And just to elaborate on what you've hinted at for others, the reason this will never make the LHC redundant is to do with that the LHC does not have a fixed centre of mass energy in collisions as as you said, they are composite particles so while the protons collide at centre of mass energy of 14TeV, the individual quarks and gluons collide with a variable centre of mass energy (depends how much of the momentum is carried by that quark/gluon) upto a maximum of 14TeV. Anything produced by this development would have a fixed centre of mass energy. Hence to discover any new particle you have to scan through the centre-of-mass energies manually so to speak which means you could well miss something interesting. At the LHC, the scanning of the centre of mass energies is automatic so to speak making it very difficult to miss the new physics resonance. Hence you build messy hadron machines to find something and then precision lepton colliders to study it in detail as lepton colliders need to know the energy of the particle they're studing in advance.
Okay I didnt read the whole guide, I read the summary of the guide (hey for slashdot thats pretty good) and was replying to the parent who also said it was $10 reading it from the guide. The fact that you have to pay $10 for wireless access at ohare is incorrect. The confusion is that the guide has a summary which is wrong. If you look at the top of the guide, the "Wireless Internet in Top 20 US Airports" section, it only lists the $10 price at Ohare and makes no mention of the $6.95.
So I appologise for saying the guide is wrong but at the very least the summary of the guide is missleading as it doesnt mention the $6.95. I think from looking at it more carefully they've made a typo, listing the Boingo provider twice.
It doesnt, I'm pretty sure I paid $6.95 last time I was there (August). According to my credit card statement, it cost me 3.78 pounds so unless the dollar tanked that day, no way was it $10.
As this is the one airport that I know the wireless price of and that its wrong in the list, I dont have much confidence in the rest of this list.
here's hoping the nunchaku is used for some sort of force push/pull, probably could take advantage of the rumble somehow. That could be so cool. Please Lucasarts, dont screw this up.
I know they are doing lead-lead (or otherwise the guys at ALICE will be very disappointed) but lead is very much matter last time I checked. I didnt know they were doing hydrogen-antihydrogen and I seriously doubt they are (atleast with the LHC). A hydrogen atom is neutral, how are you going to accelerate it up to a usefull speed? Secondly if you do somehow manage it (and I seriously doubt that), how are you going to keep the hydrogen atom together, you'll strip off the electron and be left with a proton or anti-proton. And theres no point to colliding ppbar together at the LHC energies. And what physics purpose does it have, a high energy atom-antiatom collision? All you'ld get is ep ee pp collisions, all of which have been studied better than you could do with this. I suppose you could do low energy annilhation of hydrogen-antihydrogen which may be usefull but you wouldnt do that with the LHC.
Sadly CERN does not research anti-matter in the sense you are thinking of. Anti-matter is unlikely to ever be a source of power as you have to make it. At best you could use it as a battery but thats so far off right now its science fiction because its really really hard to make anti-matter. At CERN's current production rate (people have been making and studing anti-matter for a long time now), we'll have enough anti-hydrogen to fill a ballon in about 25,000,000 billion years
Antimatter and its production mechanisms is fairly well understood with the exception of the matter-antimatter asymmetry we observe in the universe today. And incidently the LHC will be the first particle physics collider (I think, with the exception of heavy ion colliders) that will not use anti-matter particles in either of its two beams. Its a proton-proton collider unlike the Tevatron which is proton-antiproton. It gets round the seeming lack of anti-matter because protons actually contain anti-matter in the form of sea quarks and at high enough energyies you end up probing them rather than the valence quarks.
well kind of...
Depends on your defination of precision and guided. Look its the best we've got availible at the moment. Fear our soft foam missiles. Fear them.
What a plonker. Only fools (and possibly horses) would fall for being scammed by Del Boy.
Was the art scholarship to attend the "Peckham School of Fine Arts"?
For the Americans amoungst us who have no idea what I'm talking
about.
But isnt fermilab doing really well at the moment? Tevatrons running well, CDF and D0 are getting good results out (Bs mixing for one). Minos got a nice neutrino mixing result recently. More good physics is on the way, got a real shot at the Higgs before the LHC. Why is a change in management required?
I'm a particle physicist. Our computing needs are insane but massively parrallel, basically the grid is being developed for us and us alone although we figure that some other people might find a use for it. We spend the fast majority of our day to day job programming. And we're, with only a few exceptions, piss poor at it. Forget hand optimized assembly, I'm currently fighting a losing battle to stop people using x = pow(y,2) (and I have found that in our base software package, one suposedly written by the experts). However the solution usually is just to buy a faster machine to run it on.
"Half of the additives to the food you wont find in theirs - it makes a difference."
Too right, I'm a brit living in the US and myself and my fellow brits out here are greatly disturbed by how long milk, bread and fruit last here before going off. You just know what ever it is that causes it, it probably aint good for you.
I seriously wonder why this comment was moded redundant. I find this a relevant reply to my comment, the poster is completely correct and he's probably well clued up from knowing that if Alex gave a (well not "the" but that I can say is a typo) plenary session at the APS meeting he would be well respected (and if this idea was seen as plausable, he would be giving that talk). Also I think the slashdot image he posted well reflected the topic.
Thanks, but it wasnt listed on the website. And if he was a serious physicist, I would expect him to say "blah blah blah, I am a research fellow (or whatever Stanford call post docs) at Stanford." I only briefly searched for him in the post docs/prof list.
I find its very interesting that he's only an affiliate as you've found. Pretty much files him under junk scientist. I really wish slashdot and other site wouldnt report these sort of things. It harms science because these people are not scientists but appear so to the layman. And when they are found to be full of s**te, it diminises proper scientists in the eyes of layman. Proper science is objective, pure reasoning and utter respect for experimental evidence and the Scientific Method. These guys have some pet theory they have become obsessed with, explains may one or two effects at best and disregards everything else. Its just not science.
Not meaning to troll or anything but this has quite a few of the silly science traits.
Not saying its junk but a healthy skeptical approach is necessary here.
Basically if it was the genuine article, I would expect the website to list his position with Standford (he appears not be facutly) and his previous work. I didnt see that. The power point presentation has all the signs such as lots of pretty graphs and pictures which "prove" this (although admittedly this is better than most) and a lot of big words. What I would expect to see is a bit of hard maths and maybe one example, he's coming on far too eager. Also he focuses on what it fixes, what does it break? I want some predictions for experiments to measure. Its easy to explain one or two effects with a theory, the real test is what does it predict. I would also expect a link to a preprint explaining this and its abstract. I would go so far that any serious scientist would post a preprint on xxx.lanl.gov as the first step of going public.
I'm very doubious about any werid and wonderfull theory coming from somebody who is outside the world of science, as theres a lot of chafe out there. Just go the poster session of the APS annual meeting to see what I mean. Okay its helpfull to keep an open mind, Einstein came from the outside with his really werid seemly crackpot theories but that happens rarely.
Now just to point out I'm not saying its junk, I havnt read it yet, just saying it appears to raise of a few of the warning flags.
Think a DNA scanner embedded in the lip of your bottle reading all 3 gigabytes of your base pair genetic data in a fraction of a second, fine-tuning your individual hormonal cocktail in real time using our patented Auto-Drink(TM) technology, and slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex.
No one knows quite why it does this be it then invaribably produces something almost, but not entirely, unlike tea. Guess thats why its a still a beta....
Didnt find it funny, well then tough, go stick your head in a pig.
I completely agree, at the time most fundamental physics research seems completely pointless at the time but often in 60-80 years time its extremely important. Take the example of quantum mechanics, in the early 1900s, researching into being able to explain the precise movements and behaviour of subattomic particles, effects so small they had no practical application in everyday life may have seemed a bit pointless. 60 years later the understanding this lead to the invention of the transistor, which some people might argue is of some importance in todays world.
Anyway as an aside, evidence for extra dimensions != evidence for string theory. String theory isnt the only model which predicts extra dimensions. Evidence for no extra dimensions is evidence that string theory doesnt exist. However we'ld probably have to go to the planck scale to be sure which is probably impossible for the time being. Anyway we're far more likely to pick up string theory by the breaking of the E6 symetry group which produces extra massive neutral gauge bosons (Z').
Just your friendly neighbourhood extra dimensional researcher (CDF expt, Fermilab)
On a side note, when you start losing magnetic field integrity in CDFs tracker, the twilight zone theme starts playing as an alarm. Never thought much of it (apart from really freaking me out the first time I heard it late at night) but after reading this article, perhaps its meant to warn you that you may be that you may be entering another dimension where time and space have no meaning...
If we take the speed of light to be the speed of a massless particle in a vacuum (to get round the silly arguement that photons being light always travel at the speed of light), you can find that light can and often does travel at a speed less than the speed of light. In fact, unless you are in a vaccum, any light you will be seeing is actually traveling slower than the speed of light. What happens is that the photon through interactions with the medium it is traveling through picks up a "mass" which can be imaginary. It is possible in a given medium to travel faster than light, and if you do so (and are charged), you start to emit Cherenkov radiation
Cherenkov radiation. The blue glow you see around nuclear reactors is from this effect. So instead of accelerating to the speed of light, what you can do is reduce your mass to zero. Easy for photons, less easy for the rest of us although the mass of the particle is just the mass it "wants" to have not the mass it actually has to have.
Ep IV was just star wars on its orginal release. However it was changed on April 10th 1981 to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope to fit in with Empire Strikes Back. I know this as I once bet a friend that it had always been Episode IV, or atleast it had been my entire life as like you I was sure I had always seen the ep4. As it turns out, it kinda sucked that I was born April 8th 1981.
No, obedience or non-obedience of the Pauli exclusion principle does define what is a fermion or a boson. Its a common misunderstanding that the defination is based on spin. The defining property of a fermion and a boson is that a fermions probability amplitudes add with a minus sign and a bosons probablitly amplitudes add with a postive sign, ie in other word fermions obey the Pauli exclusion princible and bosons do not. The fact that fermions have half integer spin and bosons have integer spin is a complicated consquence of quantum field theory and relativity and does not define whether its a fermion or boson. That said, the obeying the Pauli exclusion princible requires the particle to be half integer spin and vice versa which is why the true defination is usually miss-stated. See "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" III 4-3 for further details.
Just your friendly neighourhood fermilab particle physicist
Slashdot Mirror
And just to elaborate on what you've hinted at for others, the reason this will never make the LHC redundant is to do with that the LHC does not have a fixed centre of mass energy in collisions as as you said, they are composite particles so while the protons collide at centre of mass energy of 14TeV, the individual quarks and gluons collide with a variable centre of mass energy (depends how much of the momentum is carried by that quark/gluon) upto a maximum of 14TeV. Anything produced by this development would have a fixed centre of mass energy. Hence to discover any new particle you have to scan through the centre-of-mass energies manually so to speak which means you could well miss something interesting. At the LHC, the scanning of the centre of mass energies is automatic so to speak making it very difficult to miss the new physics resonance. Hence you build messy hadron machines to find something and then precision lepton colliders to study it in detail as lepton colliders need to know the energy of the particle they're studing in advance.
Okay I didnt read the whole guide, I read the summary of the guide (hey for slashdot thats pretty good) and was replying to the parent who also said it was $10 reading it from the guide. The fact that you have to pay $10 for wireless access at ohare is incorrect. The confusion is that the guide has a summary which is wrong. If you look at the top of the guide, the "Wireless Internet in Top 20 US Airports" section, it only lists the $10 price at Ohare and makes no mention of the $6.95.
So I appologise for saying the guide is wrong but at the very least the summary of the guide is missleading as it doesnt mention the $6.95. I think from looking at it more carefully they've made a typo, listing the Boingo provider twice.
It doesnt, I'm pretty sure I paid $6.95 last time I was there (August). According to my credit card statement, it cost me 3.78 pounds so unless the dollar tanked that day, no way was it $10.
As this is the one airport that I know the wireless price of and that its wrong in the list, I dont have much confidence in the rest of this list.
And just before I posted this, I figured why not google it to make sure
http://www.flychicago.com/ohare/about/ORDFAQ.shtm
This list is wrong.
here's hoping the nunchaku is used for some sort of force push/pull, probably could take advantage of the rumble somehow. That could be so cool. Please Lucasarts, dont screw this up.
I know they are doing lead-lead (or otherwise the guys at ALICE will be very disappointed) but lead is very much matter last time I checked. I didnt know they were doing hydrogen-antihydrogen and I seriously doubt they are (atleast with the LHC). A hydrogen atom is neutral, how are you going to accelerate it up to a usefull speed? Secondly if you do somehow manage it (and I seriously doubt that), how are you going to keep the hydrogen atom together, you'll strip off the electron and be left with a proton or anti-proton. And theres no point to colliding ppbar together at the LHC energies. And what physics purpose does it have, a high energy atom-antiatom collision? All you'ld get is ep ee pp collisions, all of which have been studied better than you could do with this. I suppose you could do low energy annilhation of hydrogen-antihydrogen which may be usefull but you wouldnt do that with the LHC.
Sadly CERN does not research anti-matter in the sense you are thinking of. Anti-matter is unlikely to ever be a source of power as you have to make it. At best you could use it as a battery but thats so far off right now its science fiction because its really really hard to make anti-matter. At CERN's current production rate (people have been making and studing anti-matter for a long time now), we'll have enough anti-hydrogen to fill a ballon in about 25,000,000 billion years
Antimatter and its production mechanisms is fairly well understood with the exception of the matter-antimatter asymmetry we observe in the universe today. And incidently the LHC will be the first particle physics collider (I think, with the exception of heavy ion colliders) that will not use anti-matter particles in either of its two beams. Its a proton-proton collider unlike the Tevatron which is proton-antiproton. It gets round the seeming lack of anti-matter because protons actually contain anti-matter in the form of sea quarks and at high enough energyies you end up probing them rather than the valence quarks.
well kind of...
Depends on your defination of precision and guided. Look its the best we've got availible at the moment. Fear our soft foam missiles. Fear them.
What a plonker. Only fools (and possibly horses) would fall for being scammed by Del Boy.
Was the art scholarship to attend the "Peckham School of Fine Arts"?
For the Americans amoungst us who have no idea what I'm talking about.
Bundling fava beans with the "Silence of the Lambs" might not be an amazingly good idea though...
Especially with a nice bottle of chianti.
But isnt fermilab doing really well at the moment? Tevatrons running well, CDF and D0 are getting good results out (Bs mixing for one). Minos got a nice neutrino mixing result recently. More good physics is on the way, got a real shot at the Higgs before the LHC. Why is a change in management required?
I'm a particle physicist. Our computing needs are insane but massively parrallel, basically the grid is being developed for us and us alone although we figure that some other people might find a use for it. We spend the fast majority of our day to day job programming. And we're, with only a few exceptions, piss poor at it. Forget hand optimized assembly, I'm currently fighting a losing battle to stop people using x = pow(y,2) (and I have found that in our base software package, one suposedly written by the experts). However the solution usually is just to buy a faster machine to run it on.
"Half of the additives to the food you wont find in theirs - it makes a difference."
Too right, I'm a brit living in the US and myself and my fellow brits out here are greatly disturbed by how long milk, bread and fruit last here before going off. You just know what ever it is that causes it, it probably aint good for you.
Yestarday, all my copyrights expired so far away
Now* it looks as though they're here to stay
Oh, I belive in royalty pay
*thanks to Evil Mega Corp (c) lobbying agency
Yeah looking at it now I've had time, you're right its junk. And I think you're spot on on your diagnoisis of this.
I seriously wonder why this comment was moded redundant. I find this a relevant reply to my comment, the poster is completely correct and he's probably well clued up from knowing that if Alex gave a (well not "the" but that I can say is a typo) plenary session at the APS meeting he would be well respected (and if this idea was seen as plausable, he would be giving that talk). Also I think the slashdot image he posted well reflected the topic.
Thanks, but it wasnt listed on the website. And if he was a serious physicist, I would expect him to say "blah blah blah, I am a research fellow (or whatever Stanford call post docs) at Stanford." I only briefly searched for him in the post docs/prof list.
I find its very interesting that he's only an affiliate as you've found. Pretty much files him under junk scientist. I really wish slashdot and other site wouldnt report these sort of things. It harms science because these people are not scientists but appear so to the layman. And when they are found to be full of s**te, it diminises proper scientists in the eyes of layman. Proper science is objective, pure reasoning and utter respect for experimental evidence and the Scientific Method. These guys have some pet theory they have become obsessed with, explains may one or two effects at best and disregards everything else. Its just not science.
Not meaning to troll or anything but this has quite a few of the silly science traits. Not saying its junk but a healthy skeptical approach is necessary here.
Basically if it was the genuine article, I would expect the website to list his position with Standford (he appears not be facutly) and his previous work. I didnt see that. The power point presentation has all the signs such as lots of pretty graphs and pictures which "prove" this (although admittedly this is better than most) and a lot of big words. What I would expect to see is a bit of hard maths and maybe one example, he's coming on far too eager. Also he focuses on what it fixes, what does it break? I want some predictions for experiments to measure. Its easy to explain one or two effects with a theory, the real test is what does it predict. I would also expect a link to a preprint explaining this and its abstract. I would go so far that any serious scientist would post a preprint on xxx.lanl.gov as the first step of going public.
I'm very doubious about any werid and wonderfull theory coming from somebody who is outside the world of science, as theres a lot of chafe out there. Just go the poster session of the APS annual meeting to see what I mean. Okay its helpfull to keep an open mind, Einstein came from the outside with his really werid seemly crackpot theories but that happens rarely.
Now just to point out I'm not saying its junk, I havnt read it yet, just saying it appears to raise of a few of the warning flags.
Think a DNA scanner embedded in the lip of your bottle reading all 3 gigabytes of your base pair genetic data in a fraction of a second, fine-tuning your individual hormonal cocktail in real time using our patented Auto-Drink(TM) technology, and slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex.
No one knows quite why it does this be it then invaribably produces something almost, but not entirely, unlike tea. Guess thats why its a still a beta....
Didnt find it funny, well then tough, go stick your head in a pig.
I completely agree, at the time most fundamental physics research seems completely pointless at the time but often in 60-80 years time its extremely important. Take the example of quantum mechanics, in the early 1900s, researching into being able to explain the precise movements and behaviour of subattomic particles, effects so small they had no practical application in everyday life may have seemed a bit pointless. 60 years later the understanding this lead to the invention of the transistor, which some people might argue is of some importance in todays world.
Anyway as an aside, evidence for extra dimensions != evidence for string theory. String theory isnt the only model which predicts extra dimensions. Evidence for no extra dimensions is evidence that string theory doesnt exist. However we'ld probably have to go to the planck scale to be sure which is probably impossible for the time being. Anyway we're far more likely to pick up string theory by the breaking of the E6 symetry group which produces extra massive neutral gauge bosons (Z').
Just your friendly neighbourhood extra dimensional researcher (CDF expt, Fermilab)
More Star Wars http://www.starwars.com/databank/starship/tiefight er/
Looks like we're halfway there....
Well I'm sitting over a 4.2 Tesla field so hopefully none.
On a side note, when you start losing magnetic field integrity in CDFs tracker, the twilight zone theme starts playing as an alarm. Never thought much of it (apart from really freaking me out the first time I heard it late at night) but after reading this article, perhaps its meant to warn you that you may be that you may be entering another dimension where time and space have no meaning...
Missed the inevitable:
"Hmm, just about enough time for a cupa left, be a dear and stick the kettle on old chap"
If we take the speed of light to be the speed of a massless particle in a vacuum (to get round the silly arguement that photons being light always travel at the speed of light), you can find that light can and often does travel at a speed less than the speed of light. In fact, unless you are in a vaccum, any light you will be seeing is actually traveling slower than the speed of light. What happens is that the photon through interactions with the medium it is traveling through picks up a "mass" which can be imaginary. It is possible in a given medium to travel faster than light, and if you do so (and are charged), you start to emit Cherenkov radiation Cherenkov radiation. The blue glow you see around nuclear reactors is from this effect. So instead of accelerating to the speed of light, what you can do is reduce your mass to zero. Easy for photons, less easy for the rest of us although the mass of the particle is just the mass it "wants" to have not the mass it actually has to have.
Ep IV was just star wars on its orginal release. However it was changed on April 10th 1981 to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope to fit in with Empire Strikes Back. I know this as I once bet a friend that it had always been Episode IV, or atleast it had been my entire life as like you I was sure I had always seen the ep4. As it turns out, it kinda sucked that I was born April 8th 1981.
No, obedience or non-obedience of the Pauli exclusion principle does define what is a fermion or a boson. Its a common misunderstanding that the defination is based on spin. The defining property of a fermion and a boson is that a fermions probability amplitudes add with a minus sign and a bosons probablitly amplitudes add with a postive sign, ie in other word fermions obey the Pauli exclusion princible and bosons do not. The fact that fermions have half integer spin and bosons have integer spin is a complicated consquence of quantum field theory and relativity and does not define whether its a fermion or boson. That said, the obeying the Pauli exclusion princible requires the particle to be half integer spin and vice versa which is why the true defination is usually miss-stated. See "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" III 4-3 for further details.
Just your friendly neighourhood fermilab particle physicist