PVLAS & axion

Optical rotation in magnetic field and axions

Sean Carroll mentions three experiments:

• B-meson oscillations that we discussed here
• MINOS (neutrinos) that we described here
• Rotating light in a magnetic field

We have not yet talked about the last one even though the preprint written by the PVLAS collaboration appeared in July 2005 - and another one in December. This experiment is very interesting because, unlike the previous two, it seems to indicate the existence of new physics.

Take a one-meter-long magnet with 5 Tesla of magnetic field. Send a linearly polarized laser beam whose oscillating electric field is pointing in the direction of the external magnetic field and carefully measure the polarization plane. The authors, Zavattini et al., argue that the polarization axis was rotated by

• 3.9 +- 0.5 picoradians per pass.

A possible explanation of this effect involves axions, scalar particles coupled to the electromagnetic field in a particular way. Andreas Ringwald from DESY explains how this data can be explained by the axions and how the astrophysical constraints on the axions can be evaded, as argued by Eduard Masso and Javier Redondo. Jacques Distler argues that this method to evade the bounds is very unnatural (see the trackback), and I would probably agree. See also Pierre Sikivie's 2005 article about axions.

Let me write a few moderately refreshing formulae. The axion explanation of the rotating plane involves a new scalar field "a", the axion. It has the ordinary kinetic and mass term:

• Lagrangian = 0.5 [(partial_ma)^2 - m_a² a²]
  

This axion is coupled to "F /\ F" of the electromagnetic field. In the non-relativistic notation, it is proportional to "E.B", and therefore the interaction term can be written as

• Lagrangian = - a E.B / M_a

Note that the electromagnetic "E.B" itself would be a total derivative that would fail to influence physics, but with the extra factor of the axion, it is no longer a total derivative. How does this term explain the rotating polarization plane? Recall that the external "B" is a vector whose magnitude is 5 Tesla; imagine it goes in the North-South direction. If you substitute this constant to the cubic interaction term above, you obtain a bilinear term proportional to "a.E".

Now you have a new, corrected quadratic Lagrangian in which "a" and the electromagnetic field are no longer separated. If you consider an electromagnetic wave whose "E" is orthogonal to the external "B", the coupling above does not contribute, and the electromagnetic wave propagates by the usual speed of light.

However, if you consider a linearly polarized electromagnetic wave whose "E" is parallel to the external "B", for example a beam moving up with "E" in the North-South direction, things change. The electromagnetic field mixes with the axion into two new eigenstates of "omega² - p²". One of them is "mostly" the axion, and its effective mass is slightly smaller than the original mass of the axion. The other one is "mostly" the photon that however becomes slightly massive, and therefore slower. This polarization of the laser beam slows down compared to the vacuum and one can also compute the rotation of the polarization plane.

If you compute these things and think about plausible values of "m_a" and "M_a", you will see that the mass "m_a" should be a millielectronvolt, up to a factor of two or so, while the inverse coefficient "M_a" should be between 100 and 600 TeV.

You could be more conservative and say that you don't want any new field. Can you obtain the rotating plane directly by modifying the Lagrangian for the electromagnetic field? Well, the effect of the axion above can be mimicked if you integrate out the axion (for a while, imagine that the mass of the axion is higher than the frequency of your light) which will give you a term proportional to

• Lagrangian = # . ( F /\ F )²

That's a four-derivative term, a dimension 8 operator. Such terms surely appear in more complete theories except that the coefficients are tiny. Note that the tensor structure above is a different contraction than

• Lagrangian = # . ( F_mn F^mn )²

It is the last structure that occurs because of the box diagram, with an electron running in the loop. But this structure does not rotate the polarization plane. If you think for a while, the previous one does not rotate it either: it only gives you extra terms of the type "a component of E squared". For the rotation to occur, it is actually important that the axion is lighter than the frequency of the electromagnetic light. Because the wavelength of the laser light is a micron or so which gives you the energy scale of 2 eV or so. The axion must be lighter if it the light can rotate.

A completely dumb question for the insiders: do you generate the same rotating effect by the term written below?

• Lagrangian = # . ( F_mn F^mn ) ( F /\ F )

Axions in string theory

Because this is a superstringy blog, I can't avoid the comment that axions are predicted by most vacua in string theory. In heterotic string theory, for example, one always has the so-called model-independent axion. It's because the heterotic string theory predicts the two-form B-field potential under which the strings are electrically charged. Its exterior derivative is a three-form; its Hodge-dual in four dimensions is a one-form that can be written as the gradient of a zero-form if you're on-shell. The zero-form from the previous sentence is a scalar field called the model-independent axion. There are usually many other, model-dependent axions, too. See, for example, a paper by Tom Banks and Michael Dine about the cosmology of string-theoretical axions.

Bush lost a few neutrinos in Minnesota

Foxnews informs that the federal government has lost a certain number of neutrinos between Illinois and Minnesota - but the loss is compensated by the information that the physicists gained. Neutrinos from the Fermilab travel throughout 450 miles of solid Earth to detectors in the Soudan Underground Mine State Park, MN that are burrowed hundreds of meters beneath the ground. This location has the advantage that the conventional cosmic rays are screened.

While Foxnews does not seem to tell us how many neutrinos were lost by the neutrino oscillations which makes their article rather useless for the physicists, they correctly argue that John Updike should update his poem to give neutrinos the weight they deserve. The wrong poem from 1960 is as follows:

Neutrinos: they are very small
They have no charge;
they have no mass;
they do not interact at all.
The Earth is just a silly ball
to them, through which they simply pass
like dustmaids down a drafty hall
or photons through a sheet of glass ...

The Britons tell you something more: 92 instead of 177 muon neutrinos were detected - about 50 percent - and I guess that the counting agrees with the mass matrix extracted from the previous oscillation experiments. According to the press release, the measured "delta(m²)" is "0.0031(06)(01) eV²". Here, (06) is the statistical uncertainty and (01) is the systematic uncertainty. The mixing angle satisfies

• sin² (2.theta₂₃) = 0.88 or so.

However, the error is still pretty large, of order 0.12. ;-) See also this graph.

More news articles about the MINOS experiment can be found here. A derivation of the neutrino oscillations may be found on page 13 or so of a student project of mine from the 1990s. Note that I considered the neutrino oscillations to be a fact long before they were "officially" discovered.

Update: In 2009, MINOS is going to find some very powerful evidence supporting cosmoclimatology, e.g. the correlation between the cosmic rays and the climate.

Fairness of amazon.com reviews of McCutcheon: The Final Theory restored

Update: One day after this article was written, the one-star reviews were erased once again.

Brian Powell has just informed me that the critical reviews of the book

• Mark McCutcheon: The Final Theory

are no longer deleted from the amazon.com website. When we first informed about the strange filtering procedures, the book had 33 reviews with the average rating of 5 stars. Now it has 63 reviews with the average rating of 3.5 stars - a consequence of roughly 15 one-star reviews that quite suddenly appeared on the amazon website. ;-)

Recall that Anthony Kirmis was the winner of our $13.08 grand prize for the first 1-star review that survives for one week. His review had been erased two days after he received the money. But apparently something has changed about the algorithms how the reviews of this particular crackpot book are filtered. Brian Powell and I thank everyone who was pushing for more balance.

Harvard will be free for the "poor"

Yesterday, the officials announced that the Harvard students whose families earn below $60,000 a year, which includes 1/4 of the current students, won't have to pay the tuition which will be $43,655 for the next year. See The Crimson.

Let me admit that - probably because I come from a poor environment from all viewpoints and from a country where it is very hard to advocate any tuition, even 16 years after the collapse of communism - this tuition seems gigantic to me and the millionaires are the only ones whom I would advise to pay it - despite my significant respect for the school. I don't believe that one year of Harvard education is worth $43,655; however, the value of the degree may be high because of the significant prestige of the university (and the known fact that those who get here are likely to be extremely good).

If you want to compare: the previous Harvard cutoff was $40,000 instead of the current $60,000. UPenn's figure is $50,000 while Yale and Stanford have $45,000. Others can't compete at all and Harvard is simply the best school to support smart young students from the "poor" families. I used the quotation marks for the word "poor" because $60,000 is actually 1.36 times higher than the median U.S. household income in 2004.

SSC and the Clinton administration

The article "The Collider Calamity" has sparked some discussions and I need to add a few words.

When the Superconducting Super Collider was aborted, I just became a sophomore in Prague. Because I knew that it was a great physics project started by the Reagan Administration to probe the structure of matter, it was a bad news. But at that time, experimental particle physics was somewhat remote to me. I was only able to view the cancellation of the SSC as a very sad event a few years later.

During my Rutgers years (grad school) I had the impression that there was some kind of silence about the fate of the SSC. No one would exactly tell you what had been going on with the SSC. Today, my interpretation of the silence is that the cancellation of the SSC was a politically sensitive issue. Virtually all of the people who could have told me what exactly happened were fans of the Democrats and I think that it was never easy for them to tell the truth.

If you open Wikipedia, the page about the SSC

• Superconducting Super Collider

tells you the following:

• The project was eventually canceled by Congress in 1993 due to heavy pressure from President Bill Clinton. [citation needed] Many questioned the wisdom of closing down the facility, which had brought high-paying science jobs to the southern regions of the Dallas-Ft. WorthMetroplex. [citation needed] As predicted, the closing of the SSC held drastic ramifications for the area, and resulted in a mild recession made most evident in those parts of Dallas which lay south of the Trinity River. [citation needed] It is thought today that President Clinton had wanted to close the SSC all along as an economic retaliation against George H. W. Bush's home state of Texas. [citation needed] At the time the project was cancelled, 22.5 km (14 mi) of tunnel were already dug and nearly 2 billion dollars had already been spent on the massive facility.

Well, I, for one, know the right citation for most of these statements. Nearly all of these things are described in Volume 302 of the Science magazine from October 3rd, 2003, on pages 38-40. The two articles are called

• 10 years after the SSC: lots of reasons, but few lessons
• Scientists are long gone, but bitter memories remain

You are only allowed to read the article from this website if you or your institution pays for the journal. Once you read the article, you can easily see why the CapitalistImperialistPig - who should really be called a CommunistSocialistSwine ;-) - is simply wrong, even though he is not brave enough to admit to himself that he is not right.

For example, you can extract the sentences about Bill Clinton:

• John Gibbons, President Bill Clinton's first science adviser, thinks that the SSC's fate was sealed soon after his boss took office and that neither the White House nor the project's advocates could save it. "I briefed Clinton the same day on both the SSC and the international space station," recalls Gibbons, a physicist who served in the White House from 1993 to 1998. "He agreed to back the station and we agreed that the SSC was a goner. The momentum was all going in the wrong direction."
• Figure: One man, few votes. The Clinton Administration didn't push hard for the SSC, admits John Gibbons.
• It also didn't help, say supporters, that the Clinton Administration was never sympathetic to the idea of a big physics project. "I was always worried about how many of these big commitments we could afford," says Gibbons. "I recommended to the Senate that we build it, but I only testified once. And I didn't lie down in front of the train [of growing opposition]."
• Marburger acknowledges that Clinton's 1992 victory over Bush - a Texan who served as Reagan's vice-president - was a big blow. "No subsequent administration is ever going to be as supportive to a project as the one that proposed it," he says. "The SSC had only one parent, and he was a Republican."

While the first article explains many more not entirely political aspects and potential errors that have led to the death of the atom smasher, the other article also describes the economic consequences of the SSC cancellation for the relevant regions of Texas. I find it undefendable to say that the Clinton administration had no direct responsibility for the death of the SSC. I understand that the fans of the Democratic Party often like to imagine that their party is more supportive of science than the Republicans. But we just happen to have some evidence that it's not the case in high-energy physics. It's up to you what you do with this evidence.

You know, I forgot to mention...

... that there's been this little immigration thing going on lately, involving a bill in the Senate and some protests by high school students all around the nation.

Stace and Charles have been covering it well, and Dos Centavos in particular explains the Mexican flag thing for the unreasonable gringos among us.

And all I have to say about this is 'fuck it'. There's already a syndrome identified that accounts for the rise: B.I.T.S.

Maybe if we would ITMFA, we could curb the pandemic.

While I was away...

My "spring break" is over. Let's catch up with some (in cybertime) old news:

-- special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will likely seek additional indictments in the Plame leak case sometime in the next month, and their names might (finally) be Rove or Hadley. Herr Rove is said to be cooperating with Fitzgerald's office, and has been described lately as "jaunty" by observers. Does he have reason to think he's slipped the noose ... again?

-- Antonin Scalia had a good week; first he discussed publicly the Guantanamo case pending before the Supreme Court, has so far declined to recuse himself from it, and then made the "bafangu" gesture at reporters. As he came out of church.

-- Pastafarians rejoice! You made the mainstream media.

-- the best news in Bloglandia concerned the FEC ruling that online political discussion remains a First Amendment right. So blogs that discuss candidates and campaigns, like this one, will not be considered political advertisements. So you'll probably begin to see me mention the campaign I am working on here more often.

I'll try to be more frequent here, health permitting. Thanks as always for stopping by.

Update: Forgive my wretched Italian. It's "vaffanculo", and both Sean-Paul and Atrios have a photo of the Justice flipping us off. Why couldn't Dick Cheney have shot this bastard in the face?

Searching for the answers

This blog had to face about 2,000 additional hits on Wednesday plus 3,000 extra hits on Thursday and 2,700 extra hits on Friday because many people are apparently very curious what was the real motive of Winkler's murder, a very sad event that has stunned America a week ago. It seems obvious to me that the Tennessee officials and Mary Winkler herself (plus a few more conceivable exceptions) are the only ones who know the reasons behind the murder. It is known that the reason was a very particular thing. If this insight leaked, it would probably spread over the internet very quickly.

This fact can't discourage the Americans from searching for the answers on the web. What answers do the search engines offer?

Google:

• winkler and motive - frame is #1
• winkler motive - frame is #2
• mary winkler - frame is #3 or #20, depending on details

Yahoo:

• winkler motive - frame is #1
• mary winkler - frame is #2 (yes, Foxnews rules)

MSN:

• winkler motive - frame is #1

At any rate, the search engines are obviously using superficially reasonable algorithms. What the people are looking for are really theories which is why they must offer their customers websites that analyze the theory of everything. Such a theory might, in principle, also include the answer to the question Why did Mary Winkler kill her husband... The only problem is that our current knowledge of string theory is not sufficient to calculate observables such as the motive of this particular murder. It is also too primitive to be able to save Matthew Winkler's life...

Mithat Ünsal: deconstruction as twisting

Mithat Ünsal from Boston University spoke about his interesting work with David B. Kaplan, his collaborator. The talk was about deconstruction. As we explained in the past, the method of deconstruction allows you to define lattice-like models of gauge theories with supersymmetry in such a way that fine-tuning is no longer necessary or at least the amount of necessary fine-tuning is reduced.

In the continuum limit, one naturally obtains a larger amount of supersymmetry from a discretized starting point with a smaller amount of supersymmetry. From the field theory viewpoint, it is a consequence of some nice and non-generic discrete symmetries. For a string theorist, the main reason can be described as a combination of dualities and various limiting procedures.

If you deconstruct the N=4 gauge theory, only a subset of supersymmetries is preserved before taking the continuum limit. There exists another manipulation with the N=4 gauge theory that preserves a part of supersymmetry: namely topological twisting. Mithat argued that deconstruction and topological twists are closely related.

More concretely, he explained that the discrete symmetries that act on the "theory space" are not really discrete subgroups of the rotational (or Lorentz) symmetry group. Instead, they form a discrete subgroup of a diagonal SO(4) group that generates rotations of the Euclidean spacetime as well as SO(4) rotations inside the SO(6) R-symmetry group.




When you redefine your Euclideanized Lorentz symmetry to include the R-symmetry rotations, you effectively change the spins of the fields - just like in the case of topological twisting. The preserved supercharges are those that look like spin 0 operators after this field and symmetry redefinition.

Mithat also discussed other topics - such as a deformation that changes the U(k N^2) gauge group on one space to a U(k) gauge group on a higher-dimensional space by using some extra phases in the superpotential - phases analogous to the giant fuzzy moose but apparently different in details. (There should also be a link to a paper of Nick Dorey here but I am not sure which paper is the most relevant one.) See their previous available paper for more details and wait for a new one.

The Collider Calamity

The Scientific American has published an article

• The Collider Calamity (a new C.C. problem)

of exactly the type that I always expected to start to appear in 2006 or so. It explains that the U.S. experimental particle physics will move overseas. At the Tevatron, only B-physics has the ability to compete with (or beat) the LHC. And B-physics, in which George W. Bush is an expert, is probably not a sufficient justification to continue with these colliders. The calamity started when Reagan's Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was cancelled in 1993, during the Clinton-Gore era. For Al Gore, this decision was nothing strange because Al Gore openly prefers junk science such as the "climate change" over serious scientific fields such as particle physics.

The Scientific American suggests that the only way to restore the American pride - and the boost that the development of high-energy physics gives to technology, medicine, and economy in general - is to build the ILC on the American soil even though its price will be comparable to the cancelled SSC. If supersymmetry is found by the LHC, surely the American ILC will be a necessary condition for the U.S. to remain a superpower in 2020 or so. ;-)

Warren Siegel and Kiyoung Lee: ghost pyramids

Tonight, I recommend you the preprint

• Simpler superstring scattering

by Warren Siegel and Kiyoung Lee. It is actually a followup of a 2005 preprint that most of us missed

• Conquest of the ghost pyramid of the superstring.

In these papers, the authors propose a formalism that is arguably (and certainly according to the authors) better than the four existing frameworks to compute perturbative type II superstring amplitudes, namely than

• Ramond-Neveu-Schwarz Lorentz-covariant approach
• light-cone-gauge Green-Schwarz approach
• the hybrid RNS-GS approach
• Berkovits' pure spinor approach

In the picture of Siegel et al., the super-Poincaré invariance is manifest and no exotic picture-changing insertions are needed. The price you pay - and I guess that Nathan Berkovits would argue that it is a high price - is the infinite number of fields.

What you actually need is to extend the spacetime spinor variables "theta_a" where "a" is a spinor index in the 32-dimensional representation (the same variables that occur in the pure spinor or other covariant Green-Schwarz frameworks) into a ghost pyramid

• theta^{mn}_{a}

where "m,n" are non-negative integers which is why you span a pyramid (or a quadrant, if you draw "m,n" as vertical and horizonal axes). The original ordinary group of observables "theta_a" becomes "theta^{00}_{a}". The number "m+n" measures the "ghost level" (where 0,1,2 means humans, ghosts, and ghosts for ghosts, and so on) while the difference "m-n" counts the ghost number. Note that the statistics of theta's is flipped for odd values of "m+n".

If you keep "m+n" fixed, there are "m+n+1" sibbling fields "theta". Their central charge should be counted as "(-1)^{m+n}" times the central charge "C00" of the fields "theta^{00}". This means that the total central charge of the whole ghost pyramid is

• Cpyramid / C00 = 1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + 5 - 6 + ...

The contributions 1,-2,+3,-4 come from the theta variables with m+n=0,1,2,3 and so on while the alternating signs arise from the alternating statistics of the ghosts for the previous ghosts. This sum plays an important philosophical role in the new formalism, and it is useful to evaluate it. You can use the zeta-function regularization with the usual allowed tricks. A simple reasoning shows that

• 1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + 5... =
• 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5... - 2 ( 2 + 4 + 6 + ...) =
• 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5... - 4 (1 + 2 + 3 + ...) =
• (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5...) x (1-4) =
  
• (-1/12) x (-3) = +1/4

That's one quarter. Note that this heuristic calculation is inevitably confirmed by the rigorous theta functions when you check the one-loop modular invariance. One quarter is significant because it tells you that the 32-component spinorial ghost pyramid has the same "number of degrees of freedom" as a single 8-component spinor, such as the spinor found in the light-cone gauge description.

Your worldsheet field content then only has the usual fields "X,b,c" much like in the bosonic string plus the "theta^{mn}_{a}" ghost pyramid. No "beta,gamma" systems occur. Pure spinors "lambda" are absent, too. The total central charge cancels because of the identity

• 10 (X) - 26 (bc) + 16 (theta pyramid) = 0
  

The BRST charge is constructed as some annoying conjugation by an operator "U" (to make the non-invertibility of the following operator harmless) of the operator defined as follows:

The operator in the core of the BRST operator is essentially the usual bosonic BRST term, i.e. the integral of "cT(sigma)", plus a fermionic term that is equal to the integral of

• (1/4) Pi . Gammapyramid . Pi

Here, "Pi" are the conjugate momenta for the fields "theta" in the pyramid and "Gammapyramid" is a generalization of the Dirac matrices that acts on the "Pi" and "theta" components of the pyramid in a particular way. The operator "U" needed for the conjugation is defined as a particular exponential.

You can then define vertex operators for physical states and if you read and understand the paper that appeared one hour ago, you can also compute some particular scattering amplitudes.

And because I don't want to write their whole paper again, anyone who is interested in details should try to read the original papers. It should be possible to prove the equivalence with the Berkovits picture, and it is even conceivable that the proof is known.

An expert from the Western hemisphere confirms that Siegel's and Kiyoung's approach is analogous to working with the picture 0 operators in the RNS superstring while the picture -1 may be more natural on the worldsheet. These picture 0 operators are enough for tree-level and one-loop graphs but it seems obvious that for genus 2 diagrams and higher, one needs an extension of the formalism and the ghost pyramid approach could face problems at this level.

Kadima party wins & mess in France & Summers' annihilation of poverty

Breaking news: the Kadima party, the center-right party that was formed by Ariel Sharon after he left the right-wing Likud, has won about 30 seats in the Israeli Parliament that has 120 seats. Labor Party will be around 22 seats, Beitenu (Russian) around 12 seats. Likud's Netanyahu with 11 seats admitted a "body blow" to his party and is expected to resign. Pensioners will take 7 seats or so.

France

Meanwhile, France is paralyzed by new strikes organized by a new Jacobin club. These young people are revolutionaries. In fact, they are very odd revolutionaries who don't want to change the world. Instead, they want to preserve all the socialist constructs that became so normal in France. Preserve them for themselves.

Of course, France can no longer afford these things. The unemployment among the young people under 26 is about 23 percent. The employers are afraid to hire anyone because they would have to guarantee all the socialist achievements for these employees. As Quantoken obviously misunderstands, when it's hard to fire, it's better for the company not to try to hire.

The government has decided that the job market must become more flexible and they have created a new law that allows the employers to fire the young people for 2 years without inventing convoluted explanations. The young students don't like it and the young non-students are even worse. The latter group attacks both the government as well as the young students.

The only reason why I am not ashamed of these officially young but morally old people - who are, indeed, similar to some of the retired workers from Czechoslovakia who loved the paternalistic communism - is that I don't find my citizenship in the European Union to be one of the two most important parts of my identity.

If you didn't know: the Jacobin Club was the first Stalinist organization in the world that became powerful at the end of the French revolution during the Reign of Terror when about 30,000 people were executed. It was led by people like Jean-Paul Marat who was a killer analogous to Che Guevara and by Robespierre who was a left-wing radical metrosexual analogous to - but worse than- Howard Dean. Of course, the lunatics from the French streets mattered, too. Thanks God, the terror ended on 7/28/1794 when Robespierre and his 21 associates were executed.

If you think that I am the only one who compares the French left-wing revolutionaries to Stalin, you may want to know that Jean-Robert Pitte, the president of Sorbonne, is "ashamed of his country" where "Stalin is not yet dead". He explained that "France is his last refuge". Pitte had opposed the protests in 1968, too. If you guess that the article must mention that Sorbonne's president has similar reasonable opinions as Harvard's president, you guess correctly.

Summers will eliminate poverty from the Milky Way

If you are interested, Larry Summers just hails Dubai's economic strategies and they praise him. Yesterday, Summers recommended the International Monetary Fund to run a half-a-trillion USD hedge fund. The main goal of this modest but meaningful proposal is to eliminate poverty from the Solar System - and probably beyond - by replacing the incompetent managers in the Third World by competent managers supervised by IMF. Many underdeveloped countries have huge financial reserves that are not dealt with efficiently.

The left-wing activists did not realize that by firing Summers, they will initiate - if you allow me to exaggerate just a little bit - a daily transfer of half a trillion USD in the right direction, a direction that they viscerally hate. ;-)

B-mesons and supersymmetry?

I am usually very skeptical about statements that new physics has been discovered through high-precision experiments; especially about the precise identity of the new physics - and this case is no exception. Five years ago, we have heard a similar story about the discovery of supersymmetry in Brookhaven. It went away after some signs in theoretical calculations of some two-loop diagrams were corrected.

Nevertheless, you should still know that the D0 detector team at the Tevatron at Fermilab is submitting a paper about the

• B_s meson oscillations

to Physical Review Letters in which they argue that their measurement is "the first tangible evidence for supersymmetry" (at least in the article above they say so). I, for one, will only believe that SUSY is discovered once the things are so clear that Michal Fabinger pays me those 1,000 dollars which will probably not happen in 2006 if ever.

Moreover, a reader points out that the measured frequency is exactly what is predicted by the Standard Model, which would make the comment in the article to be just the opposite of the truth. I am not able to verify the exact number.

The B_s meson is a neutral bound state of a bottom-quark and a strange-antiquark that can, much like the neutral K meson, oscillate in between this state and its antiparticle. The frequency of oscillations is, according to the experiments, 19 trillion Hertz plus minus 10 percent at 90 percent confidence level. These oscillations measure violations of discrete symmetries, especially the CP symmetry.

The article also explains that the physicists only accept a statement as a discovery once the confidence level is 99.99995% which you should view as an explanation why I find various tests about the correlations of XY and health (or climate) to be junk science.

The spokesman of the competing CDF detector group explains that the CDF people are jealous but they are better anyway. With a higher sensitivity, they have a more chance to make the discovery by looking at a corresponding dataset. Stay tuned but don't expect miracles.

Steve Shenker: Inflation in AdS/CFT

The last duality seminar by Steve Shenker was about

• inflation in AdS/CFT

Steve is a captivating speaker so we could not miss this one. He brought us some fresh air from the West Coast, including the West Coast thinking where everything is fine, everything goes, just as required by the anthropic principle, and moreover the metric tensor signature is (+---).

One of the dreams of modern, high-energy alchemists was to create a Universe in the bottle. Imagine that there is a scalar field whose potential energy has a local minimum somewhere above our minimum. You prepare a scattering process and try to raise the value of the scalar field to the higher minimum in a large enough region of space inside your bottle. This small seed can start to inflate: it may begin to grow exponentially while its boundary may remain small. A large new Universe with billions of stars may eventually appear inside your bottle.

Is it possible? Although this picture uses physical concepts that are widely believed by theoretical physicists to be correct, the ultimate answer is No. Today we may argue that such a Universe in the bottle violates the entropy bounds and the holographic principle: the entropy and the number of degrees of freedom in a region (inside the bottle) should not exceed the surface area of the region (the bottle).

More materially, Guth and Farhi have proved years ago - using the classical methods of general relativity and the theorems about the existence of singularities - that a few moments or minutes before the inflation starts, the spacetime must develop a singularity. If you want a Universe in the bottle, you must sacrifice all your history except for the last few minutes, pretend that the Big Bang occured five minutes ago, and as you can agree, this is far too high a price to pay. Farhi, Guth, and Guven did not want to give up and they proposed a new way to start the local inflation - using quantum tunneling.

Steve reviewed these things - and he drew the Penrose diagrams in various situations sketched above (for example, an air-conditioning inflating box attached to the filled anti de Sitter cylinder) as he participated in intense debates whether the tunneling breaks the analyticity of various quantities. But his intent was more modern. Today we have alternative definitions of theories of quantum gravity, especially the AdS/CFT correspondence. Can they tell us something new about inflation? While I don't know the answer to this question, Steve could still manage to say some interesting things.

Don't get me wrong: the conclusion remains that the Universe in the bottle is impossible, even if you use quantum tunneling.

But the exact explanation why it is so is somewhat interesting albeit controversial. Steve essentially argued that if there is an inflating region inside anti de Sitter space, it must be described by a mixed state in the full theory. Because pure states can't evolve into mixed states, the evolution that initiates inflation is impossible.

I don't understand the assumptions of this argument (although I agree, of course, with the impossibility to evolve into mixed states) and Steve's answers to my questions confirmed my expectation that I won't ever understand it because it contradicts my understanding of some basic notions of quantum mechanics. We can't ever say that the world is objectively described by a mixed state. A mixed state or a density matrix is nothing else than the quantum counterpart of the classical uncertainty, the classical probability distributions. A mixed state is a mixture of matrices constructed from pure states that is a useful description of reality whenever we only know some features of the pure states (such as some macroscopic or low-energy quantities) but not all of them.

But a representative pure state included in the mixed state must always have the same macroscopic properties as the mixed state itself. And we must always be free to imagine that our system is in a particular pure state - we just don't know which one. If you consider a thermal density matrix, surely you don't think that you can't find particular pure states that behave in the same way. The description of the macroscopic physics in terms of a thermal mixed state may be more convenient than any calculation you could do with any particular pure state that looks thermal, but it is just a matter of convenience, not a matter of the truth.

Moreover, when you derive by some semiclassical methods that a CFT description of your inflating region is traced over some degrees of freedom and it therefore looks as a mixed state, it does not mean that the mixed state is the exact answer. By the same semiclassical methods, you might argue that a black hole is a pure state that has no entropy. That would be, of course, wrong. The opposite case - in which the semiclassical approximation overestimates the entropy - is unlikely because the semiclassical degrees of freedom are subset of all degrees of freedom and an inequality should therefore hold. However, I did not see how one can isolate the "many" degrees of freedom on the boundary that describe the CFT, so I don't see a sharp contradiction with the entropy argument.

At any rate, one can never objectively say whether the Universe is found in a pure state or a mixed state: this question is a subjective question about our complete vs. incomplete knowledge of the physical system. The density matrix is not the same as a classical state of a classical system. And no physically measurable quantities or questions can depend on the answer to this philosophical question about the purity of our Universe because that would be in contradiction with the postulates of quantum mechanics, I think.

Steve was telling me that these basic ideas of "mine" break down in quantum gravity but I don't understand what they have to do with gravity which is why I cannot fully reproduce their argument here.

Time magazine: Another Ice Age?

An unusually chilly spring has delayed planting in Canada and the harvest will disappoint.

The cooling trend shows no signs that it will be reverted. The apparently contradictory weather effects show, in fact, a global climatic upheaval. If you average the temperature over the planet, it has been gradually decreasing in the past few decades. Since the 1940s, the temperatures dropped by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.



Climatological Cassandras who foresee the misfortune are increasingly apprehensive because the weather anomalies they study seem to be the harbinger of another ice age.

Telltale signs are everywhere, from the unusually thick Icelandic ice to the migration of the warmth-loving armadillo from the Midwest. Satellites have shown that three years ago, the ice has grown by 12 percent during one year. The Baffin Island used to be snow-free. Now it's covered by snow all the time.




There are many other independent proofs of global cooling. The cap of high-altitude cold winds, the circumpolar vortex, is widening and causes droughts in Africa. The humankind may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend because of farming and fuel burning. Whatever is the cause of the cooling trend, the effects may be catastrophic. It has been calculated that a decrease of solar radiation by 1% means that the tipping point has been breached.

Some scientists like Donald Oilman suggest that cooling may be only temporary.

Current climate is exceptional and we are likely to return to the ice age. But even if the new ice age won't come in the full force, global food will be sharply reduced. Kenneth Hare, the ex-president of the Royal Meteorological Society, warns that the world's population above 4 billion people is unsustainable if there will be three more disastrous years as the last one. If you want to know more details, read:

• Time: Another Ice Age?
• HTML

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Unless you want to use your brain. Well, as you can see, when I was born, the world already was a s**tty place although I must admit that the articles in MCMLXXIIII were still a bit less crazy than those that are being written today, in MMVI. The MCMLXXIIII article at least contains many more mechanisms and local details than the contemporary one. Certain fields of science have deteriorated, indeed. And the Time magazine has replaced a moderate global cooling with a hysterical global warming.

See also: Rasool, Schneider, Hansen's model predicted ice age

Dyson and 42 as the answer to everything

As Wolfgang has always known, the number 42 is not only the universal answer to life and the Universe but also the third moment of the zeta function.

• Seed magazine

The first two moments of the zeta function are 1 and 2. All these big discoveries follow from an encounter of Freeman Dyson with another scholar, Hugh Montgomery, in 1972, and because I don't understand anything in this story except for the value of the moments of the zeta function, your explanations will be welcome.

If Freeman Dyson can explain life and the universe with the third moment being 42, The Reference Frame can also explain the multiverse and God because the fourth moment is 24024. I am not kidding you. Ask J.B. Conrey and S.M. Gonek for details.

Monty Hall Paradox

This is a good example how people who professionally deal with statistics can disagree about the results if the problem is not accurately defined.

The Monty Hall problem is the following. There are three doors 1,2,3, goats behind two of them, and a car behind the third. You want to win the car. The procedure has several steps.

1. First, you choose one of the doors. Without a loss of generality, because you don't know anything yet, you choose the door number 1 (they don't know that this is your convention)
2. Second, Monty Hall chooses and opens another door, say the door number 3 (the subtlety occurs at this point!), and you see there was a goat behind the door number 3
3. Third, you can either choose to keep the door number one or switch to the door number 2, trying to maximize the probability that you win a car

In fact, you can play it here. This seems as a trivial task but actually the rules above are not yet well-defined as we will see. What is the probability that you get a car if you keep the door number one?

Symmetric argument

At the beginning, there are three equally likely possibilities with likelihoods of 1/3:

• 1/3: car behind (1)
• 1/3: car behind (2)
• 1/3: car behind (3)

Once you see a goat behind (3), it is obvious that the third possibility could not have been realized. So only the first two possibilities survive. Once the third possibility is eliminated, you should work with the conditional probabilities, i.e. you should replace P(Answer) by

• Pconditional(Answer) = P(Answer & Assumptions) / P(Assumptions).

Given the condition that the car is not behind (3), which is what we have just learned, we know that the truth must be one of the first two possibilities. Because their total a priori probability was 2/3 (the denominator of the formula above) and each of them had 1/3 a priori (the numerator), the new predicted probabilities of victory are 1/2 for each door 1 or 2, and it therefore does not matter whether you change your door or not. Because no one has seen anything behind the door 1, it is completely irrelevant whether you were standing in front of 1 or not.




The winning probability is 50 percent whether you decide to switch or not. It is important to notice that in this scenario, we were assuming that Monty Hall had a rule to open the door number 3 literally: he always opens the door number 3 if we open the door number 1, which means that sometimes he will open a door number 3 with a car behind it. That never happened on TV.

Asymmetric situation

However, the script where you can play the game above leads to a different outcome than 50:50. Those who switch have the probability of 2/3 to win while those who keep the door number one only have 1/3. How is it possible? It is because in this game on the internet, there is a different mechanism how Monty Hall chose the door. In fact, he did not choose the door number 3 as a rule. Instead, he followed a different rule. He chose a door that had a goat behind it - and at least one door among the two has a goat behind it, so he can always do so.

This changes the numbers completely. The three equally likely initial situations, after you choose to occupy the door number 1, lead to the following events:

• 1/3: car behind (1) – they will randomly open 2 or 3
• 1/3: car behind (2) – they will open 3
• 1/3: car behind (3) – they will open 2

What are the probabilities that you win a car if you keep the door number 1? There are no conditional probabilities here because all three situations allow the game to continue in the standard way. If you keep the door number 1, you will only win in the first case, in which the car is behind the door number 1, i.e. the probability is 1/3. If you choose to switch to the last door, the door we called "2" but it can also be "3" if Monty Hall opens 2, you will win a car with probability of 2/3 because in the situations 2 and 3 (two thirds of the situations), when the car is not behind 1, switching is guaranteed to give you a car. So you should better switch.

Inverse asymmetric situation

We can also define a mechanism in which it is strictly better to keep the door. Imagine that Monty Hall tries to open the door with the car whenever he can. Obviously, if the car is found behind the door number 2 or 3, you know that it can't be behind 3 or 2, and you have lost anyway (unless they allow you to take the car revealed by the host). On the other hand, if Monty Hall opens a door with a goat, you know for sure that it is because there was no car behind the doors 2,3, which is why you keep the door number 1. It gives you a 100% probability of a car. If you switched, you would have a 0% probability of winning a car.

Conclusions

As you see, you need to know the rules how Monty Hall works. You need to know his internal mechanisms that are used to decide which door he opens. If you don't know the internal mechanisms of the things you study, not even approximately, you can't predict any probabilities. There is no God-given algorithm how the host works. In fact, there is even no God-given probability distribution on the space of algorithms that Monty Hall follows. This simple fact is what the fans of the Bayesian inference misunderstand.

The internal mechanisms of Monty can be probabilistic; in fact, if the car were behind the door number 1 in the asymmetric (internet) version of the problem, Monty had to choose 2 or 3 randomly. The mechanisms don't have to have any deterministic justification - which is what the advocates of the Bohmian mechanics misunderstand. Probabilistic mechanisms are equally fine and quantum mechanics works in this way. But still, we must know the mechanisms in order to make any scientifically reliable predictions.

If we don't know whether the mechanisms inside Monty Hall prevent (or encourage) him to open a door with a car, we can't say whether switching gives us an advantage. If we don't know what is the natural noise and the structure of autocorrelations of the global temperatures, we can't tell whether the current temperature data show human influence or not. And until we know what are the natural percentages of men and women in various professions, we can't determine whether these percentages are influenced by a particular social effect.

Lisa Randall's Warped Passages website

The only role of this posting is to inform you and the search engines about the new website of

• Lisa Randall's Warped Passages.

Among other things, you will find a free chapter from the book on that website much like MP3 files with various interviews. Enjoy!

Ukraine

Meanwhile, Ukraine is at risk of undoing the Orange Revolution. The party of Viktor Commie Yanukovich has received 33 percent of votes while Viktor Western Yushchenko's party has only received 13 percent or so. Fortunately, the former ally of Yushchenko and the former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, who is also a blogger (with a few blog secretaries), received 22 percent of votes and is ready to re-unify the orange coalition. Their union has broken after different attitudes to some corruption charges.

Freeman Dyson on PhD, global warming, biotechnology, and superpowers

Via William Connolley.

Freeman Dyson has been and is an eminent physicist who has never received a PhD even though his name appears in the main text of 1,410 scientific articles. In fact, he considers the PhD system to be deeply flawed. In December 2005, he offered a very interesting

• speech at University of Michigan

in which he promotes three opinions that he calls "heresies".

1. Global warming theories are unreliable, exaggerated, and based on models with many flaws (Dyson describes them in detail), and the researchers in this field create a lot of hype to steal money from more legitimate human activities
2. Biotechnology will become as domesticated as computer games and children and housewives will create their new animal and plant species at home. Most people don't realize that this will happen much like John von Neumann didn't appreciate computer games as a major source of the 21st century entertainment
3. The United States have less than 100 years left as a global superpower because in most cases, the superpowers become overextended and eventually collapse - and Dyson who is British American sees signs that the United States may slowly be approaching this point

At the celebration, Freeman Dyson also informed the new PhDs that their education will probably turn out to be overspecialized and they may be declared redundant; indeed, Dyson is just like the Fairy Blackstick from his fairy-tale. Much like in the fairy-tale, such a redundancy may also be an opportunity because the students can always join the heretics. Dyson himself is a proud heretic but, unfortunately, an "old heretic" - one of those who don't "cut much ice". The world needs young heretics, he says. And in November 2006 he will release a book about scientists as rebels. You should buy it:



Are there any young heretics in this world?

Well, I, for one, don't think that the statement that the global warming industry is essentially a fraud is a heresy. And I am not a heretic but a mainsteam person; there just happens to be too many stupid people around who oppose my opinions. It is they, not me, who should be burned at stake. ;-) William Connolley who is unwilling to recognize that he is less qualified than Dyson and your humble correspondent to judge the reliability of the climate models is one of them.




This world is a scientific world that belongs to people like me and the climate charlatans are just guests. Also, I share Dyson's predictions about the growth of family biotechnology and general estimates about the lifetime of superpowers - although I would probably think that 100 years is too long a time period to price the predictions in and we don't know exactly when the changes will occur.

William Dembski's creationist readers also liked Dyson's speech. Incidentally, The Uncommon Descent is the place where climate scientists such as William Connolley learn new things. Too bad that the sympathy is not mutual and both Dyson (who has spent a lot of time by research of the origins of life) and I consider creationism to be complete crap. Your humble correspondent also thinks that plants with parabolic mirrors don't live near Saturn, as Dyson proposed during a talk after which I took the picture linked at the top, but that would be another story. :-) Dyson, whose Motl number is 4, has also constructed an interesting and apparently unprovable mathematical assertion here.

If William Connolley and others really believe that Freeman Dyson, one of the most versatile physicists of the 20th century and beyond, must be less qualified than they are, they should think twice. Dyson who has been important in the development of nuclear technology and who has proven the equivalence of different approaches to quantum field theory is no beginner in climate science. For example, he's been thinking about the wet Sahara in the past for 47 years; his conclusion is that the increasing levels of CO2 could make Sahara wet again which would be an improvement.

And the global warming is not the first hypothesis that Dyson found problematic, to put it mildly. Dyson has said the following sentence about the theory of "nuclear winter":

• It's an absolutely atrocious piece of science but who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?

Of course, he was right on this one: a nuclear blast has no lasting consequences such as a multi-decade absence of life. Is he right about the global warming? I hope that Prof. Dyson has strong enough nerves today when he opens the outrageously idiotic main article of the Time magazine, also reprinted as the main story of CNN.COM on Sunday.

See The American Thinker, Mike Jericho's blog and Katy Delay's blog for rational analyses of the Time magazine article.

In 1999, Dyson said the following about the climate change:

• The public has been led to believe that problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a single cause and a single consequence, that, put simply, fossil fuel burning leads directly to global warming. But in fact, there are multiple causes and multiple consequences, and these need to be understood and measured. It is my belief that too much Federal money has been spent on modeling and not enough on measurement of the causes of climate change.

In 1979, Freeman Dyson showed that if there were a problem of global warming, it could be easily solved - for hundreds of millions of dollars per year (1,000 times less than Kyoto that moreover solves nothing) by introducing fine particles into the upper atmosphere. In 1997, this approach was also elaborated upon by Edward Teller, the father of the Hydrogen bomb (and the main initiator of the Star Wars), who was also a climate skeptic and who died in 2003.

One month ago, Freeman Dyson has co-authored the very same letter to the editors of Science as Steve McIntyre did, asking Science to assure that the data used to create the "hockey team" climate reconstructions are archived, as required by the magazine's policies.

Mary Winkler: the motive

See also: Who was the Virginia gunman & Victoria Lindsay in FL
See also: news.google.com & blogs on Winkler

August 4th, 2008: Mary Winkler regains custody of her three daughters!

December 19, 2007 update: Grandparents' appeal rejected, a jury (10 women + men) discusses voluntary manslaughter again, her state of mind is becoming the key.

September 12th, 2007 update: Mary Winkler may get her kids back

August 14th, 2007 update: Mary Winkler is free after 67 days in custody

June 8th, 2007 update: Mary Winkler asks for mercy and indeed, she will only serve 210 days in prison although she was sentenced for 3 years. The message: if your husband annoys you, just shoot him.

April 19th, 2007 update: Jury decides it was voluntary manslaughter (definition), 3-6 years. Mary Winkler showed no emotions when she was convicted.

April 18th, 2007 update: Mary Winkler doesn't really remember picking the gun. He criticized her hair and wanted her to watch porn and have "unnatural" sex afterwards, and kicked her into face, and she just wanted him not to be mean. She didn't pull the trigger but something suddenly went off - boom - and he was dead. Guns sometimes have "unnatural" spontaneous ejaculations, it seems.

April 14th, 2007 update: Experts say that the gun was working well. Mary Winkler was deeply in trouble with the Nigerian scam.

April 12th, 2007 update: Mary Winkler claims that she was abused and the death was an accident - she just wanted attention from Matthew. On Friday 13th, she admitted shooting, claiming it was done by her ugly.

April 9th, 2007 update: Jury selection started. Dan and Diane Winkler filed a \$2 million lawsuit against Mary Winkler, apparently to prevent her from profiteering via book or movie deals.

January 2007 update: Some interviews with family members.

November 2006 update: Mary Winkler argues that the murder was due to constant abuse.

Final news: Mary Winkler told police that she shot Matthew Winkler after a fight. She was fed up with her husband telling her how to eat, how to walk, etc. Especially, there was an argument about family finances that she managed. She deposited \$17,500 into family accounts because she apparently became a victim of scams - Canada and even Nigeria (a famous source of a certain kind of scam) appeared in the testimony. See a reconstruction. Bond was set to \$750,000: she will have to kill about minus 30 more husbands to be able to use it. Surprisingly, she did it.



The following entries are sorted anti-chronologically, and the main, original part of this article is at the bottom. I think that the resolution does not confirm all the details I predicted. It confirm, of course, the primary statement that in non-priest families, this would probably get solved by a divorce.

News: Mary Winkler might have been indicted on Monday 6/12 - indeed, she was indicted - and as predicted, she appeared in court on Wednesday 6/14, pleaded "not guilty" and asked for a bond. The children are happy with the grandparents. Around 6/19, Winkler's attorney has filed 25 motions (everything about this case is unusual), especially trying to hide Winkler's testimony for the police and the evidence from the court because it was obtained "illegally". Meanwhile, some people start to speculate about the death penalty.





Update: Mary Winkler celebrates Mother's Day in prison.

Disclaimer: chances are that you got here because of a search engine. This page does not contain the ultimate answer - although the Tennessee officials already know it and it is something very particular - but you may still learn something. Please don't be evil when you speculate about the motives.

Last Thursday, Mary Winkler who is held without bail was expected to plead not guilty and explain her motive but she has waived the public hearing to simplify the life of her daughters. It is conceivable that Steve Farese - who told us to "expect the unexpected" last Thursday even though nothing happened after all - has advised Winkler to shelve the original explanation and they will eventually claim that the murder occured because of post-birth depression.

The family's computers have been seized to find the answer that 2,000 people a day try to find on this page. And the attorney will even attempt to show that the shooting was an accident! In a newer development on Wednesday 04/05, the attorney has encouraged the speculations about Matthew Winkler's pedophilia when he said that "She may have been protecting someone".



Figure 1: Mary Winkler and defense attorney Steve Farese in Selmer court (AP Photo/Rogelio Solis). Can she get a fair trial?

The Winkler family is described by their neighbors as a perfect family: a precious mother and wife (and a teacher), a superb and charismatic father and husband (and a preacher), and loving, bright, happy children. In fact, it is completely useless to ask neighbors about these issues because unless the motives are obvious, the neighbors will always tell you the same thing, namely that the murderer and her family were perfect. It must be so. It is a physical law.

Why is it a physical law? It is because a murder is an extreme, infrequent act, and it must therefore have extreme reasons. Extreme reasons for a murder fall into two extreme categories: either the murderer and the victim have been involved in some extremely obvious controversial events such as sexual abuse or organized crime, or they have been hiding and suppressing some of their feelings in an extremely tight mental box.

The Church is, much like the Academia, an ideal place that encourages hypocricy - and that often prefers the form over the content. This is why this Hungarian pastor has been less popular than Matthew Winkler. In fact, the Church of Christ also likes to oppress women as the Median Sibling convincingly argues.



Figure 2: Matthew Winkler, a minister

Although many bloggers are ready to invent far-reaching theories about Matthew Winkler, I continue to assume that he was primarily a victim of a murder, and I find it highly inappropriate to accuse victims themselves of crimes without having a good reason. Of course, some people disagree with me and the radical feminists consider Mary Winkler to be their hero. Every husband should hire a personal injury solicitor or a bodyguard.

What was her motive?

That's a question that many people are obviously asking these days. It turns out that the Tennessee officials already know the answer but they can't yet disclose it. Of course, I don't know the answer but one can still speculate. There can be something very concrete behind the murder. For example, Matthew Winkler could have been involved in pedophilia - as Jennifer and many other women believe - or something effectively equivalent that his wife really hated. I find such an explanation rather unlikely. Instead, let me say a few general comments.

I have been exposed to the very same fundamentalist Christian environment for a year or so - because of my former girlfriend - and this experience has brought me, among other things, some striking insights. First of all, those Christians who believe the Bible literally - and the Winklers clearly fall into this category - find certain acts, including pre-marriage sex and divorce, unimaginable. Under these extreme circumstances, a murder can become easier than a divorce.

If you press CTRL/F and search for bcos on this page, you will find a theory that Mary's "bi-polar" psychological problems are behind the murder. The only problem with this theory is that "bi-polar" psychological problems are probably not what could be called "a particular motive" which is what the officials say led to the murder. But it's certainly true that the amount of expectations from pastors' wives and their loneliness is immense.

One thing seems clear to me right now: Mary Winkler did not love her husband in the usual, emotional sense. If she did, she could not have killed him. This fact could have had very ordinary biological reasons. According to the photographs, I wouldn't personally consider them to be a match because the physiques of the partners should be comparable.

• Update (4/29/2006): In March, I was apparently the only blogger in the world who has pointed out the different physical size as a factor to consider. At the end of April, Farese (the attorney) was mysteriously referring to the culture of "men being physically bigger than women" as a key point of the defense.

The reason behind their marriage could have been something very different from internal love, and I suspect it is the case in many Christian families. You can also speculate about the importance of the miscarriage that Mary Winkler had before their youngest baby was born.

You can also imagine that her husband wanted her to have a fourth child - by mathematical induction, the fourth daughter - but she disagreed but was not in charge of this decision.

Mary Winkler could have found someone else, too. But a divorce is unthinkable for a charismatic, fundamentalist preacher as you know. Such a thing would destroy his career and not only his career. According to the sixth commandment, a murder is unthinkable, too. But unlike the divorce, she at least did not need any permission from her husband.

Did she believe that no one would figure out that she has killed her husband? If she did, she must be a really stupid woman. Many people in Tennessee say that she was very nice. I don't like the word "nice" too much. If you statistically evaluate what the word is used for, it has a large amount of compassion in it. Moreover, the word "nice" also represents a quiet compliance with the values of the environment as well as some degree of confusion about what the person really thinks. If you think for a while, it is not exactly a compliment for someone to be called "nice".

At any rate, Matthew Winkler is gone and in a couple of hours or days, we will learn what is the official explanation of the murder. It seems that the daughters have not yet learned what happened to their father. I guess they can survive it pretty well. A new minister in Tennessee will be hired. They will show him his new parsonage: this is where the guy before you was killed by his "loving" wife. Good luck to everyone!

Rae Ann shares many things with Mary Winkler, yet she is so different. Some lyrics refreshes her meditation about this event. Or do you want to know what Mary Winkler would write if she had a blog? If you're looking for an even more extensive discussion than the discussion in the two comment sections under this article, see the Huff Crime Blog

A newspaper snippet

Rae Ann has scanned and sent me an interesting newspaper snippet that is apparently going to be published on Sunday:



Please don't ask me what it exactly means because I must still study the details.

Update: a reader has sent me a TV screenshot when they informed about the same thing. You can see our experimental colleague from Fermilab.

Lennart Carleson wins Abel prize

Lennart Carleson (78) who is described by the British socialist daily "The Guardian" as the inventor of the Fourier series whose discovery was used in the electronic components of iPod :-) has been awarded by the Abel prize which includes half a million British pounds. The prize is intended to be a mathematical counterpart of the Nobel prize, as demonstrated by the verse Nobel-Abel, and can only be awarded to mathematicians who avoid non-Abelian gauge theories. See news.google.com.

More seriously, Carleson has studied "complex dynamics" of complex maps such as the Henon map, convergence and growth of partial sums of Fourier series, interpolations of bounded analytic functions, and many other things, some of which look like simple math but it may be just a wrong impression. Most famously, Carleson has proved the Corona theorem in the early 1950s.

When we talk about the millions of dollars: the Kennedy School of Government has received $1.5 million to support women in politics, under the slogan "From Harvard Square to the Oval Office". Actually I did not know that Lewinski had a Harvard degree.

Bug in MSIE 6

There exists another reason to download the new excellent Internet Explorer 7 that we discussed here. The new, March 20th edition of its beta 2 preview is the first version of a Microsoft browser that is not (according to Microsoft Security Response Center Blog) affected by the new, highly critical text-handling bug that allows hackers to do anything with your computer they want, including eating the food from your fridge. Note that if you have installed a previous version of Internet Explorer 7, you must first uninstall it before installing the new one.

How they probably did not steal my identity

This story looks like a continuation of the story

• How they stole $2800 from my account (for a while)

but the details are slightly different and potentially more serious.

What happened today? At 3:00 pm, after the class about the anomalous magnetic moments, I received a very strange package to the department. It was a book about Benazir Bhutto. If you don't know - and I did not really know - she was the first female leader of a Muslim country: a politician from the People's Party of Pakistan (PPP). The pretty book by Mary Englar costs $30.60, quite a price for 112 pages. But the book looks really nice.

It should be obvious that I had never ordered a book about Benazir Bhutto. What was even more disturbing was the address where the book was sent:

• Lubos Motl
• Lyman Lab
• Photographer
• 36 Oxford Street Apt. 11
• Cambridge MA 02138-1957

I am not a photographer and the address has nothing to do with me: it is a complete accident that it ended up in the physics department at 11 Oxford Street where we have no apartments: moreover, the Lyman Lab is not a photographic lab. Josh Lapan (and Suvrat Raju) helped me to try to apply for the free annual credit report to see how much money have the identity thieves borrowed on behalf of my name. Neither of the three agencies returned any data. It became obvious that someone has stolen my identity and changed the official address so that I cannot get the data using my real address. And he or she is buying books, houses, and airplanes using the credit card.

Moreover, who could be interested in a Pakistani politician? For example, Al-Qaeda. A terrorist has apparently used my identity from the phishing website and the politically correct bankers have opened a credit card for him, assuming that he must be Lubos Motl.

The only method how to pay all those millions of dollars back that I could think of was to nominate Viktor Kožený, a friend of mine from the Bahamas who offered me to become a Czech shadow minister of education, as a candidate for "Scholars at risk", a scholarship at Harvard. If he wins, he could give me a few million from his assets of hundreds of millions of dollars. ;-)

So I went to see how 36 Oxford Street looks like. The building is called the Conant Hall and it belongs to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. You could smell the drugs and see the blood on the floor. There are scary posters informing the readers about conferences of various researchers in racial studies and similar pseudosciences. You can imagine that the environment had to be quite depressing for me. You can't get behind the second door into the building - otherwise police is immediately alerted, as you can read on the walls. I made it sure that my fingerprints are cleaned from all the doors that I touched. Also, I was waiting for the fake Lubos Motl to appear behind the door. How is he or she going to look like? Should I kill him or her? Am I strong enough to do it?

Eventually I called the publisher and a rough framework of the solution to the mystery suddenly emerged in front of my eyes when they told me that the book was free. I completed the details of the theory after the telephone conversation. Can you solve the puzzle, too? Let me give you a hint: the page 36 of the book explains that Benazir came to love her experience in the United States at Harvard's Radcliffe College in snowy New England. Also, the page 97 of the book outlines the most important events of Bhutto's life between 1968 and 1971 - and the page contains three pictures: a picture of a college in Cambridge, a photograph of the first man on the Moon, and a picture of the first microprocessor by Intel.

Why are these events in Bhutto's life relevant for solving a mystery about criminals who just ordered a book about her 35 years later? Do you know the answer? If you don't, read the following sentence backwards:

.koob reh fo ypoc eerf a em tnes dna ,211 egap no em deknaht ,effilcdaR fo erutcip ym desu sah ralgnE yraM

Inaccurate clocks in quantum gravity?

Rodolfo Gambini, Rafael Porto, and Jorge Pullin have a paper

• gr-qc/0603090

in which they argue that there exists some "additional" fundamental contribution to decoherence arising just from the fact that someone is able to measure time. They even say that there is a "fundamental loss of unitarity" in a theory of quantum gravity. I believe that all these papers are completely wrong. Five years ago, we investigated similar statements by Ng and van Dam together with Raphael Bousso and other guys who were in Santa Barbara.

The authors had claimed that quantum gravity implies that the uncertainty of measuring a distance "L" is always of order "L^{1/3} Lplanck^{2/3}" which is a pretty huge uncertainty that grows with "L" quite rapidly. They followed Wigner and constructed a completely stupid kind of inaccurate clocks. Because they had inaccurate clocks, they argued that all clocks must be inaccurate (probably because they are the smartest people in the world and no one can construct better clocks than they can), which means that the inaccuracy of their dumb clocks is a fundamental principle of Nature, they argued.

What a piece of crap. Of course, in reality, one can construct much better clocks. In fact, John Baez had independently realized the same idea as we did and constructed clocks in which the pendulum is attached to a very massive rod - something that guarantees that the position of the pendulum does not fluctuate. By adjusting the ratio of the masses of the two segments of these better clocks, Baez can get the uncertainty "Lplanck" for any measurement of distance "L" which is independent of "L". (The guys who constructed clocks in the 17th century knew similar tricks quite well.) Ng and van Dam tried to "refute" Baez's (and our) statements here - but the only thing that they did to "refute" the criticism was to say that they did not like Baez's (and our) clocks.

I suppose that if you see that even John Baez agrees with me, my argument must have a sociological weight. ;-)

Of course that Baez's result is the correct result for the uncertainty and I believe that every grad student should be able to calculate these things after 2 semesters of quantum field theory. Quantize the gravitational field. Write the metric as

• g_{mn} = eta_{mn} + sqrt(Gnewton) h_{mn}

The coefficient of "sqrt(Gnewton)" is inserted to make the kinetic term for the spin-two field h_{mn} canonically normalized, schematically:

• S = integral (partial_{k} h_{mn})^2

What is the uncertainty of the proper length between two points separated roughly by "L"? This uncertainty depends on the uncertainty of "h". Clearly, the uncertainty of "h" (whose dimension is mass in 4D) must be given by the cutoff "Lambda" because in the theory for "h" whose action is written above, there is no other scale (no other dimensionful parameter). By averaging over distances on the rod of length "L", the cutoff "Lambda" can be chosen as small as "1/L".

The typical standard deviation of "h_{mn}" is of order "1/L" which means that the typical standard deviation of "g_{mn}" defined using "h_{mn}" is simply "Lplanck/L" because "sqrt(Gnewton)=Lplanck". The standard deviation in "g_{mn}" from "1" measures the relative error in the measurement of the distance. If the relative error is "Lplanck/L", the absolute error in the measured length is "Lplanck". Note that this simple result only holds in four dimensions; in other dimensions, you need other power laws. Any result that is parameterically higher than this simple estimate is just an artifact of using suboptimal types of clocks and other tools.

If I generalize their flawed reasoning more ambitiously: many people think that if they are unable to prove something or calculate or measure something accurately and reliably, and if everything seems fuzzy and uncertain to them, it implies that no one else can prove, see, or measure these things accurately either. Well, all these people are completely wrong because other people can be simply more skillful than they are - and some people could also say that the believers are "arrogant". But of course, I think that they're mostly nice people after all: they are just plain wrong.

D-dimensional generalization

Incidentally, in D spacetime dimensions, the fluctuation of "h_{mn}" must still be given by a power of "L" which is "L^{1-D/2}", and the corresponding relative error of "g_{mn}" and the relative error in the measured distances therefore goes like "sqrt(Gnewton)/L^{D/2-1}". Note that as the dimension gets very large, the error of the measured distances decreases much faster as these distances grow. In "D=2", the relative error is always of order 100 percent. In three dimensions, the error for distances "L" goes like "sqrt(L)". In low dimensions, the long-distance (infrared) fluctuations are very large; in high dimensions, they are very small.