Best professor I had, at the beginning of a History of Science course, said that some of us will be offended in his class, in fact, he HOPED we would be offended by something or he didn't do his job correctly. He stressed that university is for free thought and that even offensive thoughts should be talked about and debated, We are there to have our ideas and sensibilities challenged by a whole world of thoughts, we are not supposed to be indoctrinated in any one school of thought. Universities are not 'safe havens' they are a place that gathers ALL knowledge, no matter the politics or religions of the people there.
The entire course came back to this point over and over, showing that through history science and politics are entwined but how universities were places where offensive ideas had a way of cutting through that. Some ideas were eventually discarded, others were able to thrive. His entire last 3 hour lecture was about offensive ideas and how they should be protected in universities. Wonderful course and I hope lots more people take his course, though it's a very small class of 12 to foster discussion better.
And there are very specific parameters for Dark Matter as well, it must interact gravitationally, it must not interact with EM. All the models I know of also have parameters on mass. Thing is, this isn't JUST a experimental science, there are theorists who are trying to fit Dark Matter into The Standard Model. The Standard Model is built upon symmetries, so if you just add in DM it would break it, it needs to be added in specific ways and thus has to have specific properties. The last hundred years of physics has been very heavily leaning towards mathematics (I mean more so than before), and the past 50 years of particle physics has been heavily reliant upon symmetries, and you know what? It's payed off wonderfully! Just by working out symmetries we have discovered the Higgs, 3 generations of particles, neutrino flavor mixing, and lots of others I don't even know about.
Besides, the neutrino hypothesis was wrong, it thought neutrino's were massless. They are not.
And Japan. It's not just IP to worry about, it's a whole host of things. Under NAFTA Canada became the most sued country and most of those were to remove our environmental protections. At least we're in an election right now and if we can get the Conservatives out we have at least a HOPE of at least renegotiating it. Then again, a guy I work with just voted (advanced voting) and somehow accidentally checked the wrong box...sometimes I want to give up...
You are right that it's all about comparing risks of different power. But fear of radiation is harmful on it's own. 1600 people died from fear of radiation while thus far no one has died of the radiation (estimates I've read vary greatly so I'm not going to quote any of them about the long term effect). Whatever your opinion about nuclear power, the FEAR of it is a problem and IS costing lives, whether that is this type of fear or keeping us dependent upon fossil fuels which cost a lot of lives.
Before tasted they are both triple fudge chocolate and not. At the time you measure it, by tasting it, it becomes either fudge or...I'll let you figure out the other 'fudge' flavour.
I had the opportunity to go and see a talk by Dr. Charles Till, he was the director of the Argonne National Laboratory West, and developed the Integral Fast Reactor. A great speaker and very passionate about his work there. I could hear the frustration in his voice still when he talked about their work being shut down during the Clinton Administration, and this talk was in 2013, many years after. I was extremely impressed with how far he pushed everyone to go to actually BREAK their reactor, he wanted near unrealistic safety, and he got it! Every aspect of the reactor had safety as the foremost concern and so much of it became completely hands off, robotic hands to handle nuclear products and stuff. He talked about how every single problem government wanted them to solve, they solved, nuclear waste, proliferation of weapons, etc. All except the cost, but it was shut down in the 90s, the cost would have dropped a lot since then, either with cheaper technology or cheaper engineering.
It really makes me sad--and I can understand his frustration--that this got closed, with those extra years of research who knows how viable nuclear power would be now.
That oil, gas and coal still get subsidies is almost unbelievable to me! All the talk of alternative energy, and instead of taking away those subsidies they just give higher ones to renewable energy. It would save governments a lot more money if they reduced those subsidies and cut off the polluting ones.
The bigger problem with Nuclear though, is that they are the only industry that is being held accountable for long term waste. In Canada we have lots and lots of tailings ponds from all sorts of mining, not just fossil fuels, and many of them have NO END LIFE. Last year there was a major break in one of them in BC because the company had been warned for 10 years to upgrade the barriers and they did nothing, the company was content to just leave it there as is until the end of time (or whatever end life that one may have had). Tailings ponds also leak through ground water, albeit very slowly cause of the type of ground they are built over and linings, but they DO leak. Not to mention what natural disaster could effect them and the cost to animals, birds sometimes will swim in them and get poisoned, there are precautions taken for that but it still happens. Why is nuclear waste the only one that has plans for long term storage? "Radioactive" vrs "Chemical" I think the public has been far too desensitized of the word chemical waste that they forget that it can be much more dangerous.
Nuclear power is only high cost because they are playing with a major handicap in that other businesses are not held to the same accountability as them, and maybe not all of them should be but this is the reason it is so expensive.
Thanks for your very informative response. That superfluid calculation is extremely fascinating! For some reason I never thought of superfluids in moons and other objects, I have a tendency to think of that as specifically a man made thing--my bad!
I highly doubt neutrinos would actually be a heating source as well, I was just naming off mechanisms off the top of my head, not being series. As for gamma's, not in any large manner either, I was instead imagining VERY small pockets of heating, melting a small amount of ice. Yeah, not really a moon powering source.
and yet again a moon/planet is getting power by some unknown mechanism, Pluto was the other recent find. This is fascinating news! I wonder if it could be a combination of many, many small factors. Physicists (and I am studying it as an undergrad) are very prone to hacking off small factors when calculating things, thinking small factors don't contribute to the overall result, and most of the time they don't. But all the tiny factors like neutrino's, radioactive particles, other stars, gamma rays, etc etc, is there any way that the combined contribution could add up to the energy, or even a part of it, that we are failing to find? The rest of that unknown could be...I don't know, one of those energy's we are still trying to figure out, like Dark Energy or the new evidence for the Z', W' force...
I'm just throwing spit at a wall here cause it's fun. And fascinating.
It's no surprise to me that same demographic worships at the faux science altars of Mythbusters, Alton Brown, Bill Nye, and Niel DeGrasse Tyson - they want science, but only if it's tarted up, made entertaining, and reduced to sound bites they can pass around like cargo cultists.
I hate this being paroted around like it makes any point at all. It doesn't. You know who like to read science articles? Scientists. And just because a scientist knows physics does not mean they can understand all the jargon of biology, it NEEDS to be explained in a way that by-passes that specialized knowledge. And guess what? Some of us LIKE well written/explained concepts of complex topics, which is something most scientists lack the ability to do well. Most scientists don't take any writing classes and it shows, so if a well written article takes their ideas and explains it better than they can, I will prefer to read that, especially if it's in a field that I don't know well. Saying you don't like NDT or Bill Nye does NOT make you special, it makes you an elitist who doesn't understand that communication skills are an important part of the scientific process. Science does NOT exist in a vacuum, it is entwined in everything; politics, daily life, love, etc. Communicating that part of the world is important, and frankly we need more people that can explain scientific ideas to everyone--yes, other scientists as well--to make a better world.
Sorry if that was not your intended point, but I hear this thing constantly and it really gets under my skin. I study physics but my understanding of biology is, frankly, atrocious; so I rely upon communicators to get a basic understanding of DNA processes. Shows like Quirks and Quarks make up a lot of my understanding of the current work in a lot of fields, hell, even a lot of the complexities of physics I need describes in a way that most scientists can't do.
Dr Charles Till came and spoke at my university. He's the guy who was in charge of the research project in the states to make the safe nuclear reactor in the documentary. He put his heart and soul into that project and had some of the worlds best physicists putting their faith in him. Makes me really sad that the project was cancelled even after they demonstrated that it was the safest reactor ever conceived and they had managed to solve all the problems the nuclear industry had been fighting against.
And we have tailings ponds that have to sit far, far longer than that. Some that have no end life at all. Parent is right, we are far more paranoid about nuclear than we are of all the chemical waste from other mining practices.
This is a 9 Sigma result, far FAR higher than the Higgs. The summary is stating that exotic matter does exist but we don't know what kinds. Can glueballs exist? What other combinations are out there to be found?
Interpretations of QM's is not science since they can not be tested (as of yet, I hope it can be some day). However the different models of atoms can and have been tested very well and QCD's has fit the data to an amazing precision. I'm sure there are competing theories but I have never heard of any that fit the data this well.
btw, I'm a fan of the many worlds interpretation as well. Took me a long time to come around to it, thought it was just a curiosity at first, but eventually I saw the beauty of it. You don't need to add anything else to QMs it just pops right out of the science.
You should always look at the funding path. It tells you a lot about the quality of research. In the past 60 years funding towards 'think tanks' has gone into making bad science to combat good science research, all in an effort to move political goals. I'm not saying this particular research is bad, however it is good to know some of the funding came from the NSA.
Why is parent modded up? Everything stated is wrong. Modified Newtonian Gravity (MOND) has been attempted to explain away dark matter for decades with no success. The Bullet Cluster pretty much put the nail in the coffin of MOND. Dark Matter is the simplest and currently only idea that actually explains all the observations. That's not saying anyone knows what it is but lots of experiments are getting close to getting first glimpses at possibilities.
Scientists should be political, scientists are not separate from the world, nor is science separate from what it is to be a human being. Scientists need to take part in a democracy, and that does not just mean voting, it means participating. They should be sharing science to educate the public on issues, they will have a different perspective even if the science isn't the whole story.
Second point is Fox News can say anything they want for two reasons; they don't have to tell the truth because they and argued that they are an opinion station; 2, the policy on 'balanced reporting' is so utterly stupid. Any issue can be shown to be decisive if they want it to be, get an expert on one side and an 'expert' on the other. It's what they do anytime they talk about climate change.
Pretty much every physics paper is pre-submitted to arXiv and after it is published in a paper the final copy is again resubmitted. The arXiv archive is there for peer review too, so it goes through two rounds of peer review. This has been the case for a decade now, I don't understand why this hasn't been taken up by other fields by now.
MP3's have helped so many heavy metal bands gain exposure and allow them to tour. Most metalheads have found new bands by talking with friends and then downloading albums. This in turn gives the band enough exposure to allow them to tour. On tour they actually don't make much per concert, most make about 100-200 which would be losing money. However, at these shows they are able to sell album and merchandise. Can anyone think of another genre that people are so willing to advertise for? There are so many people walking around with metal band t-shirts and hoodies, and, like me, all they own are band t-shirts.
In talking to most of these bands, they are happy you hear of them through downloading MP3's. Most of these bands can't do it for a living, they have regular jobs so they just want their music out there. And every once in a while a band gets enough exposure that can do it for a living. But the only way to get that exposure in through the internet. Hell, you ask any metal band how they found their musical influences and how they find new bands, they'll all tell you they downloaded the music.
To me one of the most surprising things is the wavelength. Back of the envelope calculation gives me 4.4 *10^-26m. That is amazingly small, 8 orders of magnitude smaller than the proton. This also came from 1/4 of the universe away, which makes me wonder how much smaller it is due to the expansion of the universe. Probably not much, but DAMN that is small.
Not only that but conservation of energy doesn't hold for the universe on a whole, only locally. At least that's the current theory, it could be proven wrong. For evidence look at the expanding universe and the cosmic microwave background. All the energetic photons created after the big bang have lost energy as they have shifted down to 3 K. Again, this could be proven wrong because we have no clue what the vacuum energy really is, any time it's calculated from quantum mechanics the energy is thousands of orders of magnitude too large. But the current theory is that energy is NOT conserved in the universe as a whole.
One of my favorite comics ever. Seriously though, I like when physicists step out of their area and play or dabble in other areas. Probably refreshing for them too. I think there isn't enough interdisciplinary projects out there for scientists.
This is an old idea that is really about emergence. Terrence Deacon pointed out a flaw in this argument and shifted the idea about emergence from the 'many states' to directional states (I forget the term he used for it). It's the limiting number of states in the system that leads to life, these constraints need energy and so the entropy around them increases. It's a fascinating idea and I hope more work is done on it, listen to it here. [youtube.com]
My CS department writes their own 1st year notes and posts them online for free (yes, it'll cost if you want to print them, but most people have laptops now). The school kinda 'forced' them to put a textbook down for website, the first class my prof said that we'll not be following that book so we can return them, or keep them if we want extra reference material. My experience has been quite good, the first class was extremely well structured and the notes very easy to understand. My second class is more difficult to follow but the professor that wrote the first class is teaching the second for the first time, he never wrote the notes and I can tell he wants to rewrite it all so that it's much easier to follow. By doing this, they can structure the notes around the class, not trying to fit the class to the textbook. I think it works much better.
Slashdot Mirror
Best professor I had, at the beginning of a History of Science course, said that some of us will be offended in his class, in fact, he HOPED we would be offended by something or he didn't do his job correctly. He stressed that university is for free thought and that even offensive thoughts should be talked about and debated, We are there to have our ideas and sensibilities challenged by a whole world of thoughts, we are not supposed to be indoctrinated in any one school of thought. Universities are not 'safe havens' they are a place that gathers ALL knowledge, no matter the politics or religions of the people there.
The entire course came back to this point over and over, showing that through history science and politics are entwined but how universities were places where offensive ideas had a way of cutting through that. Some ideas were eventually discarded, others were able to thrive. His entire last 3 hour lecture was about offensive ideas and how they should be protected in universities. Wonderful course and I hope lots more people take his course, though it's a very small class of 12 to foster discussion better.
And there are very specific parameters for Dark Matter as well, it must interact gravitationally, it must not interact with EM. All the models I know of also have parameters on mass. Thing is, this isn't JUST a experimental science, there are theorists who are trying to fit Dark Matter into The Standard Model. The Standard Model is built upon symmetries, so if you just add in DM it would break it, it needs to be added in specific ways and thus has to have specific properties. The last hundred years of physics has been very heavily leaning towards mathematics (I mean more so than before), and the past 50 years of particle physics has been heavily reliant upon symmetries, and you know what? It's payed off wonderfully! Just by working out symmetries we have discovered the Higgs, 3 generations of particles, neutrino flavor mixing, and lots of others I don't even know about.
Besides, the neutrino hypothesis was wrong, it thought neutrino's were massless. They are not.
And Japan. It's not just IP to worry about, it's a whole host of things. Under NAFTA Canada became the most sued country and most of those were to remove our environmental protections. At least we're in an election right now and if we can get the Conservatives out we have at least a HOPE of at least renegotiating it. Then again, a guy I work with just voted (advanced voting) and somehow accidentally checked the wrong box...sometimes I want to give up...
You are right that it's all about comparing risks of different power. But fear of radiation is harmful on it's own. 1600 people died from fear of radiation while thus far no one has died of the radiation (estimates I've read vary greatly so I'm not going to quote any of them about the long term effect). Whatever your opinion about nuclear power, the FEAR of it is a problem and IS costing lives, whether that is this type of fear or keeping us dependent upon fossil fuels which cost a lot of lives.
Before tasted they are both triple fudge chocolate and not. At the time you measure it, by tasting it, it becomes either fudge or...I'll let you figure out the other 'fudge' flavour.
I had the opportunity to go and see a talk by Dr. Charles Till, he was the director of the Argonne National Laboratory West, and developed the Integral Fast Reactor. A great speaker and very passionate about his work there. I could hear the frustration in his voice still when he talked about their work being shut down during the Clinton Administration, and this talk was in 2013, many years after. I was extremely impressed with how far he pushed everyone to go to actually BREAK their reactor, he wanted near unrealistic safety, and he got it! Every aspect of the reactor had safety as the foremost concern and so much of it became completely hands off, robotic hands to handle nuclear products and stuff. He talked about how every single problem government wanted them to solve, they solved, nuclear waste, proliferation of weapons, etc. All except the cost, but it was shut down in the 90s, the cost would have dropped a lot since then, either with cheaper technology or cheaper engineering.
It really makes me sad--and I can understand his frustration--that this got closed, with those extra years of research who knows how viable nuclear power would be now.
Interview with Dr. Till
That oil, gas and coal still get subsidies is almost unbelievable to me! All the talk of alternative energy, and instead of taking away those subsidies they just give higher ones to renewable energy. It would save governments a lot more money if they reduced those subsidies and cut off the polluting ones.
The bigger problem with Nuclear though, is that they are the only industry that is being held accountable for long term waste. In Canada we have lots and lots of tailings ponds from all sorts of mining, not just fossil fuels, and many of them have NO END LIFE. Last year there was a major break in one of them in BC because the company had been warned for 10 years to upgrade the barriers and they did nothing, the company was content to just leave it there as is until the end of time (or whatever end life that one may have had). Tailings ponds also leak through ground water, albeit very slowly cause of the type of ground they are built over and linings, but they DO leak. Not to mention what natural disaster could effect them and the cost to animals, birds sometimes will swim in them and get poisoned, there are precautions taken for that but it still happens. Why is nuclear waste the only one that has plans for long term storage? "Radioactive" vrs "Chemical" I think the public has been far too desensitized of the word chemical waste that they forget that it can be much more dangerous.
Nuclear power is only high cost because they are playing with a major handicap in that other businesses are not held to the same accountability as them, and maybe not all of them should be but this is the reason it is so expensive.
Thanks for your very informative response. That superfluid calculation is extremely fascinating! For some reason I never thought of superfluids in moons and other objects, I have a tendency to think of that as specifically a man made thing--my bad!
I highly doubt neutrinos would actually be a heating source as well, I was just naming off mechanisms off the top of my head, not being series. As for gamma's, not in any large manner either, I was instead imagining VERY small pockets of heating, melting a small amount of ice. Yeah, not really a moon powering source.
and yet again a moon/planet is getting power by some unknown mechanism, Pluto was the other recent find. This is fascinating news! I wonder if it could be a combination of many, many small factors. Physicists (and I am studying it as an undergrad) are very prone to hacking off small factors when calculating things, thinking small factors don't contribute to the overall result, and most of the time they don't. But all the tiny factors like neutrino's, radioactive particles, other stars, gamma rays, etc etc, is there any way that the combined contribution could add up to the energy, or even a part of it, that we are failing to find? The rest of that unknown could be...I don't know, one of those energy's we are still trying to figure out, like Dark Energy or the new evidence for the Z', W' force...
I'm just throwing spit at a wall here cause it's fun. And fascinating.
It's no surprise to me that same demographic worships at the faux science altars of Mythbusters, Alton Brown, Bill Nye, and Niel DeGrasse Tyson - they want science, but only if it's tarted up, made entertaining, and reduced to sound bites they can pass around like cargo cultists.
I hate this being paroted around like it makes any point at all. It doesn't. You know who like to read science articles? Scientists. And just because a scientist knows physics does not mean they can understand all the jargon of biology, it NEEDS to be explained in a way that by-passes that specialized knowledge. And guess what? Some of us LIKE well written/explained concepts of complex topics, which is something most scientists lack the ability to do well. Most scientists don't take any writing classes and it shows, so if a well written article takes their ideas and explains it better than they can, I will prefer to read that, especially if it's in a field that I don't know well. Saying you don't like NDT or Bill Nye does NOT make you special, it makes you an elitist who doesn't understand that communication skills are an important part of the scientific process. Science does NOT exist in a vacuum, it is entwined in everything; politics, daily life, love, etc. Communicating that part of the world is important, and frankly we need more people that can explain scientific ideas to everyone--yes, other scientists as well--to make a better world.
Sorry if that was not your intended point, but I hear this thing constantly and it really gets under my skin. I study physics but my understanding of biology is, frankly, atrocious; so I rely upon communicators to get a basic understanding of DNA processes. Shows like Quirks and Quarks make up a lot of my understanding of the current work in a lot of fields, hell, even a lot of the complexities of physics I need describes in a way that most scientists can't do.
end rant.
Dr Charles Till came and spoke at my university. He's the guy who was in charge of the research project in the states to make the safe nuclear reactor in the documentary. He put his heart and soul into that project and had some of the worlds best physicists putting their faith in him. Makes me really sad that the project was cancelled even after they demonstrated that it was the safest reactor ever conceived and they had managed to solve all the problems the nuclear industry had been fighting against.
And we have tailings ponds that have to sit far, far longer than that. Some that have no end life at all. Parent is right, we are far more paranoid about nuclear than we are of all the chemical waste from other mining practices.
This is a 9 Sigma result, far FAR higher than the Higgs. The summary is stating that exotic matter does exist but we don't know what kinds. Can glueballs exist? What other combinations are out there to be found?
Interpretations of QM's is not science since they can not be tested (as of yet, I hope it can be some day). However the different models of atoms can and have been tested very well and QCD's has fit the data to an amazing precision. I'm sure there are competing theories but I have never heard of any that fit the data this well. btw, I'm a fan of the many worlds interpretation as well. Took me a long time to come around to it, thought it was just a curiosity at first, but eventually I saw the beauty of it. You don't need to add anything else to QMs it just pops right out of the science.
You should always look at the funding path. It tells you a lot about the quality of research. In the past 60 years funding towards 'think tanks' has gone into making bad science to combat good science research, all in an effort to move political goals. I'm not saying this particular research is bad, however it is good to know some of the funding came from the NSA.
Why is parent modded up? Everything stated is wrong. Modified Newtonian Gravity (MOND) has been attempted to explain away dark matter for decades with no success. The Bullet Cluster pretty much put the nail in the coffin of MOND. Dark Matter is the simplest and currently only idea that actually explains all the observations. That's not saying anyone knows what it is but lots of experiments are getting close to getting first glimpses at possibilities.
Scientists should be political, scientists are not separate from the world, nor is science separate from what it is to be a human being. Scientists need to take part in a democracy, and that does not just mean voting, it means participating. They should be sharing science to educate the public on issues, they will have a different perspective even if the science isn't the whole story.
Second point is Fox News can say anything they want for two reasons; they don't have to tell the truth because they and argued that they are an opinion station; 2, the policy on 'balanced reporting' is so utterly stupid. Any issue can be shown to be decisive if they want it to be, get an expert on one side and an 'expert' on the other. It's what they do anytime they talk about climate change.
Pretty much every physics paper is pre-submitted to arXiv and after it is published in a paper the final copy is again resubmitted. The arXiv archive is there for peer review too, so it goes through two rounds of peer review. This has been the case for a decade now, I don't understand why this hasn't been taken up by other fields by now.
MP3's have helped so many heavy metal bands gain exposure and allow them to tour. Most metalheads have found new bands by talking with friends and then downloading albums. This in turn gives the band enough exposure to allow them to tour. On tour they actually don't make much per concert, most make about 100-200 which would be losing money. However, at these shows they are able to sell album and merchandise. Can anyone think of another genre that people are so willing to advertise for? There are so many people walking around with metal band t-shirts and hoodies, and, like me, all they own are band t-shirts.
In talking to most of these bands, they are happy you hear of them through downloading MP3's. Most of these bands can't do it for a living, they have regular jobs so they just want their music out there. And every once in a while a band gets enough exposure that can do it for a living. But the only way to get that exposure in through the internet. Hell, you ask any metal band how they found their musical influences and how they find new bands, they'll all tell you they downloaded the music.
To me one of the most surprising things is the wavelength. Back of the envelope calculation gives me 4.4 *10^-26m. That is amazingly small, 8 orders of magnitude smaller than the proton. This also came from 1/4 of the universe away, which makes me wonder how much smaller it is due to the expansion of the universe. Probably not much, but DAMN that is small.
Not only that but conservation of energy doesn't hold for the universe on a whole, only locally. At least that's the current theory, it could be proven wrong. For evidence look at the expanding universe and the cosmic microwave background. All the energetic photons created after the big bang have lost energy as they have shifted down to 3 K. Again, this could be proven wrong because we have no clue what the vacuum energy really is, any time it's calculated from quantum mechanics the energy is thousands of orders of magnitude too large. But the current theory is that energy is NOT conserved in the universe as a whole.
Phil Plait agree with you on that
One of my favorite comics ever. Seriously though, I like when physicists step out of their area and play or dabble in other areas. Probably refreshing for them too. I think there isn't enough interdisciplinary projects out there for scientists.
This is an old idea that is really about emergence. Terrence Deacon pointed out a flaw in this argument and shifted the idea about emergence from the 'many states' to directional states (I forget the term he used for it). It's the limiting number of states in the system that leads to life, these constraints need energy and so the entropy around them increases. It's a fascinating idea and I hope more work is done on it, listen to it here. [youtube.com]
My CS department writes their own 1st year notes and posts them online for free (yes, it'll cost if you want to print them, but most people have laptops now). The school kinda 'forced' them to put a textbook down for website, the first class my prof said that we'll not be following that book so we can return them, or keep them if we want extra reference material. My experience has been quite good, the first class was extremely well structured and the notes very easy to understand. My second class is more difficult to follow but the professor that wrote the first class is teaching the second for the first time, he never wrote the notes and I can tell he wants to rewrite it all so that it's much easier to follow. By doing this, they can structure the notes around the class, not trying to fit the class to the textbook. I think it works much better.