New IMF headquarters

I have a message from the boss to all the world financiers and politicians who read TRF. The International Monetary Fund has relocated its headquarters to a neat island in New York:



See more videos about the facility.

Out of the 14,000 inmates (maximum capacity is 17,000), 92% are black or Hispanic and 90% have not graduated high school. A nice place.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn has graduated high school but he decided to relocate after an unpleasant experience in a hotel near the Times Square. It turned out that a 32-year-old 6-feet-tall :-) black maid called Ms Nafissatou Diallo wasn't included in the USD 3,000 fee for one night.




Moreover, he wasn't in the hotel at all - instead, he was having a dinner with his daughter and his cell phone has quantum tunneled to the hotel room. But the chief of the IMF fund doesn't really need a cell phone so he simply left the restaurant for the airport.

Well, more seriously, I can't be any certain whether he is innocent. My guess is that he is not; given some known data, his alibi sounds awkward, indeed. If the DNA tests have indeed shown that pieces of his p*nis ended on the Guinean maid's lips and an*s, it sounds more convincing a piece of evidence by a few orders of magnitude.

And there may have been other cases in which he was not innocent. Of course, if he is proven guilty, he should spend some time in a prison, and of course, it's a good news that a top socialist leader of a big country and the leading 2012 presidential candidate in the same country - the kind of guys who can get away with anything - may be punished like that.



About this large...

Still, I think that 15-20 years for an act that hasn't really substantially hurt anyone is excessive. This isn't really equivalent to a murder, is it? I think that some other activities of the IMF have been much more hurtful. According to the Czech president's speech in October 2010, the IMF is a barbaric relic of the Keynesian era that should be abolished as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, it's not difficult for the French leftists to replace Strauss-Kahn by a morally cleaner person. For example, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a co-chairman of a leftist group in the European Parliament, is just a pedophile. ;-)

LHC will run at 2x 3.5 TeV in 2011, 2012

Today, the CERN folks have officially announced the verdict decided by their recent proceedings in Chamonix (picture above):

CERN announces LHC to run in 2012 (press release)

The beam energy won't be raised from 3.5 TeV to 4 TeV as previously speculated. Also, the LHC won't be stopped at the end of 2011. Instead, it will continue to run in 2012, too.




On December 21st, 2012, CERN will invite a Mayan engineer, Dr Nostradamus, to play with the device for the last time and to turn everything off. This final procedure will stop all the suffering in this world, too. That's why I don't have to tell you that the plan from 2014 would be to continue at 2x 7 TeV. ;-)

The justification of the previously unplanned run in 2012 - namely that "they won't get enough data for a discovery in 2011" - either means that they're saying arbitrary things - because no one knows how many femtobarns one will actually need to discover what Nature is still hiding - or it means that they actually have a rather quantitative clue already what to expect and what its mass is - but we haven't been told yet.

I find the latter option somewhat unlikely because if 45/pb were already enough to see convincing hints what to expect, less than 1/fb (the minimum plan for 2011) would almost surely be enough to discover it at 5 sigma.

Marie Curie: a birthday

Maria Skłodowska was born on November 7th, 1867 - exactly 50 years before Lenin's Coup in Russia - in Warsaw, Russian Empire. Yes, the history of Poland was sometimes sad so the "Vistula Land", which is how the "Congress Poland" was known at the time, was a province of Russia.

Her parents (and grandfather) were well-known teachers and she had 4 older siblings. While her father was an atheist, her mother was a devout Catholic. Nevertheless, Maria's oldest sister died - and so did the mother - which led Maria to become agnostic. She spent some time in a boarding school and in countryside. Her family's assets were stolen by the Russian feudal bastards because the family cared about the Polish independence.




Maria made a contract with her sister Bronisława that they would help each other financially. That eventually directed Maria's world line to Paris - after the first attempt that failed. She was probably in a mutual love with mathematician Kazimierz Żorawski whom she planned to marry but the plans didn't work.

She eventually went to the Sorbonne and earned a maths degree at the age of 27. An instructor at ESPCI - a different institution - was attracted to magnetism, much like she was, and a part of this magnetic attraction was transformed into a mutual magnetic attraction between Maria and the instructor. His name was Pierre Curie. ;-)

One year later, in 1895, after she was denied a job in Kraków (in her beloved Poland) because of her lack of a penis, she returned to Paris and married Pierre Curie. (In France, she only faced xenophobia and false "accusations" that she was Jewish. Despite popular misconceptions, there hasn't been any significant discrimination against women in science in Western Europe for more than 100 years.) The two happily spent the rest of their lives in the laboratory. :-) One more year later, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity of uranium - although he didn't quite know it was radioactivity - and radioactivity entered Maria's life.

Her clever methods showed that the effect had nothing to do with chemistry - only the amount of uranium mattered. Also, the air around became conductive. She began to study radioactivity systematically - finding new elements that exhibited the phenomenon, and so on. The list included thorium and polonium whom they gave the name to celebrate her Polish homeland.

She shared the 1903 physics Nobel prize with Curie and Becquerel for "research on Becquerel's radiation". Her second, 1911 chemistry Nobel prize wasn't shared with anyone because Pierre Curie's skull was fatally fractured by a horse on the street on a rainy, slippery day 5 years earlier. She got the second prize for the "discovery of radium and polonium" and became the first winner of two Nobel prizes. Even today, she remains the only recipient of two different science Nobel prizes.

Radium was discovered by the pair in 1898 in samples of pitchblende (or uraninite) that she ordered to be sent from North Bohemia. If you don't know, Bohemia is another word for the Czech Kingdom, a part of Austria-Hungary. The sample was probably the only major initial contribution of my homeland to the science of radioactivity. By the way, the uranium mining in Northwestern Czechia (near the borders of "DDR") pretty much belongs to the history books these days. But in the 1950s, the mines were alive and kicking and many enemies of socialism were forced to work over there as prisoners.

In 1932, she also founded an institute of oncology - where cancer was treated by radioactivity - in Warsaw. If you remember Maria's contract with her sister Bronisława and if I tell you that Bronisława was a physician, you shouldn't be shocked that Bronisława became the director. ;-)

Also, given Maria's immense, pioneering, self-sacrificing, and sometimes careless life-long activity in the field of radioactivity, you shouldn't be shocked that she died of cancer - leukemia, in fact - on the U.S. Independence Day in 1934 (a better day than the Great October Revolution date of her birth), aged almost 67 which is not too bad.

She may be remembered not just as one of the most important female scientists in the history but also as one of the true experimental fathers ;-) of the 20th century revolution in physics that has showed that despite the self-confidence of the 19th century physicists, lots of important phenomena had been unknown and waited to be discovered.

Sarkozy and Merkel may be humiliated over Lisbon revision

Nicolas Sarkozy decided to press a button.



No, I don't mean this button. What I mean is that before an upcoming EU summit, he agreed with Angela Merkel that the Lisbon treaty should be updated in order to strengthen the fiscal responsibility in the EU.




An anti-federalist fiscal conservative such as myself inevitably has mixed feelings. ;-)

Apparently unaware that it took 10 years to approve the European Constitution slash Treaty of Lisbon - and it was pretty likely that the process would fail again and again - Monsieur Sarkozy thinks that it is now possible to modify such treaties within a few days.

But the days of Napoleon are over, Monsieur Sarkozy. ;-)

Difficulties to approve the treaty

The Finnish PM has endorsed the Franco-German plan, some countries are neutral, many others are strictly against the plan - especially because they don't think that France and Germany can or should dictate the rules in such a direct way. It's pretty clear that one can't get the unanimous support that is needed to revise the Lisbon Treaty. In particular, the country whose debt is high are unlikely to approve the plan.

Also, it has been more or less promised that a referendum would be needed in the Czech Republic to approve any additional modification of the Lisbon Treaty. A referendum could also be a "must" in Austria, Denmark, and maybe elsewhere across the EU (the U.K.?).

Germany and France are the two largest EU countries. But their politicians clearly overestimate their role. For example, in the European Parliament, 96+74 = 170 (DE+FR) deputies are French or German. That's just 170/736 = 23 percent of the deputies. The Franco-German proportion in other organs of the EU is even smaller. Their proportion on the EU population or GDP is just a bit higher but well below 50 percent.

They seem to think that just because the German and French politicians just happen to think similarly these days, they are in charge of the EU. But the EU is much larger than their failing knowledge of the European geography. ;-)

In this small conflict, we're starting to see how the individual organs of the EU are going to be polarized in further conflicts. For example, a priori paradoxically, the European Commission turns out to be a central player against the further centralization of the EU and against the increasing role of France and Germany.

For example, vice-chairman of the European Commission, Ms Viviane Reding of Luxembourg (the EU justice minister who has previously attacked France for its "Nazi" treatment of the gypsies), has gone ballistic over the plan. The French and German politicians correctly pointed out that Viviane Reding wasn't really elected by anybody so she shouldn't scream too much.

During this criticism, however, the Franco-German politicians forgot to mention that they too were only elected in small parts of Europe and they have no business to overly confidently scream across the continent, either. ;-)

This conflict is going to be just a ludicrous farce. Sarkozy and Merkel will almost certainly lose and everyone will be happy again. The two leaders will pretend that they're no painful sore losers and most of their voters will buy it. Nevertheless, the conflict is another explicit proof that democracy can't work at a supranational level. There are many ways to compute the "majorities" and "the strength of a political mandate" and each computational method is good for someone and bad for someone else.

Also, there are many kinds of laws that encourage you to look at various political issues differently. This ambiguity becomes extremely hard when the question is whether the rules and laws themselves should be modified and who has the "moral right" to lead this process.

The content of the revision

Merkel and Sarkozy want to prevent new copies of the Greek debt scenario. So they want the fiscal villains to be punished by the EU - and, in fact, strip them of voting rights if they violate some budget rules. This is a pretty strong cup of tea. Twenty years ago, I would find it natural for the voting rights to be correlated with the financial situation but I no longer think it's sensible or just.

By the way, this is one of the differences between Czechia and Slovakia whose new right-wing government otherwise agree about pretty much anything: the Slovak government finds it OK to strip nations of their voting rights if they overspend while this attitude is not endorsed by the Czech government.

It is not endorsed despite the possibility that the Czech Republic could become the only EU member that satisfies the rules around 2013. At that time, we would be the only nation to decide and we could turn the 26 other member countries into protectorates and their citizens into Helpful EU Citizens (formerly known as slaves). ;-)

Another technicality in which people had different opinions was whether the rules should be imposed automatically. Frau Merkel, a physical chemist, sensibly wanted the rules to be imposed automatically. That's a good choice - and it's no threat for Germany that is unlikely to be among the EU countries with the highest debt.

However, Monsieur Sarkozy not only wants to impose tougher financial rules. He also wants these rules to have no impact on the traditional allies of France - the PIGS - who are the most likely subjects to the new rules. That's why he disagreed with the automatic option. He preferred an agreement between the finance ministers of all the EU countries (there are so many types of ad hoc ensembles of people who may be proposed to decide about something!). Frau Merkel ultimately surrendered and agreed with Sarkozy.

These details are not too important because the revision of the Lisbon Treaty is unlikely to pass, at least not anytime soon.

The automatic option is clearly more just - because Germany and France would always use methods to circumvent the rules, by blackmailing other members, whenever they would need it. Everyone knows that: such rules are only be applied to the "smaller ones". On the other hand, the automatic prescription is so good that it's easier for politicians to say that it is "too cruel" and suspend the rule much more rapidly; similar suspensions have taken place many times in the EU. These are difficult practical considerations.

Moreover, the EU already has many rules that should have played a similar role but they were never enforced. For example, the EU laws don't allow a country to bail out another country. Clearly, most of these laws have already been transformed into dirty pieces of toilet paper - very often, the only countries that actually respected the rules were viciously attacked (e.g. Slovakia in the Greek case) - and there's no reason to think that any additional rules will be different in this respect.

For a law to be enforced, you always need some powerful enough parties who actually care about the enforcement and who have a sufficiently direct access to the organs to enforce the rules. Some of these conditions are always violated when it comes to fiscal irresponsibility in the EU. So I am skeptical that any rules of this kind will ever work in the eurozone.

Even with the eurozone, assuming that it won't break into small pieces, the countries have to learn that they still have independent budgets and that a bankruptcy of one country wouldn't immediately cause lethal problems everywhere - just like a country using gold as a reserve currency doesn't get destroyed just because another country using gold goes bankrupt.

But truth to be said, it's still safer not to be a part of the Eurozone that seems to combine and amplify all the irresponsibility of the individual member states and all the crazy attempts to deal with it that can never work but that cause lots of pernicious side effects. The people on the European continent don't have any common "national" identity, they don't think "in unison", so they can't create any genuine and functional democratic country.

And that's the memo.

Georges Charpak: 1924-2010

Georges Charpak was born in Dąbrowica, Poland (now: Ukraine) in 1924. His family falsified the documents and escaped from the Nazi system to Vichy France in the 1930s. All of them refused to display the yellow star. Georges has also joined the resistance, he was arrested, and sent to Dachau in 1944.



Fellow prisoners from Dachau who were unfortunately not lucky enough to work at CERN later.

From Dachau, he was sent to CERN in 1959, as a student of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, invented the multiwire proportional chamber, a part of the particle detectors, and was given the physics Nobel prize in 1992. Not bad outcome for a Dachau survivor. Throughout the life, he remained a staunch advocate of nuclear energy.




He died yesterday at age of 86: Heuer's CERN, Monsters and Critics, Sydney Morning Herald.

Lee Smolin vs Thibault Damour

Le Monde informs about another battle in the neverending War on Crackpotism.

Thibault Damour faced no one else than Lee Smolin. Le Monde first summarizes how string theory solves the schizophrenia of the 20th century physics and talks about unification and dimensions.

Lee Smolin urges everyone to study any alternatives, whether they're garbage or just junk, and dares to talk about "tragic consequences" for "suicidal young physicists" who would like to work on these alternatives. (Similarity of his language with global warming is not a coincidence.)

All readers who understand anything about reality know that the situation is just the opposite than what Smolin says - namely bad consequences are more likely to meet those who publicly disagree with politically correct fashionable crackpots like himself. But "catastrophic" language and victimism is exactly the weapon used by those who already have about 500 times higher influence than they would deserve. (Similarity with crying feminists who already control the Ivy League is not a coincidence either.)

Damour has argued that not even Smolin can be so limited that he would actually believe the naive Popperian dogmas. Well, I am afraid that Smolin is much more stupid than Damour can even imagine. Accepting statements of philosophers as dogmas, blowing them out of proportion, applying them behind the range of their validity regardless of physical arguments, and using them to organize witch hunts is something that Lee Smolin is very good at.

Damour has also sketched the unprecedented conceptual richness of string theory as well as some experimental tests of string theory and its features by the LHC and other experiments. Damour also mentioned his work about the runaway dilaton that would generate a fifth force that would violate the equivalence principle. If the scenario in this paper were confirmed, it would prove their particular low-energy model that at some level naturally fits into string theory. I think that the runaway dilaton is unlikely but it could be experimentally proved if it is right and it would violate the usual consequences of the equivalence principle.




Predictably, the black crackpot has no idea about any of the actual papers so he thinks and even writes that Damour's statement contradicts my statement that all known semi-realistic F-theory and other major flux vacua exactly obey the equivalence principle. Everyone who has any clue about these things knows very well that there is no contradiction here simply because Damour talks about some very different scenarios.

I think that they're unlikely and as far as I know, he can't construct fully realistic backgrounds containing well-known particle physics (and if you ask me, it will never be possible in Damour's picture), but he is of course right that these models could be in principle experimentally proven, making the case for string theory and his particular structure of scalar fields strong. His models are 10 times more concrete a theory of future physics than anything in DSR or LQG and 50,000 times more than anything that Peter Woit has ever written down.

The usual models referred to as the landscape however don't have a runaway dilaton that would fit Damour's models. That's what I mean by the equivalence principle to be a general prediction of the whole landscape.

I just can't understand why some people read this breathtaking moron from Manhattan even after several years - when it must be so clear to absolutely everyone that he has no idea whatosoever about the topics he is writing about and everything he writes about anything that depends on physics, at least indirectly, is 100% junk. The people who read him must actually enjoy when a vitriolic simpleton constantly annoys and lies about other, much more sensible people. They must also enjoy when a wild dog attacks a human and eats her. They must suffer from some kind of deviation.

Concerning the other statement, I don't know whether Damour knows a construction to get some bizarre DSR-like dispersion relations from string theory. Maybe he knows something I know, maybe knows something I don't know, maybe he is wrong. But I can't judge what he says before I actually see a quantitative description of what he means and what's his evidence. Needless to say, crackpots can always judge anything, centuries before they understand the very basics. That's one of the millions of advantages of being a crackpot.

And that's the memo.

Sarkozy beats Royal

In 1789, Louis XVI, the French king, was removed. 218 years later, the Royal family had a chance to return to the Élysée Palace even though this socialist version of the Royal family was only relatively attractive visually, not politically. ;-)



However, it didn't happen and Nicolas Sarkozy has defeated Segolene Royal, approximately by 6 pct points in the polls that saw a huge 75 percent turnout. Segolene Royal has already called for riots to celebrate the victory of Sarkozy, a "dangerous choice."

France and astrophysics

The left-wing blogosphere often tells us that the Americans are much more ignorant about science than the citizens of more secular nations. For example, 20% of the U.S. citizens think that the Sun revolves around the Earth. So let us look into another country that is based on cultural elites and a country that most of us admire, namely France. As mentioned in the previous link, 2% of the Americans think that the United States have won their independence from France, so it is a rather important country. ;-)

The guy below can win 3,000 euros in "Who wants to be a millionaire". However, he must first answer a rather difficult question: which celestial body gravitates around the Earth? It is a) the Moon, b) the Sun, c) Mars, d) Venus. If it happens to be tough for one particular French intellectual, he can still rely on the French public, can't he? ;-)



OK, maybe the people just wanted to have some fun. Who knows. But you could also call the opinion of the public to be an example of scientific consensus, especially once those 42 percent of skeptics - and let's say it openly, heretics - are decertified. :-)

See also Blonde American geography.

Happy New Year 223 x 3 x 3

The Reference Frame is the only blog in the world that reveals the prime decomposition of 2007, showing that it is a doubly special and triply special year, after too many dry decades. The prime decomposition requires the digit 2 twice and the digit 3 thrice which sounds fair, especially because the digit 0 is used 0 times. Those who think that 1 is a prime will also include the digit 1 once. :-)

Regular readers know that the complex adjectives refer not only to the digits that appear in the prime decomposition of 2007 but also to a doubly special, triply wrong, quadruply stupid, and quintuply falsified new theory of relativity.

International years

2005 was the International Year of Physics.

2006 was the International Year of Deserts.



2007 is going to be the International Year When the LHC Gets Activated, the International Heliophysical Year, not to be confused with the International Heliocentric Year 1615 when the PC police received a complaint against Galileo, and an International Polar Year.

The International Polar Year is two years long, from 2007 to 2008. It's probably because they used the incorrect periodicity 4.pi in the polar coordinates, unskillfully trying to incorporate the fermions.

Bulgaria and Romania in the EU

At the midnight, Central European time, the number of the members of the European Union jumped by two to 27. Welcome, Bulgaria and Romania. The European Union got richer than ever before although its average citizen became poorer once again. ;-) Also, Slovenia has introduced the euro.



Alizee grabbed the Lumo hit 2006

If you Google search for hit 2006 (why aren't millions of people making this obvious search?) :-), the first link will lead you to a page about Lumo hit 2006. If you display the results, you will see that Alizee's "J'en ai marre" has become the winner. Congratulations to Alizee.

Don't believe the 11:59 pm timestamp. It's just marketing. The purpose of this timestamp is to try to teach the readers that they shouldn't take everything seriously just because it's written on a blog of a simpleton, even if the simpleton lives in the New York City.

French Intifada

As you know, France is experiencing the worst days of rioting since the 1968 student protests. I am afraid that the country has allowed more immigration than it can handle. By the "ability to handle", I probably mean a working system and infrastructure that can integrate a vast majority of the immigrants into the society.

Charles de Gaulle used the military in 1968 and it was one of the reasons he had to resign in 1970. Nowadays, the government prefers to issue a "warning" that the rioters could spend many years in the jail. In my opinion, this is no real warning. Instead, such a statement assures them that they can't be shot and they can probably always escape as long as they know how to run or drive a scooter.

One of the things I could not resist to look at was the attitude of the Muslim countries. An agency that shares the name with the most influential agency in the region,

• AlJazeerah,

(Suvrat explains below that it is actually a different Aljazeerah than the "regular" Aljazeerah), used the opportunity to summarize all criticisms and dirt they have against France and its perceived discrimination.

Comments by the readers

As an Irish reader notices, the French are not getting much credit for their opposition against the Iraq war. Well, that's hardly surprising. The second commentator is a French muslim who thinks that the riots won't help anyone. The third contributor is from Tunisia and he announces that France will be destroyed for mocking them, among other things, by headscarf bans. The fourth one is an American who conjectures that NATO and the U.S. will be the only one that will be able to save the French who were on wrong side of the history a few years ago. The fifth one, Dr. Khan from Holland, tells the "demonstrators" to keep on fighting against "discrimination". Another American advices the French muslims to work hard or return home and preserve their habits. Mshakir from Somalia surprisingly says a very similar thing. Abdul Mateen from India recommends to follow his prophet. Tuna hunter from Philippine seas explains that the French have always been soft against fascists. And so on, and so on.

In Israel, many people think that Paris "deserves it". Europe is already a battleground in the war on terror. And political correctness in France prevents the police to stop crime. RedState.ORG, a major right-wing blog, argues that blood is necessary on the streets of Paris today to prevent a greater tragedy tomorrow.

France: NON wins

According to LeFigaro.COM, the EU constitution failed in France:

• OUI (yes) 43.46% vs. NON (no) 56.54% are the current partial results

My feelings about the result are mostly positive, but still mixed a bit. France, one of the champions of European integration, rejected the proposed constitution. Most of the "NON" votes had a "wrong" reason, although there have been many reasons behind the "NON" votes, but I completely respect all of them, much like the arguments behind the "OUI" votes. It is totally obvious that the EU constitution would further diminish the chances of French farmers and workers. The Eastern European competition is tough already today, and most French citizens have probably figured out that the further integration of the EU, according to the constitution, would also mean a further wave of uniformization of the continent. In other words, the economic standards of France and the new member states would continue to converge. France has been a payer in the EU budget, and this also implies that the results had to be different from Spain, for example.

Many dissent socialists voted against the constitution because it was not social and environmental enough - the text seemed as an example of the Anglo-Saxon influence that is intended to destroy the French welfare state. Well, that's ironic because the same constitution may fail in Britain or elsewhere because of the opposite reason. But yes, I agree that the text of the constitution has a neo-liberal, free market flavor. The text tried to define too many things. Many French voters agreed with me that the economic principles should simply not be written down in the constitution - such things belong to the programs of political parties and should not be defined in a long-lasting text. More generally, the constitution is just too long. If it were 10 times as short, it would be more reasonable.

The unpopular French prime minister Raffarin is gonna be fired tomorrow. The Dutch are likely to vote against the treaty on Wednesday, too. Some unusual politicians, such as Juncker from Luxembourg, will propose that the EU constitution continues without France. Others will propose another referendum in France. Most mainstream people will agree that the constitution has been stopped cold in its tracks.

E10, billiards, and M-theory

Eleven-dimensional supergravity on tori "T^k" has exceptional non-compact symmetries, and discrete subgroups of them - uniformly written as "E_{k(k)} (Z)" - are expected to be exact symmetries (U-duality groups) of the full quantum theory, namely M-theory.

For "k" smaller than 6, the exceptional symmetry can really be written as a classical symmetry. For example, for "k=5", the symmetry "E_{5(5)}(Z)" is nothing else than "SO(5,5,Z)" and this U-duality group may be seen as the T-duality group of the (1,1) little string theory - which is the BFSS-like matrix model for M-theory on "T^5" and the stringy UV completion of 5+1-dimensional Yang-Mills theory. The T-duality group of the (1,1) little string theory - which is the decoupled limit of type IIB string theory on "N" NS5-branes for the coupling at infinity going to zero - is inherited from the "big" string theory: it's the same SO(5,5,Z).

For "k=6,7,8", the U-duality group is the honest exceptional Lie group, and no proper geometric interpretation is known. For "k=9", the "E_k" group does not exist as a finite-dimensional algebra. But in a proper sense, "E_9" is nothing else than the affine "E_8". This infinite-dimensional construction is relevant for M-theory on "T^9" which has two large dimensions.

One can go on to even more speculative realms - M-theory on "T^{10}". There, naively, the relevant algebra is "E_{10}" which is even more infinite-dimensional than "E_{9}". It is a hyperbolic algebra - the signature of its Cartan subalgebra is 9+1 and the roots appear both in the space-like region (the imaginary roots) as well as the time-like region (the real roots, analogous to the roots of the compact Lie groups), and most of them have infinite degeneracy. Incidentally, the next natural step, "E_{11}", is so horribly infinite-dimensional that almost nothing is known about its properties.

One of the proposals to illuminate the meaning of the exceptional groups, recently studied by Damour and Nicolai in

• hep-th/0504153,

is that the classical motion of a particle along null geodesics in the E_{10} group manifold describes the classical evolution of bosonic fields in M-theory (i.e. the UV-completed 11-dimensional supergravity, including higher order terms). This kind of idea was first obtained by the investigation of the evolution of toroidally compactified M-theoretical universes when the circles are very short - we have also played with things like that years ago. In this context, one sees similar behavior as in chaos theory - billiards, quantum billiards, and so forth.

Even if this picture describes the classical bosonic sector of M-theory, the obvious question is how to quantize it and how to incorporate the fermions?

At any rate, I am among those who believe that a proper generalized geometric understanding of the existence of exceptional symmetries in maximally supersymmetric flat backgrounds of M-theory is one of the most natural paths to a more universal definition of string/M-theory. This is why the picture of Nicolai et al. - much like the mysterious duality and other directions based on properties of the exceptional groups - should be looked at.

Fusion reactor (ITER)

The European guys seem pretty convinced that the research of thermonuclear fusion can lead somewhere, although not much progress was seen in the last 50 years.



The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) may be built in Cadarache, France, or in Japan, and the different countries are competing to "win" the project.

Brussels has "warned" that it may go ahead and build the first reactor with anyone who will be friendly enough.

http://www.cnn.com/ ...

I am not sure what are the estimated chances that such a reactor will work and it seems as a more important question than the location. ;-) It's pretty clear that if the thermonuclear fusion reactor worked, many other developed countries would try to build their own - because it would be a big deal.

Such a reactor would be much more environmentally friendly and more efficient than the fission reactors. Moreover, the "fuel" could essentially be the water in the world's oceans.