Not quite. It is in fact the kinetic energy of the plasma that is being transferred to the spacecraft; the electrical interaction is just the transfer mechanism. So, yes, the space station will be pushed back in a fashion more or less prescribed by Newton's 3rd Law. However, as mentioned above, the acceleration produced by the conservation of momentum is proportional to the mass, so if the space station is massive enough, this won't be a problem. Plus, I'm sure some corrective measures can be taken with orbits to minimize the effect.
I think it's fair to say that both Euler and Gauss surpass Newton as mathematicians, as well as some others. But you're right; as a jack of all trades, he is non pareil. In my humble opinion as a physicist and a mathematician:)
It is of immense importance to the theory of elementary particles, but the forces it governs involve quark interactions, and it is doubtful any technology will explicitly need a model of quark interactions for some time! Then again, I could be shortly eating my shorts...
I think most estimates put the human brain on the order of 10-100 TFlOps. That having been said, the brain is significantly more parallel than even BlueGene/L will be... although I imagine that with 130,000 "neurons,", a pretty convincing AI based on neural nets could be developed.
As always, I recommend Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" for a non-technical but interesting outlook on the eventual synthesis of the human consciousness with machines.
With a Libertarian president, we would never have been there in the first place. Well, possibly Afghanistan, but that would have been, as Badnarik says, with a declaration of war by Congress, and it most likely wouldn't have been the current half-assed job. Most of our problems in the last half-century have come--imho--from sticking our nose where is really doesn't need to be.
Aye, and it's entirely possible some of the SUSY Higgs particles will be in reach of the LHC; almost certainly *some* SUSY particle will. In any case, the Higgs has a pretty distinct decay channel (4 muons iirc) that, while it has some background, will be pretty easily detecable if Higgs exist. I'd say finding a particle with Higgs characteristics within the predicted energy range is pretty reasonable proof of *a* Higgs anyway:)
(And the Higgs found first will almost certainly be the lightest Higgs, since they'll be scaling energy up rather than starting off full steam ahead. The LEP pretty much eliminated any chance of Higgs under 130 GeV, and Tevatron has pushed that envelope up another good bit.)
wouldn't be a bad bet... I wasn't able to RTFA, but with the LHC going online at CERN within the next 5 years, I imagine the Higgs will be found within the decade, and that's pretty conservative. Most particle physicists are confident the Higgs exists, if only because its inconvenient failure to exist would knock most current unified theories into a cocked hat. Depending on the timeframe, 6:1 odds sounds like some fast cash!
It has to do with the total energy you can get. At relativistic velocities, E = gmc^2, where 'g' is the famous relativistic 'gamma', 1 / sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2). Here, relativistic effects are accounted for solely by gamma, so m is the particle rest mass, and the rest mass of an electron is about 1/2000th (I goofed on my previous post saying the factor as ~1000) that of a proton. So, for equivalent energies, you have a gamma approximately 2000 times higher for an electron than for a proton.
Now, synchrotron radiation, at relativistic velocities, is dominated by the gamma term -- in fact, it goes as g^4. Thus, this factor of 2000 becomes a factor of 1.6 x 10^13! That's why you can't use electrons at high energies! At least, not unless you have a WHOLE lot of power...
For more information, see this page:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particl es/synchrotron.html
It's useful to think of cyclotrons as the "big sticks" of particle physics, and linacs as the microscopes. Cyclotrons will almost always be able to reach a higher center-of-mass energy since they can "re-use" RF accelerating cavities. However, above certain energies, the synchrotron radiation of light particles becomes too lossy (iirc, the LEP at CERN used 10 MWs of power just to keep up with losses to synchrotron), so you have to move to heavier particles. That's why electrons are perfect for linacs.
While not as powerful, linacs can probe much more carefully than synchrotrons. Since electrons are believed to be point particles, they make MUCH less mess under collision than do hadrons or mesons, each composed of 2 or 3 quarks. Thus, assuming Higgs exists, LHC will *find* it, but it will take a linac to really zero in on its mass and characteristics in a way that it can solve some other physics questions.
Actually, curves do allow electrons. It's just that an accelerating particle radiates energy (synchrotron radiation), and that radiation increases exponentially as mass decreases. The LHC uses protons because their much larger mass (~1000 greater) siginificantly decreases synchrotron radiation. The previous accelerator at CERN, the LEP, occuped the same tunnel and used electrons and positrons. However, while the LEP could only reach energies of ~200 GeV, the LHC aims for 27 TeV.
A linear accelerator nips the problem of synchrotron radiation in the bud.
That's one of the most well written and funniest articles I've ever read in the times, including Dowd's columns, which have been slipping of late. Here is the shiniest gem among many:
Pounding Punch tastes like a nonalcoholic version of the Pagan Pink Ripple, a budget wine with tropical flavors that was a landmark beverage for me. Its distinctive hangover, a sneak preview of a cheap and tawdry death, made me realize while still in college why it is very important to drink in moderation.
Radiation is one of the poorest means of cooling something down. That's why serious cooling is done with a conduction/convection system (the cooling in your car's engine, for instance). However, since the only heat the spacecraft will be receiving is by radiation, it is reasonable that it can radiate enough of the heat it absorbs to maintain a cool temperature, provided it doesn't absorb too much radiant heat--and that is precisely what the sunshield is for.
Well, infinity is clearly a different story. Most physical occurrences--with the possible exception of the wait time for a restaurant in Anderson on Saturday night--are finite. The point being, the blisteringly fast typing of the super-super-monkeys will never produce Hamlet in anything like a reasonable amount of time; I don't recall the exact numbers and I'm way too lazy to go get my copy of Kittel, but it is something on the order of billions of universe lifetimes. Anyone from Berkeley, spawning ground of Kittel, care to chime in?
Also, since the monkeys are hitting keystrokes at random, it's not really valid to define a "rate" at which they produce Hamlet. Since generating the sequence of characters of which Hamlet consists is entirely by chance, Hamlet might never be created; or, it might be created immediately. We can only define a probability. And the probability is extremely small. Like, really.
Actually, if you work out the math, even using super-super-monkeys, the probability of a bunch of them producing the proverbial Hamlet in the lifetime of the universe is absolutely nill. But that's beside the point anyway!
Actually, they've been working on the report for over a year and released it as soon as they were finished. They didn't expect it to take this long. It's in the article.
That's true. But part of the OSS mantra, and certainly in keeping with the UNIX philosophy, is code re-use. Why should developers take the time from other development to re-invent the graphical wheel? XFree86 didn't always have these problems, so why not use it?
Everyone knows that Dark Matter is really Dust--Shadows--particles created by and vital to consciousness. Come on people! (See Philip Pullman's *His Dark Materials* trilogy... that's the American name; I think it's different in Britain.)
The particles have to be much more closely-bound than a proton/electron system. For all intents and purposes when considering the quantum mechanics of a hydrogen atom, the electron can be considered to be "independent" of the proton--it only creates an electric potential. However, for tightly bound constructs, such as an alpha particle (2 protons, 2 neutrons), the spins can in fact be summed and viewed as a composite particle, in this case, a boson. That's why you get the superfluidic properties of helium at low temperatures.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. It is in fact the kinetic energy of the plasma that is being transferred to the spacecraft; the electrical interaction is just the transfer mechanism. So, yes, the space station will be pushed back in a fashion more or less prescribed by Newton's 3rd Law. However, as mentioned above, the acceleration produced by the conservation of momentum is proportional to the mass, so if the space station is massive enough, this won't be a problem. Plus, I'm sure some corrective measures can be taken with orbits to minimize the effect.
I think it's fair to say that both Euler and Gauss surpass Newton as mathematicians, as well as some others. But you're right; as a jack of all trades, he is non pareil. In my humble opinion as a physicist and a mathematician :)
It is of immense importance to the theory of elementary particles, but the forces it governs involve quark interactions, and it is doubtful any technology will explicitly need a model of quark interactions for some time! Then again, I could be shortly eating my shorts...
Jebus. With all the links in it that article reads like a Slashdot story!
As always, I recommend Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" for a non-technical but interesting outlook on the eventual synthesis of the human consciousness with machines.
With a Libertarian president, we would never have been there in the first place. Well, possibly Afghanistan, but that would have been, as Badnarik says, with a declaration of war by Congress, and it most likely wouldn't have been the current half-assed job. Most of our problems in the last half-century have come--imho--from sticking our nose where is really doesn't need to be.
If only I had mod points... and if only Fermat had HTML!
(And the Higgs found first will almost certainly be the lightest Higgs, since they'll be scaling energy up rather than starting off full steam ahead. The LEP pretty much eliminated any chance of Higgs under 130 GeV, and Tevatron has pushed that envelope up another good bit.)
wouldn't be a bad bet... I wasn't able to RTFA, but with the LHC going online at CERN within the next 5 years, I imagine the Higgs will be found within the decade, and that's pretty conservative. Most particle physicists are confident the Higgs exists, if only because its inconvenient failure to exist would knock most current unified theories into a cocked hat. Depending on the timeframe, 6:1 odds sounds like some fast cash!
Now, synchrotron radiation, at relativistic velocities, is dominated by the gamma term -- in fact, it goes as g^4. Thus, this factor of 2000 becomes a factor of 1.6 x 10^13! That's why you can't use electrons at high energies! At least, not unless you have a WHOLE lot of power... For more information, see this page:l es/synchrotron.html
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/partic
While not as powerful, linacs can probe much more carefully than synchrotrons. Since electrons are believed to be point particles, they make MUCH less mess under collision than do hadrons or mesons, each composed of 2 or 3 quarks. Thus, assuming Higgs exists, LHC will *find* it, but it will take a linac to really zero in on its mass and characteristics in a way that it can solve some other physics questions.
Actually, curves do allow electrons. It's just that an accelerating particle radiates energy (synchrotron radiation), and that radiation increases exponentially as mass decreases. The LHC uses protons because their much larger mass (~1000 greater) siginificantly decreases synchrotron radiation. The previous accelerator at CERN, the LEP, occuped the same tunnel and used electrons and positrons. However, while the LEP could only reach energies of ~200 GeV, the LHC aims for 27 TeV. A linear accelerator nips the problem of synchrotron radiation in the bud.
Pounding Punch tastes like a nonalcoholic version of the Pagan Pink Ripple, a budget wine with tropical flavors that was a landmark beverage for me. Its distinctive hangover, a sneak preview of a cheap and tawdry death, made me realize while still in college why it is very important to drink in moderation.
Radiation is one of the poorest means of cooling something down. That's why serious cooling is done with a conduction/convection system (the cooling in your car's engine, for instance). However, since the only heat the spacecraft will be receiving is by radiation, it is reasonable that it can radiate enough of the heat it absorbs to maintain a cool temperature, provided it doesn't absorb too much radiant heat--and that is precisely what the sunshield is for.
Well, infinity is clearly a different story. Most physical occurrences--with the possible exception of the wait time for a restaurant in Anderson on Saturday night--are finite. The point being, the blisteringly fast typing of the super-super-monkeys will never produce Hamlet in anything like a reasonable amount of time; I don't recall the exact numbers and I'm way too lazy to go get my copy of Kittel, but it is something on the order of billions of universe lifetimes. Anyone from Berkeley, spawning ground of Kittel, care to chime in? Also, since the monkeys are hitting keystrokes at random, it's not really valid to define a "rate" at which they produce Hamlet. Since generating the sequence of characters of which Hamlet consists is entirely by chance, Hamlet might never be created; or, it might be created immediately. We can only define a probability. And the probability is extremely small. Like, really.
And then there are the times when you get lucky and get the right answer for the wrong reason... which is, I suppose, why we have peer review!
Actually, if you work out the math, even using super-super-monkeys, the probability of a bunch of them producing the proverbial Hamlet in the lifetime of the universe is absolutely nill. But that's beside the point anyway!
In my physics experience, coincidence typically means you got the right answer... unless it's a test question, in which case you're probably wrong.
Np ;) My tone wasn't meant to be smart, either. Geez, all of this conciliation--I think I need to go check and see if Kirk has a beard or not.
Actually, they've been working on the report for over a year and released it as soon as they were finished. They didn't expect it to take this long. It's in the article.
That's true. But part of the OSS mantra, and certainly in keeping with the UNIX philosophy, is code re-use. Why should developers take the time from other development to re-invent the graphical wheel? XFree86 didn't always have these problems, so why not use it?
For some reason Slashdot didn't want to recognize my italics tags... and the mods also don't seem to appreciate the work.
Everyone knows that Dark Matter is really Dust--Shadows--particles created by and vital to consciousness. Come on people! (See Philip Pullman's *His Dark Materials* trilogy... that's the American name; I think it's different in Britain.)
I wear a watch so I don't have to carry my cell phone and MP3 player around with me... which is a good thing, since I have neither.
The particles have to be much more closely-bound than a proton/electron system. For all intents and purposes when considering the quantum mechanics of a hydrogen atom, the electron can be considered to be "independent" of the proton--it only creates an electric potential. However, for tightly bound constructs, such as an alpha particle (2 protons, 2 neutrons), the spins can in fact be summed and viewed as a composite particle, in this case, a boson. That's why you get the superfluidic properties of helium at low temperatures.