These experiments do not share their data openly (while the experiment is still taking data) because if they did, there would not be any data. The only way to get enough physicists to work on the experiment to make it run well enough to get any data is to restrict data access to those who do service work on the experiment. After the end of data taking, the data may be released, but I don't know the time table on which that typically occurs.
I'm also at a major American university as a physics grad student. If your university has a research physics department, chances are good that they have a high energy experiment group, and high energy experimentalists use Linux (for their work boxes) almost exclusively. So, if you can't get university IT to help you out, it is likely to be worth trying to look around and see if there are any research groups that use Linux. They may be able to help.
1) IS "eaten" by microbes (well it's converted into energy and used), small plants and (I've read one paper claiming...) even by small animals
I'd like to see a source supporting this claim. Please understand, I quite strongly agree with you in general, but this one seems a little weird, and it's the first time I've ever heard it. If true, providing a reliable source would greatly strengthen your argument at large, and I think that would be a good thing.
Yes. This is correct. The Einstein field equations without a cosmological constant fail to describe the universe. Thus those equations are incorrect or incomplete. However, when we add a cosmological constant, the resulting equations do correctly describe the universe. We don't know, on a microscopic level, what sort of effect produces the term in the equations called the cosmological constant, but we do know some very general features of what sort of microscopic phenomena could produce that term. More specifically, an amount of energy which is proportional to the volume of space would produce a cosmological constant term. Since we know with a reasonable degree of certainty that a) the phenomenon in question is an energy type phenomenon, and b) it does not appear to couple to the photon, it is a form of energy which is "dark", and we call it "dark energy".
I really wish that this "dark matter and dark energy just mean scientists have no idea what they are talking about" meme would die. It simply isn't true. There are some very specific things that we don't know about dark matter and dark energy. There are a lot more things that we do know about them.
Dark energy refers to a specific general relativistic situation. While we don't know why that situation occurs, we have done measurements (including this one) confirming that the particular inputs we put into the equations of GR reproduce the characteristics of the universe to within theoretical and experimental uncertainty.
There are lots of ways that one could construct an alternative theory that would also describe a universe expanding at an accelerating rate that would not agree with our observations. The fact that our observations (and in particular the new observations of the WiggleZ experiment) agree with the particular theory called "Dark Energy" (or more accurately the Lambda-CDM model) and disagree with lots of other potential theories is the subject of the article.
Please give us an example of some quality conservative though.
While I loathe her philosophy, Ayn Rand's work is certainly extremely thoroughly thought out, and falls much closer to the conservative than the liberal end of things. It is certainly more well thought out than juvenile name-calling like "Tea-Baggers"...
Isn't most Wi-Fi used inside climate controlled buildings? Perhaps this is an attempt to notify wardrivers to stay in the lanes closest to buildings...
Also, the amount of signal degradation caused by passing through a wall is going to be so enormously larger than that caused by the atmosphere in any climatic conditions survivable by humans that I can't imagine that this would have any noticeable impact.
I suppose that if you were trying to cover a large open area outdoors with no trees or structures with Wi-Fi, then you might need to worry about this. But even then, if you're putting your access points at the maximum possible separation, your network is probably not really going to be very usable over most of the area. Finally, diurnal and seasonal variations in temperature and humidity are going to be a much larger effect on Wi-Fi planning than climate change anyway.
In short, I think that the whole premise, while just barely technically correct, is still quite ludicrous. However, IANA network engineer, so I do not know enough to truly evaluate it fully and am just relying on my intuition, but I also have no need to evaluate it fully either.
If this is what I was hearing about at work on Friday (I'm a particle physicist), then it can't be the Higgs. The rate of production is too high by a factor of 40.
You may be able to wrap your head around the idea of the quantum states of an electron bound to a proton (that is, an electron in a hydrogen atom). The hydrogen atom is defined by having a particular potential energy that varies as a function of the distance from the proton. This is just like that, but instead of a potential energy that depends on the distance, r, from the proton like 1/r, we have a potential energy that varies as a function of the distance from the center of the earth, h, like m*g*h. This is actually a common and relatively elementary quantum mechanics problem that is commonly solved by undergrad physics majors in introductory quantum. The solution involves Airy functions.
Where it gets interesting: You put the lower, reflecting plate into the potential energy as an infinite potential at a particular h (the location of the plate). This makes a sort of triangular shape if you plot it as a function of h. The precise details of just exactly what happens in the potential down around the point of the triangle (does it stay pointy no matter how low you go, or does it smooth out as some scale, and if so, how?) can tell you a lot about how gravity works on very small scales. If you get a sensitive enough experiment, you might be able to test some theories of fundamental physics that involve large extra dimensions (string theories, Kaluza-Klein models, SUGRA, etc) and derive upper bounds on the size of those extra dimensions. You might also be able to learn something about the quantum behavior of gravity itself (as opposed to the quantum behavior of neutrons, which is comparatively much much more well understood).
Re:Dramatic effect and scientific precision
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Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
They are not really the same/related, nor are they likely to be correct.
The Z' proposal is by Dan Hooper, who neglects the fact that CDF has already excluded the possibility of a Z' with a mass below 800 GeV [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0602045]. He is also the same guy who, while not being a member of the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope collaboration, used their data to "discover" dark matter not once but twice! I've become extremely skeptical of his work, as he seems excitable and prone to early and ill-considered pronouncements.
The technicolor proposal is a little bit more interesting. Technicolor models were a proposed alternative to the Higgs mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking, involving an additional SU(3) symmetry (that is, an additional force/interaction akin to the strong nuclear force). This was proposed very early on in the process of this paper by a Fermilab theorist who was consulted under confidentiality because the analysis was not yet finalized and approved by the CDF collaboration. The proposed process here is a techni-rho which decays to a W and a techni-pion. The W then goes to a lepton and neutrino, and the techni-pion goes to two jets.
Nearly all of the parameter space for technicolor models has long since been excluded, but there are a few tiny corners of modified versions of the model that are still available. While it does not seem likely that technicolor will end up being the correct explanation (this is far more likely a modeling problem in W+jets than new physics), technicolor will probably be used extensively to test whether or not this is new physics. It is already implemented in most of the Monte Carlo generators, and the model is quite generic in its properties, so it really makes a very good testbed.
I would strongly advise reading the actual paper (can be found on the arxiv) instead of the NYT article, which, as I mentioned, is sensational and largely content-free. There is plenty of information in the paper about how they determined the significance of the result and how the analysis (event selection etc) was done. It should answer your questions in this regard. As far as being "new", the data from these experiments is analyzed in scientifically and statistically rigorous ways all the time. It in no way involves "massaging" the data, which you can see if you read the hundreds of papers that have come out of high energy physics experiments.
I really can't comment professionally on the sterile neutrino re dark matter. I've heard of the MiniBOONE result, and think it is very interesting, but the viability of a sterile neutrino as dark matter is pretty far afield for me. Perhaps a passing cosmologist can comment?
D0 has done this same sort of analysis, and they do not see this bump. But, their background modeling procedure involves reweighting the expected distributions (from Monte Carlo) in delta R between the jets (sort of an angular separation between the jets), which is a variable that is strongly correlated with the dijet mass. That is, their background model would be expected to have a strong tendency to fill in a bump like this. Now, which model is more correct is open to question, but it is certainly true that whether or not this bump turns out to be from real new physics (unlikely, in my professional opinion), their procedure is almost guaranteed not to find it.
FWIW, earlier drafts of the paper were much more sensationalistic than the final draft that the collaboration approved. A large contingent of the collaboration, myself included, would have removed our names from the paper if it had done something as insane as claim discovery of a new particle. So, we specifically pushed to make the paper more scientifically honest and less effective as a "ploy to keep the funds flowing." That said, the NYT article and all the other mainstream news reports on the issue are far, far more sensationalistic than anything the analyzers ever even considered producing...
Some interesting things to note:
This search was done with a very tight event selection designed to get a relatively pure diboson sample. Loosening up the selection increases the number of data events involved in the analysis by (IIRC) about a factor of 8, and in this looser sample, the significance of the bump decreases to about 1 sigma, which is wholly uninteresting.
The feeling among the members of my particular group (one of the member institutions of the CDF collaboration) is that this is a very interesting result, but that it should be interpreted more as exposing the difficulties of / our inability to model the very large W+jets background accurately; the Monte Carlo generators are simply insufficient or are slightly incorrectly tuned. We do not really feel that this is likely to be an indication of new physics at all.
So, long story short, there is certainly something here to be interested in. Both the theorists who write the Monte Carlo generators and the experimentalists analyzing data from the LHC experiments are paying close attention to this result, as it affects their work. We will know more after further study and work, both to improve the Monte Carlos and to look for similar effects in the ATLAS and CMS data.
They did take into account the look-elsewhere effect, as is standard in bump-search type papers. This bump has a 3.2 sigma significance _after_ the look-elsewhere significance reduction and other systematic uncertainties.
I can imagine that that could become a difficult cycle to break out of. A dissertation is required to be original research, of course, and if everyone knows that tons and tons of things have been tried, gotten a null result, and ignored, then any null result is always going to be suspected of not being original...
It makes perfect sense to hold the manufacturer responsible. Anybody who is making driverless cars (or cars of any sort, really) is a very large business and can afford to pay for the shortcomings of their product. It will also provide a very strong market incentive (which is what large businesses, by necessity, understand) to improve the safety of the vehicle. The manufacturer probably wouldn't even bother to purchase insurance from an insurance provider, as they could provide what amounts to their own insurance pool out of petty cash.
Actually, if the manufacturers are smart, they will specifically advertise that they take on the liability for "driver" error. Being freed from such liability (and hence from related insurance obligations) could be a very powerful incentive for individuals to purchase driverless cars.
Well, the trouble with the anti-gun lobby is that legislating against guns seems unlikely to have a noticeable positive impact on the rate of gun crimes, and might even create a black market for illegal guns with all the organized crime, cartels, and violence that that implies. But we're getting off topic here, and I should probably be modded down.
I think that what I really meant to say was that there are no homeomorphisms between R and RxR (or RxRxR). I believe that a homeomorphism would preserve locality, so that locations that were "near" before the "folding" event would remain "near", and locations that were "far" would remain "far", but I'm not a topologist either. Obviously, that is not what continuous mapping means, and I apologize for my sloppy language. Hopefully I've cleared things up?
The space-filling curves are certainly very interesting, but they still would mix locations and produce the sort of smoothing that I talked about before.
f(x) = x is not even a mapping to RxR as x is not an element of RxR when x is an element of R. So I'm not quite certain what you are trying to say here.
Here's a bit of post-diction for you. This idea might explain the evenness of the matter distribution in the universe (without needing an inflaton field). Since there is no continuous mapping from R to RxR or RxRxR, when these events occurred, locations throughout the universe would have been thoroughly mixed. Of course, I'm not a theorist and I'm not any good at differential geometry and I haven't read the paper. So this is nothing more than idle musings, and noone should take it as more than that without better evidence or at least better authority.
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These experiments do not share their data openly (while the experiment is still taking data) because if they did, there would not be any data. The only way to get enough physicists to work on the experiment to make it run well enough to get any data is to restrict data access to those who do service work on the experiment. After the end of data taking, the data may be released, but I don't know the time table on which that typically occurs.
I'm also at a major American university as a physics grad student. If your university has a research physics department, chances are good that they have a high energy experiment group, and high energy experimentalists use Linux (for their work boxes) almost exclusively. So, if you can't get university IT to help you out, it is likely to be worth trying to look around and see if there are any research groups that use Linux. They may be able to help.
How many people have died or become ill because of this incident?
1) IS "eaten" by microbes (well it's converted into energy and used), small plants and (I've read one paper claiming ...) even by small animals
I'd like to see a source supporting this claim. Please understand, I quite strongly agree with you in general, but this one seems a little weird, and it's the first time I've ever heard it. If true, providing a reliable source would greatly strengthen your argument at large, and I think that would be a good thing.
Yes. This is correct. The Einstein field equations without a cosmological constant fail to describe the universe. Thus those equations are incorrect or incomplete. However, when we add a cosmological constant, the resulting equations do correctly describe the universe. We don't know, on a microscopic level, what sort of effect produces the term in the equations called the cosmological constant, but we do know some very general features of what sort of microscopic phenomena could produce that term. More specifically, an amount of energy which is proportional to the volume of space would produce a cosmological constant term. Since we know with a reasonable degree of certainty that a) the phenomenon in question is an energy type phenomenon, and b) it does not appear to couple to the photon, it is a form of energy which is "dark", and we call it "dark energy".
I really wish that this "dark matter and dark energy just mean scientists have no idea what they are talking about" meme would die. It simply isn't true. There are some very specific things that we don't know about dark matter and dark energy. There are a lot more things that we do know about them.
Dark energy refers to a specific general relativistic situation. While we don't know why that situation occurs, we have done measurements (including this one) confirming that the particular inputs we put into the equations of GR reproduce the characteristics of the universe to within theoretical and experimental uncertainty.
There are lots of ways that one could construct an alternative theory that would also describe a universe expanding at an accelerating rate that would not agree with our observations. The fact that our observations (and in particular the new observations of the WiggleZ experiment) agree with the particular theory called "Dark Energy" (or more accurately the Lambda-CDM model) and disagree with lots of other potential theories is the subject of the article.
Please give us an example of some quality conservative though.
While I loathe her philosophy, Ayn Rand's work is certainly extremely thoroughly thought out, and falls much closer to the conservative than the liberal end of things. It is certainly more well thought out than juvenile name-calling like "Tea-Baggers"...
Isn't most Wi-Fi used inside climate controlled buildings? Perhaps this is an attempt to notify wardrivers to stay in the lanes closest to buildings...
Also, the amount of signal degradation caused by passing through a wall is going to be so enormously larger than that caused by the atmosphere in any climatic conditions survivable by humans that I can't imagine that this would have any noticeable impact.
I suppose that if you were trying to cover a large open area outdoors with no trees or structures with Wi-Fi, then you might need to worry about this. But even then, if you're putting your access points at the maximum possible separation, your network is probably not really going to be very usable over most of the area. Finally, diurnal and seasonal variations in temperature and humidity are going to be a much larger effect on Wi-Fi planning than climate change anyway.
In short, I think that the whole premise, while just barely technically correct, is still quite ludicrous. However, IANA network engineer, so I do not know enough to truly evaluate it fully and am just relying on my intuition, but I also have no need to evaluate it fully either.
Well, if the theory is wrong, then something else is right, and this still isn't the Higgs, but something else instead.
If this is what I was hearing about at work on Friday (I'm a particle physicist), then it can't be the Higgs. The rate of production is too high by a factor of 40.
Where it gets interesting: You put the lower, reflecting plate into the potential energy as an infinite potential at a particular h (the location of the plate). This makes a sort of triangular shape if you plot it as a function of h. The precise details of just exactly what happens in the potential down around the point of the triangle (does it stay pointy no matter how low you go, or does it smooth out as some scale, and if so, how?) can tell you a lot about how gravity works on very small scales. If you get a sensitive enough experiment, you might be able to test some theories of fundamental physics that involve large extra dimensions (string theories, Kaluza-Klein models, SUGRA, etc) and derive upper bounds on the size of those extra dimensions. You might also be able to learn something about the quantum behavior of gravity itself (as opposed to the quantum behavior of neutrons, which is comparatively much much more well understood).
Oxygen is far more toxic than sugar, anyway.
They are not really the same/related, nor are they likely to be correct.
The Z' proposal is by Dan Hooper, who neglects the fact that CDF has already excluded the possibility of a Z' with a mass below 800 GeV [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0602045]. He is also the same guy who, while not being a member of the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope collaboration, used their data to "discover" dark matter not once but twice! I've become extremely skeptical of his work, as he seems excitable and prone to early and ill-considered pronouncements.
The technicolor proposal is a little bit more interesting. Technicolor models were a proposed alternative to the Higgs mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking, involving an additional SU(3) symmetry (that is, an additional force/interaction akin to the strong nuclear force). This was proposed very early on in the process of this paper by a Fermilab theorist who was consulted under confidentiality because the analysis was not yet finalized and approved by the CDF collaboration. The proposed process here is a techni-rho which decays to a W and a techni-pion. The W then goes to a lepton and neutrino, and the techni-pion goes to two jets.
Nearly all of the parameter space for technicolor models has long since been excluded, but there are a few tiny corners of modified versions of the model that are still available. While it does not seem likely that technicolor will end up being the correct explanation (this is far more likely a modeling problem in W+jets than new physics), technicolor will probably be used extensively to test whether or not this is new physics. It is already implemented in most of the Monte Carlo generators, and the model is quite generic in its properties, so it really makes a very good testbed.
I would strongly advise reading the actual paper (can be found on the arxiv) instead of the NYT article, which, as I mentioned, is sensational and largely content-free. There is plenty of information in the paper about how they determined the significance of the result and how the analysis (event selection etc) was done. It should answer your questions in this regard. As far as being "new", the data from these experiments is analyzed in scientifically and statistically rigorous ways all the time. It in no way involves "massaging" the data, which you can see if you read the hundreds of papers that have come out of high energy physics experiments.
I really can't comment professionally on the sterile neutrino re dark matter. I've heard of the MiniBOONE result, and think it is very interesting, but the viability of a sterile neutrino as dark matter is pretty far afield for me. Perhaps a passing cosmologist can comment?
D0 has done this same sort of analysis, and they do not see this bump. But, their background modeling procedure involves reweighting the expected distributions (from Monte Carlo) in delta R between the jets (sort of an angular separation between the jets), which is a variable that is strongly correlated with the dijet mass. That is, their background model would be expected to have a strong tendency to fill in a bump like this. Now, which model is more correct is open to question, but it is certainly true that whether or not this bump turns out to be from real new physics (unlikely, in my professional opinion), their procedure is almost guaranteed not to find it.
FWIW, earlier drafts of the paper were much more sensationalistic than the final draft that the collaboration approved. A large contingent of the collaboration, myself included, would have removed our names from the paper if it had done something as insane as claim discovery of a new particle. So, we specifically pushed to make the paper more scientifically honest and less effective as a "ploy to keep the funds flowing." That said, the NYT article and all the other mainstream news reports on the issue are far, far more sensationalistic than anything the analyzers ever even considered producing...
Some interesting things to note:
So, long story short, there is certainly something here to be interested in. Both the theorists who write the Monte Carlo generators and the experimentalists analyzing data from the LHC experiments are paying close attention to this result, as it affects their work. We will know more after further study and work, both to improve the Monte Carlos and to look for similar effects in the ATLAS and CMS data.
They did take into account the look-elsewhere effect, as is standard in bump-search type papers. This bump has a 3.2 sigma significance _after_ the look-elsewhere significance reduction and other systematic uncertainties.
I can imagine that that could become a difficult cycle to break out of. A dissertation is required to be original research, of course, and if everyone knows that tons and tons of things have been tried, gotten a null result, and ignored, then any null result is always going to be suspected of not being original...
It makes perfect sense to hold the manufacturer responsible. Anybody who is making driverless cars (or cars of any sort, really) is a very large business and can afford to pay for the shortcomings of their product. It will also provide a very strong market incentive (which is what large businesses, by necessity, understand) to improve the safety of the vehicle. The manufacturer probably wouldn't even bother to purchase insurance from an insurance provider, as they could provide what amounts to their own insurance pool out of petty cash.
Actually, if the manufacturers are smart, they will specifically advertise that they take on the liability for "driver" error. Being freed from such liability (and hence from related insurance obligations) could be a very powerful incentive for individuals to purchase driverless cars.
Well, the trouble with the anti-gun lobby is that legislating against guns seems unlikely to have a noticeable positive impact on the rate of gun crimes, and might even create a black market for illegal guns with all the organized crime, cartels, and violence that that implies. But we're getting off topic here, and I should probably be modded down.
So they can notify you when your email address gets stolen, of course! Didn't think that one through, didja?
I think that what I really meant to say was that there are no homeomorphisms between R and RxR (or RxRxR). I believe that a homeomorphism would preserve locality, so that locations that were "near" before the "folding" event would remain "near", and locations that were "far" would remain "far", but I'm not a topologist either. Obviously, that is not what continuous mapping means, and I apologize for my sloppy language. Hopefully I've cleared things up?
The space-filling curves are certainly very interesting, but they still would mix locations and produce the sort of smoothing that I talked about before.
I'm not sure I understand you. Could you clarify and elaborate your statement, please?
f(x) = x is not even a mapping to RxR as x is not an element of RxR when x is an element of R. So I'm not quite certain what you are trying to say here.
Here's a bit of post-diction for you. This idea might explain the evenness of the matter distribution in the universe (without needing an inflaton field). Since there is no continuous mapping from R to RxR or RxRxR, when these events occurred, locations throughout the universe would have been thoroughly mixed. Of course, I'm not a theorist and I'm not any good at differential geometry and I haven't read the paper. So this is nothing more than idle musings, and noone should take it as more than that without better evidence or at least better authority.