The problem with arXiv.org is that as it gets more popular, the signal-to-noise goes way down (a la slashdot), as anyone with a pet theory can throw it onto the preprint server. It can take a lot of energy to sift through papers to decide which ones contain crackpot ideas, and which ones are simply ahead of the curve.
Not really. At least the high energy sections are pretty crank free. The general physics section gets a bit of crank stuff, but not much. They have a filter, so you have to have an institutional email address (or a sponsor who has one) in order to put a paper there.
Virtually every paper published in the last ten years in high energy physics is online at the preprint arxiv. People still publish in peer reviewed journals, but very few people I know read them anymore. It's faster, and more current, on the arxiv. More and more physics papers in other fields are showing up there as well. The debate about open access in physics appears to have been settled already.
But right now, we have no substitute for human intelligence and adaptability. If plans change or something isn't quite right, you can talk to a human on the radio and say "Hey Jim, how about we try this instead of plan A?" That option's not often there with an unmanned probe, or some rocket with a chimp in it.
You missed the point. Unmanned missions are hundreds, or thousands, of times cheaper than manned ones. If something goes wrong, or priorties change, you just fire off another probe.
He makes that point with the Hubble. He quotes an estimate that, for the cost of one Hubble launched and serviced by manned shuttle missions, we could have had seven Hubbles.
Sure, we can get back some pretty pictures, and if we cross our fingers and hope every little detail was properly planned in advance, the craft will perform a few preset tasks for us.
I think you're underestimating the science value of unmanned missions.
The best analogy I can think of off the top of my head is drugs. You don't target the users, you target the dealers.
Except drug dealing is illegal, putting music out in the open is not. Leaving a stack of CDs out in the open isn't a crime, stealing them is. Likewise, leaving mp3s on your computer, in public view, is not copyright violation (provided you own the orginal CD of course). It's those who download them who are commiting a crime.
But manned flight is essential if we want to live in space long term.
I for one want to see a Moon colony, Mars colony, etc.
Feh... Given the state of the space shuttle program, even before today's tragic events, do you actually think we're anywhere close to long term human presence on another planet? The best we can do, at the cost of billions of dollars is to keep a few people in low earth orbit. The idea of seeing a colony on the moon, or mars, in the next 50-100 years is a pipe dream.
For a collection of stuff on this subject, search
google groups on ``reverse sokal hoax''. Then
read the (long) thread in sci.physics.research.
I'm not a string theorist so I can't be 100% sure,
but this stuff sure sounds like nonsense. The part
about the Foucault pendulum aligning with the initial singularity sounds really silly. To
quote John Baez, a mathmatical physicist (see below for a link)
It [one of the papers in question] goes on to discuss the supposed connection between N = 2 supergravity, Donaldson theory, KMS states and the Foucault pendulum experiment, which he claims "cannot be explained satisfactorily in either classical or relativistic mechanics". If you know some physics you'll find this statement slightly odd.
As I said, I'm not a string theorist, so I don't know for sure, but some very sharp people seem to support the contention that this is nonsense.
John Baez has compiled some of the relvent
stuff on his webapge,
here. Jacques Distler's
blog
also contains some good analysis.
Of those "pure mathematical" developments of twenty years (or forty years) ago, what has been used outside mathematics?
Don't know whether this counts as "oustside" mathmatics. But lots of this stuff finds uses in string theory.
Its also worth noteing that much of the math from ~100 years ago (group theory, differential geometry) is in wide use in physics now. Even in the more practical fields like condensed matt.
I'll second that... Fortran 90 is really nice for scientific work, definatly worth learning.
Re:Free Flow of information?
on
Open-Source Biology
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Another problem is that researchers can go months, even years on wrong information, and theories. If these were published, yes theres a possibility they could be discounted, but they could be perpetuated, with lots of wrong data all over the place.
How is this different from any other science. I mean, in physics, there's lots of papers out there
that will eventually be shown to be wrong. That's how science is supposed to work.
It's a shame that biology has become so profitable. Hoarding data and discoveries is not how science advances. The history of chemsitry and physics are ample illustrations of that fact.
People aren't attached to music labels. Nobody is exclusive to a certianly record label (i.e. I only buy Sony). This is a huge problem for label sponsored download sites.
While I concur with your point that nobodys going to mind paying $5/year to use BMG/Napster, they aren't going to want to do the same form Sony/Napsterclone, Universial/Napsterclone, etc. It's not just the price, it's the hassle. You've got to fill out a separte signup form for each one, and each has a different UI, different media format, different copying policy etc.
CD stores are successful becuase they aren't label specific, that's why Napster was successfull too. You could get anything you wanted there. If all they carry in the future is BMG music, then what's the point?
Wow, you seem to understand exactly what the implications of a deep theoretical understanding of the universe would be.
Yes as a matter of fact I do. I am a particle physicist, and understand precisely the experimental impact that things like string theory have. And the truth is that they have none, and will likely have very litte. The idea that if somebody just works out the correct grand unified theory we'll be able to control space and time at will is laughable.
That puts you way ahead of the rest of the scientific establishment.
What I'm saying is quite in tune with mainstream physics. I know several people who work on string theory, I know the basics of the bosonic (simpliest) version myself (at the level of the first few chapters of Greene, Schwartz and Witten). Like I said in my post, the intellectual reward of finding a correct theory of this type is enormous, but the practical benifits on a macroscopic scale will be nonexistent.
Scrap the idea of writing to Discovery Magazine - write to Science instead and get the message out there!
What? Tell them that the unified theory of graivity and quantum mechanics won't lead to large scale antigravity machines? They already know that.
You need a thorough theoretical understanding,
and we don't have that.
Yes we do. We understand gravity from cosmological scales down to the scale of present particle accerator experiments (where we understand gravity well enough to realize that it has no effect). This is a range from 15 billion light years down to less then a femtometre. Are there gaps in this understanding? Sure, but none wide enought that you could drive an ``anti-gravity'' device through.
The claims of ``anti-gravity'' crowd always focus on building some device which violates our understanding of gravity on a large scale. Not understanding the details of quantum gravity does not matter here. It doesn't matter down to extremely small distance scales. Worrying about it on laboratory scales is akin to worrying about the relativistic effects on a car travelling at 10 mph.
You don't seem to understand the difference between the deep theoretical desire to understand quantum gravity and the limited real world effect such an understanding would have.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with arXiv.org is that as it gets more popular, the signal-to-noise goes way down (a la slashdot), as anyone with a pet theory can throw it onto the preprint server. It can take a lot of energy to sift through papers to decide which ones contain crackpot ideas, and which ones are simply ahead of the curve.
Not really. At least the high energy sections are pretty crank free. The general physics section gets a bit of crank stuff, but not much. They have a filter, so you have to have an institutional email address (or a sponsor who has one) in order to put a paper there.
Virtually every paper published in the last ten years in high energy physics is online at the preprint arxiv. People still publish in peer reviewed journals, but very few people I know read them anymore. It's faster, and more current, on the arxiv. More and more physics papers in other fields are showing up there as well. The debate about open access in physics appears to have been settled already.
You missed the point. Unmanned missions are hundreds, or thousands, of times cheaper than manned ones. If something goes wrong, or priorties change, you just fire off another probe.
He makes that point with the Hubble. He quotes an estimate that, for the cost of one Hubble launched and serviced by manned shuttle missions, we could have had seven Hubbles.
Sure, we can get back some pretty pictures, and if we cross our fingers and hope every little detail was properly planned in advance, the craft will perform a few preset tasks for us.
I think you're underestimating the science value of unmanned missions.
Except drug dealing is illegal, putting music out in the open is not. Leaving a stack of CDs out in the open isn't a crime, stealing them is. Likewise, leaving mp3s on your computer, in public view, is not copyright violation (provided you own the orginal CD of course). It's those who download them who are commiting a crime.
But manned flight is essential if we want to live in space long term. I for one want to see a Moon colony, Mars colony, etc.
Feh... Given the state of the space shuttle program, even before today's tragic events, do you actually think we're anywhere close to long term human presence on another planet? The best we can do, at the cost of billions of dollars is to keep a few people in low earth orbit. The idea of seeing a colony on the moon, or mars, in the next 50-100 years is a pipe dream.
For a collection of stuff on this subject, search google groups on ``reverse sokal hoax''. Then read the (long) thread in sci.physics.research.
I'm not a string theorist so I can't be 100% sure, but this stuff sure sounds like nonsense. The part about the Foucault pendulum aligning with the initial singularity sounds really silly. To quote John Baez, a mathmatical physicist (see below for a link)
It [one of the papers in question] goes on to discuss the supposed connection between N = 2 supergravity, Donaldson theory, KMS states and the Foucault pendulum experiment, which he claims "cannot be explained satisfactorily in either classical or relativistic mechanics". If you know some physics you'll find this statement slightly odd.
As I said, I'm not a string theorist, so I don't know for sure, but some very sharp people seem to support the contention that this is nonsense. John Baez has compiled some of the relvent stuff on his webapge, here. Jacques Distler's blog also contains some good analysis.
but just to be clear, my name is Matt.
The articles are linked on my website.
Of those "pure mathematical" developments of twenty years (or forty years) ago, what has been used outside mathematics?
Don't know whether this counts as "oustside" mathmatics. But lots of this stuff finds uses in string theory.
Its also worth noteing that much of the math from ~100 years ago (group theory, differential geometry) is in wide use in physics now. Even in the more practical fields like condensed matt.
A big shout out from a fellow UW physics grad
What year were you there?
I'll second that... Fortran 90 is really nice for scientific work, definatly worth learning.
Another problem is that researchers can go months, even years on wrong information, and theories. If these were published, yes theres a possibility they could be discounted, but they could be perpetuated, with lots of wrong data all over the place.
How is this different from any other science. I mean, in physics, there's lots of papers out there that will eventually be shown to be wrong. That's how science is supposed to work.
It's a shame that biology has become so profitable. Hoarding data and discoveries is not how science advances. The history of chemsitry and physics are ample illustrations of that fact.
Here's the problem as I see it.
People aren't attached to music labels. Nobody is exclusive to a certianly record label (i.e. I only buy Sony). This is a huge problem for label sponsored download sites.
While I concur with your point that nobodys going to mind paying $5/year to use BMG/Napster, they aren't going to want to do the same form Sony/Napsterclone, Universial/Napsterclone, etc. It's not just the price, it's the hassle. You've got to fill out a separte signup form for each one, and each has a different UI, different media format, different copying policy etc.
CD stores are successful becuase they aren't label specific, that's why Napster was successfull too. You could get anything you wanted there. If all they carry in the future is BMG music, then what's the point?
Wow, you seem to understand exactly what the implications of a deep theoretical understanding of the universe would be.
Yes as a matter of fact I do. I am a particle physicist, and understand precisely the experimental impact that things like string theory have. And the truth is that they have none, and will likely have very litte. The idea that if somebody just works out the correct grand unified theory we'll be able to control space and time at will is laughable.
That puts you way ahead of the rest of the scientific establishment.
What I'm saying is quite in tune with mainstream physics. I know several people who work on string theory, I know the basics of the bosonic (simpliest) version myself (at the level of the first few chapters of Greene, Schwartz and Witten). Like I said in my post, the intellectual reward of finding a correct theory of this type is enormous, but the practical benifits on a macroscopic scale will be nonexistent.
Scrap the idea of writing to Discovery Magazine - write to Science instead and get the message out there!
What? Tell them that the unified theory of graivity and quantum mechanics won't lead to large scale antigravity machines? They already know that.
You need a thorough theoretical understanding, and we don't have that.
Yes we do. We understand gravity from cosmological scales down to the scale of present particle accerator experiments (where we understand gravity well enough to realize that it has no effect). This is a range from 15 billion light years down to less then a femtometre. Are there gaps in this understanding? Sure, but none wide enought that you could drive an ``anti-gravity'' device through.
The claims of ``anti-gravity'' crowd always focus on building some device which violates our understanding of gravity on a large scale. Not understanding the details of quantum gravity does not matter here. It doesn't matter down to extremely small distance scales. Worrying about it on laboratory scales is akin to worrying about the relativistic effects on a car travelling at 10 mph.
You don't seem to understand the difference between the deep theoretical desire to understand quantum gravity and the limited real world effect such an understanding would have.