For one, Popper is not the only philosopher of science. He is the only one that ever gets any currency on slashdot, but he is far from the only one.
Two, as I said to another reply making this same objection, the "The Data Is As It Is" theory could be understood to implicitly say "Under exactly the same conditions as we did our experiment, you will get exactly the same results as we did", which is dead easy to falsify.
Three, a measurement which breaks lorentz invariance would destroy string theory (as well as much of the rest of the last century of physics). There is no "change the words of the proposer" here (although in general, if you change the assumptions of a theory, you pretty much have to change everything. They are assumptions because they are fundamental and necessary.). This is one regard in which string theory absolutely can be wrong, and lorentz invariance absolutely is testable and is frequently tested.
Four, QFT is just as much, if not more so, of a "calibration model". QFT can describe a huge number of conceivable universes, probably more than string theory can. For instance, string theory nails down a number of dimensions. QFT does not. It is possible for us to do measurements on the number of dimensions. They are indirect, and they have a difficult time ruling out more dimensions than we have yet measured, but they can fairly easily rule out fewer dimensions than we have yet measured. So, it is conceivable that we might do LED analyses at the LHC and find that it looks like there are at least 3,972 dimensions. QFT would have no problem with this. String theory would. Yet another way in which string theory is definitely falsifiable.
Five, even the SM, the baby of QFT and of string theory opponents, is very much a calibration model in all kinds of ways. In fact, that is one of the principal criticisms of the SM. It has far too many free parameters that can only be determined by experiment. Once a particular string model (and here I mean string model : string theory:: SM : QFT) is found that actually describes our universe, in theory it will have IIRC one free parameter. Much much less of a calibration model than the SM.
Six, if we built a sufficiently powerful particle accelerator, we could probe down to string length scales (and no, I'm pretty sure that the string length scale is moderately fundamental, so the string theorists couldn't just say "well, ok, strings are smaller than that then."), and see whether we saw strings or point particles. QFT predicts points, string theory predicts (obviously) strings. This is a harsh test of string theory, which makes it falsifiable. The fact that today we do not have the technology to carry out such a test in no way affects the "scientificness" of string theory.
Seven, as I've said above, string theory can be wrong, and it is science. It is not science that I personally like, but it is science.
"It is not science" is the principle criticism of string theory coming from the non-physicist public. I have very rarely heard this criticism coming from physicists. Please keep in mind that pop-science-book-writing physicists are a tiny tiny minority of all physicists. Trust pop science no farther than you can throw it, as it is practically necessarily fraught with errors. If you wrote a pop-science book without errors in description, you would find that you had in fact written a science textbook, and it would not be very accessible to the pop-science reading public.
which is one way of summarizing much of the criticism focussed on this family of theories.
Indeed. This is what I would call a legitimate reason to dislike string theory. This is in fact one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, I'm not quite so sure anymore at 11pm after nyquil, that I dislike string theory. This is a thoroughly different argument than "It isn't science.".
Most theories involving extra dimensions (extra meaning more than our normal 3-space, 1-time) explain our non-observance of them (to date) by saying that the total size of them is very small. Now, size of a dimension is a weird concept, I know.
Suppose you had a rectangular prism-shaped room with 2 doors, exactly opposite each other on the North and South walls, respectively. Actually, better yet, suppose that the entire North wall and the entire South wall are completely taken up by their doors. Now, suppose that when you walk out the North door, you are simultaneously walking in the South door. This doesn't happen normally (obviously), but with a sufficiently weird topology of space, it could. It is certainly imaginable. The North door and the South door are actually the same place. Now, of course, you can measure this room, length height and width. You might say "but North to South it would be infinitely big!", but it isn't. Take meter sticks, and lay them end to end, starting in the middle of the room, with them oriented N-S. Eventually, because the North and South doors are the same place, you'll wrap back around, and find yourself laying the last meter stick on top of the first one. The number of sticks that you laid down is the length of the room N-S in meters.
Now imagine that your room is that trash dump in Star Wars, where the walls start closing in. Move the North wall closer and closer to the South wall, so that you can only lay down two meter sticks before they start overlapping, and then one meter stick, and then your one meter stick starts overlapping itself, so you switch to centimeter sticks. The size of your N-S dimension has decreased, say to 50 cm. The East-West and Up-Down dimensions are still plenty big, say 5 meters, and they have hard walls, ceilings, and floors, none of this wrapping around nonsense.
Now, suppose that you have a stick 25 cm long. You can orient it in whatever direction you like in this space. It has no trouble existing. Now take one of those meter sticks you had before. You can't orient it however you want, because if you try to turn it to point exactly N-S, it will run into itself. Now suppose you have a 25 cm diameter beach ball. It has no problem existing. But try to imagine a 1 meter diameter beach ball. It can't happen. No way no how. No matter how you turn the thing (unless you deflate it, of course), it will run into itself.
So, an essentially 1-d object, the meter stick, can exist in this space, but only if you turn it certain ways. It can exist even though it is larger than the smallest dimension. However, the 3-d object, the beach ball, can only exist in this space if it is smaller than the smallest dimension, otherwise it runs into itself.
This is precisely how the "black saturn" can only exist at microscopic scales. It is a 4-d object, and all our theories of extra dimensions (at least all of them that have any real following) have no more than 3 dimensions which are actually macroscopic. So if you have an object which is roughly 4-spherical, that is the same size in 4 dimensions, it can only exist if it is smaller than the 4th largest dimension (the three largest being our normal 3 space).
Another way to look at the room I described is that at scales above 50cm, it is actually a 2-d space. Only at small scales (< 50cm) is it really 3-d. Only at really really tiny scales is our space 4 (or more) dimensional (in most extra dimension theories), at any larger scales, it is 3-d. (Of course, I'm not counting time here. Only spacial dimensions.)
It's real easy to beat up on an amateur on Slashdot isn't it?
Yes, it is. But I do try to do my part to combat misconceptions, because public misconceptions about one part of science tend to hurt all of science in a small way.
Regardless, a wide segment of the scientific community look at string theory as something interesting which isn't much good for anything.
True. Regardless, a wide segment of the scientific community regards string theory as something which could very well be the most important thing since the relativities and QFT.
Time and again, string theory has been shown not to be disprovable. The standard model, on the other hand, has not.
As I tried to explain previously, but you obviously either didn't read or didn't grasp, you are comparing apples to oranges. The SM is a particular instance of QFT. Nobody has yet found a comparable particular instance of string theory. You would in fact have just as difficult of a time disproving QFT as you would string theory, perhaps even more difficult of a time. For instance, suppose we did our searches for extra dimensions (these are done regularly at HEP labs) and found that our data supported a universe with 15 extra dimensions! This would rule out string theory without drastic modifications, but wouldn't hurt QFT at all. Wouldn't even hurt the SM.
Now, if you disagree with me, please, don't take it up with me.. I'm just an amateur. Take it up with the scientific community.
If I shouldn't take it up with you, then you shouldn't be saying it in the first place. If you're intending to hide behind a shield of "I don't really know what I'm talking about," then actually behave as if you don't know what you are talking about. Keep your mouth shut unless you've really got something worthwhile to say.
Most of the scientific community that I am familiar with (experimental HEP) doesn't really much care for string theory, but neither do they think it is not science and is a waste of time. In other words, they and I largely agree. Now which scientific community did you want me to take this up with again? (and don't forget the concept of a vocal (and book-writing) minority. Only a tiny minority of scientists ever write pop-science books. Their opinions should not necessarily be considered representative.) In my opinion, it is the amateur public, who is easily and immensely swayed by a few popular books, and then who reinforce each others misconceptions by such things as posting to slashdot and saying "yeah, string theory, sucks doesn't it. I really hate it.", who need to be addressed.
Such a theory is predictive. As it stands, it predicts that that is all the data we will ever have, or that any further data will exactly mimic what we've already got. That's why it is such poor science; it is ludicrously easy to falsify.
Science's definition depends a great deal on who you talk to. Most everyone who has studied would agree that Plato did a bit of science. In fact, Plato's science was pretty amazing for its time. You recall the "four (or five) elements"? Plato said that each element was in fact tiny tiny versions of the Platonic solids. For instance, fire was made of tetrahedrons, and it hurt because it was sharp. When things decayed, the reason they smelled strongly was that the elements were actually breaking up into little triangles (their faces), and those triangles were small, so they got into our noses easily.
Plato's science wasn't very predictive at all. Pretty much purely descriptive. And yet it was a sterling example of early science.
Quantum Field Theory in and of itself is barely predictive. Pretty much its only predictions are directly its assumptions, such as the Lorentz Invariance I mentioned previously. Perhaps it is not science (and if you say that QFT is not science, then I might well agree that string theory is not science either, but I would then argue that we certainly need QFT to get the SM, which is science), but most people agree it is.
It is of course difficult to come up with decent examples of purely descriptive science, because of course purely descriptive science is very poor science indeed, and is rightly largely ignored.
Because the black holes (if they are formed at all) are not what we are interested in. Additionally, the detectors that we use at LHC weigh on the order of thousands of tons. That'd be an awful big weather balloon to lift them. Furthermore, the detectors we use are very narrowly focused. If a collision doesn't take place nearly exactly at the center of the detector, with the two particles involved having pretty much exactly equal speeds in opposite directions, then our measurements will not be on, or at any rate, the detector will be immensely more difficult to calibrate so that we get some kind of meaningful results from it. Also, having the detector underground, we can shield it from a lot of noise that adds uncertainty to our measurements. Finally, the results are immensely easier to study (in some ways, possible to study) if the particles involved always have nearly the same energies as in every other collision we are studying.
Cosmics have energies spread out over an absolutely huge range of energies. Their timing and location are nigh unto impossible to predict. We don't get anything like a 0 net momentum collision between a cosmic ray and an atmospheric atom. The upper atmosphere is an incredibly noisy place, primarily because of cosmics. We would have an awful hard time telling the difference between a particle that originated from a cosmic-atmosphere collision we were interested in and a stray particle that came from the hadron shower of some other cosmic-atmosphere collision.
So Quantum Field Theory is not science either. QFT is just as broad, perhaps even broader, in what it could conceivably describe, as string theory. The Standard Model is a QFT, and not a particularly pretty one at that. Much of the work that goes on in string theory is looking for a string theory, a particular model within the framework of string theory in the same way as SM is a particular model within the framework of QFT, that describes our universe. String theory is already just as good, and arguably better than, QFT, except in that finding models in string theory seems to be much harder.
There are ways to test QFT, and there are ways to test string theory. For instance: Lorentz invariance. Just because nobody reasonably suspects that Lorentz invariance will turn out to not be a real feature of our universe does not mean that it is not a testable prediction. The frameworks of both QFT and string theory include Lorentz invariance.
Furthermore, string theory is not as purely descriptive as you seem to think. It begins with some quite simple and quite basic first principles, and then attempts to derive all of physics from those. If it turns out that they can't describe all of physics from those principles, then they'll have to go back to the drawing board and look for new principles. Those principles are hypotheses. They have left the observation up to other physicists, and are using the existing theories as a description of those observations. So, they are letting observation refine their hypotheses.
If they were merely looking for a way to describe all our known data, then they would just say "Well, our theory is: The Data Is As It Is." Such a theory would be absolutely right. It would even be science. It would be pretty poor science, but it would be science nonetheless. If they are truly looking for the simplest way to make equations that work out to cover all the physics that we know, then it is absolutely science. Simplicity and good description of data are what make a scientific theory good. And yes, they are trying to describe data. If they are trying to make particular limits of their theory match up with extant theories that are known to work in those same limits, then they are trying to describe data, simply because those extant theories are only extant because they themselves describe data.
Now, I don't much care for the particular approach that string theory takes, but that in no way makes it not science.
As I said, learn a little physics before you try and comment on physics. Learn a little bit more of the details of what string theorists actually do, and also learn a little bit more of the details of how every other scientific theory in existence was formulated. Not that they were all identical to string theory at some point, but at base, they all tried to find the simplest way of making equations describe data, and sometimes those data were represented by other equations.
Don't worry. If the LHC were going to make Earth-swallowing black holes, if there were any real chance at all of it happening, then cosmic rays would have done it long long ago.
Earth-cosmic ray collisions occur at an absolutely fantastic rate, higher than the LHC would ever even dream of. The energies of cosmic rays are distributed across an extremely broad spectrum, extending both above and below LHC energies. If there is any chance of the LHC making an Earth swallowing black hole, then there is precious little chance of the earth being outside of a black hole by tomorrow morning, much less any chance of the earth having survived 4.5 billion years.
Furthermore, pretty much everything in the galaxy, and presumably in the universe, experiences a cosmic ray flux comparable to what the earth sees. If the LHC were going to make planet or star swallowing black holes, then the sky would be mostly nothing but black holes.
How about experimental verification? Let's suppose that we threw gillions upon gillions of extremely high energy particles at every astronomical body in the universe all the time. Energies across a wide spectrum, both higher and lower than those at the LHC. If we should expect to see any planet or star swallowing black holes created by the LHC, we would certainly expect that this program of hurling high energy particles all around the universe would also create a very very large number of similar black holes (since we're throwing a lot more particles at a lot more targets than the LHC could even dream of).
Oh wait. We don't need to do that experiment, because it has been done for billions of years, and is being done even as I type. It's called cosmic rays. If the LHC had any real chance of producing a black hole capable of swallowing the earth, cosmic rays would have already done it millions (probably much higher than millions) of times over.
It is. Learn some physics. I don't like string theory either, but at least I actually have legitimate reasons for not liking it. "It's not science!!1one lol!" is not one of them.
Although, to a point, I am also a little irritated at how shared bandwidth is marketed, you know damned well, without having to read the fine print, that you are buying shared bandwidth,
False advertising is false advertising is false advertising. Don't make no difference nohow. I don't care that you and I both know that you are buying shared bandwidth; if they advertise "5Mb/s for $60/month" then they had damn well better be selling exactly that, or else they are in actual fact engaging in an illegal practice known as false or deceptive advertising. If they sell 5Mb/s to 100 people, then their connection from those people to the rest of the internet had better be able to support 500Mb/s. No other business is allowed to sell things they don't have without telling up front that that is what they are doing. OTOH, I would have no problem with them selling shared bandwidth iff it were consistently and clearly advertised as such, with an actual maximum average allowed rate also advertised.
One way or another, someone needs to pay for the connection.
I'm curious, since I'm not actually in the telco/ISP business, how much does it actually cost them to run the connection once fiber is laid and such? If they have a line which is capable of carrying 18,000 Mb/s (just to throw a random number out there), does it really cost significantly more to run than if they have a line which is capable of carrying 18Mb/s? It seems that bandwidth carrying capability has upfront costs that perhaps scale up with the bandwidth, but that the ongoing costs are going to be roughly the same no matter how much bandwidth they can carry. Of course I'm just talking out of my ass here, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm wrong. If I'm not wrong, then why on earth should it cost $100 / (Mb/s) (month), other than so they can make a larger profit?
If we block any obscene content, our people will become fine, upstanding citizens.
I'm sure this is the view of some citizens of Norway. The Norwegian legislators who introduced this bill would be doing their constituents and a representative form of government a disservice if they did not introduce such a bill. They might have their fingers crossed hoping it would pass, but since these people elected them, they have a duty to do. And they did it.
Now, off topic, I must confess that I no longer even read the Slashdot paragraph, but I just read the headline and then go straight to the comments to see what the controversial parts were.
Pshaw, old man. I've known a lot of geezers who got crotchety and impatient in their age. Us young whippersnappers with the >500000 UID have enough energy to read the summary still.
Cosmic radiation does is not "trapped" anywhere in the geologic layers to my knowledge.
You are correct. However, there is some nonzero chance that information about the sun's magnetic field might be present in the geologic layers... Thinking about it a little more, likely not. More likely that that information would be found in rock of another solar-system object, one which doesn't have a strong magnetic field of its own.
One man's "creative influence" could very well be one lawyer's "plagiarism". It is all a matter of degree.
There are surely gray areas, but your remark suggests there is nothing but gray areas
His remark does nothing of the sort. "One car could very well be a green car." in no way suggests that all cars are green. It merely states that it is possible that there exists at least one car which is green.
Walking around with your nose in the air certainly does make you superior, but it doesn't actually make you better.
That said, I would prefer Apple over MSFT or Walmart. But I would much prefer a service that was its own company (and not owned by another big corporation) over Apple.
This feature has been around in *NIX since at least the '40s. I can't believe M$ is just now catching up with the rest of the computing world! I mean seriously, how difficult is it to issue an HCF instruction?
Exactly. What they give up in exchange for not getting in trouble all the time is the right to censor. Under current (US) laws, the telcos could very well censor the internet if they wanted to. They do not have common carrier status for IP traffic (US law). Of course, this makes me wonder why they aren't getting in trouble all the time for every little thing that happens on the internet. The only thing I can think of right now is that it is because they don't currently censor the internet.
Ah, a bit of digging reveals that the original quote is from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Supreme Court Justice 1902-1932. The original quote was "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
I suppose by usually having two different functions, one which works by side effects, and one which does the same thing except without side effects of any kind. Scheme does an even better job of this with the bang convention (adding a ! to the end of function name to denote that this version is destructive).
Not sure if that is what you mean, and it probably isn't quite good enough, but it is perhaps the right direction?
Slashdot Mirror
For one, Popper is not the only philosopher of science. He is the only one that ever gets any currency on slashdot, but he is far from the only one.
:: SM : QFT) is found that actually describes our universe, in theory it will have IIRC one free parameter. Much much less of a calibration model than the SM.
Two, as I said to another reply making this same objection, the "The Data Is As It Is" theory could be understood to implicitly say "Under exactly the same conditions as we did our experiment, you will get exactly the same results as we did", which is dead easy to falsify.
Three, a measurement which breaks lorentz invariance would destroy string theory (as well as much of the rest of the last century of physics). There is no "change the words of the proposer" here (although in general, if you change the assumptions of a theory, you pretty much have to change everything. They are assumptions because they are fundamental and necessary.). This is one regard in which string theory absolutely can be wrong, and lorentz invariance absolutely is testable and is frequently tested.
Four, QFT is just as much, if not more so, of a "calibration model". QFT can describe a huge number of conceivable universes, probably more than string theory can. For instance, string theory nails down a number of dimensions. QFT does not. It is possible for us to do measurements on the number of dimensions. They are indirect, and they have a difficult time ruling out more dimensions than we have yet measured, but they can fairly easily rule out fewer dimensions than we have yet measured. So, it is conceivable that we might do LED analyses at the LHC and find that it looks like there are at least 3,972 dimensions. QFT would have no problem with this. String theory would. Yet another way in which string theory is definitely falsifiable.
Five, even the SM, the baby of QFT and of string theory opponents, is very much a calibration model in all kinds of ways. In fact, that is one of the principal criticisms of the SM. It has far too many free parameters that can only be determined by experiment. Once a particular string model (and here I mean string model : string theory
Six, if we built a sufficiently powerful particle accelerator, we could probe down to string length scales (and no, I'm pretty sure that the string length scale is moderately fundamental, so the string theorists couldn't just say "well, ok, strings are smaller than that then."), and see whether we saw strings or point particles. QFT predicts points, string theory predicts (obviously) strings. This is a harsh test of string theory, which makes it falsifiable. The fact that today we do not have the technology to carry out such a test in no way affects the "scientificness" of string theory.
Seven, as I've said above, string theory can be wrong, and it is science. It is not science that I personally like, but it is science.
"It is not science" is the principle criticism of string theory coming from the non-physicist public. I have very rarely heard this criticism coming from physicists. Please keep in mind that pop-science-book-writing physicists are a tiny tiny minority of all physicists. Trust pop science no farther than you can throw it, as it is practically necessarily fraught with errors. If you wrote a pop-science book without errors in description, you would find that you had in fact written a science textbook, and it would not be very accessible to the pop-science reading public.
Most theories involving extra dimensions (extra meaning more than our normal 3-space, 1-time) explain our non-observance of them (to date) by saying that the total size of them is very small. Now, size of a dimension is a weird concept, I know.
Suppose you had a rectangular prism-shaped room with 2 doors, exactly opposite each other on the North and South walls, respectively. Actually, better yet, suppose that the entire North wall and the entire South wall are completely taken up by their doors. Now, suppose that when you walk out the North door, you are simultaneously walking in the South door. This doesn't happen normally (obviously), but with a sufficiently weird topology of space, it could. It is certainly imaginable. The North door and the South door are actually the same place. Now, of course, you can measure this room, length height and width. You might say "but North to South it would be infinitely big!", but it isn't. Take meter sticks, and lay them end to end, starting in the middle of the room, with them oriented N-S. Eventually, because the North and South doors are the same place, you'll wrap back around, and find yourself laying the last meter stick on top of the first one. The number of sticks that you laid down is the length of the room N-S in meters.
Now imagine that your room is that trash dump in Star Wars, where the walls start closing in. Move the North wall closer and closer to the South wall, so that you can only lay down two meter sticks before they start overlapping, and then one meter stick, and then your one meter stick starts overlapping itself, so you switch to centimeter sticks. The size of your N-S dimension has decreased, say to 50 cm. The East-West and Up-Down dimensions are still plenty big, say 5 meters, and they have hard walls, ceilings, and floors, none of this wrapping around nonsense.
Now, suppose that you have a stick 25 cm long. You can orient it in whatever direction you like in this space. It has no trouble existing. Now take one of those meter sticks you had before. You can't orient it however you want, because if you try to turn it to point exactly N-S, it will run into itself. Now suppose you have a 25 cm diameter beach ball. It has no problem existing. But try to imagine a 1 meter diameter beach ball. It can't happen. No way no how. No matter how you turn the thing (unless you deflate it, of course), it will run into itself.
So, an essentially 1-d object, the meter stick, can exist in this space, but only if you turn it certain ways. It can exist even though it is larger than the smallest dimension. However, the 3-d object, the beach ball, can only exist in this space if it is smaller than the smallest dimension, otherwise it runs into itself.
This is precisely how the "black saturn" can only exist at microscopic scales. It is a 4-d object, and all our theories of extra dimensions (at least all of them that have any real following) have no more than 3 dimensions which are actually macroscopic. So if you have an object which is roughly 4-spherical, that is the same size in 4 dimensions, it can only exist if it is smaller than the 4th largest dimension (the three largest being our normal 3 space).
Another way to look at the room I described is that at scales above 50cm, it is actually a 2-d space. Only at small scales (< 50cm) is it really 3-d. Only at really really tiny scales is our space 4 (or more) dimensional (in most extra dimension theories), at any larger scales, it is 3-d. (Of course, I'm not counting time here. Only spacial dimensions.)
FWIW, Large Extra Dimensions predate string theory by quite a bit. IIRC, LED originated with Kaluza-Klein gravity+E&M unification models.
True. Regardless, a wide segment of the scientific community regards string theory as something which could very well be the most important thing since the relativities and QFT.
As I tried to explain previously, but you obviously either didn't read or didn't grasp, you are comparing apples to oranges. The SM is a particular instance of QFT. Nobody has yet found a comparable particular instance of string theory. You would in fact have just as difficult of a time disproving QFT as you would string theory, perhaps even more difficult of a time. For instance, suppose we did our searches for extra dimensions (these are done regularly at HEP labs) and found that our data supported a universe with 15 extra dimensions! This would rule out string theory without drastic modifications, but wouldn't hurt QFT at all. Wouldn't even hurt the SM.
If I shouldn't take it up with you, then you shouldn't be saying it in the first place. If you're intending to hide behind a shield of "I don't really know what I'm talking about," then actually behave as if you don't know what you are talking about. Keep your mouth shut unless you've really got something worthwhile to say.
Most of the scientific community that I am familiar with (experimental HEP) doesn't really much care for string theory, but neither do they think it is not science and is a waste of time. In other words, they and I largely agree. Now which scientific community did you want me to take this up with again? (and don't forget the concept of a vocal (and book-writing) minority. Only a tiny minority of scientists ever write pop-science books. Their opinions should not necessarily be considered representative.) In my opinion, it is the amateur public, who is easily and immensely swayed by a few popular books, and then who reinforce each others misconceptions by such things as posting to slashdot and saying "yeah, string theory, sucks doesn't it. I really hate it.", who need to be addressed.
Such a theory is predictive. As it stands, it predicts that that is all the data we will ever have, or that any further data will exactly mimic what we've already got. That's why it is such poor science; it is ludicrously easy to falsify.
Science's definition depends a great deal on who you talk to. Most everyone who has studied would agree that Plato did a bit of science. In fact, Plato's science was pretty amazing for its time. You recall the "four (or five) elements"? Plato said that each element was in fact tiny tiny versions of the Platonic solids. For instance, fire was made of tetrahedrons, and it hurt because it was sharp. When things decayed, the reason they smelled strongly was that the elements were actually breaking up into little triangles (their faces), and those triangles were small, so they got into our noses easily.
Plato's science wasn't very predictive at all. Pretty much purely descriptive. And yet it was a sterling example of early science.
Quantum Field Theory in and of itself is barely predictive. Pretty much its only predictions are directly its assumptions, such as the Lorentz Invariance I mentioned previously. Perhaps it is not science (and if you say that QFT is not science, then I might well agree that string theory is not science either, but I would then argue that we certainly need QFT to get the SM, which is science), but most people agree it is.
It is of course difficult to come up with decent examples of purely descriptive science, because of course purely descriptive science is very poor science indeed, and is rightly largely ignored.
Because the black holes (if they are formed at all) are not what we are interested in. Additionally, the detectors that we use at LHC weigh on the order of thousands of tons. That'd be an awful big weather balloon to lift them. Furthermore, the detectors we use are very narrowly focused. If a collision doesn't take place nearly exactly at the center of the detector, with the two particles involved having pretty much exactly equal speeds in opposite directions, then our measurements will not be on, or at any rate, the detector will be immensely more difficult to calibrate so that we get some kind of meaningful results from it. Also, having the detector underground, we can shield it from a lot of noise that adds uncertainty to our measurements. Finally, the results are immensely easier to study (in some ways, possible to study) if the particles involved always have nearly the same energies as in every other collision we are studying.
Cosmics have energies spread out over an absolutely huge range of energies. Their timing and location are nigh unto impossible to predict. We don't get anything like a 0 net momentum collision between a cosmic ray and an atmospheric atom. The upper atmosphere is an incredibly noisy place, primarily because of cosmics. We would have an awful hard time telling the difference between a particle that originated from a cosmic-atmosphere collision we were interested in and a stray particle that came from the hadron shower of some other cosmic-atmosphere collision.
So Quantum Field Theory is not science either. QFT is just as broad, perhaps even broader, in what it could conceivably describe, as string theory. The Standard Model is a QFT, and not a particularly pretty one at that. Much of the work that goes on in string theory is looking for a string theory, a particular model within the framework of string theory in the same way as SM is a particular model within the framework of QFT, that describes our universe. String theory is already just as good, and arguably better than, QFT, except in that finding models in string theory seems to be much harder.
There are ways to test QFT, and there are ways to test string theory. For instance: Lorentz invariance. Just because nobody reasonably suspects that Lorentz invariance will turn out to not be a real feature of our universe does not mean that it is not a testable prediction. The frameworks of both QFT and string theory include Lorentz invariance.
Furthermore, string theory is not as purely descriptive as you seem to think. It begins with some quite simple and quite basic first principles, and then attempts to derive all of physics from those. If it turns out that they can't describe all of physics from those principles, then they'll have to go back to the drawing board and look for new principles. Those principles are hypotheses. They have left the observation up to other physicists, and are using the existing theories as a description of those observations. So, they are letting observation refine their hypotheses.
If they were merely looking for a way to describe all our known data, then they would just say "Well, our theory is: The Data Is As It Is." Such a theory would be absolutely right. It would even be science. It would be pretty poor science, but it would be science nonetheless. If they are truly looking for the simplest way to make equations that work out to cover all the physics that we know, then it is absolutely science. Simplicity and good description of data are what make a scientific theory good. And yes, they are trying to describe data. If they are trying to make particular limits of their theory match up with extant theories that are known to work in those same limits, then they are trying to describe data, simply because those extant theories are only extant because they themselves describe data.
Now, I don't much care for the particular approach that string theory takes, but that in no way makes it not science.
As I said, learn a little physics before you try and comment on physics. Learn a little bit more of the details of what string theorists actually do, and also learn a little bit more of the details of how every other scientific theory in existence was formulated. Not that they were all identical to string theory at some point, but at base, they all tried to find the simplest way of making equations describe data, and sometimes those data were represented by other equations.
Don't worry. If the LHC were going to make Earth-swallowing black holes, if there were any real chance at all of it happening, then cosmic rays would have done it long long ago.
Earth-cosmic ray collisions occur at an absolutely fantastic rate, higher than the LHC would ever even dream of. The energies of cosmic rays are distributed across an extremely broad spectrum, extending both above and below LHC energies. If there is any chance of the LHC making an Earth swallowing black hole, then there is precious little chance of the earth being outside of a black hole by tomorrow morning, much less any chance of the earth having survived 4.5 billion years.
Furthermore, pretty much everything in the galaxy, and presumably in the universe, experiences a cosmic ray flux comparable to what the earth sees. If the LHC were going to make planet or star swallowing black holes, then the sky would be mostly nothing but black holes.
How about experimental verification? Let's suppose that we threw gillions upon gillions of extremely high energy particles at every astronomical body in the universe all the time. Energies across a wide spectrum, both higher and lower than those at the LHC. If we should expect to see any planet or star swallowing black holes created by the LHC, we would certainly expect that this program of hurling high energy particles all around the universe would also create a very very large number of similar black holes (since we're throwing a lot more particles at a lot more targets than the LHC could even dream of).
Oh wait. We don't need to do that experiment, because it has been done for billions of years, and is being done even as I type. It's called cosmic rays. If the LHC had any real chance of producing a black hole capable of swallowing the earth, cosmic rays would have already done it millions (probably much higher than millions) of times over.
Ain't gonna happen.
I'm curious, since I'm not actually in the telco/ISP business, how much does it actually cost them to run the connection once fiber is laid and such? If they have a line which is capable of carrying 18,000 Mb/s (just to throw a random number out there), does it really cost significantly more to run than if they have a line which is capable of carrying 18Mb/s? It seems that bandwidth carrying capability has upfront costs that perhaps scale up with the bandwidth, but that the ongoing costs are going to be roughly the same no matter how much bandwidth they can carry. Of course I'm just talking out of my ass here, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm wrong. If I'm not wrong, then why on earth should it cost $100 / (Mb/s) (month), other than so they can make a larger profit?
Offense! Defense! Rah Rah Rah!
I don't suppose it matters to you that this law was passed in the UK, which is in fact not part of of the US...
Walking around with your nose in the air certainly does make you superior, but it doesn't actually make you better.
That said, I would prefer Apple over MSFT or Walmart. But I would much prefer a service that was its own company (and not owned by another big corporation) over Apple.
This feature has been around in *NIX since at least the '40s. I can't believe M$ is just now catching up with the rest of the computing world! I mean seriously, how difficult is it to issue an HCF instruction?
This wasn't an "Ask Slashdot" article.
Exactly. What they give up in exchange for not getting in trouble all the time is the right to censor. Under current (US) laws, the telcos could very well censor the internet if they wanted to. They do not have common carrier status for IP traffic (US law). Of course, this makes me wonder why they aren't getting in trouble all the time for every little thing that happens on the internet. The only thing I can think of right now is that it is because they don't currently censor the internet.
Ah, a bit of digging reveals that the original quote is from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Supreme Court Justice 1902-1932. The original quote was "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
I suppose by usually having two different functions, one which works by side effects, and one which does the same thing except without side effects of any kind. Scheme does an even better job of this with the bang convention (adding a ! to the end of function name to denote that this version is destructive).
Not sure if that is what you mean, and it probably isn't quite good enough, but it is perhaps the right direction?