Gapminder: all sociological correlations for all countries

Scared by the noise? Go to the individual version of this Gapminder article, browse the articles one by one, and avoid the extraterrestrial ones. Sorry for inconvenience.

You should look at a new tool bought by Google, the Gapminder. It shows the countries as disks in a two-dimensional plane parameterized by

• GDP per capita
• children per woman

You can also choose the year - and see the map. Concerning the pair of quantities above, there used to be no correlation decades ago, but as you approach 2006, things converge to a rather precise negative power law (inverse proportionality, roughly speaking).

There are actually 14 additional quantities that you can choose as either of the two axes - enough room for the web sociologists to play.

Hard-working women won't make your nation rich

For example, you will find out that there is no visible correlation between GDP per capita (in international dollars) and the percentage of women in labor force, something that the feminists would like you not to know. If there is a small correlation, it is negative.

They call it polution; we call it life

On the other hand, there is an almost perfect linear (increasing) relation between the GDP per capita and the CO2 emissions per capita - something that the Kyoto supporters would like to hide from you.

Small errata

Whenever I say "linear" in this article, I mean "linear" when you draw it on the logarithmic scale, which really describes a power law relation between the actual quantities. (The script allows you to draw it in both ways.) Whenever I say "GDP", I really mean GNP. But I guess that it won't make much difference.

Some generally expected correlations

The child mortality is an almost accurate linear decreasing function of GDP per capita.

Contraceptive use amongst adult women grows with GDP per capita, but the correlation coefficient is not strong. There is no correlation between the economic growth and the GDP per capita.

The number of internet users (much like phone users) per 1000 people is an almost exactly linear increasing function of GDP per capita, and life expectancy vs. GDP per capita is similar.

The military budget as a percentage of the budget is uncorrelated with the GDP per capita. The nations with a majority of girls outside schools are poor.

Countries with roughly 1 physician per 1000 people are poor, but for those with at least 2 physicians per 1000 people, there is no correlation with the GDP per capita.

There is no correlation between the total population and GDP per capita. GDP per capita grows with the percentage of urban population but the deviation from a linear relation is large.

You can play with the remaining 100+ of possible graphs, and also draw them for different years.

Extraterrestrial aliens in Fermiville

Shocked by the noise? Click here to get to the previous article about the evolving fine-structure constant, and to browse the articles one by one. Sorry. ;-) Otherwise click "Start" on the TV below, but not "Skip", and watch Bc. Steve in Fermiville. The flash is from the website of sci.physics.strings (SPS) national DOT org.

• FLASH

If you ask me whether I fully understand what's going on here, the answer is No. Your explanations of the role of the alien etc. will be welcome.

One thing is clear: the American Institute of Physics is trying to convince kids that one should study physics in order to become a fighter pilot, video game designer, or a fashion technologist. This may sound unusual but I actually think it is a good idea from AIP.

Evolving fine structure constant?

We often read about a time-dependent fine structure constant that measures the strength of the electormagnetic interaction in the natural units used by adult physicists in which "c=hbar=1". Let me admit at the very beginning that I find such changes theoretically unmotivated.

Our lives take place on a cosmological background but the space around is flat with an amazing accuracy. If the size of the Universe were strongly influencing the constants such as the fine structure constant through a power law whose exponent is positive and differs from zero significantly, we would have noticed. If the size of the Cosmos were influencing the constant through a negative power law, the influence is negligible and unmeasurable. The only plausible dependence is a term proportional to the logarithm of the size of the Universe that could appear in the formula for the fine-structure constant (with a small coefficient!), but I am not aware of convincing quintessence models that would lead to such a result. And indeed, quintessence - a scalar field whose potential energy mimicks the cosmological constant - is rather unmotivated anyway, which is an even more serious problem.

What do the observations say?

Let me start with the papers that argue to have found upper bounds - i.e. that argue that the constants are really constant and my beliefs are correct. The list includes observations by Chand, Srianand, and collaborators. They used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and looked at the spectrum of distant quasars:

• astro-ph/0401094
• astro-ph/0402177

These are technically well-known papers. Their final value for the relative time evolution

• d ln(alpha) / dt = d alpha / (dt alpha)

is around zero or so, with error of order

• 1 x 10^{-16} per year.

After ten billion = 10^{10} years, you get at most something like one part per million of relative change in the value of the fine structure constant. Recently, this group has debunked some kind of criticism by measuring things a bit differently. Another team looking at similar things is Quast et al.




Actually, you don't need astronomers to measure things. Patient experimenters in a lab are enough. Peik et al. measured the frequencies of some spectral lines of Cesium twice, with a 2.8 year delay, and they also obtained morally zero for the evolution of the fine structure constant, although with 20 times worse accuracy than the quasar measurements above.

Keith Olive et al. combine the astronomical and lab measurements to argue that the upper bound for the change during the existence of the Solar system is again one part per million. You know, sometimes people argue that they need an evolving alpha to obtain the right concentration of magnesium isotopes, but Keith Olive et al. think differently.

When the first nuclei were born

The Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, the process during the era when the Universe was less than three minutes old, when every mile today was one millimeter then, and when the temperature was so high that the nuclei were created out of thermal fluctuations of the strongly interacting mess, predicts a certain relative abundance of light elements - and these predictions agree with observations.

This is our most archaic directly verified prediction of the Big Bang cosmology - that goes to a few minutes after the moment of creation. Inflation occured much earlier, but we only measure its indirect effects as imprinted in the Cosmic Microwave Background that was born when the Universe was 300,000 years old and most accurately measured by the WMAP satellite.

A significant time-dependence of the constants would ruin this beautiful agreement. This imposes other bounds, see e.g. Cyburt, Fields, Olive, and Skillman. They discuss the time evolution of Newton's constant, too. Another recent paper about the nucleosynthesis bounds is by Nidal Chamoun, Susana female Landau, Mercedes E. Daimlerchrysler Mosquera, and Hector Vucetich here. During the nucleosynthesis, the most famous dimensionless parameters of the Standard Model could not differ from their present values more than by 10 percent.

Contrarians: constants evolve

OK, I have certainly omitted important teams that also argue that the evolution is zero. Let us hear the other side - which I will call the contrarians. Murphy, Webb, and Flambaum have measured some quasars differently in 2004, and they argued that the result for the relative change per year is

• 6 x 10^{-16} per year.

This is six ties higher than the upper limits found by the physicists mentioned at the beginning. Technically, however, the paper by Murphy, Webb, and Flambaum is twice as famous as the papers at the beginning that confirmed the null hypothesis. Right, I would naturally argue that this is probably due to the publication bias because people, especially in the field waiting for some new shocking things, simply prefer exciting news. It's more interesting to cite people who find 15-meter tall humans rather than those who say that the upper limit for height is around 3 meters. Giants bring you grants, and moreover you can stand on their toes (or shoulders, whichever you prefer).

I will prefer my theoretical preconceptions and continue to believe that the time evolution of the dimensionless numbers characteristic for the Standard Model is probably non-existent.

Raccoons attack Fermilab

Figure 1: A raccoon. Sometimes they also steal biscuits. Also, it's unbelievable, but I have probably found the dog who likes racooons, even baby raccoons. The family seems to be building special relationships. ;-)

Accelerator update:

Tuesday May 30

The midnight shift began with Recycler and Pbar conducting studies, and with the TeV in a dry squeeze.

At 1:24 AM, Operations reported a raccoon terrorist attack on the Linac gallery. It seemed to be a coordinated effort. Fortunately, by 1:53 AM, a joint force of operators and Pbar experts managed to drive the raccoons out of their hastily made fortifications. Then at 4:18 AM, the raccoons made what some thought to be a counter attack on the Division Headquarters, but others believed it to be only a simple reconnaissance incursion. No raccoons or civilians were either injured or captured during these encounters. Operator losses were low.




Operations prepared Pbar for an access at 5:44 AM.

Booster experts began a study period at 7:54 AM.

We will make no distinction between the raccoons who committed these acts and the raccoons and dogs who harbor them.

...

Via Not Even Wrong

"He lived on the solution side of life"

(From the memorial service for Lloyd Bentsen in Houston yesterday, courtesy Houston Chronicle. Clockwise from about 7 o'clock: John Kerry, Chris Bell, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Cornyn.)

"At the tender age of 71, a time when he could have with honor and grace and total good faith, walked into a richly deserved private life, he agreed to become Treasury secretary at one of the most challenging times for our country economically in modern history ... He was instrumental in passing our plan to expand our trade relations with Mexico -- still a controversial issue, but I ask you to think how much more complex and difficult this immigration debate would be today if we had failed then to be a good neighbor."

-- former President Clinton

"For I believe history will judge this man as a man of solutions. He lived life differently than most of us. It's been said many times that life is 10 percent what happens and 90 percent how you react to it. From my chair, I've seen far too many people who react by moaning about problems, looking down, decrying the world and the situation we have. Not Lloyd Bentsen. He lived on what I call the solution side of life, always looking for an answer, always looking for some hope."

-- Pastor William Vanderbloemen of First Presbyterian Church, which the Bentsens attended

Duff and Kalkkinen: exotic spacetime signatures

Michael Duff and Jussi Kalkkinen have two papers

• Signature reversal invariance
• Metric and coupling reversal in string theory

in which they study what happens with field theories and string theory under various sign flips. The most important one is the signature of the spacetime geometry: the authors show that various facts about the theory depend on the space and/or time dimension modulo four - because of various well-known properties of the spinors. They also try to flip the sign of the string coupling - note that this would give a negative tension to D-branes - and they try to combine various flips to see which BPS branes survive and which don't.

My attitude to these questions is conservative:

• the spacetime signature with one time (excluding multi-time theories);
  
• a positively definite Hilbert space (excluding wrong sign kinetic terms for physical fields);
  
• energies bounded from below (excluding a negative string coupling and similar things)

are necessary conditions for the slightly general and slightly specific notion of "consistency" in physics. The mathematical description in other signatures is just a convenient way to analytically continue the physics in the physical signature - for example via the Wick rotation. There is probably no new physics in these theories with different signs; just new ways to look at the same mathematics and new methods to calculate various things such as the quasinormal frequencies.

New physics is only found if you can formulate your insights in the context of the physical signature. In most cases, especially in flat space, the role of different signatures is just to continue a quantity across the complex plane of a variable. According to my definition of physics, you must continue it back to the physical signature to see "physics". It's usually obvious that you have not done anything by such a procedure. On the other hand, I still believe that the role of complexification and analytical continuation of various things will become important for our more complete understanding of black hole information issues and quantum cosmology in the future. The tricks used in the entropic principle (OVV) might be an example how the continuation could solve the vacuum selection problem.

As you can see, what I find more interesting are the questions whether the signature of various objects above - spacetime geometry; positivity of fields; positivity of the string coupling - is allowed to be flipped in the Planckian, ultrashort distance regime. This is one of the questions that has led the Bogdanoff brothers to write their somewhat controversial papers. As far as I know, no one has published "more correct" answers to some of the questions they have attempted to answer.

Henry Paulson may replace John Snow

Henry Paulson, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, only has one quarter of the hits of your humble correspondent or one twelfth of the hits of Lawrence Summers who was doing the same job a couple years ago. He was nominated to replace John Snow as the secretary of treasury.

Given the fact that the department of treasury

• prints and mints all coins and banknotes of the world's main reserve currency,
• collects all U.S. taxes through the IRS and pays all the bills on behalf of the U.S.,
• supervises all national banks,
• manages the federal finances and the public debt,
• advises on domestic and international financial, economical, fiscal, trade, and tax policies,
• enforces financial and tax laws,
• and investigates tax evaders, counterfeiters, smugglers, forgers - besides their struggle against spirits distillers and gun law violators,

I think that there should be more attention given to the identity of the person who is chosen for this work, and I offer you the following

• Spiegel's interview with Paulson.

He certainly looks like an intelligent gentleman. A website that predicted that he would be chosen one month ago, also points out that Paulson is the chairman of The Nature Conservancy (yes, the website is at nature.org), an environmental organization with the annual income around 1 billion dollars (that's not a typo). Nice hobby. ;-)

Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture Fund

You are invited to contribute to the Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture Fund which has been set up to endow a lecture in Andrew's name in perpetuity at the University of Cambridge.

There will be memorial services for Andrew in Oxford on June the 9th and in Cambridge on June the 10th. Please see www.andrewchamblin.org for specific details.



Figure 1: Picture by Clifford Johnson

Please: any nonzero amount will be helpful. Because I didn't feel too rich or financially safe, I contributed $30 only: the cheque was sent from Cambridge in New England (which means in America) to "Cambridge in America" (which actually belongs to the English Cambridge). Colonization and especially decolonization may be confusing.

You will find the relevant PDF or WORD files for the U.S. or the rest of the world at this website:

• AndrewChamblin.ORG

Think about it and ask your colleagues, especially those who knew him, to think about it, too. Andrew Chamblin deserves it.

As soon as you decide to send the form, indicating that the gift is for Andrew Chamblin, together with your cheque or your electronic card number, you may also want to inform Jo Ashbourn

• hacmemorial [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk
  

so that she will add you to the list of donors if you wish to be added, or let her know that you prefer your contribution to remain anonymous. If you find snail mail inconvenient, you can also send "N" dollars and 64 cents where "N" is integer (identification) to me via PayPal, and every time the accumulated money exceeds $30, I will send all the collected resources to the fund.

Warning: PayPal subtracts a percentage for the operations and it can't be guaranteed that the amount you pay will exactly agree with what the fund receives; the paypal method is preferred for anonymous donors.

Don't be afraid to click the icon above. Several additional clicks are needed to complete the transaction.

Ooguri and Vafa's swampland conjectures

Today, I single out the first hep-th paper:

• hep-th/0605264

Hirosi Ooguri and Cumrun Vafa extend the swampland strategy how to crack the secrets of quantum gravity by formulating five conjectures that the set "M" of all consistent quantum gravity backgrounds (which is assumed to be the set of backgrounds of the fully "completed" string theory) probably satisfies:

• "M" is parameterized by expectation values of dynamical scalar fields, i.e. there are no adjustable non-dynamical continuous parameters in string theory. That's a well-known piece of string theory folklore.
• for any point "P0" of the moduli space "M", there exist points "P" in "M" that are arbitrarily far from "P0"; the metric is measured by the kinetic terms for the scalar fields defined as fields in the large dimensions. In other words, the diameter of "M" is infinite regardless of the way how you look at "M". Note that this is true despite the fact that the volume of the moduli space is finite whenever its dimension exceeds one, according to the first swampland paper.
  
• in the previous picture, as you take points "P" that are very far from "P0", by distance "D", you will find a whole infinite tower of states whose mass is of order "exp(-A.D)" where "A" is a coefficient (exponent). We have an exponential in the formula because in the most obvious example, the distances are measured by the differences of the dilaton, and the powers of the coupling constant are exponentials of this dilaton. The existence of new light states may imply a breakdown of effective field theory, following particular rules.
• the scalar curvature of the moduli space "M" near these points at infinity - where "P" lived - is never positive; the space resembles a saddle in these regions. The only way how the inequality may be saturated is that you deal with a one-dimensional moduli space.
• every one-cycle in the moduli space "M" is contractible to a vanishing distance. This is morally true because otherwise the winding number around the moduli space, in the context of a compactification on a circle, would have a global symmetry (counting the winding number) and global symmetries don't exist in quantum gravity.

All these rules seem to be true in string theory but could be violated if you used a naive field-theoretical approach to quantum gravity. Your task is to verify these conjectures or disprove them, and if you don't disprove them, you should eventually prove them. ;-)

"Fold him in his country's stars."

Hermann Park, Houston, yesterday.

Barbara Radnofsky:


I want to express my sincere thanks to our service members and their families for their patriotic military service to our great Country. I ask that we keep our thoughts and prayers for the families of our fallen service members in all wars and the service members that died during peace time service. We must continue to remember this sacrifice on Memorial Day and throughout the year.


Chris Bell's blog (Jason Stanford):

Memorial Day is one holiday we all wish we didn't have to celebrate, and our hearts go out to everyone who has lost a friend or loved on in combat. There is not much more to say about that.

But there is a lot more to do. Texas has approximately 4,000 members of the National Guard currently on active duty in combat zones, and they are eligible for $250,000 life insurance policies with really low, $16.25 a month, premiums. On Veterans' Day, Chris said that as Governor, he would have the state pay these premiums to provide a little financial security.

When Chris' idea came out, Rick Perry's campaign called it "interesting," but not so interesting, it seems, to do anything about this. On Memorial Day, perhaps moreso than on any other day, we realize that this is an important priority and pray that no one would ever need to cash in any of these policies.

David Van Os:


My father and mother named me in memory of an uncle I never knew, my father’s older brother David, a naval fighter pilot in the Pacific theatre who did not return from his last mission and of whom it is said no trace was ever found. On the occasion of Memorial Day it is impossible for me not to think of this and of the similar sacrifices that have been made by so many Americans and their families in defense of the dream.

Over the approximately 231 years since the day the embattled colonists fired the shots heard ‘round the world at Lexington and Concord, a long line of courageous Americans and their families have offered themselves willingly to sacrifice everything they had in order to defend the dream of a place where tyranny is unknown and the people govern themselves. All of us living today owe more than words can ever express to every one of them for what they did.

On this occasion of Memorial Day 2006, something else must be said, grim though it is to have to say it. For the last 5 ½ years the chief executive of the United States of America and his entourage of sycophants have brazenly declared themselves by word and deed to be contemptuous of the Constitution and above the rule of law. In so doing they have continually shown themselves to be unworthy of every American who has sacrificed himself to defend the dream in every conflict since the courageous defenders of Lexington Green stood firm against Imperial Redcoat regiments.

The uncle I never knew did not pay the ultimate price in order for the likes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales to trample all over the American dream that he perished to defend. Every one of the honored dead who has made the ultimate sacrifice down through the years of our nation’s history deserves better than for the dream they defended to be dishonored by an American regime that scorns the very Constitution they were sworn to defend. My fellow Americans and Texans, we owe it to ourselves, our legacy, and our posterity to flood our polling places this November and bring this dishonor to an end.

Hep-th papers on Monday

Oriol Pujolas looks at the DGP model. If you don't know, the DGP model is a popular model among the phenomenologists in which you have a five-dimensional gravity with a 3-brane in it, and the action contains both the bulk 5-dimensional Einstein-Hilbert term ("integral R.sqrt(-g)") as well as an additional 4-dimensional Einstein-Hilbert term that is stuck on the 3-brane. The latter term is unlikely to appear in string theory, I think. At distances shorter than a crossover scale - usually assumed to be the Hubble scale without a good reason - gravity looks 4-dimensional. At longer distances, the bulk term starts to dominate and gravity is 5-dimensional. Pujolas studies quantum fluctuations in this model: the author computes some Green's functions, and a one-loop effective potential arising from the quantum fluctuations.

J.C. Bueno Sanchez and K. Dimopoulos study a new kind of inflation based on a rolling scalar field - a quintessence. Although the picture is string-inspired, it does not seem that they are talking about a specific well-defined background in string theory. Their description of the "trapped quintessential inflation" has many stages and it reads like a novel. The first stage of their inflation starts in a steep potential, hypothetically generated by non-perturbative effects in string theory. Then you reach an ESP - enhanced symmetry point - where you produce a lot of light particles. They argue that this leads to a period of inflation which I don't quite understand; is a strong particle production compatible with inflation? At any rate, the scalar fields eventually leave the ESP point and go into another steep region, which gives you reheating. Then the scalars freeze because of cosmological friction. It is fixed for a long time until the present, when it starts to behave as a quintessence and roll towards vanishing vacuum energy. A pretty complicated picture combining many pieces that are popular. It seems that we don't have enough data to check each wheel and gear of the construction (and similar constructions). As far as I am concerned, the "supply" of various detailed proposals about inflation exceeds the "demand" - as expressed by the observational data and the need to reconcile interesting ideas - by orders of magnitude.

Rudnei Ramos and Marcus Pinto investigate phase transitions in certain non-relativistic field theories with a lot of scalar fields. They argue that they have proved a no-go theorem: the models of this kind, describing things like hard spheres, can exhibit neither inverse symmetry breaking (which means that a symmetry is broken at high temperatures instead of the usual low temperatures) nor symmetry non-restoration (which describes a situation in which the symmetry is not restored even at very high temperatures). Finally they focus on a specific model that includes a Bose-Einstein condensate in the phase diagram. There is no reentrant phase (an intermediate phase with a partial symmetry breaking) in this model, but they argue that other models might have it.

Canoura, Edelstein, and Ramallo investigate the AdS/CFT correspondence with Sasaki-Einstein manifolds and additional D-branes. As you can see, that combines two concepts. One of them is the class of Sasaki-Einstein manifolds L^{a,b,c}. These manifolds have topology of "S2 x S3". The metric is rather complicated but for a choice of three positive integers "a,b,c", you can follow Cvetic, Lu, Page, Pope, as well as Martelli and Sparks, and construct a manifold whose topology is "S2 x S3" such that the cone constructed above this base is a Calabi-Yau three-fold. The second ingredient of the paper are additional D-branes (referred to as "D-brane probes") added into the bulk. They add bulk open string degrees of freedom on the AdS side, and flavors on the CFT side. The paper may be viewed as Witten's construction of di-baryonic operators implemented in the case of the complicated Sasaki-Einstein manifolds replacing Witten's simple five-sphere. Impressive math.

Alfonso Ramallo has another paper about a similar topic. He also adds D-branes in the AdS bulk. In fact, he wants to consider intersecting D-branes. Such D-branes generate new fields - flavors or "quarks" - in the dual gauge theory. Such "quarks" can form bound states - mesons. Ramallo claims to be able to compute the spectrum of such mesons in a rather general case where the D-branes can have rather general dimensions. He uses the quenched approximations - the D-branes are treated as probes.

Anacleto, Nascimento, and Petrov study non-commutative field theories, especially their UV behavior. The particular theory they consider has a real scalar field with a quartic potential and a Dirac field coupled by a Yukawa term. They choose the "coherent state approach". It seems that it means that this allows them to make the propagators suppressed by "exp(-theta.p^2/2)" relatively to the propagators in the "ordinary" approach that are the same as in the commutative counterpart of the theory (because the kinetic term is the same). Using the Schwinger parameterization, they end up with an integral for the one-loop effective potential that clearly converges for nonzero values of the noncommutativity "theta": at high values of "t", the Schwinger parameter, the integrand is exponentially suppressed. Also, there is a cancellation whenever the quartic coupling and the Yukawa coupling are related to each other in a way that resembles the supersymmetric relation (even though in their particular theory, there is just one real boson field, and no SUSY). At any rate, I think that the nontrivial divergence structure only occurs at the two-loop level where you can see the UV-IR mixing and similar things, but they don't get that far, so I doubt that the experts in noncommutative field theory will be thrilled. In fact, I am confused how they can get different formulae at one-loop than the formulae that have been calculated many times in the past.

Raphael Bousso tries to define a better probabilistic distribution for the landscape than anyone else, and he is approaching this problem in a typically Boussian i.e. holographic way. Recently we discussed Vilenkin's approach to the question of the probabilities on the landscape. They end up with a pile of ambiguous and contradictory mess, and Raphael is rightfully dissatisfied with these anthropic results. His first principle is that only one causal diamond should be looked at when you calculate the probabilities. This sounds correct to me because regions of spacetime behind a particular diamond could be complementary to the diamond itself: they may be described by the same degrees of freedom and you should not double-count them.

His ultimate definition of the probability distribution is relatively simple. Consider the set of stable and unstable vacua that you want to include into your landscape game. Some of them are "terminal" (usually denoted "Z" in Bousso's paper and having a negative vacuum energy) - and they don't decay. Others are unstable (labeled "A,B" etc.) and they do decay. Raphael looks at genealogy trees of these vacua. Each mother vacuum can decay to the daughter vacua, and Raphael only uses the "branching ratios" i.e. the probabilities that "A" decays to "B" or "Z". I hope that he knows how to calculate these dimensionless branching ratios from the instanton actions and vacuum energies but I don't see the rule in the paper. Instead, he focuses on the ultimate probability distribution for the vacua calculated from the branching ratios for the decay. It is virtually identical to Google's PageRank algorithm, as long as you replace (weighted) hyperlinks between web pages by decay channels between vacua, and Raphael can obtain finite results for the probabilities (PageRank) of different vacua whenever there exists at least one available terminal vacuum. If it exists, small trees dominate Raphael's ensemble. Raphael does not say which vacua of string theory ultimately end up with the highest PageRank, but someone else could have an answer. I agree that Raphael's calculation is more justified than the random ad hoc anthropic prescriptions that various people want to apply to the eternal inflation, but I think that much more work is needed to extract useful information from Raphael's semi-anthropic approach even if it is correct.

Climate change: leading by example

In 1998, a famous company received the Climate Protection Award from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its

• examplary efforts and achievements in protecting the global climate.

The company became even more famous in 2002. The company is popular with the media again. If you make a search at news.google.com for the company's name, you will receive 16,500 articles.

In a document linked below, the company declares itself as a key leader of the struggle against the climate change. Do you know which company we're talking about? The ecoterrorists among the readers surely praise the company at this moment and dream that the whole world is able to reconcile economics and environment as well as the company ;-), while they think that my negative relation to that company's policies is unjustified. If you still don't know which company it is, look at this PDF file posted on Steve McIntyre's blog.

One of the lessons of this story is that you should think twice before you decide whether you consider awards from environmental agencies to be a good sign or a bad sign.

Short world news:

• During his visit to Auschwitz, Benedict XVI has criticized God for being silent during the era of holocaust. God was not available to comment on the criticism.
• The earthquake in Indonesia killed more than 4611 people.
• Microsoft will include a "JPEG killer" with Windows Vista, namely a new format WiMP - which does not stand for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles but rather Windows Media Photo. The same quality of pictures will take 50% of JPEG space only.

Gore: climate change is a religious issue

Al Gore has been saying that the global warming is a spiritual issue for some time. Now he has changed it to a purely religious issue during his performance in the New York City. He said:

• Every faith tradition has teachings that are directly on point [to climate change]. ... The Book of Revelation [says] God will destroy those who destroy his creation. Whatever works. ... Noah was commanded to preserve biodiversity. ... If you believe what [NASA scientist] Jim Hansen said just a moment ago - if you believe, if you accept the reality that we may have less than 10 years before we cross a point of no return - if you believe that, this is a time for action.

Nevertheless, some people still argue that blinded religious bigots must always be Republicans. ;-)

Colombia: Uribe will be re-elected

A Harvard alumnus is going to win the second term as the president of Colombia. He will score 62% of the vote, The Reference Frame predicts, and be sure that we're right.

Alvaro Uribe who started in the Colombian Liberal Party (moderate social democrats) is very popular especially because he has been successful on the security front. For example, the number of murders dropped from 36,000 per year 2002 - when he was elected - to 15,000 in 2005.

Recall that Colombia used to be paralyzed by the Marxist guerillas, a rather weak government, and right-wing paramilitias that tried to do the job that the government was not able to do: to establish the order. The armed left-wingers are not only exterminating villages but also support drug trafficking: one half of cocaine sold on the streets of the U.S. and EU comes from the guerillas.

Indeed, things are black and white in this country.

What was Uribe's strategy? Well, his strategy to bring peace and order to Colombia was obvious: to shoot every armed communist that can be found but cannot be arrested, and to do it so efficiently that the paramilitias will accept that they are no longer necessary and can be disarmed. Sorry to say but the armed communists who simultaneously work as labor leaders undermining the Coca-Cola company should be no exception.

Shooting the Marxists was probably never too difficult for Uribe because the communist thugs from FARC have killed his father in 1983 - and of course they have also tried to assassinate Uribe himself many times. Uribe claims that the country must choose between him and a catastrophe, and he is probably close to the truth. What is the name of the catastrophe?

The first name of a rival is Carlos Gaviria who is a commie himself. Instead of praising Uribe for the clearly right approach, the communist rival criticizes Uribe for being a friend of the U.S. Fortunately, Uribe is 35 percent points ahead of Gaviria. Among other things, Uribe has signed a free trade treaty with the U.S. The GDP growth in 2005 was 5.3%, exactly like the 1st quarter of 2006 growth in the U.S.

I wish them the best, and I hope that once they completely defeat FARC, they may also be able to deal with the supporters of terrorism in neighboring countries - such as the bastard named Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Steinhardt and Turok: cyclic model and cosmological constant

Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok propose their solution of the cosmological constant problem

• astro-ph/0605173

based on the cyclic model. See also the Science magazine. What is their key idea? The full age of the Universe is not the usual 13.7 billion years but much more: exponentially more. The boring de Sitter eras take a lot of time, but the Universe always eventually collapses and starts a new life cycle. During this process, the value of the cosmological constant may be reduced: imagine the cosmological constant to be the potential energy of a complicated axion field.

This picture differs from the anthropic explanation because in their model, if you imagine that someone makes it truly well-defined (or even embedded in string theory), the cosmological constant is essentially a function of the total time since the beginning of the Universe. Because the relaxation time gets longer as the cosmological constant approaches zero, most of the time is spent in regions with a small cosmological constant. The small value is generic - unlike the anthropic picture where the small values are rare.

Although their explanations why the vacuum energy is small may look statistical, chaotic, and similar to the anthropic reasoning to us, the previous paragraph makes a lot of difference. They voice my usual counter-argument against the anthropic reasoning using rather clear and convincing words:

• All other things being equal, a theory that predicts that life can exist almost everywhere is overwhelmingly preferred by Bayesian analysis (or common sense) over a theory that predicts it can exists almost nowhere.

Yes, I would prefer to call it "common sense" although it is fair to say that this common sense is related to the Bayesian analysis. But the argument is more important. If your (anthropic) theory predicts that what we observe (life) is extremely unlikely and rare, it is always inferior in comparison with a theory that predicts that things we see are generic. Good theories are those that make the predicted numbers - and probabilities - closer to the observed ones - or more likely - than expected a priori. The anthropic explanations don't offer any improvement of this sort.

In their rough calculation, the small cosmological constant is indeed more "generic". One can get a similar positive discrimination for small positive values of the cosmological constant as one obtains in the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction. This could of course lead to a similar problem: why is not the cosmological constant exactly zero which might be more likely than the observed finite value?

Gravity waves and spin entropy

New Scientist has promoted the following preprint

• quant-ph/0605135

that proposes a method to observe gravitational waves via spin entropy and spin entanglement. Several people say that it is "quite an achievement" and there are only "some technical issues" that should be resolved. Frankly, I have no idea what they are talking about.

The basic mechanism underlying these 9 pages is the following simple fact.

Consider a particle with a well-defined momentum (or a wavefunction in the momentum space) and a well-defined spin state. Two-component spinors are always eigenstates of the angular momentum with respect to a particular axis in three dimensions. The particle discussed in this paragraph is described by a wavefunction that is a tensor product of the momentum state and the spin state.

Now you may want to boost the particle and switch to a difference reference frame (but please, don't switch to another blog - you won't find another Reference Frame anyway). The wavefunction in the new frame will no longer be a tensor product. You can easily see why: the wavefunction is not an eigenstate of any angular momentum in the new frame because the angular momentum in the new frame is the old angular momentum mixed with the boost generators in the old frame - and the state was not an eigenstate of the boost generator if the momentum wavefunction was general enough.

This means that by going into a different frame, you induce entanglement between the spin and the momentum. It may be the first time you hear about this trivial insight but it has been known for decades.

Ye Yeo et al. now realize that a gravitational wave is able to boost the spinning particle. Consequently, the gravitational wave is able to induce the entanglement between the spin and the momentum.

Well, a more correct statement is that the gravitational wave, much like any other influence or force in the Universe, is able to cause this effect. I have no idea why they have singled out the gravitational waves. Also, I am pretty sure that neither of the main methods and additional tricks is going to be able to improve the sensitivity so that we would need no LISAs, LIGOs, or VIRGOs. If there is no resonance in the picture - and it seems that there is none - there is no chance how this method could make the measurement easier than the classical measurements.

The amount of the "spin entropy" is proportional to the change of the momentum. If properly defined, they are of the same order. Moreover, don't forget that if a wavefunction has a component of order "epsilon", it only implies tiny new probabilities of order "epsilon^2". If the measurements are going to have a different sensitivity, they will be less sensitive, not more sensitive, than the traditional machines to detect gravity waves.

To summarize, the combination of ideas in that preprint looks illogical and random to me.

Incidentally, Cosmic Variance asks:

• [W]hy do people so often use those words ["spooky" and "weird"] when talking about quantum mechanics? why? why? why? why?!

Let me answer this question. The answer will apparently be shocking news for Cosmic Variance.

People use the words "spooky" and "weird" because the laws of quantum mechanics are not only true and extremely accurate, but they are also the spookiest and weirdest aspects of reality that the humans have revealed so far.

I hope that the PC police will kindly allow me to use the term "laws of quantum mechanics". ;-) Thank you.

A celebrated Harvard physicist has said that if thousands of philosophers were trying to invent the weirdest thing possible, they would have never invented something as weird as quantum mechanics.

Niels Bohr, a father of quantum mechanics, said that anyone who has never been shocked by quantum mechanics has not understood it.

Einstein used the term "spooky action at a distance" for EPR correlations that are indeed predicted by quantum mechanics and experimentally verified. And finally, Richard Feynman paraphrased a comment that "only 12 people understood general relativity" by saying that "I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics".

Although your humble correspondent thinks that it has been quite some time since the birth of quantum mechanics and this framework should sound much more familiar to us today, it is still the spookiest and weirdest feature of the Cosmos that we know so far. Does it make sense, Clifford?

This has nothing to do with idea by Erik Verlinde that gravity doesn't exist.

Windows Media Player 11: cute

A reader has reminded me of

• Windows Media Player 11 beta

which is Microsoft's gift from the future. It will be a standard part of the next Windows operating system, Windows Vista, formerly known as Longhorn. So I installed it.

The installation of WMP11 is a moderately non-trivial event because the program can only be uninstalled by System Restore. But I assure you that you won't need it. Everything works, everything is smooth, and all bad reviews are invented by anti-capitalist Microsoft haters and should be ignored.

The design of WMP11 is simple and beautiful. When you play a video, the space is used efficiently even outside the fullscreen mode. The way how the songs, albums, and videos are viewed resembles Google Picasa2. In fact, your picture galleries may be viewed, too. Moreover, you may have been annoyed by a small bug of the Windows Explorer: the thumbnails of videos often showed a black rectangle only because it was the first image in the video. That no longer happens inside WMP11: a more intelligent picture from the bulk of the video is chosen instead.

The installation is straightforward and the settings from WMP10 may be kept.

WMP11 is available for all Windows XP Service Pack 2 editions. That includes Windows XP SCBUEB edition, both in the Professional and Home Edition varieties. If you don't know, Windows XP SCBUEB edition is the edition semi-castrated by the upgefuc*ked Eurobureaucrats. Instead of the proper full name, it must be called "Windows XP Professional/Home Edition N" on the territory of the EU in order to indicate that it is as good as the full Windows XP. It does not include any media player at all but the price is the same. ;-) A typical invention of smart eurobrains.

Every continent contributes something to the humankind, according to its innate aptitudes. America gives the world WMP11 - and URGE, a new online music purchase system that won't make Steve Jobs terribly happy - while my old Europe gives the world Windows XP SCBUEB edition. ;-) At least, the eurobrains are not powerful enough to prevent the SCBUEB users from downloading WMP11.

If you have not seen Microsoft's maps for some time, you should look at

• local.live.com

It offers road, aerial, and bird's eye views, and may very well be better than all competitors.

Clifford Johnson and the word "theory"

Clifford Johnson has informed us that the most irritating thing he has encountered during his visit to his homeland was the phrase "special law of relativity" written on this poster with Albert Einstein in the London Museum of Science.

What does your humble correspondent think about these issues and Clifford's opinions?

Clifford has no problems

First of all, I am somewhat jealous that Clifford has the problems he has. ;-) Imagine. During a visit to one of the most important countries of this monstrous world - which is itself a shi*tty place as a classic noticed - a nearly invisible word "law" replacing the usual word "theory" is apparently the most breathtaking threat for our civilization.

The only Clifford's problem is that next Monday, his co-bloggers will effectively expel him from Cosmic Variance - or at least he will understand their remarks in this way - and he will announce it on this URL.

Let me start with some positive feedback.

I agree with Clifford that the proud scientists in 2006 are using the word "theory" as a compliment: a "theory" is a finite set of ideas, concepts, laws, and equations that is capable to describe a class of phenomena that have already been observed, and to predict features of new phenomena that may be observed in the future. A theory is the best result of a scientific or rational analysis of the world you can dream about.




Knowing how to call things vs. knowing things

But I disagree with everything else that Clifford wrote. The most important thing that Clifford does not seem to realize is that the word "theory" is just a word, not science itself. By telling someone that something should be called a "theory" instead of a "law", we don't teach her anything about science. We just teach her a piece of scientific terminology.

After all, it was us, the scientists, who has distorted the true original meaning of the word "theory", not the laymen.

History

In order to prove my point, I must become a linguist for a little while and offer you some etymology of the word. The word "theory" derives from "theorein" which is a Greek translation of "to look at". The ancient Greeks would attend theaters quite often and they were looking what was going on. It was not quite real but it was resembling the real world. The profession of the philosophers - the scientists of that era - was viewed as something analogous to the actors' job. They were creating something that resembled the real world but it was not quite the real world.

The ancient Greek scholars were already using the word "theorein" in a similar way as we are. An alternative deconstruction of the word splits it into "to theion" (divine things) and "orao" (I see). When you have a theory, it means that you see some divine things. Some of their theories were rather successful - especially the Euclidean geometry - but some of them were deeply flawed.

These mixed results inevitably meant that most people rightfully viewed "theories" as something provisional, as an equivalent of hypotheses or speculations favored by the wise men who prefer thinking over the reality.

Theories got better

During the last few centuries, science became a bit more reliable than it was in ancient Greece. The theories - more precisely, the scientific theories - became more trustworthy, too. But it takes some time for the ordinary people to appreciate these developments. So we should not be surprised that the word "theory" still creates skeptical emotions inside the hearts of a large percentage of the world's population.

When we talk about relativity, do we want the people to understand how science works and what it has found about spacetime, or do we prefer to convince them that the terminology that was around for millenia should suddenly be changed because a certain community - namely the scientific community - started to use the word "theory" differently?

I think that the first goal is far more noble and important - especially because the laymen are etymologically more right than the scientists if they insist that the word "theory" includes some "fantasy" in it. The fact that Clifford Johnson thinks that the problematic terminology is more important than relativity shows that Sean Carroll is probably not the only postmodernist thinker among the authors of Cosmic Variance.

Theories vs. metatheories

We usually present special relativity as a theory based on two postulates that codifies many laws about space, time, matter, and motion. In some sense, special relativity is not a theory: it is not a particular complete description of reality but rather a set of constraints that every acceptable model of reality must satisfy. One can be much more confident if she wants to say that special relativity is not a model. A model should be much more specific than special relativity.

Einstein used to divide the scientific theories to principled and constructive ones: quantum mechanics and atomic physics are examples of constructive theories because they add new ingredients and insights to describe an ever wider realm of objects and phenomena. Thermodynamics and relativity are examples of principled theories because they start with some basic assumptions - such as the postulates of special relativity or the non-existence of the perpetual motion machines - and then they derive general constraints that the world has to satisfy. Using modern jargon, principled theories are the results of the top-down theorists' work, while the constructive theories are the result of the bottom-up phenomenologists' work. Of course, eventually we want these two approaches to agree on a common description of the world.

Special relativity tells us how the measurements of time, space, velocity, mass, energy, and other quantities in different reference frames are related to each other. Special relativity has implications for electrodynamics and other particular theories - and its principles guide us and constrain us in our search for new theories - but special relativity itself cannot tell you the spectrum of atoms, the forces between particles, and many other things.

Die Invariantentheorie

The phrase "special theory of relativity" has other problematic aspects. In the text above, I argued that it is really a "metatheory", not a "theory". However, the word "relativity" is controversial, too. This word has led many philosophers to scream that relativity makes our knowledge "relative", which is why it makes philosophers' vague fantasies important at the same moment. Of course that such a conclusion is unjustifiable. When Einstein realized that "relativity" was a bad choice, he wanted to replace the term by "the theory of invariants", to emphasize that the insights of the theory are based on the analysis of quantities that all observers agree upon, but it was already too late.

It is hard to find anything disturbing about the "laws of special relativity". I feel uncertain whether it is better to talk about "one law" or "many laws" (probably "many laws" is better) but I can't understand how can someone be upset by the "laws of special relativity". We use the word "laws" for many analogous insights in science in general and physics in particular: Newton's laws, Kepler's laws, laws of genetics, laws of Nature.

Some of these examples are very specific, others are very general.

No one - not even Clifford himself - protests against the word "laws" in the case of Kepler's laws because we have summarized the insights about the planetary motion as well-defined "laws". No doubt, special relativity could also be summarized in this format.

A simple Google search reveals that Clifford who dislikes the "laws of special relativity" will have to send his hate mail not only to the London Museum of Science but also to Wikipedia, Eot-Wash gravity experimenters, David Hogg from IAS Princeton, David Santo Pietro of UC Davis, Stephen Wolfram, your humble correspondent, the late David Bohm, Roger Penrose, the late Paul Dirac, Lee Smolin, and 573+184 other physicists. Happy writing, Clifford. ;-)

You obtain a comparably overwhelming set of pages and papers if you search for "laws of quantum electrodynamics" (including three Feynman's famous papers), "laws of general relativity" (including papers by Israel or Smolin), "laws of quantum chromodynamics" (including official documents of Fermilab and CERN), "laws of QCD", among many other examples of terms where the word "theory" remains dominant. The "laws of evolution" in the context of Darwin's theory returns 13,600 pages, including first books about the subject from the 19th century.

Theory vs. model

There are other examples in science where the word "theory" might have been more appropriate. Steven Weinberg has invented the modest term "the Standard Model" for a theory that describes all of particle physics that we know as of 2006. As David Gross has repeatedly argued, the term "the Standard Theory" would be more accurate because it would reflect the truly deep impact of the specific gauge theory than the narrow-minded word "model" ever can.

A "model" is a "theory" but one should always have hundreds of comparably important models (or supermodels) to use the word "model". The word "model" still indicates that you have not chosen which of the hundreds of models is the right one. That's not the case of the Almighty Standard Model.

Language in motion

But we got used to this term - the Standard Model - and we are proud about this term much like a right-winger becomes proud to be a "reactionary" when he learns what the left-wing whackos mean by this "insult". ;-) Our language is developing all the time. The meaning of the word XY may become more specialized while the meaning of UV may become more general.

These changes reflect not only random fashionable cultural trends in the society but also the actual progress in science and technology. When technology creates new gadgets, we need some new words for them and some of the new specific gadgets "recycle" some old words whose meaning was more general.

For example, the word "Windows" used to represent all kinds of transparent glassy rectangles found on the walls of buildings. Today, it is mostly used for rectangles with a red X cross in the right upper corner.

On the other hand, when science unifies things, there are no longer good reasons to use two different words for two things that became one thing. In such situations, one of the old specialized words may survive and acquire a more general meaning. For example, we only use one unit for heat and for energy because Joule taught us that these two quantities are equivalent.

Mathematics distorts the original meaning of the words even more dramatically. If a word has a certain "flavor", a mathematician is ready to hijack the word and use it for the idealized objects with the same "flavor". In mathematics (and even science), we are attributing a much more concrete meaning to verbal constructions than ordinary people do. Crackpots often fail to appreciate the delicate difference in the meaning of the words in science and in the colloquial usage.

In some cases we may feel that some of these changes are too fast while others are too slow. Some of us are linguistic conservatives, some of us are linguistic progressives, and sometimes it is not clear who is actually a conservative and who is a progressive. In different national languages, various opinions about the language may also be correlated with political attitudes. For example, Czechs had to decide whether they wanted to ignore the Latin origin of the word "president" and write "prezident" much like the Russian peasants do. You can guess which spelling was the conservative spelling. ;-)

Magic words don't exist

At any rate, Clifford's dogmatic linguistic argument has no rational substance. How does Clifford justify that the word "theory" is so infinitely important?

• What we should be doing instead is better educating the public as to the meaning of the word, making it clear that the terms “Theory of Evolution”, or “Theory of Relativity” do not imply that these are not powerful, established parts of the scientific knowledge base.

Previously, I have explained that preaching that something should be called a "theory" teaches the girls exactly as much science as if they are told that it should be called "wakalixes": namely nothing. But I want to say something stronger than just that Clifford proposes a counterproductive, vacuous focus of education: what Clifford says in between the lines is not really true.

Clifford is correct that the fact that the word "theory" is used for evolution, relativity, or strings does not really imply that these intellectual buildings are terribly suspicious. But it does not prove that they are correct either. If some laymen are making the error to associate the flavor of wild speculation with the word "theory", then Clifford is doing exactly the same error backwards: he seems to believe that the word "theory" has a magical power to declare an idea true.

Needless to say, it's a nonsense. The word "theory" is also being used for all kinds of vague, speculative, and irrational ideas - from the "theory of postmodernism" to the "theory of catastrophic global warming". The appearance of the word "theory" can't and shouldn't make any idea more convincing. The word "theory", just like the word "abracadabra" or any other word for that matter, fails to have this divine power. The laymen who don't believe special relativity are making a mistake. But they are doing a very correct thing not to change their mind just because someone uses the pompous word "theory" for this intellectual structure. The validity of a system of ideas has nothing to do with the question whether we call them a "theory" or "laws".

I can't believe that Clifford disagrees with this fundamental point.

One of the basic general messages of the science education should be that the words can't have the same power in the scientific world as they used to have in the religious world (and still have in the world of philosophers). In other words, one of the basic skills that the kids should learn at school is to be able to understand why Clifford is not right.

Moreover, scientists should accept the fact that science cannot determine what the words mean in everyday life. The word "theory" has a taste of uncertainty which might reflect the current situation in the case of string theory but it is not really right in the case of special relativity. By calling the insights of special relativity "laws", we might help the laymen to be less skeptical about these well-established insights. That's why I think that it is OK to put the word "laws" in their description of special relativity, and if there were a global campaign to promote the new term "laws of special relativity", I would subscribe to it.

Especially in the case of "c" as the universal speed limit, the word "law" has the advantage that the audiences understand that this is exactly what follows from science: the word "theory" indicates that there exists uncertainty or some more detailed microscopic clarification of the law. But such a clarification is not needed in this case: "c" is really the maximal speed. It's a law.

Law, dogmas, and theories

As the previous paragraphs indicate, I also disagree with Clifford's statements that the word "law" makes science sound more dogmatic than it is. Incidentally, this argument of Clifford strikingly contradicts his previous argument that the word "law" is bad because the laymen tend to think that science is too vague and loose - now the word is, on the contrary, too strict. Is not it strange to fight against a word by two arguments that are opposite to one another?

Are the laws of the society too constant to be used as a metaphor for the laws of physics?

In fact, I am convinced that the important laws of physics such as the laws of special relativity are much more robust and unbreakable than the U.S. constitution and other laws of the society. In the long run, the laws of the society are not dogmatic either. And they should not be. Surely, many groups of people want to declare certain laws to be permanent. Religious fundamentalists would like to declare their religious rules to be valid forever; feminists would like to prohibit the very consideration of theories - or laws - that the women are less likely to be great mathematicians.

But all reasonable people know very well that our granddaughters in 2050 will have the right to change the laws in any way they want as long as our civilization survives and as long as the world won't be controlled by some drastic totalitarian regime. I hope that they will be able to see which laws are important enough and should be kept.

The laws of special relativity are much stronger than any constitution that has ever been written because they are more or less guaranteed to hold until the end of our civilization and beyond. In this sense, science is more dogmatic than the social sciences. It is more dogmatic because the laws that science reveals are much more universally and much more eternally valid. Nature with all of Her laws is a brutal dictator, indeed. If Clifford does not like Her system, he may try to find a better Universe.

Let us hope that the children will learn how to approach the world rationally and appreciate Nature's beauty and cleverness, regardless whether they will call the insights of relativity "laws", "theories", or "zákony". In other words, let us hope that the children will be able to see what's wrong with Clifford's linguistic dogmatism and with his calls to fill science education with his terminological prayers.

And that's the memo.

"I suppose I'd better stock up on soap-on-a-rope."

"Hoffa cupcakes"

Yummy. Oh wait, I have diabetes. OK, hold the chocolate sprinkles that look like freshly-turned dirt.

Down the street, customers are lining up at Leslie Watson's art store to buy $15 T-shirts reading, "The F.B.I. Digs Milford, Do You?"

And Jon Stewart (with a Sopranos reference, lost on those of you not watching this final season):

"Finally a break: they may have found Jimmy Hoffa. Ten FBI agents armed with shovels dug up a farm after a tip it might contain the Teamster leader's remains. Of course, many myths surround Hoffa's disappearance. Some say he is buried in the end zone of the Giants' stadium. Some say he was dumped in Lake Michigan. Some think he is alive and in New Hampshire having an affair with a volunteer fireman that he calls 'Johnnycakes.' But I hope, 31 years later, if they find him, it will make touchdown celebrations in the end zone of the Giants' stadium so much less creepy. Still looking for Jimmy Hoffa after 31 years. That means they'll find Osama bin Laden in 2037."

New values of "g" and the fine-structure constant

Gerry Gabrielse, an experimenter from Harvard University, and his collaborators are going to announce new, more accurate values of the fundamental constants. Using their single-electron quantum cyclotron, they can see that the new magnetic moment of the electron is

• g/2 = 1.001 159 652 180 85 (76).

As you can see, there are 13 significant figures or so - the value is six times more accurate than ever before. Using the cyclotron result for "g" above plus QED theorists from other universities, they can also deduce the value of the fine-structure constant. The theoretical calculation, starting with the terms

• g/2 = 1 + alpha / 2 pi,

requires to calculate 891 diagrams with up to four loops, and the result for the fine-structure constant

• 1 / alpha = 137.035 999 710 (96)

is ten times more accurate than the results from atom-recoil measurements. In fact, it is the first improvement of the accuracy in roughly 20 years. The precise value is sensitive on new physics at 130 GeV. All skillful numerologists are welcome to interpret the new data.

Update: Thanks to Alejandro Rivero: the correct sequence in 1/alpha is indeed "999" instead of the previous typo "997".

"Close" doesn't count

How hard is it to get some of these things right?

Matt Drudge 'reported' this week that Al Gore and his "entourage" traveled in five cars from their hotel in Cannes 500 yards away to where "An Inconvenient Truth" was being premiered. As Think Progress reports, a Gore spokesman says the former vice president and his associates walked to the screening.

Drudge also posted that the Democratic National Committee "secretly placed political operatives in the city of New Orleans to work against the re-election efforts of incumbent Democrat Mayor Ray Nagin." The DNC says the report is "unequivocally and absolutely false," and under pain of a libel lawsuit too costly for a blog to defend, Drudge now says that he takes DNC chairman Howard Dean and his spokesman "at their word."

In defense of his claim that Karl Rove has already been indicted on charges of perjury and lying to federal investigators, Truthout's Jason Leopold said last week that he had "five sources" to back him up. In its latest defense of the story, Truthout says it "now" has "three independent sources" who confirm what Rove's team denies: that Rove's lawyers were given a copy of his indictment on May 12th (or 13th).

Finally, ABC News' The Note raised a question: just exactly what was Karl Rove doing Friday May 19 at O'Hare, the airport that serves the city where Patrick Fitzgerald usually works. Wonkette has the deflation: he was headed to a fundraiser for Republicans in a northern Chicago suburb.

The Note should know that only us little know-nothing bloggers out here in Jerkwater are allowed to post rumorendo ...

Relative to Rove, Salon's Tim Grieve has more (of course he's a little harsher on us new-media types):

Consider the fact that Rove made a few public appearances last week. Maybe that's a sign that the White House thinks that Patrick Fitzgerald has given up on Rove. Or maybe, as conspiracy-minded blogger Wayne Madsen theorized the other day, it means that the grand jury really has indicted Rove already, but that the Bush administration knows that Rove is in the clear because it has gone to court to have the indictment dismissed.

Consider the fact that the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz have both written pieces dismissive of the claim that Rove has already been indicted. Maybe that's a sign that the story isn't true. Or maybe, as Truthout's Marc Ash argues, there's something "telling" about "rolling out that much conservative journalistic muscle to rebut" it.

Consider the fact that Rove's lawyer and spokesman have both denied the already-been-indicted story in interviews with both Truthout and more mainstream outlets. A TalkLeft comment poster has, and believes that Rove's people "now have a foot in the door of the liberal blogosphere" and may be using it "to manipulate their message among us."

And consider the fact that MSNBC's David Shuster said Monday night that Rove's legal team and former prosecutors watching the case "expect Patrick Fitzgerald to announce a decision at any time." Maybe Shuster's really saying that "Rove's people say an announcement by the special prosecutor is imminent," as one Truthout poster claimed. Maybe "the implication" is that Rove is "being cleared," as another asserted. Or maybe what Shuster said Monday night was simply a no-surprise update on the expected schedule of events he described a couple of weeks ago.

For Christ's sake, how much do those big-city beat reporters and TV talking heads get paid these days?

I can do that job better for cheaper. Just sayin' ...

Seth Lloyd: counting quantum operations in spacetime

Sean Carroll has written a bizarre text praising Slavoj Žižek and comparing him to Seth Lloyd, a quantum computation expert from MIT. ;-)

If you don't know, Žižek is a Slovenian postmodern philosopher and a science-hater, the kind of "smart guys" who have provoked Alan Sokal to write his hoax and submit it to Social Text. The real motivation for Alan Sokal's hoax was a political one: Sokal couldn't stand the fact that the postmodern philosophers and literary critics make it far too obvious that the core of the Left is intellectually pretentious, hypocritical, anti-scientific, and vacuous: Sokal himself is a leftist but a rational one.

On the other hand, Sean Carroll indicates that the only reason why he does not make the postmodern philosophy a starting point and punch line of his research - and why he only focuses his blog writing on these paradigms - is that it might be rejected by the referees.




The first catastrophe of science, according to the Slovenian thinker, was the Big Bang itself. Something that has created this "monstrous" Universe whose monstrosity proves that something had to go terribly wrong. The second catastrophe after the Big Bang was the birth of the global capitalism, of course. ;-) Eventually, all of science is going to be reduced to language and words, the only thing that the lit crit hordes will ever be willing and capable to comprehend. Also, the Slovenian philosopher considers quantum mechanics to be "the symbolic real" or a "signifier reduced to a meaningless formula".

If you want to understand why some people think that Žižek is an obnoxious far left-wing simpleton if not a doubleton, see this excerpt from a movie about him. The people who say or even think that this guy is charismatic must be kind of ill, too. They call it a different taste; I call it a deviation.

Because I find all of his "ideas" far too irritating, let me leave the celebration of these deep intellectual constructions ;-) to our postmodern colleagues at Cosmic Variance, and look at something more serious or at least slightly more serious.

Is the Universe a quantum computer?

Much like discrete physics, it is another "great idea" that many people believed to be geniuses by themselves and their fan clubs propose all the time. In fact, these two ideas - discrete physics and Universe as a quantum computer - are closely related. However, they have a somewhat different focus.

What is the primary reason why some people want to believe that the Universe is a quantum computer (or perhaps even a classical one)?

The main reason is the same illusion that makes many people believe in creationism: it is just hard for a certain kind of folks to believe that the complexity, richness, and beauties of the real world may be a consequence of simple and "dry" laws of physics. The creationists decide that there must exist God because the simple laws simply can't reproduce the complex world.

The Universe-as-quantum-computer people are less radical. In their opinion, the Universe without God could work after all. But it must be based on specifically and intelligently designed fundamental laws that allow or "support" complexity: the Universe must have a very active and large socialist government. A government that prescribes Al Gore Rhythms to everyone and to everything.



Indeed, it is a Universe where all of us are monkeys who are typing nonsense, but because we have a smart government equipped with Al Gore Rhythms, the random typing results in Hamlet if not Cosmic Variance. ;-) The laws of this Universe must be like the rule #110 cellular automaton of Stephen Wolfram - that is neither random nor repetitive - or an analogous great achievement of the human thought. ;-) I am convinced that Wolfram, Markopoulou, Lloyd, and many others share this kind of belief.

I find the belief unscientific, postmodern, socialist, and irrational. The physical laws are indeed able to create complex structures and to gradually expand intelligence, self-organization, and beauty, but they don't have to include any specific "policies" in the fundamental laws to achieve these goals. The ability of the Universe to create organized structures is an emergent feature of other, more fundamental laws of Nature. In the context of life, the necessary mechanisms include the reproduction of DNA, mutations, and natural selection. Neither of these processes is a fundamental law of Nature.

All of them are derived, emergent notions. If you're highly interested in these interesting features of the world, they can be more important for you than the fundamental laws. Nevertheless, they are not fundamental laws themselves. They are not directly connected with the mathematically accurate description of the real world. In fact, they do not depend on the mathematical details behind the real world. The existence of complexity is a fact, and it is a fact that is compatible with the Standard Model, with General Relativity, with String Theory, and with other theories we know to be relevant for the real world. If you study these fundamental theories carefully enough, you will be able to derive the creative power of these laws.

Some essential features of Nature's "creativity" may be identified as a rather sharp consequence of some aspects of the fundamental laws - but the "creativity" can never become a complete fundamental law by itself. Simple assumptions such as sufficient space, viable building blocks of matter, meaningful microscopic laws, and freedom from any kind of macroscopic constraints are sufficient for Nature to develop very rich structures. At sufficient time scales, She is always brighter than we are, and our attempts to dictate Her how to make the world rich can only make things worse, not better. As you can see, I formulate these ideas generally enough so that they can be used in political philosophy, too.

Because so far I have not seen any specific connections of the proposed theories painting the Universe as a quantum computer with physics insights that I consider quantitatively tested, qualitatively motivated, or associated with the insights of the last 500 years, I treat all papers proposing that the Universe is a "computer" as religious texts. There is no science in them. It's a new kind of religion decorated with some inconsequential mathematics.

Other people may believe that the Universe is not a Matrix but rather a special kind of a feminist organization because feminism is necessary for a good Universe to work. These two theories are comparably justifiable.

Seth Lloyd may have something to say

But I am far from saying that there are absolutely no ideas associated with the papers whose basic paradigm is the religion described above. Seth Lloyd of MIT, the author of the first semi-realistic prototype of a quantum computer, has proposed slightly more concrete ways how the concepts from quantum computation could be relevant for physics, especially physics of quantum gravity. He has written a book. Instead, let me link two preprints:

• A theory of quantum gravity based on quantum computation
• Quantum limits to the measurement of spacetime geometry

Let us ignore the religious parts of these papers - the attempts to dictate Nature that She should have some special affirmative action policies to increase its complexity because unconstrained, free Nature without a socialist, complex government surely can't work, as the religion believes. ;-) Are there useful ideas that could actually be used in our analysis of the theories that describe the real world, as opposed to some religious fantasies about the world?

The answer is Maybe.

The main non-trivial concept that Lloyd proposes is to compute the number of operations (ops) that can be squeezed in a given spacetime volume. If the spacetime region has a spatial section of radius "R" and if it lasts for time "T", then Lloyd proposes the maximum number of operations in this volume to be

• R T / pi Gnewton.

Note that he even conjectures the numerical coefficient (which I probably don't believe to be justified, even if I believe the general form). ;-) This should be viewed as a counterpart of the maximum amount of information that you can squeeze into a region of surface area "A", namely

• A / 4 Gnewton

"bits" (divided by "ln(2)"), also known as the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. Note that these two formulae are related. The first formula does not count bits but rather operations (another dimensionless quantity), and one spatial dimension is replaced by time. I view this analogy as a very natural one. The formulae are kind of Wick rotations of each other.

While the entropy is the best physics concept that can define a counterpart of the "number of bits" from computer science, it is harder to define "the number of operations" in physics. I would be thrilled if someone could write down a formula how to extract the "number of operations" that occured in a macroscopic system from the path integral. I say "path integral" because we clearly need a quantum, spacetime formalism to talk about the number of operations.

Note that the number of operations of a real computer - or a quantum computer - is much smaller than the (intuitively evaluated) actual number of atomic processes behind these operations. Classical computers still require a huge number of atoms to behave "collectively" if the resulting behavior can be interpreted as a reliable binary operation, and they require them to do "the same thing" for a certain period of time that is much longer than the atomic timescales. In principle, we can imagine that one "transistor" in the future computers may be composed of "N" atoms where "N" is going to be of order one, even though we are far from this point (but not astronomically far).

Also, quantum computers may be created at some point, and decades or centuries of refinement can make the elementary pieces of such computers as small as one atom, too. Another difficult task is to make the computers so fast that almost every "distinguishable change" is used as a real operation.

This means that in principle, we can estimate the number of operations that such computers can make - at least its order of magnitude. A challenge for the reader is to find a quantitative counterpart of the coarse-grained entropy formula

• S = - Tr ( rho ln rho )

for the number of operations. One trivial definition that you might propose is simply the increase of the entropy ;-), but I want something better - and something that can be nonzero even in the equilibrium.

Such a formula, probably based on Feynman's approach to the quantum theory, could make Lloyd's "operation counting holographic bound" a well-defined conjecture. Without such a definition of the "number of operations" that can be used in theories that actually describe the real Universe, religion seems to dominate in Lloyd's papers, too. The papers talk about the Universe but they think about a computer which is a different thing.

But with some bright idea added to the picture, Lloyd's speculation could become a part of serious physics, unlike the ideas of the Slovenian postmodern philosopher. But you should realize that it is subtle to define the number of operations because the world is continuous and it is not as easy as a discrete classical computer or discrete quantum computer whose information is digitized.