I wouldn't say that we have no experimental data which contradicts them. Rather, we do have experimental data which contradicts them, but no experimental data that points us in the direction of a solution (and whenever we go looking for the latter, we fail).
Consider e.g. neutrino masses. We have plenty of experimental data indicating that neutrinos oscillate and therefore have mass. This poses a problem for the standard model (because there are problems unless the mass comes from the Higgs mechanism, but in the standard model neutrinos can't participate in the Higgs mechanism due to always being left-handed). But whenever we do experiments to attempt to verify one of the ways of fixing this problem -- are there separate right-handed neutrinos we didn't know about, or maybe instead the right-handed neutrinos were just antineutrinos all along? -- we turn up nothing.
> the standard model neutrinos can't participate in the Higgs mechanism due to always being left-handed
This again? It's only true if you insist on sticking with the original form of Weinberg's "model of leptons" from 1967 [1], which was written when massless neutrinos were consistent with available experimental data. Adding quark-style (i.e. Dirac) neutrino mass terms to the Standard Model is a trivial exercise. If doing so offends some prejudice of yours that right-handed neutrino can not exist because they have no electric and weak charge (in which case you must really hate photons too, not to mention gravity) you can resort to a Majorana mass term [2] instead.
That question (are neutrinos Dirac or Majorana?) is not a "contradiction", it's an uncertainty caused by how difficult it is to experimentally rule out either option. It is most certainly not "a problem for the standard model".
So, I'm not actually a particle physicist. My understanding had been (based on something I'd read somewhere -- should try to find it again) that there is some problem caused by just declaring "neutrinos just have innate masses, they're not from the Higgs mechanism", but I could be mistaken. Obviously, if that is mistaken, then as you say it merely a question rather than a contradiction. Should try to dig that up though.
Edit: Doing some quick searching seems to indicate that giving neutrinos a bare mass term would violate electroweak gauge invariance? I don't know enough to evaluate that claim, or TBH really even to understand it. But I believe that's what I was thinking of, so maybe you can say how true and/or pertinent that is.
> giving neutrinos a bare mass term would violate electroweak gauge invariance?
Giving any standard model fermion a bare mass term would violate electroweak gauge invariance. That was one of the problems with Glashow's electroweak model from 1961 [1]: he had the right symmetry group, but all particles had to be massless in order not to break it. Weinberg's contribution was to combine Glashow's proposal with Higgs' mass generation mechanism. It is done exactly the same way for any electroweak fermion doublet (as long as you are happy with the default choice of Dirac mass terms for all of them), be it up quark and down quark or neutrino and electron.
Huh. Why do other sources seem to say that's only the case for bosons? Or am I conflating two distinct problems? Sorry, once again, not a physicist.
But if that's correct then I'm confused what your objection is to what I said earlier. If a bare mass would violate electroweak gauge invariance, then instead the mass should come from the Higgs mechanism, but that has the problem of, where are all the right-handed neutrinos, then? Am I missing something here? If you can't just give the neutrinos a bare mass and call it a day (at least not w/o causing significant problems), but do in fact have to make a more significant modification like inventing sterile neutrinos or making them Majorana particles, I'd call that a "contradiction" rather than merely a "question", because no hypothesis so far is a good fit for all of what we see (searches for sterile neutrinos have come up empty, neutrinoless double beta decay remains undetected, and I assume nobody's ever observed violations of electroweak gauge invariance!). Or I guess there are more out-there hypotheses that are consistent with what we see in that they've yet to really be tested, but, y'know, nothing that's been really tested AFAIK.
Correct. That's the pattern we see in quarks, and also applying it to leptons works just fine. In practice, if you are a particle physicist doing calculations which happen to involve neutrinos, and you are not explicitly analyzing the effects of alternative mass generation mechanisms, you use Dirac masses for all fermions.
> but that has the problem of, where are all the right-handed neutrinos, then?
One of the patterns of the standard model is that only left-handed fermions have weak isospin [1] (the charge of the "weak" nuclear force). Their right-handed counterparts have all the same properties but zero weak isospin; they do not interact via the weak nuclear force.
If you take a left-handed neutrino, which only interacts via the weak nuclear force (and gravity), and apply that pattern to get the properties of a right-handed neutrino, what you're left with is a particle with the same mass and no other interactions than gravity. That makes it pretty hard to detect.
This is not a "significant modification" of the standard model: it's what you get if you apply the pattern followed by all other fermions.
It is sometimes argued that making neutrinos Majorana is more minimalistic, since it reduces the number of particles by eliminating right-handed neutrinos, but that ignores the cost of deviating from the default pattern. In information terms, it would take more bits to encode "use Dirac masses for all fermions except neutrinos, those are Majorana and there are no right-handed ones" than just "use Dirac masses for all fermions".
> searches for sterile neutrinos have come up empty
Those would be heavy neutrinos which get their mass from physics beyond the standard model. Plain vanilla standard model fermions have the same mass whether they are left- or right-handed, so quite small for neutrinos [2].
OK, so the actual disagreement here seems to be whether adding same-mass right-handed neutrinos counts as a significant modification to the Standard Model. I have generally seen adding any sort of right-handed neutrinos to be considered a significant modification. I agree that certainly adding same-mass ones, like all othe fermions have, makes everything simpler and more symmetric! And in an alternate history of physics, that would have been considered the Standard Model, the baseline. But as best I've seen, in the history of physics that actually happened, "no right-handed neutrinos" got codified as the baseline, so changing over to this alternate one would to my mind be a significant change from what people mean by "the Standard Model".
But that doesn't exactly seem like something it makes a lot of sense to argue over, now that we've identified the disagreement.
> Those would be heavy neutrinos which get their mass from physics beyond the standard model. Plain vanilla standard model fermions have the same mass whether they are left- or right-handed, so quite small for neutrinos [2].
Hm, is that true? I know these experiments can only detect certain mass ranges and IIRC you're right that they were looking for heavier ones, but my understanding was that they were not getting it from physics beyond "standard model plus right-handed neutrinos" (technically beyond the standard model but only a way that is necessary to even discuss the subject!), rather they were just getting it via the ordinary Higgs mechanism? (The bit you linked regarding this doesn't appear to contradict this?) Unless by "beyond the standard model" you just mean that the right-handed mass is different from the left-handed mass, in which case, well, see above, now we're just talking about what "the standard model" normally means.
I mean you say you're a particle physicist, so I guess you'd know -- when you talk to your colleagues, what do they think "the standard model" means with regard to neutrinos? That right-handed ones don't exist? Or that they do exist and have the same mass as their left-handed counterparts? At the very least all the popularizations I've seen (generally written by particle physicists) have said it means the former... you're really sure other particle physicists mean the latter? This may sound a little silly, but have you tried taking like a quick poll or anything to make sure?
> so the actual disagreement here seems to be whether adding same-mass right-handed neutrinos counts as a significant modification to the Standard Model
I disagree. That has been the working definition of Standard Model for decades. All quarks and all charged leptons are known to have Dirac masses, which require both left- and right-handed components, so once it became clear that neutrinos have mass too, extending that pattern to them too was the obvious thing to do.
> in the history of physics that actually happened, "no right-handed neutrinos" got codified as the baseline
Again, I disagree. Weinberg introduced what you insist on calling "standard model" in a three-page letter, at a time when there was no evidence for neutrino masses. He correctly designed it as a minimal proof of concept, knowing full well that extending it would be trivial. For the same reason, his "model of leptons" did not even mention quarks; those were also not an established thing in 1967.
I can't imagine anyone seriously claiming that quarks are not part of the standard model. And yet, here I am having to explain for the umpteenth time that neutrinos working like all other standard model particles are part of what everybody competent means by standard model.
>> Plain vanilla standard model fermions have the same mass whether they are left- or right-handed, so quite small for neutrinos
>
> Hm, is that true?
Yes. A Dirac fermion has a left-handed component and a right-handed one. The Dirac mass term is what binds them together and makes them behave like a single particle with one mass. Set that mass to zero and you have two massless Weyl fermions. [1]
> Unless by "beyond the standard model" you just mean that the right-handed mass is different from the left-handed mass
Of course. Different masses for left- and right-handed components of a Dirac fermion is a contradiction in terms.
> I mean you say you're a particle physicist
Do I?
> the popularizations I've seen (generally written by particle physicists) have said it means the former
There is an unfortunate tendency in popularization to blur the lines between established knowledge and speculation (see Feynman's "Cargo cult science", linked elsewhere in this thread), and an understandable desire to make one's own subject look particularly exciting. If you are neutrino physicist (an intrinsically soporific activity which mainly involves staring for years or decades on end at large quantities of a transparent mass hoping to see a rare interesting event [2]) your best bet to achieve that is to push the "window into Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics" narrative. So you bring up the fact that neutrino masses are very small, point to the seesaw mechanism [3] as a possible explanation, and emphasize that massive right-handed neutrinos could be cold dark matter [4]. That's fine, although it's getting old and not looking as promising as it once did. What is not fine is stretching the truth to the point of breaking it by claiming that right-handed neutrinos are, by themselves, BSM. That is abject nonsense.
> It's trivial to add a matrix to account for neutrino masses
The matrix you are thinking of is presumably the PMNS matrix [1]. It's equivalent to the CKM matrix for quarks [2]. The purpose of both is to parametrize the mismatch between flavor [3] and mass eigenstates, not "to account for neutrino masses" or "explain their origin".
As far as the standard model is concerned, neutrino masses and quark masses all originate from Yukawa couplings [4] with the Higgs field. Adding such terms to Weinberg's original model of leptons is very much a trivial exercise, and was done already well before there was solid evidence for non-zero neutrino masses.
> it's possible experiments will say "Both the current ideas are wrong."
Assuming that by "Both current ideas" you mean Dirac vs Majorana mass, those are the only available relativistic invariants. For both to be wrong, special relativity would have to be wrong. Hopefully I don't need to explain how extraordinarily unlikely that is.
I should add that I am not in complete agreement with what he said in that speech: calling it "not essential to the science" strikes me as naive. Once you start juggling two standards of communication, you are on a slippery slope. If it's OK to lie to the funding public at large, what about politicians, funding bodies, colleagues in other disciplines competing for the same funding, journal editors asking you to review a rival's work in your own field? Where do you draw the line? Do you draw a line, or do you descend into a state of generalized charlatanry?
There was this sentence in the article: "...he realized that nonuniformly elliptic PDEs that seem well behaved can have irregular solutions even when they satisfy the condition Schauder had identified"
The article itself falsifies this explanation; IE wasn't released until August 1995. The HTML draft specs published prior to this already specified that these tags didn't need closing; these simply weren't invalid HTML in the first place.
The oldest public HTML documentation there is, from 1991, demonstrates that <li>, <dt>, and <dd> tags don't need to be closed! And the oldest HTML DTD, from 1992, explicitly specifies that these, as well as <p>, don't need closing. Remember, HTML is derived from SGML, not XML; and SGML, unlike XML, allows for the possibility of tags with optional close. The attempt to make HTML more XML-like didn't come until later.
I'd assume otherwise you have to have a way for the drones to meter their usage and pay the power company. It will likely make power theft easier, but it seems entirely viable to have an account with the power company where you report "I drew X joules from line Y" and for them to bill appropriately.
The simplest might be for the drone company to act as an intermediary. They'd bill drone users for charging and have contracts with utilities. The drone company could do some authentication / DRM / etc. so that you'd basically have to jailbreak your drone to charge without paying.
Yes, I'm sure the markup would be large as a percentage, but for most customers the convenience would be worth it. Most of the customers are probably commercial and don't want to risk getting banned or sued.
Feels like this is likely to be targeting government and major corporate clients, in which case they're probably in a strong place to negotiate agreements based on charge reported by the drone's on board software. Not to mention the utility companies themselves, who are mentioned as the initial market.
B2B transactions like this are handled fine with contracts and lawyers all the time, I doubt it would be an issue. In the worst case, the utility could own the recharging module on the drone, just like they own your power meter.
Unmetered electric service based on "trust me bro" is actually the default (at least in the US) for a huge variety of devices, like streetlights, cell towers mounted to electric poles, public irrigation systems, etc etc.
Almost every US utility has a "UM" process to self-assess an unmetered load's consumption and be billed. So, yes, it's not only viable but widespread.
I mean, if I have to pay them by how much power I draw, I'm pretty glad they have a way to measure that, because I don't.
What's there alternative in this case? If I can land a drone on the power line and suck up some power, they can either charge me when I tell them I did it, or they can not charge me.
Presumably they'd be doing inspections for the power company, who probably don't care if some minuscule amounts of power are consumed directly during operations.
There is a not so subtle hint in the description that they were mainly inspired by military applications (Air Force, DARPA). Legality doesn’t matter when you’re in enemy territory.
Liability is probably the biggest issue, rather than using the energy. If it causes damage because it fails to connect properly, or if it has a trailing wire to pick up other phases (not actually connect to it but to pick up induction)
Location: New York City
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Maybe if it's on the east coast
Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com
Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle/tree/develop/package...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.
I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)
I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).
I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!
Why do you say it's a strawman? All of those claims seem pretty familiar to me, even if, as the post says, the full exact combination might not be. You say you never assume it's in bad faith. Well, great! But that doesn't mean it's a strawman, it seems that other people do!
I say it’s a straw man because it’s a caricature that is easy to knock down. The point of my comment was that I would be surprised to find out that even 20% of people think this, much less a majority.
20% is a lot of people! If 20% of people think something is true, that's something worth arguing against!
"Straw man" strictly speaking means something you invented, although, yes, that is likely overly strict, since you can find someone saying just about anything. But 20%? That's a substantial fraction of the relevant population!
The other thing worth noting here is that the point of a straw-man fallacy is. In a straw-man fallacy, you replace your opponent's argument with a ridiculous version, and argue against that instead of what they actually said. Or, alternatively, it's where you are arguing against some general nebulous concept, and you instantiate it as something ridiculous -- which maybe someone is actually saying! -- and use your argument against the ridiculous version as an argument against the more general concept, tarring other versions by association. (The real solution here of course is to not argue about nebulous concepts like that in the first place, it's not a useful way of arguing, but that's another matter.)
But if you're not performing either of these types of substitution, if the ridiculous position is actually out there and you're simply arguing against it as it is and not trying to use it to substitute for something else or tar something else by association... then that's not a straw man, that's just people believing ridiculous things and you having to argue against them.
> But choosing foundation has real implications on the mathematics. You can have a foundation where every total function on the real numbers is continuous. Or one where Banach–Tarski is just false.
I mean, mathematicians do care about the part of the foundations that affect what they do! Classical vs constructive matters, yes. But material vs structural is not something most mathematicians think about. (They don't think about classical vs constructive either, but that's because they don't really know about constructive and it's not what they're trying to do, rather than because it's irrelevant to them like material vs structural.)
Consider e.g. neutrino masses. We have plenty of experimental data indicating that neutrinos oscillate and therefore have mass. This poses a problem for the standard model (because there are problems unless the mass comes from the Higgs mechanism, but in the standard model neutrinos can't participate in the Higgs mechanism due to always being left-handed). But whenever we do experiments to attempt to verify one of the ways of fixing this problem -- are there separate right-handed neutrinos we didn't know about, or maybe instead the right-handed neutrinos were just antineutrinos all along? -- we turn up nothing.