Much is known about the structure and statistics of the flux compactifications of M-theory and F-theory and even non-geometric flux vacua and non-Kähler compactifications. Acharya and others have thought about the landscape of G2 compactifications of M-theory, too. Some people have even considered the landscape of non-critical string theory with the dilaton stabilized by higher-order effects.
Still, many of the conservatives among us could think that the heterotic models based on the E8 x E8 gauge symmetry naturally predict many features of reality that are less natural in other frameworks, and this is why we should look more carefully at them, regardless of other, less phenomenological arguments. These models predict things like the right unified gauge groups, gauge coupling unification, realistic representations for fermions, see-saw neutrino masses, and an upper bound on the rank of the gauge group (the total rank equals 22 from now on).
Needless to say, the number of four-dimensional compactifications of the heterotic string has been known to be rather high for a long time, too. But do we have an idea about the demography of these vacua?
A talk by Keith Dienes - based not only on this preprint - offers you a positive answer; you can start with the first page and click at "Next page" about 80 times. It's a good time investment!
He and his collaborators have looked at the models that I had loved so much as an undergrad and I still like them: the four-dimensional free fermionic heterotic string models. Take the usual (1,0) heterotic string and keep the four spacetime bosons to describe our superficially four-dimensional spacetime both on the left-moving side as well as the right-moving side. Fermionize all remaining degrees of freedom and imagine that all fermions are free.
On the bosonic side, you will get fermions from 26-4 = 22 bosons, i.e. 44 fermions, while on the supersymmetric side, you get the 8 usual light cone fermions plus the fermionization of the 6 compact coordinates i.e. 12 extra fermions. Recall that one real boson is equivalent to two real fermions. The total is 20 fermions on the supersymmetric side.
Together, you deal with 64 physical fermions in the light cone gauge. Find all possible models where you impose various GSO-like projections in a modular invariant way. Include those without spacetime supersymmetry. The resulting models inherit many great realistic properties from the E8 x E8 ten-dimensional superstring but they have some additional virtues, too.
For example, there is a natural GSO-like orbifold group of projections that smoothly leads to three generations of quarks and leptons. This set of allowed boundary conditions and corresponding GSO projections is called the NAHE set. NAHE is an acronym of the discoverers and it means "beautiful" in Hebrew and "naked" in Czech. ;-)
What I liked about the free fermionic models is that they are, in principle, incredibly simple to deal with in perturbation theory. They describe the same kind of four-dimensional physics as generic Calabi-Yau compactifications. Nevertheless, they are still captured by free field theories on the worldsheet and all the additional structure enters through the allowed boundary conditions which is a discrete, combinatorial addition to your task.
Now, I would be the first one to say that Nature doesn't care whether our calculations are going to be easy. Human laziness is something different than mathematical beauty or rigidity. ;-) But still, it is conceivable that the network of transitions and dualities is so dense that the free models could always be used as a starting point to describe a realistic model. Alternatively, you might conjecture that a deeper scientific principle wants to keep the Kähler moduli of the hidden dimensions near the self-dual values where the free fermionic description becomes very natural.
Why did these models become less attractive in the middle 1990s? The reason was nothing else than the duality revolution: their strong coupling behavior is largely obscure and they don't fit into the simplest "geometric" duality networks of string/M-theory.
But imagine that you look not only at the special choices of the boundary conditions that include the NAHE set but all possible modular invariant choices for the boundary conditions of those 64 fermions. Some of these choices may be special points in the moduli spaces of heterotic strings on the Calabi-Yau manifold. Most of them will probably correspond to some non-geometric asymmetric orbifolds.
The basic computer codes to generate the models and test their modular invariance have been available since the early 1990s. I remember trying to play with these scripts using the oldest versions of Netscape.
Today, they take the machinery to an entirely new level. They divide the different vacua according to their "shatter" - something like the number of factors in the gauge group. In a certain set, there are 123,573 models but if you categorize them according to their gauge groups, you only find 1301 choices for the full gauge group. It actually becomes very hard to increase the number of different full gauge groups well above 1301 - you would have to include a huge number of new models to "randomly" get new gauge groups.
The number of gauge group factors is most likely to be around 13 if it is odd, and it is most likely to be around 20 if it is even. This different behavior according to the number mod 2 reminds me of some results that Gordon Ritter showed me yesterday. He drew the fraction of the number of reducible d-dimensional representations of "SU(n)" groups as a function of "d", and because this function is quasiperiodic with period 16 (not sure whether for any "n" or for "n=16"), the resulting graph looks like 8 DNA double-helix strands. ;-)
If the number of factors is around 12, you get the highest possible diversity for the gauge groups you can obtain. That's natural that the result 12 is in the middle: if there is only one factor, there are not too many choices and you obtain something like SO(44). If there are too many factors, they must be small groups and you don't get too much freedom either. From this perspective, you maximize the possibilities in the middle of the range of possibilities which means roughly 12 factors. Note that this is not necessarily inconsistent with reality because the Standard Model is not necessarily everything there is.
They have made a lot of statistics of this kind. The probability that a model contains the required SU(2) and/or SU(3) factors in the gauge group is of order 10% in various cases. In 99.81% of the models, the number of U(1) factors matches or exceeds the number of SU(N) factors. If you care how "generic" things are and you use the naive democracy as your measure, additional U(1) factors of the gauge group simply are generic predictions in this class much like the additional scalars and moduli are generic in geometric compactifications.
U(1), SU(2), and SU(3) contribute to the total rank significantly only if you assume that there are many factors. Otherwise, most of the rank is obtained from larger groups.
Among the models that have U(1), SU(2), and SU(3) simultaneously, most of them have about 18 factors in the gauge group. There are many other fascinating probabilistic statements, for example about the correlation between the appearance of different factors in the gauge group.
Dienes et al. show that in their non-supersymmetric heterotic models (SUSY breaking at the string scale), only several partition sums can occur at the one-loop level; this contribution is only nonzero because you break spacetime supersymmetry at the string scale. So only a few values of the cosmological constant can appear. They also conjecture that this result holds beyond one loop and maybe exactly - that there are "flat directions in the non-supersymmetric landscape". That sounds like a very strong and hard-to-believe hypothesis. I don't understand why they believe that the property of these simple one-loop results can be extended so much further.
In their ensemble, 73% of the models have a positive cosmological constant. The distribution of the cosmological constant kind of has a peak at small positive values, near zero. ;-) This graph on the page 62.html is kind of fun, too. You could hypothesize that the probabilistic distribution of different values of the cosmological constants is not really uniform in between -M_{Planck}^4 and +M_{Planck}^4 or so. Instead, it could be naturally peaked around Lambda=0, resembling a normal distribution obtained via the central limit theorem. If someone showed that the models tend to add up the cosmological constant to something near zero and the distribution is a Gaussian whose width is close to the observed cosmological constant, your humble correspondent could start to believe that our vacuum might be a random one (with a quasi-democratic measure), after all. ;-)
A problem with the hope in the previous paragraph is that the width of the distribution is expected to be of order the square root of the number of light particle species that contribute, not 10^{-120}. ;-)
The cosmological constant is statistically shown to be in linear relationship with the rank: small ranks typically mean a small cosmological constant, suggesting that the vector contributions dominate the vacuum energy and the scalars' vacuum energy tends to cancel against the spin 1/2 fermions. The cosmological constant also statistically seems to be inversely proportional to the number of factors of the gauge group, suggesting that a small value of the C.C. means an expected large number of factors.
Whether or not someone finds a non-anthropic selection mechanism in this class of vacua or others or, on the contrary, whether or not the generic and seemingly Godless vacua will be increasingly believed to be relevant for reality, I think that it doesn't hurt to know something about the demography of the possible solutions that are consistent in perturbation theory: it gives us a better idea about the measure on the low-energy parameter space and a new refinement of the notion of naturalness. This is why their work is kind of fascinating.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Miss World: Taťána Kuchařová
As expected by the gamblers, tonight, Taťána Kuchařová (18), Miss Czech Republic 2006, has also become Miss World 2006. She is a high-school student in Opočno, a very small town near Rychnov, another small town. She has won with the judges, Polish media, and Polish public.
Miss France has destroyed Miss Italy.
See news.google.com or a photogallery for more details. Congratulations.
Not only female Czech teenagers are successful. Czech hooligans have successfully attacked Foulkes. ;-)
Meanwhile, Viktor Kožený of the Harvard Funds was smiling when he was entering the courthouse on the Bahamas, and he was smiling when he was leaving because he planned to have a haircut, right after the judge decided that Kožený will be extradited to the U.S.
Update: because we unfortunately have many annoying readers here who have been trained by various vitriolic blogging sourballs and have no sense of humor whatsoever, I must explicitly say that the text from "Not only" comparing the Miss to other Czech "heroes" was a joke. Indeed, I am very far from being proud about the hooligans.
Miss France has destroyed Miss Italy.
See news.google.com or a photogallery for more details. Congratulations.
Not only female Czech teenagers are successful. Czech hooligans have successfully attacked Foulkes. ;-)
Meanwhile, Viktor Kožený of the Harvard Funds was smiling when he was entering the courthouse on the Bahamas, and he was smiling when he was leaving because he planned to have a haircut, right after the judge decided that Kožený will be extradited to the U.S.
Update: because we unfortunately have many annoying readers here who have been trained by various vitriolic blogging sourballs and have no sense of humor whatsoever, I must explicitly say that the text from "Not only" comparing the Miss to other Czech "heroes" was a joke. Indeed, I am very far from being proud about the hooligans.
ReNAMBLAcans
The exploding scandal around disgraced Rep. Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who trolled for underage male pages while he chaired the caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, now threatens to envelop the House leadership.
It seems that Speaker Hastert's office was notified of Foley's improprieties nearly one year ago -- by Majority Leader John Boehner -- but took no action.
Let's summarize that: the GOP House leaders knew there was sexual predator in their midst, but did nothing to stop him.
Have we had enough of this corruption?
What are we going to do about it?
It seems that Speaker Hastert's office was notified of Foley's improprieties nearly one year ago -- by Majority Leader John Boehner -- but took no action.
Let's summarize that: the GOP House leaders knew there was sexual predator in their midst, but did nothing to stop him.
Have we had enough of this corruption?
What are we going to do about it?
Human genome project: animation
Cosmicvariance.com has declared a weekend of animated molecular biology. The video below arguably has a lower artistic value than the video at cosmicvariance.com (also via John Cobb of Harvard University, a mathematician/philosopher) but it may have a higher pedagogical value. ;-)
When you compare the previous video with the video below, you almost - but not quite - start to understand Wolfram's sentiments that life is just another emergent blah blah blah fractal-like picture. ;-)
Note that Dave Kliman zoomed the fractal 10^{33} times. If the size of the fractal were one inch, he has looked to the Planck scale. Surely, physics would change rapidly - it would end here - but the fractals never end. ;-)
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No one was tortured. A few Republicans were, however, terrorized
The Houston Progressive Blog-O-Sphere got offline and came together at the Onion Creek last night to host out-of-towner Vince Liebowitz, in town for his abuelita's 87th birthday and the Johnson-Rayburn dinner (Russ Feingold is keynoting tonight). Charles organized and Lyn, muse, Hal, Ryan G. of BOR, and the Diddies attended, and we ate, drank, and made merry. Well, as merry as potential enemy combatants can make.
For the record, few rumors were mongered even as the Friedman campaign conducted some sort of half-hearted rally/signup out on the patio. I saw one young man, cell phone glued to his head (dude, get a Bluetooth) sitting with one of those art-deco yard signs (only 15 bucks!). Left alone to carry on his phone conversations for the most part.
Hal's got a pretty funny post with pictures of the Fort Bend parade in Rosenberg. They showed their asses to the local Republicans. Seriously. Go look. Muse likewise has been all over Shelley Magoola Something-or-Other's hapless campaign, as well as state rep John Dufus' ethical lapses. Ryan recently exposed Martha Wrong's signage malfunction.
Why are all the Republicans cutting and running from debates with their challengers? Even the SCLM-alleged "safe" incumbents are dodging. What do they have to fear but fear itself?
The really surprising thing to me is that if you only looked at Texas conservative blogs, you wouldn't even know there was an election in thirty days.
If you're in the Metroplex today, this is the place to be.
For the record, few rumors were mongered even as the Friedman campaign conducted some sort of half-hearted rally/signup out on the patio. I saw one young man, cell phone glued to his head (dude, get a Bluetooth) sitting with one of those art-deco yard signs (only 15 bucks!). Left alone to carry on his phone conversations for the most part.
Hal's got a pretty funny post with pictures of the Fort Bend parade in Rosenberg. They showed their asses to the local Republicans. Seriously. Go look. Muse likewise has been all over Shelley Magoola Something-or-Other's hapless campaign, as well as state rep John Dufus' ethical lapses. Ryan recently exposed Martha Wrong's signage malfunction.
Why are all the Republicans cutting and running from debates with their challengers? Even the SCLM-alleged "safe" incumbents are dodging. What do they have to fear but fear itself?
The really surprising thing to me is that if you only looked at Texas conservative blogs, you wouldn't even know there was an election in thirty days.
If you're in the Metroplex today, this is the place to be.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Anousheh Ansari: the first cosmic blogger
As the Grauniad has reported, the first Persian astronaut has also become the first space blogger:
That's very nice. But there is still one thing in which Anousheh Ansari is not number one: she is not the #1 Google hit for Iranian astronaut. ;-) But there is no reason for her to be sad: her space triumph has prompted a new line in underwear. :-)
Richard Hamilton behind Shing-Tung Yau
Prof. Richard Hamilton wrote
explaining more details why the text in the New Yorker was neither fair nor true and why he respects Prof. Shing-Tung Yau so much. As you know, Prof. Shing-Tung Yau has decided to go after these particular shoddy journalists. Recall that we have brought your attention to the Yau webcast, too, and discussed the Poincaré's conjecture in many contexts, for example after the paper of Zhu and Cao and Dennis Overbye's popular article.
Of course, the actual number of shoddy journalists who have written stupidities and nasty lies about science recently is far too high to be listed here. Even if you look at the New Yorker itself, you will see additional jerks of this kind. One of them is called
who writes a lot of the very same junk as his fellow garbage journalists as well as the blue crackpot and the black crackpot, among dozens of others, but the point of his relation to theoretical physics is well captured by the last two sentences of his diatribe (thanks to Charles T.!):
- And, even if a final theory is found, it will leave the questions about nature that most concern us—how the brain gives rise to consciousness, how we are constituted by our genes—untouched. Theoretical physics will be finished, but the rest of science will hardly notice.
First of all, the origin of "consciousness" can either be treated scientifically - like in neurobiology and psychology (and I am sure that Holt wouldn't like this approach) - or unscientifically, and then it is just philosophy.
At any rate, the people who can write that "we will hardly notice when the theory of everything is completed" are uncultural simpletons and physics-haters without any intellectual curiosity because, as Feynman emphasized, the physical picture of reality constitutes the main part of the true culture of our epoch, and it is literally flabbergasting that these cretins from the garbage bins of the journalistic colleges are allowed to write about this very issue in major magazines.
Using the words of one of the leading physicists of the current world: What's wrong with these people? Why don't they choose f***ing instead of writing about things that they don't like and they don't understand? ;-)
We've been thinking how to stop this whole new industry of parasites who have very significant profits from writing sensational patent lies about science and the scientists. Some people have damaged science and the civilization more than what can be easily undone. This is a moral judgement of people with questionable moral motivations but as you can guess, it is not straightforward to transform moral values to a final verdict of a court.
Needless to say, these journalists are not the only villains. Someone must buy their "products". Many people actually believe these "products". Many people, and not only those with basic or high school science education, are completely unable to understand that the impact of two books written for the laymen on science is exactly equal to zero if there is no new scientific content in them. And of course, there is no new scientific content in the blue crackpot book and no new scientific content in the black crackpot book.
Even Brian Greene's books that were much more professionally and more honestly written and also much more successful couldn't change the cutting edge physics. Science simply doesn't build on popular books.
Many people are just used to their dirty tricks from politics, propaganda, lies, intimidation, and violence, and they think that this is how science works, too. But science works very differently. Science stands exactly where it stands based on the existing knowledge of observations and experiments and rational arguments that are usually of a very sophisticated nature in the context of theoretical physics, and if you write 7,800 stupid journal articles and newspaper articles backed by 24,700 journalists, science will be standing exactly where it was standing before you killed all these trees. Science is not driven by the desires of journalists to change the truth. It is driven by the truth itself.
So I must inform all the journalists who actually think that their writing measurably changes what theories are viewed as promising and what theories are not: you will be disappointed. If you write something that doesn't agree with the actual results obtained by science, you will be viewed just as an imbecile who is dishonestly informing the laymen about the actual results - but you will have no impact on the opinion of those who actually matter in science.
In the context of theories in high-energy physics, there is simply no real alternative to string theory, and if you write 67,800 articles that suggest otherwise, it will still be true that there is no real alternative to string theory. What will change after 67,800 of such articles is that there will be 123,456,789 new laymen who will have completely flawed ideas about the real situation in cutting-edge science.
Even if you take these 67,800 junk newspaper articles and use them to influence the policies of hiring etc., for example to hire thousands of people who are not good enough to learn string theory, you won't change the fact that string theory will still be the only state-of-the-art description of physics beyond quantum field theory. The places that will have string theory (or individual string theorists in dissent, if you go to the extreme) will be those that do serious stuff, and the places that will be forced to grow the non-existent "alternatives" will become money-wasting centers of crackpot physics, just like various institutes of creationism are money-wasting centers of crackpot biology. The mechanisms are analogous in both cases: the cutting edge in science has nothing to do with the desires of journalists or laymen to alter the form how the truth looks like.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Olbermann, the Post, anthrax, and what constitutes 'funny'
Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC "Countdown" host who's been sending shockwaves through the Bushies and their toadies with his "Special Commentaries" lately, received a letter with white powder in it this week.
Here's the New York Post's reporting of it.
Here's Olbermann's response to the New York Post (transcript, and video available with additional click).
The New York Post had a different reaction when they themselves were the recipient of an anthrax hoax.
So what's so funny about getting a letter like this? KO doesn't think it's funny, but the NYP now apparently does.
Is it funny when the joke's on someone else, after it's been on you? Is it funny when the joke is only on those with whom you disagree, politically?
Is sending white powder in the mail funnier than, say, cracking wise at the airport about the "gun" in your father-in-law's luggage?
Is it funnier than putting a dead deer's head in somebody's mailbox as a college prank?
Does my definition of humor need revising?
Here's the New York Post's reporting of it.
Here's Olbermann's response to the New York Post (transcript, and video available with additional click).
The New York Post had a different reaction when they themselves were the recipient of an anthrax hoax.
So what's so funny about getting a letter like this? KO doesn't think it's funny, but the NYP now apparently does.
Is it funny when the joke's on someone else, after it's been on you? Is it funny when the joke is only on those with whom you disagree, politically?
Is sending white powder in the mail funnier than, say, cracking wise at the airport about the "gun" in your father-in-law's luggage?
Is it funnier than putting a dead deer's head in somebody's mailbox as a college prank?
Does my definition of humor need revising?
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Bill O'Reilly in Harvard's top ten
Congratulations to Bill O'Reilly. According to the new tabloid of Harvard alumni,
he has made it into the top ten of the most influential Harvard alumni. He rightfully celebrated this success on the Factor.
The first spot belongs to Bill Gates although it is not quite clear whether this wise guy is a real alumnus or just a partial one. ;-) The second spot went to George Bush. The third guy is Ben Bernanke who invented the Goldilocks. The number ten is Bill O'Reilly. He is ahead of various less important people - Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Natalie Portman, and many others. Moreover, Bill O'Reilly was the number one on the alumni's party.
O'Reilly predicts that this could mean the end of Harvard. On the contrary: this is the beginning of Harvard. O'Reilly says that it could also be ridiculous - the magazine is entertaining and smart. No way, the magazine is serious although it is not exactly addressed to the intellectuals among the Harvard alumni. Finally, O'Reilly suggests that it could mean that Harvard has finally embraced the no-spin-zone.
Exactly! "C" is correct. As a typical average member of Harvard faculty, I want to say that we admire Bill O'Reilly tremendously. We are proud about him and consider him to be one of the shining examples for all of us and for the students who will make it into the top ten list sometime in the future. ;-)
Oriana Fallaci: The Force of Reason
Review: 44 of 45 helpful votes; the review was erased from amazon.com by a certain movement
Oriana Fallaci, a famous journalist and former antifascist partisan, offers her fascinating views on Islam, its history, and the threats facing the Western civilization as well as her personal story that has become even more striking after the 9/11 attacks. For security reasons, Fallaci had to move to America, a country she views as the main hope of the Western civilization, and so do I, a citizen of the Czech Republic.
During the last years, she became the target of many fanatical Muslims and their fatwas as well as their left-wing allies who have made her life in Italy virtually impossible: her identification with Master Cecco, a victim of the inquisition, is certainly justified. But it was cancer that ultimately killed this extraordinary woman last week.
Much like Fallaci, I count myself as a Christian atheist. As most scientists, I appreciate the tough struggles between science and Christianity in which the Church was wrong. Nevertheless, these old disputes seem rather subtle in comparison with the outrageous recent attacks against the main principles underlying the Western civilization, including the power of reason and arguments as opposed to violence and intimidation. Why were the controversies relatively subtle?
As the Pope Benedict XVI, who privately met Fallaci a few months before she died, recently explained in Regensburg, the God of Christianity is restricted by His own words and by the laws of logic and mathematics. Allah is not restricted by anything and his followers are not restricted either. They will do anything to spread their beliefs. This fact is magnified by the ambiguous relation between the Quran and violence. Fallaci explains in detail how the Muslim clerics in Europe - a part of the future Eurabia - teach their believers that they shouldn't be restricted by the local laws.
Fallaci writes that the threat that the whole Western civilization faces is amplified by the political correctness and by multicultural utopists many of whom have openly become the fifth column of jihad. I have just read a shameful anti-papal (and anti-Fallaci) article in the Guardian and it looks really scary where we seem to be going.
As Fallaci convincingly argues, the presence of Islam in the West is directly proportional to our loss of freedom. Her personal experience is captivating but it is not really new to me because I have been exposed to remotely comparable kind of pressure. Everyone who advocates a principle that is inconvenient for various groups of people that are presented as "suppressed groups" and especially for their inferior ideologies - even though these ideologies are really starting to control our lives - is immediately hated by a certain segment of the society and labelled as a racist. I know these things extremely well and it was refreshing to read stories from someone with a similar attitude.
This new book as well as Fallaci's example should wake up millions of people and make them realize that if they won't actively try to defend the Western values against the pressure of an Asian religion and against the cancer of political correctness, the civilization as we know it could face a genuine risk of destruction.
Oriana Fallaci, a famous journalist and former antifascist partisan, offers her fascinating views on Islam, its history, and the threats facing the Western civilization as well as her personal story that has become even more striking after the 9/11 attacks. For security reasons, Fallaci had to move to America, a country she views as the main hope of the Western civilization, and so do I, a citizen of the Czech Republic.
During the last years, she became the target of many fanatical Muslims and their fatwas as well as their left-wing allies who have made her life in Italy virtually impossible: her identification with Master Cecco, a victim of the inquisition, is certainly justified. But it was cancer that ultimately killed this extraordinary woman last week.
Much like Fallaci, I count myself as a Christian atheist. As most scientists, I appreciate the tough struggles between science and Christianity in which the Church was wrong. Nevertheless, these old disputes seem rather subtle in comparison with the outrageous recent attacks against the main principles underlying the Western civilization, including the power of reason and arguments as opposed to violence and intimidation. Why were the controversies relatively subtle?
As the Pope Benedict XVI, who privately met Fallaci a few months before she died, recently explained in Regensburg, the God of Christianity is restricted by His own words and by the laws of logic and mathematics. Allah is not restricted by anything and his followers are not restricted either. They will do anything to spread their beliefs. This fact is magnified by the ambiguous relation between the Quran and violence. Fallaci explains in detail how the Muslim clerics in Europe - a part of the future Eurabia - teach their believers that they shouldn't be restricted by the local laws.
Fallaci writes that the threat that the whole Western civilization faces is amplified by the political correctness and by multicultural utopists many of whom have openly become the fifth column of jihad. I have just read a shameful anti-papal (and anti-Fallaci) article in the Guardian and it looks really scary where we seem to be going.
As Fallaci convincingly argues, the presence of Islam in the West is directly proportional to our loss of freedom. Her personal experience is captivating but it is not really new to me because I have been exposed to remotely comparable kind of pressure. Everyone who advocates a principle that is inconvenient for various groups of people that are presented as "suppressed groups" and especially for their inferior ideologies - even though these ideologies are really starting to control our lives - is immediately hated by a certain segment of the society and labelled as a racist. I know these things extremely well and it was refreshing to read stories from someone with a similar attitude.
This new book as well as Fallaci's example should wake up millions of people and make them realize that if they won't actively try to defend the Western values against the pressure of an Asian religion and against the cancer of political correctness, the civilization as we know it could face a genuine risk of destruction.
Nobel prizes 2006
It is not easy to predict the Nobel prizes. Here is what Thomson Scientific says about the physics candidates:
- 50% - Desurvire, Nakazawa, Payne
- 31% - Fert, Grünberg
- 19% - Guth, Linde, Steinhardt
They calculate the candidates using some citation-counting black magic.
The first group are three people who have worked on fiber optics. This field is always the most likely one but I have been annoyed by the LASER Nobel prizes for quite some time. Einstein had no chance to receive the award even for the groundbreaking pioneering theoretical discovery of the stimulated emission and the modern guys are just adding small technical additions to this old field and getting dozens of Nobel prizes.
The second pair has discovered giant magnetoresistance in 1988: you deal with thin non-magnetic and ferromagnetic alternating layers of film and you observe a rapid decrease of resistance once you turn on the magnetic field and change the mostly anti-ferromagnetic relation between the magnetic layers into a parallel orientation. While it is difficult for me to appreciate the purely theoretical value of this discovery, the effect has been used in modern hard drives and MRAM memory chips.
Of course, I like the third group. The new WMAP data have made the case for inflation really strong although many of us could still have doubts whether the general theory has been experimentally established, despite an experimental confirmation of the predicted approximate scale-invariance of the perturbations. On the other hand, I find it extremely difficult to imagine that the theory could be falsified or superseded by something very different in any foreseeable future.
The 2005 candidates were discussed previously - some of them may continue to be candidates for 2006 - and the actual 2005 winners were discussed on this blog, too. My last successful prediction of the physics Nobel prize winners happily occured in 2004.
Also, the Reference frame is looking forward to some female winners. Among the 758 winners, 33 are women so far which includes two physicists and three chemists; Marie Curie is counted in both groups. The last physics/chemistry female Nobel prize winners occured in 1963 and 1964, before the expansion of modern feminism.
I want the G.I. Jew with the Kung Fu grip
And if I can't have that, then buy me a "Torture Me Elmo".(Thanks to ITPT commenter Bob Maluga for the inspiring words.)
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Academy of P.C. sciences
I had to teach (QFT I), we had a very interesting seminar about AdS/CFT and RHIC, and now I spoke to students from my class for several hours, but let me post something simple.
Today, John Tierney who is a libertarian had a nice
Well, the last time I had the same idealistic expectations about similar academic institutions as John Tierney was a few years ago. ;-)
The long report starts like one of the articles from The Onion, Tierney says: we want to honestly evaluate the role of genders which is why the men are prohibited to serve on the committee, except for one who is just going to confirm what the 17 ladies (including one who has sadly jumped from a skyscraper) need. Tierney describes that the report starts with meaningless episodes about a young female talented professor who was discouraged and denied tenure 30 years ago - the writer of the report (Donna Shalala) herself ;-) - and it is hard to find any serious analysis on the 290 pages of the report because its point is to assume that the discrimination is behind everything and other explanations shouldn't even be considered.
Let me say that some examples are really fascinating. For example, they mention the experiments that have shown that girls with higher levels of testosterone play with male toys much more frequently than other girls. The committee wanted the readers to believe that the reason is that their environment always knows about the testosterone level and encourages these girls to play with the trucks because it is more natural according to the existing stereotypes. What kind of conspiracy theories these 17 ladies and 1 gentleman are ready to advocate in order to defend the undefendable is really amazing.
Tierney mentions that six of his scientific friends thought that the report was crap: he always prefers to mention the women's opinions. ;-) He offers a brief summary of various findings showing why the female brains work somewhat differently than the male brains, why they have different distributions in various tests, and why women have different interests in average. He presents the NAS report as a typical example of special interests in action - meant to bring better job prospects to an organized political group - and argues that it is myopic to assume, despite decades of full women's rights, that women are still unable to choose the fields that are interesting for them.
Well, yes, I can't hide that the New York Times still remains the top U.S. paper for me despite the negative emotions of some of my right-wing comrades. Even in the description of the two recent crackpot books about high-energy physics, the New York Times was arguably the least unreasonable major source of opinions although it was not necessarily enough for them to be classified as reasonable.
Besides Berkeley and MIT, Harvard is the only other institution who has had two representatives who were writing the NAS feminist pamphlet. But sometimes it can be a good idea to follow Derek Bok who suggested that Harvard is always a useful tool, whenever you want to do good things as well as bad things; it was his interesting reaction to Romney's fair criticism of the Kremlin on the Charles that Romney probably decided to make in order to strengthen his conservative presidential credentials. ;-)
Thanks to Paul Krapivsky for his tip.
Today, John Tierney who is a libertarian had a nice
- op-ed (subscription required)
Well, the last time I had the same idealistic expectations about similar academic institutions as John Tierney was a few years ago. ;-)
The long report starts like one of the articles from The Onion, Tierney says: we want to honestly evaluate the role of genders which is why the men are prohibited to serve on the committee, except for one who is just going to confirm what the 17 ladies (including one who has sadly jumped from a skyscraper) need. Tierney describes that the report starts with meaningless episodes about a young female talented professor who was discouraged and denied tenure 30 years ago - the writer of the report (Donna Shalala) herself ;-) - and it is hard to find any serious analysis on the 290 pages of the report because its point is to assume that the discrimination is behind everything and other explanations shouldn't even be considered.
Let me say that some examples are really fascinating. For example, they mention the experiments that have shown that girls with higher levels of testosterone play with male toys much more frequently than other girls. The committee wanted the readers to believe that the reason is that their environment always knows about the testosterone level and encourages these girls to play with the trucks because it is more natural according to the existing stereotypes. What kind of conspiracy theories these 17 ladies and 1 gentleman are ready to advocate in order to defend the undefendable is really amazing.
Tierney mentions that six of his scientific friends thought that the report was crap: he always prefers to mention the women's opinions. ;-) He offers a brief summary of various findings showing why the female brains work somewhat differently than the male brains, why they have different distributions in various tests, and why women have different interests in average. He presents the NAS report as a typical example of special interests in action - meant to bring better job prospects to an organized political group - and argues that it is myopic to assume, despite decades of full women's rights, that women are still unable to choose the fields that are interesting for them.
Well, yes, I can't hide that the New York Times still remains the top U.S. paper for me despite the negative emotions of some of my right-wing comrades. Even in the description of the two recent crackpot books about high-energy physics, the New York Times was arguably the least unreasonable major source of opinions although it was not necessarily enough for them to be classified as reasonable.
Besides Berkeley and MIT, Harvard is the only other institution who has had two representatives who were writing the NAS feminist pamphlet. But sometimes it can be a good idea to follow Derek Bok who suggested that Harvard is always a useful tool, whenever you want to do good things as well as bad things; it was his interesting reaction to Romney's fair criticism of the Kremlin on the Charles that Romney probably decided to make in order to strengthen his conservative presidential credentials. ;-)
Thanks to Paul Krapivsky for his tip.
Byron Nelson, 1912 - 2006
"I don't know very much," Nelson said in a 1997 interview with The Associated Press. "I know a little bit about golf. I know how to make a stew. And I know how to be a decent man."
Fastow and Ebbers go to jail
A sense of closure today, and it's not necessarily the sound of clanging jail cell doors that produces it.
Jeff Andy Fastow, the former Enron CFO got six years (instead of ten) for cooperating with the prosecutors and was placed immediately into custody; Bernie Ebbers, the one-time basketball coach and WorldCom executive reported to the medium-security facility in Oakdale, LA -- we just drove past there over the weekend -- to serve a twenty-five year term, likely the rest of his life.
These were two of the highest-profile white collar criminals of the Nineties. Few rose as high and fell so far as Fastow and Ebbers. They were hailed as wizards for their business acumen, but it was eventually revealed that they were just plain old charlatans.
Next month Jeff Skilling, Fastow's capo, will be sentenced to prison, and probably for a very long time also. And with that, a most sordid chapter in the history of American corporate malfeasance will draw to a close.
Who will be this decade's Fastow, Skilling, or Ebbers? We might not yet know their names, but unfortunately some of them are probably doing business in Texas. The biggest crooks always seem to.
Could one of them be Bob Perry, of "Swift Boat" fame, who has funneled hundreds of thousands to Republicans throughout the state? Or perhaps James "Voucher" Leininger, who has done the same in order to advance his single issue, dismantling public education in Texas? Both men have made fortunes in business and poured those fortunes into the bank accounts of Republican politicians and conservative causes. Is it possible we could see their corrupt dealings land them in jail if we succeed in voting their GOP lackeys out of office in November?
The chickens always come home in the evening to roost, and dusk is coming a little sooner now that it's fall. Maybe we can hasten it along some if we do what we need to for the next 45 or so days.
These were two of the highest-profile white collar criminals of the Nineties. Few rose as high and fell so far as Fastow and Ebbers. They were hailed as wizards for their business acumen, but it was eventually revealed that they were just plain old charlatans.
Next month Jeff Skilling, Fastow's capo, will be sentenced to prison, and probably for a very long time also. And with that, a most sordid chapter in the history of American corporate malfeasance will draw to a close.
Who will be this decade's Fastow, Skilling, or Ebbers? We might not yet know their names, but unfortunately some of them are probably doing business in Texas. The biggest crooks always seem to.
Could one of them be Bob Perry, of "Swift Boat" fame, who has funneled hundreds of thousands to Republicans throughout the state? Or perhaps James "Voucher" Leininger, who has done the same in order to advance his single issue, dismantling public education in Texas? Both men have made fortunes in business and poured those fortunes into the bank accounts of Republican politicians and conservative causes. Is it possible we could see their corrupt dealings land them in jail if we succeed in voting their GOP lackeys out of office in November?
The chickens always come home in the evening to roost, and dusk is coming a little sooner now that it's fall. Maybe we can hasten it along some if we do what we need to for the next 45 or so days.
Keith Olbermann calls Bush a coward
Chris Wallace is "a monkey posing as a news caster".
FOX is a "propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would have quit".
Watch (and eat it all, neoconderthals):
FOX is a "propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would have quit".
Watch (and eat it all, neoconderthals):
Monday, September 25, 2006
Southern hemisphere ignores global warming
Spencer and Christy have updated their tools to calculate the tropospheric temperatures between 1979 and the present era from their and NASA's satellite data to a new version 6.0 beta (readme file). Update: they would return to v5.2 in December 2006. The three graphs above show the global average, the Northern Hemisphere, and the Southern Hemisphere. This upgrade is also discussed by Steve McIntyre.
If you look at the third graph, you see that there was no warming on the Southern Hemisphere in the last 25 years even though the "global warming theory" and the corresponding models are predicting even faster rise of the tropospheric temperatures than for the surface temperatures. The decadal trend is quantitatively around 0.05 degrees which is noise whose sign can change almost instantly.
Normally, I would think that one should conclude that according to the observations, there is no discernible recent warming on the Southern Hemisphere, and an experimental refutation of a far-reaching hypothesis by a whole hemisphere is a good enough reason to avoid the adjective "global" for the observed warming.
Of course, the proponents of the "global warming theory" will use a different logic. The troposphere of the Southern Hemisphere is bribed by the evil oil corporations, and even if it were not, the data from the Southern Hemisphere can't diminish the perfect consensus of all the hemispheres of our blue planet: the debate is over. All the hemispheres of our planet decide equally about the catastrophic global warming, especially the Northern Hemisphere that shows that the warming is truly global and truly cataclysmic. Be worried, be very worried. ;-)
Hansen et al.
James Hansen, one of the fathers of the "global warming theory", has a new paper. When Hansen writes a paper, the media immediately publish hundreds of articles. The present temperatures are warmest in 12,000 or one million years, depending on the source. ;-)
However, when you open their paper, you see that it looks like one of these jokes propagating through the blogosphere and the authors are kind of comedians. First of all, most of the paper is dedicated to not-too-substantiated arguments with Michael Crichton. Michael Crichton stated in "State of Fear" as well as the U.S. Congress that Hansen's predictions from a 1988 testimony were wrong by 300 percent: a calculation based on a particular choice of time period and scenarios. Hansen then proposed three scenarios - "A,B,C" - how the temperatures would rise. "A" is a catastrophe in which no action is taken and the emissions continue to rise. "B" involves a peaceful limit in which emissions stabilize around 2000 and the warming is smaller. "C" is the scenario assuming drastic cuts of CO2 emissions.
The result as we know it in 2006? The reality essentially followed the temperatures of the scenario "C" even though the CO2 emissions continued to rise just like in the scenario "A". More details are summarized by Willis E who discusses the content of the figure 2 of the new Hansen paper. Isn't it enough to admit that Hansen was just wrong? If it is not enough, what kind of wrong prediction does he have to make in order for us to know that he has made an error? I just can't understand it.
The new paper contains even crazier assertions - e.g. the present temperature is probably the maximum temperature in the last 12,000 or one million years. This is probably based on the graph 5 on the bottom of page 5 (or 14291) and this graph's data is taken from a completely different paper written by very different authors: Hansen's only role is to hype and politicize their numbers. You see in that graph that since 1870, the oceans' surface temperature was more or less constant and the previous temperature probably can't be trusted, especially not the relative vertical shift of the graph in comparison with the current temperatures.
Even more amusingly, the paper is filled with a lot of completely off-topic comments that indicate that Hansen et al. are unable to focus on rational thinking. When I was reading one of the last sentences, I started to laugh loudly. Hansen et al. criticize the "engineering fixes" of the global climate recently discussed by Paul J. Crutzen, the 1995 Nobel prize winner for chemistry, and Ralph Cicerone, the current president of the National Academy of Sciences. Hansen says that these fixes are "dangerous" because they could diminish the efforts to reduce the CO2 emissions.
That's very funny because this is, indeed, exactly the purpose of these papers - to propose more efficient methods than the most stupid method you can imagine for the hypothetical case that we would ever need to regulate the global climate. The papers are indeed intended to diminish the role of the most uncultivated proposals how to fight with the hypothetical "climate change". As Hansen explains, that's exactly his problem with those papers. ;-)
It is very clear that the paper was only written in order to misinterpret another paper, draw media attention (which is guaranteed with Hansen), and make a purely political statement about the programs that are beginning to supersede the naive carbon dioxide cuts - political statements that have nothing do with science - in a scientific journal.
Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick's comments on the paper are here. Steve has made a much more detailed analysis later. Hansen's reasoning is not too unsimilar to the reasoning of Quantoken. :-)
Incidentally, Crutzen's proposed technology involves artificial volcanos. A major natural volcano eruption can cause 0.2-0.5 degrees of cooling over 2-3 years. Using the favorite technologies of Hansen and Gore - namely stifling the civilization - such a cooling would cost tens of trillions of dollars or many thousands of Virgin corporations. Al Gore would have to fly roughly millions of times to give his prayers for impressionable billionaires - because not all of them would decide in the same way as Branson - and these flights would probably overcompensate the cooling effect anyway. ;-)
Other popular texts about the climate on The Reference Frame
- Christopher Monckton of Brenchley & climate alarmism
- Temp determined CO2 concentrations, not the wrong Al Gore's way around
- IQ2 US debate: deniers beat believers
- Temperature CO2 dependence
- Correlation of sunspots and cosmic rays - and cloudiness
- 2006: a weak year for chicken little's
- 2006: coolest year among the last five
First Czech "anti-discrimination" lawsuit lost
Ms. Marie Čauševićová became the first Czech woman who has sued her company, the Prague heating corporation, that didn't choose her as the financial director. As far as I can say, the only evidence she seems to have to support her statement that she was discriminated because she was a woman is that she is a woman. I was hoping it was not enough.
She was mainly rejected because of two Czech guys representing the interests of a British shareholder. She demanded one million Czech crowns (almost $50,000), the chair, and an apology.
Fortunately, she lost the lawsuit 30 minutes ago: so far, it is really not enough. No doubt, she will continue to create a bad mood. If e.g. a court of the European Union started to decide these lawsuits against common sense, I would support the Czech Republic's exit from the European Union because these things are just far too serious.
She was mainly rejected because of two Czech guys representing the interests of a British shareholder. She demanded one million Czech crowns (almost $50,000), the chair, and an apology.
Fortunately, she lost the lawsuit 30 minutes ago: so far, it is really not enough. No doubt, she will continue to create a bad mood. If e.g. a court of the European Union started to decide these lawsuits against common sense, I would support the Czech Republic's exit from the European Union because these things are just far too serious.
Some from the others
On the heels of the Chris Bell video posted below, there have been some other Texas happenings while I've been absent ...
-- BOR has blown Kinky Friedman out of the water. No wait, Kinky Friedman did it to himself. Anyway, here's Chapter 57 of "Kinky Blows Up, and Not in a Good Way".
-- While there are some on the left who think that this is not a good thing.
-- Vince has posted a video which serves as a good primer for the governor's race.
-- Greg Abbott is getting sued over his voter "fraud" shenanigans.
--My man David has been busy in West Texas, and writes that something big is happening out there. And when the Midland Reporter-Telegram agrees, guess what? There is.
-- Here's a great picture of some real Texas leaders.
-- John and muse have stayed busy getting to the vote (in preparation for getting that vote out, starting October 23).
-- Stace posts the letter of a former Kingwood Republican who has seen the light.
-- it turns out that my wife worked with Valinda Bolton back in the Eighties, when we lived in Plainview. She's going to be an excellent legislator.
-- Kuffner reminisced about Rita. (That inspired me to pull my own three-part tale out of the 9/05 archives for you.) In Lake Charles on Saturday, they also stopped to reflect. The hurricane left widespread damage throughout Texas and Louisiana -- from which parts of the area still struggle to recover -- but only killed eleven people. Ten times more than that died in the attempted evacuation of Houston, which I considered to be its own disaster. It warrants reminding that we were lied to by our government -- I'm looking at you, Rick Perry -- about the contraflow lanes to be opened, about the gasoline trucks being sent to refuel the thousands of stranded motorists and the calamity that could have occurred had Rita not turned to the east.
Update: Fred suggests a bigot's dream team: Macaca-N***** Eggs 06.
-- BOR has blown Kinky Friedman out of the water. No wait, Kinky Friedman did it to himself. Anyway, here's Chapter 57 of "Kinky Blows Up, and Not in a Good Way".
-- While there are some on the left who think that this is not a good thing.
-- Vince has posted a video which serves as a good primer for the governor's race.
-- Greg Abbott is getting sued over his voter "fraud" shenanigans.
--My man David has been busy in West Texas, and writes that something big is happening out there. And when the Midland Reporter-Telegram agrees, guess what? There is.
-- Here's a great picture of some real Texas leaders.
-- John and muse have stayed busy getting to the vote (in preparation for getting that vote out, starting October 23).
-- Stace posts the letter of a former Kingwood Republican who has seen the light.
-- it turns out that my wife worked with Valinda Bolton back in the Eighties, when we lived in Plainview. She's going to be an excellent legislator.
-- Kuffner reminisced about Rita. (That inspired me to pull my own three-part tale out of the 9/05 archives for you.) In Lake Charles on Saturday, they also stopped to reflect. The hurricane left widespread damage throughout Texas and Louisiana -- from which parts of the area still struggle to recover -- but only killed eleven people. Ten times more than that died in the attempted evacuation of Houston, which I considered to be its own disaster. It warrants reminding that we were lied to by our government -- I'm looking at you, Rick Perry -- about the contraflow lanes to be opened, about the gasoline trucks being sent to refuel the thousands of stranded motorists and the calamity that could have occurred had Rita not turned to the east.
Update: Fred suggests a bigot's dream team: Macaca-N***** Eggs 06.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Meter-long 10 GeV accelerators
Do you want to build a 10 GeV accelerator of electrons in your bathroom? You need some strong lasers and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory experts can tell you what to do.
I will leave the job to others to say some intelligent comments about this fascinating text. For example, can someone say whether they can build a new LaserTeVaSLAC that would be just 100 meter long? ;-)
Thanks to Guido.
Do the laws of nature last forever?
Several people have informed me about an article in New Socialist
The author seems confused what is science, what is physics, what is a law of nature, how it looks like and how it may look like, and why we believe such laws. He is profoundly confused at many levels: basic levels as well as the technical ones.
Cosmological natural selection
Lee Smolin promotes his cosmological natural selection. Just during the last month, five independent people have mentioned this issue in discussions with me or in their own articles; the list included famous names like L.S. or A.V. All of them are convinced that it is trivial to falsify Smolin's hypothesis and it has, in fact, been done immediately when Smolin proposed it.
A decade ago, Smolin had conjectured that the laws of our universe are optimized for black hole production because every new black hole is a new baby whose properties are similar to the parent universe but it is not quite identical because there is also a cosmological mutation going on. The most prolific universes - those who create many black holes - are going to dominate the ensemble of the universes. Lee Smolin has written a whole book whose content is isomorphic to this paragraph.
It is easy to see that if you change some parameters in our universe, for example if you reduce the hierarchy between the electroweak scale and the Planck scale, many more black holes will be created. The theory is dead. Trivially dead. Period. Why does Smolin revive this nonsense all the time, without having any new arguments or mechanisms? Does a lie become the truth when it is repeated 100 times?
Smolin also misleadingly suggests that he is behind the word "landscape" in theoretical physics even though the only scientifically plausible meaning of the word in theoretical physics was explained by Leonard Susskind.
Why do we believe that the world is governed by laws
The main reason why we believe that the universe obeys laws is that the laws we have found are the simplest satisfactory explanation of the experiments and observations that we have done. Lee Smolin doesn't seem to mention this technical detail. Instead, he focuses on battles between philosophy, religion, and science that should place no role in science whatsoever.
Evolving laws vs. evolving knowledge
Lee Smolin clearly fails to distinguish the evolution of the laws themselves and the evolution of our knowledge about them. He claims that Einstein's discovery that the geometry of the real space is not flat is "another example" of evolving laws of nature. In reality, of course, Einstein's equations had the same form and applied to the motion of cellestial bodies long before Einstein realized that. The laws are not changing.
What does it mean for the laws to change?
What does a physicist mean by the basic laws of nature? He or she means the most fundamental possible mathematical reasons or rules that predict or imply a class of observed phenomena or all other phenomena. If the laws were evolving, they would not really be laws. If the question whether it is fine to kill other people had an evolving answer, there would be no law about the murder. Of course, at a longer time scale or length scale, this social law indeed doesn't exist. But it exists within an effective theory.
Physics is more fundamental than sociology and its laws are thus more lasting, too.
A physicist always picks the most fundamental law she can pick. If the laws were evolving significantly but if they were still accessible to science, the primary thing that a physicist would be interested in would be the laws that govern the evolution of the "simpler" laws. No doubt, we would call these rules "laws" again, even though Lee Smolin tends to call them "metalaws". The prefix "meta-" only means that the things are perhaps getting too complicated for Lee. But it doesn't mean that they're getting too complicated for everyone else.
In his recent book, he also incorrectly uses the word "meta-theory" for string/M-theory. In reality, the word "meta-theory" could have been used a few times at the beginning of the duality revolution but no one would use this terminology today. String/M-theory is simply a theory. It is impossible to divide it to pieces.
Even though most crackpots are unable to understand this simple fact, string/M-theory is the best textbook example what a theory in physics means. It is a logically coherent structure including a finite number of concepts and a finite number of equations and other mathematical rules that can be used to predict the outcome of many experiments. I say that string/M-theory is the best representative of the word "theory" we have in science because it is the most complete and the most logically coherent description of the widest possible set of phenomena that we have ever had, namely all of them.
Technically, by a theory, we mean a choice of the Hilbert space and/or basic degrees of freedom together with rules to determine the dynamics - the Hamiltonian, the action, or more general rules to calculate correlators or the S-matrix.
The word "theory" does not require the system of concepts to be already proven experimentally. We use the word "theory" for theories that are not yet proven or that are unlikely to be ever proven (little Higgs theory?) as well as for theories that have already been falsified (Glashow's old SU(2) theory) although the word "model" is often a substitute, especially for more concrete theories that have many conceivable "siblings".
In science, we couldn't use the word "theory" just for one of these options - a correct or a wrong theory - because the validity of any sufficiently interesting theory we discuss or investigate has yet to be determined and this fact would make the word "theory" unusable in most situations: another point that the "critics of science" completely misunderstand. Virtually neither of the "Not Even Wrong" crackpots understands that if we already knew for sure that a theory is correct, we wouldn't be developing it anymore - we would only be looking for its other consequences and we would be moving to a more profound theory.
The theory that most of the theoretical physicists, especially the cutting-edge theoretical physicists, work on at a given moment of time is necessarily an unproven theory, essentially by definition. If a theory is already proven, then it is not at the cutting edge.
Meaning of the evolution in the actual theories we have
In the state-of-the-art theories, we know exactly what it means for the theories to evolve in time. For quantum field theories, it means to change their relevant and marginal parameters into functions of the cosmological time: the masses of elementary particles and the renormalizable couplings may depend on time. We know that such a possible evolution is severely constrained by observations. Although there are a few controversies, it is fair to say that it seems that there exists no such evolution.
We shouldn't be thinking about creating new degrees of freedom because a transition from a theory with some degrees of freedom to a theory with other degrees of freedom would prove that at least one of them had to be incomplete at the mass scale of the new degrees of freedom, and thus a more complete theory was needed. Alternatively, such a transition would be completely discontinuous and it wouldn't allow us to use the knowledge about the previous regime to learn anything about the new regime.
In string theory, it is completely impossible to change the laws of nature as a function of time because string theory has no parameters to be adjusted. There is only one unique and eternal mathematical structure called string theory and it cannot be changed or contaminated. It can be twisted but the twisted version is not a realistic theory. :-)
Any evolution is governed by the laws of string theory. This is why string theory can be used to prove that spacetime topology can change, among other things. The laws of string theory don't break down and don't have to be - and cannot be - changed even when an extreme effect such as topology change occurs.
If the laws of a theory needed to change in order to describe a certain transition, we would have a proof that the theory is an incomplete description of reality.
Needless to say, this is not the case in string theory. String theory is a complete description of reality even though we don't understand its predictions in some extreme situations, especially those that have something to do with the ultratiny expanding universe. Can we really tunnel into another vacuum and which observables we should talk about in this setup? Although people assume that an answer similar to the answer of effective field theory with a "common sense" discontinuity is the right one, we are not guaranteed that we have fully understood all implications of string theory for this situation.
But at any rate, whatever the allowed observables, rules, questions, and transitions in this context are, they are a part of string theory and we are not allowed to mess up with these laws by inventing some meta-laws or laws saying how the previous laws should change.
Mathematical character of laws
In any theory that remotely resembles the theories that have been successfully used to describe reality for centuries, the most fundamental laws - even if some people would like to call them meta-laws - are given by systems of mathematical equations constraining certain mathematical structures and quantities. If this were not the case, we couldn't describe the universe quantitatively.
Lee obviously disagrees with the previous paragraph. In order to show how intensely he disagrees with the basic thesis of theoretical physics that the world is based on mathematical laws, he even quotes Roberto Unger, a Harvard philosopher, who has called the eternal mathematical laws thought to be relevant for physics "a poisoned gift of mathematics to physics". Wow.
Lee feels that physics was consistently getting rid of time and he suggests that it could be a good idea to give time the same role it played before Galileo. If the laws are evolving, we would need to return before Galileo. In other words, if his article reflects what Lee thinks, he wants to return us to the age of the Inquisition in this respect, too. Very nice.
This is the physicist who is spamming us with the nonsensical comments that we should be doing physics without a pre-existing spacetime; on the other hand, the very fact that we have permanent laws that are valid at all times - which has been the case at least for 300 years - is already too bad for him. Do you think it is a consistent approach to try to kill time where it seems almost necessary and restore its key role in contexts where it has been impossible for 300+ years because the eternal laws work so well?
In philosophy, one could spend several centuries by thinking about the evolving laws of nature. Needless to say, it would lead to the ballpark of the same realm as most other investigations in philosophy, namely the realm of nowhere. In physics, we have very different methods. According to these methods, the concept of the basic laws that evolve in time is an ill-defined concept because we can't really define any global "time" coordinate (because of general relativity and other deep insights) and because we can't define what it means for the laws to evolve unless we have other laws that don't evolve. It also seems to be a useless idea that doesn't help us to explain anything that we know about the universe, and therefore its weight in physics is tiny even though it can still generate several pages in New Socialist.
And that's the memo.
The author seems confused what is science, what is physics, what is a law of nature, how it looks like and how it may look like, and why we believe such laws. He is profoundly confused at many levels: basic levels as well as the technical ones.
Cosmological natural selection
Lee Smolin promotes his cosmological natural selection. Just during the last month, five independent people have mentioned this issue in discussions with me or in their own articles; the list included famous names like L.S. or A.V. All of them are convinced that it is trivial to falsify Smolin's hypothesis and it has, in fact, been done immediately when Smolin proposed it.
A decade ago, Smolin had conjectured that the laws of our universe are optimized for black hole production because every new black hole is a new baby whose properties are similar to the parent universe but it is not quite identical because there is also a cosmological mutation going on. The most prolific universes - those who create many black holes - are going to dominate the ensemble of the universes. Lee Smolin has written a whole book whose content is isomorphic to this paragraph.
It is easy to see that if you change some parameters in our universe, for example if you reduce the hierarchy between the electroweak scale and the Planck scale, many more black holes will be created. The theory is dead. Trivially dead. Period. Why does Smolin revive this nonsense all the time, without having any new arguments or mechanisms? Does a lie become the truth when it is repeated 100 times?
Smolin also misleadingly suggests that he is behind the word "landscape" in theoretical physics even though the only scientifically plausible meaning of the word in theoretical physics was explained by Leonard Susskind.
Why do we believe that the world is governed by laws
The main reason why we believe that the universe obeys laws is that the laws we have found are the simplest satisfactory explanation of the experiments and observations that we have done. Lee Smolin doesn't seem to mention this technical detail. Instead, he focuses on battles between philosophy, religion, and science that should place no role in science whatsoever.
Evolving laws vs. evolving knowledge
Lee Smolin clearly fails to distinguish the evolution of the laws themselves and the evolution of our knowledge about them. He claims that Einstein's discovery that the geometry of the real space is not flat is "another example" of evolving laws of nature. In reality, of course, Einstein's equations had the same form and applied to the motion of cellestial bodies long before Einstein realized that. The laws are not changing.
What does it mean for the laws to change?
What does a physicist mean by the basic laws of nature? He or she means the most fundamental possible mathematical reasons or rules that predict or imply a class of observed phenomena or all other phenomena. If the laws were evolving, they would not really be laws. If the question whether it is fine to kill other people had an evolving answer, there would be no law about the murder. Of course, at a longer time scale or length scale, this social law indeed doesn't exist. But it exists within an effective theory.
Physics is more fundamental than sociology and its laws are thus more lasting, too.
A physicist always picks the most fundamental law she can pick. If the laws were evolving significantly but if they were still accessible to science, the primary thing that a physicist would be interested in would be the laws that govern the evolution of the "simpler" laws. No doubt, we would call these rules "laws" again, even though Lee Smolin tends to call them "metalaws". The prefix "meta-" only means that the things are perhaps getting too complicated for Lee. But it doesn't mean that they're getting too complicated for everyone else.
In his recent book, he also incorrectly uses the word "meta-theory" for string/M-theory. In reality, the word "meta-theory" could have been used a few times at the beginning of the duality revolution but no one would use this terminology today. String/M-theory is simply a theory. It is impossible to divide it to pieces.
Even though most crackpots are unable to understand this simple fact, string/M-theory is the best textbook example what a theory in physics means. It is a logically coherent structure including a finite number of concepts and a finite number of equations and other mathematical rules that can be used to predict the outcome of many experiments. I say that string/M-theory is the best representative of the word "theory" we have in science because it is the most complete and the most logically coherent description of the widest possible set of phenomena that we have ever had, namely all of them.
Technically, by a theory, we mean a choice of the Hilbert space and/or basic degrees of freedom together with rules to determine the dynamics - the Hamiltonian, the action, or more general rules to calculate correlators or the S-matrix.
The word "theory" does not require the system of concepts to be already proven experimentally. We use the word "theory" for theories that are not yet proven or that are unlikely to be ever proven (little Higgs theory?) as well as for theories that have already been falsified (Glashow's old SU(2) theory) although the word "model" is often a substitute, especially for more concrete theories that have many conceivable "siblings".
In science, we couldn't use the word "theory" just for one of these options - a correct or a wrong theory - because the validity of any sufficiently interesting theory we discuss or investigate has yet to be determined and this fact would make the word "theory" unusable in most situations: another point that the "critics of science" completely misunderstand. Virtually neither of the "Not Even Wrong" crackpots understands that if we already knew for sure that a theory is correct, we wouldn't be developing it anymore - we would only be looking for its other consequences and we would be moving to a more profound theory.
The theory that most of the theoretical physicists, especially the cutting-edge theoretical physicists, work on at a given moment of time is necessarily an unproven theory, essentially by definition. If a theory is already proven, then it is not at the cutting edge.
Meaning of the evolution in the actual theories we have
In the state-of-the-art theories, we know exactly what it means for the theories to evolve in time. For quantum field theories, it means to change their relevant and marginal parameters into functions of the cosmological time: the masses of elementary particles and the renormalizable couplings may depend on time. We know that such a possible evolution is severely constrained by observations. Although there are a few controversies, it is fair to say that it seems that there exists no such evolution.
We shouldn't be thinking about creating new degrees of freedom because a transition from a theory with some degrees of freedom to a theory with other degrees of freedom would prove that at least one of them had to be incomplete at the mass scale of the new degrees of freedom, and thus a more complete theory was needed. Alternatively, such a transition would be completely discontinuous and it wouldn't allow us to use the knowledge about the previous regime to learn anything about the new regime.
In string theory, it is completely impossible to change the laws of nature as a function of time because string theory has no parameters to be adjusted. There is only one unique and eternal mathematical structure called string theory and it cannot be changed or contaminated. It can be twisted but the twisted version is not a realistic theory. :-)
Any evolution is governed by the laws of string theory. This is why string theory can be used to prove that spacetime topology can change, among other things. The laws of string theory don't break down and don't have to be - and cannot be - changed even when an extreme effect such as topology change occurs.
If the laws of a theory needed to change in order to describe a certain transition, we would have a proof that the theory is an incomplete description of reality.
Needless to say, this is not the case in string theory. String theory is a complete description of reality even though we don't understand its predictions in some extreme situations, especially those that have something to do with the ultratiny expanding universe. Can we really tunnel into another vacuum and which observables we should talk about in this setup? Although people assume that an answer similar to the answer of effective field theory with a "common sense" discontinuity is the right one, we are not guaranteed that we have fully understood all implications of string theory for this situation.
But at any rate, whatever the allowed observables, rules, questions, and transitions in this context are, they are a part of string theory and we are not allowed to mess up with these laws by inventing some meta-laws or laws saying how the previous laws should change.
Mathematical character of laws
In any theory that remotely resembles the theories that have been successfully used to describe reality for centuries, the most fundamental laws - even if some people would like to call them meta-laws - are given by systems of mathematical equations constraining certain mathematical structures and quantities. If this were not the case, we couldn't describe the universe quantitatively.
Lee obviously disagrees with the previous paragraph. In order to show how intensely he disagrees with the basic thesis of theoretical physics that the world is based on mathematical laws, he even quotes Roberto Unger, a Harvard philosopher, who has called the eternal mathematical laws thought to be relevant for physics "a poisoned gift of mathematics to physics". Wow.
Lee feels that physics was consistently getting rid of time and he suggests that it could be a good idea to give time the same role it played before Galileo. If the laws are evolving, we would need to return before Galileo. In other words, if his article reflects what Lee thinks, he wants to return us to the age of the Inquisition in this respect, too. Very nice.
This is the physicist who is spamming us with the nonsensical comments that we should be doing physics without a pre-existing spacetime; on the other hand, the very fact that we have permanent laws that are valid at all times - which has been the case at least for 300 years - is already too bad for him. Do you think it is a consistent approach to try to kill time where it seems almost necessary and restore its key role in contexts where it has been impossible for 300+ years because the eternal laws work so well?
In philosophy, one could spend several centuries by thinking about the evolving laws of nature. Needless to say, it would lead to the ballpark of the same realm as most other investigations in philosophy, namely the realm of nowhere. In physics, we have very different methods. According to these methods, the concept of the basic laws that evolve in time is an ill-defined concept because we can't really define any global "time" coordinate (because of general relativity and other deep insights) and because we can't define what it means for the laws to evolve unless we have other laws that don't evolve. It also seems to be a useless idea that doesn't help us to explain anything that we know about the universe, and therefore its weight in physics is tiny even though it can still generate several pages in New Socialist.
And that's the memo.
Wavefunctions and hydrodynamics: crackpots vs. rational thinking
It is no secret that I consider all people whose main scientific focus is a revision of the basic postulates of quantum mechanics - and a return to the classical reasoning - to be crackpots. They just seem too stubborn and dogmatic or too intellectually limited to understand one of the most important results of the 20th century science.
Every new prediction based on the assumption that there is a classical theory that underlies the laws of quantum mechanics has been proven wrong. The local hidden variables have first predicted wrong outcomes in the EPR experiments and later they predicted the validity of Bell's inequalities and we know for sure that these inequalities are violated in Nature, just like quantum mechanics implies and quantifies. The non-local hidden variables predict a genuine violation of the Lorentz symmetry. I think that all these theories predict such a brutal violation of the Lorentz symmetry that they are safely ruled out, too. But even if someone managed to reduce the violation of the laws of special relativity in that strange framework, these theories will be ruled out in the future. Their whole philosophy and basic motivation is wrong.
The whole political movement to return physics to the pre-quantum era is a manifestation of a highly regressive attitude to science - an even more obvious crackpotism than the attempts to return physics to the era prior to string theory. But among the proposals to undo the 20th century in physics, some of the papers are even more stupid than the average.
This is also the case of the recent preprint
Every new prediction based on the assumption that there is a classical theory that underlies the laws of quantum mechanics has been proven wrong. The local hidden variables have first predicted wrong outcomes in the EPR experiments and later they predicted the validity of Bell's inequalities and we know for sure that these inequalities are violated in Nature, just like quantum mechanics implies and quantifies. The non-local hidden variables predict a genuine violation of the Lorentz symmetry. I think that all these theories predict such a brutal violation of the Lorentz symmetry that they are safely ruled out, too. But even if someone managed to reduce the violation of the laws of special relativity in that strange framework, these theories will be ruled out in the future. Their whole philosophy and basic motivation is wrong.
The whole political movement to return physics to the pre-quantum era is a manifestation of a highly regressive attitude to science - an even more obvious crackpotism than the attempts to return physics to the era prior to string theory. But among the proposals to undo the 20th century in physics, some of the papers are even more stupid than the average.
This is also the case of the recent preprint
There are many meaningless words in that paper but let me focus on a section whose content is meant to be very clear and it is very clear, except that it is also totally dumb. The author claims that Timothy Wallstrom was wrong in his criticism of a hydrodynamic approach to the wavefunction.
What did Wallstrom point out? He looked at the theories in which
- abs(psi)^2
is interpreted as a density of some liquid, while the usual "classical velocity" calculated from the wavefunction - the ratio of the probabilistic current and the probability density - is interpreted as an actual velocity of the same liquid.
Wallstrom said that this map might look plausible locally but it is wrong globally. The argument is trivial. Take a generic wavefunction in three dimensions. It will satisfy
- psi=0
at a one-dimensional curve - a "cosmic string" - because the one complex or two real conditions above remove two dimensions from space. What happens with "psi" if you make a round trip around this one-dimensional curve? In quantum mechanics, you will return to the same wavefunction: the wavefunctions must be single-valued and the locus where "psi=0" is not too special, after all. Most smart high school students who are really interested in physics know that the wavefunctions are single-valued. This is the fact that underlies the quantization of the orbital angular momentum as well as other observables. It's the ultimate reason why quantum mechanics has "quantum" in its name.
On the other hand, in the hydrodynamics toy model, you can pick an arbitrary phase - which is a wrong result. The whole quantum character of quantum mechanics will disappear until you constrain the contour integrals for the velocity by a condition that is equivalent to the quantization condition in Bohr's old quantum theory, as Wallstrom pointed out.
I claim that this generic lethal flaw of the hydrodynamical model should be comprehensible to every undergraduate student who has registered for the introductory course of quantum mechanics within a few minutes after the sixth class. This argument would certainly be easy for the physicists 80 years ago, but at any rate, it has been published for 12 years. How is it possible that someone who claims to work on these things is unable to get such a simple point at least for 12 years?
The author of "Could quantum mechanics..." not only misunderstands the simple argument but he promotes this misunderstanding to a new branch of science. The author indeed admits that the phase monodromy can be arbitrary in the hydrodynamical theory - but he views it as an advantage over the conventional quantum mechanics. In other words, he indeed believes that there is no quantization of things like the angular momentum in the real world - no kidding - despite billions of experiments that say otherwise, and the hydrodynamical theory is apparently claimed to be better because it can transcend the quantization rules of quantum mechanics: the discrete spectrum of many observables is apparently another example of the sexist white male rules and stereotypes that reduce the diversity of ideas in science and that discriminate against the numbers that were not among the "priviliged" eigenvalues so far. ;-)
I just can't stand this bigotic approach. I can't stand pompous fools. The paper is an extreme example of stupidity, and no matter how many books will be written about this stupidity - books promoting the people working on similar "problems" as original scientists who are almost as good as the string theorists if not better - and no matter how many thousands of impressionable laymen and idiotic bloggers will become convinced that it is a deep idea, all these ideas will continue to be the very same patently false stupidities.
And that's the memo.
P.S.: The very idea that the wavefunction should be reparameterized into different variables by a non-linear transformation is a deeply flawed misconception. The linearity of the Hilbert space of the quantum mechanical wavefunctions is one of the key principles that allows quantum mechanics to work. If one thinks about some other variables, the devastating effect of the non-linear reparameterization will become clearest near the points where "psi=0" because this is where the non-linear transformation becomes extremely singular. This is why the places where "psi" is approximately zero could have been used by Wallstrom to show that the hydrodynamical model is wrong. The hydrodynamics toy models always create a singular earthquake near the loci of "psi=0" even though there is obviously nothing too special about these points in quantum mechanics or in reality.
But even if you picked any other model that is either redefining the wavefunction in a non-linear way or that is distinguishing priviliged operators on the Hilbert space in which your non-quantum description will be more classical, you will be able to find a proof that the theory is flawed. It's because the linearity of the wavefunction, the philosophical democracy between different observables (such as position and momentum - you can't say that one of them is classical and the other is not), and other postulates of quantum mechanics are not only beautiful and robust pillars of modern physics, but they are also experimentally proven facts.
It is fundamentally wrong to single out some observables - such as positions - to be more classical than others. In reality just like in quantum mechanics, one can talk about the spectrum of all observables, and which of them behave more classically than others is dynamically determined by the Hamiltonian - by decoherence - not by pre-established dogmas. This fact has been known at least for 20 years and everyone who understood foundations of quantum mechanics has known this fact for 20 years.
Did he know?
How could have Lee Smolin submitted such a silliness? When you try to think about his wording, it is conceivable that he does not realize that it is silly. He just thinks that the multiply-valued functions are square-integrable, and therefore they should be a part of the Hilbert space. That's of course wrong because while they might be square-integrable, they are not really functions, and therefore they are not elements of the Hilbert space. A person familiar with the mathematical terminology would know that they are not in "L^2". Most physicists would know that because they aware, unlike Smolin, of physical considerations that make them certain that the multiply-valued "functions" are not allowed.
It is also impossible to choose one value for each point which would translate multiply-valued functions on a circle to discontinuous functions. It's because the discontinuous functions wouldn't satisfy the Schrödinger equation near the discontinuity. In other words, the velocity of the liquid calculated from a discontinuous wavefunction will have an extra delta-function localized near the discontinuity, and it will thus differ from what Smolin claims to be the same thing. Equivalently, the discontinuity makes the energy diverge while the energy in the liquid picture is finite. The discontinuous wavefunctions are certainly not a part of the physically realizable Hilbert space.
Above, I assumed that Lee doesn't realize why his comments are silly. Alternatively, you might imagine that Lee Smolin realizes that what he wrote is crap, but he wants a particular preprint with a preprint number that he will cite whenever someone tells him that the classical models of quantum mechanics are impossible because of Wallstrom's argument, among other things. Lee will tell them "Wallstrom's argument has been invalidated in quant-ph/yymmnnn but unfortunately I don't have enough time now to tell you what's the argument - just read the paper". The people will eventually find out that the preprint is rubbish but Lee will earn his 15 minutes of doubts which may be enough to survive one of his public talks in which he is pumping his silliness into the audience.
Incidentally, a Harvard grad student (A.P.) has pointed out a paper by Marcel Reginatto about a very similar topic plus the Fisher information. It seems more serious. On the bottom of page 13, Reginatto also struggles with the Wallstrom's problem. As far as I can say, he also fails although not as miserably as L.S. because Reginatto at least admits that the wavefunction should be single-valued in a correct theory. ;-) Reginatto says that things look nice and simpler with a single-valued function which is not exactly what I call a physical explanation. There might be some interesting mathematical and philosophical idea in the "Fisher information" but I am probably not able to go through all the "epistemilogical" junk that has, as admitted on the bottom of page 8, no physical consequences. ;-)
Novikov about the history and methods of topology
A reader has recommended me - and other readers - the following essay by Sergey Novikov from 2000:
Novikov discusses many technical details of topology but also more philosophical issues about the right way to do mathematics.
He identifies the period 1950-1970 as the Golden Age Period. The years 1970-1980 represent the Period of Decay. The era since 1980 is the Period of Recovery.
After 1970, many people left topology for other fields which was probably the primary sociological reason of the decay. However, the internal reason behind the decay is that the mathematicians were not able to fully settle the proofs and disseminate the information about the incomplete and flawed proofs - something that used to work instantly in the better periods. No one was too interested in the full perfectionist proofs even if they were available.
Novikov thinks that the free exchange of information and its clear presentation is essential - and it is a gift that the Ancient Greeks gave us.
The period of recovery in topology started because of the influence of physics in the 1980s: quantum field theory, string theory, and some topological notions relevant for condensed matter physics (such as topology of Fermi surfaces): a new generation of leaders of theoretical physics was suddenly ready to care about the implications of their discoveries for mathematics itself instead of the previous generation's overemphasis on the application of all their ideas for experiments.
Novikov argues that in contrast to the bad and messy tendencies in the 1970s, physics didn't cause any problems in topology because the theoretical physicists never claim that their new statement is completely proven - they view their broader mathematical assertions (beautiful heuristic mathematics, as Novikov calls it) as "predictions" and their complete proof may be counted as a sort of experimental verification.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Saudis: Osama bin Laden may have died
This picture is not necessarily real but the new blog of the Boston's cardinal is real.
According to a leaked unconfirmed report of the French intelligence revealed in L'Est Republicain, the Saudis are convinced that Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan on August 23rd, 2006. A salmonella bacterium has attacked him and because there was no way to save the killer from the strong typhoid fever that has paralyzed his lower limbs, he's gone, solved, completed, and terminated. According to a usually reliable source, the Saudis learned about his death on September 4th. The French secret services found the report reliable enough to inform the French officials. No one else is able to confirm the report. See news.google.com.
Update: the TIME magazine has obtained a compatible report about Osama being "seriously ill or dead" directly from the Saudis. The Saudi officials, however, made it clear later that all the reports are highly speculative.
If the rumor were true after all, that would be a lot of fun, of course, although such an end would be boring at the same moment. Instead of dying heroically as an exceptional son of Allah under the sunshine of the world's fastest videocameras and in between the Planckian effects of quantum gravity, he could just have eaten some feces from another infected person and died in a cave as an average mammal, giving a great example to all of his fans. Whitney Houston who is getting divorced would be again on the market and, as some left-wing bloggers predict, Osama's body is already in Karl Rove's fridge waiting for the November elections. ;-)
Terrorism and Prague
A similar election idea might be - but doesn't have to be - behind the hypothetical threats of a terrorist attack against the Czech capital. On Friday night, the new Czech government has received "credible" reports that a terrorist attack against Prague - the new espionage hub - is being prepared and is linked to some recent arrests in Norway. The new minister of internal affairs Mr. Langer, who has been in his job for a week or so, evaluated the threats as the most serious ones ever.
No doubt, the synagogues, the whole Jewish Quarter (Josefov) and similar places are guarded: the Jews celebrate a new year now, congratulations, the year 5767 since the Big Bang. ;-) Police has also increased its presence at many places that are normally more or less unprotected, including malls, supermarkets, the airport, the subway, and a few public events.
The previous articles about a similar topic were Terrorism and Prague and Iran may nuke Czechia et al. Bush's speech about the threat coming from Prague is here. ;-) The American tourists in Prague had no idea that there was any threat today: they still love the city.
Friday, September 22, 2006
PBS: The Elegant Universe
I am sure that most readers have already seen the show on NOVA. Nevertheless, if you have not, Google Video now offers you a compact version of the three times 55-minute-long masterpiece of popularization of science:
The original PBS home page of the program only contained the show cut into many more pieces.
If you decide to view a Google Video, you may switch to a full screen mode by double-clicking the video while it's already running. F11 makes it "even more fullscreen".
A virgin throws away an LHC from the window
Update: How to get $25 million from Richard Branson
Figure 1: Bill Clinton with another virgin, more precisely with a Virgin boss
Sir Richard Branson has invited Al Gore into his house and Al Gore has convinced Branson to throw 3 billion U.S. dollars out of the window. The money will be used to pay for hot air. Note that the whole LHC project originally cost the same amount although the full amount has jumped three-fold or so. The postmodern world is just amazing: a charlatan comes into a billionaire's house and a whole fortune - in fact, most of Branson's assets - is instantly wasted for complete nonsense.
According to current market prices, Branson's gift will lower the temperature in 2050 by 0.00001 Kelvins which is, according to the missionaries, a good thing. According to your humble correspondent, it is madness and a fraction of the money should be spent for a good asylum for Sir Branson. Did Al Gore told him that he would get to the Heaven or what?
Czechia and global warming
Things look a bit different in the Czech Republic - a microscopic part of the reasons why I am kind of looking forward to be back. Václav Klaus, the Czech president, met the chairman of the right-leaning Green Party. Klaus said that the environmental problems are gonna be solved by the economic growth and the related higher demands of the population about the quality of their lives.
The green guy countered: "This debate is meant to suggest that everything's alright, but it is so in this hall only." Mr. Bursík also proposed to include the price of pollution into the expenses and mentioned that whenever he is climbing in the Alps, he sees retreating glaciers.
However, Klaus - who also likes to spend winters in the mountains - told him: "I would have to dispute every sentence of yours. Your contribution is a classical example how the factual data shouldn't be discussed and mustn't be discussed. Global warming caused by the humankind is a nonsensical fiction. On the contrary, we should expect that warming oceans will increase the precipitation above Antarctica and growing glaciers."
The president has also recommended the green politician to take a message from the debate - the message that the sustainable growth myth and the myth about renewable resources don't deserve a serious discussion.
The green chairman mentioned that he incorrectly expected that the president would play the role of the moderator. Instead, the green brain had to face three opponents, the president, the minister of industry, and Ivan Brezina, a journalist. ;-)
Figure 1: Bill Clinton with another virgin, more precisely with a Virgin boss
Sir Richard Branson has invited Al Gore into his house and Al Gore has convinced Branson to throw 3 billion U.S. dollars out of the window. The money will be used to pay for hot air. Note that the whole LHC project originally cost the same amount although the full amount has jumped three-fold or so. The postmodern world is just amazing: a charlatan comes into a billionaire's house and a whole fortune - in fact, most of Branson's assets - is instantly wasted for complete nonsense.
According to current market prices, Branson's gift will lower the temperature in 2050 by 0.00001 Kelvins which is, according to the missionaries, a good thing. According to your humble correspondent, it is madness and a fraction of the money should be spent for a good asylum for Sir Branson. Did Al Gore told him that he would get to the Heaven or what?
Czechia and global warming
Things look a bit different in the Czech Republic - a microscopic part of the reasons why I am kind of looking forward to be back. Václav Klaus, the Czech president, met the chairman of the right-leaning Green Party. Klaus said that the environmental problems are gonna be solved by the economic growth and the related higher demands of the population about the quality of their lives.
The green guy countered: "This debate is meant to suggest that everything's alright, but it is so in this hall only." Mr. Bursík also proposed to include the price of pollution into the expenses and mentioned that whenever he is climbing in the Alps, he sees retreating glaciers.
However, Klaus - who also likes to spend winters in the mountains - told him: "I would have to dispute every sentence of yours. Your contribution is a classical example how the factual data shouldn't be discussed and mustn't be discussed. Global warming caused by the humankind is a nonsensical fiction. On the contrary, we should expect that warming oceans will increase the precipitation above Antarctica and growing glaciers."
The president has also recommended the green politician to take a message from the debate - the message that the sustainable growth myth and the myth about renewable resources don't deserve a serious discussion.
The green chairman mentioned that he incorrectly expected that the president would play the role of the moderator. Instead, the green brain had to face three opponents, the president, the minister of industry, and Ivan Brezina, a journalist. ;-)
Part-time scholars in China
The Science magazine has an article about the policy of part-time trophy professors:
I tend to think that the policy is wrong - it is based on the desire to improve things on paper but not in reality. More generally, it is disappointing to see that so many things are decided by the money etc. but if this is what is behind these questions, one should at least approach them rationally.
A meaningful goal of these investments should be to create an environment in which many results are actually found on the Chinese territory and in which the leading scholars actually influence others in China, and I am afraid that this "trophy hunt" can't lead to such an outcome.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
What an amazing dog
The video was originally embedded but now you must click here. Moreover, our server seems to be completely down/dead right now.
Our administrator rebooted the server but this can only be finished when you're physically present but he was not allowed to enter the room because he is an undergrad. So a more senior administrator entered the room in the building but she didn't have the password that only the undergraduate knows. ;-)
The video is rather fascinating, especially in comparison with the journalists who have recently written about high-energy physics. ;-)
Thanks to G.D.
Our administrator rebooted the server but this can only be finished when you're physically present but he was not allowed to enter the room because he is an undergrad. So a more senior administrator entered the room in the building but she didn't have the password that only the undergraduate knows. ;-)
The video is rather fascinating, especially in comparison with the journalists who have recently written about high-energy physics. ;-)
Thanks to G.D.
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