So what you honestly believe is that merely "calling for regime change" in a country is the same thing as rushing to invade that country causing countless deaths?
Back to the point at hand in my original post, there is no way Gore is just as responsible for the deaths of 1700 American soldiers as the Commander in Chief. Especially given that Bush didn't have an exit strategy, ignored the advice of advisors telling him to bring in far more troops than the number he wanted, and that the units on the ground were severely under-equiped.
But hey, you're right, Bush can do no wrong, better blame that liberal Gore who apparently said he wanted regime change. After all, he was VP when Clinton got a blowjob, the horrors the horrors.
And on the whole, both we and Iraq are better off with the ones getting killed than the ones Saddam would have killed.
You obviously support this war, which branch of the armed forces are you serving in?
If you're not currently serving, then will you march right down to your local recruiting station and sign up to serve in this war you so happily support? Or are you a chickenhawk of the 101st armchair brigade that happily lets other people do the fighting and dying for him/her?
So you think that Gore merely calling for regime change in Iraq is synonymous with Bush invading Iraq? And furthermore intentionally misleading the country about the urgency to invade Iraq? And even more so, ignoring the advice of military brass and invading Iraq with insufficient troops and without any forethought given to a viable occupation plan or exit strategy?
Gore isn't responsible for the deaths of 1700 American soldiers, but the Commander in Chief certainly is.
now the idea that light == em is simply a fact, and hardly feels remarkable any more...
When I first studied E&M, I thought it was really cool that I can get one consant (speed of light) from two others (permittivity/permeability) that seemingly at first don't have much to do with each other.
Seriously, when you first study E&M in it's simplistic form, you learn about Coulomb's law for electrostatic fields, then ampere's law for magnetostatics. Okay, simple enough stuff, and even in these static situations the electric and magnetic fields are entirely independnet and don't seem to have much to do with each other. But then you look at the dynamics, and add in Faraday's law as well as modify Ampere's law for the displacement current, of which solutions to these two laws describe travelling waves with velocity (in linear media) of 1/sqrt(epsilon*mu).
For me, seeing the propogations of E&M oscillations travel at a speed deriveable from these other constants of electrostatic and magnetostatic forces, which seem to have absolutely nothing to do with travelling waves, well I thought it was pretty cool.
Einstein basically came up with SR because he was troubled by some apparent (and well known at the time) contradictions between Maxwell's equations and Newtonian time frames. SR was his method of resolving these contradictions.
Regarding the photoelectric effect, Planck had already proposed the notion of discrete quanta of radiation a few years prior in order to get a consistent statistical-mechanical description of blackbody radiation that wasn't susceptible to the 'ultraviolet catastrophe'. Einstein extended this theory to explain the bizarre frequency-dependence of radiation to get above the work function of the metal. Was this a tippy-toes process or was it standing on the shoulders of giants? In both our opinions, in this case it was a stroke of genius. I also believe SR was a similar stoke of genius.
Well, I guess you don't appreciate the subtleties and beauty of the laws of nature as much as me. Of course Maxwell's Equations describe electromagnetic radiation, that's built directly into the laws. But the way they manifest themselves at times is quite amazing.
Look at it this way, you can easily measure the permittivity and permeability of free space in a normal sized lab without sophisticated equipment. You don't need to use incredibly large distances, nor worry about small times of measurement (ie, high-speed equipment). Yet you've just effectively measured the speed of light, which to measure directly you'd othewise need to employ either very fast electronics or an incredibly large distances to measure the wave propagation with any precision.
Light is something we've known about since the dawn of time. Yet electric and magnetic phenomenon weren't studied scientifically until relatively recently. There really is no reason a priori to assume that light is a propogating electromagnetic disturbance, much less a spin 1 quanta of electromagnetic excitation.
And I'm not alone on this, the author of one of my undergrad E&M texts (maybe Griffiths?) also noted that a priori there really is no reason to think the speed of light should be related to quantities easily measured in a lab that deceptively seem to have nothing to do with light itself.
I guess your perspective on Nature is just different from mine.
Firstly, it took decades after Maxwell's equations were known to get the Lorentz transformations. Lorentz merely idenfitied them as those required to keep the equations the same in all reference frames. Einstein took it further to postulate that laws of physics ARE the same in all reference frames, with speed of light the maximum possible speed. And furthermore that time and space REALLY ARE non-Newtonian. that's quite a proclomation to make.
If SR was just a tippy-toes extension of maxwell's laws, as you imply, it would have been done long before 1905.
BTW, you've commented on my sig long before, i think we were disagreeing about something then too, and we decided we can come to some common ground since we have similar-enough sigs;-)
is not 42, it's the fine structure constant, which basically ties E&M to quantum mechanics. As Richard Feynmann said, it is "one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to use with no understanding by man". It's interesting because it's dimensionaless, meaning it's the same in any system of units, so physicists and mathematicians have tried to figure out special properties of this number, or simple ways to derive it via numerology.
It's also possible this number may have changed as the universe evolved, so is it something special or just arbitray?
Of course there is more to the universe than just Quantum Electrodynamics, so this number isn't the end-all be-all. You'll need to look at other coupling constants to get a larger picture.
You're exactly right, special relativity, as originally proposed by Einstein, isn't the full because it ignores quantum mechanics. It's QED, the quantizing of the electromagnetic field in a way consistent with both traditional quantum mechanics and special relativity, that supersedes it.
And of course even QED ignores QCD and whatever quantum gravity turns out to be too.
Relativity is brilliant, and changed science and culture forever. But it's really an ingenious refinement of Maxwell's field equations, even more than extra precision added to Newton's formulas.
First of all you're only referring to special relativity here, which ignores acceleration and gravity. Secondly, there were still some leaps of faith to be made, such as assuming c is constant in all frames of reference, which Lorentz showed non-Newtonian transformations that would allow this for Maxwell's equations. And expanding the new energy definition and concluding the zeroth-order term (mc^2) is the rest energy of mass also took another leap of faith (although that paper wasn't published until a few months after this first relativistic one).
But even so, discovering the connection between relativity and E&M is still amazing, in my opinion. For examle, the permittivity (epsilon_0) and permeability (mu_0) of free space are two constants that can be measured in the laboratory rather easily. Yet Maxwell's equations in vacuum describe waves travelling at speeds 1/sqrt(epsilon_0*mu_0), which is exactly the speed of light in vacuum (although in Gaussian units this connection is far more obvious). It's pretty amazing to think how these are related. But you still need to make some assumptions to get the Lorentz transforms between reference frames.
Additionally, even simple special relativity was extremely controversial, it rejected many assumed notions of space/time. There were also many paradoxes that took awhile to get ironed out. Many scientists didn't believe in relativity until it was shown in experiment. And in fact the theories of relativity were so controversial that the Nobel committee didn't want to award Einstein the prize based on these, so went for the safer 'Photoelectric Effect' instead.
And thirdly, general relativity, although again not included in this 100 year anniversary, is total genius, and it took Einstein 10 years to come up with the theory. So don't wave off relativity as just a 'refinement of Maxwell's field equations' because it really is much more than that.
True dat.
Temperature is merely an energy scale which relates finite changes of heat with finite changes of entropy.
What this means is that you can basically expect to see as many interesting phenomena between 1mK and 1K as you would between 1K and 1000K. These experiments were done down at 50nK, so that's a world of difference from even the cryo stuff I do at 10mK.
I've heard that reply before, that's the standard reply given by either former soldiers OR hawkish Republicans that support the war but are too cowardly to enlist themselves or their children.
There's more than a half million people on active duty and over 700,000 reservists in the army alone. Taken as a percentage chance, the ods of getting killed these last few years in the military are pretty low.
So then what you are saying is that the deaths of 1700 American soldiers thus far in Iraq are justified so that the other soldiers can enjoy the fringe benefits (career training, low-rate loans, cheaper health care) from military service?
You bring up important points, and there certainly are opportunistic benefits for joing the army. But there are some real problems with the current situation. Soldiers must be able to trust their leaders to only deploy them if absolutely necessary, and unfortunately the current administration has betrayed their trust. We're fighting a war that more and more people, including Republican politicians, are realizing we shouldn't have initiated.
You say "Military recruiters recognize the more limited future of these kids and that they have something to offer them. Military recruitment is usually a win/win proposition." If we had responsible leaders who used war as a last resort, you might be right. But in the current debacle, it's atrocious the some people justify getting poor Americans to fight a war led by hawkish politicians who won't put themselves or their families in harm's way.
About 1700 young Americans have been killed in action thus far, it shouldn't be only the poorer families be the ones to risk their children's lives in order to have a better future. Do you support these 1700 deaths, along with tens of thousands of cases of physical and psychological injuries, such that other soldiers have a chance to lead a better life?
When you say the military takes care of you, that sentiment is greatly questioned by those in active duty. Where were you stationed during your service, and how many of your fellow soldiers were killed on the front line?
Also due to the current recruiting crisis, military recruiters have resorted to unethical practices to get people to enlist. Shouldn't these potential recruits make the decision to join on their own, without pressure from the recruiter?
The current class gap recruiting policies are nothing more than a technique to allow poor soldiers fight a war that the rich politicians support but don't want their own family members fighting in.
Yeah, few people realize that the No Child Left Behind Act isn't only about raising standardized test scores but also helps recruiters get unimpeded information about potential recruits. See this
article from 2002, long before there was the current recruiting crisis due to the Iraq war.
Also - there are ways for high school parents and students to "opt out" of the recruiting campaign. If you're a high school student or parent of such a student, you might find these links helpful:
As I commented above, this is especially true with hardware companies. A startup might need to setup fabrication facilities, get all their test&measurement hardware ready and work out the kinks, while the big guys don't have these steps to do.
Startups begin with small pools of capital, but big guys have alot more. Of the people I've known to go into hardware startups, all of them had to be very secretive because companies like Lucent, if they found out what they were working on, could have swung some engineers onto the same project and beaten the startup to market.
If the startup's first product doesn't sell well at all, that could mean death to the company, so those first few years are crucial.
This sounds just simply... for lack of a better word... stupid.
How many startups have you participated in? From the other side of the coin, sometimes it feels like you have to maintain silence if you are competing against well-established entities, especially if they already have fab facilities and high-end test and measurement equipment ready to go.
Back during the dot-com boom I worked for an FFRDC, and I knew many people that were leaving the lab to go to startup companies. Some of these were senior engineers going to senior positions of a startup. The field of optical networking was extremely hot back then, and alot of research was conducted into the physics and device end for all-optical networking and dense wavelength division multiplexing, etc.
The startups felt that they had to maintain their secrecy on exactly what they were doing, and here's why. The startup is working from a small venture capital pool of funding, say $10 million or so. And they're trying to occupy a niche corner of the market. On the other hand, well-established companies, eg Lucent, if they see a perceived threat and KNOW what the company is working on, can easily route $50 million or much more to some of their engineers to work on the same thing. To put the startup out of business the big guy just needs to beat the startup to market.
Maybe in the software realm it's different, but for hardware companies, especially in fields pushing the envelope like optical networking, you really need buckets of cash to buy the necessary equipment to compete. Easy for big companies, hard for startups.
Of course you advertise the product when it's ready, but if you do it too early you let the big guys cut you off at the pass.
Uhhh, they didn't EOL the platform, OS X is the platform and it's the company's future. They're changing the processor, but to the end user on the OS X platform that change shouldn't be noticeable. That's the entire reason they pushed developers to use Cocoa and XCode, and even Carbon, so changes like this would be of little consequence to the end user.
The user should only really notice the difference if they plan to do assembly programming, or if there's ancient obscure software that doesn't use Carbon or Cocoa. But for someone switching TO mac that's not very likely at all. Additionally, future apps using cocoa should run just fine on PPC-based macs for quite some time now, due to the standardized interface.
Here in Baltimore it's kind of different, the city had negative population flow for the past several decades, and only in the last few years has this trend begun to reverse. Sure housing prices have shot up 2-3x in the past 5 years, but many of these are in areas that used to be total dumps and have really turned around and become quite nice. Compared with somewhere like California, where many areas went from already being nice to being super rich, here it's a different story.
We'll see what happens. I've heard from some finance types that there will be a market correction, but it's different from the dot-com bubble bursting because we'll still have the bricks-and-mortar investment in our possession. Ie, when a stock tanks you've got a worthless piece of paper, but with a house you still own the investment.
So it doesn't necessarily mean housing prices will tank the way stocks did in 2000-2001. What's more likely is people getting burnt who opted for variable rate and interest-only mortgages if the rates rise suddenly, but I don't know what kind of effect that would have on the economy later on.
No, the parent is correct. Before the COSTAR correctional optics package was launched to fix Hubble's spherical aberation problem, NASA engineers were able to digitally de-convolve the aberations out of the image. The digitally-manipulated results weren't as good as the ones COSTAR optics eventually offered, but they did help some initial observing runs.
Because not every Torah is tracked, and a synagogue buying a Torah wouldn't specifically know that a Torah is stolen or not.
For example, there are a number of Torahs recovered from Shtetls long since wiped out through the Pograms or by the Nazis. My hometown synagogue has one such Torah.
There is a family that goes to one of my relative's synagogues, and they helped save a Torah just before the Holocaust. Back in Europe just before it was too late (I don't remember which country) the Rabbi and some members of the synagogue took the Torah from the ark, wrapped it up securely, and buried it somewhere in the town. Some years after the Holocaust the survivors dug that Torah up and it's now being used in a synagogue somewhere.
I've also seen much of the opposite as well. Namely that many of the current Mac users I know switched over to Macs in the past year (as did my girlfriend and I). Additionally, many anti-Mac people (as I used to be) based our anti-Mac sentiments on the Mac platforms 5 years ago and prior.
I guess by clarifying I risk giving the appearance that I have absolutely no sense of humor, but I'll do it anyway;-)
Basically in these systems you must suppress thermal fluctuations sufficiently that you can observe the quantum phenomena. Specifically, many single-electron effects (as in single-electron transistors) would be 'washed-out' at too high temperatures.
Working at 4.2K is easier than you think, you just dip your sample into a dewar of liquid helium.
Slashdot Mirror
Back to the point at hand in my original post, there is no way Gore is just as responsible for the deaths of 1700 American soldiers as the Commander in Chief. Especially given that Bush didn't have an exit strategy, ignored the advice of advisors telling him to bring in far more troops than the number he wanted, and that the units on the ground were severely under-equiped.
But hey, you're right, Bush can do no wrong, better blame that liberal Gore who apparently said he wanted regime change. After all, he was VP when Clinton got a blowjob, the horrors the horrors.
You obviously support this war, which branch of the armed forces are you serving in?
If you're not currently serving, then will you march right down to your local recruiting station and sign up to serve in this war you so happily support? Or are you a chickenhawk of the 101st armchair brigade that happily lets other people do the fighting and dying for him/her?
Gore isn't responsible for the deaths of 1700 American soldiers, but the Commander in Chief certainly is.
When I first studied E&M, I thought it was really cool that I can get one consant (speed of light) from two others (permittivity/permeability) that seemingly at first don't have much to do with each other.
Seriously, when you first study E&M in it's simplistic form, you learn about Coulomb's law for electrostatic fields, then ampere's law for magnetostatics. Okay, simple enough stuff, and even in these static situations the electric and magnetic fields are entirely independnet and don't seem to have much to do with each other. But then you look at the dynamics, and add in Faraday's law as well as modify Ampere's law for the displacement current, of which solutions to these two laws describe travelling waves with velocity (in linear media) of 1/sqrt(epsilon*mu).
For me, seeing the propogations of E&M oscillations travel at a speed deriveable from these other constants of electrostatic and magnetostatic forces, which seem to have absolutely nothing to do with travelling waves, well I thought it was pretty cool.
Regarding the photoelectric effect, Planck had already proposed the notion of discrete quanta of radiation a few years prior in order to get a consistent statistical-mechanical description of blackbody radiation that wasn't susceptible to the 'ultraviolet catastrophe'. Einstein extended this theory to explain the bizarre frequency-dependence of radiation to get above the work function of the metal. Was this a tippy-toes process or was it standing on the shoulders of giants? In both our opinions, in this case it was a stroke of genius. I also believe SR was a similar stoke of genius.
Look at it this way, you can easily measure the permittivity and permeability of free space in a normal sized lab without sophisticated equipment. You don't need to use incredibly large distances, nor worry about small times of measurement (ie, high-speed equipment). Yet you've just effectively measured the speed of light, which to measure directly you'd othewise need to employ either very fast electronics or an incredibly large distances to measure the wave propagation with any precision.
Light is something we've known about since the dawn of time. Yet electric and magnetic phenomenon weren't studied scientifically until relatively recently. There really is no reason a priori to assume that light is a propogating electromagnetic disturbance, much less a spin 1 quanta of electromagnetic excitation.
And I'm not alone on this, the author of one of my undergrad E&M texts (maybe Griffiths?) also noted that a priori there really is no reason to think the speed of light should be related to quantities easily measured in a lab that deceptively seem to have nothing to do with light itself.
I guess your perspective on Nature is just different from mine.
If SR was just a tippy-toes extension of maxwell's laws, as you imply, it would have been done long before 1905.
BTW, you've commented on my sig long before, i think we were disagreeing about something then too, and we decided we can come to some common ground since we have similar-enough sigs ;-)
It's also possible this number may have changed as the universe evolved, so is it something special or just arbitray?
Of course there is more to the universe than just Quantum Electrodynamics, so this number isn't the end-all be-all. You'll need to look at other coupling constants to get a larger picture.
So it's not 42, but it's not too far off ;-)
And of course even QED ignores QCD and whatever quantum gravity turns out to be too.
First of all you're only referring to special relativity here, which ignores acceleration and gravity. Secondly, there were still some leaps of faith to be made, such as assuming c is constant in all frames of reference, which Lorentz showed non-Newtonian transformations that would allow this for Maxwell's equations. And expanding the new energy definition and concluding the zeroth-order term (mc^2) is the rest energy of mass also took another leap of faith (although that paper wasn't published until a few months after this first relativistic one).
But even so, discovering the connection between relativity and E&M is still amazing, in my opinion. For examle, the permittivity (epsilon_0) and permeability (mu_0) of free space are two constants that can be measured in the laboratory rather easily. Yet Maxwell's equations in vacuum describe waves travelling at speeds 1/sqrt(epsilon_0*mu_0), which is exactly the speed of light in vacuum (although in Gaussian units this connection is far more obvious). It's pretty amazing to think how these are related. But you still need to make some assumptions to get the Lorentz transforms between reference frames.
Additionally, even simple special relativity was extremely controversial, it rejected many assumed notions of space/time. There were also many paradoxes that took awhile to get ironed out. Many scientists didn't believe in relativity until it was shown in experiment. And in fact the theories of relativity were so controversial that the Nobel committee didn't want to award Einstein the prize based on these, so went for the safer 'Photoelectric Effect' instead.
And thirdly, general relativity, although again not included in this 100 year anniversary, is total genius, and it took Einstein 10 years to come up with the theory. So don't wave off relativity as just a 'refinement of Maxwell's field equations' because it really is much more than that.
Just fuse the original story and this dupe into a heavier-Z nucleus story.
What this means is that you can basically expect to see as many interesting phenomena between 1mK and 1K as you would between 1K and 1000K. These experiments were done down at 50nK, so that's a world of difference from even the cryo stuff I do at 10mK.
Which one are you?
So then what you are saying is that the deaths of 1700 American soldiers thus far in Iraq are justified so that the other soldiers can enjoy the fringe benefits (career training, low-rate loans, cheaper health care) from military service?
You say "Military recruiters recognize the more limited future of these kids and that they have something to offer them. Military recruitment is usually a win/win proposition." If we had responsible leaders who used war as a last resort, you might be right. But in the current debacle, it's atrocious the some people justify getting poor Americans to fight a war led by hawkish politicians who won't put themselves or their families in harm's way.
About 1700 young Americans have been killed in action thus far, it shouldn't be only the poorer families be the ones to risk their children's lives in order to have a better future. Do you support these 1700 deaths, along with tens of thousands of cases of physical and psychological injuries, such that other soldiers have a chance to lead a better life?
When you say the military takes care of you, that sentiment is greatly questioned by those in active duty. Where were you stationed during your service, and how many of your fellow soldiers were killed on the front line?
Also due to the current recruiting crisis, military recruiters have resorted to unethical practices to get people to enlist. Shouldn't these potential recruits make the decision to join on their own, without pressure from the recruiter?
The current class gap recruiting policies are nothing more than a technique to allow poor soldiers fight a war that the rich politicians support but don't want their own family members fighting in.
Also - there are ways for high school parents and students to "opt out" of the recruiting campaign. If you're a high school student or parent of such a student, you might find these links helpful:
Startups begin with small pools of capital, but big guys have alot more. Of the people I've known to go into hardware startups, all of them had to be very secretive because companies like Lucent, if they found out what they were working on, could have swung some engineers onto the same project and beaten the startup to market.
If the startup's first product doesn't sell well at all, that could mean death to the company, so those first few years are crucial.
How many startups have you participated in? From the other side of the coin, sometimes it feels like you have to maintain silence if you are competing against well-established entities, especially if they already have fab facilities and high-end test and measurement equipment ready to go.
Back during the dot-com boom I worked for an FFRDC, and I knew many people that were leaving the lab to go to startup companies. Some of these were senior engineers going to senior positions of a startup. The field of optical networking was extremely hot back then, and alot of research was conducted into the physics and device end for all-optical networking and dense wavelength division multiplexing, etc.
The startups felt that they had to maintain their secrecy on exactly what they were doing, and here's why. The startup is working from a small venture capital pool of funding, say $10 million or so. And they're trying to occupy a niche corner of the market. On the other hand, well-established companies, eg Lucent, if they see a perceived threat and KNOW what the company is working on, can easily route $50 million or much more to some of their engineers to work on the same thing. To put the startup out of business the big guy just needs to beat the startup to market.
Maybe in the software realm it's different, but for hardware companies, especially in fields pushing the envelope like optical networking, you really need buckets of cash to buy the necessary equipment to compete. Easy for big companies, hard for startups.
Of course you advertise the product when it's ready, but if you do it too early you let the big guys cut you off at the pass.
The user should only really notice the difference if they plan to do assembly programming, or if there's ancient obscure software that doesn't use Carbon or Cocoa. But for someone switching TO mac that's not very likely at all. Additionally, future apps using cocoa should run just fine on PPC-based macs for quite some time now, due to the standardized interface.
Do you know of roughly what percentage of new house mortgages are these interest-only loans?
We'll see what happens. I've heard from some finance types that there will be a market correction, but it's different from the dot-com bubble bursting because we'll still have the bricks-and-mortar investment in our possession. Ie, when a stock tanks you've got a worthless piece of paper, but with a house you still own the investment.
So it doesn't necessarily mean housing prices will tank the way stocks did in 2000-2001. What's more likely is people getting burnt who opted for variable rate and interest-only mortgages if the rates rise suddenly, but I don't know what kind of effect that would have on the economy later on.
No, the parent is correct. Before the COSTAR correctional optics package was launched to fix Hubble's spherical aberation problem, NASA engineers were able to digitally de-convolve the aberations out of the image. The digitally-manipulated results weren't as good as the ones COSTAR optics eventually offered, but they did help some initial observing runs.
For example, there are a number of Torahs recovered from Shtetls long since wiped out through the Pograms or by the Nazis. My hometown synagogue has one such Torah.
There is a family that goes to one of my relative's synagogues, and they helped save a Torah just before the Holocaust. Back in Europe just before it was too late (I don't remember which country) the Rabbi and some members of the synagogue took the Torah from the ark, wrapped it up securely, and buried it somewhere in the town. Some years after the Holocaust the survivors dug that Torah up and it's now being used in a synagogue somewhere.
As you have said, alot has changed in 5 years.
Basically in these systems you must suppress thermal fluctuations sufficiently that you can observe the quantum phenomena. Specifically, many single-electron effects (as in single-electron transistors) would be 'washed-out' at too high temperatures. Working at 4.2K is easier than you think, you just dip your sample into a dewar of liquid helium.