That page has a clear bias. The Bible also talks about the "four corners of the Earth", and also suggests that by climbing a high enough mountain in the Middle East Jesus could see the whole world. While it's true that it was "known" in learned circles that the Earth was probably round for thousands of years, the vast majority thought it flat.
That's because without the reboost, such preperations would be pointless. So only AFTER reboost (which you now admit was planned) would they have started serious work on follow-on missions to Skylab.
You're overstating things a bit. The initial plan was simply to attach a reboost module to be flown on an early (2nd, later 5th) STS flight. Martin Marietta was awarded a contract for studying development of such a module with a goal of building it in less than 2 years. But then STS got delayed because of SSME problems, and then the atmosphere changed quicker than expected.
By your strict definition, during the same time frame, there were no "actual plans" for anything past STS-4... but we all knew what sorts of plans were in the works. If Skylab had still been up there are the time, "actual plans" would have materialized for at least reboost. Refurbishment would have been contingent upon necessary funding.
You're quite wrong here. The initial plan was to drop Huygens off in-bound, but they discovered a hardware problem post-launch that would have made receiving the signal in such a case impossible due to doppler shift. A new plan had to be drawn up for dropping Huygens off later, which did wind up consuming more of Cassini's fuel.
They invented a reason That's why it stings They don't think you matter Because you don't have pretty rings I keep telling you I don't care I keep saying there's one thing they can't change
I'm your moon You're my moon We go round and round From out here, it's the rest of the world that looks so small Promise me You will always remember who you are
Let them shuffle the numbers Watch them come and go We're the ones who are out here Out past the edge of what they know We can only be who we are It doesn't matter if they don't understand
I'm your moon You're my moon We go round and round From out here, it's the rest of the world that looks so small Promise me You will always remember who you are
Who you were Long before They said you weren't Anymore
Sad excuse for a sunrise It's so cold out here Ice and silence and dark skies As we go round another year Let them think what they like, we're fine I will always be right here next to you
I'm your moon You're my moon We go round and round From out here, it's the rest of the world that looks so small Promise me You will always remember who you are
There was one in an episode of Mission: Impossible. I also wouldn't be surprised if The Man from U.N.C.L.E. didn't flirt with the concept at some point.
"We'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks and switchgrass."
So that's entirely appropriate for the research stage. Perhaps calling that "championing" is a bit strong, but that's how the media spun it, and it was after all a big enough idea that it got mentioned in the State of the Union address.
So let me get this straight... when President Bush championed swithgrass in his State of the Union speech a couple of years ago, and the news folks sorta laughed at him, he was actually right?
You're close, but still wrong. "Anything that interacts" can't be a measurement. For example, photons that interact with other photons don't "measure" the other's state; if they did so, they would each collapse each-other's wavefunction, and we'd only see point particles, not interference patterns. So it has to be an interaction that collapses the wavefunction, and exactly how and when such events occur is not well understood. This is known as the Measurement Problem. However, recent work in Quantum Decoherence offers physicists a possible answer, but it's still a very murky and controversial area of study.
It does make some predictions about new particles, some new fields, and perhaps even proton decay. But actually turning the geometric model into actual predictive calculations may be problematic. And even if it can correctly predict the masses of certain particles, it may not be able to calculate various universal constants which are otherwise believed to be fundamental.
You have no idea how your reply makes me feel, as I'm someone who stopped studying physics as a Freshman in college and can barely grasp the basic ideas behind the whole thing.:) But a hallmark of your theory seems to be that it's conceptually understandable even to those who don't understand all of the intricate parts.
I admit I'm still a bit skeptical... I mean, if E8 is the answer, why did none of the other E8 approaches work? But you're doing some unique things in your approach and in them may lie the answer. Almost makes me wish I had stayed in physics, but the math is just beyond me.
Since the 50s, particle physicists have found ways of classifying particles intro groups, much the way Mendelev classified elements into groups via the Periodic Table. When doing this, they discover "missing" particles that fit within a certain group but were not yet known, thus giving such groupings predictive power.
Different groups have different symmetries. E8 is a group in Lie algebra. The group is "exceptional" and "simple" which is why the article is entitled tongue-in-cheekishly "Exceptionally Simple". The power and beauty of the E8 group has been known for a long time, and it's featured in many theories of physics that have tried to provide an framework for explaining the bewildered world of particles and forces that make up the universe.
What this author has done is use E8 in a new way to come up with a potential new theory that unifies all the forces and fields. This is not *strictly* a theory of everything, as there's a lot more that has to be answered, but if true it provides a geometric model that can give us insight into the underlying principles that are involved, just the way the Periodic Table does for elements.
The guy is no kook, but his theory leaves a lot to be desired. One problem is that E8 and other lie algebras and their associated symmetries have been well-studied for decades, and most all of them have run into intractable problems or incorrect predictions, so this may just be another beautiful theory that doesn't fit reality. Lisi uses a little-known method called "BRST connections" to make it all seem to work, which most physicists are unfammiliar with. Another is that his theory actually forces something physicists call as "spontaneous symmetry breaking" into the calculations to make it fit what we know to be true in the "standard model". Many people feel this is putting the cart before the horse; they would prefer a theory where the symmetry is broken in a "nautral" way and the "standard model" of the universe just naturally falls out of it. Lisi's theory doesn't really tell us WHY this is the case, it just says it is, but here's the symmetry that underlies it and which you apply it to.
Another problem is that the theory is still new and doesn't have an quantitative predictions as of yet... there's a lot of math that needs to be done, and it's not clear that such calculation *can* be done given the contraints of his theory. At issue is something known as the "Coleman-Mandula" theorem, which basically says a lot of what Lisi does in his theory doesn't work if there are subgroups in the algenbra that are equivalent to what are known as Poincare groups. Lisi says this doesn't apply to his new theory because it posits that the vacuum of spacetime doesn't have Poincare symmetry but instead is deSitter space. Well, the idea of deSitter space is well-known and has been examined in theoretical physics for decades as well, but there are a lot of problems with it. One is that the "Smatrix", which physicists love so much in making calculations in theories with Poincare symmetries, no longer works and simply becomes an approximation.
The theory also predicts a very LARGE cosmological constant, which is contrary to observation, but there are other theories that explain how this is not actually a problem, so that might not be an issue. Perhaps the largest obstacle of the theory, once the calculations can be figured out, is that it pretty much obsoletes all of String Theory in favor of something like Loop Quantum Gravity. This will make a LOT of string physicists very unhappy.
Lisi's theory will probably not be the last work in physics, but it might bring us a step closer to a real "Theory of Everything". The truth is physicists have been toying with similar geometric approaches and arrange particles in tables and trying to tie in gravity for decades now and every new theory looks great but never quite actually works out. The fact that the universe can *almost* be described via these methods probably tells us we're on the right track, but a true
Ummm... but you don't need papers to drive from state-to-state. No special papers anyway. Just a driver's license.
Now if you want to FLY from state to state, you also need a driver's license or state ID of some sort. The problem is that 'sort' is defined by the federal government, and several states are not complying. That's not a case where the federal government is restricting you from getting papers to travel; it's the *state* government refusing to issue you the appropriate ID.
The old "Papers, Please" line implies some sort of federal control over who is allowed to travel and who isn't. That's not happening here... you have fairly board freedom of travel withou such papers. The federal government is happy to give everyone an ID to let them travel to specific sites via specific modes, but the law as passed has the guidelines for that ID that states aren't following.
They also point out that the billions of comets in our solar system and across the galaxy contain far more clay than the early Earth did. The researchers calculate the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet at one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against. Okay, that seems like a simply calculation... given the total amount of clay all the comets, compared to the total amount of clay on Earth, and you're more likely to get like starting in a comet, if clay is factor. However, this doesn't include how much clay is on other planets, or asteroids. This method also doesn't addess the fact that life could start somewhere and then die. Of those billions of comets, very few ever actually *impact* the Earth, which is what would be required for life in one to spread here. So the real statistical comparison is the total amount of clay that has impacted the Earth from comets vs. the total amount of clay on Earth to start with, and in that case I suspect Earth wins. Life that may have started in a comet that never impacted Earth is rather irrelevant. (And we're just assuming all secondary paths, like comet -> Mars -> Earth are far less likely to consider.)
The main reason we sent a manned mission to Mars is money, but there are other obstacles as well. We don't have a vehicle capable of launching a large enough ship with all the needed supplies to Mars, nor a lander to get us to the Martian surface and then take off again. While you're right that we've had people on the ISS and other space stations for long periods of time, the weakness they suffer from bone and muscle loss makes it difficult for them to re-adjust to gravity. We don't know yet how production the astronauts could be in Martian gravity after so long in weightlessness.
It gets worse. We don't have spacesuits for handling the martian surface, either, and the radiation astronauts would experience is higher than recommended even with a shielded settlement. And the other big difference from the ISS is no way to escape in case of trouble... if the ISS gets hit, they can come home on a Soyuz, but if the Mars spacecraft gets hit en-route or coming back, they're dead.
Anyway, many proposals have been made for travelling to Mars and back relatively safely with current technology. But the time and effort to perform such a mission is still beyond what governments are willing to do right now.
What I don't like about his reasoning is his assumption that "hard" tests will test substantial knowledge that even the most educated test-taker will not get correct. I would submit that such tests are poorly designed, at least for a final/qualification test.
If your goal is to teach X amount of material and you want to give tests to see how far along a student is at learning X, then such a test is okay, as there will be naturally parts of X that you haven't even taught yet that the student is likely to get wrong. However, if you're now giving a final/qualification test where a good student is expected to know all of X, then the test should test for all of X, and no more. Many of the students should be scoring very close to 100%. In this way, guessing doesn't become a large statistical factor in overall score.
If you administer such a test and even the best students are missing half the questions, either you're testing for more than X, or X was not taught very well. Now, in college classes, we want X from different classes in different years, at least recent ones, to be equivalent; that is, we want the kid who got 100% on the test this year to know as much as the one who got 100% last year. So one needs to be careful about lowering the standards for what qualifies as X knowledge. However, statistically speaking, it's very unlikely for a college or professional class to have a "poor" year where everyone in the class is a poor learner so they can't even reach 100% of X even if taught properly. So I don't think it's a bad idea if test high score is only 50% on a final to either make the final easier or change one's teaching methods. The chances of it actually "dumbing down" the qualifications relative to previous years is small.
I'm wondering the same thing re: shielding, but I doubt they have a lot of spare parts of that sort of thing. Still, perhaps something could be jurry-rigged and a better solution sent up next flight. At this point it's only a theory, but if there's a hardware incompatibility with the new solar arrays it's going to be a difficult problem to solve.
All the russian computers are down again. There is a suspicion that the magnetic field generated by the new solar rays is interfering with their operation. If that's true then the ISS is in a bit of a pickle, since without the new solar arrays there's no power for the additional science modules that need to be added to the ISS, which means no need to fly the shuttle (or anything else) there anymore. Disconnecting the power from the new arrays may allow the computers to operate, but you're left with an ISS that close to useless.
If disconnecting the power doesn't fix them problem, then the situation is even worse... the station will have to be evacuated next Wednesday, and would no longer have attitude control. It is likely that it would tumble out of control before any new mission could be made, making it impossible to dock the the ISS and probably resulting in its eventual re-entry.
Post-launch in-orbit inspection has revealed a potential problem. There is a small four-inch tear or bunching of a thermal blanket on the OMS pod near the tail. It's not clear at this time if this will be an issue on re-entry. This area of the orbiter receives less heating on re-entry, but thermal protection is still important. NASA will probably release more details later today.
Slashdot Mirror
That page has a clear bias. The Bible also talks about the "four corners of the Earth", and also suggests that by climbing a high enough mountain in the Middle East Jesus could see the whole world. While it's true that it was "known" in learned circles that the Earth was probably round for thousands of years, the vast majority thought it flat.
Well they did kill your God.
That's because without the reboost, such preperations would be pointless. So only AFTER reboost (which you now admit was planned) would they have started serious work on follow-on missions to Skylab.
You're overstating things a bit. The initial plan was simply to attach a reboost module to be flown on an early (2nd, later 5th) STS flight. Martin Marietta was awarded a contract for studying development of such a module with a goal of building it in less than 2 years. But then STS got delayed because of SSME problems, and then the atmosphere changed quicker than expected.
By your strict definition, during the same time frame, there were no "actual plans" for anything past STS-4... but we all knew what sorts of plans were in the works. If Skylab had still been up there are the time, "actual plans" would have materialized for at least reboost. Refurbishment would have been contingent upon necessary funding.
http://www.spaceref.com/iss/skylab.deorbit.html
http://www.astronautix.com/flights/sts2a.htm
You're quite wrong here. The initial plan was to drop Huygens off in-bound, but they discovered a hardware problem post-launch that would have made receiving the signal in such a case impossible due to doppler shift. A new plan had to be drawn up for dropping Huygens off later, which did wind up consuming more of Cassini's fuel.
They invented a reason
That's why it stings
They don't think you matter
Because you don't have pretty rings
I keep telling you I don't care
I keep saying there's one thing they can't change
I'm your moon
You're my moon
We go round and round
From out here, it's the rest of the world that looks so small
Promise me
You will always remember who you are
Let them shuffle the numbers
Watch them come and go
We're the ones who are out here
Out past the edge of what they know
We can only be who we are
It doesn't matter if they don't understand
I'm your moon
You're my moon
We go round and round
From out here, it's the rest of the world that looks so small
Promise me
You will always remember who you are
Who you were
Long before
They said you weren't
Anymore
Sad excuse for a sunrise
It's so cold out here
Ice and silence and dark skies
As we go round another year
Let them think what they like, we're fine
I will always be right here next to you
I'm your moon
You're my moon
We go round and round
From out here, it's the rest of the world that looks so small
Promise me
You will always remember who you are
The balloons that drop at political events aren't filled with helium, smart guy. Otherwise they wouldn't DROP.
There was one in an episode of Mission: Impossible. I also wouldn't be surprised if The Man from U.N.C.L.E. didn't flirt with the concept at some point.
Actually, what he said was:
"We'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks and switchgrass."
So that's entirely appropriate for the research stage. Perhaps calling that "championing" is a bit strong, but that's how the media spun it, and it was after all a big enough idea that it got mentioned in the State of the Union address.
So really, Bush was right.
So let me get this straight... when President Bush championed swithgrass in his State of the Union speech a couple of years ago, and the news folks sorta laughed at him, he was actually right?
I mean, an orbital balloon flight would be a real first, not to mention a bit frightening.
You're close, but still wrong. "Anything that interacts" can't be a measurement. For example, photons that interact with other photons don't "measure" the other's state; if they did so, they would each collapse each-other's wavefunction, and we'd only see point particles, not interference patterns. So it has to be an interaction that collapses the wavefunction, and exactly how and when such events occur is not well understood. This is known as the Measurement Problem. However, recent work in Quantum Decoherence offers physicists a possible answer, but it's still a very murky and controversial area of study.
It does make some predictions about new particles, some new fields, and perhaps even proton decay. But actually turning the geometric model into actual predictive calculations may be problematic. And even if it can correctly predict the masses of certain particles, it may not be able to calculate various universal constants which are otherwise believed to be fundamental.
Garrett,
:) But a hallmark of your theory seems to be that it's conceptually understandable even to those who don't understand all of the intricate parts.
You have no idea how your reply makes me feel, as I'm someone who stopped studying physics as a Freshman in college and can barely grasp the basic ideas behind the whole thing.
I admit I'm still a bit skeptical... I mean, if E8 is the answer, why did none of the other E8 approaches work? But you're doing some unique things in your approach and in them may lie the answer. Almost makes me wish I had stayed in physics, but the math is just beyond me.
Good luck!
Since the 50s, particle physicists have found ways of classifying particles intro groups, much the way Mendelev classified elements into groups via the Periodic Table. When doing this, they discover "missing" particles that fit within a certain group but were not yet known, thus giving such groupings predictive power.
Different groups have different symmetries. E8 is a group in Lie algebra. The group is "exceptional" and "simple" which is why the article is entitled tongue-in-cheekishly "Exceptionally Simple". The power and beauty of the E8 group has been known for a long time, and it's featured in many theories of physics that have tried to provide an framework for explaining the bewildered world of particles and forces that make up the universe.
What this author has done is use E8 in a new way to come up with a potential new theory that unifies all the forces and fields. This is not *strictly* a theory of everything, as there's a lot more that has to be answered, but if true it provides a geometric model that can give us insight into the underlying principles that are involved, just the way the Periodic Table does for elements.
The guy is no kook, but his theory leaves a lot to be desired. One problem is that E8 and other lie algebras and their associated symmetries have been well-studied for decades, and most all of them have run into intractable problems or incorrect predictions, so this may just be another beautiful theory that doesn't fit reality. Lisi uses a little-known method called "BRST connections" to make it all seem to work, which most physicists are unfammiliar with. Another is that his theory actually forces something physicists call as "spontaneous symmetry breaking" into the calculations to make it fit what we know to be true in the "standard model". Many people feel this is putting the cart before the horse; they would prefer a theory where the symmetry is broken in a "nautral" way and the "standard model" of the universe just naturally falls out of it. Lisi's theory doesn't really tell us WHY this is the case, it just says it is, but here's the symmetry that underlies it and which you apply it to.
Another problem is that the theory is still new and doesn't have an quantitative predictions as of yet... there's a lot of math that needs to be done, and it's not clear that such calculation *can* be done given the contraints of his theory. At issue is something known as the "Coleman-Mandula" theorem, which basically says a lot of what Lisi does in his theory doesn't work if there are subgroups in the algenbra that are equivalent to what are known as Poincare groups. Lisi says this doesn't apply to his new theory because it posits that the vacuum of spacetime doesn't have Poincare symmetry but instead is deSitter space. Well, the idea of deSitter space is well-known and has been examined in theoretical physics for decades as well, but there are a lot of problems with it. One is that the "Smatrix", which physicists love so much in making calculations in theories with Poincare symmetries, no longer works and simply becomes an approximation.
The theory also predicts a very LARGE cosmological constant, which is contrary to observation, but there are other theories that explain how this is not actually a problem, so that might not be an issue. Perhaps the largest obstacle of the theory, once the calculations can be figured out, is that it pretty much obsoletes all of String Theory in favor of something like Loop Quantum Gravity. This will make a LOT of string physicists very unhappy.
Lisi's theory will probably not be the last work in physics, but it might bring us a step closer to a real "Theory of Everything". The truth is physicists have been toying with similar geometric approaches and arrange particles in tables and trying to tie in gravity for decades now and every new theory looks great but never quite actually works out. The fact that the universe can *almost* be described via these methods probably tells us we're on the right track, but a true
The old measurement was 1,565 +/- 266 LY.
Bower's new measurement is 1,270 +/- 76 LY.
Assuming both error bars are correct, then by combining the two measurements we get between 1,299 LY and 1,346 LY.
Reid's new measurement is 1,350 +/- 23 LY.
So combining again, we can conclude the Orion Nebula is between 1,327 and 1,346 LY away, or 1,336.5 LY +/- 9.5 LY.
Ummm... but you don't need papers to drive from state-to-state. No special papers anyway. Just a driver's license.
Now if you want to FLY from state to state, you also need a driver's license or state ID of some sort. The problem is that 'sort' is defined by the federal government, and several states are not complying. That's not a case where the federal government is restricting you from getting papers to travel; it's the *state* government refusing to issue you the appropriate ID.
The old "Papers, Please" line implies some sort of federal control over who is allowed to travel and who isn't. That's not happening here... you have fairly board freedom of travel withou such papers. The federal government is happy to give everyone an ID to let them travel to specific sites via specific modes, but the law as passed has the guidelines for that ID that states aren't following.
The main reason we sent a manned mission to Mars is money, but there are other obstacles as well. We don't have a vehicle capable of launching a large enough ship with all the needed supplies to Mars, nor a lander to get us to the Martian surface and then take off again. While you're right that we've had people on the ISS and other space stations for long periods of time, the weakness they suffer from bone and muscle loss makes it difficult for them to re-adjust to gravity. We don't know yet how production the astronauts could be in Martian gravity after so long in weightlessness.
It gets worse. We don't have spacesuits for handling the martian surface, either, and the radiation astronauts would experience is higher than recommended even with a shielded settlement. And the other big difference from the ISS is no way to escape in case of trouble... if the ISS gets hit, they can come home on a Soyuz, but if the Mars spacecraft gets hit en-route or coming back, they're dead.
Anyway, many proposals have been made for travelling to Mars and back relatively safely with current technology. But the time and effort to perform such a mission is still beyond what governments are willing to do right now.
What I don't like about his reasoning is his assumption that "hard" tests will test substantial knowledge that even the most educated test-taker will not get correct. I would submit that such tests are poorly designed, at least for a final/qualification test.
If your goal is to teach X amount of material and you want to give tests to see how far along a student is at learning X, then such a test is okay, as there will be naturally parts of X that you haven't even taught yet that the student is likely to get wrong. However, if you're now giving a final/qualification test where a good student is expected to know all of X, then the test should test for all of X, and no more. Many of the students should be scoring very close to 100%. In this way, guessing doesn't become a large statistical factor in overall score.
If you administer such a test and even the best students are missing half the questions, either you're testing for more than X, or X was not taught very well. Now, in college classes, we want X from different classes in different years, at least recent ones, to be equivalent; that is, we want the kid who got 100% on the test this year to know as much as the one who got 100% last year. So one needs to be careful about lowering the standards for what qualifies as X knowledge. However, statistically speaking, it's very unlikely for a college or professional class to have a "poor" year where everyone in the class is a poor learner so they can't even reach 100% of X even if taught properly. So I don't think it's a bad idea if test high score is only 50% on a final to either make the final easier or change one's teaching methods. The chances of it actually "dumbing down" the qualifications relative to previous years is small.
I'm wondering the same thing re: shielding, but I doubt they have a lot of spare parts of that sort of thing. Still, perhaps something could be jurry-rigged and a better solution sent up next flight. At this point it's only a theory, but if there's a hardware incompatibility with the new solar arrays it's going to be a difficult problem to solve.
All the russian computers are down again. There is a suspicion that the magnetic field generated by the new solar rays is interfering with their operation. If that's true then the ISS is in a bit of a pickle, since without the new solar arrays there's no power for the additional science modules that need to be added to the ISS, which means no need to fly the shuttle (or anything else) there anymore. Disconnecting the power from the new arrays may allow the computers to operate, but you're left with an ISS that close to useless.
If disconnecting the power doesn't fix them problem, then the situation is even worse... the station will have to be evacuated next Wednesday, and would no longer have attitude control. It is likely that it would tumble out of control before any new mission could be made, making it impossible to dock the the ISS and probably resulting in its eventual re-entry.
Things are not looking good.
Perfect Tommy: Emilio Lizardo. Wasn't he on TV once?
Buckaroo Banzai: You're thinking of Mr. Wizard.
Reno: Emilio Lizardo is a top scientist, dummkopf.
Perfect Tommy: So was Mr. Wizard.
http://exoplanet.eu/
Post-launch in-orbit inspection has revealed a potential problem. There is a small four-inch tear or bunching of a thermal blanket on the OMS pod near the tail. It's not clear at this time if this will be an issue on re-entry. This area of the orbiter receives less heating on re-entry, but thermal protection is still important. NASA will probably release more details later today.
Article: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?cid=5127
Image: http://www.cfnews13.com/uploadedImages/Media/Video /0037(4).jpg