*Under certain models* (i.e. standard model), the scientists hypothesize a reasonable range of energies and other parameters for the Higgs. This is the "Bayesian prior". It could be wrong, but it is the conventional best guess.
Then, under various scenarios, and knowing the operation of the Tevatron, they estimate whether they will see enough particle events (which will be on the extreme tails of distributions of course) which will confirm the presence of Higgs, given that scenario.
So that's how they get the odds.
It will be more interesting of course if what they observe turns out be qualitatively different from predictions. Like no Higgs. Or two.
Unlike natural Constitutional rights, there is no right to a patent.
The U.S. constitution grants Congress the power to make patent law according to best policy for society---"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
If they should decide, e.g. certain classes software algorithms should not be patentable, then that is the law. This decision could be based on economic considerations, not 'rights of inventors'.
Congress is prohibited only from granting patents of unlimited duration.
ORLY? Added to the Galactic Epic Fail entry in the Hitchiker's Guide??
"And on through the portholes on the right, you can see the remains of yet another civilization that didn't get that really nasty third-order super-relativistic neutrino gravity correction term right when it mattered. Lunch service begins in the main cabin shortly."
Indeed, especially given that the abstract of the PRL says that the conclusions are the opposite, i.e. supporting Abraham's theory, whereas nhk is Minkowski's side.
"There are two different proposals for the momentum of light in a transparent dielectric of refractive index n: Minkowski's version nE/c and Abraham's version E/(nc), where E and c are the energy and vacuum speed of light, respectively. Despite many tests and debates over nearly a century, momentum of light in a transparent dielectric remains controversial. In this Letter, we report a direct observation of the inward push force on the free end face of a nanometer silica filament exerted by the outgoing light. Our results suggest that Abraham's momentum is correct."
The EESTOR stuff has been analyzed---yes buy some random guy on a blog, but somebody who really seems to know what he's talking about.
Only in freshman physics can you say that the energy in a capacitor is simply E=1/2 C*V^2---or more correctly---measure the capacitance at V=approx 0 and then extrapolate.
Barium titanate is definitely a known ferroelectric (this is not misspelled) material with a very high dielectric "constant" k.
But it it is not really constant! At sufficiently high voltages (i.e. interesting for power storage) you get dielectric saturation, meaning that k = k(V) in reality and it declines heavily. You just can't make atoms and electrons do what EEstor wants. There isn't enough place to stably put that much energy in electrons unless you change their energy states--which is otherwise known as chemistry---and gasoline.
And if you have 50 kW-hr or so in a little place, and you get a short thanks to a collision which breaks the circuits, there's no way to NOT have a freaking BIG ASS meltdown and explosion. That potential energy IS going to go somewhere and if it was all in E-fields and capacitance, it will discharge really fast if there is a hint of a dielectric breakdown and this will vaporize.
Only if the 50 kW-hr is experimentally measured, not imputed from a low power separate measurement of capacitance or dielectric constant, will I believe it.
I have the feeling that this patent document may really be used for continuing the funding cycle, not actually protecting a (nearly physically unbelievable) technology.
They probably did create a very good ultracapacitor with good materials processing, but I bet the energy storage is still in the ballpark range of known ultracaps.
Having it be otherwise would be like saying you've refined petroleum into a new chemical fuel which has the energy density of fissile uranium, and no radiation!
The EPR paradox isn't a paradox any more: the non-local effects are physically real, tested in experiment.
Me, I'm not sure it's the Bohm interpretation, I guess. I may be a young fuddy-duddy but the simplest explanation would be just a a field theory with deterministic evolution.
I think the simplest solution would be decoherence coming straight from QM dynamics, some tiny kind of nonlinearity (quantum gravity?) which breaks the symmetry between pure states so that one or the other is 'effectively' chosen by the dynamics of the system.
That is, when you interact a quantum thing with a macroscopic measuring device, you get an entangled state, but then when you have e.g. "spin up + entangled spin up device" and "spin down + entangeld spin down device" there is some non-unitary dynamical mechanism which makes the wavefunction very rapidly and strongly favor one or the other, with the choice depending on the innumerable interacting components of the universe as initial conditions.
No gnarly philosphical knots, just physics and integration of equations of motion, like electromagnetism.
This idea, rather like the Copenhagen interpretation, makes use of the magic "classical projection operator" box, which functions outside the normal dynamical laws of quantum mechanics.
Back in the Real World, we make measuring devices out of electrons, protons and neutrons and things which themselves are quantum mechanical objects which evolve according to QM's equations of motion.
The collapse of wave functions happens to be a very good *approximation* (like Fermi's Golden Rules are good approximations to solving the first principles equations in perturbation theory) when you interact small quantum systems with thermodyamically large ones. But, unlike the rest of physics, the 'collapse' thing has no really clear dynamical law or sensible physics.
In dynamics, you can *describe* high dimensional but deterministic dynamical systems with stochastic language (probability distributions), even though the actual truth is of highly chaotic dynamical systems with a very large dimensional attractor and high Lyapunov exponent. These are in practice indistinguishable from the behaviors of a "totally random" variable, since you do not have enough information to make any better prediction and getting such information is practically impossible.
Back to QM: this means that random comes from the coupling of the small QM system to the large QM system known as a "measuring device", with each particle having a rapidly spinning phase (roulette wheel), or even the fluctuating states of the vacuum, gravitons and the cosmic background radiation. I think this is known as 'decoherence' today by the people who do it for real and is the physically sensible and minimal explanation for observations. QM shouldn't need "interpretations" any more than Maxwell's equations, it needs explanatory power for observations.
Personally I believe QM to be deterministic evolution of states, everywhere and for all times, and nothing external to QM ever 'collapses it'.
This means that local causality, collapse, and 'randomness', hence cannot be fundemental parts of QM, but emergent properties in the classical limit that humans live in.
The real mystery of QM is the Hilbert-space-ness & complementarity. The rest---no more mysterious than turbulence: very difficult but still physics, not mumbo-jumbo.
I'm definitely not an expert on such matters, but this is my heterodox take on things. I believe even Schroedinger (and certainly Einstein) thought this way: his famous cat was intended as an example of the absurdity of the proferred explanations and the need to Think Different.
Perhaps this paper should be considered the same way: If QM + Classical Copenhagen Collapse can prove the decidability of mathematical axioms, regardless of the underlying mathematics, then.....
choose one:
a) oooooooh magical!
b) Init purgamentum, purgamentum exit---garbage in, garbage out.
Remember those high school trick "proofs" where you subtly divide by zero and in that case you can come up with any answer you want?
If an assumption leads to a ridiculous result, then the assumption is bad.
The 'butterfly effect' is a horribly misleading statement. Mathematical chaos applies to only certain deterministic systems, not real life. There is no evidence that the real world is a simulation or even if it was that it falls into the narrow range of non-linear dynamics problems that exhibit mathematical chaos. There is ample experimental evidence that chaos occurs all over physical reality.
Lorenz's attempt at modeling the weather certainly exhibited mathematical chaos, but the model wasn't the weather itself. The model wasn't weather, obviously.
I didn't think this up, but a physicist who had previously worked on barium titanate capacitors for many years pointed out what he thinks is EEstor's fundamental error.
It is true that ferroelectrics (i.e. barium titanate) can give high dielectric constants, and high quality materials processing may be able to improve the dielectric constant non-trivially.
The fundamental error is computing energy storage.
To be blunt, it appears they did this:
1. put in geometry, and dielectric constant K, compute apparent capacitance C, compute predicted energy storage = 1/2 C V^2. Wow! 1.21 jigawatts! 2. Call up the VC's! 3. Go into stealth mode 4. Profit!
The problem is that energy storage doesn't work like this for high voltages, there is well-known dielectric saturation.
Energy storage in that regime with barium titanate is linear with voltage, not quadratic.
Notice how all of EEstor's claims on milestones are about dielectric constant (measured at zero volts of course) or purity of this thing or some production process step.
None of that matters for what people really care about: net energy density at actual working maximum voltage.
That needs to be measured.
3. Find out energy storage is two orders of magnitude lower than we promised. 4. Don't profit.
Lets look at an example, amatour astronomy. the overwhelming majority of the worlds astronomers are amatours, almost none of whome have academic qualifications. In spite of this they are the acknowledged backbone of astronomy, responsible for a huge volume of discoveries and research. The field would be a wasteland without them.
No, it's just not true. Today, amateur astronomers are insignificant in advancing research and knowledge in most contemporary open questions in astrophysics and planetary physics.
Why? Because it takes expensive good instruments and a huge amount of time and knowledge and this level of committment is beyond amateurs' ability, unless Bill Gates decides to bankroll a satellite.
It is true that they are good at finding comets and asteroids (as there is no professional committment of resources to do so generally because of funding priorities), and they're generally highly knowledgable for being amateurs, often with serious academic training and professional experience.
But if they disappeared the publication strength of Astrophysical Journal and Geophysical Research Letters would be almost unaffected.
That's the excuse they pull out when they want to deny people's rights.
But otherwise, the SCOTUS majority is perfectly happy to use the club of Federal pre-emption when states want to give additional protection to their citizens and residents. Scalia is an unrepentant nutbag on this. He'll fulminate about Federalism in one decision and then ignore it one week later.
Bluntly, if its good for Republicans, SCOTUS likes it, and if it's bad for Republicans and less powerful people, SCOTUS hates it.
After all, they shoved Federalism up lady liberty's *** and abrogated Florida's right to count its votes.
Essentially all scholars agree that it had no legitimate standing or justification, it was just plain party power.
And today, there are two more members now who owe their lifetime sinecures due to that dred-ful decision.
The actual story is that the traditional source for engineering funding, DARPA, has been ordered to change to short term projects, as in "a widget for a soldier in 18 months."
That is not what academics do, it is what private sector contractors do.
Hence the academics have been overwhelming the National Science Foundation since 2001 or so. Acceptance rates for NSF research proposals are at all time lows. If the NSA also gives money for mathematics and certain segments of computer science, apparently all publicly published, why not take it?
It has been usual since 1945 that source for non-biological scientific and mathematical research have come through multiple government agencies, many military-affiliated.
What happens if you don't accept this funding? Somebody else gets it, and they get papers and grants and they stay funded. You don't. You probably won't get promotions or tenure without signficant government funding. If you're on soft money, you're just plain unemployed.
What will your protest do to stop torture by CIA or whoever? Nothing. BTW those policies didn't come spontaneously from CIA---they were ordered and approved by political appointees.
BTW: "MDA" usually means "Missile Defense Agency".
I have a modest suspicion that skype is more than it seems. I don't believe in 98% of conspiracy theories (like 9/11 'it was a inside job bomb' crap), but this one is not entirely crazy.
I do know that the Intelligence Community people in the US and elsewhere were very concerned about declining abilities to track and trace communications used by their targets, as compared to conventional telecom, where they have quasi-official backdoors installed directly with the telecom companies.
Notice the extraordinary anti-decompiling and self-modifying nature of the skype code---even manages to thwart many popular *hardware debuggers* and virtual machine strategies. The protocol itself is extremely obscure and apparently encrypted. I don't have a link but I think this can be easily verified, as I saw a presentation online which detailed some attempts to understand skype. This was not just good 'ordinary' hackers, but appeared to be the work of very serious and very professional full time computer security people, i.e. state-supported grey hats.
The level of self-security and the investment necessary to pursue this seems totally disproportionate to any commercial needs. This reflects a very serious investment of talent and money.
So why is it there?
But the really unusual fact to ponder is this: Why did eBay buy skype, and at such a high price? It makes no sense commercially for skype or eBay. I believe the reason is simple: to bring skype development and download servers and most importantly connection servers under U.S. jurisdiction. Once it is so, the government can now (thanks to our now imperial enabling acts) simply order eBay/skype to put in spyware and order them to never talk about it. Most probably the government approached US companies with this proposal and shopped around until it found one who would say yes.
A financial analyst might see something funky in eBay financials if they were clever, there no doubt has to be some payment or other compensation to eBay.
Now the reason for the hypersecurity is clear---to mask whatever data are going *OUT* from skype and whatever it is installing. For some reason I have the suspicion that uninstalling won't completely uninstall quite everything.
There is probably some kind of Manchurian Daemon ability too---if They find somebody they really want to track. Why? Because it makes sense that they'd want to do so.
They argue that predicting which characters are most likely to occur next in a text sequence requires vast real-world knowledge.
The apparent empirical result is that predicting which characters are most likely to occur next in a text sequence requires either
1) vast real-world knowledge
OR
2) vast real-world derived statistical databases and estimation machinery
but there can be a difference in their utility. The point of course, is that humans can do enormously more powerful things with that vast real-world knowledge in addition to symbolic estimation.
The underlying question is whether physical natural intelligence is really just real-world derived statistical databases and estimation machinery. Modern neuroscience says, "depends on what the meaning of 'is' is, but it's at least halfway there."
However would completing mathematical theorems by searching through Google (statistical pattern matching, which might sort of work for all known theorems on Google) work?
Clearly natural intelligence includes many tasks which can be now well solved with data-oriented sophisticated statistical approaches, perhaps with equal or better performance. Modern algorithms like 'independent components analysis' now can estimate individual sources in audition, "the cocktail party effect" a problem some once thought was a clear sign of true 'intelligence'. Turns out that some sufficiently clever signal processing and nonlinear objective functions can do it---so maybe that's what neurons do too.
The still unsolved question is whether there are some tasks which are clearly 'intelligence' where this class of methods will profoundly fail. Maybe like creating really new mathematics?
I was very worried about AGW, but statements like, "neuremberg style trials for denialists" made me think something's not right. Add in character assasination, the way any "contrarian evidence" is assumed to be funded by oil companies, and debating tactics that throw the principle of falsifiability out of the window, made me distrust the whole damnded thing.
This is wrong. Scientifically reasonable questioning, alternative theories and observations and interpretations, does in fact get published in the professional literature.
Example: Svensmark (cosmic rays have an effect on climate) got published in Physical Review and Physical Review letters. Now, many other scientists have seriously considered his hypotheses and data, and mostly find them wrong or likely exaggerated in significance, and hence unable to explain current data, whereas greenhouse forcing is a rock solid experimentally proven phenomenon which does explain most current observations.
Stuff which is idiotic tripe (most of the Rush-Limbaugh level anti-global warming stuff which is what 99.999% of the average joe spews) is mocked, deservedly.
Good science is purely about the truth. What you do with that knowledge is a different affair altogether. Good science is simply being dispassionately interested in facts. It's not the scientist's job to be a good person. Just give us the facts. We, the people, will worry about the rest.
Which is apparently to accuse the scientific community of being nearly totalitarian monsters when faced with an active, political, financially (and rarely scientifically) motivated opposition to uncomfortable but mainstream scientific facts and conclusions of enormous human signficance.
We take a vote. I ask how we decide who is right, and then I do the experiment... I emphasize that science is not a democracy, it is not the majority but the experiment that decides what is correct.
In reality: it is the majority of trained and educated scientists who DO take a vote as to what the results of the experiments mean.
In global warming we still get nitwits who fundamentally misunderstand the data, the experiments and the physics and then go on to spew their nonsense even though "The Experiment" has been done and the results are what the scientific consensus says.
And their majority voting is enormously more accurate than Joe Sixpack's majority voting.
Generally cruise missiles are easier to intercept, given that they are approximately small aircraft.
They can be intercepted by SAM or better, the usual interception fighters.
Ballistic missiles, especially long range ones, come down stupendously fast, from the top of the troposphere to ground level in four or five seconds.
Of course cruise missiles fly very low and are very difficult to intercept---but ballistic missiles are harder still (nearly impossible).
But low-observable (stealth) cruise missiles would be very hard to track and are much cheaper than ballistic missiles---using aircraft technology instead of rocket technology.
Industry also had little incentive or desire to build refineries. And it's better to use less gasoline as well. And refineries have had capacity expansion equivalent to 10 new refineries.
There are some annoying problems with clean air standards raising prices, but one of the principal ones comes from Federal political interference.
In California, the refiners are FORCED, against their desire, to use ethanol imported expensively (and not compatible with cheap pipelines) from politically powerful but sparsely populated farming states.
This despite the fact that they could meet even the strictest Los Angeles emissions standards for fuel without ethanol---and give better fuel efficiency to drivers.
Naturally this raises prices artificially---more than letting CA figure out its own means to meet the air standards. CA isn't so insignificant (30 million+ people?) that a robust market isn't possible on its own.
More oil exploration in Alaska and Gulf (which is actually already heavily explored) will make oil companies locally a lot of money but overall be insignificant. Really, look at the numbers of the hypothetical (optimistic guesstimate) oil available and compare to global consumption.
At best, Alaska is our ultimate Strategic Petroleum Reserve and we should reserve it for when the crap really hits the fan---which it will in 20 years when the terminal downslopes of all major oil reserves really get cranking past the peak.
And again, since oil is a world tradable commodity for lowering prices all that is necessary for Iraq is to just get its oil out on the world market.
If the US decided to confiscate the oil for its own profits you can bet that the attacks on the oil pipelines would be far worse than even now. No Iraqi local would have a stake in keeping the oil going.
I agree that efficiency standards ought to be raised. I prefer a fee-bate instead of CAFE standards: tax low efficiency vehicles (without normalizing by mass!) and rebate that to efficient vehicles. Make it substantial (e.g. $3000 on a normal Civic, $5000+ on a Prius-level efficiency) and relative to the fleet sold every year, not an absolute threshold.
Then automatically you get a push to increase fleet efficiency every year without additional legislation, and the vehicle choice is subject to market forces not direction.
This is better than a high gasoline tax, because people have power of choice when they buy cars, so it's not just punishing them for choices made years ago.
Although no NEW refineries have been built for a long time, existing refineries have had their capacity increased very significantly over a couple of decades, equivalent of 10 new refineries.
And, yes, old refineries were really big sources of nasty air pollution. Stop knocking the environmentalists---they've made life much nicer in many ways. There are kooks, of course, but air pollution restrictions on refineries are not kooky.
Gasoline is expensive, overall, because we're using fossil fuel which is reaching increasing geological depletion.
See www.theoildrum.com for insight, instead of slashdot drivel.
Another one claiming to debunk that we predicted global cooling in the 1970s doesn't actually debunk it at all. In fact, it admits that many scientific papers indeed predicted it. Then it goes on to explain why they were wrong. How does that debunk it? If anything, it bolsters the argument ("If they were wrong then..."). The best part is the way it ends, by claiming THIS time they're right because TODAY's scientists say different. Why are they different from the scientists of the 1970s?
The debunking is correct and scientifically justified. The statements by New Scientist are all consistent with the modern climatological understanding, which is quite strong.
Even back in the 1970's there was nowhere near the actual strong consensus and overwhelming data there exists today showing the greenhouse effect is going to far out do whatever mechanisms of cooling there might be.
There were no international conferences on cooling and doing something about it then---it was a small perturbation in some research. The data sets (ice cores and other paleogeology) had just become available and there were some analyses of orbital records and predictions. So people started thinking about it and wondering.
The difference between now and 1970's is that in the 1970's there were many open questions, and they KNEW that then.
Not only do scientists generally know more now, they know where they know enough to be confident and where they don't. Then, and now. The data and physics are much stronger now and they point to global warming from greenhouse effect being by far the dominating phenomenon.
Even the same scientists who wrote the 'global cooling' articles now are firmly on the side of the actual consensus (yes there certainly is one among geophysicists and climatologists) regarding anthropogenic global warming and they detest how their old articles are being used in tendentious and misleading ways.
It's truly amazing how otherwise intelligent people (some fraction of Slashdot readers) become preposterously silly babboons with climate science. Where is the denialist or the "We don't really know yet" faction on advanced semiconductor physics? Where is the denialist movement against modern understanding of stellar structure? (stars are less easily observed than Earth in situ)
That sort of trip cycle offers no advantage for a plug-in hybrid.
It will be pretty much like a Prius but more expensive and heavier for hauling around extra battery capacity which is expended after the first few miles. Batteries don't have much energy density.
If you do that kind of trip regularly, a Diesel minivan (as in European sized minivans, not US maximvs ''mini'' vans) is likely the best solution.
Plug in hybrids save lots of petroleum when drivers commute moderate distances to work every day, like 80% of the people.
On the other hand, renting a van to go skiing twice a year and commuting in an efficient vehicle the rest of the time seems like a win to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it works like that.
Here's what I think:
*Under certain models* (i.e. standard model), the scientists hypothesize a reasonable range of energies and other parameters for the Higgs. This is the "Bayesian prior". It could be wrong, but it is the conventional best guess.
Then, under various scenarios, and knowing the operation of the Tevatron, they estimate whether they will see enough particle events (which will be on the extreme tails of distributions of course) which will confirm the presence of Higgs, given that scenario.
So that's how they get the odds.
It will be more interesting of course if what they observe turns out be qualitatively different from predictions. Like no Higgs. Or two.
Unlike natural Constitutional rights, there is no right to a patent.
The U.S. constitution grants Congress the power to make patent law according to best policy for society---"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
If they should decide, e.g. certain classes software algorithms should not be patentable, then that is the law. This decision could be based on economic considerations, not 'rights of inventors'.
Congress is prohibited only from granting patents of unlimited duration.
ORLY? Added to the Galactic Epic Fail entry in the Hitchiker's Guide??
"And on through the portholes on the right, you can see the remains of yet another civilization that didn't get that really nasty third-order super-relativistic neutrino gravity correction term right when it mattered. Lunch service begins in the main cabin shortly."
Probably 'n' is index of refraction, which is related to the dielectric parameter.
Indeed, especially given that the abstract of the PRL says that the conclusions are the opposite, i.e. supporting Abraham's theory, whereas nhk is Minkowski's side.
"There are two different proposals for the momentum of light in a transparent dielectric of refractive index n: Minkowski's version nE/c and Abraham's version E/(nc), where E and c are the energy and vacuum speed of light, respectively. Despite many tests and debates over nearly a century, momentum of light in a transparent dielectric remains controversial. In this Letter, we report a direct observation of the inward push force on the free end face of a nanometer silica filament exerted by the outgoing light. Our results suggest that Abraham's momentum is correct."
The EESTOR stuff has been analyzed---yes buy some random guy on a blog, but somebody who really seems to know what he's talking about.
Only in freshman physics can you say that the energy in a capacitor is simply E=1/2 C*V^2---or more correctly---measure the capacitance at V=approx 0 and then extrapolate.
Barium titanate is definitely a known ferroelectric (this is not misspelled) material with a very high dielectric "constant" k.
But it it is not really constant! At sufficiently high voltages (i.e. interesting for power storage) you get dielectric saturation, meaning that k = k(V) in reality and it declines heavily. You just can't make atoms and electrons do what EEstor wants. There isn't enough place to stably put that much energy in electrons unless you change their energy states--which is otherwise known as chemistry---and gasoline.
And if you have 50 kW-hr or so in a little place, and you get a short thanks to a collision which breaks the circuits, there's no way to NOT have a freaking BIG ASS meltdown and explosion. That potential energy IS going to go somewhere and if it was all in E-fields and capacitance, it will discharge really fast if there is a hint of a dielectric breakdown and this will vaporize.
Only if the 50 kW-hr is experimentally measured, not imputed from a low power separate measurement of capacitance or dielectric constant, will I believe it.
I have the feeling that this patent document may really be used for continuing the funding cycle, not actually protecting a (nearly physically unbelievable) technology.
They probably did create a very good ultracapacitor with good materials processing, but I bet the energy storage is still in the ballpark range of known ultracaps.
Having it be otherwise would be like saying you've refined petroleum into a new chemical fuel which has the energy density of fissile uranium, and no radiation!
There isn't any Moore's law in thermodynamics.
The EPR paradox isn't a paradox any more: the non-local effects are physically real, tested in experiment.
Me, I'm not sure it's the Bohm interpretation, I guess. I may be a young fuddy-duddy but the simplest explanation would be just a a field theory with deterministic evolution.
I think the simplest solution would be decoherence coming straight from QM dynamics, some tiny kind of nonlinearity (quantum gravity?) which breaks the symmetry between pure states so that one or the other is 'effectively' chosen by the dynamics of the system.
That is, when you interact a quantum thing with a macroscopic measuring device, you get an entangled state, but then when you have e.g. "spin up + entangled spin up device" and "spin down + entangeld spin down device" there is some non-unitary dynamical mechanism which makes the wavefunction very rapidly and strongly favor one or the other, with the choice depending on the innumerable interacting components of the universe as initial conditions.
No gnarly philosphical knots, just physics and integration of equations of motion, like electromagnetism.
Here's my physicist's take on it as well:
This idea, rather like the Copenhagen interpretation, makes use of the magic "classical projection operator" box, which functions outside the normal dynamical laws of quantum mechanics.
Back in the Real World, we make measuring devices out of electrons, protons and neutrons and things which themselves are quantum mechanical objects which evolve according to QM's equations of motion.
The collapse of wave functions happens to be a very good *approximation* (like Fermi's Golden Rules are good approximations to solving the first principles equations in perturbation theory) when you interact small quantum systems with thermodyamically large ones. But, unlike the rest of physics, the 'collapse' thing has no really clear dynamical law or sensible physics.
In dynamics, you can *describe* high dimensional but deterministic dynamical systems with stochastic language (probability distributions), even though the actual truth is of highly chaotic dynamical systems with a very large dimensional attractor and high Lyapunov exponent. These are in practice indistinguishable from the behaviors of a "totally random" variable, since you do not have enough information to make any better prediction and getting such information is practically impossible.
Back to QM: this means that random comes from the coupling of the small QM system to the large QM system known as a "measuring device", with each particle having a rapidly spinning phase (roulette wheel), or even the fluctuating states of the vacuum, gravitons and the cosmic background radiation. I think this is known as 'decoherence' today by the people who do it for real and is the physically sensible and minimal explanation for observations. QM shouldn't need "interpretations" any more than Maxwell's equations, it needs explanatory power for observations.
Personally I believe QM to be deterministic evolution of states, everywhere and for all times, and nothing external to QM ever 'collapses it'.
This means that local causality, collapse, and 'randomness', hence cannot be fundemental parts of QM, but emergent properties in the classical limit that humans live in.
The real mystery of QM is the Hilbert-space-ness & complementarity. The rest---no more mysterious than turbulence: very difficult but still physics, not mumbo-jumbo.
I'm definitely not an expert on such matters, but this is my heterodox take on things. I believe even Schroedinger (and certainly Einstein) thought this way: his famous cat was intended as an example of the absurdity of the proferred explanations and the need to Think Different.
Perhaps this paper should be considered the same way: If QM + Classical Copenhagen Collapse can prove the decidability of mathematical axioms, regardless of the underlying mathematics, then.....
choose one:
a) oooooooh magical!
b) Init purgamentum, purgamentum exit---garbage in, garbage out.
Remember those high school trick "proofs" where you subtly divide by zero and in that case you can come up with any answer you want?
If an assumption leads to a ridiculous result, then the assumption is bad.
One was a nutty kook.
The other was an extremely smart and ambitious professor.
One was mentally ill.
The other had excruciating pain because of an injury.
Other than one having delusions about AI and the other having useful ideas about AI, and killing themselves, they're different.
One killed himself because he was depressed and crazy and screwed up. The other was in horrible neurological pain.
It is not uncommon for chronic pain patients to kill themselves. It's that bad.
If they had lived, one would end up institutionalized, the other would make significant progress (but not "solve") AI.
I didn't think this up, but a physicist who had previously worked on barium titanate capacitors for many years pointed out what he thinks is EEstor's fundamental error.
It is true that ferroelectrics (i.e. barium titanate) can give high dielectric constants, and high quality materials processing may be able to improve the dielectric constant non-trivially.
The fundamental error is computing energy storage.
To be blunt, it appears they did this:
1. put in geometry, and dielectric constant K, compute apparent capacitance C, compute predicted energy storage = 1/2 C V^2. Wow! 1.21 jigawatts!
2. Call up the VC's!
3. Go into stealth mode
4. Profit!
The problem is that energy storage doesn't work like this for high voltages, there is well-known dielectric saturation.
Energy storage in that regime with barium titanate is linear with voltage, not quadratic.
Notice how all of EEstor's claims on milestones are about dielectric constant (measured at zero volts of course) or purity of this thing or some production process step.
None of that matters for what people really care about: net energy density at actual working maximum voltage.
That needs to be measured.
3. Find out energy storage is two orders of magnitude lower than we promised.
4. Don't profit.
Lets look at an example, amatour astronomy. the overwhelming majority of the worlds astronomers are amatours, almost none of whome have academic qualifications. In spite of this they are the acknowledged backbone of astronomy, responsible for a huge volume of discoveries and research. The field would be a wasteland without them.
No, it's just not true. Today, amateur astronomers are insignificant in advancing research and knowledge in most contemporary open questions in astrophysics and planetary physics.
Why? Because it takes expensive good instruments and a huge amount of time and knowledge and this level of committment is beyond amateurs' ability, unless Bill Gates decides to bankroll a satellite.
It is true that they are good at finding comets and asteroids (as there is no professional committment of resources to do so generally because of funding priorities), and they're generally highly knowledgable for being amateurs, often with serious academic training and professional experience.
But if they disappeared the publication strength of Astrophysical Journal and Geophysical Research Letters would be almost unaffected.
Surely you must be joking.
That's the excuse they pull out when they want to deny people's rights.
But otherwise, the SCOTUS majority is perfectly happy to use the club of Federal pre-emption when states want to give additional protection to their citizens and residents. Scalia is an unrepentant nutbag on this. He'll fulminate about Federalism in one decision and then ignore it one week later.
Bluntly, if its good for Republicans, SCOTUS likes it, and if it's bad for Republicans and less powerful people, SCOTUS hates it.
After all, they shoved Federalism up lady liberty's *** and abrogated Florida's right to count its votes.
Essentially all scholars agree that it had no legitimate standing or justification, it was just plain party power.
And today, there are two more members now who owe their lifetime sinecures due to that dred-ful decision.
Since the XP-38 came out, the MDA404 just hasn't been in demand.
PS: The sooper-secret NSA encryption algorithm:
strcat("MDA9",itoa( fiscal_year % 100) );
The actual story is that the traditional source for engineering funding, DARPA, has been ordered to change to short term projects, as in "a widget for a soldier in 18 months."
That is not what academics do, it is what private sector contractors do.
Hence the academics have been overwhelming the National Science Foundation since 2001 or so. Acceptance rates for NSF research proposals are at all time lows. If the NSA also gives money for mathematics and certain segments of computer science, apparently all publicly published, why not take it?
It has been usual since 1945 that source for non-biological scientific and mathematical research have come through multiple government agencies, many military-affiliated.
What happens if you don't accept this funding? Somebody else gets it, and they get papers and grants and they stay funded. You don't. You probably won't get promotions or tenure without signficant government funding. If you're on soft money, you're just plain unemployed.
What will your protest do to stop torture by CIA or whoever? Nothing. BTW those policies didn't come spontaneously from CIA---they were ordered and approved by political appointees.
BTW: "MDA" usually means "Missile Defense Agency".
I have a modest suspicion that skype is more than it seems. I don't believe in 98% of conspiracy theories (like 9/11 'it was a inside job bomb' crap), but this one is not entirely crazy.
I do know that the Intelligence Community people in the US and elsewhere were very concerned about declining abilities to track and trace communications used by their targets, as compared to conventional telecom, where they have quasi-official backdoors installed directly with the telecom companies.
Notice the extraordinary anti-decompiling and self-modifying nature of the skype code---even manages to thwart many popular *hardware debuggers* and virtual machine strategies. The protocol itself is extremely obscure and apparently encrypted. I don't have a link but I think this can be easily verified, as I saw a presentation online which detailed some attempts to understand skype. This was not just good 'ordinary' hackers, but appeared to be the work of very serious and very professional full time computer security people, i.e. state-supported grey hats.
The level of self-security and the investment necessary to pursue this seems totally disproportionate to any commercial needs. This reflects a very serious investment of talent and money.
So why is it there?
But the really unusual fact to ponder is this: Why did eBay buy skype, and at such a high price?
It makes no sense commercially for skype or eBay. I believe the reason is simple: to bring skype development and download servers and most importantly connection servers under U.S. jurisdiction. Once it is so, the government can now (thanks to our now imperial enabling acts) simply order eBay/skype to put in spyware and order them to never talk about it. Most probably the government approached US companies with this proposal and shopped around until it found one who would say yes.
A financial analyst might see something funky in eBay financials if they were clever, there no doubt has to be some payment or other compensation to eBay.
Now the reason for the hypersecurity is clear---to mask whatever data are going *OUT* from skype and whatever it is installing. For some reason I have the suspicion that uninstalling won't completely uninstall quite everything.
There is probably some kind of Manchurian Daemon ability too---if They find somebody they really want to track. Why? Because it makes sense that they'd want to do so.
They argue that predicting which characters are most likely to occur next in a text sequence requires vast real-world knowledge.
The apparent empirical result is that predicting which characters are most likely to occur next in a text sequence requires either
1) vast real-world knowledge
OR
2) vast real-world derived statistical databases and estimation machinery
but there can be a difference in their utility. The point of course, is that humans can do enormously more powerful things with that vast real-world knowledge in addition to symbolic estimation.
The underlying question is whether physical natural intelligence is really just real-world derived statistical databases and estimation machinery. Modern neuroscience says,
"depends on what the meaning of 'is' is, but it's at least halfway there."
However would completing mathematical theorems by searching through Google (statistical pattern matching, which might sort of work for all known theorems on Google) work?
Clearly natural intelligence includes many tasks which can be now well solved with data-oriented sophisticated statistical approaches, perhaps with equal or better performance. Modern algorithms like 'independent components analysis' now can estimate individual sources in audition, "the cocktail party effect" a problem some once thought was a clear sign of true 'intelligence'. Turns out that some sufficiently clever signal processing and nonlinear objective functions can do it---so maybe that's what neurons do too.
The still unsolved question is whether there are some tasks which are clearly 'intelligence' where this class of methods will profoundly fail. Maybe like creating really new mathematics?
spam
Deserves a double prize, no?
Isn't spam the second oldest true Internet irritation?
I remember the the ur-spam: the Green Card Lawyer Spam on Usenet.
Of course the first oldest Internet irritation was the "troll",
and to this date, still the worst.
Honorable mentions:
ROFL
pwned
pron
Web *.*
doubleyewdoubleyewdoubleyew
mmorpg
ajax
I was very worried about AGW, but statements like, "neuremberg style trials for denialists" made me think something's not right. Add in character assasination, the way any "contrarian evidence" is assumed to be funded by oil companies, and debating tactics that throw the principle of falsifiability out of the window, made me distrust the whole damnded thing.
This is wrong. Scientifically reasonable questioning, alternative theories and observations and interpretations, does in fact get published in the professional literature.
Example: Svensmark (cosmic rays have an effect on climate) got published in Physical Review and Physical Review letters. Now, many other scientists have seriously considered his hypotheses and data, and mostly find them wrong or likely exaggerated in significance, and hence unable to explain current data, whereas greenhouse forcing is a rock solid experimentally proven phenomenon which does explain most current observations.
Stuff which is idiotic tripe (most of the Rush-Limbaugh level anti-global warming stuff which is what 99.999% of the average joe spews) is mocked, deservedly.
Good science is purely about the truth. What you do with that knowledge is a different affair altogether. Good science is simply being dispassionately interested in facts. It's not the scientist's job to be a good person. Just give us the facts. We, the people, will worry about the rest.
Which is apparently to accuse the scientific community of being nearly totalitarian monsters when faced with an active, political, financially (and rarely scientifically) motivated opposition to uncomfortable but mainstream scientific facts and conclusions of enormous human signficance.
We take a vote. I ask how we decide who is right, and then I do the experiment... I emphasize that science is not a democracy, it is not the majority but the experiment that decides what is correct.
In reality: it is the majority of trained and educated scientists who DO take a vote as to what the results of the experiments mean.
In global warming we still get nitwits who fundamentally misunderstand the data, the experiments and the physics and then go on to spew their nonsense even though "The Experiment" has been done and the results are what the scientific consensus says.
And their majority voting is enormously more accurate than Joe Sixpack's majority voting.
Generally cruise missiles are easier to intercept, given that they are approximately small aircraft.
They can be intercepted by SAM or better, the usual interception fighters.
Ballistic missiles, especially long range ones, come down stupendously fast, from the top of the troposphere
to ground level in four or five seconds.
Of course cruise missiles fly very low and are very difficult to intercept---but ballistic missiles are harder still (nearly impossible).
But low-observable (stealth) cruise missiles would be very hard to track and are much cheaper than ballistic missiles---using aircraft technology instead of rocket technology.
Regarding above points:
Industry also had little incentive or desire to build refineries. And it's
better to use less gasoline as well. And refineries have had capacity
expansion equivalent to 10 new refineries.
There are some annoying problems with clean air standards raising prices,
but one of the principal ones comes from Federal political interference.
In California, the refiners are FORCED, against their desire, to use
ethanol imported expensively (and not compatible with cheap pipelines)
from politically powerful but sparsely populated farming states.
This despite the fact that they could meet even the strictest Los Angeles
emissions standards for fuel without ethanol---and give better fuel efficiency
to drivers.
Naturally this raises prices artificially---more than letting CA figure out
its own means to meet the air standards. CA isn't so insignificant (30 million+ people?)
that a robust market isn't possible on its own.
More oil exploration in Alaska and Gulf (which is actually already heavily explored) will
make oil companies locally a lot of money but overall be insignificant. Really, look at
the numbers of the hypothetical (optimistic guesstimate) oil available and compare to
global consumption.
At best, Alaska is our ultimate Strategic Petroleum Reserve and we should reserve it
for when the crap really hits the fan---which it will in 20 years when the terminal
downslopes of all major oil reserves really get cranking past the peak.
And again, since oil is a world tradable commodity for lowering prices all
that is necessary for Iraq is to just get its oil out on the world market.
If the US decided to confiscate the oil for its own profits you can bet
that the attacks on the oil pipelines would be far worse than even now.
No Iraqi local would have a stake in keeping the oil going.
I agree that efficiency standards ought to be raised. I prefer a fee-bate
instead of CAFE standards: tax low efficiency vehicles (without normalizing
by mass!) and rebate that to efficient vehicles. Make it substantial (e.g. $3000
on a normal Civic, $5000+ on a Prius-level efficiency) and relative
to the fleet sold every year, not an absolute threshold.
Then automatically you get a push to increase fleet efficiency every year
without additional legislation, and the vehicle choice is subject to market
forces not direction.
This is better than a high gasoline tax, because people have power of choice
when they buy cars, so it's not just punishing them for choices made
years ago.
Although no NEW refineries have been built for a long time,
existing refineries have had their capacity increased very
significantly over a couple of decades, equivalent of
10 new refineries.
And, yes, old refineries were really big sources of nasty
air pollution. Stop knocking the environmentalists---they've
made life much nicer in many ways. There are kooks, of course, but
air pollution restrictions on refineries are not kooky.
Gasoline is expensive, overall, because we're using fossil fuel
which is reaching increasing geological depletion.
See www.theoildrum.com for insight, instead of slashdot drivel.
Another one claiming to debunk that we predicted global cooling in the 1970s doesn't actually debunk it at all. In fact, it admits that many scientific papers indeed predicted it. Then it goes on to explain why they were wrong. How does that debunk it? If anything, it bolsters the argument ("If they were wrong then..."). The best part is the way it ends, by claiming THIS time they're right because TODAY's scientists say different. Why are they different from the scientists of the 1970s?
The debunking is correct and scientifically justified. The statements by New Scientist are all consistent with the modern climatological understanding, which is quite strong.
Even back in the 1970's there was nowhere near the actual strong consensus and overwhelming data there exists today showing the greenhouse effect is going to far out do whatever mechanisms of cooling there might be.
There were no international conferences on cooling and doing something about it then---it was a small perturbation in some research. The data sets (ice cores and other paleogeology) had just become available and there were some analyses of orbital records and predictions. So people started thinking about it and wondering.
The difference between now and 1970's is that in the 1970's there were many open questions, and they KNEW that then.
Not only do scientists generally know more now, they know where they know enough to be confident and where they don't. Then, and now. The data and physics are much stronger now and they point to global warming from greenhouse effect being by far the dominating phenomenon.
Even the same scientists who wrote the 'global cooling' articles now are firmly on the side of the actual consensus (yes there certainly is one among geophysicists and climatologists) regarding anthropogenic global warming and they detest how their old articles are being used in tendentious and misleading ways.
It's truly amazing how otherwise intelligent people (some fraction of Slashdot readers) become preposterously silly babboons with climate science. Where is the denialist or the "We don't really know yet" faction on advanced semiconductor physics? Where is the denialist movement against modern understanding of stellar structure? (stars are less easily observed than Earth in situ)
That sort of trip cycle offers no advantage for a plug-in hybrid.
It will be pretty much like a Prius but more expensive and heavier for hauling
around extra battery capacity which is expended after the first few miles. Batteries
don't have much energy density.
If you do that kind of trip regularly, a Diesel minivan (as in European sized minivans,
not US maximvs ''mini'' vans) is likely the best solution.
Plug in hybrids save lots of petroleum when drivers commute moderate distances
to work every day, like 80% of the people.
On the other hand, renting a van to go skiing twice a year and commuting in
an efficient vehicle the rest of the time seems like a win to me.