Supercomputers help physicists understand a force of nature

University of Washington News Office ^ | 11 July 2006 | Staff (press release)

[PatrickHenry]

Bold and underlining added by me. Contact info at the end of the original article is omitted.

[PatrickHenry]

SciencePing

An elite subset of the Evolution list. See the list's explanation at my freeper homepage. Then FReepmail to be added or dropped.

[Red Badger]

Genesis 11:6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

[Coyoteman]

===> Placemarker <===

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[newgeezer]

The work was paid for in part by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

This is certainly a good and proper use of taxpayer money.</sarcasm>

It's just as Constitutional as the National Endowment for the Arts and NPR.

[Physicist]

Seriously, you can't think of a Constitutionally relevant use of nuclear physics? Really?

[Physicist]

It should be pointed out that while this result is new, the general technique of Lattice QCD is more than 20 years old. The hardware is finally getting to the point where the theory can live up to its full potential.

[MineralMan]

"This is certainly a good and proper use of taxpayer money.</sarcasm>"

---

Absolutely. The government has no rational for funding nuclear research. You betcha.

[marsh_of_mists]

"any old quark masses would do."

A phrase never used before in human history.

[King Prout]

iirc, in the Constitution, the Congress is explicitly authorized to support the "useful arts" (ie: science, technology, industry)

been a few months since I last read the USC, so I may be mistaken

[PatrickHenry]

Constitution of the US, Article I, Section 8 - Powers of Congress:

8. To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries:

[js1138]

I don't think this clause justifies NPR. I used to listen to NPR when it was the only source of classical music, but they dropped music, and I picked up XM radio as part of my DirecTV package.

As with so many other things, that which you pay for is better and cheaper than that which is "free."

[King Prout]

hrmn... patents, but not funding. i appear to have been in error.

[phantomworker]

Whenever I hear "lattice functions", I think of Lebesgue integration.

[Quark2005]

Great article, PH. Here's an animation of a quark-antiquark pair modeled using the lattice gauge QCD mentioned in the article. (A description of this as well as some other cool animations can be found here (Visualizations of Quantum Chromodynamics). )

I saw many of these simulations at a talk I attended about a year ago. Lattice QCD appears the to be the best shot we yet have at modeling the internal behavior of nuclear matter (something that is not nearly as well-understood as we would like it to be). Lattice QCD is very mathematically intensive work; it takes a lot of computing muscle to do these types of simulations.

[PatrickHenry]

hrmn... patents, but not funding. i appear to have been in error.

But they funded scientific work anyway. Navy ships were used for charting coasts, exploring, that kind of thing. Defense related, arguably. And then there's the Lewis & Clark expedition, the granddaddy of all scientific programs (with other reasons to give it some cover, I suppose).

[MineralMan]

"iirc, in the Constitution, the Congress is explicitly authorized to support the "useful arts" (ie: science, technology, industry)

been a few months since I last read the USC, so I may be mistaken

"

Yup. It's there in Article I.

[LogicWings]

Seriously, you can't think of a Constitutionally relevant use of nuclear physics?

And you end up with $billions handed over to ADM for ethanol using the same justification. Ain't no different. Mercantilism, (or corporate welfare, if you prefer) pure and simple.

It isn't the function of government. Period.

[grey_whiskers]

The hardware is finally getting to the point where the theory can live up to its full potential.

Was the solution memory, bandwidth, or CPU limited? Or a combination?

Cheers!