Steuard

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241.
by Steuard 11y ago
I see your point, but I still have a sense that the false positive rate is just too high. I don't know the actual false positive rate, but I've somehow pictured maybe a dozen or so very brief (<1 sec?) signals per year. Under a
242.
by Steuard 11y ago
My impression (from well off to the side in a tangentially related field, mind you) has been that false positives are common enough in the individual detectors that they really do need the comparison with the other location's data as a
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by Steuard 11y ago
I've just read the Abstract so far, but from there: > While passengers may generally decline AIT screening in favor of physical screening, TSA may direct mandatory AIT screening for some passengers.
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by Steuard 11y ago
It's not "cool", but I'm a professor who's always struggled to learn my students' names. A few years ago, I started to populate an Anki deck with their photos from the college lookbook paired with their names a
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by Steuard 11y ago
Oh, wow. No, that was entirely accidental, but it shouldn't have been: I know that history reasonably well (but evidently only when I stop to think about it, which I suppose only serves to illustrate my point).
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by Steuard 11y ago
Fair point: Europe and its descendants don't have anything like a monopoly on imperialism (and China in particular has that history going back a long, long time). I'm presumably focused on European imperialism because it's
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by Steuard 11y ago
I very much understand the frustration on display here about the setback to science from this decision. But (admitting up front that I don't know a lot about the specific cultural context) I'm surprised by the lack of sympathy bei
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by Steuard 11y ago
Poor phrasing on my part, I think. Brane models (whether in M-theory or elsewhere) are certainly one way of producing this sort of phenomenon theoretically. (I've done research on branes in both string and M-theory.) But ultimately, wh
249.
by Steuard 11y ago
The previous poster probably ought to have explained those acronyms for the benefit of physicists, too: I'm a tenured physics professor specializing in high energy theory (with some research experience in relativity and cosmology), and
250.
by Steuard 11y ago
Possible! There certainly is a lot that feels inelegant in the dominant model, and nobody has yet proposed a reason that so much of the universe would be so oddly invisible to us. But (as I just noted in some detail in a different comment
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by Steuard 11y ago
The Big Bang model of cosmological history is one of the most exquisitely tested ideas in science. Just for starters, any competing model would need to duplicate the highly sensitive predictions of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis ( https:/&#x
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by Steuard 11y ago
Thanks! (I usually link to the arXiv abstract page rather than to the PDF: http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07009 .)
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by Steuard 11y ago
My vague understanding of this article is that what's being described is more like the bright "caustics" that you see when light shines through a glass of water ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_%28o
254.
by Steuard 11y ago
I read the previous comment not as saying that this explanation was wrong , but that it's just unlikely to be truly enlightening to someone who didn't already know the subject reasonably well. I'm on the fence about whether
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by Steuard 11y ago
The line at the end that really hit me was this: > Almost all the attackers were known to the authorities, and if they had been watched, their use of encryption programs would have itself invited closer scrutiny. This is precisely the
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by Steuard 11y ago
The crazy thing about special relativity is that from the perspective of the observer in the car, they're sitting still and everyone else is moving. That means that the observer in the car will see the watches of people on the sidewa
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by Steuard 11y ago
I sometimes like to read a book before going to sleep: it's always been a nice, calming activity for me. I also sometimes read books on my phone, and I think that's probably going to become more common (for me and in general) over
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by Steuard 11y ago
Why "penalized"? If there's no significance attached to author ordering, why should it matter who's listed first? (I can actually answer my own question to some degree: the "alphabetical authors" convention is
259.
by Steuard 11y ago
But this isn't some new, untested regime: this is an ordinary metal cavity with some sort of resonant electromagnetic wave inside. There's nothing about it that I can see that would lead me to expect results here that would so fun
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by Steuard 11y ago
Thanks for writing this. There's a lot to think about here, but just for starters, your very first paragraph finally helped me to understand what failure of clarity on my part led to the hostility that we've been going back and fo
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by Steuard 11y ago
Can't we learn a lot of wonderfully useful things about experimental technique while studying phenomena that are more likely to be of interest in their own right? Because in this case, the subject matter of the experiments is explicitl
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by Steuard 11y ago
> The device has intrigued many of your more curious colleagues. It really hasn't. Every single time that I've seen a colleague (or a colleague of a colleague) comment on this research, they've been talking about either
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by Steuard 11y ago
But why spend that money on a project that we already know is almost certainly wrong ? Surely there are bold, crazy ideas out there worth exploring that aren't in violation of well-tested physical principles! Fund a hundred of thos
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by Steuard 11y ago
I've been a lot more impatient this go-around than I've generally tried to be in previous incarnations of this topic. It just gets frustrating . It feels like I've tried patient education, over and over, and it falls on de
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by Steuard 11y ago
Yes, and I really don't understand it. Every dollar spent on these folks is a dollar that could more usefully be spent supporting, say, searches for life on Europa, or laying groundwork for asteroid mining, or improving exoplanet searc
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by Steuard 11y ago
Every time these EM Drive people release another unconvincing result, oodles of people enthusiastically jump onto their bandwagon. Those of us who are experts in the subject matter (tenured physics professor with PhD from UChicago, here) tr
267.
by Steuard 11y ago
I don't think there's a single word in what I've written here that says "We must disavow Feynman!" But Feynman is still held up as an ideal here in our modern era, for very good reasons. As such, it is both just a
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by Steuard 11y ago
Oh, that's a perfect encapsulation of this topic! For the lazy: > The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for
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by Steuard 11y ago
That's heartening to read! But still, it rather damns with faint praise, doesn't it? With its "in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary" and its "you may be able to get something out of it" and its o
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by Steuard 11y ago
Partly it's a matter of culture. Generations of physics students grow up seeing Feynman presented as an ideal, and in so very many ways (not just scientific!) he's a great person to emulate. But if his "rakishness" is lu

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