Physicists Discover A Possible Break In the Standard Model of Physics (futurism.com) 260
Slashdot reader freddienumber13 write:
A series of experiments has shown that tau particles have decayed faster than predicted by the standard model. This has been observed at both CERN and SLAC. This suggests that the standard model for particle physics is incomplete and further research is required to understand this new area of physics.
Nature adds: One of the key assumptions of the standard model of particle physics is that the interactions of the charged leptons, namely electrons, muons and taus, differ only because of their different masses... recent studies of B-meson decays involving the higher-mass tau lepton have resulted in observations that challenge lepton universality at the level of four standard deviations. A confirmation of these results would point to new particles or interactions, and could have profound implications for our understanding of particle physics.
Nature adds: One of the key assumptions of the standard model of particle physics is that the interactions of the charged leptons, namely electrons, muons and taus, differ only because of their different masses... recent studies of B-meson decays involving the higher-mass tau lepton have resulted in observations that challenge lepton universality at the level of four standard deviations. A confirmation of these results would point to new particles or interactions, and could have profound implications for our understanding of particle physics.
Is this really so surprising? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this really so surprising? I know quite a few physicists (and some armchair physicists) who have long believed the standard model to be incomplete. The measurement problem will always have us making theories that are very, very hard to prove correct.
Additionally (granted, non-scientifically) the standard model 'feels' wrong. The model may explain the behaviors that we see but it seems overly complex for nature. Much like relativity there may be more than meets the eye going on here.
It has seemed like we were in a bit of a stagnation lately and I'm glad there are some new experimental results making us look at the standard model critically. It's not only good science it's exciting science.
Re:Is this really so surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this really so surprising?
It's surprising that it took so long to (probably) find an actual experimental break in the standard model.
Re:Is this really so surprising? (Score:5, Informative)
We don't merely think the SM is incomplete, we know for a fact that it is, because it doesn't describe gravity. Just as we know for a fact that GR is incomplete, because it's not a quantum theory at all.
There's other breaks in the Standard Model which appear to occur at energy levels we might conceivably actually be able to reach (Like this tau decay anomaly, and time-reversal invariance breaking in... D or B meson), and the long known problem of unitarity violation in the electroweak force above about 2TeV (Above this energy, known electroweak interactions have a probability exceeding 1, so something we don't know about has to be "fixing" this). And the classic hierarchy problem: The correction terms we know should give the Top an enormous mass if the coefficient on those term is near to 1, so something must be cancelling these (if one doesn't believe that the coefficient on the corrections is absurdly, vanishingly small).
There is also the grand unified theory scale around 1e19 GeV, where the strong and electroweak forces will merge into one and nobody knows how that'll work, but the energy level is so high it will never be examined directly.
So it's not surprising. It's cool!
Not surprising, but not for that reason! (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this really so surprising? I know quite a few physicists (and some armchair physicists) who have long believed the standard model to be incomplete.
We know for certain that the Standard Model is incomplete because it cannot explain gravity. It it also missing Dark Matter and a large enough asymmetry between matter and anti-matter to explain the universe being full of matter. However, none of these explains why this result is not surprising.
The reason that this result is not surprising is because of the number of Standard Model measurements which experiments like LHCb, Babar and Belle make. There are literally thousands of ways in which these experiments have tested the Standard Model and when you make 1000 measurements finding one that over 3 sigma from expectations is not at all unsurprising - in fact you would expect 3.
Now 4 sigma is better because only about 1 in 15,000 measurements will, on average, be this far apart if the Standard Model applies. However, here they have combined multiple experiments but without the respective collaborations being involved. This means it is highly possible that they have failed to combined systematic errors correctly because they are restricted to using only published data. Most combined results come from working groups involving all the collaborations involved e.g. ATLAS+CMS combined results at the LHC, D0+CDF combined results from the Tevatron etc. which can redo parts of the analysis to combine errors properly.
So while it is possible they may be on to something it is far from certain and this is hardly a major result that will elicit much excitement. This is probably why it was published in Nature! While I know this is an important journal for many fields, for particle physics it is largely irrelevant. All the important results in the field are published in journals like Phys Lett B, PRL, Phys Rev D, JHEP etc.
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Is this really so surprising? I know quite a few physicists (and some armchair physicists) who have long believed the standard model to be incomplete.
If you know any that thinks otherwise, don't consult them for anything related to physics.
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Well, I agree that the standard model feels more than a bit like a trained classificator after overfitting, i.e. it matches all reliable observations (except this new one), but it does not seem to capture a clean, simple and elegant underlying model. In laymen's terms, it is a bit like describing each field of a chess-board by its color, and neighbors, sometimes even with various pieces on it or next to it, instead of saying "8x8, alternate black and white". A reason is that a "clean, simple and elegant" mo
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Please reformulate that statement as a viable Bayesian prior.
Inquiring minds want to know.
For extra points, precisely where does this "seems" originate, and, most crucially, does it resemble a starfish?
Don't most physicists get their Nobel by thinking (Score:2)
Solved! (Score:2)
Caused by Dark Time.
Impact on radio carbon and other dating methods? (Score:2)
Does this impact the accuracy of the dating of the current dating methods such as radio carbon, caesium etc?
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Re:Impact on radio carbon and other dating methods (Score:4, Informative)
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Just a confirmation of what we knew (Score:3)
We have known for a long time that the standard model isn't complete, not least since it does not incorporate gravity in any way. I think most physicists are surprised at how QM still seems to hold together - unlike GR, it is a really complicated theory, mathematically; it is all too often not well understood by the experimental physicists, and there are examples of techniques (like quantization) being applied as a set of rules thumb, a bit like 'first we caluculate the Hamiltonian for a classical system, then use the magical quantization rules'. Amazingly, it often works even if it is mathematically incorrect, but it is of course not going to last, I think; there must be cases where the cracks in the reasoning have been plastered over by the statistical noise in the measurements, and once we see clear evidence that the theory doesn't hold, we will have to go back over old data and discover the cracks we didn't spot back then.
This discrepancy in the decay of the tau lepton is probably one of these cracks, and I think it is quite exciting, but it isn't quite the sensation the editors want to make of it. I have already read about it several times, even on Scientific American and ScienceDaily, and I have heard it mentioned in recent BBC podcasts; Slashdot's editors would do well to stop reading the big-eyed, gawping articles in glossy magazines like futurism.com, and instead reading the slightly more sober stuff in news closer to the source. You guys should stop perpetuating the ideaa that science is some sort of cool entertainment and scientists are some sort of attention seeking rock-stars.
Cable (Score:2)
Or maybe... (Score:2)
the way the universe actually works is not a constant.
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> being 5 sigma means that there's only a 1e-6 chance
Umm that's 3E-7 actually.
Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:5, Interesting)
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That page does a nice job of explaining in simple terms why we don't have perfect models, but it does not make any claims about the amount of error in any given model. It does not support the argument that you're trying to make.
Re:Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:4, Informative)
Physics: 4 sigma error, question the model
Climate: 4 sigma error, jail those who dare to disagree
Not quite.
Everything: 4 sigma error, question the model
Everything: shame those who think a 6 sigma error is the truth
Re:Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:5, Insightful)
Physics: 4 sigma error, question the model
Climate: 4 sigma error, jail those who dare to disagree
Not quite.
Everything: 4 sigma error, question the model
Everything: shame those who think a 6 sigma error is the truth
I agree with where you're going, but in all fairness, the sigma-level that matters depends on the field.
Not all fields can gather very large amounts of data the way particle physics can. For example, psychological and drug-trial studies must live with small sample sizes for moral and practical reasons. Even astronomy sometimes has to cope with large error-bars in results, yet the conclusions they draw can be significant. I think climate science lies somewhere in the middle in this regard.
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We shouldn't accept things as true simply because gathering accurate data is hard. Quite the opposite.
Particle physics, however, by it's very nature is very statistical these days. You don't observe anything directly, you observe things 3-4 steps removed from the interesting event, with a statistical model of what the decay products can be at each step. There's nothing but statistical inference typing actual measurements back to theory. Given that level of indirection, caution is called for.
Re:Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:4, Interesting)
We shouldn't accept things as true simply because gathering accurate data is hard. Quite the opposite.
Of course not. But that's not what I was talking about. We may have varying degrees of certainty about something based on the data we have. That doesn't change the utility and importance of trying to infer something from what data we do have.
Particle physics, however, by it's very nature is very statistical these days. You don't observe anything directly, you observe things 3-4 steps removed from the interesting event, with a statistical model of what the decay products can be at each step. There's nothing but statistical inference typing actual measurements back to theory. Given that level of indirection, caution is called for.
Let me share a story I heard once about indirect evidence.
Do you know for certain that electrons exist? How? Have you ever seen one? All of the evidence for their existence is indirect.
Compare this with...
Do you know for certain that the Pope exists? How? Have you ever met him? All of the evidence for his existence is indirect.
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The level of indirection for the observation of the Higgs Boson was quite a bit more ... indirect than the evidence for the electron. The level of statistical certainty they waited for before any announcement was completely correct, given that fact. When it's all statistics, you want really good statistical evidence.
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You should never accept anything as "true." In science we accept things as "most likely" and "meeting our prespecified level of evidence."
For observational sciences like parts of astronomy and climate, you might just have to live with what you get. For most of medicine and some of climate, we could certainly achieve five sigma confidence. It would cost orders of magnitude more than the two or three sigma we generally use now.
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Currently climate models are giving us about 2 sigmas of certainty (and there are so many models that you'd get that by accident, if they were independent). It's a great place to start: good progress for a very young field.
But before we make decisions involving $trillions, maybe higher confidence is called for, even if it is a bit pricey.
Climate models predictive ability is BAD (Score:2)
Physics: 4 sigma error, question the model
Climate: 4 sigma error, jail those who dare to disagree
Not quite.
Everything: 4 sigma error, question the model
Everything: shame those who think a 6 sigma error is the truth
I agree with where you're going, but in all fairness, the sigma-level that matters depends on the field.
Not all fields can gather very large amounts of data the way particle physics can. For example, psychological and drug-trial studies must live with small sample sizes for moral and practical reasons. Even astronomy sometimes has to cope with large error-bars in results, yet the conclusions they draw can be significant. I think climate science lies somewhere in the middle in this regard.
Climate science is so broad though that it arguably sits in mulitple places. The heat trapping of CO2 is known with extreme precision. Global climate models though still have known unknowns that significantly exceed the global energy imbalance.
Check the IPCC reports on climate models and the CERES and ERBE satellite data on Top of Atmosphere(TOA) energy balances.
Here's the short version. Climate models still model many things poorly because we still don't understand them fully, like clouds. Because of this,
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Two sigma is the usual standard. The magic p 0.05.
Some fields use higher standards for very high profile findings, either directly or indirectly. The FDA for example, usually requires at least two independent trials with p 0.05 to approve a new drug. In high energy particle physics it is possible to do very tightly controlled experiments that are expensive to set up but then relatively cheap to run. With this situation, getting more data is fairly inexpensive, so you can achieve very high confidence o
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Can you provide a cite to a 4-sigma error? The error bars on climate predictions tend to be fairly large, so a 4-sigma error would be pretty darn big.
Moreover, do you know what a climate scientist would do with a 4-sigma model error? Take that into account and try to improve the model. Do you know what a particle physicist would do with a 4-sigma model error? Precisely the same thing.
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You will be modded to -1, as you should be, because you did not provide evidence for your claims.
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You will be modded to -1, as you should be, because you did not provide evidence for your claims.
Uhm... no. Even though it would be nice to have, there is currently no "-1, Pseudoscientific ideologue" moderation control.
"Offtopic" and "Troll" are both available, and neither of them care whether you provided evidence for your claims or not.
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And you should be moded funny instead if insightful :D
An other option would be 'wise'.
Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:2, Insightful)
Just look at the record highs. Then notice how many times the temperature has broke the record high. This isn't even difficult science, just basic reading comprehension will work.
Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:4, Informative)
We're not dinosaurs.
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> We're not dinosaurs.
Speak for yourself, and get off my lawn or I'll come after you with my buggy whip!
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I'm not a dinosaur, well, not that kind. You may as well argue that being entirely immersed in water is not a problem because fish can do it.
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That's true. Saying that The Environmental Left (capitalised for unknown reasons) often proclaim that we will destroy the planet by making it like Venus really is ridiculous hyperbole.
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The planet will be just fine. I don't know anyone who thinks it'll disintegrate or explode or turn into a black hole because of global warming. I'm more interested in how the humans do.
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Any claim you make without evidence I can reject without evidence.
Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:4, Insightful)
Climate change is pseudoscienceâ, because their predictions have been wrong repeatedly
A beautiful fallacy! Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree with you except for "extinction", if you mean "extinction of humans". There's almost no chance that humans will go extinct. We already live in the tropics and we already live in the extreme north. We'll protect valuable shorelines, migrate away from others, and agriculture will spread north. We won't go extinct.
Idiocracy (Score:2)
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The problem with this statistic is that humans are in far better position to survive long-term than we were 20,000 years ago. We were demonstrably primitive back then, with no real ability to preserve food or build anything but stone and wood tools. Perhaps our large brains were used to catalog our environments, since we had to memorize every single thing and be masters of everything needed for survival? We had to be master warriors, master negotiators, learn to speak the language of any people we encounter
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We don't really need the extra volume. Check this guy out:
https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]
Comparing volume appears to be an inaccurate way of comparing intelligence.
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His inferior parietal lobe (responsible for mathematical thought and spatial cognition) was 15% larger than normal. He also had a large corpus callosum. The lateral sulcus was smaller on both sides.
We have a real long term problem because we've lifted selective pressure off of ourselves. Until the collapse of civilization brings it back, we're going to keep drifting and start to deteriorate.
Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:5, Insightful)
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because .....? Extinction may very well be a natural step along the evolutionary path to an eventual superior species. We need to be removed from the ecosystem to make room.
Imagine if cyanobacteria were sentient and they got together several billion years ago. "Guys, we are producing far too much oxygen pollution. At some point, we will irreversibly alter the ecosystem of this planet. And if we don't go completely extinct, we will drive ourselves into a tiny corner of the environment." Today, this planet would still be populated by pond scum.
Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:5, Insightful)
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because
Only philosophers and college students care about whether humanity is holding back some other superior species. The rest of us just want to go on living. If you think humanity is meant to shuffle off this mudball post haste, you know what to do.
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"Different", not necessarily better. Better is a subjective term.
Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the kind of pseudoscientific blabber that we could do without. Evolution has no goal and it has zero incentive to produce a "superior" species.
It doesn't matter what you think about the purpose of our existence on this planet and the "evolutionary path", because at least my aim is to survive. Giving up and killing myself through climate change certainly doesn't help with that. You also have to remember that it took about half a billion years for land-dwelling life to produce a sentient species, and that the Sun will, in around 600 million years, be too hot to support the carbonate-silicate cycle that fuels the C3 form of photosynthesis. It might or might not be possible to produce another sentient species in that time, if there is enough resources left after us for the planet to recover.
It is also important to realize that many of the factors that contributed to the rise of culture were caused by easy and abundant availability of resources (fossil fuels, unexhausted sources of rare earths) that will be permanently gone after we have drawn our last breath. Therefore, I would claim that it is not at all outlandish to claim that we are the absolutely only chance for this planet to successfully produce a species that could reach out to the stars. Based on presently available information, ours might also be the only world in this galaxy, which has even produced a candidate for that (considering that were it possible to construct a interplanetary culture and somebody would have reached the prerequisites, we'd likely see massive amounts of evidence for it).
All in all, the stakes are much higher than you claim. Of course you can just be an edgelord and claim that none of this matters, but it does matter, greatly, to anyone else who has the capacity to feel sympathy for their fellow humans and those who are yet unborn. In other words, grow up and start working on surviving instead of being such a nihilist little shit.
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it took about half a billion years for land-dwelling life to produce a sentient species
If your definition of sentience includes industrial scale exploitation of the environment, then, yes.
words, words, words (Score:3)
Warma wrote: "...for land-dwelling life to produce a sentient species"
MangoCats wrote: "...sentience includes industrial scale exploitation..."
Would you both please consider replacing "sentience" with "sapience" in such sentences? Those of us who are ourselves sapient would then find your comments make more sense.
A comparison of these words: http://casinerina.blogspot.com... [blogspot.com]
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"There's nobody else out there" is but one of many possible answers to Fermi's Paradox [wikipedia.org].
Neither you nor anybody else knows how likely that is.
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And that pond scum would have proven itself worthy of global domination.
We have proven ourselves capable of global domination, but are we worthy?
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I'm wondering if global thermonuclear war is actually a "natural" predecessor to evolution into a space-faring species? Are we preventing Gaia from seeding the stars by not irradiating the biosphere?
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option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because .....? Extinction may very well be a natural step along the evolutionary path to an eventual superior species. We need to be removed from the ecosystem to make room.
Imagine if cyanobacteria were sentient and they got together several billion years ago. "Guys, we are producing far too much oxygen pollution. At some point, we will irreversibly alter the ecosystem of this planet. And if we don't go completely extinct, we will drive ourselves into a tiny corner of the environment." Today, this planet would still be populated by pond scum.
You say that as if a planet populated by pond scum is a bad thing. What's so bad about that? What's so inherently great about higher biological complexity? And while we're pulling fantasy scenarios from thin air, who's to say that the next thing to show up after us wouldn't be some sort of Lovecraftian horrors that exist only to subjugate or wipe out all other life in the universe? Is that automatically "better" because it came later, evolutionarily?
I believe what you've described is intelligent design
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Sounds like the dinosaurs talking around 67 million years ago. "If the mammals want to evolve, they can go ahead and do so. In the meantime, they make delicious snacks."
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Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we could just stop using fossil fuels which cause us harm directly with their emissions. Society pays heavily for their use by the pollution produced when they are burnt. We would save on hospital costs, people would have better lives without or improved asthma and other lung diseases, it would be easier to breath in cities, we wouldn't have to clean up after any further pollution damage. There is a lot of environmental damage using fossil fuels from the extraction, transportation, and burning. The taxpayer has ended up with bill for much more than we were supposed to. In Western Canada there are thousands of old wells that need to be retired that taxpayers got stuck for. What happens when coal ash gets free of its containment and into rivers?
None of this has anything to do with climate change but if we stopped burning fossil fuels because of climate change we would stop having this problems (or at least they would stop being added to). But if it helps you can think of it as we solve all of those problems and get climate change thrown in for free.
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Or we could just stop using fossil fuels which cause us harm directly with their emissions
This! 1000x times this. I don't care about climate change because frankly I don't think I'll be alive to see the worst of it or the best of it. I don't have any children or a stake in the future.
That said I hate the smell of the city. I hate the smell of working one block down from a coal fired power station. I hate when I clean my windows outside the main crap coming off them is black diesel soot.
All this ties back to my favourite comic: http://farm5.static.flickr.com... [flickr.com]
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We can stop using fossil fuels like an alcoholic can stop using rum, like the morbidly obese can stop using doughnuts, like an addicted gambler can walk away from a bank of slot machines...
First, you need to cure the addiction to wealth and power in about 2% of the population, then you need to prevent the rest of us from developing it.
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Environmentalists would probably get more supporters were they to focus on smog and tailing ponds and such, than polar bears and half-degrees that extinguish all life.
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Spoiler: where I am, the air quality is rather good. Still want HK to have blue skies and Batou Steel to stop making apocalyptic landscapes. I just don't ascribe to the Cult of Big Oil (nono, atmosphere is infinite, we can add whatever to it and makes NO difference) or the Cult of the Hockey Stick (If i scream it's settled even louder, it makes it more tru
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No, it is pseudoscience because it lacks proper repeatability and has only the barest elements of falsifiability.
That can just mean that the subject is hard and that we have discoveries to make, not that we're heading in the completely wrong direction.
option 2: They are wrong and we do everything in our power to stop something that wasnt going to happen anyways: Some short term economic losses, maybe.
Reminded me of this. :) [gocomics.com]
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Problem with the venn diagram is that it is the same argument as believing in "God".
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Tell the guy who just got a cancer diagnosis that they should be happy because they only had a 1 in 4 chance of getting it.
Winning by definition (Score:2)
A beautiful fallacy! Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
No, it is pseudoscience because it lacks proper repeatability and has only the barest elements of falsifiability.
In case there is any question, I am in fact referring to both Medical "sciences" and Climate "science".
That having been said, I would still think that it would be the best course of action to err on the side of caution and assume the "scientists" are correct given the extreme ramifications if they are... The venn diagram is pretty convincing:
option 1: They are wrong and we do nothing: No harm no foul.
option 2: They are wrong and we do everything in our power to stop something that wasnt going to happen anyways: Some short term economic losses, maybe.
option 3: They are right and we do everything in our power to stop it: We saved the planet.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
Only one of those options is really bad. the rest are not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Anybody that isn't a gambling junky knows where to put their bet on that one.
Of course, when you define all the outcomes somehow your argument is compelling...
I'm afraid I can't agree with your views on what it means for us to "do everything in our power to stop it". Nor can I agree with your view on if we do nothing... extinction. So your handy and irrefutable Venn diagram is just a fancy way of declaring yourself the winner by definition, if we can start from assuming you are correct about everything, we can clearly see that you are correct...
If we do everything in our power to st
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One billion years, give or take, until the Sun gets hot enough to boil the oceans and make the Earth uninhabitable. There's always the option of moving the Earth.
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Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
Physicians aren't doing medical science. It's engineering at most. Probably more like medical technicians. Call me when your doctor offers to conduct a double blind experiment to set your broken leg.
Re:Just to keep it straight on my scorecard (Score:5, Insightful)
The straw man parade continues.
Like physicists, climatologists demand solid evidence. If you want to disagree with theirs, present yours.
This. It's easy to criticize science. It's a lot harder to do your own.
(Disclosure: IAAP)
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This. It's easy to criticize science. It's a lot harder to do your own.
I'd say it's easy to rag on science. Even having anything approaching a reasonable criticism is much harder.
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Scoring is not censorship. You're free to browse at -1 anytime.
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Burning books isn't censorship unless the government is doing it. You're welcome to have a bonfire anytime. As JK Rowling would say, by the time you're burning books, the author already got your money.
Re: Wow, posts are being censored quickly (Score:4, Insightful)
This is insanely wrong. Censorship is not only censorship if a government does it. Otherwise, the Chilling Effect and self-censorship can't possibly exist.
- The ESRB isn't a government entity. It's a trade group.
- When Nintendo refused to allow any games with blood or religious symbols, which government were they working for?
- When someone refuses to criticize Islam because of fear of professional backlash, as well as death threats, what "government" censored that person?
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The ESRB isn't a government entity. It's a trade group.
The ESRB doesn't have the force of law. You can sell video games which are not ESRB-approved through the internets, or mail order. Which brings us to the next point...
- When Nintendo refused to allow any games with blood or religious symbols, which government were they working for?
#pcmasterrace
When someone refuses to criticize Islam because of fear of professional backlash, as well as death threats, what "government" censored that person?
None. They self-censored. The word you are looking for when you want to describe what was done to them if you want to be euphemistic is censure.
Censorship is when someone doesn't even let you get your message out. If someone kills you to stop you from speaking, that's censorship. If someone kills you for what you have said, they'r
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What you seem to be suggesting is that because other platforms existed, a
Re: Wow, posts are being censored quickly (Score:4, Interesting)
Burning books isn't censorship unless the government is doing it. You're welcome to have a bonfire anytime. As JK Rowling would say, by the time you're burning books, the author already got your money.
Not long ago, JK suggested to one angry critic that she he should also burn her DVDs - and generously inhale the fumes
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It can be one of the tools in censorship. You also have to kill the author, anyone who has memorized the work, destroy all soft copies, keep killing people and destroying copies whenever they surface.
When books only existed in hard copies, destroying all representations of the book, conveniently by burning, used to be a large proportion of the work needed to censor.
Of course, my definition of censorship is - prevention of dissemination of information. If yours requires it be done by government, fair enough
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By that logic, burning books isn't censorship because your can always go visit the author to find out what the original story was.
I'm guessing that logic is not your strong point. Here, let me help you.
First of all, burning books is not censorship. Banning books is censorship.
Second, nobody is "burning" a comment by modding it down. It's still available for you to see. And you don't have to "go visit" the poster to see it. You merely adjust your browse level.
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Damn, /. dropped my link. Let's try again. [wikipedia.org]
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Practically all posts in this thread are offtopic so far, because of stupid assholes like you. Thanks for destroying /., moron!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not worth studying this (Score:4, Insightful)
Those nano scale black holes decay faster than you can get scared of them. Same goes for the huge black holes in the universe. They decay due to hawking radiation. It just takes them longer than the micro black holes you cited. A lot longer...
Re: Not worth studying this (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention any black holes created will be traveling several orders of magnitude greater than escape velocity so even if Hawking radiation doesn't exist or they didn't have an incredibly small gravitional capture cross section to be with things would be as far as the moon in about a half sec.
Re: Not worth studying this (Score:5, Funny)
would be as far as the moon in about a half sec.
Why is the summary talking about particle decay when the real news is that they have produced faster than light travel?
On top of that they're tiny (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
For that they need to travel more than 2 times as fast as the speed of light ... just mentioning it.
Re: (Score:3)
Another point regarding these microscopic black holes is that cosmic rays behave like extremely powerful particle accelerators in that particles are smashed together with far greater energy than we can manage in our own accelerators. If microscopic black holes are a problem then we wouldn't be here to complain about them.
Re: (Score:3)
The theory that tells us that black holes exist tells us that the small ones decay really, really fast.
Moreover, a small uncharged black hole has no significant attraction to anything, because gravity is really, really weak as forces go. It would gain mass only by an almost exact collision with a fundamental particle (it could go through a proton and miss all the quarks). Lots of people think black holes suck because one with an event horizon big enough to see would have a considerable amount of mass,
Re: (Score:2)
That is indeed the theory.
But if we were certain the theory were correct, then there would be very little point in performing experiments.
Personally I suspect the evaporation hypothesis will prove to hold true, but that doesn't mean I would choose to bet the continued existence of all life on Earth on it.
Re: (Score:2)
We have four-sigma evidence that leptons don't behave as predicted. We don't have a single EM experiment that rules out enough possible other factors to show that the EM drive violates the law of conservation of momentum (or its relativistic equivalent).
Re: (Score:2)
Quantum Gravity [wikipedia.org]
Do black holes produce thermal radiation, as expected on theoretical grounds? Does this radiation contain information about their inner structure, as suggested by gauge–gravity duality, or not, as implied by Hawking's original calculation? If not, and black holes can evaporate away, what happens to the information stored in them (since quantum mechanics does not provide for the destruction of information)? Or does the radiation stop at some point leaving black hole remnants?
It sound
Re: (Score:2)
Waahahha, too late: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
No, Physics assumes that particles behave in consistent ways, at least statistically. Simplified, the observation here seems to be that tau particles decay a little faster than we predict they should. There's some uncertainty, because there are errors in our measurements, and the decay time itself is stochastic. As you collect more data you can put narrower limits on the average decay time and become more confident that it is really different from prediction.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. As this is published now, it is in the "likely, but not certain" class. This is a call for assistance, may it be with possible flaws in the measurement or mathematics, may it be with more experiments. Also keep in mind that "experiment" can mean some targeted searching though the absolute huge amounts of data a collider like the LHC produces. This is how particle physicists firm up things, this is a global cooperation and that is the only way it works.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. And there is room for inaccuracies, as all measurements contain errors and some of these can just mean the model is not exact. However, the better the model, the better we can predict things without actually needing to do them. This is money well spent.
Re: (Score:2)
Science is consensus. Pirsig hypothesized that there are infinite hypotheses to explain anything. Science simply prioritizes one point of view, and uses instruments heavily entangled with themselves to prove they are right and deserve consensus approval. Science unfairly excludes other hypotheses from funding or consideration for purely social reasons. Science is much more about quirky human psychology than about reality.
Repeatability and falsifiability requires no consensus.
Science wrongly condemns other paths to knowledge about nature
Those paths condemn themselves by not being repeatable or falsifiable.