LHC: getting ready for the 7 TeV fireworks

Strong Interaction by the LHC. The player may be visible on the separate page only.

Today and yesterday, the media got full of "new" reports about the LHC shutdown. In fact, most of the LHC news in recent days talk about this shutdown.



That's completely silly and it further demonstrates the incompetency of the science journalists in most MSM outlets because the "news" is actually the same information that was known in late January 2010.

Well, it's probably not just about their incompetency: it's a result of their selective search for "bad news" even if they're neither "news" nor "bad" or too "true". ;-)

Robbert Dijkgraaf will review the IPCC

Robbert Dijkgraaf is a Dutch string theorist and mathematical physicist. He has discovered many things.

The one most cited of them remains a more complete version of screwing string theory pioneered by your humble correspondent. Together with the Verlinde brothers, they later found it independently and gave it a new funny name, matrix string theory.

(I have actually also considered that name but at the end, I decided it was too arrogant. Could one invention of myself be given a name that only differs by one important word, "matrix", from the name of the whole discipline, "string theory"?)



Robbert's 2009 general popular TEDxAmsterdam talk about the theories of the Universe. If you don't see any video above, go to the individual page of this post.

But his name is also linked to the WDVV formula, Dijkgraaf-Witten invariants, insights in topological string theory, matrix models, and other things. And by the way, he is also a very good artist as we could have seen from various string conference posters he drew.

Dijkgraaf and your humble correspondent have written a small paper together - about the higher-order DVV-style interactions in matrix string theory. And yes, I took the Wikipedia picture of him at Harvard.

Scientific politics

But of course, the topic of this posting is different. Robbert Dijkgraaf is the current president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and a co-chair of the InterAcademy Council, an international umbrella group that includes similar academies.

Time: Stephen Colbert smarter than Sean Carroll

First, an unrelated four-minute video about Paul Dirac in Florida (thanks to Laurent Sacco!):



Now, the main topic:

If you haven't heard, Sean Carroll appeared on the Colbert Report, a very entertaining left-wing emulation of the O'Reilly Factor that runs on Comedy Central TV. He promoted his dumb book, "From Eternity To Here".

Full video segment (after adds, Carroll appears around 16:25)

Colbert began with a good question: why do we need a theory of time? Carroll answered that it's because we can't answer some questions about time. Colbert can answer any questions so he wanted examples. Carroll asked Colbert why the past is different from the future.

Because we're not there anymore.

Yes: even Carroll had to admit that Colbert did know the difference. :-) So he asked almost the same question once again: but what is the difference between these two things?

Václav Klaus: talk at Club for Growth

Last week, Václav Klaus was on his business trip to Florida. He gave a talk in front of the Club for Growth, a pro-market think tank. Here is the transcript:

Global Warming Alarmism is a Grave Threat to our Liberty

If you've heard many AGW talks by Klaus, you may not be terribly surprised. There are some interesting calculations of the costs and benefits, among other things.

But the Czech president does briefly react to the ClimateGate and other "gates". He says that they haven't influenced his views because everyone who was interested in these matters has known what was going on for many years. Well, I happen to agree.

A U.S. president describes climate change: a puzzle

Here is a puzzle for you.

First, in order to produce some keywords, let me recall that I have been to dozens of academic and physics facilities in the U.S. Many of them were named after someone, including the Busch Campus, the Varian Hall, the Jefferson Lab, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Pupin Hall, the Elliot House, and Roosevelt Street (which is here in Pilsen but you will forgive me).

That's enough to confuse you.

Now, I am talking about a U.S. president who wrote a letter on December 11th, '09, nine months after he left the presidency. In his message to Nathaniel Chapman, a physician and professor in Philadelphia, he said:

Steven Gubser: The Little Book of String Theory

Steve Gubser has released a new book on string theory. Unlike Joe Polchinski's book, which was referred to as Joe's Big Book of String, Gubser's book is the Little Book on String Theory. ;-)

At the beginning, there are three paragraphs that start with "String theory is a mystery."

You may feel that the author had to be either poet or a computer program stuck in an infinite loop. But without using any mathematical equations, the author begins with the notion of energy and quickly gets to quantum mechanics, gravity and black holes, string theory, branes, string duality, supersymmetry at the LHC, and heavy ions and the fifth dimension.

Yes, I just gave you the table of contents. ;-) Introduction, epilogue, and index are parts of the package, too.

Ehrlich, Schneider et al.: preparing a pogrom against skeptics

Update: full text

If you want to see the full exchange of the NAS members who try to collect money for their anti-skeptic "outlandishly aggressively partisan" propagandistic campaign - from themselves and the corporations (5:1) - see this 17-page

collective e-mail exchange (PDF)
review by Myron Ebell (HTML)
review by NY Times / Greenwire / E&E (HTML)

It's kind of amazing that they don't see what's important here. All of their focus is on the tricks how to brainwash the people and force them to believe the "best science" that this group can offer. But their "best science" is no longer good enough.

All the brainwashing tricks and types of frauds, cherr-picking, censorship, lies, libels, and distortions have already been used by them in the past: but they won't work again because most of the public has learned something during the last 3 months and has already acquired a kind of "immunity" against these types of deception that they won't "unlearn" anytime soon.

Selected, unfiltered, and one-sided ads won't help them in any way because it will be clear that these ads fail to be impartial. And the detailed content won't impress anyone, either. That's because they don't have any real counter-arguments against the observations revealed in the last 3 months (and before that) - simply because no such counter-arguments exist. They're not interested in the content - how the climate actually works. They're only interested in the methods how to promote a particular "type" of reasoning and particular results. It has worked for years. But it won't work again.

They can't fix this "subtle" problem by collecting $15,000 after an e-mail conversation. The problem is much deeper than something that can be bought for $15,000. The problem is that their lives are built upon lies and this fact has been getting increasingly self-evident to everyone.

Tomorrow, CERN celebrates socialist women's day

The first International Women's Day was observed in the U.S. on February 28th, 1909, by a declaration of the Socialist Party of America. They wanted to remember mostly female victims of a factory fire. The following year, in 1910, the celebrations went international when they were adopted by the Second Socialist International in Copenhagen.

For obvious reasons, this holiday was quickly fading away since the late 1920s.

But it was revived by feminism in the 1960s. Going back in time, celebrations of the International Women's Day were the first rallies that ignited the October Revolution in 1917 in Russia and helped to decimate democracy in the world's largest territory for more than 70 years. Following the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Feminist Alexandra Kollontai persuaded Lenin to make it the official holiday in the USSR. So they did it but it was a working day for some time. It became a non-working day in the USSR in 1965.

In Czechoslovakia, the day would always be connected with parties of fat old obnoxious communists, both male and female ones. The latter would always include Ms Marie Kabrhelová, a de facto forced role model for the Czechoslovak women, and a top hardcore communist actress, Ms Jiřina Švorcová.

After the Velvet Revolution, the holiday would largely disappear. However, these days, it's the most celebrated women's day again, ahead of Mother's Day and the St Valentine. However, all the links to socialism and work have been forgotten. People don't celebrate it for the old reasons.

Joseph von Fraunhofer: a birthday

Joseph von Fraunhofer was born on March 6th, 1787, in Straubing, Bavaria.

His childhood was pretty difficult. When he reached the M-theoretical age of 11, he became an orphan. He had to work as an assistant to a harsh glassmaker. That was the better part of the story. However, in 1801, when he was 24, the workshop collapsed and Joseph was buried in the rubble.

How can this fairy-tale continue?

Yes, fortunately, an elected prince (who would later become Maximilian I Joseph) was riding his horse nearby the workshop. He noticed the rubble, instructed his staff to save Joseph the assistant, and forced his employer to buy books to him and to allow him to study.

Muslim states back strike on truther Mahmoud

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has explained to his colleagues that the 9/11 attacks were a "complicated intelligence scenario and act" and a "big fabrication as a pretext for the campaign against terrorism and a prelude for staging an invasion against Afghanistan."

He also thinks that capitalism was invented by Israel and it's approaching its end. ;-)



Meanwhile, Israeli deputy minister Ayoub Kara claimed that he was secretly contacted by leaders of Muslim states that don't have diplomatic relationships with Israel, including "extremist states". They supported a possible future Israeli attack on Iran, it's been stated.

Israel has no relations with 37 countries of the world, a list that includes Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan; Brunei; Malaysia, Indonesia; Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya; North Korea, Taiwan; Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia; and a few more African countries. Note the high concentration of rogue states in the list.

Sons won't be expelled from Canadian anthem

What's wrong with this anthem?



Yes, it says "True patriot love in all thy sons command," without any reference to daughters.

So as Gordon has pointed out, the "Conservative" party of Canada proposed to make the text more inclusive and replace the verse by a gender-neutral "True patriot love thou dost in us" ("thou dost" is an archaic version of "you do").

Fortunately, Stephen Harper managed to hear the voice of the conservative base that the idea was truly idiotic, so he forgot about it. ;-)

Methane and warming

The media are also full of a new methane scare. An article in Science is said to claim that the Siberian Arctic bubbles release much more methane to the atmosphere than expected (by someone who had wrong expectations). For example, the Daily Mail says:

Methane escaping from Arctic faster than expected and could stoke global warming, warn scientists

But could it really "stoke" global warming? If you just read the very same article, you learn that the answer is almost certainly No. It's useful to review the basic numbers.

Met Office claims to have found the AGW fingerprint

The Guardian just published a report about a text published by the Met Office:

Met Office analysis reveals 'clear fingerprints' of man-made climate change

In fact, there are two articles in the Guardian that "know" in advance that the Met Office will "strengthen" the case for human-induced climate change: the witches and prophets told them. The second article has a title that unmasks what is the real motivation behind the Met Office report:

How public trust in climate scientists can be restored

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, exactly 100 days after the AGW alarmism largely collapsed, the Met Office just found the fingerprints of Man imprinted everywhere in the climate. Because there hadn't been any fingerprints before the paper, we must ask: How did they realize this ambitious goal? ;-)

We learn that they didn't even need a single research paper to do so. One review was enough! :-)

Well, it's somewhat harder to find what the "holy grail" or "fingerprint" actually is. The Guardian article seems to be nothing else than another dose of the nonsense saying that everything about the climate is getting worse - and it must therefore be due to Man who is the only source of sins in the world. Amen. You can't even find the actual paper - which is claimed to be a review paper summarizing 100 other papers. Even when you look at the Met Office website, there only seems to be a press release with a couple of big mouths who claim to suddenly know everything. Doesn't sound too good.

Update: After lots of time, I was able to find out that the paper actually does exist:

Detection and attribution of climate change: a regional perspective (free abstract, paid full text)

Seven theories of everything

Nude Socialist continues in its crusade against physics and rational thinking in general. In their article,

Knowing the mind of God: Seven theories of everything,

a Michael Marshall lists string theory and six random crackpot ideas - most of which are much crazier and less justified (and less well-known) than loop quantum gravity. The list is the following:

1. string theory 
2. loop quantum gravity
3. causal dynamical triangulation
4. quantum Einstein gravity
5. quantum graphity
6. internal relativity
7. E8.

All the comments reveal that the author doesn't have the slightest clue about theoretical physics. The first item is a meaningful research program that works whenever it's asked to solve something and that is described in tens of thousands of high-quality papers.

The remaining ones, with loop quantum gravity being the intermediate case, are fringe theories with 10-30 citations (from other crackpots) in average. When combined (and when LQG is omitted, just to be sure), they are more than 1,000 times smaller contribution to science - and especially the task to find the theory of all elementary forces and particles - than string theory.

I can't believe that Mr Marshall isn't capable to see this point and that it's simply not true that there are "six competitors" of string theory in any sensible or useful sense.

RHIC creates the biggest antinucleus

As reported by

Interactions.ORG, Article Ant, and Phys Org,

the STAR detector at Brookhaven's RHIC has detected the largest antinucleus that's been seen as of today.



It's also the first antinucleus they produced that contains a strange antiquark. Because of its presence, we talk about "hypernuclei". The precise composition of the antinucleus was

antiproton (u*u*d*), antineutron (u*d*d*), antiLambda (u*d*s)

Because the strange quark is a heavier cousin of the down quark, the Lambda hyperon is a heavier (or stranger, or hyper) brother of the neutron. So the whole antinucleus can be called a heavier (or strange) sister of the antitritium nucleus - or "anti-hypertriton" for short. ;-)

They will surely continue to play similar childish games. But it must be fun. ;-) They say that the findings are relevant for the physics of neutron stars but it's not quite clear what exactly they can learn what is not yet known.

Yesterday, Softpedia also wrote about the creation of quark-gluon plasma by the RHIC.

Austrian political campaign dominated by post-Nazi emotions

A few months ago, Czech President Václav Klaus decided to surrender and add his signature to the Treaty of Lisbon. But he managed to negotiate an opt-out for the Czech Republic from the Charter of Rights - the same opt-out that Poland and United Kingdom have previously negotiated.

There are lots of possible implications of this bad document but one of the specific ones for the Czech Republic was that the Beneš decrees - crucial post-WWII laws that have macroscopically compensated the evil that most of the German Nazis did to our country and that keep on preserving the stability of the ownership rights in the Sudetenland that used to have a German-speaking majority - could have been dismantled using this charter.

RSS MSU: 0.05 °C of month-on-month cooling

The RSS MSU satellite data for February 2010 are out.



The global anomaly is +0.588 °C which is 0.052 °C lower than the January 2010 anomaly. The newest February 2010 reading is also a whopping 0.148 °C cooler than the warmest February reading on their record, namely +0.736 °C in February 1998.

While January 2010 was 0.09 °C warmer than January 1998, the average of January 2010 and February 2010 is already cooler than the corresponding two months of 1998 so it seems more likely than not that 2010 will be cooler than 1998. The ongoing El Nino is still somewhat strong but already measurably weaker than the 1997-1998 El Nino, so that's what you would expect.

The anomaly in February 2010 was also cooler than January 2007 and four warmer months in 1998.

February 2010 was somewhat unusually warm in the tropics between -20°S and +20°N where the anomaly was +1.015 °C and extremely cool in the Continental U.S. where the anomaly was -1.771 °C.

Al Gore will become a doctor

Well, an honorary one.

The University of Tennessee in Knoxville decided to acknowledge one of the brightest and most achieved Tennesseans in history:

Editorial: Al Gore a fine choice for honorary degree

Ninety-five percent of the Knoxnews readers think that it is a bad idea - but who cares.

Al Gore's greatest achievements are the lost 2000 elections, his invention of the Internet, the ManBearPig, his new kind of climate science, and especially his recent contributions to the physics of plasma:



Plasma that used to be produced in complicated labs can suddenly be obtained by digging in your garden. This opens lots of new applications, including superclean and superefficient hybrids of geothermal and thermonuclear energy.

Congratulations to Al Gore and congratulations to UT Knoxville for officially becoming the Univesity of Quacks.