Penrose's CCC cosmology is either inflation or gibberish

Concentric circles, if real (which is unlikely), may come from cosmic strings or domain walls that were "exploding" during inflation

See also a new article:

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What Penrose and Guzardyan have rediscovered is the L=40 bump in the WMAP data

Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan and Roger Penrose of Oxford have submitted an ambitious preprint,

Concentric circles in WMAP data may provide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity (arXiv).

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Echo chamber: BBC, UPI, Science News, Phys Org, Pop Sci, IO9.com, Physics World, Phil Gibbs

The authors claim that some concentric circles observed in the WMAP 7-year data at the 6-sigma confidence level provide us with evidence supporting Penrose's idiosyncratic version of pre-Big-Bang cosmology. (Their arithmetics clearly has to be checked by a serious person because 6-sigma corresponds to the 2 x 10^{-9} probability rather than 10^{-7} as they state.)



For a couple of years, Penrose has been saying that there was a period of cyclic events when the Universe was much smaller than it is today. The model is called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC).




Well, the word "model" is exaggerated. Instead of equations or any quantitative definition of what was happening before the Big Bang according to Roger Penrose, you have to live with Roger Penrose's smile and vague handwaving.

Causal diagrams

There exists one important tool to determine the possible causal relationships between any pair of events in any curved spacetime. When we talk about the newest inventions by Roger Penrose, it must sound as a complete coincidence that the tool is called the Penrose diagram. It's a picture depicting a 1+1-dimensional geometry that differs from a particular 1+1-dimensional curved spacetime by a local Weyl rescaling (metric(x,t) goes to metric(x,t) times const(x,t)).

This simple rescaling doesn't modify the two-dimensional "angles" - well, more precisely, rapidities because we are talking about the geometries of the Minkowski signature. Consequently, the light-like lines may still be identified with all the lines whose slope is 45°. In this form, the Penrose diagrams are directly relevant for 1+1-dimensional geometries as well as higher-dimensional geometries with a rotational or symmetry powerful enough to describe the equivalence classes (orbits) of points in spacetime by 2 coordinates.

What is the Penrose diagram of the Big Bang?



Here it is. But you must erase everything below the horizontal "Big Bang" line. The Big Bang event at "t=0" is represented by a horizontal, i.e. space-like, boundary of the spacetime in this diagram. That's why there can't be anything before the Big Bang. What you see at "t=0" is the initial space-like singularity of the Universe.

This beginning of the Universe has serious consequences. Two events at "t=0" with different values of "x" couldn't have shared a common past. That's why it's hard imagine how they communicated about their need to have the same temperature - which is what we observe in the cosmic microwave background.

This so-called horizon problem was identified in the 1970s as an awkward feature of the Standard Model cosmology. It is not a straight inconsistency but it does suggest that the underlying theory needed some particular fine-tuning of the initial conditions to agree with the observed properties of the Universe, especially the nearly constant temperature of the microwave background across the skies.

In this sense, the horizon problem is analogous to the hierarchy problem in particle physics. They're not inconsistencies but they're proofs of some arrangements that should have an explanation but the existing theories don't explain them.



Completely off-topic: "Horehronie" (Countryside around upper Hron river) by Kristina was the 2010 Slovakia's representative in Eurovision and remains a hit both in Slovakia and Czechia

The horizon problem, together with the flatness problem and other problems, was solved by the inflationary cosmology in 1981. Alan Guth was playing with the Higgs fields in cosmology when he discovered their ability to do something that turned out to be far more important than his original motivation. The Higgs fields optimized for the new job were renamed as inflatons. Their potential was improved and flattened a little bit.

These scalar fields may sit near the maximum of their potential for quite some time. While they're doing so, the Universe is expanding exponentially - much like the current Universe is expanding due to the cosmological constant. However, the temporary cosmological constant coming from the inflaton field - which was driving the inflationary expansion - was greater by dozens of orders of magnitude than the current cosmological constant.

What happens with the Penrose diagram? Well,



the horizontal line that used to be the boundary of the spacetime is no longer a boundary. The Penrose diagram gets hugely expanded into what would be previously called negative values of "t". It doesn't become infinitely long but it becomes long enough; the length of the Penrose diagram is given by the number of e-folding in inflation. The events at "t=0" with different values of "x" do share a common past. Inflation explains why different directions in the skies can have the same temperature of the microwave background.

It also explains why the spatial section of the Universe is so accurately flat and why the size and the mass of the Universe are so much bigger than the Planck length and the Planck mass. Everything boils down to the exponentials arising from the exponential de-Sitter-like expansion in the inflationary era.

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology

Now, inflation obviously solves the problems it claims to solve and whoever claims it doesn't simply doesn't understand physics too well. By completely irrational arguments (that also included crazy Carroll-like nonsense about the arrow of time), Penrose has been criticizing inflation for decades. Did he propose his own picture to extend the Big Bang theory?

Well, his recent creation is called the conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC). It also extends the Penrose diagram to the eon before the Big Bang. However, Penrose won't tell you what the actual proper distances are in the new portions of his spacetime. If he had done so, he would be forced to admit that the geometry is identical to inflation - exponentially growing proper distances: it is the only conceivable solution.

Instead, he only tells you what the conformal structure of the spacetime - and the Weyl tensor, the part of the Riemann tensor that only depends on the conformal structure (i.e. that is invariant under the Weyl rescalings) - is. Is that enough?

Well, it would be enough if he had a theory whose Lagrangian - or other basic equations - don't depend on the metric but only depend on the conformal structure (the metric modulo its scaling at each spacetime point). However, as you may guess, he doesn't have anything like that.

In most physical theories, the whole metric tensor - and not just the conformal structure - is essential to construct realistic actions which are essential to describe physics of the systems we know. You need the metric tensor to provide you with the upper indices to contract the lower indices from the derivatives in the Lagrangian. You need it for other things, too. Proper distances are physical.



While the electromagnetic field is classically scale-invariant, massive fields are clearly not: they have privileged proper distance scales. For example, the electron field is associated with the Compton wavelength of the electron. This is true for any other scale in particle physics. Even more universally, the Einstein-Hilbert action itself - the Lagrangian of general relativity - depends on the metric and not just the Weyl tensor.

It seems almost guaranteed that this dependence is not just an artifact of an approximation. Holography shows that the information that can be concentrated into a volume is bounded by the proper surface of this volume in the Planck units. The proper distances (and areas) matter.

In the context of CCC, you have two options: you either insist on the existence of the metric tensor, including the scaling, at each point. Then you are obviously led to the inflationary geometry as the right and natural answer: Penrose would "rediscover" inflation. (Of course, it wouldn't be quite an independent "rediscovery".)

Or you say that the overall scaling of the metric is ill-defined. Then you don't have to conclude that you deal with inflation. However, you also don't have any theory that could continuously connect to the theories we know - the Standard Model and General Relativity - in which the proper distances and scales are clearly real and important. Penrose is clearly trying to obscure this fundamental point but he simply doesn't have a single glimpse of such a theory.

Inflation could predict concentric circles

Let us look at the simple picture again:



The way how the pre-Big-Bang evolution could imply the existence of concentric circles is totally obvious: there is a world line of an object that is doing something periodic in the pre-Big-Bang eon (before what used to be called "t=0"). The outgoing future light cones of these periodic events are imprinted into the microwave background and displayed as concentric circles. This explanation is so obvious that I won't waste more time with it.

However, you see that as far as the causal structure goes, inflation is just perfect to explain such concentric circles. Gurzadyan and Penrose repeat about 10 times that the CCC is not inflation and there's no inflation in their model and that inflation couldn't explain the data. Nevertheless, they fail to mention that their model is either isomorphic to inflation or it is gibberish, and because of the identical causal structure, inflation has exactly as much capacity to explain the data as the CCC.

Well, indeed, the badly needed correction to their statements would sound as one of the Radio Yerevan jokes that Mr Gurzadyan of Yerevan must know very well. ;-)

Whether a particular inflationary model can give quantitatively satisfying predictions for such concentric circles requires a more accurate analysis. However, it is likely that the Gurzadyan-Penrose argument that inflation couldn't predict such concentric circles is incorrect. First, they correctly state that for inflation to predict such concentric circles, the source of the oscillations would have to occur many e-foldings before the end of the inflation.

Most non-uniformities that occur many e-foldings before the end of the inflation are indeed supposed to be flattened out and diluted. Perturbations of various fields decrease as powers of the size of the Universe. However, the exponents depend on the dimensions of the fields and other things.

The most general objects with the most general parameters embedded in inflation give the very same results as CCC - while the latter is incalculable. Gurzadyan and Penrose don't discuss the intensity of the concentric circles that the CCC predicts. If they had done so, it would be damn obvious that the problem is pretty much equivalent to the problem in inflation. Most likely, they would also get a brutal dilution out of the simplest models. But they are hiding behind the absence of any quantitative equations of the CCC, imposing the unjustified wishful thinking on their readers that the CCC can offer a better solution than inflation.

Extended cosmic objects may have the required longevity

I do agree that a simple enough inflation-like picture would probably tend to weaken the circles too much after many e-foldings. However, there could be explosions within inflation that could avoid the decay. The equation of state for the matter created in such explosions could have a negative pressure which would prevent it from decaying.

Recall the text Why and how energy is not conserved in cosmology to realize that the total mass stored in the dust is conserved and the total mass stored in positive-pressure types of matter such as radiation is decreasing as the Universe expands.

On the other hand, the total mass stored in negative-pressure forms of matter is increasing. The energy carried by the cosmological constant is an extreme example. But cosmic strings and cosmic domain walls have a negative pressure, too. So the total energy/mass carried by these objects is increasing as the Universe grows.

For the readers who care about the quantitative issues, strings have the stress energy tensor of the type "(+1,-1,0,0)rho" where the directions are time, space along the string, and transverse spatial directions. That's because the stress-energy tensor within the worldvolume is proportional to the metric tensor for the world sheet to preserve the internal Lorentz symmetry. No momentum components are flowing away from the world sheet so the transverse components vanish. By averaging over the directions in the 3D space, you get "(+1,-1/3,-1/3,-1/3)rho" for the cosmic strings, giving you "p=-rho/3". In the same way, membranes have "(+1,-1,-1,0)rho" or "p=-2.rho/3" after the isotropic averaging.

If you create an exploding cosmic string or a domain wall during the inflation and these objects are getting bigger, the total energy carried by these objects will increase with time and the local strength of the effect may stay pretty high.

At any rate, if Penrose and his collaborator preferred proper physics solutions of problems over tendentious non-quantitative bullshiting with the predetermined (and unjustified) goal to attack inflation, they would realize - like your humble correspondent - that the fact that the circles don't get too "weak" simply means that what is propagating is associated with objects with negative pressure such as cosmic strings and domain walls.

And that's the memo.

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P.S.: I haven't made it sufficiently clear but I doubt that a new effect of the type they describe is really there in the data. One has to do a pretty sophisticated calculation to see whether some structures may appear as "chance". In particular, the WMAP data may be decomposed to the spherical harmonics labeled by "L,M" which depend on "L" in a well-known way.



This structure of the WMAP acoustic peaks, especially the largest first one, means that the temperature variations in 2 pieces of the skies are much more likely to be correlated if the points are separated by 1 degree than 2 degrees or 0.5 degrees.

Penrose et al. could have just seen the statistical signs of some "acoustic peaks" as a function of "L" - and "acoustic peaks" are well explained by the standard cosmological evolution. In my opinion, Penrose doesn't really understand these technical things about the Big Bang cosmology so he can't reliably determine whether he has discovered a "new effect".

Update: Penrose may see L=40 peak

I have thought about the acoustic peaks a bit more quantitatively and I think I know exactly what Penrose et al. see: they see concentric circles whose radii have periodicity 5° on the sky; see their paper. If you look at the graph above, you will see that 5° corresponds to L=40. And indeed, there is a small observed WMAP peak around L=40. The L=40 WMAP black datapoint is significantly above the red predicted curve, much like the L=22 peak is significantly below the red curve.

The "excessive" spherical harmonics with L=40 and low values of M will manifest themselves as concentric circles whose apparent (angular) radii differ by multiples of 5°. I don't know why there is exactly the deviation for L=40 but the graph above brings the effect to the perspective. It's just a tiny bump on a much stronger and more structured curve that is reproduced by the WMAP data and whose bulk is totally ignored by Penrose.

SciAm: Jim Weatherall joins Garrett Lisi

In Fall 2004, when I began to teach at Harvard, my first course was Physics 287a, Introduction to String Theory. Many excellent Harvard graduate students attended the course - and some people from MIT were also regular visitors.

One student of mine from MIT was more experienced than others and he always asked the best questions, even though he used to sleep throughout much of the lectures. His name was Alan Guth. ;-)

You know, such courses also typically attract some of the most ambitious undergraduate students. In many cases, these undergraduate students are just excellent and they beat many of the graduate students and become top researchers later in their life. However, there is no physical law that implies that the undergraduate students who register for an advanced graduate course have to be bright.




So together with Xi Yin, the course's brilliant teaching assistant - now at faculty of Harvard - we also had the pleasure to have a couple of undergraduate students in the classroom. Among them, one of them was very good and there was one who was ... just ambitious. He turned out to be one of the worst students - and, if I remember well, the very worst one in the course. He just couldn't get it.

If you want to know, he also gave a presentation on the WZW models which showed his misunderstandings of pretty basic things clearly enough, too. Because Xi and me were compassionate and we didn't want to induce scandals, we gave him a letter grade I won't release but the word Crank starts with the same letter. ;-)

His name was Jim Weatherall.

Nima Arkani-Hamed was a kind of his "undergraduate advisor" - which is a relatively unimportant Harvard position in which you're expected to meet your "advisee" a few times a year. However, he would pick Arkani-Hamed as an advisor for the same reason as why he registered for my course: to get a "weapon" to legitimize his nonsensical statements about science.

Weatherall has abused his links with Nima on his own blog (and in a previous article he wrote for Slate) where he was defending some nonsense about a 2007 Higgs rumor. It was clear at that time that if the signal had been real and not just a fluke (background and/or a mistake), it couldn't have been a Standard Model Higgs - it would be to be a BSM (beyond the Standard Model) particle. Weatherall's main point was to totally deny this basic fact. (Weatherall was also clearly ignorant about the multiplicity of the Higgs bosons in MSSM and many other basic things.)

If you click at the link here, you will get directly to Nima's answer that settled the fact that Weatherall's physics was 100% wrong. Weatherall continued to argue. It just happens that even though I have spent more time with Weatherall, I don't remember any particular arguments; maybe, he was afraid that he would be failed. So I only remember that he was not a good student.

Fine, so what do you think that happens if a student goes through some courses where he should have been failed - but wasn't, mainly due to the politically correct atmosphere of grade inflation that surely makes instructors of advanced courses afraid to fail their students - and when he finishes the studies? Well, obviously, the HEP research system remains meritocratic enough so that he can't become a grad student at a decent school or get a postdoc job. But does it really hurt?

Jim Weatherall began to write about science. And not just about science. He became a close collaborator of John Horgan - the madman who thinks that science ended in 1996 (one year before the AdS/CFT correspondence, a few years before the discovery of the cosmological constant, and I could tell you dozens of other radical discoveries that occurred after 1996). They have published some of their "musings" together.

However, in the newest issue of Scientific American that will be released in two weeks, Jim Weatherall chose another collaborator whose name is well-known to the TRF readers, namely Garrett Lisi. Since November 2007 when Lisi published his "exceptionally simple theory of everything", everyone who is interested in physics and who is not completely deaf must have understood that the paper makes no sense.

Its author isn't able to distinguish bosons from fermions (or doesn't know why they can't be unified in multiplets of bosonic symmetries), spin-one bosons from spin-two bosons (or he doesn't know why gravitons can't appear as bulk gauge bosons), he doesn't know the representation theory of Lie groups (and was shocked by many basic insights about E8 such as its SU(5) x SU(5) subgroup), renormalization, or anything else that is relevant for the work on "theories of everything". And the paper looks accordingly. The maximum thing that Lisi has arguably mastered is how to project points with 8 integer or half-integer coordinates into a 2-dimensional plane. He has used this skill intensely. ;-)

Another thing that Garrett Lisi became famous for is that he endorsed (click "more" at the next page) the Universe Splitter, a worthless iPhone app that claims to split the Universe "according to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics" so that you live 2^N different lives simultaneously. :-)

Nevertheless, Scientific American - which is no longer constrained by any quality standards or any expectations of honesty, for that matter - can promote his theory of everything again, in November 2010:

A Geometric Theory of Everything

Lisi's meaningless paper is described as "the most talked about paper of 2007" (hiding that it was only the case in the crackpot community, not in real science) and it is linked, in completely absurd ways, to the LHC, James Clerk Maxwell, and other things.

It's just frustrating because we live in the age of communication and some people are actually - and intensely - affected by what they read in journals and magazines, including the popular ones. So what's being written in those magazines is spreading to the whole public, often to the scientific public in other disciplines, too.

And what the results may look like if the writing is done by the worst students in the most relevant courses at their alma mater? This question is just a rhetorical one. The situation is depressing and it's pretty hard to isolate the place "where" the main mistake is taking place. Why is it so that printing complete garbage by writers who suck most of the time allows Scientific American to survive?

Well, it's because their readers don't really mind, either. The people who remain the readers of this journal suck as well. They have already been brainwashed by tons of complete nonsense so if you add some additional nonsense and make it a little bit worse, they won't care. The magazine also lives from its trademark - and inertia - because it used to be a good magazine.

From a societal perspective, it's fine. The stupid people have the right to read the magazines written by the stupid writers. What's really wrong is that this junk magazine is still allowed to use the term Scientific in their name. The word "science" is associated with something completely different than what they write about. However, no one seems to care about the brand, or about the term "science". So no one wants to - or is able to - sue the crooks.

People who care should invent a legal way to force the magazine to be renamed to something more accurate, e.g. Stupid Brainwashed American Bigot, or something of the sort. The acronym should be simplified, too: Scum is more accurate than SciAm.

These things do matter and everyone who denies the pernicious impact of the work by Scientific American and many others on the position of science in the society is a ... denier. ;-) Recently, Erik Verlinde obtained an EUR 2 million grant for his manifestly wrong claim that gravity is an entropic force. The paper is not worth one euro, surely not two million euros.

Needless to say, the "controversy" is just another reason that allows the idiots in the European funding agencies - and many other places - to throw the taxpayers' money into similar black holes. But the lies written about Verlinde's "discovery" in the newspapers have been critical for this particular waste of the taxpayer money. Even Garrett Lisi is actually better off financially than many excellent postdocs and not only postdocs. These are just particular proofs of the statement that meritocracy is safely dead in the wider society that calls itself "scientific".

Meritocracy may continue to thrive in a few isolated, old-fashioned floors of the ivory towers but they are becoming increasingly marginal and irrelevant - when it comes to money, influence, and other things.

The competent young people who care about the money just a little bit (and be sure that even among the physicists, a majority has always cared about the material issues at least a little bit) will be increasingly repelled by the proper scholarly meritocratic jobs because they will surely notice that the crooks and crackpots - and people completely disconnected from science - are better off. And sometimes it's the conservative ivory towers' own fault because they just refuse to confront the continuous flow of garbage that is being presented as science to the public from all sides.

Be sure that it is already having a huge impact and this impact is going to grow unless the growth will be stopped.

And that's the memo.

Why there are no classicalons by Dvali et al.

Jester at Résonaances discussed a recent paper,

UV-completion by classicalization,

by Gia Dvali, Gian F. Giudice, Cesar Gomez, and Alex Kehagias. They want to claim that one can construct a Higgsless Standard Model and solve the unitarity problem with the W_L-W_L scattering - or any UV problem in any field theory, for that matter - by a simple idea inspired by black holes.

Well, the new objects postulated by their scenario are not too simple - and they can be viewed as a nearly infinitely complicated generalization of the Higgs sector - but let us call the idea simple, anyway.




Quantum gravity prevents you from probing distances shorter than the Planck length. This fact may be illuminated from many angles but the induced non-locality may also be blamed on the large number black hole microstates. Dvali et al. state that even in a non-gravitational theory, you can invent or observe similar black-hole-like states and they will soften the UV behavior in the same peaceful way as the black holes manage to do in quantum gravity.

Their non-gravitational "classical" objects that play the role of the virtual black holes are called "classicalons" and their appearance in the set of virtual particles is called "classicalization".

Needless to say, this statement is just a reflection of the authors' misunderstanding how quantum gravity work. You can't just make quantum gravity out of a non-gravitational theory. You can't make "large objects" relevant for high-energy scattering whenever you want and at any scale you want, by using your wishful thinking as the only tool.

The reason is that the black holes have many properties that are completely essential for their ability to modify the trans-Planckian scattering, especially their

1. longevity
2. large entropy
3. fast thermalization.

All of these - largely but not quite independent - conditions are actually needed for the black holes to play the role that they play.

A black hole was first discovered by Karl Schwarzschild, a German warrior on the Russian front of the World War I, as a classical solution to Einstein's equations. It was a static solution - so the lifetime is classically infinite. When the quantum effects, especially the Hawking radiation, is taken into account, the black hole lifetime remains long, especially if the black hole is really large.

You can find many other spatially extended static solutions to classical equations - but they will simply not have a measurable impact on the high-energy scattering of ordinary particles. Why? Because the inclusion of an extended object among the intermediate states - or virtual particles - may be interpreted as a kind of an instanton. Even in quantum gravity, this is the case, at least morally.

The instanton can induce new interactions - or new contributions to old interactions. The 't Hooft interaction is an example from gauge theories. The ordinary instanton may be qualitatively interpreted as a virtual monopole-antimonopole pair. And such an instanton can induce the direct interaction proportional to the product of all fermionic species in your theory.

It's my understanding that Dvali et al. understand that the intermediate objects have to be stable or meta-stable to contribute to the high-energy scattering i.e. that the condition 1 has to be satisfied.

However, a basic property of an instanton is that its effects are suppressed by "exp(-S)", the exponential of its action with a minus sign. For very large instantons in realistic theories, this action is inevitably huge, and the suppression is gargantuan. This is also true for the black hole intermediate states whose action is of order

S = A/4G

where A is the area of the intermediate black hole's event horizon. Imagine that the instanton we consider for the scattering with intermediate black hole microstates is a kind of a Euclideanized fuzzball. It's a coincidence that the action uses the same letter "S" as the entropy but it's no coincidence that the same value has appeared for the action as what we know as the black hole entropy.

So the effect of an extended intermediate object on a high-energy scattering process is tiny. How can such a black hole influence the high-energy scattering of two particles? Well, it does because the black hole is effectively being born. But why does it get born even though its probabilities are suppressed by exp(-S), as argued above?

Well, it's because there are many black hole microstates, roughly exp(S) of them, where

S = A/4G

stands for the black hole entropy in this case.

Clearly, to beat the exponential suppression from the high action, there has to be an exponentially large number of microstates. The factors of exp(S) and exp(-S) pretty much cancel. The condition 2 has to be obeyed for the entropy to be high and for this amplification to occur.

Some "cold" unique solutions of the fundamental equations simply won't carry a high enough entropy, so their contribution to the high-energy scattering will resemble an instanton, and can be completely neglected.

But can't you have many non-black-hole states that still carry a high enough entropy? Well, surely, you can. A ball of of quark-gluon plasma in a gauge theory may carry a huge entropy which is systemically analogous to the black hole entropy. After all, these two may be equivalent via a version of the AdS/CFT correspondence.

However, if the intermediate object is a high-entropy, "hot", non-gravitational object such as a ball of the quark-gluon plasma, you would be double counting. The diagrams contributing to the high-energy scattering actually depend on the "locally created" quarks and gluons only: the perturbative diagrams with their small number win (if the 't Hooft coupling is smaller than one or so). The diagrams with large balls of the virtual quark-gluon plasma are subleading because they're nothing else than the higher-order diagrams.

So the balls of the quark-gluon plasma actually don't contribute any sizable correction to the high-scattering amplitudes. As I have mentioned, this conclusion is true if the 't Hooft coupling is smaller than one. If it is greater than one, the dual gravitational picture of the AdS/CFT system is more relevant, the physics should be described as genuine black hole physics in a higher-dimensional spacetime, and it is indeed true that the high-entropy intermediate states soften the high-energy scattering.

However, even this intermediate-black-hole picture is only correct if the wavelength of the scattering particles is much shorter than the AdS radius - but it must still be longer than the Planck length. If the energy is higher than the Planck scale, physics gets averaged over the positions in the holographic dimension, and we're back to the asymptotically free Bjorken-scaling-like scattering where the gluons or other partons are the only relevant intermediate objects.

Whatever you do with these ideas, it's guaranteed that there won't be any new "large terms" from new extended intermediate objects unless it is "geometrically clear" that these intermediate objects are black holes. Black holes are the only intermediate objects whose relevant instantons may become significant because the smallness of the instanton contributions may be compensated by the large black hole entropy.

This leads me to the final point, the condition 3.

The reason why the black holes were "irreducibly new" virtual objects that influenced the behavior differently than their "elementary building blocks" is that there are no simple elementary building blocks of the black holes. At the event horizon, the information gets rapidly spread among all the degrees freedom - in a logarithmically short time (as a function of the number of degrees of freedom). Black holes are the fastest scramblers in Nature.

This property is necessary for the creation of a non-locality in a consistent theory, and for the corresponding "irreducibility" of black hole intermediate states. If the time needed for the thermalization were governed by a power law rather than a logarithm, then the extended object would actually be a literate "composite" and the correct calculation of the effect of the intermediate states would be given purely in terms of the intermediate "elementary building blocks".

In the paper about scramblers, Susskind et al. explain that the black holes - and their non-gravitational duals that involve "infinitely" large matrices with non-integrable actions (that's the same thing as the case of a large 't Hooft coupling mentioned above) - are the only objects that can "scramble" in the logarithmic time. I am convinced that this conclusion also means that they're the only "qualitatively new" extended objects that may change the rules of the game if they appear as intermediate objects.

Note that the degrees of freedom of the black holes are "hidden" so that the independence of the black hole microstates from the "elementary building blocks" is manifest. In the bulk picture, the degrees of freedom are stored at the event horizon; in the large-N matrix picture, the extra degrees of freedom are the multi-valued color indices.

So I think that if Dvali et al. actually correctly calculate how big an effect they can get from their "classicalons", it won't be big enough for the "miraculous cure" of UV divergences that they wanted to attribute to these "classicalons". The inability of "classicalons" to achieve this job comes from the many special properties that the black holes have but the "classicalons" don't.

And that's the memo.

The Guth-Vanchurin paradox

One of the canonical arguments that force Bousso et al. to see that the Universe has to be destroyed is that this obligation is the only way known to them how to resolve the Guth-Vanchurin paradox - see page 12 (13 of 23) of their paper.

The paradox is to appear in literature (unless the authors quickly understand that it is quite silly).

In this paradox, a simple probability may be calculated in different ways, leading to different results. It is this insufferable discrepancy that makes Bousso et al. insist that the world should be euthanized soon. ;-) Can you save the world by solving the paradox? What about you, John Baez and other saviors of the world?

The kindergarten paradox goes as follows.

(The story was improved by L.M.)

In North Korea, every citizen has to take one sleeping pill (everytime) before he or she goes to bed.

Kim Il-Sung, the eternal president who died in 1994 but who remains the most powerful man in the country, figured out that the brightest future of his glorious nation is achieved if 1/2 of the pills make the citizens sleep exactly for 20 minutes and 1/2 of the pills make them sleep exactly for 12 hours. That's the kind of wisdom that only the brightest governments can invent. So don't ask why this is the policy: just accept the scientific consensus.

All the pills are randomly mixed up in the factory.

Fine. So you - imagine that you're a random U.S. woman called Cynthia - emigrate to North Korea away from the evil capitalism. At some point, you feel sleepy and take one random pill from a big 50-50 reservoir, just like everyone else.




Then you wake up. The socialist sedatives are designed so that you can't determine how much you have slept. Now, the question is

What is the probability that you have slept just for 20 minutes?

Well, every nap is associated with a pill. And exactly 1/2 of them are 20-minute pills. So if you assume that the end-of-the-nap is chosen randomly, with a uniform distribution, from the set of all ends-of-the-naps, the probability that you have slept for 20 minutes is fifty percent.

As you may expect, they want to argue that there is a way to see that the probability of a short nap differs from 50%. Why should it differ?

Well, Guth, Vanchurin, Bousso, Freivogel, and others obviously believe that it must be more likely that the awaken people have just slept for a short time because the people who sleep too much are likely to be killed by the "doomsday cutoff", whatever it is, before they wake up. Too bad for them. They should have taken the 20-minute pill. The 12-hour pill is an evolutionary disadvantage.

In North Korea that approaches the doomsday, the survival of the fittest dictates that you should better find a 20-minute pill. But no one knows how to do so.

Now, if you randomly choose yourself from the set of the people in the whole spacetime of North Korea who woke up before the doomsday, and it is the only way to wake up, the 20-minute pill comrades will be given a boost. Their percentage of 20-pill comrades among the awaken citizens will increase above 50%. Can you calculate the exact number?

Well, you may be able to do so but the result clearly depends on the duration of the North Korean regime.

If their regime lasts for a very long time - a much longer time than 12 hours, and it unfortunately does - then the existence of a doomsday (that will arrive to the country, but it will fortunately be more localized than a collapse of the Universe) is pretty much irrelevant.

The number of 12-hour sleepers who will be killed while sleeping will be about 36 times higher than the number of 20-minute sleepers who will be killed while sleeping (assuming that everyone sleeps once a day; this point will be discussed later). But this number of naps that will be interrupted by the doomsday is much smaller than the overall number of 20-minute or 12-hour sleeps, so the effect of the interruption is negligible. The probability of a 20-minute sleep after you wake up will be close to 50% because throughout the Korean history, most sleeping episodes were survived by the people.

However, if the duration of the North Korean regime were shorter, for example 10 hours, and if the citizens knew about this speedy fate of their paradise on Earth, then the probability that you have slept for 20 minutes could go up to 100%. It's easy to see why: if you take a 12-hour pill, it's too bad because the judgment day (or judgment second) is guaranteed to arrive while you sleep and you will therefore never wake up again. So if you do wake up, it does prove that you have only slept for 20 minutes.

At any rate, if we know the history of the country and the approximate numbers of people who go to bed at various points of the history, we can easily calculate the probability that a randomly chosen person who wakes up sometime in the North Korean history is a 20-minute sleeper. It's just about the dividing of two numbers.

In particular, if the life of North Korea is essentially infinite, the probability will obviously approach 50%.

Frequency of sleep

It's useful to note that the probability that you were a 20-minute sleeper doesn't depend on the number of naps you have to take per day as a function of the type of the pill. For example, you may need to sleep 36 times a day if you're unlucky to get the 20-minute pills all the time - while the 12-hour pill recipients only sleep once. You could think that this asymmetry also increases the percentage of the 20-minute freshly awaken sleepers because "they" wake up more often.

Well, it doesn't because the number of 20-minute sleepers is dictated by the pills and only 1/2 of the pills are 20-minute pills. So the people who sleep for 20 minutes 36 times in a row may exist but they're rare. And the correct result that includes the existence of such people with the proper weighting still gives you "p=50%".



The Earth Day in North Korea. The country celebrates it every day.

Incomplete information available to the sleepers

Of course, if the citizens aren't told that the North Korean regime won't last forever, they may be unaware of the judgment day and it will influence their calculation of the probabilities. Most typically, they will be told that communism is a paradise on Earth that will last forever. After all, Kim is called the eternal president which means that his empire should be eternal as well. ;-)

Because of this propaganda, you will think that the regime exists forever which means that the judgment day is not real - or is "infinitely" far away. After you wake up, you will calculate the probability to be a 20-minute sleeper to be exactly 50% even though the more accurate result taking the unsustainability of communism into account exceeds 50%.

In the real world, North Korea has a beginning in time - much like this Universe that began with a Big Bang. Needless to say, if you imagined a hypothetical world where these things have existed for an infinite amount of time, it would also become "almost guaranteed" that you woke up "almost an infinite time" before the doomsday. The probability of a 20-minute nap would therefore go to 50%, too.

All this discussion actually assumed that all the citizens at all times are "equally likely" to be you. In this sense, I was accepting the "anthropic rules of the game". Even with the anthropic rules of the game, there can't possibly exist any paradox. For any kind of a history, one can easily calculate the probabilities.

Acausality in wrong calculations of the probability

It's important to note that all these calculations must start with some knowledge about the history and the timing of the doomsday - either accurate knowledge, or a probabilistic knowledge - and then they calculate the probabilities that the awaken people obey certain conditions.

If you are a dictator who makes a timing of the doomsday a function of the people's expectations, and people's expectations, calculated probabilities, and therefore their behavior may depend on the doomsday, then you are clearly going to see paradoxes. That shouldn't be surprising because you have designed a classic world with closed time-like curves and they do lead to logical paradoxes.

That's the ultimate reason why the anthropic folks see "paradoxes": their formulae are genuinely paradoxical because they imply that the probabilities of an outcome, XY, to occur now is affected by the future doomsdays and other events, and the probability of the future is clearly affected by the present, too. A classic grandfather-paradox setup.

However, such paradoxes never appear in the real world - neither in North Korea nor in the multiverse if it is real - simply because people's current experiences (and their rational expectations) can never be affected by the future that is unknown. They only depend on the past (plus the quantum "random generator"). That's the very point of future that it is unknown.

In the very same day, no valid calculation done by any beings throughout the history of the Universe may depend on non-tautological assumptions about the future simply because the future is unknown. All valid reasoning always has to boil down to the knowledge of the past and present. There's no other "primary" knowledge. All of our knowledge about the future - whether it is more or less certain - is deduced from our actual knowledge of the past.

Anthropic people misunderstand and deny causality: All the formulae by Bousso and dozens of others for the current probabilities of any measurement depend on properties of the Universe in the future (because they're based on the counting of "similar situations and objects" that will emerge in the future), which is an acausal rule, and all of their contradictions arise for the same simple reason as the contradictions in the grandfather paradox.

But the real world never admits any formulae where the current probabilities depend on the properties of anything in the future. And any valid argument and any physical law that produces some probabilities always starts with some known past/present data and it predicts the numbers - and the world behaves and evolves according to these rules. It's never the other way around: the future may never influence the "current" laws of physics as an independent variable.

The past is the input, the probabilities for the present and future is the output of all calculations based on legitimate laws. It's never the other way around. For example, the probability that your DNA suffers from autism is not affected by the abundance of the autistic people in the future. The latter may be huge but it is completely irrelevant for your predictions about the present (or test you will undergo today).

The probabilities are first calculated "by Nature", and then they're (statistically) realized. And scientists have to respect this ordering, a basic manifestation of the logical arrow of time. They can't envision a future Universe, count the number of objects satisfying some properties, and use the counting to predict what will happen now - simply because they don't know and can't know the future at the beginning of their reasoning because the future depends on the things they're just trying to calculate.

Instead of the grandfather paradox, it may be more accurate to talk about the paradox of a malicious Iranian prophet. If he knew who will be elected the U.S. president in 2012, he could deliberately kill her now (poor Christine O'Donnell: a murder is worse than masturbation), thus throwing America into a logical inconsistency (or the need to elect a dead person). Is that a real paradox or just a funny joke?

I think it is the latter because no one can know the future of a physical system that includes his own decisions. In this fictitious story, the prophet decides about his shooting by knowing the future president. In the real world, it will go the other way: the election of the president will be influenced by the U.S. politicians who will be shot by 2012. Be sure that any terror will help the right-wing candidates.

If a doomsday terminates the Universe soon and if no one can predict such an event using local physics, then the right assumption is that such a doomsday simply can't happen. It's obvious that such an assumption can never hurt you. It makes no sense to buy insurance because of a hypothetically elevated probability of a doomsday because you won't be able to spend the money from the insurance company, anyway.

So the potential doomsday is inconsequential for your financial planning. It's inconsequential for any other scientific or rational reasoning, too. The real reason is that not only rational people and scientists ignore such a possible "end of the world"; Nature ignores it, too. Whether there will be an end of the world has yet to be seen - but its possibility impacts neither events that take place anytime before the doom, nor their actual probabilities. The scientists only "copy" this independence that follows from causality.

Additional information affecting the probability estimate

So far, we have assumed that the information about the "number of naps of one kind or another kind" is the only piece of data that the awaken citizens could have used to determine what kind of a pill they have used. In other words, we have accepted the "uniform Copernican distribution of conscience" which is popular among the advocates of the anthropic principle. Among N people who woke up in one of the T mornings, your combination is a random one among the N.T choices.

Even in this setup, there can't exist any paradoxes as long as your formulae respect basic principles such as causality.

But I don't think that the assumption that you have to be a "generic citizen of North Korea in a generic morning" is rational in any sense. It's just a possible (but in no way inevitable) choice for the prior probabilities - one that is instantly superseded by non-uniform distributions as soon as you learn anything about the world and about yourself.

Moreover, this "uniform prior" is impossible if the number of possibilities (or "spacetime volume") is infinite. This impossibility is no paradox of any kind.

It just proves that if there are infinitely many choices, all possible prior probability distributions have to be clumped at some special places, determined by some special points - a self-evident mathematical conclusion. If I ask 10,000 people to invent a random positive integer, 99+ percent of them will come up with a number smaller than a googolplex - even though the fraction of positive integers smaller than a googolplex among all integers is vanishingly small.

There's nothing wrong whatsoever with such a non-uniformity of the prior probabilities and whoever thinks that non-uniform probability distributions are forbidden by mathematics or physics has misunderstood pretty much everything about probabilities he could have misunderstood.

But I want to return to the additional information that actually affects our estimates of the probability that we have slept for 20 minutes.

As we have already mentioned, if we know that the empire only lasts for a short time, relatively to 12 hours, and then it is nuked away, it becomes significantly more likely that once we wake up, we have slept for 20 minutes. Those who sleep too much are pretty likely to be killed while they sleep.

However, even if you avoid this extreme scenario - and if you avoid any doomsday whatsoever - there can exist information or principles that make "us" more likely to wake up as 20-minute sleepers (or, on the contrary, 12-hour sleepers).

Most people don't ask

One of the aspects of socialism is that it transforms the citizens into mindless machines who never dare to ask any questions. So if you ask the question whether you have slept for 20 minutes or 12 hours, it already makes you special. So you should evaluate the probabilities by counting the people-and-naps within the restricted set in which the people are actually able to ask this question after they wake up.

It's conceivable that there are no people in North Korea of 2010 who dare to ask whether their government gave them a 20-minute pill or a 12-hour pill. But North Korea hasn't been around since the Big Bang. It was created in 1948. While the sedative rules may have worked since the beginning, other things were changing.

For example, between 1948 and 1949, people may have still been able to ask questions. However, let's imagine that the march of the communism was faster and only the people in the first 10 hours of the history of the country were able to ask inconvenient questions.

If that it so, it clearly follows that the probability that you were a 20-minute sleeper goes to 100% once again. It's because if you had ever taken a 12-hour pill, you would already wake up into the era of North Korea in which independent thinking was impossible, so you couldn't have asked the question. Because you asked them, you may prove that you were a 20-minute sleeper.

This metaphor is meant to convey the point that there is nothing wrong or contrived whatsoever if we're among the first 0.0001% people who were born. Imagine that "p.100%" of the people were born before us and "(1-p).100%" people will be born after us. Is there any reason why "p" should be comparable to one?

My answer is a resounding No. In fact, "p" can be zero if infinitely many people will be born in the future. Also, "p" can be nonzero and very tiny.

The claim that "p" should be of order one is a hallmark of the anthropic reasoning. It is a dogma that is supported by no rational evidence. Could you try to find some rational evidence?

Saying that "p" is of order one looks like naturalness - the statement that e.g. gauge couplings "g" should be of order one unless you can prove otherwise. Well, the naturalness holds because "g" may be calculated from some fundamental equations with no unnaturally small or large parameters. And the solutions of such equations are likely to be numbers of order one.

However, the "p" defined above - measuring how "early" our generations are - is clearly not a solution of any fundamental equations without parameters, because "you" (or "I" or "we") are not a canonical well-defined object that can be isolated from the first principles, so the argument that is applicable for the gauge couplings manifestly fails in the case of "p".

But even in the absence of such an argument, you could just say that you "feel" that "p" should be of order one. It's a "natural" assumption for you, a kind of "truthiness". However, there exist hundreds of other arguments that we do know - and thousands of additional possible facts that we don't know yet - that show, and much more reliably, that "p" is very likely to be much smaller than one. Such arguments may even estimate "p".

Quadrillions of people

For example, it's plausible that one can make a detailed model of the future of our civilization, showing that we ultimately have to control the resources of the Milky Way which will increase the number of humans born in the future to quintillions (10^{18}) or more.

I can't show you a rigorous version of this argument now. But I can show you approximate arguments that indicate that the probability that people will be able to do such things in the future - and their population exceeds a quintillion - exceeds 0.1%. Only a few "surmountable obstacles" may prevent the mankind from such a future - so such a future can't be quite excluded. Even with this modest number, and it is not too unrealistic, the expectation value for the number of people who will live in the future is guaranteed to exceed a quadrillion (10^{15}), making "p" smaller than 10^{-5}.

You may say that by your unjustified naturalness criterion applied to "p", it's unlikely for "p" to be smaller than 10^{-5}. The probability of such a thing is around 10^{-5}, you may (irrationally) claim. But even if we considered your argument to be legitimate, it is an argument that only carries something like 11 units of evidence.

There may exist - and there probably do exist - arguments that "p" is smaller than 10^{-5} and these arguments may carry dozens or hundreds of units of evidence or more. These arguments are based on the actual detailed laws of physics, economics, and the society - the usual things about particles, fields, collisions, GDP growth, wars - science as we have known it. And because these arguments are stronger, they simply beat your irrational expectation that "p" should be of order one which was only supported by a nominally very weak argument - that was moreover completely unjustified.

The whole anthropic reasoning that promotes various uniform measures is based on the complete denial of the rest of science and the rest of evidence - because a key result of any evidence and any science is that the measures are (highly) non-uniform.

And that's the memo.

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P.S.: I am really curious what Alan Guth and his Vitaly Vanchurin collaborator (whose kids are modestly called Cosmos, Spartak, and Antonina) may write about this trivial thing.

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P.S. II: The following example explaining the situation by Anonymous Cosmologist is witty and wise:

Suppose the U.S. will exist for billions of years, and all future presidents will be white. The anthropic principle implies that Barack Obama is white (with probability essentially approaching unity).

The old-fashioned, causal reasoning goes the other way: Since America's first black president has been such a disaster, no black person will be elected president ever again and all the remaining presidents will be white. :-)

Note that there are several key mistakes in the anthropic argument. It starts by "supposing" something about the future that one can't "suppose" because it is unknown - at least at the beginning of the reasoning. Then it "derives" something about the present which is an acausal reasoning. Moreover, this reasoning is based on a fallacy called "typicality" that leads, in this case, to a wrong conclusion about Obama's skin color.

The actual story, described in the second paragraph, follows the proper logical reasoning that respects the logical arrow of time. As a by-product, the actual story shows a very good reason why some features of some presidents - such as their skin color - could not only fail to be "guaranteed to be typical"; in the story, Obama's skin color is "guaranteed to be atypical" by a simple mechanism or a simple explanation. In this case, the mechanism is that "intelligent" objects or countries may avoid repeating mistakes - which is why the objects classified as "mistakes" (and their characteristics) will inevitably be atypical.

These and similar mechanisms and their discovery, verification, and application in the reality is what science and rational reasoning is all about; the anthropic reasoning is based on a complete refusal of such a type of reasoning. It is a denial of logic and a denial of any detailed knowledge.

U.N. chose Earth's envoy for extraterrestrial aliens: Mazlan Othman

The scientific consensus has convinced our world government - the officials of the United Nations - that one of the most urgent tasks for the humanity is to optimize our communication with the extraterrestrial aliens and the E.T. diplomacy.

Because their arrival is imminent, they may be confused whom they should call if they want to talk to the Earth's humans - much like the U.S. president is confused whom he should talk to if he wants to talk to Europe.

While the situation in Europe is remaining confusing and the holy mission of the "nice" people to create a unified dictatorship on the Old Continent hasn't yet succeeded, the United Nations have apparently made much more progress.

The woman who has already worked as the Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) in Vienna - but this office wasn't yet "good enough" - is Ms Mazlan Othman, Malaysian girl who dreamed about becoming a physician. But after 100+ years of the existence of a school, she was given the first female physics PhD in Otago, whatever the place is, once the female reproductive organs became popular and worth rewarding over there. This achievement of hers, which unfortunately remained completely unmatched by her publication record, made her qualified to be employed in the modest job of the mankind's ambassador to the rest of the Universe; she will unfortunately not be sent to her new target country yet. ;-)

See Google News and The Telegraph that began with the story.




Well, this is how the consensus science works. The number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations is unknown - it lies anywhere between 0 and infinitely many. But the probability that the extraterrestrial aliens begin to communicate with us is tiny and the probability that such a communication will be relevant for us physically - that they will visit us - is basically zero.

The probabilities are reduced by additional 8 orders of magnitude if you restrict the hypothetical events to Ms Othman's lifetime. But even if they visited us or began to communicate us, the probability that they will be interested in an irrelevant U.N. envoy - a person without any special skills, knowledge, power, or scientifically interesting features, chosen according to politically correct criteria - is about 10 orders of magnitude smaller than the probabilities that were sketched previously.

Imagine: they would have to learn that there exists a dumb self-important organization that apparently wants to control the local planet (but it's not the only one that does). And because of some bizarre historical glitches, this organization worships bad scientists of color who have a vagina and who resemble one, too. This is already a lot of learning of cultural baggage for an E.T. visitor. Even if the aliens learned all this historical stuff and the details of the most decadent - transient and constantly mutating - fads of the early 21st century, about 13,730,002,010 years after the Big Bang, why should they care?

Do you really think that the aliens, once they contact or visit us, will buy the political correctness? Why should they? After some time, they will even be able to see that only some intellectually inferior inhabitants of this planet do so. So why they should care about the PC believers more than they care about e.g. the insects? Idiots who have been brainwashed for years and who have been brought up to be unable to independently think may buy the PC and the U.N. bureaucrats; but be sure that most extraterrestrial aliens won't belong to this group. You know, they would be as independent of us as you can get.

Moreover, to communicate with them will be a very hard task and the probability that Ms Othman will significantly contribute to this difficult task is less than 10^{-10}, the inverse population of the Earth, because she's below the average person on Earth in such information technology and mathematical affairs.



Even the E.T. is showing a finger to the U.N., and believe me, he is just a fictitious figure.

In other words, whoever is behind these policies has some problem inside her skull - or his skull, for that matter.

But at any rate, as Sean Carroll explained, the proper journalists are obliged to report on the consensus of the world's scientists, represented by the institutions of the holy United Nations, mention nothing whatsoever about these people's being complete nutcases, suppress all the doubts that they could personally have, and work hard to make sure that all their readers will accept the scientific consensus, too.

Imagine how many millions will be swallowed just by Ms Othman's meaningless institute of the U.N. And this is just a random tip of an iceberg. The U.N. are literally built upon similar stuff - tons of deluded freeloaders who lack a basic common sense and contact with the reality.



One of the 60 most important departments of Ms Othman's agency will be the Department of the Communication With Extraterrestrial Aliens Who Are Our Ancestors. The video above (cargo cult begins at 4:49) captures a couple of Ms Othman's colleagues who were given jobs in the U.N. Each of them will be given a skyscraper in Manhattan.

Note that already before they've gotten their new job, they knew that it was the white men who stole the airplanes from their black ancestors. And they hope that it will be the green men, contacted by the red men, who will return the wealth to the black men.

Update

Some sources say that she denies the new job that she should have announced on a Royal Society conference. I, for one, need some evidence to believe that the Telegraph article was a complete mistake or fabrication.

Even if she won't be named, it's still plausible that the U.N. have planned it but they have realized that the reaction would resemble this blog entry. Such a hypothesis is extremely natural given other crazy things that the U.N. is doing.

More likely, the Telegraph writer has learned about the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) where Othman is current a director, was shocked, and "overinterpreted" the mission of this agency. I wouldn't be surprised if she were shocked. After all, this agency promotes "peaceful uses of outer space".

You may ask what are its relationships to NASA, ESA, and [RUSA]. Clearly, these agencies "de facto" possess most of the accessible outer space, and if they have to be careful about something, it's the other two agencies. How does a U.N. agency fit into this? Do they expect that NASA will call a Malaysian astrophysicist to get a permission for every operation - or just every other operation? ;-)

This is just way too silly. The ambassador who talks to the aliens is silly at the science-fiction level but the existing UNOOSA is already bad enough. It's a bureaucratic group that can't possibly play any positive role in the actions that actually matter for the human activities in the outer space. So even if Heidi Blake overinterpreted the purpose of UNOOSA, she didn't convey a fundamentally misleading message. Her message is:

There can be no doubts that some space-related offices of the U.N. are utterly bizarre.

Bousso et al.: catastrophe imminent, time will end soon

Today, the arXiv harbors one of the most stupid hep-th preprints ever written:

Eternal inflation predicts that time will end

Raphael Bousso, Ben Freivogel, Stefan Leichenauer, and Vladimir Rosenhaus argue that the Universe has to abruptly die soon, in 5.3 billion years or so (it's their mean estimate). The whole world will probably disappear before the Sun runs out of its energy.

In the middle of the Sun's mature life, the atheist God of the Universe will suddenly say: "Sorry, dudes, time is over. I need to make at least one numerator in the papers by Bousso et al. finite, although not well-defined, so I have to kill you and everything else."




Their basic "reason" is simple. They think that the probability of an outcome is computed as a ratio of events in the multiverse where the outcome occurs divided by the number of all events:

p₁ = N₁ / N

And because both the numerator and the denominator are infinite numbers in an eternally inflating multiverse, they have to be made finite for various probabilities to be well-defined, they believe.

And the only way how they can imagine to make them finite is to euthanize the whole Universe, so they choose this as a "canonical" answer. ;-)

See also The Guth-Vanchurin paradox for a particular argument why the time should end, and its elementary flaws.

It's been amazing to watch these (and a couple of other) authors writing increasingly lousy papers and being transformed into downright crackpots during the recent 10 years or so. I am afraid that the transformation is already irreversible. These people are no longer capable to correctly answer even the most basic questions about the physical Universe.

Students, avoid these folks at any cost. They have become just a baggage of the Academia and a liability for the taxpayers. They managed to get stuck in the system as flukes - but the system is not yet quite broken and you will not be allowed to do the same thing.

The conclusion, which I have been presenting for years as a parody, incorrectly expecting that no recipient of a physics PhD degree could possibly make this argument seriously, clearly shows that the framework of their thinking about probabilities is fundamentally wrong.

Much like most other doomsday prophets and other kinds of crackpots, the authors are completely unable to understand the point and the arguments that they're assuming something fundamentally wrong in their very first axioms - and that's why everything they write down has to end up being a complete nonsense.

Instead, they obviously expect a long sequence of follow-up papers that will discuss whether the Universe will cease to exist in 5.31 or 5.32 billion years and worship the amazing prophets, Bousso et al., who have predicted this amazing doomsday. This is also clear from a staged dialogue included in the paper where a semi-dumb person asks various questions about the doomsday that the authors would clearly like to be discussed in other people's papers.

The paper also contains a lot of political kitsch - observers are systematically called "she" and subtle references to other kinds of doomsdays (the climate) are mentioned, too. As I mention below, this is probably what matters for the "uncriticizability of a paper" these days.

It probably makes no sense to explain these things again. The "typicality" crackpots won't listen, anyway.

There have been several related papers by Hartle and Srednicki that explain the right way to calculate the probabilities in a large Universe or multiverse; see also TRF (and the whole landscape category).

The main point is that a "xerographic distribution" - an assumption who we are and where we are in the Universe (or the likelihood that the answer is something or something else) - is a part of any scientific hypothesis about cosmology and this assumption must be tested (and may be ruled out) just like everything else we hypothesize. In particular, the assumption that "we must live at a random moment of time" in the history of a multiverse is just one possible xerographic distribution among others - and it is one that can be shown incorrect.

The Hartle and Srednicki papers - and others that make sense - are not even cited by Bousso et al. Bousso et al. don't want to listen. They continue to mindlessly push their rats through the mazes.

All of their key assumptions are wrong - and their paper is actually just another proof that they are wrong. It is not true that the probabilities of particular outcomes can be rewritten as quantities that are proportional to the volumes of space or volumes of spacetime. It is not true that for the concept of probability to be meaningful, the duration of the Universe has to be finite. Whether or not the eternal inflation has ever taken or is taking place, the assumptions about the probabilities requiring time to end is just wrong.

Eternal inflation does not imply anything of the sort.

After all, probabilities worked just fine before the 1920s when all the physicists thought that our Universe was eternal - more eternal than eternal inflation. It is not true that the probability is almost the same thing as the volume of space or spacetime. And even if you managed to interpret the probabilities in this naive "geometric" way, the resulting probabilities would be indefinite forms, "infinity/infinity", and the only correct regularization procedures would be those that would end up being compatible with the established laws of physics. In particular, any naive "geometric" cutoff of the Universe that someone needs to "visualize" the notion of probability is certainly unphysical.

The treatment by Bousso et al. is surely incompatible with all of physics.

First of all, it violates locality and causality. The probability that our Universe is going to do something in 5.3 billion years is given purely by the laws of physics (the quantum mechanical laws of the Standard Model pragmatically combined with general relativity, or the relevant portions of beyond-the-Standard-Model or string-theoretical physics, whenever hypothetically needed) and by the initial conditions - e.g. the present state of the Universe.

This setup is a complete toolkit and it contains the complete information that determines all the probabilities. So any additional framework you want to add to physics that implies different formulae for the probabilities - including the insane probability of a sudden death - is simply incompatible with physics.

Sometimes, you may be dissatisfied that some of our theories don't know everything - e.g. about the initial conditions. But be sure that if a framework knows "more than everything" and produces several different answers to the same question, it's inconsistent and therefore wrong which is much much worse than being "incomplete".

In other words, the setup of Bousso et al. is incompatible with causality. What will happen is yet to be seen. There can't possibly exist any influence of the hypothetical future (e.g. future collapses of the Universes) on the "current truth" i.e. on the right calculation of probabilities of events that will occur today.

Such a backward influence would be acausal: because the present era also and obviously influences the future, the influences in both directions would lead to closed time-like curves that imply all the well-known logical paradoxes. Our present phenomena - and the probabilities that some present events lead to particular outcomes - simply cannot depend on some questions from the future.

However, the Bousso et al. crackpot papers are full of these acausal mechanisms and calculations. For example, their calculations of the probability that it will be sunny today depends on some properties of the Universe (e.g. its volume) in the far future. They use insane formulae to calculate the probabilities of anything and everything which leads them to believe that the Universe has to die. Otherwise they couldn't compute the odds that it's gonna be sunny today. They can't compute them, anyway, but who cares. What matters is that the Universe has to die.

It's super-weird, isn't it?

Needless to say, Bousso et al. don't even bother to say anything about the "mechanisms" - i.e. the question how their claimed "end of time" will look like to a local observer and how it would fit into physics of particles and fields as we know them from the Standard Model and general relativity. For instance, what will be the shape of the hypothetical "cutoff of spacetime"? (Well, they suggest that only the Milky Way will suddenly disappear - an even better story.) They don't care because they don't give a damn about the actual physics. What they care about is their deluded doomsday philosophy that has nothing whatsoever to do physics.

Even if there existed some non-local or acausal effects in physics or in cosmology, they would have to be tiny not to disagree with the observations and they would have to be justified by some evidence that ultimately boils down to the empirical data. And all the empirical data we know can be phrased as properties of fields and particles that obey the well-known local and causal laws.

At this moment, there clearly exists no evidence supporting such bizarre effects that would directly or indirectly boil down to the empirical facts. The only evidence are arbitrary and incorrect philosophical assumptions about the probabilistic distributions in a multiverse - "probability should be proportional to the volume" - and there is an overwhelming evidence that these assumptions are wrong. Bousso et al. don't want to listen.

The paper also offers lots of arrogant statements such as that "the sudden end of time contradicts our intuition". It doesn't contradict just our intuition. It contradicts all of established science. All the particles and fields we have observed obey laws that guarantee that they will continue to do so. All of science is about having tested these laws and all of these laws imply that the processes basically have to keep on going: time cannot end.

The Universe may possibly suffer from instabilities - quantum tunneling into another place of the landscape, if you wish. But the only thing we can empirically know about the characteristic life expectancy of the Universes like ours is that it is almost certainly longer than 13.7 billion years. But just because this is what the simplest way to measure the life expectancy says, doesn't mean that the life expectancy has to be comparable to 13.7 billion years.

Don't worry: if you've read TRF just for 1 year, it doesn't mean that you will die in 1 year.

In fact, it's much more likely that the life expectancy is either infinite or at least vastly higher, something like 10^{100} years. If we ever learn the structure of the inflaton fields and their potentials, we will be able to calculate this number more accurately - or show why it's infinite (or Poincaré recurrence time which is basically infinite, around 10^{10^{100}} or googleplex of years). Although we don't know the exact answers, these questions may in principle be addressed scientifically. However, the scientific treatment has nothing to do with trying to make a manifestly wrong formulae or Ansätze for probability work.

I am not calling for any burning of the witches. But holy crap, if physicists don't lose all of their scientific credit by publishing this pure garbage and nothing else for years, can they lose their credibility at all? Does the institutionalized science have any checks and balances left? I think that all the people are being bullied into not criticizing the junk written by other people who are employees of the academic system, especially if the latter are politically correct activists. And be sure, some of the authors of this nonsense are at the top of it.

This is just bad. I urge all the sane people in Berkeley and other places to make it very clear to Bousso et al. - and to students and other colleagues - that they have gone completely crazy.

New Scientist attacks quantum physics

Well, I can't hide that I really hate the magazine called New Scientist.

Ninety-five percent of their articles about the disciplines I care about - and about science per se - are emotional attacks by breathtakingly deluded pompous imbeciles against the scientific principles and scientific achievements that I hold dear - that I consider the pillars of the human knowledge and progress.

Nude Socialist has already dedicated a whole issue to attacks on "climate deniers". It systematically promotes crackpots in high-energy physics (and their dumb speculations and misconceptions) and tries to put them on the same level - if not a higher level - with the world's top physicists (and the key findings of physics).

Attacks against string theory haven't been revolutionary enough for these new "scientists" so they picked all of quantum physics as their new target today. Two minutes ago, they released the following article:

Is quantum theory weird enough for the real world?

It's a classic article by anti-quantum zealots who simply refuse to accept, on purely dogmatic grounds, that the postulates of quantum mechanics could be a fundamental part of the reality.




Already the subtitle has increased my adrenaline level by a factor of pi:

Our most successful theory of nature is bewilderingly remote from reality. But fixing that may require a weirder theory still

How it can be "bewilderingly remote from reality" if it is our most successful theory of Nature? It just doesn't make sense. A theory's proximity to reality is defined by its ability to successfully and accurately reproduce and predict the information about the relevant class of phenomena and objects. So it is just a logical contradiction for a successful theory of Nature to be "remote from reality".

Moreover, as long as one is doing science, there is no justification for attempts to "fix" a theory that agrees with all the observations and works perfectly consistently at the mathematical level, too.

They quote some people with strange Slavic names I've never heard of who are repeating the misconception from the subtitle in some truly "new", bizarre ways. For example, a Časlav Brukner says:

We do not have a source for the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics. We do not have a nice physically plausible set of principles from which to derive it.

There are no known, more fundamental principles from which the quantum postulates can be derived simply because the postulates of quantum mechanics are among the most fundamental insights we have about the reality. And they're perfectly "physically plausible". In fact, they're not plausible just a priori. They have been verified and validated by some of the most accurate experiments ever made by living forms on this planet.

If someone doesn't find them "physically plausible", obviously, he confuses physics with his own philosophical bigotry. What they really want to say is that the principles of quantum mechanics are not ideologically plausible for anti-quantum bigots with tiny brains and huge mouths. But that's something completely different from a "physical plausibility".

The author of the Nude Socialist article, a Richard Webb, improves the statement by the Časlav Brukner in the following way:

Quantum physics might be quantum - but as far as we can tell it isn't physics.

Holy cattle. A few years ago, it was "just" string theory that was said - by a coalition of Swolins, Smoits, and their mindless fans - not to be physics. But that's no longer enough for the pompous fools of this world who are thriving because almost no one has enough courage to give these arrogant scumbags a proper thrashing.

In 2010, even quantum physics fails to be physics!

This is just completely insane. Quantum physics is not only physics but, as we have known for 80 years, it is all of physics. Physics is a science about the fundamental phenomena in the real world and all phenomena in the real world are quantum phenomena because the whole world follows the postulates of quantum mechanics. So any classical or otherwise non-quantum physics is bound to be nothing else than an approximation to quantum physics - as long as it is valid at all.

Following the very same template that would be used against string theory a few years ago, Richard Webb paints a picture where quantum physics doesn't belong to physics of Tycho Brahe and others. The final paragraph says:

Not so with quantum theory. Although it was initially inspired by an idea rooted in the real world - that energy came in small packets called quanta - by the time luminaries such as Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg had finished its mathematical formulation, the theory had acquired a life of its own (see chart).

Wow. So it's a sin for a theory to acquire a "life of its own". And because it differs from the phenomena that were studied by Tycho Brahe, it surely has to be separated from the real world, right? Incredible.

These dozens of paragraphs full of lies and irrationality is the only justification that Richard Webb offers to support some not-exactly-specified but surely "revolutionary" ideas by the crackpots with the Slavic names. If you want to know what is their better theory, you will hear about fantastic theories - except that it's also known that they prohibit physical systems from evolving (among other bugs that are not quoted).

Well, that's a pretty serious problem for a theory that would like to replace quantum physics, isn't it? But in the world of the Nude Socialist hype, such a failure doesn't matter. More precisely, it is a virtue. The dirtier trash you write down (and you are), the better image of you will be created by the crackpot would-be science journalists.

Several painful paragraphs about the inability of these crackpot theories to reproduce basic properties of the real world follow. When it kind of becomes clear that quantum mechanics hasn't been "replaced" by scientific tools, Richard Webb has an excellent idea how to change the rules of the game:

There is another possibility: observation might actually be leading us astray.

Exactly.

Observations are thoseevil quantum deniers that deny the true reality that has nothing to do with observations! The right new criterion to judge a physics theory is not to compare its predictions with observations but to see what Nude Socialist writes about it. After all, it has been writing pure garbage about science for many years. It has no problem to print a long and vitriolic diatribe claiming that a theory ceases to be scientific - and becomes detached from the reality - if it actually cares about the observations.

The reality is very different. At one day, we may find a deeper layer of principles that will imply the postulates of quantum mechanics as we know them today - that will put them into a more comprehensive picture. But it's virtually impossible for these postulates to ever be distorted; they are almost certainly exact.

In particular, the world of science - as long as it will be science - will never return back to the classical deterministic confines. Nude Socialists may continue to whine about the imperialist quantum mechanics that controls the world of physics even though it's so evil. And they may brainwash thousands of readers who are not able to use their own brains. But that's the only thing that they can do against the laws of Nature.

Tanmay Vachaspati: black stars & there are no black holes

A report on this blog about George Chapline's colloquium remains the #1 hit if you Google seach for black holes don't exist. It is a rather popular albeit untrue sentence that many users want to see. ;-) George is a friend of The Reference Frame but his black hole ideas unfortunately don't make any sense.



In the article under the previous link, we have explained that why the event horizon - a "red" hypersurface in space defined as the boundary separating a causally disconnected region of spacetime (the dark blue triangle, the interior of the black hole) - is created long before the black hole reaches equilibrium and long before it starts to evaporate.

In fact, the place where the horizon appears for the first time (the lower portion of the red line) looks completely ordinary and the people who live there don't have any tools to figure out whether they are already behind the horizon or not: they think that they are inside an ordinary star. If they had such tools, they would be extremely non-local, required superluminal propagation of signals, or a time machine. At that moment - when local physics still looks completely ordinary - it is already decided that the future curvature of spacetime creates a causally disconnected region because the evolution of spacetime according to Einstein's equations will inevitably lead to a spacetime whose causal diagram is depicted above: a spacetime with a causally disconnected black hole interior.

We can also prove that no plausible modification of Einstein's equations that keeps them consistent with observations can remove the conclusion about the creation of the event horizon.




This is a rather trivial conclusion of classical general relativity that most students with an A from general relativity will be able to make. It is extremely robust and whether or not we can test it "directly" is secondary. Equations of general relativity have been verified in other but related experiments and everything else we need a solid calculation that is actually more reliable than the experiments even though many people who are not quite sure about the consistency of mathematics and its relevance for the real world have irrational problems with this statement. ;-)

I always wonder whether the people who don't trust mathematical derivations believe that they would get killed if they jumped from a skyscraper. Have they ever experimentally tested this assertion?

New Scientist

Nude Socialist has just promoted a theory of Tanmay Vachaspati from Case Western Reserve University, Ohio. In his 2-page paper, he argues that black holes are never formed in the first place. Instead, the collapse stops in a stage that he calls a "black star" and he even proposes that a new, non-black-hole-like kind of collision of these black stars is responsible for gamma ray bursts.

Now, I find notion that quantum gravity regulates black holes as something that looks like a black hole but is microscopically just another "regular" object - something I called "not quite black holes" - to be a legitimate paradigm. But of course I know why all qualitative conclusions about black hole dynamics will continue to hold when the classical approximation of general relativity is valid i.e. whenever the black holes are large.

What we know today goes well beyond the classical approximation of black holes. We can calculate the entropy of large classes of black holes arbitrarily accurately, among other things. We simply know that these things are correct. It's a matter of doing the math right.

It is not hard to read the whole Vachaspati's paper and it obviously makes no sense. Does he assume some novel quantum gravity effects? No, he is just talking about classical general relativity. We can easily show that event horizons are inevitably formed in this picture. It is a straightforward exercise for those who know the technology. Of course, it is an uncertain, mysterious sea of dragons for those who don't.

We also observe (the effects of) black holes in telescopes - for example one at our galactic center whose mass counts in millions of solar masses - but I won't hide that the theoretical derivation of their existence from other experimentally known data seems even more robust than the direct observations to me (and others).

Vachaspati - whose list of former co-authors includes Mark Trodden and Lawrence Krauss, among others - rejects this result except that he doesn't seem to give a glimpse of an argument that the result should be different - except for saying other things that obviously don't occur such as a new kind of "pre-Hawking superfast radiation". Moreover, the only figure that is included in his short paper is a standard Penrose diagram for a Schwarzschild black hole. It doesn't look like he has gotten rid of the horizon. Quite on the contrary. It is quite nicely seen on the figure: it's the Northwestern diagonal line.

Nevertheless, this paper was accepted for Physical Review D which is why Nude Socialist happily describes it as science: certain papers are simply vastly more interesting for the journalists than others. Moreover, the Nude Socialist formulates the article in such a way that Vachaspati's weird paper must surely be very important and 't Hooft and Giddings are just frozen ultraconservative frogs who inhibit the "progress". Thousands of readers will buy it. New Scientist presents Vachaspati as a hero and for thousands of stupid readers, it's simply enough to become convinced.

Most articles about Vachaspati are located in Indian media which is no coincidence.

Also, in his CCNET, Benny Peiser gave it a title "Black hole denier: another scientific consensus in trouble". Benny is a smart Gentleman but it would be dishonest not to say that his title is significantly less smart. If the real driving force of his climate skepticism were a general tendency to fight against anything that others think regardless of the existence of a rational reason, I couldn't agree with him.

Classical general relativity is a settled theory and it is extremely difficult and probably impossible to invent a description that would - at least barely - agree with the same experimental tests but that would be able to stop event horizons from forming. Also, quantum effects can be neglected in the case of large black holes and the alternative black hole physicists even seem to agree with this conclusion.

There is no scientific consensus about the existence of black holes. The people who understand general relativity and its justification know that black holes must exist while those who don't understand general relativity don't know whether there are black holes and most of them probably think that black holes don't exist, at least in the privacy of their homes. I guess that the second group includes a majority of the scientific community. This has nothing to do with consensus, it is about knowledge, talent, and expertise. So I would still prefer the adjective "ignorant" instead of "denier" for any person who studies gravitational physics but is unable to make this simple conclusion even in 2007. It would be foolish to demonize such people because ignorance is the primordial state of affairs.

And that's the memo.