Lunar eclipse

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



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




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

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

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

Interview: Is climate change caused by solar inertial motion?

The questions were asked by Mr Vítězslav Kremlík M.A., a historian and a blogger at klimaskeptik.cz; see original URL

An interview with Ing. Ivanka Charvátová, CSc. from the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague). The story of one politically incorrect scientific discovery.

(Translation of the original Czech interview published at Osel.cz in May 2011 - link - also by V. Kremlík)



Motion of the barycenter of solar system relative to the Sun.

Your field of study in the Geophysical Institute is solar inertial motion (SIM). Could you explain what it is?

It is a movement of the Sun around the barycentre (centre of gravity) of our solar system. This motion is due to the varying position of the planets, especially the giant planets.

Already Sir Isaac Newton in his PRINCIPIA (1687) intuitively came to the following conclusion: “… since that centre of gravity (centre of mass of the solar system) is continually at rest, the Sun, according to the various positions of the planets, must continually move every day, but will never recede far from that centre.” This effect is not insignificant. The Sun moves across an area the size of 4.3 solar radiuses, i.e. 0.02 AU or 3.106 km. As a coincidence, the average solar speed is around 50 km/hr. Just like the speed of a car driving downtown. The first study about SIM was written by P.D. Jose in year 1965.

You are the author of quite a breakthrough in this field of study. What is it?

First I studied the SIM periodicity and in 1987 I came to survey the geometry of this motion. I discovered the solar motion can be classified into two elementary types. Motion along a trefoil-like trajectory governed by the Jupiter-Saturn order. And another motion type which is chaotic. This gave us a precise homogeneous basis, upon which it became possible to study the solar-terrestrial and climatic variability. You may find it comforting that no matter how the Sun wiggles, every 179 years it comes back to a regular trefoil path. It is important to note, that the periods of chaotic motion coincide with the long-term minima in solar activity such as the Wolf Minimum (1270-1350), Spörer Minimum (~1430-1520), Maunder Minimum (~1620-1710) or Dalton Minimum (~1790-1840). During the trefoil periods the ST-phenomena are stable – the sunspot cycles are 10 years long, volcanic activity is muted and in the middle of the trefoil period there is a temperature maximum down here on Earth.




Later I discovered also a 2402 year long cycle of solar motion. After the lapse of this period the Sun always enters a segment, when for almost 370 years it moves continuously along the trefoil trajectory. This is when the natural conditions are stable, there is a long-term thermal maximum. The latest symmetry of the motion trefoils was around 25 AD. The NASA scientists called this 2402 yr cycle as “Charvatova Cycle”. The prospective solar motion can be calculated in advance (celestial mechanics), which gave us brand new solar-predictive capabilities. So far our predictions exploit the observation that the same solar motion trajectory tends to generate similar phenomena. (I was the only one in the whole world who got the 23rd sunspot cycle prediction right). The physical mechanism is not known yet.



Figure 1: The trajectory of the Sun centre divided into two basic motion types: trefoil trajectory according to JS-ordering (top) and disordered (chaotic) (bottom). The Sun returns to a trefoil trajectory, which always lasts for 50 years, once every 179 years. The chaotic segments correspond to long-term minima of solar activity (see above). The dark yellow circles in the top images represent the Sun.

What made you study solar motion?

In the 1980s the director of our institute was academic Václav Bucha. At some conference abroad he met the renowned American geologist and climatologist Rhodes W. Fairbridge, who was currently studying solar motion along with J.H. Shirley from JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), NASA, Pasadena. Mr. Bucha could smell important topics miles away, so we decided to research this too.

Did the world notice your discovery?

Even before my major discovery came, Prof R.W.Fairbridge contacted me after I published an article about SIM periodicity in Paris. It was published under my former name Jakubcová. He and J.H.Shirley published an article in Solar Physics at the very same time. R.W.Fairbridge wrote me a very friendly letter of praise. There was a communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia in that time, so any post coming from the Capitalist West was inspected by censorship. Surely you can imagine what a fuss there was about this letter. Not only it had NASA on the envelope, but on top of that Prof Fairbridge mentioned in the letter, that he knew Prague because he had been here in 1968 during the Prague Spring at some Geology Conference. And he mentioned to have seen the “eastern visitors”, the tanks of the occupants invading Czechoslovakia. He and Jim Shirley were so excited at my trefoils that when they edited the Encyclopaedia of Planetary Sciences in the early 1990s they invited me to write the main article on “Solar Motion” there. I was the only author from the whole Eastern Block in that very Encyclopaedia. And I was the most cited one.

Did you two meet in person?

No, we did not. But we maintained very lively correspondence. He used to send me articles that were not available in my country. He also invited me to write an article to the Proceedings published on the occasion of his 80th birthday anniversary (published in the Journal of Coastal Research.)

Another well known researcher who studied solar motion is Theodor Landscheidt. Do you know each other?

We do not and I believe he is not alive any more. We agree that in the first half of the 21st century the solar activity might be lower and even the temperatures might go down. But he does not cite me and I cite only one of his studies.

Apparently there are lots of scientists who explain climate change by other factors, not merely by CO2. However in the Czech Republic, where you live, most people know only one climate sceptic. Your president Václav Klaus.

Oh my. I would rather not comment on that. I only browsed through his book “Blue Planet in Green Chains” in the bookshop.

There are many climate sceptics in the world, they have their organisations, especially at the American or Canadian universities. Many professors of theirs have contacted me. For instance Prof. O. Manuel, the former chief researcher of the Apollo project. They even published a book “Slying the Sky Dragon“, where they document the scandals of the climate change research and thus also the uncertainties in the temperature measurements of the last 40 years or so.

The UN climate panel (IPCC), which is so harshly criticised by your president Klaus, has had lots of scandals lately. Have you heard about Climategate?

Of course. The director of CRU (Climatic Research Unit) P.D. Jones had to step down.

What does the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4 2007) say about solar motion?

Nothing at all. They are allergic to SIM. Their whole research fails to consider the solar-terrestrial phenomena (solar, geomagnetic, volcanic activity etc.) and they take into account only temperatures since 1860. However in Europe we have a number of continuous instrumental temperature data sets dating back to mid 18th century. The Jesuits started the measurements. With my colleague we processed these data and we showed their relation to solar motion and published an article on it in the Climatic Change journal, Stanford University. In mid 18th century the temperature was as high as in 1940 (both in the middle of a trefoil). But was there any industry, air pollution? No. They even fail to take into account the climate reconstructions (temperatures, proxy data) derived from tree-ring width 18O or 10Be isotopes in ice cores etc., though they are already available for periods deep in the past and are of good quality at least for the Holocene period.

But how do they explain why every 180 years there is a long-term temperature maximum? How do they explain the significant temperature maximum around 1000 AD, when even Greenland was settled? How do they explain the long-term minima?


They don’t. They pretend it did not happen.

Explaining climate change by other factors, not only by greenhouse gases, it is almost a heresy in our times. Were you aware of this when you discovered the trefoils of yours?

In 1987 when I realised there are trefoils in the solar motion (note: there are trefoil symbols in the gothic cathedrals too), I shivered. I realised immediately, that it is connected with almost everything, that nobody was going to do the work unless I do and that I would have to face unbelievable enmities. I raised my hands to the sky and I almost cried: “Why me?!” On top of that, it was exactly 300 years after Sir Isaac Newton, in his PRINCIPIA, formulated his intuitive conclusion about solar motion.

You are from a Christian family. Did you face any persecution under the communist regime?

My maiden name is Kryšpínová. The brother of my grandfather, a school headmaster, was a famous constructor of steam locomotives and he even became a director of the ČKD company. Unfortunately, we lived in the same house as the family of powerful communist bureaucrats. The mother of Vasil Mohorita was an influential Communist Party secretary in Prague 7. When I was finishing my elementary school, she rang a bell in our place and she yelled at me that a relative of the bourgeoisie ČKD director would never be allowed to study at any secondary school! Times changed, today my uncle Vojta is in the textbooks of the Transport Faculty of the Prague Technical University (ČVUT) as a constructor of world fame. He even has a street named after him, he has his stamps etc.

How did you solve it?

My uncle Vojta advised my parents to send me to the other grandparents to Jilemnice, at the foot of the Krkonoše Mountains. My grandfather was an engraver who printed cloths, almost worker class, so we though this might be acceptable to the communists. It worked, I even had the support of the grammar school headmaster in advance. It was a fine school. It had great teachers, including some scientists who were expelled there from universities for political reasons. This school was established as early as in 1909 when my country was part of the Austrian Empire and it was one of the few secondary schools where lectures were in the Czech language. Many Czech artists studied there such as the song writer Jiří Šlitr, actor Stanislav Zindulka, photograph Zdenko Fejfar or the director Karel Palouš. It is unbelievable, that now some madman wants to close this great school. Only Hitler was so insolent to do that. There are protests, demonstrations, so far in vain.

Yet the communist regime let you study at a university

I went to ČVUT (Czech Technical College), the Faculty of Civil Engineering, since my father was a civil engineer. The communists did not censor technical fields so much. I did not enjoy the first grades much, meliorations, road construction, surveyor work, but in the higher grades we could specialise – higher maths, (early) computers, cartography and others. I chose astronomy. In the building of the old Technical College at Karlovo Square, the magnificent Prof. Emil Buchar chaired the “Institute for Astronomy and Elementary Geophysics”. He always took only a couple of students. I was the first woman among them. This autumn it is the 110th anniversary of his birth.

You work at the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. How did you get here?

The end of my studies was coming soon, when suddenly one day, late at night, the telephone rang. Prof Buchar called that the next day I was to go to the Geophysical Institute at 9 AM for an interview. He informed me he had already registered me. So I went there and I passed. I have been working here ever since.

Aren’t you sorry that after 20 years SIM is still not in the elementary school textbooks? That climate changes are still explained only by CO2, as if climate was influenced by no other factors whatsoever?

Publishing of my (our) articles has always been a bad dream. Some editors rejected our article without review, saying their readers would surely not be interested. Another editor told me, that they would not allow having anything about SIM published in their magazine! I even received a “peer review” consisting of a single sentence: “All articles about solar motion should be banned!” In spite of all these enmities, we succeeded to have articles about SIM and ST-relationship published in renowned world journals with high impact factor (e.g. New Astronomy (Harvard University, IF 2.2), Surveys in Geophysics (IF 3.1) or Climatic Change (Stanford University, IF 4.)

And my results are in the prestigious textbook of physics for American universities – “Fundamentals of Physics“.

What welcome did solar motion research get among the scientists in your country?

The enlightened ones, and they are many, support it and help me a lot. The others use this topic for target practice. I was sorry to hear dr. Grygar, Czech astronomer and member of the Czech branch of CSI, compares SIM to some astrology. I wonder when he will grow tired of doing that. And our climatologists? I represent our institute in the Czech National Climate Programme. These people “research” only greenhouse effect vs temperatures. I call them “heaters”. Sometimes I feel like a lone Hussite warrior – myself against all. They deny the existence of solar influence on climate let alone the influence of the whole solar system. Most of them refuse to talk to me, most of them even do not say hello, when we meet. Even now when many world journals publish articles about the influence of the Sun on climate. Probably this requires more time. Many discoveries had to wait, some very long. I do not waste my time fighting windmills. God will sort it out when the right time comes.

And what about the Czech media? What is their attitude to solar motion? Has there been any documentaries on TV about this?

Some two years ago people from the ČT2 television channel came to me and we filmed a half an hour interview for some TV magazine. I was sceptical. Will you really broadcast it? Sure, it’s already in the TV Guide. And then, some 2 hours before the broadcast, some powerful person called them and banned the broadcast.

My only media “presentation” was when I was invited to an entertainment TV contest on the PRIMA TV channel (The “Guess Who I Am” programme). It was fun and I used the opportunity to sneak a short description of the trefoils and solar motion into my speech.

But your work is known and cited abroad

It is. I am very cited in both Americas, Canada, I am cited by the Germans, Italians, Australians, Scandinavians, recently even by the Chinese. I am cited even in other fields of study, for instance in the journals Nuclear Physics, Neutron Repulsion Journal ... In 2009 as part of the European Geophysical Union congress there was a Great Panel on Sun and Climate. I had an invited talk there. And I had another invited talk at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Brazil 2010.

I hear you are cited also by the scientists who study exoplanets? How is it related?

Yes, I am cited by the Germans, the astronomers from the Heidelberg University. I suggested that we might expect barycentric motion in the stars, which manifest variable irradiance. Which means such stars probably have planets. I wrote this for CTS (Centre of Theoretical Studies) in year 1995, when no exoplanet was known yet. Now we know over 400 of them.



Figure 2 No, these are not jewel designs. These are four examples of barycentric path of stars with exoplanets (from Perryman and Schulze-Hartung, Astronomy& Astrophysics 525, A65, 2011).

Is there any message you would like to send to the readers?

When you fight for a good cause, you must never give up. I am from a family of keen followers of the Scouting traditions. My father was a founding member of the 5th Group of Water Scouts in my country. As a Boy Scout he had the honour to welcome our first president, the founder of the first independent Czechoslovak Republic, when T.G. Masaryk was returning from emigration. Thanks to his resilience my father succeeded with many things in spite of the communists. And I have a personal example too. To keep sane during the communist era I privately translated the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. My translations could be published only after the end of the communist regime, on the 100th anniversary of her birth (Modrý večer, ODEON, 1990, translated by Ivanka Jakubcová). Ms Anna had a difficult life. In the Stalinist era she was persecuted, she could not publish her poetry for decades, her son was imprisoned in Gulag for almost 20 years. But look now - her poetry is read by the whole world.

Interviewed by
Mgr. Vítězslav Kremlík, the founder of the Czech Climate Skeptic website www.klimaskeptik.cz

(The Czech text was authorised by ICH)

Profile:

born 3. 12. 1941 in Jilemnice, Czechoslovakia

education: ČVUT, Faculty of Civil Engineering, subject: geodetic astronomy and geophysics               

doctorate: CSc. 1991

current position: Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences since 1963 (Institute website - link)

List of publications
(note: some of the publications are downloadable from Klimaskeptik.cz - link)

Bucha, V., Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M. 1985 Resonance frequencies in the Sun’s motion, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 29, 107-111.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M., 1986a The planetary system and solar-terrestrial phenomena, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 30, 224-235.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M., 1986b Is there any relation between the Sun´s motion and global seismic activity? Studia Geophys. et Geod., 30, 148-152.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M.: 1987 Correlation between solar motion, earthquakes and other geophysical phenomena, Annales Geophysicae, B, 135-142.

Charvátová-Jakubcová, I., Křivský, L. and Střeštík, J., 1988 The periodicity of aurorae in the years 1001-1900, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 32, 70-77.

Charvátová, I., 1988 The solar motion and the variability of solar activity, Adv. Space Res., 8, 7, 147-150.

Charvátová, I. 1989 On the relation between solar motion and the long term variability of solar activity, Studia Geophys. et Geod. 33, 230-241.

Charvátová, I., 1990a The relations between solar motion and solar variability, Bull. Astr. Inst. Czech., 41, 56-59.

Charvátová, I., 1990b On the relation between solar motion and solar activity in the years 1730-1780 and 1910-60, Bull. Astr. Inst. Czech., 41, 200-204.

Charvátová, I., 1995a Solar-terrestrial and climatic variability during the last several millennia in relation to solar inertial motion, J. Coastal Res., 17, 343-354.

Charvátová, I., 1995b Solar-terrestrial variability in relation to solar inertial motion, Center for Theoretical Study, CTS-95-04, March 1995.

Charvátová, I., 1995c Solar-terrestrial variability in relation to solar inertial motion, Center for Theoretical Study, CTS-95-08, 2nd Edition, November 1995.

Charvátová, I., 1997a Solar-terrestrial and climatic phenomena in relation to solar inertial motion, Surveys in Geophys., 18, 131-146.

Charvátová, I., 1997b Solar motion (main article), in: Encyclopedia of Planetary Sciences, (Eds. J.H. Shirley and R.W. Fairbridge), Chapman & Hall, New York, 748-751.

Charvátová, I., 2006 Solar motion (main article), in: Encyclopedia of Planetary Sciences, (Eds. J.H. Shirley and R.W. Fairbridge), Springer, Berlin, 748-751.

Charvátová, I., 2000 Can origin of the 2400-year cycle of solar activity be caused by solar inertial motion?, Annales Geophysicae, 18, 399-405.

Charvátová, I., 2000 The cycle of 2402 years in solar motion and its response in proxy records, Geolines, 11, 12-14.

Charvátová, I., 2007 The prominent 1.6-year periodicity in solar motion due to the inner planets, Annales Geophysicae, 25, 1-6.

Charvátová, I., 2009 Long-trm predictive assessments of solar and geomagnetic activities made on the basis of the close similarity between the solar inertial motions in the intervals 1840-1905 and 1980-2045, New Astronomy 14, 25-30, doi: 10.1016/j.newast.2008.04.005.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 1991 Solar variability as a manifestation of the Sun’s motion, J. Atmos.Terr. Phys., 53, 1019-1025.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 1995 Long-term changes of the surface air temperature in relation to solar inertial motion, Climatic Change, 29, 333-352.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 2004 Periodicities between 6 and 16 years in surface air temperature in possible relation to solar inertial motion, J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys., 66, 219-227

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 2007 Relations between the solar inertial motion, solar activity and geomagnetic index aa since the year 1844, Adv. Space Res., 40, 7, 1026-1031, doi: 10.1016/j.asr.2007.05.086.

Paluš, M., Kurths, J., Schwarz, U., Novotná, D. and Charvátová, I., 2000 Is the solar activity cycle synchronized with the solar inertial motion?, Int. J. Bifurcation and Chaos, 10, 2519-2526.

Paluš, M., Kurths, J., Schwarz, U., Seehafer, N., Novotná, D. and Charvátová, I., 2007 The solar activity cycle is weakly synchronized with the solar inertial motion, Physics Letters A, 365, 421-428, doi: 10.1016/j.physleta.2007.01.039.

Charvátová, I., Klokočník, J., Kolmaš, J. and Kostelecký, J., 2011 Chinese tombs oriented by a compass: evidence from paleomagnetic changes versus the age of tombs, Studia Geophys. et Geod. 55, 159-174.

MOND and HOND: theories without dark matter

Your humble correspondent's holographic modification of gravity for low accelerations passes a quantitative test

Sean Carroll mentions a preprint arguing that it's been experimentally demonstrated that Kepler's laws fail when the acceleration of orbiting objects is below a certain constant a0:

The Breakdown of Classical Gravity?

X. Hernandez, M. A. Jimenez, and C. Allen looked at wide-orbit binary stars and they claim that for these small accelerations, the Kepler's (i.e. Newton's) formulae for the velocity should be superseded by a constant velocity

v = (G a₀ M) ^1/4.

Such a modification is compatible with the MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, theories whose goal is to claim that dark matter is not needed.

While I find the typical MOND theories with the ad hoc irrational extra vectors and scalars and/or nonlocalities to be awkward enough to be eliminated without tests, I can imagine that the observations above are actually valid and dark matter doesn't have to be exist, after all.

I have developed an explanation of the modified behavior for small acceleration that looks much more convincing than any MOND scheme I have ever seen. Let me call it HOND, Holographic Modified Dynamics.

As you know, gravitational phenomena in a quantum world like ours may be encoded on a holographic screen. In most cases, we expect the usual local dynamics to emerge out of the hologram, anyway. But is there some behavior for which the holographic nature of physics has to be taken into account - when the local bulk physics with the usual scaling laws is not a good approximation?

I believe that the low-acceleration regime is exactly a regime where this could be the case.

Consider a non-accelerating particle. It's connected with some kind of de Broglie wave, exp(-iEt+ipx). This wave is periodic in space and time. But when a particle accelerates with acceleration "a', then it moves along hyperbola whose center C is spacelike-separated from the point where "v=0" and the distance is 1/a, in c=1 units.



Imagining the de Broglie wave, the center C is where the wave may become ill-defined because the hypersurfaces of constant phase intersect at this center. I may need to draw a picture but I believe that many people understand me even without the picture. The existence of this center on the hologram may be needed for the usual Kepler scaling laws to emerge.

OK, I finally added a picture. The Mathematica command was

phase[x_, y_] :=
If[x^2 - y^2 >= 1, 0,
If[Abs[y] >= Abs[x], 0, Sin[10*Re[ArcTanh[y/x]]]]]
DensityPlot[phase[x, y], {x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2},
ColorFunction -> "SunsetColors", MaxRecursion -> 5]

However, if the acceleration is too low, 1/a is too large and it may fail to fit into the visible Universe. Only a large enough hologram with many ways - and with the center C in it - produces the usual bulk physics. What is the acceleration for which you start to get deviations? Well, the size of the visible Universe is 8.8 x 10^{26} meters which is 2.9 x 10^{18} seconds.

Its inverse is 3.4 x 10^{-19} inverse seconds. Multiply it by the speed of light to get the acceleration in the usual units and you will get

a₀^HOND = 1.02 x 10^-10 m/s²

That's my holographic prediction for the approximate acceleration below which you may start to get deviations from the usual emergent bulk physics because of the smallness of the hologram relatively to the wave patterns on it. What is their observed value of "a0"? Note that a priori, I could have received a figure that differed by dozens of orders of magnitude from what I got.

Anyway, their value is

a₀^{binary stars} = 1.2 x 10^-10 m/s²

It only differs by the missing zero in the middle of the number which doesn't really matter :-) - the difference is just 20% which led me to scream Wow when I first calculated it. Isn't it a rather amazing coincidence - or confirmed prediction, if you interpret it optimistically?

I will try to derive the new scaling law for the velocity at low accelerations when I have some time. Note that it's enough to show that the orbital velocity stays constant while Newton's force switches from the 1/r^2 law to the 1/r law, more precisely to

GravAcceleration_{low acceleration limit} = (G a₀ M)^1/2 / r.

The switch from the inverse square law to the inverse proportionality looks like an effective decrease of the dimensionality by one - like in holography, indeed. The binary stars are exchanging 3+1D gravitons as long as the hologram including the center of the hyperbola fits into the Hubble-scale holographic screen. If it doesn't, the objects effective live on the boundary only and they attract by a 1/r force only. It sounds OK but there are still many difficult issues that remain to be clarified about this heuristic picture.

For example, why the heck is it proportional to sqrt(M) only where M is probably roughly the bigger of the two masses? In the holographic context, the square root may be similar to one of the relationships in AdS/CFT between the dimensions and masses.

Also, one has to decide what is the useful orientation of the holographic screen, with respect to the orbital plane, that is relevant for a more accurate version of this argument. It may be parallel to the orbital plane.

The Bousso-Susskind hypermultiverse

Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso are creative guys and famous physicists. Both of them are well-known for some papers about holography, too. Of course, the first scientist is still a bit more famous. They have just released a preprint to show that they're on crack and they are greatly enjoying it:

The Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

The ordinary multiverse with its infinitely many bubbles whose possible vacuum states are located in 10^{500} different stationary points of the stringy configuration space was way too small for them. So they invented a better and bigger multiverse, one that unifies the "inflationary multiverse", the "quantum multiverse", and the "holographic multiverse" from Brian Greene's newest popular book, The Hidden Reality.

Yes, their very first bold statement is that parallel universes in an inflating universe are the same thing as Everett's many worlds in quantum mechanics! ;-)

Sorry to say but the paper looks like the authors want to stand next to Lee Smolin whose recent paper - as much crackpottish as any paper he has written in his life so far - is about "a real ensemble interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Bousso and Susskind don't cite Smolin - but maybe they should! And in their next paper, they should acknowledge me for pointing out an equally sensible and similar paper by Smolin to them. ;-)




Just like your humble correspondent would always emphasize that the "many worlds" in Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics are completely different "parallel worlds" than those in eternal inflation or those in the braneworlds, these famous physicists say - On the contrary, they're the same thing!

However, at least after a quick review of the paper, the drugs seem to be the only tool that you can find in the paper or in between its lines to convince you that it's the case. ;-)

It's a modern paper involving conceptual issues of quantum mechanics, so it treats decoherence as the main mechanism to address many questions that used to be considered puzzles. Good. However, everything that they actually say about decoherence is a little bit wrong, so their attempts to combine those new "insights" with similar "insights" resulting from similar misunderstandings of the multiverse - and especially the way how outcomes of measurements should be statistically treated in a multiverse - inevitably end up being double gibberish that is cooked from two totally unrelated components such as stinky fish and rotten strawberries.

In what sense decoherence is subjective

One of the first starting points for them to unify the "inflationary multiverse" and the "many worlds" of quantum mechanics is the following thesis about decoherence:

Decoherence - the modern version of wave-function collapse - is subjective in that it depends on the choice of a set of unmonitored degrees of freedom, the "environment".

That's a loaded statement, for many reasons. First of all, decoherence isn't really a version of the collapse. Decoherence is an approximate description of the disappearing "purity" of a state in macroscopic setups with various consequences; one of them is that there is no collapse. The probabilities corresponding to different outcomes continue to be nonzero so nothing collapses. They're nonzero up to the moment when we actually learn - experimentally - what the outcome is. At that point, we must update the probabilities according to the measurement. Decoherence restricts which properties may be included in well-defined questions - for example, insane linear superpositions of macroscopically different states are not good "basis vectors" to create Yes/No questions.

As first emphasized by Werner Heisenberg and then by anyone who understood the basic meaning of proper quantum mechanics, this "collapse" is just about the change of our knowledge, not a real process "anywhere in the reality". Even in classical physics, dice may have probabilities 1/6 for each number, but once we see "6", we update the probabilities to (0,0,0,0,0,1). No real object has "collapsed". The only difference in quantum physics is that the probabilities are not "elementary" but they're constructed as squared absolute values of complex amplitudes - which may interfere etc.; and in classical physics, we may imagine that the dice had the state before we learned it - in quantum physics, this assumption is invalid.

It may help many people confused by the foundations of quantum mechanics to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of a density matrix "rho" instead of the state vector "psi". Such a "rho" is a direct generalization of the classical distribution function on the phase space "rho" - it only receives the extra off-diagonal elements (many of which go quickly to zero because of decoherence), so that it's promoted to a Hermitian matrix (and the opposite side of the coin is that the indices of "psi" may only involve positions or only momenta but not both - the complementary information is included in some phases). But otherwise the interpretation of "rho" in quantum mechanics and "rho" in classical statistical physics is analogous. They're just gadgets that summarize our knowledge about the system via probabilities. Now, "psi" is just a kind of a square root of "rho" so you should give it the same qualitative interpretation as to "rho" which is similar to "rho" in classical statistical physics.

Second, is decoherence "subjective"? This is a totally equivalent question to the question whether "friction", "viscosity" (or other processes that dissipate energy) is subjective. In fact, both of these phenomena involve a large number of degrees of freedom and in both of them, it's important that many interactions occur and lead to many consequences that quickly become de facto irreversible. So both of these processes (or their classes) share the same arrow of time that is ultimately derived from the logical arrow of time, too.

First, let's ask: Is friction or viscosity subjective?

Well, a sliding object on a flat floor or quickly circulating tea in a teacup will ultimately stop. Everyone will see it. So in practice, it's surely objective. But is it subjective "in principle"? Do the details depend on some subjective choices? You bet.

Focusing on the tea, there will always be some thermal motion of the individual molecules in the tea. But what ultimately stops is the uniform motion of bigger chunks of the fluid. Obviously, to decide "when" it stops, we need to divide the degrees of freedom in the tea to those that we consider a part of the macroscopic motion of the fluid and those that are just some microscopic details.

The separation into these two groups isn't God-given. This calculation always involves some choices that depend on the intuition. The dependence is weak. After all, everyone agrees that the macroscopic motion of the tea ultimately stops. In the same way, the information about the relative phase "dissipates" into a bigger system, a larger collection of degrees of freedom - the environment - during decoherence. The qualitative analogy between the two processes is very tight, indeed.

But a punch line I want to make is that decoherence, much like viscosity, isn't an extra mechanism or an additional term that we have to add to quantum mechanics in order to reproduce the observations. Instead, decoherence is an approximate method to calculate the evolution in many situations that ultimately boils down to ordinary quantum mechanics and nothing else. It's meant to simplify our life, not to add some extra complications. Decoherence justifies the "classical intuition" about some degrees of freedom - what it really means is that interference phenomena may be forgotten - much like the derivation of equations of hydrodynamics justifies a "continuum description" of the molecules of the fluid.

Clearly, the same comment would be true about friction or viscosity. While the deceleration of the car or the tea is usefully described by a simplified macroscopic model with a few degrees of freedom, in principle, we could do the full calculation involving all the atoms etc. if we wanted to answer any particular question about the atoms or their collective properties. However, we should still ask the right questions.

When Bousso and Susskind say that there is an ambiguity in the choice of the environment, they misunderstand one key thing: the removal of this ambiguity is a part of a well-defined question! The person who asks the question must make sure that it is well-defined; it's not a job for the laws of physics. Returning to the teacup example, I may ask when the macroscopic motion of the fluid reduces to 1/2 of its speed but I must define which degrees of freedom are considered macroscopic. When I do so, and I don't have to explain that there are lots of subtleties to be refined, the question will become a fully calculable, well-defined question about all the molecules in the teacup and quantum mechanics offers a prescription to calculate the probabilities.

The case of decoherence is completely analogous. We treat certain degrees of freedom as the environment because the state of these degrees of freedom isn't included in the precise wording of our question! So when Bousso and Susskind say that "decoherence is subjective", it is true in some sense but this sense is totally self-evident and vacuous. The correct interpretation of this statement is that "the precise calculation [of decoherence] depends on the exact question". What a surprise!

In practice, the exact choice of the degrees of freedom we're interested in - and the rest is the environment - doesn't matter much. However, we must obviously choose properties whose values don't change frantically because of the interactions with the environment. That's why the amplitude in front of the state "0.6 dead + 0.8i alive" isn't a good observable to measure - the interactions with the environment make the relative phase terribly wildly evolving. Decoherence thus also helps to tell us which questions are meaningful. Only questions about properties that are able to "copy themselves to the environment" may be asked about. This effectively chooses a preferred basis of the Hilbert space, one that depends on the Hamiltonian - because decoherence does.

To summarize this discussion, at least in this particular paper, Bousso and Susskind suffer from the same misconceptions as the typical people who deny quantum mechanics and want to reduce it to some classical physics. In this paper's case, this fact is reflected by the authors' desire to interpret decoherence as a version of the "nice good classical collapse" that used to be added in the QM framework as an extra building block. But decoherence is nothing like that. Decoherence doesn't add anything. It's just a simplifying approximate calculation that properly neglects lots of the irrelevant microscopic stuff and tells us which parts of classical thinking (namely the vanishing of the interference between 2 outcomes) become approximately OK in a certain context.

Let's move on. They also write:

In fact decoherence is absent in the complete description of any region larger than the future light-cone of a measurement event.

If you think about it, the purpose of this statement is inevitably elusive, too. Decoherence is not just "the decoherence" without adjectives. Decoherence is the separation of some particular eigenstates of a particular variable and to specify it, one must determine which variable and which outcomes we expect to decohere. In the real world which is approximately local at low energies, particular variables are connected with points or regions in spacetime. What decoheres are the individual possible eigenvalues of such a chosen observable.

But the observable really has to live in "one region" of spacetime only - it's the same observable. The metric in this region may be dynamical and have different shapes as well but as long as we talk about eigenvalues of a single variable, and in the case of decoherence, we have to, it's clear that we also talk about one region only. Decoherence between the different outcomes will only occur if there's enough interactions, space, and time in the region for all the processes that dissipate the information about the relative phase to occur.

So it's completely meaningless to talk about "decoherence in spacelike separated regions". Decoherence is a process in spacetime and it is linked to a single observable that is defined from the fundamental degrees of freedom in a particular region. Of course, the region B of spacetime may only be helpful for the decoherence of different eigenvalues of another quantity in region A if it is causally connected with A. What a surprise. The information and matter can't propagate faster than light.

However, if one restricts to the causal diamond - the largest region that can be causally probed - then the boundary of the diamond acts as a one-way membrane and thus provides a preferred choice of environment.

This is just nonsense. Even inside a solid light cone, some degrees of freedom are the interesting non-environmental degrees of freedom we're trying to study - if there were no such degrees of freedom, we wouldn't be talking about the solid light cone at all. We're only talking about a region because we want to say something about the observables in that region.

At the same moment, for the decoherence to run, there must be some environmental degrees of freedom in the very same region, too. Also, as argued a minute ago - by me and by the very authors, too - the spatially separated pieces of spacetime are completely useless when it comes to decoherence. It's because the measurement event won't affect the degrees of freedom in those causally inaccessible regions of spacetime. Clearly, this means that those regions can't affect decoherence.

(A special discussion would be needed for the tiny nonlocalities that exist e.g. to preserve the black hole information.)

If you look at the light sheet surrounding the solid light cone and decode a hologram, you will find out that the separation of the bulk degrees of freedom to the interesting and environmental ones doesn't follow any pattern: they're totally mixed up in the hologram. It's nontrivial to extract the values of "interesting" degrees of freedom from a hologram where they're mixed with all the irrelevant Planckian microscopic "environmental" degrees of freedom.

They seem to link decoherence with the "holographic" degrees of freedom that lives on the light sheets - and a huge black-hole-like entropy of A/4G may be associated with these light sheets. But those numerous Planckian degrees of freedom don't interact with the observables we're able to study inside the light cone, so they can't possibly contribute to decoherence. Indeed, if 10^{70} degrees of freedom were contributing to decoherence, everything, including the position of an electron in an atom, would be decohering all the time. This is of course not happening. If you associate many degrees of freedom with light sheets, be my guest, it's probably true at some moral level that the local physics can be embedded into physics of the huge Bekenstein-Hawking-like entropy on the light sheet - but you must still accept (more precisely, prove) that the detailed Planckian degrees of freedom won't affect the nicely coherent approximate local physics that may be described by a local effective field theory - otherwise your picture is just wrong.

The abstract - and correspondingly the paper - is getting increasingly more crazy.

We argue that the global multiverse is a representation of the many-worlds (all possible decoherent causal diamond histories) in a single geometry.

This is a huge unification claim. Unfortunately, there's not any evidence, as far as I can see, that the many worlds may be "geometrized" in this way. Even Brian Greene in his popular popular book admits that there is no "cloning machine". You can't imagine that the new "many worlds" have a particular position "out there". The alternative histories are totally disconnected from ours geometrically. They live in a totally separate "gedanken" space of possible histories. By construction, the other alternative histories can't affect ours, so they're unphysical. All these things are very different from ordinary "branes" in the same universe and even from other "bubbles" in an inflating one. I don't know why many people feel any urge to imagine that these - by construction - unphysical regions (Everett's many worlds) are "real" but at any rate, I think that they agree that they cannot influence physics in our history.

We propose that it must be possible in principle to verify quantum-mechanical predictions exactly.

Nice but it's surely not possible. We can only repeat the same measurement a finite number of times and in a few googols of years, or much earlier, our civilization will find out it's dying. We won't be able to tunnel our knowledge elsewhere. The number of repetitions of any experiment is finite and it is not just a technical limitation.

There are many things we only observe once. Nature can't guarantee that everything may be tested infinitely many times - and it doesn't guarantee that.

This requires not only the existence of exact observables but two additional postulates: a single observer within the universe can access infinitely many identical experiments; and the outcome of each experiment must be completely definite.

In de Sitter space, the observables are probably not exactly defined at all. Even in other contexts, this is the case. Observers can't survive their death, or thermal death of their surrounding Universe, and outcomes of most experiments can't be completely definite. Our accuracy will always remain finite, much like the number of repetitions and our lifetimes.

In the next sentence, they agree that the assumptions fail - but because of the holographic principle. One doesn't need a holographic principle to show such things. After all, the holographic principle is an equivalence of a bulk description and the boundary description so any physically meaningful statement holds on both sides.

At the end, they define "hats" - flat regions with unbroken supersymmetry - and link their exact observables to some approximate observables elsewhere. Except that this new "complementarity principle" isn't supported by any evidence I could find in the paper and it isn't well-defined, not even partially. In the quantum mechanical case, complementarity means something specific - that ultimately allows you to write "P" as "-i.hbar.d/dx" - a very specific construction that is well-defined and established. In the black hole, complementarity allows you to explain why there's no xeroxing; the map between the degrees of freedom isn't expressed by a formula but there is evidence. But what about this complementarity involving hats? There's neither definition nor evidence or justification (unless you view the satisfaction of manifestly invalid and surely unjustified, ad hoc assumptions to be a justification).

If you read the paper, it is unfortunately motivated by misunderstandings of the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics. In the introduction, they ask:

But at what point, precisely, do the virtual realities described by a quantum mechanical wave function turn into objective realities?

Well, when we measure the observables. Things that we haven't measured will never become "realities" in any sense. If the question is about the classical-quantum boundary, there is obviously no sharp boundary. Classical physics is just a limit of quantum physics but quantum physics fundamentally works everywhere in the multiverse. The numerical (and qualitative) errors we make if we use a particular "classical scheme" to discuss a situation may be quantified - decoherence is one of the calculations that quantifies such things. But classical physics never fully takes over.

This question is not about philosophy. Without a precise form of decoherence, one cannot claim that anything really "happened", including the specific outcomes of experiments.

Oh, really? When I say that it's mostly sunny today, it's not because I preach a precise form of decoherence. It's because I have made the measurement. Of course, the observation can't be 100% accurate because "sunny" and "cloudy" haven't "fully" decohered from each other - but their overlap is just insanely negligible. Nevertheless, the overlap never becomes exactly zero. It can't. For more subtle questions - about electrons etc. - the measurements are more subtle, and indeed, if no measurement has been done, one cannot talk about any "reality" of the property because none of them could have existed. The very assumption that properties - especially non-commuting ones - had some well-defined properties leads to contradictions and wrong predictions.

Decoherence cannot be precise. Decoherence, by its very definition, is an approximate description of the reality that becomes arbitrarily good as the number of the environmental degrees of freedom, their interaction strength, and the time I wait become arbitrarily large. I think that none of the things I say are speculative in any way; they consider the very basic content and meaning of decoherence and I think that whoever disagrees has just fundamentally misunderstood what decoherence is and is not. But the accuracy of this emergent macroscopic description of what's happening with the probabilities is never perfect, just like macroscopic equations of hydrodynamics never exactly describe the molecules of tea in a teacup.

And without the ability to causally access an infinite number of precisely decohered outcomes, one cannot reliably verify the probabilistic predictions of a quantum-mechanical theory.

Indeed, one can't verify many predictions of quantum mechanical properties, especially about cosmological-size properties that we can only measure once. If you don't like the fact that our multiverse denies you this basic "human right" to know everything totally accurately, you will have to apply for asylum in a totally different multiverse, one that isn't constrained by logic and science.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that these questions may be resolved by cosmology.

You know, I think that there are deep questions about the information linked between causally inaccessible regions - whether black hole complementarity tells you something about the multiverse etc. But this paper seems to address none of it. It seems to claim that the cosmological issues influence even basic facts about low-energy quantum mechanics and the information that is moving in it. That's surely not possible. It's just a generic paper based on misunderstandings of quantum mechanics and on desperate attempts to return the world under the umbrella of classical physics where there was a well-defined reality where everything was in principle 100% accurate.

But the people who are not on crack will never return to the era before the 1920s because the insights of quantum mechanics, the most revolutionary insights of the 20th century, are irreversible. Classical physics, despite its successes as an approximate theory, was ruled out many decades ago.

I have only read a few pages that I considered relevant and quickly looked at the remaining ones. It seems like they haven't found or calculated anything that makes any sense. The paper just defends the abstract and the introduction that they have apparently pre-decided to be true. But the abstract and and introduction are wrong.

You see that those would-be "revolutionary" papers start to share lots of bad yet fashionable features - such as the misunderstanding of the conceptual issues of quantum mechanics and the flawed idea that all such general and basic misunderstandings of quantum physics (or statistical physics and thermodynamics) must be linked to cosmology if not the multiverse.

However, cosmology has nothing to do with these issues. If you haven't understood a double-slit experiment in your lab or the observation of Schrödinger's cat in your living room and what science actually predicts about any of these things, by using the degrees of freedom in that room only, or if you haven't understood why eggs break but don't unbreak, including the degrees of freedom of the egg only, be sure that the huge multiverse, regardless of its giant size, won't help you to cure the misunderstanding of the basics of quantum mechanics and statistical physics.

The right degrees of freedom and concepts that are linked to the proper understanding of a breaking egg or decohering tea are simply not located far away in the multiverse. They're here and a sensible scientist shouldn't escape to distant realms that are manifestly irrelevant for these particular questions.

And that's the memo.

Fermi reproduces PAMELA excess

Jester brings us some news from Rome that became the Mecca of the Fermi collaboration. Once again, Fermi didn't disappoint and its new findings could have implications for the "Is Dark Matter Seen" war.

In 2008, PAMELA (TRF) announced its excess of high-energy positrons with energies 1.5-100 GeV in cosmic rays which could be viewed as evidence of annihilation of dark matter. But was that signal real? Many people have harbored doubts. After all, PAMELA could also be a blonde and you don't want to believe everything that a blonde says. ;-)



Click the picture above to zoom in

However, Fermi - who is male, experienced, and renowned (not to mention that he's been dead for decades and he was formerly known as GLAST) - has just mostly eliminated all those doubts.




Unlike PAMELA, Fermi didn't have its own magnetic field but it was able to cleverly borrow the magnetic field of the Earth. This loan allowed Fermi to do something that it couldn't do otherwise: to distinguish electrons and positrons.



Click to zoom in

As you can see, at certain moments and when looking to certain directions, all of the electrons - or all of the positrons - are shielded by the Earth because their trajectories are bent by the geomagnetic field to achieve this goal. Effectively, electrons and positrons may be separated and the result, as you saw at the top, is that PAMELA's excess is confirmed.

Whether the excess is due to dark matter annihilation or a more mundane astrophysical effect remains a somewhat open question but the case for DMIS - "Dark Matter Is Seen" coalition in the war - has strengthened again.

CLOUD: cosmic rays producing lots of them

Nigel Calder has pointed out the following interview in Physics World about CERN's CLOUD experiment:



In that interview, CLOUD's boss Jasper Kirkby answers lots questions - like what are the cosmic rays and whether the climate scientists in the world agree that someone should be allowed to believe, as a heretic, that the clouds may affect the weather. ;-)

Kirkby is giving lots of relevant answers and he also credits Nigel Calder himself for some early motivation to build the experiment more than a decade ago.




The main punch line is that the experiment has found that the cosmic rays substantially increase the production of the aerosol seeds of clouds. They have also measured the detailed evolution of the size of those particles and within 2 or 3 months, we will see some published results.



See older TRF stories on cosmoclimatology.

NASA: today's launch of AMS delayed by 3 days

Tonight, at 9:47 pm Prague Summer Time i.e. 12:47 pm Californian Daylight Saving Time, the space shuttle Endeavour was scheduled to be launched to bring the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) towards the International Space Station where it is going to be attached.

See Vancouver Sun.

However, a a problem with power unit 1 heaters postponed the launch at least by 71 hours.



Little Dr Martina Dobešová is giving the not-so-little mole to the U.S. Ambassador to Czechia.

AMS, a device produced at CERN's labs, will be observing charged cosmic rays which could optimistically shed some light on the composition of dark matter, too. The mission will be led by the little Czechoslovak mole.

It will be the last flight of a space shuttle so let's hope that Endeavour won't join Challenger and Columbia.




The girl in the (Czech) video above is the new chief of NASA. Moreover, her father is the director of a company that produces the moles in space, or whatever he is doing. ;-)

Yuri Gagarin: 50 years ago

On Tuesday, April 12th, it will have been 50 years from what was arguably the most impressive achievement of the Soviet Union.

Czechoslovakia was the first country after the USSR that Gagarin visited after he returned (the picture here is from that visit) - and my positive emotions about his famous journey have survived from the times when I was a red kid even though I have never understood what was exactly the spectacular qualitative difference between flights in the airplane and the low-orbit cosmic flights. But today I admit that "g=0" for a long time is pretty new. ;-)

As TRF has already mentioned, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia celebrated Gagarin's achievement by a hit song composed within a characteristic genre of socialism and the Soviet bloc called jazz. This time, I offer you a children's TV version of the hit song; it features lots of other Soviet symbols such as the white stars from the U.S. flag and hockey sticks from a game invented by the Soviet Union. ;-)

A translation may be found below the video.

Honor to the Astronaut (click)

(Jaromír Hnilička / Pavel Pácl,
translation L.M., usually sung by Gustav Brom 4/12/1961)

1:00
The whole world heard the news from the Soviets,
the whole world suspended all its chats.
The whole world jumped away from radios,
and it turned all its eyes to the skies.

1:17
Good morning, Mr major Gagarin,
we couldn't wait but now it is here.
The whole world drank wine red as your flag,
people were waving all of their hands.

1:34
Tell the guys who live on the stars,
tell the guys who live on the Moon.
Tell them the message from us humans,
that we will follow your steps soon.

1:50
I can't sing this fun song terribly well
because my voice is trembling like mad.
I have heard that you are twenty seven
and the world is as young as you are.

2:42
Tell the guys who live on the stars,
tell the guys who live on the Moon.
Tell them the message from us humans,
that we will follow your steps soon.

2:57
I can't sing this fun song terribly well
because my voice is trembling like mad.
I have heard that you are twenty seven
and the world is as young as you are.

(In the translation, "Soviets" was chosen instead of "TASS", the Press Agency of the Soviet Union. I've exchanged "stars" and "Moon" to make "Moon" rhyme with "soon". Some articles were omitted to fit the syllables.)

Are ET aliens shy?

The Physics arXiv Blog has been intrigued by an extraterrestrial paper by Adrian Kent:

Too Damned Quiet?

Science rejected the paper in 2005 but it's fun, so why wouldn't he submit it to the arXiv in 2011? ;-)




There are three typical answers to Fermi's question - Where are they? - and Kent has added another, bold one:

1. Life is rare and we're the first ones or only ones
2. Others have quickly exterminated themselves
3. The extraterrestrial beasts don't want to interrupt our sensitive culture
4. Natural evolution at the cosmic level has trained ETs to be shy

Kent is aware of the fact that such speculations about the moral values and lifestyle of the extraterrestrial civilizations are not justified by any empirically rooted evidence. However, he claims that we can learn a lot from the evolution of life on Earth. Unfortunately, his way of learning means to deny what the history is actually telling us.

Well, are animals and plants trying to be invisible?

It depends. At the very end, life - and the economy - depends on some services that other animals, companies, or objects in the Universe are doing for us. To allow them to do so, we have to be visible by them. Then we may also have enemies and we may try to be invisible in front of them.

But in general, the contexts in which life forms try to be visible prevail - because a defining feature of life is the interaction with the world around the life form. There may also be negative contributions to our life but the positive ones have to dominate in the big perspective.

So plants and animals can't be invisible. Flowers and butterflies that try to be beautiful because of their contrived ways to reproduce are among the best witnesses.

Now, Kent doesn't really acknowledge that objects have to be visible at least for someone. Instead, he says that the extraterrestrial civilizations will fight for resources which will make it important for them to be invisible, in order not to be killed.

He even mentions a Nobel prize winner who protested against NASA's (or other people's) decision to send some signals from us to our extraterrestrial friends. The Nobel prize winner argued that it is a suicidal act because the extraterrestrial comrades are evil and we just allow them to kill us more easily. ;-)

Many things may happen but I think that the genre of these speculations is comedy. In particular, I find it very unlikely that at the cosmic scale, the life forms are "fighting for resources". What would the resources be? Dark matter? Radiation? Hydrogen? Helium? Other elements? Complicated organic compounds?

Whatever answer you choose, there are obvious problems with that. The Universe is so big that there's simply so many resources for everyone - most of it looks manifestly unused by any life form, at least in the vicinity of the Solar System where we have looked - that the market price of any of the "resources" I mentioned is zero and only a complete idiot, and not a member of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, would be fighting for a few tons of any of these things.

And the production of the complicated things depends on the intelligence and technology so fight is not the right way to proceed: research is the right way. Moreover, it's pretty unlikely to steal research of a vastly more advanced civilization because if a civilization is much more technologically advanced than another one, chances are that the more advanced one will win the confrontations, too.

So I think that the modifications that Kent made when he switched from the terrestrial natural selection to the natural selection at the cosmic level were totally wrong - they went in the opposite direction. As you go from small habitats to the galaxies and the big cosmos, the resources are surely getting less valuable and important. Their amount goes up and the percentage of the used ones goes down.

I think that Kent's thinking still reflects the degenerated left-wing logical fallacies such as the "tragedy of the commons" and similar stuff. Those things don't really play any significant role even here in Earth - but if we switch to vast regions of the Universe where most of the volume and matter is unused and interactions are rare, it's clear that the relative importance of "wars for resources" become less important.

The anonymous owner of the physics arXiv blog has demonstrated how deeply the idiotic "environmentalist" thinking has penetrated among ordinary people. He or she explains one of the classical scenarios - in which the aliens quickly exterminate themselves - and writes:

...but end up destroying themselves or their habitat with their own technology, such as with nuclear weapons or fossil fuel burning.

Holy cow, how can an advanced civilization end up destroying themselves by an activity that is as mundane and harmless as "fossil fuel burning"?

I am amazed by the complete disappearance of rational thinking of those people when it comes to topics that touch their religion. The fear of "fossil fuel burning" is a painful fad that has affected lots of brainwashed and gullible people especially between 2005 and 2009. There is no intellectual value in this kind of idiotic fearmongering whatsoever - and indeed, this fad is already several times weaker than it was 5 years ago.

It's a short-lived fad believed by people who are surely not among the brightest ones or the independently thinking ones. Still, those people think that they may take this fad - whose lifetime is a few years - and extrapolate it to learn lessons about the behavior of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations over billions of years. This is so spectacularly preposterous that even the fanatical champions of the millenniums-old religions are usually avoiding idiocies of this magnitude.

By the way, when it comes to biodiversity, I would guess that most of the hypothetical powerful extraterrestrial civilizations wouldn't give a damn, either. Some civilizations could try to treat the less advanced ones "sensitively" but others would not - and the latter group wouldn't disappear.

The latter group may look evil but there would also be lots of meritocratic, rational, neutral civilizations that would not be evil and that would still fail to care about the preservation of life of us etc. They would know that the treasure of "biodiversity" is fully encoded in the DNA codes that can be digitized and stored on their hard disks.

So the sophisticated aliens could think that we're amusing creatures but they wouldn't become religiously obsessed with us because they would understand that we're just physical objects participating in a system that they may easily understand. If they needed to sacrifice us, they would.

On the other hand, they wouldn't really have a reason unless they would be extremely similar to us. What would they gain if they were evil to us? What would an Earth without life offer them? Gold? Other elements? There's lots of it at other places in the Universe, too.

I would personally prefer to stick with Newton's "hypotheses non fingo" - and I mean hypotheses about unusual moral behavior of the aliens. What we see is that the density of extraterrestrial life that hugely modifies the cosmos around it is very low. Trying to hand-wave those observations away by some conspiracy theories about the extraterrestrial aliens' moral values - extrapolated from some provincial and short-lived fads on Earth, and extrapolated in a wrong direction - means to deny the evidence.

Also, I think that all those "intergalactic life exists" people vastly underestimate how difficult it is to make nontrivial events at the cosmic scale. Even on Earth whose radius is just 6,378 km, the evolution only occurred after hundreds of millions years in which animales were constantly eating each other, even though they only had to move by a few kilometers.

But if you take a cosmic structure as "small" as a galaxy, its diameter is 100,000 light years. Even by the speed of light, you would need 100,000 years to get from one end to the other. And realistically, the intragalactic transportation is probably not dominated by near-speed-of-light motion because they can't constantly produce E=mc^2 worth of energy for all the things they want to transfer etc.

If the typical speed of "big life forms" in a galaxy is 1% of the speed of light, they need 10 million years to get from one end to the other end. Those 10 million years play a role of a period, a "day of the galactic tigers". There have been just 1,000 such "days" from the Big Bang. Do you really believe that this is a sufficient number to produce and evolve extraterrestrial civilizations and train them that they should better be shy because otherwise they could be attacked?

I don't think so.

There may be bacteria or even multicellular animals elsewhere in the Universe but much "bigger" civilizations are hard to get. This conclusion may be disappointing because people may prefer the idea that there's lots of huge extraterrestrial life to discover; but this preferred idea is likely to be false. If we want to have a huge extraterrestrial life, we will have to work on it ourselves.

Liquidation of environmentalism that wants to reduce our energy production even below the modest early 21st century figures - from the beginning of the Earth's civilization - could be one of the early necessary steps to get further.

And that's the memo.

Buzz Aldrin dumped the LHC beam

If you continuously watch the LHC status, you must have noticed that on March 1st, 2011, a beam was dumped at some point. Why did it happen?

Well, it happened because they told the second man on the Moon, climate skeptic Buzz Aldrin, to press the red button, and he did so. ;-) Here a few words he said about the future of science:



Buzz Aldrin couldn't hide that particle physics wasn't his field but he's still such as skillful and charming speaker that what he had to say actually made some sense.




Via Symmetry Breaking

Little Czech commie mole becomes a NASA astronaut

Krtek a raketa

The Mole and a Rocket, 1965

Czechoslovakia became the 3rd country in the world - after the Soviet Union and the U.S. - that has sent its citizen to the outer space.

Mr Vladimír Remek joined the crew with Mr Alexei Gubarev of Russia in the late 1970s. Clearly, our politically correct, half-Czech, half-Slovak comrade was chosen because of the unusually authentic friendship between the Soviets and (some of) the Czechoslovaks and because of our relative technological prowess (recall also the Czechoslovak pilots who fought in Britain during the war).




Mr Remek is currently a member of the European Parliament, representing the Unreformed Marxist Leninist Stalinist Murderous Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia. He is clearly among those who give the party a better name than what it deserves.

Fourty years ago, Neil Armstrong played the New World Symphony by Mr Antonín Dvořák (Czech) on his trip to the Moon, too.

However, a brand new era for the Czech astronauts recently started when Andrew Feustel, the last person who was repairing the Hubble Space Telescope during the service mission and who has Czech roots, began to flood the outer space with the Czech culture. He filled the Universe with the Cosmic Songs by the 19th century Czech poet Jan Neruda, before he (Feustel) visited my hometown of Pilsen.

However, as the Wall Street Journal informs, the little Czech mole, a cartoon celebrity in the socialist bloc (see the video above for an episode - you don't need to speak any Czech), has even become a NASA astronaut.

Space Shuttle Stowaway Is a Commie Mole

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Google News (60+ hits)

Krtek [mole, pronounce "cur-tack"] plush toys had to be redesigned to meet the NASA criteria for passive astronauts. But I am sure that Krteček [little mole, pronounce "curteh-czech"] is ready for his mission which may include some work on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) designed to study cosmic rays. The author of the locally renowned Czech cartoon character, Mr Zdeněk Miller, is 90 years old. Feustel hopes that the mole and its peaceful values may find some fans in America.

The mole is also a big friend of the fossil fuels - which may be found politically incorrect by some people but very appropriate by others - as showed in the cute episode The Mole and the King Coal. See about 40 other episodes of the Little Mole on YouTube. For example, the 1957 episode How the Mole Got His Trousers won the Silver Lion in Venice.

The cartoons are aimed at healthy children under 5 years old and the global warming alarmists under 65 years old.

Hat tip: John F. Hultquist

Did the Supermoon cause the Japanese earthquake?

Yesterday, during a fun trip to Northern Bohemia, I was also exposed to the kind of science that is hot among those who are not exactly physicists. What's shaking? Here it is:



Last Saturday, i.e. three days ago, we experienced the best Supermoon in 18 years. I hadn't heard about this particular "breaking news" from the world of science but I should have. Google News offers about 3,000 stories about the Supermoon event. It's almost 1/3 of the number of stories that mention "global warming" - a pretty big deal.




And for example, the 3,000 articles make the Supermoon at least 15 times more visible in the media than the Large Hadron Collider that had to collect the visibility for a whole month (because the Google News data cover the recent 30 days). My sources are just directly reflecting these societal preferences that I find utterly frustrating.

The reports about the Supermoon include 300 articles that discuss whether the Supermoon cauused the earthquake in Japan: that's still a higher number of articles than those about the LHC in a whole month. (I think that most of the texts fortunately conclude that the Supermoon wasn't responsible for the earthquake.)

What follows is some simple maths describing the Supermoon. Needless to say, this is not the message that readers of the newspapers learn - even this is too complicated: what they learn is the - totally wrong - message that events such as the Supermoon are significant. It's not hard to see that this opinion is nothing else than a piece of astrology. And indeed, you will find out that the concept of a Supermoon was coined as recently as in 1979 - by astrologer Richard Nolle.

What is the Supermoon?

Well, it's not hard to guess. If you see the full moon which we had on Satuday and if you hear - or guess from the visual perception - that the Moon looks large, you may figure out what the term means (and I did): it's a moment when a full moon is very close to the perigee. How often does it happen?

Well, obviously, it never occurs "completely exactly". But we must know how the Moon orbits around the Earth. If we neglect some slow motion of the Solar System and some secondary perturbations, the Moon orbits the Earth along an ellipse.

Its distance is changing between 364,000 and 407,000 kilometers. One sidereal day takes 27.32 days. After this period of time, a perigee (closest approach) is followed by another perigee (closest approach). The orientation of the ellipse is fixed relatively to the stars. So you may just (linearly, translationally)) subtract the motion of the Earth-Moon bound state around the Sun if you want to study what's happening with the elliptical lunar orbit.

However, those 27.32 days are not the period of the lunar phases. How do we calculate e.g. the time between two full moons? Well, it's not hard. Look at the Moon-Earth system from the side where the motion of the Moon is clockwise. Every day (86,400 seconds), the Moon completes 1/27.32 of its sidereal period (the perigee-perigee separation, with directions fixed relatively to the stars). However, the Earth completes about 1/365.25 of its annual journey around the Sun.

The Earth is also moving in the clockwise direction in my convention - most bodies in the Solar system carry the same sign of the angular momentum. So if those 27.32 days above were 365.25 days, the Moon-Earth-Sun wouldn't be changing at all: the two motions would cancel. However, 27.32 differs from 365.25, so if we want to figure out how the motion around the Sun influences the lunar phases, we just subtract their inverse numbers:

1/27.32 - 1/365.25 = 1/29.53.

So during one day, the Moon completes 1/29.53 of its job needed to get from one full moon to another full moon. It follows that the full moons follow each other after 29.53 days. We call this period the synodic month (synodic means "relatively to the line defined by two other objects", in this case the Earth and the Sun).

So every 29.53 days, we have another full moon. But the phase of the ellipse is not synchronized. Every full moon, 29.53-27.32 = 2.21 days of the lunar cycle - the synodic month - is added to the "error". Because 29.53/2.21 = 13.36, it takes about 13.36 synodic months - which is 13.36*29.53 = 394.6 days - to return from one approximate Supermoon to another.

The number I calculated - 394.6 days - is remarkably close to 13/12 of a year (the error is just 1.3 days or so). So it takes about 13 calendar months to return from one Supermoon to another. You may check some dates to see that this calculation works.

Of course, if you want to be very accurate, the perigee and the full moon occur at discrete moments so it is impossible for them to ever be completely coincident. However, if you allow a plus minus 1.1 day tolerance (half of the 2.21-day deficit mentioned above), the Supermoon occurs every 13 calendar months or so.



Sidereal and synodic months for 14 calendar months before the latest Supermoon on Saturday (the right side of the graph). Click to zoom in. The graph apparently differs from the numbers in the text because of lunar precession, caused by the solar tide, which rotates the orientation of the lunar orbit every 8.85 years.

Do the Supermoons which occur "more accurately" allow you to see a "substantially" bigger Moon than the Supermoons that are misaligned by the maximum error of 1.1 days which can be guaranteed every 13 months? Well, the answer is a resounding No.

The distance of the Moon may be approximately written as

D(t) = 385,000 km - 21,000 km * cos(2*pi*t/27.32 days)

Note that the distance oscillates like a cosine - a good enough approximation for a relatively small eccentricity. The numbers are chosen so that the cycle is 27.32 days, the maximum is 406,000 km, and the minimum is 364,000 km. The phase is chosen so that perigee occurs at t=0.

Now, substitute t=1.1 days, the maximum error. The cosine equals

cos(2*pi*1.1/27.32) = 0.97

The cosine is 0.97 which is 0.03 smaller than 1.00, so the distance of the Moon will differ from the "ultimate Supermoon distance" by 21,000 km times 0.03 = 630 km. That's just 0.15% of the actual distance of the Moon. I claim you can't be able to see the 0.15% difference by your naked eyes. Every 13 calendar months, you should see the same good Supermoon.

This difference becomes even smaller if you pick the best Supermoon among N=2 or many candidates. In that case, the argument of the cosine will reduced by a factor of N, which will reduce the difference of the cosine itself from 1 by a factor by 1/N^2 - because the cosine has a vanishing derivative so you must go to the second order.

It means that e.g. (statistically) every other Supermoon candidate - e.g. once per 26 calendar months (just slightly above 2 years) - will be within 0.04% of the "ultimate Supermoon" event when it comes to the visual size of the Moon. This small difference will make it harder to find out that it's not quite the "best Supermoon" even to very sophisticated amateur astronomers. You should compare this tiny percentage with the 12% variations (407/364=1.12) of the apparent size of the Moon that are alternating every month.

Impact of the Supermoon

Now, rationally, if there is some effect of the moon phases, they primarily have individual effects. The synodic phases - such as the full moon - only change the amount of light reaching the Earth by an extremely tiny amount. The visual impact on skygazers is much larger.

The sidereal monthly cycles may have a bigger impact. After all, we get really low tides when the Moon is in the perigee (closest approach to the Earth). However, can something happen when the two points coincide? Well, I don't think so. It's just astrology. No measurable physical effect on the Earth is likely to care about the alignment of the two cycles.

Note that the Japanese earthquake occurred 8 days before the Supermoon. That's more than 1/4 of the Moon's cycle - whether you mean the synodic or the sidereal one. So during the Earthquake, the distance of the Moon was actually rather close to the average value, very far from the Supermoon-like minimum.

I think that most TRF readers must be infidels when it comes to astrology so I am not going to preach to the converted.

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P.S.: You may be confused by some numbers above - is the cycle of the Supermoon 12 months or 13 months etc.? Well, I was oversimplifying the cycles a little bit. 27.32 days is the sidereal day and, approximately the same, tropical day: the Earth-Moon direction returns to the same vector relatively to the reference frame of stars.

But because of lunar precession, which takes 8.85 years or 3233 days, the time between two perigees is somewhat longer:

1/27.32 - 1/3233 = 1/27.55

So the time between two perigees is actually 27.55 days: it's called the "anomalistic month". There's also the draconic (nodical) month, 27.21 days, between two ascending nodes (the Moon crosses the ecliptic - the plane of the Earth/Sun orbit, whether you like the heliocentric or geocentric description - while going up to the Northern Hemisphere; the descending node has the opposite meaning) but the draconic month is only important to calculate the eclipses, not the Supermoon.

To calculate the actual periodicity in which the moon phases (synodic month) get synchronized with the distance phases (anomalistic month), we need to know

1/27.55 - 1/29.53 = 1/411

so the period is 411 days which is actually 13.5 calendar months or so.

Hannes Alfvén Medal 2011: Syun-Ichi Akasofu

It's a Japanese month on TRF so this blog may take notice of events that wouldn't be normally discussed. Awards are among them.

You could think that the European Geosciences Union must be a totally politically correct institution, a part of the anti-scientific and anti-skeptics Inquisition. Maybe.

But that didn't prevent EGU from choosing a top Japanese Alaskan climate skeptic, Syun-Ichi Akasofu, as the winner of the 2011: Hannes Alfvén Medal:

EGU about the winner

Congratulations! The award is named after the 1970 physics Nobel prize winner, Hannes Alfvén, who studied plasma physics in general and magnetohydrodynamics in particular and discovered the Alfvén waves.




Akasofu has authored a dozen of books and 500+ papers, including some top-cited ones, on similar subjects - especially things such as aurorae. You may check that even in the top-cited sane climate scientists' hitparade by Prall, Schneider, et al., Akasofu is ahead of your humble correspondent (by four steps).

You must remember Akasofu as a scientist featured on The Great Global Warming Swindle who observed that it's normal for ice to melt, especially in Spring. ;-)

To compare, The Independent, an extremely politically correct British daily, looks at the qualities of Al Gore as a student:

Gore 'was lazy dope as student at Harvard'

The U.K. newspaper says that Gore's grades were worse than those of George W. Bush and, as testified by a college friend of Gore in the press, Gore was stoned a lot of the time.

A former has put the "contradiction between Gore's abilities and results" into positive light: he was a boy who shows a "lot of potential". Well, especially the potential to brainwash fellow morons as well as somewhat smaller morons - and to transform their stupidity and gullibility to a virtue (and Scandinavian precious metals).