I think this is a point that a lot of people miss; you extend the framework you have until there's enough data to suggest a shift in the way that starts to encompass the whole enchilada to that point. Without building on the framework, or 'standing on the shoulders of giants', you may as well scrap everything and start again when you don't see the observable data to match the theory.
Yes. This point is explained very well (IMHO), and in quite simple terms, in "The Meaning of it All", which is essentially a transcript of 3 public lectures given by the late great Richard P. Feynman (of Manhattan project, Quantum ElectroDynamics, and general physics-Midas touch fame), on the scientific method, and it's relation to science, politics, and modern life. Reading it might help some of the theory-bashers acquire a clue before shooting their mouths off again, and anyone with said clue will probably find it an enjoyable and quite amusing read.
The history of physics is full of theorized particles or fields that never panned out. We just never read about them in textbooks, because who wants to learn things that are wrong. We tell glamorous annecdotes about the hard to find particles that were discovered (e.g. Neutrino) and ignore the theories that were failures (e.g. Ether). So, our perceptions are colored, and we over-value theory.
For the love of Christ...
Firstly, I think you'll find that most elementary courses in Special Relativity start with the assumption of the ether, and go onto discuss the Michelson-Morley experiment, the point being that one has to first understand the problems to be able to understand the solutions.
Similarly, Pauli introduced the idea of the Neutrino, since without it, beta decays can't conserve both energy and momentum. I'm sure that at the time introducing a new particle seemed alot less silly than abandoning these conservation laws, given that they had held true (with minor modifications due to SR) for about 300 years.
Seems to me that he was right to do so, given the verification of the neutrino's existence decades later.
I took a course in atomic physics, and a fellow student couldn't understand the inclusion of the Sommerfield theory of electron orbits in the course. Again, it's always valuable to see the problems physicists faced at the time, and the valiant but failed attempts to solve them, and I expect that substantially more coverage of these theories is given than you seem to think.
Oh, please. You bring up a single example of a hard to find particle that was eventually detected, and use that to support the existence of the Higgs boson? That's not science, it's religion. The existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson will be determined experimentally, not by theory.
I think the problem here is largely the misconception that as particle physics has progressed, more and more particles have been added to the theory, and that the theories have become more and more complicated and ad hoc, ie, people think "HEP physicists already have 3000-odd particles to play with and now they're introducing a new one." This is not the case at all. Yes, as accelerator energies have increased, more and more particles have been found, but these are mostly composite particles. The situation before Gell-Mann and Zweig postulated the quark, was that there were many hundreds of new particles that had been discovered. The quark theory showed that all these particles could be constructed out of a few elementary particles. Furthermore the theory predicted new composite particles, and their characteristics with great accuracy (which were later verified experimentally). The point here is that modern physics has been for some time reducing the universe to simpler and more elegant symmetries and models. The fact that, as we have probed deeper both with theory and experiment, things have become simpler (though of course the mathematics used has become more heavy-duty), seems to be fairly good indication that HEP theory is on the right track, and if it isn't, that will become clear through experiment, and new theories will come out. That is to say, the scientific method will continue to do it's thing, as it has for hundreds of years, and progress will continue.
The accuracies of the predictions made by quantum mechanics and it's resultant field theories make it very hard to ignore, and mean that it has become very difficult to propose new theories which make the same predictions for lab experiments, fit with the ever-increasing volumes of astrophysical and observational-cosmological data, and at the same time remain self-consistant.
You can percieve the modern theories as attempts to preserve the models that have been built up to date, and you'd be right. I'd be less inclined to attribute this to arrogance and narrowmindedness, and more inclined to believe that it's because reality happens to concur with the theories to 99.99999... %
Actually, I bet with that much CPU horsepower, you could have a raytracing graphics engine instead of texturized polygons, and it would be real time still.
How is this project any more interesting or useful than a confluence of any other human-specified arbitrary classification, e.g. visiting every peak who altitude in cubits is a prime number?
Visiting every confluence of degree lines is a bit silly, what with the degree being an angular measure only surpassed in idiocy by the gradian (for shame...)
It would be of much more fundamental significance and a lot quicker just to visit the confluences of
the 0 and pi radian latitudes and longitudes. Especially if you're going to disregard confluences that occur in the ocean and near the poles, because that would leave you with identically zero confluences to visit, so you can stay home and waste away reading/. YAY!
Increasing tax would be a pretty bad solution, but it would work unless it also got wasted.
Yes, but given that the money is already being wasted, what are the odds that more tax money won't result in more waste? Pretty slim I'd wager.
Of course, removing the waste is the ideal solution. Removing the waste and increasing tax (but not going crazy) would allow public services to improve faster, and perhaps tax can be lowered later once the system's working more efficiently and a surplus is discovered.
But where is the IMPETUS for the governments to improve public services? I live in NZ, and bloating in the public sector is pretty rife.
Given that governments choose to appoint more managers, and further complicate the organisational structure of healthcare, rather than actually improving service (ie cutting waiting lists etc), I expect this is how they would tackle the problem of inefficiency:
1)Argh, the public sector is woefully inefficient, what to do?
2)We'll form a new Department of Efficiency, appoint a committee for blah and blah, appoint people to liase between this department and all services, add a watchdog to monitor the DoE, and create alot more headaches for all the administrators that are already in place.
3)Result: 120m (GBP,USD,NZD, whatever) spent on fixing up the public sector (which is what gets publicised), and sweet FA achieved.
Don't get me wrong, I voted for the tax-and-spends here last elections, and I'll likely do the same next time, but after their last budget there's been so much taxing and so much spending (on child support and such), that there are people in the position that they would be better off if they took a pay cut. It leaves them wide open for the conservatives to ask "Why tax so much?", and when they get back in again they'll just slash everything, and those public services will be just as inefficient, and will have less funding to spend in their inefficient manner. The problem with left-wing parties is that they can never seem to agree on exactly how left-wing they should be (or indeed, anything at all), and it just leads to infighting and fracturing of the party (which has been the theme of left-wing politics in NZ for about 20 years now).
I'm loathe to grind the old Iraq axe, and this is largely a seperate issue, but I'm thinking that if Blair had told Dubya he was nuts and to forget about it, it would have saved alot of cash for the UK, US, and half the other nations in the world, and I know you had several resignations over there and that Blair's party wasn't on the whole pleased with the situation, and thats the problem. NATO is now putting a naval blockade in the mediterranian (sp?) for the Athens games, thats obviously a) not going to come cheap, and b) not necessary, or at least wouldn't have been, before all this crusader shit started happening. I mean to say, do you think labour voters in the UK got what they wanted when they voted in Blair?
(If I'm talking crap regarding British politics then please correct me, I probably don't spend as much time following it as you do:) )
I hear that there are over ten managers per patient in national health service hospitals here. I also see schools wasting money on computers that are five times faster than mine just to run Microsoft Office. The money's going to the wrong places.
Either refocus the existing money or increase tax. Those are the only solutions.
If the problem is that money is being wasted in such ways (which it no doubt is in a lot of places), then how can increasing tax be a candidate solution? Surely if there's not enough money because it's being wasted, the solution is to stop wasting it.
There was an excellent doco about this shown here in NZ several months ago. For years people have claimed that their vessel was mangled by a huge wave and have been scoffed at, the reason being that oceanographers have traditionally used a linear model to describe surface waves, which yields a gaussian(?) wave-height distribution, placing all wave heights close to the mean height, and rendering these gargantuan waves extremely improbable. Modelling surfaces waves with a variant of the non-linear schrodinger (aka gross-pitaevskii?) wave equation, which is used to describe many-body quantum systems, such as Bose-Einstein condensates, shows that waves several times larger than the mean wave height will occur.
It seems to me that this is a classic case of people being morons and using simple models, and then refusing to believe that by using their crap approximation they may have missed something important. As Enrico Fermi said many years ago now, "Nowhere in the bible does it state that the laws of nature must be describable linearly!"
I just had a thought - not sure how you would do this, but if you made devices just to "look at" transmissions that were quantum encrypted, could you prevent the message from ever being received by the intended recipient?
IIRC, the quantum crypto that was developed at NIST (the story was posted on/. some time ago I think) worked a little like this:
The transmission is sent 1 photon at a time.
The photons can have isospin(?) states [A],[B], or two superposition states, like [A]-[B] and [A]+[B]
(ommiting the normalization constant). The crypto key is sent using the latter 2 states, corresponding to 1 and 0.
Any measurement of the photons during their transit would collapse these states to either [A] or [B], hence at the receiving end it becomes immediately obvious that the key has been interacted with, and it is discarded. Hence multiple keys are sent (if necessary), until it is clear that the key has not been read in transit.
With the key verified to be solid, the transmission of the message can begin.
This doesn't prevent jamming by the method you propose of course, it only prevents reading of the message.
Futhermore, the receiver will be observing ambient photons which could corrupt the message, so the receiver only makes note of those which arrive within pre-determined time windows to avoid this.
(I guess that this would make it quite difficult to implement for comms between, say, ships and planes, as the transit time obviously depends on distance)
The beam is highly directional, so I guess locating the beam would be the big hassle, but again the method is really about security from being read, not so much from being jammed.
Ysalamiri, Spaarti cylinders and cloaked asteroids.
And IIRC, the plants on which the droids resided were crazy hypercolour things which were very sensitive to pressure changes and suchwhat. Interesting that this could possibly be done with typical, earth plants.
>Dark Matter is a goofy, overly complicated >theory to try to explain something obvious. >Gravitons don't come from matter, gravitons, >like any other particle... PUSH, they don't pull
Wait a minute, isn't the attraction of two oppositely charged particles mediated by photons?
And hey, aren't nucleon's bound to each other by the exchange of other, massive bosons? Are these particles not pulling their source/target fermions together??
Emit a REAL photon, and you will recoil, and when the photon hits something else it will exert a pressure (push) on it (absorption and then spontaneous emission in a random direction results in a net momentum change in the direction that the incoming photon was travelling). Forces are not mediated by REAL bosons, they're mediated by VIRTUAL bosons. It's fairly obvious that by throwing a ball back and forth between two players, the net effect will be that the players are imparted momentum away from each other (repulsion). This is NOT the model of particle exchange that QED and subsequent theories are built on.
People rag on eps I&II because they're not the same as the OT. Lucas supposedly had the whole plot worked out back in the 70s and chose to make the middle trilogy first as he considered that it would be the best received, and that people would then watch the other episodes, having been smitten by the originals.
This has worked (most people - i assume - watched the new movies before ragging on them).
The problem is as follows:
eps 1-3 occur earlier in the SW galaxy than eps 4-6, by on-the-order-of decades, right?
The old republic was supposed to have lasted for 1000 generations, so we would expect the technology in 1-3 to be less advanced than in 4-6,but not by much - 10s of years of development after 25000+ years of space-faring is not going to be too revolutionary.
However, Lucas now has far greater special effects at his disposal, and so he makes the ships etc look MORE futuristic than in the originals. It just doesn't gel. He COULD have just made ships look the same (level-of-technology-wise), but rendered much prettier, and this would have perhaps justified piping some of that CG muscle into other things, like water-cored planets etc. However he did these silly things and STILL made ships that look more futuristic, and then made them sound like 1940s prop-driven passenger planes.
If he intended to use these creations in eps 1-3 he should have COMPLETELY revamped 4-6, and given those ships a jump on (or at least put them on par with) the ships in the new trilogy.
As it stands it's really difficult to kid one's self that the new movies take place in the same galaxy at a slightly earlier time than the originals.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a point that a lot of people miss; you extend the framework you have until there's enough data to suggest a shift in the way that starts to encompass the whole enchilada to that point. Without building on the framework, or 'standing on the shoulders of giants', you may as well scrap everything and start again when you don't see the observable data to match the theory.
Yes. This point is explained very well (IMHO), and in quite simple terms, in "The Meaning of it All", which is essentially a transcript of 3 public lectures given by the late great Richard P. Feynman (of Manhattan project, Quantum ElectroDynamics, and general physics-Midas touch fame), on the scientific method, and it's relation to science, politics, and modern life. Reading it might help some of the theory-bashers acquire a clue before shooting their mouths off again, and anyone with said clue will probably find it an enjoyable and quite amusing read.
The history of physics is full of theorized particles or fields that never panned out. We just never read about them in textbooks, because who wants to learn things that are wrong. We tell glamorous annecdotes about the hard to find particles that were discovered (e.g. Neutrino) and ignore the theories that were failures (e.g. Ether). So, our perceptions are colored, and we over-value theory.
For the love of Christ... Firstly, I think you'll find that most elementary courses in Special Relativity start with the assumption of the ether, and go onto discuss the Michelson-Morley experiment, the point being that one has to first understand the problems to be able to understand the solutions.
Similarly, Pauli introduced the idea of the Neutrino, since without it, beta decays can't conserve both energy and momentum. I'm sure that at the time introducing a new particle seemed alot less silly than abandoning these conservation laws, given that they had held true (with minor modifications due to SR) for about 300 years. Seems to me that he was right to do so, given the verification of the neutrino's existence decades later.
I took a course in atomic physics, and a fellow student couldn't understand the inclusion of the Sommerfield theory of electron orbits in the course. Again, it's always valuable to see the problems physicists faced at the time, and the valiant but failed attempts to solve them, and I expect that substantially more coverage of these theories is given than you seem to think.
Oh, please. You bring up a single example of a hard to find particle that was eventually detected, and use that to support the existence of the Higgs boson? That's not science, it's religion. The existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson will be determined experimentally, not by theory.
I think the problem here is largely the misconception that as particle physics has progressed, more and more particles have been added to the theory, and that the theories have become more and more complicated and ad hoc, ie, people think "HEP physicists already have 3000-odd particles to play with and now they're introducing a new one." This is not the case at all. Yes, as accelerator energies have increased, more and more particles have been found, but these are mostly composite particles. The situation before Gell-Mann and Zweig postulated the quark, was that there were many hundreds of new particles that had been discovered. The quark theory showed that all these particles could be constructed out of a few elementary particles. Furthermore the theory predicted new composite particles, and their characteristics with great accuracy (which were later verified experimentally). The point here is that modern physics has been for some time reducing the universe to simpler and more elegant symmetries and models. The fact that, as we have probed deeper both with theory and experiment, things have become simpler (though of course the mathematics used has become more heavy-duty), seems to be fairly good indication that HEP theory is on the right track, and if it isn't, that will become clear through experiment, and new theories will come out. That is to say, the scientific method will continue to do it's thing, as it has for hundreds of years, and progress will continue.
The accuracies of the predictions made by quantum mechanics and it's resultant field theories make it very hard to ignore, and mean that it has become very difficult to propose new theories which make the same predictions for lab experiments, fit with the ever-increasing volumes of astrophysical and observational-cosmological data, and at the same time remain self-consistant.
You can percieve the modern theories as attempts to preserve the models that have been built up to date, and you'd be right. I'd be less inclined to attribute this to arrogance and narrowmindedness, and more inclined to believe that it's because reality happens to concur with the theories to 99.99999... %
Actually, I bet with that much CPU horsepower, you could have a raytracing graphics engine instead of texturized polygons, and it would be real time still.
Are you aware of this?
How is this project any more interesting or useful than a confluence of any other human-specified arbitrary classification, e.g. visiting every peak who altitude in cubits is a prime number?
/. YAY!
Visiting every confluence of degree lines is a bit silly, what with the degree being an angular measure only surpassed in idiocy by the gradian (for shame...)
It would be of much more fundamental significance and a lot quicker just to visit the confluences of the 0 and pi radian latitudes and longitudes. Especially if you're going to disregard confluences that occur in the ocean and near the poles, because that would leave you with identically zero confluences to visit, so you can stay home and waste away reading
Increasing tax would be a pretty bad solution, but it would work unless it also got wasted.
:) )
Yes, but given that the money is already being wasted, what are the odds that more tax money won't result in more waste? Pretty slim I'd wager.
Of course, removing the waste is the ideal solution. Removing the waste and increasing tax (but not going crazy) would allow public services to improve faster, and perhaps tax can be lowered later once the system's working more efficiently and a surplus is discovered.
But where is the IMPETUS for the governments to improve public services? I live in NZ, and bloating in the public sector is pretty rife. Given that governments choose to appoint more managers, and further complicate the organisational structure of healthcare, rather than actually improving service (ie cutting waiting lists etc), I expect this is how they would tackle the problem of inefficiency:
1)Argh, the public sector is woefully inefficient, what to do?
2)We'll form a new Department of Efficiency, appoint a committee for blah and blah, appoint people to liase between this department and all services, add a watchdog to monitor the DoE, and create alot more headaches for all the administrators that are already in place.
3)Result: 120m (GBP,USD,NZD, whatever) spent on fixing up the public sector (which is what gets publicised), and sweet FA achieved.
Don't get me wrong, I voted for the tax-and-spends here last elections, and I'll likely do the same next time, but after their last budget there's been so much taxing and so much spending (on child support and such), that there are people in the position that they would be better off if they took a pay cut. It leaves them wide open for the conservatives to ask "Why tax so much?", and when they get back in again they'll just slash everything, and those public services will be just as inefficient, and will have less funding to spend in their inefficient manner. The problem with left-wing parties is that they can never seem to agree on exactly how left-wing they should be (or indeed, anything at all), and it just leads to infighting and fracturing of the party (which has been the theme of left-wing politics in NZ for about 20 years now).
I'm loathe to grind the old Iraq axe, and this is largely a seperate issue, but I'm thinking that if Blair had told Dubya he was nuts and to forget about it, it would have saved alot of cash for the UK, US, and half the other nations in the world, and I know you had several resignations over there and that Blair's party wasn't on the whole pleased with the situation, and thats the problem. NATO is now putting a naval blockade in the mediterranian (sp?) for the Athens games, thats obviously a) not going to come cheap, and b) not necessary, or at least wouldn't have been, before all this crusader shit started happening. I mean to say, do you think labour voters in the UK got what they wanted when they voted in Blair? (If I'm talking crap regarding British politics then please correct me, I probably don't spend as much time following it as you do
I hear that there are over ten managers per patient in national health service hospitals here. I also see schools wasting money on computers that are five times faster than mine just to run Microsoft Office. The money's going to the wrong places. Either refocus the existing money or increase tax. Those are the only solutions.
If the problem is that money is being wasted in such ways (which it no doubt is in a lot of places), then how can increasing tax be a candidate solution? Surely if there's not enough money because it's being wasted, the solution is to stop wasting it.
There was an excellent doco about this shown here in NZ several months ago. For years people have claimed that their vessel was mangled by a huge wave and have been scoffed at, the reason being that oceanographers have traditionally used a linear model to describe surface waves, which yields a gaussian(?) wave-height distribution, placing all wave heights close to the mean height, and rendering these gargantuan waves extremely improbable. Modelling surfaces waves with a variant of the non-linear schrodinger (aka gross-pitaevskii?) wave equation, which is used to describe many-body quantum systems, such as Bose-Einstein condensates, shows that waves several times larger than the mean wave height will occur.
It seems to me that this is a classic case of people being morons and using simple models, and then refusing to believe that by using their crap approximation they may have missed something important. As Enrico Fermi said many years ago now, "Nowhere in the bible does it state that the laws of nature must be describable linearly!"
I just had a thought - not sure how you would do this, but if you made devices just to "look at" transmissions that were quantum encrypted, could you prevent the message from ever being received by the intended recipient?
/. some time ago I think) worked a little like this:
IIRC, the quantum crypto that was developed at NIST (the story was posted on
The transmission is sent 1 photon at a time. The photons can have isospin(?) states [A],[B], or two superposition states, like [A]-[B] and [A]+[B] (ommiting the normalization constant). The crypto key is sent using the latter 2 states, corresponding to 1 and 0. Any measurement of the photons during their transit would collapse these states to either [A] or [B], hence at the receiving end it becomes immediately obvious that the key has been interacted with, and it is discarded. Hence multiple keys are sent (if necessary), until it is clear that the key has not been read in transit. With the key verified to be solid, the transmission of the message can begin.
This doesn't prevent jamming by the method you propose of course, it only prevents reading of the message.
Futhermore, the receiver will be observing ambient photons which could corrupt the message, so the receiver only makes note of those which arrive within pre-determined time windows to avoid this. (I guess that this would make it quite difficult to implement for comms between, say, ships and planes, as the transit time obviously depends on distance)
The beam is highly directional, so I guess locating the beam would be the big hassle, but again the method is really about security from being read, not so much from being jammed.
Ysalamiri, Spaarti cylinders and cloaked asteroids. And IIRC, the plants on which the droids resided were crazy hypercolour things which were very sensitive to pressure changes and suchwhat. Interesting that this could possibly be done with typical, earth plants.
The slashdot effect has mutated into the rare and virulent "... using only one user account ... " strain.
>Dark Matter is a goofy, overly complicated >theory to try to explain something obvious. >Gravitons don't come from matter, gravitons, >like any other particle... PUSH, they don't pull Wait a minute, isn't the attraction of two oppositely charged particles mediated by photons? And hey, aren't nucleon's bound to each other by the exchange of other, massive bosons? Are these particles not pulling their source/target fermions together?? Emit a REAL photon, and you will recoil, and when the photon hits something else it will exert a pressure (push) on it (absorption and then spontaneous emission in a random direction results in a net momentum change in the direction that the incoming photon was travelling). Forces are not mediated by REAL bosons, they're mediated by VIRTUAL bosons. It's fairly obvious that by throwing a ball back and forth between two players, the net effect will be that the players are imparted momentum away from each other (repulsion). This is NOT the model of particle exchange that QED and subsequent theories are built on.
People rag on eps I&II because they're not the same as the OT. Lucas supposedly had the whole plot worked out back in the 70s and chose to make the middle trilogy first as he considered that it would be the best received, and that people would then watch the other episodes, having been smitten by the originals. This has worked (most people - i assume - watched the new movies before ragging on them). The problem is as follows: eps 1-3 occur earlier in the SW galaxy than eps 4-6, by on-the-order-of decades, right? The old republic was supposed to have lasted for 1000 generations, so we would expect the technology in 1-3 to be less advanced than in 4-6 ,but not by much - 10s of years of development after 25000+ years of space-faring is not going to be too revolutionary.
However, Lucas now has far greater special effects at his disposal, and so he makes the ships etc look MORE futuristic than in the originals. It just doesn't gel. He COULD have just made ships look the same (level-of-technology-wise), but rendered much prettier, and this would have perhaps justified piping some of that CG muscle into other things, like water-cored planets etc. However he did these silly things and STILL made ships that look more futuristic, and then made them sound like 1940s prop-driven passenger planes.
If he intended to use these creations in eps 1-3 he should have COMPLETELY revamped 4-6, and given those ships a jump on (or at least put them on par with) the ships in the new trilogy.
As it stands it's really difficult to kid one's self that the new movies take place in the same galaxy at a slightly earlier time than the originals.