Official "Science News" Thread

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

Helioseismology sounds like a somewhat interesting area of study. At least, I think I'd like it more than tephrochronology. (Also, I'd never heard that particular Greek word before, tephros. Who knew there was a scientific field of study devoted to it? Er, I guess besides you two and those who do it of course )

Surely you've heard the word "tephra", volcano ejecta? Interesting mix here, btw - tephra is from Greek word for "ash", magma is from Greek word for "to knead", but "lava" is from Latin "to wash". Uh, I prefer my washing a little cooler and more water-based, thank you very much.

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Surely you've heard the word "tephra", volcano ejecta?

Nope! Not all that knowledgeable about volcanoes, really.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

Helioseismology sounds like a somewhat interesting area of study. At least, I think I'd like it more than tephrochronology. [snip]

It's certainly a hotter subject. Of course, you don't have to go to the sun to study it. But then, you don't have to go to an erupting volcano to study its ejecta, either.

The shaking and quaking of Mr. Sun is, I have heard, a mechanism for transferring energy from the interior to the surface by sound, more or less -- at a rate much faster than the .5MeV gamma-ray photons produced in the core can pinball their way through, and their avatars emerge, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of years later, at much lower energies -- luckily for us!

[ewmayer]

It would appear that Peter Woit has competition (or company) in the not-even-wrong physics blogging arena:

The Multiworse Is Coming | BackReaction

You haven’t seen headlines recently about the Large Hadron Collider, have you? That’s because even the most skilled science writers can’t find much to write about.

There are loads of data for sure, and nuclear physicists are giddy with joy because the LHC has delivered a wealth of new information about the structure of protons and heavy ions. But the good old proton has never been the media’s darling. And the fancy new things that many particle physicists expected – the supersymmetric particles, dark matter, extra dimensions, black holes, and so on – have shunned CERN.

It’s a PR disaster that particle physics won’t be able to shake off easily. Before the LHC’s launch in 2008, many theorists expressed themselves confident the collider would produce new particles besides the Higgs boson. That hasn’t happened. And the public isn’t remotely as dumb as many academics wish. They’ll remember next time we come ask for money.
...
What the particle physicists got wrong was an argument based on a mathematical criterion called “naturalness”. If the laws of nature were “natural” according to this definition, then the LHC should have seen something besides the Higgs. The data analysis isn’t yet completed, but at this point it seems unlikely something more than statistical anomalies will show up.
...
I explained many times previously why the conclusions based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely pleas for the laws of nature to be pretty. Luckily I no longer have to repeat these warnings, because the data agree that naturalness isn’t a good argument.

The LHC hasn’t seen anything new besides the Higgs. This means the laws of nature aren’t “natural” in the way that particle physicists would have wanted them to be. The consequence is not only that there are no new particles at the LHC. The consequence is also that we have no reason to think there will be new particles at the next higher energies – not until you go up a full 15 orders of magnitude, far beyond what even futuristic technologies may reach.

So what now? What if there are no more new particles? What if we’ve caught them all and that’s it, game over? What will happen to particle physics or, more to the point, to particle physicists?

In an essay some months ago, Adam Falkowski expressed it this way:

“[P]article physics is currently experiencing the most serious crisis in its storied history. The feeling in the field is at best one of confusion and at worst depression”

Personally I'm of the opinion that irrespective of the allegedly-supporting theoretical considerations, funding should banned for any search for hypothetical particles with inane, unimaginative, derivative names like gluinos, squarks, Higgsinos and sleptons - but like the faux-physics being done by the "naturalness" folks, that's just my personal aesthetic bias.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

It would appear that Peter Woit has competition (or company) in the not-even-wrong physics blogging arena: The Multiworse Is Coming | BackReaction

The Wikipedia page on Naturalness (physics) says,

In physics, naturalness is the property that the dimensionless ratios between free parameters or physical constants appearing in a physical theory should take values "of order 1" and that free parameters are not fine-tuned. That is, a natural theory would have parameter ratios with values like 2.34 rather than 234000 or 0.000234.

Hmm. Doesn't seem like a very natural requirement to me.

The above sentiments about particle physics brought to mind a vague memory about a quotation to the effect "physics is over" from around 1900. Looking it up, I found that Lord Kelvin had been unjustly saddled with it: Which 19th century physicist famously said that all that remained to be done in physics was compute effects to another decimal place?

The actual source of the sentiment attributed to Kelvin appears to be a speech given by Albert Michelson in 1894, at the dedication of the University of Chicago's Ryerson Physical Laboratory:

This might seem surprising coming from one of the scientists responsible for the Michelson-Morley experiment, which Kelvin considered one of the two great clouds hovering over the physics of the 19th century and which was satisfactorily explained only by Einstein's revolutionary work on relativity. But I think that, in the context, it's clear that what Michelson was actually doing was advocating for investing more resources on carrying out high-precision measurements. In the passage quoted, he seems to confuse the need for greater numerical precision in experiments (about which he was absolutely correct) with the settledness of the "grand underlying principles". Michelson was, after all, an experimentalist rather than a theorist.

[LaurV]

Haha, nice, this is brilliant:

You see what is happening here. Conjecturing a multiverse of any type (string landscape or eternal inflation or what have you) is useless. It doesn’t explain anything and you can’t calculate anything with it. But once you add a probability distribution on that multiverse, you can make calculations. Those calculations are math you can publish. And those publications you can later refer to in proposals read by people who can’t decipher the math. Mission accomplished.

[rogue]

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[heliosh]

"Xilinx, Inc. [...] today announced a new breakthrough product category called adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP) that goes far beyond the capabilities of an FPGA."
https://www.xilinx.com/news/press/20...-category.html

[Till]

Originally Posted by heliosh

"Xilinx, Inc. [...] today announced a new breakthrough product category called adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP) that goes far beyond the capabilities of an FPGA."
https://www.xilinx.com/news/press/20...-category.html

Sounds interesting, but is there any information on why that "revolution" should be so much faster than their last FPGA line? I didn't spot anything in the referenced page. Maybe someone knows?

[heliosh]

Here's a bit more information about the architecture:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12509...pga-soc-hybrid

[Till]

Thanks.