...it's a really cool event. The apparent radius of the the Sun is slightly larger than that of the Moon and so you get all sorts of exciting visual phenomena. The sky goes dark, you get to see the profile of mountain ranges on the moon and even the Sun's corona.
When Venus is eclipsed by the Moon you can't see it any more. Newsworthy huh?
It's nothing new that an electromagnetic field couples to gravity. Everything couples to gravity - including gravity itself (which one of the reasons quantum gravity is so hard). But you need a lot of electromagnetic field for space-time curvature to notice. It's hard to express just how much you need. Suffice it to say that if you could make such a magnet you probably would have invented the anti-grav drive centureis before.
--
The Salam-Weinberg electroweak unification is ancient history. They've handed out the Nobel prize for that work already.
However the quest is still on to unify the other forces. However we don't even have a working theory of quantum gravity (in 4 dimensions) yet - let alone a unification with the other forces.
The popularity of String Theory is due to the fact that it seems to be able to contain all four known forces - but it has many other problems.
They should just go through all their Mars research finding anything that could be interpreted as evidence for life on Mars, no matter how tenuous, and then make lots of press releases about it to agencies like CNN. They should also encourage their partners to do the same. All these stories are bound to catch the public eye and raise overall interest in, and willingness to spend on, space research.
--
That is to say that this is a symptom, not a cause
You're right, but that's not the point. This experiment is really a kind of double negative rather than a positive.
What I mean is this: there are many models that might explain why there is more matter than antimatter. However they generally presuppose a difference between matter and antimatter and so if such differences are not observed we can reject these models out of hand. What an experiment like this does is make us even more sure that there is a difference between matter and antimatter meaning that all those models that we previously rejected are now open for business again.
Ie. this experiment contradicts a proposition that could have been used to counter certain explanations of the matter-antimatter imbalance.
It's not necessarily the B-mesons themselves that are interesting.
Alex Lightman of Charmed Technology quips, "I wear the same pair of jeans all the time and I'm sure they have bacterial colonies living in them, but if they were selected to convert my sweat into sweet-smelling pheromones, that would be great," he says.
Alex Lightman, whoever he is, makes a really lame joke of the sort you might expect from an 8 year old/. reader, and yet it's posted as a news story. Isn't there any quality control?
--
Yes, you're right. For once this story isn't coming from a NASA press release and it is, in effect, nothing but private conversation between researchers. My complaint should be with the media and not NASA.
--
My my. I always though Atlanta was just a myth - but it has its own web site so it must be real. Indiana Jones will have to find another mythical place to visit. Does Kansas really exist?
--
He's made you feel guilty if you're German, American, white, human or even just 'orga' (for those who watched AI). What guilt trip could misanthropist Spielberg take you on in this movie? It's not like the Americans bombed the Atlantans, or the Atlantans were made slaves, or the Atlantans oppress teddy bears. My, my. Spielberg has a tough problem to solve here. But with the help of that genius scriptwriter George Lucas I'm sure they'll figure it out.
--
why are these scientists wrong for wanting NASA to check it out
I personally think it's not beyond the bounds of credulity to suggest that there may be life on Mars - simply because I think there may be organisms that could make the trip from Earth to Mars and occasionally events may have taken place in the history of the Earth that could have sent life bearing matter towars Mars (ejecta from volcanoes? debris from meteor collisions?)
However it seems to me that NASA are grabbing any kind of evidence they can, no matter how unlikely, in order to produce publicity. What would normally considered good material for internal discussion, but not publication, by most academic institutions, is publicly paraded by NASA. At the very least it's embarassing - at the worst downright dishonest. Repeatedly crying wolf will lead to a loss of credibility - the kind of climate where Fox's show about the faking of the lunar landing are acceptable.
NASA seem to be employing an interesting short term strategy. Link everything to the possibility of extraterrestrial life in order to gain publicity and funds. It's probably working. But the cost is loss of credibility. Eventually everyone is going to get fed up of hearing about yet another bit of evidence that there is life on Mars and NASA will have cried wolf once too often.
I personally believe they are being misleading. Most of these 'leads' are bogus.
After we've had quantum mechanics around for nearly a century something calling itself the First Quantum Symposium appears. Hmmm...
I look at the web site and see "Will quantum effects dominate...in the 21st century?" As if modern computing technology wasn't already built on solid state physics and quantum mechanics.
Then I notice two of the speakers: Stapp who's into clairvoyance experiments and Josephson who after his Nobel Prize seems to be an mystical guru who talks complete crap on quantum mechanics and consciousness. Hameroff, another bogus physicist has cancelled. I was surprised not to see Dana Zohar talking about Quantum Healing or even Deepak Chopra. Even David Deutsch, whose formalisation of quantum computing is pretty damn cool, is a complete crackpot when he starts his sophomoric philosophical ramblings (as evinced by his recent book) - and I wonder what he'll be talking about.
And now it all comes together. This isn't a real symposium on QM, which is as old as the hills. This is a symposium on how much bogosity you can extract from QM.
There are two types of people in the world: those who've studied physics and know that QM is basic ordinary freshman material and the rest of the world who get their knowledge of QM from Slashdot and the popular press and think it's some bizarre mystico-mumbo-jumbo-weirdness from Planet X. I hope that over the cousre of the 21st century this situation can be rectified somewhat.
I don't believe that. What they're actually doing is making a press release to keep the hype about life on Mars going in order to collect funds. Rather than do the research and get a negative result - which gets you no money - they're releasing information before they do the research - which gives them a chance of cashing in. This is entirely normal behaviour from anyone involved with Mars.
--
NASA News
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Scientists at Nasa Ames Research center are pleased to announce the strongest evidence yet that there is life on Mars based on spectrographic readings of the Martian atmosphere.
Using spectrographic techniques scientists have been able to determine the gaps between the energy levels of matter in the atmosphere of Mars. These energy level differences have been compared with simulations run at the Ames Research Center. What these simulations have revealed is that the energy levels correspond precisely to those of electrons orbiting a cloud of protons and neutrons.
The implication has broad consequences. The Martian atmosphere contains matter that is substantially like that on earth that is made up of electrons, neutrons and protons that are almost indistinguishable from that on earth.
Life science expert Kathryn D'Aumbert points out that all life on earth is carbon based. Carbon is made up of the same three particles - protons, neutrons and electrons. Therefore we can conclude that there is every reason to believe that there is life on Mars.
Biophysicist John Dome has been studying the physical properties of living organisms. He notes that every chemical process of every organism on earth relies on the exchange of electrons between nuclei of protons and neutrons. "We now have every reason to believe that these kinds of processes are at work on Mars. At this stage it would be pure speculation to suggest that there isn't life on Mars"
NASA is now optimistic that these results will play a key role in future discussions about the funding of this research.
There are some dissenting views however. Stephen M Arter of the Propulsion Engineering division points out that exactly the same energy levels would be visible in antimatter, not just matter. "But that's good news, not bad - we could use Martian antimatter to power some of the alternative propulsion ideas we have been investigating such as the Alcubierre warp drive".
You're clever knowing the names of all those famous scientists. It's also very astute of you to observe that the universe is still here. Do you, mayhap, have a contribution to the subject of quantum encryption?
--
Mod that back down again. That link (after you repair it) is to something completely different that has nothing to do with quantum encryption (though it does involved encryption and satellites). Follow the link, read it for yourself.
--
Doing it with a laser over 10km of desert is new. If you can do that then doing it with a satellite seems within reach. So this is fairly significant work.
--
Why do you need a 0% error rate? Read some basic information theory eg. do a web search on Shannon, Information. Any channel, no matter how noisy (assuming independence of the noise - valid in this case), can be converted to a channel with error rate approaching any rate you so desire by suitable use of error correcting codes.
--
There is a basic result in quantum mechanics called the "No Clone Theorem". It says that there is no device that can be guaranteed duplicate the quantum state of a physical system - even a simple one like the spin of a single electron. (Naively you can think of the problem as being that attempting to clone the state involves interfering with it and hence you risk modifying it - but it goes deeper than that.) The "No Clone Theorem" follows almost trivially from the basic axioms of Quantum Mechanics so that if this is violated then we have a major physics paradigm shift on our hands. Quantum encryption merely exploits the No Clone Theorem.
--
Slashdot Mirror
--
When Venus is eclipsed by the Moon you can't see it any more. Newsworthy huh?
--It is if you have sex at the same time. There's nothing about screwing with human ova anywhere in the Bible.
--
Sex is sinful. If we can remove sex from procreation we can produce humans untainted by Original Sin and the world would be a better place.
--
--
It's nothing new that an electromagnetic field couples to gravity. Everything couples to gravity - including gravity itself (which one of the reasons quantum gravity is so hard). But you need a lot of electromagnetic field for space-time curvature to notice. It's hard to express just how much you need. Suffice it to say that if you could make such a magnet you probably would have invented the anti-grav drive centureis before.
--
However the quest is still on to unify the other forces. However we don't even have a working theory of quantum gravity (in 4 dimensions) yet - let alone a unification with the other forces.
The popularity of String Theory is due to the fact that it seems to be able to contain all four known forces - but it has many other problems.
--They should just go through all their Mars research finding anything that could be interpreted as evidence for life on Mars, no matter how tenuous, and then make lots of press releases about it to agencies like CNN. They should also encourage their partners to do the same. All these stories are bound to catch the public eye and raise overall interest in, and willingness to spend on, space research.
--
What I mean is this: there are many models that might explain why there is more matter than antimatter. However they generally presuppose a difference between matter and antimatter and so if such differences are not observed we can reject these models out of hand. What an experiment like this does is make us even more sure that there is a difference between matter and antimatter meaning that all those models that we previously rejected are now open for business again.
Ie. this experiment contradicts a proposition that could have been used to counter certain explanations of the matter-antimatter imbalance.
It's not necessarily the B-mesons themselves that are interesting.
----
Well all I know is that I went to CompUSA and bought a PS/2 mouse and now I can't find anywhere to plug it into.
--
Yes, you're right. For once this story isn't coming from a NASA press release and it is, in effect, nothing but private conversation between researchers. My complaint should be with the media and not NASA.
--
My my. I always though Atlanta was just a myth - but it has its own web site so it must be real. Indiana Jones will have to find another mythical place to visit. Does Kansas really exist?
--
He's made you feel guilty if you're German, American, white, human or even just 'orga' (for those who watched AI). What guilt trip could misanthropist Spielberg take you on in this movie? It's not like the Americans bombed the Atlantans, or the Atlantans were made slaves, or the Atlantans oppress teddy bears. My, my. Spielberg has a tough problem to solve here. But with the help of that genius scriptwriter George Lucas I'm sure they'll figure it out.
--
However it seems to me that NASA are grabbing any kind of evidence they can, no matter how unlikely, in order to produce publicity. What would normally considered good material for internal discussion, but not publication, by most academic institutions, is publicly paraded by NASA. At the very least it's embarassing - at the worst downright dishonest. Repeatedly crying wolf will lead to a loss of credibility - the kind of climate where Fox's show about the faking of the lunar landing are acceptable.
--I personally believe they are being misleading. Most of these 'leads' are bogus.
--I look at the web site and see "Will quantum effects dominate...in the 21st century?" As if modern computing technology wasn't already built on solid state physics and quantum mechanics.
Then I notice two of the speakers: Stapp who's into clairvoyance experiments and Josephson who after his Nobel Prize seems to be an mystical guru who talks complete crap on quantum mechanics and consciousness. Hameroff, another bogus physicist has cancelled. I was surprised not to see Dana Zohar talking about Quantum Healing or even Deepak Chopra. Even David Deutsch, whose formalisation of quantum computing is pretty damn cool, is a complete crackpot when he starts his sophomoric philosophical ramblings (as evinced by his recent book) - and I wonder what he'll be talking about.
And now it all comes together. This isn't a real symposium on QM, which is as old as the hills. This is a symposium on how much bogosity you can extract from QM.
There are two types of people in the world: those who've studied physics and know that QM is basic ordinary freshman material and the rest of the world who get their knowledge of QM from Slashdot and the popular press and think it's some bizarre mystico-mumbo-jumbo-weirdness from Planet X. I hope that over the cousre of the 21st century this situation can be rectified somewhat.
--I don't believe that. What they're actually doing is making a press release to keep the hype about life on Mars going in order to collect funds. Rather than do the research and get a negative result - which gets you no money - they're releasing information before they do the research - which gives them a chance of cashing in. This is entirely normal behaviour from anyone involved with Mars.
--
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Scientists at Nasa Ames Research center are pleased to announce the strongest evidence yet that there is life on Mars based on spectrographic readings of the Martian atmosphere.
Using spectrographic techniques scientists have been able to determine the gaps between the energy levels of matter in the atmosphere of Mars. These energy level differences have been compared with simulations run at the Ames Research Center. What these simulations have revealed is that the energy levels correspond precisely to those of electrons orbiting a cloud of protons and neutrons.
The implication has broad consequences. The Martian atmosphere contains matter that is substantially like that on earth that is made up of electrons, neutrons and protons that are almost indistinguishable from that on earth.
Life science expert Kathryn D'Aumbert points out that all life on earth is carbon based. Carbon is made up of the same three particles - protons, neutrons and electrons. Therefore we can conclude that there is every reason to believe that there is life on Mars.
Biophysicist John Dome has been studying the physical properties of living organisms. He notes that every chemical process of every organism on earth relies on the exchange of electrons between nuclei of protons and neutrons. "We now have every reason to believe that these kinds of processes are at work on Mars. At this stage it would be pure speculation to suggest that there isn't life on Mars"
NASA is now optimistic that these results will play a key role in future discussions about the funding of this research.
There are some dissenting views however. Stephen M Arter of the Propulsion Engineering division points out that exactly the same energy levels would be visible in antimatter, not just matter. "But that's good news, not bad - we could use Martian antimatter to power some of the alternative propulsion ideas we have been investigating such as the Alcubierre warp drive".
--You're clever knowing the names of all those famous scientists. It's also very astute of you to observe that the universe is still here. Do you, mayhap, have a contribution to the subject of quantum encryption?
--
Mod that back down again. That link (after you repair it) is to something completely different that has nothing to do with quantum encryption (though it does involved encryption and satellites). Follow the link, read it for yourself.
--
Doing it with a laser over 10km of desert is new. If you can do that then doing it with a satellite seems within reach. So this is fairly significant work.
--
Why do you need a 0% error rate? Read some basic information theory eg. do a web search on Shannon, Information. Any channel, no matter how noisy (assuming independence of the noise - valid in this case), can be converted to a channel with error rate approaching any rate you so desire by suitable use of error correcting codes.
--
There is a basic result in quantum mechanics called the "No Clone Theorem". It says that there is no device that can be guaranteed duplicate the quantum state of a physical system - even a simple one like the spin of a single electron. (Naively you can think of the problem as being that attempting to clone the state involves interfering with it and hence you risk modifying it - but it goes deeper than that.) The "No Clone Theorem" follows almost trivially from the basic axioms of Quantum Mechanics so that if this is violated then we have a major physics paradigm shift on our hands. Quantum encryption merely exploits the No Clone Theorem.
--
Which of the 4 categories does "old D&D character name" go into?
--