Skip to main content

Home/ Advanced Concepts Team/ Group items tagged gods

Rss Feed Group items tagged

LeopoldS

Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system | Science | Th... - 1 views

  •  
    what an interesting personality ... very symathetic Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough.

    The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

    He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."

    Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

    Edinburgh University's authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he "might get a Nobel prize - and if he doesn't we can always get rid of him".

    Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises". A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "

    By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

    Higgs revealed that his career had also been jeopardised by his disagreements in the 1960s and 7
  •  
  •  
    interesting one - Luzi will like it :-)
santecarloni

[1203.6902] Gods as Topological Invariants - 1 views

  •  
    Truth has been revealed!!!
Luís F. Simões

Higgs Boson Particles being sold on eBay ! - 0 views

  •  
    "Higgs Boson partices - guaranteed to satisfy! Need mass in your objects? Get some Higg Bosons!" "The Higgs Boson particles are SOLD WITH THE JAR! You may not be able to SEE the Higgs Boson particles unless you use a large hadron collider." "Q: Since it is, after all, the god particle; can you observe closely and tell use what religion it is?"
santecarloni

Higgs Boson May Be An Imposter, Say Particle Physicists - Technology Review - 0 views

  •  
    "At least two other particles could be masquerading as the God particle, according to a new analysis of the data from CERN" As I said.. the press always tends to exaggerate...
Thijs Versloot

Time 'Emerges' from #Quantum Entanglement #arXiv - 1 views

  •  
    Time is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement, say physicists. And they have the first exprimental results to prove it
  • ...5 more comments...
  •  
    I always feel like people make too big a deal out of entanglement. In my opinion it is just a combination of a conserved quantity and an initial lack of knowledge. Imagine that I had a machine that always creates one blue and one red ping-pong ball at the same time (|b > and |r > respectively). The machine now puts both balls into identical packages (so I cannot observe them) and one of the packages is sent to Tokio. I did not know which ball was sent to Tokio and which stayed with me - they are in a superposition (|br >+|rb >), meaning that either the blue ball is with me and the red one in Tokio or vice versa - they are entangled. So far no magic has happened. Now I call my friend in Tokio who got the ball: "What color was the ball you received in that package?" He replies: "The ball that I got was blue. Why did you send me ball in the first place?" Now, the fact that he told me makes the superpositon wavefunction collapse (yes, that is what the Copenhagen interpretation would tell us). As a result I know without opening my box that it contains a red ball. But this is really because there is an underlying conservation law and because now I know the other state. I don't see how just looking at the conserved quantity I am in a timeless state outside of the 'universe' - this is just one way of interpreting it. By the way, the wave function for my box with the undetermined ball does not collapse when the other ball is observed by my friend in Tokio. Only when he tells me does the wavefunction collapse - he did not even know that I had a complementary ball. On the other hand if he knew about the way the experiment was conducted then he would have known that I had to have a red ball - the wavefunction collapses as soon as he observed his ball. For him it is determined that my ball must be red. For me however the superposition is intact until he tells me. ;-)
  •  
    Sorry, Johannes, you just develop a simple hidden-parameters theory and it's experimentally proven that these don't work. Entangeled states are neither the blue nor the red ball they are really bluered (or redblue) till the point the measurement is done.
  •  
    Hm, to me this looks like a bad joke... The "emergent time" concept used is still the old proposal by Page and Whotters where time emerges from something fundamentally unobservable (the wave function of the Universe). That's as good as claiming that time emerges from God. If I understand correctly, the paper now deals with the situation where a finite system is taken as "Mini-Universe" and the experimentalist in the lab can play "God of the Mini-Universe". This works, of course, but it doesn't really tell us anything about emergent time, does it?
  •  
    Actually, it has not been proven conclusively that hidden variable theories don' work - although this is the opinion of most physicists these days. But a non-local hidden variable would still be allowed - I don't see why that could not be equivalent to a conserved quantity within the system. As far as the two balls go it is fine to say they are undetermined instead of saying they are in bluered or redblue state - for all intents and purposes it does not affect us (because if it would the wavefunction would have collapsed) so we can't say anything about it in the first place.
  •  
    Non-local hidden variables may work, but in my opinion they don't add anything to the picture. The (at least to non-physicists) contraintuitive fact that there cannot be a variable that determines ab initio the color of the ball going to Tokio will remain (in your example this may not even be true since the example is too simple...).
  •  
    I guess I tentatively agree with you on both points. In the end there might anyway be surprisingly little overlap between the way that we describe what nature does and HOW it does it... :-D
  •  
    Congratulations! 100% agree.
LeopoldS

God's Number is 20 - 1 views

shared by LeopoldS on 11 Aug 10 - Cached
Ma Ru liked it
  •  
    maybe Rubik's number is 20 .... but gods ????
pacome delva

"God Machine" Critics to U.N.: Experiment an Affront to Human Rights - 3 views

  •  
    The end of the world is for this month...
Lionel Jacques

CERN to announce Higgs boson observation at LHC - 1 views

  •  
    Tomorrow, at 9am EST, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland are expected to announce, with fairly strong certainty, that they have observed the Higgs boson "God" particle at a mass-energy of 125 GeV. For just over a week, rumors have been rife that observations with 2.5 to 3.5 sigma certainty (96% to 99.9%) have been made.
Luís F. Simões

Singularity University, class of 2010: projects that aim to impact a billion people wit... - 8 views

  •  
    At the link below you find additional information about the projects: Education: Ten weeks to save the world http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100915/full/467266a.html
  • ...8 more comments...
  •  
    this is the podcast I was listening to ...
  •  
    We can do it in nine :)
  •  
    why wait then?
  •  
    hmm, wonder how easy it is to get funding for that, 25k is a bit steep for 10weeks :)
  •  
    well, we wait for the same fundings they get and then we will do it in nine.... as we say in Rome "a mettece un cartello so bboni tutti". (italian check for Juxi)
  •  
    and what you think about the project subjects?
  •  
    I like the fact that there are quite a lot of space projects .... and these are not even bad in my view: The space project teams have developed imaginative new solutions for space and spinoffs for Earth. The AISynBio project team is working with leading NASA scientists to design bioengineered organisms that can use available resources to mitigate harsh living environments (such as lack of air, water, food, energy, atmosphere, and gravity) - on an asteroid, for example, and also on Earth . The SpaceBio Labs team plans to develop methods for doing low-cost biological research in space, such as 3D tissue engineering and protein crystallization. The Made in Space team plans to bring 3D printing to space to make space exploration cheaper, more reliable, and fail-safe ("send the bits, not the atoms"). For example, they hope to replace some of the $1 billion worth of spare parts and tools that are on the International Space Station.
  •  
    and all in only a three months summer graduate program!! that is impressive. God I feel so stupid!!!
  •  
    well, most good ideas probably take only a second to be formulated, it's the details that take years :-)
  •  
    I do not think the point of the SU is to formulate new ideas (infact there is nothing new in the projects chosen). Their mission is to build and maintain a network of contacts among who they believe will be the 'future leaders' of space ... very similar to our beloved ISU.
alekenolte

Research Blog: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks - 0 views

  •  
    Deep neural networks "dreaming" psychedelic images
  • ...3 more comments...
  •  
    Although that's not technically correct. The networks don't actually generate the images, rather the features that get triggered in the network already get amplified through some heuristic. Still fun tho`
  •  
    Now in real time: http://www.twitch.tv/317070
  •  
    Yes, true for the later images, but for the first images they start with random noise and a 'natural image' prior, no? But I guess calling it "hallucinating" might have been more accurate ;)
  •  
    Funny how representation errors in NNs suddenly become art. God.... neo-post-modernism.
Dario Izzo

Forget Brainstorming - Newsweek - 6 views

  •  
    nice link from toby .... it contains some of the things that I have been saying to the wind!!
  • ...3 more comments...
  •  
    Oh god, this is so beautiful... I'm not even going to quote the best parts, they are so many :)
  •  
    "employees need to be able to put their own ideas into practice" - but they also need to want to do it ....
  •  
    "In Galinsky's lab, people were more creative after watching a slide show about China: a 45-minute session increased creativity scores for a week." Hippo: we need more pictures from you!!
  •  
    "Do something only you would come up with-that none of your friends or family would think of." - according to them, this is one of their success recipes .... a recipe for the team?
  •  
    >Get moving. I always said that fitness test should be included in the recruitment process!!!
pacome delva

Special relativity passes key test - 2 views

  • Granot and colleagues studied the radiation from a gamma-ray burst – associated with a highly energetic explosion in a distant galaxy – that was spotted by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on 10 May this year. They analysed the radiation at different wavelengths to see whether there were any signs that photons with different energies arrived at Fermi's detectors at different times.
  • According to Granot, these results "strongly disfavour" quantum-gravity theories in which the speed of light varies linearly with photon energy, which might include some variations of string theory or loop quantum gravity. "I would not use the term 'rule out'," he says, "as most models do not have exact predictions for the energy scale associated with this violation of Lorentz invariance. However, our observational requirement that such an energy scale would be well above the Planck energy makes such models unnatural."
  •  
    essentially they made an experiment that does not prove or disprove anything -big deal-... what is the scientific value of "strongly disfavour"??? I also like the sentence "most models do not have exact predictions for the energy scale associated with this violation of Lorentz invariance" ... but if this is true WHAT IS THE POINT OF THE EXPERIMENT!!!! God, physics is in trouble ....
  •  
    hum, null result experiments are not useless !!! there is always the hope of finding "something wrong", which would lead to a great discovery. For the state of theoretical physics (the "no exact predictions" quote), i totally agree that physics is in trouble... That's what happen when physicists don't care anymore about experiments...! All you can do now is drawing "nice"graph with upper bounds on some parameters of an all tunable weird theory !
Nina Nadine Ridder

Top 10 Surprising Results of Global Warming | LiveScience - 5 views

  •  
    #4 is pretty interesting 
  • ...1 more comment...
  •  
    first time I hear about this!!! Is there any peer reviewed paper reference to this? should impact missions like GOCE!!
  •  
    There are (even in Science): http://science-mag.aaas.org/cgi/reprint/314/5803/1253.pdf There is also a group at UCAR (lead by S. Solomon, one of the Gods in atmospheric research) who are analyzing this effect: http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/thermosphere.shtml
  •  
    for the drag effect, this is well known in fluid mechanics, we use the Knudsen number, which explains this phenomenon ... for a perfect gaz though!
Joris _

DailyTech - NASA Releases iPhone App - 2 views

  • The U.S. space agency has worked more diligently the past few years to better interact with the public.
  •  
    what about ESA?
  • ...3 more comments...
  •  
    have already sent it as a suggestion to our com department ... btw: installed the app and its really well done!!
  •  
    God no, why give more taxpayers' money to the shittiest, greediest and most closed company out there??
  •  
    why "more" ... do they get any taxpayers money? answer to your question: because its the most efficient (and coolest) platform to convey your message to a larger audience with relatively little effort ... btw: just ordered a time capsule for home :-)
  •  
    I said "more" because we already gave them money in the form of Sophia and Atlas :) If we want to be consistent in promoting "open" efforts (open innovation, open source, open governance, etc.) we should avoid Apple like the plague. They are far far worse than Microsoft in terms of closedness, secrecy, shady market practices and vendor lock-in. Just google a bit and you will find lots of example of their behaviour.
  •  
    cant' really argue about the Apple practices, although I ve read some things. I think the NASA app is more like a news feed and nothing more. But that online crowdsourcing game we had in mind, now that would be cool in a mobile version - new mobiles also have accelerometers nowadays
ESA ACT

God or Multiverse? - 0 views

  •  
    I don't know whom I should hate more, the physicists or the theologists.
1 - 17 of 17
Showing 20 items per page