Equipment and ability to catalog objects - yes, absolutely. Anyone with a little money and time has the capability to make an amazing discovery. They do NOT, however, have the intense mathematical training to rigorously support a THEORY about said discovery. That doesn't make their discovery any less significant, but making a discovery and arguing a theory are very different things.
Yes I do realize binary star systems are not rare. Not detecting it by visible light is exactly WHY classical mechanics comes into play - all you're really doing is dealing with a bunch of forces that go like 1/r^2. Investigating it for the sake of completeness is certainly not folly - however the arguments on the website linked in the article are nonsense.
I can't find it again at the moment - but I saw somewhere that they implied that the inaccuracy of predictions in precession over time was a result of our current theories being flawed, and that the binary theory somehow magically removed this inaccuracy. This is an example of the utter bullshit that anyone with an understanding of nonlinear dynamics would notice immediately. You're dealing with a many-body system here. That's inherently chaotic. That means, it's exponentially sensitive to initial conditions. Therefore, as time goes on your results get worse and worse due to small measurement errors in your initial conditions. NO MODEL can remove this effect and still claim to use newtonian physics - the equations are nonlinear and involve more than three objects interacting - therefore the equations of motion are chaotic. Period.
OF COURSE YOU CAN GET MORE ACCURATE RESULTS WHEN YOU PUT IN AN IMAGINARY EXTRA OBJECT - you can TUNE the parameters of this object arbitrarily to try to fit the experimental data. If I collect a bunch of data from all kinds of experiments, I can easily find a tenth order polynomial and get a very accurate fit to the data. This is also completely meaningless because all those fit parameters have no physical meaning.
Actually I am a physicst, and while I'm not an astronomer, I do work with "dynamics" on a fulltime basis.
Not to mention, all but one real astronomer also think this theory is ridiculous. The site linked is by an AMATEUR astronomer, not someone with a formal training in the hard sciences. I'm not contradicting a specialist, I'm contradicting a whackjob internet troll. No, not you - the guy with the binary solar system website.
Indeed - that was intentional to point out the absurdity of using this observation to try to justify the binary system argument. All this has done is brought up the same nonsense people have been laughing off since the 80's.
Recent observations of two nearby stars (assumed companions)
Whereas the space.com article states...
Each of the two disks has a sharp outer edge that might be caused by an unseen companion star
READ THAT AGAIN FOLKS - they are NOT assuming these two stars are companions. They are NOT a binary star system. They are simply two stars that have similar disks as our own solar system. They think a POSSIBLE cause for these disks MIGHT be an unseen companion, but NO unseen companion has been seen. This discovery leads NO MORE CREDIBILITY to the nemesis "theoory" whatsover - all it says is that there are other stars with similar structures to our own. The cause of this structure has not been observed.
Actually, the understanding of astronomy to explain why this "theory" is utter bullshit isn't really what you need. What you DO need is an understanding of classical mechanics. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here who knows enough classical mechanics to see the faults in their arguments in about 5 seconds.
As an aside, an understanding of nonlinear dynamics is also helpful to see various other flaws in their reasoning.
Methinks you're confusing relativity with classical kinetic energy. Not a tough mistake to make, as the original poster said e=mv^2 instead of e=0.5 mv^2.
Crashes are pretty complex - conservation of momentum could help or harm you. You collide with the side of a mountain, and no amount of high school physics is gonna make you feel any better. Or, maybe you crash into a guardrail next to a steep drop - the lighter car is stopped but the SUV blasts through, with a nice happy splat at the end of a long fall.
This thing seems like a few gems from genuinely insightful people, and a whole lot of buzzword babble junk. My personal favorite so far is the "headaches are like a spoon" drivel that says we should abandon the idea of physical objects and that everything we think we know is just our brain's interpretation, and there's no reason for that interpretation to match reality in any way. Only problem is - the reality of a wolf ripping out my throat is a pretty good reason to evolve senses that give me a good picture of that reality. I swear, the matrix gave this crap a whole new motivation - and it makes me wanna barf.
Since when does the resolution have anything to do with the apparant size?
12 feet is a reasonable estimate for living room size - sofa on one wall, tv on the other. Looks to me like they are trying to give an impression that makes the consumer think "tv" and not "computer".
heh... straw man isn't even close to what I did. Between the moderators and your replies, it's good to see slashdot still has a healthy supply of crack flowing in.
This is the reason I own a gamecube. Games like pikmin are great to just jump in and goof around, and the controls are simple and fun. I doubt they will ever dominate the market again, but nintendo has a neat approach, and are willing to keep making the goofy, fun, easy to get started type of games.
VOIP can tolerate a bit of lag, a bit of latency - for online gaming you want an incredibly efficient network which will let your reflexes be the limitation in game pace, not the network. For flickr it's a non-issue. Xbox live also has to support a more complicated environment - game rentals, voice chat, a TOS abuse warning system, many games, game matching systems, etc etc etc. When they built skype, they only had to do one thing - make voice work.
Plus, on launch day xbox live needs to be damn well tested and ready to go - you can't sell a couple thousand xbox 360's for a limited beta and slowly build up - you have that long line at launch day and you are hit hard.
Not to say they weren't incredibly wasteful and probably spent 3/5 of that budget on advertising, but it's certainly a more expensive setup to build than skype.
It's called hyperbole. It's the same line of logic as the original statement, but purposely taking it to an extreme to show the fallacy of logic. Just because someone has it better than someone else doesn't mean they have no right to ever complain.
The people left homeless in new orleans seem to be the biggest whiners I have seen in the world. *Whine* they didn't rescue us fast enough, they put us in a stadium and we didn't have food *Whine*.
Guess what? No one cares. Some people never had a home, period - especially a cushy historic home in a famous tourist destination.
I really hate the "you have no right to complain because other people have it worse than you" mentality. You're half a step above the "why are we discussing this when people are dying" trolls.
The free stuff websites are still relatively easy to game and get a freebie. Not quite as easy as they were when they first came out, mind you, but still pretty easy - if you're patient. I've done little for my free stuff other than put a link in my/. sig and have gotten two freebies already and am one completed referral away from a 30gb ipod video. If you're clever and work at it - it's relatively easy to talk people into signing up for the free trial services if you'll cover them for dinner one night - so for 3 10 dollar nights at a burger joint you can have an ipod shuffle. I have a couple of friends who've exploited this method quite heavily.
My point? Just because YOU assume something is a flash in the plan one-shot deal, doesn't mean it is. This kid MIGHT blow his million bucks and never have another good idea, or he might form the next google. You sure as hell don't know enough about him to tell the difference and are just being cynical for the sake of being cynical.
Funny, I've bought products, including high end stuff, at three different apple stores, and never had them ask for more than my ID to verify who I was when I used a credit card. I've had the applecare plan offered to me politely, and I declined. No sales pitch, just "would you like to hear more about applecare?".
As far as the line being slow due to the inefficiency - I was in the Lenox mall apple store about a week before Christmas, at two in the afternoon on a weekday. There were at least 50 or 60 people in the store, with all lines packed and moving quickly. The line was far from slow - the added checkout was there to handle the immense popularity of the ipod as a Christmas gift.
The easypay line was an OPTION to help handle the extra traffic for the holidays. Some folks are willing to give up an email address for the convenience of skipping the big line for the short, streamlined, grab-your-ipod-and-go line. It's still your choice, so quit your bitching.
Locality, like most things in physics, isn't exactly what it sounds like. The idea of a wavefunction is, in fact, NOT incompatible with locality. A little googling found this quote from Einstein himself, basically stating that locality was a neccesity to do science as we know it. The following idea characterises the relative independence of objects far apart in space (A and B): external influence on A has no direct influence on B; this is known as the Principle of Local Action, which is used consistently only in field theory. If this axiom were to be completely abolished, the idea of the existence of quasienclosed systems, and thereby the postulation of laws which can be checked empirically in the accepted sense, would become impossible.
In other words, locality doesn't mean a particle has a definite position in space - rather it means that its direct interactions are localized. Put another way, a particle is only affected by its immediate surroundings. However, the term "immediate" is intentionally vague, and what's immediate for one particle is not for another.
If you're wondering how this all works with things like electrostatic attraction, whose range is essentially infinite, these things are handled quite nicely via particle exchange.
Theories don't "graduate" to becoming a law - THEY ARE FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT BEASTS.
A theory is a model of reality. A physical law is a statement of what has been observed. A theory can be used to explain a physical law - for example, the theory of electrodynamics can be used to derive Ohm's Law.
Lack imagination? Looks like you lack an understanding of science - "might makes right" is not a scientific theory, it's a silly catchphrase. Give one example of a scientific theory that explained and predicted more NON INTUITIVE experimental results than quantum mechanics. You can't, because there hasn't been one.
Locality is the big stickler - and you're right, to do the proof you need to assume locality. However, locality was fundamental to Einstein's "hidden variables" argument, as well. If you don't have locality, you don't need hidden variable. Bell's inequality proves that, for quantum mechanics to be valid, either there is no locality (scary thought) or there are no hidden variables (slightly less scary thought). Neither is very appetizing from a intuitive point of view.
This is misleading. The theories have not been disproven. They have simply not been proven. The fact that they have not, to date, been proven, does not imply that they are disproven.
This is incorrect. It HAS been proven that hidden variables are mathematically incompatible with quantum mechanics. Try looking into the EPR paradox and bell's inequality. That's not to say there are no hidden variables, but quantum theory works damn well, and it's incompatible with hidden variables - so it's a whole lot more convincing an argument than simply "it hasn't been found yet"
Ask any metaphysicist.
Yeah, while you're at it, ask an astrologist, a tarot card reader, a televangelist, and a reporter for a tabloid mag.
Dimensionality is much less about being spatial, and much more about the number of independent variables needed to describe a physical situation. When someone doing relativity says there are "four dimensions" they mean there are three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. When someome doing quantum theory talks about working on a hydrogen atom, they might be in a nine dimensional space - three for orientation, three for orbital angular momentum, and three for spin angular momentum. Spatial dimensionality is only ONE type of dimensionality.
Also, there is NOTHING that says that the basis vectors in a physical space (ie x, y, z) have to be orthogonal. Indeed, we just CHOOSE them to be orthogonal, because in an orthogonal basis set, the inner product of different basis vectors vanishes, and thus the math is easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Equipment and ability to catalog objects - yes, absolutely. Anyone with a little money and time has the capability to make an amazing discovery. They do NOT, however, have the intense mathematical training to rigorously support a THEORY about said discovery. That doesn't make their discovery any less significant, but making a discovery and arguing a theory are very different things.
Yes I do realize binary star systems are not rare. Not detecting it by visible light is exactly WHY classical mechanics comes into play - all you're really doing is dealing with a bunch of forces that go like 1/r^2. Investigating it for the sake of completeness is certainly not folly - however the arguments on the website linked in the article are nonsense.
I can't find it again at the moment - but I saw somewhere that they implied that the inaccuracy of predictions in precession over time was a result of our current theories being flawed, and that the binary theory somehow magically removed this inaccuracy. This is an example of the utter bullshit that anyone with an understanding of nonlinear dynamics would notice immediately. You're dealing with a many-body system here. That's inherently chaotic. That means, it's exponentially sensitive to initial conditions. Therefore, as time goes on your results get worse and worse due to small measurement errors in your initial conditions. NO MODEL can remove this effect and still claim to use newtonian physics - the equations are nonlinear and involve more than three objects interacting - therefore the equations of motion are chaotic. Period.
OF COURSE YOU CAN GET MORE ACCURATE RESULTS WHEN YOU PUT IN AN IMAGINARY EXTRA OBJECT - you can TUNE the parameters of this object arbitrarily to try to fit the experimental data. If I collect a bunch of data from all kinds of experiments, I can easily find a tenth order polynomial and get a very accurate fit to the data. This is also completely meaningless because all those fit parameters have no physical meaning.
Actually I am a physicst, and while I'm not an astronomer, I do work with "dynamics" on a fulltime basis.
Not to mention, all but one real astronomer also think this theory is ridiculous. The site linked is by an AMATEUR astronomer, not someone with a formal training in the hard sciences. I'm not contradicting a specialist, I'm contradicting a whackjob internet troll. No, not you - the guy with the binary solar system website.
Indeed - that was intentional to point out the absurdity of using this observation to try to justify the binary system argument. All this has done is brought up the same nonsense people have been laughing off since the 80's.
The summary states...
Recent observations of two nearby stars (assumed companions)
Whereas the space.com article states...
Each of the two disks has a sharp outer edge that might be caused by an unseen companion star
READ THAT AGAIN FOLKS - they are NOT assuming these two stars are companions. They are NOT a binary star system. They are simply two stars that have similar disks as our own solar system. They think a POSSIBLE cause for these disks MIGHT be an unseen companion, but NO unseen companion has been seen. This discovery leads NO MORE CREDIBILITY to the nemesis "theoory" whatsover - all it says is that there are other stars with similar structures to our own. The cause of this structure has not been observed.
Actually, the understanding of astronomy to explain why this "theory" is utter bullshit isn't really what you need. What you DO need is an understanding of classical mechanics. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here who knows enough classical mechanics to see the faults in their arguments in about 5 seconds.
As an aside, an understanding of nonlinear dynamics is also helpful to see various other flaws in their reasoning.
On a scale of "faked moon landing" to "electric universe", I rate this 'theory' a solid "roswell alien autopsy"
Methinks you're confusing relativity with classical kinetic energy. Not a tough mistake to make, as the original poster said e=mv^2 instead of e=0.5 mv^2.
Crashes are pretty complex - conservation of momentum could help or harm you. You collide with the side of a mountain, and no amount of high school physics is gonna make you feel any better. Or, maybe you crash into a guardrail next to a steep drop - the lighter car is stopped but the SUV blasts through, with a nice happy splat at the end of a long fall.
Man, I've kept skimming the articles - and they are just getting worse. I can't believe they gave the "electric universe" nutjobs any space in here.
This thing seems like a few gems from genuinely insightful people, and a whole lot of buzzword babble junk. My personal favorite so far is the "headaches are like a spoon" drivel that says we should abandon the idea of physical objects and that everything we think we know is just our brain's interpretation, and there's no reason for that interpretation to match reality in any way. Only problem is - the reality of a wolf ripping out my throat is a pretty good reason to evolve senses that give me a good picture of that reality. I swear, the matrix gave this crap a whole new motivation - and it makes me wanna barf.
Since when does the resolution have anything to do with the apparant size?
12 feet is a reasonable estimate for living room size - sofa on one wall, tv on the other. Looks to me like they are trying to give an impression that makes the consumer think "tv" and not "computer".
heh... straw man isn't even close to what I did. Between the moderators and your replies, it's good to see slashdot still has a healthy supply of crack flowing in.
This is the reason I own a gamecube. Games like pikmin are great to just jump in and goof around, and the controls are simple and fun. I doubt they will ever dominate the market again, but nintendo has a neat approach, and are willing to keep making the goofy, fun, easy to get started type of games.
VOIP can tolerate a bit of lag, a bit of latency - for online gaming you want an incredibly efficient network which will let your reflexes be the limitation in game pace, not the network. For flickr it's a non-issue. Xbox live also has to support a more complicated environment - game rentals, voice chat, a TOS abuse warning system, many games, game matching systems, etc etc etc. When they built skype, they only had to do one thing - make voice work.
Plus, on launch day xbox live needs to be damn well tested and ready to go - you can't sell a couple thousand xbox 360's for a limited beta and slowly build up - you have that long line at launch day and you are hit hard.
Not to say they weren't incredibly wasteful and probably spent 3/5 of that budget on advertising, but it's certainly a more expensive setup to build than skype.
Mods - I'm not a troll, if anyone is - it's at the top of this thread. Give me a fucking break. Now I know why I hadn't posted on /. in so long.
It's called hyperbole. It's the same line of logic as the original statement, but purposely taking it to an extreme to show the fallacy of logic. Just because someone has it better than someone else doesn't mean they have no right to ever complain.
The people left homeless in new orleans seem to be the biggest whiners I have seen in the world. *Whine* they didn't rescue us fast enough, they put us in a stadium and we didn't have food *Whine*.
Guess what? No one cares. Some people never had a home, period - especially a cushy historic home in a famous tourist destination.
I really hate the "you have no right to complain because other people have it worse than you" mentality. You're half a step above the "why are we discussing this when people are dying" trolls.
The free stuff websites are still relatively easy to game and get a freebie. Not quite as easy as they were when they first came out, mind you, but still pretty easy - if you're patient. I've done little for my free stuff other than put a link in my /. sig and have gotten two freebies already and am one completed referral away from a 30gb ipod video. If you're clever and work at it - it's relatively easy to talk people into signing up for the free trial services if you'll cover them for dinner one night - so for 3 10 dollar nights at a burger joint you can have an ipod shuffle. I have a couple of friends who've exploited this method quite heavily.
My point? Just because YOU assume something is a flash in the plan one-shot deal, doesn't mean it is. This kid MIGHT blow his million bucks and never have another good idea, or he might form the next google. You sure as hell don't know enough about him to tell the difference and are just being cynical for the sake of being cynical.
Funny, I've bought products, including high end stuff, at three different apple stores, and never had them ask for more than my ID to verify who I was when I used a credit card. I've had the applecare plan offered to me politely, and I declined. No sales pitch, just "would you like to hear more about applecare?".
As far as the line being slow due to the inefficiency - I was in the Lenox mall apple store about a week before Christmas, at two in the afternoon on a weekday. There were at least 50 or 60 people in the store, with all lines packed and moving quickly. The line was far from slow - the added checkout was there to handle the immense popularity of the ipod as a Christmas gift.
Then wait in the normal line with everybody else.
The easypay line was an OPTION to help handle the extra traffic for the holidays. Some folks are willing to give up an email address for the convenience of skipping the big line for the short, streamlined, grab-your-ipod-and-go line. It's still your choice, so quit your bitching.
Locality, like most things in physics, isn't exactly what it sounds like. The idea of a wavefunction is, in fact, NOT incompatible with locality. A little googling found this quote from Einstein himself, basically stating that locality was a neccesity to do science as we know it.
The following idea characterises the relative independence of objects far apart in space (A and B): external influence on A has no direct influence on B; this is known as the Principle of Local Action, which is used consistently only in field theory. If this axiom were to be completely abolished, the idea of the existence of quasienclosed systems, and thereby the postulation of laws which can be checked empirically in the accepted sense, would become impossible.
In other words, locality doesn't mean a particle has a definite position in space - rather it means that its direct interactions are localized. Put another way, a particle is only affected by its immediate surroundings. However, the term "immediate" is intentionally vague, and what's immediate for one particle is not for another.
If you're wondering how this all works with things like electrostatic attraction, whose range is essentially infinite, these things are handled quite nicely via particle exchange.
Theories don't "graduate" to becoming a law - THEY ARE FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT BEASTS.
A theory is a model of reality. A physical law is a statement of what has been observed. A theory can be used to explain a physical law - for example, the theory of electrodynamics can be used to derive Ohm's Law.
Lack imagination? Looks like you lack an understanding of science - "might makes right" is not a scientific theory, it's a silly catchphrase. Give one example of a scientific theory that explained and predicted more NON INTUITIVE experimental results than quantum mechanics. You can't, because there hasn't been one.
Locality is the big stickler - and you're right, to do the proof you need to assume locality. However, locality was fundamental to Einstein's "hidden variables" argument, as well. If you don't have locality, you don't need hidden variable. Bell's inequality proves that, for quantum mechanics to be valid, either there is no locality (scary thought) or there are no hidden variables (slightly less scary thought). Neither is very appetizing from a intuitive point of view.
This is misleading. The theories have not been disproven. They have simply not been proven. The fact that they have not, to date, been proven, does not imply that they are disproven.
This is incorrect. It HAS been proven that hidden variables are mathematically incompatible with quantum mechanics. Try looking into the EPR paradox and bell's inequality. That's not to say there are no hidden variables, but quantum theory works damn well, and it's incompatible with hidden variables - so it's a whole lot more convincing an argument than simply "it hasn't been found yet"
Ask any metaphysicist.
Yeah, while you're at it, ask an astrologist, a tarot card reader, a televangelist, and a reporter for a tabloid mag.
Dimensionality is much less about being spatial, and much more about the number of independent variables needed to describe a physical situation. When someone doing relativity says there are "four dimensions" they mean there are three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. When someome doing quantum theory talks about working on a hydrogen atom, they might be in a nine dimensional space - three for orientation, three for orbital angular momentum, and three for spin angular momentum. Spatial dimensionality is only ONE type of dimensionality.
Also, there is NOTHING that says that the basis vectors in a physical space (ie x, y, z) have to be orthogonal. Indeed, we just CHOOSE them to be orthogonal, because in an orthogonal basis set, the inner product of different basis vectors vanishes, and thus the math is easier.