My solution to situations like these which makes me feel morally happy is to inform the relevant person/business and then let them fix it. If they don't then I take it to mean that they don't care and are happy for me to keep the money. The nice thing with this is that generally the companies which give rubbish service end up screwing themselves since they are ignore my informing them.
For example when getting too much (or too little) change returned I'll point it out and then it gets fixed right away. However as a grad student we had a really terrible company running the pay phone in our student hostel who would take ages to fix problems and never refunded money when the phone swallowed money without giving credit. So when burglars broke open the cash box below the phone we informed the company and true to form it took them over a week to send anyone to fix it. Lets just say that in that time we all more than recouped the cost of all the money it had swallowed previously (it was in the UK and we had an American, Italian, Australian and Malaysian in the hostel in the time before really cheap international calling!).
The nice thing was that because we had informed the company of the break in and damage in advance when they tried to recoup the missing money from the college they (and us) were covered legally (they refused to respond in a timely manner and therefore were liable). The other great thing about this was that afterwards response times on problems dropped to same/next day!
So does this count as completely moral behaviour? Given that the same company had screwed us in the past by not refunding money swallowed by the machine, that we did inform them of the issue beforehand and that I was not one of the people making long, expensive international phone calls I did not have a problem with it. Indeed I think it was a rather good example of poetic justice.
Attempts to muzzle the press or media have been tried before in Commonwealth countries (such as in Alberta in 1934) but those types of laws are usually refused royal assent because they are ultra vires, or beyond the powers of the government to enact such laws.
Actually Alberta is not a Commonwealth country, it is a province within one and I believe it was 1935 and the legislation only required papers to print government rebuttals to stories which they ran (so it was bad but not incredibly so). It might have been beyond the power of the provincial government but would probably not be beyond the power of the federal government at the time just like it would not be beyond the power of the UK government. It's true there might be severe political repercussions for a government which tried to severely curtain freedom of the press but it would be legal with royal assent - it's effectively a parliamentary dictatorship.
Which characters did he destroy? If you're talking about Faramir, then I hate to say it, but the Faramir in the movie is a better character than the one in the book.
Faramir who, in the book, was noble and intelligent and different from his brother. You might not like that kind of character but making such a huge change for, as far as I see it, no reason at all was a bad idea.
Gimli who is turned into little more than comic relief instead of a gruff dwarven warrior.
Gandalf who is portrayed half the time as semi-senile with little clue what is going on (e.g. with Theoden he counsels against fighting Isengard contrary to Theoden's wishes etc.) whereas in the books he is the main mover of the effort against Sauron.
Aragorn who seems to lose any sense of nobility and pines for Arwen. In the books he has a very humble but noble character who puts aside his love of Arwen to complete his task.
Plus the ones that never even make it in: Gildor, Farmer Maggot and Tom Bombadil (although I'll grant you that I did not miss Bombadil!).
NSERC, one of the Canadian government funding agencies for science, manages this to a good degree (obviously no system is perfect). The government gives NSERC a pot of money. This is then divided up between the disciplines using a pre-agreed formula that is adjusted by internal competition between the grant selection committees (there is one for every subject area). Each selection committee is made up of scientists from that discipline both from within Canada, and more importantly, from outside Canada i.e. foreign scientists from Europe, the US and elsewhere, have input on which grant proposals are the best. In this way scientists with no financial interest in the decisions help get to make them.
So the main government input is "how much money do we give to science". Of course there is some politics, even with scientists making the decisions, but it is certainly kept to a minimum and not of the "vote for me" kind. For big ticket items the government obviously has more of a say but that is not unreasonable: if the cost is large enough then it is a political decision since the money cannot be spent on other things and so politicians should be involved, however much we would like it to be otherwise.
Funny I don't remember Aragorn running away and falling off a cliff in the book and coming back just for the love of Arwen. I also don't remember Gandalf giving duff advice to Theoden and others or Gimli being comic relief. Jackson destroyed more than one character and severely warped others. If you want to get an idea at how good he is at directing then watch King Kong. That film does not have a fantastic author behind it to mask his lack of ability.
If you want an excellent adaption of LotR then listen to the BBC radio version. That did an excellent job of capturing the epic story and the main characters. To bring the discussion back on topic I think that the problem was that the film has very British characters and the story is not quite typical Hollywood: too subtle a romance/love triangle, the main bad guy gets killed halfway through the last book and no serious arguments and brawls between the main good guys. One of the reasons why the Harry Potter films are so good is that Rowling insisted on retaining control and used that to require British actors and locations. Had she not done so I am sure that Hollywood would have taken lots of liberties with the story to force it more into the same mould. I only wish that the Tolkien estate had held out and done the same with LotR.
The ALICE experiment is actually concentrating on heavy ion collisions which is why they only worry mainly about one month/year, the rest of the time the machine is running protons for the other experiments, ATLAS and CMS, which will look for the Higgs. ALICE will hopefully study the quark gluon plasma but, as far as I know, has no plans to look for the Higgs.
Due for operation in May 2008, the LHC is a 27-kilometre-long device designed to accelerate subatomic particles to ridiculous speeds
Actually it would be better to say "ridiculous energies" because the speed of the protons in the LHC will barely be any faster than those in the Tevatron...but the energy is seven times larger thanks to relativity.
Nah, there's a whole scene devoted to this thing. That's why people have written a 3d FPS (with great graphics) in something like 96k (I forget the name).
Yes, but it is not the same since there is not a fixed memory imprint. If you need to take 10k to add a new feature that is really cool you can. Sure you will optimize it but if you only physically have 96k and you want to add the new feature then you HAVE to reduce its size (and the other code's) somehow. This being up against the wall with zero alternatives is what really motivates people to create fantastically innovative programs.
This team is NOT following any of the "Fraud" or "Fake" technology pattern.
Perhaps not but they are incredibly ignorant of basic physics. The law of conservation of energy comes from the symmetry of space-time i.e. the laws of physics are the same here as they are where you are. For energy non-conservation you would have to find a region of space-time with different laws of physics. I think that this would likely be a heck of a lot more noticeable than managing to develop a perpetual motion machine.
Of course those who oppose the idea that we can arrive at energy by some means such as this, openly preach to us that the whole universe erupted out of the head of a pin, [Big Bang anybody?]
Actually you are quite wrong there, the head of a pin would be massive in size compared to the initial size of the universe.
and are quite happy for all of its mass and all of its energy to have erupted out of nothing in that event. [Logic anybody?]
This is called an initial condition i.e. the universe started with X amount of energy. Since conservation of energy comes from the translational symmetry of space-time and most models have space-time created by the Big Bang (though there are some interesting cylical models I've recently heard of which do not have this feature) it is perfectly logical for conservation of energy to apply only AFTER the Big Bang. Since we currently have no clue what happened before who can say where this energy came from. Ignorance of what set up our initial conditions does not invalidate what we know of the universe since then any more than your ignorance of where the last can of coke you drank was made invalidates its existence. Clearly the can existed and so therefore had to come from somewhere.
The conditions of the Big Bang were such that energy conservation may not have applied because we cannot be sure that space-time had translational symmetry then. The conditions of a simple table top experiment are extremely unlikely to produce similar conditions! You might find it illogical because you don't know enough physics but that does not mean that it IS illogical!
I don't know how popular this was outside the US but Elite will definitely get my vote for most game play ever per Kb of memory. The old BBC cassette version packed it all into less than 32Kb of memory via creative use of the built in random number generator. I've never yet seen a game that was so far ahead of the competition.
The reason why the Judge wanted Libby to go to jail NOW is to force the President to pardon him now
Sorry but as an non-US citizen I really don't understand why he would not go to gaol immediately once he is found guilty and has been sentenced. Is it normal practice for the convict to bring out his appointment book and arrange with the judge the best time for his sentence to start?
"Well your honour, I really can't fit anything into July and then I'm on holiday in August so how about we start in September? Now what about a couple of weeks off at Christmas?"
I sympathize with the guy, I really do, but in no way, shape, or form, was his freedom of speech violated, nor could they have violated even if they wanted to, even if they threatened (and followed through) with firing him. I'm getting a little sick and tired of people claiming to be the victim in what they consider "freedom of speech" issues. This is nothing of the kind.
Sorry, but are you really saying that you are happy with people being fired because of their reasonable and legal political beliefs? I can understand the case if they went after him for use of the office computers or if he were trying to pass himself off as representing the company but for expressing his personal views on a website where he makes no mention of his company at all?
What i would like to know is why they did not look at the website first and then have specific complaints to ask him? What it sounded like was more of a gentle threat: shut up or we will fire you. How can you claim to have freedom of speech if a company can do that at will? It would be like claiming that China has freedom of speech as long as you don't mind being locked up if you criticize the government. True being fired is not as bad as going to prison but it is still a severe enough penalty that people will not risk it to express a reasonable political view....and hence you no longer have freedom of speech.
While I agree with your point that freedom of speech does not mean that you are free to say anything without consequence. Expressing a reasonable, non-violent, legal political view point should be protected otherwise how can you ever have a free and meaningful political debate and without that how can you claim to have a democracy?
Virtual particles are virtual and not physical; so if they are what causes the field, then how can you say that the field physically exists? The field is virtual.
In the classical case the field clearly is physical: it requires energy to create one and then, once created, there is a region of space where charged particles feel a force. A virtual particle is just one that we cannot directly detect. However we can infer its existance from the effects it causes e..g e+e-->mu+mu- forward backward asymmetry well below the Z mass. The best example I can think of this in a classical sense is the evanescent wave. You cannot detect these as waves but you know that they are real because if you put the right medium into the evanescent wave it will excite new waves in it. For example tunnelling microwaves between two right-angled plastic or paraffin prisms (this also make a great lecture demo for introductory quantum physics lectures!). However virtual particles are just the quantum explanation for the field.
These 'fields' are merely regions of space in which the force or interaction occurs.
That is pretty much the definition of a field. Clearly there is something different in that region of space compared to a region where a charged particle feels no force so there is a physical manifestation.
The articles you point to seem to be just rehashing the debate that went on in the early 20th century between Schroedinger and Heisenberg i.e. wave vs. matrix mechanics. In the end it was shown that the two models were mathematically identical. You then enter into the realms of philosphy and not physics: if there are two identical models which are impossible to distinguish (mathematically they are the same) then which one is the "true" picture of reality? In either case I would argue that it does not matter: any model must produce predictions where a region of space will cause a force on a charged particle. GR and QFT are good example of this. In QFT you explain a gravitational field by the graviton and in GR by a deformation of space-time (a deformation field if you like).
Regarding your emphasis on "infer" when considering classical fields. This is always the case in physics. We infer everything from the available data.
...as long as you are a European hotelier which are the people who completed the survey the article reports on. Since US tipping practice calls for huge tips on the European scale (which I am sure the hoteliers love) and only US tourists with sufficient education to want to visit Europe as well as the money to afford to do so will go so this is not unbiased data.
That being said the reason I think US tourists get such a bad rap with other tourists is because they like to travel around in large groups by tour bus. When I am a tourist I find having a large groups of people clogging things up is irritating regardless of their nationality! Of course for hoteliers it is not a problem.
Gravity is most certainly not some field.....Allow me to clarify: fields do not physically exist.
Errr....yes they do. The electric field, by definition, is the force felt per unit charge. If I put a charge in an electric field then can physically observe the force and hence infer that there is a field. Virtual particles are the mechanism that creates the field but the field IS is physical entity. Another simple test that a field is something real is that it has an energy density. If the field does not physically exist then where does all this energy disappear to?
By the same extension gravity is a field too - albeit a rather strange one since as it is a tensor field. In fact as long as you put a cut off in the energy scale you can use quantum field theory to describe gravity just like any other field.
To confuse archaeologists?
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Although why you'd want to eat your cheques is beyond me
Well, if they contain excess carbon-14 (all paper contains some!) then one reason would be to utterly confuse future archaeologists when they dig up your remains and attempt to carbon date them:-)
Re:Wrong - Not the "first" ATM.
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Actually whether or not Wikipedia is correct the Barclays machine was not the worlds first "ATM" because in the UK we don't call them that!
Wooah, the Higgs model is not beautiful, Higgs model is an ugly hack on the beautiful Standard Model. Every fermion having an adhoc coupling strength to give it its mass, no thanks.
The Standard Model already had the particle masses stuck in there as free parameters so the Higgs does not increase the number of free parameters in the model (except for its own mass). What is beautiful about the Higgs is that it solves the mass problem in an elegant fashion.
For example if you do the tree level calculation of e+e--->W+W- without the Higgs you end up with a cross-section which diverges as the centre-of-mass increases simply because the electron has a non-zero mass. If you add the Higgs the extra diagram precisely cancels the divergence and everything works well. Hence the mechanism which causes the electron to have mass also cancels out the divergences caused by that mass....which is why it looks beautiful to me.
If you don't like free parameters then I don't know why you say the SM is beautiful: it has 126 free parameters IIRC, far more than just the masses. Plus it includes non-perturbative QCD where you can't even calculate what is really going on. However I suppose that is why they say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
Unitarity. In all cases, the interaction probabilities must sum up to 1.
Actually they must sum up to give less than one (since you might not interact!). However this is NOT an argument that the Higgs must be found. We have to find something, true, before 1 TeV but who is to say it must be the Higgs?
Aether models require a preferred direction (which is how the Michelson-Morley experiment ruled them out). The Higgs has a magnitude only and no direction so the two are different, although they do, naively, look alike.
Actually a magnetic field is a bad example for a Higgs field precisely because it has both a magnitude and direction. The Higgs field has only a magnitude. A better example would be the temperature map you see in a weather forecast. Everywhere has a temperature value: it has no direction. This is what makes it different from the "aether" (aether had a preferred direction which is why the Michelson-Morley experiment disproved it).
The other weird thing about the Higgs field is that it has its lowest energy density at a non-zero value of the field i.e. it requires energy to lower the Higgs field! Electric and magnetic fields have their lowest energy density when the field strength is zero i.e. it takes energy to make them non-zero.
Sorry I should have included this in the original comment. Here is a link to the original expected Tevatron sensitivity and the updated one. The y axis is the volume of data collected by both experiments i.e. sum of DØ and CDF datasets and the x axis is the mass of the Standard Model Higgs. This is currently limited to be above 114 GeV/c2. The three lines are 5-sigma discovery, 3-sigma evidence and 95% confidence limit if we don't see any Higgs event in that amount of data.
The dip round 160 GeV/c2 mass is because a heavy enough Higgs can decay differently than a lighter one and the different decay is a lot easier to detect above all the other "background" events happening in the detector. We should get 10-20 fb-1 between both experiments by 2009 so, as you can see, unless we do something clever (which had not been thought of at the time the plots were made) or the Higgs is really light we won't get 5-sigma, but 3-sigma is a real possibility.
Given that it will be fall before the LHC detectors take any useful data from collisions at 14TeV, could Fermilab collect enough data for a 5-sigma discovery by then?
It is unlikely that we will have enough data for a 5-sigma Standard Model Higgs discovery before the LHC turns on. If I remember the plot for the expected Higgs significance correctly the best we can hope for is "3-sigma evidence" unless the Higgs really is right above the current limits (where ALEPH once suggested it was).
However this assumes a Standard Model Higgs. If something called Supersymmetry (SUSY) exists then there are 5 Higgs bosons (two with a charge) and in some areas of SUSY parameter space we can see some of these a lot more easily than the Standard Model Higgs This would also be a LOT more exciting than a Standard Model Higgs!
I'd also hope for the non-existence of the Higgs boson. however, all odds are against us.
Really? You have some evidence that the theorists are right? If so please share it with us. Just because nobody has thought of a better model it is by no means proof that one does not exist. The Higgs model really is a beautiful one and I think that we will find it...but in 1904 how many physicists would have bet on the universe having a maximum speed limit as the solution to the non-invariance of Maxwell's equations under Galilean transforms? All it takes is one smart guy to come up with a better model and we'd abandon the Higgs model and say that the new one is the way to go.
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My solution to situations like these which makes me feel morally happy is to inform the relevant person/business and then let them fix it. If they don't then I take it to mean that they don't care and are happy for me to keep the money. The nice thing with this is that generally the companies which give rubbish service end up screwing themselves since they are ignore my informing them.
For example when getting too much (or too little) change returned I'll point it out and then it gets fixed right away. However as a grad student we had a really terrible company running the pay phone in our student hostel who would take ages to fix problems and never refunded money when the phone swallowed money without giving credit. So when burglars broke open the cash box below the phone we informed the company and true to form it took them over a week to send anyone to fix it. Lets just say that in that time we all more than recouped the cost of all the money it had swallowed previously (it was in the UK and we had an American, Italian, Australian and Malaysian in the hostel in the time before really cheap international calling!).
The nice thing was that because we had informed the company of the break in and damage in advance when they tried to recoup the missing money from the college they (and us) were covered legally (they refused to respond in a timely manner and therefore were liable). The other great thing about this was that afterwards response times on problems dropped to same/next day!
So does this count as completely moral behaviour? Given that the same company had screwed us in the past by not refunding money swallowed by the machine, that we did inform them of the issue beforehand and that I was not one of the people making long, expensive international phone calls I did not have a problem with it. Indeed I think it was a rather good example of poetic justice.
Attempts to muzzle the press or media have been tried before in Commonwealth countries (such as in Alberta in 1934) but those types of laws are usually refused royal assent because they are ultra vires, or beyond the powers of the government to enact such laws.
Actually Alberta is not a Commonwealth country, it is a province within one and I believe it was 1935 and the legislation only required papers to print government rebuttals to stories which they ran (so it was bad but not incredibly so). It might have been beyond the power of the provincial government but would probably not be beyond the power of the federal government at the time just like it would not be beyond the power of the UK government. It's true there might be severe political repercussions for a government which tried to severely curtain freedom of the press but it would be legal with royal assent - it's effectively a parliamentary dictatorship.
Which characters did he destroy? If you're talking about Faramir, then I hate to say it, but the Faramir in the movie is a better character than the one in the book.
Faramir who, in the book, was noble and intelligent and different from his brother. You might not like that kind of character but making such a huge change for, as far as I see it, no reason at all was a bad idea.
Gimli who is turned into little more than comic relief instead of a gruff dwarven warrior.
Gandalf who is portrayed half the time as semi-senile with little clue what is going on (e.g. with Theoden he counsels against fighting Isengard contrary to Theoden's wishes etc.) whereas in the books he is the main mover of the effort against Sauron.
Aragorn who seems to lose any sense of nobility and pines for Arwen. In the books he has a very humble but noble character who puts aside his love of Arwen to complete his task.
Plus the ones that never even make it in: Gildor, Farmer Maggot and Tom Bombadil (although I'll grant you that I did not miss Bombadil!).
NSERC, one of the Canadian government funding agencies for science, manages this to a good degree (obviously no system is perfect). The government gives NSERC a pot of money. This is then divided up between the disciplines using a pre-agreed formula that is adjusted by internal competition between the grant selection committees (there is one for every subject area). Each selection committee is made up of scientists from that discipline both from within Canada, and more importantly, from outside Canada i.e. foreign scientists from Europe, the US and elsewhere, have input on which grant proposals are the best. In this way scientists with no financial interest in the decisions help get to make them.
So the main government input is "how much money do we give to science". Of course there is some politics, even with scientists making the decisions, but it is certainly kept to a minimum and not of the "vote for me" kind. For big ticket items the government obviously has more of a say but that is not unreasonable: if the cost is large enough then it is a political decision since the money cannot be spent on other things and so politicians should be involved, however much we would like it to be otherwise.
Funny I don't remember Aragorn running away and falling off a cliff in the book and coming back just for the love of Arwen. I also don't remember Gandalf giving duff advice to Theoden and others or Gimli being comic relief. Jackson destroyed more than one character and severely warped others. If you want to get an idea at how good he is at directing then watch King Kong. That film does not have a fantastic author behind it to mask his lack of ability.
If you want an excellent adaption of LotR then listen to the BBC radio version. That did an excellent job of capturing the epic story and the main characters. To bring the discussion back on topic I think that the problem was that the film has very British characters and the story is not quite typical Hollywood: too subtle a romance/love triangle, the main bad guy gets killed halfway through the last book and no serious arguments and brawls between the main good guys. One of the reasons why the Harry Potter films are so good is that Rowling insisted on retaining control and used that to require British actors and locations. Had she not done so I am sure that Hollywood would have taken lots of liberties with the story to force it more into the same mould. I only wish that the Tolkien estate had held out and done the same with LotR.
The ALICE experiment is actually concentrating on heavy ion collisions which is why they only worry mainly about one month/year, the rest of the time the machine is running protons for the other experiments, ATLAS and CMS, which will look for the Higgs. ALICE will hopefully study the quark gluon plasma but, as far as I know, has no plans to look for the Higgs.
Due for operation in May 2008, the LHC is a 27-kilometre-long device designed to accelerate subatomic particles to ridiculous speeds
Actually it would be better to say "ridiculous energies" because the speed of the protons in the LHC will barely be any faster than those in the Tevatron...but the energy is seven times larger thanks to relativity.
Nah, there's a whole scene devoted to this thing. That's why people have written a 3d FPS (with great graphics) in something like 96k (I forget the name).
Yes, but it is not the same since there is not a fixed memory imprint. If you need to take 10k to add a new feature that is really cool you can. Sure you will optimize it but if you only physically have 96k and you want to add the new feature then you HAVE to reduce its size (and the other code's) somehow. This being up against the wall with zero alternatives is what really motivates people to create fantastically innovative programs.
This team is NOT following any of the "Fraud" or "Fake" technology pattern.
Perhaps not but they are incredibly ignorant of basic physics. The law of conservation of energy comes from the symmetry of space-time i.e. the laws of physics are the same here as they are where you are. For energy non-conservation you would have to find a region of space-time with different laws of physics. I think that this would likely be a heck of a lot more noticeable than managing to develop a perpetual motion machine.
Of course those who oppose the idea that we can arrive at energy by some means such as this, openly preach to us that the whole universe erupted out of the head of a pin, [Big Bang anybody?]
Actually you are quite wrong there, the head of a pin would be massive in size compared to the initial size of the universe.
and are quite happy for all of its mass and all of its energy to have erupted out of nothing in that event. [Logic anybody?]
This is called an initial condition i.e. the universe started with X amount of energy. Since conservation of energy comes from the translational symmetry of space-time and most models have space-time created by the Big Bang (though there are some interesting cylical models I've recently heard of which do not have this feature) it is perfectly logical for conservation of energy to apply only AFTER the Big Bang. Since we currently have no clue what happened before who can say where this energy came from. Ignorance of what set up our initial conditions does not invalidate what we know of the universe since then any more than your ignorance of where the last can of coke you drank was made invalidates its existence. Clearly the can existed and so therefore had to come from somewhere.
The conditions of the Big Bang were such that energy conservation may not have applied because we cannot be sure that space-time had translational symmetry then. The conditions of a simple table top experiment are extremely unlikely to produce similar conditions! You might find it illogical because you don't know enough physics but that does not mean that it IS illogical!
I don't know how popular this was outside the US but Elite will definitely get my vote for most game play ever per Kb of memory. The old BBC cassette version packed it all into less than 32Kb of memory via creative use of the built in random number generator. I've never yet seen a game that was so far ahead of the competition.
Your freedom of speech is protected from governmental intervention, not from intervention from anybody else.
In that case you do not have anything that I would recognise as freedom of speech.
The reason why the Judge wanted Libby to go to jail NOW is to force the President to pardon him now
Sorry but as an non-US citizen I really don't understand why he would not go to gaol immediately once he is found guilty and has been sentenced. Is it normal practice for the convict to bring out his appointment book and arrange with the judge the best time for his sentence to start?
"Well your honour, I really can't fit anything into July and then I'm on holiday in August so how about we start in September? Now what about a couple of weeks off at Christmas?"
I sympathize with the guy, I really do, but in no way, shape, or form, was his freedom of speech violated, nor could they have violated even if they wanted to, even if they threatened (and followed through) with firing him. I'm getting a little sick and tired of people claiming to be the victim in what they consider "freedom of speech" issues. This is nothing of the kind.
Sorry, but are you really saying that you are happy with people being fired because of their reasonable and legal political beliefs? I can understand the case if they went after him for use of the office computers or if he were trying to pass himself off as representing the company but for expressing his personal views on a website where he makes no mention of his company at all?
What i would like to know is why they did not look at the website first and then have specific complaints to ask him? What it sounded like was more of a gentle threat: shut up or we will fire you. How can you claim to have freedom of speech if a company can do that at will? It would be like claiming that China has freedom of speech as long as you don't mind being locked up if you criticize the government. True being fired is not as bad as going to prison but it is still a severe enough penalty that people will not risk it to express a reasonable political view....and hence you no longer have freedom of speech.
While I agree with your point that freedom of speech does not mean that you are free to say anything without consequence. Expressing a reasonable, non-violent, legal political view point should be protected otherwise how can you ever have a free and meaningful political debate and without that how can you claim to have a democracy?
Virtual particles are virtual and not physical; so if they are what causes the field, then how can you say that the field physically exists? The field is virtual.
In the classical case the field clearly is physical: it requires energy to create one and then, once created, there is a region of space where charged particles feel a force. A virtual particle is just one that we cannot directly detect. However we can infer its existance from the effects it causes e..g e+e-->mu+mu- forward backward asymmetry well below the Z mass. The best example I can think of this in a classical sense is the evanescent wave. You cannot detect these as waves but you know that they are real because if you put the right medium into the evanescent wave it will excite new waves in it. For example tunnelling microwaves between two right-angled plastic or paraffin prisms (this also make a great lecture demo for introductory quantum physics lectures!). However virtual particles are just the quantum explanation for the field.
These 'fields' are merely regions of space in which the force or interaction occurs.
That is pretty much the definition of a field. Clearly there is something different in that region of space compared to a region where a charged particle feels no force so there is a physical manifestation.
The articles you point to seem to be just rehashing the debate that went on in the early 20th century between Schroedinger and Heisenberg i.e. wave vs. matrix mechanics. In the end it was shown that the two models were mathematically identical. You then enter into the realms of philosphy and not physics: if there are two identical models which are impossible to distinguish (mathematically they are the same) then which one is the "true" picture of reality? In either case I would argue that it does not matter: any model must produce predictions where a region of space will cause a force on a charged particle. GR and QFT are good example of this. In QFT you explain a gravitational field by the graviton and in GR by a deformation of space-time (a deformation field if you like).
Regarding your emphasis on "infer" when considering classical fields. This is always the case in physics. We infer everything from the available data.
We're not so bad...
...as long as you are a European hotelier which are the people who completed the survey the article reports on. Since US tipping practice calls for huge tips on the European scale (which I am sure the hoteliers love) and only US tourists with sufficient education to want to visit Europe as well as the money to afford to do so will go so this is not unbiased data.
That being said the reason I think US tourists get such a bad rap with other tourists is because they like to travel around in large groups by tour bus. When I am a tourist I find having a large groups of people clogging things up is irritating regardless of their nationality! Of course for hoteliers it is not a problem.
Gravity is most certainly not some field.....Allow me to clarify: fields do not physically exist.
Errr....yes they do. The electric field, by definition, is the force felt per unit charge. If I put a charge in an electric field then can physically observe the force and hence infer that there is a field. Virtual particles are the mechanism that creates the field but the field IS is physical entity. Another simple test that a field is something real is that it has an energy density. If the field does not physically exist then where does all this energy disappear to?
By the same extension gravity is a field too - albeit a rather strange one since as it is a tensor field. In fact as long as you put a cut off in the energy scale you can use quantum field theory to describe gravity just like any other field.
Although why you'd want to eat your cheques is beyond me
:-)
Well, if they contain excess carbon-14 (all paper contains some!) then one reason would be to utterly confuse future archaeologists when they dig up your remains and attempt to carbon date them
Actually whether or not Wikipedia is correct the Barclays machine was not the worlds first "ATM" because in the UK we don't call them that!
Wooah, the Higgs model is not beautiful, Higgs model is an ugly hack on the beautiful Standard Model. Every fermion having an adhoc coupling strength to give it its mass, no thanks.
The Standard Model already had the particle masses stuck in there as free parameters so the Higgs does not increase the number of free parameters in the model (except for its own mass). What is beautiful about the Higgs is that it solves the mass problem in an elegant fashion.
For example if you do the tree level calculation of e+e--->W+W- without the Higgs you end up with a cross-section which diverges as the centre-of-mass increases simply because the electron has a non-zero mass. If you add the Higgs the extra diagram precisely cancels the divergence and everything works well. Hence the mechanism which causes the electron to have mass also cancels out the divergences caused by that mass....which is why it looks beautiful to me.
If you don't like free parameters then I don't know why you say the SM is beautiful: it has 126 free parameters IIRC, far more than just the masses. Plus it includes non-perturbative QCD where you can't even calculate what is really going on. However I suppose that is why they say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
Unitarity. In all cases, the interaction probabilities must sum up to 1.
Actually they must sum up to give less than one (since you might not interact!). However this is NOT an argument that the Higgs must be found. We have to find something, true, before 1 TeV but who is to say it must be the Higgs?
That sounds like Aether to me.
Aether models require a preferred direction (which is how the Michelson-Morley experiment ruled them out). The Higgs has a magnitude only and no direction so the two are different, although they do, naively, look alike.
Actually a magnetic field is a bad example for a Higgs field precisely because it has both a magnitude and direction. The Higgs field has only a magnitude. A better example would be the temperature map you see in a weather forecast. Everywhere has a temperature value: it has no direction. This is what makes it different from the "aether" (aether had a preferred direction which is why the Michelson-Morley experiment disproved it).
The other weird thing about the Higgs field is that it has its lowest energy density at a non-zero value of the field i.e. it requires energy to lower the Higgs field! Electric and magnetic fields have their lowest energy density when the field strength is zero i.e. it takes energy to make them non-zero.
Sorry I should have included this in the original comment. Here is a link to the original expected Tevatron sensitivity and the updated one. The y axis is the volume of data collected by both experiments i.e. sum of DØ and CDF datasets and the x axis is the mass of the Standard Model Higgs. This is currently limited to be above 114 GeV/c2. The three lines are 5-sigma discovery, 3-sigma evidence and 95% confidence limit if we don't see any Higgs event in that amount of data.
The dip round 160 GeV/c2 mass is because a heavy enough Higgs can decay differently than a lighter one and the different decay is a lot easier to detect above all the other "background" events happening in the detector. We should get 10-20 fb-1 between both experiments by 2009 so, as you can see, unless we do something clever (which had not been thought of at the time the plots were made) or the Higgs is really light we won't get 5-sigma, but 3-sigma is a real possibility.
Given that it will be fall before the LHC detectors take any useful data from collisions at 14TeV, could Fermilab collect enough data for a 5-sigma discovery by then?
It is unlikely that we will have enough data for a 5-sigma Standard Model Higgs discovery before the LHC turns on. If I remember the plot for the expected Higgs significance correctly the best we can hope for is "3-sigma evidence" unless the Higgs really is right above the current limits (where ALEPH once suggested it was).
However this assumes a Standard Model Higgs. If something called Supersymmetry (SUSY) exists then there are 5 Higgs bosons (two with a charge) and in some areas of SUSY parameter space we can see some of these a lot more easily than the Standard Model Higgs This would also be a LOT more exciting than a Standard Model Higgs!
I'd also hope for the non-existence of the Higgs boson. however, all odds are against us.
Really? You have some evidence that the theorists are right? If so please share it with us. Just because nobody has thought of a better model it is by no means proof that one does not exist. The Higgs model really is a beautiful one and I think that we will find it...but in 1904 how many physicists would have bet on the universe having a maximum speed limit as the solution to the non-invariance of Maxwell's equations under Galilean transforms? All it takes is one smart guy to come up with a better model and we'd abandon the Higgs model and say that the new one is the way to go.