Throwing more money at the problem is not going to necessarily fix it. I have heard this argument before about non-fossil based fuels. Don't get me wrong, I am all for it. But doubling the budget is not going to make it happen in half the time- it's not linear like that. Throwing a whole boatload of money won't either- keep in mind that only a limited number of scientists and engineers are working on it now. Particle Physicist Joe isn't about to change research interests when he's close to tenure just because that is where the funding is supposed to go.
Re:Sounds like a superhero/villain origin story.
on
Visiting the Big Bang
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· Score: 5, Funny
Quark-Gluon Man! Master of the Strong Nuclear Force! Charming, yet Strange, he flies Up and Down, seeking Truth and Beauty wherever he collides!
PS- can anybody please explain why somebody decided to mod this post troll? Yes, it was a rant, but was it off-topic? Is one not allowed to express an opinion that contains anger and resentment because others might be offended? This is not the first time I have had this happen, and while it is uncommon for me, I am curious as to why. I try to refrain from posting about things I do not know anything about- but this isn't the case here. I am giving./ readers my honest, first-hand account of how I see things. Perhaps it was better suited for a journal entry, but either way, it did have relevance in the context of this topic. So what's the deal? Have I been trolling this forum and posting like a madman to just annoy others by sheer post volume? What makes some./ modders decide to use the troll option on a post such as mine?
I am currently a grad student, and my hope is to get my Ph.D before I am 30. What do I have to look forward to monetarily? Not much. 35,000 at a university or college. 40,000 in industry, if I'm lucky. Idiots in human resources forcing me to take demeaning drug tests. Foolish business managers underpay me, and also underfund me. The public doesn't understand what I do, nor do they want to.
Why am I doing this? Because I love it. Nonetheless, I would love it even more if I was given some props. AFAIAC, lawyers are scum (anyone going to disagree with me) who are in cahoots with the cops (disgruntled, fat, balding ex-jocks who are still in high school mode) and judges (ex-lawyers, determined to feed the system with dough to produce more cops, lawyers and judges), doctors are overpaid and overglorified mechanics (and they are WRONG many many times, especially when it comes to the care of the elderly) who are in cahoots with the insurance companies and the pharmecutical industry, and business people are money-grubbing wanted-to-be-something-else-but-couldn't-make-the- grade-in-college losers. Yet here all of these people make 10x+ as much as I will ever make, even at the peak of my earning years. It is a sad state of affairs. Anti-intellecualism is alive and strong in America, and I believe it is the root cause of this whole mess. Maybe if knowledge and research were better explained to the youth of this country, especially schoolchildren, things could change for the better in the future.
As far as physics go, the Chinese get a much sturdier theoretical background than we Americans do. They also blatantly cheat on the GRE Physics test by studying past exam questions (something we US citizens don't get to do). This is accomplished by profs and Chinese Grad Students taking the exam, and memorizing a select number of questions. The exam is later reconstructed. Since the same questions are used for up to a 10 year period, they easily assemble all of the questions asked on the current GRE, save for maybe 10% on any given new exam.
Want proof? It's in the pudding- the average American Physics undergraduate scores not in the 50th percentile, not in the 40th percentile, but in the 35th percentile, or lower. How can the average American be scoring in the 35th percentile? Thousands of foreign students are causing the scores to be skewed, especially the Chinese. At most major universities, half the grads are foreign, half are American. Up to 30% might be Chinese. Most become theoreticians, supporting themselves not on Research Assistantships, but as graders for grad physics courses. They are impossible to learn anything from due to an inability to speak English (most of the time, there are exceptions, of course). They also stick to themselves, not integrating with the rest of the grad student community in Physics.
I have not viewed this program, but I did look at the website, and I have seen the commercials. I believe that Animal Planet is a subsidiary of the Discovery Channel, and I am noticing a trend. All of these evolution-related programs on AP and DC are very, very speculative. It is not science. It is a guess, and not necessarily a well-thought out one.
We are not talking about predicting what kinds of particles will pop out of a high-energy collision of heavy ions, we are talking about what life will look like in 200 million years. The former is good science, the latter is not. Did anyone notice that the DC's productions on Neanderthals, Dinosaurs, and Prehistoric Beasts were full of the exact same type of pseudoscience speculation? Worst of all, they had the animals doing such things as looking at the camera repeatedly, and even spitting out water towards the TV screen!!! I mean, come on! This makes for great ratings (maybe), but pisspoor science, AFAIAC. They had the Neanderthals going around stealing women and raping them without a shred of evidence that such things occurred, save that in our modern human society they do. Baboons that make fish nets? It seems that there is an overanthromorphization of just about every creature that is CG-rendered by these programs.
Please, when you watch these programs, don't be afraid to enjoy them- but make sure you take them with a grain of salt. To a certain extent, I believe that these programs work against getting the American public to accept evolution as scientists do, instead encouraging misconceptions about basic principles of evolution, as well as providing fodder to anti-evolutionists. Hopefully, in the future, these will be done a bit more professionaly, with less emphasis on the art, and more on the science.
Well, there is an option I just noticed but have not tried out myself. There is an ISA-USB device sold by ARS Technologies (http://www.arstech.com/usbisa.htm) that may or may not be suitable. They have both internal and external converters for about $120.
Usually, what I have done is too simply look for a newer used computer that still has 1 ISA slot left in it. Pentium chipsets still have these here and there up to the Pentium III, and AMD chipsets can be found that use today's Athlon XP 2200's. I myself have a Tbird 1000 running on a KT7A-RAID motherboard that has 1 ISA slot at home, though I don't use the slot. When I built computers for the lab, I used this mobo because of this reason.
Screw SCSI adapaters. Make me something useful in the laboratory- like an ISA to PCI adapter. There are tons of ISA cards floating in science labs all throughout the world, and they become useless because when users upgrade their computers, there are no ISA slots.
I cannot tell you all how many times I have come across this issue. I have seen some ISA adapters that cost upwards of several thousand dollars. Has anyone seen anything better and cheaper?
Shankar is too formal for most undergraduates. I like to use it as a reference for my grad classes. Quantum is not really learned at the undergrad level, just the basic concepts and a little bit of the formalism is introduced. IMHO, quantum mechanics is only grasped after tackling it at the graduate level.
Agreed. I guess that what I was trying to get across is that he disagreed with the philosophy of quantum mechanics. Though B-E statistics, the laser, the photoelectric effect, etc., all fall out from the differential equations and the boundary conditions which lead to discreteness.
As an aside, have you had a chance to read the 1916 paper he wrote, which in the middle treats the laser phenomenon? Everyone references it, but I wonder how many have actually read it (see the other thread). It is very hard to come across, and I spent about a year looking for an English translation (On the Quantum Theory of Light [electromagnetism?])... very frustrating. Not even the world-class library at Bell Labs had a translation, though they did have the original german manuscript...
In essence, I concur. It's a moot point, except that those outside of physics don't grasp why, which confounds me given the orders of magnitude argument.
Sounds most definitely like the undergrad textbook by David Griffiths. Excellent text- chapter 3 is in the introduction of formalism.
Basically, formalism in quantum mechanics is expressing quantum mechanical ideas in the language of QM, namely linear algebra. Operators and observables (physical quantities like position, velocity, etc.) are represented either by matrices or " notation". This allows one to delve further into quantum mechanics, and allows one to use mathematics to predict phenomenon. In a sense, this complication of the mathematics for simple problems (like the hydrogen atom) allows one to do more complex problems (like the hydrogen atom in a magnetic field, where the energy levels of the orbitals will split).
So today, quantum is taught by trying to relate basic concepts in QM to those in classical mechanics (such as postition, energy, momentum, etc.) in the first few chapters in a book. Then to faciliate communicating QM ideas, formalism is introduced. It's like no one wants to write three plus two equals five, when 3+2=5 will suffice. This allows more difficult problems to be tackled more easily.
Einstein didn't have a problem with the discreteness of quantum mechanics. As a matter of fact, any halfway decent mathematician (physicists included) would disagree with this property- it is the result of systems that are represented with certain differential equations PLUS boundary conditions which limit the solutions to said equations. These types of systems and equations have existed for over a hundred years longer than quantum mechanics.
What Einstein disagreed with were things like the Uncertainty Principle, the EPR paradox (If he had lived to see it), and most likely even Schrodinger's Cat. He disagreed with the assumptions that led to these conclusions. So Einstein was most definitely NOT a supporter of quantum mechanics as we now know it. Even the greatest can be mistaken.
Yes, but the canonical expression for uncertainty principles is in general hbar/2, not just hbar. Not that this really matters, since like you say it is the same order of magnitude. In general, the non-physicist scientists will use the former over the latter as a matter of convention.
>Bullshit. The monetary incentive is TO KEEP YOUR JOB (i.e. get tenure).
So by your definition, everyone is working for profit, and cutting corners in all professions. I don't buy that heavy-handed argument. Plus, once one has tenure, in your worldivew, their no longer exists an incentive that makes one strive to put out papers quickly. That is not the reality, though.
>Again, bullshit. Maybe after you get tenure you are your own boss. But before that you spend considerable time answering to your department chair, the dean, the provost, the university president, funding agency program managers...
About what? If the deparment chair is a theoretical particle physicist, and I study experimental biophysics, how much influence will he have over my research? Answer- very little. Ditto with the provost, the university president, etc. The only one you were right on is funding agency program managers, but professors aren't paid by these agencies, they are paid by the university. The funding agencies are for operating costs of the lab, such as equipment, assistant salaries, travel expenses, etc.
I don't know where you are coming from, but I am speaking from my own personal experiences, having spent close to ten years in various labs in industry, government, and academia. I really don't think people miscite articles or don't bother reading them because they are in a big hurry to make personal profit. It just doesn't add up. Take it for what you will.
It's not profit. Academic scientists have no monetary incentive to publish papers. They will not get paid more money if they publish a paper quickly. The only thing they can take advantage of is being able to land grants, which enables them to do more research.
Companies can truly profit from research. Their research tends to be more application-oriented, and thus profit-oriented. They are doing research for a market. Academia is doing research for knowledge (for the most part). There is a huge difference.
You seem to think that there is no difference between academic research and industrial research. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are very distinct, and have completely different motives. If a scientist wanted to make money based off of productivity and profit, he works for industry, where the pay is substantially higher than in academia. There is also the added pressure of marketing departments, supervisors, human resources, etc. In academia, you are pretty much your own boss. They are completely different worlds. I've seen it with my own eyes at Bell Labs, TRW, and several universities, and also NASA. I think your assessment is a little misguided.
I have to disagree strongly. When one is doing basic science research in an academic setting, 95% of the time there is no chance for profit. If one lies, there is the risk of being caught, as evidenced by the Bell Labs fraud; perhaps this is even more likely to pass in an industrial environment where profit can be a motive behind "[making] up shit and [lying]".
As far as twisting up evidence, yes, this does happen. But most definitely not 100% of the time. How was the solar neutrino problem ever discovered in the first place? How was a re-evaluation of the cosmological constant initiated? These (and many other ideas) were brought forth not because someone wanted their ideas to be put forth, but because their hypotheses did not match the experimental data! It most definitely is not bullshit. AFAIAC, science is still the most altruistic of professions, not to mention one of the most self-sacrificing.
I am by far no expert in superconductivity, but I have worked with superconductive materials here and there. This discovery seems very similar to that of MgB2, which superconducts at about twice the temp, 37K or so. If I remember correctly, wasn't that a type-I superconductor? It seems to me that this plutonium-based superconductor (is it just pure Pu?) would be a classical BCS type-I superconductor. Most type-II's tend to be really complex as far as their constiutent elements numbers and ratios, e.g. YBCO. Plus, 18K is well below 37K, so in the regime of classical type-I Tc's.
Also, I think that the cooper pairs are probably being formed by the valence f-orbital electrons. Maybe a theorist can show that this yields the lowest possible ground state energy. Besides, Yb of YBCO fame is also in the same group of elements as Pu who have partially filled f-orbitals.
The message board on dslreports.com didn't seem to high on this, and neither do we. Not suprising, I supposed, but do think about this: it's a baby step. You all are looking for some brand spanking new paradigm in broadband technology. That is not going to happen overnight, at least not in the forseeable future.
I mean honestly, I am sure that someone here can explain why DSL is fundamentally going to be limited as far as bandwidth and range goes. Copper is a very lossy media, and we already have better stuff out there like fiber optic, and even fiberless communications versus mutliplexed wavelengths (eg Lucent) or even things such as wireless LAN's (although with a more limited range).
The point is that what we need is something that is a complete departure from the paradigm of cable and DSL modems. That is the only thing that is going to allow us to ALL have broadband, and for the cheap, at very high speeds. I have no idea what it will be, though I think it will have to be some wireless technology. Until then, I think we are going to be stuck in this rut of a small number of broadband users who get to use a flawed and unsatisfactory system (except for those that just surf and check e-mail) due to speed constraints and whatnot.
Any ideas of a new system, or how long one might take to engineer? I'm guessing around 20-35 years.
I have to disagree about which is more dangerous. 8 Tesla can kill you from a great distance if you have a pacemaker, and can also crush you to death if you come between it and a large metal object that somehow gets free- it happens. Your credit cards will be erased from a several meters away.
None of these things will happen in the Earth's magnetic field. It is very dilute, and much weaker than 8 Tesla. It won't kill you, though it is responsible for the phenomena mentioned.
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Throwing more money at the problem is not going to necessarily fix it. I have heard this argument before about non-fossil based fuels. Don't get me wrong, I am all for it. But doubling the budget is not going to make it happen in half the time- it's not linear like that. Throwing a whole boatload of money won't either- keep in mind that only a limited number of scientists and engineers are working on it now. Particle Physicist Joe isn't about to change research interests when he's close to tenure just because that is where the funding is supposed to go.
Quark-Gluon Man! Master of the Strong Nuclear Force! Charming, yet Strange, he flies Up and Down, seeking Truth and Beauty wherever he collides!
PS- can anybody please explain why somebody decided to mod this post troll? Yes, it was a rant, but was it off-topic? Is one not allowed to express an opinion that contains anger and resentment because others might be offended? This is not the first time I have had this happen, and while it is uncommon for me, I am curious as to why. I try to refrain from posting about things I do not know anything about- but this isn't the case here. I am giving ./ readers my honest, first-hand account of how I see things. Perhaps it was better suited for a journal entry, but either way, it did have relevance in the context of this topic. So what's the deal? Have I been trolling this forum and posting like a madman to just annoy others by sheer post volume? What makes some ./ modders decide to use the troll option on a post such as mine?
Yeah, but on my salary, I can't afford it. Hell, I'm lucky if I get to buy week-old bread to make margarine sandwiches with...
But Al Gore invented them.
Why am I doing this? Because I love it. Nonetheless, I would love it even more if I was given some props. AFAIAC, lawyers are scum (anyone going to disagree with me) who are in cahoots with the cops (disgruntled, fat, balding ex-jocks who are still in high school mode) and judges (ex-lawyers, determined to feed the system with dough to produce more cops, lawyers and judges), doctors are overpaid and overglorified mechanics (and they are WRONG many many times, especially when it comes to the care of the elderly) who are in cahoots with the insurance companies and the pharmecutical industry, and business people are money-grubbing wanted-to-be-something-else-but-couldn't-make-the- grade-in-college losers. Yet here all of these people make 10x+ as much as I will ever make, even at the peak of my earning years. It is a sad state of affairs. Anti-intellecualism is alive and strong in America, and I believe it is the root cause of this whole mess. Maybe if knowledge and research were better explained to the youth of this country, especially schoolchildren, things could change for the better in the future.
Want proof? It's in the pudding- the average American Physics undergraduate scores not in the 50th percentile, not in the 40th percentile, but in the 35th percentile, or lower. How can the average American be scoring in the 35th percentile? Thousands of foreign students are causing the scores to be skewed, especially the Chinese. At most major universities, half the grads are foreign, half are American. Up to 30% might be Chinese. Most become theoreticians, supporting themselves not on Research Assistantships, but as graders for grad physics courses. They are impossible to learn anything from due to an inability to speak English (most of the time, there are exceptions, of course). They also stick to themselves, not integrating with the rest of the grad student community in Physics.
We are not talking about predicting what kinds of particles will pop out of a high-energy collision of heavy ions, we are talking about what life will look like in 200 million years. The former is good science, the latter is not. Did anyone notice that the DC's productions on Neanderthals, Dinosaurs, and Prehistoric Beasts were full of the exact same type of pseudoscience speculation? Worst of all, they had the animals doing such things as looking at the camera repeatedly, and even spitting out water towards the TV screen!!! I mean, come on! This makes for great ratings (maybe), but pisspoor science, AFAIAC. They had the Neanderthals going around stealing women and raping them without a shred of evidence that such things occurred, save that in our modern human society they do. Baboons that make fish nets? It seems that there is an overanthromorphization of just about every creature that is CG-rendered by these programs.
Please, when you watch these programs, don't be afraid to enjoy them- but make sure you take them with a grain of salt. To a certain extent, I believe that these programs work against getting the American public to accept evolution as scientists do, instead encouraging misconceptions about basic principles of evolution, as well as providing fodder to anti-evolutionists. Hopefully, in the future, these will be done a bit more professionaly, with less emphasis on the art, and more on the science.
do newer mobo's even include a parallel port anymore? it seems that everything is going the way of USB, including printers.
Usually, what I have done is too simply look for a newer used computer that still has 1 ISA slot left in it. Pentium chipsets still have these here and there up to the Pentium III, and AMD chipsets can be found that use today's Athlon XP 2200's. I myself have a Tbird 1000 running on a KT7A-RAID motherboard that has 1 ISA slot at home, though I don't use the slot. When I built computers for the lab, I used this mobo because of this reason.
I cannot tell you all how many times I have come across this issue. I have seen some ISA adapters that cost upwards of several thousand dollars. Has anyone seen anything better and cheaper?
Shankar is too formal for most undergraduates. I like to use it as a reference for my grad classes. Quantum is not really learned at the undergrad level, just the basic concepts and a little bit of the formalism is introduced. IMHO, quantum mechanics is only grasped after tackling it at the graduate level.
As an aside, have you had a chance to read the 1916 paper he wrote, which in the middle treats the laser phenomenon? Everyone references it, but I wonder how many have actually read it (see the other thread). It is very hard to come across, and I spent about a year looking for an English translation (On the Quantum Theory of Light [electromagnetism?])... very frustrating. Not even the world-class library at Bell Labs had a translation, though they did have the original german manuscript...
In essence, I concur. It's a moot point, except that those outside of physics don't grasp why, which confounds me given the orders of magnitude argument.
Basically, formalism in quantum mechanics is expressing quantum mechanical ideas in the language of QM, namely linear algebra. Operators and observables (physical quantities like position, velocity, etc.) are represented either by matrices or " notation". This allows one to delve further into quantum mechanics, and allows one to use mathematics to predict phenomenon. In a sense, this complication of the mathematics for simple problems (like the hydrogen atom) allows one to do more complex problems (like the hydrogen atom in a magnetic field, where the energy levels of the orbitals will split).
So today, quantum is taught by trying to relate basic concepts in QM to those in classical mechanics (such as postition, energy, momentum, etc.) in the first few chapters in a book. Then to faciliate communicating QM ideas, formalism is introduced. It's like no one wants to write three plus two equals five, when 3+2=5 will suffice. This allows more difficult problems to be tackled more easily.
What Einstein disagreed with were things like the Uncertainty Principle, the EPR paradox (If he had lived to see it), and most likely even Schrodinger's Cat. He disagreed with the assumptions that led to these conclusions. So Einstein was most definitely NOT a supporter of quantum mechanics as we now know it. Even the greatest can be mistaken.
Are you using special or general relativity? The special case would be inapplicable due to the rotating frame...
Yes, but the canonical expression for uncertainty principles is in general hbar/2, not just hbar. Not that this really matters, since like you say it is the same order of magnitude. In general, the non-physicist scientists will use the former over the latter as a matter of convention.
So by your definition, everyone is working for profit, and cutting corners in all professions. I don't buy that heavy-handed argument. Plus, once one has tenure, in your worldivew, their no longer exists an incentive that makes one strive to put out papers quickly. That is not the reality, though.
>Again, bullshit. Maybe after you get tenure you are your own boss. But before that you spend considerable time answering to your department chair, the dean, the provost, the university president, funding agency program managers...
About what? If the deparment chair is a theoretical particle physicist, and I study experimental biophysics, how much influence will he have over my research? Answer- very little. Ditto with the provost, the university president, etc. The only one you were right on is funding agency program managers, but professors aren't paid by these agencies, they are paid by the university. The funding agencies are for operating costs of the lab, such as equipment, assistant salaries, travel expenses, etc.
I don't know where you are coming from, but I am speaking from my own personal experiences, having spent close to ten years in various labs in industry, government, and academia. I really don't think people miscite articles or don't bother reading them because they are in a big hurry to make personal profit. It just doesn't add up. Take it for what you will.
Companies can truly profit from research. Their research tends to be more application-oriented, and thus profit-oriented. They are doing research for a market. Academia is doing research for knowledge (for the most part). There is a huge difference.
You seem to think that there is no difference between academic research and industrial research. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are very distinct, and have completely different motives. If a scientist wanted to make money based off of productivity and profit, he works for industry, where the pay is substantially higher than in academia. There is also the added pressure of marketing departments, supervisors, human resources, etc. In academia, you are pretty much your own boss. They are completely different worlds. I've seen it with my own eyes at Bell Labs, TRW, and several universities, and also NASA. I think your assessment is a little misguided.
As far as twisting up evidence, yes, this does happen. But most definitely not 100% of the time. How was the solar neutrino problem ever discovered in the first place? How was a re-evaluation of the cosmological constant initiated? These (and many other ideas) were brought forth not because someone wanted their ideas to be put forth, but because their hypotheses did not match the experimental data! It most definitely is not bullshit. AFAIAC, science is still the most altruistic of professions, not to mention one of the most self-sacrificing.
I have this book- where might I find the treatment of this particular problem? Could someone at least give a chapter, if not page numbers?
I am by far no expert in superconductivity, but I have worked with superconductive materials here and there. This discovery seems very similar to that of MgB2, which superconducts at about twice the temp, 37K or so. If I remember correctly, wasn't that a type-I superconductor? It seems to me that this plutonium-based superconductor (is it just pure Pu?) would be a classical BCS type-I superconductor. Most type-II's tend to be really complex as far as their constiutent elements numbers and ratios, e.g. YBCO. Plus, 18K is well below 37K, so in the regime of classical type-I Tc's. Also, I think that the cooper pairs are probably being formed by the valence f-orbital electrons. Maybe a theorist can show that this yields the lowest possible ground state energy. Besides, Yb of YBCO fame is also in the same group of elements as Pu who have partially filled f-orbitals.
I mean honestly, I am sure that someone here can explain why DSL is fundamentally going to be limited as far as bandwidth and range goes. Copper is a very lossy media, and we already have better stuff out there like fiber optic, and even fiberless communications versus mutliplexed wavelengths (eg Lucent) or even things such as wireless LAN's (although with a more limited range).
The point is that what we need is something that is a complete departure from the paradigm of cable and DSL modems. That is the only thing that is going to allow us to ALL have broadband, and for the cheap, at very high speeds. I have no idea what it will be, though I think it will have to be some wireless technology. Until then, I think we are going to be stuck in this rut of a small number of broadband users who get to use a flawed and unsatisfactory system (except for those that just surf and check e-mail) due to speed constraints and whatnot.
Any ideas of a new system, or how long one might take to engineer? I'm guessing around 20-35 years.
None of these things will happen in the Earth's magnetic field. It is very dilute, and much weaker than 8 Tesla. It won't kill you, though it is responsible for the phenomena mentioned.