The Official Science Thread

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Hell, we're already well on our way to manipulating our environment with thoughts alone. Now take that that idea, extrapolate out a couple hundred years, and the need for a physical body is a moot point. Who needs nutrients? We have electricity.

I like the foodz thanks. Though it would be cool to photosynthesis.

Only because you need to like it else you wouldn't be here. Ever see Bender on Futurama plug in to an electrical socket and act like it's a drug? Yeah, it'll be something like that.

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Hell, we're already well on our way to manipulating our environment with thoughts alone. Now take that that idea, extrapolate out a couple hundred years, and the need for a physical body is a moot point. Who needs nutrients? We have electricity.

It's interesting to think what effect all this would have on our psyche and personality? Immortality? Invincibility to health effects?

I read an article that says that access to wilderness is very important to children's development. How do all these things factor into who we are and how would being uploaded into a machine change all this?

Death is the meaning of life

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Hell, we're already well on our way to manipulating our environment with thoughts alone. Now take that that idea, extrapolate out a couple hundred years, and the need for a physical body is a moot point. Who needs nutrients? We have electricity.

I had a conversation with one of my kids regarding this not to long ago.

I wonder what the ultimate end point of evolution would be? Living energy?

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

I feel the exact opposite. I feel like reading and keeping up with the changes has done nothing but increase my knowledge on a vast number of subjects.



This....this right here....is the t!ts. It's things like this that make me want to focus on quantum mechanics once I get back to school. There's a quote out there somewhere that says modern technology is indistinguishable from magic and IMO this is proof. They have literally created something from nothing.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-...ts-vacuum.html


Scientists create light from vacuum

I think you miss my point. I feel like the more I learn, the less I really know.

I used to know everything, then I knew most things, then I knew some things, now I know nothing.

Originally Posted by k2pilot

http://www.gizmag.com/burton-true-3d...display/20499/

I had this EXACT idea, to excite oxygen and nitrogen in air with lasers to create a 3D display, several years ago, I can't believe they've already done this much....god dammit, I got screwed again

Originally Posted by Dcha

I think you miss my point. I feel like the more I learn, the less I really know.

I used to know everything, then I knew most things, then I knew some things, now I know nothing.

It sounds like you don't spend enough time with the communication majors at your school. You'll walk away more than content with your knowledge.

I'm on cowmoo's side, i keep up to date on all these things and i found myself able to contribute meaningful information to people far more educated than my self in a conversation.

Originally Posted by mashalah20

I had this EXACT idea, to excite oxygen and nitrogen in air with lasers to create a 3D display, several years ago, I can't believe they've already done this much....god dammit, I got screwed again

The inventors plight.

You could always do it better than them?

Originally Posted by 'busa

It's interesting to think what effect all this would have on our psyche and personality? Immortality? Invincibility to health effects?

I read an article that says that access to wilderness is very important to children's development. How do all these things factor into who we are and how would being uploaded into a machine change all this?

It's a fact that people who live outside of big cities are less stressed than those who live in them. It makes sense; we came from nature and being in nature is beneficial to us. But if we're able to exist forever on a computer somewhere then why would we need offspring? If a child is born, then what would keep them from instantly "maturing" as soon as they're uploaded? There really isn't any way answer these types of questions until it actually happens and until we fully understand the brain/body relationship.

Originally Posted by Rif Raf

I had a conversation with one of my kids regarding this not to long ago.

I wonder what the ultimate end point of evolution would be? Living energy?

You could argue that the point of evolution is survival. How surviving manifests in a given environment is where the real question lies.

Originally Posted by Dcha

I think you miss my point. I feel like the more I learn, the less I really know.

I used to know everything, then I knew most things, then I knew some things, now I know nothing.

Ahhh gotcha. I would much rather not know everything, there's always something to learn. All you need to worry about is staying ahead of the average and you're good to go, but I think we'll see the gradient shifted in the coming years. The internet makes it too easy to learn about anything.

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Ahhh gotcha. I would much rather not know everything, there's always something to learn. All you need to worry about is staying ahead of the average and you're good to go, but I think we'll see the gradient shifted in the coming years. The internet makes it too easy to learn about anything.

This reminds me of what they found when comparing people with extreme memories to regular ones, their intelligence isn't any greater, They just have the ability to recall everything. I think you quoted this in another thread, but it was an einstein quote that went along the lines of "Why would I remember anything I can look up?”. Useful as it may be to remember everything, it doesn't guarantee an improved ability to solve problems.

Originally Posted by k2pilot

The inventors plight.

You could always do it better than them?

They have a 5+ year head start!

Originally Posted by mashalah20

I had this EXACT idea, to excite oxygen and nitrogen in air with lasers to create a 3D display, several years ago, I can't believe they've already done this much....god dammit, I got screwed again

Don't feel bad man. I had the idea for sirius/xm in 5th grade after seeing a satellite phone on tv.

Got a question for you: How do they control exactly where the dots show up? How can you tell the laser "only excite atoms at this distance"? Is it a matter of the power of the laser at a certain distance?

The laser is focused (probably) with a set of lenses onto a point, so the energy of the laser is concentrated at that point and excites the oxygen or nitrogen at that specific point, making a dot. By changing where the laser is focused, the position of the dot changes.

Makes sense, thanks.

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Don't feel bad man. I had the idea for sirius/xm in 5th grade after seeing a satellite phone on tv.

Got a question for you: How do they control exactly where the dots show up? How can you tell the laser "only excite atoms at this distance"? Is it a matter of the power of the laser at a certain distance?

Originally Posted by mashalah20

The laser is focused (probably) with a set of lenses onto a point, so the energy of the laser is concentrated at that point and excites the oxygen or nitrogen at that specific point, making a dot. By changing where the laser is focused, the position of the dot changes.

Not sure if you guys know about it or not, but this has also been applied to fluorescence microscopy and laser-based surgery. Actually the surgery part is really cool, you can ablate away the tissue under the surface without having to cut through the surface...right now it's limited by depth, since tissue/samples will scatter light focused at deeper depths so the excitation doesn't happen...

Don't feel bad. I had the idea for a windshield wiper on the rear windshield when I was 6or7 years old. That was in 1974. Imagine if I had a little piece of every, and I mean every, rear windshield wiper ever made.

I still want to build a controller for my wiper motors that make them wipe to the beat of my music when I'm using them. How sick would that be? Practical, not really, but it would make driving in the rain so much more fun.

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

I still want to build a controller for my wiper motors that make them wipe to the beat of my music when I'm using them. How sick would that be? Practical, not really, but it would make driving in the rain so much more fun.

It would be cool until a blast beat breaks your wipers in half lol

Neutrinos are still faster than light
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...?newsfeed=true

The scientists who appeared to have found in September that certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light have ruled out one potential source of error in their measurements after completing a second, fine-tuned version of their experiment.

Their results, posted on the ArXiv preprint server on Friday morning and submitted for peer review in the Journal of High Energy Physics, confirmed earlier measurements that neutrinos, sent through the ground from Cern near Geneva to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy 450 miles (720km) away seemed to travel faster than light.

The finding that neutrinos might break one of the most fundamental laws of physics sent scientists into a frenzy when it was first reported in September. Not only because it appeared to go against Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity but, if correct, the finding opened up the troubling possibility of being able to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.

The physicist and TV presenter Professor Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey expressed the incredulity of many in the field when he said that if the findings "prove to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV".

In their original experiment scientists fired beams of neutrinos from Cern to the Gran Sasso lab and the neutrinos seemed to arrive sixty billionths of a second earlier than they should if travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum.

One potential source of error pointed out by other scientists was that the pulses of neutrinos sent by Cern were relatively long, around 10 microseconds each, so measuring the exact arrival time of the particles at Gran Sasso could have relatively large errors. To account for this potential problem in the latest version of the test, the beams sent by Cern were thousands of times shorter - around three nanoseconds - with large gaps of 524 nanoseconds between them. This allowed scientists to time the arrival of the neutrinos at Gran Sasso with greater accuracy.

Writing on his blog when the fine-tuned experiment started last month, Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University, said the shorter pulses of neutrinos being sent from Cern to Gran Sasso would remove the need to measure the shape and duration of the beam. "It's like sending a series of loud and isolated clicks instead of a long blast on a horn," he said. "In the latter case you have to figure out exactly when the horn starts and stops, but in the former you just hear each click and then it's already over. In other words, with the short pulses you don't need to know the pulse shape, just the pulse time."

"And you also don't need to measure thousands of neutrinos in order to reproduce the pulse shape, getting the leading and trailing edges just right; you just need a small number - maybe even as few as 10 or so - to check the timing of just those few pulses for which a neutrino makes a splash in Opera."

Around 20 neutrino events have been measured at the Gran Sasso lab in the fine-tuned version of the experiment in the past few weeks, each one precisely associated with a pulse leaving Cern. The scientists concluded from the new measurements that the neutrinos still appeared to be arriving earlier than they should.

"With the new type of beam produced by Cern's accelerators we've been able to to measure with accuracy the time of flight of neutrinos one by one," said Dario Autiero of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). "The 20 neutrinos we recorded provide comparable accuracy to the 15,000 on which our original measurement was based. In addition their analysis is simpler and less dependent on the measurement of the time structure of the proton pulses and its relation to the neutrinos' production mechanism."

In a statement released on Friday, Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, said: "A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny. The experiment at Opera, thanks to a specially adapted Cern beam, has made an important test of consistency of its result. The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

Since the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) team at Gran Sasso announced its results, physicists around the world have published scores of online papers trying to explain the strange finding as either the result of a trivial mistake or evidence for new physics.

Dr Carlo Contaldi of Imperial College London suggested that different gravitational effects at Cern and Gran Sasso could have affected the clocks used to measure the neutrinos. Others have come up with ideas about new physics that modify special relativity by taking the unexpected effects of higher dimensions into account.

Despite the latest result, said Autiero, the observed faster-than-light anomaly in the neutrinos' speed from Cern to Gran Sasso needed further scrutiny and independent tests before it could be refuted or confirmed definitively. The Opera experiment will continue to take data with a new muon detector well into next year, to improve the accuracy of the results.

The search for errors is not yet over, according to Jacques Martino, director of the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics at CNRS. He said that more checks would be under way in future, including ensuring that the clocks at Cern and Gran Sasso were properly synchronised, perhaps by using an optical fibre as opposed to the GPS system used at the moment.

This would remove any potential errors that might occur due to the effects of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says that clocks tick at different rates depending on the amount of gravitational force they experience - clocks closer to the surface of the Earth tick slower than those further away.

Even a tiny discrepancy between the clocks at Cern and Gran Sasso could be at the root of the faster-than-light results seen in September.

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Neutrinos are still faster than light
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...?newsfeed=true

I still don't believe it...in a previous response to this I mentioned about the maximum likelihood fit they used for the shape of the pulses, but it looks like they got rid of that too, so the only other problem (which I'm sure they have somewhere) is a clock synchronization error. I'm more interested in what the MINOS experiment has to say, I believe they can use their data to confirm or refute the observation (MINOS is a neutrino experiment in the US).