Here are some studies on the effects of antioxidants
Alpha-Tocopheral Beta-Carotene Cancer prevention study group. The effect of vitamin E and beta carotene on the incidence of lung cancers in male smokers. New Eng J Med (1994); 330:1029-35
Result: more lung cancer in the beta-carotene group AND higher death rate from prostate and gastric cancers in vitamin group.
Another two studies
Effects of a combination of beta carotene and vitamin A on lung cancer and cardiocascular disease. New Eng J Med (1996); 334; 1150-5
and
Statistical design and monitoring of the Carotene and Retinol Efficay trial. Control Clin Trials (1993); 14; 308-24
Result:antioxidant group 46% more likely to die from lung cancer, 17% more likely to die from all other causes.
Finally the a systematic review of the data from many trials
Vivekananthan DP et al. Use of antioxidant vitamins for the prevention of cardiovascular disease: meta-analysis of randomised trials. Lancet (2003); 361:2017-23
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/articles/PIIS0140673603136379/abstract
Result:Found antioxidants to be ineffective or possibly even slightly harmfull.
There that sums it up, these are what I would call good studies with a good methodology large groups (one was 30000 people), randomised, placebo control group etc. Good luck with your research.
That kind of demonstrates what the problem is. "Fake" chiropracty is...what?
If there's no difference between fake chiropracty and the kind that costs money then I'm getting my dog to treat my back pain next time.
Everyone says it is bogus because there are no studies
No everyone says its bogus because there are studies, its a common myth that alternative medicine hasnt been tested. It has and it failed.
Back surgery doesn't have any double blind studies to prove it works either, but because they can point to scientific reasons for doing the procedure it is considered legitimate.
Surgery is difficult to perform a double blind study for, in fact it is probably impossible for ethical reasons due to the dangers involved. However surgery success rates can be compared to other treatments like drugs that have been themselves compared to placebo in true double blind studies. Also surgery is used to correct a physical problem, something we know isnt normal and we can tell when it is fixed. Weither fixing the problem in this way is of benifit to the patient is left to studys of large groups and statistics. But surgery has the advantage knowing pretty much exactly what your doing when you do it so the "how" of surgery is better known.
But if it works when you don't tell them and doesn't when you do, doesn't that mean that you are ethically bound to conceal the truth becuase that results in the greatest benefit with no risk of side effects (other than gullability)?
Like I said this is an ethical question, there isnt a right answer here. Personaly I feel that honesty is important here if you have to choose between treatments you should know what your choosing between. Also placebo's can have negative side effects I wouldn't be suprised if they can even be addictive, "If i dont get my crystal therapy every week I feel awful" etc.
The more you charge, the better the effect. So if you don't charge an excessive amount, you are not giving the patient the greatest benefit.
Maybe but maybe not the "quality" of the placebo you're giving matters too, also if your charging money and giving medical advice what happens when something goes wrong and the patient gets worse or you fail not notice that the treatment isnt working because the patient is actually tired all the time because they have bowl cancer? an aromatherapist is not a doctor so why should they be dealing with sick people?
You just described most of modern medicine. Even today, we don't know how or why most things work. Sure, they can often determine a specific chemical reaction it messes with, but how it does it is sometimes not known, and why that reaction has the physiological effect is even less known.
this is not a description of modern medicine
To give someone something that's effective with no risk of side effects seems a win-win solution. If the ethics bother you, when the problem is gone, inform them. Part of deception in treatment or tests is to reveal it as soon as it can be revealed.
It is most certainly not risk free or win-win, by going to a quack you are endangering yourself by not seeking proper medical advice and treatment and some alternative treatments are themselves bad for you and dangerous.
Just want to point out that, although I offer no evidence in this post you can find it if your interested. In all the medical trials of how antioxidants effect your general health the high levels of antioxidants group has actually come out with a slightly lower life expectancy that would suggest that increasing the levels of antioxidants in your body is actually over all a bad thing. However this effect was very small and realisitcally the amount of antioxidants you ingest makes little difference to your health.
I suspect that doing the the trial you suggest would come out in favour of the full chanting experince. There have been loads of studys done into the placebo effect its an amazing subject. For example give people two placebo pain killers one in a snazzy box and the other marketed as a cheap painkiller and the snazzy one will do better. Or how about not telling the patient what the drug is supposed to do at all, instead just tell one group of doctors they're giving a painkiller or placebo and the other that they are giving a painful injection or placebo but instruct them not to tell the patient and you get patients in the first group getting pain relief and pain in the second even though both injections are the same and the patients arent told anything about them.
The problem is that to be ethically viable you should really tell the patient that your treatment is nothing more than placebo, lieing about how well it "works" or how it works is in my opinion unethical. Not to mention the fact that you're essentially charging money for doing nothing. Your treatment may be somewhat effective (and only for some things) but will be an inherently dishonest one. If I'm ill shouldn't I have the right to know what exactly your going to do to help me, how, why and how well it will work?
You could study it against chiropracty and just pretending to do chiropracty, or chiropracty and a placebo back pain pill. Making such a study double blind may then be a bigger challenge but not impossible.
The point is that it doesnt matter that drugs arent a general treatment for your spinal pain because chiropracty isnt any better and shouldnt be either
Actually in some sense the wavefunctions are the real bit. Observables do not give a full picture of the system due to the uncertainty principle and the effect of measurement. Describing an electron say classically with position and momentum is far more problematic since it just doesnt work. The wavefunction provides all the information about the system it is infact the only real thing, problems only occur when you start taking measurements and describing effects like collapsing the wavefunction which may or may not be an acurate description of what really happens. Other interpretations such as the many worlds interrupratation require no such collapse and the wavefunction is not effected by measurement.
Saying that wavefunctions are not real is a bit like saying the wind isnt real because you cant see it, you only see it's effects.
Depends what you mean by real, certainly splitting your many electron wave function into orbitals works well and allows an accurate approximation of the system as a whole. The orbitals do form a basis of functions for the system (with some acceptable approximations) so while your quantum state is the whole thing you can think of it as being built of oribitals. This is true in a mathematical sense its an expansion of the quantum function as a set of orbital functions. This is as valid as any other expansion like a taylor or powerseries expansion. So orbitals are real enough in that sense. You can then calculate observables for the individual electrons since your operators will act only on the single electron and your oribtals are normalised the rest of the electrons essentialy go away and you can calculate things like the average radial ditance etc and build up pictures of what that electron "looks like". Since the orbital functions are calculated (numerically) as a multi electron system even though the end product allows you to look at individual electrons as orbitals the overall wave function (all the orbitals combined) is still a very accurate picture of the system
In fact the experimental evidence showing a physical picture of these orbitals just goes to show that this is in fact a very sensible and useful way of picturing your atom.
While your idea's are interesting and I dont nesecarily disagree you've made some assumptions.
1)That the kinds of inventions worth protecting with a patent would be complex enough that without that protection the company first on the scene would always be able to recoup the research costs merely through having the technology first. What if the invetion was easily reproducible, what if the company that created it was reasonably large but specialised in only one thing and then Sony come along with all their market connections etc and steal it.
Surely such a system would favour the largest companys saving money by exploiting their existing advantages over anyone else who tries to inovate (even more so than is allready the case)
2)You make a case against current the current patent system without proposing an alternative you assume that the problem would solve itself to the benifit of everyone. There seems to me to be no sound reasoning behind assuming that things would be better without patents and that everyone would suddenly decide to work together and no one would exploit anyone else's research.
3)
Of course you would be thinking on the pharma example: years over years of R&D and at the end all you have is an easily clonable mollecule. Well, that shouldn't be the realm of patents but the one of copyright and trade secrets if any.
The idea that molecules are creative work and should be covered by copyright law scares me a little. espically since companys are moving towards the same ideas with dna etc.
I think the main problem with any patent system or abolishment of the patent system is that the desired outcome and motivation are quite different. On the one hand we want a system to incourage progress and share inventions with the rest of civilisation and essentially make the world a better place. Making these ideas and technology available to everyone. On the other hand few people/companies view this as a good enough reason or the just have bills to pay, therefore we offer a financial incentive* for this effort in inventing things. Joining these two things together should be the goal of any patent reform.
*I mention a finicial incentive but this is not intrinsic, other methods could be used to allow people the freedom to invent, the point being that market forces, temporary monopolies and royalties may not be the only carrots.
Shouldn't patents also protect tycoons from other tycoons. The original point being made with regard to lasers is that some inventions do require significant research and funding the only way these advances can be made is if large companys spend money on them. This requires a finiancial incentive, it needs to be profitable. If after spening huge amounts of money your rival companies can just copy your idea undercut you because they didnt spend money on research and drive you out of buisness then that would almost certainly lead to a stifling of large research projects from private companies.
I'm not saying we need longer patents nesecarily but that issueing very short patents for some kinds of inventions would be counter productive. Any patent reform would need to protect both individual inventors and the investments of large companies into research but also insuring that the patents expire within a reasonable time frame to allow the continued advancement of technology by the next generation of inventors.
But when we're dealing with something like rock music, which is owned by the artist and is very much their pension after 30 years of labor
Maybe they should save money for a pension while they are earning it like everyone else has to. I mean I can see why I would want to be able to continue getting paid from my job after I've retired but I dont think that's going to happen. Many people would disagree that works require longer protection just because they continue to be profitable. They point of copyright law should be to encourage creative work by granting a temporary monopoly for the creater in which to profit after which time the other half of the deal is that all the people who agreed not to copy their work for a while get that work in the public domain where it can benifit future artists and society. If we dont get that pay back at the end why should the public obey the copyright law while it offers the artist protection.
It seems to boil down to the choice of not releasing your work to the public and no one copying it, or releasing it and having other people actually enjoy and use it in which case a temporary copyright being granted is a generous deal from everyone else.
Planets that are visible by the naked eye and look like stars are often called stars even though we now know they are not, like venus for example. also some of the 'stars' in the night sky may be galaxies and shooting stars have nothing to do with stars either. Calling twinkly points of light in the sky stars even if they're something else is not uncommon.
Your criticisms are largely valid, but I still think the sample size was too small. After all, they couldn't know before they did the study what percentage would answer what way... not unless the study was rigged.
By that logic it is impossible to conduct a fair study, either you know roughly what percentage you expect to answer that way and your study is rigged or you don't know what percentage is likely to give that answer so you conduct your study but are told your sample size is too small because you didn't know what percentage would answer that way to begin with even though that was the entire point of your study anyway.
Your right the 'spin glass' mentioned in the summary is in fact made of dipoles, but the way they interact allows the creation of these monopoles which are not themselves particles but merely configurations of the dipoles in the glass. This is similar to how a hole in a semiconductor behaves like a positively charged particle but is actually the absence of an electron so not a real particle as such.
As you pointed out it would be impossible to create a single monopole out of dipoles however they have found a way to create two monopoles so the system as a whole is magnetically neutral but inside the spin glass both monopoles are free and behave as if they are two monopoles of oposite magnetic charge rather than two ends of a dipole.
Its a rather subtle difference but the existence of a Dirac string between the two monopoles is exactly what you would expect, but would not be there in a simple dipole system.
I would hazzard a guess to say that this finding has no real bearing on the existence of fundamental magnetic monopoles, however it will probably be nice to see if these monopoles behave in the same we would expect a monopole particle to and could give insight into detecting the properties of such a particle.
The physics of magnetic monopoles is not widly known, mostly because its slightly complicated and their existence is (was) purely theoritical. But its not new and they can be incorporated into maxwells equations quite easily. In fact it makes electricity and magnetism appear much more symetric which is in some ways nice since we allready know they are the "same thing". I think the problem is you have a definition of magnetic field lines which is fine when there are no magnetic monopoles present (which is pretty much all the time) but the fact that magnetism allways comes in dipoles is not written in stone in the equations or in the idea of magnetic field lines. There is no problem with field lines not terminating (like in the case with a single point charge) its just that this doesnt normally happen for magnetism.
The detection of monopoles may be news but the theoritical plausibilty is not and you would find mention of them in many quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics and electromagnetism text books.
I know what magnetism is, I also know what a magnetic monopole is, hell I even know what a dirac string is and what a spin glass is. Honestly your argument about coins made no sense at all.
I was attempting to point out that electric charge also has field lines but that they do not have two sides like a coin, the entire point of the discovery of a magnetic monopole is that it doesn't have two sides in the way that all the other magnetic dipoles we are used to have.
The kind of monopoles they talk about in relation to the LHC would be a new particle of somesort which has a single "magnetic charge" like the electron has an electric charge, for some complicated reasons some people believe that the existance of even one such particle in the universe would be a pretty big deal and possibly a bad thing if we created one.
The kind of monopoles created here are configurations of molecules(?) in a lattice that forms something called a spin glass, essentially it allready has lots of little bar magnets in it allready. What's interesting is they can apparently create monopole pairs, like the electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor. The behaviour of these should still match those of a pair of magnetic monopoles which is where all the dirac string buisness is from.
Yea like that electric charge nonsense, you can't have a particle with a single electric charge! that'd be crazy whatever it is will allways have another side with the oposite charge!
Surely if they are two monopoles tied by a dirac string then they actually make a dipole. I was under the impression a monopole would create a dirac string (a discontinuity in the field) that extends to infinity. Interestingly by allowing the dirac string to extend first in one direction, then in the other and joining the two resultant fields gives a fully continuous description of the monopole without the need for a dirac string.
I think what the summary is refering too is similar to the creation of a electron and hole pair in a semiconductor rather than a fundamental monopole particle. So they are in fact creating both poles but that inside the spin glass they are not confined with respect to each other so each one appears as a monopole in the material.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) would appear to suggest that the EU economy is bigger but if thats the proper measurement of these things who knows? The market for his particular piece of software could even exist primarily only in the US which would make the size of the EU economy irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are some studies on the effects of antioxidants
Alpha-Tocopheral Beta-Carotene Cancer prevention study group. The effect of vitamin E and beta carotene on the incidence of lung cancers in male smokers. New Eng J Med (1994); 330:1029-35
Result: more lung cancer in the beta-carotene group AND higher death rate from prostate and gastric cancers in vitamin group.
Another two studies
Effects of a combination of beta carotene and vitamin A on lung cancer and cardiocascular disease. New Eng J Med (1996); 334; 1150-5
and
Statistical design and monitoring of the Carotene and Retinol Efficay trial. Control Clin Trials (1993); 14; 308-24
Result:antioxidant group 46% more likely to die from lung cancer, 17% more likely to die from all other causes.
Finally the a systematic review of the data from many trials
Vivekananthan DP et al. Use of antioxidant vitamins for the prevention of cardiovascular disease: meta-analysis of randomised trials. Lancet (2003); 361:2017-23 http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/articles/PIIS0140673603136379/abstract
Result:Found antioxidants to be ineffective or possibly even slightly harmfull.
There that sums it up, these are what I would call good studies with a good methodology large groups (one was 30000 people), randomised, placebo control group etc. Good luck with your research.
That kind of demonstrates what the problem is. "Fake" chiropracty is...what?
If there's no difference between fake chiropracty and the kind that costs money then I'm getting my dog to treat my back pain next time.
Everyone says it is bogus because there are no studies
No everyone says its bogus because there are studies, its a common myth that alternative medicine hasnt been tested. It has and it failed.
Back surgery doesn't have any double blind studies to prove it works either, but because they can point to scientific reasons for doing the procedure it is considered legitimate.
Surgery is difficult to perform a double blind study for, in fact it is probably impossible for ethical reasons due to the dangers involved. However surgery success rates can be compared to other treatments like drugs that have been themselves compared to placebo in true double blind studies. Also surgery is used to correct a physical problem, something we know isnt normal and we can tell when it is fixed. Weither fixing the problem in this way is of benifit to the patient is left to studys of large groups and statistics. But surgery has the advantage knowing pretty much exactly what your doing when you do it so the "how" of surgery is better known.
But if it works when you don't tell them and doesn't when you do, doesn't that mean that you are ethically bound to conceal the truth becuase that results in the greatest benefit with no risk of side effects (other than gullability)?
Like I said this is an ethical question, there isnt a right answer here. Personaly I feel that honesty is important here if you have to choose between treatments you should know what your choosing between. Also placebo's can have negative side effects I wouldn't be suprised if they can even be addictive, "If i dont get my crystal therapy every week I feel awful" etc.
The more you charge, the better the effect. So if you don't charge an excessive amount, you are not giving the patient the greatest benefit.
Maybe but maybe not the "quality" of the placebo you're giving matters too, also if your charging money and giving medical advice what happens when something goes wrong and the patient gets worse or you fail not notice that the treatment isnt working because the patient is actually tired all the time because they have bowl cancer? an aromatherapist is not a doctor so why should they be dealing with sick people?
You just described most of modern medicine. Even today, we don't know how or why most things work. Sure, they can often determine a specific chemical reaction it messes with, but how it does it is sometimes not known, and why that reaction has the physiological effect is even less known.
this is not a description of modern medicine
To give someone something that's effective with no risk of side effects seems a win-win solution. If the ethics bother you, when the problem is gone, inform them. Part of deception in treatment or tests is to reveal it as soon as it can be revealed.
It is most certainly not risk free or win-win, by going to a quack you are endangering yourself by not seeking proper medical advice and treatment and some alternative treatments are themselves bad for you and dangerous.
Just want to point out that, although I offer no evidence in this post you can find it if your interested. In all the medical trials of how antioxidants effect your general health the high levels of antioxidants group has actually come out with a slightly lower life expectancy that would suggest that increasing the levels of antioxidants in your body is actually over all a bad thing. However this effect was very small and realisitcally the amount of antioxidants you ingest makes little difference to your health.
I suspect that doing the the trial you suggest would come out in favour of the full chanting experince. There have been loads of studys done into the placebo effect its an amazing subject. For example give people two placebo pain killers one in a snazzy box and the other marketed as a cheap painkiller and the snazzy one will do better. Or how about not telling the patient what the drug is supposed to do at all, instead just tell one group of doctors they're giving a painkiller or placebo and the other that they are giving a painful injection or placebo but instruct them not to tell the patient and you get patients in the first group getting pain relief and pain in the second even though both injections are the same and the patients arent told anything about them.
The problem is that to be ethically viable you should really tell the patient that your treatment is nothing more than placebo, lieing about how well it "works" or how it works is in my opinion unethical. Not to mention the fact that you're essentially charging money for doing nothing. Your treatment may be somewhat effective (and only for some things) but will be an inherently dishonest one. If I'm ill shouldn't I have the right to know what exactly your going to do to help me, how, why and how well it will work?
You could study it against chiropracty and just pretending to do chiropracty, or chiropracty and a placebo back pain pill. Making such a study double blind may then be a bigger challenge but not impossible.
The point is that it doesnt matter that drugs arent a general treatment for your spinal pain because chiropracty isnt any better and shouldnt be either
Actually in some sense the wavefunctions are the real bit. Observables do not give a full picture of the system due to the uncertainty principle and the effect of measurement. Describing an electron say classically with position and momentum is far more problematic since it just doesnt work. The wavefunction provides all the information about the system it is infact the only real thing, problems only occur when you start taking measurements and describing effects like collapsing the wavefunction which may or may not be an acurate description of what really happens. Other interpretations such as the many worlds interrupratation require no such collapse and the wavefunction is not effected by measurement.
Saying that wavefunctions are not real is a bit like saying the wind isnt real because you cant see it, you only see it's effects.
Depends what you mean by real, certainly splitting your many electron wave function into orbitals works well and allows an accurate approximation of the system as a whole. The orbitals do form a basis of functions for the system (with some acceptable approximations) so while your quantum state is the whole thing you can think of it as being built of oribitals. This is true in a mathematical sense its an expansion of the quantum function as a set of orbital functions. This is as valid as any other expansion like a taylor or powerseries expansion. So orbitals are real enough in that sense. You can then calculate observables for the individual electrons since your operators will act only on the single electron and your oribtals are normalised the rest of the electrons essentialy go away and you can calculate things like the average radial ditance etc and build up pictures of what that electron "looks like". Since the orbital functions are calculated (numerically) as a multi electron system even though the end product allows you to look at individual electrons as orbitals the overall wave function (all the orbitals combined) is still a very accurate picture of the system
In fact the experimental evidence showing a physical picture of these orbitals just goes to show that this is in fact a very sensible and useful way of picturing your atom.
While your idea's are interesting and I dont nesecarily disagree you've made some assumptions.
1)That the kinds of inventions worth protecting with a patent would be complex enough that without that protection the company first on the scene would always be able to recoup the research costs merely through having the technology first. What if the invetion was easily reproducible, what if the company that created it was reasonably large but specialised in only one thing and then Sony come along with all their market connections etc and steal it.
Surely such a system would favour the largest companys saving money by exploiting their existing advantages over anyone else who tries to inovate (even more so than is allready the case)
2)You make a case against current the current patent system without proposing an alternative you assume that the problem would solve itself to the benifit of everyone. There seems to me to be no sound reasoning behind assuming that things would be better without patents and that everyone would suddenly decide to work together and no one would exploit anyone else's research.
3)
Of course you would be thinking on the pharma example: years over years of R&D and at the end all you have is an easily clonable mollecule. Well, that shouldn't be the realm of patents but the one of copyright and trade secrets if any.
The idea that molecules are creative work and should be covered by copyright law scares me a little. espically since companys are moving towards the same ideas with dna etc.
I think the main problem with any patent system or abolishment of the patent system is that the desired outcome and motivation are quite different. On the one hand we want a system to incourage progress and share inventions with the rest of civilisation and essentially make the world a better place. Making these ideas and technology available to everyone. On the other hand few people/companies view this as a good enough reason or the just have bills to pay, therefore we offer a financial incentive* for this effort in inventing things. Joining these two things together should be the goal of any patent reform.
*I mention a finicial incentive but this is not intrinsic, other methods could be used to allow people the freedom to invent, the point being that market forces, temporary monopolies and royalties may not be the only carrots.
You're certainly not the only one I'm sure there are plenty of people who disliked the films after enjoying the books.
Shouldn't patents also protect tycoons from other tycoons. The original point being made with regard to lasers is that some inventions do require significant research and funding the only way these advances can be made is if large companys spend money on them. This requires a finiancial incentive, it needs to be profitable. If after spening huge amounts of money your rival companies can just copy your idea undercut you because they didnt spend money on research and drive you out of buisness then that would almost certainly lead to a stifling of large research projects from private companies.
I'm not saying we need longer patents nesecarily but that issueing very short patents for some kinds of inventions would be counter productive. Any patent reform would need to protect both individual inventors and the investments of large companies into research but also insuring that the patents expire within a reasonable time frame to allow the continued advancement of technology by the next generation of inventors.
I don't know what game you are pitching but it doesn't sound like risk.
Indeed we should that was at least 3 hours of work put into typing that comment.
But when we're dealing with something like rock music, which is owned by the artist and is very much their pension after 30 years of labor
Maybe they should save money for a pension while they are earning it like everyone else has to. I mean I can see why I would want to be able to continue getting paid from my job after I've retired but I dont think that's going to happen. Many people would disagree that works require longer protection just because they continue to be profitable. They point of copyright law should be to encourage creative work by granting a temporary monopoly for the creater in which to profit after which time the other half of the deal is that all the people who agreed not to copy their work for a while get that work in the public domain where it can benifit future artists and society. If we dont get that pay back at the end why should the public obey the copyright law while it offers the artist protection.
It seems to boil down to the choice of not releasing your work to the public and no one copying it, or releasing it and having other people actually enjoy and use it in which case a temporary copyright being granted is a generous deal from everyone else.
Makes me think of how homer tried to turn Bart straight again, in one of the simpsons episodes I can barely remember.
When I first read that I thought you must be crazy, but this appears to be that episode.
Planets that are visible by the naked eye and look like stars are often called stars even though we now know they are not, like venus for example. also some of the 'stars' in the night sky may be galaxies and shooting stars have nothing to do with stars either. Calling twinkly points of light in the sky stars even if they're something else is not uncommon.
Your criticisms are largely valid, but I still think the sample size was too small. After all, they couldn't know before they did the study what percentage would answer what way ... not unless the study was rigged.
By that logic it is impossible to conduct a fair study, either you know roughly what percentage you expect to answer that way and your study is rigged or you don't know what percentage is likely to give that answer so you conduct your study but are told your sample size is too small because you didn't know what percentage would answer that way to begin with even though that was the entire point of your study anyway.
Your right the 'spin glass' mentioned in the summary is in fact made of dipoles, but the way they interact allows the creation of these monopoles which are not themselves particles but merely configurations of the dipoles in the glass. This is similar to how a hole in a semiconductor behaves like a positively charged particle but is actually the absence of an electron so not a real particle as such.
As you pointed out it would be impossible to create a single monopole out of dipoles however they have found a way to create two monopoles so the system as a whole is magnetically neutral but inside the spin glass both monopoles are free and behave as if they are two monopoles of oposite magnetic charge rather than two ends of a dipole.
Its a rather subtle difference but the existence of a Dirac string between the two monopoles is exactly what you would expect, but would not be there in a simple dipole system.
I would hazzard a guess to say that this finding has no real bearing on the existence of fundamental magnetic monopoles, however it will probably be nice to see if these monopoles behave in the same we would expect a monopole particle to and could give insight into detecting the properties of such a particle.
The physics of magnetic monopoles is not widly known, mostly because its slightly complicated and their existence is (was) purely theoritical. But its not new and they can be incorporated into maxwells equations quite easily. In fact it makes electricity and magnetism appear much more symetric which is in some ways nice since we allready know they are the "same thing". I think the problem is you have a definition of magnetic field lines which is fine when there are no magnetic monopoles present (which is pretty much all the time) but the fact that magnetism allways comes in dipoles is not written in stone in the equations or in the idea of magnetic field lines. There is no problem with field lines not terminating (like in the case with a single point charge) its just that this doesnt normally happen for magnetism.
The detection of monopoles may be news but the theoritical plausibilty is not and you would find mention of them in many quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics and electromagnetism text books.
I know what magnetism is, I also know what a magnetic monopole is, hell I even know what a dirac string is and what a spin glass is. Honestly your argument about coins made no sense at all.
I was attempting to point out that electric charge also has field lines but that they do not have two sides like a coin, the entire point of the discovery of a magnetic monopole is that it doesn't have two sides in the way that all the other magnetic dipoles we are used to have.
Its not, its just like electric charge only for magnetism.
The kind of monopoles they talk about in relation to the LHC would be a new particle of somesort which has a single "magnetic charge" like the electron has an electric charge, for some complicated reasons some people believe that the existance of even one such particle in the universe would be a pretty big deal and possibly a bad thing if we created one.
The kind of monopoles created here are configurations of molecules(?) in a lattice that forms something called a spin glass, essentially it allready has lots of little bar magnets in it allready. What's interesting is they can apparently create monopole pairs, like the electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor. The behaviour of these should still match those of a pair of magnetic monopoles which is where all the dirac string buisness is from.
Yea like that electric charge nonsense, you can't have a particle with a single electric charge! that'd be crazy whatever it is will allways have another side with the oposite charge!
Surely if they are two monopoles tied by a dirac string then they actually make a dipole. I was under the impression a monopole would create a dirac string (a discontinuity in the field) that extends to infinity. Interestingly by allowing the dirac string to extend first in one direction, then in the other and joining the two resultant fields gives a fully continuous description of the monopole without the need for a dirac string.
I think what the summary is refering too is similar to the creation of a electron and hole pair in a semiconductor rather than a fundamental monopole particle. So they are in fact creating both poles but that inside the spin glass they are not confined with respect to each other so each one appears as a monopole in the material.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) would appear to suggest that the EU economy is bigger but if thats the proper measurement of these things who knows? The market for his particular piece of software could even exist primarily only in the US which would make the size of the EU economy irrelevant.