All that's needed is a very slight tendency toward that condensation to be biased for a universe full of one or the other after a big bang.
That is not quite all that is needed. There are three conditions for matter dominance (called the Sakharov conditions) required in the Big Bang:
CP violation: need to create more matter than anti-matter
Thermodynamic dis-equilibrium (otherwise what ever process that created the matter excess will run equally fast in reverse cancelling it out)
Baryon number violation: need some way to create baryons e.g. proton without creating anti-baryons
The 'flaw' might not even be needed. If it could be shown that the presence of matter near a high concentration of energy would affect the condensation of that energy in such a way as to bias it toward condensing into matter...
That is precisely what the flaw is so you do need it. You have to have some process which favours the creation of matter over anti-matter. This process would be CP violating because CP violation means behaving differently for matter and anti-matter.
I find it interesting myself, especially since nature seems to exhibit symmetry nearly everywhere else.
Actually I would say that nature exhibits broken symmetries nearly everywhere. The matter/anti-matter asymmetry is almost perfect (it is a VERY small effect) but slightly broken. The mass of fundamental particles may well be the result of a broken symmetry. Weak interactions break a symmetry called parity (inversion of all space axes) maximally. There may also be a symmetry between matter and force, supersymmetry, which would also have to be broken. Of course not all are broken: translation and rotational invariance, charge conservation (gauge symmetry) but a lot are.
However, my understanding of it is that there's a rather large asymmetry between the amount of energy needed to create a matter particle vs. a much higher number to create an antimatter particle.
Sorry that is incorrect. Particles and anti-particles have exactly the same mass and so require exactly the same energy to make. This is a result of Lorentz invariance (it is called CPT symmetry). Very stringent tests have been done to measure the mass differences between anti/particle pairs. Were a difference ever discovered it would mean that special relativity is wrong and all of Quantum Field Theory would have to be rewritten. So it would be a fantastic, but very unlikely, discovery!
Anti-matter annihilations give of gamma rays. In particular electrons and positrons annihilate to give two 511 keV photons so if you saw these (or other gamma rays) it would be sure sign of matter/anti-matter annihilation.
Since the solar wind does not do this with the galaxy, nor do any other stars within the galaxy, we can assume that our galaxy is 100% matter. Since none of the galaxies in the local cluster produce gamma rays with the sparse gas in between them then these too must be all matter. Further away the evidence is a bit sketchier but we see many examples of distant colliding galaxies in the universe and ont one of them shows a matter/anti-matter galaxy collision so, while that evidence is not 100% water-tight, it is a powerful suggestion that there is no anti-matter out there, at least in the same quantities as matter.
Actually, christian theology is pretty consistent on the whole God exists outside the limits of the whole time and space thing.
Well, scientifically speaking, if God is responsible for the Big Bang he would have to exist outside space and time since they didn't exist beforehand...although without time perhaps 'beforehand' is not the correct term.
It's great that you are so aware of all the help Canada has been giving you in Afghanistan. It may come as a surprise that they have been shooting at our soldiers too. I'm so glad their sacrifices are appreciated by our southern ally.
All this paper shows is that there is a difference between CP violation in the charged B mesons and the neutral B mesons. This is somewhat unexpected and while you cannot rule out something new it is also true that they cannot rule out QCD (strong force) effects.
The problem the strong force is that it is so strong at low energy that our normal technique to calculate what is going on (called perturbation theory) does not work because, rather than small perturbations, the strong interaction causes huge changes. This means that theorists have to make approximations in order to calculate anything and so their results may well just show a flaw in their assumptions rather than a flaw in our understanding of physics.
An excellent example of this was with my grad student experiment which was also measuring CP violation but with kaons. Before our measurement the theorists were saying that there was absolutely no way at all they could have a certain parameter (epsilon'/epsilon) to have a value greater than 1e-3 and it would likely be a lot lower. So, we measured it at around 1.7e-3 and, lo and behold, the theorists adjusted their models and suddenly it was in agreement with theory.
So while this might be an indication of something new I am not yet convinces that it is anything more than an incorrect assumption in a QCD calculation somewhere. Such calculations are fantastically difficult and while in this case there are things that will make it easier, it is not yet convincing evidence.
Without this "flaw" matter and anti-matter would have cancelled out almost perfectly early on in the Big Bang leaving nowhere near enough matter (or anti-matter) to form galaxies or stars. So this "flaw" is what allows us to exist. I would not call it a flaw, but rather a design feature. Without breaking this symmetry the Universe would be a really boring place, in much the same way that a tree is more interesting than a cube even though the cube has far more symmetry.
The coolest thing about Elite was the trick of using a timer triggered off the vertical sync to re-program the video controller 3/4
The other cool thing was using the random number generator to create the 8 galaxies. If I remember right that was one of the reasons that it took so long to port the game to other platforms: they had to reproduce the Beeb random number algorithm precisely to get the same galaxies.
Really? Up in Canada we regularly walk on water, although usually only from November to March. Now if you remember Christ was around 2,000 years ago before all this global warming....
On a more serious note though it illustrates the point that, looked at in a different context, things are not always as impossible as they may at first seem.
True but it is high pressure hydrogen which is bad because hydrogen is extremely good at diffusing out of wherever you have it and then forms a highly explosive mixture with oxygen. It will be interesting to see what the critical (magnetic) field is i.e. the field at which it stops superconducting. Clearly in its current form it will be useless for power transmission lines or computers but strong electromagnetics (e.g. MRI machines) might be a possible use if the critical field is high enough.
Re:Not if you are un-American!
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
Most English speakers used to say "March the 3rd, 2008" and I am guessing this is how USians started to write their numeric dates.
Interesting. Actually I would say "the third of March" and, at least at some point in the past the USians used to say it this way too since they are forever going on about "the fourth of July". So I wonder if that manner of saying the date really was the cause of the MDY order or whether it is a result of it.
Re:Not if you are un-American!
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
Um.. it's much more logical to be year month day.
Not if you are human and generally already know the year, probably the month and possibly the day. For example I could refer to a meeting on the 18th which currently would mean the 18th of March 2008, or if the meeting were actually next month I would say on 18th April the year being presumed to be 2008 or finally if I were planning something well in advance 18th April 2009.
This is why we write dates in the order 14th March 2008 - you start with the finest grained information because that is what a human wants to know. I realize that a computer would like the year first so that it would put it in a string you can use an alphanumeric sort to get the correct order. However languages were developed for humans, not computers, which is why we use DMY.
hence M.D, which is exactly what we've got.
No you in the US have MDY which defies any logical explanation since it is not period ordered and more interestingly you seem to be the only country in the world which uses it so you didn't inherit it from anyone but somehow invented it all by yourselves.
Not if you are un-American!
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, but we missed Pi day by a longshot.
Fortunately for those of us in the rest of the world where we use the more logical d/m/y time ordered notation we still have a couple of thousand years to go: 3/1/4159. It would have been earlier but April only has 30 days!
...although I also hear that they found an ancient road apparently made from unusual yellow bricks as well as a strangely built ruins of a wooden tomb which only seems to contain the upper half of a female skeleton.
Even worse we often have no idea whether work done by young scientists really is ground breaking until long after the work is published. For example Peter Higgs published his Higgs mechanism in 1964. It is now 2008 and we still do not know whether it is how the universe works or just a very beautiful, but misleading, distraction.
With a scheme like this Higgs would miss out on what is, potentially, one of the most important breakthroughs of the 20th century. If it is an international prize there will also be trouble administering it in Europe where there are ageism laws. Rather than worry about when people make a tremendous breakthrough we should fund them well once they have in the hope that this will lead to further discoveries.
No - he has merely shown that if we ignore GR and take all these fundamentalist nutters and load them onto the B ark and accelerate it to 0.99999999999990452c they will actually be correct and the universe will have been created 6,000 years ago in their frame of reference and then we can all be happy...although perhaps for slightly different reasons.
Somewhat a flawed argument, since now that ndiswrapper exists there is no incentive to write a linux driver. I would have preferred ndiswrapper didn't exist, allowing linux developers to push for open drivers and specificiations.
So is the point of open source software to be free to do what you want or are we no better than Microsoft in insisting that everything has to be done 'our way'. I would hope that we could win arguments on merit without having to use legal means to force behaviour.
The "screeching Cuban expats" are American VOTERS. Democracy works this way.
This is precisely why an organization like ICANN should be an international organization. Why should American voters have any say whatsoever over a firm operating in Europe, Canada or elsewhere? That is certainly NOT how democracy is supposed to work. It is, quite literally, none of their business, as long as the company does not operate in the US.
So far these legal attacks/enforcement have been restricted to the registrars so presumably the lesson is never use a US registrar if you don't want to be affected by US law. However ultimate responsibility rests with ICANN so how long will it be before these inane US laws start getting enforced on ICANN itself? This is why ICANN should be an international organization above any single country's law.
From TFA: the Standard Model, which encapsulates understanding of all the material that makes up the universe.
The Standard Model actually encapsulates understanding of just under 5% of the material which makes up the Universe. ~20% of the material is dark matter which is not consistent with any SM particle and ~75% is dark energy which we don't even have a good theory for!
Observations tend to provide "eureka" information that theory might miss or not become main stream for a while.
I completely disagree. It is only when theory and observation both agree that you have a "eureka" moment. For example we have an observation that there is lots of dark energy (not dark matter - that is different) in the universe. However, so far, there is no good theory as to what it is. I don't seem to remember anyone going "Eureka! We have discovered dark energy!". Rather everyone is sitting around scratching their heads and wondering what it is.
To get a Eureka moment you must have BOTH theory AND experiment in agreement. The SNO experiment is an excellent example. Experiment: not enough electron neutrinos coming from the sun; theory: neutrinos can change flavour from electron to tau or muon so the total flux of neutrinos will be correct; experiment: SNO measured the total neutrino flux and discovered that it agreed with solar model predictions while still seeing a reduced electron neutrino flux. Result: EUREKA! Neutrinos oscillate!
Conclusion: theory and experiment are both EQUALLY important to advancing science. One without the other may be interesting but not very useful.
European regulators extracting wealth from American corporations so they can fund European corporations which compete directly with American corporations.
...and of course the US would never, say, charge an illegal tariff and then use it to subsidize their corporations would they?
As a kid I once got really irritated at my dad for forbidding me to print stuff out (he thought I was wasting too much paper printing out fractal images I'd generated with my own program). Since he was one of the parent-governors of the school I went to and often had to edit the meeting minutes which contained the head teacher's name. So I hacked the printer driver to detect every time the head's name was printed (it was an old dot-matrix printer) and add the text '(old fart)' after it. Because that text did not appear on the screen, my dad could not figure where the addition was coming from - indeed he thought he had accidentally written it himself without thinking - although he pretty quickly figured out who was actually responsible! Once my dad stopped laughing I got my printing privileges back: as he put it, he'd rather have me 'wasting my time' calculating Mandelbrot sets than figuring out new mischief!
As a prof I tried out WebCT a few year ago just as my university was upgrading to Vista. My experience, using Firefox on Linux at the time, was initially limited to being told that I needed to "upgrade" to Internet Explorer or Mozilla! After fixing that with a quick user agent switch I was then told that I needed to install Java...at this point I gave up and tried Moodle and have never looked back. It turned out that this was a very good thing because the new Vista version completely overloaded the university's servers and caused HUGE problems for courses relying on it.
When I first started using Moodle I worried about what the students would think of having to use a different system from the official one. The feedback from the students was extremely positive and had helpful suggestions for improvements, which being Open Source I could actually implement! When asked to compare it to WebCT their language was, shall we say, colourful! I can honestly say that, having used Moodle for several years now it is one of the areas where OpenSource software is not just copying the leader it IS the leader. The fact that I (or my students) can come up with an idea, add it into Moodle myself and then see how well it works is fantastic. This lets me not only be innovative with my research but with my teaching too.
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That is not quite all that is needed. There are three conditions for matter dominance (called the Sakharov conditions) required in the Big Bang:
The 'flaw' might not even be needed. If it could be shown that the presence of matter near a high concentration of energy would affect the condensation of that energy in such a way as to bias it toward condensing into matter...
That is precisely what the flaw is so you do need it. You have to have some process which favours the creation of matter over anti-matter. This process would be CP violating because CP violation means behaving differently for matter and anti-matter.
I find it interesting myself, especially since nature seems to exhibit symmetry nearly everywhere else.
Actually I would say that nature exhibits broken symmetries nearly everywhere. The matter/anti-matter asymmetry is almost perfect (it is a VERY small effect) but slightly broken. The mass of fundamental particles may well be the result of a broken symmetry. Weak interactions break a symmetry called parity (inversion of all space axes) maximally. There may also be a symmetry between matter and force, supersymmetry, which would also have to be broken. Of course not all are broken: translation and rotational invariance, charge conservation (gauge symmetry) but a lot are.
However, my understanding of it is that there's a rather large asymmetry between the amount of energy needed to create a matter particle vs. a much higher number to create an antimatter particle.
Sorry that is incorrect. Particles and anti-particles have exactly the same mass and so require exactly the same energy to make. This is a result of Lorentz invariance (it is called CPT symmetry). Very stringent tests have been done to measure the mass differences between anti/particle pairs. Were a difference ever discovered it would mean that special relativity is wrong and all of Quantum Field Theory would have to be rewritten. So it would be a fantastic, but very unlikely, discovery!
Anti-matter annihilations give of gamma rays. In particular electrons and positrons annihilate to give two 511 keV photons so if you saw these (or other gamma rays) it would be sure sign of matter/anti-matter annihilation.
Since the solar wind does not do this with the galaxy, nor do any other stars within the galaxy, we can assume that our galaxy is 100% matter. Since none of the galaxies in the local cluster produce gamma rays with the sparse gas in between them then these too must be all matter. Further away the evidence is a bit sketchier but we see many examples of distant colliding galaxies in the universe and ont one of them shows a matter/anti-matter galaxy collision so, while that evidence is not 100% water-tight, it is a powerful suggestion that there is no anti-matter out there, at least in the same quantities as matter.
Microsoft Physics?
I hope not. I would hate for us to turn on the LHC only to discover the Universe has a blue screen of death.
Actually, christian theology is pretty consistent on the whole God exists outside the limits of the whole time and space thing.
Well, scientifically speaking, if God is responsible for the Big Bang he would have to exist outside space and time since they didn't exist beforehand...although without time perhaps 'beforehand' is not the correct term.
Hmmmmm... maybe join the Canadian Army instead.
It's great that you are so aware of all the help Canada has been giving you in Afghanistan. It may come as a surprise that they have been shooting at our soldiers too. I'm so glad their sacrifices are appreciated by our southern ally.
All this paper shows is that there is a difference between CP violation in the charged B mesons and the neutral B mesons. This is somewhat unexpected and while you cannot rule out something new it is also true that they cannot rule out QCD (strong force) effects.
The problem the strong force is that it is so strong at low energy that our normal technique to calculate what is going on (called perturbation theory) does not work because, rather than small perturbations, the strong interaction causes huge changes. This means that theorists have to make approximations in order to calculate anything and so their results may well just show a flaw in their assumptions rather than a flaw in our understanding of physics.
An excellent example of this was with my grad student experiment which was also measuring CP violation but with kaons. Before our measurement the theorists were saying that there was absolutely no way at all they could have a certain parameter (epsilon'/epsilon) to have a value greater than 1e-3 and it would likely be a lot lower. So, we measured it at around 1.7e-3 and, lo and behold, the theorists adjusted their models and suddenly it was in agreement with theory.
So while this might be an indication of something new I am not yet convinces that it is anything more than an incorrect assumption in a QCD calculation somewhere. Such calculations are fantastically difficult and while in this case there are things that will make it easier, it is not yet convincing evidence.
Without this "flaw" matter and anti-matter would have cancelled out almost perfectly early on in the Big Bang leaving nowhere near enough matter (or anti-matter) to form galaxies or stars. So this "flaw" is what allows us to exist. I would not call it a flaw, but rather a design feature. Without breaking this symmetry the Universe would be a really boring place, in much the same way that a tree is more interesting than a cube even though the cube has far more symmetry.
The coolest thing about Elite was the trick of using a timer triggered off the vertical sync to re-program the video controller 3/4
The other cool thing was using the random number generator to create the 8 galaxies. If I remember right that was one of the reasons that it took so long to port the game to other platforms: they had to reproduce the Beeb random number algorithm precisely to get the same galaxies.
"If a person walks on water, they'll sink."
Really? Up in Canada we regularly walk on water, although usually only from November to March. Now if you remember Christ was around 2,000 years ago before all this global warming....
On a more serious note though it illustrates the point that, looked at in a different context, things are not always as impossible as they may at first seem.
True but it is high pressure hydrogen which is bad because hydrogen is extremely good at diffusing out of wherever you have it and then forms a highly explosive mixture with oxygen. It will be interesting to see what the critical (magnetic) field is i.e. the field at which it stops superconducting. Clearly in its current form it will be useless for power transmission lines or computers but strong electromagnetics (e.g. MRI machines) might be a possible use if the critical field is high enough.
Most English speakers used to say "March the 3rd, 2008" and I am guessing this is how USians started to write their numeric dates.
Interesting. Actually I would say "the third of March" and, at least at some point in the past the USians used to say it this way too since they are forever going on about "the fourth of July". So I wonder if that manner of saying the date really was the cause of the MDY order or whether it is a result of it.
Um.. it's much more logical to be year month day.
Not if you are human and generally already know the year, probably the month and possibly the day. For example I could refer to a meeting on the 18th which currently would mean the 18th of March 2008, or if the meeting were actually next month I would say on 18th April the year being presumed to be 2008 or finally if I were planning something well in advance 18th April 2009.
This is why we write dates in the order 14th March 2008 - you start with the finest grained information because that is what a human wants to know. I realize that a computer would like the year first so that it would put it in a string you can use an alphanumeric sort to get the correct order. However languages were developed for humans, not computers, which is why we use DMY.
hence M.D, which is exactly what we've got.
No you in the US have MDY which defies any logical explanation since it is not period ordered and more interestingly you seem to be the only country in the world which uses it so you didn't inherit it from anyone but somehow invented it all by yourselves.
Sorry, but we missed Pi day by a longshot.
Fortunately for those of us in the rest of the world where we use the more logical d/m/y time ordered notation we still have a couple of thousand years to go: 3/1/4159. It would have been earlier but April only has 30 days!
...although I also hear that they found an ancient road apparently made from unusual yellow bricks as well as a strangely built ruins of a wooden tomb which only seems to contain the upper half of a female skeleton.
Even worse we often have no idea whether work done by young scientists really is ground breaking until long after the work is published. For example Peter Higgs published his Higgs mechanism in 1964. It is now 2008 and we still do not know whether it is how the universe works or just a very beautiful, but misleading, distraction.
With a scheme like this Higgs would miss out on what is, potentially, one of the most important breakthroughs of the 20th century. If it is an international prize there will also be trouble administering it in Europe where there are ageism laws. Rather than worry about when people make a tremendous breakthrough we should fund them well once they have in the hope that this will lead to further discoveries.
No - he has merely shown that if we ignore GR and take all these fundamentalist nutters and load them onto the B ark and accelerate it to 0.99999999999990452c they will actually be correct and the universe will have been created 6,000 years ago in their frame of reference and then we can all be happy...although perhaps for slightly different reasons.
Well they have at least put an upper limit on it. It must be less than 13.73 billion!
Somewhat a flawed argument, since now that ndiswrapper exists there is no incentive to write a linux driver. I would have preferred ndiswrapper didn't exist, allowing linux developers to push for open drivers and specificiations.
So is the point of open source software to be free to do what you want or are we no better than Microsoft in insisting that everything has to be done 'our way'. I would hope that we could win arguments on merit without having to use legal means to force behaviour.
The "screeching Cuban expats" are American VOTERS. Democracy works this way.
This is precisely why an organization like ICANN should be an international organization. Why should American voters have any say whatsoever over a firm operating in Europe, Canada or elsewhere? That is certainly NOT how democracy is supposed to work. It is, quite literally, none of their business, as long as the company does not operate in the US.
So far these legal attacks/enforcement have been restricted to the registrars so presumably the lesson is never use a US registrar if you don't want to be affected by US law. However ultimate responsibility rests with ICANN so how long will it be before these inane US laws start getting enforced on ICANN itself? This is why ICANN should be an international organization above any single country's law.
From TFA: the Standard Model, which encapsulates understanding of all the material that makes up the universe.
The Standard Model actually encapsulates understanding of just under 5% of the material which makes up the Universe. ~20% of the material is dark matter which is not consistent with any SM particle and ~75% is dark energy which we don't even have a good theory for!
Observations tend to provide "eureka" information that theory might miss or not become main stream for a while.
I completely disagree. It is only when theory and observation both agree that you have a "eureka" moment. For example we have an observation that there is lots of dark energy (not dark matter - that is different) in the universe. However, so far, there is no good theory as to what it is. I don't seem to remember anyone going "Eureka! We have discovered dark energy!". Rather everyone is sitting around scratching their heads and wondering what it is.
To get a Eureka moment you must have BOTH theory AND experiment in agreement. The SNO experiment is an excellent example. Experiment: not enough electron neutrinos coming from the sun; theory: neutrinos can change flavour from electron to tau or muon so the total flux of neutrinos will be correct; experiment: SNO measured the total neutrino flux and discovered that it agreed with solar model predictions while still seeing a reduced electron neutrino flux. Result: EUREKA! Neutrinos oscillate!
Conclusion: theory and experiment are both EQUALLY important to advancing science. One without the other may be interesting but not very useful.
European regulators extracting wealth from American corporations so they can fund European corporations which compete directly with American corporations.
...and of course the US would never, say, charge an illegal tariff and then use it to subsidize their corporations would they?
As a kid I once got really irritated at my dad for forbidding me to print stuff out (he thought I was wasting too much paper printing out fractal images I'd generated with my own program). Since he was one of the parent-governors of the school I went to and often had to edit the meeting minutes which contained the head teacher's name. So I hacked the printer driver to detect every time the head's name was printed (it was an old dot-matrix printer) and add the text '(old fart)' after it. Because that text did not appear on the screen, my dad could not figure where the addition was coming from - indeed he thought he had accidentally written it himself without thinking - although he pretty quickly figured out who was actually responsible! Once my dad stopped laughing I got my printing privileges back: as he put it, he'd rather have me 'wasting my time' calculating Mandelbrot sets than figuring out new mischief!
As a prof I tried out WebCT a few year ago just as my university was upgrading to Vista. My experience, using Firefox on Linux at the time, was initially limited to being told that I needed to "upgrade" to Internet Explorer or Mozilla! After fixing that with a quick user agent switch I was then told that I needed to install Java...at this point I gave up and tried Moodle and have never looked back. It turned out that this was a very good thing because the new Vista version completely overloaded the university's servers and caused HUGE problems for courses relying on it.
When I first started using Moodle I worried about what the students would think of having to use a different system from the official one. The feedback from the students was extremely positive and had helpful suggestions for improvements, which being Open Source I could actually implement! When asked to compare it to WebCT their language was, shall we say, colourful! I can honestly say that, having used Moodle for several years now it is one of the areas where OpenSource software is not just copying the leader it IS the leader. The fact that I (or my students) can come up with an idea, add it into Moodle myself and then see how well it works is fantastic. This lets me not only be innovative with my research but with my teaching too.