David Van Os announced Saturday at the Progressive Populists caucus that he would run for Attorney General of Texas in 2006, taking on incumbent Republican Greg Abbott.
Fresh off a couple of bruising smackdowns (Van Os was Lt. Col. Bill Burkett's lawyer -- he of CBS National Guard memo fame -- and was defeated by Scott Brister for a place on Texas' Supreme Court just last November) it's nice to see this man get back in the ring again. Some on our side of the aisle are lesser fans of David's than I, but none would -- or should -- quarrel if he's able to pull off the upset.
He's started a blog, A Fighting Democrat, that will keep you posted on his activities.
So an update of announced Democratic candidates for 2006 includes Chris Bell (governor), Barbara Radnofsky (US Senate), Van Os and Richard Morrison (hasn't officially announced but the groundwork is ongoing) taking on Tom DeLay again.
Time to start collecting those nickels and dimes and sending them in the proper (not right) direction...
Update: I should correct myself and say that Chris Bell has only formed an exploratory committee to run for governor and not (yet, if at all) announced his candidacy. And Vince over at Burnt Orange Report has a better wrap-up, including the plans of Ron Kirk, Jim Turner, and others.
Monday, February 28, 2005
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Wick rotation
In the discussion under the article The entropic principle about the recent paper by Ooguri, Vafa, and Verlinde, there has been a significant opposition of many participants against the concept of the Wick rotation - one invented by a renowned and virtually unknown physicist Gian-Carlo Wick. They were saying that this mathematical method can't be trusted; they were comparing the use of the Wick rotation to the idea that physical theories should not be tested experimentally. Because I believe that most of this criticism is unfair and the Wick rotation is a useful, and in many cases essential mathematical tool to calculate the physical predictions of a quantum theory, let me dedicate a special article to this issue. Peter Woit added his comments about the Wick rotation, too.
First of all, a summary
The Wick rotation is a calculational trick in quantum theory in which we assume that the energy or the time are pure imaginary. We do the calculations given these assumptions, which are often more well-defined, and then analytically continue the results back the usual real values of time and/or energy. It works. But let's now look at the situation a little bit more closely.
Behavior of path integrals
According to Feynman's approach to quantum mechanics, the probability amplitudes may be calculated as the sum (well, a path integral) over all conceivable classical histories of the physical system. Each of them is weighted by
First of all, a summary
The Wick rotation is a calculational trick in quantum theory in which we assume that the energy or the time are pure imaginary. We do the calculations given these assumptions, which are often more well-defined, and then analytically continue the results back the usual real values of time and/or energy. It works. But let's now look at the situation a little bit more closely.
Behavior of path integrals
According to Feynman's approach to quantum mechanics, the probability amplitudes may be calculated as the sum (well, a path integral) over all conceivable classical histories of the physical system. Each of them is weighted by
- exp (i.S/hbar)
where "S" is the classical action calculated for this history. As you can see, the absolute value of this weight is always equal to one as long as "S" is real. From a naive viewpoint, that does not seem to be a good starting point for a convergent integral; the integral keeps on oscillating. Convergence is improved if we add a small negative real part to the exponent. Write the action as
- S = int dt L
and imagine that "dt" has a small imaginary part. You obtain the weight
- exp (i.(int dt (1+i.epsilon)).L/hbar).
Because of the term proportional to "-epsilon" in the exponent (i.e. because of the factor "exp(-epsilon.S)", roughly speaking, the contribution of the configurations with a large action will be exponentially damped, and the convergence will improve. This regularization is applied both to ordinary quantum mechanics as well as quantum field theory. In the latter case, it's the origin of the "i.epsilon" prescriptions for the propagators etc. While the naive Feynman's prescription is obviously reproduced for "epsilon" going to zero, a tiny nonzero value of "epsilon" is essential for making the path integral convergent.
The Wick rotation
This was not the Wick rotation yet, but I hope that the inevitability of this "epsilon" treatment is obvious to everyone: the simple prescription of Feynman is a heuristic inspiration, and the oscillating path integral must be regulated in some innocent way. The "i.epsilon" prescription is the way that preserves all symmetries. Not a big deal. Now let's look at the real Wick rotation.
Imagine that the degrees of freedom in your theory - either quantum mechanics or quantum field theory - are defined not only for real values of time "t", but for complex values. The action is the integral "int dt L". Let's now integrate over a contour in the "t" complex plane, while the time-derivatives in the Lagrangian should also be treated as derivatives with respect to this "dt" which is complex. If the contour is taken to be in the purely imaginary direction, "dt" in the integral will get an extra factor of "i", while the terms bilinear in the time-derivative will flip their sign. One of the results is that the weight of the configuration is effectively changed to
- exp(-S_E/hbar)
where "S_E" is a "Euclidean" action, which is typically a non-negative number; its definition differs from the usual action by changed signs of the kinetic terms that are bilinear in time derivatives, and the overall sign. You see that this exponential dies away if "S_E" becomes large. The contributions decrease very quickly as "S_E" grows and the path integral is even "more convergent" than in the "epsilon" example at the beginning.
What is the physical meaning of these operations? We're essentially continuing the physical results analytically to complex values of time "t". For example, the evolution operator
- exp (H.t/i.hbar)
is continued - if we substitute "t = -i.beta.hbar" - into the density matrix
- exp (-beta.H)
describing the thermal ensemble at temperature "T = 1/beta". Note that the exponential is a holomorphic function. Therefore, the evolution operator "exp (H.t/i.hbar)" is a holomorphic function of the complex variable "t". The matrix elements of it and other physically relevant observables will be holomorphic functions, too. Note that we're not doing anything that would contradict experiments or something like that. We're just using the fact that it is possible to calculate various other functions of a well-defined operator "H". Equivalently, in the path-integral language, it is possible to calculate various other, more convergent quantities out of a formula for the action.
Wick rotation in quantum field theory
In relativistic quantum field theory, the Wick rotation is particularly useful. The analytical continuation of "t" into purely imaginary value effectively converts the Minkowski spacetime into the Euclidean spacetime.
(For time-dependent backgrounds, the nature of the Wick rotation is more subtle. However, locally in spacetime, it's the same problem as in the Minkowski space, and globally, it's likely that we may be forced to learn how to do the Wick rotation even in these more subtle backgrounds in order to get final results. The continuation to imaginary time is definitely important even for time-dependent backgrounds. For example, Maloney, Strominger, and Yin have used the Wick rotation to understand physics of a very specific time-dependent background in string theory.)
Why is it so? Note that Einstein's favorite formula to write down the Lorentz-invariant line interval was
- ds^2 = dx_1^2 + dx_2^2 + dx_3^4 + dx_4^2
where "x_4 = i.c.t". Notice that this formula has the form of the ordinary Pythagorian theorem in four dimensions, except for the pure imaginary value of "x_4". Now it's obvious what we're going to do. If we're interested in the Green's functions, we first calculate them in the Euclidean spacetime where "x_4" is real. We express them using the four-dimensional momenta "k" via the Fourier transform, and analytically continue to a pure imaginary value of "k_4" (to be interpreted as "i.k_0" in the Minkowski space).
The Wick rotation is legal
It is legitimate simply because the physical quantities expressed as functions of the momenta are naturally seen to be holomorphic functions of the momenta. Well, up to some singular points. One can see that the only allowed singular points in the physical quantities expressed as functions of the momenta - in the propagators, for example - are simple poles (corresponding to bound states or quasinormal modes, in the simplest examples) that can perhaps join into a branch cut. However, these functions are locally holomorphic. It's because of the very basic properties how all these functions are understood and calculated - they're treated as holomorphic functions. A physically usable function of the real variable (for example, the energy as a function of the momentum) can be extended into a holomorphic function of a complex variable.
Why are the answers analytical functions of energy
While we defined the relevant integrals for the action to based on complex values of "t", it's actually more important that the observables, such as the Green's functions, are analytical functions of the momenta. The same basic idea applies to quantum field theory and quantum mechanics. In quantum field theory, we usually want to talk about the holomorphic dependence of the Green's functions on the Lorentz-invariant functions of the momenta - for example, the dependence of the propagators on "k_m.k^m" (which typically has poles).
But without loss of generality, we may talk about the continuation in the time direction only. Therefore we want to see how the Green's functions behave if we continue the energy (the complementary variable to the time, via the Fourier transform) to the complex values. And this problem can already be addressed in quantum mechanics. Just take the evolution operator "exp(H.t/i.hbar)", which encodes all dynamical information, and Fourier-transform it with respect to the c-number variable "t". (A technicality: multiply it first by "theta(t)" so that it's only nonzero for positive "t".) You will get another operator-valued function of "E" (the dual variable to "t") that encodes all dynamics. It's not hard to see that this operator will be essentially - up to some "i.epsilon" in the denominator
- 1 / (H-E)
where "H" is the Hamiltonian (an operator) while "E" is a c-number parameter. Note that this operator-valued function of "E" is clearly a holomorphic function of "E" - up to the simple poles that correspond to the eigenvalues of "H" (when "H.psi=E.psi", then "H-E" can't be inverted) or branch cuts that arise from a continuum of eigenvalues of "H". Nevertheless, the function is a locally holomorphic function of "E". This fact is generalized to quantum field theory where "1/(H-E)" is generalized to the more general Green's functions, and it is the real mathematical reason that shows why the Wick rotation is legitimate.
Emotions and prejudices vs. reality
Someone may dislike these mathematical operations and continuations. But it's not important whether someone dislikes them. The important question is whether they can be done and whether they're useful. Whether they can be done is a mathematical question about a very broad class of physical theories, and the answer to this mathematical question is Yes.
Loops in the Euclidean spacetime are more well-defined
The answer to the question whether the continuation to the Euclidean spacetime is useful is also Yes. Let me enumerate several basic advantages:
- The convergence properties of the path integral are better; exp(i.S/hbar) is replaced by exp(-S_E/hbar) as we discussed above
- When we evaluate loop Feynman diagrams, we obtained - in the momentum representations - nice integrals over the 4-dimensional Euclidean momenta; they can be written in polar coordinates and the non-trivial, radial part can be evaluated to give us results that preserve the SO(4) symmetry; consequently, the analytical continuation back preserves the Lorentz symmetry SO(3,1)
- In the Minkowski space, it would be much more subtle to decide how the divergent integrals should be regulated in such a way that the Lorentz invariance is preserved; the best definition how to regularize the Minkowski loop diagrams properly is probably to say that the methods should follow the calculations in the Euclidean spacetime
Non-perturbative physics and the priceless Wick rotation
While the loop diagrams are manifestly better in the Euclidean setup, there are other aspects of our calculations for which the Euclidean setup is almost inevitable:
- Instantons are non-perturbative contributions to various real processes. They can be visualized as topologically non-trivial field configurations in the Euclidean spacetime that are localized in all directions including the Euclidean time. I think that no one (or almost no one) knows how to calculate the effects induced by the instantons directly in the Minkowski space
- Instantons appear not only in field theory, but also in string theory - string theory also adds new types of instantons such as the D-instantons, and the importance of the language of the Euclidean spacetime is not reduced at all
- In perturbative string theory, the perturbative S-matrix is calculated as the path integral over all Euclidean two-dimensional Riemann surfaces that represent histories of interacting strings or Euclidean worldsheets embedded into the Euclidean spacetime; the Euclidean character of the worldsheet is very important for the covariant calculations because almost no one knows how we should even talk about the topology expansion if the Riemann surfaces were Lorentzian (the Minkowski worldsheets are most natural in the light cone gauge)
- The Euclidean path-integral calculations are also extremely helpful for calculating the thermal properties of a quantum field theory, because of the relation between the thermal density matrix and the evolution operator continued to imaginary times that we mentioned above
- The Euclidean path integral may also be necessary for the understanding of the initial conditions of the Universe, as shown by Hartle and Hawking; this state has also been described in various minisuperspace approximations in string theory, for example by Ooguri, Vafa, Verlinde, and by Karczmarek, Maloney, Strominger
- Most of this text is about quantum mechanics and non-gravitational quantum field theory, but it is reasonable to believe that the path integral in the Euclidean spacetime is gonna be even more important in quantum gravity than it is in quantum field theory. The Euclidean version of a black hole offers a nice explanation of its thermodynamics (the Hawking temperature is determined by the vanishing deficit angle at the horizon). The gravitational instantons, such as Witten's bubble (which is a related solution to the Euclidean black hole), are important for our understanding of instability of various backgrounds. The Hartle-Hawking state from the previous point is another example.
I hope that the text above shows that the technique of the Wick rotation is a legitimate - and in many cases inevitable - tool to find the predictions of a physical theory. If we don't want to jump to the difficult waters of calculating the loop Feynman diagrams, instantons, and other effects directly in the Minkowski spacetime, we may even consider the Wick rotation as a subtle technical part of our definition of quantum field theory.
The results involving the Wick rotation have been tested
What I want to emphasize is that the idea that the Wick rotation is something "extraordinarily suspicious" that deserves "more experimental tests" than other concepts and hypotheses is a completely irrational idea. The Wick rotation is a subtle mathematical tool to make many calculations of ours more meaningful and we understand on theoretical grounds why it should work. We know why this procedure preserves the desirable features of a physical theory that are necessary for its consistency.
Also, even if you assumed that the Wick rotation seems to be a new added element to the structure and definition of quantum field theory, it's completely fine that it is so because the predictions of the (correct) theories, even those that rely on the Wick rotation, have been experimentally tested. In fact, the predictions that have involved the Wick rotation have been more successful than those that did not. This includes the multi-loop corrections to the electron's anomalous magnetic moment. These observables have been calculated in the Euclidean spacetime. The path integral in the Euclidean spacetime is always useful, especially for the questions that can be deduced from the S-matrix. This is true in field theory as well as string theory (including vacua at different dimensions than "d=4").
Failing Wick rotation - a sign of inconsistency
Moreover, if you find a theory in which the Euclidean calculations do not give the results that would seem to reproduce the Minkowskian physics, you should be highly skeptical about such a theory because it is unlikely that this theory will be able to agree with basic physical requirements such as the Lorentz invariance of local physics. An example is loop quantum gravity. There is not just one loop quantum gravity; there are thousands of different proposals what loop quantum gravity should be, and the "Euclidean vs. Minkowski" question is one of many questions that separate different loop quantum gravities to classes. This is definitely another sign of physical inconsistency.
Future and speculations
This article has mostly discussed the aspects of the Wick rotation that have been established. It remains to be seen how the future understanding of physics will view the Wick rotation and continuation of various quantities to complex values of the real observables. The Wick rotation may remain a calculational trick, but the complexified time or energy may also offer us some new important insights about quantum gravity - for example about the black hole information paradox. There are new things to be learned in quantum gravity. In quantum gravity, for example, one can argue that one should work with complex values of the metric in the Planckian regime in order to cure the unboundedness of the Einstein-Hilbert action from below (even the Euclidean action, one that is usually bounded in other theories). Note that these comments are largely moral in character; in the consistent theory of gravity, namely string theory, we don't compute these things by direct path integrals over metrics; instead, string theory cures most of the potential problems without telling us how it was done. ;-)
And finally, the Wick rotation is able to be more controversial than the Iraq war and innate differences. A discussion in which the old alliances will be rearranged and in which the smallest Euclidean and Minkowskian biases will be magnified is getting started, so enjoy. ;-)
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Up and Down: Czech Oscar candidate
The Czech director Mr. Jan Hřebejk has produced a new movie in 2004, namely Horem pádem which is translated as Up and Down (quite a boring translation). It's a rather frustrating comedy about the contemporary Czech society. When we describe it as a comedy, be sure that only black humor is being served. You may also look at the review in the New York Times. A random generator has decided that this movie would be shown as the #1 among all 49 nominated movies.There are two main storylines in the movie available as a DVD above that eventually join seamlessly:
Franta (Jiří Macháček) and his wife Míla (Nataša Burger) who is psychologically unstable and dreams about a kid are not allowed to adopt a child because Franta is a former soccer hooligan. This couple lives in a crowded apartment in Prague and they eventually buy a child that two smugglers found in their truck. Franta's friend who is a skinhead does not like the child's dark skin. The movie describes the life of racists and various anti-immigration feelings in a realistic fashion.
The other story line involves Martin (Petr Forman, the son of the director Miloš Forman; incidentally, Václav Havel also appears on the screen) who lives in Australia. One of the goals of shooting in Australia was to show the contrast between the gray and crowded Prague on one side, and the sunny and free Australian beaches on the other side. Martin, who is the most positive character in the movie, returns to the Czech Republic when he learns that his father, Prof. Otakar Horecký, suffers from brain tumors. The plot gets messy because Otakar, the father, has lived with Ms. Hana Svobodová (Ingrid Timková) for quite some time. Well, that would be fine except that Hana used to be Martin's girlfriend.
The movie shows the tension between Hana and Mrs. Věra Horecká (Emília Vašáryová, a prominent Slovak actor), Martin's mother (who has been separated both from Martin and Otakar for years). Věra, the mother, is an example of a materialist, but honest woman who suffers from class bitterness. Hana, on the other hand, is a young liberal human rights activist who suffers from the feelings of moral superiority. Poor Martin finds himself in the middle.
These two plots eventually intersect in an unforced manner. Hřebejk analyzes various aspects of the life of the society: crime, unemployment, corruption, the friends of the "old orders" who are not too happy about the new regime, racism, unwanted immigrants, and the increasing gap between the poor and the rich.
One of the main features of Hřebejk's movies is that almost no character is completely negative or completely positive: even the "bad guys" do some good acts and they care about the brown child. On the other hand, the educated characters often manifest themselves as racist bigots. The Good and the Evil are mixed up in a way that defines complex, high-brow art. Let me admit that I slightly prefer movies whose heroes can be divided to the good guys and the bad guys (which is the case of most of the movies from Hollywood) - but my guess is that the Academy Awards may have different standards.
The previous Czech movie that has won the Oscar was Kolya by the director Jan Svěrák in 1996.
Sultans of string
Arun has pointed out an interesting article about the string theorists at the Tata Institute in India:
The article says a lot of interesting things about the interaction between the Indian culture and theoretical physics, and about many heroes of string theory from India and friends of ours.
Indian string theory has the best outcome per dollar in the world ;-) which is one of the arguments by Andy Strominger that have - during a dinner in the Society of Fellows that I attended - convinced Lawrence Summers, the famous president of Harvard University, to find some extra funding for our Indian colleagues.
Lawrence Summers asked how much money could improve their life by a significant amount, and Andy Strominger answered $100,000.
The rest has been trivial for Summers. He contacted his rich friend, philantropist Jeffrey Epstein, whose secretary called Andy Strominger and asked him where the $100,000 cheque should be sent. I assure all my readers that if a woman or a man writes a comment below this article suggesting that Lawrence Summers has nothing to do with this gift to Indian string theory, then she or he will be completely wrong. ;-) I will appreciate if she or he will stand corrected.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
New record prime
The Mersenne numbers are the numbers of the form "2^p - 1". Several centuries ago, some people used to think that these numbers were always primes if "p" itself is a prime. While it's true for the first few values, the general claim is, of course, false. Primality of "p" is a necessary condition for primality of "2^p - 1", but not a sufficient one. (It's necessary because if "p=qr", then "2^q - 1" and "2^r - 1" are divisors of "2^p - 1".)
In fact, only 41 Mersenne primes are officially known. The highest one, "2^24,036,583 - 1", is also the greatest officially known prime integer in the world. It was found in May 2004. Usually, the exponent roughly doubles if you want to find a new Mersenne prime. However, the Mersenne prime numbers look surprisingly dense for the exponents between 20 million and 26 million.An international network of computers GIMPS whose website is at
is looking for new Mersenne primes. You may join. One can see that the main page of this server announces that a new record prime may have been found. It would be the 42nd known Mersenne prime number. I predict that the exponent "p" will be
- "p = 25,964,951"
Note that if you find the first Mersenne prime with at least 10 million digits, you will win at least 1/2 of the $100k award from the EFF foundation. It takes roughly one month for a 3GHz computer to test (using the Lucas-Lehmer test) a number like "2^34,362,227 - 1" which is how a candidate for a 10-million-digit prime number looks like.
Note added later: Of course that the word "predict" was partially a joke. I knew that the exponent would be what I wrote. Congratulations to Dr. Martin Nowak from Germany (by the way, it's almost a Czech name) to the discovery of the 42nd known Mersenne prime.
The entropic principle
The anthropic principle has a new competitor.
It's called the "entropic principle" even though Hirosi Ooguri, Cumrun Vafa, and Erik Verlinde finally did not use this entertaining term for the title. Let me first state a popular version of the principle for those who don't expect to follow the details of this article:
However, an infinitesimal change of the reference point in the moduli space induces the so-called holomorphic anomaly which a slight, exactly understood dependence on Xbar that can be locally visualized as an infinitesimal Fourier transform. By an infinitesimal Fourier transform, I mean the conversion of a wave function "psi(x)" to "psi'(x')" where "x' = x+epsilon.p" - you see that we are mixing "x,p," the coordinates on the phase space. Therefore it is more appropriate to talk about the partition sum as a vector in a Hilbert space rather than a well-defined function.
Also, the partition sum is a complex number whose squared absolute value has been shown to have many physical interpretations in various recent papers that had Cumrun Vafa among its authors; it has been related to black hole entropy as well as the partition sum of two-dimensional gauge theory. That's another reason to imagine that the partition sum is a "wave function".
In the new paper, this concept is taken very seriously. "The wave function" is interpreted as nothing else than the Hawking-Hartle wave function of the Universe. You know, the Hawking-Hartle wave function is something like a wave functional of quantum gravity that solves the Wheeler-deWitt equation (a sophisticated definition of the quantum equation
In the case of string theory, we may be afraid that the Hawking-Hartle state is a functional of a much broader collection of fields, including excited strings. Ooguri, Vafa, and Verlinde only consider a restricted set of degrees of freedom - a minisuperspace. They only consider the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction to be the function of a few parameters that describe the shape of the Universe - namely the complex structure moduli of the Calabi-Yau manifold. This truncation should be enough to calculate all holomorphic, SUSY protected quantities. The Universes they study have the form of AdS2 x S2 x CY3 and the corresponding Hartle-Hawking state is defined on S1 x S2. This may look like an oversimplification, but the advantage is that the simplified Hartle-Hawking state may be calculated including all the higher-order corrections - it's calculated as the partition sum of the topological string theory on the same Calabi-Yau three-fold.
The results may be viewed as something that gives you a "natural" probabilistic measure for the Universe to have different particular values of the complex structure moduli. Of course, their context only deals with AdS2 - a space that is geometrically equivalent to dS2 - and they're using both directions of this space in the role of time in various viewpoints that they relate to each other. In other words, they apply a double-Wick-rotation on their AdS2, and they're slicing it in two different ways, in analogy with the open-closed duality seen for the cylindrical worldsheets in string theory.
You may argue that the supersymmetric AdS2 backgrounds are not a good description of our Universe, and you may be right. But there could exist some generalization that will turn out to be relevant for the vacuum selection problem sometime in the future.
At any rate, I like their brave attempt to replace the naive "vacuum counting" strategy - a prejudice that each single "vacuum" of string theory is supposed to be equally likely - by something more realistic and potentially justifiable by quantum cosmology. This attempt is one of the first ones that uses the Hartle-Hawking wave function; I was informed by a reader-insider about an earlier paper by Firouzjahi, Sarangi, and Tye from the last summer that tries to phenomenologically apply the Hartle-Hawking state on the KKLMMT compactifications.
The Hartle-Hawking states are very natural and important tools that may eventually shed light on the vacuum selection problem and the evolution of the Universe a Planck time after the beginning ;-), and therefore I think it is a good idea to try to give the Hartle-Hawking wave function a well-defined meaning in string theory. Ooguri, Vafa, and Verlinde have certainly made many new steps towards this kind of goal.
The measure as they formulate it today kind of gives the different Universes a weight proportional to the entropy of the corresponding black hole. Although one should not be comparing different topologies of Calabi-Yau manifolds, you can nevertheless do it, and your conclusion will be that the Calabi-Yau manifolds with large fluxes - corresponding to large black holes - will be dominating the ensemble even more dramatically than in the "democratic counting".
I don't like this result too much and I hope that it will eventually go away, but this inconvenient preliminary result can't diminish my sympathy for the thesis that the attempts to define and calculate the Hartle-Hawking state are more scientific than the ad hoc assumptions that "every vacuum has the same weight".
It's called the "entropic principle" even though Hirosi Ooguri, Cumrun Vafa, and Erik Verlinde finally did not use this entertaining term for the title. Let me first state a popular version of the principle for those who don't expect to follow the details of this article:
- The probability that the cosmological evolution will end up as a Universe with a particular shape of the hidden dimensions (and particular values of the fluxes) is determined by the (exponentiated) entropy of a corresponding black hole whose geometry flows via the attractor mechanism to the given shape of the Universe near the horizon. Note that this contrasts sharply with the "anthropic principle" - which itself is not a principle, rather a lack of principles. In the anthropic principle, the corresponding probabilistic weight is determined by the ability of the Universe to support intelligent life.
However, an infinitesimal change of the reference point in the moduli space induces the so-called holomorphic anomaly which a slight, exactly understood dependence on Xbar that can be locally visualized as an infinitesimal Fourier transform. By an infinitesimal Fourier transform, I mean the conversion of a wave function "psi(x)" to "psi'(x')" where "x' = x+epsilon.p" - you see that we are mixing "x,p," the coordinates on the phase space. Therefore it is more appropriate to talk about the partition sum as a vector in a Hilbert space rather than a well-defined function.
Also, the partition sum is a complex number whose squared absolute value has been shown to have many physical interpretations in various recent papers that had Cumrun Vafa among its authors; it has been related to black hole entropy as well as the partition sum of two-dimensional gauge theory. That's another reason to imagine that the partition sum is a "wave function".
In the new paper, this concept is taken very seriously. "The wave function" is interpreted as nothing else than the Hawking-Hartle wave function of the Universe. You know, the Hawking-Hartle wave function is something like a wave functional of quantum gravity that solves the Wheeler-deWitt equation (a sophisticated definition of the quantum equation
- H.psi = 0
In the case of string theory, we may be afraid that the Hawking-Hartle state is a functional of a much broader collection of fields, including excited strings. Ooguri, Vafa, and Verlinde only consider a restricted set of degrees of freedom - a minisuperspace. They only consider the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction to be the function of a few parameters that describe the shape of the Universe - namely the complex structure moduli of the Calabi-Yau manifold. This truncation should be enough to calculate all holomorphic, SUSY protected quantities. The Universes they study have the form of AdS2 x S2 x CY3 and the corresponding Hartle-Hawking state is defined on S1 x S2. This may look like an oversimplification, but the advantage is that the simplified Hartle-Hawking state may be calculated including all the higher-order corrections - it's calculated as the partition sum of the topological string theory on the same Calabi-Yau three-fold.
The results may be viewed as something that gives you a "natural" probabilistic measure for the Universe to have different particular values of the complex structure moduli. Of course, their context only deals with AdS2 - a space that is geometrically equivalent to dS2 - and they're using both directions of this space in the role of time in various viewpoints that they relate to each other. In other words, they apply a double-Wick-rotation on their AdS2, and they're slicing it in two different ways, in analogy with the open-closed duality seen for the cylindrical worldsheets in string theory.
You may argue that the supersymmetric AdS2 backgrounds are not a good description of our Universe, and you may be right. But there could exist some generalization that will turn out to be relevant for the vacuum selection problem sometime in the future.
At any rate, I like their brave attempt to replace the naive "vacuum counting" strategy - a prejudice that each single "vacuum" of string theory is supposed to be equally likely - by something more realistic and potentially justifiable by quantum cosmology. This attempt is one of the first ones that uses the Hartle-Hawking wave function; I was informed by a reader-insider about an earlier paper by Firouzjahi, Sarangi, and Tye from the last summer that tries to phenomenologically apply the Hartle-Hawking state on the KKLMMT compactifications.
The Hartle-Hawking states are very natural and important tools that may eventually shed light on the vacuum selection problem and the evolution of the Universe a Planck time after the beginning ;-), and therefore I think it is a good idea to try to give the Hartle-Hawking wave function a well-defined meaning in string theory. Ooguri, Vafa, and Verlinde have certainly made many new steps towards this kind of goal.
The measure as they formulate it today kind of gives the different Universes a weight proportional to the entropy of the corresponding black hole. Although one should not be comparing different topologies of Calabi-Yau manifolds, you can nevertheless do it, and your conclusion will be that the Calabi-Yau manifolds with large fluxes - corresponding to large black holes - will be dominating the ensemble even more dramatically than in the "democratic counting".
I don't like this result too much and I hope that it will eventually go away, but this inconvenient preliminary result can't diminish my sympathy for the thesis that the attempts to define and calculate the Hartle-Hawking state are more scientific than the ad hoc assumptions that "every vacuum has the same weight".
Bush in Slovakia
The most powerful man in the world is just visiting my broader homeland - and it's a good opportunity to promote Slovakia.
Slovakia used to be a part of Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1992. Czechoslovakia is the country in the middle of Europe; you should not confuse Slovakia with Slovenia which is a country in the former Yugoslavia and because "Yugo" means "Southern", you may guess that Slovenia is more to the South. You may think that I am assuming that the readers are idiots. However, USA Today published an article that claimed that the Bratislava Castle is located near the beaches of the Adriatic sea. :-)
Not only USA Today are ignorant about the Central European geography. On the pages of the White House you may find a photograph of Bush talking to the Czech president Klaus. The caption says that Bush is chatting with the Slovak president Ivan Gašparovič. :-) Sorry, I've already sent a mail to George and he has fixed the error on the web page.
The Czech Republic has 10 million citizens; Slovakia has 5 million citizens. The official Slovak language was defined and distinguished from a dialect of Czech in 1863. But the Czechs and Slovaks can understand each other very well. After the Velvet Revolution that brought us democracy in 1989, many Slovaks felt that they wanted more independence. After various ridiculous "hyphen battles" whether the country should be called Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia, the politicians decided in 1992 to peacefully split the country.
Note that unlike Serbia and Croatia who used to be the biggest enemies of each other, Czechs and Slovaks remain the closest friends and allies.
Václav Klaus, a right-wing friend of Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman, won the 1992 elections in the Czech Republic. The winner in Slovakia was called Vladimír Mečiar, a sentimental populist and nationalist former heavyweight champion (closer to the left). The parties were not quite compatible. Klaus and Mečiar understood that if they split Czechoslovakia peacefully, everything will be fine (and moreover they will become the most influential men of the new countries). So they just did it.
Both of them are charismatic leaders but Klaus is roughly 10 times as intelligent as Mečiar. Klaus became the second Czech president after Havel. Mečiar became irrelevant after years of his authoritative government that has almost brought Slovakia to isolation.
But this was in 1993. Today we have 2005 and the colors have reverted. The Czech Republic has a left-wing government and Slovakia has a right-wing government.
The Czech social democrats used to accuse Klaus's party from various crimes and corruption and virtually all of these accusations were wrong. On the other hand, the present prime minister Stanislav Gross (the youngest prime minister in Europe) and his wife Šárka Grossová recently bought a house and they could not say where they got the money for the purchase. Eventually it turned out that the house was paid by the best friend of Grossová, Mrs. Libuše Barková. She's an owner of the most profittable whorehouse in Prague (these companies are not officially legal, but they're tollerated), and she's made various mortgage and insurance scams before she was convicted.
The potential Czech government crisis has been mostly solved today. The social democrats recommended the prime minister to fire the Christian democrats from the government - the Christian democrats are the only ruling party that does not like prostitutes and washing dirty money. So I suppose that they will just go and everything will be fine. Also, the prime minister's wife has made a compromise. She decided not to build a new whorehouse in one of the houses she bought. :-)
On the other hand, the new leader of the centrist Christian democrats Mr. Miroslav Kalousek (who is more right-wing than his predecessor) was also accused of crimes related to finances for his new house. But Kalousek has explained his money as well - he borrowed the money from his brother-in-law Mr. Kašák who was murdered in 2002, so it's also OK. If you asked who murdered him, then the official answer is that it was his business partner, but this one is also shot, so as you can see, the air is completely clean now. ;-)
Slovakia
Our brothers in the East have a very different government. Slovakia has been recently praised as the most free market economy in Europe, to say the least. Their GDP growth is well above 5 percent. The Slovak government led by Mikuláš Dzurinda has introduced the flat tax and this flat tax has brought a higher revenue than expected. Slovakia also supports the efforts in Iraq - even though their 100 troops should probably be labeled as "symbolic". Slovakia is a problem-free member of the European Union that also plans to be the first new country to introduce the Euro. You can imagine that current Slovakia is a great example of a success story for freedom and democracy. I guess that it is more of a relaxation for Bush to visit this country.
Bush has given a public speech in Bratislava, the Slovak capital. He was hidden behind "unshootable" glass. 5,000-10,000 spectators had to be screened by a U.S.-led security check; all their deodorants have been taken away from them. Some of the spectators had white crosses on their jackets - which is the logo of the "ani-Putin-ani-Bush" (neither-Putin-nor-Bush) movement. Bush has reminded the audience that "he was the one who was serving the turkey in Baghdad in 2003".
In the private discussions with Bush, the prime minister Dzurinda mentioned the U.S. visa which are currently too complicated for many Europeans. Thanks, Mikuláš. Bush vowed to work on the problem although it won't happen instantly.
It has yet to be seen how his talks with Vladimír Putin, the president of Russia, will work out. Bush wants to tell Putin a few tougher things about various Putin's decisions that are not far from the edge of democracy. Bush's visit in Western Europe went remarkably well and a glimpse of friendship has re-emerged.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Find some kindred spirits near you (or me)
Drinking Liberally meetings in Houston (tomorrow evening), Austin, Denton and 49 other locations across the US.
The Progessive Populist Caucus of the Texas Democratic Party has their annual meeting on Saturday, February 26, in Houston. Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Texas Observer will speak; David Van Os will be feted.
And "The Wall That Heals" will be in Sugar Land* this weekend. It's a half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, and includes a traveling museum and information center.
(*Don't worry; we'll take Bug spray.)
The Progessive Populist Caucus of the Texas Democratic Party has their annual meeting on Saturday, February 26, in Houston. Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Texas Observer will speak; David Van Os will be feted.
And "The Wall That Heals" will be in Sugar Land* this weekend. It's a half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, and includes a traveling museum and information center.
(*Don't worry; we'll take Bug spray.)
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
The whole Ginsparg on your hard disk
Paul Ginsparg, the founder of arXiv.org, used to be one of the staunchest warriors against the robots. One of Paul's secret weapons was the automated "seek-and-destroy" procedure against your site that many stupid robots and visitors of my blog carelessly clicked at. Please don't click at this sentence otherwise your domain will be disconnected from the arXiv's!
He believed that the internet was entering a new era - an era of websites such as arXiv.org that contain a huge amount of stuff and can't be mirrored. Consequently, he disliked the search engines because they were attempting to mirror the whole archive of Ginsparg which was clearly impossible: it would take an infinite amount of affine time. However, a search engine called
He believed that the internet was entering a new era - an era of websites such as arXiv.org that contain a huge amount of stuff and can't be mirrored. Consequently, he disliked the search engines because they were attempting to mirror the whole archive of Ginsparg which was clearly impossible: it would take an infinite amount of affine time. However, a search engine called
suddenly showed that it was not only possible, but in fact very easy to reproduce the whole archive. Later, Google has also introduced a version of an interdisciplinary SPIRES with a full-text search capabilities
While Google was the first company to defeat Ginsparg's no-go theorem, the second defeat has been even more spectacular. She's called
(guess who took the picture on the website above) and she's, together with Alanis Morissette and a few more friends, a Canadian girl who rocked the world. What is her answer to Google.com?
It sounds great, does not it? How many of you have been sitting in the aircraft with your laptop, before you suddenly got a great idea, but you needed a formula that you knew could only be found in hep-th/0301173 - but where can you get this paper 6 miles above the middle of the Atlantic?
Because of Joanna, this won't happen to you anymore. It's the end of this most frequent kind of nightmare.
In fact, you can upload the "hep-th" archive to your iPod or Zune, if you have one (Steve Jobs tells you Thank you!) - it's just 8 GB or so. So far, Joanna only offers a demo - the year 2004 which is roughly 850 MB. What kind of technology do you need to download these gigabytes to your MP3 player or laptop?
Because Joanna is surrounded by the fans of the amateurish software (also known as Open Source software) - this category includes her brother as well as boyfriend - the answer had to be as obscure as BitTorrent - but that should not discourage you. Enjoy! :-)
An amicable faculty meeting
The Harvard's FAS (Faculty of Arts and Sciences) faculty meeting today - a continuation of the meeting from last Tuesday - may be characterized as a mostly civil exchange of opinions between president Lawrence Summers and the faculty. In other words, the last meeting (that took place between 4 PM and 6 PM) was on the edge of becoming just another boring faculty meeting. Among the 30 speakers or so, there has been essentially one speaker only who called for Summers's resignation. It was our condensed matter colleague DF. The only point of his talk that most participants understood was the bitterness, and DF had to witness possibly the most diluted applause in the history of the FAS faculty meetings.
Another speaker, a woman at the very end of the session, discussed the issue of innate differences - something that many people incorrectly expected to be the main focus of the discussions. The risk that Summers could be pressured to resign because of the opinion at the FAS has mostly disappeared.
Except for the two talks I mentioned, most other talks were dedicated to the questions about Summers's powerful leadership, its advantages, its disadvantages, the balance between the style and the factual content (a music professor at the very beginning asserted that everything was about the style, much like in music - an opinion that most participants did not share), the amount of mutual trust between the president and the faculty, and the separation of power between the president and his fellow professors.
Many of the speeches have been pretty nice pieces of literature - well, let me admit that Summers's speech at the beginning would probably remain #1 in my list - and many speakers recalled kind of entertaining stories about the first moments when they joined Harvard University decades ago. For example, one professor remembered that he joined Harvard in 1978 when the Red Sox used to be losers and the faculty meetings used to be boring. Another speaker (or perhaps the same one?) asked whether we wanted a president who was unmemorable or Mr. Platitude - the kind of people who are found in abundance among the university leaders. ;-)
Other speakers were comparing Summers and this whole story to various episodes from the history textbooks, or they were comparing the aptitudes required from a CEO vs. a university president. Nevertheless, most of the physicists who attended the meeting - including Nima, Lisa, and others - think that the concentration of the non-trivial content in the speeches was rather low. Nima argues that these faculty meetings should be run by scientists in order to increase their efficiency - which may sound as a good idea except for the fact that the physics faculty meetings are usually incredibly boring. ;-)
Although there have been roughly two more radical speeches only (and maybe one is a better word), one can still say in most of the cases whether the speakers supported the president or not - and the ratio was about 50:50, I would say. This ratio - one that reflects the opinions at Harvard according to a poll organized by The Crimson - is no accident. Dean Kirby, who was leading the discussion, has composed the initial list of speakers in such a way that it was balanced.
One of the speakers has been known to the participants of the last week's faculty meeting - Mrs. Theda Skočpol (which means "Jumpfield" in Czech, and it is a shortened version of one of the funniest Czech surnames "Skočdopole" - "JumpToTheField"). Although she has already been elected (the word "elected" is probably not the right one) to one of the new pro-women committees, she retained her critical attitude toward President Summers. I did not learn much from her talk, and I remain skeptical about such "ad hoc" committees.
After 5 PM, someone proposed another committee that would mediate communication between president Summers and the faculty - including Profs. Knowless, Skočpol, and Verba. This proposal has almost been approved, but because Philip J. Fisher from the English department suddenly complained that such a result of the meeting seemed pre-determined and henceforth undemocratic (and the speaker also complained that there was one scientist, two social scientists, and no representatives of the humanities in the committee), the proposal was eventually cancelled by its proponent himself. I personally have no idea how would we use such a committee to comunicate with the president.
David Laibson, professor of economics, originally planned to read the text of the letter he composed with Claudia Goldin - a letter that was endorsed by 186 full professors at Harvard - but the atmosphere was already so peaceful that David Laibson said a couple of rather neutral statements that I've already forgotten.
The meeting was held in the Lowell Lecture Hall and it was attended by 400-500 professors. Note that the capacity of the lecture hall is just 352 people, and therefore many of us had to stand most of the time. The usual attendance at the faculty meeting is about 100 people. The lecture hall was surrounded by journalists with hundreds of microphones and cameras and they were trying to provoke the participants and get some sharp statements from them.
Before the meeting, a group of radical students was screaming slogans such as "We vote NO!", "Summers: racist sexist anti-gay" and they were drumming. I appreciate their happiness and fresh, independent, and original ideas and emotions - but this respect can't stop me from encouraging their parents to spank these young colleagues of ours a little bit more often. Every five-year old kid knows that it's wrong to scream that the president is either a gay or anti-gay (the difference being a matter of convention by the CPT theorem). ;-) As soon as I replied to these kids "We vote YES!", roughly 10 camcorders started to shoot me. At that moment I decided to turn as silent as possible; on the other hand, Cumrun Vafa has made an interview after the faculty meeting.
Some professors have included the confidence vote for the next, March 15th faculty meeting. And yes, I am confident that it is more accurate to call it a "confidence vote" rather than "no-confidence vote".
Another speaker, a woman at the very end of the session, discussed the issue of innate differences - something that many people incorrectly expected to be the main focus of the discussions. The risk that Summers could be pressured to resign because of the opinion at the FAS has mostly disappeared.
Except for the two talks I mentioned, most other talks were dedicated to the questions about Summers's powerful leadership, its advantages, its disadvantages, the balance between the style and the factual content (a music professor at the very beginning asserted that everything was about the style, much like in music - an opinion that most participants did not share), the amount of mutual trust between the president and the faculty, and the separation of power between the president and his fellow professors.
Many of the speeches have been pretty nice pieces of literature - well, let me admit that Summers's speech at the beginning would probably remain #1 in my list - and many speakers recalled kind of entertaining stories about the first moments when they joined Harvard University decades ago. For example, one professor remembered that he joined Harvard in 1978 when the Red Sox used to be losers and the faculty meetings used to be boring. Another speaker (or perhaps the same one?) asked whether we wanted a president who was unmemorable or Mr. Platitude - the kind of people who are found in abundance among the university leaders. ;-)
Other speakers were comparing Summers and this whole story to various episodes from the history textbooks, or they were comparing the aptitudes required from a CEO vs. a university president. Nevertheless, most of the physicists who attended the meeting - including Nima, Lisa, and others - think that the concentration of the non-trivial content in the speeches was rather low. Nima argues that these faculty meetings should be run by scientists in order to increase their efficiency - which may sound as a good idea except for the fact that the physics faculty meetings are usually incredibly boring. ;-)
Although there have been roughly two more radical speeches only (and maybe one is a better word), one can still say in most of the cases whether the speakers supported the president or not - and the ratio was about 50:50, I would say. This ratio - one that reflects the opinions at Harvard according to a poll organized by The Crimson - is no accident. Dean Kirby, who was leading the discussion, has composed the initial list of speakers in such a way that it was balanced.
One of the speakers has been known to the participants of the last week's faculty meeting - Mrs. Theda Skočpol (which means "Jumpfield" in Czech, and it is a shortened version of one of the funniest Czech surnames "Skočdopole" - "JumpToTheField"). Although she has already been elected (the word "elected" is probably not the right one) to one of the new pro-women committees, she retained her critical attitude toward President Summers. I did not learn much from her talk, and I remain skeptical about such "ad hoc" committees.
After 5 PM, someone proposed another committee that would mediate communication between president Summers and the faculty - including Profs. Knowless, Skočpol, and Verba. This proposal has almost been approved, but because Philip J. Fisher from the English department suddenly complained that such a result of the meeting seemed pre-determined and henceforth undemocratic (and the speaker also complained that there was one scientist, two social scientists, and no representatives of the humanities in the committee), the proposal was eventually cancelled by its proponent himself. I personally have no idea how would we use such a committee to comunicate with the president.
David Laibson, professor of economics, originally planned to read the text of the letter he composed with Claudia Goldin - a letter that was endorsed by 186 full professors at Harvard - but the atmosphere was already so peaceful that David Laibson said a couple of rather neutral statements that I've already forgotten.
The meeting was held in the Lowell Lecture Hall and it was attended by 400-500 professors. Note that the capacity of the lecture hall is just 352 people, and therefore many of us had to stand most of the time. The usual attendance at the faculty meeting is about 100 people. The lecture hall was surrounded by journalists with hundreds of microphones and cameras and they were trying to provoke the participants and get some sharp statements from them.
Before the meeting, a group of radical students was screaming slogans such as "We vote NO!", "Summers: racist sexist anti-gay" and they were drumming. I appreciate their happiness and fresh, independent, and original ideas and emotions - but this respect can't stop me from encouraging their parents to spank these young colleagues of ours a little bit more often. Every five-year old kid knows that it's wrong to scream that the president is either a gay or anti-gay (the difference being a matter of convention by the CPT theorem). ;-) As soon as I replied to these kids "We vote YES!", roughly 10 camcorders started to shoot me. At that moment I decided to turn as silent as possible; on the other hand, Cumrun Vafa has made an interview after the faculty meeting.
Some professors have included the confidence vote for the next, March 15th faculty meeting. And yes, I am confident that it is more accurate to call it a "confidence vote" rather than "no-confidence vote".
What'd I just say?
Ruy Teixeira has more today about finding common ground on the topic of women's reproductive rights. He quotes a Boston Globe editorial:
I'm delighted to see us all moving toward acceptable compromise on this issue.
Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, who opposes abortion, has filed the ''Prevention First Act," which would require insurance plans to cover prescription contraceptives, give emergency contraception to rape victims, and fund comprehensive sex education, including discussion of birth control, in public schools.
I'm delighted to see us all moving toward acceptable compromise on this issue.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
The horrible CERN girls (LHC)
Did you know what the LHC stands for?
is famous because these girls appear on the first image on the web. The music (and lyrics) is pretty cool, too! For example, try Liquid Nitrogen. Thanks to Patrick Veverka ("Veverka" means "squirrel" in Czech) for this information.
which means "the horrible girls from CERN". This high-energy rock band
is famous because these girls appear on the first image on the web. The music (and lyrics) is pretty cool, too! For example, try Liquid Nitrogen. Thanks to Patrick Veverka ("Veverka" means "squirrel" in Czech) for this information.
Students for Larry
Update: the previous text about the Summers controversy now contains
What do the Harvard students think about the recent controversy? The only website that answers this question is
What do the Harvard students think about the recent controversy? The only website that answers this question is
Meanwhile, the petition by Profs. Claudia Goldin and David Laibson
has collected more than 160 signatures of the full professors who support the president. While president Summers enjoys the support of a majority of the scientists, it's less clear in the humanities and soft sciences.
To be balanced, let me tell you that the negative people have also organized a petition that even wants to declare no-confidence. It's not obvious whether it has already been endorsed by some scholars. But the newspaper articles show that some people are very bitter, and therefore I expect that even this petition against Summers will find some support.
A group of negative students plans to organize an anti-Summers demonstration on Tuesday before the FAS faculty meeting at 4 p.m.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Getting our activism on
Today Mrs. Diddie and I attended a training for Planned Parenthood's Lobby Day, which is happening Tuesday, March 1st in Austin.
Planned Parenthood of South Texas' location is about five minutes from my house. It is ground zero for the anti-choice faction here in Bushwanaland, and sure enough, the freaks were out in force on a Saturday: shouting their slogans, running into the street at cars, having their children holding up signs, etc.
PP has volunteer escorts; brave men and women who walk the gauntlet alongside those arriving for the clinic's various services. But it is disconcerting to say the least to see in your face --almost -- what has only been previously seen on television. I can't really imagine what a woman with an unintended pregnancy, and one who may be ambivalent about her choice, must feel being faced with a scene like this.
Once we passed through the center's metal detector we were screened again --basically eyeballed and queried as to purpose -- by security (it's just like trying to board a plane, except for the shoes part) and then we gathered in the conference room with fifty or so other volunteer lobbyists for our training.
There are so far 130 people signed up for this effort from Houston; over 700 statewide.
We'll be swarming the Capitol offices in teams of four to twelve -- and more -- on appointments with every single Senator and Representative. The ones brave enough to keep them, anyway. Rep. Martha Wong, R-Houston, will have forty of her constituents on hand (it's probably going to get crowded in her office, not to mention warm, even though we'll be in and out in ten minutes on every visit).
But this isn't about changing anyone's mind or being confrontational. Rather it's about finding that elusive common ground between progressives and conservatives: how to make end-of-pregnancy options rarer. (Note the reframing; I've just finished George Lakoff's "Don't Think of An Elephant".) The mission of this effort is "prevention first". Specifically:
I'll be filing a first-hand account of my maiden voyage into Lobbyworld shortly after the cruise.
Planned Parenthood of South Texas' location is about five minutes from my house. It is ground zero for the anti-choice faction here in Bushwanaland, and sure enough, the freaks were out in force on a Saturday: shouting their slogans, running into the street at cars, having their children holding up signs, etc.
PP has volunteer escorts; brave men and women who walk the gauntlet alongside those arriving for the clinic's various services. But it is disconcerting to say the least to see in your face --almost -- what has only been previously seen on television. I can't really imagine what a woman with an unintended pregnancy, and one who may be ambivalent about her choice, must feel being faced with a scene like this.
Once we passed through the center's metal detector we were screened again --basically eyeballed and queried as to purpose -- by security (it's just like trying to board a plane, except for the shoes part) and then we gathered in the conference room with fifty or so other volunteer lobbyists for our training.
There are so far 130 people signed up for this effort from Houston; over 700 statewide.
We'll be swarming the Capitol offices in teams of four to twelve -- and more -- on appointments with every single Senator and Representative. The ones brave enough to keep them, anyway. Rep. Martha Wong, R-Houston, will have forty of her constituents on hand (it's probably going to get crowded in her office, not to mention warm, even though we'll be in and out in ten minutes on every visit).
But this isn't about changing anyone's mind or being confrontational. Rather it's about finding that elusive common ground between progressives and conservatives: how to make end-of-pregnancy options rarer. (Note the reframing; I've just finished George Lakoff's "Don't Think of An Elephant".) The mission of this effort is "prevention first". Specifically:
- Maintaining current funding levels for family planning in the appropriations bill;
- Encouraging the state of Texas apply for a Medicaid waiver expanding eligibility for family planning and reproductive health services to 185% of the federal poverty level (which would be an annual income of $34872.50 for a family of four) ;
- Promote legislation -- as it happens, HB 676 sponsored by Rep. Senfronia Thompson -- that would require emergency conception education and medication in hospital emergency rooms for survivors of sexual assault;
- And support measures that would require health insurance companies providing prescription drug coverage to include in that benefit all FDA-approved methods of contraception.
I'll be filing a first-hand account of my maiden voyage into Lobbyworld shortly after the cruise.
Blogistan Roundups
Most of you probably already know about The Daou Report, a collection of left, right and center of the blogosphere Pete pulls together (and he's doing so now for Salon). But you'll have to either subscribe (it's certainly worth it; one of the very few sites I personally pay for) or get a day pass by watching a short advertisement.
You can find a free one done by my buddy here in Deep-In-The-Hearta. Bucky Rea, who's got a pretty nifty blog himself, wrangles some of the usual and unusual suspects every Friday at The Blog Box.
Go check them out. I'll be here when you get back.
You can find a free one done by my buddy here in Deep-In-The-Hearta. Bucky Rea, who's got a pretty nifty blog himself, wrangles some of the usual and unusual suspects every Friday at The Blog Box.
Go check them out. I'll be here when you get back.
Friday, February 18, 2005
And I haven't said anything about sports in awhile...
Pitchers and catchers reported this week. The Boys of Late Winter are warming up, just like everything else.
There's a college baseball tournament going on this weekend at Reckling Park, home of the Rice Owls, and it's just a couple of train stops from my house, and my alma mater, Lamar University, is playing in it. See you there (I'll be wearing the cap with the cardinal on it).
It's just about time for March Madness. My brother-in-law is a Dukie, but even if he wasn't, I'd have a hard time rooting for someone else. Though they are not quite as invincible as in years past; witness last night's defeat at the hands of Va. Tech. I think probably Kansas or one of those other Tobacco Road schools -- Ky., N.C., Wake -- stands a pretty good shot.
And the Rockets won eight straight heading into All-Star weekend. They have gelled around T-Mac and Yao by getting true power forward play out of Juwan Howard, gutsy Jason-Kidd-like production from Bobby Sura, and timely bench strength out of David Wesley and Jon Barry and the indomitable Scott Padgett. (I'm going to keep calling him that until he cools off.) Their second-half schedule is going to make or break, though. They may have a great season, or they may not. We'll see.
Oh yeah, something happened regarding the NHL, but I can't remember what...
I'm going to play golf. Later.
There's a college baseball tournament going on this weekend at Reckling Park, home of the Rice Owls, and it's just a couple of train stops from my house, and my alma mater, Lamar University, is playing in it. See you there (I'll be wearing the cap with the cardinal on it).
It's just about time for March Madness. My brother-in-law is a Dukie, but even if he wasn't, I'd have a hard time rooting for someone else. Though they are not quite as invincible as in years past; witness last night's defeat at the hands of Va. Tech. I think probably Kansas or one of those other Tobacco Road schools -- Ky., N.C., Wake -- stands a pretty good shot.
And the Rockets won eight straight heading into All-Star weekend. They have gelled around T-Mac and Yao by getting true power forward play out of Juwan Howard, gutsy Jason-Kidd-like production from Bobby Sura, and timely bench strength out of David Wesley and Jon Barry and the indomitable Scott Padgett. (I'm going to keep calling him that until he cools off.) Their second-half schedule is going to make or break, though. They may have a great season, or they may not. We'll see.
Oh yeah, something happened regarding the NHL, but I can't remember what...
I'm going to play golf. Later.
The Talibaptists
They're here, they're queer ( in the definition of the word before it was co-opted some decades ago as part of the bigots' agenda ) ... get used to it.
Or not. As you prefer. Of course, if you'd just rather not fight back, then please take a seat in this lovely handbasket.
The Dallas Observer has a piece -- it was forwarded to me by my nearly favorite blogger -- about Richard Ford and Kelly Shackelford, one a lion in winter, the other a Christian Soldier on the rise. These two men have and will continue to affect moderate -- a precarious definition itself, from the liberal view -- Texas GOP politicians in their inimitable way: by playing the "Who is the MORE Religious Conservative?" game. ( Go read the article. )
That made me think of a passage in Lou Dubose and Molly Ivins' Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush where they detail the takeover of the Texas Republican Party in the '90s by the likes of Tom Pauken, Dr. James Leininger and others. Even W. wasn't pure enough for them at that time ( the litmus test for party chairman in 1994 was whether or not you had attended an anti-abortion rally. You haven't? Too bad. ) I found my copy so I'll excerpt the cogent part:
The authors go on to describe how Karl Rove engineered the ascendance of Dim Son without selling out to the Jesusoidz; how John Cornyn came to be our Senator ( and not Pauken -- thank God for small favors ) and a few other kernels of wisdom.
Here's my point:
It will take at least a decade of hard work and long hours, not to mention a shitpot of money and some hurt feelings and bruised egos and maybe even some skinned knuckles in order to beat back these zealots.
And don't forget: their jihad is just. They've got God on their side.
I ask those who intend to stand for office on the progressive side one question, whether you run for precinct captain or Governor:
Are you ready to rumble?
We don't have time for any more John Kerrys -- and by that I mean Democrats, on ballots local and national, who won't fight back ( for whatever reason ). And one more thing: unless you're quite a bit younger than I am, you won't live long enough to see the fruits of your labor. Is the fight still in you?
Let's get going, then. We've got a country to take back.
P.S. There's a Houston Democratic Underground Meetup, above ground, tomorrow afternoon. Click on the link in my header. Warning: we're probably weirder in person.
Or not. As you prefer. Of course, if you'd just rather not fight back, then please take a seat in this lovely handbasket.
The Dallas Observer has a piece -- it was forwarded to me by my nearly favorite blogger -- about Richard Ford and Kelly Shackelford, one a lion in winter, the other a Christian Soldier on the rise. These two men have and will continue to affect moderate -- a precarious definition itself, from the liberal view -- Texas GOP politicians in their inimitable way: by playing the "Who is the MORE Religious Conservative?" game. ( Go read the article. )
That made me think of a passage in Lou Dubose and Molly Ivins' Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush where they detail the takeover of the Texas Republican Party in the '90s by the likes of Tom Pauken, Dr. James Leininger and others. Even W. wasn't pure enough for them at that time ( the litmus test for party chairman in 1994 was whether or not you had attended an anti-abortion rally. You haven't? Too bad. ) I found my copy so I'll excerpt the cogent part:
George W. Bush was not Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, but he understands: you got to dance with them what brung you. He has learned to dance with the Christian right. It has been interesting and amusing to watch the process. Interesting because it's sometimes hard to tell who's leading and who's following; amusing because when a scion of Old Yankee money gets together with a televangelist who suffers from too much Elvis, the result is swell entertainment. Dubya's skillful handling of the Christian right -- giving them just enough to keep them in line -- is probably his most impressive political credential. ...
In the end, the Christian right gets more sermons than blood, seat, or policy out of Bush. He talks the talk but rarely walks the walk -- and still gets the support of the Christian right. Among other things, it's very shrewd politics. Although Gary Bauer and Dr. James Dobson have figured out his strategy -- feed the lions just enough to stop them from attacking -- it is, as Sam Smoot says, a dangerous game. These disciplined political Christian soldiers have spent the last ten years taking over the the machinery of the Republican Party, precinct, county, and state. Now they want a ring, not just a promise.
The authors go on to describe how Karl Rove engineered the ascendance of Dim Son without selling out to the Jesusoidz; how John Cornyn came to be our Senator ( and not Pauken -- thank God for small favors ) and a few other kernels of wisdom.
Here's my point:
It will take at least a decade of hard work and long hours, not to mention a shitpot of money and some hurt feelings and bruised egos and maybe even some skinned knuckles in order to beat back these zealots.
And don't forget: their jihad is just. They've got God on their side.
I ask those who intend to stand for office on the progressive side one question, whether you run for precinct captain or Governor:
Are you ready to rumble?
We don't have time for any more John Kerrys -- and by that I mean Democrats, on ballots local and national, who won't fight back ( for whatever reason ). And one more thing: unless you're quite a bit younger than I am, you won't live long enough to see the fruits of your labor. Is the fight still in you?
Let's get going, then. We've got a country to take back.
P.S. There's a Houston Democratic Underground Meetup, above ground, tomorrow afternoon. Click on the link in my header. Warning: we're probably weirder in person.
Met some more cool kidz last night
at the weekly "Drinking Liberally" get-together. Among the most cool were a lawyer with a nifty blog, an actress with an Office Space credit as well as a national commercial (we don't hate Mondays either, K) and ... Travis? I cannot remember what you told me your deal was. Tell me again?
And hopefully we can get the Kink worked out (more on that later, dear reader) ...
And hopefully we can get the Kink worked out (more on that later, dear reader) ...
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Mark Jackson & cosmic strings
Mark Jackson just gave us a very nice talk about cosmic strings. He used his Apple laptop with a PowerPoint presentation. The talk explained most of the issues about the types of cosmic strings and cosmic superstrings; their stability; the bounds for their density and tension; the probability of intercommuting pairs of F-strings, D-strings, (p,q)-strings, and all combinations of these objects; the gravitational waves emitted from the cusps and their detection by LIGO and LISA; and finally the candidates for cosmic strings, namely CSL-1A/CSL-1B and the 417-days-delayed double image.
The previous blog text about the cosmic strings was here.
The talk was not only a very nice review of all the stuff that we've discussed previously, but it also presented a shocking surprise: Mark has identified the coordinates of CSL-1 - the Cosmic String Lensing candidate. So far the coordinates have been largely secret.
Imagine that you're in charge of a telescope that is comparable to the Hubble telescope, or you have just launched your personal space shuttle which carries a probe, telescope, or something like that - and you want to see whether there is a discontinuity near the object CSL-1.
How do you find the coordinates?
You open the PDF version of the paper by Alcala et al.
and you search for "double early type". As a consistency check, the redshift should be z=0.463. Try to contact all your astro-friends and give them these coordinates of CSL-1. Well, to simplify your work, the coordinates are:
The previous blog text about the cosmic strings was here.
The talk was not only a very nice review of all the stuff that we've discussed previously, but it also presented a shocking surprise: Mark has identified the coordinates of CSL-1 - the Cosmic String Lensing candidate. So far the coordinates have been largely secret.
Imagine that you're in charge of a telescope that is comparable to the Hubble telescope, or you have just launched your personal space shuttle which carries a probe, telescope, or something like that - and you want to see whether there is a discontinuity near the object CSL-1.
How do you find the coordinates?
You open the PDF version of the paper by Alcala et al.
and you search for "double early type". As a consistency check, the redshift should be z=0.463. Try to contact all your astro-friends and give them these coordinates of CSL-1. Well, to simplify your work, the coordinates are:
- OACDF
- right ascension: 12 hours, 23 minutes 30.6 seconds (note that this angle is measured in hours, 1 hour = 15 degrees)
- declination: -12 degrees 38 minutes 57 seconds (southern celestial hemisphere, close to the equator)
- double early type, z=0.463, S/N 12
- 12h 23min 29.7sec, -12 deg 38' 27'', z=0.223 (?)
Unifying the Harvard community
Update: if you're a professor at Harvard, you should consider to sign a letter by Claudia Goldin and David Laibson whose content is similar to the second part of this article - the PDF file with the letter is at
Not only because Harvard and Princeton are usually the top two ranked universities, many people are obviously interested in the developments surrounding the world's most famous university president, namely Lawrence Summers.
On Tuesday, professors Grosz, Hammonds, Skocpol, and maybe others have asked Lawrence Summers to publish the full text of his remarks at the conference in January to "clean the air". Although it initially looked as a bad idea to many of us, president Summers has now released
and informed his colleagues about these issues; he has also issued new apologies. As far as I see right now, these speeches are even more brilliant than I previously thought. And the air is almost certainly clear right now. You can see that many statements have been exaggerated. It's my private opinion, but I believe that restricting Summers's freedom of speech - and his bright ideas - is a highly counterproductive suggestion.
You can also see that the "scary" comment about "genetic features of the Jews" was actually just an observation that the Jews are underrepresented in farming and agriculture.
Some observers have claimed that Tuesday's FAS faculty meeting was the most emotional meeting since the Vietnam war. Eight out of ten speakers were critical of president Summers; approximately two speakers endorsed Summers and criticized the critics. All topics that have been viewed as politically controversial by a segment of the Harvard community since Lawrence Summers became the boss of Harvard in 2001 - including Cornel West, the co-operation with Israeli scholars, the insufficient use of the third world's capacity to absorb pollution - have been freely raised. The media have covered this meeting in detail - well, they copied the information from The Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper - the only media allowed to report on the meeting.
The meeting will continue next Tuesday. Some colleagues of ours want (or wanted) to push for the no-confidence vote. As far as I know, more than 80 percent of the faculty attending the meeting would have to agree with a new item before it's added to the program of the meeting. However, no one can stop anyone from adding this "referendum" to the meeting in March. Such a vote is expected in March even if it already takes place on Tuesday: a regulation requires to repeat such votes so that everyone has time to prepare for a repeated vote.
FAS - the Faculty of Arts and Sciences - is by far the largest of 10 schools at Harvard and includes hard sciences, social sciences, as well as most humanities. Others are Law, Medicine, Government, and so forth. The FAS vote about the confidence would have no direct implications, but it could potentially create a pressure upon the Harvard Corporation - a rather mysterious body of 7 V.I.P.'s - the only group that has the power to change the presidents of Harvard.
My understanding of the reports is that most of Harvard Corporation endorses Summers. Also, the physicists usually believe that this story is overblown (using the words of Cumrun Vafa) and it is a strange decision to discriminate against president Summers who has said what he said, but who is clearly no chauvinist (using the words of Nima Arkani-Hamed).
Also, many people feel that the gender topic is being abused by several colleagues of ours who have other reasons to dislike president Summers (using the words of the first female tenured Harvard's physics professor, Melissa Franklin). Let me try to summarize these voices that - I believe - represent the majority's opinion of Harvard's "hard science" faculty:
If a colleague of ours is reading this text and he or she is uncertain what the mainstream opinion is gonna be on Tuesday, let me answer: the bulk of the FAS faculty wants Summers to continue.
Not only because Harvard and Princeton are usually the top two ranked universities, many people are obviously interested in the developments surrounding the world's most famous university president, namely Lawrence Summers.
On Tuesday, professors Grosz, Hammonds, Skocpol, and maybe others have asked Lawrence Summers to publish the full text of his remarks at the conference in January to "clean the air". Although it initially looked as a bad idea to many of us, president Summers has now released
and informed his colleagues about these issues; he has also issued new apologies. As far as I see right now, these speeches are even more brilliant than I previously thought. And the air is almost certainly clear right now. You can see that many statements have been exaggerated. It's my private opinion, but I believe that restricting Summers's freedom of speech - and his bright ideas - is a highly counterproductive suggestion.
You can also see that the "scary" comment about "genetic features of the Jews" was actually just an observation that the Jews are underrepresented in farming and agriculture.
Some observers have claimed that Tuesday's FAS faculty meeting was the most emotional meeting since the Vietnam war. Eight out of ten speakers were critical of president Summers; approximately two speakers endorsed Summers and criticized the critics. All topics that have been viewed as politically controversial by a segment of the Harvard community since Lawrence Summers became the boss of Harvard in 2001 - including Cornel West, the co-operation with Israeli scholars, the insufficient use of the third world's capacity to absorb pollution - have been freely raised. The media have covered this meeting in detail - well, they copied the information from The Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper - the only media allowed to report on the meeting.
The meeting will continue next Tuesday. Some colleagues of ours want (or wanted) to push for the no-confidence vote. As far as I know, more than 80 percent of the faculty attending the meeting would have to agree with a new item before it's added to the program of the meeting. However, no one can stop anyone from adding this "referendum" to the meeting in March. Such a vote is expected in March even if it already takes place on Tuesday: a regulation requires to repeat such votes so that everyone has time to prepare for a repeated vote.
FAS - the Faculty of Arts and Sciences - is by far the largest of 10 schools at Harvard and includes hard sciences, social sciences, as well as most humanities. Others are Law, Medicine, Government, and so forth. The FAS vote about the confidence would have no direct implications, but it could potentially create a pressure upon the Harvard Corporation - a rather mysterious body of 7 V.I.P.'s - the only group that has the power to change the presidents of Harvard.
My understanding of the reports is that most of Harvard Corporation endorses Summers. Also, the physicists usually believe that this story is overblown (using the words of Cumrun Vafa) and it is a strange decision to discriminate against president Summers who has said what he said, but who is clearly no chauvinist (using the words of Nima Arkani-Hamed).
Also, many people feel that the gender topic is being abused by several colleagues of ours who have other reasons to dislike president Summers (using the words of the first female tenured Harvard's physics professor, Melissa Franklin). Let me try to summarize these voices that - I believe - represent the majority's opinion of Harvard's "hard science" faculty:
- This controversy is a topic that has the ability to divide the Harvard community, and it would not be a helpful development
- So far there exists no serious tension between the individual professors at Harvard, and this situation should continue
- There is no universal agreement whether Summers' statements were legitimate, true, or not; most of us want to preserve the diversity of our opinions about these issues
- There is a widespread consensus that Summers is a nice man - certainly not a chauvinist or something like that - and my liberal colleagues still consider him a liberal, by the way; politically, he represents the mainstream and it is hard to imagine that this mainstream approach would become untollerable at Harvard just because a certain segment of Harvard thinks that the freedom to propose hypotheses should be restricted
- President Summers is an exceptionally strong president. His strength may sometimes be unwelcome according to various people who are positioned lower in the hierarchy, but the same strength is also very beneficial for Harvard in many contexts
- President Summers is doing a lot of useful work for Harvard and for its expansion, and his centralized approach simplifies many things, while it also seems to agree with the opinions of the academic community
- At this moment, it seems that no one - neither the Harvard Corporation nor the professors - have a realistic plan how to replace Summers with someone else, and destabilizing Summers's position could bring very negative consequences to the school
If a colleague of ours is reading this text and he or she is uncertain what the mainstream opinion is gonna be on Tuesday, let me answer: the bulk of the FAS faculty wants Summers to continue.
Physics seminar videos
How many videos from physical seminars do you think are available on-line? The answer is "many". See the page created by Serkan Cabi
If you think that this is an impressive list, you could also try to visit Cabi's glasses i.e. his blog at MIT:
where physics - and even string theory - plays an important role.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Kyoto takes effect (update)
This article has been corrected.
The Kyoto protocol comes of age. Finally. How much will it - and its hypothetical future extensions - cost? Let's talk about the catastrophic scenario in which people won't abandon this weird international treaty and they will really try to stabilize the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Reuters published estimates that it would cost 18 quadrillions (18 times 10 to the 15th power):
Incidentally, now I guess that the report from Reuters that talks about 18 quadrillions is derived from the same graphs (note that the number starts with 18 again), and the author (Aliston Doyle) has made yet another numerical error in his counting of orders of magnitude. Note that once these discussions try to become quantitative and factual, no one has an idea what the reasonable numbers should be and two orders of magnitude don't really matter. People still call it "science"...
The Kyoto protocol comes of age. Finally. How much will it - and its hypothetical future extensions - cost? Let's talk about the catastrophic scenario in which people won't abandon this weird international treaty and they will really try to stabilize the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Reuters published estimates that it would cost 18 quadrillions (18 times 10 to the 15th power):
- Reuters report I, II, III, IV
If you don't know what a quadrillion (U.S.) means, it is roughly speaking an infinite number, and you may object to such an unrealistic result and label the news from Reuters as a kind of typo. What about the estimates from the real people behind the Kyoto protocol?
These bureaucrats and scientific bureaucrats are organized in the IPCC - the same institution that has claimed, for several years, that the temperature record in the last 1000 years looks like a hockey stick, without checking the statistics behind these claims. So what does the IPCC say about the costs of stabilizing the CO2 concentrations? Let me start with some elementary data.
The pre-industrial concentrations were about 280 ppm (parts per million, counted as volume) - the usual peak for recent interglacials. Incidentally, during the ice ages the concentration fluctuated around 180 ppm. Let's try to return further to the past.
When mammals were created 100 million years ago, the temperatures were 10 degrees C higher and the CO2 concentrations were about 3,000 ppm, eight times as high as today. The humans appeared during the "previous global warming" three million years ago in the middle Pliocene - it had to be a horrible time if monsters like humans were born; the concentrations were 380 ppm just like today and the temperatures were 2-3 degrees C higher.
Once again, the current concentration is 380 ppm and it rises by a few ppm every year. Some people want to claim that 400 ppm is already too high. We can't count the costs of stabilizing the concentrations below 400 ppm because the theory is not renormalizable. ;-)
OK, so the first realistic number that the IPCC considers is to stabilize the CO2 concentrations below 450 ppm. See the graph
- IPCC: costs (graph)
which is found as 7.3 on the page
Thanks to a reader of my blog who pointed out this page. What does this particular graph say? In order to stabilize the concentration below 450 ppm, one needs to pay 400-1800 trillions of 1990 U.S. dollars by 2100, according to different models. What would such a number mean?
Note that the 1990 U.S. dollar is more than the present one. This number amounts to more than 10 trillion USD per year. That's roughly the size of the U.S. economy (GDP), 20 percent of the world's economy.
The United States are reasonable enough not to participate in the main Kyoto activities (although there are similar programs at the level of the states), so let's talk about the real signatories. The cost of "Kyoto 450" as described in the graph would be equivalent to nuking the whole territory of Japan, Great Britain, Germany, France, and several other countries every year so that it's guaranteed that life can't continue until 2100. (You could first evacuate the people from these countries.) Note that if you only nuke the European countries in this list, the costs will be lower than "Kyoto 450". I am not proposing it, just listing the fact that according to the graph, there would be alternatives to Kyoto that would have a similar effect.
However, as a leading climate expert W.S. from Harvard who read my blog has pointed out, these IPCC numbers on the graph are bogus. The IPCC later published an "important correction"
Incidentally, now I guess that the report from Reuters that talks about 18 quadrillions is derived from the same graphs (note that the number starts with 18 again), and the author (Aliston Doyle) has made yet another numerical error in his counting of orders of magnitude. Note that once these discussions try to become quantitative and factual, no one has an idea what the reasonable numbers should be and two orders of magnitude don't really matter. People still call it "science"...
Figure 1: Taiwan's emperors of the Kyoto protocol have new clothes. Or maybe they're preparing for the after-Kyoto living standards. Click the picture for more information.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Kenneth Lane on SSC and LHC
Kenneth Lane from Boston University just gave an interesting talk about a topic that you can view as messy and boring: the imperfections of hadron colliders. He described various types of background:
He showed the structure of the detectors - such as the huge detector GEM - designed for the Superconducting SuperCollider (SSC) that has been stopped 10+ years ago. That was sad. We could have had a lot of data already. One of the clear lessons from the SSC is that the particle physicists should have voted for the Republicans at that time :-) - although the current correlation between the parties and the physics policies is less clear and might be, in fact, reverted.
Various quantities are measured with various large errors. These machines are not perfect and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) won't be perfect either. In various directions, the detectors and calorimeters are insensitive because the wires and cooling and similar necessary things must go through somewhere. Moreover, GEM - as tall as a 7-story building and almost twice as long - was divided into two parts exactly in the middle. This is the most interesting point corresponding to zero rapidity where new physics is expected. Nevertheless, they planned that there would be a blind spot exactly at this place. It's like your brain that is divided into two hemispheres exactly in the middle.
Kenneth Lane said that the experimentalists who design these detectors spend a lot of time arguing about technology choices. For example, should they use liquid argon or crystals for an electromagnetic calorimeter? He thinks one of the rules that help them to find the right answer is that, if theorists like Lane have an opinion on the technology, then they are certainly wrong. Comparing the SSC and LHC detectors, Lane thinks the choices may not always matter as much as taste and politics -- there is a lot of money and power involved. However, all these decisions are done by smart people who have very rational, scientific arguments, he added. ;-)
Incidentally, Peter Woit on his educational low-dimensional blog Not Even Wrong tried to distort the image of Kenneth Lane. Peter has even tried to picture Kenneth Lane as a person who is not enthusiastic or even bitter about string theory! :-) In reality, when we were taking the standard visitor's photograph, Kenneth Lane insisted that he should be photographed with Edward Witten, Joe Polchinski, Andrew Strominger, and Cumrun Vafa as all of them celebrate 20 years of superstring theory. In fact, Kenneth Lane is on his way to the 21st Aspen Winter Conference and he wants to have a proof that he also celebrated the 20th anniversary of strings.
Although most of us at Harvard are very realistic and sometimes even frustrated by the relatively slow progress in our field, why should we inhibit the enthusiasm of Kenneth Lane for string theory? The pictures are here and here.
Acknowledgements: I am grateful to K.L. for improvements of this text.
- real background
- faked background
- detector-induced background
He showed the structure of the detectors - such as the huge detector GEM - designed for the Superconducting SuperCollider (SSC) that has been stopped 10+ years ago. That was sad. We could have had a lot of data already. One of the clear lessons from the SSC is that the particle physicists should have voted for the Republicans at that time :-) - although the current correlation between the parties and the physics policies is less clear and might be, in fact, reverted.
Various quantities are measured with various large errors. These machines are not perfect and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) won't be perfect either. In various directions, the detectors and calorimeters are insensitive because the wires and cooling and similar necessary things must go through somewhere. Moreover, GEM - as tall as a 7-story building and almost twice as long - was divided into two parts exactly in the middle. This is the most interesting point corresponding to zero rapidity where new physics is expected. Nevertheless, they planned that there would be a blind spot exactly at this place. It's like your brain that is divided into two hemispheres exactly in the middle.
Kenneth Lane said that the experimentalists who design these detectors spend a lot of time arguing about technology choices. For example, should they use liquid argon or crystals for an electromagnetic calorimeter? He thinks one of the rules that help them to find the right answer is that, if theorists like Lane have an opinion on the technology, then they are certainly wrong. Comparing the SSC and LHC detectors, Lane thinks the choices may not always matter as much as taste and politics -- there is a lot of money and power involved. However, all these decisions are done by smart people who have very rational, scientific arguments, he added. ;-)
Incidentally, Peter Woit on his educational low-dimensional blog Not Even Wrong tried to distort the image of Kenneth Lane. Peter has even tried to picture Kenneth Lane as a person who is not enthusiastic or even bitter about string theory! :-) In reality, when we were taking the standard visitor's photograph, Kenneth Lane insisted that he should be photographed with Edward Witten, Joe Polchinski, Andrew Strominger, and Cumrun Vafa as all of them celebrate 20 years of superstring theory. In fact, Kenneth Lane is on his way to the 21st Aspen Winter Conference and he wants to have a proof that he also celebrated the 20th anniversary of strings.
Although most of us at Harvard are very realistic and sometimes even frustrated by the relatively slow progress in our field, why should we inhibit the enthusiasm of Kenneth Lane for string theory? The pictures are here and here.
Acknowledgements: I am grateful to K.L. for improvements of this text.
Monday, February 14, 2005
Frank Wilczek about Penrose's new book
Frank Wilczek did not allow his first Nobel prize to reduce his activity, and one of the many things he recently did was to read the new book The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose, even though it has about 1100 pages. Wilczek wrote an excellent review of this book for a recent issue of Science. Unfortunately, you need a subscription to access the article, or you need to buy the paper version.
Although I have not read the whole book, it does not seem necessary to determine that I completely agree with Wilczek's comments. First of all, Penrose is a highly original thinker. Among his discoveries, we find
However, the perspective of a professional physicist is less encouraging. Penrose proposes
Although I have not read the whole book, it does not seem necessary to determine that I completely agree with Wilczek's comments. First of all, Penrose is a highly original thinker. Among his discoveries, we find
- Various methods and solutions of GR related to dynamics of black holes (which includes his method to gain energy from the Kerr black hole)
- The Penrose (BMN) limit of geometries, a kind of pp-waves
- The Penrose causal diagrams
- The esoteric Insect formalism for GR: tensors are bugs and indices are their legs
- The Penrose tilings and quasicrystals
- The twistors (1967)
- Spin networks that he invented decades before they became fashionable in loop quantum gravity which was another framework that people were proposing as an approach to quantum gravity
However, the perspective of a professional physicist is less encouraging. Penrose proposes
- that the wavefunction collapse is a real process that is somewhat connected with quantum gravity and perhaps time-asymmetry of the fundamental physical laws; I guess that Wilczek and I are not the only people who think that these ideas are misguided
- the initial conditions for the Big Bang are, according to Penrose, unlikely - the gravitational field must be very ordered while the matter is in thermal state which is an unlikely state; well, I would say that these things are explained well in Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos
- Penrose believes that the Cabibbo angle governs the mixing of K0 and K0bar into K0-short-lived and K0-long-lived.
- Penrose apparently talks about some non-existing alternative directions in electroweak symmetry breaking
- Penrose believes that at this transition, some new kind of disorder arises
- Penrose believes that there is something wrong with the black hole entropy calculations - which must definitely be a misunderstanding on his side (I don't have the book so it's not clear what the misunderstanding is)
- We've been informed that Penrose protested that something had to be wrong with all theories with extra dimensions because the moduli spaces of Calabi-Yau spaces have singularities such as the conifold; Penrose obviously has not been explained that the conifold singularity is exactly one of the physical questions that has been best understood in the 1990s, and physics of string theory around this point is completely non-singular. It's an example of a triumph of string theory. See the paper by Strominger and its 400 citations. ("Conifolds in string theory" is a larger field than "loop quantum gravity", and the former makes sense.) Roger Penrose also does not like higher-dimensional theories because they make his twistor ideas less important.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Libertarian girl was a hoax
The frequent visitors of my blog have probably noticed that one of the "social" links points to the blog of Libertarian Girl:
She started with libertariangirl.blogspot.com and then she moved her blog to libertariangirl.typepad.com. I've been one of the naive people who believed that she was real, and I am proud about it. Click at these links to see what happened with that picture!
In fact, in my opinion, there exists no physical law that would strictly prohibit the existence of a young gorgeous girl who spends hours with her libertarian blog. Many girls and women are very close to that point! Libertarian girl always looked not only intelligent, but a little bit too tough - for example she was pretty strongly pro-war (even pro-war in Iran). But all these things are possible, aren't they?
What about the girl on the picture? Her name is Viktoriya and she is a Ukrainian woman from Kiev "seeking man". This was probably enough for the inventor of Libertarian Girl not to be afraid of copyright infringements. After long speculations about her gender - which Libertarian Girl identified as sexism - someone has finally found the other picture: see the blog here.
The creator of Libertarian Girl claims that he has learned several things: for example "how easy attractive women have it". He estimates that it's "ten times for a woman's blog to become popular". He also believes that "whenever [he] sees an attractive woman with a successful career, [he]’ll remember the experience of this blog and assume that she didn’t really get there on merit, just her looks."
I will personally never make this assumption; on the other hand, it's good to know about this correlation. Let me admit that "her" link did not appear on my blog just on "merit". What about the other 36 blogs that linked her within two months? We report, you decide...
She started with libertariangirl.blogspot.com and then she moved her blog to libertariangirl.typepad.com. I've been one of the naive people who believed that she was real, and I am proud about it. Click at these links to see what happened with that picture!
In fact, in my opinion, there exists no physical law that would strictly prohibit the existence of a young gorgeous girl who spends hours with her libertarian blog. Many girls and women are very close to that point! Libertarian girl always looked not only intelligent, but a little bit too tough - for example she was pretty strongly pro-war (even pro-war in Iran). But all these things are possible, aren't they?
What about the girl on the picture? Her name is Viktoriya and she is a Ukrainian woman from Kiev "seeking man". This was probably enough for the inventor of Libertarian Girl not to be afraid of copyright infringements. After long speculations about her gender - which Libertarian Girl identified as sexism - someone has finally found the other picture: see the blog here.
The creator of Libertarian Girl claims that he has learned several things: for example "how easy attractive women have it". He estimates that it's "ten times for a woman's blog to become popular". He also believes that "whenever [he] sees an attractive woman with a successful career, [he]’ll remember the experience of this blog and assume that she didn’t really get there on merit, just her looks."
I will personally never make this assumption; on the other hand, it's good to know about this correlation. Let me admit that "her" link did not appear on my blog just on "merit". What about the other 36 blogs that linked her within two months? We report, you decide...
This Jeff Gannon thing
really has me laughing uncontrollably.
So many have written so much that I'll just refer you to them for any part of this story you are not familiar with:
AMERICAblog was all-Gannon-all-the-time for a few days last week; scroll down for the juicy stuff. John also gave Aaron Brown an earful on CNN Newsnight. Atrios this morning rips Howard Kurtz (WaPo media bloviator) for his most recent hypocrisy. But the best comes from a snark-only thread at Daily Kos, whose diarists essentially broke this story (appearing as a correction):
Which brings to mind the immortal words of Dorothy Parker:
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her (let's make that 'him' as well) think."
Update: I should have mentioned that Salon's Eric Boehlert -- who was also on Newsnight with AMERICAblog's John A. -- has a great synopsis, and that Crooks and Liars has a video of the CNN interview, the transcript of which I linked above.
So many have written so much that I'll just refer you to them for any part of this story you are not familiar with:
AMERICAblog was all-Gannon-all-the-time for a few days last week; scroll down for the juicy stuff. John also gave Aaron Brown an earful on CNN Newsnight. Atrios this morning rips Howard Kurtz (WaPo media bloviator) for his most recent hypocrisy. But the best comes from a snark-only thread at Daily Kos, whose diarists essentially broke this story (appearing as a correction):
For the Record: The journalistic alma mater of 'Jeff Gannon', where Mr. Gannon studied journalism in an intensive two-day, all-meals-included course costing a full fifty dollars, is in fact known as the Leadership Institute Broadcast Journalism School and not, as I had previously referred to it, the Morton C. Blackwell Institute of Media Whorticulture.
Which brings to mind the immortal words of Dorothy Parker:
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her (let's make that 'him' as well) think."
Update: I should have mentioned that Salon's Eric Boehlert -- who was also on Newsnight with AMERICAblog's John A. -- has a great synopsis, and that Crooks and Liars has a video of the CNN interview, the transcript of which I linked above.
Shiites win
In agreement with my predictions and predictions of many other people, the large Shiite coalition has won the Iraq elections. They've received about 48 percent of the votes.
The second party is the Kurdish coalition. My favorite Iraqi List follows. The turnout was at 59 percent.
The large Shiite coalition, led by Ayatollah Al-Sistani, is mostly religious - although there are some liberals in it, too - and it will try to transform Iraq into a new kind of Iran. Let's hope that it will stay democratic for some time, and it won't become too dangerous for the world.
The second party is the Kurdish coalition. My favorite Iraqi List follows. The turnout was at 59 percent.
The large Shiite coalition, led by Ayatollah Al-Sistani, is mostly religious - although there are some liberals in it, too - and it will try to transform Iraq into a new kind of Iran. Let's hope that it will stay democratic for some time, and it won't become too dangerous for the world.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Having java in South America this p.m.
Well, sort of. In that "in your mind" kinda way.
Me and the cool kids from Houston Metrobloggers (clink at the top...there. Right there. See it?) are doing the Meetup thing at Brasil this afternoon.
Hope I'm not the oldest one in the room...
Update: if the c.k. were there, they were hiding from me.
My Valentine of 18 years was kind enough to walk around to the other rooms and patio inquiring (you know how we men are about asking for directions) and a tableful of young men said, "sure that's us" but her BS detector red-lined. So, H-Town bloggers, if that really was you, no offense...
Me and the cool kids from Houston Metrobloggers (clink at the top...there. Right there. See it?) are doing the Meetup thing at Brasil this afternoon.
Hope I'm not the oldest one in the room...
Update: if the c.k. were there, they were hiding from me.
My Valentine of 18 years was kind enough to walk around to the other rooms and patio inquiring (you know how we men are about asking for directions) and a tableful of young men said, "sure that's us" but her BS detector red-lined. So, H-Town bloggers, if that really was you, no offense...
EU constitution in space
In April, the Union will be sending its constitution, which will soon be approved by 100 percent of the working and celebrating people, into space.
A gold-bound copy of the Union's constitution has been delivered to the Soviet cosmic center Baikonur in Kazakhstan. A cosmonaut, namely comrade Tognini, is due to pass it to comrade Tognini (sic, see REDNOVA). Finally, Tognini will take it onboard of the Russian spaceship Soyuz (which means "Union" in Russian) as a symbol of
- "how national interests can be transcended by channeling the aspirations of nearly half a billion citizens from diverse cultural backgrounds towards the common goals of peace, freedom and prosperity,"
using the words of the commissary for the peaceful expansion of the Union, comrade Verheugen. The Russian spaceship will bring the constitution to the International Space Station so that all the nations and the whole Universe sees that the Union is ahead of the American imperialists: America has never been able to transport its constitution into space, and until the heroes of socialism win their battle in the new world, there will be no progress in the so-called New World.
The bold decision to take the constitution into outer space is a revolutionary idea. Even the British Eurosceptic party UKIP said outer space was the best place for the constitution (BBC).
The spokesman for the European Soviet, comrade Kreuzhuber, said: "This time they asked to bring a copy of the European Constitution along." Although the constitution has yet to be ratified here on Earth, comrade Kreuzhuber points out that "this will make it one of the world's most thoroughly tested constitutions -- not just politically but physically." (REDNOVA)
The officials in the capital city of the Union have released a warning for its citizens saying that "if the Constitution is not approved through the referendums, it will drop on the Europeans' heads from space." (ZAMAN)
Figure 1: Comrade Chirac and French pioneers with flowers celebrate the constitution's journey through the Cosmos. Chirac is currently visiting Spain where less than 1 person in 10 will vote "no". The Spanish unemployment dropped to one-half and the Spaniards have received 219 billion USD from the Union since they joined in 1986.
Incidentally, the Union in the text above is not the Soviet Union but the European Union, and the news is not a joke. The previous blog article about the European constitution was here.
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