Good list of examples on previous exploration there. But the moon is different, because we're not currently there. For whatever reason, the initial government investment was not followed by commercial exploitation, as was the case for all the examples you mentioned.
I agree the private sector won't go there tomorrow, or next year, but they will eventually, if there is an economic need to do so. And if there's not, why should the government be going there over and over? It's not a investment in basic science (which governments should be doing), it's just some pony trick. The 40th anniversary of the moon landing is next year, this is old tech, and the tech itself has long since been passed to the private sector (microwaves, tang, etc). The only thing we get out of NASA these days is Hubble images and robotic probes, and I argue they should continue that.
Honestly I don't think this is a bad idea. NASA has lost its focus. Right now it's major scientific project is a space station to give the retiring space shuttle a place to go.
I think we've all been disappointed that the flying cars and weekend trips to mars envisioned by TV and authors in our childhood have not materialized. But the government was never a good way to go about space exploration. It's too risky, and governments are risk averse. A better way to do it is in the private sector. They're more tolerant of risk. The X-Prize has been phenomenally successful, and should be emulated. But government over-regulation, and subsidized competitors has prevented the private sector from flourishing. For a sad read, go over to Beale Aerospace's page.
NASA needs to refocus its effort on science by contracting launch services from the private sector. Congress should rearrange the regulatory atmosphere to allow this to happen (particularly with respect to human spaceflight and liability), and to enable a competitive launch industry rather than the the fat-cat subsidized government contractors we have now.
I want to go to the Moon and Mars too, but no more "flags & footprints". It's long past time we got serious about human spaceflight and did what it takes to make it an everyday occurrence. As long as all human spaceflight is in NASA's hands, nothing will change.
So 8 people accidentally leave their phone on in their purse/bag/backpack and the plane goes down? Never happened. People leave their phones on all the time. In Europe it's CD players they're terrified of. They fly the same planes the US does, Airbus and Boeing.
...the FCC and the FAA do not harmonize their regulations
As I said, heads need to roll. If there is actually a safety concern, the FCC and FAA are not doing their jobs.
First, we will likely never prove anything at the Planck scale. This means that without some radically better ideas, we may be stuck with current situation -- lots of theories but no proof.
Second, one cannot take a theory that is wrong in a measurable way, make some small adjustment, and end up with a theory that is right. In field theory if we get the strength of electromagnetism wrong, we can adjust it. It's just a number. If we find a new particle we didn't expect, it's straightforward to add it and does not radically change all the other particles. But in Wolfram's cellular-automata ideas, if you change even slightly the inter-link rules, you get radically different behavior on large scales. These ideas may even be right, but they're impossible to work with.
Instead we develop a low-energy theory that predicts everything we need and everything we observe, and that is all physics can do. This kind of wishful thinking about gravity is not physics, because it cannot be proven (or disproven). Falsifiability is an important feature of a physical theory, and is too often neglected these days. Likewise fantasizing about the beginning of the universe is not falsifiable. We have only one universe, and cannot do experiments on its beginning.
Mostly, I'm sick of being lied to in the "safety" spiel at the beginning of every flight. As TFA states, there is no corroborating evidence of interference with the plane's navigation systems. If there were, the FCC is not doing their job of certifying devices, and some heads need to roll over there.
I have no problem with turning them off, but stop telling us everything is for our "safety" and herding us like scared little sheep. People deserve to be treated intelligently, and with respect.
I think it's time for some leaks, and some incentives for leakers. Someone on the IT stuff must know what happened, how, and why, and I'd bet they have the documentation to prove it, if not the emails themselves.
It's time such people did their patriotic duty, and come forward with what they know. Wikileaks.org exists now and is a great place to post such information anonymously. Will someone set up a reward fund for information leading to the conviction of the persons responsible for destroying records?
Please, I beg you, save us from these criminals, and the criminals that will be encouraged to follow if they are allowed to get away with this. If ever your country needed you, it is now.
The article has nothing to do with dark energy or dark matter. I wouldn't say anything is circular, but let's just say I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint. It's an area I'm actively working on. CP violation, on the other hand, is much better understood and quantified than dark matter/energy. I just went looking for TFA in Nature and can't find it. I think it's not available yet. (damn the media and their failure to cite properly) The article I have been referring to in this discussion I now realize might not be the same. It's this one, in which the dominant source of deviation comes from the D0 experiment, though they are also using a lot of Belle data. I can only address what I've read, and in this paper they have clearly separated the effect of new physics and understood but poorly predicted physics, and they are orthogonal. I think their analysis is convincing, but the most likely source of the significance of their effect is that the errors are not gaussian. In other words the effect is definitely there, but probably less statistically significant than they claim. This is due to certain assumptions they had to make based on the data provided to them by the experiments. Better data (and more consistent means of reporting among different experiments) will clarify the situation and they will not have to make such assumptions.
The physics community is pretty divided on whether blogs and such are a useful communications medium. Problem is, that physics requires sitting down and thinking hard about something for quite a long time (accompanied by some calculation) to reach a conclusion. Blogs usually contain no more than an hour's thought by each poster on a given subject. And, 1000 posters does not 1000 hours of concentrated thought make.
I'm relatively neutral on the subject, blogs on these kinds of topics I think are at best useless, and at worst a noisy distraction. I'm not convinced they're actually harmful, but neither do I find reading shouting matches particularly interesting or useful. If I were to start a blog, it would be mostly to communicate to the outside world, not to communicate with other physicists.
Anyway, the links I provided are for the kinds of publications where people did sit down and think hard for weeks/months/years before publishing. These are more representative of where the science is headed, I think. It's all publicly available though. Draw your own conclusions. Note that very few physicists actually have blogs, and most of those are string theorists.
Glad I could be of service. BTW I think your "periodic table" comment is an apt description of the situation. I think what's missing is dynamics.
Rather than google, if you want to keep up with Lisi (or anyone else's) papers, I suggest the SLAC Spires database. For instance, this is Lisi's "exceptionally simple" paper. Click on the "Cited..." to get a list of citations. This is updated daily from journal sources, and more importantly arxiv.org. This database generally has topics of relevance to high-energy physics, astrophysics, and gravity. Another good database is the NASA Astrophysical Data Service, here's Lisi's "exceptionally simple" paper on ADS. I warn you however, everything retrieved this way will be technical in nature.
This is what the web was invented for, by the physics community at CERN no less, and now days all our papers are freely available before they are sent to journals, and the public is welcome to read them. Indeed, I despise the "ivory tower" perception and think we are much better off by having outsiders look at what we're doing. I just with the popular press would wrap their heads around the idea of citing primary sources with a hyperlink....but I digress.
Ok I'll one-up you: I attended a lecture this week, on this particular paper, at CERN.
why pull an unknown particle rabbit out of the quantum hat?
Because in addition to the expected effects, TFA claims NEW effects not explainable by the standard theory. So, we need a new rabbit. The original theory is NOT sufficient if their claims are not due to statistical fluctuations.
Astronomers noticed an anomaly. They dreamed up dark matter to explain it.
[...]
Then they set about looking for other signs that matched the theory...
That's a pretty darn good description of the scientific method, minus your disparaging adjectives.
Yes anyone can do science. That's the point. Observe, Hypothesize, test. Proving/disproving your dreamed up theory is hard work, and that's what we do. If their observations were explainable by the current theory, they would have been shot down in 5 seconds by their colleagues, in a seminar, or in the journals, and you wouldn't be reading about it in Science magazine. Science is incredibly adversarial. We're all trying to kill each other's theories.
FYI, it's generally a bad assumption that some piece of science you read about in the press has a simple explanation, and the scientists are idiots.
I do work on theoretical particle physics at CERN, so I would be the kind of person to take Garrett's paper and make predictions for colliders/astrophysics from it. (and hence, find methods to prove/disprove it) I'm not currently working on his theory, nor do I know of anyone who is. I only looked carefully at his paper when I posted the above comment (though I knew about it). I previously understood that he claimed the Standard Model was contained inside E8. If that is true then there are essentially no new predictions, just an interesting coincidence. However I see now that his theory is not the Standard Model, but a SU(2)xSU(2)xSU(4) Pati-Salam model. This implies several new particles that could be seen at the LHC. Garrett claims several things which are not totally justified and require some more calculations to find out (for instance...that the gauge groups unify).
The Pati-Salem model is well-studied (though not currently -- it was popular in the 80's). It is often known as a "leptoquark" theory. However I do not see in Garrett's paper the particle content necessary to make leptoquarks, nor the particles (higgses) to break the SU(2)xSU(2)xSU(4) to the Standard Model's U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3).
I think the problem is sociological. Garrett made a big splash in the gravity community, but I haven't heard a peep from any of my colleagues in particle physics. I will ask around at CERN next week. I know of no good reason why people are not studying it more carefully and making predictions (though, I'm sure Garrett is, but his background is gravity, not colliders).
Flash in the pan? Lots of stuff in the popular press is. For instance TFA is probably an effect of non-gaussian errors, but by making a splashy title they've gotten themselves a Science magazine article. Garrett got his flash partly because of his non-traditional lifestyle. Moral of the story is that the things that appear in the popular press are usually "hero" or "eureka!" stories. But science is full of neither heroes nor daily eureka's. I could complain further about the state of science reporting...
Keep in mind that there are literally hundreds of theories capable of explaining TFA (assuming it's not a statistical fluctuation), and you won't hear about them in the popular press because they're not sexy and hard to explain. For instance, a 4th generation of quarks or a complex higgs sector. Garrett's theory might be one of them, we don't know yet. We don't usually explain these theories to the public because explaining 100 different complicated theories, 99 of which must be wrong...is probably a waste of the public's time. Instead, we'll turn on the LHC this year, which will undoubtedly generate tons of popular articles, and hopefully at least one mostly-correct theory.;)
If there was antimatter floating in the universe we would see it via the annihilation of anti-matter with matter where they meet. In particular, an electron and positron annihilate into two gamma rays of a very specific energy, and we have space telescopes looking in that energy range. We just don't see them. You could postulate antimatter stars/galaxies, but their solar wind would run into other stars in the interstellar medium, and create these gamma rays along a boundary plane between them. We just don't see that. We've also put detectors in space looking for anti-protons (AMS). We do see some, but not very many. For more info, google "baryon asymmetry" which is the modern name of the anomaly, and is quite precisely measured.
No citations in 4 years is usually a damn good signal of a crackpot paper. Also, it's in the math section of the arxiv. Great way to get physicists to notice it... It seems to contain a lot of copies of the formulas you'd find in the first chapter of most grad level physics texts, and not much else.
Garrett's theory does contain some new particles, which might be used to explain the effects described in TFA. What is required is new CP violation. I believe Garrett's theory contains higgs particles which could have CP violating interactions, but this is far from clear after re-reading his paper. As far as I know no one has done a detailed study using Garrett's theory. So far Garrett's paper has not been cited by any real particle physics (phenomenology) studies, so one cannot say for sure yet.
After seeing a talk this week at CERN on this subject, I'm fairly skeptical, and I think this effect will go away with more data (particularly from D0).
As much as this dystopian future bothers me, and as much as I fear the use of this information in the wrong hands, I'm beginning to realize that it is inevitable. You probably have a camera in your pocket right now (cell phone) in addition to a real camera you may have, and a webcam that is built in to your laptop. That's three cameras per person in an industrialized city. The government has its eyes too. Private businesses also put up cameras to deter/catch theft.
There are just too many cameras. They are too easy to obtain and deploy. The cost of storing video is hitting rock bottom. It's not really a problem to keep all video produced by a given camera, forever. (Argue this point if you wish, but it is becoming more true every day).
Our problems with copyright WRT the internet are due to the fact that the marginal cost of copying hit zero. Likewise, the marginal cost of obtaining video footage of any given place, at any given time, of any given person, is also heading quickly toward zero.
So, what are we to do? Any attempt to legislate away cameras is doomed to failure. Because the marginal cost is zero, the camera use would just become surreptitious (as the downloading of bits).
I think the only workable response is to accept the fact that everyone has video, and make sure that everyone else has video too. We need to be able to shoot video of public servants, shop owners, and our neighbors, because they sure as heck are going to be shooting video of us. The "no photographs" at customs, museums, art galleries etc must go. It's not a winnable fight for them. Yes, people's behavior will be modified, but I don't see any alternative.
There are a couple of upsides to this...evidence in crimes/trials will improve greatly if cryptographic verifiability can be added. (Human memory sucks) New technologies will allow really cool things like eyeglasses that record everything you see in your entire life, catalog faces, places, and objects, and lets you search an automatically generated database of your own experiences.
-- Bob
Re:"The Republican War on Science"?
on
Science Debate 2008
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· Score: 1, Troll
So, please, excuse me, if I'm skeptical of a scientist's opinion, when I'm implored to just believe him/her... They have "cried wolf" in the past.
Please do not confuse scientists with historians. The major difference is that in history, anyone can come up with a new thesis, and go select evidence that supports that thesis. In science, any person can come along, perform one experiment, and completely disprove a major scientific theory. Let me repeat that for the slow readers. Historians select evidence to fit their thesis and scientists attempt to explain all available evidence.
Disagreement with scientists, by a non-scientist, is simple ignorance. Not that science gets everything right, but science is quite simply the most successful system humans have ever devised to determine what is true. If you have a better idea, go test it, and write a paper. Anyone can do that. I know the media loves to portray science as this "ivory tower" but it's a fantasy. If you devise a way for objects to rise from the surface of the earth, rather than fall toward it, and a theory to explain why, you can win a Nobel prize. (ob:exclude EM fields we already understand)
Politicians, not being in the business of proving/disproving things, must carefully pay attention to, and act on the opinion of the scientific community. If they discover tomorrow that lead, or Botox, or Bisphenol-A is detrimental to humans, I expect them to take action and remove it from my enviroment, and prevent unscrupulous people from selling it. If on the other hand they don't trust scientists, I don't want them in office because they're going to do me harm!!!
Politicians do have control over scientific purse strings. If they find disagreement with some scientific result, for whatever reason, I find it completely appropriate to pit the professionals against one another by funding new studies. The only appropriate way for a politician to respond to science they don't like is to fund new studies that may support their ideas. To ignore contrary evidence and the opinion of the majority of scientists is ignorant and dangerous. As you say, Republicans disagree disproportionally with many scientists. Such people are ignorant, and dangerous. All that said, topics such as evolution have been studied for hundreds of years, and it is unlikely in the extreme that we're going to discover tomorrow that the earth is only 5000 years old.
Your idea that scientists liking their cushy jobs and funding is fantasy as well. Sure there are people that do like their cushy jobs, but you know what? They stop publishing. Every university has plenty of professors that only teach and don't publish. They're guaranteed their salary, and have nice lives. People who write papers and do active research are driven by something else. Fame, glory, prizes, whatever. It's a very competitive field.
So go sit your luddite ass down and try to disprove ANY scientifically accepted idea. I look forward to seeing your paper.
Those not willing do do the hard work, must accept the findings of those of us who are willing.
In this year's budget, the democrats cancelled all funding for ITER (the big fusion experiment), along with a lot of funding in fundamental particle physics. Coupled with the cancellation of the SSC in the 90's, it seems quite clear to me that the US government is fundamentally incapable of performing any long-term science project. They review the funding every year, and sooner or later before it is finished, it will be the tragic victim of partisan bickering (as ITER and particle physics this year), or some uneducated git in congress will ask "what am I getting for this", not understanding the importance of fundamental research, and choose to divert the money.
We will never again get to Mars, or the Moon, or an Asteroid, not with plans spanning 20+ years. The funding will never survive the political process that long. If you seriously want to do any of these, lobby congress for guaranteed funding in 5 or 10 year increments for science projects (in particular, spanning party dominance changes in washington). Personally, on the space front, I have a lot more hope in the private sector.
It appears from my googling that there is quite a lot of controversy surrounding the amount of He in the atmosphere. It seems the young-earth creationist nuts have taken it up as proof that the earth is young. So, the loss is higher than expected and I couldn't find a non-crackpot webpage explaining why it is lost.
Upshot is the atmospheric concentration is ~5 ppm, and seems to be constant for unknown reasons, which is so small as to make atmospheric extraction impractical. As the loss mechanism doesn't appear to be understood, it's unknown if it would be replenished if it were extracted. It is not being trapped anywhere in the earth except oil wells, and that quantity has accumulated over hundreds of millions of years.
One cannot "mine" helium. It comes dominantly from radioactive decay in the earth of Uranium and its decay products. But because it is so light, it generally leaks out of the ground, and escapes. Also because it is so light, it is not retained in the earth's atmosphere at all, and leaks into space (at which point it is irretrievable). Our supply right now comes from radioactive decay (over the last 5 billion years) which produced helium that accidentally got trapped in the earth (mostly in the same underground reservoirs as oil -- it is mixed in with natural gas). The half-life of Uranium is about 4.5 billion years, so the Helium is produced very slowly.
The problem is that it has widespread industrial and scientific uses, and its loss will have a severe impact on our science and industry. In particular it is used as a coolant (gets down to about 4K, and is the best way to get things to that temperature). Also it is used in any application requiring high field superconducting magnets. The fancy new High-T_c magnets generally cannot support large fields, so in fields like particle physics which require big magnets, they generally use simpler materials (e.g. Niobium-Titanium for the main LHC magnets) that only superconduct at temperatures much lower than the liquid Nitrogen boiling point.
Until then, they're just a bunch of ineffectual wankers, and are increasingly more ineffectual as time goes on.
The FTC, FBI, CIA, and NSA are wasting their resources chasing some overinflated bogeyman risk ("terrorists") and meanwhile our communications, financial and transaction systems are under heavy assult. The long term effect of this is lack of confidence in transactions in general, and that is the primary thing that holds economies together.
In other words, we're seriously boned unless these jokers get their act together.
Each new power given to the government must be balanced by a power of the citizenry. Else, this is just another step on the path to a facist state.
These new powers of surveillance and databases that we're giving our governments are vast. Never before in history has a country been able to monitor the movements and transactions of everyone, with so much precision. I know of no balancing power that has been given to the citizens in countries such as the US, UK, and now Japan, to check that the government is not abusing these powers. And the citizenry certainly does not have the equivalent power of knowing the private travel habits of their officials.
The fact of the matter is that these kinds of powers are far more useful for tracking law-abiding citizens than catching criminals. You don't catch criminals by identifying all the non-criminals. The database of non-criminals is totally useless, since any truly nefarious characters will avoid it, and not end up in your database at all. These kinds of things are often justified on the basis of preventing petty crime. But, this is far too large a power to give the government to reduce petty crime. Petty crime will never hit zero.
Instead, these new kinds of powers have far more use in tracking political enemies and corporate espionage. For instance just before the next G8 summit you can bet there will be new names on the no-fly lists. Before a major political debate, the challenging candidate will be denied travel. Governments will be able to determine when competing corporations are traveling for a meeting, and deny entry to those people. For people who are not political dissidents or corporate higher-ups, the only possible consequence besides deterioration of our democratic systems is that we will end up being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and be accused of committing a crime. The dragnet will have found us. And the evidence will be ironclad. Because, fingerprints are never wrong, are they?
I need a succinct way to explain these issues. The fact of the matter these arguments always come down to the brain-dead simple arguments that are difficult to refute: a) This will help catch <latest bogeyman>; and b) I'm not a <latest bogeyman> so why should I care? I need a one-sentence refutation to these arguments to give the people that don't think very hard about it. Obviously those interested in preserving freedom such as myself are not winning this argument. Anyone want to suggest one in the comments?
Your argument has nothing to do with the "progress of the useful arts", for which the patent code was created. Patents are not true property, they are artificial, and the government should regulate them in such a way as to maximize the advancement and profit for everyone. One should not take the "intellectual property" too literally. (As, I think you have) I don't think anyone deserves the right to invent something fantastic, and then prevent the world from having it.
The idea behind patents is to reward inventors for sharing their invention, because such sharing leads to further advancements. That can be handled entirely with an appropriate transfer of money. No one should be granted the right of selfish hoarding as a reward for sharing their work. Indeed, sharing and hoarding are antonyms...
Slashdot Mirror
Good list of examples on previous exploration there. But the moon is different, because we're not currently there. For whatever reason, the initial government investment was not followed by commercial exploitation, as was the case for all the examples you mentioned.
I agree the private sector won't go there tomorrow, or next year, but they will eventually, if there is an economic need to do so. And if there's not, why should the government be going there over and over? It's not a investment in basic science (which governments should be doing), it's just some pony trick. The 40th anniversary of the moon landing is next year, this is old tech, and the tech itself has long since been passed to the private sector (microwaves, tang, etc). The only thing we get out of NASA these days is Hubble images and robotic probes, and I argue they should continue that.
Honestly I don't think this is a bad idea. NASA has lost its focus. Right now it's major scientific project is a space station to give the retiring space shuttle a place to go.
I think we've all been disappointed that the flying cars and weekend trips to mars envisioned by TV and authors in our childhood have not materialized. But the government was never a good way to go about space exploration. It's too risky, and governments are risk averse. A better way to do it is in the private sector. They're more tolerant of risk. The X-Prize has been phenomenally successful, and should be emulated. But government over-regulation, and subsidized competitors has prevented the private sector from flourishing. For a sad read, go over to Beale Aerospace's page.
NASA needs to refocus its effort on science by contracting launch services from the private sector. Congress should rearrange the regulatory atmosphere to allow this to happen (particularly with respect to human spaceflight and liability), and to enable a competitive launch industry rather than the the fat-cat subsidized government contractors we have now.
I want to go to the Moon and Mars too, but no more "flags & footprints". It's long past time we got serious about human spaceflight and did what it takes to make it an everyday occurrence. As long as all human spaceflight is in NASA's hands, nothing will change.
So 8 people accidentally leave their phone on in their purse/bag/backpack and the plane goes down? Never happened. People leave their phones on all the time. In Europe it's CD players they're terrified of. They fly the same planes the US does, Airbus and Boeing.
As I said, heads need to roll. If there is actually a safety concern, the FCC and FAA are not doing their jobs.
The problem with such theories is twofold:
First, we will likely never prove anything at the Planck scale. This means that without some radically better ideas, we may be stuck with current situation -- lots of theories but no proof.
Second, one cannot take a theory that is wrong in a measurable way, make some small adjustment, and end up with a theory that is right. In field theory if we get the strength of electromagnetism wrong, we can adjust it. It's just a number. If we find a new particle we didn't expect, it's straightforward to add it and does not radically change all the other particles. But in Wolfram's cellular-automata ideas, if you change even slightly the inter-link rules, you get radically different behavior on large scales. These ideas may even be right, but they're impossible to work with.
Instead we develop a low-energy theory that predicts everything we need and everything we observe, and that is all physics can do. This kind of wishful thinking about gravity is not physics, because it cannot be proven (or disproven). Falsifiability is an important feature of a physical theory, and is too often neglected these days. Likewise fantasizing about the beginning of the universe is not falsifiable. We have only one universe, and cannot do experiments on its beginning.
Science is prediction, not explanation.
Mostly, I'm sick of being lied to in the "safety" spiel at the beginning of every flight. As TFA states, there is no corroborating evidence of interference with the plane's navigation systems. If there were, the FCC is not doing their job of certifying devices, and some heads need to roll over there.
I have no problem with turning them off, but stop telling us everything is for our "safety" and herding us like scared little sheep. People deserve to be treated intelligently, and with respect.
The future of our nation, and the rule of law is something that I would risk my life and freedom over.
No question though, if someone actually does this, they deserve the utmost respect for their risk.
I think it's time for some leaks, and some incentives for leakers. Someone on the IT stuff must know what happened, how, and why, and I'd bet they have the documentation to prove it, if not the emails themselves.
It's time such people did their patriotic duty, and come forward with what they know. Wikileaks.org exists now and is a great place to post such information anonymously. Will someone set up a reward fund for information leading to the conviction of the persons responsible for destroying records?
Please, I beg you, save us from these criminals, and the criminals that will be encouraged to follow if they are allowed to get away with this. If ever your country needed you, it is now.
The article has nothing to do with dark energy or dark matter. I wouldn't say anything is circular, but let's just say I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint. It's an area I'm actively working on. CP violation, on the other hand, is much better understood and quantified than dark matter/energy. I just went looking for TFA in Nature and can't find it. I think it's not available yet. (damn the media and their failure to cite properly) The article I have been referring to in this discussion I now realize might not be the same. It's this one, in which the dominant source of deviation comes from the D0 experiment, though they are also using a lot of Belle data. I can only address what I've read, and in this paper they have clearly separated the effect of new physics and understood but poorly predicted physics, and they are orthogonal. I think their analysis is convincing, but the most likely source of the significance of their effect is that the errors are not gaussian. In other words the effect is definitely there, but probably less statistically significant than they claim. This is due to certain assumptions they had to make based on the data provided to them by the experiments. Better data (and more consistent means of reporting among different experiments) will clarify the situation and they will not have to make such assumptions.
-- Bob
The physics community is pretty divided on whether blogs and such are a useful communications medium. Problem is, that physics requires sitting down and thinking hard about something for quite a long time (accompanied by some calculation) to reach a conclusion. Blogs usually contain no more than an hour's thought by each poster on a given subject. And, 1000 posters does not 1000 hours of concentrated thought make.
I'm relatively neutral on the subject, blogs on these kinds of topics I think are at best useless, and at worst a noisy distraction. I'm not convinced they're actually harmful, but neither do I find reading shouting matches particularly interesting or useful. If I were to start a blog, it would be mostly to communicate to the outside world, not to communicate with other physicists.
Anyway, the links I provided are for the kinds of publications where people did sit down and think hard for weeks/months/years before publishing. These are more representative of where the science is headed, I think. It's all publicly available though. Draw your own conclusions. Note that very few physicists actually have blogs, and most of those are string theorists.
-- Bob
Glad I could be of service. BTW I think your "periodic table" comment is an apt description of the situation. I think what's missing is dynamics.
Rather than google, if you want to keep up with Lisi (or anyone else's) papers, I suggest the SLAC Spires database. For instance, this is Lisi's "exceptionally simple" paper. Click on the "Cited..." to get a list of citations. This is updated daily from journal sources, and more importantly arxiv.org. This database generally has topics of relevance to high-energy physics, astrophysics, and gravity. Another good database is the NASA Astrophysical Data Service, here's Lisi's "exceptionally simple" paper on ADS. I warn you however, everything retrieved this way will be technical in nature.
This is what the web was invented for, by the physics community at CERN no less, and now days all our papers are freely available before they are sent to journals, and the public is welcome to read them. Indeed, I despise the "ivory tower" perception and think we are much better off by having outsiders look at what we're doing. I just with the popular press would wrap their heads around the idea of citing primary sources with a hyperlink....but I digress.
-- Bob
Ok I'll one-up you: I attended a lecture this week, on this particular paper, at CERN.
Because in addition to the expected effects, TFA claims NEW effects not explainable by the standard theory. So, we need a new rabbit. The original theory is NOT sufficient if their claims are not due to statistical fluctuations.
That's a pretty darn good description of the scientific method, minus your disparaging adjectives.
Yes anyone can do science. That's the point. Observe, Hypothesize, test. Proving/disproving your dreamed up theory is hard work, and that's what we do. If their observations were explainable by the current theory, they would have been shot down in 5 seconds by their colleagues, in a seminar, or in the journals, and you wouldn't be reading about it in Science magazine. Science is incredibly adversarial. We're all trying to kill each other's theories.
FYI, it's generally a bad assumption that some piece of science you read about in the press has a simple explanation, and the scientists are idiots.
-- Bob
Very good question...
I do work on theoretical particle physics at CERN, so I would be the kind of person to take Garrett's paper and make predictions for colliders/astrophysics from it. (and hence, find methods to prove/disprove it) I'm not currently working on his theory, nor do I know of anyone who is. I only looked carefully at his paper when I posted the above comment (though I knew about it). I previously understood that he claimed the Standard Model was contained inside E8. If that is true then there are essentially no new predictions, just an interesting coincidence. However I see now that his theory is not the Standard Model, but a SU(2)xSU(2)xSU(4) Pati-Salam model. This implies several new particles that could be seen at the LHC. Garrett claims several things which are not totally justified and require some more calculations to find out (for instance...that the gauge groups unify).
The Pati-Salem model is well-studied (though not currently -- it was popular in the 80's). It is often known as a "leptoquark" theory. However I do not see in Garrett's paper the particle content necessary to make leptoquarks, nor the particles (higgses) to break the SU(2)xSU(2)xSU(4) to the Standard Model's U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3).
I think the problem is sociological. Garrett made a big splash in the gravity community, but I haven't heard a peep from any of my colleagues in particle physics. I will ask around at CERN next week. I know of no good reason why people are not studying it more carefully and making predictions (though, I'm sure Garrett is, but his background is gravity, not colliders).
Flash in the pan? Lots of stuff in the popular press is. For instance TFA is probably an effect of non-gaussian errors, but by making a splashy title they've gotten themselves a Science magazine article. Garrett got his flash partly because of his non-traditional lifestyle. Moral of the story is that the things that appear in the popular press are usually "hero" or "eureka!" stories. But science is full of neither heroes nor daily eureka's. I could complain further about the state of science reporting...
Keep in mind that there are literally hundreds of theories capable of explaining TFA (assuming it's not a statistical fluctuation), and you won't hear about them in the popular press because they're not sexy and hard to explain. For instance, a 4th generation of quarks or a complex higgs sector. Garrett's theory might be one of them, we don't know yet. We don't usually explain these theories to the public because explaining 100 different complicated theories, 99 of which must be wrong...is probably a waste of the public's time. Instead, we'll turn on the LHC this year, which will undoubtedly generate tons of popular articles, and hopefully at least one mostly-correct theory. ;)
-- Bob
If there was antimatter floating in the universe we would see it via the annihilation of anti-matter with matter where they meet. In particular, an electron and positron annihilate into two gamma rays of a very specific energy, and we have space telescopes looking in that energy range. We just don't see them. You could postulate antimatter stars/galaxies, but their solar wind would run into other stars in the interstellar medium, and create these gamma rays along a boundary plane between them. We just don't see that. We've also put detectors in space looking for anti-protons (AMS). We do see some, but not very many. For more info, google "baryon asymmetry" which is the modern name of the anomaly, and is quite precisely measured.
-- Bob
No citations in 4 years is usually a damn good signal of a crackpot paper. Also, it's in the math section of the arxiv. Great way to get physicists to notice it... It seems to contain a lot of copies of the formulas you'd find in the first chapter of most grad level physics texts, and not much else.
-- Bob
Garrett's theory does contain some new particles, which might be used to explain the effects described in TFA. What is required is new CP violation. I believe Garrett's theory contains higgs particles which could have CP violating interactions, but this is far from clear after re-reading his paper. As far as I know no one has done a detailed study using Garrett's theory. So far Garrett's paper has not been cited by any real particle physics (phenomenology) studies, so one cannot say for sure yet.
After seeing a talk this week at CERN on this subject, I'm fairly skeptical, and I think this effect will go away with more data (particularly from D0).
-- Bob
As much as this dystopian future bothers me, and as much as I fear the use of this information in the wrong hands, I'm beginning to realize that it is inevitable. You probably have a camera in your pocket right now (cell phone) in addition to a real camera you may have, and a webcam that is built in to your laptop. That's three cameras per person in an industrialized city. The government has its eyes too. Private businesses also put up cameras to deter/catch theft.
There are just too many cameras. They are too easy to obtain and deploy. The cost of storing video is hitting rock bottom. It's not really a problem to keep all video produced by a given camera, forever. (Argue this point if you wish, but it is becoming more true every day).
Our problems with copyright WRT the internet are due to the fact that the marginal cost of copying hit zero. Likewise, the marginal cost of obtaining video footage of any given place, at any given time, of any given person, is also heading quickly toward zero.
So, what are we to do? Any attempt to legislate away cameras is doomed to failure. Because the marginal cost is zero, the camera use would just become surreptitious (as the downloading of bits).
I think the only workable response is to accept the fact that everyone has video, and make sure that everyone else has video too. We need to be able to shoot video of public servants, shop owners, and our neighbors, because they sure as heck are going to be shooting video of us. The "no photographs" at customs, museums, art galleries etc must go. It's not a winnable fight for them. Yes, people's behavior will be modified, but I don't see any alternative.
There are a couple of upsides to this...evidence in crimes/trials will improve greatly if cryptographic verifiability can be added. (Human memory sucks) New technologies will allow really cool things like eyeglasses that record everything you see in your entire life, catalog faces, places, and objects, and lets you search an automatically generated database of your own experiences.
-- Bob
Please do not confuse scientists with historians. The major difference is that in history, anyone can come up with a new thesis, and go select evidence that supports that thesis. In science, any person can come along, perform one experiment, and completely disprove a major scientific theory. Let me repeat that for the slow readers. Historians select evidence to fit their thesis and scientists attempt to explain all available evidence.
Disagreement with scientists, by a non-scientist, is simple ignorance. Not that science gets everything right, but science is quite simply the most successful system humans have ever devised to determine what is true. If you have a better idea, go test it, and write a paper. Anyone can do that. I know the media loves to portray science as this "ivory tower" but it's a fantasy. If you devise a way for objects to rise from the surface of the earth, rather than fall toward it, and a theory to explain why, you can win a Nobel prize. (ob:exclude EM fields we already understand)
Politicians, not being in the business of proving/disproving things, must carefully pay attention to, and act on the opinion of the scientific community. If they discover tomorrow that lead, or Botox, or Bisphenol-A is detrimental to humans, I expect them to take action and remove it from my enviroment, and prevent unscrupulous people from selling it. If on the other hand they don't trust scientists, I don't want them in office because they're going to do me harm!!!
Politicians do have control over scientific purse strings. If they find disagreement with some scientific result, for whatever reason, I find it completely appropriate to pit the professionals against one another by funding new studies. The only appropriate way for a politician to respond to science they don't like is to fund new studies that may support their ideas. To ignore contrary evidence and the opinion of the majority of scientists is ignorant and dangerous. As you say, Republicans disagree disproportionally with many scientists. Such people are ignorant, and dangerous. All that said, topics such as evolution have been studied for hundreds of years, and it is unlikely in the extreme that we're going to discover tomorrow that the earth is only 5000 years old.
Your idea that scientists liking their cushy jobs and funding is fantasy as well. Sure there are people that do like their cushy jobs, but you know what? They stop publishing. Every university has plenty of professors that only teach and don't publish. They're guaranteed their salary, and have nice lives. People who write papers and do active research are driven by something else. Fame, glory, prizes, whatever. It's a very competitive field.
So go sit your luddite ass down and try to disprove ANY scientifically accepted idea. I look forward to seeing your paper.
Those not willing do do the hard work, must accept the findings of those of us who are willing.
Haaaaaa ha ha!
Okay, time for bed...
Oh, except that congress just cut all funding for ITER , the international thermonuclear experimental (fusion) reactor.
So no fusion, no coal, no basic research. It's all oil all the time.
In this year's budget, the democrats cancelled all funding for ITER (the big fusion experiment), along with a lot of funding in fundamental particle physics. Coupled with the cancellation of the SSC in the 90's, it seems quite clear to me that the US government is fundamentally incapable of performing any long-term science project. They review the funding every year, and sooner or later before it is finished, it will be the tragic victim of partisan bickering (as ITER and particle physics this year), or some uneducated git in congress will ask "what am I getting for this", not understanding the importance of fundamental research, and choose to divert the money.
We will never again get to Mars, or the Moon, or an Asteroid, not with plans spanning 20+ years. The funding will never survive the political process that long. If you seriously want to do any of these, lobby congress for guaranteed funding in 5 or 10 year increments for science projects (in particular, spanning party dominance changes in washington). Personally, on the space front, I have a lot more hope in the private sector.
--Bob
It appears from my googling that there is quite a lot of controversy surrounding the amount of He in the atmosphere. It seems the young-earth creationist nuts have taken it up as proof that the earth is young. So, the loss is higher than expected and I couldn't find a non-crackpot webpage explaining why it is lost.
Upshot is the atmospheric concentration is ~5 ppm, and seems to be constant for unknown reasons, which is so small as to make atmospheric extraction impractical. As the loss mechanism doesn't appear to be understood, it's unknown if it would be replenished if it were extracted. It is not being trapped anywhere in the earth except oil wells, and that quantity has accumulated over hundreds of millions of years.
One cannot "mine" helium. It comes dominantly from radioactive decay in the earth of Uranium and its decay products. But because it is so light, it generally leaks out of the ground, and escapes. Also because it is so light, it is not retained in the earth's atmosphere at all, and leaks into space (at which point it is irretrievable). Our supply right now comes from radioactive decay (over the last 5 billion years) which produced helium that accidentally got trapped in the earth (mostly in the same underground reservoirs as oil -- it is mixed in with natural gas). The half-life of Uranium is about 4.5 billion years, so the Helium is produced very slowly.
The problem is that it has widespread industrial and scientific uses, and its loss will have a severe impact on our science and industry. In particular it is used as a coolant (gets down to about 4K, and is the best way to get things to that temperature). Also it is used in any application requiring high field superconducting magnets. The fancy new High-T_c magnets generally cannot support large fields, so in fields like particle physics which require big magnets, they generally use simpler materials (e.g. Niobium-Titanium for the main LHC magnets) that only superconduct at temperatures much lower than the liquid Nitrogen boiling point.
-- Bob
When the level of spam drops back below 95% of it being spam, I'll believe these guys are doing their jobs.
Until then, they're just a bunch of ineffectual wankers, and are increasingly more ineffectual as time goes on.
The FTC, FBI, CIA, and NSA are wasting their resources chasing some overinflated bogeyman risk ("terrorists") and meanwhile our communications, financial and transaction systems are under heavy assult. The long term effect of this is lack of confidence in transactions in general, and that is the primary thing that holds economies together.
In other words, we're seriously boned unless these jokers get their act together.
Each new power given to the government must be balanced by a power of the citizenry. Else, this is just another step on the path to a facist state.
These new powers of surveillance and databases that we're giving our governments are vast. Never before in history has a country been able to monitor the movements and transactions of everyone, with so much precision. I know of no balancing power that has been given to the citizens in countries such as the US, UK, and now Japan, to check that the government is not abusing these powers. And the citizenry certainly does not have the equivalent power of knowing the private travel habits of their officials.
The fact of the matter is that these kinds of powers are far more useful for tracking law-abiding citizens than catching criminals. You don't catch criminals by identifying all the non-criminals. The database of non-criminals is totally useless, since any truly nefarious characters will avoid it, and not end up in your database at all. These kinds of things are often justified on the basis of preventing petty crime. But, this is far too large a power to give the government to reduce petty crime. Petty crime will never hit zero.
Instead, these new kinds of powers have far more use in tracking political enemies and corporate espionage. For instance just before the next G8 summit you can bet there will be new names on the no-fly lists. Before a major political debate, the challenging candidate will be denied travel. Governments will be able to determine when competing corporations are traveling for a meeting, and deny entry to those people. For people who are not political dissidents or corporate higher-ups, the only possible consequence besides deterioration of our democratic systems is that we will end up being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and be accused of committing a crime. The dragnet will have found us. And the evidence will be ironclad. Because, fingerprints are never wrong, are they?
I need a succinct way to explain these issues. The fact of the matter these arguments always come down to the brain-dead simple arguments that are difficult to refute: a) This will help catch <latest bogeyman>; and b) I'm not a <latest bogeyman> so why should I care? I need a one-sentence refutation to these arguments to give the people that don't think very hard about it. Obviously those interested in preserving freedom such as myself are not winning this argument. Anyone want to suggest one in the comments?
--Bob
Your argument has nothing to do with the "progress of the useful arts", for which the patent code was created. Patents are not true property, they are artificial, and the government should regulate them in such a way as to maximize the advancement and profit for everyone. One should not take the "intellectual property" too literally. (As, I think you have) I don't think anyone deserves the right to invent something fantastic, and then prevent the world from having it.
The idea behind patents is to reward inventors for sharing their invention, because such sharing leads to further advancements. That can be handled entirely with an appropriate transfer of money. No one should be granted the right of selfish hoarding as a reward for sharing their work. Indeed, sharing and hoarding are antonyms...