Why can't humans be a little more self aware? We know almost nothing. We're still in the stone age and we need to work really hard, invest a lot more money in education and research. It's not how far we've come, it's how far we have to go.
Hmmm. I got voted down without any comments. No one can remember the big debate 25 years ago when the US had to choose between the Hubble and the Super Collider in Texas, which would have been bigger than the LHC? Hubble won, but many argued that it was a waste of money, which turned out to be far from the truth. The discoveries about to be made at CERN could have happened 2 decades ago.
I guess I was trying to convey the fact that there are a lot of big discoveries waiting to be found. People seem to not put enough emphasis in research and education in the US. The Hubble vs Super Collider debate many years ago. Nasa is always underfunded, IMO. Seems like there is so much more we could do.
If your comment could be worked verbatim into a Miss America contestant on stage answer, it probably doesn't belong on HN. Especially when it's not really on topic except in the broadest of terms. Even choirs get bored getting preached to after a while.
Normally when I see pictures of glowing green things accompanying science articles I assume someone just did an image search for "glowing green thing" and stuck it at the top of the article. In this case (as the caption in this article says), the glowing green thing is actually (part of) the device used to make the measurement.
It's nice to get a reminder once in a while that science isn't just papers and publishing and long tedious experimentation. Science may not be exactly what I idealized as a kid, but there's still a place and a use for boxes filled with green lasers.
When I first switched from theoretical physics to experimental physics I thought the same way as you. Now, after years of aligning green laser beams through optical paths that include microscopes and experimental matter, the sight of a green laser beam on a crowded and otherwise dark optical bench makes me unendingly (well, somewhat) glad that I quit physics entirely and became a programmer. Since 2002 those poor bastards have been pointing lasers down that same optical path!
Please do not even speak of the effort that's probably required to align the beam. And let's assume that their detectors are easy to align and otherwise mostly hassle-free.
But the fact that they've run such a cool experiment, and with such interesting results, makes me very happy, too.
[Edit: added this:] Good lord, I didn't even think of the cyclotron, curved separator with its tuned magnetic field, the whole damn thing under vacuum, the hand-rolled lasers. No wonder so many authors.
The secret of photographing experimental equipment is that anything can be made to look far more exciting with coloured lights. That equipment viewed under ordinary lab lighting would look incredibly dull.
These paywalls around scientific journal articles were infuriating when I was a physics grad student, and they're even worse now that I don't have a university account through which to view them.
In that spirit, here is the authors' rather fabulous website:
What would be the consequences if this is accurate? What assumptions are based on the size of a proton? What kind of technology was previously thought impossible because protons were just too darn big? Because (as a non-physicist) I can't think of anything.
The heart of physics right now are two theories that disagree with each other. One is Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which is about gravity. The other is called the Standard Model, which is about quantum mechanics. (The whole Higgs boson issue? That's about measuring the last unknown parameter in the Standard Model, which is the mass of the Higgs boson.)
The hope of physicists is to be able to find a theory that combines the two. Because they fundamentally disagree, we know that one or both, probably both, are both somewhat wrong, but we don't have any idea how and where the theories begin to fall apart. Therefore if we can find experiments which show problems, then we can get insight on what the problems are with the theory, and hopefully that will lead us to a better theory.
To draw a parallel, in the late 1800s it looked like physics was nearly done. The big problems were solved. The remaining discrepancies were small. And of what practical use was it to know more about the movement of light, why black body radiation didn't look like what theory said it should, and whether there was really such a thing as atoms? Yet the answers to those few small puzzles lead to world changing discoveries from nuclear power to transistors.
Nobody can tell you what is left to discover. Nobody can guess the power of unknown scientific theories. But through history, science has proved its worth repeatedly in outside proportions. Isn't the hope that this could happen again worth at least some resources?
This is hard to believe. I'll wait until the experiment has been repeated using muonic helium. Most likely, the researchers made a mistake in how they applied QED in their calculation.
So, either a) the proton is a different, size, b) the muon is a different weight, c) the 'electron shell' relationship to the proton size is not what they think, d)...
The greatest thing a physicist (or any scientist) can say is, "Hmm, that's funny...". It's when we find out that we were wrong that a panoply of new discoveries open up before us. Exciting times.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 66.7 ms ] threadNot that I downvoted your original comment, but what has your follow up got to do with self-awareness or being in the stone age?
Now all you need to do is mention curing world hunger, poverty and war and you'll have your Miss America speech down to pat.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7303/full/466195a...
(but let's keep it between us)
It's nice to get a reminder once in a while that science isn't just papers and publishing and long tedious experimentation. Science may not be exactly what I idealized as a kid, but there's still a place and a use for boxes filled with green lasers.
And that makes a part of me very happy.
Please do not even speak of the effort that's probably required to align the beam. And let's assume that their detectors are easy to align and otherwise mostly hassle-free.
But the fact that they've run such a cool experiment, and with such interesting results, makes me very happy, too.
[Edit: added this:] Good lord, I didn't even think of the cyclotron, curved separator with its tuned magnetic field, the whole damn thing under vacuum, the hand-rolled lasers. No wonder so many authors.
In that spirit, here is the authors' rather fabulous website:
https://muhy.web.psi.ch/wiki/index.php
The hope of physicists is to be able to find a theory that combines the two. Because they fundamentally disagree, we know that one or both, probably both, are both somewhat wrong, but we don't have any idea how and where the theories begin to fall apart. Therefore if we can find experiments which show problems, then we can get insight on what the problems are with the theory, and hopefully that will lead us to a better theory.
To draw a parallel, in the late 1800s it looked like physics was nearly done. The big problems were solved. The remaining discrepancies were small. And of what practical use was it to know more about the movement of light, why black body radiation didn't look like what theory said it should, and whether there was really such a thing as atoms? Yet the answers to those few small puzzles lead to world changing discoveries from nuclear power to transistors.
Nobody can tell you what is left to discover. Nobody can guess the power of unknown scientific theories. But through history, science has proved its worth repeatedly in outside proportions. Isn't the hope that this could happen again worth at least some resources?
Human need for completeness is driving that, but we might find ourselves with two models that don't need to be combined.