The difference between PHD and PHB is only two bits.
Wrong, the proper capitalization is PhD, meaning lowercased 'h'. Assuming ASCII, the 'h' goes from 0x38 for 'H' to 0x58 for the properly cased 'h'. So the difference between PhD and PHB is really 0x22.
Thereby proving that there actually is something more than just a shave and a haircut between the PHB and PhD.
And yes, this is probably the dorkiest slashdot post I've ever written.
ACK, thanks for noting that, I typed too fast. IO should have said "Why does a measurement operator reduce a wavefunction to one of the eigenstates of said operator". Wonder how many other/.ers noticed...
Hi, I also did my undergrad physics study at Penn, graduated back in '97. (from your email address I'm assuming you're there now).
Fay Selove taught the 2-semester undergrad mechanics class back then, I think most other schools do only 1 semester of mechanics. We used Marion/Thornton.
Anyway, yeah, we did Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, coupled oscillations, the standard fare. Of course I didn't fully comprehend it all the first time around either. But my main problem with this review was the reviewer seeming awed at proving Kepler's 2nd law from the fundamentals, which you can pretty much do early on w/ conservation of angular momentum.
It seems weird, though, that this book is not categorized as a primary physics text, but more of a 'cool things in mechanics' text instead, if it's in fact as difficult as you say. Although it's certainly possible for any author to make a lower-level text appear much harder than it should be by not choosing the most illustrious mathematical path to demonstrate the physics involved.
If you're curious, I highly recommend the Landau-Lifshitz series. The mechanics book (Volume 1) is super slim (and that's including a long biography of L.D. Landau), and even covers many topics well into grad-level studies. But the author is so clear, and doesn't put any superfluous equations in there, it really makes sense. Perfect for people with attention problems, like myself, because it's harder to get lost. You should seriously go to the bookstore (it used to be a pathetic classroom-sized bookstore when i was there, but the new multi-storied bookstore is pretty cool now) and at least look at it, maybe the first few pages at least. I know they have at least some of the Landau-Lifshitz series because I bought Volume 5 (Statistical Mechanics Part 1) when I was last there three years ago!
Another similar thing is using two layers of linearly-polarized glass. Hold one layer fixed, and rotate the other layer to go from almost full transparency to almost full opacity.
There is a company that sells airline windows like this, and it would be pretty trivial to wire a motor to turn the layer appropriately, or even automatically to keep room brightness constant.
If you want a rough idea of the physics involved without the math, then you can probably just read the book, skipping the equations as they come to you. This way you'll still wind up getting the concepts as they're explained. Of course if you do this you're missing out on the overall beauty and spirit of physics, but at least you'll get a sense of what's going on. It's kind of like reading Shakespeare's Hamlet directly vs. reading a summary of it.
The book's content seems to be the basics of classical mechanics (harmonic oscillation, Kepler's laws), and some other stuff like hydrogen atom in quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, etc. As the review indicates, it's primarily things involving the 2-body problem. You may have learned this stuff at a higher level in other physics or chemistry classes, but this book will give a sense of where these concepts come from, and how it's not just fancy professors with crazy beards plucking them from thin air.
You can read my other comments on this topic, but I disagree with the poster as to the level of this book. I place it somewhere beyond the introductory physics classes, but not as difficult as the advanced undergraduate physics classes a physics major would take. The reviewer, on the other hand, implies one needs to be a graduate student in math or physics to enjoy this book, but I disagree with that. [disclaimer - i AM a graduate physics student, however]
Without math, you can learn a little something qualitatively of modern physics by reading some of the popular physics books of the day, like Brief History of Time, etc. Many of these authors convey nicely at a high level how and why things happen.
But if you want to know the details, you need math. Quantum mechanics is interesting because it's like a manifestation of linear algebra. Why does an operator reduce a wavefunction to one of the eigenstates of said wavefunction? That concept is one of the most central concepts to quantum mechanics, yet you wouldn't understand what eigenstates or wavefunctions are without some knowledge of math. If you explain it using only words, you're still beating around the bush, and basically it's the math that you would be describing.
Finally, to prove your example is crap, please explain using words why things fall. If your description involves anything about gravitons or Higgs bosons, please explain why they form, why gravitons should be spin-2, what a spin-2 boson field implies, etc, without using math. Basic answer - you cannot.
The reviewer raves about this book (despite not recommending it at the end), but IMHO misjudges the level or prerequisites of the reader that this book might interest. I'm a graduate physics student who didn't read this book (actually I never heard of it until now), but I'd like to throw in some comments that differ from those of the reviewer.
This book sounds pretty cool, but I disagree with the reviewer regarding the level of the book, which I can gauge from the reviewer's comments. The reviewer tends to think it's well beyond advanced undergraduate physics classes, but from the material involved I think it's somewhere between the intro and advanced undergrad classes. It sounds like this book would be useful for armchair physicists that would like to get their hands a little more dirty, people minoring in physics, and physics majors wanting a little more 'oomph' before their 'real' classes kick in. But IMHO, one definitely shouldn't need to be a grad student in math or physics to enjoy this book as the reviewer implies.
For example, the reviewer writes "It reads like an advanced college physics book, except without extra examples or redundant explanation -- he expects you to be smart or motivated enough to keep up."
So upon reading that one assumes the reviewer at least took some decently advanced calculus-based physics classes well beyond the freshman level (like a two-semester class of E&M or quantum mechanics, or classical mechanics).
But then the reviewer says "Your book might give you Kepler's second law: a planet sweeps out equal areas of its ellipse in equal times. But why? We'll just call it 'conservation of angular momentum'; that should hold you plebes. But in Shaggy Steed you'll find the equations like this that you might have thought were fundamental falling out of the woodwork, built up from the real fundamentals."
This quote right here reveals that the reviewer hasn't been exposed to any 'advanced' physics classes, maybe just advanced introductory ones. Only the intro classes will 'tell' you about Kepler's 2nd law and conservation of angular momentum. This concept, though, is usually proved and derived from the fundamentals in any reasonable undergraduate physics mechanics class beyond the freshman-level class. Such an undergraduate level mechanics class would, for example, use the textbooks by Arya or Marion/Thornton.
Similarly with motion in phase space, simple harmonic motion, Lagrangian equations of motion, the energy eigenstates of the hydrogen atom (this would be in the quantum mechanics class), etc. These are all topics which are examined from the fundamentals, and encountered usually within the first two or three years of an undergraduate physics curriculum.
So the Shaggy Steed is a book somewhere beyond the intro physics classes, but not as difficult as the more advanced undergraduate physics classes, where the majors start going. Note - if you really like this low-level sort of stuff, though, you might seriously consider majoring or minoring in physics.
So I disagree when the poster writes
"It's a beautiful book if you're a graduate-level student of math or physics..."
Most of the material covered seems to be the standard fare that the typical undergraduate physics major will encounter, and some of these topics will likely be encountered several times prior to graduation.
In skydiving you hit terminal velocity after some time (not sure how long), at which point you are not accelerating anymore, and hence you can still 'feel' gravity pulling on you. Not to mention strong upwards winds.
In the zero-g flight, for the entire 25 seconds you are accelerating downwards at 1 g, along with the air in the ship, and everything else around you. During that time you will not notice gravity pulling you.
Skydiving seems like it would be more fun and scenic, but the zero-g flight would really be a different experience.
Although I don't know how many 'normal' people would want to do all 15 of those drops. They don't call it the "vomit comet" for nothing. I don't know how many people fly at the same time, but it would be nice if they had an 'abort' option so as you get sick they'll stop the ride (assuming it's just you, of course).
Philosophical question -
Does the airline have the right to know who's on board their own airplane?
That's what this all boils down to. Do you have the right to get onto someone else's private vehicle and demand anonymity? Or do the airlines have the right to demand ID to know who you are before transporting you in their own private vehicle?
he probably spreads his research out over a variety of telescopes, I've only been aware of his radio efforts, but it doesn't surprise me if he does optical astronomical research as well. why not look up his research papers (follow the link in my other post) to see.
I'm not sure who Horowitz actually is, but it seems a safe assumption, based on his comment, that he's associated with the project
Paul Horowitz is a physicist at Harvard who's primary claim to fame is being one of the co-authors of The Art of Electronics. The other author being Winfield Hill.
Paul is a damn smart guy, is pretty funny, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of electronics. I took the Physics 123 class with him and Tom Hayes at Harvard about 5 years ago so I have some sense of his intellect.
His primary research interests are with SETI, and he has old/surplus electronics from the projects META and BETA, among others in his office. He once popped off a Motorola 68000 processor from one of those project boards to loan me for a side project with the class (instead of using the 68008's that are employed toward the end of the course), and he called it "the DIP that ate Chicago" because it's so damn huge.
Since his research involves primarily electronics and the engineering aspects of building large arrays of radio receivers for SETI projects, he referred to himself as a "fallen physicist". He even called me that too because at the time I had physics undergrad degree, but was working at an engineering lab at MIT. (Of course now I'm back in physics grad school;-) )
So anyway, I get the impression from him that he really knows what he's talking about, and I would tend to trust his scientific judgement about his research project. Now if you assume he's specifically lying or covering up, that's another story. But from a scientific point of view he knows what he's talking about.
From what I read about Einstein I gathered that he did not know why entanglement happens, but he was aware that it was proven that it did happen.
At this point you're talking philosophy.
You may as well wonder why the physical constants are the specific values that they are. Why does Coulomb's law go as 1/r^2? Why are there N+1 dimensions in the universe (where N can be 3, 9, or 25 depending on what version of string theory you prefer). Why does a quantum mechanical wavefunction reduce to an eigenvalue of it's operator and not a superposition thereof?
At this point you'll never know anything because if anybody answered one of these questions, you could just ask 'why' to the answer.
What we may be seeing is the physical evidence that space and time are not much at all like we think they are.
Actually, this is physical realization of quantum principles that have been known for about 70-80 years. And all of those quantum theories were already verified at the fundamental level. There's no new fundamental physics theory being discovered here, the strangeness of relativistic time/space at the quantum limit (ie, Quantum Field Theory) has been quite well developed and understood for a long time now.
This is more like an applied physics or engineering verification of a quantum applied physicists sketch for quantum error correction of quantum teleportation.
Now if physicsists were able to finally merge gravitation with quantum mechanics, that would be huge and just might float your battleships. But this quantum teleportation is certainly not that at all.
it is a validation of quantum teleportation, which is basically the transmission of the quantum state of a single qubit (or SU(2) algebra system, eg an electron) from one qubit to another. The quantum wavefunction of the original qubit is destroyed in the process, and the new qubit will have the same quantum wavefunction as the original. So you're teleporting the information of the qubit.
Actually, it's much more complicated than that. What I described above is basic quantum teleportation, which has been demonstrated in the laboratory years ago. What these guys in the article just did is setup an entangled collection of 5 qubits, and make use of quantum error correction through the entanglement. Entanglement is a way of interfering the wavefunctions of two or more qubits that would otherwise have been isolated, but now are coupled together. In a rough way you might think of the entanglement as a quantum version of redundancy, although that's not really accurate.
You have a qubit on your computer you want to send to me (in reality you'll have millions of qubits comprising a file, but just look at one for now). You can teleport your qubit to me through this method, and there will be a decent method of quantum error correction along the way. So it is in fact data transmission, just the technology at this point is still young and the system itself is gigantic and would have a horrendously slow data rate.
Hi, can you give some more examples of what Gmail does/doesn't do, and what other better options would be?
I was just given a gmail invite a few days ago (I think most gmail users got several invites then). I played around with gmail for awhile, and I do like it. Currently I've been using pine w/ my school account, but this gets annoying, especially if I'm logged in via ssh and want to look at a non-text attachment.
In the past few weeks (before I got the gmail account) I have been debating whether to use thunderbird or another program w/ this account, or now to possibly use gmail. Does anybody have any suggestions/comments as to the pluses/minuses of these approaches? thanks.
Almost. Tak Mak, the guy from Toronto, is member of Royal Society of London. Obvious UK members when I skimmed the article included guys at Edinburgh, UCL, Oxford, and a Beagle 2 scientist.
The two Americans are sci-fi writers as well, which is probably why they were interviewed, instead of being among the 'most influential scientists'.
So anyway, my main beef was w/ the story submitter claiming this was 60 of the most influential scientists around the world. 4 of 7 work in the UK directly, another advises to the Royal Society of London. Of the set of all scientists worldwide I question the 'most influential' aspects of the other 2.
Definitely the worst part about the submission was the 'scientific proof' claim, although that may have been intended as a joke.
Or perhaps the story submitter, that wrote " according to 60 of the most influential scientists in the world" when in fact he means UK instead of world.
Even the article at the Guardian says this about the scientists in question:"Our expert panel votes for the top 10 sci-fi films". Upon skimming the article, those scientists listed all seemed to work for/in the UK, did I miss something?
Not to mention the idiotic banter of the story submitter claiming it's "scientific proof" Bladerunner is the greatest movie. Argh.
Are you seriously quoting articles from counterpunch as some sort of factual basis? They're a reactionary news program of the radical left, kind of like an ultra-liberal Fox News.
Anyway, even French President Jacques Chirac, along with the Mayor of Paris and other French officials, admit anti-Semitism is an increasing problem (after denying it for 1-2 years). Here are links from a variety of news sources. And note in the following links that all the suspects aren't necessarily North African Muslims but also Neo-Nazis from areas near the German border.
Re:Some of the changes (possible spoilers)
on
Star Wars on DVD
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Isn't he also changing the name to 'The Gathering Shadow' and making the following the scrolling introduction:
It is a time of uncertainty. The empire's ambiguous tariff statutes mandate close reexamination of galactic import quotas. Interim Princess Agoomba has co-chaired a subcommittee to draft amendments to existing trade policies
Meanwhile, regulatory agencies are being heavily lobbied by a consortium of mercantile interest groups and their suppliers to streamline loading restrictions for class C cargo vessels. The shipping...
That's the whole point, the paper hasn't been published yet! To discredit the analysis of the authors without even seeing it (unless the authors have prior reputation of screwing up the statistics) is bad.
I find it ironic that so many people here assumed the authors screwed up the analysis, yet their assumptions without any evidence constitutes a worse violation of said scientific method.
Did you read the actual publication (not the Wired one)? The wired publication does not list the sample sizes involved, nor the rates of Leukemia.
If the scientists did make such a conclusion (assuming the Wired people didn't take it out of context) you could at least give them the benefit of the doubt that they applied proper statistical analysis.
If you make judgements about a paper/theory without knowing the specifics involved, that's scientifically less scrupulous than making a statistical error involving small sample sizes.
Did you ever study electrodynamics? If one is only considering the power involved, it's the Poynting vector of the radiation (or rather the surface integral over your body) that matters. And if you count in inverse-square law, a 500 mW cell phone held against your head would be roughly similar to being 100 meters away from a 10kW AM transmitter). [At the close range, the cell phone is in the near radiation field, so I'm just pulling a factor of 2 out of the air for the subset of radiation going into your ear]
Of course the real picture is more complicated than that, these are oscillating fields interacting on complex matter, and so quantum chemistry plays a big role. Anyone that ever solved a simple case of monochromatic stimulated emission on a single hydrogen atom will appreciate the difficulty of solving the quantum electrodynamics involved for electromagnetic radiation into a complex organic matrix. Knowing how this would react with the DNA or whatever other processes are responsible for cancer would be a MAJOR undertaking.
AM broadcasts at 1 MHz, and cell phones at 900 MHz or whatever other microwave frequencies they use nowadays are fairly different regimes. Just look at the wavelengths involved. A 1 MHz wave is 300 meters, so to the AM broadcast wave your head will basically simultaneously see the same phase of the EM wave passing through.
A 1 GHz wave, on the other hand, is 30 cm. At this frequency and above different areas in your head will be at different phases of the E&M oscillation. Now add in the complex frequency-dependent non-linear index-of-refraction of your head (spatially non-uniform too), consider dispersion and solve the boundary conditions, and you can see these two frequency realms can have entirely different effects. But it's not merely due to the power levels.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong, the proper capitalization is PhD, meaning lowercased 'h'. Assuming ASCII, the 'h' goes from 0x38 for 'H' to 0x58 for the properly cased 'h'. So the difference between PhD and PHB is really 0x22.
Thereby proving that there actually is something more than just a shave and a haircut between the PHB and PhD.
And yes, this is probably the dorkiest slashdot post I've ever written.
ACK, thanks for noting that, I typed too fast. IO should have said "Why does a measurement operator reduce a wavefunction to one of the eigenstates of said operator". Wonder how many other /.ers noticed...
Fay Selove taught the 2-semester undergrad mechanics class back then, I think most other schools do only 1 semester of mechanics. We used Marion/Thornton.
Anyway, yeah, we did Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, coupled oscillations, the standard fare. Of course I didn't fully comprehend it all the first time around either. But my main problem with this review was the reviewer seeming awed at proving Kepler's 2nd law from the fundamentals, which you can pretty much do early on w/ conservation of angular momentum.
It seems weird, though, that this book is not categorized as a primary physics text, but more of a 'cool things in mechanics' text instead, if it's in fact as difficult as you say. Although it's certainly possible for any author to make a lower-level text appear much harder than it should be by not choosing the most illustrious mathematical path to demonstrate the physics involved.
If you're curious, I highly recommend the Landau-Lifshitz series. The mechanics book (Volume 1) is super slim (and that's including a long biography of L.D. Landau), and even covers many topics well into grad-level studies. But the author is so clear, and doesn't put any superfluous equations in there, it really makes sense. Perfect for people with attention problems, like myself, because it's harder to get lost. You should seriously go to the bookstore (it used to be a pathetic classroom-sized bookstore when i was there, but the new multi-storied bookstore is pretty cool now) and at least look at it, maybe the first few pages at least. I know they have at least some of the Landau-Lifshitz series because I bought Volume 5 (Statistical Mechanics Part 1) when I was last there three years ago!
Another similar thing is using two layers of linearly-polarized glass. Hold one layer fixed, and rotate the other layer to go from almost full transparency to almost full opacity.
There is a company that sells airline windows like this, and it would be pretty trivial to wire a motor to turn the layer appropriately, or even automatically to keep room brightness constant.
The book's content seems to be the basics of classical mechanics (harmonic oscillation, Kepler's laws), and some other stuff like hydrogen atom in quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, etc. As the review indicates, it's primarily things involving the 2-body problem. You may have learned this stuff at a higher level in other physics or chemistry classes, but this book will give a sense of where these concepts come from, and how it's not just fancy professors with crazy beards plucking them from thin air.
You can read my other comments on this topic, but I disagree with the poster as to the level of this book. I place it somewhere beyond the introductory physics classes, but not as difficult as the advanced undergraduate physics classes a physics major would take. The reviewer, on the other hand, implies one needs to be a graduate student in math or physics to enjoy this book, but I disagree with that. [disclaimer - i AM a graduate physics student, however]
Without math, you can learn a little something qualitatively of modern physics by reading some of the popular physics books of the day, like Brief History of Time, etc. Many of these authors convey nicely at a high level how and why things happen.
But if you want to know the details, you need math. Quantum mechanics is interesting because it's like a manifestation of linear algebra. Why does an operator reduce a wavefunction to one of the eigenstates of said wavefunction? That concept is one of the most central concepts to quantum mechanics, yet you wouldn't understand what eigenstates or wavefunctions are without some knowledge of math. If you explain it using only words, you're still beating around the bush, and basically it's the math that you would be describing.
Finally, to prove your example is crap, please explain using words why things fall. If your description involves anything about gravitons or Higgs bosons, please explain why they form, why gravitons should be spin-2, what a spin-2 boson field implies, etc, without using math. Basic answer - you cannot.
This book sounds pretty cool, but I disagree with the reviewer regarding the level of the book, which I can gauge from the reviewer's comments. The reviewer tends to think it's well beyond advanced undergraduate physics classes, but from the material involved I think it's somewhere between the intro and advanced undergrad classes. It sounds like this book would be useful for armchair physicists that would like to get their hands a little more dirty, people minoring in physics, and physics majors wanting a little more 'oomph' before their 'real' classes kick in. But IMHO, one definitely shouldn't need to be a grad student in math or physics to enjoy this book as the reviewer implies.
For example, the reviewer writes "It reads like an advanced college physics book, except without extra examples or redundant explanation -- he expects you to be smart or motivated enough to keep up."
So upon reading that one assumes the reviewer at least took some decently advanced calculus-based physics classes well beyond the freshman level (like a two-semester class of E&M or quantum mechanics, or classical mechanics).
But then the reviewer says "Your book might give you Kepler's second law: a planet sweeps out equal areas of its ellipse in equal times. But why? We'll just call it 'conservation of angular momentum'; that should hold you plebes. But in Shaggy Steed you'll find the equations like this that you might have thought were fundamental falling out of the woodwork, built up from the real fundamentals."
This quote right here reveals that the reviewer hasn't been exposed to any 'advanced' physics classes, maybe just advanced introductory ones. Only the intro classes will 'tell' you about Kepler's 2nd law and conservation of angular momentum. This concept, though, is usually proved and derived from the fundamentals in any reasonable undergraduate physics mechanics class beyond the freshman-level class. Such an undergraduate level mechanics class would, for example, use the textbooks by Arya or Marion/Thornton.
Similarly with motion in phase space, simple harmonic motion, Lagrangian equations of motion, the energy eigenstates of the hydrogen atom (this would be in the quantum mechanics class), etc. These are all topics which are examined from the fundamentals, and encountered usually within the first two or three years of an undergraduate physics curriculum.
So the Shaggy Steed is a book somewhere beyond the intro physics classes, but not as difficult as the more advanced undergraduate physics classes, where the majors start going. Note - if you really like this low-level sort of stuff, though, you might seriously consider majoring or minoring in physics.
So I disagree when the poster writes "It's a beautiful book if you're a graduate-level student of math or physics..." Most of the material covered seems to be the standard fare that the typical undergraduate physics major will encounter, and some of these topics will likely be encountered several times prior to graduation.
In the zero-g flight, for the entire 25 seconds you are accelerating downwards at 1 g, along with the air in the ship, and everything else around you. During that time you will not notice gravity pulling you.
Skydiving seems like it would be more fun and scenic, but the zero-g flight would really be a different experience.
Although I don't know how many 'normal' people would want to do all 15 of those drops. They don't call it the "vomit comet" for nothing. I don't know how many people fly at the same time, but it would be nice if they had an 'abort' option so as you get sick they'll stop the ride (assuming it's just you, of course).
Here in grad school my friends from China never even heard of fortune cookies until they came here. It's like reverse culture-shock.
Or conversely, why do you think it is unreasonable for an airline to require you to show ID before boarding their own private vehicle?
Does the airline have the right to know who's on board their own airplane?
That's what this all boils down to. Do you have the right to get onto someone else's private vehicle and demand anonymity? Or do the airlines have the right to demand ID to know who you are before transporting you in their own private vehicle?
he probably spreads his research out over a variety of telescopes, I've only been aware of his radio efforts, but it doesn't surprise me if he does optical astronomical research as well. why not look up his research papers (follow the link in my other post) to see.
Paul Horowitz is a physicist at Harvard who's primary claim to fame is being one of the co-authors of The Art of Electronics. The other author being Winfield Hill.
Paul is a damn smart guy, is pretty funny, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of electronics. I took the Physics 123 class with him and Tom Hayes at Harvard about 5 years ago so I have some sense of his intellect.
His primary research interests are with SETI, and he has old/surplus electronics from the projects META and BETA, among others in his office. He once popped off a Motorola 68000 processor from one of those project boards to loan me for a side project with the class (instead of using the 68008's that are employed toward the end of the course), and he called it "the DIP that ate Chicago" because it's so damn huge.
Since his research involves primarily electronics and the engineering aspects of building large arrays of radio receivers for SETI projects, he referred to himself as a "fallen physicist". He even called me that too because at the time I had physics undergrad degree, but was working at an engineering lab at MIT. (Of course now I'm back in physics grad school ;-) )
So anyway, I get the impression from him that he really knows what he's talking about, and I would tend to trust his scientific judgement about his research project. Now if you assume he's specifically lying or covering up, that's another story. But from a scientific point of view he knows what he's talking about.
At this point you're talking philosophy.
You may as well wonder why the physical constants are the specific values that they are. Why does Coulomb's law go as 1/r^2? Why are there N+1 dimensions in the universe (where N can be 3, 9, or 25 depending on what version of string theory you prefer). Why does a quantum mechanical wavefunction reduce to an eigenvalue of it's operator and not a superposition thereof?
At this point you'll never know anything because if anybody answered one of these questions, you could just ask 'why' to the answer.
Actually, this is physical realization of quantum principles that have been known for about 70-80 years. And all of those quantum theories were already verified at the fundamental level. There's no new fundamental physics theory being discovered here, the strangeness of relativistic time/space at the quantum limit (ie, Quantum Field Theory) has been quite well developed and understood for a long time now.
This is more like an applied physics or engineering verification of a quantum applied physicists sketch for quantum error correction of quantum teleportation.
Now if physicsists were able to finally merge gravitation with quantum mechanics, that would be huge and just might float your battleships. But this quantum teleportation is certainly not that at all.
Actually, it's much more complicated than that. What I described above is basic quantum teleportation, which has been demonstrated in the laboratory years ago. What these guys in the article just did is setup an entangled collection of 5 qubits, and make use of quantum error correction through the entanglement. Entanglement is a way of interfering the wavefunctions of two or more qubits that would otherwise have been isolated, but now are coupled together. In a rough way you might think of the entanglement as a quantum version of redundancy, although that's not really accurate.
You have a qubit on your computer you want to send to me (in reality you'll have millions of qubits comprising a file, but just look at one for now). You can teleport your qubit to me through this method, and there will be a decent method of quantum error correction along the way. So it is in fact data transmission, just the technology at this point is still young and the system itself is gigantic and would have a horrendously slow data rate.
I was just given a gmail invite a few days ago (I think most gmail users got several invites then). I played around with gmail for awhile, and I do like it. Currently I've been using pine w/ my school account, but this gets annoying, especially if I'm logged in via ssh and want to look at a non-text attachment.
In the past few weeks (before I got the gmail account) I have been debating whether to use thunderbird or another program w/ this account, or now to possibly use gmail. Does anybody have any suggestions/comments as to the pluses/minuses of these approaches? thanks.
The two Americans are sci-fi writers as well, which is probably why they were interviewed, instead of being among the 'most influential scientists'.
So anyway, my main beef was w/ the story submitter claiming this was 60 of the most influential scientists around the world. 4 of 7 work in the UK directly, another advises to the Royal Society of London. Of the set of all scientists worldwide I question the 'most influential' aspects of the other 2.
Definitely the worst part about the submission was the 'scientific proof' claim, although that may have been intended as a joke.
So that's 3 out of 60 scientists not specifically mentioned to be from the UK?
Even the article at the Guardian says this about the scientists in question:"Our expert panel votes for the top 10 sci-fi films". Upon skimming the article, those scientists listed all seemed to work for/in the UK, did I miss something?
Not to mention the idiotic banter of the story submitter claiming it's "scientific proof" Bladerunner is the greatest movie. Argh.
Anyway, even French President Jacques Chirac, along with the Mayor of Paris and other French officials, admit anti-Semitism is an increasing problem (after denying it for 1-2 years). Here are links from a variety of news sources. And note in the following links that all the suspects aren't necessarily North African Muslims but also Neo-Nazis from areas near the German border.
Oh wait, director mixup, that was Randall Curtis.
That's the whole point, the paper hasn't been published yet! To discredit the analysis of the authors without even seeing it (unless the authors have prior reputation of screwing up the statistics) is bad.
I find it ironic that so many people here assumed the authors screwed up the analysis, yet their assumptions without any evidence constitutes a worse violation of said scientific method.
If the scientists did make such a conclusion (assuming the Wired people didn't take it out of context) you could at least give them the benefit of the doubt that they applied proper statistical analysis.
If you make judgements about a paper/theory without knowing the specifics involved, that's scientifically less scrupulous than making a statistical error involving small sample sizes.
Of course the real picture is more complicated than that, these are oscillating fields interacting on complex matter, and so quantum chemistry plays a big role. Anyone that ever solved a simple case of monochromatic stimulated emission on a single hydrogen atom will appreciate the difficulty of solving the quantum electrodynamics involved for electromagnetic radiation into a complex organic matrix. Knowing how this would react with the DNA or whatever other processes are responsible for cancer would be a MAJOR undertaking.
AM broadcasts at 1 MHz, and cell phones at 900 MHz or whatever other microwave frequencies they use nowadays are fairly different regimes. Just look at the wavelengths involved. A 1 MHz wave is 300 meters, so to the AM broadcast wave your head will basically simultaneously see the same phase of the EM wave passing through.
A 1 GHz wave, on the other hand, is 30 cm. At this frequency and above different areas in your head will be at different phases of the E&M oscillation. Now add in the complex frequency-dependent non-linear index-of-refraction of your head (spatially non-uniform too), consider dispersion and solve the boundary conditions, and you can see these two frequency realms can have entirely different effects. But it's not merely due to the power levels.