Many people on this thread mention the parallel between aviation progress in the first half of the 20th century and what is happening now with SpaceX, Virgin galactic, and so on.
The difference is essential though. In the beginning of the 20th century we simply did not know enough about fluid dynamics to make aerodynamic flight happen easily. This is still a tough field (turbulence, etc) however we have made huge progress. We can model it relatively well, we essentially know now how to simulate it, etc. The basic equations (Navier Stokes) have been known for a long time, and thank to a huge theoretical, computational and practical effort, we now have cheap, save, available, commercial flight for everyone.
In the case of space dynamics, things are actually fairly simple. We have known about minimum orbital speed, escape velocity, and so on since Newton. We've made measurable progress with chemical rocket engines since then 1950s, but the principles were known at the time. We know how much energy we need to expend to reach space. We know how to navigate space, We know how to do it.
We actually know that we *cannot* do it cheaply at present. What we need to reach a new level is a lot of basic research in materials to build space elevators, better ion drives, perhaps nuclear engines in the future. At the moment we cannot send humans effectively beyond low Earth orbit, and again, this is not cheap. It is not so much a question of entrepreneurship, it is a question of long-term, constant investments. As in several decades.
This is hugely misinformed. In the 19th century people built flying gliders and even a few prototype planes in their backyard. They did not need equivalent 19th century billionaire to bail them out, and very few of them died. This is because the physics of flying is easy and safe, once understood.
Now we already know that the physics of space travel is difficult and dangerous. We've been there. People have died. We have no easy solution. No amount of starry-eyed entrepreneurship is going to change that.
Known physics, the actual economy, and dwindling resources are not on our side.
Actually, the price of travelling by boat has basically increased over time. This is due to the fact that boating is mostly for pleasure. Who crosses the Atlantic by boat nowadays ? Not the poor.
In the case of Virgin Galactic, starry-eyed people believe that some day everyone will get to travel in one of these hypersonic planes, but I don't see that happening. The reason is that it is much much cheaper and immensely less dangerous to fly economy with any carrier. Basically the longest flight is something like London-UK to Auckland-NZ. That currently takes about 30h. Of course it would be nice to do it in 2h but this is not essential. The Concorde did not make supersonic flight happen for the masses. It was only for the very rich / super busy and would have stayed that way forever had the Concorde continued to be exploited.
Concurrently, really going to space (i.e. > 100km altitude, reaching orbital velocity) is going to stay hugely expensive using chemical rockets. There is basically no known technique that can make that cheap and safe, until we build a space elevator. Going to the Moon is essentially pointless: nothing of value to do there, and I'm not sure we will manage to send people to Mars within this century. This is hugely hard, barring some unexpected advances in thrust technology.
This needs to be said a lot more often, however you need a mix of small / large companies. Small companies have very little visibility and cannot invest the millions or billions of dollars needed for some projects.
Most people think that scientist are strange people who have amassed a huge amount of very precise facts about an extremely specific field, some of which might be useful (facts or fields), but most of which are useless to the common people. The prototype is the scientist lady in the TV series "Bones". Scientists are assimilated to dorks who have not only not an ounce of creativity in them but also no social skills.
In reality scientists need to be extremely creative in their work, and need to have the humility to accept that they know or understand only a tiny amount of the world that is around us. It is very easy and quick to tread into the complete unknown. We cannot at present even reconcile the most established theories we have about the way the world works (relativity and quantum mechanics).
No, that is easy. Most paths in science have never even been tried.
What is hard is to find a path that leads to somewhere. Then just as hard it getting the somewhere you discovered to be accepted by the scientific community. Think plaque tectonics, relativity, quantum mechanics, even something as fundamental as cosmology, and so on.
First you need a friend with an Apple computer and OSX 10.6.8 or later installed. Then you can download the 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 version of OSX for free on the Mac App Store. If you do not own Apple hardware but want to try these OSes anyway in a VM for instance, it can get a little involved but is generally doable.
Contrary to a somewhat popular opinion among car hotheads, the least reliable component on any car is usually the driver. While on the road, drive safe. If you want to have fun with your car besides enjoying the scenery, go racing.
Underground/Subway/Metro or some other specific lines with zero interconnection running as a loop, yes. They are all akin to a long, horizontal elevator, with lots and lots of sensors and other feedback systems built into the track. They make a lot of sense because they carry a lot of passengers over short to medium length lines over the very same tracks all the time. The longest automated network is the Vancouver skytrain, which is about 70km long.
General-purpose train lines, with something unlike single-purpose engines running on open tracks with interconnection ? The page does not list any. It is still too difficult for automated systems.
Nearly all of the development tools of Linux are available on OSX via ports, brew or simply compiling oneself. Even fairly advanced stuff like valgrind. There is no shortage of cross platform GUI toolkit like Qt.
Since OSX 10.4 or so, it has been relatively easy to install OSX on any PC. So if one is curious and wants to try the ecosystem, one can do it at a very low cost, that of one already existing, partitioned PC, or a virtual machine. This does require some technical skills, for sure. In recent years it has become easier, not harder, to do so.
This usually is a fairly smart move on Apple's part. This test will usually convince people who try it that they can trust Apple to be their provider for their next laptop purchase. In this department, their approach truly shines.
From an ideal standpoint it looks as if super-intelligent kids is something every parent would want. However there are some drawbacks. First, IQ is only a rough measure of intelligence, there are many factors involved and success in life is not immediately linked to IQ. See Unabomber, etc. Also super intelligent kids may not be that easy to handle. They typically hate school and may actually do poorly in school. They demand much more attention from parents (more activities, more time with them, etc). There is plenty of evidence that IQ is also linked to the environment kids grow in, so simply selecting the gene stuff and thinking this may be enough will not work. Intelligence is also linked to curiosity and independence and so perhaps to more risky behaviours. Finally there is a correlation with very high IQ and some severe forms of mental illness.
All in all, there is a cluster of reasons why the average IQ of the population is 100. High intelligence is not always that comfortable. Think of Sir Winston Churchill, hero of the battle of England, most effective Prime Minister in a time of war, Nobel prize winner in litterature. He had severe depression all his life (his "black dog"). I agree we should raise the general IQ though, cautiously.
John Bardeen has won two Nobel prizes in physics. The first for the discovery of the transistor, and the second for the BCS theory of superconductivity. Read the page, it is highly entertaining. Bardeen was very unassuming but clearly a genius as well.
Tesla cars are interesting, but their impact is currently limited. The cars are simply too expensive. We'll have to wait and see if the impact of Tesla can change the industry. Other Elon Musk endeavours are also too early to tell. SpaceX is already going to space, but as others have commented, low Earth orbit is not really space yet. This is the cosy neighbourhood of our home. Getting to Mars and beyond is currently nothing but a dream.
It is too early to compare Musk to Jobs. In spite of its many documented faults, Jobs had the drive to start and set Apple on the path to spark the personal computer revolution in the 1970s, particularly with the Apple ][. Recent Apple products are quite nice for some but this is the earlier feat that matters. Many other companies tried to do the same thing at the same time and did not meet the same success. The IBM PC was a late comer and got started after Apple and others had demonstrated that producing personal computers made business sense.
The spin of a photon is a boson is always 1. That's not too hard to transmit. Approximately 0 bits are needed. Furthermore, the momentum of a photon is always h\nu, with \nu the frequency. So if you know the frequency of a photon, you also know its momentum, with another 0 bit to transmit. Finally I don't think a photon can have an orbital quantum momentum. Electrons can have those. That is unless things have changed since I last took a class on quantum mechanics.
In other words the summary is the worst I've seen in a long time.
Basically, yes. There is basically no job that a man can do and a woman cannot, except producing sperm. So there you go (posted as a man). Think about it.
To a degree. Science is a human activity, and so necessarily flawed. However Jean-Pierre Petit's work is very speculative. There is a critique of his work in the linked page that you give here. It is in bloody french, but the gist of it is that is work is not coherent and not predictive. It does not seem very interesting then. It may be that his work has been rejected for very good reasons.
Authors are not necessarily the best people to be objective about their own work.
Slashdot Mirror
Not by itself. Enough said.
Many people on this thread mention the parallel between aviation progress in the first half of the 20th century and what is happening now with SpaceX, Virgin galactic, and so on.
The difference is essential though. In the beginning of the 20th century we simply did not know enough about fluid dynamics to make aerodynamic flight happen easily. This is still a tough field (turbulence, etc) however we have made huge progress. We can model it relatively well, we essentially know now how to simulate it, etc. The basic equations (Navier Stokes) have been known for a long time, and thank to a huge theoretical, computational and practical effort, we now have cheap, save, available, commercial flight for everyone.
In the case of space dynamics, things are actually fairly simple. We have known about minimum orbital speed, escape velocity, and so on since Newton. We've made measurable progress with chemical rocket engines since then 1950s, but the principles were known at the time. We know how much energy we need to expend to reach space. We know how to navigate space, We know how to do it.
We actually know that we *cannot* do it cheaply at present. What we need to reach a new level is a lot of basic research in materials to build space elevators, better ion drives, perhaps nuclear engines in the future. At the moment we cannot send humans effectively beyond low Earth orbit, and again, this is not cheap. It is not so much a question of entrepreneurship, it is a question of long-term, constant investments. As in several decades.
This is hugely misinformed. In the 19th century people built flying gliders and even a few prototype planes in their backyard. They did not need equivalent 19th century billionaire to bail them out, and very few of them died. This is because the physics of flying is easy and safe, once understood.
Now we already know that the physics of space travel is difficult and dangerous. We've been there. People have died. We have no easy solution. No amount of starry-eyed entrepreneurship is going to change that.
Known physics, the actual economy, and dwindling resources are not on our side.
Actually, the price of travelling by boat has basically increased over time. This is due to the fact that boating is mostly for pleasure. Who crosses the Atlantic by boat nowadays ? Not the poor.
In the case of Virgin Galactic, starry-eyed people believe that some day everyone will get to travel in one of these hypersonic planes, but I don't see that happening. The reason is that it is much much cheaper and immensely less dangerous to fly economy with any carrier. Basically the longest flight is something like London-UK to Auckland-NZ. That currently takes about 30h. Of course it would be nice to do it in 2h but this is not essential. The Concorde did not make supersonic flight happen for the masses. It was only for the very rich / super busy and would have stayed that way forever had the Concorde continued to be exploited.
Concurrently, really going to space (i.e. > 100km altitude, reaching orbital velocity) is going to stay hugely expensive using chemical rockets. There is basically no known technique that can make that cheap and safe, until we build a space elevator. Going to the Moon is essentially pointless: nothing of value to do there, and I'm not sure we will manage to send people to Mars within this century. This is hugely hard, barring some unexpected advances in thrust technology.
This needs to be said a lot more often, however you need a mix of small / large companies. Small companies have very little visibility and cannot invest the millions or billions of dollars needed for some projects.
The only sensible remark here.
Most people think that scientist are strange people who have amassed a huge amount of very precise facts about an extremely specific field, some of which might be useful (facts or fields), but most of which are useless to the common people. The prototype is the scientist lady in the TV series "Bones". Scientists are assimilated to dorks who have not only not an ounce of creativity in them but also no social skills.
In reality scientists need to be extremely creative in their work, and need to have the humility to accept that they know or understand only a tiny amount of the world that is around us. It is very easy and quick to tread into the complete unknown. We cannot at present even reconcile the most established theories we have about the way the world works (relativity and quantum mechanics).
No, that is easy. Most paths in science have never even been tried.
What is hard is to find a path that leads to somewhere. Then just as hard it getting the somewhere you discovered to be accepted by the scientific community. Think plaque tectonics, relativity, quantum mechanics, even something as fundamental as cosmology, and so on.
First you need a friend with an Apple computer and OSX 10.6.8 or later installed. Then you can download the 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 version of OSX for free on the Mac App Store. If you do not own Apple hardware but want to try these OSes anyway in a VM for instance, it can get a little involved but is generally doable.
Contrary to a somewhat popular opinion among car hotheads, the least reliable component on any car is usually the driver. While on the road, drive safe. If you want to have fun with your car besides enjoying the scenery, go racing.
Underground/Subway/Metro or some other specific lines with zero interconnection running as a loop, yes. They are all akin to a long, horizontal elevator, with lots and lots of sensors and other feedback systems built into the track. They make a lot of sense because they carry a lot of passengers over short to medium length lines over the very same tracks all the time. The longest automated network is the Vancouver skytrain, which is about 70km long.
General-purpose train lines, with something unlike single-purpose engines running on open tracks with interconnection ? The page does not list any. It is still too difficult for automated systems.
Nearly all of the development tools of Linux are available on OSX via ports, brew or simply compiling oneself. Even fairly advanced stuff like valgrind. There is no shortage of cross platform GUI toolkit like Qt.
In what way is OSX crippled as a dev box ?
Since OSX 10.4 or so, it has been relatively easy to install OSX on any PC. So if one is curious and wants to try the ecosystem, one can do it at a very low cost, that of one already existing, partitioned PC, or a virtual machine. This does require some technical skills, for sure. In recent years it has become easier, not harder, to do so.
This usually is a fairly smart move on Apple's part. This test will usually convince people who try it that they can trust Apple to be their provider for their next laptop purchase. In this department, their approach truly shines.
From an ideal standpoint it looks as if super-intelligent kids is something every parent would want. However there are some drawbacks. First, IQ is only a rough measure of intelligence, there are many factors involved and success in life is not immediately linked to IQ. See Unabomber, etc. Also super intelligent kids may not be that easy to handle. They typically hate school and may actually do poorly in school. They demand much more attention from parents (more activities, more time with them, etc). There is plenty of evidence that IQ is also linked to the environment kids grow in, so simply selecting the gene stuff and thinking this may be enough will not work. Intelligence is also linked to curiosity and independence and so perhaps to more risky behaviours. Finally there is a correlation with very high IQ and some severe forms of mental illness.
All in all, there is a cluster of reasons why the average IQ of the population is 100. High intelligence is not always that comfortable. Think of Sir Winston Churchill, hero of the battle of England, most effective Prime Minister in a time of war, Nobel prize winner in litterature. He had severe depression all his life (his "black dog"). I agree we should raise the general IQ though, cautiously.
Bill Gates claimed to be doing that that (among others) and he is not finding it easy.
John Bardeen has won two Nobel prizes in physics. The first for the discovery of the transistor, and the second for the BCS theory of superconductivity. Read the page, it is highly entertaining. Bardeen was very unassuming but clearly a genius as well.
Tesla cars are interesting, but their impact is currently limited. The cars are simply too expensive. We'll have to wait and see if the impact of Tesla can change the industry. Other Elon Musk endeavours are also too early to tell. SpaceX is already going to space, but as others have commented, low Earth orbit is not really space yet. This is the cosy neighbourhood of our home. Getting to Mars and beyond is currently nothing but a dream.
It is too early to compare Musk to Jobs. In spite of its many documented faults, Jobs had the drive to start and set Apple on the path to spark the personal computer revolution in the 1970s, particularly with the Apple ][. Recent Apple products are quite nice for some but this is the earlier feat that matters. Many other companies tried to do the same thing at the same time and did not meet the same success. The IBM PC was a late comer and got started after Apple and others had demonstrated that producing personal computers made business sense.
The only reasonable post in the entire thread. Please mod up.
The spin of a photon is a boson is always 1. That's not too hard to transmit. Approximately 0 bits are needed. Furthermore, the momentum of a photon is always h\nu, with \nu the frequency. So if you know the frequency of a photon, you also know its momentum, with another 0 bit to transmit. Finally I don't think a photon can have an orbital quantum momentum. Electrons can have those. That is unless things have changed since I last took a class on quantum mechanics.
In other words the summary is the worst I've seen in a long time.
And telephone sanitizers.
Basically correct, and we will either achieve strong AI within a century, or never.
Basically, yes. There is basically no job that a man can do and a woman cannot, except producing sperm. So there you go (posted as a man). Think about it.
The parent is absolutely correct. Why is he modded "troll"?
To a degree. Science is a human activity, and so necessarily flawed. However Jean-Pierre Petit's work is very speculative. There is a critique of his work in the linked page that you give here. It is in bloody french, but the gist of it is that is work is not coherent and not predictive. It does not seem very interesting then. It may be that his work has been rejected for very good reasons.
Authors are not necessarily the best people to be objective about their own work.
In english you can verb nouns if you want. However, like Hobbes said, verbing weirds language.