I wish physicists would stop using the word "measurement" when talking about quantum mechanics....We don't get to keep the original particle after we're done.
Actually that is not true if you go to high enough energy: have a look at this. Those four tracks coming out of the centre of the ATLAS detector at the LHC are muons, a heavy cousin of the electron. The muons are neither stopped nor destroyed by the detector but they do lose a little of their energy as they pass through it but for high energy particles this really is a very small, non-instrusive fraction of their energy. We can even use the curvature of the track in ATLAS' magnetic fields to measure the momentum of the particle.
Even if you stay at low energies there are biophysicists who can use lasers to pull apart single DNA and other organic molecules in non-destructive ways to study how they fold which involves quantum transitions between different folding states. So there are plenty of non-destructive QM based measurements which we can do both on fundamental, and non-fundamental particles.
If your objection is that we have 'changed' the system by making the measurement then perhaps it is worth reflecting that, at a fundamental level, everything is quantum mechanical. Hence there is no measurement that you can make which will not involve changing the system you are measuring. So if your criterion is that your measurement must not change the system you have just ruled out any measurement which any scientist has ever made.
every dual slit experiment shows light behaving as both particle and wave, because every photon only interferes with itself. Two or more photons never interfere with each other.
If you want to see two photons interfering in a double slit experiment you don't have to do anything more complex that direct a laser pointer at a narrow slit. This is generally what happens in almost all double slit experiments ever performed by school kids and undergrads to demonstrate diffraction. You are talking about a special version of it to show that photons self-interfere but this does not exclude them interfering with other photons if there are some present.
Anyway I didn't mean to pile on, it's not that bad an article or anything. It's just kind of general and without citations
I completely agree - these sort of articles are presenting science which we have known for a long time already, so it is hardly "news", and they don't present it well. I usually put it down to the submitter not knowing the science and so it is new to them and the editors not knowing any better either. However I could not resist pointing out the irony of your post...sorry!
Why does the concept of another category, dwarfs, enrage people?
I don't think it does but for the definition to work it will have to have some sort of sensible criteria to separate them from asteroids. However clearly the notion that Pluto is not a planet really upsets a lot of people which is something I find hard to understand. Does it really matter that much how we classify it? Indeed it seems such a silly, unimportant thing to be arguing over again when there is real science to be done that it makes me wonder if the astronomers involved have lost their grant funding and so have nothing better to do with their research time.
No, they won't. They will believe based on observations and known history.
Actually if we program that information into their memory before turning them on then they will actually know who created them. That's one difference with computers - they can be easily programmed.
not everyone has the money to pay the teachers. Nor are there enough people educated to be teachers.
True enough but in that case how are they going to have the money to buy computers and have people educated enough to be able to support them and keep them running? Not to mention the electrical power to run them let alone a network connection. It seems to me that if they have what they need to purchase and keep running all these computers they probably have what they need to teach basic literacy and arithmetic without computers.
I look at the sky every night, knowing the light is hundreds of years old. Half of the stars might have gone supernova already.
The life cycle of even the largest stars is still in the 10-100 million year range. The chance that one of them has exploded in the last few hundred years is tiny. Galaxy-wide we expect one supernova roughly every century so, unless you get really lucky, practically every star you can see with the naked eye has an extremely good chance of still being there...even Betelgeuse which they estimate has a 100k year lifespan remaining and is only 600 light years away. Of course if you had RTFA you would have known most of this...hope you appreciate the irony!
I don't go fast enough to need to change clothes when I arrive
It's usually cold enough and dry enough that I don't need to change clothes when I cycle in to work. On the downside though you really cannot cycle in the winter - the river valley park I cycle through has ~0.5m of snow which they don't plough and the temperatures can hit -40C which is a bit nippy for cycling (although so do do it!).
On the plus side the summer is warm (20-25C) and low humidity usually which is ideal cycling weather and there is far less rain than a British summer - even those in East Anglia. Not sure about the "free" part though - bikes take money to buy and upkeep. One of the strange things I've notices switching from a wet UK climate to a dry central Albertan one is that chains wear out quickly. I cycled for 6-7 years as an undergrad/grad student without needing to replace a chain but here I had to replace it after less than 3 years.
He argues about climate denial, and resorts to insults attempting to make the point. Antagonizing people is probably the worst method of teaching them.
Yes but he is at least honest about that: he is one of America's foremost science educators and he grades America's science education as an 'F' so exactly how good a teacher did you think he was going to be?
An astronomer might know a little about the optics inside his/her telescope, but the level of understanding that a physicist would have is simply not in scope.
Actually I would expect an astronomer to have a level of understanding of the optics in their telescope comparable to that of a physicist's understanding of their own experimental apparatus. If you don't understand the apparatus you use to collect the data then that data is useless because you won't know whether some interesting feature of the data is due to some new phenomena never before observed or because you forgot to plug in your GPS cable properly.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." -- Edsel Murphy
