Building three unfathomably massive anti-tornado walls would count as the infrastructure project of the decade, if not the century. It would be also be exceedingly expensive.
If it is not exceedingly expensive, it's not the infrastructure project of the century.
Franson's theory cannot be right, as it disagrees with the solar system tests of General Relativity
His Equation 18 predicts a change in the gravitational red shift by a factor of 9 alpha / 64 for photons, where alpha is the fine structure constant (~ 1/137), so the correction is ~ 1.08 x 10^-2. The gravitational red shift has been tested, by GPS and also by Gravity Probe A, with an accuracy of a few parts in 10^-4 (see Figure 3 in that reference). This excludes the Franson correction, and so his theory cannot be correct. Since the Shapiro delay also depends on the gravitational redshift, Franson's theory thus predicts a 1% change in that too, which is also much too large to be consistent with experiment (see Figure 5), again excluding the Franson theory.
So the theory is wrong, and the other problems I have with the paper are irrelevant.
When 1987A happened, it is fair to say that an enormous amount of attention was placed on those neutrinos - >> 1 paper per neutrino. The report of an earlier neutrino burst from the Mt Blanc LSD was discussed at length - see Arnett 1987 Table 1 for the time line.
The facts are these - the optical supernova could not be accurately timed, it wasn't bright at Feb 23.10 and it was at 2 / 23.443. The Mt Blanc LSD burst was at 2 / 23.12, while the other two detectors had a mutual burst at 2 / 23.316. Note that both neutrino bursts occurred before the optical SN was detected, and also that none of the other detected picked up the Mt Blanc LSD burst.
All of this has been known a long time, and numerous theories have been introduced to explain it.
- formation of a nlack hole (from the neutron star) - formation of a quark star (from the neutron star) - the Mt Blanc data were unrelated to the SN (that appears to be Arnett's viewpoint).
So, this is another explanation, and not a super compelling one to me. It will clearly never be proven from the SN 1987A data - the next such close supernova should have a lot of neutrino data, and maybe will resolve the issue.
"When we speak of the Europa mission at our shop we are talking about going for the gold ring: landing on the surface of Europa; sending a nuclear-powered cryobot carrier vehicle through the ice crust; discharging a nuclear-powered 'fast mover' autonomous underwater carrier vehicle that has planet-scale range, and selectively launching a series of miniaturized, highly intelligent AUVs [Autonomous Underwater Vehicles] to go into the more dangerous areas (e.g. around black smokers, up into ice cracks, into corrosive chemical plumes) to search for and collect biological samples and bring them back to the mother ship,"
but I don't know anything about their comms plans. A german group plans to have a submersible return to the surface and then broadcast everything back.
I would strongly prefer to have a transmitter on the surface (sending either back to Earth, or to an orbiter somewhere), and use acoustic signaling, just as you would do with a deep submersible here on Earth. Problems with the "go back to the hole" plan include
- a failure on the return trip means no data comes back at all - a good fraction of the under-ice mission time would be spent going back to the hole, or making a new one, rather than further exploration. - if the submersible gets into trouble, or has to make a decision as to what would be best to sample/explore/go to next, Earth cannot help.
Of course, we know nothing of the acoustic noise level in Europa, so this might require a precursor seismology mission just make sure it would work.
“where there is a significant chance that contamination carried by a spacecraft could jeopardize future exploration.” We define “significant chance” as “the presence of niches (places where terrestrial microorganisms could proliferate) and the likelihood of transfer to those places."
The Europa probe is likely to get a little less scrubbing, significantly less than an Europan orbiter, but more than the Juno spacecraft, as, although it will be in a Jovian orbit going near Europa, it can be placed in a "safe" orbit away from Europa at the end of the mission. But, Europa orbiters and landers will get the full treatment.
By the way, even if Mars landers had some bugs, they were sterilized, which undoubtedly greatly reduced the total bio-loading, Just because you didn't wash your hands once before dinner doesn't mean you should stop washing them altogether subsequently.
A first mission would have a spacecraft orbit just 16 miles over the moon's surface, analyzing the material ejected from the moon, measuring salinity, and sniffing out its chemical makeup.
Actually, the first mission dedicated to Europa will be the Europa clipper, focused on Europa, but not in Europa orbit. The radiation near Europa is so intense (even for machines) that dipping in and out of the field in an inclined Jovian orbit will save about a billion dollars over going into a Europan orbit.
This is not a treaty, it is an "agreement," which would rely on "Fast Track Authority" to get through Congress, as a simple bill requiring a 50% majority, non-filibusterable and not subject to amendment. The FTA rules are structured to not allow any meaningful debate in Congress.
As it happens, FTA has expired, and a simple way to kill this BS would be to kill the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities Act of 2014 now in Congress to revive it.
It is not particularly surprising, but it is, however, news. That unfortunately we have come to expect sleazy results from these "Trade Agreements" (which are not really about trade, and should properly be Treaties) does not mean that we can ignore yet another example of sleaze.
This would not be a treaty - it should be, but it wouldn't. It would be an Act, nominally sent through Congress by Fast Track Authority (which has thankfully expired, although a bill to renew it is now in Congress). The entire point of FTA is to eliminate any meaningful debate in Congress.
Let's be blunt - these "agreements" invariably represent efforts by corporate interests to obtain in secret what they could never get through Congress or by the ballot box in public. They are bad for the world, bad for the United States, and bad for our constitutional system of governance
The Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities Act of 2014 is now in Congress to revive the expired "Fast Track Authority," and should be opposed by anyone against TPP, TISA, etc. I was originally supportive of Fast Track, but I think it has been badly abused and is dangerous to the constitutional separation of powers. It has expired; like Frankenstein's monster, it would be best if were not resurrected.
Oh, I don't think that the Alcubierre warp drive is actually physically possible, and I sure don't think Harold White's experiments are going to show otherwise (although I would be delighted to be wrong). But I think Alcubierre's solution is a valid solution of General Relativity, and it shows that strong-field fluctuations in space-time can, at least in principle, go faster than light.
The speed of light is the ultimate speed limit relative to the underlying spacetime. If spacetime itself expands or contracts, that speed limit may not apply. That is, in fact, also the basis of the Alcubierre warp drive.
Actually, they did some research, had a press conference, other researchers pointed out potential problems with the conclusions, and they put some weasel words in the actual published paper. It doesn't matter; the way they went about this, and the weakness of their dust calibration, means that no one will really believe the cosmological interpretation of their results* until more data comes along. That may not take long, according to Nature News:
In addition, presentations given earlier this week at a cosmology conference in Moscow, based on observations from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite add fresh evidence that what BICEP2 [observed] could be entirely due to a confounding effect of dust.
* That doesn't mean that lots of theorists won't publish papers showing, or purporting to show, or speculating, that this or that implication follows assuming the BICEP2 results are right. That's OK, that's what theorists do. It's mostly harmless, and occasionally leads to something useful even if the original results were wrong.
There is a lot of evidence for the universe being in an early, condensed, hot state - as you say, the CMB is a one of them, as is the success of Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). If that is what is meant by the "Big Bang," then it is indeed well established. If, however, what is meant is there was some sort of singularity from which everything exploded than that, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, seems to be receding into the distance or fading away.
This can be most clearly expressed by asking, how old is the universe? You will hear things like, the CMB represents conditions 300,000 years after the big bang, BBN occurred in the first 3 minutes, etc., but what is really meant is, the Hubble time at such-and-such an event was 300,000 years, 3 minutes, etc. In the theory of eternal inflation (basically, the idea that inflation is the natural state of the larger universe, and our piece of that universe was just an area that happened to convert to a "true" vacuum state), inflation may have been going on a long time, or even an infinite time, so the Hubble time is just the time since the end of inflation; the actual age of anything (i.e., the time since the "Big Bang") is in such theories completely undetermined.
I still find it hard to believe that they would do a major press conference on results that depended (fairly crucially) on a calibration screen-scraped from a presentation from another scientific group. I would love to know the true back-story here - was knowledge of this dependency on screen-scraped data widespread within the BICEP2 group, or was this just some grad student who was being expedient? Didn't anyone try and contact the Planck group and ask for their best dust estimates?
While it is quite possible that such a technical flaw might have made it through the usual paper peer review process without being caught, that isn't the route they chose to take, which just makes it more embarrassing.
It is surprisingly hard to anonymize data, and I would not trust anyone who claims to do so. This is just the metadata problem all over again.
To be useful at all, this data has to be tied to geography and time somehow, and also last for at least a while. So, suppose I anonymize thermostat data to zip code, so it might provide information like, in zip code X house Y with a 2 zone system the owners went on vacation during the spring break for the X county public school system, etc. It doesn't take too much of this to identify a specific house or family, especially if (as Google may well have) you have other information, such as knowledge that a power spike similar to (say) an Apple Mac tower system in area X being turned on occurs at the same time as IP address Z (also in area X) starts using the Internet, or that family A bought plane tickets for a flight that left 2.5 hours after the house thermostat was put into vacation mode.
So, you can do what you want, but I would ignore assurances of anonymization.
In his blog post, he says that data won't be shared with anyone, including Google, without a customer's permission.
You can, at least at times, trust people, especially ones you know well. A person's word may mean something.
You can, however, never trust companies unless you have a contractual relation with them (and, at times, not even then). A company's word is meaningless. Times change, people change, and what was impossible can become all too easy. The day will come, for example, when Mr Rogers is no longer at Dropcam / Nest / Google, and his successor may feel differently (or may be ordered to feel differently) about this.
This is without mentioning the elastic definitions of "permission" used at times on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
If it is not exceedingly expensive, it's not the infrastructure project of the century.
Franson's theory cannot be right, as it disagrees with the solar system tests of General Relativity
His Equation 18 predicts a change in the gravitational red shift by a factor of 9 alpha / 64 for photons, where alpha is the fine structure constant (~ 1/137), so the correction is ~ 1.08 x 10^-2. The gravitational red shift has been tested, by GPS and also by Gravity Probe A, with an accuracy of a few parts in 10^-4 (see Figure 3 in that reference). This excludes the Franson correction, and so his theory cannot be correct. Since the Shapiro delay also depends on the gravitational redshift, Franson's theory thus predicts a 1% change in that too, which is also much too large to be consistent with experiment (see Figure 5), again excluding the Franson theory.
So the theory is wrong, and the other problems I have with the paper are irrelevant.
When 1987A happened, it is fair to say that an enormous amount of attention was placed on those neutrinos - >> 1 paper per neutrino. The report of an earlier neutrino burst from the Mt Blanc LSD was discussed at length - see Arnett 1987 Table 1 for the time line.
The facts are these - the optical supernova could not be accurately timed, it wasn't bright at Feb 23.10 and it was at 2 / 23.443. The Mt Blanc LSD burst was at 2 / 23.12, while the other two detectors had a mutual burst at 2 / 23.316. Note that both neutrino bursts occurred before the optical SN was detected, and also that none of the other detected picked up the Mt Blanc LSD burst.
All of this has been known a long time, and numerous theories have been introduced to explain it.
- formation of a nlack hole (from the neutron star)
- formation of a quark star (from the neutron star)
- the Mt Blanc data were unrelated to the SN (that appears to be Arnett's viewpoint).
So, this is another explanation, and not a super compelling one to me. It will clearly never be proven from the SN 1987A data - the next such close supernova should have a lot of neutrino data, and maybe will resolve the issue.
"The Europa probe is likely ..."
That should be
"The Europa clipper probe is likely ..."
Stone Aerospace has some elaborate plans:
but I don't know anything about their comms plans. A german group plans to have a submersible return to the surface and then broadcast everything back.
I would strongly prefer to have a transmitter on the surface (sending either back to Earth, or to an orbiter somewhere), and use acoustic signaling, just as you would do with a deep submersible here on Earth. Problems with the "go back to the hole" plan include
- a failure on the return trip means no data comes back at all
- a good fraction of the under-ice mission time would be spent going back to the hole, or making a new one, rather than further exploration.
- if the submersible gets into trouble, or has to make a decision as to what would be best to sample/explore/go to next, Earth cannot help.
Of course, we know nothing of the acoustic noise level in Europa, so this might require a precursor seismology mission just make sure it would work.
That's not what NASA Planetary Protection thinks and, at least for US space probes, that's what counts.
I wonder what they are doing to guard against contamination from Earth bugs. IIRC, the Mars rovers showed up as dirty.
Lots. Europa is in the elite Category III / IV of planetary protection, along with Mars and Enceladus,
The Europa probe is likely to get a little less scrubbing, significantly less than an Europan orbiter, but more than the Juno spacecraft, as, although it will be in a Jovian orbit going near Europa, it can be placed in a "safe" orbit away from Europa at the end of the mission. But, Europa orbiters and landers will get the full treatment.
By the way, even if Mars landers had some bugs, they were sterilized, which undoubtedly greatly reduced the total bio-loading, Just because you didn't wash your hands once before dinner doesn't mean you should stop washing them altogether subsequently.
Actually, the first mission dedicated to Europa will be the Europa clipper, focused on Europa, but not in Europa orbit. The radiation near Europa is so intense (even for machines) that dipping in and out of the field in an inclined Jovian orbit will save about a billion dollars over going into a Europan orbit.
I expect better from someone in his position.
Yeah, but when you lead with a press conference, and then have to back-pedal, you are going to take a hit, and they have.
This is not a treaty, it is an "agreement," which would rely on "Fast Track Authority" to get through Congress, as a simple bill requiring a 50% majority, non-filibusterable and not subject to amendment. The FTA rules are structured to not allow any meaningful debate in Congress.
As it happens, FTA has expired, and a simple way to kill this BS would be to kill the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities Act of 2014 now in Congress to revive it.
You haven't been paying attention much, have you?
It is not particularly surprising, but it is, however, news. That unfortunately we have come to expect sleazy results from these "Trade Agreements" (which are not really about trade, and should properly be Treaties) does not mean that we can ignore yet another example of sleaze.
This would not be a treaty - it should be, but it wouldn't. It would be an Act, nominally sent through Congress by Fast Track Authority (which has thankfully expired, although a bill to renew it is now in Congress). The entire point of FTA is to eliminate any meaningful debate in Congress.
Let's be blunt - these "agreements" invariably represent efforts by corporate interests to obtain in secret what they could never get through Congress or by the ballot box in public. They are bad for the world, bad for the United States, and bad for our constitutional system of governance
The Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities Act of 2014 is now in Congress to revive the expired "Fast Track Authority," and should be opposed by anyone against TPP, TISA, etc. I was originally supportive of Fast Track, but I think it has been badly abused and is dangerous to the constitutional separation of powers. It has expired; like Frankenstein's monster, it would be best if were not resurrected.
Oh, I don't think that the Alcubierre warp drive is actually physically possible, and I sure don't think Harold White's experiments are going to show otherwise (although I would be delighted to be wrong). But I think Alcubierre's solution is a valid solution of General Relativity, and it shows that strong-field fluctuations in space-time can, at least in principle, go faster than light.
The speed of light is the ultimate speed limit relative to the underlying spacetime. If spacetime itself expands or contracts, that speed limit may not apply. That is, in fact, also the basis of the Alcubierre warp drive.
If anyone had any doubt that Lubos Motl has no credibility at all, that post proves it IMHO.
Actually, they did some research, had a press conference, other researchers pointed out potential problems with the conclusions, and they put some weasel words in the actual published paper. It doesn't matter; the way they went about this, and the weakness of their dust calibration, means that no one will really believe the cosmological interpretation of their results* until more data comes along. That may not take long, according to Nature News :
* That doesn't mean that lots of theorists won't publish papers showing, or purporting to show, or speculating, that this or that implication follows assuming the BICEP2 results are right. That's OK, that's what theorists do. It's mostly harmless, and occasionally leads to something useful even if the original results were wrong.
There is a lot of evidence for the universe being in an early, condensed, hot state - as you say, the CMB is a one of them, as is the success of Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). If that is what is meant by the "Big Bang," then it is indeed well established. If, however, what is meant is there was some sort of singularity from which everything exploded than that, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, seems to be receding into the distance or fading away.
This can be most clearly expressed by asking, how old is the universe? You will hear things like, the CMB represents conditions 300,000 years after the big bang, BBN occurred in the first 3 minutes, etc., but what is really meant is, the Hubble time at such-and-such an event was 300,000 years, 3 minutes, etc. In the theory of eternal inflation (basically, the idea that inflation is the natural state of the larger universe, and our piece of that universe was just an area that happened to convert to a "true" vacuum state), inflation may have been going on a long time, or even an infinite time, so the Hubble time is just the time since the end of inflation; the actual age of anything (i.e., the time since the "Big Bang") is in such theories completely undetermined.
They are all just theories. It's just that some are rather better confirmed than others.
I still find it hard to believe that they would do a major press conference on results that depended (fairly crucially) on a calibration screen-scraped from a presentation from another scientific group. I would love to know the true back-story here - was knowledge of this dependency on screen-scraped data widespread within the BICEP2 group, or was this just some grad student who was being expedient? Didn't anyone try and contact the Planck group and ask for their best dust estimates?
While it is quite possible that such a technical flaw might have made it through the usual paper peer review process without being caught, that isn't the route they chose to take, which just makes it more embarrassing.
No, it wasn't.
It is surprisingly hard to anonymize data, and I would not trust anyone who claims to do so. This is just the metadata problem all over again.
To be useful at all, this data has to be tied to geography and time somehow, and also last for at least a while. So, suppose I anonymize thermostat data to zip code, so it might provide information like, in zip code X house Y with a 2 zone system the owners went on vacation during the spring break for the X county public school system, etc. It doesn't take too much of this to identify a specific house or family, especially if (as Google may well have) you have other information, such as knowledge that a power spike similar to (say) an Apple Mac tower system in area X being turned on occurs at the same time as IP address Z (also in area X) starts using the Internet, or that family A bought plane tickets for a flight that left 2.5 hours after the house thermostat was put into vacation mode.
So, you can do what you want, but I would ignore assurances of anonymization.
You can, at least at times, trust people, especially ones you know well. A person's word may mean something.
You can, however, never trust companies unless you have a contractual relation with them (and, at times, not even then). A company's word is meaningless. Times change, people change, and what was impossible can become all too easy. The day will come, for example, when Mr Rogers is no longer at Dropcam / Nest / Google, and his successor may feel differently (or may be ordered to feel differently) about this.
This is without mentioning the elastic definitions of "permission" used at times on the Internet.