After many iterations they get a good working theory of why the phenomena occurs and they publish.
What you are forgetting is that they are working within the existing framework of the known physical laws and simply applying them to a new situation. Quantum gravity is something new. There is no framework that is self consistent. In addition we have no way to just go out and play with a black hole in the lab. Hence the only hope we have is to come up with a self consistent theory and hope it has some accessible phenomenon we can observe in the lab. Your method is good for applied physics research - less so for fundamental physics research.
I gotta wonder if this ever has worked.
Nuclear power (and weapons) were understood theoretically before being built.
The fact that you've identified a potential problem in a technology...
This is a scientific problem, not a technological one at the moment. We need a better understanding about the fundamental nature of space-time. Until that happens we have no reliable science for any technology to exploit and lots of contradictory results based on our current flawed understanding will no doubt continue to be reported here.
There's no such thing as proof that something ISN'T possible
The Michelson-Morley experiment proved that it is not possible to explain light as a wave in the 'aether'. The LEP collider at CERN showed that it is not possible to have a Standard Model Higgs with a mass under 114 GeV/c2. etc. etc.
The problem is that negative experimental results that prove that certain theories are not possible are rarely reported because they are less important that the ones which prove that a theory is correct.
So you think being an asshole should become a criminal offense?
Pretty much, yes.
You'd better be careful - I find sentiments like that extremely offensive and they cause me substantial emotion upset. If you say that again it will be repeated and so you could go to gaol. Still think that sounds like a good idea?
my right to free speech overrides your right not to be offended by what I say
Better still my right not to have to listen to you means that I don't have to care what you say because if I find it offensive I can ignore it. I wish politicians would take this approach as the sensible alternative to passing ever more restrictive laws.
If you take it 30 minutes later and it is still over the limit it certainly does prove guilt. Any delay will only lower the alcohol in the suspects blood (unless they are still guzzling alcohol when pulled over in which case they deserve what they get) and so it is a 'safe' test since it can only err on the side of finding the guilty innocent.
QM is not 'for' describing everything. It was invented to describe certain phenomena: black body radiation, photoelectric effect and atomic spectra. It was then found to apply to a lot more situations except of course for gravity. So QM does not describe everything nor was it ever intended to. So which ever way you want to have your 'syntactical argument' you have it wrong.
Any system involving humans has the potential for abuse. However with peer review given that schools are far closer together you can require some input from external sources i.e. other schools. True there may be regional biases but nothing is perfect.
The issue is that it is possible now to watch all of the BBC's programming on demand for a week after it is broadcast without having a TV. No TV=no TV license. And the BBC is trying to expand its tax into this new medium.
Surely a more sensible solution to this would be to provide the service for an annual subscription? This is effectively what a TV license is afterall and it would be far, far easier to implement and enforce this on the web than it is for tellies. It might also allow us Brits living abroad to support the BBC.
Part of the problem is, what metric are you using to judge the teacher?
The metric that works best, as I am sure you are aware working in higher education, is peer review. Student performance depends too much on external factors and parents are not qualified to assess a teachers overall performance - although they certainly can alert others of a need to be reviewed.
for one, sobriety tests, which should yield fairly good indicator...
There is a test - it is called a blood test. Since the legal limit is set in terms of the amount of alcohol in your blood this is the only completely accurate way to determine whether you are over the limit.
Sure, but QM is still a framework for describing everything that exists.
Gravity exists. Gravity is not (yet) explained by QM therefore QM is not a framework that explains everything that exists.
That doesn't mean it's a complete framework...
Completeness is not the issue. Since we cannot quantize gravity successfully yet we have no idea whether it can be done. At the turn of last century you would have been completely wrong had you said that Newtonian mechanics was an incomplete theory but that once complete it would explain the photoelectric effect.
Photosynthesis is fully described by QED.
I completely agree with your point that this was a stupid observation: its extremely obvious that QM is involved. My only point was to correct your statement that QM describes everything - we think it probably does but until we have a description of gravity we don't know it. There is also Dark Matter and Dark Energy which technically we don't know are explained by QM but only because we have no clue what they are yet.
I wasn't excusing people causing distress to her family...
You were explaining that there was an excuse for them to behave this way, even though you disagreed that it was a sufficient excuse. My point is that this is no excuse at all because the logic is wrong.
Would you have been more empathetic if she had left left a trail of causalities in her wake?
Yes, I would be far more sympathetic if those doing this had been the family of her (thankfully hypothetical) victims. The reason being that these people would have been extremely emotional and could be excused in lashing out in such a fashion. It would still not make it right but I would at least excuse them for not having made the best choice of action in a time of such distress.
QM is a universal framework for describing all the actions of everything that exists.
Except for gravity. We can quantize this but only if we put in an artificial energy cut off. Of course most of us physicists believe that there is a proper QM description of gravity to be found but we have not yet do so so we cannot yet say that it is described by QM.
Is it just me or is everything now being explained through Quantum Mechanics?
No it is not just you. Practically everything is explained through QM. The only exception being gravity which we think is governed by QM if only we can find the right model.
Nearly everything involving chemistry is governed by quantum mechanics...
Actually all chemistry is governed by quantum mechanics. In fact practically everything we can explain is governed by quantum mechanics, the only exception being gravity and even then we think it is governed by QM we just have not found the right model. Of course for things that happen at human scale it is often easier to use a continuum-based approximation of QM...but it is still an approximation of the underlying QM.
if you are in the far north (in a populated area, rare), or in the soutern hemisphere as your winter approaches, worry now.
Actually the article you quoted says "at temperatures slightly above freezing" so the optimal temperature range is presumably ~0-16C. So, speaking as a resident of the somewhat 'far north' (for North America at least, less so for Europe) this might be less of an issue since our winters are well below 0 (it is usually -10 to -30C).
Interesting...but it suggests another use. What about safety goggles? 30ms seems to be considerably less than human reaction time to visual stimulus (190s grabbed from Wikipedia - no idea whether this is accurate for blinking). So this might be good for laser safety goggles - assuming it absorbs the correct wavelengths.
But her actions could have been devastating to another family as well.
Yes they could have but they were not in this case nor are her family responsible for her actions to this degree. So how does this excuse causing distress to her remaining family? If you park illegally you might delay an ambulance causing someone to die. Does that mean people have the right to start harassing you? What level of probability is enough? There is a reason we have laws with prescribed penalties for breaking them. It is not a perfect system but mob justice is no justice at all.
However I agree with your second point that just because there are some who abuse societies freedoms that is not an excuse to strip those freedoms fro the rest of us.
VNC? That would be a heck of a lot of clicking if I need to submit 300 batch jobs to analyse data. I'm talking about large clusters of machines that are stored in a secure room and which are used for analysis. These machines are ONLY accessible remotely. Using VNC to remotely manage desktop machines does not count because, by their very nature, desktop machines sit on someone's desk and are easily accessible. My point is that a large number of Linux machines are not physically accessible at all because they are not desktops.
Slashdot Mirror
After many iterations they get a good working theory of why the phenomena occurs and they publish.
What you are forgetting is that they are working within the existing framework of the known physical laws and simply applying them to a new situation. Quantum gravity is something new. There is no framework that is self consistent. In addition we have no way to just go out and play with a black hole in the lab. Hence the only hope we have is to come up with a self consistent theory and hope it has some accessible phenomenon we can observe in the lab. Your method is good for applied physics research - less so for fundamental physics research.
I gotta wonder if this ever has worked.
Nuclear power (and weapons) were understood theoretically before being built.
The fact that you've identified a potential problem in a technology...
This is a scientific problem, not a technological one at the moment. We need a better understanding about the fundamental nature of space-time. Until that happens we have no reliable science for any technology to exploit and lots of contradictory results based on our current flawed understanding will no doubt continue to be reported here.
There's no such thing as proof that something ISN'T possible
The Michelson-Morley experiment proved that it is not possible to explain light as a wave in the 'aether'. The LEP collider at CERN showed that it is not possible to have a Standard Model Higgs with a mass under 114 GeV/c2. etc. etc.
The problem is that negative experimental results that prove that certain theories are not possible are rarely reported because they are less important that the ones which prove that a theory is correct.
So you think being an asshole should become a criminal offense?
Pretty much, yes.
You'd better be careful - I find sentiments like that extremely offensive and they cause me substantial emotion upset. If you say that again it will be repeated and so you could go to gaol. Still think that sounds like a good idea?
my right to free speech overrides your right not to be offended by what I say
Better still my right not to have to listen to you means that I don't have to care what you say because if I find it offensive I can ignore it. I wish politicians would take this approach as the sensible alternative to passing ever more restrictive laws.
If you take it 30 minutes later and it is still over the limit it certainly does prove guilt. Any delay will only lower the alcohol in the suspects blood (unless they are still guzzling alcohol when pulled over in which case they deserve what they get) and so it is a 'safe' test since it can only err on the side of finding the guilty innocent.
QM is not 'for' describing everything. It was invented to describe certain phenomena: black body radiation, photoelectric effect and atomic spectra. It was then found to apply to a lot more situations except of course for gravity. So QM does not describe everything nor was it ever intended to. So which ever way you want to have your 'syntactical argument' you have it wrong.
Any system involving humans has the potential for abuse. However with peer review given that schools are far closer together you can require some input from external sources i.e. other schools. True there may be regional biases but nothing is perfect.
The issue is that it is possible now to watch all of the BBC's programming on demand for a week after it is broadcast without having a TV. No TV=no TV license. And the BBC is trying to expand its tax into this new medium.
Surely a more sensible solution to this would be to provide the service for an annual subscription? This is effectively what a TV license is afterall and it would be far, far easier to implement and enforce this on the web than it is for tellies. It might also allow us Brits living abroad to support the BBC.
Ha! The Welsh are experts at bizarre place names: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
Part of the problem is, what metric are you using to judge the teacher?
The metric that works best, as I am sure you are aware working in higher education, is peer review. Student performance depends too much on external factors and parents are not qualified to assess a teachers overall performance - although they certainly can alert others of a need to be reviewed.
for one, sobriety tests, which should yield fairly good indicator...
There is a test - it is called a blood test. Since the legal limit is set in terms of the amount of alcohol in your blood this is the only completely accurate way to determine whether you are over the limit.
This flu is actually two parts swine flu, one part bird flu...
So that would make it flying pig flu?
Sure, but QM is still a framework for describing everything that exists.
Gravity exists. Gravity is not (yet) explained by QM therefore QM is not a framework that explains everything that exists.
That doesn't mean it's a complete framework...
Completeness is not the issue. Since we cannot quantize gravity successfully yet we have no idea whether it can be done. At the turn of last century you would have been completely wrong had you said that Newtonian mechanics was an incomplete theory but that once complete it would explain the photoelectric effect.
Photosynthesis is fully described by QED.
I completely agree with your point that this was a stupid observation: its extremely obvious that QM is involved. My only point was to correct your statement that QM describes everything - we think it probably does but until we have a description of gravity we don't know it. There is also Dark Matter and Dark Energy which technically we don't know are explained by QM but only because we have no clue what they are yet.
I wasn't excusing people causing distress to her family...
You were explaining that there was an excuse for them to behave this way, even though you disagreed that it was a sufficient excuse. My point is that this is no excuse at all because the logic is wrong.
Would you have been more empathetic if she had left left a trail of causalities in her wake?
Yes, I would be far more sympathetic if those doing this had been the family of her (thankfully hypothetical) victims. The reason being that these people would have been extremely emotional and could be excused in lashing out in such a fashion. It would still not make it right but I would at least excuse them for not having made the best choice of action in a time of such distress.
QM is a universal framework for describing all the actions of everything that exists.
Except for gravity. We can quantize this but only if we put in an artificial energy cut off. Of course most of us physicists believe that there is a proper QM description of gravity to be found but we have not yet do so so we cannot yet say that it is described by QM.
Is it just me or is everything now being explained through Quantum Mechanics?
No it is not just you. Practically everything is explained through QM. The only exception being gravity which we think is governed by QM if only we can find the right model.
Nearly everything involving chemistry is governed by quantum mechanics...
Actually all chemistry is governed by quantum mechanics. In fact practically everything we can explain is governed by quantum mechanics, the only exception being gravity and even then we think it is governed by QM we just have not found the right model. Of course for things that happen at human scale it is often easier to use a continuum-based approximation of QM...but it is still an approximation of the underlying QM.
if you are in the far north (in a populated area, rare), or in the soutern hemisphere as your winter approaches, worry now.
Actually the article you quoted says "at temperatures slightly above freezing" so the optimal temperature range is presumably ~0-16C. So, speaking as a resident of the somewhat 'far north' (for North America at least, less so for Europe) this might be less of an issue since our winters are well below 0 (it is usually -10 to -30C).
Interesting...but it suggests another use. What about safety goggles? 30ms seems to be considerably less than human reaction time to visual stimulus (190s grabbed from Wikipedia - no idea whether this is accurate for blinking). So this might be good for laser safety goggles - assuming it absorbs the correct wavelengths.
Could you imagine a CD burner which takes 30ms per bit?
Could you imagine a CD burner that takes 30ms per CD?
But her actions could have been devastating to another family as well.
Yes they could have but they were not in this case nor are her family responsible for her actions to this degree. So how does this excuse causing distress to her remaining family? If you park illegally you might delay an ambulance causing someone to die. Does that mean people have the right to start harassing you? What level of probability is enough? There is a reason we have laws with prescribed penalties for breaking them. It is not a perfect system but mob justice is no justice at all.
However I agree with your second point that just because there are some who abuse societies freedoms that is not an excuse to strip those freedoms fro the rest of us.
VNC? That would be a heck of a lot of clicking if I need to submit 300 batch jobs to analyse data. I'm talking about large clusters of machines that are stored in a secure room and which are used for analysis. These machines are ONLY accessible remotely. Using VNC to remotely manage desktop machines does not count because, by their very nature, desktop machines sit on someone's desk and are easily accessible. My point is that a large number of Linux machines are not physically accessible at all because they are not desktops.
They are only "just as easy" after you have spent considerable effort installing additional software to make it "just as easy".
Looks like the Swedish court system is rotten.
So much for Shakespeare...