Never mind security, what about reliability? If I go hiking in the mountains where there is no cell phone coverage and e.g. scratch my face on a tree branch I do not want to get back to the car only to have it fail to recognize me and refuse to start. Frankly I also wonder about whether Ford are thinking clearly about this given the claim in the article that "Ford Motor Company [NYSE:F] already believes the technology can help improve privacy..". How can adding a camera to a car improve privacy? No matter what protections you put in place around the system if there is no camera there is no data on who is driving which has to be better privacy than a system which knows.
"moving mass" here is being used for poorly named relativistic mass, which is not an invariant. For both gravitational and inertial purposes, things act like their relativistic mass in a given frame, regardless of what their rest mass is.
Actually they do not. Try using 'F=ma' with relativistic mass and you will not get far. You can only use the simple 'gamma' factor when dealing with relativistic momentum and then, at a fundamental level, it comes from the fact that the particle's velocity has to be redefined for relativity because there is no universal clock. This is not a pedagogical argument it is a fundamental physics argument: relativistic mass is a broken concept, the universe simply does not work that way and you will go wrong if you use it in any but the simplest situations.
That paper shows the solar neutrino problem not flavour oscillations. SuperK saw the first hints of this from atmospheric neutrinos, not solar neutrinos. However SNO was the first experiment to conclusively prove oscillations: they showed that the total flux of solar neutrinos was as expected but that only ~a third of them were electron neutrinos despite the fact that all of them started as electron neutrinos. Seeing a disappearance of a particular flavour does not prove oscillations: they might have somehow decayed or been absorbed through unknown processes. While this requires new physics neutrino oscillations was also new physics at the time so Occam's razor can not really pick between them.
As long as neutrinos have been known about (and even when just a postulation) they had moving mass, as they carry energy away from decays and reactions.
Actually that is not true. The Standard Model originally had them with zero mass. This was disproven in 2002 by the SNO experiment which conclusively showed that neutrinos from the sun changed flavour which meant that they had to have a mass. The SuperK experiment also had some earlier results with atmospheric neutrinos which also suggested flavour oscillations. You are also under the misconception that mass changes with speed: it does not and is an invariant quantity the gamma factor in momentum comes from the velocity changing under relativity not the mass.
You are mixing up rest mass (which neither the photon nor the neutrino has) with moving mass / impulse
No, actually I'm not: trust me I'm a particle physicist! There are two misconceptions there. First a particle does not have to have a mass to have a momentum. Einstein's favourite equation is not actually 'E=mc^2' unless you are standing still. It is more correctly written: 'E^2=p^2c^2 + m^2c^4' where 'p' is momentum. In the case of a massless particle (m=0) this is just: 'E=pc' so a photon with a non-zero energy has a non-zero momentum but ALWAYS has a zero mass.
The second misconception is that the mass of a moving particle somehow changes. This is wrong and in fact you can show quite easily (if you know relativity) that the mass is something called a Lorentz invariant which means it is the same for all observers in all inertial reference frames. The misconception regarding the mass "getting bigger" at higher velocities comes from the formula for relativistic momentum for a massive particle "p=gamma*m*v" where 'gamma' is always greater than 1 for v>0. This factor is erroneously coupled with the mass to give what some textbooks call 'relativistic mass' (gamma*m). This is WRONG! One of the consequences of relativity is that space and time get 'mixed' differently for different observers. Velocity is 'space/time' so this is where the gamma factor comes from. This is very obvious to see if you look at acceleration. The relativistic form of Newton's second law is NOT 'F=gamma*m*a' which it would be if this was just an effect on the mass increasing.
You claim that a neutrino has always mass (or more than a photon) is either plain wrong or grants you a noble prize if you can proof it.
See this paper: “Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory”, The SNO Collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 1, 011301 (2002). It is not possible for neutrinos to oscillate unless they have a mass difference which means that at least two of the neutrino flavours must have a non-zero mass. You are correct that it is likely to win the authors a Nobel Prize probably within the next few years but I'm not one of them (but I was an author on the Higgs discovery paper so that's ok!;-).
Do you realize that the event and Chernobyl are impossible to happen to any reactor in France?
Rubbish. European plants are far, far safer than Chernobyl and the risks of a catastrophic meltdown are far, far less but impossible means that there is absolutely no chance of that happening under any circumstance. I think that highly unlikely: look at Fukushima. Rare events and human stupidity happen and all the safety systems in the world are not going to stop that. That being said I think that nuclear power is frankly safe enough and less risky than the alternative which is fossil fuelled power stations. So I would support France's strategy but don't kid yourself that it is zero risk. However the cost of cleaning up the rare, occasional nuclear accident may well be far less than the cost of dealing with accelerated climate change and given that any radiation release will likely be slow and is very easy to detect the risk to human life is minimal - it is the cost of cleanup that is expensive.
True but the point is that if a reactor in France suffers a severe failure (which is far less likely than something like Chernobyl) parts of Germany may well get severely contaminated and not be inhabitable without a lot of expensive cleanup work. This is the disadvantage with fission-based nuclear power: there is a tiny, but non-zero risk of long term contamination of regions as well as a slight increase in the risk of cancer for those exposed.
You can argue, as I would, that this risk is very small and, I would go further, is far outweighed by the risk of releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. However is it not really possible to claim that when your next door neighbours are heavy users of nuclear power that you have escaped the risk of severe contamination because, in the unlikely event that their plants fail you will still get the radioactive fallout. Hence I do not see the sense in one European country shutting down nuclear power plants: either do it at the EU level or else you might as well benefit from nuclear power because you have the risks regardless.
If I can cut a ton of carbon emissions by switching to solar for a $40 subsidy or by adding insulation to an attic for $20 why chose the more expensive option?
If you could insulate a loft for $20 this would not be a discussion: at that price I'd pay for my neighbours as well! Unfortunately the real cost of insulating is far higher, try several thousand dollars and on most newish homes is standard - our loft is basically half full of polystyrene balls. Also the house construction in the US and Canada is typically wood which provides far less insulation than the cavity walls construction used in the UK and the cost of fixing that would be really prohibitive.
Things like "not risking dying from radiation sickness"
For this to be true you also need all your neighbours to stop using nuclear power and unfortunately Germany is right next door to France which has a huge nuclear power generation capacity. Remember how far the radioactive fallout cloud from Chernobyl went? The result is that Germany now still faces all the disadvantages of nuclear power without receiving any of the advantages.
You can't break a contract that has already been fulfilled. Money has changed hands, a physical good has changed hands. The contract is fulfilled.
Tell that to those convicted of trafficking in stolen goods. Contracts have to be legally fulfilled. What is being sold is not the physical ticket but the right to attend an event which can arguably be sold to an individual - instead of a ticket you could use photo-id and a list of names. The ticket is just a convenient, practical way to easily determine who has bought the right.
The photons still move at 2.99x10^8m/s. It's the electrons and positrons that move slower.
This whole premise sounds wrong and needs data to confirm it. The problem is that the article is wrong to claim that neutrinos move at the speed of light - they have a non-zero mass and so must move slower than this. However their mass is incredibly small (probably ~100,000 times less than an electron - so small that we have not actually measured it yet!) so they move very close to the speed of light. What sounds dodgy is that they are claiming that the primary effect of the non-zero neutrino mass is negligible while the secondary effect of the zero-mass photon coupling to virtual electron-positron pairs is more significant. A quick back of the envelope calculation suggests that the neutrino mass could cause a ~30 minute delay in the neutrino arrival over such a distance.
In addition they are basing this on being able to accurately calculate the scattering delay time of photons in a super nova. Less than a decade ago super nova models could not even get the star to explode (the explosion was not powerful enough and was overcome by gravity) so I have a hard time believing that they have perfected things to the extent where can really give a reliable number for the scattering delay time.
As usual extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so far there is much of the former and none of the latter. Although it is also possible that the article is completely misrepresenting the claims but if so it is doing an even worse job of it that you suggest!
Depends where they built it. If it is on the east side there is a large refinery there and I cannot imagine it will out stink that! Also it is not burning the rubbish but is converting it into useful chemicals so it is not clear that it will produce anything like the same levels of odour and pollution that burning refuse will cause.
If my hypothesis requires 100x the energy of what the LHC can provide to verify, it is still falsifiable.
True but that is not commonly what happens. Generally the case is that the energy threshold is not fixed at all but, as the energy increases, you have to force the theory into ever decreasing areas of phase space in order to explain whatever phenomenon you are trying to describe.
When you say "Does the Higgs Boson exist?" there is an implicit assumption that it is the one proposed by Higgs.
Correct. The Higgs boson could exist and behave exactly as predicted by Higgs and yet not be the dominant mechanism which breaks the EW symmetry because something else does it first i.e. the symmetry is broken by some other mechanism and, although the Higgs is there, it is at some huge mass scale where its contribution to the breaking is tiny. Hence had the LHC found that nature used something else to break the EW symmetry that result would NOT had disproved the existence of the Higgs it would just have made it unnecessary and so Occam's razor applies and you lose interest in it as a possible theory.
is the big bang exlainable by a deity?
That is falsifiable in principle. Assuming we find a way to probe the causes of the Big Bang then either we find god "lighting the blue touch paper" or we find some as yet utterly unknown natural mechanism which happens without space and possibly without time too (so 'happens' and 'natural' might not be the right words but we don't really have an appropriate vocabulary for such a situation).
Compared to the "golden age" which many people think of in terms of UK university education, there's not much difference.
There is a huge difference! The "graduate tax" as you call it is independent of your salary. A teacher who earns not much more than £25k/year will be paying off the loan for much of their career whereas some investment banker in the city will probably pay it off in the first year or two and barely notice the effect. Worse, because the teacher takes longer to pay it off they pay more because interest accumulates on the loan.
This has none of the typical traits of a real tax. Taxes on income are almost always percentage based so that those who earn more pay more. In addition the rate is usually, but not always, progressive so that the rate on income above a certain amount is taxed at a higher percentage rate. Were this funded by a graduate tax then you would expect the high earning investment banker to pay far more in tax than the poorer teacher whereas in fact the exact opposite is the case due to the interest!
The end result is that loans provide an massive financial disincentive to work in low paid but essential professions such as teaching, nursing, the police etc. and encourage people to go into more lucrative professions. Worse loans, unlike grants, also makes the investment banker think that s/he got there all by themselves with no help from the government. Give them a free education and they will have received something valuable from the state which was paid for by taxes and so they are less likely to complain about paying tax in the future because they can see that everyone in society benefits from it.
Lighten up! You have to be amused by the irony of a site which at the top of it: "Help us reduce the influence of money in politics!" just above a button which is labelled "Pledge Now!".
The higgs boson hypothesis as it was presented was falsifiable in both principle and in practice, because they supplied a predicted a range where they expected it would exist.
True but that range was on the assumption that the Higgs boson cancelled certain divergent cross-sections. Nature could possibly have provided a different mechanism to do that and yet still have a Higgs boson at some higher energy scale. Of course at this point the Higgs becomes a lot less interesting because it no longer solves a problem with the Standard Model but nevertheless until we did the experiment you could not exclude that possibility.
This would make the hypothesis unfalsifiable in practice, but falsifiable in principle as a bigger machine could (and probably will be built).
That is not true because there is no upper bound on the energy at which you can claim your model of new physics exists. No matter what the energy of your machine is I can always crank up the energy of my model so that you cannot see it there. The point at which people stop being interested in a theory is when they rule it out as an explanation of a particular phenomenon it was invented to solve not when they have excluded any possibility that the theory exists in nature.
Falsifiability simply means that there is an experiment that can be done to determine whether the hypothesis is true.
That is exactly the definition I am using. The problem is that you are not stating you hypothesis correctly. The hypothesis which is interesting to us particle physicists is not "does the Higgs boson exist?" but "is the Higgs boson the primary mechanism for breaking the electroweak symmetry by giving fundamental particles mass?".
Extending this to religion the question about whether a creator exists is exactly the same as asking whether the Higgs boson exists: you can only ever get a definitive answer in the positive case where what you are looking for exists and you find it. If you want a falsifiable hypothesis then you need to ask a more specific question e.g. is phenomenon X explainable by mechanism Y.
6-figure debt makes it the point. A debt that you cannot refinance makes it the point. A debt you can't escape through bankruptcy makes it the point.
Agreed but the real point is that if not everyone goes to university then the cost borne by students is far less. When I was at university in the UK tuition was free because the government paid it. The argument being that I would then go and get a job and with a higher salary my higher taxes would pay for the investment the government had made.
However this model collapses when 50+% of the population goes to university. First the universities have to either provide additional teaching resources and/or lower graduation standards because such a large increase means that the educational standards on the incoming students are lower. This is exacerbated by the fact that the average salary of all graduates drops because the total wages available does not increase with the number of degrees granted so essentially you have the same tax base as before but now have to pay for twice as many degrees.
The result is that tuition has gone through the roof. The same degree that was free for me 25 years ago now costs £9,000/year ($16,400/year). It is also now a 4 year degree (used to be 3 years) because of the lower standards in school. Of course this means that students acquire so much debt that they have to be extremely concerned about their potential salary after graduating. The puts an increasing pressure for universities to shift from the academic institutes of higher education which have served society for the best part of a millennium (or possibly longer in some cases) towards becoming vocational training colleges where each course is targeted to a specific career which provides enough income to pay of the massive debt so good luck finding the next generation of teachers!
The LHC didn't exist in the 18th century so if the Higgs boson were proposed in the 18th century would not have been practically falsifiable, but it was still falsifiable in principle
Actually that is not quite correct. The notion of a Higgs boson is not falsifiable in principle. All you need to do is say that it has a higher mass than you can reach with your accelerator. At some point this mass will be so large that your higgs can no longer explain the things that it was invented to solve but that is NOT the same as saying that there is no fundamental scalar Higgs field out there - all it says is that if such a field exists it would no longer be able to explain why fundamental particles have mass.
Least you think that this is a purely hypothetical argument this is the exact situation we have at the moment with a theory called Supersymmetry. So far we have seen no hint of this symmetry but it is arguably the best explanation we have as to why the Higgs has such a low mass. However if after the next run of the LHC we still see no hint of it then it is likely that, if it exists at all, it is probably at too high an energy to explain why the Higgs is so light and so nature likely solves this problem a different way. This is usually when theories get dropped - not because they have been proven wrong but because they have been shown not to solve the problem they were invented for.
No religion in schools was one of the few things I envied about the US school system
Really? Whether or not you believe in a religion it is worthwhile knowing what the basic beliefs of the major world religions are because chances are you are likely to have to interact with people who do believe in them. Besides, they do teach religion in US schools: they just cover it in their science classes!;-)
Ok, I stand corrected. It's a relatively recent law passed by Victorian-era MPs who back in 1994 had probably never heard of the internet and certainly not the web.
First, I'm guessing we are now specifically talking about Google's "Don't be evil" motto, which is specifically a reference to the Chinese wall between advertising income and search results
What? No, Google's motto is to do with doing good for the world rather than take short term gains, see this. Not paying taxes and forcing others to pay more to cover the shortfall is precisely taking a short term gain and causing others pain. Sounds pretty close to the definition of 'evil' to me.
I'd argue that Google has done a better job in terms of the social contract than those elected to govern.
Really? You mention surveillance of citizens which is exactly what Google does for economic gain. They also do what Google thinks is good for society which is not the same as what people think is good for society. Google is not elected by, nor accountable to, the people of the UK and worse, is in fact a foreign corporation with interests that may diverge greatly from those of the UK. I will grant you that I tend to agree with a lot of Google's aims (other than immoral tax evasion) but people have no control over this and it could change in a second with a new CEO.
Indeed if we are to discuss types of government then I would suggest that the corporate philanthropy model you espouse is more akin to a feudal system. Google is the feudal lord who does what it thinks is best for us peasants without us having any input or control whatsoever. That model only works when you have a benign lord but, as history shows, the next to inherit the throne may be far from benign and that overall this model of government is an abject failure. In addition it is not just Google who is doing this but Amazon, Starbucks etc. Are you going to argue that all the large multinational companies playing this tax evasion game are contributing more to society than they would if they had to pay tax like the rest of us? Google may be the best of the bunch at the moment but there is more than just Google playing this game.
As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.". You can quibble about the type of democracy in the UK and you can argue that the government should be doing a better job with the way it spends taxes (and I would not disagree) but I would still claim that history shows that, averaged over time, it is still far, far better than letting unelected, powerful corporations decide.
Blame your politicians, not the companies they are actually encouraging to behave in this way.
I will admit that this was my first reaction upon hearing it too - blame the politicians for not having set up laws to stop this. However when you think about things more it is extremely hard to come up with any rules to fix this unless you tax the revenue of companies rather than their profits. I don't see anyway that you can easily differentiate between a genuine expense for a company vs. a profit moving expense designed to make the purchasing company unprofitable while making the selling company profitable.
The only way I could see this working would be to pass a general law forbidding the movement of profits by this method and giving the Inland Revenue the power to decide when this has taken place. This would be a very vague law with potentially far reaching consequences that gave government a lot of power. However when it comes to these large, multinational companies I'm not sure there is any other way because they can use their army of lawyers to devise a way around any concrete, well defined law that does not enforce a general principle.
...and that in order to do this, you'll have to physically relocate to Ireland
The point is that the people making the deal are not physically located in Ireland. The negotiation, sale etc. is all taking place in the UK. They then twist the law to the point where they can legally claim it took place in Ireland. Also while you might be able to decide whose laws are used to negotiate disputes regarding the contract you cannot decide whose laws apply to taxation resulting from the contract.
They are following the absolute letter of the law and using it to get around their social responsibilities to support the society in which they operate which is immoral, or to put it another way evil. So I'm guessing they have had the same lawyers figure out how to get around their "do no evil" rule.
Slashdot Mirror
If it fails to recognize you, it will send your picture to your cellphone and ask you if it is okay for the unrecognized person to use your car.
Which is why I specifically used the example of hiking in the mountains where there is no cell phone service.
Never mind security, what about reliability? If I go hiking in the mountains where there is no cell phone coverage and e.g. scratch my face on a tree branch I do not want to get back to the car only to have it fail to recognize me and refuse to start. Frankly I also wonder about whether Ford are thinking clearly about this given the claim in the article that "Ford Motor Company [NYSE:F] already believes the technology can help improve privacy..". How can adding a camera to a car improve privacy? No matter what protections you put in place around the system if there is no camera there is no data on who is driving which has to be better privacy than a system which knows.
"moving mass" here is being used for poorly named relativistic mass, which is not an invariant. For both gravitational and inertial purposes, things act like their relativistic mass in a given frame, regardless of what their rest mass is.
Actually they do not. Try using 'F=ma' with relativistic mass and you will not get far. You can only use the simple 'gamma' factor when dealing with relativistic momentum and then, at a fundamental level, it comes from the fact that the particle's velocity has to be redefined for relativity because there is no universal clock. This is not a pedagogical argument it is a fundamental physics argument: relativistic mass is a broken concept, the universe simply does not work that way and you will go wrong if you use it in any but the simplest situations.
That paper shows the solar neutrino problem not flavour oscillations. SuperK saw the first hints of this from atmospheric neutrinos, not solar neutrinos. However SNO was the first experiment to conclusively prove oscillations: they showed that the total flux of solar neutrinos was as expected but that only ~a third of them were electron neutrinos despite the fact that all of them started as electron neutrinos. Seeing a disappearance of a particular flavour does not prove oscillations: they might have somehow decayed or been absorbed through unknown processes. While this requires new physics neutrino oscillations was also new physics at the time so Occam's razor can not really pick between them.
As long as neutrinos have been known about (and even when just a postulation) they had moving mass, as they carry energy away from decays and reactions.
Actually that is not true. The Standard Model originally had them with zero mass. This was disproven in 2002 by the SNO experiment which conclusively showed that neutrinos from the sun changed flavour which meant that they had to have a mass. The SuperK experiment also had some earlier results with atmospheric neutrinos which also suggested flavour oscillations. You are also under the misconception that mass changes with speed: it does not and is an invariant quantity the gamma factor in momentum comes from the velocity changing under relativity not the mass.
You are mixing up rest mass (which neither the photon nor the neutrino has) with moving mass / impulse
No, actually I'm not: trust me I'm a particle physicist! There are two misconceptions there. First a particle does not have to have a mass to have a momentum. Einstein's favourite equation is not actually 'E=mc^2' unless you are standing still. It is more correctly written: 'E^2=p^2c^2 + m^2c^4' where 'p' is momentum. In the case of a massless particle (m=0) this is just: 'E=pc' so a photon with a non-zero energy has a non-zero momentum but ALWAYS has a zero mass.
The second misconception is that the mass of a moving particle somehow changes. This is wrong and in fact you can show quite easily (if you know relativity) that the mass is something called a Lorentz invariant which means it is the same for all observers in all inertial reference frames. The misconception regarding the mass "getting bigger" at higher velocities comes from the formula for relativistic momentum for a massive particle "p=gamma*m*v" where 'gamma' is always greater than 1 for v>0. This factor is erroneously coupled with the mass to give what some textbooks call 'relativistic mass' (gamma*m). This is WRONG! One of the consequences of relativity is that space and time get 'mixed' differently for different observers. Velocity is 'space/time' so this is where the gamma factor comes from. This is very obvious to see if you look at acceleration. The relativistic form of Newton's second law is NOT 'F=gamma*m*a' which it would be if this was just an effect on the mass increasing.
You claim that a neutrino has always mass (or more than a photon) is either plain wrong or grants you a noble prize if you can proof it.
See this paper: “Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory”, The SNO Collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 1, 011301 (2002). It is not possible for neutrinos to oscillate unless they have a mass difference which means that at least two of the neutrino flavours must have a non-zero mass. You are correct that it is likely to win the authors a Nobel Prize probably within the next few years but I'm not one of them (but I was an author on the Higgs discovery paper so that's ok! ;-).
Do you realize that the event and Chernobyl are impossible to happen to any reactor in France?
Rubbish. European plants are far, far safer than Chernobyl and the risks of a catastrophic meltdown are far, far less but impossible means that there is absolutely no chance of that happening under any circumstance. I think that highly unlikely: look at Fukushima. Rare events and human stupidity happen and all the safety systems in the world are not going to stop that. That being said I think that nuclear power is frankly safe enough and less risky than the alternative which is fossil fuelled power stations. So I would support France's strategy but don't kid yourself that it is zero risk. However the cost of cleaning up the rare, occasional nuclear accident may well be far less than the cost of dealing with accelerated climate change and given that any radiation release will likely be slow and is very easy to detect the risk to human life is minimal - it is the cost of cleanup that is expensive.
True but the point is that if a reactor in France suffers a severe failure (which is far less likely than something like Chernobyl) parts of Germany may well get severely contaminated and not be inhabitable without a lot of expensive cleanup work. This is the disadvantage with fission-based nuclear power: there is a tiny, but non-zero risk of long term contamination of regions as well as a slight increase in the risk of cancer for those exposed.
You can argue, as I would, that this risk is very small and, I would go further, is far outweighed by the risk of releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. However is it not really possible to claim that when your next door neighbours are heavy users of nuclear power that you have escaped the risk of severe contamination because, in the unlikely event that their plants fail you will still get the radioactive fallout. Hence I do not see the sense in one European country shutting down nuclear power plants: either do it at the EU level or else you might as well benefit from nuclear power because you have the risks regardless.
If I can cut a ton of carbon emissions by switching to solar for a $40 subsidy or by adding insulation to an attic for $20 why chose the more expensive option?
If you could insulate a loft for $20 this would not be a discussion: at that price I'd pay for my neighbours as well! Unfortunately the real cost of insulating is far higher, try several thousand dollars and on most newish homes is standard - our loft is basically half full of polystyrene balls. Also the house construction in the US and Canada is typically wood which provides far less insulation than the cavity walls construction used in the UK and the cost of fixing that would be really prohibitive.
Things like "not risking dying from radiation sickness"
For this to be true you also need all your neighbours to stop using nuclear power and unfortunately Germany is right next door to France which has a huge nuclear power generation capacity. Remember how far the radioactive fallout cloud from Chernobyl went? The result is that Germany now still faces all the disadvantages of nuclear power without receiving any of the advantages.
You can't break a contract that has already been fulfilled. Money has changed hands, a physical good has changed hands. The contract is fulfilled.
Tell that to those convicted of trafficking in stolen goods. Contracts have to be legally fulfilled. What is being sold is not the physical ticket but the right to attend an event which can arguably be sold to an individual - instead of a ticket you could use photo-id and a list of names. The ticket is just a convenient, practical way to easily determine who has bought the right.
The photons still move at 2.99x10^8m/s. It's the electrons and positrons that move slower.
This whole premise sounds wrong and needs data to confirm it. The problem is that the article is wrong to claim that neutrinos move at the speed of light - they have a non-zero mass and so must move slower than this. However their mass is incredibly small (probably ~100,000 times less than an electron - so small that we have not actually measured it yet!) so they move very close to the speed of light. What sounds dodgy is that they are claiming that the primary effect of the non-zero neutrino mass is negligible while the secondary effect of the zero-mass photon coupling to virtual electron-positron pairs is more significant. A quick back of the envelope calculation suggests that the neutrino mass could cause a ~30 minute delay in the neutrino arrival over such a distance.
In addition they are basing this on being able to accurately calculate the scattering delay time of photons in a super nova. Less than a decade ago super nova models could not even get the star to explode (the explosion was not powerful enough and was overcome by gravity) so I have a hard time believing that they have perfected things to the extent where can really give a reliable number for the scattering delay time.
As usual extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so far there is much of the former and none of the latter. Although it is also possible that the article is completely misrepresenting the claims but if so it is doing an even worse job of it that you suggest!
Depends where they built it. If it is on the east side there is a large refinery there and I cannot imagine it will out stink that! Also it is not burning the rubbish but is converting it into useful chemicals so it is not clear that it will produce anything like the same levels of odour and pollution that burning refuse will cause.
If my hypothesis requires 100x the energy of what the LHC can provide to verify, it is still falsifiable.
True but that is not commonly what happens. Generally the case is that the energy threshold is not fixed at all but, as the energy increases, you have to force the theory into ever decreasing areas of phase space in order to explain whatever phenomenon you are trying to describe.
When you say "Does the Higgs Boson exist?" there is an implicit assumption that it is the one proposed by Higgs.
Correct. The Higgs boson could exist and behave exactly as predicted by Higgs and yet not be the dominant mechanism which breaks the EW symmetry because something else does it first i.e. the symmetry is broken by some other mechanism and, although the Higgs is there, it is at some huge mass scale where its contribution to the breaking is tiny. Hence had the LHC found that nature used something else to break the EW symmetry that result would NOT had disproved the existence of the Higgs it would just have made it unnecessary and so Occam's razor applies and you lose interest in it as a possible theory.
is the big bang exlainable by a deity?
That is falsifiable in principle. Assuming we find a way to probe the causes of the Big Bang then either we find god "lighting the blue touch paper" or we find some as yet utterly unknown natural mechanism which happens without space and possibly without time too (so 'happens' and 'natural' might not be the right words but we don't really have an appropriate vocabulary for such a situation).
Compared to the "golden age" which many people think of in terms of UK university education, there's not much difference.
There is a huge difference! The "graduate tax" as you call it is independent of your salary. A teacher who earns not much more than £25k/year will be paying off the loan for much of their career whereas some investment banker in the city will probably pay it off in the first year or two and barely notice the effect. Worse, because the teacher takes longer to pay it off they pay more because interest accumulates on the loan.
This has none of the typical traits of a real tax. Taxes on income are almost always percentage based so that those who earn more pay more. In addition the rate is usually, but not always, progressive so that the rate on income above a certain amount is taxed at a higher percentage rate. Were this funded by a graduate tax then you would expect the high earning investment banker to pay far more in tax than the poorer teacher whereas in fact the exact opposite is the case due to the interest!
The end result is that loans provide an massive financial disincentive to work in low paid but essential professions such as teaching, nursing, the police etc. and encourage people to go into more lucrative professions. Worse loans, unlike grants, also makes the investment banker think that s/he got there all by themselves with no help from the government. Give them a free education and they will have received something valuable from the state which was paid for by taxes and so they are less likely to complain about paying tax in the future because they can see that everyone in society benefits from it.
Lighten up! You have to be amused by the irony of a site which at the top of it: "Help us reduce the influence of money in politics!" just above a button which is labelled "Pledge Now!".
The higgs boson hypothesis as it was presented was falsifiable in both principle and in practice, because they supplied a predicted a range where they expected it would exist.
True but that range was on the assumption that the Higgs boson cancelled certain divergent cross-sections. Nature could possibly have provided a different mechanism to do that and yet still have a Higgs boson at some higher energy scale. Of course at this point the Higgs becomes a lot less interesting because it no longer solves a problem with the Standard Model but nevertheless until we did the experiment you could not exclude that possibility.
This would make the hypothesis unfalsifiable in practice, but falsifiable in principle as a bigger machine could (and probably will be built).
That is not true because there is no upper bound on the energy at which you can claim your model of new physics exists. No matter what the energy of your machine is I can always crank up the energy of my model so that you cannot see it there. The point at which people stop being interested in a theory is when they rule it out as an explanation of a particular phenomenon it was invented to solve not when they have excluded any possibility that the theory exists in nature.
Falsifiability simply means that there is an experiment that can be done to determine whether the hypothesis is true.
That is exactly the definition I am using. The problem is that you are not stating you hypothesis correctly. The hypothesis which is interesting to us particle physicists is not "does the Higgs boson exist?" but "is the Higgs boson the primary mechanism for breaking the electroweak symmetry by giving fundamental particles mass?".
Extending this to religion the question about whether a creator exists is exactly the same as asking whether the Higgs boson exists: you can only ever get a definitive answer in the positive case where what you are looking for exists and you find it. If you want a falsifiable hypothesis then you need to ask a more specific question e.g. is phenomenon X explainable by mechanism Y.
6-figure debt makes it the point. A debt that you cannot refinance makes it the point. A debt you can't escape through bankruptcy makes it the point.
Agreed but the real point is that if not everyone goes to university then the cost borne by students is far less. When I was at university in the UK tuition was free because the government paid it. The argument being that I would then go and get a job and with a higher salary my higher taxes would pay for the investment the government had made.
However this model collapses when 50+% of the population goes to university. First the universities have to either provide additional teaching resources and/or lower graduation standards because such a large increase means that the educational standards on the incoming students are lower. This is exacerbated by the fact that the average salary of all graduates drops because the total wages available does not increase with the number of degrees granted so essentially you have the same tax base as before but now have to pay for twice as many degrees.
The result is that tuition has gone through the roof. The same degree that was free for me 25 years ago now costs £9,000/year ($16,400/year). It is also now a 4 year degree (used to be 3 years) because of the lower standards in school. Of course this means that students acquire so much debt that they have to be extremely concerned about their potential salary after graduating. The puts an increasing pressure for universities to shift from the academic institutes of higher education which have served society for the best part of a millennium (or possibly longer in some cases) towards becoming vocational training colleges where each course is targeted to a specific career which provides enough income to pay of the massive debt so good luck finding the next generation of teachers!
I think death by accidental asteroid impact is a more likely danger from this plan.
The LHC didn't exist in the 18th century so if the Higgs boson were proposed in the 18th century would not have been practically falsifiable, but it was still falsifiable in principle
Actually that is not quite correct. The notion of a Higgs boson is not falsifiable in principle. All you need to do is say that it has a higher mass than you can reach with your accelerator. At some point this mass will be so large that your higgs can no longer explain the things that it was invented to solve but that is NOT the same as saying that there is no fundamental scalar Higgs field out there - all it says is that if such a field exists it would no longer be able to explain why fundamental particles have mass.
Least you think that this is a purely hypothetical argument this is the exact situation we have at the moment with a theory called Supersymmetry. So far we have seen no hint of this symmetry but it is arguably the best explanation we have as to why the Higgs has such a low mass. However if after the next run of the LHC we still see no hint of it then it is likely that, if it exists at all, it is probably at too high an energy to explain why the Higgs is so light and so nature likely solves this problem a different way. This is usually when theories get dropped - not because they have been proven wrong but because they have been shown not to solve the problem they were invented for.
No religion in schools was one of the few things I envied about the US school system
Really? Whether or not you believe in a religion it is worthwhile knowing what the basic beliefs of the major world religions are because chances are you are likely to have to interact with people who do believe in them. Besides, they do teach religion in US schools: they just cover it in their science classes! ;-)
Ok, I stand corrected. It's a relatively recent law passed by Victorian-era MPs who back in 1994 had probably never heard of the internet and certainly not the web.
First, I'm guessing we are now specifically talking about Google's "Don't be evil" motto, which is specifically a reference to the Chinese wall between advertising income and search results
What? No, Google's motto is to do with doing good for the world rather than take short term gains, see this. Not paying taxes and forcing others to pay more to cover the shortfall is precisely taking a short term gain and causing others pain. Sounds pretty close to the definition of 'evil' to me.
I'd argue that Google has done a better job in terms of the social contract than those elected to govern.
Really? You mention surveillance of citizens which is exactly what Google does for economic gain. They also do what Google thinks is good for society which is not the same as what people think is good for society. Google is not elected by, nor accountable to, the people of the UK and worse, is in fact a foreign corporation with interests that may diverge greatly from those of the UK. I will grant you that I tend to agree with a lot of Google's aims (other than immoral tax evasion) but people have no control over this and it could change in a second with a new CEO.
Indeed if we are to discuss types of government then I would suggest that the corporate philanthropy model you espouse is more akin to a feudal system. Google is the feudal lord who does what it thinks is best for us peasants without us having any input or control whatsoever. That model only works when you have a benign lord but, as history shows, the next to inherit the throne may be far from benign and that overall this model of government is an abject failure. In addition it is not just Google who is doing this but Amazon, Starbucks etc. Are you going to argue that all the large multinational companies playing this tax evasion game are contributing more to society than they would if they had to pay tax like the rest of us? Google may be the best of the bunch at the moment but there is more than just Google playing this game.
As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.". You can quibble about the type of democracy in the UK and you can argue that the government should be doing a better job with the way it spends taxes (and I would not disagree) but I would still claim that history shows that, averaged over time, it is still far, far better than letting unelected, powerful corporations decide.
Blame your politicians, not the companies they are actually encouraging to behave in this way.
I will admit that this was my first reaction upon hearing it too - blame the politicians for not having set up laws to stop this. However when you think about things more it is extremely hard to come up with any rules to fix this unless you tax the revenue of companies rather than their profits. I don't see anyway that you can easily differentiate between a genuine expense for a company vs. a profit moving expense designed to make the purchasing company unprofitable while making the selling company profitable.
The only way I could see this working would be to pass a general law forbidding the movement of profits by this method and giving the Inland Revenue the power to decide when this has taken place. This would be a very vague law with potentially far reaching consequences that gave government a lot of power. However when it comes to these large, multinational companies I'm not sure there is any other way because they can use their army of lawyers to devise a way around any concrete, well defined law that does not enforce a general principle.
...and that in order to do this, you'll have to physically relocate to Ireland
The point is that the people making the deal are not physically located in Ireland. The negotiation, sale etc. is all taking place in the UK. They then twist the law to the point where they can legally claim it took place in Ireland. Also while you might be able to decide whose laws are used to negotiate disputes regarding the contract you cannot decide whose laws apply to taxation resulting from the contract.
They are following the absolute letter of the law and using it to get around their social responsibilities to support the society in which they operate which is immoral, or to put it another way evil. So I'm guessing they have had the same lawyers figure out how to get around their "do no evil" rule.