Large Hardon Collider

[Mizango]

I mean it's called the 'god' particle for a reason.

[Mizango]

Now, whether you wish it to exist or not is a whole different topic lol.

[BerenTebogo]

Oh mizzypoo, you so silly.

Come explore giraffes with me.

[Mizango]

All day erryday, lets roll out.

[Max™]

Is that slang for "sweaty manbutt sexification" or do you literally mean explore giraffes?

Nevermind, I don't wanna know.


Nonetheless, the Tevatron guys themselves said its just a rumor unsupported by the stuff they do... like science.

[Tagus]

Shouldn't you guys be talking about the gravity myth by now?

[Max™]

http://www.fiatforum.com/gallery/dat...t-a-theory.jpg

[Tagus]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/sc...ty.html?src=mv

Saw this in the morning... I love the first sentence:

"It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams."

Reading it I was just like, damn... sagging flesh and dreams? Screw you, Earth. Gravity does suck.

[BerenTebogo]

Is that slang for "sweaty manbutt sexification" or do you literally mean explore giraffes?

Nevermind, I don't wanna know.


Nonetheless, the Tevatron guys themselves said its just a rumor unsupported by the stuff they do... like science.

Sweaty giraffebutt sexification, to be precise.

[Mizango]

lol

[Max™]

Sweaty giraffebutt sexification, to be precise.

...

There's nothing wrong with that then.


As for Verlinde, entropic gravity is an interesting take on it, and kinda meshes with how I describe it... but he seems to be trying to eliminate the whole "curving spacetime" from being necessary for gravity in order to kill the idea that it is a force, like EM/Weak/Strong.

I thought that was the idea behind spacetime curvature, you don't fall down because you're being pulled by little force carriers, you fall because the paths available in that direction require less effort than any others, they're shorter/closer to a geodesic. It's a hindrance on a degree of freedom, doesn't need "gravitons" unless they're what those degrees of freedom are composed of... in which case they aren't exchanged like force carriers anyways.

[Kryssan]

Nuclear Education Research Funding Up!

The funding, being provided through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP), will see DoE provide $5 million in scholarships and fellowships to 117 nuclear science and engineering students. A further $13.2 million is awarded to universities and colleges for equipment and infrastructure, including upgrades to research reactors. In total, some 39 academic institutions stand to benefit from the funding.
Announcing the funding, US energy secretary Steven Chu described it as an investment that would give US students the support and resources they would need to keep the USA at the forefront of the nuclear industry. "Restarting the US nuclear industry is a critical part of our efforts to build a clean energy economy and create clean energy jobs," he said.

Four major research reactor upgrades funded by the grants are led by North Carolina State University, which receives nearly $1.4 million to upgrade its PULSTAR research reactor. Other major reactor upgrade projects are cooling tower cell upgrades at the University of Missouri Research Reactor, infrastructure upgrades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Reactor, and cooling tower replacements plus other infrastructure replacements at Texas A&M University's Texas Engineering Experiment Station. Minor reactor upgrades are funded at a further 11 institutes.

Student funding

Both undergraduate and postgraduate students in nuclear energy-related science and engineering programs will benefit from the $5 million in scholarships and fellowships announced by DoE. One-year scholarships of $5000 will be awarded to 85 undergraduate students, while 32 postgraduate fellowships will each receive $50,000 per year over 3 years to help pay for their graduate studies and research.

In May 2010, Chu announced the award of $38 million to 42 university-led nuclear research projects covering fuel cycle research and development, Generation IV reactor research and development, light water reactor sustainability and mission-relevant investigator-initiated research. US universities and students have received over $80 million in funding under NEUP since 2008.

Even PULSTAR gets a mention, hoorah! Near and dear even if it has been years.

[BerenTebogo]

Finally. America's fear of Nuclear research and power is so fucking ridiculous that it makes me rage.

[zoobernut]

Lol Sath you should hear my father-in-law talk about it at family gatherings. He is a nuclear engineer and he specializes in plant safety specifically so it really irks him when people talk about it in an uninformed way that makes it seem unsafe.

On another note that youtube lecture you posted in the alien thread was amazing. Very interesting to watch/listen to while working. Thanks.

[BerenTebogo]

Lol Sath you should hear my father-in-law talk about it at family gatherings. He is a nuclear engineer and he specializes in plant safety specifically so it really irks him when people talk about it in an uninformed way that makes it seem unsafe.

On another note that youtube lecture you posted in the alien thread was amazing. Very interesting to watch/listen to while working. Thanks.

Any time. That particular talk always gets me. He's a really good speaker imo.

And yeah, I hear it all the time, and while I'm not even an avid reader on the subject of Nuclear power I know enough to have it piss me off when people are ignorant of the situation.

[Max™]

Well, that was quick, doesn't look good for Verlinde atm, these guys show you can't incorporate inflation with a holographic screen in a way which produces the field equations, unless you do things like throw away energy conservation, or assume a negative temperature for the co-moving screen during inflation.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1004.0877

A No-go Theorem Prohibiting Inflation in the Entropic Force Scenario
Authors: Miao Li, Yi Pang
(Submitted on 6 Apr 2010 (v1), last revised 8 Jul 2010 (this version, v3))

Abstract: We show that to accommodate inflation in the entropic force scenario of Verlinde, it is necessary to introduce a negative temperature on a holographic screen, this will introduce several puzzles such as energy non-conservation. If one tries to modify the derivation of the Einstein equations to avoid a negative temperature, we prove that it is impossible to find a proper new definition of temperature to derive the Einstein equations.

[Kuya]

I probably asked this before, but forgot: What is it about mass that bends space exactly? I suppose i keep asking this because it's hard to comprehend, because first you have mass which i believe isn't well understood and then you have a statement like "bends space" which i'm not sure if i'm supposed to be taking literally or not, since it implies that space is a "thing" that can be bent and not just "empty space". Even using language to describe it seems inadequate.

[Max™]

http://www.askamathematician.com/?p=270

Q: Why do heavy objects bend space and what is it they are bending?

Physicist: Scientists can generally answer “medium complicated” questions. The really hard ones are too damn hard, and the really simple ones are often “just the way things are”. Or they may be really, really difficult questions in disguise. You’ve found one of the fundamental questions that no one seems to have a good answer for. We also don’t know why the mass, http://s.wordpress.com/latex.php?lat...&fg=000000&s=0, we use when talking about inertia (as in http://s.wordpress.com/latex.php?lat...&fg=000000&s=0) is the same as the mass we use when talking about gravity (as in http://s.wordpress.com/latex.php?lat...&fg=000000&s=0). The best theory I’ve ever heard is that matter is actually made of bunched up “knots” of space-time, and even that isn’t a terribly good a theory.
The second half of your question we do have an answer for, it’s just a little mind bending and hard to picture. What heavy objects are bending is space itself. The way you detect space (follow me here) is with rulers or stretched out strings, or stuff like that. Anything that measures distance. Near heavy objects the distance between points is greater than you would expect, and you can use this fact to detect and measure the stretching of space.
The usual trick when trying to picture higher dimensional space is to knock off a couple of dimensions, and picture that instead. 3 dimensions is too complicated, and 1 is stupid, so here’s 2!

Feynman described what it means wonderfully, there is excess radius inside the Earths gravity well, it's deeper that way *points down* than you would expect by measuring the circumference around it. It's a tiny amount, but it's there, and it's enough to register it as gravity.


The why, that's something everyone is trying to figure out, the Higgs is the standard model answer, and part of why they're looking for it so intently.

[Neosutra]

I probably asked this before, but forgot: What is it about mass that bends space exactly? I suppose i keep asking this because it's hard to comprehend, because first you have mass which i believe isn't well understood and then you have a statement like "bends space" which i'm not sure if i'm supposed to be taking literally or not, since it implies that space is a "thing" that can be bent and not just "empty space". Even using language to describe it seems inadequate.

Think of the distance between two objects (space) as a function of mass(gravity), velocity (relative to c), and time.

Viewing distance and space that way, you dont see it as this 3D graph of points and vectors, but actually a ever changing (based on relative perspective) mesh. The "bending" of space is actually how we describe how matter interacts with this relativistic mesh.

i.e. To a photon, space is a single point (a photon emitted at one end of the galaxy that travels for 1000000000billion years and hits a rock on the other side of the universe views that time as instantaneous, and thus the atom that absorbed that wave was literally right next to the atom that emitted it (in the eyes of the photon).

[Kuya]

http://www.askamathematician.com/?p=270


Feynman described what it means wonderfully, there is excess radius inside the Earths gravity well, it's deeper that way *points down* than you would expect by measuring the circumference around it. It's a tiny amount, but it's there, and it's enough to register it as gravity.


The why, that's something everyone is trying to figure out, the Higgs is the standard model answer, and part of why they're looking for it so intently.

It's still hard for me to understand that answer about what space is.