I agree that it might be easier, quicker and cheaper with a drone. However I don't really care. As a passenger I'm far more interested in whether it is just as effective as spotting problems as the human eyeballs it replaces. On the plus side images can be zoomed and you might see more detail than a human eye. On the downside the image is probably not going to be 3D and it sounds like the person taking the pictures with the drone will not be the engineer who inspects them.

In that case if you are still around then clearly the beeping did not wake you up so perhaps the sound of the exploding battery might. See, it's really just an extra safety measure.

The problem with this, and to some extent student loans in general, is that now you are selecting university students based on wealth and not merit. If you don't have enough collateral to secure the loan - or your parents are not willing to take the risk - then you do not get to go to university no matter how intelligent you are. Society then not only potentially loses out on the next Einstein but also it also becomes less fair leading to all sorts of problems with social unrest.

There is also another issue which the UK is now facing having introduced massive tuition hikes and an increase in loans. Some essential jobs which require a university degree, like teaching, are suddenly experiencing a huge shortfall in new graduates. The reason is that a teachers salary takes decades to repay a large loan while someone going into finance can repay it in a matter of years.

This is why university education should be funded by taxes and the funded positions awarded to the best and brightest. Those who earn more will pay more for their degree through taxes while those whose earn less will pay less. The alternative is that society will need to start paying e.g. teachers a whole lot more money in order to attract sufficient numbers and to do that it will have to raise taxes so ultimately everyone will be paying anyway but in the meantime the affected professions will be in severe trouble.

Not entirely correct. If he is the architect behind the subprime mortgages then he did not directly con an old lady out of her savings but his actions indirectly wiped half the value off those savings. He deliberately designed an extremely risky investment vehicle to look to the banks like a low risk, high return investment and they did not spot the trick. It might have been entirely legal but it bears all the hall marks of a con and in such a case, while the mark takes some blame for letting their greed overcome their common sense, the person who devised the con takes most of the blame.

The problem is not starting to affect physics. The reluctance to let go of Supersymmetry is nothing new and in any case I would argue it as extremely premature given the currently available data.

Take a look over a century ago at the Michelson-Morley experiment. While we regard it as the killing blow to the aether theory of light at the time the first explanations it engendered were suggestions of 'frame dragging' where somehow the Earth was dragging the aether along with it. This was hard to reconcile with astronomical observations but, as always, the first instinct of many is to adapt the existing theory to see whether it can account for the new data. What shifted the field after Michelson-Morley was Einstein coming up with a far, far better theory to explain the data than any aether based model.

Another example is the superweak theory which was invented to explain CP violation in kaon decays. As experiments put ever tighter limits on it theorists dialed down the strength making it weaker. What killed it was the Standard Model providing a better explanation via a complex phase in the CKM quark mixing matrix.

Reluctance to let go of the best theory you have is nothing new. As these theories become more and more constrained fewer people think them likely and start to look for better ones. When someone finds that better explanation and it is confirmed by experiment then the old theory is abandoned. Since Supersymmetry was invented to explain the huge difference between the planck scale (where gravity is important) and the mass of the higgs. Until there is a better explanation for this it is unlikely there will be a consensus to drop SUSY as a candidate theory.

Sorry but that is completely wrong. It has lots of explanatory power. For example it explains how the electron can have a mass without breaking essential symmetries of physics (via the Higgs mechanism), it explains how the EM and weak forces are two aspects of the same thing, it explains the existence of the different types of mesons and baryons which was such a mystery before the SM that one Nobel prize winner suggested that there should be a fine for discovering anymore particles before we explained those we had found! etc. (and there is a lot more!)

The problem is that we no longer talk about what the Standard Model did explain because we now know the answer so it is not so interesting anymore and we focus on the things which it does not explain. This is the nature of human inquisitiveness. Indeed the Standard Model is an astounding success. It took Particle Physics out of the 'particle zoo' era of stamp collecting and moved it to the forefront of fundamental physics research. It's certainly true that it contains some major holes and because of that nobody thought it would stand up this long to experiment. However it has survived over 40 years and is still the best model we have although some extensions, such as neutrino masses, have been needed.

As for making observations you clearly fail to grasp how science works. The way you find something beyond the SM is that you make a measurement of some process where new physics predicts X and the Standard Model predicts Y and you see which your measurement agrees with. The fact that for 40+ years every time we come up with a new measurement we get Y and never X is because that's the way the universe works. If you are unhappy with it then don't blame the physicists - it's not like we got a say in how the universe was put together!

Actually that depends. As you remove the electrons the charge will build up which means that you have an increasing electric field. Providing that you kick out the electrons with sufficient energy to escape the field the field will continue increasing and will reach the point where it will breakdown even in vacuum.

For a high enough field strength virtual electron-positron pairs will gain sufficient energy as they are pulled apart to become real. The electron will be attracted back to the craft to neutralize some of the positive charge there and the positron will be repelled out into space creating even more thrust. The result is that after achieving a critical charge the charge will stop increasing.

However you will need a huge charge build up to get this far and you would probably need high energy gamma rays to give the electrons sufficient energy to escape the intense electric field required (otherwise they will not leave the material). Since you are, at this point, essentially converting energy into mass and flinging it out the back of the craft I also expect that your net thrust would be no different than just reflecting the incident photons.

...which was precisely why shining a laser onto an object and seeing very obvious thrust was a surprise.

Actually you will typically only get two out of those three. Saying that there should never have been any tax spent on this is really not understanding what these entrepreneurs are doing. The reason that any of these startups are even possible is because of the huge amount of work which has been done on fusion in the past by governments. If none of that money have been spent there would be no fusion start ups because we would not have enough knowledge about fusing plasma to make any sort of even vaguely viable bid for investment funding. In addition some of the startups are actually get tax money to help them startup.

Rather than denigrate the government paid research that got us here you should be looking at a research system which is doing exactly what it should be and working extremely well as a whole. The, yes often ponderous, ship of state takes science on the long, risky and costly journey across a vast ocean of knowledge which does not appear to be very relevant to improving our quality of life until it gets within sight of something extremely useful. Then the entrepreneurs take over and rapidly construct a fleet of many different craft to get to the new shore which is now in sight. Most will sink without trace on the way to that shore but those that arrive rapidly explore and open up new territory for us all to benefit from.

So what we have here is a great example of the system working as it should. It's not a case of tortoise vs. hare and more a case of the tortoise carrying the hare until it is close enough to the finish that it can sprint across the line and win the race faster than either one could by themselves. Government research is slow and it is expensive but that is because they take on the big, slow and expensive research which private enterprise lacks the stamina to do. A successful team plays to each member's strengths and that's exactly what appears to be happening here. So don't complain - all those tax dollars you probably previously complained were wasted on fundamental research may well be about to be paid back ...and with a lot of interest if any one of these companies are successful.

Really? It has already happened once with something called the November Revolution. This was the discovery of the charm quark which completely revolutionized our understanding of what baryons and mesons were and ushered in the quark model.

Prior to that there was the prediction of anti-matter by Dirac followed by its discovery a few years later which showed that we could unite quantum mechanics and Special Relativity. Prior to that there was Rutherford's discovery of the atom which completely changed our understanding of the nature of matter and all the early work with particles which lead to quantum mechanics. In fact if you look back at the last century or so of physics many of the major paradigm shifts in the field have come from particle physics or its clear precursor.

If you think that getting a PhD merely requires you to accept certain beliefs then you have a very poor understanding about how science works. Good PhD students will challenge the beliefs of those examining them and defend their work using the data and analysis they have in their thesis.

As for damaging careers coming up with some radical new idea will greatly enhance anyone's career...provided that they put in the ground work to do the studies needed to convince others of its worth. Big experiments are an issue because the amount of ground work to get one of these funded is huge and this limits the scope of ideas to ones which are clearly going to work.

Lastly though as for thinking of the Standard Model as the truth absolutely nothing could be more wrong. In fact we usually start by pointing out one of its most obvious flaws: there is no gravity in it! Indeed we particle physicists spend all our time trying to break it by looking for physics beyond what it allows for. Whoever finds physics beyond the Standard Model is likely to end up with a Nobel Prize so I'm not sure why you would think we would not he extremely motivated to break it and why this would not be really good for anyone's career.

It depends on what you compare it to. Since this process was hitting the graphite with photons it makes sense to compare the thrust produced to that created purely by bouncing photons off a material. Electrons might be light but they have more mass than a photon and so the thrust should be significantly higher.

That may be correct but the article you linked has an incredibly misleading title. This process does not convert photons into electrons it simply imparts the photon's energy to one or more electrons which, in the case of thrust, causes them to be ejected from the graphite. The coupling of electrons to photons is extremely well understood, in fact it is the second most accurately tested scientific theory ever discovered (the first being special relativity). The only way to create electrons from photons is to also create an equal number of positrons. However this requires far higher energy processes ~1 MeV of energy which is many orders of magnitude higher than the energies involved in visible light and would easily break apart graphite which is something they ruled out.

They could easily come from all the material which is surrounding the graphite. As the charge builds up on the graphite due to all the electrons being expelled it will develop an increasingly strong electric field eventually will pull electrons from the walls of the chamber. Since the vacuum will also not be perfect the remaining gas molecules could also transfer charge by moving back and forth between the graphite and the chamber walls.

A similar effect exists in the LHC where the electrons are 'helped' to leave the walls by synchrotron radiation hitting the walls of the beam pipe and are then dragged along by the electric field of a bunch of protons forming a electron cloud. This effect is one of the primary limiting factors on the number of protons we can have in an LHC beam.

Actually this could provide more thrust. Use sunlight to propel the craft until it has built up a large enough electric charge that the efficiency of the thrust begins to drop (since it will take an increasing amount of energy to expel the electrons from something with a large positive charge) and then introduce a stream of neutral gas into the sponge. This should strip the electrons off the gas and the remaining positively charge ions will then be repelled by the positive graphite and provide even more thrust.

Of course this means that you need to have a fuel source but it's likely to be far more efficient than current rocket fuel plus there it no need for it to be something explosive like hydrogen - you could probably use Xenon which is a noble gas and so extremely inert and so a lot safer.

The one advantage we have with Netflix over broadcast stations is that it is on demand and, like websites, it is conceivable that if the ads become obnoxious it will motivate someone to provide a plugin to Ad Blocker to deal with them like there is for YouTube.