At a famous discussion forum of enemies of string theory, the previous letter to Wall Street Journal was exposed to severe criticism that I consider completely irrational and kind of dumb because the letter is right on the money. Let me say a few more words explaining what's wrong with the critics' opinions.
Technical and historical misunderstandings
First of all, the people over there have no idea about things like the AdS/CFT correspondence, black hole physics, or history of theoretical physics. They don't understand any of the calculational frameworks of string theory, which is why they can't understand Barton's obviously correct statement that string theory is essentially as rigorous as mathematics demands; there are no questions with ambiguous or even contradictory answers. But how could you know this fact before you actually know string theory? Of course that you can't. Why do the critics say so many wrong technical things about string theory? It should not be surprising because they are just laymen who have never learned these things.
So they also can't comprehend what it means to explain *why* black holes have entropy. Explaining why something has a non-zero entropy always means to identify the microscopic constituents of the physical system. What Hawking did in 1974 was to determine *that* black holes have a temperature, and consequently also an entropy, by a semiclassical and effectively a macroscopic and thermodynamic argument, but it did not explain where it comes from. It did not explain *why* the entropy is there and people have been waiting for a convincing calculation leading to the right result for more than 20 years.
Prejudices about the number of vacua
But the remaining points where the critics of physics give totally wrong answers to some questions look a bit different because I am convinced that every college science concentrator should simply be able to avoid this kind of flawed reasoning.
First of all, they view the existence of the large number of solutions to be an argument against a theory. They were apparently contacted by divine forces who informed them how many minima the potential energy relevant for this Universe has. Maybe they were told that the human beings are the only possible intelligent beings, too.
With this "knowledge" obtained directly from the skies, they enter the debate and try to attack everyone else who does not confirm their predetermined "knowledge". It's needless to say that their approach has nothing to do with scientific reasoning. What they promote is a very anti-scientific sort of philosophy or religion: it is bigotry.
In ancient Greece, it was believed that the whole world could have been constructed out of four elements. They just found it enough. In the modern era, it turned out that there are more than 100 elements (the word means something a bit different that the Greeks could not have quite understood) and hundreds of stable or metastable isotopes of their nuclei. Does it mean that we should abandon the theory that predicts these atoms and nuclei - many of which have not yet been seen or created?
No, it means that we should use the opportunity and *learn* something. It's exactly the whole point of every scientific theory that deserves the name that it can predict certain things that were not inserted as input. The position of the critics is completely inconsistent because they criticize string theory for not predicting anything new, but whenever it predicts something new, they hate it, too.
The same comment - that we should try to learn from our theories - applies to the number of anti de Sitter or Minkowski or de Sitter ground states of a theory of quantum gravity. It's just the case that whoever is thinking scientifically knows that a priori, we just don't know how many other solutions than those that are relevant for our life exist.
We just can't impose any dogmas about this question before we actually make some research. It is because the answer *is* unknown. Instead, we must try to apply scientific reasoning and collect arguments. If you think about it for an hour, it is rather obvious that there is nothing wrong about some laws of physics - dynamically or philosophically - if these laws also admit other solutions besides our Universe. We have seen analogous things many times. Our planet was not the only planet, and so on.
In the physics community, we are not sure whether there is a sufficient evidence that we live inside a "random" vacuum - that might be difficult to find - or whether there should exist deeper laws that will determine the right one more directly. There is some kind of controversy whether the answer to the previous question is obvious and what it is.
But there is not any controversy - and there can't be any controversy - about the fact that only detailed and careful mathematical reasoning based on known facts of the Universe may be used in science to determine how many vacua - and how many semi-viable vacua - there are and whether they are directly relevant for physics. We must take the most refined and accurate description of quantum gravity we have, apply its rules as carefully as we can, and derive these conclusions if we can.
In the previous sentence, the best description of quantum gravity is based on certain tools that fit together and whose union we call "string theory". Most of us are convinced that it is extremely unlikely that someone would ever find a semi-realistic description of the real world that would not be a part of string theory in any sense. This opinion is not a preconception: it is a consequence of thousands of technical papers about string theory and its conceivable alternatives or deformations that have had some impact to the question whether other possibilities exist or not. If we are brief, the answer is that the alternatives or deformations can't exist.
Even if you hypothetically imagine that the alternatives exist and will be found in the future, you can't use these hypothetical and currently unknown alternatives to make any scientific arguments. Science would become black magic or politics if we were approaching difficult questions with arguments based on hypothetical theories.
If we use the tools of string theory, we see that there are almost certainly googols of perfectly plausible anti de Sitter supersymmetric four-dimensional universes and everyone who follows (or works on) the latest developments knows that the evidence is overwhelming that these vacua exist. Quite possibly, there are also many metastable long-lived de Sitter universes but our certainty is not as high in this case. And we don't know how many important cosmological and other mechanisms that could be relevant for the vacuum selection problem we're still missing.
But the attempt of the critics of string theory to dictate Nature how many metastable states She should have is completely anti-scientific, and I am sure that no college physics concentrator who should be called "intelligent" would ever fall into this trap. Also, such a clever student would never think that the number of metastable vacua could be used as an argument against a theory or as an argument supporting the theory until we know what the number actually is.
Their idea that they can deduce far-reaching conclusions about string theory by comparing its properties with their religious preconceptions is a sign of profound ignorance and flawed reasoning. If we have two theories among which one explains the parameters of the Standard Model in detail, we will prefer the more predictive theory. But if we have theories that don't yet predict the exact parameters of the Standard Model, we must be choosing according to different criteria. According to the optimal application of scientific arguments that we can realize right now, it seems obvious that quantum gravity has a lot of supersymmetric anti de Sitter vacua, whether or not someone likes it.
Distribution of attention
There exist many more aspects of their criticism that I consider to be incompatible with the thinking habits a bright college science concentrator. One of them is their attempt to assign the weights of different fields and subfields *before* one actually studies the subject and its inner structure.
In the context of theoretical physics, they would like to argue that a higher fraction should study "alternatives" to string theory - because they don't want to waste their precious time by figuring out whether any consistent alternatives actually exist. In the context of string theory, they believe that everyone should study AdS/QCD. This acronym only represents the gravitational dual of the actual SU(3) QCD we know from the strong itneractions, not the general AdS/CFT enterprise.
Everyone who actually knows something about the state-of-the-art theoretical physics knows very well that AdS/QCD is just one among dozens of research directions. Much like others, it seems promising because of many reasons. Much like in the case of others, there are reasons to think that the amount of truly interesting applications and insights might be approaching the point at which the "excitement potential" has been largely exhausted.
People in science are actually choosing their topics according to their qualified guess which topic is the most likely one to lead to some valuable outcomes. It is completely obvious that if AdS/QCD were by far the most interesting direction in string theory and if most people were familiar with the arguments why it is the most interesting direction, the proportion of the people working on this topic would jump almost instantly because of the very laws of supply and demand.
Science has seen many examples of this kind. When it became obvious in 1984 that string theory was clearly the most interesting framework for physics beyond the conventional local quantum field theory, hundreds if not thousands of people switched to string theory. When many of them got the feeling that the progress got stuck in the early 1990s, they were switching to different topics. In the middle 1990s, people jumped on D-branes, M-theory, dualities because it was clearly the new "gold mine" filled with exciting ideas, and so on, and so on.
The market equilibrium is reached quite rapidly after a credible piece of information that reveals the importance of a particular direction becomes available to most scientists.
Those "Not Even Wrong" people believe in many conspiracy theories - not too different from the theories that NASA never landed on the Moon. They believe that throughout the last two or three decades, some evil invisible hands have been systematically leading theoretical physics in a completely incorrect direction. I find these conspiracy theories as likely as in the case of the theory about NASA, and those who are immediately ready to believe this kind of theories are not too bright as far as I can say.
Even in the most politicized parts of science where the standards are poor - for example the climate science - it only takes a few years for everyone to see that a scientific paradigm was wrong. When it was proposed in 1998 and 1999 that 1998 was the hottest year in the millenium and that the human influence on the climate exceeds the natural background essentially by an order of magnitude, it was endorsed by thousands of dishonest journalists, politicized scientists, and politicians for political reasons. It took less than 5 years until serious bugs were described in detail - in peer-reviewed journal articles - and it took 8 years before it became a generally known fact to the mainstream climate science community that there exists no evidence that 1998 was the hottest year in the millenium and that the natural variations are at least comparable to the human influence, if not much bigger.
If there are no serious political pressures, wrong papers or directions are abandoned much earlier. It typically takes less time to debunk a wrong paper than the time you need to write it. Think about it: it can't be otherwise.
Why do the critics of string theory exactly single out AdS/QCD? It's simply because QCD is the last topic in theoretical physics whose meaning they can at least vaguely understand. Imagine an ordinary guy who likes beer and who noticed how bubbles are created in the bottle when you shake it. He does not want to understand anything else besides beer. Such a guy might think that all physicists should be working on hydrodynamics of beer (because he does not realize that hydrodynamics is not really enough to say everything about the bubbles).
The situation of those who propose AdS/QCD to be the only "recommended" topic in string theory is completely analogous to the beer lover. Rather severe limitations of their education and, indeed, of their intelligence just make it impossible for them to imagine that there could be other interesting topics in string theory. They just don't want to hear about other topics, they don't want to learn them, and they don't want to listen to any scientific arguments about them. They are already decided, much like the beer lover.
Meanwhile, those who actually know the subject and who know what's going on have no doubt that they could redirect all of their efforts to AdS/QCD if they wanted but most of them don't do it because they realize that there are many other interesting topics around.
If the science critics focused their attention on chemistry, they would surely argue that too many people study compounds with many carbon atoms. It is unfair, the critics would say. However, the people who understand chemistry know very well why a significant fraction of chemistry is organic chemistry where the carbon atoms play a rather important role. My most important point is that without knowing how the science works internally, one is ignorant not only about the answers to detailed technical questions but even about the rough hierarchy of importance of different topics.
One just can't judge any of these things before he or she learns them at a sufficient level. When all these critics are asking whether one can be a legitimate critic of string theory without actually knowing any details about it, my answer is No. It is really not possible. All of us who are critically evaluating loop quantum gravity are doing so after we studied the arguments and technical details in many papers. It is not a "different field" that we criticize. It is a wrong set of ideas in our field. I can't imagine how science could work if string theorists and loop quantum gravitists were viewed as different, complementary fields within quantum gravity. Whoever is asking profound questions about quantum gravity must have faced the question whether the concepts of string theory or loop quantum gravity are correct. And this person must again use rational arguments to decide.
How do the critics envision their forced, Inquisition-style redistribution of the attention within science? I think that it is obvious that they must be eventually think about attracting people who don't like string theory and who think it is important to do other things. Sorry to say, but this really means people who are not capable to learn string theory and the rest of the state-of-the-art image of the world according to theoretical physics. In other words, they want to replace physicists by complete or partial ignorants.
It is important for the internal structure of science and physics not to be directly manipulated by the beer lover in our story and other "critics" who have no idea what's going on because such a direct influence contradicts all moral standards of science and it can only lead to codification of bigotry rather than scientific progress. In science, it is critically important that scientists are not being forced to believe ideas that they find demonstrably and patently false. And that's the memo.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Judges want redistricting maps in two weeks
The Lone Star Project has it:
That answers the question as to whether the judicial trio or the Lege will approve the maps. Judges Higginbotham, Rosenthal, and Ward aren't fooling around. But with a sixty-day period for DOJ review, new districts will require a special election.
In November?!? Does that mean that those elected in a special will serve a regular two-year term? Does it mean Cuellar or Doggett, with no GOP opponent in the general, can draw additional challengers -- from either the right or left?
My goodness, this gets curiouser and curiouser.
Update: Charles Kuffner seems to think there's plenty of time to pull off an open primary. (Color me skeptical.)
Update II (6/30): The Valley Politico seems to have it all figured out. His scenario posits a politician on the ballot for, say, state legislature in the regularly-scheduled general election on November 7, and the same politician on a special election ballot for Congress. The same person running for two different offices at the same time, a la LBJ and Lloyd Bentsen. At this point I feel as if I must confess to a learning disability regarding this issue.
Update III: Charles K explains it to me. (Thanks, dude.)
The three-judge Federal District Court has issued an order and provided a schedule for determining a remedy in response to the recently released opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court on Texas redistricting.July 14, 2006 - All parties (plaintiffs and defendants) required to file remedial proposals including briefs and proposed maps.
July 21, 2006 - responses to remedial proposals must be filed.
August 3, 2006 - 9:00 a.m. - Oral arguments on proposals before the three-judge panel in Austin, Texas
That answers the question as to whether the judicial trio or the Lege will approve the maps. Judges Higginbotham, Rosenthal, and Ward aren't fooling around. But with a sixty-day period for DOJ review, new districts will require a special election.
In November?!? Does that mean that those elected in a special will serve a regular two-year term? Does it mean Cuellar or Doggett, with no GOP opponent in the general, can draw additional challengers -- from either the right or left?
My goodness, this gets curiouser and curiouser.
Update: Charles Kuffner seems to think there's plenty of time to pull off an open primary. (Color me skeptical.)
Update II (6/30): The Valley Politico seems to have it all figured out. His scenario posits a politician on the ballot for, say, state legislature in the regularly-scheduled general election on November 7, and the same politician on a special election ballot for Congress. The same person running for two different offices at the same time, a la LBJ and Lloyd Bentsen. At this point I feel as if I must confess to a learning disability regarding this issue.
Update III: Charles K explains it to me. (Thanks, dude.)
Barton Zwiebach: a letter to the editor
By Prof. Barton Zwiebach, MIT
Dear Editor:
As a string theorist and an enthusiastic daily reader of the Journal I was baffled by the gloomy assessment in "Has String Theory Tied Up Better Ideas in the Field of Physics?", of Friday June 23, 2006. In this column, science reporter Sharon Begley presents the viewpoint of those who regret the twenty-year old dominance of String Theory in the marketplace of ideas in High-Energy Physics.
The "Not Even Wrong" epithet is hurled, suggesting that string theory is a sloppy and speculative work that cannot even be judged. To the contrary, string theory is an extraordinarily precise and rigorous framework where facts can be proven beyond doubt and computations give unequivocal answers. As every theory in science, it is speculative until confirmed by experiment -- hardly a reason to single it out. The cited naysayers correctly state that string theory has a myriad solutions, each describing possible universes. From this they conclude that making predictions, or disproving the theory, is impossible. Not really. All that is needed to confirm string theory is finding one solution that describes our universe. All that is needed to rule out string theory is showing that no solution describes our universe. An answer must exist.
Rather than speculate on the ideas that might have developed in the absence of string theory, we can celebrate the remarkable insights that have emerged from it. It has explained, for example, why black holes have entropy and temperature. It has also demonstrated a surprising fact: theories of strong nuclear forces are equivalent to theories of gravity. Over the last two months, several new papers use string theory to describe the motion of quarks in the plasma created by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven! Not bad for a theory whose critics say is pie in the sky.
As in other collective endeavors, there is a bandwagon effect and many people rushed to string theory at the early start. There have been market corrections and a healthy equilibrium exists where string theory and other good ideas are explored and compete for attention. In this competitive environment, string theory continues to hold its own and to excite physicists with its possibilities.
Barton Zwiebach
Professor of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
Prof. Zwiebach is the author of the famous textbook "A first course in string theory" based on his award-winning MIT undergraduate course, and a world's leader in string field theory.
Dear Editor:
As a string theorist and an enthusiastic daily reader of the Journal I was baffled by the gloomy assessment in "Has String Theory Tied Up Better Ideas in the Field of Physics?", of Friday June 23, 2006. In this column, science reporter Sharon Begley presents the viewpoint of those who regret the twenty-year old dominance of String Theory in the marketplace of ideas in High-Energy Physics.
The "Not Even Wrong" epithet is hurled, suggesting that string theory is a sloppy and speculative work that cannot even be judged. To the contrary, string theory is an extraordinarily precise and rigorous framework where facts can be proven beyond doubt and computations give unequivocal answers. As every theory in science, it is speculative until confirmed by experiment -- hardly a reason to single it out. The cited naysayers correctly state that string theory has a myriad solutions, each describing possible universes. From this they conclude that making predictions, or disproving the theory, is impossible. Not really. All that is needed to confirm string theory is finding one solution that describes our universe. All that is needed to rule out string theory is showing that no solution describes our universe. An answer must exist.
Rather than speculate on the ideas that might have developed in the absence of string theory, we can celebrate the remarkable insights that have emerged from it. It has explained, for example, why black holes have entropy and temperature. It has also demonstrated a surprising fact: theories of strong nuclear forces are equivalent to theories of gravity. Over the last two months, several new papers use string theory to describe the motion of quarks in the plasma created by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven! Not bad for a theory whose critics say is pie in the sky.
As in other collective endeavors, there is a bandwagon effect and many people rushed to string theory at the early start. There have been market corrections and a healthy equilibrium exists where string theory and other good ideas are explored and compete for attention. In this competitive environment, string theory continues to hold its own and to excite physicists with its possibilities.
Barton Zwiebach
Professor of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
Prof. Zwiebach is the author of the famous textbook "A first course in string theory" based on his award-winning MIT undergraduate course, and a world's leader in string field theory.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
What the redistricting decision means
Maybe. At this point.
Having qualified my conclusions, it's still subject to lots of legal interpretation, a few more decisions still need to be made, and then a plan will be executed. By someone(s). At some near or not-so-near point in the future.
First, as backstory for those of you not paying close attention, the SCOTUS -- in a decision announced earlier today -- invalidated a portion of the Texas Congressional district maps that the Republicans in Austin redrew in 2003, according to Tom DeLay's edict. There are various interpretations of whether this was a victory for democracy or not.
Blogs and listservs are ablaze with translations. Here's a few of mine. First, the facts:
1.Two* One districts -- CD-23, currently held by Republican Henry Bonilla, and CD-25, held by Democrat Lloyd Doggett* -- were deemed in violation of the Voting Rights Act due to dilution of minority votes. They must be redrawn and submitted for approval by the USDOJ again. You may recall that the political appointees there overruled the career attorneys in approving the current boundaries several months ago. Any redrawn maps for these districts likely also change marginally the composition of CD-21 (Lamar Smith-R) and CD-28 (Henry Cuellar-D, barely).
2. The Texas district court panel of three judges which arbiters this matter now has the responsibility of deciding what to do with the map. The first and most immediate decision is when to rewrite the map -- this election or the next (my guess is the boundaries for 2006 will not change). The second decision is whether they will redraw it themselves -- accepting three maps each from Democrats and Republicans has been customary in the past -- or whether they kick it back to the Texas Legislature to redo the lines during the 80th legislative session, starting in January of 2007.
Speculation and further decisions and accompanying speculation to come. For now, I'll focus on what was won:
This ruling is a substantial victory for the Voting Rights Act, a victory that puts the Republicans in Congress (like the odious John Carter) on the spot, since they delayed VRA renewal to see what the Justices would do with Texas redistricting.
I don't think it was ever likely that the Supreme Court would have tossed out the entire plan simply because of political gerrymandering, which in this decision the Justices have largely approved. Much more interesting is that redistricting can apparently happen any time a state legislature feels like it, which opens a Pandora's Box in the short term for the GOP (in states besides Texas).
Summarizing: we don't know what the relief will be. The three-judge panel could 1) draw its own map; 2) give the Texas Lege a deadline to draw one; 3) let the current districts stand for 2006; 4) move quickly to change them.
As regards the current occupants of the affected districts, Bonilla and Cuellar can be more easily defeated in redrawn districts, but Lamar Smith would be strengthened.
Some good and some not so much, which is probably the best short conclusion of what the SC decided in this case. And there will be much more to dissect in the days, weeks, and months ahead.
*Update: Only CD-23 was declared in violation of VRA. Interestingly, in the opinion issued by the Supremes, they suggest the remedy is redraw CD-25 ...
Having qualified my conclusions, it's still subject to lots of legal interpretation, a few more decisions still need to be made, and then a plan will be executed. By someone(s). At some near or not-so-near point in the future.
First, as backstory for those of you not paying close attention, the SCOTUS -- in a decision announced earlier today -- invalidated a portion of the Texas Congressional district maps that the Republicans in Austin redrew in 2003, according to Tom DeLay's edict. There are various interpretations of whether this was a victory for democracy or not.
Blogs and listservs are ablaze with translations. Here's a few of mine. First, the facts:
1.
2. The Texas district court panel of three judges which arbiters this matter now has the responsibility of deciding what to do with the map. The first and most immediate decision is when to rewrite the map -- this election or the next (my guess is the boundaries for 2006 will not change). The second decision is whether they will redraw it themselves -- accepting three maps each from Democrats and Republicans has been customary in the past -- or whether they kick it back to the Texas Legislature to redo the lines during the 80th legislative session, starting in January of 2007.
Speculation and further decisions and accompanying speculation to come. For now, I'll focus on what was won:
This ruling is a substantial victory for the Voting Rights Act, a victory that puts the Republicans in Congress (like the odious John Carter) on the spot, since they delayed VRA renewal to see what the Justices would do with Texas redistricting.
I don't think it was ever likely that the Supreme Court would have tossed out the entire plan simply because of political gerrymandering, which in this decision the Justices have largely approved. Much more interesting is that redistricting can apparently happen any time a state legislature feels like it, which opens a Pandora's Box in the short term for the GOP (in states besides Texas).
Summarizing: we don't know what the relief will be. The three-judge panel could 1) draw its own map; 2) give the Texas Lege a deadline to draw one; 3) let the current districts stand for 2006; 4) move quickly to change them.
As regards the current occupants of the affected districts, Bonilla and Cuellar can be more easily defeated in redrawn districts, but Lamar Smith would be strengthened.
Some good and some not so much, which is probably the best short conclusion of what the SC decided in this case. And there will be much more to dissect in the days, weeks, and months ahead.
*Update: Only CD-23 was declared in violation of VRA. Interestingly, in the opinion issued by the Supremes, they suggest the remedy is redraw CD-25 ...
Redrawing that district (CD-23) will force nearby District 25, the Austin-to-Mexico district held by Democrat Lloyd Doggett of Austin, to be redrawn, according to the court opinion. The court's majority noted that the Doggett district, which joins two distinct Latino communities 300 miles apart, is not compact enough.
A rather extraordinary flight
My most recent flight certainly wasn't the first flight that looked like a weird story. For example, one of the previous flights from 2000 - in which Evgenij Vitchev has played an important role of a driver of a broken car - was published on "The Invisible Dog", a well-known Czech private internet daily.
However, the flight from Boston to Prague was probably the first flight of mine that could be a subject of a book or a movie. ;-) Such a movie would not be quite as dramatic as United 93 but it would not be too different either.
Boring introduction: trying to plan a flight in advance
Last summer, I had to buy a very speedy round trip ticket Prague-Boston-Prague. As you can see, the Prague International Airport remains my the location of my aviatic headquarters, because of immigration restrictions. The date and time of the flight back to Prague had to be changed 5 times, as you will see.
What I needed was late June. Originally, they could only reserve May 8th because of certain limitations. The date was later changed to May 25th after I bought the ticket in August 2005. Much later, one month ago, I spent two days - by telephone calls with Continental Airlines and by a personal visit to the Logan International Airport in Boston - by changing the May 25th to June 27th. That was the second change.
The rough plan of the flights can't be changed. My flights in both directions were Prague-Frankfurt-Newark-Boston and back through the same cities.
While I was at Logan in May 2006, the woman scheduled the final flight from Frankfurt to Prague to June 27th, too - about 12 hours before I arrive in Prague. That plan looked slightly acausal, so I asked her to change the last flight of the sequence to June 28th, and she did so. That was the third change, neither of which I really needed.
I was hoping that this had to be the end of the useless difficulties, and the only painful thing expecting me were the 3 parts of the long trip. However, one week later, I noticed that the departure from Frankfurt was 9:30 am. The arrival to Frankfurt was 9:30 am, too. The only reasonable approach to that newly discovered problem was to ignore it: the experience has made it clear that a further communication with the Continental Airlines leads to no progress whatsoever. So I decided that I would simply fly as far as I could, which probably meant to Frankfurt, and then I was planning to fight for another flight.
Yesterday, on June 27th, the Gentleman at the ticket counter in Boston agreed that I was going to miss the 6/28 9:30 am flight from Frankfurt to Prague, and he promised me a flight at 7 pm instead - something that would make the total length of the flights close to 24 hours. If you count, this was the fourth change of the plan. The fifth change will be one of the punch lines of the story that has not yet started. ;-)
The flight from Boston to Newark was straightforward. It was delayed by two hours because of a "ground stop" and several other extraordinary measures. I spent many hours at Logan and one my fun activities was to shoot various people with my camcorder. How many of you are looking around who are the most interesting people around and what are they doing when you wait for an airplane? The passengers that attract most of my attention in 95 percent of cases are young representatives of the politically correct sex.
Before the flight to Newark, it was actually a 10-year old boy who won the contest because he was an interestingly alive, curious, and emotional kid - frankly speaking, something similar to how I could have imagined myself at his age. It accidentally occurred that he, together with his older brother, was sitting next to me in the plane. It turned out they were from Brazil, even though I originally thought that they were either Scandinavian or Irish, and the language they were speaking to each other had to be Portuguese but I just couldn't tell. But of course, these kids can speak several tongues and they are native speakers in all of them.
The selection from Newark to Frankfurt was more diverse. It fitted the usual 95 percent template and I have recorded two winners on the videotape. On the plane, I was sitting next to a tall German left-wing inorganic chemist from the University of Michigan (and originally from Cologne) who designs materials for the linings of the power plants, among other things. He complained that the airplanes are produced for dwarves and explained me that he did not like America (except as a place for a job) because the country did not care about the environment and because of similar issues. You can guess whether your humble correspondent agreed with most of his points. But it was an entertaining and insightful conversation - somewhat analogous to what we used to talk about with Jochen Brocks. I also told him some things about sociology of high-energy physics, the character of the difficulties separating us from thermonuclear energy, and other things.
Of course, I learned many useful things, too. For example, Detroit is becoming a dead city, he argued, where the crime rate exceeds the crime rate of all other areas in the U.S. The people are afraid to live there and the skyscrapers are vacant. I will have to check these surprisingly sounding assertions.
He also confirmed my hypothesis that it could be fun for me to try to see the city of Frankfurt. I was ready to find the "local" railway station and spend a few hours in Frankfurt. Most of the city had to be destroyed during the Second World War, but there are still things to look at. But I was not really dreaming about the visit because it was just not a right time for such tourism.
The real story is getting started right now.
As explained above, I was expected to wait in Frankfurt for 10 hours. This is much like the 50 years that some people propose as a reasonable estimate for a truly significant progress in string theory in the future. But sometimes, things can become extremely dynamical in a very short period of time.
When you're sometimes doing certain things that are far from routine, you can get stuck in a quagmire of problems. You start to see that one problem is likely to create 2.6 new problems which is close to or even above the critical mass.
Whatever you do, these problems create newer problems, and the total time that you need to solve all of them may become obviously divergent. Such a general description can apply to most kinds of bureaucracy, problems with overly convoluted flights, as well as the scientific research or the public defense of important ideas. You know that things are sometimes bad, and whether or not you do something, they will become even worse, reduce the optimism, constructive activity, and the mutual understanding, increase the amount of ignorants who publish their silly opinions in the Wall Street Journal, which leads to another and bigger explosion of irrationality, and so on. The similarity with a nuclear bomb is clear.
This situation is analogous to a perturbative expansion in the strongly coupled regime; see Chapter 12 of Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" for other analogies. ;-)
On the other hand, things can sometimes become extremely convergent. You see that every new problem that occurs is just a small perturbation on the previous problem, and you know very well that when you sum up all the time that is needed to solve all of these problems, you obtain a finite number. Even if a subproblem splits into two, you know that it won't invalidate the convergence properties. In the case of convoluted flights, you actually need the result not only to be a finite number but a number that is smaller than the time until the departure of the plane that you
want to catch.
This was exactly what happened in Frankfurt.
After I picked my luggage in Frankfurt, I went to the Continental ticket counters, but instead of the E area, I originally went to the D area. Meanwhile I noticed that my 9:30 am flight to Prague - with Czech Airlines and Continental Airlines - was delayed by one hour. One hour is a lot but it was not enough. The plane was just leaving. I could not catch it. However, I noticed that there was a flight of Lufthansa at 12:15 pm. That would be great to get this one.
Eventually I arrived to a Continental ticket counter. Unlike all other open counters, there were no people waiting in line there at all. After the first two sentences of mine explaining my situation to the women, she said something like "Vy musíte by Èechún" which means "You must be Czech" in Slovak language. Not only her knowledge of many languages was completely authentic but she could recognize that my accent was neither Hungarian - as most people who offer their opinion say - nor Slovak (which is her country): it was Czech. Some people, especially women, have these abilities that I will never fully comprehend because I sometimes fail to distinguish even British English from American English.
I semi-jokingly told her that it could be a good idea to switch me to their bitter competition, Lufthansa, and she said that such things don't work. After she exchanged several German sentences with her colleague, I was told "Yes, you have the 12:15 pm flight with Lufthansa". It was 11:16 am.
As you can see, the Czechoslovak friendship turned out to be a critical ingredient in this story.
These flights to Prague are almost never delayed, so I literally had 59 minutes left. The tasks for these 59 minutes became obvious: I had to find the airport train to go from terminal E to terminal A; then I had to wait in a long line and to check in my luggage (that I simply could not afford to send directly to Prague because of the uncertainty about the flights). Then I had to go to the terminal B. At terminal B, you must wait in two lines for two independent security checks and walk for half a mile or one mile. When you get to the gate B55, you must negotiate with the agent and ask her to assign you a seat because I did not yet have a seat in the airplane.
Of course, you didn't really have 59 minutes because you must be in the airplane 15 minutes before the departure or so. In fact, the boarding starts 35 minutes before the departure, so what I had was actually 24 minutes. Is it possible?
The previous mistake I did when I went to the D area instead of the E area to find the Continental ticket counter turned out to be a virtue because I could abruptly find the two elevators and get to the airport train real fast. It was clear that another error means the end of the story. The terminal A was rather long and I could not afford to lose additional time. My suitcase was too heavy and unstable to run. Fortunately, there was an electric vehicle nearby. I could not jump on it but I attached my heavy suitcase (with wheels) to that vehicle and I was running next to it, around 10 miles per hour, which saved me about 1 or 2 minutes.
When I got to the ticket counters of Lufthansa - between A55 and A200 or so - there was a rather long line of people that could easily be quantified as a one-hour line. It was absolutely clear what would happen if I decided to wait. What is the lesson? Of course, I could not wait. Following the deep philosophy that equality is a stupidity, I used the "head & shoulders" approach and asked the guy who controls the line to make an exception for me because my flight was departing in 45 minutes or so. He sent me to the end of the line.
I still knew what it means to go to the end of the line. ;-) So I explained my situation to another uniformed officer who was standing nearby. He told me that I might be right but I should ask the first guy. I had already done so, but I explained the second guy that the first guy did not quite understand the situation and he must be explained by the second guy what's going on. Of course, eventually it worked and I spent about 2 minutes in that line, receiving a priority treatment.
It is not a problem for a bright reader to add another episode about long corridors.
When I got to the first security check of the terminal B, it was relatively fast. I did not have to take my shoes off - but of course, I always had to remove my laptop and the camcorder from the carry-on luggage. The second security check, a mile further, was more difficult, and there was another long line of people that I could not circumvent. One of the guys in front of me had 4 clocks on his arms and he was shocked that the clocks should be screened together with the suitcases. Another guy was stunned that his laptop had to be removed from his carefully locked suitcase, and so on.
But all these things have worked in some miraculous way, after all. The boarding started at 11:40 am and I was at the gate at 11:41 am. The last task was to be assigned a seat number. Unfortunately the woman told me to wait for 5 minutes. She had about 6 telephone calls that she considered more important, and the 5 minutes became 18 minutes, but eventually she called Herr Motl and gave me 7C.
Everything was fine. At 12:10 pm I joined the official bus that took us to the aircraft in another very different part of the large airport, and the aircraft took off at 12:27 pm, only 12 minutes after the official time of departure. In Prague, my
luggage was actually the 4th one that appeared which was really fast and the passport control was even faster. We arrived at the new Terminal 2 in Prague which was extremely clean - including the restrooms that have impressed some of my American neighbors from the flight (I don't know whether they also tried the restroom in Terminal 1 which was dirty and stinky). The Terminal 2 still looked rather empty; its capacity is not yet used efficiently, I guess.
The punch line is that when things suddenly start to fit together, the progress can become real fast. It's a matter of time when the critics of string theory will be undeniable identified as jokes. Maybe they should already start to look for their hideout. And that's the memo.
However, the flight from Boston to Prague was probably the first flight of mine that could be a subject of a book or a movie. ;-) Such a movie would not be quite as dramatic as United 93 but it would not be too different either.
Boring introduction: trying to plan a flight in advance
Last summer, I had to buy a very speedy round trip ticket Prague-Boston-Prague. As you can see, the Prague International Airport remains my the location of my aviatic headquarters, because of immigration restrictions. The date and time of the flight back to Prague had to be changed 5 times, as you will see.
What I needed was late June. Originally, they could only reserve May 8th because of certain limitations. The date was later changed to May 25th after I bought the ticket in August 2005. Much later, one month ago, I spent two days - by telephone calls with Continental Airlines and by a personal visit to the Logan International Airport in Boston - by changing the May 25th to June 27th. That was the second change.
The rough plan of the flights can't be changed. My flights in both directions were Prague-Frankfurt-Newark-Boston and back through the same cities.
While I was at Logan in May 2006, the woman scheduled the final flight from Frankfurt to Prague to June 27th, too - about 12 hours before I arrive in Prague. That plan looked slightly acausal, so I asked her to change the last flight of the sequence to June 28th, and she did so. That was the third change, neither of which I really needed.
I was hoping that this had to be the end of the useless difficulties, and the only painful thing expecting me were the 3 parts of the long trip. However, one week later, I noticed that the departure from Frankfurt was 9:30 am. The arrival to Frankfurt was 9:30 am, too. The only reasonable approach to that newly discovered problem was to ignore it: the experience has made it clear that a further communication with the Continental Airlines leads to no progress whatsoever. So I decided that I would simply fly as far as I could, which probably meant to Frankfurt, and then I was planning to fight for another flight.
Yesterday, on June 27th, the Gentleman at the ticket counter in Boston agreed that I was going to miss the 6/28 9:30 am flight from Frankfurt to Prague, and he promised me a flight at 7 pm instead - something that would make the total length of the flights close to 24 hours. If you count, this was the fourth change of the plan. The fifth change will be one of the punch lines of the story that has not yet started. ;-)
The flight from Boston to Newark was straightforward. It was delayed by two hours because of a "ground stop" and several other extraordinary measures. I spent many hours at Logan and one my fun activities was to shoot various people with my camcorder. How many of you are looking around who are the most interesting people around and what are they doing when you wait for an airplane? The passengers that attract most of my attention in 95 percent of cases are young representatives of the politically correct sex.
Before the flight to Newark, it was actually a 10-year old boy who won the contest because he was an interestingly alive, curious, and emotional kid - frankly speaking, something similar to how I could have imagined myself at his age. It accidentally occurred that he, together with his older brother, was sitting next to me in the plane. It turned out they were from Brazil, even though I originally thought that they were either Scandinavian or Irish, and the language they were speaking to each other had to be Portuguese but I just couldn't tell. But of course, these kids can speak several tongues and they are native speakers in all of them.
The selection from Newark to Frankfurt was more diverse. It fitted the usual 95 percent template and I have recorded two winners on the videotape. On the plane, I was sitting next to a tall German left-wing inorganic chemist from the University of Michigan (and originally from Cologne) who designs materials for the linings of the power plants, among other things. He complained that the airplanes are produced for dwarves and explained me that he did not like America (except as a place for a job) because the country did not care about the environment and because of similar issues. You can guess whether your humble correspondent agreed with most of his points. But it was an entertaining and insightful conversation - somewhat analogous to what we used to talk about with Jochen Brocks. I also told him some things about sociology of high-energy physics, the character of the difficulties separating us from thermonuclear energy, and other things.
Of course, I learned many useful things, too. For example, Detroit is becoming a dead city, he argued, where the crime rate exceeds the crime rate of all other areas in the U.S. The people are afraid to live there and the skyscrapers are vacant. I will have to check these surprisingly sounding assertions.
He also confirmed my hypothesis that it could be fun for me to try to see the city of Frankfurt. I was ready to find the "local" railway station and spend a few hours in Frankfurt. Most of the city had to be destroyed during the Second World War, but there are still things to look at. But I was not really dreaming about the visit because it was just not a right time for such tourism.
The real story is getting started right now.
As explained above, I was expected to wait in Frankfurt for 10 hours. This is much like the 50 years that some people propose as a reasonable estimate for a truly significant progress in string theory in the future. But sometimes, things can become extremely dynamical in a very short period of time.
When you're sometimes doing certain things that are far from routine, you can get stuck in a quagmire of problems. You start to see that one problem is likely to create 2.6 new problems which is close to or even above the critical mass.
Whatever you do, these problems create newer problems, and the total time that you need to solve all of them may become obviously divergent. Such a general description can apply to most kinds of bureaucracy, problems with overly convoluted flights, as well as the scientific research or the public defense of important ideas. You know that things are sometimes bad, and whether or not you do something, they will become even worse, reduce the optimism, constructive activity, and the mutual understanding, increase the amount of ignorants who publish their silly opinions in the Wall Street Journal, which leads to another and bigger explosion of irrationality, and so on. The similarity with a nuclear bomb is clear.
This situation is analogous to a perturbative expansion in the strongly coupled regime; see Chapter 12 of Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" for other analogies. ;-)
On the other hand, things can sometimes become extremely convergent. You see that every new problem that occurs is just a small perturbation on the previous problem, and you know very well that when you sum up all the time that is needed to solve all of these problems, you obtain a finite number. Even if a subproblem splits into two, you know that it won't invalidate the convergence properties. In the case of convoluted flights, you actually need the result not only to be a finite number but a number that is smaller than the time until the departure of the plane that you
want to catch.
This was exactly what happened in Frankfurt.
After I picked my luggage in Frankfurt, I went to the Continental ticket counters, but instead of the E area, I originally went to the D area. Meanwhile I noticed that my 9:30 am flight to Prague - with Czech Airlines and Continental Airlines - was delayed by one hour. One hour is a lot but it was not enough. The plane was just leaving. I could not catch it. However, I noticed that there was a flight of Lufthansa at 12:15 pm. That would be great to get this one.
Eventually I arrived to a Continental ticket counter. Unlike all other open counters, there were no people waiting in line there at all. After the first two sentences of mine explaining my situation to the women, she said something like "Vy musíte by Èechún" which means "You must be Czech" in Slovak language. Not only her knowledge of many languages was completely authentic but she could recognize that my accent was neither Hungarian - as most people who offer their opinion say - nor Slovak (which is her country): it was Czech. Some people, especially women, have these abilities that I will never fully comprehend because I sometimes fail to distinguish even British English from American English.
I semi-jokingly told her that it could be a good idea to switch me to their bitter competition, Lufthansa, and she said that such things don't work. After she exchanged several German sentences with her colleague, I was told "Yes, you have the 12:15 pm flight with Lufthansa". It was 11:16 am.
As you can see, the Czechoslovak friendship turned out to be a critical ingredient in this story.
These flights to Prague are almost never delayed, so I literally had 59 minutes left. The tasks for these 59 minutes became obvious: I had to find the airport train to go from terminal E to terminal A; then I had to wait in a long line and to check in my luggage (that I simply could not afford to send directly to Prague because of the uncertainty about the flights). Then I had to go to the terminal B. At terminal B, you must wait in two lines for two independent security checks and walk for half a mile or one mile. When you get to the gate B55, you must negotiate with the agent and ask her to assign you a seat because I did not yet have a seat in the airplane.
Of course, you didn't really have 59 minutes because you must be in the airplane 15 minutes before the departure or so. In fact, the boarding starts 35 minutes before the departure, so what I had was actually 24 minutes. Is it possible?
The previous mistake I did when I went to the D area instead of the E area to find the Continental ticket counter turned out to be a virtue because I could abruptly find the two elevators and get to the airport train real fast. It was clear that another error means the end of the story. The terminal A was rather long and I could not afford to lose additional time. My suitcase was too heavy and unstable to run. Fortunately, there was an electric vehicle nearby. I could not jump on it but I attached my heavy suitcase (with wheels) to that vehicle and I was running next to it, around 10 miles per hour, which saved me about 1 or 2 minutes.
When I got to the ticket counters of Lufthansa - between A55 and A200 or so - there was a rather long line of people that could easily be quantified as a one-hour line. It was absolutely clear what would happen if I decided to wait. What is the lesson? Of course, I could not wait. Following the deep philosophy that equality is a stupidity, I used the "head & shoulders" approach and asked the guy who controls the line to make an exception for me because my flight was departing in 45 minutes or so. He sent me to the end of the line.
I still knew what it means to go to the end of the line. ;-) So I explained my situation to another uniformed officer who was standing nearby. He told me that I might be right but I should ask the first guy. I had already done so, but I explained the second guy that the first guy did not quite understand the situation and he must be explained by the second guy what's going on. Of course, eventually it worked and I spent about 2 minutes in that line, receiving a priority treatment.
It is not a problem for a bright reader to add another episode about long corridors.
When I got to the first security check of the terminal B, it was relatively fast. I did not have to take my shoes off - but of course, I always had to remove my laptop and the camcorder from the carry-on luggage. The second security check, a mile further, was more difficult, and there was another long line of people that I could not circumvent. One of the guys in front of me had 4 clocks on his arms and he was shocked that the clocks should be screened together with the suitcases. Another guy was stunned that his laptop had to be removed from his carefully locked suitcase, and so on.
But all these things have worked in some miraculous way, after all. The boarding started at 11:40 am and I was at the gate at 11:41 am. The last task was to be assigned a seat number. Unfortunately the woman told me to wait for 5 minutes. She had about 6 telephone calls that she considered more important, and the 5 minutes became 18 minutes, but eventually she called Herr Motl and gave me 7C.
Everything was fine. At 12:10 pm I joined the official bus that took us to the aircraft in another very different part of the large airport, and the aircraft took off at 12:27 pm, only 12 minutes after the official time of departure. In Prague, my
luggage was actually the 4th one that appeared which was really fast and the passport control was even faster. We arrived at the new Terminal 2 in Prague which was extremely clean - including the restrooms that have impressed some of my American neighbors from the flight (I don't know whether they also tried the restroom in Terminal 1 which was dirty and stinky). The Terminal 2 still looked rather empty; its capacity is not yet used efficiently, I guess.
The punch line is that when things suddenly start to fit together, the progress can become real fast. It's a matter of time when the critics of string theory will be undeniable identified as jokes. Maybe they should already start to look for their hideout. And that's the memo.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Gallery of the Absurd
I've added some really interesting things in the blogroll lately, but none more so than Gallery of the Absurd. Go look around, and don't miss Celebrity Endorsement Idea No. 645.
Rush Limbaugh-Viagra humor
While we wait for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, here's some bad jokes by Grant Miller ...
*badaboom * badabing*
What's the difference between a meeting with Republican lobbyists and a Dominican Republic sex vacation? When you meet with Republican lobbyists, you don't have to take your Viagra through customs.
I hear Daryn Kagan broke up with Rush -- apparently she only does hard news.
Limbaugh takes Viagra so he can be an even bigger dick.
I heard he was supplying Viagra to President Bush. Even the President gets tired of screwing the country all the time.
This confirms that the vast right-wing conspiracy isn't quite so vast.
He puts the "social" in "social conservative."
Limbaugh declined to comment on the drug seizure. I guess he likes to keep his privates private.*badaboom * badabing*
Monday, June 26, 2006
Jacques Distler: LQG landscape
I hope that many of you still remember that Jacques Distler is a pioneer of serious blogging about theoretical physics, and also a source of interesting articles - many of them feature math in TeX. The reason why I link to him now is that he has extracted an interesting core of an exchange at CosmicVariance.com and opened a discussion about the following question:
The spectrum of possible LQG-like theories is referred to as the LQG landscape.
Even before Jacques asked this question, Lee Smolin has already provided us with an answer: everything goes, especially all the nice things. Some readers might be satisfied with this surprising statement; others may want to look under the surface. ;-)
The linker-not-thinker and silent character of this blog will escalate tomorrow because of the most awkward flight / train trip to Europe in my life so far: it is plausible that I will have to take train from Frankfurt because of the misorganized, acausal plan of the flights.
Tomorrow evening or Wednesday morning, it is expected that the 500,000th unique visitor will open this blog. Up to the first three people who will send me a #500,000 screenshot will have the opportunity to make a posting here, or donate this right to someone else.
Richard Lindzen: there is no consensus
Wall Street Journal sucks as far as high-energy physics goes, but it is pretty good with respect to the climate science. Prof. Richard Lindzen has a nice article there:
Moneyshot Quotes of the Week
Greg has already expounded, so let me just repeat what these two idiots said:
Update (6/27): Think Progress administers another smack to Carter's head with this:
"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons ..."-- Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)
-- Rep. John Carter (R-TX)
"I don't think we have racial bias in Texas any more."
Update (6/27): Think Progress administers another smack to Carter's head with this:
Texas leads the nation in several categories of voting discrimination, including recent Section 5 violations and Section 2 challenges. … Section 5 of the VRA, the preclearance requirement, was extended to Texas in 1975 due to the State’s history of excluding Mexican Americans from the political process. … Texas is home to the second largest Latino population in the U.S.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Boss of UCSC commits suicide
In 2000, I have spent 6 months at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Very nice redwoods etc.
Very sadly, the chancellor of UCSC
Very sadly, the chancellor of UCSC
jumped from the roof of a rather tall, 43-story building yesterday.
Last January, Denton attended the conference about women in science and engineering and she was one of the more moderate critics of Summers - nevertheless, her articles and proclamations helped to increase the heat at Harvard.
One month later, last February, she became the boss of UCSC with the task to reconcile the old UCSC made out of feminist studies and social justice with the new UCSC of astrophysics, molecular biology, and "non-technology" as the author of the previous link calls it.
Journalists speculate that criticism over her female effective spouse's new job at UCSC and criticism over some seemingly irrelevant but still controversial investments such as campus perks or her dog's $30,000 dog run could be behind the decision.
Such frustrating news often shake the world. Denton can no longer run for the U.S. president. Prof. Lawrence Summers, despite the difficult year+, can still run in 2008, although probably on the G.O.P. ticket only.
Being a chancellor is unfortunately no recipe for a universal happiness, especially if you have to send several death announcements per month. On the other hand, there is a clear recipe what one must do when he or she is knocked down.
My deep condolences to the family and the campus.
Pride Parade photos
These are from last year and were originally posted at Todd's, but they're representative of last night's atmosphere. More -- and more current -- shortly.
Update: Lyn has posted some good ones from yesterday.
Update II: And Robb Zipp has some from this year's Pride Parade, including some interesting ones of Taylor Dane (let's just say that they don't call them backup singers for nothing). Thanks, RZ; by that time I was sound asleep from the day's sweat.
Too far behind to catch up
This time last Sunday we were preparing for the Juneteenth Filibuster, which began just as the rain stopped and ended as the sky opened again. A brief account was posted here and a few pictures here.
I drove back to Houston Monday morning in the middle of the worst of the downpour, but experienced only minor traffic delays on I-45 and the South Loop. The white-knuckle, windshield-wipers-on-fast-and-still-can't-see, slightly-hydroplaning-once-in-awhile ride took 2 1/2 hours instead of one, but really the worst of it was on the other side of the highway, where the Loop was flooded -- not just the access roads -- and the cars were stopped, their drivers out walking around. A scene reminiscent of the Rita evacuation. *shudder*
On Tuesday the 21st I met the Van Oses -- David, Rachel, Maya, and Leya -- at the Galveston County Courthouse and began our odyssey. Well, their odyssey. Fifteen courthouse stops in three days, of which I managed six in two. After Galveston came Chambers (Anahuac) where we met mayor Guy Robert and Judge Jimmy Sylvia and others for lunch at the Wooden Spoon. The Baytown Sun covered this visit. Then to Liberty, where about twenty supporters greeted us, among them CD-02 challenger Gary Binderim and and mi bloghermano Stace Medellin, who posted a lengthy account of this part of the trip at his place. We got in a radio interview with KSHN-99.9 FM before we left for Kountze, the seat of Hardin County, where David spoke to about thirty activists including chair Willa Coe, mayor Fred Williams, superintendent of schools Gus Holloman, and others. (It's important here to note that Hardin County has no Republicans on the local ballot. This is true of several of the counties we visited -- Southeast Texas remains Yellow Dog Democrat country.)
From Kountze to Beaumont and the Jefferson County courthouse, a radio interview with Jack Pieper of KLVI, and then a dinner reception with the Progressive Democrats of Southeast Texas, headed up by DVO supporters John and Suzanne Stafford. (David was kind enough to acknowledge my mother Jean's upcoming birthday in his remarks.)
Wednesday started in Orange, Texas and a press conference including Glenn Earle of KOGT and county judge Paul Thibodeaux, who told David that the steps from which he spoke were the same ones where Lyndon Johnson addressed Orange County citizens in his 1947 Senate run.
I lef the tour after Orange and returned to Houston; David and family continued on to nine more county seats, wrapping up the trip in Conroe on Thursday the 22nd, with Agriculture Commissioner candidate Hank Gilbert and 70 supporters. Sharon posted an excellent DKos diary here with photos, links to coverage by the Montgomery County Courier and the Jasper Newsboy, and podcasts by David of the tourstops. Thursday night concluded the week's events with a spaghetti dinner fundraiser held at the Woodlands home of Nahla Williamson. Mrs. Diddie and I tried to get up there for it, but once again the weather (and 5 o'clock rush hour traffic on I-45 North) was uncooperative; we were forced to turn back after getting caught in the gridlock.
Friday morning the 23rd I returned to Galveston County and represented the campaign at the Mainland Ecumenical Alliance luncheon, and spoke for a few minutes for David along with Chris Bell, Barbara Radnofsky, Hank Gilbert, county judge Jim Yarbrough, and district court judge Susan Criss. In attendance were many of the area's Baptist ministers, parishioners, Democratic activists, organized labor leaders Lee Medley, Sam Munn, Daryl Stewart and more.
Saturday at the Pride Parade we filled in at the DFA booth registering voters and signing up supporters. The heat and humidity did not deter the revelers.
I'll try to manage a few photos of some or all of the week's events later.
I drove back to Houston Monday morning in the middle of the worst of the downpour, but experienced only minor traffic delays on I-45 and the South Loop. The white-knuckle, windshield-wipers-on-fast-and-still-can't-see, slightly-hydroplaning-once-in-awhile ride took 2 1/2 hours instead of one, but really the worst of it was on the other side of the highway, where the Loop was flooded -- not just the access roads -- and the cars were stopped, their drivers out walking around. A scene reminiscent of the Rita evacuation. *shudder*
On Tuesday the 21st I met the Van Oses -- David, Rachel, Maya, and Leya -- at the Galveston County Courthouse and began our odyssey. Well, their odyssey. Fifteen courthouse stops in three days, of which I managed six in two. After Galveston came Chambers (Anahuac) where we met mayor Guy Robert and Judge Jimmy Sylvia and others for lunch at the Wooden Spoon. The Baytown Sun covered this visit. Then to Liberty, where about twenty supporters greeted us, among them CD-02 challenger Gary Binderim and and mi bloghermano Stace Medellin, who posted a lengthy account of this part of the trip at his place. We got in a radio interview with KSHN-99.9 FM before we left for Kountze, the seat of Hardin County, where David spoke to about thirty activists including chair Willa Coe, mayor Fred Williams, superintendent of schools Gus Holloman, and others. (It's important here to note that Hardin County has no Republicans on the local ballot. This is true of several of the counties we visited -- Southeast Texas remains Yellow Dog Democrat country.)
From Kountze to Beaumont and the Jefferson County courthouse, a radio interview with Jack Pieper of KLVI, and then a dinner reception with the Progressive Democrats of Southeast Texas, headed up by DVO supporters John and Suzanne Stafford. (David was kind enough to acknowledge my mother Jean's upcoming birthday in his remarks.)
Wednesday started in Orange, Texas and a press conference including Glenn Earle of KOGT and county judge Paul Thibodeaux, who told David that the steps from which he spoke were the same ones where Lyndon Johnson addressed Orange County citizens in his 1947 Senate run.
I lef the tour after Orange and returned to Houston; David and family continued on to nine more county seats, wrapping up the trip in Conroe on Thursday the 22nd, with Agriculture Commissioner candidate Hank Gilbert and 70 supporters. Sharon posted an excellent DKos diary here with photos, links to coverage by the Montgomery County Courier and the Jasper Newsboy, and podcasts by David of the tourstops. Thursday night concluded the week's events with a spaghetti dinner fundraiser held at the Woodlands home of Nahla Williamson. Mrs. Diddie and I tried to get up there for it, but once again the weather (and 5 o'clock rush hour traffic on I-45 North) was uncooperative; we were forced to turn back after getting caught in the gridlock.
Friday morning the 23rd I returned to Galveston County and represented the campaign at the Mainland Ecumenical Alliance luncheon, and spoke for a few minutes for David along with Chris Bell, Barbara Radnofsky, Hank Gilbert, county judge Jim Yarbrough, and district court judge Susan Criss. In attendance were many of the area's Baptist ministers, parishioners, Democratic activists, organized labor leaders Lee Medley, Sam Munn, Daryl Stewart and more.
Saturday at the Pride Parade we filled in at the DFA booth registering voters and signing up supporters. The heat and humidity did not deter the revelers.
I'll try to manage a few photos of some or all of the week's events later.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Reports from Strings 2006
There are cases in which one must become a linker-not-thinker, and this is one of them: :-)
Jonathan Shock - China (with Paul Cook at Caltech)
For some extra idea about the atmosphere, see
Jonathan Shock - China (with Paul Cook at Caltech)
For some extra idea about the atmosphere, see
- Dennis Overbye's report (copy)
Thanks to Rae for pointing out a defective link. ;-) Our previous article related to the Strings 2006 conference was here.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Harvard may pay extra $115 million for firing Summers
One year ago, it was more or less a done deal that Lawrence Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, would donate 115 million U.S. dollars to Harvard University led by Lawrence Summers in order to create the
- Ellison Institute of World Health
that was supposed to fight against major diseases that decimate Africa and the rest of the world.
Nowadays, Ellison is apparently concerned that without Summers, Harvard won't be able to direct this difficult project, and after having seen what algorithms and principles many of the non-Summers people would like to use to lead Harvard, your humble correspondent shares Ellison's worries and has a full understanding for his potential desire to change his mind. Yes, indeed, I would guess that the university may become a black hole.
Nancy Hopkins' temptation to vomit and Lorand Matory's Brezhnev-style resolution - besides many colleagues' inability to defend their president against malicious attacks - may turn out to be rather expensive. See more details in the
The amount of $115 million should be symbolically added to $50 million that were, under the pressure of the feminist movement, promised for programs to intentionally discriminate against men. And no, I am not going to count any human lives.
If you enjoy black humor, it's somewhat funny to imagine that the ouster was a consequence of the "lack of confidence" resolution in 2005: each vote against Summers may then have been worth about minus half a million dollars. ;-)
Thomas Sowell of Stanford University argues that Harvard is a cathedral that has lost the faith that has originally built the university.
Wall Street Journal on the critics: less unfair
As you can imagine, I would be disappointed if the Wall Street Journal that I kind of like because of its rational approach to economy and politics wrote a similar virulent stupidity like the recent Goebbelsian articles in the Sunday Times and the Financial Times.
Another reason to like the Wall Street Journal is that they offer, unlike most of other media, a fair, honest, and balanced report of the NAS climate panel from the previous article:
So is WSJ going to destroy string theory much like the British papers? Fortunately, this worry has not yet quite materialized although we are not terribly far from it. While Sharon Begley chose an irritating title,
the content is bad but still much more reasonable, balanced, and material than the recent idiocies in the U.K. and it actually contains some physics although less than what we expect from leading science journalists such as Dennis Overbye. Because of the horrifying lousy quality of the U.K. articles, the comparison with them is very far from being a compliment for the Wall Street Journal.
Besides two irrelevant outsiders who have no idea what the existing high-energy physics means and who offer their irrational bitterness, the article also asks a real distinguished physicist, namely Michael Peskin whom many of us appreciate not only because of the QFT textbook that he has co-authored: for example, his objectively measured contributions to particle physics exceed all of the opponents and all of the supporters of the opponents' blogs combined.
Surely, Ms. Begley won't tell you that 90% of her article is based on irrelevant and uninformed people.
Michael Peskin is no official string theorist but he knows what's going on. He points out that string theory has the power to explain features of reality such as the number of generations in particle physics. In field theory, this number is a (discrete) non-dynamical parameter. In string theory, it is a dynamical quantity describing a more fundamental system. String theory is the first theory that can answer similar questions that are obviously nothing else than axioms in various field theories.
The number of generations is just one example. In the conventional heterotic compactifications, the number of generations is proportional to the Dirac index that can be shown to be the absolute value of the Euler character divided by two. In the compactifications of the types studied since the 1990s, the number of generation arises from other geometrical and related quantities such as the intersection numbers. But in all cases, it is a result of dynamics that follows physical laws as opposed to dogmas.
It's up to the reader and his or her intelligence whether he or she chooses comments about physics from a particle physicist or unphysical conspiratory and "philosophical" theories from non-particle physicists, particle non-physicists and anti-physicists quoted at the beginning. String theorists are not asked what they think about string theory - it would be a clash of interests if scientists could actually speak about science :-) - but it does not really matter because the recent "controversy" is not a confrontation between string theorists and the rest, but between sane scientists and the rest. Sure, most people are stupid and they will choose to believe two semi-crackpots rather than one Michael Peskin, but it's their fault, not mine.
At the beginning of her article, Begley says - using my words - that a year ago or two, everyone would know that Woit was a crackpot. Today, people are not certain because there are at least two such crackpots. Well, I, for one, am still equally certain. Many sentences about the insane "untestability" statements follow.
Some paragraphs are dedicated to the landscape of compactifications and I think that these things have been overdiscussed, so let me ignore them because there is nothing interesting in the article about this issue. The article ends with a malicious formulation about the "betrayal of science" by string theory. Ms. Sharon Begley gets an F, but as mentioned, it is a better F than the F for Robert Matthews or John Cornwell. She is apparently a weak journalist, but one who can at least sometimes put a question mark behind a patently wrong sentence and who can find not only crackpots but also Michael Peskin. ;-)
Also, I am going to restore the blog article about the semi-official unholy alliance between Cosmic Variance and the anti-science activists - an alliance whose existence is obvious to everyone who sometimes looks at the anti-science blogs. As it was announced, the article was only temporarily suspended to moderate an inflow of nasty anonymous as well as onymous attacks, and I find a long-term censorship unacceptable.
Again, I am outraged how easy it has become for various crackpots and idiots to spread their dumb and unjustifiable opinions about science, and how many people are more or less actively collaborating to make the situation even worse. No doubt, the people who are trying to paint the silliness of various "critics of science" as a part of the scientific voice are the main villains. The Reference Frame will continue to criticize crackpots, lousy and dishonest journalists and pseudojournalists, and others who want to present manifest crackpotism as a part of science.
Another reason to like the Wall Street Journal is that they offer, unlike most of other media, a fair, honest, and balanced report of the NAS climate panel from the previous article:
So is WSJ going to destroy string theory much like the British papers? Fortunately, this worry has not yet quite materialized although we are not terribly far from it. While Sharon Begley chose an irritating title,
the content is bad but still much more reasonable, balanced, and material than the recent idiocies in the U.K. and it actually contains some physics although less than what we expect from leading science journalists such as Dennis Overbye. Because of the horrifying lousy quality of the U.K. articles, the comparison with them is very far from being a compliment for the Wall Street Journal.
Besides two irrelevant outsiders who have no idea what the existing high-energy physics means and who offer their irrational bitterness, the article also asks a real distinguished physicist, namely Michael Peskin whom many of us appreciate not only because of the QFT textbook that he has co-authored: for example, his objectively measured contributions to particle physics exceed all of the opponents and all of the supporters of the opponents' blogs combined.
Surely, Ms. Begley won't tell you that 90% of her article is based on irrelevant and uninformed people.
Michael Peskin is no official string theorist but he knows what's going on. He points out that string theory has the power to explain features of reality such as the number of generations in particle physics. In field theory, this number is a (discrete) non-dynamical parameter. In string theory, it is a dynamical quantity describing a more fundamental system. String theory is the first theory that can answer similar questions that are obviously nothing else than axioms in various field theories.
The number of generations is just one example. In the conventional heterotic compactifications, the number of generations is proportional to the Dirac index that can be shown to be the absolute value of the Euler character divided by two. In the compactifications of the types studied since the 1990s, the number of generation arises from other geometrical and related quantities such as the intersection numbers. But in all cases, it is a result of dynamics that follows physical laws as opposed to dogmas.
It's up to the reader and his or her intelligence whether he or she chooses comments about physics from a particle physicist or unphysical conspiratory and "philosophical" theories from non-particle physicists, particle non-physicists and anti-physicists quoted at the beginning. String theorists are not asked what they think about string theory - it would be a clash of interests if scientists could actually speak about science :-) - but it does not really matter because the recent "controversy" is not a confrontation between string theorists and the rest, but between sane scientists and the rest. Sure, most people are stupid and they will choose to believe two semi-crackpots rather than one Michael Peskin, but it's their fault, not mine.
At the beginning of her article, Begley says - using my words - that a year ago or two, everyone would know that Woit was a crackpot. Today, people are not certain because there are at least two such crackpots. Well, I, for one, am still equally certain. Many sentences about the insane "untestability" statements follow.
Some paragraphs are dedicated to the landscape of compactifications and I think that these things have been overdiscussed, so let me ignore them because there is nothing interesting in the article about this issue. The article ends with a malicious formulation about the "betrayal of science" by string theory. Ms. Sharon Begley gets an F, but as mentioned, it is a better F than the F for Robert Matthews or John Cornwell. She is apparently a weak journalist, but one who can at least sometimes put a question mark behind a patently wrong sentence and who can find not only crackpots but also Michael Peskin. ;-)
Also, I am going to restore the blog article about the semi-official unholy alliance between Cosmic Variance and the anti-science activists - an alliance whose existence is obvious to everyone who sometimes looks at the anti-science blogs. As it was announced, the article was only temporarily suspended to moderate an inflow of nasty anonymous as well as onymous attacks, and I find a long-term censorship unacceptable.
Again, I am outraged how easy it has become for various crackpots and idiots to spread their dumb and unjustifiable opinions about science, and how many people are more or less actively collaborating to make the situation even worse. No doubt, the people who are trying to paint the silliness of various "critics of science" as a part of the scientific voice are the main villains. The Reference Frame will continue to criticize crackpots, lousy and dishonest journalists and pseudojournalists, and others who want to present manifest crackpotism as a part of science.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
NAS: schizophrenic climate report
The theory about an unprecedented global warming, described by James Inhofe as the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people, was essentially downgraded from "certain" to "plausible"
A catchy subtitle was needed because much of the material that follows is boring and confusing, and it is not my fault. ;-)
Typo: The filename should say "schizophrenic". Thanks, Benjamin. I don't want to change it now because it would break some links.
The #1 news on cnn.com right now is about the NAS climate report or the
that you can buy, for $42.30, here, but you can also see the pages freely here; the executive summary is also for free, much like the audio. Other sources are here. However, I don't recommend you to spend your money for this new audit of the climate reconstructions because the freely available information is enough. It is a document that tries to make everyone happy which makes it schizophrenic. On one hand, they admit that there has almost certainly been the Little Ice Age and quite plausibly also the Medieval Warm Period - in both cases it is something that the hardcore alarmists wanted to deny for the last 10 years.
Because of the MWP and the large uncertainties before 1600, we can only say that the current temperatures are warmest in 400 years, not more, the panel says. In other words, it's warmer now than in the Little Ice Age. Well, this is why the Little Ice Age is called in this way. On the other hand, however, they try to promote the idea that it could "plausibly" (original report) or even "likely" (CNN's translation or "spin") still be warmer today than in the Middle Ages, and maybe the current temperatures are highest in the last 1000 or 2000 years.
Well, maybe the geologists are also wrong and they temperatures are highest in millions of years. Such "maybe" sentences are completely meaningless. If someone cannot defend a statement at the 99% confidence level, he should close his or her mouth because sentences without sufficiently strong evidence required by scientific standards are nothing else than brainwashing and manipulation.
I am happy that in different parts of the report, the panel at least confirms that Mann's statement that the 1990s were the hottest decade in a millenium and 1998 the hottest year - and similar statements that had filled the media so many times in the past - are unjustifiable by existing data (go to 47:00 of the audio or so), despite 10 years of passionate statements that these insights are definitive, ever more definitive, and that the debate was over.
Because the reconstructions can only be trusted up to 1600 or so instead of 1000 or 0 as claimed previously, Benny Peiser has told us a nice joke: What do you get if you shorten the hockey stick by 60 percent? A boomerang!
Mann suddenly started to say that he never said that he was certain that the current era is the warmest era in the last 1000 years and, on the contrary, he always emphasized that their research was meant to show how uncertain these numbers are. Well, we probably live in different Universes because in this Universe, he said it roughly 350 times and 870,000 articles have been written about this extraordinary statement. This confusion - more precisely these untrue assertions - are discussed at 19:20 of this
At 53:40, a desperate activist / journalist tries to criticize the NAS panel that they used the word "plausible". How could this have happened? ;-) The same crazy journalist even says that there is no evidence for string theory but we can say it's "plausible". I assure this comrade that string theory is much more plausible than a catastrophic global warming. ;-) Around 54:30, they also agree with your humble correspondent that quantitative estimates of "Bayesian" confidence levels in this context (and similar contexts) are meaningless and the real uncertainty can't be quantified. Near 57:00, Myron Ebell asks about the divergence problem - the fact that the current proxies don't show the warming measured directly by thermometers. He is answered that the problem is there, indeed, and it might be hand-waved away by some very vague comments about moisture. At 59:30, another passionate eco-journalist complains against the word "plausible". How can you say it is less plausible if there is no evidence against [except for those paid by the oil company, he would normally say]? ;-) He is again explained that we just don't know, and there is a lot of natural climate variability that increases the uncertainty. Around 1:03:00 into the audio, it is being discussed how much money is being wasted for climate research whose insights are ever more murky and questionable, despite hundreds of papers. At 1:06:30, they say that the variability - and thus also the uncertainty - is higher than thought previously.
Although the NAS members say and write a lot of wise and correct things (and things that I've been saying for months if not years), of course, there are many other examples of schizophrenia of their document and its interpretation.
On one hand, they concede that virtually every single criticism of the "hockey stick graph" has been valid and the methodology of Mann, Bradley, and Hughes is unsatisfactory because of all these reasons (besides the examples above, also lacking statistical skill for individual years, problems with unavailable data and secret computational software - go to 16:20 of the audio for the transparency issues). On the other hand, they are using graphs from papers that are criticizable because of the very same reasons and they essentially encourage the reader to think that these reconstructions are trustworthy even though the actual content of the chapters 9 and 11 leads to the opposite conclusion. The most penetrating and freely available analysis of the document was written by
who has been - together with Ross McKitrick, his collaborator - the world's principal auditor of the climate reconstructions and some very useful comments on that page are also offered by Eduardo Zorita and others. I think that the whole field of "global climate science" has become a political game where people are looking for a compromise or, as many of them openly call it, a consensus.
The recent developments in science have shown that some statements in the past decade are scientifically undefendable and some papers have simply been wrong but those people just don't have enough courage and integrity to admit this fact openly which is why they only soften their language and generate logically inconsistent bureaucratic hybrids. It will take a lot of time to restore the integrity of climate science but we may hope that the NAS panel made the first steps towards this goal.
A less technical summary describing the schizophrenia in their report was written by Iain Murray:
Also, you may want to read a rather technical comment by David Stockwell at landshape.org and a nice, non-technical summary of the report by a climate director from the University of Delaware,
A catchy subtitle was needed because much of the material that follows is boring and confusing, and it is not my fault. ;-)
Typo: The filename should say "schizophrenic". Thanks, Benjamin. I don't want to change it now because it would break some links.
The #1 news on cnn.com right now is about the NAS climate report or the
that you can buy, for $42.30, here, but you can also see the pages freely here; the executive summary is also for free, much like the audio. Other sources are here. However, I don't recommend you to spend your money for this new audit of the climate reconstructions because the freely available information is enough. It is a document that tries to make everyone happy which makes it schizophrenic. On one hand, they admit that there has almost certainly been the Little Ice Age and quite plausibly also the Medieval Warm Period - in both cases it is something that the hardcore alarmists wanted to deny for the last 10 years.
Because of the MWP and the large uncertainties before 1600, we can only say that the current temperatures are warmest in 400 years, not more, the panel says. In other words, it's warmer now than in the Little Ice Age. Well, this is why the Little Ice Age is called in this way. On the other hand, however, they try to promote the idea that it could "plausibly" (original report) or even "likely" (CNN's translation or "spin") still be warmer today than in the Middle Ages, and maybe the current temperatures are highest in the last 1000 or 2000 years.
Well, maybe the geologists are also wrong and they temperatures are highest in millions of years. Such "maybe" sentences are completely meaningless. If someone cannot defend a statement at the 99% confidence level, he should close his or her mouth because sentences without sufficiently strong evidence required by scientific standards are nothing else than brainwashing and manipulation.
I am happy that in different parts of the report, the panel at least confirms that Mann's statement that the 1990s were the hottest decade in a millenium and 1998 the hottest year - and similar statements that had filled the media so many times in the past - are unjustifiable by existing data (go to 47:00 of the audio or so), despite 10 years of passionate statements that these insights are definitive, ever more definitive, and that the debate was over.
Because the reconstructions can only be trusted up to 1600 or so instead of 1000 or 0 as claimed previously, Benny Peiser has told us a nice joke: What do you get if you shorten the hockey stick by 60 percent? A boomerang!
Mann suddenly started to say that he never said that he was certain that the current era is the warmest era in the last 1000 years and, on the contrary, he always emphasized that their research was meant to show how uncertain these numbers are. Well, we probably live in different Universes because in this Universe, he said it roughly 350 times and 870,000 articles have been written about this extraordinary statement. This confusion - more precisely these untrue assertions - are discussed at 19:20 of this
- real audio from the press conference.
You're exactly one click from verifying that various media and the RealClimate group blog are just trying to fool you completely.
If you go to 25:30 of this audio, a distinguished NAS scientist explains that the belief that Mann's results were definitive were not Mann's fault but rather the climate science community's fault. I can't believe he's serious. Is he talking about the same Mann who established his own propagandistic blog to promote his speculations, deny all criticism, and describe the critics as corrupt people? Of course that it was also a fault of the climate community because it is not a terribly bright and honest one, but indications that Mann is innocent are just crazy. At 35:00 into the audio, they discuss Mann's flawed usage of the principal component analysis. At 37:30, they discuss why the bristlecone pines are not good temperature proxies. At 50:00, a panel member answers "Yes" to the question whether he is saying that the odds than Mann is right are around 2:1 - which means "almost completely uncertain".At 53:40, a desperate activist / journalist tries to criticize the NAS panel that they used the word "plausible". How could this have happened? ;-) The same crazy journalist even says that there is no evidence for string theory but we can say it's "plausible". I assure this comrade that string theory is much more plausible than a catastrophic global warming. ;-) Around 54:30, they also agree with your humble correspondent that quantitative estimates of "Bayesian" confidence levels in this context (and similar contexts) are meaningless and the real uncertainty can't be quantified. Near 57:00, Myron Ebell asks about the divergence problem - the fact that the current proxies don't show the warming measured directly by thermometers. He is answered that the problem is there, indeed, and it might be hand-waved away by some very vague comments about moisture. At 59:30, another passionate eco-journalist complains against the word "plausible". How can you say it is less plausible if there is no evidence against [except for those paid by the oil company, he would normally say]? ;-) He is again explained that we just don't know, and there is a lot of natural climate variability that increases the uncertainty. Around 1:03:00 into the audio, it is being discussed how much money is being wasted for climate research whose insights are ever more murky and questionable, despite hundreds of papers. At 1:06:30, they say that the variability - and thus also the uncertainty - is higher than thought previously.
Although the NAS members say and write a lot of wise and correct things (and things that I've been saying for months if not years), of course, there are many other examples of schizophrenia of their document and its interpretation.
On one hand, they concede that virtually every single criticism of the "hockey stick graph" has been valid and the methodology of Mann, Bradley, and Hughes is unsatisfactory because of all these reasons (besides the examples above, also lacking statistical skill for individual years, problems with unavailable data and secret computational software - go to 16:20 of the audio for the transparency issues). On the other hand, they are using graphs from papers that are criticizable because of the very same reasons and they essentially encourage the reader to think that these reconstructions are trustworthy even though the actual content of the chapters 9 and 11 leads to the opposite conclusion. The most penetrating and freely available analysis of the document was written by
who has been - together with Ross McKitrick, his collaborator - the world's principal auditor of the climate reconstructions and some very useful comments on that page are also offered by Eduardo Zorita and others. I think that the whole field of "global climate science" has become a political game where people are looking for a compromise or, as many of them openly call it, a consensus.
The recent developments in science have shown that some statements in the past decade are scientifically undefendable and some papers have simply been wrong but those people just don't have enough courage and integrity to admit this fact openly which is why they only soften their language and generate logically inconsistent bureaucratic hybrids. It will take a lot of time to restore the integrity of climate science but we may hope that the NAS panel made the first steps towards this goal.
A less technical summary describing the schizophrenia in their report was written by Iain Murray:
Also, you may want to read a rather technical comment by David Stockwell at landshape.org and a nice, non-technical summary of the report by a climate director from the University of Delaware,
When Millikan measured the charge of the electron for the first time, he obtained 50% of the correct result only because of his incorrect treatment of the air viscosity. Those who followed him have already used a correct approach to the air viscosity but they obtained 55%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% of the right result before they settled near the right value. The reason why they did not obtain the correct result already in the second experiment was that they were intentionally eliminating data from their experiments that were too far from the previous ones. Virtually all experimental physicists know that this is bad science - but in the climate science, things seem a bit different. The authors of crappy papers are still forming the consensus and others don't want to lose friends so they keep on including junk science to their reports and statistical ensembles.
The downgrading of the certainty about the "unprecedented global warming" from "certain & debate is over" to "plausible" has made some climate activists, such as our friend William Connolley, worried. He talks about a "step backwards". How does he define progress in science? It's quite obvious. The higher temperatures and disasters are predicted and the more irrational, hysterical, and political the justifications become, the more progressive science becomes according to this "scientist". ;-)
The science about the "catastrophic climate change" seems rather similar to paranormal sciences: the amount of "signal" that one obtains is more or less directly proportional to the lack of scientific integrity of the scientist. Not surprisingly, the signal and certainty obtained by NAS is much smaller than what William Connolley, Al Gore, or other charlatans would obtain. But the NAS members are still not perfect, so they still get a signal. ;-)
At least, William can fool himself into believing that the NAS panel has not confirmed any criticism. Those who have listened to the press conference know very well that the panel has confirmed that, as far as I see, all the criticisms by M&M and others are valid. However, the panel has also tried their best to be nice to people like Mann which I think is questionable.
Meanwhile, Mann and Connolley's propagandistic blog called "RealClimate" is trying to keep a low profile. There are only 13 comments about the topic which is slightly less than 166 comments about the same story at the "Climate Audit".
Liars in the newspapers
While the NAS panel has concluded that the climate before 1600 is virtually completely uncertain, hundreds of left-wing newspapers have published fraudulent and completely false articles claiming that according to NAS, we're the hottest in 1000 or 2000 years. Of course, the journalists remain the most important sources of the disinformation and the primary drivers of the global fraud. See Micajah's article for a more detailed comparison.
A critic of Star Tribune in Minnesota shows that the journalists took a tendentious article in the Washington Post but they were still not quite satisfied, so they erased all the remaining paragraphs that described the problems with the hockey stick graph, and then they published the castrated article!
I ask all honest owners of newspapers and other media bosses who realize that the global warming has become a gigantic fraud in which their employees are actively involved - as shown by lies they published about the NAS panel - to fire these employees as soon as possible.
The diplomatic schizophrenic language of NAS aside, the panel has essentially done a good work, offered a comprehensible summary of their review process, and it has buried the "consensus" on "unprecedented" global warming theory - the conjecture that the recent changes of the climate are unprecedented in comparison with previous millenia - and you can see the graphs from the NAS report that show it rather clearly:
- I (for example, in Greenland and Antarctica - those that matter - there is no recent warming at all according to the graph 1000-2000)
- II (noise)
- III (mostly noise)
- Viscount Monckton & climate
- Naomi Oreskes & non-existent consensus on global warming
- Temp decided about CO2 in the atmosphere, not the other way around
- IQ2 US duel: skeptics beat alarmists
- Links between the Sun and cosmic rays - and temps
- 2006: a lousy year for chicken little's
- 2006: coldest average temperature since 2001
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Physics and mathematics: boundaries and interactions
In the fast comments under the previous posting, we have had some discussions with Q2 about the boundaries between physics and mathematics. Does Yau's theorem belong to theoretical physics? Are the differential equations governing the vector field flows tools of physics? My answers were essentially Yes, while the answers of Q2 were No.
The separation of wisdom and research to physics and mathematics is largely a social phenomenon - one that is affected by some objective features of reality (including the Universe around us as well as the Platonic Universe of mathematical ideas) but one that can also be influenced by personal and political decisions, by social conventions, and by fashionable trends.
Let's jump to the era between Galileo and Gauss. We find many true heroes of thinking squeezed into several centuries. The separation of the quantitative thinkers into mathematicians and physicists is slightly arbitrary, and in fact it is mostly a result of the historical perspective that only appeared in the new era. Those thinkers who liked to do (or look at) some experiments or observations are counted as physicists - Newton, Maxwell, and others - while others are usually classified as mathematicians - Leibniz, Euler, Gauss. The actual theoretical work of these two groups did not differ much. If your physics department could hire Euler in the Fall, I think you would hire him. Even if we call them mathematicians, they could still count as extraordinary theoretical physicists.
One century ago or so, people decided to separate mathematics and physics. The main substantial, non-sociological reason behind these developments was the discovery that our intuition can often fail. Newton used to be convinced that he was directly "reading" the laws of physics from the real world: this is the only way how we can interpret his quote "hypotheses non fingo" (I am not inventing any hypotheses). In the 19th century, people realized that this can't be possible.
Non-Euclidean geometries were discovered. Suddenly, the opinion that the Euclidean geometry is the only mathematically possible geometry, which would also imply that it must be true in the real world, collapsed. The mathematicians had to build on firmer fundaments instead of the fundaments that collapse whenever the physicists find something surprising about this dirty world - and whenever the mathematicians find that some insights about the real world aren't as logically inevitable as they seemed to be previously.
So the mathematicians realized that they could (and should) build their structures without any links to the observable physics and the intuition from everyday life whatsoever. One starts with a set of axioms, and using well-defined and "obviously meaningful" rules of logic, he (and today also she) can prove the validity of some other statements. Modern mathematics was born.
The birth of pure mathematics was an important moment in the history of thinking. Nevertheless, it did not change the fact that a majority of the most interesting questions and results was directly or indirectly linked to the real world as understood at the given moment of the past, or at least to the real world as understood from a more complete future perspective. Also, the intuition from the everyday life was no longer necessary for mathematics. Again, it still helped many mathematicians even though many of them decided (and are still deciding) to obscure this fact. ;-)
The key reason for the separation of mathematics and physics was described by Einstein as follows: whatever is rigorous cannot be directly applied to the real world, and whatever can be directly and accurately applied to the real world is not rigorous. Of course, such a rule could break down as soon as we find the complete theory of everything that could be formulated rigorously and that would be physically accurate at the same moment. But we're not there yet, which is why we can still separate the fields.
Mathematicians themselves had to discover some purely mathematical and surprising facts, especially about the solution of paradoxes in set theory and Gödel's theorems
The separation of wisdom and research to physics and mathematics is largely a social phenomenon - one that is affected by some objective features of reality (including the Universe around us as well as the Platonic Universe of mathematical ideas) but one that can also be influenced by personal and political decisions, by social conventions, and by fashionable trends.
Commercial: See also Feynman's lecture about the relation of physics and mathematicsIn ancient Greece, people did not distinguish physics and mathematics. In fact, all of us were philosophers, the lovers of wisdom. The crowning achievement of that era, the Euclidean geometry, later became a part of pure mathematics. As Einstein emphasized, it can also be interpreted as the oldest branch of physics: statics of perfectly solid bodies.
Let's jump to the era between Galileo and Gauss. We find many true heroes of thinking squeezed into several centuries. The separation of the quantitative thinkers into mathematicians and physicists is slightly arbitrary, and in fact it is mostly a result of the historical perspective that only appeared in the new era. Those thinkers who liked to do (or look at) some experiments or observations are counted as physicists - Newton, Maxwell, and others - while others are usually classified as mathematicians - Leibniz, Euler, Gauss. The actual theoretical work of these two groups did not differ much. If your physics department could hire Euler in the Fall, I think you would hire him. Even if we call them mathematicians, they could still count as extraordinary theoretical physicists.
One century ago or so, people decided to separate mathematics and physics. The main substantial, non-sociological reason behind these developments was the discovery that our intuition can often fail. Newton used to be convinced that he was directly "reading" the laws of physics from the real world: this is the only way how we can interpret his quote "hypotheses non fingo" (I am not inventing any hypotheses). In the 19th century, people realized that this can't be possible.
Non-Euclidean geometries were discovered. Suddenly, the opinion that the Euclidean geometry is the only mathematically possible geometry, which would also imply that it must be true in the real world, collapsed. The mathematicians had to build on firmer fundaments instead of the fundaments that collapse whenever the physicists find something surprising about this dirty world - and whenever the mathematicians find that some insights about the real world aren't as logically inevitable as they seemed to be previously.
So the mathematicians realized that they could (and should) build their structures without any links to the observable physics and the intuition from everyday life whatsoever. One starts with a set of axioms, and using well-defined and "obviously meaningful" rules of logic, he (and today also she) can prove the validity of some other statements. Modern mathematics was born.
The birth of pure mathematics was an important moment in the history of thinking. Nevertheless, it did not change the fact that a majority of the most interesting questions and results was directly or indirectly linked to the real world as understood at the given moment of the past, or at least to the real world as understood from a more complete future perspective. Also, the intuition from the everyday life was no longer necessary for mathematics. Again, it still helped many mathematicians even though many of them decided (and are still deciding) to obscure this fact. ;-)
The key reason for the separation of mathematics and physics was described by Einstein as follows: whatever is rigorous cannot be directly applied to the real world, and whatever can be directly and accurately applied to the real world is not rigorous. Of course, such a rule could break down as soon as we find the complete theory of everything that could be formulated rigorously and that would be physically accurate at the same moment. But we're not there yet, which is why we can still separate the fields.
Mathematicians themselves had to discover some purely mathematical and surprising facts, especially about the solution of paradoxes in set theory and Gödel's theorems
- about the incompleteness - the existence of an unprovable and undisprovable assertion - and
- about the unprovability of the internal consistency of a system of axioms
which are valid for all consistent systems of axioms that can mimic the set of integers and its usual properties.
But these interesting insights occured inside the world of mathematics after its velvet divorce with physics - and most physicists are more or less certain that these logical games have no physical (or even measurable) consequences whatsoever. For example, we can't design an experiment that would decide whether the axiom of choice is true, false, or undecidable or whether the Zermelo-Frenkel set theory is better than the Gödel-Bernays framework.
The velvet divorce - inspired by the split of Czechoslovakia - was not good enough for a certain extremist group of mathematicians who preferred a divorce according to the Yugoslav example. The group called Bourbaki started to publish boring, mechanical books that were based on the ideology that physical intuition must always be assassinated whenever it appears near the iron curtain separating mathematics from the rest of the world of ideas. Because I think that the mathematicians should mostly be ashamed of this chapter of their history ;-), let me say nothing else about that movement.
During the last decades, the iron curtain started to disappear again, especially in the context of geometry and related disciplines where the gap or wall between the cultures of mathematicians and the culture of physicists is finite, shrinking, and penetrable.
I am convinced that there exists some general organization of deep mathematical ideas - something that God or Nature had to know when He or She was designing the world(s). In this organization, the main ideas have certain mutual relationships and a hierarchy. Even if you think about deep questions in mathematics only, I am convinced that the identity of the most interesting generalization(s) of a mathematical structure has an objectively well-defined answer that can in principle be found, plus minus the error margin proportional to the social conventions.
Moreover, all these very deep ideas eventually turn out to be important for theoretical physics. I can't prove this assumption but I believe that it is consistent with the whole history of mathematics and physics, as I understand it, combined with my personal appraisal of the values of different ideas in mathematics. This appraisal, of course, values general insights about robust and continuous structures (those that are useful for predictive natural science) much more than special insights about particular discrete structures (that are useful for creating many new games in recreational mathematics).
When Newton was solving the differential equations relevant for the Kepler system, he was solving not only an abstract mathematical problem but also an extremely important physical system. Some of the modifications, deformations, and generalizations of these equations and other equations turned out to be more important for physics, some of them were less important for physics, but I think that no one would question that the insights about the solutions to differential equations are important for natural sciences, and in this sense they belong to the natural sciences.
They can only be isolated as "mathematics" if someone decides that some subproblems should only be solved by the people from one group, and other problems should be solved by the people from another group, and that these groups should not be encouraged to look behind the boundaries of their fields of expertise. This arrangement is nothing more than a social policy that does not say much about the true internal relationships between different ideas and insights. You may decide that you're not interested in anything outside your narrow field; but such a decision can't change what is actually there behind these walls.
When Jacobi studied the theta functions, he did not know much about string theory. But it was his fault, so to say - and the fault of other scholars before him who were not able to do what Lenny Susskind et al. could do in the late 1960s. ;-) Today, we know that when Jacobi proved his obscure identity, he also proved a necessary condition for spacetime supersymmetry in superstring theory formulated in the RNS variables.
In fact, we know much more. The theta functions and similar functions are related to the partition sums and correlators of a physical system called the worldsheet. This insight provides us with natural generalizations and new important unanswered problems along the same lines. I am convinced that the answer of string theory to the question
- "What should we do with the theta functions in the following century?"
is more or less unique. It is not a coincidence that most of the 21st century papers that talk about theta functions use them as the partition sums of a string or a dual, equivalent physical system unified with the strings in string theory. I would bet that the extraterrestrial aliens would find the same application of the theta functions.
The same comment applies to many other insights that have become important parts of physics in general and string theory in particular. Yau's proof of Calabi's conjecture was presented as pure mathematics. In the decades that followed, it was realized that it is primarily an extremely important result in theoretical physics. That does not mean that Yau is suddenly a pure physicist; he is still a mathematician although he is now co-authoring a large number of physics papers. But it does mean that the natural and interesting generalization of his insights has a very powerful physical interpretation.
Similar observations hold in the case of mirror symmetry. If you only define mirror symmetry as the fact that for every Calabi-Yau manifold "M", you can find a Calabi-Yau manifold "W" whose Hodge diamond is rotated by 45 degrees, it can look like an abstract mathematical problem. Or perhaps even a sophisticated exercise from recreational mathematics.
However, if you actually try to solve some more general problems of this kind and to extend the result into a stronger statement, you will inevitably be led to string theory. Also, string theory will allow you to solve some problems from "recreational mathematics" much more efficiently than what the mathematicians who are ignorant about string theory can do.
In string theory, the "elementary" description of mirror symmetry involving the Hodge diamonds of manifolds "M" and "W" above is just a very tiny portion of a much more general conclusion that reveals the equivalence between "two" physical systems that look very different a priori but that can be shown to be isomorphic, including the infinite number of new observables that both of them admit and that were ignored in the paragraph about the Hodge diamond.
When people study important mathematical results carefully enough, they will inevitably be led to their natural generalizations. In other words, they will be forced to discover the role that these mathematical insights play within physics or within string theory. I could continue with many examples such as those in knot theory, Chern-Simons theory, and their extension via topological string theory and perhaps the full string theory, but the main point of this essay is of philosophical nature, so let me avoid too many examples.
Many proofs in mathematics use various ad hoc inequalities or they assign mathematical structures different roles than those that would be viewed as natural ones from a physicist's viewpoint, but I believe that none of these physically unexpected features can be quite unique, fundamental, or universally important. All of them are technicalities that could be replaced by different technicalities and the true important result is the proof modulo the choices of these technicalities. Only the properties of the mathematical objects that are natural from the physics viewpoint can be truly important and deep.
Of course, you might think that this statement simply means that the physicists should be defined as those who are thinking in a deep way, but I still feel that what I want to say is more than just a definition of "physics".
The paragraphs above make it clear that I believe that the distance between string theory as theoretical physics on one side and mathematics of string theory studied using the tools of pure mathematics on the other side will be diminishing throughout the remainder of the 21st century. The term "mathematics of string theory" mostly describes properties of various "continuous" mathematical structures. But it is not hard to imagine that very discrete subfields of mathematics such as number theory will be incorporated into this powerful system of ideas, too.
Of course, there will always be differences between people who study pure sciences and applied sciences, and between people who use their hands vs. heads, but these differences will be viewed as sociological barriers while the actual, intellectual barriers between the ideas of different fields - and between physics and mathematics in particular - will continue to melt down.
Physics PhDs vs. special relativity
Several days ago, a couple of readers questioned my statement that there exist very many physics PhDs in the world who don't believe relativity. How do I prove that I am right? Just by waiting for a few days. Today, 56,000 (fifty-six thousand) physicists received the e-mail from Dr. Robert Halmai, the chair of the "Society of Hungarian Reformer Physicists" called
But you're never quite sure. Maybe your humble correspondent is wrong and these theories are a triumph in science (and sociability). The link in the previous sentence, pointed out by a SLACKER, leads to a page with photographs of L. Riofrio, a new Einstein, taken by JoAnne Hewett - yes, the same smart JoAnne Hewett who just informed us about the annoying delay of the full-energy start of the LHC collider. ;-) Don't blame her: I also like to take pictures of crackpots, especially the sexy ones.
- Introduction of our new society
that contains one nontrivial piece of information only, the "best" link to a website of their "prominent member"
that shows that special relativity is not even wrong. ;-) The e-mail, starting with "My name is Dr.", also explains that have sent the spam to 56,000 recipients. I am sure that these crackpots have violated laws in many countries, and it is conceivable that someone will even complain about it.
But you're never quite sure. Maybe your humble correspondent is wrong and these theories are a triumph in science (and sociability). The link in the previous sentence, pointed out by a SLACKER, leads to a page with photographs of L. Riofrio, a new Einstein, taken by JoAnne Hewett - yes, the same smart JoAnne Hewett who just informed us about the annoying delay of the full-energy start of the LHC collider. ;-) Don't blame her: I also like to take pictures of crackpots, especially the sexy ones.
Zhu and Cao: Chinese finish of the Poincaré conjecture
One of the unsolved problems of pure mathematics has been the Poincaré conjecture. This hypothesis formulated by Henri Poincaré in 1904 says that the three-sphere (the boundary of a four-dimensional ball) is the only kind of bounding surface without holes. More precisely,
- all simply connected three-manifolds (i.e. those containing no non-contractible one-dimensional submanifolds) can be continuously deformed to an "S^3".
Note that the topology of three-dimensional manifolds is the maximally difficult part of the research of topology of manifolds of different dimensions; this is also where knot theory occurs. It is not trivial to give a convincing conceptual explanation why it is so but it is much easier to show historical evidence for the difficult character of "n=3".
If you replace "S^3" by "S^n" in the conjecture above, all statements with "n" different from "3" have been proved years ago. For "n=1", the conjecture trivially follows from the fact that the circle is the only compact one-manifold. For "n=2" it follows from some classical facts about the Riemann surfaces. The "n=4" case was proved by Freedman in 1982, earning him a Fields medal in 1986. The "n=5" case was demonstrated much earlier, in 1961, by Zeeman. The "n=6" was proved by Stallings in 1962, and a 1961 proof by Smale covered all cases where "n > 6"; later, this proof was improved to include all cases "n > 4".
As you can see, only the "n=3" case was waiting. This is where Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman comes to rescue: see John Lott's website for details about Perelman's work (thanks, Mike Ros). In fact, Perelman, who has worked on the problems for 7 years in isolation, seems to have established an even stronger result, namely Thurston's geometrization procedure.
The difficult "n=3" case is the analogue of the whole string/M-theory at a generic values of the couplings, while the cases in which "n" is very small or very large, far enough from "n=3", correspond to certain weakly-coupled and low-energy limits of string/M-theory that could have been understood much earlier.
Richard Hamilton of Columbia University, the original father of the Ricci flow approach, now says that the work of two Chinese scholars, Cao Huaidong and Zhu Xiping - recall that the first names written in the sentence are their last names - the work that was published in the American journal called Asian Journal of Mathematics is "very important" for completing the proof. Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard, who has also worked on these problems, is "very positive" about the work of Cao and Zhu. He knows it well enough so that he described it at a seminar during the second day of Strings 2006 - a day freshly summarized by Victor Rivelles. The third day - with Brian Greene & cosmology, among other things - is also available.
Why Strings 2006? You should have learned, by now, that all good ideas in theoretical physics and continuous mathematics are parts of string theory, and most of the famous mathematicians in geometry and related fields are literally or essentially string theorists: Witten, Yau, Perelman, Atiyah, Singer, and many others. In this particular case, the inclusion in string theory occurs because the proof involves the Ricci flows - a method to deform one manifold to another that is essentially equivalent to the renormalization group flows on the string worldsheet.
The theories on the worldsheet must be conformal which is string theory's way to demand the spacetime equations of motion - the beta-functions are the equations of motion. If the worldsheet theory is not conformal, you will not get a consistent string-theoretical background but such a theory can still be useful for solving mathematical problems (or for understanding time-dependent configurations). Also recall, from initial chapters of string theory textbooks, that the beta function for the spacetime metric in a nonlinear sigma models is equal to the Ricci tensor (plus corrections) - which is the reason behind the terminology of "Ricci flows".
The proof is then rather simple and here's a sketch: take a non-linear sigma model (string theory) on your simply-connected three-manifold, and flow it to the infrared. The manifold can be seen to become increasingly smooth and the only possible endpoint is the three-sphere.
When we say that Cao and Zhu's contribution is very important, it might be a good idea, because of certain reasons, to quantify how important it is. ;-) Shing-Tung Yau and Yang Le, two mathematicians who know what they're talking about, propose the following quantification - note that 100% means $1 million:
- 50% Hamilton
- 25% Perelman
- 30% Yau, Zhu, Cao
Congratulations to Prof. Yau who has appeared in the list, too. Yau himself had convinced Hamilton to think about the conjecture at the very beginning, and his own contributions to mathematics and its fruitful co-existence with physics are great. There's not enough space to describe them here in detail. He is arguably among the mathematicians who have attended the largest number of physics seminars, too.
The numbers don't yet add up to 100% - the wrong precise values are probably a contribution of a journalistic imbecile - but I am sure that with a few extra years of work, they could fine-tune the details. :-) Perelman does not care about pathetic things like "money" so I am afraid that the mathematicians' consensus will ultimately eat the 5% to get the correct sum from his portion.
Regardless whether there are any risks that people will find serious holes in Zhu and Cao's work, this success has already ignited the jealousy of numerous morons. For example, "pubkeybreaker" believes that the Chinese mathematicians must be incompetent because he also believes that competent mathematicians would never write the following sentence (which is true according to everything we know):
- "This proof should be considered as the crowning achievement of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of Ricci flow."
Well, "pubkeybreaker's" beliefs that this dumb comparative literature means anything in math are as silly as similar statements at a certain anti-physics blog: namely breathtakingly idiotic. The journalists should be very careful before they are influenced by random posters on the Internet. "Pubkeybreaker" also conjectures:
- Competent mathematicians do not pat themselves on the back in their own paper. They let OTHERS judge the work.
Quite on the contrary, "Pubkeybreaker". Competent mathematicians are defined as those who do not have to wait for others to decide about the validity - and indeed, also the value - of a proof. Also, I find their appraisal modest. They could also try to paint the initial ideas by Hamilton and the contributions of Perelman as incomplete non-rigirous heuristic speculations and they could try to present the proof purely as their work. Of course, I will consider the proof to be primarily Hamilton's and Perelman's victory. But I also understand that in mathematics, rigor plays an important role and there is a significant difference between a slightly incomplete proof and a complete proof.
The fact that a full proof of the Poincaré conjecture is the crowning achievement of virtually anything that contributes to the proof should be completely obvious to anyone who knows what questions in pure mathematics are important. It is important to say that there doesn't seem to be any disagreement about the credit and most of it will go to Perelman - but some people just like to generate vitriolic comments.
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