Yes you do. Maskelyne's method just uses the moon as a clock and required being able to accurately measure the angular separation between the moon and a bright star near its path to determine the time. Since the moon moves ~0.5 degrees every hour you need to measure the angle to at least this accuracy to get a time. While it worked it required great care measuring the angles, complex tables to convert the angle to a time and a clear view of the night sky. Even with all this extra effort on the one voyage where they were compared directly this method produced an error three times greater than Harrison's clock.
I would also disagree with your open tech argument. Have a look at the 1775 Nautical Almanac. Apart from copyright on the tables you had to have a government license to print them and the calculations on which the tables are based are not given anywhere (although there is some reassurance that the calculations have been checked multiple times). Worse this is a something you had to purchase every year. I don't see how this is any more open than Harrison's clock whose mechanism you could examine and tweak if you though you could do better.
If the clock could be produced using 1700's machining and metallurgical technology, only then would it prove Harrison's contemporary critics incorrect.
Harrison built his clocks in the 1700's (although apparently Slashdot only just heard about it). They were incredible machines for their time and, after much wrangling with the astronomers of the time (who thought that schemes like making detailed observations of the moons of Jupiter through a telescope on the heaving deck of a ship in the mid-atlantic were better ideas) he won 1700's X-prize equivalent for inventing a machine to accurately measure longitude. You can actually see the clocks he made in the old Royal Greenwich Observatory building in London.
An even better idea would be to do it as an international collaboration - but a real international collaboration based on international treaty (like CERN) not a US-controlled project with other partners (like the ill-fated SSC). Not only do you share the costs but it might also help to reduce the need for those F-35s.
Taking your interaction rate without question a trillion is 10^12. The LHC has several orders of magnitude more protons than that in each beam and remembering that muons decay it seems entirely reasonable that a muon collider would probably need even more to have the same number of particles. Even one interaction could be serious at these energies since it will shatter a nucleus and create a shower in the body however the rate would more likely be hundreds per second given the same particle counts as the LHC.
The threat was bad enough to be seriously considered: see this paper.
One of the more precious resources that asteroid miners are going after is water, something that is in abundance on Earth and, oddly enough, in space as well
Why is that so odd? Where do you think the water on Earth came from?
Not quite - doing the research required to know how to blow up the moon and then telling everyone how to blow it up is apparently what this guy thinks is protected. The tortuous logic is that activities required for communication are protected and, before you can communicate scientific knowledge you have to have found that knowledge and so therefore scientific research is protected.
This is clearly nonsense. You can communicate scientific ideas freely without knowing that they are right. Indeed this is what a lot of scientific discussion is - exchanging ideas about how things might work and then designing an experiment to test the hypothesis. As with everything else the speech should be protected, acting on that speech, i.e. research, should not.
Why not just use rubber bullets or baton rounds? The technology has been around since the 70s and you are not limited to one less-lethal shot. In fact rubber bullets seem like a far better idea - with this solution what happens if the first shot misses?
but the short lifetime of the muon has kept anyone from coming up with a workable proposal so far.
The other problem they had with the muon accelerator proposals which Fermilab looked at a while ago was the lethal amounts of neutrino radiation from muons decaying. While neutrinos rarely interact at energies below a PeV if you get enough of them there can be enough interactions to be dangerous if a human stood in the beam and unfortunately shielding really isn't an option with neutrinos.
I think the limiting factor is going to be financial.
That's one way to look at it but I prefer to think that the limiting factor is really cleverness. The techniques we use in the LHC to accelerate particles are fundamentally the same as those used since the 1930's albeit with significant, incremental improvements. We have indeed reached the financial limit of current accelerator technology but there are alternatives.
One way, as you suggest, would be to go for new acceleration techniques. Plasma physicists have had some impressive results with particle acceleration but while the accelerating gradients are incredible there are major issues with reproducibility, scaling and intensity.
Another way to go is to let nature do the acceleration for you. There are an increasing number of experiments looking for or studying exceedingly high energy particles from astrophysical sources e.g. IceCube, Hesse, Auger etc. The problem there is that there are not very many of these particles so you need a big detector to have a chance of seeing enough to be able to study them.
Lastly you can let quantum mechanics give you access to physics well above the energy scale that you are at through 'virtual' particles. For example nuclear beta decay is only possible through the W-boson which has a mass ~80 times that of the proton and so larger than some of the nuclei which beta decay! If we can observe rare decays of particles which the Standard Model says are forbidden we can start to get some idea of the new physics out there. An example of this is the search for proton decay which 'grand unification' models of the fundamental forces suggest should happen through extremely heavy (10^16 times the mass of a proton) particles which is why the proton is so incredibly stable.
So that's three possible ways around the financial limit of ever larger accelerators so with the 'easy', incremental option off the table really we are now only limited by how clever we can be in coming up with ways around this.
There is a good reason for that - there is no supporting evidence and, in fact, very strong evidence suggesting that it is completely wrong...but that's what you get with 'startswithabang', it usually ends with a whimper. The one of the most damning bits of evidence that there is something well before 10^19 GeV (no clue where he gets the 1^8 TeV figure from) is that the Higgs mass 125 GeV/c^2.
Unlike every other fundamental particle the Higgs has no spin, which means it has no intrinsic angular momentum like electrons, quarks, photons etc. This has the effect that quantum corrections very strongly affect its mass. In fact these corrections apply to the square of the Higgs mass and grow as the square of the energy scale so if the Standard Model is good up to the Planck scale at 10^19 GeV these corrections are of the order of 10^38 in size. Each Standard Model particle has its own correction to the Higgs mass with fermions and bosons providing opposite sign corrections.
Here is the problem though. In the Standard Model there is no symmetry between fermions and bosons and the coupling to the Higgs field, which determines these corrections, are all free parameters. So if we believe that there is nothing but the Standard Model before the Planck scale then we have an amazing co-incidence that a series of essentially random terms each of order 10^38 cancel so precisely that the remainder is of order 10^4.
To put that in context it would be like tossing a coin about 100 billion times and getting heads every single time. I don't know about you but personally I would start getting suspicious that something was fixing the result sometime around toss 100.
This is the issue with the Standard Model: the fact that there is a Higgs at 125 GeV is like the 100 billion coin tosses all coming up heads. The problem is that we do not yet know how nature is fixing the result but it does mean that the new physics required to fix it most likely occurs below ~10 TeV. While this is not a hard limit the higher in energy you go the less natural any accidental cancellation will be so really the energy limit where you expect new physics depends on how many times you can toss a coin and get heads before you believe that something is fixing the result.
Yes because their motivation will determine the type of solution they might seek or accept. For example if there is some loop hole they can find in Irish law which would allow the disclosure then they may go for that if money is their prime motivation (unless they are concerned that any disclosure would hurt then financially). Whereas if they were fighting this on principle they would not accept any solution that would force them to disclose data about non-US citizens which is not held in the US.
True but I expect that there is a strong financial incentive behind it. If the US government compels them to turn over the data in contravention of local laws it will not absolve their responsibility and culpability under those laws. Hence they will also most certainly get sued for damages by the people whose data they have illegally turned over as well as end up facing criminal fines for violating privacy laws.
Check your link again. It says we are living in a time with relatively high sea levels, the opposite of what you claim.
Read the text again carefully! From the caption under the figure I linked: "Note that over most of geologic history, long-term average sea level has been significantly higher than today.".
In case that was not clear if over much of geological history sea level has been higher than today this means that we are living in a time of relatively LOW sea level. If you don't believe that then just look at the data in the plot!
A 200 metre rise is impossible.....If you'd actually read the text under the image you linked to, you'd have realized that.
I don't know which image you were looking at but the text under the image I linked to says: "Comparison of two sea level reconstructions during the last 500 Ma. The scale of change during the last glacial/interglacial transition is indicated with a black bar. Note that over most of geologic history, long-term average sea level has been significantly higher than today."
I don't see anything there to suggest that any major plate tectonics are required. Furthermore in the text of the article in says: "During the glacial-interglacial cycles over the past few million years, the mean sea level has varied by somewhat more than a hundred metres. This is primarily due to the growth and decay of ice sheets (mostly in the northern hemisphere) with water evaporated from the sea."
Which seems to explicitly contradict you and say that the change is precisely due to changes in temperature. Melting ice is not the only way to increase sea level: thermal expansion is also a major factor and what evidence I could find suggests that it accounts for about 50% of sea level change at the moment. So if you get 80m from melting the ice and another 80m from thermal expansion you can easily get close to 160m. After that there is no reason to limit thermal expansion since this could continue even after all the icecaps melt so 200m does not seem impossible.
I agree that this is a surprising number and I expected to find that the maximum possible rise would be far less than this but the evidence suggest otherwise.
How about WEB then? (and no it is not HTML, Javascript or anything to do with the WWW!) It's the programming language used to write TeX which itself lies behind LaTeX which is widely used by scientists and engineers to typeset papers involving maths as well as for theses, text books etc.
That is surprising since claims regarding the failings of our schools are so prevalent in media and society as a whole.
I agree - it's the same here in Canada - but I would attribute that to attempts to improve the system using new techniques which have never been proven to work better than the system they replaced. Worse the reason given for using the new system is that the previous system is "old and archaic". You do not replace something simply because it is old, you replace it when you have something better.
Many of the new teaching techniques I have seen work not because of their brilliance - indeed many are half-baked ideas - but because the person who came up with them is clearly enthusiastic about the approach and communicates that to their students when using the technique. To really show the worth of a new teaching technique it needs to be used by someone who is not particularly keen about it (but neither hostile to it). The reason that we keep seeing all these different approaches which then get withdrawn and/or derided is because this is the hurdle they almost all fail: they do not work with a less motivated tecaher
The rise will stop. There is a finite amount of water on the planet that can end up in the oceans.
True but the sea could rise quite a bit before we get to that if you have a look at the sea level over the past 500 million years. Interestingly it seems that we live in a time of surprisingly low sea levels. A 200 metre sea rise would affect quite a few people.
Depends on the possible side effects and depends on the most likely outcome using conventional medicine.
Well since we already have an educational model that works (or at least used to) to some degree and we are looking at ways to improve it the medical equivalent would be having a condition which medical science can already manage to a varying degree of success and then replacing that with a new treatment which has never been tried on anyone before (so nobody knows the side effects) but which the doctors think will work better than the old treatment and they can give you a glitzy presentation from the company pushing the new treatment which contains lots of hyperbole about how wonderful it might be but no actual data which would stand up to scientific review to support that.
That pretty much sums up what happens when a publisher rep comes into my office with a $200+ text book to push on the students which comes with a quiz system, ebook version etc. etc. and lots of buzz words. The very distinct impression is that they have lots of evidence that this technology will improve their bottom line and a lot less reliable data about whether it improves education.
The education industry could learn a lot from the angel / VC funding industry. You only need 1-10% successes to make the 90-99% failures worth it as long as the success are sufficiently scale-able.
Try telling that to the students who have had an appalling low standard of education because of the 90-99% failure rate of all the new things they had tried on them. Education involves humans and so experimenting with it is somewhere in between the venture capital model you mention and medical science. Nobody would accept a 90-99% failure rate for medical innovations which get as far as being tried on patients!
Clearly education is not life-critical as medicine can be but, unlike medicine, there is really no way to determine whether a new technique is effective other than to try it on students. So while education is more risk tolerant than medicine it is nowhere near as risk tolerant as VC industry funding.
The data should always be king--not the math--inconsistencies should point the finger at the math and theories, not the other way around.
Except when the data are "bad". The most recent example of this was the Opera experiment's claim to have observed faster that light neutrinos. That's what their data said...at least until someone found that their GPS cable was loose.
Experimental science is never that cut and dried. The data may always be right given the experiment performed but, as the Opera case shows, that may not be the experiment which you think you had performed. The result is that there is always a tension when theory and data contradict: is it because the theory is wrong or is it because of an invalid assumption when interpreting the data?
No, new theories do not have to look mathematically connected to the math of old theories--this is the root problem--assuming that the old theories are *proven* and *correct*.
Here you have taken a position which contradicts your earlier one. We believe old theories *because* they are consistent with the data we have so far. Hence, by logical extension, any new theory must also be consistent with that same data otherwise we would point to that data and say "see it disagrees with data and so it must be wrong!". Within the precision of existing data any new theory *must* have identical predictions, i.e. an identical mathematical form, to the previous theory under the conditions where the old theory has already been tested and confirmed. It can only vary under situations where the old theory has not yet been tested.
Do you really think they are going to share your network retard? Clearly any user on the WiFi network will have their own IP address.
Even if they have a separate IP address the question is will the ISP records indicate that it was assigned to your router? If they do how confident are you that the police will be aware of the distinction between the public and private IP addresses and understand that the activity had nothing to do with you? In fact, even if they are aware of the difference, they may still want to investigate you in case it was you connecting to the public side of your WiFi so the activity was not directly linked back to you.
Slashdot Mirror
With classifications like that I think they got the abbreviation wrong: it should be OCD-10.
You do not need a clock to determine longitude.
Yes you do. Maskelyne's method just uses the moon as a clock and required being able to accurately measure the angular separation between the moon and a bright star near its path to determine the time. Since the moon moves ~0.5 degrees every hour you need to measure the angle to at least this accuracy to get a time. While it worked it required great care measuring the angles, complex tables to convert the angle to a time and a clear view of the night sky. Even with all this extra effort on the one voyage where they were compared directly this method produced an error three times greater than Harrison's clock.
I would also disagree with your open tech argument. Have a look at the 1775 Nautical Almanac. Apart from copyright on the tables you had to have a government license to print them and the calculations on which the tables are based are not given anywhere (although there is some reassurance that the calculations have been checked multiple times). Worse this is a something you had to purchase every year. I don't see how this is any more open than Harrison's clock whose mechanism you could examine and tweak if you though you could do better.
If the clock could be produced using 1700's machining and metallurgical technology, only then would it prove Harrison's contemporary critics incorrect.
Harrison built his clocks in the 1700's (although apparently Slashdot only just heard about it). They were incredible machines for their time and, after much wrangling with the astronomers of the time (who thought that schemes like making detailed observations of the moons of Jupiter through a telescope on the heaving deck of a ship in the mid-atlantic were better ideas) he won 1700's X-prize equivalent for inventing a machine to accurately measure longitude. You can actually see the clocks he made in the old Royal Greenwich Observatory building in London.
An even better idea would be to do it as an international collaboration - but a real international collaboration based on international treaty (like CERN) not a US-controlled project with other partners (like the ill-fated SSC). Not only do you share the costs but it might also help to reduce the need for those F-35s.
Taking your interaction rate without question a trillion is 10^12. The LHC has several orders of magnitude more protons than that in each beam and remembering that muons decay it seems entirely reasonable that a muon collider would probably need even more to have the same number of particles. Even one interaction could be serious at these energies since it will shatter a nucleus and create a shower in the body however the rate would more likely be hundreds per second given the same particle counts as the LHC.
The threat was bad enough to be seriously considered: see this paper.
One of the more precious resources that asteroid miners are going after is water, something that is in abundance on Earth and, oddly enough, in space as well
Why is that so odd? Where do you think the water on Earth came from?
Not quite - doing the research required to know how to blow up the moon and then telling everyone how to blow it up is apparently what this guy thinks is protected. The tortuous logic is that activities required for communication are protected and, before you can communicate scientific knowledge you have to have found that knowledge and so therefore scientific research is protected.
This is clearly nonsense. You can communicate scientific ideas freely without knowing that they are right. Indeed this is what a lot of scientific discussion is - exchanging ideas about how things might work and then designing an experiment to test the hypothesis. As with everything else the speech should be protected, acting on that speech, i.e. research, should not.
Like one of the posts says above: "If any member of your team is caught or killed, Vodafone will disavow all knowledge of your actions."
Why not just use rubber bullets or baton rounds? The technology has been around since the 70s and you are not limited to one less-lethal shot. In fact rubber bullets seem like a far better idea - with this solution what happens if the first shot misses?
but the short lifetime of the muon has kept anyone from coming up with a workable proposal so far.
The other problem they had with the muon accelerator proposals which Fermilab looked at a while ago was the lethal amounts of neutrino radiation from muons decaying. While neutrinos rarely interact at energies below a PeV if you get enough of them there can be enough interactions to be dangerous if a human stood in the beam and unfortunately shielding really isn't an option with neutrinos.
1e8 * 1e12 = 1e20 eV, which I suppose is kind of like GeV.
1GeV=1e9 eV. The 'G' is the SI prefix 'giga-'...just like the 'T' you correctly identified as 'tera-'! ;-)
I think the limiting factor is going to be financial.
That's one way to look at it but I prefer to think that the limiting factor is really cleverness. The techniques we use in the LHC to accelerate particles are fundamentally the same as those used since the 1930's albeit with significant, incremental improvements. We have indeed reached the financial limit of current accelerator technology but there are alternatives.
One way, as you suggest, would be to go for new acceleration techniques. Plasma physicists have had some impressive results with particle acceleration but while the accelerating gradients are incredible there are major issues with reproducibility, scaling and intensity.
Another way to go is to let nature do the acceleration for you. There are an increasing number of experiments looking for or studying exceedingly high energy particles from astrophysical sources e.g. IceCube, Hesse, Auger etc. The problem there is that there are not very many of these particles so you need a big detector to have a chance of seeing enough to be able to study them.
Lastly you can let quantum mechanics give you access to physics well above the energy scale that you are at through 'virtual' particles. For example nuclear beta decay is only possible through the W-boson which has a mass ~80 times that of the proton and so larger than some of the nuclei which beta decay! If we can observe rare decays of particles which the Standard Model says are forbidden we can start to get some idea of the new physics out there. An example of this is the search for proton decay which 'grand unification' models of the fundamental forces suggest should happen through extremely heavy (10^16 times the mass of a proton) particles which is why the proton is so incredibly stable.
So that's three possible ways around the financial limit of ever larger accelerators so with the 'easy', incremental option off the table really we are now only limited by how clever we can be in coming up with ways around this.
There is a good reason for that - there is no supporting evidence and, in fact, very strong evidence suggesting that it is completely wrong...but that's what you get with 'startswithabang', it usually ends with a whimper. The one of the most damning bits of evidence that there is something well before 10^19 GeV (no clue where he gets the 1^8 TeV figure from) is that the Higgs mass 125 GeV/c^2.
Unlike every other fundamental particle the Higgs has no spin, which means it has no intrinsic angular momentum like electrons, quarks, photons etc. This has the effect that quantum corrections very strongly affect its mass. In fact these corrections apply to the square of the Higgs mass and grow as the square of the energy scale so if the Standard Model is good up to the Planck scale at 10^19 GeV these corrections are of the order of 10^38 in size. Each Standard Model particle has its own correction to the Higgs mass with fermions and bosons providing opposite sign corrections.
Here is the problem though. In the Standard Model there is no symmetry between fermions and bosons and the coupling to the Higgs field, which determines these corrections, are all free parameters. So if we believe that there is nothing but the Standard Model before the Planck scale then we have an amazing co-incidence that a series of essentially random terms each of order 10^38 cancel so precisely that the remainder is of order 10^4.
To put that in context it would be like tossing a coin about 100 billion times and getting heads every single time. I don't know about you but personally I would start getting suspicious that something was fixing the result sometime around toss 100.
This is the issue with the Standard Model: the fact that there is a Higgs at 125 GeV is like the 100 billion coin tosses all coming up heads. The problem is that we do not yet know how nature is fixing the result but it does mean that the new physics required to fix it most likely occurs below ~10 TeV. While this is not a hard limit the higher in energy you go the less natural any accidental cancellation will be so really the energy limit where you expect new physics depends on how many times you can toss a coin and get heads before you believe that something is fixing the result.
Yes because their motivation will determine the type of solution they might seek or accept. For example if there is some loop hole they can find in Irish law which would allow the disclosure then they may go for that if money is their prime motivation (unless they are concerned that any disclosure would hurt then financially). Whereas if they were fighting this on principle they would not accept any solution that would force them to disclose data about non-US citizens which is not held in the US.
True but I expect that there is a strong financial incentive behind it. If the US government compels them to turn over the data in contravention of local laws it will not absolve their responsibility and culpability under those laws. Hence they will also most certainly get sued for damages by the people whose data they have illegally turned over as well as end up facing criminal fines for violating privacy laws.
Check your link again. It says we are living in a time with relatively high sea levels, the opposite of what you claim.
Read the text again carefully! From the caption under the figure I linked: "Note that over most of geologic history, long-term average sea level has been significantly higher than today.".
In case that was not clear if over much of geological history sea level has been higher than today this means that we are living in a time of relatively LOW sea level. If you don't believe that then just look at the data in the plot!
A 200 metre rise is impossible.....If you'd actually read the text under the image you linked to, you'd have realized that.
I don't know which image you were looking at but the text under the image I linked to says: "Comparison of two sea level reconstructions during the last 500 Ma. The scale of change during the last glacial/interglacial transition is indicated with a black bar. Note that over most of geologic history, long-term average sea level has been significantly higher than today."
I don't see anything there to suggest that any major plate tectonics are required. Furthermore in the text of the article in says: "During the glacial-interglacial cycles over the past few million years, the mean sea level has varied by somewhat more than a hundred metres. This is primarily due to the growth and decay of ice sheets (mostly in the northern hemisphere) with water evaporated from the sea."
Which seems to explicitly contradict you and say that the change is precisely due to changes in temperature. Melting ice is not the only way to increase sea level: thermal expansion is also a major factor and what evidence I could find suggests that it accounts for about 50% of sea level change at the moment. So if you get 80m from melting the ice and another 80m from thermal expansion you can easily get close to 160m. After that there is no reason to limit thermal expansion since this could continue even after all the icecaps melt so 200m does not seem impossible.
I agree that this is a surprising number and I expected to find that the maximum possible rise would be far less than this but the evidence suggest otherwise.
How about WEB then? (and no it is not HTML, Javascript or anything to do with the WWW!) It's the programming language used to write TeX which itself lies behind LaTeX which is widely used by scientists and engineers to typeset papers involving maths as well as for theses, text books etc.
That is surprising since claims regarding the failings of our schools are so prevalent in media and society as a whole.
I agree - it's the same here in Canada - but I would attribute that to attempts to improve the system using new techniques which have never been proven to work better than the system they replaced. Worse the reason given for using the new system is that the previous system is "old and archaic". You do not replace something simply because it is old, you replace it when you have something better.
Many of the new teaching techniques I have seen work not because of their brilliance - indeed many are half-baked ideas - but because the person who came up with them is clearly enthusiastic about the approach and communicates that to their students when using the technique. To really show the worth of a new teaching technique it needs to be used by someone who is not particularly keen about it (but neither hostile to it). The reason that we keep seeing all these different approaches which then get withdrawn and/or derided is because this is the hurdle they almost all fail: they do not work with a less motivated tecaher
The rise will stop. There is a finite amount of water on the planet that can end up in the oceans.
True but the sea could rise quite a bit before we get to that if you have a look at the sea level over the past 500 million years. Interestingly it seems that we live in a time of surprisingly low sea levels. A 200 metre sea rise would affect quite a few people.
That's who I'd go to for tech assistance.
Depends on the possible side effects and depends on the most likely outcome using conventional medicine.
Well since we already have an educational model that works (or at least used to) to some degree and we are looking at ways to improve it the medical equivalent would be having a condition which medical science can already manage to a varying degree of success and then replacing that with a new treatment which has never been tried on anyone before (so nobody knows the side effects) but which the doctors think will work better than the old treatment and they can give you a glitzy presentation from the company pushing the new treatment which contains lots of hyperbole about how wonderful it might be but no actual data which would stand up to scientific review to support that.
That pretty much sums up what happens when a publisher rep comes into my office with a $200+ text book to push on the students which comes with a quiz system, ebook version etc. etc. and lots of buzz words. The very distinct impression is that they have lots of evidence that this technology will improve their bottom line and a lot less reliable data about whether it improves education.
The education industry could learn a lot from the angel / VC funding industry. You only need 1-10% successes to make the 90-99% failures worth it as long as the success are sufficiently scale-able.
Try telling that to the students who have had an appalling low standard of education because of the 90-99% failure rate of all the new things they had tried on them. Education involves humans and so experimenting with it is somewhere in between the venture capital model you mention and medical science. Nobody would accept a 90-99% failure rate for medical innovations which get as far as being tried on patients!
Clearly education is not life-critical as medicine can be but, unlike medicine, there is really no way to determine whether a new technique is effective other than to try it on students. So while education is more risk tolerant than medicine it is nowhere near as risk tolerant as VC industry funding.
The data should always be king--not the math--inconsistencies should point the finger at the math and theories, not the other way around.
Except when the data are "bad". The most recent example of this was the Opera experiment's claim to have observed faster that light neutrinos. That's what their data said...at least until someone found that their GPS cable was loose.
Experimental science is never that cut and dried. The data may always be right given the experiment performed but, as the Opera case shows, that may not be the experiment which you think you had performed. The result is that there is always a tension when theory and data contradict: is it because the theory is wrong or is it because of an invalid assumption when interpreting the data?
No, new theories do not have to look mathematically connected to the math of old theories--this is the root problem--assuming that the old theories are *proven* and *correct*.
Here you have taken a position which contradicts your earlier one. We believe old theories *because* they are consistent with the data we have so far. Hence, by logical extension, any new theory must also be consistent with that same data otherwise we would point to that data and say "see it disagrees with data and so it must be wrong!". Within the precision of existing data any new theory *must* have identical predictions, i.e. an identical mathematical form, to the previous theory under the conditions where the old theory has already been tested and confirmed. It can only vary under situations where the old theory has not yet been tested.
Do you really think they are going to share your network retard? Clearly any user on the WiFi network will have their own IP address.
Even if they have a separate IP address the question is will the ISP records indicate that it was assigned to your router? If they do how confident are you that the police will be aware of the distinction between the public and private IP addresses and understand that the activity had nothing to do with you? In fact, even if they are aware of the difference, they may still want to investigate you in case it was you connecting to the public side of your WiFi so the activity was not directly linked back to you.