Possible murder of Tycho Brahe investigated in Prague

Isaac Newton had to verify that his theory of gravity predicted the right elliptical orbits. How did he know they were ellipses? Well, Johannes Kepler determined his laws out of the very accurate data obtained by Tycho Brahe. Both Kepler and Brahe worked in Prague.



A statue of Kepler and Brahe in front of the Kepler High School, near the Prague Castle. Only in Summer 2010, I visited it for the first time.

Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman - who has been incorrectly called Tycho de Brahe for centuries - and his death in October 1601 (aged 54+) remains a kind of mystery.

The classic legend says that he was so repelled by the idea of breaking the royal etiquette that he bravely but simply refused to go to the toilet during a long and fancy dinner (where Brahe got drunk a bit) hosted at the Rožmberk Palace of the Prague Castle (that has belonged to Rudolph II for a year, since 1600) by Petr Vok of Rožmberk on October 13th (where Brahe went in a great mood; the guests can only leave the table after the host): his bladder just exploded.

Maybe it didn't but when Brahe returned home, he could no longer use it. More modest sources only speak about a related bladder infection as opposed to an explosion. Others talk about kidney stones which are, according to modern medicine, needed for a bladder to explode (instead of empty itself).

The dinner came just a few days after Brahe's personal meeting with our Emperor Rudolph II who had just hired him to produce new accurate astronomical tables. After escalating pains, he died on October 24th amid tears and prayers by his family. His last words were "Let it be apparent that I didn't live my life in vain." At least Kepler has claimed so. ;-)




However, there are good reasons to think he was poisoned - either by an act of murder or by his own negligence (namely improper experiments with elixirs). In 1901, when his remains were lifted for the last time so far, the researchers found lots of mercury. The Austrian-Hungarian authorities were afraid that the body had been stolen which is why they opened the tomb. Brahe's body was there - but without the metallic nose and without any kidney stones.

In the 1990s, lots of lead were found in Brahe's beard which is probably not unusual given the importance of the element 400 years ago. Also, his dead body may have spent some time in a lead coffin.

The newest hypotheses about the possible murderer are pretty amazing. Brahe had to leave Denmark when Christian IV, a royal bastard, took over at the age of 19 or so. That was different than during the reign of Christian's father, Friedrich II, who employed Brahe as his astrologer and who paid over 5% of the Danish GNP for Brahe's research. ;-)

I called the famous king of Denmark, Christian IV, a bastard not only because he reduced the funding for science but also because he could have actually been Brahe's biological son, as some theories claim! Brahe would create him with Christian's mother Sofie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin at the age of 32 (she was 19+ when Christian was born in 1577).

Some top Danish researchers claim that the young king's mother had an affair with Brahe so either Christian IV or his brother Hans ordered the murder of Brahe; the physical killer would probably be Erik Brahe, Brahe's distant cousin who was a Swedish diplomat (his meeting with Hans in Poland is described in Erik's own diary). In fact, they also say that these stories inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet which is, you know, a pretty big deal in literature. Recall that Prince Hamlet of Denmark murdered his uncle Claudius.

Of course, when I mention the name Erik, it's also plausible that the murder was realized by some people who have gotten lots of money from the stupid people purely for denying the existence of gravity (2 million euros) which was going to be established because of Brahe's fine work. ;-)

It's 2010 and the right time for another test. Danish toxicologists and other international experts gathered in Prague to do so.



The Czech Press Agency, The Associated Press, and others inform about the event that started today in the morning.

Imagine that you're in Prague, the Czech capital, and you go to the Old Town Square. Instead of looking at the Prague Astronomical Clock (Orloj) on the City Hall that celebrated 600 years just a month ago, you choose the Church of Our Lady (see picture above) that has been called the Týn Church (Týnský Chrám) for many years by the Czech atheists. ;-)

The previous Czech name is literally The Church of Godly Mother in front of Týn (Kostel Matky Boží před Týnem) - Týn Yard is a historical object currently with 18 houses between the Church of Our Lady and Church of Greater St James.



That's where Brahe's remains remained for a long time. It was not clear in what shape the remains would be found today. See the video here or the English one by the BBC to get a glimpse of the atmosphere.

Bladder problems, kidney stones, poisoning by elixirs or murderers remain possibilities. However, there actually exist other possible explanations of the source of trouble. Let me offer you my own.

When Brahe was a student, he fenced against another Nobleman who cut a piece of Brahe's nose. It's a historical fact that the biological material was replaced by a metallic component. The metallic nose wasn't found in 1901 but he has used it for quite some time.

Now, my hypothesis is that the artificial nose was made out of a rather low-quality unstable amalgam with lots of mercucy. (Update: some sources say that the nose was made of gold or a gold-silver alloy.) And in 1601, the material leaked a lot of the heavy liquid metal which would kill Brahe. Dr Vellev has another hypothesis about the source of mercury - a pain reliever that Brahe would take before he died.

I am not sure whether the folks will be able to settle the question, however. The tests will include a CT-scan and an X-ray technique known as PIXE analysis in the Nuclear Research Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Řež, 20 miles from Prague. PIXE analysis was already made in 1996 with some of his hair that were stored in Denmark: they not only found mercury but concluded that it got into his body just a day before his death (i.e. long after the dinner).

Update

At 4:20 pm, it was clear what they roughly found in the grave. They saw two caskets. One belongs to Brahe, another belongs to his wife, a commoner from Kågeröd in Skåne named Kirstin Jörgensdatter who gave Tycho 3 sons and 5 daughters (they never married in a church). His wife's casket is made out of wood and it is in the state of decay. However, there are also astronomers' remains collected in this tightly packed, well-preserved tin coffin.



Click the picture to find 15 more fresh photographs

The Danish folks are not interested in the wife so they plan to leave her in her grave. A piece of a wooden broom was found in the grave, too. A janitor may have left it over there during cleaning exercises in 1901 or earlier.

A sophisticated drilling procedure has to be designed to pick the tin box without damaging the environment too much - because they're also interested about the way how tin coffins used to be put in the grave etc. They're also dreaming about renaissance clothes.



About 100 journalists are present. The research should be speedy because by Friday, all the things should return to the grave. A mass will be held.

---

Bonus: funeral

Johannes Kepler himself wrote lots of stuff about Brahe's life in Prague and the funeral was no exception. Kepler wrote:

The coffin was carried by twelve imperial officials, mostly noblemen. In long mourning clothes, Tycho's younger son was marching right behind the coffin, in between Erik Brahe [possible murderer] and baron Ernfried von Mincwitz. They were followed by additional imperial aides, barons, and noblemen. Tycho's assistants and servants, Tycho's spouse accompanied by two revered royal judges, and finally his three daughters in separate rows, each of whom was surrounded by two aristocrats. The chairs in the church, on which his family members were sitting, were covered in black English drapery. The streets were so full of people that all those who were walking in the procession were seemingly confined by two walls. And the church was so overcrowded both by the aristocracy as well as low-born people that it was nearly impossible to find a spot for yourself.

Flash: many candidates



This detective flash (in Czech, sorry) may be a little bit too inclusive. Candidate killers include the church as well as Johannes Kepler himself - who may have wanted some unlimited access to Brahe's data. If you walk around, you will also learn about Brahe's life.

Boston Globe & Lene Hau

The Boston Globe interviews Lene Hau.

Our famous colleague explains that 300,000 km/s is incomprehensibly high a number ;-) so she decided to lower it and became passionate about the slow light. She argues that these tricks have applications for computing. Finally, they can't avoid the usual questions about women in science: she essentially says that there's no discrimination but the tenured female numbers lag. Also, she says that the Academia doesn't have free thinkers despite the tenure system that would be expected to support it. Well, experimentally it is clear that it does not.

See also Physics as a Danish enterprise.

Black Saturn

Henriette Elvang (MIT) spoke about the Black Saturns, a work with Pau Figueras and very recently also with Roberto Emparan. Because I teach during the duality seminars (today: angular dependence of the photoelectric effect in advanced QM), she was nice to repeat the talk for me, in a more interactive form, and it was even more interesting than I expected.



A black Saturn is a black hole surrounded by a black ring. The ring's angular momentum creates a force that repels it from the black hole in the middle. The solution will have negative modes signaling instabilities but it is a classical solution anyway. In their case, they construct solutions to five-dimensional pure gravity i.e. Ricci-flat geometries with an unusual structure of horizons.

The basic method to calculate these solutions goes back to a 1917 paper by Hermann Weyl - a paper whose content is described in Wald's book on GR. I didn't know about it but Weyl discovered an early version of the LLM construction 90 years ago.

I find it quite impressive that a mathematician could find such an LLM-like construction in 1917 - the same year when crackpots in less advanced countries, such as Vladimir Lenin, were able to impress whole nations with their dumb leftist ideologies - just a year after general relativity was completed. Recall that in the AdS5 x S5 version of LLM, you want to fill a two-dimensional plane with two colors (black and white, for example). For each such picture, you can construct a solution.




However, as we noticed, there exists a similar construction due to Weyl that one may use to construct various solutions in pure four-dimensional gravity. We have two colors "t" and "phi" that can be used to draw a picture on line. If you fill most of the line by the "phi" color except for a line interval whose color is "t", you obtain the Schwarzschild black hole. The length of the line interval is correlated with the size of the black hole. Evidently, the limit where the length goes to infinity corresponds to an infinitely large black hole - i.e. flat space or Rindler space in different coordinates. A similar limit - a plane divided to black and white - gives you the Penrose pp-wave in the AdS5 x S5 case.

Analogous constructions for five-dimensional gravity were found more recently. They use them to construct solutions of five-dimensional pure gravity.

In five spacetime dimensions, the massive little group is SO(4) whose rank is two which is why you can have two independent angular momenta. Let's look at stationary solutions with one angular momentum only, e.g. J_{12}. The metric will have three Killing vectors - two angles generated by the J_{12} and J_{34} rotations and time translations (that would be true even if you had both angular momenta). That's why the metric won't depend on five coordinates but only two.

It turns out that the Einstein equations for this Ansatz are non-linear but integrable differential equations in two variables. You can use a trick that I recently heard from Zack Guralnik - if I remember well - how to transform non-linear partial differential equations in two variables to linear differential equations for some generating functions of a higher number of variables. The procedure is somewhat analogous to replacing a system of non-linear differential equations for a classical system by the linear Schrödinger equation for its quantization because the generating function is analogous to a wavefunction: such a procedure can surprisingly simplify the calculations in some cases. These integrable systems lead to similar equations as the planar limit of the N=4 theory although this is most likely a mathematical coincidence only.

The relevant five-dimensional version of the LLM-Weyl procedure involves three colors on a line. For a suitable configuration of colors, you may obtain a black Saturn solution.

It is interesting to draw the phase diagram of these solutions. Create a two-dimensional graph and believe me that they can construct a two-parameter family of solutions. The x-axis is the total angular momentum "J" while the y-axis is the total area "A" i.e. the entropy. All points of this graph below a certain line can be identified as black Saturns with different parameters describing the ring and its distance from the black hole.

Black rings themselves are special examples of black Saturns for which the size of the spherical black hole at the center vanishes. In the phase diagram, the family of the pure rings looks like a union of two semi-infinite lines connected with a cusp. The point at the cusp maximizes the entropy and minimizes the angular momentum - but there are two lines along which you can go if you want to lower the entropy or increase the angular momentum. The angle at the cusp is zero.

There exists another, very similar pair of lines in the phase diagram (whose detailed position is however different) corresponding to black Saturns at equilibrium. Note that the horizon of a black Saturn is disconnected: it is made out of a three-sphere (hole) and a Cartesian product of a circle and a two-sphere (ring). These two components can therefore have different chemical potentials for energy (also known as the temperature - in the context of black objects, it is proportional to the surface gravity at the horizon) and different chemical potentials for the angular momentum (also known as the angular velocity). However, some black Saturns happen to have the same angular velocity for both components and the same surface gravity for both components. They are described by the one-dimensional pair of semi-infinite lines connected at a cusp.

We discussed how to get black bi-Saturn, among other possible solutions. You can also imagine a "black bi-Saturn" as a black hole near the Southern pole connected with another black hole near the Northern pole by a negative-tension (repulsion-inducing) cosmic string (that creates an excess angle, unlike the usual deficit angles for positive-tension strings) - and both of them are surrounded by a black ring wrapped near the equator of the Earth. Such a configuration has the same symmetric as the black Saturn and it is conceivable that you can write an exact metric for it, too.

Because the Ricci-flatness for the black Saturn Ansatz defines an integrable system, you may also believe that various other physical questions about this system - such as the perturbations, geodesics, classical worldsheets and worldvolumes of various branes in this geometry etc. - could be exactly solvable, too.

We took the speaker for a dinner. It was the first time when Henriette visited Henrietta's table in the Charles Hotel. ;-)

Cosmoclimatology

Our regular weekly dose of peer-reviewed deniers is here. ;-) Henrik Svensmark, the director of the Danish Sun-Climate Research Center (e-mail: hsv at spacecenter dot dk) has an article in Astronomy & Geophysics, a peer-review journal of the Royal Astronomical Society

• Cosmoclimatology: a new theory emerges

where the status of the cosmic ray theory influencing the climate is discussed. The author argues that the new paradigm is already as secure, scientifically speaking, as the enhanced greenhouse theory. See also his

• physics/0612145

Echoes in the media:

• The Sunday Times (Experiments hint that we are wrong on climate change)
• The Times (Blame cosmic rays not CO2 for warming the planet)

The possible paradigm shift is ready so you can already buy a book that was released ten minutes ago. ;-) The book is now among 20 topsellers at amazon.co.uk.

Previous article about the same topic:

• Papers challenging geocentrism

Via Benny Peiser and Bob Ferguson & improved

SKY experiment: cloud nucleation by cosmic rays

This is an update about the CLOUD story. A Danish experimental team has experimentally demonstrated that negative ions created by high-energy cosmic rays increases the creation of nuclei of the clouds.

Recall that the significance of this finding is that because the increased solar magnetic activity has reduced the cosmic rays in the last century, it has also decreased the amount of clouds and positively contributed to the temperature.

The observation of this effect may upgrade the cosmic rays theory of the climate to a competitor of the greenhouse gas theory, to say the least.

More facts:

• Nir Shaviv's sciencebits
• JunkScience
• SpaceDaily
• Foxnews
• Danish press release
• A description of the experiment
• A Copenhagen description
• The peer-reviewed paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society A
• Animation (compressed)

Sex and intelligence: 3.6 extra points

J. Philippe Rushton, a well-known psychologist from University of Western Ontario, has done a work that would otherwise be nothing else than a routine exercise. He extracted the g-factor - "pure intelligence" - from the SAT results of 100,000 American teenagers. One of his conclusions was that

• the average boys' IQ exceeds the average girls' IQ by 3.63 points

See also news.google.com. The result applies to young people who are 17-18 years old, after the effect of girls' getting mature earlier starts to disappear.




Their article with Douglas N. Jackson

• Males have greater g ...

appears in the September issue of Elsevier's journal Intelligence. But because the topic is politically loaded, the work is not just a pile of boring numbers. Rushton had to produce dozens of disclaimers what the results don't mean and how unhappy he is to have obtained these results, and all this nonsense. And still, he is not safe.

Lawrence Summers had to resign as the president of Harvard University. The main reason was that in January 2005, he offered his working hypothesis why women lag in science and engineering during a conference whose official goal was to study why women lag in science and engineering.

The same Harvard University will host Mohammad Khatami on Sunday, less then 20 hours before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Right now, all of us are very proud of the academic freedoms and open-mindedness. Hundreds of people will admire the great thinker from Iran who will offer his impressive and thoughtful theories that Israel is a piece of dirt on the map where the shameful U.S. foreign policy is being created. Daniel Wolfson called the Harvard's combined attitude to Summers and Khatami "Crimson hypocrisy" in the Boston Herald. Stronger words could be more appropriate.

Back to the SAT tests.

A year ago or so, Helmuth Nyborg, a leading Danish psychologist, published an article

• Sex-related differences in general intelligence g, brain size, and social status

in a peer-reviewed journal called Personality and Individual Differences. The Inquisition was ready.

Recall that many Danish products are very advanced and the Danish Inquisition has a rather sophisticated structure, too. In 2001, Bjorn Lomborg published a book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" in which he demonstrated that the effects of climate change wouldn't be too important and they would probably be beneficial anyway. The Inquisition's activities entered full gear. A bizarre branch of the Inquisition called

• Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty

started to cling mud on Lomborg. It took almost a full year until a ministry of the Danish government decided, in December 2003, that the bigots in DCSD didn't handle the investigation properly and their conclusions were invalid.

With this precedent in mind, you can guess what happened to Helmuth Nyborg if his peer-reviewed, accepted paper argued for an IQ difference of 8 points (or 3.8 points, depending on certain subtleties, or 4.55, after a certain set of errors was caught) between men and women. Svend Hylleberg, the dean of social sciences at Aarhus University, asked Nyborg to vacate his position in 2006.

Of course, the international science community was extremely upset because of this witch-hunt. J. Philippe Rushton, Linda Gottfredson, and lots of econometrists were defending Nyborg as much as they could. But still, you know that a rational discussion with bigots is an extremely difficult enterprise. Nowadays, sex and intelligence is a more sensitive topic for them than heliocentrism. Many of these empty skulls have been high-profile people. For example, David Peterson, a former "progressive" Ontario premier and a huge opponent of free trade, had said that he would have fired Rushton immediately if he could have. ;-)

The higher male variance of the IQ distribution has been a well-established piece of science for quite some time. The difference between the averages seems to be between 3 and 4 points according to many recent studies by Rushton, Nyborg, as well as Richard Lynn from 1999. Of course, this difference depends on the details how the quantities are defined and measured.

But unfortunately, the main topic that the researchers can freely focus on is not the question whether the difference is 3 or 4 and what it depends on. The main topic is how can they ever justify the incredible heresy to suggest that the difference could be anything else than zero.

Well, the explanation is due to Murray Gell-Mann, it is called the totalitarian principle, and it applies to all of science. Everything that can occur - everything that is not prohibited by an exact symmetry of the physical system - will occur. There is clearly no exact symmetry between men and women, and all conceivable differences and correlations will indeed occur. There is certainly no good open Yes/No question in the research of these differences. The real questions are quantitative: how much, what is the cause, what does it mean, and how rational policies should be influenced by these insights.

Salman Awan: The truth is...

The truth is, The Prophet of Islam can neither be symbolized/drawn nor can be characterized in any way and anytime.

First of all I would like to pay my gratitude to Mr. Luboš Motl for giving me an opportunity to express my point of view on Danish Cartoon illustrations. Secondly, English is not my first language, however, I will try to communicate the intended message at the top of my abilities. Thirdly, most of you won't agree with what belief we Muslims and majority of the world share, but I am happy that I am into the act of Jihad through Pen.

Well, I am studying Business here in London and I am a Muslim by religion.

Firstly, I would to clear some misconceptions about Islam. Islam means "to make peace" and it struggles to maintain peace. We are no way terrorists, but all over the world we are looked upon as terrorists only because of few individuals who misunderstood the true meaning of Islam and were used by some economies for political reasons and benefits. After the 7th July, 2005 incident I have been stopped and searched 23 times at various London Underground Stations under a section, which says that I might be a terrorist. Well, that's another issue but the issue I will discuss here is concerning the height of disrespect our Prophet (PBUH) is treated with.

There is a lot happening at present in Muslim countries and wherever Muslims live. Yeah, its all emanated from Danish Cartoon Illustrations (DCI), moreover, these DCI are compelling Muslims to be defensive. Condoning or punishing such acts is a personal opinion shaped by religion, culture, values and heritage.

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was the last of all messengers and Islam was completed during his life. For us, Muslims, he is the best of all human beings and we try to follow his footsteps in every walk of life to get the best of the both worlds. Concisely, he is a model of excellence, and our love for him is unlimited.

The Prophet's Distinctive Characteristics as a Reformer

1. The most Successful of Prophets
2. Universality of the Message
3. Unity of Human Race
4. Development of entire Human Race
5. Greatness in all Directions
6. Not a Product of Environment
7. Universal Peace

The Prophet's Sublime Morals

1. The Prophet, an Exemplar
2. No Work was too Low for him
3. Simplicity
4. Food
5. Dress
6. No Attraction for Comforts
7. Cleanliness
8. Love for Friends
9. Generous to Enemies
10. Equal Justice for all
11. Humility
12. Sympathy for the Poor and the Distressed
13. Hospitality
14. Gentleness
15. Faithfulness
16. Forgiveness
17. Modesty
18. Affection
19. Respect for Others
20. Courage
21. Steadfastness

He possessed all the qualities we can think of and the qualities beyond our imagination. All these attributes make us fall in love with him. The DCI aimed to depict him as violent and terrorist minded, moreover, it's an attack on his attributes and not only that every Muslim is deeply offended and insulted our religion Islam is also disgraced and disrespected. I will not forgive such callous, disdainful, condescending disregard of things dear to me, things that I love.

No one has ever dared to draw his sketch except DCI, it's because of the respect we all hold for other religions. As CNN refused to post the DCI:

"CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of respect for Islam."

(This comment by CNN is an act of respect)

He was so perfect that we cannot bear anyone manifesting him as a terrorist or any other character as depicted by DCI. We treat each other with respect, I have respect for your values and religion it doesn't means that you can abuse my Prophet or Allah. Cartoons are no way means of depicting such personalities. The truth is, The Prophet of Islam can neither be symbolized/drawn nor can be characterized in any way and anytime.

It's a grave mistake by the Danish Prime Minister to oversimplify it into an issue of freedom of speech and religious sensitivities; it would miss the point completely. The Danish editors cannot claim that they were only exercising freedom of expression because hiding behind that guise would misrepresent what they did, and what they did was deliberately incite. That defeats the very purpose of a freedom of expression.

What should we do? We will be intolerant of such actions. We will not pretend that you have the right to insult our religion. But, we will be intolerant without being violent. We will use this forum of speech, and expression and non-violent action, to make ourselves heard. This is not on. This will never be on. We will fight, but our fight is not violent, at least not yet. Freedom of expression is not a vice. It is a virtue. Let us not forget that. Let us not forget that it is open to us too. That we can tell them it is wrong, and we can continue telling them, until they listen to us. But just because they don't listen to us right now, does not mean we burn and we torch, and we kill. Our fight is better than that, our fight is smarter than that. It is a longer, more difficult fight. But it is the right fight. And that is what matters. That is what Muslims are supposed to be about.

Also, I will make it crystal clear that who the fight is against. It is not against a civilization. It is not against non-Muslims as a whole. It is not against American governments as a matter of default. Our fight is against, those who believe our religion is not worth being respected. We need to earn our respect. We earn it, by being patient, by showing all the good that our religion stands for. We earn it by respecting them, and by respecting theirs. That is what we do.

So far there have been some deadly protests and I stand against them.

Salman Awan
awansalman at msn.com

Kurt Westergaard and courage

Update Feb 12th 2008: A terrorists' plot to kill Kurt Westergaard was stopped and the would-be assassins were arrested.

Update Jan 1st, 2010: The Danish police had to shoot another Islamic mental cripple who wanted to kill the cartoonist in his apartment.



Google only returns 18,000 hits if you search for Kurt Westergaard but this Danish citizen is already one of the most valuable people in the world. You may ask: how do you want to quantify the value? Well, in U.S. dollars.



He drew something that has arguably become the most provocative cartoon in the history of the humankind. What was the cartoon about? An authoritative person with a turban and a timebomb in it. You might think that the drawing depicted a generic fat person. But one billion of people immediately (i.e. after 4 months) knew: it was Him! The Holy Prophet (PBUH & SAW).



It is apparently completely legal in many countries of the world to order a murder. A Pakistani cleric offers you 1 million dollars. An Indian wild killer who also happens to be a minister of an Indian province is more generous. He offers you 11.5 million dollars plus 200 pounds of gold (which costs about 1.5 million dollars, as fas I can count) for the job: you will probably have to cut Kurt's head, too. Add other bounties that are offered by similar "people" and organizations and you will see that Kurt Westergaard has probably exceeded Osama bin Laden himself whose price is only 25 million dollars.

Some people may start to be afraid but Kurt Westergaard is not. In a new interview, he is confident that he has done the right thing to protect the freedom of press and speech and equal standards for different groups of people. Unfortunately, Westergaard is hiding these days and must be protected by PET, the Danish secret service.

This guy's courage is nontrivial and somewhat impressive.

Incidentally, America's finest news source informs that Hamas started to advocate peace and they proposed a giant summit with all Jews in the world where a final solution of the Middle East conflict may be found. A related event is that if you draw one of the three best cartoons of the previous "giant summit", Ahmadinejad et al. will give you 25,000 dollars.

Last disclaimer: if you're an English-speaking Muslim who decided to earn millions of dollars by doing the dirty job and who has found this web page using a search engine, let me inform you that you will be killed if you try and the heaven has run out of virgins. Moreover, the house you call the heaven is crowded with people like you and I am not sure whether this is where you want to spend the eternity.

Europe in 2015

And the future of Europe? Click it.

Iranian humor just like ours

Iranian humor can be very similar to ours. This picture is from an article that described Iranian official protests against the publication of the cartoons in two Czech newspapers. Click the picture to get the original source.






Incidentally, another article about the psychological terror against the Czech diplomat in Iran is here. I sort of understand that because of the conditions in Iran, he or she simply has to apologize. Be sure that the Czech government understands very well that whatever happened to Denmark could have happened to the Czech Republic, too. The cartoons were reprinted in the Czech dailies:

• Mladá fronta DNES (300,000 copies, #1 daily)
  
• Hospodářské noviny (#1 daily focusing on economics)
  
• Nedělní svět ("Sunday World")

President Klaus was much less sympathetic to those who published the cartoons. He likes to emphasize that the freedom of speech is just a contract between a citizen and a particular government and can't extend internationally because it cannot be enforced internationally. Of course I agree with that. But the Danish journalists have published it in Denmark where they already have a "contract" with the government and others who should protect their freedoms. The local laws are primary.

Physics as Danish enterprise

Physics, in the usual sense, started with the refined models of the Solar system, and it can be interpreted - with a slight stretch of imagination - as a Danish science.

First of all, some math had to be known before physics could smoothly develop. The letters "Dan" sound almost like "Tan". Who discovered the tangent? Yes, it was Thomas Fincke who was Danish.

Classical mechanics was the first successful discipline of physics as we know it today. Newton's equations could only be found because Kepler's laws of planetary motion were already known. Why were they known?

As Einstein always emphasized, Kepler could only find his laws because of huge Excel files describing the planetary motion and produced by Tycho de Brahe. Although Tycho de Brahe did his important work in Prague under Rudolph II, a great sponsor of arts, sciences, and alchemy, he was born in Copenhagen. Although his Tychonic model was kind of geocentric, it combined the Ptolemaic model with the virtues of the Copernican one and agreed with the available high-precision data.

With Tycho's accurate data, it was straightforward to discover Kepler's laws and Newton's laws, and the rest of classical mechanics quickly followed.

At this point, it should be clear that the rest of the world was just helping to complete some Danish discoveries that initiated classical mechanics. What is the next important milestone in the history of physics? Yes, you're right, it's field theory - especially electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism - the relation between electricity and magnetism - was discovered by Hans Christian Ørsted. Needless to say, he was Danish, too. In 1820 he observed that the needle of his compass was moving whenever the battery was turned on or off. Electromagnetism was born and several other physicists completed the details. As Wikipedia explains, Ørsted never hesitated to promote radical views. For example, he encouraged the greatest writer of fairy-tales, Hans Christian Andersen of Denmark, to write more stuff. :-) Quite a radical set of books.

The rest of electromagnetism was straightforward and it had many obvious implications such as the discovery of special relativity (and consequently also general relativity).

You may think that I am skimming over a lot of other physics to create a false impression that physics is mostly a Danish science. For example, there is also optics. Who discovered the relations between the index of refraction and the density of a gas? Yes, it was Ludwig Lorenz from the University of Copenhagen in 1869. The Dutchman Hendrik Lorentz discovered it independently in 1870, which is why we often call it the Lorentz-Lorenz formula.

I guess that 92% of the readers have not been able to distinguish Lorentz from Lorenz and the Dutchmen from Danes before they read this article. ;-) Do you think that the figure 92% is exaggerated? Do you think that I am incorrectly assuming that all the readers have the IQ of Quantoken? No, I am not! Do you remember the gauge invariance in the theory of Ørsted's electromagnetism? We can fix the ambiguity, can't we? For example, the most natural relativistic gauge-fixing requires that

• partial A^mu / partial x^mu = 0

Do you know whose condition it is and what was his nationality? It's the Lorentz's condition and Lorentz was Dutch, 92% of the readers will say. Nope! It is actually the Lorenz condition and the author was Danish. The Danes are so modest (or ignorant) that they never protest against the typo.

Do you still think that 92% was an exaggeration? Not at all. At scholar.google.com, you will find 3,620 wrong papers :-) that describe the Lorentz gauge. The list of the authors who are wrong includes Schwinger, Guralnik, Kibble, as well as most other physicists you know. On the other hand, only 295 papers talk about the correct Lorenz gauge. You can do the math.

There are two more revolutions in the 20th century physics waiting for us.

The more important one - so far - seems to be quantum mechanics. After introducing the old quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr of Copenhagen became the spiritual leader of the young generation of quantum mechanicians. The orthodox interpretation or quantum mechanics was called the Copenhagen interpretation, to emphasize Bohr's key contributions to the community.

What is the final revolution of the 20th century physics? Yes, it is string theory. Who discovered that there were any strings to talk about in particle physics? You may have seen the TV program about our friend who got drunk when his paper was rejected. But he was not the only one. One of the two other co-discoverers of string theory was Holger Nielsen. We are pretty much near the current state of theoretical physics.

Once again, many readers may protest that I only focused on a single line of reasoning in physics and that there are many other disciplines in physics. For example, self-organized criticality. Well, yes, you're right. Self-organized criticality was invented by Per Bak, another Dane. At this moment, some people will become a bit nervous and argue that biochemistry can't be Danish. Someone had to discover things like the vitamin K and get a Nobel prize for it. Yes, it was Henrik Dam of Denmark.

The feminists will object that all the physicists above were male and the ratio should have been 50:50. Well, I can't offer you this number. But I can tell you that one of the Nobel prize candidates may be Denmark's Lene Hau of Harvard University who was able to stop the light. She may become the first female physics Nobel prize winner after more than 40 years.

Dear Muslim friends, it is now up to you to multiply the discoveries above by a factor of 250 in order to give the humankind the same contribution per person as the Danes. If you can't do it, then we will have to conclude that at least at the level of natural science, neither Allah nor Mohammed (PBUH) works right.

And that's the memo.

Cartoon policies

Many of our Danish friends seem to be rather scared - and frankly, I fully understand why. You can read an authoritative explanation why everyone who has insulted Islam must be executed. It's a scary reading, is not it?



Assuming that the situation will continue to develop in the same direction, the following and other policies should be considered.

European homeland security:

• Define temporary rules restricting the freedom of expression in the Western countries, to expire on March 31st, 2006
• Visualization of major prophets and deities or their linking with the recent political questions would be an offense and the persons who do it could be detained for a day or two
• Posters and placards favorably referring to things like 7/7, 9/11, Al Qaeda, bin Laden, holocaust, executions of religiously inconvenient citizens, or placards attacking freedom as such would also be an offense, and the culprits could be detained, too
• Citizens of Arab descent would temporarily be disallowed to be equipped with weapons and dangerous tools including guns, knives, gasoline, or other equivalents except for their homes
• The cartoonists and perhaps others should be given a new identity

Presence in the Islamic world:

• All Danish embasssies and companies present in the region should cancel their activities and be evacuated, and companies from other countries whose situation resembles that of Denmark should consider the same thing
• NATO should ensure safe transfer of all people whose life is at risk

Economy:

• The European Union should pay measured compensations to the affected companies
• The EU commission should buy products from those exporters who lost the markets, at least for two months, and use the products to appease various ethnic groups on the EU territory, among other programs
• Other "luxurious" programs unrelated to the crisis could be frozen if a higher amount of resources is needed
• Currencies such as the Danish krone and others at risk should be pegged to the euro or even the U.S. dollar with the change from February 1st guaranteed to be preserved in 2006 plus minus 10 percent, by a common declaration of several central banks
• Prepare EU plans and compensation policies for various types of hypothetical terrorist attacks on the European soil

Immigration:

• All Western countries with population density below XY and with Christianity as the primary religion should be automatically giving political asylum to all applicants from the mostly Islamic countries who are either Christians or whose race is Caucasian

Work with the ideas and impressions:

• Experts in the culture of Islam and psychologists should be hired to develop an optimal system of ideas that would have the capacity to convince the Muslims that freedom, at least in the Western world, is something that they must learn how to live with
• Try to think about big-scale visual Hollywood-like effects on the skies that would convince sufficiently uneducated Muslims that Allah wants them to behave differently
• Teach all Western soldiers located in the Islamic countries how to play the theater that they actually believe and adore their prophet

Expansion of the EU:

• Speed up negotiations with candidates such as Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria
• Freeze the negotiations with Turkey because their approach to human rights and safety of Christians on their territory is probably going to remain questionable and incompatible with the EU standards and the current developments highlighted the differences

Diplomacy and military:

• Close all Western embassies and consulates that are perceived as insufficiently protected against attacks, and move some of their tasks to other, safer embassies of other EU countries
• Send Danish soldiers currently in Iraq back to their homeland because their reduced self-confidence could prevent them from doing their job right
• Prepare emergency defense plans for the hypothetical scenario of an Islamic country attacking another country, including the policies for using unconventional weapons if necessary

Although this cartoon trouble will certainly unify most of the people who are worried about various related trends, it will unfortunately not unify everyone, not even at Harvard. Our colleague from the Asia Center of Harvard University unfortunately shows a complete lack of understanding of the West after 1500, including the fact that it is no longer mandatory to believe in God. In fact, honestly speaking, most people at Harvard today believe that a belief in God is a symptom of reduced intelligence. Could not she have figured this fact out? Sad and hard to understand.

Buy Danish products

Do you also think that the threats against all innocent Danes, the boycotts, and the burning Danish embassy are not a fair price for Denmark's press freedom? And for the fact that the Danish queen is not exactly among those who think that Islam should be tolerated? Buy Danish. What does it mean? You should buy:

• Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics
• The complementarity principle
  • as opposed to Shahriar Afshar's attempts to refute it :-) - please, this is not a comment about Shahriar's religion but about the achievements of Denmark
• Holger Nielsen et al.
  • realization from 1970 that the dual models described dynamics of strings
• Danish gift baskets
  
• Carlsberg beer
• Tuborg beer
• LEGO toys & BRIO toys
• Stokke stuff for babies
• Bang & Olufsen: audio/video/phone
• Danish cheese: Fontina, Havarti Creamy, Saga Blue
• Danish Crown hams (Plumrose USA): DAK etc.
• Danish foodshop (online)
• Danish deli food (online)
• iGourmet (online)
• Lagermann's - candy
• Toms and Galle & Jessen chocolate
• Novo Nordisk - medicine
• Watco Danish furniture Oil
• Gevalia coffee
• Ecco shoes
• Hummel clothing
• Arla - company that is hit hardest:
• owner of Wisconsin's White Clover Dairy (brands: White Clover & Holland Farm)
• cheeses (Rosenborg, Dofino and Mediterra)
• Danish Air Transport
• SAS - Scandinavian Airlines
• Danish porcelain
• Dansk dinnerware & glassware
• Raadvad knives
• Prince (only for smokers!)
• Kasper Olsen's blog
• MadeInDenmark.ORG

These are pretty good offers from merely 5 million people, aren't they?

American new sensitivity and European new backbone

Criticizing Europe for its unprincipled approach to the defense of the Western values is suddenly so yesterday!

As you know, newspapers in a majority of European countries - and other countries such as New Zealand - have reprinted the Danish caricatures of Mr. Mohammed (PBUH & SAW). Most journalists and politicians on the old continent emphasize that the freedom of speech is the freedom to offend others and if it were not, it would become completely vacuous. The government has no right to apologize on behalf of privately held newspapers and it cannot punish them either. While a balance between responsibility (self-censorship) and freedom (provocation) is desirable, Europe would always prefer an excess of caricature over an excess of censure, using the words of a French politician.

The anglosaxon reaction is very different. The British media that are usually provocative - much like The Reference Frame - chose not to reprint the caricatures (although BBC has shown them on TV). The right to provoke does not mean that we must do it. And Jack Straw, the minister of foreign affairs, praised the British media for their approach. Finally, the United States - according to the State Department - shares the feelings of the Muslims that the drawings were offensive.

America had to invest hundreds of billions of dollars for various wars which has not only established democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan but it has also predictably damaged America's image in the Muslim world (at least so far). Europe can harm its own image equally profoundly (and maybe even more) by 12 mediocre drawings. Well, Europe can be very efficient, too. The only improvement how to get more Joules per Muslim would be to draw Allah Himself but I guess that no one has the courage to do so right now. ;-)

What do I think about the U.S. and U.K. reactions? I think that they are very decent but not sincere. But because of some reasons, I appreciate their slightly hypocritical attitude. Of course that their reaction is caused by the vast experience that the Americans and the British already have with the militant Muslims. Many British and Americans have died in the recent war and the U.S. and U.K. governments know that every word to support anything found offensive by the Muslims will lead to new British and American casualties. In this sense, the approaches of the governments are kind of responsible.

Do I really believe that the U.S. and the U.K. will stay on the Muslim side if this conflict happens to grow? Do I believe that Washington will nuke Copenhagen as thousands (or millions?) of Muslims imagine? I hope not. It seems obvious that if the conflict becomes something more serious, it will be a part of the war on terror and Uncle Sam will again be the usual nice and helpful uncle who helps to save Europe from its lethal problems so often.

Do I think that there is some conspiracy going on? That the reaction of the Muslim world was organized and planned and the caricatures as just buttons that made it start? Not really. My impression is that many Muslims actually believe that drawings of Mr. Muhammed (PBUH & SAW) are much more unforgivable than the obscene treatment of the people in Abu Ghraib, among many other recent incidents. Sorry to say but the reason is simply that the human life and dignity have a negligible value in the Islamic world - at least in comparison with the prophets. This is how their world works - and our Christian world was not so terribly different in the Middle Ages.

Indeed, many things have changed about the Western world since renessaince and analogous changes have yet to occur in the bulk of the Islamic world.

If this conflict evaporates and peace between the cultures is restored, what rules will it follow? I think that it is obvious that the rules must still say that the territory of the Islamic world may follow their laws but the Western countries must obey their own laws. Westerners would become a bit more careful (=scared) after a few Danes are hypothetically killed (much like the Americans and British did) but they will probably still enjoy their usual rights including the right to draw God and His hypothetical friends (PBUH & SAW).

Every Muslim reader of The Reference Frame should realize that they will have to accept this right that has existed in the West for many centuries, and if they can't live with it, it's too bad. Even if you find a couple of allies in the West who are ready to help you to make drawings of Mr. Mohammed (PBUH & SAW) illegal, be sure that you will never find a sufficient support to change the laws in this fashion. Note that our mentalities are vastly different. Anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-American brainwashing newspaper articles occur on daily basis in the Islamic world and we don't care much. (In fact, maybe, we should care, but we just happen to respect the right of the Middle Eastern newspapers to brainwash their readers with stupidities.)

This brings me to the second - and hopefully less likely - scenario, namely that the conflict won't go away. How can it look like? What semi-realistic catastrophic plans can we invent?

• The Parliaments of most Islamic countries reject, under the popular pressure, the caricatures and demand a punishment (note that such resolutions are unanimous so far, e.g. in Pakistan), including death for the cartoonists
• By March, most diplomatic ties between the Western countries and the Muslim countries will be cut
• First assassinations start to escalate the atmosphere
• A violent demonstration of Muslims in a Western country will be stopped by armed policemen
• The Gaza strip - a piece of land that we allowed to be controlled by militant extremists - will always lead the effort to start a new world war, and most of Westerners and Jews who are still there will be killed as a retaliation
• The Western consensus will be that the Gaza strip is the world's epicenter of terrorism and the West will try to re-occupy it, with a silent approval from a few Arab countries including Jordan
• At this moment, the Islamic world will be sufficiently unified to start to defend its territory of Gaza, bringing many countries to the conflict
• Military bosses in the West will agree that it is impossible to fight 1.2 billion people by conventional weapons. The countries will be nuked roughly in the following order: Iran, Syria, Pakistan (unsuccessul attempt to retaliate with nukes), Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and the rest
• Incidentally, the hypothesis that there are enough nukes to destroy the planet thrice will turn out to be a miscalculation, and America, Britain, and France - the main Allies in the war - will have to triple their stockpiles by 2008
• At the very end of the war around 2010, weakened Iran will finish its first nuclear weapon, and they will send it to CERN two weeks after the last squark is discovered (the squark discovery is probably the least likely part of my scenario, according to Peter Woit); however, a complete surrender of the Islamic world will follow three weeks later
• The Third World War will be remembered as the worst conflict in history, partly due to the hundreds of millions of casualties. After one year of evacuation because of increased radiactivity, secular multi-cultural democracies will be established on the territories of the former Islamic countries. Islam will remain legal, but only in its update that allows people to draw God and prophets and allows them - including the women - to rely on hundreds of other elementary human rights, too
• Most importantly, the aerosoles from the nuclear explosions in the Middle East will cool down the planet by hefty 0.02 degrees, diminishing the single most important threat to our civilization called the global warming

The intelligent Muslims should think twice whether they want to provoke the whole Western world with their sensitivities because this is a conflict that they could not win. All peaceful outcomes of this conflict assume that it will continue to be legal to draw the prophets in the Western world.

Clash of civilizations

The cartoon war is the best example of the clash of civilizations we have ever seen. The West is convinced that the citizens are free to believe or not to believe a particular religion. The West assumes that the prime minister can't control a journalist or a cartoonist. And the prime minister can't be responsible for their acts which is why he cannot really apologize for their work.

There is another region in the world where it is widely believed that the government has the responsibility to punish those who diminish the name of God - or even those who visualize God in any context. In fact, it does not have to be God: a militant religious person who lived 1400 years ago (peace upon him) is enough. It is easy to see that not much intellectual progress has occured in this region of the world during the last millenium or two.



Figure 1: An example of a proof from the first principles

What does it mean to lose the cartoon war? For the West, it means that anyone who draws a picture that others find offensive - even if they live 10,000 miles away - will be fired and may even be killed: everyone will have to be very careful before she draws any caricature or does anything else for that matter. A new era of Inquisition will start if the West loses this cartoon war. For Islam, losing this war would mean something even more catastrophic: namely that the people - at least those who live in the West - will be allowed to draw pictures of the particular medieval person whom some people visualize as a terrorist - a person we mentioned above. ;-)




We often say how the different religions are equally good and all this politically correct stuff. But there are striking differences. For example, Mohammed Al A'Ali explains in The Voice of Bahrain that the insulting cartoons are unforgivable. In fact, this is the description of the situation by two parliamentary blocs in that country that invite people for demonstrations. I apologize but this is an example showing why Islam is inferior in comparison with Christianity. Why it is a religion that could not effectively lead to the modern world - and a religion that may become an example of Darwin's natural selection.

According to Jesus Christ, every sin (and maybe even every cos - except for daily kos) is forgivable. In fact, Jesus can forgive you the most distateful sins you have ever done. The people in the West must forgive sins to each other every day. This Christian principle has become a crucial part of the Western civilization, including its atheist portion. We are continuously learning and identifying our past anger as a mere episode in our evolution towards more sophisticated and modern forms of our culture and towards a more complete knowledge.

Making a picture unforgivable is an evil manifestation of bigotry. It is a method to guarantee that there will be no progress. It is a proof that the person who can't forgive is doomed to be an equally silly fundamentalist until the end of his life. One good consequence of the fact that the pictures are unforgivable is that it makes absolutely no sense to apologize because they won't be forgiven anyway.

When I mentioned the bigot who will be a bigot until the end of his life, it was indeed more appropriate that I said "his life" and not "her life" because there are brave women such as this woman from Egypt who are not afraid to advocate freedom (and Denmark), despite a large concentration of medieval religious fanatics who surround her.

I am amazed how little understanding of the Western civilization there exists in the Muslim world. While the rest of the world may silently tolerate their medieval laws violating the basic freedoms of the individuals as we understand them today, it should be clear to every informed person in the world that blasphemy is legal in most of the civilized world. It seems that most people in the Muslim world have not learned this basic fact; the apparent reason is that their education systems are pretty much upgef**ked.

On BBC, Randa Ahmed Essa from Egypt wrote:

• Freedom of speech has its limits when it concerns others... How would it feel if Jesus Christ was the one insulted instead?

Nope. It does not have these limits and it can't have these limits. How would we feel if we saw a picture of Jesus? Nothing special. If Randa Ahmed Essa knew basics about the life in the West, he or she would know that there are thousands of websites with funny images of Jesus or religious jokes. I personally know dozens of religious jokes.



Figure 2: Jesus for president

The Pope is visiting Washington, D.C., and President Bush takes him out for an afternoon on the Potomac, sailing on the Presidential yacht, the Sequoia. They're admiring the sights when, all of a sudden, the Pope's hat (zucchetto) blows off his head and out into the water. Secret Service guys start to launch a boat, but president Bush waves them off, saying, "Wait, wait. I'll take care of this. Don't worry." Bush then steps off the yacht onto the surface of the water and walks out to the Holy Father's little hat, bends over picks it up, then walks back to the yacht and climbs aboard. He hands the hat to the Pope amid stunned silence. The next morning, the headlines in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Cosmic Variance, Daily Kos, Atlanta Constitution, Capitalist Imperialist Pig, Washington Post, Boston Herald, Buffalo News, Houston Chronicle, Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal, Minneapolis Tribune, Denver Post, Albuquerque Journal, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle all proclaim: "Bush Can't Swim!"

It has been unthinkable that someone would be jailed or executed because of such jokes in the Western civilized countries - at least during the last 100 years. The existing laws may protect individual people - but God is too large to fit into our laws and He or She must simply protect Himself or Herself. And the same rule applies not only to God but also to dead prophets.

It is fine if someone is afraid of God but in some cases such a fear is just a demonstration of flawed education. If some people in the Middle East start to talk about confrontation with Europe or the West (and not just talk), they should be primarily afraid of the nuclear and other weapons. God may be great but the nukes can eliminate whole nations within a day. The people over there should be taught how the world in the 21st century works and what are the actual forces, laws, and principles that are relevant for this world.

When I said that the Muslim world does not understand the West, it is probably also true that many people in the West do not understand the world of Islam. France was apparently convinced that the Arab world would love French forever because France did not support the war in Iraq. If you look a bit more carefully, you will see that they don't care. Finally, some people in France decided to make the whole Muslim world upset because of something that is surely more valuable than democracy in Iraq: namely one copy of moderately entertaining caricatures of Mohammed. Every nation has its characteristic reasons to enter the war. Of course, it will be the United States who would have to protect Europe in the hypothetical case of a conflict...

Finally, I encourage you to buy Danish.