Many graduate programs have core graduate physics courses, perhaps 4 to 6. The enduring standards over the last few decades are Classical Mechanics by Goldstein, Electromagnetics by Jackson, Statistical physics by Reif, QM (not sure if there are enduring classics there).
You've got to be able to work problems out of these books quite well.
I would reccomend that you read a survey course book in astronomy like Chaison's Astronomy today. It's a gentle introduction into the current astronomy suitable for even a freshman. A good intro to physics is a University physics book such as Sears and Zemansky (now written by Young and Freedman). This covers the calculus version of the basics - 1100 pages covered in two to three semesters.
Then, in order to get to the level of the graduate texts, there are typically one to three courses between the basics and the graduate level. This is in electromagnetics, quantum theory, statistical physics, classical mechanics, thermodynamics. Optics is another probable option.
The feynman lectures are great for explanations and concepts. Use them in concert with other texts for good results.
you also need to learn error analysis and basics of experimental methods taught in undergrad labs.
Remember, math has the principle tools of science but it is not the science.
I worked on load shedding projects 25 years ago that had tens of thousands of units installed and covered large fractions of some states. It used radio pager technology and temporarily shut down selected groups of units, each had an item, such as the air conditioner, hot water heater, irrigation pump, that would be shut down for about 15 minutes when commanded by the computer in the office. Different groups would be shut down each time to spread the inconvenience. Participation wasn't exactly optional.
Near as I can tell, the advent of the smart meter, an idea back then whose time had not yet come due to the cost and reliability of the technology involved, has brought about schemes to exploit the lack of reliability of people in order to extract more profits from them. Other than that, it would seem this whole thing is just another rehash of an idea already in successful operation over two decades ago and not limited by having people voluntarily doing something.
what? after all buffet's crap about how the death tax that takes away family farms and family businesses is a good thing? and how he's going to leave his worthless kids almost broke????
An object the size of the human body is always being bombarded by a combination of radioactive decay and cosmic ray secondary particles. The almost obligatory encounter in education with the little yellow radiation survey meter, unchanged from the 1950s, shows the typical click, click, click click click, click when nothing seriously radioactive is present in the immediate area, implying there's only the occaisional event. That is very misleading as it is a rather insensitive measurement over a mere fraction of a cubic inch. An oscillocope trace of a body sized sensitive detector looks more like the oscilloscope trace of heavy metal music group's sound track.
While it's theoretically possible that a single radioactive event could start the chain of events leading to a genetic mutation or some virulent cancer, neither are likely at all with essentially zero probability. Once the immediate danger of susceptability to a severely weakened immune system is over, there is little left in the way of damage or danger. Otherwise, green skin and tenacles would be fairly commonplace and tgi fridays would ressemble the bar in the first star wars movie.
In other words, in that meadow where no one ever thought of building a large research telescope, those daisys are responsible for the destruction of the universe. I wonder if the act of thinking about building a telescope there might accelerate the end of the universe even further. LOL
At times it looks like the failure to create the unified field theory may be due to the problem that cosmology is not yet as screwed up as qm. Perhaps this article is the beginning of a correction to that problem which will quickly lead to the unified theory.
actually, the gov. plan is to subvert china into a capitalist state - assuming that the mentality of the majority of chinese is the same westernized version that existed in american pioneers two and three hundred years ago. Unfortunately, it's not even that common in the US now. It would also seem that china's plan is to subvert the US into socialism. It appears a multipronged approach including sabotaged products and funding antiamerican prosocialist political candidates. Anyone notice any chinese army related campaign funding flaps in the US presidential race yet, er, other than lots of independently wealthy kitchen staff in some chinese restaurants?
makes sense for the most part. Problem could be knowing who's who. The frogs might have assumed we're the best at detecting satellites and would never 'out' our own but would 'out' every other one. Then again that ephimeris might include all the space debris as well (hazards to navigation).
It's probably almost foolish to believe we've got almost anything the russians don't know about and that if they know, the rest of our enemies do too - at least for any long term asset up there.
Comments were already made concerning people versus books as being influential.
However, books can help promote and further one's interest in science if one gains some bit of interest. SciFi can help a great deal but it's a double edged sword. Star Trek influenced a generation, according to some. There's a history channel program about how william shatner changed the world that includes interviews of many examples where people were influenced to think and invent some of the staples of our modern technological society. The flip side is that I think star trek helped create a lack of interest in our space program - how can going to the moon compare to traveling to the stars?
That said, for the more mature and interested budding scientist or engineer, Dava Sobel's book "Longitude" is quite the fascinating read. Her other book has never enticed me to continue reading past chapter one so I can't comment on it. Another book that has some fascinating things to learn is "The Measure of All Things". Note there is another by an almost identical name which I've not read as well. The first is the struggle to establish reliable longitude measurement, a key nautical consideration. The second is an attempt to measure the length of the prime meridian and establish the length of the meter - where the notions of scientist versus savant and accuracy versus resolution are presented.
well it does facilitate people going through areas where they maybe shouldn't be going - even if its potholes and uneven walking areas rather than muggers in the bushes.
you might try solving the eqn for the configuration(s) first then getting the values. Perhaps Maxima or some of the other symbolic capable math programs might offer aide.
Otherwise, seems like the best book I've seen on practical handling of complex mathematics is Numerical Recipes which has versions in fortran, c and other languages.
seems like a good friend just finished teaching a graduate level partial differential equations class last spring that covered wave equations substantially. If you have a particular one and particular constraints - I might be able to enquire on it. Again, this is solving - not numerical methods.
It's been called video astronomy for years. In more recent times, webcams have started to dominate due to the direct input into the computer. Programs such as Registax, a free program on the web, have been around for years and through many iterations. In essence, this is done using relatively small telescopes and relatively insensitive equipment, mostly limiting it to planets, sun and moon. It consists of alignment since both the mount and the sky tend to vary the position of the object somewhat. In fact, this random noise of position permits higher resolution imaging than the pixel resolution of the camera. (random noise gets reduced or eliminated by statistics)
The easiest way to think of it is that the atmosphere does all sorts of weird things over a short time frame. It can displace the object slightly. It can bring it into perfect focus briefly and then blur it out tremendously. It can do this even to a portion of the image. Programs such as registax have alignment sections and stacking or combining sections. The use of fourier analysis and point spread functions can be done to measure quality - as can manual efforts. There are usually quite a few options that can be specified as well as settings. On the combined image, registax uses wavelet processing to balance 'noise' with data in the final image and it is strictly an artistic and personal preference decision.
Typically, the planetary stuff is averaged which provides lower noise per number of raw images than summing, which is needed for dim objects. One finds a few hundred to a few thousand raw images combined into a final image of extraordinary quality.
This stuff was pioneered by the amateur community. However, a few years back it was used to get an image of mercury's surface using a 60" telescope in california and tens of thousands of images were analyzed and combined.
Due to the nature of low photon count imaging and high noise, video astronomy has been quite limited in achieving much in the way of extended exposures based on short time frames, such as 1/20 second. However, fairly dim scenes have been brought into the realm of being recognizable out of a series of video frames that appeared to be total noise. Image intensifiers have also been used to image dim deep sky objects with some bit of success.
Since typical good seeing tends to vary somewhat in the subsecond realm, even exposures of a few seconds tend to blur and keeping telescopes tracking to that level is virtually impossible. Fortunately, so many deep sky objects of interest to amateurs are quite large and require mostly time.
What actually sets this new effort apart is the low noise camera which actually permits short sub second exposures to be summed at the lowest of intensities without the injection of random noise - typically readout noise which is for the normal ccd somewhere in the 3-20 electron count average per pixel. Since the sensitivity of the typical astronomy camera ccd ranges from 20-70 or 80% quantum efficiency (100% is one electron per photon) at least at the peak sensitivity wavelength of the ccd, short images aren't that practical when short is under 1 second for a dim deep sky object. That's where this new camera is making waves. If versions can be had for under $10k US, there will even be a market in the amateur world. However, the thinned ccds I noticed described on their website can cost as much as a house which is outside the realm of the dedicated fanatic (and the small college imaging program).
The article is nice to see and it's nice to hear about the new camera. Seeing it named 'lucky' reminds me of a fortune cookie and it really isn't luck but rather persistance and the ability to isolate clear seeing instants from blurry averages. And besides, the technique already has a name - it's called video imaging techniques and they did not invent it. What's more, it's also known as the poor man's adapative optics.
One would have to do a full analysis to determine just how costly those government provided things are. When I look at my landline phone bill, I see I must still be paying for those things as like the cellphone bill, there is substantial numbers of taxes that can add up to half the total of that bill. As far as I can tell, the REA and telephone efforts were essentially finished sometime before I was even born. whether or not doing this and opening the door for more people moving to rural areas can also be hotly debated.
I do live in a rural area, miles outside of a small town and over an hours drive to an actual city, although small. And I was aware of internet access limitations then and now. My solution initially was dial up which runs about 22kb. That is the preferred solution of numerous neighbors who do not use the internet for much at all. In the 5 years I've been here, there seems to be no movement for cheap DSL to this area.
My current solution is cheap satellite, primarily because it was about the same cost as maintaining a dedicated telephone line and with two people sharing the link, having essentially DSL speed is far preferrable to having half dial up speed, especially split 2 ways.
While unsuitable for gaming or downloading movies or lots of music, I don't find that to be a problem. It is about 3 times the price of cheap DSL which is somewhat of a factor. Also, one must maintain their dial up option or risk being down in bad weather, either here or at the associated earth station.
There is or will be another solution in this area soon. It is currently in limited use and is rather innovative. It is WiFi with high gain antennas mounted at height. Coverage for one can be in excess of 2 or 3 miles with a similar mounted antenna and the backbone, including redundancy has high speed links over dozens of miles. DSL is only good for 3-5 miles or so from the phone substation. These souped up WiFis are capable of that and more - without infrastructure in between. It becomes a matter of sufficient customer base in the area of coverage for the equipment and a suitable location with power at an appropriate altitude - building or tower.
As for government solutions - all one has to do is look at the FCC's support for the disastrously bad, unecessary and polluting crap referred to as BPL, virtually guaranteed (and proven in almost all trials) to destroy radio communications occurring near by, including emergency communications. So far, it has fortunatley proven to be economically disastrous for those actually engaged in doing it and there are always superior ways available.
Having worked in SCADA for years, some time back, security was generally not a serious concern over the communications channels. Since I've not been involved in the arena since before the first world trade center bombing or since ethernet interconnects became practical for embedded systems, concerns back then were not based on anything but common sense and forward thinking - at least beyond that provided the operations center at company hq.
Original SCADA systems often used conditioned lease lines going from point a to point b via the phone company. Others used radio (vhf/uhf) and virtually none used dial up telephone. Consequently, vendors used their own proprietary protocols which were concerned with security only for integrity of message. Earlier systems were even non asynchronous in many cases. In some cases, message timing was even part of the security which could be rough for those migrating to radio links.
For power line systems, some even used power line carriers rather than conditioned lines.
As time progressed, the cost and availability of conditioned phone lines made other solutions more attractive. The advent of the $10,000 - $20,000 satellite radio link started looking attractive. This is where the break occurred between pretty much having secure lines and having something that could be 'hacked' or potentially destroyed militarily from halfway around the world.
My recommendations on that and the fact that satellite signals can fade due to rain and heavy cloud cover brought in the notion of a backup dialup line. However, protocols at that time became so intrenched and the cost of SCADA systems so high, it was quite common to keep old protocols when expanding or updating systems. Security for the data transmissions was left to the satellite system people who merely pieced together the SCADA protocol messages being run thru their system and feed them serially to and from the RTU.
With backup - like a dialup line - the system wasn't subject to what has now known as a denial of service attack. Back then the internet was still called the ARPA net and was not in common use, nor was it designed for security beyond message integrity. However, a system such as what I worked on would be most vulnerable to a specific attack requiring information of the SCADA protocol and preferrably the actual system layout and perhaps even current scheduling information - something very unlikely to be acquired except via an inside agent although great damage would be possible simply with a knowledge of the protocol and the ability to monitor message traffic and insert one's own messages into the flow.
Other than DoS attacks, it should be possible to protect SCADA operating via the internet although I'm not a fan of such malarky. Actually, the notion of using other than embedded systems running code that is totally known and understood does not give me warm and fuzzy feelings. Using some mickeysoft operating system that crashes and is subject to infection from any highschool kid with a malicious streak is just not the sort of thing to use except in the most limited of man-machine interfacing.
Einstein didn't have a phd while working as a patent clerk. However, he did do theoretical research and published papers that changed the nature of physics while he was a patent clerk.
Advances are made by those dedicated souls who want to do what they want to do and will do so no matter what. What's more, the learning only starts after the degrees are earned as the degrees essentially provided the most rudimentary of tools in order for learning to progress effectively.
Giving away educations will tend to make them valueless. Flooding the market will reduce the rewards for the efforts of those involved and reduce any incentives for others to excel. For those who want to enjoy the rewards of their labor, that means they'll have to learn and work in other areas.
Are college educations too expensive now? Undoubtedly! It would seem the gov. and bureaucratic incompetence pervades academia far more so now than in the past. Are there too many lawyers around? - Without a doubt! Would we be better off as a society with more smart engineers and scientists and fewer lawyers? Probably.
Unfortunately, virtually no scientist or engineer has ever earned the type of money that any of the many rap stars and pond scum atheletes like that Vick fellow. In general, they earn some amount associated with the value that others in society place on their contributions to society. It's not the record company execs who ultimately establish that value, it's the people who buy that rap crap who do.
Nothing new about that. Half the journalists around on the national scene are nothing but leftist democrat political operatives AND have worked full time in that capacity on and off for years - from bill moyers, ace dirty campaigner for lbj in the 60s, to georgie step-on-all-of-us of the former clinton regime there are few if any unbiased ones out there. As for the supposed equal and balanced flip side, Novak and Buchanan may be the intelectual balance of the rest of the other side, but they are most certainly outnumbered 10 to 1 in total number of warm bodies.
As for the bloggers doing research - just look at the dan rather controversy. Now there's an example of the preemanent 'unbiased' major media personality - dan rather with all the resources of CBS News - checking out his story on bush's 30 yr old previous national guard service allegations - probably being fed to him by his leftist political activist daughter - just in time to attack bush for the 2004 presidential election - obviously timed to produce maximum damage. It evidently took no time at all to realize the document was a very recent forgery, being done on a modern word processing program rather than an antique typewriter of the era.
This story is virtually the norm in the major media now, not a spurious one time event.
Unfortunately, you're missing something serious. Note the comment on liquid water boiling. It's happening due to the lack of pressure. Guess what, boiling requires the serious absorption of energy for the change of phase. It's going to give up thermal energy in order to boil, cooling down rapidly, until the remaining liquid actually freezes. That means if one's saliva boils - as mentioned in the article, it could well freeze and give someone a frostbit tongue. Also, I would expect offhand that there could be a great deal of 'freezer burn' that could occur - sublimation. Finally, a bit of 'gas' would make for a serious problem.
Whether any of these would kill someone off is perhaps potluck. Vision could be quite a problem if the eyeballs virtually freeze. For sure, air embolism would be fatal as would only 15 seconds of consciousness in a dangerous situation. Considering that there is some expansion of the body - as proved by the existance of the 'bends' there is possibly some problems in that arena too although the 10-12 psi in space craft going down to 0 psi doesn't seem to be a huge pressure differential.
searching for 'reality' scenarios in movies though is quite a waste. At best, it's a marketing gimmick for them.
I wonder if tim mcveigh had been detected and his his ton or two of amfo been siezed prior to his trip to OK city, would he be claiming his 5th amendment rights had been violated?
Also, if you're so worried about 5th amendment property rights, are you concerned over the 'takings' going on in various places by various levels of gov. who are then giving it to others for some sort of commercial projects that might net the gov. a little more in property taxes?
Finally, are you concerned at all about all this gun control hype that threatens to take one's property (firearms) away?
If you were concerned about the 5th, you'd be concerned about these every bit as much as you would be over the drug siezure laws which have been violating the 5th amendment rights for some time now - and not just for the druggies. If you pull less than $10000 in cash from your bank account (in some areas), you will be flagged and investigated. If you are stopped by authorities and found to have $10000 on your person, they can sieze it and it could cost you more than that just to get it back. And, this has happened to people who have nothing to do with the drug trade, but who merely do some cash business.
A steam engine is an external combustion engine with excellent torque and pretty decent power/weight. As such it can be made less polluting and potentially more efficient than an internal combustion engine. When it comes to energy transfer from one medium to another, inefficiencies and losses occur at every step or conversion of one form to another and the steam engine can get away with fewer conversions. What's more, a steam engine only needs a heat source to provide energy for operation. One can mechanical motion directly from the thermally induced expansion - and it's possible to reduce that motion down to minimal levels while not having a transmission, unlike internal combustion engines. And, if youre worried about co2, an external combustion situation can be better controlled for capturing and sequestering carbon than could be an internal combustion situation. Also, being external combustion, it's not picky and choosy over what is burned. There is even a stirling engine which can use the same techniques on ambient air using solar energy.
Over my lifetime which includes a good bit of secular and religious interactions, from nobel prize winners to illiterate illegal aliens - and everything in between, I've met perhaps 5 to 10 people who believed in a 6000 yr old earth - and one of those had a phd in hydrology and was a retired professor from a fairly prestigeous university. That gentleman didn't appear to be antiscience having spent his life involved in it, but rather just a believer in a young earth hypothesis which he offered scientific arguments for his position.
I've also encountered other 'believers' that insisted evolution was the gospel and that it mandated long term stability of the planetary conditions for such to occur. They obliterated the notion of catastrophism as not being able to occur because earth had to be stable. LOL. I think they're still fighting the notion that dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid and that it must've been some other reason. Now that the levy shoemaker comet hit jupiter for all the world to see what could happen with a major impact, it would seem that some have decided we won't get hit because jupiter will block them from getting here. I guess they spent too much time in biology class to have ever taken astronomy and haven't yet figured out that sometimes the big gas giants are on the other side of the solar system - and that occurs almost every year (LOL).
Consequently, your test is not a particularly reasonable one. First, it might actually eliminate someone with a strong belief that might not be a factor - although extremely unlikely as there are so few of them, a tiny fraction of the fundamentalist sect. Second, and most important, it does nothing to catch any of the vast majority of anti-science types who exist today.
You'd be better served just asking the question whether they believe in socialism and/or communism. If they say yes, then eliminate them as they are totally naive or ignorant, they are ignoring hundreds of years of proof it's defective as well as being shown to be theoretically defective and since two tenents of that 'religion' are that "the end justifies the means" and that "the truth is whatever promotes the agenda" is in conflict with the fundamental notion of scientific truth. It's the economics equivalent of a 6000 yr old flat earth at the center of the universe.
This is obviously not only the age of tabloid journalism, it's the age of tabloid science.
I'm surprised there's no stories on re-animating anna nichole (and ultimately elvis). Or maybe dr. frankenstein lost the pr battle a long time ago.
quantum entanglement (spooky action at a distance or whatever you want to call it) is a fascinating sci-fi-ish concept anyway - except that it's real. Such a thing should be fascinating for anyone with a modicum of curiousity and by the sounds of it, their research is actually doing something to expand knowledge. Sometime in the future, if and when we ever spread out from the earth, such a mechanism might be the instant radio stylecommunications across vast distances. It doesn't need to be hyped and tied to cancelled television show that existed prior to the birth of most of the people on this planet.
The total worthless BS of a startrek transporter that requires the energy to totally dismantle every molecule of an object and send the information somewhere else was nothing more than deux ex machima solution to solve the obvious problem that the big starship wasn't designed to land and shuttles seemed too inefficient to transport sufficient people and supplies.
Heck the very notion was obscene. Imagine someone stepping into a disintergration chamber just so some identical twin could be replicated somewhere. It's either that, or some never mentioned notion of an ability to transfer the 'soul' in the information stream as well. The primary benefit of the transporter was that it offered new venues of exploration for writers with writer's block.
Outsourcing is nothing new. Kennedy tried to hire the mob to 'rub out' fidel castro.
edwin wilson (alias merchant of death) was a contractor at one time back in the 70s.
Near as I can tell, the clintons didn't bother much with the intellegence community for their efforts and directly contracted out the private detectives to attack their enemies. They collected FBI files on hundreds of political opponents (and got caught). And, currently, it's come out they've (or she, now) have been having cell phones of political opponents being 'bugged' rather much like what the dems used against bayhner? and gingrich with political operatives following them around with cellphone capable scanners - in direct violation of criminal telecommunications statutes dating back to the 1930s. Of course now, the equipment is much more specialized and expensive than back then.
In contrast, the bush administration won't even secure the borders or prosecute espionage cases pertaining to former clinton associates like sandy burglar.
An old idea dating back to the 70s or 80s was the notion of putting solar energy collection onto satellites, converting it to microwave and transmitting it to a small region of earth where it would be received and converted straight to electricity. By using a large enough antenna, the energy density would have been low enough to keep from broiling anything in the area. While there are doubtless all sorts of problems with the approach (like adding to the earth's energy budget, slightly cooking tweetie pie and donald duck etc) it does offer the ability to get around the daytime night time problem, normal atmospheric extinction of radiant enegy at various wavelengths and the very nasty problem of cloudy and rainy days.
This article is about concentrator solar cells where light from an area 10 to 100 times that of the cell is focused down on the cell. There's another physorg article linked to the story from 2005. It seems these people are a year behind their own stated expectations. The number of $3/watt for the equipment, probably in very large multimegawatts commercial systems was claimed in the 2005 article to be on the horizon.
For an installed system to cost $3/watt would mean that purchasing it might pay off in 2 to 4 years. Note it's a leap of faith here that their expectations are on and that a small personal system could be done for that price. However, a 3 to 5 year payout for a commercial venture might actually be acceptable.
However, looking at it another way - comparing it to putting the $3 in a savings account earning interest, it would seem that the electricity generation would provide a 9% interest rate for the money, except that eventually, the principle would be eaten up as well.
These numbers are using my own electric bill rates of.13 / kwh and assumptions of a 6 hr average day over 360 days/yr which are probably a fair average for here. It also assumes a system to suppliment power by feeding back into the power line anything that is not consumed at generation time to reduce the electric bill at full residential rates and that this is not an off the grid system with massive expense of storage for off times.
It will be interesting to see what sort of longevity results as semiconductors don't like heat and almost 60% of the incoming energy will become heat and the fact that it is concentrated means it's rather like using a magnifying glass to burn something. However, that 60% heat energy might could be harnessed for solar thermal activity as it is likely to be more significantly concentrated and generating higher temperatures than would be something like a typical solar water heater.
Since there was no mention of this or of the potential need for a cooling system, one can only assume that this $3 may not have been referring to anything but the basic solar panel.
Offhand, it may become a race between these high efficiency approaches and the cheap, low efficiency ones like the dye based cells from New Zealand that made the rounds a few months back.
Hazzarding a guess, I'd suspect that the low efficiency dye based ones might dominate the market for home based noncommercial systems while the concentrator high efficiency devices might win out in the commercial power generation market. This is assuming that both can become feasible and achieve fairly competitive cost/benefit ratios at some respective level of generation.
However, for the global warming worrier crowd, solar isn't a panacea. This little thing called albedo or the light and heat energy reflecting back off into space is a rather important factor, possibly more so than co2 if large areas of land are converted to solar power and significantly change the albedo amount. It's not necessarily a deal killer but it's got to be dealt with.
Having a technical degree and an mba certainly can open up even more venues for work, including work that is interesting and creative. It's important to do something that you like. Otherwise, you'll wake up one morning 15yrs later and realize you cannot take it anymore - leaving you and your family in the lurch.
Just having an mba isn't a good route for the creative person as creative accounting tends to lead one to a more boring existance - creating license plates for the state.
Granted the ranks of mbas are rife with corporate socialists who are in it only for themselves, but ultimately, they wind up hurting everyone and everything else including themselves, opening the door for opportunity for others concerned with doing a good job as well as getting paid for it.
It's a large creature but it's also basically a one of a kind.
One of my friends is down there now on that project. Vostock has always been on the menu, although probably not for something that big either. Europa is an entirely plausible venture as they have equipment on new horizon which is working rather well - although again, it's not for the prototype.
The gizmo has about 30+ microprocessors networked together, just about one for every section and function. I think once they get the basics operational and the initial testing complete is when they'll start making it into a tabletop device rather than a table sized device. While there's limits on this size due to deep diving requirements, it still should be capable of being somewhat smaller.
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You've got a tough road.
Many graduate programs have core graduate physics courses, perhaps 4 to 6. The enduring standards over the last few decades are Classical Mechanics by Goldstein, Electromagnetics by Jackson, Statistical physics by Reif, QM (not sure if there are enduring classics there).
You've got to be able to work problems out of these books quite well.
I would reccomend that you read a survey course book in astronomy like Chaison's Astronomy today. It's a gentle introduction into the current astronomy suitable for even a freshman. A good intro to physics is a University physics book such as Sears and Zemansky (now written by Young and Freedman). This covers the calculus version of the basics - 1100 pages covered in two to three semesters.
Then, in order to get to the level of the graduate texts, there are typically one to three courses between the basics and the graduate level. This is in electromagnetics, quantum theory, statistical physics, classical mechanics, thermodynamics. Optics is another probable option.
The feynman lectures are great for explanations and concepts. Use them in concert with other texts for good results.
you also need to learn error analysis and basics of experimental methods taught in undergrad labs.
Remember, math has the principle tools of science but it is not the science.
I worked on load shedding projects 25 years ago that had tens of thousands of units installed and covered large fractions of some states. It used radio pager technology and temporarily shut down selected groups of units, each had an item, such as the air conditioner, hot water heater, irrigation pump, that would be shut down for about 15 minutes when commanded by the computer in the office. Different groups would be shut down each time to spread the inconvenience. Participation wasn't exactly optional.
Near as I can tell, the advent of the smart meter, an idea back then whose time had not yet come due to the cost and reliability of the technology involved, has brought about schemes to exploit the lack of reliability of people in order to extract more profits from them. Other than that, it would seem this whole thing is just another rehash of an idea already in successful operation over two decades ago and not limited by having people voluntarily doing something.
what? after all buffet's crap about how the death tax that takes away family farms and family businesses is a good thing? and how he's going to leave his worthless kids almost broke????
An object the size of the human body is always being bombarded by a combination of radioactive decay and cosmic ray secondary particles. The almost obligatory encounter in education with the little yellow radiation survey meter, unchanged from the 1950s, shows the typical click, click, click click click, click when nothing seriously radioactive is present in the immediate area, implying there's only the occaisional event. That is very misleading as it is a rather insensitive measurement over a mere fraction of a cubic inch. An oscillocope trace of a body sized sensitive detector looks more like the oscilloscope trace of heavy metal music group's sound track.
While it's theoretically possible that a single radioactive event could start the chain of events leading to a genetic mutation or some virulent cancer, neither are likely at all with essentially zero probability. Once the immediate danger of susceptability to a severely weakened immune system is over, there is little left in the way of damage or danger. Otherwise, green skin and tenacles would be fairly commonplace and tgi fridays would ressemble the bar in the first star wars movie.
In other words, in that meadow where no one ever thought of building a large research telescope, those daisys are responsible for the destruction of the universe. I wonder if the act of thinking about building a telescope there might accelerate the end of the universe even further. LOL
At times it looks like the failure to create the unified field theory may be due to the problem that cosmology is not yet as screwed up as qm. Perhaps this article is the beginning of a correction to that problem which will quickly lead to the unified theory.
actually, the gov. plan is to subvert china into a capitalist state - assuming that the mentality of the majority of chinese is the same westernized version that existed in american pioneers two and three hundred years ago. Unfortunately, it's not even that common in the US now. It would also seem that china's plan is to subvert the US into socialism. It appears a multipronged approach including sabotaged products and funding antiamerican prosocialist political candidates. Anyone notice any chinese army related campaign funding flaps in the US presidential race yet, er, other than lots of independently wealthy kitchen staff in some chinese restaurants?
makes sense for the most part. Problem could be knowing who's who. The frogs might have assumed we're the best at detecting satellites and would never 'out' our own but would 'out' every other one. Then again that ephimeris might include all the space debris as well (hazards to navigation).
It's probably almost foolish to believe we've got almost anything the russians don't know about and that if they know, the rest of our enemies do too - at least for any long term asset up there.
Comments were already made concerning people versus books as being influential.
However, books can help promote and further one's interest in science if one gains some bit of interest. SciFi can help a great deal but it's a double edged sword. Star Trek influenced a generation, according to some. There's a history channel program about how william shatner changed the world that includes interviews of many examples where people were influenced to think and invent some of the staples of our modern technological society. The flip side is that I think star trek helped create a lack of interest in our space program - how can going to the moon compare to traveling to the stars?
That said, for the more mature and interested budding scientist or engineer, Dava Sobel's book "Longitude" is quite the fascinating read. Her other book has never enticed me to continue reading past chapter one so I can't comment on it. Another book that has some fascinating things to learn is "The Measure of All Things". Note there is another by an almost identical name which I've not read as well. The first is the struggle to establish reliable longitude measurement, a key nautical consideration. The second is an attempt to measure the length of the prime meridian and establish the length of the meter - where the notions of scientist versus savant and accuracy versus resolution are presented.
well it does facilitate people going through areas where they maybe shouldn't be going - even if its potholes and uneven walking areas rather than muggers in the bushes.
better to issue police nightscopes.
you might try solving the eqn for the configuration(s) first then getting the values. Perhaps Maxima or some of the other symbolic capable math programs might offer aide.
Otherwise, seems like the best book I've seen on practical handling of complex mathematics is Numerical Recipes which has versions in fortran, c and other languages.
seems like a good friend just finished teaching a graduate level partial differential equations class last spring that covered wave equations substantially. If you have a particular one and particular constraints - I might be able to enquire on it. Again, this is solving - not numerical methods.
in any case - good luck with that guff.
It's been called video astronomy for years. In more recent times, webcams have started to dominate due to the direct input into the computer. Programs such as Registax, a free program on the web, have been around for years and through many iterations. In essence, this is done using relatively small telescopes and relatively insensitive equipment, mostly limiting it to planets, sun and moon. It consists of alignment since both the mount and the sky tend to vary the position of the object somewhat. In fact, this random noise of position permits higher resolution imaging than the pixel resolution of the camera. (random noise gets reduced or eliminated by statistics)
The easiest way to think of it is that the atmosphere does all sorts of weird things over a short time frame. It can displace the object slightly. It can bring it into perfect focus briefly and then blur it out tremendously. It can do this even to a portion of the image. Programs such as registax have alignment sections and stacking or combining sections. The use of fourier analysis and point spread functions can be done to measure quality - as can manual efforts. There are usually quite a few options that can be specified as well as settings. On the combined image, registax uses wavelet processing to balance 'noise' with data in the final image and it is strictly an artistic and personal preference decision.
Typically, the planetary stuff is averaged which provides lower noise per number of raw images than summing, which is needed for dim objects. One finds a few hundred to a few thousand raw images combined into a final image of extraordinary quality.
This stuff was pioneered by the amateur community. However, a few years back it was used to get an image of mercury's surface using a 60" telescope in california and tens of thousands of images were analyzed and combined.
Due to the nature of low photon count imaging and high noise, video astronomy has been quite limited in achieving much in the way of extended exposures based on short time frames, such as 1/20 second. However, fairly dim scenes have been brought into the realm of being recognizable out of a series of video frames that appeared to be total noise. Image intensifiers have also been used to image dim deep sky objects with some bit of success.
Since typical good seeing tends to vary somewhat in the subsecond realm, even exposures of a few seconds tend to blur and keeping telescopes tracking to that level is virtually impossible. Fortunately, so many deep sky objects of interest to amateurs are quite large and require mostly time.
What actually sets this new effort apart is the low noise camera which actually permits short sub second exposures to be summed at the lowest of intensities without the injection of random noise - typically readout noise which is for the normal ccd somewhere in the 3-20 electron count average per pixel. Since the sensitivity of the typical astronomy camera ccd ranges from 20-70 or 80% quantum efficiency (100% is one electron per photon) at least at the peak sensitivity wavelength of the ccd, short images aren't that practical when short is under 1 second for a dim deep sky object. That's where this new camera is making waves. If versions can be had for under $10k US, there will even be a market in the amateur world. However, the thinned ccds I noticed described on their website can cost as much as a house which is outside the realm of the dedicated fanatic (and the small college imaging program).
The article is nice to see and it's nice to hear about the new camera. Seeing it named 'lucky' reminds me of a fortune cookie and it really isn't luck but rather persistance and the ability to isolate clear seeing instants from blurry averages. And besides, the technique already has a name - it's called video imaging techniques and they did not invent it. What's more, it's also known as the poor man's adapative optics.
One would have to do a full analysis to determine just how costly those government provided things are. When I look at my landline phone bill, I see I must still be paying for those things as like the cellphone bill, there is substantial numbers of taxes that can add up to half the total of that bill. As far as I can tell, the REA and telephone efforts were essentially finished sometime before I was even born. whether or not doing this and opening the door for more people moving to rural areas can also be hotly debated.
I do live in a rural area, miles outside of a small town and over an hours drive to an actual city, although small. And I was aware of internet access limitations then and now. My solution initially was dial up which runs about 22kb. That is the preferred solution of numerous neighbors who do not use the internet for much at all. In the 5 years I've been here, there seems to be no movement for cheap DSL to this area.
My current solution is cheap satellite, primarily because it was about the same cost as maintaining a dedicated telephone line and with two people sharing the link, having essentially DSL speed is far preferrable to having half dial up speed, especially split 2 ways.
While unsuitable for gaming or downloading movies or lots of music, I don't find that to be a problem. It is about 3 times the price of cheap DSL which is somewhat of a factor. Also, one must maintain their dial up option or risk being down in bad weather, either here or at the associated earth station.
There is or will be another solution in this area soon. It is currently in limited use and is rather innovative. It is WiFi with high gain antennas mounted at height. Coverage for one can be in excess of 2 or 3 miles with a similar mounted antenna and the backbone, including redundancy has high speed links over dozens of miles. DSL is only good for 3-5 miles or so from the phone substation. These souped up WiFis are capable of that and more - without infrastructure in between. It becomes a matter of sufficient customer base in the area of coverage for the equipment and a suitable location with power at an appropriate altitude - building or tower.
As for government solutions - all one has to do is look at the FCC's support for the disastrously bad, unecessary and polluting crap referred to as BPL, virtually guaranteed (and proven in almost all trials) to destroy radio communications occurring near by, including emergency communications. So far, it has fortunatley proven to be economically disastrous for those actually engaged in doing it and there are always superior ways available.
Having worked in SCADA for years, some time back, security was generally not a serious concern over the communications channels. Since I've not been involved in the arena since before the first world trade center bombing or since ethernet interconnects became practical for embedded systems, concerns back then were not based on anything but common sense and forward thinking - at least beyond that provided the operations center at company hq.
Original SCADA systems often used conditioned lease lines going from point a to point b via the phone company. Others used radio (vhf/uhf) and virtually none used dial up telephone. Consequently, vendors used their own proprietary protocols which were concerned with security only for integrity of message. Earlier systems were even non asynchronous in many cases. In some cases, message timing was even part of the security which could be rough for those migrating to radio links.
For power line systems, some even used power line carriers rather than conditioned lines.
As time progressed, the cost and availability of conditioned phone lines made other solutions more attractive. The advent of the $10,000 - $20,000 satellite radio link started looking attractive. This is where the break occurred between pretty much having secure lines and having something that could be 'hacked' or potentially destroyed militarily from halfway around the world.
My recommendations on that and the fact that satellite signals can fade due to rain and heavy cloud cover brought in the notion of a backup dialup line. However, protocols at that time became so intrenched and the cost of SCADA systems so high, it was quite common to keep old protocols when expanding or updating systems. Security for the data transmissions was left to the satellite system people who merely pieced together the SCADA protocol messages being run thru their system and feed them serially to and from the RTU.
With backup - like a dialup line - the system wasn't subject to what has now known as a denial of service attack. Back then the internet was still called the ARPA net and was not in common use, nor was it designed for security beyond message integrity. However, a system such as what I worked on would be most vulnerable to a specific attack requiring information of the SCADA protocol and preferrably the actual system layout and perhaps even current scheduling information - something very unlikely to be acquired except via an inside agent although great damage would be possible simply with a knowledge of the protocol and the ability to monitor message traffic and insert one's own messages into the flow.
Other than DoS attacks, it should be possible to protect SCADA operating via the internet although I'm not a fan of such malarky. Actually, the notion of using other than embedded systems running code that is totally known and understood does not give me warm and fuzzy feelings. Using some mickeysoft operating system that crashes and is subject to infection from any highschool kid with a malicious streak is just not the sort of thing to use except in the most limited of man-machine interfacing.
Einstein didn't have a phd while working as a patent clerk. However, he did do theoretical research and published papers that changed the nature of physics while he was a patent clerk.
Advances are made by those dedicated souls who want to do what they want to do and will do so no matter what. What's more, the learning only starts after the degrees are earned as the degrees essentially provided the most rudimentary of tools in order for learning to progress effectively.
Giving away educations will tend to make them valueless. Flooding the market will reduce the rewards for the efforts of those involved and reduce any incentives for others to excel. For those who want to enjoy the rewards of their labor, that means they'll have to learn and work in other areas.
Are college educations too expensive now? Undoubtedly! It would seem the gov. and bureaucratic incompetence pervades academia far more so now than in the past. Are there too many lawyers around? - Without a doubt! Would we be better off as a society with more smart engineers and scientists and fewer lawyers? Probably.
Unfortunately, virtually no scientist or engineer has ever earned the type of money that any of the many rap stars and pond scum atheletes like that Vick fellow. In general, they earn some amount associated with the value that others in society place on their contributions to society. It's not the record company execs who ultimately establish that value, it's the people who buy that rap crap who do.
Nothing new about that. Half the journalists around on the national scene are nothing but leftist democrat political operatives AND have worked full time in that capacity on and off for years - from bill moyers, ace dirty campaigner for lbj in the 60s, to georgie step-on-all-of-us of the former clinton regime there are few if any unbiased ones out there. As for the supposed equal and balanced flip side, Novak and Buchanan may be the intelectual balance of the rest of the other side, but they are most certainly outnumbered 10 to 1 in total number of warm bodies.
As for the bloggers doing research - just look at the dan rather controversy. Now there's an example of the preemanent 'unbiased' major media personality - dan rather with all the resources of CBS News - checking out his story on bush's 30 yr old previous national guard service allegations - probably being fed to him by his leftist political activist daughter - just in time to attack bush for the 2004 presidential election - obviously timed to produce maximum damage. It evidently took no time at all to realize the document was a very recent forgery, being done on a modern word processing program rather than an antique typewriter of the era.
This story is virtually the norm in the major media now, not a spurious one time event.
Unfortunately, you're missing something serious. Note the comment on liquid water boiling. It's happening due to the lack of pressure. Guess what, boiling requires the serious absorption of energy for the change of phase. It's going to give up thermal energy in order to boil, cooling down rapidly, until the remaining liquid actually freezes. That means if one's saliva boils - as mentioned in the article, it could well freeze and give someone a frostbit tongue. Also, I would expect offhand that there could be a great deal of 'freezer burn' that could occur - sublimation. Finally, a bit of 'gas' would make for a serious problem.
Whether any of these would kill someone off is perhaps potluck. Vision could be quite a problem if the eyeballs virtually freeze. For sure, air embolism would be fatal as would only 15 seconds of consciousness in a dangerous situation. Considering that there is some expansion of the body - as proved by the existance of the 'bends' there is possibly some problems in that arena too although the 10-12 psi in space craft going down to 0 psi doesn't seem to be a huge pressure differential.
searching for 'reality' scenarios in movies though is quite a waste. At best, it's a marketing gimmick for them.
Gee,
I wonder if tim mcveigh had been detected and his his ton or two of amfo been siezed prior to his trip to OK city, would he be claiming his 5th amendment rights had been violated?
Also, if you're so worried about 5th amendment property rights, are you concerned over the 'takings' going on in various places by various levels of gov. who are then giving it to others for some sort of commercial projects that might net the gov. a little more in property taxes?
Finally, are you concerned at all about all this gun control hype that threatens to take one's property (firearms) away?
If you were concerned about the 5th, you'd be concerned about these every bit as much as you would be over the drug siezure laws which have been violating the 5th amendment rights for some time now - and not just for the druggies. If you pull less than $10000 in cash from your bank account (in some areas), you will be flagged and investigated. If you are stopped by authorities and found to have $10000 on your person, they can sieze it and it could cost you more than that just to get it back. And, this has happened to people who have nothing to do with the drug trade, but who merely do some cash business.
I think some aspects have been done before that ostensibly prove the notion but perhaps not all of what Kramer is tryingto do.
Personally, I think that there is no such effect and photons are just psychic.
As a fallback position, I am beginning to suspect that space-time isn't and that reality is a figment of your imagination.
A steam engine is an external combustion engine with excellent torque and pretty decent power/weight. As such it can be made less polluting and potentially more efficient than an internal combustion engine. When it comes to energy transfer from one medium to another, inefficiencies and losses occur at every step or conversion of one form to another and the steam engine can get away with fewer conversions. What's more, a steam engine only needs a heat source to provide energy for operation. One can mechanical motion directly from the thermally induced expansion - and it's possible to reduce that motion down to minimal levels while not having a transmission, unlike internal combustion engines. And, if youre worried about co2, an external combustion situation can be better controlled for capturing and sequestering carbon than could be an internal combustion situation. Also, being external combustion, it's not picky and choosy over what is burned. There is even a stirling engine which can use the same techniques on ambient air using solar energy.
Over my lifetime which includes a good bit of secular and religious interactions, from nobel prize winners to illiterate illegal aliens - and everything in between, I've met perhaps 5 to 10 people who believed in a 6000 yr old earth - and one of those had a phd in hydrology and was a retired professor from a fairly prestigeous university. That gentleman didn't appear to be antiscience having spent his life involved in it, but rather just a believer in a young earth hypothesis which he offered scientific arguments for his position.
I've also encountered other 'believers' that insisted evolution was the gospel and that it mandated long term stability of the planetary conditions for such to occur. They obliterated the notion of catastrophism as not being able to occur because earth had to be stable. LOL. I think they're still fighting the notion that dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid and that it must've been some other reason. Now that the levy shoemaker comet hit jupiter for all the world to see what could happen with a major impact, it would seem that some have decided we won't get hit because jupiter will block them from getting here. I guess they spent too much time in biology class to have ever taken astronomy and haven't yet figured out that sometimes the big gas giants are on the other side of the solar system - and that occurs almost every year (LOL).
Consequently, your test is not a particularly reasonable one. First, it might actually eliminate someone with a strong belief that might not be a factor - although extremely unlikely as there are so few of them, a tiny fraction of the fundamentalist sect. Second, and most important, it does nothing to catch any of the vast majority of anti-science types who exist today.
You'd be better served just asking the question whether they believe in socialism and/or communism. If they say yes, then eliminate them as they are totally naive or ignorant, they are ignoring hundreds of years of proof it's defective as well as being shown to be theoretically defective and since two tenents of that 'religion' are that "the end justifies the means" and that "the truth is whatever promotes the agenda" is in conflict with the fundamental notion of scientific truth. It's the economics equivalent of a 6000 yr old flat earth at the center of the universe.
This is obviously not only the age of tabloid journalism, it's the age of tabloid science.
I'm surprised there's no stories on re-animating anna nichole (and ultimately elvis). Or maybe dr. frankenstein lost the pr battle a long time ago.
quantum entanglement (spooky action at a distance or whatever you want to call it) is a fascinating sci-fi-ish concept anyway - except that it's real. Such a thing should be fascinating for anyone with a modicum of curiousity and by the sounds of it, their research is actually doing something to expand knowledge. Sometime in the future, if and when we ever spread out from the earth, such a mechanism might be the instant radio stylecommunications across vast distances. It doesn't need to be hyped and tied to cancelled television show that existed prior to the birth of most of the people on this planet.
The total worthless BS of a startrek transporter that requires the energy to totally dismantle every molecule of an object and send the information somewhere else was nothing more than deux ex machima solution to solve the obvious problem that the big starship wasn't designed to land and shuttles seemed too inefficient to transport sufficient people and supplies.
Heck the very notion was obscene. Imagine someone stepping into a disintergration chamber just so some identical twin could be replicated somewhere. It's either that, or some never mentioned notion of an ability to transfer the 'soul' in the information stream as well. The primary benefit of the transporter was that it offered new venues of exploration for writers with writer's block.
Outsourcing is nothing new. Kennedy tried to hire the mob to 'rub out' fidel castro.
edwin wilson (alias merchant of death) was a contractor at one time back in the 70s.
Near as I can tell, the clintons didn't bother much with the intellegence community for their efforts and directly contracted out the private detectives to attack their enemies. They collected FBI files on hundreds of political opponents (and got caught). And, currently, it's come out they've (or she, now) have been having cell phones of political opponents being 'bugged' rather much like what the dems used against bayhner? and gingrich with political operatives following them around with cellphone capable scanners - in direct violation of criminal telecommunications statutes dating back to the 1930s. Of course now, the equipment is much more specialized and expensive than back then.
In contrast, the bush administration won't even secure the borders or prosecute espionage cases pertaining to former clinton associates like sandy burglar.
An old idea dating back to the 70s or 80s was the notion of putting solar energy collection onto satellites, converting it to microwave and transmitting it to a small region of earth where it would be received and converted straight to electricity. By using a large enough antenna, the energy density would have been low enough to keep from broiling anything in the area. While there are doubtless all sorts of problems with the approach (like adding to the earth's energy budget, slightly cooking tweetie pie and donald duck etc) it does offer the ability to get around the daytime night time problem, normal atmospheric extinction of radiant enegy at various wavelengths and the very nasty problem of cloudy and rainy days.
.13 / kwh and assumptions of a 6 hr average day over 360 days/yr which are probably a fair average for here. It also assumes a system to suppliment power by feeding back into the power line anything that is not consumed at generation time to reduce the electric bill at full residential rates and that this is not an off the grid system with massive expense of storage for off times.
This article is about concentrator solar cells where light from an area 10 to 100 times that of the cell is focused down on the cell. There's another physorg article linked to the story from 2005. It seems these people are a year behind their own stated expectations. The number of $3/watt for the equipment, probably in very large multimegawatts commercial systems was claimed in the 2005 article to be on the horizon.
For an installed system to cost $3/watt would mean that purchasing it might pay off in 2 to 4 years. Note it's a leap of faith here that their expectations are on and that a small personal system could be done for that price. However, a 3 to 5 year payout for a commercial venture might actually be acceptable.
However, looking at it another way - comparing it to putting the $3 in a savings account earning interest, it would seem that the electricity generation would provide a 9% interest rate for the money, except that eventually, the principle would be eaten up as well.
These numbers are using my own electric bill rates of
It will be interesting to see what sort of longevity results as semiconductors don't like heat and almost 60% of the incoming energy will become heat and the fact that it is concentrated means it's rather like using a magnifying glass to burn something. However, that 60% heat energy might could be harnessed for solar thermal activity as it is likely to be more significantly concentrated and generating higher temperatures than would be something like a typical solar water heater.
Since there was no mention of this or of the potential need for a cooling system, one can only assume that this $3 may not have been referring to anything but the basic solar panel.
Offhand, it may become a race between these high efficiency approaches and the cheap, low efficiency ones like the dye based cells from New Zealand that made the rounds a few months back.
Hazzarding a guess, I'd suspect that the low efficiency dye based ones might dominate the market for home based noncommercial systems while the concentrator high efficiency devices might win out in the commercial power generation market. This is assuming that both can become feasible and achieve fairly competitive cost/benefit ratios at some respective level of generation.
However, for the global warming worrier crowd, solar isn't a panacea. This little thing called albedo or the light and heat energy reflecting back off into space is a rather important factor, possibly more so than co2 if large areas of land are converted to solar power and significantly change the albedo amount. It's not necessarily a deal killer but it's got to be dealt with.
Having a technical degree and an mba certainly can open up even more venues for work, including work that is interesting and creative. It's important to do something that you like. Otherwise, you'll wake up one morning 15yrs later and realize you cannot take it anymore - leaving you and your family in the lurch.
Just having an mba isn't a good route for the creative person as creative accounting tends to lead one to a more boring existance - creating license plates for the state.
Granted the ranks of mbas are rife with corporate socialists who are in it only for themselves, but ultimately, they wind up hurting everyone and everything else including themselves, opening the door for opportunity for others concerned with doing a good job as well as getting paid for it.
It's a large creature but it's also basically a one of a kind.
One of my friends is down there now on that project. Vostock has always been on the menu, although probably not for something that big either. Europa is an entirely plausible venture as they have equipment on new horizon which is working rather well - although again, it's not for the prototype.
The gizmo has about 30+ microprocessors networked together, just about one for every section and function. I think once they get the basics operational and the initial testing complete is when they'll start making it into a tabletop device rather than a table sized device. While there's limits on this size due to deep diving requirements, it still should be capable of being somewhat smaller.