Only because of your worldview and presuppositions.
No, because of logical deduction and reasoning based on the preponderance of evidence which the universe provides (indeed the great thing about science is that you don't have to take my word for it - go out, look at the evidence and use your own intelligence). The fact that you are unable to accept this means that you clearly do not really understand logic and reasoning. Since these are large components of what most people call intelligence it calls this into question as well despite of what an IQ test may say.
In mathematics, distance is the generic term when dealing with how far two points are in an arbitrary metric space. Or isn't it?
The term you are looking for is 'interval' - at least that's what we call it in physics when dealing with 4-position which is technically what we are discussing. It also happens to be the correct english world for a "distance" in time.
My IQ is 54 points higher.... and I am Young Earth Creationist.
This is probably not the point you want to make while arguing that IQ tests are accurate....and the fact that you did make it only compounds the irony.
Sure, but what if a red LED is a natural evolution while blue LED, once thought impossible is the true revolutionary idea?
Apparently it still doesn't matter. A few years ago they awarded the prize to Kobayashi and Maskawa for the 3x3 quark mixing matrix and yet ignored Cabibbo who did the groundbreaking work to show that quarks mixed for the first time. The extension to 3 generations was a direct extension of that work and the matrix is even called the 'CKM' matrix after all three of them...but no Nobel for Cabibbo.
While questionable decisions are always part of any award process the Nobel prize is running into some real issues with modern physics. For a start it is almost impossible to award a prize for any recent experimental particle physics result (the recent Higgs prize was for the theory, not the experimental discovery) simply because we work in large groups and you generally can not point to three, or fewer, people and say that they did it. The only exception I can think of to this would be the SNO solar neutrino result.
However it is not just particle physics: 'Big Science' is spreading to other areas as well with the addition of accelerator-based light sources for some condensed matter physics, large scale plasma and fusion experiments etc. The part of the experimental field to which a Nobel prize can be awarded in physics is continuously shrinking making the prize less and less relevant...although it still has a long way to go before it gets knocked off its perch!
Hmmm... so I suppose all those physicists going around in the early 20th century studying the atom and the nucleus and developing quantum mechanics were just wasting their time as well. Those discoveries "pretty nicely define 'irrelevance' to the everyday lives of humans" at the time....and yet with hindsight they appear slightly more relevant perhaps? Certainly not "economically useless"?
The problem I am still having is that your description sounds far more like engineering than physics and indeed at least two of the winners are engineers and not physicists. I completely understand that it is a big breakthrough and that they have made a major contribution to electronic engineering. Still the Nobel committee have a dodgy record when it comes to identifying subject areas: Rutherford was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry for discovering the nucleus and was reputedly so upset that he almost turned it down!
Really? A lot of my postdoctoral colleagues from Fermilab were actively recruited by Lucent and several also went into finance. At least one of the latter made quite a bit of money judging from the car he drove back to visit us! Mind you this is physics not biomedical although the article says this is a "crisis in science" which is suggesting it applies to more areas.
Historically university posts were open to people with a BA (e.g. John Wesley and John Newman at Oxford in the 18th and 19th century)
...and if you go further back to the ancient greeks you didn't even need a degree just a school education was enough. This is not surprising. If I look I my own field of physics by the end of my second year undergrad we had pretty much covered state of the art for the 19th century and even covered basic quantum and special relativity from the 20th century.
That it now takes a PhD and post doctoral work to get the same post means that we are training too many.
The point of a PhD and postdoc work is not purely to train people for academic positions. Industry also needs these people. Many of my peers when I was at Fermilab went off to work for Lucent or into finance. Indeed analyzing financial data using the latest techniques from particle physics turned out to be quite lucrative for some of them!
Having been a postdoc and also having been lucky enough to land a faculty position I don't see that this is a new problem at all. There have always been far more postdocs than academic positions available for them to fill. While it was always my hope that I would get an academic job I was fully prepared for the reality that I might end up in industry and had even started putting out feelers in that direction.
If postdocs are entering the position thinking that they will all end up in an academic job then either they are not doing their homework or someone is feeding them unrealistic expectations. The maths is simple: faculty positions are for life while postdoc positions are for ~3 years at a time. If every postdoc were to land a permanent academic job faculty would have no more than one postdoc over their thirty year career i.e. faculty would outnumber postdocs by a factor of 10 to 1.
You can increase this to allow growth in the number of faculty positions but ultimately if you want to have a reasonable number of postdocs a large fraction will have to move into industry. There is no doubt that the uncertainty of being a postdoc is hard (it was for me) but I knew full well going into it that there was a chance I would not end up as a faculty member. Having a cadre of highly qualified researchers entering industry is a very good thing since they bring the latest discoveries and techniques with them...plus they will likely end up earning far more than they would as a faculty member so it's not all bad!
Doesn't have to be fundamental science, and can indeed be a pure engineering achievement.
I never argued that it had to be fundamental (the graphene prize several years ago was a great example) but it does say "within the field of physics". I would argue that this invention is within the field of engineering, not physics.
Actually the problem they are wrestling with here is one that has science has had to deal with for a long time: the uncertainty on a measurement. The star ratings are a measure of the popularity of a game so what you are really asking is "given the ratings it received which game is best?".
Unfortunately with a finite statistical sample you always have some degree of uncertainty and, within this uncertainty your data does not provide any ranking at all: you simply do not know which game is best to any sensible degree of certainty. However while correct this would lead to really confusing rankings since to be fair you would need to randomize the order within the uncertainty of each game's score. This would be complex and confusing to users!
Instead what they suggest is using a confidence level limit: what score can I be confident that 95% of people would rate the game higher than? We do this all the time in particle physics when we put limits on some new physics which we looked for an did not see. For example the precursor to the LHC, LEP had a result that it was 95% confident that the Higgs boson had a mass higher than 116 GeV/c2 (IIRC). There are better ways to do this than the method they quote but since this is just a game rating and not science it's a fine method to use.
This might be true for subjective subjects like the arts but is not at all true for the sciences. It is easy to test creativity in an objective way: confront the student with a situation they have never seen before but which they can solve with the science they have studied. This used to be a common type of question towards the end of the old UK A' level exams. If US school exams do not test this creative component of science then the solution is to fix the school exams and NOT the university admission process.
On the other hand, higher education is good for you as a person.
There are lots of experiences that can be good for you as a person if you have the right personality and mindset. Serving in the military can teach you a lot about discipline, sacrifice, teamwork etc. but I would have been hopeless unsuited for such an experience. Similarly there are some people who are completely unsuited to benefit from higher education. Society needs to get out of the mindset that everyone needs to go to university. It is damaging the universities for those who do benefit from higher ed and it is saddling many with a crippling student debt. There are many different routes to become a valuable and respected member of society and many of them do not lie through university....and lest you think I am biased against universities I am a university prof!
If this looks too high to you, imagine you are giving a talk about the last 18 months of your research, and a prearranged setup stops working.
Not that this excuses their illegal behaviour but if you are giving a talk that important and you do not have at least one local copy of the talk without then your reputation deserves to take a battering. I'd be astounded if such a thing seriously affected someone's tenure though - it certainly would not where I work.
Not it is not. It is really just a simulation of a particle. All they have done is create a system which behaves like we think a majorana fermion should behave. They have emphatically NOT created a new fundamental particle. What they have done is hype up the interesting physics they have done to make it look like they are doing particle physics which they are not.
Don't get me wrong: this is definitely an interesting result but it is unnecessary, and rather deceptive, to present it as particle physics when it isn't. Such experiments are very interesting and worthwhile because they may improve our understanding of how a majorana particle behaves. However if we found an inexplicable deviation between the way that this "simulated particle" behaves and how a theoretical majorana fermion is expected to behave after 'debugging' we would put it down to them not simulating the particle correctly and we would not be rewriting the fundamental laws of physics.
So do I, they seem to have completely forgotten their old drive for capitalism. Here they are storing everyone's personal phone calls, electronic documents, photos etc. and nobody in the US government has thought of marketing this as the ultimate solution to everyone's backup problem.
No but neither did we climb Everest to explore it - it was done for the challenge. Exploration could have been done far more easily by a flyby of an aircraft in the same way exploration of coasts was done by sailing past it to see whether there was anything worth landing to investigate.
As for the deep ocean the drive to explore is curiosity to see what there is there and, ultimately, whether there is anything useful to us down there. So you do have a point that really the point of exploring, at a basic level, is motivated by trying to find things useful to us (either knowledge or resources). However with space the only realistic way that such remote resources can be used is with colonization whereas with the deep ocean it is far more practical to bring them to the surface. There is also the survival of the species argument which suggests that colonizing another planet and creating a self-sustaining ecosystem there is a good idea.
And just FYI, those two places are orders of magnitude more hospitable than the sucking, killing, arid empty deadly hell of space.
Really? We reached the bottom of the Mariana's Trench in 1960 only one year before the first human in space (1961) and since then only four expeditions have made it to the bottom of the Trench whereas far more have made it into space. The crushing pressure of the deep ocean makes it at least as inhospitable as space.
No we don't. There is a vast difference between the things you want (in the manner of a little girl wanting a unicorn), and the things that humanity needs (food, shelter et. al).
Humanity only needs food and shelter because it wants to survive. In the same way humanity only needs to colonize space because it wants to survive a global catastrophe such as a major asteroid impact. Geological history is littered with major extinction events. We have not had one for 65 million years and some, like the permian mass extinction, wiped out 96% of all known marine species and 70% of all land species. It even caused a mass extinction of insects.
So technically you are correct, we don't need to colonize space in the same way that we do not need to live...it's just something we generally tend to want and, as a result of evolution, most of us want it pretty strongly.
It is not necessarily as simple as that. For example the gravitation field near mountains is actually less that that further away from them. Mountains are areas of thicker continental crust and this displaces the denser underlying mantle meaning that there is actually less mass near mountains despite appearances to the contrary.
In this case it looks like the hots spots are right on the coast so is it possible that the ice has actually thickened and displaced more of the denser sea water? This might also cause a decrease in the gravitational field there. It would be nice if articles actually discussed some details of the science and some of the effects which researchers have considered.
We have this technology since 1890, minimum. There is no much difference between a submarine and a spacecraft.
There is a huge difference and the spacecraft part is only to get there. The hard part is maintaining an oxygen atmosphere for years and years after you arrive and there is no way that someone in 1890 could do this without several trials first. As for the primitive technology needed for North America it is true that if you don't care about a high survival rate it is easy to colonize: you try an unknown local flora or fauna and if you drop dead the rest of the tribe know not to eat it again.
That approach does not tend to be a popular one unless you are driven by necessity but there is no denying it works. The same applies to crossing the ocean in a primitive boat: you can do it but the odds of survival and arriving anywhere close to where you intend and not large. So it works but, as has been pointed out, technology tends to make everyday life a lot safer and so makes us more risk adverse.
The government is under no constitutional or legal obligation to inform you of a warrant on you
True and I don't have a problem with that so long as they actually have to go to a court to get that warrant. However that is not the point, its the reverse: there is no legal obligation for you to store data in a way that the government can access it without you being aware of them accessing it.
Given that governments have clearly demonstrated that they are willing to subvert the normal legal process and search and read private information without any warrant whatsoever the only way to prevent this is to ensure that you are in the loop required to read the information. This does not put you above the law it just ensures that the government will need an appropriate warrant to compel you to divulge the decryption key. Since the encrypted data can be seized and protected from erasure without knowledge they still have many of the same protections that secret warrants are designed to provide.
...the irrational notion that we need to send flesh for a mission to be legitimate.
Why are we interested in exploring space at all if the goal is not to eventually have humans living off-planet? We can use robots for lots of things but ultimately the aim of exploration is to find new places to live and new resources to exploit to propagate the species. Hence the interest in manned missions. That's not to say that unmanned missions are not legitimate: they are absolutely essential but we need to develop, and practice, manned technology as well.
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Only because of your worldview and presuppositions.
No, because of logical deduction and reasoning based on the preponderance of evidence which the universe provides (indeed the great thing about science is that you don't have to take my word for it - go out, look at the evidence and use your own intelligence). The fact that you are unable to accept this means that you clearly do not really understand logic and reasoning. Since these are large components of what most people call intelligence it calls this into question as well despite of what an IQ test may say.
In mathematics, distance is the generic term when dealing with how far two points are in an arbitrary metric space. Or isn't it?
The term you are looking for is 'interval' - at least that's what we call it in physics when dealing with 4-position which is technically what we are discussing. It also happens to be the correct english world for a "distance" in time.
My IQ is 54 points higher.... and I am Young Earth Creationist.
This is probably not the point you want to make while arguing that IQ tests are accurate....and the fact that you did make it only compounds the irony.
Sure, but what if a red LED is a natural evolution while blue LED, once thought impossible is the true revolutionary idea?
Apparently it still doesn't matter. A few years ago they awarded the prize to Kobayashi and Maskawa for the 3x3 quark mixing matrix and yet ignored Cabibbo who did the groundbreaking work to show that quarks mixed for the first time. The extension to 3 generations was a direct extension of that work and the matrix is even called the 'CKM' matrix after all three of them...but no Nobel for Cabibbo.
While questionable decisions are always part of any award process the Nobel prize is running into some real issues with modern physics. For a start it is almost impossible to award a prize for any recent experimental particle physics result (the recent Higgs prize was for the theory, not the experimental discovery) simply because we work in large groups and you generally can not point to three, or fewer, people and say that they did it. The only exception I can think of to this would be the SNO solar neutrino result.
However it is not just particle physics: 'Big Science' is spreading to other areas as well with the addition of accelerator-based light sources for some condensed matter physics, large scale plasma and fusion experiments etc. The part of the experimental field to which a Nobel prize can be awarded in physics is continuously shrinking making the prize less and less relevant...although it still has a long way to go before it gets knocked off its perch!
Hmmm... so I suppose all those physicists going around in the early 20th century studying the atom and the nucleus and developing quantum mechanics were just wasting their time as well. Those discoveries "pretty nicely define 'irrelevance' to the everyday lives of humans" at the time....and yet with hindsight they appear slightly more relevant perhaps? Certainly not "economically useless"?
The problem I am still having is that your description sounds far more like engineering than physics and indeed at least two of the winners are engineers and not physicists. I completely understand that it is a big breakthrough and that they have made a major contribution to electronic engineering. Still the Nobel committee have a dodgy record when it comes to identifying subject areas: Rutherford was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry for discovering the nucleus and was reputedly so upset that he almost turned it down!
Really? A lot of my postdoctoral colleagues from Fermilab were actively recruited by Lucent and several also went into finance. At least one of the latter made quite a bit of money judging from the car he drove back to visit us! Mind you this is physics not biomedical although the article says this is a "crisis in science" which is suggesting it applies to more areas.
Historically university posts were open to people with a BA (e.g. John Wesley and John Newman at Oxford in the 18th and 19th century)
That it now takes a PhD and post doctoral work to get the same post means that we are training too many.
The point of a PhD and postdoc work is not purely to train people for academic positions. Industry also needs these people. Many of my peers when I was at Fermilab went off to work for Lucent or into finance. Indeed analyzing financial data using the latest techniques from particle physics turned out to be quite lucrative for some of them!
Having been a postdoc and also having been lucky enough to land a faculty position I don't see that this is a new problem at all. There have always been far more postdocs than academic positions available for them to fill. While it was always my hope that I would get an academic job I was fully prepared for the reality that I might end up in industry and had even started putting out feelers in that direction.
If postdocs are entering the position thinking that they will all end up in an academic job then either they are not doing their homework or someone is feeding them unrealistic expectations. The maths is simple: faculty positions are for life while postdoc positions are for ~3 years at a time. If every postdoc were to land a permanent academic job faculty would have no more than one postdoc over their thirty year career i.e. faculty would outnumber postdocs by a factor of 10 to 1.
You can increase this to allow growth in the number of faculty positions but ultimately if you want to have a reasonable number of postdocs a large fraction will have to move into industry. There is no doubt that the uncertainty of being a postdoc is hard (it was for me) but I knew full well going into it that there was a chance I would not end up as a faculty member. Having a cadre of highly qualified researchers entering industry is a very good thing since they bring the latest discoveries and techniques with them...plus they will likely end up earning far more than they would as a faculty member so it's not all bad!
Doesn't have to be fundamental science, and can indeed be a pure engineering achievement.
I never argued that it had to be fundamental (the graphene prize several years ago was a great example) but it does say "within the field of physics". I would argue that this invention is within the field of engineering, not physics.
This article would suggest the Queen Elizabeth prize for Engineering.
There is no doubt that the blue LED is a great engineering achievement but I'm struggling to see how this really advances the science of physics.
Actually the problem they are wrestling with here is one that has science has had to deal with for a long time: the uncertainty on a measurement. The star ratings are a measure of the popularity of a game so what you are really asking is "given the ratings it received which game is best?".
Unfortunately with a finite statistical sample you always have some degree of uncertainty and, within this uncertainty your data does not provide any ranking at all: you simply do not know which game is best to any sensible degree of certainty. However while correct this would lead to really confusing rankings since to be fair you would need to randomize the order within the uncertainty of each game's score. This would be complex and confusing to users!
Instead what they suggest is using a confidence level limit: what score can I be confident that 95% of people would rate the game higher than? We do this all the time in particle physics when we put limits on some new physics which we looked for an did not see. For example the precursor to the LHC, LEP had a result that it was 95% confident that the Higgs boson had a mass higher than 116 GeV/c2 (IIRC). There are better ways to do this than the method they quote but since this is just a game rating and not science it's a fine method to use.
You use your own creativity and make something up!
Creativity assessments are very Judgemental.
This might be true for subjective subjects like the arts but is not at all true for the sciences. It is easy to test creativity in an objective way: confront the student with a situation they have never seen before but which they can solve with the science they have studied. This used to be a common type of question towards the end of the old UK A' level exams. If US school exams do not test this creative component of science then the solution is to fix the school exams and NOT the university admission process.
On the other hand, higher education is good for you as a person.
There are lots of experiences that can be good for you as a person if you have the right personality and mindset. Serving in the military can teach you a lot about discipline, sacrifice, teamwork etc. but I would have been hopeless unsuited for such an experience. Similarly there are some people who are completely unsuited to benefit from higher education. Society needs to get out of the mindset that everyone needs to go to university. It is damaging the universities for those who do benefit from higher ed and it is saddling many with a crippling student debt. There are many different routes to become a valuable and respected member of society and many of them do not lie through university....and lest you think I am biased against universities I am a university prof!
If this looks too high to you, imagine you are giving a talk about the last 18 months of your research, and a prearranged setup stops working.
Not that this excuses their illegal behaviour but if you are giving a talk that important and you do not have at least one local copy of the talk without then your reputation deserves to take a battering. I'd be astounded if such a thing seriously affected someone's tenure though - it certainly would not where I work.
It's sure a particle alright.
Not it is not. It is really just a simulation of a particle. All they have done is create a system which behaves like we think a majorana fermion should behave. They have emphatically NOT created a new fundamental particle. What they have done is hype up the interesting physics they have done to make it look like they are doing particle physics which they are not.
Don't get me wrong: this is definitely an interesting result but it is unnecessary, and rather deceptive, to present it as particle physics when it isn't. Such experiments are very interesting and worthwhile because they may improve our understanding of how a majorana particle behaves. However if we found an inexplicable deviation between the way that this "simulated particle" behaves and how a theoretical majorana fermion is expected to behave after 'debugging' we would put it down to them not simulating the particle correctly and we would not be rewriting the fundamental laws of physics.
I really feel for the poor Americans.
So do I, they seem to have completely forgotten their old drive for capitalism. Here they are storing everyone's personal phone calls, electronic documents, photos etc. and nobody in the US government has thought of marketing this as the ultimate solution to everyone's backup problem.
Did we climb Everest to live there?
No but neither did we climb Everest to explore it - it was done for the challenge. Exploration could have been done far more easily by a flyby of an aircraft in the same way exploration of coasts was done by sailing past it to see whether there was anything worth landing to investigate.
As for the deep ocean the drive to explore is curiosity to see what there is there and, ultimately, whether there is anything useful to us down there. So you do have a point that really the point of exploring, at a basic level, is motivated by trying to find things useful to us (either knowledge or resources). However with space the only realistic way that such remote resources can be used is with colonization whereas with the deep ocean it is far more practical to bring them to the surface. There is also the survival of the species argument which suggests that colonizing another planet and creating a self-sustaining ecosystem there is a good idea.
And just FYI, those two places are orders of magnitude more hospitable than the sucking, killing, arid empty deadly hell of space.
Really? We reached the bottom of the Mariana's Trench in 1960 only one year before the first human in space (1961) and since then only four expeditions have made it to the bottom of the Trench whereas far more have made it into space. The crushing pressure of the deep ocean makes it at least as inhospitable as space.
No we don't. There is a vast difference between the things you want (in the manner of a little girl wanting a unicorn), and the things that humanity needs (food, shelter et. al).
Humanity only needs food and shelter because it wants to survive. In the same way humanity only needs to colonize space because it wants to survive a global catastrophe such as a major asteroid impact. Geological history is littered with major extinction events. We have not had one for 65 million years and some, like the permian mass extinction, wiped out 96% of all known marine species and 70% of all land species. It even caused a mass extinction of insects.
So technically you are correct, we don't need to colonize space in the same way that we do not need to live...it's just something we generally tend to want and, as a result of evolution, most of us want it pretty strongly.
It is not necessarily as simple as that. For example the gravitation field near mountains is actually less that that further away from them. Mountains are areas of thicker continental crust and this displaces the denser underlying mantle meaning that there is actually less mass near mountains despite appearances to the contrary.
In this case it looks like the hots spots are right on the coast so is it possible that the ice has actually thickened and displaced more of the denser sea water? This might also cause a decrease in the gravitational field there. It would be nice if articles actually discussed some details of the science and some of the effects which researchers have considered.
We have this technology since 1890, minimum. There is no much difference between a submarine and a spacecraft.
There is a huge difference and the spacecraft part is only to get there. The hard part is maintaining an oxygen atmosphere for years and years after you arrive and there is no way that someone in 1890 could do this without several trials first. As for the primitive technology needed for North America it is true that if you don't care about a high survival rate it is easy to colonize: you try an unknown local flora or fauna and if you drop dead the rest of the tribe know not to eat it again.
That approach does not tend to be a popular one unless you are driven by necessity but there is no denying it works. The same applies to crossing the ocean in a primitive boat: you can do it but the odds of survival and arriving anywhere close to where you intend and not large. So it works but, as has been pointed out, technology tends to make everyday life a lot safer and so makes us more risk adverse.
The government is under no constitutional or legal obligation to inform you of a warrant on you
True and I don't have a problem with that so long as they actually have to go to a court to get that warrant. However that is not the point, its the reverse: there is no legal obligation for you to store data in a way that the government can access it without you being aware of them accessing it.
Given that governments have clearly demonstrated that they are willing to subvert the normal legal process and search and read private information without any warrant whatsoever the only way to prevent this is to ensure that you are in the loop required to read the information. This does not put you above the law it just ensures that the government will need an appropriate warrant to compel you to divulge the decryption key. Since the encrypted data can be seized and protected from erasure without knowledge they still have many of the same protections that secret warrants are designed to provide.
Nevertheless this would imply that there was significant change: he finally became aware that he was an "ornery son of a b****".
...the irrational notion that we need to send flesh for a mission to be legitimate.
Why are we interested in exploring space at all if the goal is not to eventually have humans living off-planet? We can use robots for lots of things but ultimately the aim of exploration is to find new places to live and new resources to exploit to propagate the species. Hence the interest in manned missions. That's not to say that unmanned missions are not legitimate: they are absolutely essential but we need to develop, and practice, manned technology as well.