Your humble correspondent was brought up to like the classical music and to play the piano but I actually like pretty much all genres and my tastes are arguably close to the mainstream.
However, let me admit that I consider rap to be an inferior genre specifically produced for consumers whose IQ is mostly between 70 and 80.
[I'm not a climate scientist] [I'm not a climate scientist] [I'm not a climate scientist either]
[Yo, we're climate scientists] [and there's no denying this] [Climate change is real!]
Who's a climate scientist... I'm a climate scientist... Not a cleo finalist No, a climate scientist
Droppin' facts all over this wax While bitches be crying about a carbon tax Climate change is caused by people Earth Unlike Alien Has no sequel
We gotta move fast or we'll be forsaken, Cause we were too busy suckin' dick in Copenhagen: (Politician)
I said Burn! it's hot in here.. 32% more carbon in the atmosphere. Oh Eee Ohh Eee oh wee, ice ice ice Raisin' sea levels twice by twice
We're scientists, what we speak is True. Unlike Andrew Bolt our work is Peer-Reviewed... ooohhh
Who's a climate scientist.. I'm a climate scientist.. An Anglican revivalist No, a climate scientist
Feedback is like climate change on crack The permafrosts subtracts: feedback Methane release wack: feedback... Write a letter then burn it: feedback
Denialists deny this in your dreams 'Coz climate change means greater extremes, Shit won't be the norm Heatwaves bigger badder storms The Greenhouse effect is just a theory sucker (Alan Jones)
Yeah so is gravity float away mother fůčkéř
Who's a climate scientist.. I'm a climate scientist.. A Penny Farthing Cyclist? No, a climate scientist.
A Lebanese typist No A Paleontologist No A Sebaceous Cyst No! a climate fůčkíňg scientist! Yo! Freaks!
Unfortunately, the obscene rap by the self-described climate f*cking scientists only reinforces my viewpoint. By the way, Natalie Portman is also a climate scientist.
They just look so stupid and obscene. Because of their inability to include a single intelligent sentence into the lyrics, you may say that there is probably not a single person among the "musicians" who should be a scientist in a properly functioning system of institutionalized science.
Still, the names of the people are genuine and they're various kinds of climate graduate students and similar stuff. These obscene imbeciles are actually being paid as climate scientists. It is not hard to predict the quality of the scientific results that these "climate scientists" are capable to produce.
Poor Australia. And it's not just Australia.
If you look at the actual scientific output of all the people in the rap, it's, of course, poor or non-existent. For example, the blonde chick Ailie Gallant (a postdoc) is showing a paper, claiming that unlike Andrew Bolt, their work is peer-reviewed. But what she's showing is actually a paper that none of the people in the rap co-authored. For example, Ailie Gallant only has one 2007 paper co-authored with 2 more people that has 29 citations. Otherwise her work has been non-existent. But she surely looks attractive in a stupid rap video.
Climate science vs particle physics
Just compare the content of the rap with a rap produced in another discipline, particle physics.
Sung by Kate McAlpine and L.M. although the latter had to speed up his singing by a factor of 1.5; this was just sssooooo fffaaassssttt :-), especially in a language that I only learned as an adult.
Among other things, the 2008 rap above explains the LHC proton-proton collisions, their speed, the size of the experiment, the differences between the four detectors, LHCb, ALICE, CMS, and ATLAS and their main purpose, the fact that the device will either detect the Higgs boson or a serious reconstruction of the particle physics theories will have to be done, the method of finding new particles via missing transverse energy, the characteristic locations of black holes, the role of dark matter in cosmology and the differences between the astrophysical and terrestrial detection, fundamental weakness of gravity, the method how large extra dimensions may explain it and how the corresponding Kaluza-Klein modes may be detected, among other things.
And the bad rapper doesn't even claim to be an expert. AlpineKat is a self-described science journalist. Still, her video couldn't be recorded by a generic rapper - unlike the climate rap - and it is something I am ready to call a self-evident exception from the rule the rap is addressed to audiences with IQ between 70 and 80. In her case, it is not an actual rap; it may be viewed as a parody of rap.
But what about the rap from the "climate scientists"? It is the real thing. It is composed by the same kind of people who are dumb as soup which is why they listen to rap and produce rap. The "climate scientists" are not just pretending to be mentally limited idiots; they are idiots.
The content, focusing on childish attacks against "deniers" (who are 10 times more educated in the climate science than the rappers) and cruelly making fun of the fact that the politicians who attended the insane Copenhagen conference are homosexuals, is not a parody of raps; they're actual rappers driven by the same hormones and using the same primitive content of their brains that drives most other rappers.
When I am listening to this rap, I can't fail to recall my shopping in a supermarket in New Brunswick. I had no problems to visit the black neighborhood but I was always feeling more pleasant when there were cops on a nearby sidewalk. ;-)
Well, when it comes to similar genres focusing on free-minded teenagers enjoying some wild life, punk rock bands such as Horkýže Slíže (Slovakia) would be more likely to be my choice.
Richard Feynman, in the BBC Horizon 1964 program called "Strangeness Minus Three", discusses the coming revolution in the understanding of nuclear physics.
Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman predicted a "strangeness=3" particle which had just been found; the quark picture was clearly useful for them. Feynman predicts some breakthroughs in our understanding of nuclear physics. QCD came a few years later.
Feynman discusses the SU(2) symmetry between protons and neutrons and many other features of nuclear physics that had been freshly known to exist at that time. He kindly credits Gell-Mann with the development of strangeness, a numerical quantification of the difficulty that a nuclear particle may have when it wants to decay to a neutron or a proton.
By watching this program, you would never agree that Feynman wasn't nice to Gell-Mann (and others). For example, he says that the search for the Omega minus particle (s=-3) was a typical example of a dramatic scientific investigation. Two ingenious men, Gell-Mann and Ne'eman, had to wait for two years to see whether Nature recognizes their ingenuity. She did. The particle was found. ;-)
Gell-Mann appears at 15:26. He predicts that he has a few more years to actively live; physicists lose flexibility at some point; he describes fiery discussions with Feynman, and so on. After 19:20, Yuval Ne'eman describes his exotic paths from military to science (via Imperial College). (Israeli soldier) Ne'eman has some lovely things to say about his key collaborator (and devout Muslim) Abdus Salam.
A Brookhaven experimenter who found the Omega minus speaks at 23:20. He had to prepare the experiment. Gell-Mann had a great track record of his predictions so it wasn't a problem. Graphs of the decuplet, mass differences, and decay channels are nicely sketched; it seems clear to me that these "technicalities" would be omitted in a 2011 BBC show which would be filmed for a much more dumbed down audience. Finally, the experimenter shows some cutely visual bubble chamber images of their discovered Omega minus.
At 32:50, we get back to Feynman who is a kind of moderator of the show. He discusses how the scientific understanding develops in waves - using an example of periodic table and atomic physics - and meditates on whether or not partially broken symmetries are beautiful or deep. Great discoveries always require some philosophical surprises. Feynman also emphasizes that our (or his) age was exceptional because those things can't be discovered twice. Lots of cute and deep thought of Feynman about Nature and science.
Quite generally, I was impressed by the speaking abilities of all the physicists on the show. Maybe, and quite likely, they were reading some prepared texts. But maybe it is the right thing to do, anyway. It may have been a bad development that the TV shows began to prefer "authentic (disordered) interviews" with the physicists lately.
At the same moment, while the 1960s are often presented as a period of a bursting frenzy in experimental particle physics, I don't quite see it. For two years, people would be waiting for a mundane bound state of three strange quarks and they would dedicate a special BBC show to this single particle in the decuplet. I am absolutely certain that a possible discovery of the Higgs, or even supersymmetry, would make our era much more striking than the 1960s.
That's why I included a link to Lisa Randall's new book, Knocking on Heaven's Door. I happen to know the content in detail and it's excellent - covering quite some details of philosophy of science, particle physics, effective physics, model building, and the LHC. It will be released in September 2011 and you may pre-order it now.
If you have something like O(10 x 100 minutes) = O(1000 minutes) and you want to learn the basics of our only candidate for a theory of everything, here is the playlist with ten Prof Susskind's lectures on string theory and M-theory for the Californian pensioners.
Lenny Susskind is much more than just one of the early fathers of the field.
I hope that some of you will try to watch at least a part of this symphony and we will hear some comments about the people's impressions and insights.
I just discovered the YouTube channel of ICTP, i.e. Abdus Salam's International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.
During the last month or so, they have posted a number of recent lectures (November 2010) by the winners of the Dirac Medal that they have distributed every August since 1985.
A significant fraction of the Dirac Medal winners are string theorists and I have chosen a sequence of 30-minute lectures by Joseph Polchinski (2008), Cumrun Vafa (2008), Michael Green (1989), John Schwarz (1989): two hours in total.
Note that Polchinski is being introduced by a young East Asian female physicist. Most other folks who introduce the speaker are much closer to the Muslim world, as appropriate for a center founded by Abdus Salam who was Pakistani.
Joe Polchinski talked about holography and unification. Cumrun Vafa chose to clarify the physical role of compact extra dimensions. Michael Green looks at string theory as a UV-finite extension of supergravity and he explains why SUGRA isn't enough. John Schwarz focused on superconformal field theories and their role in string/M-theory.
I also recommend to you talks by Roman Jackiw, Helen Quinn, John Iliopoulos, Jogesh Pati, Giorgio Parisi, David Gross (it has probably been shown on TRF), Shiraz Minwalla, Sergio Ferrara, Stephen Adler, and others.
Nima Arkani-Hamed gave a 90-minute public lecture on unification, relativity, QFT, scales in physics, the LHC, and other key things. I have modified the name of the collider in the title because this blog is way more polite than the prícks at Princeton. ;-)
Nima focuses on the hierarchy problem (the Higgs' unbearable lightness of being) and the cosmological constant problem - and their solutions, including supersymmetry etc.
Bonus: admissions at USC
An interesting story: Clifford Johnson has been bullied by a mediocre physicist who nevertheless wanted to become a USC graduate student, despite having totally lousy scores and other objective parameters, in order to improve the weather (he lives in a very cold state now).
Clifford wasn't able to tell him to f*ck off, and as a result, he has missed a talk by a Nobel prize winner.
That's how it works: if you can't authoritatively deal with obnoxious, pushy, and stupid as*holes, they will beat the battle for your time - and influence in general - against the Nobel prize winner or anyone else who has something to offer.
Last week, the BBC TV aired another one-hour program from its Horizon collection, What is reality?. It's a brand new show - one that already carries the year 2011. Here it is:
You will meet people such as Lenny Susskind, Seth Lloyd, Frank Wilczek, Anton Zeilinger, Max Tegmark, and others. Frank Wilczek plays with fruits on his cottage while the Tevatron is celebrated for its discovery of the top quark.
I like the mysterious voice of the narrator. But lots of bullshit scenes - like meaningless discussions about, well, "what is reality" - get boring very quickly. Zeilinger explains the double-slit experiment - well, not too much - and Lloyd says things about quantum computing - well, not too many.
Susskind discusses the information loss paradox and shows the house where Hawking shocked him by (not ultimately correct) claims that the information was lost. The holographic principle is explained by a moving but fake three-dimensional blonde lady. They also use Susskind and his clone and one of them is holographic. No one understands it, they claim.
Craig Hogan shows his holometer. An extensive apparatus given the fact that these self-described "holographic" effects he conjectured clearly don't exist. Max Tegmark says a lot of things I agree with to the extent that they look totally vacuous to me. Unless he thinks he is saying something more than that in which case it's wrong. ;-)
They return to the TeV physics, mention the LHC but remain the Tevatron fans. The Higgs boson is mentioned but not explained. Wilczek, Susskind, and others are led to say vague things about the reality instead. Well, I think that these programs have become much less demanding - but it's also true that the British audience has grown much more ignorant when it comes to physical sciences in the last 20-30 years. It's a nation in decline, and it's not the only one.
Via Phil Gibbs who also says something about the content
If you have a spare hour and you want to see Edward Witten sitting in an IAS armchair and give you a lecture of modern physics from the 19th century all the way to string theory, continue to read this text.
You will also learn some Italian along the way. Most importantly, "string theory" is "La teoria delle stringhe."
The playlist of "Beautiful Minds, vol. 20", has 5 parts. In Czechia, you couldn't become successful with a half-English program with an English title but in Italy, things are different. ;-) The episode was released in July 2010.
In the first part, Witten discusses how Maxwell's equations predicted light, electromagnetic waves, and their universal speed. The significance of the latter was only appreciated by Einstein. Even more importantly, he developed general relativity a decade later.
If you don't speak Italian, you may want to skip 9:44-12:30 in the first part.
The second part is dedicated to relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, antimatter, and the Standard Model. He gets to string theory at 3:45 when he adds Einstein's gravity to the quantum framework. At 6:10, an Italian segment begins. Gabriele Veneziano can't be omitted.
The last Italian words are "teoria di tutto" (yes, TOE) and you return to Witten and English after 9:15. He talks about particle physics of the 1960s and the birth of string theory which is, of course, presented as an event in Italy: Regge, Veneziano, Fubini, Virasoro, and too many others. Fundamental equations able to describe the Regge trajectory mess were looked for. Some time is dedicated to the zeroth string revolution - at Rutgers, Joel Shapiro once forced me to invent a concise name for that period of their heroic discoveries. ;-)
In the third part, the amazing richness of string theory is emerging. The Feynman path integral for string theory - the world sheets - is discussed in some detail. String theory automatically tells you how it interacts when you know how the free one propagates - a perturbative explanation of its superior predictive power. At 3:30, another Italian segment begins.
The name of Pierre Ramond appears - so it's not shocking that at 5:19, when Witten returns with English, the discussion is about the supersymmetry. Witten says that string theory is very robust and hard to be deformed. After all, almost nothing works and string theory is just barely able to obey all the conditions. Supersymmetry was nevertheless found, in the string context. Reasons why physicists didn't appreciate string theory are mentioned - extra dimensions looked strange; QCD, and so on.
Witten was in the graduate school when just a handful of people worked on strings. They knew it was miraculous enough. And Witten himself eventually knew that something was going to happen. However, he was bothered that there were no viable left-right-asymmetric (parity-violating) vacua known at the moment. The Green's and Schwarz's discovery changed that, of course.
The fourth part begins with an Italian portion. Comments about the LHC, dark matter, and theory of everything will be comprehensible to everyone. After 2:55, Witten reappears with the picture of string theory after the first superstring revolution. Five string theories existed, and so on. Witten has played a "little bit of a role" :-) in reunifying them. The previous "vices" - such as extra dimensions - were recognized as a blessing in disguise.
In the 1990s, people got broader in their understanding what string theory is all about. Holography and Maldacena's AdS/CFT correspondence are being discussed. Around 11:00, an Italian narrator explains M-theory and its mysterious name.
You will only hear English again in the last, fifth part. Witten says that string theory is probably on the right track - because it predicts gravity while QFT is incompatible with it; and because the consistency holds so miraculously. Two minutes later, the accelerating expansion of the Universe is praised a the biggest recent experimental discovery. The possible Universe clearly follows. Witten is not sure whether the anthropic or "uncalculable" viewpoint is right or whether he likes it; he prefers to be able to calculate everything. But Witten claims that he hasn't consulted when the Universe was created (unless he is just hiding it, of course, haha). So the Universe could work in this way.
At 5:30, you hear the Italian chap again. He speaks about the CERN. At 8:05, Witten returns to the discovery prospects of the LHC, especially about the supersymmetry. He would be delighted, of course: "one half" of his papers depend on SUSY in one way or another. String theory's ability to uncover secrets in other disciplines (via AdS/anything etc.) is mentioned as another major reason to think it's on the right track.
He concludes at 12:00. The main criticism of string theory he may understand is that it is too ambitious, too big a step, so we may always remain uncertain about important things. The circumstantial evidence is convincing, however. Too many things work so that it is unlikely to be a coincidence. And it gives us a good draft of the world.
Three weeks ago, on December 15th, 2010, Friends of the IAS Princeton invited the undisputed Lord of the Strings, Edward Witten, to give a talk about knots in general and about their relationship to the quantum theory in particular.
It is the discipline of mathematics in which the power of the physical intuition and the power of Witten's brain have been demonstrated most comprehensibly from the mathematicians' viewpoint - and the topic that has largely earned the Fields medal for Witten himself.
Press ► to play. Click here to play or right-click to save the large MP4 file (311 MB) or small MP4 file (167 MB).
On December 24th, 2010, your humble correspondent spent a few hours by untangling a knot on a closed circuit of Christmas tree light bulbs. Fortunately, I didn't know about this talk by Witten. If I had seen the talk before the Christmas, I would surely start to compute the knot polynomial.
And after dozens of hours, the knot polynomial would turn out to be equal to one, as I was able to experimentally demonstrate within a few hours. This story is an example of a context in which I am a better experimenter than a theorist. ;-)
We had recent discussions with Gordon (and maybe others) whether Penrose's popular texts on twistors may be read by undergraduates. Well, in this case, Edward Witten confirms my viewpoint that this stuff - like the Jones polynomials - could be taught to the high school students without losing much. There is a mechanical procedure to evaluate J_K and if it is distinct for two knots, they're inequivalent. In particular, J_K different from one means that the know cannot be untangled.
For adult people, however, a quantum definition could be simpler than the mechanical stuff that the high school kids could learn: the Jones polynomial is the expectation value of a Wilson loop evaluated in the fundamental representation for a SU(2) Chern-Simons theory defined on an S^3 (R^3 in which the single point at infinity can be surpassed).
How do the kids calculate J_K? For an unknot, a circle, J_K equals one. Then, pick your favorite numbers which can be anything but must be 2,3,5 for you to follow what Witten is going to say :-). If there is a relationship between three knots K,K',K'', then 2J_K+3J_K'+5J_K'' vanishes. This powerful identity is enough to calculate the J's.
How do the three related knots K,K',K'' differ? Well, they differ behind a circular shadow that has 4 external lines going from it. The 4 external lines can be connected into pairs in 3 simple ways, corresponding to K,K',K'': X-like connection with the Northeast-Southwest line on the top; two vertical connecting lines; X-like connection with the Northeast-Southwest line on the bottom. As I have mentioned, we postulate:
2JK + 3JK' + 5JK'' = 0.
It's rather easy to show that this rule is enough to calculate J; it's harder to prove that there can't be any contradiction - the worry is that one may calculate J in many ways which could contradict each other. Jones proved in the 1980s that there's no contradiction.
Why it's so conceptually? Well, because you may calculate J_K from physics of Chern-Simons theory - which makes it clear that it doesn't depend on how you draw the knot. The polynomial is invariant under deformations.
Khovanov homology is similar to the polynomial but it is tougher, so you need a very smart high school student. Witten eventually got to his more recent research, namely a clarification of a paper by Gukov, Schwarz, and Vafa. His thinking brought him to his recent paper about geometrizing of quantum mechanics (TRF).
Again, the most important and natural insights about these objects can be obtained in quantum field theory and string theory.
In the question period, the first question was from a friend who hates maths and who asked what it is good for. (The individual may still be a friend of the IAS buildings, one who plans to transform them into brothels.) Witten said that quantum computers could find the knot polynomials to fight decoherence - in quantum Hall systems. Topological insulators are another example close even to the Khovanov homology. Not sure whether it's applied enough for the "friend". :-)
The second question was about the relevance of the polynomials for tangles in biology; Witten hasn't heard of it. The third question was where have the monopoles gone; Witten said that Alan Guth overdid his job and in trying to protect the mankind from too many monopoles from the inflation, he threw the baby out with the bath water and diluted them exponentially so not even Sheldon Cooper could discover them. ;-) However, Witten has only worked on theories that are inconsistent with the absence of monopoles, as he puts it.
The fourth question is how Witten chooses his problems; it's the hardest job, Witten says. He looks in the sweet spot - not too easy, not too hard. Semi-jokingly, he says that it turns out that he does nothing most of the time as a result.
The fifth question led Witten to explain that the knots are his passion. Another question made him mention some work by Gaiotto and others that is seemingly so remote from the knots that he couldn't say anything useful.
The seventh question led Witten to describe a paper by Albert Schwartz that only has a few citations and Witten claims to be the only person aside from the author who paid attention to the work. That's quite wrong! ;-) I did, too, and in fact, I checked that Nima had a copy of one of the papers a few days ago (I was rechecking that I made Nima pay attention as well). In 1998, I spent quite some time with fun discussions with Albert Schwartz at Rutgers.
One more question was about some invariants that are not appropriate for that audience - and for TRF, either. ;-) So Witten chose to be silent and so will I. One more question made Witten praise string theory that has made many insights possible. String theory is on the right track but more accurate answers may be obtained by younger physicists only.
Two more questions shared a unified simple answer: "All theories have their critics." To get an idea about the intelligence of these particular critics, the newest question that the critics of string theory discuss on their most well-known blog is whether Edward Witten is an extraterrestrial alien sent from Mars (and what about your humble correspondent?). The critic-in-chief is somewhat skeptical but he believes that he, the critic, was sent by the people from Venus.
New articles are being posted below this one, so don't stop reading...
Merry Christmas to the TRF community!
Needless to say, I am not wishing any good Christmas to the environmentalists because it would be insulting for them. According to environmentalists, Everything that is wrong with humanity [...] is summed up in Christmas. Among other things, it is a turkey genocide day, we heard from Ethanol Greenfart, before he recycled his granny and wrote a book about it. ;-)
Yes, I mean a White Christmas. In 2010, global warming caused exactly the same winter as we have always been used to. So enjoy it. ;-)
Meanwhile, as Roy Spencer reports from the very place, Cancún in Mexico experiences the Gore Effect. They are living through the coldest December 7th on record.
Two weeks ago, Al Gore admitted that his support for the ethanol biofuels was a mistake that has raised food prices, among other things. Sorry, folks, I was wrong and you had to pay tens or hundreds of billions.
So far, Gore won't tell us that his whole life was a gigantic mistake that has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars and could cost us trillions or tens of trillions of dollars if we didn't stop the jerk. He's not brave enough to admit that much. Al Gore should have been responsible for his deeds from his very birth - because this was already pretty much his biggest sin. :-)
Google has presented the Cr-48 laptop with the Chrome OS, based on the Chrome browser. Note that Cr is the chemical formula of chromium.
Also, Google has opened the Google Webstore which is their database of "web applications" or bookmarks or extensions - possibly paid ones - created for Google Chrome in such a way that it should resemble the Apple AppStore as much as possible. ;-)
A friendly correspondent of mine located at Princeton has reminded me of a talk that James Hansen of Columbia University gave at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, the place where Einstein worked and that still employs some of the smartest people on the planet, including a powerful group of string theorists.
The 70-minute talk by the man who was repeatedly arrested in recent months and years - a rather unusual fact about a speaker at the IAS - was given on November 19th:
In the words of the person who told me about the talk - and who attended it - it was very strange.
And after I watched it, I agree, especially if I try to compare this talk to regular scientific talks or even colloquia.
From the very beginning, Hansen made lots of bold statements about the "planetary emergency" and horrible things waiting in the pipeline unless we reduce the CO2 concentration from 390 ppm to 350 ppm (a randomly chosen nonsensical number that is lower than 390 ppm) but he hasn't provided the listeners with something that they are used to from pretty much all the talks at their institute, namely evidence or a story that makes at least some sense.
Instead, the IAS researchers could repeatedly see photographs of Hansen's grandchildren who have admittedly inherited certain ugly and visibly non-cute features from their granddad. At some moment, you can watch a picture of Sophie for minutes. Hansen argues that it's partly right to call him the "grandfather of global warming" because he is a grandfather.
Additional ugly pictures of children are shown and given silly captions. Two little bastards, Sophie and Connor, are claimed to evaluate the radiative forcings. ;-) A traditional way to abuse the children - something that is even more widespread in Islam than it is in AGW.
Hansen claims that the Earth is "out of balance", without explaining whether it should be usual for a planet to be at balance, how much imbalanced it normally is, and what is the error bar of his current estimate. Clearly, the talk is optimized for people who never ask any sensible questions. Not sure whether the IAS folks were the right audience, however.
New pictures of grandkids follow. Somewhat prettier than before. Sophie is writing one of her first letters to President Obama now. She asked Barack: "Why don't you listen to my grandfather?" Meanwhile, the grandfather considers this argument "very clever", using his standards. Hansen told us that even the greenest countries such as Norway suck: imagine, they fund tar sands instead of using perpetual-motion machines to get the energy they need.
Remotely related: James Hansimian, a chimp, didn't beat NOAA in his hurricane predictions this year. Via NCPPR.
On another picture, Connor joins Hansen and Sophia and they celebrate the very good letter mentioned above. Congratulations. Hansen must be really proud. :-)
Hansen's mood rapidly deteriorates at 18:05; he has to return to the science. Superficial tautological statements are made about the sources of information - history, present, models. Global temperatures going back 65 million years ago were shown: there were no ice sheets prior to 40 million years before Christ.
Preposterous statements that all these changes were caused by CO2 are soon fixed: he admits that the orbital motion is the main cause. But he returns to the preposterous statement quickly. He doesn't feel any urge to even try to produce some evidence that CO2 mattered. Whenever it's clear that something is not caused by CO2, he mentions that CO2 has to be a powerful feedback - against, with no evidence. It's just some "mandatory baggage" that has to be added everywhere to skew the truth and that cannot be questioned.
Hansen promotes his crackpot pet theory of the sliding ice that will simply walk to the ocean - a hypothetical process that definitely doesn't decide about the fate of the ice sheets. Listeners had to go through a long and standard litany about melting glaciers, wildfires, coral reefs, ocean acidification, and others. At this point, his talk really picks comic proportions. He shows the list of all these hypothetical "catastrophes" - [here a miracle occurs] - and "derives" that each of them implies that the "right" CO2 concentration should be between 300 and 350 ppm to "preserve creation". Holy cow.
Could you please be more specific about the step 2 in the calculation, Mr Hansen?
Again, we simply cannot burn the available fossil fuels, he says. We can't burn the coal, we can't burn the unconventional fossil fuels. Well, be sure that we almost certainly will. Again, we learn that even Norway, the greenest country, is controlled by Big Oil. Well, it has to be so because the whole modern civilization depends on energy, Mr Hansen.
Hansen actually realizes that the cheapest fuels will be burned if they're the cheapest source. Of course, it's just like Newton's law of gravity, so the "right" solution he proposes is to distort the market in so gigantic ways so that they're no longer cheap. He wants a fee to be paid for mining or important fossil fuels. In fact, he also wants the fee to keep on increasing until the economies are happily devastated. The money should be given to the U.S. citizens to adapt to the fact that they must live without energy. In his viewpoint, it's better than cap-and-trade.
Two previously undisclosed grandchildren have totally distracted Mr Hansen while he was explaining that "China is going to suffer most from climate change" - what a piece of crap, by the way. We're promised that aside from the four grandchildren, we will also see Hansen's wife. I don't think that he has fulfilled the promise.
The grandson Jake is a gentle giant. He's among the top 1% biggest kids of his age, we learn. You need to be a top IAS researcher to understand this talk. If we allow Jake to grow under business-as-usual, he will be 2 meters tall. That's unacceptable so Jake must be made starving and hungry - that's how I understood Hansen's bizarre mixture of the two topics.
By now, we have acquired a deeper knowledge about Hansen's grandkids than their parents have.
Jefferson's "Earth belongs to the living" is totally misinterpreted - really inverted to its negation. Jefferson clearly meant that you can't allow dead and future people to vote about the decisions about the present. Only the present generations can decide. Jefferson surely did not mean that the rights of hypothetical people in the future should be taken into account now. He mainly wanted to say that the debts calculated by the previous - currently dead - generations shouldn't determine the lives of the present generation (a point I only partially share, but that's clearly unrelated to our relationship with the future generations).
Governments shouldn't be allowed to decide about their levels of carbon regulation. Courts should tell them that they are obliged to destroy the economies completely, Hansen argues. Thanks, the talk is over. Thank God.
Maldacena's question
The question-and-answers period began. Juan Maldacena, the author of what most top people in high-energy physics consider the greatest breakthrough of theoretical physics in the last 15 years (the 1997 AdS/CFT correspondence), among a hundred of other papers, asks whether geoengineering is a suitable alternative solution to the extra taxes and duties that Hansen has promoted.
Now, we agreed with my contact at IAS that Hansen probably doesn't know who Maldacena even is. This is a crazy world given the fact that Hansen, a random average activist employed in an inferior discipline of physical sciences, is now known to Maldacena.
Hansen answers that we are "already doing geoengineering" by emitting CO2. Well, it is not quite a Maldacena-level-sophisticated geoengineering, I guess. ;-) Carbon sequesteration is the only acceptable geoengineering for Hansen. He admits that aerosols etc. could cool the planet but it would not solve the ocean acidification problem or the main problem he truly cares about, namely how to cripple the world economy.
Unless the price is high, we will consume the fossil fuels, Hansen correctly says. It's as clear as the law of gravity; however, Hansen didn't manage to describe the situation of gravity from the boundary CFT, gauge-theoretical perspective. ;-)
Instead of talking about the topic of the question - geoengineering - Hansen returns to his mentally ill delusions about collapsing ice sheets and other tragedies that have nothing to do with the question. He is really incapable to focus on science.
He eventually returns to the question and says that "covering one pollutant by another is not a sensible thing to do". That's it. However, he immediately stops thinking about any technicalities and returns to his clichés that energy has to be expensive so that people don't "waste" it.
Population growth
The second question, by a female listener, was about the population growth. How does it fit into your picture? Hansen is "optimistic" because the population growth is slowed down. Even the population in China, which allows 2 children to the people born in the 1-child policy era, will continue to decline. Only the poor countries keeps on growing but it's "solvable". Many children become "unpopular" among women once they are educated, he adds when a new question is already being asked.
The duties that are collected on the borders should be sent to the poor countries - previously, he said that they should be given to the U.S. citizens to adapt to a life without a cheap energy. But the money shouldn't flow to arbitrary poor countries. They should be paid to poor countries' projects to decelerate or decimate their own populations to create a "sustainable Earth". Holy cow, this guy is a complete loon.
Another question
I haven't understood what this man really meant. He referred to the first slide about the expert-public gap. However, what's the question? The man asked something about how affirmative action may address the expert-public knowledge gap? Holy crap, how is it supposed to work? Affirmative action may indeed reduce the gap because more incompetent people may "officially" become experts. Well, it has already happened in climate science.
Hansen complains that the Big Oil has done a terrific job in convincing the people that they don't want the economies to collapse and that the scientists are making stuff up to get more research grants. Indeed, it's probably not too difficult to do a good job in explaining these self-evident facts.
James Hansen says that the situation is much better in China because the government can simply s*it on the citizens and manipulate with their opinions but it's much worse in the U.S. with the f*cking democracy. See also Hansen's op-ed praising the Chinese communists and his comparison of China with the barbarians - the worst ones are not even communists, could you believe?
But he thinks that they have to use the democratic process, too. That's why he bribed and forced his granddaughter to write a letter to the U.S. president saying that Obama is obliged to obey the granddad's orders - aside from the Chinese democracy, it is the closest thing to "democracy" that Hansen may imagine. ;-)
New Real Climate blog
Another female participant asks why there can't be a fabulous blog that answers all the questions - something like "Factcheck.org", she says. Well, the answer is that such a blog already exists. Dozens of them. The more details are being analyzed on the Internet, or anywhere outside the intellectually rotten corners of the AGW religious cult, for that matter, the more clear it becomes that the likes of Hansen are fanatical, deluded, and dishonest crooks.
So dear lady, as Hansen knows very well, the right solution that improves the propagation of this ideology is not to create new websites but, following the example of non-democratic countries, to prevent the citizens from learning the truth and from talking or thinking about the issues rationally. Censorship, blackmailing, and harassment are indeed the only tools to make your lies - or any lies - systematically spread. Yes, that's how Michael Mann and others have been approaching the problem at least for a decade.
The lady even proposes that Rush Holt, a Democratic Congressman who attended the IAS lecture, should become responsible for creating the "website of the only allowed truth".
Hansen says that the only thing that should matter is a political declaration of the holiest scientific institution, the National Academy of Sciences, which would always approve Hansen's own delusions, he thinks. But Obama didn't ask the Academy to do so. Clearly, Hansen is totally avoiding the question - about a new website - once again. Instead, out of context, he attacks dirty jobs of the miners.
One more attack against Norway and tar sands is added - away from any context of the question. A Norwegian politician wrote Hansen that it's not government's job to interfere with the commercial sector's decisions. That drove Hansen up the wall: what the government is good for if it can't screw private subjects at will? Every good government of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong was doing such things all the time. Stalin has even executed 40 million inconvenient people - and the Norwegian government is unable to even destroy one f*cking tar sand company? Hansen is deeply disappointed.
Money balance
A man asks why (Hansen thinks that) there is more money on the "dirty side". Shouldn't the insurance companies etc. be stimulated to fight against climate change?
The reality is, of course, that there are vastly more money on the alarmist side than the skeptic side of the debate. That was also the reason why California recently insanely preserved its dinosaur law to regulate the carbon: the champions of the regulation have outspent its foes by a large factor. In the scholarly and think-tank spheres, the funding for the alarmists outweighs the funding for the realists by three orders of magnitude.
Hansen says that there is money on both sides and the stalemate is enough for the skeptics to win. I actually agree with him and thank God it is so. When he says that the media is more "fair and balanced", the far left part of the audience explodes in laughter.
Drought
A man is confused why people think that a warmer world would produce more drought. That seems to contradict some historical records - as well as common sense that a warmer world leads to more evaporation and more moisture.
Hansen argues that a warmer world enhances both extremes but he presents no real evidence for this bold statement - except for some anecdotal comment about the recent increase of 100-year floods. Clearly, such floods were not comprehensively monitored more than 100 years ago so one can't really calculate the trend.
To summarize, there could be some humanity types at the IAS who would find this talk OK but I think that the IAS scientists had to see that Hansen is not really one of them. He is not a scientist. He is a fanatically obsessed activist who has lost his ability to look at the world objectively decades ago.
It's hilariously entertaining and most of the people who fight against global warming in various ways - by stones in their pocket indulgences, and walking along one-choice spiral "labyrinths", among others - are just unbelievable. I can't believe that there are so many people who are so stupid and so easily robbed of their money.
The participants of the "quantum debates" are encouraged to watch this inspiring, insightful, no-nonsense lecture given by Sidney Coleman at the New England sectional meeting of the American Physical Society (Apr. 9, 1994):
Sixteen years ago, the APS wasn't a shameful mouthpiece of the environmental extremists yet. It helped to nourish and promote actual physics.
A few years ago, when I was at Harvard, Brian Greene (together with a few friends at Columbia) asked me to arrange some copyrights so that he could have used this lecture, too.
I was kind of sure that he wouldn't use it - because in the lecture, Sidney Coleman crisply and beautifully clarified some of the very same points that I was trying to explain to Brian Greene just a few weeks earlier (before he asked me to get the permission).
While I thought and still think that The Fabric of the Cosmos is an excellent book, the "anything goes" attitude to pretty much all bizarre "interpretations" of quantum mechanics is perhaps too much out of control. And yes, the stuff in the FOC written about the arrow of time is just a full-fledged crackpottery.
In 1994, Sidney had also made similar comments about those who misunderstood why quantum mechanics just works - and it works according to its own rules.
In particular, Sidney explains that our world is a quantum world and any phenomena that look classical are approximate or derived. So it's really nonsensical to ask for an "interpretation of quantum mechanics". Instead, one should really discuss the "interpretation of classical physics" and its derivative appearance from the quantum framework.
Coleman showed that the opinions that there was a "nonlocality" in EPR-like phenomena were misconceptions, too. There is not even an interaction Hamiltonian between the two subsystems when they get separated, so of course that there is no nonlocality, either. Around 34:00-35:00, his demonstration of the quantum mechanical nature of the world based on the GHZM state culminates. Coleman thinks that this setup is more pedagogical than Bell's inequalities.
Coleman only needs to assume that causality holds: the future cannot influence the results in the past. In another reference frame, the chronology of 2 spatially separated events is reverted. Causality requires that the 2 events can't influence each other at all. That's a proof of locality and locality, together with the experimentally tested facts, implies that the probabilistic outcomes can't result from hidden variables. Prof Diehard who refuses to accept quantum mechanics is shown to be wrong.
Coleman stresses around 33:00 that in a striking contradiction to the pronouncements in much of the popular and even not so popular (i.e. somewhat technical) literature, the dichotomy here is "quantum mechanics or nonlocality", not both!
Around 46:00, Coleman rejects some basic introductory comments about quantum mechanics that he also reviewed at the beginning of the lecture, e.g. that there is a "collapse" of the wave function. In fact, there's no collapse, as he says between 46:00 and 47:00.
In fact, Sidney also showed that many of the would-be "mysteries" are not mysterious at all. For example, why don't we ever perceive the linear superpositions of dead and alive cats? That's a question that Wojciech Zurek asked in this way. Coleman has simply made the calculation of Sidney Coleman's feelings after he observes a cat. Needless to say, the "dead cat" state leads to "Sidney perceiving a dead cat" while the "alive cat" leads to "Sidney perceiving an alive cat".
(Coleman also reviewed an equivalent argument why the lines in the bubble chamber are straight - an argument that was known to Nevill Francis Mott, not Motl, many decades ago. To understand what's going on, it's important to appreciate that the bubble chamber - much like Coleman - is a quantum object.)
A general superposition produces the corresponding superposition in the final state. But the probability that Sidney Coleman perceives a "mixed" cat is clearly zero - a conclusion he reaches around 55:00 or so. It's enough to use the standard framework of quantum mechanics and treat the observer - Sidney Coleman - as just another quantum system. It's one of the key points that all objects - including observers - are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics.
Equally directly, Sidney could also prove that the repeated experiments produced random outcomes. There are no autocorrelations or periodicities, as he proves around 1:00:00. Again, this proposition boils down to a trivial calculation. And the measures of all the correlations you can think of go to zero as you send the number of repetitions N to infinity.
You can show that the probability of randomness of an infinite sequence is 100%: whenever the probability of something is 100%, you can prove it by quantum mechanics even without assuming anything probabilistic going on! And the randomness of the outcomes of infinitely many repetitions of the same experiment is "paradoxically" such a statement that is 100% certain! ;-)
Of course, Sidney was well aware of the fact - and made this fact explicit - that the people who have problems with these concepts have those problems simply because they believe that underneath quantum mechanics, there is still some classical physics operating. They try to think of quantum mechanics as classical physics. It's simply wrong. There's no justification to talk about deep questions here. Who doesn't get these points is failing in freshman quantum mechanics, Coleman confirmed.
The main reason why people fail in these matters is that they're not able to overcome certain dogmas that have been imprinted into people's intuition by millions of years of everyday "classical life" and by centuries of worshiping of the classical physics.
At the very end, Sidney paraphrases a wise comment by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. People used to believe geocentrism. Wittgenstein asked why people usually considered such a history "natural". His friend told him that it was because it "looks like" the Sun is revolving around the Earth. Wittgenstein replied with this key point:
Well, what would it look like if it had looked as if the Earth were rotating? :-)
Obviously, it would look exactly like the world around us. ;-) It's natural for things to move - and people could have known for quite some time that "free motion" is indistiguishable from the rest (the old principle of relativity, perhaps combined with the equivalence of inertial and gravitational masses).
Some people try to justify the scientifically invalid approach of the geocentrists but they are just wrong. The conclusion that "it seems that geocentrism had to be valid" was always completely irrational. It couldn't have ever been justified by the scientific evidence. Geocentrism was always a naive emotional dogma that was spreading by the "consensus" of the blinded believers, not by rational arguments.
In the very same way, some people keep on saying that it "looks like" there must be a classical mechanism beneath the quantum phenomena - a real process corresponding to the reduction of the wave packet. But Coleman encouraged everyone to seriously consider the following question:
Well, what would it look like if it looked like that the world is really following the causal laws of quantum physics without any reductions of the wave packets - and not any laws of classical physics - at the fundamental level?
Needless to say, it would look exactly as our ordinary everyday life. Welcome home. :-) And thank you for your patience.
The three spin-1/2 particles are prepared in the GHZ state, as later clarified by Mermin,
(up*up*up - down*down*down) / sqrt(2)
Each of three Dr Diehard's students measures one of the particles. The student randomly presses X (A) or Y (B) on the black box - and he measures sigma_x or sigma_y, respectively. The experiment is repeated millions of times.
If one of them measures sigma_x and two of them measure sigma_y, which is in 3/8 of the cases, the product of the three eigenvalues (each of which is +1 or -1) will be +1 as can be shown by a simple quantum calculation. sigma_x1 sigma_y2 sigma_y3 acting on the GHZ state gives the state back (times +1). The GHZ state is an eigenstate with eigenvalue +1.
However, if all of them measure sigma_x, which is in 1/8 of the repetitions of the experiment, the product of the three eigenvalues will be minus one (i.e. an odd number of the eigenvalues will be -1) - according to quantum mechanics and experiments. That will be the case in all the repetitions of the experiment because the GHZ state is also an eigenstate of sigma_x1 sigma_x2 sigma_x3 with the eigenvalue -1.
This very fact directly contradicts the basic proto-classical reasoning underpinning classical physics because this reasoning implies that the product of the three eigenvalues has to be +1 in all these cases, too. Quantum mechanics always gives exactly the opposite answer - something that is possible because the operators sigma_x and sigma_y don't commute. In fact, they anticommute - something that is entirely impossible for observables in classical physics.
Why would the proto-classical reasoning predict that the product of sigma_x1 sigma_x2 sigma_x3 has to be +1? Well, it's simple. In the classical reasoning, sigma_xi and sigma_yi are classical observables (that can also depend on hidden variables lambda), and the correlation in the 3/8 of the experiments - which produced the product +1 - imply
That's what can be statistically deduced from millions of measurements which show the correlations in the XYY, YXY, YYX measurements. The three sigma quantities may have a random aspect but the observed correlations shows that the three equations above have to be satisfied with accuracy that can be experimentally shown to be as exact as you want.
However, one can simply take the product of the three equations above to deduce that
sigma_x1 sigma_x2 sigma_x3 = +1
One just assumed that sigma_xi and sigma_yi objectively existed before the measurement. While it may sound incredible, the experimentally verified quantum product is exactly the opposite,
sigma_x1 sigma_x2 sigma_x3 = -1
In 100% of cases when three spins relatively to the x-axis are measured, quantum mechanics produces a 100% disagreement with the (proto-)classical physics. Experiments resolutely show that the (proto-)classical reasoning is wrong; it's falsified.
Why the classical physics has really failed is the refusal of the observables to commute in the actual, quantum world. In fact, sigma_x and sigma_y anticommute. This fact is not possible to reproduce with any classical mechanism, regardless of the complexity of the hidden variables you include.
According to (proto-)classical physics, the answers to the measurements of sigma_x or sigma_y had to exist before the measurement. Whatever hidden variables you include, this really includes the assumption that these quantities commute with each other. But they don't. As quantum mechanics shows, they often anticommute, in fact.
The addition of hidden variables has really nothing to do with the basic problem of classical physics: the basic problem is the vanishing of the commutators that any kind of classical physics always incorrectly predicts. The Bohm-like theories are meant to convince the classical diehards that one can "explain" the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics in terms of a childish mechanism.
However, the probabilistic character isn't the only new thing in quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle - the nonzero commutators - is another fundamentally new development and the hidden variables simply don't solve it. So for example, you can't design any sensible Bohmian theory that would describe the GHZM experiment with three spins. And spins are just a beginning: the whole quantum physics contains similar new non-commuting observables pretty much everywhere.
Quantum mechanics in its proper form is the only framework that can work as a description of similar microscopic (and not only microscopic) experiments.
Just to be sure, Nima fits into the context of this blog. In the first lecture, he announces that his whole series will require the viewers to become radical conservatives much like Nima himself. ;-) Nima borrowed the term from John Wheeler.
Originally posted on 10/01/10, 10:10 am. But I think it should be reposted on 10/10/10, 10:10:10 because the video below became the ultimate symbol of this moment.
Update: the video was labeled "private" on Friday, a minute before 3 p.m., Prague Summer Time, when it had 10,000-20,000 views, 45 positive and 250 negative votes. I managed to download a copy 20 seconds before it disappeared - and then Boom. ;-)
Please contact me if you need a copy. Meanwhile, another YouTube copy uploaded by a skeptic has been embedded below (there exist about 15 skeptics' copies and they want you to perversely vote "thumbs up" to make the video more visible - it's up to you).
You used to believe that you had the right not to believe that it was beneficial to reduce the CO2 emissions. Times are changing.
The 10:10 movement is going to abruptly reduce the CO2 emissions by 10 percent in nine days, on 10/10/10 at 10:10:10 am. How will they do it?
Warning: the following video is brutal: if you don't like gore (and Gore), the movie is not for you
James Lee killed himself too early: he would have surely been delighted by this film. The film was produced by Richard Curtis, a top film director (e.g. many episodes of Mr Bean). He was a hired gun but the people who hired him were for real.
Yes, they will simply kill all people who are openly skeptical: the "No Pressure" video proposes a "final solution" of the problem with the AGW skeptics. No pressure. Just a little bit of pressure that is needed to press a red button and all skeptics in the world will explode in bloodbath. It was their choice - and the alarmist killers will continue smiling. It's excellent, isn't it?
Well, the explosion was the kids' choice in a virtual world. Meanwhile, in the real world, the kids actually have the right to choose without facing such consequences. This basic human right is guaranteed by the constitutions of all civilized countries in the world - and even many uncivilized countries in the world. The people are still allowed to realize - and say - that James Hansen is a nutcase and Al Gore is a greedy liar.
The spiritual fathers of the video at the 10-10 campaign want you to praise them and to send your compliments to hello@1010uk.org. O2 and Sony are among major private sponsors of 10:10. You may thank to howard.stringer@jp.sony.com and pressoffice@o2.com. The film has also been paid from the U.K. taxpayer money.
However, it was the choice of the 10:10 movement to openly promote genocide. They are not just promoting it: much like in the case of The Fate of the World PC game, they are planning it. They are genuinely planning ways how to reduce the global CO2 emissions by 10% a year. And indeed, genocide similar to what they present in the video (or in the game) is the only plausible way how something of the sort may be achieved.
However, if 10:10 has similar ideas what to do with the people from the "other side", they may rename themselves from 10:10 to 9:11; the sum wouldn't change, after all. Al Qaeda U.K. may sound nicer than 9:11.
The CIA, FBI, and others should go after the neck of the inhuman activists behind the 10:10 movement and those who harbor them. These people are a genuine threat not only for your well-being and prosperity but for your freedom and health (or life), too. It is amazing that people such as Gillian Anderson (of X-Files) collaborated to produce this atrocious video. Did someone threaten her with a red button (by the way, would Scully believe that such a thing could work? She must be a true believer: before Y2K, she predicted food shortages because with a wrong date on your PC, people can't load food onto trucks: video), or is she really such a disgraceful bloody N-word b-word?
Unless she was blackmailed, I do think she may want to go to jail.
By the way, the 10:10 campaign probably won't cremate the remains of the 7 murdered individuals because cremation is bad for the climate.
I am not afraid of Pilsen or the Czech Republic: if a climate fearmonger dared to enter our city or our country and he or she would pose a genuine threat for our freedom to breathe or do other activities that produce the gas we call life, he or she would get a proper thrashing - in a more friendly way than on the video, of course.
But I am afraid that the lives of others - not necessarily the white kids on the video above (Philip and Tracy, RIP), but perhaps the lives of black kids in Africa and elsewhere - are genuinely threatened by the now-militant AGW movement that has inherited pretty much all the methods from Nazism, communism, and others. As they have demonstrated, they are surely not repelled by the idea that they will have to kill many people to achieve their insane dreams.
In The Guardian, film director Franny Armstrong (who has already contributed to an aptly named movie called Age of Stupid) claims that their conscience is fine because they have only killed 5 people while 300,000 people are killed by climate change every year. Well, they have actually killed 7 people in the video (murderers of their caliber probably can no longer even count the victims) - and global climate change kills 0 people a year. But is a murder of 5 or 7 people insufficient?
I hope that this mini-movie will make many people realize that climate alarmism is a genuine threat for our freedom, democracy, prosperity, and even security, much like islamic terrorism, and we may have to do something about it. It was actually difficult for me to believe that the movie was created by the actual alarmists. Wasn't it just a movie paid for by some skeptics to exaggerate how a typical alarmist thinks and to blow a final lethal blow to the AGW movement?
Is there any exaggeration in the movie at all? Maybe, the climate alarmists really want to scare the ordinary people to death - make them think that they will be killed if they openly display the skepticism. What will you do, the ordinary people? Are you scared? Well, believe me, children would surely be scared.
An initial caption on the YouTube video argued that there was a "shrinking time frame" for a climate action. Oh, really? (If there were a climate threat of any kind, it would take centuries for it to become substantial.) So maybe if there is such a "shrinking time frame", you may really want to start to kill the people around, right? Franny Armstrong told the Guardian that the detonation could be exaggerated but they could amputate the skeptics' arms and legs. She thinks it's a great and funny idea that should spread in the society.
The explosions of the people may have been computer tricks. But to be sure, the 10:10 campaign has equally passionately destroyed a big airplane, and this act was for real. The airplane was cut into pieces, melted, and transformed into lots of tags with the Nazi-like logo of the eco-terrorist organization.
A self-described "friend" of the inhuman creatures behind the 10:10 movement, who is also harbored by The Guardian, a left-wing U.K. daily, asked his "friends" about the effects and motivations for this shocking piece of work. My understanding is that these unhinged people really want to detonate - or at least scare - millions of humans because they believe that climate action "has" to be done in 4 years (click for a 3-minute video explanation of the deadline). Wow.
The fact that environmentalism originally emerged from Nazism rather than communism has been made clear many times but few of us expected that the true "roots" of environmentalism would ever be made so self-evident, with so many famous people participating.
When you watch the video via YouTube and you click the thumbs-down button, there is another button, "report this video". This video deserves to be reported in all categories - violent content, torturing kids, dangerous work with explosives, and many others. Please, don't invent stories that it's good idea to make these people ever more radical and at large. For the safety of our society, it may be important to have official "stamps" - such as a ban of this video - showing that climate alarmists are not just ludicrous morons but bloody criminals.
(The previous paragraph was written before the video was withdrawn and it is therefore obsolete now.)
I think that many people keep on underestimating how serious those folks are about all these matters. The Guardian knew about the video - and praised it - yesterday. Jamie Glover, a boy who was the first male to explode in the video, was told that he had to be sacrificed to save the world. What did he say afterwards?
Jamie Glover, the child-actor who plays the part of Philip and gets blown up, has similarly few qualms: "I was very happy to get blown up to save the world." The public reaction to the film will be fascinating – please add yours below.
You see that there's no qualitative difference in their methods of brainwashing of the children between the greens and the conventional Islamic jidhadists. They're ready to sacrifice their life for the "highest value". Compare Jamie's answer with the Arabic hit song, "When We Die As Martyrs".
Well, hours after the video had to be removed, I hope that the reactions to the film have been genuinely fascinating for the ecofascists - and they will continue to be fascinating up to the very last 10 minutes and 10 seconds of global warming ecofascism. In this sense, I favor the precautionary principle. Nothing else than a complete liquidation of the climate change ecofascism can safely protect the children's lives at school.
Now, let me just press a little red button here.
Well, I hope you didn't think that I was just like them. ;-)
The past and the future play a fundamentally asymmetric role in logic. After more than 100 years, some people are still not getting it.
A backward guy is living his ordinary everyantiday backward life. Things get dramatic when he starts to antidrink and antieat. Some people still don't believe me but the events above don't naturally occur in the real world.
They imagine that to exchange the past and the future is as easy as to rotate a picture by 180°. But it's not.
This 101010th part of the neverending story will try to shrink the argument as much as possible.
Any evolution whose probability we want to calculate may be written as
Forward = A evolves into B
where "A" means that the physical system is found in one of the microstates (precisely determined positions and/or velocities of elementary particles, or whatever else can be maximally determined) A_1 or A_2 or A_3 ... or A_{N_a} where N_a is the number of microstates that we summarize as A.
Similarly, "B" means that the physical system is in one of the microstates B_1 or B_2 or B_3 ... or B_{N_b} where N_b is the number of microstates that we summarize as B.
The probability of evolution is calculated as
P(Forward) = 1/N_a Sum [i=1...N_a, j=1...N_b] P(A_i evolves to B_j)
Note that to get the total probability, we're simply summing over possible final states B_j because the probability that "B_3 or B_5" appears as the final state is simply the sum of the partial probabilities for B_3 and B_5.
However, we're averaging over the initial states A_i. We know that one of the microstates A_i was realized in the initial state but we don't know which one. The sum of these "prior" probabilities of A_1, A_2, etc. has to equal one. Therefore, each of them has to be given the prior probability 1/N_a only. (We assume all the microstates to be equally likely, an assumption that can be relaxed if you need it.) The probability of the evolution from A_i is proportional to the prior probabilities of A_i, so we had to divide by N_a because the priors contain 1/N_a.
Now, assume that the physical system is T-reversal symmetric. And we also want to calculate the probability of the reverse process,
Backward = B evolves into A.
More generally, we should consider states A* and B* whose "velocities" are reverted relatively to A, B which is appropriate when the sign of time is inverted.
But for the sake of simplicity, let's assume that the velocities of both signs are equally represented in the ensemble A as well as B, so that the ensembles satisfy A=A*, B=B*. It wouldn't be hard to generalize the calculation for general states A, B.
What is the probability of the backward process? Well, it's given by the same formula as the forward process but A is exchanged with B:
P(Backward) = 1/N_b Sum [i=1...N_a, j=1...N_b] P(B_j evolves to A_i)
Note that the coefficient in front of the sum is 1/N_b in this case rather than 1/N_a. So are the probabilities of forward and backward evolutions equal? Even if the microscopic laws are T-reversal-symmetric i.e. P(B_j evolves to A_i) is the same as P(A_i evolves to B_j), it's still true that
P(Backward) / P(Forward) = N_a/N_b.
Note that they are not equal if the numbers N_a, N_b differ. When we use the language of thermodynamics and the ensembles A, B are large, the numbers N_a, N_b are given by the entropies of the states A, B called S_a, S_b:
N_a = exp(S_a / k), N_b = exp(S_b / k)
where k is Boltzmann's constant which means that
P(Backward) / P(Forward) = exp[(S_a-S_b) / k].
If the entropy of B, S_b, is greater by 10^{26}*k than the entropy of A, which is typically the case in a macroscopic process (which adds a bit of entropy to each atom, and recall how large Avogadro's number is), then the backward probability is smaller than the forward probability by a factor of exp(10^{26}): for all practical (and most impractical) purposes, it is zero.
Note that I don't mean just 10^{26}: I mean exp(10^{26}) which is approximately the same thing as 10^{10^{26}}. This number quantifies the error that the people who don't understand the difference between the past and future are making in every single calculation of probability. A huge error, indeed.
This is no philosophy and there is no controversy here; it is an unquestionable conclusion of basic mathematical logic. A large entropy only increases the probability of a process if it is the final state that has a large entropy; because of the 1/N_a factor, a large entropy of the initial state is not favored by Nature in any way.
At any rate, there is a fundamental asymmetry between the initial states and the final states in mathematical logic that governs all calculations of probabilities that we ever perform in science, and outside science. Some naive "visualizations" of the Universe may look past-future symmetric but the full-fledged reality including all the required structure, including mathematical logic, is surely not past-future symmetric.
This asymmetry has nothing whatsoever to do with any assumptions about cosmology. It is a property of each cubic Planck length of space at each individual Planck time. The calculations above are valid anywhere and everywhere, whether or not there were many Big Bangs, one Big Bang, or no Big Bang.
I am completely convinced that every college freshman or sophomore who has gotten a grade better than F from mechanics, statistical physics, and quantum mechanics should feel absolutely certain about the rudimentary calculations above because the logical considerations needed to derive the conclusions above are needed in every portion of science.
