"e=mc^2: 103 years later, Einstein's proven right"
 

[url]http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081120/sc_afp/sciencephysicseinstein;_ylt=At.9TDIXN0bPIKXcH3m9Fz9xieAA[/url]

Needless to say, the content of that article is heavily watered down. Any ideas for where I can find a not-so-watered down article? A search through the website of France's Centre of National Research turned up nothing.

/. linked to a more technical look at it: (I haven't read either link in detail so I don't know the difference)
[url]http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html[/url]

Thanks, that's much better. I don't think New Scientist is technical at all; it has no equations in it. :wink:

Obviously, the AP's claim that E= mc^2 has never been verified before was way overblown. As far as I can see from New Scientist, the relevant research was about testing one of the predictions of quantum chromodynamics.

One commenter wrote:

[quote]Really?

Fri Nov 21 10:25:59 GMT 2008 by [B]Skivehard[/B]



What really gets confirmed here is the effectiveness of lattice QCD (a way of doing ridiculously hard QCD calculations). The stuff about most (but not all) of the mass of a proton coming not from the valence quarks but from the virtual cloud that surrounds them is kind of old news. Still awesome, but its not really the story here.
[/quote]

[url]http://www.fz-juelich.de/portal/index.php?cmd=show&mid=650&index=163[/url] is the news report from the place whose supercomputer they used; I get the impression this was at least in part a matter of throwing computation (from a 180TFlop Blue Gene) at the problem. People have built custom supercomputers for QCD in the past, the fastest of which is QCDOC ([url]http://www.bnl.gov/lqcd/comp/[/url]) which is basically a custom Blue Gene, but funding means that it's easier to use a pre-existing larger but less custom machine.

Juelich is the big academic supercomputer centre in Europe, and next year they're putting in a machine with 16000 Nehalems and aiming to expand that to a petaflop system in 2009, presumably by adding GPUs since another 64000 Nehalems would be a little expensive.

I find it depressing that Physics gets less and less tractable.
With maths it's understanble: the low hanging fruit has been taken.

David

In summary, a much more accurate headline would be:

Supercomputer Calculation Yields More Accurate Estimate of Proton's Mass

[QUOTE=jinydu;150250]In summary, a much more accurate headline would be:

Supercomputer Calculation Yields More Accurate Estimate of Proton's Mass[/QUOTE]

That is all any science can hope for, answers that are a little less wrong.

[QUOTE=geoff;150442]That is all any science can hope for, answers that are a little less wrong.[/QUOTE]Au contraire, if something turns up answers that are radically wrong, that is [b]very[/b] exciting, much more exciting than calculating another decimal place and finding it agrees with what you expect.

Just one example will suffice: "as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you."

Paul

So would it be too much to hope that sometime in the *next* 103 years, string theory will provide physics with at least one nontrivial, not-true-by-construction, falsifiable claim about the physical world? How many "Nth string revolutions" do all those incredibly clever folks need to actually get around to some real physics?

[QUOTE=ewmayer;150523]So would it be too much to hope that sometime in the *next* 103 years, string theory will provide physics with at least one nontrivial, not-true-by-construction, falsifiable claim about the physical world? How many "Nth string revolutions" do all those incredibly clever folks need to actually get around to some real physics?[/QUOTE]Who knows? It took Einstein the best part of a decade to come up with some testable predictions of GR. It took the best part of a century to find significantly more than the paltry three that Einstein found.

Paul