Mechanism is via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium (that's only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded).
More clearly, in a dispersive medium like a prism, the wavelength of the light depends on its frequency.
Because the speed of light is the product of wavelength with frequency, both the speed and the wavelength vary with frequency, thus also the refractive index varies with frequency.
This is quite nuanced and not as most people assume.
It is the "phase velocity of light in that medium" that is exceeded.
phase velocity of light in a medium = speed of light / refractive index of the medium.
Thus the EM wave is slowed down in a medium and so a charged particle can exceed it producing Cherenkov radiation. This is similar to a sonic boom in atmosphere when speed of sound is exceeded. In both cases the object is traveling faster than the wavefront.
It is only in vacuum that "phase velocity of light" = "group velocity of light" = c (i.e. 300,000 km/sec)
IIRC the group velocity in a medium can also exceed c when you send pulses through certain nonlinear media. Basically, the "lump" of the pulse can appear to "exit before it entered," but what really happens is that the tiny tip of the pulse has already gone through at <= c, and starts growing into the body at the exit before it has completely shrank at the entrance because of the nonlinearity. So it is actually the information/"signal" velocity (the tip of the signal) that cannot exceed c.
v(g) : group velocity which can be thought of as a function of the overall wave packet (i.e. pulse) and hence contains the actual energy/information/signal.
v(p): phase velocity which can be thought of as a function of a single wave and hence the crest of that wave.
If you ask AI, you will get a list with nice short explanatory notes; check it out.
Finally on a related and very interesting vein, Physicists have even brought light to a standstill in tiny gas clouds of sodium atoms cooled to near absolute zero! See the pdf of Scientific American article "Frozen Light" by Lene Vestergaard Hau from her publications webpage - https://groups.seas.harvard.edu/haulab/publications/HauPubli...
To be more perfectly precise, it is only in a vacuum with an infinitely repeating regular signal that "phase velocity of light" = "group velocity of light".
The deviation caused by uncertainty in the package arrival time is typically extremely short, but not zero, for finite signals.
The actual "entity" that is restricted to be <=c is "information velocity". An infinitely repeating pattern would have travel at (phase velocity)=c ... but would ironically transmit no actual information (the bit value is restricted to 1, not 0 or 1).
Nice. Trying to read/understand "RF Systems and Modulation" is what got me interested in this subject in the first place.
So in my mind i map your comment as; the "carrier signal" frequency (analog) is the infinitely repeating regular signal traveling at v(p) while the "information signal" frequency (analog/digital) imposed on top of it creates the pulse/wave packet traveling at v(g).
If anyone was wondering how some of that heavy stuff gets to the south pole to build such a large engineering project, at the farthest possible end of any logistics chain:
There's a weird overlap in engineering and physics disciplines between the hard engineering/business practices of the mining industry, and particle physics.
Right, but for those they need to make/move/collect a large amount of transparent material, like heavy water etc for the particles to interact with. But they get that 'for free' with the ice.
Greenland is much better logistically in some ways (I work on experiments both in Greenland and in Antarctica), but the ice in Greenland is unlikely to be as good for IceCube as in Antarctica, due to a presumed larger number of dust layers from dry periods in Europe.
The US has a research station at Summit Station Greenland but compared to South Pole, it's spartan (like, the first time I went there, I slept in a tent because of lack of hard-sided berthing, but then a Polar bear came a few years later and now hard-sided berthing is required). There are longer-term plans to improve the station in Greenland but we'll see.
The best science comes from areas that have no obvious use. The original insights into nuclear physics, quantum physics and relativity were all pure thought experiments. They led to the world we live in.
I'm personally very happy that we're still funding science that isn't obviously monetised.
The reason for Antarctica is that it's the only place you find cubic kilometres of stable ice that doesn't drift around.
All of it was driven by a flood of experimental results that were not compatible with classical physics.
See "Ultra Violet Catastrophe" in black body radiation, photo effect.
Planck famously performed curve fitting on the black body spectrum and only afterwards found the theoretical foundation for the function that fit the data.
I'm actually not sure exactly what "they" is in this sentence.
I know about the Ultraviolet catastrophe, but that's cherry-picking.
Dirac predicted the Positron before it was discovered.
Quantum entanglement was predicted by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen before it was shown ("Spooky action at a distance")
Black Holes and Gravitational waves were both predicted before they were detected.
Einstein predicted time dilation before it was detected.
Szilard predicted chain reactions in Nuclear fission before they were demonstrated.
And probably most pertinent to this discussion, Pauli predicted Neutrinos before they were detected.
Half of the list above are critical for GPS, energy, semiconductor research and many other fundamental technologies of the modern age. They were researched and predicted without any thought of a "monetisable" product.
> And probably most pertinent to this discussion, Pauli predicted Neutrinos before they were detected.
Because of the experimental result of missing energy in the beta radiation spectrum.
Bone of these were "pure thought experiments" as you describe. Many were side effects, new predictions of theories to address other experimental results, but none of them happened in isolation.
You simply don't make predictions about the real world in "pure thought experiments".
1: Ice-mass that isn't contaminated by atomic testing fallout (if the ice has been there since the 40s it's without radioactive waste (faschinating to read about how WW2 wrecks is a prime resource of steel since it's a huge amount of steel without trace amounts of radionucletiods from testing fallout).
2: No current interference (nuclear power, radiowaves,etc) creating possible test uncertainties.
3: I'm sure there are other reasons
The negative naturally is cost, but since the expriment succeeded it will probably be useful for any attempts to send robots or even humanity into space beyond the solar system.
Neutrinos need a large detector volume for efficiency because they interact so rarely. You can’t detect them directly so you need a transparent medium to detect their collision byproducts. Good detector mediums are water and ice, and are underground to minimise background light. There are relatively few places you can do this. Mine caverns and under the sea are the most common, but marine detectors are notoriously hard to build. Francis Halzen proposed using ice. At the Pole, the glacial plateau is 2 miles high and the breakthrough was confirming that the ice is in fact highly transparent if you go deep enough.
Why the pole specifically? You could probably build a second IceCube 100 miles away, but how are you going to get that materials there? Pole has a skiway for large aircraft and infrastructure to house a large number of people. The traverse (SPoT) only became operational near the end of construction - the initial holes were drilled in 2005 and almost everything had to be flown in.
Telescope In The Ice does a great job of explaining the history and science behind the experiment.
The biggest challenge is finding ice without dust layers from historical volcanic activity, and the South Pole is particularly clean because of it's remoteness as well as the prevailing wind directions. There is, however, one big dust layer that causes signal distortion.
> which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
I have been researching applications of FTL as well;
Where is there an actual vacuum on Earth or in microgravity? So, there are Proca waves within dielectric Proca metamaterials and plasmas and waveguides; and photons can have effective mass and/or longitudinal charge Ez in ionized plasma?
So, Maxwellian waves with no longitudinal (Ez,) component can exist in what fraction of the universe if they can only exist in a vacuum?
If it moves, we can communicate with it. Your mobile phone's neutrino signal will not lose a single bar, wherever you are on Earth, or in the solar system, or in the galaxy.
I wonder - was there really no other people they could have given it to? The detection of gravitational waves was split between a theorist, experimentalist and a person who had a big hand in shepherding the project along. Could not the same have been done here?
I would imagine the problem is that there are too many of them.
For better or worse the prize can only go to 3 people. Over the years there are generally many dozens of people who make absolutely critical contributions to these kinds of experiments. In this case, though, the same guy was listed as the PI of the UW Madison group, and Madison is very clearly "the" operator of the project.
Halzen is by any measure an awesome physicist, but he's also a good "fit" for the Nobel because of this unique situation.
All of science is collaborative and this is especially true in these big experiments: the IceCube collaboration is over 400 people [1] from several dozen institutes. There are a lot of experiments where giving a Nobel prize would be impossible because there's no "principal investigator" for the experiment.
I appreciate the boldness of this project, it has an element of sci-fi to it. Building a base at the south pole to bury sensors in ice to measure elusive particles. The stuff of dreams!
To be fair, the base was already there and logistically essential. The IceCube topside building is just a part of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, about a km or so from the Elevated Station.
This image* from Wikipedia surprised me. The topside building is...you could say...the tip of the iceberg. The detectors span a huge area going over 2km deep. The predecessor AMANDA array was also down there.
The building is just for housing the data gathering and comms equipment and whatever maintenance and engineering stuff the array needs. I don’t think anybody physically works there regularly.
We think of receiving a Nobel Prize as something super rare and exceptional and it is. What still always astounds me though, is this:
There are nearly 300 living laureates. Enough to hold a yearly meetup for them in Lindau, where usually about 40 gather. This year, for the event's 75th anniversary, there were even about 70. Imagine that.
IIRC Oppenheimer facilitated / sponsored a meeting there after the Manhattan Project, as a gathering where physicists could talk freely about physics for a change.
That's an uncharitable take. The proposed observatory was through pristine dense forest, and one of the most important elephant corridors in Asia. It was opposed by the democratically elected government, and litigated in courts in an open and transparent way. The physics gains do not outweigh the environmental cost, and the fact that scientists were able to get valuable data from an observatory in the lifeless Antarctic is further justification not to build this.
IceCube observatory is for studying the high energy cosmic neutrinos from a distant galaxy or black holes. But the one proposed INO is to study the low and medium energy atmospheric neutrinos. INO was designed to study the mass ordering of neutrinos. Both observatories are for studying different aspects and properties of neutrinos and are not the same.
As a trained high-energy physicist who loves the subject, I wouldn't want the destruction of forests, tiger and elephant habitats (or any other habitats) for "science". There are always alternatives - alternate sites, alternate designs, alternate experiments.
One of my primary disagreements with my friends and colleagues was based on their insistence that opposing a new facility was anti-science and only done by the "uneducated". IMO, while this was true for a small subset of opposing factions, there were often real reasons for not building which took realities outside research into consideration.
Neutrino physics is the frontier. It’s one area where we know there are “physics beyond the standard model” though IceCube hasn’t quite been able to answer the neutrino mass question.
Photons work better for driving a car too but being able to hear is still quite useful.
In other words: we already have lots of things that measure photons. You see things on two totally different media it's a lot more compelling than just one.
Neutrinos are not an analog to sound in the point you are trying to make. They are many orders of magnitude more weakly interacting and much, much difficult to measure.
Similar to the Millennium prize by the Clay institute, the amount of luck and effort you need to receive the prize don't make it worthwhile. Plus, it's generally expected to use that money for further research. It would be advisable to focus on other endeavors, if money is your motivator.
It could be the beginning of Neutrino astronomy [1]. So far, we only used the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, to observe the universe. If we could equally leverage neutrinos or gravitational waves, we could observe much more of the universe. For example, the cosmic microwave background radiation enables us to deduce the conditions at 300ky after the Big Bang. The cosmic neutrino background [2] could give us insight in the conditions 1s after the Big Bang.
Sometimes I think it would be nice if there were biographies that laid out when and how Nobel laureates made their discoveries. Then wouldn't it be possible to pattern how people discover certain phenomena?
The common denominator is money and time. The only way to get more results is to put more funding out there (and accepting that not everything is about a direct ROI).
Not Nobel laureates, but people have tried this. I once was looking for the early education of famous scientists and found the book Cradles of Eminence [1], which compares the childhoods of several hundred famous people.
One thing I noticed was that more than a few were seriously sick in childhood and had to be homeschooled. This includes Edward Morley, Peter Higgs, René Descartes (though I'm not sure how rare it was at his time), and the mathematician Julia Robinson, who was bedridden with scarlet fever at 9 years old, then had to get tutoring to catch back up, and had this to say about it [2]:
> I have since read that a solitary childhood or, what amounts to the same thing, a period of isolation resulting from an illness is frequently noted in the early lives of scientists. I am not sure what the significance of this finding is. Obviously I had to amuse myself for long periods of time, but I didn’t do so with mathematics. I am inclined to think that what I learned during that year in bed was patience.
> By the time I was well enough to go back to school, I had missed more than two years. My parents arranged to have me tutored by a retired elementary school teacher. In one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Sidenote: I found the book [1] through asking a free LLM what source this quote might be referring to. They are reasonably good at this kind of literature search, especially because it's easy to judge whether they gave you something useful.
> wouldn't it be possible to pattern how people discover certain phenomena?
This question in the field of "general problem-solving" (inventions etc.) was investigated by studying patent literature by Genrich Altshuller in the former Soviet Union and systematized as TRIZ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
Theory of inventive problem solving' is a methodology which combines an organized, systematic method of problem-solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in global patent literature.
TRIZ developed from a foundation of research into hundreds of thousands of inventions in many fields to produce an approach which defines patterns in inventive solutions and the characteristics of the problems which these inventions have overcome.
Thank you always for your consideration and for showing me a broader world. I know I can be a nuisance, but I’d appreciate it if you could think of me as a younger, more foolish junior programmer.
Ha, Ha, You are being too self-effacing and self-deprecating ;-)
Don't worry about etiquette too much; And you are not being a nuisance. We just need to focus on gaining and sharing knowledge on this forum while being polite, that's all.
Pretty cool. One of the big challenges in trying neutrino detection in ice is dealing with funding agencies. The optical properties of ice only get good when you are actually a few kilometers deep in very old ice. That is you can't just build a demonstrator in the nearest glacier with a few leftover photomultipliers, you need to go directly to Antarctica and bore a three kilometer hole into the ice. And projects where the MVP is quite expensive are always very hard to get funded.
I remember one of my professor, a pioneer of neutrino detectors in Europe, mentioning Ice Cube in a lecture more than 20 years ago. Long time scale (due to funding).
We hire two people to stay over the winter and operate the detector each year. No icecube affiliation or physics background required, although a technical background helps.
I worked on IceCube. Was at the South Pole for a little over a month. Wild once in a lifetime experience. And if I am being honest I was terribly bored after the first 2 weeks. Its very flat and white and cold and not much to do. I was asked to go back the next year and I said no.
Clear skies happen regularly enough. You can see refractive phenomena frequently (sun dogs, moon halos and the like). Same for night, plenty of clear skies and auroras during the winter when it’s dark enough to see them.
Field work even in beautiful places can get stifling. When you don't have access to friends, family, routine, various freedoms... It can be a bit much.
I romanticized that kind of work, but I think my limit is roughly what you said at around 2 weeks. The novelty wears off. Especially because I miss my kids a lot after a few days.
Actually, another big one: I love cooking. When you eat what you're given and don't have a choice, even if the food is pretty good it's kind of... I don't know... I really just want to go home and make something that is distinctly 'my food', something I would only have at home.
Even so, I absolutely love field work. The stuff I do is nowhere near as crazy as the Antarctic. I'm typically on the semi-remote islands of the British Columbia coast. My wife goes to the Arctic; her experience is probably more like yours. Lots of time isolated on icebreakers. Occasionally visiting remote navy or military bases, though. Some indigenous communities. Not as middle-of-nowhere as the Antarctic! The longest she has done is 7 weeks, with ~4 days off of the ship.
I spent a bit over a year at South Pole for IceCube. There's an old joke in the Antarctic: the first time is for the adventure, the second time is for the money, and the third time is because you don't fit in anywhere else anymore.
What an amazing accomplishment! I played a very tiny part in this project and went to the South Pole in 2009 to help with construction. Didn't see any neutrinos the entire time I was there though :/
192 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 16.7 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
Mechanism is via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium (that's only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded).
This was also discussed recently if you are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655286
Thanks, I had no idea this was possible!
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Because the speed of light is the product of wavelength with frequency, both the speed and the wavelength vary with frequency, thus also the refractive index varies with frequency.
It is the "phase velocity of light in that medium" that is exceeded.
phase velocity of light in a medium = speed of light / refractive index of the medium.
Thus the EM wave is slowed down in a medium and so a charged particle can exceed it producing Cherenkov radiation. This is similar to a sonic boom in atmosphere when speed of sound is exceeded. In both cases the object is traveling faster than the wavefront.
It is only in vacuum that "phase velocity of light" = "group velocity of light" = c (i.e. 300,000 km/sec)
What really is the speed of light in a medium/vacuum, group or phase velocity? - https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/450377/what-real...
1) Non-Dispersive medium (eg. vacuum) : v(g) = v(p) = c
2) Normal Dispersion medium (eg. in water) : v(g) < v(p)
3) Anomalous Dispersion medium (eg. absorbing materials) : v(g) > v(p)
where (simplified);
v(g) : group velocity which can be thought of as a function of the overall wave packet (i.e. pulse) and hence contains the actual energy/information/signal.
v(p): phase velocity which can be thought of as a function of a single wave and hence the crest of that wave.
Here is the relevant chapter from the Feynman lectures, Relativistic Effects in Radiation - https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_34.html
If you ask AI, you will get a list with nice short explanatory notes; check it out.
Finally on a related and very interesting vein, Physicists have even brought light to a standstill in tiny gas clouds of sodium atoms cooled to near absolute zero! See the pdf of Scientific American article "Frozen Light" by Lene Vestergaard Hau from her publications webpage - https://groups.seas.harvard.edu/haulab/publications/HauPubli...
The deviation caused by uncertainty in the package arrival time is typically extremely short, but not zero, for finite signals.
The actual "entity" that is restricted to be <=c is "information velocity". An infinitely repeating pattern would have travel at (phase velocity)=c ... but would ironically transmit no actual information (the bit value is restricted to 1, not 0 or 1).
So in my mind i map your comment as; the "carrier signal" frequency (analog) is the infinitely repeating regular signal traveling at v(p) while the "information signal" frequency (analog/digital) imposed on top of it creates the pulse/wave packet traveling at v(g).
Add in different media and you have a difference between v(g) and v(p) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49988070
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=south+pol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole_Traverse
https://octanepress.com/content/south-pole-traverse_antartic...
Significant amounts of things still come in by air cargo at great cost, but a lot also comes the long slow way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Neutrino_Observatory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNO+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande
There's a weird overlap in engineering and physics disciplines between the hard engineering/business practices of the mining industry, and particle physics.
The US has a research station at Summit Station Greenland but compared to South Pole, it's spartan (like, the first time I went there, I slept in a tent because of lack of hard-sided berthing, but then a Polar bear came a few years later and now hard-sided berthing is required). There are longer-term plans to improve the station in Greenland but we'll see.
I'm personally very happy that we're still funding science that isn't obviously monetised.
The reason for Antarctica is that it's the only place you find cubic kilometres of stable ice that doesn't drift around.
All of it was driven by a flood of experimental results that were not compatible with classical physics.
See "Ultra Violet Catastrophe" in black body radiation, photo effect.
Planck famously performed curve fitting on the black body spectrum and only afterwards found the theoretical foundation for the function that fit the data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe
I'm actually not sure exactly what "they" is in this sentence.
I know about the Ultraviolet catastrophe, but that's cherry-picking.
Dirac predicted the Positron before it was discovered.
Quantum entanglement was predicted by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen before it was shown ("Spooky action at a distance")
Black Holes and Gravitational waves were both predicted before they were detected.
Einstein predicted time dilation before it was detected.
Szilard predicted chain reactions in Nuclear fission before they were demonstrated.
And probably most pertinent to this discussion, Pauli predicted Neutrinos before they were detected.
Half of the list above are critical for GPS, energy, semiconductor research and many other fundamental technologies of the modern age. They were researched and predicted without any thought of a "monetisable" product.
Because of the experimental result of missing energy in the beta radiation spectrum.
Bone of these were "pure thought experiments" as you describe. Many were side effects, new predictions of theories to address other experimental results, but none of them happened in isolation.
You simply don't make predictions about the real world in "pure thought experiments".
1: Ice-mass that isn't contaminated by atomic testing fallout (if the ice has been there since the 40s it's without radioactive waste (faschinating to read about how WW2 wrecks is a prime resource of steel since it's a huge amount of steel without trace amounts of radionucletiods from testing fallout).
2: No current interference (nuclear power, radiowaves,etc) creating possible test uncertainties.
3: I'm sure there are other reasons
The negative naturally is cost, but since the expriment succeeded it will probably be useful for any attempts to send robots or even humanity into space beyond the solar system.
Why the pole specifically? You could probably build a second IceCube 100 miles away, but how are you going to get that materials there? Pole has a skiway for large aircraft and infrastructure to house a large number of people. The traverse (SPoT) only became operational near the end of construction - the initial holes were drilled in 2005 and almost everything had to be flown in.
Telescope In The Ice does a great job of explaining the history and science behind the experiment.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1137280085
I have been researching applications of FTL as well;
Where is there an actual vacuum on Earth or in microgravity? So, there are Proca waves within dielectric Proca metamaterials and plasmas and waveguides; and photons can have effective mass and/or longitudinal charge Ez in ionized plasma?
So, Maxwellian waves with no longitudinal (Ez,) component can exist in what fraction of the universe if they can only exist in a vacuum?
A Twistor model can model such;
This question could have avoided the offense:
What is the relation between Cherenkov relation and effective mass in longitudinal plasma waves?
What are neutrinos good for? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6iyyM5XRx4
https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2011-february-13...
For better or worse the prize can only go to 3 people. Over the years there are generally many dozens of people who make absolutely critical contributions to these kinds of experiments. In this case, though, the same guy was listed as the PI of the UW Madison group, and Madison is very clearly "the" operator of the project.
Halzen is by any measure an awesome physicist, but he's also a good "fit" for the Nobel because of this unique situation.
[1]: https://icecube.wisc.edu/collaboration/meet-the-collaboratio...
I appreciate the boldness of this project, it has an element of sci-fi to it. Building a base at the south pole to bury sensors in ice to measure elusive particles. The stuff of dreams!
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory#/...
The building is just for housing the data gathering and comms equipment and whatever maintenance and engineering stuff the array needs. I don’t think anybody physically works there regularly.
https://www.infographics.se/
https://www.behance.net/JohanJarnestad
There are nearly 300 living laureates. Enough to hold a yearly meetup for them in Lindau, where usually about 40 gather. This year, for the event's 75th anniversary, there were even about 70. Imagine that.
IIRC Oppenheimer facilitated / sponsored a meeting there after the Manhattan Project, as a gathering where physicists could talk freely about physics for a change.
https://www.lindau-nobel.org/meetings/
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/why-the-neu...
One of my primary disagreements with my friends and colleagues was based on their insistence that opposing a new facility was anti-science and only done by the "uneducated". IMO, while this was true for a small subset of opposing factions, there were often real reasons for not building which took realities outside research into consideration.
In other words: we already have lots of things that measure photons. You see things on two totally different media it's a lot more compelling than just one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_astronomy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_neutrino_background
One thing I noticed was that more than a few were seriously sick in childhood and had to be homeschooled. This includes Edward Morley, Peter Higgs, René Descartes (though I'm not sure how rare it was at his time), and the mathematician Julia Robinson, who was bedridden with scarlet fever at 9 years old, then had to get tutoring to catch back up, and had this to say about it [2]:
> I have since read that a solitary childhood or, what amounts to the same thing, a period of isolation resulting from an illness is frequently noted in the early lives of scientists. I am not sure what the significance of this finding is. Obviously I had to amuse myself for long periods of time, but I didn’t do so with mathematics. I am inclined to think that what I learned during that year in bed was patience.
> By the time I was well enough to go back to school, I had missed more than two years. My parents arranged to have me tutored by a retired elementary school teacher. In one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Sidenote: I found the book [1] through asking a free LLM what source this quote might be referring to. They are reasonably good at this kind of literature search, especially because it's easy to judge whether they gave you something useful.
[1] https://archive.org/details/cradlesofeminenc0000goer_l9f8/pa...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181207045746/https://www.maa.o...
Indeed, "in-spiraling" seems more like a discovery than many (not all, obv) nobel prize winning work
This question in the field of "general problem-solving" (inventions etc.) was investigated by studying patent literature by Genrich Altshuller in the former Soviet Union and systematized as TRIZ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
Theory of inventive problem solving' is a methodology which combines an organized, systematic method of problem-solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in global patent literature.
TRIZ developed from a foundation of research into hundreds of thousands of inventions in many fields to produce an approach which defines patterns in inventive solutions and the characteristics of the problems which these inventions have overcome.
See also my older comment for more resources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976697
Don't worry about etiquette too much; And you are not being a nuisance. We just need to focus on gaining and sharing knowledge on this forum while being polite, that's all.
https://archive.org/details/quarksleptonsint0000halz
Not right now though! https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/spwebcam.cfm
I romanticized that kind of work, but I think my limit is roughly what you said at around 2 weeks. The novelty wears off. Especially because I miss my kids a lot after a few days.
Actually, another big one: I love cooking. When you eat what you're given and don't have a choice, even if the food is pretty good it's kind of... I don't know... I really just want to go home and make something that is distinctly 'my food', something I would only have at home.
Even so, I absolutely love field work. The stuff I do is nowhere near as crazy as the Antarctic. I'm typically on the semi-remote islands of the British Columbia coast. My wife goes to the Arctic; her experience is probably more like yours. Lots of time isolated on icebreakers. Occasionally visiting remote navy or military bases, though. Some indigenous communities. Not as middle-of-nowhere as the Antarctic! The longest she has done is 7 weeks, with ~4 days off of the ship.
Anyway, I'd love to do it again