One of my schoolmates went to Harvard, and he couldn't even get into the gifted program in school. So it wasn't a high IQ that got him there. He had OK grades but wasn't stellar.
I think you are massively over estimating the correlation between being intelligent and high grades/gifted programs at schools.
Except for the timeliness factor how is this any different from what publishers already do with a letters page? All the same arguments apply and if you have a link to the raw comment dump you sidestep the censorship issue (which a letters page does not).
I know this is Slashdot but it helps if you actually read the article before commenting. I quote from the article:
A project that is going to take eight years of construction work before it produces any scientific results cannot and should not be built by a PhD student.
ATLAS took over 8 years of construction work before it produced scientific results. Some PhD students worked on detector construction and physics simulations - in fact it required agreement with universities in some cases that they would allow a PhD with monte-carlo studies instead of a real physics result. Yes their projects were shorter in scope than ATLAS as a whole but those projects, while essential to the success of the overall ATLAS experiment, did not produce real, experimental scientific results because there was no data.
So, contrary to what the article claims you can do a PhD on a project which is more than 8 years before scientific results come from it. This is not miscontruing the article - what the article says is provably wrong for the field of particle physics.
...that he has no clue about particle physics. Building the ATLAS detector took well over 8 years and PhD students were involved. They worked on detector R&D, performance studies etc. as well as simulation of the physics the detector would eventually be able to detect. Not everyone can do their physics in their own lab with their own group of students and postdocs. Some physics requires huge machines and detectors and that necessitates long construction times...and if this guy poked his head outside his lab once or twice he would know that!
In ye old days there was a specific amount of space available for letters to the editor; usually about half a page.
There is still a limit even today: the patience of the reader. Just because you can publish every comment on an article does not mean that you should. I rarely do more than glance at the comments on news sites because they are full of drivel. They could at least select the one or two sensible comments and have the rest accessible by a link if anyone wants to bother reading them.
Your argument seems to be that past the age of 40 or so our views no longer keep up with the values of society. In which case how can selecting a 40 year old pope who stays in office for 40 years and is woefully outdated for the last 10 years of his reign be worse than selecting a 70 year old pope who is woefully out of date for all 10 years of his reign? With the younger person you at least have 10-20 years in-sync with society instead of permanently being at least a generation behind society which is very clearly where the Catholic church is.
Gods don't define a boundary of knowledge. Citing "gods" is a direct admission that you know nothing.
No, "gods" is the first scientific hypothesis that you test. It is the result of a very simple logic: things happen because someone makes them happen but since there is no way that I know to make X happen the person making it happen must be "god". You then test this but instead find that e.g. things fall in a way governed by a simple formula so you conclude that there is no entity making a conscious decision to grab things and pull them down because, if there were, sometimes they might forget or alternatively pull them down harder.
So why the difference? Well suppose we had found that gravity did behave in a non-predictable way like that (think Road-runner cartoons!). Clearly that would have been evidence that gravity was due to some external intelligence deciding what would fall and how strongly. Obviously we did not find that result in reality but it is only with hindsight after having done the experiments which prove it that the answer is "obvious".
The rules of the English language are shockingly simple and mixing up homophones doesn't make a great case for the intelligence of the writer.
If you actually read the whole post rather than throwing up your hands in utter shock at the first error in grammar you would realize that I use "its" vs. "it's" correctly everywhere else. As a scientist I would then expect that you could infer that (a) the writer probably does know the difference and hence (b) he made a mistake. In fact one could argue that an inability to look at the available data and make a simple inference like this doesn't make a great case for either the intelligence or the scientific skills of the reader...
Or an hour and a half later, when AAA gets there. At which point you could be towed to a charging station instead, anyway, and then get a quick cjarge.
I don't think you have the same definition of "quick" that the rest of us have. It takes an hour to fully charge from drained and that is at a rapid charging station. Get it down to 5 minutes and then you can call it quick. Not to mention that you now have to have a tow truck and be towed to a charging station. I'm all in favour of electric cars but until they improve the recharge speed I can only imagine using them for a "runabout town" sort of car where the distance is not too far and they can recharge overnight.
Even then I will not be buying one until they are cheaper to run than an ICE - the "fuel" might be a lot cheaper but unfortunately this is more than compensated for by the huge cost of the batteries which have a limited life span. If you factor in the Tesla specified life of the battery the cost of fuel is roughly equivalent to a car which makes ~10 mpg - at least this was the case a couple of years ago when I looked into it.
As for newspapers the NYT is no better than the rest: they are generally more interested in making a story sound good to attract readers then they are in communicating the truth. Just look at the Leveson inquiry and related prosecutions in the UK.
Try walking through Italy and see if you can't find someone infested with yersinia pestis.
We can cure that with antibiotics and, if needed, life support while they recover. In the past if we'd spent all the money on caring for the immediate needs of people instead of pushing the boundaries of knowledge then you might be out there offering help but that help would be selecting a suitable burial spot and digging a hole. Science is like a pension plan - you may feel like all the money is disappearing without any return but forty years down the line you'll be very glad you had the foresight to invest in it.
I think you are getting a little confused which is not surprising given the site that you linked to! It's a very interesting site but it's talking about the special case where the minimum energy in the Higgs field corresponds to zero Higgs field which not at all the case in the Standard Model.
The Higgs field does indeed give mass to the fundamental particles. It has a strange property that the lowest energy density of the field is NOT when the field is zero but rather when it has a non-zero value (so very different from a magnetic or electric field). This field is then what couples to particles and the coupling energy is what we see as mass - indeed at a fundamental level this is why mass and energy are the same thing. The Higgs boson is simply a quantized vibration of this field in the same way that a photon is a quantized vibration of the EM field.
However, to get back to the original discussion point, I would argue that we are seeing exactly what we might expect to see were this a Supersymmetric Higgs rather than a Standard Model Higgs. If you scan the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model phase space with a Higgs mass of 125 GeV then you'll find that most of it has the lightest Higgs looking just like a SM Higgs with only a few percent difference in some of the branching ratios. It will take a few years more data before we can measure things this accurately by which time, with the higher energies after the shutdown, we may have already found something new.
Science of the 21st century will be less about discovering what we can do and more about what we can't. We'll find that that there aren't any radical exotic physics left to discover...
Dark Matter: makes up ~23% of the mass of the universe and we have no clue what it's fundamental nature is. Then there is Dark energy which makes up ~73% and is accelerating the expansion of the universe. So given that practically all science to date has been regarding 4% of the universe and there is 96% of if out there (that we know of so far) with a nature we simply do not yet understand I can tell you that we know for 100% certainty that there is some "radical, exotic physics" left to discover. What I cannot tell you is its nature nor whether we'll discover it in the 21st century but we know it's there. Even if you don't yet believe in Dark Matter the largely discredited alternative theories to explain the observations involve corrections to Newtonian dynamics and/or gravity which is even more "radical and exotic".
So, I can drive about 200 miles to and from work, to the mall and the supermarket for about $2.00 / day
Not true. The cost of the electricity might only be $2/day but the cost of the battery is FAR more. If you do the maths and figure out the stated battery life and the cost to replace it then an electric cars power+battery costs are a lot higher than petrol+fuel tank. See an old post of mine. The numbers have changed slightly but it still holds unfortunately.
I think this supports my argument. If it is that bad with petrol how much worse will it be with batteries where, even if they make it to the charging station, they have to wait a hour to fill up (assuming that there is no queue!).
You've never lived in a really cold climate, have you?
I live in Edmonton, Alberta where it usually hits -40C at night during parts of the winter. Had a block heater installed when we moved here and I have used it a handful of times when we first moved here and never again since but I have never had an issue starting the car...which is not even a modern one - it's a 1998 Cavalier.
Read it again. It says the nickel becomes copper, which means that the proton isn't ejected from the nucleus.
So in other words a neutron does not split into a proton and electron but rather a nickel nucleus decays into a copper nucleus because neither the neutron or the proton are unbound and so normally you would not describe it as such. However in this case they are describing nuclear beta decay which most assuredly does produce dangerous ionizing radiation.
Intelligence has evolved in various desperate species on Earth -- primates, birds, dolphins
In this context intelligence means capable of developing a technological civilization. Other animals may be intelligent but they are not capable of developing a technological civilization. At a minimal level this requires some form of writing and/or art.
There is another pretty severe mistake in there as well. From the article:
This sets off a reaction in which one of the neutrons in the nickel atom splits into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. This changes the nickel into copper, and releases energy without dangerous ionizing radiation.
A proton and an electron moving with nuclear decay energies are precisely what "dangerous ionizing radiation" is. The used fuel from nuclear reactors is dangerous because it is rich in beta emitters which produce high energy electrons. High energy protons are even more dangerous because, for the same energy, they will move more slowly and so be more heavily ionizing.
The article is also extremely vague about how the electric field forces the electrons and protons to convert in neutrons. Typically giving an electron more energy causes it to move into a higher energy orbital which have even less overlap with the nucleus. It is also exceedingly unlikely that they can give it enough energy that the nuclear cross-section is significantly enhanced. The mass of the W boson which mediates the reaction has an energy roughly 10 orders of magnitude higher than the electron energy (~10 eV vs. 80 GeV). Increasing the energy will certainly help to some degree but it seems unlikely that they can do this by the many orders of magnitude required to have a significant effect. So, if it does indeed work, there is going to need to be some research to figure out exactly how.
Essentially what you are asking is why are energy and momentum conserved since the laws of motion can all be derived from that. Emily Noether showed that for any conserved quantity there is a symmetry (note this is a purely mathematical proof). For energy this symmetry is translation in time I.e. the laws of physics today are the same as they were yesterday and the same as they will be tomorrow. The symmetry of translation in space gives conservation of momentum I.e. the laws of physics here are the same as the laws of physics where you are.
So effectively the laws of motion we observe are a direct consequence of the symmetries of the space time in which we live. When you add in relativity you get Lorentz transformations (which is undoubtedly what your Russian friend was talking about). Indeed we think of the fundamental laws of physics in terms of the symmetries they obey
Since Noether's theorem and Lagrangian mechanics is taught in first or second year mechanics (depending on where you are) anyone with a physics degree should know this...
Correct, with a 100 billion stars in the galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies billion to one odds will have occurred 100 times in our galaxy alone. However I dispute that we have any clue how likely intelligent life is. For all we know every habitable zone planet we have found, and perhaps some of the non-habitable zone ones too, have life. Or the odds of life may be so overwhelmingly unlikely we are alone. We simply have no clue and can only make mildly educated guesses based on assumptions that could be wrong.
Rutherford worked with, maybe, a thousand dollars worth of gear, and was producing results (ie world record radio transmission distances).
Right. So if we are going to start looking at things outside fundamental research you may possibly have heard of something called the world wide web - if not try Googling it.;-) Now, look up where it was invented and why. Doing fundamental research can have spinoffs just as much now as it did in Rutherford's day.
As for the cost of research yes it does cost more to find the Higgs - we need protons with about one million times more energy than the alpha particles Rutherford used. Since nature does not provide a nice portable source of these like there are for alpha particles we have to make it which is more expensive.
As for the practicality as I was explaining fundamental research is almost always non-practical when it is first discovered as was the case for Rutherford's nucleus. It takes time to apply this knowledge to the benefit on mankind. What your ignorance may be blinding you to is the fact that all new "widgets" that IT companies produce today rely on an understanding of the fundamental physics of ~100 years ago. If you stop fundamental research then, once the ideas based on out current understanding of physics are used up that's it - no more new widgets. A colleague of mine had a good way of putting it: no amount of applied research will give you the electric light bulb starting with a candle: you have to have fundamental research to be able to make that leap.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been constantly amazed that a company that tries to push an 'extreme' image hates their customers
Well here's one amusing way of dealing with it.
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
It depends more on whom you stole it from.
One of my schoolmates went to Harvard, and he couldn't even get into the gifted program in school. So it wasn't a high IQ that got him there. He had OK grades but wasn't stellar.
I think you are massively over estimating the correlation between being intelligent and high grades/gifted programs at schools.
Except for the timeliness factor how is this any different from what publishers already do with a letters page? All the same arguments apply and if you have a link to the raw comment dump you sidestep the censorship issue (which a letters page does not).
A project that is going to take eight years of construction work before it produces any scientific results cannot and should not be built by a PhD student.
ATLAS took over 8 years of construction work before it produced scientific results. Some PhD students worked on detector construction and physics simulations - in fact it required agreement with universities in some cases that they would allow a PhD with monte-carlo studies instead of a real physics result. Yes their projects were shorter in scope than ATLAS as a whole but those projects, while essential to the success of the overall ATLAS experiment, did not produce real, experimental scientific results because there was no data.
So, contrary to what the article claims you can do a PhD on a project which is more than 8 years before scientific results come from it. This is not miscontruing the article - what the article says is provably wrong for the field of particle physics.
...that he has no clue about particle physics. Building the ATLAS detector took well over 8 years and PhD students were involved. They worked on detector R&D, performance studies etc. as well as simulation of the physics the detector would eventually be able to detect. Not everyone can do their physics in their own lab with their own group of students and postdocs. Some physics requires huge machines and detectors and that necessitates long construction times...and if this guy poked his head outside his lab once or twice he would know that!
In ye old days there was a specific amount of space available for letters to the editor; usually about half a page.
There is still a limit even today: the patience of the reader. Just because you can publish every comment on an article does not mean that you should. I rarely do more than glance at the comments on news sites because they are full of drivel. They could at least select the one or two sensible comments and have the rest accessible by a link if anyone wants to bother reading them.
Your argument seems to be that past the age of 40 or so our views no longer keep up with the values of society. In which case how can selecting a 40 year old pope who stays in office for 40 years and is woefully outdated for the last 10 years of his reign be worse than selecting a 70 year old pope who is woefully out of date for all 10 years of his reign? With the younger person you at least have 10-20 years in-sync with society instead of permanently being at least a generation behind society which is very clearly where the Catholic church is.
The geese left in disgust.
It's France: the geese didn't leave they were eaten.
Maybe we should outlaw all them?
Since laws also kill people I'm not sure that is a good idea.
Gods don't define a boundary of knowledge. Citing "gods" is a direct admission that you know nothing.
No, "gods" is the first scientific hypothesis that you test. It is the result of a very simple logic: things happen because someone makes them happen but since there is no way that I know to make X happen the person making it happen must be "god". You then test this but instead find that e.g. things fall in a way governed by a simple formula so you conclude that there is no entity making a conscious decision to grab things and pull them down because, if there were, sometimes they might forget or alternatively pull them down harder.
So why the difference? Well suppose we had found that gravity did behave in a non-predictable way like that (think Road-runner cartoons!). Clearly that would have been evidence that gravity was due to some external intelligence deciding what would fall and how strongly. Obviously we did not find that result in reality but it is only with hindsight after having done the experiments which prove it that the answer is "obvious".
The rules of the English language are shockingly simple and mixing up homophones doesn't make a great case for the intelligence of the writer.
If you actually read the whole post rather than throwing up your hands in utter shock at the first error in grammar you would realize that I use "its" vs. "it's" correctly everywhere else. As a scientist I would then expect that you could infer that (a) the writer probably does know the difference and hence (b) he made a mistake. In fact one could argue that an inability to look at the available data and make a simple inference like this doesn't make a great case for either the intelligence or the scientific skills of the reader...
Or an hour and a half later, when AAA gets there. At which point you could be towed to a charging station instead, anyway, and then get a quick cjarge.
I don't think you have the same definition of "quick" that the rest of us have. It takes an hour to fully charge from drained and that is at a rapid charging station. Get it down to 5 minutes and then you can call it quick. Not to mention that you now have to have a tow truck and be towed to a charging station. I'm all in favour of electric cars but until they improve the recharge speed I can only imagine using them for a "runabout town" sort of car where the distance is not too far and they can recharge overnight.
Even then I will not be buying one until they are cheaper to run than an ICE - the "fuel" might be a lot cheaper but unfortunately this is more than compensated for by the huge cost of the batteries which have a limited life span. If you factor in the Tesla specified life of the battery the cost of fuel is roughly equivalent to a car which makes ~10 mpg - at least this was the case a couple of years ago when I looked into it.
As for newspapers the NYT is no better than the rest: they are generally more interested in making a story sound good to attract readers then they are in communicating the truth. Just look at the Leveson inquiry and related prosecutions in the UK.
Try walking through Italy and see if you can't find someone infested with yersinia pestis.
We can cure that with antibiotics and, if needed, life support while they recover. In the past if we'd spent all the money on caring for the immediate needs of people instead of pushing the boundaries of knowledge then you might be out there offering help but that help would be selecting a suitable burial spot and digging a hole. Science is like a pension plan - you may feel like all the money is disappearing without any return but forty years down the line you'll be very glad you had the foresight to invest in it.
I think you are getting a little confused which is not surprising given the site that you linked to! It's a very interesting site but it's talking about the special case where the minimum energy in the Higgs field corresponds to zero Higgs field which not at all the case in the Standard Model.
The Higgs field does indeed give mass to the fundamental particles. It has a strange property that the lowest energy density of the field is NOT when the field is zero but rather when it has a non-zero value (so very different from a magnetic or electric field). This field is then what couples to particles and the coupling energy is what we see as mass - indeed at a fundamental level this is why mass and energy are the same thing. The Higgs boson is simply a quantized vibration of this field in the same way that a photon is a quantized vibration of the EM field.
However, to get back to the original discussion point, I would argue that we are seeing exactly what we might expect to see were this a Supersymmetric Higgs rather than a Standard Model Higgs. If you scan the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model phase space with a Higgs mass of 125 GeV then you'll find that most of it has the lightest Higgs looking just like a SM Higgs with only a few percent difference in some of the branching ratios. It will take a few years more data before we can measure things this accurately by which time, with the higher energies after the shutdown, we may have already found something new.
Science of the 21st century will be less about discovering what we can do and more about what we can't. We'll find that that there aren't any radical exotic physics left to discover...
Dark Matter: makes up ~23% of the mass of the universe and we have no clue what it's fundamental nature is. Then there is Dark energy which makes up ~73% and is accelerating the expansion of the universe. So given that practically all science to date has been regarding 4% of the universe and there is 96% of if out there (that we know of so far) with a nature we simply do not yet understand I can tell you that we know for 100% certainty that there is some "radical, exotic physics" left to discover. What I cannot tell you is its nature nor whether we'll discover it in the 21st century but we know it's there. Even if you don't yet believe in Dark Matter the largely discredited alternative theories to explain the observations involve corrections to Newtonian dynamics and/or gravity which is even more "radical and exotic".
So, I can drive about 200 miles to and from work, to the mall and the supermarket for about $2.00 / day
Not true. The cost of the electricity might only be $2/day but the cost of the battery is FAR more. If you do the maths and figure out the stated battery life and the cost to replace it then an electric cars power+battery costs are a lot higher than petrol+fuel tank. See an old post of mine. The numbers have changed slightly but it still holds unfortunately.
I think this supports my argument. If it is that bad with petrol how much worse will it be with batteries where, even if they make it to the charging station, they have to wait a hour to fill up (assuming that there is no queue!).
You've never lived in a really cold climate, have you?
I live in Edmonton, Alberta where it usually hits -40C at night during parts of the winter. Had a block heater installed when we moved here and I have used it a handful of times when we first moved here and never again since but I have never had an issue starting the car...which is not even a modern one - it's a 1998 Cavalier.
Read it again. It says the nickel becomes copper, which means that the proton isn't ejected from the nucleus.
So in other words a neutron does not split into a proton and electron but rather a nickel nucleus decays into a copper nucleus because neither the neutron or the proton are unbound and so normally you would not describe it as such. However in this case they are describing nuclear beta decay which most assuredly does produce dangerous ionizing radiation.
Intelligence has evolved in various desperate species on Earth -- primates, birds, dolphins
In this context intelligence means capable of developing a technological civilization. Other animals may be intelligent but they are not capable of developing a technological civilization. At a minimal level this requires some form of writing and/or art.
This sets off a reaction in which one of the neutrons in the nickel atom splits into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. This changes the nickel into copper, and releases energy without dangerous ionizing radiation.
A proton and an electron moving with nuclear decay energies are precisely what "dangerous ionizing radiation" is. The used fuel from nuclear reactors is dangerous because it is rich in beta emitters which produce high energy electrons. High energy protons are even more dangerous because, for the same energy, they will move more slowly and so be more heavily ionizing.
The article is also extremely vague about how the electric field forces the electrons and protons to convert in neutrons. Typically giving an electron more energy causes it to move into a higher energy orbital which have even less overlap with the nucleus. It is also exceedingly unlikely that they can give it enough energy that the nuclear cross-section is significantly enhanced. The mass of the W boson which mediates the reaction has an energy roughly 10 orders of magnitude higher than the electron energy (~10 eV vs. 80 GeV). Increasing the energy will certainly help to some degree but it seems unlikely that they can do this by the many orders of magnitude required to have a significant effect. So, if it does indeed work, there is going to need to be some research to figure out exactly how.
Essentially what you are asking is why are energy and momentum conserved since the laws of motion can all be derived from that. Emily Noether showed that for any conserved quantity there is a symmetry (note this is a purely mathematical proof). For energy this symmetry is translation in time I.e. the laws of physics today are the same as they were yesterday and the same as they will be tomorrow. The symmetry of translation in space gives conservation of momentum I.e. the laws of physics here are the same as the laws of physics where you are.
So effectively the laws of motion we observe are a direct consequence of the symmetries of the space time in which we live. When you add in relativity you get Lorentz transformations (which is undoubtedly what your Russian friend was talking about). Indeed we think of the fundamental laws of physics in terms of the symmetries they obey Since Noether's theorem and Lagrangian mechanics is taught in first or second year mechanics (depending on where you are) anyone with a physics degree should know this...
Correct, with a 100 billion stars in the galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies billion to one odds will have occurred 100 times in our galaxy alone. However I dispute that we have any clue how likely intelligent life is. For all we know every habitable zone planet we have found, and perhaps some of the non-habitable zone ones too, have life. Or the odds of life may be so overwhelmingly unlikely we are alone. We simply have no clue and can only make mildly educated guesses based on assumptions that could be wrong.
Rutherford worked with, maybe, a thousand dollars worth of gear, and was producing results (ie world record radio transmission distances).
Right. So if we are going to start looking at things outside fundamental research you may possibly have heard of something called the world wide web - if not try Googling it. ;-) Now, look up where it was invented and why. Doing fundamental research can have spinoffs just as much now as it did in Rutherford's day.
As for the cost of research yes it does cost more to find the Higgs - we need protons with about one million times more energy than the alpha particles Rutherford used. Since nature does not provide a nice portable source of these like there are for alpha particles we have to make it which is more expensive.
As for the practicality as I was explaining fundamental research is almost always non-practical when it is first discovered as was the case for Rutherford's nucleus. It takes time to apply this knowledge to the benefit on mankind. What your ignorance may be blinding you to is the fact that all new "widgets" that IT companies produce today rely on an understanding of the fundamental physics of ~100 years ago. If you stop fundamental research then, once the ideas based on out current understanding of physics are used up that's it - no more new widgets. A colleague of mine had a good way of putting it: no amount of applied research will give you the electric light bulb starting with a candle: you have to have fundamental research to be able to make that leap.