I don't see the present theoretical discovery directly related with Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation occurs when a pair of virtual particles is created right on the edge of the event horizon such that one of the particles ends up inside the Schwarzschild radius while the other one remains outside. Consequently the virtual pair cannot annihilate, and the particle outside the event horizon seems to be radiation from the black hole. The particle that ends up inside the black hole has a negative energy which translates to a negative mass, and as a result the mass of the black hole actually decreases due to the process. Ergo, Hawking radiation really should have a black-body spectrum as it originates from the quantum field fluctuation and is in no way a representation of the inner structure of the black hole.
The information loss associated with black holes is therefore an unrelated phenomenon and stems from other strange characteristics of black hole theory (perhaps most notably the possibility of a singularity, and the fact that we cannot do measurements beyond the event horizon). Therefore I find this correlation between string theoretical black hole structure and the 'classical' (ha) event horizon quite fascinating. Like someone already said, it might be too good to be just a co-incidence:)
IAAP but black holes are still just a hobby of mine, not a profession. I might have made a mistake somewhere; please correct me if I'm wrong.
I personally pipe my guitar from the POD to a laptop with Audacity to a home stereo/PA. Very nice, I always get my playing recorded, and with Audacity's very efficient handling of large files it's easy to pick out the good bits.
You should check out Ardour for a more professional, multi-track recording environment. It shouldn't have any serious latency issues, at least given that you run a low-latency kernel. It's still under (active) developement but it works quite well already.
I'm not sure which worries me more: the risk of inflating the public interest in the technologies you mention until it becomes disinterest, or the fact that these technologies will materialize eventually regardless of whether the public wants it...
[sarcasm] Oh yeah, they really shouldn't have published this crap result, it simply doesn't live up to the hype. I mean, it's like the special effects were badly done. [/sarcasm]
What's this, do you think that scientific progress should be kept in the shadows until it has reached a certain level of shock value? Do you *really* intend to sound as if you were disappointed, just because someone's kept busy and learned something that could be worthy of sharing? Because if you do, I believe there are issues with your attitude towards the world that you should spend a little time musing on...
I for one am happy to learn about these advances in various fields. They may or may not eventually culminate in, for example, a functional quantum computer. With public reporting of the progress I and others might even get inspired enough to lend a helping hand, and the likelihood for us reaching your prized Big Breakthrough (even as I doubt you know where you actually draw the line) is increased.
Perhaps he's found out we need to be shown, not told. Wouldn't you think differently of his books if he was still giving us interviews at 2069 (and don't you just hate when math just right out jumps at you)? Clarke has dreamt up such futures for mankind one has to wonder how there can still be such outrageously obvious mistakes as the U.S. military budget.
Or, while we're on Slashdot, proprietary software.
Re:The decay bateria are hungry!
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 1
One of the heavier elements -- carbon, some 12 times heavier than fundamental element hydrogen -- conveniently arranges itself into the benzene rings of six atoms that are the scaffold for all Earthly life.
In Finland, one of the news items for today seems to be the ABC report that 60% of Americans literally believe the bible. 30% take it as an educational story.
Perhaps the remaing ten are the Texan descendants who believe the manna was really oil...
Re:Here's a couple I really want to know
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 1
He went into the mechanics of information processing in the brain and the differences between patterns in two different brains, and concluded based on this set of facts that even if you could detect the signal generated by someone else's brain, you wouldn't be able to parse it.
As evidenced by all attempts at communication between myself and the rest of mankind.
Seriously though, I think both your professor and you have a point. The difference is that your professor is talking about telepathy at a very fundamental level, as in transferring *experiences* between two brains. That is, for the most part, impractical for the reasons broadly outlined in the quote. On the other hand I also agree with your signal processing theorem -- or in other words, I see speech as just a crude form of telepathy.
True, but a lot of people thought Einstein and Newton were crazy too, and they didn't exactly have many peers at first to verify and critique their information, as they were just cast off as silly just as you've done.
The difference here is that Einstein and Newton both were faced with observations that contradicted the best theories at the time. Now there's a good starting point for a new theory. As for gravastars, there's no need to find an alternative for black holes until we have observations that contradict our present theories about them. So far, there are none -- the points about entropy remain moot, as they can be explained in precisely the same way in black hole theory as with gravastars: behind a black hole there very well could be another world.
This leads to the corollary that this world is the nether side of some black hole -- which is equivalent to what the gravastar researchers conclude within their framework. The problem for the gravastar theory is the infamous Occam's Razor. Their theory is more complicated than the black hole theory it is trying to replace, and unnecessarily so because it does not bring about any new explanations. Just a word play on the old stuff, basically.
Sure, it's fun to play the game of 'what if', and little harm can come of it, and there's always a possibility that one ends up with something that is actually better than the best existing theory. It's good for raising research funds. As a method for advancing knowledge it's no better than filling a room with typewriters and monkeys.
who in the world has the ability to use all of these scary nuclear weapons of mass destruction? who, of all people, has these hideous weapons that you're desperately AND blatantly looking for in foreign territories? who, of all the world, has an insane silly monkey as a leader, guided by a bunch of insane war-mongers who believe in nothing but increased national PROFIT, has these weapons that the rest of the world is scared of?
if you, my fellow voting americans, are the joke, then pardon me for not laughing. i'm too afraid.
Earlier this year, when I was considering the options for using GPUs to do some quantum physics, I found out that there were serious bandwidth problems in the GPU drivers, and even though it was possible to send the data to a GPU for fast processing, the readback of results was awfully inefficient (so much so you lost any processing advantage). This has been solved now?
i think you're confused. What you're saying is pretty much true as far as computer software & hardware goes -- i believe we really don't need every latest version that's being offered.
But musicians at the forefront have always been quick to adopt the newest technology and the most advanced instruments. B.B. King picked up his Lucille. Jimi Hendrix didn't settle for an old acoustic, he stomped the wah-wah. Pink Floyd and the tape delays, Keith Emerson, Bernie Worrel & Jarre with their synthesizers, and I won't even begin with hiphop, electro etc. that's using ANYTHING available. Do you think the present day fragmentation in musical genres would've ever occured if everyone had sticked with the cembalo?? Or think of the Stradivarius violins, or the Hohner piano. They were all THE technological advancements back in their days. Or shall I remind you of the revolution that computers have caused in the recording industry? You can have a top-notch digital home recording environment these days for the price of the ticket you had to pay in the seventies to fly to Abbey Road...
Technologies DO mature. That's why there's still the Shure SM58, and the Les Paul, and Floyd Rose tremolo. That's why we get updated versions of synthesizers that 'only' mimic the vintage sound better (never mind that the racks needed in the seventies would fill a small truck...)
In my opinion, Roland has played a significant part in the evolution of musical instruments. Like you say, the old instruments ARE being actively used to create new music, and in this regard I can see why Roland would want to be precise when their property is under consideration. Yet while they can't find a direct evidence of a problem, they happily let the emulator continue its existence. Wish all companies were as level-headed and fair.
(But I do hope that Roland can't come up with the required evidence -- free beer is fine by me;-))
Try reading the Silmarillion or the Unfinished Tales. Why, take a look at the Books of Lost Tales as well.
It is quite possible that those beautiful, indeed, essential volumes in the tale of the Middle-Earth would not exist without Christopher, or at least wouldn't, in all probability, fit in so well with the original published works of JRRT. Christopher is, quite understandably so, the best Tolkien scholar par none.
It's actually interesting how real life mirrors the fantasy. What Christopher's been doing with his father's writings is very much the same thing that Frodo and Sam did for Bilbo's Red Book.
I for my part am forever grateful for Christopher for publishing any- and everything his father left behind. And I understand his grudge with the franchising of Middle-Earth, even as I love the movies on their own accord.
I don't understand this concept of indeterminate relationship. It strikes me that his claim boils down to saying that time and motion are not possible unless you regard the set of physical relationships as constituting an uncountable infinity.
which is a way of stating that the physical reality consists of an infinity of layers most conveniently imagined as a set of parallel universes, or multiverse for short. the set can be sliced in any angle, and it's ok to think of 'a parallel universe' as any subset of the actual cosmic spatial quantum configuration. within the set, 'time' has no meaning unless used synonymously with 'change' -- for the set, all time is now. But what is the big deal with that? R is uncountable on an open interval, but it still retains a fully ordered relationship.
the big deal is that the world-view most prominently propagated by Everett, DeWitt and Deutsch, but superficially also by the eastern school of thought for the past coule of thousand years, is correct. reality is a multiverse. it can be understood. and there might be a lot more to living than most people realize...
the time we feel and play our mind-games with is indeed subjective. i tend to think that, quite possibly, the subjects could be active in their experience -- that is, instead of passively observing the illusionary flow of time (resulting, in the first approximation, from the minimum energy difference between possible quantum configurations in the brain), the subject might be able to direct the flow.
feel free to continue on this track of thought for yourself:)
The multiverse theory states that time is quantized and the instances of time, or moments, actually constitute a parallel universe. Any quantum configuration does, and especially those with spatial structure such as DNA molecules.
Also the fact that last night was the peak of Draconides meteor storm, which occasionally can reach the intensity of the more well known Leonid showers (I have no idea if the constellation is visible in Colorado area).
Still it seems a bit funny that there should be so many fireballs crashing down on a relatively small area.
2) Getting closer to the topic, this article smells kind of fishy. McFadden doesn't seem to understand Quantum Mechanics. I know, I know. He claims noone does, and on some fundamental level, that may be true. But we do know how to make some pretty damn precise calculations and predictions with it. Which requires at least some understanding.
Doing precise calculations and predictions with quantum mechanics requires no understanding about it -- we have been able to conceive a whole new civilization from the predictions of quantum physics without understanding what's going on. You say that in a double-split experiment, which is essentially a demonstration of single-particle interference, the electron goes "both ways in some sense". That "some sense" screams for explanation. Multiverse is currently the most straightforward explanation and requires no extra-assumptions (wrt to postulates of the quantum physics as formulated in the 20's), and for the moment I stick to it -- it is my explanation. But let's hear yours -- what happens in the single-particle interference "in some sense"?
3) The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is strongly disfavored (though not discredited) by physicists. Primarily because there is no real way of testing or disproving it. It predicts exactly the same things as the "orthodox" (aka Copenhagen) interpretation, which is simpler.
The multiverse interpretation has indeed been disfavored by physicists, although this is rapidly changing. In any case arguments of that kind do nothing to refute the theory of the multiverse itself, and reminds me of the troubles of Galilei. In the end, majority has no real authority in scientific reasoning, but explanatory power has.
Dear Professor, in quantum mechanics we have perhaps the most succesful theory and tool ever devised by man. One of the strangest features of the theory in my opinion is that we have been able to use it without really understanding what it is all about -- for example, what *is* an electron? What happens in the Young experiment?
With various interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the copenhagen interpretation, hidden variable theories and the "multiverse" explanations, I wonder what would be Your personal opinion about the fundamental meaning of quantum mechanics? What kind of a universe do You live in?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see the present theoretical discovery directly related with Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation occurs when a pair of virtual particles is created right on the edge of the event horizon such that one of the particles ends up inside the Schwarzschild radius while the other one remains outside. Consequently the virtual pair cannot annihilate, and the particle outside the event horizon seems to be radiation from the black hole. The particle that ends up inside the black hole has a negative energy which translates to a negative mass, and as a result the mass of the black hole actually decreases due to the process. Ergo, Hawking radiation really should have a black-body spectrum as it originates from the quantum field fluctuation and is in no way a representation of the inner structure of the black hole.
:)
The information loss associated with black holes is therefore an unrelated phenomenon and stems from other strange characteristics of black hole theory (perhaps most notably the possibility of a singularity, and the fact that we cannot do measurements beyond the event horizon). Therefore I find this correlation between string theoretical black hole structure and the 'classical' (ha) event horizon quite fascinating. Like someone already said, it might be too good to be just a co-incidence
IAAP but black holes are still just a hobby of mine, not a profession. I might have made a mistake somewhere; please correct me if I'm wrong.
I personally pipe my guitar from the POD to a laptop with Audacity to a home stereo/PA. Very nice, I always get my playing recorded, and with Audacity's very efficient handling of large files it's easy to pick out the good bits.
You should check out Ardour for a more professional, multi-track recording environment. It shouldn't have any serious latency issues, at least given that you run a low-latency kernel. It's still under (active) developement but it works quite well already.
I'm not sure which worries me more: the risk of inflating the public interest in the technologies you mention until it becomes disinterest, or the fact that these technologies will materialize eventually regardless of whether the public wants it...
But I do see your point now.
[sarcasm]
Oh yeah, they really shouldn't have published this crap result, it simply doesn't live up to the hype. I mean, it's like the special effects were badly done.
[/sarcasm]
What's this, do you think that scientific progress should be kept in the shadows until it has reached a certain level of shock value?
Do you *really* intend to sound as if you were disappointed, just because someone's kept busy and learned something that could be worthy of sharing? Because if you do, I believe there are issues with your attitude towards the world that you should spend a little time musing on...
I for one am happy to learn about these advances in various fields. They may or may not eventually culminate in, for example, a functional quantum computer. With public reporting of the progress I and others might even get inspired enough to lend a helping hand, and the likelihood for us reaching your prized Big Breakthrough (even as I doubt you know where you actually draw the line) is increased.
Perhaps he's found out we need to be shown, not told. Wouldn't you think differently of his books if he was still giving us interviews at 2069 (and don't you just hate when math just right out jumps at you)? Clarke has dreamt up such futures for mankind one has to wonder how there can still be such outrageously obvious mistakes as the U.S. military budget.
Or, while we're on Slashdot, proprietary software.
One of the heavier elements -- carbon, some 12 times heavier than fundamental element hydrogen -- conveniently arranges itself into the benzene rings of six atoms that are the scaffold for all Earthly life.
...
In Finland, one of the news items for today seems to be the ABC report that 60% of Americans literally believe the bible. 30% take it as an educational story.
Perhaps the remaing ten are the Texan descendants who believe the manna was really oil
He went into the mechanics of information processing in the brain and the differences between patterns in two different brains, and concluded based on this set of facts that even if you could detect the signal generated by someone else's brain, you wouldn't be able to parse it.
As evidenced by all attempts at communication between myself and the rest of mankind.
Seriously though, I think both your professor and you have a point. The difference is that your professor is talking about telepathy at a very fundamental level, as in transferring *experiences* between two brains. That is, for the most part, impractical for the reasons broadly outlined in the quote. On the other hand I also agree with your signal processing theorem -- or in other words, I see speech as just a crude form of telepathy.
Man, that SCO scam has really made people paranoid
Fortunately Groklaw obtained a nice and to-the-point clarification about the legal issues involved.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200402
(No, OSS developers, you don't need to poke out your eyes now that windows source is out in the open.)
It seems sad to me that we spend quite a lot of money exploring rocks in the sky and basically no money exploring 70% our own planet.
...
Gotta keep those weapons factories running lest the commies keep cumming
U.S. military budget for 2003 was ~$380 billion, whereas NASA received roughly $15 billion.
You see, we don't need to explore our own planet when we're about to blow it to pieces anyway!
make my funk the p.funk!
True, but a lot of people thought Einstein and Newton were crazy too, and they didn't exactly have many peers at first to verify and critique their information, as they were just cast off as silly just as you've done.
The difference here is that Einstein and Newton both were faced with observations that contradicted the best theories at the time. Now there's a good starting point for a new theory. As for gravastars, there's no need to find an alternative for black holes until we have observations that contradict our present theories about them. So far, there are none -- the points about entropy remain moot, as they can be explained in precisely the same way in black hole theory as with gravastars: behind a black hole there very well could be another world.
This leads to the corollary that this world is the nether side of some black hole -- which is equivalent to what the gravastar researchers conclude within their framework. The problem for the gravastar theory is the infamous Occam's Razor. Their theory is more complicated than the black hole theory it is trying to replace, and unnecessarily so because it does not bring about any new explanations. Just a word play on the old stuff, basically.
Sure, it's fun to play the game of 'what if', and little harm can come of it, and there's always a possibility that one ends up with something that is actually better than the best existing theory. It's good for raising research funds. As a method for advancing knowledge it's no better than filling a room with typewriters and monkeys.
you.
yes, you, my dear AMERICAN slashdot reader.
take a moment now, and ponder.
who in the world has the ability to use all of these scary nuclear weapons of mass destruction? who, of all people, has these hideous weapons that you're desperately AND blatantly looking for in foreign territories? who, of all the world, has an insane silly monkey as a leader, guided by a bunch of insane war-mongers who believe in nothing but increased national PROFIT, has these weapons that the rest of the world is scared of?
if you, my fellow voting americans, are the joke, then pardon me for not laughing. i'm too afraid.
Earlier this year, when I was considering the options for using GPUs to do some quantum physics, I found out that there were serious bandwidth problems in the GPU drivers, and even though it was possible to send the data to a GPU for fast processing, the readback of results was awfully inefficient (so much so you lost any processing advantage). This has been solved now?
Errr....
...
;-))
i think you're confused. What you're saying is pretty much true as far as computer software & hardware goes -- i believe we really don't need every latest version that's being offered.
But musicians at the forefront have always been quick to adopt the newest technology and the most advanced instruments. B.B. King picked up his Lucille. Jimi Hendrix didn't settle for an old acoustic, he stomped the wah-wah. Pink Floyd and the tape delays, Keith Emerson, Bernie Worrel & Jarre with their synthesizers, and I won't even begin with hiphop, electro etc. that's using ANYTHING available. Do you think the present day fragmentation in musical genres would've ever occured if everyone had sticked with the cembalo?? Or think of the Stradivarius violins, or the Hohner piano. They were all THE technological advancements back in their days. Or shall I remind you of the revolution that computers have caused in the recording industry? You can have a top-notch digital home recording environment these days for the price of the ticket you had to pay in the seventies to fly to Abbey Road
Technologies DO mature. That's why there's still the Shure SM58, and the Les Paul, and Floyd Rose tremolo. That's why we get updated versions of synthesizers that 'only' mimic the vintage sound better (never mind that the racks needed in the seventies would fill a small truck...)
In my opinion, Roland has played a significant part in the evolution of musical instruments. Like you say, the old instruments ARE being actively used to create new music, and in this regard I can see why Roland would want to be precise when their property is under consideration. Yet while they can't find a direct evidence of a problem, they happily let the emulator continue its existence. Wish all companies were as level-headed and fair.
(But I do hope that Roland can't come up with the required evidence -- free beer is fine by me
and then you say
We need to pursue peaceful solutions in the future when possible
for once, the subject DID describe the content ...
Try reading the Silmarillion or the Unfinished Tales. Why, take a look at the Books of Lost Tales as well.
It is quite possible that those beautiful, indeed, essential volumes in the tale of the Middle-Earth would not exist without Christopher, or at least wouldn't, in all probability, fit in so well with the original published works of JRRT. Christopher is, quite understandably so, the best Tolkien scholar par none.
It's actually interesting how real life mirrors the fantasy. What Christopher's been doing with his father's writings is very much the same thing that Frodo and Sam did for Bilbo's Red Book.
I for my part am forever grateful for Christopher for publishing any- and everything his father left behind. And I understand his grudge with the franchising of Middle-Earth, even as I love the movies on their own accord.
Are they selling McLembas already?
I don't understand this concept of indeterminate relationship. It strikes me that his claim boils down to saying that time and motion are not possible unless you regard the set of physical relationships as constituting an uncountable infinity.
...
:)
which is a way of stating that the physical reality consists of an infinity of layers most conveniently imagined as a set of parallel universes, or multiverse for short. the set can be sliced in any angle, and it's ok to think of 'a parallel universe' as any subset of the actual cosmic spatial quantum configuration. within the set, 'time' has no meaning unless used synonymously with 'change' -- for the set, all time is now.
But what is the big deal with that? R is uncountable on an open interval, but it still retains a fully ordered relationship.
the big deal is that the world-view most prominently propagated by Everett, DeWitt and Deutsch, but superficially also by the eastern school of thought for the past coule of thousand years, is correct. reality is a multiverse. it can be understood. and there might be a lot more to living than most people realize
the time we feel and play our mind-games with is indeed subjective. i tend to think that, quite possibly, the subjects could be active in their experience -- that is, instead of passively observing the illusionary flow of time (resulting, in the first approximation, from the minimum energy difference between possible quantum configurations in the brain), the subject might be able to direct the flow.
feel free to continue on this track of thought for yourself
The multiverse theory states that time is quantized and the instances of time, or moments, actually constitute a parallel universe. Any quantum configuration does, and especially those with spatial structure such as DNA molecules.
Now watch your wallclock tick. Experience time.
You're testing it.
--
jussi
Also the fact that last night was the peak of Draconides meteor storm, which occasionally can reach the intensity of the more well known Leonid showers (I have no idea if the constellation is visible in Colorado area).
Still it seems a bit funny that there should be so many fireballs crashing down on a relatively small area.
2) Getting closer to the topic, this article smells kind of fishy. McFadden doesn't seem to understand Quantum Mechanics. I know, I know. He claims noone does, and on some fundamental level, that may be true. But we do know how to make some pretty damn precise calculations and predictions with it. Which requires at least some understanding.
Doing precise calculations and predictions with quantum mechanics requires no understanding about it -- we have been able to conceive a whole new civilization from the predictions of quantum physics without understanding what's going on. You say that in a double-split experiment, which is essentially a demonstration of single-particle interference, the electron goes "both ways in some sense". That "some sense" screams for explanation. Multiverse is currently the most straightforward explanation and requires no extra-assumptions (wrt to postulates of the quantum physics as formulated in the 20's), and for the moment I stick to it -- it is my explanation. But let's hear yours -- what happens in the single-particle interference "in some sense"?
3) The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is strongly disfavored (though not discredited) by physicists. Primarily because there is no real way of testing or disproving it. It predicts exactly the same things as the "orthodox" (aka Copenhagen) interpretation, which is simpler.
The multiverse interpretation has indeed been disfavored by physicists, although this is rapidly changing. In any case arguments of that kind do nothing to refute the theory of the multiverse itself, and reminds me of the troubles of Galilei. In the end, majority has no real authority in scientific reasoning, but explanatory power has.
Dear Professor,
in quantum mechanics we have perhaps the most succesful theory and tool ever devised by man. One of the strangest features of the theory in my opinion is that we have been able to use it without really understanding what it is all about -- for example, what *is* an electron? What happens in the Young experiment?
With various interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the copenhagen interpretation, hidden variable theories and the "multiverse" explanations, I wonder what would be Your personal opinion about the fundamental meaning of quantum mechanics? What kind of a universe do You live in?