Crichton in Senate

Michael Crichton became one of the favorite celebrities of The Reference Frame. So it should not be surprising if we point out that he was the key witness in the U.S. senate environmental committee two days ago. You may read his speech here. Some of you may prefer Real Video in which case you should jump to minute 41: 20 (unless you prefer Hillary Clinton).

He explained some crucial features of the scientific method of inquiry: especially the requirement that the experiments and calculations must be repeatable - in principle by anyone - without silly comments that certain things are only allowed to priests or "experts". He compared the high standards of drug testing - with a story showing that the standards can be incredibly strict - with the relaxed atmosphere in climate science - where people find it completely natural to write unbelievable sentences like "we won't give you our data because your aim is to find some problems with it"; where data can be touched by many people; where verification is not a part of the process; where data are usually not archived.

Not surprisingly, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick were proudly celebrating Crichton's intelligent testimony because their heroic analysis of the "hockey stick graph" was chosen as one of the examples how the climate community itself - without the help of the "outsiders" - is unable to produce trustworthy results.

On the other hand, it is even less surprising that the alarmist propagandistic blog replied with attacks. Such a reaction seems very painful to me because I am convinced that Crichton has not said a single sentence that a scientist who deserves this name could disagree with - except that he forgot that he was married. :-) Mr. Mann and Mr. Schmidt are completely unimpressed by Crichton's description of the methodological and ethical principles of science. Moreover, they offer their readers a pile of untrue and mostly untrue statements. For example,

• Mann and Schmidt argue that the scientists were not proclaiming an imminent ice age in the 1970s; it is easy to check that their assertion is false, for example here
• they argue that 30 years of global cooling does not mean that global warming is not right; this sentence is so bizarre that it probably deserves no comments; of course that 30-year-long trend does not imply any solid conclusions, much like another 100-year-long trend, but it is enough to rule out some of the silliest theories - and it is enough to learn that a decade is a period in which the climate may evolve in an essentially random direction
• Mann and Schmidt argue that important pieces of climate sciences were independently verified; this is untrue as the example of the very most influential piece of climate science - the hockey stick graph - shows quite clearly; it had not been verified for several years and once the people started to attempt to verify it, it became pretty clear that the hockey stick graph was methodologically rubbish
• they also say that the chaotic character of weather does not change anything about their belief that climate can be predicted; well, it is obvious that the chaotic nature of weather reduces the potential for accurate medium-term as well as long-term predictions; what is their argument against this rather obvious observation? This silly text

The direct influence of the Sun

Incidentally, Mike Ros has pointed out a press release about an article by a physicist from Duke and his colleagues from North Carolina in the September issue of Geophysical Research Letters. I can direct you to the full paper:

• The Sun has contributed more than thought to recent warming, according to combined satellite data

They adopt a phenomenological approach and calculate the most likely magnitude of the influence of 11-year and 22-year solar cycles on the measured temperatures.

Honestly, it is pretty unclear to me how the 22-year cycle - in which the solar magnetic field returns to the original position - can affect the terrestrial climate. The only change after half ot this period - 11 years - is that the poles of the solar magnetic dipole get interchanged. The solar magnetic field as seen on the Earth is just about a nanoTesla, compared to microTeslas of the geomagnetic field. Nevertheless, if it's OK to conjecture that the climate now evolves primarily according to the carbon dioxide, it is probably also legitimate to conjecture that such a 22-year-long periodic solar effect exists and to try to quantify it.

Their result is that the influence of the Sun is roughly 3 times larger than what the climate models predict (and re-use); the influence is particularly large for the lower-frequency, 22-year cycles because of the inertia of oceans. Their total estimate is that up to 0.15 K out of the measured 0.40 K jump in temperature in 1980-2002 is probably due to the Sun's direct influence.

Of course, the higher influence the solar cycles have, the more likely it is that the weather will cool down by 2020.

They use some formulae that may be incomprehensible to those climate scientists who are not physicists such as William Connolley. ;-) For example, they became "Newtons of climate science" and re-invented "integral Z(omega) d_omega f(omega)" (to account for different influence of different frequencies) instead of "Delta_omega x f+(omega)" which could be easier to swallow for WC, right? :-)

Finiteness of moduli spaces

Zhiqin Lu and Mike Douglas propose a physics proof of the finiteness of the moduli spaces - where the volume is measured by the Zamolodchikov metric - that was recently promoted by Cumrun Vafa in his Swampland. It is not quite clear how general their proof is but it has essentially the following parts:

• argue that your non-linear sigma-model may be constructed from a gauged linear sigma-model (GLSM) and RG flow
• show that the volume of the moduli space is finite in the GLSM - it's because the moduli space is something like CP^{125} with a non-singular metric
  
• demonstrate that the finiteness does not change by the RG flow: although the total "time" of the flow is infinite, most of the changes appear in a particular finite interval where the RG scale is comparable to the typical scales of the GLSM given by its coupling(s)

They need to assume a gap, making the connection between the discrete spectrum and the finiteness of the volume a bit more comprehensible. It's a bit confusing that the existence of dualities - that seem essential for the finiteness - does not seem to play too much of a role. It's probably because the GLSM does not have most of these dualities and it directly describes a fundamental domain. The dualities appear in the IR limit only. Do I understand it well?

The first millikelvin

Sometimes next week or so, there will be worldwide celebrations of the first millikelvin that will be saved by the Kyoto protocol; see the Kyoto counter on the right side. This millikelvin is a source of immense pride for all the people who care about the global warming.

One negative millikelvin is the upper limit on the temperature difference that the world community has bought so far; this "huge" temperature difference is the highest estimate based on the assumption that CO2 really matters - which is what the "climate models" behind Kyoto assume. If the carbon dioxide matters less, then we have bought an even more negligible amount of negative temperature.

When you will talk to your granddaughter in 2030 and she will be looking at the global thermometer and it will show 16.443 degrees Celsius, you will proudly say the following:

• Do you see the number 16.443, Hillary? This is a result of the worldwide efforts in 2005 in which I actively participated - efforts to cool down our blue planet. If we had not united most of the civilized world back in 2005 and if we had not paid 100 billion dollars in 2005 itself, the thermometer would probably be showing 16.444 degrees Celsius today. That would be a real disaster. Can you imagine, 16.444 instead of 16.443 on September 30th, 2030? You can see how much I loved you, even decades before you were born. And it was actually very easy: those hundreds of billions of dollars were mostly paid by the evil capitalists anyway. We used the most advanced technology available in 2005 - especially bureaucratic regulations designed to reduce the economic growth. And this progress continued. This is why you are a polar bear, Hillary, instead of a dirty human being. A happy polar bear who likes its country, namely the Icy Socialist Union of Equatorial Glaciers.

You may think that it is not nice to kick into a dead body - and Kyoto is dead even according to Tony Blair and Japan Today, much like newspapers in New Zealand, Scotland, D.C., China, and elsewhere. But such an incredible exercise in madness, using the words of Japan Today, probably deserves to be kicked into even after its death.

P.S.: Some people such as CIP have questioned whether I have actually seen the precise words of Tony Blair who recently declared that no Kyoto-like treaty can ever work and that Kyoto will never be repeated - and it should be replaced by efforts to improve science and technology faster, without any mandatory caps. Of course that I've seen it. You can read the full PDF file with their proceedings here or find Blair's Kyoto comments on page 14.

9900 pages of 175 books on string theory online

In the case that you have not yet tried print.google.com, you should look at

• 9900 pages of 175 books on string theory scanned and online

They include Polchinski, Zwiebach, Greene, and about 9000 others. ;-) You may need a gmail mail account to see the full content of the pages.

The books were scanned in the libraries of Harvard University, because of the very constructive approach of President Summers, and four other, less famous places. ;-)

Ronnie Earle might be batshit crazy.

And if he is, it's in that cool Austin way.

Roy Blunt is just as corrupt as Tom DeLay

And you don't have to just take my word for it.

Update: "DeLay is guilty," insider says.

David Murff, Democrat for the 7th District of Texas

I spent a few minutes earlier this week with David L. Murff, who will challenge DeLay flack John Culberson for the right to represent the 7th Texas Congressional District in Washington.

Murff is a family and criminal law attorney in private practice; he served in the U.S. Army (2nd Armored, 1st Brigade, Fort Hood). He’s a graduate of Western Kentucky University and the South Texas College of Law, a member of the Houston Bar Association and the Texas Center for Legal Ethics and Professionalism, and has routinely donated his time as an attorney ad litem to Children’s Friend in Court, a non-profit organization providing legal service to indigent children.

My transcript of our conversation follows.

===============================

Q. Why are you running for Congress?

A. As simply as I can put it, I find myself perplexed by the partisan agenda of the people currently in office, and I’m concerned about the direction our country is headed while that narrow agenda is being served.

With all of the challenges we face, in every direction I look -- from the enormous budget deficits to healthcare to energy concerns to homeland security and on and on -- what I see is nothing but partisan conservative platitudes, which just seem to be disconnected from the concerns of the average American.

Q. What about Congressman Culberson? Any specific differences of opinion with him?

A. Sure, absolutely. In many ways John Culberson is actually worse than Tom DeLay, if you can believe it, and his statement today in response to DeLay’s indictment is an example of what I’m talking about relative to partisan politics overriding everything else. I would’ve thought that Culberson would try to distance himself from this growing scandal, or at least be mum about it, but instead he chose to attack (Travis Co. district attorney) Ronnie Earle, whose record clearly shows he’s gone after corrupt politicians regardless of party affiliation.

Regarding the DeLay matter, it will probably drag well into the 2006 election cycle, and frankly I’m not excited about the Democratic Party potentially being the beneficiary of the Republicans’ misfortune. I’m tired of the Republicans portraying Democrats a certain way, and the truth is that the party in power needs to clean up their house and start serving the people instead of the corporations, and maybe this will give them the incentive to do so. If they don’t, or won’t, then that’s a good enough distinction between us to give voters a clear choice.

Culberson voted to relax the ethics rules that enabled DeLay to continue as majority leader up to now, and he also voted for the 11th-hour Medicare provision before he got enough political cover to vote against it. He’s also expressed the opinion that the judicial branch is supposed to serve the will of the President and Congress; that judges should just rubber-stamp the laws passed by Congress and signed by the President. As I hear that, it sounds like he’s against an independent judiciary. That’s truly alarming.

I think it would be a good thing if the people of the 7th District had a congressman who actually listens to them, who gets to know them, who understands their concerns and who will look out for them, as opposed to blindly following the instructions of the Republican leadership.

Q. What issue(s) do you feel most concerned about?

A. I think we‘re squandering a tremendous opportunity from a national perspective, and a tremendous resource right here in Houston -- namely the brilliant minds of the Texas Medical Center -- by blocking stem cell research. That’s got to change.

I think we need to get serious about alternative fuels in this country, and I think there’s a lot we can do regarding biofuels.

Q. You served in the Army. What should we do now regarding Iraq?

A. You know, our soldiers didn’t deserve what they walked into over there. From everything that was known at the time, I would’ve probably voted to authorize the use of force, but the lack of an exit strategy going in is simply the best reason why it’s now time to get our boys and girls back home. And if Iraq then degenerates into civil war, then it may take a true national coalition, one built on real alliances, to restore order.

This administration may just not be capable of doing any of that, unless we the people can send them a strong enough message in 2006.

============================

Murff will have a website up shortly; http://www.murff4congress.com/ .

He’s available to speak to clubs and groups throughout the district. Contact his office at 281-335-4777 or via e-mail at dlmurff at sbcglobal dot net .

Swampland

Some people may think that the stringy landscape is huge which may imply that anything goes. But Cumrun Vafa explains that even if the landscape is as large as the maximally anthropically religious people in the field say, it is not the biggest thing in the world:

• hep-th/0509212

The landscape is surrounded by a much bigger swampland which includes effective field theories that seem consistent as effective field theories, but become inconsistent for subtle reasons if you want to couple them to quantum gravity i.e. realize them within string theory.

Such a claim means that Cumrun - together with several of us who are thinking in the same way - has a couple of general background-independent statements or predictions about string theory such as the finiteness of its moduli spaces - which includes finiteness of moduli spaces of conformal field theories (measured by the Zamolodchikov metric; note that everything in this statement about CFTs is well-defined); both upper and lower bounds on the number of low-energy fields, and other things.

The new paradigm is once again that the stringy landscape is still a small and special part of a much larger swampland. And even this swampland is embedded in a much more gigantic s**tland of inconsistent field theories and theories of quantum gravity, but Cumrun chose not to discuss this very broad context of his observations. ;-)

(This is really off-topic but if you're interested in the most general jargon, s**tland is a small part of f**kland of ideas about physics that are not even wrong. In the real world, Scotland is not a part of the Falkland Islands, but in physics, it's different.)

I think Cumrun's is a very appealing proposal - one that could be important for our understanding what string theory is and especially what string theory is not. All of us could try to derive some inconsistencies - for example, worldvolume anomalies and contradictions with holography - in various theories that may be legitimate as field theories, but become impossible as backgrounds of string theory.

Can someone present a convincing proof that a background of string theory - even beyond the vacua known today - cannot have U(1)^{496} gauge group in 10 dimensions? Or can you find a stringy realization of this N=1 SUGRA/SUPER-YANG-MILLS? Can you find infinite-volume moduli spaces in string theory or CFTs with infinite volumes? Do they have a discrete spectrum?




There are many questions. And some sceptics may think that all no-go theorems will be wrong because some no-go "theorems" have been shown incorrect. But there are reasons why Cumrun or me believe that this is not the case, and some general statements about the stringy vacua will survive an arbitrary number of superstring revolutions. No doubt, the survivors will be the fittest: which ones they are?

Criticism

I should mention that not everyone is excited with this new program. For example, A. believes that the program has two basic flaws: the conjectures are trivially correct in every theory of quantum gravity independently of string theory; and moreover they are wrong.

Although A. may be correct, I would respond to the first objection that it is not a goal to distinguish string theory from a generic consistent background of quantum gravity; on the contrary, it is a part of the belief system in this context that the class of string-theoretical backgrounds and consistent theories of quantum gravities are probably identical sets. The response to the other objection is that while we can't prove most of the conjectures because a complete definition of string theory is lacking, some of them may be true and common features of all string backgrounds may be a good guide in the search for the ultimate formulation of string theory.

Link

I agree with the description of Jacques Distler except for one point. He uses the word "enthusiastic belief" for the ultimate heretical opinion that anything is realizable somewhere in the landscape. ;-)

Strings on supermanifolds

There is a paper

• http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0509198

by Tokunaga that advocates string theory on supermanifolds. Bosonic string theory may be defined on supermanifolds whose super-dimension is (26+k/k), he or she argues. That of course cancels the central charge - since the spin 0 worldsheet fermions carry c=-1 - and she or he also shows modular invariance. However I find it likely that these theories won't be fully physical in spacetime - for example they will violate spin-statistics relations, won't they?

Also, I wonder what the insiders among the readers think, after a year or so, about the status of mirror symmetry of supermanifolds. Has it passed the test of time?

Topology of horizons

This is a rather noteworthy result. Galloway and Schoen show in

• http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0509107

that the topology of the black hole horizons in any dimension must admit metrics of positive curvature. This allows the rings but forbids various other conceivable topologies.

DeLay indictment pending?

Update (9/28, 11:39 CT): DeLay indicted on conspiracy charges

==================

Could it be? At long last?

A Texas grand jury's recent interest in conspiracy charges could lead to last-minute criminal indictments -- possibly against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay -- as it wraps up its investigation Wednesday into DeLay's state political organization, according to lawyers with knowledge of the case.

Conspiracy counts against two DeLay associates this month raised concerns with DeLay's lawyers, who fear the chances are greater that the majority leader could be charged with being part of the conspiracy. Before these counts, the investigation was more narrowly focused on the state election code. By expanding the charges to include conspiracy, prosecutors made it possible for the Travis County grand jury to bring charges against DeLay. Otherwise, the grand jury would have lacked jurisdiction under state laws.

The Associated Press spoke to several lawyers familiar with the case, all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. DeLay, R-Texas, said Tuesday that prosecutors have interviewed him. He has insisted he committed no crimes and says Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, a Democrat, is pursuing the case for political reasons.

The disclosure came as congressional officials said top House Republicans were quietly considering how to respond if an indictment were issued.

Will King Cockroach escape the pointy-toed shoe again? Can he scuttle safely back under the baseboards once more? And if he avoids the jailer, is he significantly damaged enough for the Republicans to finally slip a shiv into his ribs? Does he finally take the hint and quit his leadership post -- or even his seat in Congress?

Or do we just have to wait until Nick Lampson sends him home to Sugar Land?

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets...

Update (9:38 p.m.): Speculation abounds.

Seed magazine

Because the reborn Seed magazine has also sent me a copy of their October issue, because they mention this blog alongside with other blogs, it may be expected that I join Clifford Johnson and Peter Woit and write a couple of nice words about them, too.



The design is very attractive and the magazine only costs 5 USD for 100 pages. The cover page apparently shows an animal that has been constructed via Intelligent Design. Its face is composed entirely of the mouth and it's really disgusting. I assume that this picture belongs to an article of Chris Mooney - a blogosphere's well-known far left-wing political manipulator of science - about a very cheap topic: namely the assertion that creationism and George Bush are wrong. The article is not really about science but rather about various general arguments of authors of a textbook with the Christians and similar things.

While I agree with most Mooney's opinions about evolution, I strongly dislike his politicization of science. George Bush is not a leading biologist and no one pretends it. His opinions about the origin of species follow the same pattern as the opinion of hundreds of millions of his fellow Christians. His opinion is not threatening scientific research in any way. It's just scientifically insufficient - but it is equally scientifically irrelevant. And it is completely unfair to pretend that it is just the Christians whose religion affects their opinions about science. During the controversy about the "innate aptitudes" we have seen that the feminist religion has the very same effect on the far left-wing believers. Science becomes secondary once a belief is threatened.

Some other articles are about the cosmic relaxation to 3D - an attempt of Lisa Randall and Andreas Karch to explain the dimensionality of our spacetime using an inverse Brandenberger-Vafa mechanism applied to spacetime (or brane) dimensions embedded in the 10D spacetime instead of the worldsheet dimensions within the 4D spacetime. I kind of worked on it and the idea is appealing - and there will be a new paper by Andreas, Lisa, and Liam that may convince new people that their picture works and localizes gravity into the right number of brane dimensions.

Other articles are about buddhism and science, why we love Einstein, four new species, and many other things.

Contraflow confusion cost lives

The only damage Rita did to me personally was really just inconvenience, forcing me to idle away a half tank of gas insix hours, in what could have been -- without much exaggeration -- history's worst traffic jam last Thursday afternoon. A tragic set of events on a bus filled with nursing home evacuees sent the death toll above the last Category 3 hurricane to hit Houston; Alicia in 1983. But there were a few people who died fleeing the storm whose deaths were more the result of spectacularly poor planning on the part of regional officials, and an unspecific amount of incompetence and cronyism at the Texas Department of Transportation:

From Corpus Christi to Norfolk, Va., most vulnerable cities have pre-set plans to run their highways in one direction only, headed out of town, said Brian Wolshon, a civil engineer at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center.

Wolshon gave a presentation on the subject at Houston's TranStar traffic management center two years ago, but found that officials were reluctant because Houston's freeway grid is much more complicated than other coastal cities.

"I don't think they really took it seriously," he said.

State and local officials changed their minds early last Thursday in the face of a historic traffic jam. But it was too late, and the one-way freeways that eventually opened on Interstate 10 and Interstate 45 didn't relieve drivers' 20-hour nightmares.

All the idling engines created the secondary problem of empty gas tanks and empty gas stations, which state officials admitted they were in no position to remedy.

The TxDOT executive director is a gubernatorial appointment. Michael Behrens assumed the position in September 2001, less than a year after Rick Perry became governor of Texas. Behrens' bio lists education completed prior to his career in state bureaucracy as a bachelor's degree from Texas A&M University, where Governor "Adios MoFo" led cheers for the football team as an undergrad.

Behrie, you're doing a heckuva job.

Update (9/28): Local ABC affiliate KTRK reports at least 31 deaths -- in Harris County alone -- attributable to the hurricane, 19 of those before Rita ever made landfall.

Update (9/29): The death toll reaches 107, and the stories are horrid.

"You're not all that ugly waking up, girl..."

There was a little rain and a little more wind on the northwest side of Houston yesterday morning, early, and the lights flickered a couple of times and went off once for about five seconds about 5 a.m.

That was it. Not even any tree limbs down. Just a little trash blown around.

So by 8 a.m. I was reduced to watching the news and worrying about my folks. I just had to hope in my father's case, that the sheriff's department had evacuated RV parks to a safe place -- a shelter, a high school gymnasium, something -- somewhere the previous day (Jasper County had announced a mandatory evac Friday morning).

At lunchtime I finally laid my head down to rest, after reading some of my FIL's book of Yiddish meditations, entitled "Bringing Heaven Down to Earth". I highly recommend it, incidentally.

Mid-afternoon I had had enough of the news, and I couldn't watch the Astros or college football, and the freeways were starting to build with returning evacuees, so I piled up the car and decided to head back to my house. SH 290 inbound at 4:30 p.m. had the normal Saturday afternoon traffic; busy but moving at posted speeds (which translates into 75-80 mph).

I came home to a cool house and some flashing 12:00 appliances, so I lost power but apparently not for long. I showered, fixed dinner, and was starting to fall asleep about 7 p.m. when I heard from my brother that Pop had made it through OK.

They had "a rough ride", and once the worst passed them in the afternoon, walked into 'downtown' Jasper and found a working land line to let us all know they were OK.

It just wasn't their time, I suppose.

No word from Mom yet, but she did make it safely to Nacogdoches Thursday night and was ensconsed in a private guest house with a few friends there, and by news accounts that area was comparatively spared. I'm guessing she can't get to a land line, so I'm choosing not to worry. My neighbor knocked on my door this morning at 7:30 to tell me he was OK, and my friends in Livingston called and said they're safe.

I still think that TxDOT's contraflow plan (under the auspices of our good-haired God-fearing Governor) was a colossal mal-execution, and had Rita come in on top of us, could've been catastrophic. He'll probably attempt to advance his mega-toll road agenda now as a result.

But for now I'm headed out to drink some beer, shoot some pool, and watch some football.

How was your weekend?

Friday September 23: Rita Watch

At 7 a.m., I left my home in the Medical Center area on the south side of Houston and headed for my I-L's house, near the intersection of SH 290 and FM 1960 on the northwest side of town. I had been urged by my wife earlier in the week to take them with me to Dallas, but he stubbornly refused to go. Now I was joining them, in what still seemed to me to be a foolish place to take refuge from Rita.

The freeway was wide open. I made the trip in the usual forty minutes, accompanied by about half a dozen other motorists. The freeway bottlenecks, big news the previous day, had apparently managed to plod their way out of Harris County, with monstrous traffic jams now in exurbs like Sealy, Brenham, Conroe, Lufkin, and Baytown.

I had awakened at 3:30 a.m. and immediately turned on Local2News, which IMHO had become the best source for current and accurate information. I had thought that if the exodus had softened up I might attempt another escape to D-FW in my other still-gassed up car; Mrs. Diddie was flying in that evening from her business trip and we had a hotel room and she would be worried and lonely by herself. No dice; Local2 was talking to a doctor stuck in stop-and-go in Huntsville. He'd been on the road 18 hours coming from Friendswood.

A digression about the local media coverage here:

I usually never watch the channel mentioned above; it's the NBC affiliate and is renowned for its tabloid journalism. The anchors are all surgically enhanced and the weathermen are all flaming (not that there's anything wrong with that). And the worst pair of talking heads is their Chocolate-and-Vanilla early morning team (I'll be kind and not name them, but you H-Towners probably know who I'm talking about). I'm certain it's actually the set of a porn flick, with Seventies music cued up and the two of them ready to undress each other at any moment. But the station's field reporters were everywhere, from The Woodlands to Port Arthur to Lake Charles, seemingly outnumbering the competition of the other three affiliates combined. And they didn't seem to focus so much on the inane, such as Rick Perry's say-nothing press conferences or pictures of Air Force One taxiing down the runway after landing in San Antonio or Austin or wherever it was Our Leader was, safely doing nothing as usual. FWIW my usual pick for local news, Channel 11, had the funniest moments: video of the arrested surfer -- handcuffed by Galveston authorities wading in the surf after him -- following his plunge off the pier at the Flagship Hotel at 4:30 in the morning. And an on-location with the twenty or so hurricane partiers at some gin mill on the Seawall Friday evening about 5:30 p.m.

Mostly at this point -- Friday midday -- I was concerned about family and friends in harm's way: my mother had evacuated at the same time as me, heading from Beaumont for northeast Texas and ultimately northern Louisiana. I had received no word on my father and stepmother, who had been planning on taking the RV to Lake Sam Rayburn -- just north of Jasper, Texas -- as they had done for Hurricane Lili last year. Neither of them were answering their cell phones. I had spoken earlier that morning with my neighbor, who had made it to Conroe in 17 hours and was on the side of the road with thousands of others but with still a half-tank of gas, and my friends living in League City who had traveled to Kirbyville (in Jasper County) and Lake Livingston respectively. None were contemplating returning, even as Rita's track was bending to the east.

Finally around noon my brother called and said that Dad had indeed headed for Henhouse Ridge, the previously-mentioned RV park near Jasper, which was developing into Rita's inland bulls-eye. When I had last spoken to Pop on Tuesday, he bragged that the tall pines in that area would shield them from the storm.

Yes, I thought that was monumentally stupid, and I urged him to reconsider, as did my brothers, sister, stepbrother and stepsisters. All of our pleadings had failed to dissuade them.

So I spent most of the afternoon worrying about my peeps and worrying about the weather. The aftermath of the bus fire which claimed the lives of the Bellaire nursing home patients on I-45 near Wilmer was the horrifying news of the morning, and I was glad again that I hadn't tried to get to Dallas. And I went to bed early, as Rita was expected to land early Saturday morning and I had no intention of being asleep when she did.

I'll finish this journal with the rather anticlimactic events of yesterday in the next post.

Rita on the rocks, no salt

Well, what a buildup to a big fizzle that was.

You get my account live-blogged on a tape delay, beginning Thursday afternoon the 22nd:

====================

I hit the road just after noon, having secured my prescriptions, and headed for I-45 N via 288. 'Freeway closed', at the Pierce Elevated. So I turned south on 45, passing the back of the line at about Cullen (near U of H), came around on Loop 610 all the way past the Astrodome and the Bellaire and the Galleria and a long line exiting 290 (the Austin escape route), heading for I-45 on the north side. Got the same message. I exited the loop and headed north on Airline, turning back to 45 N on Crosstimbers, past the first gas line I was to see, and gradually (as in less than one MPH) merged onto the main Dallas escape road by 1:15 pm. I breathed a premature sigh of relief.

I managed to travel about one exit an hour. For a Houstonian's reference, I was at the Gulf Bank exit by 4:30 p.m. The entire distance I traversed lies roughly between Loop 610 and BW-8, the road to InterGalactical Airport (some call it Bush, but not me). Most of the motorists surrounding me had their windows down in the 100-degree heat to save their dwindling fuel. The fellow directly in front of me for quite awhile was actually pushing his minivan full of children and provisions forward. Not because it was broken down; because he was practicing conservation.

To this point I had seen about one ambulance an hour, snaking its way through the mass of autos, sometimes with siren on, sometimes not. But about 4:45 pm three paramedic vehicles sailed by on the inside shoulder flashing and wailing. Followed a few minutes later by two pairs of police motorcycles, and a minute later two police cruisers, all lights and sirens hot. Less than five minutes later, six more cycle cops, and at 5:05 p.m., two more police cars, another motorcycle, and another ambulance. And at 5:15, another pair of HPD on two wheels.

Never learned what the emergency was.

By 6 p.m., I was two miles from Beltway 8 and the IAH airport exit, at mile marker 58. My gas was down to a bit over half a tank, and it was obvious that I wouldn't make it to Dallas on that, that there was no gas to be purchased ahead and no room at any of the inns along the way. Determined that I was NOT going to be sitting on the side of the road when the hurricane hit, I hit the exit and turned around for home.

It took me six minutes to travel the distance I had come in a bit over five hours.

Throughout the waiting, I saw people and cars severely overheated on the side of the road, and at stores and parking lots alongside. A few times I flashed on the Highway of Death (the road from Kuwait to Iraq which was mercilessly bombed during the Gulf War). I thought, these people are all going to be stuck here when Rita rolls in. No gas, no shelters (Mayor White had repeatedly said there would be only a few for the elderly and infirm), no way to get back home; it seemed that thousands would be hiding under overpasses from the storm.

I called my father-in-law on the northwest side of Houston, who had insisted on riding it out there, and told him to expect company Friday morning.

Continued in the next.

Nobel candidates for 2005

After my 100% success rate at the German virtual Nobel stock market in 2004, I don't have a sharp prediction for the physics Nobel prize winners this year.

(The stock market otherwise failed miserably - because there were almost no semi-insiders in the game. A sophisticated system to "vote" can't help in this case and the stock prices were thus random - and they cancelled the website in 2005. Most of the actual winners were not even proposed to the market.)

As Peter Woit has pointed out, Thomson Scientific (TS) predicts that Green, Schwarz, Witten will win the physics prize. I am not sure whether one should join their prediction, but it is a good idea anyway (much like many other names associated with string theory and supersymmetry that I could add). ;-) Their (TS) alternatives, based on citation impact, are

• Shuji Nakamura (UCSB) for the blue laser and LED diodes of many colors
• Yoshinori Tokura (Tokyo) for new superconductors and giant magnetoresonance

I would also raise the following possibilities for our colleagues to be awarded:

• Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, and maybe Paul Steinhardt or Henry Tye or Andreas Albrecht for their pioneering contributions to inflationary cosmology
• Vera Rubin (plus some other theorists or experimentalists?) for her work on dark matter
• Edward Lorenz for his contributions to the theory of chaos and attractors
• Peter Higgs, Jeffrey Goldstone, and possibly Philip Anderson (as Minki pointed out) for their explanation of spontaneous symmetry breaking
• Sheldon Glashow (again?), John Iliopoulos, and Luciano Maiani for their GIM mechanism and the theory of the charm quark
• Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Maskawa, and probably Nicola Cabibbo - the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (as in "CKM matrix") for their description of quark mixing (and, in the first two cases, CP violation)
• Stephen Adler and Roman Jackiw for their discovery of anomaly cancellation in particle physics (John Bell died in 1990)
• Leonard Susskind for his discovery of string theory, technicolor, Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory, quark confinement, theory of scaling violations in deep inelastic electroproduction, holography, one quarter of Matrix theory, black hole complementarity, and quantum tautology (I borrowed the last one from one of my immitators at Not Even Wrong)

I could also mention some additional colleagues at Harvard whose chance is nonzero:

• Lene Hau for her work on non-linear optics and "slow light"
• Bertrand Halperin and David Nelson for their work on anti-ferromagnets and two-dimensional phase transitions, among other things

Comments welcome. Be cautious: most people in the Nobel committee may be deciding by reading this blog.

Jacek Kuroń debate

I apologize for this temporary excess of postings about European politics. It won't last long.

On Saturday night, they convinced me to attend a Jacek Kuroń debate at Boston University

• Values and Social Policy

I have also met Vladimír Špidla, the (only) Czech commissioner in the EU and a former Czech prime minister (who was one of the special guests in the audience, sitting in front of me). He was telling me that the commissioners from the older & newer member countries as well as the large & small countries are treated as equal - which I believe. This is his second visit to the U.S. - and Boston is really a kind of European city as he correctly pointed out.

The panel was composed of 4 panelists (politicians) plus one moderator (an academician) in the middle: Charles Taylor who has not said too much. If you looked at the panelists starting from the left, you would have obtained the following list:

• Giuliano Amato
• Danuta Hübner
• Charles Taylor
• Stanley Greenberg
• John H. Sununu

Incidentally, the same list also orders the debaters from the Left to the Right on the political spectrum. The first two panelists were European; the remaining ones were Americans. Yes, indeed: all Europeans in this small group are on the left side from all Americans (including Stanley Greenberg who is an American progressive who even does not want to call himself a liberal because it is not progressive enough but it is still enough to be on the right from the European guys). And yes, the U.S. academia seems to be on the left from the Democratic Party, but it is still on the right side from the European politicians. And yes, Amato is on the left side from everyone else, including the former communist Hübner. ;-)

And yes, the last one - John Sununu - was the only one whose comments made a lot of sense to me. I forgot most of the ideas of the other panelists (except some painful ones described below); they seemed to be combining various generally known stereotypes that should not insult anyone. All of them except for Sununu seemed to misunderstand the "big" ideas about the mechanisms that are necessary for a modern U.S.-like society to work properly.

For example, Giuliano Amato, a former Italian prime minister (from the socialist party), was explaining some "advantages" of the European political, economic, and social model. He believes that one of the "advantages" of Europe is that "everyone" agrees with the concept of the "social market economy" and the emphasis on the adjective "social". Amato said that this is true for all parties; the only exception was Margaret Thatcher and Amato apparently believes that Thatcher was not too important so that she can be neglected (and he also neglects the Civic Democratic Party that I support in Czechia). Amato also argued that it is enough to have one shadow finance minister who does not agree with the concept of socialism and you will lose a lot of votes like Angela Merkel.

Whenever I listen to these comments about the "consensus about socialism", the virtual knife is opening in my pocket. We've had a much stronger consensus about socialism in Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989 and I hope that it will never be repeated. Mr. Amato should know that there are many European citizens who consider his opinion about the power of the word "social" disgraceful.

Amato was a representative of the Old Europe; Danuta Hübner represented the New Europe. She's a European commissioner from Poland, she is a former communist, and as far as I can say, it is pretty obvious from her opinions as I will explain later. Both Amato and Hübner were analyzing how the "smart" European politicians are trying to find the right balance between the social values & solidarity on one side and the growth and high employment on the other side. (Hübner admitted that the search for the ideal system may involve some learning from the U.S. experience, too.) Random unimpressive sentences that have taught me absolutely nothing.

John Sununu, a former governor of New Hampshire (and an engineer by profession), pointed out that this European approach is not an example how a functioning (and democratic) mechanism may be designed. Amato and Hübner are essentially trying to find some "ideal and permanent equilibrium" between some quantities. Sununu argued that it was much like the idea that there exists an ideal position of the steering wheel that should be set before you drive from one place to another.

His description of this non-democratic and typically European tendency is spot on, and I believe that this is a similar example that Feynman used to choose for these political questions, too. It is also very related to the idea of the "pre-conception science" or "consensus science". On the other hand, it is essential for modern science as well as modern politics that we admit that we don't know the right answers in advance and that the answers can't be right permanently.

Incidentally, the idea of finding the ideal compromise for the social, tax, and other systems that won't need any corrections in the future was one of the pillars underlying the EU constitution - and it's one of the main reasons why we should be happy that the constitution is dead. No doubt, Václav Klaus would agree with Sununu most of the time, too.

Of course, the correct answer - as clarified by Sununu - is that you only get to your destination if you have a flexible system - or if you (or someone else) can regulate the steering wheel - and if there are various checks and balances that have the ability to fix the mistakes (which is why the mistakes are not disasters) and direct the system in the correct direction if a new situation requires a left turn or a right turn. Also, a working system is one in which radical changes can't be done efficiently.

I must continue to think about this inspiring idea; it's not obvious whether I quite agree with this one; but probably I do because it fits my understanding of a "robust structure" and moreover it agrees with Franziska Michor's description of the difference between "good" and "bad" mutations.

Sununu also argued that lobbying is very important for the U.S. system to be functioning properly because it is an efficient way to communicate opinions and illuminate interests that various groups of the people have; on the other hand, lobbying is a pejorative word in Europe.

Sununu argued that it is essential for the U.S. political system - that has shown its muscles in many cases which includes slavery - that there is a debate going on. You turn on your TV and you see a debate about the role of personal responsibility for communities. Today, television plays an important role in stimulating the debate.

Stanley Greenberg argued that the main political conflict is between self-reliance and community. Sanunu argued that this was a mistake - a better description is that there is one debate about the role of personal responsibility of individual members of communities.

Danuta Hübner protested against Sanunu's "anti-European insult" by saying that there was actually much more political dialogue going on in Europe than in America; people started to laugh to her unbelievable statement when she began to explain how this assertion agrees with the fact that there are not so many political TV duels in Europe. She said that in Europe, we don't use TV to talk to the people. Instead, we talk directly to them. How does such a direct talk look like, Sununu asked? Hübner answered that she spent 6 months on tours through Poland by explaining the farmers why everything must be done exactly in the way that her party proposes. This story illustrates that a former member of a totalitarian communist party is usually guaranteed to think like a totalitarian communist until the end of her life.

Sununu's point was, on the contrary, that the political system should be such that it is able to learn what the actual people need, want, and think; it must be affected by those things; and it must self-regulate itself and use all sorts of feedback mechanisms to make adjustments. This democracy or self-regulation is more important than some particular questions about the size of the welfare system and other detailed topics, Sununu argued, and the Europeans should try to see this important fact.

Hübner's alternative to the self-regulating system is that the people in the whole country should be explained why the opinion of the governing political party is permanently the right one. Well, there are indeed certain differences between the European and the American political system, and I personally find it worrisome that the folks with the opinions about democracy that are similar to Mrs. Hübner's are included in the "European government", namely the EU commission. Too bad that Hübner's opinion is apparently mainstream in Poland and there is no one in that country who would attack her for similar statements.

Sununu is also convinced that it is incorrect for Europe to try to copy the U.S. system that involves 50 states whose social, tax, legal, and immigration rules - among other things - have been homogenized (although there exists a lot of diversity in the ethnicity, race, and other characteristics that are not so important for the functioning of the system). In Europe, there exists not only national diversity but also a lot of diversity in the social, tax, immigration, and other issues, and it requires a very different approach. He agreed with one attendant that Airbus is a good example how Europe can surpass America while it only relies on the integration of those things whose unification is beneficial (business and exchange of know-how in this case).

Sununu answered a question about the election systems. The proportional systems found in most of Europe seem to be inefficient as a method to figure out what is the opinion of the majority because the smaller political parties often acquire crucial influence in the coalitions.

It should not be too surprising that Sununu also defended his colleagues from the G.O.P. He explained that the local (Democratic) authorities are fully responsible for the mess in Louisiana during the hurricane Katrina. He told us that Lousiana is the most corrupt U.S. state and New Orleans is its most corrupt city - something I did not know before but something that seems to be the case. Well, this is not the only thing I learned from this guy; without Sununu, however, this panel discussion would have been useless.

If you watch the news, you will certainly notice that there is something special going on in Louisiana - something that would happen neither in Mississippi (where Katrina was stronger) nor in TeXas (pun intended). Even the hurricane Rita - that The Reference Frame correctly predicted to be a non-event - has shown the incompetence of the officials in Louisiana.

Too bad that Václav Klaus seems to be the only current leader in Europe who is capable to think independently and differently than the "official left-wing euro-optimistic consensus". There are indeed noticeable differences between the American and the European understanding of democracy. For example, virtually everyone agrees that the American "debate" involves a creative fight and competition while it tends to be replaced by a "consensus dialogue" in Europe. One can say many things about advantages of both approaches. But The Reference Frame certainly believes that the American approach is more correct.

Commute to Dallas didn't go so well

I traveled about six miles in six hours on I-45 North yesterday afternoon before turning around and heading back home.

Will join my in-laws later this afternoon on the NW side of Houston to ride it out. Online access will be limited, so posting could be sporadic to non-existent. Don't be alarmed.

Klaus's talk at Harvard

The speech by Czech president Václav Klaus (the gentleman in the middle of the picture above - together with Tomáš Kočiš on the left and your humble correspondent on the right) was almost definitely one of the extraordinary events of the Center for European Studies at Harvard.

The main bad thing is that I had to skip a talk by Finn Larsen; I hope that this gap will be filled very soon.

First of all, the organizers may have underestimated the attractivity of Klaus. The lower level conference room of the Busch Hall may be designed for the audience of 100 or so. There were roughly 150 people attending the lecture and many others have given up the talk because they could not get in.

The Velvet revolution occured nearly 16 years ago. Klaus started by saying that it's a good idea not to repeat the mistakes from the past; he often quoted classics of his favorite literature and painted NGOism, euronaivism, communitarianism, and various other trends as the new illusions that are supposed to replace communism and that many naive people are accepting as the universal cure for their problems.




He emphasized that the Eastern - and Southern - Europe simply had to join the European Union and other institutions (OECD and NATO in particular) because it was a confirmation that these countries are the "good guys" unlike Lukashenko or Miloševič who are the "bad guys".

Klaus complained about those in the EU who want to define the European questions by saying that "you are either supporting our policies or you're just like Lukashenko" and about the generally low quality of the discussions about the future of Europe in which the voices that differ from some of the official ones are nearly unherable. However, our membership in the EU - and the votes in the referendums about joining the EU - were not about the particular details associated with the inner workings of the Union. Unfortunately.

Why unfortunately? If we summarize, the reasons are the following: There is a significant democratic deficit in the EU, the member states have little residual sovereignity, and overregulation is being imported from the EU to the member countries. (See the article about the talk in The Crimson Comrade of Harvard.)

The European Union we joined in 2004 is a democratic and free market institution; but it is not the free market as promoted by the Chicago school, Hayek, or Friedman (Klaus's friends and icons). It could be rather something like a version of the free market promoted by some people at Harvard, Klaus joked: the social market economy (and Klaus called it in many other different ways in various languages).

He objected to the misconception that everything good that has happened in Europe since 1957 was a work of the EU. For example, the Velvet Revolution - and the collapse of communism in general - was not made by the EU: it was done by ourselves.

Klaus said that he was a Euro-optimist - he asked the journalists (especially the Czech journalists who may have been in the room) to remember this word :-) - who believes that Europe is changeable and is changeable for the better in the future. He questioned that the European integration is improving the life of individual citizens, their economic situation, happiness - or the personal utility function if you wish - and their freedom.

When he was asked by a rather smart young guy whether he finds it plausible that the European Union can actually be more liberal (which means "neo-liberal") than the individual nations, Klaus answered that he never argued that every individual decision of the EU is worse than the decision that would be done by the French or another nation. But the overall trend, Klaus claimed, was clear: socialism is being imported from the EU to the countries like the Czech Republic; it is not exported from the country to the EU.

He also disagreed with the idea that Europe should be completely unified because "big is beautiful" and because it should act as a counterbalance to America. People keep on repeating the same mistakes, he explained.

A Harvard professor asked Klaus what can the politicians do to assure that the European Union brings more than just the absence of wars in Europe; that it even brings peace. Well, many other nice words whose meaning I did not understand followed. Klaus answered that these arguments to justify the need for the European integration (it was a good idea to make the French and the Germans more friendly) may have been valid in the 1940s but they are completely misguided today in 2005. I am pretty sure that this professor - whom I talked to a bit before the talk - won't join the Klaus fan club. But I am also pretty sure that Klaus is completely right. And of course, Klaus is also sure and he did not hide it. ;-)

Someone asked Klaus what he would do if he were the president of the European Union or at least Tony Blair. Klaus asked the journalists to consider his answer to be off-record. He answered that if he were the chief of the EU, he would start a Velvet Revolution. Another participant made a comment that whoever was a dissident would remain a dissident forever; he or she apparently confused Václav Havel and Václav Klaus.

One of the main points emphasized by Klaus is that democracy can't work well at the supernational level. There is no historical example where something like that have been successful and there are many reasons to think that it can't work in the future either.

Klaus became the first person in the CES who used the so-called blackboard. The CES is not like our physics department where we fill all blackboards on the walls with physics five times a day; in the CES, the blackboard is apparently only used as a background for a CES poster. ;-) Klaus used the blackboard to explain the difference between the depth of the integration and its expansion or inclusiveness. He argued that there is a trade-off and the graph he drew looked more or less like the inverse proportionality relation: the deeper you want to integrate the countries, the less countries will be able to join such a Union. Someone asked whether Klaus liked the the idea of the EU expansion, especially in the case of Turkey. Klaus essentially answered that he disliked the idea to increase the depth of the integration which means, according to his graph, that he actually likes expansion. Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, but also Turkey or Ukraine, for example, are just fine.

Klaus also used his inverse proportionality graph to demonstrate that many people who dream about ever closer and ever larger European Union are completely confused - away from his curve - and some other people like the professor from the audience mentioned above are almost infinitely far away along the vertical axis (huge depth - where the EU is probably composed of France only). Klaus drew himself at a reasonable place where the extent of the EU is preferred over the degree of homogenization. He also agreed that he could add a third axis to his graph if a more detailed analysis were necessary.

The talk was not really focused on the referendums in France and the Netherlands. The only place where he discussed these events was when he argued that the government should not require the citizens to buy a T-shirt of a fixed size and a standardized color. This is what the EU wants to do in many cases. It wanted to codify these standards in its failed constitution. And it was not right. Even if you imagine that the French rejected the EU constitution because the EU was too (neo-)liberal for them - which Klaus believes is a naive misconception - while the Dutch rejected the EU constitution because the EU was not liberal enough, the important point is that these two apparently different reasons to reject the constitution are actually identical: both nations disliked the idea of standardization and homogenization.

Someone asked Klaus how can a government be simultaneously small - which many of us wanted - as well as powerful enough to do things like the war against terror. Václav Klaus's answer mostly avoided the word "terror" that he clearly does not find to be one of the most important words. Instead, he said that the government should be and can be much smaller than it presently is, and it will naturally become smaller if it is closer to the citizens and if the crazy paternalistic arms of the government are cut off.

Other questions showed that some of our colleagues in the audience have not realized that Czechoslovakia does not exist anymore (Klaus was described as the president of Czechoslovakia); the overall character of the questions demonstrated that most of the audience was completely unfamiliar with the relevant issues of the contemporary European and Czech politics. There have been many other questions that I forgot and many other people did not get the opportunity to ask their questions.

At the end of the lecture, the organizer said that after Klaus's tenure as the president of the Czech Republic comes to its end, he may be welcome at Harvard as a professor. Klaus may have liked the idea and he gave the organizer a copy of his new book On the Road to Democracy that was subtly promoted throughout the lecture. Another debater conjectured that Klaus's opinions sounded much like Charles de Gaulle (did I understand the name well?) who spoke at Harvard many years ago. Klaus has politely described his relation to de Gaulle by saying that he would not attend the lecture. ;-)

When I spoke to Prof. Václav Klaus - which was not more than one minute - I told him that his lecture was excellent and it would indeed be great for Harvard if he joined it - even though it's not like Chicago, I joked. (Although the economists in Chicago may be brighter according to my opinion, Harvard is probably a better school than University of Chicago.) Klaus told me very politely that his comment about Harvard (being connected with the socialist ideologies) was a joke.

Well, not quite. ;-)

Last post for a few days...

I'll try to get back here no later than Saturday with news of my Friday commute from Houston to Dallas, and other musings about Rita.

Klaus in the U.S.

This news is not covered by the U.S. media at all, so The Reference Frame comes to save the day.

When the Czech president Václav Klaus met Condi and Cheney, all of them agreed that there are no problems in the Czech-American relations. There have been some minor emotions during the war in Iraq; Klaus talked to the U.S. ambassador and told him that if the WMD were going to be found in Iraq, it would have been clear that they were probably seeded by the FBI. George W. Bush got a bit upset, too. ;-)

Of course, while Klaus is an outspoken politician and a principal opponent of most wars (that try to export systems which Klaus believes is impossible), he is also one of the strongest advocates of the American values in Europe and no battle between him and the U.S. could last for a long time.

Klaus and the American VIPs discussed various international politics topics - and also the asymmetry in the visa system. The Americans don't need visa for the Czech Republic but they require them from the Czechs (even for very short visits). The visa procedures I had to go through have been disgusting - and I am happy that Klaus opened this topic. Of course that they're probably not gonna be cancelled. But at least, Condi said a couple of polite words and the student visa procedures may be simplified a bit in the future.

Tomorrow, Klaus is visiting Harvard University and Brandeis University, and I expect that this article is gonna be updated.

Viscosity and Andreas

There are many interesting people now at Harvard, and also many interesting visitors. For example, our physics buddy Andreas Karch - who is now in Seattle - is visiting us, too. He finds "AdS/QCD" to be the among the most interesting topics these days to work on. I want to write some general comments about it later.

One of the things that he clarified for me was the origin of the AdS/CFT derivation of the lower bound for the viscosity that we discussed for example here. In a huge class of theories, the viscosity must be greater than "1/4.pi" times the entropy density, counted in fundamental units. It seems to be true in general. In a subclass of the theories, one may construct a gravitational dual of the theory. How do you derive the bound from the gravitational dual? Let's start in the field theory. The viscosity may be calculated, in the field theory, from some two-point function of the stress-energy tensor. This quantity is directly translated to the gravitational picture.

The relevant calculation involves a graviton propagator in the background of a large (greater than the AdS curvature radius) AdS Schwarzschild black hole; such a black hole is generically dual to the lowest-viscosity environment. It's a rather tedious calculation but you may get the result including the numerical pre-factor. A simpler calculation - one that Andreas found less comprehensible - involves the quasinormal modes. But Andrei Starinets comments:

Viscosities (shear and bulk) of thermal theories with gravity duals can be computed basically in three ways (all inter-related, of course):

• via Green-Kubo formulae (graviton's absorption on the gravity side)
• by computing the (retarded) correlator of stress-energy tensor in (Lorentzian signature) AdS/CFT
• by computing the lowest quasinormal frequency of the relevant gravitational background. This frequency is precisely the hydrodynamic pole in the above mentioned correlator. Computing quasinormal frequencies is sometimes technically easier than computing full correlators, but it is absolutely rigorous. If you like, please look through our recent paper with Pasha Kovtun, hep-th/0506184, where we sort of summarize this.

Global warming on Mars

Martians discovered



See also: Global warming on other planets and moons

This picture showing how the natives welcome Spirit is not the only evidence that there are humans living on Mars. What's the new evidence? As you know, global warming is caused by the humans; it can't be of natural origin. And global warming was just identified on Mars; BBC says that "climate change is in progress". The polar cap is retreating at a prodigious rate (1.5 meters per terrestrial year, nearly 0.01% of the Connolley rate). It follows that there must be Martians over there. How exciting! ;-)

An alternative explanation is that the White House and NASA are already building factories and power plants on Mars.




The scientists who have not yet seen the image above say that "they have no explanation why Mars is warming". More seriously, don't you think that it should be easier to predict the climate on Mars than the climate on Earth? Don't you think that the right scientific approach is to learn how to predict the future in simpler, more controllable environments, and then try something as complex as the terrestrial climate? Despite various charlatans who predict the weather in 2050, we have not made the first steps yet. A scientific conclusion about the new data simply says that the climate at generic planets is probably changing pretty rapidly because of natural forces.

The idea that the humans are a significant contributor is a pre-conception that has never been independently justified. On the contrary, it naturally predicts (although this statement is just qualitative) that the planets without humans should have a more stable weather. Such a prediction has just been falsified.

Lovely, Rita

Bitch messed up my interview/blog post today with David Murff, the challenger to John Culberson in TX-07. Maybe next week (if the roof doesn't fly off my place).

We have an evacuation plan that includes picking up my in-laws in northwest Houston and carrying them to Dallas, where we have a hotel room reserved beginning Friday evening for a week. (Mrs. Dittie, who leaves for Chicago on business tomorrow morning, will change her return plans to land in D-FW Friday night, instead of Hobby.)

You all should also have an evac plan right about now ...

Hello? ... Anybody there? ...

Rational geometry

I wonder what you think about this news that was pointed out to me by Olda Klimanek. An associate professor of mathematics in Australia, Dr. Norman Wildberger, has figured out that the angles, sines, and cosines essentially do not need to exist and irrational functions should be eliminated from math by replacing angles by new concepts of "spreads" and "quadrances". Students won't have to learn any functions beyond the rational ones. I wonder whether you have an explanation what this means and whether there is a reason why this bizarre news appears in tens of newspapers.

Monday Night Democrats: Bill White and John Courage

Tonight I did double duty, bouncing between my local club meeting at which Houston's mayor Bill White spoke, and a conference call with the Texas progressive blogosphere and TX-21 Democratic challenger John Courage.

You can go read my comments about the man whom I believe is currently the most powerful Democrat in Texas at the first link above; here I'll talk briefly about the guy who's going to send Lamar Smith packing.

I first met John at Camp Casey about three weeks ago; he and his wife were among the thousands of advocates against the Iraq occupation who gathered with Cindy Sheehan in Crawford last month. He's a passionate speaker against the war, and as an Air Force veteran he knows more about serving his country than Smith and any of the rest of the chickenhawks. One of the things he talked about tonight was the $30 million dollar rehabilitation facility that is being constructed in Washington -- it will take two years to complete -- which tells him that the government is planning for a lot more disabled veterans. The shortest quote is the most powerful:

"If I'm elected, I'll work every day to end that war."

Courage will be a strong advocate for vets (he'll fight hard for the VA hospital in Kerrville) and for education (he's a teacher by profession). He feels strongly that unfunded mandates like No Child Left Behind are another example of the ' all talk and no action' epitomized by the administration and Republicans in Congress.

He's another one of those progressive populists I like so much (just like this man) who believes that government is supposed to help the little guy and not the corporate fat cats.

He's also in the running for DFA's Grassroots All-Star, and if you like what you're reading here, then go vote for him.

Update (9/20): More about the pit viper that is Lamar Smith posted here.

Latent heat II

This exchange is kind of funny. A serious calculational error of a well-known promoter of the global warming theory - an error described below - shows how weak intuition the climate folks have about the order-of-magnitude estimates of the basic processes in nature. They obviously never discuss technical things that require actual numbers.

In his new text meant to humiliate the latent heat

• The arctic sea ice is not really a heat sink

William Connolley decided to show how trivial it's to defeat the latent heat. It is becoming completely obvious that he actually believes that the latent heat can indeed be neglected. In the original version of his article, he wrote the following sentence:

• Long-wave-down (not net) at the sfc in January is about 135 w/m2 so it would melt about 30m of ice in a day. Of course that neglects the long-wave up.

Yes, this is what he thinks. Don't get confused by his pretentious terminology - his point is very simple. He thinks that the solar radiation above the Arctic is enough to melt 30 meters of ice a day! This is how the "mainstream" climate scientists visualize the heat budget. This is how they do calculations that are meant to justify investments of trillions of dollars. It can't be surprising that they conclude that a "catastrophe" is imminent if they expect ice to melt so quickly. Note that William Connolley is not a random person who has nothing to do with ice; he is paid as a "senior scientific officer" and "climate modeller" of the British Antarctic Survey. You may expect that such a person has some idea about ice; you would be completely wrong. You would be wrong by 3 orders of magnitude.

Of course that Connolley's statement is complete rubbish; the correct answer is not 30 meters but 30 millimeters. He's wrong by three orders of magnitude. Most healthy children would be able to figure out that the Arctic Sun can't melt 30 meters of ice a day. Do you think that a climate modeller focusing on Antarctica should have no idea how much heat one needs to melt ice? His error is like confusing the height of Mount Everest with your house. It's like predicting that the year 3005 will arrive next year. It's like a string theorist who believes that the critical dimension is 10,000. It's like a particle physicist who believes that the size of the nucleus is the inverse electroweak scale. It's just unforgivable ignorance. For pedagogical reasons, let me do this calculation properly.

Let's be very cavalier and multiply those 135 Watts per meter squared by the number of seconds per day, 86,400, which will certainly lead to a huge overestimate. We obtain 11,664,000 Joules per day and per squared meter. Let's call the units "meters times Joules per day and cubic meter". If we divide it by the density of water or ice, namely 1,000 kilograms per cubic meter, we obtain 11,664 meters times Joules per day and kilogram. If we divide this number by the latent heat of ice which is 355,000 Joules per kilogram, we obtain roughly 0.03 meters or 3 centimeters. Yes, indeed, he can only melt 1 inch a day instead of the 30 meters that he argued.

No doubt, the climate arguments and models are robust against such changes by 3 orders of magnitude. They're permanently safe because what they actually rely upon are not calculations but human bigotry and political fanatism. Folks like William never solve actual scientific questions that require rational reasoning or a calculation like this one. Whenever someone wants to help them to do some reasoning properly, they will attack him (the biggest insult being that the person is connected with the commercial sector) ;-) because they are, by definition, the only experts in the world.

Ocean circulation

The sea ice is important as a heat sink not only because of the latent heat whose relevance I have probably sufficiently demonstrated. It is also critical because the sea ice, whenever it exists, drives the circulation of the ocean. Normally, 90% of the ocean mass is below "thermocline" which is 100-400 meters below the surface. Within this region, the temperature is dropping very quickly. Below thermocline, the temperature only drops slowly, towards those 0-3 degrees Celsius of the very deep ocean. What's important is that the ocean below thermocline does not exchange heat efficiently. When we talk about the heat exchange and about the ocean as a heat sink, only the upper 100-400 meters of water are important.

Sea ice is important not only because the large latent heat of the 2 meters of ice is enough to compete with the specific heat of 100 meters of "active" water. Ice is also critical for ocean's being a heat sink because ice drives the circulation, and it actually decides about the height of the water column that is able to store the heat.

I just can't understand how someone may think that he is able to say anything about the future climate if he neglects things like that - that are much more important than some greenhouse effect involving not-the-most-important greenhouse gas. But everyone knows the reason: it's because they are allowed do it like that by the environment. There is almost no one - or at least almost no one in the scientific world - who would have the courage to tell them that what they're doing is completely silly.

Although it has always been the case that the weakest students of physics chose climate science, in our bizarre world such people are apparently gaining a divine status. But they are still the very same people; poor students who can't distinguish meters from millimeters. And these people indirectly suck one half of the GDP growth of our planet.

QM II: part 1

Incidentally, someone wanted to follow my lecture notes. See Fall2005-Lectures directory here. The directory Fall2005-Basics is also non-empty.

Say hello to Rita

Click the pic, from Weather Underground, for a larger, clearer view.

Latent heat of ice and climate models

This looks like an excellent example how the self-confident climate "big shots" are ignorant about basic numbers in physics and how worthless their reasoning is.

Steve Connor wrote another dramatic article in The Independent claiming that global warming is past the point of no return. Such articles appear virtually every day. They're addressed to the people who know even less than the journalist himself. But the fate of our civilization - always an uncertain thing - is not what I want to mention here.

William Connolley is one of the main driving forces among the 9 people who started the alarmist climatologist propagandistic blog called RealClimate. William is one of the main people who define the "scientific consensus" about the climate. If you believe the "scientists" without calculating it yourself, you believe people like William Connolley.

William also has his own private blog called Stoat. In the newest article, he questioned the statement by Steve Connor that the Arctic sea ice is a major heat sink. In the main text he said that ice couldn't be a heat sink because it reflects solar radiation. So I explained him that when we say that it is a heat sink, we mean that it absorbs the heat particularly from the ocean, not from the Sun. I expected him to realize his error.

Instead, he continued and wrote that the latent heat of ice is completely negligible, and they can forget about it when they work with their climate models. In order for you to see how incredible his statement is, let me say a couple of numbers.

The heat capacity of liquid water is 4,200 Joules per kilogram and kelvin. The latent heat of ice is 355,000 Joules per kilogram. What does the ratio tell you? If you melt ice, you can cool down the same amount (mass) of water by roughly 85 degrees.




Now, there are about 2 meters of ice in average in the Arctic and approximately 2 kilometers of water underneath. Simple counting shows that by melting the ice, you can cool down the whole underlying ocean by 0.1 degrees - the predicted "global warming" trend for a whole decade. (Let's not talk about what's actually happening and what will be happening because this is too politically sensitive a topic.)

Also, the atmosphere is equivalent to roughly 10 kilometers of air. Its mass is like 10 meter high column of water. But because the specific heat capacity of air is just 1/4 of that of water (counted per kilogram), the atmosphere is something like 3 meters of water. That means that 2 meters of ice have enough latent heat to cool down the whole atmosphere above the Arctic by 50 degrees; these are order-of-magnitude estimates meant to evaluate whether an effect is negligible. Alternatively, you may also consider atmospheric CO2 only which is 380 parts per million. The latent heat of the sea ice would be enough to cool down the CO2 in the atmosphere by something like 150,000 degrees if it were possible.

Nevertheless, the latent heat of sea ice seems negligible to William Connolley and probably also most of his colleagues; they prefer the atmospheric CO2 as the object that everyone should look at (especially the 2 parts per million that the humans produce every year). They neglect things such as ice in their considerations. They omit such entities in their models, too. Water is also the most important greenhouse gas (more than 90% of the total effect) but they neglect it as a greenhouse gas, too. They don't care whether one increases or decreases the total amount of clouds and water droplets in the atmosphere. They don't care that the specific heat capacity of water is the highest one after Hydrogen and Helium. Water does not matter for them. What's the real reason that water is not interesting? Well, it's because the evil capitalists produce as much water as the nice communists and ecoterrorists.

They just pick one term - one insight from high school physics - among hundreds of others that they neglect. They apply it to one, politically most interesting gas, and calculate something from this one term and call it science. They want others to believe that they can predict temperature for the next 100 years. The fact that they neglect sea ice that cools down their gas component by 150,000 degrees if it melts does not matter to them. It's negligible, is not it?

Many journalists then transform these "scientific insights" into even more impressive articles, and various politicians use these "improved" insights to fight against the whole civilization. But the scientific basis of these claims is based on totally weird assumptions such as that the latent heat is negligible.

In reality, ice matters. Some glaciers grow; some of them retreat - and the current ratio is not necessarily 50:50 because the laws of political correctness do not apply to mother Nature. The Antarctic ice is growing (this is an argument by NASA that the global warming is not global and it is not exactly warming either), the Arctic ice is diminishing. It's pretty clear that the places with a lot of ice will have more stable temperatures (typically close to 0 degres Celsius) because ice can regulate the fluctuations. The heat capacity including the latent heat is simply large. These are rudimentary insights from elementary school physics and they have absolutely no political flavor if they are understood rationally.

"Dieb-Throat"

"It's all over but the counting, and we'll take care of the counting."

-- Rep. Peter King (R-NY), Summer 2003

Pointing to a little-noticed "Cyber Security Alert" issued by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the source inside Diebold -- who "for the time being" is requesting anonymity due to a continuing sensitive relationship with the company -- is charging that Diebold's technicians, including at least one of its lead programmers, knew about the security flaw and that the company instructed them to keep quiet about it.

"Diebold threatened violators with immediate dismissal ... In 2005, after one newly hired member of Diebold's technical staff pointed out the security flaw, he was criticized and isolated."

(The source) confirmed that the matters were well known within the company, but that a "culture of fear" had been developed to assure that employees, including technicians, vendors and programmers kept those issues to themselves.

You surprised?

Lisa's op-ed

Lisa Randall has an op-ed in the New York Times:

• Dangling particles

She explains that the communication between the scientists and the public is more difficult than it could be in the ideal world because of

• terminological confusions
• complexity of science
• uncertainty of the scientists themselves

The first, terminological theme is documented by the terms "relativity", "uncertainty principle", and "theory" that are abused by moral relativists, uncertain anti-scientific postmodernists, and intelligent designers, respectively. It is possible to abuse them because the words mean something little different in science than what they mean in the everyday life.

As you know, while I agree with her viewpoint on creationism, I completely disagree with Lisa's evaluation of the climate science, especially the statement that its insights have been "underplayed" (unfortunately, I've checked that this was no typo); with her comments about the intrinsic aptitude of sexes, and their sociology - including the questions where is the source of the confusion; what are the true reasons that prevent anyone from finding the truth about these questions, and so forth. But I think that she has done a good job anyway.

Others about the op-ed

The op-ed is also discussed by Peter Woit and Sean Carroll. Sean seems to agree with Lisa - and he conjectures that the topic of the op-ed shows that Lisa must be reading Cosmic Variance; I think that Sean's conjecture is wrong.

Peter says more useful as well as more incorrect things: he explains that the title is a pun (a "dangling participle" is an example of faulty grammar). Peter also shows that he does not know himself what the word "theory" means in physics. Why do I say so? Because Peter seems to believe that the term "string theory" is a misnomer.

Does the word "theory" refer to a wild speculation, as the creationists want you to believe, or a cheap and immediately testable set of equations that must avoid all concepts from string theory, as Peter Woit wants you to believe?

"String theory" is definitely not a misnomer; more precisely, if it is a misnomer, it is because the first word (it is not just a theory of strings), not because of the second word (theory). A theory is a coherent and consistent set of ideas, concepts, and equations that have the capacity to make predictions about a larger set of observations or experiments than the set of its assumptions, axioms, and parameters. The word "theory" does not have to mean that the theory is correct or exact as the description of the real world. We say "Newton's theory" even though we know many profound reasons why this theory is not quite the right description of reality. We also use the words "Kaluza-Klein theory" and "Little Higgs theory" even though we know that at least one of them will probably be proved incorrect.

String theory is definitely a theory in the scientific sense. It is the most coherent, consistent, and rigid set of ideas, concepts, and mathematical equations we have ever seen. It has no adjustable continuous parameters whatsoever; and it is clear from what we know that it contains all the features that are required to describe all observed phenomena in the real world. It also admits many unrealistic classical solutions (or "backgrounds"); in many of them, we can calculate almost everything with no input, and the character of these calculable quantities follows the template of the previous theories (such as the S-matrix). And Peter Woit shows that his misunderstanding of the word "theory" may be compared to the ignorance of the creationists.

Models vs. theories

Also, it would be completely crazy to replace the term "string theory" by the "string model" or something like that. The word "model" has been used to represent one of hundreds or thousands of conceivable "small theories" or "systems of a few equations" of a certain kind. Even in the context of string theory, the word "model" represents one of numerous classical solutions or backgrounds whose detailed physics may be very different; in which we make a lot of choices.

Models are usually constructed according to a template rooted in a well-known framework: models in quantum field theory are constructed by choosing the gauge groups, the matter representations for the fermions (and scalar) and their couplings.

A purely stringy example is a free fermion heterotic string model in which particular choices of the GSO projections (and the corresponding allowed boundary conditions) for the fermions have been made. The word "model" belongs to the model builders whose task is to produce thousands of models; virtually all of them will be proved inconsistent with observations soon or later. Some model builders use the intuition from string theory, others don't.

Depth vs. explicitness

Another but related difference between a "model" and a "theory" is that a model should be much more specific. It does not have to be terribly deep, but it must immediately allow the calculation of certain things. The model's being too specific usually means that the model is less likely to be true; less profound; less general; and it does not deserve to be called a "theory". This is another reason why the evolution theory or string theory can't really be called "models".

String theory as we know it is definitely not "another model". It is the unique theoretical framework of its kind. Even after several decades of attempts, it is the unique known framework that reduces to quantum field theory at low energies but goes beyond at short distances (and can include quantum gravity). I am convinced that this general insight is extremely important and those who think that the word "string model" would be more appropriate for "string theory" have misunderstood what the last 20+ years in theoretical physics were all about; no doubt, this set of people includes several heroes of theoretical physics and Nobel prize winners for physics.

String theory may have started as the "dual models" in the late 1960s before the people actually understood their meaning and their mutual relationships. Today we know that the consistent "models" follow from "superstring theory" and all their Hilbert spaces and dynamical properties are connected into a single master theory called "string/M-theory".

't Hooft's definition of a theory

Also, string theory undoubtedly satisfies the expectations that Gerardus 't Hooft (as quoted in Peter Woit's article) expects from a "theory": it comes together with instructions how to deal with it to identify the things that one wishes to describe - the elementary particles - and how to define, at least in principle, the rules to calculate the properties of these particles and make predictions about them.

(These rules are not known universally; but they are known in various approximations, e.g. the perturbative expansions in the string coupling, expansions around AdS spaces, etc. A theory does not have to be known non-perturbatively from the scratch for it to be called a theory. QED was only known perturbatively, yet it was the most accurately verified theory we have ever had. A difference between QED and string theory is that QED is non-perturbatively inconsistent due to the Landau pole while string theory is, according to everything we know, non-perturbatively consistent.)

The detailed physics as predicted by the evolutionary theory or string theory is just much more complex than in some simple models - for example in the model of creation of species by God in 7 days (that allows you to calculate that it took "7 x 5,040" minutes which you may check by comparing it with hundreds of editions of the Bible) or in the model of spin networks (whose prediction that there exists no macroscopic space can also be compared with hundreds of papers about loop quantum gravity, and most of them agree).

(The paradigm that a "model" in theoretical physics does not even have to agree with the apparent existence of space around us is often called background independence; this term used to be meaningful in theoretical physics until it was twisted in this bizarre, loop-gravitational fashion.)

This complexity and generality is another reason why the word "theory" is much more appropriate for evolution and for string than the word "model". The word "theory" is closer to a "framework" and long-term research projects; the word "model" is closer to a small set of ideas that can be "completely" calculated within a very short time period.

String as chairs

Comparing string theory to a "chair without legs, seat, back, and armrest" is just silly, and the Nobel prize given to the author of this statement does not make it any more reasonable. If you allow me to underplay the importance of string theory a bit, string theory is the most perfect kind of chair produced out of platinum that we have ever had. ;-) Identifying the exact solution or a stationary point of the effective action may turn out to be difficult, much like the identification of the precise history how all the species evolved. But this fact of nature does not change the fact that the evolution and strings are "theories".

Strings and evolution: two soulmates

I am deliberately comparing evolution and strings because I find this analogy natural, and because both of them have been used in the previous articles. In both cases, the theory is the only known solution (and probably also the only possible solution) that is consistent with very basic insights about the relevant issues.

The evolution theory is the only known theory consistent with the Earth that was created 5 billion years ago, with the apparent absence of divine forces surrounding the biosphere, with the observed difference between the offspring and their parents, with the striking similarity between biochemistry of all species, and with the fact that organisms with certain "negative" features are more likely to die.

String theory is the only known theory consistent with the existence of gauge fields and chiral fermions coupled to each other at low energies in agreement with the laws of quantum field theory; with the existence of gravity that apparently follows the laws of general relativity to very good accuracy.

In both cases, we just don't have any alternatives and don't seem to have any choice. Of course that one may continue to invent ever more intelligent theories of intelligent design ;-) or ever more convoluted theories of spin networks. But at some moment, science should realize that some attempts to reconcile these basic insights into a coherent framework have probably failed. It is not easy to give precise, quantitative predictions of evolution theory or string theory for this particular Universe, but it does not diminish the fact that the logical reasoning that has led to these two theories is very robust. This robustness justifies us to use them as the intellectual framework for further reasoning.

Speed is not the truth

You know, there can be faster and slower periods in evolutionary biology or any other field. But whether or not a period in science is fast or slow can't be enough to determine the fate of a theory. A theory can only be abandoned once some demonstrable contradictions (internal or with reality) are found and another theory doing a better job is found.

This is a reason why evolution is - using Glashow's language - more or less permanently safe, despite some possible difficulties in reconstructing the history of genes (unless we are making a silly error and missing a better theory of the origin of species). And string theory is almost permanently safe and it will only be abandoned and replaced once a better choice emerges - which, I believe, will never happen.

This safety of the status of a theory or a framework as a leading explanation of certain phenomena is of course something completely different from the safety of individual careers or grants; the latter should depend on the speed of progress, of course. But I hope that the readers can distinguish that the money and the truth are not necessarily the same thing.