If you make your decision based on knowledge obtained in an illegal search and publicized in the media, when it was clearly illegal and prohibited at trial, you remove one of the constraints preventing us from descending into a police state.
Rubbish. If the evidence is valid and not tainted by the way it was collected then it should be allowed. If the police conduct a clearly illegal search then the correct response is to discipline them (and by clearly illegal I don't one that with full hindsight and a high paid lawyer might possibly be shown to be illegal).
You do know they generally have very good reasons why the evidence is not admissible, right?
Only sometimes. For example suppose a policeman searches a car because he thinks he has probable cause to do so and finds a body. If a judge disagrees that he had legal cause to search the car why should the evidence be inadmissible? Discipline the police officer for the illegal search by all means but don't let that stop the evidence that was uncovered from being used.
There is an outreach "master class" scheme involving the LHC where your students can get their hands on data (simulated at the moment but real eventually!). While the tools are simplified compared to what we actually use for an analysis you do get to look at and study real data. You could try talking to CERN to find out if this is available in whatever part of the world you are. We also have a video conference scheme which I've taken part in before where someone from your local university will come and visit and set up a video conference with other people at CERN to discuss the LHC and the physics we do.
There are also various cosmic ray projects that your school can get involved in. If you are in Alberta then your local one is ALTA which is run by a colleague of mine. There are others in various parts of the world as well. These link together multiple schools in a region to build a large air shower array.
How do you verbally say a date? Every person I know says "March fourteenth two thousand nine", not "fourteenth March two thousand nine".
No actually I always say 14th March and I write it that way as well. That is how it is written and spoken in English. Even you Americans refer to the 4th of July and not July 4 so clearly you used to pronounce it that way but have somehow lost it over the years. So if you are speaking American you are probably correct (with the one exception) but when speaking/writing English the correct way is always 14th March 2009. If you don't knwo any English speakers then there is no reason for you to have known this though.
The only reason we're looking for the Higgs is because we can. We simply don't have any other HEP we can do. Every alternative theory so far needs energy levels at least an order or two of mag more than LHC to even approach usefulness
I return to my remark that the fact that you say this shows that you do not know a lot about high energy physics. The reason we are looking for the Higgs is because we have not found it and must find it soon or rule it out which would completely turn the field on its head. Assuming that we do find it there is something called the hierarchy problem that means there is VERY likely to be some new physics below ~10TeV and in reach of the LHC. In addition there is the thermal production argument for Dark Matter which again suggest DM below ~1 TeV. You might be ignorant of these theories but that does not mean that they do not exist.
HEP is dead. There is another way, however, and it's well on it's already far more interesting. That's astronomy. Every time we turn on the newest telescope we immediately find something that's essentially impossible under current models.
Really? Ever wonder where the physics used to make and correct the models comes from? I'd love to know how astronomy is going to explain the properties of the particles making up Dark Matter. Indeed all your examples can be summed up as Dark Energy and Dark Matter. These are all different facets of the same "problem". To solve this problem we need particle physics. A good example is the solar neutrino problem - no amount of astronomical observation would ever have been capable of solving this we needed particle physics experiments.
How many questions has HEP answered in the last 25 years that aren't internal to HEP? None.
Try looking up the solar neutrino problem - that was an astronomy problem. Heard of the World Wide Web? - invented by particle physicists to solve their communication problems (and yes I am going to include that if you are including making E. Coli smell as an 'advance').
And HEP's done what in that time? Spend billions of dollars to answer questions they're already utterly convinced they know the answer to?
What particle physics has been doing is increasing our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature that underpin ALL science. The fact that we have been showing that the Standard Model is very correct is not a failure - we are not an applied science, we can only find what there is to find. Complaining that we have not found new physics would be like berating Columbus for finding the Americas when he set out to find India. However to imply that it is a waste of money to experimentally check an incredibly fundamental question where we think we might already know the answer shows that you really don't understand science at all: it is all about making predictions and then seeing if you got them right.
Charge and polarity of electromagnetic phenomena are a function of "spin"
Sorry but they are not. The weak hypercharge does depend on the spin (or rather the helicity) but the electric charge in no way depends on spin. A right handed electron has exactly the same electric charge as a left handed electron and will undergo identical electromagnetic interactions.
That said, restated, your argument is effectively that maybe Big Bang just started with more matter than anti-matter. This is certainly a possibility that cannot be ruled out. However we do actually see a difference between matter and anti-matter (in something called the Weak force which is spin dependent - so perhaps this is what got you confused). The problem is that we don't understand how this tiny difference could give rise to the matter asymmetry of the Universe. However given that the Universe does distinguish between matter and antimatter it seems more "natural" that the asymmetry occurred post Big Bang rather than as a result of the initial conditions.
I didn't say 5 sigma, you did. Sure, 5 sigma is the gold standard.
5-sigma is not the gold standard it is THE standard to claim discovery. 3-sigma is the significance to claim 'evidence'. Less than 3-sigma and you cannot write a paper that people will take seriously. Yes these are arbitrary standards but they are the standards that the field has adopted.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. First you say "I find this far less likely," and then you say that such statements about likelihood are not meaningful.
Actually I said "Personally I find this far less likely than finding Dark Matter but it is certainly a possibility.". The indication being that I am expressing my opinion (based on the problems that such models have accommodating baryon number violation). There is no contradiction between having a personal opinion about how likely something is versus knowing how likely something is. It might be a subtle distinction but it is a very important one.
You cannot have the Standard Model Higgs exist and yet not be found at the LHC....unless the Universe starts to play silly buggers with the laws of probability which in itself would be a result many have long suspected!
The GP would have been more accurate to say something more limited, like referring to "high-energy physics from the LHC"....It's possible that Fermilab will discover the Higgs
Not true. The Tevatron will not get to a 5 sigma discovery significance unless the LHC is delayed by several years more - the best they can hope for is 'evidence' of the Higgs, and event that is somewhat doubtful. However there are very good theoretical arguments that the LHC should be able to reach the Dark Matter scale as well as finding some evidence to explain the Higgs low mass. These are certainly not certainties but they are certainly well motivated possibilities.
There's a strong possibility that all of these questions will turn out to be ones that can't be answered by LHC-style accelerator experiments.....For instance, the LHC doesn't come anywhere near the Plank energy scale, so there's virtually no chance that it will give any insight into quantum gravity.
Sorry but you are also wrong here. There are extremely good arguments regarding thermal production of dark matter that suggest the particle cannot have more than ~1TeV mass unless it is not thermally produced. As such it is likely that we will produce it at the LHC and, if not the LHC, it could be produced in a higher energy accelerator since these recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang where the Dark Matter has to be produced (unless you believe a certain amount of Dark Matter was one of the starting conditions of the Big Bang).
Regarding the Planck scale you only think that it is unreachable because gravity is so weak. If there are extra dimensions of space then the Planck scale might only be a few TeV and then we can do quantum gravity at the LHC. Personally I find this far less likely than finding Dark Matter but it is certianly a possibility. Plus, while the neutrino questions need fixed target or underground experiments to answer these are still particle physics, and there is more to particle physics than the LHC!
The trap you seem to be falling into is that because there is no guarentee that something will be seen there is no chance of seeing it. While it is certainly true that there is no strong guarentee of seeing more than just the Higgs (or whatever else it might be) there are good theoretical motivations to expect to solve some of these other problems. You cannot say whether it is a strong or weak possibility because we do not know enough to assign any meaningful chance. All we can say is that there is a possibility and there is some good theoretical motivation for such a possibility based on reasonable assumptions. Sometimes those assumptions can of course be wrong...but not always in a 'bad' way.
95%CL means that if you were to build 100 Tevatrons and repeat that experiment exactly as before you would expect no more that 5 of those experiments to show a Higgs signal within the given range. The reason for expressing things this way is that the chance of a Higgs boson being produced (if it does exist) is random. Hence there is always a non-zero chance that the reason you have seen nothing is because nature just 'randomly' decided not to produce any Higgs bosons in you experiment i.e. you were really unlucky.
In fact the range shown is not a flat confidence range and in the centre we can be a lot more certain that we have not just been unlucky i.e. the range shown is 95% confident or higher.
What are the implications for NOT finding the Hggs Boson?
Not finding the Higgs is the BEST scenario because it means that what we think we know is all wrong and that means that the Universe does things a different way and once we figure out what that is there will be a whole realm of new and exciting possibilities to explain some of the other stuff that we do not understand.
What is great about the LHC is that we have to start seeing evidence either for either the Higgs or something else. The Standard Model literally breaks down and starts to make no sense at all arounf 1TeV in energy: without the Higgs it predicts certain interactions will happen more than 100% of the time! Hence we either have to see the Higgs or something else if the Higgs does not exist.
The fact that this is all that's left of high energy physics says a lot.
The fact that you say this shows that you do not know a lot about high energy physics. Even if the Higgs does exist somewhere in the gap shown there is a huge problem trying to explain why it has such a small mass compared to the scale where gravity is important and the Standard Model has to break down. The chances of this occuring by pure chance are about the same as you winning the UK national lottery for about 5 weeks in a row - if you did that people would not be thinking 'wow you are incredibly lucky' they would be wondering how on earth you cheated the system. Similarly we need to figure out how the universe 'cheated' and made the Higgs mass so light.
There are also several other questions we need to solve: what is all the dark matter?, what is all the dark energy?, why is there no anti-matter in the Universe?, is the neutrino its own anti-particle?, how does quantum gravity work? etc. etc. You need to remember that so far all of science has been based on the 4% of the Universe made of atoms. 96% of the Universe is made of stuff we do not understand so thinking that the Higgs is all that is left is just crazy talk!
...one thing I think no one will deny is that it's a version of Windows far more capable of taking care of itself...
How is asking the user to "cancel or allow" taking care of itself? All they have done is let the helpless newborn of XP grow into a continuously wailing baby.
Sometimes a democracy seems like a bad relationship that you just can't shake...
To quote Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.". Until we come up with a better idea - or at least an idea which is different enough to count as new - we are pretty much stuck with democracy as the best thing going.
Now they have observed one top quark (and another quark) emerging from a W-boson.
Actually that is only one of the single-top processes that we looked for. You can also have a W-boson exchange which changes the flavour of two quarks, one of them into a top. With enough statistics you can distinguish the two different mechanisms and measure their ratio which is a good way to detect new physics.
You cannot isolate a quark outside a hadron... The top quark is special because it decays before it even forms a hadron with other quarks.
So, in fact, you can actually study isolated top quarks which are outside a hadron because the top quark never exists in a bound state. Indeed this is one of the interesting things about the top quark in that you can study the properties of an unbound quark.
First this is production of single top quarks, not production of a single quark. The production mechanisms we looked for always produce a top and a b quark together i.e. single as in one top quark as opposed to two top quarks.
The top quark is unusual in that it only ever exists as an unbound quark. The reason is that it has such a large mass that it decays to a b quark so rapidly that it does not live long enough to become bound.
I got taught about quarks at secondary school years ago in the UK. As a particle physicist who was actually involved in this analysis I now go to schools and give talks about particle physics and they have usually heard of quarks (here in Canada) even if they are not quite sure what they are.
I know lots of people who are very dedicated to getting straight A's. Every single one of them takes the time--because they want the grade--NOT because they give a shit about the stuff they're learning.
You are confusing motivation with learning. This is a problem with the North American system - it is so broad that a lot of the time students are taking subject they could not care two figs about - for example I could not stand English it did not matter how good the teacher was I literally hated the subject. In the UK we used to have an excellent system which allowed you to specialize early on. This worked great for me but some people hated it because it made them choose early on when they did not know what they wanted to do. Although the UK system is rapidly collapsing due to continual government interference I would argue that, as it was originally, it was a vastly superior system. Sure it made you choose early on but at least it made you think about what you wanted to do rather than just letting you drift. Also you were strongly motivated to learn (at least once you started to have to make choices) because you were taking subjects that interested you. The result was happier students and happier teachers. Sure there were some students who made the wrong choices and then either had to work very hard to switch or who soldiered on unhappy but compare that to a system where a good many students spend half their time unhappy learning subjects they have no interest in.
but right now we are writing off so many potentially brilliant people in favour of those who are mediocre at best because whilst they can remember things, their ability to think dynamically and work things out can often be quite poor.
Sorry but this is a fault of the person writing the exam but the technique. I teach physics at University and physics is a subject where memorizing facts can only get you so far. For most of the questions in my exams you have to be able to apply the techniques from the lectures to new and different situations. I let the students write their own formula sheet so they do not have to memorize too much but it is a big mistake to think that you can get by without learning anything - reference books are only useful if you know enough to be able to figure out what you need to look up and that requires some memorized knowledge.
Even if they did they so what? They will still not know in which cinema or exactly when the film was recorded. I fail to see how knowing where the pirate sat will help. In fact if they look at the distortion of the image they can presumably already figure out the angle.
The "arbitrary system" is simply to encourage you to learn the material. If you cheat it by not learning it then you are only cheating yourself and come the exam, where this type of cheating will not work, you will have a very nasty surprise.
What if the fish evolving to be smaller to avoid human mouths eventually leaves them set to be eliminated by some other force?
If that force is worse than humans then evolution would work in the opposite direction because small fish would be being preferentially selected for dinner leaving the big ones to survive. Evolution is a beautiful feedback mechanism.
you can't even really evolve in a 'bad' direction since evolution by definition increases the survivability of the species.
Tell that to the dinosaurs who evolved to be nice and big just before the meteor hit. Evolution only acts to increase the immediate survivability of the species it does nothing for longer term, foreseeable events.
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If you make your decision based on knowledge obtained in an illegal search and publicized in the media, when it was clearly illegal and prohibited at trial, you remove one of the constraints preventing us from descending into a police state.
Rubbish. If the evidence is valid and not tainted by the way it was collected then it should be allowed. If the police conduct a clearly illegal search then the correct response is to discipline them (and by clearly illegal I don't one that with full hindsight and a high paid lawyer might possibly be shown to be illegal).
You do know they generally have very good reasons why the evidence is not admissible, right?
Only sometimes. For example suppose a policeman searches a car because he thinks he has probable cause to do so and finds a body. If a judge disagrees that he had legal cause to search the car why should the evidence be inadmissible? Discipline the police officer for the illegal search by all means but don't let that stop the evidence that was uncovered from being used.
There is an outreach "master class" scheme involving the LHC where your students can get their hands on data (simulated at the moment but real eventually!). While the tools are simplified compared to what we actually use for an analysis you do get to look at and study real data. You could try talking to CERN to find out if this is available in whatever part of the world you are. We also have a video conference scheme which I've taken part in before where someone from your local university will come and visit and set up a video conference with other people at CERN to discuss the LHC and the physics we do.
There are also various cosmic ray projects that your school can get involved in. If you are in Alberta then your local one is ALTA which is run by a colleague of mine. There are others in various parts of the world as well. These link together multiple schools in a region to build a large air shower array.
Of course surrounding your lair with a water filled moat might not be the best idea if you are wanting to get rid of mosquitoes.
How do you verbally say a date? Every person I know says "March fourteenth two thousand nine", not "fourteenth March two thousand nine".
No actually I always say 14th March and I write it that way as well. That is how it is written and spoken in English. Even you Americans refer to the 4th of July and not July 4 so clearly you used to pronounce it that way but have somehow lost it over the years. So if you are speaking American you are probably correct (with the one exception) but when speaking/writing English the correct way is always 14th March 2009. If you don't knwo any English speakers then there is no reason for you to have known this though.
The only reason we're looking for the Higgs is because we can. We simply don't have any other HEP we can do. Every alternative theory so far needs energy levels at least an order or two of mag more than LHC to even approach usefulness
I return to my remark that the fact that you say this shows that you do not know a lot about high energy physics. The reason we are looking for the Higgs is because we have not found it and must find it soon or rule it out which would completely turn the field on its head. Assuming that we do find it there is something called the hierarchy problem that means there is VERY likely to be some new physics below ~10TeV and in reach of the LHC. In addition there is the thermal production argument for Dark Matter which again suggest DM below ~1 TeV. You might be ignorant of these theories but that does not mean that they do not exist.
HEP is dead. There is another way, however, and it's well on it's already far more interesting. That's astronomy. Every time we turn on the newest telescope we immediately find something that's essentially impossible under current models.
Really? Ever wonder where the physics used to make and correct the models comes from? I'd love to know how astronomy is going to explain the properties of the particles making up Dark Matter. Indeed all your examples can be summed up as Dark Energy and Dark Matter. These are all different facets of the same "problem". To solve this problem we need particle physics. A good example is the solar neutrino problem - no amount of astronomical observation would ever have been capable of solving this we needed particle physics experiments.
How many questions has HEP answered in the last 25 years that aren't internal to HEP? None.
Try looking up the solar neutrino problem - that was an astronomy problem. Heard of the World Wide Web? - invented by particle physicists to solve their communication problems (and yes I am going to include that if you are including making E. Coli smell as an 'advance').
And HEP's done what in that time? Spend billions of dollars to answer questions they're already utterly convinced they know the answer to?
What particle physics has been doing is increasing our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature that underpin ALL science. The fact that we have been showing that the Standard Model is very correct is not a failure - we are not an applied science, we can only find what there is to find. Complaining that we have not found new physics would be like berating Columbus for finding the Americas when he set out to find India. However to imply that it is a waste of money to experimentally check an incredibly fundamental question where we think we might already know the answer shows that you really don't understand science at all: it is all about making predictions and then seeing if you got them right.
Charge and polarity of electromagnetic phenomena are a function of "spin"
Sorry but they are not. The weak hypercharge does depend on the spin (or rather the helicity) but the electric charge in no way depends on spin. A right handed electron has exactly the same electric charge as a left handed electron and will undergo identical electromagnetic interactions.
That said, restated, your argument is effectively that maybe Big Bang just started with more matter than anti-matter. This is certainly a possibility that cannot be ruled out. However we do actually see a difference between matter and anti-matter (in something called the Weak force which is spin dependent - so perhaps this is what got you confused). The problem is that we don't understand how this tiny difference could give rise to the matter asymmetry of the Universe. However given that the Universe does distinguish between matter and antimatter it seems more "natural" that the asymmetry occurred post Big Bang rather than as a result of the initial conditions.
I didn't say 5 sigma, you did. Sure, 5 sigma is the gold standard.
5-sigma is not the gold standard it is THE standard to claim discovery. 3-sigma is the significance to claim 'evidence'. Less than 3-sigma and you cannot write a paper that people will take seriously. Yes these are arbitrary standards but they are the standards that the field has adopted.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. First you say "I find this far less likely," and then you say that such statements about likelihood are not meaningful.
Actually I said "Personally I find this far less likely than finding Dark Matter but it is certainly a possibility.". The indication being that I am expressing my opinion (based on the problems that such models have accommodating baryon number violation). There is no contradiction between having a personal opinion about how likely something is versus knowing how likely something is. It might be a subtle distinction but it is a very important one.
Unless, of course, it really does exist.
You cannot have the Standard Model Higgs exist and yet not be found at the LHC....unless the Universe starts to play silly buggers with the laws of probability which in itself would be a result many have long suspected!
The GP would have been more accurate to say something more limited, like referring to "high-energy physics from the LHC"....It's possible that Fermilab will discover the Higgs
Not true. The Tevatron will not get to a 5 sigma discovery significance unless the LHC is delayed by several years more - the best they can hope for is 'evidence' of the Higgs, and event that is somewhat doubtful. However there are very good theoretical arguments that the LHC should be able to reach the Dark Matter scale as well as finding some evidence to explain the Higgs low mass. These are certainly not certainties but they are certainly well motivated possibilities.
There's a strong possibility that all of these questions will turn out to be ones that can't be answered by LHC-style accelerator experiments.....For instance, the LHC doesn't come anywhere near the Plank energy scale, so there's virtually no chance that it will give any insight into quantum gravity.
Sorry but you are also wrong here. There are extremely good arguments regarding thermal production of dark matter that suggest the particle cannot have more than ~1TeV mass unless it is not thermally produced. As such it is likely that we will produce it at the LHC and, if not the LHC, it could be produced in a higher energy accelerator since these recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang where the Dark Matter has to be produced (unless you believe a certain amount of Dark Matter was one of the starting conditions of the Big Bang).
Regarding the Planck scale you only think that it is unreachable because gravity is so weak. If there are extra dimensions of space then the Planck scale might only be a few TeV and then we can do quantum gravity at the LHC. Personally I find this far less likely than finding Dark Matter but it is certianly a possibility. Plus, while the neutrino questions need fixed target or underground experiments to answer these are still particle physics, and there is more to particle physics than the LHC!
The trap you seem to be falling into is that because there is no guarentee that something will be seen there is no chance of seeing it. While it is certainly true that there is no strong guarentee of seeing more than just the Higgs (or whatever else it might be) there are good theoretical motivations to expect to solve some of these other problems. You cannot say whether it is a strong or weak possibility because we do not know enough to assign any meaningful chance. All we can say is that there is a possibility and there is some good theoretical motivation for such a possibility based on reasonable assumptions. Sometimes those assumptions can of course be wrong...but not always in a 'bad' way.
95%CL means that if you were to build 100 Tevatrons and repeat that experiment exactly as before you would expect no more that 5 of those experiments to show a Higgs signal within the given range. The reason for expressing things this way is that the chance of a Higgs boson being produced (if it does exist) is random. Hence there is always a non-zero chance that the reason you have seen nothing is because nature just 'randomly' decided not to produce any Higgs bosons in you experiment i.e. you were really unlucky.
In fact the range shown is not a flat confidence range and in the centre we can be a lot more certain that we have not just been unlucky i.e. the range shown is 95% confident or higher.
What are the implications for NOT finding the Hggs Boson?
Not finding the Higgs is the BEST scenario because it means that what we think we know is all wrong and that means that the Universe does things a different way and once we figure out what that is there will be a whole realm of new and exciting possibilities to explain some of the other stuff that we do not understand.
What is great about the LHC is that we have to start seeing evidence either for either the Higgs or something else. The Standard Model literally breaks down and starts to make no sense at all arounf 1TeV in energy: without the Higgs it predicts certain interactions will happen more than 100% of the time! Hence we either have to see the Higgs or something else if the Higgs does not exist.
The fact that this is all that's left of high energy physics says a lot.
The fact that you say this shows that you do not know a lot about high energy physics. Even if the Higgs does exist somewhere in the gap shown there is a huge problem trying to explain why it has such a small mass compared to the scale where gravity is important and the Standard Model has to break down. The chances of this occuring by pure chance are about the same as you winning the UK national lottery for about 5 weeks in a row - if you did that people would not be thinking 'wow you are incredibly lucky' they would be wondering how on earth you cheated the system. Similarly we need to figure out how the universe 'cheated' and made the Higgs mass so light.
There are also several other questions we need to solve: what is all the dark matter?, what is all the dark energy?, why is there no anti-matter in the Universe?, is the neutrino its own anti-particle?, how does quantum gravity work? etc. etc. You need to remember that so far all of science has been based on the 4% of the Universe made of atoms. 96% of the Universe is made of stuff we do not understand so thinking that the Higgs is all that is left is just crazy talk!
...one thing I think no one will deny is that it's a version of Windows far more capable of taking care of itself...
How is asking the user to "cancel or allow" taking care of itself? All they have done is let the helpless newborn of XP grow into a continuously wailing baby.
Sometimes a democracy seems like a bad relationship that you just can't shake...
To quote Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.". Until we come up with a better idea - or at least an idea which is different enough to count as new - we are pretty much stuck with democracy as the best thing going.
Now they have observed one top quark (and another quark) emerging from a W-boson.
Actually that is only one of the single-top processes that we looked for. You can also have a W-boson exchange which changes the flavour of two quarks, one of them into a top. With enough statistics you can distinguish the two different mechanisms and measure their ratio which is a good way to detect new physics.
You cannot isolate a quark outside a hadron... The top quark is special because it decays before it even forms a hadron with other quarks.
So, in fact, you can actually study isolated top quarks which are outside a hadron because the top quark never exists in a bound state. Indeed this is one of the interesting things about the top quark in that you can study the properties of an unbound quark.
First this is production of single top quarks, not production of a single quark. The production mechanisms we looked for always produce a top and a b quark together i.e. single as in one top quark as opposed to two top quarks.
The top quark is unusual in that it only ever exists as an unbound quark. The reason is that it has such a large mass that it decays to a b quark so rapidly that it does not live long enough to become bound.
I got taught about quarks at secondary school years ago in the UK. As a particle physicist who was actually involved in this analysis I now go to schools and give talks about particle physics and they have usually heard of quarks (here in Canada) even if they are not quite sure what they are.
I know lots of people who are very dedicated to getting straight A's. Every single one of them takes the time--because they want the grade--NOT because they give a shit about the stuff they're learning.
You are confusing motivation with learning. This is a problem with the North American system - it is so broad that a lot of the time students are taking subject they could not care two figs about - for example I could not stand English it did not matter how good the teacher was I literally hated the subject. In the UK we used to have an excellent system which allowed you to specialize early on. This worked great for me but some people hated it because it made them choose early on when they did not know what they wanted to do. Although the UK system is rapidly collapsing due to continual government interference I would argue that, as it was originally, it was a vastly superior system. Sure it made you choose early on but at least it made you think about what you wanted to do rather than just letting you drift. Also you were strongly motivated to learn (at least once you started to have to make choices) because you were taking subjects that interested you. The result was happier students and happier teachers. Sure there were some students who made the wrong choices and then either had to work very hard to switch or who soldiered on unhappy but compare that to a system where a good many students spend half their time unhappy learning subjects they have no interest in.
but right now we are writing off so many potentially brilliant people in favour of those who are mediocre at best because whilst they can remember things, their ability to think dynamically and work things out can often be quite poor.
Sorry but this is a fault of the person writing the exam but the technique. I teach physics at University and physics is a subject where memorizing facts can only get you so far. For most of the questions in my exams you have to be able to apply the techniques from the lectures to new and different situations. I let the students write their own formula sheet so they do not have to memorize too much but it is a big mistake to think that you can get by without learning anything - reference books are only useful if you know enough to be able to figure out what you need to look up and that requires some memorized knowledge.
Even if they did they so what? They will still not know in which cinema or exactly when the film was recorded. I fail to see how knowing where the pirate sat will help. In fact if they look at the distortion of the image they can presumably already figure out the angle.
It depends where you live. For example I hear that in Florida you might be the prime target for political ads.
The "arbitrary system" is simply to encourage you to learn the material. If you cheat it by not learning it then you are only cheating yourself and come the exam, where this type of cheating will not work, you will have a very nasty surprise.
What if the fish evolving to be smaller to avoid human mouths eventually leaves them set to be eliminated by some other force?
If that force is worse than humans then evolution would work in the opposite direction because small fish would be being preferentially selected for dinner leaving the big ones to survive. Evolution is a beautiful feedback mechanism.
you can't even really evolve in a 'bad' direction since evolution by definition increases the survivability of the species.
Tell that to the dinosaurs who evolved to be nice and big just before the meteor hit. Evolution only acts to increase the immediate survivability of the species it does nothing for longer term, foreseeable events.