> We can't really be certain about that until/unless they detect something.
If waves aren't detected and the equipment is examined again and again and everything looks in working order, then at that point it'll start becoming clear that there are no gravity waves passing through. Obviously it could take a lot of work to do this, but if no waves are detected for long enough there would come a point where physicists would accept that the device is working.
> What is a gravitational wave composed of? of gravitons?
General relativity predicts that gravity waves exist. Quantum mechanics predicts that all energetic wavelike phenomena can be thought of as made up of particles. So putting the two together suggests that gravity waves can be thought of as being made up of particles, and a good name for these particles is 'graviton'. But there are big problems with combining general relativity and quantum mechanics and there isn't a very good theory of gravitons. Physicists are still fairly confident that however the combination of these two theories works out, it'll probably have gravitons in it, but a lot of physicists probably wouldn't stake their lives on that because we just don't (yet) have a good physical model.
> gravitons are not proven to exist.
Neither gravity waves nor gravitons have been detected.
> If a gravitational wave has energy (as well as momentum and angular momentum) then what kind of energy is contained in the wave?
Gravitational energy.
> where does this energy come from?
Whatever generated the gravity wave in the first place. For example this pulsar is in a binary star system. The theory of general relativity predicts that it should lose energy through gravity waves. It does in fact seem to lose energy at the same rate as predicted. So the energy of the gravity waves comes from the energy that the binary star system used to have due to its rotation.
Actually, there are a lot of subtleties in discussions about the energy of gravity waves as it's tricky to pin down exactly where the energy is. But what I've said above is a good approximate start.
A gravity wave is, by definition, a phenomenon that causes certain effects. The LIGO device detects such effects. So the LIGO device can detect gravity waves. Whether or not gravity waves have been detected is completely irrelevant. If some kind of wave zips by LIGO and LIGO fails to detect it, then it can't be a gravity wave. And if gravity waves don't exist at all, then LIGO can never fail to detect one.
> The original proton was not moved.
D'oh! If the proton moved it wouldn't be called teleportation, it would be calling moving. You know, like when you move your hand.
> matter or information is dematerialized, usually instantaneously, at one point and recreated at another
Yes, and this is completely indistinguishable from what you just described. The proton at the destination is completely indistinguishable from the one at the beginning. I'm not sure what else you want.
How can you possibly say that something was not transported? Before the experiment there's a proton in state A at location X. Afterwards there's a proton in state A at location Y. Given that all protons are absolutely identical apart from their state, and that the state was reproduced at Y, how can this under any circumstances whatsoever be considered as anything other than teleportation? What else could the word teleportation mean? That's not meant rhetorically. I want to know what you actually think the word could mean.
This is, of course, pure BS. It's just psyops. The goal is to make press releases about all kinds of non-existent technological advances in an attempt to discourage certain people from even trying to board aircraft.
> Wow, you have republicans in Britain?
Yes, they're called New Labour, and like Republicans they like invading countries populated by non-white people. We also have Conservatives who are even worse, but let's not even talk about them.
When you're using logic, you typically have propositions and you end up proving those propositions true or false. So logic is about deciding whether or not X is true or false.
How does your notion of faith work? Do you have faith in X where X is a proposition like "God exists". Or is X a state of affairs, or some kind of object, so you'd say something like "I have faith it'll work out in the end". Or is X something from a completely different class?
The reason I ask is this: there are times when people seem to have faith in X, but then scientists say X is false, and we end up with a conflict. This conflict doesn't come about because someone has decided to pit logic vs. faith. It comes about simply because two different groups say opposing things. So what I want to understand is what you do when you have "I have faith in X" and "X is false". Maybe this could never happen because faith doesn't apply to the things logic does. But I don't know, after all there are lots of people who seem to have faith in "Creation".
> Logic is something mostly objective, and provable in a mathematical sense.
Logic is "provable in a mathematical sense"? What in heaven's name are you talking about? Logic is the tool by which you prove things. You can't prove "logic". In fact, I challenge you to either "prove logic in a mathematical sense" or admit that you just strung together a bunch of long words to give yourself an air of authority. (It worked, you were modded up.)
> the only truly logical behavior is utterly self-serving
No it's not. As Bertrand Russell once said, logic doesn't tell you what to achieve, but once you've decided what you want to achieve, logic is the best way to achieve it. Logic doesn't dictate your values, and having a set of values doesn't make you delusional.
It is impossible to run a full simulation of the universe you are in, since it would automatically multiply the complexity of the universe infinitely (a simulation inside a simulation, etc).
The same argument shows that you can't possibly write a quine. And here's a link to a few hundred quines that people have successfully written.
Page 14 of the paper lists a bunch of features of the universe and the corresponding reason why they follow from the universe as VR hypothesis. It's pretty clear that given *any* state of affairs in a hypothetical universe he could come up with a story about how it follows from a simulation. "There is a universal speed limit c", that must be because there's a limit on processing speed. "Some effects seem to go faster than c", that must be because a computer could have random access to any part of the simulation. After Empedocles,it was a common notion that the universe was made of 4 elements. He'd fit that into his model by explaining that there are precisely two bits to represent the content of each point of space. Unless this guy comes up with constraints on the possible laws of physics that we can test, this paper is no better than a conversation between two very stoned hippies. "Hey man, I have this really far out idea...".
But not all our dreams contain threats. That's not surprising, says Revonuso. There's no reason a biological system has to express its function at all times...
It's a clever move. It makes the theory immune to falsification. Of course that also makes this theory pseudo-science, but you hope people won't notice that. In fact the analogy with sperm is flawed. The fact that there are many sperm that fail to fertilize an egg does stand in need of explanation. See Matt Ridley's book "The Red Queen" for some discussion of this. Similarly non-threat dreams stand in need of explanation.
My penis is microscopic and doesn't even work most days, not that I've ever had an opportunity to use it properly. Does me saying that make you feel better? Does having an average sized penis make you feel better about showing off your ignorance?
That Wikipedia article is very misleading, chess is completely the wrong type of game and that's the worst example to start with. There is no numerical payoff assigned to wining, losing or drawing a game of chess. Pick up any book on game theory and you'll find that any discussion of zero-sumness is entirely separate from discussion of combinatorial games like chess. Zero-sumness refers to games in which there is some kind of payoff (eg. at the end of each round) and the total paid out is zero. You can extend the notion of zero-sumness metaphorically to chess by simply pointing out that both players can't win. Or maybe you can assign +1 for a win, -1 for losing, and 0 for a draw. But even if you assign scores this way, it still doesn't fit the model because it is a complete knowledge came. In the language of the kind of game theory that discusses zero-sumness it's a completely deterministic game and there's nothing to say about it. In fact, try to draw up the payoff matrix for chess along the lines of the example given on the wikipedia page you'll get something completely trivial (and we don't in fact know how to fill it in because we don't have a complete analysis of chess).
And even if we read zero-sumness in this extended sense, it still has absolutely no bearing on the question that was asked. The theory behind zero-sumness has nothing to say about what is a winning chess strategy. It's just a term you throw around to make yourself seem knowledgable.
> Let me guess, would those new operators be something like this?
No. Quantum computers are not just parallel computers and the new operations that quantum computing introduces are not simply parallel operations on arrays. (Is that what you were getting at?) If that were the case, Grover's algorithm would run in time O(1), not O(sqrt(N)). None of the nice quantum algorithms out there (eg. Grover's, Shor's) work simply because they do stuff in parallel (though doing stuff in parallel is an essential ingredient).
I was hoping to find a good "square root of not" article on Wikipedia but I settled for the American Scientist one. I think it's not bad, in the sense that it doesn't bombard the reader with too much theory, but when you come away from it you may be able to start playing with the ideas yourself (make sure you get past page 1 of course). If you know better, please post here.
I would never hold it against someone that they know nothing about quantum computers or nothing about games. But you have chosen to hold forth on these subjects in response to someone's questions without taking any note of the fact that you haven't the faintest clue what you are talking about.
> A variable will still be a variable
This is completely incorrect. The concept of a variable radically changes in a quantum computer because you are allowed superposed states.
> I'm not aware of quantum mechanics introducing any new operators
What in heaven's name are you imagining? Of course quantum mechanics introduces new operators. It completely turns classical mechanics on its head and introduces concepts that make no sense in a classical framework. Here's an example of a specifically quantum operator.
TSP is NP-hard, and quantum computers don't, as far as we know, make NP-hard problems solvable in polynomial time. Grover's algorithm, however, does allow you to search a database of N items in time sqrt(N) so it could provide many speedups to familiar algorithms.
> Chess, aside from being Zero Sum
Are you *trying* to look like an ignoramus? Zero-sumness has absolutely nothing to do with chess. Zero-sumness is about the payoff you get from game of incomplete information. It has nothing to do with the strategy you should use in a game of complete information like chess. I guess you just want to sound smart by throwing around technical terms you don't grasp.
> seriously doubt there is one unbeatable strategy, since a player cannot control the first piece the other player moves.
Woah! Where are you getting this stuff from? Are you just making stuff up as you write it? It's incredible. Whether or not a game has a winning strategy has nothing to do with whether you can control the other player's first move.
As I say, there's nothing wrong with not knowing stuff. But spouting garbage in response to someone's genuinely inquiring questions is nothing short of obnoxious and just serves to lower the signal to noise ratio on Slashdot.
Years ago I went to see the movie Static. I can't remember much about the movie, but the opening credits involved some sequence with static noise getting louder an quieter in waves.
Next time someone else giggled. A few more times and everyone was trying hard not to laugh. A few more times and the whole audience was in hysterics. It was one of the funniest cinematic moments ever, and it was just a bunch of credits played over some static. I think that was all the study I needed to know that "Film Enjoyment Is Contagious".
Slashdot Mirror
> We can't really be certain about that until/unless they detect something. If waves aren't detected and the equipment is examined again and again and everything looks in working order, then at that point it'll start becoming clear that there are no gravity waves passing through. Obviously it could take a lot of work to do this, but if no waves are detected for long enough there would come a point where physicists would accept that the device is working.
General relativity predicts that gravity waves exist. Quantum mechanics predicts that all energetic wavelike phenomena can be thought of as made up of particles. So putting the two together suggests that gravity waves can be thought of as being made up of particles, and a good name for these particles is 'graviton'. But there are big problems with combining general relativity and quantum mechanics and there isn't a very good theory of gravitons. Physicists are still fairly confident that however the combination of these two theories works out, it'll probably have gravitons in it, but a lot of physicists probably wouldn't stake their lives on that because we just don't (yet) have a good physical model.
> gravitons are not proven to exist.
Neither gravity waves nor gravitons have been detected.
> If a gravitational wave has energy (as well as momentum and angular momentum) then what kind of energy is contained in the wave?
Gravitational energy.
> where does this energy come from?
Whatever generated the gravity wave in the first place. For example this pulsar is in a binary star system. The theory of general relativity predicts that it should lose energy through gravity waves. It does in fact seem to lose energy at the same rate as predicted. So the energy of the gravity waves comes from the energy that the binary star system used to have due to its rotation.
Actually, there are a lot of subtleties in discussions about the energy of gravity waves as it's tricky to pin down exactly where the energy is. But what I've said above is a good approximate start.
A gravity wave is, by definition, a phenomenon that causes certain effects. The LIGO device detects such effects. So the LIGO device can detect gravity waves. Whether or not gravity waves have been detected is completely irrelevant. If some kind of wave zips by LIGO and LIGO fails to detect it, then it can't be a gravity wave. And if gravity waves don't exist at all, then LIGO can never fail to detect one.
What are you talking about? By having machines play our games for us, humans can finally move on and become truly free.
> The original proton was not moved. D'oh! If the proton moved it wouldn't be called teleportation, it would be calling moving. You know, like when you move your hand. > matter or information is dematerialized, usually instantaneously, at one point and recreated at another Yes, and this is completely indistinguishable from what you just described. The proton at the destination is completely indistinguishable from the one at the beginning. I'm not sure what else you want.
How can you possibly say that something was not transported? Before the experiment there's a proton in state A at location X. Afterwards there's a proton in state A at location Y. Given that all protons are absolutely identical apart from their state, and that the state was reproduced at Y, how can this under any circumstances whatsoever be considered as anything other than teleportation? What else could the word teleportation mean? That's not meant rhetorically. I want to know what you actually think the word could mean.
This is, of course, pure BS. It's just psyops. The goal is to make press releases about all kinds of non-existent technological advances in an attempt to discourage certain people from even trying to board aircraft.
> Wow, you have republicans in Britain? Yes, they're called New Labour, and like Republicans they like invading countries populated by non-white people. We also have Conservatives who are even worse, but let's not even talk about them.
Then a science vessel and work my way up to siege tanks and battlecruisers. My only question is this: is the Moon populated by Protoss or Zerg?
How does your notion of faith work? Do you have faith in X where X is a proposition like "God exists". Or is X a state of affairs, or some kind of object, so you'd say something like "I have faith it'll work out in the end". Or is X something from a completely different class?
The reason I ask is this: there are times when people seem to have faith in X, but then scientists say X is false, and we end up with a conflict. This conflict doesn't come about because someone has decided to pit logic vs. faith. It comes about simply because two different groups say opposing things. So what I want to understand is what you do when you have "I have faith in X" and "X is false". Maybe this could never happen because faith doesn't apply to the things logic does. But I don't know, after all there are lots of people who seem to have faith in "Creation".
Yeah, Challenger and Columbia exploded because they used Russian parts, right?
If your diamond is flourescent then you can grind it up and make bread from the resulting powder.
Logic is "provable in a mathematical sense"? What in heaven's name are you talking about? Logic is the tool by which you prove things. You can't prove "logic". In fact, I challenge you to either "prove logic in a mathematical sense" or admit that you just strung together a bunch of long words to give yourself an air of authority. (It worked, you were modded up.)
So you say, without an argument.
No it's not. As Bertrand Russell once said, logic doesn't tell you what to achieve, but once you've decided what you want to achieve, logic is the best way to achieve it. Logic doesn't dictate your values, and having a set of values doesn't make you delusional.
Page 14 of the paper lists a bunch of features of the universe and the corresponding reason why they follow from the universe as VR hypothesis. It's pretty clear that given *any* state of affairs in a hypothetical universe he could come up with a story about how it follows from a simulation. "There is a universal speed limit c", that must be because there's a limit on processing speed. "Some effects seem to go faster than c", that must be because a computer could have random access to any part of the simulation. After Empedocles,it was a common notion that the universe was made of 4 elements. He'd fit that into his model by explaining that there are precisely two bits to represent the content of each point of space. Unless this guy comes up with constraints on the possible laws of physics that we can test, this paper is no better than a conversation between two very stoned hippies. "Hey man, I have this really far out idea...".
The more good stuff the better. End of story.
My penis is microscopic and doesn't even work most days, not that I've ever had an opportunity to use it properly. Does me saying that make you feel better? Does having an average sized penis make you feel better about showing off your ignorance?
That Wikipedia article is very misleading, chess is completely the wrong type of game and that's the worst example to start with. There is no numerical payoff assigned to wining, losing or drawing a game of chess. Pick up any book on game theory and you'll find that any discussion of zero-sumness is entirely separate from discussion of combinatorial games like chess. Zero-sumness refers to games in which there is some kind of payoff (eg. at the end of each round) and the total paid out is zero. You can extend the notion of zero-sumness metaphorically to chess by simply pointing out that both players can't win. Or maybe you can assign +1 for a win, -1 for losing, and 0 for a draw. But even if you assign scores this way, it still doesn't fit the model because it is a complete knowledge came. In the language of the kind of game theory that discusses zero-sumness it's a completely deterministic game and there's nothing to say about it. In fact, try to draw up the payoff matrix for chess along the lines of the example given on the wikipedia page you'll get something completely trivial (and we don't in fact know how to fill it in because we don't have a complete analysis of chess). And even if we read zero-sumness in this extended sense, it still has absolutely no bearing on the question that was asked. The theory behind zero-sumness has nothing to say about what is a winning chess strategy. It's just a term you throw around to make yourself seem knowledgable.
No. Quantum computers are not just parallel computers and the new operations that quantum computing introduces are not simply parallel operations on arrays. (Is that what you were getting at?) If that were the case, Grover's algorithm would run in time O(1), not O(sqrt(N)). None of the nice quantum algorithms out there (eg. Grover's, Shor's) work simply because they do stuff in parallel (though doing stuff in parallel is an essential ingredient).
I was hoping to find a good "square root of not" article on Wikipedia but I settled for the American Scientist one. I think it's not bad, in the sense that it doesn't bombard the reader with too much theory, but when you come away from it you may be able to start playing with the ideas yourself (make sure you get past page 1 of course). If you know better, please post here.
> A variable will still be a variable
This is completely incorrect. The concept of a variable radically changes in a quantum computer because you are allowed superposed states.
> I'm not aware of quantum mechanics introducing any new operators
What in heaven's name are you imagining? Of course quantum mechanics introduces new operators. It completely turns classical mechanics on its head and introduces concepts that make no sense in a classical framework. Here's an example of a specifically quantum operator.
TSP is NP-hard, and quantum computers don't, as far as we know, make NP-hard problems solvable in polynomial time. Grover's algorithm, however, does allow you to search a database of N items in time sqrt(N) so it could provide many speedups to familiar algorithms.
> Chess, aside from being Zero Sum
Are you *trying* to look like an ignoramus? Zero-sumness has absolutely nothing to do with chess. Zero-sumness is about the payoff you get from game of incomplete information. It has nothing to do with the strategy you should use in a game of complete information like chess. I guess you just want to sound smart by throwing around technical terms you don't grasp.
> seriously doubt there is one unbeatable strategy, since a player cannot control the first piece the other player moves.
Woah! Where are you getting this stuff from? Are you just making stuff up as you write it? It's incredible. Whether or not a game has a winning strategy has nothing to do with whether you can control the other player's first move.
As I say, there's nothing wrong with not knowing stuff. But spouting garbage in response to someone's genuinely inquiring questions is nothing short of obnoxious and just serves to lower the signal to noise ratio on Slashdot.
Worse. You wake up and find that she's only half covered in whipped cream.
ssssshhhHHHHHHHhhhhh...ssssshhhhHHHHHHHhhh....sssshhhHHHHHHhhhhh...
Anyway, after the first few times someone giggled
sssshhhHHHHHHhhh...heh...ssssshhhHHHHHHhhhh...
Next time someone else giggled. A few more times and everyone was trying hard not to laugh. A few more times and the whole audience was in hysterics. It was one of the funniest cinematic moments ever, and it was just a bunch of credits played over some static. I think that was all the study I needed to know that "Film Enjoyment Is Contagious".