And the really sad thing is even if you've survived everything up to the last bang, while neutrinos travel close to the speed of light the X-rays and gamma rays would still reach you and kill you first so the neutrinos never get a chance. Poor neutrinos even when they're deadly they still dont get a chance to kill
Why not? If he's theory is right surely that would be a good thing? interestingly I read the book you linked to and found it quite hard going, there was little explanation of the ideas presented and seemed to have many descriptive quotes from people like minkowski that were then interpruted, woryingly these 'sound bites' were offered as support of the theory presented.
The multi-dimensional description of time was woefully under explained, probably due to a lack of a concise mathematical description but was instead given a more general description. As a physicist I have a precise understanding of what the space time of general relativity is mathematicaly the physical interperation can be tricky at times and the mathematics hard but it is very well defined and unfortunatly the link you gave did not furnish me with the similar well defined mathematical description of the Mayer's theory.
I would be interested to see a derivation of some known results from GR or newtonian gravity and from cosmology, reproduced in Mayer's frame work as this would provide a good starting point from which to understand the theory. Just in case you are interested I would like to see how the theory reproduces orbital trajectories (ie keplers laws), The equivalent description of the CMB would also be usefull. I may just me being lazy but as you've probably guessed I'm not overly impressed so far.
What really ticked the 'crackpot' box for me though was the single publication, proclaimed as a revolution of great importance. I would like to include a quote but it appears i can't copy and paste it so just read the last paragraph on page 136. Such a statement really has no place in a scientific document and is really indicative of the entire document
Well since Minkowski latter came to be a major contributor to the development of the theory of relativity he clearly decided that they weren't worth the effort either. Any model the does not require the universe to be expanding must really take some work to avoid the fact that it clearly is. The fact the dark matter has nothing to do with the universe's expansion well that is to say the evidence for dark matter does not rely on it. Proposing that dark matter does not exist would require rethinking not just relativity but newtons gravitational laws. Also what makes more sense than the big bang? I assume since it makes more sense you could explain it for me?
Yes it looks like they are measuring the distance by paralax using the fact that galaxies are in fact quite wide really. From the article it looks like this has been done before for galaxies close by which is not very usefull for measuing hubbles constant but that they have found way of amplifying the signal from distant galaxies. What the article doesn't say is how they measure both the linear and angular size of the gallaxy which is required to gauge the distance it just says that they did. If so then this is indeed very good news for narrowing down hubbles so called constant.
As a side note using standard candles is as you said very hard and requires bridging as you put it, one method used is I believe to assume that distant galaxies have a maximum size / brightness which puts a bound on the distance to them. The measurement of velocity is actually very acurate and easy and while it may contribute to the error bars of the estimate in hubbles constant I think the contribution would be tiny compared to the problems in measuring distance.
Only assuming that the government still needs to produce tax revenue from somewhere the people being employed will have to pay more tax in some form making it less desirable to work in this corporation friendly country. So in order to entice the workers to work there the corporation will have to pay a higher salary. Or maybe if there is less tax then maybe the country just won't be as nice to live in and again people will expect to be paid more. Clearly business friendly is not always the same as people friendly and people are required to do business so really you need to strike up a balance between the two
Thats not really right at all, firstly comparing economics and string theory is just crazy, economic markets aren't themselves described by some master equation you have random inputs, people make unexpected decisions. They are in some sense chaotic systems. The failure of economic models is more similar to the failure of weather models. Trying to compare the development of string theory to this seems stupid we are not constantly discovering new experimental data that doesn't fit with string theory every week then changing string theory. At the moment string theory is not a single theory making predictions. It is not failing to make predictions that match experimental data but rather is failing to make predictions at all.
String theory does not need to predict experimental results that we have not already seen. We have no theory that explains all of the experimental evidence that we already have so doing that is enough for string theory to be useful. If it can be contorted as you say to fit past experimental results then it will be doing better than quantum mechanics and general relativity.
You also seem to think string theory has many free parameters and that thats a bad thing, well so does the standard model the symmetry groups and which symmetry groups are broken etc are all inputs into QFT which then matches predictions. The number of fields strengths of interactions masses of some of the particles etc are also all parameters that have been carefully chosen to match predictions. String theory is hoping to produce a more fundamental model one which when defined will actually have more fundamental defining parameters and at the same time fix the problems created by the required renormalization of field theories, and allow a description of gravity at the quantum scale.
Only this is a case of making predictions, I mean this can be used to predict how a super fluid behaves. Although as I said before this doesn't tell give any information about string theory being a physical theory
Also this correspondence is genuinely interesting even if the reporting on it isn't great. This is just one application it could work the other way as well allowing predictions to be made of string theory by solving the corresponding problem in the gauge theory avoiding doing the string theory maths which can be very difficult hence most of the problems with the theory.
Firstly the correspondence doesn't say anything about whether or not string theory is "right" as a theory of nature just that it can be used here to solve a difficult problem in QCD by solving an easy problem in string theory. String theory was not invented to solve this problem and has nothing to do with the number of parameters of string theory being tuned to fit the data.
Also you don't build a model in physics to make random predictions then see if someone of them turn out to be right, you build a model which is useful in explaining the results you already have and then if that works you can see what other predictions your model can make. Since string theory is still in the first stage, i.e the model is still being built mathematical discoveries and methods are still being developed to see if it can explain things better than QFT then maybe it will make some useful predictions afterwards.
I'm no expert on evolutionary models but wouldn't that leave him with no models eventually if even the best one performs poorly. I think the gp was talking about a general problem in evolutionary models getting stuck in a locally best model when there are better models available but are very different to the one you have but are unaccesable to the system. Thats the kind of thing you get stuck in with metropolis algorithms in Monte Carlo methods, getting your system stuck in a local minimum and I can see how a simillar thing could happen in evolutionary models. So I think you kinda missed his point
But that being said there are undoubtably things you can do to aliviate this and your friend probably already does and using evolutionary models sounds like a good idea.
Now I'm not sure the Plastics Council is a group I'd want to get my info from, but the rest sound somewhat compelling. So what's the deal, yes it leaches, but it's not necessarily harmful? I wouldn't want to be a sucker for some company's BS, but what's the deal with groups above?
Well you could be right, from the summary it looks like the study found that BPA levels in urine increased, not that increased BPA levels in urine are harmful. What this means is that it looks like nobody has actually looked or performed a study to see if drinking from containers made with BPA is actually harmful but are instead infering a risk from the fact that BPA does indeed leach from the containers and that there is a plausable action for BPA to damage your health. The key here is that while people may have performed experiments where they pour a load of BPA on some cells or see if it reacts with some enzyme or something the summary doesn't actually mention any link with BPA and health issues. It has "endocrine-disrupting potential" but what exactly do they mean by potential? does it disrupt endocrines in real people in the levels that are associated with the leaching from drink containers? would you have to drink everything out of such a container to be at risk? does your health suffer imdeiatly after just one sip? basically this study doesn't tell you and you would need to look at studys conducted looking at how BPA levels effect health and then compare the effects to the levels leaching out of the containers.
So yes they are probably not very harmfull and the assessments of those organisations can be trusted so long as you can find out what they actually have to say on the matter rather than taking the companys word (they could be outright lieing/missinterpruting results in the press release). The only way to really be sure is to actually do some research and find the appropriate studys (which may or may not exist). Since the plastics companys don't seem that bothered about using alternatives suggests its not actually a big deal for them just to switch so probably there won't be much more research into BPAs if they are just phased out anyway, so we may never know.
Hmm maybe I should have tried Gentoo, I tried slackware as my first linux experince since
a)I could download it and have it on floppy.
b)There was some option to install it ontop of the MS-DOS file system which was good since it wasn't my computer.
I did enjoy recompling my kernel etc but could never get it to work with the winmodem the computer had. It was great except for no internet access which meant booting to windows, downloading something/searching for help with a bug writing it down then rebooting in slackware.
When I got my own PC I went to FreeBSD which I used as a file server and other functions at home for a while, I had no need for linux or unix for a while after that and now I've started using Ubuntu for my coding and on a cluster for work at Uni and as a desktop OS at home. I do still feel some attachement to slackware still though since it really cemented my love with computing if only because it was fun trying to fix it when it went wrong.
Iraq is generally way, way outside Joe Citizen's monkeysphere, but that guy in his WoW raid is definitely inside it, and when that guy says "sorry, I have to go, someone's bombing my block"... that has an impact.
Yea the main impact being he'll have to find a better guild. Leaving halfway through a raid is inexcusable.
c = 3x10^8 m/s yes but the thing is we have defined both what a meter and a second are. (actually we define c and a second exactly which then sets the length of a meter)
If I decide to measure time in seconds but length in some new unit that just happens to be 3x10^8 meters long then if i measure the speed of light in these units i find it travels exactly 1 unit of length in 1 unit of time. Hence c = 1.
I think where your going wrong is thinking that setting c to 1 means 1m/s which it doesn't. Also in these units you can measure energy and mass in the same units since the conversion factor c^2 becomes 1. This makes a lot of the maths in relativity easier since you don't have lots of factors of c everywhere to keep track of
So you complain that we've had nothing but speculations, but when theres an experiment that could actually answer some important questions in physics like the existence of the Higgs field, or finding or putting bounds on the size of extra dimension, finding evidence for or against super symmetry. you don't class it as an advancement in physics?
And outside particle physics we seem to be doing quite well at the moment. Cosmology for example has changed considerably in the last 10 years or so and BEC's anyone?
There is plenty of gravity to keep a stable atmosphere on mars, there is in fact a 'stable' atmosphere on mars right now. A lack of active volcanoes is whats really made mars inhospitable.
"How is it possible that neutron stars can stay together? There is a law of physics called "The Island of Stability" that requires that neutrons packed this tightly together should fly apart from one another. Neutron stars therefore violate the laws of known physics."
'the island of stability' aside neutron stars are held together by gravity and there is no problem explaining their existance. Although there is a lack of knowledge in the nature of their interiors.
Also dark matter and energy have essentially been observed due to their gravitational effect. If they hadn't been detected in this way people wouldn't be trying to work out what they are.
I'm also not sure how the sun heating up and the presence of cool areas on the photosphere are evidence against the big bang.
Physics is very sophisticated we understand the laws of nature to incredible degrees of accuracy. Quantum mechanics and general relativity give a very good understanding of the universe at large and small scales. However solving complex problems with either theory is still difficult. With quantum mechanics and the standard model there are lots of experiments available to find evidence in a lab. Astrophysics is harder because it's predictions can not be tested in a lab, this makes finding evidence for or against theories much harder.
and how is that a bad thing, its one of the best theories we have at the moment for explaining gravity at small distances and continuing to work on it may yeild some testable predictions. Besides isn't lots of maths just a academic wank-fest, i'm sure thats how you'd have described complex numbers when they were first 'discovered', an imaginary number what an academic wank-fest how could something like that ever be useful in the real world!
While i agree with your argument, it does have one consequence that you failed to mention. Which is that given the limited funds that each person spends on entertainment the way for the different sections of "big media" to make the most money is to compete to reduce the amount of piracy/copyright infringment in their area. So if the consumer can't download the latest film but can get free music, tv and video games they have more money left over to go and pay to see the film. While this still doesn't mean that downloading 10000 songs is the same as stealing 10000 sales from the record company, it does explain why the action of the riaa etc in these cases is still worthwhile and profitable.
you're 3 orders of magnitude out! thats pretty bad
Re:Fat Tire is a great beer...
on
Green Geek Beer
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· Score: 1
Only thats not what he said fool
"after trying Bud-Light i was tired of beers from the other side of the Atlantic"
"after trying Bud-Light i was cautious of beers from the other side of the Atlantic"
You can be tired of trying American beers I know I would be after sampling a few. I know one is more likely given the context but personaly I'd give the author the benifit of the doubt rather than lecture them on spelling. Your error appears to have been to decide what the GP meant without actually reading what they said but then I guess i should expect that on/.
Re:Fat Tire is a great beer...
on
Green Geek Beer
·
· Score: 1
And he could have used either one in that sentance so i don't see the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
And the really sad thing is even if you've survived everything up to the last bang, while neutrinos travel close to the speed of light the X-rays and gamma rays would still reach you and kill you first so the neutrinos never get a chance. Poor neutrinos even when they're deadly they still dont get a chance to kill
Why not? If he's theory is right surely that would be a good thing? interestingly I read the book you linked to and found it quite hard going, there was little explanation of the ideas presented and seemed to have many descriptive quotes from people like minkowski that were then interpruted, woryingly these 'sound bites' were offered as support of the theory presented.
The multi-dimensional description of time was woefully under explained, probably due to a lack of a concise mathematical description but was instead given a more general description. As a physicist I have a precise understanding of what the space time of general relativity is mathematicaly the physical interperation can be tricky at times and the mathematics hard but it is very well defined and unfortunatly the link you gave did not furnish me with the similar well defined mathematical description of the Mayer's theory.
I would be interested to see a derivation of some known results from GR or newtonian gravity and from cosmology, reproduced in Mayer's frame work as this would provide a good starting point from which to understand the theory. Just in case you are interested I would like to see how the theory reproduces orbital trajectories (ie keplers laws), The equivalent description of the CMB would also be usefull. I may just me being lazy but as you've probably guessed I'm not overly impressed so far.
What really ticked the 'crackpot' box for me though was the single publication, proclaimed as a revolution of great importance. I would like to include a quote but it appears i can't copy and paste it so just read the last paragraph on page 136. Such a statement really has no place in a scientific document and is really indicative of the entire document
Well since Minkowski latter came to be a major contributor to the development of the theory of relativity he clearly decided that they weren't worth the effort either. Any model the does not require the universe to be expanding must really take some work to avoid the fact that it clearly is. The fact the dark matter has nothing to do with the universe's expansion well that is to say the evidence for dark matter does not rely on it. Proposing that dark matter does not exist would require rethinking not just relativity but newtons gravitational laws. Also what makes more sense than the big bang? I assume since it makes more sense you could explain it for me?
Yes it looks like they are measuring the distance by paralax using the fact that galaxies are in fact quite wide really. From the article it looks like this has been done before for galaxies close by which is not very usefull for measuing hubbles constant but that they have found way of amplifying the signal from distant galaxies. What the article doesn't say is how they measure both the linear and angular size of the gallaxy which is required to gauge the distance it just says that they did. If so then this is indeed very good news for narrowing down hubbles so called constant.
As a side note using standard candles is as you said very hard and requires bridging as you put it, one method used is I believe to assume that distant galaxies have a maximum size / brightness which puts a bound on the distance to them. The measurement of velocity is actually very acurate and easy and while it may contribute to the error bars of the estimate in hubbles constant I think the contribution would be tiny compared to the problems in measuring distance.
I don't know anyone who learns for the sakes of education.
I do
Only assuming that the government still needs to produce tax revenue from somewhere the people being employed will have to pay more tax in some form making it less desirable to work in this corporation friendly country. So in order to entice the workers to work there the corporation will have to pay a higher salary. Or maybe if there is less tax then maybe the country just won't be as nice to live in and again people will expect to be paid more. Clearly business friendly is not always the same as people friendly and people are required to do business so really you need to strike up a balance between the two
Thats not really right at all, firstly comparing economics and string theory is just crazy, economic markets aren't themselves described by some master equation you have random inputs, people make unexpected decisions. They are in some sense chaotic systems. The failure of economic models is more similar to the failure of weather models. Trying to compare the development of string theory to this seems stupid we are not constantly discovering new experimental data that doesn't fit with string theory every week then changing string theory. At the moment string theory is not a single theory making predictions. It is not failing to make predictions that match experimental data but rather is failing to make predictions at all.
String theory does not need to predict experimental results that we have not already seen. We have no theory that explains all of the experimental evidence that we already have so doing that is enough for string theory to be useful. If it can be contorted as you say to fit past experimental results then it will be doing better than quantum mechanics and general relativity.
You also seem to think string theory has many free parameters and that thats a bad thing, well so does the standard model the symmetry groups and which symmetry groups are broken etc are all inputs into QFT which then matches predictions. The number of fields strengths of interactions masses of some of the particles etc are also all parameters that have been carefully chosen to match predictions. String theory is hoping to produce a more fundamental model one which when defined will actually have more fundamental defining parameters and at the same time fix the problems created by the required renormalization of field theories, and allow a description of gravity at the quantum scale.
Only this is a case of making predictions, I mean this can be used to predict how a super fluid behaves. Although as I said before this doesn't tell give any information about string theory being a physical theory
Also this correspondence is genuinely interesting even if the reporting on it isn't great. This is just one application it could work the other way as well allowing predictions to be made of string theory by solving the corresponding problem in the gauge theory avoiding doing the string theory maths which can be very difficult hence most of the problems with the theory.
Firstly the correspondence doesn't say anything about whether or not string theory is "right" as a theory of nature just that it can be used here to solve a difficult problem in QCD by solving an easy problem in string theory. String theory was not invented to solve this problem and has nothing to do with the number of parameters of string theory being tuned to fit the data.
Also you don't build a model in physics to make random predictions then see if someone of them turn out to be right, you build a model which is useful in explaining the results you already have and then if that works you can see what other predictions your model can make. Since string theory is still in the first stage, i.e the model is still being built mathematical discoveries and methods are still being developed to see if it can explain things better than QFT then maybe it will make some useful predictions afterwards.
I'm no expert on evolutionary models but wouldn't that leave him with no models eventually if even the best one performs poorly. I think the gp was talking about a general problem in evolutionary models getting stuck in a locally best model when there are better models available but are very different to the one you have but are unaccesable to the system. Thats the kind of thing you get stuck in with metropolis algorithms in Monte Carlo methods, getting your system stuck in a local minimum and I can see how a simillar thing could happen in evolutionary models. So I think you kinda missed his point
But that being said there are undoubtably things you can do to aliviate this and your friend probably already does and using evolutionary models sounds like a good idea.
Now I'm not sure the Plastics Council is a group I'd want to get my info from, but the rest sound somewhat compelling. So what's the deal, yes it leaches, but it's not necessarily harmful? I wouldn't want to be a sucker for some company's BS, but what's the deal with groups above?
Well you could be right, from the summary it looks like the study found that BPA levels in urine increased, not that increased BPA levels in urine are harmful. What this means is that it looks like nobody has actually looked or performed a study to see if drinking from containers made with BPA is actually harmful but are instead infering a risk from the fact that BPA does indeed leach from the containers and that there is a plausable action for BPA to damage your health. The key here is that while people may have performed experiments where they pour a load of BPA on some cells or see if it reacts with some enzyme or something the summary doesn't actually mention any link with BPA and health issues. It has "endocrine-disrupting potential" but what exactly do they mean by potential? does it disrupt endocrines in real people in the levels that are associated with the leaching from drink containers? would you have to drink everything out of such a container to be at risk? does your health suffer imdeiatly after just one sip? basically this study doesn't tell you and you would need to look at studys conducted looking at how BPA levels effect health and then compare the effects to the levels leaching out of the containers.
So yes they are probably not very harmfull and the assessments of those organisations can be trusted so long as you can find out what they actually have to say on the matter rather than taking the companys word (they could be outright lieing/missinterpruting results in the press release). The only way to really be sure is to actually do some research and find the appropriate studys (which may or may not exist). Since the plastics companys don't seem that bothered about using alternatives suggests its not actually a big deal for them just to switch so probably there won't be much more research into BPAs if they are just phased out anyway, so we may never know.
Hmm maybe I should have tried Gentoo, I tried slackware as my first linux experince since
a)I could download it and have it on floppy.
b)There was some option to install it ontop of the MS-DOS file system which was good since it wasn't my computer.
I did enjoy recompling my kernel etc but could never get it to work with the winmodem the computer had. It was great except for no internet access which meant booting to windows, downloading something/searching for help with a bug writing it down then rebooting in slackware. When I got my own PC I went to FreeBSD which I used as a file server and other functions at home for a while, I had no need for linux or unix for a while after that and now I've started using Ubuntu for my coding and on a cluster for work at Uni and as a desktop OS at home. I do still feel some attachement to slackware still though since it really cemented my love with computing if only because it was fun trying to fix it when it went wrong.
Iraq is generally way, way outside Joe Citizen's monkeysphere, but that guy in his WoW raid is definitely inside it, and when that guy says "sorry, I have to go, someone's bombing my block"... that has an impact.
Yea the main impact being he'll have to find a better guild. Leaving halfway through a raid is inexcusable.
c = 3x10^8 m/s yes but the thing is we have defined both what a meter and a second are. (actually we define c and a second exactly which then sets the length of a meter)
If I decide to measure time in seconds but length in some new unit that just happens to be 3x10^8 meters long then if i measure the speed of light in these units i find it travels exactly 1 unit of length in 1 unit of time. Hence c = 1.
I think where your going wrong is thinking that setting c to 1 means 1m/s which it doesn't. Also in these units you can measure energy and mass in the same units since the conversion factor c^2 becomes 1. This makes a lot of the maths in relativity easier since you don't have lots of factors of c everywhere to keep track of
So you complain that we've had nothing but speculations, but when theres an experiment that could actually answer some important questions in physics like the existence of the Higgs field, or finding or putting bounds on the size of extra dimension, finding evidence for or against super symmetry. you don't class it as an advancement in physics?
And outside particle physics we seem to be doing quite well at the moment. Cosmology for example has changed considerably in the last 10 years or so and BEC's anyone?
Physics is doing just fine IMO
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/
There is plenty of gravity to keep a stable atmosphere on mars, there is in fact a 'stable' atmosphere on mars right now. A lack of active volcanoes is whats really made mars inhospitable.
"How is it possible that neutron stars can stay together? There is a law of physics called "The Island of Stability" that requires that neutrons packed this tightly together should fly apart from one another. Neutron stars therefore violate the laws of known physics." 'the island of stability' aside neutron stars are held together by gravity and there is no problem explaining their existance. Although there is a lack of knowledge in the nature of their interiors. Also dark matter and energy have essentially been observed due to their gravitational effect. If they hadn't been detected in this way people wouldn't be trying to work out what they are. I'm also not sure how the sun heating up and the presence of cool areas on the photosphere are evidence against the big bang. Physics is very sophisticated we understand the laws of nature to incredible degrees of accuracy. Quantum mechanics and general relativity give a very good understanding of the universe at large and small scales. However solving complex problems with either theory is still difficult. With quantum mechanics and the standard model there are lots of experiments available to find evidence in a lab. Astrophysics is harder because it's predictions can not be tested in a lab, this makes finding evidence for or against theories much harder.
and how is that a bad thing, its one of the best theories we have at the moment for explaining gravity at small distances and continuing to work on it may yeild some testable predictions. Besides isn't lots of maths just a academic wank-fest, i'm sure thats how you'd have described complex numbers when they were first 'discovered', an imaginary number what an academic wank-fest how could something like that ever be useful in the real world!
the 1930's called they want their joke back.
I was with you up to the newkey brown, thats just an awful drink
While i agree with your argument, it does have one consequence that you failed to mention. Which is that given the limited funds that each person spends on entertainment the way for the different sections of "big media" to make the most money is to compete to reduce the amount of piracy/copyright infringment in their area. So if the consumer can't download the latest film but can get free music, tv and video games they have more money left over to go and pay to see the film. While this still doesn't mean that downloading 10000 songs is the same as stealing 10000 sales from the record company, it does explain why the action of the riaa etc in these cases is still worthwhile and profitable.
you're 3 orders of magnitude out! thats pretty bad
Only thats not what he said fool "after trying Bud-Light i was tired of beers from the other side of the Atlantic" "after trying Bud-Light i was cautious of beers from the other side of the Atlantic" You can be tired of trying American beers I know I would be after sampling a few. I know one is more likely given the context but personaly I'd give the author the benifit of the doubt rather than lecture them on spelling. Your error appears to have been to decide what the GP meant without actually reading what they said but then I guess i should expect that on /.
And he could have used either one in that sentance so i don't see the problem.