No experimental results yet (or even any testable predictions yet AFAIK:( ) but results from superstring theory have been used to prove the Hawking-Berkowitz hypothesis - the one that states that the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its surface area. This had resisted a proper proof for 30 years or so and so this is considered quite a success.
I'm not really going to state a preference here seeing as it's an issue which I think is in part due to the human mind seeking explainations which we can relate to what we experience. However the hidden variables theory has been disproved recently, although I can't give you any references unfortunately. The best source of information on these issues (and lots of other interesting aspects of quantum mechanics) is the book Schrodinger's Kittens by John Gribbin, which also has an explaination of the transactional interpretation, which is a lot better than the Copenhagen interpretation.
The current "hot thing" in theoretical physics, superstrings, has the unfortunate position of being a theory without a principle. It's roots lie in the accidental discovery of a formula, the Euler beta function, which described certain properties of particles (Regge trajectories I believe), which was then shown to be a description of a 1-dimensional string. This has lead to the current situation, in which superstrings, although almost miraculous in the way they eliminate a lot of problems, have no underlying principle yet. Many people such as Michio Kaku are trying to determine what these principles are at the moment.
As for applications of the strong force, what about transmutation of elements (the old alchemists dream of turning lead into gold) or the ability to construct super-strong materials bound using the strong force rather than the electromagentic force? I'm not so sure about the practical uses of the weak force though:(.
Probably, since there is a set of minimum quantities calculated using the three fundamental constants h-bar (Planck's constant), c (the speed of light in a vacuum) and G (the gravitational constant). For instance, at distances shorter than the Planck length (about 10^-33 m) the Uncertainty Principle says that enough energy can be 'borrowed' so that a microscopic black hole can form for a period of time equal to the Planck time (about 10^-43 s). So distances shorter than this are effectively meaningless (unless we are talking about superstrings). Since all macroscopic (in the sense of being above the Planck length in scale) events have these minimum lengths, then a finite number of bits could be used to describe any particles position in spacetime (since time is also quantised in this way).
I've got 8 music channels at the moment - MTV, MTV Extra, MTV Base, M2, VH1, VH1 Classics, The Box and UK Play - and it's still an incredible stroke of luck to find a good video before about 9pm at night:(
Oh yeah, and America didn't spend 50 years dehumanising communists (and arresting its own people for supposedly being communists) and then invading small countries for no particular reason, as well as trying to get everyone else to act against those countries which don't like the USA (or funding terrorists within them) and a very long lists of blunders, blusters and other assorted fuck-ups.
P.S. The Austrailians just voted to keep the Queen.
Excuse me but this is the sort of thing which gives people (and their countries) a bad name. I also live in England and while I have issues with some of American society it's still no reason to be so quite so offensive about it. If you've got a comment then say it with a bit of thought. Just because someone might spend their time bashing England doesn't been you should do it back. After all, you're just lowering yourself to their level.
Besides, things aren't so much better over here as they are different. We have some concerns that America doens't and they have things which we don't suffer from them. I wouldn't go as far as saying either one was better (although others undoubtedly will), but at the same time I'm sure glad I live in England:)
Yes, there's far too many that I can see when I go into the centre of London (and I dread to think exactly how many I don't see). There's been a big reaction to inner city crime over here in recent years and this is what led to the introduction of CCTV in such large quantities. Unfortunately AFAIK it hasn't done hardly anything to the crime rates and is vary rarely useful in catching offenders. But I'm sure that they'll carry on installing them just to be seen to be doing something by Middle England, those wonderful people who are completely ignorant of any of the issues seen here on/.
Indeed. If I got logged every time I looked at someone like that I'd probably have a huge count:) Better hope they've specified a large enough field to store the count.
At the moment my job is writing bespoke programs for estimating jobs in the print industry. This involves going to a customer, finding out what they want and programming a solution just for them. If they then have any problems or additional requirements, we can fix or add those as and when they want them.
Now, I'm not from America, but that means I've got a different perspective on you guys. You're totally correct in what you say, and it seems to me that it's a national mentality where there is in inability to admit that America is as flawed as the rest of the world. If the causes of these problems were tackled then it would be the same as saying things aren't perfect - it's better to say that if a kid shoots up his school then he's got mental problems than to say it was because of the society he grew up in. Don't get more wrong, I'm not saying America is a bad place, it's just that it's not really as good as some Americans seem to spend a lot of time telling everybody.
Aaah, yet another story of someone suing someone else because they seem to be unable to accept responsibility for their own actions. This does seem to be the trend in America these days - anyone has something go wrong sues rather than admit that it was their fault, or even nobody's fault. And the saddest thing is that they seem to get away with it every time from what I've seen. Wasn't there a family who won over $300 million in compensation for having a slightly misleading contract that they didn't check properly and got charged $750 above what they had thought they would pay?
Credit cards are not supposed to monitor everything you use them for, and if they did it would raise some serious privacy concerns. If you have a credit card, you're supposed to be responsible enough to use it sensibly. And lets face it, while it's easy enough to overspend on one, $25000? What kind of idiot spends that and then claims it wasn't their fault?
This is a great piece, very funny. Unfortunately, the widespread use of antibiotics today has led to the evolution of bacteria who are now resistant to a large number of the antibiotics in use today. There's a place in the US (I can't remember where) where there is currently an epidemic amongst the children caused by these resistant bacteria and it's become extremely hard to fight them.
The cause of all this is the over-prescription of antibiotics for, well, everything. People (parents especially) want their doctors to give antibiotics for every minor ailment they or their kids suffer from, and when the course is stopped too quickly i.e. before all of the bacteria are killed, resistant bacteria develop and begin to spread. The only way to combat these is with new antibiotics, but these are now becoming extremely scarce. Once no more new antibiotics are available and bacteria develop that are resistant to all of those, then we could see ourselves back at the point before we had them at all!.
Professor Hawking would never have been born, his genes would have marked him as terminally ill.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but given the degree of knowledge we will most likely obtain, wouldn't the most likely outcome be to correct the genes which caused the motor neurone syndrome rather than to abort him?
An interesting article indeed, well thought out. However you need to consider that the definition of beauty is extremely culture-specific. There are cultures where being overweight is considered beautiful and even here in the west beauty is very relative. My idea of beauty certainly isn't blue-eyed, blonde hair etc. I doubt that it would ever come to the Aryan vision.
In effect, children may be given genotypes, genetic profiles
Even with the project completed, being able to determine how the phenotype (the physical manifestation of the genes) comes about is incredibly difficult, being the combination of hundreds of different genes which also most likely interact with other genes in new and amazing ways. It won't be a matter of selecting a genotype for a long time.
Are we comfortable living in a world in which whose categories of humanity - the retarded, the blind, the disabled - will disappear from our part of the earth?
Well, I'm probably going to get flamed for saying this, but I don't think it's a bad thing to remove these things from our gene pool. I'm certainly not trying to advocate eugenics in any form, but how does it have a negative effect if parents who would normally have a baby with difficulties of some kind are instead able to have a healthy baby that has at least the same opportunities as the rest of us?
Given the history of technological breakthroughs once this technology has been unleashed, it's a near certainty that cloning will be used to create children.
Unfortunately, I'm sure this will be all too true. I think that cloning is wrong in the whole human situation and will most likely give rise to side-effects we can't see now. Too many parents today seem to want their kids to be as much like them as possible - if they could have a kid who was them in this manner then what happens then? The whole point of sexual reproduction is to create variation in the genes of the offspring.
It's also the only thing that lets me use some applications on my computer since the mouse connector on my motherboard is broken and I can't afford to fix it:(
Slashdot Mirror
No experimental results yet (or even any testable predictions yet AFAIK :( ) but results from superstring theory have been used to prove the Hawking-Berkowitz hypothesis - the one that states that the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its surface area. This had resisted a proper proof for 30 years or so and so this is considered quite a success.
Here's a list of books I've read or bought and enjoyed:
In Search of Schrodinger's cat by John Gribbin.
Schrodinger's Kittens by John Gribbin.
Hyperspace by Michio Kaku.
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.
The Ghost In The Atom by Paul Davies.
I'm not really going to state a preference here seeing as it's an issue which I think is in part due to the human mind seeking explainations which we can relate to what we experience. However the hidden variables theory has been disproved recently, although I can't give you any references unfortunately. The best source of information on these issues (and lots of other interesting aspects of quantum mechanics) is the book Schrodinger's Kittens by John Gribbin, which also has an explaination of the transactional interpretation, which is a lot better than the Copenhagen interpretation.
The current "hot thing" in theoretical physics, superstrings, has the unfortunate position of being a theory without a principle. It's roots lie in the accidental discovery of a formula, the Euler beta function, which described certain properties of particles (Regge trajectories I believe), which was then shown to be a description of a 1-dimensional string. This has lead to the current situation, in which superstrings, although almost miraculous in the way they eliminate a lot of problems, have no underlying principle yet. Many people such as Michio Kaku are trying to determine what these principles are at the moment.
As for applications of the strong force, what about transmutation of elements (the old alchemists dream of turning lead into gold) or the ability to construct super-strong materials bound using the strong force rather than the electromagentic force? I'm not so sure about the practical uses of the weak force though :(.
Probably, since there is a set of minimum quantities calculated using the three fundamental constants h-bar (Planck's constant), c (the speed of light in a vacuum) and G (the gravitational constant). For instance, at distances shorter than the Planck length (about 10^-33 m) the Uncertainty Principle says that enough energy can be 'borrowed' so that a microscopic black hole can form for a period of time equal to the Planck time (about 10^-43 s). So distances shorter than this are effectively meaningless (unless we are talking about superstrings). Since all macroscopic (in the sense of being above the Planck length in scale) events have these minimum lengths, then a finite number of bits could be used to describe any particles position in spacetime (since time is also quantised in this way).
I've got 8 music channels at the moment - MTV, MTV Extra, MTV Base, M2, VH1, VH1 Classics, The Box and UK Play - and it's still an incredible stroke of luck to find a good video before about 9pm at night :(
It's because you've got the long comment bonus on. Go to your user settings and set the amount of lines to 9999999 and they'll all go down to -1.
Fair enough, I get pissed off with it as well, and yes, it generally is Americans having a go at other countries, especially England.
Oh yeah, and America didn't spend 50 years dehumanising communists (and arresting its own people for supposedly being communists) and then invading small countries for no particular reason, as well as trying to get everyone else to act against those countries which don't like the USA (or funding terrorists within them) and a very long lists of blunders, blusters and other assorted fuck-ups.
P.S. The Austrailians just voted to keep the Queen.
Excuse me but this is the sort of thing which gives people (and their countries) a bad name. I also live in England and while I have issues with some of American society it's still no reason to be so quite so offensive about it. If you've got a comment then say it with a bit of thought. Just because someone might spend their time bashing England doesn't been you should do it back. After all, you're just lowering yourself to their level.
Besides, things aren't so much better over here as they are different. We have some concerns that America doens't and they have things which we don't suffer from them. I wouldn't go as far as saying either one was better (although others undoubtedly will), but at the same time I'm sure glad I live in England :)
Yes, there's far too many that I can see when I go into the centre of London (and I dread to think exactly how many I don't see). There's been a big reaction to inner city crime over here in recent years and this is what led to the introduction of CCTV in such large quantities. Unfortunately AFAIK it hasn't done hardly anything to the crime rates and is vary rarely useful in catching offenders. But I'm sure that they'll carry on installing them just to be seen to be doing something by Middle England, those wonderful people who are completely ignorant of any of the issues seen here on /.
I had that the first time, but I just hit reload and it came up fine.
I think that being forced to listen to Celene Dion is outlawed by the Geneva Convention :) And if it isn't, it should be.
Indeed. If I got logged every time I looked at someone like that I'd probably have a huge count :) Better hope they've specified a large enough field to store the count.
Sort it out, there's more in the world (and on /.) than just MS-bashing you know.
At the moment my job is writing bespoke programs for estimating jobs in the print industry. This involves going to a customer, finding out what they want and programming a solution just for them. If they then have any problems or additional requirements, we can fix or add those as and when they want them.
You really have to admire this bloke's persistance - I think that he's posted a comment on every discussion on /. in the last few days.
Now, I'm not from America, but that means I've got a different perspective on you guys. You're totally correct in what you say, and it seems to me that it's a national mentality where there is in inability to admit that America is as flawed as the rest of the world. If the causes of these problems were tackled then it would be the same as saying things aren't perfect - it's better to say that if a kid shoots up his school then he's got mental problems than to say it was because of the society he grew up in. Don't get more wrong, I'm not saying America is a bad place, it's just that it's not really as good as some Americans seem to spend a lot of time telling everybody.
Aaah, yet another story of someone suing someone else because they seem to be unable to accept responsibility for their own actions. This does seem to be the trend in America these days - anyone has something go wrong sues rather than admit that it was their fault, or even nobody's fault. And the saddest thing is that they seem to get away with it every time from what I've seen. Wasn't there a family who won over $300 million in compensation for having a slightly misleading contract that they didn't check properly and got charged $750 above what they had thought they would pay?
Credit cards are not supposed to monitor everything you use them for, and if they did it would raise some serious privacy concerns. If you have a credit card, you're supposed to be responsible enough to use it sensibly. And lets face it, while it's easy enough to overspend on one, $25000? What kind of idiot spends that and then claims it wasn't their fault?
This is a great piece, very funny. Unfortunately, the widespread use of antibiotics today has led to the evolution of bacteria who are now resistant to a large number of the antibiotics in use today. There's a place in the US (I can't remember where) where there is currently an epidemic amongst the children caused by these resistant bacteria and it's become extremely hard to fight them.
The cause of all this is the over-prescription of antibiotics for, well, everything. People (parents especially) want their doctors to give antibiotics for every minor ailment they or their kids suffer from, and when the course is stopped too quickly i.e. before all of the bacteria are killed, resistant bacteria develop and begin to spread. The only way to combat these is with new antibiotics, but these are now becoming extremely scarce. Once no more new antibiotics are available and bacteria develop that are resistant to all of those, then we could see ourselves back at the point before we had them at all!.
Professor Hawking would never have been born, his genes would have marked him as terminally ill.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but given the degree of knowledge we will most likely obtain, wouldn't the most likely outcome be to correct the genes which caused the motor neurone syndrome rather than to abort him?
An interesting article indeed, well thought out. However you need to consider that the definition of beauty is extremely culture-specific. There are cultures where being overweight is considered beautiful and even here in the west beauty is very relative. My idea of beauty certainly isn't blue-eyed, blonde hair etc. I doubt that it would ever come to the Aryan vision.
In effect, children may be given genotypes, genetic profiles
Even with the project completed, being able to determine how the phenotype (the physical manifestation of the genes) comes about is incredibly difficult, being the combination of hundreds of different genes which also most likely interact with other genes in new and amazing ways. It won't be a matter of selecting a genotype for a long time.
Are we comfortable living in a world in which whose categories of humanity - the retarded, the blind, the disabled - will disappear from our part of the earth?
Well, I'm probably going to get flamed for saying this, but I don't think it's a bad thing to remove these things from our gene pool. I'm certainly not trying to advocate eugenics in any form, but how does it have a negative effect if parents who would normally have a baby with difficulties of some kind are instead able to have a healthy baby that has at least the same opportunities as the rest of us?
Given the history of technological breakthroughs once this technology has been unleashed, it's a near certainty that cloning will be used to create children.
Unfortunately, I'm sure this will be all too true. I think that cloning is wrong in the whole human situation and will most likely give rise to side-effects we can't see now. Too many parents today seem to want their kids to be as much like them as possible - if they could have a kid who was them in this manner then what happens then? The whole point of sexual reproduction is to create variation in the genes of the offspring.
When I said I can't afford it, I really meant it. At the moment a new mouse isn't very high on my list of priorities.
It's also the only thing that lets me use some applications on my computer since the mouse connector on my motherboard is broken and I can't afford to fix it :(