Sure. The EPA does a good (if sometimes possibly a little extreme) job of protecting our air and water. I think that's fantastic and wonderful! But the result is that we turn around and buy stuff from horrible polluting factories overseas that have people working in unsafe conditions, etc, but who can, by virtue of destroying their own people and environment, make stuff much more cheaply than we can.
What we need is to have protective tariffs on imports from such, so that the price of building clean factories does not render them totally unprofitable. Same deal with human rights abuses abroad. If the abuses are making their exports cheaper, then we either need to allow the same sort of abuses here so we can compete, or artificially raise the prices of the imports so we can compete without abusing our people.
You simply can't have one without the other.
Bad analogy: The Ivy League mostly plays itself in football. If Ivy League teams with tough academic requirements on their athletes were to try to play against the Ohio States and Texases of the country, they would get creamed, and everyone would say "haha, why are you losing?". So they mostly only play other teams with similar academic requirements. If they could, I'm sure that they'd love to play against Oregon, but with the restriction that only Oregon's players that met Ivy League academic standards would be allowed on the field. Obviously they can't do this. As a sovereign nation that can lay down rules for what goes in and out of the country, we can do this.
It's actually pretty easy (philosophically, not necessarily practically) for libertarianism to handle the tragedy of the commons. Libertarianism is not the same thing as anarchism. Libertarianism's claim is that the only proper internal role of government is to arbitrate where there is a conflict of rights. "Your right to swing your arm stops at the end of my nose" and all that. The tragedy of the commons exists because there is a conflict among people's right to use a common resource. Not everyone can use it all up. Therefore, libertarianism would claim that it is the government's job to arbitrate among everyone who wants to use a common resource, and thereby prevent the tragedy of the commons. Rule of law (often strongly associated with libertarianism) would further claim that the government should so arbitrate not by having a bureaucracy of officials who, on their own judgement, say "yea" or "nay", but by having a written, almost algorithmic, process for arbitrating, to remove graft, favoritism, and other bad things.
Now, of course, how you go about writing the laws to accomplish this is a very very difficult question, and the answer might well lead you to something that doesn't look much like what we think of as libertarianism. I don't know. But libertarianism, considered properly, at least desires to address the tragedy of the commons.
You could set up a directional RFID scanner, and set it rotating, then get a radar like display for direction, distance (delay), and strength of the echoes. Shouldn't be too difficult to do, really.
Ok, sure. If you fail to document stuff adequately, you're doing poorly at your job. Possibly grounds for being fired. But you want to throw someone in jail for being bad at their job? That's ludicrous!
The way to achieve perfect security for a computer is unplug it from the network, and never turn it on. I guess the only way to prevent anyone from ever dying in a new Volvo is to prevent them from entering it...
Does SpaceX and Elon Musk remind anyone else of Poul Anderson's Fireball Enterprises and Anson Guthrie? Private development of plus drive and passion for spaceflight that totally leaves overlarge bureaucratic government projects in the dust? Now we just need to wait for Musk to clone himself in a computer and keep reincarnating for millennia, right...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population You were saying? Where are the Chinese and Indian schools totally dominating the list then? Those countries each have a factor of 4 population advantage over the US, and the next 13 countries on the list are closer than a factor of 4 to the US. So if the US is able to totally wash out India and China in spite of the population difference, then we ought to expect that Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia, Japan, Mexico, the Phillipines, Vietnam, Germany, Ethiopia, and Egypt ought to be equally capable of washing out the US in spite of the population difference. Your population argument does not appear to hold any water.
Sorry, I did not mean to degrade your wonderful efforts. I think that a well written accounting of conceptual physics is an excellent thing to have.
However, I would caution you to take great care not to overstate what your students are receiving. There are already way too many people out there who think that you don't really need math and rigor, that they can do physics if they just think really hard about weird things, and that "the scientific establishment" only uses math in order to maintain some imaginary level of power and control over the "outsiders". Please try very hard not to contribute to this mentality, as I think it is much more harmful than a lack of a conceptual understanding in the first place. This is why I took issue with your characterization of your work as teaching "graduate level" physics.
I would absolutely recommend David J. Griffiths' "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics". It's blue and has a cat on the cover (and a dead cat on the back), hence it is sometimes known to physicists as "the cat book". Multivariable calculus, linear algebra (with a small emphasis on abstract algebra if possible), and diffeq (partial, not just ordinary), are exactly the math that you need to grok everything in Griffiths. It is one of a few standard undergrad (usually sophomore or junior level) texts, and, in my opinion, the best written among them.
Another poster recommended a modern physics text, but I would disagree that that is your best choice. Modern physics texts tend to be great at going "wooee! look at how weird the universe is!" and touching briefly on a whole bunch of the seminal experiments and theories, but without really going into much of anything in any sort of depth.
I'm not saying that it isn't physics because you aren't using math. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. I think that explaining physics on a conceptual level to non-scientists is a really, really good plan.
But, a graduate level education (in any field) is intended to prepare you to teach and to do novel research. You cannot teach physics, and you certainly can't do novel physics research, if you don't know any more than grade school math. It is simply impossible. So, the people who are creating what might well be a really excellent popsci series should not tell people that it is graduate level physics, because it is in fact something different from graduate level physics.
Argh. You are the last (currently) in a line of about a dozen people who have totally misunderstood my comment.
They're not trying to train physicists just help laypeople understand.
This is precisely what makes it not graduate level physics, because graduate level physics *is* trying to train physicists. I'm all for teaching people about physics on a layperson sort of level; I think it is a phenomenally great thing to do. I'm not in favor of lying to them about just what it is that they are learning.
Car analogy (possibly bad, as always): I think that making people take a driver's ed program so they can get a license is a really good idea. I think that telling them that their driver's ed program is training them to be movie stunt drivers is a really really bad idea. It isn't, and the consequences of so telling them are probably worse than not giving them training at all.
I don't disagree with you, and I was not intending to claim that the lecture PDFs are not worthwhile. But I stand by my claim that they do not teach *graduate level* physics. They may teach the concepts that are dealt with in graduate level physics courses, but a graduate level physics education prepares one to teach or do research, which this sort of physics-without-much-math most certainly does not do.
True. And the people who received and understood your explanation would in no way be equipped to either teach physics themselves or to do novel physics research of their own. So, I stand by my point: physics without math is not *graduate level* physics, which prepares one to either teach or do research (or both).
Oh certainly. I do agree with you. But discussing the concepts and principles is not graduate level physics, it's conceptual physics, which is what you teach to undergraduate poets and business majors. Nothing wrong with it, and it certainly is very important and worthwhile, but it is not graduate level physics, which is intended to prepare you to do actual novel physics research on your own.
Grade school level math. The most complicated math in the series is this: “if a times b is less than 6, and we measure a to be 2, then b must be less than 3.” If you can follow that, you’ll be fine.
Physics that uses no more math than this is not graduate-level physics.
You should join (and donate to!) the special interest group a former colleague of mine founded. It's called "People Outraged Over Pluto". Soon those legislative fatcats will have to eat their words, after Pluto's triumphal return!
You mention "standard maintenance". How much did you spend on that over the course of 8 years? I'd guess that you probably spent more on brakes*, battery, oil changes, spark plugs, tuneups, etc, etc, etc over the course of 8 years than the cost of a new EV battery. I could be wrong, of course, but my guess is that it is probably in the same ballpark. An EV requires practically none of these expenditures, because electric motor systems are enormously less complex and more reliable. So, at the end of 8 years with an EV, you have the choice to sell at a low value, replace the battery and sell at a high value, or replace the battery and continue driving the car for another 8 years. At the end of 8 years with a gas car, you have the choice to sell at an intermediate value (but having spent much more in maintenance during those 8 years), replace everything that gradually acquires wear in the vehicle (which is nearly everything) and sell at a high value, or keep driving the car (and eventually replace nearly everything). With those possibilities, the EV is looking pretty good to me.
Yeah. Your experimental sensitivity would almost certainly be total crap because your error bars would be too large and you couldn't get a large enough sample. But you could still design and run the experiment. My point was about the triviality of the experimental design in this case.
So, ignoring your spurious insults for the moment, what you are taking issue with is my proposed method of measuring approximate total rainfall? That's fine. I am perfectly willing to take any measurement of approximate rainfall, even if it is quite crude (and then you account for such crudeness as systematic errors). Once you've got such a measurement, none of the rest of what I said has anything to do with cloud physics. It's all statistics and experimental design. You still just need to populate two one-dimensional histograms and attempt to observe a difference in distribution between the two. All the enormous variability in clouds is subsumed in the notion that we are sampling from the distribution of all clouds (or all clouds over Norman, OK during the month of June, or whatever). The only thing you have to worry about is getting enough samples to populate your histograms, like I said.
Yes, cloud physics is hard, and no, I did not mean to imply that it was not. But it is not so hard as to render such an experiment impossible.
Neutrino oscillations (and hence implied masses) were rather definitively observed years ago. The recent result that you are referring to (I infer) is rather than antineutrinos have masses that are different from their corresponding neutrinos. Perhaps even more fascinating than the former!
No. It appears that Lisi's theory (as well as the Pati-Salam GUT upon which it is partially based) contains a single Higgs doublet, rather than the 2 Higgs doublets suggested by this D0 result.
Oh, I absolutely believe that right and wrong DO exist (I come from a long line of Baptists from the south and midwest (although I do not any longer claim to be a Southern Baptist, as that group's beliefs have changed out from under me and my forebears), and share their faith). I did not intend to imply otherwise. I have some very firm ideas about what is right and what is wrong. I don't think that any of them in particular is incorrect (otherwise I'd have a different idea, of course). However, I also don't think that I'm correct about every last one of them. It seems improbable in the extreme that there is not some aspect of morality or truth that I am wrong about. I just don't see any utility in or requirement for insisting that other people, who may or may not share my ideas about what is right and what is wrong, and may well be correct in the cases where I am incorrect, behave as if they did share my ideas about what is right and what is wrong. Do you really think that you are incorrect about nothing? I will spend a tremendous amount of effort attempting to convince them that I am correct and they are incorrect, but if they remain unconvinced, I will not throw them in prison, or seek to take away their property, happiness, or life.
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Sure. The EPA does a good (if sometimes possibly a little extreme) job of protecting our air and water. I think that's fantastic and wonderful! But the result is that we turn around and buy stuff from horrible polluting factories overseas that have people working in unsafe conditions, etc, but who can, by virtue of destroying their own people and environment, make stuff much more cheaply than we can.
What we need is to have protective tariffs on imports from such, so that the price of building clean factories does not render them totally unprofitable. Same deal with human rights abuses abroad. If the abuses are making their exports cheaper, then we either need to allow the same sort of abuses here so we can compete, or artificially raise the prices of the imports so we can compete without abusing our people.
You simply can't have one without the other.
Bad analogy: The Ivy League mostly plays itself in football. If Ivy League teams with tough academic requirements on their athletes were to try to play against the Ohio States and Texases of the country, they would get creamed, and everyone would say "haha, why are you losing?". So they mostly only play other teams with similar academic requirements. If they could, I'm sure that they'd love to play against Oregon, but with the restriction that only Oregon's players that met Ivy League academic standards would be allowed on the field. Obviously they can't do this. As a sovereign nation that can lay down rules for what goes in and out of the country, we can do this.
It's actually pretty easy (philosophically, not necessarily practically) for libertarianism to handle the tragedy of the commons. Libertarianism is not the same thing as anarchism. Libertarianism's claim is that the only proper internal role of government is to arbitrate where there is a conflict of rights. "Your right to swing your arm stops at the end of my nose" and all that. The tragedy of the commons exists because there is a conflict among people's right to use a common resource. Not everyone can use it all up. Therefore, libertarianism would claim that it is the government's job to arbitrate among everyone who wants to use a common resource, and thereby prevent the tragedy of the commons. Rule of law (often strongly associated with libertarianism) would further claim that the government should so arbitrate not by having a bureaucracy of officials who, on their own judgement, say "yea" or "nay", but by having a written, almost algorithmic, process for arbitrating, to remove graft, favoritism, and other bad things.
Now, of course, how you go about writing the laws to accomplish this is a very very difficult question, and the answer might well lead you to something that doesn't look much like what we think of as libertarianism. I don't know. But libertarianism, considered properly, at least desires to address the tragedy of the commons.
Got to be a Symbolics Lisp Machine, amiright?
Not likely. With the number of little-known and little-enforced laws on the books, pretty much everyone is guilty of plenty of things.
You could set up a directional RFID scanner, and set it rotating, then get a radar like display for direction, distance (delay), and strength of the echoes. Shouldn't be too difficult to do, really.
Ok, sure. If you fail to document stuff adequately, you're doing poorly at your job. Possibly grounds for being fired. But you want to throw someone in jail for being bad at their job? That's ludicrous!
The way to achieve perfect security for a computer is unplug it from the network, and never turn it on. I guess the only way to prevent anyone from ever dying in a new Volvo is to prevent them from entering it...
Does SpaceX and Elon Musk remind anyone else of Poul Anderson's Fireball Enterprises and Anson Guthrie? Private development of plus drive and passion for spaceflight that totally leaves overlarge bureaucratic government projects in the dust? Now we just need to wait for Musk to clone himself in a computer and keep reincarnating for millennia, right...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population You were saying? Where are the Chinese and Indian schools totally dominating the list then? Those countries each have a factor of 4 population advantage over the US, and the next 13 countries on the list are closer than a factor of 4 to the US. So if the US is able to totally wash out India and China in spite of the population difference, then we ought to expect that Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia, Japan, Mexico, the Phillipines, Vietnam, Germany, Ethiopia, and Egypt ought to be equally capable of washing out the US in spite of the population difference. Your population argument does not appear to hold any water.
Conceded. Best of luck!
Sorry, I did not mean to degrade your wonderful efforts. I think that a well written accounting of conceptual physics is an excellent thing to have.
However, I would caution you to take great care not to overstate what your students are receiving. There are already way too many people out there who think that you don't really need math and rigor, that they can do physics if they just think really hard about weird things, and that "the scientific establishment" only uses math in order to maintain some imaginary level of power and control over the "outsiders". Please try very hard not to contribute to this mentality, as I think it is much more harmful than a lack of a conceptual understanding in the first place. This is why I took issue with your characterization of your work as teaching "graduate level" physics.
I would absolutely recommend David J. Griffiths' "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics". It's blue and has a cat on the cover (and a dead cat on the back), hence it is sometimes known to physicists as "the cat book". Multivariable calculus, linear algebra (with a small emphasis on abstract algebra if possible), and diffeq (partial, not just ordinary), are exactly the math that you need to grok everything in Griffiths. It is one of a few standard undergrad (usually sophomore or junior level) texts, and, in my opinion, the best written among them.
Another poster recommended a modern physics text, but I would disagree that that is your best choice. Modern physics texts tend to be great at going "wooee! look at how weird the universe is!" and touching briefly on a whole bunch of the seminal experiments and theories, but without really going into much of anything in any sort of depth.
I'm not saying that it isn't physics because you aren't using math. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. I think that explaining physics on a conceptual level to non-scientists is a really, really good plan.
But, a graduate level education (in any field) is intended to prepare you to teach and to do novel research. You cannot teach physics, and you certainly can't do novel physics research, if you don't know any more than grade school math. It is simply impossible. So, the people who are creating what might well be a really excellent popsci series should not tell people that it is graduate level physics, because it is in fact something different from graduate level physics.
Argh. You are the last (currently) in a line of about a dozen people who have totally misunderstood my comment.
They're not trying to train physicists just help laypeople understand.
This is precisely what makes it not graduate level physics, because graduate level physics *is* trying to train physicists. I'm all for teaching people about physics on a layperson sort of level; I think it is a phenomenally great thing to do. I'm not in favor of lying to them about just what it is that they are learning.
Car analogy (possibly bad, as always): I think that making people take a driver's ed program so they can get a license is a really good idea. I think that telling them that their driver's ed program is training them to be movie stunt drivers is a really really bad idea. It isn't, and the consequences of so telling them are probably worse than not giving them training at all.
I don't disagree with you, and I was not intending to claim that the lecture PDFs are not worthwhile. But I stand by my claim that they do not teach *graduate level* physics. They may teach the concepts that are dealt with in graduate level physics courses, but a graduate level physics education prepares one to teach or do research, which this sort of physics-without-much-math most certainly does not do.
And yes, I do physics for a living.
True. And the people who received and understood your explanation would in no way be equipped to either teach physics themselves or to do novel physics research of their own. So, I stand by my point: physics without math is not *graduate level* physics, which prepares one to either teach or do research (or both).
Oh certainly. I do agree with you. But discussing the concepts and principles is not graduate level physics, it's conceptual physics, which is what you teach to undergraduate poets and business majors. Nothing wrong with it, and it certainly is very important and worthwhile, but it is not graduate level physics, which is intended to prepare you to do actual novel physics research on your own.
Grade school level math. The most complicated math in the series is this: “if a times b is less than 6, and we measure a to be 2, then b must be less than 3.” If you can follow that, you’ll be fine.
Physics that uses no more math than this is not graduate-level physics.
You should join (and donate to!) the special interest group a former colleague of mine founded. It's called "People Outraged Over Pluto". Soon those legislative fatcats will have to eat their words, after Pluto's triumphal return!
You mention "standard maintenance". How much did you spend on that over the course of 8 years? I'd guess that you probably spent more on brakes*, battery, oil changes, spark plugs, tuneups, etc, etc, etc over the course of 8 years than the cost of a new EV battery. I could be wrong, of course, but my guess is that it is probably in the same ballpark. An EV requires practically none of these expenditures, because electric motor systems are enormously less complex and more reliable. So, at the end of 8 years with an EV, you have the choice to sell at a low value, replace the battery and sell at a high value, or replace the battery and continue driving the car for another 8 years. At the end of 8 years with a gas car, you have the choice to sell at an intermediate value (but having spent much more in maintenance during those 8 years), replace everything that gradually acquires wear in the vehicle (which is nearly everything) and sell at a high value, or keep driving the car (and eventually replace nearly everything). With those possibilities, the EV is looking pretty good to me.
Yeah. Your experimental sensitivity would almost certainly be total crap because your error bars would be too large and you couldn't get a large enough sample. But you could still design and run the experiment. My point was about the triviality of the experimental design in this case.
So, ignoring your spurious insults for the moment, what you are taking issue with is my proposed method of measuring approximate total rainfall? That's fine. I am perfectly willing to take any measurement of approximate rainfall, even if it is quite crude (and then you account for such crudeness as systematic errors). Once you've got such a measurement, none of the rest of what I said has anything to do with cloud physics. It's all statistics and experimental design. You still just need to populate two one-dimensional histograms and attempt to observe a difference in distribution between the two. All the enormous variability in clouds is subsumed in the notion that we are sampling from the distribution of all clouds (or all clouds over Norman, OK during the month of June, or whatever). The only thing you have to worry about is getting enough samples to populate your histograms, like I said.
Yes, cloud physics is hard, and no, I did not mean to imply that it was not. But it is not so hard as to render such an experiment impossible.
Neutrino oscillations (and hence implied masses) were rather definitively observed years ago. The recent result that you are referring to (I infer) is rather than antineutrinos have masses that are different from their corresponding neutrinos. Perhaps even more fascinating than the former!
No. It appears that Lisi's theory (as well as the Pati-Salam GUT upon which it is partially based) contains a single Higgs doublet, rather than the 2 Higgs doublets suggested by this D0 result.
Oh, I absolutely believe that right and wrong DO exist (I come from a long line of Baptists from the south and midwest (although I do not any longer claim to be a Southern Baptist, as that group's beliefs have changed out from under me and my forebears), and share their faith). I did not intend to imply otherwise. I have some very firm ideas about what is right and what is wrong. I don't think that any of them in particular is incorrect (otherwise I'd have a different idea, of course). However, I also don't think that I'm correct about every last one of them. It seems improbable in the extreme that there is not some aspect of morality or truth that I am wrong about. I just don't see any utility in or requirement for insisting that other people, who may or may not share my ideas about what is right and what is wrong, and may well be correct in the cases where I am incorrect, behave as if they did share my ideas about what is right and what is wrong. Do you really think that you are incorrect about nothing? I will spend a tremendous amount of effort attempting to convince them that I am correct and they are incorrect, but if they remain unconvinced, I will not throw them in prison, or seek to take away their property, happiness, or life.