Well you wouldn't launch from just *any* airport... you always launch eastward to gain speed from earth's rotation.
That depends on what the purpose of your flight is. If you want to get into orbit you are correct but if you just want a sub-orbital hop between two points on the Earth's surface it doesn't really matter and given the current lack of large passenger destinations in orbit I would guess that this is the most likely initial application.
Far from advising xenophobia, I'd still like to point out that US is a fucking big country. Most people in Europe, for example, have no idea what a "fucking big country" is.
You mean like Russia that is actually in Europe (at least the part that fits given that it is so large it spreads over two continents), contains 10 time zones, and has a land area almost twice that of the US?
...but if you lose big, shouldn't be able to claim it's illegal to gamble in your backyard or tiny county where you're one of 3 residents who just voted on the measure yesterday.
Why not? If a company chooses to do business with residents of a sovereign nation then it has to accept the laws of that nation. Balance is achieved because, if some tiny nation abuses this power (e.g. by suddenly changing the law to avoid paying a debt), it would rapidly find itself with nobody willing to do business with it. In fact in effect big nations already do this. They get into debt by borrowing and, when they run low on money to pay it off they just print money, call the process something fancy like "quantitive easing" and use this to pay the debt. If they do this too much though then nobody will lend them any money, their currency becomes worthless and hyper inflation takes over.
The conditions that the LHC can recreate are unique in that they are thought to have been present only during the Big Bang.
Actually really high energy cosmic rays recreate LHC collision energies everytime they hit a planet, star or any other material object. There are not very many of them but they can actually exceed LHC energies by quite a few orders of magnitude. Some large scale cosmic ray detectors get to study these but in nowhere near as much detail as we get to at the LHC but they do have some really cool detectors to play with such as a cubic kilometre of ice several kilometres under the south pole.
So to answer the OP the universe almost certainly does create this type of matter but on Earth only high up in the atmosphere perhaps only a few times per year per square kilometre which makes it impossible to find.
I know its just the heading, but the whole "new matter" vs "new TYPE of matter" is kind of an important distinction.
It depends on what the result is due to. Quark-gluon-plasma is really a phase of matter and, in fact, not really that new since it was discovered in jet-quench events at the LHC several years ago. If it is a colour-glass condensate then you could argue that this is a new type of matter since it is essentially something constructed out of gluons.
This happens, more or less, because if you get one outgoing particle with very high energy, but it is an unstable particle, its decay products will tend to be moving in roughly the same direction
Not really - the particles (quarks or gluons in this case) can be perfectly stable. The problem is that the colour field that surrounds them acts like a really, really strong electric field. So strong that as the quark is blasted away from its opposite charged partner the energy in the field becomes so large that it is energetically favourable to create quark/anti-quark pairs and shrink the size of the field. This is why even up and down quarks produce jets despite being stable.
This is unexpected, and unexpected results == SCIENCE!
In a sane setup, the US regulators would go and prosecute US residents who used illegal services
A simpler way would simply to make any debts associated with locally illegal services unenforceable. That way everyone's laws can stick to their own borders and it becomes very hard to offer services from one country where they are legal to another where they are not.
It would probably help more to know how they got hold of the support line. Everywhere the number is given there should be some clear text indicating that there is a support fee required to use it. If you just advertise the line as "call us for support" and then hit them for a fee when they call it might annoy some users who are unaware of the usual Open Source model and intellectually challenged enough to not see reason when you explain.
If you are making it clear in all the locations where the number is given then introduce a premium rate number and have that as the public one with a normal rate line whose number is private available to paying customers. If your users don't read the explanation around the support number then they won't see the explanation that they are calling a premium rate number either but at least this way the default is that they pay.
Let the "vaccine-carrying" virus be infectious, using people as "immunity carriers".
I imagine that will be exceedingly hard to achieve. You need to make a virus which triggers an immune response but which does not get wiped out by it to the point where it is no longer transmissible. At the same time, since the virus will remain within you all your life, you have to ensure that any future event which might suppress your immune system will not cause the virus to flare up and cause an illness.
I could imagine medicine perhaps achieving the first two goals but how can you be sure that you have solved the last one without large scale trials which, by the very nature of the virus, would involve all humanity? In fact even if you had a non-infectious virus providing the immunity I imagine it will be a long time before we know whether it is safe for large scale use because you need to have your trial subjects live a good portion of their lives because the virus will be with them for their entire life and may mutate and/or flare up.
Yes, it is illegal, because it causes avoidable and irreparable damage to school property. And is it really harmless if it is deadly for any living being inside of the microwave?
Why are you limited to microwaves? There is a bike path near where I live that passes underneath some high voltage power lines. The induced EMF across the gap in a small, insulated metal ring wrapped around one of my handlebars is enough to generate a mild electric shock. This is very likely enough to damage an RFID device and is only one example where any member of the public can encounter what are normally harmless EM fields.
They're doing the best they can do at the moment while staying legal...
So exposure to certain, harmless forms of EM radiation is now illegal because it might damage the school property that you are required to wear? Not to mention the possibility of using a passive metal screen to simply block the signal as some do with passports...seems you were not smart enough to consider that possibility even when it was pointed out to you.
It's all about numbers, shares, dollars and control of data.
Don't forget technically legal (for the moment) tax evasion. I suppose that might be covered by dollars although expecting others to pay for the public infrastructure you us is hardly fair and could well be considered somewhat evil.
Given that the school claims to be a "Science and Engineering Academy" surely it isn't that hard for the students to figure out how to disable the RFID chips either by passive screening, hammer or quick zap in the microwave? That way the idiots in charge can go on in blissful ignorance and the students don't get tracked remotely but still have the ID card functionality.
Indeed it is terrifying - it's clear that their spelling is already invading Canada. We already seem to have lost our centre, we'll soon be colourless and before you know it Thanksgiving will be in November.
...they go off campaigning in Las Vegas. Then when people ask them about it, they duck and cover and say they are conducting their own investigation. So much for "the most transparent administration in history...."
Encase in 1 ton of copper, dump LHC beams and turkey gets cooked by molten copper. Exceedingly rapid but has the disadvantage that apart from the difficulty in extracting the turkey from the copper it will also be slightly radioactive due to the activation by the beams.
Arrow of Time confirmed... Wheel of Time fans disappointed.
Physicists on the CPLEAR experiment will be disappointed as well - they actually discovered this effect (called T-violation) back in the 1990's before Babar was running by looking at kaon oscillations produced in low energy proton/antiproton collisions [Phys. Lett. B 444 43 (1998)]. So Babar was certainly not the first experiment to see the "arrow of time" although it is the first to do so using B mesons.
The arrow of time is the reason why random bits of shrapnel and chemicals don't fly together and "un-detonate" to become hand grenades.
No, that is entropy. The reason that balls fall off tables and rarely bounce onto them (when provided with enough heat energy) is because there are many, many more states where the balls atoms vibrate incoherently and only one state (or a tiny handful) where the vibrations are organized enough to cause it to bounce back onto the table.
With mesons you can study a particle oscillating between two states. What you find is that the P(A -> B) is not equal to the P(B -> A) where B is the anti-particle state of A and there is no entropy involved. It's all to do with something called CPT symmetry which is a result of relativity and, since CP together are violated (anti-matter is not exactly the same as matter) we expect that T (time reversal symmetry) is also violated so this is an expected result.
I'm actually surprised that it just asks for kids. Given their established record I would have thought the question should really be "Do you have any kids or MPs in the house?".
Crap, now the Environmentalists are going to get involved. It will never be built now.
...or the military will get involved so it is far more likely to happen. Although I have to say I am somewhat worried about letting them develop a device can destroy planets especially since it would also let them leave this one.
A replacement which has approximately five times as many doesn't seem too desirable to me.
Actually I used to feel the same way - that ultimately we should have a theory with 0-1 free parameters until a colleague pointed out another possibility. Suppose you have a universe where there are many free parameters but, ultimately, the physics ends up being pretty similar regardless of their actual choice? Since then I've been a lot less hung up on the idea of free parameters despite the fact that neither scenario is applicable to SUSY!
SUSY was invented to explain why the Higgs mass is around 126 GeV/c2 (assuming it is the Higgs we have found) while gravity gets important around 10^18 GeV. If there is nothing else but the SM and Gravity then you have to have a truly amazing coincidence equivalent to winning the UK national lottery about 5 times in a row. While this is technically possible if someone won the lottery that many times in a row you would not be thinking "wow, what a coincidence" but "how did the manage to do that?". It's the same with physics: nobody believes that this is the result of random chance but that there has to be some mechanism by which the universe makes the Higgs mass so small compared to gravity.
Interestingly SUSY does not stop there. It also provides an excellent Dark Matter candidate, makes the weak, strong and EM forces unify at a single point and also turns out to the highest order symmetry possible in our space-time...but it was not conceived of to do any of this at all! When "coincidences" like this happen you really start to feel that you are onto something big so the hope is that some model of SUSY is out there in the universe despite the issue with the ~120 free parameters (which would very likely rapidly decrease from 120 if SUSY were found).
...and is not convinced by a paper looking solely at genetics, not actual intelligence, which ends with the sentence 'But in the meantime I’m going to have another beer and watch my favorite rerun of “Miami CSI” (if I can figure out how to work the remote control).' While this does seem to offer evidence of decreasing professionalism in geneticists I'm not sure I would equate that to intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
Well you wouldn't launch from just *any* airport... you always launch eastward to gain speed from earth's rotation.
That depends on what the purpose of your flight is. If you want to get into orbit you are correct but if you just want a sub-orbital hop between two points on the Earth's surface it doesn't really matter and given the current lack of large passenger destinations in orbit I would guess that this is the most likely initial application.
Far from advising xenophobia, I'd still like to point out that US is a fucking big country. Most people in Europe, for example, have no idea what a "fucking big country" is.
You mean like Russia that is actually in Europe (at least the part that fits given that it is so large it spreads over two continents), contains 10 time zones, and has a land area almost twice that of the US?
...but if you lose big, shouldn't be able to claim it's illegal to gamble in your backyard or tiny county where you're one of 3 residents who just voted on the measure yesterday.
Why not? If a company chooses to do business with residents of a sovereign nation then it has to accept the laws of that nation. Balance is achieved because, if some tiny nation abuses this power (e.g. by suddenly changing the law to avoid paying a debt), it would rapidly find itself with nobody willing to do business with it. In fact in effect big nations already do this. They get into debt by borrowing and, when they run low on money to pay it off they just print money, call the process something fancy like "quantitive easing" and use this to pay the debt. If they do this too much though then nobody will lend them any money, their currency becomes worthless and hyper inflation takes over.
The conditions that the LHC can recreate are unique in that they are thought to have been present only during the Big Bang.
Actually really high energy cosmic rays recreate LHC collision energies everytime they hit a planet, star or any other material object. There are not very many of them but they can actually exceed LHC energies by quite a few orders of magnitude. Some large scale cosmic ray detectors get to study these but in nowhere near as much detail as we get to at the LHC but they do have some really cool detectors to play with such as a cubic kilometre of ice several kilometres under the south pole.
So to answer the OP the universe almost certainly does create this type of matter but on Earth only high up in the atmosphere perhaps only a few times per year per square kilometre which makes it impossible to find.
I know its just the heading, but the whole "new matter" vs "new TYPE of matter" is kind of an important distinction.
It depends on what the result is due to. Quark-gluon-plasma is really a phase of matter and, in fact, not really that new since it was discovered in jet-quench events at the LHC several years ago. If it is a colour-glass condensate then you could argue that this is a new type of matter since it is essentially something constructed out of gluons.
This happens, more or less, because if you get one outgoing particle with very high energy, but it is an unstable particle, its decay products will tend to be moving in roughly the same direction
Not really - the particles (quarks or gluons in this case) can be perfectly stable. The problem is that the colour field that surrounds them acts like a really, really strong electric field. So strong that as the quark is blasted away from its opposite charged partner the energy in the field becomes so large that it is energetically favourable to create quark/anti-quark pairs and shrink the size of the field. This is why even up and down quarks produce jets despite being stable.
This is unexpected, and unexpected results == SCIENCE!
In a sane setup, the US regulators would go and prosecute US residents who used illegal services
A simpler way would simply to make any debts associated with locally illegal services unenforceable. That way everyone's laws can stick to their own borders and it becomes very hard to offer services from one country where they are legal to another where they are not.
It might help if you told us who you were.
It would probably help more to know how they got hold of the support line. Everywhere the number is given there should be some clear text indicating that there is a support fee required to use it. If you just advertise the line as "call us for support" and then hit them for a fee when they call it might annoy some users who are unaware of the usual Open Source model and intellectually challenged enough to not see reason when you explain.
If you are making it clear in all the locations where the number is given then introduce a premium rate number and have that as the public one with a normal rate line whose number is private available to paying customers. If your users don't read the explanation around the support number then they won't see the explanation that they are calling a premium rate number either but at least this way the default is that they pay.
Let the "vaccine-carrying" virus be infectious, using people as "immunity carriers".
I imagine that will be exceedingly hard to achieve. You need to make a virus which triggers an immune response but which does not get wiped out by it to the point where it is no longer transmissible. At the same time, since the virus will remain within you all your life, you have to ensure that any future event which might suppress your immune system will not cause the virus to flare up and cause an illness.
I could imagine medicine perhaps achieving the first two goals but how can you be sure that you have solved the last one without large scale trials which, by the very nature of the virus, would involve all humanity? In fact even if you had a non-infectious virus providing the immunity I imagine it will be a long time before we know whether it is safe for large scale use because you need to have your trial subjects live a good portion of their lives because the virus will be with them for their entire life and may mutate and/or flare up.
Yes, it is illegal, because it causes avoidable and irreparable damage to school property. And is it really harmless if it is deadly for any living being inside of the microwave?
Why are you limited to microwaves? There is a bike path near where I live that passes underneath some high voltage power lines. The induced EMF across the gap in a small, insulated metal ring wrapped around one of my handlebars is enough to generate a mild electric shock. This is very likely enough to damage an RFID device and is only one example where any member of the public can encounter what are normally harmless EM fields.
And get expelled for destruction of school property, great idea.
How does a passive EM shield destroy school property?
They're doing the best they can do at the moment while staying legal...
So exposure to certain, harmless forms of EM radiation is now illegal because it might damage the school property that you are required to wear? Not to mention the possibility of using a passive metal screen to simply block the signal as some do with passports...seems you were not smart enough to consider that possibility even when it was pointed out to you.
It's all about numbers, shares, dollars and control of data.
Don't forget technically legal (for the moment) tax evasion. I suppose that might be covered by dollars although expecting others to pay for the public infrastructure you us is hardly fair and could well be considered somewhat evil.
Given that the school claims to be a "Science and Engineering Academy" surely it isn't that hard for the students to figure out how to disable the RFID chips either by passive screening, hammer or quick zap in the microwave? That way the idiots in charge can go on in blissful ignorance and the students don't get tracked remotely but still have the ID card functionality.
Indeed it is terrifying - it's clear that their spelling is already invading Canada. We already seem to have lost our centre, we'll soon be colourless and before you know it Thanksgiving will be in November.
...they go off campaigning in Las Vegas. Then when people ask them about it, they duck and cover and say they are conducting their own investigation. So much for "the most transparent administration in history...."
Well you saw through them didn't you?
Encase in 1 ton of copper, dump LHC beams and turkey gets cooked by molten copper. Exceedingly rapid but has the disadvantage that apart from the difficulty in extracting the turkey from the copper it will also be slightly radioactive due to the activation by the beams.
...and the TFA is wrong. Read the paper.
Arrow of Time confirmed... Wheel of Time fans disappointed.
Physicists on the CPLEAR experiment will be disappointed as well - they actually discovered this effect (called T-violation) back in the 1990's before Babar was running by looking at kaon oscillations produced in low energy proton/antiproton collisions [Phys. Lett. B 444 43 (1998)]. So Babar was certainly not the first experiment to see the "arrow of time" although it is the first to do so using B mesons.
The arrow of time is the reason why random bits of shrapnel and chemicals don't fly together and "un-detonate" to become hand grenades.
No, that is entropy. The reason that balls fall off tables and rarely bounce onto them (when provided with enough heat energy) is because there are many, many more states where the balls atoms vibrate incoherently and only one state (or a tiny handful) where the vibrations are organized enough to cause it to bounce back onto the table.
With mesons you can study a particle oscillating between two states. What you find is that the P(A -> B) is not equal to the P(B -> A) where B is the anti-particle state of A and there is no entropy involved. It's all to do with something called CPT symmetry which is a result of relativity and, since CP together are violated (anti-matter is not exactly the same as matter) we expect that T (time reversal symmetry) is also violated so this is an expected result.
I'm actually surprised that it just asks for kids. Given their established record I would have thought the question should really be "Do you have any kids or MPs in the house?".
Crap, now the Environmentalists are going to get involved. It will never be built now.
That's hard to answer because I don't understand why you would expect it to be infinite.
A replacement which has approximately five times as many doesn't seem too desirable to me.
Actually I used to feel the same way - that ultimately we should have a theory with 0-1 free parameters until a colleague pointed out another possibility. Suppose you have a universe where there are many free parameters but, ultimately, the physics ends up being pretty similar regardless of their actual choice? Since then I've been a lot less hung up on the idea of free parameters despite the fact that neither scenario is applicable to SUSY!
SUSY was invented to explain why the Higgs mass is around 126 GeV/c2 (assuming it is the Higgs we have found) while gravity gets important around 10^18 GeV. If there is nothing else but the SM and Gravity then you have to have a truly amazing coincidence equivalent to winning the UK national lottery about 5 times in a row. While this is technically possible if someone won the lottery that many times in a row you would not be thinking "wow, what a coincidence" but "how did the manage to do that?". It's the same with physics: nobody believes that this is the result of random chance but that there has to be some mechanism by which the universe makes the Higgs mass so small compared to gravity.
Interestingly SUSY does not stop there. It also provides an excellent Dark Matter candidate, makes the weak, strong and EM forces unify at a single point and also turns out to the highest order symmetry possible in our space-time...but it was not conceived of to do any of this at all! When "coincidences" like this happen you really start to feel that you are onto something big so the hope is that some model of SUSY is out there in the universe despite the issue with the ~120 free parameters (which would very likely rapidly decrease from 120 if SUSY were found).
*looks at evidence of increasing IQs and increasingly complex scientific achievements*
...and is not convinced by a paper looking solely at genetics, not actual intelligence, which ends with the sentence 'But in the meantime I’m going to have another beer and watch my favorite rerun of “Miami CSI” (if I can figure out how to work the remote control).' While this does seem to offer evidence of decreasing professionalism in geneticists I'm not sure I would equate that to intelligence.