There are always people with stupidity and the authority to use it.
There, fixed it for you. Exercising authority is not always stupid. For example firing the morons responsible for this raid would be an excellent use of authority.
Depending on the specifics of what this guy's dealing with, he may be subject to rules regarding the safe disposal of certain chemicals, etc.
Then wouldn't a more sensible response have been to talk with the guy, make sure that he knows the rules and possibly get a warrant and make an inspection if you were not satisfied? This sounds far more like trying to save face after finding out that the guy was not a drug manufacturer or terrorist.
"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity."
I'm not so sure. If this was really the case then given our locally oxygen rich environment you'd expect one to cancel out the other. This suggests that the relative abundance of stupidity greatly exceeds that of hydrogen.
Actually it sounds far more like they got wind of the guys lab somehow decided that the only possible reason someone would have a checmistry lab is to make drugs or be a terrorist, raided his house and are now desperately trying to find something he has done wrong so they don't look like incompetent morons.
Of course by not owning up, apologising and making amends they are now coming across as vindictive, malicious incompetent morons. Somebody needs to remind them that when you find yourself in a hole it really is time to stop digging!
I am sure a college educated English speaker would be protected from any embarrassing questions about their legal status in those towns, right?
I don't know. As a completely legal foreigner I was certainly never exempt from being treated like someone trying to enter the country illegally everytime I crossed the border or dealth with the authorities (although I did once have trouble trying to persuade one idiot NOT to register me for voting when getting a US drivers license!).
While a certain level of caution is excuseable I used to find that they would regularly deliberately misconstrue whatever you say in the most convoluted and tortuous fashion possible in order to make you sound suspicious e.g. on returning to a visit to Niagara Falls a few months after just arrived in the US on a J1 visa they asked "what do you intend to do when the visa expires?" to which I replied "I don't know, I have not thought that far ahead - I have only just started my job here". Bad idea: apparently this is code for "I plan to remain the US, thumb my nose at your laws and be an evil foreign bastard" - and this was BEFORE the terrorist attacks. Apparently the "correct" response was "I will immediately leave and make no plans to return".
The sad thing was that at the time that was not at all true...but after several years of being treated as persona non grata US immigration moved me around to their way of "thinking" so to say.
But I would have thought the visa hassles would put most companies off doing something as short as a 3 month internship.
Having been through the US visa process myself as a Brit I would have thought the hassle and expense of going through it would put most individuals off doing it and certainly for something as short as 3 months.
Changing the order of things may seem like a trivial change but unless it is explained that this has been done it may give the impression of a very different series of events. Just ask the BBC.
Time and space are freely convertible so they are interchangeable - there is no universal distinction between the two, the distinction is very much observer dependent.
True - but as physics is a physical science and not abstract we have to deal with observables and any observer will agree that there is a clear difference between time and space in their frame of reference so it is useful to keep track of which one you are referring to. The same cannot be said of length and breadth. Note: I am not saying that we could not define a dimensional basis where time and space have the same dimensions I am simply saying that we do not do that because it is more useful to keep track of what you are referring to. You may disagree with this but frankly it doesn't matter: it is the convention that we have chosen. Natural units are just another set of units which are convenient for us particle physicists to use.
If we had one set of units for length, and another for breadth, and some genius found that length and breadth are equivalent (via rotation), why can't we use either units for either type of measurement?
To say that mass and energy are the same you have to also say that time and space are the same i.e. have the same dimensions and hence the same units in much the same way as length and breadth in your example above. However if we look at the space-time metric we can see that time is not quite the same as the other spacial dimensions. We can treat it AS a dimension of space-time but it is different from the spacial dimensions.
This has clear implications for the real world: we cannot move through time as we do space, we perceive it very differently etc. Hence it is necessary to treat it differently and so we give it different dimensionality to space. Time may be equivalent to space but it is clearly not the same: the same is true of energy and mass.
A 'GeV' is a unit with a well defined dimensionality. This dimensionality is not consistent with mass. You can say "this is the about of energy that is equivalent to this mass" but then you are measuring energy and not mass. So you can either think of "GeV/c2" as being short-hand for the above or you can think of it as a unit of mass - it matters not. But you cannot use GeV directly as a unit of mass.
I don't think it's unfair that other people are willing to pay more than I am for a similar service -- it's their problem.
...but don't you think that it is unfair that they HAVE to pay more to get the same service? I can understand that the system of multiple prices is good for the airlines: they get to charge as much as people will pay. However it is intrinsically unfair to charge people different prices for exactly the same service.
If this were applied to all prices you'd effectively end up with something akin to communism: everyone might be paid different amounts but would end up with the same spending power. Except perhaps for the super rich and those in power....er...so exactly like communism!
The energy of the photon is converted to the mass of the particle pair at will and vice versa, they are essentially the same thing with a different label.
...but their physical properties are very different. Hence it is important to distinguish between the two. For example one can argue that space and time are the same and yet because the physical manifestation of time is different from that of space we have a system which distinguishes between the two. While mass is equivalent to energy it has different physical properties and so it is useful to keep track about whether you are refering to an energy or a mass. As i said before there is a huge difference between refering to a particle with 90 GeV/c of momentum, 90 GeV/c2 of mass or 90 GeV of energy. So while you COULD define a new dimensional system with energy and mass being the same natural UNITS is not this (it is a system of units) and such a system would be useless since, even in particle physics, it is important to distinguish between mass, energy and momentum as well as time and space.
This discussion is like someone arguing that heat should not properly be measured in newton meters
Actually it should not. It should be measured in joules. While the two are dimensionally equivalent newton metres are generally reserved for measuring moments and not energies. This is convention but since energy and moment are very different physical quantities it is useful to distinguish the two.
No, this is the choice of natural units. You have effectively defined 'c' as your unit of velocity. An example of a unitless (or rather dimensionless) quantity would be pi which, regardless of what units you choose for length (metres, feet, furlongs, hands etc.) always has the same value. Since c can be either '1' or '3e8' depending on the choice of units it cannot be said to be a unitless (or dimensionless) quantity.
Using natural units by setting e.g. c=1, it is also implied that length and time have the same dimensions.
No, you cannot do that. Either length and time always have the same dimensions or they do not. You can change the units for convenience (which is what natural UNITS is all about) but you cannot redefine the dimensionality.
This (along with setting hbar = 1) is particularly useful in particle physics because all quantities can now be expressed in units of mass (GeV), and equations become a lot simpler.
Equations are just as simple, and more correct, using units of GeV/c2: the numbers are exactly the same! Apart from the lack of confusion (does a 90 GeV particle refer to its mass, energy or momentum? - there is a BIG difference!) it makes it very easy to correctly keep track of the dimensionality for when you need to calculate a physical quantity like a cross-section etc.
It's an issue of semantics. Mass and energy are fundamentally the same.
Not quite. It is possible to have an object with no mass but an energy (e.g. a photon) but you cannot have an object with a mass but no energy. So while they are equivalent, and you can convert one to the other, they are not exactly the same. In much the same way you can have kinetic and potential energy. These are both equivalent forms of energy but again they are not the same.
Also, "c" is a universal constant that never changes.
True, but it is not required that constants be dimensionless.
At the Tevatron, the backgrounds to two bottom quarks isnt soo bad and the experimenters are all very experienced at tagging b quarks using their detectors.
Actually the background for b quarks at the Tevatron is ENORMOUS. b-quarks are produced by the strong interaction at rates far higher than they are produced from any possible Higgs decay. Identifying them is only half the problem: determining what produced them is the other half! The only way that we can see anything is via associated production of a Higgs and a W or Z boson (which are a lot easier to spot). This is a far rarer process than simple Higgs production.
At the LHC you might as well give up so you have to go through the very rare vector boson fusion channel using a top quark loop to get two photons which itself has a bit of nasty background.
You are actually a little out of date here. While the vector boson fusion channel is still used the decay is actually Higgs to two taus or VBF Higgs production with the two associated quarks being top quarks. At least in ATLAS we think that both of these channels will have a higher significance than the photon channel which was the original choice for a low mass Higgs.
Actually is it not. Mass is correctly expressed in units of GeV/c^2. Einstein showed that energy and mass are equivalent with his famous E=mc^2 relationship. Hence mass, m=E/c^2. Thus we can use units of energy/c^2 to measure mass. This is particularly useful in fields like particle physics because we often convert mass into energy, or vice versa, and so it is useful to know how much energy it takes to create a particle (or is released in a particle decay).
Using units of 'GeV' for mass is actually very sloppy and technically wrong because energy and mass do not have the same dimensions and so cannot have the same physical units. The usual excuse is the use of natural units where c=1. However that '1' has dimensions associated with it and so to ensure that those dimensions are preserved you need to include it in the units. Hence mass is actually measured in 'GeV/c2' and not 'GeV'. Similarly momentum can me measured in units of 'GeV/c'.
Not finding it at all would rule super symmetry would destroy the standard model
It would destroy the SM but would not necessarily rule out Supersymmetry. Existing SUSY models only require two Higgs doublets because we think the Higgs is the way the particles gain their masses and given that assumption SUSY will need at least two of them (though more are not excluded). If the Higgs mechanism is not the way the universe works then who says the new mechanism, whatever it is, will preclude the existence of SUSY? The main argument for SUSY (to explain a light Higgs) may be gone but there are others: Dark Matter, unification of forces etc.
...can the native americans sue europe for defiling their land, and ruining their culture?
If they can then the next step will be Britain suing the US for return of the land that was "stolen" by that well known "terrorist" gang lead by George Washington. This may lead to the US government declaring itself a terrorist organization by its own laws and promptly disappearing in a puff of logic.
I've had to correct memos written by people with "degrees", not just that mythical 8th grade education.
We all make mistakes. Were these errors really due to ignorance or just a mistake? For example, I know the difference between "its" and "it's" but I've made mistakes in the past on things like emails and slashdot posts just due to lack of care.
According to Wikipedia, 95% confidence interval is 114 to 140 GeV/c2.
That is if you fit it to the Standard Model. Since we have no idea if the SM holds to LHC energies you cannot really believe that as a real bound. In fact, if we measure the Higgs at 200GeV/c2 my guess is that we'd revisit some of the input measurements and find that the result is probably not as inconsistent as we originally thought i.e. take these limits with a LARGE grain of salt, they depend on a lot of different, complex measurements all being correct.
What is far more certain is that we have to see something before 1TeV. At around this energy the probability of two W bosons scattering becomes greater than 100% without a Higgs present. Since any theory which gives a bigger than 100% probability of an event has got to be wrong there are only two possibilities:
We find a Higgs boson with a mass <1TeV/c2
We find something else which occurs before 1TeV in energy.
This is one reason why the LHC is so exciting: we HAVE to see something. Either a Higgs boson, or hopefully something entirely different.
Actually Hollywood have taken note. They sent a guy around to photograph ATLAS last month to get pictures for the computer graphics they will use to create a detector for the upcoming Angels and Demons film based on Dan Brown's book. Apparently though, like the book, they aren't trying to have any sort of scientific accuracy. In the film a thin sheet of glass will be what shields the scientists from the radiation, rather than the 10's of metres of Earth and concrete in the real case.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard of the Hatchback of Notre Dame?
There are always people with stupidity and the authority to use it.
There, fixed it for you. Exercising authority is not always stupid. For example firing the morons responsible for this raid would be an excellent use of authority.
Depending on the specifics of what this guy's dealing with, he may be subject to rules regarding the safe disposal of certain chemicals, etc.
Then wouldn't a more sensible response have been to talk with the guy, make sure that he knows the rules and possibly get a warrant and make an inspection if you were not satisfied? This sounds far more like trying to save face after finding out that the guy was not a drug manufacturer or terrorist.
"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity."
I'm not so sure. If this was really the case then given our locally oxygen rich environment you'd expect one to cancel out the other. This suggests that the relative abundance of stupidity greatly exceeds that of hydrogen.
Actually it sounds far more like they got wind of the guys lab somehow decided that the only possible reason someone would have a checmistry lab is to make drugs or be a terrorist, raided his house and are now desperately trying to find something he has done wrong so they don't look like incompetent morons.
Of course by not owning up, apologising and making amends they are now coming across as vindictive, malicious incompetent morons. Somebody needs to remind them that when you find yourself in a hole it really is time to stop digging!
I am sure a college educated English speaker would be protected from any embarrassing questions about their legal status in those towns, right?
I don't know. As a completely legal foreigner I was certainly never exempt from being treated like someone trying to enter the country illegally everytime I crossed the border or dealth with the authorities (although I did once have trouble trying to persuade one idiot NOT to register me for voting when getting a US drivers license!).
While a certain level of caution is excuseable I used to find that they would regularly deliberately misconstrue whatever you say in the most convoluted and tortuous fashion possible in order to make you sound suspicious e.g. on returning to a visit to Niagara Falls a few months after just arrived in the US on a J1 visa they asked "what do you intend to do when the visa expires?" to which I replied "I don't know, I have not thought that far ahead - I have only just started my job here". Bad idea: apparently this is code for "I plan to remain the US, thumb my nose at your laws and be an evil foreign bastard" - and this was BEFORE the terrorist attacks. Apparently the "correct" response was "I will immediately leave and make no plans to return".
The sad thing was that at the time that was not at all true...but after several years of being treated as persona non grata US immigration moved me around to their way of "thinking" so to say.
But I would have thought the visa hassles would put most companies off doing something as short as a 3 month internship.
Having been through the US visa process myself as a Brit I would have thought the hassle and expense of going through it would put most individuals off doing it and certainly for something as short as 3 months.
Changing the order of things may seem like a trivial change but unless it is explained that this has been done it may give the impression of a very different series of events. Just ask the BBC.
Time and space are freely convertible so they are interchangeable - there is no universal distinction between the two, the distinction is very much observer dependent.
True - but as physics is a physical science and not abstract we have to deal with observables and any observer will agree that there is a clear difference between time and space in their frame of reference so it is useful to keep track of which one you are referring to. The same cannot be said of length and breadth. Note: I am not saying that we could not define a dimensional basis where time and space have the same dimensions I am simply saying that we do not do that because it is more useful to keep track of what you are referring to. You may disagree with this but frankly it doesn't matter: it is the convention that we have chosen. Natural units are just another set of units which are convenient for us particle physicists to use.
If we had one set of units for length, and another for breadth, and some genius found that length and breadth are equivalent (via rotation), why can't we use either units for either type of measurement?
To say that mass and energy are the same you have to also say that time and space are the same i.e. have the same dimensions and hence the same units in much the same way as length and breadth in your example above. However if we look at the space-time metric we can see that time is not quite the same as the other spacial dimensions. We can treat it AS a dimension of space-time but it is different from the spacial dimensions.
This has clear implications for the real world: we cannot move through time as we do space, we perceive it very differently etc. Hence it is necessary to treat it differently and so we give it different dimensionality to space. Time may be equivalent to space but it is clearly not the same: the same is true of energy and mass.
A 'GeV' is a unit with a well defined dimensionality. This dimensionality is not consistent with mass. You can say "this is the about of energy that is equivalent to this mass" but then you are measuring energy and not mass. So you can either think of "GeV/c2" as being short-hand for the above or you can think of it as a unit of mass - it matters not. But you cannot use GeV directly as a unit of mass.
I don't think it's unfair that other people are willing to pay more than I am for a similar service -- it's their problem.
If this were applied to all prices you'd effectively end up with something akin to communism: everyone might be paid different amounts but would end up with the same spending power. Except perhaps for the super rich and those in power....er...so exactly like communism!
There are too many cosmic rays and neutrons stars in the universe for them to be dangerous even if we can produce them.
The energy of the photon is converted to the mass of the particle pair at will and vice versa, they are essentially the same thing with a different label.
This discussion is like someone arguing that heat should not properly be measured in newton meters
Actually it should not. It should be measured in joules. While the two are dimensionally equivalent newton metres are generally reserved for measuring moments and not energies. This is convention but since energy and moment are very different physical quantities it is useful to distinguish the two.
Exactly so. c = hbar = 1, and both are unitless.
No, this is the choice of natural units. You have effectively defined 'c' as your unit of velocity. An example of a unitless (or rather dimensionless) quantity would be pi which, regardless of what units you choose for length (metres, feet, furlongs, hands etc.) always has the same value. Since c can be either '1' or '3e8' depending on the choice of units it cannot be said to be a unitless (or dimensionless) quantity.
Using natural units by setting e.g. c=1, it is also implied that length and time have the same dimensions.
No, you cannot do that. Either length and time always have the same dimensions or they do not. You can change the units for convenience (which is what natural UNITS is all about) but you cannot redefine the dimensionality.
This (along with setting hbar = 1) is particularly useful in particle physics because all quantities can now be expressed in units of mass (GeV), and equations become a lot simpler.
Equations are just as simple, and more correct, using units of GeV/c2: the numbers are exactly the same! Apart from the lack of confusion (does a 90 GeV particle refer to its mass, energy or momentum? - there is a BIG difference!) it makes it very easy to correctly keep track of the dimensionality for when you need to calculate a physical quantity like a cross-section etc.
It's an issue of semantics. Mass and energy are fundamentally the same.
Not quite. It is possible to have an object with no mass but an energy (e.g. a photon) but you cannot have an object with a mass but no energy. So while they are equivalent, and you can convert one to the other, they are not exactly the same. In much the same way you can have kinetic and potential energy. These are both equivalent forms of energy but again they are not the same.
Also, "c" is a universal constant that never changes.
True, but it is not required that constants be dimensionless.
At the Tevatron, the backgrounds to two bottom quarks isnt soo bad and the experimenters are all very experienced at tagging b quarks using their detectors.
Actually the background for b quarks at the Tevatron is ENORMOUS. b-quarks are produced by the strong interaction at rates far higher than they are produced from any possible Higgs decay. Identifying them is only half the problem: determining what produced them is the other half! The only way that we can see anything is via associated production of a Higgs and a W or Z boson (which are a lot easier to spot). This is a far rarer process than simple Higgs production.
At the LHC you might as well give up so you have to go through the very rare vector boson fusion channel using a top quark loop to get two photons which itself has a bit of nasty background.
You are actually a little out of date here. While the vector boson fusion channel is still used the decay is actually Higgs to two taus or VBF Higgs production with the two associated quarks being top quarks. At least in ATLAS we think that both of these channels will have a higher significance than the photon channel which was the original choice for a low mass Higgs.
Actually is it not. Mass is correctly expressed in units of GeV/c^2. Einstein showed that energy and mass are equivalent with his famous E=mc^2 relationship. Hence mass, m=E/c^2. Thus we can use units of energy/c^2 to measure mass. This is particularly useful in fields like particle physics because we often convert mass into energy, or vice versa, and so it is useful to know how much energy it takes to create a particle (or is released in a particle decay).
Using units of 'GeV' for mass is actually very sloppy and technically wrong because energy and mass do not have the same dimensions and so cannot have the same physical units. The usual excuse is the use of natural units where c=1. However that '1' has dimensions associated with it and so to ensure that those dimensions are preserved you need to include it in the units. Hence mass is actually measured in 'GeV/c2' and not 'GeV'. Similarly momentum can me measured in units of 'GeV/c'.
Not finding it at all would rule super symmetry would destroy the standard model
It would destroy the SM but would not necessarily rule out Supersymmetry. Existing SUSY models only require two Higgs doublets because we think the Higgs is the way the particles gain their masses and given that assumption SUSY will need at least two of them (though more are not excluded). If the Higgs mechanism is not the way the universe works then who says the new mechanism, whatever it is, will preclude the existence of SUSY? The main argument for SUSY (to explain a light Higgs) may be gone but there are others: Dark Matter, unification of forces etc.
In practice it does: you cannot convict someone who is dead!
...can the native americans sue europe for defiling their land, and ruining their culture?
If they can then the next step will be Britain suing the US for return of the land that was "stolen" by that well known "terrorist" gang lead by George Washington. This may lead to the US government declaring itself a terrorist organization by its own laws and promptly disappearing in a puff of logic.
I've had to correct memos written by people with "degrees", not just that mythical 8th grade education.
We all make mistakes. Were these errors really due to ignorance or just a mistake? For example, I know the difference between "its" and "it's" but I've made mistakes in the past on things like emails and slashdot posts just due to lack of care.
According to Wikipedia, 95% confidence interval is 114 to 140 GeV/c2.
That is if you fit it to the Standard Model. Since we have no idea if the SM holds to LHC energies you cannot really believe that as a real bound. In fact, if we measure the Higgs at 200GeV/c2 my guess is that we'd revisit some of the input measurements and find that the result is probably not as inconsistent as we originally thought i.e. take these limits with a LARGE grain of salt, they depend on a lot of different, complex measurements all being correct.
What is far more certain is that we have to see something before 1TeV. At around this energy the probability of two W bosons scattering becomes greater than 100% without a Higgs present. Since any theory which gives a bigger than 100% probability of an event has got to be wrong there are only two possibilities:
This is one reason why the LHC is so exciting: we HAVE to see something. Either a Higgs boson, or hopefully something entirely different.
They have enough bandwidth to transfer datasets that are measured in terabytes to universities around the world.
Actually the datasets are now measured in petabytes. The first test petabyte of data, for ATLAS at least, was transfered out of CERN in 2006.
Actually Hollywood have taken note. They sent a guy around to photograph ATLAS last month to get pictures for the computer graphics they will use to create a detector for the upcoming Angels and Demons film based on Dan Brown's book. Apparently though, like the book, they aren't trying to have any sort of scientific accuracy. In the film a thin sheet of glass will be what shields the scientists from the radiation, rather than the 10's of metres of Earth and concrete in the real case.