I'm totally OK with this. Just so long as they post the same notice on the Bible/Torah/Qu'ran/Insert religious script here. After all, so many wars/acts of terrorism have been done based on the words in these books (or their interpretations).
Also all sports games. Fights break out, even at little league games. So we'd better put warnings there.
Or we could grow up and stop using such cowardly words as 'linked' - anyone can 'link' any two random things without any evidence. For cigarettes there were causal studies and medical evidence of the effects before the warning labels went on. We should hold everything to the same standards - either anecdotal crap will suffice and we can 'link' any two things we choose, or we can have research done by psychologists/sociologist and actually prove things before we do this crap.
This is kinda a side note, but I'm in physics and I certainly DO list papers posted to the arXiv on my CV. Especially when they're under review at a journal. I list published papers both with journal references and arXiv numbers and obviously those that are 'pending' I give arXiv references for. I agree that it's NOT the same as a peer reviewed journal, but it certainly offers better access for a lot of people.
The problem with the lack of open access is that it means that researchers more and more often will just go for arXiv papers instead of their peer reviewed cousins. I almost never download from a journal's website, and haven't ever read anything in print (except my own articles for vanity's sake) for research.
You're in IT. Like it or not, you're SUPPORT staff - your job solely consists of helping me do mine. If I damned well want to use my computer to do X it's your job to make this possible. That's what you are paid for. I'm sure you could keep a nice little network if it weren't for us users doing annoying things like using our computers to do work. If I want to run MATLAB from home, you make it damned possible for me to do that. If I want my email in a separate Thunderbird folder on my laptop, you do that. Otherwise there's no point in having you.
I'm sure this will come as a shock to a lot of you, but it isn't the goal of every enterprise to have a neat little network. And the time I spend having to get my password reset because the bit monkey insists that I change it every 6 weeks and that it contain at least 10 letters, 2 numbers and 2 non-alphanumeric characters? That's time wasted from me making money that keeps us all in business.
To put it bluntly: I don't give a damn what you're happy with - it's what I'M happy with that counts. Do your job well and you're a force multiplier, but remember that your function is to multiply MY output.
This isn't Hawking radiation, it's only an analogue. Now, that's not to say that it isn't an interesting and cool piece of research, but it certainly is not the black body spectrum produced by the evaporation of a black hole. So all they've really seen is that IF a real black hole behaves in the same way as their system, it will emit hawking radiation in the same way.
So far as we can tell, no. The Copernican principle, on which modern cosmology is largely based, states that the universe is (on large scales) homogeneous and isotropic. That means it's the same everywhere and looks the same in all directions (loosely speaking, and again, on LARGE scales). This is borne out by observations of the cosmic microwave background, for example which seems to indicate that there are no preferred directions, with variations of the observable data (such as temperature) being on the order of one part in ten thousand.
Oh, pets can be hacked - see Pavlov. I once trained a dog that it would get a treat every time I said the word "Radio". Then, with it sitting in its owners lap on a long drive, I managed to make it drool all over him. Most dogs are very easy to hack - you'll find that holding a treat is the equivalent of sudo.
No problem - this is stuff I work on, and I figure I ought to at least be able to explain some of it to Slashdot readers:)
Things that are proton sized certainly can be homogeneous, but this is more of a case of millions of protons forming and somehow without ever knowing about one another having exactly the same characteristics.
Ah, now you're into the fun stuff: Just about every physicist believes that general relativity will have to be modified by quantum mechanics at some stage and at least once you get to energy densities around the planck density (this value comes mostly from dimensional analysis - it's more of an order of magnitude thing). Since the standard big bang that results from GR has infinite density, we believe that corrections will happen before you get there - that quantum mechanical effects take place and that we can't trust GR when we get above the planck density. Therefore, since we don't have a proven quantum theory of gravity (there are some interesting, even heroic attempts but nothing anywhere near tested) we simply have to say that somewhere in the past, probably around the planck density, we don't have any good prediction for what's going on. So we can't just say that everything started in the same place (which was everywhere too - the joys of relativity:) ), as GR predicts.
Another outlook on this is that we know quantum mechanics will be seriously affecting matter at this stage too - the temporal heisenberg principle is between energy and time and hence there should be a large difference in energies (and hence temperatures) between nearby points, yet somehow they come out of this highly quantum mechanical phase into a classical phase in which they should be out of causal contact and yet somehow thermalize.
Well, it's not just two areas, it's any two areas. If the model you're considering doesn't have inflation, the number of patches of sky that are causally past disconnected yet have the same temperature is of the order of a million. Two things independently reaching the same state is a curiosity (well, it depends on how close they are really, but we'll let that go for now). A million things on the other hand, well, that's more than just curious.
That's an interesting question to which an answer can take a few forms. One is that below describing the balloon. This would be a closed universe model (finite size, wraps around itself) such as a torus or sphere. However, suppose the universe is truly infinite - what does it mean to be expanding?
Well, suppose one can put a mark on two points in space, and watch them over time. To be expanding these two points will move apart, as will any two points in space. To do it a little more mathematically: Suppose I have a line - the real numbers - that goes on forever. And I pick two points on the line (arbitrarily again suppose we get -0.45 and 3.09 for purpose of example). Then I double the coordinate of each point (now at -0.9 and 6.18). This way the line is still infinite - it's as long as the real line - but it has 'expanded' as every point before is now further away than previous points.
In cosmology we do this in a very similar way - using what we call a 'fiducial cell'; a blob of space. We assume the universe is (to first order) homogeneous (same everywhere) and isotropic (same in every direction). Thus if we see the blob expand we're seeing the whole universe expand. Mathematically, we form a 'metric' a way of measuring space and time, the simplest homogeneous and isotropic version of which is:
ds^2 = -dt^2 +a(t)^2(dx^2+dy^2+dz^2)
You might recognize the last bit as being like pythagoras' theorem in 3D. (There are two other homogeneous isotropic examples, but I'm choosing the simplest one to make life easy). a(t) can only be a function of time, as if it were a function of space, this would break homogeneity. Likewise it must multiply all directions equally to retain isotropy. (Again for the pros I'm being fast and loose here to make life easier). Thus our universe can be infinite (x,y,z go on forever) but distances can change over time as a(t) changes. That way we truly can see expansion or contraction in the universe. This was what Friedmann first put forward as a solution to Einstein's equations, and Robertson+Walker later showed that it's true in general cases for homogeneity and isotropy. Finally Lemaitre worked out what this really meant physically.
Now a(t) has no meaning by itself - I could just have chosen a smaller piece of space on which to start measuring. But the rate of change 1/a * da/dt is very meaningful - the relative change rate known as the Hubble parameter. It is from measurements of the doppler effect on light (called redshift/blueshift for stars moving away from/towards us) that we can get a handle on this and see that a(t) is indeed increasing - the universe is expanding. The point of inflation is to understand a model in which a(t) was not only increasing, but accelerating, but that's a much longer discussion.
By what mechanism? How does a trapped surface become untrapped? Where does the mass go if the region is still dense enough to cause a trapped horizon, how can it 'explode'?...
"stars coalesce along with planets from gas and matter in the expanding galaxy"
Actually planets come from exploded stars.
"Gravity, though seemingly weak, eventually slows the galaxy down enough to where it begins contracting again."
It's more than that - it's the entire universe. Except, that's only if the universe is above a critical density, i.e. we're in a closed universe. Which we don't know. In fact, for some reason the rate of expansion appears to be accelerating.
Anyone can have a crazy guess about how the universe works. The science part is formulating this in a rigorous manner, fitting it with existing knowledge and making testable predictions.
Similar environments and histories has been posited a number of times, but given just how similar the regions are and how many of them there are it doesn't seem likely. But more so, this only pushes the question further back: Why were their histories identical? Did they all start in roughly the same state? Why? And at the same time?
Entanglement requires causal contact. Two particles are entangled when they have been in contact, and then move apart, so this doesn't help.
But 'coincidence' doesn't cut it for science - it's one hell of a coincidence that the temperature of the entire sky varies by less than one part in 10,000. It could be a coincidence that we orbit the sun and our angular momentum is constant, but as it turns out there are fundamental and simple laws governing this motion. Finding these laws is the job of science. As for another reason, yes there could be one but there aren't many hypotheses for what this other reason could be, and none that have been tested the way inflation has. This is how science works - you see something odd, try to make some model to explain it, see if your explanation has further implications and what they are and see if those implications are realized.
I should be clear: My experience is with scalar field inflation with a quadratic potential - the simplest models that are most common. Hybrid inflation can do almost anything, it's true.
There are certainly alternatives to inflation that people do find attractive - ekpyrotic, cyclic or simply oscillatory universes for example can easily bring points into causal contact by extending the past of these points beyond where there would be a classical big bang. Various string models, and Loop Quantum Cosmology have methods for this (LQC has a really neat well understood bounce) and the idea goes back to Lemaitre's 'Phoenix Universe' ideas. However, inflation does more than just explain existing phenomena - it predicted a spectral index between 0.98 and 0.92, and COBE/WMAP bring it in at around 0.96. It also does a really good job of explaining structure formation. Now, that isn't to say that it's necessarily right, and that other theories couldn't do a similar thing, but inflation really does a good job. It's certainly far from perfect, numerous people have objections to it, but so far it fits the data we have.
The "inflation" we're talking about here is the accelerated expansion of the early universe. So, first off why do we need it?
It turns out that parts of the observable cosmic microwave background are 'causally disconnected'. This means that you take two patches of sky as observed at the time the CMB formed (300k years after the big bang, we now think - approximately 15 billion years ago) and track their behavior back to the big bang. In the normal models where the universe is full of dust or radiation they never were in contact in the past: Light from one area could never reach another. Why is this a problem? Because they are remarkably similar. They appear to have come into thermal equilibrium (same temperature) yet this shouldn't be possible if they were never in contact. So we need to have a method by which the universe expanded faster before this period.
There are a few ways to do this - one is a cosmological constant. But the problem with a constant is that it's constant - we should still see it today, and we don't. The universe is not expanding that fast anymore - the bounds we can place on the cosmological constant today put it well below the effect we want from inflation. What we need is something that acts like a cosmological constant for a while and then drops away. This is what inflationary models are all about. The inflaton is a theoretical particle that starts off behaving like the comsmological constant, but eventually decays into the matter we see today. We model this by a particle moving in a potential - think of a ball rolling on the side of a hill. How the inflaton behaves is all about the ratio of its kinetic to potential energy - high potential energy looks like a cosmological constant, high kinetic energy looks more like normal matter. (I can explain this in more detail if anyone's interested). So the ball rolls down the hill, losing potential, gaining kinetic (there's also friction from the expansion of the universe so it loses 'energy' overall) and hence our inflaton does exactly what we need - slowly changing from looking like a cosmological constant to normal matter. In theory too, it decays once it reaches the bottom of the hill, but no-one provides much of a model for this.
This is old (20-30 years old is old in theory standards) stuff from Linde, Mukhanov etc. No-one would take it seriously, except that when you calculate things from it, it works incredibly well - it's the source of http://xkcd.com/54/ - it's still controversial. Some people love it, others think it's a fudge and doesn't do much for you. The new stuff here is that there is a method being proposed by which a multiplet of supersymmetric particles (again, I can say a bit more but it's not my field) is shown to be able to act like the inflaton. Ie a stable state of multiple particles bound together could act this way, and could be found at the LHC. Now, that's a lot of 'could' - the usual inflaton mass is set to around 10^12 GeV - way above what the LHC can reach, and this is the same across most inflationary models. But if the LHC can see evidence of supersymmetry (again, another discussion, but it is thought to be likely that if supersymmetry is real then the LHC will see it) it might be able to at least give some credibility to some of these models of inflation.
The study (that is about 4 clicks away from the summary - direct link http://www.bcaa.com/downloads/BCAA_Hybrid_Cost_Analysis_2010.pdf) completely ignores the fact that your car doesn't cease to exist after 5 years - you either keep driving it or sell it used. Looking at one of the examples (Prius vs Matrix) the resale value of the car according to Kelley Blue Book was $2000 higher for the hybrid (5 years old, 100k kilometers, good condition).
In fact it even says "Long-term depreciation and resale values remain unknown so are assumed to be neutral" - complete BS in this kind of study. So when you really factor this in, you find that the TCO for the hybrid is indeed lower than for the non-hybrid. Of course this isn't going to make up for the larger differences, but certainly for anything with less than $2k difference you'll probably see your money back from the hybrid.
So someone does a Lorentz transformation on the denisty of interstellar hydrogen, ramps up the veloicty until he gets the relativistic energy to be that of the LHC and somehow this is news?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm totally OK with this. Just so long as they post the same notice on the Bible/Torah/Qu'ran/Insert religious script here. After all, so many wars/acts of terrorism have been done based on the words in these books (or their interpretations).
Also all sports games. Fights break out, even at little league games. So we'd better put warnings there.
Or we could grow up and stop using such cowardly words as 'linked' - anyone can 'link' any two random things without any evidence. For cigarettes there were causal studies and medical evidence of the effects before the warning labels went on. We should hold everything to the same standards - either anecdotal crap will suffice and we can 'link' any two things we choose, or we can have research done by psychologists/sociologist and actually prove things before we do this crap.
This is kinda a side note, but I'm in physics and I certainly DO list papers posted to the arXiv on my CV. Especially when they're under review at a journal. I list published papers both with journal references and arXiv numbers and obviously those that are 'pending' I give arXiv references for. I agree that it's NOT the same as a peer reviewed journal, but it certainly offers better access for a lot of people.
The problem with the lack of open access is that it means that researchers more and more often will just go for arXiv papers instead of their peer reviewed cousins. I almost never download from a journal's website, and haven't ever read anything in print (except my own articles for vanity's sake) for research.
Come on man, I even used the term 'bit monkey' that must have given you a hint that this was tongue in cheek stuff...
Thank god someone got it. I thought the mention of MATLAB might be enough of a hint that I'm not actually a PHB...
You're in IT. Like it or not, you're SUPPORT staff - your job solely consists of helping me do mine. If I damned well want to use my computer to do X it's your job to make this possible. That's what you are paid for. I'm sure you could keep a nice little network if it weren't for us users doing annoying things like using our computers to do work. If I want to run MATLAB from home, you make it damned possible for me to do that. If I want my email in a separate Thunderbird folder on my laptop, you do that. Otherwise there's no point in having you.
I'm sure this will come as a shock to a lot of you, but it isn't the goal of every enterprise to have a neat little network. And the time I spend having to get my password reset because the bit monkey insists that I change it every 6 weeks and that it contain at least 10 letters, 2 numbers and 2 non-alphanumeric characters? That's time wasted from me making money that keeps us all in business.
To put it bluntly: I don't give a damn what you're happy with - it's what I'M happy with that counts. Do your job well and you're a force multiplier, but remember that your function is to multiply MY output.
This isn't Hawking radiation, it's only an analogue. Now, that's not to say that it isn't an interesting and cool piece of research, but it certainly is not the black body spectrum produced by the evaporation of a black hole. So all they've really seen is that IF a real black hole behaves in the same way as their system, it will emit hawking radiation in the same way.
Couldn't this be solved by putting a simple valve into the pneumatic tubes just above the safe?
The article on which this news story seems to be based, complete with picture of Sir pTerry and his sword is at
http://www.paulkidby.com/news/apr2010.html
So far as we can tell, no. The Copernican principle, on which modern cosmology is largely based, states that the universe is (on large scales) homogeneous and isotropic. That means it's the same everywhere and looks the same in all directions (loosely speaking, and again, on LARGE scales). This is borne out by observations of the cosmic microwave background, for example which seems to indicate that there are no preferred directions, with variations of the observable data (such as temperature) being on the order of one part in ten thousand.
There's a pretty decent write-up of what we know at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/34361
Oh, pets can be hacked - see Pavlov. I once trained a dog that it would get a treat every time I said the word "Radio". Then, with it sitting in its owners lap on a long drive, I managed to make it drool all over him. Most dogs are very easy to hack - you'll find that holding a treat is the equivalent of sudo.
Hacking a cat, on the other hand...
No problem - this is stuff I work on, and I figure I ought to at least be able to explain some of it to Slashdot readers :)
Things that are proton sized certainly can be homogeneous, but this is more of a case of millions of protons forming and somehow without ever knowing about one another having exactly the same characteristics.
Ah, now you're into the fun stuff: Just about every physicist believes that general relativity will have to be modified by quantum mechanics at some stage and at least once you get to energy densities around the planck density (this value comes mostly from dimensional analysis - it's more of an order of magnitude thing). Since the standard big bang that results from GR has infinite density, we believe that corrections will happen before you get there - that quantum mechanical effects take place and that we can't trust GR when we get above the planck density. Therefore, since we don't have a proven quantum theory of gravity (there are some interesting, even heroic attempts but nothing anywhere near tested) we simply have to say that somewhere in the past, probably around the planck density, we don't have any good prediction for what's going on. So we can't just say that everything started in the same place (which was everywhere too - the joys of relativity :) ), as GR predicts.
Another outlook on this is that we know quantum mechanics will be seriously affecting matter at this stage too - the temporal heisenberg principle is between energy and time and hence there should be a large difference in energies (and hence temperatures) between nearby points, yet somehow they come out of this highly quantum mechanical phase into a classical phase in which they should be out of causal contact and yet somehow thermalize.
Well, it's not just two areas, it's any two areas. If the model you're considering doesn't have inflation, the number of patches of sky that are causally past disconnected yet have the same temperature is of the order of a million. Two things independently reaching the same state is a curiosity (well, it depends on how close they are really, but we'll let that go for now). A million things on the other hand, well, that's more than just curious.
That's an interesting question to which an answer can take a few forms. One is that below describing the balloon. This would be a closed universe model (finite size, wraps around itself) such as a torus or sphere. However, suppose the universe is truly infinite - what does it mean to be expanding?
Well, suppose one can put a mark on two points in space, and watch them over time. To be expanding these two points will move apart, as will any two points in space. To do it a little more mathematically: Suppose I have a line - the real numbers - that goes on forever. And I pick two points on the line (arbitrarily again suppose we get -0.45 and 3.09 for purpose of example). Then I double the coordinate of each point (now at -0.9 and 6.18). This way the line is still infinite - it's as long as the real line - but it has 'expanded' as every point before is now further away than previous points.
In cosmology we do this in a very similar way - using what we call a 'fiducial cell'; a blob of space. We assume the universe is (to first order) homogeneous (same everywhere) and isotropic (same in every direction). Thus if we see the blob expand we're seeing the whole universe expand. Mathematically, we form a 'metric' a way of measuring space and time, the simplest homogeneous and isotropic version of which is:
ds^2 = -dt^2 +a(t)^2(dx^2+dy^2+dz^2)
You might recognize the last bit as being like pythagoras' theorem in 3D. (There are two other homogeneous isotropic examples, but I'm choosing the simplest one to make life easy). a(t) can only be a function of time, as if it were a function of space, this would break homogeneity. Likewise it must multiply all directions equally to retain isotropy. (Again for the pros I'm being fast and loose here to make life easier). Thus our universe can be infinite (x,y,z go on forever) but distances can change over time as a(t) changes. That way we truly can see expansion or contraction in the universe. This was what Friedmann first put forward as a solution to Einstein's equations, and Robertson+Walker later showed that it's true in general cases for homogeneity and isotropy. Finally Lemaitre worked out what this really meant physically.
Now a(t) has no meaning by itself - I could just have chosen a smaller piece of space on which to start measuring. But the rate of change 1/a * da/dt is very meaningful - the relative change rate known as the Hubble parameter. It is from measurements of the doppler effect on light (called redshift/blueshift for stars moving away from/towards us) that we can get a handle on this and see that a(t) is indeed increasing - the universe is expanding. The point of inflation is to understand a model in which a(t) was not only increasing, but accelerating, but that's a much longer discussion.
Hope that helps!
"black hole hits critical mass"
What mass is this? How do you fix the scale?
"black hole explodes"
By what mechanism? How does a trapped surface become untrapped? Where does the mass go if the region is still dense enough to cause a trapped horizon, how can it 'explode'? ...
"stars coalesce along with planets from gas and matter in the expanding galaxy"
Actually planets come from exploded stars.
"Gravity, though seemingly weak, eventually slows the galaxy down enough to where it begins contracting again."
It's more than that - it's the entire universe. Except, that's only if the universe is above a critical density, i.e. we're in a closed universe. Which we don't know. In fact, for some reason the rate of expansion appears to be accelerating.
Anyone can have a crazy guess about how the universe works. The science part is formulating this in a rigorous manner, fitting it with existing knowledge and making testable predictions.
Similar environments and histories has been posited a number of times, but given just how similar the regions are and how many of them there are it doesn't seem likely. But more so, this only pushes the question further back: Why were their histories identical? Did they all start in roughly the same state? Why? And at the same time?
Entanglement requires causal contact. Two particles are entangled when they have been in contact, and then move apart, so this doesn't help.
But 'coincidence' doesn't cut it for science - it's one hell of a coincidence that the temperature of the entire sky varies by less than one part in 10,000. It could be a coincidence that we orbit the sun and our angular momentum is constant, but as it turns out there are fundamental and simple laws governing this motion. Finding these laws is the job of science. As for another reason, yes there could be one but there aren't many hypotheses for what this other reason could be, and none that have been tested the way inflation has. This is how science works - you see something odd, try to make some model to explain it, see if your explanation has further implications and what they are and see if those implications are realized.
Should have gone with
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/uploads/wmapspectrum.png
instead. Now that's a model that fits data! :)
I should be clear: My experience is with scalar field inflation with a quadratic potential - the simplest models that are most common. Hybrid inflation can do almost anything, it's true.
My references for that statement:
Tegmark: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0410281
Steinhardt: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0507455
I believe Mukhanov and Turok both talk about it too, though I can't find the references easily at the moment.
You're right - it's a blackbody spectrum not the angular power spectrum. My mistake.
There are certainly alternatives to inflation that people do find attractive - ekpyrotic, cyclic or simply oscillatory universes for example can easily bring points into causal contact by extending the past of these points beyond where there would be a classical big bang. Various string models, and Loop Quantum Cosmology have methods for this (LQC has a really neat well understood bounce) and the idea goes back to Lemaitre's 'Phoenix Universe' ideas. However, inflation does more than just explain existing phenomena - it predicted a spectral index between 0.98 and 0.92, and COBE/WMAP bring it in at around 0.96. It also does a really good job of explaining structure formation. Now, that isn't to say that it's necessarily right, and that other theories couldn't do a similar thing, but inflation really does a good job. It's certainly far from perfect, numerous people have objections to it, but so far it fits the data we have.
The "inflation" we're talking about here is the accelerated expansion of the early universe. So, first off why do we need it?
It turns out that parts of the observable cosmic microwave background are 'causally disconnected'. This means that you take two patches of sky as observed at the time the CMB formed (300k years after the big bang, we now think - approximately 15 billion years ago) and track their behavior back to the big bang. In the normal models where the universe is full of dust or radiation they never were in contact in the past: Light from one area could never reach another. Why is this a problem? Because they are remarkably similar. They appear to have come into thermal equilibrium (same temperature) yet this shouldn't be possible if they were never in contact. So we need to have a method by which the universe expanded faster before this period.
There are a few ways to do this - one is a cosmological constant. But the problem with a constant is that it's constant - we should still see it today, and we don't. The universe is not expanding that fast anymore - the bounds we can place on the cosmological constant today put it well below the effect we want from inflation. What we need is something that acts like a cosmological constant for a while and then drops away. This is what inflationary models are all about. The inflaton is a theoretical particle that starts off behaving like the comsmological constant, but eventually decays into the matter we see today. We model this by a particle moving in a potential - think of a ball rolling on the side of a hill. How the inflaton behaves is all about the ratio of its kinetic to potential energy - high potential energy looks like a cosmological constant, high kinetic energy looks more like normal matter. (I can explain this in more detail if anyone's interested). So the ball rolls down the hill, losing potential, gaining kinetic (there's also friction from the expansion of the universe so it loses 'energy' overall) and hence our inflaton does exactly what we need - slowly changing from looking like a cosmological constant to normal matter. In theory too, it decays once it reaches the bottom of the hill, but no-one provides much of a model for this.
This is old (20-30 years old is old in theory standards) stuff from Linde, Mukhanov etc. No-one would take it seriously, except that when you calculate things from it, it works incredibly well - it's the source of http://xkcd.com/54/ - it's still controversial. Some people love it, others think it's a fudge and doesn't do much for you. The new stuff here is that there is a method being proposed by which a multiplet of supersymmetric particles (again, I can say a bit more but it's not my field) is shown to be able to act like the inflaton. Ie a stable state of multiple particles bound together could act this way, and could be found at the LHC. Now, that's a lot of 'could' - the usual inflaton mass is set to around 10^12 GeV - way above what the LHC can reach, and this is the same across most inflationary models. But if the LHC can see evidence of supersymmetry (again, another discussion, but it is thought to be likely that if supersymmetry is real then the LHC will see it) it might be able to at least give some credibility to some of these models of inflation.
The study (that is about 4 clicks away from the summary - direct link http://www.bcaa.com/downloads/BCAA_Hybrid_Cost_Analysis_2010.pdf) completely ignores the fact that your car doesn't cease to exist after 5 years - you either keep driving it or sell it used. Looking at one of the examples (Prius vs Matrix) the resale value of the car according to Kelley Blue Book was $2000 higher for the hybrid (5 years old, 100k kilometers, good condition).
In fact it even says "Long-term depreciation and resale values remain unknown so are assumed to be neutral" - complete BS in this kind of study. So when you really factor this in, you find that the TCO for the hybrid is indeed lower than for the non-hybrid. Of course this isn't going to make up for the larger differences, but certainly for anything with less than $2k difference you'll probably see your money back from the hybrid.
So someone does a Lorentz transformation on the denisty of interstellar hydrogen, ramps up the veloicty until he gets the relativistic energy to be that of the LHC and somehow this is news?
That's simply not true - more recent versions of Elite (Oolite, ArcElite) have Lave-Zaonce at the beginning.