Well, for its time, OS/2 Warp 3 had a wonderful GUI. Yes, they had that single message queue problem, but at least for me, it has never been a big problem. Of course, by today's standards, the GUI would be seriously lacking (although it had some features which I still miss at current systems -- but then I have to admit they were sometimes a bit buggy). But you have to remember, at that time Windows was at 3.11.
If that is a sign of failure, the Web has failed long ago, when everyone started to make his own homepage without having anything worthwhile to offer. I guess 99.99% of those home pages were never read by anyone, too.
Forgive me if I am wrong (I dont mean to sound like a total fuckwad or anything...).. But isn't it impossible for photon to be totally massless, given that it can decay into an electron/positron pair while traversing vaccuum?
It is impossible for a photon to decay into an electron-positron pair while traversing vacuum. Only when the photon is scattered by a massive, charged particle, an electron-positron pair can be produced (provided it has enough energy).
But you are right, if that decay were possible, then it would prove that the photon were massive. Indeed, it would have to have more than twice the electron mass. Which would result in a very different behaviour of electromagnetic fields.
A truly massless vector particle would have a local time of 0, since it would be traveling at the maximum allowed velocity...(and thus it would take an infinite amount of time in any other reference frame for it to even initiate decay...) This was part of why Neutrinos were re-evaluated, when it was discovered that they could change flavors en-route from the sun to the earth. (It means they cannot be massless, because they change over time/can decay.)
Wrong. The neutrino oscillations mean that the flavour eigenstates don't agree with the mass eigenstates. Which is only possible if there are neutrinos with different mass (because if all masses are equal, then every state is a mass eigenstate). Now if two neutrinos have different mass, at least one of them cannot be massless.
While the mass of a photon would be so tiny as to be unmeasurable, it MUST have a mass, because it is ABLE to decay.
No?
No. Your premise is wrong, therefore the conclusion doesn't follow.
And if you started a search service today with the quality Google had in 98, you'd be laughed off and forgotten before you're done launching the product.
Really? I'd prefer the quality of search results it had back then...
It may turn out to be a "dumb thing" to require real names as policy, and no doubt will be a "dumb thing" if they can't handle names that are 3-words (or hyphenated, or anything else), but the "dumbest thing" of all is for those who're concerned about this to use the service at all. They can continue using the current offerings.
But isn't the point of this story that you are supposed to do dumb things?
Did you also read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity ? The first paragraph of "The train-and-platform thought experiment" actually contains the key part. I don't think there's an easier way to explain it. And then imagine a superluminal signal sent from the front end of the train, sent very shortly before the light arrives there, to the back end of the train, arriving very shortly after the light arrives there, and think about what it would look like from the platform.
The speed of light is what is defined -- it's exactly 299,792,458 meters per second.
What is defined is the value we assign to the speed of light. The speed of light would be exactly the same if we defined it as exactly 300,000,000 meters per second; however the meter would be a bit shorter.
First off, why does anything travelling faster _have_ to go back in time?
Because of the relativity of simultaneity. Whenever something goes faster than light in one frame of reference, you can find another frame of reference where the temporal order of events is reversed, i.e. the object travels backwards in time. Moreover, the principle or relativity means that if you can achieve superluminal speeds in one frame of reference, you can reach the same superluminal speed in any frame of reference. Which is enough to construct closed loops of causality.
The relativity of simultaneity is a direct consequence of the principle of relativity and the invariance of the speed of light.
If you travel faster than light away from an object, your eyes will definitely see events happening in reverse. But that is because you are seeing light that has left the object that it reflected off of earlier and earlier due to the fact that you are overtaking photons as you zip ever onward.
That's an entirely unrelated, purely optical effect.
A possible basis are plane waves (I guess that's what you mean with "complex exponentials"). Now plane waves are themselves not really physical states (they are not square-integrable); nevertheless they make an excellent basis to expand physical states into. And yes, they don't have a location, but their superposition has. Indeed, an equal superposition of plane waves of all frequencies gives a delta peak, which is the most localized state you can think of (but like the plane wave, it's again no physical state, but delta peaks can also be used as basis to describe physical states).
Bad news for you: scientists who assume nothing can travel faster than light base this on the fact that "light has no mass" which is false.
No. While experimental data can of course always only give an upper limit to the mass of a photon (therefore we cannot exclude a photon mass), all our observations are compatible with massless photons, and photons are massless in all our theories.
Light has a mass, but it is so small it's often said light doesn't have a mass to simplify things. Now, obviously scientists are all aware of this fact but those who think nothing can travel faster than light ask the question the wrong way.
I'm a scientist, and I'm not aware of this "fact".
What does "single photon with controllable waveforms" mean? I thought photons were all sinusoids under a gaussian envelope.
That would violate the superposition principle. The superposition of two arbitrary one-photon states is again a one-photon state. But the superposition of two sinusoids under a gaussian envelope is almost never a sinusoid under a gaussian envelope.
The experiment proves that under some set of conditions covered by the experiment a photon does not move faster than c. You can't automatically generalize that and claim that under no conditions does a photon exceed c.
Yeah, and it also has not yet been proven that nothing I post to Slashdot gives me god-like powers. After all, the number of possible Slashdot posts which I could write, but haven't, is extremely large. Moreover, it could be that I have to post it at a specific time (e.g. at midnight). Therefore it could even be that something I already wrote would have given me god-like powers if only I had posted it at the right time.
But with CLI they could just copy/paste the commands. Or you could send them a script to execute. If they trust you enough, you might even get a remote shell and do it yourself.
I don't understand why people need to anonymously criticize an honest mistake by someone not "in the business" to the point where it's the biggest thread.
The problem is that you didn't just make a mistake, but you criticised others for using the correct term. Nobody likes to be criticised, and especially not for wrong reasons.
One question I'd like to ask Darwin, if he were still alive, is this: If man evolved from apes, then why do we still have apes? Why didn't all species evolve like man supposedly did?
They did evolve. They just didn't evolve into humans, but into chimpanzees and bonobos.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for its time, OS/2 Warp 3 had a wonderful GUI. Yes, they had that single message queue problem, but at least for me, it has never been a big problem. Of course, by today's standards, the GUI would be seriously lacking (although it had some features which I still miss at current systems -- but then I have to admit they were sometimes a bit buggy). But you have to remember, at that time Windows was at 3.11.
I guess this man might also get problems if he wants to get on Google+ :-)
If that is a sign of failure, the Web has failed long ago, when everyone started to make his own homepage without having anything worthwhile to offer. I guess 99.99% of those home pages were never read by anyone, too.
It is impossible for a photon to decay into an electron-positron pair while traversing vacuum. Only when the photon is scattered by a massive, charged particle, an electron-positron pair can be produced (provided it has enough energy).
But you are right, if that decay were possible, then it would prove that the photon were massive. Indeed, it would have to have more than twice the electron mass. Which would result in a very different behaviour of electromagnetic fields.
Wrong. The neutrino oscillations mean that the flavour eigenstates don't agree with the mass eigenstates. Which is only possible if there are neutrinos with different mass (because if all masses are equal, then every state is a mass eigenstate). Now if two neutrinos have different mass, at least one of them cannot be massless.
No. Your premise is wrong, therefore the conclusion doesn't follow.
Really? I'd prefer the quality of search results it had back then ...
It may turn out to be a "dumb thing" to require real names as policy, and no doubt will be a "dumb thing" if they can't handle names that are 3-words (or hyphenated, or anything else), but the "dumbest thing" of all is for those who're concerned about this to use the service at all. They can continue using the current offerings.
But isn't the point of this story that you are supposed to do dumb things?
Did you also read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity ? The first paragraph of "The train-and-platform thought experiment" actually contains the key part. I don't think there's an easier way to explain it. And then imagine a superluminal signal sent from the front end of the train, sent very shortly before the light arrives there, to the back end of the train, arriving very shortly after the light arrives there, and think about what it would look like from the platform.
I guess that person was regularly violating speed limits. :-)
What is defined is the value we assign to the speed of light. The speed of light would be exactly the same if we defined it as exactly 300,000,000 meters per second; however the meter would be a bit shorter.
Because of the relativity of simultaneity. Whenever something goes faster than light in one frame of reference, you can find another frame of reference where the temporal order of events is reversed, i.e. the object travels backwards in time. Moreover, the principle or relativity means that if you can achieve superluminal speeds in one frame of reference, you can reach the same superluminal speed in any frame of reference. Which is enough to construct closed loops of causality.
The relativity of simultaneity is a direct consequence of the principle of relativity and the invariance of the speed of light.
That's an entirely unrelated, purely optical effect.
A possible basis are plane waves (I guess that's what you mean with "complex exponentials"). Now plane waves are themselves not really physical states (they are not square-integrable); nevertheless they make an excellent basis to expand physical states into. And yes, they don't have a location, but their superposition has. Indeed, an equal superposition of plane waves of all frequencies gives a delta peak, which is the most localized state you can think of (but like the plane wave, it's again no physical state, but delta peaks can also be used as basis to describe physical states).
It is also available under http://physics.ust.hk/dusw/Publication/PhysRevLett_106_243602.pdf [PDF]
No. While experimental data can of course always only give an upper limit to the mass of a photon (therefore we cannot exclude a photon mass), all our observations are compatible with massless photons, and photons are massless in all our theories.
I'm a scientist, and I'm not aware of this "fact".
You don't need a black hole to do time travel with FTL. It works well in standard Minkowski spacetime.
That would violate the superposition principle. The superposition of two arbitrary one-photon states is again a one-photon state. But the superposition of two sinusoids under a gaussian envelope is almost never a sinusoid under a gaussian envelope.
The experiment proves that under some set of conditions covered by the experiment a photon does not move faster than c. You can't automatically generalize that and claim that under no conditions does a photon exceed c.
Yeah, and it also has not yet been proven that nothing I post to Slashdot gives me god-like powers. After all, the number of possible Slashdot posts which I could write, but haven't, is extremely large. Moreover, it could be that I have to post it at a specific time (e.g. at midnight). Therefore it could even be that something I already wrote would have given me god-like powers if only I had posted it at the right time.
We could use big trucks to haul in water. Or, alternately, perhaps a series of tubes.
You mean an internet connection? :-)
The non-IR wavelengths are also turned into heat, provided the floor is not white. The darker the floor, the more visible light is turned into heat.
But with CLI they could just copy/paste the commands. Or you could send them a script to execute. If they trust you enough, you might even get a remote shell and do it yourself.
Geek Corpses? Is that where Geek Squad employees go to when they die?
No. They go to hell. They go to hell and DIE.
Processor die or gambling die? :-)
The problem is that you didn't just make a mistake, but you criticised others for using the correct term. Nobody likes to be criticised, and especially not for wrong reasons.
Anyone who spells "liter" as "litre" is a moron.
Ah, so I get everyone writing British English (guess where English originated!) is a moron?
Moron.
At least you admit, by your signature, to be a moron yourself. :-)
Imagine replacing texans with women
I've imagined it and I've got to say, I like the idea. Not sure it's terribly practical though.
Well, it's not as hard as it may initially seem, because if you look closer, half of the Texans are already women. So half of the job is already done!
The God of evolution, of course. :-)
They did evolve. They just didn't evolve into humans, but into chimpanzees and bonobos.