The guys who proposed the wacky theory did in fact suggest a test, and quite an interesting one. The critic who wrote TFA apparently missed it when he "skimmed" the papers he publicly ridiculed.

The idea is to conduct some random event, say 1,000 coin tosses, and pre-commit to cancel the LHC if we observe a ridiculous outcome, like 1,000 heads in a row.

You pay a lot for the first byte. Every subsequent byte is the free commons.

How many times must we repeat this lesson? EVERYTHING that is free gets overused, or pissed on. Even air. EVEN AIR. There are no exceptions. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Don't make me say this again.

Privacy is doomed. The march of technology can be slowed, but not stopped. Eventually this will give us a world without theft. The trick is keep it from also giving us a world without fun. That means getting rid of most of our laws, not just nibbling around the edges trying to make it hard to enforce them.

No, I don't know how to achieve that goal, short of re-wiring some brains.

So solar output was correlated with sunspots. Now it is also correlated with a subsurface current. A step forward, but it is a bit premature to use the word "explain."

On a different not, how depressing that I have been pushed into resenting several forms of science. When I saw the headline, my first thought was, "Crap. More data to cherry pick to justify central control over individuals." And I say this as someone who has actually published in peer reviewed journals. Gloom.

Parent post is insightful. If a model is flexible enough, it can fit any data.

The main criticism of string theory is that it is too flexible. It can be contorted to generate any prediction, so it predicts nothing. This problem is not unique to physics; I saw it in economics too. Add more parameters to your model and you can fit historical data better, but your predictions of the future get worse. TFA seems to be just a string of examples of contorting string theory to fit past experimental results.

What he said. In a world of villains and idiots, mischaracterizing constitutional liberties is not harmless.

I'm pleased that at least one person got it.

I compute only one chance in 100,000 that failing to activate the LHC will result in ignorance that eventually causes us to fail to prevent destruction of the earth.

Of course, my model could be wrong.

I thought the essence of the 2-slit experiment was that you can detect quantum indeterminacy without measuring the quantum state, and hence without collapsing the waveform, by observing whether the various possible quantum states are interfering with each other. In the case of 2 slits, if you get fringes you have indeterminacy (particles are going through both slits) and if you get spots then the wavefunctions are collapsed (the particles have been forced to choose a slit). I assume there is an analogous test to see whether particles have been forced to choose their polarization. This seems to be all you need for instant transfer of the message "I have measured the polarization".

This confuses me further. Are you saying there is no way to determine whether particles are interfering with themselves, or others, due to quantum indeterminacy?

As I understand, the essence of teleportation is that collapsing the wavefunction of the first particle (by measuring it) instantly collapses the wavefunction of the second particle. What I don't understand is why this does not represent transmission of the information that the first particle has been measured. Is it not possible to test whether the second particle's wavefunction has been collapsed by, say, sending it through slits?