Remember: in any reasonable state, it's not the policeman's job to write or interpret the law
It is part of their job to interpret the law since you have to interpret it to apply it, but that interpretation can be challenged and corrected by the courts. The sad thing is that this has happened, more than once, and yet the message still does not seem to be getting through to them. While I can certainly understand that the journalist in question was being aggressive and extremely annoying he was within his rights and if you can't handle people like that you should not be a police officer.
A far better way to have handled this would have been to just stand in front of the guy blocking his pictures all the while asking him politely if he would please wait until the start of the parade. That way you achieve most of your aims, get your message across loud and clear and annoy the journalist.
GR fully recovers SR *locally* when you choose a coordinate system in which the system under study is in a "slice" of Minkowski spacetime.
I realize that GR includes SR. My point was that we know GR and QM has a problem. However if the data suggesting CPT violation is correct then SR itself is broken - or at least our assumption that we can use a Minkowskian space-time for our electroweak QFT. Assuming the data stand then, in the absence of any large gravitational masses in the experiment, we can conclude that either there is some very subtle effect with neutrinos that amplifies the tiny deviation from Minkowski space-time or that Minkowski space-time is not a valid model for the space-time structure of the Universe even away from large gravitational fields i.e. the SR picture we use day-to-day (at least if you are a particle physicist!) is wrong.
That's true....but effective models is all that we have because we still don't know the 'true' physics of the Universe and probably never will, we will just have a really, really good model that always works.
Some of our models are basically there, like the "conservation" laws, which are based on rigorous mathematics.
Physics is NOT based on mathematics but on observation. Mathematics is the language and, like any language, can describe things which are not real. Hence the absolute requirement for observations otherwise how would you know what was real? Conservation laws are based on observation and, through the rigorous maths you mention, can be linked to the translational and rotational invariance of space-time i.e. the laws of physics today are the same they were yesterday and the same they are 1 km away. As long as we observe that to be true then conservation laws are here to stay but if tomorrow we find a spot of the universe with different physical laws all that changes.
It's extremely accurate and useful for dealing with many areas, but breaks down somewhat when dealing with very very small things.
No it does not. Special relativity (which is what the neutrino result probes) works just fine with the quantum world. Look up the Dirac, Klein-Gordon and Proca equations, not to mention particle physics as a whole. General relativity has issues with QM but, so far, not Special Relativity. If SR is found to be wrong the implications for physics are as profound as you can possibly get and equivalent to the effect that Newton and Einstein had on the field....which is why I fully expect that this will just turn out to be a statistical anomaly. Still we can hope...
The only reason it applies to physics is because we can't write our own laws. If we could that would be much more fun than trying to debug and understand what is already there.
Regardless whether you are a scientist of engineer or how correct, at a fundamental level, the laws you plan to tattoo are one thing is certain: you had better not be planning to sit any more exams otherwise you may end up being skinned alive either literally or figuratively depending on your choice before the exam.
They'll keep selling Macs because it's the only platform you can use to write an i* app.
That is also the reason why they can never wall off the Mac - where would you develop your Mac applications? The only way they can keep iOS walled is that you cannot develop iOS apps on iOS itself. If you have to develop your apps on the same platform that you are running then you have to allow unapproved binaries to run hence the OS cannot be walled off.
No it is not - you said that you would use the theories in different domains. My point is that there is a domain common to both GR and QM so they 'collide' because you have to use BOTH GR and QM at the same time and nobody knows how to do that and they both have conflicting views so the question remains: how do we deal with that? i.e. there is a 'collision' because there are two contradicting, equally valid (as far as we can tell) approaches. Since we cannot experimentally reach the collision region the solution remains a mystery.
In the example you give SR does not collide with Newtonian mechanics - it replaces it. Classical mechanics is invalid as a fundamental theory: there is no domain at all where classical mechanics is a valid, fundamental theory. The only reason it is still taught is because it is a good approximation and involves easier maths that SR so we still use it but it can never 'collide' with anything because if there is ever a discrepancy you would immediately put it down to it being an approximation and use SR/QM as the true, fundamental (as far as we know) theory. If you like the "collision" preceding this was between Maxwell's equations and Newtonian mechanics which lead to SR.
QM and GR 'collide' because there are particular conditions where you need to use both: when gravity becomes strong enough to be important on the atomic scale i.e. the domains of GR and QM overlap and in this overlap region you have to have both. If this type of measurement does show that m_i!=m_g then it will mean that there will be no overlap of GR and QM because GR will have been shown not to work on microscope scales so we'd need something else instead, hopefully something which will be compatible with QM, like SR is.
Even the officers of foreign corporations can be held in contempt of court.
If contempt of a US court were enforceable outside the US then your entire legal system is going to collapse trying to prosecute the 5.7+ billion people outside the US most of whom probably hold the US court system in contempt if they care about it at all.
If they Spanhaus does not want to be subject to the laws of the United States they should remove all US companies from their database.
Spamhaus IS NOT subject to US law. It provides a European based service which US companies decide they want to use. Effectively those companies are coming to Europe and using a service provided by Europeans. You might want to think about this in reverse since it helps remove any nationalistic bias. Suppose you have a US company (based entirely in the US and nowhere else) offering search services to, oh lets say, Chinese nationals. Now by your logic that company would be subject to Chinese law unless it prevented all Chinese nationals from accessing it even though it has no physical presence in China.
Do you really think that is a sensible way for all our different legal systems to work? If so then you can forget about companies existing online since they will now have to comply with all countries' laws, no matter how insane or restrictive, because it is impossible to prove that you are not a national of a given country (a passport proves nationality but there are a lot of people with dual citizenship and you cannot prove that you do not have a passport!).
Because the predictions of General Relativity are backed by some very convincing evidence which would be quite hard to explain otherwise, I find it unlikely that this is actually the case.
I agree but it is still very worthwhile to do the experiment since, as accurate as GR and QM both are, they cannot co-exist which means that there are still things we don't understand about one or both of them.
What you have to realize though is that if the experiment yields m_i=m_g then QM fails.
NO! I understand why you say that because the article was written in a very confusing way and that was my first impression when I read it - which is why I downloaded the paper to get a proper explanation because such a conclusion could not be correct!
What the paper shows is that the energy states of the system they describe depend differently on the inertial and gravitational mass. Hence by studying the energy levels of the system you can figure out whether m_i=m_g or not. It is entirely possibly to put m_i=m_g into all their equations and have a perfectly valid QM system...the interesting thing is that if this is not the system you physically observe then you can probably conclude that m_i!=m_g.
I think you are jumping the gun more than just a little. An extra Higgs doublet (which is where the extra Higgs bosons come from) is just one possible explanation. A far more likely explanation, IMHO, is that there is some systematic error which D0 has not accounted for. However even if it is a real effect there are certainly other explanations that simple extra Higgs bosons. For example I'm sure some SUSY models could explain it (although these do come with extra Higgs bosons as well!).
A far more interesting result is the recent data from MINOS which suggests that the mass splitting between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos might be different. While, again, it may well be (in fact some would say very likely) that the effect will disappear with better data if it is proven then this would violate CPT which is a core symmetry of relativity i.e. special relativity would be broken if the result is confirmed. So if you want to get excited about a still-not-yet-confirmed result I'd suggest you go after that one since the implications are far wider reaching.
At least, not if they care about having default judgments filed against them in the US.
...and being a British organization with no US presence whatsoever why would they care about this? Why even waste money appealing it? Perhaps that would have put them in contempt of court but if contempt of a US court were a problem for those not in the US you'd have 400+ million Europeans to prosecute as well.
Spamhaus... looked at the case, decided they could spend boatloads of money fighting a frivolous lawsuit..., or since they are not in the U.S.' jurisdiction, they could save themselves the worry and the stress by ignoring the lawsuit.
So why bother turning up at all? More importantly why bother appealing it? Since the case is utterly irrelevant for them why care at all?
What I don't understand is why they even bothered to do that. They are in the UK, why waste money on foreign lawyers defending a case with zero legal validity in the UK. The only thing the US could do would be to stop US people connecting to the Spamhaus service and if the US wants to emulate Chinese censorship that's their problem and nobody else's. This seems like a complete waste of money.
I would think this means we have a basis for making quantitative measurements of what happens where GR and QM collide.
Not quite. They make no assumptions about GR in the article, what they have done is come up with a way to test one of the assumptions of GR - assuming the article passes peer review, arXiv is just a preprint server. There are too possible outcomes to the test they propose: m_i=m_g or m_i!=m_g. In the first case nothing has changed and in the second case one of GR's core assumptions has been dismantled so GR cannot be a fundamental theory since there is a phenomenon which it cannot explain. Hence QM and GR will never 'collide' because GR will have disappeared to be replaced by something else - possibly something which QM has no problem with.
My personal guess is that any such experiment will show that m_i=m_g but it will be an interesting test to do and potentially result in a far more accurate test of the equivalence principle.
These are students being taught for their future and will need the skills required for their future jobs. Pushing the Mac platform is a horrible idea
I completely disagree. The skills they should be learning at school should be generally OS agnostic i.e. how to use a word processor, write a simple program, look up information on the web, use a basic graphics program etc. It does not matter what system you learn this on: Linux, Mac or Windows the concepts are very similar between all of them even if the GUI varies. If they are not teaching the concepts then they are doing the wrong thing and it would be almost just as useless on Windows as on Mac since there is no guarentee that the version or even program would necessarily be the same as the one they used at school.
However if they are going to force parents to purchase a laptop then those parents should be free to choose one they want to support. For example if my kids were affected they'd be getting a cheap NetBook with Linux on it using OpenOffice - they have zero need of a MacBook for simple word processing, web browsing etc. Not to mention that I'm not sending my kids to school with a $1,000 piece of equipment in their bag unless the school undertake responsibility to replace any loss or damage.
~13 degrees is small, compared to the two main angles in the PMNS matrix
Small, yes, almost zero (which is what you originally said) no. Meson decays involving off-diagonal terms of the CKM (which can be as large as 0.22), while suppressed, are still easily observed. The mixing certainly seems to be a lot larger in the PMNS matrix but the quark mixing is still very much non-negligible. What will be very interesting is to learn whether there is a CP phase and if so what that is.
You are correct that is an assumption. However you can correlate it with the age of meteorites and the moon as well so it seems rather unlikely that meteorites, moon and Earth all formed around the same time and then all got captured later by a far younger sun. When figuring out what happened in our local region in the past some assumptions are inevitable but I would argue that assuming everything formed at the same time is a more reasonable one (and more likely) than simultaneous capture.
The amount of helium in the Sun provides a limit on the total energy it has radiated, assuming we're right about how fusion works.
Surely you can only do this is you know how much helium the sun started with? There is the relic abundance from Big Bang nucleo-synthesis but what if our region was helium rich (or poor) at the time the sun formed? Certainly we know a supernova had dumped heavier elements into the region. Perhaps these assumptions are more reasonable than those involved in calculating supernova production - I don't know - but you still have assumptions in your method.
Slashdot Mirror
even if we all live 1000 years, getting to that planet will be incredibly long and boring.
Not necessarily if you are the one doing the travelling. In that case the trip can be arbitrarily short.
In particle physics there are experiments which seem to prove faster-than-light communication is possible.
No there are not. There is no experimental evidence whatsoever that FTL communication is possible.
Remember: in any reasonable state, it's not the policeman's job to write or interpret the law
It is part of their job to interpret the law since you have to interpret it to apply it, but that interpretation can be challenged and corrected by the courts. The sad thing is that this has happened, more than once, and yet the message still does not seem to be getting through to them. While I can certainly understand that the journalist in question was being aggressive and extremely annoying he was within his rights and if you can't handle people like that you should not be a police officer.
A far better way to have handled this would have been to just stand in front of the guy blocking his pictures all the while asking him politely if he would please wait until the start of the parade. That way you achieve most of your aims, get your message across loud and clear and annoy the journalist.
GR fully recovers SR *locally* when you choose a coordinate system in which the system under study is in a "slice" of Minkowski spacetime.
I realize that GR includes SR. My point was that we know GR and QM has a problem. However if the data suggesting CPT violation is correct then SR itself is broken - or at least our assumption that we can use a Minkowskian space-time for our electroweak QFT. Assuming the data stand then, in the absence of any large gravitational masses in the experiment, we can conclude that either there is some very subtle effect with neutrinos that amplifies the tiny deviation from Minkowski space-time or that Minkowski space-time is not a valid model for the space-time structure of the Universe even away from large gravitational fields i.e. the SR picture we use day-to-day (at least if you are a particle physicist!) is wrong.
"Just a model" is not what physicists seek.
That's true....but effective models is all that we have because we still don't know the 'true' physics of the Universe and probably never will, we will just have a really, really good model that always works.
Some of our models are basically there, like the "conservation" laws, which are based on rigorous mathematics.
Physics is NOT based on mathematics but on observation. Mathematics is the language and, like any language, can describe things which are not real. Hence the absolute requirement for observations otherwise how would you know what was real? Conservation laws are based on observation and, through the rigorous maths you mention, can be linked to the translational and rotational invariance of space-time i.e. the laws of physics today are the same they were yesterday and the same they are 1 km away. As long as we observe that to be true then conservation laws are here to stay but if tomorrow we find a spot of the universe with different physical laws all that changes.
It's extremely accurate and useful for dealing with many areas, but breaks down somewhat when dealing with very very small things.
No it does not. Special relativity (which is what the neutrino result probes) works just fine with the quantum world. Look up the Dirac, Klein-Gordon and Proca equations, not to mention particle physics as a whole. General relativity has issues with QM but, so far, not Special Relativity. If SR is found to be wrong the implications for physics are as profound as you can possibly get and equivalent to the effect that Newton and Einstein had on the field....which is why I fully expect that this will just turn out to be a statistical anomaly. Still we can hope...
Wow, if only this applied to programming.
The only reason it applies to physics is because we can't write our own laws. If we could that would be much more fun than trying to debug and understand what is already there.
Regardless whether you are a scientist of engineer or how correct, at a fundamental level, the laws you plan to tattoo are one thing is certain: you had better not be planning to sit any more exams otherwise you may end up being skinned alive either literally or figuratively depending on your choice before the exam.
They'll keep selling Macs because it's the only platform you can use to write an i* app.
That is also the reason why they can never wall off the Mac - where would you develop your Mac applications? The only way they can keep iOS walled is that you cannot develop iOS apps on iOS itself. If you have to develop your apps on the same platform that you are running then you have to allow unapproved binaries to run hence the OS cannot be walled off.
No it is not - you said that you would use the theories in different domains. My point is that there is a domain common to both GR and QM so they 'collide' because you have to use BOTH GR and QM at the same time and nobody knows how to do that and they both have conflicting views so the question remains: how do we deal with that? i.e. there is a 'collision' because there are two contradicting, equally valid (as far as we can tell) approaches. Since we cannot experimentally reach the collision region the solution remains a mystery.
In the example you give SR does not collide with Newtonian mechanics - it replaces it. Classical mechanics is invalid as a fundamental theory: there is no domain at all where classical mechanics is a valid, fundamental theory. The only reason it is still taught is because it is a good approximation and involves easier maths that SR so we still use it but it can never 'collide' with anything because if there is ever a discrepancy you would immediately put it down to it being an approximation and use SR/QM as the true, fundamental (as far as we know) theory. If you like the "collision" preceding this was between Maxwell's equations and Newtonian mechanics which lead to SR.
QM and GR 'collide' because there are particular conditions where you need to use both: when gravity becomes strong enough to be important on the atomic scale i.e. the domains of GR and QM overlap and in this overlap region you have to have both. If this type of measurement does show that m_i!=m_g then it will mean that there will be no overlap of GR and QM because GR will have been shown not to work on microscope scales so we'd need something else instead, hopefully something which will be compatible with QM, like SR is.
You can't say the same of any other printer out there.
Yes you can. Any networked printer with a ppd driver will work fine under Mac, Linux or Windows.
there is not a single thing that REQUIRES paper in todays age.
A paper aeroplane? Try that with your laptop you'll have to get a new one.
Even the officers of foreign corporations can be held in contempt of court.
If contempt of a US court were enforceable outside the US then your entire legal system is going to collapse trying to prosecute the 5.7+ billion people outside the US most of whom probably hold the US court system in contempt if they care about it at all.
If they Spanhaus does not want to be subject to the laws of the United States they should remove all US companies from their database.
Spamhaus IS NOT subject to US law. It provides a European based service which US companies decide they want to use. Effectively those companies are coming to Europe and using a service provided by Europeans. You might want to think about this in reverse since it helps remove any nationalistic bias. Suppose you have a US company (based entirely in the US and nowhere else) offering search services to, oh lets say, Chinese nationals. Now by your logic that company would be subject to Chinese law unless it prevented all Chinese nationals from accessing it even though it has no physical presence in China.
Do you really think that is a sensible way for all our different legal systems to work? If so then you can forget about companies existing online since they will now have to comply with all countries' laws, no matter how insane or restrictive, because it is impossible to prove that you are not a national of a given country (a passport proves nationality but there are a lot of people with dual citizenship and you cannot prove that you do not have a passport!).
Because the predictions of General Relativity are backed by some very convincing evidence which would be quite hard to explain otherwise, I find it unlikely that this is actually the case.
I agree but it is still very worthwhile to do the experiment since, as accurate as GR and QM both are, they cannot co-exist which means that there are still things we don't understand about one or both of them.
What you have to realize though is that if the experiment yields m_i=m_g then QM fails.
NO! I understand why you say that because the article was written in a very confusing way and that was my first impression when I read it - which is why I downloaded the paper to get a proper explanation because such a conclusion could not be correct!
What the paper shows is that the energy states of the system they describe depend differently on the inertial and gravitational mass. Hence by studying the energy levels of the system you can figure out whether m_i=m_g or not. It is entirely possibly to put m_i=m_g into all their equations and have a perfectly valid QM system...the interesting thing is that if this is not the system you physically observe then you can probably conclude that m_i!=m_g.
I think you are jumping the gun more than just a little. An extra Higgs doublet (which is where the extra Higgs bosons come from) is just one possible explanation. A far more likely explanation, IMHO, is that there is some systematic error which D0 has not accounted for. However even if it is a real effect there are certainly other explanations that simple extra Higgs bosons. For example I'm sure some SUSY models could explain it (although these do come with extra Higgs bosons as well!).
A far more interesting result is the recent data from MINOS which suggests that the mass splitting between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos might be different. While, again, it may well be (in fact some would say very likely) that the effect will disappear with better data if it is proven then this would violate CPT which is a core symmetry of relativity i.e. special relativity would be broken if the result is confirmed. So if you want to get excited about a still-not-yet-confirmed result I'd suggest you go after that one since the implications are far wider reaching.
At least, not if they care about having default judgments filed against them in the US.
Spamhaus ... looked at the case, decided they could spend boatloads of money fighting a frivolous lawsuit ..., or since they are not in the U.S.' jurisdiction, they could save themselves the worry and the stress by ignoring the lawsuit.
So why bother turning up at all? More importantly why bother appealing it? Since the case is utterly irrelevant for them why care at all?
What I don't understand is why they even bothered to do that. They are in the UK, why waste money on foreign lawyers defending a case with zero legal validity in the UK. The only thing the US could do would be to stop US people connecting to the Spamhaus service and if the US wants to emulate Chinese censorship that's their problem and nobody else's. This seems like a complete waste of money.
I would think this means we have a basis for making quantitative measurements of what happens where GR and QM collide.
Not quite. They make no assumptions about GR in the article, what they have done is come up with a way to test one of the assumptions of GR - assuming the article passes peer review, arXiv is just a preprint server. There are too possible outcomes to the test they propose: m_i=m_g or m_i!=m_g. In the first case nothing has changed and in the second case one of GR's core assumptions has been dismantled so GR cannot be a fundamental theory since there is a phenomenon which it cannot explain. Hence QM and GR will never 'collide' because GR will have disappeared to be replaced by something else - possibly something which QM has no problem with.
My personal guess is that any such experiment will show that m_i=m_g but it will be an interesting test to do and potentially result in a far more accurate test of the equivalence principle.
These are students being taught for their future and will need the skills required for their future jobs. Pushing the Mac platform is a horrible idea
I completely disagree. The skills they should be learning at school should be generally OS agnostic i.e. how to use a word processor, write a simple program, look up information on the web, use a basic graphics program etc. It does not matter what system you learn this on: Linux, Mac or Windows the concepts are very similar between all of them even if the GUI varies. If they are not teaching the concepts then they are doing the wrong thing and it would be almost just as useless on Windows as on Mac since there is no guarentee that the version or even program would necessarily be the same as the one they used at school.
However if they are going to force parents to purchase a laptop then those parents should be free to choose one they want to support. For example if my kids were affected they'd be getting a cheap NetBook with Linux on it using OpenOffice - they have zero need of a MacBook for simple word processing, web browsing etc. Not to mention that I'm not sending my kids to school with a $1,000 piece of equipment in their bag unless the school undertake responsibility to replace any loss or damage.
~13 degrees is small, compared to the two main angles in the PMNS matrix
Small, yes, almost zero (which is what you originally said) no. Meson decays involving off-diagonal terms of the CKM (which can be as large as 0.22), while suppressed, are still easily observed. The mixing certainly seems to be a lot larger in the PMNS matrix but the quark mixing is still very much non-negligible. What will be very interesting is to learn whether there is a CP phase and if so what that is.
You are correct that is an assumption. However you can correlate it with the age of meteorites and the moon as well so it seems rather unlikely that meteorites, moon and Earth all formed around the same time and then all got captured later by a far younger sun. When figuring out what happened in our local region in the past some assumptions are inevitable but I would argue that assuming everything formed at the same time is a more reasonable one (and more likely) than simultaneous capture.
The amount of helium in the Sun provides a limit on the total energy it has radiated, assuming we're right about how fusion works.
Surely you can only do this is you know how much helium the sun started with? There is the relic abundance from Big Bang nucleo-synthesis but what if our region was helium rich (or poor) at the time the sun formed? Certainly we know a supernova had dumped heavier elements into the region. Perhaps these assumptions are more reasonable than those involved in calculating supernova production - I don't know - but you still have assumptions in your method.