Karel Schwarzenberg: it was expulsion

I kind of applaud the Czech minister of foreign affairs, Karl Johannes Nepomuk Josef Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Mena von Schwarzenberg, His Serene Highness The Prince of Schwarzenberg, Count of Sulz, Princely Landgrave in Klettgau and Duke of Krummau.

Sorry for the long name. Not everyone can have a name as concise as Condi Rice. ;-)

He argues that it is nonsensical to try to avoid the word "expulsion" for what has been called "transfer" or "displacement" of the Germans from Sudetenland after the war. At the same moment, of course, he adds that one must understand this "horrible" event in its context and the lesson of the 20th century is that it is extremely dangerous to try to re-open such historic events and seek for any kind of "compensation" because we know where such attempts have led in the history of Europe.

In America, similar attempts to "compensate" for the history have only led to affirmative action and political correctness but the European experience with this concept has been more brutal.




It has been more pleasant for many Czech ears to use "human" words such as "odsun" (transfer) but "vyhnání" (expulsion) has been preferred by many Germans, for complementary reasons. The Reference Frame believes that the word preferred in Germany is more accurate as long as we realize that neither Czech nor English or German is rich enough a language to capture the catastrophe of many events that happened a bit earlier.

Harvard PhD student wins sudoku world title

Václav Klaus, the Czech president, has organized - no, it is not a rock concert against the global warming religion (he only organizes jazz concerts at the Prague Castle) but rather the second world championship in Sudoku,

• Sudoku 07

It might have been a preparation of the campaign of Prague to host the olympic games in 2016. One week ago, the representatives of the Czech capital have voted that they wanted to fight for this event.



Figure 1: Olympic games 2016: Prague?

It's a pleasure to announce that Thomas Snyder, a 27-year-old Harvard PhD student of biochemistry (JPG) who grew up in Buffalo, New York, became the world's champion. Congratulations!



Figure 2: The world's champion together with the organizer.

Dark age arrives to Sydney

Before November 7th every year during communism, people were expected to put the Soviet flags in their window as a sign of their commitment to the ideals of the Great October Socialist Revolution. If you didn't have one, you were identified and your failure was remembered. Today, at 7.30 pm local time, Sydney had

• Earth hour.

According to the event's website:

• At 7.30pm on 31 March 2007, we are inviting Sydneysiders - businesses and individuals - to turn off their lights for just one hour, Earth Hour, as a sign of their commitment to reduce global warming.

While only 50,000+ households participated, the opera house, many other landmarks, and hundreds of enterprises went dark. It is not hard to see what segments of the society contain the highest percentage of nutcases - and a country led by a conservative government is obviously not safe.



Figure 1: Switch off for brighter future. It sounds as some kind of parody of the communist slogans except that it's the real title of the article! ;-)

Note the huge progress. In Paris, they have only organized a five-minute-long "lights out" campaign before the IPCC summary for policymakers was released. Sydney has tried one hour. What's the next step: New York one day without electricity? :-) Good luck!



Figure 2: The neo-liberal (up) and environmentalist (down) version of the same place in Sydney. Which one do you prefer? Let's admit that the lighting of the neo-liberal picture was improved in a Photoshop. Click the picture for more pictures from Tim Blair.

Needless to say, even if you believe the whole man-made global warming orthodoxy, lighting is a ridiculous contribution. In the U.S., about 67 percent of the electricity is consumed by electric motors and only about 23 percent by lighting. About 1/10 of the lighting electricity is consumed by households.

Next year, the event will go global.

Sheldon Glashow vs Isaac Newton

Sheldon Glashow is giving a talk about

• The errors and animadversion of honest Isaac Newton.

It's an interesting and fun reading. Some of the facts are well-known but Glashow's interpretations seem biased to me.

Newton the tyrant

Most of us know that Newton was a kind of intensely assertive person. I feel that he had to be one, otherwise he couldn't have made all these important contributions. Isaac Newton was living in a world filled with non-Newtons and anti-Newtons, and it makes a difference.

Newton and accuracy

Newton was the first person who could have talked about all kinds of quantities - forces, masses, distances - in a quantitative fashion. He was surrounded by people who didn't appreciate the quantitative nature of physics. On the other hand, Newton really enjoyed to calculate numbers. So he just calculated them. Sometimes his numbers looked much more accurate than what could have been justified by observations.

But in his era, the rigorous prescriptions how to deal with uncertainties were not well-established. His numbers could have been incorrect but the moral lesson - namely that there are numbers behind these phenomena that could be determined very accurately and that fit together - was correct and extremely important. Newton was apparently trying to compensate the vagueness that everyone else was pumping into science.

Robert Hooke and others couldn't have approached all these questions properly because they lacked Newton's mathematical prowess. Unlike Sheldon Glashow, I don't think that it is a detail. A mathematical analysis of these phenomena is crucial.

And saying that the theory of planetary motion should be called the Newton-Hooke theory because Hooke has possibly explained Newton why angular momentum conservation (Kepler's second law) follows from a general radial force seems to be a dramatic exaggeration of Hooke's contributions. It's an important piece of the picture but there are roughly 50 comparable steps that one (Newton) must do in order to describe the planetary motion: deriving ellipses and their parameters from the differential equations.




Discoveries vs notation

Isaac Newton has also my sympathies in his calculus disputes with Gottfried Leibniz. Newton once wrote that Leibniz has invented symbols for his - Newton's discoveries. Newton's statement is oversimplified but at a rough level, it just seems this way to me, too. Of course that the notation is much less important than the actual mathematical content. Don't get me wrong: I think that Leibniz was an amazing polymath. But if you ask me who really made the difference among these two men, I wouldn't hesitate.

Flawed theories

Newton hasn't discovered all theories of physics. More seriously, he had incorrect beliefs about some basic notions. For example, he failed to grasp the wave character of light even though there was some evidence for it, including important evidence produced by himself.

Well, motion of particles was very important for Newton because he has described and studied the laws that capture this motion. There were good reasons for him to think that such a setup could explain all phenomena in the world. Therefore, light had to be composed of particles, too. I find it legitimate that a certain amount of evidence should be ignored as long as it is important for keeping a robust theory of the world alive: the theory that all phenomena result from the motion of particles had some non-trivial evidence, too.

This strategy of Newton worked well in many other examples. He insisted that all possible phenomena obeyed his laws even though he had numerous opponents in every individual case.

His approach didn't work in the case of the character of light. Newton wasn't quite God. But I would only find Glashow's strong criticism to be legitimate if Newton were a candidate to become God. One more reason to sympathize with Newton is the modern discovery of photons: Newton's intuition that light can be described as a flow of particles was correct as long as a sophisticated enough theory is found.

Newton also believed that gasses are made out of static molecules that repel each other: that was his explanation of pressure. It was a sane theory to start with, too. Even though many details of these theories later turned out to be wrong, Newton's picture was relatively coherent.

Newton as inhibitor of British mathematics

Glashow - and Morris Kline - argue that Newton's heritage has slowed down British mathematics because British thinkers preferred Newton's geometric methods over Leibniz's continental, analytical methods. Well, synthetic geometrical and analytical methods are just two approaches to similar questions. Neither of them can be labeled as universally superior.

The British thinkers arguably became more geometric and "physical" but this allowed them to remain leaders in physics and engineering - electromagnetism, steam engines etc. The continental thinkers were focusing on mathematics and it helped to produce the great German-speaking mathematicians, among others. I, for one, think that this diversity was beneficial for the growth of mathematics and physics. To give Newton a minus sign for this influence is irrational. Moreover, it's strange to hear this conclusion from Sheldon Glashow who otherwise argues that the physical approach is more valuable than the mathematical approach.

More generally, the idea that Newton's authority is responsible for the relatively slow evolution of physics after his death sounds childish to me. The growth of physics was slower mainly because of two key reasons. One of them was that a large portion of the most important laws in the same "package" had already been found during Newton's life. The second reason is that the physicists who lived for 250 years after Newton were simply not the same kind of giants as Newton himself.

Moreover, the widespread idea that the opinions of Newton shouldn't have been contradicted because he was such an "autocrat of science" was a rational idea. If this paradigm were not followed, physics would be overrun by crackpots and the discoveries would effectively be "undone" a few years after Newton's death simply because everyone was a weaker physicist than Newton and they could have switched from physics to all kinds of myths.

It literally took more than 200 years before the new insights that physicists had collected became more important than the superiority of Newton's intellect. At the end of the 19th century, physicists could start to talk about Newton's misconceptions more frequently and more critically. It was a very good time for such a change. If they did it much earlier and collectively, physics would have gone to hell.

Fudge factors

Newton has discovered all kinds of things, for example the formula for the velocity of sound, "v=sqrt(pressure/density)", although his original argument was not the most direct and the most comprehensible one (that's often the case in science that simplified arguments without useless components are only constructed later). But he invented ad hoc arguments to create the impression that his theory behind the formula agreed with reality much more accurately than it actually did.

Well, the details of his explained corrections were wrong but the qualitative message was correct once again. There are small effects that account for the errors. We know that they have something to do with non-isothermality of the sound waves. But a comfortable understanding of thermodynamics came much later. I find it very sensible that Newton had to find some plausible explanation of the small but measurable error. His theory was essentially correct but the numerical disagreement could have created a completely wrong impression that science couldn't have dealt with these things at all.

I have a full understanding for Newton's desire to make things agree exactly with theory. If a discrepancy can be measured, it's a problem. Because the world makes sense, these theories must give predictions that are exactly correct. Newton strongly believed that the world made sense exactly which is why it was more plausible to believe the first explanation of the discrepancy (he couldn't think of anything else) than to admit that there was an error.

Again, the qualitative conclusion of Newton is correct. The world works exactly. Today, all these things may be scientifically predicted and verified with accuracy that exceeds the accuracy accessible to Newton by orders of magnitude. I feel that Sheldon Glashow wouldn't care if science didn't work - even in principle - as a precise description of e.g. the phenomena at the Planck scale which is why he doesn't find quantum gravity i.e. string theory important. Well, I disagree.

Newton and creation

Sheldon Glashow criticizes Newton for believing that the world was created about 6000 years ago, as written in the Bible. What a heresy to think that the world was created if you live 200 years before Darwin! :-)

I think that Glashow's criticism in this section is entirely ideological and irrational. During Newton's lifetime, there was no good reason to think that the world had to be extremely old. The hypothetical distant past couldn't explain any detailed patterns of Nature and the creation billions of years ago was as (un)natural as the creation 6000 years ago. Geology was extremely primitive, evolution in biology was unknown, much like the Big Bang cosmology.

Why would an intelligent person choose to believe in such an old-Earth theory without having any good observational evidence if it seemed to contradict the history of mankind as known in his lifetime? I was brought up to believe and I still believe that the arguments in physics must eventually boil down to experiments and observations. What observations did they have to show that it was wrong to believe that the Universe was created to match some patterns explained in the Bible?

They had to start with a zeroth order estimate for the age of Earth. Newton started with the Christian estimate. The opinion that this is an illegitimate first guess is as much religion as Christianity: it is an anti-Christian religion. ;-) Newton simply believed that all the information in the Bible is relevant and hides important insights. It wasn't unreasonable because the Bible simply contained a non-negligible fraction of wisdom of his time: string theory textbooks were not yet sold.

Today we know that life was naturally created by billions of years of evolution. The Earth had to be around for billions of years and we know quite a lot about geology. The stars were created much earlier by pretty natural mechanisms. Three minutes after the Big Bang, nucleosynthesis provided us with the right mixture of nuclei. Inflation gave the Universe its huge mass. I could continue. The picture of an old Universe is supported by a lot of evidence, makes sense, and leads to a much more natural theory than the creation by Jesus' father. But the situation was very different when Newton was around!

Judgment day

Newton also predicted that the judgment day would come in 1867. It may have been a silly prediction. But even in the 21st century you can find people who predict that the world will approach destruction not in 200 years, as Newton argued, but in 10 years! And some of these apparently insane people could have been elected as vice-presidents of the most powerful countries in the world.

If we compare these two people, Newton was much more reasonable - because he has at least placed his prediction 200 years into his future - 3 percent of the age of the Universe in his setup.

His contemporary counterpart who is expected to know much more about science - because he lives 300+ years later - makes the same silly prediction but puts the end of the world to 2015. I just think that it is completely unfair to criticize Newton - the man who really introduced mathematics to the scientific discourse - for judgment days and fudge factor because many people, and not only those in the climate science, are doing the same or even more dumb mistakes today, too.

And that's the memo.

LHC may face another delay

Trouble with the cathedral of the 21st century

According to Peter Calamai, the LHC is like a medieval cathedral.



It has already outlasted some of its builders. The four detector experiments are distributed much like chapels in a cathedral and the CMS is large enough to accomodate the Canterbury cathedral.

Unlike the LHC, however, the cathedrals didn't fail the high-pressure test of the magnets three days ago. The CERN switched to a gloomy mood and is convinced that it is Fermilab's fault. Fermilab will try to comment on the details and invent a fix as soon as possible. Let's hope that they are problem solvers.

• PhysicsWeb.ORG reports that the failed test may cause another delay of the Large Hadron Collider

The most indisputable task for this cathedral is to find the God particle. At Harvard, we prefer this name because the technical name "Higgs particle" gives a somewhat misleading impression that Peter Higgs would necessarily have to get a Nobel prize for its discovery. Steven Weinberg has already received a Nobel prize for its theoretical understanding which is why Sheldon Glashow called the particle "Weinberg toilet": it is something you need for life but you are not necessarily proud about it. You can see that Glashow's respect for the God particle has its limits, much like his admiration for string theory herself. :-)

The LHC will generate 1 percent of the world's data and one teravolt is like an AA battery from each star in the Milky Way. And what happens if even the God particle is found not to exist? Well, Peter Calamai argues that the theoretical physicists will be lost and he is right. ;-)

High school student clarifies climate change

Do you remember what kind of homework did you do when you were a high school student?

• Kristen Byrnes of Portland Maine

is completing a project composed out of approximately 20 extensive pages that analyze the causes of the observed warming. As far as I can say, the content of the website is at least comparable in quality, quantity, and sanity to the content of RealClimate.ORG even though the latter source is written by 11 people who have sucked millions of taxpayers' dollars in several countries.




Via readers of ClimateAudit.ORG.

Czechia vs Austria: nuclear energy and radars

You might think that all environmentalists have already switched to the anti-greenhouse religion and they should therefore prefer nuclear energy over fossil fuels. You would be wrong.



This is the Temelín nuclear power plant producing 2x 1000 MW of energy. Its late Soviet nuclear core is combined with American gadgets to control the device from Westinghouse. The plant is situated in Southern Bohemia about 30 miles from the border with an anti-nuclear country called Austria. This distance makes the plant more controversial than a somewhat older type of a Soviet nuclear power plant located in Dukovany, Moravia.




Austrian environmental activists have been doing all possible nasty things against the power plant including border blockades. Very recently, this has convinced the Austrian government to accept some of their demands. This surrender has intensified the activists' belief that border blockades are a great idea: it is an extremely dangerous decision to surrender to extremists, even if it is only by a little bit. At any rate, we should no longer talk about activists: what they represent seems to be an exaggerated version of the official Austrian attitude. Temelín is not necessarily flawless - what is? - but the accusations about nuclear insecurity are only substantiated by irrational fears.

Electricity: numbers

Let me now mention some basic annual numbers as of 2004 or 2005 describing the electricity in Czechia / Austria (in this order) in billions of kWh (or percent if indicated). The countries have comparable populations:

• electricity production: 79 / 65
  
• fossil fuels: 76% / 30%
  
• hydro: 3% / 67%
  
• nuclear: 20% / 0%
  
• other: 1% / 3%
  
• consumption: 59 / 65
  
• exports: 25 / 18
  
• imports: 10 / 20

You can see that the consumption is comparable. Because of certain geographical reasons, Austria can obtain 67% of its energy from hydro sources while Czechia needs 76% from fossil fuels.



Austria must import some - 2 billion kWh - energy every year. Czechia is a clear exporter - 15 billion kWh. At any rate, one can't afford to close the nuclear power plant because the energy would be missing. Someone would have to produce it elsewhere - probably by burning more fossil fuels - otherwise blackouts similar to the recent ones would follow.

In this moderate tension, Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech minister of foreign affairs who could also be a member of the German or Austrian government if he wanted - which is both great as well as controversial under different circumstances - remained a defender of the Czech dignity. With a delicate aristocratic diplomacy, he indicated that the blockades are not the optimal way to improve the relationships between the countries.

Missiles

Temelín is not the only thing that is going to cause tension in the Czech-Austrian relations. On Monday, the U.S. and the Czech Republic will start negotiations about the radar base in Brdy, Central Bohemia. Why is this another source of tension? Well, Russia views the base as something that threatens its security and it even suggested that they could attack the base - which is of course ludicrous because that would be an attack against the U.S. Needless to say, if the U.S. can't guarantee security to the Czech ally in the case of an attack against the radar base, the project will die.



However, it is not just Russia. There are all possible countries around where the anti-American sentiments are stronger than in the Czech Republic (and my father was just explaining me that among many older ordinary Czechs he knows, these negative sentiments are strong anyway). However, Schwarzenberg argued that Austria should be grateful to Czechs because the base could potentially protect them, too. Needless to say, Schwarzenberg is right.

I just think that all these anti-nuclear, anti-energy, anti-growth, anti-capitalist, anti-greenhouse-effect, anti-American, anti-everything people have gotten far more influential than they should be and someone should deal with them much more aggressively than what we're seeing right now.

And that's the memo.

Trading views

The Texas Medical Center, looking north, from my old balcony (note the utility wires and the Dumpsters in the foreground).


New view (also the TMC, from the west looking east):



We traded up a little, indeed.

Regular posting to resume in short order.

Indoctrinate U: documentary film

A movie about speech codes, indoctrination, censorship, sensitivity training, enforced political conformity, intolerance, obsession with diversity, gender as a social construct, and violation of freedom of speech and conscience at American universities:

• Indoctrinate U (website)
• YouTube (trailer)

Well, I would be much happier if I could write a rant explaining that the movie is not true!

Borehole climate reconstructions & hockey stick revolution in 1998

Borehole climate reconstructions are based on the assumption that if you drill a very deep hole and measure the temperature profile i.e. the dependence of temperature on the z-coordinate - the depth - you will be able to reconstruct how the surface temperature looked like in the past. That's because you can simulate the propagation of heat by partial differential equations and it's very slow. When you're finished, you assume that the reconstructed surface temperature is correlated with the air temperature.

But let me get to the point which is the following:

Boreholes 1997



In August 1997, Huang, Pollack, and Shen published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters. Click the picture to see the full paper. Using the borehole paradigm, they reconstructed the temperature in the last 20,000 years.

The curves a,b,c distinguish different - increasing - weights given to the data, allowing different degrees of variation. The c-curve in particular leads to a very warm holocene climate optimum (much warmer than today) - a warm and pleasant period around 8,000 years ago that lasted for about 3 millenia. The picture shows a cool period 2000 years ago followed by the medieval warm period 800 years ago (warmer than the present) and the little ice ago 300 years ago or so: quite a lot of natural variability that exceeds the recent variations.




Their work was using heat flow and 6000 sites. The graph also makes it clear that as you go to the past, the borehole method clearly loses resolution. But that doesn't imply that we have much better methods to reconstruct the climate thousands of years ago.

MBH 1998 ...



... and MBH 1999



During the same time, in May 1997, Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (MBH) submitted their multiproxy paper with the hockey stick graph (MBH98). They were pre-determined to revolutionize and overrun the field of paleoclimatology which they indeed did, although for 5 years only.

Their paper - now known to be seriously flawed (click the hockey stick graph for an article by an esteemed physicist) - was going to argue that there were virtually no natural variations of the climate in the past 600 years (and in 1999, millenium) or so and only in the industrial era of the 20th century, the temperatures suddenly started to skyrocket. The medieval warm period was eradicated. For example, on this graph, the red curve is IPCC 1990, the blue curve is MBH99, and the black curve is Moberg 2006. Quite a difference!

Their paper was going to become a new standard that defines who is a "real" expert. As soon as it was published in February 1998, it indeed did become.

Boreholes 1998

Quite suddenly, the same borehole authors - Pollack, Huang, Shen (note a subtle permutation here) - published a new, two-page-long paper in Nature: it appeared in October 1998. The paper contained a rather different graph than the graph from 1997 (see below). Can you spot the difference?



It also argued that the authors had found an "independent confirmation of the unusual character of 20th century climate that has emerged from recent multiproxy studies [MBH98]" (see the abstract). The new paper was using temperatures and 358 sites only instead of the 6000 sites used in 1997 (94 percent of sites eliminated) and it has erased 19,500 years out of 20,000 years (97.5 percent of the time interval eliminated) from the paper written in 1997 in order not to contradict Mann et al.

That's what they call "independence". Moreover, if someone wanted to extend the record as far as possible while avoiding any hints of a warmer period in the past such as the medieval warm period, he would have made the same cut: 500 years ago. What a coincidence. Suddenly, everyone knew that boreholes should be trusted exactly for the last 5 centuries: Beltrami 2002, Mann et al. 2003 (he appears in these global warming stories as frequently as the polar bear!), and others.

But let's get back to 1998 when the second borehole paper appeared. At that time, the second hockey stick paper, MBH99 that has extended MBH98 from 600 to 1000 years, was already waiting for publication. MBH99 was published in GRL 26/6, around March 1999.

Comparing boreholes 1997 and 1998: today

It turns out that no one is able to identify any feature of the 1997 borehole paper that would make it less trustworthy than the 1998 paper - except that it doesn't quite agree with a certain fashionable lore in the contemporary climate science. The authors also think that their 1997 paper was fine. But it just happens that almost no one refers to the 1997 paper today: the 1998 paper is preferred.

Why do you think that Pollack et al. published their very different & heavily truncated paper in 1998 and what do you think is happening right now in that particular field of science - namely paleoclimatology? We report, you decide.

Via William Connolley, see scienceblogs.com/stoat/. Disclaimer for his fellow alarmists: William Connolley is not responsible for any interpretations found in this article and should be treated as innocent in the heresy accusations and should only be punished for an unintended help to heretics. :-)

String theory and a card

This video is called "String Theory". Well, the available evidence indicates that this particular effect is indeed not explained by string theory but a string theorist was able to qualitatively reproduce the observations using a particular machine in my office. Do you know which one? Do you have a better explanation? :-)

If you want to see a new Brian Greene :-) who explains string theory in 117 seconds, see AEinstein04. Well, I guess that the creator of the video will have to try harder but I haven't seen the competitors yet. :-)

Have you ever wondered how string theory looks like it she is a woman? Will Wilson proposes a rather natural, robust answer for $49,000. You must be over 21 years to click here. For the readers who can't focus: yes, the string is there. As you can see, it's a subtle question whether string theory is beautiful and it what sense it is. But there is something about it that one simply can't ignore. :-) You can compare her beauty with the beauty of loop quantum gravity.

Diversity of mammals due to warming

It has been believed that the asteroid strike that eliminated dinosaurs 65 million years ago led to the rise and diversification of mammals. But a

• new study

indicates that mammals existed long before the strike and their diversification and prosperity started much later, probably due to global warming that seems to be highly beneficial for mammal life, in a sharp contradiction with one of the statements of the environmentalists.



Figure 1: The echidna, one of the oldest mammals

Recall that the earlier expansion of dinosaurs themselves - after the Great Dying 250 million years ago - is another event where it's not quite clear whether the climate or a celestial body was responsible for the abrupt developments.

Brian Greene vs Lawrence Krauss

If you're in DC today (Wednesday), you may try to see a debate of Prof Brian Greene himself with Prof Lawrence Krauss:

• Wed 3/28 7 pm in National Museum of Natural History (map)
  

Congratulations to Lawrence Krauss that he will be able to meet Brian Greene! Well, if a reader wants to meet a famous physicist, just write a silly book against his field and all the gates will open. ;-) I am partially kidding but not quite.

The event will be moderated by Prof Michael Turner.

A few days earlier, the Pioneer anomaly was discussed at the same place.

Update

As the Science magazine reports (while crediting "Lumidek" for a photograph, guess who's that), Krauss behaved as a simple-minded and aggressive warrior against science, pumping a lot of technically unsubstantiated and untrue statements and personal attacks (including statements that he wouldn't want his daughter to marry his string theory students - nice for Hong Liu and Raman Sundrum, among others) to the audience, and some of them bought it. It went far enough that Turner couldn't declare Brian a winner - claiming a tie instead.

Both Brian Greene and Michael Turner were very decent and tried to maintain a high quality technically focused discussion while Lawrence Krauss was mainly targetting the intellectual bottom of the audience with his incredibly cheap attacks and jokes.

As a famous colleague of mine is saying, Krauss is a typical example of a grumpy physicist who has never done anything important in science and decided that it's the more successful physicists' - string theorists' - fault and that he should revenge.

Krauss reminds me of the leaders of neo-Nazi parties from Czechoslovakia after the Velvet revolution who had nothing positive to offer but they were very good in supporting negative people's hatred against freedom, democracy, other nations, and successful people, among others. It took several years until these parties were eliminated from the political spectrum.

Audio plus another report is available.

Saturn: Department of Defense, the Hexagon

A special explanation for those journalists whose mind is not powerful enough to determine the answer even though it is sufficient for them to revenge by attempted Goebbelsian character assassinations: this text is indeed a joke.

Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, should be frozen. Nevertheless, it seems to create its own heat. Also, Mars, Jupiter, Triton, and Pluto seem to be warming right now. As you know, warming is man-made. One of the small problems with the man-made global warming theory was that no evidence of humans and industry on these other planets and moons was known.



This problem has just been solved. The Cassini-Huygens mission has observed that the Republicans on Saturn have built their Department of Defense on Saturn's North pole: click the picture for more. Cars appear to be whipping around the Hexagon like on a racetrack. Twenty days ago, I saw the Pentagon in D.C. and I assure you that it looked exactly like the Hexagon on the picture except that one segment was missing.

While the Northern Hemisphere is controlled by the conservatives, the other hemisphere suffers: there is a hurricane with a giant eye on Saturn's South pole. Mars, on the other hand, is governed by Martian hippies.




Some contrarians propose an alternative explanation that hexagonal convection cells can occur in fluid dynamics. A problem with this explanation is that the consensus of climate models agrees that hexagons can't occur naturally. It's obvious to every concerned scientist that there must be intelligent design behind this remarkable structure: it is the same culprit who is responsible for the global warming on other celestial bodies. We will find them and they shall be punished. Amen.

Via David Goss.

Paul Davies: Cosmic Jackpot

Why out universe is just right for life

I have received a popular book that looks nice. Paul Davies is not only a physicist with some awards and hundreds of papers but he is an achieved popularizer of physics. The long list of his books includes "Mind of God" and "Superstrings: a Theory of Everything". The latter book contained interviews with people like F-GSW-GSW-GE i.e. Feynman, Glashow, Salam, Weinberg, Green, Schwarz, Witten, Gross, and Ellis about string theory. Only the first two failed to be positive. ;-)

Although I don't have time to read the whole book right now, let me say that what I clearly like is the absence of the grumpiness that played a key role in several recent books. Davies is a professional in this kind of business and feels no need to invent propaganda and organize revenge. In other words, it is very nice to see a popular book called Cosmic Jackpot after two or three Cosmic Crackpots pretending to be more than popular books. :-)

The book explains cosmology - Big Bang, microwave background, inflation etc. - as well as particle physics - including the Standard Model, supersymmetry, Higgs mechanism, string theory, M-theory. The author offers some standard as well as unusual ideas about symmetries, unification, the existence of a unique final theory, the fine-tuning that seems to be necessary for life, and the history of chemical elements, especially carbon. He shows why the multiverse may solve some of the bizarre coincidences i.e. the Goldilocks enigma, talks about super-turtles and observations behind the horizon, and discusses both intelligent design as well as not-so-intelligent design. :-)

Finally, you may learn about his original improvement of the multiverse ideas: Davies argues that the existence of intelligent life today helps to shape the past in an acausal fashion but I can't tell you the details because you wouldn't buy the book if I told you the punch line, especially if I mentioned whether I believe a word here or not. :-) The book is recommended by Nature, Michio Kaku, and Joel Primack, and it is dedicated to John Wheeler who never hesitated to ask big questions.

"Admitting failure" concept

In this story, "S" is a scientist. The letter can stand for "String theorist" but if in fact, if it were "Skeptic", it wouldn't be too different.

PW: Why are you studying what you are studying?
S: Because I think it is interesting!
PW: No, you are studying it because you do not want to admit failure!
S: No, I really think it is interesting.
PW: No, no, admit failure at once!
S: If I admit failure, can I still continue studying what I am studying?
PW: Yes. But why would you?
S: Because I think it is interesting!

Via Gina.

James Hansen on scientific reticence

A preprint on the arXiv

• physics/0703220 (PDF)

was written by Rev. James Hansen, the vice-prophet of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) denomination. He proves that the sea levels will rise more than 6 times (and probably 20 times) faster in the 21st century than they did in the last 50 years.

His proof is based on the concept of "scientific reticence" which is an improved version of "scientific consensus". While the consensus method allows one to prove numbers that many people who haven't looked at it carefully - but who voted for the same politicians - agree with even though they don't have any evidence, "scientific reticence" is much better because it allows a scientist to prove numbers that are about 30 times higher than the numbers obtained by the method of the "scientific consensus". The reticence method is thus clearly superior. How does it work?

In the context of the sea levels, the existence of reticence is proven by Rev. Hansen's story from California. A lawyer noticed that Hansen was not a glaciologist and he wanted to know the name of at least one glaciologist who publicly agrees with Hansen's statement that the sea level will rise by more than one meter in the next century. Hansen couldn't name one which he uses as a proof that there is "scientific reticence". Because there is no one who publicly agrees with him, it follows that scientists are reticent and their predictions of catastrophes are therefore huge underestimates.

Another paper from Rev. Hansen's list of references that supports the theory of reticence is the paper by Barber (1961) that discusses "resistance by scientists to scientific discovery". It implies, among other things, that if you want to have some good science, you should first execute all scientists because they will prevent any scientific progress. Instead, you should hire people like Rev. Al Gore to do the science.

This well-established reticence is then used to prove theorems such as that

• the climate scientists who downplayed the dangers of climate change have received more funding
  
• there is a pressure on scientists to be conservative
• scientists are so reticent that all of them underestimate the sea level rise by orders of magnitude
  

As a corollary, Hansen has proven that Lenny Susskind's picture of the multiverse is correct because Hansen must obviously live in a different universe than your humble correspondent.

Hansen hasn't considered the possibility that it is the largest ocean who is reticent - or at least Pacific; in Czech, we call it The Silent Ocean.

At any rate, Rev. Hansen has essentially proven all of his prophecies - and the only task for your humble correspondent is to avoid possible accusations of reticence and say very loudly that Rev. Hansen has approached Woitian levels of "depth", "relevance", and "objectivity" of scientific argumentation. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Unless you want to use your brain.




And that's the memo.

Via Willie Soon.

Zodiac sign: Serpentarius

Astrology is a communist pseudoscience

Ann asked me what is my zodiac sign: well, it is Serpentarius, currently called Ophiuchus, the least known among the 13 zodiac signs: see the symbol on the left. Everyone who was born between 11/30 and 12/17 had this sign behind the Sun although most of these people incorrectly assume that they are Sagittarius. ;-)



Figure 1: Sagittarius Serpentarius (Secretary Bird), the heterotic result of a compromise between the scientific and unscientific approach to the zodiacal constellations. It is an extraordinary bird of prey in the "least concern" category. The word "secretary" comes from the pencils that it stores for the secretaries. According to others, they're arrows which is why it is a Sagittarius. But the bird likes to eat snakes which is why it is Serpentarius.



Ann Coulter recently pointed out that astrologers are almost as untrustworthy as the global warming alarmists. I agree with her: astrology is just another communist pseudoscience. :-) The main features of astrology that justify this description are the following:

1. egalitarianism
2. elimination of inconvenient groups
3. static picture of the world
4. the desire to control the world from the top

Egalitarianism of astrology is obvious. All zodiac signs had to be assigned exactly 1/12 of the year - just like every European country can only get one out of 12 stars on the European flag - even though there are obvious differences in the size of the constellations.




More seriously, it turned out that there is a 13th constellation, the Serpentarius, that didn't fit the pre-conceived picture at all. Well, it had to be eliminated from the list of astrological signs. There must exist egalitarianism but only for those who "deserve" it. Those who are outside the box must be sent to Siberia and destroyed.

The ideology behind astrology was absolutely static. They believed Aristotle's dogma that the heavens couldn't ever change. Aristotle could have been smart in some ways but in most ways, he was nearly as naive as the proponents of Gaia.

Johannes Kepler, an early 17th century string theorist who became famous for the laws describing the low-energy non-relativistic two-body limit of string theory and who discovered an early version of the ADE classification, observed the last certain supernova explosion in our Galaxy: SN 1604 occured on the right Serpentarius' leg in 1604. Galileo Galilei, a fellow string theorist, later used Kepler's observation to disprove the Aristotelian dogma that the heavens were completely static.



Figure 2: Kepler's drawing of Serpentarius: wasn't he a great artist? The supernova "N" is near the right leg.

This dogma has always been very powerful. For example, they used to think that if they would divide the year into 12 zodiac signs, such a fragmentation of the year would be valid forever. Some better astronomers have known about the precession of the Earth. At any rate, the zodiac signs have shifted by 1 sign since the zodiac was introduced because it has been more than -(1+2+3+4+...) of the period of the precession which is D thousand years. Recall that the sum of integers equals -1/12 and the critical dimension of bosonic string theory is D=26.

Of course, the people who were designing the zodiac didn't care that the future generations would feel annoyed by this upgef*cked science. In some sense and despite their quiet temperament, the creators of the great global astrology swindle were the same kind of megalomaniacs as the proponents of the catastrophic global warming. Both of these groups think that they're smarter than the people who will live centuries in the future from now which is why they want to dictate how the people in the future should live, what constellations they should believe coincides with the Sun, and how much carbon they should emit. The future generations feel cheated by their ancestors.

Finally, astrology wanted to organize the world from the top. The stars, planets, and constellations were Big Brothers - or Big Sisters, in order for me to be politically correct - who had the right to control human lives as well as all microscopic processes on Earth and elsewhere. Astrology was wrong and other leftist ideologies are wrong, too. :-)

And that's the memo although this particular one is not 100% serious. Well, it's as serious as CosmicVariance's cute entangled cat and the struggle between beer and wine in the Democratic primaries.

Microsoft: 20 million licenses for Windows Vista

Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp's new operating system, has sold 20 million copies during the first month - essentially February 2007. That's more than 17 million copies of Windows XP sold in the first two months back in 2002. The demand is strong globally. Vista on new computers is the key and the consumers prefer the Premium edition because the semi-transparent Aero windows are simply cool and you won't find them in the Home Basic edition.

You can see that Ballmer's comments that he was afraid were BS.

Czechia, Slovakia, Poland vs. EU

The European Commission has slashed the annual 2008-2012 carbon limits for the Czech Republic by 15% to 87 million tons a year, and those of Poland by nearly 30% to 209 million tons a year. France is satisfied with its 133 million ton cap because it has a lot of nuclear power plants.

The numbers are comparable to the 2005 emissions.

The Czech Republic and perhaps Poland are planning to join Slovakia and sue the bastards in the EU who want to eco-terrorize the new members for whom the higher growth is necessary in order to catch up with the rest of Europe. Indeed, the recent growth in Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland was about twice the growth in the Western Europe and the Eurobureaucrats want to punish the new members for this growth.




It seems that Brussels may have forgotten that the Czech Republic has its good soldiers, too: see the picture. ;-)

Anti-Big-Bang conference at Imperial College London

A conference will take place from Monday to Thursday:

• Alternative cosmology conference website

The organizers are very tolerant so they have also invited people who dare to believe that the data support the standard model of cosmology. ;-)

However, attacks will be the main point. Lawrence Krauss and Subir Sarkar will argue that dark energy probably doesn't exist. (It is probably too dark and can't be seen, and what can't be seen is religion, not science?)

Tom Shanks will argue that the CMB has a bug because we don't see "shadows" of nearby galaxies in it. Alain Blanchard will show that there's no evolution of clusters seen in X-ray data, in contradiction with the theory. Jelle Kaastra and Niayesh Afshordi from Harvard will count the molecules in daily life, and by getting 40 percent more than we see, they will also falsify cosmology. Kate Land and Carlo Contaldi will point out an odd alignment but these people argue that inflation could explain it. Andrew Jaffe will argue that the Universe has an exotic topology. See

• press release.

As YS has pointed out, a babe in the Universe, Dr Louise Riofrio of the aptly named Cook University, attends the conference and will report about it on her babe blog. She is well-known for her new cosmological theory, "M=t". The "M=t" (mass equals time) version of her theory of the Universe is in Planck units and in a few years, her collaborators will re-discover the Planck units and find this remarkably simple form of her theory of everything.

One of the most impressive virtues of the "M=t" theory is that it works (if you neglect all observations except for this paragraph). Recall that the age of the Universe is 10^{60} Planck times. The volume is thus about 10^{180} Planck volumes. Mutiply by the cosmological constant, 10^{-120} (the number from the C.C. problem), and you get 10^{60} again! In other words, the cosmological constant goes like "rho=1/t^2": the product of the cosmological constant and the holographic screen area equals one in Planck units. I am sure you know why. ;-)

Via Benny Peiser.

Role of mathematics in science

It has been four centuries since Galileo Galilei discovered the scientific method as we know it. What were the main breakthroughs that allowed him to switch mankind from the pre-scientific mode of thinking to the scientific mode of thinking?

Time-dependence controlled by maths

No doubt, one of his most important contributions was the discovery that mathematics and quantitative thinking can be applied and should be applied to dynamical processes. As Steven Weinberg said, it was Galileo who put time into physics. No one before him had this idea: the closest thing people knew was static geometry, a gift of ancient Greece, that can be viewed as the oldest branch of physics describing perfectly solid and static objects in a certain limit, although nowadays we usually re-interpret the history and include the Greek discovery to be a part of mathematics that has nothing to do with natural sciences. However, the Greeks didn't respect our modern boundaries between physics and mathematics and they would surely have no difficulties to be counted as physicists.

In one of Galileo's key experiments, he had to determine whether the acceleration by gravity increases the velocity by the same amount per unit time or unit distance. His experiments with inclined planes in Pisa are legendary. The answer to this question was, of course, that the velocity increases under the influence of gravity by the same amount per unit time.

Refining the theories

Galileo drew the road map to study Nature ever more rationally, relying on ever more careful quantitative arguments and measurements and using ever more sophisticated mathematical structures. Isaac Newton had to discover the calculus in order to describe the motion of apples and celestial bodies. Others had to invent partial differential equations, Lie groups, Hilbert spaces, path integrals, RG flows, conformal field theory, and many other things that were necessary for a proper quantitative understanding of various physical systems.




As our understanding of various physical systems got better, we were able to make increasingly non-trivial and sophisticated predictions with ever smaller amounts of input information. We could understand and predict much more than what we could directly see with our eyes. As physics was making further progress, the gap between these two categories kept on increasing. Today, we understand the internal architecture of cells, atoms, as well as protons; we know how the Sun produces the heat and how the Universe has been expanding for 13.7 billion years even though all these insights, and millions of others, are clearly well beyond what we can experience directly.

Although there are many fields of science where abstract reasoning is not too important, the role of pure thought in theoretical physics has surely increased, too. Theories were inevitably getting more abstract. The power of mathematics - a tool that allows us to create very indirect yet robust arguments - is in fact known in many other fields such as genetics. It has become normal to reconstruct evolution of DNA by a careful statistical analysis of the DNA code or to study cancer with math. Some critical insights in physics such as special theory of relativity and general theory of relativity were essentially found by pure thought, requiring no new experiments whatsoever. These theories were ultimately proven by experiments but it is fair to say that e.g. the theoretical foundation of general relativity remains more important than the particular experiments that have verified some of its predictions.

Thinking remains a heresy

Nevertheless, 384 years after Galileo famously wrote that

• Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the Universe,

some people - including some men who have even been awarded PhD degrees in physics - completely misunderstand what science is all about. The owner of the blog called "Not Even Wrong" is a textbook example. He attacks Prof Mark Srednicki, the chairman of physics at UCSB, for saying obvious things that every physicist understands - namely that the task for physics is to find out what is true i.e. correct and what is not: whether the result is easy to see or hard to see - and whether a theory is compatible with some philosophical dogmas - can't influence our judgments about the validity of a theory.

In Lenny Susskind's words, it would be very foolish to throw away the right answer because of its tension with an arbitrary definition of "science". What is needed for something to be science is to be falsifiable in principle: when it is, it is science, and whether it is easy or hard to actually falsify the theory in practice can't play any major role in the search for the right answers.

"What I can't see can't exist"

Mr Woit thinks that if someone uses the word "true" without having a doable experiment, he must surely be a member of a religious church. Some of his readers delight us with their post-modern "wisdom" that the truth doesn't exist and cannot exist.

Mark Srednicki is a particle physicist who has made very important contributions to the question of open string tachyon condensation in string theory (the first "bulk" example) but who may nevertheless be considered to be a general particle physicist by many people because this is where he has made most of his other important contributions. Well, it shouldn't be surprising because this dispute has nothing specifically to do with string theory either. It is a dispute between people like Mark Srednicki who know what high-energy physics actually is and who have been doing it for years on one side, and science-haters like Peter Woit who only know what science is from their insane twisted anti-theoretical ideological rants on the other side.

Srednicki of course talks about quantum gravity - something that has always been a task primarily for the theorists. Everyone whose IQ exceeds 90 and who is given a five-minute explanation what phenomena quantum gravity studies should understand that it is probably very difficult to find experiments that would test the relevant phenomena directly. It follows that theorists' work in quantum gravity is destined to be more important than experimenters' work. It has always been the case, it is still the case, it will probably be the case in the future, and only very limited people can misunderstand why.

The most current discussion between scientists and laymen can be found on this Clifford Johnson's page. See also a routine addition of mine.

Chicken Little Society has been around for centuries

Peter Woit and his comparably "reasonable" readers would apparently like to ban any science whose impact they can't see with their eyes or understand with their brains. What incredible [beep] these people are! Let me enumerate a few examples of criticisms of science in the past that was virtually identical to their present criticism ("it can't be seen so it must be bad"), in order to demonstrate that a certain kind of human stupidity simply can't be eradicated:

• Columbus was criticized for his plans to try the Western route to India because this reasoning based on the round shape of Earth was pure theory but it would surely be a waste of sailors in practice
  
• Charles Darwin has been criticized by creationists because his theory was "untestable": we can't re-run evolution in the lab from the scratch, they still say; Darwinism and string theory are analogous
• The promoters of the atomic theory in statistical physics and chemistry were criticized for their "pure theory" because it was "obvious" that no one could have ever seen something as small as the atom
• Chemists were criticized by philosopher Auguste Comte for their attempts to talk about the chemical composition of celestial bodies: this question was forever inaccessible to humans because we couldn't travel into the Sun; it took 7 years only before Comte was proven wrong
  
• Alfred Wegener was humiliated for his theory of continental drift because no one can apparently ever move the continents and his reasoning was just a mad theory based on patterns (shape of Africa and America and similarities of plants and fossils, for example) that couldn't correspond to the material world
• 2,000 Nazi physicists told Einstein that he was wrong as his theories of relativity had nothing to do with the work they could do in their labs (besides his "wrong" race)
  
• Mainstream quantum mechanicians were criticized for their statement that only probabilistic predictions were possible; some critics thought it would always be impossible to decide whether there could exist hidden variables
• The quark theory was criticized because it deals with abstract objects - quarks and gluons - that can never be seen in isolation, and are thus untestable
• Pierre-Marie Robitaille criticizes the Big Bang theory because it deals with remote (cosmic) sources that can't be created in the lab; the origin of the CMB must surely be in the oceans because the Earth is more testable

I hope that the reader believes me that one could find dozens of other, and probably much better, examples in which science was attacked by the omnipresent Chicken Little Society.

Criticism without content has no value

In all these cases, the critics were wrong. But even if they were not wrong in a similar situation, this kind of criticism was just pure garbage in all the cases. A sensible person simply can't criticize a scientific direction just because it hasn't yet been proven or because it is difficult to prove it. The whole goal of science is to work on theories that have not yet been proven. The only way to criticize a theory is to show that it is wrong and why it is wrong. Whoever criticizes a theory just because it doesn't agree with his emotions and philosophical preconceptions is a bigot.

Whoever thinks that the key adjectives in science, namely "right" and "wrong", should be replaced by some completely different labels that should become primary blatantly contradicts the very general purpose of science: the search for the right answers.

"Mathematical arguments and logic are illegitimate again"

People like Peter Woit simply deny all of science, much like some of their predecessors in the list above. They want to return us before Galileo to the era in which it was not allowed to use any sophisticated and careful mathematical arguments. They apparently don't believe that mathematics plays any role in physics. Scientists could only be allowed to work on their science if they could show the results so that literally everyone - including people like Woit himself - would immediately see them. But this is not the environment in which science could work because science must first work on the hypotheses that are not quite obvious, and only after the work is completed, the results may become manifest.

This dispute is certainly not about string theory only. It is about the whole scientific method for which a careful, cool, quantitative, and mathematics-based reasoning has been more important - at least in the last four centuries - than some philosophical preconceptions restricting what kind of science is allowed and what kind of science is not. In science, a calculation is simply much more relevant than a propagandistic label attached to a theory. At the fundamental level, physics is known to satisfy mathematically solid laws even though a similar assumption could be misleading in other sciences.

Truth vs profit

Nature doesn't care whether Her secrets can be easily discovered or not. If we look at the history of science, it is very easy to see that some secrets were easy to be found while others were not. Predictions of some theories could have been easily and accurately measured, predictions of other theories could not.

It is a rationally unjustifiable bias to prefer theories that are easy to test. In the case of quantum gravity, because of the very definition of the task, we always expected that it would probably be difficult to experimentally test anything about it in any foreseeable future. This is not a new insight. It has been an inherent feature of quantum gravity since the very beginning. For example, the typical distance scales are likely to be as small as 10^{-35} meters - the Planck scale. No sane person could have ever thought that it would be trivial to design experiments that measure what happens at this length scale.

Nevertheless, we can show that at this distance (or a longer one), inherently quantum gravitational effects have to become important. We have made a huge progress in our understanding what happens in this regime.

For example, we know that black holes have thermodynamical properties. When they evaporate, the information is preserved while causality is violated by exponentially small effects. Topology of space can change and different geometries may be physically indistinguishable. Theories of gravity in AdS spaces are equivalent to non-gravitational theories defined at the boundary. These are not philosophical clichés but rather popular summaries of very accurate, rigorous, and robust analyses of various systems that almost certainly belong to the same "universality class" as objects in our Universe.

Direct experiments are not the only tools of science

If we have no easy experiments, it doesn't mean that we should give up. The history of science is literally flooded with examples of correct theories that have been found with a minimal help of new experiments - even though the members of a certain religious cult find this fact highly inconvenient. We don't need to change anything about the scientific method and we shouldn't change anything. It is clear that what the scientific community has to do is to take the best tools we have and deal with them in the most rational and careful way to learn as much as we can. It is very clear that in the case of quantum gravity, careful mathematical arguments and calculations are the key to success and we have already seen quite a lot of this success.

There are dozens of other reasons why the attack by people like Peter Woit is completely irrational. They will tell you that if we find the right answers with the help of careful mathematical reasoning and without any new experiments, it must surely be a religion. But they never realize - and they never admit - that their statement that string theory is not the right direction how to complete the theory of fundamental particles and forces is at least the same religion because they have no experimental evidence for their statement either.

Well, I think that every sane scientist would choose a direction that is justified by robust mathematical arguments and that reproduces all previous theories rather than a direction that is only justified by the hatred of dozens of silly and biased people.

And that's the memo.

Alaska: record cold snap

The coldest period Feb 12 - Mar 20 in Alaska occurred in 2007. The average temperature was minus 13.1 degrees Fahrenheit, i.e. 17 degrees Fahrenheit below the average, and it was enough to freeze not only alarmists' smiles but also septic lines.

Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control

Tom in Fairbanks, AK informed us that Tim Flannery, an Australian climate change activist, gave a talk about global warming during the cold snap. Larry R argued that it was a manifestation of the generalized Gore effect. ;-)

This is the second time I saw the name of Tim Flannery today. So I should tell you that in his book "The Weather Makers", page 291, the author proposes that "humans" have no other choice than to establish a global military junta that he calls

• Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control

unless all demands to regulate carbon are met by the people of this planet. The goal of this junta would be to stop democracy and carbon circulation in the world and stop the climate from changing. Flannery argues that his pet project could easily grow out of Kyoto.

Now you know how the cutting-edge climate "science" looks like. Well, other people could think that it could be a good idea to decarbonate the bodies of these greenshirts such as Flannery before it's too late. While their brown predecessor was more concerned about global warming than Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill, or Mr. Stalin, he brought a lot of problems to the world anyway.

And that's the memo.

Alternative physicist who "invented" the landscape

One of the self-described new Einsteins' favorite games is to claim the discovery of some well-known or important concepts even though it is transparent that they not only failed to discover it but they, in fact, still don't understand it. Let me illustrate it with the example of an alternative physicist who has "invented" the landscape.

The self-described physicist responds to a wise comment by Mark Srednicki who points out, using the example of Brian Greene, that real scientists are primarily asking and answering questions whether something is true or not, rather than asking whether it is compatible with their dogmas. The self-described scientist under consideration shows that despite Mark's patient explanation, he still has no idea about this basic goal of science:

• Dear Mark... Your selective quotation of me badly misstates my position. Not only do I acknowledge that the landscape is a possibility, I invented the idea, named it and was the first to explore its consequences, in papers from 1992 on.

It's not bad to "invent" a theory eight years before its simple version is discovered (BP) and eleven years before its more concrete and acceptable version appears (KKLT). Except that the landscape is not an "idea" and it cannot be "invented". The landscape is a set of solutions whose existence is a result of a detailed analysis of the stringy equations of motion. The only step that a researcher can do with the landscape is to "discover it", not "invent it", and she can only do so if she actually makes the hard work. It is impossible to discover or invent the landscape without these analyses that could only be done in this century.

The alternative physicist obviously can't distinguish a real discovery in science from a random sequence of buzzwords and guesses that can impress some of the laymen who read the newspapers but not the experts. These are extremely different things.

More seriously, the person above was certainly extremely far from being the first one who simply suggested that string theory could have a large number of classical solutions or backgrounds. For example, Wolfgang Lerche was talking about these things in the 1980s, using the number 10^{1500} as an estimate.

• My issue, since then has been how we can continue to make falsifiable predictions if the landscape is true. Back then I considered the use of the Anthropic Principle (AP), rejected it as unable to yield predictions, ...

Every high school student who is remotely interested in physics and who is explained what the anthropic reasoning assumes is able to figure out that if the anthropic principle is true, it is probably very difficult to make predictions. We don't need a supreme alternative physicist to tell us so and it is very silly if a person expects to be treated as a discoverer when he says these obvious words.

• and found that there are other non-AP scenarios for physics on the landscape that do imply falsifiable predictions.

They imply predictions that are not only falsifiable but they are falsifiable within a few minutes.

• My issue is then not with the landscape, it is with the use of the AP to do physics on the landscape. In fact, I had to wait many years for the string theory community to catch up and agree with me that the landscape issue was serious and needed to be addressed.

This is a nonsensical statement. The landscape "issue" can only become serious after the landscape is actually discovered. Once it's discovered, questions about it are obviously important. But the term "landscape issue" is ill-defined and can't be "serious". It's just a vague emotional combination of words that don't mean anything which is why it is impossible to imagine that physicists would have to "catch up" with these vacuous words. Physicists never try to catch up with nonsensical fog.

• To make this clear, let me give the full context of the quote of my book you use from p 165 of [his text]: …when it comes to the biofriendliness of our universe, we have at least three possibilities: ...

If the prefix "bio" is meant seriously, let me say that high-energy physics is not discussing the question of "biofriendliness of our universe" because it belongs largely to biology and most of it belongs to biology in the far future. The person continues with these options:

1. Ours is one of a vast collection of universes with random laws.
2. There was an intelligent designer.
3. There is a so-far unknown mechanism that will both explain the biofriendliness of our universe and make testable predictions by which it can be confirmed or falsified.

Neither 1) multiverse nor 2) God or 3) the possibility of complete predictive laws was first suggested by this person. It is just crazy to see that the person constantly wants to be credited for these things, including the discovery of God.

• Given that the first two possibilities are untestable in principle, it is most rational to hold out for the third possibility.

They're not untestable in principle. If someone designs a concrete model how an intelligent designer works, this theory may become very testable - and usually quickly falsifiable. ;-) Analogously, the multiverse may lead to predictions under certain circumstances - for example, small bubbles containing other universes within ours etc. The possibilities 1) and 2) are clearly disappointing and physicists will tend to avoid them as long as they see a chance to implement 3), but this observation is something completely different from the truth. The assertion that it is "most rational to believe 3)" is just another form of religion. In the absence of a specific mechanism to implement 3), the belief that the right answer is 3) is another belief just like the belief in 1) or 2). Whoever claims that it is something else than a belief or even that he can prove it is preaching a religion, not doing a science. We are simply not guaranteed that the answer is 3).

Moreover, it is silly to decide whether the answer is 1), 2), or 3) in advance. If one discovers a particular physics mechanism, it may remain very uncertain whether the mechanism should be described as 1), 2), or 3). Of course, 2) God is way too disconnected from the usual language of science and almost no scientist would say that a realistic discovery in physics supports the existence of God, even though it is a terminological issue. But whether we have 1) or 3) is a matter of convention. Even if the 1) multiverse exists, no one can be sure that all predictions are impossible. People should try which will move them from 1) closer to 3). To summarize: the separation of possible solutions into those 3 philosophical categories is inconsequential for physics.

• Indeed, that is the only possibility we should consider as scientists, because accepting either of the first two would mean the end of our field.

This is a profoundly immoral statement. It is not scientist's job to be thinking whether something will bring bright future to his or her field. The scientist's task is to find the truth regardless of its impact on his profession. For example, if there is only the Higgs boson at the TeV scale, the task for the CERN experimenters is to demonstrate that there is only the Higgs boson at the TeV scale. And I am sure that they will do so even though it is clear that this won't be great news for the future of particle physics. But anything else would be a fraud.

The author of the lines above is proposing the same kind of fraud but in theoretical physics. An honest theoretical physicist must judge the available evidence in the most objective and wise way he or she can, and whether or not one answer will make the future of the field brighter or less bright should have no impact on his decisions whatsoever. You can see that what the author of the lines proposes is to introduce the same "moral" standards as a part of climatology has adopted: the goal is to generate "exciting" results that will guarantee that money will flow to their field. I am absolutely convinced that theoretical physicists won't tolerate such dishonest thinking.

• Then, two pages later, on p 167 I discuss my original approach to the third possibility, from 1992. I beg your indulgence to quote at length, given that there are people who don’t read [his text]: But what about the third possibility, which is an explanation for the bio-friendliness of our universe based on testable hypotheses? In 1992 I put a proposal of just this kind on the table.

One that was instantly falsified by many independent arguments.

• To get testable predictions from a multiverse theory, the population of universes must be far from random.

This whole strategy of reasoning is irrational. Nature doesn't care a single bit whether the theories describing Her will be easily testable or hardly testable or untestable. Searching restricted to easily testable theories is like searching for the lost keys under the lamppost only. Among many theories that describe certain parts of Nature that we already know, some were easily testable and others were not. Making assumptions that theories describing Nature should be easily testable is irrational bias, wishful thinking, and it is strictly speaking incompatible with the scientific integrity.

• It must be intricately structured so that there are properties that all or most universes have that have nothing to do with our existence. We can then predict that our universe has these properties.

Even if we adopted the wishful thinking, the statement above is scientifically vacuous until someone actually determines what these properties are supposed to be.

• One way to get such a theory is to mimic the way natural selection works in biology.

Well, it is nice to try to mimic something. As long as we only try to mimic, we shouldn't forget that the importance of natural selection was discovered by Charles Darwin and not by his late 20th century imitators. One may try to import Darwin's idea to other sciences but it can only be described as a valuable transfer once it leads to something that works. That has certainly not been the case in physics so far. It is baffling to see someone boasting about this worthless bogus "invention" that a real scientist would be ashamed of.

• I invented such a scenario in the late 1980s, when it became clear that string theory would come in a very large number of versions.

First of all, today we know - because of the discovery of dualities and various transitions in the 1990s - that it is not true that there are many versions of string theory. On the contrary, we know that there is only one string theory although it has many minima of the potential.

Another point. You can see that the author is using the word "invent" all the time. It is no typo. The person actually keeps on inventing various fantasies that can impress ignorant laymen. But this person has never discovered something and seems to have no feeling what it means to discover something and what's the difference between discovering something that objectively exists and inventing something new that has nothing to do with reality but makes you feel as an "inventor".

• From books by evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Lynn Margulis, I learned that biologists had models of evolution that were based on a space of possible phenotypes they called fitness landscapes.

That doesn't seem terribly relevant for high-energy physics.

• I adopted the idea and the term and invented a scenario in which universes are born from the interiors of black holes.

One that could have been falsified in a few minutes, too. Some people are incredibly proud about all of their failures.

• In [a text] (1997), I reflected at length on the implications of this idea, so I will not go into it in detail here, except to say that that theory, which I called cosmological natural selection, made genuine predictions.

It made "predictions" only because the author of this "idea" didn't understand that his idea was ill-defined. At any rate, these predictions could have been easily falsified because they were naive and completely unmotivated kindergarten guesses that had no reason whatsoever to be correct. Physics is not about making random naive guesses all the time. Physics is about finding the most reliable framework to make correct predictions.

• In 1992 I published two of them and they have since held up, although they could have been proved false by many observations made since then.

Only the author of the sentence above, not a sane person, could say something along these lines. Most people find the theory so silly that they would never discuss it. Despite this fact, there have been quite many papers that have pointed out numerous holes in that theory that make it impossible to work on it.

• These are (1) that there should be no neutron stars more massive than 1.6 times the mass of the sun, and

Funny. A typical neutron star has mass between 1.35 and 2.1 solar masses. I wonder whether the alternative physicist agrees that 2.1 is greater than 1.6 and most of the observed interval actually disagrees with the silly "prediction".

• (2) that the spectrum of fluctuations generated by inflation — and, plausibly, observed in the cosmic microwave background — should be consistent with the simplest possible version of inflation, with one parameter and one inflaton field.

That's an ill-defined statement because there are many "simple" models of inflation even with one inflaton field. Moreover, as the CMB data get more accurate, we're revealing all kinds of new features such as the tilt (n=0.96) that is virtually a settled fact now and makes the multi-field models more likely. What is exactly the prediction above saying? It's a vague guess whose meaning is deliberately incomprehensible, much like the justification.

To summarize: the prediction 1) was falsifiable and easily falsifiable while the prediction 2) is confusing enough so that it is not falsifiable. This is not how good physics works: good physics always deals with theories on the fine edge that are good enough not to be shown wrong instantly, but that are still non-trivial enough so that they have some content.

• So I hope my point of view is clear: the landscape may or may not be a real feature of string theory - evidence is that I was right and it is.

For this person, claiming credit for the landscape is a symptom of an interruption of brain activity.

• But if it is we are not relieved of our obligation to test the theory by making falsifiable predictions for doable experiments.

The obligation of physicists is to find how the Universe works. They should do so without any bias that prefers developments that might be quickly rewarded. The more theoretical and mathematically inclined physicists we consider, the less true the statement about the "obligation" related to doable experiments is.

The harder it is to do relevant experiments, the more likely it is that most of the work will be done by theorists. Quantum gravity is, almost by definition, destined to be an arena where theory is more important than experiments. It has always been, it still is, it probably will be, and only stupid people misunderstand why this obvious basic fact is true. Unfortunately these stupid people were recently extremely loud in the media.

As Mark mentioned, we could also very well find a proof that string theory is the only theory of quantum gravity that is mathematically possible.

Quite a huge fraction of physics breakthroughs has been made more or less without any contact with doable experiments - including both theories of relativity - and calls to connect every piece of work in physics with "doable" experiments should be treated as what it is: a primitive Marxist screech of untalented people who feel uncomfortable when anyone else is doing something that transcends their own abilities.

Also, even if you like philosophers: Karl Popper never said that a theory is only scientific if it is easily testable or testable by cheap experiments in the near future, or anything like that. Of course he always meant that scientific theories must be falsifiable in principle. String theory clearly is; the general philosophical cliches of the alternative physicist are not.

• There is at least one scenario that stands both as an existence proof that this can be done and as a challenge to observers to falsify.

It has been falsified many times. It is just impossible, at least without an army, to force physicists to spend months or years with something that they can solve and clarify in a few minutes.

• Any newer proposal for doing physics on the landscape then has to do at least this well.

Well, that wouldn't be a real constraint. I hope that physics will do better not only than self-described new Einsteins and mediocre self-described seers but also better than the anthropic eternal inflation scenario. But my hopes are less important than the truth.

And that's the memo.

P.S.: In order to be superpolite, I have replaced the word "crackpot" by the term "alternative physicist" or its alternatives in the text above.