So how come a Google search for this comes up with zero technical/industry/science news sites?
That said, I fully believe that an end on view of a stack of nanotubes should be extremely dark.
I'd vote for a viable alternative in a heartbeat. Not only is she somehow beholden to the state security apparatus, she also does whatever Big Content wants. She's definitely in with, if not one of, the oligarchs.
Indeed, reading this one wonders how long before something bad happens to those who at least apparently have run off with the money. Part of the usual overhead for playing in a black market, after all.
I'm going to assume some things that are pretty well accepted by the physics community. Of course, one can always find people with opposing viewpoints.
I attended a talk on the firewall issue by Leonard Susskind last week, and he started with some interesting comments on the whole "what do theoretical physicists do?" question.
He gave four cases:
"Discovery" where someone makes an observation and then the theorists have to figure it out. There are plenty of these. Atomic spectra comes to mind.
The theorists come up with something, tell the experimentalists about it, and they go off and their observations either do or don't support the theory. A lot of this happens in particle physics.
A set of theories suggest an underlying common theory, and the theorist seeks a resolution using mathematical elegance as a guide. Susskind's example was Dirac putting together special relativity and quantum mechanics to come up with the relativistic wave equation. He wasn't even specifically talking about electrons, but when applied to electrons, antimatter popped out.
A set of theories present a glaring conceptual conflict, and concerned theorists seek to resolve the situation. Susskind's example of this was Boltzmann taking on the conflict between Newtonian mechanics with its time-reversibility, and thermodynamics, which is irreversible.
The conflict with firewalls is that quantum entanglement (which has held up very well so far) shouldn't cause the equivalence principal to be violated (this, too, has done very well experimentally). The equivalence principal states that an accelerated observer, absent other information, can't tell if their in a rocket or standing on a surface in a gravitational field. Implied by this is the "no drama" notion that says that nothing interesting should happen when one falls through an event horizon, which itself is a smooth bit of space-time. (I'm assuming here, for the sake of a macroscopic observer, that it's a big enough black hole that tides don't come into play until well towards the central singularity and that the surroundings aren't full of super heated, radiating matter.) The firewall hypothesis arises as a possible solution to what happens (very) late in the evolution of a black hole when most of the matter still inside the horizon is entangled with matter that's been emitted as Hawking radiation. The equivalence principal says that a firewall, being very dramatic, shouldn't happen. This firewall isn't the same as the very, very late stage of a black hole when the Hawking radiation is so intense that nothing is likely to get past and make its way into the hole. Maldacena and Susskind seek to resolve this and have come up with the notion that EPR bridges (entanglement) and wormholes (general relativity) are the same thing. (Now before everyone gets going about wormholes, these aren't expected to be anything more than a sort of identity mapping between entangled particles.) I don't claim to follow everything about how the initial entanglement described in the paper actually comes about, but the overall argument has a feeling of making sense, and a room full of gray haired physicists didn't tear it down. Susskind also pointed out that if black hole horizons become messy, so do other kinds of horizon such as cosmological ones, adding further inelegant complications for the theorists.
Something that makes this new paper fit in with all previous "scientific" papers I've seen on cold fusion:
- No error analysis. Just straight numbers and tidy graphs with no error bars. The couple of uncertainty ranges added to make it look better were pulled out of their hat.
- Pictures of the experimental apparatus, but no diagrams of what's actually claimed to be going on.
Also noteworthy:
- Most of the authors have never been seen before on arxiv.
- The one who has posted a lot to arxiv (Essen) has mostly produced articles relating to fractured ceramic vessels.
It would be nice if they'd also do something about the remote sensing infrastructure to get more data to these nice new supercomputers. My current understanding is that the Feds are getting increasingly weak in that department.
A friend of my in the 70's who was a math grad student at the time was playing with taking the absolute value of gamma = 1 / sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) to avoid the imaginary aspect of the term. Only at light speed was a massive particle forbidden. The square of the momentum remains real. Other results were the same: Things become less energetic the farther you get from light speed in either direction. At sqrt(2) times c, your relativistic mass and time are the same as at rest and your subjective trip time matches that of distant observers. Finally, at infinite speed you have zero mass and your subjective trip time is the same as the distance traveled (times c, of course).
I seriously doubt my friend was the first person to come up with this.
What's different with the new publication, AFAICT, is that these guys have an eager university press office. I love it when the press release folks feel obliged to mention that the work appears in a "prestigious" journal.
I've seen many Slashdot posts that are copy/pastes of press releases, so what's new. I follow eurekalert.org, and have been really appalled at times at the low quality of the reporting.
I'm curious what's going on such that the top is heavier than the Higgs rather than the other way around. All I've been able to find is people asking why the top was found first. *That* I understand--the Higgs signal is much much smaller. I remember something from long ago about the top's mass "leaking," if you will, to the the lighter particles, but that doesn't mesh with how I understand the Higgs mechanism. Anyway, I would expect the Higgs particle manifestation to be the most massive of those that participate in the Higgs field.
John Mauchly, who knew a thing or two on the subject, made the same observation in a conversation that touched on the issue. It wasn't so much that Babbage was pushing the day's technology too far, he just never froze his design.
I, too, find $9 million to be pretty unimpressive given the supposed potential in this kind of crime. It sounds to me like the system worked pretty well.
As for the first point, we're *almost* able to detect life on extrasolar planets. All we need are spectra that show a lot of Oxygen or other gasses that don't appear in quantity without something like life to maintain them in quantities that are out of equilibrium with respect to geological processes.
I totally agree with the SETI signals point. The only thing we'd be able to detect would be a "We're Here!" signal. Non-directional broadcasts are just way too expensive. It's also likely that electromagnetic communications would use some sort of spread spectrum technique to avoid difficulty with all the random absorbing material in interstellar space.
And there's cause to hide. If the Galaxy actually is crowded.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy
So how come a Google search for this comes up with zero technical/industry/science news sites?
That said, I fully believe that an end on view of a stack of nanotubes should be extremely dark.
Copper & magnetic bracelets and a whole bunch of other snake oil that motivated the formation of the FDA in the first place are rampant.
I'd vote for a viable alternative in a heartbeat. Not only is she somehow beholden to the state security apparatus, she also does whatever Big Content wants. She's definitely in with, if not one of, the oligarchs.
Indeed, reading this one wonders how long before something bad happens to those who at least apparently have run off with the money. Part of the usual overhead for playing in a black market, after all.
or, "with a computer."
The angry reply will be in Esperanto.
If the final price comes anywhere near as low as $15 billion (adjusted for inflation) I'll be very, very surprised.
I'm going to assume some things that are pretty well accepted by the physics community. Of course, one can always find people with opposing viewpoints.
I attended a talk on the firewall issue by Leonard Susskind last week, and he started with some interesting comments on the whole "what do theoretical physicists do?" question.
He gave four cases:
The conflict with firewalls is that quantum entanglement (which has held up very well so far) shouldn't cause the equivalence principal to be violated (this, too, has done very well experimentally). The equivalence principal states that an accelerated observer, absent other information, can't tell if their in a rocket or standing on a surface in a gravitational field. Implied by this is the "no drama" notion that says that nothing interesting should happen when one falls through an event horizon, which itself is a smooth bit of space-time. (I'm assuming here, for the sake of a macroscopic observer, that it's a big enough black hole that tides don't come into play until well towards the central singularity and that the surroundings aren't full of super heated, radiating matter.) The firewall hypothesis arises as a possible solution to what happens (very) late in the evolution of a black hole when most of the matter still inside the horizon is entangled with matter that's been emitted as Hawking radiation. The equivalence principal says that a firewall, being very dramatic, shouldn't happen. This firewall isn't the same as the very, very late stage of a black hole when the Hawking radiation is so intense that nothing is likely to get past and make its way into the hole. Maldacena and Susskind seek to resolve this and have come up with the notion that EPR bridges (entanglement) and wormholes (general relativity) are the same thing. (Now before everyone gets going about wormholes, these aren't expected to be anything more than a sort of identity mapping between entangled particles.) I don't claim to follow everything about how the initial entanglement described in the paper actually comes about, but the overall argument has a feeling of making sense, and a room full of gray haired physicists didn't tear it down. Susskind also pointed out that if black hole horizons become messy, so do other kinds of horizon such as cosmological ones, adding further inelegant complications for the theorists.
The
srsly, SCOTUS isn't the first place of long term reference to have this problem.
-- member of Project Xanadu
Something that makes this new paper fit in with all previous "scientific" papers I've seen on cold fusion:
- No error analysis. Just straight numbers and tidy graphs with no error bars. The couple of uncertainty ranges added to make it look better were pulled out of their hat.
- Pictures of the experimental apparatus, but no diagrams of what's actually claimed to be going on.
Also noteworthy:
- Most of the authors have never been seen before on arxiv.
- The one who has posted a lot to arxiv (Essen) has mostly produced articles relating to fractured ceramic vessels.
It looks like quantum teleportation meets delayed choice.
It would be nice if they'd also do something about the remote sensing infrastructure to get more data to these nice new supercomputers. My current understanding is that the Feds are getting increasingly weak in that department.
This will definitely give the bio-ethicists something to chew on.
A friend of my in the 70's who was a math grad student at the time was playing with taking the absolute value of gamma = 1 / sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) to avoid the imaginary aspect of the term. Only at light speed was a massive particle forbidden. The square of the momentum remains real. Other results were the same: Things become less energetic the farther you get from light speed in either direction. At sqrt(2) times c, your relativistic mass and time are the same as at rest and your subjective trip time matches that of distant observers. Finally, at infinite speed you have zero mass and your subjective trip time is the same as the distance traveled (times c, of course). I seriously doubt my friend was the first person to come up with this. What's different with the new publication, AFAICT, is that these guys have an eager university press office. I love it when the press release folks feel obliged to mention that the work appears in a "prestigious" journal.
I've seen many Slashdot posts that are copy/pastes of press releases, so what's new. I follow eurekalert.org, and have been really appalled at times at the low quality of the reporting.
I'm curious what's going on such that the top is heavier than the Higgs rather than the other way around. All I've been able to find is people asking why the top was found first. *That* I understand--the Higgs signal is much much smaller. I remember something from long ago about the top's mass "leaking," if you will, to the the lighter particles, but that doesn't mesh with how I understand the Higgs mechanism. Anyway, I would expect the Higgs particle manifestation to be the most massive of those that participate in the Higgs field.
Not so strange. Space.com is one of many more or less hermetically sealed news sites.
'nuff said.
Slashdotting + Ad click revenue => $$$
The actual "FA" is here, with images. Gigan, et al. say, "opaque materials."
John Mauchly, who knew a thing or two on the subject, made the same observation in a conversation that touched on the issue. It wasn't so much that Babbage was pushing the day's technology too far, he just never froze his design.
I, too, find $9 million to be pretty unimpressive given the supposed potential in this kind of crime. It sounds to me like the system worked pretty well.
I totally agree with the SETI signals point. The only thing we'd be able to detect would be a "We're Here!" signal. Non-directional broadcasts are just way too expensive. It's also likely that electromagnetic communications would use some sort of spread spectrum technique to avoid difficulty with all the random absorbing material in interstellar space.
And there's cause to hide. If the Galaxy actually is crowded.