Posts by Ben 38 12 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2009
Unfortunately not - that's what Einstein believed and the Bell inequalities were used to experimentally disprove. The pea would be a hidden variable. Things are spookier than that!
There is definitely one thing than travels faster than ordinary light though - monarchy.
Yeah, it would have only been about six times more powerful than the LHC. At just twice the cost. Taking up funds an order of magnitude below those the space station did.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a British physicist and love to see Europe beating the States in our mutually motivating tit-for-tat race for cock waving rights. But when it comes down to it, science is poorer for losing the SSC. The LHC would not have been built, nor been necessary, if we had SSC, nor would we need any other hadron collider in the forseable centuries, barring nice new technologies of course.
To put the cash in context, chances are that Japan will host the next high energy (lepton) collider. Their far-sighted government have offered to pay 50% of the costs of an international project, knowing they'll reap loads of tech, smart manpower, prestige and inspiration. That 50% is about 5 billion (insert pounds/euros/dollars here). So only double what the US chucked down the drain for the SSC, and in today's money to boot.
However much I'd rather it were different, the yanks were the only ones who could have done it alone. And instead they pissed the cash down the drain and are the trailing in the high energy game, with little now but memories of the Tevatron. Oh, and of course observer status at CERN to get access to the LHC.
Beer, because after that rant...
I'm not sure this finding gives much hope for Earth. From what I've heard these planets were once gas giants, with only their charred iron cores surviving the cremation. Any process that can strip a Jupiter down to a sub-terrestrial sized husk is not going to do wonders for the Earth's habitability!
There is a middle way - what LulzSec et al are doing is inevitable, expected and it's not worth fretting about (we're the savvy and safe ones right?). They're slightly annoying, like the lads in the alleyway on the way to the shop. Buddhism, the apathetic religion.
Then again, they're going to grow up soon. It'd be wise to make sure we've got strong passwords.
"If it's genuinely anonymous, what is the problem with Google gathering data... As for Scroogle... great idea, steal their service"
But if it's genuinely anonymous, what's the problem with using scroogle? Anyway, I'm happy with google adding me to their 'doesn't want to be tracked' demographic along with the other scroogle users.
"Inside matter, spacetime is likewise distorted by each atom of matter creating a longer total path. The photon is still attached to spacetime, traveling at C, but the path is longer due to the bending back and forth of spacetime. We see this longer path as a slower speed."
Sounds like someone's managed to unify general relativity with quantum mechanics... post your proof and book your ticket to Stockholm!
Check out SLAC. The story goes that when they built their linac, they had precision engineered cavities. The cavities did their job holding an EM wave to accelerate the particles, but because they were so well made each time a bunch of particles passed through a cavity it *induced* the same field. Subsequent bunches built up this field, inducing a 'wake field' instability in the beam, and ultimately beam loss. The solution... engineers literally hit each cavity with a hammer! The resulting dents changed the resonant frequency of each cavity, such that the induced fields in each cavity were different from one another. There was no resonant build up of beam instability, and SLAC went on to host the world's only linear collider.
But anyway... CLIC?! Don't even worry about it - the technology (drive beam, super-duper low emittance) has never even been properly demonstrated. We've demonstrated ILC tech and can't even get the cash for that!
Also ILC spaces its bunches out, so wakefields aren't too bad... no 'super-collider destroyed itself' stories to be had there. Probably.
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