As was pointed out previously (but not clearly), the Higgs is not associated with gravity. The standard model has as parameters (inputs by hand) the masses of all particles. Basically, the Higgs mechanism is the way that the massless fields (particles are simply excitations of these fields and you can loosely use the two in place of each other) gain their MASS.
Now lets remember that gravity only acts (classically) between particles with mass. So, if we don't find the Higgs boson (this is the particle that the particles of the standard model couple to to acquire mass) people will simply access higher energies in search of the Higgs. If we conclude that the Higgs is not the way particles acquire mass, a revolution in the standard model will occur and an alternate formulation must be introduced.
So many things about this make me a little curious:
1. Why choose this Journal?
-It is almost completely dominated by biological sciences. This makes me wonder about the credentials of the reviewers and therefore the credentials of the paper.
-Why not PRC? Or if it is that great of a result- Science or Nature? 2. Why short communication rather than a full article?
-Is it really such a prolific article that they wanted to get a short comm. out immediately 3. They specifically mention CR-39 detectors which are well established and well understood detectors.
-Lends some credibility to results by minimizing some of their errors. 4. Reproduction of the results.
-They claim to be able to reproduce their results, which tells me they understand very well the production of their electrodes.
I will have to wait until Monday to read the original paper.
This is a very good point. Helping to foster interest in science in young girls should be at the forefront of American education. A very good way to do this is to show the women who perservered and accomplished when it was much harder for women to do so in hard sciences. Unfortunately, currently there are few (percentage wise) professional physicists who are female. (I am speaking of physics since that is what I know about- things may be different in biology, chemistry, etc.) So it seems we still do not have it right. Getting them hooked on math and science at an early age AND keeping them interested in it through high school and college seems to be a notion that is fundamental to America keeping (or regaining) its technological and academic edge in the world.
All great choices and von Neumann and Dyson are definately not known to society at large. What about some scientists that are still alive? I truly don't know if their life story would be interesting or not- or even if they have any biographies about them but here is a list of some I would be interested in:
Steven Weinberg (nobel prize winner)
JD Jackson (every physicist knows this guy from his electrodynamics book, but he did a lot of work in particle physics)
John Baez (a character and guru of mathematical physics)
Julian Schwinger (nobel prize winner with Feynman for QED and formulated the theory of renormalization and 4 of his students won nobel prizes too! He is dead though.)
John Bardeen (the man won TWO nobel prizes in physics! TWO! For the development of the BCS theory of superconductivity for which he is the B in BCS AND the development of the transistor... simply amazing.)
Hans Bethe (a true gem- just recently died. Seemed like he worked in every field of physics)
For some old(er) great ones:
Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger,
How much does it cost does to copy the current rovers in use now? Nasa is such a lost cause right now. Anytime they say anything, it is "we dont have enough money". Well, then why dont you just take the plans you used successfully a couple of years ago, exchange out some modules, and they walla.. Your new rover. In addition, why dont they try outsource it for a change? They are acting like a bunch of children...
Sounds like you have all the answers. Maybe you should write a proposal and see if you can get funded. Ever think that the cost of doing what you proposed might have been more than their budget would allow? Do you actually think that they are just looking to spend as much money as they possibly can on these missions. That if they could do things for cheaper without losing accuracy of experiments, or other mission parameters that they wouldn't? You know all those millionaire scientist who are just gobbling up NASA money and buying fast cars, big boats and jets are just such a drag on the NASA budget... oh wait, how do you spell Halliburton again?
Take a look at NASA's budget compared to most other agencies. It is in the bottom quartile for federal agencies. That is fine, it isn't as important to a society as education or health. But the public has this misguided notion that they should expect magnificent science from NASA all the time, for less money. That it is easy to do. The questions NASA is asked to solve are difficult. If they are not so difficult, why doesn't Japan have a crew exploration vehicle yet?
As for outsourcing... think about the new Homeland Security Department and look up "Export Control" sometime.
From the overview page of the Phoenix Mars Mission:
The Phoenix Mars Mission, scheduled for launch in August 2007, is the first in NASA's "Scout Program." Scouts are designed to be highly innovative and relatively low-cost complements to major missions being planned as part of the agency's Mars Exploration Program. Phoenix is specifically designed to measure volatiles (especially water) and complex organic molecules in the arctic plains of Mars, where the Mars Odyssey orbiter has discovered evidence of ice-rich soil very near the surface.
The idea is to have a lower cost mission. Congress is constantly not giving NASA a budget that can support the kind of vision both Scientists and Engineers want from the agency. In addition, the types of experiments that Phoenix is doing only needs a good landing pad. The idea isn't to go and run around the whole polar region and identify every square foot of rock and soil. The purpose is to find a region on the edge of the polar cap that is representative of the average region and test there. If they had an unlimited budget, I am sure the lead scientist and engineer would love to make the project mobile and maybe do this test a multiple sites. This is not the reality of a scientific agency that is constrained by the whims of a fickle public and an overly bureaucratic government.
The arxiv.org original paper can be found here. From what I understand of the original paper, they only did a non-rotating black holes. This paper is a significant step forward in numerical relativity because they were able to actually get information out about the gravitational waves that carry the energy away from the two black holes and allow for the inspiral to happen.
As mentioned in the paper, a lot of previous work has been done on this problem. Up to this point, one of the methods used was a circular orbit approximation.
The detection of gravitational waves will be a huge step forward for General Relativity and these simulations are very important for the groups doing the data analysis like the LIGO Scientific Collaboration Group at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who work on the data analysis of the scientific runs from LIGO. It allows them to test their detection algorithms more accurately so that when(if) they detect an event, greater confidence can be given about the detection.
This is an interesting notion. But how can you compare? The curriculum that students have access to these days is far and away better. Access to Advanced Placement classes is increasing. Case in point is the Wisconsin Advanced Placement Distance Education Consortium WAPDEC. The expectations may not be there from teachers, but the individual drive of the "elite" students should make up for that. The access of current students to technology is much greater today (I believe). These elite students have always been outside of pop culture thus that has no effect on them.
When you are talking about Bell Labs of yester-year, you are talking about some Nobel Laureates. Can you even compare genuis of that level? So... if you think the "go-getters" that made it to the top Labs, such as Bell, back then are your Average Joe that attends public school, you are wrong.
There are possible tests at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which will make predictions that could discredit M-theory (which is the current version of Superstring theory). One possiblility is presented in http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0503178. The paper argues that experiments at the LHC can deduce if the number of extra dimensions is signifcantly larger than 6 or 7. This allows them to investigate one of the problems addressed in a previous post regarding string theory compactifications.
Although this isn't M-theory predicting something and an experiment testing it. In addition, future tests of proton stability can put tighter constraints on the validity of any theory that predicts the dimensions of our universe are more than 4. This is because having more than 4 dimensions naturally leads to the proton being unstable to decay.
the next Law and Order Series: Law and Order: IT. They can deal with the horrors of crackin' systems in a world that cannot spend more then 2 hours away from their computer at a time...
While it is nice to have online information for the average person to look up things, how many authors who have published in Nature have actually cited something from either source. My guess is that you could count them on one hand. Especially for the case of wikipedia, since the content will change with time. Neither of these two sources are authoratative on any subject and the world should know that by now.
Slashdot Mirror
As was pointed out previously (but not clearly), the Higgs is not associated with gravity. The standard model has as parameters (inputs by hand) the masses of all particles. Basically, the Higgs mechanism is the way that the massless fields (particles are simply excitations of these fields and you can loosely use the two in place of each other) gain their MASS.
Now lets remember that gravity only acts (classically) between particles with mass. So, if we don't find the Higgs boson (this is the particle that the particles of the standard model couple to to acquire mass) people will simply access higher energies in search of the Higgs. If we conclude that the Higgs is not the way particles acquire mass, a revolution in the standard model will occur and an alternate formulation must be introduced.
So many things about this make me a little curious:
1. Why choose this Journal?
-It is almost completely dominated by biological sciences. This makes me wonder about the credentials of the reviewers and therefore the credentials of the paper.
-Why not PRC? Or if it is that great of a result- Science or Nature?
2. Why short communication rather than a full article?
-Is it really such a prolific article that they wanted to get a short comm. out immediately
3. They specifically mention CR-39 detectors which are well established and well understood detectors.
-Lends some credibility to results by minimizing some of their errors.
4. Reproduction of the results.
-They claim to be able to reproduce their results, which tells me they understand very well the production of their electrodes.
I will have to wait until Monday to read the original paper.
Nothing new to see here people, keep moving...
when they built that ladder to heaven?
This is a very good point. Helping to foster interest in science in young girls should be at the forefront of American education. A very good way to do this is to show the women who perservered and accomplished when it was much harder for women to do so in hard sciences. Unfortunately, currently there are few (percentage wise) professional physicists who are female. (I am speaking of physics since that is what I know about- things may be different in biology, chemistry, etc.) So it seems we still do not have it right. Getting them hooked on math and science at an early age AND keeping them interested in it through high school and college seems to be a notion that is fundamental to America keeping (or regaining) its technological and academic edge in the world.
All great choices and von Neumann and Dyson are definately not known to society at large. What about some scientists that are still alive? I truly don't know if their life story would be interesting or not- or even if they have any biographies about them but here is a list of some I would be interested in:
Steven Weinberg (nobel prize winner)
JD Jackson (every physicist knows this guy from his electrodynamics book, but he did a lot of work in particle physics)
John Baez (a character and guru of mathematical physics)
Julian Schwinger (nobel prize winner with Feynman for QED and formulated the theory of renormalization and 4 of his students won nobel prizes too! He is dead though.)
John Bardeen (the man won TWO nobel prizes in physics! TWO! For the development of the BCS theory of superconductivity for which he is the B in BCS AND the development of the transistor... simply amazing.)
Hans Bethe (a true gem- just recently died. Seemed like he worked in every field of physics)
For some old(er) great ones:
Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger,
Take a look at NASA's budget compared to most other agencies. It is in the bottom quartile for federal agencies. That is fine, it isn't as important to a society as education or health. But the public has this misguided notion that they should expect magnificent science from NASA all the time, for less money. That it is easy to do. The questions NASA is asked to solve are difficult. If they are not so difficult, why doesn't Japan have a crew exploration vehicle yet?
As for outsourcing... think about the new Homeland Security Department and look up "Export Control" sometime.
The idea is to have a lower cost mission. Congress is constantly not giving NASA a budget that can support the kind of vision both Scientists and Engineers want from the agency. In addition, the types of experiments that Phoenix is doing only needs a good landing pad. The idea isn't to go and run around the whole polar region and identify every square foot of rock and soil. The purpose is to find a region on the edge of the polar cap that is representative of the average region and test there. If they had an unlimited budget, I am sure the lead scientist and engineer would love to make the project mobile and maybe do this test a multiple sites. This is not the reality of a scientific agency that is constrained by the whims of a fickle public and an overly bureaucratic government.
The arxiv.org original paper can be found here. From what I understand of the original paper, they only did a non-rotating black holes. This paper is a significant step forward in numerical relativity because they were able to actually get information out about the gravitational waves that carry the energy away from the two black holes and allow for the inspiral to happen.
As mentioned in the paper, a lot of previous work has been done on this problem. Up to this point, one of the methods used was a circular orbit approximation.
The detection of gravitational waves will be a huge step forward for General Relativity and these simulations are very important for the groups doing the data analysis like the LIGO Scientific Collaboration Group at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who work on the data analysis of the scientific runs from LIGO. It allows them to test their detection algorithms more accurately so that when(if) they detect an event, greater confidence can be given about the detection.
This is an interesting notion. But how can you compare? The curriculum that students have access to these days is far and away better. Access to Advanced Placement classes is increasing. Case in point is the Wisconsin Advanced Placement Distance Education Consortium WAPDEC. The expectations may not be there from teachers, but the individual drive of the "elite" students should make up for that. The access of current students to technology is much greater today (I believe). These elite students have always been outside of pop culture thus that has no effect on them.
When you are talking about Bell Labs of yester-year, you are talking about some Nobel Laureates. Can you even compare genuis of that level? So... if you think the "go-getters" that made it to the top Labs, such as Bell, back then are your Average Joe that attends public school, you are wrong.
There are possible tests at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which will make predictions that could discredit M-theory (which is the current version of Superstring theory). One possiblility is presented in http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0503178. The paper argues that experiments at the LHC can deduce if the number of extra dimensions is signifcantly larger than 6 or 7. This allows them to investigate one of the problems addressed in a previous post regarding string theory compactifications. Although this isn't M-theory predicting something and an experiment testing it. In addition, future tests of proton stability can put tighter constraints on the validity of any theory that predicts the dimensions of our universe are more than 4. This is because having more than 4 dimensions naturally leads to the proton being unstable to decay.
Doesn't anyone know a crayfish when the see one? This truly looks much more like a crayfish than a scorpion.
the next Law and Order Series: Law and Order: IT. They can deal with the horrors of crackin' systems in a world that cannot spend more then 2 hours away from their computer at a time...
While it is nice to have online information for the average person to look up things, how many authors who have published in Nature have actually cited something from either source. My guess is that you could count them on one hand. Especially for the case of wikipedia, since the content will change with time. Neither of these two sources are authoratative on any subject and the world should know that by now.