Interesting Links for 23-9-2011

[andrewducker]

• Single-sex schooling does not improve academic performance and can lead to gender stereotyping
  (tags: gender education)
• Mind-reading technology reconstructs videos from brain scans
  (tags: mri brains video TheFuture)
• Doctor Who season 7 pushed back to autumn 2012
  (tags: drwho)
• Draw a Stickman. Awesome, awesome fun.
  (tags: art games animation)
• The 29 tweets project - tell your life story in 28 tweets in February
  (tags: twitter life biography)
• Particles found to break speed of light. Anyone got more on this?
  (tags: science physics wtf einstein light)
• Computer simulation shows Solar System once had an extra planet
  (tags: astronomy)
• Disney's Dinosaur: A Christian Film Review
  (tags: Disney dinosaurs funny christianity)
• Could laser propulsion open up space?
  (tags: space lasers technology future)

Comments

[andrewducker]

Well then, we may well be buggered. I doubt it, but if we are, such is like :->

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I strongly suspect it is going to turn out to be an observational error, but if not, then very exciting times for Physics and science in general.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

I spoke with a quantum physicist about a theory I have. She said 'you have as much a chance of being right as anyone else'

which is nice.

we're both kinda hoping the Higgs Boson is not found, and Supersymetry is nonsense.
basically, string theory started to fall apart a while back and pretty much everyone involved is bloody sick of it. Or so I hear. I suppose it's inevitable when you've spent 50 years doing maths on something that is 100% made up.

[I am not a physicist, but I know many]
[also, my commentary may not be completely accurate. ahem]

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

All I know about string theory is that they'd been trying to find some actual evidence for it for years now, but hadn't been able to find anything. So as time progressed, it has been looking ropier.

It does look a bit like the search for the Higgs Boson has failed too. Which. Yes. The scientists will have to be hitting the sci-fi books to try and come up with a new theory to work on.

[andrewducker]

It's worse and better than that with String Theory. They've not, so far, come up with an experiment that would differentiate String Theory from, well, any other theory. The kinds of energies needed to get down to the level where you can spot the effects of things 20 orders of magnitude smaller than protons are so high that we just ain't doing that kind of thing in our own solar system, because we don't have a backup one.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Does that mean it's very possible that Physics will soon hit a dead-end in terms of how much further they can go?

[andrewducker]

Well, going down the way hits some limits in what's testable at the kinds of energies we have access to. But there's still lots of things to test, and the LHC has a long and useful lifespan ahead of it.

But physics isn't just about knowing what the smallest possible thing is, there's oodles of stuff we don't understand well - we still don't have anything like a complete picture of the boundaries of physics and chemistry.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Must be a bit frustrating for them. I remember when the LHC was being unveiled, they had this whole thing about several colliders being in a race to be the first to discover the Higgs Boson. Now it seems like they are in a race to be the first to conclusively prove the Higgs Boson doesn't exist.

[andrewducker]

Conclusively proving that there is no Higgs Boson would be an impressive achievement, opening up the floor to all sorts of alternatives, and revolutionising chunks of Physics. It would be very exciting.

[mair_in_grenderich]

it has been looking ropier

... that sounds like a good thing for a string theory, mm?