As a CDF student, I feel compelled to add that CDF, the similar (and original) experiment on the other side of the Tevatron, has made the same discovery and gave a public presentation of the results in the same joint seminar with the DZero folks on Friday. The resonance observed at CDF has even greater statistical significance (7.8 sigma vs. DZero's 5.5) However, DZero was quicker with getting a paper out for publication, which I suppose is why the Fermilab press release only talks about them. It's not the first time DZero has done that. (Hey, they're fast - give them credit.)
Actually, the NPR reporter visited the LHC in February (he interviewed one of our professors), so the accident wouldn't have been part of the original piece. Of course, they could have said something about it...
Today: NPR reports on LHC progress
In late February, National Public Radio reporter (and former Fermilab Public Affairs intern) David Kestenbaum visited CERN and took a tour of the LHC. NPR will broadcast his report on All Things Considered this afternoon. You can catch the program on WBEZ 91.5 FM between 3:00 and 6:30 p.m. Fermilab Todaywill publish a link to the audio on Tuesday.
Fermilab Today has been full of PR spin about the lab's mistake lately...
Also: For any day in which the outside air temperature is less than the confortable ideal for a gym, the most efficient use of that human energy is simply to let the generated heat dissipate into the air.
While this scheme could have some tiny benefit in warm months (when dumping heat into the gym is undesirable), for much of the year the imperfect efficiency of transmission to the batteries would just detract from the created energy.
I know that the weather is pleasant for a lot of the year in So.Cal, but I believe that it's still less than "room temperature" for a significant number of months. Here in Boston, the best use of gym energy is to just keep things as they are...
I'm not qualified to address your argument about space-time and thermodynamics, but I wanted to comment on the first paragraph:
The fact that black holes radiate and decrease in mass is not due to the anti-particle of the virtual pair being recaptured and imparting a "negative" mass. Anti-particles have identical mass (and lifetime, and magnitudes of charge and spin and other quantum numbers) as their conjugate particles. This is a direct consequence of CPT symmetry. Black holes are supposed to radiate energy simply because a virtual pair may briefly pop into existence near the event horizon, at which point they can be pulled apart by tidal gravity. While one of the pair is pulled back in, the energy extracted from the graviational field in separating them can make the outer particle real, at which point it can do things like escape or decay/radiate. The orientation of the particle and anti-particle is irrelevant.
Let's just hope that a tiny black hole with 14 TeV/c^2 of mass (the LHC center-of-mass energy) radiates more quickly than it interacts with particles of the Earth. That would be an interesting sociological case study though, to observe how humanity behaves when it knows that the planet will collapse on itself in, say, 91 years (totally making that up), when the microscopic black hole reaches the approximate cross section of a nucleus and everything suddenly gets out of control...
Heh. I just called the phone number (773-283-3880) posted prominently throughout the website of this guy's "agency". Not surprisingly, his voice mailbox is full:-)
That's quite a Chicago accent he's got there though...
(I think it's representative of the proclivities of the slashdot readership that it hasn't posted a dumb joke like this in the three hours that this story's been up. Or maybe it's just not funny...)
I used to wonder the same thing when I moved here a year ago Derek... Then I discovered that most people never leave their offices except for meetings or lunch:(
In my mind, I like to envision this guy (Victor Ninov, who presented fraudulent data on super-heavy atoms) strung up and shot for the damage he's done to the public perception of science. Somebody always brings this up when a discovery is announced.
Here at the CDF experiment (as well as for essentially all of the Fermilab collaborations), there exists a procedure generally known as the "blessing" of analyses, wherein one has to submit results in (multiple) meetings of collaborators who do overlapping work. Much sniping and nit-picking ensues, but the end result is typically a thorough internal peer-review process before an analysis can be made public. You would be quickly discovered here if you tried to just generate some data. Though I don't know how they do it at LBNL...
Anyway, I look forward to out meeting Monday where we'll review evidence for observation of this D_s state here.
The article here indicates that this company plans to charge $10/year for the service. Cheap, if the system proves to work, but definitely a different business model.
Further, it says that the 7 digit passwd will be sent in a "digital image"; kind of a hassle for those of us with text-only email. (long live pine)
If you were to take reasonably detailed measurements of the object's position over, say, 1 year (which plots a small fraction of its total orbital path, but would be sufficient to constrain the entire orbit), you can equate the force of gravity from the sun to the centripetal force required for it to follow that path, thus yielding the "semimajor axis" and eccentricity of the ellipse it follows. That is, this yields the distance. Knowledge of the sun's mass and the object's distance will yield its mass via Kepler's 3rd law.
Additionally, if you were to observe over a full year (or even 6 months) a simple parallax measurement (where one takes note of the angle by which the object is shifted against the "static" stellar background due to the Earth's displacement about the sun) will yield it's distance from the Earth directly.
I don't know about CS, but this has gone on for years on the Physics exam. In India, the administrations assign each student 10 questions (e.g. questions 30-40) from the exam they're given, and they write them down as soon as they get out. This is the database from which everyone studies. Braindump indeed. (I'm an American grad student; this is as relayed to me by several foreign professors.)
Much of what is recommended above, while good sources for the formalism of physics, are going to be too dense for someone who might like to just get a cool overview of the fundamental weirdness of physics.
These two are easily enjoyed with minimal formal physics education:
Kip Thorne, "Black Holes and Time Warps" -- painfully cheesey name, but an excellent introduction to Einstein's relativity (special and general), the historical development of astrophysics leading to currently expected black hole phenomena, and possibilities for worm holes and other trekky stuff. Includes helpful sketches. I'm told Thorne is an awful lecturer (he's a Caltech theorist now), but he writes a good book.
John R. Gribbin, "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat" -- Lots of cool qualitative quantum physics, minus the linear algebra. Extrapolates the favored "Copenhagen interpretation" to apply to the macroscopic "real" world. The particle physics at the end is slightly out-dated, as this was published in the early '80's, but the fundamental ideas haven't changed.
Slashdot Mirror
As a CDF student, I feel compelled to add that CDF, the similar (and original) experiment on the other side of the Tevatron, has made the same discovery and gave a public presentation of the results in the same joint seminar with the DZero folks on Friday. The resonance observed at CDF has even greater statistical significance (7.8 sigma vs. DZero's 5.5) However, DZero was quicker with getting a paper out for publication, which I suppose is why the Fermilab press release only talks about them. It's not the first time DZero has done that. (Hey, they're fast - give them credit.)
From Fermilab Today:
Fermilab Today has been full of PR spin about the lab's mistake lately...
Also: For any day in which the outside air temperature is less than the confortable ideal for a gym, the most efficient use of that human energy is simply to let the generated heat dissipate into the air. While this scheme could have some tiny benefit in warm months (when dumping heat into the gym is undesirable), for much of the year the imperfect efficiency of transmission to the batteries would just detract from the created energy.
I know that the weather is pleasant for a lot of the year in So.Cal, but I believe that it's still less than "room temperature" for a significant number of months. Here in Boston, the best use of gym energy is to just keep things as they are...
I'm not qualified to address your argument about space-time and thermodynamics, but I wanted to comment on the first paragraph:
The fact that black holes radiate and decrease in mass is not due to the anti-particle of the virtual pair being recaptured and imparting a "negative" mass. Anti-particles have identical mass (and lifetime, and magnitudes of charge and spin and other quantum numbers) as their conjugate particles. This is a direct consequence of CPT symmetry. Black holes are supposed to radiate energy simply because a virtual pair may briefly pop into existence near the event horizon, at which point they can be pulled apart by tidal gravity. While one of the pair is pulled back in, the energy extracted from the graviational field in separating them can make the outer particle real, at which point it can do things like escape or decay/radiate. The orientation of the particle and anti-particle is irrelevant.
Let's just hope that a tiny black hole with 14 TeV/c^2 of mass (the LHC center-of-mass energy) radiates more quickly than it interacts with particles of the Earth. That would be an interesting sociological case study though, to observe how humanity behaves when it knows that the planet will collapse on itself in, say, 91 years (totally making that up), when the microscopic black hole reaches the approximate cross section of a nucleus and everything suddenly gets out of control...
Heh. I just called the phone number (773-283-3880) posted prominently throughout the website of this guy's "agency". Not surprisingly, his voice mailbox is full :-)
That's quite a Chicago accent he's got there though...
Any word on whether Trey Anastacio & Co. have planned a lawsuit similar to that of a certain processed meat company for this eggregious misuse of their product name? :)
(I think it's representative of the proclivities of the slashdot readership that it hasn't posted a dumb joke like this in the three hours that this story's been up. Or maybe it's just not funny...)
I used to wonder the same thing when I moved here a year ago Derek... Then I discovered that most people never leave their offices except for meetings or lunch :(
In my mind, I like to envision this guy (Victor Ninov, who presented fraudulent data on super-heavy atoms) strung up and shot for the damage he's done to the public perception of science. Somebody always brings this up when a discovery is announced.
Here at the CDF experiment (as well as for essentially all of the Fermilab collaborations), there exists a procedure generally known as the "blessing" of analyses, wherein one has to submit results in (multiple) meetings of collaborators who do overlapping work. Much sniping and nit-picking ensues, but the end result is typically a thorough internal peer-review process before an analysis can be made public. You would be quickly discovered here if you tried to just generate some data. Though I don't know how they do it at LBNL...
Anyway, I look forward to out meeting Monday where we'll review evidence for observation of this D_s state here.
(I Am A Lowly Grad. Student Physicist.)
The article here indicates that this company plans to charge $10/year for the service. Cheap, if the system proves to work, but definitely a different business model.
Further, it says that the 7 digit passwd will be sent in a "digital image"; kind of a hassle for those of us with text-only email. (long live pine)
Additionally, if you were to observe over a full year (or even 6 months) a simple parallax measurement (where one takes note of the angle by which the object is shifted against the "static" stellar background due to the Earth's displacement about the sun) will yield it's distance from the Earth directly.
I don't know about CS, but this has gone on for years on the Physics exam. In India, the administrations assign each student 10 questions (e.g. questions 30-40) from the exam they're given, and they write them down as soon as they get out. This is the database from which everyone studies. Braindump indeed. (I'm an American grad student; this is as relayed to me by several foreign professors.)
These two are easily enjoyed with minimal formal physics education:
Kip Thorne, "Black Holes and Time Warps" -- painfully cheesey name, but an excellent introduction to Einstein's relativity (special and general), the historical development of astrophysics leading to currently expected black hole phenomena, and possibilities for worm holes and other trekky stuff. Includes helpful sketches. I'm told Thorne is an awful lecturer (he's a Caltech theorist now), but he writes a good book.
John R. Gribbin, "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat" -- Lots of cool qualitative quantum physics, minus the linear algebra. Extrapolates the favored "Copenhagen interpretation" to apply to the macroscopic "real" world. The particle physics at the end is slightly out-dated, as this was published in the early '80's, but the fundamental ideas haven't changed.
Thought I'd throw some alternatives out there.