Sunday, September 26, 2004
NeoPOD
Its name sounds like an iPOD but it actually looks like an iPHONE. You should try it anyway. ;-)
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Aral Sea: 2003-2007
The image changes when your mouse hovers over the link 2003 or 2007
Aral sea in 2003 and 2007:
This is what I call a visible change. I took the 2007 picture from Google Maps. See also Reviving Aral Sea, a story about the partial undoing of communism.
A 30-feet sea level rise in a few years seems to be a better thing than a centrally organized environmentalist attempt to make the a huge territory more friendly to life and agriculture.
The Aral Sea has been used as a rather extreme laboratory. The salinity in the ocean is 3.5 percent. In the Aral Sea, it was about 35 percent. ;-) This is the approximate value of salinity where problems start to be apparent. Nevertheless, the drought itself was still higher a problem than the huge salinity.
Aral sea in 2003 and 2007:
This is what I call a visible change. I took the 2007 picture from Google Maps. See also Reviving Aral Sea, a story about the partial undoing of communism.
A 30-feet sea level rise in a few years seems to be a better thing than a centrally organized environmentalist attempt to make the a huge territory more friendly to life and agriculture.
The Aral Sea has been used as a rather extreme laboratory. The salinity in the ocean is 3.5 percent. In the Aral Sea, it was about 35 percent. ;-) This is the approximate value of salinity where problems start to be apparent. Nevertheless, the drought itself was still higher a problem than the huge salinity.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Status of string field theory
Sci.physics.strings
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Urs Schreiber wrote (in the "Background independence" thread):
SFT used to be a very natural candidate for a full formulation of string theory. It is the closest thing to "field theory" that one can have - a field theory with infinitely many fields, if you decompose the string field into component fields. From this point of view, it looks "background independent" to many critics - and it is "off-shell", which means that it sort of *has* local Green's functions, not just the S-matrix, which is something that has extensively been used in the study of tachyon condensation.
This ambitious program has only been partially successful. First of all, a non perturbatively complete theory should be defined with an exact form of the action etc., not just a perturbative approximation of it. However, closed string field theory requires to add correcting terms to the action at each order (as well as the BV machinery). The action is therefore an expansion itself, and it can have various non-perturbative completions. Not a good starting point for a non-perturbatively complete theory.
All these reasons led the people to focus on the open string field theory whose action can be well-defined - e.g. the cubic (polynomial) Witten's action; it is enough to get the full amplitudes and cover the full Riemann surface moduli spaces. Can one see all physics of string theory in it? Well, the first problem are the closed string states. They can be seen as poles in open string scattering, but as far as I know, no one has made a convincing construction of the closed strings as composites of the open string fields so far. The understanding of the closed strings would have to improve a lot so that one could also construct non-trivial geometric configurations including NS21-branes (or NS5-branes) etc. in open SFT.
Another question are the D-branes. Using the modern perspective, the open strings themselves describe dynamics of a spacetime filling D-brane. Sen's insights made it expected that one can construct the lower dimensional branes as classical solutions of open string field theory.
String field theory has nevertheless been made less natural by the results of the Duality revolution - its degrees of freedom are made of strings, but at a generic point in the moduli space, there should be brane democracy and strings are equally (non-)fundamental as other objects. If string field theory becomes a good starting point for a full formulation, one must ask several obvious questions.
Are the S-dualities and the strong coupling limit derivable from this generalized SFT? For example, can one derive that the strong coupling limit of a type IIA string theory is eleven-dimensional, and type IIB is S-self-dual?
The answers must be yes if the generalized SFT is gonna become non-perturbatively successful. Well, there are still two basic pictures how this could happen:
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Urs Schreiber wrote (in the "Background independence" thread):
But for something different: You mentioned recently the failure of SFT to capture certain non-perturbative degrees of freedom. Is it conceivable that one can somehow "augment" SFT in a nice way to include these?This is a very interesting question, I think. Let me say a couple of related opinions of mine plus facts.
SFT used to be a very natural candidate for a full formulation of string theory. It is the closest thing to "field theory" that one can have - a field theory with infinitely many fields, if you decompose the string field into component fields. From this point of view, it looks "background independent" to many critics - and it is "off-shell", which means that it sort of *has* local Green's functions, not just the S-matrix, which is something that has extensively been used in the study of tachyon condensation.
This ambitious program has only been partially successful. First of all, a non perturbatively complete theory should be defined with an exact form of the action etc., not just a perturbative approximation of it. However, closed string field theory requires to add correcting terms to the action at each order (as well as the BV machinery). The action is therefore an expansion itself, and it can have various non-perturbative completions. Not a good starting point for a non-perturbatively complete theory.
All these reasons led the people to focus on the open string field theory whose action can be well-defined - e.g. the cubic (polynomial) Witten's action; it is enough to get the full amplitudes and cover the full Riemann surface moduli spaces. Can one see all physics of string theory in it? Well, the first problem are the closed string states. They can be seen as poles in open string scattering, but as far as I know, no one has made a convincing construction of the closed strings as composites of the open string fields so far. The understanding of the closed strings would have to improve a lot so that one could also construct non-trivial geometric configurations including NS21-branes (or NS5-branes) etc. in open SFT.
Another question are the D-branes. Using the modern perspective, the open strings themselves describe dynamics of a spacetime filling D-brane. Sen's insights made it expected that one can construct the lower dimensional branes as classical solutions of open string field theory.
String field theory has nevertheless been made less natural by the results of the Duality revolution - its degrees of freedom are made of strings, but at a generic point in the moduli space, there should be brane democracy and strings are equally (non-)fundamental as other objects. If string field theory becomes a good starting point for a full formulation, one must ask several obvious questions.
Are the S-dualities and the strong coupling limit derivable from this generalized SFT? For example, can one derive that the strong coupling limit of a type IIA string theory is eleven-dimensional, and type IIB is S-self-dual?
The answers must be yes if the generalized SFT is gonna become non-perturbatively successful. Well, there are still two basic pictures how this could happen:
- One would still be using the same string fields, even at strong coupling, and there are non-trivial functions or transformations of these string fields that can be used to define the S-dual strings, or the 11-dimensional physics, and so on.
I think that this viewpoint has become a bit obsolete after the strong coupling revolutions of the 1990s. At strong coupling, the original degrees of freedom are strongly coupled, physics becomes obscure if we use them. They are not too useful, and moreover we have learned that there can be better degrees of freedom that become weakly coupled. They are typically infinitely heavy in the weakly coupled limit, and therefore they are absent.
In field theory it is legitimate to imagine - for example in QCD - that the fundamental UV fields are the gluons and quarks, and the IR physics is whatever is implied. The gluons are superuseful in the UV - because of the asymptotic freedom - but their physics can be extrapolated to low energies. But we know that there is an asymmetry - the IR can be derived from the UV, but not quite the other way around. Therefore the analogy with strings, that are good variables at the weak coupling, is not quite perfect - because the strong and weak coupling may be totally equivalent.
The lessons of the 1990s seem to indicate that we should not try to push the validity of some degrees of freedom to too strong couplings. - Of course, the second choice is that at generic coupling, there could be new generalized degrees of freedom, whose structure itself is determined, together with the action or whatever replaces it, by some self-consistent rules. These degrees of freedom, determined by the deeper rules, would have to reduce to the usual perturbative strings in each weakly-coupled stringy limit.
While this second option is highly unusual, I believe that it is plausible and attractive. It is unusual because we have not constructed a single theory whose degrees of freedom are themselves determined by deeper rules, dynamically. We always start with some well-defined degrees of freedom, with a well-defined action or something equivalent. Such theories can have many interesting regimes and behaviors, but they cannot be quite universal.
In the perturbative limit we kind of know what are the rules that determine the allowed degrees of freedom and the action: the rules are the usual axioms of conformal field theory. The conformal symmetry constrains both the worldsheet field content as well as the action. But is there a non-perturbative generalization of this nice structure?
What happens with the worldsheet as you increase the coupling? Well, it transmutes into a M-volume, which is the worldvolume of M, which is the non-perturbative generalization of a string. ;-) The worldsheet becomes a bit fuzzy, non-local, its dimension may effectively grow (strings become membranes, but don't imagine quite local membranes). I think that its internal dynamics is itself target space dynamics of some other string theory; I have the N=2 and N=(2,1) string in mind.
We know that this complicated structure of the worldsheet theory *does* occur in some context: the worldsheet of a D-string at weak coupling,in which the D-string is superheavy, is described by open string theory - all open strings attached to the D-string with the whole Hagedorn tower of excitations are relevant. Nevertheless this D-string can be continued to something we call the fundamental string.
There should be some more general description of the allowed worldvolume theories of objects, including non-geometrical ones - and the rules would non-perturbatively generalize conformal field theory.
I've spent some time with thinking about the form of such a possible generalization. Try to think about a more general theory that has a BRST operator and the state-operator correspondence, but you relax the assumption that it is a local two-dimensional theory. It can be a theory of any dimension, with fuzzy dynamics, matrices, whatever you want. Just try to require that something as strong as the requirement of conformal symmetry applies, and the conformal symmetry itself appears as a limit of this requirement for the special case of weakly coupled backgrounds...
... One more comment. There have been some Japanese papers that studied the behavior of the boundary states under the closed-string Kyoto-group-like SFT star product; the boundary states act as projectors, roughly speaking. This sort of thinking, even though it is formal, looks like an important step towards obtaining the non-perturbative generalization of CFT mentioned above. Today, our consistency requirements for closed strings and open strings follow similar logic, but technically they are different.
The allowed spectrum of D-branes must follow Cardy's rules, and so forth. What I would like to see is to derive Cardy's rules as something like the (generalized) closed string (M) equations of motion applied on the closed string field whose vev happens to be the (total) boundary state. Adding a D-brane is a deformation of the background, and it does correspond to a change of the two-dimensional CFT. Well, the change is that we allow some new boundaries. Formally, it is analogous to adding the vertex operator for the boundary state into the 2D action although I realize that there are technical difficulties in making this procedure well-defined (but definitely, this is how the D-brane is seen from far away, as a deformation of the closed string background; in this case, we can restrict the boundary state to its lowest components).
Now imagine that the coupling becomes larger. Adding a D1-brane in type IIB becomes equivalent to adding a light string if the coupling is really large - by S-duality. But adding a fundamental string is a local change of the 2D action. Recall that adding the D-brane was a non-local change: we allowed the worldsheets to have boundaries. The goal is to describe a structure that interpolates between this local modification of the 2D action (adding a fundamental string) and a non-local modification (allowing D-branes). The worldsheet itself should become fuzzy; the distinction between local and non-local must go away at the generic coupling. But what is exactly the theory at the generic point, and how do you constrain it?
This is a sort of bootstrap thinking, but maybe not so impossible - it may be just a generalization of CFTs.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Kyoto count-up
I have removed this script, based on USD 150 billion per year and 0.07 °C of cooling per 50 years, because of complications with hosting services.
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Judging books by the cover
Richard Feynman
... For example, there was a book that started out with four pictures: first there was a wind-up toy; then there was an automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture, it said "What makes it go?"
I thought, I know what it is: They're going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of an automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.
It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: "What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining." And then we would have fun discussing it:
"No, the toy goes becaues the spring is wound up, I would say.
"How did the spring get would up" he would ask.
"I wound it up"
"And how did you get moving?"
"From eating"
"And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it's because the sun is shining that all these things are moving" That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun's power.
I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, "Energy makes it go." And for the boy on the bicycle, "Energy makes it go." For everything "Energy makes it go."
Now that doesn't mean anything. Suppose it's "Global warming." That's the general principle: "Global warming makes it go." There is no knowledge coming in. The child doesn't learn anything; it's just a word.
What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind "energy". Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.
It is also not even true that "energy makes it go", because if it stops, you could say, "energy makes it stop" just as well. What they're talking about is concentrated energy being transformed into more dilute forms, which is a very subtle aspect of energy. Energy is neither increased nor decreased in these examples; it's just changed from one form to another. And when the things stop, the energy is changed into heat, into general chaos.
(Global warming used to be called "Wakalixes".)
... For example, there was a book that started out with four pictures: first there was a wind-up toy; then there was an automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture, it said "What makes it go?"
I thought, I know what it is: They're going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of an automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.
It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: "What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining." And then we would have fun discussing it:
"No, the toy goes becaues the spring is wound up, I would say.
"How did the spring get would up" he would ask.
"I wound it up"
"And how did you get moving?"
"From eating"
"And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it's because the sun is shining that all these things are moving" That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun's power.
I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, "Energy makes it go." And for the boy on the bicycle, "Energy makes it go." For everything "Energy makes it go."
Now that doesn't mean anything. Suppose it's "Global warming." That's the general principle: "Global warming makes it go." There is no knowledge coming in. The child doesn't learn anything; it's just a word.
What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind "energy". Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.
It is also not even true that "energy makes it go", because if it stops, you could say, "energy makes it stop" just as well. What they're talking about is concentrated energy being transformed into more dilute forms, which is a very subtle aspect of energy. Energy is neither increased nor decreased in these examples; it's just changed from one form to another. And when the things stop, the energy is changed into heat, into general chaos.
(Global warming used to be called "Wakalixes".)
Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Sun spot number: correlation with global warming
Solar variations and cosmic rays may be driving climate change
See also: correlation between sea level rise and solar activity
The picture above shows the number of sunspots in the past. Note that there is a natural 11-year-long cycle and this basic solar variation cycle is modulated by a signal whose timescale is comparable to 400 years. Note the Maunder minimum - click the picture to learn more about it - during 1650-1700. It happens to kind of agree with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age. Also, the number of sunspots in recent years reached the 1000-year high.
At longer, geological timescales, there seems to be a rather impressive inverse correlation between the number of cosmic rays and the temperature. The more cosmic rays, the more clouds they help to create, and the cooler temperatures you get. Lower clouds have a cooling effect while high clouds have a warming effect.
Click the figure below - from a paper by Shaviv and Veizer - to get much more information about it from Nir Shaviv's website.
The graph above shows a period of 140 million years or so. In fact, all kinds of geophysical and astronomical records indicate that the period was around 140 million years and the coldest moment of the cycle appeared in 70% of each cycle. This fact, captured by the picture below, shows that the cosmic-climate link is rather robust:
A paper by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen - click the graph below to see the full article in PDF - shows a close correlation between the cloud cover (thick line in the middle of the range) and cosmic ray flux in Climax, Colorado (thin line):
The thick line doesn't continue to the present and you may ask whether the agreement continued to hold. Here is the updated graph of the same correlation from Shaviv 2005:
It is useful to know that a lot of changes have been taking place in the Sun. For example, the Sun's coronal magnetic field has doubled in the last 100 years, see e.g. Lockwood et al.
Video 1: Defending the sun-climate link. Original video's music by Rammstein (Die Sonne). Clip by iloveemo1984. The video was removed from YouTube, officially because of Wag TV copyrights. The company however denies such a request, indicating that it was removed because of the pressure from the global warming sect.
Also, in 1991, Friis-Christensen and Lassen have found a remarkable inverse correlation between the length of the 11-year solar cycle and temperature. See the graph below. Click it to get to their paper in Science.
The shorter the cycle whose average length is about 11 years is, the more magnetically active the Sun is expected to be. A lecture about solar effects on the climate includes the graph above.
You may also want to read about recent experiments meant to directly measure the ability of cosmic rays to influence cloud formation: CLOUD experiment at CERN (with some linked papers about the cosmic connections with the climate), SKY experiment in Denmark. It's not the first time when the link between clouds and cosmic rays is supported by experimental evidence: see a German experiment from 2002.
The magnetic field of the Sun - that becomes stronger when there are many sunspots - is probably screening the Solar System from cosmic rays. More sunspots means less cosmic rays which means less clouds which means warmer temperatures. This basic paradigm was promoted in Martin Durkin's 2007 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle.
You may also want to click the "heliophysics" sticker to see many more articles related to physics of the Sun - many of them are about the climate. There are two replies to a recent anti-cosmic article by Lockwood and Fröhlich, written by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen and by Nir Shaviv, respectively.
Additional well-known climate articles on The Reference Frame
See also: correlation between sea level rise and solar activity
The picture above shows the number of sunspots in the past. Note that there is a natural 11-year-long cycle and this basic solar variation cycle is modulated by a signal whose timescale is comparable to 400 years. Note the Maunder minimum - click the picture to learn more about it - during 1650-1700. It happens to kind of agree with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age. Also, the number of sunspots in recent years reached the 1000-year high.
Commercial: Nigel Worthington's notes on climate change (click)Click the picture below to zoom it in.
At longer, geological timescales, there seems to be a rather impressive inverse correlation between the number of cosmic rays and the temperature. The more cosmic rays, the more clouds they help to create, and the cooler temperatures you get. Lower clouds have a cooling effect while high clouds have a warming effect.
Click the figure below - from a paper by Shaviv and Veizer - to get much more information about it from Nir Shaviv's website.
The graph above shows a period of 140 million years or so. In fact, all kinds of geophysical and astronomical records indicate that the period was around 140 million years and the coldest moment of the cycle appeared in 70% of each cycle. This fact, captured by the picture below, shows that the cosmic-climate link is rather robust:
A paper by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen - click the graph below to see the full article in PDF - shows a close correlation between the cloud cover (thick line in the middle of the range) and cosmic ray flux in Climax, Colorado (thin line):
The thick line doesn't continue to the present and you may ask whether the agreement continued to hold. Here is the updated graph of the same correlation from Shaviv 2005:
It is useful to know that a lot of changes have been taking place in the Sun. For example, the Sun's coronal magnetic field has doubled in the last 100 years, see e.g. Lockwood et al.
Video 1: Defending the sun-climate link. Original video's music by Rammstein (Die Sonne). Clip by iloveemo1984. The video was removed from YouTube, officially because of Wag TV copyrights. The company however denies such a request, indicating that it was removed because of the pressure from the global warming sect.
Also, in 1991, Friis-Christensen and Lassen have found a remarkable inverse correlation between the length of the 11-year solar cycle and temperature. See the graph below. Click it to get to their paper in Science.
The shorter the cycle whose average length is about 11 years is, the more magnetically active the Sun is expected to be. A lecture about solar effects on the climate includes the graph above.
You may also want to read about recent experiments meant to directly measure the ability of cosmic rays to influence cloud formation: CLOUD experiment at CERN (with some linked papers about the cosmic connections with the climate), SKY experiment in Denmark. It's not the first time when the link between clouds and cosmic rays is supported by experimental evidence: see a German experiment from 2002.
The magnetic field of the Sun - that becomes stronger when there are many sunspots - is probably screening the Solar System from cosmic rays. More sunspots means less cosmic rays which means less clouds which means warmer temperatures. This basic paradigm was promoted in Martin Durkin's 2007 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle.
You may also want to click the "heliophysics" sticker to see many more articles related to physics of the Sun - many of them are about the climate. There are two replies to a recent anti-cosmic article by Lockwood and Fröhlich, written by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen and by Nir Shaviv, respectively.
Additional well-known climate articles on The Reference Frame
Friday, September 3, 2004
Thursday, September 2, 2004
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
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