LHC Will Run Through 2012

With the Tevatron being shut down at the end of September this year, there were questions on whether the LHC might not continue with its planned run into 2012 and opt for an early shutdown to do the needed repairs. But that appears to not be the case based on the press release today:

CERN announces LHC to run in 2012

Geneva, 31 January 2011. CERN today announced that the LHC will run through to the end of 2012 with a short technical stop at the end of 2011. The beam energy for 2011 will be 3.5 TeV. This decision, taken by CERN management following the annual planning workshop held in Chamonix last week and a report delivered today by the laboratory’s machine advisory committee, gives the LHC’s experiments a good chance of finding new physics in the next two years, before the LHC goes into a long shutdown to prepare for higher energy running starting 2014.

“If LHC continues to improve in 2011 as it did in 2010, we’ve got a very exciting year ahead of us,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. “The signs are that we should be able to increase the data collection rate by at least a factor of three over the course of this year.”

The LHC was previously scheduled to run to the end 2011 before going into a long technical stop necessary to prepare it for running at its full design energy of 7 TeV per beam. However, the machine’s excellent performance in its first full year of operation forced a rethink. Expected performance improvements in 2011 should increase the rate that the experiments can collect data by at least a factor of three compared to 2010. That would lead to enough data being collected this year to bring tantalising hints of new physics, if there is new physics currently within reach of the LHC operating at its current energy. However, to turn those hints into a discovery would require more data than can be delivered in one year, hence the decision to postpone the long shutdown. If there is no new physics in the energy range currently being explored by the LHC, running through 2012 will give the LHC experiments the data needed to fully explore this energy range before moving up to higher energy.

“With the LHC running so well in 2010, and further improvements in performance expected, there’s a real chance that exciting new physics may be within our sights by the end of the year,” Said CERN’s Research Director, Sergio Bertolucci. “For example, if nature is kind to us and the lightest supersymmetric particle, or the Higgs boson, is within reach of the LHC’s current energy, the data we expect to collect by the end of 2012 will put them within our grasp.”

The schedule announced today foresees beams back in the LHC next month, and running through to mid December. There will then be a short technical stop over the year before resuming in early 2012.

Zz.

PDE Class Rumor Creates Excitement?

Oooh.... a rumor on a possible creation of a Partial Differential Equation class! This is a damn, fine gossip! :)

OK, I read this news report, and then scratched my head, and then read it again, and then said to myself "OK, what did I miss here?" :)

It seems that the rumor that the Physics Dept. at McGill University in Canada might create a class in Partial Differential Equation is causing an excitement not seen since "... they put a flat screen in the foyer has Rutherford Physics .... " Oh my! That's is an excitement!

“PDEs is one of those things that if you want to do physics, it pretty much puts up a wall if you don’t have it,” says McGill Society of Physics Students VP Academic Nina Kudryashova. “It’s so omnipresent.”

Although it’s been brought up, it is unlikely that PDEs will become a requirement anytime soon. “To even give it rumour status is going a little far” Physics Undergraduate Curriculum Committee Chairman Professor Kenneth Ragan says, “and for current [physics] students lacking PDEs, it’s not fatal.”

Physics professors often include higher-level math, like PDEs, in their curriculum on a need-to-know basis: if a particular tool from a math course which is not required for physics majors is needed, the professor will explain it in class.

Er... Hum. When I was an undergraduate student, I took a class on PDE from the Math dept. There wasn't ANY question on whether it was needed or not, since we ALL know that a physics undergraduate NEEDS to know PDE. Nowadays, many physics dept. have courses in "mathematical physics", in which PDEs are covered. I think teaching it on a "need-to-know" basis is highly inefficient, especially when it is taught during the actual physics class where PDE is needed. You are trying to learn both the physics, and the mathematics, at the same time. I've mentioned in my "So You Want To Be A Physicist" essay why this is not the best way to learn physics (read the chapter of mathematical preparation).

It is interesting that, a "rumor" that most of us don't consider to be anything significant, is creating quite an "excitement" among McGill's physics students. Could it be that they are really indicating that there is a need for such a class? Even if it isn't just a course in PDE alone, a mathematical physics class using a text like Mary Boas' "Mathematical Methods in the Physical Science" could fulfill the same needs.

Zz.

This Blog Is A Physics "Gossip" Site?

I'm often curious as to how people find this blog. Very often, a lot of people stumbled upon it via Google search. But other times, they get here through various links that people have put up on their own blogs and websites. To those web hosts and bloggers, I thank you very much!

But then, in this case, I am not sure if I deserve the "honor". Somehow, this person has a link to all the physics sites, including this blog, and called it "Physics gossip sites". Yowzah! I know sometime I go off the deep and and rant about stuff. But gossip? GOSSIP? I don't gossip on here, or at least, I very seldom do! How awful to be considered as a physics gossip site after all the physics papers and physics news reports that I've discussed and dissected.

But I suppose I should get all worked up over it, because the blog is in good company, being listed with Resonances and Cosmic Variance as also being physics gossip sites.

Maybe the word "gossip" means something else in another language....

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Radio Is All Sound. So Radio Waves Travel At The Speed Of Sound

The thing that passes as "news" nowadays.....

So I mentioned a week ago about the Bears-Packers game that had some historical context way back when they last met in the playoffs in 1941. The Packers won the game last week and will meet the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Superbowl.

So of course, there's plenty of news hype leading up to the game. This news article examines some die-hard Packers fans (is there any other type?) who watch the game on TV, but listen to the audio from the radio broadcast.

Many fans like to turn down the sound on the TV set and listen to announcers Wayne Larrivee and Larry McCarren of the Packers Radio Network.

But then there's a problem.

"I can't watch with no sound because of the three-second delay on Fox-ATT-Uverse coverage," said Bruce West of Green Bay. "The radio coverage is way ahead of TV."

Some people get frustrated when they hear the outcome of a play and then see it unfold on the screen.

OK, so that could be a minor problem. But so far, there's no physics involved here, until the writer tries to explain why there is this problem.

It's physics: Radio signals traveling at the speed of sound arrive first because the tower is relatively close by and the TV signal traveling at the speed of light must go 23,000 miles up and 23,000 miles back to Earth.

Whaaaaaaaaa?????!!!!!!!

Radio signal, as any physics student in high school can tell you, is also an electromagnetic wave. It just happens to have a longer wavelength than, say, visible light, but it is still an electromagnetic wave, and thus, still travel at the speed of light, NOT at the speed of sound. Now notice that this can't be a typo. The writer did differentiate the radio signal from the TV signal which is "... traveling at the speed of light...". We all make typos. *I* make tons of typos. So I did consider that maybe the writer meant to type "speed of light" instead of "speed of sound". But from this paragraph, naaah! I don't think this is a typo. It is just bad understanding of basic physics.

So here, the delay isn't caused by the signal having different speeds, but rather how they are transmitted. If one listens to satellite radio, for example, such signal will still have to go through that long path to a satellite before being transmitted back down. Has nothing to do with "speed of sound".

Both writer and editor need to go back and take high school physics.

Zz.

The Structural Physics of the Golden Gate Bridge

A very entertaining and informative video on the various vibrational modes of the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, as demonstrated on a scaled model. It is presented by Dave Fleming, a mechanical engineer at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.



He made a quick mention of the vibrational mode that was experienced by the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

Credit: Buzz Blog.

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Physic

No, I didn't misspell the word "physics".

A while back, I wrote about physicists some time being mistakenly called as "physicians", and the confusion that some people have about "physicist", "physicians", and "physical". This article traces the origin and evolution of the word "physic", from which both "physician" and "physics" come from, even though they both diverges into very different areas.

In order to explain the meaning of physician, we must begin with the Latin word, physicum or physicus, and the French word, physique. All of these words mean remedy. In 1212, the Anglo-Normans appropriated these words to coin the word fisike or physic. Even though it is rarely used today, physic can still be found in any English dictionary to define medicine or remedy.

Things get rather complicated when we talk about the branch of science we now call physics. Beginning in the 1300s, physic also began to be used to describe natural science but the meaning would be made obvious by how it was used in a sentence. For example, "Sir Isaac Newton took physic for his stomach pain" is quite different from "Sir Isaac Newton undertook the study of physic to explain the concept of gravity." In 1500, the Germans began calling physical science, Physik, while English-speaking people added an "s," hence physics, to distinguish it from their word for medical remedies.

Well, there ya go. Obviously, physicists and physicians were twins separated at birth! :)

Zz.

Transport Properties of Classical Electrons in 2D

This is from last week, but I didn't have time till recently to look into this. This is a rather neat experiment. It looks at how electron transport behaves when confined to 2D, with only the Coulombic forces at place, i.e. essentially "no" quantum effects.

But electrons in two dimensions can also behave as classical particles that interact only through the mutual repulsion of their negative charges. This occurs when they are spread much farther apart and has been difficult to achieve in the lab, so researchers are still seeing new phenomena. David Rees of RIKEN, a Japanese research institute, in Wako, Japan, and his colleagues, studied this regime using electrons floating above a liquid helium surface. At low temperatures, the electrons glide rapidly far above the surface--about 11 nanometers--and barely interact with it. At temperatures somewhat below 1 Kelvin, the repulsion between electrons generates a two-dimensional solid state known as a Wigner crystal. At higher temperatures the electrons act like a liquid.

Of course, this is significantly different than when QM effects kick in, whereby we get the fractional charge/quantum hall effect. It is interesting to note that we always think that to get quantum behavior, it usually requires difficult conditions. Here, it seems that it is difficult to see classical behavior clearly when the system has such a tendency to behave quantum mechanically.

Terrific experiment!

Zz.

[1] D.G. Rees et al., PRL v.106, p.026803 (2011).

Swiss Re Scientific Arguments Against Climate Change Skeptics

It is interesting to find out that now, even companies are considering the cost of not only Global Warming, but they are also now battling those who are skeptical of the anthropogenic origin of global warming. Swiss Re, which is the 2nd largest company in the word dealing with insurance, has evaluated the validity of global warming and its origin, and decided to present a detailed, scientific rebuttal against the skpetics. We're talking about argument-by-argument rebuttals with full citations to the sources.

And they're doing this not out of some social conscience, but rather, due to profit concerns that ignoring and denying what they consider to be a serious problem will be costly. This, btw, is consistent to an earlier analysis that the cost of being wrong about the anthropogenic origin of global warming is MORE than the cost of being wrong about the non-anthropogenic origin of global warming.

Source: Charles Day at PhysicsToday Blog.

Zz.

A University Creates Physics Ph.D Program

Here's a piece of news that bucked the trend nowadays of schools shutting down physics programs. The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma has approved the addition of a Ph.D program in physics. Enrollment will begin as soon as Fall 2011.

Three to five graduate students are expected to be accepted each year in order to maintain the department’s low student-to-faculty ratio and guarantee that students receive the individual attention which they have come to expect from TU.

The doctoral program is a natural addition to the department, which has offered a Master’s degree in physics and engineering physics for three years.

Hopefully, they'll be able to attract students, or even keep the ones they have in their Masters program. Still, this is one of those "unusual" stores that I didn't think that I would read, consider how schools, especially smaller ones, are struggling to keep many physics programs open.

Zz.

A Correction To The Definition Of "Siphon" Is Itself Incorrect?

Oh, this is turning into a comedy act!

If you recall, several months ago, a physicist in Australia spotted an error in Oxford Dictionary on the meaning of the word "siphon". The news of this discovery made minor headlines, especially on the web. The physicist offered an explanation of the effect.

Well, it turns out that that explanation itself may be incorrect, as presented by a professor and his student from the University of Hawaii at Hilo!

Dr. Stephen Hughes of Queensland University of Technology proposed that the unnatural upward flow of fluid that occurs within a siphon is caused by the difference in weight between the longer and shorter portions of fluid chains that move through the device. Binder and Richert surveyed historical siphon demonstrations and designed and performed several critical experiments.

In one of their setups, they managed to make water flow up the longer leg of a siphon and down the shorter one. They concluded that fluid flows up due to a higher pressure at the siphon entrance than at the bend, and upon reaching the bend the fluid is pulled down by gravity. The Hilo-based researchers have proposed a more precise dictionary definition that acknowledges both pressure and gravity as essential ingredients of the siphon mechanism but does not mention fluid chains or leg lengths.

Binder, an established researcher in the fields of chaos and complex systems, says that “nature has had her final word” through the outcomes of the experiments he and his student ran. He also remarks that the original story was quite appealing, and spread like fire through cyberspace with relatively little scrutiny: “it’s not true just because you read it on the web.”

That press release also gives you a link to get the actual article.

OK, let's see who is going to bid higher next time?! :)

Zz.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter - The "Placeholders" of Our Time

Ars Technica has a terrific article on the nature and process of discovery in science. It describes the role of what is called "placeholder", where we assign to something, and giving it a name, of a phenomena or idea that we could not yet verify, or has any empirical evidence.

I think a lot of people, especially those who are outside of science, do not understand that it often takes a lot of time, a lot of observations, and a lot of discussion back-and-forth, before we can actually proclaim something to be well-known and come to a consensus. And when something is as difficult to test and study, such as dark matter and dark energy, the length of time involved will be even longer. And also consider that, for science to claim that we understand or have discovered something, the criteria for such claim is extremely stringent! Unlike politicians and TV personalities that seem to have no problem proclaiming that such-and-such will improve our lives or create jobs, etc. with utter certainty, science requires a lot of verification for something to be accepted as well-understood. Not only must the phenomenon be verified to be happening, but a mechanism to describe how it happened must also be in place. So it requires both experimental and theoretical aspects of the phenomenon to agree with each other. This is not easy!

Zz.

Bears Versus Packers - Physics and Football Shared History

OK, a bit of background info for those not familiar with American Football, and those who are not into sports. The Chicago Bears football team will be playing against the Green Bay Packers tomorrow (Sunday) in a football playoff to determine who will go to the Superbowl (the championship game). These two teams, the Bears and the Packers, are arch rivals, sharing a long history and tradition in this sports, very much like, say, Manchester United and Liverpool in UK soccer.

Strangely enough, they haven't met each other that much in the playoffs, even though they of course play each other at least twice during the regular season. In fact, the last time they met in the playoffs was in 1941..... 1941.... hum, doesn't that year ring a bell to science historian?

Well, by golly, that does ring a bell. In this news article, the significance of that year connects the significance of the Bears-Packers last encounter here in the Chicago area.

The achievement that South Side statue commemorates was made by an Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi. He arrived at the University of Chicago shortly after the Bears beat the Packers on Dec. 14, 1941, and built a uranium pile underneath the stands of Stagg Field, the university's football stadium, that unleashed the power of the atom.

There ya go! The last time these two teams met in the playoffs, a monumental event took place after that. I wonder what earth-shattering discovery will take place after this one! :)

Zz.

Be Careful On Who You Called As "The Most Famous Physicist Ever"

It turns out that the LA Times caught some flak from bloggers and readers when, in reporting Hawking's visit to CalTech recently, they included a description/caption proclaiming him as the most famous physicist ever. Of course, this raised the ire with many people.

To their credit, though, they did apologize for the silly "error":

"How embarrassing," Health and Science Editor Rosie Mestel said in an e-mail. "We carelessly wrote in the article 'Hawking is perhaps the best-known physicist ever' when we meant to say 'perhaps the best-known physicist ALIVE.' (We were moving fast.) When the caption for the photo was written, much like in a game of telephone, our misstatement was ramped up to 'probably the most famous.' We certainly meant no disrespect to Einstein and Newton, of whom we have indeed heard."

Hawking Assistant Managing Editor Henry Fuhrmann, who oversees the copy editors who write the headlines and captions and perform the final editing, likewise expressed regret:

I don't know if most famous or best-known is of any significance, at least to a scientist. Most cited would be something of significance. And in my book, most influential would also be something of significance.

Zz.

APS Announces PRX

The American Physical Society, publisher of the Physical Review journals, announced today of the creation of a new open access journal, Physical Review X.

As broad in scope as physics itself, PRX will publish original, high quality, scientifically sound research that advances physics and will be of value to the global multidisciplinary readership. PRX will provide validation through prompt and rigorous peer review, and an open access venue in accord with the strong reputation of the Physical Review family of publications.

Note that the APS already has two journals that are available online for free. These are the Physical Review Special Topics journal, which covers Accelerator and Beams, and the other on Education Research.

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Horrible Article On Becoming A Physicist

I probably shouldn't waste my time on something like this. But if *I* can find such article easily, someone else who might really be looking for information can find it as well. So leaving it as it is will be an utter disservice.

This person by the name of "Timothy Sexton" (BA in English) somehow thought that he could write an article titled "How to Become a Physicist and What to Expect when You Become One". Now, before we examine his article, tell me something. What are the chances that someone who has never obtained a degree in physics, and has never worked in physics, would know well enough what one needs to do to become a physics, and then know what to expect when one becomes a physicist? That's like me writing an article on how to become a lawyer ("Yes, you should get a law degree first, and then take the bar exam"), and then what to expect when you become a lawyer ("Oh, just file lawsuits against a lot of people!"). Not only does he not have first hand knowledge of what he's writing, it appears that he also hasn't been doing his homework, or talking to other physicists about it.

There are several glaring mistakes, and others that make you go "Huh?". For example:

Get yourself a bachelor's degree in physics and then get a master's degree in physics and then get yourself a doctorate if you want to be anywhere near the top of the ladder. If you are interested merely in teaching physics, you can get a job somewhere with just the B.A. A Master's in physics may net you a community college professorship or a research position, but it's not the road toward becoming the next Einstein or Stephen Hawking.

There is this silly notion that (i) you need a Ph.D to become the next Einstein or Hawking, and (ii) everyone with a Ph.D aims for, or must become, the next Einstein or Hawking. This is ludicrous. That's like saying all lawyers must become the next Supreme Court justices, failure of which must mean that your career is insignificant. Phooey!

But the biggest mistake comes in the next page when he revealed clearly of his ignorance about the world of physics:

Decide if you want to pursue the arena of theoretical physics. Theoretical physics covers the waterfront known as exploration of the very essence of the universe. Theoretical physicists look to understand how the universe began, go to where it is now and where it is going. To get a good job as a theoretical physicist where you engage in research and development based on the expansion of knowledge about the universe's origins, you'll need a doctorate. Even a Master's from the Univ. of Chicago isn't going to cut it. If you don't want to become a theoretical physicist, then decide on a discipline to pursue. Among the fields that a physicist can find work in are atomic and molecular physics, optics, acoustics, nuclear energy, plasma, superconductivity, crystallography and biophysics.

This is obviously wrong. Atomic and molecular physics, optics, nuclear physics, plasma physics, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY, etc.. etc.. all have theoretical work and have theorists. Phil Anderson, Bob Laughlin, John Bardeen are all theorists in condensed matter who have won Nobel Prizes in it. This person thinks that only cosmologists and probably elementary particle physicists are "theorists".

The rest of the article gave some superficial description about job prospects, and managed to include some rather incendiary remarks, such as:

Your best friend from physics class in high school may be conducting research aimed at developing more practical applications that all those people who you view as intellectually inferior can enjoy.

Even as a physicist, it took me a lot of effort and a lot of time to actually write my article "So You Want To Be A Physicist". It wasn't easy, and even in its current form, I still think I missed quite a bit of stuff that I will eventually include into the article. And this is coming from someone who went through the process. It boggles my mind that some people simply have no qualm about writing on something which they almost know nothing about. But I suppose that is no different than, say, Deepak Chopra or the author of "The Secret", who latched on quantum mechanics to justify their ideas, as IF they've actually understood QM. There are just too many people who really do not care about the quality and level of their knowledge, but yet, have no problems in using those in ridiculous ways.

Zz.

The Humongous Computing Task of the LHC

We should not forget that besides the scientific achievement of the LHC, the task of handling the humongous amount of data coming it at such a rapid rate in itself pushes the computing knowledge and ability to a new level. By itself, it forces new innovation in data handling and computing techniques that many commercial companies simply can't do. Yet, this is something we need to know if our technological needs are to continue to expand.

This news article (link may be open for free only for a limited time) examines the astounding effort in piping out data gathered from the ATLAS detector, and how many groups around the world are working together to handle such volume and analysis.

Even after rejecting 199,999 of every 200,000 collisions, the detector churns out 19 gigabytes of data in the first minute. In total, ATLAS and the three other main detectors at the LHC produced 13 petabytes (13 × 1015 bytes) of data in 2010, which would fill a stack of CDs around 14 kilometres high. That rate outstrips any other scientific effort going on today, even in data-rich fields such as genomics and climate science (see Nature 455, 16–21; 2008). And the analyses are more complex too. Particle physicists must study millions of collisions at once to find the signals buried in them — information on dark matter, extra dimensions and new particles that could plug holes in current models of the Universe. Their primary quarry is the Higgs boson, a particle thought to have a central role in determining the mass of all other known particles.

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Reality Check at the LHC

This is a wonderful article about what we have obtained so far from the experiments at the LHC, or in particular, at the CMS detector. It seems that from the run of several months, several tighter limits have been imposed on a number of theories.

It is still early days at the LHC, but the 27 km-circumference machine's first year of smashing protons into each other at record energies is beginning to tame theorists' imaginations. Researchers on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, for example, have reported that, at the energies probed so far, quarks do not exhibit substructure (arXiv:1010.4439), exotic particles such as colorons and E6 diquarks have not shown up (arXiv:1010.0203) – and nor have leptoquarks (arXiv:1012.4031) or new heavy gauge bosons (arXiv:1012.5945) either. Although these entities cannot be ruled out completely, LHC data have allowed them less room to hide – principally by allowing researchers to place stringent limits on the particles' masses.

I definitely can't wait for the LHC to really get to the 14 TeV energy. I can see a lot of interesting stuff, even if all it does is rule out a lot of hot air theories floating around.

Oh, btw, notice that the Higgs is barely even mentioned in this article. For anyone who thinks that the LHC has only a single mission to look for this overhyped particle, this article should set you straight once and for all.

Zz.

The Physics of Scotch Tape

Anyone who has been reading this blog for any considerable period of time would know that I love, LOVE reading on or studying small, "mundane" things. This is what got me interested in physics in the first place. So I read with glee and fascination at this Symmetry Breaking article on scotch tape.

I'm sure many of you have heard of the original discovery that peeling a scotch tape could, in some case, create x-rays. So this article examines it even more closely based on a very simple, seat-of-the-pants type experiment done at Maryland.

Amazing creativity and again, I absolutely love reading things like this where there's something fascinating going on that one can study with relatively simple setup. I am definitely curious to know the origin and mechanism that cause the emitted electrons to have such high energy.

Zz.

"It's A Shame To Shut It Down"

That's what Lisa Randall said on the imminent shut down of the Tevatron this coming September. Her quote is part of another examination of the history of the Tevatron and the fate of high energy physics program in the US in an article in the NY Times.

Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and vice president of the American Physical Society, said American scientists were struggling to adjust to a world in which Europe and Asia are attaining parity with the United States. “We are used to dominating in science,” Dr. Turner said. “We seem to be unable to make decisions, and instead continue to chase every opportunity, in the end doing nothing.”

While the fall of any civilization from the peak of its golden age can be slow and subtle, I wonder if, 100 years from now, history might mark this period of time as a milestone where the US dominance in science, and its peak in the dominant world power in knowledge, economics, and politics begin their downfall. There are certainly a lot of tell-tale signs for that, despite the political rhetoric.

Zz.

More on the Mpemba Effect

This effect seems to have a life of its own, and certainly generating a lot of interesting discussion and experiments. I've mentioned previously on such studies that studied this effect more closely. Well now comes another one, and this one has a slight twist to it[1].

Abstract: Unlike most of the research on the Mpemba effect which has focused on verifying the observation that warm water freezes faster than cold water, our work quantitatively investigates the rates at which hot and cold water cool and the point at which hot water reaches a lower temperature than cold water under a set of external conditions. Using a vacuum pump to cool samples of water initially at different temperatures, we measured reproducible temperature values at which hot and cold water equilibrate. We have confirmed that warmer water indeed cools at a faster rate than colder water and that, surprisingly, this trend continues past the point where the temperatures of the two samples are the same. Our results show that when using optimal initial temperature conditions, the crossover temperature is found to be 2.7 oC whereas our other set of initial conditions gave a crossover temperature of -0.07 oC. These data taken together provide a definite quantitative evidence of the Mpemba effect.

There you have it. We just have to wait and see if this gets published.

Zz.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.2684