Your concern is misplaced: You have reversed the arrow of cause and effect. I claimed that it might be possible to infer something about the power of the UK from the course of events surrounding the Litvinyenko affair, not that the affair signalled the end of the UK's power! The latter is of course ridiculous, and it is most interesting that you made this mistake.
I understand very well what it means to be British, being from Britian, living there as well as having lived in other countries and being very au fait with contemporary psychological theories on social identity.
I think this is a real test case of whether the notion of the UK as a nation holds any actual power in the World. The Russian constitution, as I understand it, obliges the Russian government NOT to render Russian citizens for extradition, despite the fact that in Britain the defendent will assuredly recieve a fair trial (either in the UK or by analogy to the Lockerbie case, in a third country).
If the Russian government DID sponsor an assassination within British territory, it is an affront to our sovereignty and should be exposed. If on the other hand it was NOT, then it is equally desirable that the Russian government be cleared of that.
If the UK does not take a strong, principled stand on this issue, then I feel that our identity of "British" is very probably meaningless.
I certainly think that you're right about "looking into the past" is a cliche. So maybe this analagy might clear things up:
You're at Bristol Temple Meads Station and the 10:52am from London Paddington comes in (it started in London at, say 8:30am). You rush up to the inspector and have a conversation:
You: "What's going on in London right now?"
Inspector: "Well I can tell you what happened this morning; I had a good breakfast!"
You: "But I want to know what's happening now!"
Inspector: "I can't help!"
The Inspector can't help because his knowledge about where he started is confined as it were, to when he left. He can tell you nothing about London as it is now, nor is it correct to say that his information comes from the present just because you're receiving it now!
It is I think, quite incorrect to suggest that you're somehow "seeing the present". This claim defies special relativity because it would imply that the information has travelled instantaneously. If you know any special relativity, you'll probably recognise that the idea of a "present" is not well defined in any case!
And what do you mean precisely by "its appearance is altered on the trip, for example by traveling through the Earth's atmosphere". You can get coherent photons that have travelled from precisely this sort of system that will interfere. You need to be rather precise about what you mean.
Well you certainly can measure position! What about a single slit experiment? The electron going through the slit has a quite well-defined position, but a less well defined momentum and that is the crux of quantum mechanics. Indeed, as you imply, it is not possible to say the position of the particle is exactly such-and-such because that would violate the uncertainty principle. I would prefer not to mention infinite spreads of position/momenta because this is not helpful; given you mention information propagation, do you not think that this notion might have issues with an infinite wavefunction? The wavefunction in any phase space must be normalizable and this is surely the most important concept. I'll except tunneling as there even the smallest of tails causes the finite barrier to "leak"... eventually.
An illustration - it is well known that C60 can be made to diffract. What do you mean then that position is meaningless? Do you mean to say that the atoms within the fullerene have no spatial relation to each other? How then do we know the symmetry of the molecule (from the number of absorption lines)? Of course postion is meaningful! Whether it is well defined is quite another matter.
I would also question your belief that the operators have any more meaning than the objects that the theory puports to describe! And I would certainly not advise trusting the math (although I'm a theoretician) - surely one must actually trust experiment!
I happen to be a physicist (but I don't particularly think that's relevant). I'm quite sure you grasp QM (the famous quote from Bohr aside), but I'm not sure I agree with the way you have chosen to explain it:-)
It is very common to say that "position, etc. are meaningless" but that simply isn't a correct statement at all, as I hope I've shown. Sorry for dragging this off topic (and for the profusion of exclamation marks)
Errmmm... Position/Momentum and Energy/Time are still quite meaningful concepts in Quantum Mechanics; if they were not how could you still expect to measure them (at least in the case of the first pair)? It is that notion that these pairs of conjugate variables are not simulataneously well-defined for a quantum mechanical 'object' that separates QM from Classical Physics.
Einstein's relativity is still classical physics.
I guess fortunately for them they were trying to win a war, and not build a Turing-complete computer:-) The novelty of Colossus was that it successfully used 1500 valves without a prohibitively high failure rate --- it was not at all obvious that this was possible at the time and largely due to the oft-unsung hero Tommy Flowers. (But you knew all that already)
So little? Have a read of Tommy Flower's description of the Colossus. Several processing units in parallel were used to enhance greatly the throughput of the machine. It was not until the era of the 486 that a general-purpose microcomputer was capable of performing the same task that the dedicated colossus performed.
One possible explanation is that Churchill believed it to be stategically unwise for the rest of the world to know that Britain had such an advanced codebreaking capability. The usefulness of the Bletchley Park operation of course lay in the fact that the Germans believed Enigma was uncrackable.
Of course, the military desire for secrecy (cynics might refer to it as paranoia) usually means the question is turned on it's head: rather than "why destroy this?" the question asked is "why should we make this public?".
Power Consumption: A typical 40" LCD consumes around 200W power whereas a similar plasma model consumes as you say around 350W - this is really rather significant!
Brightness: This section isn't quite right; LCDs work because a birefringent and switchable nematic layer is able to rotate the polarization state of light between a pair of crossed polarizers (which normally block all transmitted light). In the classic TN or STN geometry, the OFF state is transmitting. It is significant, and what I think you were referring to, that exactly half of the incident light from the backlight is lost because of the polarizers. The poor reproduction of darker colours by LCDs is because the Freederickz transition in the twisted nematic geometry is rather sharp - i.e. the Intensity/Voltage graph is very nonlinear. It is perfectly possible to build a display with a smoother Freederickz transition, so if this were a significant problem, manufacturers could easily eliminate it. Crosstalk between pixels, which you describe, in an LCD is only significant for very small pixels (i.e. less than a hundred microns) and hence not a signifant effect.
My bias: I'm a physicist in the Liquid Crystal Display field:-)
A far more concerning problem with the proliferation of gargantuan TV sets is their ridiculous power consumption, which is greater than that for LCDs by 50% (comparing constant area).
The cost of ownership of a Plasma should therefore be a significant factor in any decision to purchase one. And need I say anything about climate change?
OLEDs anyone? At least you don't lose half the transmitted intensity to the polarizers.
Come off it - it's a logical fallacy to suggest that just because some arguments against nuclear power are flawed, nuclear power is still the right way to go. The two sentence summary: modern plant deisgns are an awful lot safer than older designs so safety is NOT the paramount issue; rather, the disposal issue is the key problem - the waste products remain dangerous for thousands of years.
There may perhaps be some clever quantum trick that one could play that might increase the tunneling rate (and thence decrease the half-life) but noone has come up with suck a trick yet.
The proponents of nuclear power have come up with no satisfactory answer to the waste issue. I haven't even mentioned the fact that nuclear power projects have a history of cost overruns (in fact it is virtually impossible to quantify the costs). And who's going to insure a new generation of nuclear plants these days?
That's not to say nuclear doesn't have place in our efforts to tackle global warming but it is ridiculous to hysterically shout "the answer's nuclear!" when the situation is much much more complex.
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Your concern is misplaced: You have reversed the arrow of cause and effect. I claimed that it might be possible to infer something about the power of the UK from the course of events surrounding the Litvinyenko affair, not that the affair signalled the end of the UK's power! The latter is of course ridiculous, and it is most interesting that you made this mistake.
I understand very well what it means to be British, being from Britian, living there as well as having lived in other countries and being very au fait with contemporary psychological theories on social identity.
I think this is a real test case of whether the notion of the UK as a nation holds any actual power in the World. The Russian constitution, as I understand it, obliges the Russian government NOT to render Russian citizens for extradition, despite the fact that in Britain the defendent will assuredly recieve a fair trial (either in the UK or by analogy to the Lockerbie case, in a third country).
If the Russian government DID sponsor an assassination within British territory, it is an affront to our sovereignty and should be exposed. If on the other hand it was NOT, then it is equally desirable that the Russian government be cleared of that.
If the UK does not take a strong, principled stand on this issue, then I feel that our identity of "British" is very probably meaningless.
I certainly think that you're right about "looking into the past" is a cliche. So maybe this analagy might clear things up: You're at Bristol Temple Meads Station and the 10:52am from London Paddington comes in (it started in London at, say 8:30am). You rush up to the inspector and have a conversation: You: "What's going on in London right now?" Inspector: "Well I can tell you what happened this morning; I had a good breakfast!" You: "But I want to know what's happening now!" Inspector: "I can't help!" The Inspector can't help because his knowledge about where he started is confined as it were, to when he left. He can tell you nothing about London as it is now, nor is it correct to say that his information comes from the present just because you're receiving it now! It is I think, quite incorrect to suggest that you're somehow "seeing the present". This claim defies special relativity because it would imply that the information has travelled instantaneously. If you know any special relativity, you'll probably recognise that the idea of a "present" is not well defined in any case! And what do you mean precisely by "its appearance is altered on the trip, for example by traveling through the Earth's atmosphere". You can get coherent photons that have travelled from precisely this sort of system that will interfere. You need to be rather precise about what you mean.
Well you certainly can measure position! What about a single slit experiment? The electron going through the slit has a quite well-defined position, but a less well defined momentum and that is the crux of quantum mechanics. Indeed, as you imply, it is not possible to say the position of the particle is exactly such-and-such because that would violate the uncertainty principle. I would prefer not to mention infinite spreads of position/momenta because this is not helpful; given you mention information propagation, do you not think that this notion might have issues with an infinite wavefunction? The wavefunction in any phase space must be normalizable and this is surely the most important concept. I'll except tunneling as there even the smallest of tails causes the finite barrier to "leak"... eventually.
An illustration - it is well known that C60 can be made to diffract. What do you mean then that position is meaningless? Do you mean to say that the atoms within the fullerene have no spatial relation to each other? How then do we know the symmetry of the molecule (from the number of absorption lines)? Of course postion is meaningful! Whether it is well defined is quite another matter.
I would also question your belief that the operators have any more meaning than the objects that the theory puports to describe! And I would certainly not advise trusting the math (although I'm a theoretician) - surely one must actually trust experiment!
I happen to be a physicist (but I don't particularly think that's relevant). I'm quite sure you grasp QM (the famous quote from Bohr aside), but I'm not sure I agree with the way you have chosen to explain it :-)
It is very common to say that "position, etc. are meaningless" but that simply isn't a correct statement at all, as I hope I've shown. Sorry for dragging this off topic (and for the profusion of exclamation marks)
Errmmm... Position/Momentum and Energy/Time are still quite meaningful concepts in Quantum Mechanics; if they were not how could you still expect to measure them (at least in the case of the first pair)? It is that notion that these pairs of conjugate variables are not simulataneously well-defined for a quantum mechanical 'object' that separates QM from Classical Physics. Einstein's relativity is still classical physics.
I guess fortunately for them they were trying to win a war, and not build a Turing-complete computer :-) The novelty of Colossus was that it successfully used 1500 valves without a prohibitively high failure rate --- it was not at all obvious that this was possible at the time and largely due to the oft-unsung hero Tommy Flowers. (But you knew all that already)
So little? Have a read of Tommy Flower's description of the Colossus. Several processing units in parallel were used to enhance greatly the throughput of the machine. It was not until the era of the 486 that a general-purpose microcomputer was capable of performing the same task that the dedicated colossus performed.
One possible explanation is that Churchill believed it to be stategically unwise for the rest of the world to know that Britain had such an advanced codebreaking capability. The usefulness of the Bletchley Park operation of course lay in the fact that the Germans believed Enigma was uncrackable. Of course, the military desire for secrecy (cynics might refer to it as paranoia) usually means the question is turned on it's head: rather than "why destroy this?" the question asked is "why should we make this public?".
Power Consumption: A typical 40" LCD consumes around 200W power whereas a similar plasma model consumes as you say around 350W - this is really rather significant!
Brightness: This section isn't quite right; LCDs work because a birefringent and switchable nematic layer is able to rotate the polarization state of light between a pair of crossed polarizers (which normally block all transmitted light). In the classic TN or STN geometry, the OFF state is transmitting. It is significant, and what I think you were referring to, that exactly half of the incident light from the backlight is lost because of the polarizers. The poor reproduction of darker colours by LCDs is because the Freederickz transition in the twisted nematic geometry is rather sharp - i.e. the Intensity/Voltage graph is very nonlinear. It is perfectly possible to build a display with a smoother Freederickz transition, so if this were a significant problem, manufacturers could easily eliminate it. Crosstalk between pixels, which you describe, in an LCD is only significant for very small pixels (i.e. less than a hundred microns) and hence not a signifant effect.
My bias: I'm a physicist in the Liquid Crystal Display field :-)
A far more concerning problem with the proliferation of gargantuan TV sets is their ridiculous power consumption, which is greater than that for LCDs by 50% (comparing constant area).
The cost of ownership of a Plasma should therefore be a significant factor in any decision to purchase one. And need I say anything about climate change?
OLEDs anyone? At least you don't lose half the transmitted intensity to the polarizers.
Do you have any evidence for this statement?
Come off it - it's a logical fallacy to suggest that just because some arguments against nuclear power are flawed, nuclear power is still the right way to go. The two sentence summary: modern plant deisgns are an awful lot safer than older designs so safety is NOT the paramount issue; rather, the disposal issue is the key problem - the waste products remain dangerous for thousands of years.
There may perhaps be some clever quantum trick that one could play that might increase the tunneling rate (and thence decrease the half-life) but noone has come up with suck a trick yet.
The proponents of nuclear power have come up with no satisfactory answer to the waste issue. I haven't even mentioned the fact that nuclear power projects have a history of cost overruns (in fact it is virtually impossible to quantify the costs). And who's going to insure a new generation of nuclear plants these days?
That's not to say nuclear doesn't have place in our efforts to tackle global warming but it is ridiculous to hysterically shout "the answer's nuclear!" when the situation is much much more complex.