Mathematics, especially in this context, is just a language for expressing ideas. So I think that in some sense it is possible that some particular string theory really does describe what's going on. I don't know if it's very likely, but the idea of a "final theory" is that it is, in some sense, a complete and accurate description of our universe's mechanics. (The holographic principle is nice because it states that two seemingly very different theories can actually be equivalent.)

I think there are two main caveats here. One is that you never really know when you're "done", and have a theory that is indeed final. We know now that we are not done today because of inconsistencies, but science also does not have even the capability of perfect validation. The other is that a microscopic, reductionist description of physics is not useful or even the correct language for describing more macroscopic effects since basically "more is different." Chemists don't use quantum field theory because it's just not helpful.

And while it's great (even important) to consider philosophical ramifications of theoretical work like this, we have to remember that it's all still conjecture and it will probably always be conjecture. The philosophical spin-offs, so to speak, should never be taken as a way of either supporting or condemning the theory.

I think I'm basically summarizing some of what Wienberg describes in his book Dreams of a Final Theory (1993). That seems old but I highly recommend it!

That depends on what you mean by "tangible benefits." One argument I've heard for practical, what's-in-it-for-me-today benefits is that the technology produces spin-offs such as techniques to mass-produce rare-earth magnets, the world-wide web, etc. But that's honestly a weak argument because there's a lot of research going on that has similar chances to produce spin-off tech.

For particle physics, the feeling is that we are on the verge of some kind of revolution! Admittedly it's been that way for a few decades now, but the current working theory (the standard model) has a number of deep problems (thanks wikipedia!). Most new theories, and there are a whole lot of them, predict new phenomena just at the edge of our experimental reach. Part of that is because well-meaning theorists prefer to propose theories that are either presently or soon-to-be testable. But part of it is because the experimental frontier has advanced to energies at roughly the electroweak unification point and lots of theories have interesting behavior to predict at this point, broadly speaking.

So it's not just a more-is-better kind of effort that won't stop until we build solar-system-sized accelerators. There really is a sense that a major shift, possibly even a philosophically-challenging development, is nearly within our grasp, within our lifetimes. This is not a "practical" argument for basic science, but only history can tell us what has had short and long-term practical benefits. History does tell us that this sort of pursuit has in the past been enormously beneficial. Maybe we are in a whole new era where new physics will be completely impractical, but that would honestly be surprising if true.

You hit numerical problems if you calculate it that way. Wikipedia gives a series expansion that works well for large values of gamma:

v (in units of c) = 1 - 1/2 \gamma^(-2)

v = c (1 - 1.8e-10), or 0.99999999982 c

I don't think in these cases you have multiple labs bidding for the job. You have multiple countries wanting to host the lab, but that's a different story.

The biggest problem for high energy physics is establishing multi-year funding. The US government cannot promise anything beyond a single year of funding. If say $8 B has been spent over 10 years and one year congress says "but I promised to cut spending", then that's the end of the road for that lab. This happened for the SSC in 1993, but also a lot of times since then on lower-profile, some $500 M experiments that were, yes, in construction already.

Most of the cases I'm familiar with, including the SSC, were not actually budget overruns even though they were politicized that way. If you're a politician who wants to (a) publicly demonstrate how fiscally conservative you are and (b) not actually cut spending on items that might affect the bulk of your constituency, then you cut big science every time. Even if the budget grows on the whole, you've made a statement and some headlines.

I also wanted to mention the failed SSC in Texas, cancelled in 1993. That would have been running at double the LHC's energy about a decade earlier. In 1993 congress seats were won by senators promising budget cuts, and Big Science had a large target painted on its back. Killing the SSC was a big-profile way of appearing to reduce spending while at the same time not damaging something that many people understood or cared about.

Since that time, the US has proved time and time again that they are incapable of sustaining funding for a long-term science project. All of the high-energy accelerators in the US are operationally shut down, and almost no proposals in the past 20 years or so have survived all the way to producing results before getting scrapped by some budget shortfall in a particular fiscal year. The LHC survives because the US is not such a major (or critical) contributor.

Well, many of these tunnels, including the one the LHC uses, have been refurbished multiple times already. Cern's main ring was built to be somewhat future-proof, but that was a long time ago. A google search came up with The history of CERN, which dates the groundbreaking to 1954.

In accelerators you have two basic designs: linear and circular(ish). In linear accelerators each boosting element (RF cavity or whatnot) gets one chance to give the beam particles a kick, so the energy is limited to how hard you kick (limited by technology) and how many elements / how long (limited by budget).

In circular accelerators you are limited by synchrotron radiation. At some point the energy pumped into the beam matches the energy lost via synchrotron radiation. To move in a circle you have to accelerate inwardly, and an accelerating charged particle radiates light. At particle accelerator energies, this radiation is in the x-ray spectrum. You can reduce the loss by using a larger ring -- a smaller curvature requires less centripetal acceleration and hence less radiation loss. You can also of course build stronger boosting elements, but the radiation also heats the beamline and surrounding superconducting magnets, so it's not "that simple."

The other thing to vary is the kind of particle accelerated. Electrons have a very small mass and lose a larger fraction of their momentum to synchrotron radiation. SLAC and KEK are linear accelerators that use electrons. (Cornell's CESR is a ring that accelerates electrons too, but at lower energies compared to these others.) Protons are the other obvious choice, which is what Fermilab and CERN's LHC (after the upgrade) are accelerating. Being much more massive, the protons slough off less of their momentum to synchrotron radiation and can be accelerated to higher energies given the same size ring. The disadvantage of protons is that the energy of the proton is shared among its three quarks (and gluons I think) whereas the electron is truly singular as far as can be told.

I've been out of touch lately but as of at least 8 years ago three proposals were being discussed: VLHC -- big ring accelerating protons. Next Linear Collider (NLC) -- long linear accelerator for electrons. Muon collider -- a smaller ring (actually with straight sections like a track&field track) that produces and accelerates muons. Muons are just like electrons only 200 times more massive and is unstable with a half-life of 2 microseconds. The muon collider was thought to be an ideal Higgs factory, but with a lot of design challenges. One of the main challenges is to not only accelerate the muons before they decay, but also collimate, or "cool", the beam very fast as well so that you can create as many head-on collisions as possible.

So the news that the VLHC design is currently in favor is interesting, but this is hardly the first time the issue has been discussed and I doubt it will be the last. Several years ago the NLC design seemed most favorable, but this would, by its length, be limited to a specific design energy and probably be built to produce Higgs, Higgs, and more Higgs. It seems to me like a VLHC would have more discovery potential for more massive Higgs particles, signs of supersymmetry, or whatever else might exist.

I hear there's petrol in Krokodil. That's pretty addictive and dangerous.

Are you referring to nicotine and alcohol? I don't believe these are either the most addictive or the most dangerous on an individual usage basis. You may be right if you count aggregate effect (total number of people addicted to smoking or drinking) but this makes a good argument against legalization.

It's hard to use absolute arguments on this kind of subject. Take your argument to one extreme and you get something like "The problem isn't having easily-available nuclear bombs, the problem is those people who would use them." This statement goes too far at least in one way, that while drugs use causes some collateral damage so to speak, not nearly as much as nukes.

Another problem with legalized (free market) drugs is that many are physically addictive, so users are quickly unable to make free choices regarding their use. Marijuana is less addictive than most, which allows room for debate on legalization. (I voted "yes" on legalization in CO, though I'm willing to admit that may have been a mistake. I'm not sure yet but it makes an interesting experiment in any case.)

I felt like some of DPR's arguments supporting his website were delusional. Particularly this: "Let us assume you have a son who is in his teenage years and you knew they were going to do drugs, what as a parent, would you do? Would you let them go to their friends’ friends’ dealer or would you help them buy from Silk Road ..." As a parent I would not even consider either option for an instant. As soon as I become aware of my teenage (or younger or older) child's drug use, I have a very difficult responsibility and it's not as an enabler or bystander.

You also are bringing up a good point that an accurate review of any complex software requires an unreasonably large time commitment. What's the learning curve like? (This beats "intuitiveness".) How often are updates buggy or force re-learning on users? (Beats bugs-I-just-found reports.) How helpful is the community when it comes to resolving problems? What has the history of security flaws been like? How would you estimate the software's long-term viability and adoption by others? Does an experienced user find common tasks to be easy and fast, while unusual tasks are not too difficult? (Beats feature-list comparisons).

To review a movie you need (1) a decent understanding of ... I don't know maybe "filmography". Then you need to (2) watch the movie. After a couple hours you can write about it. None of the important questions about software can be answered after a couple hours' exposure. Combine this with the sheer quantity of software out there and you can see how software reviews aren't as prolific or celebrated as one might hope.

This claim (regulatory capture) would be possible to argue against if only internet access in the US were cheaper or as cheap as it is in other countries without subsidies. We know that's not true, therefore we have a market (and government) failure. Case closed.

FTA: "Vehicle tests confirmed that one particular dead task would result in loss of throttle control, and that the driver might have to fully remove their foot from the brake during an unintended acceleration event before being able to end the unwanted acceleration."

I was reading through comments hoping to find some general opinion of whether or not Barr's findings could have applied to practically any software stack. You usually don't have to work very hard when reading through code before you spot a bug or two. But in my experience most of these bugs are never (or rarely) exposed because they lie in corner cases. But in the case of Toyota's electronic throttle control system, you'd have higher expectations.

It sure sounds like Barr's group indeed found code of "unreasonable quality." I'm just not sure how to put that into proper context. One can always spend more time and money on code analysis and robustness improvements. Did Toyota really fall short of reasonable expectations? It sounds to me like they did, but I'm only hearing one side of the argument.

What I can't yet understand is how this experiment helps validate the theory of time as an emergent quantum phenomenon. It seems more like a demonstration than an experiment to me. What alternative theory is their experiment excluding?

I'm a physicist but that doesn't mean I understand any of this QM stuff. I have a feeling this is a little like experimentally demonstrating Bell's inequality -- one can do experiments whose results are consistent with predictions of QM, and in ways that one might expect other general classes of theories to differ even though you don't have a specific alternative theory to exclude. Most experiments are like this really. But in the case of this time-entanglement experiment I really don't see room for alternative predictions. I think the paper's title acknowledges this: "Time from quantum entanglement: an experimental illustration" (my emphasis).

I'm not saying that the experiment is in any way unhelpful or bad. It's a great idea, but I would not go so far as to say that this is "experimental evidence."

You're running Kubuntu 13.10? How is it so far?

I've long enjoyed KDE and pyqt programming. It's nice to see the underlying library move forward so successfully. I've found that, at least with pyqt, the QT libraries are rather large to ship around. I hope this doesn't increase the size of wireshark too much. It's nice to be able to easily install and run it on platforms like raspbian.