I wouldn't disregard General Relativity because it is not easily reconciled with quantum physics. Just like Special Relativity, and indeed Newtonian dynamics (plus any quantum field theory you choose to name) it works very well when used in the correct context but will begin to fail when pushed beyond that.
General Relativity is incredibly successful at describing physics at large length scales and it is only when you try to use it at length scales tens of orders of magnitude smaller does it begin to break down. I would say it is pretty successful!
You mentioned QED and QCD. In all likelihood these theories are also only useful in describing physics at the TeV scale. Most of the scientific community expect to find departures from the Standard Model at or above this scale.
It is the last comment on which we disagree. I argue that faith is absolutely not required for science. Scientists should never absolutely trust any of their theories or measurements, and should always be ready to accept a better theory that comes along. The pursuit of science is reason free from passion.
A computer could do science; taking measurements and evaluating the results against a set of possible theories or parameters. Clearly a computer does not have *faith*.
Your definition of 'real faith' sounds more like 'expectation' to me. Personally I expect the sun to come up tomorrow, if it doesn't I would be very surprised. It would however be very interesting.
With regards to your comment that scientists have *faith* that the Scientific process leads us to a better understanding of the universe - the very fact that you are using a computer to send this message is clearly evidence that it does. Unless you think that computers just magically appear in factories?
Re:There is no Higgs Boson
on
No Higgs Just Yet
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm afraid that for your viewpoint to qualify as real science you have to get your hands dirty and come up with a competing theory that not only explains all of the measurements that have been performed in the past (not just by hand-waving arguments but actual numbers) and also makes predictions that can be tested. Do you have one of these or is this just some gut feeling?
Yeah, it doesn't really make any sense. If it requires a net connection to install and the test is passed, you have a legitimate piece of software and there is no reason for any further checks. Also, if pirates can beat the install check they can beat the startup check, so again there is no valid reason for startup checks.
The only possible reason for this check is that they can then control the end of the product cycle - 'From January 2013 we will no longer support this game and the verification servers will be take offline. If you wish to continue playing it you must purchase a further license.'
I agree that it is possible to obfuscate using operator overloading, but I don't see how denying the programmer access to this useful tool helps the issue. Can't a crazy Java programmer also make their 'mult' function concatenate in some strange way, or set their 'equals' function to convert to base 13?
There are no age-old libraries when you program on cutting edge megaflop and petaflop-scale supercomputers (Bluegene/P, Bluegene/Q, QCDOC) for high performance physics applications such as lattice QCD. Also the data analysis tools we use often require fits to ~20 parameter non-linear functions which would be virtually impossible to get right in Java syntax. For example check out some of the NNLO PQChPT fit forms on Bijnen's page.
I hardly think that it's the case anymore where people associate gaming with kids and nerds to that extent.
Caveat: IAAPCG (I am a PC gamer).
Just going by experience, even in my circle of friends comprising mostly scientists, most people I meet consider gaming to be the domain of kids or people with no life.
We could always run a Slashdot poll but I suspect the results would be somewhat biased...:)
We should not forget that people tend to associate handheld gaming consoles with nerds and children, whereas mobile phones are *cool*. Every day I see high powered businessmen suited up for a day at work playing Angry Birds on the subway, but I have never seen an adult using a Nintendo.
There is a strange thing that I have noticed after living in the US for a year: you guys behave very differently in traffic jams than people in the UK. People in the US tend to constantly accelerate and brake, accelerate and brake, stuttering their way along the road whereas people in the UK tend to stick it in a low gear and move along slowly but steadily. I suspect the latter is far more fuel efficient.
I have decided that the reason for this is that you guys use automatic gearboxes whereas we use manual; changing gears takes effort so people are reluctant to keep changing them up and down.
Not Americans though. Consider the luxury car market: BMW (Germany), Jaguar (England), Mercedes-Benz (Germany), Bentley (England), Maybach (Germany), Rolls Royce (England).
Even if they put the money in a bank that bank now has more assets to make loans.
Not American banks. Wealthy people are far more likely to use a Swiss or off-shore bank.
Trickle-down economies may have worked in the old world, but in the age of global economies it fails miserably. I say tax the rich and use the money to benefit the people of America
As a physicist I regularly write code for particle simulations for use on supercomputers and clusters, as well as for data analysis on workstations. If we were using Java the code would be virtually impossible to debug or maintain as the developer would have to spend insane amounts of time decoding the obfuscated fit formulae to find the error or understand what's going on.
I guess if you were some sort of masochist then you might decide to take the Java route, so in that sense it is not totally useless, but for my purposes and those of my collaboration, the language is essentially so, in that it would be stupid and ridiculous to use it. This is evidenced by the fact that I have written and used simulation/analysis code in C, C++, perl, python, Fortran, Mathematica, heck, even assembler, but never, not once, Java.
In addition, I have been a TA on an undergraduate course on scientific programming in Java, so I have firsthand experience with how much of a pain it is to use.
The lack (by choice apparently) of operator overloading cripples this language for any scientific application. They say they chose to deny operator overloading because it produces 'obfuscated' code. I would reply with something along the lines of:
c++:
Matrix A,B,C;
Matrix D = A*A+B/C + A*C
Java:
Matrix A,B,C;
Matrix D = A.mult(A).plus(B.div(C)).plus(A.mult(C))
Although my Java is pretty rusty, i'm pretty sure the more obfuscated code is definitely not the c++! Now try moving this to a massively parallel environment.
You're correct, I don't make a six figure salary. This is because I made the informed decision not to buy into the money-centric consumer culture that you clearly thrive in and instead chose a career in academia that is exciting and challenging.
I hope you enjoy continue to enjoy your fashion accessories. Did you pick the colour to go with your BMW?
I don't think they'll miss you. Lets face it, people like yourself who make informed decisions about such things are not a major component of Apple's consumer base!
In the UK it was called UFO: Enemy Unknown, and I must have racked up 200 hours on that game. Also, I think you would be surprised about how popular the game is; certainly there are at least three full discussions on this Slashdot article discussing elerium-115 (including one started by yours truly), and as one of the other commenters have pointed out, there are several active open source projects aiming to recreate it's splendour (this article has a list of the major projects).
Don't know where you got that information from. According to the font of all knowledge, U 235 makes up 0.72% of natural uranium and is fissile, whereas U 238 is not.
That would be the usual convention, yes. However the online UFOpaedia wiki site (and my vague recollections) suggest that it was also referred to as element 115 in the game. That being said, the wikipedia discussion on ununpentium argues that Elerium-115 should be interpreted as the Elerium isotope of mass 115 rather than element 115, prompting this pop-culture reference's removal from the article.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't disregard General Relativity because it is not easily reconciled with quantum physics. Just like Special Relativity, and indeed Newtonian dynamics (plus any quantum field theory you choose to name) it works very well when used in the correct context but will begin to fail when pushed beyond that.
General Relativity is incredibly successful at describing physics at large length scales and it is only when you try to use it at length scales tens of orders of magnitude smaller does it begin to break down. I would say it is pretty successful!
You mentioned QED and QCD. In all likelihood these theories are also only useful in describing physics at the TeV scale. Most of the scientific community expect to find departures from the Standard Model at or above this scale.
It is the last comment on which we disagree. I argue that faith is absolutely not required for science. Scientists should never absolutely trust any of their theories or measurements, and should always be ready to accept a better theory that comes along. The pursuit of science is reason free from passion.
A computer could do science; taking measurements and evaluating the results against a set of possible theories or parameters. Clearly a computer does not have *faith*.
Your definition of 'real faith' sounds more like 'expectation' to me. Personally I expect the sun to come up tomorrow, if it doesn't I would be very surprised. It would however be very interesting.
With regards to your comment that scientists have *faith* that the Scientific process leads us to a better understanding of the universe - the very fact that you are using a computer to send this message is clearly evidence that it does. Unless you think that computers just magically appear in factories?
I'm afraid that for your viewpoint to qualify as real science you have to get your hands dirty and come up with a competing theory that not only explains all of the measurements that have been performed in the past (not just by hand-waving arguments but actual numbers) and also makes predictions that can be tested. Do you have one of these or is this just some gut feeling?
Yeah, it doesn't really make any sense. If it requires a net connection to install and the test is passed, you have a legitimate piece of software and there is no reason for any further checks. Also, if pirates can beat the install check they can beat the startup check, so again there is no valid reason for startup checks.
The only possible reason for this check is that they can then control the end of the product cycle - 'From January 2013 we will no longer support this game and the verification servers will be take offline. If you wish to continue playing it you must purchase a further license.'
Big kids understand that by taking off the training wheels they risk falling off their bikes.
I agree that it is possible to obfuscate using operator overloading, but I don't see how denying the programmer access to this useful tool helps the issue. Can't a crazy Java programmer also make their 'mult' function concatenate in some strange way, or set their 'equals' function to convert to base 13?
There are no age-old libraries when you program on cutting edge megaflop and petaflop-scale supercomputers (Bluegene/P, Bluegene/Q, QCDOC) for high performance physics applications such as lattice QCD. Also the data analysis tools we use often require fits to ~20 parameter non-linear functions which would be virtually impossible to get right in Java syntax. For example check out some of the NNLO PQChPT fit forms on Bijnen's page.
I believe it is because they intended to finalise the standard within the first decade of this millennium rather than the second.
Correction:
2) Operator overloading: because
Matrix A, B, C, D;
A = A+B*C + A*D;
is so much more readable than
Matrix A, B, C, D;
A.equals(A.plus(B.mult(C)).plus(A.mult(D)));
.... oh wait, it is! This is why Java sucks and C++ rocks for scientific programming.
I hardly think that it's the case anymore where people associate gaming with kids and nerds to that extent.
Caveat: IAAPCG (I am a PC gamer).
Just going by experience, even in my circle of friends comprising mostly scientists, most people I meet consider gaming to be the domain of kids or people with no life.
We could always run a Slashdot poll but I suspect the results would be somewhat biased... :)
We should not forget that people tend to associate handheld gaming consoles with nerds and children, whereas mobile phones are *cool*. Every day I see high powered businessmen suited up for a day at work playing Angry Birds on the subway, but I have never seen an adult using a Nintendo.
There is a strange thing that I have noticed after living in the US for a year: you guys behave very differently in traffic jams than people in the UK. People in the US tend to constantly accelerate and brake, accelerate and brake, stuttering their way along the road whereas people in the UK tend to stick it in a low gear and move along slowly but steadily. I suspect the latter is far more fuel efficient.
I have decided that the reason for this is that you guys use automatic gearboxes whereas we use manual; changing gears takes effort so people are reluctant to keep changing them up and down.
You're thinking of The Typing of the Dead, which was an awesome game for learning how to touch-type while blasting zombies away.
will bring a whole new meaning to the word 'wardriving'.
Well someone had to build those cars and boats.
Not Americans though. Consider the luxury car market: BMW (Germany), Jaguar (England), Mercedes-Benz (Germany), Bentley (England), Maybach (Germany), Rolls Royce (England).
Even if they put the money in a bank that bank now has more assets to make loans.
Not American banks. Wealthy people are far more likely to use a Swiss or off-shore bank.
Trickle-down economies may have worked in the old world, but in the age of global economies it fails miserably. I say tax the rich and use the money to benefit the people of America
Yes actually.
As a physicist I regularly write code for particle simulations for use on supercomputers and clusters, as well as for data analysis on workstations. If we were using Java the code would be virtually impossible to debug or maintain as the developer would have to spend insane amounts of time decoding the obfuscated fit formulae to find the error or understand what's going on.
I guess if you were some sort of masochist then you might decide to take the Java route, so in that sense it is not totally useless, but for my purposes and those of my collaboration, the language is essentially so, in that it would be stupid and ridiculous to use it. This is evidenced by the fact that I have written and used simulation/analysis code in C, C++, perl, python, Fortran, Mathematica, heck, even assembler, but never, not once, Java.
In addition, I have been a TA on an undergraduate course on scientific programming in Java, so I have firsthand experience with how much of a pain it is to use.
.... for some definition of matrix division of course!
The lack (by choice apparently) of operator overloading cripples this language for any scientific application. They say they chose to deny operator overloading because it produces 'obfuscated' code. I would reply with something along the lines of:
c++:
Matrix A,B,C;
Matrix D = A*A+B/C + A*C
Java:
Matrix A,B,C;
Matrix D = A.mult(A).plus(B.div(C)).plus(A.mult(C))
Although my Java is pretty rusty, i'm pretty sure the more obfuscated code is definitely not the c++! Now try moving this to a massively parallel environment.
This will never happen again as it's only a matter of time before the bill of rights is copyrighted.
You're correct, I don't make a six figure salary. This is because I made the informed decision not to buy into the money-centric consumer culture that you clearly thrive in and instead chose a career in academia that is exciting and challenging.
I hope you enjoy continue to enjoy your fashion accessories. Did you pick the colour to go with your BMW?
I don't think they'll miss you. Lets face it, people like yourself who make informed decisions about such things are not a major component of Apple's consumer base!
In the UK it was called UFO: Enemy Unknown, and I must have racked up 200 hours on that game. Also, I think you would be surprised about how popular the game is; certainly there are at least three full discussions on this Slashdot article discussing elerium-115 (including one started by yours truly), and as one of the other commenters have pointed out, there are several active open source projects aiming to recreate it's splendour (this article has a list of the major projects).
Don't know where you got that information from. According to the font of all knowledge, U 235 makes up 0.72% of natural uranium and is fissile, whereas U 238 is not.
That would be the usual convention, yes. However the online UFOpaedia wiki site (and my vague recollections) suggest that it was also referred to as element 115 in the game. That being said, the wikipedia discussion on ununpentium argues that Elerium-115 should be interpreted as the Elerium isotope of mass 115 rather than element 115, prompting this pop-culture reference's removal from the article.