Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

Tuco

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I googled coolest invention of 2013, came up with oculus rift. Was invented by a college dropout. I don't feel like doing major research into the subject, but its nice to have my first shot in the dark be a hit.
Yeah the Rift is a great invention and Palmer Luckey was very young when he started posting about it on mtbs3d. I have the DK2 on pre-order and have been following it for a year now.

There's two problems with your suggestion though:
1. The real technical work in moving that technology forward beyond the hacking he did in his basement is being done by giants in the perception, sensor fusion, inertial measurement and game programming field. Luckey had enough vision to hack together a samsung panel and some lenses to realize the tech was there, and had the ability to market it to the right people. But he's not personally responsible for the truly novel work they're doing. The low persistence panels, the sub30ms action to photon time, the sub-CM accuracy pose estimation work and the programmatic efficiency are all improvements to the tech space being done by people with experience and credentials in the field.

2. I should have been more specific, we're talking about publications here, not tech startups. We're talking about scientific discoveries.

Here's the quote you responded to:
Tuco_sl said:
I'd love to see a listing of the revolutionary publications of the last century and how much publication and credentials the publisher had before that.
Which publications were done by people with no experience, publication history and sometimes even formal education?
 

Tuco

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Mosquitoes bred with suicide genes to combat disease

What could possibly go wrong with this idea. Sounds like the premise to a SyFY movie.
I wonder how they expect the suicidal mosquitos to infiltrate the population when they are so intent on dying. Seems like if they released 1000 suicidal mosquitos the hope would be that they'd mate with a few thousand other mosquitos and then die and the other mosquitos would die...
 

BrutulTM

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The Oculus Rift guy is lucky that he got his exit when he did. Once it became clear that there was an interest in that thing it was only a matter of time before Samsung or Sony or someone like them came out with their own version that was better and crushed him with their massive manufacturing ability. Butt-hurt Kickstarter contributors notwithstanding, getting bought by Facebook or someone like them was the only way that company had any future.
 

iannis

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Wasn't one of those old-school 90's software devs balls deep in oculus rift? Or was it a competing platform with the same idea?

Like Carmack builds rocketships and shit now. I thought one of those guys who hit it big in the earlier times had put a lotta money into pseudo-vr.
 

Ambiturner

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The Oculus Rift guy is lucky that he got his exit when he did. Once it became clear that there was an interest in that thing it was only a matter of time before Samsung or Sony or someone like them came out with their own version that was better and crushed him with their massive manufacturing ability. Butt-hurt Kickstarter contributors notwithstanding, getting bought by Facebook or someone like them was the only way that company had any future.
No, the reason he got out when he did was because when you die while playing with Rift, you die in real life.
 

Ambiturner

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That's not really accurate. Photons like everything else are time dependent. Particles, photons and otherwise including those with mass, exist as probability densities. While a portion of the wavefunction (equation describing the probability, also synonymous and indistinguishable from the particle; the wavefunctionisthe particle) and thus the particle itself exists at all points, it does not behave that way in the real universe. As individual particle's wavefunctions interact with one another they constantly evolve, in time, into new wavefunctions that describe the system as a whole. This essentially sets boundary conditions to particles that are dependent on these sequential interactions and restricting on their probabilities. In an isolated system, photons would behave more independently of time but nothing to our knowledge can be a truly isolated system. So in a sense, if they could rationalize a thought, photons would not have a "sense" of time the same way we don't have a "sense" of anything but our observable spacetime dimensions, even though they are still passing through and interacting with it.

As I mentioned, all particles behave this way including those with mass. In general chemistry, shells and then orbitals are introduced. The orbitals have bubbly, cloud shapes and the introductory explanation is that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't let us know exactly where in the cloud it is, so we just draw it as a cloud. This explanation is just a glossing over of quantum mechanics, in which the electron isn't just unfindable exactly in the cloud, it exists at every point in the cloud with different probabilities. We call this "electron density" and is a major factor in atomic and molecular interactions. A large portion of introductory quantum chemistry courses goes in to the wavefunctions that result from the combination of individual electron interactions with one another in covalent bonding. While electrons move pretty fast on our time scale, they aren't that fast to the atomic world. If the electron were actually just moving back and forth around both atoms, all molecules would show a much higher fluctuation in energy depending on the electron's current location and also exhibit higher reactivities across the board. Thus, the bonding we observe can only exist if the electron's wavefunctions (and thus the electron itself!) are around both atoms at the same time.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty good with chemistry but am only 3 months into my first quantum mechanics course. The introductory course glosses over the time dependent Schrodinger equations as the math goes another major step up but we do talk about them qualitatively. Time dependency isn't until next year. So basically I may not know exactly what I'm talking about but the good news is that it's quantum mechanics, so no one does!
I don't think you really understood what was being said
 

Furry

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The Oculus Rift guy is lucky that he got his exit when he did. Once it became clear that there was an interest in that thing it was only a matter of time before Samsung or Sony or someone like them came out with their own version that was better and crushed him with their massive manufacturing ability. Butt-hurt Kickstarter contributors notwithstanding, getting bought by Facebook or someone like them was the only way that company had any future.
Who the fuck would turn down that much money? I know I sure the fuck wouldn't, and so wouldn't you.
 

Furry

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The Occulus Rift didn't overturn any conventions, wasn't running against conventional science and contradicted no papers.
There are papers about EVERYTHING. There are papers it contradicted and papers it agreed with. The fact that papers were out there on the subject or against it are entirely inconsequential to my point.

The point is, he made results, and he likely didn't give a shit about papers or their research to do it. In the extremely unlikely event that he was reading papers to develop ideas instead of working on stuff himself, he as a lay person had to evaluate and reach his own conclusions without the formal education required to do that successfully if you believe papers are necessary for these things. My point is that peer reviewed papers are not really that great a way of validating things, and results are. That's why I dislike theoretical sciences so much. Because results can't be produced, there is no way to judge the quality of ideas, so people wrongly assume that credentials are the best judge of quality, when even idiots can get massive credentials.

That's why im of the opinion that people should be extremely critical of all work and papers, peer reviewed or not, when it comes to theoretical sciences. I would even go so far to argue that peer review journals and their members have a compelling interest to keep their work self-sustaining, growing and funded. This conflict of interest is an extremely dangerous one for keeping people unbiased, and I believe climate study can be used as a case example for what happens when such bias is allowed to run unchecked. Money corrupts, and not just politicians.
 

Ambiturner

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There are papers about EVERYTHING. There are papers it contradicted and papers it agreed with. The fact that papers were out there on the subject or against it are entirely inconsequential to my point.

The point is, he made results, and he likely didn't give a shit about papers or their research to do it. In the extremely unlikely event that he was reading papers to develop ideas instead of working on stuff himself, he as a lay person had to evaluate and reach his own conclusions without the formal education required to do that successfully if you believe papers are necessary for these things. My point is that peer reviewed papers are not really that great a way of validating things, and results are. That's why I dislike theoretical sciences so much. Because results can't be produced, there is no way to judge the quality of ideas, so people wrongly assume that credentials are the best judge of quality, when even idiots can get massive credentials.

That's why im of the opinion that people should be extremely critical of all work and papers, peer reviewed or not, when it comes to theoretical sciences. I would even go so far to argue that peer review journals and their members have a compelling interest to keep their work self-sustaining, growing and funded. This conflict of interest is an extremely dangerous one for keeping people unbiased, and I believe climate study can be used as a case example for what happens when such bias is allowed to run unchecked. Money corrupts, and not just politicians.
Every single part of this is wrong
 

khalid

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Again Furry, not all ideas are equally valid and not all theoretical ideas are equally valid either. Scientists judge things based on more than simply credentials. Honestly, sounds like you got your crackpot paper rejected from a bunch of journals or something.
 

Sentagur

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Which papers did the Occulus Rift contradict?
weren't you asking about scientific discoveries made by laymen or something like that? While occulus rift is an interesting gadget, it is not really a scientific discovery. Just an innovative arrangement of existing tech.
 

BrutulTM

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I'm not sure what this dude has to do with science. Is there anything novel about the oculus rift? It seems like an idea that people came up with back in the 90s and that any electronics shop could have built. The guy picked the correct time to bring VR back in terms of availability of components and he made a big splash at CES but did he actually "invent" anything? Is there some new tech in this device or did he just build a product at a time when the market was ready for it?
 

BrotherWu

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I heard Patrick Copeland, a big shot Google, give a keynote at a conference a couple of years ago. One of the main takeaways from it was thatideas are cheapand it is theexecution that is valuable.

It seems to me that Occulus Rift is a combination of good execution in terms of timing, marketing and technology integration. Although there might be some interesting IP in how pieces of it were put together, the overall idea itself is not new.
 

iannis

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It says "with a long half life" but what does that mean?

I thought those elements above 90ish start to exist with half lives measured in seconds and exist in extra-ordinary high energy situations. So while they technically exist, for our time scales they almost might as well be theoretical.

Are they just trying to find the upper limit?
 

BoldW

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It says "with a long half life" but what does that mean?

I thought those elements above 90ish start to exist with half lives measured in seconds and exist in extra-ordinary high energy situations. So while they technically exist, for our time scales they almost might as well be theoretical.

Are they just trying to find the upper limit?
It's been theorized that there an island of stability in some of the heavy elements we have yet to discover/make, and this seems to be point to that. Looks like the half-life here is under a second, but much longer than the nanoseconds of other heavy elements.