S.
Remember that we actually have copies of the book of John dating back to 120AD, which is _really_ close to the time it was written.
Let's say John was written as early as 70 C.E., which is a stretch. That's at least 40 years after the events it describes. Most people I know aren't too clear on what happened yesterday, much less forty years ago, especially when the events concern something as emotionally charged as the death of a charismatic leader at the hands of imperial rulers in a divided society.
Seriously try writing down the history of something you experienced 20 years ago, in 1984. Just a paragraph or two. Then check any other sources available--either other people's recollections or better yet objective records at the time.
Then give what you've written to a couple of other people who have an interest in the event, and have them copy it, which is the process by which we get those early fragements of John from the 120's. I'm betting you'll find the odd mistake, and just possibly a little editorial interjection.
All the people saying "No animals were killed, no animal corpses were found" are ignoring this minor fact.
We're not so very long out of the trees that we have had time to lose any mysterious "sixth sense" that most non-human animals have. The only plausible reason for losing it in such a short time would be if it was strongly selected against.
So anyone who thinks non-human animals have some ability that humans don't--other than the fairly obvious things like a low panic threshold and the ability to run faster--needs to provide some explanation of why we don't have it when 50,000 years ago we were just another moderately successful social primate.
My bet is that we'll find life everywhere, intelligence no-where (especially in Washington.)
The argument goes like this: life is incredibly probable. Everywhere on Earth that where there is the least chance of life, we find it. But we know that intelligence has evolved at most once, and that even then it took a LONG time to do something more useful than make cave paintings and design ballistic missile defense.
So I'm still betting that we'll find life on Titan, but that we won't find intelligence, even on planets circling the farthest stars of our galaxy.
David Bohm's excellent primer, "Special Relativity" (available in Dover paperback) gives a very good summary of the situation prior to Einstein's 1905 paper. Essentially, every result that Einstein's theory gave (including the famous E = mc**2, which was published by Heaviside in 1892!) had been arrived at previously by Poincare' and others as necessary consequences of a particular dynamical interpretation of Maxwell's electro-magentic theory.
Einstein's revolution was the derivation of the same results via a kinematical restatement of mechanical laws. Dynamics deals with the causes of motion, kinematics with the description of motion. The "old" relativity assumed that there were real forces acting to squeeze matter so that rods got short and clocks ran slow. Einstein's relativity showed that the same results followed immediately from adopting a particular, consistent, description of motion based on two assumptions (the constancy of the speed of light and the invariance of the laws of nature under changes of velocity.)
One of the consequences of Einstein's theory is that when we discovered matter that does not participate in electro-magentic interactions, such as neutrinos, we could confidently treat it using relativistic mechanics. The old relativity, in contrast, only applied to charged particles.
It is a remarkable and still interesting fact that so much of what Einstein explained can be explained by alternative means within the context of Newtonian dynamics, although the explanations are much less general and much harder to understand.
Abraham Pais, a physicist who wrote what is generally regarded as the definitive scientific biography of Einstein, said of his subject that there are two things at which he was "better than anyone before or after him; he knew how to invent invariance principles and how to make use of statistical fluctuations."
This is a great one-line summary of what made Einstein an outstanding physicist.
The use of invariance principles is still finding its way slowly into other subjects. Jaynes' work on probability is an excellent example of the power of invariance principles--he derives all of probability theory from a few basic postulates, including the condition that conclusions be invariant under transformations in the path used to reach them.
The real point that these facts make is that the myth of the lone inventor who all on his own invents an entire, working, commercially viable invention is...a myth.
There may have been cases where this has happened, but they are so rare as to be irrelevant to the normal world of law. In the case at hand, it is clear that Swan had everything except a high-resistance filament. Edison had the high-resistance filament.
So who invented the light-bulb? The question isn't meaningful, except in the context of mythology. "Who invented the airplane?" is likewise somewhat muddy, as is "Who invented evolution?", "Who invented radio?", etc.
Within the pure sciences, Einstein's invention of General Relativity is uniquely individual--there were no viable competitors, although there were others working in the same area. Newtonian dynamics and gravitation were probably individual inventions, although components of the dynamics were known previously. Newtonian optics was likewise an individual invention. But even within the pure sciences in an age when collaboration was far less common than today, these instances of individual invention were rare.
--Tom
P.S. Yeah, I know most people think of scientists as making "discoveries" rather than inventions. They are wrong. Explorers discover. Scientists create. --T
No fact of the matter prior to measurement
on
Subatomic Darwinism
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The article is muddy and confusing, and makes a number of problematic claims, the most important of which is the claim that measurement changes the system measured. Within the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation of QM this is exactly the type of claim we want to avoid: prior to measurement, we can't say much about the system. We certainly can't say it "is" in any particular state or superposition--only that the outcomes of various possible experiments will follow the predicted probability distributions. To say the system "is" something prior to measurement is to load it with ontological baggage that just isn't justified.
The article also makes a hash of the relation between collapse and decoherence, which are quite different things. Decoherence theory doesn't explain collapse--it replaces it by making it unnecessary. I'm a bit out of date on this stuff, but as near as I can tell decoherence theory is treading down the path to many worlds, and it's still an open question as to whether it will be able to avoid the well-known problems that await its arrival.
There has never been any reason for the space shuttle, at least not as it was ultimately realized. The requirements for crewed flight and cargo are so radically different that there has never been much engineering justification for combining the two.
A sensible launch system would have at least two components: a small, crewed vehicle type with six nines reliability, and one or more larger vehicle types for lifting cargo and blowing up.
There are some economic factors that mitigate against this mix a bit, like the high, relatively fixed per-launch costs. But I'd be surprised if the big-picture economics didn't line up with the engineering on this one.
The shuttle exists as it does because of politics, not engineering or economics.
The article cited presents no evidence for the claim that the biblical account predates the Sumerian account of the flood. It merely asserts that it makes "more sense" that the Biblical account was written down earlier.
The Sumerians invented writing around 3000 BC, and the earliest surviving versions of the flood story date to 1700 BC. The very earliest versions are of course much older--it is very improbable that the very earliest versions just happened to also survive.
Even if we accept that the bible (pentateuch) was written by Moses, Christian scholars date it no earlier than 1550 BC, so Moses would have been writing hundreds of years after the earliest surviving Sumerian flood stories, and possibly as much as a thousand years after the very earliest versions.
Simply rejecting the generally accepted circa 600 BC date for the composition of the pentateuch gains Christians nothing in this debate, because by their own reckoning the date at which Moses wrote was considerably later than the well-established archeological date for the Sumerian flood tales.
Furthermore, Christians are in a bind, because if they want to revise their date for Moses' composition of the pentateuch they are admitting that they were utterly and completely wrong in their earlier interpretation and will have to provide some basis in fact as to why their earlier claims were completely false and their new claims should be given any credence. For a scientist, such revision is no big deal--science follows evidence, and as we learn more we expect our beliefs to change. Religions try to re-interpret facts to be consistent with their faith, which ultimately drives them to either ignore facts, or look stupid, or both.
This is implausible (which is not to say it might not be correct.)
If the US was to "premptively liberate" a(nother) country, it would have the opporunity to destroy that country's ICBMs on the ground, and be far more likely to do that as part of the initial attack rather than wait for them to be launched.
I suppose NMD would provide a backup layer (if it worked) against the possibility you cite, but from a purely technological point of view the missiles are far more vulnerable (and far easier targets) in the boost phase, so a more reasonable backup system would be a medium-range interceptor that was targeted at launching missiles rather than one that was trying to hit re-entering warheads.
Such a system would require less range and would have a targetting system that involved aiming at a slow-moving great big fuel-laden rocket spewing a many-kilometer-long trail of extremely hot gasses, rather than aiming at a supersonic ballistic (unpowered) warhead. The disadvantage is that it would have to be ship or plane based, but that is a relatively small downside compared to the other things.
There is considerable evidence that sonoluminescence is a non-thermal phenomenon, at least in water. The conditions in the bubble are very far from thermodynamic equilibrium, so the very notion of temperature is suspect, but the indications are that the light is not blackbody radiation but rather some kind of fluorescent emission.
This is not to say that some particles could not be accelerated sufficiently to fuse, but it's a long way from the simple "UV light -> heat -> temperature" arguement that is often made.
But in this case they are making it public so they can make money. The patent system is supposed to encourage people to expose things that they would otherwise maintain as trade secrets. By selling it for cash they are being rewarded for their invention, and at the same time making thier invention public. So why should they be getting a patent? What are they giving up for it beyond what they are giving up by selling it?
One could argue that without patents people like this would not sell their inventions, choosing instead to develop them further on their own so they could maintain them as trade secrets. However, experiece with software in the pre-patent days strongly suggests that this is not the case.
Reverse engineering is possible in a way that was not feasible in Newton's time. We no longer need to grant patents to learn secrets.
This is brilliant.
One notable feature of the modern world is the systematic way in which we exploit innovations and discoveries. This is radically different from all times past. Many modern "discoveries" were in fact known in the classical world, two thousand years ago--we have evidence of simple steam engines, clockworks, etc. The difference between then and now is that today we have a system for publishing and exploiting such discoveries.
But a second implication of this is that reverse engineering is ubiquitous as well. There are no trade secrets any more. Ergo, the orginal justification for patents is dead, dead, dead.
Seriously, if the history of the 20th century showed us anything, it is that all and every form of human organziation can and will be turned to vile ends at the earliest convenience of the humans running the organization.
There is absolutely nothing special about businesses, universities, governments, NGO's, trade unions, political parties, what-have-you. They are all run by human beings, and almost all human beings are motivated by the same thing: thier own comfort and convenience.
Only when you have a business or government or whatever that is run by people who are (relatively) intent on making the world a better place do you get anything good happening. The time for labelling certain types of organization as "bad" and others as "good", without looking at their goals and actions, is long past. We don't judge humans by the color of their skin any more, and it's time we stopped judging organizations by the kind of charter they have.
"Most reviewers, including those who accepted the evidence and those who did not, stated that the effects are not repeatable, the magnitude of the effect has not increased in over a decade of work, and that many of the reported experiments were not well documented."
And:
"The detected 4He was typically very close to, but reportedly above background levels. This evidence was taken as convincing or somewhat convincing by some reviewers; for others the lack of consistency was an indication that the overall hypothesis was not justified."
Emphasis added in both cases. So nothing like the claim "they've been consistently observing this dramatic effect" is justified by the content of the report.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies exist to make money, and they make money by being very highly specialized. Oil companies are only just beginning to make the transition to becoming "energy companies", and it is a sure thing that some of them will not survive the transition.
So energy companies certainly do care about where the energy is coming from, because they are currently highly optimized to generate power from oil and coal. It is harder for an oil company to switch to a new power source based on a completely different technology than it is for a small, high-margin, niche alternative energy company to grow. Ergo, it is in the interests of oil companies to put the brakes on alternative energy development as much as possible.
That said, some oil companies (notably Shell) are being fairly forward-looking about the changes they are facing over the next few decades. But even in that case they must recognize that rapid change is not at all good for them.
Finally, this is what makes some alternatives more attractive than others, and algae-derived biodeisel is particularly promising because it will utilize much of the existing supply-chain technology that the large, highly-optimized players have invested so heavily in.
--Tom
Actually, the biggest influence on her character and personality in her adult life was...herself. I can say this confidently without knowing anything more about her. As Abe Lincoln said, by the time you're 40 you're responsible for your own face. He said it about men, but let's recognize that women are mature, capable, adult humans, as fully responsible for their own character and actions as men.
--Tom
Women have made huge strides in formerly all-male fields like medicine and law. But they've spectacularly failed to make comparable inroads in engineering, science and math.
Some posters here have noted that women with Ph.D.'s graduate around the time that they'd really like to be having children (late 20's, early 30's) and that the demands of the job are hard to reconcile with having a family. But this is also true of doctors and lawyers, where women are not nearly so disadvantaged.
One possible reason for this large difference is that academic jobs basically suck--they're extremely hard, involve all kinds of non-essential extra work, poor chance of promotion and lousy pay. I'm a (male) refugee from academia myself and have dated female academics who are being ground down by committee work, curiculum changes and teaching load to the point where their research isn't so much suffering as non-existent.
I'm writing this from home, where I'm working today because my kids are home from school with colds. If I'd stayed in academia, I'd probably be giving a lecture or in a committee meeting right now. Instead, I'm self-employed and having more fun than should really be legal.
So it's possible that women simply are making more rational choices than men in this regard, and that men are stupidly sacrificing themselves to their academic careers. If we want to put this in terms of discrimination, academics--particularly junior academics--are being discriminated against relative to everyone else, and women are less tolerant of those working conditions than men are.
--Tom
From the linked site: "Today's physicist may start his lecture by convincing the audience that there is no understandable logics behind natural phenomena; it is out of date to look for a common sense picture of the physical reality."
The latter claim (it is out of date to look for a common sense picture of physical reality) is certainly true, and has been true since Newton's time. Newton's theory of gravitation was criticized for being in violation of common sense and being based on "occult qualities".
The former claim is nonsense. No one who is not looking for understandable logic behind natural phenomena is a scientists of any kind, and in hundreds (or possibly thousands) of talks from physicists all over the world I have never heard one so much as hint that they aren't looking for an understandable logic behind natural phenomena.
GR is not "taken as an absolute gospel". It is just a damned good theory, predicting with tremendous precision phenomena on scales of metres (the red shift of Mossbaur gamma rays), hundreds of kilometres (GPS algorithms have GR correction terms), millions of kilometres (precession of Mercury), tens of millions of kilometers (binary pulsars) and millions of light years (large scale structure of the universe.) You don't throw away a theory like that lightly, and any challenging theory has to do at least as well on all the things GR is so very good at.
So far, there is nothing else that even comes close.
--Tom
Look kids, see the straw person!
No one has suggested that creative works have no value, or that there ought not be some rights attached to creations.
The words you're looking for are "copyright", "trademark" and "patent". None of them are property rights. Property rights were invented to internalize negative externalities. Copyright, trademark and patent rights were invented to internalize positive externalities.
--Tom
It's easier than that--if a company is selling "solutions", I don't want their stuff. I buy products and services, not solutions. I want a hat, not a "rain protection solution" and an accountant, not a "tax preparation solution."
One important characteristic of "solution" is that it makes it impossible to tell if the vendor is selling a product or a service. Yet as a purchaser that is one of the most critical peices of information that I want, and I want it up-front.
For example, is a "tax prepartion solution" a tax software package for my PC, or is it a person who will do my taxes? It really matters to me which it is. Yet looking at the words "tax prepartion solution" I have no way at all to tell. Ergo, I move on to a vendor who identifies their product or service in the terms I care about, not in terms of some abstract irrelevancy.
--Tom
"Material" != "Cell".
The headline says "Efficient paintable solar cells", but the story is about a new material. This is like announcing a new programming language that is designed to improve database design with the headline, "New improved database design."
--Tom
Things like incarceration are driven by ideology, not rationality. The U.S. has a high incarcertation rate because a majority or sizable minority of Americans really believe against all evidence that putting people in jail is an effective means to combat crime. It just "feels right" or "makes sense" that the threat of jail will reduce crime.
Once you realize that this is an ideological or religious argument (epistemologically ideology and religion are indistinguishable) you'll realize that no practical consequences will ever have an effect on people's beliefs in this regard. The fact that Christ never comes back doesn't deter Christians from believing he's going to Real Soon Now. The fact that non-democratic socialist countries were abject economic failures didn't stop ideologues from claiming that non-democratic socialism was more efficient.
So until there is a major ideological shift in the U.S., and parents start teaching their children that the threat of jail doesn't have a big effect on crime, but reduction in poverty does, we'll continue to see the "paradox" of high crime and high incarceration rates in the U.S.
--Tom
Remember that we actually have copies of the book of John dating back to 120AD, which is _really_ close to the time it was written.
Let's say John was written as early as 70 C.E., which is a stretch. That's at least 40 years after the events it describes. Most people I know aren't too clear on what happened yesterday, much less forty years ago, especially when the events concern something as emotionally charged as the death of a charismatic leader at the hands of imperial rulers in a divided society.
Seriously try writing down the history of something you experienced 20 years ago, in 1984. Just a paragraph or two. Then check any other sources available--either other people's recollections or better yet objective records at the time.
Then give what you've written to a couple of other people who have an interest in the event, and have them copy it, which is the process by which we get those early fragements of John from the 120's. I'm betting you'll find the odd mistake, and just possibly a little editorial interjection.
--Tom
Humans are animals.
All the people saying "No animals were killed, no animal corpses were found" are ignoring this minor fact.
We're not so very long out of the trees that we have had time to lose any mysterious "sixth sense" that most non-human animals have. The only plausible reason for losing it in such a short time would be if it was strongly selected against.
So anyone who thinks non-human animals have some ability that humans don't--other than the fairly obvious things like a low panic threshold and the ability to run faster--needs to provide some explanation of why we don't have it when 50,000 years ago we were just another moderately successful social primate.
--Tom
There could be something like us, humans.
My bet is that we'll find life everywhere, intelligence no-where (especially in Washington.)
The argument goes like this: life is incredibly probable. Everywhere on Earth that where there is the least chance of life, we find it. But we know that intelligence has evolved at most once, and that even then it took a LONG time to do something more useful than make cave paintings and design ballistic missile defense.
So I'm still betting that we'll find life on Titan, but that we won't find intelligence, even on planets circling the farthest stars of our galaxy.
--Tom
David Bohm's excellent primer, "Special Relativity" (available in Dover paperback) gives a very good summary of the situation prior to Einstein's 1905 paper. Essentially, every result that Einstein's theory gave (including the famous E = mc**2, which was published by Heaviside in 1892!) had been arrived at previously by Poincare' and others as necessary consequences of a particular dynamical interpretation of Maxwell's electro-magentic theory.
Einstein's revolution was the derivation of the same results via a kinematical restatement of mechanical laws. Dynamics deals with the causes of motion, kinematics with the description of motion. The "old" relativity assumed that there were real forces acting to squeeze matter so that rods got short and clocks ran slow. Einstein's relativity showed that the same results followed immediately from adopting a particular, consistent, description of motion based on two assumptions (the constancy of the speed of light and the invariance of the laws of nature under changes of velocity.)
One of the consequences of Einstein's theory is that when we discovered matter that does not participate in electro-magentic interactions, such as neutrinos, we could confidently treat it using relativistic mechanics. The old relativity, in contrast, only applied to charged particles.
It is a remarkable and still interesting fact that so much of what Einstein explained can be explained by alternative means within the context of Newtonian dynamics, although the explanations are much less general and much harder to understand.
--Tom
From the article:
Abraham Pais, a physicist who wrote what is generally regarded as the definitive scientific biography of Einstein, said of his subject that there are two things at which he was "better than anyone before or after him; he knew how to invent invariance principles and how to make use of statistical fluctuations."
This is a great one-line summary of what made Einstein an outstanding physicist.
The use of invariance principles is still finding its way slowly into other subjects. Jaynes' work on probability is an excellent example of the power of invariance principles--he derives all of probability theory from a few basic postulates, including the condition that conclusions be invariant under transformations in the path used to reach them.
--Tom
The real point that these facts make is that the myth of the lone inventor who all on his own invents an entire, working, commercially viable invention is...a myth.
There may have been cases where this has happened, but they are so rare as to be irrelevant to the normal world of law. In the case at hand, it is clear that Swan had everything except a high-resistance filament. Edison had the high-resistance filament.
So who invented the light-bulb? The question isn't meaningful, except in the context of mythology. "Who invented the airplane?" is likewise somewhat muddy, as is "Who invented evolution?", "Who invented radio?", etc.
Within the pure sciences, Einstein's invention of General Relativity is uniquely individual--there were no viable competitors, although there were others working in the same area. Newtonian dynamics and gravitation were probably individual inventions, although components of the dynamics were known previously. Newtonian optics was likewise an individual invention. But even within the pure sciences in an age when collaboration was far less common than today, these instances of individual invention were rare.
--Tom
P.S. Yeah, I know most people think of scientists as making "discoveries" rather than inventions. They are wrong. Explorers discover. Scientists create. --T
The article is muddy and confusing, and makes a number of problematic claims, the most important of which is the claim that measurement changes the system measured. Within the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation of QM this is exactly the type of claim we want to avoid: prior to measurement, we can't say much about the system. We certainly can't say it "is" in any particular state or superposition--only that the outcomes of various possible experiments will follow the predicted probability distributions. To say the system "is" something prior to measurement is to load it with ontological baggage that just isn't justified.
The article also makes a hash of the relation between collapse and decoherence, which are quite different things. Decoherence theory doesn't explain collapse--it replaces it by making it unnecessary. I'm a bit out of date on this stuff, but as near as I can tell decoherence theory is treading down the path to many worlds, and it's still an open question as to whether it will be able to avoid the well-known problems that await its arrival.
--Tom
There has never been any reason for the space shuttle, at least not as it was ultimately realized. The requirements for crewed flight and cargo are so radically different that there has never been much engineering justification for combining the two.
A sensible launch system would have at least two components: a small, crewed vehicle type with six nines reliability, and one or more larger vehicle types for lifting cargo and blowing up.
There are some economic factors that mitigate against this mix a bit, like the high, relatively fixed per-launch costs. But I'd be surprised if the big-picture economics didn't line up with the engineering on this one.
The shuttle exists as it does because of politics, not engineering or economics.
--Tom
The article cited presents no evidence for the claim that the biblical account predates the Sumerian account of the flood. It merely asserts that it makes "more sense" that the Biblical account was written down earlier.
The Sumerians invented writing around 3000 BC, and the earliest surviving versions of the flood story date to 1700 BC. The very earliest versions are of course much older--it is very improbable that the very earliest versions just happened to also survive.
Even if we accept that the bible (pentateuch) was written by Moses, Christian scholars date it no earlier than 1550 BC, so Moses would have been writing hundreds of years after the earliest surviving Sumerian flood stories, and possibly as much as a thousand years after the very earliest versions.
Simply rejecting the generally accepted circa 600 BC date for the composition of the pentateuch gains Christians nothing in this debate, because by their own reckoning the date at which Moses wrote was considerably later than the well-established archeological date for the Sumerian flood tales.
Furthermore, Christians are in a bind, because if they want to revise their date for Moses' composition of the pentateuch they are admitting that they were utterly and completely wrong in their earlier interpretation and will have to provide some basis in fact as to why their earlier claims were completely false and their new claims should be given any credence. For a scientist, such revision is no big deal--science follows evidence, and as we learn more we expect our beliefs to change. Religions try to re-interpret facts to be consistent with their faith, which ultimately drives them to either ignore facts, or look stupid, or both.
--Tom
This is implausible (which is not to say it might not be correct.)
If the US was to "premptively liberate" a(nother) country, it would have the opporunity to destroy that country's ICBMs on the ground, and be far more likely to do that as part of the initial attack rather than wait for them to be launched.
I suppose NMD would provide a backup layer (if it worked) against the possibility you cite, but from a purely technological point of view the missiles are far more vulnerable (and far easier targets) in the boost phase, so a more reasonable backup system would be a medium-range interceptor that was targeted at launching missiles rather than one that was trying to hit re-entering warheads.
Such a system would require less range and would have a targetting system that involved aiming at a slow-moving great big fuel-laden rocket spewing a many-kilometer-long trail of extremely hot gasses, rather than aiming at a supersonic ballistic (unpowered) warhead. The disadvantage is that it would have to be ship or plane based, but that is a relatively small downside compared to the other things.
--Tom
When I was a teenager growing up in BC no one would think of drinking Olympia without scraping the "the" out of the slogan on the can.
--Tom
There is considerable evidence that sonoluminescence is a non-thermal phenomenon, at least in water. The conditions in the bubble are very far from thermodynamic equilibrium, so the very notion of temperature is suspect, but the indications are that the light is not blackbody radiation but rather some kind of fluorescent emission.
This is not to say that some particles could not be accelerated sufficiently to fuse, but it's a long way from the simple "UV light -> heat -> temperature" arguement that is often made.
--Tom
But in this case they are making it public so they can make money. The patent system is supposed to encourage people to expose things that they would otherwise maintain as trade secrets. By selling it for cash they are being rewarded for their invention, and at the same time making thier invention public. So why should they be getting a patent? What are they giving up for it beyond what they are giving up by selling it?
One could argue that without patents people like this would not sell their inventions, choosing instead to develop them further on their own so they could maintain them as trade secrets. However, experiece with software in the pre-patent days strongly suggests that this is not the case.
--Tom
Reverse engineering is possible in a way that was not feasible in Newton's time. We no longer need to grant patents to learn secrets.
This is brilliant.
One notable feature of the modern world is the systematic way in which we exploit innovations and discoveries. This is radically different from all times past. Many modern "discoveries" were in fact known in the classical world, two thousand years ago--we have evidence of simple steam engines, clockworks, etc. The difference between then and now is that today we have a system for publishing and exploiting such discoveries.
But a second implication of this is that reverse engineering is ubiquitous as well. There are no trade secrets any more. Ergo, the orginal justification for patents is dead, dead, dead.
--Tom
Businesses will twist and abuse ANY system...
Why do you specify "businesses"?
Seriously, if the history of the 20th century showed us anything, it is that all and every form of human organziation can and will be turned to vile ends at the earliest convenience of the humans running the organization.
There is absolutely nothing special about businesses, universities, governments, NGO's, trade unions, political parties, what-have-you. They are all run by human beings, and almost all human beings are motivated by the same thing: thier own comfort and convenience.
Only when you have a business or government or whatever that is run by people who are (relatively) intent on making the world a better place do you get anything good happening. The time for labelling certain types of organization as "bad" and others as "good", without looking at their goals and actions, is long past. We don't judge humans by the color of their skin any more, and it's time we stopped judging organizations by the kind of charter they have.
--Tom
Or:
4) Behave like the United States, and impose our laws by force on the citizens of foreign countries.
--Tom
From the report:
"Most reviewers, including those who accepted the evidence and those who did not, stated that the effects are not repeatable, the magnitude of the effect has not increased in over a decade of work, and that many of the reported experiments were not well documented."
And:
"The detected 4He was typically very close to, but reportedly above background levels. This evidence was taken as convincing or somewhat convincing by some reviewers; for others the lack of consistency was an indication that the overall hypothesis was not justified."
Emphasis added in both cases. So nothing like the claim "they've been consistently observing this dramatic effect" is justified by the content of the report.
--Tom