Earth's energy budget

...or balance...

This article is mostly about the new evidence supporting global warming by Hansen et al. But let me start with an idealized energy budget of the Earth.

The average (over the surface, day, and year) energy coming from the Sun in the form of solar radiation is 342 Watts per squared meter - and almost exactly the same amount of energy is leaving the Earth. Note that 342 is exactly one quarter of the solar constant 1370 W/m^2 (the inflow of solar energy near the Earth) - it's because the radiation is only absorbed by the cross section "pi.R^2" of the planet, while we attribute it to the whole surface "4.pi.R^2" of the Earth by the averaging process.



These 342 W/m^2 may be divided in various ways - see, for example, this PDF file (which I think is, by the way, much more rational than the paper I will discuss below):

• 67+168+107: here, after the 342 W/m^2 approach the Earth, 67 is absorbed in the visible and UV spectrum by oxygen, ozone, and water in the atmosphere; 168 is absorbed by the surface; 107 is scattered to space in the UV and visible spectrum
• 107+235: here, 107 is the reflected UV and visible radiation, as explained above; 235 is the total IR radiation emitted to space; the total radiation leaving the Earth is again 342

Where do these 235 W/m^2 of "infrared" energy in the atmosphere come from?

• 67+66+78+24; here, 67 is the UV and visible solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere, as mentioned above; 66 is IR radiation emitted by the surface and absorbed by the atmosphere; 78 is latent heat flux from the surface to the atmosphere (typically flowing in the rain or wet conditions); 24 is conduction and convection (from the surface to the atmosphere)

Note that the Earth's energy budget as summarized above works pretty nicely. I did not even have to consider 40 W/m^2 - a subset of those 66 W/m^2 above - which are "atmospheric windows" and may be viewed as direct IR radiation of the surface to the space.




How precisely do we know the numbers above? Of course, much less precisely than indicated. For example, the number "67" counting the UV rays absorbed by the atmosphere is just a result of simulations (which rely on hundreds of assumptions and which become extremely subtle especially once we need to include the effects of clouds). The observed absorption is by up to 30 W/m^2 higher than the predictions of the models - this is known as the absorption anomaly (see also Climate Audit or a description of cloud absorption anomaly of "unprecedented magnitude"). Let me emphasize that this is a UV absorption; greenhouse gases absorb IR radiation from the surface and their effects belong to a different term.

You can see that we roughly know the major energy flows through the atmosphere, as long as you allow for the uncertainties of order 30 W/m^2 (up to ten percent of the energy flows). Now, open the paper by Hansen et al.:

• Hansen et al. 2005

James Hansen is one of the people who started the paradigm that "climate change is one of the most important threats facing the humankind" two decades ago. In the paper above, they "derive" many new catastrophic scenarios. The only reason why you should believe these scenarios based on these specific computer models is the following "consistency check":

• Their favorite computer models happen to claim that the Earth absorbs "0.85+-0.15 W/m^2" more energy than it emits; the same number "0.85 W/m^2" is calculated from the increasing temperature of oceans as the average extra energy stored by the oceans.

You can see that their advertised error margin is roughly 100 times smaller than the error margin of any conceivable calculation that someone may want to do today or in the near future. A computer model can, of course, calculate certain numbers quite accurately - but when we make a contact with reality, we must also include the errors and uncertainties of the model itself - the model uncertainties which are large. The scientific significance of the number "0.85" is zero. One may obtain numbers between -30 and +30 (or between -10 and -10, to say the least) by various small changes of the assumptions - and any number between -2 and +3 W/m^2 is as probable as 0.85 W/m^2. Of course that if one would derive that the energy imbalance is several (or tens of) Watts per meter squared, something would have to be wrong with the calculation because this would predict a huge, unobserved change in the mean temperature. Only calculations that lead to a plausible cancellation survive.

Gavin Schmidt could tell you that the large uncertainty of the individual terms does not matter because their sum is known accurately. He may try to deduce the number 0.85 W/m^2 from the observed warming in the last 100 years (about 0.5 degrees), given a certain conversion ratio between the imbalance and the temperature anomaly - this conversion ratio is called "sensitivity". Incidentally, James Hansen himself has recently changed his idea about the value of sensitivity roughly by a factor of two, so don't expect miraculous accuracy on this front either.

But even in the highly hypothetical case that the number "0.85 W/m^2" is close to the true imbalance, the climate science is very far from attributing it to some particular effects or from justifying the currently fashionable models. You don't know how to attribute this number exactly because you don't know accurately enough how the number 0.85 is divided to the individual terms.

This imbalance could be a standard discrepancy that always occurs in this era of the glaciation cycles, for example. Once again, the obvious warning is that one cannot verify models based on hundreds of arbitrary assumptions and parameters by looking at one predicted number, especially if the error margin in determining this number makes even its sign uncertain. Even more clearly, neither of their arguments or experiments is able to make any connection with the carbon dioxide.

Global temperature and cosmological constant

This potential for flawed reasoning is just like the cancellation of the cosmological constant (the energy density in the vacuum that curves the space and accelerates its expansion) and the anthropic reasoning. We know that the total cosmological constant is much smaller than the individual terms we imagine as contributions - and in fact, it must be so if galaxies could have formed (but we don't really need this observation since we have simply measured Lambda). But it is just one number. One cannot derive the existence of googols of universes and their properties from this single number, for example. One cannot calculate the mass of the Higgs particle from the small cosmological constant either. The cancellation is something that must occur and we do not know exactly why it occurs, but the fact that it does occur is too small a piece of information to imply anything else.

In the case of the oceans, the announced error margin is not only more than 100 times smaller than the uncertainties connected with the absorption anomaly. It is also comparable to many other effects that have been neglected - such as the energy loss from the tidal forces and the heat stored by the "bulk" of the Earth. Nevertheless, the authors construct the model to get an almost perfect cancellation, and they don't hesitate to claim that the finding implies that

1. additional warming of 0.6 degrees Celsius is now guaranteed even without further changes of the atmosphere, because of "thermal inertia" of the oceans (note that "thermal inertia" is not just an awkward way to talk about heat capacity because heat capacity tends to stabilize the temperature near a constant, not in the state of uniform motion) ;-)
2. this "thermal inertia" also implies that the atmosphere is "lagging behind", and therefore we must be afraid of the future even in the case when we don't observe the predicted effects
3. melting icebergs and rising sea levels are guaranteed, as always

I am not 100% sure that the 15 authors will agree with me that their paper is a textbook example of cargo cult science. Something that superficially uses the correct words and sometimes even the correct formulae, but always in a misleading, incomplete, incorrect context. Something essential is missing. The calculations and arguments only pick some mechanisms, formulae, and possible explanations, but they do not worry that the right explanation may be completely different. The "implication 2" moreover shows that their speculations are untestable.

The logical connections between various statements and observations in the paper are flawed, the attribution is unjustified, but it does not matter too much today. What probably matters more is that hundreds of newspapers inform about this "smoking gun" or even "proof" of global warming (fortunately, BBC added quotes to the word "proof" and cited scientists who stated that the evidence supporting Hansen et al. models is weak).

The climate science, something that the U.S. spends 6 billions USD per year for, has become a huge enterprise that does not intend to explain and predict numbers anymore; it is intended to justify the failure to calculate anything correctly and overcompensate the failure by even more sensational predictions that will be shown incorrect in the future - far enough future so that their responsibility for the incorrect predictions will be forgotten. A well-known mainstream climate scientist Hans von Storch, together with Nico Stehr, recently complained about the losing battle of sober analysis against sexy, catastrophic scenarios (well, Hans von Storch - who is a former leading German defender of Donald Duck :-) - keeps on telling me that Fred Singer's translation is lousy and that an authorized translation is here).

• Greetings to the readers who came here from Climate Audit or Junk Science. Previous articles on this blog about the global climate are here.

Summary of the paper by Hansen et al.: they have demonstrated that the temperature growth in the recent decades is roughly consistent with the temperature growth of the oceans, but they have found no arguments whatsoever that could attribute this growth to any particular mechanism, and the agreement with their particular model is pure chance because of the huge model uncertainties. The warming in the last 100 years may be a statistical fluke, the end of the little ice age, the effect of the solar magnetic field, or anything else. As Roy Spencer wrote later, they just outlined one internally consistent interpretation of the data among many other possible interpretations.

Filibustering

The filibuster, i.e. an extra-constitutional obstructionist tactic - speaking about irrelevant things for hours in the Senate, trying to delay a decision, has been used by both parties throughout the U.S. history. In the 1950s and the 1960s, it was used to prevent new bills about the civil rights.

Recently, at least 10 conservative judicial nominees have been filibustered by the Democrats in the Senate - an unprecendented large number. Princeton's alumnus, the Senate majority leader William Frist, proposed the "nuclear option" based on the paradigm that it should be enough to debate a candidate for 100 hours - and a vote should follow afterwards. Today it takes 60 votes to stop a meaningless debate; according to Frist's new rules, it would take simply 51 votes in the case of judicial nominees.

Most Democrats and other left-wing forces - which also includes 95 percent of intellectually diverse Princeton University - vehemently disagree. Everyone should be allowed to speak for hundreds of hours and maybe for years. It is vital for democracy to obstruct and delay nominees that the correct people do not like - much like it is important for bureaucrats to slow everything down as much as possible (these slowing procedures are usually extremely efficient and in many cases more annoying than a "no" vote). For example, it is important to read random pages from Introduction to Elementary Particles by David Griffiths for more than 50 hours.

Edward Witten and Chiara Nappi are not the only ones - Frank Wilczek is having a great filibustering time in Princeton, too. ;-) See also the filibuster webcam and program in Princeton. I was explained that the last sentence was "unnecessary".

Stringy Baby Universes

Robbert Dijkgraaf, Rajesh Gopakumar, Hiroši Ooguri, and Cumrun Vafa (DGOV) have extended their previous work about the relations between topological string theory, two-dimensional Yang-Mills theory, and Hartle-Hawking states

• hep-th/0504221

to non-perturbative effects in Yang-Mills theory. The most relevant previous blog article about the topic is

• The Entropic Principle

Note that Savas Dimopoulos has used this term with an incorrect meaning (anthropic haystack) but we obviously mean the more correct one. ;-) Everyone who wants to read about the Baby Universes that are advertised in the title is encouraged to be extremely patient. Although the new work is very interesting, let me be rather brief. Imagine that you want to count the index of a (3+1-dimensional) black hole which is really a D4-brane wrapped on some 4-cycle of a six-dimensional Calabi-Yau space - a manifold which is nothing else than a four-dimensional fiber bundle over the two-torus. If the word "index" sounds too abstract, replace it by "the number of microstates with some minus signs".

If you accept the word "index" anyway, you are counting the supersymmetric (BPS) sector of this theory, and it is a usual story that the BPS sector of a higher-dimensional theory may be described by a non-supersymmetric lower-dimensional theory. In this particular case, the relevant lower-dimensional theory is nothing else than two-dimensional Yang-Mills theory compactified on the same two-torus.

Looking at two-dimensional Yang-Mills

Now, you might think that two-dimensional gauge theory must be terribly boring. The number of transverse physical excitations of a photon (or a gluon) is "D-2=0", for example. It does not have any other fields, like matrix string theory which is a two-dimensional gauge theory with matter, that would allow the theory to describe infinitely many states and their interactions (for example the whole type IIA string theory, in the case of matrix string theory). Nevertheless, you may still compute its partition sum as a function of the number of colors "N", the coupling constant, and the area of the torus. Don't forget that this partition sum is computing an index of the higher-dimensional black hole.

It's been shown roughly a decade ago that as far as this partition function goes, two-dimensional Yang-Mills theory is equivalent to a system of free fermions that fill a band of states with energies between "-N/2" and "+N/2" (let me ignore the integrality vs. half-integrality properties of "N"). This band has two Fermi surfaces: one of them is up (near "+N/2"), and one of them is down (near "-N/2"). The partition function is really a sum over possible excitations of these two Fermi surfaces.

Note that if "N" is large, these two Fermi surfaces are very far apart and almost decoupled. Consequently, the partition sum of the free fermions factorizes into a product

• Z_{Yang-Mills} = Z_{up} Z_{down}.

Moreover, "Z_{up}" and "Z_{down}" are very similar and essentially complex conjugates to each other. That's not the end of the "entropic principle" story: Z_{Yang-Mills} may be interpreted, for large "N", as the black hole entropy, while "Z_{up}" and "Z_{down}" are the partition sums "Z_{top}" of topological string theory on the Calabi-Yau manifold that describes our black hole and its (the partition sum's) complex conjugate. This was the essential point of the work by Ooguri, Strominger, and Vafa: the exponentiated black hole entropy may be computed as the squared absolute value of the partition sum of topological string theory.

In terms of the two-dimensional Yang-Mills variables, the black hole partition function becomes the Yang-Mills partition function. The partition sum of two-dimensional Yang-Mills theory may be written not only using free fermions, but more generally also as a sum over irreducible representations "Rep"

• Z_{Yang-Mills} = Sum_{Rep} Tr_{Rep} exp[-C_2(Rep) A (g^2) N]

where "C_2" is the second Casimir of the representation, "A" is the area of the two-torus, "g" is the coupling constant (whose dimension is "mass"), and "N" is the number of colors. For non-toroidal topologies, an extra factor "dim(Rep)^{chi}" with the exponent "chi" being the Euler character of the surface would have to be added to the sum. Nevertheless, for large "N", most irreducible representations have a huge Casimir that kills their contribution to the sum. The "small" Casimir irreps of "SU(N)" can be obtained from the tensor product of a "small" representation constructed by tensoring (drawing a Young diagram) from the fundamental representation, and another "small" representation obtained from the antifundamental representation in the same way. The Casimir is then a sum of two pieces, the summation over "Rep" factorizes into a summation over "Rep_{fun}" and an independent summation over "Rep_{antifun}". Finally, the partition sum itself factorizes in such a way that the last two displayed formulae agree.

Non-decoupling of two surfaces

Nevertheless, the two Fermi surfaces are not quite decoupled for finite "N" and there are correlations. For example, if you fix the total number of fermions "N", a missing group of electrons near "+N/2" must be accompanied by added fermions near "-N/2". These correlations modify the partition sum by "exp(-N)" effects - which are non-perturbative effects with respect to a "1/N" expansion and can be neglected for large "N". DGOV have the full expression for the partition sum, and therefore they can evaluate it including these tiny effects. The partition sum of Yang-Mills then contains not only terms of the type "Z_{top}^2" but also higher powers of "Z_{top}", so to say, and the exponential suppression of "exp(-kN)" arises because of the same reason that makes the total exponentiated entropy of several black holes negligible compared to a single black hole with the "total" mass: single black hole is entropically preferred and splitting it into pieces is unlikely and exponentially suppressed by entropy counting.

If we avoid the term "Baby Universe", the black hole partition sum may be visualized as a sum of partition sums of "K" black holes, where higher values of "K" are discouraged exponentially. However, every single black hole among these "K" objects has its own near-horizon geometry which is an independent "AdS2 x S2 x Calabi-Yau" universe. Consequently, the partition sum of Yang-Mills theory may be viewed as a gauge-theoretical dual of a system of many "AdS2 x S2" universes - the baby Universes. Andy Strominger and his collaborators also liked to play with these "AdS2 x S2 x Calabi-Yau" disconnected backgrounds. DGOV explain that this multiplicity of Universes does not destroy the coherence in a single Universe.

Another interesting subtlety is that the term in the partition sum coming from "K" disconnected Universes is weighted by a rather unusual factor - the Catalan number "C_{K}" (1, 1, 2, 5, 14, 42, 132, ... if we start from "K=0") that measures the number of planar trees whose endpoints are the given Universes. (They can be written as "(2K)! / (K)! (K+1)!".) For every tree like that, one can construct a corresponding "tree-like" solution of supergravity that are really generated by multi-centered black hole solutions. The appearance of this Catalan number may be interpreted as some new obscure kind of "statistics" that remembers the "origin": for Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac statistics of the Universes, we would obtain simpler factors.

I am still confused about some interpretational issues. These Baby Universe effects only become important for small values of "N" which is exactly where the geometry (and even the "counting of the number of universes) is fuzzy. I don't know how could one ever extract the information about multiple large independent universes from the partition sum - and its generalizations.

Since I posted about woodpeckers recently...

I was delighted to read this news.

Something that hasn't happened in 113 years happened in Houston this evening; two NL pitchers who've each won 300 games -- not to mention eleven Cy Young awards between them -- matched up at Minute Maid Park this evening, and the Astros lost. Again.

This is your final warning: stop spending so much time with your e-mail.

"The next Governor, of the Great State of Texas..."

Completing this week's Democratic trifecta was last night's happy hour and update with prospective gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell (who made a point of introducing himself to me -- as if he needed to. Turns out he's a family friend.)

With the bragging dispensed, let me work in a little history:

-- if you are a Texas Monthly subscriber there's an excellent article there, but it's hiding behind their most invasive registration. (You not only have to sign with the usual personal data but you have to enter an access code that only appears inside the magazine. And there's a different one each month.) So I'm going to sample a bit from it for you:

The chance of a Democratic upset in the 2006 governor's race is about as likely as, well, Bill Clements winning in '78. Or Mark White winning in '82. Or Ann Richards winning in '90. Or ...

... Although political pros believe that Republicans start out with a built-in ten-point advantage over Democrats in any statewide race, a battle for governor is so high-profile that it can transcend party loyalties. It happened in Texas when Republicans were on the way up, and it could happen now that the shoe is on the Democrats' foot. Deeply red states like Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, and Oklahoma have recently elected Democratic governors. "It's a high-visibility race," notes pollster Richard Murray, of the University of Houston. "There's more independent voting for governor. Independents can swing one way or another, and voters don't like living in a one-party state. The minority can win."

You might also have heard about this little redistricting thing that happened down here in Texas, which resulted in among other things Bell losing his seat in Congress, and then he filed a little ethics complaint against a certain House Majority Leader, and then things got a little vitriolic from there.

Don't mean to put much emphasis on the diminutive ...

You may, in addition, be aware of the pleasantries already being exchanged between our state's top two former cheerleaders -- Rick "Goodhair" Perry and Kay "Bighair" Bailey Hutchison -- despite the Senator's so-far-missing announcement that she is running for the Governor's seat. Standing just outside the ropes in case Bighair gets cold feet is state treasurer Carole Keeton McClelland Rylander Strayhorn (Cougar Mellencamp), whose nickname is "One Tough Grandma". (Can't you just visualize the lime green tights, the raccoon makeup, the black cape with big orange letters -- "OTG"?)

Sooooo, the GOP primary is well under way, whether they want to admit it or not, and dammit, I don't think we've popped enough corn.

Into this environment then steps the former Houston city councilman and former Congressman, whose wife Alison just happens to be undergoing chemotherapy at the moment. Suffice to say that meeting the two of them last night was a privilege, and not just because I'm a bit of a local party activist. (Last disclosure: Bell represented me in Congress prior to redistriciting.)

Bell brought to light a statistic I hadn't heard before; that 40 to 55% of Republican primary voters in Texas consist of the party base. The GOP base, for those who've been missing out, are the most rabid, fanatical Republicans you can find anywhere in the nation. In the Texas legislature, for example, their representatives can currently be found pushing legislation that outlaws gay foster parent adoption, that quashes campaign finance reform, and a host of similarly bad laws.

These folks love Rick Perry, because Rick Perry is far and away the most reactionary conservative governor this state has ever had. Which makes it entirely possible that KBH might beat on him badly (the governor's popularity statewide plummeted during the redistricting fiasco); she could certainly force him to spend millions and millions of dollars, and she could still lose. Which would leave Perry bloodied and staggering just in time for the general election.

Hypothetical chess matches aside, Bell intends to wage a campaign where his top priority is public school education (and not just the appropriate funding of it). One of my favorite phrases of his is: "Budgets are moral documents." Which highlights the fact that the decisions our lawmakers make significantly affect peoples' lives. That people actually do live, or die, according to the dictates of the state. Indeed, Bell cited a case (at a Democratic club meeting last month) of a San Antonio child who had starved to death because the state's funding cuts to CPS had left that department too short-handed to intervene in time. "What would Jesus do? I don't think he would balance the budget on the backs of poor children," Bell said.

Bell also declared that those of us who shared his concerns about the state of our state -- and our nation -- were the "new mainstream".

I like the sound of that, too.

Update: Eddie at The Red State has a take factoring in the Kinky effect.

New Scientist on TOE

The new issue of New Scientist discusses the current situation of our field, it does so relatively honestly, and the spectrum of topics is consequently not the most optimistic one: the conjectured large number of solutions of string theory which is called "the worst embarrassment of riches ever known"; loop quantum gravity; taming the multiverse in various ways, and so forth.

Concerning the anthropic haystack, Susskind obviously supports it, referring to eternal inflation, while Witten says:

• "More work has always given more possibilities - far more than anyone wanted ... I hope that current discussion of the string landscape isn't on the right track. But I have no convincing counter-arguments."
  

John Edwards is still stumpin'

Evening #2 of Meet the Candidates Week continued last night with former vice-presidential nominee John Edwards speaking at the South Texas College of Law (about a twenty-minute walk-and-train-ride from me).

Marc Olivier has a report with pictures. Salon has more on the current iteration of the former Senator (not on his Houston speech specifically). There is a transcript here of a recent speech which he sampled from in his talk last night.

Tonight we get to spend some time with Chris Bell.

This will probably be the only time I ever blog about cats

Let's ask the cats about reforming Social Security.

(Well, what did you expect from a blog that is admittedly full of crap?)

Generalized geometry

The book on the left contains almost everything you need to know about algebraic geometry and Calabi-Yau manifolds in the context of string theory and closely related fields...

Andy Neitzke was leading the postdoc journal club, and it was exciting.

Hitchin, a famous mathematician, decided to understand the following question:

• What the heck is the B-field?

And he answered the question by the phrase "generalized geometry" and the associated equations and concepts that I will mention below. Consequently, 20 physicists at Harvard had to spend 2 hours tonight trying to answer the following question:

• What the heck is generalized geometry?

What's the answer? Well, surprisingly, it seems that it is a crazy mathematical construction that is supposed to incorporate the B-field. :-)

OK, let's start more seriously. When you talk about complex manifolds or something like that, it is useful to imagine that you have the tangent field T at every point of the manifold. And there is a group like SO(d) in the real case, or more precisely GL(d) because you're not forced to preserve any metric, acting at each point.

Hitchin makes it more complicated and tells you that you should replace

• T ... by ... T (+) T*

where T* is the cotangent bundle. There is a natural contraction between the vectors and covectors that is preserved by a SO(d,d,R) group. It's a mathematically analogous contraction to the contraction of the momentum and winding, although the latter two quantities are discrete, and similarly, the SO(d,d,R) group is analogous to the discrete T-duality group SO(d,d,Z) that occurs for string theory on tori.




Also, we had a small argument whether the GL(n,Z) group of large diffeomorphisms of an n-torus is a "global" subgroup of the internal group GL(n,R) that acts at each point; I was saying that GL(n,Z) may be isomorphic to a subgroup, but this particular GL(n,Z) group is not a subgroup of the particular GL(n,R) because the latter is an internal group while the former physically acts on space as a diffeomorphism.

After this basic definition of the T+T* bundle, one applies a rather standard one-to-one dictionary between the spinors of SO(d,d) and the differential forms. And one defines some analogues of the holomorphic (n,0) form - but in this new tangent space that is doubled.

One can define generalized complex manifolds - a notion that surprisingly includes both the ordinary complex manifolds as well as the ordinary symplectic manifolds. Note that these two properties (symplectic and complex) are independent. Both of them may hold simultaneously, and if the complex structure and the symplectic structure are moreover compatible (i.e. the symplectic structure is a (1,1)-form according to the complex structure), then one obtains the Kahler manifolds - a small subgroup of which (with the vanishing first Chern class) are the Calabi-Yaus.

In terms of the generalized complex manifolds, one can rephrase the condition by having two independent mutually compatible generalized complex structures. Note that one of them remembers the complex structure and the other remembers the symplectic structure (which carries, assuming a complex structure, the same information as the Kahler form).

A similar construction allows to define generalized G2 manifolds that have an SO(7,7) group at each point that may be broken, by a differential form, to a G2 x G2. We were confused why the "generalized" character is not lost if the factorization into two G2's is imposed anyway.

There has been a lot of debates to what extent the generalized objects generalize the previous objects. A generalized Calabi-Yau manifold is too general a concept - string theory can't be compactified on it in general. However, there is a special (but still generalized) case of it - the manifold with a generalized SU(3) structure which essentially has two independent compatible generalized Calabi-Yau structures on it that satisfy some extra conditions.

One can write down generalized equations for the covariantly constant spinors i.e. for the appropriate number of preserved supercharges, and the tools of generalized geometry "package" the metric and the B-field (both of which, namely Christoffel's symbol and the torsion H appear in the covariant derivatives) into one object - well, it's nothing else than g+B, the "generalized (asymmetric) metric tensor".

However, it seems that for the "proper" Calabi-Yau spaces one does not find any new solutions. Nevertheless, there has been a debate how this stuff is related to Witten and Pestun's (WP) refinement of topological M-theory. Recall that WP argued that the precise conjecture about topological M-theory fails at one-loop level, and one can fix it if the Hitchin model is replaced by the so-called extended Hitchin model.

The extended Hitchin model turns out to have no new classical solutions for the proper Calabi-Yau spaces, but there are new massive deformations of it that modify the one-loop functional determinants and so forth. Again, we were confused by the statements that "it is suddently not known whether topological string theory describes Calabi-Yau solutions or generalized Calabi-Yau solutions; Andy argued that some of the confusion follows from a famous paper that constructed an almost correct string field theory for topological string theory where, however, some massive deformations were omitted, and most people believed this otherwise important paper including the minor flaws.

Finally, we discussed various other confusing points about topological string theory - for example the one-loop anomaly that only occurs if we put it on a wrong background, but was nevertheless unknown to everyone on the journal club before the WP paper.

Also, Shiraz Minwalla asked whether a new mathematical insight, one that does not used the word "generalized", has been found using these new tools, and Andy Neitzke answered that a student of Hitchin has solved a problem in "bihermitean geometry". This bihermitean geometry is an older concept than generalized geometry, but we could not resist the temptation to think that they're equivalent or at least closely related.

The language of generalized geometry should be good for T-duality, but we had a feeling that the integrity and topology of the base space of the bundle is preserved anyway, whatever one does with the bundles, so it does not treat the T-dual backgrounds on equal footing. Also, it seems that there has been no useful interaction between the generalized geometry and mirror symmetry - something that would otherwise be inevitable if T-duality were kind of more natural in this language.

Not too surprisingly, the next task for Hitchin is to understand

• What is the C_{MNP} field in M-theory?

I wonder whether he will replace "T+T*" by "T+(T* wedge T*)". ;-) Update 2008: See Exceptional generalized geometry.

This is Democratic Candidates Week

I'm also privileged to hear John Edwards and Chris Bell the next two nights, but the week opened with a meet-and-greet with US Senate candidate Barbara Radnofsky last evening.

With about thirty in attendance, Radnofsky used the hour to clarify her views and answer questions. There were some skeptics at my table; there's been a lively discussion here which serves as your backstory.

While my friend KG might have been more discreet had she poured gasoline on her head and lit a match, the fact that Ms. Radnofsky was responsive to her aggressive questioning -- and proved worthy of the challenge -- was far and away the highlight of the evening.

A few of the prospective Senator's positions:

-- Social Security: she objects to the "privateers" moving in on the nation's pension plan. (A great word to use, since it was also employed two hundred years ago by Jean Lafitte's PR man to try to reframe themselves as something besides criminals.)

-- Healthcare: one of Radnofsky's hot buttons is the surging number of uninsured children in the country. She counts the insurance companies as obstacles to solving this problem for all of us, but the kids need to come first.

-- a category I'll call global hegemony (because she didn't): Radnofsky detailed her father's involvement in his generation's war as a backdrop for her stance on the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought I heard some objection to a draft in a references to "Bush's future wars", but the candidate generally comes down in the Howard Dean camp -- the so-called "Pottery Barn rule".

-- recent Cabinet confirmations: Radnofsky "probably" would have voted to confirm Condoleeza Rice, considers herself "uninformed" about John Negroponte, and would have opposed Alberto Gonzales' nomination to be Attorney General.

-- electronic voting: she strongly supports open source code and a voter-verifiable paper trail at the ballot box, and believes that anything short of transparency at the polls imperils democracy.

-- bankruptcy legislation : "never should have been proposed, much less passed".

Barbara Radnofsky has kept to a rigorous schedule of speaking before local Democratic clubs as well as locations throughout the state. I urge you to attend a meeting so that you can assess her candidacy in person. I'll have my own views cobbled together so they're coherent at a later time.

RHIC produces quark-gluon plasma

Just links for those who are interested - thanks to David Goss for reminding me of this news:

• Pakistan about RHIC
• Science daily about QGP

Of course, the dual description involving black holes is mentioned, too.

LHC: Gigabyte per second transfer works

The Large Hadron Collider will create a huge amount of data - and one of the big tasks is to transfer the data to other labs where they can be effectively investigated. LHC is expected to produce 1,500 megabytes per second for ten years or so, or, according to other sources, 15,000 terabytes per year. At any rate, it will be the most intense source of data in the world.



Figure 1: The Canterbury Cathedral is small enough to fit the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), as argued here.

It's a pleasure to inform you that the GridPP project (60 million dollars) has passed an important test, the "Service challenge 2". For a period of 10 days, eight labs (Brookhaven and places in the EU) were receiving 600 megabytes per second from CERN (yes, it's not 1 GB/s yet, as announced in the title, but it will be). It would take at least 2,500 years for my modem ;-) to transfer the total amount of data, namely 500 terabytes.

The current acceptance rate is 70 MB per second only, and in a series of steps, they plan to increase it roughly to 400 MB per second. Further reading:

• eGovMonitor
• ZDNet
• CNET news.com
• PhysOrg.com

For comments about the support from IBM and their breakthough performance & storage visualization software, click here or here.




I wonder whether these guys have figured out the best methods to organize the data. For example, they might borrow a couple of guys from Google to invent better methods to "index" the events, and other guys to design various useful lossy compressing mechanisms. How many of my readers understand this stuff?

Morrison withdraws

From his e-mail received this evening:

It is with great sadness that I must withdraw my name from the race for District 22. As you all know I devoted 2 years of my life to win and placed my law practice on hold. With the prospects of having to spend another 2 years winning a primary and then challenging DeLay, my family’s financial situation is not the rosiest. My wife is expecting our 5th child in August and I feel that I must devote my time to getting my financial house in order. I think the biggest issue this county faces is our national debt and for me and mine to be facing debt that could quickly become unmanageable is irresponsible and unwise.

My mother and children's grandmother has also been diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. She has vowed to me that she will fight it every step of the way and I have committed to help her with that fight. I ask for your prayers for her and my father.

I am not giving up my fight. I will continue to stay active and work hard for Democrats. I ask that you do the same. Tom DeLay is bad for democracy and bad for America. If I can be so bold, I demand that each one of you will commit to work as hard for Congressman Lampson or Councilman Quan as you did for me. Democracy will suffer if you slack off even one bit.

That last part, naming the two presumptive challengers, is most revealing.

In the past couple of days I was made aware of two different blogs established specifically to counter Morrison's candidacy. Despite his strong words of just three weeks ago ("I'm willing to spill Democratic blood" was the quote), it seems to me that he has chosen a more noble course by not running now.

My best wishes for Richard and his family.

Update: The Houston Chronicle has a summary, and Burnt Orange Report has more opinion and speculation that the field is being cleared for Lampson. Here's a link to Richard's Daily Kos diary.

The volume of the haystack

We've been asking various questions to Frederik Denef and Michael Douglas who are visiting us.

One of the things one typically imagines is that the volume of the haystack (formerly known as the landscape) is very large. How large is large?

Take the quintic hypersurfaces in CP^4. They have 101 complex structure moduli. Construct the 101-dimensional moduli space, determine its Kahler metric from the kinetic terms in type II string theory, and measure its volume. What will you get? Something like

• 1 / 5^24 times...

well, that's a pretty small number, but it's not the worst factor, so let me continue:

• 1 / (5^24 times 120!)

Yes, it's the factorial of 120 in the denominator. That's a wicked small number, something like 10^{-250}. A typical example of my thesis that the "very interior" of the haystack (or the "configuration space") has a small volume. Nevertheless, in this small volume, one is supposed to find googols of vacua. That's because the estimated density of the vacua

• det (R - omega)

where "R" is the curvature and "omega" is the Kahler form (in dimensionless units) really does not contain the factor (1/120!). But still, don't you find it a bit strange that there is a density of 10^{350} metastable vacua per unit volume? We don't have a real emotional intuition how "density" in a very-high-dimensional space should behave, but we should probably try to learn it. I feel that these (especially the de Sitter) vacua cannot be quite isolated. There are just many other vacua nearby (virtually all of them) into which one should be able to decay. KKLT only consider one Coleman-DeLuccia instanton, without an enhancement, and I feel it can't be the whole story.

The legacy of Tom DeLay's Congress.

More on Morrison, TX-22, and the rising Democratic tide

I promised a post a while back on the subject of the "birth tax", which Richard Morrison brought up in our conference call earlier this month; the cartoon above explains the concept as well as any words I could use.

This continuing assault on the middle class in favor of the moneyed class is what defines the GOP today. This fiduciary deconstruction of the working class American -- another example is the freshly-signed bankruptcy legislation -- will be the lasting legacy of Tom DeLay's Republican Congress.

Unless they can be stopped.

It's no surprise, then, that Democrats are lining up to knock off King Cockroach, and likewise that the GOP is looking high and low for someone to run against him in the primary, so worried are they about the image of their Majority Leader going down in flames.

Candidly, though, there's no good reason why Richard Morrison and Nick Lampson and Gordon Quan should beat each other up for the right to defeat La Cucaracha Grande. (Every Democrat in the country ought to be running against Tom DeLay -- tied around the neck of his GOP opponent -- anyway.)

Lampson's motivation is that part of the old 2nd Congressional District he represented -- an area surrounding NASA -- was redistricted into the current 22nd, so he has a little name recognition and some base of support -- certainly a few folks living there who've cast a ballot with his name on it before. Quan is a popular but term-limited Houston city councilman who senses the rise of the Asian-American Democratic bloc in southeast Texas, acknowledged in Hubert Vo's recent statehouse victory over Talmadge Heflin.

But neither Lampson nor Quan actually live in the 22nd District, and that fact could work hard against them in a general election. DeLay -- or some other Republican -- could paint them as a "carpetbagger". One thing the disenchanted conservatives in Sugar Land won't do is vote for a Democrat they perceive is an opportunistic outsider.

My idea is that Lampson ought to consider running for Congress in the 14th (Ron Paul is retiring, allegedly, and that district also overlaps some of Lampson's old one in Galveston County) and Gordon Quan should challenge John Culberson in the 7th -- where Quan's residence lies. Three good strong campaigns against two significantly weakened GOP opponents and one open seat -- potentially a three-seat switch for the Dems -- would go a long way toward nullifying the DeLay-engineered 2004 gerrymandering.

That would be a good start toward taking our country back -- wouldn't it?

Kennedy's landscape

Frederik Denef (Rutgers U.) was explaining how to build a better racetrack (with Bogdan Florea and Michael Douglas), i.e. how to construct particular examples of the numerous KKLT anti de Sitter vacua - the mathematical constructions that are used to argue that the anthropic principle is needed in string theory. The talk today was actually based on a newer paper with Douglas, Florea, Grassi, and Kachru; sorry for an incorrect reference, and thanks for Frederik's correction. Nevertheless I will keep examples from the older paper, too. This stuff is impressive geometry. A really high-brow mathematics, even if it happens to be just recreational mathematics.

Nevertheless, the most illuminating idea was the following variation of Kennedy's famous quote due to Abdus Salam:

• My fellow physicists, ask not what your theory can do for you: ask what you can do for your theory.

This could become the motto of the landscape research. Suddenly it's not too important whether a theory teaches us something new about the real world - either predicts new unknown phenomena or previously unknown links between the known phenomena and objects. It's more important that such an unpredictive scenario might be true and we should all work hard to show that the scenario is plausible because we should like this scenario, for some reasons that are not clear to me.

It's slowly becoming a heresy not to believe the anthropic principle - but it already is heresy to think that even the question whether the anthropic reasoning is the explanation of the details of our universe is not the most interesting question, at least among the scientific ones. Even if some numbers in Nature - such as the particles masses - are random historical coincidences, we will never know for sure.

Let me remind you about the basic framework of the Kachru-Kallosh-Linde-Trivedi (KKLT) construction - the most frequently mentioned technical result to justify the anthropic principle in string theory. String theory often predicts many massless scalar fields that are unacceptable because they would violate the equivalence principle and we could already have detected them.

They must be destroyed - i.e. they must acquire masses. The potential energy as a function of the scalar fields must have a finite or countable number of minima. The scalar fields then sit at these minima - we say that the moduli (scalar fields) are stabilized which is a good thing and one of the unavoidable tasks. Moduli stabilization was only the main goal of Frederik's talk.

KKLT start with F-theory (a formally 12-dimensional theory due to Cumrun Vafa) compactified on an elliptically fibered (=interpretable as an elliptic curve, i.e. a two-torus, attached to every point of a lower-dimensional base space) Calabi-Yau four-fold (an eight-dimensional manifold) to give you a four-dimensional theory with a negative cosmological constant and all moduli stabilized. Then they add some non-supersymmetric objects (D3-branes) to create a de Sitter space (with the observationally correct, positive cosmological constant and broken supersymmetry) out of the original anti de Sitter space (AdS).

The talk today focused on the AdS, supersymmetric part of the task.

The F-theory vacuum on a four-fold may be re-interpreted as a type IIB vacuum with orientifold planes (both O3 and O7 where 3 and 7 count the spatial dimensions along the fixed planes). Moreover, there are some fluxes of the three-forms over three-cycles (both the NS-NS as well as the R-R field strengths). The integral

• int (H3 wedge F3) + #(D3)

must vanish due to a tadpole cancellation which constrains the fluxes H3 and F3 (numerical constants ignored). In terms of the four-fold, the vanishing quantity may be written as

• L = 1/2 (int G4 wedge G4) = chi (X) / 24 - #(D3)

where you may think about M-theory on a four-fold instead of F-theory (a dual description for finite areas of the elliptic fiber), and G4 is the standard M-theoretical four-form field strength (its integral over one of the two 1-cycles of the toroidal fiber gives you the NS-NS and R-R three-form field strengths, respectively). Such a cancellation condition still allows for a huge spectrum of possible choices of the integer-valued fluxes: as Bousso and Polchinski estimated 5 years ago, if there are 300 three-cycles and each of them can carry a flux roughly between 0 and 30, then there are 30^{300} or so possible universes. The light scalar fields that we need to stabilize are

• the dilaton/axion
• the complex structure moduli, the shape parameters of the four-fold
• the Kahler moduli, the areas of topologically non-trivial two-dimensional manifolds (2-cycles)

The former two categories are stabilized perturbatively by the Gukov-Vafa-Witten superpotential

• W = int (Omega wedge G3)

where Omega is the holomorphic three-form and G3 is the complexified three-form field strength that includes both the NS-NS and R-R components (with "tau" as the relative coefficient, which makes "tau" also stabilized). This perturbative superpotential handily stabilizes the dilaton/axion and the complex structure moduli at some values that are in principle calculable. Well, I should really write the 8-dimensional integral "int (Omega4 wedge G4)" from the M-theory or F-theory picture.

However, the Kahler moduli (the sizes of the two-cycles) are not stabilized by any perturbative effects. Such a fact is also known from other types of stringy models of reality, the so-called "no-scale supergravities" obtained e.g. by compactifying the heterotic strings on Calabi-Yau three-folds. These moduli are, however, stabilized by M5 (or "F5")-brane instantons wrapped on six-cycles of the four-fold. This can either be interpreted as D3-brane instantons in type IIB, or condensation of gauginos living on the D7-branes.

Note that we want to add new terms to the superpotential W that stabilize all the moduli. The precise value of the Kahler potential (not to be confused with the Kahler moduli although Mr. Kahler is of course identical in both cases; the Kahler potential is another function that determines the physics of four-dimensional supersymmetric theories) is not protected and it's always a source of controversies.

OK, these are the general rules - everything else is to look for more exact, particular examples. A goal is to stabilize the Kahler moduli at sufficiently large volumes of the internal space whatever the space exactly is. This (large volume) is something that can be marginally achieved (if you think that the number 20 is large), but the 2-cycles are never really large at the end. Instead, they are comparable to the string size.

The anthropic strategy is to pick as complicated Calabi-Yau manifolds as possible, to guarantee that there will be a lot of mess, confusion, and possibilities, and that no predictions will ever be obtained as long as all the physicists and their computers fit the observed Universe (which is an encouraging prediction that Frederik has also mentioned).

This means that you don't want to start with Calabi-Yaus whose Betti numbers are of order 3. You want to start, if one follows the 2004 paper, with something like F_{18}, a toric Fano three-fold. That's a 3-complex-dimensional manifold that is analogous to the two-complex-dimensional del Pezzo surfaces, in a sense. But you don't want just this simple F_{18}. You take a quadric Z in a projective space constructed from this F_{18} and its canonical bundle. OK, finally the Euler character of the four-fold X is 13,248. Great number and one can probably estimate the probability that such a construction has something to do with the real world. It becomes a philosophical question whether we should be distinguishing this probability from the number "zero" and how much this "zero" differs from the probability that loop quantum gravity describes quantum gravity at the Planck scale. One can also estimate the values of the scalar fields at the minima of the potential, and the number of vacua (some of their models only had a trillion, others have 10^{300} - of course, the Kennedy rule is that the more ambiguous and unpredictive the set of vacua is, the more attention physics should pay to them).

The example today, from the 2005 paper, was the resolved orbifold "T^6 / Z_2 x Z_2" which has 51 Kahler moduli and 3 complex structure moduli. The singularities were analyzed by a local model, and various toric diagrams shown were related by a flop (or a flip, as is now a more popular terminology). Sorry for neglecting the real model of this talk in the first version of this article.

Cumrun - who is not exactly a fan of the anthropic principle (unlike Nima, who tried to counter) - was extremely active during the talk and he argued for the existence of many new effects that were neglected. For example, there is new physics near a high-codimension singularity that is needed in one of these models. Cumrun argued that the fivebrane instantons could get destabilized - kind of unwrap from the singularity; that a lof of instanton corrections could arise from various cycles, and so forth. The expansions are never quite under control because they rely on some "small" numbers that can be as large as (4.pi/flux) where the "flux" is of order "ten" or "one hundred". Most estimates for the Kahler potential are unjustified, and so forth.

Their calculations required to draw a lot of toric diagrams (that's a representation of a manifold where toroidal fibers are attached to a region with boundaries on which some of the circles of the tori shrink to zero); determine various cycles and their triple intersection numbers (it's like counting how many holes a doughnut has, but in a more difficult 8-dimensional setup) which are needed for the volume; a lot of computer time. Do we really believe that by studying the orientifold of the weighted projective space CP^{4}_{[1,1,1,6,9]}, we will find something that will assure us (and others - and maybe even Shelly Glashow) that string theory is on the right track? I believe that the simplest compactifications, whatever the exact counting is, should be studied before the convoluted ones. If we deliberately try to paint the string-theoretical image of the real world as the most ambiguous and uncalculable one, I kind of feel that it's not quite honest.

When we study the harmonic oscillator and the Hydrogen atom, we want to understand their ground states (and low-lying states) first - where the numbers are of order one. Someone could study the "n=1836th" excited level of the Hydrogen atom, hoping that it is messy enough so that it could explain why the proton mass is so much larger than the electron mass. But it is a well-motivated approach? Some people used to blame string theorists that they were only looking for the keys (to the correct full theory) under the lamppost. It's unfortunately not the case anymore: most of the search for the keys is now being done somewhere in the middle of the ocean (on the surface). Maybe, someone will eventually show that the keys can't stay on the surface of the ocean, and we will return to the search for the keys in less insane contexts. But it's not easy to prove something about the middle of the ocean, especially if we don't yet understand the shape of the Manhattan island.

Jim Peebles & formation

Yesterday, Jim Peebles gave a nice talk about possible anomalies in the standard model of structure formation and possible remedies in the dark sector. He showed many pictures of colliding and other galaxies, and so forth. The main technical hypothesis was that there is an equivalence-principle violating fifth force caused by a massive scalar that only couples to the dark sector. The inverse mass is comparable to 1 megaparsec. Such a new force would allow to empty the voids more efficiently. I've already described these ideas after Steve Gubser's talk.




What I found really new, interesting, and simple enough was the autocorrelation of galaxies. If you draw the number of galaxies with a given angular separation theta as a function of theta, you will find that for moderately small angles, you obtain an almost exact power law with the exponent -1.77. This means that the distribution of galaxies behaves as a fractal whose Hausdorff dimension is another fractional number. In my opinion, there could exist a rather robust explanation of this exponent. Any ideas?

Woody working on dinner...

I'll get back to the GOPranos in a moment...

...but I wanted to post about my week, since I've been offline most of it.

Tuesday morning I drove up to east Texas to visit my father and stepmother at their vacation place at Lake Sam Rayburn. We played golf (Robert Trent Jones-designed course) but the most relaxing part of the two days was simply being out of the rat race. I had brought along my laptop on the chance that Rayburn Country had moved into the 21st century, but no dice. Oh, I could've plugged in and dialed up, but as those of us who've been on the Web's autobahn for a few years know, that's the surfing equivalent of the circus clown riding a tricycle. Not only are you barely getting anywhere, you're not enjoying the ride much either. So I imposed a blackout for two days, and loved it.

But it was the wildlife I enjoyed the most.

I saw a murder of crows harrassing a squirrel. On the ground. They hopped and flapped after him as he ran away -- not as fast he could have, either -- which led me to believe this was an exercise without much intensity on either side. Some kind of game they were playing with each other, or a way to pass the time.

I saw black squirrels (jet black; black as a cat) bounding along the fairway and the side of the road. They flirted with the grey squirrels and fox squirrels with no obvious discrimination practiced by either party. As cats and dogs might do, or even people, mostly.

And a large pileated woodpecker -- that's the one that would remind you of Woody Woodpecker; red crown, black face, black body with white neck and stripes -- clutching sideways to a porch railing, hammering away. During the middle of the morning, with people in the house watching and with us walking by less than fifty feet away. Which struck me as either brazen or desperate. And this bird didn't look hungry, though I knew he was searching for a tasty bug in the wood. He was nearly three feet long from tip to top, and well aware of our presence.

On my return to Houston I stopped in at the Alabama-Coushatta reservation. They are doing quite well since their casino in neighboring Louisiana opened a few years ago. Lots of new buildings; a museum and entertainment hall for visitors, a multi-purpose center for tribe members, a spanking-new convenience store on the highway, and an obviously thriving tribal economy. I intend to return for the pow-wow in the fall, when the dancers perform.

And yesterday I spent the day in a legal research project, examining a racial discrimination lawsuit against a large corporation (remaining details of which I am restricted by confidentiality agreement to reveal) . Suffice it to say that it was most interesting.

So I'll have my nose back on the grindstone soon enough. Right now I'm going to Google up an image of a woodpecker. BRB...

Update (already!) : After my own nature post, it was nice to see this in the Chronic this morning. There's pictures of koalas and prairie chickens on the front page of the paper (at the moment) .

NY Times about Kavli

The New York Times - Dennis Overbye, more precisely - writes about Fred Kavli (and his brother):

• A philantropist of science seeks to be its next Nobel
  

A celebration of Richard Feynman

Comment: a longer blog article about Richard Feynman is here.

A small announcement for everyone in the Boston area:

Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 6:30 pm (tonight)

• Boston Public Library, Johnson Building, 700 Boylston Street
• Mezzanine Conference Room, 1 level up

A Celebration of Richard Feynman:

• Alan Guth, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Robert Kirshner, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
• Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Research

Free and open to the public...

Gregory Gabadadze & UV Lorentz violations

Gregory Gabadadze was just speaking about the infrared modifications of gravity, one of his recent favorite topics. This includes various theories of massive gravity and spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking. In the latter case, for example, they found theories

• hep-th/0412232
  

in which the massive graviton only has two polarizations. This can only occur because there is neither Lorentz symmetry nor Galilean symmetry using which you could go to its rest frame in such a way that the rotational symmetry would be preserved: if it were preserved, the spin "j=2" particle would have to have "(2j+1)=5" polarizations.

There has been a discussion about the Lorentz symmetry restoration in the UV. One may imagine that the diffeomorphism symmetry group is always preserved - even Newton's theory may be written in a diff invariant fashion - but the real physical issue is whether the spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking is undone at high energies.

In normal theories where you break the Lorentz symmetry spontaneously - e.g. by Coke in a bottle - the original causality (the speed limit "v less than c") is guaranteed to be preserved. This is a consequence of the Lorentz symmetry restoration in the UV regime. However, one may construct theories - at least UV incomplete theories - that violate this property. I am a bit uncertain whether such theories that allow the Lorentz symmetry to be broken spontaneously in the deep UV may be UV-consistent.




The examples from string theory tell us a pretty simple story. For example, the B-field inside the D-branes introduces non-commutativity and it breaks the Lorentz/rotational symmetry spontaneously. But the speed of gravity waves (closed strings) remains the ultimate restriction. The open string modes propagating inside the D-branes may be forced to move more slowly...

There were many other papers discussed in his talk, but right now I don't have time and energy to describe it here.

Cottrell & Pope

Just a few sentences. Our fellow string theorist Billy Cottrell was sentenced to 100 months (more than 8 years) for his unusual treatment of the SUVs - a topic that was discussed last year here on this blog. He should also pay $3.5 million - well, one may also call it "infinity".

The cardinals have chosen a new pope - Joseph Ratzinger (78) of Germany - one of the frontrunners of betting companies. Yes, Germans are probably not as controversial (in comparison with the Italian guys) as some pundits tried to claim because he was elected by one of the fastest conclaves in history.

He became Benedict XVI. While the previous Benedict XV (about 100 years ago) was a rather liberal Pope, Ratzinger is very conservative. He's one of the leading theologians in the Catholic Church and he's already been very powerful under John Paul II. Don't expect him to legalize gay marriage or something like that. ;-) No doubt, those who will criticize him in the future will be happy to learn that much like many other kids, Ratzinger was a member of Hitlerjugend at the age of 12 or 14. ;-)

Ratzinger looks like a rather impressive guy. As a former professor (who taught dogma), he is also an accomplished pianist (who prefers Beethoven and Mozart), speaks 10 languages, and dislikes communism, relativism, homosexuality, and other things. He will prefer a smaller but purer Church. Although I don't share most of their dogmas, his approach is appealing in many ways.

Bidge and the Splendid Splinter

As they reach the end of their stellar careers, conversations about whether Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell deserve Hall of Fame induction have been had on sports talk radio, in fine drinking establishments (and not-so-fine ones as well), and in places like this for some time.

Banjo Jones details the latest milestone reached by the Astros' sparkplug:

If Craig Biggio gets hit and killed by a bus after the game today in Cincinnati, he can go to his reward satisfied that he tied Ted Williams at #63 on the Major League Baseball all-time career hit list.

Biggio likely would have tied the record at home in Houston since Astros manager Phil Garner gave him the day off today, but Biggio was called on to pinch hit in the 7th inning and delivered a single. (That) gives him 2,654 base hits, which he's gathered during a 17-year career that likely will continue a year or two after this season. Williams played 19 seasons.

The fact Biggio started out as a catcher, moved to second base, then moved to the outfield and now has returned to second base only adds to his impressive hitting resume'.

Other names you might recognize on the all-time hit list that are within Biggio's reach are: Nellie Fox (who ended his career with Houston), 2,663 hits; Luis Aparicio, 2,677; Billy Williams, 2,711; Rusty Staub (who started his career with Houston), 2716; Lou Gehrig, 2,721, and Babe Ruth, 2,873.

He ought to be voted in on the first ballot.

Enron's "Smartest Guys"

are headed both for the courthouse and the cineplex this week.

Charles Kuffner has a take on the movie, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" , which is having its Houston (and New York) debut this Friday.

And voir dire begins today in the trial of five former Enron Broadband officials. It's considered an opening act to the Big Show -- Lay and Skilling, center ring -- potentially on later this year.

I knew a handful of fellas who worked for Enron and Duke Energy and El Paso Energy during the go-go-days. They weren't the smartest guys in some rooms, but they most certainly thought they were, and that hubris made them the most arrogant guys in any room.

Very reminiscent of another group of megalomaniacs...

And maybe the best news of all...

is that we will have Tom DeLay to kick around for a while longer.

The coming week's focus will also be on Bill Frist's judicial jihad and the Social Security Baboozlepalooza and John Bolton and God knows what else.

This post seems to strike the right tone:

Personally, I'm getting a little tired of all this making fun of conservatives. When you think about it, they deserve a lot of respect.

First, they have to believe whatever the Bush administration or lesser congressional-type republicans tells them to believe. Yea sure, I know, that sounds like something any idiot could do, but those beliefs often change from day to day and often end up diametrically opposed to what they were the day before. It takes an incredibly agile mind to constantly change core values and beliefs without ever acknowledging the contradictions.

Next, they have to disbelieve absolutely whatever a certain other class of people believe. This includes democrats, independents, moderates, the educated, the scientists, the French, and just about everyone else in the world.

Then to top it all off, every piece of art or entertainment must conform to the daily beliefs, whatever they are, or it must be boycotted, burned, or banished (not stashed under the mattress, no, no, no).

And finally, they have to disbelieve, and disbelieve passionately, easily observable reality. Those people being tortured, they're not feeling any pain. South Park? Karl Rove couldn't have written it any better.

It's not easy being that fucking stupid. It really takes a lot of work. Show some respect, people.

Via Atrios.

I believe someone has already said it was 'hard work'...

Reporting from the NRA Convention:

My friend John Cobbaruvias making a statement about you-know-who yesterday.

Tom DeLay at the NRA yesterday

There's news from the MSM here and here, but the best report found so far is this one.

Both sides keep firing away. The most interesting news here is that the GOP in Sugar Land is quietly fishing for a primary opponent for the Bugman.

We're going to need more popcorn.

Update: This link (if registration is required then go to BugMeNot and get a User ID and password) will show you the report from last night's evening newscast of local CBS affiliate KHOU.

Japanese textbooks

Anti-Japan riots spread in China. The Chinese are not satisfied with the attempts of Japan to become a permanent member of the U.N. security council (this bid is supported by the U.S. while China not only opposes it, but probably wants India to become a permanent member), and with the new Japanese history textbooks that seem to downplay the evils of the Japanese aggressions against its Asian neighbors.

For example, the textbooks in the past used to talk about the "comfort women" i.e. the employees of the military brothels (a part of the Japanese war policy at that time). Most of them were Japanese, but some of them were Korean or Chinese. Most of the new textbooks fail to mention the "comfort women" and other war topics. These textbooks may be viewed as a victory of the Japanese nationalist groups that have fought against the "masochist" education that was undermining the national identity.

In Shanghai, 20,000 protesters attacked cars and restaurants that had something to do with Japan. There were also 10,000 protesters doing similar things in Hangzhou where Andy Strominger, his family, and his collaborators are having a great time. Let's pray - or do a rational equivalent of it if there is one - that the situation won't become dangerous for them. Japan demands an official apology from China - a country that apparently failed to prevent the violence; China seems to blame Japan's "wrong attitude" for these protests.




Shing-Tung Yau was explaining us that the current education system in Japan is very nationalistic. But there are many statements one cannot be certain about. I would recommend both nations to think about the present and the future - which means to tollerate different interpretations of history as long as these interpretations don't influence the present and the future. Well, this is definitely not a universal recipe for peace and friendship - China wants to become the Asian number one instead of its rival, Japan - but given the fact that the co-operation and trade is important for both countries, the future is probably a better guide than the past.

Finally, representative Chinese and Japanese newspapers:

• japantoday.com
• chinaview.cn
  

Too...much...ninnycon...

I just need to post something besides the latest stunt performed by the GOPrano goons, so...

-- Would you like to see some cool satellite photos of Area 51?

-- Those crazy madcap handicappers at Paddy Power have established German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as a 7/2 favorite to be elected Vicar of Christ. He's being challenged on the backstretch, though:

(...) France's Jean-Marie Lustiger has come from nowhere to join him at the top of the list. "Lustiger was at 20-1 two weeks ago but they've started betting for him in just the last three or four days," a spokesman at Paddy Power said.

Can you imagine how pissed the Bush Administration is going to be if there is a French Pope? More here.

And Jesus' General reports on the unholy alliance between the House Majority Leader and Mr. Wu of HBO's Deadwood.

It might be apropo to post now the epithet assorted Deadwoodians utter at least ten times per episode, but it won't be as funny if you don't have cable.

In the Comments, perhaps?

Behind the horizon

Steve Shenker (Stanford University) has reviewed his (and his collaborators') work

• Lost behind the horizon

While the AdS/CFT correspondence contains black holes, the boundary CFT only describes their exterior easily. It is hard to see behind the horizon.

Steve showed that for the eternal BTZ black holes one has two (entangled) boundaries, as described by Kraus, Ooguri, Shenker, and the correlators include contributions from the geodesics through the bulk. For a particular choice of the points on the boundary, one expects a singularity from geodesics that become null and reflect from the future BTZ singularity.

Unfortunately, one can't see this singularity in the perturbative expansion. Nevertheless, there is a lot of interesting questions that one may start to answer once some uncertainties get resolved. Steve worked on these questions with Lukasz Fidkowski, Veronika Hubeny, and Matt Kleban, and perhaps someone else whom I will add if necessary.

Another development was the description of inflation inside AdS/CFT. Steve needed to assume the Landscape conjecture. He wanted to create a bubble of a false dS vacuum inside the AdS space. This dS bubble inflates for a long time, and the question is how it should look like in the CFT. Note that this is an example of the "universe in the bottle". Guth and Farhi have shown that such a universe in the bottle is unlikely to exist because when you trace it back, you are likely to encounter a singularity in the past. Also, some people would say that such a large universe in the bottle contradicts the Bekenstein bounds or holography.

Steve has drawn a lot of non-trivial Penrose diagrams, and he was trying to figure out which boundaries should be associated with conformal field theories living in them, and how could the observers at the boundary "measure" physics inside the inflating portion of the Universe. Many questions remain open. Some of them are related to the "decoding of the hologram". We have had discussions how difficult it is to decode the hologram or the Hawking radiation; whether the complexity is very different to decode the local physics in the bulk outside the black hole, and the local physics inside the black hole. And also the role of analytical continuation in this whole story.

The questions are exciting - and probably critical for understanding of quantum cosmology - but the answers (or the lack of answers) to many of these questions are rather frustrating, and that's a reason to stop at this moment.

Councilman Kevin Cole of Pearland, Tom DeLay supporter...

sent the following e-mail to DroptheHammer.org:

Hey ass hole (sic). Tom Delay happens to be my congresman (sic) and I am happy with the job he does for me and my district. Why don’t you get the F@&* out of our district and leave us alone. Better yet, come speak to me personally and I will show you what I think of you.
Kevin Cole
Pealrand (sic), TX
(Cell Phone # Redacted)

The City of Pearland subsequently scrubbed their website of references to Councilman Cole, but this screenshot contains the missing biographical data, among which is listed his position as Deacon of First Baptist Church.

Go read the whole hilarious thing.

Update: I forgot to mention that Councilman Cole shares certain ethical characteristics with his Lord and Master (and I ain't talkin' 'bout Jesus).

Update (4/16): Councilmember Cole's bio has been returned to the City of Pearland's website, but quite a bit of editing has been performed on it. And according to a commenter at the Think Progress site (where this escapade began), Cole has disavowed to his pastor and others sending the obscenity-laced e-tirade. And Banjo Jones reports his own first-hand experiences with "Banty Rooster" Cole.

Tom DeLay's cabana boy

Ted over at Crooked Timber has an excellent post on the town hall meeting with Rep. John Culberson of the 7th Congressional district of Texas.

Now for those of you who haven't been introduced, Culberson has been carrying BugMan's water -- make that chlorine and hot towels -- for as long as he's been in the U.S House. He's spent the requisite terms in anonymity, and with the increased media attention his mentor's been getting, has been summoned from the shadows to help his master in these times of trouble.

Barbara also has some thoughts on Culberson's recent MSNBC appearance.

This is the sort of Texas Republican who might rise up in place of a fallen Sugar Land Sith Lord.

Sleep well.

Savas' colloquium

Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford University is not only an entertaining and pleasant (modern, not ancient) Greek physicist, but arguably one the most important persons behind the theories of phenomenology beyond the Standard Model. Nima summarized his achievements. The most striking - and perhaps a bit exaggerated - description was that "the joke is, whatever happens at the LHC after April 2007, Savas will be in good shape. The only question is which set of his collaborators will get to join in the fun - [Nima] hopes its [him]!" There are several choices

• a pure Standard Model with a single Higgs - it's a nightmare scenario for particle physics because Savas did not discover this one
• the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, co-authored by Savas (well, yes, there has been a pre-history)
• the old large dimensions by Savas, Nima, Gia
• the warped large dimensions by Randall and Sundrum
• the (extended) technicolor by Savas and Lenny
• the Little Higgs model etc.
• the landscape, as proved by split supersymmetry of Savas and Nima
• a question mark - a new possibility which may or may not have been written down by Savas

Recently, the Landscape has unfortunately became Savas' most favorite scenario. I've discussed split supersymmetry in a text about Gia's paper here, and the related works about the friendly landscape here and here. The previous article about the anthropic reasoning described Vilenkin's seminar. Savas compared the conjectured huge multiplicity of the vacua to the statements of Giordano Bruno:

• There are many stars and many planets like the Earth, and our civilization is not a center of the Universe.

These statements were somewhat controversial, Savas said and supported this statement by a picture of burning Bruno. However, the good news is that Bruno's ideas, applied to the Universes themselves - the idea of the landscape - is now supported by physicists all of whom are tenured professors. Therefore, the young people should be careful if they don't want to get fired like Bruno. Incidentally, that would really be an excellent joke if it were a joke. ;-) Savas explained the anthropic principle and the "entropic principle". Unfortunately, he did not use the term "entropic principle" along the lines of the "entropic principle" of Ooguri, Vafa, and Verlinde, but rather as Michael Douglas' demographic approach to the statistics of vacua.

Savas holds a more reasonable opinion about these matters - and he said explicitly that the "equal weight" probability distribution among the vacua is not the full answer. One can't count just the "entropy" but the cosmological counterpart of "free energy".

In the second part of his talk, Savas focused on split supersymmetry and its virtues. One of the "virtues" is that it shows that naturalness is wrong. Another virtue is that it can preserve the gauge coupling unification of the Standard Model - by construction. We take the smallest set of light superpartners that can do the job (therefore, supersplit supersymmetry is not enough & it's also not enough to obtain a dark matter candidate). Not surprisingly, if we make particular guesses about the family of superpartner fields that remain light, we can predict many relations between the observed parameters that could become strong indications that the scenario of split SUSY is correct. Savas also likes the long-lived gluino that could decay during vacations at CERN.

Savas argued that such a hypothetical confirmation of the split SUSY spectrum will almost be a proof of the landscape and the anthropic thinking. Chris Stubbs did not understand why - neither did I - so he asked how the reasoning leading to the proof of the landscape worked. Nima helped Savas to answer this question a bit. He argued completely rationally that once we see that some numbers - such as the Higgs mass - are indeed lighter than the naturalness based on effective field theories would lead us to believe, and there is no other new physics related to the hierarchy problem seen at the TeV scale, there will be two possibilities to explain it:

• God
• Nima and Savas

God - or another divine intervention - is not a rational explanation, as most of the audience happily agreed, and therefore we will end up, completely logically, with the Landscape, which is the only rational alternative to God. That's a really cute argument. (In discussions later, Savas and Nima agreed that the Landscape does not imply split supersymmetry, and split supersymmetry does not imply the Landscape.)

Imagine that someone asked 100 years ago where did the large ratio between the unstable nuclei's lifetimes came from. It was completely unnatural and no one understood its explanation. At that time, a physicist could say that either the explanation was God, or the anthropic explanation proposed by that physicist 100 years ago that could give a large number of different Universes - in some of them, the lifetimes were large enough to allow for life.

Shockingly enough, today we understand the exponential hierarchy of the alpha decay rates of the nuclei using a simple effective model of quantum mechanics where the alpha particle tunnels through a barrier to get out of the nucleus, and the lifetime depends exponentially on the thickness and height of the barrier, which leads to very diverse scales for the decay rates. Large and small numbers can be explained and many of them have already been explained.

The bizarre statement that "the anthropic principle will be the only rational alternative to religion" may be formulated more accurately. It is an alternative to religion for those who want to answer any question that has not yet been understood by science. It's exactly this universal "applicability" of the anthropic reasoning and its hidden recommendation that we should not actually be looking for answers that depend on the question - the "anthropic reasoning" may be the universal answer for everything - which makes the anthropic reasoning effectively equivalent to religion - and the difference is just about the choice of the words.

However, Savas encouraged others to look for a truly scientific explanation of the hierarchy problem and perhaps also the cosmological constant problem. Bert Halperin noted that he had a solution to the cosmological constant problem, but based on obvious reasons, he could not have said what it was in front of Savas. ;-) Incidentally, I just solved the problem, too, but I can't tell you the whole story either.

Savas also admitted, completely fairly, that the landscape in string theory remains a controversial idea that can completely go away within a couple of years. Someone asked whether string theory was science and testable - because a certain gentleman named Laughlin gave a talk at the B.U. arguing otherwise - and Savas said that it was and many aspects of it may become testable very soon.

Michael Dine

Michael Dine of University of California at Santa Cruz visited us today. We had the opportunity for a brief discussion about the supersymmetry breaking scale, the validity of effective field theory, and the existence of landscape. Many of Michael's comments were very interesting. He also mentioned some interesting communication that followed their paper with Banks and Gorbatov.

Before he became a sort of landscape advocate, Michael has also been trying to prove that KKLT was incorrect. One of the conclusions that seems to have survived is that the complex structure moduli in the KKLT-like vacua were never guaranteed to be much/sufficiently lighter than the Kaluza-Klein modes. I've never noticed this thing. This should not happen if the effective field theory description is to be trusted, I/we think. If the background is to be viewed as a Calabi-Yau in the first approximation, then its moduli should be lighter than whatever lives on the Calabi-Yau space - especially the Kaluza-Klein modes. It's simply because it should be possible to integrate out local dynamics on the Calabi-Yau space - above the Kaluza-Klein scale - leaving just the overall parameters of the Calabi-Yau which includes the shape. Note that in flux-free vacua, the moduli are completely massless which is O.K. for the applicability of the effective theory.

On the other hand, such a thing - KK modes lighter than the complex structure moduli - generically occurs if the fluxes are large, which is what one needs to argue that there are many metastable vacua. We agreed that there is never a parameteric suppression that would justify the application of effective field theory (incidentally, such an ability to control things parameterically would imply that the number of vacua must be infinite), and Michael even argued that virtually all of the models that are abused to generate hypothetical large ensembles of vacua always need field strength that makes the description strongly coupled. I argued that this "fuzzy region" in the middle of string/M-theory should have a small volume, in a certain counting, i.e. a small number of vacua and possibilities. The large number of vacua that are supposed to be in the middle reflects a large number of different unjustifiable effective field theories that people write down, not true physics of string theory.