Severian

That depends. I know things have been calculated to seven loops, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0309060, but that is not SM. If you are talking practical useful SM particle physics calculations, then four is probably as much as there is, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0610206. But then, if you look at it from a different perspective, there are resummations of large logs which are effectively resumming (parts of) all the loops all the way to infinite order.

I was surprised to read Linus Torvalds's rant against C++, mainly because I completely agree with him but have been a bit shy to say so simply because of the weight of all the specialists who love to use C++. I must say, I really hate classes with a vengeance because they are the antithesis of the way I program. I need my codes to be very modular, not so other people can use them, but purely for my own sanity. Whenever I made a class in C++, I would find that I wrote the class in a way which helped solve the current problem I was working on. But then when I wanted to use the class for another problem I would find that I had to alter the class considerably since I was looking at the objects from a different angle. In fundamental physics there is no way around this since you often don't appreciate the other angle until you are in the research. As a result, I have abandoned classes, and tend to program entirely in C instead of C++. The thing I hate most about C is the way it handles arrays as pointers. I actually really like Python - it seems to force structures that are very much aligned with the way scientists think. But I tend not to use it, mainly for compatibility issues.

No. It is all very technical. I would just be in the way.

I thought you might like to know..... Subject: PRESS RELEASE : CERN announces start-up date for LHC PR06.08 - 07.08.2008 CERN announces start-up date for LHC Geneva, 7 August 2008. CERN* has today announced that the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September. This news comes as the cool down phase of commissioning CERN’s new particle accelerator reaches a successful conclusion. Television coverage of the start-up will be made available through Eurovision. The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, it relies on technologies that would not have been possible 30 years ago. The LHC is, in a sense, its own prototype. Starting up such a machine is not as simple as flipping a switch. Commissioning is a long process that starts with the cooling down of each of the machine’s eight sectors. This is followed by the electrical testing of the 1600 superconducting magnets and their individual powering to nominal operating current. These steps are followed by the powering together of all the circuits of each sector, and then of the eight independent sectors in unison in order to operate as a single machine. By the end of July, this work was approaching completion, with all eight sectors at their operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-271°C). The next phase in the process is synchronization of the LHC with the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator, which forms the last link in the LHC’s injector chain. Timing between the two machines has to be accurate to within a fraction of a nanosecond. A first synchronization test is scheduled for the weekend of 9 August, for the clockwise-circulating LHC beam, with the second to follow over the coming weeks. Tests will continue into September to ensure that the entire machine is ready to accelerate and collide beams at an energy of 5 TeV per beam, the target energy for 2008. Force majeure notwithstanding, the LHC will see its first circulating beam on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). Once stable circulating beams have been established, they will be brought into collision, and the final step will be to commission the LHC’s acceleration system to boost the energy to 5 TeV, taking particle physics research to a new frontier. ‘We’re finishing a marathon with a sprint,’ said LHC project leader Lyn Evans. ‘It’s been a long haul, and we’re all eager to get the LHC research programme underway.’ CERN will be issuing regular status updates between now and first collisions. Journalists wishing to attend CERN for the first beam on 10 September must be accredited with the CERN press office. Since capacity is limited, priority will be given to news media. The event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch, and distributed through the Eurovision network. Live stand up and playout facilities will also be available. A media centre will be established at the main CERN site, with access to the control centres for the accelerator and experiments limited and allocated on a first come first served basis. This includes camera positions at the CERN Control Centre, from where the LHC is run. Only television media will be able to access the CERN Control Centre. No underground access will be possible.

On the one hand it seems such a shame that he never became President, but on the other hand I truly wonder if it was the event of not becoming President which inspired him to stand up and be counted for what he believes in. I suspect the establishment squeezes the principles out of anyone who actually becomes President.

No, but you can remove the linear term (basically absorb it into the bilinear) by redefining your states.

i think I should have been nominated for Most Improved Member. Surely me not posting is an improvement?

It can't actually find nothing. Without the Higgs boson, the theory will break down at about 700GeV when it starts predicting probabilities larger than 1. So it has to find something. I don't think it would have been funded otherwise. For timescales, it will have lots of callibration runs first and will only start with 10TeV. I am not expecting any result on the Higgs boson until 2010. Supersymmetry (if it is there) might be a bit faster (mid 2009?).

I agree entirely. If the state would just stay out of it we wouldn't have all the problems we do have.

My name is the name of the executioner in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.

All right then. Please describe the physical manifestations (ie. the signal) of love and then explain to me why it is distinguishable from other explanations (ie. the backgrounds) like friendship and lust? Only then will you have a working scientific description. And until you do, atheists should be steering clear of unevidenced imaginary concepts.

How do you know? Have you ever been anyone else? Do you have anything to compare to?

Yes it does. Otherwise it is just a secretion of hormones. Love is supposed to transcend physicality, and is therefore spiritual. But how do you show that this is the consequence of 'love' and not the consequence of lust and/or friendship? You can't! The existence of love is an unscientific premise, and therefore must be expunged from the atheist worldview.

That has absolutely no relevance. It doesn't matter what we claim it does or does not do; it is an ill-defined, unscientific notion that cannot be proven to exist. So by the same principles that atheists claim to uphold, they should be dismissing it as fantasy. Clearly? Evidence please? And evidence of hormonal secretions is not sufficient.

You certainly shouldn't think of raised and lowered indices as being linked to frames. They are not. Instead, think of a vector as always having a raised index. So, if we write the coordinates t, x, y and z as a four-vector, we write [math]x^0=ct[/math], [math]x^1=x[/math], [math]x^2=y[/math], [math]x^3=z[/math] etc. The object with lowered indices, e.g. [math]x_{\mu}[/math] is a derived object called a co-vector, and is defined by [math]x_{\mu} = g_{\mu \nu} x^{\nu}[/math], where [math]g_{\mu \nu}[/math] is the metric tensor, [math]g_{00}=1[/math], [math]g_{11}=-1[/math], [math]g_{22}=-1[/math], [math]g_{33}=-1[/math] and all other entries zero. So [math]x_0=ct[/math], [math]x_1=-x[/math], [math]x_2=-y[/math], [math]x_3=-z[/math].

This Atheists Creed is incredibly weak, and makes no attempt to explain itself or define its terms. For example "I believe in a purely material universe that conforms to naturalistic laws and principles", but what it "purely material"? What defines a law to be "natural"? Or how about the mutual incompatibility of the phrases: "I believe in kindness, love, and the human spirit and their ability to overcome challenges and adversity and to create a better world." and "I believe in the necessity for credible and objective evidence to sustain any belief and thus deny, because of the absence of such evidence, the existence of each and every aspect of the supernatural." Surely anyone know calls themselves an atheists must reject such unprovable notions as "love".

I don't see what that has to do with his point, unless you are trying to claim that electrons are made of quarks. It is an interesting mystery why the neutron is actually neutral. Why are quark charges in units of e/3? No-one knows..

Deletion would seem more appropriate. The poster clearly has no wish to enter into reasoned debate.

I don't see why there has to be a special law. If you agree to deliver a product and then don't deliver, then you are in violation of contract, irrespective of whether or not the product is supernatural.

Unless the tensor is symmetric, that is a very bad notation. One of the indices should be displaced to the right, to give them an order (then the first index is row, the second column). If [math]\Lambda[/math] is a Lorentz Transformation, then it is orthogonal, so the transpose is actually the inverse, i.e. switching the order of the indices changes the transformation into its inverse. So the ambiguity in the order of the indices is pretty severe!

That isn't quite true. Since you are accelerating protons, but are really colliding the gluons within the proton, LHC events can often have a significant boost with respect to the lab frame. Nothing like as much as a cosmic ray of course.

I dislike this for two reasons. 1. It implies that eating factory produced meat is morally superior to eating animal meat. It is not. 2. Removing the eating of "natural" meat from our society will decimate farming and mean many currently farmed species only survive in zoos. I am all for choice, but I suspect that they are doing this to try and restrict my choice, not enhance it.

Come to think of it, LQG does seem a little bit pointless...

1 is the belief of most scientists. A few think 2 will happen. But only non-experts or crackpots think number 3 will happen. You could worry about other things too if you like. Maybe switching on the LHC will cause the orbit of the moon to become unstable and crash into the Earth. Have you ever worried about that? No - because no-one has suggested it. Well no-one credible has suggested the appearance of non-evapourating black holes either.

Let me put it this way. If you don't believe the scientists who say that the black hole would evaporate, why do you believe the scientists who say that a black hole might form in the first place? After all, they are the same people. If I tell you there is a 1 in 50 million chance that your car will explode next time you get it, would you never use it again? After all, I am a scientist so everything I say is true (and the photon is massless).