I really won't have time to post much for awhile

...but since Houston has suddenly turned into the confluence of the two events focusing the nation's attention, I thought I'd better tell you what I'll be up to:

-- I'll be attending the first stop of the Bring Them Home Now Tour Thursday evening, with Cindy Sheehan and the veterans and their families, so I'll have some thoughts on that combined with my still-unposted Camp Casey report; and...

-- I'll be volunteering to assist the Katrina refugees at the Astrodome this weekend.

So if you don't see anything posted here until next Monday, you'll know why.

Warped Passages out

The U.S. edition of Lisa Randall's book called

• "Warped Passages" (amazon.com offers a 34% discount)

is finally out, about three months after the British edition. More precisely, you should see it everywhere by tomorrow. I greatly recommend the book especially to those who have already been interested in particle physics for some time.

This is a book in which you not only learn what is a dimension and how various laws depend on the spacetime dimensionality etc., but you will also see what the one-brane and two-brane Randall-Sundrum models are, even what locally localized gravity is, how the branes got started in string theory, what are the different scenarios by which the branes are included in string-theoretical and string-inspired models of reality, and how the extra dimensions may solve problems of particle physics such as the hierarchy problem or the flavor-changing neutral currents.

These are just examples. On page 152, you will even learn how a famous Russian communist was wrong in his argument with a Czech anti-communist, an argument that was focusing on the structure of the electron. :-) Was Lenin wrong? That's what the first female tenured physics professor (or at least theoretical physics, in one case) at MIT, Princeton, and Harvard who wrote the book says.




I am sure that even the string theorists will find many things in the book to learn; I certainly did learn some new ways of thinking about the questions we know. The text strengthens your ability to think about simple and less simple things in terms of scales and other popular concepts in phenomenology.

Every chapter starts with a quote from a song that is surprisingly related to particle physics; usually a small story from the world of fiction follows. Many of them are cute and they have deep connections to high-energy physics. The illustrations are nice, too. And the book does not omit an introduction to particle physics and relativity near the beginning.

But this book is first of all an authentic book by one of the most influential particle physicists. Lisa Randall may often be described as a string theorist but you should know that her account is as complementary as you can get. Lisa started her research in the string-theory-is-useless camp and she has done a lot of serious stuff in this context. She also describes what the mood was in the two camps and explains the actual meta-arguments that the two camps had used in their battles; and be sure that it has not been just 20 years of the sentence "string theory is disconnected from reality" as some books addressed to not-too-demanding readers would like you to believe.

Those readers who may think that the book is only promoted because the author is female should know that they are wrong. Lisa became the most cited high-energy physicist, which is a category that includes both females as well as males, since 1999; I hope that this characterization is not specious. :-)

When I was a high school kid, I used to think that Stephen Hawking was mostly a media construct. Much later I found out how much wrong this opinion was because Hawking has done some truly first-class physics. (Unfortunately there are not too many small black holes around; that's a pity because otherwise he would get a Nobel prize.)

I would like to stress that this book is different from a random popular book about physics because Lisa Randall is real. She's not a random person who would be irrelevant for most physicists and who has been planning to earn some money by publishing dumb insults against the physicists - which would be the appropriate description for several physics-related books recently discussed on this blog. (Some of the authors of these books will pretend that they don't know whom I am talking about.) She's a very gifted physicist and a leader who wants to share her excitement about the actual physics ideas, some of which were discovered by her, and you should try to follow her.

Entanglement entropy

One of the most interesting papers 24 hours ago was a paper by three authors from Santa Barbara, Israel, and Michigan claiming that the black hole entropy in all known examples in string theory may be entirely interpreted as

• entanglement entropy.

It is certainly true that not everyone has believed and believes that the whole entropy equals the entanglement entropy; others viewed entanglement entropy merely as one of the contributions. The total number of microstates of the interior counts the total entropy; but it is not necessarily true that each of them is entangled with a different state of the exterior degrees of freedom. The entanglement entropy could therefore be smaller. I am curious to hear comments from others.

Also,

• Kasper Risager

offers a new proof of the CSW rules for the tree amplitudes based on the maximally helicity violating vertices. If someone can explain in what sense the proof is more direct than the BCFW proof, it may be interesting.

Katrina Relief

The hurricane Katrina has not only killed 100 people or more but it may also have become the costliest natural disaster in the U.S. history - with the damage counted in tens of billions of dollars. While America always helps others, it seems unlikely that others share the same standards of compassion. Well, this is one of the reasons why the U.S. is special in the world today. But you may be different:

• Donate to the American Red Cross

The money will help those who became homeless to satisfy the basic life necessities. Next time it may be better not to build new huge and fascinating cities like New Orleans below the sea level. Be ready that the oil price is gonna hit \$80 per barrel in the short term and gasoline will surpass \$3 per gallon.

Some suffer, some don't

"The city of New Orleans is devastated."

"We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city, the water is as deep as 20 feet...

Both airports are under water. The twin spans are destroyed. The yacht club is burned and destroyed."

-- New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, from an interview with WWL late last night

Mayor Nagin said that it is possible that the highrise bridge in east New Orleans could be unstable. "All of Slidell, and most of Metairie is under water". Nagin also stated that "there was no clear path in and out of New Orleans," and that I-10 is under water.

CNN also quoted a spokesperson from the hospital associated with Tulane University in downtown, who said that they were moving all of the patients from the hospital due to water standing six feet deep in the first floor and rising at the rate of one inch every five minutes. She said white water was pouring down Canal Street (which would be from the breach in the levee at the 17th St. canal at Lake Ponchartrain).

Nagin: "An oil tanker has run aground and oil is leaking from it. Hundreds of 9th Ward residents have been rescued from the roofs of their homes. Undoubtedly hundreds of people throughout the city will have lost their lives."

Short world news

General and politics:

• According to a Flemish participant, the most impressive speech during the recent regional meeting of the prestigious Mont Pelerin Society was the speech of the Czech president Václav Klaus who warned against Europeanism, NGOism, and other -isms that are starting to replace socialism; see also Klaus's completely new article in the Financial Times (without fees)...
• The hurricane Katrin will cost the insurers and others something between 10 and 25 billions of dollars; if the higher number is true, it will be the most expensive hurricane on record. Also, the oil price has tried the $70 level because of the weather. Katrin is manifested here in Massachusetts as a rather pleasant and peaceful summer rain...
• Wearing sandals and sunglasses, Allan Adams, a Harvard physicist specializing in "string theory," looks like he would be at home sipping espresso in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse: "Gliding isn't macho-type activity. There's no adrenaline rush" :-)...
• The TIME magazine has escalated the worries that the upgef*cked terrorists are planning something significant against our good old Europe. Al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian head of the "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the land of two rivers", is apparently organizing lectures of European languages so that their task becomes easier to solve; Balkans (especially Albania) may become their "golden gate" to Europe...

General science:

• The particles of cosmic dust are larger from the very beginning than previously thought...
• The probe "Reinhold Spirit Messner" is alive and well, a long time after his scheduled death, despite the initial anti-American sentiments on Mars. He is sending new pictures and videos from his climbing and hikes...
• The U.S. may find it difficult to send people to the moon by 2020 right now, but it may be much easier for Malaysia...
• Nanocoating may eliminate foggy lens and windows...

Semiconductor world:

• FBI has identified the likely creators of the Zotob worm and they were caught by the local police in Turkey and Morocco...
• Microsoft has released a beta version of its next filesystem WinFS, well ahead of schedule...

Anthony's review erased

Just a small comment. Two days after Anthony Kirmis received his $13.08 grand prize for his review of McCutcheon's book, the review has been erased and the average rating of "The Final Theory" returned to 5 stars. All 1-star and 2-star reviews posted before the challenge as well as after it started are gone. Crackpots may often be perfectionists. ;-)

Joe Marsano has told me about something he has heard from Josh Lapan: if you look for the author "Marc McCutcheon" (with "c" which may mean that it is a different guy than the author of "The Final Theory", namely Mark McCutcheon), you will find the following book:

• Damn! Why Didn't I Write That? How Ordinary People are Raking in $100,000.00...or more Writing Nonfiction Books & How You Can Too! (Paperback)

The book explains that you don't have to have any degree or knowledge, and explains you how should you promote your book. In other words, it is the complete guide how books like "The Final Theory" may be written. Incidentally, this book also has around 35 reviews and the average rating is 5 stars. Do you think it is the same M. McCutcheon?

Duty calls

so my post on Camp Casey will have to wait. In the meantime you can read Lyn's account here.

Besides, the residents of New Orleans are on my mind this morning. Booman had previously dug this out from 2004:

The worst-case scenario here - a direct strike by a full-strength Hurricane Ivan - could submerge much of this historic city treetop-deep in a stew of sewage, industrial chemicals and fire ants, and the inundation could last for weeks, experts say.

* * *

New Orleans would be under about 20 feet of water, higher than the roofs of many of the city's homes. Besides collecting standard household and business garbage and chemicals, the flood would flow through chemical plants in the area, "so there's the potential of pretty severe contamination," van Heerden said.

Severe flooding in bayous also forces out wildlife, including poisonous snakes and stinging fire ants, which sometimes gather in floating balls carried by currents.

Much of the city would be under water for weeks. And even after the river and Lake Pontchartrain receded, the levees could trap water above sea level, meaning the Army Corps of Engineers would have to cut the levees to let the water out.

And this from a recent NWS warning (they're yelling, so I would take them seriously):

HURRICANE KATRINA A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH...RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969. MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED. THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE. HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS ...PETS...AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED.

PastorDan put this up also at Booman Tribune -- and there's more at the link -- in order to keep the Big Easyians foremost in our thoughts...

In honor of the City of Saints, an Invocation of the Saints:

• Bridegroom of poverty, our brother Francis, follower of Jesus and friend of creation:
  Stand here beside us.

• John XXIII, Pope and friend of the poor, who longed for the unity of all people:
  Stand here beside us.

• Peacemakers in the world, Dag Hammarskjold and Desmond Tutu, called children of God:
  Stand here beside us.

• Mask of the Christ, Gautama the Buddha, and Mother Teresa,
  Stand here beside us.

How does my ass look?

BBC: sensitive IQ tests

The attitude presented in the following paragraph is a joke, of course.

BBC has apparently abused the freedom of speech in England. They were not afraid and ashamed to publish the outrageous results of IQ tests designed to measure "general cognitive (spatial and verbal) ability" that two British researchers (Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn in British Journal of Psychology) gave to 80,000 people plus 20,000 extra students; well they summarized some previous tests but it does not really matter. What a crummy article.

• Below 14 years: no measurable difference between boys and girls
• Above 14 years: IQs differ by 5 points
• IQ 125 and above: 2 vs. 1 ratio
• IQ 155 and above: 5.5 vs. 1 ratio

Their story immediately became the most discussed news story in the blogosphere. To balance the viewpoint, an alternative research with the opposite result was performed by Barry Sheerman, a British MP: women are cleverer than men, he said.

The word "research" used for Sheerman's statements was another joke, of course.

Now: most IQ tests are not terribly deep (and one can train herself or himself to get better results) - and one can't really deduce anything certain from one silly number. Nevertheless, if a question should be studied rationally, something like that had to be done anyway and the correlations between the resulting IQ and other things will exist. As far as I know, they (mostly?) used the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices which is respected as a good test of the pure intelligence factor g.




Earlier in the summer, another extremely bright and mysterious sinner named La Griffe du Lion (equivalently, the Zorro of statisticians) has looked at the power of Gaussians and the different second moments or variances. He showed how Summers' speech on January 14th could have looked like and one of his or her conclusions is that a female Fields medal is expected once per 103 years.



Disclaimer: Of course, your humble correspondent respects the official opinion of Harvard University - as codified by the Congress of Women's Committees and the FAS faculty meeting on 3/15 - which says that two female Fields medals are expected every four years; one prize per 2 years. No doubt, the fact that du Lion's value seems closer to reality is a measurement error or a result of discrimination. The Reference Frame is not responsible for the content of external internet sites such as BBC.

The previous paragraph was a joke.

More seriously, this research may be interesting, it can be the best approach that a purely sociological and psychological research can take, and it probably implies something but I still prefer neurobiology that tries to figure out the true reasons behind all of this.

Even more seriously, The Reference Frame disagrees with some political statements by Richard Lynn. Amusingly, I am probably the first person to conjecture that La Griffe du Lion and Richard Lynn is the same person. Of course, du Lion could also be Charles Murray whose new and up-to-date extensive analysis of group differences is officially released next month. Or anyone else among the known names, including one of our friends from Harvard. But my guess is Lynn anyway. Feedback welcome. ;-)

Richard Lynn and Paul Irwing became very unlikely scientific bedfellows because Paul Irwing is kind of left-wing, politically correct person who would have been "happier if this fact were never found out or if the result were different". It just happened that someone had convinced him that suppressing a certain kind of data was scientifically dishonest, and Irwing agreed.

One of the things that fascinates me is that most people apparently believe that all women have to dismiss the research immediately as permanently unacceptable. I beg to disagree and many of my female friends are counterexamples. Gutsy women like Jennifer Warwick know that time will tell whether Lynn's research is good science; and it is definitely an opportunity to test and explore our own biases and prejudices.

Up even earlier than usual

...in order to leave for Crawford and Camp Casey in about an hour.

Words and pictures about today will appear here tomorrow.

Let us build the ILC

The purpose of this page is not to explain things like which two European countries shared the LEP collider. Incidentally it is either South Africa and Nigeria, or France and the Supersymmetric Republic of Switzerland, or Australia and New Zealand, or Peru and Chile.

JoAnne Hewett has encouraged everyone to promote the ILC, the "Imaginary Linear Collider", as our phenomenological friends call it. It is a pleasure to follow her instructions. My comments are primarily addressed to the true American patriots who, I hope, are well represented among the readers. :-)

In 2007, a new collider called the LHC - the "Large Hadron Collider" - will start at CERN, Switzerland. I mean the old, socialist, and stagnating continent called Europe. It should discover some kind of Higgs - which is incidentally the "God Particle" - and perhaps some kind of supersymmetry - which is a symmetry relating SuperMen and SuperMenino - which would be really cool; for example, I would win a $1000 bet which will otherwise be lost.

The LHC is being built in the same 27-kilometer-long tunnel (in circumference) in which the lepton machine called LEP ("Lot of Extra Problems", later also called "Large Electron-Positron" collider) operated in 1999-2000 and nearly discovered the Higgs particle around 115 GeV, the current lower bound for its mass. By the way, CERN has previously found the W and Z bosons in 1983. All good physicists at that time already knew that the bosons would be there - and some of them had already been enjoying their Nobel prizes for the right theory predicting them since 1979.

You may notice that these colliders, i.e. particle accelerators (atom smashers) in which the particles collide to create a lot of new stuff (sometimes even interesting stuff), belong to two basic types:

• circular colliders in which the particles orbit many times and the centrifugal force - more precisely the synchrotron radiation that also occurs for nonzero acceleration of charged particles - is the main enemy of our attempts to accelerate it too much (LEP, LHC, Tevatron); very strong magnets are needed which is why the ambitious visionaries used to think about the superconducting magnets
• linear colliders in which the centrifugal force is absent, but the particles only fly once and therefore the linear tunnel must be very long (SLAC in California, ILC) and the electric fields must be strong

There is one more important classification - according to the particles they collide:

• hadron machines (protons and perhaps antiprotons): Tevatron in Fermilab, Illinois collides protons off antiprotons; LHC will collide two beams of protons
• lepton machines (electrons and positrons): LEP, SLAC, ILC; in principle, one could also collide heavier muons, but no such accelerator has been built and it could also emit too many unhealthy highly-energetic neutrinos from the unstable muons

The advantage of the hadron machines, such as the LHC in 2007, is that the heavy hadrons can carry a lot of energy if the velocity is the same, for example. Their disadvantage is that the hadrons contain a lot of glue and other chromodynamic dirt. Whatever you produce is therefore chromodynamically dirty and hard to identify and measure. The lepton machines, on the other hand, have some problems with getting really huge energies, but their collisions are very clean. An electron annihilates with the positron to a "pure energy" (imagine a virtual photon) which is subsequently used by mother Nature to produce virtually anything.

Neither technology is universally superior over the other; physicists tend to alternate the approaches as they raise the energy, in order to get complementary information.

The power of America

Currently the Tevatron in Fermilab, Illinois and SLAC in California are running in the U.S. In 2007, the European LHC may become the only active collider in the world; SLAC is almost sure to be shut down pretty soon. That could be as painful for America as Yuri Gagarin, especially if interesting new discoveries are made by the LHC.

This paragraph is really addressed to the true U.S. patriots: the U.S. could have been ahead by a lot because the SSC - the "Superconducting SuperCollider" - a 80-kilometer long circle - was being built by the nice, scientifically oriented Republicans. The collider was invented and proposed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and continuing huge support was later led by the President Bush Sr., despite the fact that the communism was already gone, who claimed Texas as the new home for "his" SSC. (His son, George W. Bush, is also a pretty big shot in particle physics.) However, the evil anti-scientific, mostly democratic Democratic U.S. Congress later stopped the project after 2 billion dollars (about 20 percent) were already spent. Bill Clinton and Al Gore had different priorities in science, for example, the second guy wanted to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to cool the planet. ;-)

The Democrats will never tell you that the SSC was a project of Reagan and Bush Sr. and was killed once Clinton and Gore started. Most of the more recent frustration in particle physics may be attributed to the decisions in 1992 and 1993.

Whenever you will hear the bitter criticism against the string theorists or even supersymmetry phenomenologists that they are just too smart and 15 years ahead of the experiments, don't forget that it is not their fault. It is the Democrats' fault that experimental particle physics was slowed down for 15 years. ;-)

Even if the LHC is successful, the chromodynamic mud will prevent us from learning many details efficiently, or at least from measuring them accurately. This is why the ILC - which would become the "International Linear Collider" and the word "International" should really mean "Mostly American" - is needed. ILC would be a clean lepton machine where everything is nice and the desired products are produced without any garbage around.

For a couple of years, the particle physicists may be secretly afraid of bad luck. But be sure that if the LHC sees something really new, beyond the single Higgs boson, whatever it is, every other intelligent American will ask "How is it possible that Europe is ahead in these crucial discoveries?" Maybe you should already ask the question now...

Unless there is some inconsistency in mathematics, the LHC will have to discover something new that has not been yet. Something like the Higgs - the "God Particle" that transforms massless spirits into massive objects and particles. (Genesis: Let there be light in the form of the unbroken "U(1)" part of the "U(1) x SU(2)". And God realized that light was good and the Higgs mechanism was necessary.) While most physicists have already counted the Higgs as a "sure to be discovered" particle, this time we don't know what its mass will be.

The God Particle also gives mass to Himself (or the Jesus particle, if you wish) - by self-interactions - but we don't know how much He interacts with Himself although we know that His four-God coupling should be less than one or so. One of the additional magic tricks He uses to give Himself mass is to change Himself into a pair of an object and an antiobject for a while - which would typically lead to a huge mass of God, comparable to the mass of a dust particle (the so-called Planck scale). The puzzle why God is much lighter than the dust - which He apparently has to be if He is omnipotent and able to give mass to others - is called the hierarchy problem. The most popular solution still says that for each object and anti-object that are used for Him to get extra mass, there are new objects, the superpartners, for which the contribution is exactly opposite: that's called the supersymmetry. Also, I was cheating a bit: most of the mass of humans actually does not come directly from God and the humans are not as holy as I suggested; we are sinners and most of our mass comes from the chromodynamic mud. :-) Maybe, the non-physicists won't understand why this story is true, but others may assure them that it is true.

So the discovery of the Higgs will be a bit exciting anyway. But yes, if this is the only thing around, the ILC could be a bad investment. However, many of us expect more; much more.

An extra comment for all scientifically oriented billionaires who read this sentence: you may pay for the project and I will help you to negotiate that the collider will be named after you. If you pay for the whole thing, I will also help you to create new terminology of the superpartners for the case that they're seen. ;-) I don't expect that a new SLC - "Soros' Linear Collider" - will be built because the person is not sufficiently high-brow for such a project, but someone else could have different standards and more cultivated dreams.

And a special message for those string theorists who think that physics of colliders is their competitor and they don't want to support it. Forget it. We are one field with the phenomenologists. We clearly need progress in experimental particle physics because it helps us to choose the right questions and it creates excitement in the whole high-energy physics. Our colleague Quantoken has even figured out that it is really us for whom the new colliders are being built: the "super string theoretists". Roughly speaking, he believes that the purpose of the colliders is to increase the price of oil from $68 to $100 (the price dictated by Osama bin Laden).

Choptuik collapse and Barak Kol

Barak Kol from Jerusalem - who is visiting Cambridge in August - was explaining me various things related to his work in recent years. For example, he and E. Sorkin have shown that the behavior of black strings and black holes - and especially the smoothness of the transition between them - seems to depend on the dimension in such a way that "D=10" or "D=11" is one of the "critical" spacetime dimensionalities, namely one above which the transition becomes smooth.

Let me not go into details - but this "D=10" or "D=11" bound is a property of purely classical GR. No doubt, one of the obvious questions is whether there is any rational explanation why this "D=10" or "D=11" is simultaneously the critical dimension of string theory or M-theory; it can be just an accident, of course. Especially those of us who consider M-theory in "D=11" to be equally fundamental as the 10-dimensional supersymmetric vacua may ask "Why did not we get the other number from the set {10,11}, for example?"

Barak's current work is related to self-similar solutions in gravity. Let us focus on the Choptuik collapse. Imagine a spherically symmetric distribution of mass - for example, a spherical wave of a scalar field - that is going to produce a black hole. Well, it will only end up as a black hole if the initial parameters are properly chosen. Let's choose a line in the space of the initial conditions parameterized by a number we will call "P". If "P" is smaller than a certain number, which we will normalize to one, no black hole is formed. If "P" is larger than one, a black hole is inevitably the final state of the collapse.




It is not surprising that some interesting behavior occurs near "P=1". If "P" is slightly below one, the mass will bounce many times, but it will avoid the collapse into the black hole. At the critical value "P=1", the corresponding classical solution of GR will locally have a character of a self-similar fractal; the proper times of the individual bounces will generate a geometrical sequence. The self-similarity may be interpreted as a symmetry under a discrete subgroup of the Weyl symmetry of rescalings - and one may think about this picture in terms of a spontaneously broken conformal symmetry.

Let's define the total mass of the black hole "M" we create as a function of "P". For "P" smaller than one, by definition, "M(P)" must vanish. However, it starts to grow above "P=1", namely as

• "M" goes like "(P-1)^{gamma}"

where "gamma" is an exponent, perhaps something like "0.301308" (the right value is different but the last four digits of my random value may be inspiring for Quantoken). Its value is known numerically and it is universal for a fixed spacetime dimensionality and for all spherically symmetric collapses of a scalar field. It is certainly a number that deserves an analytical derivation. There are other "critical exponents" in this game; the coefficient "exp(Delta)" determining the decrease of the proper distances in the fractal solution is another example. It is hard to hide that the behavior near the critical point "P=1" shares many features with the theory of phase transitions.

Of course, these things are properties of classical GR, and we tend to consider the fractal to be unphysical at sub-Planckian distances; at least I do. Nevertheless, you know that there have been speculations that gravity could have an ultraviolet fixed point, a scale invariant theory valid at the sub-Planckian distances whose scale invariance is spontaneously broken at the Planck scale. I, for one, don't believe these things, especially because they seem to be inconsistent with everything we know about string theory, but we can't definitely rule out their existence at this moment, I think. Of course, the more one studies some fractal classical solutions of GR, the more one would like these super-short features of the solutions to be physical. ;-) But one should resist the temptation: self-similar geometries don't seem to be a part of the "real physics" so far.

It seems to me that discretely self-similar solutions may be more physical if they occur within a conformal field theory rather than gravity. But we will see whether Barak finds something interesting about the self-similar gravitational solutions. Good luck to him.

What is Tom DeLay doing now?

He's posing with Elvis at a nursing home -- err, campaigning in his district.

Go read this absolutely hilarious post at In the Pink Texas.





Their snark, and that of their commenters, is the best ever of late.

Update (8/28) : Charles Kuffner has a more polite take.

Anthony Karmis wins $13.08

Anthony Karmis (undergrad: UIUC, grad: UC Santa Barbara) has become the winner of our grand prize - $13.08 - for his first 1-star amazon.com review of McCutcheon's book. We have explained the little scandal over here and some of the initial developments here. The money has been transferred to his paypal.com account.

Anthony's prize is a deserved one. He remains the only person whose 1-star review survived for one week - and the only one that remained on the web until the present. Tens of unwelcome review posted before Anthony's review as well as after it have been erased. The latter category includes, for example, Quix from Columbus, Ohio. There seem to be many witnesses who may confirm that Brian Powell was right and something was wrong - and most likely something is still wrong.




Don't get me wrong: amazon.com is still among my favorite companies and I tend to believe that this incident is an isolated anomaly.

The award was paid mostly from my private money. If you want to contribute for future campaigns (not necessarily similar to this one), click at the "Make a donation" button at the HP keyboard support page, for example.

Last night's Daily Show interview

with Christopher Hitchens is now available for your viewing at Crooks and Liars.

You've heard it about it, you've read about it, now you can see it for yourself.

Prairie Weather links to the Texas Observer's in-depth expose' of the tangled web of connections binding the GOP together -- that's a must-click, by the way -- and adds this:

This is a big article about a big mess and these are only the opening paragraphs.

Bottom line: a real investigation, which McCain and the Indian Affairs Committee is supposed to hold, would pull down too many "key" figures in the Republican Party and (worse?) cut off big funding sources.

Now are we motivated to change the color of the Senate and House in 2006?

Well, if we are, we shouldn't count on any help from the SCLM; Editor and Publisher points to the Los Angeles Times piece that shows how the editors of TIME magazine sat on the Plame-Rove-Matthew Cooper disclosures because they did not want to influence the 2004 election:

The article details conversations involving Karl Rove, "Scooter" Libby, Matt Cooper and Robert Novak. But near its conclusion it raises an emerging issue, promoted by Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair, among others: If Time magazine had gone public about Rove's conversations with Cooper, it might have had some impact on the Bush - Kerry race for the White House last year.

Not until this summer did Cooper ask Rove for a waiver to talk to the grand jury, and ultimately the public, about their conversation. The L.A. Times article today notes that he did not do this before “because his lawyer advised against it.” But the reporters add that in addition, “Time editors were concerned about becoming part of such an explosive story in an election year.”

The story concludes: "The result was that Cooper's testimony was delayed nearly a year, well after Bush's reelection."

That worked out well for everyone, didn't it?

Sidneyfest videos

The web page of Sidneyfest now includes 13 videos - virtually all talks from the conference. QuickTime 7 or QuickTime Alternative needed. Enjoy!

Trackbacks and arXiv

Paul Ginsparg has introduced a new experimental service - trackbacks; most likely, Jacques Distler was the driving force behind this new feature. See Paul's explanation here. This service allows the visitors of arXiv.org, at least in principle, to see the list of blog articles that are describing a given paper. For example, look at the paper

• Things fall apart.

You will see "1 trackback" at the bottom of the page. Actually, there are 2 trackbacks; their new system has some minor bugs so far, for example it cannot count properly. If you click at this "1 trackback", you will see two blog articles about the paper, namely Jacques' and mine.

Google is ahead in many things; unfortunately, their blogger.com that runs all these blogspot.com blogs (including this one) has some features missing. Trackback autodiscovery is one of them. I've tried to include an RDF code that has a chance to fix it, using some haloscan.com URLs, but it probably does not work. What does it mean? It means that if you like a blog article - and/or a discussion below it - about an arxiv.org paper, you may want to "ping" the arxiv.org manually. For example, you open

• Trackback wizard

and fill out some of the entries:

• Blog name is "Lubos Motl's reference frame".
• Title of post is something like "Pure spinor formalism".
• You may write down an excerpt, but it is probably not necessary.
• The trackback URL is something like http://arxiv.org/trackback/hep-th/0410079.
• The blog post URL must contain the full name of the article, for example http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/01/pure-spinor-formalism.html

It will only work if the blog article contains a link to the PS or PDF or abstract page of the article, and if the link has http://arxiv.org in it; for example, http://www.arxiv.org that often appears in my posts is probably enough for the operation to fail.

The process has been strikingly simplified for you. Below every article, you should find a web form where you only fill out the trackback URL and press "Submit" - the excerpt may be ignored if the trackback links to the arXiv...

Have fun.

Billmon is yelling

...is anybody listening?

Some stories are so obvious that I fool myself into thinking the facts will speak for themselves. I forget that we don't live in that kind of world any more (if we ever did) and that amensia is no longer just a chronic condition for the corporate media but also a willful one.

So, to drive the point of my last post home a little harder, let me summarize:

The White House propaganda maestros used an Iraqi women's rights activist as a living prop at Shrub's state of the union address earlier this year, whipping wingnut war hawks and media dingdongs alike into a frenzy of teary-eyed patriotism. They also arranged for her to stand immediately in front of the mother of a Marine killed in action in Iraq -- setting the scene for a "spontaneous" hug that reduced a national television audience to quivering lumps of sentimental jello and left Joe Klein spitting phlegm-coated bile at the Democratic Party.

Now, that very same activist is telling the world the Americans just sold her, and her Iraqi sisters, down the river to a bunch of medieval mullahs with Made-in-Tehran labels on the insides of their turbans.

Will her betrayal simply be pushed down the media memory hole with yesterday's garbage? Are we really that far gone?

Marcos Mariňo's book

Figure 1: Marcos Mariňo likes similar T-shirts except that he admires the opposite side than the soldier on the picture - namely Gentlemen like Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Mao-Tse Tung, and the ideals of communism and general copulation. ;-) This did not prevent him from becoming a smart mathematical physicist.

Because I helped Peter Woit to promote his book, it may also be useful to mention that Marcos Mariňo has written another book that is probably much more meaningful, namely a book on Chern-Simons theory, matrix models, and topological strings:



It should be released in November or so (which means that it is already out). The previous book is about topological quantum field theory on four-manifolds:



In the new book, one should be able to learn all the relations between the matrix models, Chern-Simons theory in 3 dimensions and its "holographic" duality with topological string theory; and the implications for knot theory and the Gromov-Witten invariants.

Camp Casey Day 6

brainshrub has another report:

As usual, I am writing from the back of the tent at "Camp Casey II" on a borrowed laptop via wi-fi connection. I don't know if I'll ever want to blog indoors again. Something about being outside while surfing the internet makes blogging seem like a miracle.

I have just been handed a half-melted ice cream sandwich; I'm typing with one hand and munching cold vanilla bliss with the other. Ice cream at the end of a hot, Texas day is the most glorious food in the world.

###

People who have been here awhile will mark the number of days they have been here on their nametags. It's the closest thing to rank that anyone has around here.

Ann Wright, the closest thing to a "leader" here, can be seen walking around with her head still wet from a shower, helping to do dishes and giving administrative advice to the Peace House.

###

I've sweat so hard today that there are wide salt-marks on my shirt. Most of the day has been spent the day running around as an assistant to Rebecca Mac Neice.

Rebecca is a joy to work with. She is the only professional videographer here who has camped out full-time and developed a good relationship with both sides of the Iraqi War. The raw footage is so damn good, I'll be amazed if she doesn't win awards for it.

###

I'm a bit surprised about how few liberal media organizations are represented here. Considering how much they are praising the activities of Cindy Sheehan, you'd think they'd bankroll a few reporters to write from here. DemocracyNow left days ago, AAR is nowhere to be seen and the only person still broadcasting live with any regularity is Brad's radio show.

My regular site has gotten so many hits, that people are staring to sent me emails thanking me for blogging and helping give the Peace Movement a vehicle. IMHO bloggers are getting too much credit for covering the event. The only hard-core bloggers I've meet here so far are myself, TruthOut and BradBlog. There are rumors that Markos Moulitsas from the Daily Kos is here, but I haven't seen him.

The real force behind the media coverage are the common citizens here who are writing letters, urging friends to contact their congresspeople, and taking telephone calls from media organizations too lazy to send a reporter to do it in person.

Case in point: The only major publication I've meet in the six days I've been here is Eric Pfeiffer, a columnist for the National Review. Let me repeat what I just wrote just in case you think I'm kidding: A columnist for The National Review.

What this means is that resistance to the Iraq war is not being driven by progressive media or by bloggers. It's organic and much more mainstream than anyone cares to admit.

There is no attempt to coordinate the message by IVAW, Gold Star Mothers for Peace, MoveOn, Not In Our Name or Code Pink. It's all being done organically by common citizens. Bloggers and indie-media bloggers are spreading the information fast, but we aren't driving it.

More, including comments, here.

I'll be heading that way to spend a day this weekend.

Two of ours come out swinging

As the situation in Iraq deteriorates almost as quickly as the price of gas rises and the President's poll numbers fall, two of the Texas Democratic candidates yesterday broadsided their GOP incumbent opponents for their respective failings.

David Van Os writes under the headline "Yearning to Breathe Free"(emphasis mine):

An August 22 story in the Austin American-Statesman describes the plight of immigrant workers who perform some of the most laborious jobs in our economy yet have difficulty obtaining the pay they have earned for their work. (“The power of shame pays off; public vigil helps migrants claim money owed to them,” Austin American-Statesman, Asher Price, 8-22-05; link above req. reg.)

Under state law the Texas Attorney General has the power to come down hard against unscrupulous employers who exploit low-wage immigrant workers by refusing to pay such workers for work they have performed. Suits by the Attorney General to obtain injunctions and to assess the stiff monetary penalties provided by Texas payday laws would quickly get the attention of employers who unlawfully refuse to pay their workers and would deter other employers from similar conduct.

The immortal words on our Statue of Liberty proclaim, “Give me your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” We are mostly a nation of immigrants who came and whose ancestors came to this land fleeing injustice and seeking the breath of liberty. The exceptions, such as those who are descended from victims of the African slave trade and those whose ancestors were incorporated into the nation under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, nevertheless often take lead positions in our nation’s pursuit of freedom and justice for all. No human being can “breathe free” if unable to purchase the necessities of life as a result of laboring without just compensation. The 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution is uncompromising in its permanent prohibition of involuntary servitude as a fundamental value of the American social covenant.

The Texas Legislature meant what it said when it enacted laws against non-payment of wages with stern penalties assessable through suit by the Attorney General. While the current Republican Attorney General politically grandstands over a Ten Commandments monument on the State Capitol Grounds, he ignores the biblical injunction that "You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers.” The Republican Attorney General should move quickly on this issue, but he will not do so because it would interfere with the immigrant-bashing philosophy of his radical political base. It is a terrible shame that enforcement of the laws of Texas on behalf of the working poor will have to wait until I am sworn in as Attorney General in January 2007; but when that time comes, enforcement will arrive swiftly and aggressively on behalf of not only immigrants but all Texas workers, regardless of background or status, who are victimized by such unjust and unscrupulous labor practices.

And then Barbara Radnofsky smacks down KBH with this:

Recent news reports showed that Senator Hutchison has abandoned the issues on which she based her announcement to seek re-election, choosing to focus on three issues our campaign identified: veterans? affairs, education, and health care. She has crawfished on a variety of issues our campaign raised.

* She has flip-flopped on veterans affairs after a series of speeches and press releases from our campaign, and has finally called for a VA Hospital south of San Antonio, after months of my campaigning for such a facility.

* She has flip-flopped after her abandonment of her Constitutional obligation of Advise and Consent, and is now calling for Senate vetting of Supreme Court appointees, after her prompt rubberstamping of the President's nomination and her immediate call on her colleagues to ensure the nomination.

* She wrongly claims to be supportive of health care when in fact she voted against the bipartisan Bingaman-Smith amendment that restored Medicaid funding cut from Texas. After the last eleven years of rubberstamping and failed leadership, Texas now leads the nation in percentage of uninsured children and adults. She now parrots our campaigns call for insurance reform. We call on her to echo our call for prompt pay and preventive care.

* She wrongly claims to support education, while on her watch Texas has achieved the lowest high school graduation rate in the U.S. We call on her to echo our recommendations for mediation and full funding for grants for higher education.

* She has proudly touted her role in passage of the transportation bill. We call on her to concede that the transportation formulas in the bill that she rubberstamped have harmed Texans, sending our hard-earned Texas dollars out of state so that we can build needless construction projects in Alaska.

It sure will be nice to have real leaders in Austin and Washington for a change, won't it?

Verizon

I forgot to include an elementary introduction to the black holes in string theory before the black hole posting in the morning, so here it is:



The Verizon customers already know the powerful stuff. When will the readers of Not Even Wrong join them?

We ALL need two

Book that is Not Even Wrong

Let's start with my first public review of this book.



Bitter emotions and obsolete understanding of high-energy physics (1 star)

Peter Woit is the owner of a well-known blog that provides high-energy theoretical physics with the same service as William Dembski's ID blog offers to evolutionary biology: it is designed to misinterpret and obscure virtually every event in physics and transform it into poison - and to invent his own fantasies to hurt science. This makes Woit's blog highly popular among the crackpots, for example some of the reviewers of this book. The book is not identical to the author's blog but it is not too different either.

Parts of this book are fun to read, although they will be too difficult for outsiders. But the text is definitely not a trustworthy source of knowledge about physics. The book can basically be divided into two parts. The first part of the book describes physics from the early 20th century to the 1970s or so. This part covers some standard material as well as some points that have not yet appeared in the popular literature. The early chapters also honestly explain that the author has not done any important work in high-energy physics himself and that he has been isolated from research (and researchers) for the last 20 years. Because of these reasons, I originally rated the book by two stars.




As the focus of the presentation shifts to modern physics since the 1970s or so, an expert recognizes that the author misunderstands some very elementary questions.

The book contains a lot of very embarrassing errors. Let me mention a few examples. Woit originally wrote that the center-of-mass energy of the LHC beams would be 14 GeV, instead of 14 TeV: this error has been corrected after long debates in which he didn't want to admit any flaws. He incorrectly argues that the neutrinos with electroweak energies interact very weakly. He thinks that higher-dimensional rotations are associated with one-dimensional "axes". He misunderstands how SU(2) can be embedded to SO(4). In his description of the history of supersymmetry, he forgets Pierre Ramond. He writes that the supersymmetric vacua predict a higher vacuum energy than the non-supersymmetric ones.

Also, Woit seems to misunderstand that all of our knowledge of theories such as QED comes from perturbative expansions when he attacks the perturbative method as such. He also misunderstands what "background independence" means. At one point, the author also claims that the primary evidence supporting scientific theories is an authority (Edward Witten in his case). Even more seriously, he builds his case upon e-mail messages from undetermined sources that supported Woit's viewpoint. Most of these e-mails were obviously written by cranks.

Authorities play an important role and the author quotes many outsiders in high-energy physics who have criticized string theory. But he never mentions names like Weinberg, Gell-Mann, Hawking, Randall, Arkani-Hamed - famous and active physicists who are not string theorists but who believe that it is the right direction. Books by Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, and others were much more balanced in this respect. The book is a gigantic spin zone.

Woit conjectures the existence of singularities in some integrals that appear in string theory and that are known to be non-singular. Woit does not distinguish a family of theories from one theory with a massless scalar field (a modulus). He does not mention Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa when the black hole entropy is discussed. Woit incorrectly believes that the "beauty" of a theory is the same thing as an experimental verification.

The author repeats poisoned remarks about string theory too many times. The second part of the book could be reduced by 60 percent or so. Moreover, most of the statements in the second part of the book are supported by no technical arguments, neither in the book nor in scientific literature. The problematic statement that string theory makes no prediction is repeated hundreds of times, and in many particular contexts, such a statement becomes not only boring but also patently false. The author is not aware (or denies) the actual mechanisms that are considered to be solutions of various puzzles - for example the doublet-triplet splitting problem.

The book is also full of inconsistencies. In one chapter, he argues that the alternatives to string theory in the field of quantum gravity should be supported. In the following chapter, he argues that they should be suppressed - the work of the Bogdanoff brothers is one of his examples. Woit's knowledge of the history of the subjects he discusses is extremely superficial, too. For example, Leonard Susskind is painted as the discoverer of the large number of vacua in string theory. Quite obviously, Peter Woit has no idea about the "discretuum" described by Bousso and Polchinski and many other concepts that have been discussed for years.

Peter Woit also offers a highly obsolete view on many concepts in theoretical physics such as the gauge symmetry; he is obsessed with the old-fashioned idea that all of physics follows from a gauge symmetry principle. He thinks that the gauge symmetry is uniquely determined by physics because he is apparently unaware of dualities and all other phenomena discovered in the last 20 years that show that his preconceptions are wrong and that gauge symmetries are only associated with a particular description of physics that does not have to be unique.

The book is called "Not Even Wrong" but the readers should know that most of the book is wrong after all. I can only recommend the book to the people who dislike theoretical physics - or at least theoretical physics of the last 20 years - and who want their opinion to be confirmed by a semi-serious source. The readers who want to learn what physics is all about may want to avoid the book because it could make them very confused. As far as modern physics goes, the author is a layman. The topics he raises have nothing to do with the actual discussions that take place among the scientists.

... [End of review] ...

A seventeen-page-long review of the book is here. An analysis of typical reviewers is here.

Comment by Lenny Susskind, one of the most original scientists of his generation:

• You’re talking probably about some of the books and blogs that have come out in very very big criticism of [string theory]. Well, I think one would have to say that some of it is due to a certain kind of grumpiness of people who... um...
• Well, for example, there’s one fellow who failed as a physicist, never made it as a physicist, became a computer programmer, has been angry all of his life that he never became a physicist and that physicists ignore him, so he’s now taking out his revenge by writing diatribes and polemics against string theory.

Let's continue with the old text of this blog article:

McCutcheon's book is completely wrong - and in a few days, we will officially announce the winner of the $13.08 grand prize. But there are books that are Not Even Wrong. One of them has been written by Peter Woit - and I am apparently the first one who found its page at amazon.com. He explains that the whole book is full of a bitter criticism from a person who does not know what high-energy physicists are talking about but who wants to criticize them nevertheless - which is how Peter Woit apparently envisions the ideal combination for a science writer. ;-) Using this strategy, he concludes, among other things, that supersymmetry and string theory "have failed conclusively".

If the blog is a realistic guide how the book looks like, then it is roughly a 2-star book. But of course I would have to see an actual copy of the book to give you a more accurate rating. ;-) I have nothing against the publication of silly books - except that the internet may be enough and many trees could be saved. As you can see, my opinions about the book are exactly opposite that those of Sean Carroll: I believe that Woit's criticism of the Landscape is a legitimate one (which is the real reason why he did not get 1 star from me), but his dislike for string theory as a mathematical structure is grounded in an uninformed and unscientific judgement. ;-)

Peter Woit probably can't write a scientific book on current high-energy physics, not even a popular one. The publisher apparently realizes it; this may be the reason why the book has been included in the category: Social Science - Popular Culture.

Peter also argues that the string theorists among his referees - who did not like the book, with one exception - did not have too many explicit arguments against the book and did not find too many undisputable errors. One should not believe everything that Peter Woit says; but in this case, I tend to believe him. It requires a certain amoung of training to learn all these silly pseudo-arguments that most critics who are unfamiliar with the subject are typically using. In many cases, it is incredibly difficult for some of the leaders of our field to comprehend that some critics of string theory really believe XY - because XY is often dumb beyond imagination.

The first educated referee - apparently a physics bigshot; my guess is Andy Strominger himself - mentioned that arguing against string theory is like arguing against the evolution. In my opinion, that's a bit exaggerated - but it is not too exaggerated! ;-) In both cases, the main reason to be convinced about the validity of the theory is that it is the only known (and conceivable) scientific theory that is compatible with some of the most fundamental observations, such as the existence of diverse species, their related characteristics (and DNA codes); or the existence of gravity as well as other forces described by quantum field theory. In both cases, a specific enough alternative that someone proposes is more or less guaranteed to be silly. But once again, yes, I do think that at this moment, the evidence in favor of evolution is stronger than the evidence supporting string theory.

Hagedorn, black holes, and Brownian motion

Most of us seem to agree that the most interesting hep-th paper today is one by

• Albion Lawrence and Martin Kruczenski.

It's true that no one seems to be able to say exactly what is the new stuff - probably because no one has read the paper in detail so far - but there is a lot of interesting material in it anyway. Let me describe some of the crucial ideas for this business.

They study the behavior of strings near the Hagedorn transition. As you know, the partition sum diverges above this critical temperature because the number of excited string states at a certain level increases faster than what the Maxwell-Boltzmann exponential factor is able to suppress; alternatively, the partition sum diverges because a thermal scalar emerges - it is a tachyonic winding string wrapped on the thermal (Euclidean periodic time) circle in spacetime; its winding number equals one. These two pictures are related by the modular transformation on the worldsheet (tau goes to -1/tau). Kruczenski and Lawrence insist on the traditional Atick-Witten rules of the game and don't try to believe some recent "Hagedorn revolution" papers that we discussed a short time ago.

When the tachyon dominates, the partition sum may be calculated using the path integral over the histories of this particular field in spacetime; these are the random walks or, equivalently, the Brownian motion. I believe it's a well-known fact that the highly excited strings - which are inevitably long (more precisely, one long string with a gas of small strings is the typical configuration) - are a dual description of the thermal scalar near the Hagedorn temperature.

Albion and Martin focus on the typical size of these chaotic strings and random walks and they argue that the characteristic radius goes like the square root of the energy in string units (recall the basic rules of the Brownian motion pointed by Einstein 100 years ago). Then they make a jump to the long strings in the AdS space and argue that there exists a transition to the black hole - something that has been advocated by various authors. We will only see the new argument once we look at the paper in detail.

You know, there exists a nice paradigm that a black hole may be thought of as a condensate of the thermal scalar. This is most clearly manifested in the work by Adams et al. In their case, a circle in spacetime with antiperiodic boundary conditions for the fermions carries a scalar field that becomes tachyonic if the radius shrinks below a critical value; the final state of the condensation of this scalar is a spacetime with a different topology in which the handle is cut into two pieces and the closed strings are banned from the region that used to connect the two sides. This picture can also be interpreted in the case when the circle is viewed as the thermal circle: the condensation of the thermal scalar then produces a black hole. Note that it is not true that you get the black hole "immediately"; you must roll over the configuration space and increase the condensate to actually change the topology of the spacetime, and this fact makes many connections between these two pictures difficult to calculate.

Together with Allan, we also tried to interpolate between the tachyonic perturbative instability and the Witten's non-perturbative instability of the Kaluza-Klein compactification but it is pretty hard to extract any quantitative checks from such a nice picture especially because the Witten bubble is a "large" condensate of the tachyon.

Albion and Martin also study the excited strings in the anti de Sitter space and advocate their connection with the anti de Sitter black holes. One of the paradigms that their work seems to support - or at least paradigms that they independently believe to be relevant - have been summarized in various intriguing papers by Lenny Susskind around 1994, for example in this work by Uglum+Susskind. They argued that the black hole entropy can be explained using a long string that is chaotically wound around the black hole horizon. I also believe that these ideas must be morally correct - well, I've rediscovered them independently, too. It is even plausible that this picture, once it's put on firm ground, will confirm Samir Mathur's ideas that the black hole interior is very different than we thought. But no one seems to have a clear picture yet.

Conservatives going buckwild

Pat Robertson thinks it's time for the United States to assassinate the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.

He went on at length about it:

"We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," Robertson said Monday on the Christian Broadcast Network's "The 700 Club."

"We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator," he continued. "It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," Robertson said. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."

Keith Olbermann caught Rush Limbaugh denying and trying to cover up only his most recent smearjob -- the one he performed last week on Cindy Sheehan. It would be funny if it weren't so wretched:

On his daily radio soap opera, on August 15, Limbaugh said “Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents, there's nothing about it that's real…” The complete transcript of the 860 words that surround those quotes can be found at the bottom of this entry.

Yet, apparently there was something so unpopular, so subversive, and so crazy about those remarks that he has found it necessary to deny he said them - even when there are recordings and transcripts of them - and to brand those who’ve claimed he said them as crackpots and distorters. More over, that amazing temple to himself, his website, has been scrubbed clean of all evidence of these particular remarks, and to ‘prove’ his claim that he never made the remarks in question on August 15, he has misdirected visitors to that site to transcripts and recordings of remarks he made on August 12.

Limbaugh is terrified. And he has reason to be.

And even our local right-wing freaks are jumping on the crazy train. From Tom DeLay's suburban outpost in Sugar Land, here's Safety for Dummies (hat tip to BOR):

The Governor (of Texas, Rick Perry) will be in Houston on Monday (August 22) at 2:30 for a Press Conference on Education Issues. We need to build a good crowd for the event. Please join us and invite 5-10 people to come along.

Let’s try not to blast this around but attempt to build a friendly crowd. We want to avoid Strayhorn people.

As Marcus noted:

On an issue as big as education, I would have hoped the governor would have asked his friends to bring more than 5 to 10 people to hear what he has to say. Safety for Dummies stresses the point that the email says they "need" a friendly crowd. It is a good thing then that they are avoiding the "Strayhorn people". I hear them people hate education... or, wait, is it the fact that they hate the way Perry has failed the state's education system?

I may just make "Conservatives Gone Wild" a regular feature of this online magazine.

Three views of Camp Casey

One from the damned liberal media:

However, Cindy Sheehan's gone but the camp up here is even bigger. More and more people are coming from around the country. They now have this enormous setup, Camp Casey. Used to be a couple pup tents, now it's this enormous--we call it the Cirque du Soleil tent with eight spikes, catered meals, a Cindy shuttle, a peace shuttle that takes people up and down the mountain. Right now it's PETA, hippies, Naderites. The question is, if it becomes the Little League dads, Pop Warner moms, then the White House has a big problem.

-- Mike Allen, on Face the Nation yesterday

There were several shuttles carrying people between the camps and the house. The line moved quickly, and people were practically competing for the chance to give up their seats for anyone they thought might need it more. We boarded a van and headed out. A hundred or so bikers were parked at some businesses, and we were told they were there in "support of the troops," though from another viewpoint from ours. The van proceeded to Camp Casey 1, the original. Thinking that it was moving day anyway, we stayed on board and went on to Camp Casey 2. I caught a glimpse of Dylan Garcia, in a floppy hat and glasses as the van rolled by. Cars were parked along the street as far as we could see. Cindy's original tent was there, and probably 50 more along the roadside. The crosses that had been run down lined the road perpendicular to the rest of the camp, starting at Cindy's tent. Driving past those crosses for the first time is a moment I'll always remember. About 6 or 8 counter protesters sat across the triangle.

-- Lisa, my friend who was there this past weekend (dial-up warning: pic-heavy)

We were there about 20 minutes when Stan Merriman (Chair Emeritus of the PPC) and Jim Rine (San Jacinto Democratic Veterans Brigade) and Charisse Hines appeared. They brought the flags of the Texas fallen that were originally assembled for Memorial Day by Jim's group, along with the flags representing the unit that lost their lives with Casey Sheehan. After a while, the folks that set up Arlington West brought 800 of the crosses for Camp 2. Several Houstonians pitched in to set up the flags around the new Arlington West. In no time, the crosses and flags were positioned into an amazing memorial. We were almost finished placing the flags when there was a flutter of excitement. There was Coleen Rowley, the FBI whistle blower who is running for Representative from Minnesota and Becky Lourey, a Minnesota state senator who lost her own son in Iraq filming a documentary.

-- My friend Lyn, who was also at Camp Casey this past weekend (pic-heavy)

Sounds like Bush is in trouble, Mr. Allen.

Disengagement is mistake

The Israeli-Arab conflict is a very sensitive issue. Let me start with the following points:

• I hold respect for all peaceful Arabs, their culture, and religion - and also the digits: 0123456789
• on the other hand, I am completely impressed by the Jewish culture and their contribution to our civilization
• the current Palestinian leaders are more or less worth our sympathy
• the co-existence of the Jews and the Palestinians is a difficult one, which is especially the case on the territory of the hypothetical future Palestinian state
• the Jews should be thanked for their sacrifice in the name of peace; in fact, a slight majority of the Jews supports the plan
• the disengagement plan for the Gaza strip is realized in a professional and smooth way, and even those $200,000-$300,000 seem as a large enough compensation

Fine. So what do I really want to say? When I look at the maps, it is impossible to forget about the analogy with our "second republic" - namely Czechoslovakia after Hitler equally peacefully took over Sudetenland in 1938, after the outrageous Munich treaty was signed by two bastards - Hitler and Mussolini - and two traitors - Daladier and Chamberlain. The country had simply become defenseless. Once we abandoned the idea to ask the allies (Stalin?) for help, it was painfully clear that there was no other choice than to accept Hitler's conditions in March 1939 and become the (occupied territory i.e. ) "The Protectorate Bohemia-Moravia" in which the Third Reich could have decided about everything. (Slovakia became a relatively independent satellite country of the Third Reich.)

I am afraid that the situation of the "smaller Israel" inside the huge Arab sea is similar. And I don't think it is quite reasonable to expect that all the Arab states are going to like the idea of the Jewish "spot" in the middle of "their" region for decades or indefinitely. Remember how difficult for the Jewish nation was the period of the Second World War. Nevertheless, six Arab countries found it tasteful enough to attack the emerging state of Israel in 1948 or so.

Why they don't do the same thing today? Is it really because they are so much more peaceful these days? Maybe - and one could mention some great leaders. But I would guess that a more important reason is that a sufficiently energetic White House administration - the potential new crusaders - is watching them. That does not have to be the case forever. Because the U.N. and Europe (and probably others as well) are virtually irrelevant for all these questions, I am afraid that once Israel escapes both from the Gaza strip as well as the West Bank, the fate of Israel will depend on the results of the elections in the U.S. Be sure that Dennis Kucinich won't defend Israel, for example.

Such a development would be very sad. Once again, I respect the Palestinians as human beings and as a nation - although they are still something like a part of the greater nation of Arabs (a nation that has apparently been given enough territory) and the somewhat confusing label "Palestinians" creates an illusion of a larger diversity than the actual one.

But my attitude towards the Jews is different. The Jews represent a very crucial and tested element of the whole modern "Western" democratic civilization; among other things, this nation is completely essential for modern science; there are numerous friends and colleagues of ours among the Jews. (Recall the wise joke that besides the world, there exists an anti-world where everything is anti-: for example, they investigate anti-physics and the research is mostly done by anti-Semites.)

If I were social-engineering a sustainable equilibrium in the Middle East, the territory of the Jewish state would probably be expanded, not shrunk, also because the relative importance of the Jews vs. Arabs in my eyes is closer to parity than the ratio of their territories. (Of course, I don't argue that such a thing could be realized peacefully.) I would love to be proved wrong but my prediction is that in a couple of decades, we - or perhaps the other generations - will view the disengagement plan as a mistake, together with our new democratic friends in the Arab world who will be remembering some bad days of their future history. Today, however, all of us should support the peace plan and hope for the best.

The nice houses have been demolished. It's always sad when houses are demolished - and a completely rationally oriented nation would find better ways to deal with these buildings - but it is much worse when the people are killed. I wish the Palestinians to be able to build equally nice or better houses in their new land, despite the skepticism of many bloggers.

Becker Schwarz Becker

Becker Schwarz Becker. That's not a description of a tennis duel in Germany but a rumor about a possible new string theory textbook that is being prepared. Anyone knows more? This rumor came from the blog of CapitalistImperialistPig.




Update (2006): I have seen portions of the book and I can recommend you the book wholeheartedly as a modern update of Green-Schwarz-Witten. There's a lot about black hole precision entropy etc. The book also has a nice cover:



When I mentioned Germany: It turned out that the mysterious Piano Man is German, too. Also, some new rumors indicate that this citizen of Bavaria can't really play the piano and he is not ill. These developments make the British media look like the Radio Yerevan.

Stanford supports Newton

The Stanford experimental group around Alan Kapitulnik has found no deviations from the Newtonian gravitational law. They have improved their limits on a new force at 20 microns - a force that they parameterize as a Yukawa force - and published a paper about it, namely hep-ph/0508204. According to the newest rumors, the Washington group will also confirm a negative result. The results so far are consistent with Newton's theory much like the new Intelligent Falling theory. ;-)

It is not hard to summarize all hep-th papers today. Raman Sundrum offers his TASI lectures on the fifth dimension. Alexander Vilenkin reviews the cosmic strings and confirms that the Hubble decision about the CSL-1 galaxies (Cosmic String Lensing?) should appear by early 2006. One abstract paper speculates about the Immirzi parameter and torsion. There is shockingly one more paper about the Immirzi parameter: a new value of it is proposed. Although many people would be happy if someone else referred to their (my) work often, I am personally very confused what all these guys want to do and why they think it's interesting; see the quasinormal story on quasinormal modes. Christian Saemann studies a certain cousin of the twistor space for three-dimensional gravity - in fact it is N=8 supergravity. Agarwal and Ferretti study integrability of spin chains; they show that a new, "higher" conserved charge in the su(2|3) sector of N=4 Yang-Mills is determined algebraically. Similar questions in a different, su(1|1) sector of the same theory is studied by Alday, Arutyunov, and Frolov in relation with the free fermions. Frey, Mazumdar, and Myers argue that stringy effects can leave imprints on the CMB radiation through inflation and reheating in multi-throat cosmologies; a new, long-string era plays role in their picture. Two Sorokas argue that they can construct a multiplet in the Minkowski space with different masses in it, marginally contradicting the Coleman-Mandula theorem. Finally, Kopper tries to make some facts about renormalization flows (in the context of the Euclidean lambda.phi^4 theory) more rigorous.