Lindzen and Choi 2011: lots of improvements

I was preparing a short climate talk and I decided it was sensible to at least mildly study the newest paper by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi that will appear in Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences:

On the observational determination of climate sensitivity and its implications (full text PDF)

I think it's a much more refreshing reading than the biased reactions at PNAS where the paper was previously submitted.

The authors have admitted several errors of their 2009 paper that were pointed out by subsequent papers and they believe that they have addressed them and the mistakes are fixed in the new 2011 paper.




The measured response of the energy fluxes at the top of the atmosphere to the changes of the sea surface temperature is still significantly larger than claimed by the IPCC and the climate sensitivity ends up being 0.7 °C. In fact, their 99-percent confidence interval is 0.5 - 1.3 °C. Imagine: they are 99 percent certain that the climate sensitivity can't exceed 1.3 °C. This is, of course, qualitatively incompatible with the IPCC whose lower bound is 2 °C.

Quite generally, I like the fact that their method uses lots of data point - a more detailed measurement of the responses to the atmospheres to many episodes of warming and cooling of the seas. This is the real source of their pretty impressive accuracy.

If the calculated sensitivity 0.7 °C were pretty much right, it would follow that one expects no warming by 2090 or so - when the CO2 will be twice the pre-industrial value - because a warming by 0.7 °C has already occurred so there's "nothing left", assuming for the sake of simplicity that all non-CO2 sources of warming average out over two centuries or so.

Feedback about the paper will be appreciated. It would be great if some TRF readers actually read the whole paper.

T2K: hint of neutrino oscillations driven by theta13

There are three light weakly interacting neutrino flavors. In fact, this figure has been measured by experiments that investigated the decay width of the Z-boson. This width is proportional to the number of the relevant neutrino species and allows you to say that there are roughly 3.01 plus minus 0.02 of them - or something like that. ;-)



Neutrinos were first claimed to exist by Wolfgang Pauli who used energy conservation. But they were given their name by someone who has found many things about them and the processes in which they participate, Enrico Fermi (picture above). He chose the funny little Italian suffix -ino not only to distinguish them from neutrons but also to place a piece of Italian terminology into physics for the future times when his nation may possibly become an ethnic group of savages who will deny that the nuclei store lots of cheap energy.

The Standard Model assumes that only left-handed neutrinos (and right-handed antineutrinos) are light enough; their right-handed neutrino (and left-handed antineutrino) partners are probably very heavy - near the GUT scale. Those heavy partner masses are Majorana masses. Then there are electroweak-scale Dirac masses mixing the light and heavy components.

When the heavy partners are integrated out, we obtain just the light species with new Majorana masses that are very light. They're lighter than the Dirac masses by the same factor as the Dirac masses are lighter than the heavy Majorana masses (so the Dirac masses are near the geometric average of the tiny and huge Majorana masses we have mentioned). That's why the mechanism leading to this relationship is known as the seesaw mechanism.




In experiments, neutrinos are usually produced with a well-defined handedness so there's really no detectable mixing between neutrinos and antineutrinos in the experiments we can perform. Even though the masses are Majorana masses, the two sectors - neutrinos and antineutrinos - are separated pretty much by the angular momentum conservation law.

See my report on Neutrino oscillations and Majorana/Dirac neutrinos from the last century for a more technical presentation of spinors, oscillations, and experiments testing various aspects of this science. Some things have changed but most of them have not.

However, there is a mixing between the 3 generations. The SU(2) partners of the electron/muon/tau charged lepton mass eigenstates are not necessarily mass eigenstates themselves. In an analogy with the CKM matrix for the quarks, the mixing of the neutrinos is described by a unitary PMNS matrix. Just like its CKM cousin, the PMNS matrix depends on 3 real angles and 1 additional CP-violating phase. The latter can't really be measured and it's assumed to be zero.

Several kinds of neutrino oscillations have been observed. The oscillations depend on the differences of m², the eigenvalues of the squared mass, and the mixing angles θ_12, θ_23, θ_13. The solar neutrino oscillations (causing a smaller inflow of neutrinos from the Sun relatively to the solar models) are caused by Δ(m²)_12, the difference between the two smallest m² eigenvalues in the matrix. That's not hard to understand: the Sun-Earth distance is long so the lowest-frequency processes are the most important ones.

The atmospheric neutrino oscillations are caused by the remaining Δ(m²)_13 and Δ(m²)_23 - the higher frequencies - and moreover, it empirically seems to be the case that these two quantities are nearly equal: |Δ(m²)_13| = |Δ(m²)_23|.

However, it's actually not known whether Δ(m²)_23 is positive or negative. These two "qualitatively separated options" consistent with the data are known as the normal and inverted hierarchy, respectively. The absolute value of Δ(m²)_{23} is 0.0024 eV² or so. One more mass difference may be measured but the absolute additive shift of all mass² parameters is hard to measure and remains unknown because the oscillations are only affected by the differences. The known parameters are:

• sin² (2θ_13) = 0 or 0.08 or so
• sin² (2θ_23) = 1 or 0.95 or so
• sin² (2θ_12) = 0.86 or so
• Δ(CP) = 0; if it is large, one may get differences for neutrinos vs. antineutrinos (there is a normal CP-violating phase to deal with before you scream that you violate CPT!)
• Δ(m²)_12 = 0.00008 eV²
• Δ(m²)_23 = Δ(m²)_13 = 0.0024 eV²; the sign is unknown (hierarchy)

All the known oscillations measured so far depend on θ_{12} and θ_{23}. Moreover, it seems that θ_{23} is almost exactly 45 degrees - so its squared sine is nearly equal to one. This is the "maximum mixing" because a mixing by 90 degrees would already be nothing else than the exchange of the eigenvalues. The angle θ_{12} is also high so it doesn't make much sense to approximate the neutrino mass eigenstates by the flavor eigenstates - they're very different things.

Now, this 2010 preprint explains the T2K experiment, a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment in Japan using Super-Kamiokande. Today, the collaboration has released its results:

Indication of Electron Neutrino Appearance from an Accelerator-produced Off-axis Muon Neutrino Beam

In the T2K device, they detected 6 electron neutrinos created out of muon neutrinos. When they compared it with the lower predictions, they claim that this is a 2.5-sigma evidence that θ_{13} responsible for this enhancement is nonzero. Their preferred sin²(2.θ_{13}) is about 0.15 plus minus 0.1 or so.

It's not a terribly accurate or safe measurement so far but it may get better in the future. The today's paper may be viewed as the first reasonably robust experimental evidence with many authors - listed on the first 5 pages - that the angle is nonzero. Let me mention that their result - that sin²(2.θ_{13}) is higher than 0.03 at a high confidence level - directly contradicts PDG 2005 where exactly the opposite condition is stated above (13.30). So it's surely not a solid result yet.

Lunar eclipse

If clouds or anything else have prevented from seeing the lunar eclipse, here is a video:



Note that people could have used this event to figure out that the Earth was round. You may see the ratio radius(Earth)/radius(Moon) either from the curvature of the boundary of shadow, or from the timing of the longest lunar eclipses divided by the speed of the moving shadow.




The radius of the Moon may be converted to kilometer if you measure its angular size and its distance. The latter may be measured by comparing the position of the Moon on the skies as seen from two different places on Earth. Note that if you move by 3,000 km, the angular direction of the Moon changes by 0.01 rad = 0.57°.

You may calculate (from the period, a month or so, and the distance) that the speed of Moon is about 1.0 km/s in average so if the Moon is able to hide for 100 minutes, the object that is creating the shadow - the Earth - must have the diameter comparable to O(10,000 km).

Well, this lunar eclipse wasn't the longest one possible but at least I got the right answer up to a factor of two which would be good enough to exclude Flat Earth theories. ;-)

Sometimes, life just sucks

If you embrace this concept, that sometimes life just sucks, it ironically helps you through the sucky part. Whether it be in business, money, relationships, the Red Wings, other drivers, Jim Cramer, the weather, Jim Cramer driving, the government, (did I say relationships?), children, siblings, ex-spouses, lawyers, oh, excuse me "attorneys" (I just sent $119 to the Georgia bar to be "inactive, retired, fed-up", or whatever they call their annual fee that I cower in fear of not paying for God knows what they might do)  relationships, banks, spam, oh the spam, insurance of all kinds, shoes, (yes, shoes, you have a problem with that?) relationships, one-hundred and five degrees in June and cutesy run-on sentences.  Yes, sometimes, life just sucks.

But we plow on, because sometimes, life doesn't suck.  Tequila, sex after tequila, the stock market, being held in the middle of the night, Italian food and the Red Wings.

There is a lot of stuff in-between, that doesn't exactly suck, but doesn't exactly not suck either. Woody Allen, iPhones, a sunset at the beach that we will never see again and one of those songs that so often grace these pages, poignant and full of memories of another time, another place, another life.

A

A microscopic look at hotel hygiene makes a microbiologist travel with an impervious mattress cover

From CNN:

The microbiologist Philip Tierno doesn't feel comfortable staying in hotels. He knows too much. He travels with an impervious mattress and pillow cover to protect against the unseen debris that guests leave behind. When humans sleep they shed about 1.5 million cells an hour.

While the covers were developed for allergy sufferers, Tierno encourages everyone to use them at home and on the road.

And definitely ditch the bedspread, he advises. Hotel bedspreads became a hot topic when one featuring bodily fluids from several sources was introduced in boxer Mike Tyson's 1992 rape trial.


How hotels clean drinking glasses

An Atlanta TV station used hidden cameras to monitor how the drinking glasses in hotel rooms were cleaned. In one case, a housekeeper appeared to clean a toilet and the glasses wearing the same gloves. In multiple hotels, the glasses were rinsed in the sink and dried for the next guests, in violation of health codes.

The Health Magazine lists the 12 germiest places in America or the so called "dirty dozen":

1. Kitchen sink
2. Airplane bathroom
3. A load of wet laundry
4. Public drinking fountain
5. Shopping cart handle
6. ATM buttons
7. Playgrounds
8. Bathtub
9. Office phone
10. Hotel-room remote
    
    

References:
A microscopic look at hotel hygiene, CNN, 2011.

Strikers should be fired

A general strike is crippling Greece today.

In principle, strike may be a legitimate tool of the employees to show or try to show that their work is more important and valuable than what the employer seems to indicate by her behavior. This claim may turn out to be right. However, this claim may also turn out to be wrong. Only if the strikers bear some responsibility for their decisions and behavior and if they are at risk of losing advantages because of their decisions, strikes may turn out to be a tool that improves the life of the society.



Once a nation enters the mode of thinking in which the employees are always right - because the government and the employers who are in charge are just reflections of the same striking employees - the nation is just destined to drop to the bottom of the sea. Glub glub glub. Such a nation is going to give ever greater advantages to the employees for ever smaller amount of work.

Tomorrow, there will be a strike in the Czech Republic. Trains and various cities' public transportation systems will be among the sectors that will make many consumers upset. Of course, the strike won't occur in as dramatic conditions as Greece but it's still annoying.




While I don't claim that my homeland is perfect, I see a striking difference between the atmosphere in Czechia and the atmosphere in Greece. In Czechia, most of the population realizes that the striking unionists are lazy assholes who just protect their own interests. Facebook is flooded with groups claiming that the "unionists don't speak on behalf of me". General population realizes that it has nothing to do with them. More importantly, it really has nothing to do with them.

Czech President Václav Klaus has urged the Czech government to hire private bus companies to do the job previously done by the unionists, and tell the strikers "good-bye". That means to fire them. I think that most people who are not directly involved in the strikes agree with our president. Some people will surely disagree. Some hardcore communist and/or socialist voters will always support lazy unionists, regardless of the context, as a matter of principle - but they're fortunately a small minority.

The situation in Greece looks very different. As far as I can say, the political confrontation in Greece is about a disagreement between lazy parasites and even lazier and more parasitic parasites. It's a battle between socialists, hardcore socialists, and communists. I am not sure whether there is any top politician in Greece who dares to say that as many of the strikers should be fired as possible. It's a job for any sensible employer to minimize the expenses and an employee who doesn't work much but who would surely love to be getting lots of money is not such a positive contribution to a company, or the mankind, for that matter.

Even if Greece were forgiven the USD 0.4 trillion debt, what's really wrong about the country - which already has the lowest Standard and Poor's rating among all countries in the world (and don't forget that some of them are really screwed!) - the main problem is that the citizens have lost their sanity. Their way of thinking is incompatible with the creation of wealth. It's not just the case that a majority of the Greeks have lost their sanity. It seems that almost no one who realizes that what they're doing is really intolerable is able to survive in that country. I think that everyone who would loudly say that the strikers have to be fired and replaced would be harassed or beaten in Greece.



Business as usual in Athens. Sara Firth of Russia Today is offering us a pretty peaceful, relaxed report. :-) Good idea to send them EUR 100 billion to have more money for Molotov cocktails and yogurts to throw at the cops. See two more minutes of some drama. The Telegraph can only shoot such things from a safe distance. ;-)

Greece is totally captured by insane conspiracy theories claiming that their debt is not real and that their unsustainable fiscal situation is just a numerical trick perpetrated by the evil global banks and others. It is just totally crazy. It is a country that is importing about 3 times more stuff than it is exporting. It is a country where people eat 3 times more than what they produce. How can these shocking and comprehensible coefficients be hand waved away by references to big foreign banks?

Obviously, a solution has to be radical if there's any hope for Greece to get back on the track. All government employees should see their salaries and pensions drop by something like 50 percent because it's really the government employees who are the source of the problem. That wouldn't reduce the living standards by 50 percent; it would only reduce them by about 30% because there would be a corresponding 20% drop in the prices as the bogus wealth of the people is erased and brought closer to the reality. But a radical change of this magnitude is necessary.

Slovakia has agreed to participate in the second wave of the likely waste of money but they have several conditions:

1. the Greek government should make more savings
2. it must start privatization and the opposition has to promise to continue in the privatization as well
3. the loan should be guaranteed by the state Greek property
4. the private sector should agree with delaying the maturity of the bonds by seven years

I have some doubts about the ability of Slovakia to assure that its viewpoint will be adopted but they're still perfectly sensible demands. The budget cuts have clearly been extremely far from being sufficient so far.

Privatization is needed. Together with that, Greece has to liquidate pretty much all of its "achievements" giving special rights to all the employees who are pretty much guaranteed by the law to be un-firable and to have salaries that are much higher than the work that they actually do. The business environment in Greece is suffocating because of the anti-employer and anti-prosperity socialist garbage regulations that so many Greeks still have the chutzpah to defend.

No wonder that the unemployment has increased from 11.6 to 16.2 percent in the last year and the unemployment between less-than-25-year-old folks, around 40%, resembles countries like Zimbabwe. Who would like to employ people under such conditions? The strikers pretend not to realize that the very demands they're defending during their strikes are the source of the high unemployment and the misery (which will inevitably get worse).

Because it's otherwise way too likely that all additional loans will be thrown to the trash bin, they should be actually backed up by some actual assets such as islands and the remaining state companies that have some value.

Finally, the private sector must share a burden because the taxpayers in the countries of creditors - and even in countries that have nothing to do with Greece (except for having entered the same currency union) - shouldn't be the only ones who suffer and who lose their money. Obviously, the rating agencies will have to decide whether such a forced collaboration means a "default". If I were working for a rating agency, obviously, I would think that it does. But the default of Greece is really unavoidable. All these extra ideas are just ideas how to make it more organized, following some predictable rules, and to give Greece chance that it will start to function as a proper country again in the near future. They're not ideas how to avoid any default because this would be an impossible goal.

If I were not personally able to see a Greek political party which is supported by dozens of percent of the population and which loudly emphasizes that the way of life that Greece was choosing in the recent decades was unacceptable, unsustainable, and has to be abandoned, and that it was unforgivable for the Greeks to repeatedly vote for pernicious left-wing populist parties such as PASOK, I wouldn't pay a penny to that country. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case. It is a nation brainwashed by idiotic utopias about a paradise where employees may have all advantages without doing the corresponding work. Such a nation has no future and shouldn't have any future.

It sounds very unpopular and I know that many people won't like it but I am convinced that at this moment, Greece vitally needs someone like Pinochet to take over, save the country and send it in the essentially right direction.

Will Solar Cycle 25 be annihilated?

PhysOrg.com and others are writing about a talk in New Mexico where solar physicists have hypothesized that the Solar Cycle 25 will be delayed or it won't occur at all.



The black region on the picture indicates the absence of activity near the Sun's poles. This activity should be occurring over there as a preparation for the Solar Cycle 25 expected to begin around 2020. Note that we entered Solar Cycle 24 a few years ago and a cycle lasts 11 years in average.




A missing jet stream and fading sunspots are among the other hints that the next cycle will be suppressed and we may enter a new Maunder-like minimum.



The butterfly diagram shows that the solar activity should be concentrated near the poles of the Sun at the beginning of the cycle, and then move closer to the equator.

Will it also mean a colder climate on Earth? Maybe. Well, I've been looking at those correlations and I wasn't impressed by the degree of correlation in recent years. So it's plausible that it will make some impact but I would tend to bet against a big impact.



Frozen Thames in 1677, in the middle of the Maunder minimum; the trends around 2020 would be more likely to resemble the middle of a milder Dalton minimum (1790-1830).

It seems very unlikely to me that the variable overall solar output itself is responsible for whole degrees of temperature change on the Earth; after all, it's changing at most by 0.1 percent which should correspond to a tenth of a degree only. If the solar activity makes a big difference, it's through the effects of the magnetic field on charged particles entering (or present in) the Earth's atmosphere, and or much bigger relative variations of the ultraviolet portion of the solar spectrum.

However, if you asked me whether it is reasonably likely that 2020 will be cooler than 2010 - well, my answer would surely be Yes, it is conceivable. The odds are about 50% that 2020 will be cooler than 2010. It's surely refreshing to see the media jumping on a new bandwagon - see the surprising headlines below - but I won't join them.

• Sun enters 'hibernation', cooling possible - Sydney Morning Herald, NineMSN
• What does the decline of sun spots mean for the Earth and its climate? - Alaska Dispatch
• A sun with no sun spots? What that could mean for Earth and its climate - Christian Science Monitor
• Solar forecast hints at a big chill - MSNBC blogs
• How a weather lull on the sun affects Earth - MSNBC

Lots of climate interpretations over there... Well, we will see.

See also NASA pages on Solar Cycle and SolarHam.com.

Rational thinking at Daily Kos

Anthony Watts has noticed a glimpse of a rational reasoning about the climate at one of the seemingly least likely places: one of the largest community servers dedicated to American communists and other extreme leftists, the Daily Kos. Their weatherdude has asked the community to

Stop saying everything is because of climate change. Just stop it.

The author actually realizes that there is no detectable trend in any of the extreme events and that claims that every latest unpleasant weather event is due to man-made climate change prove that the authors of these claims are dishonest fanatical biased jerks and crooks (he uses slightly different words, but the content is the same).

Among the 400+ comments, you surely find hardcore voices that "this diary is deeply troubling" but from a more general perspective, I feel that weatherdude will get away with this blasphemy against the far leftists' sacred cow. In fact, you will find many voices in the discussion that are even more skeptical than weatherdude.

Living lasers

You may have read about living lasers that were built out of proteins. Fun.



The cell stayed alive while being hired as a laser. :-) It's not necessarily the most handy thing in the world but it is kind of cool what people have managed to do. A similar recent news was about DNA-based calculators that can compute square roots! :-)

I just wanted to embed this video from NewsyScience because I can't believe that this pretty good new source of video information about scientific issues only has had two viewers so far. ;-)




Check the YouTube channel of Newsy Science that has so far uploaded 17 videos in the last three weeks.

Their general website is Newsy.com.

Children's Math Book: The Button Box

Button, button, who's got the button? Yesterday, I gave my 5yo a container of buttons and a bunch of tiny plastic containers. Left to his own devices, he prepared "snacks" for me; I got to choose the color of "snack" I wanted.

After our delicious purple and pink snack, we settled in to read a favorite book, The Button Box. In the story, a child sorts buttons from Grandma's button box, using a wide variety of categories, including looking at where the buttons may have come from: sparkly buttons from kings, leather ones from cowboy shirts, tiny buttons from old fashioned shoes, and shiny buttons from uniforms.  I've always thought this book a must-have for preK-kindergarten! ;) You might also read Grandma's Button Box, a Math Matters book.

Sleep Habits Differ by Ethnicity but All Groups Are Sleep Deprived

All ethnic groups said they missed work or family functions because they were too sleepy, with the percentage ranging up to 24%, according to a 2010 "Sleep in America" survey by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF).

Some distinct differences are listed below:

On weekdays or workdays, African Americans reported they slept the least - 6 hours, 14 minutes, compared to 6 hours, 34 minutes for Hispanics, 6 hours, 48 minutes for Asians, and 6 hours, 52 minutes for Caucasians.

10% of African Americans and Hispanics reported having sex every night or nearly every night in the hour before bedtime, compared to 4% of Caucasians and 1% of Asians.

African Americans had different pre-bedtime activities and tended to pray in the hour before bedtime - 71% of them said they prayed but only 18% of Asians did so.

Asians were least likely to drink alcohol an hour before bed - a practice that many mistakenly think will help sleep. Only 1% of Asians had a nightcap every night or nearly every night, compared to 7% of whites, 4% of African Americans and Hispanics.

Caucasians were most likely to sleep with their pets - as well as more likely to sleep with their spouse or significant others: 16% of them say they sleep with a pet, and 72% say they sleep with their partners. In comparison, only 4% of Asians, 4% of Hispanics, and 2% of African Americans let the pet on the bed.

References:

The 2010 Sleep in America poll by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF).

Sleep Habits Vary by Ethnicity. WebMD, 2010.

Image source: A halo around the Moon. Wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License.

D0 rejects CDF's claim on top-antitop mass difference, too

First: major LHC detectors reach one inverse femtobarn!

By 21:10 Prague Summer Time tonight, the CMS and ATLAS at CERN have collected 1/fb of data each: see viXra blog.

This was the original plan for the whole year 2011 - and it's reached in mid June! The figure includes 47/pb from 2010, but 47/pb is collected in 36 hours in average these days, so on Wednesday, the 2011 run will probably reach a femtobarn, too. About 95% of the data have been recorded, so in a few more days, one also surpasses 1 recorded femtobarn of the data.

The LHC could collect 4/fb by the end of 2011 and, because of expected luminosity increases, 15/fb by the end of 2012 which should be enough to discover the Higgs boson even at the most inaccessible places. In fact, if the Higgs boson isn't in the data that have already been collected by now, then it's probably lighter than 135 GeV. It follows that the vacuum of the Standard Model is unstable and needs new, SUSY-like particles to be saved.

Now, let's look at the opposite side of the Atlantic

A Japanese translation of the text below is available.

In March, Tommaso Dorigo hyped a preprint by the CDF Collaboration,

Measurement of the mass difference between top and antitop quarks

As far as I remember, I hadn't discussed that paper on this blog because I considered it and still consider it a very bad, offensive piece of work. At any rate, they claimed that the top quark was much lighter than the antitop antiquark:

M(top) - M(antitop) = -3.3 +- 1.4(stat) +- 1.0(syst)

Using this lousy measurement, they wrote a paper phrased in such a way that they offered a 2-sigma evidence that the CPT "hypothesis" (which, of course, implies that antiparticles have to have exactly the same masses as particles) was wrong.



CDF, a pretty detector that has produced lots of rubbish lately (and maybe it's the people behind it who did it)

This is just offensive. It's the kind of shoddy research with the most sensationalist claims supported by the weakest possible (and, independently of that, flawed) evidence that belongs to the climate "science" but surely not to particle physics.




Today, the CDF's competitors at D0 have released their paper on the very same question:

Direct measurement of the mass difference between top and antitop quarks

There is no sign of the mass difference, of course. In the previous D0 paper, the very same mass difference was +3.8 +- 3.4 (stat) +- 1.2 (syst) - yes, the mass difference was going in the opposite direction than the CDF claim! The newest D0 paper says it is

M(top) - M(antitop) = +0.8 +- 1.8(stat) +- 0.5(syst)

Again, it's the opposite sign than the CDF claim but the mass difference is as zero as you could hope. The accuracy of the measurement remains disappointing but the preposterous idea suggested by the CDF paper that the experiments would begin to uncover a huge, multi-GeV mass difference between the top and the antitop has clearly been debunked.

Something is really wrong with the CDF detector and/or the CDF Collaboration and/or their methods.



Newsy Science: this is actually a fair and clear popular report on the Wjj 150 GeV events

In March, I had some exchanges with an experimenter on Dorigo's blog. The first thing I wrote was:

I think that the interpretation chosen by this [CDF] paper is shameful sensationalism. Paying attention to 2-sigma deviations is bad enough, but using 2-sigma deviations to "disprove" one of the most important principles of the discipline is a really bad taste.

Whoever had the idea to interpret their inability to measure the masses of tops and antitops more accurately in this far-reaching way should be ashamed.

Sean agreed with me. Andrea Giammanco, an experimenter who is not even a CDF member, tried to defend their work:

Hi Lubos,

I suspect you didn't actually read the paper.
I didn't find a single sentence of the paper where they claim that this result "disproves" anything. If I missed it, please point me to the exact line.

The most bold sentence that I found is that it deviates at 2 sigma level from the CPT-symmetry expectation. What is your criticism, exactly? That they should have written "it agrees at 2 sigma level with the CPT-symmetry expectation"? Whomever is able to read until that point in the paper also knows that the two statements are the same.

I must also add that I can't understand the criticism in some of the comments above for looking for an effect that "cannot" be there.

I find healthy to look for deviations even when you have no reason whatsoever to expect a deviation; I understand in general the criticism that, with finite resources, these must be prioritized, but this is a particularly uncontroversial case because data are anyway available as a by-product of all the rest of the Tevatron program, and performing this study doesn't require any other cost than a few months of salary of just two people (*).

There are several instructive historical examples of important effects that could have been observed before, because the data for their discovery were already available or easy to produce, but none of the "owners" of the data had considered to look for that particular effect (or, even worse, had actually stumbled into a 2-3 sigma deviation and paid no attention, remodelling the background or inflating the systematic uncertainty to take it into account and therefore unwittingly hiding it under the carpet.)

(*) their number and identity can be seen here:
http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/physics/new/top/2010/mass/TMT_massdiff_p28_public/

So I gave him a longer explanation:

Dear Andrea, what I find offensive is their arrogant suggestion - included to the very title, and much of the abstract as well as the paper - that they have measured a nonzero difference between top and antitop masses.

To deduce what are the masses of the particles from their measurements, you effectively have to use some quantum field theory at one level or another. Quantum field theory implies that the mass difference is zero. So the most accurate measurement is to do nothing and to conclude that the difference is exactly zero.

In this sense, the most outrageous sentence about that paper is the last sentence, one that the measurement of the top-antitop mass difference - which is a whopping 3.3 GeV according to the CDF paper - is the "most accurate" measurement of the quantity.

This is just bullshit.

The most accurate measurement of the mass difference, done with a clever definition of the mass, is 0.000000 +- 0.000000 GeV, and neither they nor you have presented any real evidence that this is not the case. The CDF result is a striking sign of the immense inaccuracy with which they measure the mass of the heaviest quark, so it's really disingenious for them to claim that they've just produced the most accurate result.

They have produced one of the most *inaccurate* results for this quantity ever written down.

It is healthy to look for whatever effects but it is totally unhealthy to publish papers claiming to have measured effects that almost certainly don't exist, without having any real evidence for such claims.

CDF should have verified that they don't have any 5-sigma deviation, and because they don't, they should use the obvious identity mass(top) = mass(antitop) as a method to make their other measurements more accurate. In other words, they should have used the top-antitop average mass, 172.5 GeV, as the actual input to use for other measurements. They failed to do all such things which really indicates that most of the mass measurements depending on the matter-antimatter difference are likely to have similar 3.4-GeV-like errors, too.

They have surely nothing to boast about in this context, so it is irritating that they apparently do.

Cheers
LM

Obviously, they just don't feel that way. They produced the worst (largest) bullshit number ever describing the top-antitop difference - over 3.3 GeV even though it is obviously 0.000 GeV and many others have come really close to it - and they don't see any problem about claiming that the 3.3 GeV result for the mass difference is the "most accurate measurement". Holy crap.

Obviously, the conversations were completely unproductive. Maybe it's because the experimenters don't actually understand the laws of physics. Maybe they're being honest but they just don't know that to suggest that they have measured a nonzero mass difference of a particle and its antiparticle because of a 2-sigma bump is just idiotic. It's like claiming that the rectangular triangle with legs 3 and 4 has hypotenuse of 5.05 plus minus 0.02 meters which deviates from the Pythagorean "hypothesis" by 2 sigma.

Hopefully, they at least understand the experiments, so they should be able to understand that the D0 has just confirmed that I have always been right and that the CDF paper had actually made the most inaccurate measurement of the m(top)-m(antitop) mass difference ever, it should be ashamed of that paper, and it had absolutely no moral right to suggest far-reaching interpretations of their shoddy measurement.

Claims about the CPT violation (or, equivalently, about the nonzero matter-antimatter mass difference) are extraordinary claims and if you're a serious person, you simply shouldn't make them based on some illusions or 2-sigma signals.

I think that the CPT-symmetry is exact, a direct consequence of the Lorentz symmetry and analyticity. Just Wick-rotate your scattering problem to the Euclidean spacetime, rotate the "tz" plane by 180 degrees, and Wick-rotate back to the Minkowski space. You will get the CPT image of the original process. Because the analytic continuation and the "tz" rotation - which is a kind of the Lorentz boost - were the only operations and they're symmetries, it follows that CPT has to hold.

(You may be confused why the reversal of the "tz" plane gives you CPT rather than PT. While the obvious geometric transformation induced by this operation is PT, the particles also start to move backwards in time after this PT, and a particle moving backwards in time has to be interpreted as an antiparticle. So the full transformation is CPT, not PT, and one has to be sensitive to properly derive that the non-geometric "C" factor is included there as well.)

But even if you had doubts whether the CPT symmetry would be exact forever, it's just exact according to all measurements that had been done so far. So a claim that it doesn't hold - and that it's even violated by 2 percent by ordinary top quarks - is just an extraordinary claim and 2-sigma deviations are surely not good enough to claim to support the claim.

Tornado CO2 propaganda

Warning: the video below is amazingly offensive.



It still got 95% of upvotes among the 1,000 votes from 50,000 viewers. An op-ed by Bill McKibben is being read and illustrated by a Stephen Thomson of Plomomedia.com.




Just imagine how hopeless psychopaths those viewers have to be to upvote this propagandistic garbage. It's just stunning.

There are tens of thousands of "types" of interesting or "extreme" or "rare" weather events that could occur at various places of the globe. If one estimates 2,000 of their types (those that are "noteworthy enough") - specified by "what's going on" and "which region of the world is affected" - it's totally obvious that roughly 2,000/100 = 20 of them will set "new records" every year simply because the record books only go back 100 years or so and statistics guarantees that new records have to be set. If you have 100 numbers, the probability that the last one is the largest one is 1/100 which is large enough to set many new records in many things every year.

What's important is that if you avoid this insane hype about every interesting weather event and look at all possible weather events statistically, there is not a glimpse of a significant trend. The number of tornadoes is not increasing. The number of hurricanes is not increasing. The same thing applies to floods, typhoons, droughts, and all other local phenomena of this kind. Those people won't ever admit that everything they have said in the previous years about entering an era without snow in winter, entering an era with Katrinas every year, and so on, and so on, have been pure, shitty, and malicious lies. They don't care. They don't want to care. They're immoral scum.

How stupid a person has to be if she is brainwashed by this totally idiotic emotional gibberish that is based on nothing else than lies and irrational fears. Not a single portion of the data justifies the alarm. Not a single of those local weather phenomena can be linked to CO2 emissions in any scientific way. CO2 may have contributed tenths of a degree to the increase of the global mean temperature - but it hasn't changed and cannot changed anything significant about the character of the local weather.

Individuals helping to promote this alarmist garbage are the enemies of the mankind, enemies of the truth, enemies of the civilization, enemies of science, enemies of progress, and enemies of the Earth. What I hate about them is that they are so hopeless. There doesn't seem to be an infinitesimal hope that these people could ever start to think rationally and honestly. What they want to do is to repeat their offensive lies frequently enough so that tons of amazingly stupid gullible people will eventually buy it, much like many Germans bought that all their problems were due to Jews - or any other equally disgusting propaganda that we know from the history textbooks.

Any discussion that fails to eliminate these nasty chronic liars and McKibbens is guaranteed to be hopeless. A sensible discussion with them is impossible. They can only be dealt with from the position of power.

Italy abandons nuclear energy

A two-day referendum in Italy has just ended. Silvio Berlusconi has encouraged people not to vote.



Italy has its Greenpeace whackos, too

The referendum will be valid because almost 60 percent of the voters participated. They were asked to answer four questions. About 94% of the voters mindlessly said Yes to all of them. All the "Yes" answers mean "scr*w Berlusconi". One of them also scr*ws nuclear energy as a side-effect.




Italy stopped being a nuclear country in 1987, one year after the Chernobyl tragedy. It hasn't built anything for decades. Last year, strong nuclear proponent Berlusconi codified a plan to revive nuclear energy in Italy. Those plans seem to be dead in the wake of the referendum.



Poor Silvio will have to rely on biological sources of renewable energy again...

Well, I am not surprised. The recent news about their trial against seismologists who couldn't save lives by predicting an earthquake and who may spend 12 years in prison for their not being supernatural witches has reinforced my so-far subleading impression that Italians are weird emotional Southern savages so it would be shocking if they endorsed nuclear energy or any other marginally controversial achievement of modern science and technology, for that matter.

I guess that Fermi had to be an extraterrestrial alien. ;-)

Porcelain Unicorn

A genuinely touching mini-movie.




This story has won a 2010 short film award. The dialogue, "What is that? It's a unicorn. I've never seen one up close before. Beautiful. Get away, get away. I'm sorry," was pre-determined for all 600 contestants.

The people's runner up was Baby Time which is somewhat less serious. ;-)

Thanks to Gene, porcelainunicorn.com

Acyclovir reduces risk of HIV-1 disease progression, if positive for HIV-1 and HSV-2

Most people infected with HIV-1 are dually infected with herpes simplex virus type 2. Daily suppression of this herpes virus reduces plasma HIV-1 concentrations, but whether it delays HIV-1 disease progression is unknown.

In this study, the median CD4 cell count at enrollment was 462 cells per μL and median HIV-1 plasma RNA was 4 log10 copies per μL. Aciclovir reduced risk of HIV-1 disease progression by 16%.

The role of suppression of herpes simplex virus type 2 in reduction of HIV-1 disease progression before initiation of antiretroviral therapy warrants consideration.

References:

Daily aciclovir for HIV-1 disease progression in people dually infected with HIV-1 and herpes simplex virus type 2: a randomised placebo-controlled trial. The Lancet, Volume 375, Issue 9717, Pages 824 - 833, 6 March 2010.

Image source: Diagram of HIV. Image source: Wikipedia.

Summer Blogging Break!

Math Monday Blog Hop #10

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Zen and the Art of Trading Stocks

It is hard to use the word Chautauqua in a sentence.  OK, not so hard.  There was a famous book of the mid-1970's titled, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from which I have been inspired to speak to the yin and yang of trading.  The concept is simple, that there are opposing forces always at work in the market.  These opposites only exist in relation to each other and it is their interaction that a greater whole forms and becomes its own dynamic system.

That is why a fellow like Jim Cramer is such an idiot. For an hour a day he does a slight of hand where he paces a pea inside a walnut shell and while distracting you with his clowns hat and a whistle, rearranges the shells and then has you pull out your wallet and pick the shell that houses the pea.  You are betting with the town jester for the right to be the town fool.

In other words, Cramer espouses buy a stock and hope it will go up.  Romantic, but silly.  You may as well hope for world peace, or diamonds on the soles of her shoes.

On the other side is what we espouse at AllanTrends and is best understood within the context of the yin and yang of the marketplace.  It is the recognition of force applied to an object that determines the outcome.  If a greater force pushes, the object goes one way.  If a greater force pulls, the object goes the other way.  Ah, but the wild card here, the key to market success, is to identify the greater force, the one that has the staying power to create a trend.  One solution: look at which way the object is moving, there is the greater force.

After decades of technical trading, from moving average crossovers, to Elliott Waves, to neural nets, to channels to pattern recognition to astronomy to astrology, I was finally ready to see and understand the holy grail of trading. No, it's not a subscription to my AllanTrends.  It is the concept of being one with the market.  This was the essence of my two-second trading system from back in 1998, where I held up a chart to a group of traders at a seminar and asked them, after looking at the chart for only 2 seconds, "Do you wish you already owned this stock?." If the answer is, "Yes," the stock is a Buy, if the answer is, "No," the stock is a Sell, if the answer is, "I need more time," or, "I can't decide," then go on to the next stock.

No one can trade like that, it is too trite, too corny, to simplistic, too much a game, not serious investing, not credible, not Cramer.

As for credibility, it is at once secured by clothing the grail in math:  The AllanTrends Algorithm. An equation when applied to a set of data derived from the immediate past measures the probable direction for the immediate future.  It is an application of rational thought, in lieu of Cramer's bells and whistles, that uncovers, or at least approaches the Zen-like truth of the marketplace, "Being in the moment." My two-second test, reduced to its most basic, rational, objective, self;  The holy grail of trading.

"You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. "

— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

A

Lidice anniversary: Klaus vs Sudetenland nuts

In May 1942, the Czechoslovak government in London decided that the "blonde beast" and one of the main architects of the holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich, has committed too many crimes.

Even though he had never run in any elections, he was behaving as a kind of dictator on our territory, calling himself the "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia. Thousands of Czech people became the victims of his terror.




So much like in the case of Osama bin Laden, the government decided that the beast should be executed and from its London office, it sent a couple of paratroopers who simply executed him. The Czechoslovak government knew that every sensible German would agree, within a couple of years, with this decision.

However, at that time, many Germans failed to be sensible.

So in June 1942, the Nazis decided to revenge for the death of the beast. They irrationally misinterpreted a love letter addressed to someone in Lidice, or something like that, and decided that the village had to be destroyed. Sixty-nine years ago, on June 10th, 1942, they sent a couple of trained Nazi troops to the village, just Northwest of Prague. (Another village, Ležáky, was destroyed two weeks later.)



Lidice's children who were murdered. Memorial by Ms Marie Uchytilová who is also the author of the history's most famous Czechoslovak 1-crown coin with a woman seeding a plant. Click to zoom in.

I don't want to give you all the details. At any rate, all 190+ men were shot on the place and the kids and women were sent to concentration camps (with a few exception of newborn babies who could have been converted to Nordic Germans). Most of the kids were killed by gas, bringing the total casualties to 340+. All the trees and buildings were flattened. The village was, of course, revived after the war.

At the end of the war, it was clear that Czechoslovakia was incompatible with the Sudetenland Germans' past attitudes. The Nazis among them had previously demanded to become a part of the German federation. After the war, this desire was permanently fulfilled and the Sudetenland Nazis and their collaborators were expelled to Germany. Those Germans who could have proved their anti-Nazi resistance could stay but I assure you that it was just a tiny minority. Needless to say, the expulsion wasn't perfectly smooth and couldn't have been perfectly smooth.

Because of the communism that would start in Czechoslovakia just 3 years later, the Germans who were moved away really benefited economically but that's already a different chapter of the history. At any rate, I think it's obvious that after those years of Nazi terror that was almost universally supported by the German-speaking population, the emotions were inevitably high. I may get a bit upset even 69 years later, even though I had nothing to do with that history.



This year, on the very Lidice anniversary, the Sudetendeutschen Landsmannschaft, an organization of those Germans whose ancestors used to live in the Sudetenland and who would still love to rewrite the causal relationship between the different episodes above, demanded that the Czech president Dr Václav Klaus would apologize (again) for the imperfections that took place during the expulsion. This demand was articulated by Franz Pany.

Well, you may guess what the result has been. President Klaus said:

Apology has always made sense as a beautiful human individual gesture a person makes as one's own decision. [...]

Disputes over responsibility for World War Two and associated events cannot be resolved by apologies and certainly not by us, who live today, which means 66 years later. [...]

Some in Germany do not want to hear all previous apologising statements by the Czech side. [...]

Besides, demanding an apology on the day of the anniversary of the Lidice horrendous tragedy is a sign of extreme human insensitivity and inability to draw lessons.

Well, very true.

A typical Czech man in the pub probably calls the Sudetenland leader Mr Berndt Posselt (on the picture above) "a bloated Sudeten pig". However, former nominally social democratic Czech prime minister Dr Miloš Zeman was more creative when he referred to Mr Posselt as "a Hitler returned from a fattening station".

At any rate, Mr Posselt has already complained that this kind of a declaration could have been heard before 1989. Well, that's right, before 1989, after 1989, and after 2089 as well. (The Landsmannschaft talks like the Sudeten Germans before 1945, by the way.) Mr Posselt has also claimed that he has visited Lidice and put a wreath over there. Well, maybe he has confused who has killed whom over there!



A new big movie, Lidice, just got into the Czech movie theaters.

Quite generally, the idea that the guilt for the inhuman acts that took place in the 1940s was "uniformly distributed" is fundamentally untrue and pernicious. Just because Czechoslovakia couldn't organize the punishment of the Sudetenland Nazis in a totally organized way doesn't mean that it was on par with the Nazi Germany.

Meanwhile, don't expect that Klaus's approval rate will drop because of this. Quite on the contrary! The Czechs are constantly being assured that no significant political force in Germany wants to revive the imperial desires of the Third Reich - which could threaten the ownership rights in the Czech borderland, among other things. At the same moment, with quite some regularity, the Czechs are being reminded that they must remain cautious and they should never become too certain about it.

Rewriting of the history is something that some people continue to do. As we're getting further from the 1940s, people are forgetting what the history actually was and it is actually becoming easier to rewrite the history.

Ghirardi, Rimini, Weber: a collapsed pseudoscience

Many people are incapable of understanding that the experimental as well as theoretical evidence shows that quantum mechanics is right.

They can't see or don't want to see that the world is described by state vectors that inevitably have a probabilistic interpretation, that evolve according to linear equations and satisfy the superposition principle, that all measurable properties of the physical systems are described by linear Hermitian operators, and that probabilities are the only predictable things that always arise from squared magnitudes of some complex probability amplitudes.



Various people who dream about the resuscitation of classical physics and a reversal of the last 85 years of physics have done pretty much all the conceivable mistakes and have proposed lots of diverse, deluded, and fundamentally flawed schemes whose only purpose is to hide the most important insight of the 20th century science, the framework of quantum mechanics, from the authors' eyesight.




Bohmian pseudoscience

I have spent lots of time with explaining why various major frameworks designed to deny quantum mechanics are deeply flawed. The de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory claims that there exist both particles and waves. The waves are guiding the motion of particles in a manifestly non-local, non-relativistic way (when there are at least two particles). There are other aspects that make it incompatible with relativity and quantum field theory - e.g. its impossible coherent description of the spin and quantum fields.

But much more generally, what is flawed about the approach is that it is imagining that there are some "preferred" observables - usually positions - that have well-defined values at a given moment (a particle is really there) while other observables such as the spin with respect to an axis are "not real" because there's no way how to describe them consistently in the Bohmian framework - and moreover, the authors of the scheme must kind of understand that different observables don't commute with each other in the proper physics, so it is fundamentally misguided to try to define all of them at a given moment.

This separation of observables to the real "primitive" observables or beables and the "contextual" or unreal ones that still have to obey quantum mechanics in some sense is completely spurious and artificial. As a result, the approach totally disagrees with the insights about decoherence. Decoherence shows that the physical quantities that "behave approximately classically" after some time in a given environment are fully determined by the Hamiltonian, by the dynamical laws of the theory. There's absolutely no freedom for you to pre-decide which quantities should behave classically (or be "primitive") and which observables shouldn't (and remain "contextual") because the Hamiltonian has the responsibility for this decision: see TRF.

Decoherence really kills the very basic pillars of the de Broglie-Bohm paradigm and I am amazed that some people still haven't noticed.

Everetian pseudoscience

Recently, I have also discussed the many worlds pseudoscience initiated by Hugh Everett III. In that picture, one is imagining that the other alternative outcomes of the experiments are "real worlds somewhere". Except that this picture, while it depends on the real existence of "other worlds", can't provide us with any mechanism how and when the worlds really split so that the possibility of a later interference is not destroyed. (And 0.1 microns is already too long a distance for a good "classical description" - because even distances 10^{-15} meters are known to behave perfectly classically, so GRW really don't solve what they wanted solve.)

Also, this picture can't really give any interpretation to the main set of numbers that every quantum mechanical theory is all about - the probability amplitudes - because the different alternatives are "equally real worlds". Again, it is strikingly obvious that the whole paradigm is incorrect because there is never any exact "splitting of the worlds". Different histories or different outcomes of a measurement only become "mutually exclusive" in the classical sense because of decoherence which is never quite complete. Classical physics only emerges in a limit and always stays approximate - and this is also true for the strict classical logic and classical probability theory that emerge from another approximate description of a phenomenon in terms of decoherence. The world fundamentally remains quantum mechanical.

In principle, there's always some possibility for different terms in the state vector to interfere with each other at some later moment. This possibility is just becoming very unlikely because the off-diagonal elements of the density matrix for observable degrees of freedom expo-exponentially rapidly converge to zero. But it's fundamentally flawed to imagine that there is any moment in which the different outcomes have been objectively and "strictly split".

Ghirardi, Rimini, Weber: a real collapse

But I want to discuss another approach that hasn't been described on this blog yet: the GRW approach. The basic 1986 paper in PRD has 1217 citations as of today which is just gigantic if you realize that the paper is complete crackpottery:

Unified dynamics for microscopic and macroscopic systems (PDF full)

Much like in the other anti-quantum approaches, this approach is trying to make some "classical reality". Unlike the Bohmian pseudoscience, it doesn't add any sharp positions of the particles. Instead, it keeps Schrödinger's equation only and adds some nonlinear "flashes" into the evolution that are meant to squeeze the state vector in the mantinels that the authors consider "appropriate".

It's very easy to describe what their proposal is - even though you may have a hard time to extract this basic point from the dozens of useless pages of the paper above. Imagine Schrödinger's equation for N non-relativistic particles - like the Bohmian pseudoscience, the formalism is linked to particles of the non-relativistic type, so all attempts to apply it to fields are inevitably awkward.

It is evolving according to Schrödinger's equation but GRW don't like that it's spreading because they want to imagine that the wave function is a "real object" and "real macroscopic objects" are not spreading - a classical misinterpretation of the wave function by all the anti-quantum "thinkers". Well, it obviously is spreading and there are many outcomes that have various probabilities - which doesn't hurt - but GRW just don't like it. So they decide that the wave function shouldn't freely spread! How do they ban the spreading? Well, that's easy for GRW.

They say that every 10^{15} seconds, which is a randomly chosen new bureaucratic constant of Nature (whose value is of course completely fabricated and has nothing to do with any justifiable laws of physics or any observations) each particle is obliged to prove to the census officials that it has a rather well-defined location. So there is a Poisson process running for each particle that once per 10^{15} seconds in average, it says "flash" to each particle. The more particles you have, the more flashes you obtain.

Each flash is associated with a particle label "J" - pretend that the particles are distinguishable. The flash is also characterized by a position in the real space, R = (x,y,z). What does the flash do? It changes the wave function discontinuously. How? The wave function Psi(r1,r2, ... rn,t-epsilon) before the flash is changed to a new

# Psi(r1,r2, ... rn) exp(-(rJ - R)²/2a²)

The factor # is chosen to preserve the normalization of the wave function - you surely know how to calculate it as the square root of an integral to guarantee that the new wave function is normalized if the old one is. The whole Gaussian profile is randomly invented. Different functions would produce different theories. Clearly, there's not a glimpse of a justification for a particular function.

The flash is associated with the point in space, R. You see that the wave function for the J-th particle is modified so that the J-th particle will suddenly be more concentrated around the point R (while its finer patterns remain unchanged - it just eliminates the portions of the wave function that is too far from R). You don't want the particles to jump to random locations, so R is chosen randomly from the distribution that coincides with the probability distribution for the J-th particle before the flash - the integral of Psi*Psi over all the other particles' positions.

So it's more likely for the position of the J-th particle to collapse to the place where its wave function is concentrated. Needless to say, the distance parameter "a" is another awkward unjustified bureaucratic dumb parameter that the GRW theory needs to add.

So you see that these particular "physicists" are obsessed with the idea that quantum mechanics, including the superposition principle and the freedom of wave functions to spread freely, has to be bureaucratically suppressed, so they invent a random time scale 10^{15} seconds and a random new width of a wave function for a particle, 0.1 microns, that force individual particles to keep a rather well-defined citizenship. Every 10^{15} seconds, each particle has to undergo a census in which it has to fill its position with the accuracy of 0.1 microns. Because the relative positions between particles are kind of constrained in the bound states, a flash acting on a single particle affects other particles that share a macroscopic object with the flashed particle - so all of them become "localized".

Now, this doubly artificial prescription - depending on two new and totally unphysical bogus parameters (the only genuinely universal parameter that decides about the validity of the classical approximation to quantum mechanics is hbar!) - may seemingly have the "right impact" that makes the world "look like" it does in the proper quantum mechanics. Morever, we've added some perturbation to the system. Does it hurt?

Of course, the bureaucratic values of the timing and the width of the the collapsed packet are chosen to express the feelings of the authors about "what is microscopic" and "what is macroscopic". The collapse is meant to make large objects behave classically. Only if you have 10^{15} particles or more - a macroscopic object - you get a collapse every second. But doesn't it hurt the quantum properties of the objects?

You bet. While the "accuracy of the citizenship" is chosen to be 0.1 microns - which is very high relatively to the size of the atom - it is still vastly smaller than the distance scales at which real particles in the real world may be delocalized according to the wave functions. The latter is, of course, infinite. There is no limit. Particles may have delocalized wave functions. It's a basic point of quantum mechanics.

Consider a large crystal or metal, e.g. a cube whose side is 10 meters. You can buy those. It's 1,000 cubic meters and the weight could be almost 10^7 kilograms or 10,000 tons. Now, does the squeezing of the wave functions of the electrons affect them in a measurable way? You bet.

The linear size is 10 meters which is 10^{11} times the atomic radius. So there are about 10^{33} atoms in it so that 10^{33-15} = 10^{18} flashes appear each second. Obviously, the census officials will keep the position of the crystal "classical". But will they also preserve the internal integrity of this bound state of many nuclei and electrons?

If an electron has a wavelength that is longer than those GRW 10^{-7} meters, then the flash will substantially change its energy. It means that the electron's wave number "k" should be smaller than 10^{7} inverse meters. The spacing of "k" in each direction is 0.1 inverse meters (the inverse size of the crystal), so there are 10^{8} possible values of "kx" as well as "ky" and "kz" for which the electron has a lower energy before the flash. Consequently, there are 10^{24} electrons in our crystal that satisfy the condition. Each 10^{24-15} = 10^{-9} seconds (one nanosecond), the GRW flash will substantially kick an electron so that it has a very different energy.

Similar "flashes" will also destroy the coherence of laser beams (which may have much more than 10^{15} photons that are coherent at distances much longer than 0.1 microns) and do many other nasty things. Every time you have a flash, you really shift the position of the whole system by 0.1 microns. Do you think it couldn't be seen? Don't be silly. Interferometers may measure positions of their arms with the accuracy of 10^{-15} meters or so.

Now, you may try to observe those "predictions" and be sure, you will never see any of these pathological GRW effects because they're just completely unsubstantiated violations of basic principles of quantum physics such as the superposition principle. You may try to slow down the frequency of the flashes or make the post-flash packets wider, so that the predicted pathological effects of the GRW flashes are diminished. And indeed, when you do so, you will restore quantum mechanics in the ultimate limit because the GRW additions will become inconsequential.

If you go to the limit, i.e. if you send the GRW time scale to infinity and/or you send the GRW distance scale to infinity, will you get a valid theory that agrees with the observations of microscopic as well as macroscopic objects in the real world? You bet. In the limit I described, you obtain proper quantum mechanics and you can be damn sure that the predictions of unmutated untwisted unmessed-up-with quantum mechanics agree with the observed behavior of all systems in the world, despite the attempts of anti-quantum zealots to claim otherwise. They surely agree with the behavior of the microscopic objects - that's what GRW agreed with which is why they chose quantum mechanics as their starting point. But quantum mechanics also agrees with the behavior of the large objects: in particular, it predicts that one will never observe a large object "at two points simultaneously". The sign "+" in the wave function or density matrix doesn't mean "AND": it means "OR". If you want a symbol for "AND", you need "x", multiplication.

Quantum mechanics works perfectly well for any kind of objects which is the first thing that people should try to understand before they start to spend years with completely unjustifiable and thoroughly idiotic attempts to mess up with quantum mechanics.

Don't mess up with quantum mechanics.

And that's the memo.

---

By the way, I had to write this rant because I had to go through the end notes of The Hidden Reality supplementing the chapter on quantum mechanics. I am pretty much sure that all other popular books on quantum mechanics look similar if not worse but it just drives me up the wall! Pretty much every sentence is fundamentally wrong, usually upside down. Ten years ago, I wouldn't believe that I could say anything like that about the author's text on quantum mechanics.

Video: "You Can Never Trust Doctors"

Video: "You can never Trust Doctors", linked by one of my Facebook friends.

I'm sure some patients and doctors will not find this Eurosport commercial funny, and they probably have a point. Humor may be difficult to explain and interpret. Some social media "experts" even advise doctors not to use humor on Twitter, Facebook and blogs for fear of misinterpretation and legal repercussions.

However, humor is what makes us human. It can also help with the healing process and provide some relief at a time when you need it the most. Don't be afraid to use it appropriately and as needed, PRN. The commercial above may not provide the best example for that particular purpose but I think you get the point.

Comments from Twitter:

@scanman: Ha!! I do this ALL THE TIME!!!

Editors, reviewers, and bias

Richard Lindzen has informed me about some adventures he recently experienced while offering his new paper written together with Choi to PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While it's standard that 98% of the submissions over there get published, the people in charge of PNAS guaranteed that the likes of Gavin Schmidt would be the reviewers. With some additional not-quite-standard procedures, the Lindzen-Choi paper got rejected. So there exists some seemingly polite but inherently nasty correspondence that shows how it exactly happened.

I decided not to run a detailed story on this material because it seemed somewhat frustrating and personal to me (while not sufficiently "fiery") and I was sure that there would be people coming to the discussion - usually people who have no clue just opinions but sometimes semi-qualified people with their own interests - who would be saying "You see! Lindzen got what he deserved! That's how he should be treated. Peer review in action." and so on.

And I just didn't want Richard to be undergoing such things. Not just because of him - he can really withstand such things. But also because of others among us who find Richard's authority to be a helpful island of relative certainty, nostalgia over old-fashioned structure of the scientific community, and a beacon of hope that it will be restored in the world of climatology and other politically loaded disciplines sometime in the future - a world that is so messed up today.




Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts did run stories on the journal submission. The discussions confirmed my expectations. On Steve's blog, climatologist Andrew Dessler (together with Rattus Norvegicus which is just common rat in Latin, not the name of a big ancient thinker!) played the same role I expected. (He has publicly debated Lindzen in the past.) On Anthony's blog, this role was mainly played by an anonymous poster called KR.

When you look what was going on with the submission, you can have no doubts that Lindzen and Choi have received a "special treatment". First, it's normal for the PNAS authors to choose their reviewers. Obviously, this policy can't produce a full-fledged peer review. However, it's being used in a big majority of other submissions to PNAS.

Will Happer of Princeton was classified as incompetent while Chou was rejected because he has "recently" had a paper with Lindzen that was written 7 years ago. In particular cases, if you had more appropriate names, you could agree that those choices were problematic. However, if you know what's going on, they're just very reasonable choices.

Will Happer has written lots of papers on physical topics that are "advanced versions" of the physics needed for the greenhouse effect. He has vigorously studied the absorption and emission of infrared radiation and visible light. His most cited paper on optical pumping has over 1,000 citations which - together with lots of other influential papers - makes him an order of magnitude more successful a research than mediocre scientists such as Andrew Dessler. Happer has actually studied fluid dynamics, too.

Still, Andrew Dessler finds it appropriate to call Happer "incompetent". Where did the arrogance of mediocre scientists in a fringe subfield of physics that has always been attracting the least talented students of physics - who differ from other physicists by their knowing almost nothing about physics in general, besides the narrow-minded and distorted questions about the climate - obtain so much self-confidence to talk in this way about scientists who are 10 times better scientists than the likes of Dessler?

Now, Chou (not to be confused with Choi) is surely competent when it comes to the very detailed content of the paper - energy fluxes in the atmosphere, and so on. It's clear why they didn't like it even though his "detachment" from Richard has safely exceeded those 4 years that PNAS requires.

What the editors and others wrote to Richard and how they decided could make sense in isolation. But if you try to think how other papers get in, you can have no doubts that the authors are being treated differently depending on how "convenient" the message of their paper - and their own personal message - is.

In particular, alarmist climatologists are uniformly working on the same, extremely narrow phenomenon of the CO2 greenhouse effect that is just being "perturbed" by everything else you may see in the climate. From this viewpoint, if you use the same standards as PNAS would like to use for Chou, no alarmist climatologist should be allowed to review another alarmist's paper.

Obviously, alarmists are happily reviewing papers written by other alarmists all the time. Not only that: the agreement about the "underlying questions" between them isn't presented as a clash of interests - like in the case of Chou - but rather as a striking case of the scientific consensus that makes the science settled and that should make you piss in your pants because the doomsday is coming.

How blinded one has to be if he doesn't see that double standards are being applied to the interpretation of the "broader agreement" between several climate alarmists; and the interpretation of the "broader agreement" between several climate realists? In the former case, the broader agreement is viewed as a totally positive thing; in the latter case, it's the other way around. Review process based on such distorted standards simply cannot be impartial.

What I find frustrating is that there's clearly no solution that would use the same set of climate scientists that exists today. You rearrange the capabilities between the editors and reviewers in some "ingenious" way and you will obtain the same bad results. The climatology community is clearly screwed these days. Whatever rules you will impose, it will ultimately be the case that the dishonest and deluded majority will be heard and will be able to strengthen their position further, by increasing rejections of the papers and the people who don't pay lip service to the party line.

Climate science cannot be fixed unless those roughly 90% of the people who got into it in order to promote the climate alarm will be fired. They have to be fired. There is no other way to avoid systematic ideological harassment of fair scientists in the future.

Undoubtedly, the editors of journals have some power. When I was in the Academia, I would review something like 50 papers and I rejected about 1/2 of them. In some cases, I could guess - although I was never quite certain certain - that the editor just didn't like a paper so he chose a reviewer who was likely to reject the paper. It's not surprising that people who know their work and opinions a little bit may predict whether the other person will like a given paper or not.

Of course, in the case of your humble correspondent as a reviewer, there's no problem because your humble correspondent is the 100% symbol of objectivity and impartiality - so any editor who has ever sent me a paper did the most legitimate and objective thing that he could have done. ;-)

However, there are many other potential reviewers who are not as impartial. And my experience has been enough to know that even in fields such as the climate science that really suck, the editor has the power to determine the outcome of the peer review process. So whether the editor is competent and impartial matters.

Someone may worship the peer review process but it is never perfect and it may be extremely far from perfect and even counterproductive, especially if most of the peers just suck and if the editors have too much power in cherry-picking the reviewers, while the editors sometimes suck even more so than the reviewers. ;-)

Climatology has entered a vicious cycle because the percentage of dishonest and fanatical members of the climatological community has exceeded a certain critical mass. Above this critical mass, the mechanisms guarantee that what the research is converging to is not the truth as reflected by the empirical evidence but rather the perfect partisanship and universal parroting of the Gore-style lies about a coming judgement day.

Many people don't like comparisons with the Nazis but I think that they're very important and revealing. Moreover, I think that despite a rather powerful chancellor, Aryan Physics in Nazi Germany has never become so capable of suppressing its "contrarians" as the modern Alarmist Climatology. The same is true about various distortions of natural science that communism wanted to impose.

Aryan Physics was seemingly perfectly politically correct. There were German physicists who wanted to become the "leaders" of a "clean" way of doing physics. However, the Nazi party never gave them as much support as they needed. Moreover, the other genuine physicists just couldn't give a damn.

In particular, take Werner Heisenberg, a great hero of quantum mechanics. He was unquestionably a German patriot and he peacefully supported many goals that became associated with NSDAP. These facts reflected his personality that had nothing to do with science. But of course, he wouldn't be stupid to refuse relativity just because it was discovered by a Jew and his leader didn't like the Jews!

Obviously, Werner Heisenberg - and others - continued to work with relativity and other things that were found by the Jews, as well as others. In 1937, Heisenberg got labeled a "White Jew" in the SS's weekly, The Black Corps. Nice: that was probably meant to be the biggest offense at those times. But it didn't really hurt him. Everyone still knew that he was a genuine German patriot and a top scientist at the same moment. So it was natural to assign him the task to build the German nuclear bomb - as a theorist, he fortunately failed miserably in this task. ;-)

The secret to the failure of Aryan Physics was the actual absence of important interactions between the scientific results and the politicians' goals. If relativity had been found by a physicist of the Nordic race who loved Hitler, relativity would have been totally fine for the German leaders. In some sense, the same thing holds for Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. If the Lysenkoist agriculture were invented by the capitalists, it could have been dismissed by the Soviet leaders just like proper genetics was.

However, the climate alarm is different. The very outcomes of this "science" - and not only the random historical questions about the identity of the discoverers - are important for the politicians (and other people). The more alarm there is, the more powerful and richer they will become. This correlation is greatly distorting the otherwise "color-blind" and impartial processes within the scientific community and above the critical mass, the personal, political, and ideological interests become the main driving force of the research.

That's why I would give up if I were expected to write papers interfering with sensitive questions about the climate. You're brave if you're ready to struggle with 10 times bigger obstacles than your alarmist colleagues who are not really as good as you are. But does it really have a purpose? Aren't you fighting wind mills? This mess in the climate science has been engineered from the "top", so I am kind of sure that it has to be fixed from the "top" as well.