This story has no relevance to any of the usual slashdot themes. But it's obvious why it was posted. To get a few laughs out of corsets-for-men jokes. It's not like I had high expectations to begin with. But this is a new low.
> One option it presents is that the brain is an input-output device: give it a stimulus, and it will process it and respond. The alternative view is that the brain is simply doing its own thing, and stimuli act to modulate its activity, rather than direct it.
Oh my God, this is so stupid. I bet people really argue about this.
Put it this way: does Linux respond to stimuli or do its own thing? Is there any experiment that could help us decide? Two people could know the entire Linux source code back to front and inside out, and the source of every application running on it, and still disagree over this stupid question. Don't these people have real and meaningful phenomena to investigate?
I have to admit, the intensive/extensive distinction came to my mind too. It's not quite right, but it's on the right track.
Anyway, individual observers shouldn't see any change in any mass that they observe over a period of time that remains in the same location. In order to compare two different masses you need to bring them to a common location with common velocities, so again, you shouldn't see any difference, and no 'memory' exists, in their mass, of the path they took to bring them together. The only conceivable time when you might spot a difference is when you decide to measure that masses of two different objects moving at different velocities - but that's a tricky thing to do anyway, and I doubt anyone is doing that.
Not even the most solicitous parent in the world could possibly watch their teenage son for every minute of every day. I'm having difficulty imagining what kind of life you could have led that would allow you to avoid learning this fact. Are you maybe a monk or nun?
> There are a few circumstances I can see (jogging, maybe).
That's like saying "I can't see any use for a car. Maybe if you needed to travel from A to B, but that's all.". What planet are you living on? Have you looked at how many people jog or work out with mp3 players? For many people this is the only time they get to listen to music and is the reason they buy an mp3 player in the first place.
There is no twin paradox for mass. I've no idea where you got this idea from.
How much you age when you travel from event A to event B depends on the path you took to get there. This is known as the "twin paradox", though it's not actually a paradox. According to special (or general) relativity, your mass doesn't depend on the path you take. There is nothing anywhere in the theory of relativity that talks about such a dependency. There's no reason to expect masses at different latitudes to diverge in mass over time. There's nothing to explain. You've simply pulled an imaginary phenomenon out of nowhere.
In summary: your age (or "proper time") is a function of your path. Your mass isn't.
> Don't we have homeless, sick, and displaced people in our own country that should be cared for first before a money is spent frivolously on some stupid moon exploration?
Because if we made sure everyone was well and housed before we did anything interesting the world would be an extremely boring place. I stand just as much chance as anyone of finding myself a sufferer from Alzheimer's, or cancer, or Parkinson's, or some other horrible disease before my life is up, so I don't think I'm being selfish in saying that I'd like to see money spent on space research as well as medicine. After all, if I find myself dying of cancer, say, I'll take solace in knowing that though I die, at least the rest of humanity is making bold steps elsewhere. In fact, if humans stop making bold steps, I may as well die now anyway. What would be the point of being a member of such a pathetic race of beings?
Is that like the liar paradox (as applied to wombats)? You can't just take an effect, write "(as applied to X)" after it, and hope that somehow you've made something that makes sense.
> the main complaint I have about string theory is the endless crappy pop science documentaries with pictures of flashing loops of string that it's spawned.
I've never watched a pop science documentary about String Theory. I wonder if I'll get to the end of my life without every having watched one.
The only thing that bothers me about String Theory is that people aren't agnostic enough about it. You either believe or you don't, and if you show the slightest interest in it you must be a believer. If you mention something stringy in the presence of anti-Stringists they'll jump down your throat, and vice versa. Well I'm a String Agnostic, and I'm proud of it. I studied it, loved it, thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, but doubt it describes the world we know.
> Dark matter was not predicted by the Standard Model, it was bolted onto it after it was realized that large-scale structures could not be explained without it
You have a really bizarre picture of science. You don't have to predict everything in advance when doing science. When you do fundamental research you are defining the arena in which you think other phenomena take place. You don't expect to predict the existence of every single little thing that appears in that arena, you merely have to make sure that there is room in your arena to contain everything that you find. Similarly in biology, you can have a really good understanding of how genetics is explained by DNA, but you don't expect that model to predict what new species you'll find next time you go exploring in the Amazon. You only start worrying about your DNA theory when you find that the next species you find in the Amazon doesn't have any DNA. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - but that there might be matter out there that is hard to detect (but not impossible, and it even appears to be mappable) is hardly an extraordinary claim.
> Dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and other things that have never been directly observed are added after the fact
Black holes were never added after the fact, they are extrapolated from known and well tested physical models. Dark energy arises in a natural way from general relativity as soon as you add in a cosmological constant term. As Einstein had no justification for removing that term in the first place, it's entirely reasonable to work with this hypothesis. The existence of dark matter is being deduced using the same method that has been used through the centuries to detect things like the planets Neptune and Uranus - modifications to the expected path of gravitating bodies explicable through the postulation of other, as yet unseen, matter. What's being "added after the fact"? This is normal everyday science.
> Perhaps different approaches to the Standard Model get plenty of funding, but this is still a monoculture.
Pick up and read some physics papers. The Standard Model is barely even discussed in the majority. Consider the vast number of papers on supersymmetry, a symmetry that isn't even present in the Standard Model. I suspect that you don't even know what the "standard model" is. Not just the details of it. I suspect you don't even know what broad category of thing it is. There's nothing wrong with not knowing stuff, we all have to start out that way, but most of us have the sense to find out what we're talking about before we criticize the work of others.
> dare to question your sacred viewpoint
Please spare me the cliches about scientists defending sacred physical beliefs. I am defending no particular physical model here. I'm merely pointing out your ignorance about current trends in physics and stating that if you bother to read current research you'll find that (1) there is an incredible proliferation of papers on fundamental physics with a wide variety of different ideas and (2) what you call "bolting on" is simply ordinary physics as it's been practiced for centuries. I'm not using the word 'ignorance' as a form of insult. It's merely a statement of fact.
> content-free statements like "... turned upside down..."
Doesn't look content-free to me. There have been amazing advances in physics over the last 20 years. I've no idea what this has to do with indignation. It's a suggestion to you to get out of your armchair and have a look at what's been going on in physics recently. Dip into arxiv.org to see the diversity of work going on all over the world - whether it's the unification of disparate String Theories into a unified M-theory or the way the wackiest predictions of quantum mechanics have been borne out by the subtlest of mesoscopic experiments. That way, you can stop your own content-free blathering and make a contribution yourself rather than simply moaning about other people.
And sure - there are all kinds of problems in the physics world right now. But you'll need to do some more work before you understand what they are.
Well it's not like there's the Pontiff of Physics and he/she decides what everyone studies. Research students and researchers make choices about what to study based on what's open to them and what seems interesting/useful/plausible/correct at the time. It's not like these people are unaware of competing models such as loop gravity. So I'm not sure how you intend the phrase "isn't it time to move on?" to be implemented in practice. Fine people up who study strings? Despite the fact that people naturally gravitate towards the cool new thing, they're still flocking to String Theory. Clearly it's still compelling until someone finds a good place for everyone to "move on" to.
> no one who is willing to change things and try a totally different approach has any chance of receiving the funding and support that's necessary to get off the ground.
Um...physics has completely turned upside down in the last century and has changed pretty dramatically over the last 20 years. What kind of remote island are you living on that you're so out of touch and think that 'different' approaches never get funding? If you've never bothered to look at current research then you really don't have any right to speak, and it's obvious that you haven't. For example there has been ongoing debate for many years now between people who are searching for dark matter and proponents of MOND. There's nothing more annoying than pontification from ignorant armchair physicists.
That's an interesting opinion you have there. What do you think of the way that String Theory accommodates gravitons alongside lower spin particles in a single model? And what do you think of the way the proliferation of particle type in other quantum field theories can be cut down to a single string type (or maybe two in the case of Heterotic String Theory) in String Theory? Also, what do you think of some of the mathematics that has emerged from String Theory such as the proof of the Monstrous Moonshine conjectures by Richard Borcherds, as well as the contributions to geometry and topology by people like Kontsevich and Witten?
> Writeprint, which 'automatically...'...determine[s] who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%
Why bother? Why not just make a press release claiming that you can do this when you can't. Then you can (1) get government funding and (2) you might even serve a useful purpose by disrupting communications between terrorists dumb enough to believe the (false) claim.
> It's worth watching some old ones (especially the first two doctors)
Are these episodes different in character? I enjoyed Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker - but this was primarily because of the personalities that they portrayed.
Do you mean "hard science fiction" when you say "actual science fiction"?
I've watched hundreds episodes of Doctor Who in my life and almost all are simply stories from another genre with characters dressed in science fictiony outfits. Many episodes read as straight horror, or crime, or fantasy quests, rather than science fiction. For example, consider time travel. It's mostly just used as an excuse to have people wearing different period outfits in different episodes. Any time there might be an interesting consequence of a bit of time travel, the Doctor makes some excuse about paradoxes and closes off that plot direction. (Which is of course just an excuse for scriptwriters to avoid anything that might hurt their little brains.) Finally, after decades of waiting, Stephen Moffat has written a couple of stories that explore some of the consequences of time travel. It seems like he's the first writer they've had whose read some science fiction before in his life - as opposed to seeing tinfoil outfits in 50s science fiction movies and thinking that that was what science fiction was about. Is exploring time travel in anything other than a trivial way "hard science fiction"? I'm not sure it is. It's just plain science fiction.
Having said all that, I do like Doctor Who. But I like it for the fun character interactions, and the shiny science fictiony outfits, not because there's any science fiction content.
Slashdot Mirror
...tubes?
This story has no relevance to any of the usual slashdot themes. But it's obvious why it was posted. To get a few laughs out of corsets-for-men jokes. It's not like I had high expectations to begin with. But this is a new low.
Oh my God, this is so stupid. I bet people really argue about this.
Put it this way: does Linux respond to stimuli or do its own thing? Is there any experiment that could help us decide? Two people could know the entire Linux source code back to front and inside out, and the source of every application running on it, and still disagree over this stupid question. Don't these people have real and meaningful phenomena to investigate?
Well bully for him.
Anyway, individual observers shouldn't see any change in any mass that they observe over a period of time that remains in the same location. In order to compare two different masses you need to bring them to a common location with common velocities, so again, you shouldn't see any difference, and no 'memory' exists, in their mass, of the path they took to bring them together. The only conceivable time when you might spot a difference is when you decide to measure that masses of two different objects moving at different velocities - but that's a tricky thing to do anyway, and I doubt anyone is doing that.
Teaspoonfuls of honey in your coffee is not homeopathy.
Now we shouldn't even laugh at bad science. Heavens! Is there anything left we're allowed to laugh at?
Not even the most solicitous parent in the world could possibly watch their teenage son for every minute of every day. I'm having difficulty imagining what kind of life you could have led that would allow you to avoid learning this fact. Are you maybe a monk or nun?
> There are a few circumstances I can see (jogging, maybe). That's like saying "I can't see any use for a car. Maybe if you needed to travel from A to B, but that's all.". What planet are you living on? Have you looked at how many people jog or work out with mp3 players? For many people this is the only time they get to listen to music and is the reason they buy an mp3 player in the first place.
How much you age when you travel from event A to event B depends on the path you took to get there. This is known as the "twin paradox", though it's not actually a paradox. According to special (or general) relativity, your mass doesn't depend on the path you take. There is nothing anywhere in the theory of relativity that talks about such a dependency. There's no reason to expect masses at different latitudes to diverge in mass over time. There's nothing to explain. You've simply pulled an imaginary phenomenon out of nowhere.
In summary: your age (or "proper time") is a function of your path. Your mass isn't.
"why...you feel throwing money away is a good thing"
Why do you expect the expansion of the universe to somehow affect our perceptions?
Because if we made sure everyone was well and housed before we did anything interesting the world would be an extremely boring place. I stand just as much chance as anyone of finding myself a sufferer from Alzheimer's, or cancer, or Parkinson's, or some other horrible disease before my life is up, so I don't think I'm being selfish in saying that I'd like to see money spent on space research as well as medicine. After all, if I find myself dying of cancer, say, I'll take solace in knowing that though I die, at least the rest of humanity is making bold steps elsewhere. In fact, if humans stop making bold steps, I may as well die now anyway. What would be the point of being a member of such a pathetic race of beings?
Is that like the liar paradox (as applied to wombats)? You can't just take an effect, write "(as applied to X)" after it, and hope that somehow you've made something that makes sense.
You mean like Congress?
Damn! I'm always the last to know about these things.
In fact, pee into a bottle now and store it in your hiking/camping kit for emergencies.
I've never watched a pop science documentary about String Theory. I wonder if I'll get to the end of my life without every having watched one.
The only thing that bothers me about String Theory is that people aren't agnostic enough about it. You either believe or you don't, and if you show the slightest interest in it you must be a believer. If you mention something stringy in the presence of anti-Stringists they'll jump down your throat, and vice versa. Well I'm a String Agnostic, and I'm proud of it. I studied it, loved it, thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, but doubt it describes the world we know.
You have a really bizarre picture of science. You don't have to predict everything in advance when doing science. When you do fundamental research you are defining the arena in which you think other phenomena take place. You don't expect to predict the existence of every single little thing that appears in that arena, you merely have to make sure that there is room in your arena to contain everything that you find. Similarly in biology, you can have a really good understanding of how genetics is explained by DNA, but you don't expect that model to predict what new species you'll find next time you go exploring in the Amazon. You only start worrying about your DNA theory when you find that the next species you find in the Amazon doesn't have any DNA. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - but that there might be matter out there that is hard to detect (but not impossible, and it even appears to be mappable) is hardly an extraordinary claim.
> Dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and other things that have never been directly observed are added after the fact
Black holes were never added after the fact, they are extrapolated from known and well tested physical models. Dark energy arises in a natural way from general relativity as soon as you add in a cosmological constant term. As Einstein had no justification for removing that term in the first place, it's entirely reasonable to work with this hypothesis. The existence of dark matter is being deduced using the same method that has been used through the centuries to detect things like the planets Neptune and Uranus - modifications to the expected path of gravitating bodies explicable through the postulation of other, as yet unseen, matter. What's being "added after the fact"? This is normal everyday science.
> Perhaps different approaches to the Standard Model get plenty of funding, but this is still a monoculture.
Pick up and read some physics papers. The Standard Model is barely even discussed in the majority. Consider the vast number of papers on supersymmetry, a symmetry that isn't even present in the Standard Model. I suspect that you don't even know what the "standard model" is. Not just the details of it. I suspect you don't even know what broad category of thing it is. There's nothing wrong with not knowing stuff, we all have to start out that way, but most of us have the sense to find out what we're talking about before we criticize the work of others.
> dare to question your sacred viewpoint
Please spare me the cliches about scientists defending sacred physical beliefs. I am defending no particular physical model here. I'm merely pointing out your ignorance about current trends in physics and stating that if you bother to read current research you'll find that (1) there is an incredible proliferation of papers on fundamental physics with a wide variety of different ideas and (2) what you call "bolting on" is simply ordinary physics as it's been practiced for centuries. I'm not using the word 'ignorance' as a form of insult. It's merely a statement of fact.
> content-free statements like "... turned upside down ..."
Doesn't look content-free to me. There have been amazing advances in physics over the last 20 years. I've no idea what this has to do with indignation. It's a suggestion to you to get out of your armchair and have a look at what's been going on in physics recently. Dip into arxiv.org to see the diversity of work going on all over the world - whether it's the unification of disparate String Theories into a unified M-theory or the way the wackiest predictions of quantum mechanics have been borne out by the subtlest of mesoscopic experiments. That way, you can stop your own content-free blathering and make a contribution yourself rather than simply moaning about other people.
And sure - there are all kinds of problems in the physics world right now. But you'll need to do some more work before you understand what they are.
Well it's not like there's the Pontiff of Physics and he/she decides what everyone studies. Research students and researchers make choices about what to study based on what's open to them and what seems interesting/useful/plausible/correct at the time. It's not like these people are unaware of competing models such as loop gravity. So I'm not sure how you intend the phrase "isn't it time to move on?" to be implemented in practice. Fine people up who study strings? Despite the fact that people naturally gravitate towards the cool new thing, they're still flocking to String Theory. Clearly it's still compelling until someone finds a good place for everyone to "move on" to.
Um...physics has completely turned upside down in the last century and has changed pretty dramatically over the last 20 years. What kind of remote island are you living on that you're so out of touch and think that 'different' approaches never get funding? If you've never bothered to look at current research then you really don't have any right to speak, and it's obvious that you haven't. For example there has been ongoing debate for many years now between people who are searching for dark matter and proponents of MOND. There's nothing more annoying than pontification from ignorant armchair physicists.
That's an interesting opinion you have there. What do you think of the way that String Theory accommodates gravitons alongside lower spin particles in a single model? And what do you think of the way the proliferation of particle type in other quantum field theories can be cut down to a single string type (or maybe two in the case of Heterotic String Theory) in String Theory? Also, what do you think of some of the mathematics that has emerged from String Theory such as the proof of the Monstrous Moonshine conjectures by Richard Borcherds, as well as the contributions to geometry and topology by people like Kontsevich and Witten?
Why bother? Why not just make a press release claiming that you can do this when you can't. Then you can (1) get government funding and (2) you might even serve a useful purpose by disrupting communications between terrorists dumb enough to believe the (false) claim.
Are these episodes different in character? I enjoyed Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker - but this was primarily because of the personalities that they portrayed.
Having said all that, I do like Doctor Who. But I like it for the fun character interactions, and the shiny science fictiony outfits, not because there's any science fiction content.