Personally, I say that if a nuke is detonated on US soil and the material was found to have originated in Iran, we level them. Same for any other country that tried to pull something like that.
Great - so if a Russian nuke is stolen and detonated in the US we are going to have World War 3 then? What about the UK - would you nuke us too, or does this just apply to Iran because you don't believe that it really was "stolen"? The problem with this policy is that any state which can have nuclear weapons stolen from it clearly has nuclear weapons and can retaliate in-kind. A better solution would be to insist that the country gives up its nuclear stockpile - if you cannot secure the weapons then you do not get to keep them.
If the US were nuked and we traced the fuel back to the Iranian enrichment program, no one would care about the subtleties.
I can see that this would be the case if nuclear material was "stolen" and they said nothing. However suppose they informed the world that the material had been stolen? Even if it had happened accidentally-on-purpose unless you had proof that they deliberately allowed it to be stolen there is no way that the US or anyone else would be able to nuke them in retaliation. They could certainly put enormous pressure to bear to shutdown their nuclear program but beyond that, without proof, it would be very hard.
The question is not whether or not it is possible but whether or not it is realistic and practical.
Not only is it realistic and practical but it is already in use for data analysis! Everyone on the ATLAS experiment at CERN uses python to some degree in their analysis and my grad students and I use an analysis framework almost entirely in Python with ROOT for I/O.
You do not even need a war. If you have 200 nations wach with their own nuclear deterrent can be be sure that every single nuclear device is secure enough that it will never be stolen by a terrorist group? I agree that there seems to be some evidence that nuclear weapons seem to have effectively stopped large scale conflict (although I think there needs to be a longer period of peace before I'll be convinced). However I see considerable danger in trying to scale this unproven principle down to smaller, regional conflicts.
All this fuss about the font choice makes me more and more certain that we really are descended from the Golgafrincham B Ark. If Douglas Adams rewrote the Hitchhikers Guide today it would probably go:
Arthur: "...but you haven't even found the Higgs boson yet!" Golgafrincham: "Oh we discovered that years ago but we are still trying to find the optimal font and colour scheme to present the result with"
Also if you fly in executive class, you can carry bags of unlimited mass.
Not quite - you only get 32kg/bag, same as if you are a frequent flyer. So, by causing me to fly to CERN frequently, the Higgs has managed to increase my baggage allowance from 1x23 kg to 1x32 kg + 2x23 kg. Unfortunately, were you ever to be able to turn off the Higgs field, it would only decrease the mass of your bag by 0.1% (and radically alter their chemistry) so I think the frequent flyer route is definitely the most practical!
Yet when we observe something that doesn't match up with our predictions, we never take that as evidence that the universe is unpredictable.
Yes we do - that's exactly what happened with Quantum Mechanics! There is NO requirement in science that the universe be predictable, only that that the nature of that unpredictability be predictable!
Not true. The gravitational field of a mass may stretch out forever but there is nothing to stop you from placing a second mass such that its gravitational field precisely cancels the first gravitational field at a single point. At this point there will be zero gravitational field.
You've violated the conservation of momentum. There is no need to answer the second part of your statement because it is irrelevant. Remember F = dp/dt.
You have not violated any conservation law. First look at what you just wrote: F = dp/dt. So if there is an external force acting on the system dp/dt !=0 i.e. the rate of change of momentum is not zero. Only a system with no external forces has a constant momentum. An even easier way to see that there is no problem (classically at least): reduce the mass while at rest when v=0 this way momentum remains a constant zero before and after.
However the whole premise is flawed because only 0.1% of the mass of a proton or neutron (which is where almost all the mass of atoms comes from) is due to the Higgs. So, even if you could shield something from the Higgs its mass would decrease by 0.1% but all the energy states of the electrons would change due to their suddenly relativistic nature so the chemistry of the object would radically alter which is probably not a good thing to have happen.
For example, look at the binding energy of the electron in the atom. It is flat out proportional to the electron mass. A zero-mass electron could not be bound at all.
I understand exactly why you say this but there is one thing which you've forgotten about. If you have a zero mass electron then it is relativistic which means that you cannot use the Schrodinger equation which is what gives the energy vs. mass relationship you are quoting. Instead you have to use the Dirac equation to calculate the bound states. These will look different but they will exist. The quarks in a proton are in this situation. Their masses are a lot less than the energy of the field which binds them so they are relativistic.
I'm not disputing the accuracy of your claim, I'm just saying that if you hope to educate people about science, ur doin it wrong.
My claim is that to understand why the Higgs is important you have to understand the difference between weight and mass. Either you are disputing that or your english is worse than your physics. If you think that the Higgs gives things weight you are getting completely the wrong picture. It is not semantics - it is fundamental to the way the physics works! If you think it's ok to let someone's miscomprehension stand because it might offend them if you correct it then I don't think you really understand education. I know this bucks many modern educational trends where it is deemed better to engage than to educate but I'm not someone who agrees with that philosophy.
it is generally considered rude to correct someone on a small mistake when nothing of importance is at stake
I understand that but what I keep telling you is that when talking about the Higgs the difference between mass and weight is NOT a "small mistake" it is critical to understanding what the Higgs does. It's an important part of the "Big Idea". You seem to be unable to accept that for some reason I cannot fathom. If you'd spend the time to read up about the Higgs mechanism and understand how it works then perhaps you could find out for yourself that the difference is rather important since you clearly have a problem with being told.
Correcting someone about the mass/weight difference when they are making a joke, is, indeed, pointless.
...or could be viewed as an opportunity to provide some education. If you never get your mistakes corrected then how will you ever learn not to make them? I would not correct someone using weight vs. mass in an everyday context but, when discussing physics, the language is precise and it is important to be correct. When you are keen and passionate about science you want to share that understanding with others not sit back and let them muddle on in half comprehension as you suggest. The reason for this is because, without that comprehension, you can see no more of the grandeur of science that you can see of the grandeur of the Mona Lisa through a sheet of frosted glass.
I said you were wrong for derailing the topic to make the point.
The topic was the Higgs which explains mass, not weight. So again I fail to see how this is derailing the topic - it was correcting a very relevant misconception highly relevant to the topic being discussed.
This kind of pedantry is what annoys me about the way people teach physics.....Finding pointless minutia to criticize...
That's ok, this kind of willful ignorance annoys me! The difference between mass and weight is NOT "pointless minutiae" they are fundamentally different physical things - one which the Higgs boson can explain and one which it cannot. It cannot possibly be more central and critical to the topic being discussed! I get that you do not understand the difference between the two and it does not surprise me - this difference is subtle and hard to grasp and was something I struggled with when first learning physics. However to refuse to listen and learn and to continue to deny that the difference is important frankly puts you in the same willful-ignorance category as the creationists when they deny evolution because "they know better". You might _think_ you know better but if you'd open up your mind just a crack and go and look up what the difference between weight and mass and how that relates to the Higgs you might discover how wrong you are to dismiss the difference as "pointless minutiae".
Therefore, the Higgs field, while not binding the universe together, is vital for gravity to do so.
Not really - most of the mass in matter comes from the binding energy of the quarks in protons and neutrons, less than 0.1% comes from the Higgs. Turning off the Higgs field (which would require enormous energies) would have very little impact on the total mass of objects.
The mass of the Higgs boson is just the energy needed to make the Higgs field vibrate. The reason that the Higgs field gives particles mass is that, at its lowest energy level, the value of the Higgs field is not zero and this non-zero field then fills the universe and binds to particles giving them mass.
Hence the mass of each type of particle depends on the zero energy value (vacuum expectation value) of the Higgs field and how strongly the particle couples to it while the mass of the Higgs boson depends on how the energy density of the Higgs field changes as the strength of the field varies.
No actually it is quite easy to say - you stopped being a country on the frontier with lots of virgin territory (both literal and figurative) to expand into and became an adolescent country with established business interests that fight tooth and nail against any new, entrepreneurial ideas that threaten their business model.
On the good side your spirit still seems to be there - look at the boom created by the new virtual territory of the internet which allowed original ideas to flourish briefly again because the established interests did not see it as a threat. Of course now it has its own established interests and, if you start something new and successful, you'll be snowed under by patent court cases until you are bought out or shut down.
However this is a member of the EU and which has treaties with the UK....Stop being so parochial and xenophobic.
Ah the irony! Isn't Sweden being exactly that: parochial and xenophobic? Why can't they question Assange on UK soil to determine whether he needs to face charges and THEN extradite him? If their laws prevent that then I would argue their laws are extremely parochial and xenophobic - what makes UK soil a less worthy place to conduct questioning - we are all in the EU after all.
As I said I've no concerns about the US conspiracy theory - that is Assange being paranoid - but why does Sweden need to be so obstreperous and insist than any questioning must take place in Sweden, especially after they already let him go. I'm sure Assange will be dealt with fairly in Sweden, in accordance with Swedish law. My only point is why not avoid this circus if you can by interviewing him in the UK first to see if he actually needs to be extradited to face charges? Sweden might have the right to extradite him to face questions - and as a fellow EU member I've zero problem with them having that right - but that does not make it the most sensible thing to do.
In both of the examples you give the individuals were physically present in the foreign country and so, at last in theory, could have committed a crime there. The US-UK extradition treaty allows for UK citizens who have never been to the US and who have not committed any act which is illegal in the UK, to be extradited to the US because what they did in the UK is illegal under US law.
This is very different from the issue of corrupt officials - this is a question about who gets to determine what is, and what is not, legal in the UK.
In Sweden, the US only needs to request a "temporary transfer"
Wrong. If you are in Sweden normally that might be the case but if you are extradited there under a European arrest warrant the country from which you were extradited MUST agree to any further extradition. Hence to be extradited to the US from Sweden both the Sweden AND the UK must agree so you have just made things harder, not easier.
Sorry if it annoys you but the distinction is really important here and not mindless pedantry. The Higgs explains _mass_ it does not explain _weight_ because weight is far more complicated and we need quantum gravity to really explain that. Also the poster is wrong - the pound (as used) is a unit of weight, not mass and the poster's confusion arises from the broken, inconsistent definitions of the imperial system.
If this were true, then atoms would have negative mass. Binding energy isn't extra energy required to bind the particles together
Welcome to Quantum Chromodynamics! There is no "free quark" state to measure binding energy against in quark systems so the usual usage is to refer to the binding energy as the energy in the QCD field between the quarks. Effectively all this means is that we use a different zero point for the binding energy because the one use with EM or protons/neutrons makes no sense when dealing with quarks.
There is the "E=mc^2" type of mass and the resistance to acceleration "F=ma" mass.
These are the same types of mass. I think what you mean is the gravitational-inertial mass equivalence principle from General Relativity (E=mc^2 is from Special Relativity) and we can't say why these are the same until we have a working theory of quantum gravity. So, with the Higgs, we can say that we know why energy and mass are equivalent but we cannot explain why gravitational and inertial mass is the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I say that if a nuke is detonated on US soil and the material was found to have originated in Iran, we level them. Same for any other country that tried to pull something like that.
Great - so if a Russian nuke is stolen and detonated in the US we are going to have World War 3 then? What about the UK - would you nuke us too, or does this just apply to Iran because you don't believe that it really was "stolen"? The problem with this policy is that any state which can have nuclear weapons stolen from it clearly has nuclear weapons and can retaliate in-kind. A better solution would be to insist that the country gives up its nuclear stockpile - if you cannot secure the weapons then you do not get to keep them.
If the US were nuked and we traced the fuel back to the Iranian enrichment program, no one would care about the subtleties.
I can see that this would be the case if nuclear material was "stolen" and they said nothing. However suppose they informed the world that the material had been stolen? Even if it had happened accidentally-on-purpose unless you had proof that they deliberately allowed it to be stolen there is no way that the US or anyone else would be able to nuke them in retaliation. They could certainly put enormous pressure to bear to shutdown their nuclear program but beyond that, without proof, it would be very hard.
The question is not whether or not it is possible but whether or not it is realistic and practical.
Not only is it realistic and practical but it is already in use for data analysis! Everyone on the ATLAS experiment at CERN uses python to some degree in their analysis and my grad students and I use an analysis framework almost entirely in Python with ROOT for I/O.
Or what if it's the wrong person with your name?
That's not always a bad thing - may be I'll get some free upgrades out of it! ;-)
Even when they are, war still finds a way.
You do not even need a war. If you have 200 nations wach with their own nuclear deterrent can be be sure that every single nuclear device is secure enough that it will never be stolen by a terrorist group? I agree that there seems to be some evidence that nuclear weapons seem to have effectively stopped large scale conflict (although I think there needs to be a longer period of peace before I'll be convinced). However I see considerable danger in trying to scale this unproven principle down to smaller, regional conflicts.
All this fuss about the font choice makes me more and more certain that we really are descended from the Golgafrincham B Ark. If Douglas Adams rewrote the Hitchhikers Guide today it would probably go:
Arthur: "...but you haven't even found the Higgs boson yet!"
Golgafrincham: "Oh we discovered that years ago but we are still trying to find the optimal font and colour scheme to present the result with"
Also if you fly in executive class, you can carry bags of unlimited mass.
Not quite - you only get 32kg/bag, same as if you are a frequent flyer. So, by causing me to fly to CERN frequently, the Higgs has managed to increase my baggage allowance from 1x23 kg to 1x32 kg + 2x23 kg. Unfortunately, were you ever to be able to turn off the Higgs field, it would only decrease the mass of your bag by 0.1% (and radically alter their chemistry) so I think the frequent flyer route is definitely the most practical!
Yet when we observe something that doesn't match up with our predictions, we never take that as evidence that the universe is unpredictable.
Yes we do - that's exactly what happened with Quantum Mechanics! There is NO requirement in science that the universe be predictable, only that that the nature of that unpredictability be predictable!
There is ALWAYS a gravitational field.
Not true. The gravitational field of a mass may stretch out forever but there is nothing to stop you from placing a second mass such that its gravitational field precisely cancels the first gravitational field at a single point. At this point there will be zero gravitational field.
You've violated the conservation of momentum. There is no need to answer the second part of your statement because it is irrelevant. Remember F = dp/dt.
You have not violated any conservation law. First look at what you just wrote: F = dp/dt. So if there is an external force acting on the system dp/dt !=0 i.e. the rate of change of momentum is not zero. Only a system with no external forces has a constant momentum. An even easier way to see that there is no problem (classically at least): reduce the mass while at rest when v=0 this way momentum remains a constant zero before and after.
However the whole premise is flawed because only 0.1% of the mass of a proton or neutron (which is where almost all the mass of atoms comes from) is due to the Higgs. So, even if you could shield something from the Higgs its mass would decrease by 0.1% but all the energy states of the electrons would change due to their suddenly relativistic nature so the chemistry of the object would radically alter which is probably not a good thing to have happen.
For example, look at the binding energy of the electron in the atom. It is flat out proportional to the electron mass. A zero-mass electron could not be bound at all.
I understand exactly why you say this but there is one thing which you've forgotten about. If you have a zero mass electron then it is relativistic which means that you cannot use the Schrodinger equation which is what gives the energy vs. mass relationship you are quoting. Instead you have to use the Dirac equation to calculate the bound states. These will look different but they will exist. The quarks in a proton are in this situation. Their masses are a lot less than the energy of the field which binds them so they are relativistic.
I'm not disputing the accuracy of your claim, I'm just saying that if you hope to educate people about science, ur doin it wrong.
My claim is that to understand why the Higgs is important you have to understand the difference between weight and mass. Either you are disputing that or your english is worse than your physics. If you think that the Higgs gives things weight you are getting completely the wrong picture. It is not semantics - it is fundamental to the way the physics works! If you think it's ok to let someone's miscomprehension stand because it might offend them if you correct it then I don't think you really understand education. I know this bucks many modern educational trends where it is deemed better to engage than to educate but I'm not someone who agrees with that philosophy.
it is generally considered rude to correct someone on a small mistake when nothing of importance is at stake
I understand that but what I keep telling you is that when talking about the Higgs the difference between mass and weight is NOT a "small mistake" it is critical to understanding what the Higgs does. It's an important part of the "Big Idea". You seem to be unable to accept that for some reason I cannot fathom. If you'd spend the time to read up about the Higgs mechanism and understand how it works then perhaps you could find out for yourself that the difference is rather important since you clearly have a problem with being told.
Correcting someone about the mass/weight difference when they are making a joke, is, indeed, pointless.
I said you were wrong for derailing the topic to make the point.
The topic was the Higgs which explains mass, not weight. So again I fail to see how this is derailing the topic - it was correcting a very relevant misconception highly relevant to the topic being discussed.
This kind of pedantry is what annoys me about the way people teach physics.....Finding pointless minutia to criticize...
That's ok, this kind of willful ignorance annoys me! The difference between mass and weight is NOT "pointless minutiae" they are fundamentally different physical things - one which the Higgs boson can explain and one which it cannot. It cannot possibly be more central and critical to the topic being discussed! I get that you do not understand the difference between the two and it does not surprise me - this difference is subtle and hard to grasp and was something I struggled with when first learning physics. However to refuse to listen and learn and to continue to deny that the difference is important frankly puts you in the same willful-ignorance category as the creationists when they deny evolution because "they know better". You might _think_ you know better but if you'd open up your mind just a crack and go and look up what the difference between weight and mass and how that relates to the Higgs you might discover how wrong you are to dismiss the difference as "pointless minutiae".
Therefore, the Higgs field, while not binding the universe together, is vital for gravity to do so.
Not really - most of the mass in matter comes from the binding energy of the quarks in protons and neutrons, less than 0.1% comes from the Higgs. Turning off the Higgs field (which would require enormous energies) would have very little impact on the total mass of objects.
The mass of the Higgs boson is just the energy needed to make the Higgs field vibrate. The reason that the Higgs field gives particles mass is that, at its lowest energy level, the value of the Higgs field is not zero and this non-zero field then fills the universe and binds to particles giving them mass.
Hence the mass of each type of particle depends on the zero energy value (vacuum expectation value) of the Higgs field and how strongly the particle couples to it while the mass of the Higgs boson depends on how the energy density of the Higgs field changes as the strength of the field varies.
Hard to say
No actually it is quite easy to say - you stopped being a country on the frontier with lots of virgin territory (both literal and figurative) to expand into and became an adolescent country with established business interests that fight tooth and nail against any new, entrepreneurial ideas that threaten their business model.
On the good side your spirit still seems to be there - look at the boom created by the new virtual territory of the internet which allowed original ideas to flourish briefly again because the established interests did not see it as a threat. Of course now it has its own established interests and, if you start something new and successful, you'll be snowed under by patent court cases until you are bought out or shut down.
However this is a member of the EU and which has treaties with the UK....Stop being so parochial and xenophobic.
Ah the irony! Isn't Sweden being exactly that: parochial and xenophobic? Why can't they question Assange on UK soil to determine whether he needs to face charges and THEN extradite him? If their laws prevent that then I would argue their laws are extremely parochial and xenophobic - what makes UK soil a less worthy place to conduct questioning - we are all in the EU after all.
As I said I've no concerns about the US conspiracy theory - that is Assange being paranoid - but why does Sweden need to be so obstreperous and insist than any questioning must take place in Sweden, especially after they already let him go. I'm sure Assange will be dealt with fairly in Sweden, in accordance with Swedish law. My only point is why not avoid this circus if you can by interviewing him in the UK first to see if he actually needs to be extradited to face charges? Sweden might have the right to extradite him to face questions - and as a fellow EU member I've zero problem with them having that right - but that does not make it the most sensible thing to do.
That's unfair. Why single the US out?
In both of the examples you give the individuals were physically present in the foreign country and so, at last in theory, could have committed a crime there. The US-UK extradition treaty allows for UK citizens who have never been to the US and who have not committed any act which is illegal in the UK, to be extradited to the US because what they did in the UK is illegal under US law.
This is very different from the issue of corrupt officials - this is a question about who gets to determine what is, and what is not, legal in the UK.
In Sweden, the US only needs to request a "temporary transfer"
Wrong. If you are in Sweden normally that might be the case but if you are extradited there under a European arrest warrant the country from which you were extradited MUST agree to any further extradition. Hence to be extradited to the US from Sweden both the Sweden AND the UK must agree so you have just made things harder, not easier.
That type of pedantry annoys the shit out of me.
Sorry if it annoys you but the distinction is really important here and not mindless pedantry. The Higgs explains _mass_ it does not explain _weight_ because weight is far more complicated and we need quantum gravity to really explain that. Also the poster is wrong - the pound (as used) is a unit of weight, not mass and the poster's confusion arises from the broken, inconsistent definitions of the imperial system.
If this were true, then atoms would have negative mass. Binding energy isn't extra energy required to bind the particles together
Welcome to Quantum Chromodynamics! There is no "free quark" state to measure binding energy against in quark systems so the usual usage is to refer to the binding energy as the energy in the QCD field between the quarks. Effectively all this means is that we use a different zero point for the binding energy because the one use with EM or protons/neutrons makes no sense when dealing with quarks.
There is the "E=mc^2" type of mass and the resistance to acceleration "F=ma" mass.
These are the same types of mass. I think what you mean is the gravitational-inertial mass equivalence principle from General Relativity (E=mc^2 is from Special Relativity) and we can't say why these are the same until we have a working theory of quantum gravity. So, with the Higgs, we can say that we know why energy and mass are equivalent but we cannot explain why gravitational and inertial mass is the same.