If CERN was doing real science (at the LHC) they would have been able to say with confidence that they were going to find (or not find) this "new" "particle" months ago and give reasons for exactly where and how they expected to find it.
What part of the fact that the Standard Model predicts this bound state at this mass did you not understand?
Do you have a hard time stomaching neutrinos too? When they were first proposed they could not be detected. Still they solved the very real problem of explaining the beta-decay spectrum.
The shots are beautiful, but it's obvious the composition was put together by punks trying to be hip.
And you know this how? I know JF Salgado personally and he is by no standards a punk. He is in fact a very professional astronomer and visualizer. It may not be your style but that in no way means he is a punk.
You do realize that even CfA people aren't experts in all fields, right? Doing Fermi-LAT is very tricky in the Galactic plane and only maybe a handful of people in the LAT team know how to do it correctly. That being said, this result isn't necessarily wrong but it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
From the article itself:
Their kit consists of a few dozen beryllium ions trapped in magnetic and electric fields using a device called a Penning trap. These ions vibrate at between a few mega and kilohertz, frequencies that can be accurately measured by bouncing laser light off the ions and measuring any Doppler shift they cause.
Me thinks you forgot to read the part about bouncing photons off the ions. The ions will be moving relative to the photons due to the vibrations.
No, the neutralino does not interact through the weak interaction.
They really do. To quote the Berkeley CDMS website linked from the Ars article about possible (but very speculative) dark matter detection, who are trying to detect WIMPS and in specific neutralinos:
Specifically, a cross section for interaction between a neutralino and a nucleon in ordinary matter of the order of the electro-weak scale would be consistent with a meaningful cosmological role for the particle. This expectation of a weak interaction together with the expected mass range of the neutralino, 10 to 1000 GeV, produce the acronym "WIMP": Weakly Interacting Massive Particle.
So that and other usages of "weak interaction" lead me to believe neutralinos interact via the weak interaction.
I would expect there to be differences in the experiment, but the overview seems very similar: Put an extremely sensitive detector as far down in the earth as you can to shield yourself from as many normal cosmic rays and particles as possible, and wait for years to see enough events to say you've got a decent probability of having actually seen something real.
Weakly interacting does not mean that it interacts via the weak interaction. That is why direct detection experiments look for elastic interactions between a dark matter particle and a nucleus in the experiment. This is why you have to minimize the background as much as possible.
This student is a concentrator, a la Feinman.
Feinman? Surely you're joking, Mr Feynamn! Sorry just couldn't resist picking a nit.
"In fact, for most engineering jobs a master's degree is required."
I think that's the OP's point. Is the degree merely required to have the job, or are the things you could only know if you have a masters in Engineering actually the skills required for the tasks performed on the job?
What I replied to was the statement that "Masters and Doctorate programs have nothing to do with the real world of non-academic jobs", which in my world is just plain wrong.
And the reality is that you don't get to use what you learned in college in entry level jobs anyway
A lot of the work done in high energy physics is done by graduate students and post-docs, so yes, entry-level jobs require you do use what you learned in college and they are exciting.
building an OS from scratch, international monetary policies, building a skyscraper. But then you end up fixing typos on web pages, fetching coffee, updating Sarbanes-Oxley paperwork, etc.
For the rest of them you have point, but only a small one.
You know, Masters and Doctorate programs have nothing to do with the "real world" of non-academic jobs. There IS a lot that you don't learn in college, but you are expected to learn it on the job.
This may be true in the U.S. but its not true everywhere else. In many European countries, like my own home Sweden, a master's degree in engineering is not at all uncommon. In fact, for most engineering jobs a master's degree is required.
That doesn't mean it prepares you for the job.
You know, the original post stated that Masters and Doctorate programs have nothing to do with the "real world" of non-academic jobs, which in my world is plain wrong.
Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. -- Mt.
