Uhhh, yes they are. Quantum field theories are exactly quantum theories with Lorentz symmetry. They are, as the GP said, spectacularly successful. QCD is one of them. Disclaimer: IAAPGS (Physics Grad Student)
On the other hand, if you look at the search box, you will see that there is a down arrow just to the right of the google logo at the left end of the box. If you click on this arrow, you will find a default list of search engines. If you select one of these, then it will subsequently become your default search engine. You can also add searches to this list at any time. Heck, you can remove the google search from the list entirely if you want. Frankly, when changing search engines is that easy and obvious, I really don't want the browser nagging me on first install. Why not nag me on first install about all the other browser settings, most of which are much less obvious to change?
Well, first, it is hinted at in basic analysis. "The real numbers are the smallest ordered field." Well first, what is a field? Second, what other fields, ordered or otherwise, are there? Once we figure out that a field is a particular type of arithmetic structure, what other arithmetic structures are there?
There are applications, too. The operators in quantum mechanics form a C*-algebra acting on a Hilbert space. Learning the properties of a C*-algebra is easier than trying to deduce what the properties of the momentum and position operators might be and then attempting to generalize from there to other operators.
If you ever hear someone talk about symmetries in physics (immensely important and useful, BTW), they are talking about groups. A symmetry in physics shows up when you can take any solution, transform it in a well defined way, and get another solution. Ok, so now you have another solution. You can transform that in another way, and get another solution. So we see that these transformations compose to form another transformation. Take a glance at the other group axioms, and you find that your symmetry operations form a group. So, the results of group theory are useful to deduce properties of systems that have certain symmetries.
Outside of theoretical physics: True and False, together with AND and OR as plus and times (I can't remember which is which) form a field. You can make a vector space over any field you like, and once you can make a vector space, you can make matrices. Once you can make matrices, you can use them to solve coupled linear equations: for instance, take a set of Boolean equations. You can either work out what the solution is tediously by hand, or you can just pack them into a matrix and invert it.
Because it's a PITA to do, and leads to incredibly messy, hard to follow, and prone to wires-getting-caught-on-anything-and-ripping-off boards like those pictured in the wikipedia article.
The Tevatron has been steadily increasing in luminosity (number of protons/antiprotons in the beam, roughly) since it was begun. The LHC will do the same. Higher luminosity is always a high priority goal for any accelerator.
A gas of neutrinos, no matter how hot, should not emit blackbody radiation simply because neutrinos do not couple to photons. Oh, they do indirectly (through a W or some such), but that's gonna be a much higher order process and not particularly significant.
IIRC, standard model neutrinos are Dirac particles, which have well defined antiparticles. However, the hypothesis being tested is whether or not neutrinos are actually Majorana particles, which are invariant under charge conjugation (that is, they are precisely the same particle as their antiparticle.). It all comes down to representation theory and the Lorentz group (and friends). If we claim that charge conjugation is an interesting transformation to examine, then we must clearly describe exactly how each of our fields (particles) changes when we apply that transformation. Dirac and Majorana particles transform two different ways, and we don't know that our conjecture that all the fermions are Dirac particles is actually correct.
The OP didn't rigorously specify the complexity class of his algorithm (see Big O Notation), but we can probably assume that he would have used big-O notation if he had done so. In that case, the base for the logarithm would not matter in the slightest. Logarithms of differing base are related by a multiplicative constant, and big-O notation does not denote either multiplicative constants or terms in the complexity which are smaller than the leading term.
Baylor University is in fact not a liberal arts school, but a full fledged university, with thriving programs in the hard sciences, engineering, business, etc. Furthermore, Baylor as a university is strongly committed to academic honesty (although perhaps Rodney Stark is not, based on your critique of the survey questions. I don't feel qualified to pass judgement on sociological survey questions, primarily because I think that all or nearly all sociology is complete BS.). I don't claim that perfect academic honesty has been achieved across the entire university yet, nor do I claim that there is such a thing as academic honesty in sociology, nor do I claim that any other university has achieved perfect academic honesty. There's always politics, and at this point, "Christian" interference with academic honesty at Baylor has become, in most cases, a matter of politics. I put Christian in scare quotes because, like most of the Baylor faculty, I believe honesty, including academic honesty, to be a vital Christian virtue.
Disclaimer: Baylor undergraduate class of 2007, Physics
Quantum mechanics is not falsifiable because it relies on the number 1, which cannot be proven not to exist.
Quantum Mechanics is a set of theories that fit observable data, and are definitely falsifiable.
Yes. That was rather the point. The AC I originally replied to claimed that ID is not science for an incorrect reason (to wit, that it relies on an unfalsifiable construct). I gave a counterexample (two in fact), a theory that relied on an unfalsifiable construct but that was still science (valuable or not).
It would probably be good if you would read both your parent and your grandparent comment before replying in the future. This might help you avoid this sort of confusion in the future.
It's not falsifiable because it relies on an intelligent designer which, by definition, cannot be proven not to exist.
You've almost got this right, but your argument doesn't work as it stands. Observe:
Quantum mechanics is not falsifiable because it relies on the number 1, which cannot be proven not to exist.
See the problem? There are plenty of reasons why ID is not science, but this is not one of them. Another example:
My theory involves invisible pink elephants, undetectable elves, and other universes which do not interact even indirectly with ours. It unequivocally predicts that the sky is green and not blue.
This theory is science because it makes a falsifiable prediction. It relies on unfalsifiable constructs, but it is still itself falsifiable and therefore science.
If you look at history, every man was a member of the militia.
Citation please? Even during the Revolutionary Frickin' War, there were thousands of men who were not. Merchants, farmers, do-nothings, politicians, etc. Most men engaged in no military activity whatsoever.
Hey klutometis, j85wilson here. I generally just treat the various scheme implementations as separate languages to a large degree. As somebody recently said (I can't remember who), most schemes are themselves very portable, so there is a sense in which portability from one scheme to another isn't really that important.
Some of the people in my (physics) research group use EVO online. It is written in java and seems to work just fine on multiple platforms, provided java web start works for you (we've got it working reliably on 64-bit SuSE 11).
Re:More than scientific learning
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Step aside sir, I'm hijacking your first post.
Here is a picture from the control room which I'm sure makes sense to someone that isn't me.
The image is produced by an event display program, which provides a nice visual representation of the output of the whole detector (ATLAS in this case) for one event. One event here means one beam crossing, generally, which could include up to several proton-proton collisions, but generally only one interesting one.
Now, I'm not completely familiar with ATLAS (I'm a CDF guy), but I'm pretty sure the top left section is the muon chambers. These record, well, muons, which are the only thing which interacts poorly enough to consistently punch all the way through the detector and the layers of steel in front of the muon chambers, but strongly enough to be recorded all the way along its passage.
The top center shows a zoomed in view of the middle of the top left: the calorimeters. Calorimeters record the amount of energy that enters them, and are arranged radially, so that you can see just how much energy (in the form of both mass and kinetic energy) was carried away from the collision in a particular direction. This is accomplished by means of scintillator crystals, which tend to get ionized by the passage of high energy particles, thus absorbing some energy from the particles, and then they reemit that energy as photons, which are collected and measured in photomultiplier tubes. The calorimeters are used to look for most particles, particularly electrons and "jets" (which are a spray of particles resulting from the ejection of a quark from the collision), both of which leave clusters of energy over a significant area of the calorimeter.
The top right is again a zoomed in view of the middle of the top center: the tracking chambers. These act sort of like thousands and thousands of geiger counters; every time a charged particle passes through the vicinity of a wire in the tracking chamber, it records a hit. You can then piece all these hits together in a line to measure the track of a particle. The offcenter pink and blue line is almost certainly a cosmic ray, which will naturally leave a track in the chamber, but not appear to originate from the interaction point. In the lower left, you can see what is probably two different short track segments.
The first three images have been more or less slices out of the center of the detector, perpendicular to the beam line. The lower left is a side-on view, showing the somewhat less important parts of the detector that lie at small angles to the beam line, the so-called forward detectors.
The lower right is probably intended to be a flat plot of the calorimeter, as if you sliced it parallel to the beam line and unrolled it. The height of the bars would then indicate how much energy was deposited in each section. However, at the moment, that plot looks like it is having some sort of overflow problems.
I imagine it isn't possible in passive RFID devices. But in active RFID devices, you could have anything at all in the backend, including hordes of monkeys with encrypting typewriters.
You'd be far more likely to see something along the lines of a key pair, where the private key is on the RFID, and any device that needs to read the RFID has the public key. Then the RFID would sign something, eg encrypt a hash of the message it received and send that encrypted hash back along with its response. The reader decrypts the hash, and makes sure it lines up right. As long as public-key encryption isn't cracked, you're good.
For a huge percentage of the population, moving to another area is not a legitimate solution to the problem of internet service provision. Reasons for this are legion; among them are ties to the locality (family, job, etc), inability to afford the move (moving is expensive!), preference for services or conditions only available there (including school systems, local laws, etc; often another source of "well, if you don't like it, just move!" responses to similar complaints), etc. Quality of internet service provision is not a sufficiently large factor to cause people to move. In short, internet connectivity is not sufficiently important to the majority of people's livelihood or way of life.
Also, many people cannot afford to purchase business class internet service without sacrificing some other portion of their way of life which is more important to them.
These are both very effective barriers to competition in the ISP market. In conclusion, neither the availability of different ISP options in different localities nor the availability of a higher level of service at a higher price are sufficient to ensure competitiveness or the proper functioning of the free market.
I doubt it. RFIDs that need to be secure (credit card, not product tag) can easily incorporate some sort of cryptographic mechanism to prevent cloning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID#Security_concerns, third paragraph. Of course, that paragraph lacks a reference. Trust at your own risk.
Yes. The strong force is really, really strong. Molecules and atoms only have EM binding energy, and nuclei only have residual strong binding energy (much weaker than the full-on strong force).
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh, yes they are. Quantum field theories are exactly quantum theories with Lorentz symmetry. They are, as the GP said, spectacularly successful. QCD is one of them. Disclaimer: IAAPGS (Physics Grad Student)
On the other hand, if you look at the search box, you will see that there is a down arrow just to the right of the google logo at the left end of the box. If you click on this arrow, you will find a default list of search engines. If you select one of these, then it will subsequently become your default search engine. You can also add searches to this list at any time. Heck, you can remove the google search from the list entirely if you want. Frankly, when changing search engines is that easy and obvious, I really don't want the browser nagging me on first install. Why not nag me on first install about all the other browser settings, most of which are much less obvious to change?
There are applications, too. The operators in quantum mechanics form a C*-algebra acting on a Hilbert space. Learning the properties of a C*-algebra is easier than trying to deduce what the properties of the momentum and position operators might be and then attempting to generalize from there to other operators.
If you ever hear someone talk about symmetries in physics (immensely important and useful, BTW), they are talking about groups. A symmetry in physics shows up when you can take any solution, transform it in a well defined way, and get another solution. Ok, so now you have another solution. You can transform that in another way, and get another solution. So we see that these transformations compose to form another transformation. Take a glance at the other group axioms, and you find that your symmetry operations form a group. So, the results of group theory are useful to deduce properties of systems that have certain symmetries.
Outside of theoretical physics: True and False, together with AND and OR as plus and times (I can't remember which is which) form a field. You can make a vector space over any field you like, and once you can make a vector space, you can make matrices. Once you can make matrices, you can use them to solve coupled linear equations: for instance, take a set of Boolean equations. You can either work out what the solution is tediously by hand, or you can just pack them into a matrix and invert it.
Because it's a PITA to do, and leads to incredibly messy, hard to follow, and prone to wires-getting-caught-on-anything-and-ripping-off boards like those pictured in the wikipedia article.
I don't consider nuclear energy to be a good/viable alternative to fossil fuels. *shrugs*
Why?
The Tevatron has been steadily increasing in luminosity (number of protons/antiprotons in the beam, roughly) since it was begun. The LHC will do the same. Higher luminosity is always a high priority goal for any accelerator.
A gas of neutrinos, no matter how hot, should not emit blackbody radiation simply because neutrinos do not couple to photons. Oh, they do indirectly (through a W or some such), but that's gonna be a much higher order process and not particularly significant.
IIRC, standard model neutrinos are Dirac particles, which have well defined antiparticles. However, the hypothesis being tested is whether or not neutrinos are actually Majorana particles, which are invariant under charge conjugation (that is, they are precisely the same particle as their antiparticle.). It all comes down to representation theory and the Lorentz group (and friends). If we claim that charge conjugation is an interesting transformation to examine, then we must clearly describe exactly how each of our fields (particles) changes when we apply that transformation. Dirac and Majorana particles transform two different ways, and we don't know that our conjecture that all the fermions are Dirac particles is actually correct.
The OP didn't rigorously specify the complexity class of his algorithm (see Big O Notation), but we can probably assume that he would have used big-O notation if he had done so. In that case, the base for the logarithm would not matter in the slightest. Logarithms of differing base are related by a multiplicative constant, and big-O notation does not denote either multiplicative constants or terms in the complexity which are smaller than the leading term.
I am Spartacus!
No, you're BronsCon.
Baylor University is in fact not a liberal arts school, but a full fledged university, with thriving programs in the hard sciences, engineering, business, etc. Furthermore, Baylor as a university is strongly committed to academic honesty (although perhaps Rodney Stark is not, based on your critique of the survey questions. I don't feel qualified to pass judgement on sociological survey questions, primarily because I think that all or nearly all sociology is complete BS.). I don't claim that perfect academic honesty has been achieved across the entire university yet, nor do I claim that there is such a thing as academic honesty in sociology, nor do I claim that any other university has achieved perfect academic honesty. There's always politics, and at this point, "Christian" interference with academic honesty at Baylor has become, in most cases, a matter of politics. I put Christian in scare quotes because, like most of the Baylor faculty, I believe honesty, including academic honesty, to be a vital Christian virtue.
Disclaimer: Baylor undergraduate class of 2007, Physics
Quantum mechanics is not falsifiable because it relies on the number 1, which cannot be proven not to exist.
Quantum Mechanics is a set of theories that fit observable data, and are definitely falsifiable.
Yes. That was rather the point. The AC I originally replied to claimed that ID is not science for an incorrect reason (to wit, that it relies on an unfalsifiable construct). I gave a counterexample (two in fact), a theory that relied on an unfalsifiable construct but that was still science (valuable or not).
It would probably be good if you would read both your parent and your grandparent comment before replying in the future. This might help you avoid this sort of confusion in the future.
It's not falsifiable because it relies on an intelligent designer which, by definition, cannot be proven not to exist.
You've almost got this right, but your argument doesn't work as it stands. Observe:
Quantum mechanics is not falsifiable because it relies on the number 1, which cannot be proven not to exist.
See the problem? There are plenty of reasons why ID is not science, but this is not one of them. Another example:
My theory involves invisible pink elephants, undetectable elves, and other universes which do not interact even indirectly with ours. It unequivocally predicts that the sky is green and not blue.
This theory is science because it makes a falsifiable prediction. It relies on unfalsifiable constructs, but it is still itself falsifiable and therefore science.
If you look at history, every man was a member of the militia.
Citation please? Even during the Revolutionary Frickin' War, there were thousands of men who were not. Merchants, farmers, do-nothings, politicians, etc. Most men engaged in no military activity whatsoever.
Hey klutometis, j85wilson here. I generally just treat the various scheme implementations as separate languages to a large degree. As somebody recently said (I can't remember who), most schemes are themselves very portable, so there is a sense in which portability from one scheme to another isn't really that important.
Hey mods, I know this guy is an AC, but he's got the stuff we need to hear. Throw a couple of points his way.
Some of the people in my (physics) research group use EVO online. It is written in java and seems to work just fine on multiple platforms, provided java web start works for you (we've got it working reliably on 64-bit SuSE 11).
http://evo.caltech.edu/evoGate/
Here is a picture from the control room which I'm sure makes sense to someone that isn't me.
The image is produced by an event display program, which provides a nice visual representation of the output of the whole detector (ATLAS in this case) for one event. One event here means one beam crossing, generally, which could include up to several proton-proton collisions, but generally only one interesting one.
Now, I'm not completely familiar with ATLAS (I'm a CDF guy), but I'm pretty sure the top left section is the muon chambers. These record, well, muons, which are the only thing which interacts poorly enough to consistently punch all the way through the detector and the layers of steel in front of the muon chambers, but strongly enough to be recorded all the way along its passage.
The top center shows a zoomed in view of the middle of the top left: the calorimeters. Calorimeters record the amount of energy that enters them, and are arranged radially, so that you can see just how much energy (in the form of both mass and kinetic energy) was carried away from the collision in a particular direction. This is accomplished by means of scintillator crystals, which tend to get ionized by the passage of high energy particles, thus absorbing some energy from the particles, and then they reemit that energy as photons, which are collected and measured in photomultiplier tubes. The calorimeters are used to look for most particles, particularly electrons and "jets" (which are a spray of particles resulting from the ejection of a quark from the collision), both of which leave clusters of energy over a significant area of the calorimeter.
The top right is again a zoomed in view of the middle of the top center: the tracking chambers. These act sort of like thousands and thousands of geiger counters; every time a charged particle passes through the vicinity of a wire in the tracking chamber, it records a hit. You can then piece all these hits together in a line to measure the track of a particle. The offcenter pink and blue line is almost certainly a cosmic ray, which will naturally leave a track in the chamber, but not appear to originate from the interaction point. In the lower left, you can see what is probably two different short track segments.
The first three images have been more or less slices out of the center of the detector, perpendicular to the beam line. The lower left is a side-on view, showing the somewhat less important parts of the detector that lie at small angles to the beam line, the so-called forward detectors.
The lower right is probably intended to be a flat plot of the calorimeter, as if you sliced it parallel to the beam line and unrolled it. The height of the bars would then indicate how much energy was deposited in each section. However, at the moment, that plot looks like it is having some sort of overflow problems.
I imagine it isn't possible in passive RFID devices. But in active RFID devices, you could have anything at all in the backend, including hordes of monkeys with encrypting typewriters.
a way for radio waves to travel 3 cm and then stop themselves.
You mean something like exploiting near field effects?
You'd be far more likely to see something along the lines of a key pair, where the private key is on the RFID, and any device that needs to read the RFID has the public key. Then the RFID would sign something, eg encrypt a hash of the message it received and send that encrypted hash back along with its response. The reader decrypts the hash, and makes sure it lines up right. As long as public-key encryption isn't cracked, you're good.
For a huge percentage of the population, moving to another area is not a legitimate solution to the problem of internet service provision. Reasons for this are legion; among them are ties to the locality (family, job, etc), inability to afford the move (moving is expensive!), preference for services or conditions only available there (including school systems, local laws, etc; often another source of "well, if you don't like it, just move!" responses to similar complaints), etc. Quality of internet service provision is not a sufficiently large factor to cause people to move. In short, internet connectivity is not sufficiently important to the majority of people's livelihood or way of life.
Also, many people cannot afford to purchase business class internet service without sacrificing some other portion of their way of life which is more important to them.
These are both very effective barriers to competition in the ISP market. In conclusion, neither the availability of different ISP options in different localities nor the availability of a higher level of service at a higher price are sufficient to ensure competitiveness or the proper functioning of the free market.
I doubt it. RFIDs that need to be secure (credit card, not product tag) can easily incorporate some sort of cryptographic mechanism to prevent cloning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID#Security_concerns, third paragraph. Of course, that paragraph lacks a reference. Trust at your own risk.
Yes. The strong force is really, really strong. Molecules and atoms only have EM binding energy, and nuclei only have residual strong binding energy (much weaker than the full-on strong force).