A scribble with good content

If I tell you that this picture is the cover of a book, what will you think about the book?



I suspect that most readers think that it must be a handbook of terrorism, an attack against infidels, or something like that.

New particle masses in heterotic orbifolds

I still consider the heterotic compactifications to be the most natural - and most likely - realizations of the real world within string theory.

The natural incorporation of the gauge group into the E8, the gauge coupling unification, a natural setup to explain the three families, and the uniform "field-theoretical" realization of all the known low-energy fields just "smells" right.

Ben Dundee, Stuart Raby, Alexander Westphal

have studied the moduli stabilization and SUSY breaking in heterotic orbifold string models. A superpotential in the hidden sector breaks SUSY and all moduli are stabilized by supergravity effects.

The models have an MSSM spectrum with all the required realistic properties and a chance for a very small cosmological constant - relatively to the heavy stringy AdS starting point. But what I find amazing is their ability to calculate the masses of all new particles. Various superpartners go from 100 GeV to tens of TeV and a large portion of them should be detectable at the LHC.



Most of the masses are around 1 TeV. But look how amazingly explicit and accurate the models are concerning their predictions of pretty much anything. Click to zoom in.

Mahmoud orders weapon-usable uranium

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the main star of a concert today.



As CNN and others noticed, he ordered his experts to create 20% enriched uranium instead of the 3.5% enriched uranium they're developing now.

Basic texts about the enriched uranium may explain you that the percentage refers to the fraction of the U235 isotope. The natural uranium is "less than 1% enriched" - 99% of the stuff is the dominant natural U238 isotope.

Entropy, information, and mixed states

Off-topic: Internet Explorer users are urged to instantly install this patch from Microsoft (click) fixing a security issue recently found in Europe.

People around physics - and increasingly often, many physicists themselves - are getting confused about ever more elementary concepts in physics.

A few years ago, it became obvious that most people in the broader physics community are inherently incapable to understand string theory and why it is inevitably the only mathematically possible unifying theory of gravity and quantum mechanics. Well, it's a difficult subject and a PhD - not even a PhD in theoretical physics - can't guarantee that you will be able to master it.



String theorist Anne Hathaway

But things have been getting worse recently. Today, even fundamental pillars of quantum mechanics, relativity, and statistical physics are controversial once again. They're controversial because people - and often people with physics PhDs - just don't understand them. Or to say the least, they don't understand them well. It has become very fashionable to do things that would be inseparably connected with the unquestionable crackpots just a few years ago.

A few years ago, everyone would agree they were silly and physically impossible - but it's obvious today that many people would only agree because everyone else did, not because they actually understood the issues.

History of entropy

One of these raped theoretical constructs is the concept of entropy. While this concept became popular and important in various disciplines at various later times, all of its universal logical and physical properties have been fully understood since the late 19th century, i.e. for more than 100 years.

The history of the notion may still be divided to the thermodynamic and statistical era.

Chinese media impressed by Fred Singer

Tom Nelson mentions an article in Pajamas Media about an article in China Daily.

Its author, Ms Li Xing, attended the Copenhagen summit and was impressed by Fred Singer. So was I, when I met him in Berlin (and before). He showed her lots of data and she wanted to know the opinion of the other side - the "IPCC side". What can they say about these issues?

Imagine the scenery in the Danish capital. She had clearly heard a lot of details, understanding many of them, while being confused about some others. A lot of stuff to discuss. The "IPCC types" would only tell her:

"Warming in the climate system is unequivocal".

You have heard the holy word. Global warming is real (and that surely means man-made). Amen.

It must be strikingly obvious to her - and anyone else - that all details or verifications are just unwelcome to those folks because they don't support the primary thesis of the AGW orthodoxy. This quasi-religious thrives on fear and ignorance. Knowledge is chasing it out of the holes.

A slap from its dad, IPCC, forces Greenpeace to behave

On Thursday, The U.K. Times and The Telegraph informed us about the statements by John Sauven, the director of Greenpeace U.K.:

Mistakes will always be made but it’s how you handle those mistakes which affects the credibility of the institution. Pachauri should have put his hand up and said ‘we made a mistake’.

It’s in these situations that your character and judgment is tested. Do you make the right judgment call? He clearly didn’t.

The IPCC needs to regain credibility. Is that going to happen with Pachauri [as chairman]? I don’t think so. We need someone held in high regard who has extremely good judgment and is seen by the global public as someone on their side.

If we get a new person in with an open mind, prepared to fundamentally review how the IPCC works, we would regain confidence in the organisation.

Well, do you think that the words of these guys have some value? Right, the answer is No. They're addled eggs: green garbage in, green garbage out. The Treehugger just issued a "correction", a new statement by Greenpeace U.K.:

Lord Monckton explains the IPCC definition of a spade

I have never seen this talk by Christopher Monckton and it's just cool!



You know, the IPCC wouldn't call a spade a spade. Instead, it would be called

A one-person-operated, manually-controlled, foot-powered implement of simple and robust yet adequately efficacious ligno-metallic composition designated primarily though by no means exclusively for utilization on the part of hourly-paid operatives deployed in the agricultural, horticultural, or constructional trades or industries, as the case may be, for purposes of carrying out such excavational tasks or duties as may from time to time be designated by supervisory grades as being necessary, desirable, expedient, apposite, or germane with regard to the ongoing furtherance of the task or objective in hand or, on the other hand, underfoot, Secretary-General.

Only when you memorize the paragraph above and convince your ancestors to be hereditary peers, you can think about $100,000 speaking fees. :-)

The talk above was given in Melbourne. A similar talk in Minneapolis (October 2009) is available, too.

Bonus: Google's definition of global warming



Reasonable thoughts are winning 9 to 1. ;-) Click to zoom in.

Hat tip: Olda K.

Egypt: Israel to strike Iran from Gulf and Kurdistan

One important prime minister skipped the Copenhagen summit.

Benjamin Netanyahu's sensible explanation was that he didn't want to waste thousands of taxpayers' dollars for such a meaningless trip. Needless to say, he was right - the gathering was nothing else than a complete waste of money and a farce.

Of course, he had somewhat more serious things to do, too. ;-)

Tonight, Egyptian sources - backed by some circumstantial evidence from Saudi Arabia - claimed that

Israel is preparing an attack on Iran from the sea and from Northern Iraq

A good news is that the U.S. seem to be assisting Israel in the preparations although a direct co-operation of the U.S. in the Israeli attack still seems very unlikely. Mike Huckabee is disturbed by the current U.S. Iran policy.

Today, leading Egyptian newspapers also praised Mossad's boss, Meir Dagan, for having successfully disrupted the Iranian nuclear program in the last seven years.

Half a month ago, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, three sensible (and non-Shiite) countries in the region, were apparently coordinating their responses to a hypothetical Iranian reaction in a hypothetical future war. Well, the U.S. participated, too.

IPCC deeply regrets errors, Pachauri doesn't: and other news

BBC has interviewed Chris Field of Stanford, a co-chair of the second working group of the IPCC, who deeply regrets the GlacierGate mistake, mentioning that there are others.

Meanwhile, Rajendra Pachauri doesn't regret anything.

It would be nothing else than "populism" to take the responsibility for the report, he says. Pachauri only picks the positive results of the report such as the Nobel prizes, has nothing to do with any of the negative things, and everyone who wants him to be responsible is a corrupt stooge of the oil industry, the malicious porn author explains.

Well, I think it is sheer populism, flattering to the tens of thousands of freeloaders in the green and propaganda industries, to hesitate with the imprisoning of this particularly arrogant crook.

Video interview: the stunning arrogance of R.K. Pachauri (4 times 5 minutes). Note e.g. his comments about Lord Monckton around 5:30 in the first part. Pachauri even still wants to get the money for the "glaciers to be gone in 2035" grant proposal. He's a complete lunatic. Do you know what's the difference between Pachauri and Hitler? Hitler didn't think he was Pachauri. Hat tip: Willie S.

By the way, in an interview for The Financial Times (orig. source), Pachauri also said that he hoped that asbestos, a carcinogen, is applied to the faces of all climate skeptics as talcum powder every day. Pachauri is a lethal threat for billions of people in the world.

Thank God, Carnegie Corporation rejected to give the desired funding to Pachauri's fraudulent "TERI" group today. But "TERI" may still rob many other charities or, more likely, governmental foundations (where the officials donate money from other people's pockets: e.g. EU taxpayers).

And even Greenpeace U.K., or at least its director John Sauven, says that Pachauri has to resign because he handled errors inappropriately.

In the BBC program, Roger Pielke Jr complained that the expert literature in his discipline - losses caused by climate change - was misinterpreted and distorted by the IPCC.

The literature agrees that virtually all of the increased damages caused by the natural disasters are linked to the increasing wealth that can be damaged in the first place - not by the increasing inherent "destructive power" - while the IPCC tried to deliberately obscure this point.