But now that they've found the Higgs boson, what are they going to do with it?
I don't know it depends on what clever ideas people come up with. At the moment we are not even sure if it is the Higgs we have produced so we need to study it more. This precisely illustrates why industry will never fund research like this: it is too far ahead of any practical application and may even turn out to just be a stepping stone with no applications of its own but which leads to something amazingly useful. While I could make wild conjectures about what we might be able to discover the best way to understand the case for fundamental science like this is to look back.
In the early 1900's Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus and you could have wondered exactly the same thing: what is anyone going to do with it now we know it is there. Well 40 years later it lead directly to a new source of power. However indirectly it let us understand atoms far better. That understanding, along with quantum mechanics gave use an understanding of materials that led to the invention of the silicon transistor, an invention that has literally transformed the entire planet. I very much doubt Rutherford, or anyone on the planet at the time, had even the tiniest clue that this would be the result of this discovery.
Sadly it seems that the cry for immediate, short term applied science is getting stronger and stronger. What the industry types who are calling for this need to understand is that they are turkeys asking for christmas. Sure it might be nice to have all those fundamental research dollars wrapped up under the christmas tree and given to you to build a better widget but once those presents are opened and gone there will be no more fundamental research you can apply to build the next generation of widgets. It's then that they will realize who society will eat for dinner...
More that the quality (which is most assuredly is an issue) the material is a more important factor. Know any good ways to print copper plates, or cryostat vessels etc. because we cannot make all our detector out of plastic and those that are plastic usually need to be very transparent and I don't imagine 3D printing will achieve anything like the clarity we need.
However, if anyone has a 3D printer and the time we do have detailed 3D models of the detector geometry that we use for simulations. There has already been a Lego model of ATLAS developed so, if you are up for a challenge, how about a 3D printed model of ATLAS? It would be great to have for outreach talks at high schools!
I bet they have really good backups because they are critical systems on which people's lives depend. I doubt the same can be said for TV transmission towers.
The difference is, with a gas car, once a week. With an all electric, every day.
No, the key difference is that one I can fix in a couple of minutes the other takes an hour or so. Given I will forget to fill or charge the car from time to time regardless of power source what matters is how easily can I fix that mistake when I make it. A 5 minute trip to a garage is a lot easier to accommodate than a 1 hour one if I need to get to work in the morning.
Now when there is a fault at the transmission mast which interrupts your TV signal you'll no longer be stuck watching a blank screen: just go outside and look for planes colliding.
Whose fault it is is somewhat irrelevant. Do you want a car that you have to remember to plug-in overnight and which you have to carefully plan your trips to ensure that you can get to the next refuelling station? Even if you fully understand how they work and their limitations you can easily make a mistake by forgetting to plug it in and suddenly you can't drive to work the next day because it takes several hours to charge.
Supersymmetry, or at least the minimal version of it, has 126 free parameters. You can do (and I have) analyses which can rule out parts of that parameter space so you can falsify specific values of SUSY parameters. However it is not possible to rule out all possible parameter values for SUSY. So, taken as a whole, SUSY is non-falsifiable.
However SUSY was formulated to solve a specific problem (related to the light Higgs mass, called the heirarchy or fine tuning problem) and has since been used to address others such as unification of the forces and dark matter which is why it is so attractive. What we can conceive of doing is ruling SUSY out as a solution to these. At this point it would essentially be a useless theory that solves none of the issues we would like to but that is not proof that nature doesn't have it tucked away in some corner of phase space.
In fact this is typically what happens to scientific theories that are "wrong". You exclude them to the point where they cannot solve the problem. However but that does not mean that you have falsified them, all you have done is make them boring possibilities. Examples which would will have heard of are probably unlikely because we are talking about theories which got dropped as uninteresting but the superweak force and technicolour are two such examples from particle physics.
Ah but this is the reassuring side. Deep down people are not idiots. When their safety and livelihoods are threatened any rejection of science goes out of the window. For example during the recent bird and swine flu epidemics there was nobody running around saying "but bird flu was created to infect birds it cannot evolve to infect humans". The only sad thing is that some 21st century kids may end up with a medieval education before these idiots come to their senses.
If a nuke were available, I've got no doubt that terrorists would have no trouble killing millions.
Why would they bother? Killing people is just the horrible means terrorists use to achieve their aims. The terrorists goals are usually to oppose the US' historical championing of freedom and democracy throughout the world. From what I see sitting well over 100 miles north of your border they don't need to bother anymore: if you can't support freedom and democracy in your own country you have zero credibility when you try to promote it to the rest of the world. The US might still be more free and more democratic than a lot of nations but to champion it you need a squeaky clean image not a "ho-hum and getting worse" one.
I'm sorry but you are completely wrong about what a theory is. Look it up in the dictionary: "A supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something". That's all a theory is. Scientific theories are ones which can explain how observed phenomena work and then use that explanation to predict behaviour of any system. The reason that religion is not a scientific theory is that it makes no predictions of future behaviour given a particular set of conditions. This is why scientific theories are generally falsifiable and religious ones are generally not: there is no predictive power. For example String Theory is a perfectly valid scientific theory in that it has the power to make predictions. However it does this about phenomena which we cannot (yet) observe. As the mathematical tools improve it may get to the point where we can test its predictions.
The theories that are taught at school (well outside Texas at least) are those scientific ones which have a strong history of making predictions which have been proven correct, sometimes to incredible precision. They are consistent with all known observations. This does not make them correct it just makes them the best explanation we have so far. If tomorrow some one does a new experiment which has never before been tried and the results differ from predictions based on those theories then we go back to the drawing board and try to come up with something better. This is now an extremely hard thing to do because any new theory has to explain all the previously observed phenomena correctly as well as the new observation.
Texas would like to think of it as a hypothesis or maybe a theorem. Or a rumor. Maybe a wacky folk story. "Darwin's Wise Tale of Evolution"
Perhaps we should repay the favour and think of Texas as a work of wacky fiction too (not a very good one though because it the story seems too unbelievable). In this case though I'd suggest "The Land that Time Forgot".
This is not the case for EM though. Quantum Electrodynamics is the second most stringently tested scientific theory ever (only special relativity has been tested to a higher precision). I also highly doubt that their intended review will involve getting a group of particle physicists, cosmologists and string theorists together to discuss ways that they can make the latest ideas in gravity and the other fundamental forces accessible to school kids (it would be quite inspiring if it was though!).
Actually it isn't. Very few scientific theories are falsifiable. All I do is reduce the coupling between Standard Model particles to the point where they effectively never interact (or are even produced!) and there you do. You have a perfectly useless theory which addresses none of the problems you want it to but you have not proven it does not exist.
As I said its about impact factor. If and when open access journals get decent impact factors, researchers will be more inclined to use them.
It is not just about impact factor. I would not want to release a paper without a ND licence because a scientific paper is not the same as a book or manual. It is essentially scientific "speech" where you communicate your ideas to others. They are then free to take that idea and run with it but I do not want some random stranger downloading the paper, editing it to change those ideas and conclusions, and then resubmitting it with my name associated with it. If they want to write their own paper then great - use the data, argue that my conclusions are wrong etc. but you don't get to edit my paper even if you willingly acknowledge I wrote it you have to write your own so it is clear whose opinion is being expressed.
This is particularly true in more controversial fields - imagine what would happen in climate change or evolutionary fields if anyone can download, edit and then resubmit papers. You could completely alter the meaning of the paper and resubmit it with credit given to the original authors who, by implication, will appear to be supporting whatever you wrote.
Which is stupid, and is just a blatant illustration of the author's lack of vision and understanding of the world and of history.
Actually I would say it is pretty much to be expected. We don't really know what the major, ground breaking discoveries are today which will have a major impact on peoples lives 50 years from now. So I think it would be quite normal for a non-scientist to look around and not understand or see how todays discoveries might affect them in several decades time. In fact I don't even think us scientists can do that either - at least with any degree of accuracy.
The result is that when you look back with hindsight you see the "big breakthroughs" for what they really are but this is only possible with hind sight. Who knew that the transistor would revolutionize almost every aspect of day to day life when it was invented?
The only way you can reconcile faith (in anything, a god, your mother, a book) is to put artificial limitations on the applicable domain of science
Really. Suppose I tell you that I have faith that a scientific theory called Supersymmetry will be discovered at some point in the future. I accept that I could be wrong or that my current understanding of the concept of Supersymmetry might be flawed and will need to change when more data become available or may even possibly be ruled out altogether at some point (although really scientific theories are rarely every excluded they just get restricted to the point that they no longer solve the problem they were thought to). Is this faith in a scientific theory which has not yet been proven restricting science? If so I hoenstly cannot see why or how.
Now, why can't the same be true of religion. Why can't I treat it as a theory which has not yet been proven? I might need to adjust it as we collect more data and rule out certain things e.g. we know the world was not created in 6 days but dropping that literally hardly undermines the core of christianity and it is exactly what we do with scientific theories e.g. the Standard Model of particle physics was amended to include neutrino mixing with very little change to the overall theory.
Note that I did not say "scientific theory" because it is exceedingly hard to prove or disprove the claims of many religions so, in that respect, they are not scientific. Also this implies an acceptance that future evidence may prove your religious beliefs wrong - you might not believe that will happen but you have to accept it is a possibility. With those caveats where is the conflict? The last caveat might be wholly unacceptable to fundamentalists but if you are willing to accept this I don't see any conflict between science and religion: religion is just a theory which some believe to be true and others do not. The only significant difference is that there are no fundamentalist supersymmetrists who use violence against non-supersymmetrists (although I've been in one debate where it might have come close!;-).
Actually most students do not cheat. While the number of cheating incidents is sadly on the rise - probably by about a factor of 2-3 since I started as a prof 10 years ago - the vast majority of university students do not cheat. So while it is always bad to hear of cases like this it is worth getting a little perspective: many students work extremely hard for their degrees and we should not devalue that because some idiots insist on cheating.
When someone wins the lottery or gets a big bonus, they tend to throw a party and buy stuff for themselves AND their friends.
Exactly but my thought on reading the article is perhaps it is far more fun to be flying around the city by yourself rather than being stuck in a helicopter (which may have frustrating controls). If so perhaps all this experiment has shown is that when people are happy and content they are more willing to help out. Conversely if you have been frustrated and are unhappy you are probably less likely to be thinking about helping others.
Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb. He invented the first practical one that lasted a long time and didn't stink up your house.
He didn't even do that. He was a fantastic salesman though. So perhaps what has really happened is that inventors have become less colourful characters who can't make their inventions sound quite as fantastic due to the grey, uniform corporate world which lives in perpetual fear of law suits.
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But now that they've found the Higgs boson, what are they going to do with it?
I don't know it depends on what clever ideas people come up with. At the moment we are not even sure if it is the Higgs we have produced so we need to study it more. This precisely illustrates why industry will never fund research like this: it is too far ahead of any practical application and may even turn out to just be a stepping stone with no applications of its own but which leads to something amazingly useful. While I could make wild conjectures about what we might be able to discover the best way to understand the case for fundamental science like this is to look back.
In the early 1900's Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus and you could have wondered exactly the same thing: what is anyone going to do with it now we know it is there. Well 40 years later it lead directly to a new source of power. However indirectly it let us understand atoms far better. That understanding, along with quantum mechanics gave use an understanding of materials that led to the invention of the silicon transistor, an invention that has literally transformed the entire planet. I very much doubt Rutherford, or anyone on the planet at the time, had even the tiniest clue that this would be the result of this discovery.
Sadly it seems that the cry for immediate, short term applied science is getting stronger and stronger. What the industry types who are calling for this need to understand is that they are turkeys asking for christmas. Sure it might be nice to have all those fundamental research dollars wrapped up under the christmas tree and given to you to build a better widget but once those presents are opened and gone there will be no more fundamental research you can apply to build the next generation of widgets. It's then that they will realize who society will eat for dinner...
More that the quality (which is most assuredly is an issue) the material is a more important factor. Know any good ways to print copper plates, or cryostat vessels etc. because we cannot make all our detector out of plastic and those that are plastic usually need to be very transparent and I don't imagine 3D printing will achieve anything like the clarity we need.
However, if anyone has a 3D printer and the time we do have detailed 3D models of the detector geometry that we use for simulations. There has already been a Lego model of ATLAS developed so, if you are up for a challenge, how about a 3D printed model of ATLAS? It would be great to have for outreach talks at high schools!
I bet they have really good backups because they are critical systems on which people's lives depend. I doubt the same can be said for TV transmission towers.
The difference is, with a gas car, once a week. With an all electric, every day.
No, the key difference is that one I can fix in a couple of minutes the other takes an hour or so. Given I will forget to fill or charge the car from time to time regardless of power source what matters is how easily can I fix that mistake when I make it. A 5 minute trip to a garage is a lot easier to accommodate than a 1 hour one if I need to get to work in the morning.
Now when there is a fault at the transmission mast which interrupts your TV signal you'll no longer be stuck watching a blank screen: just go outside and look for planes colliding.
Whose fault it is is somewhat irrelevant. Do you want a car that you have to remember to plug-in overnight and which you have to carefully plan your trips to ensure that you can get to the next refuelling station? Even if you fully understand how they work and their limitations you can easily make a mistake by forgetting to plug it in and suddenly you can't drive to work the next day because it takes several hours to charge.
Supersymmetry, or at least the minimal version of it, has 126 free parameters. You can do (and I have) analyses which can rule out parts of that parameter space so you can falsify specific values of SUSY parameters. However it is not possible to rule out all possible parameter values for SUSY. So, taken as a whole, SUSY is non-falsifiable.
However SUSY was formulated to solve a specific problem (related to the light Higgs mass, called the heirarchy or fine tuning problem) and has since been used to address others such as unification of the forces and dark matter which is why it is so attractive. What we can conceive of doing is ruling SUSY out as a solution to these. At this point it would essentially be a useless theory that solves none of the issues we would like to but that is not proof that nature doesn't have it tucked away in some corner of phase space.
In fact this is typically what happens to scientific theories that are "wrong". You exclude them to the point where they cannot solve the problem. However but that does not mean that you have falsified them, all you have done is make them boring possibilities. Examples which would will have heard of are probably unlikely because we are talking about theories which got dropped as uninteresting but the superweak force and technicolour are two such examples from particle physics.
Sorry to disappoint but it's been well established that God is an Englishman ;-)
Ah but this is the reassuring side. Deep down people are not idiots. When their safety and livelihoods are threatened any rejection of science goes out of the window. For example during the recent bird and swine flu epidemics there was nobody running around saying "but bird flu was created to infect birds it cannot evolve to infect humans". The only sad thing is that some 21st century kids may end up with a medieval education before these idiots come to their senses.
If a nuke were available, I've got no doubt that terrorists would have no trouble killing millions.
Why would they bother? Killing people is just the horrible means terrorists use to achieve their aims. The terrorists goals are usually to oppose the US' historical championing of freedom and democracy throughout the world. From what I see sitting well over 100 miles north of your border they don't need to bother anymore: if you can't support freedom and democracy in your own country you have zero credibility when you try to promote it to the rest of the world. The US might still be more free and more democratic than a lot of nations but to champion it you need a squeaky clean image not a "ho-hum and getting worse" one.
I'm sorry but you are completely wrong about what a theory is. Look it up in the dictionary: "A supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something". That's all a theory is. Scientific theories are ones which can explain how observed phenomena work and then use that explanation to predict behaviour of any system. The reason that religion is not a scientific theory is that it makes no predictions of future behaviour given a particular set of conditions. This is why scientific theories are generally falsifiable and religious ones are generally not: there is no predictive power. For example String Theory is a perfectly valid scientific theory in that it has the power to make predictions. However it does this about phenomena which we cannot (yet) observe. As the mathematical tools improve it may get to the point where we can test its predictions.
The theories that are taught at school (well outside Texas at least) are those scientific ones which have a strong history of making predictions which have been proven correct, sometimes to incredible precision. They are consistent with all known observations. This does not make them correct it just makes them the best explanation we have so far. If tomorrow some one does a new experiment which has never before been tried and the results differ from predictions based on those theories then we go back to the drawing board and try to come up with something better. This is now an extremely hard thing to do because any new theory has to explain all the previously observed phenomena correctly as well as the new observation.
Textbook publishers take note, you'll sell Texas a ton of books if you pander to our religious beliefs in your science books.
Perhaps but you are not going to be able to charge much if your text book on electromagnetism just contains the single sentence "Let there be light.".
Texas would like to think of it as a hypothesis or maybe a theorem. Or a rumor. Maybe a wacky folk story. "Darwin's Wise Tale of Evolution"
Perhaps we should repay the favour and think of Texas as a work of wacky fiction too (not a very good one though because it the story seems too unbelievable). In this case though I'd suggest "The Land that Time Forgot".
This is not the case for EM though. Quantum Electrodynamics is the second most stringently tested scientific theory ever (only special relativity has been tested to a higher precision). I also highly doubt that their intended review will involve getting a group of particle physicists, cosmologists and string theorists together to discuss ways that they can make the latest ideas in gravity and the other fundamental forces accessible to school kids (it would be quite inspiring if it was though!).
Oops - I should have said "reduce the coupling between Standard Model particles and SUSY particles"!
Supersymmetry is falsifiable.
Actually it isn't. Very few scientific theories are falsifiable. All I do is reduce the coupling between Standard Model particles to the point where they effectively never interact (or are even produced!) and there you do. You have a perfectly useless theory which addresses none of the problems you want it to but you have not proven it does not exist.
As I said its about impact factor. If and when open access journals get decent impact factors, researchers will be more inclined to use them.
It is not just about impact factor. I would not want to release a paper without a ND licence because a scientific paper is not the same as a book or manual. It is essentially scientific "speech" where you communicate your ideas to others. They are then free to take that idea and run with it but I do not want some random stranger downloading the paper, editing it to change those ideas and conclusions, and then resubmitting it with my name associated with it. If they want to write their own paper then great - use the data, argue that my conclusions are wrong etc. but you don't get to edit my paper even if you willingly acknowledge I wrote it you have to write your own so it is clear whose opinion is being expressed.
This is particularly true in more controversial fields - imagine what would happen in climate change or evolutionary fields if anyone can download, edit and then resubmit papers. You could completely alter the meaning of the paper and resubmit it with credit given to the original authors who, by implication, will appear to be supporting whatever you wrote.
Many world-class conferences (ICPR, for example) are charging up to USD 1000 for registration
This depends on your field. You would not get many particle physicists at a conference with a $1,000 registration fee!
Which is stupid, and is just a blatant illustration of the author's lack of vision and understanding of the world and of history.
Actually I would say it is pretty much to be expected. We don't really know what the major, ground breaking discoveries are today which will have a major impact on peoples lives 50 years from now. So I think it would be quite normal for a non-scientist to look around and not understand or see how todays discoveries might affect them in several decades time. In fact I don't even think us scientists can do that either - at least with any degree of accuracy.
The result is that when you look back with hindsight you see the "big breakthroughs" for what they really are but this is only possible with hind sight. Who knew that the transistor would revolutionize almost every aspect of day to day life when it was invented?
The only way you can reconcile faith (in anything, a god, your mother, a book) is to put artificial limitations on the applicable domain of science
Really. Suppose I tell you that I have faith that a scientific theory called Supersymmetry will be discovered at some point in the future. I accept that I could be wrong or that my current understanding of the concept of Supersymmetry might be flawed and will need to change when more data become available or may even possibly be ruled out altogether at some point (although really scientific theories are rarely every excluded they just get restricted to the point that they no longer solve the problem they were thought to). Is this faith in a scientific theory which has not yet been proven restricting science? If so I hoenstly cannot see why or how.
;-).
Now, why can't the same be true of religion. Why can't I treat it as a theory which has not yet been proven? I might need to adjust it as we collect more data and rule out certain things e.g. we know the world was not created in 6 days but dropping that literally hardly undermines the core of christianity and it is exactly what we do with scientific theories e.g. the Standard Model of particle physics was amended to include neutrino mixing with very little change to the overall theory.
Note that I did not say "scientific theory" because it is exceedingly hard to prove or disprove the claims of many religions so, in that respect, they are not scientific. Also this implies an acceptance that future evidence may prove your religious beliefs wrong - you might not believe that will happen but you have to accept it is a possibility. With those caveats where is the conflict? The last caveat might be wholly unacceptable to fundamentalists but if you are willing to accept this I don't see any conflict between science and religion: religion is just a theory which some believe to be true and others do not. The only significant difference is that there are no fundamentalist supersymmetrists who use violence against non-supersymmetrists (although I've been in one debate where it might have come close!
You need Python! You'll just fly over all those obstacles...at least until the medicine runs out.
Actually most students do not cheat. While the number of cheating incidents is sadly on the rise - probably by about a factor of 2-3 since I started as a prof 10 years ago - the vast majority of university students do not cheat. So while it is always bad to hear of cases like this it is worth getting a little perspective: many students work extremely hard for their degrees and we should not devalue that because some idiots insist on cheating.
When someone wins the lottery or gets a big bonus, they tend to throw a party and buy stuff for themselves AND their friends.
Exactly but my thought on reading the article is perhaps it is far more fun to be flying around the city by yourself rather than being stuck in a helicopter (which may have frustrating controls). If so perhaps all this experiment has shown is that when people are happy and content they are more willing to help out. Conversely if you have been frustrated and are unhappy you are probably less likely to be thinking about helping others.
Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb. He invented the first practical one that lasted a long time and didn't stink up your house.
He didn't even do that. He was a fantastic salesman though. So perhaps what has really happened is that inventors have become less colourful characters who can't make their inventions sound quite as fantastic due to the grey, uniform corporate world which lives in perpetual fear of law suits.
I wonder if they've also accidentally given Microsoft a perpetual license to the look-and-feel of their stores?
I doubt it reading the summary suggests that this might be Apple's revenge:
Apple has requested that no store be allowed to replicate various features, including 'a clear glass storefront surrounded by a panelled facade'
In other words they have managed to trademark windows! ;-)