I remember programming in FORTRAN back in middle school. and waiting for my turn at the card reader in college. what a pain it was punching cards - i'm a lousy typist...

YES! Fun with Science ... I Respectfully suggest that WE name this NEW "GOD" particle after that MOST worshipful REPUBLICAN Sarah Palin... Or, alternatively, we simply call it...

...the HICKS BOZO BOSON...

curious_guy (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 3:59 pm Wouldn't computers made with vacuum tubes still be possible?

NOPE! Vacuum tubes are nothing but electron gates and Quantum Mechanics best describes the behavior of ELECTRONS, of mass 9.1 X 10-31Kg. This is a mass WAY too small to use Ne

Dave (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 4:27 pm wtonian Physics to describe with ANY degree of precision.

I saw a computer made with vacuum tubes back in 1968 and it was a huge dumb box. It alone took up the entire side of a small, four story building on one floor. IT was antique then. by the time I got out of college, you purchase handheld calculators more powerful. Your computer would fill your house and you would have a t

iny living space just big enough to open the electric box.

THE first COMPUTER WAS ENIAC. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC) It weighed in at over 30 TONS and probably even Dave's girlfriend could not have used it as a laptop without crushing her poor tu tu...

This computer was programmed by HARD WIRING it so to run another program one had to shut it off and then re-wire the damned thing.

Computer lore tells that this was the first computer with a "BUG" in it's program. It was a DEAD MOTH stuck in a mechanical relay keeping it from closing thus preventing the program from running. I do not

Dave (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 4:27 pm know who was the first systems analyst to de-bug a program.

In those ancient days, an IBM 360/67, the most powerful of IBM's computers in 1968 and printed circuits was a gargantuan set of boxes with tape drives for memory and required punch cards and the computer was 12 feet long and three foot wide and four foot high. Like I said, it had printed circuits. The great success of the 1968 year's computer programmers was to make it run two p

rograms at once in one memory. WOW. isn't that impressive?

I learned to program on a Control Data Systems obtained through a U.S. Congressional Representative from my district who managed to get it donated surplus for a $5.00 U.S. to a local university when it was retired by the military from the Pentagon. It was from this university that I earned my first degree with a minor in Computer Science.

The CDC Cyber had a 6 - bit architecture as compared to the IBM mainframes which all used 8 - bit architecture. This made the CDC Cyber very fast for it's day and it was used as a multiple user system connected by hard wiring throughout computer labs all over campus. I programmed in Basic, ForTran (short for FORmula TRANslation), COBOL (a business application language that I seldom used) and the language that was a BREAKTHROUGH in data structures and DATA handling PASCAL.

Then came C, C+, C++ and so forth, but soon the age of BIG mainframes came to an end. The res

Dave (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 4:27 pm t is HIStory and is older than River and Wolfie combined...

No one dreamed of a personal computer in those years. They thought it was a ridiculous idea.

The biggest programming language was FORTRAN and only because A.J. Perlis was head of the computer department did we get privileged to learn ALGOL. Remember ALGOL? how about PASCAL or ADA?

Every computer program was unique and I mean unique. SO unique that most programmers would never touch another programmer's code because each programmed so illogically (That was the reason for inventing ALGOL which didn't solve the problem) Each programmer coded a Float Sort differently and each programmer wrote a linked list in different variables. There was nothing in the world more spiteful than a horny computer programmer whose balls were achingly blue and glasses were smudged (wink, wink).

I taught myself FORTRAN and said to myself (often) why is FORTRAN a synonym for FUCKED UP?

Word processing? nonexistent in the computer world at that time.

Spreadsheets were thought of by dreamers in the English Department when they dared to write SciFi.

Computerized publishing (In Design, PHOTOSHOP, etc...) -- HAH! most printers had moveable typesetters that required that people retype all text to set it in newspaper and "hyphenation for justification" was done by hand. So was kerning. Spelling by editor. Grammar correction by a person with a huge book and a ruler to smack your fingers.

If you don't know what some of that is or don't recognize what I'm talking about, your word processor does all that for you. You spreadsheet dose mountains of mathematics in seconds where even the "big computer" the IBM 360 was fed cards and did it overnight because you were too insignificant a user to use the daylight computing time. Today, your computer sits on your lap and adores you like a puppy waiting for fingers to pet its willing keyboard.

added after posting: Do you know why the "discovery" of the Higgs Boson was so hard? That bump that the graphs show at roughly 120 GeV is less than a percent difference between two lines and to reach 5 or 6 sigma required billions of collisions and each collision had to be analyzed by a computer. CERN and the LHC ran two separate tests of collision decay particles and analyzed them separately. That was why it took many months to analyze the

data and get a decision precise enough to call "discovery."

Dun with the Computer science history now... except arguably the FIRST personal com

Riverwind (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 4:54 pm puter WAS the IBM 610 (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/610.html). It

was so expensive that nobody could afford it.

1981 was the year for the first DIGITAL PC. (http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml/)

Book m

Slammr (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 5:21 pm e a passage on the next ship to the next universe, I am ready to go.

River

Intelligent life on Earth has been rendered EXTINCT for all practical purposes by FOX NEWS and Conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers.

...Al Gore "INVENTING" the Internet notwithstanding...

Yeah, but the computer on your desk would take up your whole house, generate enough heat for whole block, and cost you a fortune in electricity.

Perhaps, I should have said transistors wouldn't exist, but home computers certainly wouldn't exist without quantum mechanics. When I worked for IBM, they had a big meeting introducing their first integrated circuit board. It had the equivalent of two transistors, some resistors and capacitors, forming two flip-flops, which could store two bits of information. Today's microchips have the equivalent of as m

any as two billion transistors.

Back then, business computers took up whole rooms an

Slammr (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 5:25 pm d had enormous tape drives for storage. Input was generally done with punch cards. Back then, most businesses

stored their data on punch cards. It might take hours to print out a payroll.

Computer memory and

Paolo wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 5:59 pm processor prices have steadily DROPPED wh

ile quality has improved. This is the only industry where this has happened.

If the Multiverse exists, you're already there, infinite versions of you, all of them thinking they are you.

...and if you could look infinitely far in the universe you would be TREATED to SEE ....

(_)*(_)

(...not the back of your head. Think LOWER!)

:-\

Oh Good God, now there's a scary thought.

YOU AIN'T JUST A-SHITTIN"!

I forgot COBOL. What an ugly pile that was. I never programmed in it. ugly, ugly,

A.J. Perlis said to the freshman class in 1967 that computer programmers would not exist in the future once threaded languages like ALGOL, PASCAL, ADA and (I did forget to mention the inheritor of all those languages) C, C+, and C++...

That was the vision of the future.

Pascal was elegant. I never wrote in ADA or C and C's variations.

>>A birthday gift

>>

>>

British theorist Peter Higgs lives to see his boson

83-year-old physicist witnesses unveiling of subatomic particle he predicted in '60s

By Robert Evans

updated 7/4/2012 5:17:48 PM ET

GENEVA — Peter Higgs was no good in the lab, but he never doubted that one day his theory of a powerful subatomic particle that bears his name would be proven right in practice. His surprise was that he lived to see that day.

Speaking at Geneva's CERN research center on Wednesday after experimental physicists announced the discovery of a new particle, a boson much as Higgs imagined half a century ago, he confessed to Reuters he felt "rather dazed but very pleased."

As a schoolboy in Bristol in the southwest of England, the now 83-year-old Higgs admitted to being "incompetent" at science in the laboratory. He went on, however, to specialize in the theoretical realm, applying mathematics to exploring the outer reaches of our understanding of the universe that makes us.

One paper he dispatched from Edinburgh University in 1964, as he was formulating a theory of an elusive particle to explain how an ordered universe emerged from Big Bang, was rejected by an academic physics journal edited at CERN.

But he gave no sign of bearing a grudge when he spent the day at the institution watching its experimental experts vindicate him.

"For me personally it is just the confirmation of something I did 48 years ago, and it is very satisfying to be proved right in some way," Higgs said in the interview. "I haven't been dreaming about it for 48 years because I had other things to do with my life. At the beginning, I had no expectation that I would still be alive when it happened."

That experimental proof had been delivered in his own lifetime was, he said, "incredible," and he suggested the moment would have greatly surprised his early science teachers: "I certainly did some lab work as a schoolboy in Bristol. I was incompetent," he said, a boyish grin flitting across his round face.

For nearly three decades, physicists at CERN and at the Fermilab research center in Illinois had tried to find what became known as the "Higgs boson" in particle colliders creating mini- explosions duplicating the big bang of 13.7 billion years ago.

The physicists hedged its bets in their report on Wednesday, and held back on claiming it had discovered the Higgs until they had time to "get inside" it, but they were sure they had found a new particle.

No hint of resentment

The rotund, bespectacled theoretical physicist, who for many years held a professorial chair at Edinburgh University, gave no hint of schadenfreude over the fact that his original idea was rejected by a CERN journal as being "of no relevance to physics."

"What I did 48 years ago wasn't very specific," he said. Earlier, at a news conference, he had refused to get into what his feelings were. "This day belongs to CERN and the people who work here," he insisted.

Higgs, who has strong views on what is good and bad about science and resigned from a movement for nuclear disarmament when it began campaigning against the harnessing of nuclear energy, makes clear he has no religious faith.

He said he was not worried by the fact that it was not yet finally established whether the new boson — sometimes dubbed, to his disgust and that of all CERN scientists, "the God particle" — was exactly as he conceived it.

His vision of a particle linked to a force field that attracted the flying debris of the big bang and turned it into stars, planets and galaxies "was about a type of theory, and I'm not particularly bothered if this is a single Higgs boson or one of several," he told Reuters.

But, he added, it would be "rather surprising" if study of the new boson over the coming months in CERN's Large Hadron Collider showed "deviations from the expectations for the properties of any kind of Higgs boson."

CERN experts say that if such a scenario — discovery that the new boson was something totally outside their expectations — were to unfold, the whole modern concept of how the universe works would have to be reviewed.

End of an era? Or a beginning?

The Higgs, in its basic form, has long been seen as filling in the last major gap in the so-called Standard Model of physics. That model, drawn up in the 1970s, describes the way the universe works at the most elementary level.

"From the point of view of future physics," said the scientist, "it seems to me that in one way it is the end of an era in that it appears to complete the Standard Model. But the more important thing is that studying it [the new particle] will lead onto what lies beyond that model which we hope will have more interesting connections with cosmology, the dark matter problem and that sort of thing."

CERN physicists say the finding of the boson — widely hailed as the biggest advance in knowledge about the cosmos for over 30 years — will open the door to probing this and other ideas that were once the stuff of science fiction.

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Gravity remains unexplained outside the model, although it is the force that created the black holes at the center of galaxies and elsewhere in the universe.

Other concepts that scientists say could now be examined more closely are supersymmetry, the idea that all particles have a much heavier counterpart; the dark matter believed to make up about 23 percent of the universe but cannot be seen; and the dark energy that constitutes anotgher 72 percent.

"You may call it science fiction, but to me these are speculative theories which have been around for quite some time, and it's only now they are beginning to be tested," said Higgs.

"As with the Higgs boson, there's a lot of theoretical motivation for some parts of these theories to be true, in particular supersymmetry, which I think most people would say is a necessary feature of any theory that is going to unify the Standard Model with gravity.

"If we don't unify these theories with gravity, there is something very funny going on, because gravity on its own doesn't fit in properly with quantum theory" — the overriding theory of the nature of matter which evolved in the first half of the 20th century.

A-1 (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 7:05 pm

Slammr (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 5:25 pm If the Multiverse exists, you're already there, infinite versions

of you, all of them thinking they are you.

Is that why I feel myself coming and going all the time.

River

River -

Frivolous science ? ? ?

Really ? !

What about the future military applications ! ?

Effect your enemies Higgs Boson and he might become particulately unglued.

Sub atomically speaking of course.

You don't want "them" acquire it first, do you?

Moi

While vacuum tubes might work with quantum mechanics, They would have been discovered even if we had never discovered quantum mechanics, just as cave men used fire without knowing anything about the chemistry of combustion.

I think that if we had not discovered quantum mechanics, vacuum tubes would have progressed more than they did. Tubes used in a computer might be as small as a grain of rice. They would still be enormously larger and consume very much more power than the integrated circuits we have now.

It just seems to me that this abstract, extremely complex, almost mumbo-jumbo stuff should be given a back burner in science. What we really need is a viable means to get the planet's population back in sustainable numbers...and all of our societal woes, specifically, the inequities of race in, particularly, our society. Anybody here taken a ride in downtown Newburgh, NY of late? Clear that up and I'll scream "hallelujah"...Overpopulation is the number one problem in the world today..The cause of all pollution. And it's root cause is ignorance and over zealous religious doctrine..Let's get science working on that...There's a mighty task...Meanwhile, at 66 years of age (67 next week)..I know I'll make it...but my grandkids, I'm not so sure of..Sorry to get off-topic...Maybe we could discuss some of these issues...smooches Jackie (you guys are so smart it makes my head hurt)

curious_guy (imported) wrote: Fri Jul 06, 2012 1:25 am While vacuum tubes might work with quantum mechanics, They would have been discovered even if we had never discovered quantum mechanics, just as cave men used fire without knowing anything about the chemistry of combustion.

I think that if we had not discovered quantum mechanics, vacuum tubes would have progressed more than they did. Tubes used in a computer might be as small as a grain of rice. They would still be enormously larger and consume very much more power than the integrated circuits we have now.

Field-emission cathodes could, in principle, allow making far smaller vacuum tubes than thermionic cathodes allow, for the simple reason that it becomes rather difficult to maintain the temperature differences necessary for thermionic cathode vacuum tubes to function well when the size of a vacuum tube is sufficiently reduced. However, I note that the essence of quantum mechanics was alive and well in electronics during the 1920s. I happen to have a first edition printing of Keith Henny, M.A., "Principles of Radio," Wiley, 1929. Henney was Associate Editor of the McGraw-Hill journal, "Electronics."

From pages 3 and 4 of op cit.:

"5. The ether.---The fact that one charge can exert a force, either attraction or repulsion, upon another implies that something connects the two. For instance, a comb which has been rubbed on the coat sleeve will pick up bits of paper even though it does not actually touch them, the paper jumping to the comb while the latter is still some distance from it. Evidently something exists in the space between the comb and paper. That it is not air may be demonstrated by performing a similar experiment under a jar from which all the air has been pumped.

This leads to a conception of what is commonly known as the ether. It is simply the place or substance, or whatever one may choose to call it, wherein the attraction or repulsion of electrical charge exists. The ether is an invention made necessary by our difficulty in conceiving how one body can exert an effect on another except through some intervening medium...."

I do not need a "luminiferous ether" model because I have access to a seemingly better one, "wave functions."

Some folks may yet believe that a "wave-particle duality" actually exists. Some folks have learned a better form of understanding than that of duality.

As one of the latter group, a person who finds no such duality to actually exist, I find that an observation is comprised of two aspects, those of recognition and noting. Recognition may be usefully modeled as comprised of an event, sensation of the event, perception of sensation, and awareness of perception. Noting may be usefully modeled as interpretation of awareness and remembering interpretation. In this form of modeling, tangible observations are the recollection of remembered interpretations. And the process of recollection starts with an event which is sensed, perceived, brought to awareness, interpreted and remembered. Thus, recollection is also itself an observation.

If we now reflect on the "dramatis personae" of an observation, a useful model may be comprised of the observed, the observer, and the observation. In this model, the observation is the relationship of the observed with the observer and the observer with the observed. Because the observation is relational, the mathematics of observation cannot be completely reductionist in form or function; relational mathematics (such as "high-dimension-space, complex-variable, relational tensor calculus -- or "lattice theory"? -- may be required for decent accuracy of understanding.

And not all useful electron tubes were vacuum tubes, examples of non-vacuum tube electron tubes include the full-wave rectifier, BH, and also, the OD3, the OZ4, the 85A2, the 5651, and the UX300.

Electronics is, in essence, applied quantum mechanics; the invention of electron tubes is inseparable from the discovery of quantum mechanics.

moi621 (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2012 9:16 pm River -

Frivolous science ? ? ?

Really ? !

What about the future military applications ! ?

Effect your enemies Higgs Boson and he might become particulately unglued.

Sub atomically speaking of course.

You don't want "them" acquire it first, do you?

Moi

Yes moi, frivolous science. If you can so easily dismiss Global warming which anybody can see touch and feel, Frivolous Science of describing multi Universes is just that, FRIVOLOUS. Higgs Boson is another, at least today it is, now if you don't like my comment maybe if they can do something with it, I will change my mind however spending millions of dollars to prove it involving countless scientists is a waist of talent when there are real problems that science needs to be working on, but I guess from your point of view Global Warming is not real or a problem and is just frivolous to you.

So tell me, now that we know Higgs Boson is real, what applications are you going to develop for it? How will it help our lives? Will it allow us to build a space craft to move mass people to other worlds? Will it help the population explosion on this world? Will it end global warming? (sorry that was Frivolous). Will it stop, prevent, accelerate, open new doors, close doors, what, anything?

I await your response with great anticipation for you to tell me all the things that Higgs Boson will do for us, now and in the future. Some suggest it might take 500 years, if man is still on the world in 500 years. Remember another science, extension is the rule not the exception.

Is it time for Spock to land in North Dakota?

River