That depends on where you find the proton. Protons in the lighter nuclei (below iron) probably do date back to the Big Bang since they come from ordinary stars and fusion generates proton-rich nuclei which decay by positron emission. However Supernovae, which create the elements beyond iron, are thought to create these elements by neutron absorption which creates neutron rich nuclei. The neutrons in these nuclei will then decay to protons via beta decay so some of these protons will have the same age as the nucleus itself.
And how can you tell the age of a single atom?
You can't but, for unstable nuclei if you know the relative abundance at creation e.g. in a Supernova, the relative abundance now and the lifetimes of the different nuclei you can determine when the event which created them took place. This technique, applied to two different Uranium isotopes, is how the age of the Supernova which gave Earth her heavy elements, was determined.
Actually I very much doubt that since almost all the elements above helium and up to iron were formed in the hearts of stars and so are a lot younger than the Big Bang. For the trace elements above iron in your food we actually have evidence that they were created in a supernova about 6 billion years ago. So other than the hydrogen, which makes up only a tiny proportion of your food by weight, most of the atoms are likely to be considerably younger than 14 billion years and formed in the hearts of stars not in the Big Bang.
Plus injecting yourself with 3.5 billion year old bacteria "just to see what happens" is not how you do real science since the only thing you will learn is whether this species of bacteria is dangerous to humans. He seems to have mistaken a Marvel comic for a science textbook.
Claiming something is wrong just because it includes discriminating behavior is not a valid argument by itself, as it is quite intellectually dishonest. Unless prejudice against men is found (aka, they aren't being included because they are deemed inferior)...
I disagree. Discrimination based on gender, unless our different biology is relevant, is wrong because it automatically implies prejudice. Look up the definition: prejudice is "an unfair and unreasonable opinion or feeling, especially when formed without enough thought or knowledge". Hence this example is prejudicial against men since they are being rejected out of hand without and knowledge of who they are based solely on the unreasonable criteria that they are men.
I never said that all discrimination is bad, clearly we should discriminate based on ability, but I will claim that discrimination based on gender, race, religion etc. is wrong unless that gender, race etc. is directly relevant e.g. women do not need prostate exams. This is because such discrimination automatically implies inappropriate prejudice either for or against some group. Indeed I would claim that it is you who is being intellectually dishonest because you are trying to use sophistry, such as re-defining the meaning of prejudice, to escape the real issue which is simply whether discrimination based purely on gender can every be justified.
I ran into this problem while trying to build a laser lawnmower. You have to boil the water out of the grass before the laser will cut it...
That's actually not the worse problem with a laser lawnmower. If you had tested it on a lawn with a lot of dry grass the resulting grass fire would probably have meant that you would not be here telling us about how it did not work. Still, if you and your house did survive the experience at least you would not need to cut the grass for a while.
Can we think of doing something in light waves, two lasers in beyond visible range, but they interfere with beat frequency in visible range.
No. First the beat frequency is the frequency at which the amplitude of the wave oscillates. The frequency of the wave itself is the average of the two waves which make it up. So actually what you would want is one higher frequency and one lower frequency beam of waves so say IR and UV at which point the beat frequency will be too high to see.
The next problem you face is that beats only occur at the precise point where the beams interfere and they are not created and then emitted from that point as a new wave. With sound the ear hears the beats created at the point where the ear is. This would also be the case for light so to create an image you would have to arrange the beams such they interfered on each, individual retina of the people who will see the image with each retina getting a different image to create the 3D effect.
Lastly there are few issues with this in that focussing IR and UV beams onto someone's retina is probably not a good idea from a medical point of view. In addition the frequency would have to be controlled incredibly well controlled to generate the colours and the system would have to track the location of everyone's retina. Lastly, if you overcame all these hurdles, the result would probably be extremely disconcerting because you would possibly be able to see the image whether or not your eyes were open depending on the penetrative power of the radiation used e.g. microwave and X-ray will penetrate the eyelid but again focussing microwaves and X-rays on your eyeball is probably a really bad idea.
Not yet practical, but maybe this is the technology that one day will give us real working light sabres.
Unlikely. The problem with using lasers for this is that they focus the beam to get the intensity needed to ionize the air and so much of the beam will carry on only slightly attenuated by the plasma. Assuming you had the power requirements to run this intensity continuously (or at least at a far higher repetition rate than todays femto-second lasers) then you could certainly imagine using this to create a tube of plasma like a light sabre but in reality what you have created is a massively powerful laser beam which you have focussed to ionize the nearby air.
This would undoubtedly cut through things but the cutting power would not be limited to the length of the blade and, if you did not bother to focus it, it would extend a great deal further and be harder to detect...but at the cost of looking nowhere near as cool. However I expect that, unlike Hollywood, when it comes to real world weapons effectiveness will outrank the "looking cool" factor by quite a lot. If you really want a lightsabre I think it is far more likely to come from other ways of generating and containing plasma (such as this) rather than using laser-created plasma because in the latter case you might as well just use the laser beam without the plasma.
...which was why Canada did not get independence until the threat was removed and it no longer needed British protection from the US which was, in fact, my entire point. Thank you for agreeing!
Canada and Australia are not independent. They still swear allegiance to the Royal House of Britain.
Canada is fully independent. It is no less correct to say that Britain swears allegiance to the Royal House of Canada. The queen has two, independent titles: Queen of the UK and Queen of Canada. I expect Australia has a similar deal.
The advantage with Canada's independence is that we got it by asking nicely and without anyone having to die, we got to keep a parliamentary democracy which had the benefits of centuries of adjustments to make it function well and we got a constitution with a wonderful clause that stops those with wealth using it to block laws they don't like.
You may disagree but I would argue that Canada's path to independence worked out far better than that chosen by her neighbour and, if anything, that neighbour slowed the path to independence down since for a considerable time Canada wanted and needed British protection against her young, violent neighbour's territorial desires.
Some of them remind you of the old joke about nuclear fusion; it's always 20 years away.
Actually it's 40 years - and it's been 40 years away for the past 60 years or so. However batteries are a bit different in that there are regular claims of working prototypes with capacities 2-10 times the current limit and/or recharge rates similarly improved yet none ever seem to make it into a commercial product and yet the capabilities of Li-ion are slowly improving. What I would love to know is where all these ideas fail (as so many clearly have). Is that they cost too much to make, aren't safe in everyday environments or that the improvements claimed are woefully optimistic? or is if that by the time they would come to market Li-ion has improved itself to the point where there is not much difference in capability?
Resonance occurs when the external driving forces drives the system such that it produces a maximum amplitude response in the steady state (last part is important). If you are not driving it at this precise frequency (which is actually slightly less than the natural, undamped oscillation frequency due to damping) then you are not at resonance. In physics you do not use terms such as more or less resonance: it's like being pregnant either there is a resonance or there is not and for systems where the damping ratio is >1/sqrt(2) there is no resonance.
You can talk about the width of the resonance and generally the less damping there is the narrower the resonant peak is and the larger the resonant amplitude. If you are off-resonance you would say that you get a lower amplitude response. Aeroelastic flutter is a transitory response which gives an exponentially growing amplitude. Furthermore it can occur in systems which cannot exhibit resonance because of too much damping.
The distinction is drawn at the end of part III. Seems to me to be pure semantics. If the bridge were driven to flutter at a self-resonant frequency then yes, it was a resonant phenomenon.
Resonance is a steady state phenomenon so if the amplitude is exponentially growing this is evidence of anti-damping (which is what aero-elastic flutter is) and not resonance. Both mathematically and observably the two phenomenon are different. Furthermore you can have aero-elastic flutter in a system which has enough damping that it cannot resonate (which is the case when the damping ratio is >1/sqrt(2) ).
I don't know where you got those definitions from but they are wrong. Aeroelastic flutter is essentially a form of anti-damping force applied to a simple harmonic oscillator and is neither a type of resonance nor the motion itself: you still need an oscillator to experience the anti-damping.
Simple harmonic motion is just the sinusoidal motion in time. To exhibit resonance you actually need a DAMPED harmonic oscillator (otherwise you have infinite amplitude at resonance) and not all damped harmonic oscillators exhibit resonance: only ones where the damping ratio is less than 1/sqrt(2) will show resonance.
Resonance is when an external force drives a damped, harmonic oscillator at a frequency which generates a maximum amplitude response in the steady state. This last part is very important and is why aero-elastic flutter is not resonance. In resonance the amplitude is large but constant, with aeroelastic flutter it grows exponentially and is part of the transient solution of the damped harmonic oscillator. You can also have aeroelastic flutter in a damped system which cannot show resonance.
Saying this wasn't resonance because the forcing function was a product of the oscillation in the first place is pedantic.
Actually it is not pedantic the two types of motion are quite dissimilar: aero-elastic flutter generates an exponentially growing amplitude whereas resonance generates a large, but constant, amplitude. Aero-elastic flutter is essentially the inverse of damping whereas resonance requires an external, oscillating force which drives the system.
Actually it really is not like resonance but more like and anti-damping force. Resonance is when a periodic force is applied to the system and, when the frequency of that force matches the natural vibration frequency of the system, the steady-state response gives a large amplitude response. The key difference is that with resonance the system is in a steady state with a constant amplitude. With "anti-damping" (called aero-elastic flutter in this case) the amplitude of the system increases with each oscillation since you effectively have a negative damping ratio.
Hence there is a clear difference in the motion between resonance and anti-damping which you can determine by studying the motion which the paper seems to have done. It is NOT just a fancy name for a resonance effect: the behaviour is transitory and not steady-state. However this has been known for over a decade now and I'd be surprised if it were still being taught as resonance in introductory physics courses. Certainly for the one I teach I describe it in terms of damping and point out the fallacy of the resonance explanation.
So, in this case, men are not actually being hurt in any way....I'm looking forward to the tortured logic that tires to claim it is though.
No tortured logic required, just a reversal of roles. Suppose the event had been organized such that women were excluded? This would be regarded by almost everyone to be sexist discrimination that denied women a fair opportunity to demonstrate their talents to Google and thus it harms them. If this is true for women if then, by symmetry it applies to men when they are excluded. To argue otherwise would be to claim the sexism does not harm those it is biased against.
There may be a more subtle bias elsewhere which harms women but surely the society we want to strive for is where nobody's chances of success are harmed by their gender not one where we strive to harm everyone equally? The solution to sexism is to identify it and fix it not to be equally sexist in reverse. As the old saying goes "two wrongs do not make a right".
Progress is insanely expensive, funding is all but non-existent, it's hard to find talented scientists who actually want to study it, and the general public just isn't interested anymore.
I completely disagree, funding still exists although it is being squeezed by governments who want to fund building better widgets rather than understanding the physics which will let you continue to do this 50-100 years in the future. Given the article it is clear that the public are interested in it - so much so that they will listen to someone like 'startswithabang' who, when it comes to particle physics, doesn't really know what he is talking about since the heirarchy, or fine tuning, problem is all about trying to explain the difference between the mass of the Higgs and the scale of gravity and not just why gravity is so weak. For example in SUSY you still end up with gravity incredibly weak and there is still no explanation as to why.
But we should dismiss something because of who said it?
Eh? Try reading what I wrote again: I was specifically arguing against that.
They're not arguments. "Don't trust this guy because philosophers suck and my gut tells me he's wrong about the talk I didn't hear."
Try: "don't trust this guy because he claims that classical mechanics has not been tested when it has been". Seems like an argument to me, of course it is based on what has happened rather than force of personality but that's how us scientists tend to argue. Might I suggest that you will make a more effective counter point if you argue based on evidence and actually read what was written?
Two points: first my criticism was aimed at the author's interpretation of the talk which I suspect missed much of the relevant detail. Hence the admonition to not trust the philosopher. Second science is not based on personality: arguments are won or lost on the evidence to support the positions. Arguing that because someone with a Nobel Prize said it it must be right might be how an philosopher would argue but for a scientist it carries no merit. However if that does not persuade you then clearly you must believe in the paranormal because Brian Josephson does and he has a Nobel Prize.
So if you disagree with me point out why my arguments are wrong. Don't try to claim that something is right simply because of who said it or, in this case, because of what someone else thought he said. It's extremely unscientific.
You do realize that the quotations you give have to do with a talk by David Gross [wikipedia.org], a Nobel Prize winning particle physicist, right?
Yes, filtered through the mind of a philosopher which is why you do not trust the philosopher talking about science because somewhere something went very wrong and I strongly suspect that the problem is with the philosopher's interpretation. However it is worth pointing out that winning a Nobel prize does not make you immune from saying crazy things which you would know if you had ever met Brian Josephson (look at the latter part of the article!). That's one of the great things about science: it respects evidence not authority. Winning a Nobel Prize earns you the respect and attention of your peers so they will listen carefully to what you say but it does not mean that they will blindly accept it without evidence to support any claims.
Gross proposed to distinguish among frameworks, theories, and models. Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and string “theory” are not theories, but rather frameworks. Theories are something like Newton’s or Einstein’s theory of gravity, or the unfortunately named Standard “Model.” Theories can be tested, frameworks not so much. Models include the BCS model of superconductivity, or BSM (Beyond Standard Model) models.
Unfortunately classical mechanics and quantum mechanics can and have been tested. Frameworks in his definition seem to be multiple applications of the same fundamental, physical principles to different situations. These can easily be tested and, for two of the examples given, have been. Then we get gems like:
According to Gross, since physical phenomena scale as the log(energy), physicists can extrapolate theory to very high energy. Unfortunately, experiments scale only as energy^2, which means that they cannot easily be extrapolated to very high energy.
which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Just off the top of my head there are the corrections to the Higgs mass which scale as energy squared (which is theory) and I've no idea what it means to say that an experiment scales with energy-squared since, for many experiments, increasing the energy is irrelevant and for others, e.g. a linear accelerator, the energy increases linearly with size.
In that case the correct actions are to present the research about how many whales can be harvested sustainably (this must meet international peer review standards, not just some national government review) to the IWC. Then request that whaling be allowed within these quotas. If they cannot come back with sensible, scientifically supported reasons as to why this is not sensible then you threaten to leave and, if ignored, you do leave (citing the unscientific, irrationality) and then limit yourself to the scientifically established limits.
That's the honourable way to behave. The dishonest, dishonourable way is to openly flout the international treat you signed by lying about the need to kill whales for research.
If whale populations have recovered to the point where they can support commercial whaling again then fine but in that case there should be quotas, just like there are for fish, and all nations which want to whale should be allowed to within the scientifically established quotas. Lying about "research" as a way to avoid all of this is not acceptable. At a minimum the rule should be that any whales killed for scientific reasons are destroyed afterwards and no part of them may be consumed to avoid extremely dishonest requests like Japan's.
Slashdot Mirror
But the protons are.
That depends on where you find the proton. Protons in the lighter nuclei (below iron) probably do date back to the Big Bang since they come from ordinary stars and fusion generates proton-rich nuclei which decay by positron emission. However Supernovae, which create the elements beyond iron, are thought to create these elements by neutron absorption which creates neutron rich nuclei. The neutrons in these nuclei will then decay to protons via beta decay so some of these protons will have the same age as the nucleus itself.
And how can you tell the age of a single atom?
You can't but, for unstable nuclei if you know the relative abundance at creation e.g. in a Supernova, the relative abundance now and the lifetimes of the different nuclei you can determine when the event which created them took place. This technique, applied to two different Uranium isotopes, is how the age of the Supernova which gave Earth her heavy elements, was determined.
Actually I very much doubt that since almost all the elements above helium and up to iron were formed in the hearts of stars and so are a lot younger than the Big Bang. For the trace elements above iron in your food we actually have evidence that they were created in a supernova about 6 billion years ago. So other than the hydrogen, which makes up only a tiny proportion of your food by weight, most of the atoms are likely to be considerably younger than 14 billion years and formed in the hearts of stars not in the Big Bang.
Plus injecting yourself with 3.5 billion year old bacteria "just to see what happens" is not how you do real science since the only thing you will learn is whether this species of bacteria is dangerous to humans. He seems to have mistaken a Marvel comic for a science textbook.
Claiming something is wrong just because it includes discriminating behavior is not a valid argument by itself, as it is quite intellectually dishonest. Unless prejudice against men is found (aka, they aren't being included because they are deemed inferior)...
I disagree. Discrimination based on gender, unless our different biology is relevant, is wrong because it automatically implies prejudice. Look up the definition: prejudice is "an unfair and unreasonable opinion or feeling, especially when formed without enough thought or knowledge". Hence this example is prejudicial against men since they are being rejected out of hand without and knowledge of who they are based solely on the unreasonable criteria that they are men.
I never said that all discrimination is bad, clearly we should discriminate based on ability, but I will claim that discrimination based on gender, race, religion etc. is wrong unless that gender, race etc. is directly relevant e.g. women do not need prostate exams. This is because such discrimination automatically implies inappropriate prejudice either for or against some group. Indeed I would claim that it is you who is being intellectually dishonest because you are trying to use sophistry, such as re-defining the meaning of prejudice, to escape the real issue which is simply whether discrimination based purely on gender can every be justified.
I ran into this problem while trying to build a laser lawnmower. You have to boil the water out of the grass before the laser will cut it...
That's actually not the worse problem with a laser lawnmower. If you had tested it on a lawn with a lot of dry grass the resulting grass fire would probably have meant that you would not be here telling us about how it did not work. Still, if you and your house did survive the experience at least you would not need to cut the grass for a while.
Can we think of doing something in light waves, two lasers in beyond visible range, but they interfere with beat frequency in visible range.
No. First the beat frequency is the frequency at which the amplitude of the wave oscillates. The frequency of the wave itself is the average of the two waves which make it up. So actually what you would want is one higher frequency and one lower frequency beam of waves so say IR and UV at which point the beat frequency will be too high to see.
The next problem you face is that beats only occur at the precise point where the beams interfere and they are not created and then emitted from that point as a new wave. With sound the ear hears the beats created at the point where the ear is. This would also be the case for light so to create an image you would have to arrange the beams such they interfered on each, individual retina of the people who will see the image with each retina getting a different image to create the 3D effect.
Lastly there are few issues with this in that focussing IR and UV beams onto someone's retina is probably not a good idea from a medical point of view. In addition the frequency would have to be controlled incredibly well controlled to generate the colours and the system would have to track the location of everyone's retina. Lastly, if you overcame all these hurdles, the result would probably be extremely disconcerting because you would possibly be able to see the image whether or not your eyes were open depending on the penetrative power of the radiation used e.g. microwave and X-ray will penetrate the eyelid but again focussing microwaves and X-rays on your eyeball is probably a really bad idea.
Not yet practical, but maybe this is the technology that one day will give us real working light sabres.
Unlikely. The problem with using lasers for this is that they focus the beam to get the intensity needed to ionize the air and so much of the beam will carry on only slightly attenuated by the plasma. Assuming you had the power requirements to run this intensity continuously (or at least at a far higher repetition rate than todays femto-second lasers) then you could certainly imagine using this to create a tube of plasma like a light sabre but in reality what you have created is a massively powerful laser beam which you have focussed to ionize the nearby air.
This would undoubtedly cut through things but the cutting power would not be limited to the length of the blade and, if you did not bother to focus it, it would extend a great deal further and be harder to detect...but at the cost of looking nowhere near as cool. However I expect that, unlike Hollywood, when it comes to real world weapons effectiveness will outrank the "looking cool" factor by quite a lot. If you really want a lightsabre I think it is far more likely to come from other ways of generating and containing plasma (such as this) rather than using laser-created plasma because in the latter case you might as well just use the laser beam without the plasma.
That is a very dependent sort of independence.
Canada and Australia are not independent. They still swear allegiance to the Royal House of Britain.
Canada is fully independent. It is no less correct to say that Britain swears allegiance to the Royal House of Canada. The queen has two, independent titles: Queen of the UK and Queen of Canada. I expect Australia has a similar deal.
The advantage with Canada's independence is that we got it by asking nicely and without anyone having to die, we got to keep a parliamentary democracy which had the benefits of centuries of adjustments to make it function well and we got a constitution with a wonderful clause that stops those with wealth using it to block laws they don't like.
You may disagree but I would argue that Canada's path to independence worked out far better than that chosen by her neighbour and, if anything, that neighbour slowed the path to independence down since for a considerable time Canada wanted and needed British protection against her young, violent neighbour's territorial desires.
Hmmm... fire and brimstone....the CEO of Sony isn't a Mr. de Ville by any chance?
Some of them remind you of the old joke about nuclear fusion; it's always 20 years away.
Actually it's 40 years - and it's been 40 years away for the past 60 years or so. However batteries are a bit different in that there are regular claims of working prototypes with capacities 2-10 times the current limit and/or recharge rates similarly improved yet none ever seem to make it into a commercial product and yet the capabilities of Li-ion are slowly improving. What I would love to know is where all these ideas fail (as so many clearly have). Is that they cost too much to make, aren't safe in everyday environments or that the improvements claimed are woefully optimistic? or is if that by the time they would come to market Li-ion has improved itself to the point where there is not much difference in capability?
Resonance occurs when the external driving forces drives the system such that it produces a maximum amplitude response in the steady state (last part is important). If you are not driving it at this precise frequency (which is actually slightly less than the natural, undamped oscillation frequency due to damping) then you are not at resonance. In physics you do not use terms such as more or less resonance: it's like being pregnant either there is a resonance or there is not and for systems where the damping ratio is >1/sqrt(2) there is no resonance.
You can talk about the width of the resonance and generally the less damping there is the narrower the resonant peak is and the larger the resonant amplitude. If you are off-resonance you would say that you get a lower amplitude response. Aeroelastic flutter is a transitory response which gives an exponentially growing amplitude. Furthermore it can occur in systems which cannot exhibit resonance because of too much damping.
The distinction is drawn at the end of part III. Seems to me to be pure semantics. If the bridge were driven to flutter at a self-resonant frequency then yes, it was a resonant phenomenon.
Resonance is a steady state phenomenon so if the amplitude is exponentially growing this is evidence of anti-damping (which is what aero-elastic flutter is) and not resonance. Both mathematically and observably the two phenomenon are different. Furthermore you can have aero-elastic flutter in a system which has enough damping that it cannot resonate (which is the case when the damping ratio is >1/sqrt(2) ).
I don't know where you got those definitions from but they are wrong. Aeroelastic flutter is essentially a form of anti-damping force applied to a simple harmonic oscillator and is neither a type of resonance nor the motion itself: you still need an oscillator to experience the anti-damping.
Simple harmonic motion is just the sinusoidal motion in time. To exhibit resonance you actually need a DAMPED harmonic oscillator (otherwise you have infinite amplitude at resonance) and not all damped harmonic oscillators exhibit resonance: only ones where the damping ratio is less than 1/sqrt(2) will show resonance.
Resonance is when an external force drives a damped, harmonic oscillator at a frequency which generates a maximum amplitude response in the steady state. This last part is very important and is why aero-elastic flutter is not resonance. In resonance the amplitude is large but constant, with aeroelastic flutter it grows exponentially and is part of the transient solution of the damped harmonic oscillator. You can also have aeroelastic flutter in a damped system which cannot show resonance.
Saying this wasn't resonance because the forcing function was a product of the oscillation in the first place is pedantic.
Actually it is not pedantic the two types of motion are quite dissimilar: aero-elastic flutter generates an exponentially growing amplitude whereas resonance generates a large, but constant, amplitude. Aero-elastic flutter is essentially the inverse of damping whereas resonance requires an external, oscillating force which drives the system.
Actually it really is not like resonance but more like and anti-damping force. Resonance is when a periodic force is applied to the system and, when the frequency of that force matches the natural vibration frequency of the system, the steady-state response gives a large amplitude response. The key difference is that with resonance the system is in a steady state with a constant amplitude. With "anti-damping" (called aero-elastic flutter in this case) the amplitude of the system increases with each oscillation since you effectively have a negative damping ratio.
Hence there is a clear difference in the motion between resonance and anti-damping which you can determine by studying the motion which the paper seems to have done. It is NOT just a fancy name for a resonance effect: the behaviour is transitory and not steady-state. However this has been known for over a decade now and I'd be surprised if it were still being taught as resonance in introductory physics courses. Certainly for the one I teach I describe it in terms of damping and point out the fallacy of the resonance explanation.
So, in this case, men are not actually being hurt in any way....I'm looking forward to the tortured logic that tires to claim it is though.
No tortured logic required, just a reversal of roles. Suppose the event had been organized such that women were excluded? This would be regarded by almost everyone to be sexist discrimination that denied women a fair opportunity to demonstrate their talents to Google and thus it harms them. If this is true for women if then, by symmetry it applies to men when they are excluded. To argue otherwise would be to claim the sexism does not harm those it is biased against.
There may be a more subtle bias elsewhere which harms women but surely the society we want to strive for is where nobody's chances of success are harmed by their gender not one where we strive to harm everyone equally? The solution to sexism is to identify it and fix it not to be equally sexist in reverse. As the old saying goes "two wrongs do not make a right".
Progress is insanely expensive, funding is all but non-existent, it's hard to find talented scientists who actually want to study it, and the general public just isn't interested anymore.
I completely disagree, funding still exists although it is being squeezed by governments who want to fund building better widgets rather than understanding the physics which will let you continue to do this 50-100 years in the future. Given the article it is clear that the public are interested in it - so much so that they will listen to someone like 'startswithabang' who, when it comes to particle physics, doesn't really know what he is talking about since the heirarchy, or fine tuning, problem is all about trying to explain the difference between the mass of the Higgs and the scale of gravity and not just why gravity is so weak. For example in SUSY you still end up with gravity incredibly weak and there is still no explanation as to why.
But we should dismiss something because of who said it?
Eh? Try reading what I wrote again: I was specifically arguing against that.
They're not arguments. "Don't trust this guy because philosophers suck and my gut tells me he's wrong about the talk I didn't hear."
Try: "don't trust this guy because he claims that classical mechanics has not been tested when it has been". Seems like an argument to me, of course it is based on what has happened rather than force of personality but that's how us scientists tend to argue. Might I suggest that you will make a more effective counter point if you argue based on evidence and actually read what was written?
Two points: first my criticism was aimed at the author's interpretation of the talk which I suspect missed much of the relevant detail. Hence the admonition to not trust the philosopher. Second science is not based on personality: arguments are won or lost on the evidence to support the positions. Arguing that because someone with a Nobel Prize said it it must be right might be how an philosopher would argue but for a scientist it carries no merit. However if that does not persuade you then clearly you must believe in the paranormal because Brian Josephson does and he has a Nobel Prize.
So if you disagree with me point out why my arguments are wrong. Don't try to claim that something is right simply because of who said it or, in this case, because of what someone else thought he said. It's extremely unscientific.
You do realize that the quotations you give have to do with a talk by David Gross [wikipedia.org], a Nobel Prize winning particle physicist, right?
Yes, filtered through the mind of a philosopher which is why you do not trust the philosopher talking about science because somewhere something went very wrong and I strongly suspect that the problem is with the philosopher's interpretation. However it is worth pointing out that winning a Nobel prize does not make you immune from saying crazy things which you would know if you had ever met Brian Josephson (look at the latter part of the article!). That's one of the great things about science: it respects evidence not authority. Winning a Nobel Prize earns you the respect and attention of your peers so they will listen carefully to what you say but it does not mean that they will blindly accept it without evidence to support any claims.
Gross proposed to distinguish among frameworks, theories, and models. Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and string “theory” are not theories, but rather frameworks. Theories are something like Newton’s or Einstein’s theory of gravity, or the unfortunately named Standard “Model.” Theories can be tested, frameworks not so much. Models include the BCS model of superconductivity, or BSM (Beyond Standard Model) models.
Unfortunately classical mechanics and quantum mechanics can and have been tested. Frameworks in his definition seem to be multiple applications of the same fundamental, physical principles to different situations. These can easily be tested and, for two of the examples given, have been. Then we get gems like:
According to Gross, since physical phenomena scale as the log(energy), physicists can extrapolate theory to very high energy. Unfortunately, experiments scale only as energy^2, which means that they cannot easily be extrapolated to very high energy.
which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Just off the top of my head there are the corrections to the Higgs mass which scale as energy squared (which is theory) and I've no idea what it means to say that an experiment scales with energy-squared since, for many experiments, increasing the energy is irrelevant and for others, e.g. a linear accelerator, the energy increases linearly with size.
The field where humans really excel over other species, the field that really allowed us to take off, is communication...
In that case the correct actions are to present the research about how many whales can be harvested sustainably (this must meet international peer review standards, not just some national government review) to the IWC. Then request that whaling be allowed within these quotas. If they cannot come back with sensible, scientifically supported reasons as to why this is not sensible then you threaten to leave and, if ignored, you do leave (citing the unscientific, irrationality) and then limit yourself to the scientifically established limits.
That's the honourable way to behave. The dishonest, dishonourable way is to openly flout the international treat you signed by lying about the need to kill whales for research.
If whale populations have recovered to the point where they can support commercial whaling again then fine but in that case there should be quotas, just like there are for fish, and all nations which want to whale should be allowed to within the scientifically established quotas. Lying about "research" as a way to avoid all of this is not acceptable. At a minimum the rule should be that any whales killed for scientific reasons are destroyed afterwards and no part of them may be consumed to avoid extremely dishonest requests like Japan's.