Stephen McIntyre: a math prodigy

Update: I've added the answer to the title.

Try to solve my conundrum and identify the following person - who is far too modest to reveal the following data although it may be relevant for many people to form their opinion:

• much like Albert Einstein, he is often considered to be an outsider in the field in which he is moderately famous today
• he stood first among his countrymates in an international math contest at the high school
• he comes from the second territorially largest country in the world
• he studied pure math at the University of T., and typically stood 2nd
• the country may be the same country where the first commenter under this article lives, and the T. city is the city where "casting is coming" according to her blog
• he was offered a full scholarship for PhD in mathematical economics at MIT when such offers were rare
• Paul Samuelson (Nobel prize in 1970) made this offer by phone
• it won't help you but a nephew of the P.S. above is the president of a certain well-known university in Massachusetts
• among the mathematical adjectives, our mystery man always liked "elegant" and "nontrivial"
• however, he chose a job of a director of various "search companies" unrelated to the Internet
• he is often viewed as an opponent of a person who is not a clear thinker and who uses inflated terminology to describe trivial operations
• this opponent is thus very inelegant, but the opponent's work has really been rejected because it was methodologically flawed
• the last name of the opponent means a person of politically incorrect sex in a major European language
• the second largest country mentioned above also recently happens to be the second most successful country in a certain sport, after the Czech Republic
• a certain tool is necessary for this game
• our mysterious person has become very famous for playing with this tool, although normally he prefers to spend his leisure time with squash
• The Reference Frame estimates that his mathematical IQ exceeds that of those who essentially paint him as an amateurish outsider roughly by 15 in average, and a similar comparison holds for his effectivity, accuracy, and breadth of his analyses
• he has a blog whose quality, extent, and usefulness is higher by one order of magnitude than a blog of his opponents, although the number of these opponents is higher by an order of magnitude than the number of mysterious men you are trying to identify
• in 2007, he will be able to reverse-engineer NASA's data and find a bug that will be corrected and 1934 will become the warmest U.S. year on record instead of 1998

If you want to know who he is, try to click at the comments, assuming that someone else has already solved the conundrum before you. :-)

I got yer jack-o-lantern right here

Doubly special relativity in 3D

Nima who just returned from the Perimeter Institute was excited about very reasonable discussions with Laurent Freidel who is a loop quantum gravity person.

Laurent has shown that the so-called DSR (double or deformed special relativity) may arise naturally in 3 dimensions.

The Harvard interpretation is that 3 dimensions are special; there are no gravitons; and moreover, there is an invariant mass scale - the maximal mass you can have to avoid a closure of space (deficit angles exceeding 2 pi) - and these things won't hold in 4 dimensions or above four.

Nevertheless, the basic story of Laurent is quite interesting. Take 3D gravity coupled to a scalar field PHI with a cubic coupling, and integrate out the gravitational field. What you obtain is an action for PHI only; it differs from the original PHI-part of the action by having a new kind of a "star product" instead of the original one. However, it is not a Moyal product but rather a new kind of product relevant for addition of momenta in DSR.

The rule is

• exp(iPx) * exp (iQx) = exp(iRx)
• R = P sqrt(1-L^2.P^2) + Q sqrt(1-L^2.Q^2) + L P x Q

where "x" is the cross product in three dimensions, involving an epsilon, and L is the Planck length, more or less. As you can see, the last term in "R" makes it very noncommutative but differently than in noncommutative geometry as we know it.




I am puzzled how the "epsilon" terms can suddently arise when one integrates out gravity in 3D. Using the Chern-Simons interpretation of 3D gravity (which is apparently used in their derivations), it is easier to envision how this spontaneous "violation of parity" may arise. But has the result anything to do with gravity? It is not the first time in which the CS theory behaves differently under parity than the "true" gravitational description.

Also, it is not clear to me how the expressions above are defined if the arguments of the square roots become negative. A loop quantum gravity person may want to explain us these issues.

Alito, but maybe also Luttig

Here's what President Katrina has been up to since we last saw him on Friday praising Scooter Libby as a "great patriot"(bold emphasis is mine):

Bush spent the weekend at Camp David huddled with Miers, who remains his White House counsel and is therefore in charge of the judicial selection process, along with Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., who originally advocated Miers as the first choice to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. As the three talked, White House officials contacted prominent conservatives to test the reaction to various candidates.

One group consulted was the Concerned Women for America, whose decision to oppose Miers last Wednesday became one of the final blows to help kill the nomination. Janet M. LaRue, the group's chief counsel, said it received a call from the White House on Saturday and liked what it heard.

"Alito and Luttig have always been at the top of our list," she said in an interview. "We think either of them would be a supreme pick. There isn't a thing stealthy about them. They've got a long, proven record of constitutional conservatism."

Other conservatives yesterday also embraced Alito, in particular. "Alito, Luttig -- all these people are solid conservatives," Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said on CBS's "Face the Nation." On CNN's "Late Edition," Gary L. Bauer, president the conservative group American Values, described his criteria for a Supreme Court justice and added, "Certainly, Judge Alito fits those characterizations."

My prediction is filibusters and nukes.

Update: I forgot to mention that they call him "Scalito":

A judge on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Alito has been dubbed "Scalito" or "Scalia-lite" by some lawyers because his judicial philosophy invites comparisons to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's.

"That is not one of the names that I've suggested to the president," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told "Late Edition" on CNN. "In fact, I've done the opposite. I think it would create a lot of problems."

Reid said Bush would be making a "mistake" were he to settle on a hard-liner simply to appease the far right in his party, especially after conservatives' wrath undermined Miers' nomination.

Yes. A big mistake.

Ten reasons to oppose gay marriage

On November 8, Texans will cast ballots on a number of constitutional amendments, among them one which defines marriage as being exclusively between a man and a woman. So when you go into the voting booth, please keep these mind:

1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

2) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

3) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of outlandish, immoral behavior. As Senator John Cornyn has pointed out, people may even choose to marry their pets, because box turtles have legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

4) Marriage is a fundamental institution and cannot be expected to be revised on the basis of societal whim. After all, women are still property, blacks still cannot marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

5) Heterosexual marriage will be damaged if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour, alcohol-induced, impulsive marriage would be devastated.

6) Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

8) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the citizens of an entire country. That's why there is only one religion in America.

9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why our nation has expressly forbidden single parents to raise children.

10) Gay marriage will alter the foundation of society for the worse; we could never adapt to new social mores. This is similar to the way our society has failed to adapt to automobiles, the service-sector economy, and longer life spans.

Be sure to vote against proposition 2.

Snow is back

Snow is back here in Cambridge. So far it is lighter than in January, but we will see where it goes. The temperature for tomorrow is forecast to be 22 Fahrenheit above the temperatures today. Many of us already have a lot of fun with the snow.

Don't forget that weather is local in time as well as in space. Our friends in Central America have a tropical opportunity to learn the Greek alphabet properly. :-) Now they're learning (hurricane) Beta.

Also, don't forget the proverb "spring forward, fall back". It's the last full weekend of October, and therefore the daylight saving time is over! If you did something wrong in the last hour and you wish it would have never happened between X:00 PM and (X+1):00 PM, just return your watch back by one hour, and repeat the hour without the error.

"Official A"

As Hunter at Kos notes, the Associated Press cites no fewer than "three people close to the investigation" who identify "Official A" as none other than the Turd Blossom himself.

Why is "Official A" the only person not identified by name or title in the indictment?

On or about July 10 or July 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke to a senior official in the White House ("Official A") who advised LIBBY of a conversation Official A had earlier that week with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson's wife was discussed as a CIA employee involved in Wilson's trip. LIBBY was advised by Official A that Novak would be writing a story about Wilson's wife.

Why the secrecy around the identity of "Official A"? Why the deference to his anonymity? What's going on with "Official A" that isn't going on with anybody else?

At the end of this Fitzmas Day...

... the gifts revealed aren't as significant as the gifts still to be.

**For example (as I asked earlier), from whom did the Vice President learn of Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA officer? Tenet has claimed it was not he, and the indictment only identifies a "senior officer of the CIA". As Mssrs. Lang and Johnson indicate, we may only learn that at a trial of Mr. Libby.

**Who is the "undersecretary of State" mentioned on page 4 of the indictment who was working with Libby to get information on Wilson?

Why, it could be Marc Grossman, or it could be John Bolton.

**And who is "Official A"?

**Finally, the gift revealed puts to rest the neocon bromide that Valerie Wilson was not undercover, as well as revealing that Libby -- and Cheney -- knew she was undercover. Page 5, top, item #9:

On or about June 12, 2003, LIBBY was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Divison. LIBBY understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA.

Why is this noteworthy? As Josh Marshall clarifies, CPD is where the spies work, not the analysts. Libby and Cheney, with their top security clearances and close association going back to their days at the Pentagon, knew Plame was NOC. There was no way they could not know.

And yes, as Fitzgerald indicated, the investigation continues, but it's no longer just about Karl Rove.

It's about the Vice President of the United States.

Israel and the president of Iran

The Reference Frame has repeatedly criticized the new policies of appeacement and an insufficient support of Israel from Europe and other regions, for example in the article "Disengagement is a mistake". For example, I argued

• ... And I don't think it is quite reasonable to expect that all the Arab [sic: I meant Muslim] states are going to like the idea of the Jewish "spot" in the middle of "their" region for decades or indefinitely. ...

Unfortunately, the newest events start to confirm these worries in detail. The current president of Iran - representing the political party called "Islamic Society of Engineers" (what a strange kind of thinking for an engineer) - has called the "wise" Palestinians to "wipe off this disgraceful blot [Israel] from the face of the Islamic world". He has expressed the very same plan in many similar sentences.

You can see that my prediction was not accurate. I predicted the word "spot" while Ahmadinejab used the word "blot". Please accept my apologies for the inaccuracy. If you want to see that all good people in the world agree with the upgef**ked Mahmoud, read his newspaper.

The European Union, the United Nations, even some Arab analyticians have protested. Israel has officially asked the U.N. to cancel Iran's membership in the world's organization. Some other Iranian politicians attempted to soften the president's remarks. Nevertheless, the president of Iran has re-confirmed his statements today on a demonstration of thousands of empty heads.

The ministers of defense of all potent democratic countries in the world - which of course means primarily Donald Rumsfeld - should refresh their strategic plans for a conflict, including nuclear war, with Iran because unfortunately, the probability that such plans will be needed soon has just increased by an order of magnitude. It would be irresponsible to assume that we will never need nuclear weapons.

The Reference Frame finds it inappropriate for the politicians in civilized countries to tollerate statements such as the recent statements by Ahmadinejab and to do things that increase their self-confidence, and I personally find it inappropriate to keep this creature alive.

Gary Horowitz's bubbles

Yesterday, Gary Horowitz was explaining, in a very interesting talk, that the black holes can catalyze the creation of bubbles of nothing in the context of closed string tachyon condensation studied by Allan Adams et al.

Recall that in the Scherk compactifications with antiperiodic fermions around a circle, a single wound closed string has a ground state that becomes tachyonic if the radius of the circle is small enough. Its condensation is a perturbative addition to Witten's non-perturbative nucleation of "bubble of nothing" - a process obtained by an analytical continuation of the Euclidean Schwarzschild black hole.

Gary showed several bubble solutions that may be connected to black hole solutions via non-supersymmetric counterparts of geometric transitions, and he conjectured that this novel process may even describe final stages of black hole evaporation. These mechanisms to resolve singularities are somewhat analogous to the picture envisioned by Eva and John.

He also mentioned a paper of Simon Ross that argues that similar bubbles may even arise in asymptotically supersymmetric background in the presence of rotating charged black holes. The possibility that these bizarre processes occur even in the stable, supersymmetric context make them even more interesting.

Early Fitzmas present or a Pandora's box?

Maybe Fitzmas will finally come tomorrow...

... but today's news about the scuttled Supreme Court nominee, predicted here earlier in the week, produces the same combination of thrill and angst as does the looming announcment from special prosecutor Fitzgerald.

So now what will a petulant, bitter, angry, politically wounded President do -- especially since his brain is preoccupied with self-preservation? Long used to getting his way, Bush has been rumored to revile the Unreligious Wrong going back to his pre-Goobernatorial days. And the fundies now wear the blood of Harriet Miers, one of Bush's closest confidants, on their hands.

So will he throw the Christian lions a piece of red meat, such as Priscilla Owen or Edith Jones -- or will he tell them to "bring it on" again with a 'moderate' nominee like Al Gonzales or Edith Clement?

Is he a uniter (of just the GOP) or a divider (of the entire nation, again)?

Bush is foremost a rewarder of loyalty, and he prefers Texans, and he's got a bit of a retribution hangup, so I'm guessing he taps the beaner.

(Hey, Carlos Mencia uses that word all the time, so don't call me a racist. Besides, I'm married to a Cuban.)

*heavy sigh*

... on the opposite side of the upper deck near the left-field foul pole, 89-year-old L.L. Godwin sat in his chair, his cane tucked under one arm, a blanket over his legs and an Astros cap tipped back on his head.

He, too, attended countless games of the Astros, Colt .45s and, before that, the Houston Buffs. His granddaughter — Debbie Rasmussen of Tomball — recalled how as a child she used to cuddle into bed with her grandfather on visits and fall asleep to the sounds of Astros games on the radio.

It was a loss. The Astros' first World Series is over. But for many, the taste was worth the wait.

Lawrence Krauss: Hiding in the mirror

I found this book to be particularly weak among the recent books about theoretical physics in general and extra dimensions in particular. The main problem is that Krauss does not distinguish random stories and fiction from physical theories. He mixes aliens hidden in extra dimensions with QCD, Picasso, Plato, Flatland, M-theory, and many other things.

Krauss' book is a classical example of politicization of science. He tries to present extra dimensions as a form of religion; it's the main agenda behind this book to put modern physics in the context of some old unscientific fairy-tales. Of course that when we talk about some physical theories or conjectures involving extra dimensions seriously, there is no room for religious or anti-religious arguments. But Krauss prefers the non-serious approach. Unlike Krauss, I personally have no a priori positive or negative feelings about extra dimensions whatsoever. Extra dimensions is something that it forced upon us by the rules of mathematics. If physical arguments implied that elementary particles had to be 3D Platonic polyhedra, I would view this derivation equally seriously. Krauss prefers pre-conceptions and his atheism - that he incorrectly believes to be correlated with 3+1 dimensions - is one of them.

You may read more in my review at amazon.com which is also the fastest way to get to the amazon web page of the book. Incidentally, Krauss uses very similar techniques to control the available reviews as Mark McCutcheon. Once the book was published, he has secured several identical reviews saying that "the book is Krauss' best yet and Ira Fratow was right". One of these reviews was written by Miss Rouge, Krauss' daughter. Her review of Krauss' previous book was even more informative:

• i am krauss' daughter, and i loved it, September 6, 1999
• hellO! i am lawrence krauss' daughter and i havent read the book yet, but i figured i'd review it just to give it the 5 stars! :) yay!

Her father sometimes - but not always - seems to have a similarly honest approach to the ideas in physics, which is why I guess that the book will be more popular among bitter crackpots and empty heads rather than physics fans. It seems totally obvious to me that the readers of this book will be the people who find some old unscientific confusions of some well-known people more interesting than the thrilling picture of reality drawn by modern physics.

Hockey sticks: round 29

When some people claim that the human activity has warmed up the climate much more drastically than Nature could do Herself, their most convincing argument for their statement is the reconstruction of global temperatures in the last 1000 years. Although people used to think that the variations were large and there was a strong Medieval Warm Period as well as Little Ice Age afterwards, things suddenly changed in 1998 and 1999. Mann, Bradley, and Hughes published papers that argued that the temperature was essentially constant between 1000 and 1900 (the shaft of the hockey stick) and then it abruptly grew since 1900 (the blade).

Even though the hockey stick contradicted most of the folklore people used to believe, it was instantly accepted by most of the climate community. In 2001, it became the key graph on the final page of the climate report made by the United Nations (IPCC). For five years or so, no one tried to reproduce the graph. Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre became the pioneers. They attempted to reproduce the graph but nothing worked. After intense research, they discovered that Mann et al. used a mathematical step that essentially generated hockey sticks out of random input.

...This is probably an old unfinished posting. ...

Concentrations

An example of policy issues discussed at Harvard right now: on Monday, we had a physics faculty meeting. Gary Feldman explained that someone at FAS wanted to cancel the joint concentrations. In the case of physics, the joint concentrations are moderately important, especially for the students focusing on Physics/Mathematics and Physics/Astronomy. The FAS plan was to replace the joint concentrations by "secondary fields" that would not appear on the diplomas.

This topic is not going to destroy the civilization but still: cancellation of the joint Physics/Mathematics and Physics/Astronomy programs at America's most well-known college is not a completely irrelevant detail.

On Monday, Gary explained these things to us. Bert Halperin wanted to hear the arguments of the proponents first. Gary argued that they seem to have no arguments; at least none of them were mentioned in the document that proposed it. This statement of Gary seems to be supported by all other sources that I have seen and heard so far. We exchanged a few more words and then voted: everyone (in the physics department who participated) voted that the proposal should be re-considered.

Yesterday, the proposal for the new system was presented by EPC at the FAS faculty meeting, and Gary was not the only one who responded negatively although the negative replies used somewhat contradictory arguments (which is not a real contradiction because different departments and fields may require different things).

As The Crimson reports, the proposal was presented by David Laibson, a very reasonable economist who was incidentally one of the driving forces behind the petition supporting Summers against hysterical attacks of the feminists and their allies.

Nevertheless, I don't believe that EPC understands the logic and situation in sciences well enough to make constructive recommendations. This suggestion opens several questions: How important it is to allow joint concentrations? How much coursework should be required for one field or another? Is it too much, is it too little, is it too much more than in other fields, is it enough for the student to get familiar with everything that is important in her or his field? Is there enough time left for the student to think about the world independently? Is the joint program difficult enough so that it won't become just a way to simplify one's life? Does the student have enough opportunity to choose the field that he or she would find important at the end?

I can imagine that a very enlightened leader who understands sciences etc. could make a reasonable decision that takes all of these questions into account. But I am much more skeptical that a committee of non-scientists should be expected to make a good decision. Such decisions affect the work of the departments such as the Physics Department, and this is the level where these relatively technical decisions should be made.

Decisions that affect the relative growth of different fields etc. should almost certainly be done centrally, at least to some extent; but the decisions about the "details" which things should be taught and required and how should be left to the "local experts", I think. If a professor of Latin American studies argues that it is very important for a student to travel to all possible continents or participate in an international experience, one must say that he has no idea what it means to study other fields except for his own.

An international experience plays a completely negligible role for a physicist - especially the U.S. physicist - in comparison with experience with mathematics, and it would be very bad if people who don't understand this point were deciding about the physics curriculum.

25 years of Polyakov action

In 2005, we also celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Polyakov action. Although many of us were still in kindergarden back in 1980, we just could not ignore this important contribution of the bloc of peace to string theory. The article about Fadějev-Popov ghosts in string theory seems appropriate for the week before Halloween.

Even more mysteriously, Saša Polyakov celebrates his 60th birthday, congratulations!

Polyakov - and several other people - introduced the BRST methods to string theory. BRST quantization is a powerful technology to deal with gauge invariance, especially non-Abelian gauge invariance. Some physics fans do not understand that BRST is mostly formalism - a calculational framework to deal with various unphysical states - but physics is only the very final product of the BRST quantization that could also be found by other means - for example, by light-cone and other gauge-fixed approaches.




Imagine that you have an Abelian gauge symmetry G. Because it is a gauge symmetry, the physical states must be invariant under all generators of the group called L_i. You may impose these dim(G) conditions as the single requirement that all the physical states are annihilated by

• Q = c^i L_i

where "c^i" are arbitrary coefficients i.e. as the condition that "Q psi = 0". Also, all states of the form

• psi = Q lambda

are pure gauge and therefore unphysical. It's because they are combinations of the variations "L_i psi", the differences between two infinitesimally similar states identified by the gauge symmetry. What I said also works if "c^i" are chosen to be new degrees of freedom, namely Fadějev-Popov ghosts. The advantage of making them anticommuting is that

• Q^2 = 0

i.e. the operator Q is nilpotent, much like the exterior derivative operator "d" acting on the differential forms. The physical states can be found as those that are annihilated by "Q" but not of the form "Q lambda" - i.e. as cohomologies of "Q" which is a well-defined concept because of nilpotency.

At your Halloween party, you should not forget that there are good ghosts - the Fadějev-Popov ghosts - who allow us to fight against the bad ghosts - i.e. the states with a negative squared norm. A good ghost usually asks a bad ghosts whether he is BRST-closed but not BRST-exact, and if the bad ghost answers "No", he is simply screwed. This allows Fadějev, Popov, their ghosts, BRST, and Polyakov to keep the bad ghosts - the terrorists with a negative squared norm - away from the borders of the physical Hilbert space. Consequently, all of us are happy and we may enjoy our lives in the world where probabilities are guaranteed by the Hilbert space government to be positive. It's one of the exceptional examples in which a government bureaucracy is actually useful.

The real power of the BRST formalism of course only occurs if we consider non-Abelian gauge symmetries. In this case we must add the dual variables "b_i" (antighosts) associated with each "c^i" (with ghosts) and we must add a "b.c.c" term to "Q" to keep it nilpotent. It turns out that we must only add "1/2 c^i L_{i}^{ghost part}" because the ghosts, together with their own symmetry generator, prefer to be half-real, half-imaginary.

The ghosts "c^i" transform just like the parameters of the gauge transformations and "b_i" transform as the generators themselves. For conformal symmetry, "c^i" are fields of dimension "-1" while "b_i" have dimension "+2". There is a canonical action for the "bc"-ghosts, too.

For any theory with gauge (local) symmetry - which includes diffeomorphism and Weyl symmetries relevant for the string worldsheet - the contribution of 1-loop diagrams with "bc"-ghosts running in the loops cancels the contribution of unphysical modes, and it simplifies both the definition as well as calculations of loop amplitudes. Alternatively, in the path integral formalism, the one-loop determinant from the FP-ghosts cancels the unphysical degrees of freedom, and removes an unwanted Jacobian from a gauge-fixing.

In the case of string theory, the Polyakov (BRST) approach is very powerful because it allows us to rewrite the loop integrals over the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces as very elegant integrals over the zero modes of the "b"-antighost. This simplifies the proofs of finiteness while we may keep the (Lorentz) covariance of the formulae manifest.

It was harder to keep the spacetime supersymmetry manifest, and Berkovits' pure spinor approach based on a new kind of ghosts is the first super-Poincaré quantum approach to the string worldsheet that we know.

My guess is that the BRST approach is more popular among the majority of theoretical physicists; it makes it even more impressive that Green and Schwarz preferred their light-cone gauge approach with manifest supersymmetry when they did their important discoveries peaked in 1984.

A generalization of the BRST approach, the Batalin-Vilkovisky approach, also involves ghosts for ghosts and ghosts for ghosts for ghosts, and so forth. Recall that ghosts - who themselves always violate the spin-statistics relation - also celebrate Halloween (together with antighosts) where they dress up as ghosts for ghosts; ghosts for ghosts (not to be confused with antighosts) are not quite like us, but they have the same spin-statistics relation as we do.

It is a relatively big question whether a new formalism analogous to the BRST approach will have to become important in the future when we figure out a more complete and unified way to formulate the theory of quantum gravity i.e. string/M-theory.

"Big Time" (and "Slam Dunk")

So now we now it was the Vice President who told Scooter Libby the name of Joe Wilson's wife, but who told him?

Larry Johnson fills in the back story:

It also seems pretty clear that the notes show that Libby lied to the grand jury when he claimed he learned the name from reporters. ... Although the NY Times story reports that Libby's notes indicate that George Tenet told Cheney about Plame, there are some intriguing unanswered questions. For starters it is highly unlikely that George Tenet showed up at the White House and just happened to know the name of Valerie Plame. Someone at the White House asked for it first. Tenet clearly came prepared to respond to a White House request. I'm sure the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, knows who called CIA to ask the question.

I also doubt that Tenet used the name "Plame". Since Valerie married Joe Wilson she went by 'Valerie Wilson'. Someone introduced "Plame" into the equation. Who did the subsequent work up on Mrs. Wilson? Only Scooter? Unlikely. Look for other names to emerge in coming days that will reveal who helped work out the "background" info on Valerie Wilson.

Find the excerpt above here and here.

The situation is worsening quickly. Where does this lead from here?

Steve Clemons thinks there may be a connection to John Bolton:

The question is how did Libby then churn up more info on Wilson without other parts of the "untrusted" bureaucracy spitting in his face or reporting his sins?

My hunch is that he went to trusted spear-carriers for Vice President Cheney -- the office and staff of Under Secretary of State John Bolton. Fred Fleitz, Bolton's chief of staff, maintained his CIA WINPAC portfolio and access as an active duty CIA staff member while he operated as Bolton's "acting" chief of staff. We know that Fleitz was a key part of the intelligence cherry-picking/stove-piping operation when it came to both the intel and policy response to various global WMD concerns -- in North Korea, Libya, Iran, and Iraq.

We also know that David Wurmser and John Hannah, who have both apparently cooperated after threats of legal action (i.e., time behind bars) with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald worked both for John Bolton's operation and the Vice President's office.

I recently consulted with a number of senior State Department officials about the level of interaction between Vice President Cheney's office and John Bolton's office -- and was informed that there was "intense" exchange between them, constant. One said that "Bolton and his team were operatives of Vice President Cheney inside the State Department establishment -- there to subvert Armitage and Powell wherever they could, and if not subvert, then there to spy on the them and report back.

I'd just like to know if the President gets a pass because we all believe he's too stupid to have known any of this was going on.

Update: The Bolton connection -- specifically Bolton's chief of staff, Fred Fleitz -- was detailed by Arianna Huffington last month. Sheesh, I gotta keep up.

Goldilocks

Strange music in the background is cause by the second article older than this one. The Iraqi constitution just passed (78 percent).

One of our former undergraduate students here at Harvard, Ben Bernanke, was chosen to replace the economist. The Reference Frame thinks it's a good choice. Bernanke introduced the concept of "goldilocks" to economics: not too cold, not too hot. This applies to inflation and deflation in particular.



We hope that he realizes that things could become too hot very soon and he will raise the interest rates to something like 6-7 percent sometimes in 2006. You know, the Americans are not afraid to borrow money. They're self-confident and optimistic enough which is one of the reasons why the U.S. interest rates should be, in average, significantly higher than the interest rates in other countries where the people are shy (such as Japan, obviously, but maybe also Europe).

Too low U.S. interest rates contribute to the huge U.S. trade gap; they may actually be the primary reason behind it. The more the Americans borrow as a group, the more they must import - ignoring "second order" effects such as the growth. :-) But maybe I should no longer give Bernanke lectures; as mentioned previously, he is a former student of Harvard. ;-)

The sorry spectacle of Judith Miller and Harriet Miers

Two women in the middle of two very big messes at the same time -- both the result of their own arrogance: Judith Miller, irascible New York Times reporter and Harriet Miers, woefully inexperienced Supreme Court Justice nominee. Both women find the headlines every day and the stories behind those headlines keep getting worse. And yet neither woman can summon the humility to simply stand up, declare “mea culpa” and walk away -- sparing the rest of us the circus they've both created.

Sunday's New York Times has yet another story by yet another colleague of Miller’s, Byron Calame, “the reader’s representative”, throwing more poisonous darts in an attempt to push her out the door. Coming on the heels of MoDo's missles, it's obvious that there are quite a few of Judy's co-workers who think she deserves to be pushed -- hard.

I suspect we'll see some more of this in days to come as the Gray Lady tries to salvage what little is left of her former reputation. Unfortunately, it will continue to be the kind of spectator sport in which the audience members are tied to their chairs, eyes held open with a speculum ( a la Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange) and forced to watch as the paper repeatedly flogs itself in an act meant to convince people that, this time, it really means it -- it will change.

Note to the Times: we can only take so much of this.

When President Bush announced the nomination of Harriet Miers on October 3, he called her “a leader of unquestioned integrity.” Much of what we’ve learned since then does not support that claim. To review:

- Miers was suspended from the DC bar for nonpayment of dues.

- Miers was suspended from the Texas bar for nonpayment of dues.

- Miers repeatedly had tax liens placed on property she owned in Texas for nonpayment of fines and fees.

- Miers received 10 times the market value for a small piece of land she controlled from the state of Texas, awarded by a panel stacked with friends and allies. A mediator ordered Miers to repay $26,000 but she has failed to do so.

These take on added significant because -- since Miers doesn’t have any judicial experience -- Bush is selling Miers’s nomination to the court, in large part, on her “character.”

Harriet Miers needs to withdraw her name from the nomination process immediately. It’s become obvious that a person so full of herself that she would even consider accepting a nomination for the Supreme Court with her glaring lack of qualifications places herself above what's good for the court and the United States.

It's hard to believe that this administration is concerned about avian influenza when it is a raging case of hubris that seems to be affecting nearly everyone in Washington.

Bush praises Miers' character, but that's only because it reflects his own to a T: grab all you can and screw everybody else.

Samir Mathur's black holes

If you hear silly songs, it is because of the videoclip included in the previous text.

Today, you won't find a single gr-qc article with at least one sentence that makes sense. Guaranteed.

One hep-th article that could have appeared on gr-qc is by our friends Ghosh, Shankarayanarayanarayanarayan, and Das (sorry, I could not resist!) who confirm using the monodromy method that ln(3) is really, really not a universal feature of the quasinormal modes of generic black holes. Update: their particular paper was wrong because of using wrong topology of Stokes' lines but keep on believing the conclusion that ln(3) is not universal.

There has not been a single article on this blog about Samir Mathur's picture of the black holes. Because I find it exciting - and with probability of order 10% even correct - Samir deserves a couple of words. He has a new gospel

• hep-th/0510180

in which he discusses his unconventional ideas about the black hole interior. Note that according to conventional general relativity, the horizon itself can't be identified by local measurements. The black hole interior has an interesting causal structure, and whoever falls into a black hole, can never escape (until the black hole evaporates completely).

George Chapline would argue that we should not trust general relativity and its laws may completely break down at the horizon and its interior can therefore look very different from the conventional picture of general relativity. Well, George Chapline would prefer to replace GR by gossamer superconductors.

Although such a hypothesis about a drastic change near the horizon is only possible when locality is heavily violated, Samir Mathur would probably agree with it. Samir Mathur and Oleg Lunin constructed solutions with infinitely many parameters that can be identified with the microstates of a five-dimensional black hole with two charges. Their interior is "fluffy" and Samir wants to argue that it is a general feature of black holes.




Samir and Oleg start with a general vector-valued function "V^i(t)" that describes transverse fluctuations of a long wound string, and apply a sequence of dualities to construct a non-singular, asymmetric solution of supergravity. If you look closely at this solution corresponding to "V^i(t)", you find out that all singularities are just coordinate singularities and the local geometry is therefore smooth everywhere. Moreover, the solutions have no horizons. The infinite-dimensional space of possible functions "V^i(t)" must be quantized and it leads to the appropriate number of microstates that can be credited for the black hole entropy.

Bound states in quantum gravity such as black holes, Samir argues, may become very large, fluffy objects. They may be as extended as the black hole radius itself, and their two-charge wiggly black hole solutions serves as a moral proof of the concept.

Why are the bound states so extended? Obviously, they look like a bound state of very light, relatively weakly coupled states. Recall that the atom is much larger than the nucleus, for example, and it is because the electron is light and relatively weakly coupled. Samir explains that the black hole is really made of many "bits" which may be interpreted as fractional branes or other fractional objects. For non-extremal black holes, you may imagine that the black hole has a lot of fractional objects "XY-antiXY" where XY represents the charges that would otherwise be in a minority inside the black hole. Each of these "XY" fractional branes is extremely light - and has a small enough charge - so that the physical size of "non-locality" describing the interactions of the "fractionated" objects is always comparable to the black hole radius.

I would like to mention that this "fractionation" may be dual, via the gauge-gravity duality, to the decomposition of gauge-invariant singlet states into many colored constituents. The black hole may be thought of as a composite of many "quarks" in the CFT description, and because there are many of them and they are light, the natural size of the bound state is large.

In the CFT language, we are usually unimpressed by such a large size of the glueball because we believe that the locality in the bulk has very little to do with features that are easy to see on the CFT size. However, Samir wants us to believe that the bound state called a "black hole" has a comparable level of non-locality to its radius.

I actually believe that he may be right in some sense, but the effective physics for most probes will be as local as GR leads us to believe. How can we have physics that is simultaneously almost local as well as very nonlocal? Recall that in Matrix theory, the required bound state of N D0-branes has a radius that scales like N^{1/3} in eleven-dimensional Planck units. It becomes infinite as N goes to infinity; nevertheless, it should describe a graviton in 11 dimensions which is essentially a point-like object.

Something similar must be happening in Samir's picture if it is correct. His picture of the black hole looks extremely non-local but when you try to calculate some typical process, you will find out that physics may be described, with a rather good accuracy, as local physics that follows from general relativity, including the horizon. However, the non-locality as envisioned by Samir may still be used to guarantee that the information may slowly escape from the black hole interior and be encoded in the outgoing Hawking radiation.

It is rather hard to prove this picture although it may very well be correct. The truth is that we have not really understood, in some intuitive way, why the huge fluffy bound states of D0-branes in Matrix theory behave so incredibly locally. I also believe that we should first understand how the large bound state of N D0-branes may be approximately described as a bound state of smaller number of bound states, each of them being "approximately" gauge-invariant under a smaller gauge group. Also, we should understand the scaling of "N" as a kind of generalized renormalization group flow.

Even though the local physics involving the bound states of D0-branes essentially follows from dualities and M-theory, the best picture how to explain this apparent "miracle" is to argue that most of the D0-branes' wavefunction that is spread to large distances actually arise from some very high-frequency degrees of freedom whose effect is averaged out if you probe the system with any reasonable, finite energy probe. (It would be nice to know how to "integrate them out" and use approximate degrees of freedom in which the bound state looks small.) The same comment applies to strings in perturbative expansion themselves: their squared average size is also logarithmically divergent, but this divergence is regulated if we impose a UV cutoff on the worldsheet - something that is interpreted, in this particular case, as a UV cutoff in spacetime.

Someone should try to describe the functioning of these ideas in a slightly more coherent and quantitative fashion. Such a complete answer should illuminate the following questions:

• are gauge-non-invariant states good degrees of freedom to describe the black hole interior in the dual CFT description?
• what kinds of objects are able to probe this fine structure? What are the length scales of non-locality measured by various probes?
• is there an explicit link between Samir's fractional branes and the gauge-non-invariant ingredients of the black hole?
• can you evaluate the total amount of information per unit time that the non-local part of dynamics is able to emit from the black hole?
• do you solve the information paradox by a careful compromise and interrelations between the black hole's local and non-local dynamical processes?

Kay Bailey Hutchison's devolving opinion on perjury

February 12, 1999:

The edifice of American jurisprudence rests on the foundation of the due process of law. The mortar in that foundation is the oath. Those who seek to obstruct justice weaken that foundation, and those who violate the oath would tear the whole structure down.

Every day, thousands of citizens in thousands of courtrooms across America are sworn in as jurors, as grand jurors, as witnesses, as defendants. On those oaths rest the due process of law upon which all of our other rights are based.

The oath is how we defend ourselves against those who would subvert our system by breaking our laws. There are Americans in jail today because they violated that oath. Others have prevailed at the bar of justice because of that oath.

What would we be telling Americans -- and those worldwide who see in America what they can only hope for in their own countries -- if the Senate of the United States were to conclude: The President lied under oath as an element of a scheme to obstruct the due process of law, but we chose to look the other way?

I cannot make that choice. I cannot look away. I vote `Guilty' on Article I, Perjury. I vote `Guilty' on Article II, Obstruction of Justice.

I ask unanimous consent an analysis of the Articles of Impeachment be printed in the Record.

October 23, 2005:

I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation were not a waste of time and dollars.

As ThinkProgress points out, Kay's probably forgotten that perjury is a technicality punishable by up to five years in prison.

Scientific consensus proves zombies

Climate scientists were asked whether zombies exist. And what they think that the U.S. president drinks. The results of their cutting edge research and the new scientific consensus is summarized on the server climatemash.org. For your convenience, we also show it here:

Originally, there was a flash directly here.

Normally, I would think that this website was funded by an oil company to show the believers in the "global warming theory" as five-year-old retarded children who don't quite distinguish fairy-tales from reality. But there is also an alternative theory - namely that those who paid for this animation actually imagine that this is how the real world works.

Incidentally, what do you think is the easiest way to get $1 million dollars for climate? Via ExxonMobil or from one of those corrupt far-left wing foundations? The website activistcash.com has so far tracked 800 million dollars that various environmentalists got for their "work". For example, James McDonnell was a believer in the occult, so I guess that he would agree with giving his millions to these scientists who promote zombies, vampires, and global warming. To summarize: be sure that the statement that the sceptics are corrupt is the opposite of the truth.

More seriously, America is simply ahead. The communist regimes also created various propagandistic fairy-tales attempting to convince the children that the White House was made of zombies, but none of them was so catchy as this one. I hope that Quantoken and others in the target audience will finally get convinced by this scientific animation that the global warming and vampires are for real. ;-)

But most importantly: have fun. Will you identify which zombie is your humble correspondent?

Thanks to W.S. for the tip.

Moneyshot Quotes of the Week

I'm a little behind on these, so let's catch up with the comics:

"President Bush is getting a lot of grief from conservatives about Harriet Miers' lack of legal opinions, which is kind of surprising. A woman without any opinions? That's like a Republican's dream, isn't it?"
--Jay Leno

"But this sort of barrenness is threatening to the Republican base because they're generally people who hate sex and are bad at it. So they fear that their own population will dwindle because there won't be enough Republicans willing to **** each other. Harriet Miers isn't using the equipment God gave her for making babies, and that's just wrong. It's like God giving you a beautiful garden and you not strip mining it for coal."
--Bill Maher, on the fact that Harriett Miers isn't married with children

"Over the weekend at one of the games---Houston and St. Louis---one of the camera men caught former President Bush and his wife Barbara Bush kissing. Y'know, by God, you know you're at a dull game when you'd rather make out with Barbara Bush."
--David Letterman

I don't know what to do to keep from getting the Avian Flu, but my first step is staying away from any bird running a fever.
--Will Durst

"According to the latest polls, just 39% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing. The White House is jumping on this 39% thing, they're saying he's now the president who represents minorities."
--Jay Leno

Bill O'Reilly: There's a lot of bad people out there and it's our job to go after them.
Jon Stewart: So when are you going to start?

It's a beautiful day in Houston, so I'm pushing away from the computer for the rest of it. Have a nice weekend.

Greenland ice grows

Update

The paper in science concluding that the icecap in the bulk of Greenland grows by 2.5 inches per year was published after this article was written.

Original material

Climate modeller William Connolley - the colleague who believed that the Arctic Sun could melt 30 meters of ice layer per day - has been trying to run an after school club despite the thicket of government regulations. William failed while his shy and conservative friend Ross succeeded. William thus came close to being converted to the values of entrepreneurship...

And suddenly, indeed, he realized that he did not want to have anything to do with the sourballs who generate piles of biased data whose only purpose is a political one, namely to further thicken the thicket of government and international regulations that are annoying already today. (Yes, the letters "thick" will appear many times in this text.) Their only goal is to make life unbearable for ExxonMobil, CocaCola, McDonald's, Microsoft, all other corporations, Luboš Motl, all other people who like freedom, and for William Connolley's after school club. :-)

Be sure that the degree of regulation in Great Britain is much more modest than in most places in the world! William Connolley and his famous after school club would really suffer elsewhere; William is a poor conservative and/or libertarian guy who has been intellectually and financially raped by environmental activists who forced him to change into a leftwinger.

So it may be him who started a refreshing wave of more balanced data. For example, CNN explains that the icecap of Greenland is crucial for the debates about the future catastrophes caused by global warming because once this three-kilometer-thick icecap melts, the sea level will rise by 7 meters. This will happen, as the global warming scientists argue, by Christmas 4005. Good bye, New York City, Boston, Bangkok, and other cities. Okay, we have heard this science already. ;-)

Surprisingly, CNN admitted in the article #1 in their Science & Space section that the Greenland's icecap actually grows by 5 centimeters every year; linear extrapolation puts the destruction of the New York City's Downtown to Christmas 60,000 years before Christ. You may think that I would like such an article. But it is so terribly illogical that I just can't like it. It starts by saying that there were "wide predictions of a thaw". However, five paragraphs later, it is announced that "they said that the thickening is consistent with theories of global warming".

I don't need to explain you that there could really have been no "scientific predictions" of a thaw - something that had a 50% probability to occur and something that eventually did not occur - that would deserve this label - just stupid political proclamations, worthless guesses, wishful thinking, and emotions.

You see that these two sentences about the predictions of the "consensus theories" contradict each other - unless you imagine that most of the predictions that are being made contradict the "theory of global warming" whatever this bizarre combination of words means in this context.

Obviously, many people have made wrong "predictions". It's not a disaster but it is a good enough opportunity to learn who has made the wrong predictions that the Greenland's icecap should retreat, and not to trust these people in the future.

Be sure that empty heads like those in the eco-terrorist organization called NRDC (or, using the terminology of Chrichton's book, NERF - whose boss is Nick Drake, the brother of Frank Drake whose semi-scientific equation indirectly led to "global warming") are not the only examples. Other examples include Bill Clinton - infected by Al Gore - who just told 5000 people in Canada that "The real danger is the ice cap in Greenland is melting." And yes, there are many in the scientific community.

You can't get an "A" for both contradictory types of a prediction. I am sure that many of those "predictors" had teachers who allowed them to pass the high school exams via the answers "maybe yes, maybe no, I want an A anyway", but the readers of The Reference Frame should be a bit more strict.

There are many other inconsistencies in the article. In the middle of the text, they say that the thickening could be offset by a melting of glaciers around the fringes of Greenland but no data can support this statement. Nevertheless, towards the end, they ventilate the opinion of other authors who argue that "Greenland presently makes the largest contribution to sea level rise" which seems to contradict all other justified facts mentioned in this article. I have not seen the article cited by CNN but it seems to be a work of pure fiction.

After all, Thor Karlstom from the U.S. Geological Survey predicts a new ice age in which ice will cover all of Canada. :-)

Now THIS mugshot might be fake...

I think "Hot Tub" Tom is probably standing on some phone books...

" tell her that I just ate an MRE and crapped in the hallway of the Superdome"

From the e-mail exchanged between "Heckuva Job" Brownie and the regional FEMA chief, Martin Bahamonde, in testimony before Congress on the Katrina disaster and the incompetent response by the government. Here's a fuller excerpt:

Bahamonde to FEMA Director Michael Brown, Aug. 31, 11:20 a.m.

"Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical. Here some things you might not know.

Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water. Hundreds still being rescued from homes.

The dying patients at the DMAT tent being medivac. Estimates are many will die within hours. Evacuation in process. Plans developing for dome evacuation but hotel situation adding to problem. We are out of food and running out of water at the dome, plans in works to address the critical need.

Sharon Worthy, Brown's press secretary, to Cindy Taylor, FEMA deputy director of public affairs, and others, Aug. 31, 2 p.m.

"Also, it is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner. Gievn (sic) that Baton Rouge is back to normal, restaurants are getting busy. He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes. We now have traffic to encounter to get to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc.

Bahamonde to Taylor and Michael Widomski, public affairs, Aug. 31, 2:44 p.m.

"OH MY GOD!!!!!!!! No won't go any further, too easy of a target. Just tell her that I just ate an MRE and crapped in the hallway of the Superdome along with 30,000 other close friends so I understand her concern about busy restaurants. Maybe tonight I will have time to move my pebbles on the parking garage floor so they don't stab me in the back while I try to sleep.

More here.

News on string theory in the media

How faithful picture of string theory do the media offer? Let's look at this sample from the last 48 hours or so. ;-)

• "EinsteinFest" at the Perimeter Institute attracts 18,000 people
• Vanishing Netgear rebate proves additional dimensions predicted by string theory
• India Daily has another experimental proof of extra dimensions
• India Daily had yet another article "String Theory" one day earlier
• Brian Regan's brain exploded when he watched string theory on PBS
• It is argued that the rest of the show "Girlfriends" looks like string theory
• Emerson Quartet that became famous for joining Brian Greene plans to perform Mendelssohn and Mozart
• Steel string theory is going to perform in Ohio
• Alan Lightman thinks that artists are like scientists because they also like string theory
• Ancient neutrinos described in a crackpot paper may prove either loop quantum gravity, string theory, or a required diet for Schrödinger's cat
• Computer simulations indicate that type IIA vacua with orientifolds of six-tori produce one MSSM-like model per one billion of backgrounds

Poles vs. cuts

Sean Hartnoll from the old Cambridge discussed the phase structure of N=4 gauge theory and the main topic of the debates that followed was how can the apparent existence of branch cuts in field theories at weak coupling agree with the meromorphic nature of the Green's functions at strong coupling derived from the dual bulk gravitational description where the poles - e.g. the poles known from the quasinormal mode spectrum - are the only singularities.

My opinion is that the branch cut nature of the amplitudes is always a perturbative illusion and any background with quantum gravity actually resolves the branch cuts into a sequence of individual discrete poles. The main challenge for this "stringy" point of view is to explain how the continuum of two-particle (double-gluon) states that appear as intermediate states in gauge theory can be accounted for in the gravity picture, or why is the spectrum of the double-particle intermediate states discrete even at weak coupling.

If you have some strong or other opinions about the existence of branch cuts and their transitions at finite values of the couplings, I am curious to hear them.

That smiley mugshot? Nuh-uh.

THIS is the real one. ;-)

The illusion of gravity

All readers who like or want to read popular texts are recommended the article "Illusion of gravity" about holography in quantum gravity in the November issue of Scientific American. It is written by a person who has done the maximum to prove the concept of holography quantitatively - namely Juan Maldacena. His article offers Escher's pictures and rather detailed explanations of anti de Sitter space and other relevant concepts.

No longer waiting to exhale

Heterotic MSSM

Burt Ovrut (UPenn) just gave a joint phenomenology seminar of the kind that I really like. This blog has discussed the heterotic standard model several times but it is impossible for me not to inform you about the talk today - especially because Burt has announced brand new results of his team that were found primarily by Volker Braun during the last weekend - namely a unique pure MSSM (minimal supersymmetric standard model) found in string theory. We will discuss this point at the end of this text.

Getting the right spectrum from string theory

It has been a long-standing question - and one of the most important questions in theoretical physics - whether string theory produces vacua that agree with everything we know about the real world. The first question is whether we can obtain the right particle spectrum. Obviously, string theory has the capacity to produce gravity, the Standard Model gauge group, and particles charged under it that include the observed quarks and leptons. But that's not good enough. We must find a model - or models - which lead exactly to the correct spectrum. No exotics i.e. unobserved particles coupled directly to the Standard Model are allowed if we claim that our favorite background of string theory describes reality and that Shelly Glashow and Peter Woit have been ultimately proved wrong.

In the context of string theory, we usually want to find an N=1 supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, something like the MSSM.

Since the paper by Candelas, Horowitz, Strominger, and Witten in the mid 1980s that showed that SUSY GUT models naturally follow from heterotic string theory on Calabi-Yau manifolds, people have encountered a lot of technical problems in their attempts to get rid of the exotics. Burt Ovrut argues that it is a tremendously strong constraint that was only solved recently. Also, he suggests that even though some people used to conjecture that various exotics pair up and become very massive, his more explicit calculations tend to lead to the conclusions that if the exotics appear as massless particles at the string level, they just won't disappear.




At the same time, some people working on the intersecting brane models - like Christos Kokorelis - and D3-brane models probing various singularities - like Martijn and Herman - also argue that they have found models that exactly reproduce the MSSM from string theory, but we won't discuss these competitors here at all. Let me just mention that the model of Herman and Martijn has an extended Higgs sector, so it is not called "MSSM" in the strict terminology of this text.

Let's return to the model of Burt et al.

The bundle construction

Let's repeat that they have studied the following class of vacua: the Calabi-Yau is taken to be an elliptic fibration (fibration whose fiber is a two-torus) over dP_9 - generalized del Pezzo surface - because the latter is an elliptic fibration itself and it simplifies a part of the calculation. My understanding is that even their brand new solution from the last weekend is an elliptic fibration over dP_9. They can construct a manifold in such a way that it has a "Z_3 x Z_3" symmetry that acts freely, and you may orbifold by it. The resulting orbifold is a smooth Calabi-Yau manifold whose first homotopy group is "Z_3 x Z_3". This discrete group implies that the degeneracies typically look 9 times bigger on the covering space than what you get after you orbifold the covering space.

The visible E_8 gauge group has an SU(4) bundle that breaks the gauge group down to the centralizer, namely SO(10), a good grand unified group. In GUT field theories, you may want to break this SO(10) by a Higgs field transforming in a huge representation of SO(10) down to the Standard Model group. String theory shows you that you won't ever get realistic Higgses with couplings like that, and you must find different ways how SO(10) may be broken.

Of course, the right solution are the Wilson lines. You may embed "Z_3 x Z_3" inside SO(10) so that its centralizer will be the Standard Model gauge group if the holonomies of the gauge field over the first homotopy cycles are exactly these elements of the "Z_3 x Z_3". Such a stringy breaking of gauge symmetry has many advantages. It preserves the spectrum of the fermions transforming as full representations of SO(10) as well as gauge coupling unification if present at the GUT scale; it preserves the good features of GUT. Also, it kills the main ugly feature of GUT theories because it automatically splits the Higgs multiplets. With a right choice of the bundles, you obtain no lethal Higgs triplets, just doublets, and you avoid all the doublet-triplet splitting mess.

The main technology they use are sheaf cohomologies and various long exact sequences optimized to calculate the particle spectrum at low energies. It's been kind of fun when he showed the long sequences where you first calculate a whole rectangle of things that you don't really need, and only at the very end, you deduce the entry in the middle of the rectangle that you're interested in. They have mastered this method, some of the required mathematics was only developed recently in some papers - mostly their papers (no textbook available yet!) - and it is probably hard for anyone outside to compete with them at this moment. There has been some discussion between Burt and Andy whether it was difficult to find stable bundles over Calabi-Yau manifolds. Everyone agreed that the problem was mostly solved for K3 surfaces, but Burt has convinced Andy that their solution of the hard problem for three-folds was new.

The punch line is, of course, that a correct SU(4) bundle over the Calabi-Yau manifold gives you exactly the right number of representations: three copies of 16 (families), no copies of 16_BAR (no antifamilies) - actually, I was surprised that they could calculate these degeneracies separately instead of just their difference (the index) but it is apparently the case. Again, the degeneracies of these things are calculated using the skyscraper sheaves and long sequences. The skyscrapers and sheaves also answer my question why you only get 1/7 of a Higgs doublet pair per unit of a topological invariant. ;-) You get the gauge bosons with their gauginos and no other fields transforming as the 45-dimensional adjoint of SO(10), which is also nontrivial.

Important comment: if you tend to believe that the skyscraper sheaves must be really disgusting, Davide Gaiotto claims that he had the same opinion until yesterday when he started to study Eric Sharpe's lectures. Skyscraper sheaves are, roughly speaking, generalized bundles on submanifold that you can view as singular limits of certain bundles.

The number of Higgs doublet pairs

Finally, you obtain two pairs of the Higgs doublets, twice as many as what you get in the MSSM. This was a source of a minor controversy in the past because the second Higgs doublet pair would modify the running and destroy the gauge coupling unification which only holds beautifully in the pure MSSM. Burt was explaining me that it would not have to be the case because of some arguments that the other Higgs doublet could be as heavy as 10^{12} GeV which would be far enough to agree with the observed gauge coupling unification. At any rate, in their brand new model from the last weekend, they get exactly the MSSM spectrum only, with one pair of Higgs doublets only.

When I say that they obtain the MSSM spectrum only (as the spectrum of particles that are massless at the string level), I must add a few comments. Of course, they are doing string theory, so they also obtain moduli. There are 6 geometric moduli for their Calabi-Yau space - the Hodge numbers h_{11}, h_{12} are equal to three, three (a formal self-mirror). Moreover, there are 19 moduli for the SU(4) bundle. Only 4 of them nontrivially interact with some of the stuff in the Standard Model, but I can't tell you about all these technicalities. Moreover, when I told you that their older model presented today had 19 bundle moduli, you should also know that the brand new model from the last weekend has about 10 moduli only. It is significantly less than what one typically finds in these constructions. You may conjecture that cosmology for some reason prefers the backgrounds with the smallest number of moduli or the smallest number of light fields in general, which could lead you to their model as a unique solution of a minimization problem. Nima confirms that the minimization of the light fields is also favored anthropically, which is another reason why should one consider these realistic backgrounds more seriously than generic backgrounds.

Hidden sector

From the talk, I also understood the hidden sector story more completely than before. Heterotic string theory has the other E_8 which is treated very differently. The second Chern class of the other E_8 should mostly cancel the second Chern class of the visible E_8; this comes from the equation

• dH = Tr ( F1 /\ F1 + F2 /\ F2 )

where I erased the "R /\ R" terms. Actually, I had to say "mostly" because it does not have to be the case. Their difference may be a four-form whose Poincaré dual must however be an effective class, i.e. it must be realized as an actual two-cycle in the Calabi-Yau three-fold. You may then wrap a heterotic fivebrane on this two-cycle to cancel the second Chern classes of the two E_8 bundles.

They imposed many potentially unnecessary (but slightly appealing, because of the arguments above) conditions about the hidden sector, trying to make it as simple as possible, and with these assumptions, they have found two solutions. One of them can be used as weakly coupled heterotic string theory because the second Chern classes agree exactly, up to the required sign; no fivebrane is needed. The other solution has different second Chern classes of the two bundles and you must introduce a fivebrane. Burt explained me that this should only be allowed in the strongly coupled Hořava-Witten heterotic string theory because you don't want the fivebranes to coincide with the real world. They should be separated along the 11th dimension so that they can be called the hidden sector.

Finally, these two solutions are actually related by a critical transition in which the fivebrane dissolves into an instanton on the hidden wall.

In both of these cases, one assumes gaugino condensation in the hidden sector to be responsible for supersymmetry breaking. I was a bit puzzled why Burt talked about the KKLT-like antifivebranes to lift their (so far) AdS-like solution to a positive cosmological constant. Before, I assumed that this task is realized by the supersymmetry-breaking gaugino condensate and its effective superpotential. Of course, it remains very unclear whether such a model can predict the observed small cosmological constant (and the anthropic pessimists argue that it can't happen unless there exists either God or a discretuum of Burt-like vacua), but I think that it is a very correct strategy to try to check this number as the last one and attempt to match the rest of particle physics first. This is the reflection of the ultimate top-bottom approach. You first find your correct UV-consistent theory - string theory - and then you deduce all physically interesting operators in it starting from the highest-dimension ones (and masses of accessible particles starting from the heaviest ones). The cosmological constant is the last one in this sequence.

Conclusions for the "landscape"

At any rate, they have finally found a stringy model that agrees with the required physics of MSSM which is a big success. Burt was asked what he thinks about the remaining 10^{350} Standard Models in the landscape, and he replied that he had no idea what the landscape people are talking about - and he was not quite the only one ;-) - because the number of the good stringy candidates to describe the real world is not about 10^{350} but about 1 or 2.

Be sure that the really smart landscape people admire their work.

Burt has also explained something about the couplings. A general lesson is that it is often the case that all the couplings vanish at the tree level which is bad enough. Consequently, he often needed to check that there are models or bundles where all the required couplings seem to be nonzero. I actually think that it is very healthy if some of these couplings remain zero at the stringy tree level (in the classical heterotic free fermionic models, only the top quark received a mass at the tree level), but they will have to study this issue later. My understanding is that the tree level predictions of these Yukawa couplings generalize the triple intersection numbers in a straightforward way, and they will be able to calculate these things in a finite amount of proper time.

On the other hand, if the loop corrections are nonzero and important for the Yukawa couplings, it's a task that no one know how to solve efficiently (a different task from most of their calculations so far which are topological and F-term-like in character) - but not a task that would be unsolvable in principle. When the small Yukawa couplings come from worldsheet instantons, it is conceivable that it will be easier to calculate them.

A famous physicist whom all of us like has asked what Burt is gonna do if they calculate that the muon/electron mass ratio is 5 as opposed to 206.8. Will you return to your blackboard? I am kind of puzzled by this kind of questions. If string theory is a correct description of the real world, its relevant background must imply the observed ratios between all particle masses. Until this happens, all investigations of things like black hole entropy etc. are ramifications of a theory that is potentially irrelevant for physics. Of course that we will need to be returning to our blackboards until we get the right model including the couplings. Or is our beloved famous physicist already convinced that string theory is wrong, it cannot predict the correct properties of particle physics, and everyone's job is to hide this truth and study the questions that involve no risk of showing us that we are doing something wrong?

I personally find it very unlikely that after all these non-trivial agreements and all the roads that lead to a single master theory, string theory will turn out to be a wrong description of the real world. But if it were hypothetically the case, I want to be among the first people who will learn! More realistically, it would be nice to learn that all of physics has been derived from string theory.

Hurricane Wilma

Hurricane Katrina has been the most expensive natural disaster in the U.S. history. You may think that this should mean that it was at least the strongest hurricane of 2005.

However, then you may realize that hurricane Rita was actually stronger. So you would change your mind and argue that Katrina was the second strongest hurricane of the year.

Nevertheless, you would still be wrong. Actually, hurricane Wilma has just become the strongest hurricane of 2005 and the strongest hurricane on record, with pressure dropping as low as 882 mbar (rank 1) near the center, compared with Rita's 897 mbar (rank 4) and Katrina's 902 mbar (rank 6).

What does it mean? First of all, it means that the particular year 2005 and the particular ocean called the "Atlantic ocean" has seen very many strong tropical cyclones compared to other years and other oceans. Note that the tropical cyclones are called "typhoons" in the East Asian region, and they have other names in other parts of the world.

These other regions have seen no increased statistics of the tropical cyclones. "Hurricanes" with this particular name are a local effect. Wilma is not the strongest tropical cyclone every: it is the 10th strongest tropical cyclone ever. There have been 9 stronger typhoons, so please don't think that we live in an globally exceptional historical era. ;-)

Hurricanes prove feminists wrong




Second of all, it proves that the feminists have been completely wrong once again. ;-) By the 1970s, only female names were used for the hurricanes. (This was based on a comparison of winds and women: when they arrive, they are warm and pleasant summer winds; when they leave, they take cars and houses away with them.) The feminists conjectured that it was a kind of discrimination and men may be equally destructive if they are employed as winds. :-)

Consequently, male and female names have alternated. But something that the feminists don't realize is that you can't simply hide reality. Katrina, Rita, and Wilma are all female. The male hurricanes in between were jokes or they did not become hurricanes at all. Andrew 1992 is the only proud representative of the males in the field. The hurricanes after Wilma will be called Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, which - I believe - are also female, at least in Czech. ;-)

Explanations

More seriously, does the increased frequency of hurricanes mean something? An explanation would have to explain why it is exactly 2005 and the Atlantic ocean in which the tropical cyclones became frequent. Even the official spokesmen of the alarmists agree that you can't deduce anything about "global warming" from a few hurricanes. I personally can't imagine that there is a good explanation why it is exactly 2005 and the Atlantic ocean.

Why did we get three gigantic hurricanes exactly half a year after the Kyoto protocol became valid? Will the Kyoto protocol increase the frequency of hurricanes even further? Why did we get three gigantic hurricanes in the same year in which the feminists attempted to humiliate president Summers? Do you really believe that there will be an explanation like that?

There could exist a mechanism that "squeezes" the hurricanes into the same year more often than the Poisson distribution would lead you to believe. But I actually don't think that the data support the conjecture that the available statistics deviate from the Poisson distribution in a significant way. There is no effect and therefore one should look for no explanation unless he is superstitious. As far as we can say today, the increased frequency of hurricanes in 2005 is a coincidence.

Little hierarchy problem

When you compute quantum, loop corrections to the Higgs mass, you obtain quadratically divergent graphs. Therefore, the exact value is quadratically sensitive on the cutoff scale and it is naturally predicted to be huge - unless we fine-tune the bare mass of the Higgs. On the other hand, reality forces us to believe that the Higgs is about as heavy as two W bosons. Otherwise, its quartic coupling is far too large and the effective quantum field theory breaks down.

This is called the (big) hierarchy problem. It is big because usually we want to assume that the effective theories should be valid at the GUT scale or even the Planck scale.

Some people may say that they don't care about these high scales, and they're perfectly happy with completely new - and perhaps non-field-theoretical - physics kicking in already at a few TeV. Even these people have a problem. It is the little hierarchy problem.

According to the precise measurements, the Standard Model is incredibly successful. It seems more successful than just a theory of physics below the 100 GeV scale. If you imagine that there is new physics at "M = 3 TeV" or so, it will generate new non-renormalizable terms (operators whose dimensions exceed four) in the low-energy effective action, suppressed by powers of "1/M", whose coefficients will be of order one. You can estimate the effect of these small corrections on the measured data. Indeed, you will find no effects whatsoever and the precision we have today implies that "M" must be greater than 3 TeV or something like that.




This also holds for new physics that is supposed to stabilize the Higgs mass - such as supersymmetry but not necessarily just supersymmetry. The observation about the higher dimension operators should therefore mean that the mass of the Higgs should be around 3 TeV, too. Of course, theoretical considerations show that it should be somewhere in the 115-200 GeV range - and perhaps up to 700 GeV in the non-supersymmetric case. You see a certain discrepancy between 150 GeV and 3 TeV - a factor of order 20 or so - which is called the little hierarchy problem.

I personally don't call it a real problem. There may be cancellations that drive the Higgs mass to 5% of its "natural" value. The coefficients of order one are never exactly one and 0.05 is an example of a number of order one. What a big deal. We have more serious problems. However, if you're a low-energy phenomenologist, this detail may be one of a very small number of problems that you still have :-) and therefore you study it most of the time.

Giacomo's talk

Yesterday, Giacomo Cacciapaglia from Cornell - yes, the Italians are taking over phenomenology - was presenting their model for the Higgs. The electroweak SU(2) is enhanced to an SU(3); you still need another independent U(1) to generate the hypercharge with the correct Weinberg angle. Such a construction creates extra SU(2) doublets inside the adjoint of the weak SU(3). These new fields would transform as vectors under the Lorentz group. But if you imagine that the space is five-dimensional, there will also be the fifth component of the gauge field and it will behave as a four-dimensional scalar. You play for a little while, trying to reproduce the Standard Model.

In their particular construction, it requires some amount of work to guarantee that there will be light fermions. At the end, however, it is more important to get the heavy top quark because its loop effects are responsible for obtaining the correct Higgs mass, including the sign. Their particular construction achieves this goal by introducing new large representations of the weak SU(3) group, namely the rank-four tensor "15".

Such new objects increase the couplings they needed to increase but they also lower the cutoff below which the theory is usable. The calculated cutoff will be just a few times higher than the compactification scale "1/R". It means that the terms that violate the five-dimensional Lorentz invariance may be generated with relatively large coefficients; and it also means that you only have a few Kaluza-Klein modes that can be trusted. Consequently, the set of rules that you find makes this class of the models equivalent to deconstruction and the little Higgs models where the fifth dimension is discretized and replaced by a couple of nodes in a quiver diagram. And in this context, the five-dimensional Lorentz invariance does not really constrain you and you may invent many justifications why the terms violating this invariance may be freely added to your Lagrangian whenever you find them useful.

Democracy between solutions of the little hierarchy problem

This means that the moral content of all known solutions to the little hierarchy problem is isomorphic; moreover, the factor of 20 is just moved to some other unnatural features of your theory that must be adjusted. For example, adding an otherwise unjustified large representation whose dimension is D - where D turns out to be at least 15 - is about as bad as fine-tuning a continuous parameter with the 1/20 accuracy, I think. Consequently, you may ask whether the problems and unnaturalness that you added exceed the problems that you solved.

Supersymmetry only solves the big hierarchy problem (the little hierarchy problem remains because we know that superpartners are absent below 200 GeV or so), but it does so in a very satisfactory way. It allows us to believe that quantum field theory will be valid up to very high scales, which I guess will ultimately be the conclusion of any experiments that the people will ever construct. On the other hand, it allows you to exactly cancel the loop corrections to the Higgs mass. The nonzero contributions that remain are governed by the supersymmetry breaking scale.

I am too conservative to abandon the notion of naturalness. On the other hand, it is obvious to all of us that a sharp and well-defined definition of naturalness can only occur once we have a complete enough theory.

Natural estimates of the size of a quantity are nothing else than an incomplete approximative calculation based on a theory that is pretty close to the full theory, and it should eventually be replaced by an exact analytical calculation of such a quantity. It has been the case of atomic physics and many other contexts and it is the only interpretation I can imagine that makes the question "which model is more satisfactory" relatively well-defined. A more satisfactory model is, of course, a model that is closer to the exact full theory of everything whose existence must be assumed.