Hui Chen helps us - and our Chinese friends - to circumvent the so-called Great Chinese Firewall. If you've ever heard someone in the People's Republic of China who had problems with the access to this blog, you may write her or him the following URL of the mirror.
Right now, the Reference Frame has absolutely no intent to influence the social or political atmosphere in the world's most populous country which is our Chinese friends' internal affair. We assure all the glorious leaders that they have no reason to be afraid of anything. Greetings from the People's Republic of Cambridge, LM
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Closed string vacuum solved analytically
The most interesting paper on the arXiv today is a paper by
who is currently at CERN, Switzerland. Around 1998, Ashoke Sen conjectured that the open string tachyon may get a vev that corresponds to a complete annihilation of the D-brane onto which the open strings were attached. This predicts the energy density of this minimum of the tachyonic potential: it must be equal to minus the tension of the D-brane that has annihilated.
In the framework of boundary string field theory (BSFT), this fact has been proved by Kutasov, Marino, and Moore. Of course, there have always been almost complete physical arguments that assured us that no reasonable person had any serious doubts that Sen's conjecture - the second insight in science after the Higgs mechanism that shows that the tachyons are more than just an inconsistency - was correct.
The formalism of Witten's cubic string field theory of the Chern-Simons type is however much more well-defined than boundary string field theory. People wanted to verify Sen's conjecture in this cubic string field theory, too. They could have done so numerically and they obtained 99.9999% of the right value. Many other facts have been checked numerically, too. Many physicists also proposed various formal heuristic solutions and maps between the cubic string field theory and the boundary string field theory but it was usually hard to give these formulae a precise meaning.
An exact and rigorous proof was however missing, much like a well-defined formula for the vev's of all those scalar fields unified inside the string field.
At the very same time, many people studied wedge states, sliver states, and similar states that have a natural physical interpretation but that can also be expanded as states in the Fock space in a controllable fashion. Martin Schnabl became one of the five people in the world who were most familiar with these mathematical objects.
Martin's work is a breakthrough in our understanding of cubic string field theory because it gives a complete, well-defined, and concrete solution for the single most important nontrivial classical configuration of the cubic open string field theory: the so-called closed string vacuum. Much like other people before him, Martin starts with identifying a convenient gauge-fixing of the huge open string gauge group. However, he finds a much more friendly and natural way to gauge-fix the symmetry. Instead of the Siegel gauge that requires the string field to be annihilated by "b0", Martin demands it to be annihilated by the zero mode of the "b"-antighost calculated in a different coordinate system. This smart trick allows him to get rid of the ghosts in a very cultural manner.
In a level-truncation scheme, he was able to figure out the numerical values of various coefficients needed for his state. It had to be exciting. For example, if he ever obtained -691/2730, he had to know: wow, this is the Bernoulli number B_{12} and we should look at this important sequence from mathematics more carefully. Bernoulli's numbers and the Euler-Maclaurin formula (an identity that represents the difference between a sum and an integral as an expansion involving the Bernoulli numbers) play a paramount role in Martin's proof - and he derives many fascinating related identities.
He also analytically proves Sen's conjecture about the energy density of the closed string vacuum.
Here at Harvard, we widely expect that Martin's paper will revive the interesting in cubic string field theory - at least a little bit. There should exist some extra solutions analogous to Martin's solution for the "closed string vacuum". While it remains likely that string field theory will remain an interesting formalism for perturbative string theory only - and it won't answer the physical questions we would like to see answered - it seems that string field theory got a new boost that makes it more mathematically interesting than we used to think.
What does Martin's solution look like?
Because it is not so easy to find what the solution actually is in the 60-page-long paper, let me tell you. First, define the wedge states |r> which satisfy the relation that
who is currently at CERN, Switzerland. Around 1998, Ashoke Sen conjectured that the open string tachyon may get a vev that corresponds to a complete annihilation of the D-brane onto which the open strings were attached. This predicts the energy density of this minimum of the tachyonic potential: it must be equal to minus the tension of the D-brane that has annihilated.
In the framework of boundary string field theory (BSFT), this fact has been proved by Kutasov, Marino, and Moore. Of course, there have always been almost complete physical arguments that assured us that no reasonable person had any serious doubts that Sen's conjecture - the second insight in science after the Higgs mechanism that shows that the tachyons are more than just an inconsistency - was correct.
The formalism of Witten's cubic string field theory of the Chern-Simons type is however much more well-defined than boundary string field theory. People wanted to verify Sen's conjecture in this cubic string field theory, too. They could have done so numerically and they obtained 99.9999% of the right value. Many other facts have been checked numerically, too. Many physicists also proposed various formal heuristic solutions and maps between the cubic string field theory and the boundary string field theory but it was usually hard to give these formulae a precise meaning.
An exact and rigorous proof was however missing, much like a well-defined formula for the vev's of all those scalar fields unified inside the string field.
At the very same time, many people studied wedge states, sliver states, and similar states that have a natural physical interpretation but that can also be expanded as states in the Fock space in a controllable fashion. Martin Schnabl became one of the five people in the world who were most familiar with these mathematical objects.
Martin's work is a breakthrough in our understanding of cubic string field theory because it gives a complete, well-defined, and concrete solution for the single most important nontrivial classical configuration of the cubic open string field theory: the so-called closed string vacuum. Much like other people before him, Martin starts with identifying a convenient gauge-fixing of the huge open string gauge group. However, he finds a much more friendly and natural way to gauge-fix the symmetry. Instead of the Siegel gauge that requires the string field to be annihilated by "b0", Martin demands it to be annihilated by the zero mode of the "b"-antighost calculated in a different coordinate system. This smart trick allows him to get rid of the ghosts in a very cultural manner.
In a level-truncation scheme, he was able to figure out the numerical values of various coefficients needed for his state. It had to be exciting. For example, if he ever obtained -691/2730, he had to know: wow, this is the Bernoulli number B_{12} and we should look at this important sequence from mathematics more carefully. Bernoulli's numbers and the Euler-Maclaurin formula (an identity that represents the difference between a sum and an integral as an expansion involving the Bernoulli numbers) play a paramount role in Martin's proof - and he derives many fascinating related identities.
He also analytically proves Sen's conjecture about the energy density of the closed string vacuum.
Here at Harvard, we widely expect that Martin's paper will revive the interesting in cubic string field theory - at least a little bit. There should exist some extra solutions analogous to Martin's solution for the "closed string vacuum". While it remains likely that string field theory will remain an interesting formalism for perturbative string theory only - and it won't answer the physical questions we would like to see answered - it seems that string field theory got a new boost that makes it more mathematically interesting than we used to think.
What does Martin's solution look like?
Because it is not so easy to find what the solution actually is in the 60-page-long paper, let me tell you. First, define the wedge states |r> which satisfy the relation that
- |r>*|s> = |r+s-1>
- |psi> = sum (n=0,infty) B_n ||n>>
Blackberry loses round in patent dispute
News: Mike Lazaridis, the founder of the Perimeter Institute and the company Research in Motion - that produces the e-mail mobile gadgets called BlackBerries - loses round in a patent dispute.
Upcoming Texas Democratic Candidate Events
Air America Radio's Al Franken takes his show on the road to Dallas this Friday, December 2 at the Hard Rock Cafe (2601 McKinney, 75204 for those of you in Big D). Guests include Texas Attorney General candidate David Van Os, US Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, and columnist Molly Ivins.
(Since Clear Channel hasn't yet been convinced to bring AAR to Houston, you can stream the broadcast live through your computer by clicking on the link above. David's interview with Al is scheduled to air at just after noon -- but since it's live radio that could change.)
David's Whistlestop Campaign Kickoff party is Saturday, December 3, at Austin's Barr Mansion. Jim Hightower is featured speaker. Music by Tres Lunas. Tickets are $50 and include a dinner buffet.
Barbara Radnofsky will file for election and hold a press conference on Monday, December 5 at the Democratic Party offices, 707 Rio Grande, in Austin at 2 p.m., where she will deliver her proposals for Texans' health care, education, and veterans' affairs. She'll also outline the Top Ten Cynical Anti-Texas positions her opponent, Kay Bailey Perjury Technicality Hutchison, has taken during the past year.
And Chris Bell will be appearing at the Galveston County Central Labor Council's Holiday Banquet on Tuesday December 6, at Fisherman's Wharf restaurant in the Strand, Galveston. The event starts with a social hour at 6 p.m., and the dinner program begins at 7. Congressional candidates Nick Lampson and Shane Sklar will also be speaking at the event.
Colbert report with Brian Greene
It's definitely intense fun and Brian Greene is doing a superb job.
Thanks to Joe Minahan for the tip. Colbert's show is somewhat similar to Bill O'Reilly's Factor, indeed. I was explained that it is a deliberate similarity.
Just like the Reference Frame argues that string theory is forced upon us by mother Nature in somewhat analogous way as the evolutionary framework in biology, and much like Peter Woit believes that string theory is just like Intelligent Design, Colbert says that Occam's Razor requires us to accept the simplest explanations of everything - and the simplest explanation of the real world is that it was created by God like that: click. Occam's razor proves that Intelligent Design is better than science.
That's slightly paradoxical because Stephen Colbert is the youngest among 11 children, and is therefore a walking experimental proof of M-theory: he's the M-theoretical circle at weak coupling, in fact.
Colbert yelled: "So I am a descendent of a monkey, right?" Finally, they came to the following exchange:
- Greene: Well, what we've come to learn is that the universe doesn't care about your tastes.
- Colbert: I don't care about the universe. The feeling is mutual.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Computation after 90th birthday
We just had a dinner to celebrate the Loeb lecturer, John Hopfield from Princeton, who bravely applies physical reasoning to neural networks and other models of the human brain.
There have been many interesting discussions during the dinner but I will only mention a couple of them. Howard Georgi allowed me to understand a bit better the pretty high score of our F-group in the last homework problem set assigned in my class. Thanks, Howard, for the help. ;-) Yes, F stands for "female". Two different homework assignments have been made for the two groups, and no one has yet called the New York Times, not even Howard himself. ;-)
Incidentally, my feeling after the class in the morning was that 160 minutes is simply too little to properly teach scattering, partial wave analysis including all of its limiting cases, Born approximation, including all the kinematical relations between amplitudes, cross sections, transition rates, time-dependent perturbation theory, and examples including the Yukawa and Coulomb potentials, spherical well, and 38 other issues. Moreover, these calculations in the old-fashioned quantum mechanics are sometimes even messier than in quantum field theory. I would probably reduce the amount of material related to these questions in the syllabus.
Tai Wu, a member of our band, joined my opinions about the Summers controversy and Noam Chomsky and other things. We chatted about the LHC, too. And no, C.S. Wu did not belong to his family.
Ursula Holliger (harp) described many things including the music critics. Of course, they're often annoying and they became critics because they could not become the musicians. Not surprisingly, the very same thing probably holds for the literary critics and the physics critics, too. ;-)
Chris Stubbs has finished reading Barton Zwiebach's book on string theory. Because he learned many things and was pleasantly surprised that the whole modern high energy theoretical physics is fully accessible to him, he actually thinks that every experimental physicist should learn string theory from this book. I am happy to report this experimental conclusion. :-)
Incidentally, Chu Xing who works in a factory in Hong Kong also studies Barton's book. Sometimes, he would find it helpful to know the answers to Barton's problems in the book; he informed me in the e-mail. When I had the pleasure to talk to Dr. Simon Capelin who may be credited for having published so many great physics books in the Cambridge University Press today in the afternoon, he agreed that Chu Xing should get the password to access the web page of Barton's book at the CUP's server. We will see this week whether Barton will agree. ;-) Good luck, Chu.
One of the crimes against the copyright (not humankind) I did in 1993 was to ask a librarian in Prague to xerox the superstring textbook by Green, Schwarz, and Witten for me. She did so! For 12 years, I could not sleep because I worried that the Cambridge University Press would eventually sue me. It turned out today that Dr. Capelin who published the book will probably forgive me this particular sin!
Norman Ramsey has told me many stories about the history of physics, his lectures on 9/11/2001 (the day of my PhD defense), the development of atomic clocks, negative temperatures of lasers, the most precise current experiments testing both special and general relativity, and his recent studies of string theory. He believes that the vacuum energy is gonna be an important question in physics for the years to come. Another very illuminating comment from him was about the changes of your approach to research when you're older than 90 years. Of course, when you're above 90, almost everything works easier than before. Just the short-term memory is slightly worse. When you need to finish some integral - that you otherwise do on the top of your head - with your calculator, it is sometimes a bit more difficult to remember what you want to type on your calculator. It is slightly more difficult than when you are young, e.g. about 85 years or so.
Well, what an impressive person. ;-)
In the afternoon, James Wells (Michigan) was explaining his children GUT constructions extending NMSSM but I will only mention the talk if I have really too much time tomorrow which is unlikely.
There have been many interesting discussions during the dinner but I will only mention a couple of them. Howard Georgi allowed me to understand a bit better the pretty high score of our F-group in the last homework problem set assigned in my class. Thanks, Howard, for the help. ;-) Yes, F stands for "female". Two different homework assignments have been made for the two groups, and no one has yet called the New York Times, not even Howard himself. ;-)
Incidentally, my feeling after the class in the morning was that 160 minutes is simply too little to properly teach scattering, partial wave analysis including all of its limiting cases, Born approximation, including all the kinematical relations between amplitudes, cross sections, transition rates, time-dependent perturbation theory, and examples including the Yukawa and Coulomb potentials, spherical well, and 38 other issues. Moreover, these calculations in the old-fashioned quantum mechanics are sometimes even messier than in quantum field theory. I would probably reduce the amount of material related to these questions in the syllabus.
Tai Wu, a member of our band, joined my opinions about the Summers controversy and Noam Chomsky and other things. We chatted about the LHC, too. And no, C.S. Wu did not belong to his family.
Ursula Holliger (harp) described many things including the music critics. Of course, they're often annoying and they became critics because they could not become the musicians. Not surprisingly, the very same thing probably holds for the literary critics and the physics critics, too. ;-)
Chris Stubbs has finished reading Barton Zwiebach's book on string theory. Because he learned many things and was pleasantly surprised that the whole modern high energy theoretical physics is fully accessible to him, he actually thinks that every experimental physicist should learn string theory from this book. I am happy to report this experimental conclusion. :-)
Incidentally, Chu Xing who works in a factory in Hong Kong also studies Barton's book. Sometimes, he would find it helpful to know the answers to Barton's problems in the book; he informed me in the e-mail. When I had the pleasure to talk to Dr. Simon Capelin who may be credited for having published so many great physics books in the Cambridge University Press today in the afternoon, he agreed that Chu Xing should get the password to access the web page of Barton's book at the CUP's server. We will see this week whether Barton will agree. ;-) Good luck, Chu.
One of the crimes against the copyright (not humankind) I did in 1993 was to ask a librarian in Prague to xerox the superstring textbook by Green, Schwarz, and Witten for me. She did so! For 12 years, I could not sleep because I worried that the Cambridge University Press would eventually sue me. It turned out today that Dr. Capelin who published the book will probably forgive me this particular sin!
Norman Ramsey has told me many stories about the history of physics, his lectures on 9/11/2001 (the day of my PhD defense), the development of atomic clocks, negative temperatures of lasers, the most precise current experiments testing both special and general relativity, and his recent studies of string theory. He believes that the vacuum energy is gonna be an important question in physics for the years to come. Another very illuminating comment from him was about the changes of your approach to research when you're older than 90 years. Of course, when you're above 90, almost everything works easier than before. Just the short-term memory is slightly worse. When you need to finish some integral - that you otherwise do on the top of your head - with your calculator, it is sometimes a bit more difficult to remember what you want to type on your calculator. It is slightly more difficult than when you are young, e.g. about 85 years or so.
Well, what an impressive person. ;-)
In the afternoon, James Wells (Michigan) was explaining his children GUT constructions extending NMSSM but I will only mention the talk if I have really too much time tomorrow which is unlikely.
Lurching toward theocratic fascism
Long before Dr. James Dobson forced Harriet Miers to withdraw from consideration for the Supreme Court, and long before Dick Cheney and the Big Oil kingpins had the minutes from their meetings sealed by the USSC after Cheney and Scalia went duck-hunting in Louisiana, I felt that the United States was heading down this ominous path. Two friends recently forwarded me some articles that prompt me to cobble together this post. Two excerpts follow, the first from Paul Bigioni:
=========================
Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: The vast bulk of legislative activity favours the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.
Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds the exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.
These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. "Yes," he replied, "but we will call it anti-fascism."
... Before the rise of fascism, Germany and Italy were, on paper, liberal democracies. Fascism did not swoop down on these nations as if from another planet. To the contrary, fascist dictatorship was the result of political and economic changes these nations underwent while they were still democratic. In both these countries, economic power became so utterly concentrated that the bulk of all economic activity fell under the control of a handful of men. Economic power, when sufficiently vast, becomes by its very nature political power. The political power of big business supported fascism in Italy and Germany.
Business tightened its grip on the state in both Italy and Germany by means of intricate webs of cartels and business associations. ... This was an era eerily like our own, insofar as economists and businessmen constantly clamoured for self-regulation in business. By the mid 1920s, however, self-regulation had become self-imposed regimentation. By means of monopoly and cartel, the businessmen had wrought for themselves a "command and control" economy that replaced the free market. The business associations of Italy and Germany at this time are perhaps history's most perfect illustration of Adam Smith's famous dictum: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
How could the German government not be influenced by Fritz Thyssen, the man who controlled most of Germany's coal production? How could it ignore the demands of the great I.G. Farben industrial trust, controlling as it did most of that nation's chemical production? Indeed, the German nation was bent to the will of these powerful industrial interests. Hitler attended to the reduction of taxes applicable to large businesses while simultaneously increasing the same taxes as they related to small business. Previous decrees establishing price ceilings were repealed such that the cost of living for the average family was increased. Hitler's economic policies hastened the destruction of Germany's middle class by decimating small business.
Ironically, Hitler pandered to the middle class, and they provided some of his most enthusiastically violent supporters. The fact that he did this while simultaneously destroying them was a terrible achievement of Nazi propaganda.
Hitler also destroyed organized labour by making strikes illegal. Notwithstanding the socialist terms in which he appealed to the masses, Hitler's labour policy was the dream come true of the industrial cartels that supported him. Nazi law gave total control over wages and working conditions to the employer.
...
The same economic reality existed in Italy between the two world wars. In that country, nearly all industrial activity was owned or controlled by a few corporate giants, Fiat and the Ansaldo shipping concern being the chief examples ... As a young man, Mussolini had been a strident socialist, and he, like Hitler, used socialist language to lure the people to fascism. Mussolini spoke of a "corporate" society wherein the energy of the people would not be wasted on class struggle. The entire economy was to be divided into industry specific corporazioni, bodies composed of both labour and management representatives. The corporazioni would resolve all labour/management disputes; if they failed to do so, the fascist state would intervene.
Unfortunately, as in Germany, there laid at the heart of this plan a swindle. The corporazioni, to the extent that they were actually put in place, were controlled by the employers. Together with Mussolini's ban on strikes, these measures reduced the Italian labourer to the status of peasant.
Mussolini, the one-time socialist, went on to abolish the inheritance tax, a measure that favoured the wealthy. He decreed a series of massive subsidies to Italy's largest industrial businesses and repeatedly ordered wage reductions. Italy's poor were forced to subsidize the wealthy. In real terms, wages and living standards for the average Italian dropped precipitously under fascism.
Even this brief historical sketch shows how fascism did the bidding of big business. The fact that Hitler called his party the "National Socialist Party" did not change the reactionary nature of his policies. The connection between the fascist dictatorships and monopoly capital was obvious to the U.S. Department of Justice in 1939. As of 2005, however, it is all but forgotten.
...
It might be argued that North America's democratic political systems are so entrenched that we needn't fear fascism's return. The democracies of Italy and Germany in the 1920s were in many respects fledgling and weak. Our systems will surely react at the first whiff of dictatorship.
Or will they? This argument denies the reality that the fascist dictatorships were preceded by years of reactionary politics, the kind of politics that are playing out today. Further, it is based on the conceit that whatever our own governments do is democracy. ... In the U.S., millions still question the legality of the sitting president's first election victory, and the power to declare war has effectively become his personal prerogative. Assuming that we have enough democracy to protect us is exactly the kind of complacency that allows our systems to be quietly and slowly perverted. On paper, Italy and Germany had constitutional, democratic systems. What they lacked was the eternal vigilance necessary to sustain them. That vigilance is also lacking today.
====================
And from Bill Wheeler, in an e-mail to me:
====================
======================================
Comments?
=========================
Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: The vast bulk of legislative activity favours the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.
Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds the exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.
These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. "Yes," he replied, "but we will call it anti-fascism."
... Before the rise of fascism, Germany and Italy were, on paper, liberal democracies. Fascism did not swoop down on these nations as if from another planet. To the contrary, fascist dictatorship was the result of political and economic changes these nations underwent while they were still democratic. In both these countries, economic power became so utterly concentrated that the bulk of all economic activity fell under the control of a handful of men. Economic power, when sufficiently vast, becomes by its very nature political power. The political power of big business supported fascism in Italy and Germany.
Business tightened its grip on the state in both Italy and Germany by means of intricate webs of cartels and business associations. ... This was an era eerily like our own, insofar as economists and businessmen constantly clamoured for self-regulation in business. By the mid 1920s, however, self-regulation had become self-imposed regimentation. By means of monopoly and cartel, the businessmen had wrought for themselves a "command and control" economy that replaced the free market. The business associations of Italy and Germany at this time are perhaps history's most perfect illustration of Adam Smith's famous dictum: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
How could the German government not be influenced by Fritz Thyssen, the man who controlled most of Germany's coal production? How could it ignore the demands of the great I.G. Farben industrial trust, controlling as it did most of that nation's chemical production? Indeed, the German nation was bent to the will of these powerful industrial interests. Hitler attended to the reduction of taxes applicable to large businesses while simultaneously increasing the same taxes as they related to small business. Previous decrees establishing price ceilings were repealed such that the cost of living for the average family was increased. Hitler's economic policies hastened the destruction of Germany's middle class by decimating small business.
Ironically, Hitler pandered to the middle class, and they provided some of his most enthusiastically violent supporters. The fact that he did this while simultaneously destroying them was a terrible achievement of Nazi propaganda.
Hitler also destroyed organized labour by making strikes illegal. Notwithstanding the socialist terms in which he appealed to the masses, Hitler's labour policy was the dream come true of the industrial cartels that supported him. Nazi law gave total control over wages and working conditions to the employer.
...
The same economic reality existed in Italy between the two world wars. In that country, nearly all industrial activity was owned or controlled by a few corporate giants, Fiat and the Ansaldo shipping concern being the chief examples ... As a young man, Mussolini had been a strident socialist, and he, like Hitler, used socialist language to lure the people to fascism. Mussolini spoke of a "corporate" society wherein the energy of the people would not be wasted on class struggle. The entire economy was to be divided into industry specific corporazioni, bodies composed of both labour and management representatives. The corporazioni would resolve all labour/management disputes; if they failed to do so, the fascist state would intervene.
Unfortunately, as in Germany, there laid at the heart of this plan a swindle. The corporazioni, to the extent that they were actually put in place, were controlled by the employers. Together with Mussolini's ban on strikes, these measures reduced the Italian labourer to the status of peasant.
Mussolini, the one-time socialist, went on to abolish the inheritance tax, a measure that favoured the wealthy. He decreed a series of massive subsidies to Italy's largest industrial businesses and repeatedly ordered wage reductions. Italy's poor were forced to subsidize the wealthy. In real terms, wages and living standards for the average Italian dropped precipitously under fascism.
Even this brief historical sketch shows how fascism did the bidding of big business. The fact that Hitler called his party the "National Socialist Party" did not change the reactionary nature of his policies. The connection between the fascist dictatorships and monopoly capital was obvious to the U.S. Department of Justice in 1939. As of 2005, however, it is all but forgotten.
...
It might be argued that North America's democratic political systems are so entrenched that we needn't fear fascism's return. The democracies of Italy and Germany in the 1920s were in many respects fledgling and weak. Our systems will surely react at the first whiff of dictatorship.
Or will they? This argument denies the reality that the fascist dictatorships were preceded by years of reactionary politics, the kind of politics that are playing out today. Further, it is based on the conceit that whatever our own governments do is democracy. ... In the U.S., millions still question the legality of the sitting president's first election victory, and the power to declare war has effectively become his personal prerogative. Assuming that we have enough democracy to protect us is exactly the kind of complacency that allows our systems to be quietly and slowly perverted. On paper, Italy and Germany had constitutional, democratic systems. What they lacked was the eternal vigilance necessary to sustain them. That vigilance is also lacking today.
====================
And from Bill Wheeler, in an e-mail to me:
====================
The first of the Dixiecrats to leave the Democratic Party in 1948 took place when the Democrats would not remove a plank in the platform calling for an integrated military. Jesse Helms formed the Dixiecrat Party and ran for President that year. He later moved on to the Republican Party who accepted him and all others of his ilk with open arms.
In the South they were called the ‘yellow dog’ Democrats because it was said that if they ran an old yellow dog against any Republican, they would still vote for the dog. Now they’re Republicans. Mostly made up of neo-Nazi, KKK, white supremacists, paramilitary and conservative religious fanatics, they joined the far right conservative, John Birch Sociey wing of the Republican Party. Their movement grew slowly in the fifties, gained speed in the 60’s and 70’s. At best, they could be described as social conservatives or, in my view, social misfits.
They became the ‘swing vote’ that started changing the face of Congress and the national political scene. This is when the likes of Trent Lott and Phil Gramm went ‘over’. The old conservative social Democrats would accept the traditional Republican adherence to Big Business; in return, the Republicans would accept them as the petty bourgeoisie with their social hatreds.
I explain this political movement not as a long journey from the politically extreme left to the extreme right; but as one short step. How? The political dichotomies, in my view, form a continuum not along a straight line left and right but rather as a clock face, where moderates or centrists are located at 6:00 and the extreme right and left wings converge at 12:00. With this in mind, it is easy to see that it is but a small step from totalitarian left to totalitarian right. There is not much difference in these extremes except their social standings.
Leon Trotsky called both of these enigmas of mankind ‘fascist’. The right wing corporate conservative unites with the petty bourgeoisie left wing social (usually religious) conservatives. He called left wingers “social democrats” and “social fascists”.
Once the petty bourgeoisie were compelled to change course, they were employed to fight the street battles, to get bloody, and take the risks. This is just what the Republican Party needed, an Army – not in this case to fight a war but to win the battle at the polls.
Trotsky wrote:
“the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role -- but it means first of all for the most part that the workers' organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism....”
Trotsky further wrote:
“After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives.”
And finally:
======================================
Comments?
Monday, November 28, 2005
HCDP has a new Director
Meet my buddy Melissa Taylor, who was just named the new Director of Party Administration for the Harris County Democratic Party.
I've known Melissa since we both rode the bus to Crawford on the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in March of 2004. She was *ahem* slightly active in Howard Dean's presidential campaign, was the volunteer coordinator for Richard Morrison's congressional run last year, and has recently served on the steering committee of Democracy for Houston.
Melissa's task -- and she is more than qualified to accomplish it -- is to improve upon some of the following numbers:
Harris County, with a population of 3.6 million people, is larger than 24 states and the District of Columbia. It covers 1,777 square miles and has 913 precincts. In 2004 58% of its 1.8 million registered voters cast ballots in the general election, and 45% of those votes were for John Kerry.
This county -- the second most populous in the United States -- is already purple, and with a little extra work is going to turn blue in 2006.
Congratulations Melissa. Let's kick some Republican ass in 2006 -- and beyond.
Royal society: ban science on the web
The Royal Society - i.e. the British Academy of Sciences - has warned that "making research freely available on the internet could harm the scientific debate". It could even lower the profits of printed journals, the society predicts, especially of the non-profit journals. :-) The Royal Society is fully committed to the preservation of the reptiles.
A free access to scientific results on the internet could also threaten feudalism itself and the leading role of the royal family in the world. Instead, the internet may encourage heretics. Prince Charles agrees that science and technology are dangerous. He expressed concern that economic progress is "upsetting the whole balance of nature." In another interview, he said that "if you make everything over efficient, you suck out, it seems to me, every last drop of what, up to now, has been known as culture."
Some observers have pointed out that Charles may have especially referred to one of the royal colonial territories where a few anarchic elements have been trying to become independent for 229 years.
Her eminence Camilla, Duches of Cornwall, also said Her excellence husband was worried about the importance of technology in modern life. He is afraid that the computers who should be our "slaves" could become the "masters" and replace the royal family.
While Prince Charles remains one of the intellectual and spiritual leaders of the modern, post-crucification world and one of the most famous crusaders against the pernicious sins called science, technology, global warming, the Internet, and the emerging political and economic trend called capitalism, he remains very modest. In previously released excerpts of the CBS interview, Charles said he was concerned about being seen as irrelevant:
A free access to scientific results on the internet could also threaten feudalism itself and the leading role of the royal family in the world. Instead, the internet may encourage heretics. Prince Charles agrees that science and technology are dangerous. He expressed concern that economic progress is "upsetting the whole balance of nature." In another interview, he said that "if you make everything over efficient, you suck out, it seems to me, every last drop of what, up to now, has been known as culture."
Some observers have pointed out that Charles may have especially referred to one of the royal colonial territories where a few anarchic elements have been trying to become independent for 229 years.
Her eminence Camilla, Duches of Cornwall, also said Her excellence husband was worried about the importance of technology in modern life. He is afraid that the computers who should be our "slaves" could become the "masters" and replace the royal family.
While Prince Charles remains one of the intellectual and spiritual leaders of the modern, post-crucification world and one of the most famous crusaders against the pernicious sins called science, technology, global warming, the Internet, and the emerging political and economic trend called capitalism, he remains very modest. In previously released excerpts of the CBS interview, Charles said he was concerned about being seen as irrelevant:
- "The most important thing is to be relevant ... It isn't easy, as you can imagine ... because if you say anything, people will say, 'It's all right for you to say that.' It's very easy to just dismiss anything I say. ... It's difficult," the heir to the British throne said.
I hope that a special article at The Reference Frame will convince Prince Charles that he is relevant, indeed. Moreover, it's all right for him to say whatever he wants, especially if it improves his health and good mood. The same rules apply to all members of the Bohnice Institute and Charles deserves at least the same standards.
With all of my respect and admiration for the priviliged genes of His Excellence and His Relevance, Luboš, a vassal
Abramoff, Scanlon, Suncruz, and Elmore Leonard
Josh Marshall just keeps pulling on the loose threads (and so does the Justice Department):
You know that when the casino boat line SunCruz was owned by Jack Abramoff and Adam Kidan, the company paid the men who blew away SunCruz founder Gus Boulis.Now it turns out they also had the company pay the National Republican Congressional Committee (the House GOP election committee) $10,000 on behalf of Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH). That was in exchange for Ney's putting anti-Boulis remarks in the congressional record that helped Abramoff and Kidan pressure Boulis to sell them SunCruz.
The guy who helped arrange Ney's anti-Boulis-trash-talking and the later pay-off was none other than Mike Scanlon, who later did public relations work for SunCruz, in addition to going into the Indian gaming bilking biz with SunCruz owner Abramoff.
Scanlon is the guy who just agreed to testify against, well ... everybody in the Abramoff cases.
Complicated? Hey, don't blame us! We didn't tell them to go out and live an Elmore Leonard novel.
As Glenn Reynolds would say: "Heh."
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Don Page & death of de Sitter
A. V. Yurov and his mirror image, V. A. Yurov have a very provocative paper attempting to reconcile the conjectured lifetime of the KKLT de Sitter vacua calculated from the low-energy effective field theory - this lifetime is not too far from the recurrence time and let's call it a "googolplex" - with the much shorter lifetime of our Universe comparable to a mere "googol" that was recently advocated by Don Page and his even more provocative paper. ;-)
Let me emphasize at the beginning that although I find the KKLT estimates somewhat uncertain, they are definitely much less speculative than anything I am gonna describe in this text.
Don Page argues that if our Universe approaches the de Sitter exponential cosmological expansion with the currently likely value of the vacuum energy, then its lifetime should be shorter than 10^{50} years or so. Why? Because if the lifetime were longer, then - I kid you not - most of our perceptions (such as the feelings of our brains expressed by a complicated projection operator onto a state of your brain) would usually occur because of random vacuum fluctuations.
Technically speaking, the projection operators onto states of our brains that we use to decide whether we have perceived something or not would have a non-zero expectation value (the probability) just because of the thermal de Sitter fluctuations, roughly speaking, and because the total probability is proportional to the spacetime four-volume, a perception would have to occur just by a chance as long as the total four-volume is large enough.
Vacuum fluctuations are unlikely to create a happy person who just sees Jesus Christ walking on the water, but if the lifetime of the Universe is long enough (longer than Don Page's upper bound), it will eventually happen. Obviously, the Universe around us does not seem to be a random fluctuation from the vacuum because it seems to be much more ordered and well-behaved. Don Page believes that the previous sentence implies that our Universe should die in less than 10^{50} years.
I think that the argument is entertaining but it is hard for me to convince myself to treat it seriously. It is an argument showing how far the anthropic and similar thinking can go. If we see an ordered Universe today, does it imply something disastrous about our world's future 10^{50} years from now? If there is such a link, does not it violate causality?
I can't use Don Page's argument because the projection operators that I use to define the states of my brain differ from his operators. My projection operators require the brain not only to look like a brain for 0.15 seconds in the volume of a few liters but they also require the past of my environment to qualitatively look like a decent evolution on a decent planet that makes sense. The probability for these things to occur as vacuum fluctuations is closer to the inverse googolplex than the inverse googol and Don Page's bound is breached. If these features are not satisfied, the vacuum fluctuation is annihilated by the projector because it is simply not my brain.
This is how I define my brain and its feelings. Everyone is allowed to define her brain projection operators in any way she wants. ;-)
On the other hand, the people who define the projectors for their brains without the careful definitions of the acceptable history won't face any contradictions either. Indeed, the people with these projectors identifying the states of their brains will mostly find themselves in a chaotic environment that does not make sense. Because they are not careful about the past of their brains prior to the measurement, they either find their brains mostly within a meaningless vacuum fluctuation, or under the influence of drugs. The perceptions are virtually identical in both cases.
The lesson is that one must be careful about LSD and about a proper definition of his or her identity if we want to avoid unphysical upper bounds on the lifetime of the Universe and if we want to avoid lives suffered in disordered perceptions that don't make any sense.
More seriously, I think that Don Page's calculation is simply flawed because the expectation value of a projector that identifies a particular brain is of order exp(-10^{26}) because 10^{26} particles must be arranged in a way that makes up a brain; the entropy of a brain is comparable to 10^{-26} and it must be exponentiated to get an estimate that the brain appears randomly. When the size of the brain is sent to the de Sitter horizon radius, the corresponding correctly calculated "upper bound" on the lifetime should approach the recurrence time.
The number mentioned in the middle of the previous paragraph would be even more drastic if I created the brain out of de Sitter thermal fluctuations. At any rate, the probability for a whole brain to emerge as a vacuum fluctuation is closer to an inverse googolplex, and correspondingly, the required spacetime volume in which the weird conclusions could be found is closer to googolplex itself, not a googol!
I tend to think that even this googolplex upper bound on the allowed lifetime of the Universe is unphysical - but this kind of science is little bit too far from the kind of science that has been tested and I would prefer to take neither of these arguments too seriously. Do we have the right to use the word "physics" for any speculation about the time scales such as 10^{50} years or even 10^{10^{50}} years?
Yurov and Yurov reach a similar conclusion (the bounds of Don Page should be raised dramatically) as my not-quite-serious argument about a not-too-serious topic above, and moreover, they think that they find evidence for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics as a by-product. ;-) Well, this is how it looks like when physics studied by pure thought gets out of control.
Let me emphasize at the beginning that although I find the KKLT estimates somewhat uncertain, they are definitely much less speculative than anything I am gonna describe in this text.
Don Page argues that if our Universe approaches the de Sitter exponential cosmological expansion with the currently likely value of the vacuum energy, then its lifetime should be shorter than 10^{50} years or so. Why? Because if the lifetime were longer, then - I kid you not - most of our perceptions (such as the feelings of our brains expressed by a complicated projection operator onto a state of your brain) would usually occur because of random vacuum fluctuations.
Technically speaking, the projection operators onto states of our brains that we use to decide whether we have perceived something or not would have a non-zero expectation value (the probability) just because of the thermal de Sitter fluctuations, roughly speaking, and because the total probability is proportional to the spacetime four-volume, a perception would have to occur just by a chance as long as the total four-volume is large enough.
Vacuum fluctuations are unlikely to create a happy person who just sees Jesus Christ walking on the water, but if the lifetime of the Universe is long enough (longer than Don Page's upper bound), it will eventually happen. Obviously, the Universe around us does not seem to be a random fluctuation from the vacuum because it seems to be much more ordered and well-behaved. Don Page believes that the previous sentence implies that our Universe should die in less than 10^{50} years.
I think that the argument is entertaining but it is hard for me to convince myself to treat it seriously. It is an argument showing how far the anthropic and similar thinking can go. If we see an ordered Universe today, does it imply something disastrous about our world's future 10^{50} years from now? If there is such a link, does not it violate causality?
I can't use Don Page's argument because the projection operators that I use to define the states of my brain differ from his operators. My projection operators require the brain not only to look like a brain for 0.15 seconds in the volume of a few liters but they also require the past of my environment to qualitatively look like a decent evolution on a decent planet that makes sense. The probability for these things to occur as vacuum fluctuations is closer to the inverse googolplex than the inverse googol and Don Page's bound is breached. If these features are not satisfied, the vacuum fluctuation is annihilated by the projector because it is simply not my brain.
This is how I define my brain and its feelings. Everyone is allowed to define her brain projection operators in any way she wants. ;-)
On the other hand, the people who define the projectors for their brains without the careful definitions of the acceptable history won't face any contradictions either. Indeed, the people with these projectors identifying the states of their brains will mostly find themselves in a chaotic environment that does not make sense. Because they are not careful about the past of their brains prior to the measurement, they either find their brains mostly within a meaningless vacuum fluctuation, or under the influence of drugs. The perceptions are virtually identical in both cases.
The lesson is that one must be careful about LSD and about a proper definition of his or her identity if we want to avoid unphysical upper bounds on the lifetime of the Universe and if we want to avoid lives suffered in disordered perceptions that don't make any sense.
More seriously, I think that Don Page's calculation is simply flawed because the expectation value of a projector that identifies a particular brain is of order exp(-10^{26}) because 10^{26} particles must be arranged in a way that makes up a brain; the entropy of a brain is comparable to 10^{-26} and it must be exponentiated to get an estimate that the brain appears randomly. When the size of the brain is sent to the de Sitter horizon radius, the corresponding correctly calculated "upper bound" on the lifetime should approach the recurrence time.
The number mentioned in the middle of the previous paragraph would be even more drastic if I created the brain out of de Sitter thermal fluctuations. At any rate, the probability for a whole brain to emerge as a vacuum fluctuation is closer to an inverse googolplex, and correspondingly, the required spacetime volume in which the weird conclusions could be found is closer to googolplex itself, not a googol!
I tend to think that even this googolplex upper bound on the allowed lifetime of the Universe is unphysical - but this kind of science is little bit too far from the kind of science that has been tested and I would prefer to take neither of these arguments too seriously. Do we have the right to use the word "physics" for any speculation about the time scales such as 10^{50} years or even 10^{10^{50}} years?
Yurov and Yurov reach a similar conclusion (the bounds of Don Page should be raised dramatically) as my not-quite-serious argument about a not-too-serious topic above, and moreover, they think that they find evidence for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics as a by-product. ;-) Well, this is how it looks like when physics studied by pure thought gets out of control.
Sounds like a plan (but it may just be a flip-flop)
Dick Cheney said this just a week ago:
That was in response, of course, to Rep. John Murtha's call for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
The LA Times reported this yesterday:
And then there was this (in response to this op-ed piece by Joe Biden in the Washington Post, also yesterday):
A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be a victory for the terrorists, an invitation to further violence against free nations, and a terrible blow to the future security of the United States of America.
That was in response, of course, to Rep. John Murtha's call for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
The LA Times reported this yesterday:
President Bush will give a major speech Wednesday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in which aides say he is expected to herald the improved readiness of Iraqi troops, which he has identified as the key condition for pulling out U.S. forces…The developments seemed to lay the groundwork for potentially large withdrawals in 2006 and 2007…
And then there was this (in response to this op-ed piece by Joe Biden in the Washington Post, also yesterday):
The White House for the first time has claimed possession of an Iraq withdrawal plan, arguing that a troop pullout blueprint unveiled this past week by a Democratic senator was "remarkably similar" to its own.
It also signaled its acceptance of a recent US Senate amendment designed to pave the way for a phased US military withdrawal from the violence-torn country. ...
In the White House statement, which was released under the headline "Senator Biden Adopts Key Portions Of Administration's Plan For Victory In Iraq," McClellan said the administration of President George W. Bush welcomed Biden's voice in the debate."Today, Senator Biden described a plan remarkably similar to the administration's plan to fight and win the war on terror," the spokesman went on to say.
McClellan added that as Iraqi security forces gain strength and experience, "we can lessen our troop presence in the country without losing our capability to effectively defeat the terrorists," and also said the White House now saw "a strong consensus" building in Washington in favor of Bush's strategy in Iraq.
You may recall that McClellan -- less than two weeks ago -- blasted Murtha for calling for an immediate pullout of troops, accusing him of "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore".
So let's review:
Two weeks ago Republicans were calling Democrats cowards for advocating troop withdrawal from Iraq -- and voted 403-3 against doing so -- and next week there will be a plan announced by the President to withdraw troops from Iraq. A plan heretofore unknown, but is "remarkably similar" to a Democrat's plan.
Would that be considered a flip-flop?
Is bringing the troops home a bad idea only if someone other than Bush suggests it?
Discrete physics
One of the "great" ideas that are being proposed billions of times every day is the idea that the fundamental physical laws of Nature are "discrete". The world is resembling a binary computer - or at least a quantum computer, we're being told very often. "Discrete physics" even has its own USENET newsgroup "sci.physics.discrete" which has fortunately been completely silent since it was created. Various games and "types of atoms" that are supposed to produce spacetime at the Planck scale are even sold as "alternatives to string theory".
I am among those who are convinced that every single proposal based on the idea that "the fundamental entities must be discrete" has so far transparently been a crackpot fantasy. What's wrong with all of them?
Both discrete and continuous mathematics matter
First of all, both discrete as well as continuous mathematical structures are important for actual reasoning and calculations in physics and not only in physics. We just need both of these categories of tools and theorems. Many people who like to say that only one of them may be fundamental are usually the people who don't know the other set of insights well enough - or they don't know it all. And they don't want to learn it. Instead, they want to promote a "theory" that implies that it is good if you don't learn it. In other words, they ignore at least one half of the basic math that is needed for physics.
Discrete and continuous concepts are related
Second of all, there are many deep relations between discrete and continuous objects, or between combinatorics and calculus. The Riemann zeta function is a completely continuous function of a complex variable. Nevertheless, it knows more or less everything about the distribution of prime integers. There are many other examples like that in mathematics and even a bigger number of them may be found in theoretical physics.
Knots in three dimensions are discrete objects, too; nevertheless, their properties are encoded in correlators of operators in Chern-Simons theory. The Gromov-Witten invariants and other integers associated with manifolds and their topology that seem to be completely combinatorial in their character may be derived from another continuous theory, namely topological string theory. The integer degeneracies in many contexts are calculated as coefficients in generating functions that are, once again, completely continuous.
Crackpots are almost always discrete
The proof of Fermat's last theorem - a theorem that has attracted so many crackpots exactly because it looks so simple (and discrete) - is essentially based on geometry and smooth objects, too. Riemann's hypothesis has attracted many less crackpots - despite the $1,000,000 award from the Clay Institute. It's because most crackpots are discrete, zero-dimensional objects.
The mathematical insights that allow us to derive many "combinatorial" conclusions from analytical considerations, continuous functions, properties and equations defined over smooth manifolds etc. have been important at least for 200 years. As time goes, the fundamental concepts that underlie a significant part of our knowledge of mathematics and mathematical physics become continuous in character. The discrete features and integers are increasingly integrated into increasingly continuous structures. The combinatorial concepts are being integrated with geometry.
Modern history of continuous dominance
Both the 19th century as well as the 20th century have escalated and accelerated this process. The discrete, point-like particles in classical mechanics were largely replaced by continuous fields in the 19th century. Although new discrete processes and objects were observed later, their complete description always happened to be a continuous one.
The "old" quantum theory with its model of the Hydrogen atom from Niels Bohr became a childish game when the "new" quantum mechanics was constructed. The correct picture that explains the quantization of energies may be defined in terms of a continuous wavefunction. Shockingly enough, the eigenfunctions of a Hermitean operator may form a discrete set. Also, there still existed discrete particles. Nevertheless, it turned out that they were again manifestations of a discrete spectrum of a completely continuously defined operator in quantum field theory where it acts on a completely continuous Hilbert space.
The more and the deeper we understand something, the more continuous and geometric the fundamental objects underlying our descriptions become. The previous sentence is more or less a tautology for objects: "objects" only look "discrete" when we describe them in a superficial manner, without looking into their structure. The discrete social security number is only a good description of a person for those who are not interested about anything else connected with the person.
String theory continues in the same direction. In quantum field theories, the identity of elementary particles - and their charges and masses - were discrete in character. There were dozens of types of "matter" in the Standard Model. In string theory, there is only one type of matter and the discrete choices only emerge as properties of eigenstates of another Hamiltonian. Also, many "discrete" phenomena and features of low-energy physics are provided with a geometric interpretation and realization emerging from string theory; it often involves additional dimensions of space.
Future: more geometric
I find it rather obvious that this process will have to continue if we continue to make progress in our understanding of the fundamental mathematics underlying the laws of the Universe. All kinds of discreteness will have to be derived from a starting point that is rather continuous. A new kind of fuzziness, non-commutativity will be introduced to our physical laws while keeping them quantitative and predictive. Try to look for discrete objects and choices that are used in our current laws of physics and string theory in particular; they must be explained by a deeper principle that is inherently continuous and geometric, where the word "geometry" is used in a generalized sense.
Discreteness is always a derived concept if you look carefully enough. Discreteness is emergent if you wish; it can never be quite fundamental.
Even though the previous paragraphs were mostly about the future, I have also emphasized that the same kind of progress has been dominant in mathematics and theoretical physics at least for 200 years. This is why I am so flabbergasted by the huge number of people who seem to be interested in maths and physics but who have not yet realized what the trend has been for two centuries and who find their childish "discrete" theories so sexy.
As far as I can say, neither of these theories had anything to do with physics. What do I mean by physics? I mean the actual phenomena that we observe in Nature and their mathematical description that always happens to be quite unique. Examples? The Hydrogen atom. Other atoms. Chemistry. Newton's laws. The Lorentz invariance, the translational invariance, the rotational invariance, the required gauge symmetries and diffeomorphisms - all of them being continuous symmetries. Superconductors. Particle scattering. Radioactive decay. The laws of quantum field theory and general relativity into which we must embed the previous theories to agree with all the observed phenomena. String theory that is absolutely needed if we want to agree with quantum field theories as well as general relativity within a unified framework.
The "discrete geniuses" don't care about a single among these experimental constraints. Frankly speaking, their theories may have been silly even in the ancient Rome. They resemble Maxwell's pathetic and totally redundant models of aether from the 19th century - whose naivité was truly understood only when Einstein wrote down his special relativity, after appreciating insights by Hendrik Lorentz (who understood that only one electric and only one magnetic vector exists at each point and even in vacuum) - except that Maxwell's model of the luminiferous aether at least could agree with Maxwell's equations - and FitzGerald has actually constructed a working model out of many gears and wheels.
Modern "aether geniuses"
The modern "aether geniuses" don't care about a single physical effect in the list above or many other lists for that matter and they don't even try to construct the models because they probably know very well that they could not work. (The worse among them don't even care about quantum mechanics.) They may propose a theory that the Universe looks like LEGO or a binary computer or a binary quantum computer with a few operations. And they expect others to believe that all of physics will miraculously be reproduced. The Lorentz invariance will suddenly emerge without any reason (or maybe after a few (?) parameters of their LEGO building blocks are adjusted); the atoms will also emerge and they will have the right spectra. Gravity suddenly starts to act according to Einstein's laws. Why not? They have the great idea, don't they? The Universe is just like a simplified model of Commodore 64 - that's exactly what you need to revolutionize all of science.
A technical paragraph: Jacques Distler seems to be confused by my statement that the Lorentz symmetry can never emerge without a good reason, and his example is lattice QCD, apparently in Euclidean spacetime (and he apparently assumes some discrete symmetries that are nearly equivalent to the Euclidean Lorentz symmetry). I am talking about the actual "SO(d-1,1)" Lorentz symmetry in the Minkowski space. If you start with a non-Lorentz-invariant theory, there is a separate dimensional analysis for operators with respect to the scaling of time and the scaling of space. You definitely cannot derive that the IR limit is Lorentz-invariant for a generic non-relativistic field theory, and if Jacques ever did so, it's only because he already assumed the Lorentz invariance - a symmetry between space and time - from the beginning. The best thing that can happen is a theory with different speeds of light for different particles where a finite number of IR parameters must be adjusted. This is however not the case if you start with a generic non-relativistic theory. Then there are infinitely many fine-tunings needed for all the operators with arbitrarily many spatial derivatives (equivalently, in the language of lattice theories, with new interactions that are less local). Infinitely many miracles are needed to get a Lorentz-invariant theory from a generic non-relativistic interacting theory. You can only get to the point where the number of terms to adjust is finite if you assume that the theory will be a small perturbation of a Lorentz-invariant theory (and therefore the relativistic dimensional analysis is applicable), and it's simply not a right assumption when you start with a generic non-relativistic theory.
God is just like Lord Sinclair except that God is a bit more lazy so He created a simpler computer. At any rate, deep mathematics is certainly not needed. Every ordinary person may understand the "theory of everything", they believe. All the sins of physics between 1905 and 2005 - that have made physics counterinuitive and too abstract for the farmers - will be undone, they seem to think.
Can this kind of simplicity be a selection criterion in physics? Certainly not. Nature does not care how much time we need to spend to understand some of Her fancy concepts. Nature is simple but the simplicity is only revealed once we accept Her rules of the game. The laymen's "psychological" feelings of simplicity have nothing to do whatsoever with the kind of "beauty" that has become a good guide in the search for new and better theories. As the Russian physicist Okuň once said, "Prostoj prostoty něbůdět." There will no longer be any simple simplicity.
Do they really believe it?
Whenever I see these proposals that Nature must be a simple discrete system and everything else will hopefully work, it's hard to avoid the obvious question: have they completely lost their mind? In 2005, a usable theory must agree with billions of observations, and indeed, the Standard Model and General Relativity do agree with them. What miracle makes it happen? It's because the Standard Model and General Relativity satisfy many important principles that more or less imply the right physics, at least qualitatively - because the laws of mathematics are pretty strict if these principles are taken seriously. The principles are often almost enough to choose the right track or even the right theory.
Principles of physics matter
The Lorentz invariance of our theories guarantees that millions of properties of the actual collider observations will match with reality. The postulates of quantum mechanics are needed to agree with millions of experiments and many of their common features. Quantum mechanics plus special relativity implies that physics must look much like quantum field theory.
Quantum field theory only allows some types of fields and a very small number of relevant and marginal interactions. This simple classification of interactions is only possible because of a symmetry between space and time. When you think about the possibilities, there are not too many and because the principles are apparently right, our theories agree with experiments. A similar comment would apply to General Relativity, too. One just can't throw QFT and GR into the garbage bin. It is absolutely critical for any theory that is meant as a fundamental theory to reproduce the successful features of GR and QFT. It can be shown to be the case of many dual descriptions of reality that emerge from string theory even though some of these facts could seem like fascinating miracles at the beginning; and it can easily be shown not to be the case for all other "alternatives", especially the "discrete alternatives", that have ever been proposed as of November 2005.
But the "discrete geniuses" won't ever listen. They don't want to hear a 30-second proof that their theories can't work. This is not about any rational debates. The Discrete Universe is one of the postmodern religions. Why are there so many believers? The expansion of the computer industry may offer a clue.
Miracles in a discrete world
The Lorentz invariance of a generic interacting theory can never "emerge" accidentally from a starting point that is not Lorentz-invariant. The only reason how why it should emerge is that we could prove that it does - for example, because the theory is exactly equivalent to a manifestly Lorentz-invariant theory. This is the case of Matrix theory or the large N limit of the AdS/CFT correspondence where the Lorentz invariance is not manifest but in the appropriate large N limits, it appears because of the equivalence with a manifestly Lorentz-invariant description of the same physics.
But assuming that it will happen in a random discrete theory due to some miracle, without having a single rational reason why it should happen or why the discrete model should have anything to do with reality, makes Intelligent Design look like a highly reasonable up-to-date scientific theory in comparison.
It's just completely unreasonable to assume that a random, cheap, and childish discrete toy model will give you the Lorentz invariance, the physics of GR, the right atomic spectra, or the Standard Model. It's not only silly because it is too optimistic; we have dozens of rigorously proved theorems that show that such things can't work. String theory is able to circumvent many of these theorems because it is a very sophisticated theory that only differs from quantum field theories in very subtle ways. But the naive discrete models simply can't evade these theorems. The theorems were constructed to kill these silly theories, and they did so. I am aware that the first sentence of this paragraph implicitly says that thousands of people who are viewed as "alternative physicists" are completely unreasonable, and indeed, I don't think that their large number makes their opinions more justifiable.
The discrete religion can't be killed
At any rate, we will be hearing these things again and again because they have become a part of the "postmodern" era. The Universe is like an "Intel 8080" microprocessor or a simple type of a quantum computer with two or three gates. The Universe is a discrete history of tetrahedrons, dodecahedrons, or any Platonic polyhedra you can think about. The Lorentz invariance, gauge symmetries, diffeomorphism symmetries, chiral interactions, or the Higgs mechanism don't matter.
They will surely work out properly if the basic idea - namely the idea that the Universe is a simple computer that a mediocre geek can comprehend (but an idea that unfortunately does not have the tiniest glimpse of being realized in Nature) - is accepted and promoted to a new dogma. There will be a growing pressure on all of us to treat the "discrete geniuses" as physicists and never mention that we believe that they are really morons. This is simply how this postmodern era works.
Once again, I think that the statement that the proponents of Intelligent Design are less reasonable or more religious than the proponents of "discrete theory solves it all" hypotheses is a politically motivated and biased assertion. They're on the same level. Both of them may be described as pseudoscientific garbage that attempts to deny virtually everything we have learned in science (physics or biology) in the last 200 years. Both of them need a huge, rationally unjustifiable belief that seems to contradict everything we know and that is only supported by the dogmas themselves - dogmas that have seen no contact with the observable world whatsoever.
What has provoked me to write this rant?
I was asked what I thought about Seth Lloyd's ideas about quantum gravity. Seth Lloyd is a great expert in quantum computing whom many of us admire. In a slightly popular paper, he argued that the Universe can only have about 10^{90} bits. Well, today we believe that it is probably above 10^{100} because of the black holes at the galactic centers: the microwave background no longer dominates the entropy of the Universe. But except for this detail, Lloyd's statement is OK. We call the information "entropy" (up to a "ln(2)" factor) - and it is probably the only quantity discussed by Lloyd that can be defined in physics.
But he also talks about the upper bound of 10^{120} of "operations" (the term is being imported from computer science) that could have been done in the Universe. I am convinced that no one has ever defined an "operation" of the Universe. (It could be a spacetime path-integral counterpart of the coarse-grained entropy formula but I remain skeptical that it is possible at all.)
On the contrary, I am convinced that they can only be defined in systems that approximately behave as binary (or other discrete) computers and where we pick a priviliged basis of the Hilbert space. One of the important principles of quantum mechanics is that its Hilbert space has no priviliged basis in general. The number of "operations" then has no meaning in fundamental physics. The only similar concept that matters in fundamental physics is entropy and its time-derivative, and even these concepts are well-defined only when we define some "macroscopic quantities" that divide the microstates into groups. The increase of the total entropy is guaranteed to exceed the number of "operations" - usually by a lot. Computers generate much more entropy than the information that they manipulate with.
One of his conclusions is that the average operation must take 10^{-13} seconds, the geometric mean of the Planck time and the age of the Universe. This sounds as a complete nonsense to me. 10^{-13} seconds is a huge time in particle physics. A few microprocessors can surely make more operations than 10^{13} per second. What is the bound supposed to mean? Are these operations per Planck volume of space? Or in the environments with the particular bizarre values of the density?
Whatever you do, your dimensional analysis estimates of the total and global number of operations per unit time will either be clearly wrong; or it will be clearly higher than any practically realizable number of operations and clearly lower than the entropy times hbar divided by the total energy of the Universe. Pretty big window. ;-) And until someone gives me a quantitative definition (either a measurable one, or a function of operators in the theories we treat seriously) of the "number of operations in the Universe", I really don't care which point in the window someone chooses because it is not physics.
If someone says that the Universe is a family of angels on the tip of a needle, she can also ask how many sisters a particular angel has. If someone says that the Universe is an Apple Macintosh (why I chose this one will be clear after the following paragraph), he can similarly ask how many keys or operations it has. In both cases, it is an unphysical nonsense.
One of the happy punch lines is when Lloyd admits on page 15 that our Universe is not a computer that runs Windows or Linux. ;-)
In January 2005, Prof. Lloyd proposed that the world is a particular quantum computer. Fancy interdisciplinary terminology notwithstanding, it is essentially a paper about the Regge calculus with all the typical careless exercises. At the end of the paper, it is even suggested that - essentially - among the Standard Model gauge groups, SU(3) x U(1) may act on the wires while the SU(2) may act on the gates of the computer. Honestly, I really don't know whether it is a joke or not. (If it is not, it is at least as fascinating a representation of the Standard Model group as the intersecting brane worlds. Of course, my psychological certainty that this can't work exceeds 99.999%.) Honestly, it seems more funny to me than Bogdanovs' suggestions - especially because Lloyd's ideas refer to a system that we know pretty well: the Standard Model.
I am among those who are convinced that every single proposal based on the idea that "the fundamental entities must be discrete" has so far transparently been a crackpot fantasy. What's wrong with all of them?
Both discrete and continuous mathematics matter
First of all, both discrete as well as continuous mathematical structures are important for actual reasoning and calculations in physics and not only in physics. We just need both of these categories of tools and theorems. Many people who like to say that only one of them may be fundamental are usually the people who don't know the other set of insights well enough - or they don't know it all. And they don't want to learn it. Instead, they want to promote a "theory" that implies that it is good if you don't learn it. In other words, they ignore at least one half of the basic math that is needed for physics.
Discrete and continuous concepts are related
Second of all, there are many deep relations between discrete and continuous objects, or between combinatorics and calculus. The Riemann zeta function is a completely continuous function of a complex variable. Nevertheless, it knows more or less everything about the distribution of prime integers. There are many other examples like that in mathematics and even a bigger number of them may be found in theoretical physics.
Knots in three dimensions are discrete objects, too; nevertheless, their properties are encoded in correlators of operators in Chern-Simons theory. The Gromov-Witten invariants and other integers associated with manifolds and their topology that seem to be completely combinatorial in their character may be derived from another continuous theory, namely topological string theory. The integer degeneracies in many contexts are calculated as coefficients in generating functions that are, once again, completely continuous.
Crackpots are almost always discrete
The proof of Fermat's last theorem - a theorem that has attracted so many crackpots exactly because it looks so simple (and discrete) - is essentially based on geometry and smooth objects, too. Riemann's hypothesis has attracted many less crackpots - despite the $1,000,000 award from the Clay Institute. It's because most crackpots are discrete, zero-dimensional objects.
The mathematical insights that allow us to derive many "combinatorial" conclusions from analytical considerations, continuous functions, properties and equations defined over smooth manifolds etc. have been important at least for 200 years. As time goes, the fundamental concepts that underlie a significant part of our knowledge of mathematics and mathematical physics become continuous in character. The discrete features and integers are increasingly integrated into increasingly continuous structures. The combinatorial concepts are being integrated with geometry.
Modern history of continuous dominance
Both the 19th century as well as the 20th century have escalated and accelerated this process. The discrete, point-like particles in classical mechanics were largely replaced by continuous fields in the 19th century. Although new discrete processes and objects were observed later, their complete description always happened to be a continuous one.
The "old" quantum theory with its model of the Hydrogen atom from Niels Bohr became a childish game when the "new" quantum mechanics was constructed. The correct picture that explains the quantization of energies may be defined in terms of a continuous wavefunction. Shockingly enough, the eigenfunctions of a Hermitean operator may form a discrete set. Also, there still existed discrete particles. Nevertheless, it turned out that they were again manifestations of a discrete spectrum of a completely continuously defined operator in quantum field theory where it acts on a completely continuous Hilbert space.
The more and the deeper we understand something, the more continuous and geometric the fundamental objects underlying our descriptions become. The previous sentence is more or less a tautology for objects: "objects" only look "discrete" when we describe them in a superficial manner, without looking into their structure. The discrete social security number is only a good description of a person for those who are not interested about anything else connected with the person.
String theory continues in the same direction. In quantum field theories, the identity of elementary particles - and their charges and masses - were discrete in character. There were dozens of types of "matter" in the Standard Model. In string theory, there is only one type of matter and the discrete choices only emerge as properties of eigenstates of another Hamiltonian. Also, many "discrete" phenomena and features of low-energy physics are provided with a geometric interpretation and realization emerging from string theory; it often involves additional dimensions of space.
Future: more geometric
I find it rather obvious that this process will have to continue if we continue to make progress in our understanding of the fundamental mathematics underlying the laws of the Universe. All kinds of discreteness will have to be derived from a starting point that is rather continuous. A new kind of fuzziness, non-commutativity will be introduced to our physical laws while keeping them quantitative and predictive. Try to look for discrete objects and choices that are used in our current laws of physics and string theory in particular; they must be explained by a deeper principle that is inherently continuous and geometric, where the word "geometry" is used in a generalized sense.
Discreteness is always a derived concept if you look carefully enough. Discreteness is emergent if you wish; it can never be quite fundamental.
Even though the previous paragraphs were mostly about the future, I have also emphasized that the same kind of progress has been dominant in mathematics and theoretical physics at least for 200 years. This is why I am so flabbergasted by the huge number of people who seem to be interested in maths and physics but who have not yet realized what the trend has been for two centuries and who find their childish "discrete" theories so sexy.
As far as I can say, neither of these theories had anything to do with physics. What do I mean by physics? I mean the actual phenomena that we observe in Nature and their mathematical description that always happens to be quite unique. Examples? The Hydrogen atom. Other atoms. Chemistry. Newton's laws. The Lorentz invariance, the translational invariance, the rotational invariance, the required gauge symmetries and diffeomorphisms - all of them being continuous symmetries. Superconductors. Particle scattering. Radioactive decay. The laws of quantum field theory and general relativity into which we must embed the previous theories to agree with all the observed phenomena. String theory that is absolutely needed if we want to agree with quantum field theories as well as general relativity within a unified framework.
The "discrete geniuses" don't care about a single among these experimental constraints. Frankly speaking, their theories may have been silly even in the ancient Rome. They resemble Maxwell's pathetic and totally redundant models of aether from the 19th century - whose naivité was truly understood only when Einstein wrote down his special relativity, after appreciating insights by Hendrik Lorentz (who understood that only one electric and only one magnetic vector exists at each point and even in vacuum) - except that Maxwell's model of the luminiferous aether at least could agree with Maxwell's equations - and FitzGerald has actually constructed a working model out of many gears and wheels.
Modern "aether geniuses"
The modern "aether geniuses" don't care about a single physical effect in the list above or many other lists for that matter and they don't even try to construct the models because they probably know very well that they could not work. (The worse among them don't even care about quantum mechanics.) They may propose a theory that the Universe looks like LEGO or a binary computer or a binary quantum computer with a few operations. And they expect others to believe that all of physics will miraculously be reproduced. The Lorentz invariance will suddenly emerge without any reason (or maybe after a few (?) parameters of their LEGO building blocks are adjusted); the atoms will also emerge and they will have the right spectra. Gravity suddenly starts to act according to Einstein's laws. Why not? They have the great idea, don't they? The Universe is just like a simplified model of Commodore 64 - that's exactly what you need to revolutionize all of science.
A technical paragraph: Jacques Distler seems to be confused by my statement that the Lorentz symmetry can never emerge without a good reason, and his example is lattice QCD, apparently in Euclidean spacetime (and he apparently assumes some discrete symmetries that are nearly equivalent to the Euclidean Lorentz symmetry). I am talking about the actual "SO(d-1,1)" Lorentz symmetry in the Minkowski space. If you start with a non-Lorentz-invariant theory, there is a separate dimensional analysis for operators with respect to the scaling of time and the scaling of space. You definitely cannot derive that the IR limit is Lorentz-invariant for a generic non-relativistic field theory, and if Jacques ever did so, it's only because he already assumed the Lorentz invariance - a symmetry between space and time - from the beginning. The best thing that can happen is a theory with different speeds of light for different particles where a finite number of IR parameters must be adjusted. This is however not the case if you start with a generic non-relativistic theory. Then there are infinitely many fine-tunings needed for all the operators with arbitrarily many spatial derivatives (equivalently, in the language of lattice theories, with new interactions that are less local). Infinitely many miracles are needed to get a Lorentz-invariant theory from a generic non-relativistic interacting theory. You can only get to the point where the number of terms to adjust is finite if you assume that the theory will be a small perturbation of a Lorentz-invariant theory (and therefore the relativistic dimensional analysis is applicable), and it's simply not a right assumption when you start with a generic non-relativistic theory.
God is just like Lord Sinclair except that God is a bit more lazy so He created a simpler computer. At any rate, deep mathematics is certainly not needed. Every ordinary person may understand the "theory of everything", they believe. All the sins of physics between 1905 and 2005 - that have made physics counterinuitive and too abstract for the farmers - will be undone, they seem to think.
Can this kind of simplicity be a selection criterion in physics? Certainly not. Nature does not care how much time we need to spend to understand some of Her fancy concepts. Nature is simple but the simplicity is only revealed once we accept Her rules of the game. The laymen's "psychological" feelings of simplicity have nothing to do whatsoever with the kind of "beauty" that has become a good guide in the search for new and better theories. As the Russian physicist Okuň once said, "Prostoj prostoty něbůdět." There will no longer be any simple simplicity.
Do they really believe it?
Whenever I see these proposals that Nature must be a simple discrete system and everything else will hopefully work, it's hard to avoid the obvious question: have they completely lost their mind? In 2005, a usable theory must agree with billions of observations, and indeed, the Standard Model and General Relativity do agree with them. What miracle makes it happen? It's because the Standard Model and General Relativity satisfy many important principles that more or less imply the right physics, at least qualitatively - because the laws of mathematics are pretty strict if these principles are taken seriously. The principles are often almost enough to choose the right track or even the right theory.
Principles of physics matter
The Lorentz invariance of our theories guarantees that millions of properties of the actual collider observations will match with reality. The postulates of quantum mechanics are needed to agree with millions of experiments and many of their common features. Quantum mechanics plus special relativity implies that physics must look much like quantum field theory.
Quantum field theory only allows some types of fields and a very small number of relevant and marginal interactions. This simple classification of interactions is only possible because of a symmetry between space and time. When you think about the possibilities, there are not too many and because the principles are apparently right, our theories agree with experiments. A similar comment would apply to General Relativity, too. One just can't throw QFT and GR into the garbage bin. It is absolutely critical for any theory that is meant as a fundamental theory to reproduce the successful features of GR and QFT. It can be shown to be the case of many dual descriptions of reality that emerge from string theory even though some of these facts could seem like fascinating miracles at the beginning; and it can easily be shown not to be the case for all other "alternatives", especially the "discrete alternatives", that have ever been proposed as of November 2005.
But the "discrete geniuses" won't ever listen. They don't want to hear a 30-second proof that their theories can't work. This is not about any rational debates. The Discrete Universe is one of the postmodern religions. Why are there so many believers? The expansion of the computer industry may offer a clue.
Miracles in a discrete world
The Lorentz invariance of a generic interacting theory can never "emerge" accidentally from a starting point that is not Lorentz-invariant. The only reason how why it should emerge is that we could prove that it does - for example, because the theory is exactly equivalent to a manifestly Lorentz-invariant theory. This is the case of Matrix theory or the large N limit of the AdS/CFT correspondence where the Lorentz invariance is not manifest but in the appropriate large N limits, it appears because of the equivalence with a manifestly Lorentz-invariant description of the same physics.
But assuming that it will happen in a random discrete theory due to some miracle, without having a single rational reason why it should happen or why the discrete model should have anything to do with reality, makes Intelligent Design look like a highly reasonable up-to-date scientific theory in comparison.
It's just completely unreasonable to assume that a random, cheap, and childish discrete toy model will give you the Lorentz invariance, the physics of GR, the right atomic spectra, or the Standard Model. It's not only silly because it is too optimistic; we have dozens of rigorously proved theorems that show that such things can't work. String theory is able to circumvent many of these theorems because it is a very sophisticated theory that only differs from quantum field theories in very subtle ways. But the naive discrete models simply can't evade these theorems. The theorems were constructed to kill these silly theories, and they did so. I am aware that the first sentence of this paragraph implicitly says that thousands of people who are viewed as "alternative physicists" are completely unreasonable, and indeed, I don't think that their large number makes their opinions more justifiable.
The discrete religion can't be killed
At any rate, we will be hearing these things again and again because they have become a part of the "postmodern" era. The Universe is like an "Intel 8080" microprocessor or a simple type of a quantum computer with two or three gates. The Universe is a discrete history of tetrahedrons, dodecahedrons, or any Platonic polyhedra you can think about. The Lorentz invariance, gauge symmetries, diffeomorphism symmetries, chiral interactions, or the Higgs mechanism don't matter.
They will surely work out properly if the basic idea - namely the idea that the Universe is a simple computer that a mediocre geek can comprehend (but an idea that unfortunately does not have the tiniest glimpse of being realized in Nature) - is accepted and promoted to a new dogma. There will be a growing pressure on all of us to treat the "discrete geniuses" as physicists and never mention that we believe that they are really morons. This is simply how this postmodern era works.
Once again, I think that the statement that the proponents of Intelligent Design are less reasonable or more religious than the proponents of "discrete theory solves it all" hypotheses is a politically motivated and biased assertion. They're on the same level. Both of them may be described as pseudoscientific garbage that attempts to deny virtually everything we have learned in science (physics or biology) in the last 200 years. Both of them need a huge, rationally unjustifiable belief that seems to contradict everything we know and that is only supported by the dogmas themselves - dogmas that have seen no contact with the observable world whatsoever.
What has provoked me to write this rant?
I was asked what I thought about Seth Lloyd's ideas about quantum gravity. Seth Lloyd is a great expert in quantum computing whom many of us admire. In a slightly popular paper, he argued that the Universe can only have about 10^{90} bits. Well, today we believe that it is probably above 10^{100} because of the black holes at the galactic centers: the microwave background no longer dominates the entropy of the Universe. But except for this detail, Lloyd's statement is OK. We call the information "entropy" (up to a "ln(2)" factor) - and it is probably the only quantity discussed by Lloyd that can be defined in physics.
But he also talks about the upper bound of 10^{120} of "operations" (the term is being imported from computer science) that could have been done in the Universe. I am convinced that no one has ever defined an "operation" of the Universe. (It could be a spacetime path-integral counterpart of the coarse-grained entropy formula but I remain skeptical that it is possible at all.)
On the contrary, I am convinced that they can only be defined in systems that approximately behave as binary (or other discrete) computers and where we pick a priviliged basis of the Hilbert space. One of the important principles of quantum mechanics is that its Hilbert space has no priviliged basis in general. The number of "operations" then has no meaning in fundamental physics. The only similar concept that matters in fundamental physics is entropy and its time-derivative, and even these concepts are well-defined only when we define some "macroscopic quantities" that divide the microstates into groups. The increase of the total entropy is guaranteed to exceed the number of "operations" - usually by a lot. Computers generate much more entropy than the information that they manipulate with.
One of his conclusions is that the average operation must take 10^{-13} seconds, the geometric mean of the Planck time and the age of the Universe. This sounds as a complete nonsense to me. 10^{-13} seconds is a huge time in particle physics. A few microprocessors can surely make more operations than 10^{13} per second. What is the bound supposed to mean? Are these operations per Planck volume of space? Or in the environments with the particular bizarre values of the density?
Whatever you do, your dimensional analysis estimates of the total and global number of operations per unit time will either be clearly wrong; or it will be clearly higher than any practically realizable number of operations and clearly lower than the entropy times hbar divided by the total energy of the Universe. Pretty big window. ;-) And until someone gives me a quantitative definition (either a measurable one, or a function of operators in the theories we treat seriously) of the "number of operations in the Universe", I really don't care which point in the window someone chooses because it is not physics.
If someone says that the Universe is a family of angels on the tip of a needle, she can also ask how many sisters a particular angel has. If someone says that the Universe is an Apple Macintosh (why I chose this one will be clear after the following paragraph), he can similarly ask how many keys or operations it has. In both cases, it is an unphysical nonsense.
One of the happy punch lines is when Lloyd admits on page 15 that our Universe is not a computer that runs Windows or Linux. ;-)
In January 2005, Prof. Lloyd proposed that the world is a particular quantum computer. Fancy interdisciplinary terminology notwithstanding, it is essentially a paper about the Regge calculus with all the typical careless exercises. At the end of the paper, it is even suggested that - essentially - among the Standard Model gauge groups, SU(3) x U(1) may act on the wires while the SU(2) may act on the gates of the computer. Honestly, I really don't know whether it is a joke or not. (If it is not, it is at least as fascinating a representation of the Standard Model group as the intersecting brane worlds. Of course, my psychological certainty that this can't work exceeds 99.999%.) Honestly, it seems more funny to me than Bogdanovs' suggestions - especially because Lloyd's ideas refer to a system that we know pretty well: the Standard Model.
'Walk the Line' is a fine tribute to Cash
So we went to see this movie yesterday.
I was a Johnny Cash snob growing up. My Dad was a big fan; he used to walk around singing "Hey, Porter", but I was way too much into Kiss and Deep Purple and Black Sabbath for anything from another musical genre to make much of an impression.
It's really only been the last several years that I discovered his artistry, and what led me to his music was reading about his influence on musicians whom I respect.
Now I'll have to go find some of the bios of John and June, because their love story is timeless.
And this will make the FReepers' head explode: Johnny Cash was a progressive populist.
What could be more liberal than this...
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on.
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.
I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.
Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.
I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.
And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believen' that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen' that we all were on their side.
Well, there's things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin' everywhere you go,
But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You'll never see me wear a suit of white.
Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Holographic 300 GB disks
What is the capacity of optical disks? If they're DVDs, you can squeeze up to 4.7 GB of information on them. Imagine a very similar disk with 300 GB on it. Yes, it is more than the magnetic hard disks you have ever seen.
Amazingly enough, some readers found the opportunity to argue about the previous sentence to be more interesting than the new fascinating technology described below - very sad.
And it would read the information 10 times as fast as the DVDs. Impossible? No!
Haf haf. (That was in the Czech dogs' language. Not sure how the American dogs translate it.)
Amazingly enough, some readers found the opportunity to argue about the previous sentence to be more interesting than the new fascinating technology described below - very sad.
And it would read the information 10 times as fast as the DVDs. Impossible? No!
- InPhase Technologies in Colorado
has developed a commercially acceptable version of the holographic disks. It could be sold as early as in 2006. The required physics was discovered by Dennis Gabor in the 1950s using the methods of anticipation plagiarism. More concretely, Gabor stole the insights about the holographic principle in quantum gravity from 't Hooft and Susskind and applied them in optics 40 years before 't Hooft and Susskind published it and 60 years before string theory was confirmed experimentally.
Unfortunately, 300 GB is still 50 orders of magnitude less than what the area should be able to store according to the holographic principle ;-), but it is progress nevertheless. See other articles via news.google.com or the company's web. If you're interested, you should certainly see the WMV video or another exciting QuickTime video.
PDF introductions:
Paradoxically, the holographic disks are the first ones in which not only the two-dimensional surface but also the three-dimensional bulk of the medium is used. One can record thousands of holograms on the same medium by changing the angles or frequencies. Many bits are read simultaneously. The hologram is written down by adjusting many bits in a semi-transparent two-dimensional "checkerboard" which is really called "spatial light modulator" or LSM (also known as the "linear sigma-model") and letting two parts of a split laser beam to interfere with each other to create a three-dimensional pattern within the optically sensitive plastic medium. The LSM does not differ much from some modern types of displays.
When you read the data, you only use the reference beam that deflects off the medium and reconstructs a similar checkerboard image in a "detector".
The disks are slightly thicker than the DVDs but have the same area. The optimists predict that these disks could eventually store up to 1,600 gigabytes of data that could be read as quickly as 15 megabytes per second. Of course, technology will only be pushed to the limits if the modest versions of the disk turn out to be reliable.
Although the idea of the holographic storage disks has been around since 1963, people could not find a good enough medium for 40 years. The two-chemistry "TapestryTM" disks have suddenly solved these problems. The lesson - one that even the string theorists should learn - is that even if you have a great idea deeply connected with an obviously important physical principle such as holography, it may take 40 years - years of listening to obnoxious Peterwoits - before the details are refined so that you may celebrate the final success. Fourty years? String theory was born in 1968. You can do the math.
Incidentally, the readers who think that this posting - about a fascinating technology that has become a reality - should ignite discussions about the capacity of conventional magnetic hard disks are considered to be retarded and uncultural intellectual equivalents of dogs by The Reference Frame. But feel free to write whatever you want.Haf haf. (That was in the Czech dogs' language. Not sure how the American dogs translate it.)
NBC censors Thanksgiving Day parade
This just seems appalling to me:
Does this make you curious about other times this kind of manipulation may have occurred?
NBC did not interrupt its broadcast of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade yesterday to bring viewers the news that an M&M balloon had crashed into a light pole, injuring two sisters.
In fact, when the time came in the tightly scripted three-hour program for the M&Ms' appearance, NBC weaved in tape of the balloon crossing the finish line at last year's parade - even as the damaged balloon itself was being dragged from the accident scene. At 11:47 a.m., as an 11-year-old girl and her 26-year-old sister were being treated for injuries, the parade's on-air announcers - Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker - kept up their light-hearted repartee from Herald Square, where the parade ends. ...
Ten minutes later, the upbeat broadcast ended without mention of the accident in Times Square. CNN carried a flash about the accident at 11:51, while the parade telecast was still going on. NBC's cable news network, MSNBC, followed two minutes later. And WNBC, the New York affiliate, carried the news at 12:30 p.m. ...
When the balloon failed to arrive at Herald Square at the appointed time, she said, "we rolled with some previously recorded footage."
Does this make you curious about other times this kind of manipulation may have occurred?
Friday, November 25, 2005
Supernovae: Lambda is constant
Scientific American reports that the observations of 71 distant galaxies suggest that the dark energy is constant, namely the cosmological constant, indeed. The upper bound on the pressure/energy_density ratio is now
- pressure/energy_density < -0.85,
very close to "-1". More details in the paper by Ray Carlberg et al.
ATLAS at Wikipedia
Incidentally, if you look at Wikipedia today, the featured article is about the
It was mostly written by SCZenz, a graduate student of experimental particle physics at Berkeley. Very good job!
Incidentally, some people think that the Bush-haters usually like science. It does not seem to be the case at Wikipedia. The user Z6 has only "edited" two pages before he was eradicated by an administrator: ATLAS experiment that Z6 proposed to be destroyed, and George W. Bush whose page Z6 has modified in a very similar way. To show how difficult it is to destroy the communists, Z6 has also reincarnated into a new user V9 who attempted to destroy the Atlas experiment again. ;-)
Ignorance of Paul Boutin
In this text, I want to demonstrate that Paul Boutin has no idea what he is talking about in his text at Slate - he is writing about theoretical physics - and why he is an example of people who know absolutely nothing but who want to influence absolutely everything.
- Elegance is a term theorists apply to formulas, like E=mc2, which are simple and symmetrical yet have great scope and power.
This is one of the less serious problems in his article, but I don't think that any physicist would use the equation "E=mc2", popular among the laymen, as an example of an elegant piece of mathematics or physics. Incidentally, in this form, the equation has never appeared in Einstein's revolutionary papers.
- The concept has become so associated with string theory that Nova's three-hour 2003 series on the topic was titled The Elegant Universe (you can watch the whole thing online for free here).
NOVA's "The Elegant Universe" was titled this way not because NOVA was the first one to realize that string theory is elegant, but simply because the title was borrowed from Brian Greene's bestseller - a book version of the TV program - that every journalist who is informed about modern physics knows very well. This book is the reason why the words "elegant" and "string theory" simultaneously appear at so many pages.
- That's because compared to E=mc2, string theory equations look like spaghetti.
At the beginning of the show, Brian Greene reminded us that it may be rather difficult to explain general relativity to dogs, and therefore even the people may have problems to understand advanced mathematical concepts that are necessary to understand string theory and its beauty.
No doubt, people whose mathematical skills end with the product of "m" and "c2" - and who are therefore probably closer to the dogs than to Edward Witten - will hardly appreciate algebraic geometry, mirror symmetry, conformal field theory, or homology of the super moduli spaces. After all, dogs don't distinguish superstrings and spaghetti either.
- His General Theory of Relativity says gravity is caused by the warping of space due to the presence of matter. In 1905, this seemed like opium-smoking nonsense.
Except that general relativity was published in 1915, not 1905. I would think that such flagrant ignorance of history of science should prevent one from finishing the high school. In reality, it is not even a problem for publishing physics articles at Slate.
Moreover, relativity - either special or general - never seemed like opium-smoking nonsense to the physicists. The special theory of relativity was accepted almost instantly; the general theory of relativity was accepted quickly - and almost universally after the 1919 observations of the bending of light. There may have been counterparts of Paul Boutin who always thought that relativity was opium-smoking nonsense but their voice never played any role in physics.
- Quantum's elegant equation is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Except that the uncertainty principle is not an equation. It is an inequality and not a particularly elegant one.
- The closest you can get is a function related to Planck's constant (h), the theoretical minimum unit to which the universe can be quantized.
A "function" cannot be related to Planck's constant. And Planck's constant is not a unit into which the universe can be quantized. It is a quantum of the action or the angular momentum, not a "quantum of the universe".
- If relativity and quantum mechanics are both correct, they should work in agreement to model the Big Bang, the point 14 billion years ago at which the universe was at the same time supermassive (where relativity works) and supersmall (where quantum math holds). Instead, the math breaks down. Einstein spent his last three decades unsuccessfully seeking a formula to reconcile it all—a Theory of Everything.
Einstein never worked on reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity. What he worked on was unification of electromagnetism and gravity but he never intended quantum mechanics to be a part of his fundamental equations.
- The most popular string models require 10 or 11 dimensions.
They're not the most "popular" ones. They're the only ones that predict a stable universe with all the qualitative features we observe in the real world.
- Krauss' book is subtitled The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions as a polite way of saying String Theory Is for Suckers.
Well, I hope that it will be widely understood that my comment that Boutin's intelligence resembles that of dogs will be viewed as an appropriate answer to this "gentle" man.
- Scientific Method 101 says that if you can't run a test that might disprove your theory, you can't claim it as fact.
If you can run a test that might disprove your theory, you can't claim the theory as fact either. And if your experiment actually disproves your theory, you definitely cannot claim the theory as fact. ;-)
- And there's no way to prove them wrong in our lifetime.
Maybe. The same thing holds for the evolution etc. But there is a significant chance that the theory will be proved right - a deeper theory than the previous ones to describe reality - in our lifetime. Mr. Boutin does not seem to be interested in this alternative possibility that string theory is right; a textbook example of Crackpotism 101.
- Einstein's theories paved the way for nuclear power.
The only thing that Einstein's theories had to do with nuclear power is that he could have calculated the gained energy from the mass differences of the nuclei - much like he could have done for any physical process in the world. The development of science and technology behind the nuclear power has nothing to do with Einstein's theories. Einstein's letter to Roosevelt (warning him that the Nazis may have been working on the bomb) is perhaps the only link between Einstein and the nuclear energy.
- Hiding in the Mirror does a much better job of explaining string theory than discrediting it.
Good joke.
- Krauss knows he's right, but every time he comes close to the kill he stops to make nice with his colleagues.
He knows that he's right much like the Catholic Church who opposed Darwin's theory, does not he? A difference between string theory and its Kraussian "alternatives" is that the former is evaluated by scientific, rational arguments and calculations. The latter is evaluated by articles written by journalists whose understanding of physics resembles the skills of dogs.
It's pretty sad if someone like Boutin whose knowledge of modern science is completely superficial - and he just writes down confused misinterpretations of some popular accounts of physics that have already been written in such an oversimplified way to target the silliest 10% of the population - are given space at such influential places as Slate.
Well, of course I know why he was given space. It's because he's the senior editor at many places like that. ;-) Unfortunately, even having a lot of money does not prevent one from being a complete ignorant.
Le Grande Thanksgiving
Wide awake this morning for no good reason, with the local "news" reporting the occupancy of the mall parking lots and "interviewing" the lemmings out early to consume.
Trying not to reach the conclusion that this is what our soldiers are dying for in Iraq: our God-given right to go deeper into debt in order to acquire the latest X-Box.
Did you read Art Buchwald yesterday?
====================
One of our most important holidays is Thanksgiving Day, known in France as le Jour de Merci Donnant .
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Harvard diversity skyrockets
There are people who still think that Harvard is not diverse enough. Well, that's certainly wrong. Harvard tops the black student yield among 22 colleges in an ensemble. The female tenure offers have essentially doubled and exceeded the level before Summers' presidency.
On the other hand, Princeton is different. While it seems that the women are already allowed to enter the physics department, it was not the case 50 years ago because they were a "distraction" for the Princeton scholars. At that time, women were already walking to the left and to the right everywhere at Harvard!
Moreover, a (redhead) student explained me that you must essentially be a redhead to join Princeton as a student. It seems to be the case. CNN describes the official hair color of the Princetonians as follows:
On the other hand, Princeton is different. While it seems that the women are already allowed to enter the physics department, it was not the case 50 years ago because they were a "distraction" for the Princeton scholars. At that time, women were already walking to the left and to the right everywhere at Harvard!
Moreover, a (redhead) student explained me that you must essentially be a redhead to join Princeton as a student. It seems to be the case. CNN describes the official hair color of the Princetonians as follows:
- Now, students at Princeton University have joined forces to discuss and celebrate their unique experiences of having red hair. ... The Princeton Redheads Society has gotten official recognition and funding from Princeton University. ... Members plan redhead-oriented events, honor red-haired faculty members with sunscreen awards, and discuss the many implications of living with red hair. ... The only thing they have in common is red hair, but that ties them together in such a strong way.
Once again. If racial or gender diversity at Harvard is something that worries you, you should have a good sleep tonight and look elsewhere for any problems. ;-)
Annihilating letters
If you're just waiting for your turkey, you can try to destroy some pairs of letters.
Explanation: the letters are elementary particles. Your goal is to construct tree level Feynman diagrams that pair-annihilate the particles. The only vertex is a quadratic vertex with a coupling "lambda" and the angle 90 degrees in it and your Feynman diagrams must be suppressed at most by "lambda^2".
Happy Thanksgiving not only from the true savior of music but also from everyone in our band.
Which one is the turkey?
Click to enlarge.
Off to the in-laws, where we'll be having ham. No beef (mad cow) and no fowl (bird flu).
Did I mention my FIL is an Orthodox Jew? Seriously.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Physics fades from UK classrooms
Quite independently, Clifford discusses the very same issue - physics at British schools.
2005 is the international year of physics, so let me offer you some "optimistic" news - namely news about the intellectually degenerating British society.
The number of British pupils who took physics dropped by 40 percent in the last 20 years. In the last 10 years, the number of UK physics departments dropped by 30 percent. And the situation will become even worse as the current generation of teachers will retire and be replaced by mostly female young teachers who usually don't like physics, Alexandra Blair predicts in The Times.
Female science teachers who dominate among teachers heavily prefer biology (60% of biology students are female) over physics (20% of physics students are female), the findings published by University of Buckingham also show. Also, in
- GCSE (British high school exams)
they have abandoned Newton, Einstein, the periodic table, and hard sciences in general - and replaced them with soft "sciences" such as "benefits of healthy eating and benefits of genetic engineering" which occured because one science is enough according to the new rules and the sentence "healthy eating is healthy" is apparently another science just like physics.
The modified curriculum in 1988 may be blamed for all these changes. Responsible scientists at Harvard and elsewhere must ask whether the changes being prepared for the Harvard curriculum are really going in a different direction than the disastrous British changes in 1988. Recall that the new curriculum proposed for Harvard also allows the students to avoid hard sciences altogether and pick only 3 pieces of soft stuff that has been added to the same group as "science and technology" in the proposed distributional requirements.
Most of them will probably choose the subjects Apples are healthy, Global warming is a threat, and Sexes are equal, as soon as the corresponding "scientific" courses are listed (and maybe they already are listed). ;-)
Back to Great Britain. More generally, pupils tend to study subjects that fit their aptitudes which unfortunately but not surprisingly means that they are refocusing from sciences as well as languages and geography to
such as religious indoctrination, gyms, and citizenship that require minimal talents and minimal effort. Well, soft subjects have been soaring for quite some time. It's also becoming a standard that
in your exam is enough for the A* "superman" grade. Then it can't be surprising that the grades are getting better despite a gradual collapse of the intellectual skills of the British students. If it makes you happier, it is not just physics and sciences that evaporate; foreign languages such as French and German dropped by 15 percent in one year.
This may be a beginning of another medieval, postmodern era in which people know how to act as journalists, but they have no idea what to write about; they believe that healthy eating is important, but they have no idea about the existence of cells; they believe that global warming is dangerous but they have no idea about physics of the atmosphere; they believe that the sexes don't differ in their intellectual passions at all and it is consistent with all of their knowledge of science and history because they have no idea who Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and maybe even Mozart were.
A special clarification for Rhiannon: the previous sentence does not quite argue that the very existence of the great male scientists *proves* something. But still, the existence of a certain "signal" that does not seem to disappear, even after a century of equal opportunities, indicates that the simplest and most "symmetric" theories about the intellectual passions are likely to contradict the available data. And what I wanted to say is that it is much easier to ignore this signal for someone who is ignorant about science and its history. Please treat these statements of mine rationally and as cold and unemotional statistical assertions. Happy Thanksgiving.
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