The strangest one I ever saw was this: Help Me on Mt Lemmon in Arizona. I reported it as an error, but it's still there today. Seems like somebody was joking around in the map-making office one day.
Electrons are negatively charged. How do you inject a massive charge into this gas without messing up the models big time? You still need the heavy protons to balance the charges.
If the gas accounted for 10% of the total mass, how can getting rid of that component change the mass of the universe by 20%?
From reading the paper, Table 5 seems to be the most relevant. They model their data using different interpretations: uniform warm gas, filamentary warm gas and hot plasma. If the soft X-rays are being generated by inverse Compton scattering of cosmic microwave background off of the hot plasma's electrons, then you can work out the density of the plasma. They list 2.4×10^-3/cm^3, as opposed to the (presumably orthodox interpretation) warm gas model having 3.3×10^-3/cm^3 in the hot gas plus 1.3×10^-3/cm^3 in the warm gas, which is about a 50% difference.
So if this component was thought to contribute 10% to the overall cluster mass (as postulated in this guy's previous paper A massive warm baryonic halo in the Coma cluster), then this knocks that down to 5%. The paper doesn't even bother mention this, but instead focuses on the change to models of chemical abundances. Apparently, their new model pushes heavy abundances up to Solar levels; they had been lower using the old model.
As best I can tell, baryonic mass for the universe should be about 30%. The warm gas was thought to be 30% of that, or around 10% of universal mass. So knocking this down is really a problem (though garbled in the press release). Perhaps this lends support to a MaCHO component of galaxies?
Some of them apparently violate a theoretical limit on the energy of a particle that has traveled a long way across the universe... leading to the question of where exactly they come from.
This is a really interesting topic called the GZK cutoff. Basically, you expect that a particle with sufficiently high energy could scatter off of the microwave photons in the cosmic microwave background that permeate the entire universe, left over from the Big Bang billions of years ago. The particles have so much energy that when they hit the little photon, they pop off an entire pion (mass about a 15% of the proton). Since the universe is dense with such photons, you'd think these high-energy particles would just continuously pop off pions until their energies are below the GZK cutoff.
Such a project is totally useless. Ten seconds of google search (the website was already down) led to an error: under Hydrogen, there is listed the origin "Latin: hydrogenium". Hydrogen was derived from French "hydrogene". Although the construction "hydrogenium" does exist, it's a rare (possibly obsolete?) usage that was coined in English to emphasize in certain contexts the metal-like properties of hydrogen. And oops, Wiktionary could have told them that: Wiktionary on Hydrogenium
Aside from being a cool observation, I think the most important aspect of this story was that the astronomers failed to realize the potentially great acronym here. The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) is good, but would it not be better to be just the Great Observatories Deep Survey?
No sinful star-eating black hole can cloak itself in dusty bands to hide from the all-seeing eye of GODS!
Competing theories are GOOD. I'm not sure MOND is really a direct competitor to string theory, but the more ideas the better.
MoND is not a competitor for string theory. It was a competitor for the dark matter, until the discovery of this: Direct Detection of Dark Matter in Galaxy Collision. Now it's just another bad idea in the dustbin of science history.
The main competitor for string theory is called "Loop Quantum Gravity", which is easy enough to google for more information. It's also possible that ordinary "supergravity" might work, though most physicists are not too hopeful about that one.
So, if a black hole is "alone" with no significant matter nearby to attract and consume, it is invisible @ the x-ray part of the spectrum, yet it's gravitational pull affects other bodies not necessarily near. IANAA, but, isn't this case a good candidate for resolving the dark matter issue?
No. Although not much is known about dark matter, enough is known to rule out this possibility. For example, it is known from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis that not much of dark matter can be baryonic. That is, it can't be made up of ordinary protons and neutrons. Since the stellar precursors of the black holes would have been baryonic during the relevant part of the Big Bang, that rules out stellar black holes as candidates for the bulk of dark matter.
In addition, black holes would form a component of galaxies known as MaCHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects); that is, they are star-heavy dense objects that live in the outskirts of the galaxy, as opposed to in the main disk. When a MaCHO passes in front of a distant object, it causes gravitational lensing (called microlensing) which increases the brightness of the object for a short period. Surveys of the sky for microlensing events have ruled out densities of MaCHOs high enough to account for the bulk of dark matter.
For that matter (this part I'm making up myself), you wouldn't expect star-born black holes to actually live in the halo of the galaxy. Since most stars live in the disk, their remnants ought to be clustered around it as well. Since dark matter is known to be roughly spherically distributed in a halo, that doesn't match up.
No, that's also wrong. The analogy breaks down because balloons are necessarily closed; they have to hold air inside and be made of a finite amount of material. The universe need not be finite and it need not be closed. It could just as well be flat (imagine an infinite flat rubber sheet being pulled apart) or open (saddle-shaped is the usual analogy). But if you have trouble picturing that, don't worry about it; high-dimensional curved geometry is just a tricky subject to hold inside the human brain.
What we should not do is provide special loans and incentives for companies to choose nuclear power, or any other specific power generation technology. The government should step in to make the true costs of generation match the price as closely as possible, and then let the market determine what power generation method to use.
Typical the-market-fixes-everything nonsense. Since the various forms of power generation cause varying amounts of environmental and political damage, they can never be treated on a cost-equal basis. The government should tax forms of power generation that damage our communal interests, and they should subsidize those that do not. The market does not account for damage that one consumer causes to his neighbors or society; in fact, it tends to reward people who screw over the rest of us. Government is exactly the tool we need to prevent that sort of thing, and subsidies are exactly the tool they should use.
You're forgetting that there are a lot of particles in that beam. The beam dump of the LHC running at full capacity is 333 megajoules (see, for example, A New Concept In The Design Of The LHC Beam Dump. According to my calculations, that's enough to liquefy about 2 cubic feet of steel. Of course, the beam is highly penetrating, so it's not going to dump all of that energy in the same spot, but it's still not something you want to be standing in front of when it goes off. If you check the link, it discusses the actual carbon block they want to use as a beam dump reaching 2800 kelvin.
IAAP, and this point of view (that in standard quantum mechanics no information is transmitted superluminally) is entirely correct. This will just be one more shoddy example of science reporting in a very very long line. The only question here is who got their basic facts wrong?
The physicist in question really ought to know better. Did he lie to the reporters in order to get press for his experiment?
The newspaper ought to have done some basic fact-checking; reading Wikipedia would be enough to figure things out in this case. Did they lie to the public to make the story more interesting?
So let's do some digging. The physicist in question is a proponent of the "transactional interpretation" of quantum mechanics (not coincidentally invented by this same guy). In this interpretation, particles may send signals back in time that "handshake" with other particles in the past; however, they do so in such a way that ordinary causality is always correct. See, for example, Cramer's paper at http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/qm_nl.ht ml where he says:
Can quantum nonlocality be used for faster-than-light or backward-in-time communication? Perhaps, for example, a message could be telegraphed from one measurement site of the EPR experiment to the other through a judicious choice of which measurement was performed. The simple answer to this question is "No!"
So that seems to answer that question. However, he goes on to muddy the water by suggesting that quantum mechanics as verified by every experiment to date is actually very slightly wrong, that quantum theory is actually slightly nonlinear. In that case, the delicate conservation of our usual notion of causality will break down and superluminal signals become possible again. Virtually nobody believes this is the case, but I suppose that shouldn't stop us from checking just to be sure. After all, sometimes what nobody believes still turns out to be true.
The blame here (as so very often) must fall on the reporters. Let's examine some of their shoddy work:
The problem with quantum theory, put simply, is that it's really weird.
That's not a problem with quantum theory; it's a problem with what you think is weird.
One of the paradoxes of interest to Cramer is known as "entanglement." It's also known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, named for the three scientists who described its apparent absurdity as an argument against quantum theory.
Like the twin paradox, this is not a paradox at all. Quantum mechanics predicts something. EPR say, "Hey, that sounds weird and wrong." Experiment verifies quantum mechanics. Once again, the problem is with what is perceived as being "normal", not with quantum theory.
If one of the entangled photon's trajectory tilts up, the other one, no matter how distant, will tilt down to compensate.
This one is the core conceptual problem with the whole article. It should read:
If one of the entangled photon's trajectories is measured to be up, the other one, no matter how distant, if measured will be measured to be down.
That doesn't sound very weird at all, which is why reporters persist in getting it wrong. People like to think quantum mechanics is weirder than it is; it adds some kind of mystical aura to the whole thing. But the universe is plenty weird and interesting even when you get all your facts right. I hope eventually the popular writing on quantum theory will reflect that.
Way to make yourself look like a jackass by spouting off about something you don't understand. Time only appears to distant observers to stop at the event horizon, because there is a coordinate singularity at that point. Essentially, all the light that is being emitted from the body falling in gets hung up at that point for an arbitrarily long amount time. Over the rest of the age of the universe, that light (ever more redshifted) will trickle out from just above the horizon. The object itself will fall onto the singularity in a very short amount of time.
Well, I would imagine it has to be a bit more sophisticated than phototropism. I mean, it's easy to detect light, and the side of something that isn't in the light is in shadow. So there's a clear, strong directional signal.
With smell, on the other hand, you have to detect very minute gradients in a trace amount of chemical that's being dispersed in the air. When the front half of your plant is facing a tomato, it's really only seeing a tiny amount more tomato-smell than the back half due to the dispersion of the tomato-smell. Animals can resolve this problem just by moving their noses back and forth; you sample a bunch of locations and then move toward the smellier area. But a plant cannot so easily move about, so how they can detect the gradient is the real mystery.
As far as I know, the article is wrong on this point. The problem is not that Neptune and Pluto have similar orbits. (They actually don't. Pluto has a more highly inclined, eccentric, wider orbit than any planet.) The problem is that Pluto has virtually the same orbit (highly inclined, eccentric, 3:2 resonance with Neptune) as a wide variety of similarly sized bodies known as plutinos. Hence, one could not consider Pluto to be a planet, but just the largest of the plutinos.
The problem with this definition is that sphericity is not an interesting property.
The classes of object in the Solar System (according to shared features) are:
Gas Giants
Rocky Planets
Asteroids
Comets
Kuiper Belt Objects
Oort Cloud Objects (only Sedna yet observed?)
And then there are some asteroid-like bodies that have wandered off (Apollos, Jupiter Trojans, etc) and some kuiper-like bodies (Centaurs) that have wandered off. Moons are a bit trickier to classify, but we'll ignore them since they're not Sun-orbiting.
Planet is most sensibly defined to be the combination of the first two classes. They share such features as: circular in-plane orbits, large mass, common formation. The most important feature of these two classes is that they are small; four bodies each. A definition of planet that included thousands of objects would not be useful.
Since Pluto and 2003-UB_313 fall into the KBO class (sharing such features as: eccentric orbits, resonance with Neptune, icy composition, medium mass), they are not planets. Pluto was originally mistaken for a Gas Giant-type body; it's not, so it should have been declassified as a planet. However, the KBO class was unknown at the time, and Americans liked the idea of an American-discovered planet, so it got inappropriately included. As for 2003-UB_313, it's hardly surprising that the discoverer thinks that it's a planet, but his opinion should clearly not be taken seriously.
Maybe, just maybe, it's not dark matter but some of our "laws" are simply wrong.
Simply??? What is simpler?
1) The laws of general relativity are valid universally, but we're having a hard time detecting part of the matter in the universe. What is it? Well, we have a dozen theories from supersymmetry to axions predicting particles that we might have trouble detecting. In fact, we only recently discovered large dark matter components of the universe such as the massive neutrinos and intergalactic neutral hydrogen streamers. This hypothesis matches impressively with a wide variety of measurements, such as galactic rotation curves, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, cluster formation and fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background.
2) Chuck out relativity and make up your own theory that is the same as GR everywhere (because GR is verified in all experiments to date) except in galactic rotation curves. This hypothesis matches impressively with... galactic rotation curves, because that's what you invented it to fit in the first place!
Having successfully improved on Einstein, I suggest we next work on improving the Mona Lisa. It's too painty.
The blurb is very poorly informed. The bar structure of the Milky Way has been known for decades. Not only does a cursory search of the Harvard Astrophysics database yield a 1992 paper on the subject, but the Wikipedia article on the Milky Way clearly describes its structure as SBbc (loosely wound barred spiral).
Next week, I'm sure we'll all be thrilled to learn that the sky is blue. Rewrite the textbooks!
This claim is about as credible in the physics world as "Apple is dying" would be in the tech community. People sometimes just spout off crazy bullshit to get attention. If the press would stop giving it to them, they'd just go away and we could get on with the business of figuring out what's really going on in the universe.
It's not the masses of the mesons that have to be put in by hand, it's the masses of the quarks. In principle, one should be able to compute the masses of all possible mesonic states just by putting in the masses of the few constituent quarks. Of course, in practice, this is quite difficult.
The two party system will not end until the electoral system is radically modified. In a first-run plurality-takes-all system of voting, only a single large block of voters can ever win the system. You could have a radical, unpopular party with 11% of the vote win the whole thing if, say, nine other centrist parties have split their votes into blocks of 10% each. So the only way a party can win is to encourage voters to be loyal to the party rather than any particular person or ideal. Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what has happened: two blocks of loyal radicals and a huge disenfranchised population who doesn't bother to vote.
A simple move to a run-offs would end the two-party system, but why would the two ruling parties want to allow that? Don't hold your breath waiting for reforms on this front.
To be fair, who are these companies supposed to donate money to? They can't be expected to support somebody who proposes bills that they think hurt their business interests.
Shouldn't they be able to support a politician whose wrong-headed views match their own? If you think somebody else would do a better job than this guy, why don't you just send some money to one of his competitors?
Of course, maybe the solution is to ban donations to political candidates. Then only the super-rich can become politicians. Yay.
How about
3. Ban indirect links of any length where any reasonable person (perhaps a member of a jury) would say that the intent of the link is to circumvent the law
Or is the concept of a reasonable person forbidden from this discussion?
Slashdot Mirror
The strangest one I ever saw was this: Help Me on Mt Lemmon in Arizona. I reported it as an error, but it's still there today. Seems like somebody was joking around in the map-making office one day.
What's the difference between a cosmologist and a cosmetologist?
Cosmologists use Planck's constant as a foundation; cosmetologists use Max Factor.
What's the difference between Max Factor and string cosmology?
Max Factor has models that work.
- Electrons are negatively charged. How do you inject a massive charge into this gas without messing up the models big time? You still need the heavy protons to balance the charges.
- If the gas accounted for 10% of the total mass, how can getting rid of that component change the mass of the universe by 20%?
From reading the paper, Table 5 seems to be the most relevant. They model their data using different interpretations: uniform warm gas, filamentary warm gas and hot plasma. If the soft X-rays are being generated by inverse Compton scattering of cosmic microwave background off of the hot plasma's electrons, then you can work out the density of the plasma. They list 2.4×10^-3/cm^3, as opposed to the (presumably orthodox interpretation) warm gas model having 3.3×10^-3/cm^3 in the hot gas plus 1.3×10^-3/cm^3 in the warm gas, which is about a 50% difference.So if this component was thought to contribute 10% to the overall cluster mass (as postulated in this guy's previous paper A massive warm baryonic halo in the Coma cluster), then this knocks that down to 5%. The paper doesn't even bother mention this, but instead focuses on the change to models of chemical abundances. Apparently, their new model pushes heavy abundances up to Solar levels; they had been lower using the old model.
As best I can tell, baryonic mass for the universe should be about 30%. The warm gas was thought to be 30% of that, or around 10% of universal mass. So knocking this down is really a problem (though garbled in the press release). Perhaps this lends support to a MaCHO component of galaxies?
This is a really interesting topic called the GZK cutoff. Basically, you expect that a particle with sufficiently high energy could scatter off of the microwave photons in the cosmic microwave background that permeate the entire universe, left over from the Big Bang billions of years ago. The particles have so much energy that when they hit the little photon, they pop off an entire pion (mass about a 15% of the proton). Since the universe is dense with such photons, you'd think these high-energy particles would just continuously pop off pions until their energies are below the GZK cutoff.
And recent high-statistics experiments verify the existence of the cutoff, refuting earlier suggestions that there were anomalously high-energy cosmic rays: Observation of the GZK Cutoff by the HiRes Experiment
Such a project is totally useless. Ten seconds of google search (the website was already down) led to an error: under Hydrogen, there is listed the origin "Latin: hydrogenium". Hydrogen was derived from French "hydrogene". Although the construction "hydrogenium" does exist, it's a rare (possibly obsolete?) usage that was coined in English to emphasize in certain contexts the metal-like properties of hydrogen. And oops, Wiktionary could have told them that: Wiktionary on Hydrogenium
Aside from being a cool observation, I think the most important aspect of this story was that the astronomers failed to realize the potentially great acronym here. The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) is good, but would it not be better to be just the Great Observatories Deep Survey?
No sinful star-eating black hole can cloak itself in dusty bands to hide from the all-seeing eye of GODS!
MoND is not a competitor for string theory. It was a competitor for the dark matter, until the discovery of this: Direct Detection of Dark Matter in Galaxy Collision. Now it's just another bad idea in the dustbin of science history.
The main competitor for string theory is called "Loop Quantum Gravity", which is easy enough to google for more information. It's also possible that ordinary "supergravity" might work, though most physicists are not too hopeful about that one.
No. Although not much is known about dark matter, enough is known to rule out this possibility. For example, it is known from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis that not much of dark matter can be baryonic. That is, it can't be made up of ordinary protons and neutrons. Since the stellar precursors of the black holes would have been baryonic during the relevant part of the Big Bang, that rules out stellar black holes as candidates for the bulk of dark matter.
In addition, black holes would form a component of galaxies known as MaCHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects); that is, they are star-heavy dense objects that live in the outskirts of the galaxy, as opposed to in the main disk. When a MaCHO passes in front of a distant object, it causes gravitational lensing (called microlensing) which increases the brightness of the object for a short period. Surveys of the sky for microlensing events have ruled out densities of MaCHOs high enough to account for the bulk of dark matter.
For that matter (this part I'm making up myself), you wouldn't expect star-born black holes to actually live in the halo of the galaxy. Since most stars live in the disk, their remnants ought to be clustered around it as well. Since dark matter is known to be roughly spherically distributed in a halo, that doesn't match up.
Accidentally mismoderated this post. Replying to you to undo moderation. Sorry...
No, that's also wrong. The analogy breaks down because balloons are necessarily closed; they have to hold air inside and be made of a finite amount of material. The universe need not be finite and it need not be closed. It could just as well be flat (imagine an infinite flat rubber sheet being pulled apart) or open (saddle-shaped is the usual analogy). But if you have trouble picturing that, don't worry about it; high-dimensional curved geometry is just a tricky subject to hold inside the human brain.
IAAP, and this point of view (that in standard quantum mechanics no information is transmitted superluminally) is entirely correct. This will just be one more shoddy example of science reporting in a very very long line. The only question here is who got their basic facts wrong?
The physicist in question really ought to know better. Did he lie to the reporters in order to get press for his experiment?
The newspaper ought to have done some basic fact-checking; reading Wikipedia would be enough to figure things out in this case. Did they lie to the public to make the story more interesting?
So let's do some digging. The physicist in question is a proponent of the "transactional interpretation" of quantum mechanics (not coincidentally invented by this same guy). In this interpretation, particles may send signals back in time that "handshake" with other particles in the past; however, they do so in such a way that ordinary causality is always correct. See, for example, Cramer's paper at http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/qm_nl.ht ml where he says:
So that seems to answer that question. However, he goes on to muddy the water by suggesting that quantum mechanics as verified by every experiment to date is actually very slightly wrong, that quantum theory is actually slightly nonlinear. In that case, the delicate conservation of our usual notion of causality will break down and superluminal signals become possible again. Virtually nobody believes this is the case, but I suppose that shouldn't stop us from checking just to be sure. After all, sometimes what nobody believes still turns out to be true.
The blame here (as so very often) must fall on the reporters. Let's examine some of their shoddy work:
That's not a problem with quantum theory; it's a problem with what you think is weird.
Like the twin paradox, this is not a paradox at all. Quantum mechanics predicts something. EPR say, "Hey, that sounds weird and wrong." Experiment verifies quantum mechanics. Once again, the problem is with what is perceived as being "normal", not with quantum theory.
This one is the core conceptual problem with the whole article. It should read:
If one of the entangled photon's trajectories is measured to be up, the other one, no matter how distant, if measured will be measured to be down.
That doesn't sound very weird at all, which is why reporters persist in getting it wrong. People like to think quantum mechanics is weirder than it is; it adds some kind of mystical aura to the whole thing. But the universe is plenty weird and interesting even when you get all your facts right. I hope eventually the popular writing on quantum theory will reflect that.
For more information, read Falling into a Black hole (with nifty animations). Specifically, see answer to question 5. Or see question 3 of the Black Hole FAQ.
Well, I would imagine it has to be a bit more sophisticated than phototropism. I mean, it's easy to detect light, and the side of something that isn't in the light is in shadow. So there's a clear, strong directional signal.
With smell, on the other hand, you have to detect very minute gradients in a trace amount of chemical that's being dispersed in the air. When the front half of your plant is facing a tomato, it's really only seeing a tiny amount more tomato-smell than the back half due to the dispersion of the tomato-smell. Animals can resolve this problem just by moving their noses back and forth; you sample a bunch of locations and then move toward the smellier area. But a plant cannot so easily move about, so how they can detect the gradient is the real mystery.
As far as I know, the article is wrong on this point. The problem is not that Neptune and Pluto have similar orbits. (They actually don't. Pluto has a more highly inclined, eccentric, wider orbit than any planet.) The problem is that Pluto has virtually the same orbit (highly inclined, eccentric, 3:2 resonance with Neptune) as a wide variety of similarly sized bodies known as plutinos. Hence, one could not consider Pluto to be a planet, but just the largest of the plutinos.
The classes of object in the Solar System (according to shared features) are:
- Gas Giants
- Rocky Planets
- Asteroids
- Comets
- Kuiper Belt Objects
- Oort Cloud Objects (only Sedna yet observed?)
And then there are some asteroid-like bodies that have wandered off (Apollos, Jupiter Trojans, etc) and some kuiper-like bodies (Centaurs) that have wandered off. Moons are a bit trickier to classify, but we'll ignore them since they're not Sun-orbiting.Planet is most sensibly defined to be the combination of the first two classes. They share such features as: circular in-plane orbits, large mass, common formation. The most important feature of these two classes is that they are small; four bodies each. A definition of planet that included thousands of objects would not be useful.
Since Pluto and 2003-UB_313 fall into the KBO class (sharing such features as: eccentric orbits, resonance with Neptune, icy composition, medium mass), they are not planets. Pluto was originally mistaken for a Gas Giant-type body; it's not, so it should have been declassified as a planet. However, the KBO class was unknown at the time, and Americans liked the idea of an American-discovered planet, so it got inappropriately included. As for 2003-UB_313, it's hardly surprising that the discoverer thinks that it's a planet, but his opinion should clearly not be taken seriously.
Xerxes
Simply??? What is simpler?
1) The laws of general relativity are valid universally, but we're having a hard time detecting part of the matter in the universe. What is it? Well, we have a dozen theories from supersymmetry to axions predicting particles that we might have trouble detecting. In fact, we only recently discovered large dark matter components of the universe such as the massive neutrinos and intergalactic neutral hydrogen streamers. This hypothesis matches impressively with a wide variety of measurements, such as galactic rotation curves, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, cluster formation and fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background.
2) Chuck out relativity and make up your own theory that is the same as GR everywhere (because GR is verified in all experiments to date) except in galactic rotation curves. This hypothesis matches impressively with... galactic rotation curves, because that's what you invented it to fit in the first place!
Having successfully improved on Einstein, I suggest we next work on improving the Mona Lisa. It's too painty.
Xerxes
Next week, I'm sure we'll all be thrilled to learn that the sky is blue. Rewrite the textbooks!
This claim is about as credible in the physics world as "Apple is dying" would be in the tech community. People sometimes just spout off crazy bullshit to get attention. If the press would stop giving it to them, they'd just go away and we could get on with the business of figuring out what's really going on in the universe.
It's not the masses of the mesons that have to be put in by hand, it's the masses of the quarks. In principle, one should be able to compute the masses of all possible mesonic states just by putting in the masses of the few constituent quarks. Of course, in practice, this is quite difficult.
A simple move to a run-offs would end the two-party system, but why would the two ruling parties want to allow that? Don't hold your breath waiting for reforms on this front.
Xerxes
To be fair, who are these companies supposed to donate money to? They can't be expected to support somebody who proposes bills that they think hurt their business interests.
Shouldn't they be able to support a politician whose wrong-headed views match their own? If you think somebody else would do a better job than this guy, why don't you just send some money to one of his competitors?
Of course, maybe the solution is to ban donations to political candidates. Then only the super-rich can become politicians. Yay.
How about 3. Ban indirect links of any length where any reasonable person (perhaps a member of a jury) would say that the intent of the link is to circumvent the law Or is the concept of a reasonable person forbidden from this discussion?