Thursday, January 05, 2017 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

XENON100 rejects DAMA/LIBRA dark matter modulation at 5.7 sigma

DAMA/LIBRA is an Italian dark matter experiment that most colleagues apparently don't take too seriously. In recent years, it has claimed to detect some clear signatures of dark matter, especially through the dark matter seasonal modulation. Some effects are different in the summer and in the winter, and so on. This is what you would expect from a dark matter counterpart of the "aether wind", if I dare to borrow to a debunked concept. ;-)

The most recent DAMA/LIBRA paper is this 2013 update which says that the statistical significance of their observed – nominally discovered – dark matter modulation signal is 9.3 sigma. If true, it's a discovery on steroids.

When the pro-dark matter side seemed to be winning in the dark matter wars, there were other reasons to think that this modulation exists. CoGeNT has confirmed some modulation in 2011, too.

The atmosphere is different now and the anti-dark matter side seems to be on an offensive. It's particularly clear from the today's new preprint by the XENON collaboration:

Search for Electronic Recoil Event Rate Modulation with 4 Years of XENON100 Data
XENON, one of the most formidable dark matter detectors in the world (I think that LUX and XENON are upgrading and fighting for the leadership), investigated the annual modulation as well. Using the 2010-2014 data, they have evaluated the theory with dark matter modulation and parameters suggested by the claimed DAMA/LIBRA signal. And they have excluded this theory. Experimenters normally tend to disprove theories with newly proposed effects at 2 sigma or 95% confidence level – because the "null hypothesis" to which they return to isn't extraordinary and doesn't need extraordinary evidence.

But in this case, they could take the DAMA/LIBRA claim to be a "natural hypothesis" and XENON excluded it at 5.7 sigma – because it's more than five, you may say that XENON has made a discovery that DAMA/LIBRA is wrong.

Wednesday, January 04, 2017 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

Summers vs Trump on the economy

You know, I've met Larry Summers several times, talked to him during the dinners in the Society of Fellows that he was formally heading, and had to admire him for his seemingly penetrating, hard-science-like thinking and relatively honest attitudes towards the feminists and similar junk, attitudes that gradually turned into a frustrating surrender.

(I remember a party for new junior faculty in his house in late 2004 or early 2005, days before he gave the famous speech about women in science. On that party, I started to apologize to him for some anti-feminist blog post that created some havoc and complaints that had already gotten to his mailbox – but I have already forgotten who the complainer was etc. But of course, I did expect he would say that I had no reason to apologize and he did it. Soon afterwards, he carefully said similar things as those in my blog post and had to pay his beloved job of the Harvard president for that a year later, after some 14 months of annoying battles with the SJW whiners.)

I still think he's sort of very smart and independently thinking but so many Summers' pronouncements in the recent decade make me feel like an idiot because I was considering Larry a relative conservative icon at Harvard, if I exaggerate just a little bit. It just seems crazy to me now. The political atmosphere at Harvard had to be insane – and probably is even worse now – when the likes of Summers could have been viewed as oases of relative conservatism by people like me.

Yesterday, he spoke for some 9 minutes at Bloomberg. See reports in Business Insider, Bloomberg video only, AFR Financial Review, and echoes elsewhere.

Summers criticized the markets and investors for failing to switch to an absolute hysteria. He has also denounced a paper by Wilbur Ross, a billionaire and soon-to-be Secretary of Commerce, and economist Peter Navarro as a paper that is "beyond voodoo economics". This paper is an economics counterpart of creationism and makes climate skeptics look like responsible scientists. Well, the latter is surely OK – we are responsible scientists.

Tuesday, January 03, 2017 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

Constitutional right to shoot terrorists

The current Czech minister of interior, Mr Milan Chovanec (social democracy; previously the governor of the Pilsner region who was 65 kg heavier than he is now and started his successful diet-with-a-nutella-punchline and a clerk in a vegetable shop; the smiling grey gay on the picture happens to be our neighbor from my childhood Mr František Hykeš, a communist journalist and at the time of the photograph, a spokesman for the zoo or something like that), has reacted to the recent attacks in Berlin and Istanbul (if I omit the stabbing of a Pole in a Polish kebab shop) in a thought-provoking way.

He proposes a constitutional amendment saying that every Czech citizen has the right to shoot a terrorist dead. It's that simple. When someone is going to be confirmed as a terrorist on a mission – or, almost equivalently, a perpetrator of a violent attack considered an attack against the country – the holders of guns have the right to shoot at this individual and terminate his or her life.

UAH AMSU: 2016 finally beats 1998 as warmest year, by Earth-shaking 0.02 °C

Dr Roy Spencer, one of the folks in the UAH AMSU team who calculate the temperature data from the NASA satellites, published the value of the global mean temperature for December 2016 and therefore the whole year 2016, too:

Global Satellites: 2016 not Statistically Warmer than 1998
In December, the global temperature anomaly (according to the version 6.0 of their product) dropped by 0.21 °C (a lot for one month) to +0.24 °C. Despite the first or second strongest El Niño that we experienced earlier in 2016, the global temperature is just a quarter degree above the normal, 40-year value for a December.



Alexander Ač asked me to publish this video shot by his friend who is an astronaut and irrevocably proving global warming. Czech Globe, the European center of excellence, is impressed by this new proof of climate change. (OK, the previous sentences were a prank but the broader message that institutes like that are employing complete idiots holds.)

The five warmest years according to UAH (and their temperature anomalies) are:
01 — 2016 — +0.50 °C
02 — 1998 — +0.48 °C
03 — 2010 — +0.34 °C
04 — 2015 — +0.26 °C
05 — 2002 — +0.22 °C
You see that 2016 was 0.02 °C warmer than 1998, the year that has defended its gold medal against the following 17 competitors.

Monday, January 02, 2017 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

Nautilus' disillusioned ex-physicist

Bob Henderson wrote an autobiography for Nautil.Us (via CIP):

What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics?

Einstein and Feynman ushered me into grad school, reality ushered me out.
He's a Rochester theoretical physics PhD who had come to the grad school after he read some New Agey pop-science books and left a cushy engineering job. He grew disillusioned and at the time of the PhD defense, he decided to switch to Wall Street which he left in 2012, i.e. 15 years later, and became a science writer. While the content of the article is annoying, I think that he is an excellent prospective novelist.

Henderson complains that his dreams were destroyed, he lost the faith that theoretical physics is meaningful or theoretical physicists are marching towards a holy grail. His reasons to leave the university world have nothing whatever to do with my reasons – in some sense, they are the opposite ones – but I am highly familiar with this kind of a frustrated talk because it's widespread among (especially young) physicists. Well, this frustrated talk about physics is less widespread among older physicists because before they reach the higher age, most of the young whiners get eliminated. It's that simple.

Before we look at Henderson's whining a bit more closely, I want to say two more general things. First, it's probably not an accident that the "hero of 2016-2017" in such a popular article is someone who left theoretical physics and mostly began to hate it. Decades ago, such popular journals preferred to celebrate successful theoretical physicists but quitters are apparently more fashionable nowadays. This subtlety strengthens the claims that the science media have switched to a new mission, to hurt theoretical physics.

Second, there are surely lots of other fields in which most people remain relatively unsuccessful and disillusioned. I am sure that there are lots of boys who want to be the world's best athletes and tennis stars and anything of the sort (or actors, add your favorite famous occupation) but find out that not everyone becomes successful and the life of the unsuccessful ones may be hard. Djokovic's life may be comfortable (although I am not certain even about these statements) but for every Djokovic, there are thousands of would-be stars who remain broke and don't get rewarded for their efforts.

Nevertheless, many people play tennis in the afternoon even if they don't earn the same money as Djokovic. Most of those just accept that they're not as good as Djokovic – but tennis is still fun for them, anyway. For some reason, people (including Henderson) don't want to accept that they're less successful than the top theoretical physicists simply because they're not as good. Without the decent salaries and big prizes, these would-be "physicists" find out that they don't actually like physics at all.

Third, Henderson's personality is clearly not that of a theoretical physicist, a fact that the pop-science books have obscured to him. You may see that pop-science books often present physicists as some kind of magicians who are having a great time under shining lights all the time – like Harry Potter or at least the Hollywood stars. What a surprise that many people who actually try to do physics grow disillusioned.

Sunday, January 01, 2017 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

Lindzen, me: U.S. climate science needs to shrink by 80-90 percent

The new, Trump administration brings a lot of hope when it comes to the climate change. Perhaps, hundreds of billions of dollars won't be wasted – as they are today – for much more expensive forms of energy and much more expensive alternatives to common things. The climate hysteria has been costly.

But the unnecessary economic costs were not the only problem. Climatology as a discipline of pure science has suffered, too. Well, even the climate scientists aren't cheap. The U.S. spends some $2.5 billion paid through 13 government institutions to fund the American climate scientists. The field has obviously become this huge only because the meme that "the global warming will kill all of us" was spread and it was spread mostly because of political incentives.

Real Clear Investigations wrote a text about the expected transformation of the field

Skeptical Climate Scientists Coming In From the Cold.
The title says that sensible climate scientists will finally be heard. Hopefully. We hope that it will become possible to say that the good weather is actually good, that the Earth won't warm up by 10 degrees in a century, and if it will warm by a degree or two, it won't have any dramatic consequences and the consequences are likely to be beneficial. The bullies who were preventing you from saying important, even elementary things – e.g. that there's no scientific basis for the claim that a higher CO2 concentration increases extreme weather – will hopefully lose their influence over the scientific community.

What happens with the mass of the climate scientists?

NYT publishes new Russophobic fake news against Czech president

Happy New Year 2017, dear readers!

One advantage of 2017 is that it is easy to remember its factorization into primes. Like 2003 and 2011 – and no other year in this century so far – 2017 is a prime. Note that the probability that a number of this approximate magnitude is a prime is around \(1/\ln(2017)\) i.e. about 13%. Let's hope that it won't be the only sense in which 2017 will be a prime year. In three weeks, many things in the world should start to improve from the viewpoint of most of us. Among other things, a well-known German economic institute, ZEW, has praised Trump's plan to reduce the U.S. corporate taxes – at 36.5%, those were just way too high.

Some people will keep on promoting the old world, the world of high taxes, intrusive governments, politically correct bullies, and mindless and primitive anti-Russian racism, among other annoying things. Sadly, two days ago, the New York Times "pleased" us with a propaganda piece titled

How Russians Pay to Play in Other Countries
This kind of rants is basically isomorphic to the Nazi propaganda against the Jews. Like the Jews, the Russians are painted as some evil forces behind the scenes that are the puppet masters of all other evil people and who cause all evil in the world.

This primitive anti-Russian racism is the overt side of disgusting pieces like Neil MacFarquhar's hit piece above. In reality, if you look closely, Russia isn't the only target. Texts like that are mainly hit pieces against those who are – usually nonsensically – painted as the Russian puppets, like all politically decent and conservative people in the West (and in this case, Czech politicians who refuse to become puppets of George Soros). What is the actual story?

Saturday, December 31, 2016 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

The ER-EPR correspondence does deserve the time of Hollywood actresses

After a one-year-old 12-minute video about Stephen Hawking, Paul Rudd, and quantum chess that got over 2 million views, Caltech has released another 11-minute video

Quantum is calling
where actress Zoe Saldana along with Stephen Hawking promote Juan Maldacena's ER-EPR correspondence whose title page was kindly signed by Lenny Susskind, too. ;-) These short films also feature Keanu Reeves, Simon Pegg, and John Cho. I admit that I haven't watched either film in the entirety yet – I plan to fix the bug soon. Well, I still faithfully watch every second of The Big Bang Theory where similar stuff appears but that stuff is a part of a story I care about. I am not sufficiently motivated to watch similar film segments in isolation.

Tetragraviton claims that the ER-EPR correspondence does not deserve this kind of the "star-studded" Hollywood "treatment". Well, he is just wrong.

Friday, December 30, 2016 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

Gauge symmetry: its virtues and vices don't contradict each other

Three physicists affiliated with Princeton (now or recently) published an interesting preprint,

Locality and Unitarity from Singularities and Gauge Invariance
I know Nima from Harvard very well, he's brilliant and fun. Jaroslav Trnka is a big mind and my countrymate. Although I am a French writer (a month ago, I had to memorize sentences like "Je suis un écrivain français" for my sister's BF, one of the 21 cops who shot the terrorist in Nice), I only know that both Laurentia and Rodinia were supercontinents about 1 billion years ago.

Laurentiu Rodina is a particularly interesting hybrid name of an author especially because the supercontinent Laurentia (basically Eastern 2/3 of North America now) was a portion of the supercontinent Rodinia. Laurentia was named after the St Lawrence River which was named after Lawrence of Rome. Rodinia is named after Rodina – a Slavic word meaning "the motherland" in Russian but "the family" in Czech. Yes, this "subtle difference" appears on the Czech-Russian edition of the false friends of a Slavist.

At any rate, the Rodinia was a motherland or a family of smaller supercontinents that included Laurentia. (Rodinia was a more ancient counterpart of Pangaea – a clumping of all continents into one – except that Pangaea existed between 300 and 200 million years ago, much more recently.) There's some redundancy in Laurentiu Rodina's name – and this redundancy and the subtleties linked to it may be similar to those of the gauge symmetry.

OK, after this silly geological introduction, we are finally getting to theoretical physics.

Wednesday, December 28, 2016 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

John Kerry's bizarre anti-Israel rant

I hope that you have enjoyed the holinights or other holidays. If you feel somewhat socially exhausted, you are not the only one. There have also been lots of events that had to be cut and won't be discussed by us, the TRF community. But there's a random event that might be.

An hour ago, I received an e-mail alert and watched John Kerry's speech about Israel and Palestine. He tried to provide the audiences with a boringly longish, 72-minute-long sequence of repetitive excuses for the Obama administration's betrayal of Israel in a U.N. vote. A hopefully symbolic resolution drafted by an Arab state criticized the Jewish settlements. It was the kind of a resolution that the U.S. would veto at every moment in the past. But because the likes of Obama and Kerry are still in charge and their anti-Israel sentiments are culminating during the last month of their tenure, the U.S. abstained and the resolution passed.

At Fox News, Anne Bayefsky has argued that the Palestinians have hijacked all limbs of the U.N. and Obama+pals are encouraging that process. Thanks, Bill, for the URL. It's being said by the Israeli officials that while Obama and Kerry formally abstained, they're the true masterminds of the U.N. slap into Israel's face.

Israel has already stopped funding of the U.N. bodies. Donald Trump has already criticized Kerry's moves and promised Israel a radical U-turn back to friendship from January 2017. As far as ambitious and unlikely projects go, Trump may even dissolve the U.N. (withdraw the U.S. out of the U.N., kick the U.N. out of New York, and make the U.N. basically irrelevant).

Sunday, December 25, 2016 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

Tragic death of the Alexandrov choir is a big loss for Russian culture

Way too many well-known people died in recent days. Physicist Sidney Drell and modern dark matter pioneer Vera Rubin. Fermilab co-father Edwin Goldwasser. George Michael. Carrie Fisher, Leia of Star Wars. Claude Jensac, Louis de Funes' movie "wife" from Saint Tropez. Astronauts John Glenn and Piers Sellers. Russian drinkers of methanol-based bath lotion (cause of death: high ethanol taxation). Czech actress Luba Skořepová was another.

Vesna Vulović, a Serbian flight attendant, died on the same day, December 23rd. She's been a remarkable entry in the Guinness book of records. In 1972, a Yugoslav aircraft exploded 10 kilometers above a Czechoslovak village miles from East Germany – village that is paradoxically called Sorbian Chemnitz [Stoneville] (Sorbs were the "other", now mostly assimilated, Slavs who have lived in East Germany – in the Czech language, we use the word "Srb" for both Sorbs and Serbs). The bomb was planted by the Croatian Ustasche fascist movement – that for some reason failed to evaporate in 1945. Imagine that. An explosion followed by a fall from 10 kilometers. Vesna Vulović survived it because of her fortunate location within the aircraft. She wasn't even shocked and didn't develop any phobia from flying. 46 long years of life were ahead of her.



By far the greatest catastrophe was the demise of a military Tupolev-154 aircraft near Sochi today. The passengers and crew weren't as lucky as Vesna Vulović and all 92 people – who were going to Syria – were killed soon after the takeoff. 64 of them were members of the Alexandrov choir. In Czech, we call them "Alexandrovci" or the "Alexandrov Ensemble of Songs and Dances". Except for 3 soloists, all the members of that music group are gone.

The ensemble was formed sometime in 1928 and as the music wing of the Red Army, it energized the Soviet warriors during the Second World War. Aside from Katyusha above, you should listen to their version of Kalinka, the other war-like motivating Soviet song. The white-dressed soloists nicknamed Mr Kalinka, Mr Vadim Ananev, survived because a son was just born to his wife. Let me remind you that the weapon was named Katyusha after the song that is all about the love between a man and a woman, not the other way around.

Friday, December 23, 2016 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

Sidney Drell: 1926-2016

Stanford News and The New York Times brought us sad news yesterday. Sidney Drell died at home in Palo Alto (the town around Stanford) on Wednesday, December 21st, at age of 90.3.

The information was confirmed by his daughter Persis Drell, also a particle physicist and recently the director of SLAC (Sidney Drell has only been a deputy director of SLAC in his life). One more daughter and one son survived him, along with three grandkids.



I am old enough to remember his name primarily for the Bjorken-Drell textbook of quantum field theory. They wrote Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Quantum Fields. The QFT textbook played the same role that was probably played by Peskin-Schroeder in the following decades. Its influence was huge. Among other things, the mostly minus convention for the metric has also been known as the Bjorken-Drell convention. That's a way to say that they basically defined the mainstream in particle physics.

Note that the first edition of Peskin-Schroeder appeared in October 1995, more than five years after I started to study QFT, so it's clear that I had to be led to an older text like Bjorken-Drell.

I remember that I was intrigued by the idea that the Bjorken-Drell textbook really explained everything I needed to fully describe both wave-like and particle-like properties of the electromagnetic field. But it took me some time to see through all the equations that looked complicated – to figure out that the quantum field with the "same" Hamiltonian that we know as the total energy of the field in classical electrodynamics is rewritten as a higher-dimensional harmonic oscillator which may be quantized into photons. This point is really so simple and the book made it look so hard (when I was about 16) so I tend to think that books have gotten more pedagogically edible.

Although it was my first QFT textbook I studied, I switched to other books, like Ramond's, rather early so I don't even remember whether Bjorken-Drell included a systematic treatment of the Feynman diagrams (my guess would be No). But I am sure that the strong and weak interactions are covered in a way that is hopelessly outdated today.

What Germany allowed Anis Amri is stunning

Now, at 10:36 am, I learned that the attacker was finally shot dead at 3 am in Sesto San Giovanni in Greater Milan, Italy (840 km away from Berlin), after a shootout and an obligatory "Allah Akbar". After he was asked to show his documents, he replied with the Islamic expletive, so the Italian cops reasonably concluded that it was a wrong answer and shot him dead before he seriously injured one cop (shoulder). A photo, a slide show, Street View (all such things are from my research).

Anis Amri who was born in Tataouine (now a Daesh stronghold in the desert), Tunisia, on December 22nd, 1992, has been proven to be the perpetrator of the attacks (by fingerprints and other methods). It really seems that Angela Merkel and her folks sent a birthday pie to him yesterday, on behalf of all the grateful German people.



Naďa Čižmár [Nadya Chizhmahr], the Czech victim, was using the nickname Sedmikráska (Daisy, literally "Seven-beauty"), on Pinterest

The 2016 Berlin attack wasn't the bloodiest one among the recent Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe. But I think it's fair to say that it has been the closest one to the post-socialist Europe. Among the 12 victims, we find 7 Germans, one Polish driver, one Israeli, one Italian, one Ukrainian, and yes, a Czech woman, Naďa Čižmár who has worked for supply chain logistical "4flow Management GmbH" company in Germany for 2 years. Well, she's the third Czech victim of Islamic terror – tourist Mr Petr Kořán was killed in Egypt in 2005 and Mr Ivo Žďárek, the Czech ambassador to Pakistan, died in 2008. She's the first Czech victim killed on the European territory.

She's been missing since the attack and her husband (and their 5-year-old son) had to wait for 3 days to get the devastating news.

Čižmár is a Czech transliteration of a Hungarian surname (Csizmár or Csizsmár) – but that may mean as little as that 1/32 of her husband Petr Čižmár's DNA is Hungarian from a patrilineal ancestor a century ago – and she may have used the original, masculine form of the surname. But because the tally is Čižmár 106100 Čižmárová, most Czech women with this name bend it just like any other Czech name. The first name Naďa is a widespread Czech – and more generally Slavic – first name.

My condolences to her relatives. By the way, they wanted her identity to be released which I find sensible.

But let's return to the Tunisian man.

Thursday, December 22, 2016 ... Français/Deutsch/Español/Česky/Japanese/Related posts from blogosphere

Santa Barbara dorms for KITP visitors to open in early 2017

Two years ago, I wrote about a gift by Charles Munger (who is 92), who must be used to be referred to as the #2 in Warren Buffett's company, to the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB).



A picture from September 2016 already looked nearly finished.

Today, The Santa Barbara Independent reminded us that the project is almost complete. I think that the money wasn't wasted, like Warren Buffett's gifts to Hillary. Note that Munger's $65 million was enough for the whole project. A seemingly wealthier Bill Gates only paid a part for the "William Gates Computer Science" building at Stanford – and he sent the rest of the money to an African jungle.