Even though I lived in San Diego at the time, I never got to see that. That would have been cool to see. I remembered it mainly from modeling traffic flow for human and computer drivers in a physics class and using the data from the San Diego tests to verify the models. Without having to deal with human reflexes, competition and "selfish" lane changing, you can pack a lot more traffic flux on the freeway. I also remember the debate over whether that not-insignificant amount of money may be better spent on buses and trains.
This isn't all that hard. It's more of a social problem than a technological one. Correcting for erratic and imperfect human drivers is the big problem.
I think it was I-15 in San Diego that had a lane used as test for autonomous cars in the 1990s. It required a regular spacing of markers for the cars to follow and that that all the cars contain transponders. If that was doable on a freeway ~10 years ago, what's proposed here can be done. It may just mean that you're no longer allowed to drive your own car.
There are certain types of people who are turned off by the cut throat nature of science careers. Make things less cut throat and you've solved the problem. Too bad that costs money. We're losing out on their input.
Linking to a Debra Rolison search isn't nearly enough. She's an advocate and a very good scientist, but she doesn't actually study gender disparity. Post the data. The studies I've heard about have been discredited due to things like "the data getting lost" and adjectives like "possible" turning into "actual" due to some mistake. The data is far less than "copious" that girls are being singled out and discouraged from being physicists.
I would love to have more women working with me (I'm also a physicist). How are quotas going to do that, when we can't recruit women into advanced physics degrees when outreach in middle school, extra funding and administrative support hasn't done it? Really, what do we do? Force them? Hire a biologist and call her a physicist? Your suggestion elsewhere of forced retirements is good, if cold and heartless. Maybe we could go further and just fire every other male professor? Would that really change the culture, or just piss people off and encourage the awful idea that women need some help if they're to compete with men in physics.
The people who know what they're talking about know that the culture of physics has to change. It's not just something easy like "stop being mean to girls."
The schooling is long, you don't get paid well at all, and you have to compete for any scraps of money that may be available. The fight for funding is such that there is enormous pressure to get rid of any student/postdoc/junior faculty who may not make it. Why would anyone want to do this? We can't get enough qualified people from the US to fill open positions. So it's useful for potential immigrants. The rest of us would do it for free if we had to.
As a male, I've had professors tell me I didn't belong in physics, didn't belong in grad school and that I was expected to work 13 out of every 14 days (but only get paid for 20 hours a week). I had one professor tell me I was going to fail his class, and then he gave me an A when I didn't wilt. Most of my classmates didn't fare so well and quit under the pressure. Of the 20 people who started with me in my degree program, 4 have or will get a PhD from the program (true to the statistics, the survivors are 25% women). That's the kind of thing that needs to stop, but it shouldn't stop just for women. You've been through this! Did you feel bad for only the women who were sent crying from the department offices?
We need what biology had a decade ago to get to equality: a good reason to do this. Biology did that by doubling the available funding over the course of 10 years. If departments aren't breaking the budget to keep one more student, there will be less pressure to force out anyone who doesn't desperately want to do physics. That means less abuse, less intense competition and a culture which may not be toxic to women. (It also means a crisis when the funding stops going up, which you see in biology today, but which hasn't hurt gender equality.) Double the funding and put in the quotas, but my guess is you wouldn't need the quotas.
There are a series of "classic" physics textbooks published by Dover. They're not hardcovers with glossy paper and amazing color diagrams, but they are about $5-$10. They're generally reproductions of text books which went out of print a few decades ago. Given that most core undergraduate physic curricula stop at ~1930, that's not too bad.
A better suggestion may be to ask the professors at your university, that's what they're there for. If you walk in to someone's office, they may just hand you the perfect book right there.
All good points, and any material which has not previously been made into a nanoparticle needs to be tested in it's new form.
The prefix "nano" was not used to describe nano scale particles until recently. Should we be retesting the effects of ash on the human body because we recently discovered that it contains nanoparticles? Maybe our time would be better spent on studying Co(60), but the policy makers are being sent something that says otherwise.
There are dangerous materials out there and claiming that all nanoparticles are dangerous doesn't get us closer to identifying them.
I did say that we should test new materials. That's absolutely necessary, and I was very clear about that.
If we change "house cat" to "shark cat", does that make cats more dangerous? That's what's going on with titanium dioxide and other materials which are being re-branded as modern by adding "nano" to the front of their names without any change to their physical properties. Some of the guys who work with those materials want more research funds, so they scare the pants off of people on one side and promise unreasonable technological advances on the other to rip off the government. It's totally silly, and it's damaging to the field as the rest of us have trouble articulating what is and is not dangerous amid all the noise. Simply stating that it's all dangerous (which is what these Canadians did) is not true.
Let's see some real research on the properties of actual new materials, without using the buzzwords as a crutch.
Well, asbestos isn't a nanomaterial, and it's plenty dangerous. A material, simply because it has "nano" in its name is not inherently dangerous and a material without nano is not necessarily safe.
Why is it someone on Slashdot can understand this, but no one on this Canadian blue ribbon panel was able to make that connection?
"Nano" is a new prefix, which is commonly applied to old materials. There's nothing inherently evil about small particles, they do occur in nature. If a new material comes along using nanotech, it should be subject to testing just like any other new material. If an old material (like titanium dioxide) has been tested for decades, and now gets the "nano" label, we need to understand that marketing spin does not change the chemical or physical properties of a material.
If you want to do academic style research, there are many languages that could be useful.
Any language spoken by a large number of technical people is always good, as is a language spoken by prospective graduate students. For example, learning Mandarin Chinese would be very helpful for an academic in the US for recruiting Chinese students. In the next 20 years, where are US companies and universities going to be importing foreign talent? Figure that out and learn that language.
You could learn Spanish. If you plan on being grant supported, it's very useful to recruit "diverse" workers and students. That usually means women, African-Americans and Latinos. Latin America may also be the answer to the question above.
I would have found Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, Russian or Italian useful in specific circumstances (dealing with people I've worked with or at conferences I've been to). Of course, my university allowed me to take three years of music instead of language, and that's been useful too.
Go to grad school. Get a degree in biology, psychology, business... something. Don't pick a field you don't like again. At least you realize this now. It would have been ideal to figure out what you wanted to do with yourself a few years earlier.
Platinum was originally used because it was thought to be totally unreactive in air. That turns out not to be the case over several decades.
Silicon will react with air almost instantly. There's already a layer of oxygen and water contamination on those things, which will vary with temperature, humidity and time. I remember reading somewhere that they had accounted for this, but I don't remember if it just turns out to be a fudge factor, below the current measurement error or what. It seems to me that relating mass to some easily defined electromagnetic force would be better in the long run.
Have we not been extending lifespans for decades now? I thought science was already pretty firmly on board with combating the effects (and causes) of aging. One of my quantum mechanics professors was part of a study on aging and caloric restriction in humans several years ago. I think it's the people outside of science (like the people who run the funding agencies) who need to go to this conference.
Because of the debacle last year, the science agencies have lots of IOUs out there.
At my University, in physics and chemistry, we're owed at least $20 million (that's two departments at one school). Until the NSF decides that they either can or can't pay us, we can't look elsewhere in the government for money. So we work on those projects for free, look for private funding, or do something else.
The original source for this particular experiment is this Science article. The submission was terrible. Press releases should be banned from any site which claims to have intelligent discussion.
An indirect exciton (what these guys are using) is made using three layers. In one layer, you have extra electrons (negative charges). In another layer, you have a lack of electrons (positive charges). In between those two is an insulating layer. If you tune the charge densities and some other parameters (temperature, for example), you can get the positive and negative charges in the two charged layers to align into pairs. Each pair is an exciton.
A normal exciton is a pair like this without the insulator between them. As you might imagine, they don't last very long and pretty much instantly combine. When an exciton combines, it gives off light at a very particular wavelength. Conversely, when light at that particular wavelength is adsorbed by the material, it creates an exciton.
You could imagine creating an exciton with light, making it an indirect exciton (so that it's stable), doing something with it, and then making it a normal exciton again and waiting the picosecond or so it takes for it to collapse and emit light. That's basically what they've done... but it's much harder than I've made it sound.
As a scientist working on disruptive science, I don't want someone else telling me what to do, or what I'll be able to do. If you know the results of your research before you do it, it's not research. If they want Einsteins, they have to allow open ended physical science research. Einstein was not an engineer.
Oh, and what would Kuhn say about applying scientific cultural ideas from more than a generation ago? The old guard *is* dead, Kuhn was one of them.
Given that Chuck Connell is not really asking us to do his research for him, but is actually conducting a survey of what people think good programming principles are, I wonder if this section of his research isn't really sociological? If so, did he get IRB approval for human research?
(Sorry, this is just a really bad university bureaucracy joke, IRBs make me glad I'm not a social scientist.)
Sometimes a long road to publication is a good thing (although, if a review is taking two years, you need to pull the plug on that submission and corner the editor at a conference to give him an ear-full).
A friend of mine had a paper go through a long review with the same result of "hasn't that already been done?" In the end, he stuck with the paper, and did a few more experiments. The resulting paper was far better than it would have been without the long, negative review. The few experiments he added were nowhere near being their own paper, so in the end, he counts it as a win.
On the other side of it, I've had very fast review processes which came back totally crazy, with reviewers sending back comments which showed a complete lack of attention or knowledge. Without good reviewers, the whole academic journal process is pointless and we may as well just post our stuff on blogs.
Raping the lifeless rocks and iceballs floating around the solar system serves two purposes: 1) We're raping the earth a little less (the only place we can live right now without serious technological help) 2) We get better at living off the earth and moving on to bigger, better things
As a number of other physicists have pointed out here, anti-matter has mass and falls like everything else that has mass.
If it does not, then far more is wrong in physics than some minor law, or backwater part of relativity. We have been able to very successfully predict the existence and many properties of anti-matter. If gravity does not act on anti-matter normally, it would mean some fundamental understanding quantum mechanics is wrong, and we may not have an explanation for why anti-matter even exists.
A very high payoff if they get an unexpected result, but very, very unlikely. If I were doing this experiment, I would doubt my own abilities first if I didn't get the result everyone else expected. A hard thing to put yourself up against.
As a physicist, I agree that programming is absolutely necessary to an undergraduate degree. Most of the institutions I've been at have included programming with the mathematical methods courses (usually using Mathematica, and making "real" programs, not just one line math). This has been by far the most effective tool for getting the "masses" of physics students to learn some programming. I have used this mathematica toolset and really liked it.
I have also had programming (not math methods) classes in Java and IDL from a physics department. While I enjoyed them, most of the students who did not have prior programming experience found those classes difficult and uninteresting. Most physics students aren't interested in learning the details of why or how a programming language works, simply what they can do with it. The students who had taken a math methods/programming course found "regular" programming courses much more useful.
I've also had (and taught) classes with LabView. While theorists find LabView totally useless, it is by far the most common programming tool used in experimental labs. You can learn structure and flow with labview, but it's not a very useful learning "language". However, it can (and should!) be taught in advanced lab classes to make things like temperature controllers, timed electronic measurements, instrument control etc. The people who say experimentalists don't need to program are dead wrong. If you can't rig up a simple temperature controller, basic e-beam writing system or digital oscilloscope in software, you're going to be wasting money on hardware you didn't need to buy.
I've had to teach lab classes where the students were forced to present the data in Excel, and that was bad enough. Good luck finding a graduate student in a physics department who's willing to teach VBA and Excel well enough to do anything useful. Use of Excel as a programming platform is not as common as your peers think. I would try very hard to get them to move to something like Origin or Igor, which are much more powerful, produce better graphs and actually ubiquitous.
This whole thing exposes economic and governing weaknesses in the country that we haven't seen in living memory. We don't lose in the US, but now we're losing badly in physics. So badly that Congress is willing to give up to save money. Essentially, the budget cuts directed the lab not to start any new experiments, and finish up the old experiments with reduced staff. These cuts do signal the end of Fermilab, there will be no point to operating it in a few years without an upgrade. The $5 million only cushions the fall.
While our budgets are getting cut, Europe and China are increasing science funding, building new facilities, and importing talent we've trained here. That our tax dollars were used to subsidize that training only compounds the injury. Maybe we don't want high energy physics here, but my understanding is that Congress does want it (the military certainly wants it), but can't afford it.
I'm embarrassed that my government is incompetent.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though I lived in San Diego at the time, I never got to see that. That would have been cool to see. I remembered it mainly from modeling traffic flow for human and computer drivers in a physics class and using the data from the San Diego tests to verify the models. Without having to deal with human reflexes, competition and "selfish" lane changing, you can pack a lot more traffic flux on the freeway. I also remember the debate over whether that not-insignificant amount of money may be better spent on buses and trains.
This isn't all that hard. It's more of a social problem than a technological one. Correcting for erratic and imperfect human drivers is the big problem.
I think it was I-15 in San Diego that had a lane used as test for autonomous cars in the 1990s. It required a regular spacing of markers for the cars to follow and that that all the cars contain transponders. If that was doable on a freeway ~10 years ago, what's proposed here can be done. It may just mean that you're no longer allowed to drive your own car.
"Interstrate" is a word Roland made up. By it he means: substrate and gate dielectric.
Excellent post.
There are certain types of people who are turned off by the cut throat nature of science careers. Make things less cut throat and you've solved the problem. Too bad that costs money. We're losing out on their input.
Linking to a Debra Rolison search isn't nearly enough. She's an advocate and a very good scientist, but she doesn't actually study gender disparity. Post the data. The studies I've heard about have been discredited due to things like "the data getting lost" and adjectives like "possible" turning into "actual" due to some mistake. The data is far less than "copious" that girls are being singled out and discouraged from being physicists.
I would love to have more women working with me (I'm also a physicist). How are quotas going to do that, when we can't recruit women into advanced physics degrees when outreach in middle school, extra funding and administrative support hasn't done it? Really, what do we do? Force them? Hire a biologist and call her a physicist? Your suggestion elsewhere of forced retirements is good, if cold and heartless. Maybe we could go further and just fire every other male professor? Would that really change the culture, or just piss people off and encourage the awful idea that women need some help if they're to compete with men in physics.
The people who know what they're talking about know that the culture of physics has to change. It's not just something easy like "stop being mean to girls."
The schooling is long, you don't get paid well at all, and you have to compete for any scraps of money that may be available. The fight for funding is such that there is enormous pressure to get rid of any student/postdoc/junior faculty who may not make it. Why would anyone want to do this? We can't get enough qualified people from the US to fill open positions. So it's useful for potential immigrants. The rest of us would do it for free if we had to.
As a male, I've had professors tell me I didn't belong in physics, didn't belong in grad school and that I was expected to work 13 out of every 14 days (but only get paid for 20 hours a week). I had one professor tell me I was going to fail his class, and then he gave me an A when I didn't wilt. Most of my classmates didn't fare so well and quit under the pressure. Of the 20 people who started with me in my degree program, 4 have or will get a PhD from the program (true to the statistics, the survivors are 25% women). That's the kind of thing that needs to stop, but it shouldn't stop just for women. You've been through this! Did you feel bad for only the women who were sent crying from the department offices?
We need what biology had a decade ago to get to equality: a good reason to do this. Biology did that by doubling the available funding over the course of 10 years. If departments aren't breaking the budget to keep one more student, there will be less pressure to force out anyone who doesn't desperately want to do physics. That means less abuse, less intense competition and a culture which may not be toxic to women. (It also means a crisis when the funding stops going up, which you see in biology today, but which hasn't hurt gender equality.) Double the funding and put in the quotas, but my guess is you wouldn't need the quotas.
There are a series of "classic" physics textbooks published by Dover. They're not hardcovers with glossy paper and amazing color diagrams, but they are about $5-$10. They're generally reproductions of text books which went out of print a few decades ago. Given that most core undergraduate physic curricula stop at ~1930, that's not too bad.
A better suggestion may be to ask the professors at your university, that's what they're there for. If you walk in to someone's office, they may just hand you the perfect book right there.
All good points, and any material which has not previously been made into a nanoparticle needs to be tested in it's new form.
The prefix "nano" was not used to describe nano scale particles until recently. Should we be retesting the effects of ash on the human body because we recently discovered that it contains nanoparticles? Maybe our time would be better spent on studying Co(60), but the policy makers are being sent something that says otherwise.
There are dangerous materials out there and claiming that all nanoparticles are dangerous doesn't get us closer to identifying them.
I did say that we should test new materials. That's absolutely necessary, and I was very clear about that.
If we change "house cat" to "shark cat", does that make cats more dangerous? That's what's going on with titanium dioxide and other materials which are being re-branded as modern by adding "nano" to the front of their names without any change to their physical properties. Some of the guys who work with those materials want more research funds, so they scare the pants off of people on one side and promise unreasonable technological advances on the other to rip off the government. It's totally silly, and it's damaging to the field as the rest of us have trouble articulating what is and is not dangerous amid all the noise. Simply stating that it's all dangerous (which is what these Canadians did) is not true.
Let's see some real research on the properties of actual new materials, without using the buzzwords as a crutch.
Well, asbestos isn't a nanomaterial, and it's plenty dangerous. A material, simply because it has "nano" in its name is not inherently dangerous and a material without nano is not necessarily safe.
Why is it someone on Slashdot can understand this, but no one on this Canadian blue ribbon panel was able to make that connection?
"Nano" is a new prefix, which is commonly applied to old materials. There's nothing inherently evil about small particles, they do occur in nature. If a new material comes along using nanotech, it should be subject to testing just like any other new material. If an old material (like titanium dioxide) has been tested for decades, and now gets the "nano" label, we need to understand that marketing spin does not change the chemical or physical properties of a material.
Yeah, it's a bad analogy.
The opposite would be better:
Where as previously, you needed a Ferrari to do single photon measurements, now a Fiat will do just as well.
If you want to do academic style research, there are many languages that could be useful.
Any language spoken by a large number of technical people is always good, as is a language spoken by prospective graduate students. For example, learning Mandarin Chinese would be very helpful for an academic in the US for recruiting Chinese students. In the next 20 years, where are US companies and universities going to be importing foreign talent? Figure that out and learn that language.
You could learn Spanish. If you plan on being grant supported, it's very useful to recruit "diverse" workers and students. That usually means women, African-Americans and Latinos. Latin America may also be the answer to the question above.
I would have found Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, Russian or Italian useful in specific circumstances (dealing with people I've worked with or at conferences I've been to). Of course, my university allowed me to take three years of music instead of language, and that's been useful too.
Go to grad school. Get a degree in biology, psychology, business... something. Don't pick a field you don't like again. At least you realize this now. It would have been ideal to figure out what you wanted to do with yourself a few years earlier.
Platinum was originally used because it was thought to be totally unreactive in air. That turns out not to be the case over several decades.
Silicon will react with air almost instantly. There's already a layer of oxygen and water contamination on those things, which will vary with temperature, humidity and time. I remember reading somewhere that they had accounted for this, but I don't remember if it just turns out to be a fudge factor, below the current measurement error or what. It seems to me that relating mass to some easily defined electromagnetic force would be better in the long run.
Have we not been extending lifespans for decades now? I thought science was already pretty firmly on board with combating the effects (and causes) of aging. One of my quantum mechanics professors was part of a study on aging and caloric restriction in humans several years ago. I think it's the people outside of science (like the people who run the funding agencies) who need to go to this conference.
Because of the debacle last year, the science agencies have lots of IOUs out there.
At my University, in physics and chemistry, we're owed at least $20 million (that's two departments at one school). Until the NSF decides that they either can or can't pay us, we can't look elsewhere in the government for money. So we work on those projects for free, look for private funding, or do something else.
Ha ha!
No, just frustrated with science journalism in general.
The original source for this particular experiment is this Science article. The submission was terrible. Press releases should be banned from any site which claims to have intelligent discussion.
An indirect exciton (what these guys are using) is made using three layers. In one layer, you have extra electrons (negative charges). In another layer, you have a lack of electrons (positive charges). In between those two is an insulating layer. If you tune the charge densities and some other parameters (temperature, for example), you can get the positive and negative charges in the two charged layers to align into pairs. Each pair is an exciton.
A normal exciton is a pair like this without the insulator between them. As you might imagine, they don't last very long and pretty much instantly combine. When an exciton combines, it gives off light at a very particular wavelength. Conversely, when light at that particular wavelength is adsorbed by the material, it creates an exciton.
You could imagine creating an exciton with light, making it an indirect exciton (so that it's stable), doing something with it, and then making it a normal exciton again and waiting the picosecond or so it takes for it to collapse and emit light. That's basically what they've done... but it's much harder than I've made it sound.
I was going to suggest the opposite.
As a scientist working on disruptive science, I don't want someone else telling me what to do, or what I'll be able to do. If you know the results of your research before you do it, it's not research. If they want Einsteins, they have to allow open ended physical science research. Einstein was not an engineer.
Oh, and what would Kuhn say about applying scientific cultural ideas from more than a generation ago? The old guard *is* dead, Kuhn was one of them.
Given that Chuck Connell is not really asking us to do his research for him, but is actually conducting a survey of what people think good programming principles are, I wonder if this section of his research isn't really sociological? If so, did he get IRB approval for human research?
(Sorry, this is just a really bad university bureaucracy joke, IRBs make me glad I'm not a social scientist.)
Sometimes a long road to publication is a good thing (although, if a review is taking two years, you need to pull the plug on that submission and corner the editor at a conference to give him an ear-full).
A friend of mine had a paper go through a long review with the same result of "hasn't that already been done?" In the end, he stuck with the paper, and did a few more experiments. The resulting paper was far better than it would have been without the long, negative review. The few experiments he added were nowhere near being their own paper, so in the end, he counts it as a win.
On the other side of it, I've had very fast review processes which came back totally crazy, with reviewers sending back comments which showed a complete lack of attention or knowledge. Without good reviewers, the whole academic journal process is pointless and we may as well just post our stuff on blogs.
Hear hear!
Raping the lifeless rocks and iceballs floating around the solar system serves two purposes:
1) We're raping the earth a little less (the only place we can live right now without serious technological help)
2) We get better at living off the earth and moving on to bigger, better things
As a number of other physicists have pointed out here, anti-matter has mass and falls like everything else that has mass.
If it does not, then far more is wrong in physics than some minor law, or backwater part of relativity. We have been able to very successfully predict the existence and many properties of anti-matter. If gravity does not act on anti-matter normally, it would mean some fundamental understanding quantum mechanics is wrong, and we may not have an explanation for why anti-matter even exists.
A very high payoff if they get an unexpected result, but very, very unlikely. If I were doing this experiment, I would doubt my own abilities first if I didn't get the result everyone else expected. A hard thing to put yourself up against.
I have also had programming (not math methods) classes in Java and IDL from a physics department. While I enjoyed them, most of the students who did not have prior programming experience found those classes difficult and uninteresting. Most physics students aren't interested in learning the details of why or how a programming language works, simply what they can do with it. The students who had taken a math methods/programming course found "regular" programming courses much more useful.
I've also had (and taught) classes with LabView. While theorists find LabView totally useless, it is by far the most common programming tool used in experimental labs. You can learn structure and flow with labview, but it's not a very useful learning "language". However, it can (and should!) be taught in advanced lab classes to make things like temperature controllers, timed electronic measurements, instrument control etc. The people who say experimentalists don't need to program are dead wrong. If you can't rig up a simple temperature controller, basic e-beam writing system or digital oscilloscope in software, you're going to be wasting money on hardware you didn't need to buy.
I've had to teach lab classes where the students were forced to present the data in Excel, and that was bad enough. Good luck finding a graduate student in a physics department who's willing to teach VBA and Excel well enough to do anything useful. Use of Excel as a programming platform is not as common as your peers think. I would try very hard to get them to move to something like Origin or Igor, which are much more powerful, produce better graphs and actually ubiquitous.
This whole thing exposes economic and governing weaknesses in the country that we haven't seen in living memory. We don't lose in the US, but now we're losing badly in physics. So badly that Congress is willing to give up to save money. Essentially, the budget cuts directed the lab not to start any new experiments, and finish up the old experiments with reduced staff. These cuts do signal the end of Fermilab, there will be no point to operating it in a few years without an upgrade. The $5 million only cushions the fall.
While our budgets are getting cut, Europe and China are increasing science funding, building new facilities, and importing talent we've trained here. That our tax dollars were used to subsidize that training only compounds the injury. Maybe we don't want high energy physics here, but my understanding is that Congress does want it (the military certainly wants it), but can't afford it.
I'm embarrassed that my government is incompetent.